We’re very proud of our particular and deliberate themes at The Doe. They cover a broad range of topics, ones that we feel are crucial to discourse in the world today. 

But still! The Doe is very much aware that not every story or idea can fit into a designated silo. And that’s why we created this category. Think of these narratives as the singles that an artist drops outside of a full LP. 

Here, we release the topical hot fire, irrespective of which theme we’re focusing on in a given month. 

Hold onto your butts. These are must-reads.

The Doe's editor and staff are digging deeper and pulling back the curtain on widely publicized stories to provide you an inside take on the matter.

On the Record with The Doe’s Editors & Staff - The Doe

The Doe is very much aware that not every story or idea can fit into a designated silo. And that’s why we created this category. Think of these narratives as the singles that an artist drops outside of a full LP. 

Collection

In recent days, the world has woken up anew to the ongoing violence between Israel and Palestine. If 2020 taught us something, it’s that unaddressed systemic issues that are continuously ignored will eventually erupt into collective consciousness. This moment is one of revelation surrounding the pain and trauma that the land and people carry across generations. 

Jerusalem has been in flames for some time now. A city that holds spiritual meaning to multiple faiths is a divided one, separating between the West and the East. This separation is far from equal. Palestinians live under militarized occupation with very little resources in East Jerusalem, while Israelis enjoy the luxuries of a capitalistic, well-tended city in West Jerusalem.

I was born in Jerusalem and grew up with a deep love for the holiness of this land. I am Jewish and my family has been living here in Jerusalem since way before the creation of the State of Israel. The Jerusalem I know and love is a city of multi-faith connection and collaboration. 

But with the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, this reality has become ruptured. Instead, Jewish supremacy is acclaimed and indoctrinated. On a land that has been my home for centuries, I find myself feeling a sense of isolation. The depiction of the struggle as “Arabs versus Jews” erases me and my history. 

I am not fully part of the Palestinian community because of the privileges I hold from my Jewish identity. Yet I am not fully part of the Jewish community, as I do not hold onto the narrative of Jewish supremacy over others. Being in this identity group, I am in perpetual grief over the violence done in the name of Judaism against Palestinians. 

When violence in Israel-Palestine erupts, it is simple to see it as a conflict between two peoples. Yet, the asymmetry in power challenges this framing. How can this be a conflict when one group is systematically denied basic human rights? Even though all who live here suffer when violence arises, the dynamics of oppression must be named and understood.

The Israeli government has been provoking Palestinians for decades: Stealing land and evicting families from homes they’ve lived in for generations; denying their narrative and right to their history; and enabling anti-Palestinian violence with no consequence. And of course, the massacre of Gaza. When the international media starts reporting on recent events in the Holy Land, we must understand the backdrop of ongoing settler colonialism. 

From marches in Damascus Gate chanting “death to Arabs” to attacking protestors at Al-Aqsa, the Israeli side has initiated this latest round of violence. The forced evictions of families in Sheikh Jarrah began with Palestinians hosting peaceful iftars every night as an act of resistance. They were met with police violence. 

Moreover, Israeli settlers have been organizing marches across mixed cities with the goal of harming Palestinian people and businesses. There have been lynchings and acts of violence targeting civilians. Many Palestinians were scared to leave their homes and removed any identifying objects around their homes and cars because of this rising anti-Palestinian violence. This violence comes from Israeli civilians but is backed by the Israeli police, the IDF, the government and U.S. money. Even if Palestinians fight back, their fight is not a match to this level of institutional violence. 

Israelis have also been lynched and targeted during this time. Suffering on all sides is incomprehensible. And still, with the level of police brutality, militaristic force and state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians, the world outcry is valid.

As someone who travels between both the Israeli and Palestinian communities, I see the levels of pain and trauma that this vicious cycle of violence creates for all people on this land. And still, the last couple of weeks here I have been more concerned with the safety of my Palestinian friends. Even though the experience of war is not pleasant for anyone, Israelis are largely protected and can carry on their normal lives even in the face of rockets. But who is protecting Palestinian people against the brutal and cruel militarized occupation?

Palestinians have a right to defend themselves. Palestinians have a right to build a movement of resistance. In oppressor and oppressed dynamics, both identities suffer. Yet the oppressor has a layer of denial that doesn’t allow them to see the reality as it is. This denial represses their own pain and suffering as well as the reality of the oppressed. 

While many may want this ceasefire and a return to “normalcy,” this view does not allow for a recognition of the systemic issues that led to this moment. Normalcy is not acceptable because it enables occupation and colonization. The growing Palestinian resistance will not end with a simple “agree to disagree,” but with a demand for freedom and justice. 

It is only with Palestinian liberation that Jerusalem can return to herself as the multi-faith spiritual center of solidarity she is meant to be. As a Jewish person, I pray and fight for this reality to manifest. 

Religion

My Jewish Perspective: Free Palestine

I fell hard for the myth of the American Dream. I believed that if I worked hard enough I could write my own destiny, and if I didn’t succeed it was my fault. So, when I didn’t achieve the things I wanted to, I blamed myself. The shame that accompanies this is compounded by the knowledge that, as a Black person in America, my failures are seen as my own doing, even when they’re not. Disadvantaged, marginalized and oppressed people in this country share this burden. When the pandemic hit, exposing the inequalities that make the American Dream impossible, the finger of the nation still pointed at us.

I’m normally an easygoing person, but the thing that has always infuriated me is pervasive injustice in America. It especially bothers me that the general opinion of people with power is that people without power are to blame for their circumstances. 

I was raised upper middle class in America by immigrants who came from the kind of poverty that’s often associated with life in a developing country. Because of this, I was taught that as simple as a flip of a coin, one could be born into a life of wealth or a life of want, and that while you should work hard, that isn’t the only route to success. My family worked very hard to get to this country, but by no means was that all it took. Being in the right place at the right time and accepting the kindness of others came into play. 

As a young adult, I noticed that many people believed the false premise that victims can be blamed for the actions of their perpetrators. Whether it’s pertaining to sexual assault, intimate partner violence, housing inequalities, police brutality or the failing justice system, it’s acceptable in many circles to criticize the powerless for circumstances being the way they are. 

It incenses me that those in powerful positions and those who benefit from injustice operate under these assumptions. The most blatant example is that if people of color, like myself, don’t achieve success, there’s an unspoken, racist assumption that it’s because of something inherent in us, whether it’s laziness, incompetence or lack of skill.

