Leaving Phoenix

Before I write the rest of this post, a disclaimer.  I love my city.  I moved to Arizona almost eight years ago, and the entire time, regardless of where my actual address was, I considered myself a Phoenician.  When I finally left renting behind and bought a house, I would not hear of living in the 'burbs.  It was Phoenix - and very specifically central Phoenix - or I wasn't doing it.  I'm at 12th and Osborn now, smack middle of the block.  I absolutely love living in a densely populated urban center where I can hear the birds in the back yard.  There are world-class cultural venues on my doorstep.  Every day I get the most spectacular view of Central Phoenix on my way to and back from work, courtesy of the HOV ramps from the 51 to I-10 East and back the other way, and every day it makes me smile. 

That said, Phoenix is a screwed up place.  There is too much undeveloped land.  It is strangled by inadequate infrastructure.  It labors under a "plan" that can barely be said to exist and badly needs to be reworked, if not tossed and rethought thanks to the great recession.  In just one school district, my own, you get schools that get their As, and schools that rank meager Cs, and if you travel too far in any given direction those A-rated schools get farther and fewer between.  We are awash in drug addicts.  Homelessness remains a chronic problem, and you can't take an offramp anywhere in the city's core without seeing panhandlers or signs of them.  Our historic buildings are forever at risk of the wrecking ball, victim of a city that has yet to make the pivot from reactive to proactive preservation policy.  Perhaps, though, worst of it all, Phoenix feels like the diaspora of community.  Where other communities would naturally take root and grow, where any other city this size would have its Chinatown, its Little Italy, its various immigrant enclaves and religious hubs, Phoenix has something that somewhat resembles a gayborhood, something else that somewhat resembles a barrio, a cluster of historic districts, and all those other communities have shattered against a ground so hard it can scarce be dug or tilled.  It has crossed my mind, I must admit, to give up on any cultivation and leave.

But I can't leave here.  Despite having stood at South Mountain and understood the depth of John 11:35, I cannot leave here.  I see a city that is the test bed for liberalism.  It is the argument built on desert sand that man is only bad due to bad structures and bad policy, and that if we abolish those he will naturally right himself and form new ones.  We can point to example after example of completely bad policy.  There is, of course, everyone's favorite hated Arizona policy - SB1070.  We could decline to comply with it.  It is an unfunded mandate, and we could very easily direct our police force that not one red cent of Phoenix's monies will pay for its enforcement.  The city could refuse to pay for holding, transferring, or processing individuals under SB1070. We would in effect revert to our de facto status of sanctuary city.  The reality, folks, is that "illegal aliens" have been living in Phoenix for as long as there has been a Phoenix to live in.  The cleaning lady is not a threat to public safety - but the meth dealer you already have sufficient cause to hold very much is a threat, and he will be just fine in a jail in this country, rather than hurled across the border a free man. 

It gets more obvious.  Take the PHLOTE forms.  These things serve one purpose and one purpose only - to take kids from Spanish-speaking homes, segregate them out of the classroom, impede their progress, and make them feel stupid and inferior for not speaking perfect flawless English like the white kids (who can't read, by the way).  This shunts students into a program that makes them take English and only English, and nothing but English, until a test designed by English-speakers decides it is OK for them to study things other than English with students that speak English.  Who decided this was a good idea?  Why are we doing this?  We've all seen Arizona's God-awful completion figures.  If you take a chunk of students, and you make them not study content, for years, you are willfully causing that God-awful completion figure to exist.  Further, you are ensuring that those children never get a chance to exchange ideas with peers that share their interests outside of their own linguistic block. Castaneda v. Pickard be damned, there is no legitimate educational need being served here - and the readily-available metrics quoted by the Governor herself should bolster our legal cover should such cover become necessary.  Phoenix should inform the State that we intend to find a way to circumvent AZELLA, and then do so.  

Though, city government could do more than nullify bad policy from the State.  There is the matter of this foolish method of revenue collection the city uses - sales tax.  We charge 2% on everything that is purchased within city limits.  Land taxes, on the other hand, are peanuts.  My fellow Phoenicians, I would like to take this moment to inform you that this is how you ensure your tax structure attempts to rob the poor for your revenues.  It isn't effective.  It isn't even efficient.  It creates onerous bureaucratic burdens for business.  It diminishes the purchasing power of every single consumer in city limits by 2%.  That's an economic drag.  At an assessed value of $12.3 billion (yes, billion), you could sneeze on the property tax rate and abolish the 2% sales tax.  You wouldn't even have to do it in a revenue neutral way and you'd still cause virtually no economic pain.   Let's say we wanted to raise twice the amount of tax through property taxes as we do now from sales tax - which would be about $1.2 million.  We're talking a property tax rate increase in the pennies to get completely rid of the city sales tax.  Gone Adios.  Two percent more stuff being purchased in exchange for everyone pays one percent more property tax.  Yes, this requires a referendum, but really, how do you make an argument against a fairer tax policy that raises more money and causes less pain?  The neighboring cities might hate it, but then, they might copy it, too.  In a city of 1.5 million people, making on average some thirty-six grand a year, this is an impact of somewhere in the $600-$700 per person ballpark that would not be spent on taxes, and could be spent on goods and services.  Let's say my late-night napkin math is way off.  Let's say this only restore $300 in purchasing power to every Phoenician on average.  This is still $450M back into the local economy.  In exchange for this huge boom in purchasing power, we are going to ask everyone that owns land - i.e. the business that will profit handsomely off all this new purchasing power - to pay a wee little sneeze more in property taxes.  If you can find me the business leader who will not trade a $0.02 per $100 assessed value property tax increase for 2% more sales, I'll give you a quarter (and I'll probably slap him).  

