Self-worth

Give Them The Big Ten!

/ It Takes One To Know One / 1 Comment
The Concentric Rings of Existence

Dear Democrats, for the love of America, give them the Ten Commandments in the classroom! Then spend the time, effort and legal resources you would have spent on that fight to fight against the illegal seizure of our government, institutions, and, foremost, law abiding residents and civilians! I know, I know. Republicans’ insistence on displaying their religious texts in every classroom is one more power grab to assert their ideology and exercise dominance over others. No one is denying the obvious here. But since those religious texts are in the same Bible I read and have studied for my entire adult life, I’m asking you to hear me out on this one for a quick minute.

Not “If” But “Which” Religion Are You?

First of all, I don’t mind being called religious. I don’t mind when Bill Maher or Ricky Gervais make fun of and think they are superior to “Religious People,” or think that Religion is the cause of all war and conflict and every bad thing in the universe.

I don’t take it personally.

This is because I know something they are not yet aware of.

And you may not be aware of it either.

I know that Ricky is Religious.

Bill is too.

And whoever you are readin’ this,

I’m lookin’ at you too!

After near sixty years worth of human interaction on this big marble, one thing that has become unequivocally clear to me is that everyone is religious!

Everyone believes something about the three most basic dimensions of being alive. Either consciously or unconsciously, everyone is operating from some answer to these three questions:

– What is the essential nature and source of my being? (To what or whom do I owe my life?)

– What am I here for? (to what end do I put my effort and resources?) and

– How best can I coexist with all these other beings and things?

Everyone is operating on certain assumptions about these fundamental questions, and the various answers we come up with will create the processing algorithm which metabolizes all the input of our lived experiences and spits out patterns of behavior and ways of being in the world. Those with similar answers to these questions have, over the centuries, unionized and, for better or for worse, used this leverage sometimes for the good of the world and sometimes for selfish gain. But do not be fooled! Those that only have the social capital of one are no less ruled by their processing algorithm, and the world is not necessarily safer because of its singularity and lack of traditional pedigree. In fact, I find that it is the very lack of reflection and transparency about one’s algorithm, the actual answers to these three questions, that makes navigating coexistence such a tricky game of hopscotch. And, as I have learned the hard way, using words like Baptist, Lutheran, Atheist, Buddhist, etc, as shortcuts, doesn’t offer much help either.

That brings us back to the Ten Commandments. Since that third question is all about navigating relationships, ie a moral code (news flash: everybody’s got one), the real question ought to be, “Which commandments have been guiding the classrooms all this time?” In my teacher training, we learned to facilitate the class in a conversation around values and to agree on principles and behavioral expectations for the shared space of our classroom where everyone could feel safe, seen, and valued. These results were then shared in a letter to the parents inviting their input. If that is happening all around the country, fantastic! But it would be misleading to not also share that it was my own moral compass that steered and guided those conversations, influenced the outcomes, and encouraged and enforced adherence to our agreements.

So if I was a teacher in America today, and I was being forced to hang the Big Ten in my classroom, I wouldn’t hesitate to do it. But I wouldn’t just hang them up. I would facilitate a deep discussion on this first ever Declaration of Independence, and see if we might be able to imagine what kind of world this particular algorithm would produce. The result of that discussion might sound something like this:

Background, Context, Purpose: Don’t Leave Home Without ’em!

After getting them to do their own research and group work to understand when, where, and for whom these commandments were written, we would establish together that they were written for a large population of people who had escaped generations of slavery under the rule of a king who claimed to be god’s (Ra) representative on earth. We would discover they had been made to believe their sole purpose on this earth was to increase the security, wealth, and status of his empire, that they had been forced to work without ceasing to satisfy the ambitions of a driven overlord. We would discover that, as a means of coercive control, they had been separated from the source of their true identity and dignity, from both the means and the fruit of their own labor, from each other through divide and conquer tactics, and even, eventually, from their own offspring.

We would learn that the rules they lived by all those centuries, which they were terrified to break, were something along the lines of: Don’t dare question those who claim ownership, authority, and ultimate power over you! Don’t dare make demands, ask for what you need, or express (or even have) your own longings! Don’t dare slack off the pace of production, but rather you must work ever harder to out perform not only others but even yourself! Don’t EVER rise above your station! Don’t dare make a mistake! Don’t even think of conspiring with your fellow slaves to thwart our control! And most importantly, don’t ever speak up for yourself, talk about what harmed you, or bring any negative attention to the system!

We would learn that this group of former slaves would have to spend a long time unlearning these rules before they were ready to govern themselves in a way that they could all flourish both individually and as a whole. They would need a new way of thinking about themselves, their labor, and their relationships. It was during this time that Moses introduced them to the “New Rules for Free People,” otherwise known as the Big Ten.

New Rules For Free People

#1 You shall not have any other Gods before me.

⁃ No one else (man, beast, spirit, lesser god) may insert themselves between you and my infinite, generous, and benevolent self to subjugate and rule over and enslave you. There are no intermediaries to lay claim to and control your identity, your agency, and your attachments.

⁃ This is a declaration of their Freedom and Autonomy within the full expanse of the infinite reality!! This is placing them (us) in the widest possible circle well beyond anything we could possibly conceive of.

#2 You shall not make for yourself an idol (graven image).

⁃ you will also not sell yourself short of the full measure of goodness and glory of my infinite and eternal being. No settling for fixed, rigid, and limiting ideas of who you are and what you could be or what is possible or worthy of your strength, effort, and attention.

⁃ Just like no one else may draw a smaller circle for their existence, they should also not do that to themselves.

⁃ This gives them an Orientation for their own growth which is limitless

#3 You shall not take the name of the Lord in vain.

⁃ you will not invoke God’s name (authority) to bully others for your agenda. No borrowing His name to puff yourself up or add to your authority, conceal your real motives & intentions, intimidate & shame others, nor blame “God” when your plans go sideways.

⁃ This lays the Cost and Responsibility for their choices, actions, and outcomes squarely on their own shoulders. They, alone, are accountable for their lives.

⁃ But also, to know that anyone claiming to be God’s intermediary, is avoiding accountability for their own agenda and is using it as an effective tool for social control. To fall for it, is the quickest route to subservience and enslavement.

#4 Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.

⁃ A practice of regeneration and re-creation.

⁃ You are no longer slaves and machines, but creators and stewards, to steward not only your own home, garden, and field, but also your body, mind, and spirit.

⁃ No more hustle! No longer slaves to ambition (that horse which will never tire)… neither other’s nor your own!

⁃ This is about remembering Moderation and Sustainability and knowing where our true security, growth, and connection – our Sustenance – come from.

#5 Honor your father and your Mother that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.

⁃ Honor is about giving weight to something. Understanding its importance and accounting for its significance.

⁃ (Once you are thriving in the land) Do not become complacent or take for granted or despise the life and inheritance (total package) you were handed, no matter how small or comparatively insignificant it may be, but instead

⁃ Appreciate the Source of your life , the obstacles that were already overcome so far to get you to this place (i.e. leaving Egypt and through the wilderness), and

⁃ Redeem it – create something meaningful and beautiful out of whatever it is you have to start with, no matter how meager that may be! Make it count!

⁃ Become worthy of this one precious life they gave you!

(These first five of the commandments make it clear that we are the ones who are ultimately responsible to grow our own tree, and that we owe no one an explanation for our existence, nor do we need to ask anyone’s permission to grow without ceasing in this world of infinite abundance.)

#6 You shall not murder

⁃ Shall not take a person’s life, Separate their body and soul.

⁃ Whether it is the quick killing of the body, or slowly draining the life out of the soul (soul sucking job), or any of the many ways in between.

#7 You shall not commit adultery

⁃ Shall not take, come between, Separate a person from their partner, their collaborator, their most intimate and fruitful relationship, and thereby

⁃ Disrupt the very foundation of the life and future they are building together. We must remember that this is about more than just a “romantic” or even intimate relationship. Families were an entire survival eco system, working together for their shared prosperity. Adultery is a hit at the innermost core of this necessary network, wreaking havoc on every area of the entire system.

#8 You shall not steal

⁃ Shall not Separate a person from the fruit of their labor and creation nor their means of survival and flourishing.

#9 You shall not bear false witness or testify against your neighbor.

⁃ Shall not Separate a person from their community through blaming, shaming, stigmatizing, and dishonoring. A behavior that begins already in kindergarten, and is wielded to great effect by every system of control and empire ever built.

#10 You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, wife, male or female servants, ox, donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

⁃ In my imaginary classroom, we could spend most of the year talking about just this one commandment. It is amazing to me how it so perfectly brings us full circle to the beginning, and addresses the heart of where all the problems begin.

