This Weekend I…
It’s like one of those papers you had to write in grade school, isn’t it. During My Summer Vacation. Somehow the teachers never wanted to hear about the interesting stuff. That’s one’s first experience of writing for an audience, in most cases, and an education in what authority figures really want to hear when they ask you a question.
So this weekend I:
* worked at the bookstore
* met Steve, a very nice fan, who kindly enthused
* saw four rainbows on my way home through stormy weather Saturday
* saw a fight almost break out in the pasta aisle of Trader Joe’s, spurred no doubt by the stormy weather and the fact that EVERYONE and their cousin was at TJs
* finished 6500 of 7k words in a short story for an anthology, to give the editor a choice of stories
* made everyone in the house help me with the tidying-up, which means the house looks less like a disaster area and more like…a soon-to-be disaster area
* read Love and Consequences, which was amazing
* went grocery shopping, saw a flock of seagulls, and witnessed what might have been almost a kidnapping
* bought Girl Scout cookies because I am a sucker for a little bright-eyed kid
And this morning I finished a 3K essay for an anthology (more about that when I can give the details). Frankly, I’m pooped. I need to find someone to beta that essay and the 7K shortie so I can be sure they’re as good as they need to be, but all my betas are tapped out. *groan* Oh, well, I’ll think of something.
The most enjoyable part of the weekend (barring twining antennae with the Selkie) was reading Love and Consequences. Margaret Jones was a foster child, and she ended up in South Central LA, in the middle of a foster family torn apart by the battle against the poor and Reagan’s drug policy. It’s a quick read, and I would have hoped for more about her initial home and circumstances. Hell, I would have wanted more of everything in the book, which is rare. It is heartening to read a memoir where the bleakness of poverty and violence is balanced by the sense of people really, honestly trying to do their best.
Most examinations of inner-city violence, drug use, and poverty take a moralistic tone just by virtue of what they are. It’s hard to see the animals made out of people by grinding hopeless poverty and not escape into moralizing, in sheer self-defense. But if there’s hope and a solution to the problem it lies in reminding ourselves that these are people, for God’s sake, and by turning on them we turn on ourselves.
That isn’t meant to be a “bleeding-heart liberal” (as my stepfather so often called me) viewpoint. I have a healthy sense of self-preservation when it comes to being in the Bad Part of Town. I am merely saying that we need to examine the reasons why there is a Bad Part of Town in the first place. America’s economy is underpinned by a vast pool of underpaid (read “slave”) labor, and various facets of the drug policy and that rigging of the economy against second-class (i.e., darker-skinned) citizens breed the kind of hopelessness that feeds the bacteria of crime and violence in the petri dish of society. Turning the funding for corporate welfare and the huge teat of the military-industrial complex toward social justice would make short work of the problem. But that would cut into the profits of the ruling class.
And we can’t have that, can we.
ANYWAY, Love and Consequences is very well written, mostly unflinching (though I could have wished for more of the author’s perspective of street violence and how she witnessed it), and all-around a compelling read. I even paid full-price for it in hardcover, which I almost never do. The author also works for International Brother/SisterHood, a gang outreach program–putting her work where her mouth is, so to speak. All in all, highly recommended.
So, that was my weekend. One of the wonderful things about a blog is that there’s no teacher grading this little “what I did during X” essay. All hail the Internet.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to go lay down and drool on the floor, and wait for my brain to become less like oatmeal and more like thinking matter.
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