Why do I write here? It's been months since I've journal'd. Who reads this? Well, no one. Not even me. But this is the space I talk to when I haven't anyone to talk to, or feel like the things I need to talk about are things I can't talk to anyone about. Or that they're tired of hearing.
I'm exhausted. I'm so tired. I'm nearly through my first year of grad school and this semester has been really hard. Long, frustrating, emotionally draining. I've written a long art piece. A 12-page paper. Really pushed myself to get all this done. This weekend I mostly wrapped everything. I felt pretty accomplished.
Then I walked into work this morning and all the dread and misery came flooding back. It was awful. I really felt like I'm leading a double life--one where I do this day job, and one where I'm my music self. And this day job me is the one that's the mask, the pretend, the fake. I'm into a job that isn't so terrible, with people I like, but it's still so not me, so far removed from who I really am and want, need, to be that I just get totally depressed from it. And there's a kicker in there too with school having been so hard this semester, it's almost like well fuck I'm miserable at work and miserable at school too! Thank god I'm getting terrible sleep because I don't know how I could stand not being miserable 24 hours a day!
I sarcasm, but there's a kernel of truth in there.
I just hope I start feeling better soon. Maybe this morning was just too rough a shift for me. After being off for a few days and going bonkers with the final push to take care of my schoolwork, going in to work this morning was just a huge shock. And it's not like I'm happy with the day job (or any other day job I've ever done) anyway, that's why I'm doing the school thing. And maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to move on with this Masters degree into a doctoral program where all I'll be doing is music and I won't have to contend with the day job, just the stress of that. Which won't be easier, if anything it'll be harder. But at least I'll be stressing for something I want to do, instead of something I have to do.
((As a little aside, it feels very strange to write that I 'want' to do music, considering the art music I've been writing for school. But whatever, that's a bitchfest for another day.))
Monday, May 12, 2014
Thursday, January 9, 2014
January update
Looks like I’m not out of the woods yet when it comes to journaling. Sometimes I wonder. It’s like it comes and goes. I really feel the need, then I totally don’t for a while. Ah well, I’m writing now so how about that. Once again, it stems from the need to blow off steam about work.
My job isn’t stressful, and there isn’t a lot of work to do. I’m also not doing a lot of work. Maybe I could seek work out, but I really just don’t want to. What for? So I can get more work heaped on me? Or worse, give away the fact that I’m not really doing anything? I just had a chat with myself. The ol’ voice of “you’re just lazy; you really don’t want to work” and today I was just “actually, I do want to work, I just don’t want to do THIS work”. Cause this work feels like silly busy work bullshit to me. Then I flashed on being in the GATE program when I was a kid and the teachers who thought that being gifted (re: smart, talented, etc.) meant giving more homework. Ugh.
Things are going well with Red. Very well. I suppose I could do a big long write up about it, but I’d rather not. It feels… what she & I have is for us. And even here in this anonymous space, I don’t really feel like writing the details. That’s between me and her, ya know? But things are really awesome. I’m hopeful that this is going to last a really long time.
I submitted a revised version of my research paper to the CSUS student journal. Looks like it’s just an online journal, they don’t actually print, but that’s alright. If I’m accepted, it will still be something to put on the resume where I had nothing there before. It would be a very minor publication, but a publication all the same.
Ugh. It’s not even noon on Thursday yet. I want so badly to be out of here. All things in their time.
My job isn’t stressful, and there isn’t a lot of work to do. I’m also not doing a lot of work. Maybe I could seek work out, but I really just don’t want to. What for? So I can get more work heaped on me? Or worse, give away the fact that I’m not really doing anything? I just had a chat with myself. The ol’ voice of “you’re just lazy; you really don’t want to work” and today I was just “actually, I do want to work, I just don’t want to do THIS work”. Cause this work feels like silly busy work bullshit to me. Then I flashed on being in the GATE program when I was a kid and the teachers who thought that being gifted (re: smart, talented, etc.) meant giving more homework. Ugh.
Things are going well with Red. Very well. I suppose I could do a big long write up about it, but I’d rather not. It feels… what she & I have is for us. And even here in this anonymous space, I don’t really feel like writing the details. That’s between me and her, ya know? But things are really awesome. I’m hopeful that this is going to last a really long time.
I submitted a revised version of my research paper to the CSUS student journal. Looks like it’s just an online journal, they don’t actually print, but that’s alright. If I’m accepted, it will still be something to put on the resume where I had nothing there before. It would be a very minor publication, but a publication all the same.
Ugh. It’s not even noon on Thursday yet. I want so badly to be out of here. All things in their time.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
“Moyers Quote”
I’ve gone a little silent lately. Today, I read this Bill Moyer’s piece on Salon.com and was so glad for it. There’s one particular quote he uses from a retired Supreme Court justice that really encapsulates my own feelings about society, social justice, things of that nature:
“We do not yet have justice, equal and practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for alienated youth, for the urban masses… Ugly inequities continue to mar the face of the nation. We are surely nearer the beginning than the end of the struggle.” --Supreme Court Justice William Brennan.
