The inequalities built into the United States have mystified me for a long time. I was born and raised in Maine, a poor state and, incidentally, the whitest state in the Union by a wide margin (well, maybe Vermont can compete). We were taught that black people had been – and continued to be – discriminated against by society from an early age; I can remember Mr. Casey in seventh grade – he had an amazing moustache, and the girls all had a crush on him – writing outlines on a transparency projector about Martin Luther King, and about equal opportunity, and about bias and Native American oppression and slavery and the Klan. I had good teachers: they told me that the story of America wasn’t a great one, even if it had some good moments, and that we all had a responsibility to make up for the evils of our past.
Imagined colloquies
As I was reading, my gaze wandered from the page of text and out through the upstairs window, where on a clear day I can watch the Atlantic sweeping in towards the beaches of County Donegal. That day, grey mist and drizzle blurred the horizon line, the sky and the sea lost in vaporous obscurity: not unusual for Ireland in July. My attention briefly returns to my book until my phone alerts me that a text has arrived. It is from my friend who, like me likes to read. We often talk books together.
The moment you knew
The moment I knew – well, the first one – was at a good old fashioned proper funk-ska album release party in Ballard. She had been talking for awhile about wanting to go out dancing – not big band swing dancing, but proper dancing, she wanted to smoke up ahead of time and then just let go – and while I didn’t need to smoke up to dance, I went along with it. It was a great band, locals, Blacks and Whites together, the Whites mostly on horns but not exclusively, the Blacks on vocals but not exclusively, and two drummers that were clearly on something. Three hours of funk with a ten minute intermission where we went outside and had a cigarette, and in between, just dancing – release, full on, full out, jump up and up and get down, and take it down Timmy, and originals and James Brown and you couldn’t have stopped me with a blackjack and a shiv.
Social myths
My son’s school back in Seattle is a pretty amazing elementary school. It’s public – for those of you in England, it’s a state school – and my ex-wife and I really just stumbled into it. When we bought the house that she now lives in, we were really just looking for a nice house; we had no kids and no near-term expectation of any, as she was in grad school and I was a “high powered executive.” But it turned out to be a great match for our son, eleven years after we moved into the house, a couple years after we split up. North Seattle isn’t exactly a patchwork quilt of diversity, but the school has a decent enough mix of kids from different ethnic and social and economic backgrounds, and the teachers are engaged, and the administration is pretty good too. It also has one of the most devoted parent organisations I’ve ever seen; each year they raise the equivalent of 15% of the school’s operating budget via private fundraisers (their two big ones are a silent auction, normally the preserve of private schools, and they also run the biggest Christmas tree lot in the area), and they use the budget to supplement teachers’ room costs, run an amazing set of subsidised after-school enrichment programs, and help top up various budgets around the school.
Notwithstanding
It’s been an entertaining week here in the US, which seems like a callous thing to say and, frankly, I’ll cop to the charge. I have been entertained – not by the ongoing misery of Covid-19 and its steady rampage across the country I was born in, and certainly not by the everyday and cast-iron racism in most Western countries that’s only been emphasised and highlighted by recent events. No, I’ve been entertained by the other side of the news, namely the functioning of government. If you can’t be entertained by government, you simply aren’t paying attention, or else you’re some kind of anti-tax nut job who can’t acknowledge that your ability to be an anti-tax nut job is due to the existence of an effectively functioning civil government in the first place.