My son called tonight to ask me if I was finished packing and ready to leave the country. He was kidding… Sort of. And I joked back at him… Sort of.
This is a tough night. So much was at stake and so much has been lost. I’m not certain how grotesque the new government of our country will be, but it will be hard to watch. Right now Joni Ernst is making her victory speech and it’s all I can do not to throw something at the TV. She, Cory Gardner in Colorado and several others hold views so extreme and benighted that it is painful to imagine what our lives will be like for the next two years
Of course they didn’t win in a vacuum. Democrats made mistakes, ISIS and Ebola didn’t help and the deep damage done to President Obama by the Republicans from the day he took office didn’t help either, nor did the long years of gridlock or the disproportionate number of Democratic seats up this year. But they won, and excuses won’t change that. I think I’m giving up MSNBC for Netflix for a while.
R- L from top R: BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone, SheKnows’ Philippe Guelton and Samantha Skey, and BlogHer co-founders Jory Des Jardins and Elisa Camahort Page
BlogHer has merged with SheKnows, as Lisa Stone and and AdAge announced this morning. Since 2006 the wonder that is BlogHer has been a central part of my life. On this NABLOPOMO day 3, here’s why*:
In 2006, I was working with David Aylward and the National Strategies firm. He doesn’t know this but there’s a story (If you know me you know there’s almost always a story.) We had a client who wanted to reach parents. David hired me to help and I had this big idea about making a parent website to promote them. Well. David sort of said “What about these blogs I keep hearing about? Would that be better?” I knew so little about blogging that I had to go look it up online. I found a story about this little conference in San Jose called BlogHer, meeting for only its second year. David and I convinced our client that I should attend this mysterious event and off I went along with fliers for our product and real curiosity about who these women were and what they were up to.
Here is what I received – from BlogHer 2006 and every one since:
3. More fun than a barrel of groovy blogger women knew they could deliver. And – here’s the reason I’m writing this post at all:
4. Another decade at least of being part of and participating in the new parts of the world – online and on screens, instead of watching from the bleachers.
Lots of boomer women have joined me and the other early birds each year and I am certain they feel the same way (I’ve asked several and besides they’ve written about it.) At a time when many of our friends are settling into a more and more peer-centered life, we have the gift of having broadened, rather than narrowed, our world and hearing the voices of women we never would have known about, much less known for real. So David, thank you for the gift of my entry into this universe and for the imagination and vision that opened your mind to its possibilities. It’s a beautiful place to hang out and I’ll always remember who sent me through the door.
Few places are more private, spiritually critical, inspiring and, as Rabbi Danya Rutenberg writes, comforting, than the mikveh. Her piece on the unspeakable desecration of that space by Washington Rabbi Barry Freundel, who allegedly used hidden cameras to spy on women while they were there, brought me to tears even though I became observant when I was older and the mikveh less central than it was for all my younger sisters, who taught me to keep kosher and light candles and honor Shabbat. For them it is all so much worse, a kind of collective rape. Rutenberg writes:
I don’t know what percent of the water in the mikveh is actually made up of women’s tears, but I suspect it’s a lot. The mikveh is meant to hold vulnerability. The fact that one is naked when immersing is not just a literal fact — the symbolism of it penetrates every single pore, every inch of the self that goes under the living waters. It is, for a lot of women, a unique place for a certain kind of stopping, a certain kind of reflection, a certain kind of engaging with the present moment and with God. Not everyone has the same experience, obviously, but the ritual of mikveh opens up a space that can be exquisitely intimate and deeply personal.
Six years ago, I wrote about one young woman’s mikveh experience; I’m republishing a version of it here as an example of just what has been violated.
We had a party Saturday. Ice cream cake, fruit, songs and verses. It wasn’t exactly a birthday party, but kind of. It’s very tough to convert to Orthodox Judaism. Rabbis ask you over and over if you’re serious. You have to study. You have to read out loud in Hebrew. You have to answer questions to a board of 3 (male) rabbis. Then, you have to immerse yourself in a mikveh. It’s the culmination of several years of study and soul-searching.
