Resilience: AKA Some Things I've Learned From Coyotes

I've been in the habitat restoration game in one capacity or another for at least ten years now. In that time I have sat through many classes and many conferences. In addition to these conferences having very good snacks, there is an intriguing combination of can-do science talk and a subtle message of the world coming to an end in virtually every way we recognize it as a livable and lovely space. It's like Bob the Builder saying, "Can we build it? Yes we can but does it even matter if everything I build will be under the ocean and/or overtaken by a sea of sand" before eating one hundred tamales and taking a very long nap while still in his overalls.

In these discussions I've noticed an increasing amount of discussion about "resilience." In a rapidly changing world where the very soil on which we depend is cracking and blowing away in year after year of record heat while Nero fiddles... with his cabinet (can you imagine Trump sitting down long enough to actually learn how to play the violin?). Where communities most dependent on living off of the land actively encourage its destruction in order to vote against hijabs, we no longer talk about restoration as the end goal. Business as usual, from an ecosystem standpoint, is often no longer an option. We don't talk as much about communities that are resistant to things like fire and disease, because resistance only goes so far. When resistance breaks down, it is disaster. Now we talk about resilient plant communities.

For example: take your favorite camping spot. It's probably filled with trees. Big, majestic trees that are filled with squirrels that chitter at you constantly before trying to steal your snack foods. We like forests during the summer. They're cool and shady and smell nice. This forest is pretty resistant to change. In your mind it never will because it's been there since you were a child. But this forest represents the past. It developed in a landscape shaped by massive snowpacks and steady rain. Snowpack, we're told, will decrease. Rains will become more sporadic and less predictable, and your forests will burn. Or, because we are not experiencing freezes as deep as we used to, the pine beetles will march on. Where hundreds of years ago it would be replaced by more or less the same thing, it no longer will be.

Restoration biologists look at this and, after quickly (or slowly, in my case) moving through the cycle of grief, say, "Ok, what next?" What next, in this case, is to try to predict these events and design ecosystems that will be resilient. Resilient communities are tuned to disturbance. Instead of major disturbance events being catastrophic, like it can be in those forests, for example, resilient communities thrive on it. We stop looking at what this forest is, and start looking at what it will become.

Lodgepole pines sometimes have cones that are sealed with a waxy resin that can only be opened in extreme heat. Since these trees tend to create a canopy that doesn't allow a lot of light, it doesn't make sense to constantly drop seeds in an environment where they can't grow. So they've adapted to keep those seeds stored until a fire sweeps through. Now that light can get in easily, the cones have opened and dropped their seeds into the nice new fertilized soil. Gambel's oak has a massive root ball called a lignotuber. Burn it, chop it, chew it up. New growth shoots right back out.

So on Sunday I gave a lesson in church to the 12-14 year olds and I gave this same example. It went pretty well, I think. I was talking about how eventually kids grow up to be adults and they need to be resilient, and building that resiliency was adults' responsibility as teachers and parents. It's not enough to just tell kids that they have to avoid trouble, you need to talk about what happens next if trouble finds them. I'm a very good teacher in church.

Then, in a training last night about domestic violence, we talked about parental resilience being one of five key factors highlighted by the Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP) for reducing abuse and neglect. Now, when the same concept comes up in completely different contexts we in the failing blog business perk up and say, "I might have a post here."

Our instructor said sometimes when she speaks with parents, they don't immediately know what resilience means. So she often defines it as "strong, but flexible." When I think of strong, but flexible, I think of the coyote. Coyotes are one of the more hated wildlife species here in the west, and are a common scapegoat for mule deer deaths (among many, many other issues). It is an at least weekly incident where someone tells me they used to be able to see deer everywhere but then we stopped poisoning Ky-Yotes and now there's none. When I ask them where they live and they point to their new neighborhood in the foothills I nod and they don't get it, but that's another story. There is a standing bounty in my state of $50 for a coyote pelt. In the last 100 years, we have poisoned them, hunted them with dogs, killed them in "hunting derbys," and shot them from helicopters.

But coyotes are doing fine. Better than fine, actually. They are flourishing. They live everywhere. In the East, they are hybridizing with the gray wolf to create some kind of super coyote that, I am assured, would have no problem catching the road runner even without the seemingly never-ending catalog of items offered by Acme.

The hybrid, or Canis latrans var., is about 55 pounds heavier than pure coyotes, with longer legs, a larger jaw, smaller ears and a bushier tail. It is part eastern wolf, part western wolf, western coyote and with some dog (large breeds like Doberman Pinschers and German Shepherds), reports The Economist. Coywolves today are on average a quarter wolf and a tenth dog.

Strong, yet flexible. All of the qualities you want in a good longboard, but it can also eat you.

Coyotes, when their numbers get low, have something programmed into their DNA that says, "Fewer coyotes = more food for the rest of us let's get cracking," and then they get cracking. In areas where active coyote suppression takes place, they have litters that are double the size. In Yellowstone, when wolves were completely eliminated from the lower 48 states (honestly we can say 49 states because I don't know how well wolves were doing in Hawaii), coyotes happily took over the role as apex predator. When wolves were reintroduced, coyotes said "listen guys, we're good. We'll mate with you and turn into a super species eventually, but also we can get by just fine hunting with badgers, too."

Maybe they were bummed. I don't speak coyote. But they moved on with their lives, is what I'm saying. I've been to Yellowstone. They're doing fine.

Here's where I talk about a very scary thing that people all over the internet are arguing about. It's this question: White People: What is Your Plan for the Trump Presidency? This question is tough. I put a picture on Instagram wearing a safety pin. Here's why: I was going to go out into the world looking for an NES Classic (see last post), and I wanted people of color to know that I didn't vote for Donald Trump. That's it. Because I imagined that if I were a member of a marginalized community, I would look around me at Wal-Mart or Gamestop or whatever and think to myself, "These people all voted against me," and I would be mostly right.

The safety pins are a national disgrace now, and while I liked the sentiment, if there's one thing I'm going to do when trying to stand up for people who are marginalized in my society it will be to listen to them when they say this doesn't help anyone.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the safety pin wasn't for other people. It was for me. I didn't want someone to look at me in the store and think that I did this. Because I'm a good person. White liberals are so desperate to prove that we are good people and if I'm looking at my facebook feed, we are not handling this thing with resilience. I see a lot of different views on there, but I also see a lot of spoiled sports who are so sad that "we" didn't win. Already they're blaming each other for it. They feel like their voice wasn't heard, and for a lot of them, those who have spent most of their adult life with a Democrat in office, it's the first time they've been on the losing team. Ouch, you poor poor baby liberals.

Apparently what we're doing to be good isn't good enough, no matter what it is. Don't wear a safety pin, volunteer. Don't volunteer, protest. Don't protest, revolt. Resistance!

The discriminated groups? They tell us it has always been this way. While we've been shocked. Shocked! They say "start looking at all the people who believe in these ideas and they are sitting in our classrooms, they are in our courtrooms, and they are pastors of our churches. I feel like Donald Trump is not a big bad wolf. He’s existed for a long time.” If this is the first time we're seeing that we live in a system that is structurally unfair and it breaks us, that's a sign of being tough only as long as the disturbance isn't catastrophic. That is resistance. We need to look to those for whom catastrophe is the norm.

As individuals, people of color and immigrants and LGBTQ+ and Jews and victims of sexual violence and women are very vulnerable and need us to stand up for them, but as a group? They are resilient as heck. They have been dealing with Donald Trumps and his followers for centuries, and they are still here. They know what needs to be done better than all the white thinkpieces on all the websites combined. George Takei knows what persecution looks like. He quotes an old Japanese saying, "Fall seven times. Stand up eight."

That's what resilience looks like. Strong, but flexible. When a resilient forest burns, it already has the seeds of its regrowth at its feet. When hurricanes whip at its branches, it bends all the way to the ground, but then it comes back. It's like me when I ask for your hottest chili, and you give it to me, and after eating a bowl I spit out some teeth and grin and say, "hotter." What I'm saying is that I like spicy food.

