Resonant Dissonance

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

So I wrote my plan for 2018– focus on me, loving me, accepting me and let what happens happen.  Live in the NOW.  Be present.  All the buzz words.

But how?  How does one really do this?  Where do you even start taking apart the years of busy-ness and preoccupation in order to really stop and love the now?

It’s been an interesting journey, and not one conjured up just in time for the new year.  It’s been building quietly within me, but now seemed as good a time as any to officially declare a shift in mindset.  It might sound annoyingly liberally cliche, but it really all began for me the night of the election.  That was the night I opened my eyes to see that not all things were as I thought in this country and that I couldn’t mindlessly put myself through the paces in order to end up in a place I wanted to be.  This realization wasn’t about politics.  It was about what I perceived that people were willing to overlook or maybe what they saw and deemed acceptable.  Maybe people weren’t overlooking at all.  Maybe they just felt the political stances were worth the human cost.  Or maybe they saw no cost.  I really don’t know.  It really doesn’t even matter now.  I only know that I didn’t like the way I felt responsibility for this, for staying silent when I believed others were being hurt.  For staying silent for fear of upsetting others when silence was the very thing that ended up doing the harm.

Then, my grandmother passed away.  My perception of our country’s values shifted at the same time I lost my family’s moral compass.  I remember never wanting her funeral to end.  I have never been to a more celebratory service of LIFE.  There were so many, many stories about the lives she touched and the battles she fought for social justice.  Y’all, she was a renegade.  And she passed it on.  And she changed the world (her world, my world).  And I knew when people stopped telling stories of her battles, when we sang the last hymn and said the last goodbye, that she would really be gone.  That it would be my turn, our turn, to pick up where she left off, to be her legacy, to answer her call to action for social change.

So I was kind of unwillingly, unknowingly thrust into facing a new reality and figuring out my place here, my cause here.  I’m a super sappy, sensitive person so I read sappy, sensitive people books.  Usually I don’t discuss them because I’m also a private, sappy, sensitive person.  But suddenly it seemed VERY IMPORTANT to talk about all the things.  But I didn’t know how because I spent my whole life surrounded by talkers and I never really felt the need to join in.  They said all the things.  I agreed and processed.  It all worked well.  Suddenly, though, being silent wasn’t working anymore.

Suddenly, also, all the things I had been so busily working for seemed a little pointless too, honestly.  But the sappy people books all had told me that you can’t change the world or spread your voice or do your thing until you really, truly love and accept yourself. I am a researcher, a scholar; I read a lot.  And I also use this analogy a lot:  I can read every single gymnastics book ever.  I can know how to do all the moves.  I can explain every concept.  But I am not a gymnast unless I get on the floor and implement. I will fail many, many times no matter how much I know.  So, that was step 1.  Step 1: Reread the books!  Figure out what the heck it all means and how to do it.  Then, really focus on Step 2: Actually apply it to self.  I hadn’t really ever done this yet because, quite frankly, the application seemed hard and maybe I was scared of where I would end up.  I realized, though, that the efforts would lead me to where I wanted to go, even if that place was uncertain and scary from afar.

To apply, I had to decide what mattered most.  I had to take a hard look at what I said mattered most and what actually mattered most based on my actions.  What I said mattered most was kindness, fairness, unconditional love and acceptance, service to others.  What I emphasized through actions seemed more centered on self criticism, busy-ness, achievements, stuff.  It wasn’t clicking together.  I wasn’t implementing the things I wanted to embody.  I couldn’t love others unconditionally if I didn’t love myself.  I couldn’t emphasize service to others if I was too busy to serve.  I wasn’t walking the walk.  Why did I feel like upgrading my kitchen mattered so much?  Why did I care if other people thought my half-finished basement was a less than ideal place to hang out?  Whoever didn’t like it didn’t have to come!  It’s not that I was overly materialistic really; I was just mindlessly trying to have all the things one is “supposed” to have in a standard suburban home.  I was on autopilot, checking off all my boxes, but I had forgotten why I ever cared about the boxes in the first place.  

