When I arrived at 9:30 a.m., there were probably 40-60 people in the plaza. It was an incredibly calm space all morning, but with this amazing sense of purpose underneath it all. I grabbed a banana from the free food table, donated some money for them to replenish supplies, and heard some of the people involved in organizing discussing the financial committee they had set up to manage donations and costs (things like the port-a-potties cost money). I sat down near some young people playing music and read for about an hour, and then I decided to walk around and check things out before heading home to finish up some writing for class.

Let me tell you what I came away with.

In my life, I have gone to more than my fair share of rallies, marches, etc. I have volunteered for political campaigns and organizations, canvassed, phone banked, and stuffed envelopes. I write all the time, and used to write a lot more about change and issues facing us.

In all of these experiences for the last 20+ years that I’ve been a concerned and relatively active citizen, I have never experienced something like what I saw today.

Yes it was small this morning, but the democratic organization of the people involving themselves (I think that’s key – this isn’t a top down effort, but one in which the people who opt in will define goals and values) was amazing.

There’s the free food table, a donations (of things they need) table, a medical area, a “teach-in” area, a “media center,” and a family area that I saw. What I also saw and experienced this morning was what could be framed in an ethic of caring. The people organizing are addressing basic needs to facilitate everyone’s participation, sharing resources and trusting people to give what they can and take what they need, and to move to higher order needs like discussion and education.

The criticism of lack of messaging and “a point” couldn’t be farther from the truth. One of the tragedies our country has experienced over time is an erosion of our democracy, which came to a head with the Citizens United ruling, but has been rearing its head in different ways – often tied to money. Money is a voice, a source of power, and it has seemed for some time that without money, we had no power – it felt like shouting into the wind.

The thing is that there are many people who have been shouting into the wind. They may have different perspectives and different takes on things, but there is at least one commonality: they feel that the current situation is unacceptable and that, without riches, there is truly only one power that the 99% have and that power comes from collective efforts.

The people down there are democratically organizing with general assemblies and decision-making. I talked to people at the teach-in table – smart, engaged people – about the Constitution, about the labor movement, about tuition and education access, about the ethic of caring and support, and about helping educate each other (For instance, one person said that she’d only seen one outburst happen when a truck drove by and its passengers shouted at the occupiers and one person shouted back something threatening and called him a pussy. I pointed out that addressing misogyny within the community of occupiers would be really good and building understanding of that would be useful).

This didn’t feel like a resistance. It didn’t feel like a protest. It felt like a construction – of community building and building democracy. It felt like a redefinition to a point where I don’t even care if people insult the movement. It really doesn’t matter. What does matter are the conversations in the plaza and of people opting in and voicing their knowledge and concerns and listening to each other. It’s something we’ve been missing.

I’ve seen critiques of the folks occupying Wall Street right now – either that they’re privileged white kids or that they’re silly, aimless liberals – but both are in service of a right wing narrative (whether they know it or not).

It wouldn’t surprise me if you hadn’t even heard about the protest or the criticisms, because the media has expressed very little interest thus far in reporting on it, which Wonkette noted today in its article Liberal NPR Won’t Cover Wall Street Protests, So Read This Instead. In case you were interested in NPR’s response, this is it:

We asked the newsroom to explain their editorial decision. Executive editor for news Dick Meyer came back: “The recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective.”

Wonkette also reported another criticism that is often leveled at youth or even at middle or lower-middle class people who deign to protest their condition. Don’t listen to them, they own technology – if they were really poor, they wouldn’t have a laptop. This infuriates me. The most powerful tools that we have right now are those that facilitate the mass distribution of content. That means video cameras, that means iPhones, that means laptops. Twitter and YouTube are powerful tools for organizing when the media ignore you, and it’s sure as hell hard to type on location without a portable computer. When people critique those so-called luxuries, what they are advocating for is silence.