Dang son

Because Pessimists Never Even Try

Today, because I'm very lucky to have a job with flexible hours and not in a factory where I have to physically punch in and out to even go to the bathroom, or an Amazon warehouse, or like when I worked at UPS when I was unloading a trailer as fast as I could with a tiny man with very large biceps screaming at me to go faster, I took a little break and went to a couple of stores to see if anyone was selling an NES Classic early. Nobody was, by the way, but I found someone who put me on a list so I'm good. We can all relax.

Anyway, that's not what I was getting at but it was a nice little distraction for just a second from the fact that I have cried at least 4 times each day for the past two days. I don't need to get into it because you either agree with me and have cried, or you don't and you think it's as hilarious that we are crying as liberals thought it was when people were crying at Mitt Romney's election parties. It's funny, I get it. It's funny to watch people who are so used to getting their own way lose for once. It is the lifeblood of being a Raiders fan, that feeling. We win so rarely, and here in the West we live under the shadow of Broncos fans' smugness, that when we won it's hard not to revel in those defeated, distant stares.

Everyone has been using sports metaphors for this, and it's easy to say that people have just organized into teams and root for their teams, but just like most easy explanations, I don't buy it. I don't buy it anymore than I do that Hillary Clinton lost because of emails.

While I was out in some stores, I saw little clusters of people between various aisles, including one very loud cluster at the DI, who were exulting. I heard this at work yesterday, too. People who are ecstatic that Hillary Clinton lost. People who hate her more than any single person on this planet.

Here's how I felt: I felt like I was in an occupied country. I considered talking to a manager at DI until I found a cluster of managers giggling about how wrong the liberal media was about the predicted outcome of the election. It felt like a part of a secret resistance force with the knowledge that if I spoke up, I'd be reported and put on a list. 

And then I realized that's how these folks have felt under an Obama presidency. They have felt in the last 8 years that they don't have a president who cares about them. They have spent 8 years genuinely worried that there would be no safe country for their children. These are the people who have been predicting a global economic tragedy that would lead to World War III, tent cities, and fascism. Sounds like my Facebook feed right now.

Is this true? I don't think so. That's why I voted for Hillary. But on a very significant level, it doesn't matter. We can talk all day long about the realities of all of this and show statistics about job growth and murder rates and Gross Domestic Product (I don't know why we spend so much time talking about our sewer system but whatever). We can talk about how wrong they are, and how they've been duped by Fox News and later Breitbart. We can use charts that show that illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes given their proportion of the population than natural citizens. We can talk about how black people don't all live in the projects, that in fact most of them live in suburbs, and those suburbs are nice places to live. Or we can talk about this reality: our country elected Donald Trump to be its president because enough people who lived here felt like they were under siege. 

Hold onto your butts, people. I believe everything I'm about to say is wrong, but it's true to enough of our nation to elect someone who is deeply unqualified and unfit to be even a city council-member in not even the main city of a Grand Theft Auto game.

Now, in their little clusters, all over states that voted overwhelmingly in favor of a Donald Trump presidency, they celebrate because they felt like someone was stepping on them with a boot and increasing that pressure, little by little, for eight years. Everything they were taught as children that was wrong is now right. And it's being forced on them. They voted in their states to define marriage, but they were told that their vote doesn't matter by 9 people who live thousands of miles away. They are told, while debt piles around them and foreclosure notices arrive in the mail and their children can't find a job, that they are living life on "easy mode" because they are white. They watch reports on television of black teens knocking out white elderly people in cities because it's fun and calling it "the knockout game" (this is an actual urban myth that has constantly been broadcast on Fox News and talk radio for years). They are told every day that there are American cities, like Deerborn, Michigan, that are already under Sharia law and their city will be next. They believe that Hillary Clinton has ordered that her opponents be murdered.

(Deerborn, by the way, is a town in the United States that is 44% Muslim. It also sounds like a pretty decent place to live. One of their high schools, in a city where 53% of the population lives at or below poverty, has a 100% graduation rate and a 96% college readiness rank.)

By Rmhermen (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

That's what Sharia ice cream trucks look like

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (which, according to one site, there is "A growing consensus on the political right is to consider being labeled a hate group by the SPLC a badge of honor.") right-wing militias went from 35 during George W. Bush's administration to a peak of 334 during Obama's. Says one militia member when asked about storming the White House in the event of a Hillary victory: "I will be there to render assistance to my fellow countrymen, and prevent them from being disarmed, and I will fight and I will kill and I may die in the process."

Obviously this guy is the extreme. But I definitely heard my share of assassination "jokes" during the Obama presidency. And I'm going to take the very strong moral stand and I may get some flack for saying this but I don't think that's OK.

I don't think it's OK now, either. Even if I think the new president elect is going to be bad. I don't know that he's going to be bad, but I bet he is. If he's great I will be so happy to admit it. I will be so relieved. Just like if his new Director of the EPA candidate is wrong and climate change really is some elaborate (I mean, SO elaborate) hoax. You guys, if that turns out to be the case that would be some really good news. It would be the best news. We have all the best news. We're going to get so much good news we'll be sick of good news.

Ugh. Anyway, here's the thing about betting. You go with past history because past history is a pretty good predictor of the future. Here's an example: in my lifetime we had 8 years of Reagan. Then we had 4 years of Bush. That's the weird part. Because after that we get 8 years of Clinton and then 8 years of (another) Bush and then 8 years of Obama. Now if I'm a betting man I see a pretty clear pattern here and that 4 years of Bush senior is not the norm. I was in college when George W. Bush won his second term, and I know that everyone says that this time is different (and I agree), but that felt a lot like the end of the world, too. More recession, more war, more extreme faux-pas with government officials (giving unwanted backrubs to the woman German Chancellor, oh and also blundering us into a land war). I saw "Not my president" stickers all over campus. Also, and stop me if this sounds familiar, "Bush lied, people died." I remember one with bush with x's over his eyes all over the place.

Each day the great blackjack dealer in the sky says to us, "Place your bets, gentlemen," and we do. Some of us bet on calamity. We burrow into our basements with ammunition and dry food and prophecies of doom and gloom. We hoard our resources and we dare our neighbors who we have previously been told that we are to love as ourselves to even try to come and get them as we polish our guns. In essence, we spend all of our free time soaking up resources and give nothing back. It's us against the world and what has the world ever done for us? Here is a blog post of mine that I'm particularly proud of. You should read the whole thing because I have bad self esteem and I need it. But if you don't, here's what I wanted to talk about:

Those guys I can take or leave. I like the optimists. The ones who bet on the future. I cried three times watching Inside Out. A Pixar movie takes somewhere between four and seven years to make and costs from $175 to $245 million to make. The company employs around 1,200 people. That's a pretty steep bet. Of course, it made almost a billion dollars back and taught kids that their emotions are not their enemies. That growing up has some sad in it but that the sad can actually be pretty important. It said that it's not wrong to be down in the dumps sometimes but overall there are lots of exciting things in the world.

Now as sad as I am, I would be a bigger hypocrite than Jason "I can't look my 15 year old daughter in the face" Chaffetz if all of the stuff I said in that blog post didn't apply today.

Here, maybe it will have more weight if Iron Man says it:

There's only two things I ever managed to believe in. Firstly, myself, and even then, only about some of the time. Secondly, the future. That there would be one and we'd make it. By default, optimists make the world, because pessimists never even try. I've believed that for as long as I've been me, no matter what. - Iron Man Volume 1: Believe

Now listen. This is not the optimism of a privileged white man in a country where everything already fits me but in the near future everything will be specifically tailored just for me (just like clothes are because I'm tall and, let's face it, svelte (well, except for sleeves)) saying "everything is going to be OK." Because I don't know if it will. Things have been not OK in the past. Lots of times. It was not OK in concentration camps, neither was it in slave ships. It wasn't OK for entire nations of native people who were eradicated first by disease, and then by US military. It's scary as F.

