Never Walked In High Heels

One of my best friends and I have been following a Supreme Court case which has recently completely engrossed our dinner time conversation. Last month they reached a verdict, but we still can’t let it go. A middle school-aged girl, suspected of hiding painkillers, was strip searched in front of the school nurse and another female teacher after no prescription drugs were found found in her locker. The US Supreme Court fortunately has ruled that the search was unconstitutional and went against an individual’s right to privacy. The student, and if I might say victim, in this situation is now in college and although the decision brings closure, it cannot begin to undo the damage brought on by the incident.

There’s something about being in a school setting, which forces individuals, who are otherwise quite pleasant, to come under the false assumption that there is no governing body higher than there own and nothing any parent or student can do to complain will ever have ramifications on an administrative career. The situation that invoked the Supreme Court case was of course every parent’s worst nightmare. You send your child to school to educate them in  reason and logic. You expect faculty and staff to treat your student with decency, showing them how a moral upright person is to behave in a larger society. Students are taught that they should trust their teachers, and I think the relationship with those in front of the classroom can often prove to be as important or as detrimental as a relationship with a parent. What happened was of course a breech of power, but it was so much more than that as well. What the students learned is that there is no law, and in this particular situation, that might makes right. Is a classroom full of young people where we want to call this into question? Forced to strip down to her underwear and shift her breasts to prove that there was nothing in her bra, the teachers who observed the strip search actually advocated for her to turn off her mind, her conscience, and her self-respect for their own suspicions.

What disturbs me about this case is that I know this abuse of power and manipulation of students happens on a daily basis. I have seen it happen in my own education, which is why I find the case so angering. If our teachers are responsible for educating and molding the next generation, what does it mean to teach children that there is no right to privacy and that any official can demand a strip search and must immediately be complied with? How can we ever teach that a woman has a right to choose what happens to her own body when this occurs? Such is a recipe for a rampant abuse of power particularly when brought upon a student who has no prior history of using any harmful substances. What is obvious about this situation is the fact that the faculty who administered the search were used to living in fear and thought that such mandatory complacency was perfectly acceptable. I wish more parents were involved in their children’s education to the extent of being willing to take the school administration to court when they are severely in the wrong. I am fortunate enough to have parents who were willing to do so and who taught me to do likewise. The greatest education that can be received often comes from the mistakes of the teachers who are supposed to be offering it freely. Battles with school administration are unfortunately an everyday occurrence if you are a student with a disability and critiquing though they might be, they teach you never to turn of your mind, always to question authority, and how to really be an aware individual, even if it means always being suspicious of those in charge.

              When my roommate brought home a new fling, I didn’t pay much attention. In our house, boys come and go, and while most of them are friendly they all have their faults. So, we’ve learned not to get too attached, not to invest too much, and not to become too annoyed by the fault that one can see plain as day even when the other cannot. But this particular one got unexpectedly on my bad side so fast that he managed to permanently smear himself to my disfavor.

              It started when I was stupid enough to walk across the floor of our new flat barefoot and I received a splinter from an ill cared for floor. This unleashed a general barrage of comments about my landlord not taking care of the place and not being responsible for his investment. I was having various amounts of trouble with the property owner that week and the splinter just sealed the deal.

              “But Athena, you shouldn’t hold people responsible to their actions like that. People just do stuff, it doesn’t mean anything,” he said, reclining on the couch and lazily fondling my roommate’s hand. OK, I instantly went from having on opinion about the guy to utter disgust all in a matter of four seconds. This was an impressive record. My somewhat embarrassed roommate asked him to clarify what he meant, which he gladly did, by repeating himself. I looked to my roommate in utter disbelief, ready to punch the guy in the face, before I realized that he would dismiss the action as being “just stuff.” What was the point?

              I couldn’t imagine having a relationship with a guy who, when asked to take responsibility for his actions, refuses to due so. More to the point, I can’t imagine having sex with someone who behaved in this manner either.

              The link between sex and responsibility is an issue that makes modern audiences very nervous. In an age of birth control and condoms we’d like to think that we’ve removed any responsibility from having sex. And we’ve gotten rid of the big ones to be sure, but sex is something which profoundly affects every facet of life including economics and politics.

