One Snow Globe Indivisible

I had a discussion yesterday with a Facebook Stranger. The kind of discussion that, even when you enter with good intentions, seems to become agitated and end in a scramble for the last word. Preferably a resounding, clever last word as you attempt to leave the conversation with a self-satisfied feeling you never do quite feel. This discussion ended differently and gave me hope that people can still communicate with one another productively in these divided times across the greater American snow globe.

I commented on the post because the scene it depicted touched me deeply. It also troubled me, because I could imagine how it would play out if it were shot from another angle. The post told the story of two boys from a rough neighborhood, one who was talented at football and ultimately made it to the NFL, and one who was not, who worked at McDonalds and then joined the military. This post is timely in America, as football season comes spiraling into the middle of our mutual playing field. And unless somehow you avoid all contact with people both in your actual presence and on your devices, the words flag and kneel are causing some sort of reaction for you.

Take one of the scene, as posted by a Facebook Stranger: Boy One, the NFL player, kneels in protest before the flag as the national anthem plays. He has no idea how fortunate he is, and he owes it all to Boy Two, the soldier, who once in a while catches a game from a war-torn country far away as he risks his life defending that flag. I watched it unfold with a weight on my heart because it’s true, there is no fair comparison between football and war, and we watch football on Sunday (and Monday, and Saturday, and Friday night, or not at all) because we are free and safe to do so.

I’ve never been one to enjoy choosing sides. As a child I avoided eenie meenie miney mo moments because someone was always going to be You-Are-NOT-It! As a grown up I still want us all to get along in one big happy group. It’s not a realistic wish, but it does lead me to examine the sides of an issue, wanting no one to be dismissed as not it. While my first reaction to the kneeling protesters was to see them as clearly disrespectful, I started searching for what they had to say about their reason for kneeling, which led me to dialogue about it with a Facebook Stranger, trying to defrost the view from my snow globe into his.

I saw take one, and I wanted to show him take two because the weight on my heart presses with equal force when I imagine it: two boys from a rough neighborhood, looking for a way to make their lives better and finding the opportunities frighteningly few. One is handed the idea that his athletic ability can save his life; the other is not an athlete and instead is handed the idea that the military can save his. It wasn’t the life either of them dreamed of, but it was the one available. We see these boys as opposites, but are they really?

I told him about a Netflix documentary series I’ve been watching called Last Chance U, with athletes scouted into a community college football program scratching and scrambling their way toward the NFL. It has given me glimpses into the places they come from, one heartbreaking reality after another. Lingering in my mind was the boy from a small Florida town where people are “going in circles,” who watched his mentor, a junior league football coach, get shot. He held his 3-year-old nephew and looked into the camera, eyes dark with responsibility, “Ain’t nobody moving up, unless I move up." His football story runs parallel to those on a reddit feed full of comments from people found by recruiters and given the military as their way out. Honorable as that choice is, many admit to making it because they didn’t want to fall into dangerous patterns that make ends meet in tragic ways. They have family counting on them and adding to the pressure, the whole country is counting on them too. 

In this land of opportunity, it seems to me there should be many choices that lie between football and war, no matter what neighborhood you’re raised in. True, America is full of opportunities, but how many of us know young people who need to be shown the way, redirected, pulled back, gently nudged forward? My sons had choices and more importantly, they had people to show them how to find and consider the options. People who had resiliency and stability, who cared about them personally, not only as scouts or recruiters care.

Boy One and Boy Two live in this country, but there are many, many more who are Boy Three. They aren’t athletic, they don’t cross the path of a military recruiter, they aren’t good in school, they don’t have adults able to meet their basic needs let alone show them options for their lives. They repeat a cycle. They die needless, violent deaths or trudge in an out of incarceration and the pain of their lives paves roads going nowhere. It’s for Boy Three that Boy One is kneeling. And Boy Two supports him. In an interview with more than a dozen black veterans from WWII to Afghanistan, all of them expressed reverence for the flag they served, and all of them but one said they thought of the kneeling as exactly what they fought for and didn’t feel disrespected by it at all.

These thoughts I shared with a Facebook Stranger, and he told me he believes take two is true. He also stood firm in considering kneeling to be a display of poor character. Any disrespect of our flag is, in his words, a disgrace. He wants instead to see players use their platform doing concrete things to make a difference in the off-season, being an active example for the kids who look up to them. He passionately believes in respect for the flag that flies over our freedom and the sacrifices made to keep it waving there. I believe in it too; In my snow globe I was raised with that respect firmly planted in the secure ground of a safe and happy upbringing. I mourn the shadow that has fallen over my sun bright patriotism, miss the uncomplicated tears that filled my eyes when the anthem played and the flag was raised. It’s so easy to turn away from those who have cast that shadow with their kneeling. But I can’t quite turn away. I still cry when the flag is raised but the tears are complicated tears now because some of them are for the circumstances from which grew what he labeled poor character.

This issue is a raging one, a freezing force across the country, but at the end of my discussion with a Facebook Stranger, I know if the two of us were in charge we would reach a compromise on how to go forward. I thanked him for the discussion, he told me he applauded me for taking the stance I’ve chosen and stated strongly that all voices speaking out on this topic should be heard and respected. We ended with “Good talking to you.” If we can do it, another two and another two can do it. America can do it. One snow globe indivisible.

