When You're Accustomed To Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression

I've never been punched in the face. Not in an actual fight, at least. I'm not much of a fighter, I suppose... more of an "arguer." I don't think I'm "scared" to get into a fight, necessarily — there have been many times I have put myself in situations where a physical fight could easily have happened.

I just can't see myself ever being the guy who throws the first punch, and I'm usually the kind of guy who DE-escalates things with logic or humor. And one of the things about being that sort of person, is that the other sort of guy — the sort who jumps into fights quickly — tends to not really be a big fan of me. Not when he first meets me, at least. They usually like me later. Not always. You can't win 'em all...

The first rule of White Club is you do not talk about White Club...

When I moved to Nashville, I didn't really know anyone. I got a job as a server on my second day here. And before long, I was one of the servers the management favored, which meant I got better shifts, better sections and better money.

About nine months after I had been there, a new guy started. We instantly disliked each other. He didn't like my smart mouth, and I didn't like how he walked in and immediately acted like he owned the place. He carried himself with this annoying confidence — like it was his world, and he would tolerate our being in it, as long as we stayed out of his damn way.

There were also rumors that this guy had spent some time in jail, and it was very clear that he was not a "DE-escalater." He was the sort of guy who knew exactly how much he could bench, you know? And you could sense that — just below the surface — there was always this restless energy that silently dared you to say something. He was an intimidating dude.

So it bothered me a little bit when — only a month after he started working there - he was already getting rotated into some of the good sections. Another mouth to feed meant less money for me. He was a good server though.

But nothing he did got under my skin nearly as bad as this: When Chuck (we'll call him "Chuck." His name wasn't Chuck, but it was definitely a name in the "Chuck" category of names. It certainly wasn't a pushover name like "Chris") would walk toward you, he always expected you to be the one to move out of the way. He didn't do this when walking toward girls.

Turns out there are other people...

But if he and another guy (me, especially) were heading toward each other, he would head straight for the other guy — not making eye contact — and he always assumed he had the right of way. If not, you would get bumped by this stocky, solid mass of aggression who seemed to be just itching for someone to question his intended path. And really, this seemed to best describe how Chuck lived his whole life — walking straight at people, and expecting them to move. Until one day...

I had had enough.

I kept thinking, "Why am I always moving out of this guy's way?" Just about everyone else in the world seemed to agree that if two people were walking toward each other, both people would acquiesce a little, leaning the side closest to the other person back just so.

What gave this guy the right to just expect that I'm going to move out of his way? And then another thought started tugging at my brain: "What if I didn't move? What if I just kept walking too?"

I was done playing by his rules. And that evening, as he walked quickly toward me in the aisle of the restaurant (we both were fairly fast walkers), I walked toward him — and I didn't move. I'm not a giant of a man, but I'm solid enough to hold my own — especially when I see a collision coming — and the impact spun him around.

Right there, in front of guests, he immediately said, "What the F*CK, dude!?"

I said, "You alright?"

He was furious, and insisting to know why I had just bumped into him.

I said, "Chuck, I was just walking. Why did you assume that I was going to move out of your way?"

He followed me around the restaurant, angrily attempting to escalate things. He ended up stopping me by another table, and when I said something along the lines of "Welcome to planet Earth," he shoved me. Hard. And not like a shove where you put your hands on someone and then shove.

"Equality can feel like oppression. But it's not. What you're feeling is just the discomfort of losing a little bit of your privilege."

It was the sort of shove where his hands were already moving really fast when they hit my chest, and it made a pretty loud noise. All of his bench-pressing muscles let lose on me — this person who dared question his right of way — and I was knocked about two steps back.

I walked away from him, and I could feel my heart beating in my ears. I thought about what I should do, if I should say something to a manager (that didn't seem like a good idea), if I should say anything more to Chuck (that seemed like an even worse idea).

I decided to just try to avoid him for a bit and let him cool off. About 15 minutes later, the GM asked to talk to me. He said that a guest had seen Chuck angrily shove me, and had complained and described what happened (describing it as him "hitting" me, but it was definitely a shove).

I told him what happened — about him always assuming I was going to move, about me simply walking and not moving, and about the arguing and the shove that followed. It was a corporate restaurant, so he took everything very seriously. He filled out an incident report, asked me if I wanted to press charges, and told me if I wanted him gone, he was fired. I said that I didn't want the guy to lose his job. I just wanted him to recognize that other people had every right to be there that he did.

And so, I recently thought about this story again after I had just read this amazing quote (a quote for which I tried very hard to find an attribution, but kept coming up "Unknown)
:

"When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."

