One child has been killed each hour in Gaza over the past two days
Kyung-Wha Kang, Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and UN Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator told those gathered at an emergency meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council six days ago. Far away, I begin the mental mathematics. Adding it up, I know for sure only this about Gaza – children are dying.
The news comes fast and furious, twenty-four hours a day. Mainstream media. Social media. Mixed-up media. From their early morning studios, Starbucks in hand, the “experts” weigh in, all the while equivocating their way out of circumstances they cannot comprehend. How could they? How can we? We, with our children who fall asleep at night under the non-threatening whir of a ceiling fan or to the sounds of laughter down the hall with Jimmy Fallon and a TV audience in New York city.
The other day, I heard one member of the mainstream media criticize another for not providing enough context in its coverage of Gaza. I wonder how much context would suffice. Some of the children in Gaza – the dead children – knew only the context of innocent lives under siege, the sounds of bombs dropped from F16 fighter jets, the stench of smoke from piles of rubble that smolder still where their houses used to stand. What do babies know of context?
Context: from the Latin ‘Contextus” – interwoven, connected, or united.
I remember reading a book about Northern Ireland and realizing I am probably a Child of The Troubles, even though I was always, by nothing other than luck, in the right place at the right time – at a safe distance. Still, I know the dull thunder-clap of a bomb, the tremble of our kitchen windows in its wake. I know the stench of smoke from rubble that once was a hotel, a supermarket, a restaurant. I know that based on images flickering from black and white screens on living rooms in faraway places, strangers tried to understand the context of Northern Ireland, reducing it to tidy phrases about Catholics and Protestants, about calls for cease-fires, about heartbreaking hard-fought compromises that led, after three decades to a residual uneasy state we dare call “peace.” I know about bombings and rubber bullets and booby-traps like the kind that killed three Israel soldiers at the end of July 2014. I know about the disregard for the lives of innocent people, like those killed in Omagh, a small market town in Northern Ireland, the weekend before a new school term began in 1998. Or yesterday, in Gaza, when Israeli shelling killed 15 children who had taken shelter in a United Nations-run school.
How do we put this in context? How do we keep on working, loving, worshipping as we were taught, and wishing for better days?
In May the Lord in HIs Mercy be Kind to Belfast, based on his interviews with the people who lived there, with Protestants and Catholics, Tony Parker makes an unsettling but astute observation that those born and brought up in Northern Ireland’s complex context, have a mutual need to know, from the start, about a person’s background, so they can go ahead in the dialogue, in what may even become a lasting relationship, without saying the wrong thing, “the wrong word.” The schools we attended, our last names, the way we pronounce an “H” all became clues to help establish “who we are.” “Derry” or “Londonderry?” “The Troubles,” “the struggle, or “The Irish Question?” “Ulster” or “The Six Counties?”
On the words we use in the context of Gaza – a lexicon familiar to those from deeply troubled places – Soweto, Belfast, Sarajevo – there is no easy answer. I first heard poet, Damian Gorman, as his voice on a PBS channel filled my Phoenix living room some twenty years ago. He was reciting Devices of Detachment.
It was poetry. Spare and searing, the words suggested that the bombs and bullets, the “suspect incendiary devices” all too familiar in the 1980s Northern Ireland were far less deadly than the “devices of detachment, as dangerous as bombs” its people used to distance themselves from the violence, to cope. Aware of it, yet so removed. We were, all of us, very good at “detachment.”
We know how to cope, how to turn a phrase, a word, a hint, around and around until we have successfully distanced ourselves from the subject.
We have coped too well, the heart is numb,
~ Damian Gorman
Through social media, I have come to know Damian Gorman, and when I need words, he somehow finds the right ones at the right time. It was on his Facebook page in this harrowing, heartbreaking week on the Gaza strip, that Damian posted this:
For too many Palestinian and Israeli Parents (and for sharing)
July 23, 2014
Today I bury my child,
stop
And it was you who killed my child,
stop
I know that he wasn’t the target,
stop
But that doesn’t make him any less killed.
I know that “these things have contexts,”
stop
I have walked all around the contexts,
stop
I have tried unfamiliar angles,
stop
But they don’t make him any less killed.