Here follows the full Moyers piece…
Thursday, Dec 12, 2013 06:13 AM PST
Bill Moyers: “We are this close to losing our democracy”
The legendary journalist warns about the devastating impact of dark money and voter suppression
Bill Moyers, TomDispatch.com
I met Supreme Court Justice William Brennan in 1987 when I was creating a series for public television called In Search of the Constitution, celebrating the bicentennial of our founding document. By then, he had served on the court longer than any of his colleagues and had written close to 500 majority opinions, many of them addressing fundamental questions of equality, voting rights, school segregation, and — in New York Times v. Sullivan in particular — the defense of a free press.
Those decisions brought a storm of protest from across the country. He claimed that he never took personally the resentment and anger directed at him. He did, however, subsequently reveal that his own mother told him she had always liked his opinions when he was on the New Jersey court, but wondered now that he was on the Supreme Court, “Why can’t you do it the same way?” His answer: “We have to discharge our responsibility to enforce the rights in favor of minorities, whatever the majority reaction may be.”
Although a liberal, he worried about the looming size of government. When he mentioned that modern science might be creating “a Frankenstein,” I asked, “How so?” He looked around his chambers and replied, “The very conversation we’re now having can be overheard. Science has done things that, as I understand it, makes it possible through these drapes and those windows to get something in here that takes down what we’re talking about.”
That was long before the era of cyberspace and the maximum surveillance state that grows topsy-turvy with every administration. How I wish he were here now — and still on the Court!
My interview with him was one of 12 episodes in that series on the Constitution. Another concerned a case he had heard back in 1967. It involved a teacher named Harry Keyishian who had been fired because he would not sign a New York State loyalty oath. Justice Brennan ruled that the loyalty oath and other anti-subversive state statutes of that era violated First Amendment protections of academic freedom.
I tracked Keyishian down and interviewed him. Justice Brennan watched that program and was fascinated to see the actual person behind the name on his decision. The journalist Nat Hentoff, who followed Brennan’s work closely, wrote, “He may have seen hardly any of the litigants before him, but he searched for a sense of them in the cases that reached him.” Watching the interview with Keyishian, he said, “It was the first time I had seen him. Until then, I had no idea that he and the other teachers would have lost everything if the case had gone the other way.”
Toward the end of his tenure, when he was writing an increasing number of dissents on the Rehnquist Court, Brennan was asked if he was getting discouraged. He smiled and said, “Look, pal, we’ve always known — the Framers knew — that liberty is a fragile thing. You can’t give up.” And he didn’t.
The Donor Class and Streams of Dark Money
The historian Plutarch warned us long ago of what happens when there is no brake on the power of great wealth to subvert the electorate. “The abuse of buying and selling votes,” he wrote of Rome, “crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors.”
We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have the Roberts Court that consistently privileges the donor class.
We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have a Senate in which, as a study by the political scientist Larry Bartels reveals, “Senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes.”
We don’t have emperors yet, but we have a House of Representatives controlled by the far right that is now nourished by streams of “dark money” unleashed thanks to the gift bestowed on the rich by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case.
We don’t have emperors yet, but one of our two major parties is now dominated by radicals engaged in a crusade of voter suppression aimed at the elderly, the young, minorities, and the poor; while the other party, once the champion of everyday working people, has been so enfeebled by its own collaboration with the donor class that it offers only token resistance to the forces that have demoralized everyday Americans.
Writing in the Guardian recently, the social critic George Monbiot commented, “So I don’t blame people for giving up on politics… When a state-corporate nexus of power has bypassed democracy and made a mockery of the voting process, when an unreformed political system ensures that parties can be bought and sold, when politicians [of the main parties] stand and watch as public services are divvied up by a grubby cabal of privateers, what is left of this system that inspires us to participate?”
Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty. Why are people falling through the cracks? Because there are cracks to fall through. It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests, and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do. Yet a study by scholars at Northwestern University and Vanderbilt finds little support among the wealthiest Americans for policy reforms to reduce income inequality.
Class Prerogatives
Listen! That sound you hear is the shredding of the social contract.
Ten years ago the Economist magazine — no friend of Marxism — warned: “The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.” And as a recent headline in the Columbia Journalism Review put it: “The line between democracy and a darker social order is thinner than you think.”
We are this close – this close! – to losing our democracy to the mercenary class. So close it’s as if we’re leaning way over the rim of the Grand Canyon waiting for a swift kick in the pants.
When Justice Brennan and I talked privately in his chambers before that interview almost 20 years ago, I asked him how he had come to his liberal sentiments. “It was my neighborhood,” he said. Born to Irish immigrants in 1906, as the harsh indignities of the Gilded Age brought hardship and deprivation to his kinfolk and neighbors, he saw “all kinds of suffering — people had to struggle.” He never forgot those people or their struggles, and he believed it to be our collective responsibility to create a country where they would have a fair chance to a decent life. “If you doubt it,” he said, “read the Preamble [to the Constitution].”
He then asked me how I had come to my philosophy about government (knowing that I had been in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations). I don’t remember my exact words, but I reminded him that I had been born in the midst of the Great Depression to parents, one of whom had to drop out of school in the fourth grade, the other in the eighth, because they were needed in the fields to pick cotton to help support their families.
