In the mean time…
I’m still struggling to get my head together in a variety of ways, both assisted and hampered by a family holiday last weekend.
This was the third time we’ve been to the “Captain’s Cottage” rental house near Bateman’s Bay, and we managed to get all the grandparents plus my Uncle Jim to join us for part of the time.
As you can see, it’s a pretty special place.
About a year ago, I started working for the awesome Australian gaming company Tin Man Games, co-writing “Choices: And The Sun Went Out” which is an interactive sci-fi subscription story, with new content released each week. It’s on itunes and Android, and after more than a year it has less than a month remaining.
On Android (which shows such details), over 50,000 people have installed the app on their devices, and over 500 people have reviewed it. That is seriously amazing.
Alyce Potter, KG Tan and I are all feeling quite weird now that the epic journey is nearly at the end.
Of course I’m still writing my own solo (+editors) story, “Choices: And Their Souls Were Eaten”, which is hidden inside the same app. That’s the one with the bear picture.
It’s steampunk, with my magic system.
Whyyyyyyyy?
It’s taken a few days for me to get my head together enough to blog again.
Louisette is slightly bewildered by all the people who have given money to charity because of her generosity. She knows she’s done something special, and as far as she’s concerned life is normal now (even if she’s going without her allowance for a while). Normality means watching “Peppa Pig”, asking me for lollies every few minutes, and hiding her brother’s favourite toy under the couch.
Lucky she’s cute.
Some reassuring news: It’s very clear from statistics in places like this that the majority of Trump supporters are old white men (shocking, right?) and in fact the majority of votes from people under 45 years old were for Hillary (let alone the overall majority of voters, altogether).
This is not because people over 45 are intrinsically bad. The simple fact is that white people like myself are the majority in the Western world, and can have a happy fulfilled life without once giving a thought to the life experiences of people who have a different skin colour. Anyone living in the Western world with darker skin will not be allowed to go through life without being reminded constantly of their skin colour and how it makes their life harder. So we live parallel lives; same place, different experience.
White people, as the more powerful majority, have to make an effort if they want to to understand racism. That knowledge is unpleasant, and it just goes on and on. I only learnt in my 30s that “watermelon” and “African American” is a symbol for “African Americans are lazy”. (It’s really not a thing in Australia, but we have plenty of racist symbols and ideas of our own.) Now that I know about watermelons, I have to be careful that when I’m writing a story that happens to have an African American character in it, he or she must never eat watermelon. Ditto Fried Chicken. And a whole list of other things. All accompanied by both an inherited and a present guilt: inherited, because the simple fact is that (regardless of my own genuine and painful struggles) my life is better because my white ancestors destroyed the first residents of Australia (in ways that are still destroying lives today); present, because while I eat raw cookie dough and watch “The Flash” (true story) other people are starving. For the price of my cable subscription I could literally save lives.
My comparatively-pleasant life is built on generations of racism and greed. That’s not an easy truth to live with. White people who make an effort to actually understand what racism means tend to work hard to get to a certain point of understanding, and then stop. If you fought and risked your life to abolish slavery, abolishing the n-word seems like an incredibly minor quibble. So don’t hate the older people for having a less-nuanced understanding of racism than younger people, who had a much better starting point (thanks to the work done by those same older people).
Having said that, racism is racism. A lot of people didn’t vote Trump BECAUSE he’s openly racist (many certainly did), but everyone who did vote for Trump decided racism was no big deal. And they were so, so, wrong. As expected, incidents of racism, sexism, homophobia and religious persecution immediately rose after Trump’s victory.
John Scalzi explains non-deliberate racism neatly here.
There is a bit of genuine stupidity mixed in, too. Trump was popular among the rural poor because he is a symbol for success*, for “saying it like it is”*, for destroying the political elite*, and for “making America great again”*.
*He has declared bankruptcy several times and run several business ventures into the ground and/or based entire businesses on fraudulent schemes (such as the infamous Trump University).
