Month: January 2018

This is me with my daughter circa age 5 months. We were out brunching with her daddy as I wasn’t yet back to work full time. We were enjoying these peaceful moments of early parenting before our kid was really mobile or vocal and was generally chill and excited to be out and watching the happenings in public.

As a new mom, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I loved motherhood. I am an anxious person by nature, so before she arrived, I was certain I would be quite lousy at this. I was blessed with a very happy inquisitive child who made my early momming look so easy. My own mother was famously quoted as saying to my sister, “Who would have thought Ellen would be such a good mom?” And as poorly as it sounded when it came out of her mouth, I knew exactly what she meant because it was a sentiment I shared.

As much as I enjoyed early motherhood, I no longer knew my body. After spending 9 months as an occupied territory and the first 6 months postpartum as almost her sole food source, pretty much everything in my body hurt, exercise time was hard to find, and I was experiencing huge hormonal swings in my moods that I remember left me sobbing after an episode of Law and Order feeling sorry for a police officer who kidnapped a child because his wife couldn’t carry one. In short, I was a terrible wife. It wasn’t my fault because it wasn’t my focus. Early motherhood was all consuming, as it should be, and my relationship with my husband was, well, changed.

He never faltered. He let me treat him distantly. He let me snap at him from the stresses of extreme sleep deprivation. He held me when I cried. He cleaned my home, maintained our yard and car, shopped for and cooked our dinners. He was what he had been for the decade before her arrival, my constant.

On January 12, 2018, The Wall Street Journal broke the story that the president had purchased the silence of an adult film star with whom he had an affair in July 2006. The payment occurred in October 2016 to buy her silence before the now fateful election in November. If true, this affair would have happened when his youngest son Baron was merely 4 months old. The president stepped out on his wife for a fling with a porn star at a time when his new wife (they were married in 2005) was experiencing probably very similar body insecurity and hormonal swings as I was. Unfortunately, Melania didn’t have a quilt of a decades worth of memories with her husband to keep her warm as she built her relationship with her new child.

And yet, this story completely flew under the radar. It wasn’t even the most shocking news story of the week. It was a week where we learned of the “shithole countries” and when Oprah was floated as a potential candidate in 2020. People heard shithole on NPR for the first time and were certain they were experiencing the apocalypse. It was a week when some senators claimed they just heard shithouse which gave them plausible deniability to call other senators liars. It was a week where a false missile alarm in Hawaii sent natives and vacationers alike into 30 minutes of decidedly unrelaxed island living which revealed the administration has no plan for such a scenario.

So the president buying the silence of a porn star with campaign funds for an affair that happened while his wife was nurturing his newly born son wasn’t even a blip on the radar. Furthermore, white evangelicals are just giving him a pass, because of course they are. The son of Billy Graham takes to the air waves and says the president is a changed man from the man in 2006 or the man before the election with simply no supporting evidence in the public record. He said the president has a “concern for Christian values.” I guess it shouldn’t surprise me to see how far the evangelicals have gone in defense of the indefensible.  The evangelicals lament the emptiness of pews each Sunday. But who would want to go share a seat with someone who can defend behavior like that listening to sermons from a man who would basically condone the bad behavior of the president from their pulpit? How far this group has sunken to advance their social conservative agenda dispensing of the need for a moral compass and family values in the leader who can deliver it to them. Baby Baron was 4 months old at the time. How can you as a Christian fully embrace a man who walks out on his wife in her most vulnerable early motherhood months for a fling with another woman who enriches herself by the depravity you claim to deplore?

Ironically, the nonpartisan watchdog group Common Cause, the same people who secured jail time for John Edwards after it came to light that he had used campaign funds to buy the silence of a woman with whom he had had an affair in the run up to his bid for the presidency, has filed another complaint with the Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission this time against Donald Trump. The complaint alleges that the amount of money $130,000 vastly exceeds the minimum amount any individual can contribute to a campaign ($2,700) and the source of the money has not been revealed. By current law, any person contributing more than $200 to a campaign must be identified.

