The New Rambler

England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses
It’s the home of police who kill blacks boys on mopeds
And I love my boy and that’s why I’m leaving
I don’t want him to be aware that there’s
Any such thing as grieving.

Sinead O’Connor, “Black Boys on Mopeds”
[ full lyrics ; YouTube ]

I didn’t know this Sinead O’Connor song until my friend Steve posted (or rather bumped) it on FriendFeed yesterday. Like most people who aren’t terribly musically aware, I knew “Nothing Compares 2U” because the video was everywhere when I was sixteen and “Last Day of Our Acquaintance” because it was on a mix I inherited from a former roommate of a friend. Surely I heard the rest of the album at some point, but not so that it stuck in my head. Not until yesterday.

Yesterday people were listening to the song because of Margaret Thatcher.

Yesterday I was listening to it on repeat in part because of Margaret Thatcher and in part because I have a baby and in part because I talked to a kid recently who didn’t have enough to eat and in part because I worry a lot about race relations in the town where I work and the town where I live. But I was listening to it on repeat most of all because I realized it was the song I was looking for — the one that explained an idea I’ve always had about England, about the world, even. But I’ll start with England.

I grew up on English children’s books (like Salman Rushdie, I believed that going to boarding school in England might be like moving into one, though unlike him, I was not disabused of this notion by actually attending an English boarding school). Before Harry Potter, that meant Narnia, of course, but also The Wind in the Willows and The Five Children and It and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Tom’s Midnight Garden and The Secret Garden and The Sword in the Stone. Many would be quick to point out that there are poor children in some of these books and bad things in almost all of them. But they all too have a strong heaping of England’s green and pleasant land. They look back to a past (where, as TH White writes, “the weather behaved itself”). Those that despair often look for a coming again.

My awareness of the news as a child was, like most children’s, spotty, and informed by what I was exposed to (CBS and NPR and Time magazine and the local newspaper) and my mother’s reactions to it. I knew that Mikhail Gorbachev was preferable to Ronald Reagan and that the reforms of Lech Walesa were better than those of Margaret Thatcher, but I couldn’t have told you why. These beliefs were there, in the background, not primary to my understanding of the world nor of great interest, but present, like buildings you pass every day but have never been in.

Instead I walked along hoping that the mists would part, hoping that there was a garden behind that wall, and that someday I might see it.

There wasn’t, though. The mythical land was there, but it was the land of imagination. The land around me was what it was: full of broken concrete, ugly houses, fences. I was doing okay, but other people were not. I’m not sure if I knew that first or if music helped me see it, but Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” I realized, was a song about a world that existed, that I held some responsibility for, and “This Land is Your Land” was a song about a world we could aspire to, not a mythical one.

But what of England? Did England exist? It seemed to me it must be odd to live in a place where everything was old, where everything that people came to see was something that was dead, something that didn’t exist anymore, something you could never hope to live up to. I was grateful to be an American: we’d wiped out our history, it was true, and we’d built ugly things in its place, but at least no one expected anything but vulgarity from us. We might still surprise people.

When I got to college, friends played me the Smiths. Most people think of their music as being about mopey adolescent angst and unrequited love. I thought it was that but more than that, I got a glimmer that these people were singing about the very problem I’d identified. “The Queen is Dead” was about the way the world felt; “How Soon is Now?” was a question about life, not just love; getting a job as a backscrubber was what one might aspire to.

Later I heard the Clash and the Sex Pistols, later still I read about the effect of Thatcherism on Northern England. Later still I heard and repeated jokes about New Labour being like New Coke. A couple of weeks ago I started reading Rushdie’s Joseph Anton, where I read about his hopes for boarding school in England and the realities he found there.

I got older, in short, and I read more, and more things connected. And yesterday I listened to “Black Boys on Mopeds” again and again and again, because it was a song about this world I inhabit. And then I thought about my son, and the books he has yet to read, and the things he has yet to discover, and I wondered if I should stop.

We all know Republicans hate single mothers. (Dude, I’m not even going to provide you people a link for that. You’ve lived through at least a few decades in this country, right? That ought to be enough. If you need help, just Google Dan Quayle Murphy Brown. Trust me.) I had no idea until quite recently that single mom was a controversial term even among those who claim it.

By most definitions, I think, I am one, although the more I read on that comment thread, the less sure I am. But let me break it down for you: I’m not married, I have a kid, we live without the kid’s father. So that makes me a single mom. Of course, he helps out a lot, as do a lot of other people, which makes me perhaps not a totally single mom. I rarely feel that way, anyway.

But this is not a post about reality. This is a post about feelings, which only occasionally match up with facts.