And things started making a little more sense to me. All this anger we see from people screaming "All Lives Matter" in response to black protesters at rallies. All this anger we see from people insisting that their "religious freedom" is being infringed because a gay couple wants to get married. All these people angry about immigrants, angry about Muslims, angry about "Happy Holidays," angry about not being able to say bigoted things without being called a bigot...

They all basically boil down to people who have grown accustomed to walking straight at other folks, and expecting them to move. So when "those people" in their path don't move — when those people start wondering, "Why am I always moving out of this guy's way?"; when those people start asking themselves, "What if I didn't move? What if I just kept walking too?"; when those people start believing that they have every bit as much right to that aisle as anyone else — it can seem like their rights are being taken away.

Can a brother get some "peach"?

Equality can feel like oppression. But it's not. What you're feeling is just the discomfort of losing a little bit of your privilege — the same discomfort that an only child feels when she goes to preschool and discovers that there are other kids who want to play with the same toys as she does.

It's like an old man being used to having a community pool all to himself, having that pool actually opened up to everyone in the community, and then that old man yelling, "But what about MY right to swim in a pool all by myself?!"

And what we're seeing politically right now is a bit of anger from both sides. On one side, we see people who are angry about "those people" being let into "our" pool. They're angry about sharing their toys with the other kids in the classroom.

They're angry about being labeled a "racist," just because they say racist things and have racist beliefs. They're angry about having to consider others who might be walking toward them, strangely exerting their right to exist.

This is the "Again" of "Make America Great Again." Don't worry, they'll just open some swim clubs and make the membership really expensive...

On the other side, we see people who believe that pool is for everyone. We see people who realize that when our kids throw a fit in preschool, we teach them about how sharing is the right thing to do. We see people who understand being careful with their language as a way of being respectful to others. We see people who are attempting to stand in solidarity with the ones who are claiming their right to exist — the ones who are rightfully angry about having to always move out of the way, people who are asking themselves the question, "What if I just keep walking?"

Which kind of person are you?

I should mention that "Chuck" and I eventually became friends, proving that people who see the world very differently can get along when they are open to change, and when they are willing to try to see the world though another person's eyes. There is hope.

Chris blogs at theboeskool.com about Jesus, politics and bathroom. You find him on Twitter and Facebook.

This post originally appeared on TheBoeskool.

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Persistent Illusion

Happy 4th of July

The Arena - Lindsey Stirling

Religion & The Rich

The Education System

The world’s losers are revolting, and Brexit is only the beginning

Washington Post illustration, iStock

HE world has enjoyed an unprecedented run of peace, prosperity and cooperation the last 25 years, but now that might be over. At least when it comes to those last two.

That, more than anything else, is what Britain's vote to leave the European Union means. A British exit, or Brexit, will make the country poorer in the short run, perhaps in the long run too, and might drag the rest of Europe down with it. That's because Britain is essentially ripping up its free trade deal with the rest of Europe. But of far greater concern than just dollars and cents is that this is the most significant setback in Europe's 60-year quest for "ever closer union," and the most shocking success for the new nationalism sweeping the Western world.

Brexit, in other words, is the end of the end of history.

That, of course, was Francis Fukuyama's famous idea that, with the end of the Cold War, capitalist democracy had not only defeated communism, but also every other ideology. It was supposed to be, as he wrote, the "final form of human government." And insofar as democracies tended to work together, this implied the future would be one where competition wouldn't lead to conflict, but would rather replace it. Tariffs would come down, money would move across borders to where it was needed most, and workers would too. This meant, then, that governments weren't the only ones that would become more alike. People would as well. They'd stop being citizens and chauvinists, and become consumers and cosmopolitans. You'd have nation-states without the nationalism.

What happens next after Britain votes for a Brexit from the E.U.

In a stunning victory for the "Leave" campaign, Britain has voted to exit the European Union. Here's what happens next. In a stunning victory for the "Leave" campaign, Britain has voted to exit the European Union. Here's what happens next. (Jason Aldag, Adam Taylor/The Washington Post)

For a while, this seemed true enough. Democracy spread, war lessened and economies opened up. In turn, international groups like the European Union and World Trade Organization codified itall. As any Mumbai taxi driver could have told you, the world really was a Thomas Friedman book.
Or at least it looked that way, if you didn't stare too closely. If you did, though, you would have noticed the cracks in this liberal international order. For one, financial capitalism didn't always work so well for countries. Money moved in and out of them at the speed of a mouse click, inflating and then popping bubbles along the way. From Mexico to Argentina, Thailand to South Korea, Hong Kong to Indonesia, and, eventually, the United States to Southern Europe, these capital flows magnified the economy's boom-bust cycle, with an emphasis on the bust.

