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Light and Grace

Almost 50 years ago, I was welcomed into a community of Jewish friends.

Alan and Sheila were from Philadelphia. Their circle of friends had mostly migrated to San Francisco from the East Coast. They had come from neighborhoods that were well-defined: Jewish, Italian, Irish, and so on.

I was welcomed into their circle because I never expected them to not be Jewish. It is only years afterwards that I realized what a leap of faith they took in trusting me.

Sometime around the early 80s, I was included in their Seder celebrations. Their Seders were a bit, shall I say antic. The men wore head coverings that ranged from a fedora to baseball caps to a yarmulka or two.

They laughed a lot, bringing up memories of their being the hungry children at the table waiting for the story read from the Haggadah to be finished so they could eat. They passed the Haggadah from person to person, so each had a section to read. I probably was the one who read most reverently. I loved that there was a story being told as part of the celebration. At the same time, I grew hungrier and hungrier as I smelled the brisket waiting in the kitchen and saw the food laid out before me. Inner child is universal.

At one end of the table was a man who was the first male child born in a community of Jews who lived in Philadelphia. His parents were Survivors. They had lost two children to the camps. He was laughing and enjoying the irreverence along with everyone else.

As I sat through the reading, and enjoyed their irreverence, it occurred to me that, despite the irreverence, it was vital for them to continue this tradition, to tell their story—and what it must have been like to have had their story outlawed, disallowed, made to be covert.

Sometimes you just understand things through your skin. Genocide is taking peoples’ story from them. Yet resilience kept the story going.

Two women kept shooting covert comments my way, assuming I was the Irish Catholic girl who they had met in school or maybe even lived across the street—the side that marked the other neighborhood. It was uncomfortable. I wondered how I offended, what I did that made them want to let me know that I was not Jewish, and they were.

I attended three more Seders with this circle of friends. By the fourth one, the two women had come to accept me. I think the fact that like them, I didn’t have a husband, so maybe I wasn’t so different after all. I also came to learn that they were like the aunties who competed even at a table with all Jews—noticing who had not quite done the thing right. My grandmother and aunt were like that—competing over who made the best peach cobbler. That was something else we had in common, though I never tried to explain that.

As Fellowships ended, some in the circle moved to new cities to start their careers. Alan and Sheila separated, then divorced. That was hard on those who stayed in San Francisco. Sheila moved back to Philadelphia, becoming more and more disillusioned that the world would not be as she wanted it to be.

She tried to kill herself with a friends’ pistol, but it misfired. So instead, she got on a red eye to San Francisco, spent the hours on the plane writing letters to those who still lived in San Francisco, got in a cab at the airport, stopped three times to deliver the letters, then had the cab driver drop her off at the Golden Gate Bridge. She walked out to the middle of the Bridge and jumped.

Those who received the letters frantically called the Bridge administration to ask them to be on the lookout for her. But by then she was already gone. The newspaper had a small article that said the body of a woman with long dark hair and wearing a brown jacket was found in the water near the Bridge.

It was devastating. Alan and Sheila’s sister took her ashes to the Bridge and set them free.  

I lived in Mill Valley by then, so had everyone over for a small gathering to honor her and their grief. Most felt guilty. Wondered what they could have done to stop her. It was clear to me that she was dedicated to ending her life. There was nothing anyone could have done. My devastation was something different—that she couldn’t find even the smallest spark of love within herself to make her want to go on living. I had never experienced that before.

I have lost touch with that circle of friends. Alan descended into some dark places. Once when I was in Livermore I got a call from him, using his job as a telemarketer to call my business so he could connect. But that was the last I heard from him.

I miss those Seders. There are things from the story that I don’t embrace, like that God would kill the first born of those who didn’t have the blood of a lamb on their door. I can’t imagine a God who would do that.

Here’s what I did embrace from my experience. Taking the time to celebrate how extraordinary the very ordinary act of eating a meal with others is. I also took from it that eating the bitter herb was a commitment to taking the bitter with the sweet. Being willing to experience the full range of life.

I am acutely aware that I live on native land. That were it not for the genocide that was aimed at the indigenous people on this continent, I would not be living here. Yet, like the Jews, the indigenous people of this land are resilient.

I chose the image I use on this blog post because it shows that light can shine through the darkness. And that we must find some way in this world, to let light and grace shine through. We are more alike than we are different.

Rachel Posner took this picture from her window in Kiel, Germany in 1931. On the back of the picture she wrote, “Our light will outlast their flag.”

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Because It’s a Child

Forty years ago, I worked with an African-American woman who told me her story. I’ll call her Jane.

Palestinian boys

Jane grew up in the deep south. In 1965, she and the son of the woman for whom her mother worked as a maid fell in love. His family was Jewish.

She was 15 when she became pregnant. At the hospital, when she asked the white nurse to bring her her daughter, who was light-skinned, the nurse said, “We don’t have no nigra babies here.” Jane threw the ice water from the pitcher on the nurse.

A little later, the same nurse came to her because a white child who had been born wasn’t thriving and its mother couldn’t nurse. Would Jane be willing to nurse the baby.

Jane told me she told the nurse she had to think about it. I was surprised. Jane had always seemed like an earth mother to me. So I asked her why she had to think about it.

“Because,” she said, “that child could grow up to kill my child.”

This was 1965. Two years earlier, four black girls were killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Jane wasn’t paranoid. There was also the history of enslaved women used as wet nurses to their enslavers’ children.

She did nurse the baby. I asked her what made her decide to do that. She said her mother told her she should because it’s a child.

I don’t know what I would have done.

I have been distraught about the current war between Israel and Hamas.

Children, including babies, were killed or taken hostage by Hamas during the October 7th attack. Some are still being held hostage, or maybe they have already died. Of the 15,000 killed by the bombing in Gaza, it seems that half of those victims are children. Then there’s those babies in incubators. Survivors of the bombing are at risk of starving; breakdown of infrastructure has rendered drinking water unsafe, making them vulnerable to deadly diseases.

It is undeniable that Hamas showed no mercy on October 7th. Israeli officials call the death of children in Gaza as collateral damage, blaming Hamas for their deaths. They show no mercy either.

This is a conflict over land. Close to a million Palestinians were removed from their homes to make way for a Jewish state. The Jewish state was created because Jews had nowhere to go as Nazis implemented their “Final Solution.”

It seems to me that Palestinians were and are treated much the way Native Americans were treated as the continent was populated by immigrants from Europe. I worry that Netanyahu’s killing of Palestinian women and children is his version of genocide—get rid of the women and children, you get rid of Palestinian future.

Would an Israeli woman nurse a Palestinian child who wasn’t thriving? Would a Palestinian woman nurse an Israeli child who wasn’t thriving? Or would both decide that the child they would nurse could grow up to kill their child?

I don’t know. I don’t know what I would do.

But as Jane’s mother said, it’s a child.

We need some grace in the world.

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Karen Hogan Public Statement About Sequim City Council and Hot Mic Moment

In a “hot mic” moment, after the April 12th Sequim City Council meeting adjourned, a woman who appeared to be in the room with Mike Pence, said, “That Karen Hogan, everybody knows what a cunt she is, and she has to be the first . . . “. Mike Pence interjected, “First word out of her mouth . . .”. The woman continued, “Every week . . .” At that point the feed was cut off.

I had not planned on speaking publicly about this “hot mic” moment. But news media have approached me. One asked if I wanted an apology. After contemplating that question, I decided I should make this public statement:

The time for an apology has passed. I want Mr. Pence and Mr. Armacost to resign.

I’m less concerned with the obscenity of the language and their opinion of me than I am with the irresponsible, mendacious, and abusive behavior Mr. Pence has exhibited. I am also concerned with Mayor Armacost’s mendacity and authoritarian approach to presiding over the council meetings, which I also consider abusive behavior.

In an opening statement Mayor Armacost characterized those who are concerned about the behavior of council members as “rabid” and their comments as “venomous.” His claim to victimization was that some members of the public allege that he supports QAnon despite his denials. Yet on the August 27, 2020’s Coffee with the Mayor he promoted QAnon, calling it a truth movement, and encouraged listeners to view the video “Q – a Plan to Save the World.” Is he quibbling with semantics—support vs promotion?

