I'm not getting over it: a reflection on rape culture

Trigger warning: This piece deals with stories about rape, assault and violence. It also involves me talking about my own life, including my body and my sex life, in a level of detail that might make some people uncomfortable.

Disclaimer: I am a white, straight, able-bodied, cisgendered woman, and my personal experiences with feminism and rape culture have been influenced by those identities. This essay is meant to be a personal reflection, and as such, it’s not an all-inclusive look at how all people experience and perceive rape culture. I in no way wish to discount the experiences of people of color, queer people, transgendered people and people with disabilities, and would welcome any criticisms, corrections or additions.

1

In Ecuador I walk down the street, morning, mid-afternoon, dark approaching. I’m wearing skinny jeans, normal jeans, corduroys, a short skirt, a long skirt, a t-shirt, a sweater, low-cut, high neck, sneakers, sandals, boots, hair up, hair down. I’m walking slowly, walking quickly, looking at the ground, looking ahead, lost, sure of where I’m going. I pass a guy, or a group of them, and they call after me: Hey baby. Can’t you even hit on me in Spanish?, I wonder. Hola, mi amor. They laugh. They whistle. They stare. I want to shout at them, Tengo un nombre. Soy una persona. I want to ask them, has that ever worked for you? Ever, in the history of the world, has a woman heard a strange man yell something at her on the street and said, Oh hey, I actually do want to dance with him, go out with him, fuck him, marry him and have his babies? But I guess it’s not really about that. It’s about power. It’s about control.

2

I used to experience these things as isolated incidents.

The catcalls start in middle school, the same year we have the history teacher who supposedly seats girls in his class by chest size—largest in the front. My eighth grade boyfriend and I rarely talk about our hopes and ambitions in life, but he makes sure to tell me I look hot when I wear tight shirts. I refuse to shave my legs or armpits as a gesture of feminist resistance. Friends, guys and people I meet online all feel compelled to point out that hair removal is just another part of hygiene, like brushing your teeth.

In high school, I run cross country for two seasons. On the way home from practice, a guy six years my senior sits next to me on the bus. He asks for my number, and I pray he’ll leave me in peace. I don’t yell at him even when he won’t stop talking to me, because I don’t want to cause a scene. I finally give in and start shaving sophomore year. Although my times on the 5k put me near the middle of the girls’ team, I’m far more concerned with the fact that my hair never seems to stay in a nice-looking ponytail like everyone else’s. I gain ten pounds.  I decide to quit junior year when we get a new coach who takes things too seriously. My mom, concerned about my health, asks me, “Aren’t you worried you’ll get fat if you don’t exercise?”

Later that year, I have lunch with a guy in my aikido class because I want to practice my Spanish with him. He’s in his 30s and I’m still not legal, but he tries to take me to a hotel. He kisses me goodbye on the lips, and I’m too afraid to pull away. I get home and call my best friend, because I feel bad. I told him we could hang out again, but I don’t want to see him. I’m afraid of what he might do, but I’m almost as afraid that he’ll think I’m mean if I don’t answer his calls. She tells me I’m never going to talk to him again, and makes me program him in my phone as DO NOT ANSWER. He calls me almost every day for the next two weeks, leaving long messages in Spanglish telling me how much he loves me. I spend these two weeks terrified that he’ll figure out where I live and come looking for me. I feel dirty and ashamed, and I refuse to say anything to my mother. I’m scared she’ll say it’s my fault for going to meet a guy I didn’t know very well. I’m angry at myself for being stupid enough to think that I could have a friendship with a guy who happens to be older than me without him wanting more. I wonder what I would have done if he’d gotten me to that hotel. I wonder what I would have done if he’d tried to hurt or rape me. I tell myself I would have fought back, would have hit and kicked and screamed until he stopped and left me alone. But I wonder—if I didn’t run away screaming when he asked me to go to a hotel in the first place, if I willingly sat through lunch with him, if I hugged him goodbye even though he was the last person on earth I wanted to touch, if he kissed me and I said nothing—what would it take to make me actually stand up for myself?

3

I have, at various times in my life, been called beautiful, ugly, fat, skinny, a prude, a slut, a tease. I have worn each of these labels with pride, hated myself for being called each of them. Skinny me desperately wanted breasts. Ugly me was proud that men wouldn’t be tempted by my body, that I would be ignored, left in peace. Fat me loves my curves and hates the lack of self-control that keeps me from running four times a week, from leaving that last piece of bread for someone else to finish. Prudish me took pride in not giving in, in being stronger than desire, and slutty me loves screaming yes to someone I want to be with. And me, whole me, soul me hates fragmenting myself, letting these labels define me, work their way inside my skin and influence my thoughts, my perceptions, my very sense of who I am.

4

I hate the thought of someone else judging me silently, so I preempt their judgment by labeling myself first. I know I’m not as thin as I used to be.  I believe in fat acceptance wholeheartedly, but my willingness to support it only matters to me if I can prove that I’m “strong” enough not to have a double chin. It’s so much easier to fight someone else’s battles, so much easier to say you’re helping an oppressed group than fighting for your own liberation. A skinny girl preaching acceptance is radical, forward-thinking and empathetic. A fat girl asking for the same rights has to accept herself for who she is before she can work for change. I tell myself that I’m not really fat, not enough that anyone would come out and say it, and I’m not sure if that makes it better or worse. I feel disingenuous for identifying with either label. I hate that I have these thoughts at all, that people can’t just be people and a body can’t just be a body.

5

Sometimes I have to remind myself of all the things my body can do, all the ways I am powerful. True, I’m no great athlete, but I know how to move. I have run a mile in under seven minutes. I have hiked over a dozen miles in a day carrying a 30 pound backpack. I have had at least eight orgasms in a single hour. I have run barefoot through mud and rolled around in grass, stood naked in a canopy tower and felt the breeze play with my hair.

6

I can’t deal with the clubs anymore. A song is playing, and it’s always the same song. The lyrics may change, but the message never does. There’s a video too, faceless women, a dark room, a pole, a man who says things and dresses like a businessman, but we all know what business he’s really in. I know it could never be my body on the pole—maybe in real life, but not in the video. I hate knowing I’m not worthy of being an object and hate that feeling even more. I want the story my body tells to be mine. I want its pride and accomplishment to be written in sweat, drive, determination, not in the desires of someone I’ve never talked to.  Looking around, I see couples, women bent at impossible angles, men scheming to find a partner. And the happy groups, and the people who know each other, and it isn’t all bad I swear. But those images get locked in my head—disembodied tits, a roaming hand heading south—and I can’t breathe. A guy asks me to dance and I want to shove him up against a wall and ask him who he thinks he is. I’m so angry all the time, and it really isn’t his fault. An innocent question. I shake my head. No, I do not want to dance. I want to smash patriarchy and rape culture, but I love club music. Some nights I take another shot and let my hips find the rhythm without listening or thinking too hard. Some nights I want to walk outside, wander around by myself, dare a guy to find me and try something because I will smash his fucking face into the ground. Some nights I go home feeling empty.