An article that is a “must-read” on the occupation was an essay titled The Revolution Begins at Home, by Arun Gupta that was reposted today by Naomi Klein. A few highlights:

They have created a unique opportunity to shift the tides of history in the tradition of other great peaceful occupations from the sit-down strikes of the 1930s to the lunch-counter sit-ins of the 1960s to the democratic uprisings across the Arab world and Europe today.

Our system is broken at every level. More than 25 million Americans are unemployed. More than 50 million live without health insurance. And perhaps 100 million Americans are mired in poverty, using realistic measures. Yet the fat cats continue to get tax breaks and reap billions while politicians compete to turn the austerity screws on all of us.

…

Yet against every description of a generation derided as narcissistic, apathetic and hopeless they are staking a claim to a better future for all of us.

…

To be fair, the scene in Liberty Plaza seems messy and chaotic. But it’s also a laboratory of possibility, and that’s the beauty of democracy. As opposed to our monoculture world, where political life is flipping a lever every four years, social life is being a consumer and economic life is being a timid cog, the Wall Street occupation is creating a polyculture of ideas, expression and art.

Yet while many people support the occupation, they hesitate to fully join in and are quick to offer criticism. It’s clear that the biggest obstacles to building a powerful movement are not the police or capital – it’s our own cynicism and despair.

Get size and scope (plus a bunch of rich folks looking down on them while drinking champagne…you can’t make this stuff up).

So here is the thing: these folks weren’t rallied and organized by FOX. They haven’t been fed talking points to regurgitate. They are actually in the midst of identifying and creating their actual agenda – all while maintaining presence on the more global agenda – that our country’s current interpretation of what capitalism should look like is destroying our country and their futures.

Those of us who have careers – who are lucky enough to still be on a track – might glom on to the idea that these are spoiled kids, but that’s not a valid narrative (and not only because it’s not just young people). We would be attracted to that narrative because it would make us feel better about our relative positions or provide an outlet (however inappropriate) for the exhaustion and stress of paying off debts for our own educations and houses. It’s why the NY Times so easily prints those criticisms or why NPR until recently (I think today) chose to not bother with it.

The truth is that those of us who cling to our middle class lives are clinging to a myth. Nothing guarantees that your luck won’t turn, that you won’t wind up one of those human interest stories about the successful person who lost it all. Very few of us are going to give up what we have without kicking and screaming, however, which is why the people taking up camp on Wall Street are so important. They have the time, wealth, privilege, poverty, powerlessness, or just plain guts to do what I’m not and what you’re probably not.

They’re holding the people responsible for the economic condition we’re in to account – the people who have made wealth beyond your wildest imagination at your expense. And that is why both narratives we’re presented with – the spoiled rich kids and the silly liberals – are in the service of the right wing: they both encourage you to do nothing, and nothing is getting a few people very, very rich.

Sadly, it’s sure not helping you.

She talked about something that has gone under the radar for some time: that the plume of smoke from the World Trade Center towers’ collapse completely enveloped parts of Brooklyn and other western parts of NYC that day. It’s not like it’s never been discussed, but it’s really not been part of public discussion.

So I’m listening to her talk about the chemical effects of burning jet fuel + asbestos + the insides of thousands of computers and other electronic devices, and all I can think about is how normal it’s become for me to cart around an inhaler, how I can expect any cold to go straight to my lungs, and it sends me back to how hard it was to breathe that day and I realized I never actually needed or owned an inhaler before then.

Most years, you know, I write something about 9/11 – something about the experience or a perspective of how the general tragedy of it is used/abused in our political system, but this year I think we should pay attention to all those emergency responders who still can’t get support for health care for diseases they acquired working at ground zero, to the decisions at the EPA about what was deemed safe and what was not and why, and to the people who were not in lower Manhattan, but saw their worlds shrouded in dust as well.

I am thrilled that New York’s legislators decided to vote yes on gay marriage. I sincerely hope we overcome the cruelty our own legislature is trying to inflict on the MN LGBT community and that we can get back on track to getting gay marriage here. It would be nice to be legally recognized in more than six states.

