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I Wish for Each

Dusty Leave a comment

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

So all right. We’ve been hearing a lot about this lately, right? Those are the words of the First Amendment to the Constitution. But what does it mean?

What is free speech?

Does it mean anybody can say anything they want? Anything? Or are there limitations? Should there be?

Does it only apply in American? Only to citizens? Does it apply differently to public figures, to famous people?

And why the hell are we still talking about this? Do we not know what it means? Shouldn’t we know what it means by now? I mean, really?

Okay: well first, let me just address that. I do not think there is anything wrong with having a conversation again. I don’t believe that something can be talked through once, and then that’s it, and we all know everything there is to know, and there’s no need to bring it up again. I understand that people get tired of having the same conversation over and over again, but you see, I’m a high school teacher: my whole job is essentially to have the same conversation over and over and over again. From one year to the next, from one class to the next, from one student to the next, I have to continuously repeat myself, and that often means I have to continuously find new ways to say the same things I have said before. The fact that I am willing to do that, even eager to do that, is what makes me a good teacher: because if I got impatient with students who didn’t hear or didn’t understand what I said to another student, then nobody would learn after the first student. I confess that I do get tired of saying the same things to the same people over and over again, but that’s not the same thing as having the same conversation: that is stating the rules, the limits and boundaries which are necessary for us to live and work together and abide one another, and then stating them again because some childish, selfish person decided they didn’t have to follow the rules. And then I repeat myself: and then I get angry about it.

But if you didn’t understand what I said before? I will say it again. If you don’t understand it after the second time, I will say it a third time, in different words or with different examples. And I will keep repeating it until it is clear and fully understood. And then, when you have a new thought or a new experience, and that changes how you view what we talked about before, I will happily talk about it again: perhaps after I have thought about it some more, to integrate whatever new concept or perspective you brought into it today, apart from what we discussed yesterday. No problem.

We seem to still be having trouble with freedom of speech. We are still talking about it, still debating it, still disagreeing over it; and now we are doing this in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death. In that wake, and, I suspect, pretty directly related to that terrible crime, my wife was censored by Facebook, because someone reported a post she shared about Trump, calling it spreading misinformation. It was not, it was simply a joking criticism of the administration; specifically, it was this:

Exploring Shutdown Day 1: Discovering New Perspectives

My working assumption is that the person who reported her post was a Trump supporter, angered (as always) by libs and the left and so on, and recently energized by Kirk’s murder and the gaslighting from the right, convincing people to take action now to defend free speech (And please stop talking about the Epstein files and the still ongoing wars in Gaza and the Ukraine and the swiftly tanking U.S. economy), who probably reports every left-leaning or Trump-criticizing meme they see. Probably laughing while they do it. Facebook, as a private company that doesn’t want to suffer the wrath of the Trump administration, not only took down my wife’s post, but has also been monitoring and restricting her posts ever since: they are limiting her free speech. These new situations — unique neither to Charlie Kirk nor to my wife — has given people a new perspective on the issue, so: let’s talk about it again.

Here. This is where we start.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Okay, so the First Amendment actually says a lot of things. It restricts Congress’s ability to control religion, and the press, and peaceable assembly, and the right to petition, all in addition to the freedom of speech. Let’s put those other aside for now: though it may be worth considering why all of those different, and all of those important, ideas were all packed together into a single amendment, and then the next one is only on one issue: guns. And the one after that is only about not letting soldiers sleep in your house against your will. Both important, maybe (though neither as important as freedom of speech) but both very narrow topics. Why are all these other things together in one place? Honestly, I haven’t read enough on the Founding Fathers and their choices regarding the Bill of Rights, so I could only speculate; but either way, we can ignore this topic for now, because we’re only here talking about the freedom of speech (and the others will become more clear as we focus just on speech, I think). Freedom of the press might come into it directly if we want to talk about Jimmy Kimmel, but it’s not clear to me that that discussion needs to involve anything other than free speech; that one right seems enough to cover what happened there. So let’s focus.

What is freedom of speech? Why do we have a right to it?

So hot take: freedom of speech is not actually critical. It is a roundabout way to protect the actually critical thing — or rather, two critical things: freedom of thought, and freedom to express those thoughts. Freedom of thought is absolutely critical to humanity, because in the most essential sense, we are our thoughts. I am what happens inside my skull. My body is also a critical part of me, but if I have a broken body, I am still me, because it doesn’t change what is inside my skull. It changes how well I can act out and reflect the decisions I make inside my skull — my freedom to express my thoughts — but it doesn’t change who I am. But if my brain dies, then who I am is gone, even if my body remains. My body can’t express my thoughts if I have no more thoughts: and without those thoughts, there is nothing for my body to express, no purpose for it to achieve; it can continue for a period of time, and then it will, mercifully, stop.

I wonder if my body would be sad if my brain died. Would my body grieve the loss of my mind?

Well: I would grieve the loss of my mind, so the question of my body’s reaction is academic. It is a part of me.

Now, in the ordinary way of things, there is nothing that could limit my freedom of thought. It’s one of the great things about being a sentient, thinking being; on that most essential level, we are always free. (Well, almost.) It’s because we are always essentially alone, and because there is no substance to thoughts: they can dance and flit anywhere we can imagine, always within the skull that holds the brain; and nothing will change other than the thoughts themselves — and potentially the mind having those thoughts. Nothing else is affected, and so nothing else can affect those thoughts: they can dance and flit to anywhere else, faster than anything that actually exists. Nobody else will even ever know where our thoughts are going, inside our minds. This was what Henry David Thoreau was talking about in On Civil Disobedience, when he described the inability of the state to actually punish him with a night in prison after he refused to pay his taxes:

I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it. Source

As he says, his thoughts cannot be trapped inside the cell, but can go anywhere that Thoreau wishes to send them: and the attempt to punish his body because they cannot punish his mind is just pitiable. What the State wants here is to control his thoughts, because they want to control Thoreau’s actions through his decision-making ability. Because their initial attempt to control his actions, through a threat to his body’s freedom if he made a certain decision the way the State didn’t want him to decide, didn’t work: knowing the threat, Thoreau still decided not to pay his taxes. His thoughts were uncontrolled, and his person/body/being followed along that thought decision, and didn’t pay his taxes. So then the State put him in jail: and he just kept right on deciding not to pay his taxes, regardless of what they did to his body. His thoughts were entirely unaffected, and uncontrolled, and they did the thing that the State didn’t want them to do — without any influence from the State at all. And so we all do, every thought we have that is in defiance of what our society demands of us. We are free to think whatever the fuck we want to, even the thoughts we’re not supposed to have, or not allowed to have.

Please take a moment and think a thought or two, which people outside of your head would not allow you to have, if they could tell you what to think. Any thought you like. Any thought at all.

Nice.

So because nobody can control a person’s thoughts, the laws focus on the second critical part of the process of having a free mind: the expression of our thoughts. Free speech, and in a broader context, free expression. Let me focus on that second aspect for a moment, because it shows more clearly what the point is here.

I can have my thoughts, and you can’t stop me. So far so good. But obviously, if I can’t act on those thoughts, then my thoughts cannot be complete. If, for instance, I think about spitting on the sidewalk, decide to spit on the sidewalk, but I cannot spit on the sidewalk — at the moment that is just because there is no sidewalk near me; I could spit on the floor of my office and call it a sidewalk, and to some extent I would have acted out my thought, and brought that thought to its completion, but then I would have to deal with my spittle, and also my wife would kick my ass — so I don’t spit: and thus the thought is not free, it is limited. I think, “I’m going to spit on the sidewalk!” and then I can’t do it: the thought is constrained. When the thought is constrained by reality — “I want to grow nine arms and use them to juggle chainsaws!” — then again, my thought is not free, but there’s no point in talking about our freedom to do things that we can’t do, or the need to pass laws to prevent things that are not possible. At that point, all we can do is shrug, and say, “It sucks to suck, Dusty. But you go ahead and dream of nine chainsaw-juggling arms, that’s fine, you can think about it all you want.” Freedom of thought is still protected, because I can carry the juggling arms thought as far as it can go; and as thought is still the most essential aspect of being human, that’s fine then. Thoreau can think that his taxes should not be collected by a government that supports both human chattel slavery and a war of conquest against Mexico (the reasons Thoreau didn’t pay his taxes), and if the action is not possible — if taxes didn’t exist and so he couldn’t choose to pay them or not to pay them — then he has all the freedom he could ever have.

But see, what happened is, Thoreau’s aunt paid his taxes for him, against his will. I don’t know why: I suspect she either thought he was suffering in jail and wanted to help him, or she was ashamed that her nephew was in jail, and wanted him to stop embarrassing her. (I would guess the second one, because she did not consult with him before she did it, and if she wanted to help, seems like she would at least visit and ask if he was okay.) Which then limited his free expression of his thoughts: he could think his money shouldn’t go to the government, and he could decide not to give his money to the government; but the government got his money anyway. Not because it was impossible for the government to have his money, but because someone else took his choice away. I guess it wasn’t really his money, it was his aunt’s money; but Thoreau’s idea was not to save his own pocket change, it was to refuse to participate in the government’s immoral acts, and when money went to the government in his name, it defied and negated his decision. Imagine if he talked to someone about not paying his taxes, if he argued with the government tax collector about the issue, and expressed his disagreement with the government, and said, “I will never contribute to this immorality, sir!” Can’t you just see the agent smirking and saying, “Sure, buddy. I mean, we already have your money, so you can say what you want.” Thoreau’s thought, while still free, has been constrained in its expression: and that pretty much ruins the thought; a thought which was not constrained by impossibility, it was possible, and he could have acted upon it — but then the option was taken away.

This is why, of course, jail is actually a very effective punishment for most people: because while we are all free to think our way out of jail, I would guess most people in jail want to walk out of jail: and they can’t. Which means their thoughts, while potentially free, are nonetheless really trapped along with their bodies. It is worth noting that, if you can find a way to free your thoughts, then prison wouldn’t matter so much; it would become a struggle to try to force you, through continued discomfort, to think about being in prison and how much you don’t want to be; then your thoughts are controlled, and trapped, and you are suffering for your punishment. But when Malcolm X was in prison, he found freedom in learning: and he talked in his autobiography about how prison really didn’t bother him at all, once he taught himself how to read and found things worth reading — and also once he found his faith in Islam, which also gave him something to think about that wasn’t constrained by being in a cell.