For another, global capitalism didn't always work so well for workers in the United States and Europe even as — or, in some cases, because — it pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty everywhere else. In fact, the working class in rich countries have seen their real, or inflation-adjusted, incomes flatline or even fall since the Berlin Wall came down and they were forced to compete with all the Chinese, Indian and Indonesian workers entering the global economy. You can see that in the chart below, put together from economist Branko Milanovic's data. It shows how much real incomes have increased — or not — for the whole world between 1988 and 2008. Now, the way to read this is to imagine that everyone, as in everyone in every country, was lined up from highest to lowest income. The richest people in the richest countries (and every other one for that matter) would be in the global top 1 percent, the working class in the richest countries would be around the 80th percentile, and the middle class in middle-class countries like China would be at the 50th percentile.
Globalization didn't create a lot of losers, but the ones it did were concentrated in the countries that were the driving force behind it.

This was a political powder keg. If rich-world workers were losing ground even when times were good, what would happen if we got hit by one of the financial crises the new global economy seemed to spawn every few years? Well, things would get ugly. Although, in truth, they had already started to. Right-wing populists like Pat Buchanan in the United States, Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Jörg Haider in Austria had scored surprising near-victories, if not actual ones, in the late 1990s and early 2000s by focusing the working class's incipient ire on a "foreign" enemy besides outsourcing: immigrants. This antagonism reflected economic anxiety, cultural fear and even racial resentment. Displaced workers felt like immigrants were taking jobs and benefits that should have been theirs. They were worried about losing the one thing — their national identity — the market couldn't take. And, a lot of times, they just didn't want to be around people who didn't look, sound, or worship like they did.

It didn't take long, then, for the West's triumphal globalism to fuel a nationalist backlash. In the United States it's Trump, in France it's the National Front, in Germany it's the Alternative for Germany and, yes, in Britain it's the Brexiters.

O Britain's "leave" campaign was about what you'd expect, especially considering that immigration had doubled the previous 20 years as people from the E.U.'s poorest east had come looking for work. Brexiters called to "take back control" from Brussels's bureaucrats. They warned that Turkey is about to join the E.U. — it's not — and flood the country with immigrants. They said that Europe's refugee crisis has pushed them to a "breaking point" in a poster reminiscent of Nazi propaganda. And they promised to earmark the funds now being sent to the E.U. for what they claim is the overburdened-by-immigrants National Health Services instead. Never mind that they overstated how much money that'd be by a factor of two. Their basic argument was that Britain could only stop this influx of immigrants if it ditched the E.U. and its rules mandating the free movement of people, and that the elites had failed the people by forgetting there was a Britain outside of London. The only real surprise is that all this happened in Britain and not some other E.U. country, since they were smart enough not to adopt the euro and thus avoided the worst of Europe's double-dip recession.

If he were around today, Louis XV might amend what he said to this: Après Brexit, le déluge. That's not, though, because of what Brexit might do to Britain's economy, but rather to everyone else's politics. Now, of course, it is true that leaving the E.U. without getting a new trade deal almost as good as the one it has now will make Britain permanently poorer. And it is also true that the uncertainty over what any future agreement will look like will put the brakes on business investment and possibly push Britain into recession. But the economic fate of one little island isn't what has global markets on edge. It's whether the rest of Europe will follow Britain out of the E.U. and into their own portmanteaus. In other words, whether Brexit will beget Frexit, Itexit and Nexit.

It might. Right-wing populists, after all, in France, Italy and the Netherlands have already called for their own referendums on E.U. membership. And if they win, it wouldn't just tear the common market apart but the common currency as well. See, unlike Britain, all those countries use the euro. So if one of them were to leave, two things would happen: First, they'd have to change all the money in their economy, and, second, every other euro country would worry that they'd be next. That, in turn, would set off a slow-motion bank run across Southern Europe as people tried to get ahold of their euros before they could be turned into, say, liras that wouldn't be worth anywhere near as much. It'd be the mother-of-all financial crises. Which is why German, French, Spanish and Italian stock markets all fell much further than Britain's did after it voted to leave. Indeed, those markets dropped 6.8, 8.0, 12.4 and 12.5 percent, respectively, on Friday, while Britain's "only" declined 3.2 percent.
Brexit, it turns out, is more about Europe than it is about Britain.

