World Vegan Month Tip #4

Millions of beautiful and healthy animals are euthanized every year due to companion animal overpopulation. Please consider opening your home and heart to a homeless animal this year, and please remember to never support pet stores or breeders. Also, volunteering at your local shelter is a great way to lend a hand. My son and I volunteer at our local shelter and it is both deeply fulfilling and a valuable life lesson in giving back for my son.

Girl bully...

Imagine this eleven-year-old girl with a crazy, black mushroom cloud for hair - it was a poorly executed Dorothy Hamill “wedge,” earning about a 1.2 score by the judges simply for the effort – during the preppy era, surrounded by straight-haired blondes who all seemed to be at least a foot taller than her. In sixth grade, that was me. Oh, I also had boobs. This was the year that my elementary school joined three or four others, all tributaries feeding into one violently fast-flowing, bubbling river of hormones and anxieties that was our collective junior high. My inner-life, never exactly placid, was especially tumultuous at this time. Whenever my father was home, he was either on a rampage or, blessedly, passed out cold; my mother wandered our tidy suburban house with perpetually red-rimmed eyes from crying, lines deepening on her forehead and I was petrified that she’d die of grief and leave us with Him. My sixth grade homeroom teacher was a notorious bully and a certifiable jackass. My next-door neighbor and best friend’s father – a truly gracious, heroic man who I often imagined was my own father – died of leukemia the winter I was in sixth grade. Many of my old friends, girls I’d played with since I was in kindergarten, suddenly became nervous with the influx of new kids with better hair and froze me out. It was an awful time.

Add just one more external stress to everything else that was dreadful: an incredibly mean-spirited school bully who had me, the girl with the mushroom cloud for hair, in her sights. It is easy to see why I was singled out and it was pretty much a numbers game anyway: each of us except for the upper echelon of popular kids had a tormentor of some variety and she just happened to be my personal bully. There were others in line behind her to pick up the slack when necessary, for sure, mean boys and their female counterparts who would snicker and shove and say cruel things just to inflict harm pretty much daily. If there was a day that was without much taunting – the mean kids had to refuel occasionally and restock their munitions – where I could get from Point A to Point B with a minimum of viciousness directed at me, I was floating on the clouds, that was such a joyous day. It was a rare occurrence and usually just a matter of sheer luck when this girl, let’s call her The Wench for clarity’s sake, didn’t seize on me like a heat-seeking missile.

The Wench had gone to one of the other elementary schools: she was tall and skinny with a large, crooked nose and a witch-y, long face (or perhaps my judgment is clouding my memory). She was athletic and was befriended by The Right People, Nordic-looking girls and sporty boys, probably way back in kindergarten or first grade. Thankfully we never had homeroom together, but when we passed in the hall, or in gym class or lunch, I was fair game. “Nice hair,” The Wench would say, screwing up her mouth into a sneer. “You are so pretty!” Or, “Hey, can you teach me how to be just like you? You’re so awesome.” Day in and day out, The Wench was on my trail. She would pretend that popular boys liked me, that I was invited to parties I knew I wasn’t, that I was every bit as awesome as she knew herself and her feathered-hair friends to be. Right before she’d say something new, The Wench would squint her already beady black eyes at me, smirk and reach into her inner bag of tricks for some more ammunition, or she would look me down from head-to-toe and just riff off whatever she felt inspired by - my clothes, my hair, my being - like some highly talented jazz artist of misanthropy. My stomach hurt pretty much every day of school in sixth and seventh grade; whenever I’d walk in those front doors, a deep sense of dread would sink inside me like an anchor. Kerplunk. By eighth grade, The Wench had other fixations (boys) and largely left me alone as I recall. I was in the throes of anorexia by then, shrinking ultimately to 75 pounds and growing hair on my concave belly, so I was quite literally in the process of disappearing. By the next year, high school, I had beat anorexia and was able to get lost in the sea of others. The Wench became insignificant at our complexly tiered high school, no longer ruling the hallways and the cafeteria with her cackling understudies, and she, too, got lost in the sea of people. After junior high, our paths rarely crossed.

