My History X

Finally got around to seeing American History X. Interesting, thought-provoking, powerful, well-acted, well-written, serious - no doubt all adjectives those involved with the film would want viewers to use to describe it. One of the most interesting and poignant sections is when the father, shown in a flashback, is showing his prejudice in reasonable way, softly and logically giving the reasons why it's ok to be racist. His sons don't lap it up at first, but they love him, and they accept the prejudice because they don't know better, they aren't worldly or wise, and although it makes them uneasy, rejecting their father's opinion would feel like they're rejecting him. In my opinion, this is probably the hardest lesson the two main male characters have to learn, to love someone without believing, accepting, and integrating (ironically in this case) everything a loved one, a role model, even a father, believes without rejecting the whole person.

I had to learn this with my own grandfather, who I loved and revered more than I can say in words, but only in memories and pulses of my heart. My grandfather was a soft bigot, prejudiced against Blacks, Jews, and Latinos. These are the groups I heard him disparage in our conversations on the front porch around sunset. Given that he talked about these groups negatively with me on a couple occasions when I was very young, I have a difficult time believing those were the only groups he negatively stereotyped and disparaged. At the time I heard it, I was quite young, probably under 10, and I didn't have the courage, experience, or wisdom to push back. But I didn't believe those things he said. They didn't feel right and I didn't accept or integrate them into my world view.

That's not completely true. I had some difficulty overcoming my discomfort with homosexuality partially because of his views, something else he tried to help me form a preconceived notion about. Because I didn't know any homosexuals for quite a while, until I was 20 or so, I didn't have any immediate knowledge or experience to refute this particular poison, and it persisted for a few years after I did. On the other hand, with the other poisons he tried to feed me, I was going to school in California's San Joaquin Valley, which is ethnically diverse, and if I didn't have friends in all of them, I had enough exposure to each of them personally or to human, not cartoonish, portrayals of them in media, to know the statements he made about them were probably untrue.

And yet I still loved and admired my grandfather and I still do, very much. As an adult, an important part of loving him is seeing him clearly and being honest with myself and others about his flaws, his bigotry being one of them. I don't know if he was a great man, but he was my grandfather, and even if by negative example, he taught me valuable lessons. He wasn't nearly as curmudgeonly as Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, another good movie on lifelong prejudice and late transformation, but he was a man in a similar, though much softer vein. Towards the end of his life, as his own weaknesses and his mortality became very obvious to him, his heart softened and he learned to see and treat people more as individuals than just their appearances. This wasn't just a gift to those around him, his family and the diverse group he had coffee with at Denny's in the morning, but mostly to himself and his own ailing heart.

Thank you Grandpa Spitler.

Not Equal, Not Separate

It is interesting that both Deen and Wayne have said or done some pretty offensive things and the results have been very different. Although I'm not excusing his stupid and offensive behavior, Wayne started the record label that he belongs to (Young Money) and his father runs it, so he's not going to get dropped from that label.

Paula Deen also has her own business, a restaurant, so she’s not going to get fired from that company either. She also worked for a few companies (Target, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and the Food Network, among others) who felt that many of their customers probably find her past racist language and more recent lack of racial sensitivity a little or a lot offensive, so they've dropped her. Deen is at the mercy of the people she works for and they must have thought she was bad for the rest of their business, so I think it was a simple business decision for them.

If Wayne thought that his behavior and speech would cost him a lot of money, he'd probably change his tune (no pun intended, I'm sure he can't carry one). In fact, Mountain Dew did stop an endorsement deal with him in early May because of insensitive lyrics he wrote about civil rights icon Emmett Till, an African-American teenager who was tortured and murdered for whistling at a white woman in 1955.

Much to the credit of Deen’s fans, many of them are shocked and disappointed with her language and attitude. On the flip side, much to the discredit of Wayne's fans, they don't seem to be very shocked or disappointed with his stupid behavior, language, and attitude. It’s just more of the same and he probably won't lose any fans.

Catching Up

So, Nancy wrote her first blog post (ok, it was her third), and I cannot possibly let her get ahead of me on this. I don’t know if I’m being competitive so much as it’s a matter of balance. Let’s say you’re a car nut and you have a good friend whose idea of car maintenance is filling the gas tank and the tires, who just drives to and from work, and they suddenly decides to build their own car. So I think it’s time for me to be a bit more consistent and disciplined about posting, to walk my tech talk.

