Advent Calendar for Social Justice

Posted on December 1, 2016 by lisafindley

Check out the Advent Calendar for Social Justice here!

We have one month left before we’re in 2017, and although it’s tempting to just curl up into a ball until it’s over, we know that we need to prepare to live in a Trump world. (For the many people who see how this year has just pulled back the mask on what wasn’t all that well hidden to begin with – I hear you. I’m sorry it’s taking some of us so long to figure it out.) Okay, so let’s live in this world, let’s make it as good as we possibly can, and let’s do it together.

anarchy

I used to be a weekly churchgoer, and the rhythms of the church year still echo in my life. The season leading up to Christmas is called Advent. Advent is a time of preparation, during which Christians prepare for the coming of the savior of the world. They prepare for the end of the world as we know it and the arrival of a better world we can barely imagine. This year, we are preparing for what certainly feels like the end of the world, and it’s hard to see anything beyond it. Trump is the opposite of a savior, no matter how he brands himself in his populist speeches. So this year we need to prepare ourselves to be our own saviors, to save ourselves from what we’ve allowed to happen. (I’m speaking mostly to my fellow straight white cis folks here – people of color and queer folk have been doing the heavy lifting since forever.)

This election seems to have served as a wake-up call for many of us. It’s not right that it took a loss that will devastate so many lives and alter the fabric of our democracy to serve as such, but here we are. So now what? is the question I see most frequently on Facebook, Twitter, in the news. There are a lot of good answers out there, from better thinkers than I. Read them, discuss them with friends and family, take action.

But for what it’s worth, here is my “what now?” response. Advent is a time of preparation, so let’s prepare. For each day of December, I’m going to take concrete action that makes me more prepared to resist the Trump presidency, or that offers some resistance now, or that contributes something good and kind to the world. Some of these actions can be done anywhere in the world, and some are US-specific.

I also think it’s important to do a mix of overtly political and more community-building or “good deeds” type things. Especially if you haven’t been politically active before, you may find this a little intimidating, but what we’ve seen from the way Trump’s campaign was run, and now after the election, is that white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia, and homophobia play a prominent role in people’s political decisions and everyday lives. Coaching Little League builds community, yes, please keep doing that — but also see how you can assist your local Black Lives Matter chapter, to build community in that way as well. And artists — keep creating, always. Artists are vital.

black-lives-matter

Will you join me for this month? Especially for people who wouldn’t normally consider themselves political, or who don’t have much experience with activism, I tried to make this an accessible collection of things to do that will show how easy it is to fit these things into our busy lives, and how it’s not that scary to do.

If you have suggestions, please comment. Share this with anyone you like. The key is to take action, and to do it together. So call your mom, talk to your coworker, make a new friend, and go all in. As Angela Davis recently said, “How do we begin to recover from this shock? By experiencing and building and rebuilding and consolidating community. Community is the answer.”

Here is where I was going to put the calendar, but I can’t get it to embed. So please click through to the Advent Calendar for Social Justice. Be sure to click on each day to see notes and useful links with further info for each action item.

This calendar is intended as a helpful tool for people who want to do something, but aren’t sure where to start. I hope it will help you sample different ways of taking action, so that in the new year, you’ll be better prepared to really dig in to volunteering, donating, and organizing roles. I’d love your feedback. I consider it a live document and will adjust it as necessary.

Shout-out to Liz and Emmett for providing excellent advice and action items.

niwj1nyd

Resources for Educating Yourself and Taking Action:
Accomplices Not Allies
A List of Pro-Women, Pro-Immigrant, Pro-Earth, Anti-Bigotry Organizations That Need Your Support
Oh Crap! What Now? A Survival Guide
Opportunities for White People in the Fight for Racial Justice
“We’re His Problem Now” Calling Sheet
What Educators Can Do to Support Undocumented Students
What to Do Instead of Calling the Police

Organizations Fighting the Good Fight:
350
American Civil Liberties Union
Amnesty International
Black Lives Matter
Campaign Zero
Council on American-Islamic Relations
Emily’s List
National Center for Transgender Equality
National Coalition for the Homeless
National Disability Rights Network
National Women’s Law Center
Planned Parenthood
Showing Up for Racial Justice
Southern Poverty Law Center
Sylvia Rivera Law Project
The True Colors Fund
Welcoming Refugees

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Community, Where My Ladies At?

Posted on February 28, 2012 by lisafindley

Community is coming back! After a hiatus that had comedy nerds across the country weeping along to Arrested Development reruns in an attempt to fill the void, the show is back on March 15. I love this show for so many reasons: the jokes, the musical numbers, the complex callbacks, Donald Glover. It’s also a show with an uncanny eye for detail. Community subverts the conventions of any genre it tackles, while simultaneously celebrating those conventions. Characters wear ridiculous outfits, stories hang on the thinnest of premises, and yet the intricate plotting and consistent character development means that we wind up caring a great deal about what’s going on at Greendale Community College.

we all wish this was our college crowd

So it struck me as odd when I realized that with all the care that’s gone into creating and embellishing this fictional world, one aspect is severely underdeveloped. I’m not talking about the fact that we haven’t seen Shirley’s children outside of that one episode in Season 1, or that it’s Season 3 and Jeff isn’t even pretending to try to get back into his law firm anymore. It’s a sitcom; some facts just aren’t as important as the overall story and the jokes. No, I’m talking about the lack of ladies on the Greendale campus.

We’ve got the seven main characters (4 men, 3 women), two secondary characters (2 men–the Dean and Chang), and several tertiary characters (all men). I wouldn’t for the world suggest we lessen Dean Pelton’s presence, because Jim Rash’s portrayal is one of the funniest things on TV in the last decade. And it looks like they’re finding a balance with Chang, which is good, because a little goes a long way with that one [insert Chang’s self-referential joke about “the Chang” here].

The show does a good job of having characters recur in the background, to make the Greendale world feel more complete. But women outside that crowd show up as one- or two-episode love interests for the guys in the group, and then disappear. Tertiary characters: Duncan, Star-Burns, Leonard, Magnitude, Garrett, Neil… see a pattern here? Sometimes Vicki shows up, but she never gets much to say, whereas Magnitude has a catch phrase, Garrett plays pivotal production roles in Greendale promo videos, and Leonard is a well-known old crank.

C’mon, Dan Harmon et. al., let’s liven things up with some wacky women as regulars on the Greendale campus! Lord knows there’s plenty to be found at that wild and wonderful place.

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The Genius of Falling Down

Posted on March 29, 2011 by lisafindley

Ladies and gentleman, I have uncovered one of the great secrets of that dark and twisted world we know as comedy. Lengthy treatises have been written on just what makes people laugh, and entire tomes are devoted to the debate over whether high-brow or low-brow humor is funnier. The answer to the latter is both, obviously, but for my money, nothing makes me laugh so instinctively and delightedly as a well-executed pratfall.

What makes a pratfall well-executed, you may ask. (As I hope you might, since this is the great secret I promised to share with you. If you did not ask, then you probably already know the secret but shh, don’t ruin it for the rest of the class.) I’m glad you asked! A pratfall can take many forms, but its basic definition is someone taking a fall in a way that makes people laugh. Someone falling down the stairs in a Lifetime movie = not funny. Someone falling down the stairs in a Three Stooges movie = funny. You hear “pratfall,” you think “banana peel.”

And that’s funny, of course it is. People falling down is inherently funny. I don’t know if it appeals to me so much because my natural grace and style manifests in tripping over invisible objects and walking into doorframes, but I love it when a casual conversation or stroll down the street on stage or in film is interrupted by a sudden slip-n-slide. Much of the humor comes from the unexpectedness of the fall (at least unexpected to the person falling), but even when we in the audience know it’s coming, we love watching the norm literally upended.

Chevy Chase takes a fall for the president

Which brings me to Chevy Chase, whose weekly (and therefore very expected) cold open pratfalls on SNL elevated the act to a whole new level. His genius? He never stopped falling down. He didn’t just trip and land on his butt. He tripped, windmilled his arms, fell on his knees, reached wildly for support from whatever was handy, took down an entire bookshelf in the process, and landed on his butt. He could fall from any height and still find something to destroy on his way down, all with the most dignified look on his face, like, “I am not falling, I am momentarily off-balance.” The dignified look is part of it; he was playing straight man to the funny man of the fall, almost making the few moments of falling into a double act starring himself and gravity.

This insight struck me as I was watching Season 1 of “Community,” in which Chevy gets to perform a couple of his patented Neverending Pratfalls(TM). He trips over an instrument in a band room, and sure enough, the entire jazz combo setup comes crashing down in a glorious rain of cymbals and drums. He trips in a dorm room with a giant bowl of popcorn in his hands, and next thing you know, he’s grasping at the door handle, the desk, anything, while popcorn rains down on him and his friends laugh hysterically. He’s still got it!

SNL and NBC in general keep a tight grip on their video content, so I was unable to find either of those “Community” clips online or some of Chevy’s more classic how-are-you-still-falling moments from the ’70s. But this clip below is still excellent, with a festive fall as performed by Gerald Ford. (For the young kids in the audience, President Ford was portrayed in the media as clumsy and kinda dim, and Chase regularly played Ford as a bumbling buffoon on SNL. This clip is no exception; we don’t get the fall til the end of the 2:30 minute video, but all the record playing and tree trimming before it is wonderful to see as set-up.)

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/christmas-eve-at-the-white-house/29163/

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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Film Club: Whale Rider

Posted on May 13, 2010 by lisafindley

Dearest fellow travelers, come with me to the beautiful coastline of New Zealand, where we’ll cover some Film Club and some A Country a Month at the same time. Whale Rider is a 2002 film directed by Niki Caro, from a screenplay by Caro and Witi Ihimaera (who authored the book it’s based off of). Several people recommended this film to me, telling me how much I would enjoy the story of a young girl overcoming a thousand years of patriarchal rule to become the next leader of her tribe. This was an accurate prediction on your part. Whale Rider is a lovely movie.

Whale Rider movie poster

Paikea is named after the legendary Maori figure who rode on the back of a whale from the homeland of Hawaiki to reach Aotearoa (the islands of New Zealand). Pai is a delightful 11-year-old who adores her crotchety old grandfather, Koro, the chief of the tribe. Yes, there is some of that well-worn gruff old man with a soft spot for a precocious young child — a tiresome cliché that flattens out both characters in many films — but it’s kept from getting too sentimental because Koro really does resent Pai for being a girl instead of a boy and thus unable to assume leadership of the tribe. Throughout the movie, he has many opportunities to relent and acknowledge her as his heir, but he refuses right up until the end. He does love Pai but says several cruel things about her and actively keeps her from learning the rites of chieftainship. She loves Koro but consistently disobeys his orders to keep her place as a girl. It’s more painful to watch a film like this, because the characters are acting more like real people than characters in other movies, and real people can be pretty awful to each other, but that’s what makes it so great, and also what makes the eventual reconciliation much more meaningful.

Another thing I liked about the movie is the film’s and Pai’s refusal to make her a saint or ideal. Koro is searching for a prophet to lead his people out of the troubled times they find themselves in (encroaching crime and drug use). Pai knows she is the next leader of the tribe, but she also knows she is no prophet. She is a gifted, sensitive girl, with a strong link to her ancestors and the natural world that her community lives in, but she is not superhuman. She doesn’t want to be a savior; she wants her whole community to come together and bring themselves out of the bad times and into a brighter future. How rarely do films, books, or even real life leaders express this wish? We are so accustomed to looking for saviors (and that’s not even counting religious figures) who will make everything right that we miss countless opportunities to fix our own problems and improve our own communities. Pai knows that the only way to be a strong group is to work as a group, and we see a beautiful illustration of that communal effort at the end of the film, when she leads a giant waka (Maori canoe) full of her neighbors into the sea as part of a celebratory ceremony. We need leaders who know how to bring out the best in us, not saviors who bring the best to us.

And yes, that happens to be my political philosophy. Heroes and saviors make great action figures and film stars, but they rarely make great history without a strong community to build on their vision. Whale Rider shows that truly humble people can also be compelling on the screen, and the numerous regular people in our lives working for a better world show how compelling they are in making history.