Adventures in Real Parenting: Safe at Home

I've been having nightmares about Trayvon Martin's killing. In the dreams, he's that fresh-faced young man in the Hollister tshirt we've seen splashed all over the media. Then he morphs into Nathan. I stand helpless, unable to move while he's pursued.

On his Monday show, Rev. Al Sharpton played the 911 tapes of the neighbors in that gated community calling to report the disturbance while Trayvon struggled with his murderer. I was not prepared to hear the screaming for help and the gunshot. I was on my way to the post office to drop off a small care package for Chloe. I imagined the horror of Trayvon's parents listening to those tapes.

My cheeks were wet as I carried the box to the door. On the other side of the glass was an African American woman on her way out. Our eyes met. She pulled the door open and stepped aside to let me pass. I thanked her.

I wanted to ask her. Did she have children. Did she have sons? Did she teach them to beware? Did they inherently know they were suspect because of their skin? I asked nothing. She kind of shrugged and turned away.

As I left, she was leaning against her car digging through her purse. I can't find my cell phone, she said. I was so upset about that young man in Florida who was shot, they were talking about it on the news. When I got out of my car, I don't know what I did with my phone.

I was just listening to a story about it, too, I said. The woman looked up from her purse. That poor child. His poor mama. I nodded and opened the car door, slipped back inside.

Thursday evening, Nate's girlfriend and I huddled together under an umbrella. A light rain fell on the batter as he took a swing. His dark skin glistened under the lights. She told me how her teacher asked if anyone knew about the Trayvon Martin case. She raised her hand and was called on to explain it to the class.

I felt so smart, she said. I knew about it.

Isn't that a great feeling? I asked and congratulated myself for doing something right. Which makes me look like a total tool. I know.

She often spends the weekends at our house, using Chloe's empty room, because she lives so far away. On Sunday mornings while I watch Up with Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris Perry, she comes into the living room and hangs out. I thought maybe she was bored by it, but last weekend, when Nate wanted to watch something else, she refused. I like watching this, she said.

She told me how the kids in her class, most of them African American, were outraged at what had happened in Sanford, Florida. Outraged, but not surprised. They're used to the attitudes that separate them from their white classmates. The Rite-Aid across from the school will only let three students into the store at a time. Not that it matters if you're black or white in that case - three students. That's it. If the school were mostly white and upper middle class, would such a rule exist?

The team was stomped. Hard. Slaughter Rule evoked hard. This was a big disappointment because they can play better. We've seen them play so much better.

After the game, they walked by looking all hang-dog. I wanted to stop each one of them and quiz them. Did they know Georgia has one of those Stand Your Ground laws? Did they realize those laws are meant to make "some" people feel safe, but it made them with their not exactly white skin vulnerable to frightened people. Frightened people who believe the law says they can shoot first and justify their fear later.

Do they know how to stay safe? Did they know that they were in more danger in a white, gated community than Nate is when he goes to their homes? Because let's not kid ourselves, if Nate gets shot by a black man  claiming self-defense, the black man is going to spend some time in a holding cell.

MathMan and I drove home and Nate and his friends went out for a bite to eat. I couldn't shake a bad feeling, a sense of something about to go wrong. Antsy and snappish. I was going to spread my misery around to anyone unfortunate enough to have contact with me. I went to my room to worry.

Nate called MathMan. He'd been rear-ended on I75. What should he do? Pull over, call 911and wait inside the car.

Nate did what MathMan said to do, pulling onto the grassy median. The other driver pulled in behind him. MathMan ended the call and went back to lesson planning. I went downstairs to keep busy. A bit later, I asked MathMan if he'd heard from Nate again. He called Nate back. He was on the speaker phone so I could hear what was happening.

While Nate explained to MathMan where exactly he was, the police arrived.

You're gonna get me killed! One of the officers was shouting. You on the phone? Get off the phone!

Yes, sir, I was talking to my father, Nate said. Then he was gone.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath. Made a wish. Let Nate would remain respectful. A nervous kid who'd just been in a car accident being shouted out by a uniformed person with a gun and all the power. He was on his own. What happened next depended on his ability to stay calm and respectful even if the other person was neither.