Mr. Pence’s application, Mr. Armacost stated, was accurate but confusing in his description of the evolution of the Department of Public Works in the city of Liberty, Missouri. Yet Mr. Pence admitted to fabricating his resume in his March 26th interview on KONP with Pepper Fisher: “It could be looked as misleading. I put down my highest qualifications for that time period. Now, it wouldn’t make any difference that I went from director of whatever to street sweeper. Why would you list street sweeper? That’s how I look at it, that, you know, what’s that going to do for you in life?”

From 1988 to 1994, Mr. Pence held the Position of Director of Utilities and Maintenance in Liberty, Missouri. In 1993, Liberty’s City Administrator, Gary Jackson, asked City Engineer, Steve Hansen to review the operations of both engineering and the street and utilities department and propose a plan that would improve the services provided to the community.

Mr. Jackson liked the plan, and the Department of Public Works was created in January 1994. With the consent of the City Council, Mr. Jackson appointed Mr. Hansen to be Liberty Missouri’s first Director of Public Works. Mr. Pence’s role was reduced from a department director to a division manager overseeing streets and utilities. After a performance review in November of that year, his role was further reduced to crew leader/street maintenance. In that role he supervised street maintenance.

It is simply untrue that Mr. Pence was ever Liberty, Missouri’s Director of Public Works, let alone for 21 years.

Mr. Armacost’s April 12th opening statement and motion to move Public Comments to the end of the evening because he anticipated concerned citizens would comment on the matter of Mr. Pence’s falsified résumé were antithetical to transparent government where public servants must be accountable to the people. Four of the seven council members voted to move public comment to the end of the meeting, obviously aware that Mr. Pence’s fabricated resume would be a key topic, and hopeful that the people wouldn’t be able to sit through the rest of the meeting.

Mr. Armacost and Mr. Larkin stated that they were taking that action because Public Comments distract from conducting city business. When have Public Comments distracted from conducting city business? Hopefully the city’s business includes knowing the truth about what appointed city councilmembers put on their applications. Coincidental timing to have the public get in the way, to be sure.

This city council is out of control. The way in which Mr. Larkin was appointed in October 2020 went against precedent, with the mayor stepping down as mayor to nominate Larkin, immediately stepping back up to move for his appointment, then calling for the question without discussion. No other nomination could be made, though there were several women who were arguably more qualified.

The payoff for Larkin’s appointment came in January when his was the 4th vote needed to oust Charlie Bush as city manager. We still don’t know why this faction made that decision. And now the faction is pushing to fill the city manager position before the election, even though we have heard no complaints about the interim manager.

Mr. Pence has had time to apologize for his mendacity. He has not. Instead, he alleged that Marsha Maguire and I didn’t like anything about Sequim. His solution was we should move. He threatened legal action claiming we defamed him by revealing the truth. And now he and whoever was in his home with him on Monday April 12th claimed that “everybody” agrees with their opinion of me, an opinion that used graphic language generally considered obscene. As of April 16th, he has expressed no regret for that hot mic moment.

Mr. Armacost blatantly lied at the beginning of the evening regarding his support of QAnon. Or, if he wasn’t lying, he is confused about what he said on August 27th, 2020. He does not seem to get his story straight. Either way, it is not what we expect of an elected official.

Mr. Pence’s and Mr. Armacost’s bullying and mendacious behavior flies in the face of the words they recite in the Pledge of Allegiance, “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

It is time they both resign. Their behavior is polarizing and sets a bad example to the youth of our community. Moreover, it creates chaos, interferes with efficient city operations and sound fiscal management, and damages the reputation of Sequim.

My only apology is that I’m sorry they haven’t resigned sooner.

Karen Hogan

karenlhogan@me.com

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AOC and Lucile—With One L

Aunt Lucille

Aunt Lucille the year before she died

My Aunt Lucille embodied the rage of women of her generation, the Greatest Generation. She wanted more. She wanted to be more. But she felt obligated to wear the straitjacket handed out to women after the War

It was an act of patriotism to don that jacket—to acknowledge the sacrifice and pain men had suffered during the Depression and then on the front lines of the war—to show one’s commitment to returning to normal.

