Crippled by Compassion

Changing hostile architecture

One of my best friends moved to Colombia to do a Spanish immersion program. While there she fell in love with it and decided to relocate for a while. A tourist visa turned into an apartment lease, and an apartment lease turned into what now looks to be a permanent life. Last month she got married, in Spanish, to a Colombian man.

His family is welcoming, she loves the culture, and she can do her job remotely. More importantly, even if she could bring her husband back here - which she can’t yet - men like him aren’t exactly safe. Not as long as ICE agents operate as a government-funded terrorist group.

Here in New England, a Colombian man was killed by ICE for fleeing in fear the other day. His last words reportedly being “I tried to stop” as his dying body was yanked out of the car, the man who shot him probably still not thinking of himself as a murderer.

But there’s citizen groups identifying ICE agents and they figured out who did this heinous thing. An ordinary looking white guy with a baseball cap brim rolled so tight it was trying to be a circle. And, surprise surprise, he’s got a history of violence and menacing behavior against the women in his life.

So many things are coming full circle, and it can be hard to watch. Canadian wildfires blotting out the sky, leaving me with subtle smoke-induced migraines, lights popping and zapping like fireworks before the nausea begins.

I eat too much ice cream, trying to stave it off, while noticing some animal has eaten all my blueberries before they’ve fully ripened, likely desperate in the heat.

Worms invade 99.5% of my plums and make them drop early. We may not get any this year. My peach tree makes only three peaches and two of them are stuck together, a double. But I see that they are large and ripe to the touch, a shade of orange and gold that rivals the crimson sun. I gather my children to pick them, making a big production for these few pieces of fruit. No sooner than I reach out to twist one off, a number of earwigs slither out. It takes a few moments of ick and offense to realize they have been living between the peaches, not actually in them. But their presence has nonetheless caused some superficial damage.

Undeterred, I cut the earwig’s portion off and we each take a bite, perfect and juicy. That’s got to be a metaphor for something.

Figuring out what damage is surface level and what is deep often takes more work (and more courage) than I think.

Top tier insanity regularly seems to count for more than mid tier talent.

Obstruction and criticism feels like a lighter lift than actually building anything.

Combine those things and it is obvious why it’s much easier for some to function like an earwig between somebody else’s peaches than it is to get out there and grow their own.

Meantime, I’m not having a hard time figuring out what to do with my life, but rather a hard time doing all the things I want to do with the one tired body and mind and set of responsibilities I’ve got. Maybe if there were three of me. Or one of me crazy enough to just obsessively commit to something.

But I find it’s hard to stay with a long thought long enough to go crazy for anything. Finish a summer read. Heck, even get out and water the plants.

I notice a favorite little potted maple tree of mine has died in the heat wave and I didn’t even pick up on it, as its’ orange leaves were shriveling while retaining color. I feel sad and guilty that I couldn’t keep such a beautiful thing alive. But it is true I have been prioritizing the lives of the humans I’m in charge of, and even if I wasn’t, the garden always seems to be left to sink or swim by mid July.

I update my resume in the air conditioned cafe at the Y. I work on a contract project. Have a couple impromptu meetings. Go home and fold some laundry that the baby quickly unfolds while I’m making the kids a snack.

I watch them eat out of one eye and seek petty distraction with the other, surrounded by crumpled toddler-sized t-shirts.

I open a link to a short video someone made, clips of a podcast interview with the city’s purchasing director, where she accuses everyone of yelling at her. Despite the edited background sad trombone, it could be seen as a fun summer gossip session between two women feeling loose and comfortable in an interview, giving some play-by-play on a past activity. It’s definitely got barfly vibes, but the type where you could sit down beside them and not have to feel bad about whatever trashy thing you wanted to say either. On some level that’s appealing. And that’s how the lowest common denominator gets you. Has you becoming an earwig among the peaches too.

When what you’d actually be joining in is financial impropriety, hosted by bigotry and fueled by racism. Trumper stuff. Because whether you’re into that or not, after you’re already hanging out with them, suddenly all you’ve got is denial and tepid excuses. False victimhood - the currency people live on when what they otherwise might be embarrassed about what they are really up to - becomes the modus operandi.

Perhaps that’s why we all get weird when we find ourselves momentarily mired in trashy situations. We first want to pretend to be above it. But none of us are. Not really.

So we need to recalibrate once in a while.

