One- reasonable expectations, like expecting a man to not:

Cheat, build a fort out of Domino’s Pizza boxes in the living room, buy Xbox Live credits with money that should have paid the heating bill, open a GoDaddy account, try to sell you Amway, make his own salvia YouTube videos, make you watch “Two Girls, One Cup,” force you to take the bus to the hospital because it’s the night Madden comes out and he won’t drive you, etc.

Two- dumb, outdated expectations, like expecting a man to:

Always make more money than you do, never fart or grow/lose hair in an unfortunate way, read your mind (gifts you want, tasks that you’d like done, why you’re mad), have a clearer, more defined career path than you have, sacrifice all the things he enjoys because you want him to, have somehow weathered the recession without taking the same kinds of hits you have, pay more than he can afford for things you want, continually strive toward the goal of making lots of money for you to spend despite what he may actually want.

Women who carry around more expectations from category 2 than category 1 are a generalized group that I call Princesses.

Like the Judd Apatow guy, The Princess is sort of co-constructed by media and commercialism. It doesn’t take more than a casual glance at most magazines or TV shows aimed at 20-something women to see that the rhetoric is all about narcissism, sexual power, and consumption. YOU deserve this. YOU need this. YOU can have all of this. YOU are special. YOU are beautiful. YOU are worth it. Though this is mirrored, in large part, in lad mags like Maxim and, to a certain extent, Playboy, there is a fundamental difference. While the boy versions present the goal of affluent consumption as a reward for hard work and climbing up the corporate ladder (as flawed and fictitious as that construct might be, especially now), the girl versions basically assert that by virtue of being an attractive woman, things are *owed* to you. The sex tips (while always hilarious) are presented alongside ads for diamonds and Louboutins to really drive the message home… do this, and you’ll get jewelry. Do that, and you are owed a Mercedes. This makes for some particularly toxic relationships and some pretty terrible pairings in a dating field that, as I’ve established, tends to have a pretty rough Seth Rogan to JFK Jr. ratio.

Spoiler Alert: literally every "bad girl sex tip:" putting your finger in his butt.

It’s not just Cosmo. A disturbingly large portion of advertisers seem to parrot this same idea… perhaps it says more about the fact that Americans are generally told to let products do the talking for them, but nevertheless, the message every Valentine’s Day  and Christmas season is the same: women use sex as currency, and if you’re not paying up, you’re not holding up your end of the bargain.

But what about all the work that feminism did to bring women into the workplace, attempt a more equitable society, make women aspire to kill the old stereotypes and grow past the idea that they need a man to meet their needs?

Well… the sad thing is, all that happened and is still happening, but Princesses have grown to embrace an entitled attitude not because they can’t do the things that men can do, but because they would like for a man to give them everything they want.

It seemed to be an outgrowth after about the third wave of feminism (the really pissed-off wave) when it looked like things were simply never going to change. Camille Paglia had go flapping her trap about sexual power and before you knew it, an entire generation of girls was raised believing that breaking down barriers and fighting for equality was for ugly chicks. A weird concept of what empowerment truly meant began to bubble up, encouraged by advertisers and a culture that just refuses to grow up about sex.

This endures in what Stephanie Coontz described as “The Hottie Mystique:” the idea that it’s OK to do all the things you want to do, careerwise, lifewise, even pregnancywise… as long as you’re hot. If you’re hot, you can be excused for being female. And if you’re hot, the world owes you a living. Being pretty may no longer be the only thing that a woman can offer to the world… but in many ways, it is still portrayed as the most important thing. I’ve yet to read a single magazine article about Christine Lagarde or Arianna Huffington or Hillary Clinton that does not, in some way, make a pointed evaluation of the subject’s physical appearance. Just as I’ve never read a piece that mentions Mark Zuckerberg’s “sexy smile” or Warren Buffet’s “gracefully aging” face. This may be for several reasons, but one of them is definitely that our society doesn’t think that Warren Buffet’s appearance isn’t important, but Hillary Clinton’s appearance is.

So… let’s talk a little about why I’m calling women who bank on their sexuality “Princesses” instead of, well, any number of choice terms for women who exchange things of financial value for sex. It’s because of just how early on the idea of Pretty=Power is beaten into little girls’ heads.

Belle is the most intellectual one, but even she gets married due to Stockholm Syndrome.

Now, obviously, Disney didn’t invent the idea of the pretty princess who finds a prince and never has to work at a Dress Barn a day in her life. But Disney has packaged it, marketed it, and all but forced it on every girl age 0-16. Just as a diminishing field of expectations has lead to a group of men for whom fully-realized adulthood is entirely optional, an obsessive focus on the Princess storyline has lead to a group of women for whom beauty is understood as a key to success.

And there really isn’t much to discourage this… Our modern day Princesses are everywhere you look. Talentless celebutantes, reality TV stars, pretty-but-bland pop stars. I’m just waiting for the moment I ask a little girl what she wants to be when she grows up, and I’m answered with “A Kardashian.” If it is necessary for even the most successful women in the world to be at least somewhat attractive, it is still completely optional for the most beautiful women in the world to be at least somewhat useful.

