From The Privilege of Positivity by John Pavlovitz
If being positive, means to not call out abject racism,
if it means, not to advocate for migrant families in cages,
if it means, to silently ignore human rights atrocities,
if it means, allowing my LGBTQ friends to have their rights eroded,
if it means, to make peace with bigotry in the highest levels of our Government...
if it means, to avoid unpleasant conversations about the things that burden my heart because they make other people uncomfortable—then I guess I won’t be positive today.
Being positive is a privilege.
If you are living a life where you will post nothing but kitten videos and photos of your food on social media to that you don't have to have anything "negative" in your life these days, you are privileged. If you aren't having to worry about coming home to find our spouse gone - deported - or an eviction notice that you know is because your landlord found out you're gay, if you have never had to worry that your son, husband or brother will die in police custody or during a traffic stop, if no creditors are calling you, if you haven't spent hours on the phone and in offices fighting for access to health care, you are privileged.
I am privileged in a million ways. But I'm still thinking about, and talking about, kids in cages. Oh, and yes, those ARE concentration camps - every reference to the Nazi camps BEFORE the world knew they were death camps is "concentration camps." They are referenced in Casablanca and joked about in To Be Or Not To Be - two movies made before the world realized they were so much more than just concentration camps.
Wonder what we're going to realize as time goes on and the truth emerges...
I'm not saying post the kitten videos. I like the kitten videos. But if you get to take a break and "stay positive", at least recognize your privilege.
Sunday, July 14, 2019
Sunday, July 7, 2019
Oregon called & said "No, thanks."
When I moved back to the USA, I was determined to make a home out of wherever it was I chose to live, to fully integrate myself as a returned citizen after 10 years abroad.
I had a plan on how to do it. And I was methodical and diligent and strategic. And I thought I was doing great. In pursuit of fully investing in this community, in order to call it "mine":
And, yet, at a face-to-face job interview in June - only the second face-to-face interview I've had for a job since moving back to the USA - I was asked, incredulously, why I was applying for a local government job because, after all, I wasn't really a part of the community. It was the moment when I knew that I wasn't getting the job.
Outside of the city of Portland, the state of Oregon is one of those places that, if you weren't born here, or somewhere else in the Pacific Northwest, your presence here is looked at with skepticism. If you move here from another part of the USA - particularly, God forbid, from California - then the only acceptable reason for you to move here is that you, or your spouse, got a job at Intel or Nike or that you had to take care of your parents or in-laws that still live here. I expected Texas to treat outsiders this way, but in the more than four years I lived in Texas, I felt welcomed, even when I was well outside of Austin. Were it not for the annual six months of unbearable heat, I would have moved back to Austin when I left Germany.
I have lived in Oregon longer than I lived in Germany. And for 10 years, pretty much every time I have told someone in Oregon that I moved here from Germany, they have asked, incredulously, "Why?!" The question is loaded with all kinds of inference, including:
Why would you leave Europe?
Why would you give up your career?
Why would you choose here and not New York or Washington DC or San Francisco?
This area has NOTHING to offer YOU.
Among the MANY phrases I would love to never, ever hear again is this one:
Why did you move here?
It’s not said as a put down of the place where I live, as in Why would you move to this place, which is really boring. It’s said as a put down of me, as in If you have really done all this international work and international travel, why did you move to Oregon, to this place where I was born/chose to live? It’s said with snark, with incredulity, and often, with skepticism. The implication is that I must be lying about my background, or be hiding out because I screwed up somewhere else.
The backlash in Oregon regarding newcomers is exhausting. Oregonians make it clear that if you aren't born here, you will always be an outsider. How hostile can it be here for people not from here? Here's but one example of the kinds of things posted to the community group for the city where I live in the PDX metro area:
What we need is NO MORE people here!!! I know I sound like a broken record but the city leaders of this town just dont care if ths town stays small and manageable or not. Way too much new housing. This is all going to come back and bite everyone in the hiney with everyone having their hand out for more money for schools, electricity, transit, grocery stores and on and on. It's done and it's just going to get worse now. It all feels so defeating. Just sad
These comments are posted ALL the time. And if I'm feeling unwelcomed, I can't imagine how horrible it is for the many Latino immigrants all around me.
Contrary to popular belief, I cannot live anywhere I want to in the world. I cannot live in Scotland, for instance, because I am not a citizen of the United Kingdom. And I can't work in any language other than English, which negates any chance of me ever working in Europe unless some international agency recruits me. And I don’t want to live in a big city - New York or Washington DC or San Francisco - because, while I have loved living in big cities when I was younger, and while I love visiting them, I’m older now and my tastes and lifestyle has changed. I want to have a garden, I want to walk in neighborhoods that have trees, I want to sit in my backyard and feel somewhat isolated, I want to walk to neighborhood festivals… to do that in a residential neighborhood in Portland would require a salary of about half a million a year, and in San Francisco… I’d have to win big in the lottery.
Why is it weird that I’ve chosen a small town in Oregon? I have to live somewhere. Why not Oregon? Why not this little town of less than 30,000 people?
And why can't someone live in a small town and also care about world affairs, travel globally, even work globally? Why can't someone live in a small town and also want to learn other languages and delight in different cultures? Is all of that reserved only for people living in big cities? Really? And why is it strange that someone would try to make a home here, to treat the community as something more than just a place to sleep at night?
I had all sorts of great reasons for choosing to live in the Portland, Oregon area, in addition to the weather: I had heard it was fun and progressive and bicycle-friendly and had great beer and was booming economically. But I knew after just a week that Portland wasn't quite what we'd been told. The first year we were here, I would comment about how taken aback I was at the open drug use and homelessness in downtown and Portlandiers were offended at my comments - "I haven't seen that" and "It's no worse here than anywhere else!" and on and on. I stopped talking about it. And progressive? The Oregon tax system favors the top 1% just like everywhere. The booming businesses here do not support nonprofits financially anywhere near the rates they should, and the salaries offered by these nonprofits are shamefully low - far from living wages. The condition of too many public schools - infrastructure, class sizes, arts offerings - are also shameful, and all these supposedly progressive folks in Portland refuse every bond measure to make things better. You would think an area that prides itself on being progressive would have outstanding public schools and the funding for such. Portlandiers wax poetic about their mass transit system - but as someone who actually takes it regularly, relies on it, I can tell you that I'm one of the few people on the bus with a driver's license, one of the few people taking it out of choice. And bicycle-friendly? That's been the biggest joke of all. No way would I ride a bicycle in downtown Portland. I'm terrified every time I do it here in this small town.
Do I feel cut off living in this small town? Oh, gads, yes. If you live outside the USA, you actually know what is happening globally. In the USA, we’re on a global news blackout. I wish so much we got CNN International. I have to work to stay connected to what's happening outside this country. Some Facebook groups I'm on for humanitarian workers, Twitter and non-USA news outlets are very helpful in that regard. But having that international focus seems to isolate me even more from people around here.
None of my efforts have lead to me feeling a part of anything. None of it has made me feel like I'm making a different in the places where I've lived since moving back here. They haven't even lead to that many friendships (though I'm grateful for the few I have gotten as a result). In fact, it's lead to far more negative comments and experiences than positive ones. Maybe it's just Oregon, but the amount of snarky comments here for anyone trying to do something good, whether they are running for office or volunteer at an event, are overwhelming. There's only one other place I've seen such cutting down of tall poppies: Afghanistan, where women - I guess because they have so little power - will cut other women down like it's the most fun you can possibly have.
I have a specific walking route that I do with my dog on weekdays, and I do that route specifically to avoid people - I just want to think and be alone, especially lately. A local guy that runs a couple of nonprofit initiatives and recruited me to volunteer for such - and I've resigned from them and really don't want to be involved with anymore - saw me walking and stopped his car, pulled over, and said, "I really would like to walk with you and talk with you." And I know I turned white as a sheet. I almost started crying. I said, "No, I'm on my own time right now, I can't talk, maybe next week" and I just walked away. I just felt so... goddamn it, leave me alone! He wasn't being creepy, but it just felt so unbelievably, incredibly intrusive. And I'm like, well, great, where am I supposed to walk now to avoid people, including YOU? I want a t-shirt that says, "Don't talk to me."
I used to be Miss Good Morning! In fact, two former local frenemies made fun of me for being that person, and for how much I missed living in a place where people say "Good morning" and how I was trying to be that person here. They are both native Pacific North Westerners, and they think greeting strangers is stupid and intrusive. They loved to roll my eyes at how much I liked to talk to neighbors, how I stopped frequently during walks to chat people up.
