wrong all the time

“Everybody else cain't be wrong all the time. Sometimes it's gotta be you.”
― Angela Fournoy, The Turner House

they're actually swimming

You know. . . the shallow end of faith is easier to spend time in. It’s not a real commitment. You can just hop in, stand around in tight circles and people watch. You can examine your nails and catch up on all the gossip. You can talk and talk and talk and come to a great many conclusions and decisions and still maintain your hairstyle and even avoid mussing your makeup. This is important because you never know when someone will pull out a camera. You can spend an entire comfortable life there, really, and just stand around and be heard. You never even have to learn to swim in the shallow end. Good times. 

I think the reason we don’t hear from the people in the deep end as often is because they’re actually swimming. In the deep end, you have to keep moving. It’s hard to look cool. It’s tiring and scary even, since it’s just you and your head and your heart in the silence of the depths. There’s not a lot of chatting or safety in numbers in the deep end – you have to spend most of your time there alone. And it’s impossible to get any solid footing. You just have to trust that the water will hold you and you have no other choice but to flail about and gasp for air and get soaking wet, head to toe. - Glennon Doyle Melton, Carry On, Warrior

Original Post can be found here.

Between the World and Me and Let's Us White Guys Shut Up Maybe

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.” – Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

It’s not often that I pull back the curtain on the Great and Powerful Oz that is Howie’s Book Club: The Blog, but today I will. My basic format is to tell a story or observation from my life, taking up about ¾ of the post, and then hastily and sometimes clumsily tie it to the book that I just read. In other words, I spend most of the time saying “look at me” and then a little bit saying also look at this book. Many posts end up like a “very special” episode of your favorite 90’s sitcom: 15 minutes of mirth followed by a sobering lesson about the danger of caffeine pills.

And all I can say about it is so far, so good, you guys. But I admit that in the past few posts it’s been getting harder and harder to do that. A previous post is one that I really agonized over, and I can’t say that it was a success. I put it up because in many ways this whole thing is just a public diary and it’s important to me that I capture my mistakes as well as the many, many, many unmitigated triumphs in my journey to understand this world through literature. I take solace in the clear evidence that very few people are taking this journey with me.

If anything I hope that my efforts to summarize 250-400 pages of painstakingly selected and organized sentences into a few paragraphs has shown how important it is to read the books themselves and in the words of the great Levar Burton, “You don’t have to take my word for it.”

A good book needs every word and every page to make its point. We can’t sympathize with a character we don’t know, and we can’t know a character without being there with her throughout her story. Summarizing a book by trying to pick out its theme and then saying to a dozen or so blog readers “this is what this book is about” is pretty silly, actually. The best I can do is give a glimpse and hope you read it too so that we can run into each other and you can say “that book” and I can say “right?” and we kind of bond over it and maybe you buy me lunch after I weakly protest, faking to grab my wallet but doing so in a way that is almost comically slow.

Otherwise what I’m doing here is akin to posting memes where big blocky letters make a complex subject simple to the point of absurdity. Willy Wonka thinks that your political opinion is stupid. This Minion is confounded that you would believe such a thing. The puppy dog is, frankly, sickened. He’s going to throw up in your shoes later, probably.

I’m in no position to “review” Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, is what I’m saying. The story of being black in the United States is not my story and will never be my story. I make a lot of mistakes in my writing, but even I’m not dumb enough to try to tell you about that experience like it’s something I understand.

So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give the police a reason. All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to “be twice as good,” which is to say “accept half as much.” These words would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket. This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile.

It’s not a long book, so you should just read it. You should especially read it if you think that we are in some kind of post-racist society. You should read it, if, at any point you told someone that racism couldn’t exist because we have a black president. You should even read it if you see inequality every day like you’re the only one wearing 3-D glasses at IMAX Star Wars. “It’s like I can reach out and hold one of those TIE Fighters,” you say in awe while everyone looks at you like you’re some kind of lunatic. But you’re not a lunatic. You tell this to yourself all the way home in your motorcycle sidecar that isn’t attached to anything because the sidecar is your home.

I’ve found that the best way to learn and get a glimmer of understanding about what it’s like to be a member of an oppressed group is just to listen to them. Social media gives us a chance to eavesdrop on the public conversation of what it’s like to be a minority in your community. In Between the World and Me, we can listen in as Ta-Nehisi Coates gives his 15-year-old advice on how to navigate the world in which he was born. Just because you might not be the audience, it might be a little harsh. You can handle it.

If you're not part of the oppressed group, my only advice is when we listen in on these conversations, let’s do it quietly. A lot of times we want to speak up in these spaces, let everyone know that it’s not us. “I don’t see race,” we are so anxious to point out. “I’m not part of the problem.” Also: “I get it, you guys. I know what you’re going through.” We definitely need to speak up, but not when there’s a voice from within the community already doing so. Our time is when nobody is standing up for the oppressed. When we won’t be praised for it. When it’s scary to do so. Don’t worry. All of us will get plenty of chances.

