Susan Sheu » Politics

Finding Grateful

Susan — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 23:16:39 +0000

I feel a very unusual sensation — if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.

-Benjamin Disraeli

When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.

-Willie Nelson

According to some of my Facebook friends, November is an unofficial month of gratitude, where each day a participating person is supposed to name the blessings in his or her life. I’ve been hunting around on the Internet for the origin of this and can’t find it, so if anyone can point me to the source or a link that explains it, please do!

On a related note, last night at the monthly parenting group I attend by Betsy Brown Braun, we talked about the upcoming holiday season and how to find less materialistic ways to give to our families and make the season more meaningful. Betsy had a number of suggestions, including making one of the kids’ presents a gift certificate to give to a charity of their choice or to Heifer International or World Visions. Other charities like Mazon or Feeding America or organizations like the local Meals on Wheels are good choices, but those that allow kids to help other kids can foster empathy and make the giving feel more personal. The point of it all, when it came to our kids and the holidays, was to take the excessive focus off the material goods and sensory comforts that give us pleasure for fleeting moments as we consume them. Because, Betsy told us, gratitude is enhanced by verbal expressions of thanks, as when she encouraged us to have our kids lead up to Thanksgiving by naming what they appreciate in their own lives. And gratitude is enhanced by doing things for other people in need.

With that in mind, I’m trying to find my gratitude this year. Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong in my life that a few more hours of sleep each night and getting my 250-page manuscript out of my office won’t solve. I’ve had an eventful, productive year. None of my loved ones is deathly ill. We know where our next meal is coming from, and we can make our mortgage payments. I’m just tired, overworked, and sick of first- and second-draft writerly limbo. I’m wrung out from caring too much about the recent presidential election and wish I had more help with my non-writerly responsibilities. But I can’t help feeling like I’m missing the forest for the trees (I wish there was a non-cliched way to say that). There have been times in my life, even in the recent years I was in mourning for my father, when I have felt buoyed by hope and gratitude at the holidays — if only the black comedic gratitude of knowing that my far-from-fun natal family has provided me with years of writing material. So far, this is not one of those kinds of holiday seasons.

Having finished the first draft of my book, “The Rag and Bone Man,” this summer at VCCA was an incredible achievement. Most of my frustration lies in now not having the unfettered time to finesse it well enough to send out to anyone else to read. I won’t sport with your intelligence to enumerate the reasons I don’t have time to write. But two of them are running and screaming with laughter through the house right now, since their school in on a series of “minimum days” for what seems like eternity during November.

So, with one week to go until Thanksgiving (and then the onslaught of Hanukah, Christmas, and New Years, with family visits and school vacations and the never-ending parade of office and school and family celebrations), I am trying to brace myself with a strong dose of authentic gratitude. It’s always bittersweet because this is also the season, 12 years ago, when my father died. His death, after decades of living in poverty with schizophrenia, was also what propelled me to write “The Rag and Bone Man.” This morning before school the kids and I filled out a gift form for Meals on Wheels, and I plan to take Betsy up on some of her suggestions for family charity. (I’d like to make it more of a family habit throughout the year, not just at the holidays.)

And as for the teeth-gnashing over the second draft of the manuscript? Having just now written about the frustration, I already feel a little less ungrateful.

A brief history of racism

Susan — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 00:02:58 +0000

Last week, the Associated Press and other news outlets reported that racial attitudes have gotten worse, not better, since the United States elected its first African American president four years ago in 2008. Those who admitted to having anti-African American feelings rose from 48% in 2008 to 51% in 2012. If the researchers included implicit racist beliefs, the proportion rose from 49% in 2008 to 56% in 2012. Anti-Hispanic attitudes surveyed in 2011 were reported at 52% (57% by the implicit racism criteria). This is disheartening. My social science-trained spouse believes that this is a suspect conclusion; he suggested that more people surveyed were willing to admit to racist attitudes than the people surveyed during the last presidential election. I hope he is right.

