Being There

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There’s been a lot of righteous indignation that people are so heartbroken over the Paris terrorist attacks—so upset that they’ve taken action, by changing their Facebook profile photos! But no one changed their Facebook photo when terrorist attacks took place in Lebanon, or Iraq, or Nigeria.

Is this Islamaphobia? Well sure it is, with some people, but not for most.

I think it has a lot more to do with familiarity, in two ways.

First, in 2014 there were 16 terrorist attacks in Lebanon. 16! So far in 2015 there have “only” been seven. I looked it up on that great scholarly source, Wikipedia, because I had been thinking, “Bombings happen all the time in Lebanon” and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t just imagining that. I wasn’t.

In 2014 there were three terror attacks in France, all carried out by lone extremists, and one person died. So the attacks that came in January were the launch of a new era.

I’m not saying, “So what?” about terror attacks in Lebanon. I’m just saying that the frequency of them numbs us to the point where we might roll our eyes and shake our heads and maybe think for 10 seconds, “Those poor people. What a terrible way to live.” But we don’t change our Facebook photos.

Then there’s the other aspect of familiarity: Many westerners (North Americans, Europeans, Aussies, and Kiwis) have been to Paris. We may have studied French in high school or college. We’ve certainly seen Paris, and France, in films and TV shows and heard it referenced in music. How many westerners have been to Beirut? Studied Arabic? Can you name one movie set in Lebanon?

When I googled “films set in Lebanon” I found 16. I’d only heard of one—the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun. When I googled “films set in France” there were so many I couldn’t count them. There were 16 alone that started with the letter “L,” including the good old oldie Lust for Life, starring Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh.

So my point is, empathy is about being able to imagine yourself in someone else’s situation. Even if we’ve never been to Paris, we have seen it so many hundreds of times that we feel it’s familiar, and it’s easier to imagine ourselves in that MacDonald’s where one of the terrorists blew himself up.

—

I went to the Middle East for work earlier this year. I was fortunate to be able to take some extra time to visit Petra, a 2,000-year-old city built by a people called the Nabateans who have since vanished from history. I hiked, bullshitted with the Bedouin guides, and savored the astonishing beauty of the place and the silence—so rare in our world.

TreasuryMoi

A few months later, ISIS starting destroying ancient sites in Syria and Iraq, most notably Palmyra. Palmyra was built thousands of years before Petra and had similarly stunning structures.

A year ago, I might have rolled my eyes and shaken my head and thought, “That’s terrible,” then gone on my way. But now I felt sick to my stomach and I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

So having been to a very similar place, I got it. I got it on a visceral level what a loss to our world the destruction of Palmyra was and I started worrying that ISIS might get to Petra eventually.  Stone buildings aren’t people, but you know what I mean.

Travel creates empathy. Not always, but often. Ironically, the attacks in Paris will probably cause people to stay home or travel only to the safe, sanitized foreign destinations like all-inclusive resorts in Cancun and Ibiza.

Free But Not Free

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After avoiding each other for a couple days—not easy to do in an 800-square-foot space—I offered to make dinner so Vince and I could talk and clear the air.  “Unless u want me to write a letter to u instead,” I texted.  No, he texted back, we can talk.

We started with a hug and “I love you.”  It reminded me of our moments on the hug rug in prison.

He wolfed down his stir fry while I talked, then talked while I ate.  We went through our lists of grievances.  To my surprise I didn’t get defensive and he didn’t roll his eyes and walk out of the room.

The one thing I was nervous about was saying, “It is my house.”  That’s a fact, right?  But saying it would feel like I was lecturing a teenager.  This was about my request that Vince ask me—or at least give me a heads up—when he was inviting people over—even family members.  He responded that I had brought my friend Sarah home a few nights earlier without warning him.

“I didn’t even know who she was,” he said.

“Sarah?  You don’t remember Sarah?” I asked.  “We came down to visit you and we spent the day together picking agates.  We had dinner at that nice restaurant where you ended up working….”  Had he been high on something, all day and evening, and I hadn’t been able to tell?  It didn’t matter now.