How far we have come as a country that this bombshell story didn’t even make a blip on the news radar. It seems every single day there is some detail of this administration more sordid than the last, some corruption in the heads of the federal agencies more inconceivable than the previous, some new racist or bigoted policy intended to increase the margins separating already marginalized populations. If you are news hound like me, at this point, you are practically numb. Nothing makes any sense and you pray for the day it will all end, but you know the scar tissue is there. You don’t know how this country you love will emerge from this period and realize the potential you thought it had in it. The stature of the nation you love has fallen so far on the world stage that you wonder what if any impact it will have in the largest issues that plague our planet like geopolitical instability in the middle east and the warming global climate. In fact, you are certain in this administration, they mean more harm to both than good.

Congressional leadership has shirked their responsibility to check the excesses of the executive branch because it means they craft and pass historically unpopular policies like sweeping changes to the tax code in almost total isolation. It means they can further their ultimate legislative agenda of dismantling the social safety net that protects millions of the most vulnerable Americans to give more money to the already ludicrously rich ones. They seem unconcerned about the regular scandal that engulfs the White House. They seem blind to the corruption, deaf to the excesses, complicit in their steady resolve to deny all of it. How far we have come in eroding the prestige of the office and our nation’s global influence. How far will we have to go whenever this crooked road ends?

#electionshaveconsequences

The Children’s Health Insurance Program or CHIP is a program that provides health insurance to 9 million children whose parents are too rich for Medicaid but too poor for anything else. It is the other hostage in the debt crisis. It easily could have been funded way back in September with a clean bill and overwhelming bipartisan support. It could be passed today as a clean standalone bill. But that isn’t how the GOP rolls. They call themselves pro life but they hold these children and their families hostage, leverage in a fight that isn’t even about these children.

It is amoral to do this.

The maddening thing is, Trump could have had it all. He could have gotten 1.6 billion for the stupid boondoggle wall. He could have saved the hostages, the children and the Dreamers. Even on Friday in a one on one meeting with Chuck, he was going to get this bill of love and his precious wall/fence/flight of fancy. But he says one thing, then he talks to xenophobic nativists and sows enough confusion that there is clear evidence you simply can’t negotiate with him.

So Chuck Schumer is negotiating with terrorists. He was nice enough to compare them to Jell-O, but I am not. The nativist wing of the GOP is pulling all the strings. These people are terrorizing immigrants who came here at the average age of six years old. They have lived here for decades. They are simultaneously terrorizing millions of poor children and their families who receive letters threatening the loss of healthcare for their beloved child as an early Christmas present. Chuck and Dick before him think they have deals, and then hours later, the president is singing a markedly different tune.

Paul Ryan isn’t in the business of passing bills the Senate would clear because he has an unfortunate medical condition of been not born without a spine. Mitch McConnell isn’t interested in putting clean DACA or CHIP bills or even a bill to protect military families and death pay during the shutdown because he has the unfortunate medical condition of being born without a heart.

There is one party and one party only who believes there are valuable government solutions to the plight of regular Americans and who fights to protect social programs that elevate the poorest among us. The other party decries the futility of government solutions and makes its bread and butter on lamenting its lack of function. Give them unfettered control, and look what they do: create facts on the ground.

These people can’t be trusted. Let’s wave them goodbye from Congress in record numbers in 2018, so their fearless leader can get evicted in the next.

#electionshaveconsequences

I am not going to take the bait. I am not going to act like the dogs on a mission in the movie Up and have a “Squirrel!” moment. I won’t let the horrifying racist statement distract me from the true purpose of the meeting, restoring the protections to the almost 800,000 people in this country known as Dreamers.

On September 5, 2017, the president signed an executive order ending the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), a program designed to give undocumented immigrants who arrived here in circumstances beyond their control a way to safely avoid deportation. But more importantly, it gave them a legitimate status that allowed them to come out of the shadows and become more effective, contributing members of the only country many of them have ever truly known.

To receive DACA status, you had to be under the age of 31 before June 2012 and had to have come to this country before you were 16. So, clearly, your coming to the United States was not your decision nor was it under you control. 45% of Dreamers are in school. Of those over 70% are pursuing bachelor’s degrees or higher.