This was why I wanted to go to law school. I wanted the power to stand up, use my voice and fight for those who no one would listen to. As an attorney, I could change the narrative.

Today, I am an attorney, but I have yet to find my American Dream. I’m ashamed that I haven’t been able to dedicate my career to helping other people obtain their American Dream either. 

Because my family achieved this dream, and because I was a hard worker, I believed that it was possible for me, too. But, in America, there aren’t enough dreams to go around, especially if you’re not born into generational wealth or you’re not white, able-bodied, straight or cisgender. The systems that built this country to be what it is today aren’t designed to support everyone’s success. If they did, that would take away from those that the systems were created to protect. Of course, there are exceptions, people who slip through the cracks, but a few people who have “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps” are insignificant compared to the millions who aren’t able to. Many times, even those anomalies are not what they seem. 

I am one such anomaly. At first glance, my story would appear to support the notion that hard work will garner a person success, even if they are part of one or several marginalized groups. I worked hard and furthered my education just to get closer to my American Dream, while being Black, queer, a child of immigrants and learning disabled.  

But the following is also true: I’m unemployed, and this isn’t the first time. I was laid off due to COVID-19 from the first permanent job I’ve had in almost ten years. I moved across the country for this job and was only employed for five months. I’m in a quarter of a million dollars in debt from the very degree I can’t leverage to find a permanent job. I’m scared every day that I will never own a house or make enough money to retire.

Graduating from law school was one of my proudest accomplishments. Sometimes I’m not even sure how I managed it. Finding a job afterward, though, proved to be much harder. I graduated during the financial crisis in 2008, and my struggles with ADD, resulting from a lack of health insurance, greatly affected my GPA, which in turn affected my ability to get a job with a well-paying private firm. 

After a few bumps in the road, I earned a couple of positions working in the public sector, but they were unpaid. I had to shift gears so that I could pay my bills, including my growing student loans. For years, I used my undergrad degree and worked hourly jobs. A couple of times, opportunities opened up, but they soon fizzled out. All the while, I amassed more debt because I simply wasn’t making enough money to survive.

I shifted gears again and started working temporary, contract positions in financial compliance. Thankfully, the pay was decent, but they didn’t provide health insurance, and there wasn’t much room for growth or job security. In addition, these jobs didn’t involve the practice of law, so if I attempted to find a job practicing law again, I’d only be eligible for entry-level compensation. Entry-level salaries are low, but acceptable when you’re a recent grad—not for someone who has been out of school for years and certainly not for someone with debt.

Instead of giving myself a break because I was doing the best I could, I blamed myself for my inability to obtain my American Dream. I was working for the very banks that helped make my ideal legal career impossible. The same banks that, though they were responsible for the economic crash, were swiftly bailed out by the government, instead of having to deal with the consequences—unlike the rest of us who had nothing to do with it. I hated that, in exchange for a paycheck that would only temporarily cover my bills, I had aligned myself with these institutions instead of the people I was supposed to be advocating for.

America’s unfair policies and discriminatory government practices function only to improve the lives of the wealthy, while making everyone else’s lives more difficult. While this has been going on since the birth of this nation, the consequences have been critical during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though the pandemic has taken a stranglehold of the economy, student debt still looms and we still have bills to pay. Yet, for months the government nursed (and continues to nurse) a debate over whether those who are unemployed deserve unemployment assistance because it supposedly discourages work. Huge corporations, however, have once again been bailed out.

For me and so many others, unemployment doesn’t mean that we stop working. More than 12 hours a day, including weekends, I look for jobs while trying to expand my once part-time freelance career. I started a very part-time retail job, putting my health at risk so that I can support myself until a full-time job materializes. The state I live in miscalculated my unemployment benefits and the only way I was able to barely stay afloat was the $600 per week COVID-19 unemployment benefit. Three months later, I was still unemployed, the $600 benefit was eliminated and my unemployment claim ran out. 

The truth is, unemployment benefits (particularly with the COVID-19 add-on) are often more than what people make at a job no matter how hard or how many hours they work. The issue isn’t whether benefits discourage work—the issue is that most people in America do not make a living wage. For those of us who do, or have the potential to, the pay is rarely enough to dig ourselves out of our student loan debt. The fact that the government is unwilling to bail out its citizens the way it bails out big corporations—while pointing the finger at us for being unable to pay our bills—is appalling.

America’s citizens are struggling with this pandemic as Congress continues to argue about whether or not it will approve another stimulus check. The already severely flawed education system is now riddled with complications due to the pandemic and lack of government support. 

The pandemic still rages on in much of the country, but some people feel so entitled that they don’t wear masks to protect themselves or other people. Medical professionals and essential workers are on the front lines to save our lives and make our existence as normal as possible, while naysayers claim the pandemic is a hoax. 

Racial disparity is only now becoming apparent to everyone but people of color—because everyone is home with nothing to do but watch the news. Instead of truly working to eradicate racism and white supremacy, many are simply capitalizing on America’s sudden “wokeness.” 

I’m still trying to unlearn the fallacy of the American Dream today. Being blamed for not having a steady job or having massive debt turns into internalized shame for even the most seemingly upwardly mobile people. The rhetoric that we must pull ourselves up from our bootstraps—and that hard work is the only key to surviving in this country—is a false narrative that harms us even when we know it's a lie. That myth created the fabric of this country.

Thanks to racism, capitalism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia and xenophobia (to name just a few), this is not the American Dream—it’s a nightmare. My hope for tomorrow is for the powers that be to acknowledge reality and stop gaslighting us into believing that the responsibility for our success or failure rests only on us. Only then will we be able to work toward justice and parity. But I fear that, at least during my lifetime, that day will never come.

Coronavirus

Money

The Myth of the Lazy, Unemployed American: A Reckoning With COVID-19 and Income Inequality

Okay, for starters, I've never actually been to any theme park for fun—ever. No, I'm serious. I enlisted in the Army straight out of high school, served for three or four years, and that gave me all the thrill I needed out of life. After that, the plan was school and freelance work till I either got famous and picked up by a design studio, or Kanye West deposited a million dollars in my bank account by accident. Since neither of those things have happened, I'll just tell you about what goes on at the one amusement park I worked at during the current pandemic. That way you'll avoid it because it's the least safe place to be in the country right now besides the White House.

