graciespeaks

For Wes on Veterans Day

My ex-father-in-law died five years ago on Veterans Day, November 11, 2004. 

This is part of what I wrote in his obituary:  “He was born August 29, 1920 in Forest Park, Illinois. He volunteered and enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1939, serving on submarines, destroyers, and battleships. A qualified submariner, gun captain, soundman and radar operator, Wes served as gunner on five submarine combat missions during World War II, sinking numerous enemy vessels while he and his crewmates narrowly escaped death on a number of occasions. Wes was awarded the Navy Commendation, Asiatic Pacific Service, American Area, Philippine Liberation, American Defense with an 'A,' World War II Victory, Korean Service, United Nations Service, China Service, Navy Occupation (European) Medals and various other honors and awards. He retired after 20 years of decorated Naval Service at the rank of Chief Gunner's Mate.”

All of that would have been important to him, but five years later, I add this:

Wes was proud of the medals I wrote about.  He had wanted them for years, and getting them from the Navy was a project that took months.  Angela, have you sent the letters about my medals?

Naval service was, for him, about doing the right thing according to a simple code of honor that had to do with sacrifice for his fellow seamen as well as for his country.  He told the story of risking his life to disarm a live and malfunctioning gun, an act for which I believe he won the Navy Commendation medal.  He didn’t see it as particularly courageous. It was the right thing, it was who he was.  He was humble and brave and he was also one of the kindest men I have ever known.

During the last month of his life we traveled to Mobile, Alabama to attend a reunion of some of the men for whom he would have given his life, the veterans of the USS Texas battleship, and then almost immediately afterward he began the intermittent hospital stays that consumed his last weeks.  The time I spent with him then was indescribably sweet.

I sat with him in the hospital one weekend after I had just begun the MFA program I will (finally) complete next Spring, and I was working on something for a workshop.  I’m fine, don’t worry about me, he would say when I would stop writing in my notebook.  Just keep writing.  It’s important. 

On November 8, 2004, Wes went home from the hospital via ambulance.  I slept on the floor beside the hospital bed in his living room three nights, grateful for every breath. Thursday, November 11, Veterans Day, he died.

Happy Veterans Day, Wes.  May your soul be free.

Rihanna: "I got very embarrassed, humiliated, angry."

You can watch the first part of Rihanna's interview with Diane Sawyer here.

Diane Sawyer: Why be ashamed?  Why should you be ashamed?

Rihanna: I fell in love with that person.  That's embarrassing . . . that that's the type of person that I fell in love with, so far in love, so unconditional that I went back.  It's humiliating to see your face like that, it's humiliating to say that this happened, to accept that."

I applaud Rihanna for this interview.  Cynics say that she is only talking as part of promoting her record, but regardless of her motives, which are no doubt complex,  her speaking out will help women to feel less shame, or at least to examine their own shame.

When we tell our true stories, lives change.

she wore a sparkly purple dress

Please imagine yourself as a high-school girl.  The fifteen-year-old you dresses up for a homecoming dance, wearing a sparkly purple dress and faux diamond jewelry.  Choosing the dress has been your obsession for weeks.  The jewels make you feel like a princess.  You spend all afternoon on your hair and makeup. 

You go alone to the dance, excited and nervous and hopeful that you will meet your friends, be comfortable and accepted, dance, flirt, gossip, laugh.  Your father will pick you up at an appointed time.  You have your cell phone so you will be safe.

When I put myself in the heels of a fifteen-year-old whose potentially joyful rite of passage ends with a horrific gang-rape and beating, I feel overwhelmed with sadness and powerlessness.

The bystanders stood by.  We don't have to.

Dora McQuaid has created a Facebook Group called "Circle of Light" and if you're on FB, please join the group and post your prayers.  If you're not on FB,  please join the circle of light by offering your prayers for this survivor.

Here are some resources from the  FB  "Circle of Light" group page:

ON THE RAPE AND BEATING:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/10/28/california.gang.rape.bystander/
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/10/28/california.rape.investigation/index.html

ON THE POWER OF PRAYER AND POSITIVE THOUGHT:
http://www.time.com/time/columnist/jaroff/article/0,9565,193084,00.html

RAPE, SEXUAL ASSAULT AND INCEST RESOURCES:

To get information and resources:
http://www.nsvrc.org/contact/nsvrc
http://www.rainn.org/

For organizations addressing sexual violence:
http://www.nsvrc.org/organizations

To find a local Sexual Assault Crisis Center:
http://centers.rainn.org/

a "new black man" on October

Mark Anthony Neal blogs about October's breast cancer awareness and domestic violence awareness in the black community. 

