I Have Never...

So I've been meaning to write a new post for weeks now, but Things Keep Happening and whatever I was going to say gets eclipsed by whatever else is in the headlines.  I have like three started and discarded posts just in the last month.  Maybe at some point I could get them together and publish them under Things I Might Have Said If They Had Still Been Relevant, or something like that, but I doubt that anybody would be interested.  Anyway, there is only one subject at the moment and it's about people with a skin color different than mine being murdered by police, in part because of an insidious, systemic racism that's been with us since essentially forever.  And what we can do about it.  Yes, even us pale folks.

I dunno about you, but when I was in school, we learned basically nothing about African-American history. Zero. Zilch.  Oh, we talked about slavery for about five minutes in the lead-up to spending three weeks on the Civil War, but it was like, "Yeah, there was slavery, and it was bad, and then we had the Civil War and after that there wasn't slavery anymore, so we're going to spend the next week talking about the Battle of Gettysburg."  I majored in English in college, at an allegedly liberal institution, and out of all the literature classes I had to take (and there were a lot), we got assigned exactly one book by an African-American author.  One.  Seriously, just one (and it was Beloved by Toni Morrison, and if you haven't read it yet, what's stopping you?), and when it came time for the final exam, there weren't any questions on it because we ran out of time to discuss it in class. (Sigh and eye roll here.) And forget the civil rights movement or the March on Washington or Martin Luther King.  None of that ever even got mentioned. "Anything that's less than fifty years ago isn't history, it's current events, and so we're not going to cover it in a history class," said a professor of mine.  I mean, I guess I could have pointed out that it's still going on, but that would have only proved his point.

So everything I know about African-American history, which is still not a lot, I learned as an adult.  The books I've read by black authors (most recently: The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, and I could not. Put. It. Down.) I read as an adult.  And I'm not sure adult brains are the best, most fertile ground for learning essential truths about humanity, though I guess they are better than nothing. I'd like to think the schools are doing a better job with this stuff now than they were then. 

For the record, I grew up in Utah, and at the time, there were no black people in Utah.  Well, I'm sure there were, somewhere, but I didn't know any and nobody I knew knew any.  (I might add here that the Mormon Church didn't let black men into the priesthood between 1849 and 1978, and I was nine in 1978, so for the bulk of my childhood, African-American folks should be forgiven for suspecting that Utah might not be the friendliest place they could settle.  They would also be right.)  I made my first African-American friend when I was about eleven.   I find this both pathetic and sad. This is also part of the whole insidious systemic racism thing.  Just because all the segregation laws have been thrown out doesn't mean segregation doesn't still exist.

Also, there's this thing called white privilege.  That is, the things that white folks get because they are white that black folks don't get because they are black.  There's a lot to say here because it covers so many facets of life, but I'll try to hit some of the big ones:

• I have never, in an emergency room, been asked if I'm using illegal drugs, or for that matter, had a doctor accuse me of lying.
• I have never, in a workplace environment, had to hunt high and low for any colleagues that might look a little like me.
• I have never, when pulled over by the police (three times that I remember), worried that I might not make it home alive that night.
• I have never thought to take my small child on a walk with me so as to look less threatening and therefore less likely to be shot or have someone call the police on me.
• I've never been asked about my religion as I was about to board an airplane.
  
• I've never had a delivery service refuse to come to my neighborhood. 
• I've never felt like it was necessary to tell my kids how to survive an encounter with the police.  (Okay, I don't have any kids, but if I did, I would think it part of my job to teach them how to stay alive from day to day, and that's just not something I would think to bring up.)
• I have never been fired from a job or not hired for a job because I had the "wrong" first name or skin color.
• I have never had anyone tell me I need to leave a certain neighborhood by sunset.  And yes, for the record, I do live in Texas.

I mean, I could go on.  Lots of people have, and a lot more eloquently than me.  But the thing about racism generally is that it is so insidious.  It permeates every facet of life.  It's in our faces all the time, but most of the time we don't see it.  So what can we do about it?

Well, in a word, lots:

• Here's 75 things white people can do to for racial justice.
• Here are four steps we can take to fight racism.
• Here's a book we can read about why this is so hard for white people.
• Here's another book we can read, especially for folks in the legal field. 

