tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71012012837586488432024-02-06T19:31:07.763-08:00Cape Town to Cairo to Cambridge: RamblingsShannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.comBlogger67125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-49421313780698574982014-08-14T23:05:00.003-07:002014-08-14T23:26:21.138-07:00To Christians Who Care About Ferguson...#GoingThereYesterday was busy. I had promised my godson Torian that I would take him to the beach, so we made the hour-long trek to Galveston, along with his mom and his 2-year-old brother Ace; when we got back I let him swim in the pool for a while and then I had to drop his mom at work and meet a friend and make sure Phen knew what to do while watching the boys (this mostly involved "open the door for the pizza guy" and "make sure the games on the iPad are age-appropriate") so I didn't catch up on the loss of sanity in Ferguson until last night around 11.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ace and I watch Tori fly a kite at the beach.</td></tr>
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<br />
A friend and I texted and tweeted back and forth about it while I rocked the baby to sleep and kept an eye on the two older boys. Of course I was worried; Julian was out with friends and I sent him a text warning him to be particularly careful in case the police were extra jumpy. Certainly what is happening in Ferguson is big. It just isn't...news. It isn't news to anyone who loves a black boy and has journeyed with him through the world. So here is my response to the pleas from Christians who are asking me via Twitter to be outraged, to be vocal, to be active:<br />
<br />
I am tired of outrage. I am tired of despair. I am tired of talking
about race to white people who tell me I am suffering from white guilt
or have imagined it or don't I know the Lord is color-blind and my
goodness, I don't even *see* race myself. <br />
<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I am tired of wondering when people will stop thinking this face is charming and start seeing it as menacing.</td></tr>
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I am tired of trying to make Phen and Julian feel safe and loved and cared for in a country--no, a world--that insists on treating black lives as less valuable than white ones. It is like trying to make bricks with no straw; it is nearly impossible. Julian has a note he takes with him if he needs to take my car. It says he has my permission to be driving it and has my contact information in case he gets pulled over. He has it because I don't want to end up trying to explain that at a police station at 1 am. My friend Runako said dryly "You've given him traveling papers" and I laughed and then gasped. Traveling papers were what slaves had to have from their masters in order to be off the plantation.<br />
<br />
There are a million things I could say about Ferguson, all of which have been said by people who are more eloquent and more vocal than I am. I could point out that if you'd been paying attention, you'd have known about the slaying of Mike Brown almost a week ago. I could say that the police are no more racist than the rest of us, but that this action shouldn't come as a surprise when you give them military-grade weapons with which to act out those prejudices. I could say that the police have been brutalizing black people for decades, they just didn't have such fancy riot gear. I could say that if you think this isn't America, you live in a bubble; this has always been America. I could point out the way black victims are often identified by any misconduct and white perpetrators are often treated as people with great potential who went tragically wrong. I could say that the way we defend Mike Brown by saying things like "he was going to college" as if that made him more valuable, like he deserved to be shot a little less, demonstrates how much we've dehumanized black people: we have to defend their right to exist. I could say I'm worried that this will be another cycle of social media outrage that fizzles when we find something else to fixate on. I could say that all the venting and retweeting and favoriting may make us feel like we're doing something in lieu of actually, you know, DOING something.<br />
<br />
I could speak to you of quieter things, too: of teenage boys who are raucous and goofy because that's what teenage boys are like, and the fear that a police officer--or, hell, any citizen with a gun and some fear--won't wait to find out that Phen is great at math and Julian is a brilliant musician, that Phen is reading The Art of War and Julian believes his patronus would be a panther if he ever gets his Hogwarts letter. I could tell you I don't just worry about the boys; I worry about my friend Corregan, he of the Princeton degree and megawatt grin, who is cerebral and compassionate and wildly funny and who, at 6-4 and 200+ pounds, is someone's idea of the bogeyman, and I worry about my friend Runako, who by his own admission "gets stroppy" when his rights are being trampled on, and I worry about my friend Mijha, who refused to watch any news coverage of this because she is tired of caring too much. I could tell you that my pastor--my soft-spoken, gentle-spirited pastor--is the one who taught Phen how to behave when approached by police, how to narrate every movement ("My license is in my wallet, which is in my pocket, so I'm going to reach for it now if that's OK") and be as unthreatening as possible. I could tell you that it's tempting to tell the boys to avoid any protests or demonstrations in hopes of keeping them safe and the gut-wrenching realization that I'd be trading their physical safety for their dignity and self-respect. What kind of person would I be to ask that of them? What kind of young men would they be if they made that trade? I could tell you that 17 years into this life I've chosen, of living and working and worshipping across racial lines, I've learned that the resilience of black people is awe-inspiring, because everything conspires to try to make them smaller and meaner than they were meant to be. I could tell you I'm up at 1 am writing this blog post because Julian isn't home yet, which is fine--he's 19 and it's summer--but I worry until I hear his key in the lock.<br />
<br />
So I am tired, because this is not an event, this is just life. And I am embarrassed to admit I am tired because black people do this every day with no choice and no complaint. I could, if I wanted to, walk away from all this. (Well, in theory; in reality, I'd only have about five friends left and I'd have to find a new church, new apartment and new life.) The privilege of being white is that I can choose not to think about race; I can choose not to care. Even if I don't make that choice, it's there; I have options.<br />
<br />
Even typing that sentence is laborious because I've said it so many times. This is where I hit the wall. There is a zeal to some in the New Evangelical movement that I admire. I am so pleased that being an evangelical and caring about social justice are no longer mutually exclusive. I am thrilled that we are no longer a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party. I am so glad that there are speakers and blogger and pastors and thinkers who are talking about race and injustice, and they are passionate and zealous and I thank God for them.<br />
<br />
But I remember when I was the only one in the room, and I remember when Sojourners was a struggling little outfit that had about 30 subscribers and could barely pay their rent, and being a white Christian who grappled with racial injustice was lonely. I'm a little suspicious of your zeal; I'm afraid it won't last. And if I'm honest, I'm not just tired. I'm angry. I'm angry that so many of you found out about racism yesterday--or six months ago, or a year ago, or five years ago. And I know it's irrational because someone could just as easily say it of me: what's 17 years to someone who's been doing it for 30 or 40? Who lives it in their skin every day? I know that the same questions I roll my eyes at are questions I once asked, and people were kind enough to answer them without any visible eye-rolling. That's how I learned. I owe you that, and I'm failing you.<br />
<br />
And I'm failing you if I don't tell you that as exhausting and draining and deeply, deeply sad as this work can be, it is where the Kingdom grows and where God is at work; it is vibrant and meaningful and joyous as well. Fifteen years ago, I landed at City of Refuge Church. That I found it at all is what my
charismatic friends would call a "divine appointment." At the time, it
had maybe 60 people. It didn't have a building; it met in a room at a
homeless shelter in Houston's historically black Third Ward
neighborhood. But I had interned at that homeless shelter a few years
earlier, and the pastor had been the spiritual life director there. And
this little church, which drew a motley congregation which included the
former district attorney of Houston and several former inmates whom he
had probably prosecuted, had a bold vision of being a glimpse of the
Kingdom of God, a place where believers reached across lines of race and
class, where there was enough for everyone and no one went without. It
felt like the home I hadn't known I was looking for. And while I
didn't grow up there, over the next 10 years that church grew me up
spiritually.<br />
<br />
We didn't always know exactly what we were
doing. No one in multiracial churches does. That is one of the first
things that people who study multiracial churches will tell you: they
are too new and too few for anyone to know what makes them work or, more
often, not work. They are an unknown quantity, this wild adventurous
leap of faith that dares to imagine that the way things are is not the
way they have to be. We hit all the bumps in the road: the people who
left the church because the reality of interracial fellowship was so
much harder than the dream; disputes over who would fill leadership
roles; conflict over leadership styles and musical styles. It has not been easy. We've all been angry and we've all cried.<br />
<br />
But it's where I first experienced palpable grace in for the form of black folks who took a chance on me and loved me when they had no reason to. It's where people extended their trust and I did my best to hold that fragile, precious thing and not break it--and when I did, they offered it again. It's where I learned to listen. It's where I found out that recovering addicts are the wisest people in the world and if you're smart, you'll befriend some, and they'll take care of you when you discover your own brokenness. It's where I sat in a huddle with people ranging from a partner in one of the city's biggest law firms to a woman who lived at the homeless shelter and read Bonhoeffer's "Life Together" as we tried to figure out how to live into the Beloved Community.<br />
<br />
I'm tired and angry. I'm also joyous and exhilarated. I'm angry with you for not coming to the table sooner. Today I told Mijha "I know I should be glad they're coming to the party, even if they're late" and Mijha said, "Late?! The plates have been cleared and we're having coffee! We're putting on our coats! Don't bother to show up now!"<br />
<br />
I feel mean and hypocritical for feeling that way, but there it is. You're late and I'm angry; I went to a lot of funerals while you were off not knowing that racism and all its attendant evils were killing a lot of the people I loved. I pray to be gracious; I usually fail. Please be patient with me as I try to be patient with you. I'll answer your questions and I'll recommend books and I'll tell my stories; as best I can, I'll point you toward Jesus, who seems to like to hang out with the oppressed and marginalized. I'll assure you that my neighborhood isn't scary, that I prefer it to tonier areas because the parties are better and the people are kinder. I'll remember Fannie Lou Hamer saying the Kingdom of God was like a banquet table, a Sunday-dinner-on-the-grounds, and that there was enough for everyone and everyone was invited, even James Eastland and Ross Barnett, "but they'll have to learn some manners." I'll remind you to bring your manners and your appetite because there's enough for everyone at the welcome table and no one need go without, and I'll celebrate when you show up.<br />
<br />
But sometimes I'll wish you'd come sooner. Sometimes I'll resent the way you dominate the conversation. Sometimes I'll roll my eyes at your enthusiasm. I'll know you haven't gotten knocked down yet. I'll worry you won't have the stamina for it and you'll disappear. I'll worry that you'll hurt people who really shouldn't have to take any more pain.<br />
<br />
Remind me, when that happens, that I am not vice-Jesus and God is the host of the banquet, not me.<br />
<br />
So come join us, but stick around when the attention has moved on from Ferguson. Be prepared for your whole life to feel like Ferguson sometimes. Be prepared for big pain and bigger love.<br />
<br />
Julian's home.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Phen's graduation, June 2014. </td></tr>
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Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-79003553927896396212013-10-09T22:23:00.000-07:002013-10-09T22:23:17.298-07:00Dear NALT Christians...We Are ALTA few weeks ago, a new trend in Christendom lit up my Facebook feed. Christians were going to change the world, stand up for human rights, and defy their image as narrow-minded bigots...by making Youtube videos.<br />
<br />
You may take a moment to wipe the tears of hilarity/frustration from your eyes. I had to.<br />
<br />
It seems there is a new group on the scene, and they want you to know that when it comes to hating on the gays, they are Not All Like That. That is their catchy acronym: the NALT Christians. Inspired by the It Gets Better Project that Dan Savage and his partner started in 2010 to assure young gay kids that life gets better after high school, this group has so far posted about 75 videos on YouTube assuring the world that, fear not, we're Not All Like That.<br />
<br />
What strikes me first is that they entirely missed the point of the "It Gets Better" campaign. What made IGB so powerful was it was a family conversation: older gay folks saying to younger ones, hey, it won't be like this forever. It wasn't gay people saying to everyone else, "Guys, we're totally cool! We pay taxes and join the PTA and curse in traffic just like the rest of you! Honest, we're not what you think we are!" No, they were talking to each other. And if NALT had actually taken Savage's advice, maybe this wouldn't be such an exercise in absurdity either. Savage coined NALT because so many Christians came up to him and said, "You know, we're not all like that." His response? "Don't tell me that, tell Pat Robertson!" Tell all the anti-gay leaders who claim to speak for all Christians. In fact, Savage didn't need to be told not all Christians are like that; his mother was both Christian and supportive of him. He already knew.<br />
<br />
Maybe if NALT was a conversation amongst Christians, I'd be more supportive. If it were Christians talking to other Christians about why they believe--biblically, morally, spiritually, because of the presence of Christ and the Spirit--that sexuality is not an obstacle to a relationship with God, then that would be a conversation I'd be interested in taking part in. Instead, it comes across as Christians who want gay people to know that they're the good ones, the cool ones, the ones you can totally hang out with! Please affirm me and my coolness and don't lump me in with the un-trendy Christians who probably live in red states and wear polyester. The harm that is done to you is a shame, gay folks, but I need you to affirm that I am a good person! Because LGBTQ people TOTALLY have nothing else to do but shore up your confidence, NALTies. They don't have bigger issues facing their communities AT ALL. My eyes have rolled so far back into my head I'm not sure they're coming back around.<br />
<br />
But snark aside (and it's hard to put aside because this effort is so rich with snarky possibility), I'm bothered by something deeper. I understand wanting to say that Christianity is not a monolith. There are two billion of us, almost a third of the world's populations; any thinking person shouldn't need to be told that Pentecostals in Uganda are probably different from Catholics in the Philippines or Russian Orthodox in Moscow. I make it a point of assuming that in any group of 2 billion people, there's probably a plurality of opinion on any given topic, but I've always been a maverick. (As a corollary, I also don't assume it's every Muslim's job to convince me they're not in favor of flying planes into buildings or every black guy's job to convince me he's not a criminal.) So let's assume that message still needs to get out there.<br />
<br />
I'm all in favor of a good theological fight (I'm fondly recalling a div school professor who referred to me as a "theological pugilist," which I took as the highest of compliments). I think we should have hard discussions and wave our fists and stamp our feet, always in the humble certainty that we may be getting this completely wrong because, let's face it, we usually do. We can talk about why we disagree, and we can let those who are on the outside of this family argument listening in know that we have differing opinions on this subject.<br />
<br />
But I can't help but feel that when they say "we're not all like that," they really mean "because we're better than."<br />
<br />
We're better than those Christians who disagree with us--and who, it must be said in the interest of fairness, include a number who are indeed sometimes homophobic and hateful, as well as a number who are earnestly trying their best to be faithful to a complicated text, history and spirit. We're better than those Christians who are Republican, who are not as well-educated, who live someplace we don't like; better than those who think differently, vote differently, believe differently.<br />
<br />
Except you're not, and basic Christian theology tells you you're not. One of the great contributions of Christianity, I believe, is the belief that we are both beautiful and broken, every last one of us. We have the capacity for great goodness and for the depths of evil. So: NALT, you are ALT, because we are ALL ALT. We are all judgmental, we are all hypocritical, we are all petty and hurtful and shaming. We all say ugly things behind other people's backs. We worry that someone getting more means we will have less. We just do. And we can and should fight those impulses, but please don't pretend to me that you're not like me. I know you, because you ARE me. And you're a hot mess too.<br />
<br />
Say you disagree, say you think the Christians who condemn homosexuality are wrong and are reading the Bible wrong, say it loud and strong. But don't say you're not like them. You violate the communion of the Church and you deny your own fallible humanity when you do.<br />
<br />
And by the way, if you want to know what transformation and grace really look like, you won't see it in a Youtube video, but you might be lucky enough to meet my mom some day. Her best friend since high school--a friendship of close to 50 years now--is a lesbian who has been with her partner for about 35 years, almost as long as my parents have been married. Joan was the only bridesmaid in my parents' wedding. She and my mom used to make teachers cry. On one occasion, Joan pretended she was sick to stay home from school, then called the school pretending to be my grandmother in order to pick my mom up so they could drive to the beach in Joan's convertible.<br />
<br />
I don't know when Joan came out to my mom, but I imagine it was gut-wrenching for both of them. We used to tease my mom because she once said, when my sister asked "but what do lesbians DO," "Sweetie, I don't know, I just pretend they're roommates who share recipes." That was probably 20 years ago. I think they had some rocky years in there. They kept talking, though, even when it was just a birthday call or a Christmas card.<br />
<br />
Fast-forward several years. Mom went up to Vermont in August to visit Joan and Suzi, who got married in September after DOMA was overturned. Was she going to the ceremony, I asked? She said she wasn't, because her trip to see them had been arranged before the DOMA ruling came down and it was too late to change her flight. But in the quiet of their house, when just the three of them were there, my mom asked them to say their vows for her.<br />
<br />
I cried, standing on a street corner in New York City, when she told me that story. That is so far out of her comfort zone, but she loves Joan and Suzi and she wants them to be happy. She is not theologically convinced that homosexuality is God's plan for human sexuality; but she loves her friend and accepts her fully. And Joan accepts my mom. Suzi mentioned on this trip that my mom was the last person Joan came out to, after she'd come out even to her parents, because she was so afraid of losing my mom's friendship. "Did you think I was that much of a judgmental bitch?" asked my mom, who is known amongst her close friends, and her distant ones, for being a straight shooter. "Oh, Susie, Joan doesn't think that about you at all," Suzi said firmly. "She thinks you're principled. She *admires* that about you."<br />
<br />
Tell me that's not grace. I'm a moral pygmy next to Joan and my mom. <br />
<br />
It's moved my mom politically a bit; I think she favors civil unions, or at least wouldn't vote to oppose them. She wants Joan and Suzi to be able to make end-of-life decisions for each other. When my dad said staunchly that he wouldn't go against the Bible and vote for something so unbiblical, my mom said, "Well, you don't know any gay people." Not true, Dad blustered; he has gay acquaintances at work. "Fine," Mom amended; "you don't LOVE any gay people."<br />
<br />
And that's the game changer, isn't it? YouTube videos won't change anything. Trying to get a gold star for being NALT won't do it. But getting into the messy incarnational reality of people who aren't like you but who are, actually, exactly like you just might. That's where you'll find the grace and transformation.<br />
<br />
That's where you'll find Joan and Susie and Suzi. And those broads are worth knowing.<br />
<br />
<br />Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-7102113355046906422013-08-07T21:46:00.002-07:002014-08-14T21:01:05.421-07:00An Open Letter to Phen<style>
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Phen is 17 now and will start his last year of high school in two weeks. How on earth that happened since he was a lap child about six months ago is a mystery for the ages. As the adage goes, "The days are long, but the years are short." </div>
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I wrote this letter to him after the verdict came back in the Trayvon Martin case, because he was angry and scared and talking about getting a gun. Sigh, 17. I couldn't pull my thoughts together without putting them on paper first--twas always thus--and he is used to getting notes and letters from me. So this was a letter to him, never intended for public consumption. My friend Rémy believes it should be read by more than Phen, though he is the audience who matters most. But I have succumbed. The letter follows.</div>
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Dearest child o’mine,</div>
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During the Zimmerman trial, I often found my eyes drifting
to two framed photos of you on the bookshelf. In one of them, you are about ten
years old. You are asleep in my bed in your soccer jersey, clutching my old
teddy bear. You are still wearing the green wristband that meant you had
successfully swum the length of the swimming pool and were allowed to go down
the big slide. Your top teeth have just come in and your face still has the
soft curves of childhood.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKtPuEILrhkv_Fl11bwDrbC9Cxs73f9wSUSxAFBecDso_snJc0gEXbEE84dqWx15xcrEnv2IVYHpgJyXMGvuVhVUzwWB1Y-oW1y_j5PTePZSY6uN_GeSRnpLQV0JZogDsVOq_yzdtUXRI/s1600/Phen-sleeping.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKtPuEILrhkv_Fl11bwDrbC9Cxs73f9wSUSxAFBecDso_snJc0gEXbEE84dqWx15xcrEnv2IVYHpgJyXMGvuVhVUzwWB1Y-oW1y_j5PTePZSY6uN_GeSRnpLQV0JZogDsVOq_yzdtUXRI/s320/Phen-sleeping.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Phen, age 10</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In the other, taken a few months ago, you are tall and lean,
your six-foot frame draped over a chair while you play on your phone. The baby
curves have melted away, leaving the angular face of a young man: high,
chiseled cheekbones, a strong jaw, clear dark eyes. You’re wearing a hoodie.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWEvDwXjuhlIVc9yK5ZaOJqu5Se5CGZCyOjFD5R7_psA9c1Iqm9IDC9atRRdHtxLNxV2QAc5NIZBO60uMjliRVEoaUH2FcNKZxYGjX0jCsq-Pxw4ESbR8l3SRf0fV7EwShB04fLZhabvA/s1600/IMG_0135.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWEvDwXjuhlIVc9yK5ZaOJqu5Se5CGZCyOjFD5R7_psA9c1Iqm9IDC9atRRdHtxLNxV2QAc5NIZBO60uMjliRVEoaUH2FcNKZxYGjX0jCsq-Pxw4ESbR8l3SRf0fV7EwShB04fLZhabvA/s320/IMG_0135.JPG" height="320" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Phen, 17</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You are 17 in that photo. You are Trayvon Martin’s age. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is not possible to have observed this case without some
measure of emotion, I think. What I want to talk with you about—what I hope
this will spark as a series of conversations—is the specific elements in this
case, and the bigger sociopolitical issue around it. You are angry. That in
itself is rare; you are sometimes petulant, occasionally angst-ridden, but
rarely angry. You are actually quite even-tempered. It’s not that I don’t want
you to be angry; I want you to be angry about the right things, and to direct
it in the right way.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
First, the case. The hysteria surrounding it has obscured
all nuance, and legal cases rest entirely on nuance. Remember that because of
our federalist system, the legal system is different depending on what state
you live in. We live in Texas, which means you can get the death penalty for
crimes for which other states would only give you a life sentence. Similarly,
Florida’s laws are unique unto Florida. Zimmerman claimed self-defense. In most
states, someone who claims self-defense must prove that he was indeed under
threat. This means the defendant would have to take the stand and the
prosecution would have the chance to cross-examine him. In Florida, if a person
claims self-defense, the burden is on the prosecution to prove that it was NOT self-defense.
It has to prove a negative. The defendant does not have to take the stand.
Those cases are virtually unwinnable, which is why the state generally declines
to prosecute them. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You have heard the phrase “beyond a reasonable doubt.” That
is what the prosecution must prove: that events happened in a particular way
beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s a high bar, as it should be. Taking someone’s
freedom is a grave thing, so we tilt the system in favor of the defendant: the
right to counsel, not to incriminate himself, to have the state prove its case
beyond a reasonable doubt. It should be hard to convict someone. A liberal
justice system rests on the presumption that it is a graver offense to convict
an innocent man than to let a guilty one go free. The truth about this case is
that there is a lot we don’t now. We don’t know who threw the first punch. We
don’t know when Zimmerman pulled his gun. The only person who could have
contradicted Zimmerman’s story is dead.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This decision was not the result of a racist jury. It’s not
Medgar Evers’ trial replayed 50 years later. It was the illogically logical outcome of
Florida’s laws and the way self-defense is defined there. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You may have noticed the prosecution didn’t talk about race.
They made some opaque references to “profiling,” but race was not central. Most
white people do not now how to talk about race. And we have the privilege of
choosing not to if we so choose; we can choose not to think about it at all.
When forced, our speech is labored and our tongue sticks to our mouths. Try not
to hate us for this. We were taught very early that race was not to be spoken
of, that it was far too volatile a topic to be broached. We do not have a
vocabulary for it. It is one of our great failings.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb_SWDcEXTJjtaYjooODkF-wu6QtQUmcf-tOQjsctcnPqnMr_eZCyPYeZeaX1X8o3L7e26hnLDptPKGWhgYJuj3cMPN77U8YD2BuOeqQTIrz7zsrWfL8zzRX-BEKC9IThhL9af7kTBl-s/s1600/Rachel-Phen.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjb_SWDcEXTJjtaYjooODkF-wu6QtQUmcf-tOQjsctcnPqnMr_eZCyPYeZeaX1X8o3L7e26hnLDptPKGWhgYJuj3cMPN77U8YD2BuOeqQTIrz7zsrWfL8zzRX-BEKC9IThhL9af7kTBl-s/s320/Rachel-Phen.jpeg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Phen in his unfortunate cornrows period, circa 13. But SO CUTE, no?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A lot of people hoped the jury would ignore the law and
follow their conscience. It sounds nice, but it’s a dangerous proposition. It’s
called jury nullification, and it means the jury chooses to ignore the law.
That might sound appealing in a case like this, but the face of jury
nullification has far too often been the 1960s civil rights cases in which all
the evidence was ignored because a white jury just didn’t believe it was right
to convict a white person for killing a black person. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But the specifics of this case are not why you are angry and
why I cried. That is a much broader, more complicated, more painful picture.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At its heart is the fact that the justice system has not
worked well for black people. That black bodies have not been counted as worthy
as white bodies. Our heavy history, particularly in this Southland I love so
much and which is the only home you remember, infuses every aspect of our lives
and, therefore, of this case. We are a land swimming in blood. It is our
original sin. And I use that word intentionally: I want you to know, Phen, as
the person who first carried you into a Sunday School room and who cried at
your baptism, that our country’s racism is a grave, grave sin, one that should
drive us to our knees. It is a sin against you. Don’t ever let anyone call it
something less or cheapen it. Zimmerman’s racism—the thoughts and
preconceptions that drove him to follow Trayvon, to pursue him, to confront
him—was a sin. But so is the socialization that led him to believe that was
true without questioning it or perhaps even being aware of it. In the South, we
all have bloody hands.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggXlw1iSXHw-8OpDQ-i50s-hjEp1xXdQsiEJFmyhzq7sJwa20AQ_PzzjQPDn0aH4Ws_qsGmHLQB37y76c0BJ6yZ5j3G_TmA9Aeq4XedbF_uXb-Ks3wo22sP3gfKukzLoITJ0y08QbJCrU/s1600/IMG_20130725_102809.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggXlw1iSXHw-8OpDQ-i50s-hjEp1xXdQsiEJFmyhzq7sJwa20AQ_PzzjQPDn0aH4Ws_qsGmHLQB37y76c0BJ6yZ5j3G_TmA9Aeq4XedbF_uXb-Ks3wo22sP3gfKukzLoITJ0y08QbJCrU/s320/IMG_20130725_102809.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Phen, left, age 6, with brother Cesar, 9. I CAN'T EVEN.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjV76tcaGfCWH00YVlUI_xOySoUwOMtPx_Ea4h8bOuLsgarhPfxDCUXppxV1X2mjos22UJlg37VC12gPdHfu9PA7d8zzUzOKZ96JbKs2CBpSvlVVjrc2oy5rvKR3NecdIUKJSakNbHm8Q/s1600/IMG_0143.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjV76tcaGfCWH00YVlUI_xOySoUwOMtPx_Ea4h8bOuLsgarhPfxDCUXppxV1X2mjos22UJlg37VC12gPdHfu9PA7d8zzUzOKZ96JbKs2CBpSvlVVjrc2oy5rvKR3NecdIUKJSakNbHm8Q/s320/IMG_0143.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">First time at sleepaway camp. Yes, he labeled himself in the photo.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
When you were about 12, the fine-boned features of your
adult visage just starting to emerge from your baby face, I talked with you for
the first time about growing up. This wasn’t the “your body is changing” speech
or “you will start to feel strange new feelings for girls” speech. This was the
talk about how you were reaching an age at which people would stop seeing you
as a charming little boy and start seeing you as a menace. About how it didn’t
matter that your hoodie said “Harvard” on it; they would see a young black man
in baggy pants and a hooded sweatshirt and they would not see the young man who
excelled at math and played a mean game of chess, whose intricate footwork on
the football field was a byproduct of a childhood spent on soccer fields, who
still watched cartoons and could deliver a killer line without cracking a
smile. Certainly they wouldn’t see what I saw when I looked at you, all your
earlier selves, like a Russian nesting doll: the tiny boy who brought his
church craft projects to me, the child who wanted to be carried on my hip, who
stomped on the sidewalk so his Buzz Lightyear shoes would light up; the
first-grader with missing teeth, the sturdy fullback on the soccer team, the
kid who slept every night curled up against my back, the 11-year-old sick with
a fever who nevertheless leapt barefoot into the backyard when Boston got its
first snow and then screamed at the unexpected cold. They wouldn’t see any of
that. They would see a potential troublemaker. They would see a menace to
society, not the extraordinary gift I know you are.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJBFOPIhxi9-6f9_uLVR89j8A2KyHaOBtul_aH-cPVuck1zsmIspEwdA5V_Vp8HPtRCUyOQb7XtyjQPs55SNRxVdE6M-ZMGKkFrLIca7AdfjGO2kng2vhb_IOijT9WM9a7AO6Z5O1eBWQ/s1600/Phen-Wellesley.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJBFOPIhxi9-6f9_uLVR89j8A2KyHaOBtul_aH-cPVuck1zsmIspEwdA5V_Vp8HPtRCUyOQb7XtyjQPs55SNRxVdE6M-ZMGKkFrLIca7AdfjGO2kng2vhb_IOijT9WM9a7AO6Z5O1eBWQ/s400/Phen-Wellesley.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Phen, in Harvard hoodie on the Wellesley grounds, age 12.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Talking to you about that felt like stealing your innocence.
