I am not bummed out that the United States is out of the World Cup. No, on the contrary, I smiled when I got the news. The super-power got beaten by a third world country in the poorest continent in the world.
I do not wish to sound anti-American here, because I am not. But for me, the World Cup has not been about national pride, because Americans have very little of that when it comes to soccer. The World Cup is no Olympics that dominates our TV screens—the World Cup is only being broadcast in the United States on ESPN 2 and on Spanish-language stations. The bars in New York are full of fans, but they are wearing jerseys from every country in the world, speaking an array of languages and singing British soccer anthems at the top of their lungs. I’d like to go to Texas or Alabama, or even West Chester, and see how many people are watching it in the bars there. See how many people who even own cable have the dial turned to ESPN 2. (Not ESPN 1, but ESPN 2—ESPN 1 was showing competitive bowling yesterday during the afternoon World Cup game.)
Since I went to the bars on the fateful day 2 weeks ago and got interested in the World Cup, what’s been a bummer for me is realizing how few Americans really care about it. It’s exhilarating to watch people from
other places—England, Germany, even my next door neighbor from Costa Rica—who are enthusiastically addicted to the games. The World Cup holds so much significance for every other country in the world, whether it’s a country who has a team or whose team is still struggling to qualify. I wish we Americans could get behind something like that, a sport with international importance that brings true joy and unity to a country. Unfortunately, I see more and more that we cannot, or maybe we’re just unwilling to do so.
And then people get bummed when we lose. Our American pride is injured because we’re not the best. We’re the most powerful country in the world and we cannot even win the World Cup, we can’t even come close. The loss today genuinely saddened many people, and it should. The whole country should be devastated, as any country would be, but we are not.
And that is why I so appreciate the team that beat us—Ghana, who has struggled for so long to qualify for the World Cup. A country who is just as obsessed with the sport as any other, and whose dedication to its players and the true nationalism it represents is something that we, as Americans, lack horribly. Beyond that, being beaten by an African country is so symbolic painted against the history of hundreds of years of American racism and slavery. It’s a triumph of true equality, a sign that we can all compete equally, and even the underdog can win. And finally, I hope that this loss serves to humble Americans. I hope that it helps us turn our noses down a little bit and climb off our high horse of superiority. I hope that people take it with a slap in the face, feel humbled and understand that we all live on one big flat ground, and that the United States is not situated on an ivory tower that can’t be brought down.
I can hope for these things, but I will not hold my breath. Perhaps if the World Cup meant more to us, these wishes would come true. But since it carries so little meaning for so many people, I believe today’s loss will be forgotten quickly and with little lost on the way. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bars in Texas weren’t even broadcasting that game today, and besides, the people in Accra will celebrate a lot better than we ever could.
My dad was a marathon runner and used to run all the time. My first plane ride was as an infant, going to Boston with my parents so my dad could run the Boston Marathon. I cried the whole way. The first and only race I remember being at was in Philadelphia. I don't remember how old I was, but I know I was walking and I was short enough that a runner dumped his cup of water on my head and didn't notice that I was below. I cried then too.
In all the pictures from when I was young, my dad is wearing his running t-shirts: on the beach in Cape May or Eagles Mere, running in short races on vacation that my brother and I used to do with our friends also. They hold dates like 1980, 1979, 1987. My favorite has the year I was born, 1984.
I don't know when, but after a couple years my dad, or maybe my mom, put all those shirts in a huge box and left them in the attic. I don't remember ever noticing that my dad stopped wearing them. Maybe he didn't even stop, he just had so many shirts that he had to leave some in the attic. Maybe he abandoned the shirts that were all too worn out, they were old and soft and even the colored ones had become see-through with age.
All I know is that when my brother and I got to them, my dad's shirts were amazing enough for us to fight over. I remember one day a couple years before my dad died when my brother and I were in the attic (I have no idea why) and we stumbled upon the big box of running shirts. Between the two of us, we divied them up and proceeded to wear them all the time. I was in middle school at the time, or else early high school, and my new soft, vintage-looking t-shirts became the most admired piece of clothing that I owned. All my friends loved my running t-shirts; they all asked to rummage through the mysterious box in my attic. I always said no: those were my dad's shirts, and the ones he didn't want were mine and my brother's.
In the years since our attic find, my brother and I have started to outgrow the shirts just like my dad did. My brother is larger than my father ever was, and so bulges out of the shirts and causes the tiny holes to stretch and tear more. And I've retired the more shelpy look for work and internship-appropriate attire. But the shirts are still in my drawer. Somehow over the years the numbers of them have dropped, but my favorites are still there: the one I found tonight is for the New York City marathon and has the World Trade Towers set against the NYC skyline. It reads 1984.
