“We haven’t told the others yet,” my coworker said to me yesterday. “They aren’t going to take it as well as you did.”
“As well as I did…” Her words lingered in the air as I felt my mouth fill with what I wanted to say. And it all was very negative.
“Not yet.” I told myself. “Say nothing.”
I got up to get a glass of water.
But mostly I got up to get away. Continue reading
Still reeling some from the punch in the gut I got at work Wednesday, I’m tired and can’t write. So in honor of being tired, here’s a clip from my most favorite movie, Blazing Saddles, and my most favorite actress, Madeline Kahn, performing my most favorite musical number, I’m Tired. God Bless Mel Brooks. 
While running errands, my daughter Meg asked if we could go to Target. On another recent trip there she had seen some pink plastic flamingos in the dollar aisle and wanted to buy one.
“They are perfect for the backyard,” she said, rather liking the tackiness of them. “Besides,” she added, “they represent what mankind so often does… wipe out a species then make their likeness out of plastic.”
She’s 17 going on 37.
So, off to Target and straight to the dollar aisle we went. She found them immediately and her face, fresh and enthusiastic, lit up.
She picked out one of the flamingos, wrapped, appropriately, in plastic, looked it over and put it back.
“That one only has one eye,” she said.
Then she paused. After a moment, she bent back down and picked up the very same plastic flamingo she had just returned to the shelf.
“No. I want this one. I’m not going to discriminate against him because he has one eye. That’s just how he is and I like him. He is just as good as the others and I want to give him a home. That’s ableism.” She proclaimed.
Then she asked, “Can we get two so he’ll have a friend?”
And I looked at my child, my sensitive, thoughtful, sweet child and said,
“Absolutely my dear.”
It was a “just imagine” moment as I stood there looking at Meg and her pink plastic flamingos in the dollar aisle at Target. She has lived her entire life with a brother with Aspergers… she turned five months old on the day he was diagnosed. I would be lying if I didn’t say she has suffered on occasion. She has. She has been on the receiving end of his rages. She’s has had to compromise. She has had to bend. She has had to leap ahead four years and be the older, wiser sibling. She has gone to counseling to help her deal with the complex emotions and stresses such a position creates. Yet she has empathy. She has compassion towards him and others with special needs.
Just imagine a world were people had a similar understanding of the differences amongst us and this knowledge spread a Meg-style love and tolerance. A world were we naturally, instinctively include and provide support for those with differences, rather than avoiding them and putting them back on the shelf.
Just imagine…
Alex, from Bully, touched my heart.
And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Elie Wiesel from Night
I went to see the movie Bully last night. I left more glad than ever that I am telling our story. Glad that I am not being quiet. I am here to say I have worked with good school administrators. They care about kids and are motivated to do whatever it takes to make sure the kids in their schools are receiving the best services possible and I am so very grateful for their efforts. And unfortunately I am here to also say I have worked with administrators that aren’t good at their jobs. I have wondered if they cared. It’s so hard to imagine people not caring. But their actions, and inactions, were stunning and begged me to ask, “Do they care?”
I know what it is like to sit across from a teacher, a principal, a special education director and dump out your heart, show them psychological evaluations and share the most private of details of your child’s life and then look in their eyes and see nothing has registered with them. It’s like they can’t, or maybe won’t, comprehend the words I had spoken.
My son needs your help.
My son dreads coming to school.
My son was so upset he wet himself and you sent home on the school bus in his wet clothes.
My son hit the kid because that kid continually calls him names and he knows no other way to protect himself and knows you have done nothing to stop it.
I might sound like a broken record with all of this, but I will go on, because I know what was shown in Bully does happen.
Because it happened to us.
And thank God my son was one of the lucky ones.
We sued the school system to get him help.
There are some kids who haven’t been so lucky and they paid with their lives.
So I will go on telling our story and encouraging others to speak up and act out if they too find themselves in a situation where their child is in danger.
I will also keep saying if you need help, if you need someone to listen, I am here, you have a friend, and you are not alone.
Our boat sank Saturday. It was an awful feeling as I stood, unable to do anything but watch from the dock as Neal was frantically trying to bail out the water faster than it was pouring over the transom. The bilge pump wouldn’t work, and within a minute, despite his efforts, the boat was underwater and he was swimming. As the day went on I thought about how we can’t always control our situation but we can always control how we feel about our situation. It can be hard to be positive when your boat is sunk or your kid is struggling. Then I remembered it’s Memorial Day, and this post I wrote about boats and attitudes…
Originally posted September 2011
“ I wonder.” It’s one of my favorite thoughts. I get excited at “I wonder.” The walls in which I live tremble when I say, “I wonder” for I have taken an entire house down to the studs and rebuilt it fueled with those two words. Today though it is not architectural renovation on my mind but rather emotional archeology.