HIS could be the beginning of the end of the euro, the European Union and the liberal international order itself. Like the French Revolution, though, it's too soon to say. Britain may yet back away from the brink. And Europe may yet fix the flaws in its currency and its bureaucracy to head off any more nationalist uprisings. Neither of those is likely, but we can't rule them out — just like we can't rule out the opposite. Brexit really might be the end of the E.U. if France and Italy follow Britain out the door; it might also be the end of the U.K. if Scotland and Northern Ireland decide they'd rather be part of the E.U. (or what's left of it); and it might even be the end of our era of economic integration if it helps propel populists to power who only care about putting their people "first."

The E.U. may certainly seem to deserve this fate. It has let an economic fire burn across Southern Europe for nearly eight years, its only response to that has been to pour some gasoline on it, and it seems to think it has done its job now that that is down to just a smolder. Now, its first mistake was ignoring the economists who warned that creating a currency union without a fiscal union to go with it would end, well, as badly as it has. Its second one was ignoring the evidence that things were indeed going bad just as predicted, and blaming irresponsible governments instead. And its last one was all but blackmailing governments into slashing their budgets out of the misguided belief that this would get their sputtering economies growing again. It didn't. It was the economic equivalent of tossing a drowning person an anchor instead of a lifeline, because you thought they needed to get stronger and not bailed out. Which made the E.U. Europe's bête noire.

The sad irony of all this is that the E.U. was built to prevent the very kind of nationalist fervor its economic mismanagement and political heavy-handedness are provoking now. So maybe its time has come. The dustbin of history exists for a reason.

And yet, and yet. It's easy for a generation that has only known peace and relative prosperity to forget that the arc of the political universe is long, and it bends toward wherever you point it. If that's toward chauvinism and isolationism, well, that's what you'll get. Europe's countries will end up with metaphorical walls around their economies, and eventually physical ones around their borders. Hungary's nationalist government is already well on its way with its razor-wire fences. This is a dangerous time for Europe. It has had walls before. It doesn't want them again. The only thing, then, that might be worse than the E.U. is the people who want to get rid of it. The same could be said of globalization. It might have made growth less inclusive and less sustainable than before — at least in rich countries — but it's hard to say the alternative would be better. We'd be a little poorer, and poorer countries would be a lot less able to grow.

The liberal international order isn't working for too many people, but, on balance, most economists would say it's still worth fighting for. After all, there are much worse alternatives. If we want to avoid learning that firsthand, though, we're going to need to build bigger safety nets for globalization's losers, and, in the case of the E.U., make it more responsive to voters. Otherwise, we might get the toughest lesson of all.

History doesn't always move forward.

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It's Official: New Yorkers In 2020 Won't See Sunlight

A flurry of skyscrapers is planned for NYC. Unless you have millions to drop on a high-rise penthouse, prepare for imminent darkness.

New York City is in a real estate frenzy. In Manhattan, the skyline is rising higher and higher thanks to forthcoming projects by some of architecture's biggest names: Rafael Viñoly, Bjarke Ingels, SHoP, and Herzog and de Meuron, among others. Across the river in Brooklyn, a similar fleet of towering buildings is taking shape. One thing's certain: the streets of NYC are sure to get a heck of a lot darker.

Explore the interactive site hereNational Geographic

National Geographic put together an illustration of the proposed and in-progress additions to the skyline superimposed with the existing cityscape. Before 2004, there were 28 skyscrapers 700 feet and taller. Thirteen have been built since then, 15 are under construction, and 19 more are proposed. Many are concentrated in Hudson Yards and near the World Trade Center, but as the infographic shows, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building—two of the city's most iconic silhouettes—could potentially be engulfed by their taller brethren.
While the 34 in-progress and proposed skyscrapers seem staggering, London has a whopping 230 new towers over 20 stories planned.

The NYC buildings will hold some sorely-needed square footage for billionaires in search of their next pied-a-terre. But for the rest of us? Sayonara sunlight, it was nice knowing you. The city should consider building publicly accessible rooftop gardens to compensate.

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Paulette Leaphart walked topless from Biloxi to Washington to talk about the realities of cancer survivors

By Latria Graham | Jun 30, 2016
Special to espnW.com

Latria Graham

Paulette Leaphart and her daughter Madeline walk through Spotsylvania County, Virginia, on the shoulder of Jefferson Davis Highway, on June 23.

