End of the Year Thoughts & 2010 New Year’s Resolutions

December 30, 2009 by Jess in peace, religion, Social Issues | Leave a comment

Well, looking back on my New Year’s resolutions from last January, I’ve been a dismal failure this year.

I started a photography class but dropped out because I’m too busy.

I’ve made progress on the South Africa book about healing, but am nowhere near a workable first draft.

I went to church a couple of times but certainly haven’t started going regularly and, frankly, am not sure whether I’ll start going regularly this year either. The thing is, I want to belong to a supportive community that really tries to make a difference in the world, but where to find that good community is the problem. Every time I think church might make a good community, I’m reminded of all the horrible things church people I know have done to me and appear to do regularly to other people without remorse.

Just as a teensy-tiny example, I was looking at a photograph of somebody on Facebook, and one of the church people I used to know made the comment “so-and-so is gay” and one of the other church people I used to know responded with “Jesus hates homos” and I thought, “There you go. That’s exactly why I have no freaking interest in going to church. Jerks like that are pretty much the last kind of people I want to hang out with.” It’s true that you find jerks everywhere, but why subject myself to them on a weekly basis? I know lots of good church folks who are nothing like that and if church was filled with those good kinds of people, I’d be there; but in my past experience, the good folks do not outweigh the icky ones. And my past experiences make me pretty gun-shy to try it ever again.

My Spanish, Portuguese, and Zulu still suck but working on at least one of those languages is something I still want to do as I look forward to 2010.

For the other resolutions on my list: I think I have resolved some of my workaholic tendencies and I am more transparent/vulnerable in my writing. I didn’t walk a half-marathon but I did amp up my exercise considerably this year. I think I’ve started to forgive myself for being human, but I still have a long-ass way to go.

But looking at my list, I realized my final resolution was truly inane, not on the face of it but for me. I stated that “I’m going to learn to love others the way I love myself.” It’s been this year, really, that I’ve realized the problem with that statement is that I don’t really love myself. In fact, I’ve finally become conscious of the fact that 9 out of 10 mornings, I wake up with the lingering thought, “I hate myself.” So how am I supposed to love others the way I love myself when I don’t even love myself?

So this year, my resolution is very, very simple, and it comes from one of my all-time favorite Bible verses, Micah 6:8:

      “He has showed you, O man, what is good.
       And what does the LORD require of you?
       To act justly and to love mercy
       and to walk humbly with your God.”

So that’s it. For 2010, I want to serve the cause of justice, act towards everyone with mercy, and respond to others and myself with humility and grace.

May it be enough.

Eek-A-Mouse and the thugs in San Jose

July 10, 2009 by Jess in Bay Area, Iraq, Iraq war, latino/a, Music, pacifism, peace, poverty, power, race, Uncategorized, violence | 1 Comment

We went to see Eek-A-Mouse last night at a free concert in San Jose’s downtown park. This is our fourth time to see Eek-a-Mouse and it doesn’t get much better than free concert, outdoors, summer nights, fairly cheap beer, surrounded by a bunch of thugs, all chilled out because it is, after all, a reggae concert in northern California.

Eek-a-Mouse I’ve lived in the Bay Area for four years now but usually we go to outdoor concerts in San Francisco. With our move to Livermore, San Jose is closer so it may become our port of call. Anyway, right away, as we walked to the park, I was surprised by three things: how everybody was dressed in black, how many dudes there had gold teeth (can I just say, ew), and completely beside the gold teeth, how many tough guys were hanging around. What I mean to say is, every other person looked like a gangsta.

Maybe to outsiders, the Bay Area is lumped together as one big cauldron of weird-ass rainbow-wearin’ gay lovin’ hippiefied liberals. But for the record, Read More

True democracy: it can look like total chaos

November 28, 2008 by Jess in Africa, Cultural categories, democracy, peace, politics, poverty, power, Social Issues, South Africa, Uncategorized, violence, Zimbabwe | Leave a comment

When I was staying at a guest house in Pretoria, South Africa this summer, I had an invigorating conversation comparing South Africa to Zimbabwe with a man named Simon, a conservationist who lives in Zimbabwe and works on land issues in Mozambique. Simon, a white man of British descent, grew up in Tanzania where his father ran one of the game reserves.

At the time of our conversation, the violent attacks on Zimbabwean refugees in South African cities was still a fresh topic. And Mbeki was busy brokering talks between the leader of the MDC, Morgan Tsvangirai,Â and Robert Mugabe. Zimbabwe was the talk of the town.

I mentioned that many people in South Africa, especially those critical of Jacob Zuma’s likely ascension to presidency in 2009, are afraid that they’re setting up for a long and terrible fall similar to Zimbabwe’s. “Is that where we’re headed?” they ask. They’re afraid (and who can blame them?) of becoming a place where food security is an enormous issue, where the value of currency plunges so low that you can’t afford to buy a loaf of bread with your monthly salary, where democracy is a joke, and where elections are an excuse for the state to use extreme violence to keep political dissidents in line.