It was a desperate attempt to invent normal—a normal that had no room for the traumatic memories of economic humiliation followed by the spiritual devastation of being in combat.

And so many women, like my Aunt Lucille, donned the straitjacket and seethed at the constraint of being a homemaker in a home that was defined by neatly folded linens in the linen closet, dinners served on time, a sparkling clean house, and well-behaved daughters.

Aunt Lucille did not wear the straitjacket well. She carried an armory of rage and resentment within it and lobbed emotional grenades when the constraint became too painful.

The one I remember the most was Thanksgiving at her house in 1960. There were eight of us. My cousin Patty (her daughter and only child) and I were gleeful because it was my brothers’ turn to do the dishes. But then my aunt sent my brothers out to play and my cousin and I into the kitchen.

The counters were stacked with gravy-smeared dinner dishes, salad plates, water and wine glasses and coffee cups, desert plates, plates for dinner rolls at each place setting, serving utensils, silverware that ranged from salad forks to butter knives to desert spoons and forks.

A roasting pan with partially gelled turkey grease along with pans that had been used to boil the potatoes, green beans, and brussel sprouts covered the stove. Beaters from the electric hand mixer, whipped potatoes stuck to them, lay in the pan that had been used to boil the potatoes.

And then there were the leftovers that covered the kitchen table that had to be transferred to storage containers, thus liberating serving dishes that would be added to the graveyard of the dinner we had just consumed.

My aunt did not have an automatic dishwasher.

Patty and I were pissed. We protested. It wasn’t fair. It was my brothers’ turn to do the dishes. “You may as well get used to this,” Aunt Lucille said. “This is what your life is going to be about,” then left to have cocktails with my parents and her husband in the living room.

Patty and I sat cross-armed at the kitchen table seething with impotent rage. Then finally got up and disappeared all remnants of the Thanksgiving dinner the eight of us had just consumed.

We were eleven. It was our rite of passage into womanhood. One in which boys and men had privilege without accountability and girls and women swallowed their rage and covered it with a commitment to duty.

That’s what happens when commitment to “normal” covers trauma and spiritual pain. For a woman to challenge that, to claim the right to her own self, was to threaten what held together the rickety foundation on which “normal” was built.

Any woman who did was a fucking bitch.

Along came Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. AOC.

With impenetrable fierceness and articulation, AOC named the privileges men such as Rep. Ted Yoho have claimed as their birthright: misogyny, racism, protection from anything that might reveal a world that does not conform to the one that plants them without merit or accountability as its center.

She threw “fucking bitch” into the dustbin filled with tiny-hearted men where it belongs. With a flourish of his sword, Zorro left his mark of Z behind to show he had been there. With the power of her words, she left the mark of AOC on Reps. Ted Yoho and Kevin McCarthy as they sputtered and bumbled their attempts to regain control of the universe that had just been decimated.

I have struggled for years to believe and feel in my DNA what Alexandra Ocasio Cortez said with an eloquence and fierceness that parted the air in the chamber of the House and revealed the polite rudeness of the words of Reps. Ted Yoho and Kevin McCarthy. Her colleagues stepped into the parted air and cleared it forever from the toxic cloud of privilege that grants the right to demean and demonize the other.

There was neither rage nor impotence in their words.

Dreams come to me at significant times. My Aunt Lucille died in 1974 from breast cancer. About a year later she appeared to me in a dream in which she asked me to feel how cancer had eroded her pelvic bones. “Don’t let this happen to you,” she said.

The women’s movement was flourishing with rage at the time so I thought she meant don’t let men do this to you. Years later I realized she meant don’t let impotent rage do this to you.

Two days after AOC’s speech, I dreamed that I was backstage at a play. The lead was pregnant and giving birth in between acts (dreams have a logic of their own). She gave birth to a girl. She and her husband looked at me and said they would name her after me, Lucile—with one l.

Lucille is my middle name. I don’t know why my parents did that, given that my aunt didn’t include my mother’s name when naming her daughter. Perhaps it was my mother’s subservience to her dominating older sister.