“It’s my house,” I said, and the world didn’t end.  We agreed to have dinner together a couple times a week so we can talk things over on a regular basis instead of saving them up.

—

A few days later I texted Vince to ask if he’d like to eat lasagna with me that evening, and he replied that he just wanted to go home and go to be after work.

This is it.  This is what they were talking about the day Vince was released, when they said that adjustment to life on the outside would be harder than anything they experienced in prison.

And now the weather has turned, to the cold, dark days of Minnesota winter.  It’s hard for anyone to get up and leave the house when it’s dark as night and freezing drizzle, but Vince has to walk six blocks, take a bus and a train, then walk six more blocks to his job in the laminating factory.  He still can’t cash his own paycheck because Wells Fargo requires two forms of ID, even for checks drawn on its own accounts.

—

There was an editorial and an article in the St. Paul paper about criminal justice system reform.  At the end of a local forum, two mothers got up and spoke about the effects of incarceration on the family.

“There’s no help,” said one mother whose son had committed suicide at age 28 because he just couldn’t make it on the outside.

“There really isn’t,” said the second mother.  One of her sons is schizophrenic, and thanks to her persistence he’s in a state hospital, not a prison.  She faces eviction because her landlord won’t let her other son, newly-released on 10 years of probation, live with her.  He was convicted of criminal possession of a firearm.  If I was renting in her building and found out he had moved in, I’m sure I’d be unhappy.

These forums and op-eds are good news—there are reform efforts like this going on at the national, state, and local level, and that they have bipartisan support.  But the words of these mothers weighs on me.  Vince actually said the other day something like, “It would almost be easier to go back to prison that to be trapped on house arrest like this.”  Ugh.

MUST be positive!  Must make gratitude lists!  Must not indulge in self pity!  This too shall pass!

Only eight more months to go.

Your Art Here

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I received an email from JPay, the company that sells email access to inmates’ families and friends.  I wrote a couple posts about them in July.  They were the new Department of Corrections vendor with the slick-looking website featuring people who looked totally thrilled! to be overpaying to send emails to their loved ones.

JPay asked me to like them of Facebook.  As if!  Why would anyone want to broadcast that they had a family member in prison, and give free publicity to a company that was harvesting big profits from their misfortune?  There probably is a segment of the population who thinks it’s cool to have someone inside.

And now, JPay is having a holiday art contest.  The theme is “Season’s Greetings.”  Wow, that’s original.  Why not something really crazy like “Happy Holidays”?

Or “I’ll be home for Christmas—not.”

Three winners will be chosen to receive up to $500 worth of prizes.  Up to $500 each or $500 total?  Let me guess, the prizes will be $10 gift cards for JPay emails.  That would work out to about 3 emails.

The contest is only open to JPay customers “that are currently not incarcerated.”  I guess that means mothers, wives, kids, and anyone else left on the outside.  I can’t bring myself to go look at the contest rules.   It doesn’t say what will be done with the artwork, but since the submission email is Facebook@JPay.com, I guess they will be broadcasting that you have a loved one in prison for you, whether you like it or not.  Just another happy customer!

You can’t make this stuff up.  I was taken aback when I saw this in my in box.  I had hoped to never, ever have anything to do with the prison industrial complex again.

I could opt out of receiving future emails from them, but the absurdity of of a coloring contest from a prison vendor–not to mention the poor and vague wording–has provided me with so many laughs that now I’m kind of looking forward to what they’ll do for Martin Luther King Day and Valentine’s Day.

Geographic Cure, Denied

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We’re having a long, warm, sunny autumn here in St. Paul. I get outside as much as possible. I hike along the Mississippi River or go to a park and sit in my car with the sun on my face while I read or do a crossword puzzle. I even went camping in the middle of the week.

Well, it was cabin camping. A heated cabin with electricity. I went for a long hike along the St. Croix River then made a roaring fire outside the cabin. I drank some wine and read a book. It was soooo quiet. Lovely. It was just what I needed, but now it seems like a year ago.

