it’s hard for me to remember a time when elton john wasn’t a chart-topper in the US. but this work, border song, a single from the 1970 album elton john, did only marginally well anywhere. in fact, my girl ree-ree (aka aretha franklin) covered it the following year and did a bit better with it.
but i simply love this song.
whether you hear it as a song about alienation or about racial harmony, this song simply reaches in and finds something. i have spent countless hours sitting at the piano, playing this song. not as well as elton, of course, but definitely with some intensity. it’s almost like a do-it-yourelf exorcism for me, of sorts.
see, my kids get freaked out sometimes because it is definitely possible for a song to bring me to tears. and there is one song that brings me to tears each and every single time i hear it. this one. it’s like my own personal prayer to the world:
holy moses, let us live in peace.
let us strive to find a way to make our hatred cease.
there’s a man over there. what’s his colour, i don’t care.
he’s my brother. let us live in peace.
i never thought i would live to see a day when our country would be in such jeopardy the world over. i never thought i’d see a day when the united states would undertake policies that would make me ashamed. i never thought i’d see a day when so many people would be in such horrible straits.
but then again, i never thought i’d live to see a day when an african-american would be elected president of the united states.
only because happy birthday technically came out in 1980, i’ll pick a different stevie wonder song. (but happy birthday, Dr. King!) let me tell you — picking a stevie wonder pop hit for this is tough. this guy wrote some of the most amazing standards — and he’s still at it today, over 40 years after he started.
so i’ll just pick out superstition, a song originally meant for jeff beck. covered a zillion times by groups as varied as the jonas brothers (gah) and stevie ray vaughn — a phrase you can say about tons of wonder’s works, btw — it’s just a funky little jaunt into the world of old wives and the tales that love them. when the song was recorded, stevie wasn’t little stevie anymore (the moniker must have driven him nuts when he was a teen), but he wasn’t exactly aged either — 22 or so. his clavinet just kicks, as does the horn section, as well as pretty much every damn thing about the song.
yep. so. damn. hard. to pick between this one and higher ground (for you power ranger fan kids, the red hot chili peppers covered this, not the other way around.)
or even harder to not mention my most very favorite wonder song — favorite, grand poohbah, top 10 favorite songs of all time as well — which he did but which wasn’t a hit. (but a song which i wrote, word for word, in my daughter’s first birthday card. i’m obsessive like that.)
okay, okay. i’m being completely and unalterably gushy. it’s hard for me not to be when it comes to stevie wonder, even though i just called to say i’m pregnant and you are black and i am white are two incredibly sappy songs which even i cannot tolerate. but then again, you get songs like my cherie amour, which played at my wedding when i danced with my daddy — but that song’s from 1969 and doesn’t count…
i’ll stop. but i think you get the picture. i’m a bit crazy about the wonder dude.
…not to be confused with the other wonder dude, whose birth we’re celebrating today.
this is for all the people who don’t feel very shiny or happy this time of year.
december is a whirlwind kind of month around here. we have BC’s birthday. we have chanukah. and we have christmas. it’s a crazybusy time. i never remember whether i’ve gotten the whole presents thing right. BS usually has one full day of cursing out the christmas tree lights (because apparently, there is always one bad apple that spoils the whole bunch.) the kids are wound up on cookies and frosting and dreams of what presents will be coming around for them. i know we should be feeling the joy, but there are moments…
see, there’s this tacit assumption that during holiday time, everyone should be feeling happy and peppy and bursting with love. it sickens me, to be honest, in it’s self-centeredness. if you’re depressed, well, it seems like the world around you is having a great big party and you have not been invited. (n’yeah n’yeah.) and even though people will often try to involve you and get you in the spirit so to speak, they may become angry when you simply don’t have it in you.
and then you’re sad and rejected. goody.
depression is very real. having experienced it myself after giving birth to BC, i can honestly tell you that you feel like you have dug yourself a deep hole and nothing will pull you out of it. fortunately, it’s a bit less stigmatized than it once was. if you’re lucky, you might either know you need help, or perhaps someone close to you will suggest it. you might needs meds; you might need to talk to someone. hell, you might need both. and if you don’t have health insurance, call your local health department, as they may be able to let you know how you can get help you can afford.