I’ve always wondered about my middle name. It came from a woman who lived life so darkly. And yet it means light. Lucille means light. In the dream I thought about telling the new parents that I spelled my name with two ls, but then tried on “Lucile.”

I woke understanding that something in me had been reborn in the dream. Somehow letting go of that extra l let light through my aunt’s darkness and disappeared the straitjacket she had tried to bequeath me.

I am quite worried and scared by what is happening in my country right now. The very worst of white male privilege, power without accountability or merit, is embodied in the man in the White House. It’s clear how damaging and destructive it is.

AOC and her colleagues are our hope for leading us out of this dark wasteland. Lucile, my new voice, rises with them.

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Enough!

Instagram Post 5A young activist of color in my community, when I objected to the phrase Defund the Police, explaining that it sent a fuzzy message because of the meaning of defund, said that the definition of the word didn’t matter. I told him I was a writer so I choose my words carefully . They should express what I intend to express.

Write to your own people, he replied.

By which he meant to white people.

I don’t think of white people as “my people.” I didn’t know how to explain that to him or that I didn’t think I could explain anything to white people. It actually put me off and I turned into a grumpy 70-year old woman who thought if only this youngun’ knew my story.

Then on Friday, another black man was killed by police who were called because he was sleeping in his car in a Wendy’s drive-thru.

The words “enough is enough” flooded through me.

So here’s my story:

I went to San Francisco State, starting in the Fall of 1967. It was a working-class university in that it was a commuter college. The average age of students was 25, with many being young Black men who had served in Vietnam. It was well-respected academically, but you didn’t go to San Francisco State if you had ambitions for the presidency. Elites didn’t go there.

I come from a working-class background, or as I like to refer to  it, American peasants. And I do not mean that derisively.

I was the first woman on my mother’s side of the family (she hailed from Oklahoma) to go to college. My father was the seventh out of seven sons born (in 1916) into an Irish American family of 10 on a farm outside of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. They lost the farm and moved into town when my father was about 13, where the town’s people shamed my dad and his family for my grandfather’s having lost the farm. It is likely that some very shitty men got him drunk and tricked him into signing it over to them.

These were in the NINA days—No Irish Need Apply. You know, those drunks.

I had a somewhat unique experience as a daughter of a working-class family in that we lived in Saudi Arabia from 1955 to 1960, so my world extended beyond a neighborhood. Instead of getting on a plane and coming back to the States for what Aramco referred to  “the long vacation” (three months), my parents bought passage on a Dutch freighter. We spent 75 days traveling through the Far East, stopping in ports to load and offload cargo. Places like Mumbai (then known as Bombay), where instead of hiring a car to take us through the city, my parents hired a horse-drawn carriage. We experienced the sounds, sights, and smells of a city teeming with people.

“You see those people living on the streets?” my parents said. “That could never happen in America.”

They believed that. It was certainly the mythos of the time (1958). But they were not what one would think of as elites, coming from generations of wealth. They were part of the peasant class of America that had entered the middle class.

This is a long introduction to my story. I give it to you so you understand that though I entered San Francisco State after living in a virtually all white suburban town in the Bay Area, I had absorbed by osmosis my early experience of traveling to non-European countries. I was eight then—young enough that I could see without judging.

And, yet, I was not prepared for what I was about to experience.

The Vietnam war was raging. Men of color were disproportionally sent to fight there while in America, little Black girls were killed in a church bombing, Medgar Evers had been gunned down outside his family home, riots raged in cities across the country, and the livelihoods of Blacks who attempted to register were threatened. Others were murdered. The murder of Black people went unpunished or even acknowledged by the criminal justice system.

However, when young white people were killed because they tried to register Blacks, the country started to pay attention.

On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. came out against the Vietnam War, making the connection between it and the domestic terrorism of racism at home. He was vilified for it.

I signed up for a philosophy class the second semester of my freshman year (1968). The teacher was a follower of Herbert Marcuse. In March, he invited 4 members of the local Black Panther party to come speak at our class.

I remember clearly that I was wearing a floral-print dress with puffy short sleeves and orange Mary Jane shoes that perfectly matched the orange flowers in my dress. I was 18.

