Writer As Peace Builder: Dear Friends, Celebrate

So, reflecting on the inspiration I gained from Eleanor Roosevelt’s letters last week, as well as the inspiration that was passed on to all the Americans who read her daily column while she was alive, I was wondering, “What if someone who wasn’t a public figure wrote letters like that to the public? Would they still be an agent for social change? Would anyone really care?”

I’ve decided that it may take longer for people to become interested in such letters in a newspaper. More time would have to be spent establishing yourself as a person who could be trusted, a friend, an average run-of-the-mill person (although Eleanor did spend a great deal of time setting up this image in her early letters) but I do feel that it could be just as powerful. I myself may not be able to write national letters to the entire country that could make people think, yet still provide hope and a sense of comfort, but I may be able to pull off writing letters in a column for a local Rochester paper or my Ithaca alumni news letter, and most definitely this blog. I think the most important thing to keep in mind is Eleanor’s letters worked because they complimented her actions. People saw her out in the field getting her hands dirty, these made her words easier to trust and enjoy. The lesson of the week seems to be: one’s writing has the power to change the world, but it is even more possible for their words to change others when they compliment great actions.

Before I attempt to write a moving letter to change hearts and mind (:P), I wanted to touch on another thought really quick. I’ve been taking a conflict management class this semester which has empowered me and encouraged me more than any class of my grad school career, and writing to change the world actually fits nicely into one (and I’m sure many) theory of peace building. The theory as it was presented to me by Mary Anderson and Lara Olson in Confronting War: Critical Lessons for Peace Practitioners states that there are many approaches to peace that need to be interconnected. Below is a chart that shows the different approaches to peace building and highlights their interconnectedness. It comes from page 66 of Confronting War.



First, there is peace building that happens on an individual/personal level. This is what I like to refer to as the process of “changing hearts and minds” and “learning to live peace.” This process needs to both happen for large groups of individual citizens (people at the grassroots level) and within the hearts and minds of key people. These would be the people capable of making policy changes (politicians) and establishing new cultural norms (the media, role models, elders, ect). Once these individuals have a new understanding of peace and justice, their individual transformation is taken into the public sphere. This is where those new policies and cultural norms are set into action. Of course, even when the social political level is being transformed, time and energy still has to be placed individual change efforts. Some people haven’t been reached as the overall culture is being transformed and have the ability to disrupt new policy and social norms. Others have been reached but need support and reassurance to hold on to the lessons learned from personal transformations.

But where does “writing to change the world” come in? It is part of that personal level of transformation. It creates an understanding of shared humanity at the very least, and captures the true essence of peace and justice and, at its very best. And if the message finds the right hands, it can lead to social/political transformation. If it finds the wrong hands, it can be distorted and used against its original call. (I can’t help but think of the Bible and the Qur’an here.) Peace literature—writing that can change the world—is threatening, dangerous, but it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be attempted.

I like this thought of the author as peace builder. The letter below probably won’t be worthy of that title, but it’s worth a try. As I learned in undergrad, write a lot because most of it will be garbage a writing a lot improves your odds of a finding something useable, but not necessarily good.

Dear Friends,

The other night, I went to bed thinking ferociously. “Should’ves”, “Would’ves”, “Could’ves” bombarded me from every angle it seemed. I couldn’t stop the stream of judgments and unresolved issues rushing through me. I couldn’t help but think how useless it was to be spending these two years in grad school when I could actually be out doing something. I kept thinking about how unfair my sister’s life is at the moment, living in a house with no electricity or insulation, working at the casino on the reservation from 3am-8am because there is nothing else that pays and no one around to show her how to dream. I kept thinking about issues we are all dealing with in our classes her at school; how it feels like the moment I came into grad school I stopped being a person with experiences and understandings and became just a student that needs to be filled with knowledge. For the most part we are often bodies in a classroom, sometimes when time was permitted we have the chance to become people again. The professor are just professors, researchers, the appear distant. The system has taken away part of their humanity as well. I thought about how as students we’ve tried to address this, but have been told we are over exaggerating, told that there is nothing wrong, and that we should be worrying about people with real problems.

So, again my brain began to worry about people with “real” problems. I thought about my kids back in Rochester. I thought about their classmates and friends. Many of them are seniors. I wondered how many were going to graduate. I wondered how many parents would show up. I wondered how many were going to be able to afford to go on to school. I wondered how many were encouraged to even try to apply. I was overwhelmed by structural violence, and being pretty violent towards myself because “I wasn’t doing enough.”

This experience lasted for much too long, but began to end when I consciously said to myself, “Brandi, breathe. Let it go. Release it all and let your whole body be filled with Love.”

It was a struggle and I didn’t even successfully let go of everything, but the stream of thoughts became controllable and began to calm its movements. I found myself able t breathe again, and felt hints of the love and beauty that I know is always there waiting to be noticed and embodied. And I heard a voice say, “You are much too hard on yourself. There is always room for improvement, but you are doing great things. Celebrate that. Celebrate!”

The voice was so reassuring that I finally fell asleep.

Anyone working for social justice, for peace, or for others has experienced that nighttime panic. That list of regrets. That list of things still yet to do. For many it’s a regular occurrence, but why don’t more of us go to bed celebrating? And more importantly how can we really understand peace, social justice, or love when we don’t take the time to see it, or celebrate it? When we only see what is still yet to be done?

A wonderful documentary that I watched about a year ago at the Student Peace Alliance Conference in D.C. called Soldiers of Peace focuses on the presence of peace and love that is present in some of the most violent societies in the world places, like Columbia and Liberia. It shows that peace is always out there to grasp no matter where you are. You just have to recognize its seedlings, the energy of good will, love, hope, excitement, and compassion, and help it to manifest itself into something powerful that can be experienced by many at once.

The next morning, I woke up and walked an hour to work, and made the conscious
decision to look for social “issues” to celebrate on my way. I saw a school bus pick up a man for work. He wasn’t outside, but the bus didn’t drive away. The driver pulled over and honked the horn. The man ran out in a hurry, frazzled, but the driver smiled and said, “Good morning.”

I saw two young mothers standing at the bus stop with their 6 year old daughters, all for were giggling. I thought how rare to see parents at the bus stop with their kids? How wonderful!

I saw a man sorting his recycling on the curb. He waved.

I saw an older woman working in her garden. She had the most beautiful tulips near her porch. It made the small area on the street look a little more inviting and full of life.

I had three or four men respectfully say “Good morning” and “God bless.” And when I got to work the security guard gave me a friendly good morning, and I started my day.

Sure, there were things that I saw in that hour that weren’t as beautiful. But I chose to spend more of my energy celebrating that day. Everyone should spend more time celebrating the peace, providing energy for it to manifest itself even more. I, myself, will encourage the good. I will give it attention and praise. I won’t ignore the bad, of course. But I will find balance in my life.

Love,
Brandi

Reflections on "My Day": Eleanor Roosevelt- providing security, connection and trasfomation through action and over 1,000,000 words

So, I’ve just spent most of my day reading My Day: The Best of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Acclaimed Newspaper Columns, 1936-1962, and right now one question and one remark echo through my brain on repeat, “Why was I never taught anything about Eleanor Roosevelt? She’s amazing!” The reason that I probably never learned anything about her is because every year in my history classes in elementary and high school we never seemed to get past reconstruction and carpet baggers. The reality that my grandparents and parents lived through, the realities that probably shaped the way that they raised me and therefore, had a huge effect on the person that I’ve become, were never really seen as important in the eyes of the New York State Board of Regents. I do remember taking the initiative to do a report on Eleanor Roosevelt in the 5th or 6th grade. I remember my class being taken to the library and shown the biography section. We were told to pick one book on a famous person to take out and write a report on. I remember staring at book upon book of famous men. Then seeing one on Florence Nightingale that one of the other girls immediately snatched, and being left with a book on Eleanor Roosevelt. I don’t really remember getting much out of that report because as a 11 or 12 year old I just couldn’t get past the fact that she married her cousin (Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt were 5th cousins once removed). But reading this I’m sad and a bit frustrated that I was never given the opportunity to learn about a woman who did so much.

For me this reading brings up a lot about gender and a lot about the power of honesty and sincerity has for building connection. First, let me pretend to wrap my head around the issues of gender that a swirling around in my head, thoughts that I can feel making me slightly uncomfortable which means they are probably effecting something more than my head as well, my heart perhaps? The thoughts below are not well formed simply because I have never felt comfortable expressing them. But how can our thoughts be improved, clarified or changed if we never acknowledging them in the first place? How can we really write to change the world or ourselves, if we are hiding behind a curtain of fear? What I am trying to express below is simply my own personal muddled understanding of the world, and I greatly welcome anyone’s voice that can help me work through them.

