#metoo

The post that would have gone up tomorrow was going to say that I was going to stay off of Facebook forever except for a few exceptions. It's a pretty good post and I thought that no matter how timely this one got, I would still post it as scheduled. But this one evolved and I guess that other one can wait a week so here you go.

Maybe by that post I'll have kicked the habit for good. Let's just assume that's what happened. You see I was really good for a pretty good stretch. I just used the site to tell you that there were new blog posts and make sure everyone involved with the refugee sponsorship knew that I still existed. Still to this point (hopefully) I have not written any jokes or hot takes or clicked on any articles that will make me mad (though I did see headlines that indeed made me very, very despondent). But today I did kind of binge on the thing like a black bear in a doughnut shop.

Did you know that in my office when we get a call that there is a nuisance black bear (nuisance in this case usually means minding its own business but in a place where things could go very south very quickly if said bear decided not to mind its own business, like a campground or a shopping mall), we get day-old doughnuts to bait them. Bears love doughnuts, and all they know is the day-old ones! If you put a bear in a doughnut shop and they got a chance to try the fresh ones I assume it would be like me greedily reading Facebook.

Except doughnuts are delicious, and the thing I can't stop reading is the horrible stories of people who I know and love sharing that they have been sexually harassed or assaulted. Were you shocked and horrified by everyone who used #metoo? If you were a guy, you probably were. If you are a woman, you might be, but more from the sense of sadness and maybe a tinge of relief because it's not just you.

I can't imagine what it's like, to be honest. Here's what I think, though. Please correct me if I'm wrong. You've had these horrible experiences, and you wonder what you're doing wrong. Why are you the one having men make terrible comments to you, or the one who got cornered when you were very young by someone who you were supposed to trust. Or have had men on multiple dates--nice men--push you for more than you were willing to give. Even guys who you just thought were your friends. Why does this keep happening to you? What are you doing wrong? So you find out that it isn't just happening to you. It's happening to all of your friends, too. And even like your aunt is saying stuff. Was it your grandma, too? Great-grandma? Probably.

Then you start thinking about all the pain you experienced and you look at the faces of all these women around you and realize that they are carrying much of that same pain with them and I imagine it's just overwhelming and horrible. I'm sorry, you guys. I'm sorry that we are so bad at believing you and also so bad at understanding the breadth of the problem. Also the part where we are garbage? Sorry.

That's me trying to understand women's point of view, because much of the stories I've read so far have been from women, and many of them have talked about the severe mistreatment they received after telling someone. These experiences are horrible, for sure, but they are compounded by the difficulty of living in a patriarchal society where the main people you need to tell your story to in order for something to happen are men.

I read stories of young girls telling their church leaders that they were raped and being told by the church leader to keep it to themselves so that their future husband won't see them as "used." They watched their attackers go on missions or get married in the temple, knowing that they never told anyone themselves. They told mutual male friends about what happened, only to be disbelieved and even ridiculed. They got to school the next day and were ostracized by their friends who decided to side with the attacker they knew because "he's not that kind of guy."

It's not just women telling their stories, though. Lots of men experience sexual harassment and assault. And it's way more men than you thought (that article explains this stuff better than I ever could). When I was in training to become a volunteer, I started to remember multiple times when I was harassed in a way that would clearly qualify as sexual harassment, but the whole thing was so complicated by rules of traditional masculinity and gender roles that all I knew at the time was that it made me uncomfortable. I had coworkers, girls several years older than me, who would whisper dirty words in my ear because I couldn't stop from blushing. A girl at school followed me around and pinched my butt when I wasn't paying attention. A guy I barely knew at a party explicitly described an imaginary sexual scenario he made up involving me and a movie star, and when I was clearly uncomfortable, he blamed my discomfort on my Mormon upbringing.