but please. get help. no one has to be happy. but no one should have to suffer this sort of pain, either.
those go-go 1980s, the ones which promised everyone mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money; the decade which started the true rise of the walmart-ization of the US [motto: you can have everything you ever wanted — you can pay less for it, and we’ll buy it all from china, where we can pay eight year olds to make this cheap, unsafe crap — damn the social, economic, political, health, or even environmental ramifications]; the era where we forgot all consequences of our actions — consequences, shmonsequences, a president teetering around 80 won’t need to deal with the consequences for more than a few more decades. remember them? the ’80s psychological fallout is present all around us.
in short, the 1980s, as fostered by ronald reagan, made it quite acceptable to bash the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. it made it okay to be mean to those less fortunate.
it made it okay to not care. period.
people on welfare? they all want to be on welfare, those lazy good-for-nothings. (i’m shocked that they didn’t bring back debtor’s prisons.)
damn taxes all around. the government shouldn’t be taking my hard-earned cash to pay for infrastructure. if it doesn’t affect me personally, i don’t need to pay for it. schools? i have no kids. elderly? i’m young. and those ‘special interest programs’? i’m a white male. no one’s looking after me. why should the government be paying special attention to minorities or women? we’re now a nation of knee-jerk, egocentric whiners:whatever it is, i’m against it.
sound familiar? these self-serving attitudes permeate the land to this very day. they’re even celebrated in places like Fox News, i daresay.
yes, the decade that made selfishness a G-d-given-right has helped to shape our current circumstances. the clinton era, while clearly not nirvana itself, attempted to swing things back some through failed efforts for the common good, such as the push for universal health care (though the flourishing tech boom reinforced the whole greed is good bit — believe me, i met my fair share of ’90s gordon gekko geeks), but somehow, americans then voted in droves for a president who would revalidate their selfishness about everything.
how patriotic can you be if you don’t wave a flag and affirm america the greatest country in the world?
how much can you possibly love this country if you spend time criticizing those in power, just because you wish the country to be a beacon to the world for freedom… and compassion?
we have become a nation where so many have lost connection with others. so many do not see themselves as part of a larger whole. so many only want what’s in it for them. they may sacrifice others in the short term for their profit; but eventually, they, too, will suffer.
and we’ll all be poorer for it.
Being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by everybody, I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than the person who has nothing to eat. Mother Teresa
and then, there’s john mccain. apparently, while he was in that awful POW camp, he was missing his beautiful, former model wife carol. what he didn’t know was that she was in a horrible car accident. she needed 23 operations. and she held it all together, children and all while he was away, serving the country of course, but still away.
when he returned, he essentially screwed around on this poor woman. he ended up dumping her for his current wife, a beer heiress 17 years his junior. even ross perot, who paid carol’s medical bills — and there were heaps of them — put it succinctly:
let the record show mccain’s cheating past. and let that info go straight to the working-class women voters he’s trying to woo. i’m sick and tired of public men getting away with this crap. they cloak themselves in the garments of American Hero, but somehow, the content of their character is betrayed by such cowardly acts of disloyalty.
plenty has been written about what happened on 9/11. people especially focus on what happened in NYC, as the sheer number of lives and the immense destruction of the twin towers is just overwhelming. but on this anniversary of one of the worst days we have ever known, i thought i’d share a glimpse of what life was like for a mom and her small child directly in the flight path toward the pentagon and DC. it’s something i perpetually need to exorcise.
tuesday morning, 9/11/01, started like any other tuesday. most tuesdays, BC, then almost 3, stayed home from her preschool in BS’s office building. i had negotiated that in my last job — tuesdays were my mommy and me days, and i ended up leaving that last job when my then-boss, a seriously unhappy person who had inherited me from my previous angel-of-a-boss, just didn’t like that i didn’t sit at my desk 80 hours/week.