⁃ You shall not covet your neighbor’s relationships, resources and power to effect change, nor their means of production, nor anything at all that belongs to someone else. I would get my class to make a long list of things that other’s have that we might want for ourselves, like Titles, Reputation, Good looks, Intelligence, Glam & Bling, Health, Abilities & Talents, Luck, Pedigree, Armies & Weapons, Mobility, exotic vacations, attention & accolades, their validation, admiration, and approval of us…

⁃ Or summarized, their Security, Prosperity, and Stature nor the (ill-gotten) means by which they got them.

Lost in Illogical Translation

I can see how casting only a side glance at this last commandment, one could possibly jump to some wrong conclusions. I was taken aback, however, to hear even someone like Yuval Noah Harari, who is otherwise known to be deep thinking, astute, and articulate, make one of these superficial assumptions about this commandment and, by doing so, flipped the whole meaning of it on its head. In one of the worst cases of not only logical fallacy, but also failure to understand the context, Harari, on Bill Maher’s talkshow no less, makes the claim that because this commandment does not outright forbid slavery and instead only the coveting of slaves, it is actually not just condoning the practice of slavery, but, he claims, “endorses” it! He makes this point in support of his larger argument that the man made American constitution is a better example of a unifying text, since it can be amended and adapt to the times, in contrast to the Big Ten, which cannot, since they are a definitive declaration from an immutable God. Thus a constitution can eventually be amended to outlaw slavery altogether, where as the Bible cannot and never does.

To Harari’s misinterpretation we can add another possible and far more logical one. It is anyone’s right (and I believe duty) to ask of such a Verbot, “whom does this serve?” And it would be a far more reasonable assumption than the one that Harari makes, to see such a command as primarily serving the wealthy and powerful, acting as a kind of spiritual e-fence to protect their power and wealth from those without any, by declaring the latter’s discontent a moral and spiritual failing. I have much more sympathy for this argument than Harari’s, and can see how an isolated reading of the text by a beginner might lead someone here. But for both, these assertions come from taking the text out of its immediate and larger context, for which a beginner can be forgiven. I would have expected more from Harari.

Harari’s glaring leap in logic is so obvious in fact, that when I asked Chat GPT for the name of the logical fallacy (just checking my bases here) of inferring a positive from the absence of a negative, Argument from Silence and Negative Proof Fallacy, Chat GPT used Harari’s claim about slavery as a textbook example of these fallacies without my having even brought up this case! Add to these the False Dichotomy or False Dilemma fallacy (assuming there are only two options, discounting the possibility that something may, in fact, be neutral, irrelevant, unaddressed, or something else entirely), and you may understand why I am seriously considering removing Homo Deus from my “To Read” stack! If you need any further proof that Harari’s assertions are not only unoriginal, but have been refuted for millennia, you only need to ask Chat to give you a list of that long tradition of Rabbinical and Church fathers’ teachings who have already made any argument I could make here.

But the, let’s call it, “Opiate of the People” argument, does actually force us to dig a little deeper. Does the tenth commandment keep people out of slavery, or does it simply keep them from complaining about their own disenfranchisement? To answer this question, as well as Harari’s assertion, we must remember what we started off with, namely, that the Ten Commandments are not an arbitrary laundry list of clean and dirty behavior. It is an answer to the three basic questions we posed at the beginning. It is code for an Algorithm meant to give autonomous human beings a relational pattern to best coexist with other autonomous human beings, an orientation for where and to which end to best invest their resources and labor, and a measure for how to place and assess themselves in the larger scope of things between where they have come from and where they are headed which best accounts for their true nature.

And to understand the essence and thrust of this algorithm, we must remember the context in which it was given.

⁃ These commandments were not given to Israel after entering the Promise land, after their first victories, at the height of the Davidic Kingdom, nor even upon their return from exile. They were given after escaping slavery in Egypt!

⁃ They were given by Moses, who chose to leave the position and wealth he had in Egypt for a counter-cultural narrative, an entirely different algorithm!

⁃ These ten commandments were written for a people who had never known freedom, did not even know what freedom was or looked like or felt like, and indeed, were already confusing it with licentiousness by the time Moses came down the mountain with the tablets. They were written for those who only knew of two kinds of people: those who were slaves and those who had slaves. This commandment is telling these former slaves who had spent their lives dreaming of being the other kind of people, that there is, in fact, a third option, to be the kind of person who does not rely on the stolen labor of others for their own flourishing.

⁃ To say that the commandments “endorse” slavery because it does not explicitly forbid it in name, or that it guards the Haves from the discontent of the Have Nots is to miss the whole point not only of the tenth commandment, but of this entire Decalogue!

⁃ All ten commandments are solely and entirely about keeping them out of slavery…both being enslaved and enslaving others!

It all ends (and begins again) with the tenth commandment

It is not enough to say that coveting (desiring, setting your heart on, lusting after) is what leads to these other behaviors listed in the previous commands and, being the root of the thing, is therefore problematic. Many people covet who do not kill nor steal. It is actually much worse than that.

In the very act of desiring and craving what belongs to and is within someone else’s influence, we abandon and leave defenseless ALL that is within our influence! We are literally investing our attention, imagination, emotional and cognitive energies into what our neighbor has already grown, (or stolen, extrapolated, or extorted), rather than investing those essential resources into the growth and flourishing of all that is already under our agency. We are in a real sense emotionally and cognitively squatting in someone else’s life rather than fully inhabiting our own life. This not only makes us an intruder where we are not wanted, but it also means we are absent from the one and only place we need to be, and where we are sorely needed to nurture, protect, and elevate what does belong within our province. Coveting what our neighbor is or has or does is at its core self-abandonment and betrayal.

With our own lives unguarded in this way, we ourselves become vulnerable to marauders. Those predators that would vandal what we have left unattended, plant weeds where we have failed to plant a useful crop, and auction off to the highest bidders what we have deemed not worthy enough for our investment. And piece by piece, we lose the sovereignty over our lives, since the fastest way to give someone control over your life is to want what they have.

Becoming and Unbecoming a Singularity

But even more profound and disturbing is the trajectory and ultimate objective of this insatiable appetite. The command does not forbid the Israelites from desiring and wanting good things: a place of one’s own, collaborative and intimate relationships, to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor, or even to create and possess beautiful things. Indeed, it has been God’s promise up to this point to give them all of this in the promise land. What it says is to not covet these things that belong to someone else! In other words, to allow the kind of good things which we want for ourselves to also belong to others, to allow for some to remain outside of our province and control. This command counters an internal FOMO, an urge to possess every good thing we encounter, to consume it, ascribe it to ourselves, control it, and make it work to our favor and advantage, and if we can’t, to diminish and destroy it. We would carry on like this until we were singularly in possession and control of all there is that is desirable, having become devouring entities that can allow no good thing to exist outside of our own dominion. (Eve, David w/Bathsheba)

This is the exact opposite of the very nature of the God described in the first two chapters of Genesis, who, while already existing as a singularity of all that is good, created autonomous beings with a will of their own they were free to excersize outside the bounds of divine control! Coveting is the very antithesis of the divine drive to share the abundance of existence with others whom it chooses to know intimately and collaboratively as autonomous beings rather than control coercively as subservients.

Coveting is an outside in movement, where genuine growth and development is an inside out job. The one becomes an all engulfing vortex, a soul sucking, life suffocating, bottomless black hole which drags down and enslaves resources, people, communities, and whole societies into feeding its monolithic structure. Genuine sovereignty, on the other hand, seeds, waters, prunes, and releases what it has grown from within itself, networking with other willing sovereignties to create a thriving and diverse ecosystem.

These second five commandments let us know that our growth may not come at the expense of someone else’s existence. Beginning at the inner most ring of a person’s being (soul/body) and working its way out to intimate partner/co-founder of family line, then to the fruit of their creativity & intentions & labor, to finally their place in the wider community, these address in order how a person is rooted and grows in the world and their inalienable right to also make the most of whatever they were given.

Conclusion

The Israelites still bore the scars on their bodies, in their minds, and in their souls of that first insatiable and brutal algorithm, the commandments of slavery. Now that they had escaped it, they were being asked to place their faith in an entirely new algorithm. A reordering of relationships which challenged them to become personally sovereign without becoming controlling overlords, to embrace their freedom as well as the responsibility that came with it, to transform and multiply what they were given instead of subtracting and extracting from others, and to have a sober understanding of who they are by appreciating both where they had come from and just how far the road stretched out ahead of them before they would ever cross the finish line of moral purity.

Slavery has no place in this algorithm.

Seeing that these Rules for a Free People are antithetical to the whole direction the Republican Party is taking our country, it is hard for me to see the upside for them in having the Big Ten in every classroom. But if that is what they want, I think we should give it to them. I think every child in America ought to discover for themselves just how shamelessly these charlatans are playing by an entirely different set of rules than the ones revealed to keep us all free.

