kittens don't care if they're black or white

like the rest of the world, i have looked on in dumbfounded horror as the reports rolled in last week of two innocent men in louisiana and minnesota who were killed in cold blood by those meant to protect them for no reason other than the color of their skin. then, when a sniper fired on a demonstration in dallas, killing and injuring police, it seemed that the united states was on the verge of meltdown.

during a long drive back from germany, on my phone i read the early accounts of the dallas events, all of which were very careful not to name the color of anyone's skin. some part of me appreciates the caution, as it's somehow borne of politeness and a wish to reserve judgement. but the fact is that these things are happening due to the color of people's skin and to be afraid to talk openly about it only adds to the problem.

the problem seems pretty insurmountable. instead of making things better, having the first black president in american history (who will also undoubtedly go down as one of the best) seems to have made things worse. the toothless mouth breathers are angry and with open carry gun laws in force, they're not afraid to show it.

i don't pretend to have any knowledge of what it must be like to be black in america today. as a white, educated, midwestern female living in europe, i'm surely steeped in about as much white privilege as one can be. living outside my culture, i have my moments feeling Other, but they are no doubt mild compared to daily fears of being stopped and shot by police just for going about my life within my own skin.

all these events seem to be bringing out the worst in people, especially on facebook. i suspect it's not good for us. we isolate ourselves in silos of those who believe as we believe. and we shake our heads at the sharing of treacly videos about how people are not born racist, considering ourselves above such superficial analysis. we don't really engage with the question at all. and it all feels quite hopeless.

some part of me feels as i did during the reagan years with his anti-russian rhetoric. i imagined a young girl in russia who was my age and maybe looked a bit like me and wanted the things i wanted. and i thought, if we could just meet and talk to one another and get to be friends, we wouldn't need all of this. maybe we all need to start making friends with people who are different from ourselves - whether it's skin color, sexual orientation, nationality or something else. maybe it's a place to begin.

lacking words

i don't seem to be able to find many words about the events in paris on friday evening. the horror seems at once too great and too commonplace to articulate. we grow numb from the frequency of these things, from them happening in the places where we work or play or go to school or go to relax and have fun. we could easily end up afraid to leave our homes. doors locked, minds closed, alone only with those we love and that which we know, afraid to let anything and anyone new in, lest they harm us. i don't think such a world would be that much fun. and i hope it doesn't come to that. so, we do what we can - symbolic gestures, like changing our profile picture in solidarity with those who lost their lives - to say that we stand with paris, feel for them, our hearts bleeding for them. i'm not sure if it means that much and i only left mine for a little while. it suddenly felt disingenuous. i've only ever been at the airport in paris and frankly, it's not my favorite place - so what business do i have standing in solidarity? i can't even really imagine how those people felt - how frightened they were, how panicked, how horrible it must have been. on some level, i just can't relate. i feel a bit numb about it. but, i hope that people will defiantly return to the cafés and concert halls and streets and football stadiums - that they will go about their lives, that they will not live in fear, because living in fear means those terrorists have won. hmm, maybe it's time to finally go see paris.

* * *

and on a happier and better-smelling note - a story of the last perfumer in belgrade.

makes me want to go to belgrade.

with thanks to bill for sending me the link.

in the same boat

still trying to absorb what happened last evening in copenhagen and like with the charlie hebdo events a few weeks ago, i find it too easy that the supposed perpetrator is killed before making him explain. now we will assign whatever meaning we wish to it - fear, terror, suspicion - and it will only continue in the long run. us against them will solidify rather than dissolving.

i have this notion that instead of being afraid, we need to hold more events where we discuss free speech, we need to have so many of them that no disgruntled, disenfranchised person with skewed ideas can possibly attack them all. we need to overwhelm them with the freedom of our speech.

shaken.

