Finding a Community

It’s been almost a year since I updated this blog! How’s everyone doing?

The Spring 2022 semester is almost over, which means I’m going to have a bit more time on my hands during the summer, so maybe that means I’ll be able to get back to blogging some more. I’ve definitely got some ideas about things to write about that have been swirling around in my head. I just haven’t had the time to sit down and write.

The topics I really want to write about are fairly unpleasant, unfortunately. Texas is further sliding into becoming a White Supremacist Christian Theocracy. This is something I’ve worried about for a long time but it’s really accelerating now. I’m saving that for future posts.

When I last updated the blog, I had enrolled my daughter in a Montessori school and I was about to go back to teaching on campus instead of remotely. Things were supposed to be getting back to normal.

That didn’t quite happen. COVID-19 wasn’t done yet. My husband ended up catching the Omicron variant from work in January and then gave it to me and our daughter. He was vaccinated but had procrastinated on getting boosted. My daughter is too young to get vaccinated. I was fully vaccinated and boosted, but caught it anyway from being stuck in a house with a sick husband and toddler filling the place up with their germs.

Fortunately for all of us it turned out like getting a bad cold. I give credit to the vaccines for that, and thankfully the common wisdom that little kids tend to get less sick from COVID than adults held true for my unvaccinated daughter.

But that’s not the good news I have to report. The good news is that the Unitarian Universalist Church that my in-laws have been members of for many years now has a CUUPS group, and I have joined it!

(Oh, that reminds me. Sadly my father-in-law passed away in October. After seeing the outpouring of support my mother-in-law got from the church, it made me even more determined to go ahead and join that church, even before I found out they had a CUUPS group in the works.)

I’ve written here before about my difficulties in finding a community, but this is looking promising for several reasons.

First, someone else is running the thing! A woman from the church got this CUUPS group all set up and official and all I had to do was join! I do plan on helping out and becoming more active in it as soon as I can, but the whole thing isn’t depending on me. If something comes up and I can’t make it, they can go on without me. This is definitely not a “if you want a pagan group, why don’t you start one yourself?” type situation where the whole thing is resting on MY shoulders. Thank the gods!

Also there seem to be at least three or four people who are committed to making this work, maybe more, so it’s not dependent on just the woman who got it started either. This is a problem I’ve encountered before with pagan groups. One person (sometimes it was me) gets it all set up and pays all the money and makes all the plans and reservations, and other people maybe show up, but if something happens to that one person that does all the work, no one else steps in and the whole thing fizzles out.

I think it helps that this is a CUUPS group affiliated with an established Unitarian Universalist Church that has been around for decades. That means we have the use of church facilities and the people who are members of the CUUPS group are also members of the church in general. These are people who know how to run an organization, who are not against actually paying money and doing some work to keep things going, who are actually interested in building something that lasts, and I mean that both metaphorically and literally. A few of the members are people who were actually involved in getting the church building built to begin with.

We’ve had one Zoom meeting so far and then a physical get together in a member’s backyard in April. Children were welcome. My 2 year old daughter was the youngest child there. The rest of the kids were pre-teens, but no one seemed to mind having a toddler there. She is a really cute kid, of course, and was very well behaved! I was quite happy with the diversity of people there. Kids, parents of those kids, single people, seniors. That’s the kind of group I want to belong to, one that has people from all walks of life. (As I’ve written about before, I got kind of cut off from the pagan community when I had a baby because there were no baby-friendly things around.) I was also afraid that I’d be the only Heathen there with a bunch of Wiccans, but I saw at least two Thor’s hammers on other people’s necks and one Valknut t-shirt. I wore my Valknut necklace.

The plan is to do some events that are just for CUUPS, and some that are hosted by CUUPS but for the whole church. We were going to do a Maypole for Beltane for the whole church, but it turns out it was a little bit of short notice to plan out something good, so instead we’re planning on doing something for Samhain/Day of the Dead and maybe we’ll add Beltane next year. We’ve got plenty of time to plan something awesome for that, and hopefully it will become an annual tradition, and we could add more events later on.

I also plan to get more involved in the UU church in general. I was going to do it sooner, but the pandemic made them go all remote and watching a church service on Zoom didn’t sound that appealing. Then they went back to face-to-face, but only for vaccinated adults, so I wouldn’t have been able to bring my daughter. Then they allowed only vaccinated children, and my kid is too young. Now finally they have their childcare open again for children under 5.

It seems to be especially important right now to find some kind of community like this, with what’s been happening in Texas lately. I’ve got to find “my people,” and by that I mean people who don’t want to live in a society where white women are the property of our husbands and our only purpose to pop out as many white babies as possible, where people of color are second-class citizens or worse, and where LGBTQ folks are ostracized as perverts. It really looks like that’s what the people in charge want, so it’s even more important to find my people because there’s safety in numbers.

The minister of this church is a black woman who does lots of work for racial justice and women’s rights. The church members I’ve met so far, besides the pagans, seem to be a mixture of atheists and agnostics and liberal Christians who left more conservative churches but still consider themselves believers in Jesus. Sounds like exactly the kind of people I need to be associating with and making alliances with during these times.

Technically I haven’t officially joined the church yet, but I let the lady who is in charge of that know I’m interested. They have some kind of initiation or something every six months or so, and I just missed the most recent one. I think she said the next one is this fall. But now that they’re meeting in person again and I can bring my daughter with me I’m going to start going regularly and hope this works out. I’m optimistic that it will.

Getting back to “normal?”

Next week will be two weeks since I got my second dose of COVID-19 vaccine, so it’s almost safe for me to show my face in public again!

This past year has been one of the hardest years of my life. Possibly THE hardest. My daughter was almost 6 months old in March of 2020 when everything shut down. My life had just felt like it was getting to some sense of “new normal” after having a baby. I was back at work, my daughter was in daycare, she was sleeping through the night.

Then the pandemic hit. All my classes went remote. The daycare I had my daughter in was one of the few in the area that didn’t shut down, but so many people pulled their kids out that she was often there with only one or two other babies. It was actually kind of nice for those last two months of that semester. I still dropped her off at daycare every day and then went back home to teach my classes on Zoom. There were so few other babies there that I wasn’t too worried about her catching COVID, or any other diseases for that matter.

Until May 1 when the governor ordered the economy open again, and suddenly the daycare was packed. We toughed it out for the last two or three weeks until I was on summer vacation. I didn’t teach any classes over the summer and was a stay-at-home mom for three months.

Then back to school in August. She was only back in daycare for a few weeks until she got sick and passed whatever it was on to me and my husband. We all got tested and it wasn’t COVID. The doctors said it was probably just one of those other viruses that frequently get spread around in daycares. But we caught it despite the daycare’s supposed enhanced safety protocols, so it could have just as easily been COVID.

