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TV Today: "Colony" and the Healthcare Bill

3/23/2017

Sarah Wayne Callies in "Colony"

Does anybody watch the TV series "Colony"?

It's a sci-fi show set in futuristic L.A.. A family is living under military occupation of aliens, assisted by collaborating humans called RAPs. Basic necessities are hard to come by, and in the pilot episode, the main character is trying to buy insulin on the black market.

Here's one of the lines in that scene:

"Certain conditions have been deemed 'unworthy for treatment.' Diabetes is one of them. The RAPs are culling weakness from the herd."

I don't think it's a stretch to say that the GOP "healthcare" plan is attempting to do the same thing. And as much as people keep rebuffing the analogies to the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany, I think it's completely fair. This administration, which in reality is a bunch of criminals who have yet to be held accountable, is a cult of strength. We're all supposed to be skiing in Aspen and feasting at resort hotels and enjoying our wealth at the expense of the lesser beings.

I'm grateful to Chuck Schumer, and my senator Kamala Harris and others who are fighting the good fight.

#resist

p.s. good show. And the main family has a dog, which is always a plus:) Note, the line mentioned above is spoken by actress Deidrie Henry.

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A Poem for Healthcare

3/12/2017

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This Man Stands
By Lisa Houston

for the man in the photo

This man is a stranger to me,
Standing at the back of our town hall meeting.
The room is packed.
Is he tired?
Unwell?
But there he stands.

I don’t know what to do, so I take a picture of him.
There but for the grace, etc.

Weeks later, I struggle to contemplate the soul of a congressman in Utah who says that this man is spending all his money on a new iPhone.

By which he means, “He’s just whining.”

It feels like that’s all I hear these days, spewing forth in the bills introduced, the edicts that read like royal decrees from Mad King George. The words of an angry, illogical parent, possibly drunk, or otherwise impaired.

They’re yelling. “Suck it up, crybaby!”

If I had a better heart, I’d be crying for them, these politicians with lumps of coal where their hearts should be.

But I don’t cry for them.

Instead I look at this man and wonder, where’s his iPhone?

In the end, I decide that no human being would have the nerve to say such a thing to this man. Not to his face.

And that makes me think about insulation, about the cocoons of safety we’ve spun in our cyber systems, and whether, perhaps, they are making us less kind.

Face to face, I used to feel that I had a fundamentalist friend, or two. Opera singers are a diverse group. Thrown together by the freakish commonality of a blessing in the throat, we are Jews and Christians, black and white, short and tall. And everybody wants to eat after the show, whatever God you pray to.

But now, I don’t know.

I commune with one such friend from across the globe on the jetstream of our cyber society. She praises POTUS and FLOTUS for “bringing prayer back to the Whitehouse,” and I trip over her words as if a stone three meters wide has placed itself in the middle of my path.

I fall down, flummoxed. Injured.

“Prayer?!”

Is that what you call it?

Meanwhile, I wonder if she prays for this man. And what she would say to him, or the millions like him. What she would say to his face.

Some days, I have to tie my wrists down to stop from typing a direct public message to this “friend” with a picture of this man and the Hashtag, “What would Jesus do?”

Because what would he?

And now I’ve put this woman in quotation marks, this “friend,” for the word has lost all meaning. She’s fallen into the abyss of someone I reject. Someone I don’t wish harm, but refuse to include in my company. Now I want her away from me. More than arm’s length.

In today’s language, I “mute” her.

But some don’t have that privilege. To push away those who would encroach upon them. I can’t imagine that this man wants to be here, standing in the thick air, listening to hours of political chatter. But here he stands, among us. And I have a flash of insight that this is the only way out. We must be there, physically, to protest, speak, listen care. We must show up. In person.

Meanwhile, I navigate my internal highways, trying to find ways of pushing this friend’s posts out of my “feed” without pushing the person out of my heart.

A faint echo returns from a decades-long journey into the void.

It's a memory of some silly family moment on the stairs, when we hugged, all five of us, and Dad said, “All for one and one for all!”

And with that I’m reminded: We’re in this together. No one is safe unless everyone is.

And through all of that, this man stands.

And I take a picture of him.

With my iPhone.

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Thoughts and Photos for Mom: Happy Women's Day!

3/8/2017

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Mom and Me on her 80th Birthday in 2014

Today I’m looking forward to the Women’s Day celebrations, and I’m also honoring my mother.
            Last week I attended an event to celebrate Mom. The California Women Lawyers association was giving her an award. Named for trailblazer Rose Bird, who was not only the first female justice on the California Supreme Court, but the first female Chief Justice on the California Supreme Court. But beyond that, Bird was a woman of exceptional courage and principle. She opposed the death penalty, and overturned 56 death penalty sentences before she was voted out of office after a highly publicized campaign against her. And in a case we might be hearing more about as states continue their efforts to curtail the right to abortion, she ruled that poor women should be provided with free abortions.
            Mom was thrilled to be receiving an award named for this woman.
            It was a nice event, with a buffet dinner and a medium-sized room packed with about a hundred lawyers and Judges. My niece, who will be 14 in a month, was all dressed up and wanted to circulate in the crowd by herself. I loved watching this, and can’t help but think it had something to do with the fact that it was a very pro-female room.
            Mom’s acceptance speech included profound thanks to her clerk and bailiff, and the social workers she deals with daily, but also a rousing cry of outrage at the decimation of the judicial system, the budget cuts that make it more difficult to dispense justice, and the new administration’s cutting of the a legal services corporation for the poor. And as she spoke, I watched the faces of the women lawyers, many of them about my age, mid-life and working hard to do their thing. And I saw how much Mom meant to them. How they had watched her for years, and been influenced by a woman doing her job with grace and authority.
            Mom’s been a trailblazer in her own way, working hard to support drug recovery as an option to prison, and for the past ten years helping to establish a mental health court so that people receive treatment instead of jail. And I could tell it was meaningful to these women, what Mom had done.
            Mom didn’t have examples like that. Mom went to Harvard Law School in the 50’s, applying to the Law School because her first choice, the Harvard Business School didn’t accept women. (But it does now! Here's a picture of my cousin Kathleen, Mom’s niece, graduating from Harvard Business School in 2014.)

