T-shirt and shorts

It has been an interesting day today--in the way small things here are interesting to me--the discovery of a new color of lily (red) hiding behind the gooseneck loosestrife, or the Japanese beetles invading the shrub at the corner of the house. Herb has been decanting the boxes of stuff from the apartment in Medford. I took a long walk in the neighborhood.  I put another insecticide--well bacteria-cide on the garden and am feeling like a chemist rather than a gardener: Serenade and Seaside and Liquid Fence and Rotenone and Diatomaceous Earth. And finally the heat has broken so that I can do these things without being stung by deer flies. And I should be sitting working on the class I am teaching in 9 days or so. But I am a bit restless. Maybe it is because we have finally completed the last move after so many in the past year. The garage is as full of Herb's stuff from Medford, as the garage at the tiny house I rented was a year and change ago. Seems more like a hundred years. I feel oddly wiser now than when all that began back then--like the begat cycles of the Bible, or its plagues. 

In any case, I have been sitting at my desk, catching up on email, avoiding working on the class, and thinking about changes, the micro and the macro scale changes and the way we measure them, while Herb is on the lawn mower in between spells of rain and scorch. He is wearing a t-shirt. He never wears t-shirts. He was wearing shorts the last two days. He never wears shorts. They are odd markers of his comfort with being here. He always wore jeans or khakis and a button-down collared shirt before, or one of the pseudo-Hawaiian shirts that make me cringe. But he is entering the life of a Vermonter. Or at least so I think.

I find it oddly sexy.

Now imagine a movie screen dissolve and a change of scenes here...It's what The New Yorker's writers  do when they start to tell a story and then break to a flash back or some other character's narrative or a scene change, leaving you hanging on the suspense-filled story they had begun.

I was reading through the e-mailed solicitations for signatures and a few dollars that were arrayed single file on my computer screen--the "defenders of wildlife",  the independent media sources, the Obama-supporters, the representatives of regional and state government, the activist phone company and the organization originally founded to stop-the-endless-harangues-of-the-impeachment-forces-in-the wake-of-the-Lewinsky-scandal-and-now-a-petition-signing-pass-through-operation-for-left-wing-causes etc.--and I came to the following:  

"I love maps. Which is good, because running our Purple to Blue program involves poring over a lot of them. Right now I've got two of them hanging on my wall.  The first is a map of Virginia -- it's covered in Post-Its, marking target races, key districts, and campaign plans.

The other is our map of 2014 Target States. Soon, it will have lists of potential candidates and pickup opportunities. But for now, it's totally blank except for one critical, all-important goal: Win in Virginia.

Victory in Virginia gives us the momentum to win across the country in 2014 and beyond. We've got our candidates -- can you chip in $4 or more today to build our urgently needed grassroots campaign.  

It's hard to understate how pivotal this fall's elections are. A decisive win in Virginia lets us expand our target map, gives us a blueprint for future victories, and delivers a powerful blow to far-right donors and special interests. But if we come up short this fall, we'll find ourselves playing defense against a re-energized conservative movement -- one that's causing plenty of damage already.

Want to restore women's rights in Texas? Protect working families in Wisconsin? Repeal "Stand Your Ground" laws in Florida? The path to victory lies in winning back key state houses and districts -- and that road starts by winning in Virginia, Nora.

To get there, we're building a unified grassroots campaign from the ground up, and we don't have a moment to lose."

So I wonder how we decide what battles aren't worth winning, and how we decide where our energy must be put to the task of making change. That's not a fashionable sentiment, but it isn't entirely new. Remember during the first Obama campaign when there was that email about letting the red states secede and take all the poverty and teen pregnancy and education failures with them, while the blue states kept the vineyards and the water and the cities with good restaurants and the film industry and the R1 educational institutions? Well I am back there today. I don't think that my $4 is going to do anything to change the South. I don't think that if we are able to mount serious dollars against the Koch brothers' assault on human decency, we will change the pattern of life for those who live in the South or that Bobby Jindall and Rick Perry and Santorum et al are going to go away. Or that Grover Norquist will find truth and honesty beside Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter in a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon at the San Francisco celebration of the defeat of DOMA. Abortion clinics won't suddenly be allowed to operate without phalanxes of people displaying posters of aborted fetuses. The men who want to ensure that they can buy their grills from WalMart while they know that it is destroying Main Street culture and JOBS (remember those?), won't suddenly decide that it makes more sense to shop somewhere that pays its employees a livable wage.

