White Privilege

So. White privilege. I read a really great blog post about this, and I wanted to add my own two cents to the mix.

I’m white. Like whiter than white. But my children are Hispanic. Specifically, Mexican and Nicaraguan and indigenous/Native American. This puts me in a weird situation as far as discussing civil rights and racism, the same sort of situation as white parents who adopt children of color (and of course other parents of biracial children).

I support Black Lives Matter and similar groups trying to protect marginalized people in the US. As a child of the early 70s, I remember when race riots were still a topic of national discourse. Things seemed to quiet down in the 80s and 90s. That’s not to say that racism went away. It just got ignored again.

But then, oh lordy, we got ourselves a black President. People lost their minds. Obviously he had to be from Kenya because (apparently) that's the only place black people come from.

In my naïveté and privilege, I had sort of thought that Obama’s election signaled that racism in the US was on the wane. Boy was I wrong. The ugliness that poured out astounded me, and my view of what Americans are changed dramatically.

It’s hard to push back against the seething mass of hatred, fear, and anger that was unleashed following the 2008 election. My voice is small, and the volume of negativity has continued to get louder and more vicious.

I talked to my children, tried to educate them, and I became more mindful of my own privilege and how I could use it to help stem the tide. I know I will never understand or experience what African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics, and other marginalized groups have to deal with on a daily basis. The only way I could hope to relate is my struggles against the misogyny I’ve encountered in my life. But if I’m honest, which I should be, my socio-economic background has insulated me to a certain extent there, as well.

See, the thing with white privilege is that you grow up without having to fear for your life any time you leave the house. It has never occurred to me during a traffic stop that the police officer might shoot me if I said anything wrong. I’ve never walked to the store with the knowledge that some random vigilante could find me threatening and blow me away. When I’ve had to knock on a stranger’s door, it has never been with the fear that I would be seen as a threat and killed before I had a chance to speak. I’ve never had to fight to assert my right to live unmolested and safe. I’ve never had to prove that I matter.

I never expected to have to warn my children about the prejudice and aggression they will encounter because of their skin or their surname.

When Donald Trump rode down that ridiculous elevator and stood in front of the cameras, he chose to accuse Mexicans of rape and murder and insisted he would rid the country of these evil-doers. I’ll ignore for the moment that the vast majority of Mexican immigrants are hard workers, dedicated to their families and communities, and living lives that would make the average suburban white person weep.

The thing that sickened me most about that speech was that it signaled that racism was socially acceptable. Since that day, I have heard and seen more racism, bigotry, and intolerance than I think I had in my entire life up till that point. Because now we have this open culture of hate, and to our shame, a great percentage of our citizenry has jumped up on that wagon.

My oldest son told me once that he “feels white.” What he meant is that he has been sheltered and essentially accepted into the predominantly white environment due to our family’s financial advantages. He’s never been treated like a “lazy Mexican.” Even so, I had to warn him that there are many people out there who will remind him he’s brown, and that he might even miss out on job opportunities just because of the name at the top of his résumé. He didn’t believe me before the Trump speech. Now that he’s seen the aftermath, he realizes that it’s only too true. I hate that he had to have that revelation.

My youngest son asked me if Trump would deport his father. He is genuinely scared of this. He is proud of his heritage and cannot understand why people would hate his grandparents, his father, and him because of it.

As a white woman in the suburbs, I don’t know if I’m really qualified to talk about racism, but I think I need to anyway. I think we all need to. Because if it’s socially acceptable to let hatred and bigotry have a voice, then it should also be okay to speak out against it. So even though I’m steeped in white privilege, I’m not going to stay silent. My children will not stay silent. And I hope that at the very least, I can leave behind a legacy of descendants who will be unafraid to speak the truth.

Life on the Spectrum's Edge

This is long, serious, and personal. It has nothing to do with writing or books and everything to do with real life. I’ll understand if you choose not to read it, but I hope you will.

There are a lot of people out there who don’t understand the autism spectrum. That’s okay. There are a lot of us living with it who have a dodgy grasp on it, as well. That’s part of the problem – it’s such a wiggly, amorphous concept that trying to fully understand it is a lot like trying to nail Jell-O to a tree.

"Have fun with that."

Still, we need to talk about it, because 1 in 88 children today are diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, so not having some awareness of what “autism” means is a lot like not being aware that some people are born with red hair.

"It's so... not brown!!!"