Last week, though, lo and behold, I got a “friend request” from The Wench via my Facebook account. My first thought, after my eyeballs pretty much jumped out of my head and I breathed into a paper bag for a few minutes, was, “Oh, she’s making fun of me again? She still thinks that I am going to fall for that one?” My next thought was, “How dare you?”

I know that growing up we all face untold indignities and attacks against our pride. I know that I was not alone, nor was I necessarily singled out much more than the average dorky kid at my school. But I also know how very painful that time in my life was, how I wished that I could just fade away and disappear when she (or one of the others) had me in her sights. They were so darn effective at what they did, in fact, that they made me want disappear altogether, not just when they were near. We tend to minimize childhood cruelties when we grow up: oh, it wasn’t that bad. I survived. Or we ponder that perhaps our bullies had bad home lives. To that I say, yes, I survived (is mere survival what we’re striving for in life?) and, yes, it was that bad. When we’re children, especially those of us in an unsupportive home environment, that is our reality and as our life experiences are so limited, it is very difficult for such bullying to be anything but hugely painful. And maybe she did have a bad home life. You know what? So did I, a really awful one. She made a horrible time in my life just that much worse.

I went on from that wretched junior high to high school and then to college, finally meeting the sort of people who made me feel good about who I was, who supported me as I discovered who I was after so many years of being defined by others. By the time I graduated college, I was confident, happy and assertive: my friends from around this time couldn’t believe that there’d ever been a time when I was cowering by my locker, hoping beyond hope that someone like The Wench wouldn’t spot me as she did her daily sweep of the hall. I emerged from the cocoon I’d built for myself apprehensively but with determination: I would never be vulnerable to a hateful bully again.

I briefly – like for less than a second – contemplated accepting her friend request if just so she could see that I survived her beautifully, that I have a great life and fantastic friends. But then I realized I didn’t want The Wench to have access to my life on any level. She already took too big a bite out of it. Even by the loose definition of “friend” that seems to be Facebook’s operating description – that a “friend” is someone you know, or someone your friends know – The Wench doesn’t count as a friend of mine. Friendship is too sacred to me. Friends are those who want the best for you in their hearts. Friends are those who make your heart lighten up just a little to think about. Friends are there for you when you are at your most vulnerable and they never, ever exploit that or get a cheap thrill out of making you hurt worse.

My finger hit the “ignore” button (oh, how I wish that said something else, more like, “Denied!” or “Screw you!”) and it felt astonishingly good.

Oh. And fuck off, Wench.

World Vegan Month Tip #3

One of the most common questions asked of vegans is, "Where do you get your protein?" We get pure protein from a variety of sources, all without cholesterol: legumes, beans, nut butters, sprouts, grains (quinoa is especially high in it), and on and on. Soy can also be a source but it... is not necessary to eat soy to get adequate protein as a vegan, nor do we have to be overly concerned with amino acid combining (an old notion) to make sure we get enough. A delicious bowl of lentil soup with multigrain bread is a simple, protein-rich light meal.

World Vegan Month Tip #2

Today is November 2 and you know what that means. Time for World Vegan Month Tip #2: starting every morning with a green or all-fruit smoothie is a great way to get a natural energy rush. My favorite fruit smoothie recipe consists of orange juice, soaked (and pitted) dates, chopped frozen banana, ground flax seed and powdered cacao. Click here for green smoothie recipes and face the day with a clear mind and great vitality.

World Vegan Month Tip #1

So I decided last night -- too late to update here -- that for every day of November (except the first, apparently), I'm going to update this here blog with one tip, link or helpful bit of miscellanea to support a compassionate vegan lifestyle. Tasty morsel for today: you don't have to abandon your convictions just because your traveling. Globe-trotting vegans can find delicious and cruelty-free grub all over the world. Check out HappyCow.net and VegDining.com for listings and reviews.

Candy Demons...