You hadn’t had much experience with injustice at that point. You were in a
high-performing school in which all of the students and most of the teachers
were black. The white people you knew were friends of mine. Your world had been
a pretty friendly, welcoming place. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But it would have been at best naïve and at worst negligent
not to let you know that the world will see you differently, judge you
differently, because you are black. I needed to be sure you were prepared. I
wanted you to know how to deal with the police if you were ever approached by
them: be courteous, don’t run, always keep your hands in view. These behaviors
are second nature to you now. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What is so terrifying about this case is that it
demonstrates that it’s not just the police I have to worry about anymore. Now
it’s anyone who might think you look daunting and who might be carrying a
concealed weapon—which is to say, anyone. Thirty years ago, Zimmerman would
have been convicted simply because he was illegally carrying a weapon, and he
would have gotten the stiffest possible sentence because that gun acted as an
accelerant in a confrontation that ended in death. Concealed weapon laws didn’t
exist. Lax gun laws and laws that encourage people to escalate rather than
diffuse a confrontation ensure tragedies like this will happen.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is worthy of your anger, Phen. This toxic combination
produces lynching under another name. Was Zimmerman racist? Probably not in the
KKK-sense, but in the sense that almost every white American is racist, of
having absorbed on a cellular level the idea that black men are dangerous, I’m
sure he was. That in itself is only part of the problem. The fact that he had a
gun in his hand and could pursue and act on that impulse, one that he may not
even have been consciously aware of himself, is the real problem. That is worth
fighting, Phen. That is worth struggling and donating and VOTING (you can
register on your 18<sup>th</sup> birthday). </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I don’t want you to hate Zimmerman because I don’t want you
to give him the power to warp your character. You are an open, confident,
trusting young man. You are trustworthy. You are honest. You give people the
benefit of the doubt. You stick up for the underdog. Someone like Zimmerman
can’t be allowed to make you less than you are.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (which I know you’ve read,
but you should read it often—like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Les
Miserables </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anna Karenina, </i>you
will see something new every time), King talks about watching racism warp his
children’s sense of their own worth, damage their character as they learned to
hate and distrust. I want to keep that poison away from you. I worry about
keeping your body safe, but I worry about your spirit just as much.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL_2E4f8LcA-aVxsElS2Hapjtk_netNCR0vEZ1Ks27KLunBrcsN8mYHflUNp8X0_lGYsKrAJUPNXwA-mvGY-r08Nw_pXnSxKdji7ZPlR49TwVqPPo8ArUDikLF4PpJniz2WIFXPB7qZac/s1600/Phen-sunglasses.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgL_2E4f8LcA-aVxsElS2Hapjtk_netNCR0vEZ1Ks27KLunBrcsN8mYHflUNp8X0_lGYsKrAJUPNXwA-mvGY-r08Nw_pXnSxKdji7ZPlR49TwVqPPo8ArUDikLF4PpJniz2WIFXPB7qZac/s320/Phen-sunglasses.jpg" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">My wild child</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
With all that said, Phen, know that what I have always said
still holds: there are no excuses. Things are not fair; you will encounter
obstacles others will never know. It’s not an excuse. Rise up, work
tirelessly, live passionately. Much of life is not in your hands, but who you
are—you get to choose that. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As I watch you move with feline grace, notice how long and
graceful your fingers are, how tall you’ve become, I’m reminded of the Maya
Angelou line: “I am the hope and the dream of the slave.” You are indeed. You
are also the hope and dream of parents who risked everything to try a new place
in the hopes it would be better. And you are the answer to a prayer I wasn’t
audacious or imaginative enough to pray when I was 24. You are so wildly,
lavishly loved by so many people, and there are no excuses for not being your
own marvelous self.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always, as long as
I’m living, my baby you’ll be.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglhyphenhyphenrmZDgBEmE08g8acc4jBMj06WAoJ00JA4uO2WnI9A4tHE1wDZnzZ5_83F84xjcKCjKF1wg3H7bC9W9jOy2IMVA1SgEi2UL0lG_Lu4HD3eT1QUVoCpkLKYPjGLW7vDAOn7osRj8DnR4/s1600/DSC02253.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglhyphenhyphenrmZDgBEmE08g8acc4jBMj06WAoJ00JA4uO2WnI9A4tHE1wDZnzZ5_83F84xjcKCjKF1wg3H7bC9W9jOy2IMVA1SgEi2UL0lG_Lu4HD3eT1QUVoCpkLKYPjGLW7vDAOn7osRj8DnR4/s320/DSC02253.JPG" height="320" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Christmas Eve service</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-29835110895832161222010-11-23T08:08:00.000-08:002010-11-23T08:10:42.853-08:00I Love the Smell of Victory in the MorningAs some of you may remember, the World Cup was held in South Africa this past summer. South Africa was justifiably proud of itself for pulling off a major tournament, although perhaps that was only because the expectations were so low; after all, a number of developing nations, including Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, have hosted the tournament successfully. And South Africa is now faced with several stadiums built for the World Cup on which they spent billions of rand and the upkeep of which is likely to be in the millions annually, making it virtually impossible to recoup the cost. The stadiums in Cape Town and Johannesburg may be able to do so; Nelspruit and Mbombela, I think we can agree, are screwed.<br /><br />But it stirred up a fresh wave of support for the national team, Bafana Bafana ("the boys"), which is good in that sports here tend to break down along racial lines: cricket and rugby are largely followed and supported by whites, and soccer by blacks. But for a brief halcyon moment, everyone rallied behind Bafana, which is nice because you don't have to be here long before you realize that under a thin veneer of courtesy people here actually freaking hate each other, and I'm all for anything that postpones the race wars, if only for a time. <br /><br />It only took about a week for the bonhomie and good will to wear off and the sniping to start again, but it was nice while it lasted. So people were really excited when they heard Bafana would be playing a match in Cape Town against the US national team. Maybe it would resurrect the World Cup spirit.<br /><br />But no one was more excited than I was. Because no one likes to win, and on the opponents' turf no less, more than I do. Look, I am all for global citizenry. I am a polite and courteous guest in this country. I try to confine my venting about the postal service, poor internet connections, crime and generally shoddy service to my American friends. I watch rugby; I don't really bother with cricket, it's a less refined version of baseball. I can greet people in Afrikaans and Xhosa. I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to explain to people how the American electoral system works and the phenomenon of Sarah Palin. But I draw the line at sports. You are allowed to be every inch the Ugly American when your team is playing. In fact, it's your patriotic duty. And when you win, you tell everyone to suck it, because we are GLEEFUL winners, we are EXUBERANT winners. It is part of the American charm.<br /><br />So I readied myself for the game, wishing I had a really obnoxious American T-shirt that said something like "these colors don't run" and listening to Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red White and Blue," which you may remember for the delicate phrasing of this line: "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way." I was a little dicey about our chances, because we were fielding a very inexperienced squad that had only three members of our World Cup team.<br /><br />Walking to the game was like being swallowed by a bright yellow whale. Yellow (Bafana's color) everywhere you looked; people in jerseys, face paint, wigs, wrapped in the South African flag. And the singing of the South African national anthem, which is in several languages, was truly beautiful. Just as beautiful was the American anthem, with all 15 of us Americans representing in the sea of 51,000. But we stood and put our hands over our hearts and sang and though some of the South Africans looked at us funny, like they weren't sure where we had come from, they were gracious and respectful of the American anthem.<br /><br />The game itself was not really a promotion for the Beautiful Game. Our team looked young and raw; theirs could string some good passes together but couldn't dominate in the air or in the midfield and couldn't get many shots. And then, in a golden moment less than 10 minutes before the end of the game, a 17-year-old American reserve player who had just been called up from the junior team for this game knocked in a goal from about 7 years out. Oh it was fantastic. And there is something surreal about screaming and shrieking when everyone around you goes quiet. And by surreal, I mean awesome, because they were so cocksure that they were going to win this game. YES WE CAN. UUUU-SSSSS-AAAAAAA. WE ARE SPARTA. I might have yelled all those things in my euphoria whilst jumping up and down in my seat.<br /><br />I then proceeded to heckle everyone from the dejected passersby on the street to my doorman, because that's the beauty of sport: it is the last arena of sanctioned aggression. Look, I am tired of unreliable internet, of not being able to go places by myself at night, of having my cell phone stolen, of crappy customer service, of spotty postal service, of segregation, of arrogant attitudes about Americans and American culture as they play on their iPhones and wear Levis, of instant coffee. I would like to start fights, but I don't. I just let that game be the catharsis I have needed for three months.<br /><br />WE ARE SPARTA. YES WE CAN. AMERICA HELL YEAH. Brilliant.Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-86562347015139957492010-10-08T15:50:00.001-07:002010-10-08T16:46:10.668-07:00I know, I'm late but I'm here!I've been in South Africa about six weeks, and am happily settled into my apartment with its pay-as-you-go electricity (seriously, you buy electricity at the 7-11, which I had to do at 7 pm the other night when suddenly all my lights went out and I realized I hadn't checked the meter in a week or so) and capped wireless. That's right, American friends, you pay by the megabyte here. None of your crazy limitless-free-wireless-in-coffeeshops-and-parks nonsense. We're obviously dealing with a finite commodity here and it must be rationed.<br /><br />Welcome to the Third World.<br /><br />I'm in Pretoria for the week, although I'm based in Cape Town, and I'm gaining traction on the research, things are good, I'll write more later when I'm not falling asleep.<br /><br />I like South Africa. This isn't my first trip, it's about my sixth. South Africans always ask me eagerly, "how do you like South Africa?" Honestly, I have never seen a country so desperate for affirmation. That's really what the entire World Cup was about: spending billions of dollars that you'd spend years paying off so the cool kids would come, drink your beer, and like you, at least for a little while. It is panting to be liked, to be cool--even though, as every cool kid knows, the essence of coolness is not caring (or at least acting like you don't care) if you're cool. If a 15-year-old insecure freshman were a country, it would be South Africa.<br /><br />So I tell them: lovely country, lovely beaches, lovely people. And--here's what I don't tell them--people who are inadvertently hysterical. Like the South African blogger in the US I read the other day who mentioned the foolishness over whether or not Obama was Muslim and said "don't people here understand the concept of reconciliation? Mandela could teach them a thing or two." The irony is too much for me, I rolled around on the floor and wished I could call friends in the States. With all our problems--and I'm the first to admit we have them--we've elected an African-American president; if African-Americans were to form their own country, their economy would be among the top 15 in the world; and yet a WHITE SOUTH AFRICAN, apparently oblivious to the seething anger and disdain I regularly hear voiced by black and Coloured South Africans who tell me with relief that they can talk freely with me because I'm a white American and not a white South African--is going to tell us about reconciliation? Do tell, we eagerly await. Until then we'll go on being the *real* Rainbow Nation (check the demographics, we're way more diverse). Oh, same blogger said Americans don't talk about race as freely as South Africans. Certainly this has everything to do with where you are and who you hang out with, but again--rolling on the floor clutching my sides. I grew up in integrated schools, had African-American teachers and friends from the earliest days, had an African-American mentor professionally, have worked, lived and worshipped in majority-black environments. A generation like that has not yet come of age in SA. Meanwhile South African schools don't really look much different than they did pre-1994, very few people have cross-racial friendships of any depth, and the surface politeness hides the fact that most black people will commute back to the townships in the evening and whites will return to their monochromatic neighborhoods and monochromatic friends. As a black American friend of mine said, "I didn't really appreciate Arkansas until I lived in South Africa." ARKANSAS, Y'ALL. Exactly.<br /><br />So: I love being in SA, I really do. It's an absolute blast, I love the work I'm doing, I love traveling, I love meeting people and hearing their stories. But the very best part is that I don't have to stay here. Someday I will return to a place where people don't routinely get killed for their cell phone (I called my hostel from the street the other day because I was lost, and the guy said carefully, "you really want to avoid talking on your cell phone on the street"), where books and laptops and cell phones and blenders and software are cheap because that's what happens when your countrymen actually produce things, and where the people at fast food restaurants put enough ice in my cup without me having to send it back three times (which I do, because I'm the Ugly American).<br /><br />Save me a peppermint mocha from Starbucks, kids, I'll be home for Christmas. (And then back here for another 9 months.)<br /><br />More later on more substantial things, but really, the reconciliation comment demanded a response, no? I mean we can't just let absurdity go unchallenged, that's how civilization crumbles. That, and inadequate amounts of ice in the Coke. (Seriously, is there a shortage?)Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-64807242911038997532010-07-01T19:46:00.001-07:002010-07-01T20:13:34.644-07:00World Cup Woes<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">One of the great things about being a country which plays so many sports is that no single sporting disappointment can linger for very long. I was bummed for about 15 minutes when the Celtics lost to the Lakers, but then the World Cup started. Then I was kinda disappointed when the US lost to Ghana, but I didn't actually watch the match--I had a training all day--and anyway Argentina is my pick to win it, plus baseball is in full swing and there was that crazy Wimbledon match and the NBA draft (do we think Lebron James will stay with the Cavaliers? I say yes).<br /><br />So what is souring the World Cup for me is not the US performance, but the round of commentary on why the US doesn't play "global sports," with the implication that it's because we're arrogant and don't care about the rest of the world. News flash: not being soccer-mad is not the equivalent of pulling out of the UN. Perspective, people, perspective.<br /><br />It does not help that I regularly read a South African newspaper along with its comment section. I'm going to have to take a break from it, because </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">I find the kneejerk anti-Americanism and misconceptions to be so exasperating that now I'm grossly overreacting. I realized this about myself the other day when someone said that he was glad to see the English and Americans cry when they lost because they thought they owned the soccer field, and the Americans need to start playing global sports and stop saying they are world champions at sports only we play.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family:arial, sans-serif;font-size:13px;"><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Well. And then I lost my shit.