Franklin Roosevelt, I recalled, had been president during the first 11 years of my life. My father had listened to his radio “fireside chats” as if they were gospel; my brother went to college on the G.I. Bill; and I had been the beneficiary of public schools, public libraries, public parks, public roads, and two public universities. How could I not think that what had been so good for me would be good for others, too?
That was the essence of what I told Justice Brennan. Now, I wish that I could talk to him again, because I failed to mention perhaps the most important lesson about democracy I ever learned.
On my 16th birthday in 1950, I went to work for the daily newspaper in the small East Texas town where I grew up. It was a racially divided town — about 20,000 people, half of them white, half of them black — a place where you could grow up well-loved, well-taught, and well-churched, and still be unaware of the lives of others merely blocks away. It was nonetheless a good place to be a cub reporter: small enough to navigate but big enough to keep me busy and learning something new every day. I soon had a stroke of luck. Some of the old-timers in the newsroom were on vacation or out sick, and I got assigned to report on what came to be known as the “Housewives’ Rebellion.” Fifteen women in town (all white) decided not to pay the Social Security withholding tax for their domestic workers (all black).
They argued that Social Security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that — here’s my favorite part — “requiring us to collect [the tax] is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage.” They hired themselves a lawyer — none other than Martin Dies, Jr., the former congressman best known, or worst known, for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the witch-hunting days of the 1930s and 1940s. They went to court — and lost. Social Security was constitutional, after all. They held their noses and paid the tax.
The stories I helped report were picked up by the Associated Press and circulated nationwide. One day, the managing editor, Spencer Jones, called me over and pointed to the AP ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a notice citing the reporters on our paper for the reporting we had done on the “rebellion.” I spotted my name and was hooked. In one way or another, after a detour through seminary and then into politics and government, I’ve been covering the class war ever since.
Those women in Marshall, Texas, were among its advance guard. Not bad people, they were regulars at church, their children were my classmates, many of them were active in community affairs, and their husbands were pillars of the business and professional class in town. They were respectable and upstanding citizens all, so it took me a while to figure out what had brought on that spasm of reactionary defiance. It came to me one day, much later: they simply couldn’t see beyond their own prerogatives.
Fiercely loyal to their families, to their clubs, charities, and congregations — fiercely loyal, in other words, to their own kind — they narrowly defined membership in democracy to include only people like themselves. The black women who washed and ironed their laundry, cooked their families’ meals, cleaned their bathrooms, wiped their children’s bottoms, and made their husbands’ beds, these women, too, would grow old and frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show for their years of labor but the creases on their brows and the knots on their knuckles. There would be nothing for them to live on but the modest return on their toil secured by the collaborative guarantee of a safety net.
The Unfinished Work of America
In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.
I should make it clear that I don’t harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy. Remember, I worked for Lyndon Johnson. Nor do I romanticize “the people.” You should read my mail and posts on right-wing websites. I understand the politician in Texas who said of the state legislature, “If you think these guys are bad, you should see their constituents.”
But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That can be the difference between democracy and plutocracy.
Toward the end of Justice Brennan’s tenure on the Supreme Court, he made a speech that went to the heart of the matter. He said:
“We do not yet have justice, equal and practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for alienated youth, for the urban masses… Ugly inequities continue to mar the face of the nation. We are surely nearer the beginning than the end of the struggle.”
And so we are. One hundred and fifty years ago, Abraham Lincoln stood on the blood-soaked battlefield of Gettysburg and called Americans to “the great task remaining.” That “unfinished work,” as he named it, remained the same then as it was when America’s founding generation began it. And it remains the same today: to breathe new life into the promise of the Declaration of Independence and to assure that the Union so many have sacrificed to save is a union worth saving.
Bill Moyers has received 35 Emmy awards, nine Peabody Awards, the National Academy of Television’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and an honorary doctor of fine arts from the American Film Institute over his 40 years in broadcast journalism. He is currently host of the weekly public television series Moyers & Company and president of the Schumann Media Center, a non-profit organization which supports independent journalism. He delivered these remarks (slightly adapted here) at the annual Legacy Awards dinner of the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan public policy institute in New York City that focuses on voting rights, money in politics, equal justice, and other seminal issues of democracy.
“We do not yet have justice, equal and practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for alienated youth, for the urban masses… Ugly inequities continue to mar the face of the nation. We are surely nearer the beginning than the end of the struggle.” --Supreme Court Justice William Brennan.
Here follows the full Moyers piece…
* * *
Thursday, Dec 12, 2013 06:13 AM PST
Bill Moyers: “We are this close to losing our democracy”
The legendary journalist warns about the devastating impact of dark money and voter suppression
Bill Moyers, TomDispatch.com
I met Supreme Court Justice William Brennan in 1987 when I was creating a series for public television called In Search of the Constitution, celebrating the bicentennial of our founding document. By then, he had served on the court longer than any of his colleagues and had written close to 500 majority opinions, many of them addressing fundamental questions of equality, voting rights, school segregation, and — in New York Times v. Sullivan in particular — the defense of a free press.
Those decisions brought a storm of protest from across the country. He claimed that he never took personally the resentment and anger directed at him. He did, however, subsequently reveal that his own mother told him she had always liked his opinions when he was on the New Jersey court, but wondered now that he was on the Supreme Court, “Why can’t you do it the same way?” His answer: “We have to discharge our responsibility to enforce the rights in favor of minorities, whatever the majority reaction may be.”
