Author Archive
Today, I seriously wanted to hit a woman.
I was walking toward the Independence Center, a clubhouse run by persons with severe mental illness, to meet with the adjunct instructor for whom I am a teaching assistant this semester. The Center happens to be located next door to Planned Parenthood’s headquarters in St. Louis. This is where, twice a month, anti-choice protesters gather in advance of a doctor’s arrival, seeking to harass and intimidate women who exercise their (shrinking) constitutional right to surgically terminate a pregnancy.
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As a social worker, I would frequently get asked by people outside the human services field (and sometimes those within it) whether working with survivors of intimate partner violence was “depressing” or “sad”. (When I worked at a community mental health center in Michigan, I was frequently asked whether working with people with mental illness was “dangerous” or “scary”.) This question doesn’t usually bother me coming from people whose day job involves something so totally outside the realm of my own experience and interests that it seems genuinely curious. For instance, I often wonder how people who design websites can sit behind a computer for hours on end, every single day, typing and cutting and pasting little pieces of code into little windows. I’m further impressed by people who work in offices, sell real estate, or find fulfillment as a restaurant chef. The fascination is there because, well, the idea that your day job involves low pay and long hours with people who have been brutalized (and who can often be fairly brutal themselves) doesn’t compute for many people who went to school for marketing.*
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Dear Brooks,
Every morning when I thread my fingers through your laces, I feel my heart beat heavily against my chest in anticipation. I prefer a double knot and I have to jump up twice to make sure you’re tight but not constricting. I think about where we’re going to go as I reach toward you in a standing stretch. Out the door, down the steps of my front porch, out to the corner of Shenandoah and Magnolia and you cushion the muscles of my feet and legs as they churn and warm. And then, who knows?
Yesterday we headed south through Tower Grove Park, through the Morgan Ford business district and across the train tracks as a soft rain began to fall. I had the vaguest slip of memory from childhood, watching a ribbon of asphalt curve up Carondelet Park from the window of a passing car. I wanted to see Horseshoe Lake although I didn’t remember that’s what it was called, barely more than a puddle where once, my brother and I fed ducks with a loaf of moldy bread. I passed Chippewa and the city soured a little, rundown clapboard houses and expressionless faces regarding me from behind cigarette smoke. The windmill on Delor was static against a murky sky. It rained harder. My iPod stopped working, or I bumped the off button accidentally–I don’t know. I continued in silence, lungs pumping and sirens all around and somewhere over the Mississippi there was a halfhearted thunderclap.
By the time we reached Holly Hills the city turned on itself again, all tree-lined boulevards and sidewalks without ruts. Carondelet Park straddles the divide of poor and not-so-poor, but this city’s small enough that every other park does the same. Soaking now, soles swishing softly against the paved trail winding up through and around the park. No one else around by this time–I saw the looks from people in cars or peering out of living room windows–”Who would be out in this?” But I don’t mind it. My clothes wet all the way through, my legs pulling me up and up and up these hills–sometimes I catch myself smiling through long gulps of air and passersby think I’m smiling at them, and wave back. What I’m really happy about, though, has nothing to do with anybody else. It has everything to do with my feet kissing the ground beneath me, outside air thick around me, and my muscles propelling me on fast forward through the world. It’s just my Brooks and willpower that make it possible.
I turn north from the park’s eastern entrance and pound up Grand, past another rough part and nice part and then the sort of rough-nice part, which is where I stay. I can feel the beginnings of a blister on one baby toe from my wet socks and despite all the rainwater, sweat dripping into my eyes. I don’t want this to end but I know my body needs to rest, and my Brooks can only take so many miles. Tomorrow’s another day and another opportunity for experiencing the world on two legs, fast-forwarded.
xoxo-
A
I went to a lecture today by a visiting professor who I’d heard practiced “feminist law” (also I thought there might be free snacks. There weren’t.) The subject of the lecture was about the gender gap in academia–not the gender ACHIEVEMENT gap, which has received quite a bit of popular press recently, but your good old-fashioned gender gap: pay, benefits, promotion, etc. I wasn’t expecting to get as angry as I did. For one thing, although I consider myself–or at least, others consider me–a pretty radical Marxist-feminist who sees gender discrimination and a heterosexist paradigm where other people see an engagement party. Yet I’m also aware that I’ve had the immense privilege of spending most of my adult life working in largely supportive, female-dominated non-profits or sheltered by the four walls of a graduate school. By and large, these are both places where there are women in all kinds of roles–leadership, supporting, middle management, you name it–as well as the sort of liberal-humanist mindset that leads to recycling and yoga practice. As such, I have rarely felt as though I have been the victim of direct, institutionalized, plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face sex discrimination. If anything, Title IX has done me proud. However…
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I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this movie all week.