I asked how much more precarious the situation would be if Nate were a kid with brown skin.

Later he told us how the officer berated him. Do you even have a license? The cop yelled. Why had he been so stupid to pull into the median? Didn't he know he was supposed to pull over to the right shoulder? Whose car was he driving? Why was he out so late?

Why be like that? Since when does serving and protecting include shouting? I mean, Nate already has a mother for that.

He got home in one piece. I could breathe again. After he went to bed, I stopped in his room to say goodnight. To tell him how much I love him, to make sure he was okay behind that mask of cool, calm, collected.

I had a million questions, but only one thought which gave me little comfort, despite the fact that my sixteen-year-old son was safe at home.

Things could have turned out so differently.

Intransigent

Photo: Lisa Golden (has nothing to do with post)

Last night MathMan and I went to bed with the TV on. Before we turned on the Foyle's War DVD, we'd been watching MSNBC and listening to the day's political spin.

As I listened to the cadence of words, the repetition of phrases, I thought about Sherry's post at A Feather Adrift. She pointed out a couple of new buzz phrases that have become part of the conversational stew surrounding the U.S. budget, the debt ceiling and the deficit.

The American People.

Job creators.

There is no American People the way it's used by politicians. Hell, you can't even get The American People to agree on Coke or Pepsi, but if you ask politicians why they're doing something, they'll you that The American People sent them to Washington to do xyz. What they should say is that they won an election and now they're going to carry out the wishes of their donors while pretending to give two shits about what the people who elected them want them to do.

The phrase job creators is the perfect illustration of this. Republicans are using the phrase to cover the entire spectrum of business and the wealthy. Big business and small. Job Creators is code for People on whom we will not raise taxes.

The people they're referring to don't actually create jobs in any meaningful way. Tax cuts don't create jobs. Demand creates jobs. You can give businesses all the tax breaks in the world, you can hand them massive tax refund checks (which is a transfer of money from the taxpayer to the corporation in case you didn't realize that) and they still aren't going to create jobs if there isn't a critical mass of consumers who want and can buy their services or goods because they have money with which to buy those goods and services.

We've tried this tax cut experiment for over ten years and it's failed. The proof is in the unemployment line.

Source: Think Progress

By the end of the day yesterday, it became clear that another word had burrowed into the DNA of the American political lexicon. I really wish that we had some sort of app that could identify which talking head was the first to use it in the current context. Now that's the kind of app that could entice me to buy a smartphone.

The word?

Intransigent.

There it is all over the television. There the word is, too, on my wall, smack in the middle of the list of adjectives I have taped next to my desk.

Intransigent. Intransigence. The words are being used to describe Republicans who are unwilling to compromise.

In today's political atmosphere, the word compromise no longer carries the air of maturity, but rather it's spat out as it's own euphemism. Only bed-wetting liberal pantywaists compromise. Pussies compromise. Real men, real Americans don't compromise. The American People don't want compromise. They're busy hollering yeehaw while riding their rugged individualist lawnmowers.

I zeroed in on this word and became obsessed with it because unlike Job Creators and The American People, this word is accurate. It's not code. It's reality. Republicans have dug in on the subject of taxes. They'll tell you that they're carrying out the will of The American People who know that the The Job Creators need to pay lower taxes so they can create jobs and that we need to cut government spending and cut taxes because taxes and Big Government are the problem.

Or shorter: We're all Grover Norquist now!!!

See how that works?

I'd been drinking and that brought everything into focus like when you suddenly notice the veins in your hands look like rivers on a map. "When we wake up in the morning and turn on the TV, let's see how long it takes for someone to use the word intransigent on Morning Joe," I said, mashing my pillow into place.

When I'm happily alcohol softened, MathMan justs lets me talk. "Okay," he said. He probably just wanted to get laid.

As I fell asleep, I pontificated on the Balanced Budget Amendment. "That's like if your car breaks down and you quit your job because you can't get there and you can't get there because you won't raise revenue to fix your car."

Then everything went black.

The alarm went off at 6:10a.m. I opened my eyes, assessed my level of hangover. Nothing. Excellent. I reached for the remote, pushed the power button and glanced at the clock next to me. 6:11. MathMan bailed out of the bed and headed to the shower.