But by far the biggest, most important thing we can do is to listen.  Be willing to let go of our preconceived notions about racism generally and white privilege in particular.  Be willing to listen to people who are actually affected day to day.  And work to change those things that we can change, depending on where we are and in what field and in what station of life.  I had to twist a few arms to get my book club to read The Underground Railroad, but I did it.  It is a small thing, but small ripples of air spilling off the Western Sahara can start swirling around the Canary Islands and eventually become hurricanes. 

Oh, and in case I haven't mentioned it yet, VOTE.  The whole ticket, not just against the Cheeto in Chief.  The small races for City Council and State Senate and who should be judge of what court have a lot more to do with people's day to day lives than what happens in Washington.  They're also the races where your vote really counts, because these are the races that are often won or lost by a handful of votes. And if you don't know who's running for what on your local ticket, this is a great time to find out.  You have five months.  Get busy. 

Somebody Find Toto

Well, ya cain't say I didn't warn ya.  It was on this spot right here, only a few short months ago, that I told you what would be happening after pregnant women were banned from all the big cities.  Being caught in a metropolis with a bun in the oven will lead to an immediate charge of felonious breathing, as I think Margaret Atwood would call it.  Or reckless endangerment through inhalation of toxic gases.  Imagine, having the nerve, the unremitting gall to walk through New York or Boston or San Francisco, while pregnant, and knowingly inhale air known to be toxic to fetuses.  No different than Utah's skiing-while-pregnant ban or Florida's preborn human sun exposure law.  Nope.  We're having no more of these scandals.  I'm sorry, but that's it.  We're just gonna send them all to Kansas.

Why?  Because pregnant women are irresponsible and only take their own selfish feelings and demands for liberty into consideration.  Because in spite of all the scientific evidence that says women only exist as containers for preborn babies, there's always one or two that have to hop up and down and squawk about their "personhood" and their "rights."  Because Kansas is the only place that's safe.  Sorry, everybody in Wichita and Topeka and Olathe, but you're going to have company.  A lot of it.  For the  next nine months.

Think of it.  Millions of women packed onto Greyhound buses without a nay-say or maybe as soon as that little stick turns blue.  Shipped from around the country to the safest state in the Union (unless there's a tornado).  No skiing, no surfing, no sunbathing, no sex or drugs or alcohol.  (Well, there is that little crystal meth problem, but we'll get rid of that; we'll just jack up the sentences for possession and manufacturing and everybody'll be scared and, you know, just stop making and selling the stuff.) Nine months of perfect safety for the fetuses and their containers and then all the babies will be born healthy!  And that's what we want, isn't it?

Ah, perhaps you think I exaggerate. Or perhaps you think I'm off my proverbial rocker.  Well, you could be right about that second thing, but I'm afraid I am not exaggerating.  Take a look at this lawsuit, recently filed in Federal Court by the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (and ponder, for a moment, why we even need such an advocacy.  Get back to me on that, will you?) Go down to the first orange link on the page.  Then read that sucker.  Yes, I know it's fifty-odd pages long. Read it anyway.  If you're anything like me, you won't be able to put it down.

Brief recap of the facts:  Alicia Beltran, a woman and, by definition, a human being, sought prenatal care at a local clinic in Milwaukee.  She confidentially told the doctor that she had been treated for prescription drug abuse and had been taking Suboxone, a pain medication.  She'd stopped taking it because she found out she was pregnant.  A few days later, five policemen came to her house and arrested her.  She was handcuffed, shackled and taken to a court hearing that she knew nothing about. An attorney had been appointed to represent the interests of her 14-week-old fetus.  (I am not making this up.  It's all in the lawsuit.  Go back and read it again.)  There was, however, no attorney appointed to represent Alicia Beltran, the living, breathing, already born woman.  With no testimony from any medical experts whatsoever and with Ms. Beltran not allowed to speak, the judge ordered her involuntarily committed to an inpatient drug treatment program two hours away from her family.  She has been a prisoner there since July 13, 2013.

Now, let's consider this for a second.

It is not illegal to take a prescription drug.

It is not illegal to refuse medical treatment.

It is not illegal to seek another medical opinion.

It is illegal for a doctor to release information about a patient without that patient's consent to a third party.  The law that governs that kind of conduct is called HIPPA.  It is also highly unethical for a doctor to release information given to him or her under the doctor-patient privilege, which is what happened here.

