HOW WE GOT HERE

My first job was teaching English in Browning, Montana.  The school district there is a state function performed in a place supposedly governed by a tribal council with federal "support", which meant the Bureau of Indian Affairs second-guessed and controlled everything.  Today's federal pattern of career people trying to do their jobs while being second-guessed and contradicted by international corporations is very similar.  The additional complication was the underlying family and clan patterns based on personal connections going back centuries, which overrode any thing on paper, rather like the mafia undercurrent in our own government, which first came to attention when local Sicilian families filled the vacuum left by a receding officialdom.

My second "career" overlapped and was based on my attempt to be safe, which meant hooking up with Bob Scriver whose income came from taxidermy and then Western Art, a growing -- exploding -- field where he excelled.  Locals admired him, grew up with him, and hated him in a sometimes racist way.  Like Bob, I was a minority -- everyone else was indigenous.  His culture was Native American in a kind of wrestling match with his mother's brand of Brit worship from Quebec where his parents grew up on adjoining farms in the 19th century.

Then came animal control, which people mock and stigmatize and stereotype.  I was an officer on the street going to homes and neighborhoods, first-hand observing both genteel scuffles over barking and fecal indiscretions, and (as the first woman) venturing into the underworld of drugs and madmen.  It was the beginning of public non-compliant sex roles like cross-dressing and massage parlours.  It was a struggle to figure out the key to problems while overcoming people's hatred of uniforms and violent resistance to control.  Going to court weekly was an education in the Rule of Law.

Overlapping that, mostly through moral questions and the effort to be a respectable citizen, I was becoming involved with the Unitarian denomination where I was quickly sucked into the just developing Organizational Design ideas presented in a week-long intensive workshop along with the Big Ideas like Evil, Death, Metaphor, and Idealism.  The men in the Pacific Northwest District of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association were big, handsome, potent, well-educated and elite.  They had organized a buddy system in which each was assigned to look out for the mental health and career success of another. (A few got into very bad trouble.)  I wanted in, so I wangled my way to a little seminary attached to the University of Chicago.  The little seminary was collapsing.  The U of C was a massive, irreproachable, hard, cold place where I thrived on the ideas and the guarded approval of Richard Stern, a major novelist.

For three years I rode a circuit in Montana of four reluctantly cooperating fellowships, each with only a few dozen members, stirring up ideas as though I were making grasshoppers leap from the grass.  Then was Kirkland, an interim year of delight across from Seattle with a congregation of artists and therapists. Denominational rules prevented me from staying.  Then Saskatoon where a little enclave of wanna-be Brits held a fort against dispossessed indigenous people taking refuge in drugs and alcohol, bitter academics, and Ukrainians who somehow escaped from Stalin's famine.  Two years there and I left the ministry.

I went back to Browning, Mt., where I was sort of the Methodist minister for a year, then on the first high school faculty at Heart Butte in bear country on the foothills of the Rockies.  Two years until being thrown out of there.  After an eight month gap, I took a civil service job with the City of Portland Bureau of Buildiings -- data entry and answering the phone -- at a time when the streets were full of armed drug gangs and my home neighborhood had gone Black with gangs in shooting wars across the lawn of our house where my aging mother and brain-damaged brother tried to live normally.

When my mother died, she left enough money for me to buy this disintegrating little old house in a tiny village next to the rez, where I have barely enough retirement to stay afloat but my internet connections have made me part of the world conversation of panic over climate change and governmental corruption.  It's been twenty years now, and I feel as though the whole story has been continuous, leading directly to where we are now, both myself and everyone else.

I "talk" to people I would have no access to without the internet.  My reading is lay versions of a remarkable change in knowledge as technology opens up a whole new vision of everything we thought we knew, including the idea of Empire and what we've come to call Predatory Capitalism.  Now we analyze traces in rocks back to the beginning of the galaxies, we collect bits of hominins that stretch millennia to the first mammals or even the structure of fishes, we delve into our own bodies to discover how cells work together -- though some were distracted for a while by the idea that computers are us and we are essentially brains in a bucket.  Finally, we came to our senses and for some this is a love affair with the world and the arts, the deep story that we carry in our whole bodies, the unity we can find when we reach through our skins to the world.

What we finally come to is our capacity to destroy each other and possibly all life on this planet.  I myself am coming to the end of my life with no regrets and deep resignation, but also determination to figure it all out before I end.  Every job I've had -- mostly unchosen -- has taught me useful things about the stubborn tragedies we seem to face everywhere.  Stubbornness is what I'm good it.  My personal morality -- no smoking, drinking, lying, fooling around, hoarding, and so on -- is stubbornness-based.  I like to call it tenacity, or maybe integrity.  Depends on your point of view, I guess.  I value the ability to change one's point of view, since everything always changes around us, sometimes because of our bad behavior.

Surprisingly, the highly respected magazine called "Nature" offers a whole set of articles about leaving one discipline and finding a new one.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02123-4?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=e95060d7d5-briefing-dy-20190705_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-e95060d7d5-44122505

A LIST OF TRANSGRESSIONS that pointed to now:

60's:  For some people, violence is as good as sex.  Cops were beating up kids. I let them talk about it. My superintendent defended me to the Chief of Police, but then instructed me never to talk about such things.

Bob Scriver started out blameless, but as he became more famous, he left aside kindness, patience, and independence.  Big shots began to control him.

70's:  The supposed head of Animal Control was a Portuguese German whose parents had died early in his life.  He had gotten a woman pregnant, married her, divorced her, and was hired for AC by a county commissioner who wanted her alimony to continue.  The assistant really ran AC while he went on with a horse stable that hired a lot of teen girls.  He always had a pocket full of plane tickets to Hawaii.  You connect the dots.

80's:  The church had a secret committee.  When it was time to ask for money, this committee (banker, doctor, real estate salesman) met to estimate how much money each member had, so therefore how much to ask for. They used a little muscle.

90's: At one point my cubicle was close to that of the low level City Attorneys. Interesting deals through law suits.  I deny everything.

After that:  Villages are always a trip.  After a while you know who is lying and who is simply silent.  I attended town council meetings for years until a pugnacious couple determined to force people to meet their standards.  They were from a city.  Still haven't really given up, unevenly enforcing laws against people they don't like and ignoring friends, a pre-existing practice.

This is the little stuff that is almost funny until it accumulates and reaches all the way up to international matters.  On this low level it is often what adjusts justice to sidestep law.  It can be humane and even necessary.  Or not.