I would laugh along with them because I wanted to be cool. And part of me liked the attention, even if it made me uncomfortable, because I really liked attention. My coworkers were even my friends. I liked them and liked hanging out with them, I just wished that it wasn't so weird sometimes but couldn't place why it was weird. I wasn't going to report them to a manager; the thought never even occurred to me. First, because I didn't know what was happening or what I would even call it, and second, I liked them. I didn't want them to get fired, because then who would I work with?

I was also on the wrong side of this sometimes. I definitely tended to get caught up in talk and actions that almost certainly made someone uncomfortable. I mistook someone's uncomfortable laughter or silence with approval. Even in times when I wasn't directly participating, I certainly stayed silent when I shouldn't have. This is even when I knew that silence or quiet laughter was my own way to cope with uncomfortable situations. 

In retrospect, the right thing to do probably would have been just to say something. Tell them it made me uncomfortable. Probably a lot of cases would be solved that way, but none of us are taught how to do that. Men aren't taught how to respond to unwanted sexual comments. It's assumed that we're always into it. We aren't taught how to respond if a woman makes overt advances. Men can be left in situations where they know that they were physically aroused, but also that something happened that they had decided years before that they would not let happen until they felt like it was right for them. And that they had said no right then but it happened anyway.

We as a society are horrible at dealing with this stuff. We joke about young boys who are coerced into sexual relationships with their adult teachers. Or we even see those young boys as the perpetrators, seducing lonely women who finally gave into their charms. We see men as physically large and strong and unable to be coerced into non-consensual sex, while forgetting that the responses to trauma are multiple, that "fight or flight" only tells a tiny part of the story. We always forget "freeze."

Similar to the flight/fight response, a freeze response is believed to have adaptive value. In the context of predatory attack, some animals will freeze or “play dead.” This response, often referred to as tonic immobility (Gallup, 1977), includes motor and vocal inhibition with an abrupt initiation and cessation. Ethologists have documented non-volitional freeze responses in several animal species (Arduino & Gould, 1984; Kalin, Shelton, Rickman, & Davidson, 1998). Freezing in the context of an attack seems counterintuitive. However, tonic immobility may be the best option when the animal perceives little immediate chance of escaping or winning a fight (Arduino & Gould, 1984; Korte, Koolhaas, Wingfield, & McEwen, 2005). For example, tonic immobility may be useful when additional attacks are provoked by movement or when immobility may increase the chance of escaping, such as when a predator believes its prey to be dead and releases it.

Despite evidence suggesting that tonic immobility may be a key facet of alarm reactions, freezing has received relatively little scientific attention in humans. One exception is the PTSD/rape literature wherein several studies have described a rape-induced paralysis that appears to share many of the features of tonic immobility (Galliano, Noble, Travis & Puechl, 1993; Mezey & Taylor, 1998; Scaer, 2001; Suarez & Gallup, 1977). This literature suggests that a relatively high percentage of rape victims feel paralyzed and unable to act despite no loss of consciousness during the assault (Burgess & Holmstrom, 1976; Heidt, Marx, & Forsyth, 2005). 

- Exploring Human Freeze Response to a Threat Stressor, Schmidt et al.

If anyone--male or female--has said "no" and had that no ignored, we would be fundamentally misunderstanding the ways our bodies and chemicals and brains and all that to assume that it's just a matter of fighting or running. Not to mention the complex emotions going on when something is going on outside of one's control. Even if guys are bigger, are they going to punch a woman who keeps going even if she's told to stop? Body slam her?

I'm glad we're talking about this right now, and it would be a missed opportunity to not join in. But we have so far to go. For example, this spring a new bill was passed in Utah lowering the age for someone to get a concealed gun permit to 18, the bogus explanation being that it would prevents sexual assault on campuses (that just happens to be sponsored by the companies that make guns). According to a nationwide survey, 90% of rape victims knew their attacker prior to the attack. Often they take place on dates, or in social situations, or with a boyfriend or girlfriend or spouse. How many of those people are carrying a gun when they're watching movies with their boyfriend, let alone willing to kill someone they're on a date with or have been involved with for years?