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in
prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read
awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any
degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave
me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness,
and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer
telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him,
“Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I
feel might be able to help the black man.

…

But I’m digressing. I told the Englishman that my alma mater was books, a good library. Every
time I catch a plane, I have with me a book that I want to read-and that’s a lot of books these days.
If! weren’t out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just
satisfying my curiosity – because you can hardly mention anything I’m not curious about. I don’t
think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did. In fact, prison enabled me to study
far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently and I had attended some
college. I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions,
too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that. Where else but in a prison
could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely sometimes as much as fifteen
hours a day? Source

So again: the real goal of punishment, the only kind that is possible being constraint of the body, is to control the mind; and if the mind is able to continue thinking, then the constraint of the body is essentially meaningless. But in the vast majority of cases — and also, I will point out, in these two cases I have mentioned, because I don’t doubt that at some point Thoreau would have wanted to get out of jail and therefore would have felt trapped, and therefore actually would have been trapped, and Malcolm X would have been severely constrained if he had not been released to become the leader he became — trapping the body, because it limits the expression of thoughts, is an effective way to control a person’s thoughts. And even more importantly, for the purposes of society in general, constraining someone’s actions, the expression of their thoughts, is enough, because the purpose of prison is to stop a person from affecting others, and thoughts have no effect without expression. So just like I accept that I can’t ever have those juggling arms I dreamed of, society accepts that it can’t ever control our thoughts: and it just makes do with having potentially total control over our bodies.

And that’s where the amendment comes in.

I hope it is clear that thought without expression through the body, whether through action, through communication, or through a public display of some kind, is incomplete, and more importantly, useless. A useless thought is not a bad thought: all impossible thoughts are useless in and of themselves, which includes every dream, every fantasy, and every imagined existence; but they can still have enormous impact; and even if they don’t, they can encapsulate important things about the person who thought them, and that’s good, even if that encapsulated thought never reaches outside the mind that dreamed it. But when society wants to control us, controlling the impact we can have on other people is the primary goal and thus also the primary means of controlling people and the thoughts that define us. And that’s why the Founding Fathers included an Amendment that protects free expression in several different forms, most importantly speech and press and peaceable assembly.

Let me be clear now: the Founding Fathers were not always right. You don’t have to look any further than chattel slavery to know that they and their ideas, and the documents and the nation that they built, were fundamentally flawed, right from the beginning. There were some bad thoughts in there, and we’re still dealing with the legacy of those bad thoughts. But they were right in this: government wants to control people, and that means they need to control our thoughts — but they can only control our bodies, which is what they try to do. The First Amendment is there to set a baseline protecting our thoughts, through protecting the only things the government can attack and control, which is our actions.

So that is the essence of the Amendment, and the right: we have the right to express our thoughts, freely. The government cannot control our expression of those thoughts, so long as the thoughts do not have a direct impact on others in a way the government can control, and should control. In other words, if I decide to pick up a rifle and shoot someone I disagree with, that is no longer simply the expression of my thought, now it is an attack on another person, and it can be controlled, and should be because it is harmful. Though I will point out that, to some extent, the expression of that thought can’t always be controlled; sometimes it can only be reacted to after I have already done the thing I decided to do. But insofar as it can be predicted, and thus prevented, it should be.

Do I need to talk about why I shouldn’t have the unfettered ability to inflict harm on my fellow humans? Or can I assume we’re all on board with that? Just for the sake of saying it, the issue is that I have no right to control other people’s thoughts, nor their expression of their thoughts, except in the service of preventing harm. If I do harm to another person, I am affecting their ability to express and complete their thoughts, or possibly even their ability to think thoughts in the first place. If I am the one looking to do harm, not just prevent harm, then someone should have the ability and the right to stop me before I do harm.

Should that be the government? My first thought was to say that of course it should be; that this is the reason why we create governments and cede to them the power to control us: so they can prevent us from doing harm to one another. But government is frequently bad at this, and in that case, maybe other people and other authorities should have that power, that right, that responsibility, to prevent my harmful actions. But this is where we get into a conversation about how society should work, and that’s too complicated for right now. Suffice to say that the government, as imagined by the Founding Fathers — that is, existing with the consent of the governed — is a reasonable place to invest the power to control people’s obviously harmful actions. I would like to expand on the FF’s ideas about the governed who were consenting to the government, to include all of those who are governed, which would include people they didn’t consider worthy of consideration, or even consider to be people; it would also include all those who reside within the jurisdiction of the government in question, and who would be subject to the government’s control: those people should be considered “governed,” and therefore should be asked for consent to the government over them. Yes, that means undocumented migrants as well as those who don’t have full legal status. And also suspects, convicts, prisoners and parolees, all those governed by the justice system: they, too, must consent to the government over them, or else it becomes illegitimate and tyrannical.

And to be clear, when I say “consent,” I mean continuous, affirmative, and enthusiastic consent. The only kind of consent that matters.

Also at this point, I would like to express my burning volcanic rage that the First Amendment does not include the right to vote. What the actual FUCK, Madison? Why did you leave that one out?

It was the slaves, wasn’t it.

So all right: we should give the government the power to control our actions which can be harmful (and which can be controlled): but we retain the power to consent to be governed, and also the power to abolish the government if it becomes destructive of the ends we created it for, ideally through voting in free and fair elections. Since the government exists with our consent, what one thing do we most clearly need in order to legitimize that government?

A voice. The power to say “Yes,” and the power to say “No,” and to have those words heard. The power to consent, in the simplest terms. Continuous, affirmative, enthusiastic consent. If we don’t have that power, the government has taken too much control and has lost its legitimate authority, and should then be abolished: and that is the intent of the First Amendment, to protect and enshrine, first and foremost, our power to keep or abolish our government, which would otherwise have unchecked power over us.

You know: the power to vote. But in the absence of that, the power at least to speak, and to be heard. Not just to think freely, but to actually express those thoughts. The power to spit on the sidewalk. And on fascists.

So. Now. Did Charlie Kirk have freedom of speech? He did, and he should have: he spoke, and was heard. He lost that freedom when another person caused harm to him, murdered him, in an act that our government should have done all it could to prevent. Was Charlie Kirk a promoter, and therefore a martyr, for the cause of free speech? He was not: it was not his job to protect people’s right to free thought nor to free speech as an expression of their thoughts; inasmuch as he encouraged free thought and the free exchange of ideas through debate, then he was a proponent of free speech; but watching his debates makes it very quickly clear that he was not interested in the expression and free exchange of ideas, he was interested in scoring points and (as my students would say) farming aura: trying to get famous and powerful because he was seen as a staunch defender of his political and religious views. This is no criticism of the man: I would also like to get famous and powerful using my words, though I’d probably rather write than speak; but I want the same thing. But it does mean he was not a martyr for the cause of free speech, because free speech was not his cause: it was the means by which he tried to achieve his purpose, to fight for his cause. He shouldn’t have had to defend his free speech, he should have simply been able to exercise it. And just like Charlie Kirk, as a private citizen, it is not my job to protect free speech directly: that is what the government is for. To secure these rights, to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Let me emphasize that again, because we talk about free speech as though it is just something that needs to be protected from the infringement of the government on our rights, that the point of the First Amendment is to constrain the government from taking away our free speech; the First Amendment is that thing, that is its point — but also, the real point of the amendment is to tell the government that it should be working to protect and secure that right for all people within its jurisdiction and influence. Actively. Affirmatively. Enthusiastically. Continuously.

Which means, in practical terms, that the government should not only have done more to protect Charlie Kirk from being murdered (if we believe the government could have done more to prevent that, which I think is self-evident, but that’s not the argument I’m making here), but also, it should be doing more to ensure that all people under the jurisdiction of the U.S. government, all persons resident in this country and under its control around the world, have the opportunity to be heard, to express their thoughts freely. By publishing their opposition to the war and genocide in Gaza, without losing their legal status. To have their case heard before an immigration judge, through the due process of law. Through posting whatever the fuck you want on social media, even if other people don’t like it, so long as it is not actively, directly causing harm. Through speech, through the press, through petition, through peaceable assembly.

Which means the government should have kept the Fairness Doctrine. And in this modern era, the government should ensure that social media does not censor people’s free speech, so long as that speech does no harm. In fact, I would argue that the government should have a platform for people to be heard, to be seen, to which all people who must consent to the government over them have access. I would include NPR, PBS, and VOA among those platforms, but I would argue the government should also provide some simple form of social media, to at least offer an alternative to the private companies, which are all controlled by billionaires with agendas. I don’t think the government should seek to control the social media companies per se, but they have a responsibility to ensure our rights: including the right to speak our thoughts, online as well as through print and speech. The government should also protect protestors and ensure that they have the right to assemble and petition for redress of grievances, so long as they are peaceable in that assembly.

Yes, that last clause, as well as the earlier condition that speech should be protected as long as it does no harm, does create an opportunity for the government to limit free speech, depending on what we mean by speech that does harm, or by peaceable assembly. I think the current laws distinguishing between protest and riot, and the laws preventing libel and slander, make sense and should remain (I don’t know enough about the specific laws and so can’t speak to their current efficacy, but conceptually, I’m in favor), and where these two rights cross over, with the law preventing speech that incites to violence, is also a useful law that protects people from harm. I also think there should be a gray area around and beyond those laws (Does “Fight like hell or you won’t have a country” count as incitement to violence? I honestly can’t say, not without further evidence of intent and context. If only there had been a trial…), and that the burden of proof within that gray area should definitely be on the government, as the ones who enact the control of people’s speech, to show that someone lost their right because they were causing harm with their speech. We have a system in place to carry out that process: but we need to have people in the government who are dedicated to maintaining and using that system.