Paulette Leaphart left her hometown of Biloxi, Mississippi, on April 30, intent on walking to Washington, D.C. -- a journey of 1,034 miles -- and arriving by June 27, her 50th birthday, a milestone her doctors weren't always confident she would reach.
She strides with a sense of purpose, acknowledging that her body is forever changed. Leaphart was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer in January 2014. She underwent a double mastectomy and wears the scars as emblems of her struggle.
Accompanied by her youngest daughter, 8-year-old Madeline, Leaphart is traveling the entire route topless.
All she can talk about is what will happen when she gets to Washington. Leaphart wants to tell lawmakers about the battle everyday people like her face in trying to afford treatment.
She shares the stories of other people in trouble, folks in agony, at the mercy of their insurance, unable to focus on their survival because they lack the economic means to get the treatment they need.
"Yellow is the new pink. We're taking lemons and making lemonade," Leaphart tells Chrystie Logan, a woman who flags her down on the side of the highway near Fredericksburg, Virginia. Logan has been following Leaphart's journey online.

Latria Graham

Leaphart uses her phone to check her progress in Stafford County, Virginia, on June 25.

The lemonade quote is not an accident -- Leaphart made an appearance in Beyoncé's visual album "Lemonade" on April 23. The hourlong film is described as a visual representation of every woman's journey of self-knowledge and healing. Leaphart spent some time with the singer on set.
"She said I inspired her -- that she admired me. It was great to hear that. I asked her to join me for a block of the walk, and she offered to join me for a mile," Leaphart says, a smirk forming on her lips as if she's letting this slip.
Beyoncé has yet to make an appearance, but that doesn't bother Leaphart. She's concentrating on the end goal.
Leaphart endured a journey before this walk, and she wrestled with a number of the emotions represented in Beyoncé's film. Anger and emptiness attempted to take root in her, but she chooses to focus on hope and redemption.
She wants to make sure Congress understands her experience and recognizes that her plight isn't unusual. In the United States in 2015, 60,290 people received a new breast cancer diagnosis and 40,290 people died of the disease, according to the American Cancer Society.
So she walks. God gave her this mission almost a year ago. Those are her words.
"I trained for this. When I got sick, I had to sell my cars. That made me walk to the doctor," Leaphart says, the memory still vivid. "I'd walk the 5 miles there, recover for an hour or two, then walk the 5 miles back."
She has to get to D.C. After she shows Congress her chest, she wants to show them her teeth.
Cancer treatment had an effect on her mouth. Many of her teeth are now chipped or broken, her molars useless.
"I need to get my mouth fixed, but do you know how much they want? Ten thousand dollars," Leaphart says, the number spilling from her lips with acrimony.
She and her daughter are taking a break and eating peaches after a hot morning in the sun. The fruit serves a dual purpose -- it's a favorite of Madeline's, and the ripe peach is one of the few things Leaphart can eat comfortably.
She hopes to receive dental treatment one day, once a change is made. She believes delivering the message is her duty, so she goes back to walking in her black Nike Air Maxes and neon-green socks, kicking up rocks, creating a rough-sounding scrabble that reverberates as she heads down into a valley.
The journey hasn't been without its problems. First there was the dissolution of her relationship with a documentary crew, which resulted in the removal of the recreational vehicle that was meant to provide a respite at night. Leaphart and her young daughter were left by the side of the road, but the mother of eight was undaunted. She needed a new plan and decided to travel light -- a relative picked up their luggage, and they continued their journey with three changes of clothing each.
Leaphart has no support vehicle. Every day she must decide on the move what she and Madeline will eat and where they will sleep.
Once, near the border of North Carolina and Virginia, they were stranded 12 miles from the nearest hotel and had no access to a cab. Mother and daughter made their way to Lake Gaston, where someone knew of her trek and helped the pair find a place to sleep.

Latria Graham

Taraysha and Sarah Woodall stop Leaphart outside of Falmouth, Virginia, on June 25 to see if she needs a ride.

"People expected me to quit now that there wasn't any publicity," Leaphart says, her arms swinging. "I made a promise to make it to D.C., and that's what I'm going to do."
She does a lot of talking and walking at the same time. She has to, in order to hit her goal of 30 miles a day. When pressed, she can cover 5 miles in an hour, but by doing so she pushes her body to the point where it can endure no more.
People who know her story stop by the side of the road almost every day. Some bring Popsicles. Some bring Powerade, or anything with electrolytes. Some join the journey. They shower Leaphart with prayers and at times offer her and Madeline a place to stay.
Leaphart documents the kindness from strangers on her Facebook page. Videos of her story have spanned the globe, and now 20,000 people watch daily, tracking her progress. One of the videos she made has more than 10 million views. The online presence has helped her fight the inclination to hide her scars.
"I loved the color pink. I can't stand what they've done to it," she says, the frustration evident in her voice. She has adopted yellow to symbolize the need for hope and a cure, not awareness.
"We need to tell the truth about cancer. They're using the slogan, 'Save the ta-tas,' but the ta-tas aren't what's important. It's the people with the breasts. You can still be alive without your breasts."
Leaphart had a medical condition that made breast enhancements risky, so breast reconstruction was not an option.
"I'm still beautiful," Leaphart declares. "I still turn heads even though I don't have breasts. It doesn't make me less of a woman. I'm a girly girl. I like getting dressed up, putting on makeup and everything else, but I refuse to allow one standard definition of beauty to exist in my household. That sets us all up for disappointment when things change. Regardless of what we look like, we should be celebrated."
"Sit tight for a minute."
A deputy of the Spotsylvania County Sheriff's Office eases out of his vehicle, parked along Jefferson Davis Highway in Virginia. He and another officer have come to talk to Leaphart about her decision to walk bare-chested.
Leaphart taught Madeline how to use Facebook Live so that when they are stopped by the police, the girl can document the encounter. Just in case.