It is illegal to use intimidation or threats under color of authority, such as sending a social worker to someone's house and threatening that someone with losing custody of her children, to get that person to do something that you want. It was illegal for the doctor to send the social worker out there and it was illegal of the social worker to go.

It is very very illegal to kidnap a woman from her house, haul her away in chains, and lock her up someplace.  Yet somehow, Alicia Beltran needs a Federal lawsuit to get her out of a situation that never should have happened in the first place.

I can hear some of you thinking.  (Psychic powers.  I has 'em.)  And what I can hear some of you thinking is along the lines of "But what if she relapses and goes back on the drugs?  That would be bad for her baby, so it's better if she stays locked up until she gives birth."

Really?

Really?

Okay. Let's try this.  Somebody grabs you off the street, shackles you, throws you into a car, drives you to what's obviously a prison and surrounds you with police officers.  After several hours you finally get into what looks like a courtroom and there's a judge and you think, "Oh thank God, now we can clear up this mix-up," because obviously there's been one, right?  And then the judge winks at the guys who kidnapped you and says, "It's okay, boys.  She's pregnant."

Guess what.  Illegal behavior is illegal behavior whether the victim is pregnant or not.  Kidnapping is illegal,  Being addicted to a substance is not illegal.  Trying to quit the addictive substance on your own, without some nice rehab counselor holding your hand every step of the way, is not illegal.

No one ever offered any evidence that Alicia Beltran was using drugs.  No one tested her for drug use.  No one, as far as I can tell, even bothered to ask her, "Hey.  Pop any Suboxone today?"  Even if they had, though, that wouldn't justify anything that happened.  Again, being a drug addict is not illegal.

In fact, the law treats pregnant people and nonpregnant people almost exactly the same way.  There are a few exceptions for pregnant people who are under 18, but not many.  It is legal for a pregnant woman to drink.  It is legal for a pregnant woman to go skiing.  It is legal for a pregnant woman to go skydiving, go Rocky Mountain climbing, go 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fu Manchu.  And it is illegal for a pregnant woman to do drugs, only insofar as it's illegal for anyone else to use drugs.

Believe me, if we could outlaw stupid behavior, we'd need enough prisons to fill the entire state of Texas.

It burns me up that more news agencies aren't following this story.  Why CNN and NBC aren't pounding on the doors of Casa Clare, demanding to speak to Alicia Beltran.  Why isn'lt Amnesty International protesting outside on the sidewalk? Where's the ACLU, when you really need them? Why aren't sixteen helicopters circling that rehab facility 24/7, demanding to know what the hell is going on? Because the last time I Googled it - 30 seconds ago - I found one story on Reuters and it was under a headline about Democrats and the shutdown.

Well, I intend to make some noise.  Do what I can to get some attention.  Send this blog post to people I know who will give a damn and might even write about it.  I may be a Buddhist with a Nook at a table at Afrah, but by God, you don't want to piss me off. I type mean when I'm mad.
 

Horror Of The Rice Bowl

 This week saw the premiere of not one, but two new horror shows -- er, that is, TV shows with a decidedly horrific thematic element.  Season Three of The Walking Dead (Sundays, AMC) covers new ground; the characters, instead of squabbling with each other and hanging around the farm like they did most of Season Two, are actually running from zombies and breaking into (rather than out of) a prison. Much fighting, splattering and brains going everywhere ensued, apparently in a quest to find out how much they could get away with on basic cable.  Answer: Quite a bit.  Well, that is to say, nobody's complained too much yet.  And the first episode ended on a monstrous (er, so to speak) cliffhanger that had me doing the long slow blink not once but a couple of times.

Then on Wednesday on FX we have American Horror Story: Asylum.  In case you missed it, last year's AHS was all about teen angst, cheating husbands, scary household help and Jessica Lange.  This year's AHS seems to be all about institutionalized homophobia, serial killers, Nazi doctors and Jessica Lange. Because too much Jessica is never enough, and Jessica as a frustrated nun with a cane and a set of keys is, well, pretty scary.  But during AHS, I started having the same horrible thought that plagued me during The Walking Dead.  The thought was: "Why am I watching this?"