I will not tell you, as you are staring into that inky black maw of uncertainty, using your predictive powers to process a career of a man that is dotted with failure, lawsuits, unpaid bills, and sexual harassment and assault and then say, hey-let's-give-this-guy-a-shot-maybe-he'll-surprise-us. I don't think that's a good bet.

But I will say that I find it impossible to despair. I can't. Look at Iron Man up there. He's not real. I get it. But there's an interesting thing about the Marvel movies. There's always an after credits sequence. It takes forever to see, though, because so many people work on those movies. All of them very well paid. In Dr. Strange all the stars have their own drivers and they fly those drivers to all of the locations. Just the drivers! That's a living wage plus gas or whatever and all the flights just to hustle Benedict Cumberbatch and Tilda Swinton all over the place. Imagine driving Chiwetel Ejiofore all over frickin Nepal. WHAT AN AWESOME JOB. 

What I'm saying is that movie cost 165 million dollars. These guys have a plan through 2019 and no sign of stopping. That's what betting on the future looks like. I don't know about you, but I want there still to be a civilization by the time Captain Marvel comes out. So bad.

Today I was walking around a site that is extremely ecologically degraded. Weeds, garbage, nasty, nasty stuff. As I walked around with a restoration biologist he pointed out all of the things they were going to do to improve it. They were planting trees, killing weeds, designing a stream meander and a fishing pond. When I asked how long it would take, he said for everything to get done, it would be ten years.

That restoration will be meaningful for migratory birds because it would serve as a stopping off point in a large city. Those birds get tired and need to eat and nest and make out with other cute birds. Is there a part of me that thinks, "what if these birds are extinct in ten years and none of this matters?" or, "This entire country will be a post-apocalyptic hellscape in which we will be warring with one another over water while for some reason wearing a lot of black makeup?" Hell yes there is. I think that every day. I am investing in black makeup. BUT, if we don't live like there will be birds and trees and football and Captain Marvel and new video games and new machines that play old video games, there won't be.

So we place our bets. We invest in the stock market. We plant trees. We have kids. And we teach those kids that there will be a future and it will be beautiful, because if we teach them that, they will make it so. I'll put money on it.

Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women and A Little Bit About Hamilton

Very often I cannot help laughing when I think of the surprise you will have when you see the woman I have become. But one thing I have learned here is to know the true value of everything that is human, of the heights to which the human soul can raise itself... Do you have any new picture of Anita? She will soon be able to write to us herself. - Olga Benário Prestes, from Sarah Helm's Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women

Ian Mackenzie, Creative Commons

I've been listening to Hamilton a ton, and am fascinated by the consistent conversation between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton throughout the musical that I probably won't have the opportunity to watch until it is done by local theater. And you guys, we've really got to get to the bottom of all of this racial tension by then or high schools and local community theater groups giving this thing a shot is going to be a powderkeg.

Anyway, the musical is probably an oversimplification of two very complex people and this summary is going to be an oversimplification of that, but basically Burr's strategy for success is to "talk less, smile more, don't let them know what you're against or what you're for." Hamilton, on the other hand, can't keep his mouth shut if he wanted to. By taking a stand, Hamilton quickly rises in fame, but also makes enemies. Through some of his own weaknesses and the scheming of his enemies, he eventually (spoiler alert) gets shot to death in a duel with Burr, his previous friend. We're reminded of Burr's warning during their first meeting that "Fools who run their mouth off wind up dead."

When Hamilton puts himself out there, Burr warns him that every time he talks it gives his enemies ammunition. Now, you guys, I'm not aware of any enemies. I'm not in a spot where I have to post memes about ignoring the haters, because one has to be known to be hated, and there is abundant evidence that my voice rarely travels beyond the sphere of immediate family. But it's something I think about.

I have a strong feeling that if someone were to pore through the archives of Howie's Book Club, they would find contradictions, mistakes, and times when I just blew it. By cherry-picking through the almost 200 posts, you could probably assemble a pretty good list of quotes both out of context and in that would present a fairly unflattering portrait. At the thought of that I have to admit that I wonder why I do this at all. The impact of this blog on the world is microscopic, and yet the potential for negative impact on me personally is not insignificant. I don't know, but it's possible that I've been unfollowed on Facebook by people who I like because of opinions in here. It doesn't seem out of the question that at one point someone has read something from here aloud to their friend or spouse preceded by the words "listen to this idiot."

What if I talked less and smiled more? What if nobody knew what I was against or what I was for? Like in this universe my interactions online consisted mostly of pictures of hikes and wildlife and the occasional cute picture of my kids selling lemonade. Some of you would be very bored with me, while others would at least not think "what's going on with that guy he used to be cool." (In this alternate universe I used to be cool.)

Wouldn't that be fine? It feels like it might be. I know Hamilton is supposed to be the hero of the story, but what if I just talked myself out of ever having to write another blog post.

Don't worry, it's not going to be this time. Here's a twist: I started this post as the intro to one book I read, and then put it aside, and since then have been reading another book. That book is Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women.

There's probably a million jillion takeaways I could write about here, and this is close to 700-pages which is why you should read books IN ADDITION to blogs (not instead of, you guys). This thing is not a substitute, it turns out, for the culmination of years of research from the author and lifetime of living and then reliving the horrors of these poor, brave, resilient, amazing women.

Marlene shows her mother in her last days, lying asleep in bed. 'She has become beautiful again in old age,' says Marlene's inscription. 'She is cared for like a baby and never speaks or smiles. I see the shadow of her imprisonment falling across the end of her life, unfinished business. In another place or time the shadow could have fallen on me or my child. Would I know how to be brave?

We can definitely talk about the women who risked their lives daily by looking out for the weaker, older, or sicker among them. Or the terrifying idea that in every community there is a sub-group of sadistic monsters who quietly go about their lives tormenting people on a small scale like weeds waiting to take over a garden if left unchecked. But if they are ignored, or worse, encouraged in a society where such cruelty and deep disregard for human life is grounds for promotion, they can enact brutality most civil societies thought wasn't possible.

OK, let's talk about that a little, because it goes to my larger point. There are scary things on the internet that I'd prefer not to delve into but that I hear about. Like there are videos on the internet of women in high heels stomping on cats and dogs until they die because that is someone's sexual fetish. This isn't something I like to think about and aside from seeing enough about it from reputable sources to know that it exists, it's not something I've looked into. But wouldn't it be nicer not to even know that it exists? I contend that no, it would not.

It's important to know and be aware that there are enough people to frequent these websites to make them profitable, and enough "models" who will do this, and photographers who will capture it, and people who will find the animals, and clean up the mess afterward, and people who will upload them to websites. We need to know that they are there because in the right environment, they will aid in the destruction of a livable society. Everything I said applies to child pornographers, too. Or the folks who congregate on websites and share tips for seducing young children on internet forums where they like to gather and talk about Minecraft. Or so-called "men's rights" activists who gather in secret to hack into the accounts of women who have the gall to call out sexism in video games in order to publish private information, like their parents' phone numbers, so they can call in SWAT raids and death and rape threats and make video games in which players beat these women to death.

I'm not going to link any of that refuse because I don't want it to get any more clicks, but I'm not making this stuff up.

These people shop with us, and they go to school with us, and they work with us. You might marry one and not know it. Your son or daughter's best friend may expose them to something monstrous when they're on a sleepover. Or just on their phone while they're in class. We don't know what people get up to in their free time, but us not knowing does not make them go away. And if somehow (and this is wholly hypothetical), your nation elects a leader who values people who are fundamentally unable to experience empathy, they will be given power over all of us because suddenly cruelty and sadism is a job quality.

Let's say you have a dirty job that needs doing, and this job is (again hypothetically) to root out members of a certain religion or racial group because they were deemed to be dangerous to the greater populous. Most people you and I know would not enjoy this job, as it entails separating families from their loved ones for no reason other than the border they were born within or the church they go to. Some would do it out of a feeling of duty towards their nation. Or because it's their job. Others would do it because they believe in an organized society of laws and the flaunting of said laws motivates them. But there will be people who do it because they like to do it.