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">First of all, of the many places we are arrogant, soccer really isn't one of them. Americans always come in as underdogs, at least in our own heads. But here's the thing: soccer is now the most popular youth sport. We're going to be a force in global soccer very soon. And all the people whining about how Americans won't play their sport may soon have reason to regret when we do. As Time magazine said a couple of weeks ago, "Face it: the US is going to play, watch, market, manage and own your sport sooner or later." We have 300+ million people; we can have soccer be our fifth or sixth most popular sport and still be a top-10 team.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">However, let's talk about this whole not-loving-soccer thing. We are hardly unique in this. As </span></span><a href="http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/07/how-soccer-crazed-is-the-world/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+matthewyglesias+%28Matthew+Yglesias%29&utm_content=Google+Reader"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">writer Matt Iglesias noted</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">, "I</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">t’s worth pausing for a moment to note that the USA isn’t really that much of an outlier in terms of its relative lack of enthusiasm for soccer. For example in China the most popular team sport is basketball and there’s tremendous passion for table tennis. The most popular sports in India (and Pakistan and Bangladesh) are cricket and field hockey. I’m told that in Indonesia badminton and tennis are the most popular. In Russia and Canada it’s ice hockey. Which isn’t to deny that many people in those countries may enjoy soccer as well—many Americans like soccer. But 'the world' is not the same as 'Europe and Latin America.' Indeed, I believe the countries I’ve just been naming account for about half the world’s people."</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">So let's put to rest once and for all the canard that we are the lone nation resisting the siren song of soccer on which all future world peace and interdependence relies.</span></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">Secondly, why do other people care what sports we play? Do they know what they sound like? It sounds like a little brother whining "Come plaaaay with me, I wanna plaaaaaay with you." Dude, we're not bothering you, let us play what we want. Why do some people take it as an affront? It seems to speak to an inferiority complex: this strange seething resentment that the superpower doesn't think your sport is so super. </span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">And third, if you honestly still think American sports are exclusively that--American--then you're far more provincial than the Americans you're criticizing. American football is the only American sport that is still uniquely American. Basketball is global. Eastern Europe has some of the best teams, European leagues are popular, and the NBA is packed with international players--German, Slovenian, Serbian, Chinese, Italian, you name it. We still win the Olympics but it's no longer by the 50-point margins it once was, it's a fight, because the rest of the world is catching up, and it's hugely popular. Baseball is less so, but even that is global--Japan, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, etc. Cuba has won the Olympics more times than we have. And if basketball is an Olympic sport and cricket isn't, then arguably one is more of a "global sport" than the other.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">What gets me is that aside from soccer, the sports people always point to as "global sports"--cricket and rugby--are English sports. This comes back to my theory that most former English colonies don't know how to decolonize themselves and give the middle finger to England, and that part of our success was a very clear and decisive break with the mother country. We don't want your soccer, England; we took your rugby and made American football, and took your cricket and made baseball. (Then we changed how everything is spelled, and just for fun and because we can, we make sure American English is the default setting on computer software that we sell all over the world. Ha.) Other former colonies seem to maintain this weird love-hate adolescent relationship that we just don't have. But those are not global sports, they are English sports, Commonwealth sports. Let's call it what it is.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">So clearly I care way more than is normal about what some halfwit said on a message board, and I need a break from South African media to regain my sanity. So, back to the soccer: good luck, Uruguay, represent the Western hemisphere well against Ghana; may the best man win in Brazil v. Netherlands (I think that will be a great match); Paraguay, I'm afraid you're outclasses by Spain but greater upsets have happened; and Argentina, I look forward to the clash with Germany but my money and my heart are with you, Lionel Messi. And I'm going to Austin tomorrow to see aunt and cousins (17-year-old cousin: "Nelson Mandela is like an adorable koala bear." Which a) he kind of is, and b) I was just relieved she knew who Mandela was) and a friend who had a baby a couple of months ago.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'times new roman';">It's the first time in four years I'll be in the US for July 4. You will not believe this, fellow Americans, but July 4 is actually *not a holiday* in other countries. I KNOW. MADNESS. So I'm particularly excited to be home to celebrate all of us.</span></span></div></span>Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-26647906991471116192010-05-27T18:46:00.000-07:002010-05-27T18:46:01.176-07:00M.Div.And it's done.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWIYueKhIo74Ya4KR3X29f-6KfAyTswwDqGe45k3V3EbC5G-O6Gyi55IZsFOR8U3ezsstlQQ_HVqRZMcoTMfHJtGx_h6lHWnoaNHim3Tb78veIK-F6Uqa6JcMTQE2CPAS-jIYQmz-id4M/s1600/DSC01788.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWIYueKhIo74Ya4KR3X29f-6KfAyTswwDqGe45k3V3EbC5G-O6Gyi55IZsFOR8U3ezsstlQQ_HVqRZMcoTMfHJtGx_h6lHWnoaNHim3Tb78veIK-F6Uqa6JcMTQE2CPAS-jIYQmz-id4M/s400/DSC01788.JPG" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Master of Divinity degree conferred, May 27 2010.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-31145703156115796122010-05-23T23:46:00.000-07:002010-05-23T23:49:58.663-07:00A Week From TodayA week from today, I will be drinking mimosas and getting facials with my friend Naomi (congratulation on your MBA from Penn!) and my little sister (congratulations on being a cog in the giant corporate machine!) in Philadelphia.<br />
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</div><div>And two weeks from today, I will be at the beach in Texas with my godson Torian, whose picture adorns this blog. (He is the one not wearing a cowboy hat and bikini.) Side note because it's funny: he was recently overcome with fear of "little people." I can understand that, it would have to freak you out if you were 4 and there were suddenly grown-ups who were your size. Tori saw his first little people in Target and was simultaneously terrified and mesmerized. He dragged his mom after them and, when he couldn't find them in the aisle, whispered earnestly, "Maybe they were magic." </div><div><br />
</div><div>Magic little people in Target. I would love to live inside that kid's brain.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Anyway, the most notable thing is that before I make it to Philly and then Texas, I will graduate from Harvard. All the graduates from every Harvard school will gather in the Yard on Thursday. Someone will give a speech in Latin, professors will show up in their colorful regalia, there will be pomp and circumstance, and you can mock it for pretentiousness but I will be part of a ceremony that is older than this country, part of a tradition that goes back to a mere 16 years after the first Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. For all the "liberal elite Ivy League" reverse snobbery that the Sarah Palins of the world like to throw at Harvard, there is no more American place, and I am proud to take my place among the ranks of its alumni, who are present in every field of endeavor and every corner of the globe.</div><div><br />
</div><div>Here's a glimpse of where I've spent the last three years:</div><div><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE13bvRNuKybW1wbwLMv5N03JmqJnYv97lCgRGyHFxa2r5h8F8pYDieLcsOua69j6gmw34miaK-wIOz7gSY2m6Iv9Y2YZ3tC_Mzan8jooIuvE4vPa3B7TCZbIF-Kha5oiGqGIXguJfDrM/s1600/DSC01646.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE13bvRNuKybW1wbwLMv5N03JmqJnYv97lCgRGyHFxa2r5h8F8pYDieLcsOua69j6gmw34miaK-wIOz7gSY2m6Iv9Y2YZ3tC_Mzan8jooIuvE4vPa3B7TCZbIF-Kha5oiGqGIXguJfDrM/s320/DSC01646.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In Harvard Yard in the Fall</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl0ToJdekTyXPCXR5BO1f1m22fhmgd62nNAPKeSfMP_y90B_X1AFsRgix3TVpgDa3TYY4TXVuAjfGHJOYtkAhps_SEdPHWWZBAQSeYXWi5XbUsppg3TmplOd9pCvth5kX9Ne3HslAG844/s1600/DSC01658.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl0ToJdekTyXPCXR5BO1f1m22fhmgd62nNAPKeSfMP_y90B_X1AFsRgix3TVpgDa3TYY4TXVuAjfGHJOYtkAhps_SEdPHWWZBAQSeYXWi5XbUsppg3TmplOd9pCvth5kX9Ne3HslAG844/s320/DSC01658.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Widener Library, where I spent more time than I care to remember.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF8V3MfqJ0gAcSkiowhCt8l76LJDF0tQjgcXpMSojNuIgX_7P1oxe8iP0BxFnDzQVqHMyJA3UEPEvg5CA3Q2y-CPl4ObaTEP5VPjjknPVsS37Kbqka17HQtdfl12B6HrXg6yoP_COD15Q/s1600/DSC01644.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF8V3MfqJ0gAcSkiowhCt8l76LJDF0tQjgcXpMSojNuIgX_7P1oxe8iP0BxFnDzQVqHMyJA3UEPEvg5CA3Q2y-CPl4ObaTEP5VPjjknPVsS37Kbqka17HQtdfl12B6HrXg6yoP_COD15Q/s320/DSC01644.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">This is the statue of John Harvard. You're supposed to touch his foot for good luck. You're not supposed to know that drunken undergraduates routinely have contests to see who can make their urine arc elegantly onto John's foot.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIwUgjfbiQFRmRlCixrE-Jz0riQ7_CaBmISyyUedFYcmu0DyeoRBAyNhFm6C6aUEP5PpKydKp66leYbDqwv67fti1ICtQI37tslxD9Jh6Vbshjhw19MkrXBIS0BlVXkw9P1OgWD-VJ7HQ/s1600/DSC01662.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIwUgjfbiQFRmRlCixrE-Jz0riQ7_CaBmISyyUedFYcmu0DyeoRBAyNhFm6C6aUEP5PpKydKp66leYbDqwv67fti1ICtQI37tslxD9Jh6Vbshjhw19MkrXBIS0BlVXkw9P1OgWD-VJ7HQ/s320/DSC01662.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">This is the view from the steps of Widener Library, across Harvard Yard to Memorial Church. It's a sight that makes an all-nighter at the library almost bearable.<br />
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Veritas.<br />
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</div>Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-27073320092672771392010-05-16T22:05:00.000-07:002010-05-16T22:38:06.734-07:00What Price Freedom?Harvard has experienced its own tempest-in-an-ideological-teacup of late. Because anything that happens at Harvard seems to have traction beyond our ivy-covered walls, it has made the news and various blogs, and has me thinking about how free we really are in this place that makes such lofty claims to academic liberty and freedom of inquiry.<div><br /></div><div>A third-year law student <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/04/30/042010_original_email_harvard_law/">sent an email</a> to some dinner friends following up on a conversation they had had at dinner. In it, she suggests that she is open to the idea that African-Americans are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent than whites, at least in such quantifiable ways as standardized testing. </div><div><br /></div><div>She also indicates that she could be persuaded that cultural and social factors account for the achievement gap, but that so far, she doesn't find the science on either side to be conclusive. That's her big statement: she is unpersuaded by the studies coming from either direction, and she wants to stay open to all the possibilities. (As it happens, she did undergraduate research at Princeton with sociologist Thomas Espanshade, whose research focuses on race and achievement, so I'd wager a guess that she's actually given more serious thought to this topic than her dinner guests.) </div><div><br /></div><div>The predictable happened. One of her "friends" forwarded the email to the Black Law Students Association, which then forwarded it to what seems like every Black Law Students Association in the country. It made it onto widely-read blogs like Jezebel and Gawker, invariably with headings like "Harvard Law Student's Racist Diatribe." Now various groups are putting pressure on the federal judge she is slated to clerk with to rescind her clerkship, the dean has condemned her statements, and one can safely assume she is persona non grata at HLS these days.</div><div><br /></div><div>My concern here is not for Stephanie, who I'm sure will come through this just fine. My concern is for the message sent when the dean condemns a dinner conversation amongst bright, inquisitive students who have the gall to question the accepted orthodoxy. It is for the right to question the things that we assume we know, the right to be wrong even, the right to say "I'm just not persuaded." </div><div><br /></div><div>The truth is, there is nowhere where this kind of debate and discussion should be more welcome than in the academy. We should be the absolute safest place for this kind of boundary-pushing. There should be nothing, absolutely nothing, that is off-limits; there should be nothing sacred, nothing that cannot be reinvestigated and criticized and examined. And it is intellectual death when we stop being that place.</div><div><br /></div><div>At least Stephanie had the courage to say it out loud. That allows other people to argue back: to rebuke, to criticize, to challenge, to lay out their own position and the evidence supporting it. Because I promise you: for every Stephanie who has the balls to actually verbalize her misgivings, there are a hundred white kids who silently wonder, "But why *is* it that Africa is so underdeveloped and can't seem to get their act together? Why is it that even when you control for income and parents' educational level, there is still a racial gap in SAT scores?" They don't say it out loud; saying it out loud gets you branded a racist and that's the end of any career aspirations you might have had (not to mention any social life you had), as Stephanie's case has so starkly reminded us. But the questions will sit there. And if we're not willing to have those conversations in academia, with the best minds and best resources, we should not be surprised when the questioners find other people with whom to have those conversations. And you won't like who they're talking to. Rumor has it that various white-supremacist groups have already contacted Stephanie to offer their support. "Come to a meeting"--that's not where you want the conversation to be happening.</div><div><br /></div><div>The tamping down on any line of questioning that violates our social orthodoxies should be chilling to anyone who cares about intellectual rigor and freedom. For one thing, it calls into question any studies and conclusions drawn from them that may emerge down the road: after all, if you were an academic investigating racial inequity and knew that having an undesirable data set would jeopardize both your professional and social standing, wouldn't you at least be tempted to make sure your study comes down on the "right" side of the discussion? And even if you didn't, doesn't the fact that I'm even asking the question throw doubt on the integrity of your research? Because if we can't ask the questions honestly, we can't trust any of the conclusions that follow.</div><div><br /></div><div>In Stephanie's email, she wrote, "I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true." In other words: it's intellectually dangerous to decide what you believe and then manipulate the data to confirm it. We should all be able to agree on that, whether or not we like the particular questions Stephanie is asking. At least by asking, she's giving people the chance to answer. The next bright, questioning kid with an eye on a federal clerkship or a plum job at a firm won't ask the question, after seeing what's happened to Stephanie. He'll just quietly wonder, and draw his own conclusions.</div><div><br /></div><div>And that's not good for any of us.</div>Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-39964157072944554442010-05-02T08:27:00.000-07:002010-05-02T08:48:57.771-07:00Of Derby Hats and Delightful News<div>Last week I went to the annual HDS ball:</div><div><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2Eb5ulyBqO5gzU2Td9okXWMV7IoSYtoTpHMoHVcHxmyMrLC3EWlrEhRW4dIMXJoChn_F2Dn5-NFFMmhroxq63dP7tKbgLh02fWR3V6TejvYQY9TTiwEN-dzk7VunSQom20N2Amf6O09s/s1600/DSC01779-1.JPG"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2Eb5ulyBqO5gzU2Td9okXWMV7IoSYtoTpHMoHVcHxmyMrLC3EWlrEhRW4dIMXJoChn_F2Dn5-NFFMmhroxq63dP7tKbgLh02fWR3V6TejvYQY9TTiwEN-dzk7VunSQom20N2Amf6O09s/s320/DSC01779-1.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5466695700455954274" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px; " /></a><br />And yesterday I went to a Kentucky Derby party, where my horse finished in dead last place but my hat and dress were a blazing success (and you can't see it here, but I am wearing silver flats, which were A-DOR-A-BLE with the dress):<div><br /></div><div></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCNe6w6hO1pjX3Xd7dFM0fNv733H39v4cEtjoqgCE6f1tQTFN5gfUyNNfba3rw8yIz6nz5zqNs8ywx4Qy9wgL20FB6OfnmUbC8JLZ9cUHSQqBK9x1OeW4EQWhNqLuYE7bPqVA1pt4mMPw/s1600/DSC01782.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCNe6w6hO1pjX3Xd7dFM0fNv733H39v4cEtjoqgCE6f1tQTFN5gfUyNNfba3rw8yIz6nz5zqNs8ywx4Qy9wgL20FB6OfnmUbC8JLZ9cUHSQqBK9x1OeW4EQWhNqLuYE7bPqVA1pt4mMPw/s320/DSC01782.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5466697112749802274" /></a><br /><div>Sadly, I do not spend all my time gallivanting about like a debutante, since a) I don't come from an old-money family, and b) it's not 1882. In the midst of my social commitments, I also find time to write tedious final papers and secure summer employment and make plans for the next year.</div><div><br /></div><div>Yes, friends, I have plans for the next year, humdullallah. Harvard, in a fit of poor judgment, is funding my independent study proposal and I will be living in South Africa for at least a year. It was such an insanely long shot when I applied for it so it's the understatement of the decade to say I am pleasantly surprised. I'll leave in August or September, no final date yet as I am waiting for the ridiculous World Cup-inspired airfare prices to approach normalcy again. My project is on the role of religious institutions in facilitating dialogue around issues of racial justice and reconciliation and adding their voices to the conversations in political science, sociology and international relations that have appropriated these words but don't recognize that they are implicitly theological...hello? hello? I have totally lost you, haven't I? I know, it's of interest only to me and, apparently, the Harvard committee on graduate fellowships. But that is enough. It's a variation on the old "me plus God equals a majority" line we learned in Sunday School. Me plus the fellowship committee=exactly as many people as I need to be interested in this project.</div><div><br /></div><div>Anyway, more plans as they emerge, but obviously the door is open to any of you who want to visit. </div>Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-85958161960122995552010-05-01T11:50:00.000-07:002010-05-01T12:07:56.054-07:00Lesson for the Young'UnsI sat on a panel discussion this week of grad students who had spent time in Africa. We were talking to about 75 Harvard undergrads who will be spending their summers in internships and research all over Africa.<div><br /></div><div>During the Q&A, I remembered a story that I haven't shared with you all, and it is still funny, so I'll share it now. It comes under the heading of "even when you are trying to be culturally sensitive, you will inevitably fail, and you have to be able to laugh about it."</div><div><br /></div><div>On my last trip to SA, I was staying over at my friend Lynette's house. Lynette's housekeeper, Miriam, was making breakfast for me, and it just...kept...coming. Scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, yogurt, fruit, more toast. I'd been told it was very rude to waste food, so I was gamely eating everything that was served although I was starting to feel slightly nauseous, but before I could tell Miriam I was finished, she brought 4 more pieces of toast.</div><div><br /></div><div>I couldn't eat them. I knew, in my heart (and stomach), that if I ate the toast, all my breakfast was going to end up in a puddle on the floor. So I did the only reasonable thing.</div><div><br /></div><div>I kicked it under the sofa and told myself I would get it that night after Miriam had left. I knew I didn't have time in the brief moment her back was turned to make it all the way to the trash can and back.</div><div><br /></div><div>Later that night, I remembered the toast and dove under the sofa to get it. Turns out Miriam is a very thorough cleaner: the toast was not there. I told Lynette what had happened and moaned, "She's going to think I'm the crazy American who hoards toast under the furniture!" Lynette proceeded to chastise me about how we come from different food cultures and you absolutely cannot waste food in South Africa, it's offensive, and I'm saying "I KNOW this, Lynette, that's why I was TRYING not to seem wasteful, YOU HAVE TO HELP ME FIX IT."</div><div><br /></div><div>So we went over to Miriam's and I apologized and Lynette proceeded to speak with her in Xhosa, giving an explanation that, I later found out, did in fact amount to "she's a crazy American, they have strange and mysterious ways." Miriam gazed at me stonily the whole time. I'm pretty sure I never redeemed myself in her eyes.</div><div><br /></div><div>However, as I found out this week, the story is good for a laugh, and a cautionary tale: your best efforts at cultural sensitivity will still fail. Laugh about it and move on.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm off to a Kentucky Derby party shortly. Photos will be forthcoming.</div>Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-19783860176351963722010-04-17T15:07:00.000-07:002010-04-17T16:58:06.550-07:00Home StretchI have lots of blogs saved up from the last couple of months, and I might actually get to them soon since it's the last month of school, in which I traditionally seek out anything to do other than the work that will allow me to graduate (which currently involves writing at least 100 pages and about 10 times as much reading in order to write the aforementioned 100 pages). <div><br /></div><div>However, for now, let's look ahead, beyond graduation, to the Summer of Frivolity and Slackness I am meticulously planning. Boston is currently being a bitch-goddess intent on reminding her minions that they exist only at her whim, having teased us all with temperatures in the 60s and 70s and lots of clear, bright days, only to drop down into the 40s and dump a lot of freezing rain on us the last couple of days. I shake your dust from my feet, Boston, I am so OVER IT.</div><div><br /></div><div>So, summer. For those wondering what I will be doing post-grad (if any of them are still reading, since I haven't blogged in 4 months), the answer is "God knows," said with utmost reverence. Honestly, I have no idea. In my ideal world, I'll win a fellowship that will fund a year of study in South Africa; I should know my fate in that regard by the end of the month. Failing that, I don't know what I will do. I'm not too worried, though. I come through in the clutch. Meanwhile, I am more focused on my summer of awesomeness, which I am planning whether or not I go to Africa (if I go, it won't be till August/September).</div><div><br /></div><div>Summer delights:</div><div><br /></div><div>1) Laid-back work that pays enough for gas and Starbucks and occasional forays to Sephora. I might teach swim lessons at the YMCA, might work with kids at church. Whatever it is, it will not be overly intellectual or isolated, it will be relational and physical. I'm trying to rebalance after three years in academia.</div><div><br /></div><div>2) Beach trips. Lots of trips to Galveston, one to Padre, one to Mobile with Mijha which we are calling our White Trash Vacation as we intend to lay on the beach all day and gamble at the offshore casinos all night. PURELY AWESOME. Also, we have matching T-shirts for this vacation. They say "100% Pure American Infidel" with the word "kaffir" (which just means "unbeliever" in Arabic, not the racially pejorative term it became in South Africa) written in Arabic. I figure as long as we don't run into any Arabic-reading South Africans in Alabama, we're safe. Which means: we're safe. We will be rocking this look with bikinis and cowboy hats. We are insanely excited. Also, right after graduation I'm headed to the Jersey Shore with my little sister and brother-in-law.</div><div><br /></div><div>3) Breakfast tacos. Maybe every day.</div><div><br /></div><div>4) My parents have a new dog! A big one, which is the best kind. He is partly white and partly black and kind of a mutt and my dad wanted to name him Barack. Saner heads prevailed and his name is Harley. Harley will be my new running buddy.</div><div><br /></div><div>5) Miller Outdoor Theatre, this great outdoor venue in Houston where they have concerts and plays and you can sit on the hill and bring food and drinks and enjoy the one time of day (nightfall) when Houston is not oppressively hot.</div><div><br /></div><div>6) Reading things that are not assigned for class. My friend Jenny and I will be reviving our book club, which is really our margarita club. Also, I will be mixing in some old classics (Bleak House, Anna Karenina, maybe some Faulkner) with totally mindless chick lit. I may also try to tackle one author's ouevre, but I haven't decided whose; I'm leaning towards Elizabeth Gaskell or George Eliot. I'm accepting all reading suggestions now.</div><div><br /></div><div>7) Did I mention margaritas? They're not confined to book club.</div><div><br /></div><div>8) Movies, starting with Sex and the City 2 which I could NOT BE MORE EXCITED FOR. My sis and I are seeing it the weekend I graduate. We saw the first one together the weekend before I left for SA the first time, so I'm pretty pumped. I intend to see lots of fun mindless summer movies. Also, I have a summer movie project: epic films. I think I can drag my dad into this project with me. I figure we'll start with the Star Wars trilogy (only the original, natch) and Lord of the Rings and move on to both old-school epics (Lawrence of Arabia, Zulu--I considered adding Gandhi in here but I don't think you get to be an epic just because you're super long) and moving on to 300, Troy, Braveheart, etc. My friend Melissa, an epic connoisseur, will my advisor in this project.</div><div><br /></div><div>9) First Fridays at Chacho's Mexican restaurant drinking margaritas and chilling with the girls in Third Ward.</div><div><br /></div><div>10) Soccer at twilight. Perfection.</div><div><br /></div><div>11) Apparently Houston has all these cool new parks, who knew? And most of them are great for playing with kids and have some sort of water component. I love Hermann Park's water park, I would go by myself except then I look like a pedophile scoping out the kids so I take my friend Roz's kid as a cover.</div><div><br /></div><div>12) Sitting outside at Starbucks with Phenias and drinking frappucinos while we tease each other. He is a pretty good trash talker now and I take a lot of pride in that. </div><div><br /></div><div>13) Church. I love my church so much it deserves its own post. I can't wait to be back with my church and my friends and summer evenings spent together at someone's house, cooking out and laughing and enjoying each other.</div><div><br /></div><div>14) Sonic, which will go a long way towards helping me meet my summer goal: hitting 120 pounds and invoking my dad's promise to take me to Egypt when I got there.</div><div><br /></div><div>15) Baseball games at MinuteMaid Field. Yeah, the Astros suck this year, which is unfortunate. But tickets are $5 and it's classic Americana, so you really can't beat it.</div><div><br /></div><div>16) Road trip to Austin to see the cousins, go to the lake, eat more breakfast tacos in the city even the NY Times concedes is the breakfast taco capital of the world, and hit the outlet mall.</div><div><br /></div><div>17) World Cup madness! I toyed with the idea of going to South Africa for the World Cup since I'd have a place to stay for free, but it was still going to be crazy expensive, and I hate crowds. I know, I'm 85 and you can call me Ma-Maw. However, I will be watching the World Cup the way the Beautiful Game was meant to be watched: in a bar with cheap booze and plentiful sunshine where one can watch one's favorite teams lose for free. (Or, alternately for the earlier games, on the sofa in my pajamas eating breakfast tacos.)</div><div><br /></div><div>What are your ideas of summer fun? I'm compiling a list, so I'm open to all suggestions.</div>Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-9188005377501907322009-12-23T13:45:00.000-08:002009-12-23T14:00:19.732-08:00The TV Tells Me About MyselfDo y'all ever feel that way, like you see uncomfortable glimpses of yourself on TV and realize there but for the grace of God, etc?<div><br /></div><div>Intervention does that for me. I like to watch it with a drink and feel smug that no one has yet approached me to be in a "documentary about addiction." (By the way, when are the addicts going to catch on to that? I mean, they watch TV. Especially the ones on meth or coke where they stay up for 72 hours at a time, and Intervention likes to run middle-of-the-night reruns. You gotta know one of these days one of them is going to get approached and say "Waaait a minute, sucker, I've heard this song before" and it will be like Punk'd when Ashton Kutcher had to cancel the show because every time something weird happened to a celebrity they were like "Ashton?! ASHTON! Am I getting punked?") </div><div><br /></div><div>On the other hand, as this week has shown, I am totally dependent on Klonopin which I've been on since I was 16 for Tourette's syndrome. I accidentally left my prescription up in Cambridge so I had to get a refill here in Houston, but it took several days. Meanwhile I had imsomnia, weird dreams, loss of appetite, irritability, nausea, anxiety, muscle cramps and fatigue, and tingling in my face. According to the interwebs, Klonopin is a Class 1 narcotic and has withdrawal symptoms similar to heroin. The things they don't tell you when they put you on mind-altering drugs during adolescence...sigh. </div><div><br /></div><div>However, I am back on it and feeling fine now, and as I told my dad, we should just think of it as insulin, the kind of med you might be on your whole life but which enables you to live fairly normally and which, in my case, does a good job of controlling the Tourette's. However, I do watch Intervention now feeling like there's just a bottle of cheap wine between me and that shady hotel room with all my loved ones and the interventionist (who I will totally recognize from the show, duh).</div><div><br /></div><div>So I'm switching my attention to Hoarders. I can still maintain my moral superiority there. There's a lot of crazy on that show, and I highly recommend it to those who need assurance that their little idiosyncracies are nothing to worry about as long as their back issues of Reader's Digest from the 1950s aren't threatening to take over their house and force them to find a new abode.</div>Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-6980288858343557432009-12-06T20:37:00.001-08:002009-12-06T20:57:06.088-08:00One Village Elder to AnotherThis post comes to you courtesy of a few hours spent studying at Starbucks while various yuppie parents let their children run around like they were at Chuck E Cheese:<div><br /></div><div>Raise Your Damn Kids.</div><div><br /></div><div>I recognize that saying that puts me squarely in the category of Cranky Old People, which I'm totally comfortable with because I'm 33 now and I've made my peace with it. But at some point when I wasn't looking, it's like a whole mess of people decided that saying "no" to their children would suppress their little ones' creativity and spirit and life force.</div><div><br /></div><div>What it might suppress is their badassness, and I'm fully supportive of this.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Starbucks parents--and there were several of them in a steady stream--let their children wander around, yell, throw things on the ground, touch strangers' computers (NOOOOOOO), and then gave me dirty looks when I said firmly to their kids, "Do not touch this. This is not yours." (I bet you those kids didn't come back by me again, though.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Raise your damn kids.</div><div><br /></div><div>Or when I was waiting for the subway recently and a kid who was maybe 3 or 4 was jumping around perilously near the train tracks, with nary a glance from his parents:</div><div><br /></div><div>Raise your damn kids.</div><div><br /></div><div>A friend of mine once complained that his teenage daughter, who was still in high school at the time, had stayed out all night and not come home until 5 THE NEXT AFTERNOON and hadn't told them where she'd been. I asked if they had grounded her. "How do you ground an 18-year-old?" he asked plaintively. Ummm..."you're grounded"? How about "since you are entirely financially and emotionally dependent upon us, you can forget about using your cell phone or the car or the computer or any other item that renders your existence non-Amish-like until you remember how the house rules work?" </div><div><br /></div><div>I cannot imagine trying to pull that on my parents when I was in high school. When I say "I can't imagine," I literally mean "the human mind doesn't have the capacity to go to that dark space." I don't know what they would have done. I just know, you see the face of God and you die. The most you can bear is a glimpse of the shadow as you hide in the cleft of the rock. You don't test it.</div><div><br /></div><div>Raise. Your. Damn. Kids.