Day 321- A letter I will surely regret writing

Dear Mr. President,

This morning my American Indian Law class had a guest lecturer from our University's law school. He gave an interesting talk on local water rights disputes, and I asked several questions, trying to place the local issues in context with the international water disputes I study in another class. After the bell rang and students lined up to shuffle out, I thanked him for the lecture. My professor began speaking to him and, before I was totally out of earshot, began telling him about me. As much as my ego enjoys overhearing complimentary descriptions of my academic abilities, I hurried out, knowing exactly what would have to come next. This professor, who has encouraged me to consider law school and who has praised my engagement in her class, does have a significant reason to be disappointed in me. I'm often absent from class for no legitimate reason. Her class is not unique in this respect- I have skipped many of my classes this quarter (and over the course of my long college career.) While I have often formed a close bond with professors, or at least a significant rapport, all of the most encouraging and supportive instructors have had the same complaint about my attendance.

For years, for probably my entire life, I have struggled with anxiety and depression. I won't blame my poor attendance entirely on illness, mental or otherwise, because there have been plenty of times when I just sleep too late to make it to class. More often, however, the idea of getting out of bed, or leaving my apartment, or even going through the doors of the classroom has just been too much for me. I will stare at my ceiling, or the door, and I will give myself permission not to go. I will try to rationalize this behavior, claim that I'm not prepared, or that I don't need to go because I've done the reading, but the truth is I often just can't get past the physical anxiety or despair.

As it is now, missing class is pretty much as bad as it gets. There have been times in my life, especially as a very young person, when my depression got so out of hand that I was not functioning at all. I've tried therapy and medication, finding little success with either. One constant, however, has been my inability to discuss these problems frankly, even with professionals. I'm usually the type of person who can narrate the struggles in my life like they happened to some one else. I'm pretty comfortable telling a perfect stranger about my last awkward crush, (partially because it makes for such a good story) but I won't talk to my closest friends about the way depression can paralyze me, make me withdraw and unable to do something so simple as get out of bed.

Part of my reluctance to talk about it is certainly related to cultural stigmas about mental illness. Once close friend who used to struggle with similar problems now works for the defense department and was refused a post outside of the US on the basis of her mental health issues, despite years of very successful treatment. Celebrities who come clean about eating disorders or suicide attempts are called brave, while a politician must carefully hide any hint of similar problems in their past for fear of being viewed as unstable or unqualified. I say I'll regret writing this letter because, even more than my radical leftist politics, revealing this aspect of my life to the unending memory of the internet is damning to any future in which I might wish to be taken seriously.

This isn't to say I feel I should be held to a different standard. Getting out of bed this morning may have been more of a personal victory for me than it would be for most people, but that's not all I'm responsible for, now that I'm awake. I have goals, and I have expectations for myself that have nothing to do with being depressed or not. I don't think that depression is an excuse for me to be satisfied with an ordinary life. Similarly, I think it is completely unfair that any one else would change what they think of me or my abilities because of it. As humans we all have our own struggles, our own challenges to overcome and our own disadvantages. If one of my challenges is to keep depression from affecting my academic performance, it certainly isn't my life's greatest, only the one I have been taught I must be the most ashamed of.

Respectfully yours,

Kelsey

PS

Our guest lecturer this morning mentioned that your administration, while more ambitious and better at communication than the previous administration, has failed to live up to your promises for improving Native American rights and addressing the social, economic and environmental concerns of many tribes. The Bush administration, he said, wouldn't give tribal leaders a meeting, flatly refusing most requests. Your administration shows up to the meeting, hears the concerns, and then says no. While this may represent a small kind of victory, it sounds to me like you're giving yourself too much credit for making it out of bed. Being better doesn't mean much when the bar has been set so low for so long.

Day 283- Columbus Day

Dear Mr. President,

I don't know if you've heard, but there's a culture war raging in America. A concerted effort by the socialist, America-hating liberals of our country to destroy a cherished American holiday. It's an outright war on Columbus Day. If there's one thing I learned, for sure, in my public school education, it's that distorting historical fact to disguise unsavory aspects of imperialism is our birthright as Americans. If the 4th of July is our annual opportunity to remind the British just how badly we beat them in the Revolutionary War, than surely Columbus Day's annual celebration of the (approximate) beginning of the Native American genocide is just as valid. (Because nothing says class like committing genocide and then celebrating it every year with department store sales.) Seriously, I can only imagine that, centuries from now, when the Germans are celebrating an annual day in commemoration of Hitler, some whiney liberals will be crying for political correctness and ruining every one's fun.

Ok, my Bill O'Reilly impression will only carry me so far. As a whiney liberal, I do find the celebration of our bloody, imperialist origins to be extremely offensive. Columbus and those that would follow him brought all of the hellish and most reprehensible practices of the imperial powers down on the indigenous people of this continent. I say this in full acknowledgement of my own European descent. I can't change what my ancestors did, and I probably can't even begin to make it right to the descendants of the survivors, but I don't have to participate in this stunningly insensitive display of pride in those crimes.