And, lest we forget, there are plenty of men for whom the idea of sexual capital has been reinforced to the point where women no longer register as people, but as products themselves. I’ve had experience with men like this. A lot of those “catches” out there, with 250k salaries, postgraduate educations, Audi SUVs, attractive in that “rich douchebag” kind of way… they have no reason at all to believe that women won’t do anything for money, because those are the only women they’ve ever been around. And the women, in turn, have no reason to believe that being beautiful can’t buy them whatever they want. It’s gross.

But here’s the thing. Not all women are gold-digging Princesses, any more than all men are slackass Grandma’s Boys, rich douchebags or Ryan Gosling. The point I tried to make with my previous post, and the point I’m trying to make here, is that men and women live in a world where the old expectations are no longer relevant, but are still tenaciously embedded in our culture. We can all take care of ourselves, none of us “need” a partner to give us what we require on a day-to-day level. It’s time to stop thinking of relationships in terms of who “owes” what to whom. The only thing we should expect our partners to give us is themselves.

That something is this: The ONLY population right now that puts any kinds of expectations on single men ages 20-40 are single women ages 20-40. And as the last vestiges of any kinds of goals or ambitions we impose on the male population fade into history, women’s expectations of these guys only continue to go up.

There is a fundamental disconnect here. Somehow Sex and the Cityand Katherine Heigl movies have convinced a generation of women that Prince Eric and Beast haven’t gone away… they’re just out there, to be found at a coffeeshop scribbling in a moleskin notebook and wearing a peacoat. Meanwhile, an entire generation of men has been raised in a society where they are expected to do little else than buoy the video game and adult entertainment industries. For every single 30-something professional woman out there who is working herself into a Zanax presription with a full-time job, higher education, insane expectations for female aesthetics, a ticking biological clock and a match.com profile, there is a 30-something man (maybe two of them!) with a medical marijuana card, an unemployment check and eight straight hours of Halo spread out before him: a vast mindless horizon of pixelated death and dismemberment. Ladies, it is important to remember this: a huge contingent of single men in their 20s and 30s are essentially Tom Hanks in “Big.” They are a boy in a man suit. The internal dialogue of an 11 year old boy and a 28 year old man are only distinguished by experience and frequency of swear words.

Yes, there are exceptions, and no, you shouldn’t settle. The exceptions, however, are a vanishingly small population. I work for the city, and I see them occasionally: well-dressed, ambitious young urban planners, lawyers, financial professionals. But the thing is, a guy possessed of ambition, drive and career goals like that is basically the supermodel of the man world. They are, almost without fail, married (or gay) or have had girlfriends their entire adult lives. Or, and perhaps this is even more common, they are not that interested in getting into a long-term relationship of any kind because they are married to their jobs or aren’t emotionally mature enough to think in those terms. In this world, that guy in the peacoat with more appointments on his smartphone than games AND a desire for a long-term committed relationship is Heidi Klum. It’s OK to dream big, girls, but it’s also important to understand that this is the reality of our situation. It’s time to reevaluate The Keeper. If you find a guy with a job, no drug addictions, and a reasonably tentacle-free porn collection, you are ahead of the game. And maybe it’s time for all of us to look past the antiquated ideas of the man making more money, the man having more education, or the man needing to be the provider and see that this guy has a lot more to offer than a 401k or a spot on the board of his HOA. These guys aren’t bad, they’re just… constructs of our society.

Hey girl. Let's make some grilled cheese and play Red Dead Redemption.

It’s not the guy’s fault that our nation has basically made adulthood the responsibility of women and people in other countries. Think about it: women are taking on more management roles, women are frequently the heads of households in the absence of a man, and the jobs that used to employ men with limited educations or skill sets are no longer available in this country. The American Man has outsourced adulthood to the Chinese labor force and women in management. Nothing left to do than sit back and smoke a bowl and play Fallout 3.

I am married. I am not married like Zoey Deschanel and Ben Gibbard were married. We don’t play ukelele songs and draw pictures of unicorns and wear fake handlebar mustaches and go for rides on our tandem bicycle (this is basically what I imagine their marriage to be like, and all the while Zoey is singing in that weird June Carter Cash/Morrissey voice of hers about baking cupcakes).

The saddest part was when Ben rode the tandem bike home, alone, from the courthouse.

I am married like we pay the bills and have to make decisions about health insurance and I am past the point where I try to look cute when I’m getting ready for bed and I try not to care when promises go unkept and things go unsaid. I am married because I found someone who loves me and who is a genuinely good person. I am married because I can take care of myself and don’t need someone to do that, but I like coming home to someone who cares about me. I decided to be married and I opted not to hold out for a guy who has a genetic mutation that keeps him from farting or growing back hair. It’s far from perfect. But it’s real. And it’s here, now.

The author here asserts that there are hard-wired, genetic reasons that cause “threat-averse” people to be more conservative-minded, and an “exploratory” nature can be cited for liberal ideologies.