This led to Step 3:  Figure out what was hindering the implementation of my values in the first place.  I had already identified busy-ness and autopilot, but self criticism was harder to tackle.  I know we are all hard on ourselves and I like to think I’m not more or less hard than your average person.  I did start to realize I was so much easier on others than I was on myself.  I happened to see an article and video with two teenagers reading to each other all the mean things they thought about themselves. These two beautiful girls had all these hateful things running through their minds, and we all do that to some extent. I realized how much negativity I fed myself on a daily basis.  I couldn’t love myself while demeaning myself all day long.   I also heard the comments others would make about themselves, and I would think about how silly it was that that person was worried about whatever thing, because that person to me seemed to have it all together.  I guess we all put on a strong front.  Likely they felt the same about me.  Why do we do this to ourselves? As far as kindness, I had to accept the fact that I was being selectively kind to animals, even when I knew the truth about the meat industry.  That, however, is another post altogether.

So, on to Step 4: Remove barriers.  Removing busy-ness is kind of tricky when I am finishing an EdD program, working full time, and being a mom to two school age girls.  I will be busy for the foreseeable future.  I have a busy life.  I have a life goal of finishing this EdD, and my career is where I feel I best serve others.  I prioritize this.   To combat the busy-ness, I am making more of an effort to be conscious of how I delegate my time.  I think I have always done a good job of keeping my family first, but I am making more of an effort to spend time with the girls just being silly and hanging out.  It’s hard when you know you have a paper due or an email from a parent to return, and our culture of NOW NOW NOW makes you feel like those things are oh so pressing.  They aren’t.  Somehow, the things that need to get done all get done.  What should be pressing is modeling for my girls how to relax, have fun, goof off, let the dishes pile up and ignore the dust balls and just laugh together.

I prioritize exercise as a way of de-stressing, but I also hate the time it takes away from my family.  I always had a constant loop in my head of “go to the gym” vs. “don’t ignore your girls” that sounded like: “if I leave by 4:54 I can make it to work out….Oh great look now it’s 4:56 you are still here and traffic is getting all bad and now you failed again… you will be so late if you go now and they will be the last ones at after school pick up and you can’t let that happen or they might have memories of feeling abandoned after school”… and so forth.  I think it’s the curse of working moms.  Guilty no matter which choice we make.  I decided exercise should not stress me out.  It’s my stress relief.  I make a schedule, and if the schedule falls through no one says I can’t do jumping jacks in my (half finished) basement.  Or run around the yard with the girls and dog.  Or take a walk.  I was being too hard on what I “counted” as activity.  I was “busy-fying” my free time.

Somewhere along the way, I stumbled upon a mention of the book Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It.  Caution if you click the link; the book has a terrible cover, but the content is quality.  Basically, it taught me to refocus all that negative talk.  No more berating. Action step:  Rephrase!  At school we use positive language with the kids.  Why was I giving myself any less?  Not to say I want to give myself excuses or let myself off the hook, but I realized I wasn’t being kind to myself and that just changing my thought patterns made a huge difference.  

The last thing I realized was that I needed to really, as all my authors say, live my truth. I was so worried about what other people would think of me or how they would feel about me that I was hiding behind what I thought everyone wanted.  I have never and still do not wish to offend anyone.  My beliefs are mine; I respect yours as yours.  But I caught myself all the time thinking “What will other people think if I wear this or eat this or say this or do this…”  and really, who cares?  Why do I care what they think as long as my actions, thoughts, words are not abrasive/offensive?  I don’t like everything everyone else does and that’s fine.  I still like the people themselves.  I was just so busy hiding, trying to blend in, that I lost my voice.  

Not that any of this is easy or that I have it all down, but that’s my plan and my rationale. To work toward it, I bought a Best Self Journal and wrote my goal:  Be as authentic and mindful as possible and stick to my core values, 24 hours at a time.  I only focus on 24 hours.  I said could do anything for 24 hours.  But– confession– I messed up my Best Self Journal.  I did not do the stuff for like 48 hours.  A few times.  Old me would have been like “This is crap.  You always do this.  You never stick to anything.  Great job wasting money.”  New me tries to rephrase to sound more like  “Hey, things don’t always work the first time.  Maybe you set yourself up for failure picking this time to start when you knew that other thing was coming up.  It’s ok.  Week 3 is the new Week 1.  WHEN I get to the end, I’ll just copy some more pages from the website to finish it out.  Or I maybe won’t.  Maybe my journal is an 11 week journal.  That’s ok.”  It’s not pretty and it’s not perfect, but we are all works in progress.

