#saltylicorice

Dearest US of A

/ bolettew / Leave a comment

I love you, but you got to get your shit together.

You are so technologically advanced that you can deliver toilet paper directly to the restroom via drone and find terrorist leaders in the most remote and mountainous corners of the world. Still you cannot seem to get a handle on the school shootings.

I know that the mass violence against innocent people has deep psychological roots that cannot be fixed overnight – if ever – and I am open and all for a long term solution, but in the meantime could we please get rid of the guns? It will not fix the rage, the aggression, the isolation and the dark feelings of inferiority and pain and revenge in these boys and men, but it will make parents sleep a lot better at night.

While mass shootings are not unheard of in other countries they are not nearly as frequent as in God’s own country. They seem to be in fashion here. But just as the dreadful leg warmers and the tight body stockings that always crawls into your butt and is impossible to button if you are just a teeny tiny bit tipsy, this is a trend that is not cool.

I respect, though do not understand, your stance on gun rights, but it is really worth 294 mass shootings in the US this year alone? I wholeheartedly agree with the idea of personal freedom and rights, but maybe it comes at too high a price? To me it seems like you are holding onto a dream that reality has turned into a nightmare.

Can we at least go halfsies on a solution? If you put the same effort into catching and preventing these mass shootings as you put into preventing the panic and despair of sitting in the can with nothing else to wipe your butt but an old Entertainment Weekly with GoT on the cover (sacrilege!), I will do everything in my power to prevent my children and their friends and class mates from becoming mass murderers.

Thank you!

Enough

/ bolettew / Leave a comment

For months I have been outraged and ashamed of the political rhetoric towards refugees and migrants in Denmark. The right wing parties that think that we have done enough – even too much – won a landslide victory in the recent election. While the most hardcore of the lot did not get into power, the ruling party has to rely on them to pass anything in parliament. Among other nasty actions this caused Denmark to put ads in Lebanese newspapers telling refugees not to come to Denmark, because we are not having it. Needless to say I have not been flaunting my Danish citizenship lately.

I was in the garage trying to find my soap box so I could rant about how I don’t understand the measurement of “enough”. What does it mean that you have done “enough”? Does it mean that we will turn away anyone that rings our doorbell in the future and resign ourselves to a life of pork rinds and inbreeding? Or does it mean we will assess the people coming in, check their pedigree and credentials to see if they are worthy? Even more basic, where do we get off thinking we are so much better than anybody else? Considering the size of the country that makes Denmark way more reliant on the outside world than the world on us, we should recognize that this is a two-way moral obligation.

Luckily, I did not have to air my grievances in from the street corners, because the Danes came through for me. It turns out that the image painted of refugees and migrants as touristy gold diggers who are looking move into your house and to steal your stuff was just a scare tactic employed by very small and petty people who have no idea how global economics work (hint: migration does not make your slice of the cake smaller, it makes the cake bigger!).

The people who are currently entering Europe are not adventurers, they do not have a hidden agenda. They are people who are convinced that their only chance of survival is to leave everything behind and flee their home. And Danes recognize that when they look into the migrants’ eyes, when they see the refugees cry for their drowned children, when they hear them try to locate their lost family members. Danes understand the migrants are like us, that they just want to get their children out of harm’s way and wish for a life free of war and poverty for their family.

I am happy to see that this awakening to humanity is happening in almost all of Europe, and where resistance persists it is frowned upon with the promise that Mama Merkel will deal with you later.

As the wise woman T. Swift states “The haters gonna hate” and while they can inflict horrible pain and indignity, the way forward is to rise above it.There is a meme going around FB saying:

“When you have more than you need, build a longer table, not a higher fence”

And that trumps “I have done enough” every time – pun intended!

Under God’s Authority

/ bolettew / Leave a comment

The ongoing case about the Kentucky county clerk refusing to issue marriage licenses due to her faith has been irking me for days now.

While I have the deepest respect for people with strong beliefs – I sometimes wish mine were more solid – I have a hard time understanding what the intention of holding other people hostage with that faith is. This seems more reminiscent of totalitarian regimes than a government official of the land of the free and the home of the brave.

So she is against same-sex marriage. That is perfectly fine.

So she cannot bring herself to issue marriage licenses with her name on it to same-sex couples. Completely acceptable to me.

But in between those opinions and the utter circus this has turned into, there is about a universe of options and solutions that could have dissolved this seemingly Gordian knot situation many moons ago.

Let me tell you a little story from my old neighborhood. On June 15, 2012 (yes, more than three years ago) it became possible for not only same-sex, but also transgender couples to get married in church in Denmark. Before that date – since 1989! – it has been possible for same-sex and transgender couples to enter a civil union that for all intents and purposes is equal to a mixed-sex marriage in the eyes of the state of Denmark, but for a lot of couples, regardless of sexual orientation, it is obviously also important to be equal in the eyes of the church.

