Female Privilege: The GOP, the War on Women, and Class

Let's talk about privilege.

priv - i - lege (n): a right, immunity, or benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantages of most.

There's the now-ubiquitous take down of white male privilege explained in gamer terms (that I love, for the record, and I don't even play video games). And honestly, public discussions of privilege generally center on white male privilege, and for reasons well and good, but there are other types of privilege.

Female privilege, for example. Now, you must understand before you decide to crucify me that "female privilege" and "white male privilege" are not exact correlations. The kind of privilege I am going to talk about with regard to women is not the all-encompassing power of cultural superiority that white men hold. But still, there have traditionally been some privileges afforded one by being (white and/or wealthy) female. These privileges fall generally under the condition of "immunity" rather than "right," but that doesn't preclude them from being privileges, as you can see, from the above-quoted definition.

It's a political truism that there are two kinds of freedom: freedom from and freedom to. Generally, people don't specify which they mean because (in my extremely humble opinion) the people that yell the loudest about "freedom" usually mean "freedom from" and that's a rather inferior sort of freedom, don't you think? I think so. I mean, I'd much rather have the freedom TO go where I please than have the freedom FROM men yelling at me on the street. It is more important to me that I be able to set my own goals and accomplish them, which requires a more or less absolute freedom of movement, than it is to never encounter something unpleasant. That's how I parse the difference between freedom to and freedom from.

(N.B. - Ideally I'd have both, but I am, despite my unflappable optimism, a realist, and getting both is a little greedy so I'll take the freedom to, thankyouverymuch. And do whatever I can do ensure that maybe my great-great-great-great-great-granddaughters will have both.)

However, that's how I value-weight things. I am not the only person, nay, nor even the only woman in the world. And women have, since time immemorial, enjoyed a particularly privileged position when it comes to "freedom from." There are concrete examples, like street harassment: only going out with a male chaperone is a pretty effective way to not have dudes cat-calling and/or trying to grab parts of your body.

But the female privilege of freedom from extends much farther than such concrete examples, as privilege is wont to do. The privilege of freedom from is the freedom from all sorts of unpleasantness. Let's face it, everyone, the world is a pretty awful place. Navigating it is hard work. Making decisions, weighing options, walking the tightrope between self-care and caring for others: these are difficult, draining things. They are difficult and draining things for everyone, regardless of gender. But women have had the privilege of avoiding these things, by letting men make such decisions for them. The privilege of women has long been the freedom from having to chart a course through the universally-determined awfulness of the material world.

Sexism is, at its core, a belief that women are not capable of doing this. Women are not capable of making decisions, weighing choices, wielding power, and navigating the world. Because they are not capable, they must be protected, given freedom from having to do these things. That explains men that want to limit women's choices.

But what about women? They must realize that they're capable of choosing things for themselves, they must realize that they are capable of navigating the world. They must. Particularly high-power, high profile women, women like Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin and Nikki Haley, they must realize that the perception that women can't do the things they have done is wrong. So why do they (and hundreds of thousands of other women) align themselves with a political party that is dedicated to legally limiting women's choices? This is the question of the hour! Everyone is asking it!

Here's my take: privilege. It's not that these women are stupid, or self-loathing, which are the two explanations I see advanced most often. No, they are neither. What they are is deeply, deeply aware of their female privilege. We're at, you might say, a tipping point. Feminism has advanced to the point where women can indeed become Ann Coulter and Nikki Haley and even Hilary Clinton. But it has not advanced so far that actual equality is achieved, and thus, female privilege is preserved.

The option of retreating from the world, of ceasing to navigate it's awfulness and messiness, still exists for women of a certain class. The option of being protected and deferred to still exists. Women like Coulter and Haley and all the others are scared of losing that privilege.