(A small parenthetical note here: According to that bastion of liberal thinking, The New York Times:

"According to the American Federation of Teachers, the state with the highest average pay for teachers in 2003-04 was Connecticut, at $56,516; the lowest was South Dakota, at $33,236.
Or look at it this way: Pick a corporate chieftain — say, Jeffrey R. Immelt of General Electric. He earns $15.4 million a year. Every single day — including Thanksgiving and Christmas — he makes almost what the average teacher does for a year of taming wild children, staying up nights planning lessons, and, really, helping to shape a generation.")

And though I am not the first one to compare all this to the fundamentalists in the Middle East who deny a woman a place in public society, the parallels are stark. I am also probably not the first one to say that as we probably can't change every culture to democratic process by will or war, we also probably can't change our own country's fundamentalists by will or building wealth to counter wealth. OK, so it is probably worth sending money to support the independent media, and I have my mother's words ringing in my ears about writing editorials to the press to tell them when I agree and when I don't, but for the most part,  I think we make change at home. I think that Texas women need to vote their representatives out of office. I think that the pro-choice forces need to provide protection for women who need access to Planned Parenthood in North Dakota and Wyoming. But there will always be fundamentalists with more time on their hands to shout and make protest signs and stand in the hot sun, trying to impose their decisions on others.  The American Taliban. Somebody wrote that book didn't they? Amazon says it was the brilliant founder of The Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas.  He used data to predict the 2012 election while the right wing was dissolving in its own flop sweat.

Here comes that dissolve again...

So here we are in a state where people work multiple jobs to be able to live here. The bartender at the place we go on the weekends, looks like she is 20 something but has three kids and one is ten years old. She can't be 20. Her partner behind the bar doesn't look much older, but has two kids. I asked if they see each other after work or whether they never want to see anybody related to work once they get home from an 8 to 9 mile run around the bar area each night. "No!" Miranda said. "We have 5 kids between us, and she does my nails. And when I work at the Snack Bar three nights a week..." So she's pouring wine and scooping ice cream; her friend may be working in a salon or at the local school as a substitute teacher and their husbands or boyfriends are probably working construction and coaching Little League or soccer. And that's what their kids are seeing. Mom and Dad making a living at multiple jobs. Or Mom if the marriages don't survive. And of our friends? Most of them are working more than one job and volunteering to keep the town's institutions afloat.  And that doesn't include time in the gardens and keeping the lawn mowed....

Oh yeah...the lawn mower....So what's the connection? Remember that solicitation about funding the grassroots movements?  (Hah!)

Herb said last night that he is starting to feel that this is home in a way he hasn't had a home in many years. He has the t-shirt and shorts to prove it. We picked blueberries in the backyard this morning, and he dumped a few Japanese beetles in a jar of soapy water.  And he watered the new trees. And we went to the dump and the local post office to pick up our mail. And when he finishes with the lawn and I finish with this post, we will pick up the work on building our business again. And I will work on the class. And he will write. And Derrick may stop by to check on our early-blighted tomatoes. Or on the garage full of boxes and chairs. Or on us.

And restoring women's rights in Texas, and having the right to work for a livable wage, or to walk the street without being profiled?  These are huge issues and I want to believe that I can make change, but as I get older, I believe that generating money in Vermont to influence a "grassroots campaign" in Texas or Virginia or Florida changes only what you know when you read the paper or watch TV. And while that matters when one side controls all the media outlets, change has to come from within. 

We have a friend who isn't convinced about global warming. We are working on that with him. Over coffee. And we have another friend who sees himself as a Republican, and a believer. He talked with us the other day about people who are unemployed and can't find work despite their efforts to do so. It isn't their fault, he said. And I suspect that he saw some of that close to home as his two sons have struggled to find work to keep themselves afloat. It isn't the way it once was. And we are all struggling to find the path, to stay afloat. Well, except for the Koch brothers and Ann Coulter and her friends.

Grassroots indeed. The lawnmower engine is off. Time to get to work.