The heat of summer is soon to be a distant memory. This is an "El Nino" year in California, which means torrential rains during the wet season (Oct-Apr).
This coming Monday the weather service is predicting the first storm of the season, and it promises to be a wallopaloozer: 60mph winds, up to 8 inches of rain spread over 2 days.
As dramatic and potentially hazardous as that is, I really see it more as a reason for hope: California has been in a moderate drought for a number of years, and the copious rains of an El Nino year are great news for that.
But also, the beginning of every rainy season in California is somewhat analogous to Spring in the "4-seasons" parts of the US: it is the season of new life. The oaks, laurels and madrones are becoming stressed at the end of the dry season, the grasses are long-golden and rattle dry in the wind; the creosote and ceanothus bushes are looking pretty twiggy and dessicated, the creeks have slowed to a few pools and trickles, and a fine layer of dust coats the leathery leaves of summer-dried eucalyptus up on the ridgetops. It is as if nature is crying out for rebirth and renewal.
But just lately there has been a hint of humidity in the winds, as over the horizon in the Pacific the autumn rains prepare to break at last through the last ramparts of summer heat and overrun the mountains and fields with blessed, long-missed rain.
[Update: now may be close to 10 inches in some areas. Yeesh.]
Showing posts with label Hope. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hope. Show all posts
Thursday, October 08, 2009
Sunday, April 26, 2009
It's all "us"
Although I am a white Irish Catholic, I grew up in a black neighborhood, and this has given me what I think is a pretty unusual point of view (for a white person) on race relations in America.
I've noticed again and again that what's missing from lots of discussions between whites about "the Ghetto" is any sense of understanding of the the concrete, complex humanity of the people being discussed. The often glib caricatures used by whites (even relatively well-meaning ones) do not bear virtually any relationship to the actual people who were my neighbors in Richmond, California. For those who know the area, I grew up almost exactly between the Kennedy Manor and Easter Hill housing projects, in a solidly working-class black neighborhood - in the 1960s and into the 1970s (we moved to suburbia in 1976). We were the only white family in the neighborhood.
Do this for me: Think about how long ago, say, 1983 is from the moment in time that you are reading this diary. That was the amount of time separating the folks in the neighborhood in 1970 from a time when they lived in the Jim Crow, pre-civil-rights South, and could be lynched - taken out on some back road, emasculated and hung - for calling a white woman by her first name.
I saw first-hand the psychological devastation that was wrought in people who had experienced that culture: because of an accident of melanin, they could be murdered for performing the intrinsically human act of speaking with kindly familiarity to a woman they might actually be acquainted with.
There was a family down the street I'll call the Millers. Dad worked in the Chevron chemical plant, mom was a part-time secretary at the school district office. 5 kids, the youngest of whom was in my class at Pullman Elementary.
The oldest boy, who I'll call Duane, had had polio, and walked with a pronounced limp. Duane had one of the kindest, most tender hearts I've ever been privileged to know. He used to look out for me sometimes when things in the neighborhood got rough.
One day when I was...oh, probably 6 years old, I was over at the Millers' house visiting my friend from school, and Duane got the new Chihuahua dog they had just gotten, and handed the dog to me to see - and the little mutt bit me on the stomach and held on with its teeth. I screamed with pain and fear, and Duane hurriedly got the dog off me.
His mom came running, and when I told her what had happened, Duane, right there on the spot, was beaten by his mom. She shoved him, his bad leg just collapsed, and his mother just...attacked. He got the beating of his life right there in front of me.
When she was done, she turned to me and apologized in anxious tones: "Duane didn't mean it - he was just playing - just tell your mama it was an accident..."
At the time, it struck me as strange - here was this big, powerful woman, and she was begging for my forgiveness?
She had met my parents, had sat and talked with my mom many times over coffee - she knew my parents were about the furthest thing possible from the racists she had left behind in Alabama.
But here's the thing I've realized since. In a time in her life no more remote from that moment than 1983 is from us today, Duane's carelessness with a white boy might have put their well-being, even their lives, in danger. She struck Duane not out of anger, but deep, unreasoning terror.
***
The neighborhood could be, at times, almost saturated with an atmosphere of latent violence - but there was also deep, overflowing, selfless love, a love so profound and simple and deep that it gave me a taste of what heaven might be like.