The survey brought to mind not the small minority of white supremacists in America, or members of what the Southern Poverty Law Center refer to as the Patriot Movement, but what I imagine is the wide middle swath of people who wouldn’t dream of burning a cross on anyone’s front yard, or putting a group of people in a concentration camp, but nonetheless harbor ideas that diverge significantly from the idea of Ebony and Ivory living together in perfect harmony. Families like the one I grew up in.

My grandfather, a man whose memory I still revere for the selfless love he showed me as he helped raise me, was born in 1907 and brought up in a Swedish American home in Nebraska. He moved to Wisconsin in the 1930s. Most of my memories of him are happy ones — planting trees together on his farm, milling around his modest home while he made dinner at 5 pm on the dot for our family, listening as he hummed along to country songs by singers like Anne Murray. But along with those are memories of him talking at the television as the NBC news broadcast images of Billy Carter and men with covered heads and dark glasses.

“Damned A-rabs!” he’d shout over the traditional, delicious meat-and-potatoes meal he’d just cooked, saying that whatever Billy Carter was doing, it was un-American — as un-American as whatever the hell “Hanoi” Jane Fonda had been doing in Vietnam a couple of decades earlier. Just behind my grandpa, on the shelf that held little colored vases my grandma collected, was a certificate from the John Birch Society thanking him for his membership. (Over the years as I have revisited my childhood dining room in my imagination, I have wanted to excise this – telling myself that I was mixing up “Birch” with the American Tree Farm certificate that stood nearby. But alas, no; both pieces of paper were there, congratulating my grandpa for his patronage.)

My grandmother was born in 1908 in to a mixed European, mostly German-American Nebraska family. I remember her as an outspoken, often overbearing woman with an impeccable coif, an ever-present cigarette — a tough-talking yet loving grandma. When she watched the news over dinner with us, if there was a news story about dysentery in a foreign country, or teenage girls getting married, or one tribal group wiping out another, she would declare over the background sounds of Tom Brokaw and David Brinkley that she “thanked God in heaven that I was born White and American!” Other times, when describing trips she had taken to big cities or people she had met in her life, she told us that “Black people have a different smell.”

You would think that having biracial grandchildren sitting there listening to this would have made my grandparents self-conscious. You’d be wrong. To them, they were simply stating the truth; and Black people were 100% different from Chinese people, who were only somewhat different from White people. Their love for us, the products of my Caucasian mother’s brief marriage to my Chinese father, was separate from their ideas that their culture was the best. (Of course, this also has to do with the benevolent racist assumptions of being Asian — my grandparents and many others believed that my brother and I were hard-wired for industriousness, love of the traditional family unit, and math.)

My mother didn’t say anything as outrageous as this when she was raising my brother and me. But we grew up in an overwhelmingly Caucasian place, and it was hard to avoid the default settings of the implicit racism the overwhelming sea of Whiteness bred in us — where having “a Black friend” was supposed to be shorthand for “there’s no way I could be a racist!” Etc. I could tell stories about how she claims that if the perfect man happened into her life and was Black, she claims she would date/marry him, or about how she speaks warmly to the naturalized American citizen from Latin America who babysits my children and yet is adamant that illegal immigration from south of the border is a scourge and a danger to “our way of life.”

But I can’t quite bring myself to go there. In an election year filled with racial and cultural innuendo (who is “one of us,” who is not), this all cuts too close to the bone for me.

I don’t claim to be fully evolved when it comes to racism. I think of it as a journey rather than a destination.

Jenny Sanford – have you considered a political run?

