Culture Archives : Page 15 of 51 : Suki Wessling, writer

Santa Cruz Families March for Women… and all of us

Posted on February 5, 2017May 23, 2019 by Suki

Interviews by Suki Wessling
Photographs by Abe Jellinek

(C)AJellinek2017 — Thousands of Santa Cruzans marched together in an incredible show of unity in our support of diversity and dignity for everyone.

Click on photos to see them full-size.

If ever all of Santa Cruz gathered for a big family photo, this would have been the day. On January 21, the day after the inauguration of a president that Santa Cruzans overwhelmingly voted against, whose platform contradicts nearly every strongly held value of our citizens, our community came out for a day of celebration. We celebrated our diversity and our strong values, along with our affirmation of the rights of all the people who felt that their voices weren’t heard in this election. In this photo essay, each family we photographed answered the question, “What are you doing here?”

Kate: “We’re here to support rights for everybody, for women, for minorities. There’s a lot of fear out there. For the kids, we’ve been aware that the fear is going through to them, so we wanted to say something positive. We’re stronger together!”

Andi: “I am marching as the parent of a transgender child whose safety is in jeopardy with the incoming administration, as well as her trans-specific healthcare which will almost certainly be removed from insurance mandates.”

Tessa: “I’m here for women’s rights and just because of everything is going on, I want to feel safe with everything.”

Tiffany: “We wanted to be an example to her to show that in terms of standing up for yourself, you’re never too young to come out and be supported by your family and others in your community to get your point across.”

Julie: “We’re here in solidarity for women. Everybody is equal, we need equality and reproductive rights. Equal rights are human rights. We can try to support love and not hate. I think that’s really important.”

Bella: “My mom said that she wants me to grow up to do anything that I want to do.”

Darrin: ”I’m here because I love my kids!”

Kids: “We want to protest!” “I want to avoid World War III!” “Yes!”

Gretchen: “We’re here in solidarity with women. We’re disappointed with the direction of our country and we want to do something positive.”

Craig: “I want my son to know that all people are equal and that no one can put anybody else in a box and tell them what they can and can’t do. It’s the world I want him to live in, so I’m here to show that.”

Evyn: “We are here to support women’s rights, gender equality, basic civil human rights, religious freedom, LGBTQ rights, and immigrant rights.”

Leslie: “I’m here because I’m really upset at the illegitimacy of this election and I want to promote values across the US, I feel like we’re really inoculated in some ways against what’s happening in other parts of the country. I don’t want there to be normalization of values of racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and islamophobia.”

Rose: “I’ve known many situations and I know lots of people who would probably be in trouble if things like that happened and I care about things too much, so I don’t like it.”

Macky: “Because I like protesting!”

Lisa: “We’re here to support anyone who, now or in the future, might not be treated fairly. We’re trying to stay on the positive, it’s not that we’re fighting against something. We’re fighting for equality and fairness for everyone.”

Anthony: “To support women!”

Kristin: “I think it’s important that they see they have the right to stand up against tyranny and fascism and to make their voices heard and to peacefully assemble.”

Sebastian (about his sign): “I just wrote ‘Be Kind’.”

Elizabeth: “We both come from families that our parents are immigrants. I feel that we have a right to be here, our parents have a right to be here, and I’m just happy to be among people that are for that. I’m really happy to stand strong and not let hate get to us.”

Tyler: “For my mom. To stand up for our rights because everyone is the same.”

Ben: “We wanted to get involved in things for a little while, and now that we’re in Santa Cruz we decided that this is the time.”

Christina: “We’re here to fight for everything we believe in that we feel is at risk. The rights of all people, the environment, science, the fight against bigotry, and also against the 99.9% having all the power.”

Children playing with bubbles before the start of the march.

The great hunt

Posted on December 31, 2016 by Suki

Each year my family awaits the December holidays for a number of reasons. One of the major ones involves tramping around hillsides like this one:

forest

Searching the forest floor, which looks like this:

forestfloor

for a certain sort of gold, otherwise known as chanterelles. Here are a few that we found today:

chanterelles

They don’t look like much, but they taste like heaven. They are also the only mushroom that I am willing to identify and eat, which makes them ultra-special to me.