A lot has happened in the last few months. We had lost, through no fault of our own, a couple’s position at a private school in South Korea. That was a difficult and emotional time for us, and it was very frustrating to see to know that it wasn’t going to happen for us at that school, that we would have to start over looking for other positions. Finding a couple position at the same school is particularly difficult, and that’s why losing that job was so challenging. Well that’s one of the reasons, the other reason is that our FBI background checks were going to expire in mid-January and getting new ones would involve time and money. While money was short, time was much more valuable to us. There are two main times of the year which schools hire, and our background checks were going to expire around the beginning of one of those main periods. To give you an idea of the of the timeline, it takes about five weeks to get a background check and another week to a month to get the apostille necessary for the background check from the US Department of State. Those are the most difficult component of the visa paperwork, but certainly not the only one. The other components are getting a apostate deal and notarized copy of your college degree, though that takes only about two weeks and it doesn’t expire. Background checks expire after six months, and Nancy and I had gotten our background checks done back in June. Nancy wrote Nancy’s post about the position that fell through is a short but good explanation of what happened.

Because my job at The Buck ended in October (and it had been tapering off already) money was becoming an issue, so I decided to apply for work until we could get to Korea. I started working at Meijer in late November in the meat department, knowing that I would be leaving in 3 to 6 months. Or at least I hoped I would be leaving in 3 to 6 months, since the challenge of finding work in a much more competitive market in Korea was a bit of an issue with Nancy’s and my ages. For whatever reasons, Korea has an obsession with hiring younger teachers (I’ll probably go into this topic at a later date.). All of the recruiters we had talked to told us that it would be difficult to find work because we were old, old in their eyes being over 30.
Because I wanted it to happen so much, I tried to remain very optimistic, at least on the outside when Nancy and I would talk about the hurdles that we faced. But inside, I was struggling to remain so, knowing that our ages were a high hurdle, and the competition was much more stiff than it had been when I started two years ago. Nancy and I were both desperate to be somewhere else, doing other things, and my job at Meijer wasn’t exactly something I wanted to turn into a career for number of reasons, the first one being that it started at minimum wage and getting up to just $10 an hour would take three years working full-time, based on the union’s pay scale. The other tricky thing about finding work in Korea is that there aren’t a lot of couples positions available and trying to work out a living arrangement with a decent-sized apartment while working at different school was going to be challenging. I was also very tired of us being on different schedules, even though Nancy had bent over backwards with her position at Whirlpool to match my schedules both at the restaurant and at Meijer, which were not very flexible at all.

So it was with a cautious sense of optimism, or veiled pessimism, that I took a friend’s suggestion, someone who was already working in South Korea, to follow up on another mutual friend’s job posting for two positions at her hagwon. The positions are in Dongtan, where I had first worked when I started teaching in South Korea in June of 2010. The job landscape has changed somewhat in the last two years and it seems like schools are taking more of a direct role in hiring teachers directly instead of going through recruiters, though a majority of positions are still done through recruiters. And it was the recruiters mainly who were discouraging about our ages. Lo and behold, my friend’s hagwon, bit right away, and we had two interviews in short order and were hired very quickly. Thank goodness! Fortunately our paperwork, and by that I mean our background checks, would be ready in time for their new school year. When we got them back from the FBI, as we did before, we used a courier service to get them to and from the State Department as quickly as possible, about a week round-trip. We sent visa UPS all of the documents that weren’t already in Korea with our previous recruiter, who we had sent them to back in September for the jobs which fell through, so they could start our work visa application with Korean immigration.

Because I actually started the my first job in Korea without a visa and flew to Guam to get one, which is called making a visa run, I had forgotten, scratch that, never knew the standard process for getting a work visa, and remembered only last Thursday that we needed to do something with the visa application numbers that the school gave us. So there was another mad scramble to get things together and mailed, so the Korean Consulate in Chicago received our applications yesterday and they will be processing them this week. Hopefully we’ll get our passports back with work visas this coming Monday. We already have our plane tickets that the school bought and we’ll be flying out of Chicago on February 21. Woo hoo! The next few weeks are going to go quickly and neither of us have started packing or wrapping things up here in Benton Harbor, so we have a lot of work ahead of us, but the joy will make the work relatively light and our future stretches out in front of us.