I am rereading everything Brene Brown has written about being imperfect, taking chances, dusting yourself off and getting up after failure, and embracing and living your truth no matter what the cost.  I also love Glennon Doyle Melton’s blog (feeling all the feelings, doing the hard things, belonging to each other despite our imperfections).  I’m learning more about mindfulness, slowing down, breathing and really thinking through my motivations for actions.  I’m reading all the John Pavlovitz I can take in, so thankful to read a renegade take on Christianity.  

Maybe you think I’m going off the deep end– that’s ok.  I’m feeling pretty comfortable here.  I’m not worried if you think I’m a hippy dippy bleeding heart liberal because I am so proud to be one.  I don’t care if you aren’t one…. You’re still cool.  You do you; I’m going to start doing me.

 

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

This year– no resolutions, no challenges, no gimmicks… This year, I only vow to be true to me. I only resolve to love the fact that I am me. This year, I will be happy, and that is my only goal. I will be happy starting NOW.

I will not be happy when/if I lose weight, finish my degree, keep my house clean, make my kids watch less TV and eat healthier food, make more money, finally finish my basement or upgrade my kitchen…. I will be happy right now with who I am and with what I have.

Because, truly, I just need to slow down and remember that I am enough. Right here. Right now. Just the way I am.

It’s probably the scariest commitment I’ve ever made.

For my whole life, the voice of my own judgment has reigned supreme in my head. I’m never thin enough, I’m never a good enough mother or wife or daughter or sister, there’s always a carrot just out of reach and if I could just change one thing two things three things life would be so wonderful. If I could just keep making enough other people happy regardless of how it made me feel, then their happiness would become mine and I would be THERE.

Turns out, though, that there is no THERE. You never get THERE. You are always HERE, and THERE is so maddeningly just out of reach.

So this year, I stop worrying what the world thinks I should be doing and feeling and saying, and I slow down and learn to love me in the HERE and NOW. Truly, I have to get to know me again, or maybe I need to get to know me at all.

I’ve been so busy being busy. I’ve been so busy doing and getting ALL THE THINGS.

I don’t want to be so so busy and one day wake up wondering where it all has gone, wondering if I spent my whole life racing to a destination that doesn’t exist. I don’t want the edge of all of my beautiful memories tainted by the tint of worry and doubt. I don’t want to raise my daughters to race headlong toward ENOUGH, when ENOUGH was there the whole time.

In 2018, I will learn to be mindful. I will learn to be easier on myself. I will learn to see my own beauty and I will celebrate my own worth.

As transplants in our hometown, I am struggling to create the kinds of reliable holiday traditions I treasured as a child for my child. I am searching for traditions.

I have been in CA for 13 holiday seasons. Every one we have flown back to GA for the holidays. I guess it feels easier since all family is there and we have the time off.

Counterintuitively, it was harder for me to book the flight this year. Now we have her, and she needs to spend time with her cousins and grandparents and aunts and uncles, but I am her mom and have a really strong desire to build her holiday connection to her home. Being the adult now, it is my responsibility to create the magical holiday memories she will be nostalgic for when she is momming for her children. She may only be 2.6 but she has an incredible memory like my husband and I wager even some of this season will be remembered by her next year and beyond, so the pressure on me feels intense. The last two seasons, I just got through knowing I could get serious about it when she will remember. Memory seems to be here, and the intense internal pressure that created was unanticipated.

So here it is my 13th Christmas as a Californian, and we got our first tree. Our place is small, no room for a big real one, and it took me 4 different stores before I finally found a fake one in stock and under 7 ft tall. It was her size, 4ft tall, so my husband called it our Charlie Brown tree, but she absolutely loved decorating it. I mean it was about the size of a toddler attention span, so there’s that. In fact, she spent every night undecorating and then redecorating it which was also great. But she is very independent and could not understand why she wasn’t allowed to plug it in every morning so the new threat of electrocution was less great. But lighting the tree morning and evening having her chase the green lights as the little tree we found and cycled through, that was pretty magical. So I will call the tree a win.