None of this addresses the risks faced by gay and trans men and women, though statistically they are at an exponentially higher risk. It doesn't address sports and military hazing, which often fulfills every definition of rape but is dismissed as some kind of "boys will be boys" excuse. Our society seems only able to comprehend ambushes and rapes in prison, which we use as a joke or a deterrent, or molestation, which also we have such a profound misunderstanding of that at times we may as well know nothing.

This started out as a book post, but I don't have a way to connect it to the one I read in a way that would even remotely make sense. It certainly fits with other books I've read this year, including The Round House, Border Child, Shelter, Lucky Boy, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Bad Romance, too. Elena Ferrante has somehow crystallized this rage into something weaponized. It turns out if you start reading books written by women, you start learning about these stories. Just like it doesn't take a lot of people saying #metoo on your social media feed, it doesn't take a lot of authors from vastly different backgrounds telling the same story over and over to see how much more work we have to do on this.

So let's get to work.

A Song for Issy Bradley and 90s Kids Am I Right

He keeps talking but Claire can't keep up with his words, she can't catch them, they're flying past her ears like tiny bids, fluttering to the open door and out into the hospital corridor. He has made Issy's recovery contingent on her faith and she doesn't know how she will ever forgive him. - Carys Bray, A Song for Issy Bradley

A Song for Issy Bradley made me bawl. A lot. Not just the sort of weepy, whoa, is a book making me cry? kind of sniffly uncertainty, but full on sobs. It does so many things phenomenally well, but after trying to go to sleep last night following a marathon reading that left me blinking at my clock as it insistently told me that it's 2:30 AM, I couldn't shake one thing. This book would have been near flawless if it had been set in the 1990s. But it's not, and to me that's a real problem.

I stopped watching The Walking Dead after the season in the prison, whichever that one is. I've been reading the books for a long time, and couldn't stand what they did to my favorite character (Andrea) and how much time they spent with my least favorite character (The Governor). Aside from a handful of conversations and the occasional headline, I haven't looked back. Which is fine. There's a lot of show there and a lot of it is gross and I can get gross stuff from other places, like having children.

The upshot of this is that I don't have a lot of input in conversations about The Walking Dead TV show because even though I have intimate knowledge with the first handful of seasons and the source material, I acknowledge that too much has changed since then for me to have much to say about the current status of the show. I'd probably still get some stuff right (whoa, Carl sucks), but I'd definitely mess up on others (isn't it cool how alive Glen is and how dead he isn't?)

That's my problem with Carys Bray's portrayal of the LDS (shorthand for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) church in A Song for Issy Bradley. And I need to include some big massive caveats before I go any further. I usually don't read online reviews of books before I write about them, because I want to make sure my opinions are my own, and also online reviews are written by Mogwai who have eaten chicken out of a bucket after midnight (I mean the post-rock indie band--they get indigestion). But last night/this morning, I couldn't help it. The results were about what I expected. People with little knowledge about the church were pleased that the book confirmed a lot of their suspicions. People who had left the church a decade or so ago were ecstatic to see the realities of their lives portrayed in rich literature, and people who were still faithful saw little of their faith expressed on the pages.

This is basically my bishop's face when he sees this book

I didn't want to fall into one of those categories, and don't think I do. When I picked up the book I welcomed a harsh and critical look at a church and its surrounding culture that I think is deeply flawed in a very human way (as institutions run by humans are want to do). And when it comes to characters, Bray just absolutely nails it. There are no villains here, and no heroes, either. Everyone is flawed and trying their best and on a journey to improve. That's how I think about my religion, too. I think it has a past replete with genuine horrors, a present that is sometimes beautiful and sometimes extremely damaging, and a future that is unknown but I'm basically optimistic about because despite everything I just have to stick with optimism or I don't get out of bed in the morning. That and an eagerness to find out what new color combinations the marshmallow engineers have come up with next in the world of Lucky Charm rainbows.

Anyone can be brave for five minutes or an hour or two. The bravery no one talks about is the hardest bravery of all. When you get up in the morning even though you'd rather be dead, that's brave.