Although a liberal, he worried about the looming size of government. When he mentioned that modern science might be creating “a Frankenstein,” I asked, “How so?” He looked around his chambers and replied, “The very conversation we’re now having can be overheard. Science has done things that, as I understand it, makes it possible through these drapes and those windows to get something in here that takes down what we’re talking about.”
That was long before the era of cyberspace and the maximum surveillance state that grows topsy-turvy with every administration. How I wish he were here now — and still on the Court!
My interview with him was one of 12 episodes in that series on the Constitution. Another concerned a case he had heard back in 1967. It involved a teacher named Harry Keyishian who had been fired because he would not sign a New York State loyalty oath. Justice Brennan ruled that the loyalty oath and other anti-subversive state statutes of that era violated First Amendment protections of academic freedom.
I tracked Keyishian down and interviewed him. Justice Brennan watched that program and was fascinated to see the actual person behind the name on his decision. The journalist Nat Hentoff, who followed Brennan’s work closely, wrote, “He may have seen hardly any of the litigants before him, but he searched for a sense of them in the cases that reached him.” Watching the interview with Keyishian, he said, “It was the first time I had seen him. Until then, I had no idea that he and the other teachers would have lost everything if the case had gone the other way.”
Toward the end of his tenure, when he was writing an increasing number of dissents on the Rehnquist Court, Brennan was asked if he was getting discouraged. He smiled and said, “Look, pal, we’ve always known — the Framers knew — that liberty is a fragile thing. You can’t give up.” And he didn’t.
The Donor Class and Streams of Dark Money
The historian Plutarch warned us long ago of what happens when there is no brake on the power of great wealth to subvert the electorate. “The abuse of buying and selling votes,” he wrote of Rome, “crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors.”
We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have the Roberts Court that consistently privileges the donor class.
We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have a Senate in which, as a study by the political scientist Larry Bartels reveals, “Senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes.”
We don’t have emperors yet, but we have a House of Representatives controlled by the far right that is now nourished by streams of “dark money” unleashed thanks to the gift bestowed on the rich by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case.
We don’t have emperors yet, but one of our two major parties is now dominated by radicals engaged in a crusade of voter suppression aimed at the elderly, the young, minorities, and the poor; while the other party, once the champion of everyday working people, has been so enfeebled by its own collaboration with the donor class that it offers only token resistance to the forces that have demoralized everyday Americans.
Writing in the Guardian recently, the social critic George Monbiot commented, “So I don’t blame people for giving up on politics… When a state-corporate nexus of power has bypassed democracy and made a mockery of the voting process, when an unreformed political system ensures that parties can be bought and sold, when politicians [of the main parties] stand and watch as public services are divvied up by a grubby cabal of privateers, what is left of this system that inspires us to participate?”
Why are record numbers of Americans on food stamps? Because record numbers of Americans are in poverty. Why are people falling through the cracks? Because there are cracks to fall through. It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests, and demands that our political class push for further austerity. Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do. Yet a study by scholars at Northwestern University and Vanderbilt finds little support among the wealthiest Americans for policy reforms to reduce income inequality.
Class Prerogatives
Listen! That sound you hear is the shredding of the social contract.
Ten years ago the Economist magazine — no friend of Marxism — warned: “The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.” And as a recent headline in the Columbia Journalism Review put it: “The line between democracy and a darker social order is thinner than you think.”
We are this close – this close! – to losing our democracy to the mercenary class. So close it’s as if we’re leaning way over the rim of the Grand Canyon waiting for a swift kick in the pants.
When Justice Brennan and I talked privately in his chambers before that interview almost 20 years ago, I asked him how he had come to his liberal sentiments. “It was my neighborhood,” he said. Born to Irish immigrants in 1906, as the harsh indignities of the Gilded Age brought hardship and deprivation to his kinfolk and neighbors, he saw “all kinds of suffering — people had to struggle.” He never forgot those people or their struggles, and he believed it to be our collective responsibility to create a country where they would have a fair chance to a decent life. “If you doubt it,” he said, “read the Preamble [to the Constitution].”
He then asked me how I had come to my philosophy about government (knowing that I had been in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations). I don’t remember my exact words, but I reminded him that I had been born in the midst of the Great Depression to parents, one of whom had to drop out of school in the fourth grade, the other in the eighth, because they were needed in the fields to pick cotton to help support their families.
Franklin Roosevelt, I recalled, had been president during the first 11 years of my life. My father had listened to his radio “fireside chats” as if they were gospel; my brother went to college on the G.I. Bill; and I had been the beneficiary of public schools, public libraries, public parks, public roads, and two public universities. How could I not think that what had been so good for me would be good for others, too?
That was the essence of what I told Justice Brennan. Now, I wish that I could talk to him again, because I failed to mention perhaps the most important lesson about democracy I ever learned.