Because, honestly, I wasn't enjoying it.  Them.  Whatever.  I liked them last year.  Did all the stuffing leach out of them between last year and this year?  Or are scary TV shows I used to like falling victim to the same strange syndrome as horror novels I used to like?  Surely not.  Surely we can blame Joe Hill for that last one; I got three-quarters of the way through his truly terrifying Horns before I came uponst the scene that did it, that carved a bright red wound into my brain.  Something about a guy being mean to a little old lady and about that I'll say no more, but I haven't been able to pick up a horror novel and look at it the same way since.  Maybe, having spent six or so years helping take care of my mother-in-law at the end of her life and dealing with people who maybe weren't as nice to her as they should have been, it just all became too real for me.  Or maybe it tapped into one of my big ol' Primal Fears, one I've had since early childhood and is probably past-life related because in this life it just doesn't make any darn sense.

But, anyway, I'm not enjoying these shows anymore.  Joan would probably say my disbelief suspenders have snapped again, just like they did during Lost, Season Three Episode Two, and The X-Files, Season Four, the episode styled after Forrest Gump.  I swear, whatever this is it better not happen to horror movies, because I frick'n love horror movies (of the supernatural bent; no slasher films, please) and it would suck to lose those too.  Besides, I'm three behind.  I haven't even seen The Possession yet and Paranormal Activity 4 and Sinister just hit the big screen. 

Speaking of scary stuff, a couple of weeks ago I was called uponst to go with all of my co-workers to a particular restaurant where they cook the food right there at your table and do flashy stuff with the knives.  The restaurant bills itself as being "...of Tokyo" but I sort of have a feeling it was of Racine, Wisconsin originally, and worked itself up to Tokyo the old-fashioned way.  I'd never been to this place, but some of my cow-orkers go there often.  There seem to be two kinds of chefs; the ones that can do flashy, impressive things with the knives, and the ones who can't.  The ones who can't have some running schtick that they use to engage the table, thus preventing conversation and, I dunno, making themselves feel important, I guess.  There were too many of us for one table, so we were seated at two of them.  The other table got the flashy knives guy and we got--yeah.

This particular chef's ongoing monologue was about the different types of people at the table.  The tall guy (one of our guys is 6'5"), the tiny girl (4'10"), the bald guy, the lady with the top that was pulled down so far that a person could lose things.  He kind of went around the table.  If he couldn't find a particular characteristic for somebody, he made one up.  And when he got to me, he--

Oh hell.  You know where this is going, right?  I'm the fat chick.  Inevitably, even if there's a fat guy sitting right next to me (and there was), it's like open season.  But it was subtle.  First he went around filling rice bowls with the fried rice he'd just made.  Er, except for mine, which got about a teaspoon of rice and "You ordered the diet plate, right?"

The truth is, I don't much care for rice.  Never have.  When I have Asian food I usually leave the rice.  I commented to my boss (who was on the other side of me from the fat guy), "Hey, somebody finally gave me the right amount of rice."  But my boss was frowning.  He knew there was something wrong.  He just didn't know what.

Anyway, the chef came back around and said, "Oh, my mistake.  You didn't order the diet plate.  You ordered the special."  He proceeded to cram my bowl with rice.  Probably twice as much as anyone else got.  Rice was falling out of the bowl and onto the table.  Now, the crack about the diet plate I could have just ignored, but this coming back around thing?  Uh, no.

Now it was war.

Thus began one of the weirdest meals I'd ever eaten.  I'd ordered the calamari with vegetables, which was delicious.  I ate the calamari.  I ate the vegetables.  I left the rice.  The chef came back around again and said, "Something wrong with your rice?" "No."  "You should eat it before it gets cold."  "Thanks for the tip." We had this same discussion at least twice, and some variations on the theme.

Have you ever been to a restaurant and had a staff member cajole you about eating your food?  For that matter, have you ever, since you were six, had anyone tell you to clean your plate who wasn't your mother or father?  Can you imagine a chef, the most vaulted member of the kitchen staff, getting in your face about what you had and hadn't eaten?  It was a very strange meal.  And some of the other diners began to notice that it was a very strange meal, including my boss, who asked me what was wrong with my rice.  "Nothing," I said, realizing only later I should have said something like, "I just don't like it when they serve it with so much sarcasm."

At the end of the meal, the chef--yes, the chef, people--told me he'd get me a box for the rice.  Chefs do not do this. This is waitstaff territory.  As soon as he disappeared around the corner I waved for one of the busboys and asked him, very politely, to please take this rice away.  Which he did.  And I managed to get out of the restaurant without running into the chef again.

So I won that round, I think.  But for crying out loud, I don't go to lunch--much less with my cow-orkers--with the idea of going to war over rice.  I came home and told Joan this story and she thought I should write a letter to the manager.  I thought about that, too, but I finally decided against it.  I didn't think he would get it.  I had this feeling he'd look up from the letter, very puzzled, and say, "So something was wrong with the rice?" And I didn't feel like trying to explain the whole thing, anyway.  Instead I wrote this.  And in case anybody in Dallas is wondering, Banner Drive at Merit near Coit Road south of the 635.  You're welcome.

Weird Wednesday: A Cure For Brain Cancer

There's a lot of weirdness going around this Wednesday. To begin with, we have some whack job taking over the Discovery Channel offices because the channel encourage human breeding. Here's a link to his rant--apparently MySpace took his page down, so if you were trying to use the earlier link, sorry about that. We also had a psycho-stalker ex-girlfriend get herself stuck and actually die while trying to break into her former boyfriend's house by way of the chimney. I mean, there's no end to the possible jokes here, but I'll stick to "If Santa can do it, I can do it." But the weirdest by far is this one: A brilliant batch of masters of the obvious have just published an article in the Journal of the AMA, announcing that if you have bits of you lopped off, your risk of dying of cancer in your missing bits drops to zero. I mean, it's hard to imagine how we ever managed twenty thousand years of civilization without knowing that.

Seriously, look at the article. (Oh, sure, you can look it up on CNN or U.S. News and World Report, but let's just be hardcore and look at the real thing, shall we?) Honest to God, there it is, right under "Results": " No breast cancers were diagnosed in the 247 women with risk-reducing mastectomy compared with 98 women of 1372 diagnosed with breast cancer who did not have risk-reducing mastectomy." In short, if you don't have breasts, you can't get breast cancer. Wow. I mean, I'm just in awe.

All joking aside, though, "This is the first study to show that this risk-reducing surgery can extend the life of women," says Virginia Kaklamani, an associate professor of medicine at Northwestern University, who wrote an editorial that accompanied the study. Which is more than a little upsetting to yours truly. Women who carry a "mutant" version of a gene called BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 are much more likely to get breast or ovarian cancer than women who don't. That's a statistical probability. But just because one has an increased risk of getting cancer, does that mean one should have the offending bit removed? And when? Should we DNA-screen every infant and start with the double mastectomies when they're six months old? Or wait until they're twelve? Is twenty-four okay, or has the "mutant gene" already started to wreak havoc by then? When is it the least traumatic to have a body part chopped off? Would you rather lose your leg at five or fifty?

To make this even more tricky, the "mutant" genes tend to be carried by Jewish women of Eastern European origin at a rate 10 times higher than in the rest of the population. "Me of IA" nailed it when he or she commented on the U.S. News & World Report forum,

"Voluntary" sterilization. Implementation is based on a woman's submission to the authority of the medical doctor (and his appeal to her fear of death). 'Jewish women with Eastern European roots should get tested.' If testing is recommended to them, is sterilization encouraged? Sterilize the Jews?!?!?! Holy mother of god! They're mutilating and sterilizing women, and openly admitting the genetic motive! If that's not whitewashed genocide, nothing is.

Thank you, Me of IA. That's exactly what I was thinking.

I gotta wonder if doctors would be quite so quick to recommend this same "risk-reducing surgery" to their male patients with a high risk of testicular cancer. Not an issue, right? You don't need balls to live, do you? And what's a little sack of tissue hanging from your scrotum when compared with extending the lives of men? Good God, DNA screen the dudes and start chopping at age twelve. Better safe than sorry and all that.

Come to think of it, I just thought of a cure for brain cancer. Let's start with Virginia Kaklamani. Oh, whoops. Too late.

Gay Marriage - In Texas? Now There's a Friday Fright...

Playing in the background: Bird twitters. It's cool enough to leave the door open.