We do not currently have that. We have an authoritarian who wants to eliminate free speech because he doesn’t want anyone to have rights except himself. We have a legislature that agrees with him, completely and slavishly — they are not expressing their thoughts, they are expressing only his. (The opposition, presumably, is not expressing the authoritarian’s thoughts. We just need to find where that opposition is hiding…) We have a Supreme Court that also thinks no one should have rights other than the President, and themselves, because they think their trump card over Trump (pun obviously intended, as all puns should be — also, we should have a right to pun…No, we do have a right to pun, and it should be protected by the government.) enables them to live as exceptions to the dictatorial power they want to give him, and they like the idea that a dictator could enhance the lives of the people whom they (the “justices”) deem worthy of enhancement, and destroy the lives of those whom they deem worthy of destruction, without they themselves dirtying their lil fingies. They’re wrong, of course, because if Trump ever did become a dictator, he would end up killing or jailing the justices because they have defied him in the past, and no dictator can abide that kind of challenge to their power; but then, all of these people are wrong. They all think that the dictator would only use power the way they want him to use power, and that’s not how dictatorship works.

Please take note, all you MAGA voters who want Trump to hurt the people you hate, but not you yourself. That’s not how dictatorship works. He doesn’t dance to your tune. If the Supreme Leader is the only one with rights, then we will no longer have rights ourselves: not the right to life, not the right to liberty, not the right to the pursuit of happiness. We will then not have the right to express our thoughts through speech or writing, through assembly and protest and petition; more importantly, we will no longer have the right to consent, and though that immediately means the government will no longer be legitimate, it also means that we won’t have the ability to remove it without violence.

That is where the Second Amendment comes in. It is not, as the fools who care only about that one and not the First would have us all believe, the right which ensures all the others; that is the First Amendment. It is free speech. It is the power to consent, and to withdraw consent. The practical power that enforces the moral and intellectual power is the right to communicate, to agree, to assemble and stand together: that is what changes governments. (Also, if we don’t lose it, the right to vote. Tell me why the right to free exercise of religion usurped the place that should have gone to the ballot, I beg you.) The right to defend ourselves physically is the last resort when the first one has been lost: and every one of those gun rights advocates, from the rational ones to the chuckleheads, have been ignoring the infringement of the First Amendment while trying to protect the Second. Protecting it, I might add, through their right to free speech.

So. Free speech is not only important, it is critical, it is definitive, both to us as humans, and to our country as a free country, with government of the people, by the people, for the people. It is the most important right we have, and it is the best way to delegitimize, remove, and replace the current government, which I think we can say safely does not have our consent any longer to govern us, taking “our” and “us” in the largest collective sense, meaning the majority of people governed by this administration. The government should not only not be infringing on it, the government should be actively protecting and promoting it: that is the government’s job, the reason it exists, and the best way to ensure that the other rights are also maintained. Because free speech leads to the free exchange of ideas and information, to the shining of a light into the darkness where tyranny grows. It’s what lets us all communicate and understand each other, and then agree: and take action.

Before it’s too late.

Pride Goeth Before… Something Something

Dusty Leave a comment

I got stopped by a fellow teacher this past week and asked a question I had never thought about before: between the two most common science fiction future predictions, that is, that humanity will evolve and transcend in some way, or that humanity will destroy itself, which did I think was the most likely? And although I had never thought about that before, I have read enough sci-fi to have encountered both of these predictions — actually, in my new elective class on fantasy and science-fiction literature, we have read both a dystopian novel (Feed by M.T. Anderson — HIGHLY recommend) that predicts that humanity will destroy itself and the Earth’s ecosystem along with us; and a short story by Isaac Asimov called “The Last Question” (Asimov said this was his best story. It’s probably not — but it’s a cool idea, and it’s very well realized. Also recommend. But not as highly as Feed.) which depicts humanity evolving and transcending. Along with our computer intelligences, I might add; which is a nice element to include in this unusually hopeful story. So I was able to formulate an answer, quickly; one that responded to the question but also considered some of the complexities in the topic: I said, immediately, that the doom option is far more likely — but I also pointed out that said doom is certainly not going to be the actual end of the human race, because we are enormously adaptable and incredibly good at surviving, so some people would live through the end of the rest of us, and those people would end up being very different from the people who came before the doom; and therefore those people may be said to transcend. But also, I asked what was meant by “evolve” and by “transcend?” Humanity has largely stopped evolving physically, because we now evolve societally; our greater height and longevity, our now-selective fecundity but also our incredibly improved survival rate — all these are changes that have been wrought by society, and not by physical evolution through natural selection. So is evolution to be defined as something that happens naturally through the same process of environmental pressure which differentiated us from the other great apes? Then hell no, humans will not evolve. But is evolution simply about the changes wrought on the species by their — our — continued survival and our steady adaptation to differing circumstances? Then yes, we will continue to evolve. Also, does “transcend” mean changing who we are as a species? Being born different, as the kids say? Or is it about changing individuals after birth? That is, if I am born as a normal weak-ass human, but then I add machine elements to my body, and end by uploading my consciousness into a robot body: have I transcended? Have I evolved?

Is this an evolved human? I mean, other than because it is Patrick Stewart…

Anyway, the point is I talk too damn much. But also (And this is more the point): I’m very smart. I was able to start answering the question, and then think about both the question and my answer, while making my initial point. I thought of these two works I have named, and thought about how they fit into the spectrum of future possibilities. I could have kept going. I could have turned this into a lesson, or even a unit, without thinking too hard. (We should also include “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut. Great story about evolution, and also dystopian doom. And “By the Waters of Babylon” by Stephen Vincent Benet is a nice example of people surviving past the cataclysm, and maybe becoming better? Maybe stronger?) I could have put this to students, and maybe helped them to recognize the importance of trying to become better, rather than worse, even though worse is MUCH easier. I have used it as an example here, but I could have turned this into a whole essay; it might have been a good one.

I am proud that I can do that. I am proud of my abilities. I read well and remember what I read; I think well and speak well and write well. Over the last 20+ years of teaching, I have actually learned to think like a teacher: surprising, considering that I didn’t even think like a student when I was growing up. Part of why I do that, why I think like a teacher? I’m proud of being a teacher. I’m proud of what I have done as a teacher. Not as proud as what I have done as a writer; I still think art is more important than education, because education has been co-opted and commodified, and also to some extent Balkanized (Meaning it has been broken up into small pieces, as the Balkan states were broken off of the Soviet Union; now there are lots of them, but they are individually much less than they used to be, partly because they are hostile to each other. Huh. I actually didn’t know that last part was in the definition. Now I have to think about whether that applies to teaching. Yeah, probably; I have often had conflict — beef, as the kids say [By the way: I do that “As the kids say” thing precisely because it is “cringe,” which is hilarious. I can actually make my students shiver with loathing when I say something like “No cap, for real for real.” I love it.] — with other teachers, and that probably is a result of the system, at least in part.); while that has definitely happened to art on the internet (which was where and how I discovered the term Balkanization, in a description of how the internet has affected art), art is able to — well, to transcend that process, and remain valuable, which education has struggled to do. So when asked what I have accomplished that I am proud of, the immediate answer is always: my books. I have written books. They are good books. I am proud of them. Only after I have said all of that — and probably much more — do I maybe add — “Oh, and I’m proud of teaching, I guess.”

And that’s why I’m writing this: because two weeks ago I wrote about value and worth and price, and I recommended that people stop buying stuff, which theme I wanted to expand on lest I be too holier-than-thou; and both that piece and this one are in response to the number of my friends who question their value and their worth: particularly in terms of their art and their accomplishments as artists. I do it too, and for some of the same reasons; but I do it less. Because I’m a proud man.

And Pride goeth before a fall.

Okay: so what is pride? What does it mean to be proud of something, or of someone? What does it mean to be proud of yourself — and is that the same as being proud as a person? Of having pride? Is pride good, or bad?

According to Christian values, pride is bad. We should instead be humble. But okay, what does that mean? My immediate thought is that humble means “Not proud;” so I should define “pride” first, and then “humility” in relation to it. I suspect we are more familiar with and have a better understanding of pride, especially we Americans. So we’ll start there.

I think of pride in two contexts: pride in one’s accomplishments, and the pride a parent feels about their child. That’s not to limit it to those: I am proud of my wife, I am proud of my brother, I am proud of my father (Maybe even more so than he is proud of me…), I am proud of my friends. I am proud (in a way) of things about me that I wouldn’t label as accomplishments, like my intelligence and my empathy. But the first things that come to mind are the first two I stated. When I talk about being proud of my accomplishments, I think that feeling is a sense that what I have done is good, is important, and is something I think is defining for me. I’ve done stuff that I’m not proud of (Which should be a simple statement describing things like “I drove to the post office today” but has a strong negative connotation, implying things that I have done which I am not only not proud of, but that I am ashamed of; those things also exist), and some of it is good and important — like food. I make dinner sometimes. I made dinner last night. Sandwiches. Pesto, tomatoes, mozzarella cheese. Potato chips on the side. (I didn’t make those.) Delicious. Food is good and important, the fact that I make the food sometimes so my wife doesn’t have to is good and important — but I’m not proud of that. Because I don’t see it as defining.

That’s another aspect of this we struggle with, I would guess. It’s hard for us to define ourselves. It’s particularly hard for artists to define ourselves, because most of us — almost all of us — have other jobs. Almost no one makes their living exclusively from their art. And here in our capitalist society, we define ourselves first and foremost by our jobs; that is, by our income-earning vocations. Even that word is misused: it means a career or occupation (One regarded as particularly worthy and requiring great dedication, the Google tells me, so the definition is closer to what I want it to be, and I’ve just been misusing it. But I wonder how many people who use the word use it to that full definition.), but it comes from the Latin word for “to call,” vocare, so it is a calling. Something we are summoned to, something we are compelled to do — no, even that doesn’t have the right feel, because honestly, I am summoned and compelled to earn a paycheck because I have a mortgage and because I need to buy tomatoes and pesto and mozzarella for my sandwiches. A vocation should be something that thrums the iron string of our soul that Emerson wrote about in On Self-Reliance. Something that makes sense of us, and by which we make sense of ourselves and our world. My father spent five years or so working as human resources director for a tech company in Boston; but his vocation was always particle physics, and when he went back to that, he made sense to himself. So he is proud of his work at SLAC [Stanford Linear Accelerator Center], and not as proud of his work at the tech company. Similarly, I am proud of my writing, and proud of my teaching — and I mean, I guess it’s cool that I have put a lot of work into home renovation projects over the years.