One of the chief guards of the camp was Maria Mandl, who often beat Jews to death in front of the other prisoners. After one occasion, when a woman was kicked to death, Maria Bielicka, a prisoner, remembers the following:

But a strange thing happened after that. I had a friend who had a job cleaning in the guards' hostels. One of the senior guards had a piano in her room. One day my friend went in and heard the most beautiful music. The woman who was playing was lost in a world of her own -- in ecstasy. It was the same guard who had murdered the Jewish woman a few days earlier.

These people have wanted to have power over a group they consider beneath them for a long time. They've fantasized about it. They've posted secretly (or openly) on internet forums about the things they'd like to do to (hypothetically) Muslims and women and Mexicans and gays and Democrats, or Christians and American soldiers and police officers. They've posted "memes" that parade around as "jokes" about how these people should really be dead because they aren't even really people. Not like they themselves are people. These are the kind of people who would happily pose for a picture with a smile alongside the dogs they've trained to attack and maim. Who will send these dogs after an underfed woman who has the gall to slip and fall in the mud while trying to push a cart full of sand through a swamp.

Now I don't doubt that this tiny fraction of our population is taking this out on somebody in their lives. And I really grieve for them and I think we need to be aware of it and tell each other that we won't stand for it. Part of our job is to tell the people we love that if they are being targeted and bullied and abused by them, they can tell us because we will believe them and we will not stand for it. 

That's what we can do on the small scale. But you guys if someone stands up in front of a TV set or a podium and starts egging those people on we need to tell them that it is not OK. Because the thing that happens when we don't is that they start to get bolder. Instead of posting on the internet, they buy guns and go into buildings and shoot people who look different than them. Or they burn down religious buildings. Or they attack people at rallies because they are being told by the man at the podium that he'll make sure they get away with it. Or they shoot or beat unarmed civilians because they know they'll never be found guilty, because virtually no one ever has. This isn't hypothetical it turns out. I fooled you.

If someone tells you that they are going to restore your nation to greatness and the path to greatness lies through members of your own populace that's kind of a red flag. I am not comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler because Hitler murdered 6 million people and Trump has murdered zero. So far there's only been one Hitler (though there has also been a Stalin and a Pol Pot and a Slobodan Milošević and an Abubakar Shekau and so many more. Including one Andrew Jackson, the man who is on our 20 dollar bill whose Indian Removal Act resulted in at least 30,000 native deaths.) 

I am concerned, however, that the same people who think that Hitler was a great man are openly campaigning for Trump. Is Donald Trump going to put people in ovens? It seems unlikely. But if the people who think that was a good idea think he is and he doesn't really race to correct them and nobody tells them to shut up then something very bad is happening to our country.

By Norbert Radtke (Photographer/ self) (Privatarchiv Norbert Radtke) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

These are real and they have had people in them, whether or not people liked to think about it

The Holocaust started in 1933, when Adolf Hitler began enacting legislation to remove Jews from regular society. First there was the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, making illegal a marriage between Jews and Germans and forbidding the employment of German females in Jewish households. Then came Reich Citizen Law, which gave citizenship only to residents of German decent, removing it from Jews, Romani, and Afro-Germans.

Then there were concentration camps. Maybe surprisingly, Ravensbrück generally had very few Jews within its walls. In the early days of Hitler's reign, the camps were for political prisoners who had spoken out against him. The majority of the prisoners were Communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and "asocials," a catch-all that included prostitutes, political agitators, or people who the Gestapo just didn't like for whatever reason they could think of. While Ravensbrück was the only concentration camp just for women, many camps, including the legendary death camp Auschwitz, had women sections of their prisons.

Especially interesting are the Jehovah's Witnesses, whose religion infuriated Hitler, insisting on calling him the Antichrist. They numbered in the thousands in the prison, and contrary to many of the prisoners, all they needed to do was renounce their religion to be free. Of the thousands, only five were known to do so. They further enraged the SS officer in charge by refusing to do any work that they construed as part of the war effort. In every other way they were model citizens, yet this rebellion often resulted in beatings, solitary confinement for months in an underground building known as "the bunker," and execution.

By Unknown (Sometimes mistakenly attributed to Jerzy Tomaszewski who discovered it.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Have you ever seen the face of a prisoner behind bars? Freedom lies on the other side of the window. Heaven lies on the other side of the window. On the other side of the door there is only reality.

I could list all of the atrocities, but we've heard them before. Everything you know about the holocaust is here: gas chambers, ovens, shootings, beatings, torture, isolation, slave labor (Siemens, the massive power corporation, had a factory next to the camp and enjoyed slave labor from prisoners who were sometimes beaten to death on the factory floor for not meeting production quotas), medical experimentation (including, but not limited to: removal of limbs in attempt to graft them onto another person, removal of a collarbone from one patient to be transplanted into another, and cutting limbs and filling the wounds with dirt, glass, and garbage in order to introduce infection), and pure cruelty.  

You kind of know what you're getting into reading a book about a concentration camp. It's rough. It's not what I wanted to talk about, though.

What I really want to talk about is from a few minor passages in this book.

In 1941, when the war had started, Hitler used the fervor over war as a distraction so he could begin his ultimate goal: mass murder. He was searching for a way to kill the most people with the least amount of money and effort. To test out various methods, he started with what he called "useless mouths," or people who needed to be fed but were unable to contribute to the nation's cause. These were the mentally ill and elderly. They weren't sneaky enough, though.

During the spring and summer of 1941 a form of silent protest began across Germany. Families placed identical condolence notices in the newspapers, expressing their disbelief at the 'incomprehensible' news they had received of a loved one's sudden death. Lawyers acting for families of patients still in asylums said families were 'being made fools of' by the 'monstrous programme' and by the 'flimsy camouflage' used to cover things up. Those responsible had 'lost a sense of the difference between right and wrong', wrote another Catholic Priest.

On 3 August 1941 came the most serious protest yet. Count Clemens August Graf von Galen, bishop of Münster, took to the pulpit to condemn the murders: an 'unproductive life' was no reason to kill. By this time articles about the killings and the cover-up had begun to appear in the foreign press, most notably the New York Times.

People were speaking up. They were taking a stand. In the case of these clergymen, at great personal risk, knowing that anyone who spoke out against Hitler quickly disappeared. What's especially important to me is that these were people with a great deal of influence and privilege speaking up for their loved ones who couldn't speak up for themselves. That's laudable, but also understandable. We tend to raise a ruckus when someone we know and love is being oppressed. But then there's this tiny little part that struck my heart for some reason. This is from from Wolfgang, a schoolchild at the time of Ravensbrück:

Wolfgang's father had a laundry in town, where twenty prisoners worked, washing clothes -- military clothes and prisoners' clothes. 'My father sometimes smuggled a piece of bread into the clothes. I didn't understand how it could be done but I didn't ask questions. Nobody did.'

Wolfgang remembers his father sewing pieces of bread into the clothes of prisoners. His father, during the darkest time in his country's history, found a way to fight back, even if it was minuscule in the grand scheme, it meant a lot. And Wolfgang remembered it for the rest of his life. And now so do we. Because of that little act of kindness and many more like it from prisoners within the prison, the occasional kind guard, and people in the surrounding area, we have a historical record of people who did what they could to lessen the horrors.

I've seen the memes, you guys. Both parties liken the opposition's candidate to Hitler. It's like what you do. That's not what I'm trying to do here (aside from reminding everyone, again, that current Nazis openly advocate for one of the candidates). I read a book about the holocaust and I started thinking about it and I made the decision that I'm going to stand up against this guy because he's racist and sexist. That's what I do with this blog. You can unfollow me for the duration, I get it. Hopefully in December we go back to banter about 80s movies. If we disagree, then seeing my constant updates probably cause the same kind of anxiety I get when I see polls saying that this race is now a dead heat and nobody needs more heartburn. This fight isn't going anywhere, though, and I guess neither am I.