someone with murderous intentions has attacked a free speech event in copenhagen which featured a swedish cartoonist who published islam-critical cartoons back in 2007. it's happening again. probably (tho' we don't really know that for sure, since photos of the perpetrator are very sketchy at best, as are descriptions). one of the people in denmark who means the most to me is a cartoonist. he wasn't involved in the jyllands posten drawings back in 2005 (he works for a competing newspaper), but he is equally sharp in his editorial cartooning skills. and it shakes me to the core to think that i have to worry about his safety as he goes about his everyday life here in denmark. but it probably really has come to that after charlie hebdo and now this attack in copenhagen. is it really possible now that people will die for free speech and being clever and skeptical? and is it worth it? at this moment, even in the face of the uncertainty over what has really happened in copenhagen earlier today (and we don't really have a clear picture of it yet as i write this), that might very well be the case. keep your loved ones close and tell them that you love them.

a little assemblage of thoughts on the tragic events in paris

the tragic events in paris at charlie hebdo are on my mind, like they surely are for you as well. i'd frankly never heard of the magazine before, but my french is pretty weak, so it's no wonder. i have great affection for biting satire that forces you to think deeper and from what i've seen and read, they produce a newspaper in that vein. it is a horrible tragedy that they were slaughtered for doing so by people who didn't agree with their views and methods. it's so horrible that i think on some level i can't even really fathom it. it seems quite unreal, even in the face of graphic videos shot by bystanders. so it's taken me a few days to begin to collect my thoughts enough to write something about it. but i have been reading a lot of articles about it in a variety of places, from the nytimes to the guardian to danish newspapers to a friend's blog. that blog is probably the best, most sensible piece i've read.

i find it exceptionally disheartening what the tragedy seems to have done to people. i see it in my facebook feed, but i'm also reading it in the various opinion pieces online. it's not only the blood and gore of it, but how it has turned on a hatred of an entire religion, based on the actions of a few fanatics. my facebook feed is full of people calling for closing denmark's borders and sending home syrian refugees, calls to withdraw all resources from programs which help people in need who happen to be muslim. there is a mass reaction that is very black & white, very unnuanced and which, in my view, contains as much hate as those men with the guns must have felt on wednesday. it's a similar kind of reactionary fanaticism.  and it's tinged with more than a little racism and xenophobia. and to me, it means that the terrorists have won beyond their wildest imagination. if they can make us fear and hate at the same level as they do, they have reduced us.

i am heartened to see pockets of rationality and sense here and there. twitter is our barometer these days and like in australia, where a supportive hashtag surfaced, saying #illridewithyou, after the lunatic held all those hostages in the lindt café, there seems to be a groundswell of folks rallying around the policeman they so brutally shot, saying #jesuisahmed, rather than #jusuischarlie, which carries with it a more radical connotation.

it is hard to see what good can possibly come of this, but i do hope that we are able to take up a discussion which allows us to discuss the nuances and actually begin to address the problems that underlie these things...like the imbalance of resources in this world, the imperialist notions of those in the west, so sure of our own superiority, like getting education to women and the young populations of the muslim countries, so that they can see that they have options other than violence. rather than saying we need to send all of the foreigners home, maybe we should make them more welcome around here. it's much harder for people to hate and kill when they are your friends.

we're not a tribe anymore

they're apparently celebrating on the streets of kosovo. it seems after much lobbying of facebook "officials," they are now officially a country. on facebook. ironically, this makes me wonder if we are witnessing the beginning of the end of countries and nations as we know them. what's next, will countries send ambassadors to facebook and google? and perhaps apple and microsoft while they're at it? maybe coca-cola (just so they're not all tech companies) and disney? just because some wing nut who probably couldn't find kosovo on a map changed a bit of code in the backend of facebook, kosovo now feels legitimized. who cares if the united nations and the european union don't agree? facebook likes us! we're not a tribe anymore.

the next thing you know, they'll be opening starbucks in denmark...

sunday morning reflections

sunday morning finds me leisurely looking through pinterest, facebook, my flipboard blog feed and the new york times on my li'l iPad. husband always gets up and makes tea and delivers a cup, milky and sweetened with honey, so i don't have to leave the warmth of the quilts. the cats curl up next to me, purring and jockeying for position and it's pretty much my favorite hour or so of the week.