On my 16th birthday in 1950, I went to work for the daily newspaper in the small East Texas town where I grew up. It was a racially divided town — about 20,000 people, half of them white, half of them black — a place where you could grow up well-loved, well-taught, and well-churched, and still be unaware of the lives of others merely blocks away. It was nonetheless a good place to be a cub reporter: small enough to navigate but big enough to keep me busy and learning something new every day. I soon had a stroke of luck. Some of the old-timers in the newsroom were on vacation or out sick, and I got assigned to report on what came to be known as the “Housewives’ Rebellion.” Fifteen women in town (all white) decided not to pay the Social Security withholding tax for their domestic workers (all black).
They argued that Social Security was unconstitutional, that imposing it was taxation without representation, and that — here’s my favorite part — “requiring us to collect [the tax] is no different from requiring us to collect the garbage.” They hired themselves a lawyer — none other than Martin Dies, Jr., the former congressman best known, or worst known, for his work as head of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the witch-hunting days of the 1930s and 1940s. They went to court — and lost. Social Security was constitutional, after all. They held their noses and paid the tax.
The stories I helped report were picked up by the Associated Press and circulated nationwide. One day, the managing editor, Spencer Jones, called me over and pointed to the AP ticker beside his desk. Moving across the wire was a notice citing the reporters on our paper for the reporting we had done on the “rebellion.” I spotted my name and was hooked. In one way or another, after a detour through seminary and then into politics and government, I’ve been covering the class war ever since.
Those women in Marshall, Texas, were among its advance guard. Not bad people, they were regulars at church, their children were my classmates, many of them were active in community affairs, and their husbands were pillars of the business and professional class in town. They were respectable and upstanding citizens all, so it took me a while to figure out what had brought on that spasm of reactionary defiance. It came to me one day, much later: they simply couldn’t see beyond their own prerogatives.
Fiercely loyal to their families, to their clubs, charities, and congregations — fiercely loyal, in other words, to their own kind — they narrowly defined membership in democracy to include only people like themselves. The black women who washed and ironed their laundry, cooked their families’ meals, cleaned their bathrooms, wiped their children’s bottoms, and made their husbands’ beds, these women, too, would grow old and frail, sick and decrepit, lose their husbands and face the ravages of time alone, with nothing to show for their years of labor but the creases on their brows and the knots on their knuckles. There would be nothing for them to live on but the modest return on their toil secured by the collaborative guarantee of a safety net.
The Unfinished Work of America
In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.
I should make it clear that I don’t harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy. Remember, I worked for Lyndon Johnson. Nor do I romanticize “the people.” You should read my mail and posts on right-wing websites. I understand the politician in Texas who said of the state legislature, “If you think these guys are bad, you should see their constituents.”
But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That can be the difference between democracy and plutocracy.
Toward the end of Justice Brennan’s tenure on the Supreme Court, he made a speech that went to the heart of the matter. He said:
“We do not yet have justice, equal and practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for alienated youth, for the urban masses… Ugly inequities continue to mar the face of the nation. We are surely nearer the beginning than the end of the struggle.”
And so we are. One hundred and fifty years ago, Abraham Lincoln stood on the blood-soaked battlefield of Gettysburg and called Americans to “the great task remaining.” That “unfinished work,” as he named it, remained the same then as it was when America’s founding generation began it. And it remains the same today: to breathe new life into the promise of the Declaration of Independence and to assure that the Union so many have sacrificed to save is a union worth saving.
Bill Moyers has received 35 Emmy awards, nine Peabody Awards, the National Academy of Television’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and an honorary doctor of fine arts from the American Film Institute over his 40 years in broadcast journalism. He is currently host of the weekly public television series Moyers & Company and president of the Schumann Media Center, a non-profit organization which supports independent journalism. He delivered these remarks (slightly adapted here) at the annual Legacy Awards dinner of the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan public policy institute in New York City that focuses on voting rights, money in politics, equal justice, and other seminal issues of democracy.
Saturday, December 7, 2013
“Early Weekend”
So have I mentioned yet that there are some mornings where my workplace totally smells like weed? I don’t know what the deal is, but some days I come in and the place reeks. Like, I think it’s being pumped through the ventilation system. They say the air system is all new, so it can’t be leftover from when the building was a skating rink. Or can it? Ah, whatever. Anyway, yeah some mornings I come in and the place totally reeks.
Got another date happening tonight. Got no idea how this is going to go, but in the getting to know you back and forth there seems to be a lot in common. It sounds like she might still be married. Actually, no, that’s not it. She definitely IS still married; what it sounds like is that even though she’s living on her own, she hasn’t actually filed for divorce yet. How do I feel about that? Not too happy. So we’ll see how things go.
I’m still hopeful about a movement from my quintet being played next week. Can’t wait to hear the read-through. My presentation is done, I’ll have one more lesson next week and then a class next Wednesday where I get to just show up and listen to the other students give their papers. And then a month and a half break. Nice. I’m thinking seriously adding French in to my class schedule. We’ll see if there’s something that works, time-wise.
I think this entry will post Saturday, but I’m writing it the Friday before. I’m stoked to only have to deal with a half-day at work—I’m heading out early to hear my quintet be read. It’s a great way to end the work week—early lol.
There’s a number of thoughts running through my mind, but I think what I want most is to just sign off and coast the last hour and half of work I’ve got left. Give me my weekend, please!
Got another date happening tonight. Got no idea how this is going to go, but in the getting to know you back and forth there seems to be a lot in common. It sounds like she might still be married. Actually, no, that’s not it. She definitely IS still married; what it sounds like is that even though she’s living on her own, she hasn’t actually filed for divorce yet. How do I feel about that? Not too happy. So we’ll see how things go.
I’m still hopeful about a movement from my quintet being played next week. Can’t wait to hear the read-through. My presentation is done, I’ll have one more lesson next week and then a class next Wednesday where I get to just show up and listen to the other students give their papers. And then a month and a half break. Nice. I’m thinking seriously adding French in to my class schedule. We’ll see if there’s something that works, time-wise.
I think this entry will post Saturday, but I’m writing it the Friday before. I’m stoked to only have to deal with a half-day at work—I’m heading out early to hear my quintet be read. It’s a great way to end the work week—early lol.
There’s a number of thoughts running through my mind, but I think what I want most is to just sign off and coast the last hour and half of work I’ve got left. Give me my weekend, please!
Friday, December 6, 2013
“Scattered Brain”
I was out for a walk, on break from work, and thought about my upcoming appointment with the therapist, trying to sort out what I want to talk about this week. If I go in with just a busy brain, then I feel like whatever spits out first is what gets worked on. I think talking about the recent depression pangs might be a good idea? Or how about the relationship fears/struggles about not being able to get one going. Or maybe my frustration that everything in my life isn’t perfect LOL. And now I’m feeling some serious resistance to writing about all that, so I think I’ll change subjects.
My paper/presentation went fine. I feel like I wasn’t able to give good answers to the questions I was asked, but it went fine and I got some kudos from my fellow students afterwards. Just one more week and then the semester will be done. Wow. I’m relieved to not have the heavy workload, but while school is going it gives me a lot to look forward to.
A reading of the quintet I wrote this semester has been scheduled, and I’m hopeful that one of the movements will get performed. It feels so obscenely last-minute to make arrangements like this, but my professor had said he should be the one to make the arrangements, so I let him.
My brain is spacing today. Going all over the place. Maybe I’ll do another entry later.
My paper/presentation went fine. I feel like I wasn’t able to give good answers to the questions I was asked, but it went fine and I got some kudos from my fellow students afterwards. Just one more week and then the semester will be done. Wow. I’m relieved to not have the heavy workload, but while school is going it gives me a lot to look forward to.
A reading of the quintet I wrote this semester has been scheduled, and I’m hopeful that one of the movements will get performed. It feels so obscenely last-minute to make arrangements like this, but my professor had said he should be the one to make the arrangements, so I let him.
My brain is spacing today. Going all over the place. Maybe I’ll do another entry later.
Thursday, December 5, 2013
“Anti-Crowds and/or Homebody”
I don’t like crowds. Like, as a general rule. We had a staff appreciation day at work. Folks from other offices came and joined us, and our 150+ capacity building was suddenly filled to capacity. Way too many people. I had planned on attending, went down, but saw and heard the massive volume of people crowded in, milling around, meeting and greeting and I just could not hang.
There’s a lot of peer pressure in an office to attend things like this, so I’m feeling a bit of something about not going. But I’m also feeling a lot of fuck you about needing to go and it’s like hey, I can not go to these things if I want to! Ugh. See, this is why I don’t fit in in an office culture. Or maybe I’m just one of those who doesn’t go to the group functions. Whatever. Just leave me out of it lol.
Since it’s the big appreciation day and all these other folks are here, we’ve got tons and tons of random people walking around the building. I’ve been introduced to many many folks whose names I will never remember. It just highlights how the setup for my cubicle drives me crazy. Instead of facing the aisle, where I can see and say hello to everyone, I’ve got my back to them and they can see into my workspace and everything I’m doing. I’ve heard a couple folks comment on how nice it looks and I really have to restrain myself and not make a crack about how they wouldn’t think it was so nice if they had to work here, and if they had a bunch of strangers wandering all through your workspace. Bleh. I can’t wait to get out of here today.
It’s almost an afterthought, but I find myself wishing for something deep and profound and philosophical to write about. Some deep thought to explore or pontificate on. But the truth is that I’m tired and I just want to relax. I’ll go home, grab a quick bite, do the school thing, and then I’ll be free. And I think I do need to do something special for myself, even if special means make a pizza and go shoot pool. That’s special-ish enough.
I remember thinking of treating myself to a weekend down in SoCal as a reward for finishing this semester. I’m pretty sure now that I’m not going to do that. Should I do something else instead? The idea of spending more money—a lot—to go some place by myself, that doesn’t appeal to me very much. Go gambling in Tahoe or Reno? Meh. Maybe I’ll take a day trip down to SF? Or Santa Cruz? It’s strange. I used to have no problem taking off for anywhere all by myself. Now, I’m feeling the need to hunker down for some reason. Or maybe I just don’t want to spend hours driving in my uncomfortable car, or tons of money on a decent hotel room because I don’t want to sleep in an uncomfortable bed.
Or maybe, I really need to go do something by myself just to do it and to have the experience of it. I think I’m a bit afraid of getting some place and being overwhelmed by loneliness. But that could just be something I’m feeling because of what I’m going through right now. Ah, I’ll think on it some more.
