| For more than a year the state of Louisiana has been trying to tell me i owe and undisclosed amount of back tax money to them for a year i never lived in Louisiana. I’ve been out of the country for most of it but intermittently try to provide them with proof of the negative. Quite the existential activity to prove where i wasn’t… finally an agent gave me examples of the different things i could provide. I faxed all of them to the office and was informed it would be about six weeks to process.Fast-forward less than six weeks later but more than one, and i was informed that i owed $2,984.70 by a letter from a collection agency. Imagine my surprise (and chagrin) that i was given 10 days to “settle this obligation voluntarily”. Of course it arrived on Saturday so i couldn’t do anything all weekend except worry.
Monday afternoon i settled into the couch and was caller number 22 to the state of Louisiana department of revenue. I listened to the announcements loop – including a piece about how convenient it is to use their online tools. Finally connected, an agent pulled up my file, opened my documents and confirmed that i didn’t owe them any money. Hooray! Only when i called the collection agency the agent informed, with an edge of “this is a much bigger problem than you think” in his voice, that some major meeting pertaining to my account was happing on the 25th and since i didn’t have a confirmation number that could prove problematic. This time i was caller number six, but it took longer because i was waiting for the collections department. That agent informed me that all was well and they would handle what needed to be handled and pass that information on to mr “big meeting on the 25th. I guess i’ll see. At least it is one less thing for me to worry about- i don’t really have the time for it- all my brain power is concentrated on finding gainful employment. Le sigh. |
Tags: money, neworleans
| Growing up I never understood the story of the prodigal son. I mean, I knew the story, but I always identified more with the son who never strayed. Far from the perfect child, i was – however – the contrast to my sister. She was the popular cheerleader full of potential who was content (at 17) to do what she wanted, consequences be damned. I was the geek- good grades and extracurricular activities.
i watched with irritation as my parents tried to get my sister to understand what consequences were and why she should care. And success or failure at driving that message home – driving it always ensured time and attention directed her way. She was, in my estimation, our family’s prodigal daughter without ever having left home. Please understand, I was never short of love or attention by any means. Even then i knew it wasn’t favoritism, it’s just the point in anticipation of my counterpoint. Fast-forward 10 years and i am the prodigal child. Youthful ways discarded, my sister became an amazing wife-mother-woman. All of a sudden i’m on the receiving end of extra time and attention and resources. And much like with my sister- my parents never say a word. Simply offer up what they can and try to help me to remember i haven’t always been and won’t always be their prodigal daughter. Being on the other side now allows me an understanding of all the players in a prodigal tale. Parents and children alike looking for love – looking to show love in whatever ways it can be received. And seeing the world through both the story’s characters helps me to understand it in a way i never did when i was younger. Understand it and see those roles, and my reaction to them, unfold in other ways. Sometimes friendships are prodigal tales of their own; old lost love revived in a wave of nostalgia and regret at all the lost time. I recently had a friend return to my life. More than the FB catch-up, we’ve begun building an “us” again. So many years behind us, we can neither pretend to start anew nor rely too heavily on what was. Instead we are constructing some hybrid of past and future. And i’m loving it. Still, there are people in my life who never faded away…my kindreds. People who have not received a joyous reception because they have been here in my day to day life, laughing and arguing and offering love without pause. The thing is- there is beauty in both. Beauty in the still staid love; grace in that which returns. One providing faith in the ability of love to remain despite life running off in its many directions- the other offering proof that that which we sometimes lose can be found again. |
Some people, more than place, are home. The smell of them. The slight laugh, a truncated chuckle with some irony thrown in. the feel and look of them – even though time adds pounds and grays hair. The voice reverberating deep in a chest. The smile not telling everything.
He was there when I was becoming. He was the mortar to my bricks and held me in place.
Life gets complicated. Marriage and kids and countries and years of silence punctuated by short bouts of “almost”. Almost a replica of the human hometown. Crack the same jokes. Insert laughter just where it would have been. Close but so far away from what it was.
But home seemed changed. Home was different. Home was gone.