if i view the world through the lens of my various feeds, i have learned that vladimir putin has some canny editorial writers, we can no longer use the words lame, crazy or insane, disney has been infiltrated by the illuminati, the reason that time magazine didn't put putin on the cover in the US this week (he was on the cover everywhere else) was because the media is controlled by 6 corporations, sweden is awesome, there are a lot of injured, homeless animals in need of homes, iowa beat iowa state (i surmised this more from the silence of certain iowa state folks in my feed), people think it's homemade if you combine 4-5 premade ingredients (cake mixes, oreos, cool whip, jello and tortilla chips), eating the resulting sweet dessert will likely bring you closer to jesus, there is major flooding in colorado, berlin is where all the cool stuff takes place, triangles are the new circle, autumn is upon us, the latest trend in photographing food is to place it against a dark background, which serves to make it more moody and poetic and according to my myers-briggs profile (ENTP), i am sirius black from harry potter. 

i do wonder what effect this melange of input has on me? does it connect new synapses in my brain or reinforce the old ones? are my horizons expanded or narrowed? do i end up feeling helpless about my ability to do anything about the state of the world? do I even have the first clue about what state the world is in? does it take away my desire to argue against the madness before i even begin? am I even allowed to call it madness (that illuminati thing is pretty out there)? is it all a load of bullshit?

i listened to a pretentious panel of "experts" yesterday on P1 (our NPR equivalent, only even better) debate the ability of individuals to live more sustainably in practice. they justified their purchases of non-organic food, designer bags, frequent airplane travels, long showers and wasting of energy with homes filled with electronics they never turn off and ended up concluding that we as individuals cannot do anything about living more sustainably. we might as well load our grocery cart with cheap chicken and sit in front of our enormous flat screen televisions, clad in prada, planning our next holiday in bali. they decided that we should wait for governments to wake up and regulate us, since we were too lazy to take steps ourselves.

and while that's a pretty dire and cynical conclusion, and it rather pissed me off when i heard it (as i was driving instead of biking, no less) upon reflection, i don't think it's that illogical in light of the input we feed in to our brains. a lot of what we read and expose ourselves to points to individuals not being able to make one iota of difference (after all, the illuminati and those 6 corporations are controlling everything). and i'd like to say that it's lame and crazy of us, but apparently that avenue is now closed as well.

also in my various feeds, i came across a guardian piece by jonathan franzen about our frustrating way of conducting ourselves in the modern world. he harkens back to an austrian intellectual, karl kraus, who was  blogging in a journal called the torch, before blogging was invented. maybe we need to do as kraus did, and spend a lot of time reading stuff we hate, so as to be able to hate it with authority. i'll admit i'm not good at that, as i blogged the other day, i've been turning off those who post the most objectionable stuff on my facebook feed, because i don't want their vitriol polluting my mind or messing up the steady stream of photos of kittens and lego minifigures. 

i think i've said it before, but we have to start fighting back. we've been slacktivists long enough. it's time to start arguing against the madness. because not doing so clearly isn't working.

the A&F thing is much ado about nothing

i have to start by saying that i have long loved abercrombie and fitch, from the artfully ripped jeans to the dark moodiness of their stores, with that alluring scent of buy-me that they waft through the air. i get a little light headed just thinking about it (in a good way). hell, i even once named my cats after the place. the A&F items in my wardrobe are largely sweatshirts, but one of my favorite dresses - a simple blue linen one, that i've worn to tramp through egypt, russia, morocco, turkey, greece and the balkans, as well as my own back yard is also one of theirs. these clothes are old friends - they've been with me through thick and thin, we've had good times together and we will continue to do so. they're somehow an essential part of who i am. and also of how i see myself. and want to see myself. it's also how i want to see husband, so his wardrobe has had its share of A&F items as well.

there's a tag on the inside of this sweatshirt that says, "this body is incredibly shaped to meet and exceed standards for perfection." i bought it in an A&F shop in a mall in fargo (we could ask how exclusive they really are if they are in the mall in fargo, but i digress) in 2003. it's ten years old. so what the ceo of A&F said recently isn't news. it's how A&F has always been - targeting exclusive, upscale, popular kids. like me. because i want to be that and see myself as that. and i do.

so i have to say that my feelings aren't hurt by his statement. in fact, i find it refreshingly honest. the world is full of hierarchies and most everything is aimed at one or the other place in the hierarchy. it's about marketing and target audiences and who you're trying to reach and what you're trying to sell. am i the only one watching mad men? and he was being honest - their audience is the cool the kids, the posh ones, the snobs. why is it that we can no longer admit that there are differences between people? why does the world (or maybe just the internet) get outraged by something so nonsensical and so not newsworthy (it not being news and all)? what the hell is the matter with people?