Over 25% of them live in my state. The modal (most common) age of their arrival to our country was the age of 3. The average age of the arrival of a dreamer in our country is 6. My daughter is approaching age 3, and while I think she is a genius and in my weaker moments, it feels like her will triumphs over mine, she is not in control of our family.

But more importantly, our government made them a promise. Our government said something to the effect of, “If you give us your information, you will have a status that allows you to have a gainful employment without the threat of deportation.” So they came out of the shadows. They registered in the DACA program. They were subjected to background checks. Many got drivers licenses. And their earning potential increased. Their average hourly income increased by $7 an hour by coming out of the shadows. Roughly 700,000 people stand to lose their jobs. We made them a promise. And reneging on that promise throws their safety and security into chaos. They could be deported from the only home some of them have ever known.

And as of March 2018, not only have they lost their protected status, they could be subject to deportation. And they would be relatively easy to find. They registered with our government on good faith because our government made them a promise of a legitimized status.

On the plight of the Dreamers:

• An estimated 1.9 million people are eligible for DACA. Of those Roughly 800,000 have had their DACA status accepted.
• In a Center for American Progress Survey, the US stands to lose $460 billion dollars from GDP over the next decade due to the loss of an estimated 600,000 workers from the workforce if the legal status of DACA recipients is changed.
• An estimated 20,000 are teachers.
• A recent Quinnipiac poll finds 80% of Americans say Dreamers should have the right to stay in the US and apply for citizenship.

It is time to stop playing politics with the lives of real people in our country who love our country and who are working to make our country a better place. It is time to honor our promise to them and pass a clean Dream Act that protects their status and allows them a path to citizenship.

But the hateful comment was born from discussion of a different set of immigrants, those with Temporary Protected Status (TPS). These are 300,000 people who migrated to our country because conditions in the home country were not sustainable at that point in time. And, sadly, the deteriorated conditions have not improved.

To focus on the “shithole” nature of the countries in question is to ascribe that quality to the people themselves and not the root causes of geopolitical instability and natural disasters exacerbated in many cases by US inaction. That would be a lie. It takes great courage to flee your home on a prayer of a better life for your family. To create that better life, you must be your best self. You likely came with nothing, so you must work hard from day one to provide the security your family needs. You must behave impeccably because the xenophobic grip on our current government is ready, willing, and able to send you back to the nightmare. Almost 90% of these immigrants work. They clean our homes and businesses, construct our buildings and roads, tend our gardens. It is the hard work of honest people that brings 4.5 billion to our GDP annually. We should honor their hard work and faith in the American dream, not denigrate their homelands with words unbecoming of a high school class president let alone the leader of our nation.

Republicans own all branches of government. Theoretically, they could enact any single change they desire. If they really want to take a stance against the president’s racism, they could pass a clean Dream act and honor our promise to these valuable people. Call your senators and representatives. Tell David Perdue you wish he had a better memory, sure. But make sure you also demand he and they all honor this “no-brainer” concept.

#electionshaveconsequences

Recently my sister made a very eloquent statement about the complexities of her relationship with the south in her post Southern Discontent.  Here I would like to offer a slightly different perspective as a Georgian by birth who has been a California resident  for over 13 years.

I am originally from a town of about 3000 people little more than an hour south of Atlanta. I was born in a blue house in a red state with a big mouth and a typically small tape delay for stating the things that race through my active mind. As such, the south was not such an easy place for me growing up. Some of the reasons were apparent while I lived there. Some only became apparent with perspective from years on the West coast. My parents raised me encouraging my free spirit and my free thought and engaged me in discussions that showed they valued my young and naive perspective, but they also frequently implored me to restrain my speech when it could cause unintended harm. They knew I could be indelicate and felt it would be best if I could just refrain.

It is only now I ask, best for whom?

It certainly wasn’t best for me. While it might have kept me a few more friends, they rarely heard from the true me. As a GA resident, I never felt truly free to express myself and my views. In a large way, I was a closeted liberal and a female scientist, all things that seemed a little deviant. It definitely wasn’t as mentally and emotionally damaging as being a closeted homosexual in the south, but over time, it did take a toll.