              For a woman to have a partner who refuses to take responsibility for himself and his actions is like a throw back to the days before feminism.  Its saying that she doesn’t deserve someone who is honest with her or respects her. If he can’t be held accountable for his actions, what will stop him from  becoming abusive or cheating on his partner? Why should his girlfriend have any value to him, if he doesn’t value his own actions. 

              Like so many of society’s problems, this commentary is meaningless without making it concrete. Most women will say “I would never go out with anyone who would say that!” Fair enough, but would you get involved with someone who subconsciously believed it? How many times do you tell yourself excuses for your significant other. Or are left trying to explain the unexplainable to friends when your partner does something stupid?

              But then let’s add sex to the mix. It goes without saying that this sort of attitude carries huge risks for my friend in terms of STDs. But the ramifications become much more distressing than that. If a man refuses to take responsibility for his actions, then sex is meaningless to him in every sense of the word. It is not an act of adoration, commitment, or even enjoyment. If “people just do stuff” then the intention cannot exist, even if the intention was/is hedonism. Sex is “just stuff” and as mundane as doing your laundry or emptying your pockets. When even the most exciting things become mundane  there is no longer passion or even a sense of life.

              Suffice it to say, the beau didn’t last too long after that. I think my roommate figured out they didn’t have that much in common. It was the first one in a while that I had learned anything from, so this boy had more sticking power than most in my mind. And for that I tip my hat to him…not that I expect that to mean much to him. After all, people “just do stuff.” 

I’m guessing its rare for most people to have a complete stranger come up to them and be informed that their old home was the perfect spot for skinny dipping. Add to that situation that I was at a wedding when I was informed of this fact and you may get some clue of just how bizarre my life actually is. But maybe I should back up a little bit.

My last year of college I lived on Lake Norman, foreshadowing my obsession with living on water in subsequent years.  We were surrounded by docks and walkways which made for amazing spring evenings and nighttime strolls spent battling bug bites. It was from the back porch that I wrote my thesis and various plays which were desperate to be born. And it was just the beginning of November when my friend Cristi and I discovered that the dock which lead from the back door of my apartment to the middle of the lake not only looked creepy because all of it’s lights were burned out, but also made the perfect place for skinny dipping,

Now I figure if peer pressure can be blamed for kids taking on drug use or drinking alcohol, there must be somewhere in the book that says you can blame it for suddenly finding yourself swimming naked in a lake at midnight just four weeks before Christmas. Our terry cloth bathrobes left in a pile on the planked wood while each of the five of us girls did our best to slip silently into the cold autumn water without giving sign of the icy shock. Our still changing figures cast shadows in the night as we discovered curves and lines we never knew we had. A waist which was still hidden under baby fat last summer, breasts we still crossed our arms to hide, all the insecurities of a teenager were still held up in defense and eventually had to be stripped away through a combination of proximity to other people and water which was so cold, it was violent.

Many of us girls hit puberty at ten or twelve and we look like women long before we feel like it. By college the rest of the world expected me to act like a woman and I had no idea what that was. Refusing to look down when we got into the shower, we hid under t-shirts and basketball shorts or, on some evenings, under the dock in a huddle, as a man with dog walked by. Most people assume that for young women, body image issues stem from a lack of self esteem or a fear of being ugly. I don’t remember it like that. I think my issues came from immaturity. I looked like a woman. I had all the equipment. Problem was, I was still a nineteen year old kid who thought jumping in the lake after Thanksgiving totally naked was a great idea.

This summer I found myself walking around the quays in my part of London most days. The unusually beautiful weather this year meant that I could walk around in a sundress and pretty sandals rather than pulling on some awkward combination of sensible but comfy outfit. Going along the quay one afternoon I noticed that I sat a little taller and greeted the men in the boatyard more confidently all the way around. I felt the breeze in between my thighs, a strong energy sliding down my spine and radiating through my hips. I suddenly wanted a pair of hands around my waist and someone who was as confident as I was to talk with.

Within five minutes I had met a man fishing off the dock and he and I were digging for worms. My sandals had been kicked off and I was eyeing his cooler full of orange soda. So much for being a woman.