Once in awhile I feel sorry for my single mother self. You know, when other people talk about their husbands handling bedtime, or bringing home ice cream. But mostly, I regret to say, I feel smug. Smugness is not a superior emotion to self-pity (in fact, I’m pretty sure smugness is but a subdivision of pride, putting it at the very top of the seven deadlies). But it sure as hell feels a lot better.

Oh, you poor married people whose spouses are away at a conference and thus making you handle bedtime solo! I do that every night! You say you had a hard time traveling with the baby? I did a trip with the baby by myself! And I had my period! I did it all! Backwards, and in high heels! (Oh, fine. That last part is a lie. I can barely stand in high heels, despite everything my grandmother tried to teach me.)

And when I do have help (as I often do), I tend to get resentful. Why are they not doing more? Why, in fact, are they not doing EVERYTHING? After all, I do everything. I put the baby to bed and feed him and change his diapers and get up with him, usually several times. I play with him and take him around on errands. I give him baths. I sing him songs! I tell him stories! I leap tall buildings at a single bound, with my baby in a sling! Why are they not doing ALL THESE THINGS? SIMULTANEOUSLY?

I can give you an earful on my opinion of American maternity leave and prenatal care and childbirth practices and utter lack of affordable daycare or support systems for parents. Google any of those phrases and I bet you’ll come up with arguments as cogent as any I could make. And all of those things would certainly improve my life, and I’ll continue to fight for them. But in the meantime I have this funny talented tiny human to take care of. And I have a lot of help.

So as the election season progresses this fall, you can expect me to look more and more smug. I’d apologize, but really, smugness is what I get. It’s what I get when I look at the politicians of the world and think, “Oh yeah? Try MY job for a day. No? Well, while you’re out, could you get me some coffee ice cream?”

I once asked a black man in a hoodie for his identification.

I am not proud of this.

I am less proud because the man in question turned out to be not only someone I knew but someone I worked with, and our job was working campus patrol at my college. It was the night of a big party on campus, the sort of thing where there was a lot of free beer and a lot of other stuff floating around that was probably free if you knew the right people. I was working patrol that night, and one of our jobs, as always, was to get non-students off campus after dark. I saw two people walking toward me from off campus with hoodies pulled down over their faces, and so I asked them for ID. Anthony raised his head up and gave me a look of death. I apologized. Later I confessed what I had done. But to this day every time I think of it, I think of what my drivers ed teacher used to say when we made mistakes: Don’t be sorry, just don’t do it.

I thought that was terrible advice for people like me who were forever mistakenly turning right instead of left. I think it’s the best summation I’ve ever heard of how we need to deal with race relations in this country.

On Monday night I took my nine-week-old son to my town’s Million Hoodie March. It was held on the same pedestrian mall where I’ve been attending rallies since I was fourteen years old. Going there often makes me feel very, very old, which is a common side effect of living in your hometown as an adult, especially if you then have a kid.

There was a crowd when we got there. The days when I used to count people at rallies are over (we used to joke that you had to count yourself, or take the police count and triple it), so I’m not sure how many exactly, but it was in the multiple hundreds. What impressed me was not the size, though — I’ve seen smaller and larger over the years — but the make up. I said to my friends when I found them, “I was going to say this is the most racially diverse rally I’ve ever been to here, but actually I think it’s the only racially diverse rally I’ve ever been to in this town.”

There were plenty of usual suspects there — people like me who are prone to going to rallies and accosting you with quarter sheets on street corners and standing around with signs or candles or red tape over their mouths. But much of the crowd was made up of what I am afraid people around here often refer to as “people from Chicago.” That means black people, of course, but more specifically it means “black people who are not like us.” And “us,” sadly, means people like me.

In a demographic sense, that’s true. Different socio-economic background and work experience and education and religious affiliation and all sorts of other little boxes you can check on forms. But that’s stupid, because they also are like “us”: the “people from Chicago” may be from Chicago, but now they live here, and that means we are all Iowa Citians and we all bear responsibility for our community.

This rally was different from others I’ve attended in another way. It was quieter. That doesn’t make sense, give the level of outrage over the events that inspired it. But I think it was quite out of respect and out of despair.

The problem with racism is that there isn’t an easy legislative solution. We’ve done most of the work of enacting the legislation that ended separate but equal and the denial of voting rights and so on. Those things still exist, of course, but that’s a problem of enforcement, not a problem of the law.

If you are upset about the death of Trayvon Martin and you want to find something tangible you can fix, you will have to look hard. Changing laws like the one in Florida that allows almost anyone to plead self-defense for any reason, or no reason at all, would help prosecute the killers, but it wouldn’t stop the killing.

You can’t legislate attitudes. You can hope to outgrow them. You can think you’re above them, that you aren’t poisoned by their presence, but you’d be wrong. This very blog post is poisoned by them. I can put all the scare quotes I want around “us” and “them” in an attempt to convince you that I find these categories false, but I have still written them down. And that means I’ve thought them. And that means, well, that means I can say I’m sorry all I want, but I still did it.

I don’t have a solution to that. Perhaps one day my son can help find one.

Mario Savio is famous, or at least he’s famous if you’re an activist at all interested in the history of student activism in the United States. He is famous enough that he’s even been institutionalized — or co-opted — at the University of California at Berkeley:

The steps [of Sproul Hall] are named for Mario Savio, the eloquent graduate student who was the symbolic face of the movement. There is even a Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus where some of Mr. Savio’s words are prominently displayed: “There is a time … when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part.”

The speech continues — although this part, apparently, they haven’t seen fit to emblazon

And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

That’s the idea of nonviolent protest. It’s the idea of strikes and sit-ins and of linked arms and of destroying draft files with homemade napalm. The idea is to keep the machine from working at all. But it turns out that in a lot of situations, that’s very hard to do.

When I was involved, in my own small way, in a sit-in at the University of Iowa in 2000, our idea was that we would keep the machine of the administration from working by occupying their main building. We ended up occupying their hallway for a week, and while we certainly inconvenienced them somewhat (I’ll never forget the woman who came out to spray air freshener over us every morning), we could not, as it turns out, stop the machine. We never even saw then UI President Mary Sue Coleman. She had, we assumed, some sort of bathole entrance to the building, because we were there round the clock and we never saw her enter or leave. She never once spoke to us.

And so our fight, like those of many of the Occupy movements now, became not against the machine itself but against its minions. We were lucky: when the cops came to get us, they acted nonviolently. No one was sprayed with pepper spray or dragged or beaten. Others, as anyone who watches YouTube knows, have not been so fortunate at late.

Most of the people who are involved with Occupy movements didn’t set out to treat the police as the enemy. Sure, police brutality is a problem, but I think for the most part we recognize it as a symptom, not a root cause. It’s true that the actions of the Chicago Police Department at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 were officially deemed a riot, but it was Mayor Richard Daley who gave the “shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand . . . and . . . to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in our city” order to the police some months prior to that in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

It was ordinary soldiers who carried out torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, but it was officials of our country at the highest levels of power who endorsed waterboarding.

It was campus police who pepper-sprayed students at UC Davis, but it was Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi who issued their orders.

And while it is local police who have done the dirty work of cracking down on Occupations in Oakland, Portland, New York City, and elsewhere, it is the mayors of those places — acting, apparently, not only with each other but also under the advisement of the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security — who have issued those orders.

It’s damned hard to get to the chancellor of a university. It’s hard to shut down the machine of Wall Street. Even throwing money on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange only interrupted things for a little bit. It’s hard. You throw your body up against the machine, and fifty years later, they put your words in a coffee shop.

I understand that people are disappointed in those occupiers who have turned their attention to battling the cops. It saddens me, too. I’d rather be talking about economic inequality and the Supercommittee and the latest appalling contract between the University of Iowa and a multinational sweatshop and the work that Shelter House and the Free Mental Health Clinic have to do because we don’t actually bother to take care of people in this country and the staggering numbers of people who are out of work or on the verge of losing their homes and — well, I could go on. But how do you get people to talk about these things, or more importantly, to do something about them? And why, when people do try to dramatize them, do we insist they be “cleaned up?”

If you have an answer, I would love to hear it.

I am not actually occupying Iowa City (although this being Iowa City, we are transforming, not occupying. Liberating was rejected on the grounds of being too confrontation and sharing on the grounds that someone did not want to share with the 1%). My six-month’s pregnant old lady butt is instead occupying my sofa, which is where I’ve been sleeping lately because it seems to result in less back pain that sleeping on my bed. But I did stop by the occupation/transformation at College Green Park last night and stayed for a couple hours worth of the General Assembly, which churned out a preliminary statement of intent and a statement of nonviolence in two hours.

If you’ve ever been a part of consensus decision-making, especially in a group of 200 people, you’ll know that two statements in two hours is actually kind of a record. As I was telling a friend, it’s always instructive to remember the story of the SDS chapter in New Jersey that once spent 24 hours trying to decide if they could take a day off to go to the beach.

Decision-making of the sort being practiced at College Green Park and in public spaces all over the country is not something a lot of people are really willing to do. Even those of us who participate in such things are likely occasionally to say Dude, let’s just pick a word already. But that, of course, spins off into a debate about whether and how words matter.

Regular life affords few opportunities for such debate. Oh, sure, advertisers and politicians argue about wording all the time. But advertisers and politicians have a mission that’s about convincing other people, not about satisfying them. Wording a statement as an activist is about convincing other people, sure, but it’s also about defining yourself. It’s about defining and creating the kind of world and society that you want. In the beginning was the Word, and in some sense even atheists function that way.

