On Being a NIMBY

Today Granny became a NIMBY. For a while.

I am elderly. And I am a woman. And I live in a country whose government declines to protect either.

Hey, now. Being a NIMBY isn’t an all negative thing. If everyone takes care of the people, problems and resources in their own back yard, then collectively we’ll be just fine and dandy. Someday we'll be together  again and we'll each have saved a piece of something. 

In fact, being a NIMBY can be a good thing. That’s what I’m going to strive for over the next few years. You can be as callous, prejudiced, greedy, and stupid as you want in someone's back yard. But Not In My Back Yard. My neighbors and I will decide what belongs in our back yard. That’s how a revolution begins – people taking care of their own families, their own neighbors, and their own back yards. Everything for The Greater Good begins in one's own back yard.

How big is my back yard? I care about my neighborhood, and my daughter’s. On a wider scale, I care if it happens in Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, or Connecticut, basically anywhere along the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers, and between the Berkshires and Boston (sing a chorus of ‘Sweet Baby James’ here).

You want to hate on people? Not in my back yard. My back yard was a battleground in the American Revolution. My back yard was a stop on the Underground Railroad. My back yard sent proud Union soldiers to fight the Civil War. In fact, my back yard sent soldiers to every war you had, both real and fabricated. 

My back yard gave birth to public health care and gay marriage. I’ll stand up for my neighbors, with my neighbors, for the inalienable rights of all the folks who live in my back yard. There are a host of different cultures, skin tones, languages, and faiths in my back yard. We don’t want outsiders messing with that. Take your hate to somebody else’s back yard.

You want to sell your charter schools to help bring back segregation of the races and the classes? Not in my back yard. My neighbors and I won’t go down without a fight. If necessary, we’ll found the biggest, best-ever home school programs since the American Revolution just to keep our kids out of your damned socially regressive charter schools. We want our kids to learn a lot of everything: English, Spanish, foreign languages, local history, world history, civics, math, art, music, sports, science; we want them to know about evolution and conservation, algebra to zoology. We believe our different faiths make us stronger, and our kids more open to new ideas, more tolerant and more prepared for the whole wide world abroad. We believe in separation of Church and State, and that public education is the responsibility of the State.

If a woman needs health services in my back yard, we’ll take care of her. If our criminal justice system gets out of hand, we’ll let them know. If our civil rights are at risk, we’ll deal with it. We aren't suspending the Constitution in my back yard.

You want to frack for gas and drill for oil? Level grand forests? Build pipelines from nowhere to nowhere? Not in my back yard. My neighbors and I will fight every inch of the way. Take your humanity-hostile greed programs elsewhere. We don’t want you here. Go where someone doesn’t care about his own back yard. If there is such a place.

You want to sell public lands for private development? My real, genuine back yard is an Audubon Sanctuary, it's private – and you’re not welcome here. I’m pretty sure lots of other people will feel the same when you come to destroy their back yards.

You want to kill insurance programs for the weakest among us, folks like me? Not in my back yard. We had a head start on you here in Massachusetts. We’ll get our own program up and running again. We’ll take care of the folks in our own back yard.

Oil spills from offshore drilling? Not in my back yard. Earthquakes from fracking? Not in my back yard. Frack-polluted water? Not in my back yard. We’ve worked very hard to keep our land and waters clean. We don’t want you destroying that, not in my back yard.  

We have clean energy here, wind, water, sun. We have the kinds of things people DO want in their back yards. We have organic farming here. We’re not dependent on your GMO crops and agent-orange weed killers. In winter, we already pay the price to import clean farm foods.  Life is fine in my back yard. And we’ll work to keep it that way.

We try to keep ourselves healthy in my back yard. We are a suburb of Canada here. They send us clean water and clean air, and it gets forward it on. We send it to south, as clean as it can be. What happens after it leaves our back yard is in someone else’s back yard, not our problem any more.

If we need expensive medications or eye surgery, Canada is a cheap, short, and pleasant train ride away. They are good neighbors, those Canadians, and we love them. They are good to us. They are our back yard neighbors.

If you’re concerned about the natural and unnatural disasters, global warming, the quality of your education, your health care, your natural resources and wildlife, the quality of your food supply, the quality and price of your drugs, your civil rights or your voting rights – you’d best take care of your own back yard. My neighbors and I will be busy taking care of ours. For a while.

MRP

On a Failing Filter

Getting on in years can make a gal pretty crotchety. You find, like Maxine, that there are lots of things that ran around in your brain for years and got trapped in your mouth filter. Now they are falling out, willy-nilly, often without invitation or provocation.

There is no medical process to replace a worn out mouth filter. Eventually, those things you didn’t say for a half century will come tumbling out. The real ‘you’ that few people know is exposed. The worst of it is that the thoughts that festered unspoken for fifty or sixty years, when finally spoken, can expose a lifelong hypocrisy. That’s what Granny’s Desk is for – to give mine a soft landing.