You ask, “what should we do – tell me?”
stop
And I say, “don’t murder my child”
stop
“Walk as far away from that as you can'”
stop
“Move forward, away from that thing.”
stop
And you say you are “just like” me,
stop
That we feel and we do the same things.
stop
I know what you mean, but we’re not
stop
For today you don’t bury your child
stop.
On my way home from work, I stopped by Half-Price Books, remembering that I still needed to buy George Orwell’s 1984 (the obligatory summer reading for a high school Senior). My lucky day, I found a well-worn paperback copy, published in 1961- the only one in the store – and I paid a dollar for it. Just a dollar to enter a world of newspeak and double-think, of propaganda and psychological manipulation, of “Big Brother’s Watching You.” Sometimes I think George Orwell wrote to remind us of our worst selves.
Handing over my dollar, I spied a record section and asked the young man sorting through donated books to hang on for a minute while I checked out the albums. I wanted to point out that I was “an early adopter” of vinyl with an impressive collection back home in Ireland, but I imagine he dismissed me as somebody who could be his mother with no taste in music. Still, I maybe impressed him with my purchase.
It has been over 30 years since I held a record by The Clash in my hands – a 7” single in its original paper sleeve, “Remote Control” in stereo and on the B side, “London’s Burning” in mono. Given my recent musings on Terri Hooley and the Good Vibrations Record Shop and Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In, it wouldn’t have been right to leave The Clash in a second hand bookshop in Phoenix, Arizona.
I know I would be far better off adopting more of a minimalist lifestyle, confronting the clutter and discarding all the unnecessary bits and pieces, but I must regress. I’ve decided to renew my relationship with vinyl. I’m annoyed that I ever ended it. I’m annoyed that I ran with the crowd and turned my back on LPs opting instead for shiny compact discs in plastic cases that were hard to open. Privately and begrudgingly, I started over, and after twenty odd years, I had an impressive CD collection. Then along came some genius who figured out a crafty way to store my thousands of songs on a computer, an iPod, and ultimately, my phone. No more labor over a mix-tape – effortlessly and endlessly, in countless configurations, sorted by artist, album, genre, date last played, my music is delivered whenever and wherever I need it. It exists, apparently, on a virtual cloud, the location of which remains a mystery to me. Meanwhile, all the cool kids are collecting new vinyl, gushing over the digitally remastered Led Zeppelin 1 and acting like they invented it. Well, they didn’t. I’m reclaiming it. And, I’m going to start at the end of July, with the release of the tribute to JJ Cale album.
The laid-back songs of JJ Cale, the original cool breeze, the “boogie minimalist,” have been part of my personal soundtrack since the early 1980s when I bought the “Naturally” and “Grasshopper,” album, and when I went to The Errigle Inn in Belfast every Saturday night to see S’kboo who, when they played “Cocaine,” would always announce it as a JJ Cale song, knowing presumably, that most of the world thought it was an Eric Clapton song. By the time I came to Phoenix and its hotter than hell afternoons, JJ Cale was the natural choice for backyard ambience, for a beer in the hammock under the shade of a mesquite tree. That’s where I was last summer, listening to Travel-Log, when I heard that JJ Cale had died. I felt personally bereaved the way some of us do when we learn of the death of someone we don’t know, someone who has never met us but who has been next to us in our bedrooms and backyards, telling stories and singing us to sleep whenever we’ve needed them. Naturally.
Around the first anniversary of Cale’s death at the end of July 2014, Eric Clapton will release a new album “The Breeze, An Appreciation of JJ Cale.” Featuring Tom Petty, Mark Knopfler, John Mayer, Willie Nelson, Derek Trucks of The Allman Brothers Band, and Clapton himself, the album is an over-due tribute to the man without whom Eric Clapton may not have had such success.
In a statement about the new record, named for Cale’s 1972 single, “Call Me the Breeze,” Clapton stresses that he is just the messenger, wanting to bring more attention to JJ Cale the man who made him and so many other people famous when they covered his songs. “In this case . . . I’m just saying thank you,” he tells Rolling Stone.
Thank you – a powerful pair of words, typically unsaid when we need to hear them most.