Susan — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 07:09:10 +0000

CNN reported that Jenny Sanford was quoted as saying that her husband’s political career was not a concern of hers, and that whether or not he was in her future, she would not only survive but thrive. Where was this woman when McCain was looking for a female GOP running mate to take Hillary swing voters? I’m only sort of kidding… Seriously, kudos for not pulling a Mrs. Spitzer.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090627/ap_on_re_us/us_sc_governor_wife

RIP Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett

Susan — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:19:18 +0000

Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett both died within 5 miles of each other yesterday – Thursday, June 25, 2009 – in West Los Angeles. The only other time that I can remember two such celebrities dying within such a short period of time was in late August, 1997, when both Mother Teresa (in India) and Princess Diana (in Paris) died. Farah died in Santa Monica at St. John’s Hospital after suffering from colorectal cancer, and MJ had cardiac arrest in Westwood and was pronounced dead at UCLA Medical Center in Westwood. Had UCLA Medical Center been more stringent in their medical records security, Farah might have been at the same hospital. But after a UCLA employee disclosed details of Farah’s medical records to tabloids during her illness, she understandably changed physicians and medical facilities.

Los Angeles traffic, always horrible on Thursday afternoons, was worse than usual. Local fans and tourists who were visiting Los Angeles flocked to the house that Michael rented near UCLA and swarmed in the area around the university hospital. Freeways nearby were jammed. Although recent Michael Jackson news has almost always been sad or cringe-worthy, news of his death dominated the day on radio, television, and the Internet. He was already being mourned as an innovator and a legend in pop music and culture. Farah’s fame was more modest in comparison. Her run on “Charlie’s Angels” and fame in the 1970s made her iconic, and her dramatic roles since then had been meatier but more low-key.

Many of my Generation X contemporaries were remembering and mourning on Facebook and in real gathering places. CNN’s Anderson Cooper related a story of being 10 years old and in Studio 54, and seeing Michael Jackson dance.

My emotions ran high during that last week of August 1997, not because I had formed such an attachment to the idea of either Princess Di or Mother Teresa. It was because I was getting married that week. The night of my bachelorette party was the night Princess Di died, and my friends and I were at a nightclub in West Hollywood. A gay male exotic dancer had just finished dancing for me with his crotch at my eye level when the news broke that Diana had died. Being in a trendy gay bar at the moment of Princess Di’s death was somehow so fitting. She was a glamorous and fashionable woman who loved pop music and would have fit in well with the crowd. Because I was getting married, I must have been searching for the events that would provide the backdrop for my milestone.

But somehow the news this week hasn’t hit me yet. I was not a follower of either Farah or Michael, and I am in a less zeitgeist-y and more mundane place in life than I was in 1997. But it also occurs to me that the media following the story 24-7 with every angle and every reaction makes the news have less of an impact.

AIG

Susan — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 08:28:16 +0000

Why have the public waited until the AIG bonuses scandal to become outraged? This behavior on the part of failing companies is par for the course in the world of people who disapprove of handouts, except when it comes to themselves. The banks and investment houses that received government bailouts also gave their executives large bonuses, based on nothing other than tradition it seems. ”Retaining talent” is a joke. There are plenty of ambitious generation Y and recent graduates who would learn well enough on the job and could well change corporate culture for the better. They could hardly be less responsible or ethical than the ossified schmucks they would replace. Dump the losers and let them use creative accounting to figure out ways to get out of paying their own gigantic mortgages. In any event, get mad as hell and refuse to take it anymore. Please.

This is a start:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090322/ap_on_re_us/aig_bonuses

Franken the Vote

Susan — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 09:23:03 +0000

Who knew after the decisive Presidential election that we’d have all of this drama about the US Senate in January? As of now, Caroline Kennedy is making a strong, PR-powered push to replace Hillary Clinton as a senator from New York. Kennedy first entered the collective consciousness of this election cycle when she joined her uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy, in endorsing Barack Obama for President. Roland Burris is referring to himself as “the junior senator from Illinois” even though it looks unlikely that the Senate will seat him let alone allow him in at the start of business on Tuesday morning. And the epic recount has been taking place in relative quiet (though not for Minnesotans) to decide whether Norm Coleman would return as Minnesota’s senator or be unseated by politically-minded comedian Al Franken. It’s almost like the awful denouement to the 2000 presidential election, except that Minnesota is generally more civilized than Florida and has no one resembling Katherine Harris trying to ensure the results are in her candidate’s favor.