My son is going to be a ghost-hunting alien this year for Halloween. Luckily, we're not a family that's averse to homemade costumes. He is bouncing around the house in excitement: Halloween is like a birthday party, Mardi Gras and New Year's Eve all wrapped up in one crinkly plastic wrapper for children. Watching him, and seeing how the holiday influences almost every aspect of our lives as the final countdown to Halloween day begins, reminds me very much of my own childhood.

When I was a child, like nearly every other child in my little suburban universe, I absolutely loved Halloween, every pumpkin-scented aspect of it. I loved the weeks leading up to Halloween, the thrilling anticipation that was almost too much to take, and as a result, I recall October as vividly as any of my childhood memories. I remember watching the Charlie Brown Halloween episode each year, knowing each line of dialogue, every plot development, but still bewitched by the whole thing. I remember going to the Woolworth’s, referred to by my mother as “the dime store,” (an old-fashioned term even then) at Eden’s Plaza every year, and - I can’t believe how incredibly quaint this is going to sound, but it’s true - my mother and her best friend Rose would sit at their long lunch counter and drink Cherry Cokes while I looked around for my Halloween costume with Rose’s daughter, Susan. I was Wonder Woman one year – with that creepy mask with the oval eyes cut out that I had to keep hidden away until the big day because it was so clearly going to suck the soul out of me otherwise – and I remember those cardboard-y wrist cuffs, which I wore all year until they finally disintegrated. I remember the caramel apples sales at our school (specifically Affy Taples here in Chicagoland) coming out just a couple of weeks before Halloween and I remember that squeamishly sick feeling I got as I was eviscerating a pumpkin, reaching in for the grotesquely slimy innards, and that particular pumpkin smell, all unripe and sharp. I remember Mrs. Lane next door and her homemade, orange-colored buttercream-frosted pumpkin cookies that she handed out to trick-or-treaters (imagine such a thing today – the Department of Homeland Security and the FDA would shut down her operation in a minute flat). I remember the thrill at school on the day of Halloween, and I remember shrieking with unbridled joy when I’d locate a friend in a particularly outlandish costume. I remember the Halloween celebration at school, where we would all parade across the stage in the auditorium with our ungainly swords and shields and robes everywhere. I remember racing home after school with my friends on Halloween day, so unbelievably excited; I remember that the air always smelled so delicious, like a candy version of itself. I remember going door-to-door as the sky began to darken, and how we would skip in pairs and small groups down Romona Road, and sometimes even into the townhouse development on the other side of our block. I remember hearing squeals of excitement everywhere, disembodied voices down our dark street, and I remember that the festivities became a little more deliciously sinister as it edged closer to nighttime. I remember lugging my bag of candy around until it felt like there were dumbbells inside and it was so heavy I was afraid the bag would rip. I remember going home and dividing up my candy into different tiers of preference, from miniature candy bars - even whole ones sometimes! - at the top of the list to boxes of dried-out raisins relegated to the bottom. I remember that I had a system of how my stash was to be self-allocated, and how I stored it all in my bed table drawer, those poor raisins never seeing the light of day again until six months later, on their trip to the garbage can. I remember the unsubstantiated rumors of “razor blades in apples” that had Been On The News and the candy in lunchboxes for weeks afterward. Every October, I remember it all with an enthusiasm that seems to build every day. I still think of Halloween from the perspective of a child who was really thrilled by haunted houses and spooking herself out and, yes, candy. Now that I’m a parent myself, none of that enthusiasm has really diminished.

Oh, except for the candy part.

Candy-will-rot-my-son’s-teeth-leave-him-unfocused-at-school-hyper-at-bedtime-and-it-will-alter-his-taste-buds-fundamentally. Sweet-and-sour will excrete from his pores. The arteries to his brain will become clogged with corn syrup. The little, pure, perfect body I nurtured and protected for nine months inside my own will be attacked from within by mutant armies led by artificial food dyes, scary preservatives, wholly unnatural additives, making him a human science experiments. His smooth, satiny skin will become rough and mottled, his bright eyes will become cloudy, his inquisitive nature will become dull. Right?