At the wedding this weekend I looked from the stranger, who, at some point in time had jumped naked off my back dock, to Cristi in her white dress and veil. It may have been her day but I still needed an explanation.

“I don’t know. You must’ve been at an audition or something. Heck if I know, I did it all the time without you.”

“Cristi, I can’t have random people jumping naked off my dock. Do you know how much trouble-“

“Oh grow up,” said the new wife.

Girls don’t grow up in a consistent and straight line. Somewhere between the age we feel like, the age we actually are, and the age the world expects us to act, there is us, afraid to look down and see that our bodies seem much more confident than we are in them. And there are always women’s voices coming from the shadows of the banks. Strong voices of sensual women promise all the treasures and secrets of being a women. Many girls instantly jump in, desperately trying to grow up way too fast and taste the mysteries which tempt men and women alike. Others hide under the dock, afraid to let go into unknown waters. They do not know if they can swim or survive.

More often than not there are young women who jumped in naked just to be silly, only to realize later that nobody had a map of the lake. We get dangerously close to the sirens at times and then we flee to take refuge underneath the dock. There are entire days spent back and forth, restless and trapped in one’s foolishly mature body.

And there are days when we get closer to the bank than we can ever remember. And actually, we are quite comfortable just listening; we all know we are going grow up someday, but none of us know how to pass through the deep waters directly.

I’m in Central London trying to get the 188 home. A driver pulls up to the stop looks at me and insists that London buses don’t have wheelchair ramps. Now in a lot of ways, I can’t say I really blame him for being a fool, just like I can’t be blamed for being born with a disability. He doesn’t know that I have lived in London for years. He doesn’t know that I’ve used 3 buses today, all of which had wheelchair ramps. He probably doesn’t even know that one entire side of his double-decker bus is devoted to a full color ad declaring all buses in London to now be wheelchair accessible. And I’m assuming that he has no idea that I work for Transport for London and I just met his supervisor last week. All he knows is that he is one hundred percent right and I have a disability, which makes me automatically one hundred percent wrong.

Like I said, people shouldn’t blamed for how they are naturally.

Except it is this exact excuse which keeps London miserably inaccessible to wheelchair users and woefully under prepared for the Olympics / Paralympics in 2012. Yes, the London Underground was started in 1863. Yes, London is a city where things are so old that every piece of construction could qualify for a blue historical plaque. Yes, the city is hard for anyone to get around in. None of this justifies the fact that we are now five years after Britain passed the Disability Discrimination Act and there is still not a single reliable form of transportation in London for disabled people to use. As a transportation advisor, I’ve heard public officials try to justify these conditions over and over. And you know what, after all this time and all the warning, after America passed its disability legislature a full fifteen years before Britain passed it, there is still no good way for person’s who have anything less than a fully functioning body to get around in London.

An athlete in the Paralympics stands to be insulted by the ground staff at any London airport. They would be appalled to learn just how many taxi drivers don’t know how to use their own ramps, and how many bus drivers deny that ramps even exist. And, my guess is, after a day or so, they would consider themselves lucky to even get on a train with the level of resentment I’ve seen from most station staff. And the London Underground has a goal of making thirty three percent of all stations on the system accessible by 2013… that’s it, just one third. These are the situations I see in London on a daily basis. In one of the world’s most diverse cities, access is far from being even “manageable.”

When determining nation wide access, the concrete obstacles are often easiest to change. The mental blocks that people throw up are always inhibit equality more than issues of bricks and mortar. Now my worry is that people are falling for ‘good enough,’ and the idea that London was never made to be accessible. Maybe if you have the luxury of taking this attitude London’s accessibility today seems impressive. But to those of us who are dependent on accessible transit, these conditions are paltry to say the least.

People of London you have just under three years to inform, change, and build. The first thing you must do is stop hiding behind your “nature” however justifiable of an excuse it may provide. Since when has something right ever been easy? I don’t think with this little time left Londoners can accomplish the necessary adjustments to make this city wheelchair friendly. Prove me wrong.

