The world is broken the world is beautiful

and I am trying to make sense of it. The white supremacist man who murdered ten people at a grocery store yesterday. The lovely writer friend who offered me seedlings from her garden. Six tomato plants. Two zucchinis. Two cucumbers and one chamomile. I really love that chamomile. I went to a rally

with my husband. The last rally for reproductive rights I attended I was with my daughter. Several hundred people gathered outside the Ohio Statehouse, a woman from Planned Parenthood waving her megaphone, telling us: "Next time, come back with your boyfriends, your husbands, your fathers, your brothers." This time the men are here. This time there are several thousand of us. 

Some of the men wear rainbow vests that read Clinic Escort. It makes me want to cry when people show up for each other. My friend had all of the carefully potted and labeled seedlings waiting for me when I came to collect them. I say, my friend, but the truth is I hardly know her. A few years ago she gave me an aloe plant. She'd read a blog post I'd written about a weird encounter I had with an aloe juice salesman in Prague and offered the plant to me. I take back what I said about not knowing her. I know this: she is a giver of plants. 

My husband held my sign for me at the rally when my arm got tired. He was hot and his back hurt, but I was the one who said it's okay, we can go now. My sign is the same one I take to all the rallies. A stop sign with the word NO. Here is one way I have of making sense of things: Hold up my hand to everything that is terrible and refuse to consent to it. White supremacists with guns. Deluded people who want to tell others what they can and cannot do with their own bodies.

The man who murdered the people in the grocery store was an eighteen-year-old forced birther. In his "manifesto" he raged about how white women need to give birth to 2.6 babies or be replaced as a race. The world is broken the world is beautiful and I am trying trying trying to make sense of it, 

but what if there is no sense of it? What if it's only us, here, now, in all of our brokenness and beautifulness? After the rally I went to work at the library. I stashed my NO sign in the back seat of my car. I packed up all of my extra seeds and filed them in the library seed exchange. 

It isn't much, but I like to imagine later this summer, my flowers growing wherever strangers have planted them.  

Where to put your rage when you live in a Democracy (Or hope you still do)

A friend knitted me a pink hat for the March. She couldn't go and she knew I was planning to. She wrote me a card. Please wear this for me, and I immediately burst into tears. We have a shared history of sexual assault, but that was in the past and we were over it, healed, we thought, but the new president's election brought it all back, fresh, his disdain for women, his mockery and bullying, and worse, and infinitely more painful,

-- all of these people cheering him on and turning a blind eye to it. I was back where I started, dazed and scared, angry too, which was a feeling I didn't have when I was a child being sexually assaulted. You know what? Let's call it rage. I was enraged. Honestly, I was a little scared of all of that rage.   

I mean, where do you put it? How do you let it out, without hurting others? Because, let me tell you, the anger I felt when I saw that man brag about grabbing women by the pussy and then watched people I know, friends, family members, neighbors, shrug it off-- well, that rage had better go somewhere. I made a cardboard sign. 

I cut it to look like a stop sign and I painted it red and pasted letters on in white: NO. I went to Washington with another friend. She was mad too. But the drive there felt more like a road trip. 

Rest stops. McDonalds for lunch. We stayed with one of her friends on Capitol Hill. There were other women there, friends of the host. None of us knew each other but we all immediately clicked. No one had to explain to each other why we were there. In the morning I put the pink hat on, and the truth is, I felt a little silly. 

I had never been to a protest rally before, unless you count this one time I went to the board of education, after the state of Ohio decided to cut funding for school librarians and I made a speech outside the building about how a librarian saved my life when I was a child. I was a nervous wreck that day because I had to speak through a megaphone.