We could not possibly have done this without a huge amount of financial and emotional support from our families. I’m also extremely grateful that Nancy has been willing and able to do this. I’m really looking forward to having some wonderful adventures together there and in other parts of Asia when possible. I have a lot of friends in South Korea, both Korean and foreign, and I look forward to them meeting her. She’s at a great time in her life for this type of adventure and I can’t believe how lucky I am to be in this relationship. I think she’ll really love it and I know that I’ll love spending time with her in Korea and taking the next step in our lives and our relationship.

Letter to My Representatives

Dear Senator Stabenow,

I appreciate your service to the state of Michigan in the US Senate. I was reading Nicholas Kristof’s latest column in the NY Times and felt myself getting very angry about the situations he described. Obviously the fair treatment of women, roughly half of the population of US and every other country on the planet, should be a priority. As an American man, it’s easy for me not to think about very much until I come across something like this. And then, in my anger and frustration, I look to my state and national leaders to see what they’re doing about it, if the issue is a priority for them. I know you have a lot on your plate, and I don’t want to dictate your priorities. To me, when women are oppressed, traded into slavery, and abused without a second thought, this is a fundamental problem, and we must drag ourselves and other countries, especially our partners and allies, that would like to be considered mature and modern, into the light and chart a path to gender equality and protection of the abused. As a man, women are our mothers and our sisters, our aunts and cousins. This is a no-brainer. The stories in his column are truly astounding, infuriating, and heart-breaking.

Thank you for listening.

Peace, sincerely,
Colin Spitler

I remember

I remember the apartment, 2-bedroom apartment that my family lived in for a year in Bakersfield. Beth was still very young, maybe a year old and Anne (still Ann or Annie then) was in 4th or 5th grade. I’m 2 1/2 years older than her, so I started at Thompson Jr. High in 7th grade two days after we drove to Bakersfield in August in our classic orange and white VW bus on an incredibly hot day, when our legs in my Ocean Pacific corduroy short shorts sweated and stuck to the vinyl seats. The driver – my mother in this case – really had to work to get a speeding ticket and keep it on the road in a high wind. At least that’s how it felt as a 13-year old who watched every single car on I-99 zoom past us. We were handicapped by the boxes we packed in the car that morning, the first wave of our move from Merced, 3 hours north of Bakersfield. I was starting school the next day at Thompson and was that strange combination of cocky, nervous, and self-conscious that the young and inexperience often are. Different for girls of my age? Probably, maybe, I don’t know.

Given that Bakersfield has a well-deserved reputation for brutally hot summers, we had packed nothing for me except my short shorts and t-shirts. Still, I was sweating wildly when we pulled into our apartment complex’s parking lot.

Anne and I slept in one room and mom slept in the other room with Beth in a crib in my parent’s walk-in closet. We teased Beth about that for years, hope she didn’t resent it.

I forget who told me on the first day of school that my shorts were against the rules. Shorts couldn’t be any shorter than 2 inches above the knee.My OP’s, which I thought were pretty cool (literally too) and everybody who was cool in Merced were wearing them. I remember laughing at the kids I saw in Bakersfield as we drove into town who were wearing these-old-man shorts that were comically long, some reaching all the way to their knees. I think Ann and I both laughed at them. But I was the one embarrassed when I had to go to the principals office and he explained the dress code to me. He told me I’d have to go home that day and put on a longer pair before I could come back to school. I nearly broke down thinking about the many offending pairs of shorts I had and zero pairs of the sill, long ones. Of course, why would I have any of those ridiculous things?

Fortunately, my parents knew one family in Bakersfield with kids Ann and my ages. My mom didn’t have anything more than food and gas money, so until dad arrived with the rest of our stuff, including my pants and more money, I had to borrow a pair of my de facto best friend’s pants. He wasn’t as, ahem, stocky as I was, so I felt like a sausage when I finally squeezed into them, but at least I didn’t have to wear those silly shorts. I had to suppress my laughter every time I saw them. At least for the first week. As the temperatures hovered in the low 100′s all week, my resistance melted, along with the rest of me.

A New K-Pop Star Emerges

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Some Recent Happenings

• Hostess, which made many baked goods, such as Twinkies and Wonder Bread, went out of business yesterday. It’s debatable whether their baked goods were any good.
• Former general and ex CIA chief David Petraeus, testified about the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Lybia. Fortunately the focus was on the intelligence, not on gossip about the affair which caused his resignation from the CIA.