At the Republican National Convention this year, there is something called the Women's Pavilion, organized and presided over by GOP women, where salon services and feminine hygiene products are available, and where women can meet to talk to other women "in ways women can relate to." The whole thing strikes me as redolent of a harem, minus the sexual overtones. Women winking over what the men say and speaking to each other in a coded, female-specific language; women occupying a place where men are forbidden; women assigned a specific sphere of influence. Even the name, "pavilion," calls up images of ladies sitting on comfortable chairs and shaded from the sun that might damage their complexions whilst they chat idly over lemonade. This is the privilege of women: a space "just for them," a language all their own. But, of course, by virtue of gender-exclusionary practices, nothing will get done in this women's pavilion. There will be lots of talk and no action. No decisions will be made, only communication, only translation.

Because the privilege of women is the freedom from decision-making. In an interview with Mary Anne Carter, organizer of this women's pavilion, a telling quote turns up:

I would think that the current healthcare bill that may or may not be repealed — I don’t want to call it ‘Obamacare’ but I can’t remember the name of it — is potentially a serious war on women, allowing women to make their own healthcare choices.

Allowing women to make their own healthcare choices, instead of having them dictated by a husband or a father or a doctor or even (in a pinch?) the government that is run by men is the real war on women, for those that are terrified of losing their female privilege. Having to take responsibility for those kinds of things, those things that happen in the real and awful and terrifying and messy world is a pretty scary thought. It's much easier to rest on female privilege, on the perception of the fairer and weaker sex, on the idea that women need a space and a language all their own, on the construction of the general world as male and therefore outside your purview.

Women have historically been great enforcers of gender roles. We shame and punish each other for being sluts, for breaking the rules, for doing what women aren't supposed to do. Why? Because we all know that we're capable of managing our own lives, but some of us really don't want to have to. The world is awful and living is hard.

The problem is, of course, that not all women have the option, the luxury of relying on the female privilege that is largely the demesne of the wealthy. And setting public policy for the comfort of the wealthy has never worked out indefinitely for any culture. But still, that doesn't stop people from clinging to their privileges with terror-hardened fingers.

Who Deserves to Die?

A year ago, during the awful lead-up to and then even more awful execution of Troy Davis, I started thinking about the death penalty. And now, as Texas sets itself to execute (another) cognitively deficient man, I'm thinking about it again.

What is a "death penalty?" Killing someone for a crime committed. Lots of people find such punishment appropriate: "An eye for an eye," goes the refrain of the religious who support it; "Some people just can't be trusted," say the less Biblically minded. In essence, a death penalty is a judgment of irredeemability. Killing someone for a crime necessarily means that society has judged that person incapable of rehabilition; they will never be a functioning member of society, and therefore must be removed from it so as to prevent further harm.

You might be able to guess that I am not a supporter of the death penalty. I find the idea of judging someone beyond redemption a horrific display of hubris and privilege that leaves me sick to my stomach. Of course, as soon as I start to talk with anyone about my moral objections to the death penalty, they'll inevitably come up with one scenario or another for which I have no good rejoinder. The expense of keeping people behind bars (if we quit locking people up for years for non-violent offenses, the cost of locking up violent offenders would be much more tolerable), the danger to other members of the prison population posed by certain offenders (sociopaths are a thing I really have no solution for), the inherent inhumanity of a lifetime of isolated confinement in an 8 by 8 space (a point made eloquently to me by a man that vowed to get himself shot before being locked up again; I think he meant it, too).

I don't have practical solutions to these issues. All I have is the absolute conviction that killing people is wrong. And it is just as wrong to kill someone that has killed someone else as it is for that person to kill someone else in the first place. The practical issues of human beings being awful to each other are messy, but the morality of it is crystal-clear to me: killing people is wrong. Full stop.

So what does it say about us, as a society, that we have authorized the state to validate our own worst impulses and kill people? What does it say about us that we suffer a governing principle that does not demand of us to better ourselves, but rather allows us to close our eyes and stop up our ears like children frightened of something in the dark? Because desire to hurt another being always stems from fear.