The author here claims that this is an evolutionary mechanism… and I can imagine that the evolutionary payoff for both ideologies would probably be about one-to-one for those who are less likely to make changes and face risks (thereby lessening the chances of being poisoned by new foods, killed by a different clan, or injured/made less desirable by mates by a backfired invention or innovation) and those who are more likely to try new things, and therefore reap rewards in the wild (i.e., biodiversity among tribes, better nutrition through a diverse diet, lives made easier by inventions of their own design).

But here’s my problem. If we are, as the writer here says, genetically more likely to adopt one idea over another, there is no way we can make progress away from conservatism, unless it is simply a matter of those who evolved one way conquering those who evolved the other. To my mind, this simply promotes the notion that liberals and conservatives are opposite football teams, unable to cross over and unable to change their minds. And I really don’t like that idea. I’ll lay out a few reasons here why I think the author may be right, and a few reasons why I think he’s wrong:

I do agree that may of the toughest, most dyed-in-the-wool conservatives I’ve met do, indeed, seem to be almost physically unable to think the way I do. It does seem to bear out that in many cases, liberal parents have liberal children, and conservative families have conservative children (though there are many reasons for this). And many people who are conservative politically vote directly against their own best interests, seemingly out of a fear of change and a risk-averse worldview, wherein political change is seen as very, very frightening. The language of the right does seem to be most effective when fear is used to characterize changes or people on the other side. Was Rove using a biologically-based technique when he constructed the rhetoric around The War on Terror? Perhaps.

But… I’ve also seen many people change their minds. Think Ariana Huffington, the founder of the site the original blog appears on. It is pretty typical for young idealists to become more conservative as they grow up or for progressives to become more conservative as they become wealthier. I have become a hundred times more liberal than I was when I lived in Boulder and was so aggravated by the blind faith everyone there took in liberal ideals and oversimplified progressive concepts. Everyone knows someone whose political mindset has done a 180. And I’ve frequently encountered the 50/50 rule when it comes to children of hard-line ideologues. About half of the children of any politically-aligned family will rebel, and go completely away from the ideologies of their parents.

The 50/50 Rule: It even happens to Mormons.

When I was in a class as an undergrad (a long, long time ago) we discussed the whole “gender as a social construct” thing in the context of feral children. These are, for those unaware, children who had been left to fend for themselves in wild settings for any number of reasons (abuse and neglect, usually), and who developed without society, culture or artificial constraints on behavior. Feral children are a rare glimpse into what it is like when someone lives entirely outside the social constructs we impose on our daily realities. Among the observations made about feral children is that without society’s dictates of gender, the children do not express any kind of sexual identity. Despite the vast body of research that says we are genetically and biologically different as men and women (and all manner of expressions in between), the removal of culture seems to result in an inactivation of these differences. I would argue that although there may be genetic reasons behind risk-averse behaviors and risk-accepting behaviors, just like there are biological differences in the genders, the outward or ideological manifestations of these markers is likely a cultural construction, not a biological mandate. I would tend to believe that if you tested a random sample of persons in a culture like, say, The Netherlands, you would still find risk-averse and risk-accepting invididuals who express themselves politically in much different ways than Americans with the same genetic coding.

Further… I know I’ve experienced the feelings of “disgust” that the writer used as examples of a conservative reaction to “threatening” images of people like Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush. They make me angry and inspire feelings of disgust and contempt, even now. I don’t think of myself as a particularly “exploratory” person, political or otherwise. If anything, I would characterize my liberalism more as a fear of or disgust with threats like unchecked Capitalism, government control of my sexual health, the eventual consequences of corporate destruction of the world we live in. I don’t know if my fear of a post-Peak-Oil world is the exact same fear that someone else might have for a world in which gays can marry at will, women are in complete control of their sexual and medical choices, and cultural pluralism is the rule instead of the exception. But I think it might be close.

Lymphoma is a tough bitch. Known treatments more or less fall into a hole when lymphoma is the diagnosis. The doctors said they could treat his symptoms, but that the cancer would not be stopped. He was up for any kind of treatment: chemo, stem cells, transplants, clinical trials. He was going to fight it by any means necessary, and he did. But among the ugly truths about cancer, the one put so eloquently in one of Christopher Hitchen’s last columns for Vanity Fair is that what doesn’t kill you doesn’t always make you stronger. In fact, in the case of cancer treatments, what doesn’t kill you can bring you right up close to death, and what eventually saves you can make you want to die.

Yet, nothing was out of the question for Roy. He wanted to live, at least long enough to do important things like be an important part of his granddaughter’s life, and to learn a little bit more about me, the woman his son married. He wanted to learn more about the man his son had become, with whom he had only recently begun to truly reconcile after a tough childhood and tougher young adulthood. This Tuesday morning, three and a half years after he was given just a half-year to live, he slipped away in his sleep. Quietly and without the complications of breathing machines, ugly decisions, painful and expensive measures to keep him alive. We saw him together for the last time on Saturday evening (Dale had seen him Monday evening, only hours before he passed) and while it was clear he was pleased to see us, he looked depleted in a way I’d never seen before. He was just so tired, so delicate-looking, so small. I didn’t think it was the last time I’d see him alive… but I thought it was going to be one of the last.