For as much as my parents and siblings joke about the contrary, I must have gotten quite good at suppressing myself. At my going away party just before I embarked on my drive across the country, my neighbor who lived across the street from me my entire life says, “Just because you are moving to Berkeley, don’t go getting radical on me!” Don’t go getting there you say? Moving to Berkeley was like the mothership calling me home. My neighbor of 22 years whose child had been a close friend of mine had no idea who was standing across from them saying goodbye.

As such, to me, southern hospitality felt like a bit of a facade. People put a smile on their face while loaning you that cup of sugar, and that is fine as long as you don’t shine a light on the unpleasant aspects of your shared communal experience. As long as you are comfortable being the mirror people need to believe about the self they present to the world, you are considered hospitable and kind. To do so may require that you censure yourself to spare someone else’s feelings, so if you are vocal and opinionated like me, you will never be completely at ease.

I would argue this isn’t necessarily a uniquely southern phenomenon. It is a self preservation mechanism in rural America. I can’t say I have had a large sample size, but from my perspective as a former rural now urban resident there are certain challenges to one’s full self expression in small rural communities.

In urban America, you are surrounded by all kinds of people with all kinds of beliefs and all kinds of outlets for expression and all kinds of businesses selling you all kinds of goods. It is almost impossible not to have enhanced cultural awareness as you live in close proximity to such a diversity of thought and life experience, and you can tap into as many new and crazy experiences as you can fit on your dance card. It actually might help your small business if you are a bit eccentric. It could give you an edge in a marketplace with a lot of consumers who want to seem like they have the finger on the pulse of a certain niche market.

Rural America houses small business owners in small communities with a finite number of consumers. It houses retirees in small rural communities with few prospective new friends. It houses people who yearn to congregate with others celebrating their faith but in doing so may find themselves on pews with people with whom they disagree on a range of issues. If you really aim for assimilation rural America, it is important to measure your expression even to the point of the bumper sticker you put on your vehicle.

However, you can do such a good job of assimilation, people can mistake you for someone sympathetic to their view. Any social situation can provide an opportunity for another person to state a thing with which you vehemently disagree, and an instantaneous cost benefit analysis of the ramifications of your response must ensue to preserve your position and your sanity. Then as a resident now as a visitor, it was and is like this for me on a range of issues that has only grown as I have matured and further refined my positions.

To be honest, I have been writing this post for weeks. And as I explored all of the positions of my personality in which southern rural living was challenging for me, the post grew longer and more cumbersome diluting the impact I intended it to have. As my sister said so perfectly in 2018, this year is all about being true to ourselves and honoring our true selves in the best expression of us. I want to allow myself the space to explore, but I want to put the exploration in more manageable chunks. It is my hope that you will join me as I explore the complexities of my personal self-censureship in an effort to encourage people to find their voices and spark richer, more honest local conversations about the times we live in and the changes we hope to see.

I am not ashamed to admit I was an inquisitive child. I had a voracious appetite for learning. My father was a zoology major and a medical doctor. My mother was a math major then math teacher then stay at home mom and dad’s office manager. My parents never felt my education should or would be confined to the classroom. They took a very active role in guiding our learning at home as well as at school. I would say my home schooling was much more of a liberal arts education. My mother loved to read, but only fiction and definitely not science fiction. My father loved to read anything really but held a special passion for history.   Dad would read on his bed every night with my sister and  me reading as bookends on the neighboring pillows. He would help us with words we didn’t know or provide a context for a confusing situation. I was the only child who gravitated towards math and science, and they both fed my hunger. My dad got me an algebra book in fifth grade. Who does that?

But I found it hard to be a true scholar in my small town. I was enrolled in the gifted program at my school and had sort of a ready made micro community of similarly inquisitive children. But as we entered middle school (what my dad called the seething cauldron of hormones), social hierarchies formed, and I never quite seemed to fit into any of them. I had political opinions that weren’t very popular, so I tried not to share them. They would surface at points, and it would cause friction and fractures in my friend groups. I had a few extremely close friends but I kept many more at an arm’s length. As we entered high school with college applications looming, even my close friends in the classroom began to compete, and further fractions occurred. I almost tried to transfer to college a year early just to escape, but my parents and teachers convinced me to persist. In the end, I am thankful I got to build some important core memories in my senior year.