Mondays at our house are craft nights. The first Monday I got a big tub of holiday stamps and a red and green stamp pad. We went to town making a paper chain for the tree. But then I had forgotten to get tape or staples to form the links, so that was only kind of a fail. The second Monday, I had my husband get candies for decorating cookies, and I whipped up a batch of ginger bread dough, but I was short on molasses, the cookies were hard to roll out, and when I opened the red sugar, though it seemed sealed, red sugar fell all over the counter and appeared opaque. Not wanting to poison my child but still wanting to be festive, we stuck with the green sugar, but the candies my husband found were for birthday cookies, so it wasn’t quite the red and green explosion I envisioned. But they got eaten so it was a another partial victory. We met up with friends later that week to craft gingerbread houses and learned the importance of making that a multi day affair. Day one: walls. Day 2: roof. Day 3: decoration. If you try to shove it into a single afternoon with 1-3 year olds, the structure can not withstand the force. In the end, I am going to call our Christmas crafting marginally successful.

She is totally on board with Christmas lights. She already enjoys looking for the moon when it is dark. So looking for Christmas lights was a logical progression. I would pick her up from school. She would comment on the darkness and say, “now we can look for Christmas lights?” I would say yes, and that would sustain her interest for the 30 min car ride home. It would also occupy her interest for any walk we took, and especially excited her the night we took a walk just for lights! And the new popular projector light things provided endless driveway dance party opportunities! My fail was not really taking the time to string outdoor lights for our place. I sense next year she will be a big help with that! Looking for lights was our biggest holiday win!

Of course, we had to see Santa. But I was more behind than I have ever been grading this semester, so I put it off until 5 days before Christmas. Toddler attention spans being what they are, I could sense this was going to be a fail, so I booked an appointment with Santa. Even still, a 45 minute wait ensued. Thank goodness for fake snow and a similarly aged toddler next to us in line. She was so excited to see him and tell him about our jingle tree right up until the moment it became her turn. I leapt out of the picture to catch a smile and no more words were exchanged with Santa, only tears. I suppose that was to be expected. Maybe next year Santa will be traditional. This year, his lap was still obligatory.

Perhaps the reason I don’t have a great track record of established CA traditions commensurate with my years as a resident is because my foot is always halfway out the door. We always fly back almost as soon as we can wrap up our professional obligations. All of the traditions I identify with at Christmas are found on my sleepy little street in my sleepy little hometown where I have the same bedroom I have had intermittently since birth swapping only to the one that adjoins through the bathroom when I was in middle school. But now my old room is my nieces’ room, and instead of getting locked out of the shared bathroom by my sister, I get locked out by her daughters. Instead of being bathed in a warm orange tone in all pictures from the wood paneling in the living room, we are all brighter from the light paint that now coats it, but there is no mistake. This is the home of the Christmas of my memory. This is where my family has joined hands to say a prayer of thanks for prosperity and togetherness before sharing a Christmas feast for over 30 years.

So this year, I tried to stay as long in CA as possible to maximize home memories coming into Atlanta in the early afternoon on the 23rd. By the time we arrived, I could just hear the chorus of that song, “we need a little Christmas right this very minute” ringing in my ears as the soundtrack to the immediate family time that ensued. We had barely put our bags down when we were furtively sneaking Santa presents from them to the tree trying not to wake her. Still jet lagged and groggy she bolted upright when she heard her cousins and joined them in welcoming Santa. She seemed not to notice the smallest stack was hers being that which I could fit in the corner of my checked bag. She definitely didn’t seem to note the hastily assembled ziplock bag of cookies from Sissy’s kitchen were the sad offerings in a stocking I forgot to plan on. In the end, permission to rip paper seemed more satisfying than the content of the package. I am sure this is probably on par with the Christmas mornings of other toddlers this year. For some reason, I thought all the anticipation would generate more. More emotions in both of us were interestingly lacking. Perhaps the hurry up to Christmas exhausted us too much for simple enjoyment.

But there was also no mistaking that the homestead felt half as big this year. We lost our matriarch last fall. We lost her home across the street from my parents’ home last spring. We lost our traditional Christmas Eve gathering last week. Fire truck santa passed almost without observation because my two year old was screaming louder than it sirens because she wanted to change clothes for the 13th time that day. But we made it outside just in time to watch him pass because he was a perfectly timed diversion. And that makes me sad. At her house, he was a magical treat we shared as a family sipping egg nog in her driveway, one of those fabled Downs holiday in West Point traditions. This year when I felt so much pressure to create the magical Christmas memories for her, he was a diversion from her tantrum.