It all began at the beginning of the year. I’d recently graduated from school and needed a job—nothing crazy, just something to help pay bills. I’m an artist—design, illustration, all that shit—so I applied everywhere, looking for any type of work I could do that was art-related. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of entry-level creative jobs in Orlando, Florida. I wasn't surprised. I asked some friends—the ones who didn’t leave right after graduation—if any of the places they worked at were hiring. After about a week, a homey hit me back and told me this art job he had at Universal Studios was looking for more people. I took the job, no questions asked. Not only did I need the money, but I'd never been to Universal, and a chance to see it would be dope. So he set up an interview with his manager and I met up with him a few days later to show him my art portfolio. It was the most unorthodox interview I've ever had, but I got the job, my shit uniform and all.

I started at Universal in late February. It was hot, and there was a soundtrack that played all day on a loop, over and over. Since I worked in the KidZone, I had to listen to shit like Trolls and Shrek movie music all day. It was straight garbage, but it had its perks, plus the pay was decent.

So we time-skip a little into April. By now all the world knows about COVID-19, and big business orders a shutdown on anything that would cost them money, including Disney and Universal’s respective parks. For a couple of months, we were all out of jobs. I went back to freelancing and surviving with my fiancée. It was a struggle since we both worked at Universal. (It wasn't easy to get her a job there with me, but it was convenient.) So, two artists, out of their normal nine-to-five, freelancing and living off what they know. Unemployment was like the lottery. A lot of us got denied before we even finished the application, only to find that the Florida government was doing it on purpose because they couldn't pay all of us like that.

June came, and I got a text from my boss to open an email they’d sent me. (A simple phone call would've worked.) The parks were opening back up, woo-hoo. I was extremely skeptical, I didn't trust people with this pandemic, especially after watching crazy folks with guns storm state capital buildings—for fucking haircuts. These are the people who make up fake medical conditions to prevent having to wear a mask. My friend who got me the job has asthma that he's had his whole life. My fiancée was born with a lung deficiency, so she only has one actively strong lung. So when Patty Crybaby and Hank Hard-Headed whine about having to wear a mask, all my respect goes out the window. I just can't deal.

I still went to work, of course, because I had bills to pay. I think that’s how all of us felt. As an employee, you could kind of tell what everybody around you was feeling, which was dread and desperation. We needed a way to survive, and this was the only guaranteed means that we had.

Universal made it feel like one of those cult books—1984, that George Orwell shit: “Big Brother is watching,” and all that. Yeah, that's what it felt like: giant posters of random Universal workers wearing masks, reading "Welcome Home, We Missed You." It was so creepy, and just so fucking weird that I honestly hope they fired whoever thought those were a good idea. Also, they lied about, um, well, all the sanitation they said they’d do. They didn't take it half as seriously as they said they did. I don't really have to back that up with evidence. The proof is in the numbers. Universal opened up one week; the next week, the whole state of Florida was the epicenter of the U.S. pandemic.

Let me take you there: Okay, so daily, when you go through the back gate for employees, you have to get your temperature read. Too high, and they send you home. After you go into the first building in the back, which is wardrobe, you have to wear your mask at all times. They have hand sanitizer everywhere, so there’s never a point where you can't tap that bottle and get a little on you for safe measure. It was clockwork, a well-oiled machine—in to work and out, no problem, no issue.

The issues started to arise after I told my fiancée she should leave the park. She already had another job, so it wouldn't hurt us financially, and the thing about my boss was, he liked to run his mouth a lot. He was telling me and the other coworkers things that we needed to know but probably weren’t supposed to—like how other managers were getting infected and being sent home, but not the employees.

We had a Zoom meeting late in July about opening up another art stand and had to go over the rules. This man told us, "The park is the safest place to be." So I dimed him out to everybody on the call. I told them all about how a week prior to this they’d let three employees come to work with high fevers—including one reading 103.8, and who was a damn chef, somebody who handles food.

It was all smoke and mirrors and security theater, and for what? To get more of peoples’ money? They were practically giving away tickets—all the deals they have going on left and right—just to get the attendance up. It wasn't worth staying there and risking myself or my fiancée’s health. She already has a medical condition, and I'm not putting her life or any of my friends’ lives at risk. To this day, I still wish they would close both Universal and Disney because things aren't getting better. They're only getting worse. People aren't taking this seriously, especially when they don't even enforce the mask policy. It ain't worth it.

"Universal is the safest place to be." That shit still echoes in my head every time I see an ad for the park on social media. I know without a doubt I made the right call to leave. I'm clean, and so is my fiancée. I hope that every single person who walks into that park—or Disney or any of 'em— understands what they’re doing when they do. I wish them all the best from the safety of my apartment.

Insiders

I Worked at Universal Theme Park During the COVID-19 Pandemic

I was working from home on a weekday afternoon when a friend dropped round in the hopes I'd be able to entertain her, despite the work piling up on my desk and the unanswered emails screaming in my inbox. We sat down in the living room, where I curled my legs underneath me and watched her warm her hands on the cup of coffee I’d just made her.

As I half-listened to the stream of mundane information coming out of her, I made a to-do list in my head: reply to Cathy, make notes for tomorrow’s meeting, read that student’s draft. By the time I returned to what she was saying, she was discussing marriage. Someone she worked with had recently ended their 14-year marriage after an affair. It was messy: hurt egos, kids caught in the middle and a rising financial cost.

“I’ll never get married,” I said, without a thought.

My friend blew on her still-too-hot coffee, a reminder of how slowly time was passing. “Never say never,” she said, her voice oddly casual as she dismissed me with three simple words. “You never know where you’ll be in a few years.” She seemed ignorant that she had just outlined one of the most quoted arguments against marriage: divorce.

I hadn't been raised to think of marriage as aspirational. Instead, I was raised by a single father who discouraged relationships of any kind. He built up a small world, one that was impenetrable to outsiders. We saw our extended family once a year, he never dated and he discouraged the pursuit of romance over education. Once, when I was eight years old and still unsure of my sexuality, I asked when I should have my first girlfriend. “In your twenties,” he said, “when you’re done with school.”

Through watching him, I had learned the value of independence and a particular type of working-class emotional repression that was hard to shake. I was never quite comfortable when someone else paid for dinner.