People who know me well know that 1) I’m not a big movie-goer and 2) when I do go to movies, I’m a terrible movie-watcher. However, this past Thursday I was treated to a screening of “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth”, specifically a documentary about a notorious St. Louis housing project and generally a portrait of the North American city during the past half-century. Several former Pruitt-Igoe residents spoke afterwards (to the crowd of 800 squeezed into a tiny chapel on my university campus) about this failed sociological “experiment” that continues to replicate itself on the vast frontier of hopelessness that so often characterizes our response to poverty in these United States. However, as one of the panel members was quick to point out–she had moved into Pruitt-Igoe as a child and, before its widely publicized demolition, responded to calls there as a law enforcement officer–all was not broken dreams and despair inside the walls of these gigantic high-rises. “Poverty never created immorality; poverty created want,” said a sociologist who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Pruitt-Igoe situation. I can’t agree more, and further: allowing poverty in this country is, to me, the greatest sin of all.
The title quote above is attributed to one of the professors in my department, who moderated the panel discussion following the screening. Beyond the obvious cataclysm of poverty and racism to which the movie speaks, there is an overwhelming sense–as the movie draws to a close–that nothing has really changed. That instead of addressing the real problems of class and institutionalized racism headfirst, we are attempting to put a 21st century spin on the same old shit. So now instead of white people bulldozing out to the suburbs, we have selected class of young educated professionals bulldozing into “economically depressed” neighborhoods where their very presence is enough to jack up the property values, only to leave as soon as they have kids.
The particular ways in which white flight have impacted St. Louis are also dealt with in the movie; the city–county divide is still so incredibly stark, it seems almost unreal in the 21st century. In Jonathan Franzen’s first novel, The Twenty-seventh City, he thoroughly explains the (shortsighted) historical decisions that set the stage for the Gateway City’s unique boundaries and zoning laws. Unfortunately, backroom bargains by a few corrupt politicians in the 1800s have led to a world of disastrous fiscal consequences that made things like Pruitt-Igoe possible, and which continue to affect us today.
This week, the New York Times reported on the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights legislation which has just taken effect in parts of Jersey. Students and teachers alike can report bullies to the police through the anonymous Crimestoppers hotline, and schools themselves must adhere to a set of standards to be overseen by the State Education Department (albeit without any additional funding for programming, training or personnel). Since most schools are strapped for cash, they are tapping high school guidance counselors or social workers to add “bully investigator” to their list of credentials–which may very well include following up on every last complaint about every last schoolyard disagreement and making sure there is a bunch of paperwork filled out to show the state auditors. The anti-bullying law also puts teachers and other school staff on the line for not reporting bullying if it is suspected–which could either be a good classroom management tool or a total disaster.
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In the wake of a string of pretty gruesome local news regarding gun violence, children, and adolescents, I have been writing an article about international volunteers and their contributions to youth development in Central America.* My literature review has focused a lot on the positive youth development framework which outlines the supports young people need to be successful, matching each of these supports to a state-level policy or program initiative. Of the 40 positive youth development needs, “safe places” is sticking out currently, as is “constructive use of time”, “physical and psychological safety” and “integration of family, school and community efforts”.
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Yesterday I overheard someone talking about how they just couldn’t understand–and furthermore, didn’t believe–that the crime statistics in St. Louis (namely, that it is currently topping the charts as the most violent city in the U.S.) were real. The people to whom this gentleman was speaking averred. One woman offered tentatively, “Yeah, I guess it just depends on where you go.” Another guy said, “How do they really figure that stuff, anyway?”
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Although most of what I am expected to do on a daily basis involves reading and writing, I am convinced that graduate school is killing my (up to now, somewhat decent) ability to communicate via the written word. In my college writing workshops and literature classes, language was something to be manipulated–once you had mastered it. (Manipulation was off-limits if you didn’t know where to put the apostrophe, in other words.) My long sentences and parenthetical style suit themselves to my brand of communicating. This was something that people at my job noticed. “Your case notes are always the best to read,” my supervisor at the women’s shelter commented. I’d like to think she meant more of it than just the plain fact I am able to string together words with subject, verb and predicate. Name the parts of speech of this sentence: “Advocate informed S.C. once again that she could not change her child’s diaper on the kitchen counter during meal preparation.”
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I’ve had pets for as long as I can remember. At various points in my childhood, you would have found the following animals in our house or backyard: chickens, goats, pot-bellied pigs, rabbits, cats, kittens, ducks, bad-tempered geese, a pony, a Great Dane the size of a pony, and dogs–small dogs, medium-sized mutts, herding dogs, purebred dogs for sale. I am currently owned by two cats, who have mostly recovered from the many cross-country moves, subway rides, and cramped apartments to which I have subjected them. Although I would like to have a dog and a bunny, and possibly a baby deer, my mother tells me that my life is too unstable to introduce a creature that requires more than an occasional scoop of food and fresh litter (she has flatly refused to let me have one of her dogs, in fact*).
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