Muddy Dust on the Windshield

Posted on by Kari Kopnick

18485327_10154832302689125_5606031839612231471_n.jpgI drove to San Diego yesterday, roughly a three hour round trip during a quiet weekday. The sky was clear blue and the sweeping turns with nothing but ocean in view made me smile, right there, alone in my car.

The podcasts I chose for the drive were about resilience and connection: two things that aren’t always easy for me. Coming home I was struck, maybe loosened by the wise words of sages or the beauty of this earth. It was as clear as the dirt on the windshield, the spray of the ocean muddying the dust of the hills: this–the connection of earth, sky, planet, people, animals, ocean– is everything.

There is not you and me. No I and thou. There is not a right and a left or a right and a wrong. There is just us. All of us. ALL of us.

We are here, together, for better or for worse. I cannot separate my air from yours, clean water from dirty, it all flows downstream eventually, mingles with what I have breathed in and you have breathed out.

We are one.

I pray for you and me, for our earth and our leaders; both great and wretched. Because there are not winners and losers; we are all them. We are all those people. We are one.

It’s almost too simple. We are one. May we remember this as we fight for justice and equality and clean air and clean water and for people to be awakened to what is right and good instead of what will bring the most money and power. May we remember. May we remember.

We are one.

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Hello? Hello? Is Anyone THERE?

Posted on by Kari Kopnick

I can only imagine what it was like. A new and loud device was installed in the house. It had it’s own table maybe with a beautiful lace doily, just to brighten it up or maybe it was on the wall–you know, with those early adopters. The young people in the home were excited. But the folks who had done just fine, thank you, without one–well, they were not so happy. old-phone.jpg

I know my mom, who was born 11 years after women got the vote, grew up without a phone in the house when she was young.

I know that now she’s an avid Facebook user and can text better than any other person in their 80s, except maybe my hero Senator Dianne Feinstein. Dianne can do anything, including getting a pacemaker and being back at work two days later, but….I digress.

But still. Not everyone adapts. Not everyone gets used to the new things like my mom. Electric lights over gas lights? Electric typewriter over manual? Running water over a hand pump. OK, not that one. Everyone likes that one. But when the telephone came along, I know that not everyone was happy.

It’s like that with social media. Today. Now. With people who should know better.

You cannot post a big, loud, statement that brings huge commentary without curating the comments and spinoffs. If you’re going to make an inflammatory tweet, or Facebook or Instagram post, you have to stay in the conversation.

I am absolutely certain that there were phone calls that went along the lines of a loud lecture and ended with a click of the receiver. I’m sure that sometimes there was not a conversation. There was the delivery of a message. Click. That’s it. Period.

When people told that new telephone user that you were supposed to stay ON the telephone to have some back and forth with the person you had reached out to communicate with; that it was rude and just not acceptable to just holler your statement into the telephone and then hang up, folks didn’t understand. They said “when I write a letter, there’s no back and forth” or “that’s just what you think, this is how I am doing this” there might have been some frustration. Some angst.

That’s what I see today. On social media.

New users, or newish users will throw out an inflammatory statement that brings about hundreds of comments, some downright nasty, and they will just stay the hell out of it.

“I said my piece, I’m out.”

But they’re not. On social media you can’t just post and then check out. When you dump a big, explosive thing onto social media and then just let the flames build, that’s your fault. You did that.

If you don’t want to curate and tend, then do not post. It’s that simple. You don’t have to continue to engage. Lord knows sometimes silence is the most powerful message. But you have to at least answer questions and respond when someone points out abusive trolls and inflammatory language. That’s the bare minimum.

Today I removed an inappropriate comment from a post I made on Facebook. It was a comment that made no sense, by someone who was not a friend or a friend of a friend. They assumed when I said GA I meant Georgia, when almost anyone who knows me at all knows that I am going to New Orleans for an org’s General Assembly–GA. So, not worth engaging. I removed the comment and changed the privacy to Friends. Because who cares?

Later in the day I was tagged in a pretty inflammatory comment about the emerging candidates in our upcoming congressional primary on our district Indivisible Facebook page. Yes, I had to respond to that. I am a huge fan of one candidate (GO TEAM LAURA!) but this page is not the place to campaign or disparage one of the other candidates. So I took some time to reflect and carefully craft my response. I would not have even looked at the comment if I were not tagged, but I was. So I did. And I responded as best I could. Flames doused, tempers cooled. All good.

That’s current common decency. That’s polite public discourse. That is how we behave. Or how responsible, caring, people respond.

We do not write explosive commentary and then check out. That, friends, is not OK.

If you are going to write something important on social media, you must stay in the conversation, at a minimum to reduce the harm you may cause, at best, to bring meaningful dialogue and discourse.

The White Mamas

Posted on by Kari Kopnick

Middle aged, middle class, white woman from the midwest. Biggest demographic group around, right? Right.

Except for one thing.

No one in my world understands what it is like to be white and have children who are not white, not really, no one but other white mamas of brown babies.

When my husband finally stopped running hard and fast from his identity as a transracially adopted Asian man it was the loneliest I’ve ever been. My story was such a tiny slice of life, no one else had gone through standing on the sidelines while their spouse stormed and railed like a banshee against all he had been taught and all he knew.

Until I found a comment on an old blog; someone else who had been through this. She gave her email address and invited other spouses of Asian adoptees to reach out to her. By the time I did, her marriage had ended. But we’ve remained Facebook friends for years now. When something comes up for me, she’s on it. No one else would understand what his business trip to Japan would mean for me, but she does. Still. Long since re-married and moved on in her own world, she gets it. She’s the mama of a Hapa kid, trying to do the very best she can.

I’ve met other white mamas of children of color over the years, and when the Trump team and their explicit racism claimed the presidency, I needed the other mamas more than ever. We started a group and a Facebook page. It’s a whole thing. But it sure wasn’t the start.

Years and years ago, I met one stalwart mama of mixed race kids.  I think it was through a blog she had about raising mixed race kids; curly kidz. She was a fierce powerhouse. I can’t remember if she commented on my blog or I commented on hers. I do remember we were frustrated with the big systems in our shared faith, Unitarian Universalism, around kids who are mixed race.

It must have been not long after my son was given the option to sit in the circle of white folks or the circle of people of color and my boy, a proud Asian son of his proud Asian father who listed himself as Corean (with a C, there’s a story there….) on his Myspace profile, caucused with the white folks. I didn’t know what to think or do or how to react. It seemed like something was very wrong, but of course I wasn’t THERE, I just heard about it later.

I think I wrote a blog about wondering if they’d take the queer kids and tell them to choose gay or straight and if they weren’t able to pick a circle, would then tell them to sit in the group that society sees them in. Yeah. Not a lot of nuance there from me. But she got it. Mama instinct is powerful. She understood.

This was the start of a nice white-mama-of-kids-of-color Facebook friendship. I watched her kids grow. I watched her fight like hell for justice and against white supremacy, white privilege and racism. I watched her kids break her heart and drink all the milk in the fridge.

On Sunday I learned that she’d been hit by a car while riding her bike. And died.

Funny how you can know someone only online but their loss feels really real. If you know Cyndi Whitmore, or you are a Unitarian Universalist or you are the white parent of your own children of color, or you know if you’re just a human–say a little “thank you” prayer that this woman lived, once. And maybe, if you’re so moved, join me in chipping in to help her very young adult son manage this next stage of family life.

May we remember how blessed we are to live in such a time of connection and to remember how short life can be.

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