Why don’t you go on over and welcome a new blogger to blogland. I’ll give you a few hints:
– she’s cute
– she loves soccer and running mini-marathons
– she’s always been a deep thinker beyond her young years
– she made me a Mommy
(Note: if you’re a creep and you have no business being there, than stay far, far away from this particular blog, because I’m not afraid to HURT YOU!)
That’s right, I’m in Cahoots. Remember when I fussed and fumed about the fact that there are very few good magazines out there and I thought I’d have to start my own to satisfy my high standards? And remember when I said that two smart women in Saskatchewan read my mind and started the magazine of my dreams? (Whew! It seemed like a lot of work to start my own, so I’m glad they beat me to it.)
Well, that magazine is Cahoots, and shortly after I fell in love with it, I sent them an article (many of you already read it when it appeared here – it’s about preparing to turn 40). Those two smart women were kind enough to publish it in the latest edition. (If you’re reading this, Carla and Michele, thanks!) 
Here’s a picture of it. Trust me, you really should whip out your credit card, go here, and subscribe to this magazine. No, they didn’t pay me to say so, it’s just SO GOOD! Women of blogland (and other friends), this is the kind of magazine that NEEDS to thrive. This is the kind of magazine that should appear on every magazine stand, bravely telling the world that smart women are looking for a little more than glossy fashion magazines, celebrity rags, and homemaking tips. Take my word for it – you’ll be glad you did. (And I’m not just saying that because they had the good sense to publish my article – there are lots of other things in there that outshine my meagre offerings.) For starters, isn’t it refreshing that the cover page features artwork instead of airbrushed models?
(For my local readers, you can get it at McNally Robinson. Other than that, I’m not sure where it’s available.)
In other news, I’ll also have a piece appearing in Beyond Ordinary Living, another new magazine that shows alot of potential. I’ll let you know when it shows up on a magazine rack near you. And I have a contract for a couple of other short pieces for another magazine that, at this point, shall remain nameless.
It’s happening, folks – I’m putting my stuff out there in the universe and lately, the universe has been responding favourably. I can say much more bravely now – I AM a freelance writer.
I ride through a pedestrian/bike tunnel every day on my way to and from work. There is almost always graffiti in the tunnel. It seems to be a favourite place for graffiti-painting teenagers with time on their hands. It’s out of the way and can’t be seen from the street so it’s an ideal place for idleness. About the only time there isn’t graffiti in the tunnel is the day or two after the city crew comes by and removes it with their sandblasters and gallons of grey paint.
Mostly, I don’t mind the graffiti. I actually like some of it – the stuff that’s artistically done. For a long time, the word “Hush” greeted me as I entered the tunnel, and it often made me smile. I wish the city crew could leave the good stuff there and just get rid of the pointless messy stuff.
A few weeks ago, they cleaned the graffiti off, and it was clean for a couple of days. Since then, however, the graffiti painters have returned. But these aren’t the artistic graffiti painters – these are the ones with just a single can of black spray paint and an evening of boredom on their hands.
A few days ago, a swastika appeared in the tunnel. A big, black, ugly swastika. There is nothing even slightly artistic about it – just an unevenly painted ugly symbol of hatred.
I don’t understand hatred. I don’t understand the feelings behind something like a swastika. The idea that one group of people can hate another group of people so deeply that they wish them destroyed boggles my mind.
Most of the time, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. I don’t (usually) yell at bad drivers, because I try to assume that they’re cutting me off because they’re having a really bad day and need to get home to their sick kids. If someone’s rude to me in the grocery store, I try to imagine that they don’t have much love in their life so they can’t entirely be blamed. As much as I can, I try to put myself in another person’s shoes before I cast judgement on them for their actions.
The problem is, I can’t put myself in the shoes of anyone who would paint swastikas in a tunnel. I suppose it was just an ill-advised joke by some bored teenagers, but I can’t fathom the kind of boredom that would reflect itself in hatred.