But that’s not exactly why I’m posting.

In our desire for equality – something valid and good and worthwhile – it’s important to remember, and to celebrate, the people who sparked a movement of pride and the call to come out, without whom many of the people in our community who are out now in 2011 would not otherwise be.

Always remember – it wasn’t the rich, the “straight-acting,” the “normative” folks who acted at Stonewall

The only photograph taken during the first night of the riots shows the homeless youth that slept in nearby Christopher Park, scuffling with police. The Mattachine Society newsletter a month later offered its explanation of why the riots occurred: “It catered largely to a group of people who are not welcome in, or cannot afford, other places of homosexual social gathering…. The Stonewall became home to these kids. When it was raided, they fought for it. That, and the fact that they had nothing to lose other than the most tolerant and broadminded gay place in town, explains why.”

So the questions I want all of us to keep in our heads are these:

If not for the actions of the queens, the street kids, the prostitutes, the gender non-conformists, and all of those folks that some people in and out of the community say are inhibiting acceptance…

Would you be out?

Really, what would you risk for the kind of life you have now?

However, Megan told me a couple of weeks ago that I am an idealist, which I scoffed at. I feel deeply cynical and exasperated. She countered that I am wrong about that. Cynical people, she said, don’t keep trying to change others’ minds. They don’t believe people will change or develop empathy. She said that I am an idealist because I never stop trying.

So I’m a frustrated idealist, then. Not naive, not Pollyanna, but I guess I do buy into MLK’s idea that the “arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice” (for many issues). And I suppose that’s about as idealistic as it gets.

Anyway.

Last night, Minnesota’s GOP-controlled House passed the constitutional amendment that writes anti-LGBT discrimination into our constitution. This means it will go to the ballot next fall, which means 18 months of brutality as people who bully under the auspices of moral righteousness flood money and nastiness into our state.

We cannot stop that.

We can, as LGBT people and as allies, ask every person we know to vote no.

Last night I was at a very fun wedding. It was really obvious how well the personalities of the bride and groom were embedded in the ceremony, the poetry was gorgeous, and it was a terrific celebration of their relationship – and considering all the cheers and whooping in the crowded room, they truly were celebrated as a couple.

Because I knew what was going down at the capitol as we ate and drank and danced, it was sometimes hard to reconcile the dueling feelings of happiness and sadness that were at war in me.

Being at a wedding where everyone is really happy was, for me, laying plain what it was that the GOP in this state want to keep from us.

Yes, it’s about the rights, but that isn’t the core of what they want to exclude us from. The plain fact of it is that they do not want us to be celebrated or happy. They know something that I am really late in the game in understanding – that marriage is like a hidden room in a house that you think you know every inch of.

It is not a simple collection of rights (though it is that as well), it is an entrance into another way of being that is specifically characterized by how other people value your relationship, how other people come to celebrate your relationship, and how other people support your relationship. Because, despite the fact that not every marriage lasts, actually speaking your commitment to each other out loud and in public has a whole bunch of community support and acceptance attached to it.

The people who want to enshrine this amendment into our constitution know that. They know it’s awfully hard to be closeted when you’re married (public proclamations make it hard to hide a relationship). They know it makes reluctant families unable to ignore the relationship. Not only that, but a wedding pulls at the heartstrings and makes it possible for people who are not necessarily comfortable with LGBT people to see how much we love each other when they otherwise may never have access to that.

The anti-LGBT sponsors and supporters of this amendment know that, at the end of the day, acknowledging and celebrating LGBT relationships in the light of day results in people accepting us more. I’m not saying everyone suddenly slaps a rainbow sticker on their car, but people can and do evolve in their thinking.

So, yes, this can be about rights. It is about rights. And yet what it is really about to the GOP – what I think they are scared of most – is the open, public support and celebration of LGBT relationships.