Pines

I love being outdoors and I love to travel, but I am also a homebody. I’ve been trying to not be home as much as possible because things are tense. Sharing 800 square feet would be tough with anyone, but I am living with my grown son. No grown man wants to live with his parents.

And my grown son is newly released from prison and negotiating all sorts of challenges, like maintaining sobriety in the land of 10,000 liquor stores and bars. His time outside the condo is very limited and must be pre-approved. The probation agents have not come to the house lately, unless they’ve come in the middle of the night and I didn’t hear them. Apparently they are now showing up at his workplace and making him take urinalysis tests there.

He is working full time, volunteering, cooking, getting out into nature and exercising, and going to AA. He doesn’t complain. He doesn’t ask me for much. I thought things were going relatively well.

When there is something I don’t like, I’ve been direct—asking him to take off his shoes when he comes home, for instance. He always says okay.

He’s been mostly silent for weeks. It’s uncomfortable, but I figured he was going through lots of changes and it wasn’t about me. I figured if he had something to say he would say it. Then I discovered that he had said it, just not to me. Ouch.

I want him to have his say. I want him to speak up. This morning he took me to task for making noise in the kitchen while he was sleeping. His bedroom is on the other side of the wall from the garbage disposal…I got defensive at first, then apologized.  I’m glad he said it to me, not to the spectators in the arena that is the blogosphere.

—

I interviewed for a job in London three weeks ago. Typical for a nonprofit, they wanted someone who could do at least three jobs in one. They wanted a researcher, a relationship/sales manager, a writer/editor, a trainer, and a budget/finance person all in one. Ideally, there would be a division of labor by people who are suited to and strong in different skill sets.

It was 10 days until I found out I didn’t get it, but it was 10 days of daydreaming. It was like having a “Move to London” lottery ticket in my pocket. I researched where the office was and looked at flats on Craig’s List. I mentally packed two large suitcases with everything I would need. Vince would, of course, stay behind in the condo and have all 800 feet to himself. We would get along great again, once I was 4,000 miles away. I would use every vacation day to travel, travel, travel. London would be such a great base! It would be so much easier to get to my long-haul bucket list destinations, like Australia, New Zealand, Japan, India, and all of Southeast Asia. Oh yes, and the job…of course the people would be easy to get along with and they would love my work and it would be cosmically fulfilling. Then after 3-5 years I would come home and semi-retire, just as Vince was getting married and wanting to buy his own place.

Yep, I had it all figured out. I probably dodged a bullet.  But now what?

Beautiful France

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ANNE

I am writing this the day after the latest terrorist attacks in Paris. There were multiple terrorist attacks in Lebanon the previous day which are getting a lot less attention in the west. I don’t think this is callous disregard for people in the Middle East. I think it’s about what Paris stands for.

I’ve been to Paris and it’s wonderful but the trip that helped me appreciate joie de vivre was to Provence in 2012. I went for a Mini Cooper festival. Yeah, it’s a thing. Specifically, Iggy Pop was the festival headliner, and seeing Iggy Pop in concert was on my bucket list. So off I went.

I had taken a heavy-duty meditation class for three months prior to this trip, so I was as chill as I will ever be. I missed my flight from Paris to Marseilles because I was too absorbed in watching planes come and go through the cavernous windows at Charles de Gaulle airport. I got to Marseilles after dark and chose to drive the two-hours to my hotel in the dark instead of spending the night in a hotel. So part of my perception that France is “so laid back” was my own state of mind, and the fact that I was on vacation. If I actually lived in the south of France, had to get up and go to work every day, pay bills … well, I’d be willing to try it to see if it was as stressful as daily life in the U.S.

I turned the corner out of the rental car company into the enormous tunnel under the port of Marseilles and ran smack into a thousand-car traffic jam. Here’s where I first noticed something different. In the U.S., people would have been laying on the horn, screaming the F bomb, and abandoning their vehicles to “go get someone to straighten this out.” I witnessed something like this when I was in a 25-car pileup on the freeway in St. Paul during a blizzard a few years ago.

