Paris, Syria, and courage: a brain dump

I wrote most of this on the Tuesday after the Paris attacks. I spent the last few days deciding if I should edit to make it... well, better-written... but I decided not to. So here it is:

I spent at least some of Monday holding back tears. And yes, at least once it was because of the new Adele song, but mostly it was because of everything that is happening far away - Paris, Beirut, Syria. And as if that's not hard enough to stomach, I live in a privileged country full of people who don't realize their privilege, and if they do, they certainly don't want to share it. And we have the news, where people with money are given a voice, and social media, where EVERYONE is given a voice, and I'm not hearing or reading much that is making anything better.

I bet there is a word for what I'm feeling, but I don't know what it is. Despair seems insensitive, in light of the source of the feeling. Frustrated isn't adequate. Heartbroken? Maybe. Hopeless... Hopeless is close. Heartsick. Sad.

I remember the Sunday after the shooting at Sandy Hook, which Anne Lamott called "the end of the world," I went to church. To me, a belief in God doesn't mean anything unless it makes you a better person than you might otherwise be, unless it teaches you how to BE with others. The idea the pastor expressed that Sunday was that so many people were asking, "How could God let this happen?" and the answer was that God was asking the same thing: "How could YOU let this happen?"

It's on us. All of this, everything that happens on this planet, the only habitable planet as far as time can tell... it's on us. And we are fucking it up, royally.

Religion - a belief in something bigger than you - has the power to do so much good, and yet in our hands, it does exactly the opposite. THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS. After spending a lifetime believing in God and going to church, at times more frequently than others, I am presently in a tenuous relationship with religion and I guess with God. I still think a strong faith can be good, as long as the believer does good with it. (Of course, different believers think different things are good and different things are evil... so it's really just a mess.) Pray for Paris? No. We don't need more religion. We don't need more prayers. It's on YOU. It's up to YOU to make a difference.

And who can we look to? Fred Rogers' mom told him to look for the helpers. Okay. We have all of these governors in America, the land of the free and the BRAVE, saying they won't accept any Syrian refugees. Let's forget about the fact that Mary and Joseph were a Middle Eastern couple looking for shelter. Let's just not even mention that. Instead, let's look at this quote, from FDR: "Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear." I tell my kids this all the time. "Being brave isn't about not being afraid. It's about being afraid but doing it anyway." This is where we need to step up. This is what my pastor was talking about. This is the stuff we have to do. It's okay to be afraid, but we have to go on anyway and do what is right.

We are so far removed from what is happening anywhere else but here. We are so LUCKY, and we forget it all the time. I almost bitched to a co-worker this morning about somebody taking up two spots in the parking lot and thereby forcing me to park 3 blocks away, and I stopped myself, because REALLY, KATIE?

So maybe this is the difference to be made, for me. Maybe I just work harder to practice a little gratitude. A little compassion. At the end of the day, we are all made of the same space dust. You and me and the guys who blew themselves up in Paris. The people escaping terror and civil war in Syria. We're all the same, just a collection of cells and codes and patterns, more alike than we are different. So maybe I just embrace my own humanity a little better. I'll work on teaching my kids to be good people. And yes, I donated and will continue to donate, but I will also try to remember: remember how lucky I am, remember how brief my time is here.

What will you do?

Donate to UNHCR here.

A very casual observer's opinions on the oil spill

I can’t even watch the footage of the oil spill. Except for one crab and one bird, I have carefully avoided shots of wildlife affected by the spill. I’ve seen the Spill Cam, and I’ve seen the satellite imagery of how large the spill is. Beyond this, I avoid visual coverage of it.

It’s frustrating to me that people are comparing Obama’s reaction to the spill to Bush’s reaction to Katrina. Just because two catastrophes happen in the same place doesn’t mean they’re the same. Bush’s administration was quite unaware of what Katrina had done until days after the hurricane hit. Americans were left to die in New Orleans while the government scrambled to help. There was a humanitarian crisis on our hands the size of which this country had not seen in a very long time.

Is the oil spill as catastrophic? It depends on your idea of catastrophe, but I would argue to say that yes, it’s just as catastrophic. It will affect the area for probably much longer than Katrina has and will. The Gulf is most likely forever changed because of this spill. It’s heartbreaking to think of the ramifications – the animals affected, the economy and jobs that will be affected. It’s terrible.

With Katrina, there was no one responsible but the government. Mother Nature smacked us in the face, and we depend on our government to take care of us when stuff like that happens. This BP disaster was a terrible accident, and while I won’t assign blame, there was and is a company whose job it is to fix it. I would say it’s the government’s responsibility to make sure that the company is fixing it, but ultimately, it’s up to BP to fix this. And it looks like they have, thank God. I don’t understand WHAT THE HELL TOOK SO LONG, but I also know I don’t know anything about oil drilling – I would imagine it’s pretty complicated. (I have to wonder why they don’t have a solid plan in place should disasters like this happen… perhaps this is where government can really shine – forcing oil companies to figure out a way to stop something like this right away the next time it happens…)

I don’t understand people rushing to blame Obama for this. It seems like the people who are blaming the Obama administration are the same people who think government involvement is generally a bad idea. Also, adding a jab to the left side of the spectrum, I don’t agree with people yelling at Obama saying, SEE, THIS IS WHY WE SHOULDN’T DRILL IN OUR WATERS! Those are MY people saying that, democrats, liberals, etc. How about instead of yelling about not drilling, we come up with an answer for this global oil-dependence crisis? How about us Americans come up with a way to be less dependent on OIL in general, foreign AND domestic? If oil drilling is so terrible, we need to figure out another way to power our cars – plain and simple.

If anything, I think this spill should serve as a wake-up call that we are destroying our planet with our complacency. We should be encouraging children to study science and math and come up with a way to end our dependence on oil. This is not good enough – it needs to be better. And no one is going to fix it but us.

Hilarity

We had a 4.4 earthquake this morning, but the local news in LA acted like it was armageddon, covering the small quake for the entirety of the morning newscast. Robert Kovacik is a local anchor, and while he was interviewing people this morning, my gaydar went off, so I tweeted this:



I was kind of surprised to see this email in my inbox once I got to work:



His auto-follow bot might want to be a little more selective.