A New Darkness, Glass Ceilings, and a Bit About Rikki-Tikki-Tavi

When you're a young lad with zero interest in staying at school for even one second longer than you are required by law (and often attempt as hard as you can to not even be there that long) society acknowledges your general lack of meaningful contribution and offers you a bargain: work for minimum wage doing things nobody else will do, and you will get free movies. At least that's how it worked for me. At 16 I applied at the movie theater in my neighborhood where my cousins had worked before me and, because I'd earned my Eagle Scout award (and because my cousin was a manager), I was hired.

I might have mentioned this before, but 16-year-old Howie was the worst. I'll never be sure if everyone was the worst and we all think that we were terrible but this is clearly not completely true, as many of my peers were well-liked and I was ignored by most and despised by a few. At school, at least. At work, I experienced something of a renaissance. Freed from the shackles of my ignoble high school rep (well-earned, I'm sure), I made quick friends and, in some ways, flourished. I made super good friends, you guys, some whose influence on my life I think about on the reg. And I am so grateful for them. 

The only two school dances I ever attended were with girls I worked with at the theater. Once we were all sitting around between movies and a guy asked me if I was going to Homecoming, I said I didn't know who to ask, and he said, "Take her," gesturing to the girl who was also there. It was very awkward, but somehow I stammered out an OK and so did she and negotiations were made. It was fun and if we're all going to be honest with each other I did have a crush on her and he knew it. Thanks, bud. Sorry we're not Facebook friends anymore because of politics. 

The other one said it would be fun to go to a dance with me and I said there's a dance coming up and she said we should go. I liked her a lot, too. She had a boyfriend but we had fun and I was a mess. It's weird being a teenager. You have crushes on a lot of people all at once and you're like a mongoose who was raised by an old lady who always had a bowl of milk out but she died and suddenly you are unleashed on the world. You know you're supposed to pursue cobras. There's something in your DNA that says get those cobras, but when you see a cobra you also want to hide and so often you do. Or you sort of hang around the cobras, but don't let yourself get too close because they are very, very scary.

ANYWAY. The movie theater was a strange place. You had full-grown adults (like 20-30!) running the place. They were the managers. Then you had kids (16-18), who were the rank-and-file employees. Some of the kids had crushes on the managers and some of the managers had crushes on the kids. In some cases this was within the realm of acceptable social circumstances and I would be remiss to not say that there are at least a couple of quite happy marriages that resulted from this fraternization (I guarantee if you're reading this, it isn't about you). But there were some cases, and in this case one case, where a guy in his 20s regularly and serially harassed 16-17 year old girls.

If she went out to the parking lot and came in saying it was cold, he would look at her chest and say, "I can't tell." He would tell a girl (legally a child) that her shirt was too tight. Or that girls can't wear the horrible dorky plastic suspenders that we were supposed to wear because of their breasts. He would turn and let me know whose shirt was see-through enough to make out her bra. Later, as an adult, I would remember this guy every time I had a sexual harassment training and think that every single day I worked with him I observed a fireable offense. 

Later, at other theaters, I would watch these assistant manager predators work their dark arts on generation after generation of 16-year-old girls just starting their first job. When I eventually reached that ripe old age of 25, it made a kind of gross sense to me. This kind of guy lacked the confidence to hang with the self-aware, smart girls his own age, felt bitterness about it, and took it out on the cute young girls who didn't know enough about the world to destroy him for it. The combination of power from being older and the authority over them in a professional sense creates a brew as toxic as when elementary school kids mix everything from their school lunch into one square of tray and dare each other to eat it.

Even when the girls I worked with and respected uncomfortably (or seemingly comfortably) laughed this stuff off, I knew it was awful, but I can't guarantee that it didn't wear off on me. Let me be clear, I don't remember a single case where I would have had the guts, let alone the desire to try any of that crap, even though at least I was the same age as these girls and we were friends, but I also know that I said a lot of really dumb stuff at the time in an effort to be funny and I've been told later that some of it definitively was not. I don't know what the impact this situation had on the girls I worked with (if you happen to read this, shoot me a message though), but it stuck with me.

Another thing that stuck with me was the concessions-usher situation. Apparently pretty girls sold more concessions than boys did, so girls always sold the drinks and popcorn, and boys always tore tickets and swept out the theaters. Concessions was easily the worst job. It was often intense and physically exhausting. You'd finish your shift coated in fake butter and stinking like stale soda. You spent the last hour cleaning everything, soaking the nozzles on the soda machine, mopping the floor, taking apart the popcorn maker, and dozens of other tiny and gross tasks. During this time the ushers who were closing would sort of sweep and make sure that all the hobos from the liquor store across the street had woken up and cleared out. We also ended up cleaning vomit and other mystery liquids but we all know that's boy work.

The joke was that we ushers were in charge of "holding up the railing" while the movies were playing, while the girls constantly bustled and/or hustled. Being ambitious teens, we all aspired to the next level up. If you were a girl, that meant you worked the box office. It was a little cushier and a lot less buttery. If you were a boy, you aspired to usher-b. You guys, Usher-b was the pinnacle of the teen job. You thread the film through the projector, you start the movies, then you sit at your desk and read while they play. If you want, you can go help sweep the theaters, or back up in the concessions if your friends were working, but if you didn't, you didn't. For a while there I would go to the book store, buy a book, read that entire book during my shift that day, and go home.

Every once in a while a girl would look at us boys in our bow-ties and immodest suspenders while oil dripped down their apron and teens relentlessly asked for their phone numbers and say, "I want to be an usher," and everyone would laugh. Girls just weren't ushers. It was not how it was done.

Until one was. At the age of 16 I got to watch a very small and very minor glass ceiling get shattered. One day one of my friends, let's call her Popcorn Penny, showed up to work, put on a bowtie (I don't think suspenders), and stood behind the podium and tore tickets. Like a damn boss.

Then boys started getting hired straight to concessions. Were these boys especially cute? I don't remember. I do know that I wasn't one of them. I was an usher-b at this point and basically didn't even have to learn anyone's name anymore, I was such a badass. But you guys, it wasn't that big of a deal. Girls can tear tickets, boys can ask do you want butter (flavored topping) with that, and we could all do whatever because that's the way the world works. Or the way it should work.

Basically what I'm saying is that if we get a woman president, I'm going to give Penny the credit.

Well. Have you heard of Joseph Delaney's Spook's Apprentice books? There were 13 of them. In that series Tom Ward, the seventh son of a seventh son, works as the Spook for the county. Each county spook takes care of the ghosts and witches and boggarts and whatnot. They're like a plumber but for scary stuff. (I'm acknowledging that plumbers deal with a lot of scary stuff.) Tom takes on the apprenticeship and for 13 books encounters one horrible nasty thing after another while working under the legendary spook Old Gregory. That's a lot of books, you guys, but they are quick and fun and you read them one in a day (especially in the projection booth) and they're genuinely pretty spooky in the not-real way that I like so much.

You should probably read them first. But after that, read A New Darkness, which is what this blog is about even though we all know by now that the blog is about something that's bugging me and I shoehorn a book in even though the population of people who know what shoehorns are is dying out like Fox News supporters (because they are the same people).

In A New Darkness Tom Ward is on his own as the new County Spook. (I won't tell you why because that would be a spoiler but you don't know that it's because of a bad reason and you should just go ahead and assume it's because Old Gregory is happily retired on a porch swing watching the world go by.) Tom is just 17, which is young for a spook, but he's been through some pretty crazy stuff 13 books in. Early in the book, a young girl with remarkable powers approaches him about being a spook, which is crazy bonkers.

She's tried to apprentice with two other spooks, one was, in her words, "a pig." The other sicced his dogs on her. Guess what, you guys, girls just aren't spooks. Why not? Because you have to be the seventh SON of a seventh SON. Jenny is just a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter and that's not the same thing because (and this is not said in the book but let's face it) of penises. Tom Ward is young, though. At first he's resistant, but when he sees what Jenny is capable of he starts to really question it.