There’s a lot of peer pressure in an office to attend things like this, so I’m feeling a bit of something about not going. But I’m also feeling a lot of fuck you about needing to go and it’s like hey, I can not go to these things if I want to! Ugh. See, this is why I don’t fit in in an office culture. Or maybe I’m just one of those who doesn’t go to the group functions. Whatever. Just leave me out of it lol.
Since it’s the big appreciation day and all these other folks are here, we’ve got tons and tons of random people walking around the building. I’ve been introduced to many many folks whose names I will never remember. It just highlights how the setup for my cubicle drives me crazy. Instead of facing the aisle, where I can see and say hello to everyone, I’ve got my back to them and they can see into my workspace and everything I’m doing. I’ve heard a couple folks comment on how nice it looks and I really have to restrain myself and not make a crack about how they wouldn’t think it was so nice if they had to work here, and if they had a bunch of strangers wandering all through your workspace. Bleh. I can’t wait to get out of here today.
* * *
It’s almost an afterthought, but I find myself wishing for something deep and profound and philosophical to write about. Some deep thought to explore or pontificate on. But the truth is that I’m tired and I just want to relax. I’ll go home, grab a quick bite, do the school thing, and then I’ll be free. And I think I do need to do something special for myself, even if special means make a pizza and go shoot pool. That’s special-ish enough.
I remember thinking of treating myself to a weekend down in SoCal as a reward for finishing this semester. I’m pretty sure now that I’m not going to do that. Should I do something else instead? The idea of spending more money—a lot—to go some place by myself, that doesn’t appeal to me very much. Go gambling in Tahoe or Reno? Meh. Maybe I’ll take a day trip down to SF? Or Santa Cruz? It’s strange. I used to have no problem taking off for anywhere all by myself. Now, I’m feeling the need to hunker down for some reason. Or maybe I just don’t want to spend hours driving in my uncomfortable car, or tons of money on a decent hotel room because I don’t want to sleep in an uncomfortable bed.
Or maybe, I really need to go do something by myself just to do it and to have the experience of it. I think I’m a bit afraid of getting some place and being overwhelmed by loneliness. But that could just be something I’m feeling because of what I’m going through right now. Ah, I’ll think on it some more.
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
“Family Pains”
Or, more accurately, *no* family pains. As in, pain of not having a family.
I was walking up and down the row of cubicles and looking at various pictures of husbands and kids. At first, I was just noticing the attractive gals in the office and how none of them are single, but then I started realizing how just about everyone is paired up or at least has kids. And the ones who aren’t paired up are the more emotionally unhealthy folks. Which I suppose I still fall into. I mean, hey, I am seeing a therapist every week, and haven’t been able to maintain a healthy romantic relationship like, ever. So why not call a spade a spade? Damn, I just want to cry right now.
Depression is such a perception warper. I am understanding better how things go in my dumb head, though. It’s not that I look around, see all these people paired up with partners, and this of myself as a loser because I don’t have someone in my life. It’s that I think I’m a loser and so I look around for reasons to justify that feeling. When I don’t feel down on myself, these kind of thoughts don’t really occur to me.
Do I want a family? I ask myself this question from time to time. I’m not sure, or I don’t know seems to be the answer. Or maybe, looking at the evidence, it seems that if I do it’s pretty far down on the priority list. I guess what I always wanted was to meet someone, feel that spark of connection, things progress, we fall in love, get married, then after a few years decide it’s time to start having kids. Is that artificial? Romantic? A fairy tale?
I don’t know. And it does hurt a little to think about, because I always come back to some ‘reasonable’ thoughts on how I’m in school and don’t have time for a family right now and how if all goes well I’m going to be in school for some time. Then there are the words I’ve heard more than once about how I ‘still have time.’ Excuse me, but just what the fuck does that mean anyway?
I guess… I guess I’m bitter and scared. Bitter and frustrated because something which seems to be so common, finding a partner and having a family, seems to be a life path shrouded in mystery for me. I can’t even look back on my life and find a ‘should have.’ Except maybe the gal I went out with in my early 20s, after me & my first wife split up. Maybe.
It’s getting harder and harder to trust ‘if it’s meant to happen, it will happen.’ The best I seem to do is to not think about it. I’m dating, I’m meeting people, going out with them, even occasionally having some sex (which, I’m sorry to say is usually pretty shitty). So it’s not like I can sit here and say I’m just moping and not doing anything about the situation. Ah well, whatever.
I bumped into The Goddess online. I reached out, made an offer to talk about what happened between us. She says she’s interested so we set up a time to talk. I have no idea how that will go, but it felt like the right thing to do. What do I have to say? Not a lot, but I was thinking about it and I might talk about how when she showed up that Friday it was almost like she was a different person. Like, there had been some closeness between us and when we got together for that third date it was like she had closed herself off. Or maybe about how she dumped a lot of emotion on me and that was not fair—especially to someone you’re on just a third date with. Or I don’t know, maybe I’ll just listen.
But just thinking about all this gets me into another mode of thought. Like, how I’ve thought before about work—is it really possible that I’ve always had such shitty luck with jobs? Or is it more likely that the problem is me? Maybe that’s my issue with women, too—it’s not that all women are crazy, or unstable, or whatever, just that I’m the one who… Ah, I don’t know how to finish that sentence. Yes, there is a common thread—me—in all that stuff, but there have been good ones that I’ve let go. The Engineer is probably the best example. But even on that one, I mean, the sex was really unsatisfying (in every sense of the phrase) and I wasn’t happy with her.
