One day my wife and I were having what you might call a vigorous conversation about our plans, or lack thereof, for a rare weekend without work or hosting. It followed a familiar, not-so-healthy cycle of her expressing frustration, me getting defensive, and us then sorting it all out over the course of a less-than-happy day.
In the midst of the silence and back-and-forth, I tried to defend myself by saying I wished she would just tell me what she wanted. What she wanted, she said, was for our weekends together to be as carefully attended to as my bike trip weekends. Ouch. I thought I was making space, that I was willing to make sacrifices for her. But what I thought of as sacrifice was actually an unwillingness to learn more deeply about her and her needs.
Recently this conversation has come back to mind. I sit in horror watching masked men dragging parents from their children in front of day care centers or chasing random Brown people down streets, watching people running simply because they want to escape the netherworld of a federal detention facility. What is wrong with the men who give these orders, with the men who follow them?