I loved being at the park last night not because I really love sitting on the ground for two hours and repeating everything everyone says in phrases and twinkling with my hands to show approval. What I love is seeing people engaged in the process of creating something, watching them get to feel — for some for the first time — that they are making something that is real and true.

When I got home last night, I listened to the Friday installment of Planet Money. I have a perverse love of economic news and analysis (I lay it entirely at the feet of Louis Rukeyser for being so funny and dapper), even though it routinely pisses me off. Despite what the right wing seems to think, NPR, especially in the form of Planet Money, is not even remotely left-wing. It’s taken as a default position that capitalism is good, that the democratic process as displayed in the United States works, that growth is good. I disagree with almost everything they say. On last night’s show, they decided to visit Occupy Wall Street. I was immediately worried. It’s going to be like the time they interviewed “a socialist,” I thought (although to be fair, they poked no more fun at him than they did at the folks at libertarian summer camp, who were checking the price of gold on their smartphones in order to calculate how much gold to offer for goods at the camp). But it was actually pretty good: they are the first media people I’ve heard to understand that the part of the point of the protest is the protest. What we want for the larger world is what we are creating for ourselves. If hundreds of people living rather uncomfortably in a public place and sleeping on the ground can come to consensus, why the hell can’t the grown ups?

I don’t speak for anyone else at any Occupy event. But for me, at least, it’s true. The means is the end. Or, as one of my favorite bits of writing from another era put it,

We conducted a long struggle, assuming responsibilities we should not have been made to assume, heartbreakingly alone until the end, taking time out from our studies and our lives to do a job that should not have needed to be done. And we comported ourselves with dignity and grace, on the whole unexpectedly so, and with good hearts and kindness for each other. Confronting an institution apparently and frustratingly designed to depersonalize and block communication, neither humane nor graceful nor responsive, we found flowering within ourselves the presence whose absence we were at heart protesting.

(excerpt from a letter sent by a Berkeley Free Speech Movement participant to the judge in their case, quoted in Michael Rossman’s The Wedding Within the War)

Your week probably did not start at 8:30 on Monday morning with a health care professional telling you that you were gaining too much weight in your pregnancy and that “if you keep this up, you’re going to look like the Michelin girl by the time you deliver.” At least, I certainly hope your week didn’t start that way. I’m sorry to say that mine did, and even more sorry that my response, rather than uttering an expletive or an eloquently worded rejoinder, was to burst into tears.

Of course, pregnancy may well explain that response, as well as my getting teary looking at BoingBoing just now (and damn, that was some fast CSS work on someone’s part) and reading my all the nostalgic Apple posts stream by on FriendFeed and Facebook.

But I didn’t set out, actually, to whine about pregnancy or reminisce about Macs (I’ve done that before) but rather to comment a bit on one of the other events of this apparently tumultuous week, the Occupy This, That, and the Other Place movement that started with Occupy Wall Street. Before the Steve Jobs encomiums started rolling in, most of the posts I saw online this week were either repostings of assorted Occupy signs (hell, I posted a few of them myself) or people complaining about the ways in which the movement, or the people involved, lacked focus, or direction, or goals, or objectives. Frequently these went together — Gosh, I love this sign! I sure wish they had a program!

Watching activism take place on the internet makes me feel very, very old, and weirdly nostalgic for the days when I was handing out flyers that said, “meet on the Pentacrest at noon and the Ped Mall at 5 the day the war breaks out!”, because of course we didn’t know when the war was going to start (this would be the “first” Gulf War), and we wanted to have a plan, and we couldn’t email everyone, much less invite them all to a Facebook event.

The group that made those flyers was called Operation US Out, and I attended its very first meeting, when I was fourteen. We had a program, or at any rate we had five Points of Unity, the idea being that if you agreed with these, you were part of the coalition, regardless of your position on, say, abortion or Israel. The only ones I remember now (1990 was some time ago, and I’d have to look the rest up) were “Troops Out Now” and “End the Poverty Draft,” but the idea was to create some simple demands we could all get behind and rally around, so that we could build a broad-based coalition and gather the maximum possible resistance.

That worked, to a point, the point in question being when a group of mostly women decided that OUSO was being dominated by either men or International Socialist Organization members, or ISO members who were men, and they thus decided to form a separate group called Women Against War. I stuck with the original group, as that’s where my friends were. I knew the people on the steering committee. Of course, they mostly were ISO members, as tends to happen with new activist groups on college campuses with active ISO chapters, if Chicago decides that’s where ISO members should focus their energies. The idea of a Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist group is, at least in part, that you’re creating a vanguard for the revolution, because when the time comes, you’ll need to have people who are organized and know how to get shit done. Consequently, ISO people tend to be very organized and know how to get shit done, and while everyone else is sitting around and dithering about whether the group is anti-war or pro-peace, or whether or not to include demands about Palestine, or what have you, the ISO folks are going around and booking meeting rooms and getting march permits and making and copying flyers and generally, well, organizing. But I digress.