So first, what’s with the spectrum? How come autism gets a spectrum? Shouldn’t a person either be autistic or not autistic? How can people who manage to function in society, hold down jobs, and have families claim to be autistic? How can those people possibly be facing the same challenge as Grandma Ruthie’s hairdresser’s son, who hasn’t spoken a word in twenty years? Does the spectrum just exist to give lazy people an excuse for blowing off important things? Or is it just doctors’ way of making autism fancier than other disorders?

"Care for some champagne with your diagnosis, sir?"

When you meet a severely autistic person, there is no question that their disorder is real. Human beings are quite capable in believing in a condition when there are physical manifestations that prove its validity. However, what many people do not understand is that autism is not a physical issue. Autism sits in the brain. It lives in the mind.

Now, I am in no way qualified to talk about severe autism and what that experience is like for the parents of severely autistic children. What I know, without question, is that it has to be an intensely difficult, exhausting, often discouraging, but sometimes miraculous experience. Non-verbal autistic people are blowing away audiences with their unexpected vocal talents, and through the tireless intervention of families, teachers, doctors, and friends, these people who could so easily be discounted and marginalized are having a profound impact on the people around them. Each of them can touch a person’s heart, even if they cannot tolerate being physically touched themselves. Each one of them can contribute to the world in their own unique way, whether on a large scale or small. They are not defective. They are not less. In so many ways, they are beyond the normal, and the world seen through their eyes is an awe-inspiring place. This is why it is so important for us to continue to build bridges of communication. We do not need to bring these people into our world – we need them to bring us into theirs.

I want to tell you about my son. I will call him Steve, since that would make him laugh. In order to talk about him, though, I first need to tell you a bit about me.

Mental illness seems to run in my family. Nothing exotic that involves drinking Kool-Aid or eating one's neighbors or anything, but it’s there. Along with a HUGE boatload of denial. When I was in high school, I told my parents that something was very wrong with me. They insisted that I was just “being dramatic” as teen-aged girls are wont to be. They were wrong.

I wound up struggling on my own with near-crippling clinical depression through the rest of high school, the entirety of college, and into my adulthood. The longer I went without the proper professional help, the worse my symptoms became. In my final year of school, my boyfriend was tying my shoes for me and delivering chapters of my thesis to my advisor on my behalf. I couldn’t have done it if you’d put a gun to my head – not even tying my own shoes. That was the year I finally got the help I so desperately needed, but anti-depressant drugs are tricky things, and again my boyfriend was there, peeling me off the ceiling when the doctors guessed wrong and reassuring me when I thought I would lose this battle for sanity.

I married him two months shy of my twenty-fourth birthday. My new husband had graduated college a whopping five days earlier. It was the late 1990s, and as many of our generation were discovering, the plentiful jobs we’d been promised were simply not there. I was working as a temp, though I was in a long-term assignment that soon afterward became a full time position. Neither of us knew what we wanted to be when we grew up, so when I discovered I was pregnant a year later, we found ourselves scrambling to define who we were as productive members of society. A mere twenty months after our wedding, Steve was born.

We were both thrilled and terrified. My husband had buried his own father just the day before the birth, and the entire family was emotionally wasted. I was shocked when it came time to leave the hospital, and the nurses just handed me this tiny, fragile human being and let us drive off with him. It was tempting to demand that they wait until a responsible adult showed up. Twenty-five hadn’t felt unbearably young until that moment.

As new parents do, we adjusted, learned, and second-guessed ourselves silly, and the years began to pass. Steve was in a nice daycare, my husband and I both had stable jobs, and my depression had receded to a whisper that was easy to ignore. And then the letter came.

It was from the director of Steve’s daycare. She advised us that Steve was no longer welcome to attend because his behavior made him “a danger to himself and others.” He was three years old.

Steve had had a meltdown, they told us. The children had been fighting over a popular toy, so the staff had removed it to a high shelf to resolve the matter. This had upset Steve more than anyone would have predicted, and he had lashed out, throwing his shoes and flailing around so much that he had knocked over a wooden bookcase. It had almost fallen on a child napping nearby.

We didn’t understand. Steve was sweet, kind, generous, articulate, and perceptive. The child they described was a monster. Our child – my baby – was a monster to them.

"Who, me?"

We found another daycare center. This one had more highly trained staff, and we kept them apprised while we began talking to child psychologists to try to understand Steve’s behavior. We thought it was our fault as parents, and that if a professional could just tell us how to fix it, Steve would be fine. But he wasn’t fine. He loved that daycare, but they weren’t equipped to handle him. One day, I was called to pick him up, and the director lowered the boom. Another rejection, except this time he was aware of it, and it hurt.

When I arrived at the center, I found him in the director’s office. He was in hysterics, crying over and over, “Help me, help me, Mommy. I can’t stop. I can’t stop.” My heart broke. It has been twelve years since that day, and I still cry when I think about it. My little boy was suffering, and I was failing him. I didn’t know what to do.

Neither did the specialists we consulted. We talked to everyone. We took him to the Cleveland Clinic for a battery of tests, including allergies, vision, hearing, and anything else they could think of. I paid his now full-time babysitter to drive with us to the All Kinds of Minds (now, Success in Mind) center in North Carolina to have him assessed by their team of specialists. We filled out more forms than I could have imagined, until my entire world was reduced to “strongly agree” and “somewhat disagree.” This went on for YEARS. It was not until he was in 3rd grade that he was diagnosed by a neurologist with ADHD, and the medications began.

The medicine helped, but not enough. Every year, the neurologist increased the dosage, looking to mask the symptoms and assuring me that I was being paranoid when I wondered if there wasn’t some other issue contributing to Steve’s abnormal behavior. When he was in 6th grade, the neurologist increased the dose again, and when I saw the pill, I wasn’t sure Steve was physically capable of swallowing something that size. I followed my instincts and didn't administer it.

We fired the neurologist. Steve’s new psychiatrist finally – after EIGHT YEARS of consultations and treatments – diagnosed him with high-functioning autism, which at the time was labeled Asperger’s. By continually increasing the dosage of his medication, the neurologist had actually put Steve at risk for heart disease. The psychiatrist also confirmed the ADHD diagnosis, and she added one more to the mix. Steve showed undeniable signs of anxiety disorder, and it was quite clear where that had come from.

6th grade was a nightmare. The public middle school assured us that they were equipped to work with Steve, but it soon became clear that this was a lie. His teachers continued to insist that he be responsible for tasks that he was not able to manage on his own. Rather than accommodating him or helping him, they began emailing me at work on an almost daily basis. They wouldn’t even speak to him directly to correct the behavior, instead choosing to report the infraction in real time to me at work. I just kept getting emails and phone calls and being summoned for meetings, in which they made it clear that these problems were a result of my failings as a parent. I should be making sure he did these things. Not them. Obviously, they could not be held accountable in the face of my flagrant inability to parent my child.

"You suck."

We now had a younger son – let’s call him Fred – who had started kindergarten that year. Because the Universe has a weird sense of humor, little Fred had also been kicked out of his daycare at age three and was diagnosed with ADHD. He would get over-stimulated and lash out, in one instance forcing the teachers to evacuate the classroom and restrain him to prevent any injuries to himself or his classmates. So I was now receiving emails and phone calls nearly every day from TWO schools. To say I was overwhelmed and desperate doesn’t even begin to cover it.

I worked in a law firm as a paralegal, and there was no way for me to continue working and parenting my boys. The longer I attempted to find a balance, the worse both areas of my life became. One day, I had a moment of real clarity, and I quit. I have been home for almost four years now. We eat a lot of ramen noodles.

One of the things we have always been aware of is Steve’s staggering intellect. This kid is flat-out brilliant. Any adult who sits down and speaks with him is completely blown away. There was no way I was going to let him fall through the cracks and waste all that beautiful potential and unique genius. I’ve kept talking to specialists, talking to him, and just being present. We found him a wonderful private school that boasted a one-of-a-kind integrated autism program, and he blossomed. After two years there, he was accepted to one of the most challenging private high schools in the area.

Today, Steve is a sophomore at that school. He is both thriving and struggling. We are beyond fortunate that this school understands that high-functioning autism isn’t just an excuse. The teachers and staff recognize the potential in him, and they bend and adjust to allow him to achieve. He is happy there.

However.

Steve began having crippling anxiety attacks that made doing his homework impossible, and occasionally interfered with his performance in the classroom. At first, we attempted to help him with a mild anti-anxiety medication, but when he began to exhibit signs of clinical depression, I was on the phone looking for a therapist without hesitation. I knew what this meant. I knew the cliff’s edge he was peering over, and I would not let him fall.

We have learned a lot from his therapy sessions. In order to make it a safe place for him to speak freely, I am not in the session with him, and his therapist does not share anything Steve tells him without Steve’s permission. One revelation was that Steve’s mind works entirely by association. This explains his flair for maths and languages. It was the source of his academic strength.