It says nothing flattering about us, to be sure. It says we will suffer stagnation. It says that we, as a culture, refuse to move beyond fear and reactionary retribution.

And I can't help but draw corollaries between state-sponsored execution and vigilantism and mass murders. We continue to grant the state this power of life and death over its citizens because we will not let go of the idea that we ought to have the power of life and death over each other. The different, scary Other deserves to die, and we will be the instrument of death if no one else steps up, it is our RIGHT to extract pounds of flesh and harvest souls.

Yes, I know that generally sane, well-adjusted people don't tend to be the ones that take up arms and kill people. But that's the point, isn't? Generally sane, well-adjusted people don't do that sort of thing. Generally sane, well-adjusted people don't kill other people. So why are we, collectively, killing people left and right? We must not be generally sane, or well-adjusted. Perhaps we should do something about that.

A culture that continues to hold that there are people that deserve to be killed will continue to breed Loughner's and Holmes' and Page's.

The Palm, the Willow, the Way Forward

When I was nine, I spent part of a summer with my paternal grandparents in South Carolina. My family's relationship with my father's family has always been complicated, so this trip was something of an anamoly in the firmament of my childhood. The experiment was a nearly unmitigated disaster; my grandmother and I fought like the pig-headed autocrats we both are inside. However, the pine forests of the Carolinas are beautiful, majestic, regal, and to this day I sometimes dream about how they smell and the quality of silence that's created by the muffling effect of years upon years of pine needles decomposing beneath your feet.

About halfway through the trip, my grandfather took me for a drive along the Carolina coast. This was 1993, as I recall, after Hurricane Andrew. There were palm trees along that drive that were growing crooked: gnarled and bent over and sticking out from the earth at a uniform impossible angle.

"Do you know why those trees are bent?" my grandfather asked me.

I shook my head.

"They bent in the hurricane's wind. They bent so that they would remain standing. The trees that didn't bend are gone now."

We spent the rest of the drive in silence. Even at nine, I knew what he was trying to tell me. And I was a little ashamed that he felt he had to impart this lesson to me, and I was little resentful that he wasn't trying to impart it to his wife instead, and I was about as thoughtful as a nine-year-old gets.

My grandfather died a few years ago; my grandmother is still alive in the Carolinas, and the last few times I've seen her, it's certainly seemed as if she's learned to bend in the wind.

The palm trees in the wind are the beginning of mystery. I am grateful to my grandfather, and the hurricane, and those trees, for giving me such a concrete lesson, but it's time to move on from the palm trees. The palms, you see, they bent in the wind so that they would survive. That's all. That's it. Acceptance so that survival.

I've been having trouble bending to the winds lately. I've been having trouble accepting merely to survive. My horizon is broadened, and mere survival seems small. I feel buffeted at every turn, everything and everyone seems hell-bent on knocking me over and leaving me small and broken on the ground. Events, yes, but also people. From elections to relationships, I cannot bend the way I ought. I have no acceptance because acceptance feels like defeat. I don't want to succumb; I want to thrive. I don't want to be a solitary palm tree, isolated and broken and just hanging on. I want so much more than that.

A few days ago, I randomly stumbled on a parable that I can no longer place, but it showed me where to go, how to continue to bend to the winds.

The willow shoot bends in the wind until it is a forest that can break the wind.

Time to grow into a forest.

The Depths of Toddler Despair

My three-and-a-half-year-old is deep in the pit of an existential crisis. I know that sounds adorable and precocious and like a good opportunity for personal growth for a Mama that purports to be mindful, and it is all those things. It is.

But, no jokes, no funny business, it's also hell. A three-and-a-half-year-old existential crisis involves some pretty horrendous temper tantrums. You can't really blame her, really: it's got to be awful to be in the grips of angsty ennui when you don't even know the words "angst" and "ennui." As nebulous and imprecise as they are, they at least provide some sort of structure for your feelings.