I had also grown up queer, questioning my sexuality and gender identity ruthlessly. For the first twenty-one years of my life, marriage wasn’t an option that was actually available to me. There were civil partnerships, but their perceived status, both culturally and politically, was second-class to marriage. So while my straight peers dreamed of white dresses and quaint countryside churches, I checked out. I thought about sex and exploration. I thought about my future, about what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go. I thought aimlessness and the fact that I floated between potential professions, unable to moor myself to anyone, was the biggest issue facing me. Marriage was never even part of my plan.

Now, in my late twenties, marriage is an ever-present specter. Mornings go by scrolling on Instagram, which is often filled with the delicate fingers of young women adorned with diamonds that could sink a ship. These women, who are often burdened with making the announcement, caption their photos “I Said Yes,” alongside an engagement ring emoji. Then there are photos of bridal fittings, wedding fairs, pink champagne, hen nights, stag parties and nuptial destinations, before the eventual walk down the aisle.

What I began to notice more and more, though, were the LGBTQ+ people engaging in this type of behavior and the way that type of content often went viral. On Twitter, I saw a video of two women at Disneyland. One pulled out a ring and got down on her knees. The other screamed and pulled a ring from her rucksack too. I read Tinder bios of men looking for “husband material.” I saw women in tuxes in front of the altar and men posing outside churches in a shower of rice. The posts, and the way they spread across the internet, spoke to just how much the culture at large wants to see queer people married.

For the better part of a decade, gay marriage was the rallying cry for the queer liberation movement: The theory held that this major legal milestone would burst the dam and give way to a flood of total equality. Then, when it finally happened in various places across the world, this hard-fought-for parity felt anticlimactic. If anything, it created another stick with which to bash nonconformists while fueling the already tense respectability politics within the LGBTQ+ community. Much like second-wave feminism, the queer liberation movement was now keenly aware of what “type” of queer best-served progress. Was it the hypersexualized gay that could be spun by right-wing pundits as perverted and predatory? Or was it the sweet innocent gay dreaming of one day getting hitched?

A month or two after that conversation, I met up with another friend for a walk. The heat was oppressive, and my back dampened with sweat with each step I took. As we caught up, I listened to her lay out her life to me—work, family, pressures and assorted stresses—until we got onto the topic of her boyfriend. She was in a long-distance relationship and struggling with isolation. The post-university shift, where everyone either goes home to reconfigure, transplants themselves to the capital or follows a job offer, had left the two of them hundreds of miles apart. The question was not only how they would navigate their current position—using FaceTime, Skype and expensive train journeys—but also their future status. Where would they settle down? My friend suggested that moving in together would most certainly lead to marriage, and she had decided she was comfortable with that. She saw it for herself and always had. She'd attended a Catholic school, after all.

"I don't think gay people should get married," I said in a tone harsher than I intended. "At least, in the political sense."

She looked at me, puzzled. “Surely, you’re joking?” she said.

Marriage was in the abstract for me. I had no long-distance boyfriend and so, annoyed that I had to consider my decision in relation to hers, I became oddly defensive.

“I’m just not sure we’ve thought it through,” I said. “It feels like all these gay people are rushing to get married, and what is marriage but a heterosexual concept, one that is built on a history of female oppression and patriarchal control? How can gay people fit within a structure that wasn’t built to include them without compromising?”

Over the past few months, I had been reading and informing myself about the politics of gay marriage. I was marching towards 27, and I realized that I would have to heavily defend my decision not to marry for the next few years. I'm the last single adult in the family; thus, I needed the ammunition.

It seemed that most people cast me as a bitter queer who was turning down something I had not yet been offered. As if, when the offer did come along, I would be grateful that someone had come to rescue me from the stew of resentment and loneliness I was broiling in. They arrogantly assumed their heteronormative predictions would prove fruitful and I would eventually succumb to their way of thinking. It didn’t seem to occur to them that my disavowal of marriage didn’t mean I would live my life alone. It didn’t mean I couldn’t be with someone for a long time, or that we couldn't draw up legal contracts regarding co-owned property or how we would split up assets if we broke up.

To them, the choice was either marriage or life as a spinster.

My friend took a deep breath and decided she wanted to move on. But I wasn’t done.

“I mean, don’t you think it’s fucked up?” I went on. “Queer people spend their adolescence being treated like shit, called names, beaten up, and then when they get older, they’re so conscious of what the straight majority thinks. So what? They get married as if to say, ‘I’m just like you, please stop hating me.’ It’s super weird.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, I give no weight to conservative objections to it. Fuck them. But, I don’t know, I think it’s more complex than people realize.”

“Isn’t marriage about love?” she asked, absently, hoping this brief interlude into radical social politics was coming to an end. I didn’t know if it was worth entering into the debate around marriages as transactional and the idea of “love” being used as an institutional selling point. So we walked on.

For a long time, there has been a feminist argument against marriage, and now there is a queer one too. In her book Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino posits that there is room to change the gendered implications of marriage because, in the wake of Obergefell v. Hodges, same-sex marriage, “reconfigured it as an institution that could be entered into on gender-equal terms.” Relying on queers to revitalize a heterosexual institution, rather than allowing them to create their own, is problematic. We're not going to come in and Queer Eye an outdated tradition by putting it in a shiny metallic bomber jacket and teaching it to love itself. That is not the path to queer liberation.

The view that LGBTQ+ people and straight people are now equal in Western society is a blurry illusion. We’re now allowed to engage in traditionally straight activities such as marriage or raising children, and while these are essential legal rights, they aren't precisely equality. They merely equate to assimilation, or the right to be treated fairly if you conform to the structures already in place. This means that LGBTQ+ people who don’t wish to enter into marriages—especially those who might be non-monogamous or in “unconventional” romantic arrangements—are judged differently and not offered the same social status who follow straight traditions.

It is no mistake that marriage offers certain legal and social advantages that no other agreement can. In that way, marriage is incentivized to gays and straights alike who seek legal security for their children, healthcare benefits and insurance payouts. But, I believe this speaks to how we should offer alternatives—a straight female friend of mine recently talked to me about how she would much rather have a civil partnership. “All the benefits without the patriarchal history,” she called it. I am inclined to agree.

The queer feminist writer Audre Lorde wrote that when trying to build the vision of your future within the confines of a racist patriarchy, "Only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable." But how does that affect queer people? Have we, as queer people, given up any hope of forming our own rules now that we have the right to abide by someone else's?