But not in the south of France. People were honking, but only in a half-hearted, “I’m bored so I’ll toot a tune on my horn” sort of way. We all had our windows rolled down because it was a hot evening and there were diesel fumes and of course most of the people were smoking. My fellow travelers were listening to a comedy show on the radio. It was in French so I didn’t know it was a comedy show until the people around me started laughing and it echoed throughout the tunnel. Some of them looked over at me and I fake-laughed. Not one of the thousands of us got out to “go find someone and get this fixed.” Eventually we started moving and were on our way.

—

My friend Heidi flew over from London for 24 hours for the festival, but after that I was on my own for however long I was there. A week? 10 days? I can’t even remember. Time seemed to slowed down.

I went for a hike along the Mediterranean:

The Med

Yes, there were vineyards, and sections of the trail smelled like pizza because they were planted with rosemary and oregano.

Vinyard

I drove around the mountains in my rental Peugot, which was smaller than my Mini Cooper. I stopped at a farmer’s market and bought some fresh produce, Roquefort cheese, a small bottle of champagne.

French Farmers mkt

I ate at a seaside restaurant. I was there for hours—no one came to whisk my plate away and deposit my bill the moment I’d taken my last bite.

?

France, in my mind, stands for beauty and enjoyment of all life’s moments and pleasures. Food that tastes like food, drinking (and—gasp!—even smoking) in moderation. Seeing and appreciating beauty, not just rushing blindly through life checking off items on a to-do list. I know France has got plenty of ills, but I believe these are some of the reasons she is targeted—because fundamentalists (of any faith) hate beauty and pleasure. Not to mention topless sun bathers.

Sun bathers

Today, I will be French.  I will appreciate the sunrise from my front window.  No terrorist can take that away from me.

Sunrise

Prison News Roundup, Suspicious Pork Story Edition

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ANNE

Now, having written in my last post about how my guiding principle in life is the pursuit of justice, I have to confess that I have no desire to do anything on prison issues beyond writing the occasional blog post about them. I thought I would take up the prison-industrial complex’s exploitation of prisoners for near-slave labor, or their milking of families with outrageous phone charges, but I don’t want to even think about these things anymore. I no longer want to carry around clippings about prison abuses in my diary for future blog posts. I want to be free. I want to have fun. I want to go to a trampoline park, or race my Mini on a real track, or bake French macaroons, or just hunker down with a good 800-page novel for the winter.

—

However, there have been some big developments recently on the prison front that I can’t not note.

In case you have been at a silent retreat in Nova Scotia for the last month, you don’t know that the U.S. Justice Department has begun releasing 6,000 federal prisoners. This is the largest one-time release in history. It’s part of a bipartisan effort led by President Obama to reduce crowding in prisons and free nonviolent offenders who were given harsh sentences in the 80s and 90s. Maximum sentences were reduced in 2014 and the changes were retroactive.

About 2,000 of those released are undocumented individuals who will be deported immediately.

The others will have their challenges, as recently featured on John Oliver Last Week Tonight.  Thank you, John.

—

In the “I can’t believe I’m reading this” department, the nation’s pork producers are in an uproar after the feds abruptly removed all pork products from the menu for federal prisoners.

I have not eaten pork since I converted to Judaism nearly 40 years ago. I don’t keep kosher; I eat plenty of shrimp. The pork thing is just symbolic. But everyone around me seems obsessed with bacon, so I was very suspicious to read that this pork ban is based on surveys of prisoners which found that they didn’t like pork. Really?  When I asked Vince, who loves all forms of pig meat, he said it could actually be true because the “pork” that is served in prison is of such poor quality that it’s nauseating.

Of course there are those who suspect that the Obama Administration is kow-towing to Muslim prisoners (he’s a Muslim, you know).

