"A Place Where There is No Darkness"

"We shall meet in a place where there is no darkness," is a quote from George Orwell's futuristic novel, "1984." Besides being a warning never to name a book after a year, it was a vision of a dystopia not totally unlike what we may be seeing today. "Freedom is slavery," "Ignorance is strength," seem Trumpian now. The place where there is no darkness, which all believe in a state beyond state repression, turns out to be a prison cell where the lights are never turned off.

Maybe I am being alarmist but it's better than passivity. I am inclined toward worse case scenarios perhaps because I'm a Jew. The fact that some Jews still exist is partially attributable to Darwinism.  We are descended from folks who, for whatever reason, foresight, or twist of fate got out before it was too late.

I have been running around to planning and brainstorming meetings of all stripes trying to find a place work from when the attacks start coming and, unless we can overturn this election, they will. Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare may be first on the chopping block if Tom Price is confirmed as head of Health and Human Services.

Many Trump voters, including Sarah, Russia from my backyard, Palin, are already regretting their presidential choice. Yes, we are a divided nation. Racial and gender identity politics without class analysis are a dead end but so are class politics that don't include an analysis of other types of oppression that compound socioeconomic struggle.

In 1993 I was a librarian at the San Francisco Chronicle when we all went on strike. There were Teamsters from the printing plant, reporters from the Newspaper Guild and some AFL-CIO members as well. We were picketing at a printing plant in Richmond when some of the Teamster guys started calling some outside strike-breakers crossing the picket line, "faggots." Later at a meeting we explained to them how, because many of us were gay (that was the word then before all the initials), that divides us. They got it.

Maybe the rural heartland Trumpers can get it too. Maybe not. We don't need to wait for realization to dawn. We need to organize and come together with whoever wants to fight back. Time to put up hurricane shutters and brace ourselves for the coming storm.

The People of Broken Glass

When I got into a graduate degree program at UC Berkeley in 1988, I found the proposition of attending a prestigious school quite frightening. I had actually written two of the three required recommendation letters myself. My Alma Mater, Ohio State University, was a totally adequate school but certainly didn't have the status and mystique of Cal Berkeley.

Mostly, I was afraid that the range of my experience growing up and being an adult (I was 37 when I got in to grad school) would not mix well with the pedigreed and polished lives of my classmates. UC Berkeley is a very difficult school to attend for folks who need to work for a living, due to the fact that all the major classes are during the day. Luckily, I was living with a supportive partner and able to take out a small loan, so with the financial aspects taken care of all that remained were the psychological ones.

Of course, once I was established at the school, I connected with others who came from backgrounds more similar to mine. We found each other immediately, with that unspoken radar that seems almost instictive.

And I also socialized with folks from very different backgrounds and perspectives. I remember eating lunch with a woman who had gone to an Ivy League school and was working on her second master's degree, preparing to go on for a doctorate. I thought about how I would love to spend my whole life in school and what it would actually cost to do that.

She was a very sweet person. In my experience, people who come from loving families where there needs are met on many levels usually are. They are like the folks in my workplace who tell me I complain too much. She was effusive, warm, fluffy and soft, a bit like sitting across from a gently purring, contented kitten.

My best friend at school, Shari, who I wound up calling "scary Shari" for reasons I won't go into, had a good luck, fend for yourself background more similar to my own. Sitting across the table from her was a bit like dining with a pile of shards of broken glass.

When I tell friends this analogy, they assume I am being negative and tremendously self-deprecating. To which I can respond, "I'm Jewish and working class and we tend to be like that." But I truly believe that most of the earth-moving, gut-wrenching, creative contributions to society are made from the outside, not from sleepy kittens, but from honest, damaged people of broken glass, the ones with the power to reflect back a brutally accurate image of society at every level. You only have to hold us up to the light for all things to become visible!

Happy, Merry and Peaceful whatever you celebrate, even if it's just a day off work!

Status, Emotions and Disclosure in the Workplace

Emotional Expressions

In October of 2010 an interesting study by Kraus, Cote and Keltner was published that correlated lower socio-economic status with an increased ability to recognize the emotions others may be experiencing. They postulated that this ability among the have-less has been developed as a survival skill in the true Darwinian sense of the term. Wealthier people are less dependent on others for their safety and well-being therefore they have not perfected the art of anticipating their needs. But working class and poorer folks' destinies are more dependent on the external world and the fickle winds of fate. They are not more compliant when confronted with those needs, just more observant.

Another fact they discovered is that what they termed "lower-class" individuals are more expressive to begin with than those of higher economic status, something I have frequently observed in various job environments.
When I worked in a factory making wind chimes for piecework pay my co-workers and I would listen to the radio, sing to it and chat about our lives as our fingers moved as quickly as possible tying ceramic pieces with string. When I was a drafting technician the guys didn't talk much, but the women who worked in the office would talk about everything from sex to laundry detergent.