In the summer of 2018, I dated a painter for two months. At no point did we talk about marriage (why would we?), but that didn't stop the idea from percolating amongst my friends. He was, on paper, a perfect match for me. He was American, an artist, chilled-out enough to balance my neuroses and occasionally even thoughtful. To others, it seemed that I'd found my match—and that was it. I had done what every single person was supposed to do: I found a potential end to my singledom. Though, as the weeks passed by, it became increasingly clear that I was unnerved by the prospect of monogamy and the idea of lifelong commitment.

Even in the hypothetical, marriage was terrifying. It felt like I wasn’t just talking about the painter as he was, but also as he would be. Would his scatterbrained nature prove annoying in the future? Would I eventually find the weed smoking tiresome? Would we be happy together, forever, in a three-bedroom, semi-detached in the suburbs? I felt like I was having a pre-approved future forced upon me—a quasi-heterosexual life that felt like it would close in on me with its mortgages, baby clothes and shared cemetery plots.

Could I spend the rest of my life with the painter? Doubtful. Was it possible to know that after two months? No. So, why then was I going insane over lifelong compatibility? I was considering his potential through the lens of heteronormativity, subconsciously assessing our whatevership by heterosexual standards. Then, when it ended, it felt more like a failure than the two-month romp that it was. Would it have felt that way if the pressure of marriage or longevity weren’t so prevalent?

My disdain for marriage is born from a confluence of reasons, some personal and some political. Mostly, however, it comes down to the fact I’m not made for it, and it was not made for me. Yet, I am expected to want it. The idea of it makes me anxious. (While writing this essay, my right ankle broke out in a stress rash.) But it also makes me angry: angry about a lack of understanding from heterosexuals who continually promote marriage as the pinnacle, and mad that it’s me who’s expected to alter my perception, rather than them. Instead of doing their part in dismantling the heteronormative patriarchy and the systems of oppression, they ask that I, as a queer person, enter into their institution and try to galvanize it—to make it cool again as if it were a '90s tracksuit or Polaroid camera.

That day when my friend rang my doorbell as I was trying to work, I realized how little sense the whole thing makes. My friend was mourning the death of a marriage because we see marriage as success and divorce as a failure. What if, as queer people, we were able to opt out of that, and create our own systems of success and failure as we see fit? What if you happily spend 20 years of your life with someone and then break up? Is that failure? What if it were normal for people to split and move on when things became a little stale or were able to spread their wings sexually without the curtain-twitching neighbors getting curious? What if it were normal not to expect all things from one person, if society were set up to value close friendships and nurture them alongside romantic ones? Why not let queer people figure out that new vision? Let us make our own rules and not bend to someone else's.

When she finished her coffee, she stood up and made to leave. I followed her out into the hallway and slinked around her to open the door. She stood still for a moment, looking out onto the street. I wondered what she was thinking. She turned me to, hugged me briefly and headed off into the afternoon.

I sat back down at my desk, opened my inbox, and got back to work, but I couldn’t shake what she’d said. Never, I thought defiantly. Never, never, never. Never.

Long Reads

LGBTQ Voices

I’m Gay and I’m Against Gay Marriage

Drugs & Alcohol

Up, up and away! Time to get out of the house with The Doe.

Travel

Stories that can only be told from the land of the free, home of the brave.

American Stories

Motherhood

Earth Day or any day, let's celebrate our planet. 

Mother Earth

Tearjerkers

The Doe celebrates its authors this Black History Month.

Black Voices

Extra, extra, read all about it! The news-media industry has shifted dramatically over the last decade—heck, within the last two years. Between print journalism, podcasting, social media and infotainment, The Doe turns over every rock in this evolving ecosystem.

Media

Stories of starting over and finding the fresh.

New Beginnings

The ol' nine to five has changed quite a bit in the past couple of years, from working remotely to, well, not working at all. This month we take a look at how cash still does rule in our capitalist society and what the future of business and money might just look like.

The Doe's editorial team takes a look back at the year and shares its favorite narratives.

Best of 2021

Growing up in South Africa always made me feel as though I had little to brag about when in the presence of foreigners. Only when I moved to Europe several years ago did I realize how deprived I had been of small freedoms, like being able to ride your bike home from school, walk to the shops or catch public transportation. I also had to grow accustomed to having electricity 24 hours a day, stable residential infrastructure and decent public healthcare—things that would have been considered a luxury in my third-world home.

However, there’s one thing I’m incredibly proud of as a South African. Since our country’s democratic turning point in 1994 and the abolition of the notorious apartheid regime, we’ve boasted one of the most progressive constitutions in the world—one that prioritizes equal rights and social justice for women, the LGBTQ+ community and other minorities. While this was never something I gave a second thought to growing up, its importance has heightened in the wake of the United States’ current battle for reproductive rights.

Watching the ongoing struggle for reproductive rights in one of the world’s most developed nations invokes helplessness, desperation and concern for how the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision may direct the rest of the world. And although abortion access is readily available and legal in all parts of South Africa today, times like these make me think back on our nation’s past, when our constitution was vastly different.

When my mother was 20 years old in the 1980s, she had an abortion. My parents were living in Johannesburg during a time when abortion was very much illegal under the apartheid-era National Party. They had been dating for roughly two or three years and were living together, to the dismay of my mother’s conservative parents. They had casually discussed the possibility of my mother accidentally becoming pregnant, and both agreed that they were in no position to have a child, so they would “make a plan” if the day ever came.

When the day did, in fact, come and my mother realized she had become pregnant, it was simply a matter of putting their backup plan into action. A friend knew someone who knew someone who had a connection, and the appointment was set up.

My father drove her to an arranged drop-off point, and she waited alone for several minutes. Someone came up behind her, blindfolded her and led her to a back-alley makeshift surgery room. She was laid down on a cold steel table and sedated while her pregnancy was terminated by people she could not see. She wasn’t allowed to look at any of her operators for fear she might expose them to law enforcement.

She woke up later feeling groggy and tender and, still blindfolded, was led back to the drop-off point where my father had left her. Her blindfold was removed, and she was told to wait one full minute before opening her eyes. When she did, she was standing alone. My father then came to pick her up.

This was the story my mother finally summoned up the courage to tell me when I was 18. I was horrified—not at my mother for what she had done, as was her initial fear, but that any woman in South Africa or anywhere in the world ever had to go to such extreme and dangerous lengths to get the healthcare they needed and desired. 