There’s a lovely minute or two in the Irish film, “Waking Ned Devine,” that never fails to remind me of this. The hapless Lottery official has arrived unannounced at Ned Devine’s funeral, just as Jackie O’Shea is about to give the eulogy. Always quick on his feet – and realizing his scheme to cash in on Ned’s winning lottery ticket is about to come crashing down – Jackie pauses, looks over at his best friend, Michael O’Sullivan, who is posing as Ned, and as an easy smile spreads across his face, delivers this:
As we look back on the life of . . . Michael O’Sullivan was my great friend. But I don’t ever remember telling him that. The words that are spoken at a funeral are spoken too late for the man who is dead. What a wonderful thing it would be to visit your own funeral. To sit at the front and hear what was said, maybe say a few things yourself. Michael and I grew old together. But at times, when we laughed, we grew young. If he was here now, if he could hear what I say, I’d congratulate him on being a great man, and thank him for being a friend.
I rarely watch movies when I’m flying, but on the plane from Chicago to Dublin two Novembers ago, perusing my options for in-flight entertainment, I paused when I heard the unmistakable hiss that comes after a stylus is dropped right in the groove, and a Northern Ireland accent infused with Woodbine cigarettes:
“Once upon a time in the city of Belfast, there lived a boy named Terri . . .”
Terri Hooley.
Where do I begin, and what can I say that hasn’t already been said about him? In 1977, he opened his own record shop, “Good Vibrations” on Great Victoria Street in Belfast. The next year, under his own record label of the same name, he released “Teenage Kicks” by a relatively unheard-of Derry band, “The Undertones.” I bought the single and played it relentlessly. It was 1978. It was Northern Ireland, where, when our kitchen windows rattled, we wondered if a bomb had exploded not too far away, and we wanted to be farther away still, to escape, to “teenage kicks all through the night.”
Now this may seem neither remarkable nor the stuff of a movie that was playing on my flight back home, except that Terri Hooley opened “Good Vibes” on the most bombed street in Europe, just two years after “the day the music died” in Ireland, and as I watched Richard Dormer’s brilliant portrayal of him in “Good Vibrations,” I was a teenager again, fingering through the sleeves of vinyl records in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop in Antrim, my hometown, knowing that Ronnie knew what I’d like, and if I asked, he’d play it on the record player for everyone in the shop to hear. And when he did, you would never have known that our little country was in the grip of The Troubles.
There were moments on that flight back home when I wanted to jump out of my aisle seat and cheer for Terri Hooley, for Punk Rock, for everyone who bought a record from a smoke-filled shop just down the street from the most bombed hotel in Europe , and for every musician who ever played in Northern Ireland. I think I maybe even understood – if only for a moment – what Joe Strummer of The Clash meant:
When punk rock ruled over Ulster, nobody ever had more excitement and fun. Between the bombings and shootings, the religious hatred and the settling of old scores, punk gave everybody a chance to live for one glorious burning moment.
But when the movie ended and my remembering began, I wept for all that Northern Ireland lost between those bombings and shootings. I felt guilty for having left it behind when perhaps the better thing would have been to stay and strive to see far beyond the images that flickered on our TV screens at six o’clock every night.
Unlike Terri Hooley, I fled.
Ironic then, that I am shocked when some of my American friends refuse to visit Belfast while vacationing in Ireland. They don’t think it’s safe. “But it’s a great city!” I tell them. “The best in the world! And the Antrim Coast is stunningly beautiful.” I urge them to take the train from Belfast to Dublin, to enjoy the full Irish breakfast on the journey. In my enthusiasm, I forget about all those times my brother had to get off the Belfast to Dublin train and take the bus because of the threat of a bomb on the line. So what must it have been like for Terri Hooley trying to convince bands to play in Northern Ireland in the 1970s?, when musicians were afraid to come because of something terrible that had happened in the summer of my twelfth year.
In the early hours of July 31, 1975, five members of The Miami Showband, one of the most popular bands in the country, were traveling home from a gig at the Castle Ballroom in Banbridge. The sixth member, drummer, Ray Millar, had gone home to Antrim instead to stay with family. On a narrow country road outside Newry, they were flagged down by a group of uniformed men at what appeared to be a routine UDR (Ulster Defense Regiment) army checkpoint. Like the rest of us, I’m sure they didn’t think anything of it until they were ordered out of their vehicle and told to stand by the roadside while the soldiers checked the back of the van.
