Vacation reflections
Or: what I learned while sitting on the beach for a week.
I have to admit, it was really nice to be on vacation somewhere with a warm, clear ocean to swim in. Within probably 20 minutes of arriving at our place, which was right on the beach, I had my suit on and was running out to the water to be held, buoyant and near-weightless, by the salty undulations of the Caribbean Sea. We hadn’t been there for six years, and husband pointed out it’s the longest I’ve ever gone in my life without swimming in the ocean. I’ve spent almost my entire life in the Midwest, and I love the Midwest and the Great Lakes. But the ocean is in my blood, and I didn’t realize how much I missed it.
The assumption made by much of my family is that this will now become a yearly thing again. Much as this trip was cup-filling, though, it won’t be an annual thing. Because, aside from the ocean itself, which is not recreate-able closer to home, much of the rest of what was cup-filling is. Here are some reflections:
The single most relaxing thing about this vacation was not being tethered to my phone, or a screen of any kind. I’m not just talking avoiding social media or email, I’m talking spending many of my waking hours outside while my phone was inside. When I did have my phone on me, I didn’t get service unless I was on Wifi, and most of the time I wasn’t. So it really just functioned as an old school iPod, which was lovely. I didn’t get many photos while I was on vacation, but that’s an easy trade-off for the relative mental calm of a mostly phone-less existence. This observation is not revelatory or new. Nor is it meant to be a humblebrag or a judgement on anyone who wants to be, or must be, tethered to their phone. It is simply the undeniable fact that my brain relaxes much more readily when there aren’t screens around bugging me with emails, texts, notifications, and news of a world gone mad. The more time I spend away from my phone and all its harassment, the more I hate it when I have to come back to it. There is no more clear example of the enshittification of modern life than the smart phone.
My son woke up the morning after we got home, crying. I asked him if he was sad we weren’t on vacation anymore, and he said yes. But when I probed deeper, what it was really about was that he spent a whole, glorious week of relative independence and unsupervised adventure with his cousins, and he missed them. Both of my kids have said their favorite thing on this vacation was not snorkeling or swimming or playing on the beach, per se, but being with their cousins and doing these things together. As in, the fun was not necessarily in the destination itself or the activities, but in doing it with family, whom they love and adore. We don’t need to hop on a plane for three hours to give the kids a magical experience. Some good adventures with the cousins will do it.
This is a bit of a water is wet observation, but, if we weren’t escaping the drudgery of our lives in a late-stage capitalist, increasingly authoritarian, cruelty-is-the-point, consumption-obsessed (to numb the pain) society, maybe we wouldn’t feel so desperately like we need to fly off and away from it all so frequently? Isn’t it sort of sad that we’re all so thrilled to “get away” for a while? What if we worked to build lives - and a society - we didn’t feel the need to escape from regularly? Just a thought.
Bonus observations:
Boy do young men like rocking flat bill, snapback hats and mustaches these days! I know this isn’t really a new trend anymore, but until I saw numerous 20-30 somethings (and the occasional 40-something) with this particular, 90s skater/surfer look (plus mustache, for some reason), I didn’t realize quite how popular it had become. I bought a cool snapback hat with a crab on it while I was on vacation, without even knowing how cool and trendy it was. I very uncooly tried to bend the bill a bit because I thought I looked dumb in the hat with the flat bill. Then, I ended up sitting next to a 20-something guy on the plane, with a mustache, several rings and bracelets, socks and sandals (another “cool” trend, if you didn’t know), and that very same hat with the crab! I refrained from telling him I bought the same hat as him. I didn’t want to embarrass him with the knowledge that a 42 year old suburban mom also had his hat.
The hat in question. It’s cool, right?! You guys, why does everyone close their window shade on the plane these days?! I have very few fond feelings towards flying, but seeing the earth from thirty thousand feet, seeing the tops of clouds, seeing the inside of clouds (aka fog), is definitely one of them. This is the closest us regular folks will get to being astronauts and getting the privilege and wonder of seeing our planet from a vantage point few have access to. Why shut it out? So you can stare at the screen in front of you instead? If I had a window seat, you better believe I’d be staring out that window the whole damn time.