Latria Graham

Deputies Pearce and Ridings of the Spotsylvania County Sheriff's Office stop Leaphart on June 24 to speak with her about her decision to walk topless.

The officer's initial concern stems from social norms based on gender -- the idea that she should be wearing a shirt because she is a woman. The officers respectfully but firmly insist that she wear a shirt.
For Leaphart, hiding would mean giving up her confidence and giving in to shame. She tells this to the police when they stop her. Today it's the Spotsylvania County Sheriff's Office, but it has been a dozen other departments along the way.
"It's amazing that I've got to educate the police on the law," Leaphart says. "I took the time to do the research before I ever got started. I knew this was coming."
After her double mastectomy, her chest has long, horizontal scars and pouches of skin where fat, ligaments and connective tissue used to live. Leaphart no longer has nipples. That's why she is allowed to walk around shirtless.
In most states, indecent exposure is defined as exposing the genitals (breasts and nether regions). She explains this to almost every officer she meets. While respectfully challenging the police's reasoning, she also confronts society's definition of what it means to be a woman.
Later, the Spotsylvania County Sheriff's Office will share a Facebook post chronicling its time with Leaphart and the education the officers received about breast cancer and her story. In the final picture, everyone is all smiles. With their differences resolved, Leaphart loads Madeline into her stroller and sets off again, walking down the side of the highway.
This trip has been educational for the child, and her mother isn't the only one getting stronger with each mile. They stop to read historical markers. On rest breaks, they use Leaphart's phone to look up the types of plants and animals they encounter on the trail. Madeline sits in her stroller for the better part of the day, taking mental notes.

Latria Graham

Paulette waits patiently for Madeline, who stopped to smell and examine foliage in Thornburg, Virginia, on June 24.

Madeline's favorite scenery is the forest. They walk past the blooming primrose and dandelions, the scent of honeysuckle trailing after them as they seek shelter from the unrelenting sun. Overgrown grass threatens to overwhelm the pair at times, and they hold hands to get through the scary parts. They hardly take notice anymore of the clatter and clank of trucks carrying freight as they zoom past on the highway.
Still, even a day of relaxation has its perils. Late last week, after a day at a theme park, the door of a passing SUV is accidentally left open and it strikes Leaphart on the left side of her body. She says she is grateful -- if they door had hit her chest, she would still be in the hospital.
Vehicles aren't the only problem. Often the weather refuses to cooperate. Leaphart is occasionally thwarted by the rain; one morning the sky opened up and let loose a torrential downpour.
Mist clings to their ankles when they walk through patches of fog after an early-morning rainstorm. The mud on the shoulder of the road seems like quicksand sucking at her shoes. Leaphart has only one thought: forward.
Later on, the sun will deprive the dirt of its moisture and the ground will turn to dust, which swirls around their feet like smoke.
There are moments when the two must take shelter from the sun. Temperatures in the high 90s are common this time of year.
Sitting under a shade tree in Spotsylvania County, Leaphart begins to talk about the past. She had a different life before all of this -- she was a social worker. Cancer tried to take a lot of things from her. It took her home: One day, Leaphart returned from an appointment to find a notice on her door ordering her to vacate. Soon she and her children would be homeless, and because she had an eviction on her record, she has trouble finding safe, affordable housing for her family.
She tries not to dwell on this, grateful that she is alive to bring the issue to light. She takes another swig of her Powerade before resettling her and Madeline's things in the basket of the stroller.
They move beyond Aquia Harbor in Virginia, and then on past Quantico. The increased military presence means they don't have much farther to go.
A green-and-white sign in the distance announces their progress.
Dumfries 5
Alexandria 32
Washington 40
She is getting closer. She gets a call from a friend -- Leaphart has been granted a meeting with some lawmakers when she arrives. After the news, Leaphart redoubles her efforts, arms swinging, meeting on her mind, hope radiating from her with every footfall.