The Barren Roots Rodeo

/ It Takes One To Know One / 3 Comments

It was an odd time and place to have my eyes well up with tears, but what I was watching had been suddenly, inexplicably, transformed into a meaningful and encouraging exhortation offering solace directly to – or from- a deep and wounded place within me. But because I was surrounded by a whir and whishing of industrious friends and family in our garden, I quickly wiped the tears from my cheeks without taking time to sit with that message or with the emotions it stirred up within me. Three weeks have passed since that day, and while my landscaping project impatiently waits for the rain to stop and the next phase to proceed, I want to do a little digging into that free and unexpected moment of therapy.

The Neighbor

That morning I woke up to the penetrating sound of a jack hammer outside of my window. Our neighbor, Bela, was already sitting in the open cabin of the excavator we had rented and, with the jack attachment, was skillfully demolishing a low concrete wall which has vexed me for the last twenty four years. Over the years, Bela (Bay-la), the very German man with a deep, loud, and gravely voice that lives across the street from us, has become an unlikely friend of my husband’s and a Godsend to both of us.

My husband and I both studied Theology, Religious Instruction to be more exact, so it would be fair to say we fall into the academic side of things, actually, perhaps even the most abstract side of the academic side of things. Theology is basically a swirl of philosophy, sociology, and psychology, but beyond studying the ideas behind the actual things and behavior, we studied the often intangible realities behind the ideas behind the things and behaviors. In addition, my husband is a musician. That means in our home there is a lot of singing, whistling, guitar playing and talking about why things are the way they are and how they might be instead. The flip side of that is that neither of us has become a master of the things themselves. So when it comes to realizing my dreams for our home and garden, we plod along slowly with the enthusiasm of DIYers who would rather be, and be better at, reading and writing poetry than pouring or breaking up concrete.

Not so with Bela. He is much better adept to this world of things than my husband or I are, and he has become a valuable point man, mentor, and resource at innumerable junctions during our ongoing renovations. Not long before, he had retired from his many years as a construction worker and is still licensed to operate just about every construction machine there is. He was not only a master at operating the excavator we rented for two days, but he was actually chomping at the bit to get to do it! This was already the fourth time Bela had scooched my husband out of the driver’s seat of a digger. We had rented a smaller one in previous summers to take out over a hundred cedar shrubs from the hedge that surrounded our property and put up a fence in their place. I had been impressed with my husband’s efforts, who had never operated such a machine in his life and yet had managed to remove a few of the meter thick, two meters high, seventy year old shrubs within as many hours. But once Bela took over, the hedge that had plagued us since we moved to Augsburg in 2000 went down like dominos.

This year the smaller machine was not available, so we rented the next size up to do the heavy lifting of our somewhat ambitious landscaping project. Our son, one of our daughters, and her boyfriend were home for the week to help us extend the patio, dig a foundation for a garden house, remove said concrete wall, and take out a tree stump.

The Stump

The low concrete wall was broken up before I had finished my breakfast, which the kids (in their late twenties now) wheelbarrowed to the trailer hitched to the back of our car, and my husband then drove to the dump. The next order of business was the stump, which Bela, perched high on his excavator throne, was confident would come out without much ado. With the digger now attached, he began mauling the ground around the stump, then, scooping up the grassy dirt, he piled it up in an area of the garden that would have to wait its turn. The digging went fairly quickly, and with every scoop, more of the stump was exposed. Though the mountain of earth, which I now refer to as Mt. Doom and can still be seen from my living room window, kept growing and growing, there seemed to be no bottom to this stump. Not only did it reach deep into the ground, but it sprawled for at least two or more meters in every direction from its center like a giant octopus. My son had gotten a spade and was trying to dig under the long, thick fingers, which were clenching the floor of the only home they’d ever known, so that the digger could get under them and pry them loose. Once under the roots, Bela began an upward leveraging, but instead of the stump or its long tentacles being pried out of its lair, the whole excavator heaved and lifted off the ground. For the next couple of hours, as he tried to wrangle this surly stump from its grip on our garden, our neighbor looked like he was riding a mechanical bull. All he needed was a cowboy hat, and Bronco Bela could have been mistaken for a rodeo attraction.

That is when I started to cry.

The Tree

Looking at the diameter of this stump for a reason why its removal was proving so challenging, Bela concluded that the tree must have been at least forty years old.

He was wrong.

The large cherry tree that I had hired a man to remove in late February was not even half that age. We only began renting the apartment on the second floor of this house 24 years ago, when we returned to Germany from Papua New Guinea in 2000. In, or shortly after 2002, in conjunction with the work our landlady was doing on the north side of the house, we planted an apple tree and a sour-cherry tree. We had no idea what we were doing, and not only were the trees planted in the wrong spot too close to the house and in less than optimal soil, they were also too close together. Subsequently, the apple tree suffered in the shade of the cherry tree and died a few years later. It took a long time for that cherry tree to finally produce any cherries, but, though the fruit bearing years have sometimes been sparse and unpredictable, we have gotten at least some jam and pies out of this tree.

We also got another cherry tree out of it. By 2015 we had bought the house and were finally able to clear away and remove the overgrown flowerbeds left by our landlady. As my husband was clearing the flowerbed planted along that low wall Bela removed for us three weeks ago, the offshoot was only a scrawny two meters high sapling. At the time, I was the one who chose to leave it in, a decision I’v regretted miserably for the last nine years. Unfortunately, by the time I was ready to give this usurper tree its walking papers several years ago, my husband had grown a tree conscience and insisted we keep it. To some degree, it was understandable that he would want it to stay. The cherry blossoms in spring were very pretty… (for five minutes, then they littered our patio for weeks with a continual rain of rotting petals). It did provide shade…(just not anywhere someone would want to sit and enjoy the garden). And of course I think trees are an important feature in, and add character to, any landscaping project… (just not when they randomly and unintentionally crop up in all the wrong places).

Within no time at all, that little sapling grew to three times the size of our original cherry tree. In less than ten years, it was taller even than our three story house. Not only did this tree grow smack in the middle of where I wanted to extend the patio, but it littered our current patio throughout the whole spring, summer, and fall with every phase of its foliage. Not only did this tree tower over and in dangerous proximity to our house, it cast the whole north side in even more shade and turned it green with mildew. Not only did this offshoot not produce any edible fruit of its own, but its crown was so high and so wide, that it hogged all the sunlight from our actual fruit bearing tree, which eventually stopped producing any cherries at all and showed all the signs of a diminishing and dying tree.

So, while my husband and I were at a standstill, the tree seemed to just double in size every year until we were finally able to resolve our differences. And by “resolve our differences,” I mean I just went ahead and hired a guy end of February who took it down in a day’s work, leaving only this stump in the way of our landscaping plans.

The Email

Whatever my body may be doing in any given moment, my mind is always in some kind of discourse with itself. Either it is engaged in a socratic debate about some new/old truth claim taking the world by storm, it is holding court over something someone did or said that annoys me, upset me, or just pissed me off, or it is trying to resolve an internal dilemma between what I really want and what others want from me. It was no different during the days we were all at work in the Garden. In this case, what was front of mind, when I wasn’t actually answering logistical questions and doling out tasks, was an email I had gotten a week before. Though it may have seemed benign on the surface, this email had woken up all of these discourse monkeys, who in turn woke up the rest of the zoo animals that I thought I had fed and put to bed.

There is no doubt in my mind that the author of the email believed they were doing a good thing by writing to me. It was surely with the best of intentions that they offered me their morally laden suggestion of what would be appropriate for me to do in the situation. They had generously taken the time to offer advice in a conflict in which they had the most minimal historical knowledge or insight, no relevant professional competence, and a demonstrable lack of impartiality. But none of this is what had set the monkeys off. Rather, it was the assumption underpinning the admonition that was so noisily disturbing my hard won internal peace about the matter. Boiled down to its most basic message, the email was little more than a notification from a third party debt collector. With the subtlety of a town cryer, the solicitation meant to remind me that in the relationship under question, my accounts would always be in the red. Because of their initial, rudimentary investment, I was now on the ropes indefinitely. I should make regular “interest” deposits to their personal “account,” and they could withdraw any amount at any time from mine without even a hint of recompense, accounting, or restitution. No matter how often, nor how hurtfully, they plundered our relational account and left it in the negative, I would still owe them on that initial capital. In any other context, this would be seen as usury.