Dale and I have been together for about five years, and I think that most of the strength that forms the foundation of our marriage has to do with the fact that for most of our years together, we have held each other up in the face of this awful diagnosis: the trips to the hospital, the treatments, the insane levels of financial and emotional stress it injected into an already-dramatic family dynamic. I truly believe a weaker connection would have been broken by the events of the last three and a half years, but for us, it has brought us closer in ways I don’t think either of us ever anticipated. I wouldn’t wish this kind of situation on my worst enemy’s crab lice, but the truth is, life happens. And when you face life with a partner, both the good parts and the unimaginably bad parts, it is often the bad parts that truly make or break the bonds you share.

I never knew I could be this strong for someone, and the part of Dale I’ve seen in the face of these tragedies is the part of him that I have come to most admire. While it’s ground us both down plenty of times, and while we haven’t gotten here without the occasional aide of a strong cocktail, when the worst times bring out the best in someone, you can’t help but love them even more.

 I already miss Roy. He and I related on a number of things: cars, vintage films (and vintage starlets), food, history. I am sad that I never really got to know him as well as I would have liked. I could have sat in that dusty, tchotchke-filled den and talked about Volkswagens and Stuart Andersons steaks for hours. While Dale and I grew up in vastly different homes and in vastly different ways, Roy and I could always find something to chat about. He spent the last years of his life doing everything he could to raise his granddaughter in an incredibly difficult circumstance, and doing everything he could to make up for the struggles he faced when raising his own family. He wanted to make things right with his son, and I think, in his way, he did.

The way Roy would talk about food was the way I talk about food, and toward the end, he didn’t enjoy eating like he always had. I know that for me, that would be torturous. He was so glad we were there for Christmas, but you could tell he couldn’t enjoy it as much as he wanted to. He was just so tired. His body wasn’t letting him do the things he loved, even on a basic level. I know that if this was the way I had to live, I would only hold on for the really important stuff. I think that he did just that. Thank you for the time we were able to share, Roy. You will be missed.

The crazy thing? Both of these films are actually so feminist I don’t think they’d get greenlit today. The idea of Lily Tomlin’s lament of a “Pink Collar Ghetto” or Diane Keaton’s CEO turned small business owner would bounce right off the shiny faux-tanned foreheads of just about any Hollywood exec today. I actually can’t imagine anything as progressive as either of these films getting onto a screen today. First: middle-aged women and funny women are about as common on the Silver Screen today as wheat pennies, and women who express any power unaccompanied with sexual power simply don’t exist in American film. Even if they remade Baby Boom today, the main character would be an impossibly sexy mid-career starlet, not a dowdy chick in tweed and shoulder pads.

It has taken me a long time to realize this, especially given the environment I grew up in, but the truth is, we are not becoming more progressive as a nation, especially in regards to our portrayals of women.

Let me back that up. We are not becoming more progressive in the ways I always thought we would. There are some ways in which progress, as I see it (as a child raised on NPR, PBS and Sunday mornings watching James Carville carve his wife up like a Christmas ham) have occurred. Gay marriage is in the dialogue, the gay community is becoming a more accepted part of American life (at least in most communities, and, I think even if someone is a bigot in the abstract, they often make exceptions in the concrete, day-to-day social maneuvers they perform). Racial discrimination is a social taboo, and all but the most backwards among us accept the idea that outward manifestations of racial prejudice are unacceptable (although the internal beliefs held by many are still very much alive and a much trickier, stubborn facet of racism to remove from a society. Racism may be thought of as backwards and ignorant, but we disagree a lot over what exactly comprises a racist). We accept women in very powerful positions in this country, to a degree and not without a heapin’ helpin’ of sexist comments and degradation. Yes, some progress has been made and  I do think that the social climate that is expressed in those 1980s flicks where women tried to “have it all” is part of that progress. But I don’t think my liberal parents thought that we would still be debating the scientific merit of evolutionary biology in 2011. I don’t think my parents thought that their daughters would still be fighting to be taken seriously in the workplace in 2011, and I am sure they would have been as dismayed as I was while watching a member of the next generation of girls open pink package after heteronormative pink package on Christmas day.

It was actually after watching our niece on Christmas that I had a pretty awful breakdown with my husband. What hope is there? I asked him. I begged him to give me a reason to believe that this world would be a world worth living in during the lifetime of any child born today. As if the big stuff isn’t enough: Christian dominionism, global warming, peak oil, garbage gyre, the diminishing importance of science and technology in the most developed nation in the world… There is the little stuff. Our niece didn’t get a single book for Christmas. Just a slew of plastic crap meant to help her fulfill her more important role as a pretty thing, a pink-clad, oversexualized object. She’s eight. She’s smart. But she’s cute, and she is being hammered with the idea that this is what is most important. And yes, I know that if we had a girl in our lives, we’d do what we could to counteract these kinds of social pressures. And if we had a boy, we’d do what we could to teach him that girls have more to offer in life than to be tiny Barbies or, even worse, passive, faceless Bellas (from Twilight). But nevertheless, there are always going to be kids all around them that feed off of this social narrative, and those will be their peers.