It's been a really tough week for us, these past seven days or so. She's been moody, operating on a hair-trigger that sends her from smiling and delightful to anger ball monster in a matter of seconds. There have been lots of thrown toys, lots of screams, lots of "NO!" regardless of what is being offered.

After her angry outbursts, she always starts to cry and then tries to burrow into me. If I ask her to stop crying, she'll look up at me with tear-stained cheeks and whimper, "But I'm really sad, Mama. I'm really sad."

It's heartbreaking.

But for seven days, I have been unable to get her to tell me what it is, exactly, that she's sad about. She's either ignored the question completely when its been asked, or mumbled some throwaway answer along the lines of  "I don't know."

Yeah, yeah, I know: she's my kid. She's MY daughter. This behavior makes perfect sense when you think about it that way, right?

Last night, after the fourth straight dinner-table meltdown, I took her upstairs to calm down. Time-outs weren't working, obviously, so I sat with her, instead - the two of us cuddled up in the rocker in her room.

And she said to me again, "I'm sad, Mama. I'm just really sad."

"What are you sad about?" I asked, again, with no hope or expectation of a response.

She lifted her chin, and the lamplight glinted on her wet, mottled cheeks. "I don't know who I am, Mama!" she wailed confessionally. "What's my fourth name?"

I was taken aback. What did she mean, fourth name? What was this about not knowing who she is?

"You're Genevieve Anne Findley. You're my snugglebug, and you are my best girl, and you are clever and strong and big and beautiful," I said to her. "Mama gave you three names. Genevieve, for St. Genevieve; Anne for Anne Shirley; and Findley, just like Mama."

She wasn't sobbing anymore, but there were still tears making tracks down her face, and her grip on my shirt was compulsively tight.

"But what about my fourth name, Mama? I should have four names," she choked out.

"Well, you think about what you want your fourth name to be. You think about all the names you know, and all the names you've heard, and when you find the perfect fourth name, you let me know, and we'll add it, ok?" This is me trying to be supportive in my absolute bafflement.

She snuggled deeper into my chest and stared at the wall. I stroked her hair. We sat and rocked, gently, back and forth, back and forth.

After what felt like an eternity, she straightened up and looked me dead in the eye.

"Bookwriter," she said. "My fourth name is Bookwriter."

"Absolutely," I replied. "Genevieve Anne Bookwriter Findley."

She squeezed out a tiny smile, and back we went to the dinner table, where she still didn't eat anything, but at least she didn't howl the whole time.

My three-and-a-half-year-old, who can't write her own name yet, wants to be a bookwriter. And is deep in the pit of an existential crisis. Perhaps some stereotypes exist for good reason. And perhaps all writers really are crazy, right from the very beginning. It would sure explain a lot about me.

The Gender Politics of Internet Trolling

I can be pretty obnoxiously political. As a general rule, I've kept most of it off this particular venue of expression of mine and focused here on my personal experiences of things, but really. I can be pretty obnoxiously bleeding-heart, far-left political.

Mostly this comes through on Twitter, where it was the protests against Governor Scott Walker and his union-busting that made me truly appreciate the medium. I was looking at a picture of the court order re-opening our state Capitol an hour and twenty minutes before it hit any local news site. (And yeah, I timed it.) I have made some really wonderful friends while tweeting about politics. And had some fascinating discussions.

So when I tell you that I've never been trolled, not seriously, you should understand that I do go through pretty long jags of political commentary. It's not that I've never been trolled because I stay away from that sort of thing. But, back in March when I starting getting the first inklings, I definitely did circle my wagons and clam up for a few days. And that's a strategy that's worked very well for me ever since. I am obnoxiously political for (at maximum) five days, and then I go back to tweeting about my love life or clothes or food or something safely domestic for a period of time that is at least three days longer than however long I spent tweeting exclusively about politics and current events.