Now, property taxes are only valuable on property that is developed.  Vacant lots are death to the tax base. They erode the value of the land around them.  If only there were a way that the city could invest in itself!  If only some provision of the charter allowed the city to engage in industry!  Oh, but if only some legal framework existed whereby the city could snatch away a piece of land at these locked-in-by-law bottom of the bust land prices and fruitully employ it!

Oh wait, there totally is - and if we're smart we'll hijack money from Washington to do it.  Follow the crazy idea. 

Remember the drug problem I talked about up above?  Addiction and mental disorders receive parity for treatment under the Affordable Care Act starting in 2014 - including under Medicaid.  There simply aren't the facilities in existence to treat them all and deal with them all.  The city charter explicitly authorizes the city to engage in industry by whatever means necessary.  Under eminent domain, the city would only need to pay the appraised price, and 2012's Prop 117 ensures that those valuations will stay in bargain-basement territory for the next decade.  The city could snap up derelict buildings and empty lots, create its own clinics of all manner - from urgent care to general practices to STD clinics to, yes, addiction treatment centers - and start scraping people up off the street and putting them back together again.  If private practice can do this profitably, what on earth stops public practice from likewise doing it profitably?  It's not like the market for health care is so small that behemoths like Banner will get crowded out any time soon.  Hell, at customary rates, these facilities would pump money back into the city coffers at a brisk clip, and create scores of high-paying healthcare jobs in fields and communities that tend to be woefully under-served.  We could pair this with existing drug interdiction programs and instead of just the incessant chain of incarceration that costs money and drains resources, maybe rehabilitate so much as a handful through a process that creates resources and maybe, just maybe, will let that person become a productive member of society instead of a felon.  We would no longer need to let our fellow men die by the wayside.  

The industry piece of it goes on, mind you.  APS would hate it, but we could use the roof of absolutely every government building and every single parking lot that the city of Phoenix owns, lease it all out for solar panels, and save a fortune on electric costs.  Considering the absurd amount of recyclables the city takes in every year, we could likely work a better deal than just handing it over to whomever - like a public-private partnership to bring an actual recycling plant to Phoenix, and create good, high-paying, blue-collar union jobs to take up some of the slack from construction as we transition from growth to sustainability.  We could get into housing, into parking, into pharmacies - into whatever hole in the local economy city government chooses to plug up, just by exercising existing power under existing law, and we can get a quick cheap easy half million a year on a no-brainer of a tax change that I can't fathom the voters not going for, if we can just be brave enough to do it.  

That, however, is why I love Phoenix.  Phoenix is a brave city.  It exists in one of the harshest climates in the nation, and yet it has matured into the nation's fifth-largest metropolis.  It dares to think of places like airports as being friendly.  There was a once upon a time, not too long ago, that it even dared innovate, and innovate successfully, on public policy.  If this city is going to rise up again, if we are going to permanently establish our own prosperity, if it is going to make of itself the fertile soil in which communities can take root instead of barren waste where they whither, then it must be brave again.  Personally, I do not believe Phoenix's best days are behind her.  There will be no leaving Phoenix for me.

Confessions of a Policy Wonk

I, Jo Hafford, resident of Phoenix, Arizona, am a liberal policy wonk.  During the 2012 campaign cycle, when folks were bemoaning how similar the parties were, I knew the policy differences not from the Sunday shows but from their white papers - which I read, though I don't think Mitt Romney did.  Simpson-Bowles? Yeah, I know why that didn't pass, and will never pass, and should never pass.  Even here locally, in my fourth-bluest-in-the-state legislative district, I felt it necessary to read the House Minority Leader's legislation before making like a good little volunteer and falling in line (turns out he's farking brilliant on policy, but more on that at a later date).  

There is, however, a problem with trying to be this familiar with policy, to say nothing of honestly loving the process that no one should watch up close.  There are vast swaths of public policy that are unabashedly stupid.  No, I'm not talking about the fiscal hara-kiri.  That, for liberals, is genius, and at least short term will glue budget talks to the things that are actually in the budget - like do we want taxes, or do we want education, for example.  I'm talking about things like the milk mess.  

The milk mess would not exist were it not for a piece of legislation that never really got overturned, it just got papered over.  Think of it like having a hornet's nest in your house, but instead of removing the hornet's nest, you get some really heavy wallpaper and just keep gluing another layer up there every few years.  The mechanism that will (and I mean will) drive milk to $8 a gallon, to say nothing of the price of everything from cheese to chocolate, is still there in the statute.  It's there for want of a single sentence in the Farm Bill - repealing not the Agricultural Act of 1948, but the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938.  That, Speaker Boehner, is your Soviet-style dairy policy, that ties commodity prices to the commodity producer's standard of living.  The reality is good ol' American capitalism and ingenuity have rendered that thing more or less useless, and it should go, but it doesn't.  It is not still in the law because we don't know how to repeal a law - the House of Representatives symbolically repealed Obamacare 31 times, they totally understand repeal.  It just never occurs to them "Hey, this law is crap, let's get rid of it."

