Personal essays
Separating the bad and the good
After work drinks
Jeff and I stood at the bar at the conference hotel at the end of the day. We had each been given a ticket for a cocktail and a soft drink.
It was Italy so I ordered a Negroni and slid over my cocktail ticket. He ordered a beer and slid over his cocktail ticket.
The woman looked confused.
Uh oh, I thought, maybe they aren’t accepting the coupons at this bar. Maybe it’s only for the room where the party is.
She slid his ticket back to him and said, “soft drink.”
He paused a moment, realized what she’d said, and took his cocktail ticket back and replaced it with his soft drink ticket.
As we stepped away from the bar we joked that maybe here a beer is a soft drink.
We knew that’s not what was meant. Sometimes words change meaning and sometimes they don’t. A beer is not a soft drink, even at this bar. All she meant was that to pay for a beer you use the soft drink ticket.
Immigrants
During the Trump administration, a woman who had voted for him was upset because her husband was being deported.
She and her husband had been married for more than twenty years. He owned a business in their town, employed many of his neighbors, and served many of the others. He was very popular in the community but there was some problem with the way in which he’d entered the country and so he had been arrested and was being deported.
The woman had known all of this about her husband when she voted for Trump and she knew the policies that Trump promised to enact but it never occurred to her that this would involve her husband. These rules were supposed to be for the bad immigrants - the dangerous immigrants.
Her husband was one of the good ones. Everyone knew that.
There were stories about buses traveling through Cleveland and upstate New York that were stopped by government officials. People who seemed like they might not be citizens were taken off of the buses and detained.
The practice was legal because some law or policy had been passed allowing these surprise inspections within one hundred miles of the US Border.
Yeah, but we thought you meant the Mexican border. All of the rhetoric was about building a wall and keeping the caravans of immigrants from coming over the southern border.
Well, it turns out, a border is a border. The law wasn’t specific so the Canadian border is also a US border so the policies could be applied here too.
It never occurred to us. Immigrants doesn’t mean the ones with Tim Horton’s donuts crossing the border near Niagara Falls - it means those people, you know, the bad ones.
The bad ones? Yeah. At one point they said it explicitly. Not the ones from Norway or Europe. You know - “those” immigrants.
The word “immigrants” never changed its meaning but it was shaded one way when advocating for policies and free for literal interpretation when being enforced. The laws on the books applied to all immigrants - but not all people were stopped equally and asked to prove they were or weren’t citizens.
Marriage
This election is a little emotional for me because Kim was killed ahead of the final sprint to election day eight years ago.
The process of realizing that Clinton lost to Trump wasn’t the same as losing Kim but some of the stages were similar. A fog of not understanding how this could happen, followed by a disbelief that it had happened, followed by an understanding of the implications of what had happened.
The memories are tied to Kim because it was the first awful event after her death and we wouldn’t be going through it together.
I look back at my marriage and think of all of the ways in which we helped each other day to day. At the end it was just us in the house together doing the daily things you do in a marriage. Pick up groceries. Mow the lawn. Do the laundry. Make coffee. Cook a meal. Share a news item. Go for a walk.
Before that, it was many years where our lives were focused on the kids. Pack a lunch. Watch a game. Drive them somewhere. Talk to a teacher. Read together.
Now that the Supreme Court has taken away Roe, they’ve clearly set their sites on other targets and one of them is gay marriage - or, as I like to call it, marriage.
But that, like immigrants, was one of the tricks of the right wing.
When they talk about gay marriage they are not focused on the special bond of marriage and the ordinariness of married life. When they say gay marriage, they want us to think about gay sex.
They know that it’s hard to get anyone to object to forming loving, committed relationships. But those people - there are always “those” people - they shouldn’t be married.
Which people? Those people who have gay sex.
I have to tell you, if I think back to sex in my marriage -
“Daniel,” you say quickly, “this is a family show.”
All I was going to say is that it isn’t what defined my marriage. It didn’t even make the top ten of things I mentioned when I was listing things that were part of my marriage and it certainly wasn’t how I thought of or think of anyone else’s marriage.
Abortion
Since the reversal of Roe, abortion has been a big part of the political debate - but its nature has changed.
During his candidacy in 1992, Bill Clinton often used the phrase that “abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.” That was thirty years ago.
The right preferred to paint the word differently than the left. To them, abortion was used capriciously to make up for behavior that should somehow be punished. If you hadn’t have had sex, you wouldn’t be pregnant and you wouldn’t be needing an abortion.
Somehow the conversation continued to move and the emphasis in arguments were on the late term abortions. Trump talked about abortions into the ninth month - even abortions after the baby is born.
You want to dismiss this as being so stupid that it’s not worth a reply but it’s the gay marriage trick.
If we can get you to think of gay sex when you talk about gay marriage - then maybe we can get you to oppose gay marriage.
If we can get you to picture an actual baby when we talk about an abortion then those first term abortions before there’s an actual heartbeat feel very different.
Pete Buttigieg helped reframe the discussion when he was asked about late term abortions. He explained that no one getting an abortion in the third term is doing so casually. They have likely come up with a name for the baby and begun to decorate a room and buy items for this baby. They are ending the pregnancy because there is either something seriously wrong with the baby or there is a danger to the mother.
The mother won’t celebrate the end of this pregnancy. She will mourn it. It will stay with her forever.
Unfortunately, the procedure is an abortion. And restrictions on abortions mean that doctors are afraid to give the mother the care that she needs. We’ve seen women die. We’ve seen women so dramatically impacted that they can never have children again.
That’s not the intent of the law. We want to stop the bad ones. You know the ones.
It turns out maybe that is the intent of some of these laws. No exception for rape or incest. Arresting people who leave the state to get help where it is legal. Suggesting a registry to track cycles and pregnancies.
I’m hoping the left has successfully changed what we think of when we hear the word abortion to include necessary reproductive care.
I’m writing this on election day 2024 in the US afraid that if things go the wrong way, many words are going to change their meaning.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 241. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe