Love is a Student Love is a Teacher

It's been a while since I posted due to the school massacre in CN and the holidays.

About the former I will say that what shocks most is the lack of a human scale in our everyday lives.

I am a teacher and know what it means to be forced to place your life in the hands of the opponents or the threats to your students even temporarily.

The difficult and deliberate work of peace drives the meanings of love to restoration and expression, in the minds of my students and in my own.

I made peace with myself by witnessing a movement that spearheaded itself against many of its odds (most of which was made worse by their advocates).

I know what it is to worsen the situation of someone I think I am advocating for.

I know what it is to err with good intentions and later recognize the fallacy.

It isn't easy to say to someone 10-20 years younger, "I stand corrected."

It is even more impotant to tell the same person, "my errors were paid at your expense and your sacrifice was made harder by my own false authority on such things."

Every day life gets harder.

Everyday I get stronger.

What type of mathematics can account for the mistakes, the laws, and the behaviors of love?

Love not education is the great equalizer of society.

But what is love?

There are many things love is pride, love is self-love, love is merciful.

What love can do no law can mandate yet it persecutes.

The inverse of the law is love brought to mercy.

Love is both a noun and a verb.

Love is a teacher.

Gender as Inequality

The reason sexual intimidation works is because it’s a protected right of the employer to base labor on the indemnification it holds in its regulation of gender as a basis for power  –an ideology  of male supremacy superimposed over domestic affairs which are those of the educational sector. Learning is far more frequently a metaphor for sexual aggression, domination, or sublimation whether by militarism, economy, or cultural attitudes.  Each one of these modes is as persuasive a unit of social relation (marriage) as can be regimented in the development of the fallacious category of “woman” and that of “man.”

            Gender is a racial class as much as it is a sexual one, yet the reverse is professed, that gender is more universal and class more specific. Vertices of public ascriptions consist of the language or even the architecture of social divisions premised on inequality not simply when effected as such.  Being a woman for me means being able to experience, endure, and enumerate the quality of inequity in the way that being a woman is a multiplicitous condition which is economic as well as categorical. Privations ensure my enclosure in a status of a predestination. I actively disavow. I refuse to submit to my inequality as an assertion of truth. As it cannot be untrue I am unequal than it is erroneous to believe I am.

            I establish as I construct my method of thinking, that none can authenticate what I say who is not me. I write to you, reader, not to convince you I am credible but to assure you that I am not. I am negligibly false where it concerns the imposition of my gender. I am a woman, and I am not a woman. 

Constant New Beginnings

-->You carry what would be extra sets of clothing with you everywhere you go.  But they aren’t clothing at all, they are mental wardrobes for high endurance survival.  

What are these layers made of?  They are made of emotions and rational explanations of things, all skewed beyond recognition when harassment is underway, but to which you still refer as often as possible.   

Though you can’t be happy, you make yourself rehearse the behaviors of people who are happy.  You hope one day this nightmare will end.

I know I use the word a lot: pain.  I often wonder why I call it pain instead of torture. Losing your privacy is a very painful experience.

Being a sexual object under pressure of harassment is facing a beast for the first time, many times over.  Each encounter weighs heavier than the previous. Each one originates a new pattern.

Being censored is bad (that it brings me here to write)  -- losing your privacy is a horror.  Once lost, privacy is a privilege afforded according to wealth, status, and biology.

Survival is technological. It advances, develops tools, functions with predictable patterns, produces, and advances.

I’m presumed guilty of being a woman.

Hopeful messages and great writing become necessary nutrients for you.  

You gain a greater sense for a wider variety of language registers. Your memory is heightened. You calm yourself. You separate paranoia from reality, carefully, courageously.   

Once the episode has passed, you pick up where you last started (before being interrupted by harassers) and begin again and begin again.

 

Untouchable

--> I become like a barometer of my own atmospheric conditions.  I carry the baggage of being a woman, being a woman of color women of color won’t touch: I’m an untouchable.

My letters are stamped with red letters by the administration of Pitzer College.  Its orange logo set to a broiling temperature. 

When they talk about race, they all mouth the same words: the boiler pot.

I enter a sleek business tower and make my way to the deposition.

Each harassment relationship has its own way of being identical to the next.

My chair is placed so that there is a constant glare refracted onto me from the windows.

Pitzer can’t decide if it’s better to have me face at an acute angle from Prater or have my direct gaze in their video camera. The light shining through the windows magnifies the adversity.

I see myself as they must see me. 

“So you say that everybody at Pitzer College was out to get you?”

"I was told by Professor Wachtel that, yes, that it was the entire college."

I remember passing a sociologist in the hallway one day.  He held a book in his hand. It was the story of Kitty Genovese which sparked a moment of a conversation. "Have you heard of it?"

"Yes."

As we part ways on the sidewalk, he hands it to me, a gift.