There are other chunks of stupid in American policy.  Everyone's hair is on fire over President Obama having given Congress a raise of about $900.  Here's the deal - by law, Congress has gotten a cost of living adjustment for decades now.  They've routinely rejected it for years.  For the last two years, there has been a pay freeze in effect for all civilian employees of the federal government - all of them - and the only getting around it is by executive order, which we've done, for two years.  Prior to that, cost of living adjustments were made by a matter of statute since forever, but what we've actually paid federal civilian employees has been dictated by the President since Bush 41.  

That's right, kids.  Doesn't matter if we're talking Biden or a petty warrant officer.  If your job in federal government falls somewhere in the purview of the Executive, your pay has not been tied to your performance, or your tenure, or even a collective bargaining agreement for the last generation.  The President picks up a pen and essentially decides, "OK, I will pay you this much," and that's what we pay you, by way of executive order.  The average American wouldn't run a hot dog stand this way, much less the governing structure of the world's largest economy.  But on we putter with this really asinine piece of policy that nobody seems to be willing to call out for what it is.  The last attempt at a federal merit system was Carter, and Reagan chucked that along with everything else Carter tried to do, and we've never looked back.

Then there's the other thing we haven't tried to do since Carter - energy policy.  Right now, it is a popular trick of demagoguery to rabble on about gas prices.  It's like the common wisdom that when you're really desperate, and everyone is ignoring you, stand up and holler "TWO DOLLAR GAS!" as loud as you can, and the media will instantly hand you the microphone.  Two dollar gas is never coming back, folks.  Saudi Arabia can't support itself at the oil prices necessary for two dollar gas to be profitable ever again, and we'll do well to stick around three dollars for the near future.  As the middle eastern OPEC nations become ever less stable - and have to throw around ever more largess to keep themselves in power - expect the price of oil to trend upwards over time, and take the cost of gasoline with it.  Even after we throw a bazillion dollars at Big Oil, and even after Big Oil returns the favor with the lowest gas prices in the world (and they do), we are never ever ever going to see long term trendlines for gasoline, or for fossil fuels in general, trend down.  Shan't happen.

So what's a wealthy, developed nation to do?  Simple - you pull a Germany and build something else.  You do this part, yes, through debt, but part through starting to siphon off these massive oil subsidies, and let the price of gas (and the tax revenues it takes in) drift upwards.  Yes, this is hardcore economic engineering, but all policy is engineering of some sort.  We could repurpose existing oil subsidies to retooling gas stations to provide hydrogen, for example.  Or encourage oil companies to go into your local apartment complex, sign a deal with the property owner, and stick a recharging station in all of those spaces.  Hell, they could get really clever and convert the covered parking to solar panels in some parts of the country.  Or, as a nation, we could decide you know what, screw you Big Oil, we're gonna build that ourselves.  We could take all those billions, build our own infrastructure, reduce our dependency on gasoline by orders of magnitude, start buying back gas vehicles, and let Big Oil shrivel down to Medium-Sized Oil.  But we don't, because we talk about gasoline prices as if they were a barometer of anything in the universe, which they aren't.  That, my friends, is stupidity in American policy making at work. 

I could talk taxes.  Tax policy in America is really, really stupid.  From income tax to estate tax to sales tax, it's all so bloody dumb I could scream.  We all know sales taxes are hideously regressive.  We all know estate taxes are ham-handed efforts to prevent dynastic control of the economy (news flash: didn't work).  We all know we have the highest corporate tax rates in the world that nobody pays.  So what do we do?  We nibble around the edges of this splendidly stupid section of policy, and bicker about a measly 3% in the rates.  Really?  3%?  Y'all want to fight over $800B when we need closer to $4T?  The one whole sole and only reason I am not throwing a full-on tantrum over this right here and now is I'm working on a better plan.  

This brings me to the confession I must make as even just a minor policy wonk.  Everything, everything, has a highly technical plan to fix it.  I am doggedly interested in these highly technical fixes.  It's why I write this blog, why I'm politically active, and why every time I hear John McCain on TV I have to check myself for signs of an aneurysm.  On policy, you will never hear conservative and liberal policy wonks prattle on the way demagogues and ideologues do.  This was Paul Ryan's tell of how we knew he was not one of us - no real wonk in this life is ever going to hold up a damn philosopher as the backbone of a plan, ever, unless there's one out there I'm not aware of named Calculator.  This is how we know John McCain is not one of us, too.  When your objection is "lead from behind", when your answer to everything is boots on the ground and arm the rebels, you have stopped looking for technical solutions to achieve a definitive goal.  You're just a war hawk.

Government has definitive goals because society has definitive goals, and society has definitive goals because the individuals that comprise it have definitive goals.  We should not be bickering about what those goals are.  The blatherskite of how American America can be and in America we have these American values that are American and blah blah blah from our politicians should be screamed down for the blatherskite it is.  Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, Amendments 1 through 26 - got it.  These things do not need further defining, nor do they necessarily need tidbits like "Christian" or "traditional" or "English-speaking" jammed in them.  These things need to be indefatigably worked toward.  I confess that I want for the public discourse to be focused to the exclusion of all else on policy that does just that, and does it in a provable, mathematically sound way. And I confess that every time I hear someone rattle off an unprovable or flatly untrue talking point because they don't have a logical, well-reasoned counter, I want to whack them with an abacus.