Related to number two, above: flying is kind of a miracle, to which many of us have become so accustomed, we simply don’t care. There’s, of course, a lot to hate about the process of it. But the feat of physics and engineering that is flying should be a lot more jaw-dropping than it is. My five year old son took his first plane ride on this trip. I’m so glad we waited until he was old enough to appreciate it; and in fact, just the right age to think it was the coolest damn thing he’d ever done. As the plane picked up speed on the runway at O’Hare, he grew more and more excited. Finally, it lifted off, and my son could be heard throughout the whole back of the plane as he shouted “Ohhhhh, here we gooooo!” We have a video of this moment of unbridled joy at something that most of us view as an unpleasant necessity to get to the vacations we’re so eager to document for our digital lives. Getting on a plane was worth it for just that moment alone. I’d share it here, but I don’t like sharing my kids on the internet. But if I know you and you want to see it, just ask. It’ll make you smile.
So that’s the vacation recap. I have lots of book writing to catch up on, so next week I’ve got a list of book, movie, TV and music recs lined up. Because who doesn’t need tons of art at a time like this? Then I’ll be back with the usual stuff.
But before I go! I read “There’s No Justice Without Power” by Hamilton Nolan last week, and you should read it, too. I’ve written before about how I don’t want hope from the left, I don’t want feel-good rhetoric or pride flags on military uniforms. I want the left to find some real, honest-to-goodness power. Nolan, a labor journalist, writes:
“The left tends to think a lot about justice, but less about power. We are adept at figuring out what is just and unjust, how and why the oppression happens, what a better world would look like. We are able to produce detailed policy prescriptions that would, if enacted, remedy many of the world’s wrongs. We raise our voices in the streets—or, hello, write brilliant essays—about why these things should happen. But they do not happen. All of the effort we expend on polishing and promoting a program of justice does not accomplish anything if that program is not accompanied by the power to make it a reality.”
He talks about the soft power of persuasion, protests, and marches, which the left uses all the time, and their failure against the direct, material power of the right in the form of money and guns. So what form of direct power do we, the left (or, let’s just say, the not-rich) actually have? Labor, of course.
“What makes the power of organized labor any better or stronger or more important to highlight than protests or politicking or persuasion? Simply this: Organized labor, which creates the ability of workers to collectively strike to withhold their labor, is a form of direct power. It does not rely on persuasion. It does not ask those who already hold power to do something on our behalf. It is power. It shuts things down directly, because all enterprises—warmongering and oppression included—require labor. If we are able to withdraw that labor, those enterprises stop. The people with all of the money cannot make their money without labor. In this, the power of organized labor stands apart from the other ways that the left typically tries to enact our will. A strike is not a request; it is a physical fact of the world. It is a roadblock to the other side’s will. It is the strongest move that we have.”
If you’re floundering right now, trying to figure out how we stand up to this administration in a meaningful way, put your energy into labor organizing. Don’t know where to start? Neither do I, really. But I recently realized I could join the National Writers Union, so I did that. There’s the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee and the AFL-CIO. Did you know there are even unions for nonprofit workers? There’s also IWW, though, having been a member for a while now, I’m not sure they’re super effective at what they do anymore?
The thing that stuck with me from Nolan’s piece was the quote he shared from the Silicon Valley rich guy: “I guess the left is a complete distraction. They’re so easily dismissed. They know nothing, and they come at it with so many prejudices that they can’t see anything clearly at all.”
The right speaks an entirely different language about power than the left does. And they’re not wrong that the left in this country hasn’t figured out how to build meaningful power to oppose the right. We rely on asking people in power, and the courts, to do the right thing (definitely watch this interview on Democracy Now with Elie Mystal if you want to know why the courts are a losing strategy). We’re simply not a threat - yet.
Time to stop asking for permission and find our real power.
Whatever you do, save some of your organizing energy for labor. And while we’re at it, keep going after Tesla, too. Boycotts and strikes. And I’ll add one more thing to our power toolbox - numbers. There are way more of us than there are of them. They can’t dismiss us if we’re collectively exercising our most direct, and undeniable, forms of power: withholding our labor and money.
Can confirm, that liftoff video is pure joy!!