This has had the interesting (and hilarious) effect of getting me on some really interesting public lists. Like "Almost Worth Following." I laughed pretty hard at that one. There was another one that was simply titled Liberal/Retard/Spam/Troll, which I thought was an interesting grouping of things to be. I didn't laugh so much at that as I did wince.

But my strategy of just never going for too long without backing off and becoming nonthreateningly girly again seemed to work. Aside from the most glancing, easy to identify, and non-personal trolling that exists, I've never had to deal with vitriol from strangers.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine (one of those wonderful Twitter pals I met through politics and #wiunion) dropped a comment along the lines of "Remember when I didn't have my real name here and people thought I was a guy? That was fun."

And it made me think: I'm pretty obviously female, even on a gender-neutral platform like Twitter. My handle is "TheGirlOne" for crying out loud, and for a long while I had a picture of my actual face up there as an avatar, and I'm clearly female. What if the reason I never get trolled is less to do with my careful curated strategy, and more to do with my gender? A woman in politics isn't "worth" trolling?

I don't think that's seriously the case; I think it might be some combination of gender roles and my strategy, but after having read this piece, and this one, and this one, I am pretty convinced that my being a woman hasn't been the driving force in not being trolled, either on Twitter or here. Because there are, apparently, a lot of men out there, and a lot of people out there in general, that are willing to aim a lot of pent-up rage at women on the Internet.

And I think that the quote at the end of the Time article is intensely relevant to anyone that's about to tell me that it's *just* the Internet:

"This is 2011. It’s not “just” the Internet. It’s our culture. At this moment in time, you can work, socialize, date, learn, communicate and debate online. There is no longer a divide. What is happening online is happening in real life. This type of abuse reflects real-life attitudes, real-life misogyny and it’s prolific. It’s about time we started discussing it."

The Internet is, for better or worse, a part of the way we live these days. It is our culture. It's no longer a subculture, or an underground culture, or any other negating adjective you want to throw on it. The Internet is pop culture. We inhabit these spaces as surely as we do our bedrooms, apartments, cubicles, cars. And what happens here is real.

I've been lucky. Startling, beautifully, terrifyingly lucky. I have blogged about gender relations, and gender bending, and patriarchal political pundits, and my own sexual history. I have been, at times, uncomfortably personal. I have been, always, lucky that all of you that read this or have stumbled upon it have been kind and supportive.

I worked for a political office in Milwaukee for a year when I was in college. When the then-governor of our state, Jim Doyle, vetoed concealed carry legislation, a lot of people were understandably upset. Several of them called into the Mayor's office to express their disapproval. (Don't ask me why people upset with the governor were calling the mayor of a city. I don't know. People are dumb.)

One of the interns answering phones during that period was a lovely young woman, a friend of mine, and she took a call in which the man on the other end of the phone told her, after she tried to explain to him that the Mayor had no control over what the governor did and it wasn't under our purview, that he "hoped she got raped on her way home tonight, so [she'd] understand that carrying a gun is a good thing."

I cried when it was directed at her, and I certainly looked over my shoulder the entire walk from City Hall to my busstop, the whole bus ride home, the whole walk from that busstop to my apartment.

I have been (for me, anyway) remarkably open here, and I have been lucky. And I have been consistently supported in that. I hope that never changes. But I would be lying if I didn't tell you that putting this piece out there is taking slightly more courage than I probably have.

We should all be more compassionate. Telling that to a mysogynistic, scared little man in his basement spewing hate at all the women he can find on the Internet is probably a bit like spitting in the storm's eye, but I'll do it anyway. We should all be more compassionate. We should all be working to understand the ways in which we're all vulnerable and scared, and we should all be working to change those conditions. Life doesn't have to be nasty, poor, solitary, brutish, and short. We can be better than that. So, let's be better than that.

And let's start by all being as civil to everyone as you've all been to me.

