Intentional Citizen

How Did I Become A Single-Issue Voter?

/ Meredith Whipple Callahan

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I returned to my hometown in Michigan this week to visit and introduce my grandparents to my newborn son, Hawk. Gathered in their living room, Grandpa told stories of working as a machinist in the auto industry, and Grandma knit another beautiful afghan. We ate egg salad sandwiches and homemade cake, cooed over the little one, and caught up on life. And yet, while our visits were lovely, they all happened in front of a backdrop of scathing purple-state attack ads. The muted television in the background prompted me to see that, while this narrow moment was perfect, there are so many challenges in the wider world.

The tone of the ads reminded me that we live in a country where intelligent discourse has fallen by the wayside, where there is little listening, and where both sides are guilty of unprincipled behavior and partisanship. All of that points to my bigger concern. As we approach Tuesday’s election, I am concerned about our fundamental respect for each other. I am concerned about human rights.

I look back on the past two years and see so many things that horrify me:  the rampant use of dehumanizing language, a failure to condemn white supremacists, threats to revoke citizenship of birthright Americans, separating children from their parents at the border, work to limit the rights of trans citizens; and, beyond our borders, our country’s complicity with the human rights abuses of other countries as we fail to hold them accountable.

We can talk about the economy, healthcare, education, foreign relations, or anything other political issue you’d like to debate; but, to me, all those have become secondary to our fundamental human rights. Events like the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh demonstrate how dire this issue has become, not only for the Jewish community, but for all of us. I am surprised and saddened that human rights need to be an issue at all, and yet, here we are.

I would say that the actions of this administration have reduced me to being a one issue voter, but that would be wrong in multiple ways. First, I am not reduced or diminished in any way; atrocities call forth my power instead of minimizing it. Second, the administration has not forced this upon me; I choose to stand up, first and foremost, for human rights.

And so:
I vote for treating each other as humans worthy of respect.
I vote for understanding people however different they may be from me.
I vote for erring on the side of compassion.
I vote against fear.
I vote against blame.
I vote against ‘other-izing’ our fellow humans.
I vote against using harmful descriptors (e.g., “animals”, “lowlifes”, “dogs”) which lead to harmful beliefs and increase the likelihood of harmful actions.

And so, how to vote?

In the past I have voted for both Republicans and Democrats, though I have trended towards the left as of late. That said, even if I didn’t mostly vote Democrat, I would in this election. Any Republican who has not openly, actively, and continuously disavowed the actions of this administration cannot claim to be a champion of human rights. And that is what we need right now. We need people who will openly and vocally disavow Trump’s actions even if they agree with his policies. We need to reestablish our foundation of how we are with each other instead of sacrificing it for superficial political wins – for it is only upon that foundation that of rights and respect that we can again engage in a thoughtful discourse to come to workable solutions.

The Talmud states that “who can protest and does not is an accomplice in the act.” If you’re a Democrat, a Republican, an Independent, or someone who formerly affiliated but now feels dismayed and dejected, please vote this Tuesday. And, for me, I will vote Democrat in order to make my stance as clear as possible: Human rights are at stake. I do not support anyone who, by commission or omission, accepts the atrocities of this administration.

I would love to hear your perspective on this especially if you disagree with me. I promise it will be met with an open mind and an open heart.

With love and listening,
Meredith

 

Today’s Resistance: Choose Love Over Fear

/ Meredith Whipple Callahan / 2 Comments

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Two weeks ago, the Callahans embarked on a ‘near-shore’ adventure — a long weekend in Montreal to meet up with friends, dine on poutine, and test our high-school French skills. As we crossed from New York into Quebec, we were grilled at the border by the guards: How long would we stay in Canada? Who were we meeting? When was the last time we saw them? Where were we staying? Did we have a reservation? Who made the reservation? When would we come back to the United States? As we drove through Quebec’s broad fields, we made appropriately grim jokes about seeking asylum in Canada as a LGBTQ family. We laughed about The Handmaid’s Tale and shared our adoration of Justin Trudeau.