Some priests have had – and still have – qualms about performing the wedding ceremony to any couple other than a man and a woman. Therefore the church allows those who are uncomfortable with this to gracefully bow out and leave it to somebody else. Problem solved, no muss, no fuss, no media frenzy. Right now the debate in Denmark is about how the opting out does not apply to mixed-sex couples where one partner has undergone gender reassignment. If they are a man and a woman now, the priest has to marry them.

And is that not a nice affirmation of what matters is what you are now? It does not matter what you were before, a cokehead, a heavy drinker, an adulterer, a divorcee or a different gender. It does not matter how long you have held your beliefs, all your life or since Tuesday 2 PM, the only thing that matters is that you are here.

To me that is also the essence of the American spirit; that you welcome everybody, that you separate church and state, because regardless of faith you strive to live together in a democracy, that you call yourself The Melting Pot with pride, that the biggest leaps forward in terms of civil rights has been the result of relentless non-violent activism. It should be unnecessary to point out that the American inclusiveness and forgiveness does not work with hypocrisy. If you want it, you have to extend it to everyone else.

I think it is time for someone to be the bigger person. And by someone I mean a certain county clerk who – without losing any dignity – can just say:

“This is against my beliefs and I therefore will step down”

And the rest of us can – just as gracefully – refrain from starting a social media witch hunt on a person who repeatedly has proven that it is never too late to do the right thing.

Colin Powell Did It For Me

/ bolettew / Leave a comment

Recently some Dane in my FB realm reposted a piece from BuzzFeed called ’34 Things Every Dane Living Abroad Has Experienced’. It was hilarious and heartbreakingly true, because it poked fun at all the places where the cultural differences are large and so ingrained in your Danish DNA that you don’t notice until it is too late.

Like when you discover you are the only topless person on the beach, or you wonder what party it is you are not invited to on Sunday mornings, that everybody else is dressing up for or how you are in the grips of an overwhelming existential angst every time someone asks you ‘How are you?’, contemplating an honest answer lasting less than an hour and ending up mumbling something incomprehensible while hastily stepping away.

I am Danish, married to another great Dane and have two amazing American kids. Hubby and I have lived in the US for 16 years now and there is no doubt that it has had a profound effect on us. I like to think I inhabit the best of both worlds.

I love living here. Southern California is like a perpetual Danish summer day on steroids and (almost) without the bug bites. You work hard, you play extreme, you pursue your dreams in whichever way works for you, and you take yourself seriously with a great deal of humor.

This is however not how it started out. I never imagined I would live in the US, let alone like it. Before I got on a plane to move here, my picture of the US was this big, slow bully with a goofy grin. And that picture I fought hard to uphold the first couple of years I lived here. We would get together with other Europeans to talk about how crude and ignorant our host country was and where to special order our traditional rye bread and salty licorice.

But it got harder and harder to dis this great country (though President Bush helped immensely) and still justify us staying. If we really did not like it, we could just move back to our puny sorry ass shoebox of an arrogant fatherland and file the experience under ‘been there, done that, not going back’. The fact of the matter is, though, that we did and still do like it. A lot.

There is so much more room here; physically, mentally, spiritually. That is liberating and exhilarating and also scary. You can live your life exactly how you want to – within the law, of course – but that requires you to figure out what that life looks like, embrace it and it leaves you no excuses if you do not get it. That is very unDanish. We are the world champions of everything being somebody else’s fault.

A few months after our first child was born we were fortunate enough to end up at a company retreat in the Bahamas where Colin Powell was the guest speaker. He is one of the most charismatic people I have ever been in the presence of. Agree or disagree about his politics, but he is not slouching around in the corner. He was so proud, had so much integrity and spoke about the future and the difficult choices and the responsibility the US had to live up to as a world leader. Somehow that did it for me. Somehow that made me realize that either we fully embrace this American life (pun intended) or we pack up and go home. We chose to stay and have never regretted it.

Now, it may sound like I turned my back on Denmark. Nothing could be further from the truth. Denmark is where my roots are, where my history is, my starting point. It is a huge part of my identity that I am not letting go. In fact, it is so much of my nuclear family unit’s identity that I want my children to be familiar with it and hopefully proud of it.

In a weird convoluted way, it makes them even more American. Every American is a dual citizen no matter the number of generations residing here. And that is what the melting pot is about; bringing the best of your background to expand the perspective further.

So I am going to bring my perspective; the salty licorice perspective. There are still so many American quirks that make me pause; in disbelief, in awe or both. And hopefully my integrated outside perspective can add to yours.