Welp, I guess I'm now a true Pacific North Westerner: I don't want anyone to talk to me. Have you avoided me because I'm such a chatty Cathy? Well, don't worry - those days are over. The only person who still has to put up with that is my husband and my hairdresser.
Months after we bought this house, my first house ever, I tried to read Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, hoping for a similar literary experience to Elmer Gantry, one of my favorite books of all time. But I had to quit early on because the story was WAY too close to what I had experienced in my first four years in Oregon: outsider moves to a town, tries to be friendly, tries to be a part of the community, gets a hostile reception, gets derided for her ideas and her worldliness, becomes isolated and ends up being miserable.
For all I know, we would have been miserable had we moved elsewhere, or had we stayed in Europe. Maybe this is the best we could have it: my husband got employed almost immediately after we moved to Oregon, and in the job he is in now, he is beloved. He's got a career, a beautiful place to ride his motorcycle and he's a volunteer firefighter. I'm so happy for him.
I'm not as nice as I used to be. And I think it's not only because of the November 2016 election - I think it's also because of the Pacific Northwest. I try to remember, and to care about, the potential to do one good thing for someone else today, or this week. I try to remember, and to care about, how much a small act of kindness can mean to strangers, neighbors and friends - opening a door for someone whose hands are full, offering to take a shopping cart back for a woman dealing with a grumpy child, giving up your seat for someone you decide needs it more, not getting upset at a screwup by a shop clerk - I try to remember, and to care that, it can mean whether or not someone goes home and cries as soon as they get home, and for the rest of the night. I try to remember that I do have power, and I can use it for good or for bad.
But trying is getting harder and harder.
Here in Oregon, it feels like all of my work for the last 10 years to invest in this community has been for absolutely nothing. Making this my home has been like a full-time job for me, in lieu of having an actual full-time job. And none of it, ultimately, has mattered.
I'm not from here, and I'm never to forget that. Okay, message has been received: the people of Oregon are just not that into me.
I had a plan on how to do it. And I was methodical and diligent and strategic. And I thought I was doing great. In pursuit of fully investing in this community, in order to call it "mine":
- I bought my first house ever in my life, here in Oregon, in the county where I live now.
- I joined a citizens' government advisory group regarding bicycles and pedestrians in the Oregon town where I lived before this one, and joined another one, regarding public safety, after moving here.
- I participated in a series of citizens advisory meetings by a state agency regarding bicycle tourism.
- I joined a county government advisory board for the arts.
- I joined the local chapter of the League of Women Voters.
- I took the 12-week citizens academy by the local sheriff's department and went on a ride-a-long with a deputy overnight.
- I've volunteered at candidate forums and attended even more.
- I 've attended town halls by local elected officials - state representative, US Representative and US Senators.
- I've attended so many city council meetings and work sessions that a rumor started that I was running for office.
- I put in almost 24 hours checking ballots about to be counted in the 2014 elections here in the county where I live.
- I registered voters at a local farmer's market and an area high school.
- I've had coffee with staff from various local nonprofits, people running for office, local government officials - even the police chief.
- I regularly searched for nonprofit and government events to share on Facebook and Reddit, and live-tweeted a couple of local government events, and shared so much, so often, related to government meetings that people have asked me if I work for the local government or the local newspaper.
- I've attended civic theater productions, university shows and public lectures.
- I have been a user of the mass transit in this region as my primary means of town-to-town transportation for the entire 10 years I've been in Oregon and I joined the online advisory group for mass transit (I fill out a LOT of surveys).
- I started a Facebook group to talk about bicyclists and pedestrians in this part of the county where I lived, and was invited to talk about it on a local public access TV show
- I volunteered to help move a public library to its new building (and made my husband volunteer too).
- I did a free workshop on my area of expertise for local nonprofits and met with people founding nonprofits to help them solidify their visions.
- I attended two public events at a mosque in the county and attended some events at area churches - I'm an atheist, but I wanted to show my support for these specific events.
- I've walked every neighborhood of the town where I live. Granted, it's not that big a town, but I've walked EVERY neighborhood.
- I've attended a range of public events all over the county, from strawberry festivals to German Christmas markets to corn roasts to a world premiere theater production.
- I volunteered with local Girl Scout troops for almost two years.
- I've ridden my motorcycle all over Oregon, and all over this county in particular - I think I've seen more of both than most people born here.
