For the Other

Please stop telling me how to feel.

Stop telling me to calm down. Stop telling me to get over it. Don’t tell me to relax or to stop being offended.

If you know me, and you care about me, I would be grateful if you would give me a minute; if you would really pay attention.

I am grieving the outcome of this election. I am disheartened, discouraged, and disappointed. I have just recently attained a small degree of emotional health and stability after a crushing personal loss—and this feels like a set-back to me.

You may not understand this. You probably don’t understand it. That’s OK. You don’t have to understand it in order to be empathetic. All you have to do is believe me that this is really how I feel.

I am trying my best to not say unkind things about people who supported Trump. I think I’ve succeeded for the most part—but if I’ve said or written something that feels like a personal attack or insult, please bring it to my attention. I do not want to hurt or offend you. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, and I would like you to do the same for me.

You say how upset you are by the negativity—as though “negativity” on its own is a bad thing. “Negativity” is the only appropriate response to racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, and violence. No matter who we voted for, we should ALL be negative when we read a story about a young Saudi college student in Wisconsin beaten to death, or middle-school students in Michigan chanting “build the wall” at Latino classmates.

This is why I grieve. This is why I am discouraged, and even afraid for my friends who are Latino, black, gay, Jewish, or Muslim.

White Trump supporters do not, as a group, I presume, feel threatened and afraid when they leave their homes. They don’t wonder if they will be insulted or demeaned or threatened just because of who they are or what they look like.

But the groups that are targeted by Trump and some of his supporters do feel these kinds of threats and fear. The president-elect of the United States has said rude, scary, demeaning, threatening things about them—and some of his supporters take this as license to bring their formerly hidden racism, ethocentrism, misogyny out into the light.

Trump’s America is frightening for some people—entire groups of people. If you could acknowledge this without minimizing it, or contradicting it, or blaming it on the media, it would go a long way to helping those of us who are grieving and/or afraid to believe that this is not the America that you want to see.

Please don’t minimize it by saying it goes both ways.

I know of a few incidents that went the other way—Trump protesters that went too far, a white man who was beaten possibly because he voted for Trump. But these, I believe, are rare events in a backdrop of rising intolerance for the Other.

Pointing out that some Trump supporters have been insulted and even harmed by Trump-opposers does not mitigate the fact that Trump’s presidency, aligned with the KKK and other hate groups, represents an increase in fear and actual danger to at-risk groups. This comparison is another false equivalence in a sea of false equivalencies. It doesn’t even come close to being the same because Trump supporters are the ones who have the power and influence of the President on their side.

I’m not in any way saying that all Trump supporters are racist or sexist or any other “-ist.” I’m not saying you are. I’m saying it’s out there, and it appears to be getting worse.

I started out by telling you about my own grief and discouragement—but none of this is really about me and my feelings. I acknowledge my own white, cis-gender privilege. My sorrow is not for me.

I grieve for the Other. For the immigrant. For the mother of young black men. For a Muslim woman afraid to wear a scarf. For a brown-skinned store owner, for a young woman getting her first job, for a queer student in a classroom.

I am grieving for America.

Yet Another Fire in the Peevie Homestead

I was feeling miserable with the head cold from hell, and had considerately taken myself to bed. I gave C. Peevie instructions on finishing up dinner: wash, pierce, butter, and wrap the potatoes in foil and put in oven. Remove foil-wrapped rib packs from oven, carefully dump into roasting pan, cover with BBQ sauce, and return to oven. Simple enough, right?

All was well--except for, you know, the fever, congestion like a brick behind my nose and eyes, and prodigious amounts of snot emigrating from my nasal passages--until C. Peevie's friend Lil' Biscuit walked into my room and said, "Um, C. Peevie wanted me to let you know that the oven is on fire."

Most normal parents, I assume, would immediately leap out of bed and race to the scene of the conflagration. Not me. I have a high tolerance for domestic contretemps. I laid there, pondering whether or not this was God's way of putting me out of my mucus-filled misery, and then I asked, "Are there actual flames, or are you exaggerating?"