Let me give you a quick synopsis: the Bradley family is one of those perfect Mormon families we all grew up with (or in?). Ian is the Bishop, a leadership position that is unpaid but requires enormous amounts of personal time, and he throws himself into the calling with all of his heart. When we first meet the Bradley family he is missing his son Jacob's 7th birthday party, and his wife Claire is singlehandedly planning the day. Claire was a convert to the church, having joined it shortly after falling in love with Ian.

They have four kids. In addition to Jacob, there's 4-year-old Issy and two older teens. Zippy is the oldest, and confused about the conflicting lessons at church about female sexuality. She's been taught all her life that it's the boys who want sex, and it's the girls' job to keep them away at all costs. Except she kinda wants it too; is there something wrong with her? Then there's Alma, though he insists everyone call him Al, because Alma is a girl's name. Al isn't interested in explaining that he was named after a Book of Mormon prophet to his peers, even though his dad calls it a missionary opportunity.

The family has to deal with a tragedy that is portrayed so expertly that I am still grieving. Even while telling myself that none of the characters are real. I'm just gutted by it. Faith and family are tested, etc. I want to point out that from my experience, this is not a typical LDS family, but one that I know exists. Even the book acknowledges that while Alma isn't allowed to participate in team sports because they're too "worldly," many other Mormon kids are. Even PG-13 goes to far for these folks. There's no TV, except Book of Mormon cartoon videos (yeah, that frickin scam). It's basically Gilligan's Island. These guys are hardcore.

Early on in the book I was delighted by a gentle (and sometimes not) skewering of many LDS tropes. And much of it resonated with me down to my very bones. Some of the things I was taught as a kid in church I now consider genuinely damaging to adult life and I've seen firsthand how it can be absolutely devastating to victims of sexual assault and abuse, to name just one example. I was grimly amused by a teen girl's complaint that while she was given multiple handouts about how to prepare to be a perfect and pure wife, the boys her age were playing basketball in the gym. The assumption being that men had little to aspire to other than church service and jobs, while women had a complex code of domestic perfection and femininity that needed intensive training. A scene where the Bradley mother, Claire, just destroys one of Mormon culture's worst object lessons by indulging in some ABC gum in front of a young women's teacher is pretty priceless. 

At times the portrayals veer toward caricatures, especially when given the limited handful of side characters the Bradley family deals with. But I don't necessarily have a problem with that. Fiction (and often nonfiction) distills characters to their most concentrated forms. Timelines compress. In one book we're shown every bad example and painful church lesson an adult has experienced over a lifetime taking place within just a few weeks of time for the Bradleys. That's a reasonable writing technique, but it's worth recognizing.

There are only just a few ward members (for the uninitiated, wards are another word for local congregations) that we meet, and they are all broad stereotypes. There is one "cool" Mormon leader who gives out Kit-Kats and one time takes his shirt off and spins it around his head during a rugby game and everyone is kind of shocked but also amused. But aside from him, it's a rogues gallery of the weirdos every LDS person meets on their journey of holding fast to the iron rod. The doomsday prepper, the "old maid" who is approaching 30 and is still  unmarried, the purity obsessed young women's leader. The Bradleys unfortunately carry the brunt of the responsibility to show that Mormons can be normal and funny and sometimes awful and trying their very best but failing most of the time. 

Honestly, I think that Bray pulls as many punches as she delivers. And there are real or at least perceived miracles that happen here. Prayers are answered, though in ways not anticipated (a very, very Mormon kind of thing to happen), and the boring conclusion I was anticipating -- a wholesale abandoning of the faith by the Bradley family -- doesn't happen. I think there's fondness in Bray's portrayal of her culture (she says she left the church at age 30, replacing it with writing), even though she has a hefty amount of anger about the lessons she learned. One online reviewer, post-gremlin transformation, called the book "preachy."