This time I just had to walk around in public wearing a tightly fitted knit pink hat and waving a No sign. I could do that, damn it. The minute we stepped outside the house, it was a sea of pink hats. Crowds of people, mostly women, walking from every direction. They weren't screaming. They weren't carrying tiki torches (that would come later, for the aggrieved white men who like the idea of grabbing women by the pussies or kneeling on the necks of Black men and don't want to be called out for it) No,

the women were talking, laughing, moving toward the Capitol, a crowd so thick you could get lost in it, get squished in it, but I was never afraid. Which is interesting, when I think about it now, because several people--all trump supporters coincidentally--called me before I left to express fear, to tell me they were "thinking of me," 

which I laughed off, said, Don't worry, when what I wanted to tell them was F off, but I'll admit, there was a small doubt of What if they were right? What if the crowd did get out of control? 

But there, in the thick of it, with people laughing and chatting and waiting in lines for the port-o-potties, the funny creative signs, the making of new friends, the picture snapping, and all of those absurd pink hats everywhere you looked, how could you be afraid? 

In some moments you could even feel joy. There are more of us, I thought, and that was before I knew there were 500,000 people at the march. Millions of people rallying at the same time in cities all of the country, all over the world. Maybe we could all do something constructive with our rage?

I did. I learned my congressmen's names and state reps' names and phone numbers. And called them. A lot. I went to townhalls and wrote postcards reminding people to vote and wrote letters to the editor and went to more marches and canvassed neighborhoods for candidates and joined organizations to help fight back unfair laws, and voted, of course, 

and all of those millions of pink hatted women combined with so many other people-- Black Lives Matter people (who, according to some of my now former friends and neighbors, have the audacity to say that Black people's lives matter), and scientists freaked out over Climate Change, and children terrified of being gunned down in school, and immigrants and refugees and gay people and trans people-- all of us standing up to say NO

to human rights abuses and corruption and fraud, 

voted too. And the person we voted for won the election by 7 million votes.  

So, if you find yourself on the other side of that, enraged, I hear you. 

But don't carry your arsenal of guns to the statehouse to try to kidnap the governor or set up a gallows outside the Capitol so you can hang the Vice President or break through the barriers of the building and scratch your balls on the Speaker of the House's desk or beat a police officer to death with an American flag and then turn around and tell me it was nothing, let's all move past this for the sake of unity, 

I heard that enough when I was a child, and this time I say what I couldn't say then

No. 

One of my friends taught the young woman who died in the mass shooting in Dayton

She wrote a tribute on Facebook. The young woman was in her class at the Antioch Writers' Workshop. Her name was Megan Betts. She was twenty two years old, the same age as my daughter. Last week my son texted something about driving through Gilroy every time he visits Yosemite. I said, What's in Gilroy? I had already forgotten that there was a shooting there, the one at the garlic festival. A week ago.

I had to look it up. Three people shot and killed. Fifteen injured.

Maybe this will be the tipping point, I told my husband.
I don't think so, he whispered back. Newtown should have been the tipping point. We were holding candles on the steps of the Ohio Statehouse Sunday night. A candlelight vigil organized by Moms Demand Action. Three hundred people gathering just as it began to rain. We huddled together under the statehouse eaves. One of the speakers said:

It's hypocritical to pray for a problem you are unwilling to fix.

In Dayton there was a candlelight vigil too. The governor spoke about coming together. The crowd yelled back at him DO SOMETHING!

The governor seemed flustered. Maybe he forgot that before the shooting happened, he was eager to sign a new law in Ohio to allow Conceal Carry with no permit or training.

In El Paso a mom, on her way to pick up her daughter from the airport, stopped at Walmart to run a quick errand. A woman buying school supplies for her five year old was shot holding her infant child. Her husband died too, trying to shield both of them. The six year old boy who was shot in the back at the garlic festival loved Legoes and Batman.

The young woman who died in Dayton was a good writer. My friend kept one of the pieces she wrote and shared a fragment of it on Facebook:

She was a creature of space. Created in the heart of a supernova, her soul had formed from the dust of celestial bodies and the light of the stars that threw life to the edges of the galaxies. Her eyes had seen the eclipses of worlds, watched the formation of the solar systems and the placement of the planets . . . she painted supernovas across the event horizons . . . she knew the maps of the stars . . .

At the vigil one of the organizers asked us to please return the candles before we left. Sadly, she said, we will most likely need to use them again.