Why can't a girl be a spook? Well, because one never has been before and because men make the decisions. After some deliberation, this doesn't cut it. In Tom's adventures he's encountered countless powerful women. One is a witch assassin, another is his mom, another is his best friend Alice. They all carved out difficult places in patriarchal worlds. He's also seen women being marginalized, accused of witchcraft just for being assertive, and enslaved. So he gives Jenny a shot.

It's a fun book, but you better read the ones before them first. This one, even though it's the beginning of a new series, is pretty self-referential. Also don't read it if you love the way things are right now and don't have a problem sending your teenage daughters to have grown men talk about their nipples and your teenage sons to work with adult role models who will attempt to undo every lesson you've taught them about respecting women. Or if you think that you're worried about a female president because they are so hormonal that they might start a war, even though every war in American history was started by a white man. Actually, you should read it especially then.

"It is unwise to risk the good we already have for the evil which may occur" 

Did nobody see through the shameless demagogy

Did nobody see where we were heading? Did nobody see through the shameless demagogy of the articles of Goebbels? I could see it even through the thick walls of the prison; yet more and more people outside were toeing the line. - Sarah Helm, Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women

Ghosts, Miracles, and Raymie Nightengale

So in the tradition of getting into things well past their point of being part of the general conversation and then wanting to talk about them even though roughly one million thinkpieces already exist on the subject that are both thinkier and piecier than mine, I'll touch briefly on a thing I've finally caught up on and am therefore an expert: "Stranger Things".

The only thing I want to say about it is that while it's creepy and tense, it doesn't really scare me. I'll watch X-Files style of scary stuff all day long. Give me vampires and werewolves and space vampires and space werewolves and sundry other combinations of mythical supernatural beings both on this here planet earth and the space versions thereof. I will find these trifles adorable and exciting and fun, but not scary. Oh no. Never that.

Do not give me real life serial killers or serial killers who could exist in real life. I will not watch your slasher movies or your rednecks in the hills movies nor will I indulge in your cannibal redneck slashers in the hills movies. I have never watched anything that could be classified as "torture porn." And unless they include one Kevin McCallister, I will avoid your home invasion movies every day of the week. The one exception to this rule is, of course, if they are in space. In which case maybe.

I don't believe in ghosts, it turns out. We have countless ghost stories, some with multiple witnesses, some with eyewitness accounts from reasonably trustworthy people, some with horrifying illustrations by Steven Gammel that we all bought during book fairs.

But somehow in a world where everyone has a high quality camera and recording device in their pocket that captures the most absurd of coincidences and bizarre behavior we just haven't managed to catch one of those little guys on a camera. We have citizens training their cameras on every police officer and/or cat in this nation just to see if they do something horrible and/or adorable (honestly it could be either in both cases) but no ghosts. This doesn't include the countless TV shows where people go into the most haunted places in the world and have to fake evidence in order to have anything remotely interesting happen.

The people who are maddest at those reality shows, it turns out, are the truest believers. I get that. They don't want TV charlatans to give ghost hunting a bad name. Ghost hunters are generally so well-respected in the general populace that this is a problem, is my guess. Ghost hunters should be known for one thing only, their sword collections.

I certainly don't think I have the last word on ghost existence. I have a couple of weird stories from when I was a kid and we were driving around cemeteries trying to scare girls because we didn't think we were very interesting by ourselves so we let the tormented souls of the dead do the talking so that maybe we seemed worth hanging out with by default. I also think we see what we want to see and if what we want to see is a girl who wants to be hanging out with us when she is clearly uninterested you'd be surprised at how much self-delusion one can whip up. Also with the ghosts. Why just this year I was working with someone late at night looking for owls and she told a heck of a ghost story, even after both of us affirmed how little we believe in the things.

But while I don't believe that a place can be filled with ghosts, I do believe that a place can be haunted. This spring I stood on a Civil War battlefield and got the danged willies. I ticked off one thing on my bucket list (I can tell you what's on the bottom of my bucket list and that's Home Depot buckets. Those things stick together like bros do at Lilith Fair) this spring when I went to Harper's Ferry. There's not much left of the place, but what is there feels haunted as f.

"Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!" - John Brown

Now do I get the dang shivers because I know what happened there, or is there something else going on? Like if the signs weren't there, would I know anyway about so many people dying and bleeding into that soil? Is my amazing brain (amazing in the sense that every human brain and not in the sense that my goofy one is particularly great) processing reams of information and delivering a general sense of creepiness and I'm not sure where it comes from, or is there something else going on?

Before germ theory, people used to think that illness was caused by miasma, or a cloud of bad air that surrounded dead and rotting things. There's a great book called The Ghost Map about the London cholera outbreak that led to a serious exploration of germ theory, if you want to explore it further. But you get the point. We can call the heebie-jeebies haunting for now, but I suspect there's some good old-fashioned brain science going on there (along with a healthy dose of carbon monoxide poisoning cases) that explains things a little better.

This is all a round-about way to talk about something that may be more sensitive to a lot of folks, and that's miracles. A lot of the stuff I talked about with ghosts fits pretty well with miracles. We hear about some pretty amazing ones from back in the olden days, but nowadays somehow they never manage to get caught on camera.

I guess I mean a certain kind of miracle. I like the idea of miracles, but I also think it's a bummer every time a surgeon who has spent decades learning his or her craft, practicing incessantly, always striving to be better, and performing at a level beyond the majority of humans who have ever been alive on this earth saves someone's life and it's proclaimed to be a miracle. If your car has a broken hose, and you take out that broken hose and put in a new hose and it works, that's not a miracle, it's mechanics. A lot of surgeons video the whole process and never, to my knowledge, has someone pointed to the camera and said, "oh look there's the angel's hand sewing that guy up. NICE."

Why is it when someone gets in a car accident they immediately have to tell you that, "the doctors said if he had hit my car an inch to the left I would be dead?" Guys, I'm no doctor but doctors are no physicists. Or when someone says that the seat belt saved their life but they didn't put on their seat belt. You ever have those days where you wash your hair twice because you didn't remember doing it the first time? If something is routine we don't remember doing it, that's the whole point of a routine.

Anyway, I'm not trying to talk anyone out of anything, I'm just sort of thinking out loud (yes I talk while I type, don't you? Also when I delete something I've written I have to say the words backwards as I delete them or I will die. This is why people say writers are brave.) and what I'm thinking is that this kind of thinking can be dangerous. Because why does that dude get a miracle? I know for a fact that they torrent all of their movies.

It's sort of the same way I feel about ghosts. If you ever read a ghost book you'll find that all the ghosts are dukes and princesses and stuff. Famous rich people. How come it's always mansions that are haunted and not trailer parks? The poor get the shaft during life, and don't even get to wander the earth and see how cool smart phones get after they die? Bummer, poor people!

Now whatever your belief system, I think there's a pretty interesting story in the surgeon who is exhausted but finds herself with a burst of energy and clarity during a surgery. Something unexplained and fortuitous. Or maybe she feels like her hands are working on their own. Or when you're driving and suddenly you feel like you should really, really buckle up. Is that something otherworldly talking to you or is it your brain taking in information clear up the highway that your conscious thoughts hadn't caught up with yet? I don't know.

I've had experiences of my own that I have a hard time explaining away, especially with volunteering. I've taken over someone else's shift on the rape crisis team and then gone on a call that I really felt I should have been on. Does that mean I did great and they would have done crappy? No (yes (no)). But I felt like I had some bit of knowledge or the right thing to say. I don't know if that's the case, but I think it. Does that make it a miracle or am I just a narcissist? Maybe the miracle is my simple, glorified existence and its gift to both humanity and wildlife.

There's a reasonable amount of data supporting going with your gut and there's a reasonable amount of data saying that our guts are crappy. Some data (scary zombie movies) seem to point to guts being gross to look at but delicious to the undead. I'm not sure what to do with all of this data. I see this all of the time with fantasy football. My strategy is to go with the preponderance of data, but sometimes at the end I just pick a guy because I like the cut of his jib. Results vary.