Only one of these three Senate “races”, so to speak, will change their parties’ headcounts in the Senate itself. With the exception of the Franken-Coleman showdown, they are about the Senate appointees as individuals. Sadly for Roland Burris, he actually seems abundantly qualified to be a US Senator. But the taint of being a Blagojevich appointee would be hard to overcome. Although his claim appears legal, accepting a Democratic senator who was appointed by someone who will likely be impeached and possibly indicted, would not be a great start to a Democratic majority in Congress.

I’m reluctant to criticize Caroline Kennedy’s gambit to become a senator. There’s something to the power of myth in politics, and she could very well prove a committed and effective senator – eventually. Before her highly publicized endorsement, universally treated as more of a celebrity endorsement than a political one, she was best known for being a torchbearer for her famous family name and the last remaining guardian of both Jacqueline and John F. Kennedy’s legacy. She published a few editions of her mother’s and her own favorite poems for children. Like many in her family she is an attorney and has a Harvard degree, and she also is a graduate of Columbia. This makes her literary and intellectual, to be sure.

But her lack of political experience is disturbing. Like Republican Senator Bill Frist (who tells anyone who will listen that he is a physician) and others who have entered national politics after other careers, Caroline Kennedy seems to have missed out on numerous opportunities to vote. Her famous discretion and desire for privacy, which has always been held up as ladylike in the mold of her mother, is perhaps what has prevented her from speaking out on any political discussion at a national level until her endorsement. However, there have been many instances when her fame and her highly regarded last name might have been lent to articulate a position on a good cause. Other members of her extended family have contributed to public discourse on vaccines, become members of the national media (and gone on to be the first lady of California), and even contributed civically as a member of the local city council.

While having a woman replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate would be a nice gesture, and Caroline Kennedy is surely not the least qualified person to be a contender for a Senate seat, we need more than empty signs and signifiers of gender equality and family legacy to prove that the recent Democratic victory can rise above the tenor of politics lately. Democrats need to prove that they would not appoint someone with less public experience than Sarah Palin to the Senate.

At least Al Franken has written several books on politics and the culture wars prior to seeking office – even if “big fat idiot” is in one of the titles and “lying liars” is in another. Tongue-in-cheek books on politics at least count as an interest in government.

Just as I couldn’t bring myself to join email petitions and Facebook groups that called on women to oppose Sarah Palin, I can’t altogether oppose Caroline Kennedy. I just wish she’d apply some of her supposed gifts – charm, discretion, and brains – to prove that she would learn quickly on the job. (To be clear – I totally opposed Sarah Palin and consider her unqualified to be not only the Vice President, but also the office she currently holds, the Governor of Alaska.)

Al Franken will be a great senator, provided the results hold up against the lawsuit Norm Coleman is about to file. (In the words of Keith Olbermann, “he’s suing on the grounds that he lost.” That joke was almost Minnesotan in its dry eloquence.) He’ll no doubt make mistakes and have plenty to learn, but anyone who moves back to Minnesota to pursue office in his home state, writes and speaks so passionately to a wide audience about politics and public interest, is bound to serve the public with similar passion. His performance as Senator will certainly outshine Minnesota’s last semi-celebrity politician, former Governor Jesse “The Body” Ventura.

2009

Susan — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 09:52:42 +0000

I think it would be impossible to say that I think 2009 is going to be a great year. The economy in the United States and abroad is tanking. Banks and investment houses have failed. The real estate market is sinking, and no one I know is buying. Acquaintances who I’d never think would economize are worried about money and cutting back on anything discretionary. I know one couple where both lost their jobs in 2008 and others where one spouse is working a second job in order to make up for the other’s nonexistent wages.

Just when we couldn’t take much more from the incompetent corporations – bankers, investors, insurers, and the entire American automotive industry – powerful individuals abused our trust and took us for a ride, or tried to. The Madoff hedge fund Ponzi scheme on Wall Street has devastated personal fortunes and wiped out foundations, and so far it has caused one highly publicized suicide. Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, a politician who was elected on a platform of ending the culture of graft and corruption in his state’s politics, was found to be peddling Barack Obama’s Senate seat to the highest Democratic bidder.