Only to rediscover eight hours later at the heart of a hug that home is still there, under the years. And he says, “people don’t change, not really, they deepen but…”. And the ‘but’ hangs there uncertainly but profoundly understood in its unfinished incarnation.
Tomorrow or next week may bring hurried and harried life back into my home. May invite laughter that doesn’t ring with the same joy, or hugs that don’t evoke the same tears that I know are possible. But an eight hour respite from homelessness is a reprieve unanticipated and for this tiny moment I am sated.
Reconciling my own feelings about working overseas in development is difficult enough. Is there harm done? To what extent? Is there good? Does it make up for the bad? I don’t believe good intentions are enough, that something is always better than nothing. Sometimes the cure can be worse than the disease. But how do I know…for sure…how do I know?
Second graders aren’t that nuanced. Differentiating Africa as continent versus Africa as country seemed a fair starting point. So we looked at the map and named different places they’d been; and once they settled down from the excitement of talking about trips to San Antonio and Mexico – not differentiating city from country – we named a few countries in Africa.
Honestly speaking, I had an agenda of my own. Rather than perpetuate the singular vision of Africa, starving child with flies languishing on a distended belly, I introduced another face of the African identity. The city.
Everyone sees the rural villages with grass roofs and mud walls, that reality is well documented on television and in magazines. There is generally the photo of a long dusty road and someone carrying a load of fire wood or 20 liters of water or herding cows in the brown swath cut through a nameless savannah, dry grass brown and blowing in a breeze. Those can be legitimate photos; I have a few. In the various villages I’ve lived in and visited, it is an experience in Uganda or South Africa or Ethiopia.
But it isn’t “the” experience.
And so I introduced Uganda with a skyline picture of Kampala- the capital. I’d prefaced this revelation, met by “ohhs” and “ahhs”, with “what does Uganda look like?” And after a flurry of “dry” and “sand” and “hot” we flushed out more –“ straw houses” and “sticks”. The tall buildings, not unlike Dallas or Houston, were not what they had described or expected to see.
But Kampala isn’t the only Ugandan experience either. And so I showed them Iganga, the rural town I lived in, and another picture of one of the villages my organization worked in.
We talked about foods – similar and different. We talked about water and the ways people collect it, the dangers they sometimes face.
I have no idea how much of our conversation stuck- the students are seven and eight year olds after all, their reference points are Spongebob Squarepants and Hannah Montanna. One child waved her hand in the air eagerly to ask a question and then earnestly told me about a movie she’d seen with monkeys who were being prodded with an electrical shock device, stole it, and then prodded their captors with it. I smiled and nodded and thanked her for her story.
Another girl, however, with a calm hand raised and a soft shy voice, shared that, “when the water is unclean sometimes you can put it on the fire for five or 10 minutes and then you can drink it.” And I was so pleased all I could do was smile.
Our session on my time in Uganda over, and the school day drawing to a close, I spoke briefly with the teacher who’d so graciously cleared her afternoon schedule to provide time for me to speak. “The other day we were collecting shoes for orphans,” she shared with me, “and I was explaining to the kids that those kids don’t have shoes and sometimes they only get one meal a day- if that. It is good for them to understand that people live differently than they do in other countries.”
Maybe my message, like her parting comment to me, weren’t clear. I wasn’t sure if she’d soaked in the Kampala cityscape and filed it away with the photograph of the second graders hauling water from a swamp. I’d hoped to convey our similarities at least as much as the ways our worlds seem foreign- for the harsh realities to be balanced by the more beautiful ones. After all, Africa is large, it contains multitudes.
I wrote this back in 2003 and it still feels true to me now.
The Black Experience. It sounds like a thrill ride at an amusement park. Strap yourself in and prepare to be amazed or dismayed, amused or abused. Strap yourself in and discover what life is like when your skin is browner than a tan, your hair like lamb’s wool. Only, the idea of the Black Experience as a singular experience is as narrow as the idea that Black is reserved only for those who are darker than a brown paper bag. There are experiences; plural, wrapped up in all the ways Black people look and sound, wrapped up in all the ways we live.