In university I would debate with my friend Mark about gender roles endlessly. Neither of us really fit into the common classifications for our sex. I was the one who was always looking for logic and reason, numbers and proofs. He was always ready to live by faith. When I would come home from four AM crew practice I would see him piling flowers into his car for the nursing home he volunteered at.We would drive by and I would honk the horn, making him slam his head on the top of the car before he looked out and waved at me. By that time, I was already to our dorm with my sweaty shirt stripped of and showing my sports bra.

From first hand experience I can say he was the best feeder on campus, and when in our junior year an incoming male freshman had a severe disability, Mark was first in line to offer to be a care taker. That’s what made me think of him this weekend.

While on a flight home I saw a family with an older son with cerebral palsy. Given that the son looked about eighteen years old I wasn’t surprised to see his father carry him on-board. But then for the next eleven hours it was the men of the family (particularly his father) which never left his side, helping him eat, adjust his iPod, or help him to the toilet.

Now maybe this behavior doesn’t seem odd to you, if not…then you are, admittedly, a much more progressive person than I am. Even though I have been lucky enough to have a wonderful relationship with my dad, growing up it is the mothers who I have always seen take their children to therapy, making the sacrifices needed to make sure her disabled child gets proper care.

What is it about a male taking care of someone else that doesn’t seem effeminate or out of place? If the qualities of nurturing and giving peace are qualities which we usually attribute to women, why do I look to the men of my life who offer the same gifts as the most masculine men I know? My mother often speaks of the male nurses she worked amongst with more reverence than any doctor. Their ability to lift fallen patients, provide calm in emergencies, and work the least desirable shifts have always shaped my image of what a man ought to be.

If a man is made by his strength, then his efforts and put others before himself is an act full of effort. If it is  muscle which is the defining characteristic of masculinity, then that muscle is only worth its use to serve others. And if it is gentleness that is somehow a feminine quality, undesirable by ‘real men,’ perhaps it is because the power which it takes to be gentle and supportive requires a unique combination which is beyond the reach of most every man.

Like so many other qualities, the most masculine thing is a man who never needs to question his masculinity. Because giving someone relief takes the same form of building a house or clearing a forest. It takes seeing what needs to be done, doing it, and not expecting anything in return.

I always thought Mark and I made a good team because he and I balanced each other out. I thought I was the male to his female. Now that I miss him, I’ve reevaluated my judgment. He is one of the best men I know as his particular brand of masculinity is one that made football players look sheepish as they ran by us on the quad.

I was twelve years old the first time my father recommended that I read Atlas Shrugged. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if he offered to read it as a bedtime story before realizing the amount of sex that was involved in the story and quickly retracted the suggestion. Last Christmas, due in part to three extremely enthusiastic friends, I started reading it for myself and six months later, she is proving to be a major source while working on my university dissertation from now until the end of the year.

While I was visiting old college friends, I had the opportunity to make good use of my college’s inter-library loan services and so I ordered the nineteen boxes that held all of the surviving drafts and manuscripts from the libraries of Congress. The day they came, the librarian lined them up for my examination. My first thought was sheer excitement of getting to read her handwriting and experience the development of an epic novel from start to finish. Side by side with my copies of her journal, the completed and published Atlas Shrugged, and a plethora of her nonfiction work, I began to see the inner workings of a woman I’ve come to idolize over the past few months. I opened the first box and within five minutes I was completely frustrated by the woman’s utterly illegible and jagged handwriting —the scratched out passages, the coffee stains, the illegible notes at the bottoms a pages—Rand had a particular habit of utterly refusing to retype a page until she had completely filled up the draft of the page she was working on. So much so that it is completely illegible to a young woman working in the library fifty years later.

I looked at notes that she later disagreed with. Complete (at least to me they seemed ‘complete’) characters and chapters that never made it into the novel. When I say that they never made it, I don’t mean that it’s like seeing the director’s cut of the Watchmen and feeling sorry that they left a scene out because of time restrictions. No, what I mean is that some ideas she had were so bad (there’s no other word to describe it), that I would have been happier and more satisfied with the woman had I never seen them. In her journal, at the age of 23, Rand wrote, “From now on, no thought whatever about yourself, only about your work.You are only a writing engine. Don’t stop, until you really and honestly know that you cannot go on.” She then goes on to remark that she still has yet to accomplish anything and that the pride that she feels for herself is completely inappropriate given her blank resume. Coming from the highest advocate of selfishness, this thought was shocking to me—that at 23 even Ayn Rand had the same insecurities and frustrations that I struggle with in my own journal.