But it was the drive back — not the drive there — that made the sad truth of our circumstances even more real. As we approached the American border, I felt my heartbeat quicken. Yes, we held American passports. Yes, we were crossing the Northern border and not the Southern one. And yes, as Caucasians we had the privilege of not triggering any of the profiling flags that would cause someone to doubt our case. And yet, I was attempting to cross the border into the United States with my child. Thousands of mothers and fathers in similar situations had their children taken from them over the past weeks and months. It was only an accident of birth and circumstance that separated me from the parent who comes to the border seeking asylum.

As this disturbing truth percolated in my head, it didn’t take too much imagination to hear Elliott’s cries not as innocent toddler crises — about dropping her milk, wanting to take off her shoes, or refusing a graham cracker — but instead about being separated from Liz and me. I cannot imagine the horror of having your child forcibly taken from you, however briefly. I cannot imagine the inhumanity it takes to do that.

On a daily basis, I’m ashamed by what our country has become. We increasingly live in a country which is run, at the highest levels, without a sense of compassion or humanity. While there may be room for power and politics in parts of government, the way we treat human beings is not up for debate.

Regardless of our political persuasion, we increasingly have a choice between acting out of love and acting out of fear. Do we believe that others are worthy of respect and treat them accordingly? Or do we demonize and dehumanize them, characterizing them as animals or criminals? There is a long history of humans blaming “the other” in times of uncertainty and distress. It is easier to point the finger than it is to take responsibility for our contribution to the problem. But it takes a certain level of personal evolution to assume responsibility, to humbly seek to understand, to leave the need to be right behind, and to contribute to the solution. I am not always good at this; I can’t imagine that you are either. But, hopefully, if we can choose to face every situation — even the smallest and most trivial situations in our lives — with love instead of fear, we can collectively shift into a different way of being.

What does it look like to choose love? Every time you find yourself afraid — afraid of a person, afraid of a situation, afraid of an outcome — look inward. Try to investigate what is going on inside of you. What are you afraid of? Are you afraid of not being loved? Of not being good enough? Of failing? Of not being able to provide for your family? How do you act when you are consumed by that fear? In reality, that fear is just that — a fear. It may come true; it may not. You will find out over time. But, in the short term, your relationship with that fear — your mindset about it — dictates your actions. What would it look like to have more love, to have more faith? What might you see differently? How would you act differently?

So please, take all the political actions you can to influence our government in the direction you believe is the most compassionate and loving. Call your elected representatives. Sign petitions. Donate. But, in addition to these, take the initiative to shift from fear to love in your own life. Nothing but the sum of our everyday choices to love will unlock a bigger transformation in who we are as a people.

With love,
Meredith

What I Learned In The Ten Years It Took To Publish My First Book

/ Meredith Whipple Callahan / 1 Comment

I wrote my first version of Indispensable nearly ten years ago, over the early part of 2008.  Later that year, as the publishing industry struggled with the birth of eBooks, the economy collapsed, and my life moved forward, the goal of publishing it shifted into the background.  I largely put the manuscript down and didn’t touch it for years.

Now, it’s ten years later and my book is due to be published on June 26th.  The process of resurrecting, revisiting, and revising the book has been insightful.  More than anything else, the manuscript has served as a point of reflection of who I was then and who I am now.  As I set to work on revisions, I found myself having visceral reactions to the content. The tone of some sections made me cringe.  How could I be so rude, so flippant, or so ignorant?  On the other hand, some sections felt like old friends briefly forgotten.  How wise I used to be!  If I had only remembered that advice and applied it myself since writing it!  Over the past decade, I’ve learned and grown.  And the world has evolved around me.  My manuscript – from its previous incarnation and its current revisions – has been a lens through which to see all that change more clearly.

