Profile Update

Good Morning -

The image you see is from the "informational" hand-out I received from Qwest this week about reconnecting to the Internet and is used on the Virgen to represent my day of verifying my identity and the profiling that can occur with that.

For instance - we went yesterday morning to get our new Colorado driver's licenses. I looked on-line before we went and saw that, a la Tancredo and Co., we would need proof of citizenship beyond our AZ driver's license - a birth certificate or some sort of documentation to prove that we aren't undocumented.

When we arrived at the license office, we were processed by a nice young woman who took our AZ licenses, punched a hole in them, asked us our address, but didn't ask for proof of it, processed our paperwork and sent us on down to the picture person. A signature, fingerprint and smile later, we were done and in possession of a paper license to use until our official license arrives in the mail in a couple of weeks.

Never in the process did we have to show proof of citizenship, proof of address, or proof of anything because our skin-tone said it all.

We now had paperwork that allowed us access to all sorts of other social amenities, such as our library card, which we got after our license.

I told my partner as I left the license office that I wished that somehow I had been born to missionary parents in Mexico or somehow was not a citizen even though I "look" like a citizen, just to mess up their racist profiling.

While that makes me smile a little, what doesn't bring me joy is knowing that many people who do have documentation are questioned like criminals because they look like they might not have documentation.

What makes me even less happy than that is how we treat people who don't have documentation - it's not okay to treat someone who is a citizen like a criminal based on their skin-tone, and it's not okay to treat someone who is not a citizen like a criminal based on their skin-tone. We won't even go into how it's really not okay to treat anyone like a criminal - even if they have broken the law - because that's a whole other topic. Suffice to say, how about we just try to be nice to people, period.

Beyond state driving documentation, the rest of my identification experiences took place yesterday via the phone - both with Qwest and with Sprint.

I need to find a way to better handle it when I call a help-line and come to realize that my call has been received half-way across the world through a bad connection by someone whose accent when speaking English is exceptionally hard to understand through the bad connection and who is not to blame for bad company decisions - like the one that says that the customer needs to repeat their verifying address, pass code, phone number, blood type, name of first pet, and pin to every agent to whom she has been transferred - even if she has been transferred four times, not including the disconnection, which would make for 8 times of verifying.

There are bigger issues here and deeper discussions around racism, work, corporate decisions, global economies, and such, and such, but now it's time to get dressed and take the bus to Boulder for the farmer's market (wow - that sounds like a bad mix of my privilege and Stuff White People Like).

So it is. Here are pictures from our current now, to mark our progress.

How we measure success in our house - we made coffee here this morning for the first time, instead of walking across the street to the Safeway Starbucks for a cup.
Autumn is adjusting and spends her days marking each door frame as one that belongs to her with a double swipe of her cheeks.
Boris is doing well. He was a wreck and a half at the vet the other day (so much so that the tech got out the muzzle and the falconer gloves to handle him), but otherwise he's good.
Owen is adjusting well and has made the basement his own. Here he is in the kitchen, rehydrating after a busy morning of doing laps up the stairs, down the long hallway, and back around again.

Squeak (a.k.a. Monster) looks grumpy enough here, but she's actually in love with our new place and wakes us each morning with purrs of appreciation.

Here's to that. Here's to purrs of appreciation. Here's to being nice to people. Here's to taking the regional bus up to the farmer's market and other Stuff White People Like.