Barely passing the brown paper bag test myself, I have spent years fighting the assumption that Blackness is a finite definition complete with checklist to verify authenticity. Victorious when that definition embraced the “light bright, darn near white” philosophy, in turn I was set aside for “the darker the berry the sweeter the juice”. What did that say about my berries?
The rigidity in defining who is Black has intrigued and bewildered me. Caught up somewhere in hairstyles or political standings, mingled with hip-hop as lifestyle or the adoration of Marcus Garvey over Booker T. Washington, the expectation or assumption that Black people must share the same thought processes and aspirations saddens me. Those assumptions have cast me into a category of exceptions. An anomaly. Just looking at me could raise an eyebrow at my purity- as if there were such a thing. My appearance is sometimes called into question, my hair curly more than kinky, my eyes hinting hazel.
More than my look, it is my behavior that causes people to question just how Black I really am. For starters, I talk like a white girl…or so I’ve been told. What exactly that means I’m not sure. Is my voice inflection somehow different than the race issued one I was supposed to have, or is it implying that Black people use Ebonics instead of Standard English?
And when people find out I’ve lived abroad, listen to country music, sky dive, when people discover my hair isn’t chemically straightened and I’ve been published, the questioning look perches in their eyes as if I’ve cheated in some game I never wanted to play.
And so I’m not Black. People tell me in “complimentary” tone that I’m not like other Black people, insulting me without realizing it because I come from everything they praise me for not being. I’m not Black. Called a wannabe for simply wanting to be myself.
I’m not Black. I’m not Black…but I am.
A friend and I joked that we wanted to start a website. We’d post our activities and search out others just like us – or just as different as us – to join us. We could just imagine all the different kind of Black folks all over America signing on. It was that joking, at least in part, that got me thinking about the way people are socialized to think about race and gender in a certain way. The way a culture, a community, a kinship can cultivate the way people see themselves and the rest of the world.
Growing up I read Black Boy and The Bluest Eye looking for myself between the pages. But I wasn’t there. I didn’t find a light-eyed light-skinned Black woman who was sometimes called swirl, sometimes darkie. I never met a fictionalized me, someone with parents still married after 30 years, someone whose family doesn’t buy gifts at Christmas.
All of those images of myself that never materialized make up who I am. They shape my personal definition of Blackness and my Black Experience. But if no one is telling my story than the myth of the one great Black Experience is strengthened.
The rural village I lived in as a Peace Corps Volunteer will probably never make the news or National Geographic. Most people will never know how the girls come back from Koma (rite of passage) painted in red, eager and waiting to burn their blankets of childhood, the women greeting them with ululations and pride. Most people will never have the chance to experience the similarities of an Ndebele grandmother insisting that I eat in much the same way my own grandmother insists. But it is an experience- my experience. It happened; it is a story that deserves to be told.
I want to see the pictures that are never shown and watch for the story that is never told, so I can show and tell them. I want a girl looking for a glimpse of herself to have more than a singular experience to choose from.
Tags: me-ness, socialcommentary
The back cab of an 18-wheeler was not the transportation I’d imagined for the evening; but i hadn’t foreseen an armed driver chasing me down the street either.
Shannon and I were supposed to be heading to a gathering of friends in…wow…I don’t even remember where, South Africa. Contrary to our actual knowledge of maneuvering in South Africa, we’d dilly dallied the morning away. It was Saturday and we must have forgotten, despite more than a year in country, that transportation slows to nothing by two o’clock, earlier depending on how big the town or city you were in.
We left Pietersburg around noon I think. Stupidly, neither of us was concerned, not even when the place where our first khumbi (picture a beat up minivan with 15-25 people and animals shoved into it) dropped us off, was almost empty and the few khumbies idling there were empty of passengers.