There was elderly Mrs. Pender next door, who had had a stroke and walked with a walker. Her husband, Mr Pender, had the most awe-inspiring lawn on the block - he probably weeded the thing with tweezers - but his wife was the real gift to the neighborhood. She would take me in sometimes when the 'hood got extra crazy, and tell me that she knew, just knew, that one day I would grow up to be someone really special. (Mrs. Pender is now long dead, and heaven is a richer place for her being there. RIP, Mrs. Pender.)
There's the elderly black lady I met one day when I was selling door-to-door. The whole enterprise, while technically not fraudulent, was making me pretty uncomfortable. Lots of the salesmen loved selling to ghetto addresses - they would just wave a couple free months of service in the naive residents' faces, kinda forget to mention the charges that would hit after that two month grace period, and rack up sales. I worked the ghetto when I had to, but hated it - I felt like Judas.
One day, I knocked on some humble little basement-apartment door, and the door opened to reveal a frail, elderly woman...who had the kindest eyes I had ever seen - it was as if she were staring right through the glib salesman veneer, past all the BS, and directly into my soul, and genuinely appreciating, unconditionally loving, the qualities she saw there. It was as if I were staring dumbstruck into the very Face of Christ. I could sell no more.
***
There are spiritual treasures heaped in our ghettos among the poverty and violence, and one of the more tragic facts of our culture is that the vast majority of whites have absolutely no clue about the riches to be found there.
There is a woman I know who lost both of her grandchildren to murder - both in their mid-teens. To see this woman is to see a person who has been almost physically crushed by grief - she walks with stooped shoulders, and to look into her face is to see care-lines that have little to do with age, and lots to do with having gazed heartbroken into the coffins of two grandchildren she had loved with primal, protective, simple, profound, unconditional love.
And yet, she has refused to believe that murder, that hatred, that retaliation is all there is in this world. She spends practically every waking moment working in outreach programs for at-risk youth. She sees some straighten out their lives and make it out. Some she loses to murder or prison. The ones in prison, she writes to; the ones who were murdered, she prays for and with their families. Her actual first name is "Hope" and she is a saint.
I also have some very painful memories of my childhood, some of which are the reasons I suffer from PTSD, but I must say I've never found elsewhere the kind of simple, stripped-down, elemental love I witnessed and experienced in the old neighborhood. If only more Americans could see that Hope and they are in the very same world. They and Hope could help each other heal.
I've noticed again and again that what's missing from lots of discussions between whites about "the Ghetto" is any sense of understanding of the the concrete, complex humanity of the people being discussed. The often glib caricatures used by whites (even relatively well-meaning ones) do not bear virtually any relationship to the actual people who were my neighbors in Richmond, California. For those who know the area, I grew up almost exactly between the Kennedy Manor and Easter Hill housing projects, in a solidly working-class black neighborhood - in the 1960s and into the 1970s (we moved to suburbia in 1976). We were the only white family in the neighborhood.
Do this for me: Think about how long ago, say, 1983 is from the moment in time that you are reading this diary. That was the amount of time separating the folks in the neighborhood in 1970 from a time when they lived in the Jim Crow, pre-civil-rights South, and could be lynched - taken out on some back road, emasculated and hung - for calling a white woman by her first name.
I saw first-hand the psychological devastation that was wrought in people who had experienced that culture: because of an accident of melanin, they could be murdered for performing the intrinsically human act of speaking with kindly familiarity to a woman they might actually be acquainted with.
There was a family down the street I'll call the Millers. Dad worked in the Chevron chemical plant, mom was a part-time secretary at the school district office. 5 kids, the youngest of whom was in my class at Pullman Elementary.
The oldest boy, who I'll call Duane, had had polio, and walked with a pronounced limp. Duane had one of the kindest, most tender hearts I've ever been privileged to know. He used to look out for me sometimes when things in the neighborhood got rough.
One day when I was...oh, probably 6 years old, I was over at the Millers' house visiting my friend from school, and Duane got the new Chihuahua dog they had just gotten, and handed the dog to me to see - and the little mutt bit me on the stomach and held on with its teeth. I screamed with pain and fear, and Duane hurriedly got the dog off me.