And, yet, at a face-to-face job interview in June - only the second face-to-face interview I've had for a job since moving back to the USA - I was asked, incredulously, why I was applying for a local government job because, after all, I wasn't really a part of the community. It was the moment when I knew that I wasn't getting the job.
Outside of the city of Portland, the state of Oregon is one of those places that, if you weren't born here, or somewhere else in the Pacific Northwest, your presence here is looked at with skepticism. If you move here from another part of the USA - particularly, God forbid, from California - then the only acceptable reason for you to move here is that you, or your spouse, got a job at Intel or Nike or that you had to take care of your parents or in-laws that still live here. I expected Texas to treat outsiders this way, but in the more than four years I lived in Texas, I felt welcomed, even when I was well outside of Austin. Were it not for the annual six months of unbearable heat, I would have moved back to Austin when I left Germany.
I have lived in Oregon longer than I lived in Germany. And for 10 years, pretty much every time I have told someone in Oregon that I moved here from Germany, they have asked, incredulously, "Why?!" The question is loaded with all kinds of inference, including:
Why would you leave Europe?
Why would you give up your career?
Why would you choose here and not New York or Washington DC or San Francisco?
This area has NOTHING to offer YOU.
Among the MANY phrases I would love to never, ever hear again is this one:
Why did you move here?
It’s not said as a put down of the place where I live, as in Why would you move to this place, which is really boring. It’s said as a put down of me, as in If you have really done all this international work and international travel, why did you move to Oregon, to this place where I was born/chose to live? It’s said with snark, with incredulity, and often, with skepticism. The implication is that I must be lying about my background, or be hiding out because I screwed up somewhere else.
The backlash in Oregon regarding newcomers is exhausting. Oregonians make it clear that if you aren't born here, you will always be an outsider. How hostile can it be here for people not from here? Here's but one example of the kinds of things posted to the community group for the city where I live in the PDX metro area:
What we need is NO MORE people here!!! I know I sound like a broken record but the city leaders of this town just dont care if ths town stays small and manageable or not. Way too much new housing. This is all going to come back and bite everyone in the hiney with everyone having their hand out for more money for schools, electricity, transit, grocery stores and on and on. It's done and it's just going to get worse now. It all feels so defeating. Just sad
These comments are posted ALL the time. And if I'm feeling unwelcomed, I can't imagine how horrible it is for the many Latino immigrants all around me.
Contrary to popular belief, I cannot live anywhere I want to in the world. I cannot live in Scotland, for instance, because I am not a citizen of the United Kingdom. And I can't work in any language other than English, which negates any chance of me ever working in Europe unless some international agency recruits me. And I don’t want to live in a big city - New York or Washington DC or San Francisco - because, while I have loved living in big cities when I was younger, and while I love visiting them, I’m older now and my tastes and lifestyle has changed. I want to have a garden, I want to walk in neighborhoods that have trees, I want to sit in my backyard and feel somewhat isolated, I want to walk to neighborhood festivals… to do that in a residential neighborhood in Portland would require a salary of about half a million a year, and in San Francisco… I’d have to win big in the lottery.
Why is it weird that I’ve chosen a small town in Oregon? I have to live somewhere. Why not Oregon? Why not this little town of less than 30,000 people?
And why can't someone live in a small town and also care about world affairs, travel globally, even work globally? Why can't someone live in a small town and also want to learn other languages and delight in different cultures? Is all of that reserved only for people living in big cities? Really? And why is it strange that someone would try to make a home here, to treat the community as something more than just a place to sleep at night?
I had all sorts of great reasons for choosing to live in the Portland, Oregon area, in addition to the weather: I had heard it was fun and progressive and bicycle-friendly and had great beer and was booming economically. But I knew after just a week that Portland wasn't quite what we'd been told. The first year we were here, I would comment about how taken aback I was at the open drug use and homelessness in downtown and Portlandiers were offended at my comments - "I haven't seen that" and "It's no worse here than anywhere else!" and on and on. I stopped talking about it. And progressive? The Oregon tax system favors the top 1% just like everywhere. The booming businesses here do not support nonprofits financially anywhere near the rates they should, and the salaries offered by these nonprofits are shamefully low - far from living wages. The condition of too many public schools - infrastructure, class sizes, arts offerings - are also shameful, and all these supposedly progressive folks in Portland refuse every bond measure to make things better. You would think an area that prides itself on being progressive would have outstanding public schools and the funding for such. Portlandiers wax poetic about their mass transit system - but as someone who actually takes it regularly, relies on it, I can tell you that I'm one of the few people on the bus with a driver's license, one of the few people taking it out of choice. And bicycle-friendly? That's been the biggest joke of all. No way would I ride a bicycle in downtown Portland. I'm terrified every time I do it here in this small town.
Do I feel cut off living in this small town? Oh, gads, yes. If you live outside the USA, you actually know what is happening globally. In the USA, we’re on a global news blackout. I wish so much we got CNN International. I have to work to stay connected to what's happening outside this country. Some Facebook groups I'm on for humanitarian workers, Twitter and non-USA news outlets are very helpful in that regard. But having that international focus seems to isolate me even more from people around here.
None of my efforts have lead to me feeling a part of anything. None of it has made me feel like I'm making a different in the places where I've lived since moving back here. They haven't even lead to that many friendships (though I'm grateful for the few I have gotten as a result). In fact, it's lead to far more negative comments and experiences than positive ones. Maybe it's just Oregon, but the amount of snarky comments here for anyone trying to do something good, whether they are running for office or volunteer at an event, are overwhelming. There's only one other place I've seen such cutting down of tall poppies: Afghanistan, where women - I guess because they have so little power - will cut other women down like it's the most fun you can possibly have.
I have a specific walking route that I do with my dog on weekdays, and I do that route specifically to avoid people - I just want to think and be alone, especially lately. A local guy that runs a couple of nonprofit initiatives and recruited me to volunteer for such - and I've resigned from them and really don't want to be involved with anymore - saw me walking and stopped his car, pulled over, and said, "I really would like to walk with you and talk with you." And I know I turned white as a sheet. I almost started crying. I said, "No, I'm on my own time right now, I can't talk, maybe next week" and I just walked away. I just felt so... goddamn it, leave me alone! He wasn't being creepy, but it just felt so unbelievably, incredibly intrusive. And I'm like, well, great, where am I supposed to walk now to avoid people, including YOU? I want a t-shirt that says, "Don't talk to me."
I used to be Miss Good Morning! In fact, two former local frenemies made fun of me for being that person, and for how much I missed living in a place where people say "Good morning" and how I was trying to be that person here. They are both native Pacific North Westerners, and they think greeting strangers is stupid and intrusive. They loved to roll my eyes at how much I liked to talk to neighbors, how I stopped frequently during walks to chat people up.
Welp, I guess I'm now a true Pacific North Westerner: I don't want anyone to talk to me. Have you avoided me because I'm such a chatty Cathy? Well, don't worry - those days are over. The only person who still has to put up with that is my husband and my hairdresser.
Months after we bought this house, my first house ever, I tried to read Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, hoping for a similar literary experience to Elmer Gantry, one of my favorite books of all time. But I had to quit early on because the story was WAY too close to what I had experienced in my first four years in Oregon: outsider moves to a town, tries to be friendly, tries to be a part of the community, gets a hostile reception, gets derided for her ideas and her worldliness, becomes isolated and ends up being miserable.
For all I know, we would have been miserable had we moved elsewhere, or had we stayed in Europe. Maybe this is the best we could have it: my husband got employed almost immediately after we moved to Oregon, and in the job he is in now, he is beloved. He's got a career, a beautiful place to ride his motorcycle and he's a volunteer firefighter. I'm so happy for him.
I'm not as nice as I used to be. And I think it's not only because of the November 2016 election - I think it's also because of the Pacific Northwest. I try to remember, and to care about, the potential to do one good thing for someone else today, or this week. I try to remember, and to care about, how much a small act of kindness can mean to strangers, neighbors and friends - opening a door for someone whose hands are full, offering to take a shopping cart back for a woman dealing with a grumpy child, giving up your seat for someone you decide needs it more, not getting upset at a screwup by a shop clerk - I try to remember, and to care that, it can mean whether or not someone goes home and cries as soon as they get home, and for the rest of the night. I try to remember that I do have power, and I can use it for good or for bad.
But trying is getting harder and harder.
Here in Oregon, it feels like all of my work for the last 10 years to invest in this community has been for absolutely nothing. Making this my home has been like a full-time job for me, in lieu of having an actual full-time job. And none of it, ultimately, has mattered.
I'm not from here, and I'm never to forget that. Okay, message has been received: the people of Oregon are just not that into me.
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