Syndicate and Hague

I’ve been feeling disheartened lately. In the news and in life, it seems that online learning has become the mythical goose who laid the golden eggs in the eyes of a funding-starved public higher education system.

You remember what they did to the goose, right? And how that turned out?

One of the reasons I went back to school to get my PhD is because I very uncynically believe that education is transformational on many levels. I decided that if I cared at all about our students and the future of higher ed as we incorporate and rely on technology more, I had to gather the expertise and research experience to gain a voice in the discussion.

I love technology and the ways it provides us to collaborate and talk and experience life in ways that we may not otherwise be able to; I love teaching and being there with my students as they work through difficult issues or texts or problems with their writing; and I truly believe we owe it to all the people in the state to provide students with an exceptional education.

All of this being said, I am old enough and have been around enough work environments that I am cautious in my optimism and hope. It’s an experience that I don’t think people who go straight through school get - the experience of getting your hope and optimism beaten out of you and having to rediscover the source of it in yourself and know that everything is cyclical, everything is tidal, and you can create change by finding new pathways for the change you want to create.

A writer on a political blog I have an affinity for is leaving today for a new job at a different blog, where I assume he will continue to be astute and funny and asinine in no particular order. And he said on his departing post:

If I was “cynical,” meaning, if I didn’t believe that government was important or capable of or needing to play a critical role in American life, I wouldn’t be able to type this blog all day. Who would ever want to read and write about apocalyptic, depressing horror tales hour after hour for years if they thought things didn’t matter, or that they didn’t *have* to be better?

This is the kind of thinking I return to in trying times. It is a kind of personal masochism to get so distressed over something you literally have no control over, but all of this matters. In the blog’s case, it’s about politics; in my case, it’s about education. Even though sometimes I feel like I come from a different planet, I’m not going to stop making the case that the students and their learning experiences are not to be ignored and that we focus only on revenue generation at our peril.

Online education isn’t a gold-filled goose. It’s just a bird.

…at least not for institutions and ways of life.  Elegies of people I can get behind.  Especially one of my favorite Larry Levis poems.  Oh hell, let’s interrupt what is going to be a bit of a rant by posting the poem.

Boy in Video Arcade

Some see a lake of fire at the end of it,
Or heaven’s guesswork, something always to be sketched in.

I see a sullen boy in a video arcade.
He’s the only one there at this hour, shoulders slightly bent above a machine.

I see the pimples on his chin, the scuffed linoleum on the floor.

I like the close-up, the detail. I like the pointlessness of it,
And the way he hasn’t imagined an ending to all this yet,

The boy never bothering to look up as the sun comes out
In the late morning, because Big Deal, the mist evaporating & rising.

So Death blows his little fucking trumpet, Big Deal, says the boy.

I don’t see anything at the end of it except an endlessness,

The beauty parlors, the palm reader’s unlighted sign, the mulberry trees
Fading out before the billboard of the chiropractor.

The lake of fire’s just an oil speck.

I don’t see anything at the end of it, & I suppose that is what is wrong with me,
Among the other things. And it’s slow work, because of all the gauzy light,

It’s hard to pick out anything.

And now I want to talk about this poem. Dammit. Okay, I’m giving myself one paragraph of the troubles and then we’re talking poetry.

Apparently, there’s some consultant running around the University saying student engagement isn’t important in online learning, it’s about maximizing class sizes and delivering content. What this means for faculty, I think that’s a topic to be taken up by someone else with more knowledge of how they’re feeling in all this. But for me, it brings up issues of dominance; a basic tenet of what the U is to serve and what it means to be educated and to get an education. And it downright frightens me that there are people who would go into a university and tell them that student engagement wasn’t important.

You know what I would do if I found out my program wasn’t concerned with its students?

Quit. We’re all worth more than that. Thankfully, that isn’t the case.

So let’s see how that pans out, but I’m going to try to talk about the problems and philosophies underlying that as the weeks go on. Frankly, it makes me nervous for online education because they see it as a cash cow - more students, teacherless classess - we’re living the dream. Or some administrator’s dream. Sadly, it isn’t a student or teacher dream, but that is for another time.

Ah, but Larry Levis.

He makes me happy. I like that he ruminates on what it means to be alive by focusing on the bored boy, the sullen boy, the careless boy - and that the meaninglessness with which he conducts his life is situated in beauty he chooses not to see. And it is what it is - it doesn’t matter to him, but the beauty exists and the banal exists and this is what life is. A subtle moment doing something innocuous and mundane.

I’m not a believer in heaven or hell, which upsets some people. I think of it much differently. I am fond of going to visit my grandmother’s grave and driving by everyone else’s - her parents and brother and uncle; my grandfather and his grandfather and half-brother and step mothers; the Tracys - his aunt and uncle who raised my grandfather; and the oldest part of my Irish family here - Patrick and Elizabeth, who came over in 1845 for a reason I don’t know about and probably won’t ever.

Despite this fondness that makes me visit the spot where her ashes are, I still think she’s dead and done and everything about her that was uniquely and completely her is gone. What I figure is that the way in which we live on after we die is in the impacts we make. I’m not quite sure how this became about my grandmother, but sometimes I think about her hope for us, her faith in our education carrying us through life and making us more thoughtful, better people…and I worry. I worry that even though I believe so passionately and fiercely that postsecondary education can do wonders for your perspectives and critical thought development; I worry that others with more power than I have don’t have a remotely similar philosophy. Call it greed, call it “diminishing funding,” but there are philosophies being bandied about that I literally thought would be laughed out of the room. Things I’m going to talk about this week: the idea of a profit model for courses, “maximum seats” in an online course, media and team development on courses, feminist pedagogy, and general discomfort with the divide between administration and the people actually doing the work and research on what works.

I try to hold myself to standards that my grandmother set - be good, be nice, be smart, and don’t let anyone tell you what to do - because only you know what that is. That’s probably what’s living on in this moment, her message that we have the power to speak, and to speak well. I hope I achieve that most of the time.

Man. She was so great. You all really missed out not knowing her. I cannot believe it has been over eight years since I’ve gotten to talk to her.

I don’t have much time these days to write long, detailed posts about interesting things (or, at least, interesting to me…), but I wanted to take a moment to comment on the unallotment decision from the MN Supreme Court.

For background reading, I suggest just going over to MPR. Here are most of their stories.

• How the budget may affect legislators
• Graphic: Minnesota’s deficit picture
• State faces unprecedented cash-flow crisis
• A closer look at Gov. Pawlenty’s unallotment cuts

• Explainer: What is unallotment anyway?

What I want to say about this is that I am so furious at Pawlenty right now. He and his legal team knew that what they were pulling had an iffy chance of not being overturned in the courts because the argument that it was not unconstitutional was not terribly convincing.

He used a law meant to bridge gaps to overturn the legislature’s decisions and do exactly what he wanted however he wanted. He passed all the spending, but not the revenue bills, which created the crisis situation that triggered his ability to use unallotment to change the spending bill to whatever he wanted it to be.

And now we’re in for it. Because of his cynical political move, our state is in an absolute fiscal crisis. I want to hammer home that it doesn’t matter where you stand politically - Republicans and Democrats should be outraged that he prioritized a ploy over our security as a state. He knew this was a possible outcome of his decision - even a likely one - and he did it anyway.

He sold us out. And I don’t know if it was to look tough on the national stage or if it was because he doesn’t know how to negotiate or compromise, but he sold us out.

After riding the high that is MinneWebCon, the coming down off that today was more brutal than it has ever been.

Today, two of my 6 coworkers were told that as of July 1, they would be laid off.

While I’m glad I’m not among the casualties, the skill sets that we are going to miss are so profound that it is going to be like losing our eyes and at least one limb.  I reserve a great deal of my vitriol in this for Pawlenty and his absolute hatred for higher education as evidenced in his budgets, but I am truly baffled by the decision-making process going on behind closed doors at the U.

Basically, if you’re at the U, take note: none of your jobs are safe. You may be mission-critical to a department, but that doesn’t matter anymore.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I’m not entirely sure how to start this, so I will start by saying I’m going to obscure some specifics in this to protect someone I care about while still trying to communicate the larger implications/issues in the decision that was handed down.

Megan and I were asked to participate in an interview with a media outlet with a fairly large distribution. The interview was - in general - about relationship decisions and dynamics and whether the choices we made in ours caused us to fight less or made our relationship different from others.

I was surprised, and a little impressed, that they would be willing to interview a married couple about something that had nothing to do with our status as a “same-sex” couple. Of course, it was my friend who was hunting down people for the story, and we came to mind because Megan and I make a big effort to look at the major stumbling blocks of relationships - chores, responsibilities, money - and make explicit, managed decisions about things so that we don’t wind up passive-aggressively damaging the relationship due to resentment/grudges.

Also, we really like being happy.

Anyway, tonight the word came down that we couldn’t be interviewed because they didn’t think that it was “surprising that a same-sex married couple would *insert doing the thing we do here*” and needed a straight married couple for it.

My initial surprise at the wonderful banality of us doing a story that had nothing to do with our genders was misguided. It wasn’t the institution of media that didn’t care, it was our friend who analytically looked at the topic and decided we would be a great couple to speak to it.

And here is where the diatribe comes in:

In this instance, they didn’t want a same sex couple because then they couldn’t play traditional gender roles against the “change” that they perceive is going on. Essentially, the decisions themselves weren’t the story, but the perceived decrease of male authority in the household was the story.

Media is one way we interpret our existence. We consume it, we are influenced by it, and I think we often forget how contrived things are. People in general don’t spend a ton of time thinking about audience and how carefully interview subjects are selected to influence a certain desired perception in the audience. Yes, liberals deconstruct FOX News, but venerated news outlets spin constantly as well.

This is why it drives me crazy when straight people say things like “Well, we don’t have a ’straight’ pride parade, I don’t understand why you have to do that sort of thing.” Heterosexuality is inscribed and reinforced as dominant, and homosexuality is so threatening that - unless a story is specifically constructed around it - it cannot exist. It cannot be banal, it must always be controversial. Decisions are made on a daily basis about what can be spoken to and what cannot be, and without us running around waving flags and making our presence known, we would be swept under the carpet forever.

The media outlet’s decision on this was one part homophobia, one part sexism, and one part reinforcement of the aberration of female equality or power in a heterosexual relationship.

That last one is what really kills me about this. Let’s give the management the benefit of the doubt on the homophobia and say that wasn’t a factor (::ha::). The point of explicitly wanting to frame the discussion around a straight couple making decisions that, for some reason, you wouldn’t expect them to make should force the question: why is this an issue? Usually, it’s about some traditional female role that is being upended:

• she’s making more money now, how does the guy feel?
• the guy decided to stay home with the kids, is he being mocked?
• she has a more advanced degree, does that make him feel inferior?

I’m sure you could add to the list, because you read/watch/hear these stories all the time. And they reinforce to us as a society that we should feel surprised by these showings of female authority/power. That we should be concerned by the lowered status of men in these relationships. It inscribes a very specific kind of spin and serves as a form of societal push-back onto a select group of people who either represent a changing society or people fear are representing a changing society.

It’s messed up.

Anyway. I wish I could actually talk about what we were going to talk about, because it’s interesting, but I wanted to be able to be critical without jeopardizing anyone’s job. It’s crappy times out there, you know?

I wanted to open this by saying that there are so many things I don’t understand about the people crying “socialism” in regards to having public health care, but that isn’t entirely true. I intellectually understand a lot of the factors leading them to that reaction. Some of it is simply that they have good insurance through their employers and don’t want to possibly wait another day to get seen by a doctor so that we can all be covered. It’s a naive way to think in this economy when a person could lose his/her job and be without insurance or with insurance at staggering COBRA premiums.

I could go into the racial undertones of the anti-health care reform language (directed both at Obama, and at the “others” who may take away “our” health insurance/doctors), but what I want to focus on is why public health care is good for entrepreneurs - and, by extension, for capitalism.

If our leaders are really concerned with the needs of small businesses and individual start-ups of new businesses as they say they are, their resistance to publicly run health care is puzzling. Needing to maintain a relationship with a specific employer in order to have health insurance actually deters people from striking out on their own and becoming innovators.

I could write up some scenarios for you, but you should already know them. Someone with a child with chronic health conditions cannot stop working at a job with great benefits just because they “have a great idea for a business” because no individual plan would provide the level of care the group employee plan does (nor would the individual plan probably cover the child, what with the child’s pre-existing conditions and all).

You could have Crone’s, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, severe mental illness, whatever - and you are either lucky enough to be trapped with an employer who offers benefits that keep your illness from driving you into bankruptcy, or you get sick. And sickness can be disastrous.

So what are you going to do? Forget yourself, even - if you have people relying on you who absolutely need good medical care are you going to strike out on your own with that new business idea or are you going to stay at your job (hoping benefits don’t get cut more, hoping you don’t get laid off)? In my experience, people with great ideas stay at their jobs because when faced with the kinds of medical bills they would be paying without it, they simply can’t do anything else.

If you’re a capitalist who thinks big business is the only way to go, then this is a pretty good set up. However, no politician likes to go on about how much they looove big business. They’re always talking about “the little guy.” American ingenuity and exceptionalism blah blah blah. But they don’t really mean it. Our fates are tied to the whims of behemoths. Social programs support us so that we have a safety net. As anyone who has ever gone from a dangerous situation to a safe one knows, safety brings freedom. When you’re not in reactive mode, you can plan and dream and innovate.

It’s hard for me to untangle this argument from morality though. At its root, I think it’s immoral for us as a society to not leverage our power as a community to support and buffer each other so that we can all do better.

(A side note to the “SOCIALIST/COMMUNIST” screamers: please read Marx. It is so embarrassing when you use the term “socialist/communist” in place of “i don’t even want to hear what you say” because, due to the context in which you are using it, it is plain that you don’t actually have full knowledge of the tenets of that philosophy.)

Way back during the Clinton impeachment hearings (over his blow job), my (dearly missed) grandmother and I were talking about the state of politics in this country. She said “If politics when your grandfather was alive was like politics now, I never would have allowed him to run for anything.”

What she meant, of course, was that character assassination was steadily growing as the focus of political battles. It didn’t matter how much damage it did to his family at the time, but if all the Republicans could distract us with about Clinton was that he got a blow job, then that was going to take precedence over policy and legislation.

I can’t imagine what her impression of the politics of today would be.

Here is the situation we’re in: a small minority of very loud Americans will do or say anything to bring down our president. I’d say that they get media play because the media gets a lot of airtime out of the Battle of Left Vs. Right, but I don’t know about that. Back in 2003, when the global Iraq war protest was staged, somewhere between 100,000-400,000 people flooded the streets of New York (the figure depends on the source), and between 6-10 million people protested that day in February in different cities all over the world. We weren’t covered with nearly the same seriousness as the town hall screamers are.

The anti-health care reform people; the birthers; the right wingers in general get a few dozen people at a rally - maybe even a hundred or two at a protest - and this is a movement? Yes, they’re loud and very good at parroting Fox’s talking points, but their numbers are hardly representative of massive public sentiment.

The problem is that every time their screaming town halls are reported on, it lends them credibility. Just like every time the media even asks questions like “should the president’s message to schoolkids be allowed in the classroom?” gives that insanity credibility.

(A sidebar on that: are you people fucking kidding me?????!!! He’s the president. George Bush made me want to gouge my ear drums out every time I heard him talk, but if he wanted to get on TV and tell the kids to study hard and have a good school year, I wouldn’t have batted an eye. And neither did my parents back when Reagan and HW broadcast messages to schoolkids. Way to raise your kids to have respect for this country.)

I just don’t understand why the media is legitimizing the ideas that are coming out of the right wing machine. It’s not like having “two sides” of an issue=critical analysis of an issue. There are things called facts, and when one of the two sides has an argument that consists of “socialism,” “death panels,” and “Hitler,” they are not a “side” of an argument, they do not have an argument.

To be clear, I have no problem engaging in a debate with someone who wants engage in an actual discussion of the pros/cons of various types of health care reform. However, I have found that many right wing-identified people begin an argument with me by calling me a socialist. That’s not an argument, that’s invective and hyperbole and has no place in a debate/discussion.

In fact, I want to extend Godwin’s law to the “Socialist” moniker. If you have to say “Socialist!” or “Socialism!” in order to win an argument, you automatically lose. It’s like sinking the 8 ball. You say “socialist” to win an argument, you fail.

Man, I really miss talking current events with my grandma, but part of me is glad she didn’t live to see this insanity.

Two things happened this week.  First, we now own a house.  Second, we had the wedding reception. That one followed the day after the other was a fluke.

I’ve hesitated to write anything in detail about our experience in buying the house this summer because I was unsure if anything I said would come back to hurt us before it was all over.  But now it’s over.

We bought a short sale from a nice guy who had a whole hell of a lot of bad luck.  I know we live in America and all - currently the land of “I’ve got mine and if you don’t then there must be something wrong about you” - but there hasn’t been a day when my excitement and joy about this beautiful house that we now own hasn’t been tempered with a sadness and resignation about the only way we could afford something like this.  And that is by someone else being in desperate circumstances.

When I’ve told people that, they tend to become remarkably uncomfortable.  They usually try to justify the whole exchange as simply financial and amoral, but there is a large part of me that fully believes the amount of pain M & I have suffered this summer in our transience has been some sort of penance for the way we’ve come to own such a special place.

To buy a short sale, a house that is still owned by the person who is losing it, you must have an element of vulture to you.  The ability to rationalize that their loss is inevitable and it may as well be  you who gains.  And I suppose that is good enough for many people, and, despite rationalizing in that way myself, the guilt of it would overtake me at times.

I’ve seen the destruction left in the wake of other houses people were financially forced to vacate: the appliances pulled from the walls, glass doorknobs stripped and sold along with any other valuables that could be harvested from the house.  Those houses are filled with anger and despair.  You can feel it when you walk in.

When we came to see the place that is now our home, it was a last minute thing and the owner was here.  The moment I stepped into the house, I was blown away by the feel of it and how beautiful it is.  We talked with the owner for a while afterward on the porch and decided to come back the next day and look at it in the daylight.  We were smitten with the house, and he made it clear that he wanted us to have it.  I think what he recognized in us was that, despite our status as vultures, we saw the same kind of beauty in the house.  We weren’t going to tear it apart; we weren’t going to flip it.

For months, we waited.  We moved.  We lost the futon to mold, we lost the sofa, area rug, and chair to moths in the storage space.  We moved four times by the end of the summer, living out of suitcases and hardly anything to cook with or eat on.  I reminded myself constantly that our homelessness was - to an extent - of our own making. It was a waiting game.  Would the house win? Or would we give it up and move to an apartment and call it quits?

Obviously the house won.  But not until we gave up and decided to abandon it, only to be talked back into trying a new loan.

This weekend, the former owner of the house routed an email through his realtor to our realtor to us.  He said that leaving this house was the hardest thing he’s ever had to do, but that he’s glad that we’re the ones who got it.  He told us the history of the house, of its former owners before him, of the things he’d done to the house to make it look the way it should (things that I had assumed were original to the house).  Though some people may find the email guilt-inducing (being reminded of the kind of work and care poured into this place), I found it a relief.  I cannot forget how I’ve profited on someone else’s misery - and despite people wanting to make me feel better about it, I don’t think I should forget it - but having that person feel that their love of a place wasn’t in vain, that he trusts us to do right by the house means a lot to me.

My father likes to tease me and is currently saying that nothing makes you a capitalist like becoming a homeowner, but I think he’s wrong.  I think the loss of community identity is tied to a feeling of entitlement.  If you continually question that entitlement, if you dig down and look at the privilege you have and what the effects of your choices are, then the often-repeated triteness that we become more conservative as we age doesn’t have to become true.

And to the former owner: Thank you for giving us so much in this house.  I know the house itself wasn’t voluntary, but everything you carefully added to the house over the years was your choice to leave and I recognize that as a gift.

For those of you who missed the rally, or want to forward this on, or use the arguments, I’m pasting the text of my speech from this afternoon’s rally below.

I want to start by saying that though the administration often frames dissent like this as us hating the University, they’re wrong. We love the University. I am a graduate of the English department, and when I moved back here from New York I made an effort to get a job at the University of Minnesota. Our faculty and students are wonderful, and it was actually my job here at the University that inspired me to go back to school and work on my PhD.

Everyone has made fantastic arguments about the encouraging the culture of learning at the University and this being a big part of who we are and why we are here, but I’m going to focus on those of us whose degrees or coursework directly pertain to our jobs.

First of all, I will hammer home the fact that this is a pay cut. Not only is it a pay cut, but it is one of the only cuts in our compensation that will almost exclusively affect low- and middle-wage employees.

Whether it’s the first degree or PhD, the people who take these courses are people for whom education will improve their professional lives. Senior-level employees and faculty members, who for the most part make much more than the rest of us, will not feel this cut personally. And I want to thank those faculty and senior employees who support us and know that cutting the Regents scholarship is the wrong thing to do.

Let’s talk about what kind of pay cut this is.

If you are working on your first bachelors degree, taking one four credit course at a time each spring, summer, and fall, you will be paying approximately $390 per year. An employee working towards their first degree makes less money, so based on a salary of $25,000 per year, that is a 1.5% pay cut.

Let’s say you have a Bachelor’s degree and let’s be generous and say you make $37,000 per year. At the 25% rate, taking a spring, summer and fall undergraduate course will cost you about $950 – about a 2.5% pay cut.

Taking a graduate course each semester at $37,000 per year will cost you about $1,900 – about a 5% pay cut.

Who is being asked to sacrifice? Who is taking the pay cut?

I am a technology professional in the civil service/bargaining unit here at the University. I am also a PhD student in Curriculum and Instruction. Part of my focus is on Learning Technologies. My PhD program directly benefits my boss and my department and my school. I am not unique. The University of Minnesota staff in my courses bring inspiration and new knowledge back to our departments so that we create improve the output of the University.

This pay cut effectively renders the education that is part of our compensation package unaffordable. It will lead to decreased inspiration, innovation, and that will affect the strategic positioning of the University and the quality we currently provide.

This pay cut will affect staff recruitment and retention. Once the economy recovers, the University of Minnesota’s ability to recruit talented staff will decrease, as will our ability to retain staff. Other schools offer dependent and spousal tuition support at varying levels, we offer none. Decreasing a part of our compensation that doesn’t stand up to what other schools currently offer is misguided.

This pay cut is not about the myth of 10% annual increase: the Regents Scholarship increases in cost on average 10% a year. So does tuition. The program itself isn’t getting too expensive, tuition is.

Using short-term tax incentives to market a pay cut that affects long-term policy decisions is fraudulent. Destroying the Regents Scholarship and justifying it with temporary tax incentives that only a small part of our population can even use is disingenuous at best.

The Regents Scholarship didn’t become a perk until the administration wanted to decimate it. Prior to that, it was part of the compensation package that HR reminds us of on an annual basis.

This is a pay cut.

We are better employees because of our classes. We have new ideas, fresh ideas, current ideas. We make the University a better place, we make the education better, and we keep morale strong.

The common portrayal of gays and lesbians in the media is this: dual income, no kids; highly educated; artistic; relatively affluent; white. It’s been part of the argument some have made about gay marriage - think of all the money gay and lesbian people would bring in with their fancy weddings!

This observation is, of course, somewhat true. The only reason Megan and I are traveling out East for our wedding (along with a few friends, all of us contributing to the Massachusetts economy) is because it’s legal there and not here in Minnesota. Middle class people can travel, upper class people can travel and throw lavish affairs.

This perception was something that ran under some anti-gay sentiment during the arguments over proposition 8, and also reinforces the idea that gays are just rich, white, and privileged.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are poor gay people. It shouldn’t surprise me that gays and lesbians are poorer than our heterosexual counterparts, but it did. The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law released the results of a study they did that compiled and analyzed data from the 2000 Census, the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth and the 2003 and 2005 California Health Interview Surveys. via Echelon

Though poverty is on the rise among all Americans, the authors of the study–entitled Poverty in the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Community–suggest that unique social and political aspects of LGB life play a role in contributing to higher rates of poverty in this community, including vulnerability to employment discrimination, inability to marry and higher numbers of uninsured.

Key findings include:

• After comparing families with similar characteristics, gay and lesbian couple families are significantly more likely to be poor than are heterosexual married couple families;
• In general, lesbian couples have much higher poverty rates than either different-sex couples or gay male couples;
• African-Americans in same-sex couples have poverty rates that are significantly higher than black people in different-sex married couples;
• People in same-sex couples who live in rural areas have poverty rates that are twice as high as same-sex couples who live in large metropolitan areas;
• Employment discrimination, lack of access to marriage, and a greater likelihood of being uninsured exacerbate poverty among LGB people.
• Children of gay couples are living in poverty at a rate that is twice as much as the children of straight married couples. (this one is via Pam’s House Blend)

Also, a note about the the lack of transpeople in this study:

Because no representative data exist for transgender people, the report does not analyze poverty in that community. Previous Williams Institute studies, however, found that large proportions of transgender people report very low incomes, which suggest that poverty is also a major concern for transgender people.

This seems like an important analysis, and sad. It was really amusing to both Megan and me today when we drove behind some bigot’s truck with his “Marriage = 1 man + 1 woman” bumper sticker, pulled in front of them so they would be forced to drive behind my big ol’ rainbow-stickered car.

That is what life is like when you’re comfortable. You live in a big, liberal city and the bigots are out of place driving down 28th street. You don’t feel like the people who dominate this report. You have agency. There are parts of your existence you’re powerless over, but on the whole you’re not powerless. Hell, in my case, your life is filled with people - mostly straight - who go and buy you the stones for your wedding rings because you can’t afford them right now yourself.

I think it is important to recognize that those of us who are gay and comfortable - incomes we can live on, jobs we can be out at, relationships we don’t have to hide - are like refugees who have found the safehouses. It’s not like we’re truly ignorant of our status - people feel free to slap their prejudices on their bumpers, even in Minneapolis - but that we have the privilege to pretend they don’t exist at times.