Anyway, it freaked my husband out enough that he insisted we pull her out of daycare and get a nanny. Either that, or I would have to quit my job because there is no way I can look after a toddler and teach Zoom classes at the same time.

So we hired a college student to look after her for the rest of the fall semester, but after that semester she said she couldn’t anymore, so we had to hire another college student for Spring 2021. Having a nanny has probably been much safer than daycare, but it’s about four times more expensive, which means we’re paying about half of my salary just on the nanny. Nannies are also much less reliable. If she can’t make it because she’s sick or her car breaks down or her dog is sick or whatever, there’s not much I can do about it but miss work too. That’s happened more often than I expected, and really I’ve needed to work more, not less, to adapt my courses to work online when they weren’t designed to be that way. Every missed day or week because the nanny had some kind of personal issue meant me getting more and more behind. I started missing deadlines for work. Then of course there’s the distraction of trying to Zoom while everyone can hear a kid screaming in the background or trying to work silently while the kid naps. It sure was much easier to work when she was at daycare and I had a nice, quiet house all to myself!

I recently read an article written by a mom whose kid was born in February 2020, so she was still on maternity leave when the pandemic hit. She said she can’t tell if all her stress is new-baby stress or pandemic stress because it’s all blended together. I could really relate to that, even though I had my kid right before the pandemic. I still have to remind myself that probably being a parent isn’t usually this stressful. I have to tell myself, “it’s not me, it’s the pandemic,” to assure myself that it’s not that I’m not cut out to be a mom.

Now it’s summer and I finally have a little bit of a break. I feel like I’m just starting to get back out of “survival mode” and am able to take a deep breath and reflect on what I’ve experienced. That’s why I can finally write another blog post after over a year!

We have enrolled my daughter in a Montessori preschool to start in August so I won’t have to deal with nannies anymore. She’ll be almost two years old by then, and it will be the first time she’s been around other kids her age for over a year. It’s more expensive than a regular daycare, but definitely cheaper than a nanny! I’ll be teaching one face-to-face class and the rest of my classes are going to still be remote, so I’ll only be going in to work two days a week. That schedule was set a couple of months ago, and fortunately they said that now that students are starting to enroll, they won’t change any of my remote classes to face-to-face, even though the pandemic is finally starting to die down. Thank goodness, because at least that gives me some predictability. One thing I’ve learned is that teaching remotely is different enough from teaching face-to-face that it really requires a full course redesign. Which is something I haven’t had a lot of time to do.

I have a feeling that I’ll be back to 100% face-to-face for Spring 2022.

But will things be back to normal by next spring? What does that even mean anymore? I know a lot of people are asking this question now, not just me. I’m lucky that I didn’t lose anybody to COVID. My husband, who is an “essential worker” and had to keep going to work like normal this whole time managed to avoid catching COVID. I only have one friend who even got sick from it, and they made it, though they have some of those lingering symptoms you may have heard about. Then of course there’s the continuing political unrest with a frighteningly large number of my fellow Americans thinking the current president is illegitimate, and there was the severe February winter storm we had here in Texas. That could warrant a post in itself, but we survived that too!

I guess that’s about all I have to report right now. Just wanted to write something real quick to let anyone who still reads this blog know that we’ve survived the last year. My daughter is starting to stir because it’s about time for her afternoon nap to be over, so I’d better wrap this up!

Impeachmas

Now there have been two presidents impeached in my lifetime. Bill Clinton is kind of special to me, because he was the first president that I was old enough to pay attention to. I remember when he was impeached. Back then, the party configuration of the government was reversed, with Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, controlling the House, and Democrats controlling the Senate. I was just thinking of how ironic it is that back then they impeached Clinton for lying about a sexual affair, and now today Republicans are united behind someone like Donald Trump, who lies almost constantly about easily provable things, and has had multiple sexual affairs, which he’s bragged about publicly.

I’ve written before about the alliance that has occurred between white nationalists and Christian theocrats and how scary I think it is. Other people who understand these things better than me have written better things about it. It seems like there’s nothing Trump can do to lose the support of the so-called Moral Majority. Clinton’s personal sexual behavior was absolutely our business, according to them, but it’s OK that Trump had an affair with a porn star right after his wife gave birth to his son.

Mitch McConnell has already said that the Senate trial will be a mere formality, and they’ll acquit Trump as quickly as possible. If Trump has done nothing wrong, if he really didn’t try to get another country to meddle in our elections, then why not have a fair trial? Surely that would then prove his innocence. The only explanation I can think of is that they know that Trump did all the things that the Democrats say he did, and they still want to stick behind him anyway. Perhaps Trump really could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any support. They’d probably say the guy he shot had it coming.

It seems like Republicans don’t really believe in anything anymore besides Us vs. Them, so as long as Trump is a Republican, they’ll back him no matter what. I don’t know what values or principles they have anymore besides that.

It’s not very different from how conservative Christians view the world. Anyone who isn’t a Christian, or even anyone who isn’t the right kind of Christian, is pure evil and deserves to burn in Hell. You can be the nicest Jew, Hindu, Muslim, Heathen, Wiccan, or atheist who ever lived, and still go to Hell just because you’re not a member of the right religion. On the other hand, if you are a member of the right religion, you can do pretty much anything you want and you’ll be forgiven.

What you do doesn’t matter, it only matters what “side” you’re on.

I could be experiencing a bit of postpartum depression here, so now I feel a bit bad about making a pre-Yule post that’s so depressing.

Yule is about how we’ve made it halfway through the dark, and the winter will not last forever, and spring will come. Sometimes that’s harder to believe than other times. I worry about my little baby daughter and what kind of country and world she’s going to live in.

Tonight is another Democratic debate. Any of these people would be better than Trump, but I also worry about the 2020 election either way. Either he’ll be re-elected (possibly with more help from Russia), or he won’t be and his rabid followers were be in an uproar and probably say the election was rigged by the Deep State.

It’s nice to hear people talk about taking climate change seriously, or trying to fix our broken healthcare system, but is any of that really going to get done?

The Moomins

My husband’s father was a civilian working for the Air Force, so when he was a kid the family moved around a lot. He spent a big chunk of his childhood in a village in England called Fritwell. He told me that he lived there long enough that when they moved back to the United States, he had an English accent for a while until he managed to change it into the generic-American accent he has today.

This also means he grew up with English children’s popular culture, some of which is just not well known here on the other side of the pond. Some of his favorite books from when he was a kid were the ones about the Moomins.

The Moomins are a family of trolls that are the main characters in a series of children’s books by Swedish/Finnish author Tove Jansson. The are popular in Scandinavia, Britain, and pretty much all of the rest of Europe, but just never really hit it big in the United States. There’s even a Moomin theme park in Finland!