Well, the latest thing to shake up the Metroplex is a judge's recent ruling granting a gay couple a divorce. Upon first glance it does seem pretty radical, but in the end, I'm thinking not so much. The judge did state, though, that she thought Texas's ban on gay marriage (which was approved by both voters and legislature by some ridiculous margin, like 75% in favor) violated the United States Constitution. What she cited was the Full Faith and Credit Clause, Article IV, Section 1, which states, in part, that "full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records and judicial proceedings of every other state."

I was waiting for somebody in the whole gay-marriage debate to finally get to that. According to the Full Faith & Credit Clause, if you're married in one state, you're married in all states - that's why you don't have to get re-married every time you move. The Defense of Marriage Act, a federal law passed under George W.'s reign of error, says that states can freely ignore the clause where gay marriage is concerned. This judge is saying, uh, not so much. I think she's right, but maybe not for the reasons she's stating.

Warning: I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one at work, and I don't know jack about family law, except what I've picked up in passing. So don't take anything I'm about to tell you as gospel. Check it out yourself. Your local library is a great place to start.

See, a gay couple can get married in a handful of states (we got married in Cali in 2008, right before they banned it again) but in order to get divorced, you have to live in a place. It's called being "domiciled" and it's mainly to do with children, but it's what they base the whole case on. This is why you hear about people moving to Nevada to get divorced in a hurry, say. I think you only have to be domiciled for three weeks before you can file for divorce in Nevada. Most states it's six months to a year.

Now, it goes without saying, if you got married in one state and move to another, you need to divorce in that second state because that's where you're now domiciled. But what if you're gay and the state you moved to doesn't recognize your marriage as valid? Can you then not get divorced? Do you have to move to a state that does recognize gay marriage in order to get divorced? Or can you just walk away, secure in the knowledge that your state doesn't recognize gay marriage so you're just free and clear? (Course, your partner could move back to the state where you were married, sue you for abandonment, and you could lose your shirt, but I digress.)

The judge was addressing this very problem when she granted the divorce. She was essentially saying, "It doesn't matter where this marriage was entered, or by whom. They live in Texas now and we need to divorce them if they want to divorce." So it's really not as radical as it sounds. I do find it interesting, though, that Gov. Perry wants to appeal the ruling. I'm pretty sure he doesn't have standing to do so. I think domestic-relations cases can only be appealed by the parties involved. But again, I know jack about family law, so I could be wrong.

Speaking of scary domestic relations, this week's Friday Fright is The Mist, based on the novella of the same name by "Big Steve" King. This is a truly terrifying movie, but not the way you might think. The story involves a bunch of people who are trapped in a supermarket when an eerie mist swallows the town and, who knows, maybe the entire Eastern seaboard. Outside in the mist are, well, monsters. They show up and do what monsters do--eat people, spit venom, hiss a lot, etc.--but the really scary creatures in this movie are the human beings in the store.

As the situation deteriorates, people behave badly, mobs are formed, fights break out and -- nah, I better not tell you anything else. Except that even after some of our intrepid few escape the store, their troubles are not over. This movie will haunt you for days. Half monster movie,half brooding meditation on the thin veneer of civilization, The Mist asks us what we really believe, if our values can be so easily tossed aside in a crisis. As a person, as a parent, as a community, when is the right time to give up hope? And if it turns out that you gave up hope too soon, what do you do then? Four stars (AWESOME). Arachnophobes, avoid this one. Everyone else, check it out.

...And He Is Us, Part II

Playing in the background: The soothing chuggity-chug of the washing machine
Meters swum today: None, 1300 yesterday.

Y'all may find this hard to believe, but once in a while I get negative comments on this blog. Some people even call me bad names. Check out the response to ...And He Is Us, below. Oh, wait, you can't because it's not there. I deleted it. And before you jump all over me for stifling interfaith discussion and discouraging conflicting opinions, let me just say that I had three (count 'em, three) very good reasons for deleting the comment. One, there's a big difference between enlightened discussion and throwing more fuel on the fire of conflict. If you want to engage in enlightened discussion, you should probably not start off your first sentence by calling the other person an idiot. Two, this here's a religious establishment and y'all need to act respectable. Three, this is my blog and I'll delete whatever I want. You wanna call me names, do it on your own blog.