His mom came running, and when I told her what had happened, Duane, right there on the spot, was beaten by his mom. She shoved him, his bad leg just collapsed, and his mother just...attacked. He got the beating of his life right there in front of me.
When she was done, she turned to me and apologized in anxious tones: "Duane didn't mean it - he was just playing - just tell your mama it was an accident..."
At the time, it struck me as strange - here was this big, powerful woman, and she was begging for my forgiveness?
She had met my parents, had sat and talked with my mom many times over coffee - she knew my parents were about the furthest thing possible from the racists she had left behind in Alabama.
But here's the thing I've realized since. In a time in her life no more remote from that moment than 1983 is from us today, Duane's carelessness with a white boy might have put their well-being, even their lives, in danger. She struck Duane not out of anger, but deep, unreasoning terror.
***
The neighborhood could be, at times, almost saturated with an atmosphere of latent violence - but there was also deep, overflowing, selfless love, a love so profound and simple and deep that it gave me a taste of what heaven might be like.
There was elderly Mrs. Pender next door, who had had a stroke and walked with a walker. Her husband, Mr Pender, had the most awe-inspiring lawn on the block - he probably weeded the thing with tweezers - but his wife was the real gift to the neighborhood. She would take me in sometimes when the 'hood got extra crazy, and tell me that she knew, just knew, that one day I would grow up to be someone really special. (Mrs. Pender is now long dead, and heaven is a richer place for her being there. RIP, Mrs. Pender.)
There's the elderly black lady I met one day when I was selling door-to-door. The whole enterprise, while technically not fraudulent, was making me pretty uncomfortable. Lots of the salesmen loved selling to ghetto addresses - they would just wave a couple free months of service in the naive residents' faces, kinda forget to mention the charges that would hit after that two month grace period, and rack up sales. I worked the ghetto when I had to, but hated it - I felt like Judas.
One day, I knocked on some humble little basement-apartment door, and the door opened to reveal a frail, elderly woman...who had the kindest eyes I had ever seen - it was as if she were staring right through the glib salesman veneer, past all the BS, and directly into my soul, and genuinely appreciating, unconditionally loving, the qualities she saw there. It was as if I were staring dumbstruck into the very Face of Christ. I could sell no more.
***
There are spiritual treasures heaped in our ghettos among the poverty and violence, and one of the more tragic facts of our culture is that the vast majority of whites have absolutely no clue about the riches to be found there.
There is a woman I know who lost both of her grandchildren to murder - both in their mid-teens. To see this woman is to see a person who has been almost physically crushed by grief - she walks with stooped shoulders, and to look into her face is to see care-lines that have little to do with age, and lots to do with having gazed heartbroken into the coffins of two grandchildren she had loved with primal, protective, simple, profound, unconditional love.
And yet, she has refused to believe that murder, that hatred, that retaliation is all there is in this world. She spends practically every waking moment working in outreach programs for at-risk youth. She sees some straighten out their lives and make it out. Some she loses to murder or prison. The ones in prison, she writes to; the ones who were murdered, she prays for and with their families. Her actual first name is "Hope" and she is a saint.
I also have some very painful memories of my childhood, some of which are the reasons I suffer from PTSD, but I must say I've never found elsewhere the kind of simple, stripped-down, elemental love I witnessed and experienced in the old neighborhood. If only more Americans could see that Hope and they are in the very same world. They and Hope could help each other heal.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
"He's For The Whole World"
"When people speak of Obama, we don't say he's Luo Obama," said Ogega, 27, referring to Obama's Kenyan ethnic group. "We say he's Kenyan. We hope he will help us see each other as Kenyans instead of certain tribes."
A group of young women studying for an exam in diplomacy echoed that idea.
"We hope he'll be able to straighten out some politicians of this country -- give them a straight deal on issues like graft," said Judith Ngandoki, 27, who is studying for a master's degree in international relations.
Not far away, Kadiro Ganemo, an Ethiopian immigrant, suggested that such hope stretches beyond Kenya.
"He's not just for Kenya -- he's for the whole world," said Ganemo, 28, who is not a student but joined the celebration because he didn't want to watch alone at home.