Faith of my Mother

Every year at Christmas, I turn into an emotional wreck.  The impetus for that amped-up distress stays with my through my birthday, is supplanted by a different trauma in February, and finally breaks by Saint Patrick's Day.  As I have aged, it has become clearer and clearer to me where this derives from. 

I was raised as a Christian.  My background was not Nazarene or Pentecostal, though those were the names on the buildings we went to, and we didn't go for the philosophical diatribe between Peter and Paul in the Epistles.  What drove that upbringing was not any man in a robe or vestment or freshly pressed suit behind a pulpit - it was the faith of my mother. 

My mother was not brought up in this tradition.  She chose it.  She studied it.  She passed a fair amount (perhaps more than she realizes) of that well-reasoned approach to faith on to me.  The churches we attended, at least early on, took the same approach.  There was no infallible human leader.  There was an all-knowing, all-loving God, who had left us instructions to life that were nothing if not as complicated as life itself, that could be questioned and plumbed and an exact, correct, righteous answer reached for every ethical quandary we would ever have in our lives.  This, however, meant sitting with a fair amount of tension. This meant reconciling the God of Galatians with the God of Leviticus - and this was a thing you had to do as a Christian, because there can only be the one God.  Even the over-simplified division I've heard of the Old Testament as God the Father and the New as God the Son does violence to the truly monotheistic heart of the Faith and the teachings of Christ and the Prophets.  

I digress - but only a little.  The purpose of the study of the Bible, the reason we would gather in the back of the tabernacle for advanced classes with Sister Esther at Whited Bible Camp, was this deep-seated belief in unity and wholeness.  God could not be divided, neither could his Word, therefore, the failing is not in the text but in our inability to reconcile it, so back to the text we go, to question, to reason, to debate, to pray, and to seek to understand in a way that is consistent with the core fundamental teachings of the Faith.  

Well and good, but we do this with any philosophy, and Christianity is not a philosophy.  What sets Faith apart is the irrationality at the very heart of it.  It is the mustard seed from which all else springs, without which nothing else moves.  For Christianity, obviously, that thing is Christ Himself.  

This is the part where my Humanist, Secularist, and Atheist friends generally decry all their understandings of the Faith.  They denounce the need of a God to "make you" behave.  They detest the notion of some supernatural rewards system where the good go to heaven and the bad to hell.  They attack the accuracy or lack thereof of the telling of the orthodoxy itself.  It's a free country, they're entitled to do so, but I have to ask for the space to make the apology for the Faith.  These things are not that which sprouts from the story of the Christ Child.  All the other trappings that have grown up around it, the condemnation, the moral herding of man, the celestial granting of privilege, all of that comes later.  None of it sits at this privileged, core, primary position.  

What does sit there is love for its own sake.  Love without condition or reservation.  Love that need not see the fruits of its labor now, but that seeks desperately with its each pace and breath to move the hearts of man closer to one another.  It is a divine love that calls us all together for the sake of being one, and nothing more.  Much the way we must reconcile our readings of the Bible into a unitary text, so too must we reconcile our readings of one another into a unitary fellowship.  Unlike with so much of the complex Biblical teaching, on this matter, we are called to merely do two things - love and believe. This is the core irrationality at the heart of true Christianity. 

We believe that all things are possible through Christ.  We believe there is neither male nor female, Greek nor Jew, slave nor free - all are one in Christ.  We believe we do not follow Paul or Apollos or Cephus, but Christ.  We believe in the one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it.  But the one great unspoken, in all of our creeds, from Corinthians to the Masai, is that we continue to believe all this when there is no sign of it in the world.  To hold a Faith that teaches that we can all be made whole, be made one, through this irrational boundless love is to outright defy the modern experience.  

I am well acquainted with that defiance.  I have every reason in the world to be bitter.  I have suffered my share of slings and arrows.  There is no logical thing that stands between me and my life experience and being a law-and-order die-hard neoconservative arguing for self-defense and self-sufficiency and social Darwinism.  The coldly rational approach to putting and end to stories like mine is to destroy and lay waste to things and people that cause them.  But that which moves me as a Christian is not rational.  It is an irrational belief that the world is a better place, that there is less suffering, if we judge a little less and love a little more, even if my life is snuffed out.  There is a divine love that loves us each individually and together collectively, that calls us to find a way to it.  Christmas Day is the observation of that love becoming a real thing in the world, whose life was snuffed out, who yet triumphed over death, hell and the grave, who still calls us to love individually and collectively, to sit with the tension that divides us in the belief that through love we can be united.  

So yes, Christmas is the gifts, is the lights, is being with friends and family and all of that.  It is the observances both secular and religious.  But moreover, it is a reminder that Christian love - real, boundless, unreserved and unashamed Christian love - can be made a real thing in the world.  It is a chance to follow in Mary's example, and treasure this in our hearts.  In times like these, beset as we are on all sides by a reality that would seem intent on disproving that, it is as important to cling to that faith as it is difficult.

Merry Christmas.  May we find the way to live and love in God's glorious light.

Breathing

I find myself once more staring at this great expanse of white space choking on the words.  I want so much to hide behind the the grandiosity of a greater good, when the reality is I just want the air I breathe.  The fight exhausts me, and I yearn to set it down.  

