When sharing leaves you out

Bike sharing is here in St. Louis! Bright and shiny green-and-yellow LimeBikes are sitting on sidewalks and street corners throughout the city waiting for smartphone and debit card holders to pay a buck to ride for 30 minutes. It’s economical, environmentally-friendly, helps people get to bus stops and run errands and provides a fun fitness activity. They’re in Seattle, San Francisco, South Bend, DC, Dallas and Miami. Great idea for the city of St. Louis, right?

I thought so too. I heard and read about this new dockless bike sharing system coming to the city. And I was excited last week to see a few scattered across my neighborhood while I was out walking my doggy. So I scooped up my 15-pound Chihuahua mix to see if she could fit in the bike’s front basket and she did. Well, I thought, it’s been 15-20 years, but they say you never forget.

I pull out my phone to download the LimeBike app to unlock the bike. As I was scanning and verifying by text, a man in his 30s got off the bus and came over. He had a sparkle of curiosity in his eyes. “Hey, I heard about these,” he says. “You can just get on it and ride? For free?”

“I think so…” I tell the man as I’m looking at the app information. “Oh wait, it’s $1 for 30 minutes but you get the first ride free.” I start to show him the app and we go through the scanning process (it didn’t work, I had to manually enter the number). I don’t know this man but we actually go through the entire process together until I get the bike automatically unlocked by entering the code LimeBike texted me. The man walks away smiling. “Yeah I’ll be getting on one of these,” he says before telling me to have a nice day.

And so it began. Me and my doggy’s urban bike sharing adventure. The wind blew through our hair. The air blew out of my lungs. Quickly. I walked the bike more than I rode it. I made it to the corner near my house and put the kickstand down. Time to park and lock.

As I sat on the steps in front of my house trying to catch my breath, I noticed a group of neighborhood kids show interest in the bike. Three black boys around 10 to 12 years-old. Two looked like brothers. As they approached the colorful bicycle, I saw the same sparkle in their eyes that I saw in the grown man who got off the bus. I felt in them the same anticipation that I felt when I first saw this shiny new toy. Something that I could pick up and play with.

But they could not. They examined the bike, looked at the wording and markings, kicked up the kickstand and tried the lock to see if it would bulge. It did not. There was no smartphone for them to pull out. No debit card to load cash into their registered accounts. They walked away.

I’ve seen these boys before. The two brothers have frayed clothing and unkempt hair. Their friend, the leader, has been seen trying to start fights. They have time on their hands and they walk around looking for something to get into. I’ve never seen these kids riding bicycles.

More than 30 percent of the people who call St. Louis home live below poverty level. Of the African American population, 70 percent live below poverty level. Yes, that means that most of the black people who live in St. Louis are poor. The poor black people in St. Louis are dealing with gun violence, police brutality, neighborhood neglect, substandard schools, excessive crime, low wages and systematic and institutionalized racism. We are hurting. And we need care.

I realized then that these little boys will be seeing these lime and lemon treasures all summer. They will be walking past them with the knowledge that they will never be able to ride them. Just one more enticing but unattainable thing dangling in front of them. Like so much in America, it’s there – but it ain’t for them.

I know there are practical reasons that minors can’t ride. Legal liability, injury, parental responsibility (or lack thereof), etc. And LimeBike claims that they are putting processes in place for those who don’t have smartphones or debit cards (even though I couldn’t find the ‘registration online’ thing they claim exists). But the legal disclaimer on their websites states that the bikes are for those 18 or older; or 13 and older with parental permission – permission from the parents who aren’t empowered enough to provide bikes for their kids in the first place. In other words, these kids will not be sharing the bikes that are part of the city’s bike sharing program.

Did the city of St. Louis consider how this bike sharing program would affect kids who don’t have bikes? Does it matter at all that these kids will once again be excluded. That this is symbolic of how these citizens of St. Louis will continue to root in poverty and neglect and hopelessness. Or are city leaders so busy portraying an image of a hip and with-it city like Seattle, that the impact of this exclusionary bike program on the black or poor youth is just collateral damage?

If we really want to value the youth who are the future of our city, perhaps we should come up with a better way. Like if the city is going to have a bike sharing system for adults, then perhaps it should also be making an effort to provide free bikes for the kids. And since the bike sharing companies are for-profit, hey what about the city stipulating that they provide those free bikes. I don’t know. Just thinking out loud.

As for me, I’m not getting back on a LimeBike or any other bike sharing product. I’m not riding with a system that excludes the very population that so desperately needs to be included.

Shadows and Light

Hey ya’ll. Auntie is evolving. 

In approaching this new blog, I received an understanding. I must embrace the shadows in order to move into the light.