7

When I had someone, this was easier. When I could go home, we could take our clothes off slowly, relishing each moment, drawing ourselves into each other closer and closer together, when I could scream without reservation, feel loved, feel whole, feel wanted in the best possible way, when I could separate being wanted from being an object, separate sex from the meat market and just breathe him in deep, I felt nourished. Now, it feels like I’m just waiting to get that back. I know I should be strong and confident on my own. I know I don’t need a partner to complete me. But sometimes it’s so hard to stay grounded without someone to hold on to. It’s so hard to remember that relationships can be mutual, that love can exist without objectifying, and that even being an object can be fun when the person you’re dressing sexy for is someone you know and care about, someone who knows that you’re so much more than just a pair of striking eyes and a nice rack.

8

New CDC research says that one in five women in the United States will be raped in her lifetime.

I have four younger female cousins.

9

A friend told me that she decided to have sex for the first time because she was afraid. She had had a friend try to take advantage of her, and it made her realize that given the choices she makes in her life, the fact that she spends time drinking in the company of men, she couldn’t be sure that that wouldn’t happen to her again. So she wanted to control her first sexual experience, wanted it to be with someone she loved and cared about. And she did love him and care about him, and she would have done it anyway. But she wanted to do it sooner rather than later, because she was worried that if she didn't give up her virginity, someone was going to take it from her. This way, she knew that if she ever was raped, at least it wouldn’t be her first time.

10

Recently, I’ve started thinking that I want to have sex with a woman. I can’t tell if this is because I actually want to have sex with a woman or just because the female body has been so sexualized and so objectified that I want it for the aura of sexiness it seems to radiate. I can’t decide if not knowing matters. Sex columnist Dan Savage frequently gets letters from readers with fetishes and fantasies ranging from pie-fighting to hardcore humiliation. These readers often wonder where their desires came from, and Dan usually tells them that it’s not important. Even if you can identify the precise cultural norms and facets of your upbringing that lead you to want what you do, at the end of the day, you’re still going to want it. Better to just go for it and see if you like it or not. But I can’t shake the feeling that those two methods of desire are fundamentally different. If I actually wanted to have sex with a woman, I would do it. It would be about her, about us, about connecting. But if it’s just about the female body, then I’m lusting after an object, not a person. How can I reconcile that with everything else I believe in?

11

Sometimes I get told I’m too angry. I should learn to compartmentalize, mellow a bit. Yes, we live in a sexist fucking world, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have fun. I try, and it works sometimes. But it never lasts for long. Frat guys at Yale run around campus chanting, “No means yes! Yes means anal!” At the University of Vermont, they distribute a survey asking members who they’d like to rape. Police officers warn women in New York wearing short skirts that they’re putting themselves in danger of being raped, and this is after Slutwalks have been going on for a few months. An eleven year old in Texas is gang-raped by eighteen men, and the New York Times feels it’s relevant to mention that she wore clothes appropriate for a much older woman.

And god, do we have it good in the United States of America. In Ecuador, lesbians are sometimes locked up by their families in prisons where they are raped by men in order to “turn them straight”. During the Guatemalan civil war, raping Mayan woman was a key tactic used by the US-backed state army, because they were the ones who gave birth to the enemy. Rape gangs patrol the refugee camps and temporary shacks in Haiti, terrorizing women who are already living in the post-earthquake nightmare. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it’s estimated that 40 women per day are raped just in the South Kivu area, and hundreds of thousands of women have been raped in total, just a few more casualties in a conflict which has claimed 5 million lives. Women in the US Army serving in Iraq have died of dehydration because they won’t drink water. They’re afraid of having to go to the bathroom at night because they are afraid that their fellow soldiers will rape them.

Ask me how much longer I could keep writing this list. Ask me how I’m supposed to sleep at night knowing that somewhere on earth, a woman is living through hell. Ask me how I can live knowing how many women are walking around feeling his breath on their neck, feeling broken, feeling guilty, feeling powerless.

12

Feminist Harriet J explains how social conditioning can poison women, make us less likely to fight for ourselves even in situations where our lives depend on it.

If we teach women that there are only certain ways they may acceptably behave, we should not be surprised when they behave in those ways. 

And we should not be surprised when they behave these ways during attempted or completed rapes.

Women who are taught not to speak up too loudly or too forcefully or too adamantly or too demandingly are not going to shout “NO” at the top of their goddamn lungs just because some guy is getting uncomfortably close.

People wonder why women don’t “fight back,” but they don’t wonder about it when women back down in arguments, are interrupted, purposefully lower and modulate their voices to express less emotion, make obvious signals that they are uninterested in conversation or being in closer physical proximity and are ignored.

And then, all of a sudden, when women are raped, all these natural and invisible social interactions become evidence that the woman wasn’t truly raped. Because she didn’t fight back, or yell loudly, or run, or kick, or punch. She let him into her room when it was obvious what he wanted. She flirted with him, she kissed him. She stopped saying no, after a while.

13

I have never been raped, which is to say, I have been lucky. Do I have a right to feel so traumatized when I don’t have a night to relive over and over, don’t have a smell or sound that will make me flash back to a moment when I had no control? I talk to my friend about this, about secondary trauma, the idea that just witnessing enough can make you unable to fall asleep, unable to walk down the street at night without feeling terrified every time you see movement in the shadows. I’m not a victim, but there are still places I won’t go by myself, situations I can’t feel safe in because I’m afraid of what might happen.

Sometimes I think we’re all a little traumatized. How else to explain our inability to say no even when we really don’t want it, our refusal to stand up for our desires, our true wishes? How else to explain the times I’ve had sex with guys I didn’t want to just because it was easier to not speak up, easier to give in than to own my no? How else to explain that when I ask my younger cousin what her biggest fear is, she tells me it’s getting grabbed, and when I ask her what that means, she tells me a girl at her school was kidnapped and sexually assaulted by a stranger and she doesn’t want it to happen to her too? How else to explain that, as much as I want to, I’m terrified to have a daughter, terrified to think of trying to keep her safe from a world that would control her, hold her down, kick her, spit in her face and tell her she asked for it?

14

Every time I have this conversation, more stories come out. Friends, relatives, people I thought I knew tell me about eating disorders, suicide attempts, cutting, abuse. I sit in my kitchen with a friend well past midnight, and she tells me she’s never been raped. But she did have a boyfriend who pushed her off the bed and sometimes kicked her and tried to have sex with her when she didn’t want to and she had to fight him off. And then a few times, he had sex with her while she was asleep or passed out. And I tell her, that is rape. You can’t consent to anything when you’re blackout drunk, when you’re not conscious. And she stares at me. She thinks. And then she talks.

 How can I say that? I feel like I went through something so horrible that I don’t even remember. It’s like I’m looking at my life with different eyes. It’s like waking from a deep sleep into a hellish nightmare, begging yourself to go back to sleep when you do.

She stops. We talk about other things. I ask her about his other actions, the way he treated her during their relationship.

 If I’d ever said to him ‘you raped me last night’, I’m pretty sure he would have hit me.

And yet somehow, we stay silent.

No one else knew these things. It took me until our conversation to decide that this happened to me. It’s hard to think about yourself in that way. How could that thing happen to you? That thing you swore would never happen to you, that you were invincible from…

She still won’t say, “I was raped.” She doesn’t want to tell herself she was abused. An hour later we’re still talking, about silence, about blame, about how many women will live through this in their lifetimes.