That's not an option, though.  Political fights are one thing.  There's the campaign, and then the election, then everyone sleeps for a little bit.  Even interpersonal fights - you can ignore the individual for a little bit, let the flames die down on their own, before reaching out to rekindle the relationship.  But when the fight is for basics like life and dignity, there is no setting it down.  There is no chance to catch your breath.  

Midway through the campaign, I made the decision to stop talking to my father.  My father is a bigot.  He believes he is always right, and that I am always stupid.  He feels he has special standing in the world having dealt with mortality in his 60s in the form of a triple bypass.  I feel I do, too, considering I have held my mortality in my hand every day since I was 23.  And while I would fight with my last breath for him to be able to say and do as he pleases, and indeed have reached out to his enemies to try and get them to back off, my father shares no such compulsion towards mutual defense.  In a sense, to win any of my battles, great or small, I must defeat my father. 

He decided at one point it would be appropriate to accuse the Democratic ground game of unethical and improper behavior in polling and voter registration.  Then he didn't understand why I would find this offensive.  He couldn't fathom why I would take that so personally, it's not like I had anything to do with it personally, he was referring to the mystery "them" that does bad things, the phantom menace "they".  It didn't matter to him that I was partially responsible for organizing a legislative district, and it sure as shit didn't matter to him that I had met and worked alongside literally every organizer in the county.  No no, it wasn't about me, specifically, so I shouldn't be offended, and I should afford him "some kind of consideration" because he's my father and he's old. 

Fuck that.

Initially, it was beyond liberating to cut the man off.  No longer did I have someone haunting my every last victory who was actively cheering my demise.  The specter of his self-righteousness, of his insistence on playing the sinned against martyr, was wholesale jettisoned from my life.  I felt like I could speak freely without having to give a damn if my father back in Maine got wind of this that or the other.  He could sit and rant at the Facebook all he wanted.  I didn't have to hear it anymore.  Now, though, the door of this new closet is clearly gone, and I am still afraid to come out of it. 

I should have the bravery to do it.  I should have the courage of my convictions to stand tall on my own narrative and tell it rather than flee from forming it.  The truth is I hate the story of me.  It is not that I am ashamed or regret it.  The making of me has been what it has been, and I cannot exist as I do now without it.  There are people all around me now who have encouraged me, who have lifted me up, who have lead me to believe in my own inherent good just as much as I believe in the inherent good in all of them.  That man cannot be divorced from his making.  If I am to be effective, let alone understood, I must come to grips with and be able to talk down that making.  I have to draw this deep ragged breath as best I can and begin the process of enumerating the moving parts, describing their orbits, explaining the warp and woof of the plane they transit.  

Here goes.

Three Things

This is not about that.  Whatever that is, I'm not writing about it here.  There will be no Olympics talk here.  No tax returns, no shootings, no whatever is in today's news cycle - this is not about that.  

In fact, nothing is about that.  As much as we like to think how interconnected we are, how interdependent, the fact of the matter is the teeming mass is remarkably stable.  Sure, the whole mass weebles and wobbles around as though at any moment it'll all fall over, but ultimately all it does is jiggle all over like a planetary jello mold.  If you were so lucky as to win the ovarian lottery and be born in America, a disaster will not occur to day that will ruin your life tomorrow - guaranteed.  So what are we doing here? 

We're watching TV.  We're going to jobs we hate.  We're driving our cars that cost too much money while pining for cars that cost more money, down too-small freeways provided by a too-big government.  We're tweeting and Facebooking and texting and emailing about that thing that guy at that place did with that girl from that other place and OMG did you see that?!  

But just as no disaster will occur that will ruin your life, chances are, no miracle will save you, either.  While most of us are looking at the TV, somewhere in America, someone is looking at a bill they can't pay, a child they can't feed, or a fist-full of pills that keep them alive.  Somewhere some fast food worker is being yelled at over french fries as though they were the cure for cancer, AIDS and the common cold - and nowhere, absolutely positively nowhere, is the conversation happened that this isn't civilized society anymore, it's panem et circenses. 

A little history.  Once upon a time in this far away place called Rome, there was an empire that had sprouted out of a Republic.  This empire had come to dominate absitively posolutely everything - and I mean everything.  If there was a speck of dirt to be seen, the Romans had seen it, claimed it, slapped a Latin name on it, and built a road to it.  Rome had more or less had its way with the world for hundreds of years, and then it started to decline.  During the decline, a satirist (yes, satire is this old), first coined this phrase to refer to superficial appeasement.  The people got their bread, they went to the circus, they watched the lions eat the Christians, everyone (except the Christians) had a great time, and nobody paid any attention to the impending doom - I mean, did you see when that gladiator at that colosseum took that big honkin' sword and ran it through that other guy?  Wasn't that the coolest thing ever?!  No, I don't care about whatever the Meccabees or Maccabees or Honey bees in the cedar trees of Judea - when is the next circus? 

Sound familiar? 

There's still the major issue that separates us from Rome.  They thought they had subjugated the world.  We've actually done it.  If you are not starving now, you are not likely to be starving tomorrow.  If you do not have AIDS now, you will not need three hundred dollars with of pills tomorrow (and every day thereafter).  If you are not homeless now, you are unlikely to wake up in a cardboard box.  Those positions are already filled.  This is about that.  