The thing about khumbies is that they don’t care what time it is. Time is not of the essence, money is. And so a khumbi driver will wait, and wait, and wait…and wait, until his vehicle is full – whatever his definition of full is (recall the 15-25 people/animal range). On a busy day in a busy hub like Pretoria or even Louis Trichardt, that could be a few minutes; in Lebowakgomo, the township closest to the village I lived in, it could be hours.
The sparsely populated hub, so late on a Saturday afternoon, should have been a blaring warning sign to us but we assured ourselves it would be fine- we let ourselves be assured.
Every taxi rank, as the khumbi hubs were then known, had a Taxi Marshall. This was the person who knew where every khumbi was going and how much it would cost to ride. They couldn’t tell you when you’d depart – let alone arrive- but even in a parking lot filled with hundreds of khumbies they could point you to the overcrowded death trap heading in the direction you needed it to go. This taxi rank had no easily identifiable Marshall –warning number two. Instead Shannon and I were met with a khumbi driver headed where we wanted to go and eager for our fare. His taxi was empty but he smiled and directed us inside assuring us that it would soon fill and we’d be on our way.
An uncertain look around the quiet town and sparse parking lot did not yield any alternatives and so Shannon and I settled into our favored seats and fell into conversation. It was hot but it wouldn’t stay that way, the altitude was high and the temperature would start dropping by nightfall. Nightfall was still a long way away though – it hadn’t crept into our minds.
An hour passed, two. At the three o’clock mark I remember Shannon having to pee but refusing to go, garnering her the nickname Camel. I remember the first true doubts crossing our minds and our first attempt to get out of the khumbi.
See, what I neglected to mention is that one thing not really allowed is getting out of a khumbi to attempt a different mode of transportation. I don’t know if it is because we were foreign or if that translated to all passengers but in the two years I lived in South Africa it was not something I remember seeing. And so when we attempted to disembark, backpacks, sheepish grins, and excuses at the ready, we were rebuffed. A tight smile and a stern assurance, again, that we’d be leaving soon. Only now darkness was less distant stranger and more inevitable visitor. We let some more time pass, the sun making its journey across the sky and hatched a plan in the meantime.
I would get off without our stuff, head to the bathroom and then circle back when the driver was distracted so that Shannon could feed our bags through the window and she could ease out. Everything went more or less according to plan except…
…except our driver saw us.
He and another man spotted us as we neared the edge of the parking lot – the street stretched before us filled with the possibility of escape from eternity in waiting– we hoped. The driver yelled and screamed at us as we crossed the street at a near run, panting, with our bags in to – fearful and giggling because it all seemed surreal.
Now we were stuck. There was no going back and only hitchhiking leading us forward, the sun daring us to beat it to the finish line. We sat on the side of the road, cattycorner to our previous parking purgatory, waiting for cars to pass, hands outstretched to demonstrate our need for transportation. Observing our attempts to hitchhike the khumbi driver and another man came running towards us, gun waving.
What they were yelling I couldn’t tell you, my eye was trained first on the men, then the gun, then the houses and streets and cars blurring past me as Shannon and I ran. In retrospect they probably wouldn’t have shot us. Less a threat for us, it was an effective deterrent to any passing car that appeared sympathetic to our plight. Still, fear is a great motivator and Shannon and I were motivated to move on down the road.
Much further down the road, away from businesses and caught in a stretch of road canopied by houses closed up for the night, fear and panic were tap dancing on our hearts. The cold rolled in with the darkness and we realized we had no safe place to sleep. This was the part of our story when a crazy but workable plan was supposed to descend upon us so we could save ourselves, or where someone else emerged magically to save us.
The 18-wheeler eased to a noisy stop right about then. I don’t remember it driving up – which is hard to believe given the sheer size and noise of an 18-wheeler. Still, there it was, like some mythical beast descending to save us, right on schedule.
Desperation prevented Shannon and I from judging the situation too critically – to judgmentally – as daylight and the absence of a gun toting khumbi driver might have. I am thankful for that. The driver stuck his head out of his window and asked, with a rather soft voice, where we were headed. We countered with, “Where are you going?” It was too late to make our event and the novelty and anticipation had long since evaporated. We wanted out – wherever out might be. We could figure out the rest later.