I've started wearing these t-shirts again now that I've begun running. I wear them more because they are there than anything else, b utmaybe also because of their symbolism. When I wear them I think of my dad and the way that he began running and trained for years and years for all those runs. I run myself and often times believe that I could never do it, the body that he left me is incapable or my discipline is just not strict enough. Sometimes I truly believe in that inadequacy, and other times I just push beyond it. Afterall, you don't get anywhere crying at races.
It can be dangerous to wear a skirt in New York City.
A male friend of mine was recently very shocked to find this out on a walk with myself and another female. “Yeah!” we told him. “There are comments from men all the time. No matter what you’re wearing or what you look like: always men saying rude things.”
His response was a genuine, “Really?!?!”
It’s always surprising to me when men don’t realize what women go through as they walk through the streets of the city. Not that they should realize: it doesn’t happen to them and it almost never happens to a woman who is walking with a man. It’s really only the woman trudging blocks through the city, independent and without protection, who feels the eyes or hears the dirty comments behind them. And it’s only that woman who is affected: it’s only her who is the prey.
For those of you who aren’t that woman, I will tell you from shared personal experience that some men in New York have an endless storage of explicit remarks intended for females of all shapes, sizes, colors and attire walking alone, and those comments come in all different forms: from cars, from across the street, from right beside her in her ear, from the subway, walking in the opposite direction, or even in collective form—like from the workmen near my work who sit in a row against the buildings and all turn their heads and make comments under their breath to every woman who walks by.
What I think many men, including my friends, don’t realize is how very poisonous and sexually violating such commentary on the street is—how severely it can destroy a leisurely walk and leave a women feeling truly invaded and dirty.
Perhaps this sounds dramatic, but it’s not. From talking to my female counterparts, I’ve learned that we all go through it, we all feel severely degraded by it and we all make clothing choices based on the assumption that if we wear a certain type of outfit (any type of skirt or dress, shorts above the knee, tank tops, etc), we’ll get even more comments than usual. Men have a hard time understanding this, not because they don’t care or are unsympathetic, but because they just don’t have anything with which to compare it.
Today I got to thinking about how aggressively I was striding down the street on the way to work. No, not strutting, but striding: using my full concentration to keep my hips still, my face forward, my eyes dead in my head and not darting around, consciously resisting the urge to turn in response to any noise, calls, even car honks that might result in eye contact with hissing predator. And I walked fast.
But behind my dead eyes, I was thinking. I was thinking about the fact that people think New Yorkers are such jerks. New York has a reputation for coldness: people who walk along without eye contact or kindness, who push and shove in a world where we’re each just a nameless, hollow face. I realize I am one of those (dare I say “bitchy?”) women who gives New York that reputation. But I feel I have no other choice. Do any of us women here have any other choice?
New York is home to some of the smartest, most beautiful and stylish, most powerful and educated women in the world. And at the same time it’s the collision point of classes, races, cultural backgrounds and international social standards. On these streets we see combinations of people that will never match, yet they must share the same sidewalk everyday.
I believe that the catcalling and jeering that women get on the streets of New York with such abnormal regularity is the manifestation of a power struggle in an ecosystem where each individual is competing for every aspect of survival. By whistling and degrading, some men have found a fantastic way to compete against the woman who they believe—either accidentally or purposely—is using her femininity to the same ends. It seems almost like a sexual game, a mating ritual, but one into which women involuntarily enter just by living in this city, and which these men start in order to equalize a threat or feeling of inadequacy.
If this is true, my feminist side would love to say that the remarks on the street have no bearing, and are in fact a poor method of competition because they are immediately forgotten. But I cannot. The feeling alone of guardedness and anger that must be exerted to avoid such degrading comments on the street is enough to impact a woman’s energy and her feeling of self-worth. Her personal style, her manner of behavior and walking, even her possible desire to make eye contact on the street or enjoy her personal surroundings or look people in the eye is stifled by those seemingly meaningless comments.
So maybe women are perpetuating the bad New York City reputation of coldness in order to preserve their own self-worth. I know I am.
Taking the LSATs and applying to law school was a recent decision. It's an idea that I've been playing with ever since I realized that my father's warnings against it were not a reason for me to disregard law as a possible career. After my freshman year of college, I got a job in Philadelphia working as an office assistant at my father's former law firm. I got all the work I needed to done in the first week and proceeded to make friends around the office, distract people, drink a lot of coffee and take 2 hours lunches everyday. The summer ended, and my boredom had determined that law was really out of the question.
Until recently. A year later and a year ago (meaning last summer), I worked with two very dear friends who were taking the LSAT in October and studying during work hours because, like I had found a year before at the law firm, there was nothing better to do. I was very inspired by them, specifically the friend who is now on her way to an amazing law career this fall. Maybe it was them, maybe it was my dad, maybe it was just something in me, but I took a constitutional law class this semester, and after the first class, I had decided for sure this time, to become a lawyer.
A lot of people, since I made and announced this decision, have asked me what I'm going to do with law. What I'm going to study, what I'm going to practice, where I want to go for school. Others have looked dismayed: I'm so gung-ho about human rights and teaching and international politics and lobbying and all that, what will I do with a law degree? What about my writing? Will I just be a sell-out and make lots of money and grow old early from anxiety and work ridiculous hours??
My answer to that is that I hope I won't. My answer is that I want to do it all: I want to be a lawyer and actively practice law, specifically in court, and I want to keep writing freelance work for magazines and newspapers, and I want to always stand up for causes in which I believe and for people whom I believe deserve more than what they are getting.
But I always feel stupid answering those questions in that way. I feel like I'm describing an impossible dream. When I say that and write that, I can feel my eyes growing bigger than my stomach, I can see a little me reaching for something I can never grasp and ending up with nothing instead of with everything.
I'm writing this because today I was inspired. Below is a link to a very very long article, but I suggest that you read the whole thing when you have time. It's written by a lawyer, professor, traveler and of course, a journalist, who before today I didn't know about and at the end of the day, I still don't know much about. But from the little I know, I understand that my dream is difficult and complex and nearly impossible, but nowhere near beyond the realm of possibility.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040830fa_fact1This woman, Samantha Power, writes in this award-winning article about Darfur, Sudan. She gives what I think is a very fair, well-researched and well-written account of a genocide that seems overwhelmingly abstract to many of us. Read it, enjoy it, think about it, let me know what you think and realize that we can find other people living our own ideals everyday: so there is no excuse why we shouldn't reach for them.
I really loved the combination of Opinion and Editorials in today's New York Times. The subtle way that they're twisted together sends a really profound message about the outrageousness of our society.
The first one is the
Editorial on the rate of HIV/AIDS and the new research that has recently come out as the disease turns 25. Countries around the world were supposed to be reporting to the United Nations about how they've succeeded in meeting their goals and drafting a new action plan.
The best part reads as follows:
"The word "condom" has also gone missing [from the draft]. Depressingly, nations have been debating whether they can make any reference at all to 'empowering girls' or 'vulnerable populations,' itself a euphemism for sex workers, drug injectors and gay men. Tellingly, the United States has insisted on taking out all references to 'evidence-based prevention strategies' — strategies scientifically proven to work. Instead, Washington wants to use the phrase 'evidence-informed prevention strategies.'"
Sometimes when I tell people that abstinence only education programs lie, they don't believe me. But it's true. They either lie, or they fail to provide critical information because of a conservative-Christian moral standard surrounding the ever taboo and dirty subject of sex. Finally, now, we're seeing that such an absense of education and resources does take a real toll: it allows AIDS to spread to populations that are the most at-risk: the whores, the druggies and the queers. You know how it goes, those nasty people ought to find
God so that they don't have sex or do drugs and therefore don't contract the disease. Happy Birthday AIDS.
And then there was
Bob Herbert's Article that began with the story of Kika Cerpa who had sex with 19 men the first night of her forced prostitution career and held her dying friend in her arms after the girl was shot when she refused to have sex with a client. Herbert notes an interesting new piece of information that I didn't know until this morning: "It may seem peculiar, but there is no law against sex trafficking in the state of New York — or most other states, for that matter."
I love the contradiction...or rather, I hate it. I've never understood why sex is so stigmatized here. It's stigmatized to the point that the government withholds pertinent, scientific-based information from prostitutes, many of whom are repeatedly raped and abused, never picked that career and who aren't even protected by the law. In other words, this country allows women and children to be trafficked in for sex and then screws them all over again by giving them INCORRECT INFORMATION about how to protect themselves correctly and by leaving laws against trafficking off the books.
And this isn't even about prostitution, it's about sex and our government. This is about the fact that there's a general sentiment in this country that sex is always bad, sex should always be private and that sex is dirty. We've seen this time and again: in today's world the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto can shoot up all of San Andreas, but when he goes behind some closed doors, in the password-protected world of video games, to get it on, he creates a public outcry. The sad part is that the world of Grand Theft Auto is not so different from our own.
We live in a world now where apparently people shouldn't be having sex: it's such a hideous act that those who do, prostitutes and gays, don't even deserve the education to protect themselves from AIDS. In other words, they deserve to die. So then in that view, perhaps all of us deserve to die. Perhaps none of us deserve education about how to use a condom or how to get tested for HIV, because none of us should be doing anything that would put us at risk anyway. And so perhaps we're all on our own-- the Mexican girl who was trafficked in for sex and repeatedly raped, the horribly impoverished family in South Africa, the heroin addict on my street corner, me and you.
Is that what they're telling us? That each one of us deserves to die? Each one of us deserves their lies? That each one of us deserves AIDS? Is sex really
that gross??