The things we teach girls are not just a feminist issue, or a women’s issue. We all are either women or people who interact daily with women. Women are half of our society. If we continue to go backwards with what we teach our girls, the rest of society will go backwards as well.

It is really easy for me to get morose about this kind of thing, and when I was discussing it with my sister yesterday. She was talking about having children, I was talking about all of these reasons why I wouldn’t want to force someone to have to live through this shitshow of fundamentalism, short-sightedness, greed, oppression, war and self-destruction. She made me feel somewhat better in that she’s much smarter than I am regarding things like human nature and public policy. She said she thinks that things can only get so much worse before something amazing happens, and that while negative changes may be occurring on some levels, in other ways, fantastic advances and changes are happening that have immensely positive implications down the road. Focusing on just one part of the changes and developments in this world is a myopic view. And that maybe this experiment called America will eventually fail, something else will necessarily take its place. Things go on. We don’t know how this story will go. I still don’t think I’ll ever feel confident enough about what happens next to make the conscious decision to try and have a child. But for all of the things that go worse, there are ways in which things can possibly get better.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I was not raised in a religious household. My parents were happy to provide us with the basic ideas of Christianity, but we did not go to church. Perhaps this is why I simply cannot understand the impulse of belief. I remember other children describing their Sunday School lessons to me and just not understanding why anyone would believe it. I find moral guidance in empathy with other people. I find fellowship in family, friends, even coworkers. I find purpose in myself, the support of those I love, my talents and inspirations. I find solace in the beauty and complexity of the world as we know it, and fascination with the discovery of new theories for things we don’t know. I have never in my adult life truly felt a compulsion to believe in anything supernatural. I’ve never come face-to-face with a problem so great I’ve felt a need to consult a higher power for aid. I’ve never had a question in my life where I’ve needed a God to help me find an answer.

And now that I’ve seen Christopher Hitchens face cancer, decay and an agonizing battle against the inevitable without once succumbing to the path of least resistance and greatest catharsis, I feel relatively sure there is no dilemma so great that will ever turn me to faith.

I understand why religion exists. We are social animals but also scheming ones, a dangerous combination in some cases. There was a time when, in order to be safe from predators and warring tribes, moral codes needed something more than the enforcement of a tribal leader to be taken seriously. In a superstitious time, the threat of a vengeful God kept people from doing things that were understood to keep a community in control. This control kept the community producing the things that kept a society prosperous in the face of enemies and uncontrollable elements.

To keep a society safe, it needed numbers and structure. It needed women to have and raise babies and men to preside over strong family units. It needed to have trust among its members to not steal or kill. It needed a social contract that provided incentive against doing things that people would do, if acting on pure self-interested instinct. Enter God. And eventually, heaven and hell. Burgeoning cultures needed an entity that enforced the codes that kept civilizations prosperous, profitable and safe. Perhaps this is why we’ve had such a difficult time keeping the church and state separate. In its previous incarnations, the church WAS the state. It was the law.

But much as our progression up the hierarchy of needs allowed us to invent God to keep ourselves in line, our summit to the very top has allowed us to question God’s relevance.  Our world is so different now. Women, freed from perpetual childbirth, childrearing and pregnancy now not only contribute to society’s success but lead, manage and strategize it. Same-sex relationships no longer threaten the society’s growth and “safety in numbers.” Marriage is no longer necessary for building a society’s stability and population. Religion tells us these progressions are transgressions and we must return to the order we once knew. But I see it differently. We built societies based on these moral codes and their success enabled us to come to the point we are at now. But I seriously think that the concept of God has taken us as far as it can. And that clinging to it now only keeps us from reaching the next level of our magnificent, unique evolution.

A girl is planted in the middle of the bus despite the crush of people boarding at Downing. The man behind me asks politely but loudly to move back. We all proceed to the back.

There are spots in the back, untaken. I sit across from the roadblock girl and notice she is carrying creamy coffee in a spaghetti sauce jar. I do this often and I smile and I want to tell her how I always feel less crazy when I see someone else do it. But I’ve learned from experience that talking about “crazy,” even in a somewhat colloqial sense, is not usually a good way to start a conversation on the bus.

It is then that I notice her eyes, and from then on I can’t stop stealing glances at them. The lightest lightest gray, as close to white as you could get without looking monstrous. The color of smoke. The color of river stones. Like the sky when you can’t see clouds because the whole sky is a cloud.

I can’t help myself, but each time I see her startling eyes, I think of some writerly way to describe them. Grey like what green looks like in a black and white movie. Grey like a baby goose. Grey like sunbleached cement.

I find myself wondering if it runs in her family. I imagine the same white-grey eyes staring out onto Salisbury Plain or up at castle spires in some Teutonic mountain valley. I imagine a family portrait at the turn of the century, two generations of the eyes staring out.

I try to make a point of not staring at her, but staring out into nothing. Staring on the bus is not acceptable, this is how you differentiate between people who are just trying to get to work and those who don’t have anywhere else to go.

The bus stumbles down Colfax, slowly. I’m late for work. It’s icy out, I respect the committment to safety, but I’m frustrated nonetheless. I notice that right as I finally get to my stop, as I stand up to leave, the grey eyes briefly meet mine. I blink and turn away, shuffling through legs, arms, coats and bags to exit. Everything on the bus is momentary. Touch, sight, people, space. Blink and it’s over.

Sure enough, a small line of people were moving from the camp toward our administrative building. They blocked traffic and the cop cars that had been sitting silently around the park began to mobilize. This isn’t going to end well, I thought. And I’m sure it won’t. As of 2 pm today,  mark my words: Someone is about to do something stupid and it will be labeled as part of these “Occupy” shenanigans those crazy kids are talking about.

It’s time to stop this. Maybe the people you’ve heard about who have defecated on the sidewalk or picked fights with cops were plants. Do you think it matters? Of course it doesn’t. Does it still matter that the WMDs were a lie? No, it never mattered. The truth about what happens is not nearly as important as the way it characterized a moment. And right now, Occupy is letting what could have been the most important populist moment in our nation’s history since VietNam become branded in the dumbest way possible, by the dumbest people involved. But, let’s face it, Occupiers have been going about this the wrong way since day 1. I’ve only been a PR student for four months and I see this.

First. Camping. What does camping accomplish? Besides violating pretty well-known laws regarding the use of public spaces, the only thing camping proves is that you are so entrenched in a culture of privilege that you have purchased equipment for the “recreation” purpose of sleeping outdoors rather than viewing it as a possible worst case scenario. I’m not sure who first decided that camping was the rhetorical approach the Occupy movement needed to take here, but they screwed up. The only thing the camping idea created is a frame of lawlessness (not following park rules), and presupposes that the people involved in the protest either don’t or don’t have to work (and can take a week off to camp in a park). Great start, good job.

Second: the message. Yes, the media has distorted, ignored, oversimplified and dumbed-down the Occupy message. Guess what? They do that. They always do that. But you can manipulate the media to your advantage, too. The Occupiers needed a clean, short easy-to-distribute, press-release style manifesto from day one. It needed to make its way into the hands of large numbers of press professionals, at the local level. Not a month later, casually thrown onto the blog like so much half-assed afterthought, not after malcontents and idiots started carrying signs about anarchy and “distributing wealth evenly” that had nothing to do with what they really were trying to accomplish. Not only was the message unclear, but it was unclear enough that even protesters started bastardizing it. The thing is, if you are going to truly affect change (or build a brand, which, isn’t that really what you’re doing here?), you must control your message. You must make sure it is well-articulated and kept strong, and that other messages don’t start to dilute the original spirit. And you can’t control a message that comes out halfway into the movement.

Third: the crowd. What started here as a comment on Capitalism Gone Wild has been diluted by basement-dwellers and mental cases carrying anarchy pamphlets and whacked-out plans to destroy our fundamental economic system (rhetorically destroy and, you know, destroy with actual bombs and stuff). Obviously, a message that a.) speaks truth to power and b.) takes actual, tangible action and protest to the doorsteps of people in power is going to attract some weirdos. The Tea Party may have had some good points about restructuring government (let’s face it, they actually did, but then, the Koch brothers… well, you know the end of that story). But whose pictures end up in the paper? People with signs photoshopped so Obama looks like a simian Hitler. The weirdos always, always wind up speaking for you. You might have taken some lessons from how the Tea Party made their points. But no. If Occupy hadn’t started with breaking the law by sleeping on public property, maybe the crowd would be different. But now we’ll never know, will we? And instead of getting any kind of constructive message articulated, you wind up with people like this:

Classy.

My point is that while there is a possibility that a lot of the truly idiotic acts that have been attributed to Occupy may or may not be coming from actual protesters, it doesn’t matter. The way the entire protest has been framed is now a fait accompli. And it didn’t have to be that way.

From what I can tell, the people who actually began this protest are smart, savvy people with a good head on their shoulders and the advantage of actually being, you know, right about the issue at hand. Global corporations (and the people who run them) have used capitalism to perpetrate environmental destruction, endless war, a gaping and growing gap between the rich and the poor, constant illness requiring constant healthcare consumption, desperate poverty in our own nation and abroad, and the dwindling relevance of the American worker. This is all stuff well worth protesting. In fact, it is all stuff that requires protest. But the rhetoric of how Occupy addresses this is all wrong. It’s messy, flawed, vague, based on a practice that breaks the law, and as such, opens a space for the really, really dumb rhetoric that has, sadly, come to exemplify the entire movement. Blame the press if it makes you feel better. Say the people who punched that cop were planted, if that gives you something to tell your therapist. But the truth is, it’s too late. By failing to take control of the message at the beginning, it stopped being yours to control.