Family Firetruck Santa viewing 12.2016

So who knows what 2018 will bring? Who knows what if any of this 2017 holiday season my child will remember? Who knows if we will do any of these same things next year or what crazy new options we will explore? Who knows how much of it will be spent in each location for optimal holiday togetherness and enjoyment? I just know adulting is sometimes hard. I know it is strange to feel pulled between creating the moments of family and togetherness you treasure while still maintaining home holiday traditions when the homes and the family you need are a continent apart. I also know Christmas knows no property. It lives in the love and laughs we share with the people we surround ourselves with in the moments that we gather. Perhaps one day many years from now when she struggles to balance the needs of her family with her memories of the traditions of ours, she will read this meditation and know that we tried.

I am from this land

my eyes are cut from these sapphire skies

my knees have stained this clay 

with crimson blood

I belong to this land

my past sways among these pines

my secrets sink in rivers 

brown with shame

my soul carries this land

of nights alive

with beams of promise

of sun so bright

I burn with longing

~E. Davis 01.02.07

I’m Southern.  If you’re Southern too, you know it’s complicated.

This land is terrible and beautiful all at once and truly, deeply misunderstood.  

From the outside, the country sees a backward place.  A place filled, they think, with racism.  From the outside, I imagine we seem slow, and not just in our speech.  From the outside, I am sure we are perceived as many things.  I can’t really speak to that, because I’m not on the outside.

I imagine it’s easy to stand on the outside and assume.  It’s easy to proclaim and declare how things should be, but it’s harder to live the change.  I’m working to live the change.  I believe in the beauty we have here.  I see you, fellow Southerner, struggling, too, to live the change.

There is kindness here.  There is good here.  There is hope here.  It isn’t even all that hard to find.  You don’t even have to know where to look.

I know the eyes of the country were on Alabama.  Now that Alabama has done its part for change, eyes will likely turn from Alabama to focus on the next big cause.  In a similar fashion, the eyes were here on us to “Flip the Sixth” in the northern Atlanta suburbs.  We didn’t flip, but we did fight.  I’m proud of our fight.  I’m proud of Alabamians for fighting harder.

In the small Southern town of my childhood, people were black or white.  People for the most part were Protestant, as we were.  I never knew a Jewish person and quite frankly even being Catholic was considered an oddity.  There was a predominantly white private school and a predominantly black public school.  My siblings and I went to the public school.  We were also considered an oddity. I am grateful for this.

That was the status quo in the 1980s; I don’t pretend to know the status quo there in 2017.  What I do know is how incredibly fortunate my own children are to grow up in a school and community teeming with diversity.  They know people from all over the world who celebrate all different religions and traditions.  They truly, honestly don’t know the world a different way, and I am so, so grateful for that.  

It’s easy to become discouraged because change doesn’t happen quickly.  But I see it happening.  I see it in an election in Alabama.  I see it in a near-victory in the northern Atlanta suburbs.  I see it in the halls of my children’s schools.  I see it at soccer games, at chorus concerts, in the pews of my (Catholic) church…

I’m not one to belittle the beliefs of others.  You know your heart and I know mine.  To me, this change isn’t about party or politics; it’s about people.  If you love this place, you work to shape it.  You work to ensure Southern hospitality extends to all, not just those who look and think and feel like you.  There may have been pain and anger and hatred in our land’s past, but there will be joy and love and hope in our land’s future.

Don’t stand on the outside and assume, come on down.  All y’all are welcome here.

#bethechange

 

I have been enrolled in a class this year all about active learning strategies in science and math classrooms. This semester we have been watching 7 min clips of each other teach.

I watched footage of my biology colleague using a game with his students. He got them in groups of four, gave them each a straw and a plate full of kidney beans. He said, “alright, you need to fish for the kidney beans using only your straw. Go.” He gave them no other directions. It seemed simple enough. They went at it, giggling, playing, fishing. After a certain amount of time he said, “alright, time. One year has elapsed. If you still have beans on your plate, those fish can reproduce. Put three beans back for every fish in your lake.” 90% of the plates had no beans. The communities were dead because the lakes were dead.

Uncontrollable consumption of resources without regard to the common good is totally unsustainable. I begged this teacher to take his game on the road to congress. I joked I would pay for his flight. The game was so simple yet so effective at illustrating a core tenet of conservation: One cannot use resources selfishly without regard to the common good. To do so is unsustainable.