For any historian who has done primary source research, after about the first five minutes of feeling a thrill of holding a piece of history, you begin to see the human effect of that individual. There are smudges illegible points, pen marks that proved frustrating, even a small red smudge on one of the corners where I’m pretty sure she wiped off her lipstick, and even though you can’t actually see it, I can just smell the amounts of cigarettes that the woman smoked during the eleven years of drafting her Magnus Opus. Actually, doing primary source work is like looking behind the veil at the real Wizard of Oz. In real life he’s just as insecure and human as anyone else on the Yellow-Brick Road. Not that Rand wanted anyone to know that. Her philosophy is so extraordinary and at times so combative that the aura she strove to give off during her years was as someone who never wrote drafts, never edited, and for that matter was never a child. She wanted, like most people in the public eye, for everyone to believe that she came out of Zeus’s head, fully formed and ready for battle. Looking at her mistakes, her little sketches in the margins, and even the imperfect preservation of her own work however, makes her passion for life and her philosophy even more extraordinary. Here was a woman who refused to settle for good enough or any amount of dishonesty toward her own work, even when it came to her own work. As a person who fled Soviet Russia, she saw that we must not be hindered by who we are, but actively reach for who we can become. In her own words: People create their own questions because they are afraid to look straight. All you have to do is look straight and see the road, and when you see it, don’t sit looking at it - walk.”

Walking into the church, I felt gorgeous. My green dress perfectly complimented my red hair as the fabric skimmed off of my shoulders and tightly hugged my waist flowing in a cascade down to my knees. The gold sandals I wore had rhinestones that hit the light with such intensity, you would swear they were diamonds. I hoped I was stunning as I walked into one of the back pews, greeted my neighbors, and sat down.

When we all rose for the first song, I noticed that I was having a good day on my feet, able to stand upright and straight (my mother had recently commented that she thought I had grown over the summer despite being 25 years old and far past growth spurts) I opened my mouth to sing noticing the reflection of the sunlight through the stain glass window. Suddenly and inexplicably I felt something cold at my back—I was nearly bowled over. “What the — ?” I started to wonder. Whipping around I noticed a little old lady who had her fingers down the back of my dress.

“Everything’s fine dear. It was just that your bra strap was showing and I decided to fix it.”

On what planet is it ever considered a reasonable action to stick your fingers down the back of someone else’s dress in order to make them appear more modest by covering their exposed bra strap?

I recognize of course that I have a rather different outlook on the showing of brassier straps than my elders. In my opinion, every woman wears one, so what’s the big deal if it shows every once and a while. I really do appreciate and admire this reverence with which older women treat this topic—that’s not my issue here. My issue is the invasion of privacy and the fact that this little old lady took it upon herself to become especially intimate with me without even asking my permission.

I don’t know what it is about me that says to perfect strangers that I have no boundaries of intimacy. As I’ve stated before, I’ve learned to very carefully seek out potential invaders of privacy. The man on the street who believes that I suddenly need a kiss, the women who take it upon themselves to fix my bra straps, the people who suddenly decided that they know exactly where I’m going and seek to push my wheelchair without ever saying a word to me. Living in London, I’ve come to realize that different cultures have different distances that they perceive as intimate. In the western world, when two people are in a elevator, chances are that they will stand on opposites sides. In more eastern countries, this distance option becomes much closer. What is invasive to one person is uninvasive to another, but I’m pretty sure that sticking your hand down the back of some perfectly strange young woman is considered inappropriate in a majority of cultures.

I believe that my lack of a right to privacy has something to do with my disability. Perfectly good natured people seem to take the stance that if someone in the village has a disability it is the responsibility of the entire community to bound together and help them, which on the one hand is perfectly true. But at the same time, the communal help is supposedly to offer the disabled person as normal a life as possible, and a normal life usually means keeping boundaries to some sane level. It does not mean letting everyone in to manipulate your life, your possessions, and your clothes to however they see fit. Help is only a blessing when it’s actually helpful. When it isn’t helpful, it quickly turns into a nuisance.