And now, you’re entire movement, what could have been the American Autumn to follow the Arab Spring, is reduced to this guy:

So what happens now?  Well, if we’re going to follow with my branding analogy here, you do damage control.

First, get the fuck out of the park. You’ve done all you can there. Pack up the tent, rent an office (with that $1.2 million in donations) and start working.

Second: build the Occupy brand like you’re starting from scratch. The commercials are a good start. It’s really almost too late to recuperate from the disastrous events in the parks over the past 3 weeks, but the message needs to be that you are the 99%. Not in number (we get that already) but in culture. The face of occupy can’t be the guy above with his emergency crocs and stupid sign. The message can’t be that capitalism doesn’t work. It needs to be that capitalism isn’t being allowed to work. See what I did there? Normal people can understand a movement that, you know, doesn’t start dancing down the red-brick Communism road. The solution needs to be presented in the context of action items people can understand. What can be done (try things like “not camp out in a park,” for starters)? How can people vote? Who can they write to? Where can they donate? What is the actual problem (Hint: it’s not the CEOs. It’s the lack of corporate regulation and campaign finance oversight that allows them to exist the way they are)? How can we solve it? How can the real 99%, the ones too busy (or well-reasoned) to camp in a park take action to affect real change? There are answers for these questions. You know them. Now get out of your tent and start making a difference.

The diesel smell was just one of the scents the Albuquerque wind brought to his rooftop. For a while, it was just the one smell. The decaying smell. The putrefaction of all of the bodies in the Red Cross’s makeshift emergency room. The military was able to hold off the sickened masses from the repurposed recreation center for an admirable amount of time. But as he’d seen in the other war, too, desperation makes men and women both stronger and weaker than they could ever imagine. Before long, stores of food and water were running out and even the Marines were fighting among themselves. He had watched from the rooftop as the people inside made an attempt to escape, and as they were devoured by the sickened. He had watched their bodies bake and bleach in the New Mexico sun, a few reanimating to scavenge the streets. For days the death-stench would waft upward to his post, but as the desert heat intensified into the midsummer months, and as the monsoons washed their blood into the gutters, the sage-filled, sandy, summer smell returned. The smell of his childhood at his grandfather’s ranch in Bernalillo. And of course, the smell of teenage summertimes, parked in the desert, making love to her in the backseat of his Chevy Nova.

He arched his back, stretched his muscles, tried to focus on the pain in his back instead of the pain all over that every memory of her would always inspire. He stared intently through the scope of the sniper rifle, hoping that a target would make itself plain, something he could take down. Usually popping a sickened or two would take his mind off of her. It didn’t last long, but it helped get him through the day. The roof of the high-school-turned-lofts had a splendid view of downtown, offering a vantage point for most of Central Boulevard and parts of the surrounding neighborhoods. Usually there was something to kill. And nothing short of killing something kept her from creeping back into his mind.

Today was tougher, though. It was October now, and the leaves on the few deciduous trees downtown were changing to a fierce yellow. The breeze tossed the leaves like confetti into the air, and imbued it with the bitter, tea-like perfume of autumn. He didn’t know what day of the month it was, and even “October” was a tenuous guess, but it was close enough. He remembered seeing her for the first time in her wedding dress, walking under the Old Town Square trees to the gazebo, a slow cascade of yellow leaves falling around her as she walked. Must have been almost ten years ago, he thought, desperately scanning the boulevards for a sickened to take down. He remembered her black hair gently blowing back from her bare, freckled shoulders as she approached him. He remembered her smile, all red lipstick and crooked teeth and nervousness. He remembered kissing the bride.

Pop.

An elderly sickened emerged from an underpass and immediately slumped to the ground. The soldier’s mind refocused for a moment. He took another breath and began to scan the arroyos.

It had to be close to their anniversary. Which meant it was also close to the ten-year-mark of when he was shipped off. Which meant it was close to the eight-year mark of when she started fucking his stepbrother. He hunched his shoulders.

Movement, then, faint at first but growing louder. He strained to hear. A familiar shuffling and muted, bestial howls. There were a lot of them, somewhere close and getting closer. First just a few were visible, walking the middle of a dry arroyo. Then dozens, then maybe a hundred. He tried to calculate how much ammunition was still available in the sporting goods store down the street, the one he’d been raiding for months now. It was pretty picked-over when he got there, but it had sustained him this far. His mind briefly alighted on a long-term plan. How much longer would he stay, picking off the sickened, passively waiting for signs of healthy life while feeding off the canned goods left in the lofts below? He walked to the opposite corner of the rooftop, toward the direction of the wailing sounds of the sickened. They had someone, he thought. They always howled like that when they were hunting live prey.

Then he saw her. Through the scope it was unclear at first, then his heart swelled into his throat and beat at a rabbit’s pace. She was bitten. Probably only hours from sickening. They were after her. She was limping down the arroyo, trying at times to walk up the the sides, but it only slowed her down. Her hair blew around her face as the breeze gusted into a full-blown desert wind. Dust and sand obscured her for a moment, then she was clear in the frame of the rifle scope.