Perspective:  Let America Be America Again

Hope:  Let's Listen Together

Headlamps

If you happen to be people of the Snow Globe, let me explain a great mystery. Those twin bobbing lights on Notus Road at 7:30 p.m., like headlights but no, too high to be headlights, those are us. Tom and I. Walking at quite a perky pace with headlamps on our heads. He thinks it’s not only practical, but clever. He’s always wanted a reason to buy me a headlamp. Better yet, matching headlamps! His, however, stays nicely in place over his no-nonsense Carhart beanie. Mine struggles to stay still over my busy hair which is covered by a shifting variety of hats from my soft-as-a-cloud crocheted hat to my left-over-from-Halloween cow hat. Usually it is sliding down over my eyes. This is an annoyance I gamely endure to support my Love in his fitness mission. Tom has had heredity hypertension and high cholesterol since high school, like his dad, and then just before Christmas he was diagnosed with diabetes.

He tells people his doctor called him Fatty and told him to get out of his office, which gets a chuckle from most. But what the doctor really said was “take an Aspirin every day so you don’t have a heart attack until we get this under control,” which does not get a chuckle from me. In fact, I swallow a bit of panic every time I hear the bottle of Aspirin chink-chinking in his coat pocket and I have a collection of stashed Aspirin bottles myself, just so one is always at hand.

Walking quickly seems as manageable a way as any to out distance panic, and typical of Tom, we haven’t stopped there. He processed the news himself first, and by the time he shared it with me he had a membership at the YMCA, an appointment with a dietitian and a personal trainer, a Fitbit, and a plan to lure me with new workout clothes. Do you realize how expensive workout clothes can be? Even more so at the beginning of the year, when so many of us have made a resolution involving our health and we need moisture-wicking, figure trimming, support lending, speed enhancing gear to keep that resolution. Apparently, there must be added benefit if said gear is electric green or intensely coral, because to find understated colors in our sizes at any local store or across the world wide web was a pre-challenge to the challenge.

Anyway, we’re finally outfitted and working out, being proactive and positive. I mostly manage to shovel away the feeling of being stuck in the center of the Globe, the snow falling around me in the form of a fear named diabetes. It helps that at the YMCA we encountered a favorite used-to-be employee from our gas station, who now enthusiastically teaches water fitness classes. We also chatted with our former neighbor, a young basketball star from the Globe and recently returned college graduate. She teaches people how to master the fitness machines. They make the YMCA feel down right homey.

I’ve always thought I’d be a good fitness person, after all I took aerobics for college credit. I lost all the baby weight from my first child with a devotion to Cher’s exercise video on VHS. I actually and honestly enjoy yoga, Power Yoga mind you, if only on PBS. I fully expected to be good at working out. This is not the first time I’ve felt smugly more qualified than Tom for an undertaking I was in favor of. I should know by now I am usually wrong, given the skiing-actually-sucks incident and the West Coast Swing tangle up, both things he tried because I begged, only to discover he was infinitely better at it than I. So it shouldn’t have surprised me, three weeks in, to find myself in the closet one morning, having crawled there in determination to start my day only to find I was unable to quite get up off the floor, due to my lower back being not a fan of some unspecified thing I did at the Y the night before.

Not a problem really. I’m walking almost completely upright again and he’s doing great at his workout, losing steady weight and feeling so much more energetic; He’s all about earning those fireworks on his Fitbit (although that damn thing has a graph and I seriously refuse to take part in certain activities that create peaks on the graph ever again unless it’s not on his wrist for goodness sake!). I’m certainly not ready to give in and let him buy me my own, try as he might, but I’m glad he has people. In and around the Globe are other people who get it, who can share their experiences and lighten the load.

Other people are one of the Snow Globe’s best features. More than once I have been on the edge of spitefully, hopelessly cooking and drowning in a fat filled cheesy lasagna paired with a whole loaf of butter-soaked garlic bread (oh, the carbs, carbs!) because my mind cannot process one more weird diabetic recipe with obscure ingredients. I mean, only so many times can you follow no less than three Wal-Mart employees around the produce department in search of shirataki spaghetti (low carb, low carb) because the mobile app says they carry it even though no one there has any idea what it’s made of or where it’s hiding. Carb, my friends, is a four-letter word. But some people in the Globe know this. One of them talked me off the edge via Messenger, by sharing how he kicked his diabetes into control with foods I can locate on my own. Another provides a manageable challenge by posting recipe links for the successful low carb dinners she cooks for her husband. If she can do it, then maybe I too can avoid death by lasagna.

Life is too good to let it end that way! Other people in Tom’s online support group are getting on with their good lives, and they're a humbling reminder of how little we have on our plates in comparison. We don’t have to continually prick the finger of a sobbing two-year-old who will live with a damaging disease his whole life. We are not battling physical limitations that make it nearly impossible to exercise, we are not without health insurance or good medical care. When I get angry because despite my best efforts to walk this path with my partner, I cannot share the burden of the nerve pain that keeps him awake at night, I turn to gratitude. I’m thankful for a strong and determined husband; I’m thankful there are people who understand; I’m thankful red wine has only 4 carbs per glass (thank-you, thank-you!), and I’m thankful for matching headlamps.