Seeds of Change

My balloon flowers opened this week. They’re a little late, but we had an oddly cool spring and summer is half way over. No, not literally, but the fourth of July in my mind always signals a few weeks past, a few weeks to go before it all comes sadly to an end, again.

Things have changed for me this year. I’m not spending every waking second that I can in the sun, or even at the pool. I’m not sure of what happened but things have changed. For the last 5 ½ years I’ve lived in one of Forbes list wealthiest counties in the country and been proud of it but over the last several weeks the general milieu here has changed. My very nice neighbors moved out and some heavy cigarette social smokers moved in. The smell of the smoke is coming through my walls and I can’t imagine how bad this will be this coming winter with the windows shut. Whenever I’ve lived in an apartment with cigarette smokers in the house, I moved. But I own here and I didn’t have immediate plans to go—especially since the real estate market here hasn’t bounced back enough to get back the amount of money that I’ve put into my place.

There have been other changes, too. Twice in the last week people have had outdoor parties in their driveways with crowds of people drinking and hanging out. We had some burglaries and some graffiti; there have been dirty looks and verbal altercations at the pool. Most of us are just talking about it in shock; others have actively started looking to move out of here—mostly my friends. What was a lovely little wealth filled community on the mountain is becoming lower class by the actions of the people who reside here and their guests. On occasion I’ve witnessed something that has happened here and thought ‘no one here behaves that way’ and ‘where did those people think they were moving to’? For example, last summer, a woman who yelled at her kid from across the pool. Everyone else here understands that if you want to speak to your child, you get up, walk across the deck and reprimand your child as quietly and classy as possible—as not to disturb the other residents of the community—not the big mouthed, loud Long Island poor who though they could act the same way as they did ‘there’, but move to the suburbs of New Jersey. Those reality TV shows were extraordinary, but not in a good way. They just showed the worst of tasteless and classless of what New Jersey is.  I get that the outsiders; the ‘they’re not our kind’ disrupt and destroy out of jealousy. The ’have’s’ verses the ’have not’s’; the ‘they need to be dropped down a peg to equalize’ mentality even if I have to do damage in my rage. But this is different. This is about self-centeredness and anything that I do you’re just going to have to deal with without any sense of ‘community’.

One of my mentee’s wrote to me having had a conversational experience of a woman who had been sexually assaulted, and told her ‘second date’ about the assault and how she was further traumatized by a police officer asking her what she was wearing. As she continued the story to her ‘potential’ she discussed how she had to remind the officer that newborns and old women in nursing homes are raped and how she dressed wasn’t germane to the issue of her assault. Long story short, the assaulted woman was offended that her date wasn’t more sympathetic to her and SHE decided not to date this man again. My mentee asked me what I thought of the situation. Generally, she chose the wrong person and certainly the wrong sex to be having a conversation looking for sympathy to. It’s woman who sooth and smooth thing over; men take on a woman’s problems as problem solvers; and he couldn’t ‘fix’ this for her. My guess is that she would have never heard from him again despite her choice (ha!) to not date him again. That kind of private matter should have been reserved for a person and time when it was appropriate. She was raised poorly. At some point, one needs to take responsibility as an adult that has nothing to do with how you were raised and everything to do with how you choose to live your life.

And since we’re on the subject, I’d like to give my opinion on Paula Deen’s current issues. I’m on her side; and the crowd mentality of her sponsors one by one distancing themselves from her is not a decision that I would have made.

Paula has every right to hire who she wants when she wants. She has every right to fire or not promote for whatever reasons she has. No one is owed a job or a promotion no matter what your race is or isn’t. If her employees weren’t happy working in her environment, they had every right to leave and start their own company with the working environment of their own choosing—but instead they complained as if she owed them any more than what she gave. Paula is correct in saying that she doesn’t have control over what does or doesn’t offend a particular person. Paula’s family owned slaves; it’s come up in the media in the last few days; I remembered that from the ‘Who do you think you are?’ series. I’m not a Southerner. Hell, I’m not even south of the Mason-Dixon line. But I’ll stand up and say it just the way that my Eleanor’s native born Georgian husband said it. ‘Just because we lost the war doesn’t mean that I’ve changed my mind.’ Hold your head up Paula. You’ve apologized once, and that’s enough.  Be who you are in your heart and soul.

No one is immune from prejudice. In December of 1862 General Ulysses S. Grant issued a directive expelling  ‘Jews as a class’ from the war zone known as the Department of the Tennessee.*Only* about 100 Jews were forced to leave, primarily in Northern Mississippi and Kentucky.  Only one hundred? That’s not a lot, unless it was your family forced to give up everything that they owned.

More than one hundred years later at the 1988 Republican National Convention, while biding former President Regan farewell , George Bush introduced the children of his son and Mexico-born daughter-in-law to the President… ’That's Jebby's kids from Florida; the little brown ones.’

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates professes to be ‘depressed’ (read that as very, very angry) that biologically, he’s half white. By his own aggrandizing, (he was arrested for potentially burglarizing his own home) his self-escalation worked itself into his having a beer with Barack Obama. I have to wonder if he would have chosen to have one with George Bush or if his own racism was responsible for his ’at a boy’ pat on the back and the pretense to stir a hornet’s nest and resolve it with the President. That’s his own racism at its worst.

 A week ago I witnessed a white man asking a Hispanic girl who was born and educated here in America (with advanced degrees) if she spoke English. She was minding her own business; he felt that he had the right to intrude on her day. Usually, you can see a neighborhood gradually change, but time caught up with me faster than I had anticipated; I need to find a way out, just like a real grown up should.