Don’t even get me started about the state of the environment. Or wars in the Middle East, where the innocent continue to be killed or radicalized into becoming sympathetic to forces of chaos and terrorism. Or whatever the hell is going on with Israel and the Palestinians.

Could it get any worse? Probably. I’m not going to wax karmic about how we collectively have to pay for eight years of GW Bush, and we have already started. I hope that’s not true. I’ve already bummed myself out too much just writing all of this.

Barack Obama and his team are going to face the toughest challenges that I can imagine on multiple fronts as soon as he is sworn into office in a few weeks. The unprecedented grassroots call to action, the hope and excitement that buoyed him to victory earned us back some goodwill from the rest of the world that we’d lost since it first peaked just after 9/11. But these empowering and optimistic feelings are not enough to keep Americans’ fears at bay for even the first year of the Obama presidency. I hope that Obama and his team are prepared to face the worst and show a new kind of American ingenuity to get us out of this mess.

As I wrote holiday cards this month, I tried to get myself to write sentiments on the order of wishing my friends a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year. I couldn’t get past the health. Writing anything about prosperity seemed like the lies you tell a hospice patient. What I really wanted to say was that I hope you and the people you care about persevere, and that I still try to believe that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.

Happy New Year. May 2009 bring you strength and patience you didn’t know you had in you.

The wifing up of Michelle Obama

Susan — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 08:48:44 +0000

Michelle Obama shows a lot of promise as our next First Lady. I’ll admit that I was turned off by her at first. She slammed Hillary Clinton in an early magazine interview, saying that if a woman couldn’t control what went on in her own house (meaning letting Bill off-leash), she doubted that she could be in control in the White House. Or something to that effect. It was catty in the old fashioned unfeminist way that women are still catty to one another, and the comment was unbefitting an admirable woman like Michelle Obama. But she has since proven herself to be more of a true partner in a modern political marriage than anyone since, well, Hillary Clinton. When Barack Obama was in Hawaii with his ailing grandmother, it was his wife who filled his shoes on the campaign trail. All throughout the campaign, Michelle was strategically deployed to speak with voters who would connect with her plainspoken manner and Midwestern working class roots. One senses that she is as much a staffer as an architect of Team Obama.

In Michelle and Barack Obama’s recent interview with Barbara Walters, I got a little alarmed at both the questions being asked and the line that Michelle towed in her answers. Walters peppered her with lots of inane questions about the “burden” of being the First Family, the hardships of the White House, and other women’s magazine of yesteryear drivel. Walters took on her trademark concerned look with questions about how Michelle would handle giving up her Chicago-based job as a healthcare executive, and the “burden” of taking a back seat to her husband as he assumed the duties of the presidency. Michelle replied that she’s never defined herself by a specific job, so giving up her career would not bother her. Focusing on her role as a mother, she told Walters that she was concerned with the normal mother stuff – finding a pediatrician, school for her children.

I don’t doubt that she is concerned foremost with settling her family into Washington and the White House. And perhaps putting her career on the back burner for the last two years has made her truly adopt the easy-come, easy-go attitude towards her career as an attorney and an executive that she claimed to Walters. But it’s hard to believe that a middle-class woman of color, educated in the finest American universities, could so easily shrug off what I’m guessing were some hard-won achievements. I would have been more interested in hearing about a plan to reinvent the job of First Lady to better reflect contemporary reality. But I surmise that Team Obama is still on message in terms of presenting themselves as a safe choice for leading America, and therefore Michelle was in no position to put forth any radical-sounding ideas about being her husband’s right-hand person. That would harken back too strongly to the early Bill Clinton debacle of a Hillary Clinton-led attempt to reform health care.