</div><div><br /></div><div>People who know me know that I have a lot of children in my life, but there is one that I have a particular measure of responsibility for, who has lived with me and for whom I make most of the educational decisions. Phenias is 13 now, and recently his school cracked down on porn on the kids' phones. My concerns about this are one of the reasons I advised Phen's dad not to let him have a cell phone (if you have an emergency, you can use an adult's cell phone, because you are 13 and you should therefore not be out of the reach of a responsible adult). He was one of the few kids not caught up in the sting. When his teacher asked him why, I am told he responded solemnly, "Shannon said if I ever got caught with porn, it was gonna be a shitshow. (Note: my pastor has said of disciplining children, "Do not underestimate the power of an appropriately timed curse word" and I was using that technique here.) I don't know what that means, but she never lied." HA! A little appropriate fear and respect goes a long way.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now I am the first to agree it takes a village. (That sounds so wise-African-proverb/ubuntu-y/Hillary Clinton, doesn't it?) But from one village elder to another: stop letting the village children run the village council. Stop letting them vote. This is not a democracy. It is a benevolent dictatorship. </div><div><br /></div><div>And if you can't get on board with that, your village needs to not reach beyond the confines of your house. Certainly it shouldn't reach all the way to my Starbucks.</div>Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-20619993402866058922009-10-30T20:45:00.000-07:002009-10-30T21:46:59.909-07:00Of TB and PhDI mentioned to my pastor back at City of Refuge that I was interning at a homeless shelter for my field education component. "Are you up on your TB testing?" he asked, which is an inside joke for all of us who have worked at the Star of Hope, where your annual performance review included a TB skin test. City of Refuge: if you haven't worked at a shelter and tested positive for TB, we probably won't hire you.<br /><br />Here's the thing: I miss my annual TB test. And that encapsulates the struggle I am facing.<br /><br />In the last year of my M.Div program, I am working on a thesis that I really find fascinating. And it has all these little tentacles which I also find fascinating: how churches can redeem a racially corrupted theology; what our theological resources are for doing so; how churches interact with other civil society agents and with government in developing societies, particularly young democracies; whether some kinds of Christianity seem to promote democracy and justice better than others; what role their theologies play in this or if we are in a post-theological dispensation when it comes to this; the emerging role of reconciliation and forgiveness as tools of statecraft, particularly in places like Burundi and Congo where punitive justice would mean incarcerating half the society, and the notable absence of theologians from these discussions about what are fundamentally theological concepts.<br /><br />So I am thinking about going on for a PhD. And I am thinking about doing it in Africa. The University of Cape Town has a great program in Christianity and civil society and a slate of scholars I really admire, and I'd be within striking distance of the theological faculties at Stellenbosch and University of the Western Cape. I've talked to some professors and advisors here and they are enthusiastic: they think it's a logical next step given my interests, that UCT would be a good fit academically, that it would open a lot of doors both in academia and nonprofits depending on the route I wanted to take.<br /><br />It makes sense. I'm seriously considering it.<br /><br />But here's the thing: I really miss that TB test.<br /><br />I miss being in the midst of lively, messy community. I miss feeling like what I did every day mattered. I've started playing the Christmas music, and one of the songs on my iPod is the London Philharmonic's version of "O Come All Ye Faithful." In my Star of Hope days, this was the song that the wise men processed in to as the grand finale of our Christmas pageant. We started practicing in October; every day after school, most evenings, some weekends, up until our December performance. I'd practice with the boys who were the 3 kings--we had a Red King, a Blue King, and a Silver King, with costumes I made myself, because there is nothing that cannot be accomplished with double-sided tape, Velcro, and a stapler--to make sure they came in at exactly the right moment, that they walked the right way, held their heads the right way, that they were *regal*. I prepared them over and over to ignore the crowd that would be there the night of the performance, to remember that they were men of great stature and wisdom, men who quested after knowledge, who carried themselves with dignity. And my rowdy 8-year-old boys, boys who were rarely in their school programs because their behavior was bad and their teachers didn't want to take a chance on them, became those kings. The first time we did it, when the music swells before the last verse and the choir sings "Yea, Lord, we greet Thee, born this happy morning," my Silver King made his dramatic entrance and the place erupted--cheers, applause, tears. And he never wavered. He didn't ham it up, he didn't wave to his mom; he kept his precise, stately gait, he looked straight ahead, he made it up to the stage and bowed to the Christ Child right at the perfect moment, as the choir says "Christ the Lord."<br /><br />It. Was. AWESOME.<br /><br />That kid's in high school now. All those 1st- and 2nd-graders are middle schoolers and high schoolers now. But there isn't a Christmas season that goes by that I don't remember how regal my little kings were, or how the wild-haired little girl who played Mary could make you cry with her version of the Magnificat, or how everyone fell in love with the angel-cum-gospel choir's rendition of "Jesus What a Wonderful Child" while the shepherds danced.<br /><br />The kids were part of the salvation story that night, and as I told them over and over during rehearsals, it was because of this story that they were part of the salvation story that was unfolding over time and space, where everyone had a role to play and, as C.S. Lewis said, "each chapter is better than the one before."<br /><br />Star of Hope had its frustrations--two of my friends took bets on how long it would take me to break a major rule, and I think the outside bet was two weeks--but I felt like what I did mattered, that every day I did something of eternal value. It's the way I feel at City of Refuge too--when I walk in, it's like realizing I'd been having trouble breathing and hadn't realized it until I could breathe freely again. What they do in that little corner of Third Ward matters. They are a glimpse of the Kingdom for those among us who have lost the vision.<br /><br />I know my giftings are academic. I am a reader and researcher and writer and analyst; that is what I am gifted to do. And while I dread the prospect of being an academic who just writes in academic journals that other academics read--a community far too incestuous for my liking--I think maybe there's a place for those of us with those talents to delve into the theology and history and study and come out with the nuggets of wisdom to give back to our churches and communities, to say "Hey! This is where it went wrong, and here's how we can fix it."<br /><br />That's the kind of academic I'd want to be. But the truth is, I've never been happier than I was at Star of Hope, playing Twister and nurturing the image of God in children and getting my annual TB test. And while I write this in my house in Cambridge listening to Christmas carols, I really wish I was trying to teach an 8-year-old rowdy boy to see with the eyes of a king.<br /><br />Because one day, that is exactly what he will be.Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-28252386063688081532009-10-21T21:45:00.000-07:002009-10-21T22:25:36.129-07:00Come, Let Us Reason TogetherWe are an arguing family.<br /><br />Growing up, I thought all families argued. In mine, we like to get the last word in. I remember realizing that perhaps this was not conventional when my little sister had a friend over in high school and he watched in horror as my dad and I yelled and shook our fists and stomped our feet about school prayer and carried the argument out of the house into the driveway until I ended it by slamming the car door. (After launching a particularly strong argument. Because I like to have the last word. And the first, and most of the ones in between.)<br /><br />I was thinking of this recently because I think we, as a church, have gotten sloppy as arguers. We proof text. We throw around words like "liberal" and "conservative" as slurs without really knowing what they mean. And growing up in a family where vigorous debate and reasoning was valued and where you'd better be able to defend your position (as my dad has said, "Your mama may have raised a mean child, but she raised no fools") has made me realize that it's a rapidly disappearing art, and the church is suffering for it.<br /><br />I have a friend recently who said the arguments against ordaining gay people or blessing gay unions were the same ones used by racists to justify apartheid. It's an argument I've heard before, and it's sloppy and inaccurate. Apartheid theology twisted Scripture to see something that isn't there: a vision of race before race existed. The Biblical writers had some concept of tribe, but not of race as defined by color; that was a European invention about 1500 years later. Even many evangelicals took issue with apartheid theology: apartheid apologists used the Tower of Babel and Pentecost as examples of God wanting people to remain separate, while evangelicals typically see Pentecost as setting right what went wrong at Babel--the sin that caused division was now being set right by the Spirit, speaking to all in their languages so they were brought together, not pushed apart, the beginning of this radical new venture in inclusion that was the early church. (Flawed and faulty, as we all are, but still radical. And an adventure. I do love adventure.)<br /><br />The parallel doesn't quite work with homosexuality. You can say Scripture doesn't refer to homosexual relationships as we now understand them, but then that does one of two things: 1) you are inverting the race analogy and, rhetorically, putting those who support full inclusion of LGBTQ people in the same position as the apartheid apologists. In one case, we argue that the Bible is misused to justify an argument about race that didn't exist then; in the second, we turn around and use the Bible to justify an argument about homosexuality that we assert didn't exist then; ie in either case, we are alleging the construct of race or sexuality *as we understand them today* did not exist in Biblical times, but in one place we are using it as a critique and in another as a justification; or 2) you're wrong, and no less a Biblical scholar than N.T. Wright says it, who says that "there is nothing that we know now about either the condition or the behavior of homosexuality that was unknown in the first century." It was not just pederasty or sexual use of slaves, he asserts, but also "read Plato's Symposium: they have permanent, faithful, stable male-male partnerships, lifelong stuff, Achilles and Patroclus in Homer, all sorts of things--Paul, in Corinth, will not have been unaware, in a world in which private life only is for the very rich and the very aristocratic, everyone else does what they do pretty much in public--Paul will have known the full range of behavior." The dismissal of first century understanding of homosexuality is, he says, "Enlightenment arrogance."<br /><br />Now. It seems to me if he is right, and I tend to trust him as probably the leading NT scholar alive and certainly one of the leading authorities on Paul and Romans, then the question is not so much what the Bible has to say about homosexuality, but what weight and authority we give it. And that is a valid discussion to have. But let's have that one and not the one in which we try to force Scripture to say what it doesn't.<br /><br />As for me, I'd like to think I'm probably not so easy to pin down on this issue as some might think I am. Where I am unsure, I prefer to err on the side of grace; I think it unlikely that God will ever say to me "You took that grace thing too literally, you over-graced the world, it got out of hand." I am tasked with loving people; the Holy Spirit is tasked with transforming them. I am less concerned with whether homosexual behavior is or is not a sin and more concerned with how the church has isolated it as a sin beyond others while ignoring the sins in its midst. We have way bigger fish to fry, folks.<br /><br />I am sorry that in our shouting at each other, we miss the opportunity to articulate what a Christian vision of human sexuality and sexual mores might look like. At least the evangelical tradition is still clear: it is covenantal, to be exercised within the sanctuary and safety of marriage, because letting someone quite literally inside your skin is not to be taken lightly and not something we do with just anyone. It's a very high view of marriage, of sexuality, and of the body. It is also, in a world where marriage now may occur 15 or 20 years after the onset of sexual maturity and may not occur at all, a very demanding view--which doesn't make it wrong, but it's worth exploring. And for those Christians (I hesitate to say liberal just because I think liberal and conservative are unhelpful terms in this context, they've become so polarizing and stereotyped) who have unloosed sex from marriage, what does a Christian vision of moral sexual behavior look like? What do Christian principles look like incarnated in our most intimate relations? That is also a conversation worth having and we're not having it.<br /><br />When an activist friend and I have talked about it we get mutually frustrated because she frames the issue of gay inclusion in the church (in her case, the Anglican Communion) in terms of human rights and I say the church isn't about rights; rights is political language, Enlightenment language, but not Biblical language and not faith language. By that I don't mean I think the church should stand in opposition to human rights; it has just made me think that it isn't the question we are meant to ask. Scripture talks about laying rights down, not taking them up. And I think a better question is not "what are my rights" but "what is my responsibility to my neighbor"--which in the end is the more demanding and costly question, and hopefully one that leads us to the same place of protecting and celebrating human dignity and worth ("rights," in political language) in its fullness but gets us there together, each of us looking out for and protecting the other over ourselves.<br /><br />We don't argue well anymore. I mean we as a church--perhaps it is the degradation of our political culture that has seeped into the churches, perhaps that we don't value reason ("Come, let us reason together") and the premise-evidence-logic strand anymore, perhaps that we haven't the discipline and attention for it anymore (remember Paul talks of discipline as a prelude to faith); but we are sloppy, lazy thinkers these days, and I am frustrated by it. And it wasn't always this way. The Anglican construct of the three-legged stool posits that Scripture, reason and tradition are the three legs that hold up the stool of faith, which becomes wobbly when any one of them is missing; the Methodists added experience but held on to reason. Because these things matter, they are worth reasoning through and reasoning through well; they are questions about who we are and what it is to be human and how to live well in this world. Our conversation is so impoverished and we do it so poorly.<br /><br />I am postmodern enough to believe that these are not our only tools or the only legitimate way of arriving at a conclusion, that narrative and art and experience are also resources, but a well-disciplined mind is still so vital--I am just not willing to give that weapon up just yet.<br /><br />"In the church of Jesus Christ there can and should be no non-theologians."--Karl BarthShannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-11905193098255698242009-10-11T20:06:00.000-07:002009-10-11T20:16:55.133-07:00Anglicans, Everyone Else Is Making You Look Bad**OK, I know it's been forever since I've blogged, so the next few blogs are going to alternate between finishing up my thoughts on South Africa and ruminations on the last year at Harvard. By the way, my housemate doesn't believe in using the heater, so I'm wearing sweatpants over flannel pajamas with an electric blanket. And still the mornings are painful.<br /><br />Anyway, this blog post reflects on a project I was working on in June and July, viewing a major anti-apartheid march from 1989 through a theological lens.<br />*******************************************************<br /><br />I love Reformed theology and thought. And I am not one who is usually enthralled by theology. I have little interest in debating the finer points of TULIP or whether Jesus became Christ before or after His crucifixion and resurrection; they can be interesting intellectual challenges, but in general, they are things we will not know the full answers to while we are yet on this side of life. I have come to the point where if a certain precept doesn’t help me in my basic mission to follow Jesus and not hurt other people—a mission that keeps me fairly well occupied most of the time, because sometimes it feels like I look up and totally unintentionally I have left mass carnage in my wake and I think, hmmm; that did not work out as well as I’d hoped—then it’s going to have to take a back seat to those things that do. <br /><br />But spend a little bit of time with Anglicans and you’ll come to have a whole new respect for a robust and vigorously articulated theology, because it’s so sorely lacking in some of their circles. (I don’t say all, because they still have N.T. Wright, and that counts for something.) Even if you disagree with it, at least it gives you something of substance to actually disagree with.