In short, I think Bray does a fantastic job of preserving a near exact portrayal of the experience of being a Mormon teen the same time that I was a Mormon teen. I was amazed at how similar the experience was in the UK compared to my Utah upbringing. I have a hunch that, similar to my experience in Mexico, sometimes Mormons in other countries were even more zealous in some ways due to being a tiny minority. I felt sometimes they had a chip on their shoulder to prove to us Utah missionaries how hard they can Mormon. This accuracy is so uncanny that the handful of times when it seems to get something fundamentally wrong, it was jarring. The problem is that Bray stopped watching The Mormon Show several seasons ago, never got caught up, and wrote a thinkpiece about it anyway.

This book is what it feels like to be Mormon in the 90s perfectly, but it's set in the 2010s, and that's a problem. At one point, someone quotes a passage from a church lesson manual from 1993, and Claire points out that the manual is outdated, that a lot can happen in twenty years. The lesson teacher points out that the church is the same today as it was yesterday. This is a very common Mormon refrain and patently false. I wish that Bray had taken her own advice. The church is in many ways massively different than it was when I grew up in it. I would argue that in most ways it's for the better.

The way church leaders teach about mental illness, for example, is vastly different than the portrayal in the book, even if it feels more or less in line with my experience from a couple of decades ago. I remember a mother who suffered from profound depression who was viewed more or less as having a personality flaw. Depression was often viewed as the result of unresolved sin. Obviously that's horrible, and there has been massive amounts of progress on that front since. Church leaders today offer referrals to therapists, and will even pay for it out of member donations. In General Conference meetings (our twice-yearly world-wide church meetings), mental illness is spoken about frankly and kindly. In my volunteering I work with phenomenal LDS therapists who are fluent in both modern research and the intricacies and complications of religion.

Does that mean that people from my generation and before don't still harbor and believe the things we were taught before? Nah. There are still problems. But not in the monolithic form that is portrayed in A Song for Issy Bradley. The same goes for some of the horrible lessons young women were taught about personal purity. Those manuals are no longer in use, and since I spent some time teaching young men and women in church, I can say that the topics are handled with much more maturity and sensitivity now.

It would be blindly optimistic, even for me, to assume that these lessons still don't find their way into discussions on Sundays, because those kinds of habits die hard. But they are dying. Because Bray has apparently been out of the loop for some time, she understandably misses some stuff. It's obvious especially when her 2014-or-so Mormons aren't talking about the things that are really dividing members right now, especially the teens she writes about. There is a quantifiable exodus of young Mormons from the church that has little to do with the subjects Bray brings up. Millennials are leaving the church (all churches, actually) often because of a divide between their personal conscience and the views of the church on social issues. There's some pretty good red meat there for a critic of the LDS faith to explore. Instead Bray focuses on the things that apparently bothered her when she was young.

A couple of weeks ago I talked about reputations, and how I wanted (and still want) people to see me as I am today, not how I was when I was younger. I'd be sad as heck if someone who hasn't spent time with me lately wrote a book with me as a character today who still acted like I did ten or fifteen years ago. It would gut me, to be honest. I'm a big advocate of letting people change and progress, and feel the same way about institutions. There's value in soberly assessing the history of a person or church or nation, while also acknowledging progress made today. Like, look at how dumb Nintendo was in the 90s. We can all laugh at that while still acknowledging that Breath of the Wild was dope AF.

All of this would be fixed so easily if she'd just set the book in the 90s. Church members reading it would be confronted with how different the church was almost 20-30 years ago and forced to really notice how much things change and progress over one's lifetime. Even in a church that was "the same yesterday, today, and forever." We could use it as a way to remind ourselves that if there is something we learn at church that doesn't sit well with our conscience, that we were all given the agency to do what we think is right. And sometimes history is on our side when it all shakes out. Remember when everyone thought Sonic the Hedgehog was better than Super Mario World, but you knew better? It's like that.

Outsiders, who are going to be inclined to see the portrayal in whatever light their preconceived notions have set, would at least know that this story is a time capsule. I've loved reading stories about other's faith and religious traditions, even when I find aspects of it foreign at best and horrible at worst, I can also see beauty in aspects of it. I think the LDS tradition could and should have that light shined on it as well. A Song for Issy Bradley gets so close. I'd recommend it to anyone curious about the culture, with the big addendum that things have changed since then. And the assumption based on past events that it will change a lot in the future.

I think many members will enjoy it, too. Watching the family deal with tragedy from the LDS perspective was especially powerful for me, and gave me a searing insight into our particular form of grieving. We are taught sometimes that we should be happy, even in spite of horrible events, because we have a more enlightened viewpoint on God's plan. Sometimes we forget that it's OK to be sad.

The postman slides fat bundles of commiseration through the letter box every day: heartfelt wishes and bad poems in muted, floral pastels. People write little notes inside the cards. She is longing for a note saying "I'm so sorry"; she is sick of explanations and justifications.

All that being said, be prepared for some very frank discussions of things a lot of LDS consider sacred. Even if we talk about them all of the time at least as frankly and irreverently as Bray does in our private conversations, it's startling to see them on a page. And don't be surprised if amid all of the dead-on details, there are a few big missteps. Some of it might be hard to hear, too. The book saves its most potent vitriol for Mormon culture, while rarely critiquing what we call doctrine, but I know that those things can be hard to separate.

As with most fiction, there's truth and then there's Truth. Bray gets some of the truth wrong, in my experience, but when it comes to the Truth--the capturing of life's essence in all its pain and hurt and everything--she's accomplished something pretty amazing here. 

Not a book

Hey everybody it's Tuesday, which means blog time! But I didn't read a book this time. I'm halfway through one, I guess, but honestly I can barely read anything. Usually comic books are a good break when I get overwhelmed by the combination of life's logistical challenges along with just its good old fashioned emotional challenges, but honestly I haven't even been able to read those lately either.

Here are things that are bothering me (in no particular order): hurricanes, wildfire, DACA, Puerto Rico, white supremacist rallies, and officer-involved shootings. CHIP, subsidized health insurance that saved my family when I was working hard but still couldn't afford insurance, has had its funding expire. Oh, and nuclear war. Then yesterday we experienced the worst mass shooting in recent history and it's so ho-hum that it didn't even seem to take halfway through the news cycle before we were moving on to another rock star who died (and then didn't, and then did). I was wondering, by the way, why everyone points out that this was the worst mass shooting in recent history. As a naturally curious person, I thought, how recent is recent, and how bad have they been before?

Well, buckle up. Like, have you heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre? I wouldn't be surprised if you hadn't, since it wasn't included in any history books and was almost completely buried until 1996, the 75th anniversary of the massacre. With eyewitnesses dying of old age, a group called The Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 was formed to interview survivors, study documents, and hear testimonies from the public. Their report found that "After three and a half years of intensive research, the commission found what had been hinted at for four decades. There had been a pattern of deliberate distortion of facts regarding the riot and even the destruction of vital documents and a subsequent coverup."

The build-up to the "riot" is complicated (generally considered an argument between a black teen boy and a white teen girl in an elevator followed by threats from the community of lynching), but the upshot is that the thriving oil community of Greenwood, often called "Black Wall Street," where hotels, restaurants, and fur stores thrived was burned to the ground by National Guardsmen opening up on the crowd with machine guns, private and police planes dropping balls of turpentine and dynamite. Approximately 300 were killed, 800 were admitted to hospitals, 6,000 black citizens were arrested, and 10,000 black residents were left homeless.

What about the Colfax massacre of 1873? A bunch of crazy election stuff happened that I don't have the time or energy to relate, but the upshot was that Southern Democrats were ticked and tried to take over the parish by force. Republicans recruited black soldiers to defend the place, and the Democrats organized a militia of confederate war veterans and locals called the White League to attack. 60 black soldiers fled into the woods and were shot in the back and thrown in the river. The remaining defenders surrendered in the parish and stacked their guns, but were shot anyway. White soldiers ran down the fleeing men and shot them from horseback, some were hung. It's estimated that up to 150 were killed. In a Supreme Court case in 1876, the case against the insurgents was thrown out and no one was convicted.

