After visits with my relative and meetings with the facility staff, we sat in the hotel room to debrief, trying to ignore the muted television in the corner — the nodding heads, furrowed brows, and moving mouths of CNN political pundits. We made tentative plans to meet again in the near future, said our goodbyes, and then I drove home through 5 hours of pouring rain. By the time I reached my home in Vermont, my shoulders had migrated up to my ears and my neck was so tense that I could barely turn my head from side to side.

I could chalk it up to the drive, I suppose, or the emotional challenge of why we were there in the first place — the contemplation of mortality and the indignities that often proceed it: adult diapers, depression, round-the-clock medical care. But if I’m honest with myself, I will admit that it was our silence, and my guilt about our historic silence around these matters and more that made me tighten into stone. There are so many difficult things to talk about in my family, so by default we usually don’t. Except when we are forced to; then we do it out of love.

After the last presidential debate, I posted a comment on Facebook about Donald Trump’s terrible debate performance, specifically his refusal to state that he would accept the results of the election if he didn’t win. After all the people that Trump has thrown under the bus during the course of his campaign, it enraged me to hear him incite some kind of conspiracy theory to cast doubt on his own independent failure to earn the trust of American voters. So I said something.

My comment got pushback from a friend (a conservative, but not a Trump supporter), who suggested that my crowing seemed a bit narrow-minded, unsportsmanlike, perhaps — that it’s easy to say these things when your candidate is winning, but that it’s harder to get into the minds of some of the really good people who happen to be Trump supporters. In other words, consider all of those nice folks with Trump signs in their yards. Most of them are legitimately disenfranchised with their government. Trump may not be ‘good people,’ but they are, and right now Trump is all they’ve got. In other words, be quiet.

We are both products of Ohio, this friend and I. Like him, I have conservative friends and family who lean right in their political views, and probably more than I care to know who have even donated to, or wear merchandise from the Trump/Pence “Make America Great Again” campaign. I have a history with these people. I care about these people; I even love most of them. Why do I keep insisting on stirring the pot? Don’t I care about how they feel?

I can tell you that I have spent most of my adult life with a buttoned lip and a careful eye on ‘caring about how they feel’ — and the only thing I can be sure that my silence successfully accomplished was the sustenance of an unhealthy environment, and a cultivation of a toxicity that served neither myself nor the people with whom I lived. It’s not that I don’t empathize with the struggles of Trump supporters; it’s that I take issue with the racist, misogynist, and xenophobic scapegoating that has been taking place inside that camp, and the general sociopathic traits of the person whom they have identified as their desired leader. To be blunt, I resent the expectation of my silence about all of the above, just because the people with Trump signs in their yards might be good people, friends or former neighbors, or even members of my own family. I have stumbled along this earth long enough to have at least figured out that love should not require silence, and that silence is not the same as love.

Much has been written this year about the “call-out culture” in our society — the act of publicly identifying individuals who have made offensive comments or taken actions of a discriminatory nature — and the pitfalls around the practice of progressive shaming. And while I agree that the reflexive pouncing that often occurs on social media can be counter-productive, I can’t help but be amused by the irony of people whose sensitivities are suddenly aroused once they have been scolded for their insensitivities.

But at least a dialogue is happening, right? Which is to say that although it may be messy, this is all an imperative conversation. We need to sit with our discomfort and acknowledge the pervasive rape culture that hovers over our girls. We need to talk about why using the term “Bad Hombres” during a presidential debate is right-to-the-bone offensive. We need to dissect the incongruities between “All Lives Matter” and “Black Lives Matter.” We need to face the tension between our country’s freedom of religion and our population’s fear of certain ones. Because the civil discourse in our country has been ailing for a while now, and it’s time we start thinking about its long-term care. We may not agree on how to avoid the demoralized, shit-filled bedpan state we’re currently headed toward, but we have got to figure this out. Our dignity as human beings is at stake. We’ve got to do this out of love.

Photo Credit: Huffington Post

The post Love Does Not Equal Silence appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.

I write a lot about toxicity. Normally I would find something to say about some recent environmental mishap, some injustice that has occurred in some community that shoulders a disproportionate amount of risk from the environmental hazards in our world. Contaminated water from a chemical spill, an abandoned factory. Or the tactics that are being employed to force construction of natural gas pipeline across tribal lands in North Dakota.

But sometimes, like today, I can’t ignore the fact that ‘environment’ is more than just a physical place, and that toxicity can encompass so much more than just a chemical characteristic.