In my extended foster family, however, this is simply the debt of gratitude I owe for being taken in as a foster child. Though never said out loud in as many words, the official family myth had always been clear to me: when I had been a child in precarious circumstances, the well meaning, selfless foster parents had done me a favor by taking me under their roof, and, now and forever more, anything other than a “thank you” was out of place… no matter how bad things got. No amount of trauma, danger, neglect, attachment confusion, rejection, resentment, contempt, or diminishment my foster parents might have subjected me to could minimize the enormity of this debt. Or perhaps the extended family just cannot imagine that any of these things had ever taken place. Either way, no matter how much time went by, no matter how much effort went into pretending, mending, and bending my reality to make things add up, that initial capital hung over me like an albatross.

Such a framing of the foster relationship is founded on the deeply disturbing notion that the foster (or adoptive) parents are only the helpers and benefactors, and the children are only ever beneficiaries. This is a profoundly diminishing and dehumanizing message to give to anyone in any relationship. No one wants to exist in a relationship where they are only ever perceived as the one being “helped” and the one solely indebted to the other. Anyone who finds themselves pressed into that role can know for certain that they are actually being used to validate someone else’s idea of themselves as a good person.

But to cast a child in that role with caretakers they did not choose for the life they did not initiate undermines the very foundation of their self-worth and existence. If a child is never told, shown, or given even subtle cues to let her know that her existence, in and of itself, enriches and contributes value to the lives of her caretakers and community, she assumes that she must produce (ie manufacture) that value in order to remove the negative balance in the relationship. Since that is an impossible task, the child either gets stuck in an appeasement treadmill, all efforts oriented toward keeping the peace with those upon whom her very life depends, (ie filling the hole by meeting their needs and expectations rather than her own transformative growth), or, as I had done, gives up entirely and acts out in self-destructive ways. In both cases, the child will struggle to cultivate a healthy sense of self-worth and emotional regulation; find it difficult to discover inherent interests, develop competences, and focus on personal objectives and values; and will often default to a rigid conflict strategy and substitutions for genuine intimacy. From the outset, children in such circumstances will be preoccupied with getting out of the hole they inherited, rather than building a stable identity on the solid ground of being wanted, cherished, and seen as the precious gift they are.

It would be hard to overstate just how crippling such a dowry is. After describing his personal odyssey growing up in the foster system in his memoir, Troubled, Rob Henderson documents what this looks like statistically on a national scale. In Henderson’s comparisons, he isolates the relational instability from economic factors by contrasting the statistical averages for foster children not against averages for the general population but just against children living in poverty and against their own siblings who remained in their family of origin. Henderson writes, “a poor kid in the US is nearly four times more likely to graduate from college than a foster kid, and that only 3% of children from foster homes ever earn a bachelors.” He goes on to say that, “Compared with their siblings who were never placed in foster homes or other types of out-of-home care, kids who are placed in care are four times more likely to abuse drugs, four times more likely to be arrested for a violent crime, three times more likely to be diagnosed with depression or anxiety, and twice as likely to be poor as adults… The findings from the 2021 study show that on average, kids who are placed into care do worse than their siblings who are not.” (Henderson pg. 297). And of course the discrepancy to the general population is even greater.

Those of us who have grown up in this predicament are not just beginning the race far behind the starting line, but we were further handicapped by being tethered to this myth of liability. Living under the shadow of this paradigm means that, even as adults, we divert too much of our emotional energy and resources away from the task of creating a worthy life for ourselves and our progeny and toward feeding the dysfunctional dynamic which continues to demand our allegiance. It was this dogma that seeded itself in my garden early on, took root, sprouted, and shot up to a towering menace in just the ten short years I was with this particular family. But for years afterward, it littered my self-esteem with a sense of inferiority, internal conflict, and a doubting of my instincts. It grew to overshadow the fruitful vegetation of my self-assertion, creative agency, and sense of purpose. And it redirected my energies and resources toward relationships that never bore the fruit of intimacy and mutuality.

But I had felled that tree some years ago.

The monkeys had scattered.

My garden project was well underway.

Yet this email had come in with the weight of a cease and desist order alerting me that I needed to redirect my funds back toward those barren roots.

And as one might trip over a tree stump, I stumbled over it and fell headlong into my internal dialogue.

The Tears

That internal dialogue sounded something like this:

“WHY IS THIS TAKING SO LONG! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!

I should be over this by now! At my age, other people have a fully finished back yard, and I am still just digging up these barren roots! I’m almost 60, and I am still tripping over these stumps from my past? Just get on with it already! What is taking you so long?! How much digging around it do I gotta do? How much higher does Mount Doom have to get, before I get enough leverage to pry this gnarly thing out of my life for good? I should have nipped this relationship in the bud, spoken up for myself, set better boundaries years earlier than I did! You’re so slow at EVERYTHING! It will be stuck like this FOREVER! Grow up already! Do better! Be better!

SHAME ON ME FOR STRUGGLING WITH THIS FOR SO LONG!”

Not the kind of cheerleaders you want to have in your head on game day. Whenever a gap opens up between what others want me to do and what I want to do, between who I or others want me to be and who I actually am at this moment, it is this troop of negative, self-defeating, mocking mind-monkeys that wants to race in and fill the space. Brené Brown calls these the Shame Gremlins. I have dedicated a lot of time, effort, and resources to taming these shame monkeys, and to a large extent it has paid off. But the debt-solicitation email from my relative had tripped the alarm and set all these old, familiar monkeys into motion again.

That was the zoo inside my head as I walked over to check the progress at the stump-removal-rodeo. There was Bronco Bela riding his mechanical-excavator-bull, tugging and heaving and huffing and hurtling and mauling and digging and scooping and lassoin’ and having a devil of a time trying to get this ten year old stump out of my garden, so that I could move forward with these beautiful landscaping plans of mine. While I was watching the show, suddenly I was aware of another voice whispering something inside that gap between who I wanted to be and who I was.

Without using any words but only the scene before me, it said, “look at him struggle with this stump! Even with all his expertise and experience, even with this heavy-duty machine, even with all this team work taking shovels and axes and even a chain-saw to the long roots, it takes a lot of effort and time and persistence to get these barren roots out of the ground. Be patient. Have hope. Don’t give up.”

And just like that the monkeys were back in their cages, my eyes welled up with tears, and an hour later, Bronco Bela had triumphed over that formidable stump.

To Forgive or To Forgive…

/ It Takes One To Know One / Leave a comment

“I will always be guilty,” he said matter of factly. “Nothing changes that.”

I have forgotten the exact question I had asked him. Maybe I had asked if he felt God had forgiven him or if he could accept that he had been forgiven, or something that, even then, felt silly the moment I heard the sound of my voice. Alistair Little was not a man who couched or minced his words, nor did he let euphemisms do the heavy lifting when talking about his past. Little’s story can be read in online articles, his book, “Give a Boy a Gun,” and seen in a film starring Liam Neeson (as Little) and James Nesbit, called Five Minutes of Heaven. When he was a 17 year old UVF member, the man having lunch next to me at this peace center in Northern Ireland had shot a catholic man dead in his home. The victim’s younger brother, who had been playing in the street, saw it all through the window. It was a terrible trauma and eventually dissolved that whole family. Little served twelve years of a life sentence as a political prisoner, and since his release, has been doing the work of reconciliation among victims, survivors, and perpetrators of political conflict in Ireland and abroad. Our paths converged when I had the privilege to take his and Wilhelm Verwoerd’s workshop as part of my M.Phil. in Conflict Resolution & Reconciliation.

This memory resurfaced as I have recently had reasons to have a good hard think on the word forgiveness and how often it is used in a number of different ways that, in my view, undermine its real meaning. More often than not, it is this misunderstanding of what forgiveness is and isn’t that actually gets in the way of healthy boundary setting and real, wholehearted reconciliation. Living amongst a flawed human race myself, I cannot escape the need to forgive and, truth be told, be forgiven. So, it serves me well to take stock if I am dealing in the genuine article, or if I have been duped by one of these counterfit versions of forgiveness. Little’s transformative journey from committing a heinous crime to being a force of nature for reconciliation could not have happened without forgiveness, even if he may not even use that word, and the memory of my encounter with him comes up just in time for his story to serve as a good ‘authentication tool’ against which to compare these pseudo versions of forgiveness.

Pseudo Forgiveness

These substitute usages of forgiveness apply to both the forgiveness we are offering as well as the forgiveness we ask/demand of others. Here is a short list: Forgiveness as a…

Get Out of Jail Free Card: Of course this is probably the most common and the most obvious miss-use of the concept. Probably since Constantine, humans small and tall, from our very own children all the way up to mega-church pastors, have effectively been pulling out the forgiveness card when caught in both minor and severe transgressions. The person who is quick to invoke this core Christian duty usually has had too little time to actually have even begun a truly transformative paradigm shift. Being more concerned with the likely consequences of their actions, a plea for forgiveness can be a pragmatic tool to bargain a person’s way out of any social, financial, or physical pain which may be coming their way. Forgiveness becomes a magic eraser which disappears any logical, natural, and causal lines connecting behavior with negative outcomes. Besides doing absolutely less than nothing to move the relationship needle toward genuine reconciliation, this Get-out-of-jail-free-forgiveness, if granted, robs the user of one of life’s most valuable learning and character development tools: the pain of consequences. Any wisdom any of us have has not come purely from theory and book learning. We have gained it the hard way, through trial and error, through experience, through the hard knocks of bad choices. Taking those knocks away from someone obstructs the growth of wisdom, character, and maturity and is likely to breed entitlement instead.

A Muzzle:. “Why can’t you just forgive and forget. Why can’t you just let it go?!” When we say this to someone who is calling us out and asking us to do better, we are leveraging forgiveness as a mouth gag to anyone who would want to hold us accountable for our actions. It implies that bringing it up at all is already a failure to forgive. When we say this to someone, what we are really saying is that we want them to privately do all the work to reconcile our differences. We don’t want to know anything about it. Behind this is the need to remain flawless in our own eyes, so if someone has a beef with us, it can only mean that they are unforgiving (if you are a christian) or intolerant (if you are a liberal). But beyond that, both the core teaching of forgiveness in the Christian tradition and the core value of tolerance in Liberal Humanism are often wielded as extremely effective tools to squelch dissonance and maintain dominance and control in social/political groups.

A Witness Relocation program: For those who procure this kind of forgiveness, it means not only do they get a whole new identity (“You are a new creation in Christ”), but also they receive a whole new back story! Not only are we no longer one who cheats on their wife, commits murder, or skims from the top, but we never were that person! In this way of understanding forgiveness, being forgiven means we get to tear out all of those unflattering pages and snap-shots of our story, put them through the shredder, and just leave the wholesome, flattering, respectable bits in. They are never to be spoken of again. They are the “sins” that shall not be named! In groups practicing this understanding of forgiveness, everyone is a generic sinner, “the worst of sinners” actually, but no one has ever even made a single, concrete, nameable mistake, let alone done anything that would put a speck on their wholesome, respectable, good christian/good liberal image. They all just slipped in through the side door and took a seat in the back pew as if they had been among the saints this whole time.

In the new gender-cult, there is a similar dogma called “dead-naming.” Here it is not only the person transitioning to a new identity who hustles to keep their past identity on the down-low, but the entire community and world around them that must be forgiven for having gotten it wrong to begin with! It is everyone else who must delete every possible trace of a person’s pre-transition selves from our memories, perceptions, and experiences, if we want any crumb of relationship with them going forward. In both cases, the past identity is whitewashed of everything a person finds intolerable about themselves and is unwilling to integrate into a new, shiny, and allegedly more worthy identity.

A Jack-in-the-Box: Being in a relationship with a person practicing this kind of forgiveness seems too good to be true…because it is too good to be true. This person appears to have the capacity to overlook (forgive) (tolerate) all of our shortcomings, annoying habits, Faux pas’, and even more serious transgressions. This person can seem to be the model of tolerance right up until you have to draw a boundary or ask them to do better in some area. Immediately the music stops and, BOING!, out springs this very ugly, unflattering version of you marked and blemished with every-single-thing-you-ever-did-or-didn’t-do that hurt, disappointed, or irritated this person at some point in your relationship with them. My brother calls them, “Whatabouters,” because if you ever bring up something that bothers you about their behavior, they counter with, “Well, what about when you…” (full discloser: my brother and I did this with each other for years while we were growing up together, and I can neither confirm nor deny that my husband and I have done this!). As it turns out, they were not even in a relationship with you this whole time, but with this simulated-monster of you they kept to themselves – and everyone else they would show it to except you. In this way, they would never dare risk loosing your favor by speaking up for themselves, but all the while in their own mind, they maintain a steady sense of patronizing superiority and hold you in private contempt and maybe resentment. … that is, until you break the “contract” and BOING!

The “Free Zone”: In the game Capture the Flag, each team has a designated side where they hang their flag. The goal of the game is to be the first team to capture the opposing team’s flag (which is supposed to be visible and accessible). Only to do so, a player must venture onto the opposing side of the field/landscape where they run the risk of being captured and “imprisoned.” To get free again, another teammate must tag them, thus risking their own freedom. Team members are only safe on their team’s section of the field or in the designated “Free Zone” in-between the two sides. There are always players who hang out in the free zone because they are either afraid of getting caught, if they move into the ‘home territory of the other team, or they are afraid someone might steal their own team flag, if they do not patrol their home border.

Of course the game is only fun if all the players are willing to take risks, and it is not really worth playing at all, if all the players just hang out in the free zone. But this is how many people live relationships. In these groups, Forgiveness or Tolerance is this “free zone.” Here, only safe topics are allowed, the kind that do not cause any tension at all. This, by necessity, excludes most of what truly matters to people: religion, politics, values, struggles, our vision for how things could be. The “flag” of their true identity is safely hidden away on their home turf. If someone behaves in a way that is or seems unacceptable to someone, it is not discussed in the free zone. It is brought behind the line to our home-side of the field and tallied there against the other team without the offenders knowledge. The game is just one very long stalemate, with at least some players hoping that the tally will fall in their favor when the game is “officially” scored at the very end.

This is the cowards version of forgiveness (or the liberal’s Tolerance). It is not based on generosity, but on mitigating loss, competing morality, and image-protection. It is peace without justice, which is no peace at all. In this Free-Zone there is a lack of wholehearted integrity, a lack of growth, and little if any movement toward mutuality, true collaboration, and intimacy. Instead, there is just light entertainment and a polite, superficial, and often unspoken agreement to stay clear of any topic that creates tension or calls into question our own or someone else’s flawless Avatar.

It takes courage to wade deeper onto the other’s ‘home field’ in generous candor to say what we really think and feel about the impact they are having on us and to get to the “flag” of real, authentic relationship with the actual person behind their projected, idealized image. And it takes courage to let others onto our home field, to let them see our scratch-pad where we are still working things out before we deliver a more palatable version of ourselves to the free zone, and to also hear what impact we are having on our community and world.

None of the above scenarios are what I would call true forgiveness or tolerance, and whether we find ourselves on the receiving end or the granting end, they do not do the job that real forgiveness is needed to do. In actuality, all these tactics are just your standard ole Conflict Avoidance masquerading as forgiveness/tolerance. In one way or the other, they are simply another means that we try to avoid one or more of the Big Three nuisances of being human: Responsibility, Limitations, and Discomfort (pain, loss, effort) and the inner conflicts that they create for us while living in a world where everything is so unlike us in all too many ways that matter. For conflict avoiders, it is more often than not the fear of losing favor with others (to not be good in their eyes) which is in the driver’s seat, and so they fall into a pattern of ignoring or masking their own limitations (boundaries, insufficiencies, wants, needs, values, purpose), while also shouldering responsibilities that belong to others and/or dodging taking 100% responsibility for themselves and the impact they have on their community and the world (blaming, excusing). But none of that sounds very nice, so it gets dressed up as forgiveness/tolerance.

I don’t mind telling you that I have lived for far too long in relationships on both sides of this kind of conflict-avoidance-forgiveness-tolerance, and I can report back that it is a cheap knock-off of the original! But buying into these street-vender versions of forgiveness is much worse than buying a fake Birkin bag. When we forgo engaging in the conflict necessary to practice real forgiveness, we miss out on the three most valuable things there are: Our Integrity, our growth, and movement toward mutuality and intimacy with others. So, for me, in any and all of my relationships, doing conflict has become a non-negotiable.

The Real Thing

Alistair Little is, of everyone I have ever met, a No Bullshit guy. I experienced more candor in that one week workshop than I had ever experienced in most of the long relationships I have had, some of them for almost my entire life. And how could he not be? When working with tough-as-nails, Irish ex-combatants who had suffered tremendous loss at each other’s hands, one cannot tip-toe around the bloodshed. Polite & Superficial aren’t going to deliver reconciliation. Alistair may or may not have used the word forgiven to describe himself, but his answer to me that day clearly indicated that he had not been duped by the knock-off version of it. “I will always be guilty.” “Nothing will change that.”

Guilt is just a shorter word for responsibility. It is the responsibility for the past, what we have done and left undone. In other words, he was saying that forgiveness does not absolve him of the responsibility for what he had done. “I will always be guilty.” It is a simple statement of fact without any emotions necessarily tied to it. He murdered a man. That will always be part of his story. An act that has far reaching ramifications into the future.

To acknowledge my guilt means I continue to take responsibility for my past and present self, no matter how unflattering or truly awful it may be, by owning it and transforming it into something meaningful and beautiful for community. That is a job that never ends. And I would say Alistair Little’s life is as good of an example of this as I have ever come across. His acceptance and integration of his past, his ongoing transformational growth, and his offering this wisdom and insight in generous candor for the service of healing the environment that had seeded his own violence are all the evidence I need to know that he is dealing in the genuine article of forgiveness.

How it Works

I think mostly forgiveness is thought of as letting go of negative feelings toward someone (and this someone can also be ourselves) who has harmed or disappointed us in some way – feelings of grief, resentment, irritation, animosity, anger, vengeance, contempt, or dread, for example. But I have wrestled with some of those feelings in some relationships for many years and have thrown everything at them, including the pseudo-forgiveness’s I’ve listed above, only to have these feelings compounded rather than diminish. I have come to suspect that it is a fool’s errand to keep trying to dissipate emotions while ignoring what it is exactly that is causing them. Like trying to relieve the pain of a blister while still wearing the shoes you love but that are simply too small. Those feelings tell us that something is amiss in a relationship, that there is a disconnect that is compromising either our integrity, our flourishing, or our need for meaningful connection – or all of the above. This disconnect will have to be addressed if we ever hope to have those negative feelings dry up or, better still, transformed into empathy and compassion.

In this light, forgiveness is not an act of letting go of our negative feelings toward the other (the painful blister), which I believe is not possible anyway, but an act of letting go of our fantasy about the other as well as the fantasy about ourselves. To let go of the fantasy about the other is to let go of the idealized image that we have of who they should/could be to us or how they should have behaved (a shoe that looks good and fits comfortably!) but fail to live up to. This image can be what they project and want us to believe about themselves (The Wizard of Oz), or what we project onto them (Nate’s Ted Lasso). To let go of the fantasy about ourselves is to let go of the idealized image of ourselves as being more magnanimous than we are (Grandiosity). It means letting go of the idea that by performing forgiveness and tolerance and inclusion for people whose behavior toward us consistently demonstrates their lack of interest in who we actually are, their need to outdo us (in status, achievement, or even morality), and how little we matter to them and factor into their priorities, we can somehow manage to win them into a relationship where we finally feel seen, supported, and included. Ironically, the more magnanimous and inclusive we strive to appear, the smaller our actual selves become, since it is only through self-betrayal (denying our limitations), self-diminishment (staying small), and self-exclusion (staying silent), that we are able to maintain the farce of community.

So, in forgiving someone, and even ourselves, we are letting go of the fantasy of who they (we) ought to be and acknowledging the reality of who they are and what they are actually capable or willing to offer us. We accept not only the limitations, inability, and/or unwillingness of the other to meet our needs, wants, expectations, and boundaries, but also the space (gap) which that inevitably creates between us! It does not fill that space with more effort, skilling up to better defend ourselves or disarm the other, coddling, badgering, pretending, exceeding/ignoring our own limitations (boundaries), a continuous shouldering of the other’s responsibility, or resentment, hellfire, and fury. In other words, forgiveness relinquishes the insistence that the other be something they are not yet, and may never become, while also maintaining the integrity of one’s own identity by not trying to fill, erase, or ignore the space created between those two realities. It is only once we have done this, that we are able to appropriately redefine the relationship in a way that no longer compromises our integrity, limits our growth, nor cheats us out of meaningful connection.

This space which gives us all room to both acknowledge and transform who we really are, some might call the Growth Mindset. I call it a guilt/grace paradigm, and it is the practice of forgiveness which unlocks that space for us and for others. This practice of forgiveness, which acknowledges and allows for the gap between where we actually end and where they actually begin, recognizes and honors both our and the other’s worthiness and dignity to exist as imperfect, not fully matured human beings, it holds each of us responsible for our own limitations as well as our transformational growth, and it invites the other into an authentic, better quality, and mutually satisfying relationship. Forgiveness stands with arms open wide as an invitation to the other to recognize our worth as the reality (boundaries/limitations) we are, share and pursue values that will enable us both to flourish and grow to full maturity, and to move toward mutuality, collaboration, and intimacy with us.

But this is not yet reconciliation.

Forgiveness is only the invitation.

Reconciliation can only happen when that invitation is accepted.

Below I’ve tried to illustrate what this looks like to me:

Forgiveness :

When we are forgiven it…

  • Changes the future not the past
  • Releases us from retributive punishment & condemnation (contempt) for our choices, not from the consequences of our choices
  • Frees us from being limited to our past not from the responsibility for that past

When we forgive we…

  • …Open the possibility to create/restore authentic relationship (each as they actually are), not idealized images & shared fantasy
  • …Cancel an unpayable debt from the past as an investment in a generative future (either together or apart!!), we do not keep upping the anti on a losing hand!
  • …Relinquish the insistence that the other be something they are not yet and may never become, while maintaining the integrity of one’s own identity by not trying to fill, erase, or ignore the space/difference created between those two realities.
  • …Keep the path clear and open for the other to grow into a person of wholehearted integrity who respects our boundaries, shares our values & purpose, and wants meaningful connection, instead of canceling for good those who have failed us. (Murdering someone in your heart = dead to me)
  • …Have an inner attitude of Standing with arms open wide in generous candor as an invitation to the other to recognize our worth as the reality (boundaries/limitations) we are, to share and pursue values that will enable us both to flourish and grow to full maturity, and to move toward mutuality, collaboration, and intimacy.

Wrap up…

Forgiveness does not erase what we or others have done or left undone (if it did, we wouldn’t have a Bible at all!). It does not pretend that wrong doing never happened or that it does not elicit a strong emotional response in us. And it is not a vow of silence that must be kept to protect someone else’s image and reputation. It is not a Witness-Relocation Program nor a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card. Rather, forgiveness is the open window which lets the fresh air and sunlight in, giving us the space and visibility to begin exactly where we are to name the mess for what it is without fear of condemnation and retribution. In this Guilt/Grace paradigm (Growth mindset), I do not have to be forever stuck being the worst version of myself, living under the fear of exposure, shame and pay-back, nor do I need to spend valuable resources keeping my flaws hidden behind a perfect image. Rather, I know my limitations, mistakes, and ugly moments (and those of other’s) can be transformed into something that is generative and connective, when I acknowledge them and integrate them into the story of who I am, do what I can to regain trust wherever it has been broken, and invest my energies into creating a more just and beautiful world.

Dear Trans Ally,

/ It Takes One To Know One / Leave a comment

(This is carried over from comments on a facebook post)

Hi again Ben! Thank you for engaging with the post and even more so with my comments. I really appreciate that.

First, I want to say that it sounds like you know personally and care about trans identifying people. There cannot be enough of that in the world, so that makes me glad to hear that you are willing to carry their concerns in this way. I too have a trans person in my life, who, though we seemed to be estranged at the moment, still matters very much to me and whom I care about more than I care about most people in the world, and it grieves me deeply and has cost me a great deal to be in conflict with them. It is because of this person that I began paying attention to this issue in the first place.

You make several points in your comment, many of which, unfortunately, I must contend with. I thought it easiest to just go through them one by one here on my blog, rather than over tax the comments on facebook. I hope that is ok!

1.) Ben: I, as I noted, live in the SF Bay Area. As a result of living here I have had the chance to know and be friends with many trans-women and trans-men. Not one of them that chose to share their story with me had reasons for transitioning anything like that.

Lee: No doubt every Trans identifying person has a unique story all their own, and I am sorry if anything I have said has led you to believe that I know or question the motives of Trans identifying people as a whole for making what I can only imagine are the most excruciating kinds of decisions a person can possibly make. That is in no way my intention when I criticize self-id specifically and queer theory in general.

But it is necessary to point out what the real-world consequences for women and children are when those who advocate self-id drill down on the misnomer that “Trans women are women,” and then insist that this means no door can be closed to them. There are many trans people who are just as appalled at this development, but unfortunately, ever more men (dysphoric or not) are taking the new, politically correct mantra to its logical conclusion ad absurdum. Sports, prisons, shelters, hospitals, changing rooms, quotas, criminal statistics, to name only some of the areas effected.

2) If you believe science points to a binary system of sexuality you are definitely not reading the same articles I am. From what I have read both biological and personality traits related to sex and gender exist on a spectrum, not within a binary. Yes most of us express within the binary due to biological averages and societal pressures but definitely not all of us.