I don’t know if, while standing on the side of the road, The Miami Showband realized that this was not an army checkpoint and that they were instead the victims of a vicious ambush carried out by members of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).
While the band members waited, two of the UVF men – later revealed as members of the Ulster Defense Regiment – planted a bomb in the back of their van. The bomb exploded prematurely, killing both, and in the chaos that followed, the remaining UVF members opened fire, killing three of the band members.
There were reports that the handsome young lead singer, Fran O’Toole, was shot 22 times in the face. Lying on his back on the ground, he was utterly vulnerable to men who showed no mercy in spite of his pleas. Brian McCoy, shot nine times, was the first to die at the scene. Tony Geraghty was shot in the back – four times. Des McAlea and Stephen Travers survived the blast from the explosion that flung both of them into the air. Des McAlea suffered only minor injuries and somehow escaped into the night; Stephen Travers was seriously wounded, and survived by pretending to be dead. He recalls the gunman kicking the four bodies to ensure they were all dead.
Sitting here at my computer, almost forty years later, I can recall the shock and revulsion – the fear – we felt as details of the massacre unfolded in our newspapers and on the radio later that morning. I remember my mother shaking her head in utter disbelief. It was unimaginable – these young men, Catholics and Protestants, darlings of the show band scene, in their prime and adored by thousands of fans north and south of the border, slaughtered in the muck on a country road. Why?
What happened to The Miami Showband left no doubt that musicians were just as much of a target as anyone else. Perhaps we had been in a kind of denial that musicians were somehow immune, perhaps because we saw in the Miami Showband what could be, its members and its audiences crossing all social, religious, and political boundaries.
Some years later, in his address to The Hague Stephen Travers said his band was “a blueprint for social, religious, and political harmony.” Terri Hooley may have been working on a similar blueprint, the odds against him. In the years following the Miami Showband massacre, musicians were scared. There were some who thought that the musical life of Northern Ireland was over. Performers from the UK mainland were afraid to risk their safety, and with this increased risk, it became wildly expensive, the cost of insurance premiums soaring given the real threat of hi-jackings and bombings. Northern Ireland was a “no go” area.
Just three years after the slaughter of those young musicians on what became known as “the day the music died,” in Northern Ireland, I remember being shaken to my very core – again – by the inhumanity of people in my country. It was February 18, 1978, and what happened in the restaurant of the La Mon House Hotel in Gransha, outside Belfast, will forever stay with me.
La Mon House was packed that evening with over 400 people, some of whom were there for the annual Irish Collie Club dinner dance. By the end of the night, 12 of those people – including children – were dead, and numerous others seriously injured. The next day, the Provisional IRA admitted responsibility for the attack and for their inadequate nine-minute warning. With cold-blooded premeditation, the IRA had used a meat-hook to attach the deadly bomb to one of the restaurant’s window sills, and the bomb was connected to four canisters of petrol, each filled with home made napalm, a mixture of sugar and petrol, intended to stick to whatever or whomever its flames touched. I remember watching the TV coverage and listening as a reporter described what happened after the blast – the enormous fireball, some 60 by 40 feet, unrelenting in its ferocity, roared through the Peacock restaurant, engulfing the people in its path in flames and burning many of them beyond recognition.
And almost forty years later and on the other side of the world, I am haunted by a widely disseminated image of the charred remains of someone who died in that horrific explosion.
How could anyone look at that image and look away, unchanged?
I looked at that image – time and again – and still I was not brave enough to stay and do the hard work. To abide.
A lot of my friends passed away. I thought I was going to be the only one left; it was a horrible time, but the idea of leaving Belfast made me feel like a traitor.
Punk Rock was perfect for him. He had an alternative vision for Belfast and its young people, perhaps inspiring Stiff Little Fingers’ “Alternative Ulster.” He was more interested in owing a record shop where kids, Catholic and Protestant, could come together and talk about music – buy a record. He had no interest in taking either side of the sectarian divide; he wanted young people to have another option, another kind of country where a young person would be more interested in picking up a guitar than building a bomb. And he was fearless in the pursuit of such a place.
Naturally, Terri Hooley loved “The Undertones.” So did I. They were from Derry, and they knew about “The Troubles,” living and breathing it every day of their lives. They chose not to sing about it. Why would they? If anyone needed an escape, they did. So instead, they sang about the everyday things that mattered to them – and to me – in 1978 – “teenage kicks.” It was unfettered escapism, and it may well have saved many of us from going down a much darker road.
Glam rock, punk rock, reggae, blues, pop, classical – my musical education encompassed all of these and more. There were piano lessons, violin lessons, orchestra, choir, but the music lessons that stayed with me I learned in Ronnie Millar’s Pop-In record shop, in vinyl.
I spent hours in the Pop-In, flipping through LP after LP, and walking up to the counter with three or four, knowing I would have to whittle my selection down to just one. After all, my school dinner money could only buy so much. I loved the ritual behind buying a new record. It began with carefully opening the album to see if the song lyrics were inside, or a booklet of photographs, or liner notes that would fold out into a full-size poster that would end up on my bedroom wall. I handled my records with care – as did Ronnie. And he would always add a clear plastic cover to protect the album art.
We had three TV channels from which to choose in the 1970s, no Internet, and no smart phone, so I spent a lot of time in my room, reading and listening to music. Still, I remember watching the Mork and Mindy show, and noticing that hanging on Mindy’s apartment wall was the cover of Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” album.
Naturally, when I went to college in Belfast, living away from home for the first time, the “Running on Empty” cover hung on my wall too.
There was nothing better than opening an album to find the liner notes and a paper sleeve inside that folded out into a full-size poster, like that of Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” That made it on to my wall as well.
And then there was the ritual of playing the record – and some records, like “Born to Run” or Steely Dan’s “Aja” should only be listened to on vinyl.
It requires some effort to listen to music on vinyl. First, you have to actually get up, look through your stack of LPs to find the one you want, remove it carefully from the paper cover, place it on the turntable, drop the stylus right in the groove, sit down again, listen. Then you have to get up again and turn over the LP to hear Side Two. It’s a major investment of time. There’s waiting involved. Shuffling music on an iTunes playlist requires no real commitment at all.
WIth vinyl, it was important to have the right hi-fi system. The first significant and most important purchase of my life was the system I bought in 1983 (feeling flush with my grant check). I remember enlisting the assistance of an engineering student who lived across the road from me, a few doors down from the Lyric Theater on Ridgeway Street. He didn’t go out much, but he loved music. A purist who would never have watched Top of the Pops but would never have missed the Old Grey Whistle Test, he did his research (imagine, in the days before the Internet!) and found the perfect component system for me – a separate receiver, cassette deck, and a turntable that had a little strobe light, and some fairly impressive speakers.
What he knew then – and I knew it too – is what the 21st century late-adopters of vinyl are discovering – there is no better way to listen to music than on a record. I loved all the pops and crackles, the anticipation before dropping the needle right in the groove, and the audible drawing of breath, the hiss before the first line was sung. Yes. I was experienced.
When I came home to Antrim on the weekends, I’d make a point of visiting Ronnie Millar’s shop. By that time the Pop In had moved from its original location by Pogue’s Entry and into the shopping center. And by that time, Ronnie Millar knew what I liked (which meant he knew what else I would like). One of the things I remember about him is that he paid attention to his customers and quickly figured out the music they liked– even if he passed judgment on their taste,like the day he asked “Why do you want to buy that rubbish?” when Dennis Ceary from the Dublin Road picked up “Never Mind the Bollocks” by the Sex Pistols.
It hadn’t taken him too long to figure out what I liked. I’d spent hours in there during which he would play something he knew I didn’t know (because, let’s face it, he knew the contents of my entire LP collection and probably everyone else’s in Antrim). And he knew I’d buy it – a perfect profit cycle. Every once in a while, I’d stump him by asking if he could get a record he hadn’t heard of – but not very often. Even though I could have probably found it, during the week, in ‘Caroline Records’ or Terri Hooley’s ‘Good Vibrations’ in Belfast, it wasn’t the same as going home to Antrim to ask Ronnie to get it for me. I don’t know when I found out that Ronnie’s brother was the drummer in The Miami Showband, but I have often wondered about the impact of that horrible night on a man who loved and sold music for a living.