"Well," said Lil' Biscuit, "There were flames, but I think C. Peevie put them out. And then I kind of thought I was going to die from smoke inhalation."

"Crap," I thought as I pulled my plague-infested self out of bed. "I better check it out."

Sure enough, the entire first floor was filled with smoke. I felt my way to the kitchen and found C. Peevie waving away the smoke that still billowed from the oven.

"I turned the oven off," he announced. "I think the rib juices caught fire. I threw a cup of water on them."

"You threw water on a grease fire?" I asked, extremely unsupportively.

"It's not grease," he said, "It's just meat juice."

"And what's 'meat juice' made of?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah," he said. "Oops. I was remembering what you did when we had that fire in the bathroom."

Well, it all worked out without the help of the Chicago Fire Department or a trip to the emergency room. Which in my world means it barely even counts as an incident.

Misogynistic Music

I was listening to a popular radio station in Chicago last week, and the female DJ played a song that was so sexually explicit, misogynistic, and profane that I almost threw up my Target cafe nachos. I reached over to punch the knob to change the station after the first line of lyrics, and instead decided I would give the song a chance.

The whole thing was disgusting, gross, inappropriate, and offensive. I mentioned it to Mr. Peevie later, and he said, "Welcome to the world of popular contemporary music." Seriously? The same world that brings us Lucky and Delilah and Leave the Bourbon on the Shelf?

And what is a female DJ doing playing shit that disses her own stupid self? Don't these people use their brains? Does she really want people singing along with a song that glorifies getting turned on by sexual assault?

I talked to C. Peevie about the station and the song, and told him in no uncertain terms that I did not want him listening to that station or songs like that.

"You wouldn't want someone saying things like that about your sister or your mother," I said, "so you don't want to people to gain from you listening to their music." He agreed; or at least, he claimed to agree. I take him at his word, because he's always been straight with me.

Meanwhile, here are my music and parenting questions for you: Do you pay attention to lyrics? Do you boycott stations that play music that you find offensive, or do you figure, well, it's just one song? How do you monitor the music your kids listen to: intensively, moderately, minimally, or not at all?

Naming Names

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I wrote about bad clients? Well, I'm ready to name names now.

The Elance client that is screwing me over (to put it delicately) is BLM Technologies of Florida. They contracted with me to re-write one page of a tri-fold brochure that they would distribute at trade shows.

(First of all, who uses tri-fold brochures anymore? That is so 1970s. I tried to talk them out of it, but they appear to get their marketing advice from a misogynist named Frank who has one foot in the 70s and one foot in dogshit.)

They sent me the existing brochure, which was absolutely awful. I think my first mistake with this company was being too blunt about their current marketing piece. You could tell that someone had cut and pasted--in a different font--the new marketing name of the company (BLM Now) over the old name throughout the brochure. Tacky.

Also, the piece was so crammed with information that no white space remained except a thin margin along the outside edge. Anyone who knows anything about graphic design will tell you that white space (also called "negative space") is an important element of graphic design, and the last thing you want to do is fill all your space with copy. People just won't read it--and plus, it's unattractive. It makes every piece of information have the same value, instead of directing the reader's attention to the most important words, phrases and images.

A big chunk of the brochure space was taken up with the logos of the companies whose products BLM is licensed to service. Why spend your money to advertise the products of other companies? I wondered.

I advised the client to cut the content and produce a smaller piece--perhaps a two-sided card--
with the purpose of driving prospects to their web site for more information. They wanted a fast turnaround, so I delivered the first draft of a tight, punchy text less than 40 hours later.

As I mentioned previously, they hated it. I didn't proof it carefully enough, and I made a minor typo (left off an "s") and a major content error: I put "BMI" instead of "BLM" about halfway through the draft. Yeeks. Embarrassing. But is it enough to justify the client ditching our contract and hiring another writer to write the brochure?