There's the Mountain Meadows Massacre, when Mormon settlers, perhaps terrified of American troops threatening the new settlements and after hearing rumors of a party set to attack, dressed as natives and attacked a group of over 100 settlers. When someone in the party recognized the "natives" as white men, the plan to just scare them away turned into a massacre. Every man, woman, and child was killed (sometimes with clubs and knives) except for children deemed to young to remember. These were adopted by Mormon families. The church tried to blame it on nearby Paiutes but eventually pinned the blame on John D. Lee, acting on his own.

Massacres are one thing, the systematic genocide of native tribes from the state of California another. A conservative estimate puts the amount of Native Americans killed just in California by state militias, vigilantes, and federal officers somewhere between 9 and 16,000. In one instance, after native slaves rose up and killed two slave masters, US Infantry and Cavalry troops fired into a village, killing approximately 800 Pomo villagers.

I don't even have a point here, other than this: when you're an inquisitive person who asks a lot of questions you find out quite quickly that some of them have very, very bad answers. Those stories are the tip of the iceberg. Most lists of American single-shooter mass killings start at 1949 with Howard Unruh, a decorated World War II sharpshooter who left his house one morning at 9:20 AM, and shot 13 people dead and wounded two others with a German Luger.

I've been reading a lot about other countries this year. India, South Korea, China, Nigeria, and Cambodia, just to name a few. We're all kind of used to it by now. Every day or two (most times a few times a day) we're hit with a headline that makes our heart sink. 50 killed in an ambush by Boko Haram in Nigeria. Ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar by Theravada Buddhists. 300,000 dead in Syria with another 135,000 missing. For my whole life when I read these articles, I think, that's terrible, I'm so grateful that I live somewhere safe.

But I don't. We're that country, too. We have massacres and genocides. We have racial unrest. We have sectarian violence where a majority religion oppresses a minority. A white supremacist stabbing two men defending a Muslim woman on a train in Portland. A young man who loved posing with guns and a Confederate flag shooting worshipers in a Black Christian church. Three men who called themselves The Crusaders caught planning to bomb an apartment complex housing 120 people, most of them Somali refugees. We have terrorist attacks from foreign extremists.

And for a relatively young country, we've got a history of atrocities that rivals all but the very worst. We don't have a Stalin, Hitler or Pol Pot, but we do have Andrew Jackson and James Buchanan.

I don't even know what to say, you guys. This sucks. I don't have any way to wrap it up in a bow that makes us all feel good about the future. This has been a huge blow to Howie's Optimism Club. I seem to rebound, sure. But how much can we put up with? Perusing the headlines today, apparently it's a lot.

ADDENDUM: Rereading this on Wednesday morning, I can see a couple of themes. First of all, as we can see from most of these massacres, the feeling of safety I was talking about has always been a myth. I'm safe because I'm white and a dude and have spent most of my time in middle to lower middle class neighborhoods where the police are our friends and the government was designed to help me succeed. Sometimes these shootings are shocking because they effect people we don't normally associate with getting shot.

Obviously mass shootings make up a tiny fraction of gun deaths in the United States (most of them are suicides). Maybe the most pernicious of human biases is the one that tells us that we're safe because we don't belong to a certain group. We think women who are being abused are married to alcoholics, because that's what movies tell us. We think that rapists hide in dark corners and target women dressed in tube tops. And we think that we're safe from gun crimes because we don't live in housing projects. Until we start seeing ourselves in every person who is suffering in America, instead of thanking God that we aren't at risk, every one of us has something to fear.

I also recognize that there are places less safe than here. Of course there are. This isn't Mexico, it isn't Syria, it isn't Venezuala. In my neighborhood we don't have concrete walls with glass embedded in the tops. There aren't bars in the gas station windows. But I also believe that one of the least effective ways of dealing with problems is to point out that someone else is suffering even more. Everyone deserves to be able to improve their lives. Whatever the current state.