The Raiders beating the Saints week one of the 2016 season sure seemed like a miracle. But I have a hard time thinking that God or the Universe or whatever you believe is moving all of the levers would make a guy whose job it is to make field goals miss so that Howie who is sitting in church trying to surreptitiously keep track of the game on his phone while pretending to listen can get a little dopamine rush.

What I'm saying is that I don't think God roots against people just because the other team prayed harder for it. I just don't.

If the wishes came true, they came true in terrible ways. Wishes were dangerous things. That was the idea you got from fairy tales.

Here's what I do think. I think that this is a sometimes miserable world to live in even though every day we are surrounded by beauty and astonishing human achievements. We walk under skyscrapers like there's nothing amazing about that and we look at supercomputers in our hands that can answer every question but no matter how much we stare we don't find happiness in them. We see these little birds on the street that are full of tiny organs and synapses and blood and stuff and we just think "gross, those things eat garbage." A lot of us are just barely scraping by and feel like we are perpetually one broken transmission away from homelessness.

What we need are some little miracles. A neighbor dropping off a loaf of fresh bread when you're standing around and wondering what you're going to eat for dinner, not because you're poor (though sometimes it's that) but because you're both just so exhausted. Maybe somebody remembered that they owed you money that you forgot about and the food truck you like is right outside your office and you could really go for some Korean bbq and hey, why not. This is all stuff that if you recorded it on your phone camera and uploaded it on youtube nobody would care but in that moment you know that it saved your dang life.

That thought is scary, though, because it means it's up to us. We can't count on an angel saving children who are sex slaves. We need to support people who are actively striving to stop it. We can't expect one of the Three Nephites (non-Mormon readers should really look this up) to stop a rape. So we talk about it a lot and refuse to support a political party or university that doesn't take it seriously and sometimes we sit with the victims and give them a blanket and a comfy change of clothes. If we can't expect dramatic miracles to rescue those who are scared and hurting and lost, that's a lot of responsibility. And that's on us? Like I said. Scary.

In Raymie Nightengale, by Kate DiCamillo, we meet 13-year-old Raymie, whose dad just ran away with a dental hygienist. Her mom isn't much help because her mom is devastated. So Raymie is taking baton-twirling classes because if she wins the Little Miss Central Florida Tire competition he'll see her in the paper and realize that he made a mistake and needs to come back home to be with his family. There she meets Louisiana, who lives with her grandmother in constant fear of being taken away to live in the County Home, and Beverly, who is a master lockpick and victim of abuse. It's 1975.

DiCamillo isn't afraid to delve into difficult family situations, and I imagine that for kids who live through this kind of thing, seeing their lives portrayed on a page is deeply compelling. For those of us who had an easier childhood, it helps us understand children who are suffering and show it in ways that make them seem impossible. She does it with a matter-of-fact sweetness that is heartbreaking sometimes. The kids in her stories don't know how hard it is. They are just surviving. They aren't miserable little objects to pity, but real kids who still have fun even though they're confused and scared a lot of the time.

She had on a spangled top that sparkled like fish scales. Her hair was very yellow. She looked like a mermaid in a bad mood.

But they also have seen too much of the world for their little hearts.

The world went on. People left and people died and people went to memorial services and put orange blocks of cheese into their purses. People confessed to you that they were hungry all the time. And then you got up in the morning and pretended that none of it had happened.

If I could summarize serious young adult fiction very briefly, given my past two reads, it is this: these are books that confront many of the uncomfortable and scary aspects of reality but with happier endings than their adult counterparts.

"Happy ending" is a bit too simple, I guess. I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that the endings of Counting by 7s or Raymie Nightengale are "happy" in the traditional sense, but I felt good after reading them. In Raymie Nightengale, Raymie's dad (spoiler) does not come back. Beverly's mom doesn't magically stop hitting her. And Louisiana is in better shape, but has a ways to go before her problems are behind her. But there is a real miracle at the end of this book. It's such a minor thing given the scale of the problems that these little girls face, but it's also everything.

It reminds me of Francie Nolan's flowers in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Compared to her problems, they are nothing, but at the moment, they are a miracle. That's my whole point, I guess. I don't think there are ghosts, but I think that we can be haunted. I don't know about red seas parting, but I do know that if we listen and pay attention (again, is it God telling us to look out for each other or something in our DNA? Don't know.) we can save the day. Or at least soften it.

Here's a thing about being an adult a human. You start to realize that everything doesn't turn out the way you want it to in the end, and you also figure out how to survive with that. Some of us learn this earlier than others, unfortunately. You see little miracles and think that maybe those little miracles are enough, even if they don't solve your problems, they make them livable.

The Only Post on the Internet about Both Love Warrior and FantasyFootball

It's that time of year when I write about fantasy football again. I know, I know. If you're not into it, you are really not into it. Actually I'm not going to write about fantasy football, but instead I'm going to talk about addiction (I am addicted to fantasy football.) I'm also going to talk about Love Warrior, by Glennon Doyle Melton, and I can guarantee with some authority that this will be the only review you see that talks about both Love Warrior and fantasy football. Hang in there, you guys.

Last night I had my last draft of the four leagues I'm in. It went kind of late and then I did the customary thing of obsessing over my team for like an hour and then it was really late. The long weekend (I'm writing this before Labor Day but you're reading it later, so this is me in the past talking to you in the future which is literally every single blog regardless of when it actually goes up. Writing and reading is time travel. That's kind of weird, right? Past me was boring but now me has figured that out and the next post will be better) is over and I have to get up early to work the next day so naturally my brain is churning about all of the mistakes I made while I drafted.

The worst of the mistakes is that I took a player (Jamaal Charles, if you care) who is going into the season injured still, or not fully recovered, or something. I took him really early because I've had him on at least one of my teams every year since I started and the guy is fun to watch play football. But I made a major rookie blunder. I didn't take his backup. This is called "hand-cuffing" and you guys, if you listen to any of the fantasy football podcasts (there are so many), you'll know that this is a very important strategy. Essentially what it means is that if you have a star running back, you need to get his backup because if he gets hurt the backup will move into that role and you'll get some points out of it instead of just being stuck with Limpy McDoesn'tplay

So I'm tossing and turning in bed, cursing my idiocy, when a thought occurs to me. Fantasy football doesn't matter and we're all going to die someday. Like, who gives a crap? I don't play for money. There's no stakes. But it's so very important to me and I can't quite explain why.

UPDATE: Killing it.

And that, friends and family and strangers (who have lasted this long, and for that I salute you. Leave a comment! (unless it's mean)) is a pretty good summation of addiction.

An addiction is something that is extremely important to you but other people don't understand, unless they are also addicted. These sound a lot like hobbies, but where hobbies are pleasant dalliances with some ephemera that makes you interesting, an addiction is a near-compulsory escape from your every day life. You guys these are not clinical terms. I'm not a scientist with this kind of stuff, I'm just talking. Let's just talk about stuff.

I want to use fantasy football because it's not as scary as a lot of addictions. Certainly it can infringe on family relationships, ruin friendships, impact productivity at work, waste time, waste money (a lot if you get into the gambling angle), and make you furious when you watch someone else run in a touchdown who you have never heard of while your guy is standing on the sidelines getting a little drink from his sippy cup because he needs a rest. YOU REST WHEN YOU'RE DONE, PAL. You rest when you're dead. My only recourse is now to tweet something hateful to you while you're playing with your kid about how I wish you were dead today so that you can get your precious rest.

OK, fantasy football is kind of scary. But you can play fantasy football a couple years in a row and be pretty fine with it. Bulimia isn't like that. Serial infidelity, not like that. Porn, drugs, alcohol. That's some heavy duty dangerous stuff. So let's stick with FF and we can swap it out for whatever it is you struggle with. Glennon is a great truth-teller, and in Love Warrior she tells the damn truth, and it's hard, unvarnished stuff. It's all of the stuff I mentioned in this paragraph except for fantasy football. Me, I'm not there. So I'll talk about the one I admit to, and that's not handcuffing my players and feeling really bad about it later.