There are lots of things I CAN understand, if I try hard enough. I can understand prejudice – at least a little bit. I can go back in my memory bank to the day a new girl moved into our homogenous little farming community. When she didn’t fit in well, and everyone thought she was a little odd, it was easiest to chalk it up to the fact that her skin colour was different from ours. And when she moved away again, only a year later, it was convenient to assume that her family’s transience had something to do with the fact that she wasn’t like the rest of us.
The truth is, though, I don’t have to go all the way back to childhood to find the deep roots of prejudice and ethnocentricity. Every day, I see homeless people on the streets of downtown, and almost every day, I have to resist the urge to equate their homelessness with their ethnicity. So, you see, though I work hard to drag out any little vestiges left in my heart, I can understand prejudice.
I can understand anger too. I can go back to that day in the park, some time after I’d become a mother, when I saw a man luridly revealing himself to everyone who walked by, when the anger welled up in me, and I knew instantly, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I could kill or at least seriously injure a man who would sexually threaten my children the way I had been sexually threatened several years earlier. And suddenly I knew why, on the day that I walked into my parents’ kitchen and told them I’d been raped, my dad told me the story of the man he’d known who’d hunted down his daughter’s rapist and castrated him. I remember knowing that, just like my pacifist father, I was capable of the transformation that would cause me to destroy the man who’d hurt my daughter.
I can understand anger, but I’m still not sure I can understand hatred. Perhaps it was hatred I felt on those nights after the rape when I’d lie in my bed, staring at the window, praying that no one would ever crawl through it again. Perhaps it was hatred when I cried myself to sleep, knowing that those filthy hands and tattooed arms had destroyed every last shred of the little bits of innocence I’d still held onto. Perhaps it was hatred, but mostly I think it was anger and fear. I can’t say I feel hatred now, after the years have mellowed and matured me.
The truth is, I can understand a lot of ugly feelings that might be the seeds of something dark inside my heart. And if I think about sinking deep into the shadows of that anger and prejudice, and allowing indoctrination and peer pressure and a little bit of mob mentality to wash over me, perhaps I’d come out on the other side of hatred too.
Maybe, just maybe, there is very little distance between myself and those who paint swastikas and kill for their passion, their prejudice, and their hatred. Maybe there’s enough darkness lurking in the shadows of each of us that, if it were fed the right amount of ugly fodder, we could become Nazis or KKK or Janjaweed.
I don’t know. I pray to God that it’s not true. I hope with all my heart that nothing will ever hold enough power over me to turn my little bits of darkness into hatred.
I’m pretty sure the idle, bored, teenage swastika painters aren’t murderers, but I hope they recognize the seeds of hatred growing in them before it’s too late. I hope they lay awake tonight knowing they’ve done a very bad thing. I hope one day their circles of friendship enlarge enough to include a Jewish person or a person of colour and they find out that love is better than hate.
I thought I had something interesting to post, but then I wandered over and read Accidental Poet’s series of posts about something incredible that happened 7 years ago, and I realized anything I might want to post about tonight would be trivial and boring in comparison. As most of you know, AP is my sister-in-law-who-feels-like-a-sister. You really should read her last 4 posts, starting with this one.
But if you don’t have time for all of them, at least read this one – it has something to do with a business trip I once took across two provinces with my mom and oldest two daughters, a bunch of (slightly annoying) phone calls while I was trying my best to get there at a reasonable time, a visit to a nursery room we all assumed had been empty since the-little-niece-I-didn’t-get-to-meet spent one solitary night there, a surprise involving my father and a baby boy (which I thought was an apparition), and, eventually, the dawning of a realization that I’d become an auntie again. That’s my (much abbreviated) side of the story, but AP’s telling of it is much more interesting. Go on, I won’t take it personally if you desert me.
After at least a million tries, Blogger is FINALLY letting me post the photo of Nikki nearing the finish line at the marathon. That’s her in the red circle, looking like she’s got some kind of strange protective shield. Maybe she did – it’s called her Momma’s love. 🙂 If you’re wondering what she’s holding, it was raining at the beginning of the race, so she wore her jacket. By the end, she was carrying it.
And because you waited so patiently, I’ll throw in a bonus picture. That’s her, before the race, excited and nervous, and just a little bit silly. She’s not too fond of having her picture taken, so I’ve got lots of pictures of her looking something like this: