Dance with the Reaper

As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live.
-Ezekiel 33:11

Like the eyes of every other American, mine were glued to the television last night while President Obama announced that a team of US forces had killed Osama Bin Ladin.

The biggest part of my mind went into the “go team go” mentality. That man did horrible things including attacking our country, my city, and killing 3000 people. He deserved to die, and I am glad he’s dead for a lot of reasons, the most important of which is that he will not be hatching any more plots to attack my personal homeland where I live, me and all of my tribe. It’s a victory for good ol’ fashioned intelligence and strong leadership. Yay America.

Go team go.

Woot.

Then the small voice inside my brain, the one that says things like “You’ve had enough to drink,” “Don’t wear that,” and “You’d better have that lump checked out ASAP” says to me, “Wait. Hold up. Think for a second.”

I’m cheering for someone’s death.

Is it justice? Is it vengeance? Does it matter?

Justice would see Bin Ladin brought before the court of the Hague, tried, found guilty, hanged, and buried in an unmarked grave.

Justice would see him grow old in a prison cell somewhere, watching his philosophy fail, and seeing himself becoming a footnote in history, a toothless asp biting at the bars of his cage, knowing that the world had changed and that he had been left behind to rot into obsolescence. But life seldom happens that way, and so we kill the bad guys to keep them from doing what bad guys do, because no one wants September 11: the Sequel.

I think back to just after 9/11 and I remember President George W. Bush declaring a War on Terror. I remember that he briefly called it a Crusade, which made me glad I had learned enough in 10th grade world history class to know what a bad idea it was to use that particular choice of words, and I remember that I chuckled amid my grief and horror at the gaff.

Not a Crusade. A campaign, a victory, in the War on Terror, a term that has come to encompass, in the decade since that attack on U.S. soil, Anyone Who Disagrees With Us.

I’m not sure that War On is the right term either. Not as bad as Crusade (and by the way, Bush writers, what on earth were you thinking?) but war implies a battle of defined entities, and terror is a slippery little bugger.

I know what terror is. It’s the fear that horrible things are going to happen to you, and the certainty that they might, and the knowledge that you can’t do a damn thing about it.

It’s what the drug cartels are doing in Mexico, just across the border.

It’s what the drug gangs are doing in our inner cities.

It’s finding out that the lump in your breast has spread to your heart and is about to end your life.

War on …

It’s rhetoric we love. War on Terror. War on Drugs. War on Cancer. Presto: good guys — us, and bad guys — them, the drug dealers, the terrorists, cancer. Bad People doing Bad Things, or a Bad Disease that strikes terror into the hearts of us all. Let’s get ’em. I wish it were that simple.

Sometimes it is that simple. Osama Bin Laden was a bad guy, and we got him.

More often it’s more complicated. 40 years ago, when President Nixon signed into law the War on Drugs, I doubt he foresaw the prohibition-esque rise in organized crime that would arise and spread like cancer throughout this hemisphere to fill the gaping maw of demand by an addiction-addled society. But 40 years ago yesterday, when President Nixon signed into law the War on Cancer, I also doubt he would foresee not just me, but hundreds of thousands of women like me, alive to raise our children, cured of cancer, cured through research funded by federal tax dollars, money spent fighting the War on Cancer, which is not rhetoric we hear much any more, because 40 years later, they still haven’t found a “cure.”

Patience isn’t part of our national discourse. I think it should be.

It took a decade to track down Osama Bin Laden.

It’s going to take longer than that to untangle the mess wrought by the illegal drug trade and by our response to it.

It may be another century before scientists discover a cure for cancer, not just a treatment that annihilates it from our bodies with the slash, burn, and salt the earth approach, but a real cure.

In the meantime, we celebrate our successes, constantly evaluate our progress, rethink, redirect, and keep fighting, because that is what we do in a free society. And we call it a War because that word is a clarion call to action, but a better term might be Persevere.

In honor of the Royal Wedding and accompanying hats, this version is brought to you by the song “Friday” and the animal hat. If someone you love has cancer, get them a hat like that. Is it a moose?

After my daughter was born, I imagined a scene where she is happily tucked in bed, teeth brushed, face washed, we’re talking about the day in a tidy, well-decorated child’s room, I read a book, deposit a kiss on a tender cheek, and we say, “Goodnight Mommy. I love you,” and “Goodnight sweetheart, I love you too,” and then I slip out.

Nowhere in this scenario is the time I took every single toy, book, and decoration out of my daughter’s room, locked them in a closet, and made her earn her stuff back by going to bed without a tantrum.

Nowhere in this scenario is the time I locked her out of her room with everything in it for a week and made her ask her brother permission to share his room, or else fend for herself with a naptime pillow and blanket on the floor of the hallway outside her bedroom.

Nowhere did I ever envision a child who would emerge from her room every five minutes for four hours every single night until we screamed at her and made her more scared of us than whatever monsters might lurk under her bed.

We tried the nice ways. They failed, and your unsolicited kindly advice offering some ideas I might not have thought of still gets the firehose of sarcasm. “Oh, of COURSE. I never thought to, say, READ A BOOK. How CLEVER you are.”

Bedtimes are easy now.

We say “tootle toddle off to bed,” and my kids do just that. My son, who has always been a joy to put to bed, with the stories and the kisses, and the “I love you mommy” dives under his covers and falls asleep. My daughter curls up with a book or five and reads herself to sleep. It sounds idyllic, and it is, because bedtime has been a crucible and anything that might mar the ease of bedtime has been burned away by parental fury.

I don’t give any kind of advice because every kid is different. This is what works for us. Not any of the bedtime books. Zero books. Zero routine. Just “Go to bed,” and they do. If this book had been written when my kids were toddlers, I would have loved it:

O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: “I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the LORD.

from the book of Ezekiel

Yesterday, I was sitting with my friends at the new IHOP on 75 and Southwestern when in walked about 30 guys in matching black warmup suits that said DC United.

“Jackpot” I said as they walked in the door, even before I had a chance to read their warmup uniforms. I know professional athletic teams don’t recruit based on looks but it they did, the team would look like DC United. Those guys were hotcakes.

I was with a large group of friends, women, who were, for the most part, not FIFA fans.

“Who are they?”

“They must be a team.”

“Are they from a college?”

“You all fail for sports,” I said in a whisper just loud enough to be overheard. “What is it with the Texas football-football-football? That’s the best soccer team in the country!! It’s like the Lakers just walked in here, only shorter.”

“What are they doing in IHOP?” asked one friend.

“Having breakfast,” said another.

“Well,” I said. “It’s not like they can go to Denny’s.” It was one of those times when I was the person who put into words the uncomfortable truth that everyone knows but no one wants to speak.  In addition to being all kinds of handsome, the players on DC United having breakfast right next to us were all kinds of brown.

It’s not like my friends are uniformly white. The group having breakfast that day included a woman from Guatemala, a woman from Mexico City, a Mexican-American, and me, part Cuban-American. My friend who was sitting next to me recounted how, when she was a Division I athlete in college, when her team was on the road, her coach only took them to buffets. “Part of it was that it was the only way he could afford to feed us,” said my friend. She didn’t say the other part, that her coach did not want his players to have to deal with what, I hear, often happens when people of color try to go out to eat.

As a white person, it is extremely difficult for me to write about race. I know that my appearance, my fair skin, my pale green eyes, my WASPyness, has benefitted me through no action of my own. It’s called white privilege, and I know it benefits me in a thousand ways I recognize and a thousand thousand ways I don’t. I don’t feel guilty about it, because I know it’s not something I did, but I am aware, and I continually strive to become more aware.

It’s hard not to when just this week, the Dallas Morning News reported a study conducted by the North Texas Fair Housing Center proving what I had long suspected, that African-Americans and Mexicans are subject to rampant discrimination when they look for places to live — either told that there were no available apartments when, in fact, there were, or quoted higher rents and security deposits than were white people looking at the same apartment complexes.

It’s hard not to be aware of white privilege every time I hear people in Dallas say racist things, about African-Americans, or about Mexicans, and I think, but do not often say, “How on earth can you say something like that,” and I remember that I have light brown hair and fair skin and green eyes, and people assume, because I look like them, that I share their racist attitudes, and I realize that I am “privileged” to hear exactly how racist many people are in this city, and I wish I had the courage, when I drop out of something I thought I had wanted to become involved with, to say, “No, I’m sorry this [whatever] is too racist for me. I’m moving on.” But I don’t have the courage, or, more likely, I don’t have the compassion, time, or energy to stay and try and make change happen from the inside, so I move on to a place where I don’t have to hear racist comments. I, too, am part of the problem.

It’s hard not to be aware of white privilege when I look at the Highland Park schools and see that, in a city that is 43% Hispanic and 22% Black, the best public school in the city is white. People who live here can kid themselves all they want about why it just works out that way, but my nonagenarian friend confided in me that her nonagenarian friends told her, “We set up Highland Park schools to keep the blacks out, but we know that times are changing and we have to let some Mexicans in.”

I don’t talk about white privilege with my African-American friends, much, because we have better things to talk about, and because, I assume, they are sick of thinking and talking about race and racism.

I don’t talk about white privilege with my white friends here in Dallas, much, because they don’t get it and I don’t want to beat them over the head with it, because they say, rightly, “It’s always been that way and I can’t do anything about it.” They say, “Dallas has a race problem, but I don’t see a solution.” They say, “I know it’s a problem, but it doesn’t affect me. It’s not my problem.”

But it is.

The numbers are shocking. Graduation rates. Employment opportunities. Crime rates. Housing opportunities. Every time I have looked for the numbers, I’ve been shocked at what I have found, and yet we allow it to go on, because life is pretty good for the 30% of us who are white, and who have the best houses and the best schools and the best jobs. Our children are growing up in a city where racism is rampant, where it is built into the law of the land, and they think it’s normal.

Dallas doesn’t have a race problem. Dallas has a racism problem.

It’s not a new problem, and it seems to be improving, even the short six and a half years I’ve lived here. I didn’t ask the players on DC United for their autographs, and I didn’t take their pictures, but a couple of kids in the restaurant did, and those kids were as brown as the players. As I live my life around the city, I see Muslims, Hispanics, Jews, African-Americans, Asians, Indians — people from all different backgrounds, living and working and shopping and going to school side-by-side, but finding a place where all these groups actually come together is called the checkout line at Costco. It’s a start.

There are a lot of wonderful things about living in Dallas. We have emerging world-class arts. We have beautiful parks. We have a welcoming business environment. But until white people — city and civic leaders, clergy, as well regular folks like me, stand up and say, “No more,” we will never be anything more than a backwater with some nice museums, a good symphony, and a few lovely parks.