Yes, I know people mean well. And I probably should be more thankful than I am. As my mother would say, ‘its better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.’ Well, so are a lot of things but that doesn’t make them OK. And for that matter, she knows I’d kill her if she ever tried to fiddle with my bra strap in public. I’m a twenty five year old woman. We live in a culture where a certain amount of privacy is required by each other in order to remain respectful. Maybe this woman would’ve acted the same way if I was able bodied, but I doubt it.

Either way, I knew my bra strap was showing when I bought the dress and I had consciously decided that wasn’t an issue. Which is to say, I suppose, I had chosen to take the consequences for my actions of exposing an eighth of an inch of a bra in public. I just never expected the consequence to be so invasive.

Apparently, I’m a fire hazard.

              I was not made aware of this until I was rejected from an internship last week. The theatre I was looking to work at is up three flights of stairs above a local pub. I frequent the theatre all the time, climbing up the staircases and making my way into the theatre all the time, occasionally putting a little extra weight in my escort’s arm. I was aware of the stairs when I chose to apply for the position. I was equally aware that I could navigate the stairs by myself safely and effectively. The stairs were a non issue for me. It should have been likewise for the theatre company.

              But then again who am I to say what I am capable of?

I never asked for a reason as to why I didn’t get the position. The company willfully offered it on their own in an email. “Although we understand the nature of your disability allows you to climb stairs, we are concerned that in the event of a fire, you would impede safety for yourself and others in the building.” And that was the end of their reasoning.

        What’s most troubling about this situation is that it occurs at least three times per year. Because a building is not accessible, the potential employer hides behind health and safety law as a means of negating any form of disability discrimination law. To be able to escape the compensatory obligations of one law by hiding behind another law represents a failure on the part of lawmakers to form a cohesive code of conduct. Worse still, it prevents society from ever effectively progressing. During the 1950’s in America we found ourselves equally able to escape the law via other laws. We called this heinous situation the Jim Crow laws and they are looked upon now as a disgraceful barrier towards civil rights.

        What is, perhaps, the most disturbing about being called  an occupational fire hazard is that it takes values such as choice and independence out of my hands. No longer am I able to decide for myself when I am able to safely walk up and down a flight of stairs. Furthermore, achieving the goal of being able to do so is no longer enough. Rather, it is up to an outside source who knows very little about me and my condition, to decide what I am capable of. Outside sources, governing experts and pragmatic cautions overstepping their boundaries often result in putting more shackles on the individual, not safety  features.

        Assuming of course that the only reason I didn’t get the position was because I would prove to be a fire hazard in the workplace, I appreciate the theatre’s desire to keep me safe. But really, that decision should be my call. I know my capabilities and limitations. I weighed all those considerations before I applied for the job and they are not their choices to make. Oddly enough, if I prove to be such a fire hazard, I’m surprised they didn’t saying anything about me going up three flights of stairs to pay them money for a ticket. I guess occupational hazards only occur when the money flows in a certain direction. 

Written for the Las Vegas Review Journal September 3, 2009

              I was very frustrated when I read the LVRJ article this morning on yesterday’s county commissioners’ meeting. It stated that there was a “compromised reached” between the residents and developers at Mountain’s Edge regarding the building of future parks in the area. This is simply not true. The only compromise which was reached was pre-established between Commissioner Brager and the Focus Developers. Meanwhile, the Las Vegas Review Journal seemed to miss the even bigger story, that democracy has become relative in Las Vegas.

              Brager stated during the hearing “I am willing to go against my constituents to do what I think is right.” Since when has this ever been the role of an elected official? Her job is to represent us and our wishes, not single handedly alter and mold her district into her visions of what it should be, no matter how noble her intentions are. Out of those of us that spoke at the meeting, there was only one man who agreed with her proposal, constituting less than five percent of the opinions heard. The other ninety five percent were in stark opposition. Commissioner Brager continued to insist that the majority were “wrong,” “foolish,” and even “unsympathetic” when we are no longer promised the parks we were guaranteed upon investing in our homes.

