lest we forget (A Bloggers Unite post)

Today, January 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a day it is imperative to remember. This is a Bloggers Unite post.

The date itself was chosen by the UN as it marks the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945.

During World War Two one sub-demographic of a culture, a group in a position of extreme power, utterly dehumanized another cultural group to the most extreme degree. That example of bigotry and prejudice now lives in infamy as an ultimate twentieth century example of man's inhumanity to man.

The point of this day of remembrance is to sear into our memory the vivid, horrid example of that inhumanity, to remember the millions of lives lost due to an utter failure of empathy, and to pay them respect. To me, it is also about remembering that it was and is not an isolated incident; that we continue to perpetrate acts of genocide upon each other today in parts of the world; that we have not learned the lesson well enough yet.

Empathy is not culturally specific. It is not a light switch that can be turned off and on depending upon who it is we are talking about, or which cultural group we are referring to. Empathy requires that we see all humans as equal and valid, and apply the same measure of respect and/or outrage to each situation regardless of who oppresses, or who is oppressed.

This is the lesson: That all life is precious; that no life is less valuable than any other; that when we drift towards a belief that a group of people are less valuable or worthy of life than another, then we are drifting towards genocide; that, in doing so, we lose ourselves; and that to remain silent is tantamount to doing it ourselves.

Respecting those who suffered and died in the Holocaust requires respecting all peoples, especially in defense of those oppressed by a power that does not recognize this fundamental lesson – that we are all human, and all worthy.

"Denying historical facts, especially on such an important subject as the Holocaust, is just not acceptable. Nor is it acceptable to call for the elimination of any State or people. I would like to see this fundamental principle respected both in rhetoric and in practice by all the members of the international community."

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Press Conference SG/2120, 14 December 2006

second hand things (a Bloggers Unite post)

I‘ve mentioned before, in passing, that I was adopted. I’ve always known I was. I can’t remember ever having “a talk” with my parents about the fact that I was adopted – it was always just out there. I was never embarrassed about it; in fact I think I was a little proud in some ways. My folks emphasized how special I was to them; how other kids were born to their parents, but that they chose me.

I’ve also mentioned that my Mom, the one who raised me, who is my hero, was plagued by issues regarding depression and anxiety from way back before I met her. While she tragically comes by those issues honestly, there were dynamics in her marriage with my Dad that exacerbated them (but that’s a story for another day). What‘s relevant here is that I almost didn’t stay with them.

They adopted a little girl about six months after me too and, between all the pressure, and the issues, and my Mom’s propensity for breaking periodically, there was a time a month or so after they adopted my sister that was profoundly dark for her. She spent some time in the hospital and Child Services almost took us both away. In the end they judged that I had bonded and that the house was still safe for me, but that Mom just didn’t have the resources then to take care of two of us.

I was spared, but my sister – my all-too-briefly-known little sister – was taken away and placed with a different family.

If you’ve read the posts about my Mom, you know that wasn’t the whole story on her. She had reserves of awesomeness that were, as yet, untapped; deep, amazing wells of strength and perseverance that were and are inspiring to me. But then… well, at that point everyone did the best they could and I ended up being an only child.

I have to say that I liked being an only child. I seemed (and seem) to be hardwired for aloneness – I can be alone, happily, without being lonely (although I am also fiercely enamored of my close friends and love to be with them). And I always got spoiled come gift giving time. I got my own room by default, always got the cool electronics hand-me-downs. It was a good deal.

I had a profoundly dark patch from around fourteen to eighteen years of age. In the midst of it, thinking that maybe it had something to do with my adopted-ness (it didn’t, not really, but that’s also part of that different story for a different day), my Mom, with the very best of intentions, registered me with the Adoption Registry in my province of birth. It took ten years for anything to come of that due to the complexities of "closed" and "partially open" adoption policies, but eventually I received a letter from a Social Worker and was invited to start the process of reuniting with my birth mother. We both jumped through their hoops and rang their bells to prove that neither of us were psychotic revenge-monsters and, after a few months, we were invited to speak to each other directly.

Those of you who love the irony and serendipity that is inherent in life will enjoy this bit: After twenty-six years, after I’d moved 1600 kilometers (1000 miles) from the middle of Canada to the left coast when I was seven, and after my bio-Mom moved twice after birthing me, we ended up living forty-five minutes apart. She lived in the next town over from mine. We were neighbors.

Mine was an adoption-reuniting best-case scenario. I met my bio-Mom one morining, had coffee with her and talked for a few hours, and then she took me with her to pick up my youngest brother from school. Then we went back to her house for dinner and I met my middle brother, then twenty-three. I went from just Mom and me, two against the world, to a big, messy, fun family in around four hours. And it worked, seamlessly. We were family before any of us even had time to think about it much. And we are family.

And It blows me away.

It blows me away that they accepted me, the son/older brother that they always knew about (I come from honest Moms, both the bio- and the adopto-), but never knew. It blows me away that, after being an only child for so long, I got to be a big brother to my youngest brother, and even coach him in hockey. It blows me away that my middle brother and I, both adults when we met, are friends in only the way brothers can be. It blows me away that my two Moms became friends (even if Mom, adopto-Mom, doesn't always remember that part of the story these days) and that my whole, massive new family was able to spend a couple holiday seasons together. It blows me away that the little brother I met that day is getting married next spring, and that I get to be a part of it.

I am a very fortunate little camper.

It isn't always like this. I’ve known other adoptees that have reunited with their bio-folks as adults. Their stories don’t always turn out as well as mine did. Often, there’s a lot of ambiguity – some good things and some not so good. And sometimes there are chasms of hurt that cannot be bridged at all. Even in the modern age with open adoptions, modern psychology, resource groups and guide books, the human psyche is just a whimsical, complicated, infinitely inscrutable thing. Sometimes time does not heal all wounds.

But that isn’t just an adoption issue. It’s a life issue. We all get to reap the benefits of that axiom. We’re fickle, fragile things, we humans. But we’re also tough too, tougher than nails by far, and full of surprises. We survive horrid things, and experience beautiful ones. Sometimes they help us grow, and sometimes they hold us back, and that's true whether the moment is joyful or tragic. Ultimately, it’s about what we make of them, what we choose.

To me, that’s perhaps the most beautiful thing about this goofy, bass-ackwards ramble through the tall grass that we call life: We always have a choice, if not about the circumstances, then at least about our reaction to them. And it’s never, ever too late.

Adoption is under fire these days in many quarters, and some of the criticism is valid. When I was adopted everything was done through government agencies, and there was no profit motive involved. Today, too often, there are those who see a buck in everything, and will do utterly ugly and reprehensible things to make one. That’s a problem, and one that absolutely needs to be addressed. That’s part of what Adoption Awareness Month is about: Shining a light on the dark places and dealing with those who treat birth mothers, adoptive parents, and most importantly the children, as commodities and revenue sources only. That needs to change, but those are problems with the industry that’s grown out of what used to be a state-controlled institution, not with the principle that underlies what adoption actually is.

At its root, adoption is about loved children that are given up for all the right reasons. It’s about mothers that want nothing but the best for the lives growing in them, and about parents that cannot have their own children but who still want to provide love and experience the miracle and profound responsibility of raising a human being. It’s about life and love and choices - really, utterly fucking hard ones - being made for the very best of reasons.

And I’m in good, nose-bleed-inducing company here. Without adoption there might not have been a Steve Jobs, or a Marilyn Monroe, or a Malcolm X. Or at least not the versions we know. Adoption can be, should be, one of those things that can make us stronger; that reinforces everything that is best about the world; that reaffirms our faith in the goodness of people and our ability to drag redemption out of imperfect circumstances.

That’s what it’s about to me, anyway. That’s what it’s about to the people I know, birth-mothers like mine who have made sacrifices to provide life to little lives, and parents that have nurtured those lives with all the strength and dignity they have within them. That's what Adoption Awareness Month should be about - celebrating the love and hope and sacrifice and redemption.

I’m profoundly grateful to my bio-Mom for having the grace and strength to give me up when I was born. And you know how I feel about Mom, the one that adopted me (if not, go follow the links). They both gave me gifts that would qualify for Master Card commercial punch lines: Priceless. I have two incredible women that love me as their kid, and that makes me pretty fucking lucky. I get that, I really do.

November is Adoption Awareness Month. Now you know...

*****

A friend, Kelsey Stewart, who I met through Bloggers Unite, tuned me into Adoption Awareness Month. She even wrote a book, The Best For You about her experience with adoption as a birth mother, and it’s pretty cool.

November is also NaNoWriMo, which you should go read about over at IBC in a guest post by the always spectacular Judy Clement Wall, who is also known as @jdistraction in Twitterland, and who fills her own blog, Zebra Sounds, with amazing things all the time.

World Alzheimer's Day - Sept. 21 - Bloggers Unite

(This is a Bloggers Unite cross-post)

When I was nine my parents split up. My dad, the aforementioned English teacher, left and, with him, so did our family’s sole source of income.

My mom has suffered from chronic depression and anxiety her entire life, has a grade 8 education, was emancipated by fifteen, spent a brief time as a street kid (imagine that in the 50’s), and worked as a data punch processor until she met and married my dad. By the late 70’s when they split up those data punch skills were archaic and useless.

We spent about a year living on welfare.