The story mentions that pork has been getting more expensive, but why ban it completely?

My personal suspicion is that there is some corporate interest at work here, such as the American turkey industry, who took a huge hit this year due to Avian influenza and may be looking to make up for lost profits.

A note: There are 206,000 federal prisoners—er, I guess 200,000 after the aforementioned prisoner release, which still leaves about 2.2 million non-federal prisoners who will be able to pig out on pork.

Jew Be a Verb

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ANNE

A story line throughout the third season of Orange is the New Black is the character Cindy’s conversion to Judaism.

The corporation that runs the prison is cutting costs by purchasing brown, lumpy slop in giant bags that they pass off as food. One prisoner figures out that the frozen kosher meals are pretty good, and soon a group of prisoners are claiming to be Jewesses in order to eat kosher.

When the prison notices the uptick in kosher requests, it sends in a rabbi to suss out who is a genuine Jew. Cindy, who is Black, begins to read up on Judaism. At first she just wants to pass so she can keep eating kosher. But then something grabs her, and as she studies she becomes serious about converting to Judaism, and well, this is one of the few happy endings in the series. It wouldn’t be a happy ending to born again Christians, and we Jews aren’t in to converting people, but I am moved when anyone finds meaning.

I heard in this scene many of the same things that led me to Judaism. Like Cindy, I was raised in a faith in which pretty much Everything was A Sin, and fear and guilt ruled the day. You didn’t ask questions, you did what you were told by the men who ran the show, some of whom were molesting your friends. If you sinned, you went to this same man to ask forgiveness and it was granted by him and after I mumbled three Hail Marys.

—

I think there’s a perception that Judasim is just like Christianity, except without Jesus. It’s not.

In liberal Judaism, which includes the vast majority of Jews in the world, there is no hell and little emphasis on sin. The idea is to do the right thing today, because it’s the right thing—not to avoid hell. If you screw up, it’s your responsibility to make amends to whoever you have hurt and to make your peace with God, if you even believe in god, because a lot of Jews are atheists. Confused? Well in Judaism it’s your responsibility to study, ask questions, and wrestle with all the big issues to figure out what makes sense for you. No one tells you what to think or do. Rabbis, who include women and gays and lesbians, are teachers and have no authority to forgive you.

Judaism doesn’t prosthelytize. We don’t care if you agree with us or not; we don’t care if you are a Christian or a Buddhist or a pagan. Just don’t try to convert us, thanks.

Instead of using the word charity, we talk about justice. It’s not an option, and it’s not about writing a check. It’s about doing, fighting, and pursuing justice. These principles are one reason why I’ve been able to look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from all sides.

Of course there are plenty of Lutherans and Catholics and pagans and agnostics who are also motivated by social justice.

There’s more, but like Cindy, the main thing that attracted me to Judasim was an inexplicably strong feeling of recognition. Like Cindy said, “I feel like I found my people.”

After I had studied for several years with a Rabbi and a group of fellow seekers and yes, learned elemental Hebrew, I converted—which is a five-minute ceremony. My mother attended the Friday night service in which this took place. Just before we left for synagogue, she said, “I guess it makes sense, you converting to Judaism, since your father’s family was Jewish.”

What!? She had known I was studying all along. She didn’t have any details, and since my dad died 47 years ago and we’re not close to his family, and I have no time or patience for family tree research, it will just remain a question mark.

When I told a rabbi this story once, she said that she hears stories like this often, and that there is a theory that all the Jewish souls lost in the Holocaust have sought refuge in the people who are converting, whether they’re in prison (Cindy) or are unwed teenage moms living in subsidized housing (me, nearly 40 years ago).

A Cell is a Cell is a Cell

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ANNE

Is there such a thing as prison-phobia? If so I’ve got it. After nearly two years of thinking, reading, talking, and writing about prison, I have an irrational fear of ending up in inside myself.

Just for the record, I have not broken any state, federal, or international laws.