When my son was younger, Halloween was all about the dressing up and crafts, and we could easily pretend that whole other aspect of it didn’t exist; now that he’s seven, though, he knows about candy. And he likes it. Blame my mother, who never met a piece of candy she didn’t like, who maintained such a well-stocked kitchen of Bubble Yum and Milk Duds that all the neighborhood kids would come gather around our house like alley cats, in the most unsubtle manner imaginable. They all knew about the gum drawer and the candy cabinet, even the new kids, like the information was transmitted psychically. It was only a matter of time before my own child would become curious about Grandma’s stash of cute, squishy Swedish fish and Dum Dums (which includes the awesomely named Artificially-flavored Mystery Flavor, which just blows the mind with its post-modern riddle within a riddle). Or maybe his father started him on this path that one day when my son was crying at the restaurant and he gave him a peppermint candy to make him stop. Was that the gateway drug, the little hard candy with the bright red points hurriedly popped into his mouth? This was the baby who followed me around our apartment as soon as he could crawl, stealing steamed broccoli from my bowl as I ran away. This was the boy who loved miso soup and turned me on to avocado sushi when he three. These days, he treasures the stray pieces of candy we allow to fly under our radar and he savors them like he once savored apples.

I do make occasional exceptions and allow our son to eat the sort of thing I don’t otherwise approve of, but it’s just a few times a year. That seems balanced to me: he’s not eating it every day or even once a month. When he does eat candy, it’s vegan and, while I’m generally not thrilled about the ingredients, it’s appreciated by him. I feel like a zero-tolerance approach would be the recipe for a future rebellion. So it’s rare but candy does happen. And when it happens, I leave him alone: I try not to scrunch up my face or make derogatory comments (admittedly, it’s a challenge sometimes). I just let him enjoy it, the same way I enjoyed candy when I was a child, with his whole, passionate self.

There are people who take a hard-line approach to candy and I can respect that. I do have my doubts as to how effective that is in the long run. (Further, as someone who grew up in almost literally a candy house with pretty much no food-like substance prohibited, I have to say that I never crave the super-sweet stuff of my childhood.) I also think that it can be neurotic and irrational to think that candy a few times a year is going to have such dangerous and lasting repercussions. It’s not. If you raise your children to value their health and to appreciate how sublime a ripe mango can be and how our bodies feel kind of icky on junky fuel, I don’t think there’s any reason to create an environment of fear and anxiety around the occasional detour: in my view, that's more about the parent's own food phobias than anything else. If a parent is creating such a tense and unpleasant environment around forbidden foods, I just don’t think that’s healthy. Those of us who are health-seekers can go overboard just as those who let their children eat anything they want can go overboard. Allowing that little bit of candy every year works for us and my son does not get the message that he needs to go behind my back if he develops curiosity about the “forbidden fruit.” So every year on Halloween night, after we pass out our last organic lollipop, we sort through my son's stash together, separate out the acceptable items, and he can choose five pieces. The rest goes to the Good Halloween Witch (a.k.a., a local dentist who takes candy off the hands of nervous parents) and she leaves a little toy or book behind as a gift. Again, this wouldn’t work for everyone but it works for us.

I want my child to experience Halloween like I did: as a time of year full of anticipation, excitement and absolute joy. I’m not going to deprive him of this experience. And, like it or not, candy is part of the Halloween experience. I want my son to have how own warm memories of Halloween when he grows up, not remember how uptight I was about everything, how he didn't get to enjoy things because of my rigidity. It's a time of celebration. Why would I create anxiety around that?

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Roman Polanski and the seamy underbelly of privileged liberalism...

As usual, I've been blissfully marooned in my internal fairyland so I’m a day late and a dollar short on weighing in on cultural matters, specifically referring here to the Roman Polanski imbroglio. It has been pestering me lately, though, because underneath it all, it touches on something that staked a claim on my serenity for years: the tendency for liberals to turn their damn brains off if something hints at “injustice” and, more subtly but every bit as perniciously, to behave like tantrum-y, breath-holding, petulant three-year-olds when it is implied that they are not as perfect as they think they are. I blame the preponderance of empty-headed, solipsistic New Age doctrine, something many liberals consume and excrete like ravenous wraiths, for much of this. More on this subject at a later date, if I can work up the fortitude.

Whenever I out myself as most definitely not a liberal, I can see the confusion in the eyes of the person who has mistakenly identified me as one, and it’s understandable: we live in a binary culture, one where you’re either liberal or conservative. Or, in this case, it is a ternary landscape, where all persuasions are determined by one’s placement among three points along the continuum: liberal, conservative or middle of the road. Well, it is clear that I am not a conservative, though I would like to reclaim that word as so much of what I love is found in its root word: conserving, meaning protecting from harm or loss, using carefully and sparingly, I can get behind that. I travel by bike or public transit, I am vegan, I buy second-hand, I love canning, I hang my clothes to dry on a laundry line, for Pete’s sake: I’d say that I am a true conservative given the original meaning of the word. I would probably totally hit it off with your homesteading Depression-era great-grandmother. I often wonder how many self-labeled conservatives are guided much by the root word. Clearly, politically, my views are pretty much the opposite of the archetype of the modern-day fire-and-brimstone, hateful, mean-spirited conservative, though. (I realize that this is an archetype, not necessarily one that is representative of your average conservative.)

Middle of the road? I don’t relate to this very strongly either. I like people who maintain strong opinions and are guided by deep passions. I have always gravitated toward emotive, expressive people and I’m glad for it: they will occasionally get overwhelming with their fiery ways, but I think they embolden the rest of us to live big as well. I do believe that the middle path is often the most measured and mindful one: it’s just when one maintains a staunch middle-of-the-road position on everything, it can be stultifying. I appreciate the “grey areas” the middle-roaders remind us of, but I think that it can become too much of a security blanket, compulsively wrapping oneself in that broad, comfortable position in the middle. There are times when strong views are not only better, they are necessary; it is the stuff that propels us toward positive change.

Now on to liberalism. I have been labeled as a liberal ever since I was a little girl and could not for the life of me understand racism. My brain just did not compute. Racism is not only hateful and self-serving, it is irrational. It simply makes no sense. At the risk of being overly simplistic, racism is just plain stupid. Not long after I learned about racism, I learned about homophobism, speciesism, ageism: to my young mind, those things were also hateful, self-serving and irrational. I have to say, though I am a little more nuanced in my understanding, I haven’t changed much from that initial revulsion toward prejudice and injustice I had as a small child. It is just icky. As such, and being more of the outspoken (a.k.a., Jewish) persuasion, I have always felt keenly for the underdog or those treated unfairly and spoken out accordingly. From my earliest memories, I was labeled the family liberal in my household of Reagan-loving Republicans.

At first, I took up the mantle with pride: young people are often seeking labels to understand themselves better. I was a liberal, this was why I looked at the world with my particular slant. Of course! With my fervent, impulsive nature, coupled with my youthful vigor, I pursued my liberalism wherever it led me because I finally had an identity I enjoyed, I called strangers on phone lists to ask them to donate to my cause, I went to marches in the dead of winter, I withheld my babysitting money from businesses and products I opposed. (I still do two and three.) I stood up for the unjustly maligned at family meals and I held my poor social studies class captive as I became more and more outspoken about apartheid, Nicaragua, Western imperialism. Oh, I’m sure I was insufferable. I had more political buttons than I had life experiences, but I was proudly liberal.