Eleanor Roosevelt was the First Lady for three terms (1933-1945). She acted as more than the hostess of the White House, but also as her husband’s eyes and ears , since his polio made it difficult for him to travel. She trekked the country visiting small Appalachian towns, inspecting the conditions of factories and juvenile detention centers, and she was known to always give FDR her honest opinions on national policy. As a woman myself, these acts make me proud and eager to look to her as an example of female leadership. But it is her writing in “My Day,” a daily column that she produced everyday from December 1935 to just before her death in 1962 (writing over 1,000,000 words), which for me shines as an example of feminine power. My day was a simple letter to her readers, she always wrote as if she were writing to a long time friend. Some letters covered the basic day-to-day realities of a wife, mother and grandmother. She talked about playing with her grandchildren and even being sick in bed with the flu. Other letters covered her reflections on recent national events and how they made their way into the domestic sphere of her life.

I believe very much that the female experience of life is distinctive, just as I believe that the male experience, the black experience and the Latina experience is distinctive. I also believe in a continuum that connects the two experiences of femininity (attributes of life-giving and nurturing qualities of motherhood, birth, intuition, creativity, life-death-rebirth and biological life cycle) and masculinity (attributes of logic, independence, a go-getting nature, strength, self control and a physical nature). I don’t believe that all women are or should be feminine or that all men are or should be masculine. I don’t even believe that individuals act with the same amount of femininity or masculinity in all situations. I do however, believe that there are valuable lessons and insights to be gained through looking at the world through the eyes of the masculine and the eyes of the feminine. I of course believe this because I believe in wholeness. I also believe that the feminine viewpoint has often been discredited in the public sphere. I personal identify with being feminine more than I do with being a woman, simply because the category of women is too large for me to even begin to find my place and I have found many woman that I relate less to than many men in my life. I identify with creation, nurturance and the act of transformation.

Anyway, I worked through all of that to say that I was floored by the feminine voice that Eleanor held on to throughout all of her writing, even as she talked about issues that were very much part of the public sphere. She advocated for birth control and divorce, she stated that housewives should be paid wages, she praised prohibition being taken off of the books as she remained dedicated to her stance against alcohol, and she spoke out against war. But she didn’t do this from a logical, rational, separate lab-like space? She didn’t spew out facts and figures. She talked from the heart and tackled this concepts as she let people into her home as she shared her experiences providing for her grown children, traveling to Minnesota for her son’s surgery to remove his wisdom teeth, and all the way to Seattle for her daughter’s third pregnancy, and her experiences making guest feel at home in the White House, and her stories of making people feel loved and not forgotten in the mountains of Appalachia and in the very living rooms of her readers. This following comment from Mary Marshall who was writing for the Nation in 1938 may be read as demeaning and/or paternalistic but I challenge that initial reaction. Mary Marshall wrote, “To prisoners of newspapers where wars are always raging ‘My Day’ is like a sunny square where children and aunts and grandmothers go about the trivial but absorbing pursuits and security reigns. In the sense of security it generates, lies the deepest appeals of ‘My Day.’

The word that may strike many when reading this comment is “trivial.” If this is the case, anger and frustration are often ignited. The reader focuses on the statement that children and grandmother’s lives are trivial, without real meaning the larger scope of world affairs. But what if one focuses on the world “security?” Then all of sudden, Eleanor becomes the provider of one of the most basic human needs, one that it is her husband’s (the President) job to provide an entire country. Suddenly, when we focus on the need to provide our children and grandmothers and their sunny squares with security there trivial lives and sunny square also appear to have a strong value to society. It is within this realm of security that I see Eleanor’s writing changing the world. Her daily writings provided radical thoughts and progressive reflections, and these thoughts were able to be received and digested because she was also providing a sense of security, as sense of normalcy, hope and love. She was not only able to form a connection between her and her reader, but also between her readers lives and the larger national and international happenings.

Silver Linings- A Brief Memoir By Brandi Remington

Here is my first attempt a memoir in awhile. I was trying to capture my social justice beginnings and explain where they came from. I think this is just part of the story, but an important part. I also hopes it brings up some of the most passionate issues to me in my current work, youth, community, love, education, and never judging a book by its cover. Let me know what you think. Just remember its rough.


The street light outside of the window always created a tiny, silvery, glowing stream on the floor next to my blankets. When it rained the stream would shift and spin in unison with the branches from the trees and the raindrops on the glass. I hated that stream. It would lull me to sleep and trick me into thinking that tomorrow was going to be a better day. I slept 6 inches away from that stream, on the hardwood floor for over a year. My little sister curled up next to me, her knobby knees poking me in the back.