All those years when I was collecting vinyl, it didn’t matter when I didn’t have a boyfriend or had nowhere to go on a Friday night. Even when I had convinced myself I would be “left on the shelf” it didn’t seem that bad given the company I was keeping – Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Lou Reed, The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, John Cougar, and The Horslips. The music made everything better, and one of my fondest memories is of sitting in my bedroom on a Friday night with our dog almost hypnotized watching Joan Armatrading’s “Love and Affection” go around and around on the turntable.
By the late 1980s, I began making cassettes – mix tapes – hundreds of them. Making a mix tape was a labor of love – there was none of this easy downloading, dragging and dropping of music into your iTunes library. No. A mixed tape required hours and hours of opening albums, choosing just the right song, making sure the needle was clean, then dropping it in the groove, and making sure to press record and pause at exactly the right time. And then you’d give it to some boy or girl, hoping the tunes said what you could not. (Or maybe that was just me.) And then you’d wait for feedback.Those were the days of delayed gratification, and I miss them.
If you don’t know Native American poet and author, Sherman Alexie, you really should. He knew a thing or two about the mix tape, as he wrote in “Ode to a Mix Tape”
Ode to a Mix Tape
These days, it’s too easy to make mix tapes.
CD burners, iPods, and iTunes
Have taken the place
Of vinyl and cassette. And, soon
Enough, clever introverts will create
Quicker point-and-click ways to declare
One’s love, lust, friendship, and favor.
But I miss the labor
Of making old school mix tapes— the mid air
Acrobatics of recording one song
At a time. It sometimes took days
To play, choose, pause,
Ponder, record, replay, erase,
And replace. But there was no magic wand.
It was blue-collar work. A great mix tape
Was sculpture designed to seduce
And let the hounds loose.
A great mix tape was a three-chord parade
Led by the first song, something bold and brave,
A heat-seeker like Prince with “Cream,”
Or “Let’s Get It on,” by Marvin Gaye.
The next song was always Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,”
or something by Hank. But O, the last track
Was the vessel that contained
The most devotion and pain
And made promises that you couldn’t take back.
~ a labor of love.
My plan last November was to go through all the boxes of vinyl stored in the roof-space of my parent’s house in County Derry. Inspired by the very cool record shop I’d discovered during my week in Dublin, I was going to bring my favorite albums – the soundtrack of my youth in Northern Ireland – back to Phoenix.
Before we were married, when I was living alone in an apartment in Phoenix, my husband bought me another hi-fi. It had the tape deck, CD player, and, the trusty turntable – although by that time, nobody was buying vinyl. Still, I must have believed it would make a comeback, because I held onto the turntable. It’s in a cupboard along with other things of sentimental value. He kept asking me why I just didn’t get rid of it, but he knew I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. And I cannot. He would have loved to see me break out that turntable to play his favorite Lou Reed album. But life barged in, the way it always does, when I was busy making other plans for us, and he never got to see me resurrect the turntable. I would have liked just one more spin.
Maybe, like vinyl, the handwritten letter will make a comeback as well. I am sad that the letter-writing of my youth has fallen out of favor, snuffed out by phonecalls, text messages, Skype, and e-mails that are simply not the same. How I miss opening my mailbox to find the red, white and blue trimmed letter that was its own envelope, light as onion-skin, marked By Air Mail, par avion. And how glad I am to have saved so many to read and reread, these objets d’art, immortal reminders of the people I treasure and who treasure me.
Unlike the evanescence of music afloat in a virtual cloud, vinyl records give us something to hold on to, something solid that represents a certain spot of time in our lives. This isn’t just nostalgia for my youth, it’s more than that. It’s a reminder that good things were and still are worth waiting for. Like peace – in Northern Ireland.
The last time I hoped Arizona Governor Jan Brewer would do the right thing was in the summer of 2010. I was sitting in my Principal’s office, only half-enjoying a visit from a former student – each of us was tense, awaiting announcement regarding SB1070. Surely our state’s Governor would do the humane and right thing? Surely she would refuse to sign an insidious and un-American piece of legislation that would criminalize undocumented immigrants and would require state and city police officers to check the immigration status of a detained, stopped or arrested individual, if they reasonably suspect he or she could be an undocumented immigrant. Surely a Governor of these United States in 21st Century America would veto any legislation that had the potential to institutionalize racial profiling?