Don't Settle, or, There's Enough Happiness To Go Around

Today, a friend of mine dug up a three-and-a-half-year-old piece from the Atlantic called "Marry Him!: The Case for Mr. Good Enough." I have a vague recollection of there being some kind of stir around it back in 2008, but in the early part of 2008 I was heavily pregnant and also completely in love, so I wasn't really paying much attention to tomes with dating or marriage advice.

Today, a single mama with a case of the lonelies, I read through the whole thing. Actually, I've read through the whole thing three times now (my boss really loves me today, guys) because the first time was full of so much emotional reaction that I had to read it a second time to get a rational read on it, and the second time was so full of incredulity at the terrible analytic capacity and also the extreme sense of over-privilege on display that I had to read it a third time to make sure I wasn't emotionally over-reacting again.

It's HORRIFYING. Really, truly horrifying.

The basic premise of the piece is that if you're looking to create a stable family unit, you don't need grand passion in your choice of partner. And on its face, that's a true and valid statement. A stable family unit is not the primary goal of most people out there looking for a life partner, though. The author takes issue with this fact, reflecting on her own dating experiences and those of her friends, and finally coming to the conclusion that a stable family unit is the goal that everyone OUGHT to have. Those that have made the trade off of passion for stability and complain about it now are lucky to have made the choices they did, and the author can't believe that it took her own self so long to figure out what she ought to want.

And that's where everything she says just breaks down and becomes the kind of drivel that I hate to read but can't stop myself from compulsively looking at.

Moral prescriptives about what people ought to want are always fraught with logical inconsistencies and mental acrobatics. Ms. Gottlieb is no exception. She starts with the realization that she's not happy. She then constructs an argument for why she'd be happier if she'd made other choices earlier in her life. The whole thing is the study of an acute case of Frost syndrome, in which "the road less traveled" is held up as some sort of saving grace.

But some of the ways in which she attempts to justify her position are interesting to me, a single mother in my 20s (rather than my 40s) who is also single, and also gets powerful lonely on occasion. The subtext of many of the most offensive statements in the piece make it clear that I am not the target audience for this piece. And I can't help but feel that perhaps if I could infuse some of my own perspective into Ms. Gottlieb's thought processes, I might be able to help her out a bit.

For starters, what is a stable family unit? Why is a stable family unit irrevocably and for all time a man, a woman, and two point three children living in a house with a white picket fence and a rose garden and a dog? On paper, I'm a single mother, but I live in a house with my parents (both my biological parents, in their 25th year of marriage), my biological child (concieved in a foreign country and born out of wedlock and with no legal father) and the two adult children of my oldest sister, who is actually my half sister (the product of my father's first marriage). No dog, no white picket fence. We're pretty stable, despite the tensions that sometimes erupt. I would even go so far as to call us a stable family unit. And my daughter certainly gets the advantage of all that stability and also all that attention.

The idea that two married, hetero-sexual people raising a child is the only thing that qualifies as a stable family unit is tied to the statistics about the children of single parents (specifically single mothers) that exist out there, and I'll be the first to admit that such statistics sound dismal. But I have always questioned those statistics, and not just because statistics can be manipulated to show just about anything. No, I've never been fully convinced that the relationship between single-parent households and under performance at school or behavior problems wasn't completely spurious. Because here's a little secret: most single-parent households are also POOR.

Yeah, shocking, I know. But true. And poverty carries it with a whole host of issues that might affect things like school performance and behavior a whole lot more than not having a daddy. Like, hunger. It's really hard to concentrate when you're hungry. Also, malnutrition in infants can and does lead to diminished mental capacity, period. And I've never seen a study that controlled completely for the variables that come with poverty when trumpeting the ills of single parenthood.

I'm pretty sure Ms. Gottlieb doesn't have to worry about poverty. So I think she can probably settle down a little on the desire to find a husband so that she can create a stable family unit. I'm pretty sure she can do that just fine on her own. Isn't that empowering?

But I don't really think that this woman wants to find a husband so desperately so that she can create a stable family unit. I think she's lonely.