The Points of Unity weren’t, as it turned out, enough to preserve a unified group, and I’m not sure at all that they were ever mentioned or covered in any newspaper story about our actions. As my friend Meg says, you can be sure that at a rally of a thousand normal looking people, the newspaper photographer will find the one guy on stilts, and that will be what shows up on the front page of the paper. I love the guys on stilts, and the people with the giant puppets, and the Radical Cheerleaders, and the people who go around doing guerilla plantings of organic pumpkin seeds, and all the other forms of spectacle we have on the Left, but I do acknowledge there’s a certain problem of media representation.

I’ve since been involved in various other struggles that had programs and demands. Students Against Sweatshops had three very specific demands, all of which had been endorsed by a remarkable list of groups and people and institutions (shouts out, Tom Harkin!). To this day, eleven years later, the University of Iowa has still only met two of them (joining the WRC and drafting a licensee code of conduct — they have yet to drop out of the FLA). The sit-in and its associated spectacle, and the years that followed, were specifically designed in an attempt to bring attention to these specific and particular demands, and they were covered, to some extent, in the stories told about us. But of course they were very complicated and involved understanding things about factory monitoring and labor standards and the right to organize and a great many other things that don’t make a good caption on a picture of a bunch of unwashed college students.

And yet we did accomplish some of our goals. There have been improvements. Mostly those were the result of a lot of grueling, irksome, behind the scenes work. But you know what happened that first day of the sit in? The administration joined the WRC, something they’d refused to do for months. I don’t think they did that due to reasoned demands. We’d already made those. I think they did it because there were a bunch of grubby college kids bike-locked together in their offices. (Well. People weren’t grubby yet. It was the first day, before we started camping out in the hallway.)

I’ve long been a fan of Frances Fox Piven’s Poor People’s Movements. If you’ve heard of Piven, you’re probably either an old lefty or a fan of Glenn Beck. Given that you’re reading this blog, I’m betting on the former, although you never know. I’d like to think my father would read my blog if he were alive, and after agreeing that “main ideas belong in main clauses and subordinate ideas belong in subordinate clauses” and that bourbon is preferable to Scotch, I’m not sure he and I would see eye to eye on anything. Piven’s book is about various mass uprisings of the poor, some of them organized somewhat but most of them simply the result of huge numbers of people reaching a breaking point.

The folks occupying Wall Street do not have a great deal in common with the tenement dwellers who went on rent strikes in Piven’s book, but there’s a quality of unrest that I think they share, and a quality of demanding something – even if it’s an inarticulate, intangible something — but something different from what they have.

I remember way back at one of those early OUSO meetings someone was trying to get people to pin down exactly what our solution to — oh, I don’t know, the global oil market? the problems of capitalism? — was. Another member stood up to speak and said, “You know, I don’t know. But you know, we elect this huge bureaucracy. We elect these people who are supposed to figure out how to make the things we want work. Isn’t that, like, their job?”

And to a great extent, I think that’s what the Occupy movement is saying. No, we don’t have a solution to the global debt crisis or the student loan scam or the unemployment rate or anything else. But dude, people in government, captains of industry, leaders of the free world — isn’t that your job? To which I can only say yes, yes it is.

The events I’m supposed to remember, the ones that are supposed to have changed my life, are 9/11 and the Challenger explosion. And I do remember them: I was in my fourth grade homeroom, getting ready for handwriting, when Mrs. Gale came to tell us about the explosion, and I was just out of teaching a rhetoric class when another grad student asked me where she could find a classroom with cable TV on 9/11. So I remember them, and I even had ties to them — one of the teachers at our school had been a finalist for teacher position on the challenger, and I had friends in New York, including one who saw the second tower fall outside her window the day after losing her job. But they aren’t the things that changed my world.

Those things were my father’s death, which I don’t remember the date and time of — I wasn’t there when it happened, and I was only five years old — but which I have a visceral reaction to every year on that date — and watching the vote on the “first” Gulf War come in on January 15, 1991. I was fifteen years old and sitting in a mess of sleeping bags and blankets on my best friend’s living room floor, and we were watching the vote on the tiny television we’d dragged in there to watch movies the night before. We had been organizing against the coming war, which we knew would happen but still believed, maybe, that somehow we could stop. But that January day, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, we sat there and watched senator after senator vote to authorize the use of force in the Gulf. The air war started a few days later; the ground war began on my best friend’s birthday. The only dissenting vote from a Republican in either house came from our own Senator Chuck Grassley. I’m fairly sure it’s the only vote of his I’ve ever agreed with. He spoke at my high school when I was a senior, and I asked him about it, and he said that he simply felt that not every other avenue had been tried, and I respect him for that still, although I wasted no time at that event lambasting him with the rest of my classmates over gays in the military.