I found it hard to be a scientist in the rural south. For one thing, there was very little opportunity outside of academic research for aspiring young science professionals like myself (a medicinal chemist) or my husband (a medical device engineer) to find gainful employment.  Actually there were very few places in the country where both of us would be able to find employment, and that played a role in my application process for graduate school. The only southern location that met our criteria was in North Carolina, and I didn’t even apply to Chapel Hill or Duke. I guess I always knew I was leaving.

But aside from need for employment (which came later), it was also hard for me to live there as I grew and matured. From my studies, I believe the science is completely settled on climate change. The overwhelming majority of scientists across disciplines agree. Human consumption is driving chemical pollution and warming temperatures that endanger every life form on this planet but especially the poor in coastal climates most immediately. But I have held my beliefs around climate for a very long time. When I was in fifth grade, I bought a book at a book fair called“50 Simple Things You can Do to Save the Earth.” I was hooked. I walked the neighborhood with my little wagon collecting aluminum cans. I made my parents drive me and my bags of stuff to the drop off site for recycling. I took all of the six pack plastic rings and cut them all for the turtles. I felt so empowered, so motivated by these simple strategies, and then no one joined me. I didn’t understand why no one else was interested in doing such simple things to improve the health of our planet. It was discouraging.

In the rural community of my childhood 20 years later, I still see only modest course correction. Now on trips to the south, I hate parking in the lot of a grocery next to a sea of cars that don’t even  get 20 miles per gallon. And people are filling the trunks of them with one time use disposable garbage like the plastic bags holding the groceries of plastic beverage bottles and prepackaged dinners. I question how I can help people see that the choices we make around cars and consumption endanger the security of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the coastal communities of the planet we share. I wish I could communicate that since we probably all hope to live in a region with safe water, secure food resources, and one virtually free from the threat of natural disaster, we probably should avoid consumption patterns that endanger all of those goals.

In urban California, my little life is very different. When my husband moved here 12 years ago, we sold my car and bought our first Prius. We have been a one car family ever since. We live near transit, and one of us bikes or transits to work or for a while we carpooled. We have solar panels on our house, and haven’t had an electric bill in 7 years. It seems every other car on the road around us is a Prius or now an electric model. Many homes and businesses are retrofitted with plugs for plug ins powered by solar panels that cover the parking structures.  The grocery stores in my city (and most cities that make up the Bay Area) won’t give you a free bag. You have to bring your own or pay $0.50 for each paper one. Plastic is forbidden. I shop at a store where my milk comes in a glass bottle that I return every week. I have alocal butcher shop where the meat is locally and sustainably farmed and gets carved in front of me. I have curbside green waste composting, recycling, and landfill pickups which is kind of amazing. It is a hot compost, so you can even compost chicken bones! On top of that the city site for vast array of other reuse initiatives like electronic recycling and community free exchanges is but a mile up the road. California certainly has a representative democracy, but we also have a lot of decisions like the grocery bags and the green infrastructure improvements like solar panels and electrical outlets at public places like schools funded through local and state ballot initiatives. Rural and urban communities alike could begin to adopt some of these if citizens propose, support with signatures, get the votes, and then implement a local or state tax funded initiative to make their state and local economies greener. This would be important grassroots organizing for real cultural change, but to be successful, it will take building a real dialogue around the need. 

I have a family of three with a toddler and a 20 gallon trash can with a weekly pickup that is rarely full which I find kind of remarkable. When my parents visit, they never quite know which receptacle should receive their refuse. It is almost never trash. They should defer to their 2.7 year old granddaughter. She has proven a quick study. In short, I am able to live the life of a low carbon footprint that I have longed to live since I was 8, and it is incredibly easy because I am surrounded by similarly concerned people who have enacted local and state changes that help our community behave responsibly and sustainably. I guess I could say it’s like in moving to CA, I really came home.