maybe it's all just a publicity stunt. but i still love my A&F sweatshirts and especially that blue linen dress. and i'm not giving them to anyone. they're part of me, part of my story, part of who i am. let the homeless have ralph lauren instead.

weather permitting

sex is apparently very hot amongst the elderly. (pun intended.) first we had the whole madness of fifty shades of grey (which i haven't read and do not intend to read). now there are at least two plays in denmark featuring the sex lives of the over 60 set.  there was even another play (or was it an art exhibition) featuring naked people having sex live. but that one closed (and i can't find a link). and they weren't old, i don't think, tho' i do think the audience they attracted was.

and all of this swirl about elder sex has meant that there have been a lot of radio programs discussing the phenomenon of late. and i'll admit that when i hear people going on and on about orgasms and trying to describe them on the radio, it makes me nervous. because what if what i thought was an orgasm isn't (because the way they described it sounded pretty strange to me) and horror of horrors, what if i've not ever really had one?

and honestly, i don't really like to think thoughts like that.

i guess this means the baby boomers are old now and it seems they consider themselves still vital  and sexual beings. and i say, awesome for that, since i'm getting older myself. but do we have to be so public and arm-waving about it? can't we just leave the sex in the privacy of the bedroom or the back yard (weather permitting)?

reality is frequently inaccurate

i am a confirmed collector of quotations. i have small notebooks full of them. many from books and a few from films, but mostly from the clever people who surround me. i remember some years ago, a friend complaining that he could never make my quote book. but if you are trying too hard, you'll never make it. and he did eventually do so, with some quote about biology, as i recall (i cannot currently locate that small notebook, as many of my books are still packed away awaiting the renovations of this house).

but i've found myself thinking about quotations recently. because a lot of them seem to be floating around. there are these trendy postcards with pithy comments on them that i think have been brought on by an odd combination of mad men and pinterest. and those "keep calm and ..." variations. and my facebook feed is full of self-help quotes. platitudes really. and i wonder what it is that makes us need platitudes so much at this particular juncture? they're generally quite obvious and a bit vapid and aimed at boosting our self-esteem. but why do we need that?

is it really more prevalent now than in other times? has world economic crisis really shaken our confidence so much that we need empty reassurance that it's all going to be ok if we just believe, don't look back, crush monsanto, eat right, live in the now, stop medicating, eat raw, grow our own, look for the silver lining?

but what if it's not...what if all of the true Idea People are gone and all we're left with is mediocrity? and these platitudes are the logical conclusion. and what we're witnessing is the end of civilization as we knew it? what if it's not going to be ok?

where are the cutesy 50s postcards about that?

why can't people just be normal?

on facebook i've subscribed to a few blogs and pages that are focused on sustainable living and/or foraging. while this means that i learn a lot of new things and get a lot of new ideas, it also means that occasionally, i stumble across things that make me throw up a little bit in my mouth.

because what is up with the sustainable living people? i feel like there are two extremes - either those who homeschool for christ or snotty hipster urbanists. i feel a bit like those of us who are more or less normal end up squeezed out. not to mention that i find myself feeling hesitant to identify myself as someone who is attempting to live more sustainably by foraging and gardening and making my own stuff because i'm neither gaga for god, nor do i have a hipster bone in my body (unless you count the tiny tattoo on my left second toe).

i know that there are a lot of normal people out there who are trying to live more sustainably (and i share a blog or two with a number of them) - whether this means seeking alternative energy sources or consuming less or making pesto from backyard weeds or starting a CSA of your own or buying appliance repair parts and fixing it themselves instead of buying new appliances, or making gifts instead of buying them - but i would like to hear more from them.

i guess it's like politics - it seems like the lunatics are the most visible.

and because of that, we get lists of things people don't spend their money on that include newspapers - on the grounds that they don't have the time to use the coupons anyway. no mention of the news at all in the reason - as if newspapers are about coupons (which may explain the state of the newspaper industry in the US). and then there was the frightening commenter who mentioned that she didn't spend money on toilet paper because at her house they used the family cloth. (singular.)

the fact that people like this are homeschooling their children deeply frightens me.