<br /><br />As part of a project I was working on, I interviewed two former Anglican priests, both of whom served in fairly high positions in Cape Town’s diocese. One of them, when asked about the theological themes that drove church resistance to apartheid, said dreamily, “Faith.” Errrr….what? What did that even mean? Is that seriously all he’s going to give me? Not even a verse of the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” which would be more profound than anything I’d hitherto heard from him?<br /><br />Unfortunately, no.<br /><br />Then he launched into an explanation of how we were all energy moving at different frequencies and when we come together all that energy…blah blah blah my ears are bleeding…something about E=mc^2…and he rambles on and I think, do I still remember the Nicene Creed? Or the lyrics to “Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam”? Because I think he is actually sucking the faith right out of my spirit. Along with my will to live.<br /><br />Then I talked to another Anglican who freely said, “I don’t really do theology, it was never my thing. It used to worry Tutu, he was always asking me when my next retreat was.” But, he continued, he just really wasn’t into the whole spirituality and theology part of being a priest. <br /><br />Huh. I'm thinking the spirituality-and-faith part of being a priest is, I don't know, A MAJOR PART OF THE JOB. Who was in charge of ordination during these years? Because someone seriously fell down on the job, and apparently poor Tutu was trying to hold it together with string and duct tape. Anglicans, you should be pissed. This doesn’t show well.<br /><br />So you can only imagine how I felt when I interviewed Allan Boesak a couple of weeks later. Boesak is one of the anti-apartheid luminaries, a founder of the United Democratic Front, fiery speaker, and a pastor in the Coloured branch of the Dutch Reformed Church. He did his Ph.D in the Netherlands and has done some great research on Bonhoeffer.<br /><br />What I am telling you is, Allan Boesak has some theology.<br /><br />He immediately started talking about Calvin and Kuyper and Bonhoeffer and about how the Reformed understanding of Christ’s Lordship of all things is the paradigm under which he operated. There is no private zone for the church separate from society, because society is also under the Lordship of Christ, whether it recognizes it or not. And Christ is steering things to His desired end. (A little bit of Calvinist predestination kicks in here.) I wasn’t sure if I should clap or kiss his ring.<br /><br />And we were mutually smug about the nebulousness of much of Anglican theology. <br /><br />I'm reading his memoir now which reflects on a major public scandal in which he was involved, so I don't want to comment on that until I've read his defense. But Boesak-Part II is coming soon.Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-68877889193140223832009-07-29T05:40:00.000-07:002009-07-29T05:41:59.655-07:00FaithfulSometimes, in spite of yourself, you end up exactly where you need to be.<br /><br />I was tired the other night after a day that included working furiously to meet a deadline and two meetings, one of them with the same people who made us fingerpaint about apartheid so, you know, I was already on my guard. I wanted to come back to my room and take a shower and fall asleep early. Instead I let myself get dragged to some church in Athlone, one of the Coloured townships (as opposed to the black townships). There was a 20th anniversary memorial service for two young people who had been killed by the security police in 1989, my friend said. She is a struggle veteran, so one feels it is poor form to say “I don’t really care about your history, I was kind of hoping to find a rerun of ‘Gilmore Girls’ on TV,” so I went.<br /><br />We arrived at a church already packed with people. Desmond Tutu was there; so was Trevor Manuel, who basically runs the country (come on, we all know it’s not Zuma) and Farid Esack. They gave great speeches, passionate and pleading, their power to sway a crowd undiminished after all these years.<br /><br />But it was not the luminaries who fascinated me, though I am something of a hero worshipper. It was the crowd.<br /><br />Many of them—perhaps most—were struggle veterans. Some had been part of the nonviolent, civil society resistance; others had been part of the guerrilla armed struggle. A handful of them were dressed in the fatigues of Umkhonto weSwizwe (Spear of the Nation), the military wing of the pre-1994 ANC that led the armed struggle. We tend to think of the South African freedom movement as very like our own civil rights movement—nonviolent in its orientation, convinced that violence only begets more violence. For many in the movement, this was true. But others believed without the fear instilled by an element of insurrection and violence, they would never achieve their desired ends. <br /><br />The violence gave the police a reason to come down ever more harshly and a way to justify it to the public. The two MK kids who died were 20 years old. They were killed by a security police bomb. Their bodies were almost unidentifiable. And their stories are unremarkable. Things like this happened to struggle activists all the time. Someone I interviewed said, “There was a time when we thought we’d never stop going to funerals.” Twenty years on, I think I would still be filled with rage—corrosive, poisonous rage.<br /><br />Instead, they rose as one and sang “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”<br /><br />Perhaps you haven’t heard the lyrics in a while; so few churches sing old hymns anymore. <br /><br /><em>Great is Thy faithfulness, O God my Father<br />There is no shadow of turning with Thee<br />Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not<br />As Thou hast been, Thou forever wilt be<br />Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!<br />Morning by morning, new mercies I see<br />All I have needed, Thy hand hath provided<br />Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.<br /></em><br />I struggle with the armed resistance. I understand, of course, why 20-year-olds rage against oppression that brutalizes their parents and families and communities. But I wonder if it didn’t do more harm than good. People died, went into exile, were detained and tortured; of course, this happened to the nonviolent activists as well. Yet I wonder if MK wasn’t the best propaganda tool the apartheid state had: concrete evidence that the revolution was at the doorstep and any means was justifiable in pushing it back, even if it meant killing kids and deploying the army into people’s neighborhoods. And on a moral level, I struggle with armed resistance. Christian tradition is not monolithic on this—Aquinas writes of just war, while the Franciscans and Mennonites and others are pacifists; Bonhoeffer struggles to hold the two together and ends up realizing that one can only act, in the full knowledge one may be absolutely wrong, and then throw oneself on the grace of God. There is no way, in a broken world, to get it perfectly right. And that’s no excuse to sit it out on the sidelines.<br /><br /><em>Summer and winter and springtime and harvest<br />Sun, moon and stars in their courses above<br />Join with all nature in manifold witness<br />To Thy great faithfulness, mercy and love<br /></em><br />Robbie and Coline, the two cadres being memorialized, were bright, brave, ambitious kids, by all accounts. They still have friends and family who miss them, who know that there is a seat missing at the family table at Christmas, who know they lost grandchildren and nieces and nephews as well when they lost Robbie and Coline. They are frozen in memory as they were at 20: hopeful, determined, with all the zeal and idealism of youth. The comrades at the service—those who fought in the same struggle, whether armed or not, and made it through to the other side—did not meet the same end, but they are not unscathed either. A woman I interviewed said they are “a scarred generation. But we wear our scars like badges of honor.” It may be true, but though they have built up normal lives for themselves, have kids and jobs and mortgages, the scars are never far below the surface. Some are tormented by what they’ve seen. Some are tormented by what they’ve done. Some are tormented by what was done to them. All are, in some way, tormented. And yet they sang.<br /><br /><em>Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth<br />Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide<br />Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow<br />Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside.<br /></em><br />I grapple with the armed resistance from a moral perspective; I believe it’s essential for Christians to do so. And I don’t think you can easily dismiss a Jesus who says “Blessed are the peacemakers.” But it is theoretical for me: I am not in a position that requires me to make such a choice. And as David Russell, a former bishop, said to me, his nonviolent protests were protected by MK. Our ability to take such a stance is often ensured by those who have taken a different one. The pope is a pacifist, but is protected by the Swiss guard, after all. So I am learning to temper my tendency to pontificate with a bit of humility. Those who fought, in whatever way their consciences led them, bear the scars of their suffering on behalf of others. Is that not part of being remade in the image of Christ? <br /><br />When people went up to light candles, they sang the MK anthem that was sung when a cadre dies. I looked at two of my friends: one who was an organizer for UDF; one who, though a priest, ran MK missions into Botswana. Both are scarred. Both are luminous. Both challenge my understanding of Christian witness. We clasped hands to sing “We Shall Overcome,” the old civil rights song, and I found myself hoping desperately that they would—overcome their own hurts and scars, but also that this wonderful, wounded country would overcome, that the deep challenges it faces will be turned into opportunities for moral imagination and agency. Because the price they have paid has been so high, and I want the reward to be commensurate. <br /><br />In some form, perhaps not the one any of us envision, I am confident it will be. Because our faithfulness falters; but there is One who never does.<br /><br /><em>Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!<br />Morning by morning new mercies I see<br />All I have needed Thy hand hath provided<br />Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.</em>Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-91898167165919680962009-07-19T10:21:00.001-07:002009-07-19T10:53:32.820-07:00Gonna Be a Lovely Dayas Kirk Franklin would say. If you are on this site, you received an invitation to be. I had a couple of, shall we say, unexpected South African visitors to the site (feel free to email me for more info on that one), and it was hampering my ability to talk about what I was doing here and, more importantly, my ability to be snarky about it. New readers are welcome, they just need to email me for access. So take heart: you're a small, select group, the elite in-crowd, just like you wanted to be back in middle school.<br /><br />SO: what's been going on? I am working on two projects here in Cape Town. The first is creating a document for an organization called The Foundation for Church-Led Restitution, to be used by churches becoming interested in a restitution-vs-charity paradigm. It's very interesting, although I have some ideological problems with it the deeper in I get. I'm eyeballs-deep in finishing a draft of it by Tuesday so I'll write more reflectively about it later.<br /><br />The second is the script for an exhibition St. George's Cathedral--known as "The People's Cathedral," or more colloquially to most of us, "Desmond Tutu's church"--is creating to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Peace March of September 13 1989, which was one of the biggest marches Cape Town had ever seen and one of the death knells of apartheid (it happened just a few days after F.W. de Klerk, who would ultimately win the Nobel Peace Prize with Mandela, had taken over from P.W. Botha--apparently Afrikaner politicians are only allowed to have initials, not actual names). The Cathedral is creating a Space of Memory and Witness, which is a nice and slightly theological way of saying a museum, to commemorate the role it has played in justice movements over time, and this is its first exhibition, so I'm pretty excited to be the author of it. It's also allowed me to meet and interview some really interesting folks, including Allan Boesak--there's a post coming up on him--and the then-mayor and a lot of struggle activists. Who are a screwed-up lot as a whole, an observation which deserves its own post.<br /><br />I have a script due tomorrow for them, which is obviously why I've chosen to blog now.<br /><br />Anyway: welcome to the newly selective Cape Town to Cambridge! Consider yourself a VIP--I sure do.Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-71525004147616671802009-07-19T02:04:00.001-07:002009-07-19T02:16:50.409-07:00And the Bible Metaphor of the Day Award Goes to...Dionne, for this advice when I lamented the occasional moments of surreal, "are they crazy or am I? am I really here? can you see me?" absurdity that threaten to intrude on my placid life:<br /><br />"When you get your boarding pass at the airport, keep facing forward. When you walk up to the gate, face forward. When you sit on the plane and take off from South Africa, face forward. Don't look behind you, lest there be a pillar of salt in your future."<br /><br />Bwahahahaha.<br /><br />Happy Sunday.Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-84526413038092377942009-07-08T10:51:00.000-07:002009-07-08T10:59:33.079-07:00I Have a Patron Saint!I passed a church today called St. Martini’s and I almost passed out from the wave of reverence that came over me. Surely the presence of the Lord is in that place, y’all. I can hear the rush of angels’ wings, I see glory on each face…I was overcome. I have a patron saint! My PresbyBaptist self can still embrace liturgical traditions! On his feast day, do you wear little black dresses at swanky bars or lounge around the house in silk dressing-gowns drinking martinis from one’s own sterling silver cocktail shaker? (I’m a shaken-not-stirred kind of gal.) Then I found out it was just St. Martin’s in Afrikaans and my religious aspirations wisped away like so much gossamer. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.<br /><br />Also, I am acutely feeling the sadness of missing Michael Jackson's funeral. I tried to stream CNN but there wasn't enough bandwidth. Or as Runako said, "Lots of little South African students couldn't do their homework on Wikipedia because you were using up all the bandwidth trying to watch Michael Jackson. I hope you're happy." Which I absolutely WOULD HAVE BEEN if it had actually *worked*.<br /><br />And now I am trying to pull an all-nighter, or at least a late-nighter, to finish a draft of a project due Friday. But how am I possibly to do that in a land without Starbucks? And no coffee maker in my room? This is going to be a subpar product, South African friends--that's right, I know you're reading--just prepare yourself for it now. <br /><br />Hey Kim, Farid Esack remembers you. Which suggests to me you did not maintain our hallowed undergraduate tradition of sleeping/not paying attention in class. I'm gravely disappointed.Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-28860499522095133902009-07-02T13:14:00.001-07:002009-07-02T13:34:22.772-07:00Random Encounters<div>I'm having communion with Desmond Tutu Friday morning. Eat your hearts out, suckers. I'm secretly hoping for a better picture with him than I got last time, because as you can see, I had kind of Mufasa hair in that picture. <img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5353959686105524530" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjir06SSB_DUbQMWBc7TN9FKahtrCh6bHJGoOFsqhXD-MLG2hVV8b_qNfQ_4gueO-9URbw0pusa4BZv05oTr5OTpvS5E06D2ycHKFjcyUmEmOPiydUu-4BVAZ4RQ6Y8rvw0X2Am3oE3dkw/s320/Pictures-2008+035.jpg" border="0" /></div><br /><p>Also, every photo I take has that glare off my Tyra forehead, I can't do anything about that. I can't be cute at 7 in the morning, it's just asking too much. I do wish I knew what happened to that fleece I was wearing, it's one of my favorites.</p><p> </p><p>Also, at the laundromat today a couple of old men actually just stopped and watched while I was sorting my delicates. Apparently no one told them the rule about how in public places like that we all keep to ourselves and, if we must look, we do it surreptitiously. It was creepy. Yes, dude, it's red lace underwear. Keep moving.</p><p> </p><p>And I ran into some of my people today. I was going to get lunch, and two 40-something men approached me. In an accent you could cut with a butter knife, one of them says, "Excuuuse me, maaaa'aaam, buuut will thiiis strate take us to Laaawwng Strate?" I immediately recognized him as my people and made a quick guess: Mississippi or Alabama. "Where y'all from?" I asked. "The U.S.," he responded. Yeah I get that. "Where in the U.S.?" I clarified. Sure enough, folks, we have a winner: Mississippi! "I'm from Texas!" I exclaimed and we immediately started to taaawwk sloooowweerr and with bigger hand gestures, and use phrases like "like to had" and "fixin to" while lamenting Cape Town's lack of barbeque or Mexican food. (I did tell him where he could find Dr. Pepper, for which he was appropriately grateful.) The second guy piped in, "I'm from Colorado." Dude, who cares? Mississippi is Faulkner, Elvis, civil rights workers, and brilliant writers who drink themselves to madness. Colorado is...skiing. And Focusing on the Family. No one's impressed.</p><p> </p><p>I even walked them part of the way to Long Street, since they were nowhere near it. I kind of wanted to ask the Mississippi guy, who was *definitely* Old School Mississippi, not part of the New South AT ALL, if he was freaked out by all the Coloured people, since at home they would just be black. (He might identify some as "high yella" or "redbone," but beyond that, probably not making a lot of distinctions.) But I'm a nice Southern girl so I figured it was best to stick to safer topics. He was already a stranger in a strange land.</p><p> </p><p>If Desmond and I take a better photograph tomorrow, I'll be sure to post it.</p>Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-48706589650884214312009-07-01T12:00:00.000-07:002009-07-01T12:01:43.063-07:00Mark Sanford is Determined to Destroy The Last Shreds of Hope for His MarriageThat is all one can deduce from his fatal proclivity for continuing to talk to the press when he needs to just pipe the hell down and ride out his last year as governor before disappearing quietly from the political landscape. This latest round of “tearful, emotional” interviews (per the Associated Press) has him saying that this wasn’t just any affair. Oh no y’all, nothing so tawdry as that. This was a “tragic and forbidden love story.”<br /><br />I KNOW. I KNOW. I’M DYING TOO. CAN. YOU. EVEN. IMAGINE. When did he start taking his cues from the back covers of Harlequin romances? When did the A.P. become his pastor/therapist/bartender? And don’t you feel like he’s somehow trying to create a moral high ground in which this is not in the same class with other people’s affairs, because it was True Love?<br /><br />And then he said that she wasn’t the first woman he had “crossed lines” with.<br /><br />Well, of course she isn’t. Who ever is? She’s the first one you got caught with, Mark. We were all clear on that without you saying it and further embarrassing your wife.<br /><br />And THEN, because apparently he has never heard of the phrase “no comment,” he said that he would “go to my grave knowing I have met my soulmate” but that he owed it to his kids and 20 years of marriage to “try this larger walk of faith.” He is, and again I quote, “trying to fall back in love with Jenny.”<br /><br />Well.<br /><br />Well then.<br /><br />I bet Jenny is awful grateful for that, Mark. It must have warmed the cockles of her heart. Why don’t you toss her some more crumbs from your table?<br /><br />Remember how people got upset when Bill Clinton wouldn’t answer questions like these and said he was irate that people even had the nerve to ask? A little of that outrage would stand Sanford and his family in good stead right now. Why won’t he just stop answering questions? Why the public confessionals? Aren’t we all uncomfortable enough?<br /><br />This guy doesn’t need a press corps, he needs a therapist.<br /><br />Favorite tweet seen on this: “We can’t judge until we too have slept with a woman in Argentina. Who’s up for a road trip?”<br /><br />Maureen Dowd at the New York Times is apparently sharing a brain with me on this, and does it better than I do, so go read her column "Rules of the Wronged" at: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/opinion/01dowd.html?_r=1">http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/opinion/01dowd.html?_r=1</a>.<br /><br />I will post about actual South African things soon, including my work, and how I am hoping to mobilize some people to put on our Barack T-shirts and go be obnoxious Americans for the 4th of July. Even though I really try and live as if loving one's neighbor transcends all borders and nationalism leads us to war and destruction, there is a tiny (but, it turns out, oftentimes loud, particularly when it's had a couple of drinks) voice that feels like on general principle, but *particularly* since the November election, I should get free drinks on July 4. Like on my birthday. Come on, we're the country that brought you brilliant constitutions with kickass bills of rights, Michael Jackson, blue jeans and iPods/iPhones/iMacs. We deserve to be a superpower.Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-86834889191066594952009-06-30T04:32:00.000-07:002009-06-30T05:17:26.964-07:00Coffee, Winter Days, and My New Political CrushSometimes, in quiet moments, I reflect on John Newton’s statement that “I know but two things: I am a great sinner, and Christ is a great savior.”<br /><br />Other times, I reflect on how I would take just about anything from the Starbucks menu right now, and on what grave desperation must have driven the man who invented Nescafe.<br /><br />I used to wonder why South Africans seemed to adopt the worst aspects of British culture. Like tea. I mean, I like tea fine, and I certainly like it a lot more now that I’ve figured out you can put a lot of cream and sugar in it. But why weren’t people here coffee drinkers, I asked in bewilderment? And then I realized that if all you knew of coffee was Nescafe, you would turn to tea as well. (Theological analogy here: you know how we’ve all been told that “you’re all of Christ that some folks will ever see?” And you think to yourself, wow, that is unfortunate for them, because I am not Jesus’ best foot forward, as it were? We are the Nescafe to Jesus’ Arabian coffee, y’all. Ponder that rich insight for a moment.)<br /><br />There used to be a coffeehouse in Cape Town that served real coffee, but it closed down, no doubt because of my patronage. I am the Typhoid Mary of Cape Town coffeehouses; two of the ones I frequented in the past have since closed. I almost want to apologize to the café I’m sitting in right now because they are just darling and obviously their days are numbered. Now all I can find is Nescafe, which lo, is an abomination unto the Lord, who hath made all coffee good in His time. But people don’t *call* it Nescafe; they call it coffee, so I am deceived. Then I saw “filter coffee” on the menu and I thought, score! Nescafe is not made with a filter, right? It’s instant, that’s the whole point, so this must be the real thing. But then it came and it had that distinctive light brown film over the top of it. You’ve never seen real coffee with that film, right? It’s the Nescafe giveaway. So all I could figure was maybe they filtered the water before they mixed it with the Nescafe. Or they put Nescafe in the filter basket. Either way, there was no mistaking that bitter taste. My hopes rose briefly when I saw “café americano” on the menu because I thought OK, American coffee. That’s what they call filter coffee in Egypt to distinguish it from Nescafe; maybe Cape Town is taking its cues from their neighbors to the (far) north. But it arrived with the same light brown film. Hopes: dashed.<br /><br />A young friend of mine here, who is 20, drinks the stuff like it’s the last drink on earth. I honestly want to stage an intervention for the kid. “We’re all here to let you know we love you but we can’t enable this lifestyle anymore, because it’s so far beneath you and you’re not living up to your potential and we just can’t watch you do this to yourself. Have a latte.”<br /><br />I worry that I’ll eventually get used to it and even come to like it, the way the Israelites in exile forgot the old ways and assimilated into Babylon. I try to hold on to the memory of real coffee, so that like Nehemiah, I’ll be ready when it’s time to return. (I’ve been spending some time in the Old Testament lately, if you can’t tell.)<br /><br />On another note entirely: you know who’s glad Michael Jackson died? Mark Sanford. That guy’s news cycle got drastically abbreviated by Jacko’s death, and you know Sanford is lighting candles in church for him in thanksgiving and remembrance. I’m kind of sorry, because I was really looking forward to the inevitable parodies of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” after he said he’d spent five days crying in Argentina. Of course that was after he’d said he was just clearing his head in Buenos Aires, driving down the coast. My friend said that’s when he knew a woman was going to come out of the woodwork: he’d been to Argentina and said, “There’s no coastline in Buenos Aires. I knew then we didn’t have the whole story.” Which was itself after he said he’d been hiking the Appalachian Trail, after leaving without telling anyone where he was going or conferring his gubernatorial powers upon the lieutenant governor. I guess it’s a good thing no one needed a death sentence commuted or the National Guard called in for those five days.<br /><br />Which brings me to what I loved best about this story: I loved Jenny Sanford. Y’all, Jenny Sanford is my new favorite political wife. (Before her, Bill Clinton was my favorite political wife. Hee.) All those press conferences where betrayed political wives stood with pained smiles plastered on their faces while their husbands publicly copped to various forms of infidelity, be it with men (Jim McGreevy, I’m looking at you—FYI he’s in seminary now to become an Episcopal priest), women (John Edwards and a whole raft of others) or boys (that one’s you, Mark Foley), had become so painful to watch. I love that Jenny basically said, “I’m going to the beach house, and you need to man up and take your licks on your own. Peace out!” I saw a parody of a Facebook page that cracked me up: it said “Mark Sanford has added ‘Buenos Aires, Argentina’ to his ‘Places I’ve Been’ application,” followed by, “Jenny Sanford has added ‘Not Your F****** Press Conference, Mark’ to her ‘Places I’ve Been’ application.” (See it here at <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2221581/">http://www.slate.com/id/2221581/</a>. Ha! If Jenny Sanford ever runs for office, I am working for her campaign, and I’m not even a Republican. That girl’s got spunk. (And personally I think she's the one who sent the incriminating emails to the newspaper, since they were forwarded from Sanford's private account. She went all Thelma-and-Louise-driving-off-a-cliff on him: if we are going down, it will be in a blaze of glory and press coverage, mo'fo'.)<br /><br />And to end, it is about 70 degrees here today. In the dead of winter. And people are actually walking around in scarves and mittens. Every time I come here, my Cape Town friends warn me that “it’s freezing! It’s bitterly cold! You must bring warm clothes!” And I think, hmmm, I seem to recall Cape Town winters as being quite mild, but maybe my mind is playing tricks on me. Maybe they’re worse than I remember and it’s just that they pale in comparison to Boston winters, where it actually hurts your skin to go outside. And then I get here and no, it is as mild as I recall. It’s like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, in which I am Charlie Brown and either my memory or my local friends’ deeply skewed sense of “bitterly cold” is Lucy. Here’s how Cape Town looks today:<br /><br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5353088279921421570" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDbfFzYk4zljc8xzptjZ1S46CEaW8Kbjyn3MKFHh09hJShEj1RP43idNcXfyYqDead9mIjuCdtNh3qTRdkKdZOWisA9mMXRKzt4p1rfE-A02MvtYmU5cAZvDuR4xr_0V17REqmWaHYYa0/s320/Winter+002.jpg" border="0" /><br /><br /><br />And here's how Boston looked as recently as April:<br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5353088778406077746" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 240px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr-rpacLATL-4o_I6Ko23HG_JUsTWiMk2TrUMU358GchZqhIWz95KJvplynnKY-tg75cRMtXaIiI3u8C0UoshO111ZNMmdXKd9f8lsxf1rhQg2ScesFYpWwXMzgiQrkpSsNArNfIrVje8/s320/Winter+001.jpg" border="0" /><br /><br />Exactly.Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7101201283758648843.post-84661831234099775292009-06-29T14:02:00.000-07:002009-06-29T14:12:04.631-07:00Cape Town Catch-Up<div>Hey peeps! I know I’m grossly late on the posting, and it’s been a busy 4 weeks so I won’t try to sum it all up. But here are some random musings over the last weeks:<br /><br />1) Lauren and I are in locked in a death match to see who can gain more weight for her wedding. Counterintuitive for most brides and bridesmaids, I know, but we never claimed to be a normal family. She wants to be fit and toned for her wedding, which has spiraled into an obsession with weight-lifting and protein supplements. (Money quote: “I eat as much protein as a mid-size Texas ranch. If you slaughtered every animal on that ranch and ate it, that’s how much protein I take each week.”) Never one to be outdone, I am also lifting weights and eating at McDonalds nearly every day in an effort to pack on the weight and not look skeletal in the strapless bridesmaid’s dress she has chosen for me. Clavicles can be sexy but not if they’re jutting out three inches from the skin. So far she’s winning, but I have hit 111 pounds!—which puts me over the 110-pound mark I have not been able to break in well over a year, and within reach of the 115-120 pounds that is my normal weight. We’re both drinking the protein shakes but I haven’t ventured into the territory of the pill supplements because they all seem to have a lot of testosterone, and I’m afraid I’ll grow a mustache. And maybe a penis.<br /><br />2) I have located a store—possibly the only one in Cape Town, lo, in South Africa—that sells Dr. Pepper. Behold, the beauty of my dietary staples:<br /><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5352859966494243666" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 247px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis4laGAFqHyEsYUFZEHWGpa4nfeP-St4w9PhaiBLbgyCXmEFGQT4rGdifQO-Gg-Qhe4tlD751IMBb3GjEaS4rwNQKEDTgyAwJkEv2LV7lnn6RKW5X4uBJ4ksCZMs1czuAKsPvSl8IPjNg/s320/Bermuda.jpg" border="0" /><br />Yes, that is a can of Dr. Pepper—doesn’t it just gleam with the promise of goodness?—and Nutella. I eat them both, frequently together.<br /><br />3) It has been pointed out to me that every time I leave the country, significant Americans die. Last trip, it was Tim Russert (oh Tim, I missed you all through the elections). This time, it’s Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and the guy who sells OxyClean.<br /><br />And Michael Jackson.<br /><br />Y’ALL. MICHAEL JACKSON. I can’t even tell you how done in I was. “Thriller” was the first real album I owned, along with the soundtrack to “Annie” (the Smurf and Strawberry Shortcake singalong albums I had earlier in my childhood do not count as real albums). I was 5, maybe 6 years old. I wanted the floor to light up when I stepped on it like the street did in the “Billie Jean” video which technically I wasn’t supposed to watch since I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV but which I watched in total awe at friends’ houses and at my grandparents’ in the summer because they didn’t know the rules. (This, children, was back when Music Television actually played music videos. I know it’s hard to conceive. Also, gas used to be less than a dollar and there were only like 30 cable stations. And we walked to school uphill in the snow and we liked it.) And even as he brought the crazy as the years wore on, that early luster couldn’t be tarnished.<br /><br />Frankly I felt like Cape Town wasn’t sufficiently mournful. I mean, my friends back home were all talking about commiserating with people on street corners and parking lots, and here? Nothing. I had a brief moment of connection with a car park attendant who sang “Beat It” with me in the middle of the sidewalk, but otherwise nothing. Possibly, though, it’s because Capetonians are simply holding to the same belief as the guy who sold me new earphones for my iPod the day after Michael died. I mentioned the sadness and he informed me MJ was not really dead. He just needed a rest, so he faked his death and has gone to Cuba with Tupac.<br /><br />Clearly, this man is my new boyfriend.<br /><br />Can I briefly mention how excited I am for the funeral? Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Ross, Liza Minnelli—it’s going to be like every VH1 diva concert rolled into one.<br /><br />I will finish by noting that I attended a meeting recently in which people were asked to fingerpaint their emotions regarding apartheid and the struggle. Maybe for my next act, I’ll knit my reaction to the Holocaust. Or perform an interpretive dance about Tianenmen Square. I’m a lot more cautious about the meetings I attend now.</div>Shannonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06590409022299595324noreply@blogger.com1