Elinor Ostrom not allowed to take high school trigonometry as a girl

Here is a great NPR interview with the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. 

She has become the role model she wanted.

two thoughtful responses to Obama's Nobel dilemma

The first, from Andrew Sullivan, who, responding to Chris Good's excellent question, if not Obama, who?, suggests Neda, Moussavi, or Karroubi.

The second, from Thomas L. Friedman, who drafts a December 10 acceptance speech speech for Obama, in which he continues Obama's theme that he is accepting the prize "as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations."  Friedman proposes Obama's acceptance of the award on behalf of "the most important peacekeepers in the world for the last century--the men and women of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps."

Sullivan and Friedman might seem an unlikely pair.  Sullivan is rougher around the edges, Friedman is more elegant, and that is just the beginning of their differences (Sullivan is a blogger and Friedman is a columnist, though both write in other genres as well), but I read both men for their passionate and intelligent thinking.

a foolish consistency

Paul Krugman examines the Right's consistencies regarding Obama in The Politics of Spite. 

I reread Ralph Waldo Emerson's  "Self Reliance" and hope for more subtlety as well as more civility:

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."

Take a chance at greatness, at being misunderstood.  Speak the hard words.  Don't parrot the lines of any ideology  for the sake of consistency alone.   We may not be in 1841 Concord, Massachusetts, but we can give it a try.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but "think before you pink"

In 2004, my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer.  Today she is a 5-plus-year survivor, thank God.

In 2006, she and I walked in the Breast Cancer 3-Day together.  I displayed pink ribbons and consumed products that promised to make donations to breast-cancer-related causes.  I would have said unequivocally that National Breast Cancer Awareness Month and all that goes with it were beneficial.  How could they be anything else?

I'm more jaded now, though, and I have a little pink-ribbon fatigue.  I also ran across Think Before You Pink, which reports on how many dollars actually go to breast-cancer-related causes from our purchases (not as many as one might hope). 

They've also pointed out and worked to correct "little" inconsistencies like Yoplait's decorating its rBGH-containing yogurt in containers with pink-beribboned lids.  Yoplait no longer uses rBGH-containing dairy.

There's an article about Think Before You Pink in today's Boston Herald.

October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month

And last night Vice President Joe Biden commemorated the 15th anniversary of the passage of the Violence Against Women Act.

Polanski and "getting over it"

I've been thinking about Roman Polanski's extradition fight.

My first reaction was that he should have come back (or been brought back) to the US to face his charges long ago.  I am not swayed by references to his artistic talent or claims that he has suffered by his self-imposed exile in Europe.

His victim's position that she has gotten over the rape, and that the media's focus on her story, more than Polanski's rape, has caused her harm, has given me second thoughts.

What role should the victim play in decisions about prosecutions of crime?  How does a victim's desire to never think or talk about an event again fit into the equation?  How does any of us decide when to speak the truth about the past and when to be "over" a painful subject? 

Kate Harding wrote a piece on Salon today that's worth reading in its entirety.  But her argument about the victim's role brought me full circle to being sure that Polanski needs to return to California:

"But what of the now-45-year-old victim, who received a settlement from Polanski in a civil case, saying she'd like to see the charges dropped? Shouldn't we be honoring her wishes above all else?

In a word, no. At least, not entirely. I happen to believe we should honor her desire not to be the subject of a media circus, which is why I haven't named her here, even though she chose to make her identity public long ago. But as for dropping the charges, Fecke said it quite well: 'I understand the victim's feelings on this. And I sympathize, I do. But for good or ill, the justice system doesn't work on behalf of victims; it works on behalf of justice.'

It works on behalf of the people, in fact -- the people whose laws in every state make it clear that both child rape and fleeing prosecution are serious crimes. The point is not to keep 76-year-old Polanski off the streets or help his victim feel safe. The point is that drugging and raping a child, then leaving the country before you can be sentenced for it, is behavior our society should not -- and at least in theory, does not -- tolerate, no matter how famous, wealthy or well-connected you are, no matter how old you were when you finally got caught, no matter what your victim says about it now, no matter how mature she looked at 13, no matter how pushy her mother was, and no matter how many really swell movies you've made."

Amen, Kate.