So we had a party to celebrate a young woman who had navigated the process and, just this past week, emerged from the waters – Jewish. As she spoke to the assembled women she told us not just about her own journey, but, in a way, about our own. Unable to begin without tears, she decided first to read the passage that seemed to her to describe where she’d been – and where she’s landed. (Another convert friend of mine told me she’s clung to the same verses; they have particular meaning to those who choose to become Jewish, to “go where we go.”) Standing at one end of the table and surrounded by many of the women of our congregation gathered in her honor, she began to read from the Book of Ruth.
Mother-in-law Naomi is trying to convince her widowed daughter-in-law Ruth to go back to her own nation and not suffer with her.
But Ruth answers “Don’t ask me to leave you! Let me go with you. Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Wherever you die, I will die, and that is where I will be buried. May the LORD’s worst punishment come upon me if I let anything but death separate me from you!”
The story represents much of what she feels about her new life. Her choice: to immerse in the mikveh as one person and emerge as another, committed to the very demanding requirements of conversion and to join the tribe that I was born into and, for much of my life, lived within – accepting my identity as a Jew but very little else.
In many ways, I have made the same choices she did. Compared to the way I live now, the Judaism I knew then was an identity easily moved aside when inconvenient. Now, after four years of increasingly observant life, my identity is so tangled with my Judaism that there’s no way to pretend it isn’t there, isn’t affecting all I see and every choice I make. They call it “the yoke of heaven” — acceptance of the rules handed down so long ago. It looks so weird from the outside, so whether you’re my young friend choosing to become a Jew, or me, choosing to actually live like one, you’re somewhat set apart by your decisions. Keep kosher – you can’t eat in most restaurants or even at your old friends’ homes. Observe the Sabbath, you can’t go see Great Big Sea or Bruce Springsteen or to a good friend’s 40th birthday party because they’re on a Friday night. Honor the holidays and you may antagonize clients and risk losing business. And sometimes, friends, and even family, look askance, withdraw or just shake their heads.
Even so, what my friend has chosen — what my husband and I have chosen — what the community of friends we love has chosen – is a life rife with meaning and commitment, with tangible goals to be better, more honorable, more committed beings with an informing value system and sense of purpose. After a lifetime that was pretty successful and often seemed glamorous and highly visible, this is a choice of which I am very proud. Different from before, but at least as demanding intellectually, ethically and emotionally as any other stop on my life’s journey. In many ways, it has allowed me to rediscover the person I used to think I was, and liked – as a writer, a thinker, a wife and mother and friend. I am grateful that I have found it, and so very glad that this generous and articulate young woman reminded me, through the moving and exquisite reflections on her own choice, just why I made mine.
I’ve spent most of my life thinking about disasters and potential apocalypses and injustice and misery: I’m a journalist, or at least I was, so I don’t get discouraged easily. So far the world, or at least our country, has always seemed to right itself in the nick of time. I seriously wonder if we can still do it though. We all know why:
A bitterly divided country
Racism
Institutional injustice
The terrifying assault on women’s rights and well-being, here and elsewhere
Beneath those individual issues lies the biggest threat: what appears to be the larger change in our values. As I watched The Roosevelts and, strangely enough, re-watched The King’s Speech, I wondered (not for the first time) where those sorts of world leaders (FDR, a president with political skills, toughness, vision and an understanding both of where the country was and where he needed to take it, Teddy Roosevelt who took on income inequality through trust busting and began what became the environmental movement (and yes he also started a couple of wars… or a reluctant King George IV, who not only held Britain together and committed under horrible circumstances but also led by example) are today, whether they could be elected or heeded — whether they would even be willing to try. Even more, I wondered if our country would accept them; whether we are still capable of selflessness or a sense of duty or a thoughtful response to a call to sacrifice. I hope so.
Nobody can stop talking about the NFL. Me neither. Yesterday I wrote about the complicity of broadcast networks and sponsors (who by the way paid my salary for more than 25 years) in this issue of women’s and children’s safety. I’ve never seen so many tone-deaf people in my life. Even CoverGirl can’t seem to get it right.
But today, on Microblog Monday, I have another question. What do we do about this world of modern gladiators in a game that damages their brains until many of them are never able to think clearly again? How do we protect them from the impact of the conditioning and brutality that is part of their work? And what is the difference between NFL owners and those who sent Rome’s ancient, doomed fighters into the Coliseum?
We need to do something (HINT: #boycottNFLsponsors)
Why is it so hard to affect the NFL and its disgraceful responses to abusive players? After all, women are45% of the NFL fan base. It makes sense to care what we think.
Sadly, there’s that other thing. To see what we’re up against, follow the money.
Team owners make money from tickets and souvenirs but even more from TV contracts and the networks who pay for them. It’s all nicely divided up. In the 2011 9-year NFL-broadcast contract, CBS gets American Football Conference games – and is asking $500,000 for thirty second spots, according to Forbes, Fox carries the National Football Conference and NBC broadcasts Sunday night in prime time – with ads going for $628,000/30-second spot. Each network gets an exclusive crack at three of the nine Super Bowls and all the revenue that comes with it. (Bloomberg News)
Here’s what Forbes said this time a year ago, “Live appointment television—already extremely important—will only grow in significance in coming years, as television programming and audiences continue to fragment. On TV, the NFL is king.”
This morning (9/15/14) Joe Scarborough, never one for impulse control, lashed out at NYT columnist Alan Schwarz for his mention of the failure of broadcasters to acknowledge their own complicity in the shameful collaboration among the NFL, sponsors and the networks who charge them for their ads.
It’s like the story of the nail and the horse and the war*: Sponsors pay the networks, networks pay the NFL, the NFL divides the revenue among the teams and the owners combine these huge paydays with their ticket sales.
The auction was a sign of the NFL’s huge leverage over television networks, which are increasingly looking to the NFL to help fortify them against the rise of online video services, the stagnation of pay TV and other threats. “It’s almost like the networks are afraid to say no to the NFL,” says one senior TV executive involved in the bidding process for Thursday night games.
So. If the NFL is king and everyone, especially the TV networks who profit from ad revenue, ratings and football programming in general, are enablers then we have to make it scarier to continue than to take a stand. That means finding, and boycotting, NFL sponsors and letting the network brass know what we’re doing. (I boycotted Greece for years during the Junta years. Then an Amnesty International leader told me “If they don’t know why you’re not coming, it doesn’t do any good. You need to write to them and tell them why you’re not there.“)
That’s the other part of it. We need to be noisy and bold and brassy and (forgive me Ms. Sandburg) bossy about this – holler like hell in support of our sisters and put our money where our mouths are. Nobody needs any of the stuff that advertise on NFL games and there are alternatives for all of them anyway.
Women’s bodies should not be paying for the bad business planning of television networks; if they won’t take a stand with the NFL, let them find another way to make their money!
Here are a few major #NFLsponsors — MAKE SURE TO LET THEM KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WHY:
CBS News camera platform at the March Against the Vietnam War, April 1971
Bruce Morton died yesterday. He was a sensitive and deeply moral man. He never raised his voice and when I asked him why he told me that he had seen so much violence when he covered the Vietnam War that he didn’t want to be responsible for inflicting any more – even verbally. Those years had left a deep mark on him, but that reply was about as far as he would go in discussing it out loud.
He was smart too, and funny, and brilliant. He won an Emmy for his coverage of the 1970 trial of Lt. William Calley for the 1968 My Lai Massacre. It was tough for someone who had been so affected by the war to cover this tale of atrocities and shame, but he did it elegantly and well, as he did everything.
