dispatches

The unattainable fantasy

I so don’t do this kind of photography, but here’s a great example of the how the unreality comes to life. Regardless of the corporate motivation behind this, I can’t help but agree 100%.

It’s a short film, under a minute. Thanks to Mike at Online Photographer.

http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/home_films_evolution_v2.swf

5 years ago

Here is what I wrote in "Dispatches" (my email proto-blog) the week of September 11, 5 years ago.

As it has for you and millions of others, my world has come to a near standstill. The attack on our country has shocked me, and probably has changed me forever.

Seeing those images, again and again and again, through the day. I couldn’t wrap my mind around them. The world had just tilted, and it would never be set right. Already I knew that the rest of my life, and my country’s life, would forever be in the shadow of this moment. I felt numbness and shock. By afternoon I was physically ill, and had to take to bed for an hour. I felt better only at evening, when a group from our synagogue gathered by Lake Washington to pray and share. Thoughts and words began to gather in me.

I feel despair at the hubris of those who act for the glory of God. The men who hijacked those planes were utterly certain in their belief that they were carrying out God’s will, and that they were acting against a titanic evil. Religious absolutism disregards any evidence to counter its absolute certainty, like the untidy notion that my enemy is human and feels like I do. And too, I am disheartened by our political leaders who are responding in kind. Our President says, this is an evil act by evil people, and we will hunt them and their supporters down. God, of course, is on our side. I fear we are going to respond to this titanic evil by bombing some poor country into the stone age, again. We seem unable to understand that revenge is not justice.

The only ones I can say were truly acting out God's will were those firefighters who headed up the stairs, against the tide.

Written in big chalk letters on the Greenlake jogging path is a third of a mile of peace aphorisms. The one I remember and take to my heart is this: "God does not grant peace to His creatures, it is a gift that we grant to each other."

Finally, I’m crying. The numbness, the shut-down feeling, the nervous energy with no outlet, it is passing. I feel terrible. This is good. There is no option but to feel horrible. My heart is open, and it is breaking.

I have not picked up a camera since Tuesday. Right now that work seems so trivial. The world cannot be put right again, and I am confused by my stance toward it. I don’t know what it will mean or how I will see when I do photograph again. I can only let this event have its way with me.

You can read more of my New York Dispatches in the travel writings section of my website here.

Kenneally in NYT Mag

Check out yesterday’s New York Times Magazine for an awesome photo essay by Brenda Ann Kenneally on the children in the aftermath of Katrina. The entire magazine is devoted to this one story, and it’s all Kenneally’s black and white photography. Shot on film, not digital.

Go here to see it on the NYT website. You must look at the multimedia version. If you think the printed version is powerful, just wait.

Is our marriage threatened?

Robin got a letter in today's Seattle Times on the recent Washington State Supreme Court decision upholding the ban on gay marriage with the peculiar logic that marriage should be reserved for procreative purposes only. Here it is.

The bride's anxiety

My husband and I have chosen not to have children.

Is the state going to revoke our marriage license, or do we have to apply for an annulment?

Does the Supreme Court ruling mean that infertile people and people over child-bearing age will be unable to obtain marriage licenses?

Please let me know soon, so that we can draw up the powers of attorney, so that we might visit each other in the hospital, rewrite our will, so that we may inherit from each other, and give back the wedding gifts, if we can remember who they came from 13 years later.

— Robin Shapiro, Seattle

The shooting

As if the world couldn't get any more crazy, then came the shooting at the Jewish Federation in Seattle. The war struck here.

A friend emailed us asking how we were doing. Robin responded with everything I would want to express, but more eloquently. Here is her letter.