In truth, I can think of nothing more acutely toxic than this last week of the election season — the degree of indecency Donald Trump and his supporters have imposed upon the American people, the virulence of his campaign to our democratic ideals. His racist rhetoric, his vulgar language, his bragging about sexual assault. But even more than that, it’s his unapologetic response to the criticism of his actions and words: Just telling it like it is, he says. And in defense of his lewd video: It’s just locker room talk.

I was in the seventh grade the first time I heard someone make a comment about my body. My oldest daughter is in the seventh grade now, and even though we’ve talked about it, I keep watching her to see if the same thing has happened to her. I’ll know it when I see it: the slouch, the rounded shoulders to try and diminish a budding chest.

In high school, I heard the sexual comments spoken about me, felt the leers as I walked by — just like so many other young women in my school. You quickly learn your currency from the feedback that you get. They get metabolized, these threads, become intricately woven into one’s self-worth.

During my junior year, some man found my phone number and called me in the evenings, posing as a researcher from Ohio State. He was studying the sexual behaviors of adolescents, he said, would I mind answering a few questions for his research survey?

I wasn’t the only one he called.

In college I worked for a man who actually told me, “If I had a body like yours, I’d walk around naked all day.” This from the man who signed my timesheet at the end of the week.

But I said nothing, did nothing to assert my humanity. God forbid someone think of me as sensitive, as emotional, as female — that would only prove that I was weak.

It’s just locker room talk, he says. Totally normal.

Except that it isn’t. Because common and normal are two completely different things.

My husband says he has this exact conversation with his patients all the time. How’s my cholesterol, Doc? It’s average — isn’t that considered normal?

And he will explain that although their cholesterol may be average for this population, that doesn’t mean it’s normal. It’s a common number to have, he’ll say. But it’s also common to die of heart disease in this country.

When I worked as an environmental regulator in Connecticut, I learned that there are portions of the state that have been so severely impacted by centuries of industrial activity, that the state has effectively rendered those ground water resources as unfit for human consumption. Places where contamination is commonplace. Permanently tainted areas with layered, co-mingled contaminant plumes from years of industrial abuse. Companies who impact ground water in these areas don’t need to clean to health-based standards. They are excused from the rigor of this work — after all, the damage has already been done.

All men talk this way in the locker room, he says.

In other words, it’s commonplace, this toxicity. I deserve to get a free pass.

Except that common ≠ normal. And I would expect the public forum surrounding our selection of the next President of the United States to be a safe place, one in which all of us can engage as equals — not a space where years of prior contamination implies permission to engage in abusive behavior and accelerate, as Republican Strategist Steve Schmidt so aptly described it, “intellectual rot.”

But let’s just take a moment and return to the contamination— the places where Trump’s rhetoric is considered “normal.” Yesterday I came across the graphic that many of you have probably already seen — two maps of the United States with predicted election results: 1) if only men voted, and 2) if only women voted.  What strikes me about these pictures is not the apparent widespread misogyny felt by thousands of men in our country, as evidenced by their support of a candidate like Donald Trump, but the acceptance of that misogyny by so many American women.

An acquaintance remarked of the map, “I live in the It’s-ok-to-grab-my-pussy-without-consent Belt” — an apt observation of the geographic distribution of female Trump supporters and its overlap with the geographic distribution of certain ultra-conservative religious sectors in this country. Which made me think: Thousands of women in this country are in an abusive relationship… with their church.

Why am I so mad?

I grew up in a home where the Bible was read every evening after dinner. For dessert, I was served words about God’s power and love and forgiveness, but I was also forced to digest words about a woman’s subservience to her husband, about her times of impurity and her relative value compared to men. Whether or not this was intended by my father is a matter for another debate — but the fact is that I listened. I listened really well.

I recently completed training to volunteer for WomenSafe, a local organization committed to ending domestic and sexual violence in our community. As part of the training, volunteers were invited to review the timeline of events and policies that have impacted the role and perception of women in our culture and society. You can bet that timeline began in Biblical times.

All of which is to say that this toxicity can take years, centuries even, to accumulate to the levels we are experiencing today. The seeds can start in our own houses, sometimes even our houses of worship. But in free, democratic societies such as ours, women aren’t things you can pollute and throw away.

photo credits:

Trump photo: Associated Press

Young woman protesting: The Forward

The post On that Pussy Thing appeared first on Mary Heather Noble.