I learned so much from him; some of it really unexpected. Once at a party in the studio for the guests who had appeared on a just-completed live broadcast, we got into a terrible fight about Lyndon Johnson. I was part of the anti-war movement before I went into journalism and was only 23, as you can see in the photo of the two of us ( along with hundreds of thousands of marchers.) I hated Johnson, blamed him for the war, of course, and had very little perspective on the rest of his history.
With the kind of passion I learned to expect from him but that was really scary then, Bruce ran the litany of Johnson’s Poverty Program, Civil Rights accomplishments and background and insisted that I take another look. He was, of course, right. Like every other story, this one had two sides and I had only seen one. That never happened to Bruce.
He was really nice to me; he and his wife Maggie even hired me, since I was usually short of cash, to babysit for their two fabulous kids Sarah and Alec. And their Great Dane. And their cats. It was a real privilege to be invited into their very exciting lives and be trusted with their kids. All those times are memories I cherish.
As I remember this lovely and remarkably talented man, (I once saw him ad lib a 1:30 live radio report and get it right, beautiful and to the second) I can’t do much better than our colleague Joe Peyronnin:
Bruce Morton was a brilliant political journalist, and a superb writer and reporter. He wrote a script faster than anyone I have ever known. His writing was imaginative, incisive and informative. We worked together at CBS News on many stories in the 70’s and 80’s, and got the scoop of the1984 Democrat Convention, that Walter Mondale had picked Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate. Bruce was a truly remarkable man. RIP my friend.
Are we there? Does the endless litany of police murders of young, and not so young, black men, and the arrest and detention of so many more, require the deep, horrendous revisiting that comes with hearings like those held in South Africa? Yes, says The Michigan Roundtable for Diversity and Inclusion:
The establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, inspired by the process that took place in South Africa, will allow us to develop an appropriate understanding of past injustices and to envision constructive remedies to create a new regional culture of fairness, equal opportunity and improved prosperity.
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, conducted after the end of Apartheid, were dramatic, traumatic, hideous and brilliant. Hideous because of the brutality of the testimony – brutal because Apartheid was brutal, and brilliant for their courage and honesty. In Country of my Skull, her gripping account of the hearings, reporter Antjie Krog describes post-traumatic stress that sent not only the accused and the witnesses but also the reporters and judges, into trauma therapy. It was simply unbearable to hear. And those who testified and listened, bore the unbearable, helped to defuse a rage that would have consumed the country.
Are things that bad here? No. Here, in theory, the law exists to protect Americans against the behavior that Apartheid institutionalized. Even so, the torrent of agony and sadness and anger of the past weeks is evidence that the current reality is often unbearable — and should not have to be borne. That reality includes an ever-growing list of dead black men, day after day after day, in WalMart, on the street, in a police car, a park, a back yard. Countless more detained, humiliated and released.
TV Producer Charles Belk, wrongfully detained.
Today, an additional outrage arose in the story about TV producer Charles Belk, (left) arrested, handcuffed and detained in Beverly Hills for several hours as a suspect who looked nothing like him (except of course, that they are both black.)
Now it turns out that although the arrest was flawed and he was never arraigned, he has an arrest record that will, according to local attorneys, probably never go away. Accomplished and with considerable power, on his way to an Emmy event, it (even) happened to him. If he’s ever stopped again, or if someone searches the law enforcement database for some other reason, his name will come up, even though he was completely innocent. He’s “in the system.” The law set him free, but racism got him arrested in the first place and left him with a record.
So. When we read of proposed reconciliation commissions, whose power lies not in their conclusions but in what they uncover as perpetrator (usually law enforcement) and victim (if they have survived) face one another, and what happens after that, we can’t just write off the idea.
Although all the recent reported incidents involve law enforcement (and yes, there are also many great police officers, we know that), so many other parts of our culture are in need of attention. Jobs, housing, shopping (even the president remembers being followed by sales staff in stores to make sure he didn’t steal something) education, culture, journalism, and the intangibles – someone grabbing on to their purse when you pass, or crossing the street, being quietly insulting … and in all of them, perception, so far from the truth.