Face it: more than 1 in 5 women have been raped. They just don’t know it.

15

This isn’t just a female issue. Genderqueer and trans people experience disproportionately high rates of sexual assault, and plenty of men are raped too. The one thing that’s clear is who’s responsible: well over 90% of rapists are men. How are we still telling ourselves this is only a women’s issue? How is it that I can have this conversation with my cousins, female friends and acquaintances, but I’ve never sat down with my brother to ask for his help in making it stop?

16

It’s all related. It has to be. The anti-civilization writer Derrick Jensen has twenty premises he bases his argument against civilization on. Premise fourteen states, in part, “If we did not hate ourselves, we could not allow our homes—and our bodies—to be poisoned.”

Harriet is right. We’re conditioned not to fight back, not to tell, not to cause a stir, not to create controversy. We’re conditioned to lie there and pray that someday we’ll be able to forget.

But Derrick is right too.

If women weren’t bombarded with images of perfection day in and day out, maybe fewer of us would hate our bodies. We’re raising a generation of feminists who are smart and media literate, and we’re still killing ourselves every day trying to be perfect. Courtney Martin said it best in her book Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: “We are the daughters of feminists who said, ‘You can be anything’, and we heard, ‘You have to be everything.’” We understand that fat is ok, but we still think we’re better than that. We need to be in control all the time. We overschedule ourselves and run events and meetings, and when that isn’t enough, we control our food with a finger shoved down our throat, control our pain with a small knife tracing lines on our forearms. The hatred is there, we’ve just found ways to bury it deeper.

17

What would the world look like if we weren’t taught to hate ourselves and our bodies?

It might look like a woman screaming NO the next time someone tries to move things further than she wants them to go.

It might look like a man refusing to stay silent about his rape even though he fears not everyone will take him seriously.

It might look like women loving and admiring each other instead of constantly judging and trying to be the best.

It might look like me taking responsibility for my sex life, not sleeping with a guy I’m not attracted to because he’s there and refusing to say anything when he spends less than a minute trying to get me off, because I don’t want to make him uncomfortable or cause conflict.

It might look like all of us reacting with love and support when someone comes forward with a story of abuse, instead of finding ways to call their experiences into question.

It might look like my friend realizing that even if she is drunk, no one has the right to violate her body or her trust.

18

Derrick Jensen’s fifteenth premise is my favorite: Love does not imply pacifism.

I think of all the women I know, all the pain I’ve seen, beautiful faces contorted remembering the unimaginable. I see the voices so long silenced, the love I feel, the courage it takes to finally share your story. And it makes me want to fight.

I’m done being silent about what I feel, what I experience. I’m sick of feeling like I don’t have the right to be visible in public. I hate that my freedom to move is challenged by the actions of a few, that there are situations in which I can’t feel safe, can’t be myself. I don’t have all the answers, and I know I can’t stop myself from being victimized. But I can’t let that keep me from speaking out.

I’m done sitting silently when people make jokes about rape. I’m done letting guys have sex with me when I don’t want to. I’m done being nice. I’m done not talking about these issues with my guy friends because I don’t want to make them uncomfortable.

I’m declaring war on rape culture, on assault, on abuse, on everything that takes our right to control our own bodies away from us. I don’t have a tactics manual. I don’t even have a game plan. But I’m going to keep pushing forward until we make a world where my daughter won’t have to fight the same battles I did, a world where all of us can fall asleep at night feeling safe and healthy and whole.


An infinite amount of thanks go out to my friend Madelyn for reading and editing this piece, and to all the friends who shared their stories with me and made this possible.


Edit: This piece can be downloaded in PDF form here.

New year's resolutions: 2012 edition

Well, the world's ending this year, but I still thought I'd make some goals and resolutions. But first, I'm going to evaluate my performance on my list from 2011:

1  Contribute significantly to the victory of my team in a game of Nerf gun capture the flag.
This did not happen, because I was too busy studying and writing for the Pio to play Nerf capture the flag. However, I did get more Nerf darts and am now ready for 2012.

2  Make, from scratch, at least once, edible versions of: cheese, sourdough bread, beer, yogurt, tomato sauce and applesauce.
I did not directly make any of these. But I watched cheese-making while volunteering on Hacienda Ilitio in Ecuador, and helped my dad make tomato sauce from scratch in Ghana. As for the rest of it, I'm saving it for a summer when I'm actually in the country. I did also make kombucha a bunch, which is way better than beer, and will continue to do so as soon as I find a new kombucha culture to replace the one that my friend killed while I was in Ecuador.

3  Come up with a bill or general idea for how we should incentivize solar power in Washington, and get in touch with everyone in the state legislature about why it's a good idea.
I also did not do this. In my defense, Washington already has some of the best solar incentives in the country. So in lieu of lobbying for something, I wrote an informative article about the proposed community solar project in Walla Walla and an editorial arguing that Whitman should support it.

4  Knit something besides a scarf that looks like someone would actually want to wear it (I'm thinking a hat, though leg warmers are always an option).
You would think that watching seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer would be ample time to knit. And you would be wrong about that.

5  Become fluent-enoughish in Spanish while in Ecuador.
Finally, a resolution I successfully completed! I am certainly not fluent in Spanish, and no one in their right mind would mistake me for a native speaker. However, I can almost always understand what people are saying to me without asking for clarification, and I can say what I need to using a combination of actual Spanish, made up cognates and hand gestures. Plus, I wrote four newspaper articles in Spanish and a 32 page research paper. 

6  Update the blog at least once a week with some meaningful insights about life, the universe and everything.
I did not literally update once a week, but I updated a lot about stuff I thought was important, and got a lot more people reading on a regular basis. So I'm calling this a win.

7  Exercise at least twice a week, plus go for more walks.
I was doing great at this until I left the country, and then all hell broke loose. In my defense, both Koforidua and Quito lack compelling walking routes. And I was working a lot. And OMG air quality.

8  Become addicted to one new TV show, author, blog, magazine, board game and hippie food item.
TV show: Dexter, Parks and Recreation
Author: Michael Lewis is probably the closest I've come. Also Matt Taibbi.
Blog: We Are the 99%
Magazine: Van Guardia (thanks Ecuador).
Board game: This did not happen.
Hippie food item: Kombucha, kale, and my vegan glop recipe that consists of bulgur, walnuts, lentils, apple cider vinegar and kale.

9  Preside over the best damn news section in the history of journalism (at Whitman College, anyway).
Another success! I had an amazing time editing news, though there are a lot of things I would do differently given the opportunity. But we published some stuff I'm really proud of. I had a great time, and became a master of sleeping for four hours, getting up at 7am and going to class straight from 8am-7pm.

10  Make a new friend by ignoring the inner voice of reason telling me to play it safe.
I can't point to any one specific friendship, but there are a lot of people I got to know and got to know better this year because I made socializing a priority, and a few I've kept in touch with even when my voice of reason was telling me to let it go.

11 Introduce the nerds at Whitman College to Diplomacy, and play at least one complete game.
Yeah, that didn't happen. Once again, I blame the Pio. And also the fact that I'm incredibly lazy. And the fact that all my nerdy friends are even busier than me.

