Bixi was a Hunter

This I Doubt

Hi, everyone. Apologies for not posting for so long. Thank you for faithfully checking for updates even when there was no reward to be found.

I am going for a new, more colloquial style; hence my greeting you directly. More idle chatter, less re-writing. I’m also going to make a short announcement: regarding the hard time Beccah and I (and Anna, when she comes back) have on this blog. Some of us lead lives of novelty by default – we live in foreign lands, or in red states. Beccah and I revel in no such luxury. The charming minutia of our days aren’t fodder for keen observation. You all know what our lives are like. So blogging is hard. Harder than you might think.

Now, onto the substance. So called.

I’ve recently revived my Healthworks habit, and a couple of weeks was doggedly pounding away at a treadmill, resisting the temptation to tune my personal TV monitor to “The Notebook” and instead, like any good Douglas, listening to NPR. You may have noticed that NPR regularly airs a segment called “This I Believe,” in which “Americans from all walks of life share the personal philosophies and core values which guide their daily lives.” I happened that day to hear Jody Williams, founding coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, speak about her beliefs.

Now that I’m re-reading her comments, none struck me as particularly offensive. But at the time I was seized with the fervor of the damned. She stated the following: “I believe it is possible for ordinary people to achieve extraordinary things. For me, the difference between an ‘ordinary’ and an ‘extraordinary’ person is not the title that person might have, but what they do to make the world a better place for us all.”

People need to stop believing that they matter! [1] You grow up thinking that any .org organization is waiting, just waiting, with bated breath, for you – you, smart and articulate perceiver of the stunted and limiting ways of the world, you, eerily astute observer of the currents of human longing and motivation. So you’re untrained, untested, at the beginning of your long life of employment. So what? They’ll wait for you to catch up; they know once you get there, you’ll rearrange everything they already think they understand. They all want to radically reform the world’s status quo, and as such they’re waiting for their own organization’s status quo to be radically reformed, by you, too, as well.

Or am I the only one who grew up with this delusion? What’s my problem, anyway? It’s not like in summer jobs I never encountered hierarchical structures where my “feedback” and input were actively discouraged, because I did. Nor were my parents the sort who delightedly gasped at my ever utterance. More often, my parents, eyebrows arched, gazed down their noses at me and reminded me that I had not the vaguest conception of what it meant to be an adult, participate in the working world, and thus be in the possession of a legitimate opinion. So why did I naïvely assume that any organization I joined was just dying to let me have a crack at the big time?

Here’s the thing. The world of non-profits is not a pancake breakfast. (Not that there is anything about a pancake breakfast that resembles the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines). It’s not a party. We don’t all go hiking together, and there aren’t fun posters on our walls. We certainly don’t all use I statements and collaborate. It is, as I’ve found it so far, entrenched and hierarchical and, the more money your org gets, the more conservative and beholden to outside interests it becomes. “The difference between an ordinary person and an extraordinary person is not the title that person may have,” says Jody Williams. Unfortunately, often, in this office and many such offices, it is. Thinking otherwise is not just naïve, it’s unwise for the movement – whatever movement. As young people graduate from college and choose careers, they need to know what they’re getting into, and not seek full-time, low-paying employment thinking that while their bank account might not be heartily fed their soul will be. Then if the soul is not fed, why, exactly, this line of work was chosen and what, exactly, the future of this cloudy career trajectory is become questions that loom larger than the pleasure of being associated with a “cause” you may care about.

I’m not quite sure where I got this idea, but I know it was in the air all throughout the time I was growing up – go into the non-profit sector and find friendly folks who are informal, open to your input, and have inborn conflict resolution skills at the ready. Join the corporate world, and condemn yourself to a life in which you not only do ill in the world, but also spend all day with people who have neither a soul nor an expressive individuality, and are – shudder – motivated by money. I was reminded of this perspective when I tried to explain my frustrations with my workplace and the ways in which I think big for-profits sometimes can treat their (white-collar) employees better than non-profits do to an old family friend, a sixties radical who still has “Boycott Grapes” stickers taped to her kitchen wall. She stared at me blankly. She could not imagine any even remotely possible way that working for the corporate world would be better than working for a non-profit. Were things different in those days? I mean, I’m sure they were. But am I missing the point of social justice work, or is it true being a cog in a world-improvement-machine – that seems awfully embedded in; indeed, part of, the status quo – scant reward for my labor in and of itself?

Anyway. At least writing this post clarifies to me that I do not want to go into non-profit management. I’m tired out just having thought this far. But, I remain, as ever, your devoted and dependable dispatcher of Non-Profit Blues…

And welcome home, Julia.

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[1] Also, they need to stop spouting irretrievably and unforgivably cliché statements on national radio. I’m sure Jody Williams is a very smart woman. So why this silly little rhyming words thing? Come on, NPR! Call a series This I Believe – and invoke the phrase “core values” – and talk to an audience of skeptics about faith at your own peril.

The D Word and Its Discontents

Today I have for you a bona fide contribution to the “Not-for-Profit Blues” category. For I am (or was) very blue, and boy has no one yet profited.

All six people who ever read this blog have already been told this story in harrowing detail, so I will try to avoid rehashing it at length here, particularly because I can just hear the psychoanalyst-in-my-head clucking over how I just can’t stop compulsively retelling the same story over and over. (Do you, as I do, have an unabating fear of telling stories to the same person twice by mistake? Have I told you that fear already?)

So I participated in this dialogue series about race and ethnicity in Boston. It was simultaneously frustrating and cool; cool because the people who participated were really grown-ups, and they didn’t mind making you uncomfortable. There was little bullshit on the part of the participants. The facilitators would quote Gandhi at us, but the participants would make mincemeat of their pacifist leanings, try to stage a mutiny, and start aggressively facilitating each other. I lie in wait for personal transformation, and though it has not arrived yet, I’m glad I spent five weeks with those folks.

This dialogue series has been running for about two years in Boston, and my own particular dialogue group was the second to have a particular LGBT focus. As such, Lee, our Executive Director, had asked me to make a presentation about what I learned at the Dialogues at a staff meeting on Monday, to coincide nicely with the unveiling of our organization’s new “Diversity Plan.”

My presentation and the aftermath was a cosmic mess, but that’s not what I want to focus on, lest I fall into the trap of reliving and rehashing the experience, getting particularly indignant in all the same places all over again. The day involved crying in the stairwell, crying on the toilet, a feeling that I might soon break in half, and a powerful hit of missing home (which, at that point, felt like school). All this, and very little discussion about “the issues” – whether we’ll ever deal specifically with the legal issues people of color call our hotline about, what kind of messaging we will have around marriage, what it means for our organization that we now have $150 per plate fundraisers.

At the end of the day, the co-worker I’m taking a bike repair class with, Kate, invited me to dinner. She wrote me a nice email; she said she supported me 100%. I fell for it. We biked to Veggie Planet together. She had good things to say, she’s smart and I wish we could work with one another. But she spoke so loudly, so definitively, almost as if I had failed her. I felt like she used my spectacular, sky-streaking failure at the staff meeting as a springboard to hear herself make sophisticated critiques of GLAD; she refused, when I asked, to envision a GLAD that was making real and constructive strides on dealing with race and class issues. She doesn’t want to get her hands dirty. She remains unencumbered and above the fray; peering scornfully down at us mortals who make ill-fated and ill-considered stabs at dealing with the problem.

It all sounds familiar. “Queer theory, that’s what it does to you!” says Beccah. I felt Kate’s way, too, for quite awhile. My hands were spotless, my mind was pure. I hazarded no guesses; my mind a ruthlessly sharpened blade. I could cut through anything, and argue for nothing. In my mind, I started every sentence with “Well, politically speaking…,” or “Intellectually, I consider…”

***

A couple of weeks ago I was looking through the website of the Lesbian Avengers in Gainesville, Florida. Whether or not they’re still really active I can’t tell, but I love their website. In the “Policies & Analyses” section, they list “How to Be an Anti-Classist Ally” and “Inter-sex & Trans Demands.” The lists make plain the insufficiency of communication; they are lists of all the ways a non-trans, non-intersex, or non-poor person can never find mutuality with a trans, intersex, or poor person.

I am often angry and do not want to be quieted, and I understand that other people may be implacably angry and may not seek intersubjectivity with me. But I wonder – what counts as skepticism, suspicion, or reservation that can be grappled with and what counts as categorically racist, transphobic, or classist? What is both racist, transphobic, or classist and ought nonetheless to be grappled with? How racist, transphobic, or classist must a person be before we write him or her off? Ordinarily, I do not have a choice in the matter; in order to preserve my psychic integrity I flee a situation in which the movement toward intersubjectivity would be too taxing for me to sustain. But it gets murkier when I am arguing as an ally, on behalf of someone who is not me, where my survival is not at issue but someone else’s is. Who educates whom, who is responsible for providing education, who is beyond the pale, and when are we ever all on solid footing?

In our dialogue group one participant, a black gay man, left midway through one of our sessions. He said, “There are black gay men who need me downstairs, and I have to go do my job.” (He leads support groups.) I don’t know why he left, but I am guessing that he was not interested being patient with us as we fumbled toward proving to him that we weren’t racist beyond whatever measure is acceptable – or proved that we were, and submitted ourselves to his education.