But then, I wasn’t happy with a lot of my ex’s. That’s why they’re ex’s! Ah, I’ve gotten myself lost in all this introspection. Summary: damn being alone sucks; man I really miss having good sex; I sure hope I figure out my shit and am able to have a partner some day; having kids would be nice, too.
Tonight is my night to present my paper in my seminar. I actually don’t feel too much about it one way or the other. The paper is good. It’s not stellar, there’s nothing groundbreaking about it. I wish it was great, that it was the kind of paper my professor was pushing me to publish. Oh well. I’m not too nervous about reading it in front of the class. I’m just looking forward to it being done.
I will say I feel like something of a hack. I mean, I’ve got a couple dozen sources for this paper, but it’s not like I actually read them all all the way through. But the paper holds together, it’s at least mildly interesting. I wish it were longer, but oh well.
Maybe I need a vacation.
I was walking up and down the row of cubicles and looking at various pictures of husbands and kids. At first, I was just noticing the attractive gals in the office and how none of them are single, but then I started realizing how just about everyone is paired up or at least has kids. And the ones who aren’t paired up are the more emotionally unhealthy folks. Which I suppose I still fall into. I mean, hey, I am seeing a therapist every week, and haven’t been able to maintain a healthy romantic relationship like, ever. So why not call a spade a spade? Damn, I just want to cry right now.
Depression is such a perception warper. I am understanding better how things go in my dumb head, though. It’s not that I look around, see all these people paired up with partners, and this of myself as a loser because I don’t have someone in my life. It’s that I think I’m a loser and so I look around for reasons to justify that feeling. When I don’t feel down on myself, these kind of thoughts don’t really occur to me.
Do I want a family? I ask myself this question from time to time. I’m not sure, or I don’t know seems to be the answer. Or maybe, looking at the evidence, it seems that if I do it’s pretty far down on the priority list. I guess what I always wanted was to meet someone, feel that spark of connection, things progress, we fall in love, get married, then after a few years decide it’s time to start having kids. Is that artificial? Romantic? A fairy tale?
I don’t know. And it does hurt a little to think about, because I always come back to some ‘reasonable’ thoughts on how I’m in school and don’t have time for a family right now and how if all goes well I’m going to be in school for some time. Then there are the words I’ve heard more than once about how I ‘still have time.’ Excuse me, but just what the fuck does that mean anyway?
I guess… I guess I’m bitter and scared. Bitter and frustrated because something which seems to be so common, finding a partner and having a family, seems to be a life path shrouded in mystery for me. I can’t even look back on my life and find a ‘should have.’ Except maybe the gal I went out with in my early 20s, after me & my first wife split up. Maybe.
It’s getting harder and harder to trust ‘if it’s meant to happen, it will happen.’ The best I seem to do is to not think about it. I’m dating, I’m meeting people, going out with them, even occasionally having some sex (which, I’m sorry to say is usually pretty shitty). So it’s not like I can sit here and say I’m just moping and not doing anything about the situation. Ah well, whatever.
* * *
I bumped into The Goddess online. I reached out, made an offer to talk about what happened between us. She says she’s interested so we set up a time to talk. I have no idea how that will go, but it felt like the right thing to do. What do I have to say? Not a lot, but I was thinking about it and I might talk about how when she showed up that Friday it was almost like she was a different person. Like, there had been some closeness between us and when we got together for that third date it was like she had closed herself off. Or maybe about how she dumped a lot of emotion on me and that was not fair—especially to someone you’re on just a third date with. Or I don’t know, maybe I’ll just listen.
But just thinking about all this gets me into another mode of thought. Like, how I’ve thought before about work—is it really possible that I’ve always had such shitty luck with jobs? Or is it more likely that the problem is me? Maybe that’s my issue with women, too—it’s not that all women are crazy, or unstable, or whatever, just that I’m the one who… Ah, I don’t know how to finish that sentence. Yes, there is a common thread—me—in all that stuff, but there have been good ones that I’ve let go. The Engineer is probably the best example. But even on that one, I mean, the sex was really unsatisfying (in every sense of the phrase) and I wasn’t happy with her.
But then, I wasn’t happy with a lot of my ex’s. That’s why they’re ex’s! Ah, I’ve gotten myself lost in all this introspection. Summary: damn being alone sucks; man I really miss having good sex; I sure hope I figure out my shit and am able to have a partner some day; having kids would be nice, too.
* * *
Tonight is my night to present my paper in my seminar. I actually don’t feel too much about it one way or the other. The paper is good. It’s not stellar, there’s nothing groundbreaking about it. I wish it was great, that it was the kind of paper my professor was pushing me to publish. Oh well. I’m not too nervous about reading it in front of the class. I’m just looking forward to it being done.
I will say I feel like something of a hack. I mean, I’ve got a couple dozen sources for this paper, but it’s not like I actually read them all all the way through. But the paper holds together, it’s at least mildly interesting. I wish it were longer, but oh well.
Maybe I need a vacation.
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