She didn’t. Perhaps she still doesn’t get the difference between the right to do a thing and doing the right thing, because in a heart-stopping instant, Governor Brewer showed us that the lessons of history apparently do not apply to her. Swiftly and proudly, she signed an inhumane bill into law, and the world finally paid attention to an Arizona that, measure by measure, would continue to make the American life unlivable for immigrants.
What I found most harrowing then, with my personal baggage as an immigrant from Northern Ireland living in Arizona, was the prospect of immigrants being required to have their immigration papers on their person at all times. Shades of my home country in the 1980s, during The Troubles, when it was not uncommon for me to hand over my driver’s license for inspection by a member of the British Army or an RUC officer at random road closures and checkpoints.
I well recall a snowy afternoon at the top of the Ligoniel Road in Belfast. A student teacher, not yet twenty-one and heading home for Christmas, I was moving out of the Halls of Residence at Stranmillis College. My little silver Datsun weighed down with library books and lecture notes, clothes and toiletries, boxes of vinyl records and cassette tapes, a collection of concert posters wrapped in rubber bands, my prized hi-fi, and a violin, I somehow looked less like a university student and more, perhaps, like an IRA terrorist. Even though I had my license and could answer politely and truthfully, the young soldiers’ questions about where I had been and where I was going, still I had to step aside in the slush and the snow, watching and waiting as they rifled through the contents of my car, looking under the seats and in the trunk, emptying out my make-up bag, disturbing the folders of college papers. All in the name of security I know, but to this day, I question the randomness of it.
I remember raging inside – seething – that I was being subjected to such treatment in my own country. My. Own. Country. I said nothing. Of course, I said nothing, and I was soon sent on my way, but I never forgot it or the way it made me wonder about what it was about me on that particular day, that would cause British soldiers with guns to interrogate me and have me step out of my vehicle and search its contents? Did I fit some profile? Did I look like a terrorist? What was the ‘reasonable suspicion?” Why me?
Fast forward to 2014, and we find ourselves waiting again to see if the Governor of a beleaguered Arizona will do the right thing. SB 1062 has passed both chambers of the Arizona legislature, and only Governor Jan Brewer can stop this discriminatory rule from going into effect.
By a 33-27 vote, the Arizona legislature passed this bill that would grant businesses the right to refuse service to anyone, as long as servicing those individuals would be a substantial burden to their religious freedom. You’ll pardon me, I’m sure, for wondering about the homophobes who might be able to make a religious claim that refusing service is, you know, consistent with their religious beliefs.
Under the bill introduced by Republican State Senator Steve Yarborough, individuals and businesses would be granted the legal right to refuse services to individuals or groups if they claimed that doing so would “substantially burden” their freedom of religion. In other words, business owners acting on sincerely held religious beliefs, can refuse services – discriminate against – groups that they perceive act in ways contrary to their religious beliefs. If signed into law, the bill would essentially legitimize discrimination against the LGBT community. Come to think of it, there is the potential for discrimination against other protected groups including non-married women, minorities, gays, people of other religions, or anyone they refuse to serve. You get the picture, and it is a distressing picture, given that we are, after all, in America in the 21st century. Well, we’re in Arizona, which often seems very far from the noble, inclusive idea of America itself.
I’m a straight woman, a newly single parent, an immigrant, a widow, a cancer patient. Often, I am the one in the room that represents everybody’s worse nightmare – my dead husband and my breast cancer reminding folks of what they fear the most –disease, loneliness, their own mortality. So why do I care so much about SB 1062? Because it is yet another bill with immeasurable potential to hurt good people, to deeply wound families who want nothing more than to get up every day knowing they are valued in their homes and schools, by their churches, and by their elected officials; knowing they are not “less than.” A bill like SB1062 terrifies me because it signifies a hardening of the heart in Arizona, an indelible mark we find in deeply wounded faraway places. Places like my Belfast. Like Sarajevo. Like Johannesburg. Like Gaza.