For much of my life, I tried to be trustworthy, loyal, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. I trashed obedience some time ago. It was too constraining, with too little return. Reverence left the room, too. Irreverence is so much more fun. Courtesy is probably next up. The page about being nice just for the sake of being nice is fading from my playbook. Thrift is a no-brainer when you are competing with church mice for survival. Clean is optional unless somebody else is paying for the water.

I am counting on trustworthy, loyal, and brave to see me through to the end. They still fit well. Cheer may be the last to go. I like laughter. I plan to die laughing.

My mouth filter is failing, but I'm not upset in the least. I guess I am prepared for the fallout, because I’m not too bothered about letting it all out any more.

When I finally announced to the world, on social media no less, that I will exit the planet as a registered Democrat – that was part of my failing mouth filter process. It was the public admission of long-held private and unspoken opinions. I will not leave the planet as a hypocrite. There will be no untold tales, and few secrets to baffle visitors to my grave. No mysteries unrevealed, if I can help it.

I am a Democrat because I want historical government records to show, long after I am gone, that this year I openly stood in opposition to the majority of my newly elected government. And that I had the courage to stand by my beliefs in a public record and on a public platform.

Between 1773 and 1783, a host of my direct blood ancestors spoke up for their convictions. Most fought openly to separate the colonies from the King. Two were loyal to England; they left the colonies for Canada. Whichever their choice, it was public, and their names and faces were attached to their actions, and still live in public records. Their mouth filters didn’t filter their political choices. They had courage. I owe them no less than to show my own.

And while we are on the subject of courage. Although I acknowledge the historical significance of the Boston Tea Party, I have believed for at least sixty years that the perpetrators were cowards. Those men dressed up as Natives, Indians, to make their dubious tax point by destroying private property for which an innocent shipmaster was fully responsible. How brave was it to take that action and shift the blame to someone else, an entire population that didn’t give a rat’s ass if white man’s tea was taxed? If they had gone to the party without the costumes, and taken responsibility for their revolt, and repaid the shipmaster for his cargo, then that would have made it a courageous act. Don’t brag to me about your Tea Party ancestors. I call bullshit. None of mine were there, but I'd feel the same if they had been.

Whew! I’ve kept that one in for a long time. Dear Lord – for so many decades. I’ve so seldom called Bullshit!, even when I saw it, even when I smelled it, even when I was standing in it. [Although, I do remember a my colleague Tom Porter saying “Tell me how you really feel; don’t hold back.”]

My friend, the late and very dear Barry Kittler. Barry bought a new truck once- about 1999. A small Dodge. He wouldn’t pay for power windows or air. The first July after he bought it, he whined incessantly about the heat inside his truck, and the smell from his dog. All because he wouldn’t pay for air or power windows. When I had had enough of his whining – and my mouth filter failed and I said “Not my fault you don’t have air and can’t reach to put the windows down, so suffer, you cheap prick.” We laughed for years. People still remind me of that. Especially when we remember Barry.

Don’t ask me how I feel about privatizing American education. I might just tell you. And it won’t be pretty. Be aware that my obscenity filter is a little compromised, too.

If you're an Evangelical, don't proselytize to me. I will choose my own method of salvation. I may be unkind in rejecting yours. Don't risk it. It's my defective mouth filter, you know. 

Don’t test me if you can't bear to hear an old lady rant. My mouth filter is failing. I will probably tell it as I see it, and you likely won’t describe the response as ladylike in any way. If you can live with my handicap, the broken mouth filter, bring it on. I'd love to talk with you.

MRP

On Moving Forward to the Past

I was raised and educated in the America of the fifties and sixties, started my own family and began my career in the late sixties and early seventies. I retired in 2007. This year, eight days after the coronation of our first ever openly misogynistic and racially prejudiced authoritarian leader, I will turn seventy-two. At my age, this could be my last go-round with an election as I face losing Social Security and Medicare which are crucial to my retirement budget.

I told you in an earlier blog about my being raised as the product of a religiously mixed marriage; but I was also raised in a culturally mixed marriage.

My father was the descendant of the families who founded America between 1620 and 1640; more than one of whom believed strongly in educating their daughters as well as their sons. Specifically, the descendants of Edmund Hobart (1573 - 1648) married educated women, and provided educated wives for their sons-in-law. And their women weren’t restricted to becoming teachers and nurses. No. Their men were needed to labor at and run the family businesses, the women managed the offices and kept the books and records – and bore a dozen or more children, and managed the family home as well. At least from just prior to the American Revolution (early 1700's) there are public records to support those facts. At sea, the women managed everything but the crew of the ship – and some even did that (which you know if you’ve read my book).

My mother was a descendant of poverty-stricken mill-worker immigrant Irishmen. She was second-and-third-generation Irish-American, the product of a culture where grown women were kept almost literally barefoot, bare-ass, and pregnant – and in the kitchen. Those families didn’t begin to educate their daughters until, well, until the nineteen sixties when my girl-cousins and I went off to college, about a hundred years after our Irish families first came to America. Of course, early on in Irish immigrant families, if a girl was physically ugly or had had her virginity compromised, thus being ineligible for marriage and motherhood – she would be educated just enough to become a nun, or a teacher, or a nurse – because she would need some means to support herself in her disgrace.