That aside, though, this person did have a couple of valid points. One of them was that you don't often see Buddhists or Catholics or Seventh-Day Adventists hijacking airplanes (though one wonders what faith D.B. Cooper professed; I'd suspect some stripe of Protestant, but I could be wrong.) In fact, El Al, the state airline of Israel and by far one of the safest in the world, admits to practicing 'racial profiling' in its screening of passengers - specifically singling out young Islamic men. They can get away with that, in part because they're a small airline (this level of security is ridiculously labor-intensive) and in part because they're based in Israel, where the laws are different. This would never fly, so to speak, in the States. That rotten ol' "all men are created equal" thing in the Declaration of Independence is still causing trouble after 230 years.

Which leads us to this person's second point about the additional layer of personal responsibility one should be required to assume in a post 9-11 world. The person points out that if a family of white Southern Baptists had a discussion about airline safety prior to take-off, we never would have read about it. Anybody getting on an airplane in traditional Muslim dress should confine his or her conversation to English-language discussions of bunnies, flowers and Shakespeare. (The sonnets, not those violent plays.) Furthermore, this person says that the airline shouldn't have said, "We're sorry, here's your free tickets"; it should have said, "We're not sorry, you're banned for life and we're suing you for the cost of diverting the plane and delaying everybody for two hours."

Look: Airline pilots have always had wide discretion to decide who flies aboard their aircraft. Pilots have been known to remove people from flights for everything from making jokes about drunk pilots (following an incident at Heathrow, London involving a United Airlines pilot from the States) to wearing provocative buttons to not wearing enough clothing. The safety of everybody aboard is the most important concern, and the joking half-naked button-wearing passengers of the world can't be allowed to open emergency-exit doors in flight and stuff like that.

In this instance, the pilot did what the pilot was supposed to do; he (or she) reported the incident to the TSA. The TSA did what the TSA was supposed to do; it investigated, called in the FBI, and then determined that there wasn't a problem. The airline then did what it was supposed to do; it apologized and gave the family new tickets. The point of my post, which seems to have been lost on my commentor as well as the general public, is that it's not the airline that should be apologizing. In fact, let's put that in bold caps. THE AIRLINE SHOULD NOT BE APOLOGIZING. THE TWO TEENAGE GIRLS WHO OVERHEARD THIS NON-EVENT AND BLEW IT ALL OUT OF PROPORTION ARE THE ONES WHO SHOULD BE APOLOGIZING.

I can't imagine it's ever a good idea to jump on an airplane and begin a loud conversation about how Dan Simmons' last book, The TERROR*, really BOMBED and he better get himself a new editor or else he's gonna CRASH. But that's not what happened here. Nor here: This guy was told he couldn't get on an airplane unless he covered up a t-shirt** with Arabic script. (He sued and was awarded $240,000.) A man on a Canadian airliner was removed for praying before takeoff. He wasn't even Muslim; he was a Haisidic Jew. And in one celebrated incident, six Islamic imams who were removed from an airplane in Minneapolis were the subject of conspiracy theories that they staged the whole event as a publicity stunt. Right. I'm sure this mom and her son got themselves tossed off an airplane to raise money for autism research.

I always pray before takeoff. What should I do if somebody next to me thinks Om mani padme hum means "Death to America" in Sanskrit? Do Buddhist monks make other travelers "uncomfortable" because they're obviously wearing "religious dress"? How about Orthodox priests? They look pretty suspicious. Plus, they have long beards. Just like imams. Should we go past Flying while Muslim/Russian/Buddhist/Seventh-Day Adventist/Whatever to the much simpler Flying While Different and just get rid of everybody who isn't white, Christian and normal?

I like my idea better. Let's all just take a deep breath and relax. Om mani padme hum.

*Incidentally, I loved that book. I do think it could have been a couple hundred pages shorter, though.

**The T-shirt read, "We will not be silent." You gotta wonder if he would have received more or less money if the shirt had read, "Fly the Friendly Skies."

...And He Is Us

Playing in the background: The sonorous tap-tap-tapping of a hammer on nails
Meters swum today: None. (1.4 km for 2009.)