I also found it hard to have a diversified historical perspective in the rural south. I must admit I wasn’t really a student of history when I lived there. I mean I took required classes and even some AP history classes at my high school, so I didn’t really have to take them in college. It wasn’t until I voluntarily took a few in college around topics that interested me that I knew very little about (The Arab-Isreali Conflict and Modern Egypt) that I appreciated how woeful my historical preparation was. Whole segments of the world and moments in time were missing from my education and there were contextualizations that were fairly suspect in hindsight. From high school, I knew almost nothing about the Middle East or Asia or Geography really. I think the Ottomans were mentioned once or twice. I mean, when we were in high school, my husband and his very close friend interviewed for the same scholarship. The question was asked, “With which historical figure would you most like to dine and why?” My husband said Eleanor Roosevelt. Our friend said Andrew Jackson, a personal hero of many of the young men at my school for his brash tactics; anecdotes about him were the stuff of legend. The interviewers looked a little taken aback. I mean, what about all the stuff with the Indians? I wonder how much of it our friend actually knew. My husband got the scholarship. I hear from my sister that standards (at least the ones in GA) are improving these types of deficiencies for today’s GA students. Having not been involved in K-12 education in almost 20 years, I can’t really comment, but I was encouraged to hear that feedback from her!

When I first came to Berkeley and had a thicker accent, people would ask me if in the south we called it the War of Northern Aggression. I casually laughed, but in all seriousness, when I took AP US history, my highly respected instructor painted the civil war as merely a war fought over economic differences. I’ll say. The southern side wanted to enslave humans for greater economic gain. The Northerners felt that was inhuman and untenable. Thus, war ensued over economic differences. Am I oversimplifying the cause of the Civil War? Perhaps. But human slavery was the right the states fought for, it was the key economic difference, and some thought that it was a war worth fighting. As far as I am concerned, have your civil war reenactment only if you hold it next to a presentation of the implements of enslavement and the stories of the true heroes of the 1800s, the abolitionists. It would be hard to deny the importance of the war if you had run your fingers along the spikes of the masks used to cage the heads of the enslaved.

I was actually loathe to ever use the term states’ rights until my now state of CA is fighting to preserve first the rights of immigrants with the Muslim ban and increased ICE aggression, more recently the coast from offshore drilling, and most recently people for their right to legal weed all from intrusion of the federal government as they seek to undo seemingly every regulation put into place by the previous occupant of the White House. So now I am kind of ok with states’ rights conceptually for the first time in history.

To be honest, there weren’t a lot of moments I tried to start conversations  or interject a controversial point about science or history when I lived in the south. While topics around our dinner table, these weren’t the substance of the conversations I overheard in social settings. This portion of my discontent only really became evident with the perspective. But I question why? Did I just not hear them, or were they not topics of discussion? My parents’ closest friends in my childhood were largely from their church community. Social gatherings were often church related. It is fairly logical that science and history would play a limited role in the kinds of conversations that would be initiated amongst a mixed group of rural southern Baptists. In the spirit of southern hospitality and considering the audience, these topics would have been taboo.

Now as an adult, there is rarely a social gathering I attend in which I do not engage in a discussion around science, or history, or culture. I almost always come away with some new insight or some new piece of culture that I must add to the growing list of things I don’t have the bandwidth to fully consume. In my social sphere, I am still a student. This is probably due to a selection bias. Most of our closest friends we met during graduate school or in our employment or in a local prenatal yoga group I joined anticipating the arrival of our child and a need to connect more concretely to my community. I have yet to realize the dream of hosting one of those interdisciplinary salons in the homes of professors portrayed by Hollywood, but I think we have come close. It is a personal goal of mine. It is important to have goals.

I question whether I could create the kinds of stimulating social gatherings if I were still a rural resident. My husband and I somehow found each other when we lived in our rural community. We would be able to find others like us, I am sure. But in doing so, would we just create an echo chamber of like-minded individuals? That wouldn’t really change community culture all that much and might leave us to feel as isolated as we did when we were in high school. Instead, could I encourage this dialogue in a broader audience? I am trained in hypothesis driven research with data, findings, models, and further hypotheses, and it is hard for me to accept how evidence-based positions had very little traction in a faith based society. Could I navigate those treacherous waters in a non-threatening way? I am not sure if I could and still be a successful professional and fully part of my small community. I am sure I would try.

Prelude to this posting: A Defector’s Southern Discontent