Latria Graham

At a motel in Stafford County on June 24, Leaphart is all smiles after receiving the news that she has an official appointment with lawmakers in Washington.

Paulette Leaphart is dreaming of her day in Washington.
When she arrives in Alexandria, the buildings go vertical, reaching for the sky in their 1980s industrial glory, the entire complex tinged with exhaust from the vehicles that wheeze and whiz by on the highway and nearby interstate. Pink clouds creep across the sky, replaced by white ones as the day goes on.
Closer.
Heels cracked, blisters deflated, she passes by the Pentagon before taking the 14th Street Bridge across the Potomac River, the Jefferson Memorial on her left. The Washington Channel is the last body of water standing between her and the moment of reckoning she has been walking for two months to achieve. In her mind, the journey -- the tests, the loss, the doubt, the despair -- has been worth it. Sweat trickles down her forehead as she looks up at the dome covered in construction netting, its whiteness a stark contrast to the color of the sky.
She has found the purpose for her pain, and as she stands on the steps of the Capitol building on her birthday, she utters three words: "Thank you, God."
Every footstep, every second of forward motion led up to this. She did it -- survived. Free of the stroller, her daughter walks beside her, followers, family and friends walk behind her, wearing yellow, bearing witness to her testimony of strength, faith and endurance.
She is 50. She is in Washington. The woman from Biloxi has accomplished the first portion of what she set out to do.
This was just the beginning.
Latria Graham is a writer based in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The majority of her work revolves around the dynamics of race, gender norms, class, nerd culture and sports. You can find more of her work at LatriaGraham.com, or engage with her on Twitter at @LGRaconteur.

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The Origin of the Coney Island Hot Dog Is a Uniquely American Story

They also have very little to do with the New York City amusement park...

A Coney dog (Diádoco via WIkicommons)

This July 4, as with every July 4 going back to the 1970s, an all-American display of gluttony will feature rubber-stomached competitive eaters once again gorging themselves in the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest on Brooklyn's Coney Island. This year's gastronomic battle, at the corner of Surf and Stillwell avenues, will honor the 100th anniversary of the founding of Nathan's Famous Hot Dogs at the same corner in 1916.

It's a patriotic event, and not just because it'll be echoed at holiday barbecues across the country. The hot dog, that quintessential American food, has been associated with Coney Island, America's most storied amusement resort, since frankfurter first met bun. But Nathan's century-old triumph of entrepreneurship is only part of the Ellis-Island-meets-Coney-Island story. Thanks to immigrants from Northern and Eastern Europe alike, the name "Coney Island hot dog" means one thing in New York, another in the Midwest and beyond.

Historians disagree on the hot dog's origin story, but many credit Charles Feltman, a Coney Island pie-wagon vendor, with inventing the fast food, serving hot dachshund sausages in milk rolls as early as 1867. The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council says Feltman opened a hot dog stand on Coney Island in 1871 and sold 3,684 sausages that year. Wieners took Feltman far. By the turn of the century, he'd gone upscale, with Feltman's German Gardens, a huge complex of restaurants and beer gardens on Surf Avenue that employed 1,200 waiters. Though seafood became Feltman's specialty, he still had seven grills dedicated to hot dogs, which he sold in the 1910s for ten cents apiece.
Nathan Handwerker, a Polish immigrant with a day job as a restaurant delivery boy, worked Sunday afternoons at Feltman's German Gardens, slicing rolls. According to Handwerker's 1974 New York Times obituary, Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor, who worked as singing waiters on Coney Island before they found fame, encouraged Handwerker to strike out from Feltman's and sell hot dogs for a nickel instead of a dime. In 1916, he did just that, opening a small hot-dog stand at Surf and Stillwell with his wife, Ida. The subway's extension to Coney Island in 1920 brought countless New Yorkers to his stand. "Society people, politicians, actors and sportsmen flocked to Nathan's," the obituary recalled, "brushing shoulders with truck drivers, laborers, and housewives." Franklin D. Roosevelt famously served Nathan's hot dogs at a 1936 lawn party for Britain's George VI and his wife, Queen Elizabeth (mother of the now-reigning Queen Elizabeth II).

Meanwhile, outside New York, the Coney Island name evokes an entirely different hot-dog tradition. In Michigan, "Coney Island" doesn't mean an amusement park, but one of an estimated 500 diners in the Metro Detroit area alone  that serve Greek food and "Coney dogs" -- hot dogs smothered in chili or ground beef, plus mustard and onions. There are plenty more elsewhere in Michigan, across the Midwest, and beyond.