(by the way, i am intentionally not linking to these blogs, as i don't want to be responsible for sending visitors their way, but if you email me, i'll be happy to tell you where to look.)

i think living more sustainably and consuming less is a process. and it's hard work. i go up and down and i still crave far too many things (shiny electronics and chanel nail polish come to mind). but i'm working on it. and i'd love to read about others who are working on it who aren't doing it for jesus or to be the next unabomber or to be a hipster snob. i think the planet needs all of us to be thinking more sustainably. but it's pretty off-putting if i have to share used toilet paper with my family...

goodbye hr. møller

denmark's richest man, maersk mckinney møller, died yesterday at the age of 98. he would have been 99 in july. taking over from his father in 1965, he built maersk into the company it is today. it's the largest container shipowner in the world, but the company is also in oil and gas, supermarkets, terminals and a significant sake in denmark's largest bank. i happened to work for the company for a number of years. and everytime i saw hr. møller, it was like encountering a rock star (in a good way). he had a powerful presence, even tho' he was thin and elderly. and if he could walk up the stairs to the fourth floor, the rest of us certainly could as well.

i remember a day when i was walking in through the security gates with a colleague as he was walking out. he smiled and said to us, god eftermiddag søde piger (good afternoon sweet girls). one couldn't even object to being called a girl by hr. møller. it might as well have been george clooney, as much of a thrill as it gave us.

and now he's gone. of course, at 98, he had a marvelous, long and successful life. he lived and ran his company according the principle of rettidig omhu - constant care.  and it was said that no detail was too small. this was nowhere more apparent than in the opera house he gave to copenhagen. legend  had some of the facade stones placed different locations around copenhagen. he would go by and pour water (which he carried in bottles in his car) over them in different light conditions to check the surface and how it reacted to the light. no detail too small.

i was surprised how sad the news of his death made me. i instantly teared up when i heard it. within the company, we used to joke about "if" he died, rather than "when," as he had some kind of immortality about him. an invincible strength of principles and personality. but die he did. and it's hard to be sad after he lived such a long and successful life.

but i think i'm most sad that i can't think of other great, remarkable men (or women) like him in today's world. where are the people of principle? the people who build something real and of value? and leave something solid and lasting behind? i don't see them  - not among business leaders and certainly not among politicians. and that's surely the saddest part of all.

goodbye hr. møller. i'm proud that i worked for your company and had a role, however small, in what you built.

where to begin?

another rainy day.

it seems like the world is full of turmoil and uncertainty. stock markets are down. starving people are meandering across africa. the syrian government is killing civilians. there are riots in london. fundamentalists of all stripes are getting bolder. the polar ice caps are melting. and the US congress is behaving like an unsupervised kindergarten. no wonder our television screens are full of senseless "reality" programs - we need escapism. because the world certainly looks hopeless. and it doesn't seem like there are any true leaders in the world with a single clue about getting a handle on it.

we had a lively conversation the other evening about whether it's even possible for individuals to make a difference anymore. i know i certainly can't think of anything that i could do (tho' i did spend some time today wondering if there wasn't an app in it). and a friend, whose job in television puts her in a position to have an effect on the wider culture, admitted that making denmark's next prime minister would be considerably less fun than making denmark's next top model.  and while it made me laugh (i do like me some cynicism), it also hits on a truth...if things aren't fun, we simply don't really want to do them. and saving the world would be some seriously hard work (unless there IS an app for that).

it seems like such a hopeless mess that setting whether or not i'm having fun aside, i wouldn't have a clue where to begin. it seems like even a small amount that you might give towards hunger in africa never makes it to those who need it...the big aid organizations have such a bureaucracy behind them that the vast majority of a donation goes to support that. we talked the other night about if it were possible to get even just a fraction of the food we are wasting in our part of the world to the people who need it, what an impact it could have. but so many regulations and rules and laws and transport issues stand in the way that we talked ourselves out of it before we even discussed it properly.

it must somehow be possible to somehow harness all of these social networks and all of the thoughts, ideas and innovations going on and channel them towards something good, don't you think? but where to begin? (maybe we should ask steve jobs.)