It was also his weakness. Steve’s memory associated homework with the trauma he experienced during that nightmare 6th grade year, and the only way to correct that would be to slowly replace the association with more positive memories. We’re still working on that. 

I am attempting to ignore the boiling rage at what that school did to my son. They took a child who already faced too many obstacles, and they broke him. Yep. Pure rage.

The psychologist spoke in awed terms about Steve’s intelligence and inventiveness. I suppose to the parent of a neuro-typical child it would be a source of pride. The level of brilliance the psychologist described to me would grind every PTA parent’s honor student bumper sticker to dust. And of course I am proud of everything that Steve has accomplished and the man he is becoming, but one fact remains. He is still dangerously depressed.

So this is my life. I work from home as an editor and author, and I advocate for my children. Fred needs speech therapy and is refusing to complete assigned class work. I’m emailing teachers and consulting with intervention specialists and trying to get him an orthodontist. Steve has to take anti-anxiety medication to even face making a list of his nightly homework, and I help keep the tasks small and manageable by parceling it out to him in tiny pieces, concealing the overwhelming whole. He was sent home yesterday at first period because his teacher saw he was too depressed to face the day. Other parents get calls from the school nurse. I get calls from the school counselor. I take a deep breath and call the psychologist and ask for an extra session. I call the psychiatrist to discuss adjusting his medication. I email the school to let them know how Steve’s treatment is changing and what new techniques we are trying.

This is the reality of autism. My son is on the high-functioning end of the spectrum. Unless you’re looking for it, it’s hard to notice the signs in his appearance or behavior. Like the depression that I know will never completely leave me, my child has an invisible burden, but he carries it with assurance and patience. He knows I understand, and he knows I’ve got his back. He also knows that not everyone will believe that his autism is real. He knows that some people will tell him to “just cheer up” and “stop freaking out.”

All I can do is keep the lines of communication open. I listen, support, and encourage. I am honest with him. Watching me accept and take pride in the weird, quirky person I am has taught him to do the same. He told me one day that he felt sorry for normal people who didn’t have a cool family like ours. I told him to be patient with them, because they didn’t see all the amazing things we could, and that made it hard for them to understand our world. I taught him that no one is better than anyone else, and that we’re all on a journey to find the best in ourselves. And then he told me the most terrifying thing of all:

The day I quit my job to stay home and help him and his brother was the day he stopped contemplating suicide as a solution to his problems, because now Mom was on his side.

I never knew, and that makes my heart go cold. My number one fear – the thing that can tear me apart with just a thought – is losing my children. To lose him to other people’s ignorance, vanity, and misplaced sense of discipline would kill the person I am and shatter the person I strive to be.

So that’s why I am writing all of this out and posting it for the world to see (or at least the ten people who read my blog). This is why autism awareness is critical. No one is asking you to understand it. No one is asking you to understand diabetes, depression, bipolar disorder, or any other of the scores of invisible hurdles that so many children and adults must overcome.

Just be aware that the reality of living with these challenges is more than you can imagine. Be aware that telling a parent who has struggled for years to keep their child whole that they’re doing it wrong is an insult and cruel. Be aware that, even though you can’t see physical symptoms, the pain is still very real, and the risk of fatality is realer still.

That’s all you need to do. If you can’t understand, at least be aware.

Thank you for reading.

Why Squirrels Are Better Than People

I haven’t been blogging lately. I’d love to say it’s because I’m so busy, but that’s not entirely true. Yes, I’m busy. But I’m also in a bit of a writing slump – known as “hell” in some writing circles. As a recovering Catholic, I am still plagued with pointless flutters of guilt from time to time, so I decided that I should write SOMETHING for my blog, even if it was off-topic.

It was at that point that I realized that this blog doesn’t have a topic, so I thought I’d talk about that a bit.

I do not have ADD, ADHD, or any other string of letters, but I do have a deep-seated love of the random. When I have what my colleagues in the publishing house call a “squirrel moment,” it isn’t because I’m easily distracted. It’s because there are so many wonderful random ideas and thoughts and nuggets of inspiration out there, and I just can’t stand to ignore them when they pass by. A phantom of an idea can become a whole story arc before you know what hit you. If you see an elephant walking down Main Street, you can turn back to what you were doing, or you can stop for a moment and have the experience. That moment then becomes a story you can share with your friends. If you never allow yourself to be distracted – if your attention never wavers from the task at hand – how many stories will you have to share? How many experiences will you have missed? Before you know it, you’ll be old and crotchety and won’t have any stories to tell or memories to cherish. That would suck.