My father’s family knew no bias toward people from other countries, other races, other faiths. They were mariners and tradesmen. They accepted everyone who would sail with them, work with them, or do business with them. My father never felt or acted superior to anyone. Or inferior. He treated everyone as his equal, from the wealthy to the poor. His great-uncle (also an Edmund Hobart descendant), fought for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment – unable to conceive why it was a contentious issue at all. The family simply felt that everyone who wanted an education must have one, and that any adult should have a vote. Not one person was singularly any different from another, regardless of gender.

My mother’s family were Irish, and Catholic, as you know from the first blog. Her people were the objects of deep social and economic discrimination because of their heritage and their faith. My mother fought every day of her life, from the eighth grade on, to prove she was as worthy and equal as any other woman, all the non-Irish, non-Catholic women. That Nineteenth Amendment? It was passed the year she was born, and her immediate and extended family didn’t believe it was appropriate to have such a law. They didn’t educate their ‘girls’, either. She lost a scholarship to Columbia University because her father wouldn't allow her to go. (If she had gone, though, she might never have met my father.)

I grew up in a small city where young people my age accepted each other based on some invisible measure, completely unrelated to family economics or ancestry  – a sliding scale from ‘jocks’ to ‘brains’ – athletes, greasers, ordinary folk, and academic sparklers. By the grace of my DNA, I was among the latter – academically successful in nearly all that I cared to touch. Neither of my parents accepted less than perfection in every subject – or as close as they could reasonably expect to perfection, given that I was a poor student of biological sciences.

I spent my social time with other academically gifted friends, both boys and girls. I never felt that being female made me in any way unequal. The males among my friends certainly didn’t treat the females as different from themselves. We all read the same books, studied the same subjects, talked about events and ideas, and generally hated gym classes. One of my high school friends (a male), once posited the idea that he wanted to study all religions and attend all churches – because he didn’t want to commit to Christianity, then die and find himself unprepared in the arms of Buddha. Yes, that was in the early sixties, friends, and those were the kind of questions we debated. Before Vietnam, before Civil Rights, before Equal Rights. As a female, I never felt discrimination or inequality. Ever.

I went off to college in the fall of 1963. I entered as an ‘English – Journalism’ major. I loved to write. Later that first year, I found myself frustrated and bored with my studies. My father gave me a subscription to Time Magazine – and told me I had until June to decide which section of Time I would like to have written. I chose Business & Finance. With my father’s encouragement, I applied to transfer from the School of Liberal Arts to the School of Management. That was when I discovered for the first time in my life that there were social and educational stereotypes for women.

I was assigned an adviser, a Dr. Young. Apparently, his job was to discourage me and send me packing back to Liberal Arts. There were only three ‘girls’ in the Business curriculum, he told me, and all three were Accounting majors. I wanted to study Business Law & Collective Bargaining. After some heated arguments, he agreed that I could ‘try’ that major for a semester – knowing I would be the only ‘girl’ in my classes. I stayed and I succeeded. That led to my career in both applications and systems software engineering. None of my fellow students treated me as 'different' because of my gender.

I went on to earn two MBA’s – one in Small Business Practices, and one in Business Computing. In the course of my career, I only once came across open gender bias. During an interview with Jack Welch, then an up and comer with General Electric Plastics Division, Jack told me I should go home, take care of my husband and baby, and not be looking to take a man’s place on his team. Ultimately, he moved on to be much more powerful in GE, and so did I – I helped to save his ass and keep his plastics company on the map as Project Leader of the Y2K effort, 1998 - 2000. Besides the put down from Jack, in the course of my career I never felt gender discrimination. I was always paid an equivalent salary to my male colleagues. I was never a second class citizen in my techie world.

Now I see a despicable fat ugly old white man changing forever the America that was so good to me, my personal land of opportunity, left to my care by courageous ancestors. I have failed the men and women who came before me. It could mark an end to the legacy of the descendants of Edmund Hobart. My granddaughter may never know the land of her forefathers. I cannot stop it, but I will accept my share of the blame, the shame.

As a token nod to Equal Rights, the new sovereign will appoint two women to his council. They will serve in traditional female roles. Education, transportation  - the soccer mom roles. Women’s work. Keep the girls happy. Contented cows give better milk. And one of them doubles as his token Asian. There's a small win for someone there. [Yes, he did appoint some women to minor roles, but these are his inner circle councilors.]

And he will appoint his token black man to lead where he perceives that only a man of color belongs and could succeed – management of inner cities and slum housing.

Otherwise, his proposed council members are much like himself: mostly fat, mostly old, mostly ugly, all white men. A distinct scarcity of eye candy all around the table, including the monarch himself. Together, they will lead society back into the sixteenth century at best, and the fourteenth at worst. [I am pretty sure that in the past year or so we have transited rapidly to seventeenth century culture by just watching this runaway debacle.] 

The future was yesterday.

The past awaits tomorrow. 

MRP