Nelspruit? Nelspruit sounded beyond wonderful to us. One of the border cities to Swaziland, we’d been there before. There was a hostel and a mall. Sleep and food were almost within reach.
Our rescuer proved more kind and gracious then my critical eye could have imagined. He was thin and white with mousy brown hair and was smoking a cigarette when he stopped. The shadows cast from a setting sun or too much time watching scary movies could have colored my impression of the driver – any other day he might have been the source of my fear. But Shannon and I eyed each other skeptically as he tidied the space behind his seats, the place I imagine he usually sleeps; we eyed each other skeptically but climbed in anyway.
Turns out he was the most genteel of people, putting out his cigarette as soon as he heard me cough (he didn’t light another one the entire drive through the winding mountainous drive) and silencing the music he’d presumably been listening to before to put in a Whitney Houston tape (he looked back at us and smiled when he pressed play).
His final act of kindness was in the drop off. He wasn’t heading into Nelspruit, he had to continue on his way, but instead of simply dropping us on the side of the road in a location similar to where he’d picked us up, he dropped us at a well-lit gas station, leaving us with a bright smile illuminated by the harsh lights of gas station and “safe journey” mingled in the air with the sound of his roaring engine.
At the time I didn’t realize it was a race. In my mind the canoe was simply a lazy way to enjoy the beaming sun as we waited for the border between South Africa and Botswana to open. And so the Orange river was my personal chauffer. I flung one long brown leg over the edge and perched my head on the opposite side. My sunglasses slipped down my nose from the sweat and my gray do-rag pulled my hair back from my face.
Lizzie was red-faced and rowing with dedicated strokes. In my world she was red from sun. Blond hair turning white in places from the intense sunlight, pale as fine porcelain- she refused to use sunscreen. I’d long given up paddling, maybe I’d never started. With the exception of a prolonged stretch of river that proved so still and stagnant that black river flies attacked us mercilessly (I was eager to assist our accelerated departure) I was content to watch the shore drift by, scenery seemingly unchanging.
Other canoes drifted by. Sometimes I exchanged laugher or staccatoed conversation with the occupants before the current, or the people power inside a canoe, propelled a boat forward and toward that distant horizon.
There was no music on the river and my voice wasn’t meant for singing, but I often find myself singing anyway. That day maybe it was the sun bathing me in bright yellow light pleasantly hot on my skin, I’m not really sure, but something started me humming.
I don’t know what put Summertime in my head since I’d never seen the opera/musical Porgy and Bess but there I was, first humming and then outright singing:
Summertime and the living is eas
Fish are jumping and the cotton is high
Your daddy’s rich and your ma she’s good looking
Hush little baby, don’t you cry
It was soothing somehow; it was fitting.
Maybe if I’d done less singing I would have realized that Lizzie was red from exertion and not sun. In her world – she confided years later (still a hint of irritation in her voice)- that leisurely boat ride complete with my hand trailing through the water, was actually a race. Each canoe that passed us by with grinning and laughing travel mates, those were competitors.
Who knew?
Summertime became a kind of theme song. It happened slowly. Spread like refrigerated honey- it comes in its own time. First it was Lizzy. At the time she seemed the most obvious person – the least challenging to infect since she was my original canoe, seat, and tent mate. In retrospect I realize musical conversion was impressive given a lingering irritation about canoe “races” 10 years later.
After a few weeks b travel – it was pretty common for me to strike up Summertime during our long daytime drives over potted and pitted roads. I’d smile to myself and hum a bar or two and then break into song good and loud –I am, after all, the antithesis of quiet and shy. I’d start it but many of my travel mates would join me.
It wasn’t a Bollywood moment – or better – a Porgy and Bess moment. We weren’t well choreographed or even in key but we’d sing and laugh together – a hodge podge of foreigners (Germany, Ireland, England, Canada, US) doing a whirlwind touristed version of six sub-Saharan African countries. It could have been any song…but it wasn’t.