Dear Mary Ellen,
        We are quite sad about the shooting. Friday night dinner with my mom was almost silent. We were stunned, then. My mom is angry, I'm sad, Doug is doing tons of fix-it things to get back control. It turns out the guy is bipolar and had been acting out all year (including standing in a fountain at a mall and flashing women who walked by--classic manic behavior). It helps that he's crazy. Most of the people shooting each other and blowing up themselves in the Mideast are clinically "sane", it's the culture that makes them act crazy.
        The funny thing is, we had a Palestinian therapist staying with us for the first half of the week. She does the same kind of therapy that I do, and was in town for more training. She was ill (newly pregnant with complications) and Doug and I took care of her like family. People can get along and not see the "other" as the enemy, sometimes.
        I don't know if you know it, but we were in Israel in January. We spent a few days in towns that are now being bombed, Haifa and Acre. It's grievous to see what's happening. I'm even sorrier for the Lebanese. The human loss, displacement, and destruction are terrible. Most of those folks aren't political. They just want to survive. So do the Israelis. My Palestinian guest said that all the leaders in the Mideast are fools and worse. It's easy to see why she thinks that.
        Every square foot of that area is soaked in thousands of years of piety and blood. Every 50 years or so some other invader took over, killed a bunch of people, and tried to convert everybody to the right way. There's so much cumulative trauma that I can't imagine them all getting over it, and seeing each other as human/related/the same/and worthy of being left alone.

Proud to Be an American

Below, Robin is usurping the blog. She joined the immigrant march last Monday in Seattle, and wanted to post her impressions.

When I saw the marches on TV, I felt proud of my country. Here were people demonstrating that they belong here, that they identify as Americans, regardless of whether the rest of us think so or not. It was a uniquely American moment. We have been through this cycle in our history again and again, with the same degree of tension, and it is this kind of renewal that gives our society such vibrancy and moral force in the world. That this group is so visible in such numbers in our body politic, for the first time, is a watershed moment.

Robin’s entry:

"On Monday I took a walk through downtown Seattle with 30,000 people. 95 % were Latino. Some white people. Fewer black people. Very few Asians, most walking behind the Asian Counseling and Referral banner. The crowd was safe, easy, and joyful. I encountered a few jerks on the side, but none that I saw on the streets, while I walked from the front to the back, about 20 blocks of curb-to-curb people. Lots of young men, many families, cute kids. Lots of cheering, especially under overpasses (because of the echo) and when anyone waved.

Chants, in Spanish:

• Si, se puede! Yes we can.
• The people united will never be defeated.
• The people united will always go forward/proceed.
• We love the United States.
• America! Viva! Guatemala! Viva! Dignity! Viva! Mexico! Viva!

Some signs, some in English some in Spanish:

• If you don’t want me here, pick your own damn apples!
• Who’s undocumented, Pilgrim? (Picture of an Indian and a pilgrim)
• We are not criminals, we are here to work.
• A people united, will always go forward.
• My Irish grandparents were immigrants. (Held by a pale lady dressed in green)
• Human beings are not illegal.
• Fair pay for everyone.
• Don’t split up my family with a guest worker program.
• If you’re not Native, you’re an immigrant.
• Proud to be an American.
• I love this country, too/ This is our country, too.
• We are human, too.

Reasons I went:

• I am appalled at the passage of the Federal House bill that turns all undocumented workers and all who help them into felons. Including social workers, health care workers, and church people.
• I don’t understand borders very well, nor differences between kinds of humans.
• Joe, from Mexico, worked at my father’s business for 45 years, and was one of the most respected people there. I’ve felt at home with all Mayans since I was about 6, because of Joe. Trips to the south of Mexico and Guatemala confirm the connection.
• My grandparents on one side and great-grands on the other were immigrants. I see myself as an immigrant’s kid. My father, while born in Iowa, didn’t speak English until he was in grade school. My step-father was an immigrant. Fifteen years ago, seven of my Ukrainian/Jewish cousins immigrated to Bellevue. More followed after that. It was only our sponsorship, Jewish Family Service, and some political pull that got them the refugee status they needed to get here, despite the discrimination and death threats that they experienced as Jews in the Ukraine.
• I wanted to be white in that crowd, showing the mostly Latino/Hispanic crowd that they had support from outside their communities. With all the roles I have in life (therapist, teacher, consultant, wife, daughter, friend, American, female), this was the first time I showed up anywhere simply to be a white body, to be counted.