It’s a shame that they aren’t better known here, not only because I think they’re adorable, but I think they’d be especially good for Heathen kids. The stories have a definite Heathen feel to them, but I guess that’s to be expected since it seems to me like Scandinavians only adopted Christianity halfway anyway.

The books have been adapted into several different television shows, even a Japanese anime version which seems to be very popular (or at least very easy to find on YouTube), but our favorite version is the Polish stop-motion animation one, which fans refer to as “the fuzzy felt Moomins.”

Since Yule is starting this weekend, here are some seasonally appropriate episodes of the Moomin TV series. You see, Moomins usually hibernate during the winter, but one winter our main protagonist, Moonintroll, woke up and got to see what goes on during the winter.

Here’s where they woke up in time for Christmas, and Moominmama misunderstands what people are talking about when people say “Christmas is coming,” and thinks Christmas is a person.:

The Lady of the Cold, who sure looks like Skadhi to me:

The Winter Bonfire, built by the woodland creatures to welcome back the sun after the long, dark Scandinavian winter:

Each of these episodes corresponds to a chapter in one of the books. They seem like they’d make excellent bedtime stories for my daughter once she’s old enough to appreciate them.

Raising Pagan Babies

Whether to raise one’s children pagan or heathen is one of those topics that comes up periodically on pagan blogs. People get into heated arguments about whether it’s bad to “indoctrinate” one’s children this way, instead of “letting them find their own path.” I tried to stay out of those conversations since I didn’t have children of my own. I know there are few things parents seem to hate worse than people without children giving them parenting advice.

However, that’s about to change. It took longer than I had originally planned for, but if everything continues to go well, the question of how to raise a pagan child is going to become not hypothetical at all for me in the near future!

So here’s my opinion on whether pagans should raise pagan kids: Of course! I really don’t see why not. I always thought it was strange that it’s so controversial. I doubt any other religious groups would even question this.

But I understand. Most modern pagans are converts from Christianity, and many of them are still bitter about it. They resent being “indoctrinated” into Christianity and don’t want to impose the same thing on their children. Since religion was imposed on them, maybe even in an abusive way, they don’t know how to raise children in a religion correctly. They might even think there is no right way to do it. That makes sense.

And I also think it’s yet some more of that “Christian baggage” that we really need to get over and move past if we want modern polytheism to survive past this generation. Relying solely on converts probably won’t be enough. We need second-generation pagans to be a thing. Besides, people raise their children to believe what they believe about all kinds of things, not just religion. I thought that was just how parenting works. (Then when the kids become teenagers, they decide their parents are stupid and wrong about everything anyway!)

Heathens, with our emphasis on ancestors and tradition, seem to have less of a problem with this than Wiccans. But I still think it’s a topic worth exploring, even if you think raising your kids to be Heathens is the right thing to do. You still probably weren’t raised Heathen yourself, so you still might have Christian baggage and struggle with figuring out how to do it in the right way.

I don’t think this is something to be taken lightly. It takes serious thought. Luckily, I wasn’t raised Christian to begin with. I was raised atheist in a Christian-dominated culture. That still gives me baggage I have to overcome, but hopefully less than if I was raised in a fundamentalist evangelical Christian household. I’m not worried that my kids will go to Hell if they end up believing the wrong things.

I’m not going to pretend I know how to do this right, either. I’m going to have to figure it out as I go along (like everything else about being a parent). It’s really a shame that Heathens and other modern pagans don’t have the kind of community support that other religions do. It probably makes it much easier to raise kids in a certain religion if you are part of a religious community that welcomes children and has activities for them to participate in.

There is a pagan organization in my area that holds two festivals a year, one at Beltane and one at Samhain, and children are allowed. My husband and I have been a few times, but it’s been years since we last went, and even while we were there, my husband felt a bit uncomfortable with the idea of bringing hypothetical future children to that event. The children are kind of segregated off into their own area where theoretically they should be “safe” from the alcohol (and other drug) use and blatantly sexual activities, but there are always still rumors of teenage girls getting oogled by old creepy men or minors being given alcohol or other drugs. And yes I know these kinds of things can happen in other religious groups too (ahem, Catholic Church), but I’m not in any other religious groups, so that’s not really my problem.

My husband and I have been going to a smaller, different campout more often. The irony is that children are not allowed at all there, but I would actually feel safer having my kid around those people. They seem to be better at respecting boundaries and not being creepy, but by Samhain I’m going to have a little baby, so I can’t go to that one anymore, because no babies allowed.

The only other option I can think of right now is the local Unitarian Universalist Church where my husband’s parents go. My husband and I attend irregularly, but maybe once we have the kid, we will start attending more regularly. They welcome parents of young children and have a Sunday school and special events for them. On the other hand, they are UU’s. That’s OK; I agree with all the UU principles and beliefs, and I don’t mind my kid learning about them, but we’d have to do our heathen things at home, I guess.

To me it seems like this illustrates a difference in the overall attitude these two organizations have towards children. At the pagan festival, the children are kept segregated from the main events in their own separate area. You could go there and hardly ever encounter a child if you stay out of the children’s area. Children are allowed there, as long as most people don’t have to be around them.

At a UU service, everyone starts out together, they bring the children to the front and tell them a little story that has to do with the topic of the day, and then the kids go off to the Sunday school area while the adults have our adult discussions about the topic of the day. Then at the end the kids come back for refreshments with everyone else. The children are treated like they are an important part of the community.

I think the latter is more like how most religious organizations treat children, because they think it’s important to pass their traditions and beliefs on to the next generation.

I’ve gone to a couple of Native American pow-wows, and I kind of wish that pagan festivals were more like that, at least in some ways. There the kids are also treated like they are valuable, with certain rituals and dances where the kids are encouraged to be involved in, right there under the main tent where everybody congregates. Adults-only things that kids wouldn’t be interested in anyway were mostly set off to the side in their own areas, kind of the reverse of the way the pagan festival was set up. Of course, Native Americans were also victims of genocide, so it makes perfect sense that they are very much in favor of having kids. It’s like my Jewish friend who told me that Jews are also very pro-kid because every Jewish child born is sticking it to Hitler.

I know children are not everyone’s thing. I’m sometimes not even sure if it’s going to be my thing, and here I am intentionally making one right now! (Oh my gosh, what have I gotten myself into?) So I’m not saying that our festivals and organizations need to be all about kids all the time, with no adults-only spaces or activities. But even if I didn’t end up having a kid myself, I think that on a community level they should be treated as something valuable rather than merely tolerated, if we care at all about polytheism continuing after we’re gone. And I guess that depends on if you think paganism is just about personal fulfillment, or if it’s something greater than yourself.