We could fix it.  We could turn off the TV, we could ignore the Kardashians and the Jersey Shore and the litany of red carpets, and fix it.  We could get up off our ever-widening American asses and close the ever-widening American gap between have and have-not, the cultural and economic divide that is increasingly making it impossible to relate to anyone not in your own little strata off the Republic.  I refuse to believe there is any such thing as a stone-hearted American.  They don't exist, and frankly, I think it's actually part of the problem.  We don't want to watch the mother fighting with the DES guy that no, really, the money is gone and she needs assistance now.  Seeing a man wasted to nothing from HIV turns our stomach.  Stories of unbalanced people hording kittens make our skin crawl.  So we turn away.  We get our bread, we go to our circus, we see who gets impaled or eaten by lions today, we go home - but we know.  It nags at the back of the mind, eats at the corner of the heart.  We don't look at the unfortunate, not directly, they live at the periphery of our vision - but we know.  Sometimes the thought penetrates our waking mind that we really can't deal with living in this world where a very few of us are doing extraordinary, and the rest are split between the haves and the about-to-be-killed-offs.  

We could fix it.  We could roll up our sleeves and get involved.  Our government will not fix this.  Our churches will not fix this.  The problem is a lack of faith, hope, and love.  Faith in our ability to fix it, hope in our ability to succeed, and a love of life that will not stand by and let destruction happen.  But those three things last forever - we do not.  We have the equivalent of a cosmic sneeze here.  Whatever faith, hope and love can be crammed into the soul of one man is nothing more than one small speck of stuff.  No matter how many soups you serve, or clothes you donate, or kitties you save, you will never, ever, be more than one speck.  But it is one speck that was not there before.  It is one speck brighter, one speck further from the abyss.  Individually they may be nothing, but in the unorchestrated chaotic undirected aggregate, they go where the fit, they fit where they go, and that steady accretion of specks will stop the slide, will give us a foothold, and spare us the fate of Sisyphus - or worse.  

I'm starting to volunteer.  Through political avenues where I can find a voice, through LGBT organizations where I can help my own community, and come Fall semester I  intend to get involved with the ASPCA.  It does not make me love my job.  It does not make the bills easier to pay.  It is time consuming, and at times, it is discouraging.  There are reminders at every turn of my status as "speck" - but I am a strangely unburdened speck.  I believe less and less in the decline we all know and feel and are told is real, because I see proof every day that the there's an alternative.  My email is flooded with people working to create an alternative.  I am watching all these specks come together in an army of the insignificant create a teeny tiny bulwark between us and the great oubliette of history.  I know all these specks will be here but a little while.  Elections end, strays get adopted, and someday there will be a cure for AIDS.  We will all eventually stop our toiling both for the day and for the longer night.  But our works wrought of faith, hope, and love - those things endure.

To My Latino Friends

Welcome to being a wedge this year -like the gays with marriage equality, and if you give it in a minute we'll see the old people, the sick people, kids, education, and the kitchen sink all picked up and hurled at the Republicans.  Welcome to the 2012 cycle.  But the next time you hear "Oh, this is election year politics" on the DREAM act - here's why it needs to be election year politics.  


In 2010, when it wasn't election year politics, Republicans had no problem killing their own idea just to sick their finger in Obama's eye.  The DREAM Act sailed through the House on a largely party-line vote, and then couldn't get cloture in the Senate.  If the GOP wanted this to be done through the Congress, like they claim now, they could simply drop their filibuster (which is technically still ongoing), vote for cloture on this bill, and then vote to pass it as presented by the House, and it would be on Obama's desk as a permanent solution by the end of the week.  They do not want that - and no matter what they say now, they do no want this policy at all.  During the primaries, Texas had its own version of a DREAM act that provided for in-state tuition for children who were illegal immigrants through no fault of their own.  It was signed by Rick Perry.  And in the debates, the other candidates piled on him for taking this stand and for defending it.  Mitt Romney took up the issue of educating children of illegal immigrants like a pair of scissors and went after Rick Perry as though he were a gay kid with queer hair.  The media acts as though we haven't heard Romney's long term plan - but we have.  Self-deportation, slam the borders shut, let Mexico die on our doorstep, we don't care.  


For them to get that, first, the President must fail.  They cheer for failure and blame it all on Obama.  Every time there is bad news they set their heads alight and scream "Obama's fault! Obama's fault!" and dance around the media and Fox & Friends.  But we are still in a stalled economy.  We still have major social issues that must be addressed.  Regardless of party, if the President fails, if the Office of the President fails  in its Constitutionally-mandated mission, then by definition the whole works fails.  If two years has taught us nothing, is that these particular Republicans, this Tea Party driven insurgency, are perfectly willing to not just drive us off a cliff, but to put the pedal to the metal.  On Immigration, and yes the timing looks very blatantly political, especially considering the memo was brought to him in February of 2011, the President has actually accomplished something, and they are spinning like mad to make this a bad thing.  "It isn't permanent!" they cry, and they're right, it's not.  If Romney gets elected, or if the GOP retains effective control of the Legislature, it never will be, either.  They are right, this is still not a win.  This is still Democrats having to play politics with the party that started the mess and refuses - quite literally - to stop the filibustering talk and bluster, and actually do things.