How am I tying all this up with Roman Polanski? Here’s how: the longer I was exposed to liberalism, the more I felt removed, and, within the last ten years or so, repulsed by it. The Hollywood liberal elite’s clubby support of Roman Polanski, despite his refusal to face his conviction for drugging and sodomizing a thirteen-year-old girl against her will in 1977, is very consistent with what I have observed time and time again among liberals: a tendency toward mindless, privileged self-absorption. What if the director had been shlocky rather than an auteur? Save those hands for manicures, no wringing required. What if the rapist was still Polanski but the eight-grade girl was Iraqi? Uh oh. That would be uncomfortable. What if the girl were instead an adult woman who was drugged and anally raped by Polanski? What was she wearing? She was trying to seduce him. Otherwise intelligent people are saying this in 2009! Here we can expose the preening, misogynistic hypocrisy of liberalism with their refusal to admit what this case is about: a man who has evaded justice for a violent, sadistic crime he committed against a child for 32 years. The fact that the survivor, as a 44-year-old mother, would like this to be dropped already, well, she has my sympathies. No one is responsible for the continued victimization of this woman in this particular case, though, but Polanski for his cowardly refusal to turn himself in after it became clear that he would face a penalty he didn’t want to face. And what sort of dangerous precedent would we create if the victim had the final word as to whether the perpetrator is convicted? For example, if a rapist were living on your block, would you want his victim(s) to determine if he doesn’t have to face charges? As much as I feel for the survivors of these heinous attacks, that is not a smart or safe approach to criminal justice. While I doubt that the 76-year-old Polanski poses much of a threat to society, that is not how our judicial system works, thankfully. (I should say here that I’m not much of a believer in prison, either, but now that he is in custody, he will go to trial and finally face what he has avoided all these years.)

Do the wealthy liberals who signed petitions and wore badges to “Free Polanksi,” (such as Martin Scorsese, Pedro Almodavar, Salmon Rushdie and Milan Kundera) think that we should have two forms of justice, one for “regular” people and one for cultured European filmmakers? That is the message I am receiving. Worse, it appears with the “Free Polanski” meme, they are trying to refashion him into some sort of political prisoner and martyr who has already suffered enough, a sort of an arthouse Nelson Mandela. (Oh, can we just forget that whole forcible sex with a minor thing? That doesn’t fit with the comfortable revisionist theme…) Could someone please tell me what on earth was Whoopi Goldberg thinking when she characterized his crime as “Not rape rape”? What was it, simply rape in the singular? I need some clarification: what is “rape rape” and what is just your garden-variety rape, Whoopi? What are the thoughts that drive this opinion? And Debra Winger, another Polanski freedom fighter, referred to the Swiss officials who arrested him as “philistine colluders.” See, we in the U.S. are the philistines and the Swiss officials were our colluders. The obfuscation around this issue is almost as fascinating as it is infuriating: is the idea here that Polanski is some refined bohemian artiste and we with our puritanical, repressed values in the United States were once again trying to impose our morality (against raping children, or anyone else for that matter) on someone who should simply be left alone to create his great works of cinematic genius? Tell me I’m wrong. Let’s sat that law officials interceded to arrest someone who had sexually attacked one of Debra Winger’s sons, and this perpetrator happened to be an artist of high regard. Would those people also be colluding on behalf of “philistines”? And how sad is it that I have to put this in personal terms? Isn’t the rape of a child universally understood to be a terrible crime? Yes, the crime was a lifetime ago – which seems to be the sticking point for a lot of people - but Polanski removed himself from due process by evading it as long as he had. Again, his apologists need to admit that he is solely responsible for the case dragging on as long as it has. He committed the crime: the crime was not committed against him.

Sadly, I have found the sort of knee-jerk, entitled, accepting-of-misogyny attitude found here to be very common among liberals, and this is what the Polanski case has exposed: the seamy underbelly of privileged liberalism. This sort of attitude is hateful, self-serving and irrational, just like conservatism as its commonly practiced, but in some ways it’s more insidious because it pretends to be something else. So the next time someone near you says that a thirteen-year-old girl should be held responsible for the actions of a 43-year-old man – and if she’s not responsible, then it’s her mother, and if she’s not responsible, then it was because those were the times, and if none of those things is responsible, can we just drop it already? – you may very well be talking to a liberal. Flee while you have the chance.

Free Roman Polanski? No. Free your mind and reject elitist, self-serving liberalism.

(Oh, and I know many of my friends identify themselves as liberals: have no fear, you are not of this variety. You are true progressives, darn it!)