Haka for Christchurch

Ever since the massacre in New Zealand, I’ve been wondering if I should post anything about it. I’m not sure what to say about it. I’m glad that the Troth condemned the shootings. There was a bit of a debate on the Facebook group about whether they should because it wasn’t clear if this guy was a “real” Heathen, even if he did mention Valhalla in his manifesto. I and some other members called it out as a “No True Scotsman” fallacy, and our side won. To me, it doesn’t matter if he was a devout Heathen or not. There is still way too much overlap between Heathens and white nationalists, enough that the general public has trouble telling us apart. That alone makes it important for inclusive Heathens to loudly disavow these actions whenever they happen. This isn’t a message to other Heathens, it’s a message to everyone else that we’re not OK with this, because sadly a lot of them don’t know.

I’ve also been thinking about the irony of a white nationalist from Australia shooting a bunch of Muslim immigrants in New Zealand, claiming they don’t belong there. And you do?

I know white nationalists do some kind of mental gymnastics about how somehow white people rightfully own Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and the United States and other immigrants should not be allowed. As a first-generation American on my mother’s side, I’ve never found their arguments convincing. There are “Mexicans” who live here in Texas whose families go back many, many more generations than mine, some all the way back to when Texas was part of Mexico, or even before that, before Europeans even got here.

And yet our president, and many other people, seem to think they don’t belong here, but for some reason people who look like me do. Nobody ever questions whether I really belong here. That just doesn’t make sense.

Well, I digress. What I really wanted to do is show you these videos that made me feel a little better about humanity. The Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand, and they have this special ritual dance called the Haka that can be done for various purposes. Since the shooting, apparently there have been multiple hakas performed in honor of the victims and to unite the diverse New Zealand community.

Cool.

The Danger of White Christian Nationalism

This year the theater students at my college did The Crucible by Arthur Miller as their October play. It wasn’t as fun as the one I went to a couple of years ago, which was Bram Stoker’s Dracula (the guy who play Renfield really hammed it up!), but they still did a good job. The programs they handed out had a note on the back from the director about how Arthur Miller first wrote this play during the McCarthy era, and today’s political climate makes it just as relevant now as it was then.

A lot of upsetting things have been happening in the news in the last few years, the latest of which was the worst massacre of Jews in American history. I’ve become somewhat desensitized (not saying that’s a good thing; it’s just the truth), but our latest mass shooting has got me squirming again, so I’ve been pondering why. After all, hate crimes are nothing new. Mass shootings are nothing new. Mass shootings which are also hate crimes are also nothing new either, sadly.

I first heard about the synagogue shooting at a family gathering we had that day. My sister-in-law asked the rest of us if we had heard the news, and we hadn’t. My father-in-law misunderstood at first and thought it had been a shooting at a mosque, and perhaps it was by a Trump supporter. Sister-in-law corrected him saying that it was a synagogue, those are Jewish, and he must not have been a Trump supporter because Trump is not anti-Semitic. After all, he has a Jewish son-in-law. I said that a lot of Trump’s supporters are anti-Semitic though, like the marchers at Charlottesville, but then the conversation sort of devolved into how Trump is a rich New Yorker, so even if he isn’t Jewish, he might as well be, ha ha.

It turns out that the murderer was not a Trump supporter, but only because Trump is not sufficiently anti-Semitic enough for him. He did carry out this attack because he was motivated by the conspiracy theory that the caravan of Central American refugees is an invasion force being summoned to the Texas border by The Elders of Zion. Trump supports those types of sentiments enough that he is about to send thousands of troops to Texas to defend us from these poverty-stricken Guatemalans that are walking hundreds of miles across Mexico to maybe get here in a month, if they make it at all.

 

During the 2016 campaign, I personally knew at least one heathen who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary and then refused to vote in the general election, because he said both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were equally bad. After Trump won, he said that his liberal friends need to quit being so hysterical about the whole thing, and be glad that “screaming pantsuit lady” didn’t win. He also said that since the Republican establishment hated Trump, the Republican Congress would obstruct all his worst decisions just as much as they obstructed Obama.

There was also a prominent pagan blogger I used to read who supported Bernie and then Trump. I remember his arguments that perhaps it’s understandable that Mexicans and Muslims would not like Trump, but no one else has anything to worry about. I also remember that same blogger saying that pagans should be happy with Trump because he wasn’t the Christian Right’s preferred candidate, and this meant that the Christian Right has lost its political power. I never was convinced about either of those arguments, but especially not after Trump made Mike Pence his running mate.

Two years later, and white Evangelical Christians are the religious group who support Trump the most. They support him more than they supported George W. Bush, who was one of them! And the only Republican politicians who criticize Trump anymore are ones who are retiring or dying. All the ones who have any power now are completely loyal to Trump.

Those loyal white Evangelical Christian Republicans include pretty much everyone who has any power at all in Texas politics. I’ve long thought that if Texas ever secedes from the union, it will become a Christian theocracy. That’s certainly what a lot of the people in power in the Texas government seem to want, if that pesky federal government would just stay out of the way. Our restrictive abortion law went all the way to the Supreme Court, and even though it was struck down, it was around long enough for most of our abortion clinics to close anyway. Most of them never reopened. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick called a special session of the Texas Legislature just to try to pass a bathroom bill to supposedly protect me from getting raped by a trans-woman in a public restroom. Yeah, because that’s something I’m really worried about. Luckily it didn’t pass, because it would be “bad for business,” but calling a special session is supposed to be just for emergencies.

We also have extremely lax environmental laws; pretty much the bare minimum that the pesky federal government forces us to have. After all, they believe that God created us to have dominion over the natural world, and we should be able to do whatever we want with it. Their official position on climate change is that it doesn’t exist, and of course the issue of teaching the Theory of Evolution in public schools is a perennial favorite that comes up times and time again.

I’ve lived in Texas my whole life, and I’ve never been a Christian, so I’ve always been an outsider here. Sure, I’m white, cisgendered, and straight, so that helps, but I’ve always known that even though I won’t be one of the people they come for first, as the First They Came poem from Nazi Germany illustrates, even if you’re not first on the list, they will come for you eventually. Not being a Christian was always a big strike against me here. When I was a kid, I knew that my classmates thought I was destined to burn in Hell for eternity. I knew that they subscribed to a belief that people who aren’t part of their group deserve such a fate. Seems like an extreme punishment for the crime of not believing in their god, but that’s what they think we deserve.

Now I’m seeing this alliance forming between Evangelical Christians and white nationalists, uniting under the leadership of Trump. On first glance, this doesn’t make much sense. Christians aren’t supposed to be racist (Christianity is supposed to be universal for all people), and white nationalists don’t necessarily have to be Christians (since some of them are heathens or atheists), but they are similar in that they both believe that everyone who is not like them need to be, to put it the Dalek way, exterminated. Maybe not literal extermination like the Nazis attempted, but the bad people who don’t belong here at least need to be driven out, or marginalized to make sure they have no power.