Make no mistake, this Republican tax scam is a redistribution of wealth. It is just taking the limited resources and supports for low and middle income people and using those cost savings to give tax cuts to already wealthy people. It is pushing the wealth up. They don’t even have the decency to lie well about it. When asking a room full of CEOs what they would do with these corporate tax benefits, none raised their hands for training, growth, or reinvesting in employees.

I feel like we were robbed. In the middle of the night. Of thousands of dollars annually. And spray painted on the walls of our home were slurs against the decisions that built the life we live.

You actually couldn’t craft a tax bill that was more an affront to me personally than the one the two houses of the legislative branch produced.  Actually we were robbed once, and I have to say, this tax bill felt more violating. All our robbers scored was some Sudafed and an iPod. GOP congress plans to take thousands of dollars from my middle class blue state family and generally increasing the tax burdens of the middle class in any area with high state and local tax burdens which we have because we want our states to fund education, infrastructure, and technology. And then we give this money to real estate developers and corporations with already astounding amounts of cash. The world’s wealthiest just got even wealthier! The poor and middle class get less! Income inequality that was already breathtakingly large just got insurmountable. America is so great! USA! USA! I can’t wait for Steve Mnuchin’s wife to have her “Let them eat cake” moment of twitter fame. Oh, and let’s eliminate healthcare for 13 million ppl and drill in the arctic for good measure.

Here’s the rub. I live in a blue house in a blue state. I wouldn’t mind paying more taxes if it meant the people of my country would benefit, if they were investments in education, healthcare, green technologies. But they aren’t. They are going to go to already wealthy people who will not reinvest in the American workforce, will not innovate to address climate change, or enhance health benefits for employees, and certainly will not provide a free college education for the children or enhanced technical retraining for their employees. They will probably just invest it, give CEOs pay raises, or do stock buy backs, you know, what corporations and rich people do.

But rich people, I just have one question. How much money is enough for you? Are you proud of what kicking 13 million people out of health coverage, limiting the already limited disposable income of middle income consumers and their ability to save for retirement, adding 1.5-2 trillion dollars to the national deficit will do to the security of your country? Are you proud that in exploding the deficit, you are also paving the way to dismantle the social safety net that has been the backbone for middle America for decades? Do you think bankrupting your employees with the new added burdens of inflated medical costs, higher tax burdens, and elder care for their financially insecure retired parents will somehow make them more productive?

And Republicans, why the speed of light legislative process with no public hearings? Why the immediate implementation that leaves financial planning for every American in limbo over the next two weeks , a time when generally most Americans prefer not to worry and focus on spending their few vacation days catching up with friends and family with whom they have had little time to interact with so few paid leave days annually? My husband and I are scrambling to figure out if it would actually benefit us to pay our full property tax bill before the year end. Is that possible? Is it deductible? Is it advisable? Who can say? Probably no one who voted on it, that’s for sure.

I guess we all knew it was going to have to get a lot worse before it gets any better. Let’s just hope this sham of a legislative process doesn’t cause too much irreparable damage to the lives of regular people before sensible legislators can regain control and attempt to mitigate the impact. You know, people who actually care about regular people and protecting the nation’s interests, not the donors or worse, their own.

In the meantime, the media must stop use of the term “major legislative victory.” That implies there is something winning about this bill. Nothing in this bill helps the republic to win or rise in stature or status. Instead they must start calling this massive wealth grab by and for the incredibly wealthy a win for the 1%. Or a win for Republican donors. It certainly isn’t a victory for any conservatives who claim to care about the deficit. It certainly isn’t a win for Republicans who favor “regular order.” It certainly isn’t a win for regular people.

I am not even sure Spider-Man can save us. I am sure it is not sustainable. I study biology. #electionshaveconsequences

This was me, peak parenting, or so I thought. My husband was participating in the Tour de Fuzz, a century to benefit the police of Sonoma County. I ordered white wine with a poolside charcuterie tray for our lunch at the Fountaingrove Inn, a landmark establishment that no longer exists. We were guests a couple of weeks before the fires. It was burned to the ground in the recent fires that obliterated many acres of Sonoma County. Here this day, gone the next. It was consumed by the Tubbs Fire.

Above are before and after images of the high school where the start of the century was staged. The destruction total. Fortunately for Santa Rosa, this high school was not in use as a school. Unfortunately the neighboring public one was.