So that’s why I’m not going to turn this into an educational blog on the art of writing. There are a ton of people out there much better equipped than me to do that. I’ll stick with the rambling randomness. It works for me.

Anyway… people are annoying. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. My nearest and dearest often observe that I have never really been a big fan of the human race as a species in general. I would like to explain why that is.

Humans have opposable thumbs, are self-aware, can dream, can create art and music, and place value in things beyond the basic necessities of life. We sing and dance; we dream of worlds far different from our own and bring them to life for others to enjoy; we have a concept of eternity and the universe. My cats are pretty awesome, but I doubt they’re going to contemplate anything more complex than their food-and-nap routine any time soon.

We are so fortunate – we can experience our lives in a way no other species can. And this is why people make me so stone-cold crazy.

Why are we arguing about religion? I’ve heard people laugh about how Doctor Who always seems to encounter aliens in London, England. Obviously, that is because it is a British television show. Little British children might continue to hide behind their sofas because of an alien invasion happening in Boise, Idaho, but people tend to relate more readily to stories surrounding what they know – their home turf. It’s now been well-established that the earth is a microscopic speck in the staggering scope of the universe. Assuming that the “one true God” only came to our speck and only delivered the “one true faith” to a select number of people living on that speck is sort of like believing that romantic comedies predominantly take place in New York City because only people who live there have embarrassing dating experiences. In other words, that’s just silly.

Why are we arguing about marriage equality? We’re specks on a speck. Our galaxy is a speck. Are we really prepared to persecute an entire group of people who just want to spend their lives together based upon something a bunch of old dudes wrote? A) The Bible was written by men. B) Those men were attempting to interpret the Word of God – they weren’t taking dictation. C) Men often get things wrong. D) Moses didn’t stop for directions, either.

Why do we worry so much about our outward image? I live in Ohio. If I see one more suburban kid trying to look “gangsta,” I may choke. My husband is from Santa Ana, California. If we had the means, I’d rent a big bus and start shipping these little wanna-be-bads down there. We could leave them on a street corner at 1:00 a.m. and see how gangsta they really are. And don’t even get me started on the ladies I tend to refer to as “hoochies.” Don’t tell me you’re looking for a man to love and respect you when you’re dressed like you charge by the hour. And trust me – heterosexual men know you have breasts, even if you don’t shove them in their faces. I see all sorts of people throughout the day, and I always wonder what they’re trying to prove. Be yourself, not an image you picked out from a catalog. If you learned to embrace your true self, then you wouldn’t have to depend on other people to discover your worth – you’d already know it.

We build houses that are many times larger than what we need. We buy cars that could seat ten but never do. We happily destroy our planet and its natural resources because heaven forbid that we be inconvenienced. We even elect politicians that we KNOW are crooked, materialistic, egomaniacal asshats because they promise to protect our completely destructive and irresponsible way of life.

Humans have created opera, sculpture, and film. People like Michelangelo, Mozart, and Shakespeare showed the incredible beauty that humans are capable of creating. Even the advances in medical science are astounding – when people take their knowledge and build it, reaching out for more answers in response to a need in the world, it is an amazing thing to witness.

But then we also developed guns, bombs, and poison gasses. We took the words of wise men and turned them into religions, but then used those religions as a vehicle for hatred.

I don’t know who invented Lycra and polyester, but anyone involved even peripherally should hang their heads in shame.

The moral of the story is (yes, I do have a point) that I dislike people because of the choices they make. They put having a fancy car before helping to feed the poor. They use their imagination to find new ways to kill rather than new ways to communicate. They constantly devalue themselves and others, and they are determined to continue to be ignorant. As I said to my friend yesterday, the mom in me wants to sit them all down and give them a stern talking to before sending them to their rooms to think about what they’ve done. But since no one would listen to me even if I did, my only consolation is that I can still retreat to a world of my own imagining, in which people learn to overcome the fears that hold them back from being truly great.

Ooh, look! Squirrel!

My Children's World

I haven’t been blogging recently because of deadlines, but I read an article today that I thought was worth chewing over. It is entitled, The Curse of Chief Wahoo.