I’m quite proud of this image of me, which I captured after I spent several hours installing that floor. I guess I’m proud of the floor.

So that’s the first part of pride. When you do something that is good and important and defining, then you are (or should be) proud of that. “Important” is a word in there that probably needs defining too, though it is definitely subjective for me: there’s no real reason to think that my writing is important, as I have not been groundbreaking or influential or even particularly successful with my writing; but I think it is important. And I see a distinction between my important writing, like this blog I keep trying to keep up, and my books; and my unimportant writing, like my journal or the emails I send, stuff like that.

So if that is pride, I’m not sure why it’s a thing that Christianity would be against. Other than, of course, the cynical assumption that the faith wants to put all goodness into God so that people need to rely on the church; if God is the source of all good things, then there isn’t anything for any human to be proud of, because we didn’t do that stuff, God did; he just let us borrow it. Personally I don’t like that. But then I’m not a Christian. That may be exactly the mindset they’re going for.

But I don’t think that’s the source of the idea that “Pride goeth before a fall.” (Hang on, let me check on that, because I used “Spare the rod and spoil the child” in an essay I wrote once for school and claimed it was from the Bible, and later on I looked it up and it does not in fact come from the Bible at all. I am actually proud of that essay in a particularly perverse way: I think it’s one of the worst things I’ve ever written, which it was meant to be, and it has been an effective example for my classes because it is so bad. Okay, so this one is from the Bible but I’m misquoting: it is “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” Proverbs 16:18, King James Version) I think — though I agree that my understanding of Christian ideology is a pretty laughable foundation for a discussion — that the pride spoken of there is a different kind of pride: and now that I have actually found the correct quote, I feel pretty well confirmed in that.

It’s the haughty spirit. That’s the point. That’s the bad pride, the one that leads to karmic justice in some way.

See, there are plenty of people who take enormous pride in things that they didn’t even do. So it’s one thing to take pride in something that isn’t good; I’m pretty damn proud of my longstanding hobby (One might even call it a vocation?) of stapling papers in the wrong corners in order to mess with my students:

Trigger warning: if you like things being done just so and being done right, you will not like what I did to these papers.

But there’s nothing good about that.

And then there are plenty of things I am proud of which are not important — like the video games I have beaten, that sort of thing. And I already spoke of things that aren’t defining, like cooking dinner for my family. Those things may not really deserve pride — and because of that it does make me question whether I feel proud about them — but regardless, there is no harm in being proud of things that don’t really matter much.

But then there are people who are proud of things they didn’t even do: like being American. Or male. Or tall. Or white. Don’t get me wrong, you can like those things, you can appreciate being those things (I’m not really sure why you would, but to each their own): but what on Earth would make someone proud of being born in this country? What did you do to make that happen? What time and effort did you put into it? Now, if you emigrated here, went through the enormous upheaval of moving to a whole new country; if you made a life and a home here, and created a place for yourself: that would be something to be proud of. But if you are proud of the fact that were born here, well. Bill Hicks has something to say about that: (**Please note: this clip is not safe for work.)

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Miss Maudie talks about Atticus’s shooting ability, once it is revealed that he was called One-Shot Finch, after he shoots the rabid dog. The kids can’t understand why Atticus never talked about how he was a dead shot, and why he never goes shooting if he is so good at it. Miss Maudie theorizes (Falsely, in a way, because he later says what he wanted his kids to think — that courage is not a man with a gun — but this point of Maudie’s also makes sense and might be part of his reasoning) that it is because Atticus recognizes that there’s no sense in taking pride in what she calls a God-given talent. She says that being born with a good eye and a steady hand is nothing that comes from hard work and dedication; it’s just a thing that is true about Atticus, like being tall.

I don’t entirely agree with Miss Maudie — I think that shooting a gun accurately would take a hell of a lot of practice, and therefore would be something to be proud of; but also, you would need to shoot in a good way, and also in an important way, for it to earn pride in my definition — but I see her point and I agree with the idea that taking pride in something you didn’t do, something you aren’t responsible for, is silly. That’s the idea of the Bible verse, too, I think.

See, if you put in the effort on something, if you really do the work, then it’s damn difficult to be proud of it. Because first of all, you’ve seen alllllll the mistakes you made in the process of learning; and if it is something hard to do, then you made a lot of mistakes. You also know, better than anyone, how much effort you have spent, and also you should know the difference that effort made: and that should pretty clearly show you that anyone else who put in the same effort would probably make the same progress — unless you were born with a gift of some kind that contributed to your ability, like having a sharp eye and a steady hand. But if it is something really difficult, then you also recognize that your sharp eye and your steady hand are not the things that make you good, or that make you great: they make it easier for you to be good or great — but only effort and dedication makes you good, or makes you great. The physical gifts are not something you did, so not something you should be proud of: the pride comes from what you put into making yourself into someone you can be proud of. Michael Jordan certainly has physical gifts that make him a great basketball player: but he’s Michael Jordan because he had the will and the drive, and he put in the effort. Therefore, I think he should be proud of what he accomplished. Shaquille O’Neal, on the other hand — well, he should be proud that he is apparently a very nice person. And then, of course, if you do what most of us do with our passions, and you look around at other people who do the same thing, what you are bound to find is people who do it better than you. Because nobody, not even Michael Jordan, is actually the greatest: there’s always somebody better. Knowing that keeps us humble, even if we have accomplished something to be proud of.

But even though it is difficult to take pride in what do, if that thing we do is a calling, if that thing is very difficult, if that thing takes years of dedication and effort to accomplish: then we have to take pride in it. We have to. Because there’s another aspect of pride.

The pride a parent takes in a child, that I take in my wife, my friends, my family, is not the pride of accomplishment. I mean, I’m proud that I support my wife in her art (and I’m proud I make her delicious sandwiches for dinner, without which she could not continue to make art), but otherwise? Her art isn’t my accomplishment. I did nothing to make her into the artist she is, not really. My support and sandwiches were helpful, but she could have done it without them, of course. But I am so incredibly proud of what she can do. So is that like the pride that dumb people take in being born between Canada and Mexico?

No: it’s something else.

The quality of an accomplishment that makes it pride-worthy, the aspects of it that make it (to one’s subjective viewpoint) good, and important, and defining, can be boiled down to one simple emotion: the most powerful emotion. Love. I write because I love what writing can do, and I love what writing is; and therefore I love writers — and therefore, when I write, I love myself. I love when I am able to create the effects that make me love writing. I am so very proud of those moments, of those effects, of what I did, and of myself for achieving them. And yes, it is entirely subjective: but then, often, so is pride. That doesn’t make it bad.

Pride is bad when it is not based on love. That’s the second half of the proverb, the “haughty spirit.” When one bases their pride on their contempt for others, then pride is bad. When one sets oneself above others, and is proud as a corollary to that, that is bad. That leads, in a righteous universe, to destruction: to a fall. (I know it doesn’t always. This is not a righteous universe.)

So really, it’s not that it’s dumb to be proud of being an American; it’s dumb to think that other people are lesser for not being Americans. (I knew that, actually. I am proud of my country. But also, I am humbled by it, because I can never do enough to make it the country that it should be, which means I am not fully worthy of it: so my pride does not create in me an haughty spirit. What a phrase that is. Don’t you just love the KJV?) It’s not that bad to be proud of being tall, or of being white; it’s bad to think that short people are worse off, or that people who aren’t white are somehow worse or less than white people. That’s where pride goeth before destruction: at least it is to be hoped that it does goeth before destruction. Because that kind of pride should be destroyed.

That’s not the pride that people have in their children, unless those people are really damn awful. Parents who put in a lot of work helping their kids to achieve something can take pride in their accomplishment, too, but mainly, parents are proud of their kids because they love their kids. And that love is pride; that pride is really just love.

I think that pride is love turned outwards. Love is generally directed into the person, or the pursuit, or the object, for whom/for which you feel the love; or it is turned into ourselves, as we enjoy the loved thing or the loved one being around us and bringing us joy. When we are proud of someone, as when we are proud of our accomplishments, we want to share that love with others: we want to express it, we want others to see it, we want everyone to know about it. That’s pride. I am proud of my books because I love my books. I am proud of my wife because I love my wife. I want to show off my books, I want to show off my wife, because I want other people to know of my love, and I want other people to understand how much I love, and why I love, and how lucky I am to have these loves in my life: both my accomplishments, and my incredible, incomparable wife.

Also: I am sometimes not proud of being an American. Because I do not always love my country. I am always proud of my wife.

But please remember this, whoever is reading this: if you work on something hard; if you think that thing is good; if you think it is important; if you think it defines a part of you: then be proud of it. Be proud of it like a parent is proud of their child. Notice that I have not spoken of the value or the worth or the price of the thing you do of which you are proud: love has no price, and so neither, therefore, should pride. You just feel it, and want to share it: and you should. Always. And if you are a parent: be proud of your child, especially when that child is proud of themselves. Love them for who they are and for what they do: and love yourself the same way. Don’t talk yourself out of it because you could have done better, or someone else could have done better, or it wasn’t exactly what you thought it would be: just love what you did, and love yourself for doing it. Be proud.

You deserve it.

Invisible People

Dusty Leave a comment

I don’t think about trans people.

That’s a confession, and it’s not a comfortable one. Because I should think about trans people; I should consider them, and try to understand them; and because I want to be an ally, I should do better at remembering them and their needs when I write about topics that touch on gender.

I’m hoping that writing this now, and posting it, will help me to keep trans people in my thoughts, will remind me to look over what I write about gender and sexism and men and women with a thoughtful eye; because shame is a powerful motivator. Considering what trans people have to go through in our society, I think the least I can do is feel shame about my past behavior and mindset.