Protect your “spot”

I will never forget my introduction to chanterelle-hunting in California. Living in a condo complex, my neighbor on one side, a French narcolepsy researcher, told me that my neighbor on the other side, a retired professor, took him chanterelle-hunting. The professor drove the researcher up in to the mountains to his “spot,” where they found masses of enormous chanterelles.

This was before the age of digital photos and the Internet. The Frenchman had his photo taken with the mushrooms, had it developed and printed, and mailed photos to France.

He said that none of his relatives would have believed him otherwise.

Here’s the catch in this story: The Frenchman had to do all of this—aside from the actual hunting for mushrooms—blindfolded. Yep, even though the two were great friends, the prof didn’t trust the scientist not to blab about his “spot” to others.

Enter the thieves!

My mom and I have a “spot.” I’m not going to tell you where it is. However, one day a couple of years ago we emerged from the forest to see a neighbor on his tractor. He noted what a haul we’d got (we’d run out of bags and were porting some of the mushrooms in our jackets!).

Oddly, every time we’ve been to our spot since then, someone else has been there first. Hmph. How dare they poach our spot?

Even though it is, ahem, on their property.

Join the hunt!

Mushroom-hunting isn’t for the lazy, the short-tempered, or those who need immediate satisfaction.

Oddly, children love it.

Our kids always did, at least, and all the kids I ever took on a hunt. You don’t even have to eat what you find—draw it, make spore prints, try to identify it. Most of all, make sure to learn about the world’s biggest organism.

If you live near Santa Cruz, make sure to check out our favorite event: The Fungus Fair. Mushroomers haul in specimens of the hundreds of types of mushrooms you can find in this area. Local chefs serve mushroom lasagne and ice cream. Artists display their pictures. And of course you can buy mushrooms. We always get some fresh, some dried, and a cultivation box to grow in our house.

Amanita Muscaria: Take pictures of it, laugh at it, but don't eat it! — Amanita Muscaria: Take pictures of it, laugh at it, but don’t eat it!

An Indecent Man

Posted on December 14, 2016February 28, 2018 by Suki

Forget politics.

I want to focus on one thing and one thing only here: What it means to be a decent human being.

Why are we indecent?

Pretty much every human religion ever invented has a mechanism for explaining and dealing with (however imperfectly) the fact that we humans do not always treat each other decently. Most of us, when it comes down to it, basically want to be decent, but we fail on a daily basis to live up to our ideals.

This is fine; this is what it means to be human. I have spent my parenting years helping my kids wrestle with this. It’s a common issue in the classes I teach. It’s good and right that kids wrestle with this issue, and it’s good and right for them to be put into situations where they clash with others who are unlike them so that they get used to wrestling with this issue.

Bullies are often the first ones to point fingers and call themselves victims.

This indecent man

Then there’s our president-elect. I’m not going to discuss his policies.

What I want to discuss is how he is an indecent man, and anyone who supports him becomes, through their support, indecent. Luckily, there’s a way to come back to decency—I’ll get to that.

In what ways is he indecent?

He’s a liar.

All politicians stretch and bend the truth to try to make their case. All politicians change their positions (which I think is a good thing!). All politicians say what their audience wants to hear as much as they can.

However, our president-elect is, quite simply, a liar. He clearly believes that whatever he says becomes true, which is the mark of someone who is a liar to the core. The most effective liars believe themselves deeply and consistently. The most effective liars simply dismiss anything that isn’t consistent with their lie as a lie.

If you support him, you support a liar.

He’s a bigot.

Even when he’s trying to be nice to people, he shows his bigotry. Remember, believing that something is better about a group of people based on an attribute they have no control over is bigotry, too. So when he makes generalizations about women, people of color, immigrants, the disabled—add other categories here—and says something “nice,” remember that’s still bigotry. Though let’s face it, most of the content of what he says is negative.

If you are still on the fence about whether or not he’s a bigot, look at his supporters in the “alt-right”—let’s call them by their real title—white supremacists. They believe he’s a bigot, and they like that about him.

If you support him, you support a bigot.

He uses his wealth for power, not to help others.

This is an important aspect of a decent person that, again, all religions agree on: decent people always help others when they can. Ironically, research shows that the less you have to give, the more likely you are to give your time and money to help others.

In other words, it’s hard being rich. It’s really hard to help others that you don’t see, don’t have contact with, and think of as “the other.” But it’s easy enough, if you’re rich, at least to give some money. Any money.

Yes, our president-elect has a foundation, but there seems to be little evidence that he has used it to help anyone. It’s also worth a fraction of the billions he says he has. And it has spent plenty of money helping…him and his family.

If you support him, you support using wealth only to empower the wealthy.

He treats others with open disdain.

It’s true that politicians are often accused of being disdainful, such as Mitt Romney after his 47% comment or Hillary Clinton after her “basket of deplorables” comment.

But our president-elect doesn’t have to say things that can be perceived as disdainful—he is simply openly disdainful. The way he behaves towards others—even, sometimes, rich white men like him—is indecent. He shows no respect for the dignity of other human beings.

If you support him, you support treating others with disdain.

How can we fix this?

The following is what I teach my children and my students.

Reject indecency
Do not vote for or support people who do not treat others decently
Call out indecency
Don’t (out of a fear of impropriety) hide the fact that you reject indecent people
Ask others to reject indecency
Make the “call to action” so that others see someone standing up for common decency
Do all of this decently
Don’t, in the name of decency, behave indecently

I have decided to be open about the fact that I reject indecency in our personal and political spheres, and thus I reject our president-elect.

I ask you also, no matter who you voted for, to reject indecency in our personal and political spheres, and thus reject our president-elect.

If you voted for him, rejecting indecency is your ticket back to decency.

If you do not reject him openly and publicly, then you, in your silence, join in the support of indecency.

This blog is not about politics, but it is about parenting. And all parents know that sometimes it’s uncomfortable to do what’s right.

Movie Review: Everything would be fine if you just got over that homeschooling thing….

Posted on December 1, 2016December 8, 2016 by Suki

A number of friends have recommended the film “Captain Fantastic” to me. None of them were homeschoolers, and when they recommended it they didn’t even mention the homeschooling angle.

Perhaps, given where I live, they were more riveted by the Buddhism and the “stick it to the man” angles.

However, upon reading the reviews, I was looking forward to this film. It sounded like a magnified version of so many homeschoolers I know:

trying to raise their kids away from the corrupting influence of popular culture
trying to get back to what was good about traditional culture
trying desperately not to replicate the mistakes that they think their parents made

“Captain Fantastic” was all that. The film starts with a comic book version of what I know to be the days of many homeschoolers I am acquainted with: The dad is spending real, focused time with his kids. They are in nature. He has borrowed a tradition that he feels had value in the past and updated it [sorta] for his own modern uses.

The movie starts with homeschool bootcamp. (Admit it, homeschoolers, haven't you wished your kids would go along with something like this?) — The movie starts with homeschool bootcamp. (Admit it, homeschoolers, haven’t you wished your kids would go along with something like this?)

Keeping the expectations low

I’m not concerned about the comic book nature of the film. By virtue of the medium, films need to present concentrated versions of reality, the same way that haute cuisine reduces an honest broth to a concentrated perfection only served by professionals.

The homeschoolers in this movie are to homeschooling what superheroes are to police officers with their feet on the pavement.

That said, couldn’t this one movie, which is quirky and wonderful in so many ways, have risen above the obvious cliché that it ends with? Really, can all our problems be solved by sending our kids to school?

Apparently, they can.

What’s great about this movie

Here’s a recap of how this movie progresses:

Homeschooling family comes out of the woods to attend Mom’s funeral
Homeschooled kids find out how essentially weird they are
Homeschooled kids also find out how well-educated they are in comparison to their schooled peers
Well-intentioned grandparents attempt to take kids from loving, though misguided, father
Kids decide to stick with dad

All dressed up for Mom's funeral! — All dressed up for Mom’s funeral!

This is all pretty good, yes? It hits the major points:

Yep, homeschoolers are weird and guess what? We don’t care!
Granted, though some homeschoolers are ill-educated louts, homeschooling can be more effective than school for motivated learners.

It doesn’t sugarcoat things, but also doesn’t demonize parents who made admittedly weird decisions.