They've all got to go, all the way down the ticket.  This is being used in an election year to force Republicans to start answering the question of what do they want.  They have to be called to account for wedging off votes, for breaking up the electorate, then digging in their heels and refusing to do anything or put forward a single idea to accomplish a single goal.  If you'd like to not be a wedge issue ever again, if you'd like to see reform beyond an executive deferment (that Romney could revoke on Day 1), your best chance is to get every single person you know in every state you know them in and get them to go to the polls and vote Democrat, all the way down the ticket, from President to dog catcher.  If you want to keep the laws on the books that break families with immigrants into pieces, reigns terror over school children, and effectively considers non-Whites as second class humans never mind citizens, then stay home or vote for a Republican down-ticket from the President.

On Being Fat

Ketogenic diets have one huge drawback - when you carb load, or when you cheat, you bloat, to the tune of five grams of water weight for every gram of carbohydrate converted to glycogen.  It drops off quickly enough, but it means enduring fat days.  


This past Thursday I had an awful day at work.  It was just awful - my stats came in destroyed for the month and fairly damaged for the year, I had an unproductive coaching conversation with my boss, and I was stressed to hell over the pending change in schedules. So I decided to hell with it, I'm eating one of the free donuts.  And a kruller.  And a bismarck.  And the Subway cookies provided with the free lunch - but not the sub.  And a bag of M&Ms, and when I got home, leftover Easter candy.  Now, anyone who knows me can vouch that I don't normally eat like that.  Or at least not these days I don't.  There were times in my life when I ate like this de rigeur.  And this encapsulated moment of badness pretty well explains how and why I used to be fat.  


But let's sidetrack a minute and talk about what I mean by "fat".  I still have a few pounds more body fat than I'd care to be carrying.  My cut cycles to date have never gotten me down to the coveted single-digit body fat levels at which you have those longed-for six-pack abs.  That's not fat, though.  Fat is when I was 255 graduating high school, or 250 after transferring back to UMaine, or 235 when I was trying to kill myself with booze and take-out.  This is not oh woe is me, I will always be fat.  This is I have been fat.  I have sat and visited with that demon, have studied him to where I can recount every nuance of his being.  


Being fat isn't a physical condition - that's obesity.  Obesity's cause is very simple - you eat more than you expend, and your body stores it away as fat.  It is the most basic of metabolic processes.  Being fat is an identity.  It is a way of seeing the self, of taking one's own measure and seeing in the mirror naught but the undulating rolls of fat.  They are repulsive.  Modern American culture tells us that it's OK to be "heavy" or "plus-sized", we wage campaigns urging us all to love ourselves - because we know what we see, and must brainwash ourselves.  We know this isn't true.  We make peace with thighs that touch, with a little pudge around the center, but there's a tipping point.  Upon each frame, only so much may be hung.  That point, that limit, may be different for each, but it's there.  That point is not the few pounds from holiday fruitcake.  This is a point of no return. 


I was predisposed to be heavy.  If I track directly up my bloodline, there aren't many small people to be found.  Short, broad, deep chested - this is the only archetype to be had in the cards, the one lonely gene in the entire familial pool.  Growing up I was fairly isolated.  Mine was a childhood spent indoors, with lots of toys, thanks to issues with allergies, chronic sinusitis, and bronchitis.  I couldn't play sports - but I could play instruments, and by nine years old in the fourth grade, I was well on my way to band nerd status.  I was also well on my way to 80 pounds.  In time, I would also become a theater nerd, and be outed as gay, and take a part time desk job for my father - and I would eat. I would eat and eat, and there would always be food available.  I usually had no one I wanted to spend time with who would spend it with me - but there was always food.  Despite demonstrative proof to the contrary that there were in fact people who saw me as more than the fat pasty gay kid, this was the identity I had come to internalize.  By the time these 'formative years' that were high school were done, I'd pretty well externalized that image, too, clocking in at 255. 


College was Columbia, pure circumstance alone gave me an opportunity to rebrand myself as something else.  For most schools, it's the "Freshman Fifteen" that you gain - but for me, I lost some 70 pounds.  The school's food was terrible.  Most of my disposable income went to clubbing (and thus not food).  And sometimes, I'd get bored, and talk to someone on my cell phone, and just walk.  Many times I would end a conversation with "Oh, I'm at the Lincoln Center..." having walked there from Columbia, and take the train back home.  Without really consciously trying, the weight came off.


That's what the first error was, how I lost to the demon the first time.  I never changed my own conception of myself.  Sure, I was still pretty pale.  But I was fairly well known and popular.  I was a young blonde haired green eyed boy in the eastern Mecca of queerdom.  Life was good.  There were any of a number of identities that could've taken root, could've supplanted the notion of self-as-fat-boy, but none did.  I still saw myself as the fat pasty gay kid from Maine, just now I was at Columbia, and me at Columbia just happened to do things that made me less fat.  Not a whit of it was on purpose.  When the wheels fell off at the end of '01, I moved back to Maine, and spring semester found me in the frozen cold of Maine.  I now saw myself as the fat pasty gay kid from up north who had gone to Columbia, lost his marbles, and crash landed back in Maine.  And unlike Columbia where there were clubs to go to and only bad food to eat, at UMaine, the food was significantly better, and it was cold.  My time at Columbia became a memory, I burned that image of myself, and climbed back up to 235.   