But Simon had an entirely different take on the issue.

“They would be damn lucky if they get to Zimbawe’s state,” Simon declared, “when people are deciding for themselves what they’re going to do, irrespective of the state.”

I would not have had that perspective before talking to Simon. I was too disturbed by pictures of people with their heads split open by military operatives acting on behalf of Mugabe.

I don’t want to under-emphasize the very real violence occuring–or ignore the fact that some people have suggested it may be genocide but I think Simon’s onto something. Democracy doesn’t have to be something endorsed by the state to occur. And maybe democracy doesn’t have to do with voting for a particular candidate. If you think about it, that’s a pretty narrow (and pretty demoralizing) definition of democracy. There’s a saying that “People vote with their feet,” meaning that they migrate to places where they believe they can build a better life. If that’s true, even if it’s only true for some people some of the time, maybe it’s also true that people in Zimbabwe are voting in other ways, every day. By sticking together and helping each other out, they’re voting for neighbors, for friends, for family members. They’re voting for Zimbabwe.

Just Be Your Quirky Self

I am reading Ariel Gore’s How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead because, of course, my daily angst is all about how I’m not a famous writer yet. It’s a great book. Read it. You can buy it directly from Ariel herself at Yo Mama’s Bookshop and she will make more money than if you buy it from Amazon or in your bookstore. That way, you are supporting your local artist (or not so local, if you don’t live anywhere near Portland) instead of the evil corporation that is, in this case, Three Rivers Press (a division of Random House, which is also my publisher, and WHOM I LOVE.) I love Ariel’s DIY philosphy which pervades every page of the book. She’s not saying, “Don’t go with the big presses,” she’s simply pointing out the myriad of ways (yes, Ariel, I used the word myriad!) to get your writing out into this world.

Here’s my problem with books like this one: Now I want to be an anarchist! Now I want to create and print hip zines and declare my allegiance to the underworld! Now I want to become a radical feminist lesbian communist revolutionary and publish things that really change the world!

Only my problem is, I don’t know anybody in the underworld. Unless you count the homeless teenagers I work with every Friday afternoon in San Francisco’s Haight district.

And frankly, I’ve never been good at revolution: I was never into the punk scene; I have always been pretty straight (with some bi inklings on occasion, like when I kissed a girl on the neck and thought, “Wow, she smells really nice,” but that sure never flowered into full-on gay fruition); and unfortunately for my image, I never joined a revolutionary movement (but I am pretty damn sure I would look sexy in fatigues, holding a machine gun. SEE ABOVE & BELOW!).

I’m just this pacifist, who isn’t very radical about it though I kind of want to be; a truly terrible Catholic–at least, any conservative Catholic would be pretty much appalled by my viewpoints which I won’t list here for fear of appalling a number of conservative Catholics who read my blog regularly, but they’re probably all the things they’d guess at anyway, that anybody reading this would guess at; an advocate for immigrants and a lover of all things African except, of course, genocide and kleptocracies; recognized by some as a hippie, others as a lover of reggae & Afro-pop & indie music; and obsessed with studying liberation movements of all kind, especially those that link religion with Marxism, or religion with violent revolution.

Probably the weirdest thing about me is how much I like teenagers, whether they’re dorky, goth, depressed, cool, smart, not so smart, suicidal, druggies, pretend druggies, alternative, mainstream, artsy-fartsy, science-geek, etc etc so on and so forth. The only teenagers I don’t like are cheerleaders, which I have tried to get over so I could like Claire of save the cheerleader, save the world fame.

And that, of course, is all part of Ariel’s message in the end: just be your own quirky self, gravy stains on your T-shirt and all.

Yeah, so I guess I won’t be going the way of radical revolutionary anytime soon. But I am becoming a publisher, or rather, I have become a publisher, and I hope to venture into the world of ezines and zines in the next couple of months, and in the meantime, I keep writing my stuff for publication in traditional formats.

It’s all part of feeding the beast.

The Riots in South Africa

May 25, 2008 by Jess in Africa, Cultural categories, immigrant rights, peace, politics, power, race, rape, Social Issues, South Africa, violence, war | 1 Comment

The violence in South Africa (which started in Jo’burg) has spread to Cape Town and, I hear from friends, to Durban. My Zulu languageÂ teacher, who is Ndebele and from Zimbabwe, says that one of the reasons Zimbabweans are being attacked (beyond the recent influx of possibly up to a million refugees) is because there was a higher literacy rate in Zimbabwe than in other countries (including South Africa) and so immigrants from Zimbabwe never had problems finding jobs. This article concurs with my teacher, claiming that the problem isn’t xenophobia but jealousy, while these comments on the spreading violence remind South Africans that Zimbabwe and other southern African countries offered shelter to tens of thousands of South Africans during apartheid.

Njau Kimemia, a Kenyan working in South Africa, has written an editorial,Â claiming that racial profiling is still occuring in South Africa at the airport–a decent black, he says, will be treated worse than a drug-smuggling Caucasion.