As admirable as literacy programs and other such ladylike projects are, I would hope to have a First Lady who takes on the plight of women and children in a more meaningful and not necessarily congenial capacity. What if we had a First Lady who was a passionate advocate of Planned Parenthood? Or the plight of Afghan women and the resurgence of the Taliban? Or a vocal advocate for equalizing men’s and women’s wages in the U.S.?

It would have been refreshing in the Barbara Walters interview to at least ‘fess up to what I imagine she must feel — ambivalent feelings about not working in the job that she was trained to do, but an understanding that she may yet have her chance to use her training and experience as the First Lady or post-White House. I guess that Michelle and Barack Obama and their advisors must have decided that such bracing candor could turn off the cadre of women (and men) who viewed Sarah Palin as an ideal candidate and woman but Hillary Clinton as a castrating careerist.

If Michelle Obama is the person she seems to be, I’m looking for a First Lady who will not go gently into that purgatory of interior decorating and speaking at ladies’ luncheons. She will shore up personal support as part of a broader Obama goal to unite the country, and then she will roll out her radical agenda of being a woman with moxy and a brain in the White House. The strength and respect the Obamas showed each other in the Walters interview was genuine, and I would be surprised if Barack Obama didn’t rely on his wife’s expertise and intelligence on a regular basis.

We will know that all is lost if Michelle Obama puts out a chocolate chip cookie recipe anytime soon.

Proposition to end the madness in California

Susan — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:28:34 +0000

I didn’t get fired up about voting no on proposition 8 in California, and I regret it. I took for granted how well organized the religious right is and how well smear tactics have worked, and I assumed that Prop 8 would not pass. It did pass, and now our court systems will be bogged down in the aftermath of lawsuits and paperwork that will rival the Bush-Gore debacle of 2000 in Florida.

One of the things that I like least about living in California is the proposition system. Every election year, well before I am thinking about the nuts and bolts issues that people who push propositions obsess over, petitioners outside of grocery stores begin asking for signatures and donations for their causes. What would really be nice is a proposition to end all subsequent propositions. The propositions waste tremendous amounts of resources – paper to print all of the confusing and often deliberately misleading pieces of propaganda; mail carriers’ time to sort through all of the junk mail created by the proposition system; the ordinary citizens’ time outside of grocery stores and malls, evading or getting caught up in paid proselytizers’ pitches; and the time we spend screening and getting aggravated about non-stop robocalls that begin months before the election.

Stop the insanity. Most people I know, even the most educated or civic-minded, lack the time or the interest to formulate opinions on complex public policy issues for fellow Californians. And almost every one of us lacks the expertise or the permission to sit in judgement of another person’s legal right to spend the rest of their life with someone they love.

Veterans Days 2008 and beyond

Susan — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 05:24:36 +0000

This week our family is observing Veterans day twice – both Monday and Tuesday. We do have a veteran of World War II in our family, but that wasn’t our reason for taking off forty percent of our work week for the holiday. My son’s preschool is off on Tuesday, and my daughter’s elementary school was closed on Monday. I’d forgotten about the oddity of our family calendar in all of the post-election celebration and relief. But perhaps celebrating Veterans Day twice is what we should all do for the next few years in payment for requiring long tours of duty and the decreasing health and mental health benefits we’ve given the troops and their families since the wars in the Middle East began.

The rows of flags at the Veterans Memorial cemetery on Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles are flying. There are a few of them panhandling with shopping carts under the 405 freeway and near the Veterans Administration complex in West LA. But other than that, the veterans are as invisible as they always are, banished from the newspapers and their caskets off-limits to the press. Thankfully the election is over, so politicians are no longer talking about American troops as if they were symbols rather than human beings. In the afterglow of Barack Obama’s victory, American troops are still entrenched in two foreign wars and returning home with many fewer veterans benefits than ever before. Here’s to hoping that the new administration makes it a priority to right the many wrongs of the Bush preemptive war doctrine. For the soldiers and veterans who’ve served in good faith in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have honored them by electing a Commander in Chief who has pledged to treat their lives, sacrifices, and their families with more respect than the departing president. One could hardly do worse than Bush and Cheney have.