2.)”Not reading same science”: where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah, climate change deniers, creationists, covid-deniers, and flat-earthers.🥴 Of course this kind of statement pulls the plug on any dialogue. To simply claim a “different science” as an authoritative voice to again try to silence legitimate questions and concerns. Science has and still does acknowledge only two sexes. I won’t dive into the actual science of sexed bodies (Brett Weinstein & Heather Heying, evolutionary biologists, do that better than I can in their book “A Hunter Gatherers Guide to the 21st Century,” as does Helen Joyce in “Trans.” My point is that THIS has been and IS the accepted science, and until there is sufficient, broad-based, independently peer reviewed reasons to over-turn it, which certainly has happened in the past in many areas, I, nor is anyone, obliged, nor likely, to suppress the overwhelming amount of salient reasons to keep the categories male and female as they are, as strictly describing biological bodies (which can be objectively verified) and not inner feelings (which cannot). Again, it is a most useful category, has considerable social, reproductive, statistical, and medical implications, and is one that I believe does more harm than good to erase.

What I believe it is less helpful to do is to attach extremely narrow, role-specific, and confining behavioral definitions to our sexed bodies, and then to blame a person’s body for not aligning with that stereotype. This is, and has been, the main tenant of feminism. I think Queer theory is making a confused jumble out of several different kinds of categories: the physical realities we all face (as healthy/normative & non-normative); the force of sex-roles in evolution; impossible, idealized stereotypes; hyper-sexualization of our culture; personality traits (as listed by either the big 5 or Cloninger’s 4 habit systems for example); Character (again, see Cloninger, Seligman, the Stoics, or just about any religion); the process and states of becoming/being an adult/not yet being an adult; individuation & belonging vs non-conformity & conformity (cynicism / group-think); Extroversion vs. Introversion; self-ideation (narcissism) vs self-transcendence (having values far above and outside of the self/self-forgetfulness (flow)); high vs. low sensitivity; intuitional vs. rational; Trauma and our responses to that trauma; attachment theory; and, and, and. All of these and more play a role in forming our personalities and how we express those personalities. And yet Queer theory wants to force all of these aspects of our identity and make them thread this one tiny needle, the relatively recently developed concept of “Gender,” making that the arbiter of absolutely everything else. I think it is tragic that we have a whole generation of young people pre-occupied with trying to pin down some unique and more eccentric gender than the next person, rather than learning how to come to terms with the reality they were born into (time, location, family, body), internalizing responsibility for positive, transformational growth for themselves and their immediate communities, and learning how to collaborate creatively and seek healthy, intimate friendship with those who may be very different from themselves, physically, cognitively, emotionally, economically, ideologically, and geographically.

So I do not think in terms of gender (except when I am speaking German, and I stumble over every noun!). I think in terms of men and women. And within those two groups, there is an infinite and fabulous assortment of individuals. And I suppose many of the traits, proclivities, and limitations these men and women have, and the contributions they make, overlap in a myriad of ways in all kinds of Venn diagrams that are always shifting and reconfiguring- much like a kaleidoscope. And though some might find it amusing to give every new variance a specific name, it is a fools errand to bully the entire world at gun-point to submit to this new and mercurial nomenclature.

3) Making other oppressed people your enemies is the oldest trick in the book.

3) “Making other oppressed people your enemies…” you lost me here. I’m not sure how you got here? From our conversation so far, you began your first comment on my post by not only aligning yourself with those in the Bay area who revile women who insist on their right to name themselves & protect their own (and their children’s) interests and boundaries, but also by condoning the aggressive and pernicious use of the slurs TERF & SWERF to dismiss, intimidate, and silence us. I believe labeling people in that way is very seductive, but never productive (just as true of using the word “woke” in the same derogatory way).

I have made no-one my enemy. I work very hard to keep my heart open, curious, and soft toward even those who treat me as their enemy. It is a spiritual practice I take very seriously, and I imagine it as a posture of standing with my arms open wide (as if on a cross) in an invitation to embrace, embrace me in my limitations, my interests, my boundaries (“This is not OK for me!”), my unique vantage point, my hopes and dreams, my unique contributions, my vision for what a community of just-harmony (beauty) might look like, and my failures to live up to that vision. And for those who cannot accept this invitation to embrace in vulnerability, to let them go in peace and forgiveness and the hope our journeys will one day lead us closer in the future. And though I often tire of holding those “inner-arms” up, I am deliberate about being held accountable to re-assuming this posture when I have let them fall.

We may be in conflict over this issue, but that need not make us enemies. It only means we have “difference with tension,” the best definition of conflict I have yet come across. Our interests appear to be tugging in different directions causing us to feel a tension on whatever chord there may be that connects us (in our case our shared past at high-school and facebook). The tension is uncomfortable, and the temptation is to relieve the tension by either dropping my own hold on the chord (negating/silencing myself) or severing the other from the chord (negating/silencing the other). I believe conflict, difference with tension, always brings a revelatory possibility with it. If we stay the course, withstand the tension while looking for a way forward, we might just find a greener pasture for all of us which may well surpass the kinds of solutions either one of us can imagine alone. And usually, that means a willingness to go wide, by gathering as much information as possible from all interested parties, and deep, going below the surface and getting to the actual heart or well-spring of the problem by finding out what the real unmet needs driving this movement and counter movement are.

4)Feminism is constantly being attacked by the ideologies and power centers of the status quo that want to discredit it. Those attackers exploit the topics of the day to focus attention on flashy divisive issues and away from issues that affect their power, like abortion rights or equal compensation. Of course a wedge has developed over transitioning. It’s an easily exploitable issue focused on a small group of people who do not fit the status quo and don’t have much power to fight back at a cultural scale.

Here we have some overlap. Though this does sound a bit like “mansplaining” -you, as a man, telling me, a woman who has born the stigma and consequences of being a (sometimes the only vocal) feminist in my conservative family and communities for a couple of decades now, about how unpopular feminism is! I know, I know! Believe me I know!

And, yes, I am very perturbed that instead of pushing forward on the already exhausting list of issues that women and girls are up against because of our sexed bodies and because of male entitlement, male appeasement, and male violence, we find ourselves faced with yet another form of male entitlement, infringement, and violence, which is targeting our economic livelihoods, our reproductive capabilities & selections, and even our personal sovereignty! But let me ask you this: who is diverting whose attention here? It is not Radical Feminists who have the infinite funds that have been bankrolling and secretly lobbying state and industrial institutions over the last decade to bring about such a dramatic cultural shift in record-breaking time. Being a “Trans-Ally” is the new virtue signaling for the Elite-left, the ‘smoke & mirrors’ that keeps those with power and money from having to address any of the issues that would actually cost them some skin (reproductive care and protection, maternity leave, pre+post natal care, domestic violence, equal pay, equal representation, and on and on). “Trans-Rights” is to the Elite Left, what ‘Pro-Life’ is to the Right, and both are harming women and allowing the rich to get richer. And just now SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade!)

5) Insisting that people are defined as who you say they are not who they say they are does not have a good history around here, in San Francisco and Berkeley. We’ve all seen directly how those concepts are regularly used against people, especially those in marginalized groups.

Gender is a concept. Sex is a reality. No one gets to define themselves alone. It sucks, but it is the truth. We don’t live in a vacuum, and whether we like it or not, our identities will always be shaped as much by others as by ourselves. (“Am ‘du’ werde ich mich selbst!”) “Only on the ‘other’ do I become myself!” Only narcissists claim absolute editorial control of their identities. I am observing and naming what I see, the physical and tangible reality that I have access to, and responding in a way that is prudent, safe, and, I believe, empowering for both men and women. I have the personal sovereignty to do that. So do you. Any trans-woman who refuses to acknowledge and take responsibility for the obvious negative implications self-id has for women’s protected status will never be woman enough for me. I have empathy for the tension they feel, but anyone trying to relieve that tension by replacing definitions and removing protections from women rather than the more difficult task of stretching the perimeter of how men can express themselves is avoiding the task of growing-up and shifting the costs for their inner conflict onto women and girls specifically and onto society as a whole, and it will have disastrous consequences if it continues.

6) Is there a discussion to be had about what being trans means and how that relates to feminism? Sure, with trans people included in the dialog.

I am not sure if you have just not been following what has transpired the last 5-10 years, which is completely understandable (I was totally oblivious until two years ago!), or which window you are looking out of, but insinuating that trans people are being kept out of the conversation is flipping reality on its head. Unless you mean the trans people who are speaking out against self-id and de-transitioners, who are just as reviled by those pushing queer ideology as we women are. This whole ‘discussion’ began as a secret lobby campaign by trans activists, and once the reality of the institutional capture of their successful lobbying became visible to regular people who were alarmed over the implications for women and children of this new ‘group think,’ that had come about without any input from women’s rights activists, these women’s activists have been most aggressively and violently bullied, hounded, and smeared in every way possible to try and completely silence any contrary input. On top of that, the most aggressive and most vocal trans-activists have refused to come to the table with people like Julie Bindel, Helen Joyce, and Kathleen Stock, all solid liberals, to have good faith dialogue! I will give you the benefit of the doubt on this one, and assume you just don’t know, because otherwise, this would be just about the most infuriating part of your comments.