Once in a while I wonder about us. We humans, I mean. For all we're brilliant beings and the apex of evolution (unless you count octopuses, and I, personally, do; next time around I wanna be a cephelopod) we still do some of the stupidest things imaginable, lots of which flat-out threaten our survival as a species. This isn't that kind of post, though. This is about more mundane stupidity: Tossing people off an airplane because of their conversation.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for tossing people off airplanes. Drunk and disorderly? Toss 'em off. Sick with something communicable and really dangerous, like multiple-drug-resistant tuberculosis? Toss 'em off. Parents of small kids who haven't bothered to explain to said kids how one behaves in a situation where one is trapped with dozens of strangers in a small metal tube or don't bother to restrain their little darlings from running up and down the aisles, kicking the seat in front of them and screaming at the top of their lungs? Fergodsake, toss 'em off. I'd be for tossing off the kids, too, but by and large it isn't their fault. We're not born knowing how to be polite in public. We have to be taught. Woe unto us if the people we're born to can't be bothered.

No, what I'm talking about here is booting people who aren't causing any problems off an airplane because you don't like their conversations, their skin color, the way they dress or the language they happen to speak. What I'm talking about here is this Muslim family of nine, on its way to Orlando for a religious retreat, that got kicked off an airplane for the crime of (gasp!) talking about where it's safest to sit:

Officials said two teenage girls sitting nearby became alarmed when they heard Sahin remark that sitting near the engines would not be safe in the event of an accident or an explosion. The girls told their parents, who told a flight attendant, AirTran officials said.

Okay, let's back that up a sec. Hands up who's ever had a conversation about airplane safety. Hands up who's ever had a conversation about airplane safety on an airplane. I thought so. I mean, where else do you discuss airplane safety, a frick'n city bus? All you have to do is pick up the cute little card they stick into the seat pocket in front of you to start a discussion about airplane safety. Myself, I worry about all the things people don't discuss. Like why you shouldn't try to take your carry-ons in the event of an evacuation (the bags hinder the evacuation, and people die) or why you shouldn't inflate your life vest until you're in the water (the life vests are big and bulky, they make it hard to see, they hinder the evacuation, and people die). Look, I know airplane crashes are extremely unlikely, but I've been in several near-disasters and I can tell ya, you need to know what to do in those situations and why. The way you find out what you need to do is to listen to the nice flight attendant doing the demo, reading the little card, and (gasp!) talking to people.

I better back up a sec. My dad flies a light plane, a four-seater one-engine job. He's an ex-Air Force pilot and he taught students for years. If Mom happened to be busy and Dad had a lesson to teach, me and my sister went along for the ride. Among the many things that went wrong; the alternator died on us, we landed without power (several times), one of the students did an unauthorized barrel roll (that was fun, actually); the door popped open at 5,000 feet and we caught ice outside of Heber, Utah and landed sans radio or lights in the dark of night. And one time we almost ran over a coyote but that was kind of my fault. What I'm trying to say here is, big commercial airliners are safe. Stuff like this hardly ever happens. Besides, it all happened to me and I'm still in one piece.

Back to this family, though. It's hard to argue that they got tossed off the airplane for any reason other than their appearance and their conversation. That sucks rocks. If anybody should get tossed off an airplane because of their conversation, it's the half-naked blonde bimbos on the way back from Spring Break who loudly extoll the virtues of oral sex with Tim, or was it Jim, on the beach at Corpus Christi to the entire airplane, whether they want to hear it or not. Or the drunks on their way to Vegas who keep doing high-fives and waving their shirts over their heads to look cool. A Muslim family in religious dress, on its way to a religious retreat, just does not fit into this category.

The FBI and the Homeland Security officials who responded to this non-incident were, by all accounts, professional and polite. The airline, AirTran, has apologized and refunded the tickets to the family, which is only right. Still, I don't think it's fair to blame the airline or the officials. The people responsible for this fiasco are the two teenage girls, who "became alarmed," and their parents, who over-reacted to a single reported snippet of conversation (hearsay!), got freaked out because the people who were having the conversation Didn't Look Like Them, and ended up violating the civil rights of nine people, to say nothing of delaying everybody else for hours. Happy frick'n New Year to you, too.

So there you have it. When it comes down to bad behavior of the human species, in the end we can blame only ourselves, our own prejudices and irrational fears and unwillingness to just let things be what they are. I hope the teenage girls are good and embarrassed. I hope the parents are having a long hard look at themselves. I hope so, but I'm pessimistic. We keep doing this shit. Us, we humans, the whole planet. If I can figure out who's representing these people, I may just send them a written apology. I think they're owed one. Not by the airline, by us. We humans, the whole planet.