I was in a league once where I had the best record in the league, and right before we went on to playoffs, the commissioner (that's a fancy word for "person who runs a little website that 8-12 people log on to in order to say mean things to each other") decided that he wanted to be in the playoffs even though his record was bad, so he made it so everyone was in the playoffs. Reminder: there were no stakes, and, repeat it with me, fantasy football doesn't matter and we are all going to die someday. Anyway, I threw a minor hissy fit in the comments. Nothing changed. Everyone was in the playoffs, and I won the whole thing because of course I did. Next year I log in to see when the draft is and I find it has already happened and I'm no longer in the league.

I was freakin' destroyed. Didn't they understand what this meant to me? What I would do without it? Here's the thing: there are lots of people dealing without it. Some people very happily don't care about imaginary points scored arbitrarily by big men in helmets who don't know or care about them. But this had become one of my ways to escape the stresses of being a very poor college student who was gone all of the time on work trips and missing things like my daughter's first steps because I was in the desert with people I only kind of liked catching rodents and measuring the height of sagebrush plants. Also, I felt like I belonged somewhere. I don't care if you think it's stupid, I need this.

Telling someone they don't need whatever it is they are addicted to doesn't help. And the way we talk about addiction is broken. So here's where I talk about Love Warrior. Glennon Doyle Melton grew up in a happy family. Some of her earliest memories are as pleasant as can be. And yet at the age of ten she started to binge and purge. By the age of 16 she was experimenting with sex, cocaine, and alcohol. It's funny that we call it experimenting, by the way, because in real experiments we try to at least have a modicum of safety and we often don't let 16 year olds work with acids and electricity and stuff without some adult supervision, but anyway.

This is clearly the behavior of someone trying to escape, but from what?

Glennon presents a theory she had as a teen when she was in treatment for her bulimia, talking with a friend who attempted suicide. She tells about canaries in coal mines, then says:

The canary's body was built to be sensitive to toxins, so the canary became their lifeguard. When the toxin levels rose too high, the canary stopped singing, and this silence was the miners' signal to flee the mine. If the miners didn't leave fast enough, the canary would die and, not much later, so would the miners... "Could it be," I ask, "that we aren't making any of this up--we're just sensing the very real danger in the air?..  

I think the world is more than a little poisonous and that we were built to notice that. I tell her that in lots of places, canaries are appreciated. They're the shamans and the poets and the sages, but not here. I say, "We are the ones on the bow of the Titanic pointing and yelling 'iceberg!' but everybody else wants to keep dancing. They don't want to stop. They don't want to know how broken the world is, so they just decide we're broken. When we stop singing, instead of searching the air, they put us away. This place is where they keep the canaries."

What if mental illness and addiction and compulsive behavior isn't a weakness, but instead a reaction to the world around us? First it affects the most sensitive of us, but eventually it gets everybody. Wouldn't we treat them differently?

In her first book, Carry On, Warrior, she talks about how she overcomes these addictions. It's basically miraculous, and amazing and if you click on that link you can see more about what I think about it. But she left out a big part of her story because she wasn't able to tell it yet.

I think I love my people more than normal people love their people. My love is so overwhelming and terrifying and uncomfortable and complicated that I need to hide from it. Life and love simply ask too much of me. Everything hurts. I don't know how people can just let it all hurt so much. I am just not up for all this hurting. I have to do whatever it takes not to feel the hurt. But what I have to do to avoid the hurt for myself hurts everyone else. My survival means I have to keep harming my people. But it is not because I don't love them, it is because I love them too much. All I can say is "I do love you," but it sounds weak, like a like, and their faces don't soften when they hear it.

Love Warrior is that part, and guys, it's rough and raw and brutal. It talks about how the people who we are closest to and depend on the most can damage us the worst. It talks about the way men can hurt women, and how we live in a society that encourages men to do the things that are just destroying the women in their lives. The correlation between a society that shows only one standard of beauty so that every girl by the time she reaches the age of 12, and usually way before that, has already seen very clearly that she is not perfect, and never will be. But she better be trying every day or else some guy will call her fat or some girl will comment on how her clothes are old.

In college, Glennon joins a sorority where bulimia is so prevalent that an announcement is made to make sure to clean up vomit off of the toilets because nobody wants to see that. There's nothing wrong with it, is the understanding, just clean up after yourself. The fraternities hang their "no fat chicks" out the windows and "check the list" to see if you can come in to a party (the list is blank, you guys.) They ply you with alcohol and pretend to love you when you don't seem to care about yourself or your own needs. That makes you a "cool girl." And you love them for it because you've been trained your whole life that to be loved by men is the only way to be fulfilled.

Men are victims of this structure as well. It turns out that treating women as objects to be admired physically isn't great for our relationships. It also turns out that many of the qualities we associate with masculinity are horrible garbage. Maybe some of you guys were turned off when I started this post talking about football. I get it. I have some real misgivings as well. There were 44 players that I refused to draft because they've been accused of or convicted for sexual assault and/or domestic abuse, like I'm some kind of freaking hero.

We put men in situations where they are idolized for aggression, for physical prowess, and for sheer viciousness sometimes. Add that to a system where administrators as low as junior high level are covering for or excusing their misdeeds so that they can keep playing for the team. Sprinkle in police officers (who also do some part-time security work for the university booster club) who tell rape victims not to prosecute because your town was "a big football town," and you'd be "run over the coals." And who wait two weeks to even question and an entire year before even obtaining a DNA sample from the accused. You get a pretty weird combination of being rewarded for being strong, idolized for being mean, and shielded from accountability for your actions.

It's not good for anybody, this stuff. And I know that so many football players are very good citizens and use their powers for good. They raise money, they visit sick kids, they eat lunch with the kid with autism who usually sits by himself. But they also have a higher than average arrest rate for violent crimes. So I get into these mental gymnastics where I don't want to cheer for Ben Roethlisberger, because he's been accused (twice!) of sexual assault, but I would like him to throw to Antonio Brown because of fantasy. Doing something habitually even though it conflicts with my basic morals (but with elaborate justifications)? Check.

The way to fix the sick parts of society, then, is to identify and talk about them.

You are not supposed to be happy all the time. Life hurts and it's hard. Not because you're doing it wrong, but because it hurts for everybody. Don't avoid the pain. You need it. It's meant for you. Be still with it, let it come, let it go, let it leave you with the fuel you'll burn to get your work done on this earth.

This is a tough thing to try to get, and I've been thinking about it since. Is our society's obsession with relief from pain a symptom of something deeper? I just read an article about a guy who was so addicted to the video game EverQuest that it cost him his job, his apartment, and almost his marriage. EverQuest wasn't the problem, he admits. It was an artificial solution to a real problem.

It would be easy for me to pin my problems on EverQuest, and society in general would accept it without question. I could say I fell prey to an addictive video game that nearly ruined my life, but I would know that wasn't the case. 

I hid. I ran from my problems, hiding away in a virtual fantasy world instead of confronting the issues that might have been easily resolved if I had addressed them directly. As far as I am concerned, the only thing Sony Online Entertainment is guilty of is creating a damn good hiding place.

This is rough stuff, you guys, but we're all dealing with rough stuff. All of us, regardless of how much money we have or how many loved ones we're surrounded by. For all of us it feels like sometimes we're just barely holding it together and nobody knows but us. We've got to stop pretending, and putting the people who are dealing with it the hardest in homes or prisons or hospitals so that we can forget about them. Medicate them, yes. Get them help, of course. But let's stop pretending that being sad is the anomaly, and accept that it's not only the price of the life we're living, but part of the reason, too.

Grief is love's souvenir. It's our proof that we once loved. Grief is the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world: Look! Love was once mine. I love well. Here is my proof that I paid the price.