My long-standing distaste for this day is heightened this year by a class I'm taking on American Indians and US Law. It's only been a few weeks, and so our focus continues to be on the early legal decisions made by European colonists toward the Native people of the Americas. The paternalism, the absolute lack of regard for the very humanity of the Indigenous people turns my stomach with every new page and every new lecture. What really surprised me was how familiar it all seems. Twisting the law to justify unspeakable acts and align a violent imperial project with supposed Christian values, even in the language of the sixteenth century, reminds me strongly of the twisted justifications for war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for the torture of prisoners during interrogations. The reason we still celebrate Columbus Day is same reason we still commit these acts of violence; we have not learned from the mistakes of our history. We can't ever make it right, but the real tragedy is that we seem doomed, instead, to keep making it worse. And so our newspapers read like our history books, stories of blood and death with unenumerated body counts for those with skin too dark or names too strange for their deaths as individuals to move a writer to include them. No culture war, no tradition is worth celebrating this many lives lost or forever ruined. The only redemption that can be found in crimes this ancient and this awful is the wisdom that ought to instruct those of us alive today to avoid, not to repeat and certainly not to celebrate, the brutality of our ancestors.

Respectfully yours,

Kelsey

Day 272- A short note on the first day of school (because I need sleep)

Dear Mr. President,

Today was my first day of classes in over a year. While most nights at this time find me wide awake and worried about getting enough sleep, my chronic insomnia seems to be on hold for the evening, because all I want to do is crawl into bed and shut my eyes. It's a feeling I really don't want to discourage, so I'll make this brief.

In the coming months, you can be sure I will write to you about my classes and the subject matter we're covering, be it American Indian law or water security issues in the Middle East. But today was just the first day, and, for the most part, we just covered the syllabus and did introductions. My name's Kelsey. I'm a NELC major. I'm a senior. I'm in this class because I think it will help me understand the rest of the world. Etc.

One of my favorite professors suggested today that we could be optimists or we could be pessimists. Maybe being a pessimist was our right, and we could write our "ugly blogs about the sky falling" but it wasn't as productive, in general, as a positive outlook. And so, for the record, let me say that I do not think the sky is falling. Forgive me, but that is all I have for tonight.

Respectfully yours,

Kelsey

Day 151- Memory in blank verse

Dear Mr. President,

I walked to work today in the pouring rain. My blood still boiling from last night, drums in my ears asking me to keep my compassion, to keep my cool, I walked and sulked and snapped at anything I could think of. I know, today is a day for remembering. Today is a day to remember the girls and boys we put in men's uniforms and gave weapons and made murderers (and murdered.) To remember the suits who sent them to their deaths and destinies. To remember the placid, peaceful suburbs and 3-day only sales we sent them to protect.

Sometimes I feel like I'm watching a microcosm of US history on fast-forward in Palestine. I fear that Palestinians face the same fate as the Native Americans; refugee camps like reservations, ostensible autonomy that creates isolation, not independence, dying traditions and tongues, hunted, then marginalized, disenfranchised, disarmed, disbanded, disappeared. When we remember the soldiers who have died for this country, do we also honor the dead who died for us to take it from them? Where is their bank holiday, their 3-day only sale? I'm so confused today, tangled up in the inevitable contradiction of being an American; of being born with blood on my hands, bearing the burden of an original sin, not against God but against my fellow man. I want to sort out these feelings; to tease out these threads into distinct narratives, of America, of Palestine, of wars and war crimes, to place it all on a timeline that makes sense.

Nothing makes sense today. Grief is giving way to disorientation and disbelief. Some lady was yelling at me about swiping her gift card too many times, because I might scratch it, and people are being taken off of a humanitarian ship in Haifa, to be taken to a room in the Tel Aviv airport, or to a prison cell, a hospital room, or a morgue. I'm just not sure I understand how these realities overlap. I've stepped, too far, off of some undersea shelf, and now I can only tread water. I can't tell if the White House thinks this is bad because it looks bad for Israel, or if, underneath the suits that control the truth, there are fathers who would not see their daughters suffer as daughters of fathers across Gaza are suffering. If you believe your own spin, or if you're saying it in the hopes of making the truth less devastating. Those boys in men's uniforms dropping down zip lines from choppers onto boats were acting in self defense. They were terrified of a truth so horrible it cannot be erased by bulletts. The truth that makes it so much harder to put on the uniform and pick up the gun. It was self defense, and if you say it enough times, it might be true.

In Washington, an unknown tomb is honored. The Schrödinger's cat of Identity. He could be white or black or Native or فلسطيني. Unknown could be any of us, bones bleached anciently to only human. The shifting, changing, contradictory American; he no longer needs to know how to live, it has been answered for him. He might have died for freedom, or security, or national unity; fighting the British, the Union, the Confederates or the Nazis. He might have fallen on a Pacific Island, or a Vietnamese jungle, or an Iraqi city. He might have been young, he might have been frightened, he might have been ready. He knows how to be an American, if he is all of these things.

Walking home, the rain had stopped. A day spent laboring under the layers of glass and steel and light that make up this city had made me tired, but hadn't made sense out of anything. I don't know what I remember and what I've just been told. I was told to remember those who died to make America safe for me. To teach me how to be an American on days like these. Overwhelmed, other people's memories wash over me; of Crow and of Blackfoot and of Cherokee, of Gettysburg and Bull's run and Blakely; of Pearl Harbor, and Dresden and Nagasaki; of Kabul and Baghdad and Karachi. (Of the dead, from a ship, in the darkness between Gaza and Turkey.) Lies are pouring in from men in suits on TV, while witnesses are being processed and discredited, until no one knows what they saw or who shot first. I still know what I believe. The drums haven't stopped. Compassion. Compassion. Compassion. I can't let it be taken from me.

To the dead, today, I remember you. I am humbled by your lives and how you lost them, for me. I still don't know how to be an American the way I am intended to, especially on days like these.

Respectfully yours,

Kelsey