gone too far

reading all i can about this shooting of arizona representative gabriel giffords in broad daylight at an outreach event at a grocery store in tucson. and i don't know whether to cry or throw up.  even the pima county sheriff says that arizona has become "a mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

it seems to me that hateful speech and words and deeds have consequences. and i wonder when people will wake up and realize it's gone too far.

things i do not need for christmas

~ a TOASTER with a radio in it.  i seriously just saw an ad for this on t.v. i don't care if it looks retro.  it's just wrong. who is thinking up these things? and who is buying them? and what is wrong with both of them?

mixed feelings about wikileaks

this cartoon, by danish cartoonist jens hage, appeared in berlinske tidende last wednesday.
it says (from left to right) "threatens national security"
"it costs lives"
"a bomb under the international cooperation"

like many of us, i've been thinking about wikileaks of late. my initial feeling is that the release of all of these internal government documents about the wars in iraq and afghanistan brings a new level of democracy about these things that our tax money pays for. a level of democracy we weren't getting from our own governments. we are, after all, footing the bill for these things, so shouldn't we know the truth?

then, the latest wave of diplomatic documents were released. and these begin to feel a bit more like it would feel if you and the homecoming queen were very good friends and you came into possession of her diary. and you read it and you found out what she really thinks about you. and it isn't pretty.

not being a diplomat, i have a little bit of a smug, people-at-that-level-should-know-better attitude about the whole thing and i don't feel that sorry for them. but what if everyone's private conversations between peers or good friends and colleagues were suddenly public information? i've said loads of things i wouldn't want to be quoted for, especially not in public. and saying those things is a safety valve of sorts...letting off steam, releasing the pressure, so that you can go about your normal life and do your job and remain on an even keel. but there is a need for making wild sweeping statements or a need to laugh about things that are serious - like referring to putin and medvedev as batman and robin. we do it all the time. i have a bad habit of giving people nicknames - usually ones that i'd never call them to their face. and i'd be pretty embarrassed if those things were revealed because someone was secretly documenting them.

so i guess it leaves me with mixed feelings about wikileaks. interestingly, as much of a netizen as i am, i haven't actually gone to the site to read any of it myself. i'm still getting it through the filter of my daily newspaper, CNN, BBC World and online sources like the new york times and the guardian. and i have to ask, how democratic is that?

so many causes, so little...

 ...caring? empathy? what is wrong with me?  i just read an editorial on the plight of the roma people (that's gypsies to you and me). they're eternally persecuted because those of us who settle down and buy a house (albeit (apparently an exception to the rule - i before e except after c) one that should have come with a complementary bulldozer) don't like the nomads, you see.  apparently normally upstanding countries like sweden are even kicking the roma out. so it must be bad (they, after all, gave the peace prize to some chinese dissident no one had heard of 'til they bestowed the prize upon him (oh wait that was the norwegians)...but i digress).

dang, she's sure using a lot of parentheses.

what else do i have trouble caring about?  made-up company politics.  the madness of the mid-term elections in the US (sorry, but i'm having trouble mustering much angst about this...perhaps because i'm not in the middle of it and well, because i simply don't get it - obama is an intelligent man with a hot, smart wife who did something about health care and is pulling troops out of iraq - what's not to like?).  lene espersen (head of the danish conservative party and about as dumb as a box of rocks). the resignation of DR general director kenneth plummer (a man with both the charisma and vocabulary of a garden gnome).

there are many other things i don't care about...like what's going on with brangelina. and the whether the crown prince is drinking too much. and where wayne rooney might play football next. and which teams have gone to the world series. and whether that facebook geek zuckerman thinks that movie is unfair.

all of these things i'm being asked to care about. and i just can't do it.

you see, tomorrow, 26 4th graders are coming to my house to a halloween party and i'm worried about what to feed them and how to keep bits of my purple and black wig out of the food. and after that, i'll be figuring out how to pack 5 wind turbines into my suitcase so i can leave for manila on sunday. so i've got bigger worries on my mind.

here's to a worry-free weekend for all of us. and if you have any suggestions for how we can entertain all those kids for three whole hours,  i'm all ears...because that worries me. husband only bought six half pig heads and how long will that really take?