How lucky she was, I considered, that she wasn’t injured or killed in this questionable process. If someone more sinister had been responsible for her procedure, it’s anyone’s guess what might have been done to her.

While I vehemently believed in the right to have an abortion before she told me her story, the idea itself was still terrifying. Big, bad abortions. Things to be feared and avoided at all costs—not for the sake of the unborn but because of the trauma inflicted on the women who chose to have them.

My mother’s retelling of her experience was perhaps the first time I saw a complete lack of both shame and trauma associated with an abortion. She spoke about it as though she got her appendix removed. She looks back on it, still to this day, as a minor incident in her life that left her largely unchanged. She has no regrets.

She admits that probably the only time she thought back on her decision was when she and my dad started actively trying to have children, about 10 years later, and my mother suffered a miscarriage. She wondered if it was God’s way of punishing her. Luckily, her doubts were quelled when she had successful pregnancies with both my sister and me.

As I got older, I was made aware of how many of her friends had similar stories. Friends in their 50s and 60s also had to duck and dive and jump through very illegal hoops to have the same procedure. Some of them have regrets or harbor guilt and shame, but a lot of them don’t. A lot of them went on to have families when they were ready, in their own time.

Being exposed to these stories changed my perspective on abortion. What was once something that was to be feared and pitied in my mind was now liberating. Freeing. An expression of autonomy. Something that, under certain circumstances, could be celebratory and joyful.

Surprisingly, my mother doesn’t seem to have a strong opinion either in favor of or against abortion rights today. I would’ve thought her experience would make her a passionate activist, but then, she’s not exactly the activist type. I think she believes in a woman’s right to choose, but she won’t have it out with you at the dinner table about it the way that I would. Perhaps she also doesn’t see the need, given that South Africa now provides liberal access to abortion.

I openly share my mother’s story with friends and family—with her permission, of course—because I believe it serves to reinforce an important truth that I think many already know: Outlawing and criminalizing abortion does not stop abortion. 

For centuries, women have found ways (albeit dangerous and sometimes lethal ways) to exercise autonomy over their own bodies. They will go to the lengths they see fit because many of them would rather suffer the consequences of a crime than bring an unwanted child into the world. The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade: Women will continue to seek abortions, but they might just die in the process.

Women

An Illegal Abortion Could Have Killed My Mother

This is part two of a two-part series. Read the first piece here.

Dusting myself off from the robbery, I packed up a bag with my backup camera gear and headed to the eastern frontline city of Mariupol on the train. I initially stayed in a hotel with correspondents from the BBC, ITV, Radio France, TRT World and others. We shared stories at night of what we had been covering and waited to see if the invasion would go ahead as predicted. 

Mariupol is a port city and therefore highly strategic for Putin. It was understood that this would be one of the first cities he would want to occupy. On my first day there, I shot raw video clips of ordinary street life, people getting on with their daily lives: buskers, young people ice skating, elderly folks feeding pigeons in parks and so forth. Even now, I get shivers thinking about how normal life in Mariupol felt before the invasion and how quickly the situation deteriorated. 

Now Ukrainian mothers are giving birth in maternity wards under Russian bombs, and people have been massacred in what is being described as one of the worst war crimes of the last century.

Back at the hotel in Mariupol, I befriended Vika, a Ukrainian fixer and intelligence officer who would end up saving my life on at least one occasion. In the evenings, we chatted about the potential oncoming invasion, the disinformation campaign Putin was goading Russians and Ukrainians into believing, Russian double agents and the vigilance one needs to maintain in the field as either a journalist or an intelligence officer.

From talking with locals in Mariupol, it was evident that the majority of people didn’t want their territory to be occupied by the Russians. In 2014, Mariupol had taken the brunt of pro-Russian separatist attacks, and we visited a police station that was heavily bombarded by shelling and gunfire that year, and the building was still pockmarked with scars from the attack.

On my walk back to my hotel on my last night in Mariupol, I heard what I thought was the sound of shelling not far off in the distance. The next day, locals confirmed it was a missile strike, and I was advised to take a train back up to the capital immediately. My unofficial Ukrainian fixer Vika was also up there, and so I met with her for dinner at a Georgian restaurant on Wednesday the 23rd of February. 

We sat down and ordered a couple of glasses of red wine and an entree of borscht soup. She looked paler and less jovial than usual. “It’s about to get real,” she said in a stern, James Bond-like voice. “It’s going down tomorrow. There is strong U.S. intelligence suggesting that the full invasion will begin tomorrow.”

Vika had told me in the past that she had some low-level U.S. intelligence clearance, so I knew she was probably right. We decided to end the evening early and return to our hotel rooms.

Sure enough, the next evening, the sound of air raid sirens followed by multiple missile strikes on Kyiv had begun. It would last for days. The hotel I was in at the time didn’t have a basement to shelter in, and so I spent most of the day in a subway station, filming and thinking about my next move. Everything had shut down, bar one or two cafes, pharmacies and a few minimarts that had long queues out the front. I called Vika and she said I should change hotels and take cover in a hotel basement with other journalists in the north of the city—this is where I took shelter while the Russian military bombarded Kyiv throughout the second night of the invasion with missiles.

After a rough night on the second day of the war in the hotel basement, I was awoken by another international journalist and colleague of Vika’s. 

“We need to go now, right now. We need to evacuate. Quickly pack your things!”

We walked out onto the street, and a driver pulled up to the hotel entrance and scooped us up in his van. Being the tallest, I climbed into the shotgun seat and turned to look at the driver. He passed me a cat in a carrier bag and said, “That’s my cat. Hold it.” 

As the car swerved through the city at speed and the cat meowed in my lap, I looked through the front windscreen to see smoke billowing out from a building on the city skyline, evidence of the missile strikes from the night before.

We arrived at the train station, along with hordes of other people all trying to escape. It looked like a scene out of the fall of Saigon. Fortunately, at this point, nobody required a ticket, and we managed to board a train later in the afternoon. The train’s lights were all turned off—I assumed so as not to be seen from above—and we rattled off to Lviv, our destination in the west of the country and closer to the Polish border. 