And hey, I have a lot of sympathy for that condition. I suffer from it myself.

But here's what I don't get: she also acknowledges that most of her married friends are ALSO LONELY. SO, she's single and lonely, and her married friends are married and lonely, and it's better to be married and lonely because it's easier to manage kids when you've got a partner to help you out.

SO, a stable family unit is not actually one that's best for the kids, it's the one that minimizes stress on the parents. And sure, as someone that has a lot of help with her daughter in the form of the very non-traditional stable family unit I enjoy, I'll be the first to say that help with kids is a godsend. But again I say unto you: Help with kids doesn't come only in the form of a husband that watches them while you eat lunch and takes the trash out. (Seriously, these are her desired traits in a mate.) You've got lots of single parent friends, you imply. Why don't you all get together and crowd-source the kid watching while you go on dates and have lives?

Because the thing this woman says that offends me the most is this: "With my nonworking life consumed by thoughts of potty training and playdates, I’ve become a far less interesting person than the one who went on hiking adventures and performed at comedy clubs."

Why don't you still do some of those things? You can. I promise.

You don't give up your life to have a child. You don't have to, and the kid will be a better person for you being an interesting, complete, well-rounded person than they will by you being a slave to them. They will be a better person even if they spend a weekend at "Auntie Em's" house now and again, or spend a week with Grandma while you go to Colombia. Really, I promise. It's not child abuse to get away from your kid now and again.

The rest of Gottlieb's dating advice, and exhortations to settle, spring from a complete misunderstanding of the difference between "lust" and "romance." Yeah, that biker that runs guns in his spare time probably gets your motor running in a way that the mild-mannered accountant with allergies to everything under the sun doesn't. But your choice is not dichotomous. Life is not black and white. And the lust you feel for the biker is not "romance." It's ADRENALINE.

Romance comes in a whole host of unexpected packages. For that matter, lust comes in a whole host of unexpected packages. And while you may not fall in love with everyone you fall in lust with, to go from that to the idea that you don't need any sexual attraction to your partner is a leap of logic that I can't even really quite follow. Yes, it's a cliche that long-married people don't have a lot of sex, but to turn that into the support for the argument that marrying someone you never want to have sex with is a good idea is just a little... off. To put it mildly.

So Gottlieb takes her own loneliness, her own frustrations with her (self-chosen, I must say) single parenthood, and turns that into a prescriptive for women everywhere. Marry a man so you don't do what I did? Settle for a man that's good enough so you don't choose to go to a sperm bank so you can have kids? Settle for Mr. Right Now so that you can be lonely with someone later on? I don't really get it.

Here's a better idea: be happy. Stop comparing your life to the lives of your friends and appreciate your life for what it is. Has it ever occured to you that you and everyone you know are unhappy because you're all desperately trying to impress each other instead of enjoying yourselves? Stop competing for happiness, because happiness isn't a pie that the world will run out of. There is more than enough happiness for everyone, more and much more than enough to go around, and you can be happy and they can be happy and I can be happy and we can all be happy. Even if we're lonely sometimes, even if it's hard sometimes, we can be happy. And if we took the road less traveled, there would still be dark places and you, Ms. Gottlieb, would have written a piece called, "Don't Marry Him!: The Case For Holding Out For Mr. Right."

Some people are never happy, and I'm sorry for that. But playing to the insecurities of single women, and exhorting young women to "settle" simply to avoid a fate that in your case actually looks pretty rosy from where I sit, is a pretty awful thing to do. Your life is wonderful. Deal with it.

Fear and Life, Courage and Compassion

Dear Every Human Being Everywhere (But Particularly Human Beings That Reside In and Around Milwaukee, Wisconsin),

I understand that it's natural to be scared of scary things. Fear is a completely normal response to things that are scary. Uncertainty. Violence. The possibility of death or dismemberment. Fear is biology's way of keeping us out of harm's way.