12  Read some form of news besides Feministing every day (not that reading Feministing isn't totally legit).
Accomplished, thanks to Twitter and Reddit.

13  Make time to hang out with people regularly, even/especially if I have homework I should be doing instead.
I may have succeeded with this one too much, as my fellow Marcus residents can attest to. But whatever, biology homework is silly anyway.

14  Read at least one book a month not required for class during school, and at least one per week on breaks.
Yes. Plus a bunch of magazines.

15  Stay up later, get up earlier, work less at work, work more at life and play more music.
I definitely lowered my sleep requirements by at least an hour spring semester. And I definitely tried harder to do things that actually matter instead of worrying about my stupid job at Safeway.



Now, here are my goals for this year:

1 Write a longform piece about Ecuador and get people to read it, whether it's via actually being published or just putting it on the blog and then posting the hell out of it on Facebook.

2 Kick ass and take names covering all the shocking scandals in Walla Walla for the Pio.

3 Read a book a week on breaks and a book a month (at least) during school.

4 Get competent at something creative that I currently can't do (possible contenders: singing, web design, guitar, knitting).

5 Spend less than an hour a day (averaged over the week) watching TV by myself.

6 Regular exercise at least 3 times a week.

7 Make new friends and stay in touch with old ones.

Happy 2012, everyone!

Readjustment

Things I missed
Seattle tap water
the smell of winter
cheese that isn't queso fresco
salt and vinegar chips
Netflix Instant
my cat
breathing deep and tasting pine trees
sourdough bread
baking cookies
the public library



Things I miss
yuca chips
sun
the ability to travel across the country for less than $10
speaking Spanish
the sunset in Intag
being able to buy a three course meal for $2
the abundance of pirated DVD stores



Things that are just weird
throwing toilet paper in the toilet
the fact that it's dark from 4pm-7am
not being visibly "different"
adjusting my stomach to American bacteria again
riding a bus without hearing Pitbull or traditional Ecuadorian music

Life lessons from Ecuador

As weird as it sounds to say it, I'm flying home later today. After four months in Ecuador, I have barely begun to process how I've changed and all the things I've learned this semester. At some point in the future, I'll be updating with more serious insights, but for now, it's time for a list of the important life lessons I've gotten out of this experience.

1) You haven't truly been on a motorcycle until you're hitchhiking up a cobblestoned and gravel road going up a mountain with three people on the back.
2) Real cheddar cheese is a sorely underappreciated thing. Especially on nachos. Relatedly, nachos should never involve eggplant.
3) Wearing an alpaca poncho may make you look like the world's biggest gringo, but it will also be the softest, warmest and most comfortable thing you've ever put on. Totally worth it when you're living in a wooden shack in the cloud forest.
4) When they tell you during orientation that the altitude will affect your body's ability to process alcohol, they are not kidding. Chupa con cuidado.
5) Every male in Quito between the ages of 15 and 30 knows exactly one English phrase: ¨Hey baby¨. The best way to deal with this situation involves your middle finger.
6) It doesn't matter how high-wasted your pants are, how much you tucked your shirt in or how much bug spray you're wearing. The wasps that live in the canopy tower will still find a way to sting you on the ass.
7) The best response to the overwhelming beauty of sunset in the Galapagos Islands involves warrior pose.
8) What happens on the chiva stays on the chiva. What happens on a park bench next to the chiva also stays on the chiva.
9) Harvesting oats for 25 hours by hand is exhausting, and working on a farm with Ecuadorian farmers will make you feel like the laziest person in the entire world.
10) When in the course of your journalism project to tour gold mines you get stranded in a town three hours from home and have to spend the night at a crazy old Russian man's house, you may want to make sure that he hasn't fathered a child with his own daughter first. Fortunately, nothing bad happened.
11) Just because someone is your host dad doesn't mean he won't charge you $80 to drive you to two interviews.
12) As much as American TV news seems to have embraced the ¨if it bleeds, it leads¨ philosophy of journalism, at least they generally don't go to the scene of a recent car crash to show graphic footage of bodies being removed from the wreckage and then interview the sobbing parents or siblings of the dead person on site and air all of this live at 7am while you're eating breakfast.
13) There's something about spending a month commuting on harrowing mountain roads mostly by sitting in the back of pickup trucks or standing in the aisle of Greyhound buses that makes you appreciate life a lot.
14) Ecuadorian clubs play a combined total of 7 songs. All of them are by Pitbull.
15) Spending two and a half hours going around a circle with your friends and telling everyone how awesome they are is one of the best ways to spend an evening.

Living on the internet

Last week, while waiting for the bus back home, my host dad William gave one of my brothers (Alexander) a toy gun to play around with. He was shooting tiny yellow balls and laughing and running to recollect them. My dad and I sat on a bench smiling at Alex’s enjoyment, and then my dad leaned in and told me that he’d given Alex the toy because today was Alex’s birthday. I was about to wish him a happy birthday and was feeling bad for not knowing earlier when my dad said, “It’s a surprise. We haven’t told him yet.” When we got back home, we had dinner like normal, and then my parents turned the lights off while my older brother, Richard, brought out a cake for Alex. Alex was delighted, beaming, and thrilled to be presented with a single gift—a battery powered wind-up truck. Sure enough, he’d completely forgotten that it was his birthday.

In the United States, I have a hard time imagining any child past the point of self-awareness not knowing when their own birthday is. Certianly our parents generally make a big deal about it, asking who we want to invite to parties and what gifts we’d like to receive, but once we’re old enough to know that one day a year is our special day, we start keeping track. I’m not sure what makes that different here—maybe rural Ecuadorian children are much less likely to be willing or able to keep precise track of the date, or maybe birthdays just aren’t a huge deal here the way they are back home (I suspect a bit of both). And now with Facebook, the rich and technologically privilged of the world (of which I’m definitely a part) have gone beyond the possibility of not knowing when our own birthdays are. Every time you log in, you’re greeted with a list of friends who are celebrating one more year of life—perhaps you’d like to write on their wall, or send them a digital gift? It’s so easy to keep in touch with people who are thousands of miles away and so easy to keep tabs on every single person you’ve ever run across in your life.

I’ve waffled back and forth with my feelings about the ever-increasing amount of information that’s just a click away from our fingertips. As much as I understand the dangers of digitizing my brain completely, I love having so much available to me. I’m completely addicted to information, and have been for a while. I spend over half of my income on books and magazine subscriptions. I’m constantly reading something. I got into journalism mostly because I realied that it’s a free pass to talk to anyone about anything you want and learn from them. Now, I follow almost 200 people on Twitter, mostly other news sources, and I’m constantly checking my feed for links to interesting articles from the New York Times, Mother Jones, Good, Slate and a million other sources. I love having a real-time idea of what’s happening, love that I can get links to five different commentaries on the same piece of news which all build off of and complement one another. But I’m starting to think that combining the seemingly unlimited potential of the internet with my information-craving brain is like building a meth lab in the basement of an addict. To be fair, information, unlike meth, is good for you in moderate amounts, but I  think there might be a limit to how much it’s healthy to know.