anyway, like all tuesdays, we were off to our co-op at a local community center. BS had a meeting way up in Maryland that day, so he wasn’t going to be able to take BC in to school, anyway, so it was just as well she was home with me. i did what i always did at about 8:50 am — i plopped her on the couch, turned on the Today Show, and started to put on her shoes and socks. only that day, i was instantly transfixed by one of the Twin Towers on fire. my aunt told me once that she occasionally helped a friend in the office downtown. i wondered immediately if she was there. i couldn’t move, though. just couldn’t. then, as i finally started to dial the phone, i saw, live on TV, a second plane. my heart immediately flipped into my throat: where’s my aunt?
i looked down at BC, who was messing about with something on the couch. oh my G-d, she musn’t see this, i thought. quickly, i clicked the TV off and ran back to the phone to call my aunt. no one was answering the phone. okay, okay, okay. don’t panic. don’t panic. i decided normalcy should be the order of the day. i quickly put BC’s shoes on, packed her into the car, and went off to the community center.
once we arrived, i saw moms huddled around a small television set. BC was the oldest in the co-op group (and has always been spookily emotionally astute), so i prayed she would get busy in the dress-up corner. but just as we seemed to be finally calming ourselves down, we heard the worst: a plane had hit the pentagon. as in, the building just down the road apiece.
and to add ridiculous insult to injury, the rumors began to fly that there was another plane in the air; that a plane had hit rosslyn, the state department, the Capitol; that the water was going to be contaminated. and there we were, right in the middle of the national airport and dulles airport flight paths. everyone began to sob. mama, BC asked, why are all the mommies sad?
sucking in all the air i could, i replied: they’re just feeling very sad today, sweetheart. how on earth do you tell a 2.5 year old girl that the world is imploding all around and nothing feels safe? you can’t. you’re a parent: your job is to maintain their world of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, happy cartoons, and teddy bears. you keep a straight face, a stiff upper lip, locked knees, and a stout heart. accepting my answer, she toddled back to the other little kids, who were pretty much oblivious in that way that only toddlers can be.
this left me free to quietly freak out. i tried to call BS’s cell phone. first, he didn’t answer. then, the lines were all beeping dementedly. decision time, and its all down to me.
i decided to take my baby girl home.
once we arrived home, i declared it an ALL BARNEY DAY! little girl could not. believe. her. luck. i stacked the videos of the VJE (Vile Jurassic Entity) in our family room and prepared to play them, one by one. and then, if we ran out, i’d play them all again. she was only under three — at that age, they love to watch things repeatedly.
i then moved out to the sun room. i set the TV up to the news and began to field the calls, first from my mother (my aunt — her sister — was later found at her significant other’s apartment, safe and sound. but at that point, neither of us could find her, and we scared each other), then from my mother in law, then from a local friend who told me that i needed to fill up my bathtub in case they attacked the water company. (i dutifully filled up the bathtub, then locked the door so that little BC didn’t toddle in and drown.) no, i had no idea where my husband was. no, i didn’t know whether the planes were continuing to fall here, but i had heard they might. as we live in the flight path, i listened for any sounds of planes overhead; all i heard was an eerie silence.
i continued to watch the TV. i watched as my town’s firefighters, police, etc, swarmed at the pentagon, the first on the scene as it happened. i hoped that my husband would come home, and soon. (he didn’t come home for hours: he had volunteered to drive three other people home, a drive on panic-riddled roads literally to the other side of maryland, then back again to virginia.) i prayed the carnage would end.
i was grateful that BC was home with me that day. on any other day, she would have been downtown. she would have been stranded, as BS was not at the office, left with the other children, children who had no food delivered to their daycare/preschool because the federal building was shutting things down due to the emergency. (the parents in the building banded together, bought all the pizza they could from the cafeteria, and brought it to the children.) with traffic snarled all around the city, i do not actually know how i would have gotten to her. i made a mental note to call my girlfriend, who worked with BS: should this ever happen again, please, please… take my child wherever you go.
and i sat, all alone, panic-striken, frozen, terrified i would jump out of my skin. but then, i’d see this little girl, her little blondey-boop-a-doop pony tail bopping around to there are seven days in the week. i had to keep her wrapped in cotton wool. there would be time later to talk about the truth (in her case, when she was eight), but for now, i had to be the strongest, most dependable mom on planet earth.