To begin: 

BACKGROUND POINT #1:  Anyone who has bothered reading my blog will already have figured out that I am a U.S. citizen of European decent. In other words, I’m so white, I’m practically transparent. My own diversity comes from the sheer quantity of different countries to which I can trace my lineage (I will spare you the enumeration). My children, on the other hand, have a lot more on their genetic plate, so to speak. In addition to the European Caucasia-palooza that I have passed on to them, they also have Mexican, Nicaraguan, and Native American bloodlines.

BACKGROUND POINT #2:  I currently live in Cleveland, Ohio, where baseball is a favorite sport and where the local team is the Cleveland Indians. The team’s logo is Chief Wahoo.

So that’s the background.

I am the first to admit that I didn’t always understand why Native Americans bothered to protest Chief Wahoo every year on Opening Day. I honestly didn't think it was a big deal. But then, when I was younger, I did not differentiate between races or creeds. I had never been taught that there were any differences between people based on the color of their skin or their cultural heritage. 

I was wrong. There ARE differences. The most glaring difference is that as an educated, middle-class white girl, I had no appreciation for what it felt like to be on the receiving end of another person's prejudice.

I never had to worry about being discriminated against when I was growing up. It was the 1970s and, while women were certainly still fighting for equal treatment, my own mother was a successful professional. Whatever the reality was for the rest of the nation, in my house, my gender was not a limiting factor. 

I was raised in the religion that was most dominant in my neighborhood. Even in my extended family, everyone was one version of Christian or another, so the concept of religious persecution was completely foreign to me.

Further, my family was financially comfy without being wealthy, so while I played with friends from both poorer and richer backgrounds, there was nothing to prompt me to notice one way or another.

In other words, my ignorance on the subject of discrimination stemmed directly from my ignorance of prejudice itself.

Of course, as I grew older, my innocence got banged up a bit and I eventually realized that there were some whack-jobs out there who really did think that skin color or gender or sexuality or religion were perfectly legitimate reasons to judge, hate, and even kill another person. I was completely flummoxed by this, and honestly still am.

Here’s what happened:

First, I befriended a girl in grammar school who was picked on mercilessly. She came from a particularly poor background, and our spoiled suburban classmates constantly tormented her for her lack of designer clothing and general polish.

Then, a boy in my class told me I was stupid because I was a girl. I must say that my reaction was not particularly mature, but he did eventually get off the floor and stop crying. Two words: saddle shoes.

Next, my teenage years brought me my first close friendships with people from non-Christian backgrounds. This marked the first time that my assumptions about religion were really challenged, but it was generally a very kind and gentle process, if occasionally a bit awkward.

I went on to college and eventually brought home a cute Hispanic boy to meet my parents. He was sweet and played guitar and sang me love songs in Spanish and was everything I hadn’t known I had been looking for, so I married him. 

Not long after we brought home our first baby from the hospital, I had one of those defining moments when everything shifts. After observing a group of Hispanic men walk past, an acquaintance of mine turned to me and said, “I hate Mexicans.”

Blink. Blink. What?

Excuse me - that’s MY CHILD you just spewed blind hatred at!

So back to Chief Wahoo.

It’s just a baseball team logo. Does it matter enough to make a fuss over? 

In the article, Marjorie Villafane, a Sioux, is quoted as saying: "I'm here so my grandchildren can be proud of their heritage. People act like we're trying to take their baseball away from them, but we're not. It's just, why do they have to turn us into Chief Wahoo?"

Here’s what I have to say about this: 

It absolutely matters.

Chief Wahoo is a logo. It is a marketing gimmick. It is used for entertainment purposes. It could be replaced.

My children are unique and wonderful. They are human beings who have the innate right to feel proud of their heritage. They are individuals who deserve to have their bloodlines treated with the same respect as any others. They ABSOLUTELY deserve not to be judged negatively for the color of their skin or their cultural heritage. And what my children deserve is what all children deserve – the chance to grow up and learn about your family background and feel proud of where you come from.

As pretty much the entire planet has realized by now, there are MANY, MANY, MANY things wrong with prevailing attitudes in the United States. One of those things is the sad truth that a cartoon created to promote a group of overpaid men in tights who hit balls with wooden sticks is seen as more important than an entire population of indigenous people who only want to see their children walk tall. And that makes so little sense that I can’t even begin to reason it out.

I'm sad that I have to raise my children in a world in which they will be valued less than a baseball mascot. All I can do to fight that, however, is to raise my boys to change the world and hope that my children's world will someday be a better place.

Momma says I'm more important than baseball.