People, especially ones from older genertions, have been lamenting the effects of technology on the brains of our youth for as long as I can remember. As a child, my mom put a weekly limit on my and my brother’s computer time—four hours a week. We kept dilligent paper logs of our time (it would never have occurred to me to lie about it), and while the limit was at times annoying (like when I was just about to beat Pajama Sam for the six-hundredth time), I don’t remember it being a huge burden in my life. I didn’t really start using the computer much until seventh grade, when it became my after-school social life (AOL Instant Messanger and LiveJournal), and then in eigth grade, when I started using it more for research for school. The internet was certianly part of my life, but it wasn’t my main activity or a place where I spent the majority of my time. I read books. I talked to my friends on the phone. I went to movies. I wrote in a journal.

How quaint that notion seems to me today. I still do all of those things—I read a ton, I watch movies, I write in several journals, I talk to my friends. And I do almost all of it online. My hours spent reading books cover to cover have been replaced by my steady stream of online news and downloaded PDFs of books and articles. Sure, I read print a lot too, but nowhere near as much as I used to. I call my friends on the phone occasionally, but mostly, we communicate via Facebook wall posts, email messages, G-chat and Skype. I journal in print when I need to work something out by myself, but I blog much more regularly. And almost all of my media comsumption—TV and movies—takes place through Hulu, Netflix, YouTube or illegally downloaded media that plays right on my computer screen. Sometimes, I feel like my life is bending ever-so-perfectly to fit the narrative Justin Timberlake lays out when he plays Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, in The Social Network. “We lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we’re going to live on the Internet,” he says, and I see my future laid out before me. And it scares me.

I love technology. I love the convenience, the information flow, the ability to meet, be connected to and stay in touch with people from every corner of the globe. I love the things social networking has enabled, love that the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street probably couldn’t have happened without Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr. I love that it’s possible for me to teach myself about anarchist history or edible plants around Seattle or how to can fruit without ever leaving my room. But I’m worried about what it’s doing to me, to my relationship with people, with reality, with hard work, with secrecy, with anonymity.

Because of the internet, I’ve largely lost the ability to be uninformed, to make a conscious choice to not pay attention to current events or world news. Sure, I go hiking or backpacking and I don’t check my email for a week. But if it’s there, if I have the opportunity, I’m always online. If I’m not online, there’s always a to-do list in the back of my head for next time I am—check email, update the blog, come up with a witty Facebook status describing my adventures, check the New York Times to make sure we didn’t experience nuclear winter while I was away. I can’t focus for very long on any one thing—I always have four or five windows open and I switch between them, reading a chuck of each at a time. I do the same thing with books and magazines—I can’t sit down and read something for longer than about ten mintues before I get distracted by something else, even if it’s just another book. Some of that is just the way my brain is wired. I’m always thinking a mile a minute, always planning what I’m going to be doing next. But the internet has definitely accelerated the trend.

Besides just my brain, I’m getting a little unnerved by how much of my life takes place on the servers of Google. I use their search engine any time I need to look something up. This blog is hosted on Blogspot, which Google owns. I frequent YouTube, use Gmail for all of my email, use Chrome to browse the internet, Google translate to help me with Spanish papers and Google Maps anytime I need to get somewhere. Now I even have a profile on G+, their newsish social network. I don’t think Google is an evil empire, and I believe that they’re going to continue to be an absurdly successful company (which is why I surrendered a bit and bought a share of their stock). Google certianly doesn’t know everything about me, but if you add in the information from Facebook and Twitter, you’d probably get a pretty decent picture of my life. And that scares me a little. There’s nothing incriminating about me online as far as I know—no pictures of underage drinking, no nudity, no calls to arms other than occasional references to defending our land against things like the Keystone Pipeline. And it might be a bit hypocritical for me to complain about all of this data being out there when I’m the one who put it there in the first place. I think the pros of visibility—getting to share ideas, meet people, have interesting dicsussions—outweigh the cons, which is why I’m as wired in as I am. But it’s still a bit scary to think of how much of a digital paper trail is out there with my name on it, how much someone could learn about me without even needing to spy on me or hack into my accounts.

I talked to my dad about this over the summer a bit. He frequently warns me that everything I post on my blog will exist forever, and that I need to be careful about what I say so as to not scare off future employers. (I try to bite my lip and not point out that this advice seems a bit forced coming from someone who’s in the middle of starting his second company and hasn’t had a boss since he quit his job at Microsoft in 1997.) At one point, we talked a bit about my LiveJournal, which I used primarily in 8^th and 9^th grade to be an angsty teenager and talk to my friends about the drama going on in our lives. My dad said he felt sorry for my generation, because we don’t have the capacity to re-invent ourselves; everything’s out there forever. I said sure, maybe, but it’s not like the friends I’ve made at Whitman are going back and reading my blog from middle school and using it to form impressions of the person I am now. No, he said, he didn’t even mean that. He meant that because we have this permanent online record of ourselves, we’ve somewhat lost the capacity to re-invent ourselves in our own minds. Back when he was my age, you could do stupid stuff and forget about it. You could grow into a more mature person and let some of your youthful  angst and adventure fade away in your own mind. But I can’t do that. If I want to, I can recall with painful clarity the conversations I had with my best friends when I was suicidal in 7^th grade, because I have our AIM chats saved on my hard drive. I can go back and read my LiveJournal entries where I was whining that no one took me seriously and my family was driving me crazy, see all my friends’ comments and still feel guilty now for being so self-absorbed and needy for so many years. My self-perception has been shaped by my digital archive in ways I probably can’t fully comprehend.

It’s not bad to know yourself. But we’ve gotten increasingly caught up in this idea that pieces of data—discrete points in time—are ourselves*. As programmer Jaron Lanier says in his book You Are Not A Machine, data always and necessarily underrepresents reality. My sense of who I was in 7^th and 8^th grade comes almost exclusively from my print journals, my LiveJournal archive and my saved chat conversations with friends, because my memories of those years of my life are too distant to be clear any more. In other words, my self-perception is based off of a series of points, not a continuous arc. And those point cannot hope to convery the rich complexity of my life. During those years, I was a mess. I was depressed and borderline suicidal for most of a year, and that’s mostly what I wrote about. Looking at the data points I have, I find myself wondering how I survived. But those points aren’t the sum total of my life during those years. I had moments of joy, of laughter, of happiness, of enjoying time with friends. I read books and got new ideas and joked around and thought about things besides the best way to hurt myself. And those barely register in the data I have. It’s like I have a photo album that’s missing a third of its pictures.

And as it does this to the past, I worry that technology is also datafying our present. I am a person. I experience a variety of emotions—crushing lonliness, extreme joy—that cannot be captured online. The other day, I was walking home while the sun was just starting to set. I’m in the middle of a cloud forest, in what I’m pretty sure is the most beautiful place on earth, and the sunset was almost too much for my brain to handle. I was full of so much emotion seeing all of that beauty, I was running and skipping and shaking my head and telling my friend that seeing things like that made me want to sleep with someone or believe in God (he, naturally, told me that I’m ridiculous). And you absolutely cannot have a moment like that on the internet. Data cannot possibly hope to represent something that real or raw.