Misogynist Frank thought so. He also picked a fight with me over a so-called grammatical error: he did not approve of the phrase "no matter your," as in "No matter your IT needs, ..." I pointed out to him that the phrase shows up half a million times if you google "no matter your," and even the New York Times approves of it.

In his complaints to me, M. Frank became uncivil, saying, "If you had half a clue, you would..." Seriously. This is probably the guy responsible for the crappy existing brochure, and when I criticized it, I became his enemy.

I am confident that if the client had called me with his instructions for the second draft, he would have received a brochure text that would have more than satisfied him. Instead, my emails and phone calls went unanswered. At one point, the primary contact (NotFrank) agreed to send me his comments and edits so that I could produce a second draft that they could use for another piece--but he never followed through.

I could go through the dispute resolution process on Elance, but it would take time and cost money for an arbitrator--and for a hundred and fifty bucks, less the Elance fees of 7-9%, it's just not worth it. I emailed the client directly, side-stepping M. Frank, and asked him to pay me $90 for the first draft. I am not optimistic.

The moral of the story is: avoid Elance, which is a marketplace for buyers who do not value the services they are seeking. M. Frank said two telling things to me. He said, We're hiring you even though you weren't the lowest bidder. (As I mentioned, I bid $150 on a project that I would normally quote three or four times higher. The other bidders were coming in at $50 and $75.) Then he said, We're paying you "a lot of money." Yes. A lot of money. $150 for five or six hours of work.

It's just not worth it.

Misogyny Wears a Skirt

Let's jump into the fray that Dr. Laura Schlessinger kicked off on Monday when she said she holds women partially responsible for their husbands' infidelity. She was not completely wrong in all of her comments on the Today Show. Here's what she got right:

• Wives and husbands share equal responsibility for keeping their marriages happy and healthy.
  
• Conversely, wives and husbands share responsibility when their marriages experience troubled times. It's rarely one person's fault when a marriage falters or fails.
  
• Mental and emotional illness in one partner changes the balance of responsibility for marital trouble.

But Dr. Laura was completely wrong when she said "frequently when there is infidelity in marriage, both spouses share the blame" and also when she said if the wife is not being supportive enough, "then she's contributing to his wrong choice." I would like to know, Dr. Laura, what is "supportive enough," exactly? How do you measure it? If he's tempted, does that automatically indicate that her level of support is insufficient?

And also, at what point does the wife assume this partial blame? Is she picking up the phone and dialing the escort service? Is she driving him to the Mayflower Hotel? Is she turning down the covers and putting a mint on the pillow?

Yes, a wife shares responsibility for keeping a marriage happy and healthy. But she does not share responsibility for the specific choices that her husband makes if the marriage is not happy and healthy. It's on him alone if he chooses to call a hooker instead of a marriage counselor, or if he chooses to let his innocent office flirtation turn into something not so innocent.

In the context of the Eliot Spitzer brouhaha, Dr. Laura also said, "I hold women responsible for tossing out perfectly good men by not treating them with the love and kindness and respect and attention they need." First of all, who died and left Dr. Laura in charge, with the authority to hold anyone responsible for anything, except her own obnoxious self?

And second, "tossing out perfectly good men"? Seriously? Sometimes misogyny wears a skirt.

This statement reeks of double standard, even in the context of the whole Today Show conversation, which included one or two grudging allusions to a husband's responsibility. The Schlessinger Theorem equates a wife's giving an undefined but insufficient amount of love, kindness, respect and attention to her husband with a wife "tossing out" her husband.

Essentially, she's providing philandering husbands everywhere with a ready-made excuse: my wife drove me to it.

Dr. L is also insulting men by suggesting that they have such a tenuous hold on their character, maturity, and emotional security that if they don't get enough compliments from their wives they will automatically fall prey to the temptation of adultery.

I guess misogyny's fraternal twin, misanthropy, wears a matching skirt.