In The Crucible, the outcasts were the first ones to be accused of witchcraft, that is true, but eventually some of the most respected people in the community got the noose. When people in power get the feeling that their society needs to be purged of the wrong kind of people, hardly anyone is really safe. And the irony is that Salem was founded by a bunch of people who were all the same race and religion, thinking that if they founded a society that was pure enough, that everything would be OK.

Evangelical Christians think that everybody needs to be Christian (and not only that, but the right kind of Christian), and white nationalists want a white ethno-state with no non-white people in it. They both want to purify society of anyone who is not like them.

Maybe the reason why the synagogue shooting seems scary to me is because Jews were not supposed to be on the hit list. Like my sister-in-law said, “but Trump’s not an anti-Semite!” And yet Mike Pence has a “Messianic Rabbi” say a prayer in Jesus’s name, to further emphasize that the victims of the shooting were not the right kind of white people, because they weren’t Christians.

And it doesn’t matter if Trump isn’t Evangelical Christian or anti-Semitic himself, the Evangelicals and Neo-Nazis both see him as being on their side anyway, so that’s good enough for them and makes them feel empowered to start getting rid of the wrong kinds of people. And that should have us all worried, not just the Mexicans and Muslims.

 

Well, I hope this post doesn’t attract any Frog People to come tell me I’m a SJW libtard cuck femnazi NPC or something. I’m not sure if I’ve even made much of a coherent argument, since I’m nursing a cold while writing this and my head’s all stuffy. These are just the things I’m thinking of as the Midterm Election gets closer.

I already voted last week during Early Voting. I’m trying not to get my hopes up too much about Beto O’Rourke, but he is running against Ted Cruz, who is a perfect example of the kind of thing I’m worried about. Ted was the last man standing against Trump during the primaries, but now he’s become a Trump supporter, despite Trump taunting him with an internet meme about his wife being way hotter than Ted Cruz’s wife. Meanwhile, he attacks Beto for not representing “Texas values,” whatever that means. Beto’s lived in El Paso his whole life, sang on stage with Willie Nelson, and loves Whataburger, but Ted keeps attacking him for not being “Texan” enough.

I always vote in every election. It’s literally the least I can do. I know what long-term Republican one-party rule looks like, because that’s what we’ve already had in Texas for my whole life (there was that one term of Governor Ann Richards back in the 90’s, but right after that we got George W. Bush). Now the Republicans are trying to make the federal government look the same as the Texas government, and I am not looking forward to that. I don’t like the two-party system either, but it’s better than a one-party system. Then all you have to do is stick an R by your name and you can do whatever you want. Alabama came close to electing a sexual predator just because he was a Republican and Evangelical Christian. I’m glad they didn’t, but it was way closer than it should have been. Ted Cruz isn’t as bad as Roy Moore, so I doubt we’ll have a similar upset here in this red state and elect a Democrat for senator.

But it sure would be nice. I guess we’ll see what happens tomorrow. Last election, I prayed to Tyr and Zisa to oversee the election and make sure it was fair. I’m not sure how much good that did, but I’ll try it again this year. I know it’s not really the gods’ job to save us from ourselves though, and there are a lot of people now who think that White Evangelical Christian Nationalism is the vision of the country that they like, and there are a lot more people who just can’t be bothered trying to do anything to stop it. For those of us who think that this country needs to figure out how to be a diverse, multi-faith, multi-racial society without shooting each other or sending bombs in the mail, I hope that voting is enough to start pulling this thing back in a different direction.

If it’s not, then I’m not really sure what else I can do.

Basil 2005 – 2018

It’s almost the Day of the Dead, and time to honor those who have left us this year. Here is my tribute to a family member I lost this year.

I first saw him when I was in graduate school living in a two story townhouse style apartment with my elderly tortoiseshell cat, Ginger. One night I was awoken by the sound of Ginger growling at the glass door that led out to the balcony from the bedroom on the second floor.

I got up to see what she was upset about. Out on the balcony, there was a handsome gray tabby cat with white legs and a white chest chewing on Ginger’s potted catnip. When he saw me looking at him through the door, he looked completely unconcerned and continued enjoying the catnip. Ginger didn’t even like catnip that much, but she growled at him as if to say, “The nerve of that guy! That’s MY catnip!”

Like many apartment complexes, there were several stray cats living around the place. Some of them were feral, but some of them were probably cats who previously had owners, but had been left behind either intentionally or unintentionally when the owners moved. Over the next several weeks, I started to pay attention to the gray tabby cat, and it started to seem more and more likely that he didn’t have an owner anymore, despite being friendly and already neutered. He was a bit skinny and got beat up by the local tomcats a lot. He also seemed to be outside all the time, day or night. He started coming to get catnip on my balcony regularly each night. This apartment complex was right next to a major interstate highway, and I worried that he’d get hit by a car sooner or later, like many of the stray cats did.

The day before Thanksgiving 2006 it was one of those days where it was going to be in the mid-80’s during the day, then that night we were getting a sudden cold front and it was going to freeze. When I was walking home to my apartment, the gray tabby greeted me and rubbed up on my legs. That moment I decided I shouldn’t leave him outside in the cold that night, and I picked him up and brought him inside.

He spent the night downstairs in the living room while Ginger and I spent the night upstairs in the bedroom. Ginger wasn’t too happy about him being inside her apartment now, but she had already gotten used to him getting on our balcony each night, so at least he wasn’t a complete stranger to her.

I wasn’t sure what to call him. My balcony had several different potted herbs besides the catnip, so I started calling him Basil, since that was the one herb I had that also seemed to make a nice name. My sister came to spend Thanksgiving with me the next day, and she thought Basil was kind of a stupid name, but I told her it was just going to be temporary until I thought of something better.

Eventually I took him to a vet to get a checkup. I told them he was a stray cat I found and was thinking of keeping him. They scanned him for a microchip and he didn’t have one, so I said, “OK, I guess that means he’s mine now.” I got him vaccinated and microchipped, and the vet commented that it was hard to get the needle in because his skin was tough, which is another sign that he’s been living outside all the time for a while. They estimated his age as being about a year and a half old, so he was probably born in the spring or summer of 2005.

I’d often see him visiting other apartments and getting treats and pets from other people. That was probably how he’d been surviving. None of my neighbors said they owned him, though, and over time it became known in the apartment complex that he was my cat now. But obviously someone had owned him at some point. It remained a mystery how he came to be living out in the parking lot of the apartment complex.

He was even friendly towards dogs. I had neighbors who got a female pitbull puppy, and I’d come home to find that dog and my cat laying right next to each other on the lawn between our apartments. The dog’s owner even came to me one time and said, “I think your cat is friends with my dog,” and I told him yes, I had noticed that. He said that Basil came to visit his dog often and they’d hang out together.

Since he had been living outside for a while, he didn’t like being inside much at all. He didn’t seem to understand the concept of a litterbox at first and left some messes for me to clean up. As a compromise, I let him outside each morning before I left for class, and brought him in each evening when it got dark. Eventually he figured out my schedule, and would make himself hard to find in the evening when it was time for him to come in for the night. It felt like having a teenage son staying out late past his curfew.

In the summer of 2008 I met the man who would eventually become my husband. Sometimes he’d help me search for Basil when he’d go missing. We spent many evenings searching the apartment complex for him shaking a bag of cat treats.  I remember one time we found him all the way at the other side of the apartment complex at the volleyball court, and he sent us on a wild chase trying to get him and make him come in.

In 2009 I graduated with my Master’s degree and moved into a rental house with my boyfriend, who already had two cats of his own, so we had to merge them together into one big cat family. He had an elderly Tonkinese cat named K.K., who used to be his store cat when he owned an antique store. He said he didn’t know what K.K. stood for because that’s just the name she came with when he adopted her. Maybe it was Kitty Kat? His other cat was Lily, a young black and white spotted cat.

The two elderly cats, Ginger and K.K., were too old for shenanigans and settled in together just fine, but the two young cats, Basil and Lily, had some serious issues getting along at first, complete with territorial peeing and occasional fights where blood was drawn. Ginger ended up passing away in 2011 at the ripe old age of 18, and eventually the remaining three cats settled their differences and figured out how to live together in harmony.

In 2012 we got married and bought a house on a large lot further out in the country, away from any busy roads. The girls remained mostly indoor cats with occasional brief excursions into the back yard, but Basil still loved being outside, climbing trees and getting on the roof, chasing little critters around, and lounging in the sun in the herb garden or on the brick BBQ pit. Whenever my husband or I did any work out in the yard, he was out there with us assisting. He remained an extremely friendly cat and loved it when I had barbecues for Midsummer and invited all my friends over. So many legs to rub on! So many people to pet him and tell him how handsome he is!

K.K. passed away in autumn of 2012 at the age of 17 and we were down to two cats, but Basil and Lily had finally become good friends. In many ways, they had opposite personalities. Lily is afraid of most people and really only likes my husband. She kind of tolerates me, but if we have company, she always runs and hides. But she and Basil would chase each other around and play together. Each night when it was time to for Basil to come in, I shook the package of cat treats to lure him in, and then both of the cats would get treats. Eventually she learned that when it got dark, it was time for Basil to come in for treats time, so she would meow at the back door, or even come and find me and meow at me to let me know. Then I’d get the treats, open the back door and shake them, and when Basil came in, Lily would rub up against him in greeting before they’d both get their treats.

Heathens say that cats belong to Freya, but I always thought Basil was more of a Loki’s cat with how much he got into trouble. He was a bit too smart and too fearless for his own good. At the apartment complex, he learned how to ring people’s doorbells to get them to give him treats. He figured out that doorknobs are how humans open doors, and would stretch himself out as tall as he could to grab the doorknob with his paws to ask to go out. I’m sure if the backdoor had a level-style doorknob instead of a round one, he would have figured out how to open it. One evening I couldn’t find him, and I finally heard his meowing coming from my neighbor’s garage, and had to awkwardly ring the doorbell and ask them to open the garage to let him out. He must have gone in there to explore earlier that day while they had it open and then got shut in.

He once got crystals in his urine that blocked his urinary tract and almost died. He had to have a catheter put in and stayed at the animal hospital for several days. Before that, he was as friendly with vets as he was with anyone else, but after that he became aggressive with them. His charts at the vet ended up with a warning on them, “Aggressive! Will bite and scratch!”

He also got into fights with other cats in the neighborhood, because of course he had to defend his territory and his family from these invaders. Many of our neighbors let their cats run loose outside most of the time, and many of them also don’t even get their cats fixed, so they get into territorial fights a lot. Sometimes he got injuries that got infected and he needed to go to the vet to drain them and get antibiotics.

He seemed to like dogs better than other cats and continued to make friends with neighbors’ dogs wherever we lived, but he was NOT happy when my sister-in-law visited with her two dogs, a blue heeler and a border collie mix. I guess he didn’t give them permission to come into his house! My sister also has cats, so her dogs are used to cats and view them as friends, but when they tried to greet Basil he stood his ground and arched his back and puffed himself up and was almost ready to strike. These dogs were several times bigger than him, and there were two of them, but I had to lock Basil in a back bedroom, for the dogs’ safety!

He was a real warrior of a cat, so maybe he was Freya’s cat too.

Last year my husband and I started to notice that Basil was getting skinnier and Lily was getting fatter. Lily would eat all her food and then help herself to the rest of Basil’s, because Basil would only eat a few bites and then wanted to go back outside. We started trying different foods to see if he’d like other food better. We started trying to feed him in a separate room from Lily (which only freaked him out because he didn’t like being shut in a room). We took him to a vet, and they did a blood test and said his liver and kidney functions were just fine, and maybe he was just a picky eater. They asked me if he had been lethargic lately, and I told them a little, but I figured it was because he was 12 and starting to get older. The vet concluded that there was probably nothing wrong with him and sent us home.

By February his hip bones had started sticking out, so we took him to a different vet to get a second opinion. That vet ran a complete blood count on him, something the previous vet didn’t do, and found out he was severely anemic, and told us we have a very sick cat here. He also tested positive for FIV, which the vet said was very common in cats the fight with other cats. They said I would have to bring him in for twice a week injections of a drug that should stimulate his bone marrow to make more red blood cells. Since my husband and I both work during the day, I had to drop him off at the vet before work, and then pick him up after work, for something that only took a few minutes. I felt terrible leaving him at the vet so much.

He kept getting sicker, and by March the vet concluded that the drug was not working, and his bone marrow must have failed due to the FIV. Daniel and I did lots of research online and found out that getting a cat vaccinated for FIV can cause them to test positive for FIV. I had gotten that vaccination way back when I first took him in, because I knew his “lifestyle” put him at risk, so I got him vaccinated for pretty much every cat disease they had a vaccine for! We told the vet that, and he said there was another, much more expensive test they could do to see if he really had FIV, and also if he had something called “feline infectious anemia” that is caused by a bacterium.

We got the test, and he was negative for both of those infectious diseases, so the vet said he probably had cancer. They said to be sure they’d have to do some biopsies of his bone marrow, but at that point he was so sick and had already been at the vet so much that I didn’t feel like having the vet drill into his bones to confirm that he had a disease that wasn’t curable anyway. My mom recently had one of her cats die of cancer, and she had been on steroids for her last few months, which really helped her feel better, even though it doesn’t actually do anything to cure the disease. We asked the vet for some steroids to give Basil.