The war started for me that day, and it never really ended. We were bombing Iraq with some regularity all through the 1990s. Economic sanctions imposed on Iraq resulted in the deaths of thousands there during that decade. The Iraq war that started in 2003 seemed to me just a continuation, not a new event, and the war in Afghanistan that started a month after 9/11 seemed all just another part of what George Bush the first called the “new world order.” That’s what changed things for me.

My mother graduated from college in the spring of 1968. At one point in grad school round one, I was immersed in reading about that period as part of the research for a book I was then trying to write. I asked her one day what that was like. I couldn’t imagine the experience of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy being shot within weeks of each other. I thought it must have felt as though the whole world was falling apart. What did she remember about it, I wanted to know.

She thought about it awhile. “I was very absorbed with your father, and with worrying about getting into graduate school,” she said. (This was around the time she was also applying to secretarial school programs in case her PhD plans didn’t work out.) Finally she came up with something. After Dr. King’s assassination, Cornell University sent a letter to my godmother, my mother’s best friend, who had applied to graduate school there, saying they were establishing a scholarship for minorities, and did she belong to any minority group? Elizabeth, who is smart alecky as well as smart, wrote back and said yes, she was Phi Beta Kappa and a church-going Christian.

You can’t predict what will change your life. I’ve spent twenty years getting told I’m unamerican, that I should move to Canada or Russia or China. I’ve seen institutions I thought well of disappointment me again and again. It doesn’t particularly faze me anymore. The first cut is the deepest, and that’s as true of political betrayal as it is of romantic loss.

A lot of people will spend today in remembrance, and an equal number will spend the day trying not to remember. I think surviving is always a balancing act between the two. I’ll never forget my father; I’ll never stop trying to change the world, but I can’t spend my whole life on either one. Among other things, I’m going to have this kid to raise and take care of, and he will someday have to encounter his own losses. I don’t know what one does about that, except to keep on living.

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Somewhere out there, perhaps, are still the three installments of The New Rambler I wrote in the weeks after 9/11. That was back in the days before blogs, when The New Rambler went out as an email, and I got around to putting it up on the website when I had the time. I never got around to it with those issues, and they were lost when the computer I wrote them on died. If anyone reading this happens still to have copies, I’d be grateful if you could send them to me, for the sake of the historical record.

I heard the news at 7 in the morning, driving home from my boyfriend’s house in that half-asleep 7 in the morning way. I was looking at the trees which seemed to have budded overnight, half listening to whatever overplayed thing they were playing on KSUI. Then the news came on. Osama bin Laden was killed by US troops at a compound in Pakistan. One of bin Laden’s sons and a woman and a courier were also killed.

The report went on. The President was pleased. The United States acted alone in this endeavor, without the knowledge or cooperation of other nations in the region. Bin Laden wasn’t actually living in a cave! He was in a multi-million dollar compound! The President talked in his sonorous way about the closing of a chapter, about a small group of US forces acting on his orders, with great care.

By the time I got home, they’d moved on to speculation and history. Would it really be possible to get aircraft into the compound unnoticed? Was Pakistan actually in on the arrangement because they were sick of dealing with bin Laden? A reporter talked about his childhood and his education and his turn to radical Islam. The 1998 attacks on the World Trade Center were mentioned. Bill Clinton spoke about that, out of the past, via a clip, sounding rather young. September 11. Tora Bora. Manhunt. Movements.

Then there were the celebrations — people singing the National Anthem outside the White House, people chanting USA! USA! USA! at a baseball game. My email brought a newsletter from a wine store urging me to raise a glass to the death of bin Laden.

No one mentioned the woman and the courier. I started to wonder if I had misheard. Maybe it was just the big guy, and I could worry simply about the ethical implications of assassination and not about what they call collateral damage. But no. The BBC says it was two couriers, two couriers and a woman. She was trying to be a human shield. She was like a woman in the Bible — no name, no job, just a tiny role in history. A woman at a well. A human shield.

Sometime on the afternoon or evening of September 11, 2001, after I finally dragged myself off my couch, where I’d felt pinned all day by Neal Conan blasting NPR listeners with the news, and even chastising one who suggested perhaps revenge was not the best option, I made a peace sign with masking tape on the window of my apartment. It stayed there till I moved out two years later. I felt ill that day because I knew we were going to war. I feel ill today because we did, and because we are still there.

People tend to regard pacifism as foolish at best and morally unforgivable at worst. Friends and strangers have told me it is a lazy philosophy. I suppose it is lazy, in that the answer to “should we go to war?” is always no. But it is not an easy philosophy to live with. You have to live with the idea of evil. You don’t get to think, “Well, of course I would have taken a shot at Hitler if I’d had a chance.” You feel sickened when your country kills someone, and you feel alienated from your country because everyone else seems. . . happy.

Lest there be any doubt, let me note for the record that I do not think bin Laden was a good guy. I do not defend his actions or his beliefs. But neither can I rejoice at his death, just as I cannot ignore that throwaway line at the end of the news report I first heard: a woman and a courier were also killed.

The passive voice takes away agency, but it cannot take away responsibility. The deaths caused in the name of one’s country are also one’s own. I’ve never learned how to handle that.

So it is Mother’s Day again. I am generally opposed to holidays that seem to exist primarily to support the greeting card industry (I know, I know, Mother’s Day started as an anti-war thing, but let’s face it, it is not celebrated that way any more). The other day, though, I saw my friend Jenna soliciting advice on Facebook for a reproductive rights place to which she could donate on behalf of her step-mother, who had asked for such a donation in lieu of a Mother’s Day gift.

As it happens, I’d been thinking just the other day about how grateful I am that I have never been pregnant and thus have never needed to get an abortion. And that got me thinking about what I would do in such a situation now that I live in the boonies. I grew up in Iowa City, home of the fabulous Emma Goldman Clinic, which currently makes its home in the building once inhabited by my pediatrician’s office. My sophomore year of high school, I joined 400 or so other Iowa Citians outside the clinic when 40 members of Operation Rescue came to town to protest. Someone across the street put Madonna on their boom box and aimed it out the window, and a bunch of us went over to dance to “Papa Don’t Preach,” an odd choice, I suppose, in the circumstances, except that it does contain the line, which we all yelled loudly, “I made my CHOICE!” There’s a newspaper photo of me standing at a Roe v. Wade anniversary rally on the history wall there, and when I used to go there for an annual exam, they’d all say how much they’d liked my most recent column.

Well. I do not live a few blocks away from Emma anymore. In fact, as it turns out, in order to get an abortion, I’d have to go to Billings, two and a half hours away and in another state. I’d have to take a day off work, and get someone to drive me up there, and come up with the money (given that my health insurance won’t pay for psychiatric care, I can’t imagine that it would cover abortion). It would be a pain, but I could do all that. I have money, and friends, and sick leave. Not everyone is so lucky.

Shortly after the passage of Roe v. Wade, my great-grandmother, Harriette Glasner, had a similar realization, and she started Emergency Medical Assistance, a fund that still helps poor women in Florida get abortions. It is one of many such funds around the country, many of them small and local, dedicated to trying to provide the kind of options that I have always taken for granted to women who have never had those options.

So this year for Mother’s Day, with their approval, I made a donation to the National Network of Abortion Funds in honor of my mother and grandmother, and in memory of my great-grandmother. These are the women who raised me, a child who was very much wanted and who was loved and helped out at every turn. My wish for Mother’s Day is that every woman be able to make the choice to become a mother, and that every child be wanted as I was, and have mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers like mine.

The picture you’re looking at is my copy of Bill Ayers’s memoir Fugitive Days, inscribed to me in early November of 2001. The inscription reads

To Laura —
With hope — wounded but alive — for a world at peace and in balance.
Best,
Bill Ayers

Ayers’s memoir is only in part an account of his fugitive days. The rest of it is a political autobiography — the story of a person who was born into enormous wealth and privilege after World War II and who went from rather pedestrian boyhood concerns to being concerned with, and appalled by, his country’s involvement in a place called Vietnam, and its callous disregard for those who lived in poverty, those who were born with the wrong color of skin, those who lived and died for his country’s mistakes.

Some readers of this blog will know of Bill Ayers from back when this memoir was published; others from even before that, but most Americans know who he is because his name came up so frequently in the 2008 election. He’s the terrorist Sarah Palin accused Barack Obama of palling around with. He was a founding member of the Weathermen, later the Weather Underground (whoo hoo feminism!), which is what part of Students for a Democratic Society became after its disastrous 1969 convention in Chicago.* The Weather people were responsible for a string of bombings of various targets, including the United States Capitol, although the only lives they ever destroyed were there own, in a botched bomb-making attempt in a New York City townhouse. They were, as terrorist organizations go, actually extremely careful not to take lives with their bombs, although it’s not entirely clear that that was the original intent. The bomb that killed three of their members in that townhouse was packed with nails — it was their imitation of the same kind of anti-personnel bomb that the United States was using in Vietnam.

Ayers’s book was published on September 11, 2001. I interviewed him, by phone, for what had been planned as a simple review of his memoir for a local alternative paper, a day or two later. The first thing I remember doing, after learning about the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, is making a peace sign in the window of my apartment out of masking tape. It stayed there for the next two years. The next things I remember are lying on my futon sofa, listening to NPR and realizing that any chance for peace was far flimsier than my improvised sign. I remember sitting on that same sofa and talking on the phone to Bill Ayers about what a terrible, terrible time it was.

Last Wednesday, April 28, Bill Ayers spoke on the campus of the University of Wyoming, on what would have been my father’s eighty-seventh birthday. Few people are in a position to realize both the irony of that coincidence and its deep appropriateness.

Ayers had been invited to speak earlier in the month by the Social Justice Research Center at the University of Wyoming. Protests poured in — to the University, to sundry officials, even to the governor, and as a result, the Center’s director withdrew the invitation. Shortly thereafter, a University of Wyoming student invited Ayers back to speak on campus. The University of Wyoming said they would not allow him to speak. The student booked an alternative venue, just in case, and Ayers and the student sued the University. The Casper Star Tribune has a collection of articles on the controversy; WyoFile has a more succinct account with links to the final decision by Chief Wyoming US District Judge William F. Downes, a decision which will cheer you greatly and give you hope for the future if, like me, you are a fan of the First Amendment. “When the Weather Underground was bombing the Capitol of the United States in 1971,” Judge Downes writes,

I served in the uniform of my country. Like many of my fellow veterans of that era, even to this day, when I hear the name of that organization, I can scarcely swallow the bile of my contempt for it. The fact remains Mr. Ayers is a citizen of the United States who wishes to speak. He need not offer any more justification than that. The controversy surrounding the past life of Professor Ayers and the widely held public perception of his past conduct cannot serve as a justification to defrock him of the guarantees of the First Amendment.The Bill of Rights is a document for all seasons. We don’t just display it when the weather is fair and put it away when the storm is tempest. To be a free people, we must have the courage to exercise our constitutional rights. To be a prudent people, we have to protect the rights of others, recognizing that that is the best guarantor of our own rights.

In April 1969, when the Weathermen were not yet a fully formed idea, some students at Grinnell College, a small liberal arts college in rural Iowa, decided to turn the American flag upside down as a protest against the Vietnam War. The move, in the context of that time, was not even that radical. The Iowa Young Democrats — Democrats! — had passed a resolution at their convention earlier that year stating that all schools should be encouraged to fly the flag upside down, at half staff — the signal for a ship in distress — for the duration of the war as a symbol of a country in distress. The Grinnell chief of police, however, did see it as a radical act, and he, along with the Poweshiek County sheriff and two sheriff’s deputies came to campus to confiscate the flag. Students organized quickly, with one group going to talk to the President of the college, one group going to write, print, and distribute flyers explaining their action in the community, and one group going to law enforcement headquarters to recapture the flag.

The flag did arrive back on campus, only to be turned upside down and then righted again. My father spent the next two days, from dawn to dusk, standing vigil next to that flag to ensure that no one could turn it upside down again. Some of his students came to stand with him, and eventually convinced him to let them take turns so he could get food, or at least use the bathroom.

My father is generally described as “making the John Birch Society look a little pink around the edges,” and while he did not live long enough for me to solicit his opinions on the Weather Underground, I can guess with great assurance that his opinion would be, if possible, lower than that of Judge Downes. But I like to think that he would have agreed with Downes in another way: I like to think that he would have agreed that Ayers should be allowed to speak, and I like to think that he would, as an academic, shared my disgust with the University of Wyoming for refusing to allow the speech.

I am an odd case for a radical. I was raised on dead white men, and I chose to study them when I got to college. I read the same texts my father did — sometimes from the same books he read — but I came to utterly different conclusions about the world. When I was little, I liked to imagine that heaven was a sort of endless tea/cocktail party, set in brownstone buildings on cobblestone streets, where like minded — and un-like-minded — people would gather to converse and argue. I always liked to imagine my father hanging out with Plato and Aristotle and Samuel Johnson and Thoreau. This is a vision of heaven that I think could only be dreamt up by a faculty brat, and I’m sure it’s far from many people’s ideal. I like to think that someday, though, I may sit around a coffee table with my father and Judge Downes and Bill Ayers and hash over all these things.

In the meantime, I, too, wish for a world at peace and in balance.

*The Weathermen are often blamed for the downfall of SDS, but they don’t deserve all of the credit. I’ve read far more history of student activism in the 1960s than any sane person should, and it’s evident from many accounts that the tactics of the Progressive Labor Party were at least as destructive as the Weathermen were at that convention. As it so happens, I watched the same group use exactly the same tactics to attempt to derail the national convention of United Students Against Sweatshops in the same city thirty-two years later.