Anyone who has been to Sonoma County wine country has seen these cypress trees lining the path to a winery. We live within an hour’s drive to Santa Rosa. We have made a life out of weekend trips to this beautiful corner of the earth. So to revisit last month after some of the worst fires in CA history, to see them scorched to the tip like skinny spent matchsticks was kind of jarring.

To enter the establishments where we have frequented, talk to the locals, hear about how many of their friends, their families are out of a home, out of a job, or worse, both, was fairly gut wrenching.

With two sets of CA wildfires of the most destructive on record in this season alone, and two apocalyptic hurricanes leaving over a thousand dead by recent estimates, I am done listening to denial of climate change. Scientists are in almost complete agreement. The few who will voice an alternative opinion are exploiting a payroll opportunity. There is overwhelming consensus that these are the consequences of climate change.

The worst part of it is how many people (scientists and politicians alike) know it. This is on the scale of the knowledge big tobacco had of the causative role smoking played as a carcinogen while Joe Camel still graced the pages of our Weekly Readers.

At a time when the US should be playing a leading role in the solutions that transform our dependence on fossil fuels to a renewable energy economy, we are the lone leaders in leaving the Paris Accord.

This is the defining moment of our times. There is no doubt. You can hear the gears grinding as GOP Representatives pivot from, “there is no scientific consensus ” to “The hour is too late.” They had our children’s future in their hands, and they sold it for short term political gain.

Disgust doesn’t begin to describe the emotions of this adult female who remembers cherishing her book “50 things you can do to save the world” snipping six pack rings and walking her radio flyer wagon around the neighborhood of her rural GA hometown as a middle schooler. It is time for leadership and action.

My friends and family just had a snow day Georgia in the middle of December. Instead of marveling at the beauty of the peacefully falling flakes, I wish more would stand back in recognition of the aberration and in abject terror that climate change means unpredictable extremes in weather that led their local forecaster to tell you to prepare for flurries that wouldn’t stick. Then pivot to the recognition that American citizens in Puerto Rico awoke to a thirteenth week without power or potable water in a botched recovery effort the likes of which our country hasn’t seen since Katrina. Then recognize global climate change is more of a national security threat than any radical Muslim or oppressed white male. It has the capacity to do millions of dollars in property damage, leave thousands homeless, kill hundreds with almost no warning. It will likely only worsen. Then come to tears when you realize this is just the new normal.

It is a time when our diplomatic envoys should be extracting their good inky pens and asking , “Where do I sign?” That is precisely what happened with the long negotiated Paris Accords, a textbook example of the power of global diplomacy. Instead, on June 1st our president announced we would be withdrawing from the long negotiated Paris Accords and hired a man to run the EPA who is a cartoon villain for human killing deregulation. And in response, Emmanuel Macron says please, come to France. Do your research here. We will fund you because the work needs doing. Make our planet great again. This guy gets it.

You can lament the inefficiency of national government, and there are few things government is really good at, but pooling resources to tackle global insoluble problems has to be on the list of its strengths. No single individual will innovate on a level to neutralize the threat of climate change, but sustained investment in innovative technology and conversion to renewable energy sources can have an impact.

Instead our president and his minions want us to party like it is 1929 and prop up coal while rolling back regulations that protect our environment and eliminating thousands of acres of National parks while tacking on drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge to tax reform because why not?

I am done. My sign is ready. When can I march. We have to fight to preserve our planet while she is in a position to save. There is no planet B. We as global citizens have to pop this nationalist bubble of ignorance and awaken to the terrifying reality that climate change is the greatest geopolitical threat facing our country and its world, and recognize that media bias meant it got all of 15 minutes in the 2016 presidential debates only because she brought it up.

There is only one party fighting for the future of this planet. But we all breathe the air. We all live on the the land. We all consume the fruits of the ground. We should all be terrified of the clear and present danger. Now is the time to demand more of our elected officials for the future of our children.

This is as close as my sister and I have ever come to being princesses. We were part of the court in a rural Alabama local community theater production of Once Upon a Mattress. I think we were 14ish and 16ish at the time. You know, we were right in the age of Roy Moore’s wheelhouse.

I remember there was a young man maybe late 30s early thirties in the show with whom I shared many jokes. Even in retrospect, I viewed this as an incredibly normal interaction. I was an adolescent yearning to be viewed as witty, interesting, perhaps even attractive. He did find my jokes funny but recognizing I was a minor he laughed and joked with me but maintained a barrier. That is completely normal behavior for two people in those two positions in life.