i tried my best; i really, really did. and i don’t think i have ever been so close to a nervous breakdown in my entire life. it took hours for BS to come home, and he told me how he had driven past the pentagon mere moments before the plane hit. later, i would learn that the wife of a colleague of mine was on that plane. later, i would volunteer my yard to house one of the 184 trees in my county planted to memorialize the Pentagon victims. later, i would drive by the burnt-out Pentagon and catch my breath; later still, i would drive by the Pentagon and have to catch my breath again when i saw the incredible rebuilding progress.
it would take me years before i stopped looking up at the sky, wondering whether the plane would stay suspended in the air or whether it would fall on my home, ending everthing in an instant. it would take me years before i would feel comfortable sending my children back to school in a federal building, especially one so close to the Capitol. it would take me years before i would get used to seeing SWAT teams occasionally atop places like the Dept of Justice or FBI (mercifully, no longer) or occasional armed army guys in the Metro. it would take me years to get used to concrete barricades around my children’s playgrounds; it would take longer still for me to grasp the contingency plans we’d have to make in case something threatened the FBI building catty-corner to the playground –things like shrapnel, pieces of building falling into the place where kids on slides might be. it would take me years before i felt okay living so close to the Nation’s Capitol.
it would take me years before i would feel safe and sound.
i believe in the free trade of ideas. there are a lot of people who have different opinions on everything i hold dear. that’s okay. i just don’t have to vote for them.
social conservatives scare me. i don’t care whether they’re male or female; anyone in power — say, a mayor — who wants to ban books from their local public library is not a person i want a heartbeat away from the presidency.
If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children, the judge ruled.
apparently, it was okay that the 22 year old woman’s 47 year old boss demanded sex from his female employees. there was even ample proof in this case for his guilt. but no matter. he was doing his part for the declining russian birthrate.
i’m just quoting the telegraph uk for the rest of this; i can’t even bear to write it myself:
According to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 per cent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped.
Eighty per cent of those who participated in the survey said they did not believe it possible to win promotion without engaging in sexual relations with their male superiors.
Women also report that it is common to be browbeaten into sex during job interviews, while female students regularly complain that university professors trade high marks for sexual favours.
Only two women have won sexual harassment cases since the collapse of the Soviet Union, one in 1993 and the other in 1997.
Human rights activists say that Russian women remain second-class citizens and are subjected to some of the highest levels of domestic abuse in the world.
if you’ve ever been subjected to sexual harassment, you know how intimidating, how soul-crunching it can feel. when i was young, there was an upper-level employee at my large organization who made me feel small. he would constantly put his arm around me and act in ways which made me, a 27 year old woman at the start of her career, feel very uncomfortable. i didn’t want to say anything because i was afraid. i would cringe, i would feel sick, but i would say nothing. i would simply try to stay out of his path as much as possible.
years later, after i left the organization, i told my mentor — who happens to be male — about it. i thought he was about to go postal and punch the lights out of the other guy, even though the other guy was fairly high-level. (my mentor has always been a guy driven by the rules; knowing the rules, he always taught his underlings, can help you be effective and help you move ahead. in short, he knew this was a broach of the rules, and he was pissed.) i hope he didn’t, though i often wonder: if i had said something during that time, would it have helped some other poor girl who would end up in that man’s path? i often feel guilty about staying silent all those years.
there are a lot of people who don’t want to think sexual harassment is real, even in this country. they often like to jump down your throat and act like you’ve asked for it somehow. but i humbly suggest that for all the tarty people out there who slither their way to the top, there are mostly the rest of us people who are just trying to get through the day doing the best job we can do. and it’s one thing when you’ve normal obstacles in your way. it’s a whole other thing when that obstacle is a powerful predator.
at least we have some protections here in the U.S. i cannot imagine what it must be like when the state sanctions this sort of treatment toward women. for 100 percent of the women polled to answer that they’ve been sexually harassed: that is simply inacceptable.
and all i can think of today is that poor woman who brought the suit. all i can imagine are the repercussions. she’ll probably never work in her town again. she’ll probably have to leave and hope she can find another job in another place where her name is not known.
and as she leaves, she’ll have to endure that hurtful, self-righteous, leering sneer.