Along the way, we heard an almighty noise that, at first, I thought was a missile but which turned out to be a low flying Ukrainian fighter jet speeding past the train window. After the initial shock, a sense of relief and feeling protected kicked in. I decided to stretch my legs and walk through the train carriages. I stopped at one carriage’s exit and stared out of the window at the sprawling countryside in front of me. I looked down at the stairs inside the train that were below me and noticed a mysterious pool of blood—that I assumed was human. I shot a few seconds of video of it and then returned to my seat, somewhat shaken by what I’d seen.

The train arrived at a packed Lviv station early the next morning, and we headed to a hotel. 

The architecture and atmosphere in Lviv felt more like Vienna than a post-Soviet town.

It seemed unusually calm and normal and carried a different vibe than both Kyiv and Mariupol. However, every night for my entire one-week stay there, air raid sirens would wake us early in the morning, and we would take cover in the hotel’s basement. 

“Stay away from the windows,” a hotel guest said to me after I sat at a table close to a window.

This routine of sleepless nights and early morning air raid sirens became a new normal and something that we all tried to get used to.

Vika called me to say she would arrange a driver to take me to the Polish border and to be ready early in the morning. She also asked me if I could take her passport out for her and FedEx it to her to a location outside of Ukraine. Sure enough, the driver handed me her passport and two envelopes on the car journey out to the border. It took me a while to realize what was going on, and later, I suspected that she was probably on a hit list and afraid of being captured by the Russians. I opened the envelopes, and inside was a significant amount of cash in two different currencies, which I later wired to her bank account after posting her passport back to her from Poland.

After getting stopped along the way a couple of times at military checkpoints by soldiers carrying Kalashnikov rifles, where I showed my press pass and passport, the driver eventually dropped me as close to the border as he could.

I got out of the car and walked with my luggage toward the customs booth. Along the road, there were hundreds of abandoned suitcases that had been stacked up on top of each other in a massive pile. It looked like some type of graveyard—but for luggage. I assumed that people must have been rushing to get out of the country and were no longer able to carry all their belongings. 

I noticed a young man in a Ukrainian military uniform crying at the crossing whilst he said goodbye to his young partner and their child, who were also both in tears. All Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 were now banned from leaving Ukraine. The young woman and child walked ahead of me and crossed over to the Polish side. It was nothing short of a scene out of a World War II movie, only this was real and happening in the year 2022. A young, smiling Polish customs woman walked over to the Ukrainian woman and instantly put her arm around her and comforted her. The true human cost of this war had well and truly sunk in by this stage.

The Polish response to the influx of refugees (one of the largest exoduses since World War II) coming across the border was astonishing. The Poles were well organized and ready to assist their neighboring country with all the resources they had. One got a sense that the Poles, in some ways, are suffering from a kind of survivor’s guilt and are rightly concerned that they, too, may become a target of Putin’s aggression one day.

The Ukrainian refugees were all given a free SIM card as soon as they crossed over into the refugee camp on the border, and hot food and drinks were also being handed out by volunteers from World Central Kitchen. I decided to work with Dave, a Polish documentary filmmaker and a journalist friend of mine, for the next 10 days on the border filming and doing interviews with aid workers and refugees.

On our first night, we got to witness a Ukrainian woman reunited with her elderly mother after they had become separated in the chaos of the first week of the war. 

“It's mother’s birthday today. We got separated during the war, and I am waiting for her to cross through tonight,” she said to me pensively whilst we hovered around one of the fires burning in the camp to keep warm.

For the next few days and nights, Dave and I would witness many more highly emotional moments in that cold border town. 

The adage that war brings out the best and worst in people is true, and I know that today. During my time in both Ukraine and Poland, I saw the best and worst of humanity. I went from covering the glamorous catwalks of Ukrainian Fashion Week to becoming a war refugee myself in the space of a few weeks. The resilience and sheer determination of the Ukrainian people’s willingness to defend their country under extraordinarily difficult circumstances is something I can’t nor will I ever forget.

All images were provided by the author to The Doe. 

Justice

Dark Days in Ukraine: A Cameraman’s War Diary – Part Two

This is part one of a two-part series. Read the second piece here.

Nothing can prepare you for an active war, especially the constant threat of missile airstrikes. Even the most seasoned war reporters will tell you this much. This was my third time going into an active conflict. The first was in Sri Lanka back in 2001, then 20 years later in Armenia during the border clashes in 2021 and then this year in Ukraine.

“Now you can tell people you’ve been in an air war,” one of my Ukrainian fixers said to me whilst we took cover in a frigid hotel basement in Kyiv on the second night of the war. We began to count the missiles exploding one after another, interspersed with the occasional echoes of small arms fire ringing out in the distance.

One of the more shocking stories my senior Ukrainian fixer told me that night was that in the weeks leading up to the invasion, Russian agents operating out of Ukraine had tricked and paid Ukrainian teenagers into marking an “X” with infrared paint on designated buildings that the Russian military would then later strike.

It was now about 3 a.m., and I decided if I was to make any attempt at sleeping, I’d need to grab a blanket from one of the empty hotel rooms. I asked for permission from one of the hotel staff, who told me to be quick and not turn on any of the lights. After psyching myself up for the mission, I bolted up the stairs to the third floor. The floor was eerily dark and empty with room doors wide open, bedsheets strewn across the floor and in one room, a TV was still on, flickering with the volume turned down. To me, it looked like a scene out of The Shining, but this wasn’t a movie. This was the real world, and whoever had been in these rooms had clearly fled in a hurry during one of the many air raids.

I walked into the room with the TV still on, and it was playing BBC World News. I sat on the bed for just a moment until…BANG! Another loud explosion that didn't seem that far from the window. I could see a red flash, the tail of the missile in the corner of my eye appearing less than two kilometers away, if I were to guess. Tempted to get closer to the window to watch, my survival instincts told me to run instead. As I left the room, heart-pumping, I skidded along the dark hallway, blanket in tow, looking for the tiny light at the end of the hallway with the exit sign to the stairs. A robotic voice in English came over the loudspeaker: “This is an emergency. There is a military attack. Go down to the basement.”

As I headed back down the stairs, other journalists, fixers and some hotel guests were still awake. Some journalists were doing live on-air reports back to their media channels’ studios. 

One international worker from WHO was frantically texting his staff whom he was trying to locate, and I could see his hands were shaking. One British journalist arrived through a back entrance to the hotel basement in full body armor, shook his head and opened his backpack. He then pulled out his laptop and a paper bag with a bottle of whiskey. “Would you like a swig?” 