In the morning it was time for school. Clothes, hair, teeth, lunch money, back pack, and double checking everything for my sister. “You good?” I’d say. She would nod her little head in agreement. Her blue-green eyes told me I was the only one she trusted. I don’t remember Dad being there. I’m sure he was, in his ratty bathrobe still lying on the couch. Maybe he was wandering around with his first cigarette and Diet Coke of the day, belching like a dragon. I’m sure he was around, but not there.

School was different. I was important, a smart-kid. The teachers knew I was friendly and the first one to volunteer.

Daren was a sweet kid. He wanted a mom, someone to love him. He wanted a friend, someone to at least like him. No one did, but me. He was on medication because he was “out of control.” He had coke bottle glasses, a learning disability and wasn’t able to control his anger or his tears. He swore alot and cursed, teaching all of us fifth graders new vocabulary every week. The teachers said he was violent and shouldn’t be allowed in “normal” classes with “normal” students. I heard them talk. I knew that adults had the most important conversations when they turned their backs turned to you. That’s when you had to listen.

Daren couldn’t eat lunch with the rest of us. Loud noises were bad for him and increased his crazy moments. The teachers called them “outbursts.” So, he had to eat in the nurse’s office at this tiny little desk that was placed against the wall opposite from the cots where kindergarteners would lie down after puking in class.

Daren ate alone, unless I volunteered to join him. Sometimes he liked my company other times he didn’t. Sometimes he would tell me stories about his dogs and how he hit them, other times he would tell me stories about his stepdad and how he was hit by him. Other times he would ignore me or tell me I was stupid. I would look at the nurse. She would nod her head to tell me it was okay. I liked the nurse. She was a beautiful woman who liked her job. She was one of the adults that you could trust. When she hugged you, she meant it. When she laid you down on a cot, she wanted you to feel better.

No matter how angry Daren was at me during lunch, he always asked me back the next day. I understood, and would join him two or three times a week. He was tiny for a fifth grader. He had arms that looked like unbent paper clips, and Lindsey said he had chicken legs. His hair was longer than the rest of the boys, and no one ever brushed it. His coke bottle glasses made his eyes the biggest feature on his face, but they really were already big and round like puppy dog’s. And his mouth was the largest I had ever seen, my Grampa would have said he looked like a walleye, but it made his smile even better when he decided to share it.

Daren was smarter than the teachers thought. He would steal a French fry off of my tray or burp in my face, and out of the corner of his eye look for my reaction. When he would see that I wasn’t impressed. He would quietly apologize and start to talk about something cool like his favorite game or how much he liked the shirt he was wearing. Daren was a normal kid. He just didn’t get a chance to act normal.

One day, Daren bit a kid in class. I don’t remember who, but I yelled. Actually, I screamed and couldn’t stop. My brain was processing all kinds of things and could no longer control my mouth and lungs. I was mad. Mad because Daren made me a liar. I told my friends that he was a nice kid. I told them that he was funny. I was mad because Daren didn’t trust me to help him. He bit someone because he was being picked on. He didn’t come to me. He bit him. But, I was mostly mad because that stupid stream of light had tricked me again the night before.

The teacher began to yell, but because she was an adult they called it scolding. She sent Daren and the kid he bit to the nurse, and then sent me to the hall. The hall was dark that day. The janitors didn’t turn the lights on and the only light came from the windows on the door at the end of the hall by the sixth grade classrooms. Silver lines separated the large tiles on the floor and reflected the light up to the ceiling. I didn’t trust the light hear either.

When the teacher came out, she was mad. Unlike the nurse, she didn’t want me to feel better. “What do you have to say for yourself? You of all people should know that you can’t yell at Daren like that! He doesn’t have as easy of a life as the rest of you students. You of all people should know better than that, Brandi. He doesn’t need you kids being mean to him. And what is all over your hands?”

I started to cry. “Paint. Face paint.”

“From what? You don’t have a Halloween costume on today, and the other kids who are dressed up don’t have face paint.”

“My little sister’s a tiger today. It doesn’t look very good. I smeared it.”

“You put it on? What was your mom busy doing this morning?”

I cried harder, “She’s at Jones Hill, at the mental hospital. She’s been there for awhile. She’s sick. She had a nervous breakdown.”

Then I got angry. Daren bit someone and got sent to the nurse. I wanted to stop him and got sent to the hall. “I painted my sister’s face. I need to wash my hands. Can I go to the bathroom?”

The teacher nodded. My hands were speckled with orange paint, and the black and white paint had from my sister's tiger nose blended together. There were silver streaks that went up to my wrists. It was a beautiful color, one that I made. "I made something pretty," I thought.

I smiled.Everything was going to be okay.