On CNN's "The Situation Room" they had a segment the other day about single women as a voting demographic. There are 37 million of us in the United States, and just barely half of us voted in 2004 Presidential Election. In the report, they called us "Sex and the City voters"--single women who attempt to emulate the glamorous lifestyle of Carrie Bradshaw through, in one way, being apathetic on the first Tuesday of November.
They interviewed a young women from close to where I grew up in Pennsylvania who said that there were issues that she cared about, but that she didn't vote because she didn't have time and she didn't feel like her vote made a difference.
In one sense, this drives me crazy because she's in Pennsylvania, where one of the tightest senate races is taking place and where (hopefully) young single women will contribute to a victory over Rick Santorum (the Republican incumbent who since 2000 has voted the same as George W. between 95% and 100% of the time). The race is close enough that for her to say her vote doesn't count is ludicrous, and merely proves that many girls in the country don't actually know what they're voting for and actively practice the ignorance and aloofness that unfortunately tends to come with apathy.
Now, don't get me wrong--I'm not trying to attack other females in my generation, nor am I suggesting that I'm any better. But that report scared me; it made me want to shake the millions of "single women" who won't go to the polls next Tuesday until they tune in and realize that all the political issues they complain about can be fixed FIRST by at least voting--at least taking part in the system that's making choices that effect them everyday.
I know a lot of people say that part of the joys of living in a free country is the freedom to NOT vote, and I agree. But the freedom not to vote is not an excuse for ignorance, nor is it meaningful or justifiable if one doesn't know exactly what it is that she's NOT voting for.
I've been on a mission as of late, trying to figure out why it is that we just don't care--what exactly drives such a large number of young women to shut out the news and political campaigns that are raging all around us? I have not found an answer, although I desperately search for one. Beyond our admiration for Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte (who I do love, by the way), what is it that makes us feel comfortable simply not knowing? How can young women, who have more education and opportunity now than they ever have before, permit themselves to live in the dark?
Part of the reason I don't understand is because I've never lived like that. I almost had a panic attack 3 weeks ago when I thought it was too late to apply for my absentee ballot. Enough said.
But when I signed that absentee ballot, I felt good. No, I don't love either senator whose running (which is the race that's most important to me), but by signing that ballot and sealing it, I then felt as if I had done my part, however small. Because at least I was 1 in the 37 million others like me who DID decide to vote and chose to be conscious. I used my voice, however small, to make a simple, seemingly meaningless contribution. But at least I used it, right? My voice, my feelings, my right and my mind. And that's all any of us have at the end of the day anyway, isn't it? One voice that can shout as loudly or as mutely as we each decide.
How do you quantify genocide?
Do you tell the most gruesome stories you can find? Do you tell them about raping women in front of their dying husbands and sons? Throwing children into the air and shooting them as they fall into fires? Do you tell about the torture that happens as young and old men are slowly put to death? About the people waiting on the edge of town listening to gunshots in the distance and wondering who is dead and what is coming? Do you tell about women who choose to get raped as they cultivate food for their families because by doing so, they are saving their husband’s and son’s lives?
Do you tell these things when you describe a genocide? About the 1 in 400,000? About the 1 in 2.5 million? Or do you speak broadly, and explain the vastness of a “refugee camp” which is a nice way of saying a “concentration camp?” Do you talk about bombs that drop from the sky and displace and kill villages of 500? About dirty water from dead bodies that makes villages sick and unlivable? About orphans and starving children? Do you tell of the masses fleeing through a country that’s supposed to be home but has turned into a bloody enemy? Or do you remind them of the suffering of the individual at the hands of that same foe?
In one way, you show the scope, the breadth of the disaster and the many people they could help. In the other, they feel immense empathy for that one woman, that one child, that one father.
What we can’t do is do both. We cannot show the experience of each of 400,000. We cannot explain the uncertain, unhealthy routine of 2.5 million. We must choose one or the other. Otherwise, it is overwhelming and impossible to understand. It is like saying to people that millions of Jews died in the Nazi death camps. They don’t know what that means. They have no idea what that means.
But what are we losing by choosing one or the other? What are we losing when we can’t understand every individual experience?
How do you quantify a genocide?
There's going to be a segment on Darfur on Sixty Minutes (CBS) tonight at 7:00. There is a brief video preview
here. It looks like it might be a decent show, and as Nick Kristof of the New York Times reminded us in his blog, CBS has done a really horrible job until now covering the conflict in Darfur.
Additionally, the conflict there is worsening--it has spread into other countries (like Chad) and the Sudanese government is working hard to kick out all the aid that's in the region that's helping the millions of displaced people living in refugee camps.
I don't know how good this report will be tonight, but at least its not ignoring the problem. Take a look if you have time.