It’s pouring down rain. I just listened to the weather at the airport. The wind is gusting to 25 knots and the ceiling is broken at 700 feet. The current conditions are one more connection to what has been on my mind for days.
It started with a song line as it so often does. Led Zeppelin. Stairway to Heaven. When John Bonham starts on the drums I know for sure I want to come back next life as a drummer in a rock band. Combined with Jimmy Page on the guitar the music is filled with energy and optimism.
While listening to it I heard the words, “Yes, there are two paths you can go by,” and my thoughts took me back to New Orleans and a visit to the National WWII Museum. I saw again the images of soldiers, young men no older than my own son. The GI’s occupying my mind’s eye were on ships, in the English Channel, June 4-5, 1944, in weather very much like today. They were waiting and wondering what would happen next.
For they were part of the massive armada headed to the beaches of Normandy to face the German army and very possibly their death. In his book D-Day, Stephen Ambrose wrote how General Eisenhower described the soldiers’ situation. “Those people in the ships were in cages, you might say. You couldn’t call them anything else. They were fenced in.”
“There’s still time to change the road you’re on.” The song continued and mixed with the images of the men, yet the two were incongruous. They were doing battle.
How could these men possibly change the road they were on? They were caged, they had no choices.
I started wondering if there are times in life when we can’t change the road we’re on. Was Robert Plant wrong when he wrote those words and I was silly for liking them?
As I wondered and read accounts from the men who experienced D-Day, I realized most paths are not concrete but actually abstractions and so “in the long run” we can always change the road we are on by choosing how we see our situation.
For even while encaged in the brutality of war men such as those aboard the USS Bayfield tried to be encased in the belief that good would come from their inevitable sacrifices.
“During the cruise across,” Lt. John Robert Lewis said, “we all assembled on the deck and sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” This was a very sobering time to sing the words, ‘As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”
What a powerful image and equally powerful is the lesson that Robert Plant was right about there always being two paths and their existence means we always have the freedom of choice. It’s when we forget we have this freedom, which we often do, that we put ourselves in cages of our own creation.
Discovered also on this “I wonder” journey was a different kind of reminder of how and what we forget. According to the National Council for History Education, in the late 1990’s 40 percent of graduating high school seniors thought the US fought WITH the Germans and AGAINST the Russians in WWII.
If we imprison ourselves when we forget we have choices, what will happen when we forget we have history? How will our future leaders, young people who don’t know basic facts make solid choices regarding the future of our country, when their judgment has no historical grounding? Are the lessons learned from our past becoming lessons lost?
“I wonder” is a journey and at its threshold the final destination is unknown. Therein lies the fun.
Occasionally I wish to have a post that is dedicated to the act of remembering. The idea is to highlight a person, an event, an invention that has contributed to what we know, experience and maybe even take for granted today. I do this in the memory of Bill Bailey, a gentleman I met in Studs Terkel’s The Good War, who affected me when he said,
“I still think we’re all part of somethin’, call it the history of the human race, if you want to. I feel that if some guy ten years from now has got some halfway decent conditions, I wanna feel that I helped in some small way to make it possible for him to enjoy them conditions. I mean, that’s the name of the game. I just want somebody to say, ‘Them poor son-of-a-bitches, they musta taken a beating back in the old days. We don’t know all the names, but glory to them, or somethin’ like that.’ “
I hope you will enjoy reading these “Bill Bailey” posts as much as I know I will enjoy putting them together. Please share any ideas and thoughts. I would like the feedback!
Footnote:
“After lunch, Eisenhower sat at his portable table and scrawled by hand a press release on a pad of paper, to be used if necessary. “Our landings… have failed,” he began, “and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to this attempt it is mine alone.” Stephen Ambrose
Saying we always have the ability to choose our course does not imply that exercising choice is always easy. But to make a choice, take action and then willingly accept the consequences of that choice without passing blame or making excuses is strong and courageous living.
I also enjoyed discovering Eisenhower led Operation Overlord and Robert Plant wrote Stairway to Heaven in English country houses just 31 miles apart.