*He lies constantly.
*Did I mention he was born rich?
*America actually IS great, in so many ways, but YES the rural poor get ignored and things have been going downhill for a while. Great article here. So a lot of the “burn it all down” attitude to politics comes from a place of desperation. But the saddest thing is that Trump is going to reduce affordable health care and give tax breaks to corporations, while Hillary was going to close corporate tax-dodging loopholes. So Hillary would have helped—a little—but Trump will actively make things worse for those who most need help.
So, in conclusion, Trump is bad news on a fundamental human level. I’ll leave his economics and the possibility of war for another day.
If you’d like to mourn, here is one man’s letter to his wife, and here is the song echoing around the world this week.
Regular readers are already aware that my knee-jerk reaction to this awful news is to give to charity. It’s an excellent knee-jerk reaction, and many other people are also giving right now.
Here’s a great list of charities that support all the groups Trump hates (including environmental groups). Trump is, in his own way, incredibly inspiring.
My second reaction is to gather together my potentially-vulnerable friends (women. Muslims. Non-Caucasian people. LGBTIQ people) and ask what I can do to help. I’ll be having a house party on the weekend Trump becomes president, and hopefully drowning out some of the hate with ice cream and scones (keeping in mind that public transport will be riskier than usual that weekend, because a lot of nasty incidents are happening there, or at petrol stations, or workplaces or anywhere that vulnerable people might be alone in public). I’ll be wearing a safety pin, since that has become an easily-recognisable way to say, “I am a safe space. If you need help, I’m here.” (Keeping in mind that there is a small number of people wearing a safety pin deliberately to help them find victims for their hate. Also keep in mind that if you’re wearing a safety pin you need to be prepared to act if someone is in trouble.)
Here’s an illustrated guide to helping someone facing an Islamophobic attack.
Some people are urging others to argue with their racist (etc) relatives and friends. Arguing rarely brings about kindness, so I think the better move is to find common ground. Keep in mind that very few people set out to cause harm in the world, and even the horrible things people say come from their own sense of vulnerability.
The Bible says that perfect love drives out fear, which is an extraordinary concept. Psychology says that when we meet people from a different social group, we rapidly grow to like and understand them (ie when we love them, the fear goes away). Right now I feel pretty unimpressed with anyone that voted for Trump—which means that I don’t truly understand what they love and care about and fear. I bet we have a lot in common… and the fact that I found that sentence so hard to write explains why I’m part of what’s dividing people. That needs to change. I need to change.
Four years
I’m crying, but it’s not sadness.
My husband Chris and I have been following the US election with increasing horror today. We both chose not to speak openly in the car on the way home, because our kids were with us. We exchanged a few careful words, and I asked Chris to drive. He knew without asking that I was too upset to drive safely.
TJ fell asleep.
Louisette is four years old, a pre-schooler in a Peppa Pig shirt and a baseball cap. She picked up on the vibe and asked, “What’s wrong?”
Chris looked alarmed as I opened my mouth to explain today’s election: “A country a long long way away has just chosen their President. I don’t think they made a good choice. He’s… mean. I think now he will be able to be mean to more people.”
Louisette was silent, thinking.
“It’s a very very long way away,” said Chris.
Damage control.
“Yes,” I said. “On the other side of the world. And there are lots of other politicians who will also be making the laws and all that kind of thing. The whole system of government is designed especially so that if someone mean is the president, they can’t do too many bad things.”
“A long, long way away,” said Chris.
“That man doesn’t hurt people on purpose,” I said. “But when people ask him for help, he says no.”
“That country is all the way on the other side of the world,” said Chris. “Really super far away.”
“And you know what?” I said. “I bet all the kind people in that country—and even us, right here in Australia—will be extra super kind and we will look after all the people who need help.”
“How?” she said.
I’d just received a “Really Useful Gifts” magazine in the mail. They have a wide range of physical items—a goat, a well, a school—that are labelled with prices eg for $50 you can buy a goat so a family has a source of milk, cheese, and future income (if they have a boy and a girl goat…).