This evening, I wonder what I can say to my hairdresser? Topher is a gay man, not yet thirty years old, a restless soul who came to Arizona – like me – in pursuit of sunny days. By all accounts, he is doing well. He has been promoted four times in one year, he has a full clientele, and he has even begun contemplating owing his own salon. In Arizona. My daughter adores him. In the weeks following her dad’s death, Topher brought a smile to her face by cutting her bangs and straightening her hair, knowing how important such things can be when you’re sixteen and insecure about your looks.
As more states legalized gay marriage, he and his partner, Ian, changed wedding plans and finally settled on Hawaii, for an intimate ceremony in front of close family. One day, he hopes to raise children with the man he loves, and until today, he envisioned doing so in Arizona. But at what cost?
As he styled my daughter’s hair this evening, I asked him about SB 1062. He told me of his shock, that at the beginning of the year, he had begun to believe that the times really were a-changin’, that we were genuinely celebrating each other’s differences, and slow as it was, change was being embraced.
As a young boy in Indiana, he had been bullied, beat up, and ridiculed in small schools in small towns. At about 10 years old, he knew he was different, he wasn’t sure how. By 13, he knew he was gay and soon the snide comments and the name-calling taught him that who he was, was somehow not okay in our world. In school, the place where he should have been safest, he was scared all the time. His teachers never intervened to halt the bullying. Not once. He was kicked out of his church youth group. Soon, he was in a position of vulnerability, an easy target for an older man who would abuse him.
One night, when he was about 15 years old, two big men came to the basement where he slept and took him away to a behavior modification program. For twenty-two months, he was assigned to a “family” of 25 boys. Constantly under surveillance, his stay there began with nothing. Even his shoelaces were taken away. He had to earn salt and pepper and the right to make a phone call, and occasionally a candy bar; he had to request permission to speak, to go to the bathroom. As a gay boy, he was designated to “the black cloud,” a kind of solitary confinement where essentially, he didn’t exist. He wasn’t taught how to operate in the real world and so even after being released to his family home, he would still call out “Crossing” when he crossed the line from hallway to bathroom.
Four times, Topher attempted suicide. Four times. He failed. Why? He tells me that, of course, he didn’t know what he was doing, but more importantly, while he doesn’t subscribe to institutionalized religion, he believes there’s something to be said about the undaunted human spirit, and that his spirit just wasn’t ready to leave. He forgives the Mormons who coaxed him to “pray the gay away.” He forgives the teachers who turned a blind eye to his tormentors. He says all of it has made him a stronger, better man, one who can champion for other children today, children who deserve a place at the table. Barely a month after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, it pains me to know we are having these discussions in Arizona. It’s wrong. On so many levels.
When I look at this young man, his easy smile tempered by new doubt, I could almost weep for those who don’t know him, who will designate him as less than acceptable, who would put him in a box where he is neither seen nor heard. Discriminated against. Discarded.
Really. I traded Northern Ireland for a place where a young and joyful man – interested only in what we all want for those we love and who love us – might be turned away?
Dear Governor Brewer, you have five days. Do the right thing. Veto SB1062.
Please share this message if you stand opposed to the dangerous “license to discriminate” SB1062, which would allow businesses to deny services to LGBT Arizonans
We cannot be silent or passively enable the passage of the Arizona Legislature’s so-called “Free Exercise of Religion” (House Bill 2154 & Senate Bill 1062) bill which was passed this past week. The legislation apparently is ready for Governor Janet Brewer’s signature as soon as this coming Monday.
From the Arizona Republic, “We need to veto the dangerous anti-LGBT “license to discriminate” legislation, saying SB1062 is a “do-it-yourself black eye” that would severely harm economic growth and make it harder for businesses to recruit and retain top talent to our state. SB1062 is bad for business and bad for Arizonans.
Many groups and organizations such as the Greater Phoenix Black Chamber of Commerce also is urging Gov. Brewer to veto anti-gay legislation.
Join the Anti-Defamation League, the Human Rights Campaign and the Greater Phoenix Economic Council to immediately contact Governor Brewer’s office asking her to veto HB 2154 and SB 1062. E-mail the Governor’s top staff: Scott Smith at ssmith@az.gov and Lorna Romero at lromero@az.gov to veto HB 2154 and SB 1062.
SB 1062 is bad for business and bad for Arizona. Please take action