Roy Moore is a child predator with a now well publicized past. A young woman in Alabama of the ages we are in this picture cannot consent to a relationship with a man. A respectable man would never put them in a position to need to.

Some polls suggest the fine people of Alabama believe this is all fake news perpetrated by democratic operatives. But the reality is quite far from that. This story was broken by real reporters, on the ground covering the runoff, listening to locals, hearing rumors, following leads, finding hidden truths.

And why shouldn’t we believe these women? Most of them were Trump voters. I mean they were spending their formative years in heavily conservative rural Alabama. It isn’t that surprising that they have certain political persuasions. It was on the ground old fashioned journalism that allowed investigative reporters to give these victims a voice.

Most were reluctant to come forward as many victims were in the pre-2017 mindset. The misogyny and sexism that are pervasive in our social and political systems lead many journalists, politicians, and lawyers to shame victims, question the veracity of their statements, judge their appearance and what their wardrobe says about their motives. Their bravery to come forward exposes them to such intense scrutiny that many feel violated all over again. So why would they report? They keep it inside. They blame themselves. They suffer silently.

I have a friend who suffered a similar fate.

He was her teacher. She was his babysitter. The relationship began when she was a young teen, but she was very intelligent, felt she was older than her age and thought she was able to consent. When she ended their relationship as she headed to college, he didn’t accept. He stalked her. She gathered the evidence. She filed a restraining order. She moved on with her life, tried hard to mentally and emotionally suppress the trauma. She became incredibly successful. Then she got the call.

He was doing it again. Or at least members of her small town suspected it. They needed her to be a witness. The police had lost some evidence. It had been almost a decade. So they needed her voice.

Thanks to the constant consistent support of her closest confidants, she found the bravery she needed to be the voice her community needed. She found that bravery based on our continual and unfailing support. But she was exposed. She had made herself vulnerable again. The torrent of hateful comments about her in local paper and media forums sent her spiraling. Though she was a minor at the time of the incident, it was a small town and there were people who spoke her name, because the internet is built for trolls.

She kept her voice strong but only for the others, the suspected unnamed victims who needed her. No women joined her because to do so was to become a figure of public scrutiny. She had to be the strong one for the young girls in his classrooms. She had to break his power for their protection. Though at the time, so many adults knew, her community did not protect her. She had to be better than that.

Child predators know how to find their victims. And they wield their influence and power in young vulnerable females. He was a teacher. Roy Moore was a district attorney. He met one of his accusers in the courthouse with her mother on their way to divorce proceedings. He was banned from the mall for prowling. Banned from the mall!

My friend was alone through it all. At least Moore’s accusers have each other. They will need each other as their integrity is questioned on a national stage, as their abuser is propped up by our pussy grabber in chief and the party he represents.

But Moore’s accusers also have something else. They have a momentum shift. The women’s march, the #metoo movement (Time’s most recent person of the year!), the wave of credible high profile abuse scandals in media and government represent a pivotal moment in women’s history. We are not taking it anymore. We as women will be heard. What she said is starting to shine a light on the darkness of him. What he said is starting to not matter as much, and that is a good thing.

We need to support these women unquestionably until evidence proves otherwise. They need our faith in their truth, they need our tissue for their tears, they need our rebuke of the power dynamic that left them and young women like them vulnerable. Let’s call this approach to the veracity of a woman’s story a much needed equal and opposite reaction.

The RNC is giving Moore money. Senate leaders are saying, “let the people of Alabama decide.” The president has both his Twitter thumbs at the ready endorsing regularly. Seriously? Seriously? At a time when the women of the country are finding the vocabulary word ENOUGH, Republicans are propping up a predator because they need his vote to advance their agenda. This is yet another in their increasingly long list of transgressions for party over country.

But I believe in you Alabama. I lived directly adjacent to you for half of my life. I believe you love conservatism and Jesus and trust you can distinguish when one should supersede the other. It is not enough just to sit this one out or vote write in “on principle” because that is not a principled stance. A principled stance is voting for the only viable non child predator option, Doug Jones, to make sure a credibly accused child abuser does not have an elected position in our government.

Elections have consequences. Make sure you don’t let another predator win one.