And that, my friends, is bigotry. The people who have everything trying to control the minority and exploit the dominant group’s fears of said minority…that is bigotry.

I believe and hope Minnesotans are better than the people they elected.

It was hard to see the inevitable fallout of last November’s elections today – a fallout we in Minnesota have largely been saved from on a broader level by Mark Dayton’s presence in the governor’s office. There is no veto pen for a constitutional amendment, and so the now all GOP majority MN Senate was free to pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and send it on to the House (where it will also pass).

I am no fan of the GOP. They are often willfully oblivious (god, I hope it’s obliviousness) to the social impact of their economic policies, chanting some starry-eyed Randian mantra of “the free market will save us all.” (Get back to me when you’ve had to actually buy your own health insurance, kiddos.) More often than not, I think they lack the ability to see life through someone else’s eyes – to imagine what it would be to have a different existence.

Sometimes, though, I think they enjoy the cruelty that can be enacted when you have power.

Today isn’t the only time I’ve thought this, but it was the most personally painful.

I listened to the testimony for a while, I’ve read the condensed versions of what happened and here are the takeaways:

LGBT and LGBT-supportive did an excellent job of explaining the humiliation this amendment will bring on our state – the hostile 18 months we are about to embark on that will leave scars even if Minnesotans vote no on the amendment. They reinforced that not one family would be helped with the passage of the amendment; they asked Limmer etc. what problem they were trying to solve with this.

The reply? “Activist judges” and “we just want to define marriage.”

What that said to me is: we want to do this because we can; because it will bring our voters to the polls; and because there is not a single story or group of stories compelling enough to make us reconsider because – in reality of realities – we think that you are less than we are and undeserving of basic human kindness.

If you listen to their inability to express what exactly it is they’re worried about or fighting against, they just can’t bring themselves to say what they really think so they insert “activist judge” or “we’re just defining” as though those are actual explanations.

I’m really sad today, especially as a Minnesotan. I’ve been so proud that we weren’t like those other states who were cruel enough to use their LGBT population as legislative punching bags. Proud of the DFL for keeping the Bachmanns of MN at bay.

And now I hear people talking about being ashamed of Minnesota. I said it while I was trying to cope with this brand of cruelty politics, but I’ve changed my mind.

The GOP isn’t giving us a choice on this – Minnesotans will have to reject this brand of cruelty politics in November of 2012 when we are actually going to be asked to enshrine anti-lgbt legislation into our constitution. There will be a massive amount of misinformation put forth (cruelty politics can’t succeed without scare tactics and actual lies) and we have to educate the public and get people to the polls.

This is not about marriage. This is a referendum on whether or not LGBT people are welcome in Minnesota as full partners in this state.

Enlist yourself. Go to Outfront and sign onto the email blast at the very least. Talk to your family and friends.

The Minnesota that I believe exists will reject this. But we have to help.

He was an “unskilled” laborer, an immigrant. When he came to the US he didn’t know that the job he was coming to would kill him not long after he arrived, leaving his three children and a wife who couldn’t speak English behind.

In June of 1916, three years after his death, the iron ore miners on the Mesabi Range went on strike. They were unorganized at first, but the Industrial Workers of the World organized them. With the minimal records kept at the time, the data that exists shows between 7,000 to 8,000 men striking out of a total of 15,500 employed. [This data is from the MN Department of Labor and Industries]

The miners were criticized by the employers for not having demands before they went on strike (something that would be echoed today if it happened in an attempt to discredit them), but until they were organized how would they know what strength they had in numbers.

Here is what they asked for:

• An eight-hour day
• A minimum wage that increased based on the relative danger of the location ($2.75 for surface; $3 for underground and an additional fifty cents a day for wet places)
• The abolition of the contract system (ie: job security and fair, consistent pay)
• A semi-monthly pay day
• Payment when quitting or discharged
• Abolition of the Saturday night shift with full pay
• The return of all strikers
• The abolition of private mine police

“Unskilled union labor is overpaid,” they say in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, etc. “Look how much the public sector union members make!”