I find having a more defined sense of what is truly shameful and what isn’t can help, because lord knows people have tried to shame me for and with all kinds of things, and what I regret is letting any of it stick as a younger woman who felt I must be above reproach.

If I could send the Heather of two decades ago a brief message, it would be look at me today, still smiling, mostly fine, only one gold tooth in the back.

Despite what admonitions may be going around about the dangers of supposedly toxic empathy, whether it’s for the past or present self or others, I’ve learned that that too is an unrealistic worry. We never run a risk of being, as one far right-winger put it, crippled by compassion. Only called back to our values by it.

Yet to hear some people tell it, any level of caring is a feminine thing, and the natural state of a woman is somehow shameful, deranged, and very much embodied.

So when I see a couple people on Reddit mocking the purchasing director for having underarm hair and floppy upper arms, suddenly I feel defensive of her and am glad to see their comments get deleted. But I get that to certain types, they were already ready to jump on what they see as a dog whistle. As if, when Ann Mahoney talked about city finances at the last city council meeting and publicly told this woman “I’m a little bit embarrassed for you,” that she’d somehow gestured at all of her and made her body fair game too, rather than (and I believe this is a more accurate interpretation) simply referring to the financial ledger that this woman hadn’t kept and the subsequent on-the-record statements she’d made about it.

But women live our lives as fair game, even more so when another woman announces it, so I can see why the purchasing director felt wholly called out, if not outright yelled at.

Meanwhile I’ve been actually yelling at my family lately. With floppy arms and body hair so blonde that even my increasingly long middle-aged chin hairs are invisible, and half the time with my shoulder straps hanging off because the baby has learned how to undress me in search of milk.

I see some corners of the internet have decided that yelling is a form of violence. I don’t know who these people are, but where I’m from, violence is violence, and yelling is yelling. And my kids are clearly not frightened enough of me yelling at them to be doing the shit they should, fiddling around with stick-on jewels over getting ready for summer camp on time, sneaking crumbly snacks onto the couch in the living room, or biting me and laughing about it, again.

I take us all to the pool to cool off and burn energy, after changing into my swimsuit. I notice a few minutes later, while getting the children ready, that my husband has moved my things and my underwear are now out on a pool lounge chair, fully on display. I quickly put them away, pointing out to him that men’s underwear being left out is merely an eww, while women’s underwear being left out comes across as inappropriately sexual.

My husband laughs and apologizes for the exposed undergarments. I continue to think about how this is a metaphor for so many things. Women’s dirty laundry of all kinds gets handled different, as if it’s all we have, and at the same time are not allowed any.

I like your big belly, momma, my son interrupts, leaning on me. I used to live in there!

I thank both of them and then quickly catch the baby before she dives into the pool on her own, as if she were a fish.

Summer juggle is a term I heard for where we are right now, with camp and pool and feeding ourselves with sporadic takeout, giving up on midsummer home and garden projects that are too hot and smoky to do (while still making sure to put out the garbage on trash day because heaven forbid if you miss doing that in 90° heat).

This culture makes its’ mothers struggle with all the tasks, packing children into complex rubrics that somehow belong to us to maintain. It even makes parks hard to sit in when we have free time. I look at the most welcoming of them, equipped with benches or a few minimalist metal tables and chairs, set out on stone patios or sheets of hot turf grass, circling the unshaded playground equipment.

In weeks like this it can feel stark and blistering.

What if we built a park with community garden beds to tend, shaded hammocks to rest in, or built-in musical equipment where anybody, including adults, could make auditory art, have a little jam session?

But the way we plan our built environment leaves too much room for sterile lawns, or cars to hit cyclists, or opportunistic schoolbus mass surveillance companies to claim they care about our kids’ safety. And now there’s a whole industry plagiarizing our creative work while claiming to be making an app or a large language model that helps us.

AI is a dumbass, I tell a friend. An aggregator. I could have just made my best guess and then chugged a large bottle of water and been better off.

I suppose all cities and people in them get a bit agitated in hot summer weather, start having more irritable thoughts and impulsive actions. It’s either the lack of sufficient air conditioning or the excess of underboob sweat (what my brother indelicately refers to as swamp ass) that gets us so annoyed, and in New Orleans this typically means the summer murder rate goes up.

