Fighting the Norms

Not my tree...

 It's sunny, and I am going to prune fruit trees today, but there's still frost and my hands do not like cold, so I have a few minutes. I'm trying to untangle a lot of complicated thoughts so I'm  looking forward to the kind of day when my mind can drift around while I attempt to create some order in my habitat.

I live with visual clutter and I don't  hate it. I've always created it, and while I can appreciate the peace of a simpler view, I need visual references around me to put together my concepts and do that further study that deeper thoughts require. So I have piles of unread books and unsorted papers and lots of postcards and little images on my walls. Not everyone would be able to thrive or even stand to be in my environment. 

In my yard I try hard to maintain spots where birds are protected and I throw seed in there so they can eat without the many cat predators. They turn over the leaves and eat insects there too, and though my yard is small, it seems wild to a degree. Right now I have tons of sticks and I find most of them beautiful. So I gradually put them into the stick tote and save a lot of branches just because. If you've seen my booth you know I find lots of them useful.

Some of my tangled thoughts are about cultural appropriation, as it keeps coming around, mostly from defenders of it. Their thin arguments are that it is appreciation, everybody does it, and so on. My feeling is that once you have seen it as racist, the discussion is over. If an oppressed group tells you something is hurtful, you listen to them. Even if it is "not everyone in the group" that says so. Often defenders of it claim that they somehow got permission from one of those people. It's basic to me...if someone tells you something is hurtful, stop doing it. 

I've done approproated in my artistic past, and enabled it, and it's still hard to say no when I am asked to participate. Often the people are my friends and we'd like to agree to disagree, but once I realized it was racist, that just ended my ability to rationalize it away. I don't think I, as a white person, get to decide what is racist or not. That comes from the person on the receiving end. So when two letters from white men I kind of know were the only statements in the Weekly letters that weighed in on the Shedd show where a blonde woman sang a Billie Holiday tribute, I wanted to write one back. I didn't (yet) because I thought maybe a BIPoC person would. But I expect a lot of people are pretty tired of having to explain it. 

It does seem like there will always be apologists for racism and oppression, and maybe a lot of people have learned to just not give them a bigger platform, and ignore them. You can't expend all of your energy trying to change the minds of white men who don't get it and don't try to. It's one of the reasons I stopped identifying as heterosexual...I did not find men, in general, trying to keep up. 

Valentine's Day always tires me out, too. So het, so focused on that two-person couple who must trade expensive romantic gifts or fail at love. I am just not very capable of tolerating romanticism anymore. It's destructive fantasy for me. I actually don't care about your anniversary. Sorry if that seems unfriendly, but it just doesn't interest me. It's not just that I don't have a partner. I get the usefulness of the bonding rituals and of having supportive partners in this difficult life, but I don't like all the fancy wrappings for what is a basic decision to partner up in an attempt to make life easier and arguably, deeper and more complex to navigate. I see that there are rewards to working in relationship, and I suppose if I had found some better opportunities, I could feel differently. But I didn't, and am not looking for them now, and am happy in my ace solitude. And I can buy my own chocolate. 

It's similar in that once I realized how destructive romantic fantasy could be, I couldn't go back. I know how good it can feel. I'm happy for you if you have found your way to a nice place there. Just don't have time for it.

I'm interested in working in community and in relationships not based in sexuality, which is why, I suppose, I support four essentially nonprofit organizations. I go to their meetings, I try to be helpful by communicating as well as I can and doing whatever tasks I have skills for, and mostly I enjoy it. But sometimes it gets ugly and I can't extract myself, in a couple of them. I've learned to be patient as things come back to where I feel ethically and practically able to continue, and sometimes I just take quiet breaks like I plan to today. I've tried to disconnect from any urgency to do the tasks to anyone's else's sense of immediate performance or arcane rules and I just keep doing them the way I think I should. It works pretty well.

Watching the rise of authoritarianism and the departure of a lot of the people I enjoy and respect most is pretty hard though. I support their choices and I expect to have to draw my own lines like I did on the "transparency" issue of meeting recordings. I could go. I would welcome having more time to do things like this (though I might have less material to write about....) 

A lot of the things we work on are circular. We discuss things in one of my committees for years. We sort through them, make a little mostly unseen progress, and then when new people come into the discussion we do it again. It's the way it has to go, I think...building consensus takes a lot of discussion. Conditions change and that changes the parameters of the possible solutions. But again, I have patience. That's why our discussion issues need to be posted on our agenda and scheduled for discussion over the long stretch of time it takes to figure them out so they work for the largest number of people. 

It's not ideal, but anytime someone swoops in with an authoritarian solution, that just ends the progress. The discussions derail and division occurs. You would think this would be obvious that authoritarian, top-down decision-making rarely results in change that works. Anyone who knows our community knows this. You need consensus or the drive for it. It's often called "buy-in" in our mainstream framework and that's similar, but you never hear about "buy-out." That's what's happening now. People are being closed out of the consensus-seeking process, and they are bowing out. It may be intentional on the part of the authoritarians. Makes things easier. You can ignore the people who disagree, when they consent to stop trying for consensus or a voice. That's one reason I tend to be stubborn about walking away. But I have not been put to the test, personally, as much as some others.

I mean, I did choose to stop performing and enabling cultural appropriation. It cost me some friendships, and will cost me more, I expect, because I'm not going back to agreeing that it is okay. I might not confront it as boldly as I could. It's still complex and layered when it comes to art and to a few other areas, but I'm gradually getting clearer on how to deal with it. If there's a question about it, just don't do it. And support the people who come from and speak from the cultures being stolen from. Not that hard. 

I didn't write the Weekly. I had a letter printed just a week before regarding archival accuracy. Not related, but I have a terrible tendency to dominate discussions if I don't check myself. A lot of my complicated feelings from a meeting last night were that I kept speaking out of turn and not raising my hand. I worked to stop but I go to a lot of meetings where we don't need to raise hands and I also think faster than discussions move usually, and I want to direct them in useful ways. I am probably arrogant about it. I've been told that everyone else in the group (a different group, and by a misogynist) is "cowed" by me and won't disagree or dialogue with me. I interrupt. I have conversations with people who can interrupt each other and still feel like it is a conversation...a couple of conversations at the same time. It's not the norm. Fitting into the norm is not easy. But I used the mute button on myself as much as I could. Still need to do better.

Yeah, I don't have a lot of time left to fit into the norms. If the norm is going to be authoritarian and heterosexual-only and infused with white supremacy culture, I don't have time for it. I have a lot of work to do and these days and years are short. So do your best to keep up, if you want to work with me. I don't think that's arrogant. I think it's practical. I think it's necessary.

I know many of the things I want to accomplish will go unfinished. But I am going to get my fruit trees pruned, and that is what matters right now. See ya!