On the whole, I’ve noticed two major dimensions along which I’ve changed the most.  First, my understanding of diversity, inclusion, and privilege has expanded significantly.  In the revisions, I rotate the gender of the managers and employees chapter by chapter.  Similarly, I intentionally included a wide variety of names to be ethnically-inclusive; it’s no longer just a book about Bobs and Rachels.  But, perhaps most notably, I rewrote the entire segment on dressing at work to be comprehensive of a more fluid range of gender expressions – and to acknowledge how precious physical expression can be to people.  The passages that used to read as “just quiet down and wear whatever you need to wear to fit in” have a more nuanced tone, one suggesting that you make a conscious choice about what you wear and own the repercussions of how others may interpret that as reflective of your professional competence.

That brings me to the second shift in my approach; not just in the realm of physical presentation, but more broadly, my overarching approach became much less proscriptive and more fungible. I wrote the initial book as the essential advice you need to succeed in your first job and beyond.  The tone conveyed that this this advice was important and that the reader should carefully listen, learn, and apply each suggestion.  I positioned it as a universal formula for success.  Now, I’ve softened that approach.  I’m wise enough to know that even if some abstracted advice is broadly useful, people and situations are different. I present the book as full of useful strategies, but ones which should be considered, adapted, and applied with judgment. I focus more on the journey, the learning, and the development into your authentic self at work. Ultimately, I put the reader more in the position of power and conscious choice over their path rather than in the position of receiving wisdom from on high.

Now, Indispensable is in the final rounds of copy editing and proofreading.  From a content perspective, this book, which was ten years in the making, is suddenly out of my hands.  And I find myself looking both backwards and forwards.  Looking forward, if I am living well, won’t I learn as much over the next decade as I did over the last?  It is scary to think that the manuscript is fixed and I won’t be able to evolve it over time – as I and the world evolve in parallel. I have to believe that I’ll look back on Indispensable in another ten years and think “Wow, I missed so much.”

And so, I’m publishing something which feels not like a universal decree, but instead, a stake in the ground. But maybe that’s okay.  Maybe, since this version of the book will be fixed, it will provide a similar view into my psychology today – and I’ll be able to see the differences between now and then – and the growth that has occurred – all the more clearly.

Meredith
For more on the book, buy on Amazon.

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The Poetry Flip

/ Meredith Whipple Callahan / Leave a comment

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It’s rare that I sit down to write and poetry comes out. In many ways, prose is more aligned with the nature of who I am — someone who wants to illuminate a clear path to what is most meaningful. To that end, I mostly find poetry a difficult medium through which to communicate meaning while maintaining clarity.

And yet, from time to time, poetry flows out anyway. It tends happen at times when my feelings on a subject are so strong that the ‘clarity’ possible in prose feels reductive and unsatisfactory. This was the case three weeks ago, when I found myself both mourning the death of a dear friend and impacted by children and teens around the nation marching for their lives. The grief of the funeral as well as the images of children proved to be an overwhelming experience of tragedy and possibility, despair and hope, death and life. I found it hard to not only process, but also to articulate anything without the nuance and shape of poetry. And so, poetry is what came.

The hardest part of writing poetry for me is my inevitable judgment of the output. Unable to judge it versus my typical rubric of meaning and clarity, I often don’t know what good looks like. Today, as I share my poetry with you, I put it into the world lightly — less concerned about the quality of the thing and simply grateful that I can flex into a different form when the necessities of life call for something else. Whatever the form, what matters most is that there is simply a way to share the most important things.

With love and hope,
Meredith


Many Are Here

I. The Way
From the darkness I saw this place inside and out.
I saw all the ways to perform and succeed.
The world, complex but clear,
was peopled by structures and traditions,
roles and expectations,
cues, routines, rewards.
This was the way.

II. The Invitation
Slowly, the crack.
First one jumped, and then two more, and now dozens at a time,
as if jumping for their lives from two towers high above.
Falling men. Falling women.
Cashing in on an invitation that,
if brave and foolish enough,
they might be able to create
out of the deepest and truest inclination of their souls.
We thought they were silly; we knew they were right.

These were the first holes in the firmament,
water drip-dropping through them.
If you didn’t know better, you’d say:
“A leaky faucet, call the plumber.”

III. The Exhortation
Exiled and out of the parklands, now
invitation becomes exhortation.
Postdiluvian but preapocalyptic.
And no one is left behind.