Basil wasn’t completely back to normal on the steroids, but it did seem to make him feel better. He became a little more active and ate a little more. Easter was April 1, and I had my sister-in-law, her husband, and my parents –in-law over for Easter dinner, and Basil got a lot of petting from them and seemed to have a good time.

But the steroids only worked for a couple of weeks, and then he started to go back to the way he was before even with the steroids. I started to try to mentally prepare myself for the reality that Basil wasn’t going to make it this time, but my husband had more trouble accepting that. He did a lot of research online and found out that there are other infectious diseases that can cause anemia in cats, so we got the vet to give us an antibiotic to give him along with the steroids, even though the vet said he doubted they would work because those other diseases were very rare. The steroids and antibiotic were both liquid medications we had to force-feed him with a syringe at home, and they must have tasted terrible because he’d struggle and then foam at the mouth when we gave him the medicine. We had to do that twice a day, every day.

We started keeping him shut up in a spare bedroom during the day while we were both at work and at night while we were asleep. We put food, water, a bed, and a litterbox in there all close together so he could get to them easily. He had gotten to the point where he stumbled around when he walked. I fed him meat baby food that he could lap up because he had trouble chewing hard food.

The medications didn’t seem to be working, but my husband was having a much harder time accepting that it was time to give up on Basil. I found a vet that does home euthanasia, so we set up an appointment for the afternoon of Sunday, April 15. All day Saturday and Sunday we let him lie outside in the herb garden in the sun, which was all he ever wanted to do. My husband wondered if cats understand what death is and if he knew his time was short, and so he wanted to do as much lying in the sun as possible. I guess there’s no way to know for sure.

And maybe all that sunshine did him some good, because Sunday morning he seemed to perk up a bit, and Daniel became doubtful again that we were doing the right thing. He ended up calling the home euthanasia vet and cancelling, telling the vet we were going to give him a few more days.

But by the time we came home from work Monday evening, he could hardly walk at all. I went to bed that night completely expecting to find him dead the next morning.

The next morning, April 17, he was still alive, but just barely. Daniel and I both called in sick to work. If we held baby food or cream up to his mouth, he would lick a little, but then would sort of nod off and his face would fall into the food, and then he’d jerk awake again and try licking some more. Sometimes he’d try to get up and walk and only take a few steps before lying down on the floor exhausted and breathing heavily like he had just had a hard run.

We called the vet again, and he said he could get there in about an hour. We put Basil in his bed and put him in the herb garden in one of his favorite spots. The vet had two injections to give him, one that would render him unconscious, and then a second one that would stop his heart. We petted him as he got the first injection. When he was completely unresponsive, he got the second injection, which actually made him start gasping and coughing, which bothered me a little. Then he let out one more big sigh, and death came over him.

Daniel didn’t want to bury him right away, so we put him back in his room, still in his bed. We left the door open so that Lily could go in there with him. I don’t know if she understood what was wrong with her big brother or not, but she kept vigil over him for a while. I set my Freya statue and my Odin candle in there on a table. Daniel is always reluctant to bury our cats right away, just in case they are maybe not really dead. We both know that’s an irrational thought, but I think waiting until rigor mortis sets in and they really start to look dead helps with closure. We buried Basil after work that Thursday. We put his grave under a Mountain Laurel tree just outside our ritual circle in the backyard, near where K.K. is buried under an American Beautyberry tree. The weather had started getting warmer, and the mosquitoes were starting to come out, so Daniel put out a lot of citronella candles and torches. We had Basil’s funeral by the light of those torches, listening to the sounds of night creatures like Chuck-wills-widows starting to come out. We wrapped him in the red fleece blanket from his bed, with one of his favorite toys, some catnip, and some cat treats as grave goods.

I still feel horribly cheated that he died that young. I expected him to make it until at least 17 or 18 like our other cats had. I still wonder if we would have been able to get him better medical treatment if we had gotten a proper diagnosis sooner. During his funeral Daniel apologized to Basil that he might have put him through unnecessary suffering by giving him those medications he hated so much for the last few weeks of his life. It’s just so hard to know what the right thing to do in this situation is. In some ways, the death of pets is easier because euthanasia is an option, so you don’t have to wait and wait and wait for nature to take its course, like how I had to just wait and watch my dad slowly die of dehydration in that hospice. But on the other hand, euthanasia means you have to decide yourself when your loved one is going to die, and pets can’t tell you when they want you to do it.

 

For a few weeks after Basil died, Lily continued to meow at the backdoor when it got dark to let me know it was time for Basil to come in and get his treats. She’d look confused when I didn’t open the door and just gave her some treats. She’d eat her treats, then go back to the door and start meowing some more because Basil still wasn’t in yet.

Lily started spending all day in Basil’s room, which probably still smells like him. She lies in the same spot he was laying the night before he died, before we took him outside to wait for the vet.

It took a while to get used to coming home to a quiet house, instead of coming home to Basil greeting me at the door. Lily eventually stopped meowing at the back door each evening, but she never goes outside at all anymore, so I had to get used to working in the garden with no cat.

I waffle about getting a new cat. Lily seems to get no exercise at all anymore, so maybe getting her a new friend would do her some good. For all I know she does nothing but lie in that room all day when we’re at work. But I decided I would at least wait until after the Wild Hunt has come to collect Basil’s soul and take him away.

Is there such a thing as Cat Valhalla? Can Basil feast on cream and tuna and catnip with the gods now? He did fight all the way up until the end. Even that last day, when it was clear his anemic body was struggling just to get him enough oxygen to stay alive, he was still trying to get up and walk.

I know it’s been six months, but it’s still hard to believe he’s actually gone. He was an especially good cat. I know, all my cats have been especially good cats, but he was especially good. Even though his life was shorter than I would have liked, I hope I at least managed to give him a better life than he would have had if I had not taken him in 12 years ago. He was my buddy through graduate school and getting married and buying a house and pretty much becoming an adult. George Carlin said “life is a series of dogs,” but my life has been a series of cats.

Raising a Horn for Tom Petty

Monday morning, as usual, I had the local news on while I was getting ready for work. I was brushing my teeth when I noticed they were playing footage of Tom Petty and thought, “Oh, he must be putting on a benefit concert for hurricane victims or something like that,” because that’s the kind of thing he’d do, or maybe he was going to be at the Austin City Limits music festival coming up soon.

And then I saw the headline at the bottom of the screen and realized that Rockalfheim, the realm of the mighty rock and roll dead, had suddenly and unexpectedly gained another member. Again.

I’ve had a busy week, so it took a while for it to sink in. Tom Petty never inspired the same passion some other musical artists did. On the 50th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper‘s Lonely Hearts Club Band I watched a documentary about how musically complex and brilliant it was. No one would ever make a documentary like that about Tom Petty. After David Bowie and Prince died, the television and internet were full of analyses of their musical genius. Tom Petty wasn’t that kind of musician.