First, let’s stop calling labor unskilled. Non-white collar jobs are physically, mentally, and emotionally demanding. The people who clean your buildings breathe in cleaning fumes all day (without union protections, toxicity doesn’t matter), the people who haul your garbage spend their days outside in the freezing cold and melting heat and are exposed to physical dangers on the job, and the non-white collar workers who keep the jails functioning certainly risk more than you do on the job.

In 1916, the miners said that the companies constantly changed their pay rates with no notice and that they often didn’t know how much they would receive on payday – in fact, the companies didn’t even provide the men with documentation of how their gross wages were calculated and usually charged the men for the tools, powder, and other items that were used. They said the only way to get the more profitable positions (mining soft ore) was to bribe the captain with money or presents, and that the captains compelled the miners to buy tickets for raffles and other activities in which the captains had financial interests – penalizing men who did not.

These were experiences not terribly unlike what our current undocumented workers go through now. The gap between abject exploitation and a living wage existed (and exists) because of unions. Negotiating alone is meaningless. The power you have when you are not in a highly specialized field is the power that comes from banding together and facing your employer as a singular whole – rather than as myriad, exploitable people.

In the years 1913-1914, when my great-grandfather was killed, there were 42 people killed in mining accidents, and another 2,252 injured. This was a jump – the non-fatal accident rate in MN industries jumped from 5,442 in 1912-1913 to 12,084 in 1913-1914.

Of course, it’s not as if twice as many accidents happened. State inspectors increased activity in calling employer’s attention to an accident report law that (it seems) was covered in the recently enacted “Workmen’s Compensation Act” in Minnesota.

Well. Try being female.

Below is a chart that shows the median incomes for women and men with graduate and doctoral degrees (JD, MA, MS, PHD, MD, etc) in full-time, year-round positions. [Also, just a note: there are too many value labels, so the states get all bunched together. You can expand the data table for all the data, which comes from the American Community Survey 2005-2009.]

And if you think it’s any better for people with Bachelor’s degrees…

The short version of this is that life isn’t fair and – in the aggregate – our financial successes and positions in life are not equal, even when we have equivalent degrees. To say that people should not band together, that it is somehow greedy and wrong, is to say that we should take only what we’re given. That we should endure a life bestowed upon us by others and stay in our respective places.

I disagree. I think the only way we fail in life is when we think too highly of ourselves and too little of others – or when we think to little of ourselves and too highly of others. The injustices we face in this society are our doing only to the extent that we are complicit in our own alienation from each other.

We should know better than to get played like this.

We should know better than to be pitted teacher against custodian, lawyer against firefighter, web designer against scientist. We will not succeed by doing this.

We are fighting the wrong people.

He was smart enough to know many things, but the two things I want to highlight are these:

He was smart enough to value education and he was smart enough to value unions.

Poverty is a cruel thing to endure, and without education there is very little hope for emergence from poverty. As a man who labored – both underground in the mines and above ground in the terrible cold and wind of the open pit mines in Minnesota winters – he did not have the opportunities that I do as a highly educated and specialized worker. What he had was the protection of the group. The strength of many instead of one.

Without a union – a group – to protect him, he was discardable (a la The Jungle), unable to push for health care, vacation, sick time, regulated weeks, pay increases, safety measures, and any other number of compensations we work to receive. As a united front, employers were forced to contend with something much stronger and they were forced to negotiate.

My grandparents didn’t live a glamorous life, but they saw hope for their children’s futures and had the capacity to let them finish high school and move on to college. All public.

That publicly-funded education was as instrumental as the unions in the opportunity for upward mobility. As individuals, a working class family couldn’t have paid for four children to go to school. As a community, we do have that power. We can educate all children, and we can do better.

In a time in which Wall Street executives are receiving record bonuses and when the rich have been given tax cuts by Governor Walker in Wisconsin, the idea that it is teachers and social workers and public servants who are breaking the back of our economy is simply a con.

This is the time of divide and conquer. Of petty bickering over who gets which scraps. And this is the time when we decide whether or not we want to expand and sustain a permanent underclass in America or whether we are going to tell people like Walker and the Koch brothers, who are just an example of the type of people Walker listens to, ENOUGH.

I love unions. I love them because they laid the groundwork for my family to gain enough momentum to rise up. They gave my mother and her siblings a future, one that my cousins and I have benefited from beyond anything they could have imagined.

At the University, I know damned well that if AFSCME wasn’t there holding the floodgates shut, those of us who are non-union would be seeing skyrocketing health care increases and more rapidly decreasing benefits than we currently see. There is no such thing as trickle down, but there is trickle up. (Management sure as hell aren’t going to let the clerical workers get better benefits than they have.)

The solution to private sector woes is not to drag union workers down to the level you perceive yourself to be at, but to value yourselves and your work enough to band together and demand to be appropriately compensated for your labor. We are always hearing about the gross domestic product (GDP) going up, of productivity going up – but does that translate to your paycheck? As an individual, are you strong enough to fix the fact that it’s not?

Your employer is not your friend, it is your employer. You are only as strong as your individual or collective worth.

And none of us is as special as we may think we are. The group is always stronger than the individual.

I am proud to have family who have struck and fought for fair compensation.

I stand strongly with the unions. I stand for the middle class.

I’m going to follow their advice, mostly because Megan is being furloughed anyway and it will be nice to not actively think about work for a week.

I hereby designate next week to be furloughcation week.

What are you going to do with this free time? Something productive? Pshaw. You need a break.

Here’s your first recommendation of what to do:

Watch Cougar Town

I am dead serious. This is the best fluffy sitcom you’ve ever refused to watch because of its stupid and offensive name.

As the producers learned relatively quickly, the whole “older woman on the prowl” theme was dumb and unwatchable, and the whole “dysfunctional friend-family” is far more entertaining than being repeatedly scandalized/titillated by a woman in her 40s having sex (EEK!).

In my countdown list, I will give you three reasons to watch this show – and give you one to watch on Hulu right now to get a taste. Even though it’s in the middle of Season 2, I think it communicates the show’s sense of humor. And then you can judge me.

3. Laurie
Honestly, she is my number one favorite thing about the show. I love her. I want her to be real so she can be my friend. I have a fondness for badass, crass, fun ladies, and her “sexy, townie ho” self is sheer perfection. The actress (Busy Phillips) does such a great job of conveying the sensitivity underneath her big personality and…yeah…can she please be real and hang out with me?

2. The relationship between the main character and her ex
One thing I really like about this is that Courtney Cox’s character and her ex-husband, with whom she has an 18-year-old son, have a complex, adult relationship. I feel like we don’t see a lot of that depicted – where people share a difficult history and still have to continue a relationship. That’s pretty much any healthy divorced couple with a kid in existence.

1. The characters and their relationships
I mean, isn’t this why anyone would want to watch a sitcom? You’re not watching for the action, the intrigue, or the mystery. You’re watching because you like the people you see enough to laugh at their jokes and want to see them play out their days.

Anyway, that is Part 1 of what to do on your furloughcation. I may recommend more dumb TV shows (or even not dumb, but most TV shows are pretty dumb), and will more likely recommend brain relaxing things. If you want to go be all intellectual, go read journals for me and write an IRB submission.

Take 13 minutes of your life. Listen to Bernie Sanders talking about incomes, estate taxes, and tax rates.

I know it may not sound as fun as compulsively checking Facebook, but he does a better job of describing the dire situation we’re in during these 13 minutes than I have heard elsewhere.

Listen to him, and let’s talk.

We need to not only educate people, but figure out what the hell we can do to create change.