In New England the reaction thankfully seems a bit more muted, to where generally less work happens and everybody either goes locally to the cape or off on a more brag-worthy vacation, or both.

I’m doing neither, so when in the midst of these red sun vacation days, our city council president announced a summer fundraiser, I of course had to be there, sunburned and in a red dress. I even took a couple selfies in my front garden before I left, glad to wear some lipstick and get out for a bit.

The fundraiser was open to the public and had good attendance, with some decent little event snacks (meatballs, tiny chicken strips, mini egg rolls, spanakopita), but a couple people from a Facebook group came hungry for another kind of summer content instead. They arrived and stood outside, ready to cook up a variety of trouble that smelled more like the Westboro Baptist Church than breaded chicken fingers.

On its’ surface it didn’t look like much more than a self-filming influencer old enough to be the mother of a weirdo J6’r kid (who I’ve been told is an actual adult, despite his appearance and use of a scooter to get around) out there together with a sharpie and a stack of neon posters full of city-councilor-directed insults designed to annoy people.

Word soon spread that this duo was on a homemade sign spree out along the public street below, pulling an instigator moment, using petty hate as bait. The problem is that the bait worked as intended, and they then got to call it a “major protest,” while claiming their free speech had been violated, capturing and sharing negative reactions and their paper signs being removed by others (who, I might add, were also engaged in free speech).

People were in fact duly annoyed and kept yanking the signs down (one of them unfortunately deciding to improperly put the torn poster down a sewer grate rather than in a trash can), but it was the rudeness of the behavior that got people to act rather than the quality (or lack thereof) of the political critique.

I would not at all have been surprised if this kid pulled yet another sign from his oversized backpack (which was so big it made him look like a middle schooler) that said AnN MaHoNeY iS a du DoO HeAd in his off-kilter script, while acting like it was a profound and rightful act of public service.

I have been wondering for a while if anybody is being paid for this professional troll operation out of some campaign slush fund or suit pocket somewhere, as the woman filming sure treats this influencer nonsense as her full time job, posting multiple times a day, but I was left thinking it must not be very good pay if she can’t afford better henchmen or some real signs. Or maybe she is getting paid decent and just spends it on booze or purses or rent in Weymouth or something else equally expensive and is merely cheaping out on the hate page content. I don’t know.

I just know that my friend Mary got filmed flipping this kid the bird after she’d removed a poster from a telephone pole and he’d followed her to her car, admitting he’s already been stalking her online, calling her a socialist, taking a video of her and her license plate, and then playing the victim after she silently made a rude gesture at him and drove off.

When this hate group posted a screenshot of her giving the middle finger from her car, some Karen said See, it will keep popping up. Very unbecoming, especially if you belong to any local civic groups, they would be clutching their pearls right now.

I’m pissed on Mary’s behalf that she even has to deal with this, in part because it should be a time of celebration. I’d just connected her and my friend in Colombia over some technical nonprofit management details, and we’d had brief but awesome results collaborating together. Good things are happening for members of the community who need it most, and Mary is working on them.

It’s probably best I’m not online anymore because I might be taking the bait too and get on there like She literally just did a bunch of work for a food bank that feeds hundreds of people. It’s lettuces and cans of tuna that the civic groups she’s working for are going to be clutching, I assure you!

But then I see my least favorite Quincy cop (who I’ve now decided must have gotten an utterly botched heart transplant to be so heartless), not content with the existing level of poor behavior from his FB crew, kicking it up a notch by posting “she’s a big mouth loser from Philadelphia who went to BU but can’t do simple math.” So I text Mary and say “if Mr Obrien wants to see a bigmouth loser, he only needs to flip down his sun visor and peek in the mirror on his cop car.” Then I tell her “This is actually an awesome pic of you. I’m proud to know you 🤣. Your eyes are saying a bigger fuck you than your finger is haha”

I believe that if my friends get protested or called out (and even if I think they may have made a wrong decision), let me check to see if it’s because they are for or against something that is fostering cruelty and hurting people. What is their intention?

So clearly I think Mary is great, and would if I didn’t already. But I’d have flipped the bird at this trump hat kid if I was her too. Also, I’m tired of hypocrisy.

Some guy who makes too much money to be so miserable online then says I don’t know which pic wins the contest, the lil girl flipping the bird or the old bird throwing trash in the storm drain.