I don’t have too much shame: I’ve never mocked a cis male for being feminine or a cis female for being masculine (For those of you who do not know — and I’m adding this because I was confused when I first encountered the term — “cis” is short for “cissexual” or “cisgender,” and it means someone whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth. It’s the opposite of transsexual or transgender. Read this.), never used “sissy” or “tomboy” as any kind of insult, never confused transvestites for transsexuals — never really thought that men in drag were funny, and so I didn’t laugh at bros in high school when they put on wigs and skirts and fake breasts for Halloween or pep rallies. I have never intentionally misused pronouns, nor thought that trans people were perverts, nor argued that anyone should use any specific bathroom (My ideal bathroom situation is and always has been single-occupancy bathrooms. I do not understand why it has to be one room with many people sharing a private function, when it could be a row of cubicles, each with their own toilet and sink and mirror and locking door.). I feel shame because I want two things: I want to give people who are transgender the respect they deserve as my fellow human beings, and because they are also an oppressed minority, I want to be an ally and fight for their equal rights and just treatment. I am always willing to do the second one, though I will also confess I am sometimes awkward or uncomfortable in the actual process of it; but because I don’t do the first well enough, I’m not good enough at the second.

Let me explain.

I know transgender people. Of course I do: so do you. Estimates of trans prevalence vary wildly, mostly because of the stigma attached to being trans, which keeps people from being open about who they are, and complicates the process of data collection as well; but this study shows that somewhere around 1 in 11,000 people seek either surgical or hormonal therapy; in surveys of self-assessed gender identity, the prevalence of transgender was around 1 in 300. That’s a huge difference, and just looking at the Wikipedia page shows that the prevalence of trans people has varied wildly over time and in different places — and Wikipedia only reports a half-dozen surveys in four countries. My point is both that being transgender is not uncommon, and also that our society has made it so complicated that everything about being trans is incredibly opaque: who is trans, what it means to be trans, how we should talk about (or if we should talk about) gender identity — everything.

The solution to this, of course, is to talk about it. And while there’s obviously a certain irony and disingenuousness in me, as a straight white cis male, opening up the conversation (Because what the fuck do I know about being trans?), it’s equally obvious that I risk nothing in so doing: I’m not going to be judged, not going to suffer bigotry, not going to lose my job or friends or family, or my life, by talking about this; and that means it is incumbent on me to do it, on whatever scale and with whatever platform I have available to use for that conversation. So here we are.

Why is it incumbent on me? Why is this any of my business? Because this is my world, this is my society, as much as it is anyone else’s; and the purpose of society is to enable the members of that society to live in the world. That’s why people are social animals: because grouping together and cooperating improves our survival. We need other people, not only to survive, but also for our well-being as individuals. Society enables us to do that, to cooperate with and socialize with other people, and for it to work, all of us need to contribute to that, to help accomplish that purpose. Think of it like this: when someone doesn’t fit into society, there is friction; that friction affects not just the person who doesn’t fit, but everyone they come into contact with — and that means it is in all of our best interests to try to smooth the way for everyone in our society, to reduce the friction. For everyone. Since the friction goes both ways, the solution, the conversation, can start from either side, and it’s easier for it to start with me; thus, for society’s sake, as well as for my own, I should be the one to do it.

And, of course, because I have empathy, and because trans people have to struggle and suffer; and I would like to make that struggle easier and that suffering less, just because they are people. That’s enough reason to try. Even if it is awkward.

I don’t want to come off as a savior: I do not think I have very much to contribute to this discussion. I don’t know very much. But as a teacher, my job is (ideally) just to start conversations; I see my job as a blogger the same way. When I can get a group of students to read a story and start talking about it, I don’t need to know very much about the story: the students, in talking about it, will find their way to the best answer they could possibly have — one they create themselves. My job then is only to make sure that their answer comes from the story, from the source, and not from something someone made up or brought from outside; and to ensure that everyone has a chance to offer their input and hear everyone else’s ideas.  I see this the same way, and so I’m going to treat this conversation the same way I treat a subject in my class: I will talk about what I know, what little that is, and try to express the value and importance of the topic; and then I will open it up to discussion. (I recognize that this blog is not a terribly great place to discuss anything, as the comment function is awkward; I’m fine with the conversation continuing between people away from this website, or even just inside someone’s head. But if you have anything you want to say here, you are invited to do so.)

So here’s what I know. I know that being transgender (And also being genderqueer and genderfluid, which are terms that attempt to encapsulate the middle ground in between cis and trans) in today’s society is hard. It’s hard to get people to treat you the way you wish to be treated. It’s hard to get people to understand who you are and the way you wish to be treated, not least because you have to be the one to explain, over and over and over again, to literally every person you interact with, how you want to be treated. Imagine that: imagine if every single time you introduced yourself, the other person disagreed with you. Thought you were wrong. Was confused and wanted an explanation, or even an argument. “Why do you have a boy’s name? You’re a girl.” “No, I’m trans.” Imagine having that or a similar exchange every single time you met someone. Imagine having to justify something as simple as your name. To justify it: imagine someone who just met you telling you your name is wrong. It may be hard to imagine this — though people who use nicknames or names other than their legal names have some inkling of it — because most of us don’t have to argue for the way we want to be treated in terms of common courtesy; I don’t have to fight to get people to call me what I want to be called.

Imagine if, every time you met someone or talked to them, they started thinking about your genitalia. You know? You tell them that your name is X, when they think your name should be Y because of your voice or your size or your body shape, and they frown and look down at your pelvis, or your chest. And they look hard. And they think about it. Maybe they ask you about it. Even if they’re trying to be understanding, and they ask you about what you have, or what your plans are for what you have. You know how many people have asked me directly about my genitalia? As if they have a right to know the answer? As if this is a conversation that anyone can have in casual polite company? You know how many: almost certainly the same number of people who have asked you about yours. Zero.

And when there’s stigma attached, all of this is infinitely worse. Like the bullshit about gender identity and perverts in bathrooms. Look: being transgender is hard. It’s dangerous. People judge and hate and mistreat and attack you for it. The idea that someone would claim to be transgender for the express purpose of finding victims to rape or molest is so far beyond absurd that it should not even have a place in this conversation. Why does anyone even think this? Do you imagine it’s hard for rapists to find victims? Do you think that child molesters can’t find children to molest? Do you think that grown adult men need to go into women’s restrooms in order to rape or molest someone? Are you insane? Women get raped and children get molested every day, and not by trans people in bathrooms.

But because people still talk about being transgender like it’s a pathway to easier sexual assault, it makes it that much harder to be trans, because now not only do you have to argue for your name and your basic courtesy, you have to convince people that you’re not a rapist or a child molester. Imagine having to basically announce, out loud, that you are not a rapist every time you walk into a public bathroom. White cis men like me get all pissy when someone accuses us of being rapists, claiming that the mere accusation smears all men (#NotAllMen); but first, not only do we not have to prove to people around us that we aren’t rapists on a regular basis — we are also the freaking rapists. Straight cis men are far more likely to be sexual predators than are trans people. Orders of magnitude more likely. Yet we can walk into public restrooms without people raising an eyebrow.

I’m not even going to talk about the jokes and memes, generally from conservatives, about people “choosing” to “identify” as absurd things in order to get preferential treatment. All I’m going to say is: try it. You think people would identify as trans, or as anything other than what people see them as, just to receive special treatment? Try it. Try something easy: walk into your church and identify as Muslim, or atheist. Walk into your sports bar and claim to like a different team, or even just a different sport. Tell your family you’re going to change your name. See how much special treatment you get. See how freaking easy it is to disagree with what society thinks you should be. See what it’s like to have to argue just to be yourself.

That’s my experience. I know someone who is both transgender, and gay; his love life is therefore complicated. And I thought, when I learned this about him, “Man, it would be so much easier for him if he could just give up being trans, because then he (as a cis woman, which he is not) would have a much easier time finding guys to date.” And of course it would be easier. He wouldn’t have to convince everyone to use the name and pronouns he prefers; they’d just do it, just act as if his name is a given, an assumed truth, rather than a source of argument. He wouldn’t get strange looks, and awkward questions, and accusations and arguments, whenever he wants to use a restroom. He wouldn’t have to dread introducing himself  — or hearing his name called on the roll at school, remember that? Remember the kid with the unpronounceable name, who had to either deal with the substitute/first day teacher struggling with their name, or had to predict where in the roll their name would appear and just shout out “Present!” when the teacher frowned and squinted at the list? Imagine the shit you would get if your name was easy to pronounce, but was associated with a different gender? Or if your name on the roll, on your driver’s license, on your legal documentation, was not the name you wanted to use, and the name you wanted to use would start an argument? He has conservative family members, too, who give him unending shit about his gender identity, and he would be able to dispose of all of that, if he were cis. And sure, if it matters, he would be able to date more guys, because there are more straight men than homosexual men, and so the pool would be larger if he were a straight cis woman.

And that is what showed me that I’m an idiot, and so is everyone else who thinks that being trans is a choice. There is no situation where it would be easier to be transgender. None. There is nothing about being transgender that is easy.

That’s how you know it isn’t a choice.

And that’s why we, as a society, need to recognize and ease the struggle that transgender people deal with every day. Because they, as people, have every single struggle that all people already have (Money/bills/job/housing/health/family/age/fulfillment/trauma), and they have another one, a constant, trying, sometimes brutal fight with themselves, with the world, with everything. And they have no easy choice in the matter: they can deny who they are, or they can fight to have everyone else stop denying who they are. Neither one is easy, and neither one is harmless.

Think about that.

Now discuss.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I am happy. My senior students graduated yesterday; I was the MC for the ceremony, which meant I was nervous and uncomfortable all day leading up to it — because regardless of how much time I spend in front of a classroom full of students, it doesn’t take away my stage fright or my introversion. And also, a classroom full of students is quite different from a gymnasium filled with probably 500 people, including parents and grandparents and all of my fellow teachers and my administrators and my wife. Much more nerve-wracking.

But it went well, my speech was well-received, I made my former students cry. Here, for the sake of those who did hear it and want to remember, is my speech; it won’t mean a whole lot to people who don’t know these kids, but these kids aren’t the only ones who suit these words, so feel free to substitute your own children or students for the ones I was talking to and about.

Ladies and gentlemen, friends and family, students, teachers, administrators – and, of course, graduates.

Welcome to the Graduation Ceremony for the Class of 2019!

(to the grads) I bet some of you thought you wouldn’t make it here today. But you did it. All of you: you did it.