He just wrote good songs that made you happy when you heard them. When I saw him in interviews, he didn’t seem to have a pretentious bone in his body. He talked about how it only took him 30 minutes to write one of his most well-known songs, “Free Fallin,” and about how most of his songs only have four chords anyway, so any beginning guitarist could play them.

When I was a teenager, Tom Petty was “comfort music” for me. My generation’s music was Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains. When I was depressed, I’d put on that music to wallow in misery.

But sometimes I didn’t feel like wallowing, so the CD I’d put in was Into the Great Wide Open. My dad got that album when it first came out, and I liked it so much and kept “borrowing” it so much, he let me have it. I still have it.

Since his death, I have seen articles praising Tom Petty for his storytelling ability, and I completely agree. He was a modern day Bard or Skald. Sure, his songs were musically simple, but songs like “Into the Great Wide Open,” feel like the plots of a whole movie or novel. He took well to the MTV era because his songs already evoked so much imagery.

But I think the reason I always found Tom Petty’s music comforting was that his songs felt optimistic, but at the same time acknowledged that life was hard. But just because life is hard doesn’t mean you just give up. You pick yourself up and keep going anyway. Maybe “I Won’t Back Down” is a more famous example, but when I was a kid, I really loved “Learning to Fly.” I remember listening to this song over and over again.

Well some say life will beat you down, break your heart, steal your crown, so I’ve started out for God knows where. I guess I’ll know when I get there.

I haven’t gotten to go to a lot of concerts in my life, but I did get to see Tom Petty back in the early 00’s. The boyfriend I had at the time was more of a heavy metal fan, but he knew I liked Tom Petty, so he surprised me once by getting us tickets to go see him when he played the Coca-Cola Starplex in Dallas. With the possible exception of when I got to see Paul McCartney, it was the most enjoyable concert I’ve been to. We got pretty good seats (unlike when I saw McCartney or the Rolling Stones), and the Wallflowers opened. I didn’t even know that until Jacob Dylan walked out on stage and started singing “One Headlight,” so I was pleasantly surprised to get a bonus band that I liked.

But Tom Petty sure knew how to put on a fun show! The venue was small enough to feel a bit more intimate than the huge stadium I saw in the Stones in. And he did that thing where he turned his songs into a sing-along for everybody.

My favorite part of the concert was when he sang “You Don’t Know How it Feels,” and on cue, he let the whole audience sing the chorus for him.

Let’s get to the point! Let’s roll another joint, and turn the radio LOUD! I’m too alone to be proud, and you don’t know it feels to be me.

That song came out in 1994, and that reminds me of another thing about Tom Petty I noticed a long time ago. There was some kind of timelessness about his music that he could keep going through the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s still making hits. A lot of artists who got their start in the 70’s didn’t manage to do that. Even if they were still creating albums and touring by the 90’s, people came to their concerts to sing along with the old familiar hits from the 70’s, not the songs that came out recently.

I have a feeling that as long as people are strumming guitars, they’ll be strumming Tom Petty songs.

So it’s the end of the line for Charlie T. Wilbury Jr. Next stop is Rockalfheim, where two of his Wilbury brothers are already waiting for him, along with Prince, and David, and Freddie, and John, and Jimi, and many others…

Maybe somewhere down the road a ways, you’ll think of me, wonder where I am these days. Maybe somewhere down the road where somebody plays Purple Haze…

We don’t have the luxury of ignoring Nazis.

Much has been written already about what happened in Charlottesville, VA a couple of weeks ago, so I feel no need to repeat a lot of that. But I would like to mention something that I learned from the incident.

The first place I encountered the slogan “blood and soil” was on a Heathen message board I used to frequent back when I was a newbie Heathen. The phrase was popular with some the regulars there. Sounded innocent enough. Blood = honoring the ancestors. Soil = honoring the land. Good stuff, right?

My skin crawled when two weeks ago I watched footage of Tiki torch wielding Nazis chanting those words, with the newscaster referring to it as “an old Nazi slogan.” So for the last fifteen years or so I thought it was a Heathen slogan. I’m just really glad I didn’t start using it myself before I found out where it was from.

This is why we can’t ignore Nazis, even though for most of my Heathen life, that’s what I’ve been told to do by other Heathens. “Ignore them and they will go away. They just want attention. Don’t give it to them,” they would advise.

But ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away. Instead, it lets the problem grow and grow until you can’t ignore it anymore. Ignoring insect pests gnawing away at the plants in my garden doesn’t make them go away. Ignoring a cancerous tumor growing in your body doesn’t make it go away. Why would ignoring Nazis make them go away?

If you are ignoring your enemies, you aren’t learning about them. Hence my ignorance about slogans like “blood and soil” when I was a newbie Heathen. Nobody told me where that slogan actually came from, and it sounded Heathen-ish enough, so I thought it was fine. None of the more experienced Heathens on that board raised any alarm about it.

I’m sure if I asked my husband right now, “What are the fourteen words?” he would have no idea what I was talking about. I think that’s how it is with most people, or at least most ordinary, non-racist white people. We’d rather not give much thought to Nazis and the kinds of things they say. We’ve got jobs and families and hobbies to pay attention to.

But then something happens like what happened in Charlottesville, and those ordinary, non-racist white people are shocked that this happened! “You mean Nazis are still around? Where did these guys come from? Can you believe this is happening in 2017?”

I wasn’t shocked or surprised, but I kind of wish I was. I don’t like having to know about these people. I’d rather ignore them. I’d like to have no idea what they are talking about when they recite their slogans and dogwhistles. Recently I heard a clip of a talk Richard Spencer gave. Maybe it was when he was speaking at Texas A&M last year; I don’t remember for sure. Anyway, he referred to white people as “The Children of the Sun,” which also sounds poetic and vaguely Heathen-ish. If that phrase came to me in a different context, say on a Heathen message board instead of out of the mouth of a famous white supremacist, I might have thought it was a Heathen thing, maybe having something to do with Sunna or Midsummer or something nice like that. Now I feel a mixture of curiosity about where that phrase came from, and dread Googling it because I don’t want to know what dark corners of the internet such a search would lead.

Though it’s still pretty dumb. If any group of people are “Children of the Sun,” wouldn’t it be black people? They’re the ones whose skin and hair are adapted to high amounts of sun exposure. If I go out in the blazing sun without a hat and sunscreen on every square inch of exposed skin, the next day I will be in pain! But I’ve written here before about how white supremacists are terrible at biology.

But I digress. I’m glad that Heathen organizations like The Troth have given up on ignoring Nazis. Finally it seems like people have figured out that ignoring them isn’t working, and actually that’s what they’ve wanted us to do all along.

I wish Heathens had figured this out sooner, but I guess better late than never.