Analysis, intersubjectivity, friendship – the cannibalizing of the psyche, the submitting of all parts of the psyche to the microscope, to cross-examination, to critique, to the freely flowing air, in which a thousand carefully guarded convictions that gird and underpin the embattled, bewildered psyche may wilt and cower – can be apolitical in the best case or anti-political in the worst; in an analysis, the relentless back-and-forth of transference and its spin-offs would have me analyzed and reduced to the point at which I, say, accepted without qualms my analyst’s cavernous mansion off Brattle Street. Politics operates the opposite way – we make rules and we stick to them; we refuse to entertain certain kinds of behavior; we write people off on the merest flicker of incompatibility with our unstated principles.

Over the weekend, the New York Times profiled Sarah Schulman, my idol in psychic integrity. Jesse Green writes that despite her “almost maternal warmth” he “still…found myself repeatedly preparing to flinch as she stalked me for bad motives, tired agendas and prejudices; when she thought she spied one she pounced as if to drag it from behind some trees and let it rot in the sun.” “She stalked you me for bad motives” – she doesn’t want his embrace, she doesn’t trust him for a second. Reporter and subject – so there’s no intersubjectivity; no big loss. But you and I, you and she – that loss seems much more significant.

Self-Deprecation Is Not A Family Value

I’m always suspicious when I meet someone who freely and easily assesses her own positive qualities for me. Suspicious, and sometimes near flabbergasted. It strikes me as a violation of a sacred social contract in which compliments are only to be paid by an Other, paving the way to mutuality and comradeship.

In recent years, however, my passionate commitment to self-deprecation has come into question. First, I had an arrogant freshman-year roommate who remained blank and uncomprehending in the face of the self-effacing jokes I offered her as tentative means to connection. She was from New York City, and soon, my bashfulness seemed as provincial to me as my expectation that we would all go to early morning classes in our pajamas and initiate trust falls in Harvard Yard. Her bewilderment in the face of my deliberate modesty suggested that I reconsider. My humility was a little forced – not to mention fake – and, besides, wasn’t it rather helpful to the patriarchy that I repeatedly insist that I’m not so formidable a person after all?

My religion of self-deprecation took a far more serious knock, however, when I, fed up with critical theory in specific and the academic world in general, decided to pursue a job in social services after graduation. I wrote naive cover letters asserting how good I was at listening and empathizing (cover letters are a tricky task for the sworn self-deprecator), and soon I was answering phone calls on a hotline actually listening to the poor, homeless, and mentally ill. Instantly, I became terrified of the tolling of my extension, each time unsure of what constellation of indecipherable problems would present itself to me on the other end of the line. Though I had grown up in a city, I had also been educated in private schools, been transported in private cars, and swum in the summers at a private swimming pool. The only local municipal public service I ever used was the library up the street, and when they didn’t have the books I wanted (which happened often), my mom drove my brothers and me to the more generously funded public library in the county. The poor existed, but I had never spoken to them, or participated in any program that saw its mission as the uplift and edification of a public unbounded by some, if not many, admissions requirements.

Quickly, I began to feel used. I sensed that the stories I was told on the hotline had been trotted out before and would be told again. No one was grateful for my carefully pitched “mm-hmm”-ing or my gentle reframing of his perspective. I wasn’t following anyone into the rabbit warrens of her psychic landscape; I eased no one’s pain by relieving the pressure on her subconscious turmoil. Instead, I was listening to a parade of grim facts, of losses and wrongs suffered. The stories could go on forever, I sensed; it hardly mattered that I listened. I was supposed to be dispensing legal information to people in trouble, but that wasn’t much of a sword against the endless variety of wrongs callers brandished.

As the list of offenses grew, so did my sense of alienation, and so also, I began to notice, grew the callers’ insistence that they were right, absolutely right, and better and smarter than whoever or whatever had done them harm. I became perplexed; then I became irritated. These people seemed so fundamentally unlike me. Didn’t they get that by insisting on their rightness and superiority they were violating my sacred social contract? Also, didn’t they get how pathetic they sounded? I had wanted to be their friend and ally, but if they couldn’t, occasionally, provide me with the sense that they had the resources and the wherewithal to laugh at themselves and their predicament, I didn’t know how to begin to relate.

And that’s when I hit upon the realization that self-deprecation is, like many things, a classist pleasure. My callers weren’t proud or conceited as such, they rather, it seems to me now, had a frank stubbornness with which they were trying to avoid losing more than they already had lost. This is not something I now consider a remarkable testament to the human spirit. It’s a sound very close to desperation, and one I still simply and totally do not know what to do with, how react to, or how make sense of.