But we don't always give in to fear, do we? People do brave things all the time. People face down other people threatening them. People jump off of bridges and out of airplanes. People go to war.

We are more than capable of over-riding our natural fearfulness.

So let's all do that, ok? Let's let go of being afraid, and add a very small smidgeon of basic compassion, and let's stop talking about carrying guns and possibly shooting other people in crowded public spaces. Let's stop calling other human beings "animals."

There's a great deal of racial tension in my beloved city. This I know. It is known. I've known since I was just a wee tot, often the only white girl in my classes at a public school. So yes, let's all stop pretending that it's not there. It is. And it can be ugly. It is human nature to be hostile to that which is different from you. That cuts across pretty much every demographic line we in the modern age can come up with. Race, age, gender, income, education level, whatever: if whoever you're looking at is different from you in some way, your initial reaction will be one of fearfulness and hostility.

Don't bother arguing with me about that. It's true.

Now the good news! We can tame those impulses. All of us. We have the capacity to conquer our fear and see that different, weird "other" as another human being. All it takes is a little courage and a little compassion. People perform this emotional alchemy EVERY DAY because, hey, guess what? NO ONE IN THE WHOLE WORLD IS EXACTLY THE SAME AS YOU.

Of course, the more percieved danger there is, the harder it is to practice the courage necessary to overcome the first impulse toward hostility. The more percieved strangeness there is, the more difficult it is to realize that the person you are looking at is, in fact, a person.

So when incidents like the one after the fireworks last month in Riverwest, or the one last night at State Fair, occur, they are generally seized upon by cowardly people as an excuse not to excercise that courage that is required of anyone that's going to function in society.

Similarly, the perpetrators of these actions have declared themselves too cowardly and without compassion to bother viewing the people they hurt as people like themselves.

But hey. EVERYONE. THIS IS IMPORTANT.

We're all human beings.

I know that we all have vastly different ways of looking at the world. I know that our experiences of the world and how it works and what we've learned from it are really, really disparate.

But we're all people. We can agree on that, right? So let's start by cutting out the nasty name-calling and the use of words like "animals" and "swine" when we're discussing this? We really should be discussing it, because there is a lot of racial and class-based tension in this city, but we need to discuss it constructively. And that's just not helpful. It's really not.

And hey, people beating other people up? Those are people you're hurting. They hurt and cry and bleed like you. They have problems, too. Making them hurt and cry and bleed is not going to solve your problems. It's not going to make the schools in Milwaukee better and it's not going to make your [parental unit] care about you. It's not going to get you a job. I PROMISE. So you might want to think of another route to accomplishing some of those goals.

Hell, you might want to set a few goals. Really. You can do that. I have absolute faith in your ability to look at your life and set yourself some goals. Why do I have that faith? Because I know you're human beings. You know it, too. So act like it.

Likewise, one-liners about how concealed-carry will solve all our problems is not helpful. Guns don't solve problems. They kill people.

I'm going to say that again, a little slower.

Guns don't solve problems. They kill people.

The subtext here is that killing people doesn't solve problems. Which is absolutely, positively 100% true. Killing people is a cowards way out. Killing people sweeps a problem under a rug, or sticks it into a hole in the ground. A really big, deep, dark hole. But that's not a solution, it's a burial. It doesn't do anything to address the fundamental things that allowed a problem to grow in the first place, and so there's always the chance that some other person or set of people will come along and have the same set of issues and then there will be no template for resolving them other than putting someone in the ground, and that's not a solution because it might happen again.

To solve a problem, you need to make it go away forever, not just for a little while.

So this is for EVERYONE: Shooting people isn't a solution. Beating people up isn't a solution. And fear is not a solution.

Being afraid is a natural response. I get that. Being afraid of the "other" out there is what we're hardwired to do. But we are none of us animals, and we can all of us exercise a little courage. And a smidgeon of compassion.

Going through life afraid and alone is no way to live. For anyone.

With sincere hopes,
Ryan