You had help – parents, siblings, relatives; teachers, and friends – and all your online friends, YouTube, Khan Academy, Quizlet, Yahoo answers, Wikipedia, Sparknotes, Slader, 123HelpMe.com.

But the point is: you did the real work. You spent the late nights, and the all-nights; the early mornings, the lunchtimes and the passing periods, cramming and studying and reviewing and furiously finishing assignments. You’ve gone through thousands of sheets of paper, hundreds of pencils and pens, gallons of energy drinks, an average of fourteen Hydroflasks each, and a literal ton of hot Cheetos. You sweated through the tests, the essays, the labs, the presentations. You fought through the despair, and stress, anxiety and depression, fear and anger and sadness and happiness – because honestly, nothing makes it harder to sit down to a test than when you’re having a really good day.

You did all of that. All of it. Make no mistake: if anyone tries to minimize this accomplishment, to tell you that this was easy, that it is not impressive – don’t listen. This is impressive. You are impressive. You made it. High school – all school – is rough. And you’ve made it.

And I only have one thing to say to you: don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.

Seriously – and I say it with love – get out. Go away and don’t come back. We’re all as tired of you as you are of us, and we’re all going to breathe a huge sigh of relief when you all have left. This is one of the most – let’s say “challenging” – classes I think this school has ever seen.

Want to know why?

You’re one of the smartest classes this school has ever seen.

You’re so smart, all of you, that it has been impossible to keep up with you. Impossible to consistently challenge you. Impossible to control you. Speaking from my experience, trying to run a discussion with all of you was insane: too many of you had things to say, and if you didn’t get to say them to the class, you would say them to each other, all at once. It was chaos.

You all burn so brightly that you draw all the air from the room – and because this school, these rooms, are so small, there wasn’t that much air to begin with. I honestly think that’s why you fought so much with each other: too many lions in too small a cage. It was a daily struggle to be on top, to stand out, to show how good you are individually, among all these other amazing people.

So. Now’s your chance.

You’ve been held in this small space, like a flower in a too-small pot, for too. Long. Now – you are free. Free to grow as tall and as grand and as glorious as you can. You will overshadow this place. You will tower over us, spread far beyond us.

I cannot wait to see what you all become.

So get out.

There was a keynote speaker, of course, a NASA scientist and actor who happens to be related to one of our newest alumni. I thought he did a great job with his speech — but I couldn’t help noticing that he leaned pretty heavily on clichés. He was actually quite up front about it: part of his theme was using Google (or technology in general) to find what you need, which was fine since he was talking to a STEM school; but the Commencement Speeches he Googled were apparently pretty generic. It was good and useful advice, but — generic.

So I thought I would write some of my own advice. Here, then, is something like what I would say if I were to be the keynote speaker at a graduation. This is what I would tell a group of students who were about to leave high school and embark on the adult part of their lives — also known as “the good part.”

 

Speeches like this are always full of clichés. Now, I don’t dislike clichés; I think most of them are true, and have genuinely useful things to say. Clever sayings don’t become clichés if they aren’t true, and truth isn’t talked about unless it is cleverly worded; so pay attention to clichés. At the same time, though, be aware of when the overuse of clichés clouds the message: because it’s a rarely known biological fact that people’s ears go deaf while that person is rolling their eyes. Think of them like memes: they are great, they make you laugh and make you think; then you get tired of them; then they’re dead. Clichés are like your favorite food: you can fall back on them when you have nothing new that sounds good; but you can also get tired of even your very favorite food, and that is a sad day.

I think one of the best things we can do is examine clichés, and reimagine them. Deconstruct them. Critique them. Because then we’re actually thinking about things we normally just swallow whole, without any consideration’ and that is no way to live, nor any good way to eat. You’ve got to chew your food: and your clichés, as well.

Ready? Here we go.

“All you need is love.” One of my favorite songs, and one of my favorite cliches. Also true — kinda. It’s not true that love is ALL you need; but it is true that love is one of the most important things you can have.

Image result for love is all you need meme

The first piece of advice I want to give you is this: find love. True love, if you can; genuine and lasting love, at the least. I did, and there is not a day that goes by that I am not shaken to my core by gratitude and happiness because of it. And though I think I am extraordinarily lucky in love, I am entirely sure that all of you can find love, too. Make it a priority: make time for it, time for the looking and then time for the love once you find it. It doesn’t have to be romantic love, if that’s not what you’re after; it can certainly be love for family, for a parent, for a sibling, for a child; it can definitely be love for your best friend, or for a beloved pet — although, as much as I love my pets, I would recommend finding a human person to love. Because human persons talk back to you, and because pet persons die too soon. But it doesn’t have to be a spouse-type person, and it doesn’t have to be only one person. But in all the years I have spent with my wife, nothing has mattered to me as much as going home to her, as having her support and her companionship, as loving her and being loved by her. Don’t settle for something less than that: keep looking until you find it, because a half-measure of happiness will keep you from the full measure, and it isn’t worth it. If you think you’ve found it, and then you turn out to be wrong, don’t stay: divorce that person, leave that person, kill that person and stuff them in a sack.

Okay, don’t do that last one. But definitely leave the relationship and look for something better. Don’t give up on love. Not ever. And if you lose love, unless the memories of that love are enough for you, go out and find more love, find new love. Always. Life is better with love than without: and I truly believe everyone can find someone to love.

Next: “Never give up on your dreams. Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

Image result for if you aim for the stars and miss meme

Okay, once again, there’s truth to this. You should have some kind of ambition in life, and it is better if it is grand; but if it is grand, it will also be, for the vast majority of us, unachievable. Which means you will have two options: give up, or keep working for something you may never accomplish. (Whatever you do, don’t look at the affirmational quotations for this one. As someone who has tried for twenty years to be a published author, and who is still a high school teacher, it both amuses and disturbs me to hear celebrities who caught their lucky break telling people to never give up. Sure, if I had been handed my dreams when I was 17, I’d believe that anyone could accomplish anything they wanted to do — if I was arrogant enough to think that luck came to me because of my talent. I’m not bitter.)

Personally, I would recommend not giving up. Not because of this landing among the stars nonsense; that’s neither true nor meaningful — I mean, if my “moon shot” is to be a published author, what does it mean to land among the stars? I can certainly imagine a second-level success — say, I sell some pleasing number of books which I self-publish, or I get to a pleasing number of followers on this blog, both of which are secondary goals I’m working towards and would be happy to achieve — but how does that fit the metaphor? The moon is infinitesimal compared to the stars, which are infinitely farther away; so what does that mean? Nothing, that’s what. But that’s okay: the point is really that working towards your dreams is a good thing to do regardless of whether or not you achieve the original dream. I really prefer this quote to the cliché, because I think this captures my experience and a lot of other people’s, as well. (Makes sense that it came from an actress whose best-known role came when she was 36.)

“As long as you keep going, you’ll keep getting better. And as you get better, you gain more confidence. That alone is success.” –Tamara Taylor

That’s why I say it is worthwhile to have a grand ambition, even if it is one you will never achieve.

But that takes me, in a roundabout way, to what may be the most important advice I have to give you; though it is also probably the most vague. It is this: there are two kinds of people in this world, and two kinds of experiences.

(There are a bunch of these memes…

 

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Image result for there are two types of people

Image result for there are two types of people

Image result for there are two types of people

But this one’s my favorite:)

Image result for there are two types of people

 

Here are my two kinds: One is the kind of person, and the kind of experience, that limits your future choices, your freedom, your ability to control your life; the other is the kind that expands those choices, that freedom, that ability to make up your own mind and to control your own life. Look always for the second kind of person, the second kind of experience. There will be many choices you will make in life, and many of them will limit your future freedom: and those are the choices you have to be most careful of. You have to make them at the right time, and for the right reason. Choices like what to study in college — after you decide whether or not to go to college. Like what job to take. Where to live. When, and if, you will marry; when, and if, you will have children. These are the defining choices in life, and if you are not yet ready to be defined, don’t make them.

More importantly, don’t EVER let someone else make those choices for you. Don’t let someone pick you for marriage unless you pick them, too. Don’t let someone pick your time to have children, or with whom. Don’t let anyone push you into a career path, and don’t push yourself into one unless you want that career to define you. Until you are ready to make that choice, and lose the freedom to choose again later. (Though here’s a secret, and another cliché I won’t deconstruct: it is never too late to change your mind. Though it does get harder as time passes and you get more settled in your place in the world.)

Let me say one more thing about work: this one?

Image result for do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life

Complete bullshit. (You can tell by the background. What the hell kind of job does this image represent? Forest ranger? Have fun chasing poachers and meth cooks all over those mountains, in between rescuing dumbass dayhikers who thought they could just take a jaunt through those woods without equipment because they were in the Brownies. Also have fun getting furloughed when the government shuts down the next time.) Jobs are work. There is always work, or else nobody pays you for it; and the aspects that are work are not going to be fun. Jobs are always difficult, even if you love them, because you can’t possibly love every aspect of them (unless you’re on a whooooooole lotta drugs, and that has its own drawbacks.). I love some things about teaching, I really do — but I HATE the paperwork, and the grades, and indifferent students and overbearing parents, and a few other things as well. I love writing — but I HATE promoting myself. Even if I achieve my dreams of being a professional published author, I will need to write to very strict deadlines, and I will have to worry about my next book being a failure and sending me into the oblivion of Used-To-Be’s. I will have to travel, and speak publically, and participate in conventions and panel discussions and incessant insipid interviews, and I’ll have to be positive ALL THE TIME. I will hate that.

Honestly, I think the best way to view a job is to refuse to let it define you, unless you choose to define yourself that way. Back to the idea of limiting or expanding your freedom: if somebody wants to tell you that you are a teacher, and therefore you can’t be, say, a stripper on the weekends, don’t listen to them; you can be a stripper who teaches during the week. If you don’t care what you do for money because your passion is elsewhere, is in your avocation or your craft or your art or your family, then good: somebody asks what you do, you tell them that you make kayaks in your garage. They don’t need to know — they probably don’t really care — that you deliver pizzas for money; the kayak-building is FAR more interesting and important. So the point is, define yourself by your passion, not by your job; don’t expect your job to BE your passion, though it is certainly nice when they coincide. As much as I hate parts of teaching, I love, so much, that I get to spend all day every day with words, with literature, with reading and writing.