The Coney dog was spread across the eastern U.S. by various Greek and Macedonian immigrants in the 1900s and 1910s. The restaurateurs were part of the great wave of Greek migration to the U.S. – 343,000 people between 1900 and 1919 – who fled the economic desolation caused by Greece's 1893 bankruptcy and a crash in the price of currants, then Greece's main export. "Many of them passed through New York's Ellis Island and heard about or visited Coney Island, later borrowing this name for their hot dogs, according to one legend," wrote Katherine Yung and Joe Grimm in their 2012 book Coney Detroit.

Lafayette and American Coney Islands both sell the chili-topped Coney dogs. (Benlmoyer via WIkicommons)

In that era, Americans associated New York's Coney Island with hot dog authenticity. Back then, the name "hot dog" was out of favor; amid the concern about meat-packing standards inspired by Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle, it still carried a hint of suggestion that the cheap sausages were made of dog meat. Handwerker called then "red hots," others "Coney Island hots."

Naming the inventor of the Coney dog – the first person to slather chili or sprinkle ground beef on a sausage – is a fool's errand. Various Coney Island restaurants in Michigan and Indiana vie for the title, claiming founding dates in the mid-1910s, but they don't appear in city directories from the era until the 1920s. Many Greeks and Macedonians likely hit upon the idea of dressing hot dogs in variations on saltsa kima, their homeland's spicy tomato-based meat sauce. "The Coney Island's formidable beef topping with a sweet-hot twang has a marked Greek accent," wrote Jane and Michael Stern in their 2009 book 500 Things to Eat Before It's Too Late.

It's easy, though, to locate the Coney dog's ground zero, the Midwest's version of Surf and Stillwell: the corner of West Lafayette Boulevard and Michigan Avenue in Detroit.

There, Lafayette Coney Island and American Coney Island have carried on a sibling rivalry for 80 years. For generations of Detroiters, their chili-topped weiners have been the ultimate urban-diner experience, the workingman's lunch and the late-night craving after last call. Brothers William "Bill" Keros and Constantine "Gust" Keros, former sheepherders from the Greek village of Dara, founded the two diners to serve hot dogs to autoworkers. Each restaurant boasts it opened first, with American Coney staking a claim to a 1917 founding, Lafayette Coney to 1914. But city directories tell a different story than family and business oral history: the Coney Detroit authors say the brothers opened Lafayette Coney together in 1923, and Gust Keros opened American Coney in 1936 after a falling-out with his brother.

Outside metropolitan Detroit, Coney dog variations abound. In Michigan cities such as Flint, Jackson and Kalamazoo, their topping isn't chili, but a sauce that's mostly ground beef, often including beef hearts. A few Coney Island restaurants still exist outside Michigan, from the Coney Island Grill in St. Petersburg, Florida, to George's Coney Island in Worcester, Massachusetts. Cincinnati's version of Coney sauce is a chili, invented in 1922 by Macedonian immigrants Tom and John Kiradjieff as their own spiced version of saltsa kima. That iteration doesn't just go on hot dogs-- it's also served with spaghetti or as a stand-alone chili.

Closer to New York City, the names change. Rhode Islanders call their Greek-immigrant chili-dog diners "New York System" restaurants, and they serve "hot wieners" – never hot dogs. "They are made in a systemic way," wrote the Sterns in 500 Things to Eat, "by lining up all the dogs in buns and dressing them assembly-line-style." But in far upstate New York, around Plattsburgh, they're called Michigans, probably thanks to 1920s Detroit expatriates Eula and Garth Otis. From there, they smuggled themselves across the Canadian border, where the Montreal-area hot-dog chain Resto Lafleur offers a steamed or grilled "hot-dog Michigan" and poutine with "la sauce Michigan."
Today, Nathan's is an international chain, with more than 300 restaurants and stands, mostly on the East Coast. It's added a chili dog to its menu. In another example of hazy hot-dog lore, Nathan's apocryphally claims it's about to host its 100th hot-dog-eating contest – actually a creation of carnival-barker-style bunkum that started in the 1970s. Meanwhile, Coney Island blogger and historian Michael Quinn is reviving the Feltman's red-hots brand, which went extinct with Feltman's restaurant in 1954. He's teamed up with a sausage-maker to make a red hot in homage to the original, which he's selling at pop-up events. In a history-minded revenge, Quinn sells hot dogs for half of Nathan's price.

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