But clearly he didn’t mind his best lady friend giving a double middle finger to the whole city council while wearing a hat saying she loves Jesus, or hanging out with a January 6 Proud (of his anti-Semitic comments) Boy, a day after the latest heinous ICE murder in Maine, with a few mean signs so poorly done that you can pinpoint the change in font at the exact moment he realizes oh shit, I can’t fit the whole word on here, better write smaller!

I know the red hat crowd are a misery loves company crew, so hypocrisy isn’t a problem for them. They’d like each of us to feel as alone and pathetic as they do, even if they live at home with parents who beg them to do something useful, or under mountains of credit card debt, hoping their failure at life in late stage capitalism is somewhat masked as they wave their assholery around like a badge of honor and claim the ability to drag down whoever they want.

In the midst of this, I don’t want to feel bad for Anne Mahoney, believing she’s a strong women who can handle herself (and a room full of people while keeping a white suit jacket looking pristine), but if it had been my disabled brother, going outside with loyalty and love for me to confront some jerks holding a sign calling me phony, it would have been hard for me to keep my cool like she did, seeing him disrespected. As someone who also has a stroke survivor in my extended family, I’d be liable to be washing some blood off my suit jacket and out from under my nails if I saw anyone look at my loved one, lucky to still be alive, and say Notre Dame is missing it’s Humpback. (Also, in that movie, the hunchback is the hero. So clearly these weirdos need to brush up on their Disney classics.)

They play the victim and call others bullies, inventing a whole bully alliance. Meanwhile they love it when their leaders do things like shut down the Long Island bridge, so homeless people have to go…somewhere else. They don’t care about actual sewage being dumped into the harbor, but will call DPW about one paper sign put down a street drain because they hate the lady that did it. Rather than scramble to help a food bank, they’ll sit online celebrating the reduction in food stamps as some sort of liberation from government largess and dependency, not a callous throwing of vulnerable people into actual hunger and despair. They mock the disabled, the ethnic, and the feminine, relentlessly, while conspiracy theorizing and lying profusely, any chance they get.

But I suppose this petty two-person protest shows that if you can’t be a peach, you can at least be an earwig making its way between the peaches. And if you can’t be great, you can at least be available.

Though what did their availability really get them?

One vacuumed storm drain (that let’s face it, probably was full of discarded Dunkins’ cups and needed it anyway), while showing exactly who they are by calling the woman who threw a paper flyer down there (and also happens to be a recent ward 3 city council candidate) a bitch, demanding she face a large fine, and chanting lock her up!

And they got a couple days’ content for a hate page. Nothing else. That’s all they got.

I want to ask if it’s worth it, but I’m sure they think it is. And undoubtedly plan to do this again.

Anything to distract from the fact that in the richest country in the world, so much unnecessary harm is not illegal. But despite that or all the bird spikes and guns and uncomfortable seating in the world, they still cannot stop anyone choosing or needing to make a home among us, or from resting their own smoke-weary lungs, or adjusting their own eyes to the dystopian orange glow, as they figure out how to live here too. Finding those among us who will welcome them as friends.

No wonder the Proud Boys and the MAHA moms (and all the other names people have for these patriarchalists and their influencers and goons) are claiming to be scared and praying (or reading their tarot cards), backing ICE murderers while loudly trying to label the actual leaders of the present and future phony and clueless.

They can look around and see their powerlessness, and that nothing they’ve done has stopped newcomers or Asians or liberals or anyone else they want to vilify from calling Quincy home.

Meanwhile I’ve got friends who are changing things, improving this city in an inclusive way for ordinary human beings.

So, in these hot halcyon days, give me more women in white suit jackets, daring to run for office and call power to account. Give me more girls with cute hair, working to build food banks, pull down hate signs, and flip mean people the bird. Give me more disabled men defending their sisters. Give me more nerds counting the public dollars, calling for better parks and less perks. Give me more people from all walks of life asking for respect and accountability. Give me a whole friend circle that coalesces around and attracts and amplifies these types.

We can let malingerers stand on the street corner and be mad about it with their silly signs. Have those haters watch from outside again next time, and the time after that, until it slowly dawns on them that we are not crippled by their hate anymore than we are crippled by our own compassion. Instead we are learning to brush them off and keep doing what we are doing.

Perhaps with enough exposure to bright light they will slither away, almost as if they were never there at all, leaving the rest of us to enjoy the sweet summer fruits of our labor.