 

There are some other, smaller pieces of advice I would like to give, but they don’t come from clichés and they don’t have their own memes (Advice from a writer and a teacher: stick with a theme only as long as it makes sense; when it’s not working any more, drop it.). One is to take advantage of opportunities when they come up. Saving things for a later day is too often saving them for never; freedom to choose in life hits an early peak and then steadily decreases — until the very end, when you gain the freedom that comes with loss. That is, once you have a house and pets and a family and a career you want to keep, it becomes much harder to travel the world — until you lose all of those things. So if you have the chance to travel, do it.

Another is to pay attention: look around you. Take your time: you actually have quite a lot of it, and it will feel like more if you pay attention. I recommend walking, often, with your eyes and ears open to your surroundings.

Another is to read, and to keep learning. Doesn’t matter what you read, doesn’t matter what you learn; if you read the conspiracy theory websites that show how the Rothschilds are behind the measles outbreak, at least you’ll learn how crazy people are — and if you believe what you read, then the rest of us can learn to avoid talking to you, which is really for the best.

An important habit related to both of those is to always question. Question yourself, question your world, question your assumptions. You have to be careful not to take this to the point of permanent uncertainty and anxiety, but that has more to do with knowing when to trust the answers you get or the answers you make, and to move on to a different question; you can always come back to this question later. (Example: should I have written this blog? Is this too long? Is it a terrible topic, that everyone will find boring? Do I seem too arrogant, giving everyone advice? Well, I’ve written this much, and I don’t have a better idea, so — here it is. If I lose readers because of it, so be it. I’ll write something short and pleasant tomorrow. Also, I’ll hopefully get some feedback on this, which will help me know if it was the right thing to do. Also, please comment and Like content you enjoy, always. One of the best things to happen to me in the last few months was when someone read my book and sent me a comment telling me how much they liked it. I’m still floating from that one.)

Actually, that’s a real piece of advice: speak up. Do it in writing, do it anonymously if you are uncomfortable with direct conversation and confrontation; I certainly do, and I do almost all of my talking through a computer keyboard. I even write letters to my students when I want to chew them out, and you know what? INCREDIBLY effective. Feels much more formal and serious when I tell them in a letter that I’m sick of their bad behavior. Highly recommend it. But: speak. Up. Always. Positive and negative. When you are grateful that someone did something nice, say it — not just “Thank you,” but “I appreciate the way you gave me that/helped out with that/did that nice thing.” Tell your loved ones not only that you love them, but also what you love about them. As often as you think of it, say it. When someone angers you or upsets you, say something. When someone makes you uncomfortable, say something. Don’t suffer in silence: say it. Always. The worst case scenario is that you’ll be a pathetic whiny sniveler, and this way, the rest of us will know that and avoid you: so then everyone wins.

Well, except you.

But that’s what you get for being a whiny sniveler.

Last thing, and it’s not cheerful, but it’s true, and it’s important: people love telling younger people that life gets harder, that high school is nothing compared to college, and that college is nothing compared to the real world. I heard that all through school — “When you get to high school, it’s going to be MUCH harder . . . When you get to college, that’s when school/professors/assignments/grades get REALLY hard . . . When you get out into “the real world,” you’ll see how much better you had it while you were still a student!” — and I’m sure you’ve heard it too.

Well, here’s your last truth from me: it’s all bullshit.

Every stage of life is hard. And every stage of life has rewards that make it bearable. College is harder than high school academically; but the freedom you gain, the agency and control over your own life, makes it worthwhile. Also, you get to meet much better people. That same combined difficulty and reward comes with moving out of school and into the world of jobs and such — whether you make that transition after high school or after college doesn’t matter, it’s always the same — you gain more responsibilities, but also more power. The power gives you more freedom and more agency — you earn your own money and you can spend it how you want, for instance — but the responsibilities reduce that freedom, as well.

It’s always like that. When you are older you will probably have more financial security, but your health will probably be worse, and you’ll be aware of your dwindling years to enjoy your life. When you are young, you have all the time in the world — and too much of it has to be spent struggling.

I’m not saying this to depress you, just to let you know: it doesn’t get worse. In most ways, it gets better, because even though there are troubles to weigh down your joys, there is something else that happens as you go through life: you get stronger. Whatever does not kill you, right? It’s true: you get stronger every single day you are alive. It doesn’t make the troubles you face less — but it means you have an easier time handling them. And as long as you keep your eyes open, and take the time to recognize what you have, your happinesses will seem greater. I am happier now than I have been at any time in my past. Last year I would have said the same thing. Ten years ago I would have said the same thing. (Not nine years ago, though. That was a shitty year. But you can’t avoid those, so don’t worry about them. Try to get through them, that’s the best you can do.)

I’m going to end this with my attempt to make my own cliché — but because I thought of it, I actually find it much too annoying to just say; so I’m going to say it with memes. (Another piece of writer’s and teacher’s advice: know your audience.)

They tell us to never give up — but sometimes, giving up means you can walk away, and go find something better to try. So the best way to look at this is:

Image result for picard make it so

or

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Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Is this one good enough?

Dusty 1 Comment

This is how it feels to be an artist.

There’s never enough time. Everything you have to do takes you away from where you should be: working, sleeping, bathing, cleaning, eating, exercising, relaxing, dressing, smiling. It always has: you started too late in life, you didn’t work hard enough, you spent all those years in math class, working at Carvel Ice Cream, hanging out with friends. So much time wasted: and wouldn’t a real artist have spent that time making art? You know those artists you read about who ignore food and sleep and companionship when they’re working? Those are artists. You’re not an artist.

When there is time to spend on art, you spend it the wrong way doing the wrong things. Everything’s the wrong thing: you have too many ideas, and no idea which idea is the right idea. There’s supposed to be a click in your head when the right idea comes and settles into its place in your brain, and then the art will just flow out of you like milk and honey. But there’s no click. So you just pick something, something that seems interesting, maybe the most recent idea, because it’s often exciting when it’s new. Then as soon as you pick an idea and start working on it, something clicks in your brain, and you realize: this is the wrong idea. That other idea would be better, that old idea, the one you’ve had enough time to think about and really develop. What were you thinking, working on a just-born idea like that? So you change, and work on the other idea. It’s not the right idea either. But you know better than to change again, because you tried that thing once, working like that artist you read about who kept nineteen different projects going at the same time, gamboling about his studio adding a dash of color here, a touch of spice there, probably singing operatic arias and feeding the birds from his hand, like Cinderella, as he did so. But that never works for you. You have to do one thing at a time. So you keep working on this idea. Even though it’s the wrong idea. Because you need to do art, and if you don’t use the time you decided on and set aside for it, the time you clawed away from work and from sleep, you’re not an artist.

So you work. And it’s lovely. The world falls away: you don’t feel thirst or hunger, none of the needling of need, and your thoughts, blessedly, turn off. There is a glorious silence. Heaven forbid you have somewhere else to be and a time to depart, because you’ll miss it. Then again, if you don’t have a reason to stop, you may surrender all the light of the day, all the peace of the night, to your work. You arise from your working space with pins, needles, cricks, stiffenings, aches; now you’re hungry, now you’re thirsty. Now you’re an artist.

And it is to be hoped that you finished what you were working on. Because coming back to it after a stop, it never feels quite right. Time away from it gives you time to think about how wrong this idea is, and how it’s not coming out the way it’s supposed to come out (like milk and honey, it’s supposed to flow like milk and honey, to fall magically from your unconscious to your hand to the paper), and how you can’t quite make it feel the way it felt in your head when it was just an idea, and looking at it now you can’t remember what you were going to do next, and now you realize that you did that thing wrong — what were you thinking? That is terrible. You’re not an artist.

It’s only right when it’s finished. When something’s finished — and long finished, not ink-still-wet finished — then you sometimes look back at it and think, “Damn. That is good.” And then you think, “How the hell did I do that?” But right then, it doesn’t matter how: you did do that. That was you. That makes it all worthwhile. Because you’re an artist.

Except nobody else sees it. Nobody else cares about it. You send your work away to the people who buy and sell art, and they never even look at it, because they’re not concerned with art, they’re concerned with buying and selling. And you and your art won’t make them any money. You read of famous artists who were rejected over and over, twenty times, thirty times, before they were accepted, and they say “Never give up! Ignore rejection!” So you keep trying — twenty times, thirty, fifty. A hundred. Maybe you’re not as good as you thought you were. Maybe you’re not an artist.

But never mind: it’s art. It’s right there, and you made it, and it’s good art, you think. So you ignore the chorus of twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred small voices in your head that say, “No, that’s not what we want. That’s no good. You’re doing it wrong.” It helps now if you have loved ones who support you; they can drown out those voices. Mostly. Though their voices come with one other, a little one, dry and creaky and quiet like Jiminy Cricket and the Cryptkeeper rolled into one, and this voice says, “They’re only saying that because they love you.” But it’s only one voice. It’s easy to ignore. For a time.

But never mind: it’s art. It’s right there, and you made it, and it’s good art, you think. Maybe you just have to do something a little different. Maybe that other idea would be better. This one doesn’t feel right. That’s why it was rejected. It’s no problem, adding this piece to your collection of finished and unpublished pieces; someday they will write books about these, have displays in museums and galleries of your early work. This will be known, someday. It’s art, and you think it’s good. You’re an artist.

You do it again, and again, and again: lose yourself, finish a piece; let some time go by so you can see your work instead of seeing only a collaboration of flaws you couldn’t fix. No: this one’s good (“No good,” shout the fifty, the hundred.). And now you have a new plan: you’ll put it on the Internet. The hell with those fifty businessmen, those hundred empty suits, those Philistine fat cats; you’ll take your work in front of an audience yourself, take your message straight to the people, no middlemen. This is the digital age: you don’t need some corporate shill passing judgment on your work; all you need is a blog. You’re an artist.

You start a blog, maybe an online shop. You post your work. You wait.

One Like. Thanks, Mom.

Hey — now there are two Likes! Oh — never mind. It’s a spam bot.

Where are all those people? The ones who told you they loved your work? Who said you were great and talented? Who said they’d buy your work if it was published?