However, just last night I was reading the novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain” by James Baldwin. In it, a character is minding his own business when a two robbers being chased by the police come running along and stand next to him, catching their breath. He is arrested with them and beaten mercilessly in an attempt to get him to confess, which he doesn’t. He is eventually released, but he slits his wrists the next day because he is so traumatized by the experience.

Did I mention he is black and the cops are white? Does this sound familiar? The book was published in 1953. Sadly, some things don’t change.

So that scenario is not likely to happen to me, but phobias are irrational, not rational.

I was also freaked out by the third season of Orange is the New Black. I won’t give away what the last scene of the last episode sets up for the inmates, but it had something to do with crowding/lack of privacy and it really hit a nerve.

—

My cousin, Molly, and I have talked over the years about buying a piece of land overlooking the St. Croix River and building a retirement community of tiny houses. You know, these are the 250- to 400-square-foot houses (75-122 square meters) made of beautiful woods and lots of clever features to store stuff and make the most use of the space. The idea is, you can have a paid-off house, live in the country, and feel good about yourself because you aren’t destroying the planet by consuming as much as the average new home built in America, which as of 2013 was nearly 2,500 square feet (762 square meters)!

Then Molly sent me this article, “Dear People Who Live in Fancy Tiny Houses” and it killed my dream:

What if you’re having a shitty day and you just want to be alone? You can’t be alone, right? Because your partner or children are sitting two to ten feet away from you at all times. Don’t you feel like a rat trapped in a cage? Don’t you ever want to turn toward your lover or spawn and shout, “Get out! Get out of my tiny house!”

The condo Vince and I are sharing is 800 some square feet. So it’s not the tiniest, but there are privacy issues. When the other Molly—Vince’s girlfriend—is over, I’m sure he wishes I would disappear. I wish I could kick back on a Friday night and watch my geek-ola shows like the PBS News Hour and Washington Week in Review with a couple glasses of wine, but I can’t.

On the whole, things are going well with us, at least from my perspective. But I have mostly lived alone since Vince left home 20 years ago, so it’s an adjustment.

Breaking Free, Mom-Only Version

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ANNE

It’s been nearly two months since I’ve written a post.  For those of you who began following this blog recently, I’m Vince’s mom.  He and I co-wrote this thing for a year.  I had been posting every other day for over a year.  He sent me hand-written pages and I typed them and posted, alternating between his content and mine.

When Vince was released from prison, I checked with him every other day: “Do you want me to write a post?” and he’d reply, “No, I’ve got it covered.”  I asked him several times to give me a couple days’ notice if he wasn’t going to post on a given day.

I winced at his typos and sloppy spacing.  But Breaking Free was his blog too, and he was really unloading some powerful content—stuff he had not been free to write about in prison, some heavy experiences and emotions.

It was kind of a nice break for me.  Vince wrote that he wanted to take his writing in a different direction, and I started thinking about what else I might blog about eventually—maybe something fun like travel.

I felt blindsided when I read his post in which he announced that he was done with the blog—right now—for personal reasons.  I have no idea what the personal reasons were.  When I tried to discuss it with him he said, “You weren’t writing anything anyway.”  Aargh.

I was pissed.  I was hurt.  He hadn’t given me a heads up, so I had no content ready.  And when there’s no posting on a blog, readership falls off quickly.  I had invested over a year of my life in conceptualizing what the blog would be, figuring out the technology, keeping it fed, and getting the word out about it.  I watched as the readership stats shriveled with each passing day of inactivity.  It was like sitting by the bedside of a dying loved one, patting his/her hand, and feeling powerless to do anything.

I was waiting for inspiration (and time) to write.  Then I read one of those Facebook quotes—it was by Albert Einstein or Fred Flintstone or a maybe a fortune cookie—something like, “If you wait for inspiration you wait in vain.”  That snapped me out of my procrastination and resentment.  Hey, whatever works.

Co-blogging with Vince created a natural cadence, a tension, and a story arc that was a pleasant surprise.  I’m not sure how it’ll go with just me, but we’ll find out.