He remembered the first night they slept together. Blake’s burgers and a sunset, vanilla cokes, driving to the top of Sandia, finding a dark spot to pull over, making love in the way only teenagers do, as if death were coming and only their fumbling passion could hold it off another day. He remembered the last time he’d seen her before today. The day he came home. A party with American flags and his grandmother’s tamales. And her, making an obligatory, wounding appearance, smiling sadly at his friends and family. It had all been said by then, of course. She was young, she couldn’t wait or him, they both had changed, Ernesto had been there for her, but could they please still be friends? The same cliches he’d seen with half his platoon. Young men, young women, impatience. Love that, when tested by PTSD, amputations and every kind of distance, doesn’t survive.

She and the mob were much closer now, and now; he was positive it was her. She was thinner, like everyone who had survived. She was flushed and obviously weakened. Blood stained her dark green pants near a wound on her thigh. She was losing ground to the sickened. She must know from the bite that she has no hope of survival, he thought. She knows… but she’s still running. But then, what choice does she have? Their peculiar, plaintive calls echoed from the bowl of the arroyo.

He arched his back, stood up. He stretched his neck from side to side. There was the familiar anger within him, the anger that had fueled the killing of dozens of insurgents and by now, God knows how many sickened. Before he had found out about her and Ernesto, the killing had been harder. He shook when he aimed. He’d shake for hours afterward. He was told he would never be a sniper and they suspended his training, tried to figure out how to use him. But once the divorce papers were signed, the trigger nearly pulled itself. He was a bullet-delivery unit. A conduit for swift and accurate death. The best sniper they had, they said. When they redeployed him, time and time again, it didn’t matter. She wasn’t his anymore. And since then, the only world he cared about was the one he saw in the crosshairs.

Squaring his shoulders again, he took aim, tracking her down the arroyo. She was almost walking directly toward the lofts, slower now, as the sickened, and the sickness, began to close in on her. Desperately, she was looking around her, as if trying to see everything she could before she could see nothing at all. A gust picked up, and a shower of locust leaves, yellow and small, fell around her, onto the sickened, all around. She looked up. It was almost as if she was looking at him, her black hair swirling around her face. He breathed out and squeezed the trigger. The shot was clean. Her neck arched, and she fell back. The locust leaves fell gently onto her body.  

He took to the matter of the rest. Mechanically, accurately, he took them down as they converged on her motionless body. He exhausted a clip before the sickened began to disperse. They would eventually move off, he’d discovered, if the smell of their own dead overwhelmed that of the fresh. They wandered away from her body, their howls quieting into the grunts and growls signifying a failed hunt.

He turned around and slumped to the ground, leaning his back against the short wall of the rooftop. He shook. Shaking as though it were his first kill. Shaking like after that moment on Sandia. He took the barrel of the rifle in his mouth a moment, shaking, sobbing, the butt of the gun resting between his feet. How to pull the trigger now?

No. Not yet.

He threw the rifle to his side. It skittered and spun on the rooftop, landing with the scope and barrel pointed toward him. He folded his arms on his knees and sobbed heavily, like a child. He arched his neck and screamed, the sound of it echoing through the silent, ruined city. As the sound faded, he sat in silence, breathing deeply, looking straight ahead. The sun hung full and low behind him, though it was only afternoon. Shadows of trees, buildings, his own shadow, were stretched long against the low orange cast of the autumn sunshine. It would be winter soon. He had to make a choice.

He walked over, picked up the rifle and slung it over his shoulder. He walked to his pack of food and water, nestled in a corner of the rooftop’s low, brick wall, and picked it up. He looked down, the long way down to Central Boulevard. Time to go, he thought. Maybe there was nothing left, maybe he would die in the desert. But he had to get the hell out of Albuquerque.

I write this in their honor because we can’t afford to lose too many more Americans who think in these ways. We aren’t sufficiently replacing the last generation’s innovators; we aren’t encouraging our children to build on their legacies. Our current cultural situation offers few incentives for new thought, and offers meager support for its cultivation.  For those who would invent, we offer ever-more narrow educational possibilities, and even fewer for those who would innovate in the unnecessarily politicized fields of energy, climate or stem cell research. For those who would fight oppression, discrimination and poverty we offer marginalization, dismissal and discouragement.

These men fought against immense odds: Jobs in an industry the world had never seen, Shuttlesworth against the horrors of the Jim Crow South. And yes, the battles we face today against the destructive juggernaut of corporate greed, the ugly bigotry of fundamentalism, the continued degradation of our educational system are all different from the challenges these men fought and overcame in their important, influential lives. But for me, this is all the more reason to mourn their passing and make a call to action that their visions will not die with them. Let’s look at what Americans can do, and let’s not forget that it can still be done. In their names, let’s never stop inventing. Let’s never stop fighting. Let’s never stop looking at a situation, a problem, an unfairness with an eye toward how it might be made better. Let’s honor those who could not live to see all of their dreams come true, by carrying their legacies with us into the future.