They’re buying other things. T-shirts and new shoes. SUVs. Vacations. Coffee. Beer. Concert tickets.

Not art.

Nobody buys art.

You try not to count the years. Sometimes you look at what you’ve done and you’re proud, you think, “Look at that. That’s a legacy.” Sometimes you look at the same work and you think, “How much time have I spent on this?” How much of my life have I given to this?” You think, “This isn’t right. I can’t be doing this right. Maybe I shouldn’t do this at all. I’m not an artist.”

But what else can you do? What are you, if you’re not an artist?

You think about why you became an artist. Obviously not for the money, you laugh — though it would have been nice to have made a lot of money. Or even some. Enough to buy something you could point to and say, “I paid for that with my art.” You can’t do that with a cup of coffee or an extra donut.

So why did you become an artist? Was it wrong? Has it all been a mistake? Is that why nobody buys your work? Why you’re only up to twelve followers on your blog, even though you have one hundred, two hundred, five hundred friends on Facebook? Share your art, get six Likes; share that kitten video, though, or that status about losing weight. Hell, asking for support in your choice to be an artist gets you a bigger response than your actual art does.

Now you feel a little bitter. A little mad at the world. We don’t live in a time or a place that values art. We should: art brings beauty and truth into our lives in a way we can abide, with just enough joy, just enough mercy to allow it to settle to our souls and become a part of us, making us larger, fuller, more whole. All the memes on the internet can’t match one genuine piece of art — which is why so many of those same memes are built on stolen art.

Yeah: that happens to you. Someone takes your idea, or takes the whole thing, your work, your art, and sells it themselves. You find out; you’re pissed; you look into the law — there’s nothing you can do. It’s the digital age, and nobody buys art. Everybody steals it. The laws protect those who make enough money to buy the laws.

You get a little more bitter.

Your art gets angrier. Sadder. It’s not as good, any more. People certainly aren’t going to buy it now, now that you’re ranting at them.

Now you face it. The end. You’ve tried long enough, done everything you could, you’ve done your best.

Do you give up? Surrender to the inevitable? There are too many good artists out there, and not enough people who buy art; the supply exceeds the demand. You’re just not good enough. Or is it lucky enough? Are you better than those who are making money doing what you do? Is there a secret to their success which you don’t know? You read the blogs of people who tell you they can give you the secret to making a living as an artist, but here’s the secret: you have to convince people that you know the secret to making a living as an artist, and then you get them to buy that secret — which is that you have to convince people that you know the secret to making a living as an artist, and then get them to buy that secret. Art is no longer a scene; now it’s a scheme.

So what do you do?

Do you give up?

If you give up, you’re not an artist, and you never were: everybody says that artists never give up, that artists are compelled to make art, that that compulsion is the only reason to be an artist: because you have no choice.

But it’s artists who sell art who say that. Just like the ones who say “Never give up! Ignore rejection!” are the ones who eventually got past the rejection to acceptance.

Not you. Maybe not yet: but maybe not ever.

So do you give up?

Are you an artist?

What is this?

Dusty 2 Comments

(Please note: throughout this piece, every use of “I” and “me” should be taken to mean both myself and my wife; we are equal partners in this endeavor. She has read and approved this before publication, and she has kindly let me speak for us both. It was just too awkward to keep saying “Toni and I.”)

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This is the dog who lives at my house. The question is, what does that make me?

I call myself his father; I call him my son. But of course, he’s not that; we are of different species. He doesn’t look like me at all. I don’t treat him as I would a human son. He doesn’t eat at the table. He doesn’t wear clothing. He doesn’t have Legos.

My human son would have Legos. I would teach him to read, and to talk like a pirate. We would watch The Iron Giant and Monty Python together, and play Sorry and Parcheesi and War. I would learn to play chess so I could teach him.

None of these things are true with the dog. So he must not be my son.

The law calls me his owner; him, my property. But how can that be? The measure of an individual life, the distinction between an object and a person, between animate and inanimate, is sentience. Sentience is the ability to feel or perceive: the dog can clearly do both. His perceptions are markedly more sensitive than mine, in some cases.

Not in all cases, though. His sense of taste, for instance. Not only does he regularly chew up live, squirming insects of any kind that he can catch, he also picks up anything — anything — that might resemble food, no matter how remotely, while on his walk. Sure, he grabbed that discarded Goldfish cracker, and he tried to eat the doughnut that someone dropped and then ran over; but he also picks up bird feathers, cigarette butts, flower petals, balls of lint and hair, pieces of tar and plastic, shiny things, and the excrement of other animals. He also regularly licks the tile floor in the kitchen, for minutes at a time. I have doubts about the functionality and acuity of those taste buds.

But there is no doubt that he can feel. He misses me when I am gone. He is happy when I return. He loves to cuddle, and to play tug-fetch. He has trouble with anxiety: when I change my routine, it can upset him, and he — well, he freaks out. He starts moving and breathing quickly, and he tries to get as close to me as possible, nipping at me and whimpering softly, desperately; if he doesn’t calm down at that point, the next stage is a good five minutes of sprinting, at top speed, in and out of the room where I am, throwing himself as violently as possible onto the bed or couch where I lay, barking at every turn and biting anything or anyone who intervenes. Clearly he has feelings — prodigiously strong feelings. He suffers because of it.

The mechanistic paradigm would hold that these are nothing more than reaction to stimuli and conditioned response, and perhaps so. As such, they are no different from any of my feelings, about which one could make the same argument — I smile when he comes to me and rolls onto his back because doing so ensures me a pleasurable experience, namely rubbing his belly, which feels good to my fingers, lowers my blood pressure, and so on. Such affection is pleasurable because it signifies pack bonding, which helps to ensure my individual survival: for I have allies in the hunt and against my enemies.

Whatever. The point is, he is as sentient as I. I do not think he can be considered an object. Property. No more than I.

When I come home, he meets me at the door, wagging his tail, but he is not a jumper; he likes it when I come down to his level. I crouch down, usually with one knee on the floor and the other out to the side, and he curls into me, pressing his body against my leg and across my torso, and I put my arms around him and bend low to kiss his head, and he is surrounded and encapsulated by me. Each morning when I get up, I lay on the couch to drink my first coffee, and he leaps up to lay beside me, sitting in the space made by my sideways lap. He leans against me while I pet him, and if I use only one hand, he puts his front paw on the other one and tugs, as if to say, “Why aren’t you using this hand, too?” So I do. And he smiles. Within minutes he melts, oozing down to lie beside me in the narrow space I do not occupy, his long legs lolling over the side of the futon. Often he rolls onto his back, hoping that I will gently scratch his belly. That’s his favorite.

He wants to be in the room where I am, no matter what. As I move back and forth between kitchen, living room, bathroom, bedroom, he follows me, his chew toy in his teeth, laying down on the bed even for the half a minute while I put on my belt and pick up my shoes. Whenever I go to any door, he wants to lead me through it, the grand marshal of my daily parade.

So what does that make him, all of that? My pet? Too condescending. My shadow? Too stalker-y. My companion? Perhaps.

I call him my friend. My buddy. (I sing the song, which I learned by heart during my adolescence when the television burned at both ends.) And it’s true. But there’s more.

I named him. We call him Samwise — Sammy for short — after my favorite character in the same books that gave my name to my parents (Well, my second-favorite character, but really, The Witch-King of Angmar, Lord of the Nazgul is no name for a dog. That’s a cat name. Or a bunny.). I named myself for him, because I speak for him as I speak to him. I recognize that the names, like the words, like the personality and the voice that I have created for him (He sounds like Sniffles the Mouse from the old cartoons) are all and only of and from me, not from him; but he takes them on, for me. He lets me color him in. He lets me play with him when I want to laugh, and hug him when I want to cry, and always, he makes me feel better.

So what is he, to me?
Here’s why it matters, what he is to me; here’s why I’m writing about this. Here. This is the second time I’ve had a dog-friend-son. The first was Charlie.

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Charlie died last year. He died because of a brain tumor. But really, he died because I killed him. I told the doctor to poison him, and I held him while he died.

If Charlie was my son — and just as I do with Sammy, I called him such, called myself his father; my parents called him their grand-dog — then I would not have done this. I would have fought that tumor, would have put Charlie on the medication, gotten him the CAT scan, talked to doctors about surgery, about chemo and radiation, about prognoses and time and quality of life.

If Charlie was my property, I wouldn’t feel badly about his death. When a possession is broken — and that tumor broke him, at the end, sent him into grand mal seizures, caused apparent blindness and confusion and loss of equilibrium and loss of bladder control, and I can’t imagine how much pain he’d have been in had we not had him on analgesics — you throw it away. Maybe you miss it, but you don’t regret throwing it away. I didn’t even throw Charlie away: I kept his ashes in a white box, high on a shelf, with his collar beside it, and the Christmas ornament we got for him, embroidered with his name.

But I feel badly about Charlie’s death. I regret the decision I made, even if it was the only one I could have. I know it was the only one I could have made, and the actual decision took almost no time; there was no question that it was the right thing to do, none at all. But I wish I hadn’t had to make it. I still wish he was here. I miss him. I loved him. I still do.

If he was my friend, then his death at my hands makes some sense. He was suffering. He was losing himself, and every day that he lived would have taken him further away from who he was. When you face that, it may be your friend — your buddy — that you ask to pull the trigger, to pull the plug, to end it.

But I’ve had friends. I have friends. None of the other ones live with me, and even when they did, I never, ever scratched their tummies like they liked. There’s a connection here, a trust and an intimacy, that friendship does not include. And, more, there’s this: the truth is, I don’t know if Charlie wanted me to have him put to sleep. He didn’t ask me for that. He didn’t decide.

I decided for him.

If I had a human child with a terminal illness, at some point, I would make the same decision — though I might decide differently. But still, I would decide to keep fighting or to let go. I would. Not the child. And I would never make that decision for a friend. Only for someone whose life was actually in my hands, someone who trusted me so completely, that I knew so well, that I could make that call for him. I’ve never had a friendship that close, and don’t expect I ever will.

That kind of relationship is family.

So, I guess that’s what Sammy is, what Charlie was. My family. My pack. My son.

My dog.

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