The Black Panther guests (two young men and two young women—likely my age) dressed in all black, loped into the classroom, and sat in the four chairs arranged for them, with the young black men sitting protectively on either side of the women. I use the word loped purposely. Loped the way an alpha wolf does—slowly, with purpose and a confidence that they were here and weren’t afraid.

The women made no eye contact with anyone in the room. They were clearly under the protection of their colleagues. I don’t remember details of the conversation other than this:

I tried to explain that I was on their side. But one of the young men claimed the room for his people. Who are your people, I asked wanting desperately to connect.

He locked eyes with me and held it while he gestured to the three other people who sat with him. “These are my people,” he asserted, making it clear that I was the other with whom he did not and would not and could not make room in his heart and soul.

He did not look away. I did. I believe I looked down. I felt foolish in my floral print dress and matching Mary Jane shoes.

I was shattered. I went back to my dorm room and wept. It wasn’t a painful experience. It wasn’t hurtful in that they intended to hurt me with an insult.

But I felt it. This is what it felt like to be the other.

And while those four members of the Black Panthers had dominion in that classroom, outside of it, they lived in a society, a culture in which they were the other, in constant danger of violence inflicted on them by the social institutions that protected me.

Protected me because I was white.

A week or so after that classroom experience, on April 4, 1968, a year to the day after Martin Luther King came out against the Vietnam War, he was gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee.

Locally, on social media group pages predominantly populated by white people who think they are entitled to the land they live on, their right to have the world conform to their limited view of reality, I am a pariah. And I wonder how safe I am in a community that comprises armed people who believe in taking the law into their own hands and who claim the right to use their weapons designed for war to protect their “privilege” of being white.

I’m a mutt. Irish. English. German. And who knows what else, but likely all European. Both sides of my family have lived in this country for generations, going back to pre-Revolutionary War. I have relatives (General Sheridan) who committed atrocities against Native tribes. My great grandfather, born two years after the end of the Civil War, was named after the slave-owning vice-president of the Confederacy. He took part in the 1893 Cherokee Strip Land Run. Someone took the parcel he claimed away from him, so he became a Marshall in Lawton, Oklahoma, when Oklahoma was still a territory. And while he went after the likes of the Cole Younger gang, he also guarded Geronimo at Fort Sill.

I can’t claim pride in that background. It was filled with ignorance and supported by the manifest destiny claim that the lands on this continent were up for grabs to the invading Europeans. That the people who lived here originally were savages unworthy of God’s grace.  That those brought here in enslavement were unworthy of God’s grace in their eyes.

I don’t know how to relate to them. I don’t understand them. I can’t go back and make right the wrongs committed by my own family.

What I can do is stop saying that this country—the country that takes children from their parents, imprisons people because of the color of their skin, justifies killing people because the color of their skin makes them more threatening—isn’t the one I grew up in.

It IS the country I grew up in.

The country I grew up in needs to grow up. It needs to recognize that the history of this country didn’t start in 1492. That our country is built on a holocaust as horrific as the one that happened in WWII in Germany. That the history of African Americans didn’t start with their being imported into this country to be used as commodities for commerce.

It is a time for a reckoning. It is time to stop saying, but if only “they” didn’t loot and destroy property I might listen to their pain.

We might want to ask our indigenous citizens what it feels like to have had their culture and land looted, massacred without retribution to seize their “property.”

We might want to ask the descendants of the Tulsa Massacre what it feels like to have property destroyed, their lives taken without retribution.

I cannot change the color of my skin. But I can claim what I hear and know in my heart and soul.

I can shout Enough!

Enough with claiming America Exceptionalism.

Enough with a criminal justice system that has its roots in enslavement and cultural and ethnic genocide.

Enough with using God as an excuse to bully, harass, and kill.

Enough of safety being a privilege, rather than a right.

To the country I grew up in, I say loud and clear:

Enough is Enough.

Time to unravel the tapestry that is the history of this country so the voices of those trapped there can be heard. So we can start a new story.

A story that doesn’t put being white at the center of it.

A story that has as its moral center an acceptance of difference without turning that difference into a threatening other.