There were nine women in Mom's class at Harvard Law in the fall of 1956, one of whom was Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And when the dean welcomed them, he told these women: “You know, you’re taking up a space that should be filled by a man.”

Even having heard the story all these years, I still find it hard to imagine such a thing.

So here she is now in 2017, 82 years old, happily married to Dad for 58 years, three grown children, four grandchildren, still serving on the Alameda County Superior Court, working with young public defenders, prosecutors, and social workers, trying to be fair and just and reasonable and kind to the people who come before her, both the “clients” as they call them, and the attorneys. California’s newest Senator, Kamala Harris, (who’s rockin’ the resistance in the Senate by the way,) Kamala served as a District Attorney in Alameda County for eight years, and argued in front of Mom, as did so many women who’ve gone on to do great things. And I think it’s been good for the men, too, to see a woman Judge who’s fair, diligent, and capable. And Mom’s all of those things.

So Happy Woman’s Day. I’ll probably go down to a midday rally later, to enjoy the activism that is inspiring our nation right now. But the real celebration is going on in my heart, as I give thanks for the greatest blessing a woman can have, an inspiring mother.

Thanks Mom.

P.S. Mom's grandmother was born in Lithuania in the 1880's. Her family left there the year she was born, fleeing the persecution of Jews that was so rampant in Eastern Europe at the time. I had the chance to go to Lithuania to sing a few years ago, and one of my concerts took place at a Jewish museum. This is a photo of me taken next to a painting there. Is this woman one of my lost grandmothers?

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Protecting the Rights of the "Foreign Born"

3/2/2017

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Today I'm thinking about how hatred seems to be spreading as bigotry and oppression somehow are more "in" with the actions of this administration. Specifically, I'm concerned that those of us who are dedicated to resisting the administration are also vulnerable to this atmosphere of hate. I wrote of this earlier in the post "Becoming the Thing You Fear" but today I mean it in a slightly different way. I have noticed online that people are critiquing one another on the tone of their resistance. One friend was given a hard time about her posts being too angry, while others are criticized, sometimes subtly, for not being angry enough.
Well-meaning in both instances, I'm sure, but troubling, for this is truly how hatred spreads. When we hate the hatred, we're practicing hatred, and as a classical musician I know that what we practice, we get good at. This is why historically in-fighting is common in resistance movements, though I think this time around people are very aware that a new, more peaceful, more loving kind of resistance is called for. But it's very hard not to be angry, and being angry, it's always a challenge not to spill over to hate. It is a slippery slope and I'm standing atop it like the rest of you, trying not to roll down the hill.
Poking around for quotations about hatred, I came across this one from President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
"We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization."
Any hatred, he said, not "their" hatred.
It was fascinating to discover that this quotation came from Roosevelt's address of greeting to the American Committee for Protection of Foreign-born in January of 1940. This was a time when almost a hundred "Anti-alien" bills were before congress.

  Writer Ernest Hemingway supported the work of this committee trying to protect immigrants, then more commonly called "aliens."
     Hemingway wrote to the magazine "The Nation" urging people to resist the movement against aliens.
He wrote:
  "You must be aware that the existence of the war in Europe has intensified the efforts of demagogic Alien-baiters who seek to destroy our rights as Americans behind the subterfuge of attacking the so-called Alien."
   Sadly, Roosevelt went on to sign Proclamation number 2537 on January 14th, 1942, which required people from enemy countries, (Germany, Italy, and Japan), to register with the Department of Justice. It was under this order that the internment order for Japanese Americans began.
   Having read a fair bit about the Roosevelts, and watched the excellent documentary by Ken Burns, I am guessing this is one of the times when Roosevelt bowed to political pressures rather than that he truly believed in this kind of discrimination. I need to research that more to know for sure. But even if that's the case, that in a way is more chilling, showing how even a decent man can do something indecent if the momentum of hatred is strong enough.
Well, I'm loving you, my friends and readers, today. Even those who think I'm not angry enough, and those who think I'm too angry! Like musicians, let's see if we can't get into a groove here, and find the sweet spot of political action fueled by love.
Here's a link to Roosevelt's greeting in its entirety. Roosevelt's Speech.
Note, as a resource for this post, I referred to Peter Rose's book, "The Dispossessed: An Anatomy of Exile."

L.H.

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TV Today: "Colony" and the Healthcare Bill

A Poem for Healthcare

Thoughts and Photos for Mom: Happy Women's Day!

Protecting the Rights of the "Foreign Born"

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