I’m not a texist. Honestly, some of my best friends –hell, family – are Texans. Some would classify me as Texan given my middle and high school residencies, but that leaves room for debate. Besides, being a Texan doesn’t preclude anyone from being a texist. People have hated what they are for centuries, be it denial or brainwashing.
That isn’t the point though. The point is that I’m not a texist. The point is that I love a whole lot about this place even as I don’t want to live here. There is more than friendliness here, there is warmth. Maybe it is just my little nook of Houston but given that I’ve been more than visitor in this state for years, I know it extends beyond these city limits.
There is art. Natural beauty. Diversity.
Saying it all like that I can almost forget that this is about me not wanting to live here. The bigger issue with texas isn’t what it lacks, mostly it is what it is…it is my childhood. It is a pre-me me. And I know that doesn’t even make sense but in some ways it really does. I mean, dough is a pre-bread bread and really Houston is where I was dough. Where I was kneaded together and left to rise. And I rose. And then I went elsewhere to bake.
The reality is that I went elsewhere to be kneaded too- cali, England, florida- but the bulk of the rising time was in texas and so I associate it with all the early missteps and heartaches, my childhood habits that I’ve struggled to leave behind but that somehow rear up whenever I’m in…you guessed it…texas.
Maybe the true sign of growth would be me staying here. Maybe the ultimate growth is maintaining the me I claim to be when I’m in the place that reminds me most of the dough I was…but maybe I’m just not that keen on demonstrating.
Mostly my heart craves to be home. My heart craves to be in a place where my life, though slightly odd, isn’t really odd at all. No husband no children no problem.
The military brat in me knows that this can be true wherever I end up. I’ve been the new girl enough times to know that if you have no choice you can dig in you can navigate and excavate and figure out home.
But I don’t wanna…
Having finally figured out home as a geographical – GPSable – location and not simply wherever my family’s love encompasses me – I’m reluctant to give it up. Check that…I’m gonna fight like hell. And if that makes me a texist…well…I can live with that.
Tags: future, transition
I felt the bump. Once. Twice. Maybe three times. I even looked around, irritated and my mind vaguely thinking about someone trying to pick my pocket. But downtown Kampala at dusk, sticking close to my BLB (big little brother) and I didn’t feel unsafe. Even so, something made me feel my bag, run my fingers across the only external pocket, the place I keep my phone so I don’t have to dig for it.
It was open. Phone? Gone.
I saw a young boy with a phone in his hand walk in the opposite direction. His head was down. He didn’t run but he never looked up.
I hesitated for a moment, reached for BLB to explain and then hurried across the street with my eyes glued to that bobbing head. stupid I know. Insanely stupid. Only, more than money or anything else, my phone – with all my numbers, my phone the basic umbilical to my life here- essential.
I skipped two steps at a time and reached out to tap him. He must have been following me with his peripheral vision. He didn’t run. Didn’t try to deny it was mine. simply said, “it’s yours, you dropped it,” handed it to me and kept walking.
Apparently the potential mob justice that would have followed a scene is less than pleasant. Instead I was caught off guard and he evaporated into the throng of people. Later, I figured out he’d stolen 10,000shilings as well…but five bucks is a small exchange for my phone.
Even so, my hands shook for hours. Not out of fear so much as…I’m not sure. BLB perplexed at my inability to let it all go, chocked it up to adrenalin. And he’s right. My adrenalin – with no fight or flight to speak of – had nothing to do but quake my hands.
Adrenalin aside, my hands were moving much as my mind was. it has been an intense few months. Challenging. Sad. Frustrating. I was craving my holiday in dar before the pickpocketing incident, but after…after I was desperate for it. Desperate to get some distance – and with it, perspective – that would reacquaint me with expecting other than the worst.
It is slow in coming…the negative assumptions still run free in my mind. When my flight landed and the visa was $100 instead of the $50 I anticipated, when the visa line was throng of people standing idly by in the stagnant heat, when the first ATM machine refused to give me money, when stalled traffic parked us next to two trucks of manure.