A Serious Post About Stuff

OK, listen. I volunteer at the local women’s shelter. I’ve debated about talking about this. On the one hand, it’s become a significant part of my life. On the other, it’s something I’ve made an effort not to talk about very much. The most important reason is because there’s confidentiality involved, and the stories I would have to tell are not my own. The second most important reason is that I know I have a tendency to present a distorted version of myself sometimes, one with flaws carefully swept under the bed and the trophies of my accomplishments prominently displayed. I’ve never wanted volunteering to be something I use to win an argument about how neat I am (I use my bowling high score to do that.)

So let me get this part out of the way right quick: though I’ve been volunteering since March for two hours a week (I know, where’s my medal), it hasn’t made me a very personable person yet. I am painfully aware that many interactions with me are probably awkward, because I am an awkward person. I’m getting better at just finding someone who needs help and helping, but you guys I’ve got a long way to go.

When I first started the training to volunteer, a guy who’d been volunteering for a year or so talked to us about what to expect. He talked about how in order to be a good volunteer you needed to get out of your comfort zone and talk to everyone. The shelter manager told us that when he showed up for his shift, kids would come running and mob his car, they were so excited. He said to knock on doors and ask how people are doing. I sat in the back in training and thought, nope. I’ve never been that guy and as much as I would like to be, I probably won’t.

What I’ve learned so far is that I don’t need to be that guy. I can be this guy. The one who quietly sorts books in the corner for two hours because I love to sort books. I will walk around the parking lot with a dustpan and clean up garbage. I’ll try to fix the doorstop and accidentally break it worse. I’ll pull weeds, or defrost the freezer, or rake leaves. I don’t sit across the table from a woman who has been displaced from every aspect of her life that has brought her comfort and stability and look her in the eyes and say “how are you doing?” That’s a person I’ve always been grateful for when I’ve needed them and one who I haven’t become because I’m paralyzed that they don’t want to talk to me.

I do better with kids. During my shift there is usually a meeting when the week is planned, and often I distract little kids from bothering their moms while it takes place. We play games, I read to them, I break up fights (a lot), I pretend I’m a monster, I pretend to fall down, I pretend to sleep when they play lullabies on the toy piano and dance when they play dance music, that kind of thing. The older they are, the tougher they are to engage with. I haven’t figured that one out yet. I have not yet taken on the role of cool youth pastor who turns his chair around to sit on backwards and gets down on the teen’s level. The best I’ve done so far is recognizing what band is on their shirt and getting a curt nod in response.

So believe me when I say I don’t bring this up to make myself look great. When it comes to volunteering, people kind of have to take what they can get. In this case what they get is someone who likes to sort canned food with his headphones on and who is getting better, though not quite there yet, at making consistent eye contact.

There are great moments and there are harrowing moments. I’ve had days where I’ve been shaking and kinda crying on the way home and others where I feel like I can’t be having more fun. Some shifts I feel like I did nothing and others I quietly tell myself that I just literally saved the world. It can be boring. I’ve had times when I feel like people are working around me and I’m just a big tall thing that gets in their way, or days where it seems like nobody is there and there’s only so many times I can alphabetize the VHS tapes. Sometimes I’m asked to lift something heavy just because I’m a guy and I think to myself please be strong enough to lift this.

Speaking of strength, can you imagine? Unless you’ve been through domestic abuse, I don’t think you can. I’ve been exposed to it on a 2-hour basis each week for months and I can’t even begin to understand. We’re surrounded every day by people who are in constant terror, and we don’t even know about it. According to the CDC, one in three women in Utah will experience domestic violence. That’s in comparison to the one in four nationwide average. If you think it’s not happening where you live, you’re wrong. 

Statistically you know someone who is being physically abused, emotionally abused, or both. Her husband may monitor all of her cell phone activity. Or write down the car’s mileage every time she comes home from work or shopping to make sure she only went where he allows her to. He might play her children against her, telling her that she’s worthless in front of them. Maybe he threatens to kill himself when she says she’s leaving. Or tells lies about her to her family so she has nowhere to go. It’s possible that someone you know has had the barrel of a gun pressed against her head in her own bedroom by the person she thought was going to spend his life making her happy. And then she’s had to make dinner for her family and smile and pretend it never happened. When her visiting teachers stopped by and ask how she’s doing, she’s said “great.”

Chances are I will never have to be as brave as the women who get out of these situations. Thank heavens. But I guess there’s a point where we can either unplug ourselves from the bad news that’s out there around us or we can do something about it. Even if it’s tiny.

Look, I was going to try to shoehorn this post into a book review about Jane Eyre, which is a book filled with unhealthy relationships, but that seems kind of crass today. 

Instead I’ll just say this: If you want to help, let me know. The shelter always needs staples: diapers, formula, toilet paper, paper towels, new dishes, canned foods, that kind of stuff. They're always looking for twin-sized bed sheets and quilts. They love gift cards and can always use them.  They always take clothes, but they don’t stockpile them, so whatever doesn’t fit someone who is currently there ends up going to thrift stores. New toys are great, too. If you want to help, let me know and we’ll work something out.

If you need help, Kristin and I are always willing to talk. Probably even better would be to contact the Utah Domestic Violence Coalition.

We get really generous around Christmastime, and that’s on top of all the crap we’re buying our families. You’re probably already spread thin. I just want to put it out there as an anytime thing. I’m there every week.