Because of that, I think I compartmentalize myself. There’s my online identity—someone a little crazy who cares about activism and food politics, who overthinks everything and pretends to be an anarchist every so often when she gets upset with politics. My status updates and tweets and blog posts all fit into this narrative. But that’s not all there is to me. I do the same thing with events. For me, a birthday isn’t just a day when you turn a year older. It’s a family dinner, it’s a thing that will show up on my Facebook friends’ sidebars, it’s an opportunity to create the perfect event page to invite people to my party. It cannot and will never be as simple as it was for my brother here, who didn’t even know it was his special day until his parents told him.

I love the internet and I love technology. On the whole, those things have done far more good in my life than bad. But they’re also changing who I am, who we all are, the range and spectrum of experiences that are possible for us to have. I’m going to keep spending a lot of my time online, because there are tools and information there that I value. But in a completely digital world, Alex’s simple happiness at being presented with a birthday cake is not possible. And that’s why, unlike Sean Parker, I never want to live online.

*This point comes from an amazing article called Generation Why, which deconstructs Facebook and the impact of social networking on our self-perception. You should go read it now.

Friendship in a post-civilization world

For the next three weeks, I’m living in the Intag cloud forest region of Ecuador. The area is dotted with tiny pueblos which are tucked into valleys and nestled on top of ridges. The roads here are dirt and cobblestone, and they wind up and down hills through a green mosaic of forest and small agricultural plantations. I’m living with a family in Peñaherrera (population about 150 families) and commuting 20 minutes each day by overcrowded bus or motorcycle to Apuela, another small town where the regional newspaper I’m working for is based.

This year, I’ve spent a lot of time in places where life runs a lot slower than my usual mile-a-minute pace. When left to my own devices, I will triple-book myself from 8am-10pm, schedule conversations with friends to make sure I have time to see them, have sixteen windows open on my browser and spend the bulk of my day trying to get as much out of every second as I possibly can (that or watching stuff on Netflix). In Ghana, I got used to waiting for hours for people to show up for interviews in their villages because they were out farming or couldn’t catch a ride or just didn’t feel like showing up on time. Every night, I went home to a house with no TV, no internet and nothing much to do except talk to my dad, attempt to cook, or read. My first two weeks in Ecuador I was on a farm in the middle of nowhere—no Internet, no TV, no radio, no cell reception and nothing to do after work except read and talk to the other volunteers. Now, I’m in a similar situation. It looks like I’ll be getting home around 4pm everyday, and while there are ample TVs here and internet cafés close by, there’s still not really anything to do in the Western sense of the term (no movie theaters, bowling alleys, bars, cultural attractions, etc.) Mostly, it seems like people play volleyball, watch TV and sit around and talk to each other.

Spending time in places like this has made me think about the nature of my friendships. With casual friends, I do many of the same things people seem to do in rural Ecuador. We watch movies together, sit around chatting about what we did today, maybe go shopping or grab a meal. With my closest friends, though, I mostly share ideas with them. Sure, we hang out and waste time together, but my closest friendships are the ones where we stay up until all hours of the night discussing Occupy Wall Street, the border and the socioeconomic factors which create food deserts. Mostly, we talk about the world—what’s going on, what’s wrong with everything and how we might go about fixing it.

In my ideal world, communities would be a lot more local than they are now. People would spend a lot more time interacting with their neighbors, a lot more time doing things like taking care of community gardens and a lot less time online. In some versions of the future, there is no internet—post-gridcrash, we all go back to being people living in the rural Third World, with no power, little connection to the outside world and a radically local lifestyle. This is how humans have lived for thousands of years, for the majority of human history. And it’s occurred to me that in this world, I have no idea what a friendship looks like. If the world were such that there weren’t absurd problems to try and solve, or if I was living so locally and off-grid that I had no idea what was going on on other continents, I have no idea what I would do with my friends.

In many ways, the Ghanaian villages I visited this summer and the Ecuadorian cloud forest where I’m living now seem like a window into this world. Here, people seem to form relationships based more on proximity than anything else. You know the people you grow up near, because they’re close to you. Obviously, there are people you get along with better than others, and you gravitate towards them. People aren’t disconnected from the outside world by any means—Intag is a hotbed of environmental activism on issues ranging from deforestation to water pollution caused by mining. But most people here don’t seem to spend their free time discussing the philisophical implications of Occupy Wall Street imbracing an explicitly nonviolent strategy, for example. They mostly spend it being normal people.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what the end of civilization (or at least a transition to a radically localized economy) would look like in economic, political and environmental terms. I’ve thought a lot about big picture things, how we would get food and energy, how democracies would function. But it’s interesting to think about the more personal—not just that my friends might be very different people, but that the entire nature of friendship might change too. I always think of things like types of food or manners of greeting people when asked to describe cultural differences. It’s kind of an exciting notion that something as basic as friendship isn’t a constant either. 

Justified murder and the ethics of "the greater good"

Is it ever ok to kill another human being?

This is one of the oldest and trickiest moral questions in the universe. Most people will say that yes, under certain circumstances, the taking of human life is justified. The most common cases where people are willing to accept killing seem to be self-defense, war and the death penalty (this one seems to mostly apply to Americans). Some people will go further, and some people are opposed to any type of killing. But the vast majority of humans seem to recognize that under certain circumstances, the taking of human life might be the lesser of two evils.

Even in situations where we might personally feel uncomfortable justifying murder, most of us can sympathize with the motivations of murderers. In both high school and college, I had classes where we read Beloved. In the book, Sethe (an escaped slave) kills her infant daughter to keep her from being sent back into slavery when slavecatchers come looking for the family. Most of the students discussing the book felt that in the same situation, we probably wouldn’t have had the guts to kill our children. A few people said that Sethe’s actions were morally wrong. But almost everyone sympathized with her motivations. The popular author Jodi Picoult (author of My Sister’s Keeper, among other things) has written several books whose plot basically revolves around unusual murder cases—the husband who smothers his wife with a pillow because she’s dying of cancer and they both agree that it would be easier to have her die quickly at home than suffer first; the teenage couple so entwined that when Emily gets depressed and wants to end her life but doesn’t have the courage to do it, her boyfriend pulls the trigger for her because he can’t bear to see her suffer anymore. Dexter is a popular TV show which revolves around a man who can’t control his impulse to kill, so he channels it by killing other serial killers. The idea of “moral” murder runs deep in our popular culture.

To me, the ethics of murder get most interesting when you’re talking about preventing a greater wrong. Most people would agree that if we had a time machine, it would be a good idea to go back in time and shoot Hitler in the face. But beyond that, the ethics get more complicated. I want to be an activist, and I’m not inherently nonviolent in my ideology. I believe that violence is justified in defense of human rights when other nonviolent measures have been exhausted. This might sound like a radical statement in this day and age, but I think it’s really just a question of degrees. Ask almost any American today if they believe that slaves fighting back against their masters were justified in killing them, and you’ll get a yes. Ask the same question about indigenous people in the Amazon killing oil company representatives who refuse to leave and refuse to stop polluting their land and destroying their way of life, and you’ll get a much wider spectrum of answers. (I’m still undecided on this one, by the way.) I once read a book which addressed the age-old question of what you would do if you knew you only had a week to live. The woman writing said she had a friend who had a simple answer. She wouldn’t go base jumping or spend time with loved ones. She would hunt down the men who had raped the people she cared about, and she would kill them one by one. I can’t say I’d do the same, but at the same time, I can’t really argue with her motivation. I’ve never been raped, and to my knowledge, neither have any of my close friends. If I were in her position, though, I imagine I would feel similarly.

Like many people, I think moral rightness should trump legality. What I mean by that is that if there are laws which are clearly wrong or immoral, it’s an obligation for responsible citizens to oppose them. Most social change in the US has come about through this premise—slave revolts, lunch counter sit-ins, draft card burning, workers going on strike before it was legal. If the Keystone XL pipeline does get approved, I’m counting on other activists to join me in stopping its construction, by any means necessary. I believe that the importance of having a livable planet trumps any laws which guarantee property rights to people building the pipeline. Likewise, if Ecuador decides to open Yasuní National Park for oil extraction, I’m hoping that the communities that live there will fight back, both legally and literally, if necessary.

The morality-over-legality idea is what inspires many vigilante groups, as well as activists willing to use illegal tactics. It’s the reason the Minutemen are patrolling the US’s southern border to keep out illegal immigrants and, in some cases, poisoning water left out in the desert to keep people from dying of dehydration. It’s the reason the Animal Liberation Front is willing to bomb animal research labs and rescue animals from slaughterhouses. Usually, I’m inspired by actions like this. I respect the convictions of people who believe enough in what they’re doing that they’re willing to go to jail for their ideals, even if I don’t personally agree with their tactics. I’m inspired by the idea of being on the right side of history later even if you’re on the wrong side of the law now.

But there’s one increasingly common action being taken by activists in the US that makes it very hard for me to agree with the morality-over-legality idea. For people who engage in this action, it’s the only way they have to stop a much greater evil. They’re at the fringes of a large movement, and while many within that movement claim to renounce the violence of their tactics, many are also secretly grateful that some people are willing to stand behind their convictions.

I’m referring, of course, to the pro-life/anti-abortion activists who have murdered abortion providers. The most recent inductee into this crowd was Scott Roeder, who shot Dr. George Tiller in church in 2009. Dr. Tiller was one of three doctors in the United States who performed late-term, third trimester abortions, almost entirely to save women’s lives or because the fetuses had debilitating disorders which would cause them to die shortly after birth. Roeder was a long-time anti-abortion advocate, and he accomplished in one day what Operation Rescue and all the rest of the non-radical activists on his side hadn’t been able to do in thirty years of protest and lawsuits—he shut down Tiller’s clinic.

I can’t really argue with Roeder’s tactics. I don’t believe in any kind of eye-for-an-eye justice—I’m talking about murder as a tactic to prevent further loss of life in a literal, immediate sense. If you believe that abortion is wrongfully killing a human life, if you believe that it’s murder, and you know that the law isn’t on your side, you don’t have a lot of options. Decades of lobbying hasn’t made abortion illegal (though it hasn’t made it dramatically less accessible, especially to low-income women). And when you’re talking about murder, you don’t really want to stand around and wait for the state to do the right thing. You want to stop it by any means necessary. I partially understand this conviction, because I know that if abortion were illegal, I’d drop everything I was doing to go to medical school so I could set up a safe and illegal abortion clinic. That’s how strongly I feel about the importance of access to reproductive healthcare.

The pro-choice crowd wants people like Roeder to be classified as domestic terrorists, something the US government has been unwilling to do. Beyond their support for access to abortion, pro-choicers argue that part of living in a civil society is obeying its laws, whether you agree with them personally or not. Mostly, I think this premise is true. You don’t run red lights even if you want to, because you respect that other people need to get places in an orderly fashion too. You pay your taxes which go to fund all kinds of shit you don’t agree with (wars, abstinence-only education, executions, food stamps, the US Department of Education), regardless of your political affiliation. But when morality gets introduced into the equation, it gets harder to make this argument. Civil society, sure, but you don’t stand by while sentient beings are being murdered. You refuse to be drafted even if it means getting arrested, you break into labs to free monkeys being tortured, or you murder abortion providers to keep them from killing.

At the end of the day, my convictions that doing right should be our highest calling trump my belief in the importance of civil society. This puts me in an uncomfortable position with people like Roeder, because holding this position means saying that I don’t disagree with his tactics, only the beliefs that motivated them. One of the points of laws is that they represent societal norms. They protect all of us by not allowing one person to impose their view of morality on the rest of us, at least most of the time. But still, I can’t make the argument that following laws we know to be morally wrong is the right thing to do. Morality has always been and will always be subjective. There are often no easy answers. One person’s guerilla is another person’s freedom fighter, and one person’s domestic terrorist is another person’s moral crusader. And while I can hope that those who choose to take the law into their own hands share my conceptions of what is moral, I can’t really fault those who disagree with me for doing the same.

Rachel's official Occupy Wall Street roundup

I've been following the Occupy Wall Street protests as much as I can from Ecuador, and I'm completely in love. So I thought I'd take a minute to share my favorite articles, photos, etc. from the various occupations going on around the country:

Steve Fake sums up the origins of Occupy Wall Street and the issues that have led to many people to protest.

The official declaration of the occupation of New York City.

The Nation takes on OWS's refusal to align itself with the Democrats and the White House, and why that's crucially important for the movement. And another article speaks about female protesters and how OWS culture has evolved to encourage diverse voices to speak up.

Slovakian philosopher and leftist intellectual Slavoj Zizek makes an awesome speech at Zucotti Park.

Literally the best protest sign I've ever seen, anywhere.

Average Americans share their stories over at We Are the 99%, and n+1 explains what we should make of this self-identification.

Over at Feministing, an awesome piece on how OWS has taught average white Americans something people of color have known for a long time: the police aren't there to keep you safe.

One of the best arrest photos I've seen. Great photography, great storytelling, and absolutely heartwrenching.

Feminist and activist Naomi Wolf describes getting arrested in New York.

Mother Jones calls for Occupy Earth, in solidarity with the planet the 1% are destroying.

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, on why homelessness is becoming an OWS issue.

The New York Times on what Wall Street thinks of the protesters in private.

Some reflections on the role violence has played in protests in the US, and how this might apply to OWS.

And the deep green crowd calls for escalation to literally, not metaphorically, stop the 1%.


Happy reading, everyone!

I am (almost) the 1%

Note: As sometimes happens when privileged white people try to write about class issues, it’s entirely possible I’m offending people here. If so, I apologize sincerely. If you take issue with anything I’ve written here, I’d appreciate knowing what and why so I can correct it in future discussions and thoughts that I have.

On a political level, I’m 100% behind Occupy Wall Street. I flip back and forth between being an anarchist depending on the day, but even old liberal me knows that the level of class inequality and lack of opportunity in this country have gotten absurd. I’m angry at Wall Street, especially the few on it who consciously steered us in this direction knowing they’d be bailed out if their gambles didn’t pay off (looking at you, Goldman Sachs). I’m angry at our government for not doing anything to stop them (not that I expected better). I’m angry at the absurdity of the debate over repealing the Bush tax cuts. I’m angry because of the number of good, intelligent, hardworking people I know who are stuck working dead-end jobs for next to nothing just to pay the bills.

On a personal level, it’s harder for me to pin down my feelings about Occupy Wall Street. As the movement has encouraged people to come forward and share stories under the theme “We Are the 99%”, I’ve taken a look at my own circumstances in life. Technically, I am part of the 99%. My family doesn’t rake in millions of dollars a year, I don’t have a trust fund, and I will have to work a real job in the real world to support myself once I get out of college. But that’s where my similarities with most of the 99% end. I will graduate from a good, private university next year with no debt and no student loans. That simple fact sets me apart from so many of the protest signs I’ve seen, from people who graduated with thousands in debt and nothing to show for it. It sets me even further apart from those who never had the means or the opportunity to go to college. And I’m just talking in the US. If you want to go global, in a world where a billion people survive on a dollar a day or less, I am the 1%.

The fact that my life has been extraordinarily privileged doesn’t stop me from worrying about the economy. After my dad told me and my brother that it would be a good idea to invest our life savings in the stock market in April of 2007, part of me was terrified to watch my money evaporate into thin air as bank after bank failed or got restructured. Another part of me knew that if seventeen-year-old me had $3000 to invest in the stock market, with reasonable certainty that I wouldn’t need to touch that money for ten or so years, I had nothing to worry about.

This pattern intensified once I got to college. Freshman year, I worked 15-20 hour weeks at Safeway for much of spring semester, while I had two smaller jobs back on campus. I’m still not exactly sure why I felt compelled to do this, but I think it was equal parts terror and guilt. Watching capitalism nearly collapse when I was coming of age made a powerful impression on me, and I’m guessing the effects of the financial crash will be with me my whole life. I saw gas prices rising, friends’ parents being laid off and my wages staying flat. More than anything, I saw that doing everything right—having a college degree, acquiring useful skills, building a career—didn’t guarantee you stability, much less prosperity. I saw how thin the line between success and destitution can be. And I saw that in spite of my family’s fortunate circumstances, I couldn’t count on their success to carry me through life. I’d always wanted to make my own way in the world, but for the first time, I felt that the safety net provided by my family might be more illusory than I’d ever thought possible. So I resolved to work as much as I could to save money in case I needed it.

The guilt part fed off of this. I would talk to friends at college, and so many of them would mention their financial aid packages, the loans they had to take out, the work-study jobs they had to have. I didn’t. I not only had parents who could afford to foot the bill, but almost half of my tuition covered by merit scholarships (which I’ve become increasingly convinced are not too far from a form of upward wealth redistribution). And while making money was certainly my main motivation for working so much, part of me wanted to know what it’s like to try to go to college full time while having an actual job, not one of the cushy campus ones where you water the plants in the science building.

Here’s (shockingly) what I found out: it’s hard. You consider not taking certain classes because they’d interfere with your ability to be available in the evenings for work. You tell your manager that you absolutely cannot work more than 15 hours a week, and you get scheduled for 24 one week and told that there’s nothing else they can do because someone just quit. You try not to let your profs know that you’re working, try not to use it as an excuse. You have to be incredibly on top of all of your homework, because you need to request days off two weeks in advance and if you forget, you end up getting off work at 11pm when you have a test at 8am the next morning that you still need to study for. You skip meals because you work 4-9 shifts, campus dining halls only serve from 5-9, and you don’t want to spend the extra money to buy dinner when you’ve already paid $2600 for a meal plan. You work 9am-6pm shifts and come home so exhausted from standing on your feet all day and so stressed thinking about all the work you didn’t do that you just want to sit on your bed and cry. You choose between working weeknights and worrying about homework you barely have time to finish or working weekends and having to turn down invitations to parties because you work the 6am shift on Saturday morning. And for all of this, you get paid $8.67 an hour, which works out to $8 after taxes. And then you pay union dues ($50 a month). Last semester, I calculated what happens if you’re trying to pay for college. To pay one semester of Whitman tuition with a minimum-wage job (assuming you pay no taxes or union dues), you would have to work 55 40-hour workweeks. In other words, you could work at Safeway full time for a year and still be about a thousand dollars short of one semester of college tuition.

I don’t mean to suggest that my experience was miserable. I was bolstered considerably by having $100-150 in extra spending money per week, and for me, work was more of a sociological experiment than anyone else. I loved talking to people, hearing their life stories, seeing who bought what and why. Mostly, work was a daily reminder of just how privileged I am. I had coworkers dealing with far more absurd schooling situations than me—people going to full time night school at the local community college while regularly putting in 25 and 30 hour weeks. Walla Walla isn’t exactly a wealthy area, and I would estimate about a quarter of my customers were on food stamps. I learned most of what I know about food politics and realistic food choices for people living in poverty during my year and a half standing behind a checkstand, and for that, I am eternally grateful to everyone who came through my line. And during this time, I was constantly hyper-aware of class—my own privilege, my guilt, and the relative and absolute poverty that so many people I interacted with lived in.

Perhaps most interesting were my interactions with other Whitman students. Some would come in chatting with friends about certain classes or profs, and I would often chime in. More often than not, the students would do a double-take, during which I imagine they had to re-program their brain to conceive of the possibility of a Whitman student working a minimum-wage job off campus. I imagine many of them assumed that this was something I had to do to afford college, and perhaps some of them felt uncomfortable being reminded of the fact that not everyone is as fortunate as they are. I had similar experiences when Whitties would come in and pay for their food with food stamps—I had to remind myself that it’s possible to go to a good liberal arts school and not be able to afford to eat. It sounds stupidly obvious now, but there’s a big difference between knowing something intellectually and seeing it right in front of you.

So now people are occupying all over the country, and most of them have personal stories of economic hardship. And when I read their handmade signs explaining why they’re out in the street, it feels like seeing Whitman students pay for their groceries with food stamps. These people are my community, and I agree with them completely. But we live in different worlds. They have student loans. I have $6000 invested in the stock market and no debt. Their houses are in foreclosure. My family owns our house outright, and it’s not exactly a small house.

I would still like to think I have more in common with “average Americans” (whatever that means) than the true 1%, the executives of giant corporations and high-profile Wall Street traders who rake in millions of dollars a year. In spite of all of my privilege, I don’t feel that I have a secure future. I have so little faith that the economy is going to start working for average people, and my post-grad job prospects seem like they’re going to rely on luck and chance as much as my own skills and ambitions. I feel like if anyone should feel secure, it’s me, and I can’t decide if that means that I’m just paranoid and unaware of just how privileged I am, or if it’s a sign of the depth of our economic problems. Neither option is really a good one.

Occupy Wall Street is also giving me a good reminder. Yes, I care about labor issues and economic inequality, but from my position of power, I’m not the best-qualified person to address these issues. Reading about the rules that have evolved around OWS General Assemblies, I was incredibly inspired. I love the idea that people moderate lines and underrepresented groups (women and people of color) get to go to the front because their voices need to be heard. I love the step up/step back idea, which encourages people who generally dominate conversations to give other people a chance to share. I want, more than anything right now, to come home from Ecuador for a few days just to get a chance to see what OWS actually looks like. But being this far away has also made me realize that I’m one of the voices that needs to step back. Rich white liberals have been going on about income inequality for years now, writing articles, citing statistics and doing interviews. It’s time to cut out the middleman and let the people speak for themselves.