The year before I left Maine once and for all, there was a great and powerful mess, that came through my life and irrevocably changed it for the worse.  It made that last year feel like trying to manage my life in a typhoon, and it became abundantly, capital red-letters clear, that I was going to have to leave Maine, or I was going to die there.  And so I did.  But before I did, I decided I needed to be able to compete with these gay boys out at ASU.  I'd been a college boy once before, I intended to do it again, and no reason not to get back down to 'fighting weight', right?  I tried to eat better, I racked countless hours on an elliptical trainer, got down to about 175-180, which in those days I had accepted as pretty good and/or good enough, and moved to Arizona.  


Arizona has been, and continues to be, a bizarre chapter of my life.  And within that chapter, there is a passage about just one man.  I loved that man.  With every fiber of my being, I loved him.  He made me feel attractive.  He laughed at my jokes.  He marveled at how smart he thought I was.  The sex was amazing, and curled up next to him, lying in that death trap of an apartment in Mesa, I felt safe, warm, and wanted.  I managed to battle my weight down to the 165-175 range while I was with him, on the grounds that I felt he was physically so much more attractive than me that it was incumbent on me to 'catch up', which he found flattering, of course, but don't pin this on the man.  This was on me.  I wanted to be rid of the identity of fat pasty gay kid.  I wanted to be this man's boy.  


So when he left, I was destroyed - literally.  He moved out on a Tuesday.  I came home, came around the entryway, and took one step into an emptied living room. My TV was there, and the stand, and my computer.  Everything else was gone, and so was he.  I collapsed on the floor, right there at the entry way, and sobbed.  I ended up drinking myself into oblivion that night, and it started a trend.  I would come home, drink, smoke cigarettes, eat food, and watch TV or play video games.  This was the second time I lost the game.  I had managed to see myself other than the fat pasty gay kid, but this time, I had built an image far less durable.  When it was destroyed, I only had the one to go back to, and so I did.  I ballooned back up to 235 pounds, and ruined my health in the process.  


But in the ruination of my health, something crazy happened.  After chasing one specialist after another, it turned out that a great deal of my trials and tribulations of dizziness and disorientation were driven by my sinuses - one of those early problems, one that had actually been diagnosed but back in the late 80s required massive risky surgery.  In 2010, it was an outpatient procedure with a week of down time.  It worked.  It was a piece of my original ancient identity that had, at long last, been chipped off.  The fat pasty gay kid mold was not indestructible after all, that did not need to be me, and I resolved to be rid of it.  This was a conscious effort.  I was simply not going to be the fat kid anymore.  And if that meant becoming something of a health nut or a gym rat instead, well then, that's what I would do.  This is the fittest I've ever been.  I am not at my goal, but then I had set my goal time-wise for 32, and I'm not there yet.  


That goal was to be built like a tank by the time I was 32.  If I was going to deal with this accursed frame that seemed to need to carry a good 170 pounds on it, then let it be muscle and not fat.  It would require discipline - and so I made myself get up and work out six times a day.  It would require research and new knowledge - so I tried and failed at many things, many times, until I found something that worked for me, a ketogenic diet and a whole lot of lifting.  It was something I could make myself into that could not exist alongside the fat pasty gay kid identity, and that is why I embrace the craziness of that whole endeavor.  The planning meals and counting macros, the body-wrecking workouts, the magic potion before the gym, all of it fall under the header of "things this identity does", as well as under "things fat pasty gay kid identity wouldn't do".  


Remember, ketogenic diets have one huge drawback - the inevitable fat days.  And after Thursday's binge, did I ever (and do I ever) feel fat.  It is critically important, I feel, that this identity die, that I stop seeing myself in the mirror as fat and assigning that identity to myself.  I have mirrors in every room of the house now.  Completely without thinking, after spending most of my adult life in apartments that had the bathroom medicine cabinet mirror and that was it, I moved into a three bedroom house with giant mirrored doors on each closet.  For the first time this weekend somewhere in the process of climbing up and down ladders, fighting with painter's tape, and rolling out three rooms, I caught myself shirtless in the mirror, just out of the corner of my eye, and didn't see myself as fat.  It was a tiny little triumph of the new over the old, as I stopped, turned, and looked at myself in the mirror in a pair of boxer shorts with red paint spattered on me.  I was not fat.  Thick, yes.  A little bloated, yes.  But I was not fat.  If you're reading this, and you're fat, please, feel free to borrow this moment from me.  I looked myself over, saw the folds and curves that were parts of my body now, not just rolls of fat. There was a decidedly male build and composition, not the genderless corpulence.  Never did I ever the whole time I was fat think I could look at myself and see anything else, but it's possible - and it's even possible on a fat day.  We do not need to whitewash fat as an acceptable identity.  We can get rid of that identity, and grow a new one in its place.


This new not-fat identity is still, at best, tenuous.  There are still days like Thursday.  There are still setbacks.  There are still times I do see the fat pasty white kid in the mirror.  There is also no going back to that.  This is my why.  Why I'm not 'on a diet', why I don't stop doing all this, why I'll call myself too sick to work before I'll decide I'm too sick to work out.  I fully expect this new identity will take a while to replace the one that has been in place for the better part thirty years, but I will not go back.  I will not be fat again.