If someone is starting from the position of having already decided who can be part of the conversation or adopts TERF as a badge of honor, making it part of their identity to exclude someone we will have a hard time finding common ground even if on many things we have similar goals.

Again, I really don’t know what to do with this. You brought up TERF as a slur, and I wrote that these kinds of labels are cheap and only meant to silence the other. Now you are turning it around and insinuating that I not only consider myself a TERF (which I don’t), but that I wear it as a badge of honor? If I was less gracious, I could believe that you were deliberately trying to turn the tables on me. Women did not come up with the term TERF. Because women who are honestly and prudently looking at the Big Picture and asking good questions about what the ramifications are for self-id and the life-long medicalization of children in all areas of our society, know that finding a way forward that helps dysphoric people live their best lives, while not jeopardizing anyone else’s, is not at all exclusionary of trans people, period! Continuing to insist that I, and others who hold my views, are trying to exclude anyone is a character smear and is simply unacceptable.

They are questioning others validity as people because they don’t fit into their classification system. I don’t understand that.

That is a pretty huge jump to go from “humans that have penises are not women” equals “humans with penises that think they are women are not people”! I know that I am not saying that, thinking that, or in anyway supporting the dehumanization of trans people, so I am wondering how you got there? I wish I could say it went both ways. But women who are against self-id, the medicalization of children, and affirmative only mental health care have faced the most vile forms of verbal abuse, ostracization, threats of violence and actual violence for stating things that are facts believed for thousands and thousands of years, and for daring to question if what seems good to trans activists is actually good for women, children, or even trans-people themselves.

Look, if there is one thing I have learned in my 56 years on this earth, and believe me, I have learned it the hard way, it is this:

It is NOT MY JOB TO VALIDATE anyone’s idea of themselves!!

Not my boss’s, not a pastor’s, not my husband’s, not even my own children’s! To assume it is anyone’s job to validate your idea of your identity (“or else!”), or even your worth, is abusive and manipulative. This need for validation is the foundation of co-dependent and abusive relationships. I believe every person is a precious child of God and I do my fallible best to treat them as such, but as far as our self-worth is concerned, each of us has to figure that shit out on our own. It’s called growing up: 1) Accepting the reality of my situation with all its light & shadows, plusses & minuses, opportunities & limitations; 2) internalizing responsibility to creatively move myself and community to more fully realize our inherent potential; and 3) reaching out for mutually edifying and collaborative relationships. I am happy to welcome anyone who is committed to this journey, and I stand with outstretched arms inviting every man and woman to join it.

Train

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With her foot up on the heater-baseboard which ran along the wall, and her elbow on her raised knee, she cupped her chin in her hand and stared out of the window. The rain was coming down in sheets now, and if it did not stop within the next two hours, she would surely be drenched by the time she got home. Not that she had forgotten an umbrella. That would never happen. But between her overly large suitcase, her bulging cosmetic bag, her laptop bag, the duffel bag with extra shoes, and the shopping bag with gifts and snacks, she would have no hand free for such a contraption. Over the decades, she had tried to constrain the amount of things she took on such trips, but no amount of inconvenience and hassle with her luggage had been able to cure her of her deeply rooted abandonment issues. “Be Prepared!” was a stain on every fiber of her being.

Now she was simply grateful for this window, literally and figuratively: the bracket of time to herself to shift into neutral and coast along for a couple of hours, as well as the cold, grey, square sheet of glass to lean her head against and be lulled by its monotonous stream of scenery. In the same way the fields and buildings and trees could be seen coming gradually toward her from the distance only to rush by and disappear behind her, so too did the events of the week pass review in her tired brain. Just as grey, just as monotonous.

It was the same old refrain. The weeks of frantic and thorough preparation hadn’t positioned her into a state of confidence, only exposed her to the infinite sea of knowledge, skills, and possibilities that she did not yet master. The closer the deadline came, the tighter the knot in her stomach grew, and the more ant-acids she took before going to bed. The migraines that plagued her on the eve of her presentations now only seemed to come when she addressed an entirely new C suit. Not knowing how high this new bar might be always left her feeling wide open to her darkest opposing line-backer with the number, “Who do you think you are?” The end-zone seemed miles away on such projects, and she felt foolish being on the field at all, let alone thinking she could run the ball, or even score.

But she always did. Though the presentations themselves felt like an out-of-body experience, afterwards, she knew she had slain it. She would hit a homer almost every time. Her clients were pleased. She would be invited back. Business was growing. And yet none of these facts managed to stick to her lapel. They ricocheted off of her like a bird flying into a window, with only a thud and a dead bird to show for it. After some polite conversation with her clients, she would excuse herself and return to her room for some rest before she began the arduous logistics of returning her entire wardrobe and kitchen sink to her place of residence. In that hour or so before she checked out, she would wilt into the hotel bed as all the tension and stress would drain out of her. Then with legs now made of rubber and arms that had become mostly useless appendages, she somehow managed to get all of her luggage into the elevator, then onto the street, down the five blocks to the station, and onto the train.

(in 5)

Hairy (in 3)

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About how I feel.

Ugh! Not this word! It is almost as bad as “moist!” But there it is, so I’ve got no choice but to spend the next 20-30 minutes writing about it. I could go the easy route and fetch up one of the many precarious situations our foster mother had gotten us into. But that would just be an avoidance tactic. I know what this has to be about. I know what needs to be said. And it won’t be pretty. It won’t be fun.

Women are HAIRY!

There! I said it! See where this is going? We grow hair. On our legs. Under our arms. We grow pubic hair. And now, at my age, we even start growing mustaches. It’s nature.

No, I am not completely liberated from the razor. I started shaving my legs and underarms long before the first hair even had a chance, so it is too late to stop now. Somehow we girls absorbed the message pre-puberty that becoming a woman wasn’t so much about the natural process of our bodies growing in certain ways, like hips, boobs, and hair, as it was about being able to use certain products, like bras, pretty underwear, and shaving cream. I cringe to think about how much of my puny allowance and baby-sitting money went to that crap… that and cigarettes!!

And it didn’t end there. Just last week, at my mother-in-law’s celebration, my 24 year old daughter told me I’d better take a tweezer to my upper lip (I had left my epilator at home), so I spent a few painful minutes in the bathroom plucking out the darker fuzz under my nose one at time until it met her approval. “Wer schön sein will, muss leiden!” “To be beautiful, one must suffer,” so the German saying.

But to what new torture has this younger generation acquiesced?! It infuriates me that the porn industry has reached so far into the main culture, that one would be hard pressed to find a woman under, what? 40? 35? Older? Younger? that has any hair at all anywhere on her body but her head. It is not enough that they are selling women string wedgies for the price of a fine bottle of wine, but now the culture is dictating that women masquerade as prepubescent girls for the rest of their lives to appease a pornography, excuse me, a child-pornography saturated male (and female?) population. Only children well under the age of consent have no pubic hair. Growing pubic hair is what happens when you grow into an ADULT. What does that say about those that are holding this up as the new bar of beauty sex-appeal for women to order their lives around?

Obviously I am not writing an expose with any facts, statistics, or personal profiles in the half hour I give myself to write my warm ups. And of course, I’ve not seen any of this for myself. But just knowing that women are going along with this is enough for me to tear my hair out!

Prompt: Iron

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Those creases were so sharp they could almost cut you. We wouldn’t leave the house without them, that stiff, crisp line right down the front of our jeans. Right out of the laundry and hot off the press, that is how it had to be. The older the jeans, the lighter the crease. We may not have always had time to shower, and make up in our day was so paired down, it could be done on the move if need be: black eyeliner heated over a lighter-flame and poked in between our lids and quick left and right motion, swipe of the finger across grey eyeshadow and onto our lids, two quick strokes with the blush-brush, and tinted lip-gloss. Voila. Ok, sometimes there was that god-awful zit that needed coverup and powder, but we had the whole procedure trimmed down to a Formula 1 pit-stop. But the pants? There was no shortcut for the crease and no occasion when it wasn’t mandatory. I couldn’t tell you if it was an ‘80’s thing or just a DC ghetto thing, but it was a thing.

Until it wasn’t anymore. Eventually I traded in my creased jeans for mini skirts, or hippy skirts, or cut offs, or just creaseless jeans.

What did we think those creases would give us? What did we think would happen if we were caught without one? Did we think we could validate our right to exist in this world, add more value to our net worth, or would somehow form deep and meaningful connections only when we had a crease in our pants? How quickly and easily we women are fooled out of our birthright. Through the years I have traded it away for so many stupid and inconsequential things, but none so absurd as when my best friend and I handed it over for an iron.