Then… the dénouement:

As a result of seeing The Real World, the oldest homeschooler, who has been accepted into “every top university” and clearly loves learning, decides to forego college entirely. Wha’?
As a result of seeing how great his children have turned out in comparison with kids in The Real World, the dad decides to… move back to The Real World and… send his kids to school? Double-wha’?

Really, I don’t think a movie has ever gone so wrong in the last few short minutes than this one did. The ending of this movie seems more intent on sticking it to anyone who has ever tried to live up to their ideals than on faithfully bringing the characters to a sense of closure.

Rewriting Hollywood, courtesy of Suki’s script-rewriting service

So, for my homeschooled readers, I am going to rewrite the ending for you. Please do watch this movie because you will laugh and cheer this quirky family of super-homeschoolers. But turn it off once the kids return to their dad, and imagine my ending instead:

As a result of seeing The Real World, the oldest homeschooler chooses the university that will allow him the greatest opportunity to learn and explore, while also growing as a human being amongst other humans. During the summers, he volunteers around the world, and is eventually able to marry his ideals with his life’s work, hopefully a bit more successfully than his dad did.
As a result of seeing how great his children have turned out in comparison with kids in The Real World, the dad realizes that yes, he is weird, but really, it’s OK. Maybe he’s lonely (he has lost his beloved wife, after all) and he decides to move closer to other humans. That’s great. But he also re-embraces the educational method he and his wife chose, seeing that his children are becoming the strong-willed, thoughtful, morally guided humans that they had hoped to raise.

But that wouldn’t be Hollywood, would it? We can’t celebrate real humans’ real achievements and real quirkiness. We have to force our world of soft greys into the black-and-whites of popular culture.

With this movie, at least, I had hoped for better.

Some very real (non-super-)homeschoolers learning in nature and celebrating their own, quirky selves.

Book review: Raising Human Beings

Posted on November 11, 2016December 27, 2016 by Suki

Raising Human Beings: Creating a Collaborative Partnership with your Child
Dr. Ross Greene
Scribner, 2016

There are times when I fervently wish that all human beings were raised to understand the value of empathy, cooperation, and collaboration. This is one of those times.

I’ve been meaning to write a review of Raising Human Beings: Creating a Collaborative Partnership with your Child by Dr. Ross Greene ever since it came out. Uncharacteristically, I bought this book in hardcover. Perhaps that’s because when my younger child was 10, I believe that I joined with a zeitgeist of parents around the country who willed Raising Human Beings into reality. Collectively, we had read Greene’s The Explosive Child because we had a child of that description, then realized that it was also the perfect manual for raising any human being, explosive or otherwise.

Dr. Greene apparently heard our collective cry for a book aimed at all parents outlining his approach, which so improved the lives of families trying to raise difficult children. He heard us, and Raising Human Beings was born.

Greene starts from a place of simple logic: All children want to do well if they can. As much as we want to impute devious motives to our misbehaving children, they are misbehaving not because they want to

Drive

Out

Our

Minds,
but because they simply need something. Sometimes they have no idea what they need. Sometimes they think they need something completely different than what they really need. But they have a need nonetheless.

Greene’s approach is to teach parents to work with their little human beings starting not from an assumption of misbehavior, but from a place of empathy and compassion. Our little human beings are works in progress. They need our guidance to learn how to work within this complicated, confusing world. As parents, it’s our job to raise our children, not to beat them down or lord over them.

All of us want to raise the best human beings we can, but many of us fall back on the flawed reasoning that informed previous generations of parents. Dr. Greene calls this Plan A, and he understands why you use it. It’s quick, dirty, and seems (sometimes) effective. It feels good to say “because I said so.” Getting angry can be cathartic.

But Plan A isn’t what our kids need in this world. We live in a Plan B world. In this world, you’ll do best if you know how to figure out what other people need, understand your own needs, and learn to collaborate so everyone gets their needs met as well as possible.

Plan B is complicated, slow, and frustrating. I would venture to predict that most parents actually give up on it somewhere before actual full realization of the approach (I certainly did). But I feel very confident that all families will benefit from however much of this approach you can implement in your particular family situation.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. If you have a particularly tough nut to crack, get The Explosive Child instead or in addition. It will improve your lives, and you will send out into the world healthy human beings who understand the value of empathy, cooperation, and collaboration.

And we could all use a few more of those around.

Category: Culture