It doesn't rain in Lima. Limenos think it does, but it doesn't.
Most of them have never seen snow, unless they've had the opportunity to leave the city and have seen the snow-capped mountains in the distance. They know they haven't seen snow. They have never touched or played in snow. They don't really understand its wetness and coldness. They don't even understand cold. But they know all these things, they will tell you they don't know, they will ask you about it.
But they think they know what rain is. They don't realize that they don't. My host mother in Lima used to announce when it was "raining" when she would come home to eat dinner with us. She would announce it like we in the United States would announce a hurricaine or blizzard. "Esta LLUVIENDO!" So we would bundle up and get ready for the monsoon weather that was apparently outside.
But when it rains in Lima, that's not what it's like. When it rains in Lima, it feels the same as always: the air dense and heavy, the sky fuzzy and muted, completely colorless and overbearingly low. The only difference is that, when it's raining, the usual wetness in the air feels alittle cooler, a little more misty and palpable. But nothing falls from the sky. Nothing gets wet. No umbrellas are necessary. No puddles can be accidentally stepped in.
No, in Lima, there is not rain. There is fog and there is humidity. There is mist, maybe, but not rain. Not drizzle, not "spit." But no one realizes it except those who come from the outside.
I had a morning utilizing Facebook as a tool for grassroots organizing. I was trying to get the word out that my boss, Gloria Feldt (past president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America), had an
Op Ed in the New York Times today.
It started with a minor panic attack. I got up at 10AM with an email from 8:30AM from Gloria with a link to the article and a "please get the word out about this" request. The immediate feeling that I would fail consumed me--how was I supposed to start an entire campaign around this article in two hours? How do I get people to care?
My roommate was the one who gave me some ideas about how to use Facebook, and by 12:30 I felt like I'd spread the article through a network of my peers fairly effectively. About Facebook, my roommate said, "It's such a great organizing tool," and he questioned why people don't use it more often that way.
I question that too; and after my possible success today, I wonder how my generation can be so lazy in taking positive advantage of this unprecedented network of peers. Or rather, I want to look at the lack of action critically, but I can't.
I think my feeling of anxiety when I woke up this morning is closely linked to the feeling of helplessness that people feel when they read stories in the newspaper about Darfur, poverty or human rights violations. It's the same feeling they have when they look at an upcoming election and choose apathy instead of voting for the better of two evils. It's paralysis; it's a sense that maybe it would be easier to pretend it doesn't exist instead of contemplating sorting out the overwhelming mess.
So I have sympathy for that feeling, and for the failure of modern Americans to take initiative, but I don't think it's acceptable. I think that we need to learn to get over that feeling. We need to learn to panic, but then use that energy to dive in, even if we're going to drown. I think that we need to learn to accept baby steps: we need to be okay with the idea that we might extend ourselves and make almost no difference at all, but that even the most basic action can make an impact.
I wish that we would have the courage to do this more often, and especially that my peers would care so deeply about something so as to act on it en mass and encourage its change. I wish our passion matched the capabilities of the tools we have to create this change. And finally, I wish that we would step up to prove that we have that capability ourselves, just like the revolutionary generations before us to demanded the change that they eventually got. Like Margaret Sanger, who
Gloria talks about, just to name one.
I was finally able to look at my pictures of the campo the other day. The urge to see them came randomly: perhaps it was because I had just gotten home from seeing my friends from Peru, perhaps I was lonely, perhaps I just wanted to feel that feeling again. I hadn't ever looked at the pictures except on my camera's screen months ago. From Ayacucho, I had gone to the campo and then taken the memory card straight to a store, had them put on CD and then deleted.
I could never bring myself to look at them. That CD, with the little girl of the future and her life in a different reality haunted me: things or people would drive me crazy in New York and then I would remember them, her, and I would want to cry. And I would feel small and in my place.
But when I opened the CD, I felt warm. I had forgotten how much color there was there, how real the people are. I hadn't realized that the memories I preserved in my mind were equal to those caught on film, to those that actually exist.
I was brought back there, more so than I ever thought I could be: to the little girl, to the pride that masked the poverty. And I remember how little sense it made there too, realized that life here can go on because in that other dimension, it's miraculously continuing as well. The little girl of the future is still waiting for her future, but she is waiting, she has not ceased to exist.
I keep returning to those pictures, especially in my mind. Keep looking back, as though if I turn away for too long, they will suddenly disappear. I find myself no longer haunted, but paranoid now. Paranoid that they will soon become obsolete; and then what will I be if I have no other reality running parallel to my own?
I have a friend who's in Lancaster, PA. She's working on the story that broke on Monday. It's probably the only story that's ever come out of Lancaster, PA and made it all the way to New York City and national news stations. But the people there won't even be able to watch their 15 minutes go by.