And then the driver made a turn and suddenly I was staring at the indigo of the Indian ocean. I expected to smell it first but instead I inhaled the tropical fragrance of frangipanis in full bloom, the white flowers in contrast to the fuchsia bougainvillea scant of scent but demanding attention with their flagrant display of color. And then a gate opened and the car rolled into a narrow yard with a beautiful home nestled in between the fence and I met Doc and Carpenter.
just like that my holiday was here the plane ride and pickpocket receded and even work, though not absent, began to recede.
Friends of a friend, conversation drifted. Our various countries of travel, work, beaches, food…and food conversation blended into a sumptuous meal of mixed green salad with grilled shrimp and boiled stone crabs. More conversation before they escorted me to my holiday home.
Since then things have been quiet. Food and dvds. reading languidly in the pool.
Searching out food (still getting my bearings) is evening I asked directions at the little store at the end of the street. The shop owner couldn’t really help but he directed me to abdul who offered to drive me at no cost. His little brothers…maybe 8 and 10 give or take a year…scrambled into the suv and immediately stood to stick their heads out of the moon roof.
We drove for a while, abdul’s English either limited or his shyness prevailing. But we found a spot. And true to his word, true to the rebuilding of my faith in people, he simply smiled and waved as I continued my search for food on foot.
not right but better…
It wasn’t a happy conversation. My family gathered in the kitchen – a rare occurrence now that my sister and I are grown and gone from the house, her married with a family of her own. But there we were, my parents and sister seated casually around the glass dining table cluttered with the day’s debris of old mail and cereal boxes. I perched myself on the counter by the sink – alternating between sitting upright on the black granite surface, and balancing on my side.
Our voices were quite but not hushed. The discussion had settled on Sandusky and the Penn scandal. Cain and Perry gaffes and political missteps pushed aside for the horror now dominating headlines.
My sister, distressed that someone’s comment to her piece in the Dallas Morning News was to dispute the statistics – not wanting to believe 1 in 3 girls or 1 in 6 boys. Her research aside, what would be an ok number? One in 10, one in 20? Would those stats make child abuse/child rape ok? Rather than fully digest the horror or think forward to solutions that person nitpicked details while the rest of us speculate about what we would have done.
But we can’t go back – not the folks who walked in and did nothing, or learned of it and did nothing, or all of us on the outside now looking in but who never looked in before- we can’t go back. All we can do is look forward. And looking forward only makes a difference if we’re forging a path to better.
In the kitchen last night my family tossed around ideas. Generally against suing we held fast that suing was one step on the path ahead. Suing Second Mile (Sandusky’s non-profit that gave him access to countless boys), Penn State (who, despite knowing, did as close to nothing an institution can do without actually doing nothing). Sue and have money for the years of therapy that lay ahead.
But suing isn’t the answer, just a component. Our idea went beyond.
My family’s conversation drifted to an end. It was late, my sister had to go and the rest of us headed to bed. I didn’t sleep for a little while, my brain fixated on all the Sandusky children we know about – the many more we most assuredly don’t. I thought about the different ways people have reacted, the person who commented on my sister’s piece, the students at Penn that rallied/rioted in support of JoPa, John Stewart and a myriad of others who raised their voices in support of victims.
When the din dies down – opinions turned to the next scandal to hit the news – I want there to be something substantive left in the wake. Something that doesn’t just condemn but contributes, doesn’t just berate but builds, doesn’t just grieve but gives something to those who can’t move on because the news cycle did.
At least one other person was thinking like my family. Chris Tickner (a professional specializing in child sexual abuse) added one additional thing to my list…research. The university as at its disposal a wealth beyond money – a wealth of intelligent people who conduct research. Why not research how good people did nothing? Or better ways to prevent – to treat? Why not disseminate that research to help other universities, churches, public institutions, from making such egregious errors in judgment and perpetuating harm to children.
Penn can’t make this right but they can make it better – they have to at least try.
Tags: family, future, health, soapbox, socialcommentary