It’s not often that The Washington Post Magazine has a cover story worth sharing, nor is it often that their recent strategy of “read more on our web site” has motivated me to do just that because, really, the Post has a kind of crappy site. Today was a bit different.
The Magazine’s cover story this week is all about the Hubble telescope. Not a lot of text but some amazing pictures. Enjoy!
2something am thoughts are rarely profound, not really. They just seem profound in the dark, when you can’t sleep, when you’re sure that your roof is leaking (even though you already checked when you got up to go to the bathroom…twice), when you’re positive that your week couldn’t get any worse yet, there you are at 2something am not sleeping. Still, I’m going to try to turn my 2something am thoughts into something useful mostly because they’re the same thoughts that I’ve been having regularly throughout my work day for quite a while now.
Yesterday was my third anniversary at my current job. That’s saying something in a profession where the attitude runs less toward loyalty and building something lasting and more along the lines of “if your job isn’t interesting or fulfilling leave it and go somewhere else.” It’s also saying something given that I work at possibly the most disfunctional non-profit in existence. Take, for example, the conversation I had this week with our Development director.
Most non-profits get the bulk of their donations during the fourth quarter of the year, and out of the fourth quarter December is the most lucrative giving month. Even so, it’s a good idea to sort of warm up your donors, especially if you haven’t been running regular online fundraising campaigns. This week my .org sent one of those warm up fundraising e-mails but it almost didn’t happen. Why? Because all of our senior managers refuse to believe that they have the power to make decisions.
We’re talking about people with 15 or 20 years experience in non-profit advocacy, people who are making, compared to the rest of the staff, a ton of money expressly because they are supposed to take responsibility. Yet, the conversation I had with the Development person in charge of this mailing went like this:
DevelopmentGuy: Why did you make this come from BigBoss not from CampaignsLady and PolicyGuy like I asked?
Me: Because in the entire time I’ve been here PolicyGuy has never been on an e-mail to supporters and a fundraising appeal isn’t a good time to introduce a new person to them. We can put CampaignsLady’s name on it if you want.
DevelopmentGuy: No, this is fine but if we’re going to have BigBoss’ name on we have to stop the clock so he can review it first.
Me: No, we don’t. BigBoss trusts us to do our jobs. You’re DevelopmentGuy and I’m the WebGeek, if we think this is a good appeal our judgement should be enough.
Now, to give him some credit, he’s worked at the place nearly 20 years and the previous head honcho was the kind of micro manager who if an e-mail went out under his name that he hadn’t approved you would catch hell for it. Still, BigBoss has been around for about three years now and you can use founder’s syndrome as an excuse for only so long. But all of this only adds to my perhaps not so profound but nevertheless persistent 2something am thought which is:
I have “don’t” fatigue.
Part of the reason the environmental movement in this country is losing ground is because it has become a haven for what the late William Safire referred to as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Oh, Communications people in environmental organizations do their best to couch the “dont’s” as “instead of”-s so they sound more positive but no matter how many times you say “switch to CFLs because it’s better for the planet” it will still come off sounding like “you’re using the wrong lightbulbs you selfish fucker and if you don’t stop it your children are going to have to live in Road Warrior like squalor competing with packs of stray dogs for scraps and hoping the water doesn’t give them cancer.”
Perhaps I use just a bit of hyperbole but how is it possible not to feel like we’re constantly being told that what we do is wrong when environmental organizations are sending out tweets like “Is blow-drying your hair bad for the earth?”
And the thing of it is, that in order to make these messages even vaguely palatable, environmental groups have had to so compromise what they really want, and what really needs to be done to ameliorate humanity’s destructive self-indulgence that the options they present are like…doing something really hard in the stupidest way possible.
It’s not just environmental groups, though, that are “don’t”-ing us into complete and utter apathy:
Get more exercise, get good grades, get enough sleep, pull up your pants, find a job, tithe, vote, volunteer. All of these shoulds are really just a way of saying “you aren’t doing what you’re supposed to be doing.” Is it any wonder people get cranky as they get older? Is it any wonder old people are prickly, having survived their generation’s version of all these messages and now some random orderly wants to call them Beverly instead of Ms. Smith?
No, the 2something am thoughts are not all that profound, or complete, but I am left wondering if Ricky Nelson didn’t give us some good advice in the early 1970s:
But it’s all right now
I learned my lesson well
You see, ya can’t please everyone
So ya got to please yourself
– Garden Party by Ricky Nelson
Yes, it’s National Punctuation Day. And while part of me knows its founder’s mission is essentially fruitless (shall we talk about textlish and the degradation of the language as a whole?) I admire his initiative.
So, indulge in some of the myriad ways to celebrate: be kind to an apostrophe; learn to use a semi-colon; dust off the ellipsis and leave something to the imagination; find a real reason to be excited because the exclamation point gets so overused.
Let us never forget both the event and that we squandered the potential of its aftermath to be better people than we were before it.
Dear HRC,
Your representatives, those scrubbed, shiny people you station on the street in those lovely navy blue t-shirts stenciled with your name and the equals sign never ask about those. No, those aren’t attention getting enough. They “don’t have time to educate people” that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people don’t want anything special yet they, and by extension you, don’t see how damaging the phrase “gay rights” is and how useful a tool it is for those opposed to equal protections under the law for everyone in every aspect of life. And don’t try to tell me that argument is past its pull-date, because it’s not.
You act as if you are the thought leaders in the lgbt community, as if you represent all of us out here, outside your big building in Washington DC. Yet, search as I might, I can find no mechanism for the average person, or even the average donor, to influence the direction of your programs. Your Contact Us form is a model of generic passivity.
Even if I wanted to talk to you about how badly you’ve bungled the “marriage equality” fight by sadly insisting on prizing assimilation through the use of the word marriage while you’ve ignored all chances to actually achieve equality under the law for legally bound couples, I couldn’t.
Even if I wanted to tell you that if by some miracle you succeed in getting that equality while calling it marriage that still doesn’t protect us out here from being fired from our jobs or being denied housing because we are, or are perceived as, different, I couldn’t.
No, your national board members guide the state-based steering committees quite likely as agents of policy and direction on which the decisions have long been made. There is no way to tell you these things or to even get any explanation on why you insist on proceeding the way you do.
Please don’t misunderstand me: I generally support the ideals that you say the phrase “gay rights” represents.
No one should lose custody of their child because she’s dating another woman.
No one should lose out on the sublime pleasure of expanding a child’s world through knowledge of math, science, literature, and all the other things we learn in school simply because he lives with and loves another man.
No one should be denied housing or access to public accommodations because her biology at birth didn’t match who she felt she really was.
And no one should be denied the measly comfort of holding his beloved’s hand at the time of death simply because they both have the same letter by the sex descriptor on their government issued identification.
If these are the things you stand for then yes, I support you, but I can not support the way in which you choose to pursue them. It’s exclusionary and it’s making the goals that we both so want unnecessarily difficult to achieve. But, again, I have no way of telling you these things because you will not, as represented by your front-line, by your street canvassers, let go of what is “easy” and what “pops.”
So instead I write to remind you of your very name: the Human Rights Campaign. I know that presents a communications problem itself; after all, Amnesty and other larger groups have so branded the phrase “human rights” in the American mind that most people likely think of refugee camps, physical torture, and forced sex slavery when they hear that phrase. Still, your name is not the Gay Rights Campaign. But rather than just criticize, which is so easy and often brings such a wonderful boost of pleasing chemicals to the brain, I’d like to offer a potential solution.
Look at your own visual branding. Take your queue from the mathematical symbol you’ve put to service as a political message. It’s simple, it’s elegant, and it says everything that needs to be said.
Yes, I have time for equality, but until you stop implying that we want something more than what everyone else has, how will you ever know if the rest of the country does too?