And so, a new creed in our crisis,
one unhinged from books but floating in the ether,
in bits and bytes around us,
and prophesied by the voices of little children
wiser and braver than you.
If you open your ears, you too can make out the words,
echoing the call of a civil rights anthem:

 We must and we must now
abandon sins of commission, and
walk to truth and reconciliation.
Radical accountability is the higher call.
What have you used? Who have you used?
And where did you discard them?

 We must and we must now
throw out our lawn signs and let the grass breathe.
Instead of arguing the point of the point, we must
strengthen ourselves to be wildly wrong.
When we find we are not only victim, but perpetrator,
we cannot be surprised.
It was us all along.

 We must and we must now.
Not create from what we know first,
and not birth from self,
but unearth what lies
beyond the me, beyond the I, beyond the mine.
We must recover the better instincts of our souls
and become brave on their behalf.

IV. The Giant
There is no other option;
you already knew there was no white knight at the gates.
But there is a giant with a flaming cloak,
a gentle shepherd to help find the other side of this,
allowing you to do something right
without letting it go to your head.
In his fire you are incinerated and embraced.
That is the start.

Many are here, I am here.
And soon, you must be here.

How To Be An Ally

/ Meredith Whipple Callahan / Leave a comment

Since Trump’s election, there’s been lots of action — and I am hopeful, even more reflection — on what it means to be an ally: being present to bullying, wearing a safety pin, signing petitions, joining protests, posting on Facebook.

I experienced what it means to have an ally when I came out to my friends and family. A handful of people reacted negatively or with skepticism. Many people offered their support. And one person stepped up as an ally, redefining what that term meant to me.

I remember sitting in my friend’s one-bedroom apartment. When I told him of my first same-sex relationship (with my now-wife), he was surprised but immediately accepting. He listened intently. He asked questions to understand me better. He shared his love and support.

I heard that support from so many people: “This doesn’t change a thing for me.” “I support you completely.” “Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

But this friend didn’t stop there. He saw that, being straight and well-connected, he could uniquely advocate for me with some of the people who struggled with my news the most. He realized that I still had a rough road ahead of me, and he wasn’t going to let me walk it alone. He asked for actions he could take on my behalf and offered up a dozen other that he brainstormed. Should he talk to this person? Could he send a note to that person? What else could he do? Nothing was out of the question, and his dedication to supporting me was clear.

That day, he taught me how to be an ally rather than just a supporter.

The most resonant metaphor of allyship is that of a WWE-style wrestling match. A supporter will sit on the sidelines and cheer. They’ll talk you up to their friends. They’ll put money on you even if the odds aren’t in your favor. They’ll bring a sign with your name on it. They’re wonderful cheerleaders.

An ally, on the other hand, gets out of the sidelines and stands in your corner, ready to fight. There, they not only rub your shoulders and provide you water. In addition, they fight on your behalf. They tag you out so you can get a break. They take the punches that weren’t intended for them. They put themselves on the line for you.

The best allies deploy their outsider status, showing that the fights of others are not theirs alone. When cisgender people fight for trans rights, when whites fight for Black Lives Matter, and when men push back on inappropriate behavior towards women they act as allies. They show that the fight is important and that the underlying values are universal. They fight for the other by putting themselves on the line.

While all signs of support — from Facebook posts to safety pins — are useful, true allyship demands more of us. Because this type of fighting takes work. With a limited supply of energy, we can’t fight for everyone else, particularly when we may be fighting on own battles. But ask yourself: Who do you support? How do you support them? Do you cheer from the sidelines or tag into the bout?

This is relevant regardless of where you stand with regards to the recent political events. You can fight for those who feel the system is stacked against them and voted for Trump. You can fight for those facing decades of systematic oppression who voted against Trump. Either way, take a look at your privilege, size up your energy, and find the fight you want to join. Ask the others how you can best fight for them. And then throw all your love into being a true ally and fighting on their behalf.

-Meredith, inspired by the man who fought for me to step up in the wake of election