After I got my master's degree at UC Berkeley I entered a "professional" employment world fraught with treachery. Talking too much about personal life or politics was considered not only gauche but dangerous. What people know can be used as ammunition to throw someone off the job ladder we were all supposed to want to climb to the top. The safest topics for conversation consist of those that are specifically job-related. My boss explicitly told me that If things were rocky back home I had to put it all aside and show the world that stiff upper lip.

An article today on Alternet: The Big Squeeze: How Americans are Being Crushed by Financial Insecurity and Doubt illustrates this mentality perfectly. It concludes with the following quote:

"We shouldn’t lose sight of the more invisible, but mounting, resistance of the moral underground. As it grows, it may undermine one of the great social fictions grounding American capitalism: That one leaves one’s morals and politics at the office, factory or store door when one enters the job site. This fiction is based on the well-propagated notion that when one sells one’s labor power one leaves one’s personal beliefs and values at home.  This social fiction is crumbling under the pressure of the Big Squeeze."

The enforced stoicism that makes for such an uncomfortable workplace is giving way to a new reality, one that recognizes the players as human beings and relies upon a new moral imperative to look out for them. This is a significant shift especially for those of us who come from a background full of animated, expressive people who have historically relied on one another to survive. It may help us build a movement to enable us to eke out a future in the bleak landscape of New America. 

The High Cost of Being an Artist

Parents are notorious at discouraging children from undertaking any risky venture that involves creativity. Yet when a child of the upper-middle class says Mom, Dad, I want to be a poet, a novelist, a musician or a painter, Mom and Dad are likely to say, "It's going to be an uphill climb dear, but we'll support you."  Even as they stress the idea of having something else to fall back upon, they will often demonstrate their support by offering tuition to good colleges, introduction to friends in that field or just plain encouragement.

On the other hand, when a child of the working-class expresses the same sentiment, Mom, Dad, Auntie, Gramma or Guardian are likely to say, "Just get yourself a frickin' job!" only a slight paraphrase of what my father said to me!

Now, as the Republicans agressively move to defund National Public Radio we must consider the prohibitively high cost of art and what a bleak society we would live in without it.

Artists catapult society in new and innovative directions but too often the necessity of economic survival precludes and obliterates the desire to contribute something beautiful, thought-provoking or gut-wrenching to a regimented world. And that is not only sad on an individual level, it is everyone's loss.

Visualize for a moment, a universe where people are paid to contribute art, writing, music, theater and dance. In Cuba they called them "cultural workers" and they were educators as well, teaching people to think of a larger life beyond the boundaries of humdrum daily existence. A place where people don't have to be retired, disabled, sick or financial daredevils in order to reach for their dreams.

It is a world worth imagining. 

Passing and Presumption of Identity

Much has been written about the phenomenon of "passing" although that term is not often used. Recently, I've been reading some fiction where the protagonist (male, in these three instances) is a working-class person trying to pass as upper-middle class, or even as part of the aristocracy. These protagonists are sometimes psychotic, "The Talented Mr. Ripley," by Patricia Highsmith but mostly they are just regular schmucks struggling to get by: "The Secret History," by Donna Tartt and "Old School," Tobias Wolff.


Although in the above cases, "passing" requires a web of falsifications, the most common form of it doesn't take any effort whatsoever. In every day life, people tend to assume that the folks they interact with are just like themselves. So, since the majority of people are straight, are brought up in the Christian tradition, aspire to be perceived as young etc...all these labels will be automatically attributed to you, if you simply keep your mouth shut.


Working as a librarian, the assumption of a Christian background and identity is a constant one. Many people use the library simply for its computers and a myriad of folks want to read one book only and that book is The New Testament.


Queers have made a ritual of passing for centuries, sometimes for the sake of security or financial gain, other times for the simple sake of expediency. Coming out is still fraught with problems although the legal protections are greater now than ever before.

Even in the bad, old days, I made a point of coming out as gay at work. Not in the interview, mind you, but afterwards in order to be able to converse about something other than the weather. I paid a high price for this as I can attribute the loss of 3 jobs to some aspect of homophobia. However, it was more commonly a hassle rather than a danger. I had a co-worker who was quite dense. She was someone I had to come out to repeatedly because she just couldn't seem to remember that I was a lesbian. This would not have been bad, in and of itself, except that when I least expected it, I would be subjected to a diatribe against some flaw or failing she attached to lesbian/gay culture. I finally learned to just cut her off and say, "Pat, I'm the wrong person to try and get support for your feelings on this issue."

As an older person, I find being called, "young lady" offensive. I have lived and worked hard for these wrinkles, this perspective, this overview of the human condition that can only be derived from experience. I'd rather just be an old crone until I engage in the ultimate passing. Passing away.