"blah, blah, blah, instransigent....." said Pat Buchanan to the roundtable on Morning Joe.

"One minute! It took one minute!" I laughed and threw the covers back. I was free to get on with my day.

What are your favorite political phrases, euphemisms, codes?

Unemployment Diary: Welcome to Anxiety Central

My initial reaction was "Shut up, Michael Bloomberg!"

His offense?  Part of what he said this morning on Morning Joe (transcript 01:09:41):  "You wonder why jobs are going overseas?  There a are a lot unemployed people in America. There are a lot of jobs available. The skill sets don't match."

But it's not just Michael Bloomberg, as Paul Krugman points out:

Who are these wise heads I’m talking about? The most widely quoted figure is Narayana Kocherlakota, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, who has attracted a lot of attention by insisting that dealing with high unemployment isn’t a Fed responsibility: “Firms have jobs, but can’t find appropriate workers. The workers want to work, but can’t find appropriate jobs,” he asserts, concluding that “It is hard to see how the Fed can do much to cure this problem.”

Now, the Minneapolis Fed is known for its conservative outlook, and claims that unemployment is mainly structural do tend to come from the right of the political spectrum. But some people on the other side of the aisle say similar things. For example, former President Bill Clinton recently told an interviewer that unemployment remained high because “people don’t have the job skills for the jobs that are open.”

No matter what the Bloombergs and Clintons say, jobs have been outsourced because people in other countries will work for less than what Americans expect to earn for the same job.  Add to that the fact that the countries receiving our outsourced jobs have fewer worker protections and you've got a pretty simple reason for why jobs are leaving the U.S.  There's more profit to be made!

I'm going out on a limb here, but here's my example of why this is just more nonsense promulgated and promoted by those who think that corporations share no blame in our unemployment crisis.

Last week, I applied for a position with a company I once worked for.  The position is one that I could do, have done.  When I worked for this company, I started as a secretary (back when we still used that word).  By the time I left (in good standing), I'd risen to the position of assistant state rep for one of the larger states in the U.S.  During my five years with this company, I consistently received evaluations of Exceeded Standards.  I'm still sorry I left that job for what turned out to be really stupid reasons (another opportunity that turned out to be a nightmare), but I know this organization rehires people.  Or, at least, they used to.

I still haven't heard from them.  While I'll admit that it's been thirteen years since I left quit my last job with them, I think it's fair to say that I still understand the mission of the organization and its basic structures.  My skill set has improved and expanded in the thirteen years since I left.

This should be a cake walk, no?  So what's the problem, Michael Bloomberg?

I've gotta tell you, I've applied for so many jobs, it's ridiculous.  In the old days, half of them would have been slam dunks.  The other half I never would have applied for in the first place because they are entry level or clearly not at the level at which I've worked for the last ten plus years.

And yet my phone does not ring.  I've had exactly one interview since December 2009.  One.

So I ask myself - is it my age?  My old salary level? The simple fact that I'm unemployed?  Am I expecting too much too soon?

You reach a point where you start to wonder if you really did all those things on your resume.  Was I really capable of running an organization once upon a time?  How did I become unemployable?

I guess I should ask the bigger question - just exactly what skill set is it that Americans need?  What's the secret, Misters Bloomberg and Clinton?  Because I haven't changed.  The job descriptions for the jobs to which I'm applying haven't changed.  The salaries seem to have been shaved and the duties expanded, but they are very much all the stuff I've done before.  I can still create an agenda, develop a database, write memos, make phone calls, read contracts, sit in meetings and worry about budgets.

If you're going to indict Americans for this unemployment crisis without questioning the corporations, then you'd better come up with specifics because more of us are slipping over the edge and if November turns out to be the political disaster we've heard it's going to be, the already straining safety nets are likely going to be shredded.

Meanwhile, I set aside the utter freak out about ever finding a job again and try to focus on writing.  Some days I can do it, other days I can't.  Those are the days when the house gets really clean and the cats cower under the bed afraid they'll get swept away in the frenzy.

Okay, I'm done whining.  I know have readers in NYC.  Will one of you go over to the Mayor's office and give him a punch in his nutsack for being such a dope?  Thanks.

Until next time.....