He confessed that he had not believed Obama could be elected, given the racism that exists in the United States. When the results came in, he said, he cried, as he expected he would again later Tuesday. "Maybe Africans can unite like people in the U.S.," he said.
Yes, please. This is what it looks like to lead the world.
Friday, November 07, 2008
A New Day
Greg Sargent, on his seven year old's first political memory:
His earliest memory of politics will be the sight of a black man getting elected president and running the country along with a cast of sober, responsible, even formidable Democratic leaders in Congress.
That's a humbling thought. It's a reminder how high the stakes were in the election and of just how big a victory it really was. And it's a reminder that all the work is just getting started, lest we take these gains for granted and they somehow slip away.
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Sunday, August 24, 2008
A Woman Called Hope
I side, reflexively and all the time, with the little guy. Unions. Blue Collar people generally. The Poor. Minorities. The desperate. The doomed. The outcast. That little old lady you see pushing a shopping cart full of garbage outside Starbucks? She's your sister. What can you do to help her? The fact that she's talking to people who aren't there means she needs help. How can we make America a place where she is overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows her around, ready to catch her if she stumbles?
The soldier returning from war, unable to escape the terrible knowledge that what he has seen has shown him the damnable lies that our country tells itself in order to enable men to do things that will haunt them forever? The one who wakes up downstairs, halfway out the front door, because he heard an explosion in his dream and is now warning buddies who aren't there that they are about to die and his wife doesn't understand but tries to be there for him any way she can, but at the same time she's worried for the children? What can you do to help them? They are your brother and sister. How can we make America a place where they are overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows them around, ready to catch them if they stumble?
The man, now 45, who suffers from nightmares and flashbacks from growing up in a neighborhood where he went to sleep many nights to the sound of gunfire; where he lost precious, priceless, irreplaceable friends to random murders, and is not sure he can handle one more fucking senseless death? How can we make America a place where he is overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows him around, ready to catch him if he stumbles?
The woman whose actual first name is Hope. The one who wakes up every morning and, if she's lucky, has a few moments of peace before she remembers that both of her precious grandchildren were murdered; before she remembers that losing the first one was hard, but staring into another grandson's coffin almost exactly a year later -- that that was the beginning of the desolation and crushing grief that robs her daily of the rightful, well-earned joy of being a grandparent. She spends her free time ministering to the kids in the neighborhood, doing what she can to reach them before the gangs or police do. The ones she loses to murder she prays for; the ones in prison she visits and writes to. She is a saint. She needs your help.
How can we make America a place where she is overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows her around, ready to catch her if she stumbles?
America has become a scary place in the last 30 years. How can we make America a place filled with people who are overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows them around, ready to catch us if we stumble?
The soldier returning from war, unable to escape the terrible knowledge that what he has seen has shown him the damnable lies that our country tells itself in order to enable men to do things that will haunt them forever? The one who wakes up downstairs, halfway out the front door, because he heard an explosion in his dream and is now warning buddies who aren't there that they are about to die and his wife doesn't understand but tries to be there for him any way she can, but at the same time she's worried for the children? What can you do to help them? They are your brother and sister. How can we make America a place where they are overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows them around, ready to catch them if they stumble?
The man, now 45, who suffers from nightmares and flashbacks from growing up in a neighborhood where he went to sleep many nights to the sound of gunfire; where he lost precious, priceless, irreplaceable friends to random murders, and is not sure he can handle one more fucking senseless death? How can we make America a place where he is overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows him around, ready to catch him if he stumbles?
The woman whose actual first name is Hope. The one who wakes up every morning and, if she's lucky, has a few moments of peace before she remembers that both of her precious grandchildren were murdered; before she remembers that losing the first one was hard, but staring into another grandson's coffin almost exactly a year later -- that that was the beginning of the desolation and crushing grief that robs her daily of the rightful, well-earned joy of being a grandparent. She spends her free time ministering to the kids in the neighborhood, doing what she can to reach them before the gangs or police do. The ones she loses to murder she prays for; the ones in prison she visits and writes to. She is a saint. She needs your help.
How can we make America a place where she is overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows her around, ready to catch her if she stumbles?
America has become a scary place in the last 30 years. How can we make America a place filled with people who are overwhelmed with gratitude at the help that follows them around, ready to catch us if we stumble?
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