"I had a good time. The crowd felt safe, easy, and fun to be with. The police behaved. The crowd behaved. There were no counter-demonstrators. The organizers and the police were shocked by the enormity of the turnout. I ran out of my meager Spanish during the speeches. What I think I heard were words about dignity, work, humanity, solidarity, and not being afraid to be seen. There were some shy country people in the crowd, staring up at the big buildings. (People were bused in from Spokane, Yakima, Olympia, Centralia, and all over the state. Some may have never been in a city.) It reminded me of the first few gay pride parades in Seattle in that people looked surprised to be "out" after years of hiding. As the march went on, those people looked prouder and happier. I hope that our country is truly ready to absorb this group of Americans as it has taken in the rest of us."

Well Thank Goodness That's Over

I almost titled this, "We Was Robbed," but that would imply I had more attachment to this game than is the case. Yes, if the referee calls had gone differently, we would have won. Had we played cleaner, and didn’t foul so often, we could have won. But this is not Bush-Kerry, where the other side played dirty, and we was robbed.

For two weeks I have been amused and bemused by the incessant chatter in the media about the Super Bowl, and that, of all improbable possibilities that could come to pass, the Seahawks were in it. My favorite was an above-the-fold headline one day in the Post-Intelligencer which read, "Frenzy Slow to Build." Frenzy? About a football game? In erudite, elitist Seattle? And that it’s news that there isn’t one?

I think this may have been the first football game in my life I have actually sat through in its entirety and watched all the plays. I have though, on occasion, taped the Super Bowl so I could scroll through the boring bits (the Game) and watch the commercials.

But now it’s over and done with. I think there will be a collective sign of relief in this city tomorrow. It wouldn’t do to upset our smug sense of superiority and actually care about a winning sports franchise like those lesser, decrepit cities in the East do because they have no other way to sustain their self-esteem. We’re not likely to have to face this challenge again anytime soon. The Mariners start up in a few weeks. I have high hopes for another year of failure snatched from the jaws of victory. Some things never change.

Final Israel Observations

We have returned to the USA, and the New York Times. The politics at home seem so simple and binary in contrast to Israeli issues. There we were reading the local English language papers, the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz, every day. My sense, from the outside, is that nothing is obvious, every issue has more facets than you can count, and every viewpoint appears to contradict every other one.

Take the Olive Grove wars. It is olive harvesting season now. West Bank Palestinian farmers go out in the morning and find hundreds of their centuries-old trees cut down, their groves destroyed.

The obvious suspects are the hard-core Jewish settlers on the West Bank. On the surface, the issue seems simple—bad right-wing settlers vs. innocent victim farmers. The Israeli government is talking about compensation to farmers whose trees have been deliberately vandalized.

First complicating wrinkle. There is apparently a criminal enterprise that goes around uprooting whole olive trees, and reselling them for landscaping. A single tree can bring thousands of dollars. The government won’t compensate criminal acts, so there is an incentive to say it is criminal, not political.

There are those who accuse the farmers of cutting down their own trees for compensation. And then there are those that say that what is reported as vandalism is just the hard pruning that they do, and there’s no wholesale cutting down of groves going on. Then there is the letter to the Jerusalem Post from a woman who insists it is the height of immorality and misplaced priorities to consider compensating anyone for destroyed trees when women have lost their husbands and mothers have lost their children (the unstated conclusion is that the destroyed olive groves are appropriate retribution). Then someone else quotes Deuteronomy 20:19 and the injuction, even in wartime, to spare the trees of your enemy.

Meanwhile the government is won’t consider compensation until there is proof that someone is cutting down the trees. How they intend to discover such proof is anyone’s guess. This season over 2,500 trees have been destroyed.

Another story. Here is a manifestation of the Israeli character that perhaps I am making too much of. Or perhaps not. In Haifa yesterday we were awakened in the early morning by a spectacular electrical storm. Several hours later, the power was still out in some places and the traffic lights were dead. When I come upon an inoperative signal I expect the Seattle solution—everyone will treat it as a four way stop. Bad idea. I stopped, which just allowed an unimpeded flow of traffic from the opposing direction. Traffic backed up behind me, honking. When there was a gap, I sped through, as did everyone behind me, stopping the flow from the other direction. It is as if there is no sense of the collective "us" in this society, only a zero sum loss or gain for your own group. Especially on the road.

I don’t recall seeing a four way stop in Israel. I don’t think they could work here.