Amish people don't believe in technological advances like we do in New York. They don't have cars or computers, Televisions or cells. They don't ride in planes or go on long trips.
The Amish used to come to my little town in Pennsylvania and sell rotisserie chickens that slowly rotated around a skewer in an oven behind a counter cooking all day. When I was a kid, we would sometimes walk into town and go to the Farmers Market where they worked and buy those chickens. My parents were friendly with the Amish man who owned the little counter, and they paid him to build a swing set and tree house for me and my brother. It's still in my backyard today--the wooden tree house with the ladder and the slide that hasn't been used for years but that we still love.
Amish people also dress differently. They have traditional outfits that they wear: solid, dark pants, suspenders and white shirts for the men; long, solid colored dresses for the women. The men grow their beards long and they wear hats. The women always have their hair up on a low bun with a cloth bonnet on their heads.
When I was younger, I remember watching the Amish children who would come to the Farmers Market and work with their parents. Sometimes the little girls would actually sell the chickens and work the cash register. I remember them being so pretty and untouchable--they were at my eye level, at my age, but completely separated from me. I could never have been friends with an Amish child, but when I would see a little girl, I would understand that she was still like me, and the little boys like my brother. If I had had a dress like that, I could have been her. I remember thinking that they looked just so cute in those dresses.
I've been thinking about those little girls a lot the past few days. How smart and hard-working they were; how adorable and gentle and perfect they seemed to me. Thinking of them is what makes my heart well up into my throat; it terrifies me to think of my 8 year old self in their place now.
My friend is in Lancaster and today she left me a message on my voicemail. She was sitting on a cinderblock watching a horse-and-buggy "klop" by. Yesterday, she said, all the bookers and newscasters from New York were there. Representatives from ABC, NBC, CBS, all standing amongst the grassy fields in Pennsylvania watching a school house where the un-explainable happened. They came in SUVs and planes and helicopters, but it smelled like manure and the beginning of Fall.
That was the paradox of yesterday. And today it seems almost as absurd as the event that brought them there in the first place.
On the way home from Macchu Pichu, he told me I would become the condor.
He had had a crush on me for days, because he could tell that's what I'd end up as. He had told the bus driver on the bus in Quechua so that none of us could understand. I knew that he had been watching me. I don't remember how I understood that, I don't remember a moment when that idea came to conscious; but when he told me that he'd been falling for me, I knew I had already known.
When he had gotten on the train that evening, and saw who he was sitting with, he had panicked, he later told me. I, eating my disgusting hamburguesa con queso, had intimidated him to the point where he had gotten up and headed for the door almost immediately: I had thought he was taking care of some last minute specifics before we left, he had actually gone to the bathroom and splashed water on his face to calm down.
He told me about the condor with that Andean-accent that I still couldn't grasp, even after four weeks immersed in it. He told me stories about other lovers, being a tour guide, how he wanted to go to Sweden-- and he told me about the condor. He told me how we're all on Earth as pumas, and then one day we become the condor or we become the serpiente. As the serpiente, you must stay with the earth; as the condor, you may fly beyond it. For the Incans, this trilogy was not about heaven and hell--it was about the strength of spirit, something that one could control and enhance, not a condemnation either way.
But I was going to be a condor, he told me. He could tell that my spirit was strong enough.
I remember the red shirt. He wore it the day when we came back to the residencia and surprised them. I remember the look on his face when we walked through the door: the black shorts, the genuine smile, the red shirt.
He told me that that surprise was the best he had gotten in a long time. I know he was telling the truth, they were all telling the truth. They were all overwhelmed with happiness--when they opened the door and couldn't believe we were there, when we walked into the living room and they realized that the voices they heard in the hallway were really ours. And that red shirt, and that smile, and that hand that just rested there on my knee so naturally, and that beautiful spanish accent that would have given me anything for that simple surprise.
I took it for granted that day, during all those days. I took for granted the fact that he cared so deeply, that I myself could be such wonderful gift. I took for granted the night a week prior when he had taken us all out to dinner so that he could spend more time with me. I took for granted the dancing-- the fact that he taught me how to salsa, pushed my hips from side to side, molded me into being more latin--just how I wanted to be. And I took for granted that red shirt and the smile that I can now remember so vividly that went with it.
I see him in pictures now, with that red shirt. It hurts suddenly, seeing it, remembering what used to go with it. It hurts to think that I didn't take that more seriously, that I only miss it in the aftermath, once I've already ruined what was so very simple to hold onto. And I dream of going back to that, to that ease, to that unreasonable lust. I realize that is impossible, but I wish it wasn't. I wish I could hold onto that smile, that I could create it again, and see it in pictures just as sweet as it was that day.