After Dad left she never spent another night in the hospital due to her depression, perhaps in part as a result of him not being there, but I think mostly because she just told herself that she couldn't. For me.

She managed to pay the bills and the mortgage until she got a job as a graveyard supervisor at a group home for the mentally challenged. She built that job into a career by turning our house into a miniature group home. By the time I was 12, she was caring full time for two developmental challenged paranoid/schizophrenic women. That was her career, seemingly forged out of thin air, and the means by which she kept us in hot dogs and hamburgers.

We never lost the house, I was always fed, always clothed, always loved, and mostly aware of how amazing all of that was. It was, at times, challenging being a teenage boy in that house, but it was also a priceless and unique experience.

To this day, I have a hard time calculating the scale of the sacrifices she made; how much focus and effort a life of service to those two women must have taken; how hard it must have been to not give up or give in to the depression that was and still is a giant cloud over her head; how much she overcame to keep our modified family together.

Thinking about it always leaves me dumbfounded and a little fucked up for a while, but in a good way.

So when I say that she is the most courageous person I know, please understand how serious I am. She is my hero.

Mom turned seventy early this year and has, over the last year or so, been slipping (mostly) gently into the early stages of Alzheimer’s. We’ve had some bad stretches already, but adjustments to her medications have helped her come back twice now, and we’re currently holding.

I know that, realistically, it won’t last forever, but I’m thankful for the time we have, and for her continued courage.

There’s no bullshit around the house. She’s aware of what’s happening and it scares the shit out of her some days, but we talk about it when it does.

We laugh whenever possible. We remember together, and the repeated stories never seem old. She tells me that she’s proud of me and I tell her I’m more proud of her. We say ‘I love you’ all the time, more than we used to, and that’s never a bad thing.

So far it’s a pretty gentle experience and we’re thankful for that too. We know that it won’t last forever, but while it does… well, while it does we’ll be in the moment and appreciate it.

Every moment. Every story. Every hug. Every ‘I love you’. Every. Fucking. One.

Hell, she’s my hero and this is just life. You deal, right?

It’s what heroes do. My Mom taught me that…

September 21 is World Alzheimer’s Day.

Maybe your folks are fine, maybe not. Either way, be thankful for the time you have. It’s precious and too short.

Bloggers Unite -- September 8 -- International Literacy Day

I was three-going-on-four when my father, the high school English teacher, started reading “The Hobbit” to me before I went to bed. I’d apparently already started to show some reading potential and he used Tolkien to help foster it. I was completely hooked in no time at all. To be fair, I don’t remember too much of the boring song and poetry part in the middle, but the dwarves, spiders, elves and dragons sucked me in big time. By the time we’d made it half way through the book my sneaky dad had me swapping reading duties with him.

When we finished “The Hobbit”, we moved on to Hemmingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” and, at the end of that, he emancipated me with the LOTR trilogy and told me I was on my own. I subsequently missed children’s lit altogether, a gross omission which I rectified in second year university by taking a whole semester on the topic, but that’s beside the point. The point is, I was taught to read at an early age, and then pointed at some really good stories to fuel my growing addiction.

My dad and I have had our differences over the years, but I’ve never been anything but monumentally appreciative for that gift. How could I not be?

Words and language unlock what might be, provide pathways into which we can drag our generation and usher the next, paths that lead to opportunity and revelation, to wisdom and discovery and empathy.

Literacy is the key to all of that. A world that can read and write is a world that can learn. In a world where literacy was ubiquitous everyone could learn. Ignorance could be banished to a minority opinion. Those who use ignorance to manipulate and control would be threatened unto extinction.

Can you imagine that? And to start, all we need to do is make it a priority to teach everyone to read. Compared to world peace, or sending people to the moon, or so may other projects that are important, this one seems relatively easy. We have, as they say, the means to slam dunk this one.

And yet we don’t.

Give a man a fish, they say, and feed him for a day. Teach a man to read, though, and he can find a book to teach him how to fish, and he’ll be fed for life. Hand him a computer and he can Google a helluva lot more than that.

And that’s probably the reason that the governments of the world don’t want us all to be able to read. An ignorant populace is a complacent one.

I will never, ever be able to thank my dad enough for the gift he gave me back when I was too small to appreciate it. He planted a seed and let it grow.

It would be wonderful if we could give that gift to everyone and see what would grow out of it.

September 8 is World Literacy Day. Give the gift, or support someone else who is.

Bloggers Unite - Women's Equality Day

It was about ten years ago that I had a sudden and, in hindsight, long-overdue realization: The world I lived in as a white, middle-classed male was dramatically different than the world my female friends lived in.

A friend described to me what it was like to walk in a parking lot at night; how she had to be careful to park in the light and as close to a door as possible; how every van parked beside her car made the world seem a less secure place; how she walked with her keys protruding from her fists just in case.

It was such a simple description of how our worlds were different. I never thought about cars or vans or where I parked my car, never considered where the lights were or how far I was from a door. Once the blinders were lifted by grace of her gentle clarification I found myself in a different reality.

It was a profound moment of empathy, and one I am ashamed to say I had to be led to. I've never looked at a parking lot, among many other things, the same way again.

Bloggers Unite recognizes this day, August 26, as Women's Equality Day, in honour of the United States of America's adoption of its 19th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1920. It was in that year that the US provided their female citizens the right to vote, 57 years after Sweden started the ball rolling, 51 after England, 27 after New Zealand provided full voting rights to all women. The domino affect would require most of the twentieth century to work itself out. Switzerland, for the record, was a notable hold out, waiting until 1971 to grant women full voting rights under their law.

To me, the timeline and my friend's story both highlight how great a gulf there is between the laws we make and the ethics and morality we practice. In Canada, where I live, women have been considered full 'persons' and equal under the law since 1950 when full sufferage was granted.

Only sixty years ago... My mother was ten when her mother finally became a full person under the law.

I find that fact hard to process.

The international recognition of suffrage is a great accomplishment, without a doubt. But the equality our laws provide is not always mirrored in the real world. Suffrage, as huge a step as it was, is only one part of creating any real equality.

Women, on average, are still paid less than men, are still threatened and abused, are still mistreated or ignored by courts.

Women still have to be aware of vans parked beside their cars where men probably don't even notice them.

We've come a long way, but the road is only half traveled. We're nowhere near 'there' yet.

So, by all means, we should take a moment and recognize where we've come from and how much has been accomplished. But when we've caught our breath and shared a toast, perhaps remembered the brave women who have paid enormous prices to get us this far, when we've done these things it will be time to make sure our boots are tied tightly so we can start the walk again.

There's a long way to go yet.

August 26th is Bloggers Unite's Women's Equality Day.

For Gaza

Let me state this plainly:

I am not anti-Israel. I believe that Israel has a right to exist as valid as any other nation state. I don't know if I would have made the same choices that were made in the late 1940's, but that's water under the bridge. Israel exists and has a right to continue to exist.

I am not pro-Palestine. I believe that the nation state is one of the poorer inventions of the human species. Show me a nation-state and I will show you an institution that will want something that someone else possesses, and will fight and kill for it if they get the opportunity.

I am not anti-Israeli. The Israeli people are a vibrant and dynamic culture with much to offer the world.

I am not pro-Hamas. Hamas, as much as the nation-state of Israel, has many crimes to answer for. I do not condone or approve of terrorism or violence no matter how much I might understand the frustration and anger that spawns it.

What I am is anti-Israeli government and policy in so much as that government and policy considers it justifiable to marginalize 1.5 million people and dictate their quality of life so that it is, at best, an existence of bare subsistence.

I am pro-Palestinian. Palestinians are a people. Like the Israelis, they have a vibrant and dynamic culture to share with the world. Like the Israelis, they deserve the opportunity to exist and flourish.

I am pro-Gaza. It is for the 1.5 million citizens of Gaza that my heart aches, that my teeth grind, that my fists clench.

They are impoverished for no reason other than an arrogant belief that one people are more worthy than another; denied the rights that we consider most basic because one culture has decreed they are less worthy; refused the basic goods required to build their homes and feed their children because a group of developed nations have decided that it is justifiable to punish an entire people for what they consider to be the sin of  poor democratic choice.

The international community of nations tout themselves as wise statesmen acting in the best interest of humanity, but they are not. Rather, they are bullies, the largest and most immature children in the playground vying for control of a global sandbox. They do not speak for me. They do not speak for you. They speak for themselves and those economic concerns that promise them fame, power and fortune.

I am anti-bully. Bullies steal from others so that they can grow fatter and bigger. They beat up those that they can to feel powerful in a vain attempt to prove their arrogance justifiable. They say that they are protecting us, but really it's more like a protection racket, an organized crime. All this can be yours,, they say, if you will just shut up and follow the program.

We cannot shut up. In the name of all of those values that our rulers give lip service to but never honor, in the name of true morals like empathy and justice and equality, in the name of simple dignity, we cannot shut up.

Instead we must remember the weak, embrace those who have been cast out and called unclean, stand up for those who cannot, dissent from the lie of the status quo. If we will not stand now for those who are beaten down, who will stand for us when we are the slaves, the marginalized, the disenfranchised?

There must be a better way, and if our 'leaders' will not seek it, then we are the ones that must demand it with more conviction, more peace, more resolve. Our leaders must be made to remember. And for that to happen, we cannot forget.

Gaza, we remember you. And we will not forget. Or rest.