When we got home and sorted out the inevitable chaos of bags and drinks of milk and the parental win of transferring TJ into his bed without waking him, I showed Louisette the magazine.
Louisette has an allowance of $1 per week. Sometimes she buys a 50 cent lolly. A lot of the time she saves it up. Sometimes she dips into her savings and buys herself a toy.
I steered Lizzie towards the things she’d understand best in the magazine: A school. Chickens. A vegetable garden (she always claims to love vegetables, although when we put them on her plate she says things like, “I meant in Summer I like them; not today.”)
She was excited that she could give these presents to someone she’d never met. I told her she had $20 saved up, and that she could spend as little or as much of it as she liked. I told her I would put in the same amount of money that she did.
We kept coming back to chickens. And a small business. And a pre-school. And adult literacy (she was shocked at the concept of someone who was all grown up but still couldn’t read. Reading is hard). And a vegetable garden.
I warned her that if she got all those things her money would be gone. All of it.
“What about my flower?” she asked.
I remembered it well: A little plastic thing with a smiling face that bobbed back and forth. It was the first toy she bought for herself with her own money.
“Actually,” I admitted, “that’s broken. It cost $3. So if you bought all of these things, you would have to wait three weeks with absolutely no lollies or buying anything. Then you could buy a new flower.”
“Okay,” she said. “Then I will buy no lollies for weeks and weeks, and I will buy this”— A school building—”and this”—a clinic—”and all those other things too.”
That’s when my eyes started to mist over. I counted up the cost. $80. Every bit of me wanted to buy it all with my own money, and let her keep her allowance. “That’s a lot of things, Louisette. You’d get no allowance at all for weeks and weeks and weeks.”
She nodded gravely. “You’d get no money at all—not even one single dollar—for weeks and weeks. Not until your birthday.”
An unimaginable distance.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I want to do.”
A lot of people feel scared of a lot of things right now. We feel helpless.
I can’t change the world, but I can change it for a few of the people who need it the most. I can be kind. I can learn about other cultures and get to know people who aren’t exactly like me—Mexicans. Homosexuals. Muslims. Trump supporters.
I can find out what we have in common, even if it takes some digging sometimes.
I can change an entire village in another part of the world by giving it a school, clinic, small business opportunity, and chickens.
I can teach my children to respond to fear by being more kind, by making more friends, and by giving more of whatever we have to give.
Four years feels like a long time. For my daughter, it’s a lifetime. But in a world that seems to be getting darker and meaner… there she is. There I am. There you are.
The world is a beautiful place.
If you’d like your money to be more effective where it’s needed most, skip the charity gimmicks and give money to a reputable company like World Vision or Oxfam.
Same story but without the Trump stuff (so it’s more shareable):
My four-year old daughter Louisette was thrilled to discover that she could use her allowance to buy presents for people she’d never met—and her presents could help them have better food, water, and jobs!
Her allowance is $1 per week and she’d saved $20. I told her that I’d give the same amount of money she did, and we looked at the “Build a Village” range and some other things that made sense to her, like chickens and adult literacy. She is learning to read and she knows it‘s hard work but super important… especially with a mother who’s a writer!
We had to choose so carefully. She paused and asked me about a toy she wanted to buy. I told her that it cost $3 so if she wanted to give her whole savings away she would have no money at all for three whole weeks and then she could buy the toy.
“Well,” she said. “I want to buy the school, and the clinic, and the vegetable garden, and the chickens, and the pre-school, and the one that teaches a grown-up to read. So if I have no money at all for weeks and weeks and weeks, can I do that?”
“That would be a very, very long time,” I told her. “All the way to your birthday… with no money at all.”
“And then I can give them all those things?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Then that’s what I really really want to do.”
Louisette loves to dress as SuperGirl, and pretend to help people. Today she made a difference to people in the real world. https://www.usefulgifts.org
Felicity Banks 