Monday Morning Confession

Today. At the cafe by the library, a successful tutoring session finished, a cup of coffee at my elbow, 16-ounce because they've run out of the 12-ounce mugs (score, me!).  A French lesson in session on my right, given by a woman in a black sweater with a ravishing accent "You want to know why you say it zis way?  Becos zat--" she points at a paper--"Iz newt si-lant. Now, for ze infeenitiv. . . ."  (Pardon my horrible attempt at the accent but I am reveling in it).  A young woman with a puppy slung over her shoulder just took her lunch to go and stepped out into the cool grey morning.

At the counter, a woman in a red cloche hat, white blouse, bright red scarf, and high-heeled, black buckled boots.  She is looking around to find a seat, latte in hand--I motion to my table.  Now she's sitting across from me.  Her bobbed hair is surprisingly white, which makes me wonder if she is actually older than what she looks, which is in her twenties.  She says it's her day off, and when I compliment her on her hat, she tells me how she travelled to Seattle on a sailboat to buy it, which I say was terribly Great Gatsby of her.  We both agree that we all need a little Great Gatsby in our lives.  Behind me, some women are discussing hula hoops.  At the window a man in a grey wool cap with an umbrella sticking out of his bag is crunching chips.  A bearded man a briefcase and eyes smiling behind his glasses makes his way to a table, answers a telephone call with a jovial voice that chuckles every other word.

A dozen different discussions are taking place in this cafe, and even more silent conversations are taking place as people stare out the window, at their computer screens, pause between sentences.  I love it. Oh, ha!  Just overheard this from the table next to me--one of women apparently has a French daughter--in-law, who the other night expressed her frustration with her husband by exclaiming, "You are always in my ass!"  Her mother-in-law corrected softly, "Actually, the saying is, 'always ON my ass.'  The two are very different."

I love being part of this greater human conversation.  When I am grateful and attentive, I feel a deep sense of communion with the great world, whether I am taking a walk alone in the drifting leaves, quietly content to be a listener to the sounds of the neighborhood and the wind and the trees.  When I am at a cafe, I feel wrapped into the experiences of those around me, as if the circle of my being and the circles of their existences are overlapping, if just for a brief time, and so it goes.  It is the magic of being in this good world.

That is why, though at moments I want to shut a great heavy door and quiet the crisis and divisions happening in our country, I just can't forget.

So here's my Monday Morning Confession: This week, I have been forced to listen, to open my ears.  I have been forced to step outside the boundaries of my own small sphere to hear the words and experiences of others.  Now I must admit: our country is hurting beyond what I wanted to imagine.

See, if 'my' party had won, I could have drawn a curtain all that has deeply disturbed me during this election cycle.  I could have gone on living as normal in my relatively carefree, self-congratulatory bubble, trying to believe that 'everything' is getting better all the time, as if we as a nation (barring some heart-breaking examples) are generally moving forward to overcome racism, misogyny, exclusion, intolerance, and fear.  Now I can't ignore reality.  I have to acknowledge, with a sinking heart: these things are real and they wound and destroy.  It's not as if the changing political climate has created these issues--they were always there, but now they are being vocalized, acted upon--in grocery lines, parking lots, schools, politics, in cafes like this one.  It makes me so, so sad.

To see the truth--that's crucial.  After the election, a friend of mine said, "I am not surprised," and went on to tell me about the misogyny she has and continues to experience in a profession dominated by men.  She is only one example of the many who have shared their stories, and the question at the beginning of each story is the same:  "Why are you so shocked?"

But honestly, I am shocked--and the fact that I'm so shocked illuminates my very privileged life and my relatively monochromatic experience of the world.  In my experiences cross-culturally overseas and here in the U.S., I have found people in general decent, loving, open-hearted and relatively accepting.  I am thankful for that.  But in the last week, I've been forced to look at the ugliness head-on.  And it's made me very, very uncomfortable.

I would love to end this entry as I end so many entries, with a paragraph that ties up the tension into a half-tied bow--things are hard, but there's love.  Even that doesn't seem as simple anymore.   Well-meaning people have tried to convince me that everything will be okay, that this is about politics as usual, that there IS NO PROBLEM, that my concerns are the result of a liberal, agenda-driven media.  I want to answer, maybe it feels that simple to you.  But would you sit down, make eye contact, and tell that to a Muslim, to a refugee, to a gay person, to a woman, to a minority? Would you tell that to everyone who feels afraid, who felt deeply targeted and disenfranchised by the vote? And to the children afraid that their parents will now be deported--could you say honestly, "It's all gonna be okay?"  It's about more than politics, and until we all open our eyes to the experiences of others, until we all realize that none of us live alone,we will not be able to move forward in any significant way.

And I realize: I have a choice.  I can watch Gilmore Girls reruns, ignore the world, and hunker down in a shabby attempt to make myself feel better.  I can demure, shrugging and smiling and keeping silent to keep my idea of "the peace."

Or I can step into the conversation.  And not to speak, but to listen, to listen not with preselected answers at the ready, but with a spirit of inquiry and wonder.