So what do we think? Is our country, in its current self-occupied, nasty mood, capable of even considering such an idea, allowing a commission to be led as Bishop Tutu led South Africa’s? Do we have leaders with the wisdom and credibility to hold such a thing together. And would we recognize such a person if they were in our midst? AND can we be ready for this:
Bishop Tutu (L) with Nelson Mandela
I hope that the work of the Commission, by opening wounds to cleanse them, will thereby stop them from festering. We cannot be facile and say bygones will be bygones, because they will not be bygones and will return to haunt us. True reconciliation is never cheap, for it is based on forgiveness which is costly. Forgiveness in turn depends on repentance, which has to be based on an acknowledgement of what was done wrong, and therefore on disclosure of the truth. You cannot forgive what you do not know… Bishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, on his appointment as Chairperson of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, November 1995
Each is a great document of a time in our history. I began thinking about the power of these films and how valuable they would be as teaching tools. With that in mind, I hereby initiate the “films to teach American history by” list. Here are some more of mine; please add your own in the comments.
Of course there’s no such thing as time travel. Of course not.
The Normal Heart though, for anyone who was in New York in the 80’s, comes about as close as you can get. We watched it after the Emmys. I had avoided it, knowing how troubling it would no doubt be, but it felt wrong to not look. Too many people had done that 30 years ago. Here’s how one New Yorker described, to the New York Times, Manhattan in May of 1987:
‘Going to funerals has become a way of life,” said George Getzel, a Hunter College social work professor who counsels AIDS patients as a volunteer. ”People in their 70’s and 80’s experience this but here people in their 20’s and 30’s are visiting the sick at homes and in hospitals and burying the dead. Some are themselves sick. It’s become a regularized aspect of the lives of gay men and others like myself who are involved.
The Normal Heart slammed me back to those days:
The day, when I worked at the TODAY SHOW, that my friend Susan Weaver did one of the first AIDS stories that included a live guest in the studio. There was fear in the air that morning. A couple of studio crew members asked to be replaced and people debated in advance whether to shake hands with the young man who had the courage to show up and talk about what was happening to him, to New York and, we know now, to all of us.
The day that Allison Gertz, who succumbed to AIDS in 1992 at the age of 26 (and who spoke at many high schools to very effectively remind teenagers that for her, AIDS came from a single encounter with an infected man and that heterosexual sex was anything but safe) spoke, with enormous impact, at my own son’s high school.
The day that our sweet friend Stephen left us.
The day one of my oldest friends told me that of his entire book group, he was the only survivor.
The day Elizabeth Glaser, wife of actor Paul Michael Glaser, stricken through a blood transfusion during the birth of her daughter Ariel, who also contracted the disease, showed up at a Georgetown party lobbying and fundraising simultaneously. Ariel’s illness drove Glaser to form the Pediatric Aids Foundation, later renamed the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation in her honor. She was everywhere, from Georgetown to Hollywood to endless television appearances, raising money and awareness until she died in 1994.
The day we watched Mark Harmon, the loveable, mischievous Dr. Caswell, walk away alone from the brilliant St. Elsewhere, his own AIDS diagnosis and certain death drawing him to an AIDS hospice to provide care until he died among his patients.
For everything here came days and weeks worth, years worth of deep melancholy and, for so many, pain, death and grief. Because New Yorkers live so close together, ride mass transit, hang out in public parks, buy food from hotdog carts on the corner and, even if they’re really really rich, can’t stay clear of strangers, we all knew it, felt it and feared it.
Of course, AIDS is still with us, a terrible epidemic in the developing world, and still present in the West. Here the reality is different today, if not entirely.
So yes, The Normal Heart was time travel; the gift of a perfect document reminding us, and portraying for those who came after, of a terrible, terrible time.
My son called tonight to ask me if I was finished packing and ready to leave the country. He was kidding… Sort of. And I joked back at him… Sort of.