              For the past year Commissioner Brager has consistently treated her electorate like children, while doing everything possible to allow big business to squirm out of obligations to residents. Behind closed doors she agreed with Focus Developers to a scaled down version of the parks we were promised. The proposed plans at the meeting were ones we had never seen before, nor were there enough printed yesterday by Focus to allow ten people to examine the changes, let alone the 150+ who had to take time off from work to advocate for their homes.

            Commissioner Brager chooses to appease big business rather than advocate for the citizens she works for. To her, democracy is a relative term as is the word guarantee. Brager chooses to be a democratic leader only as long as her voters agree with what she thinks is best, otherwise she will become patronizing. She says she can’t understand why we would reject the parks the commission is giving us for free. What she fails to acknowledge is that we here at Mountain’s Edge aren’t asking for anything to be given, we are asking for her to help in ensuring we receive the parks we were guaranteed by Focus when we took out our home loans. In a commissioner, we don’t need a nursemaid, we need an advocate.

            Brager’s actions yesterday illustrated just how relative democracy has become these days. Her behavior is indicative of the feelings of superiority and expertise which has crept into every corner of our government. Brager was elected to be a civil servant, not to insult our intelligence with fallacies and back room deals. Her job is to express the will of her constituents, not chastise them. Failure to understand this, as many on the federal, state, and local level, now refuse to do, means that people like Commissioner Brager, may soon be out of a job. 

             It’s the mother lode of clichés. You hear the recording full of static as Roosevelt takes a deep breath. “The only thing we have to fear is…” dramatic pause. Yeah, I get it, I know what you’re going to say. Come on, come on, come on… “fear itself!” The punch line has been delivered, and we can all go back to dismissing the bromide all Americans have heard a thousand times before.

              I’m sure when FDR made that speech he wasn’t expecting it to be replayed until it had lost all meaning for future generations. I never really thought too much about it until this weekend, when I found myself coming from a small town paralyzed by fear and then it took on a whole new meaning. What I always assumed it to mean was that people had nothing to fear and that there was this feeling out there called fear which was only for fools to react.

              And then this weekend I spent time with people who lived in stagnant fear. Not terror mind you, but plain, simple, fear. The difference is striking. People all over the world live in justifiable terror where there is unspeakable violence, horrible threats, and a justifiable unknown of what tomorrow may bring. According to the Oxford American dictionary, fear is classified as “a belief” which, by definition may or may not be based in fact. Conversely, terror is “a state” caused by something directly. Terror, it seems, is concrete and is caused by dangers whereas fear, is not. The people that I am speaking of live in fear, although of exactly what I do not know.

              I know they are living in fear because fear is paralyzing. This is what I have failed to notice about Roosevelt’s statement until now, the reason we must be afraid of fear is because this emotion, above all others, stops us dead in our tracks. By definition, you cannot run from a belief because there is no way to tell what direction leads towards safety. Fear lurks around every corner because it manifests itself in your mind. Thus, your entire world begins to shrink down to where the shadows don’t reach. But any wall brings its own manufactured shadow.

              I could give you the specifics of the fearful nature of the people I spent my weekend with, but in truth it seems like they’re mere generalities describing the fearful times we live in today. One woman was afraid the world was ending, another that her money would soon be worthless so she refused to spend any of it. There was a farmer afraid of fixing his tractor because of what his co-operative would think of his budget, and a kid refusing to go to school because he may fail out. These are the nebulous fears which follow us all and a person from a different demographic may even call them worries. But they each, in one form or another, stop life.

              Perhaps it took another economically tough time for me to understand what fear actually is. I would hear that there was only one thing to fear and wonder what anyone could feel staring down the barrel of a gun which Roosevelt would deem an appropriate response. But as a man with polio, I’m guessing he knew fear and he knew terror. He knew the terror of a body slowly destroying itself across the hours, and the fears of having to figure out how to live life all over again. No doubt he saw that each was very different. And while terror causes you to embrace life as you’ve never gone after it before, fear can only lead to shunning it altogether. And while there are plenty of dark forces out there, the most frightening is the one in which you willingly surrender life.