“Why not?” I said, knowing it was probably the best one could do to calm the nerves. 

After placing his laptop on a small table, we all gathered around to watch Zelenskyy give his first live address since the war had begun.

“He’s not just an actor; he’s a smart guy, and he’s got balls,” said the British journalist.

This was the beginning of my dark days in Ukraine. But let’s go back a bit.

Like many other journalists and observers, I had been monitoring the Russian aggression building up in Ukraine since the end of 2021 and was mentally preparing myself to go. Certain intel reports were suggesting the war would happen straight after the Winter Olympics in China, which, for once, turned out to be true.

I sent out my usual set of pitches to clients and managed to get a few bites from a publication in the U.K. and another in Canada. Within days of arriving in Kyiv, I received an email from ABC TV in Australia asking me to work for them on an exclusive contract that consisted of mainly shooting raw video pieces of events, interviews with Ukrainians and shots of Ukrainians going about their daily lives. I agreed and dropped my other clients or offloaded them to a couple of younger journalists I was traveling with.

 The first assignment we covered was an anti-Russian propaganda protest out the front of a pro-Russian TV channel in the center of Kyiv on a snowy night in early February. There were probably a hundred or more protesters chanting slogans out the front of the TV channel’s headquarters. As the main protest organizer finished speaking to the crowd, he put down his mic, and the song “Sure Shot” by Beastie Boys segued out of the sound system and signaled that the protest was winding down and had transformed into a pop-up block party. When the protest calmed down, I approached a handful of locals for interviews to gauge people’s opinions about the current situation.

“We are protesting about this channel that is Russian…we don’t want this channel to broadcast propaganda inside Ukraine,” said Masha, a young Ukrainian protester.

Masha went on to tell me that she hoped that the war would end and that her husband and friends would come home and that Ukraine would have a peaceful future with a good economy and be a part of the European Union. Toward the end of our conversation, her voice began to crack and tears started to roll down her pale cheeks. For the rest of that week, I carried out multiple interviews with other Ukrainians who all voiced similar hopes, especially when it came to talking with the younger generation.

The next weekend, my colleagues and I were invited to cover Ukrainian Fashion Week (UFW). UFW included all the normal fanfare of an international Fashion Week. It featured supermodels strutting the catwalks, fashion designers cheering them on, big-name artists, an endless flow of Prosecco being served and so on. This would be the last assignment in Kyiv we would cover before Russian troops invaded. The event going ahead was in and of itself an act of defiance against Russian aggression and sent a clear message to the world that Ukraine’s capital would carry on with its normal entertainment program undeterred by the warring ways of its neighbor.

“We need to get ready for the invasion. We need to work hard. We need our economy to be strong. What Putin has wanted for the last eight years is for Ukraine’s economy to collapse, for its society to collapse, and he is trying with all his power to make this country disappear from the world map,” said Vivy, who is the founder of a Ukrainian fashion start-up, among other things.

It is widely believed that Putin has always wanted to bring Ukraine back into the sphere of his influence, and he has proved that he isn't afraid to obtain it militarily.

Now, in retrospect, and to some extent at the time, it felt somewhat surreal walking around the backstage area of UFW with models swanning about giggling and having fun posing for photos and taking selfies, given what was in store for the country soon after. 

On the final night of Ukrainian Fashion Week, I was invited to a bunker bar to film in the center of Kyiv. These bunker bars are quite common in this part of the world and were real World War II bunkers that have since been converted into bars or strip clubs. 

I wandered downstairs and sat next to a British pilot, who flies private jets for VIPs, and struck up a conversation. I left my bag downstairs next to him with my camera gear inside to take a break up on the street level. He then left shortly after, and as he waved goodbye, a group of three or four men appeared, walking toward me. One opened his arms, gesturing to hug me, while another man went around behind me and snatched my wallet from my back pocket. They then ran down the stairs to the bunker bar and grabbed my backpack and ran away into the night. The whole thing happened in less than 30 seconds.

I’ve been in hostile environments before, and I’ve been injured in the field, but I’ve always been lucky to not have anything stolen. I was told by a variety of people that there was no point in reporting it, as naturally, the local authorities would have too many bigger problems on their hands. The mugging was to remain a mystery. Some people told me it was probably a Russian gang. Others said it might have been the Security Service of Ukraine in a case of mistaken identity for being a Russian spy. 

Whoever they were, they had been watching me for a while to know that I had a backpack downstairs. Moreover, it was most likely that the material on my camera was what they were most interested in and the wallet theft was only to make it look like a simple robbery. 

Apart from muggings, another pain point for journalists in Ukraine is the constant threat of cyberattacks. In the days leading up to the assault on Ukraine, I noticed periodically I couldn’t get a keystroke in Microsoft Word and my photo and video editing apps didn’t always function as they should. Google Maps became less accurate during the invasion, although this was likely to have been instigated by the Ukrainian authorities so as to mislead the Russian military advancing from inside the country. Other journalists I spoke to shared similar struggles, particularly with map accuracy on their devices. It isn’t just journalists who are targeted by cyberattacks; the Ukrainian government has also had to contend with this issue for some time now.

It goes without saying that many journalists in Ukraine are having an extremely difficult time. As of May 2022, at least 23 journalists have been killed in the field since the Russian invasion began. Aside from the risk of dying or being seriously injured in the field, cyberattacks, harassment and robbery are actually common occurrences and go with the territory. One of my colleagues later informed me that he and one other journalist had guns pointed at them by the police and a camera was ripped off them in a similar case of mistaken identity for being Russian agents. 

What was to happen over the following weeks was a kaleidoscopic matrix of psychological warfare and impending hell.

Dark Days in Ukraine: A Cameraman’s War Diary – Part One

In the South, unions are often a touchy topic—not much is known about them, and what is known is often shrouded by anti-workers’-rights propaganda. My personal journey with unions started when I was a cast member at Walt Disney World. Unions had already been established for many years, but “The Mouse,” as co-workers not so nicely called it, was trying to push them out.

Being a union member there saved my job against a management team that didn’t want me, and that's when I realized just how underrepresented workers without unions are. When I was wrongfully accused of intentional misconduct and disregard for safety, my union rep had my back and made sure I had all the information, protection and community I needed. Knowing that I could have easily lost my job—and that there were people in the workforce who face much worse because they don't have support or assurance of their employment like that—ignited something in me.

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