Now I’m not going to get all new-agey on you. But we all know that there is joy and pain, yin and yang, darkness and light. Opposing forces of energy that find balance.

Well I’ve been hurting. And I’ve been angry. And I’ve been so busy convincing myself that I was too strong, brave or at-peace to be bothered. But how can I process pain that I do not acknowledge?

I now know I have to feel in order to heal.

So I write. I write to examine the turmoil – both inside myself and outside in this world. I write to face the feelings that I’ve been running away from.

And the anger comes out. And I embrace the shadows.

Then the healing comes. And I embrace the light.

And as I share some of my shadows and light with you, I will try to bring balance. For every post I write about my community and how we gotta do better, I will also be willing to look within and examine how I can grow and improve.

Thanks for taking this journey of healing with me.

More posts coming soon…

On Stephon Clark’s anti-blackness

Black Twitter is once again aflutter today. It seems they found some tweets from Stephon Clark that he made before he was murdered by the police last week in his grandmother’s backyard in Cali.

Dude did not like black women. And he was not shy about expressing it publicly.  In fact, Mr. Clark, or @zoewoodz on Twitter, had quite a few “unenlightened” ideas about black women, colorism and race.

The tweets add context to the photo that the Shaun Kings of the media world have been spreading showing him as a handsome smiling man with his what-appears-to-be Latina girlfriend and their two young sons.

So now angry Twitter users are saying don’t support the protests over this black man’s murder at the hands of white police officers. He didn’t love or support black women so why should black women support him?

Many of us have been calling out black men for a while now, asking where they are in defense of black women. Where is the collective black male outrage over the R Kellys and Cosbys of the world? Why are not black men standing up and saying you don’t treat our women like that? The silence is deafening. And when they do talk, we get the anti-black women ho-tep tribe: Tariq Elite, Umar Johnson, Boyce Watkins, Tommy Sotomayor and Jesse Lee Patterson.

So yes, not wanting to support one more anti-black woman black man is understandable.

But this protest is not in support of Stephon Clark. It is bigger than this one individual. The protests are about government sanctioned murders of black men. Is it possible for us to separate the two?

We can agree that Stephon Clark’s anti-black women words are sad. That he is not a hero. Can we put the sting of his words aside and still stand up to the world to say stop killing us? Do all black people that we protest over have to be angels? 

It will be up to each of us as individuals to decide our own responses and actions to this issue. I choose not to protect or defend anyone that will not protect or defend me. But Stephon Clark was not killed because he had questionable viewpoints, that brother was shot 20 times because he was black. 

Sexy and Menopausal

Hey ya’ll. So Auntie is feeling pretty good these days.

Since my divorce last year, I discovered that getting and staying healthy has been an important part of the healing process. So I take care of me. I get my rest, eat healthy, stay active and maintain a healthy weight. The exercise is slimming me down and the yoga is shaping me up.

Here I am at 55-and-a-half and I must say I’m feeling fine and sexy. Yep, Auntie ain’t doing too bad -- for an auntie.

But you know what is driving me crazy? Menopause. There is nothing that says “old” like a coochie that is going through “the change.” My hormones are running things and it is not good. I break out sweating while I’m siting still. I wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat. And don’t even talk about the hot flashes. Flashes of hot, in case the first term is not clear enough. It feels like I’m about to internally combust. There’s this fire inside. It starts at the pit of my stomach and spreads over my chest to go up my neck and into my face. The heat gets more and more intense until just when you think, “okay this is what it must feel like right before you explode,” it dissipates. You get thought it. You move on.

But I ask myself, and now I ask you: Can I be hot and have hot flashes at the same time? Is it possible to be sexy AND menopausal? Is this a thing? Is anybody else feeling this? Because this real-life situation is starting to turn a little surreal.

And it’s not only affecting me personally. Being a menopausal professional is a delicate balance.

Like during a meeting at work recently. I wasn’t sick, I just looked like it. Just when I stood up to present our strategic plan, the hot flashes hit. I felt the heat coming, hoping it would be a mild episode, easy to conceal. But right before the first slide, I felt the flush and then the wetness on my face.

“Are you okay?” my colleague asks, concern wrinkling his forehead.

There is a certain panic in knowing that the only two choices you have are to either lie when everyone knows you’re lying or tell the truth and be embarrassed or, worse yet, lose professional cred.

If I said I was okay, I would be seen as lying. The sweat rolling down my temples and a new shade of red filling my melanin was in indication that I was NOT okay. But in all actuality, I was. I wasn’t sick. Just hot flashing. An organic biological process that happens when women become middle-aged and menopausal.

Unfortunately, I was not in a setting where I was allowed to be a middle aged menopausal woman. My ambitious management position required me to be a tenacious warrior, smart, savvy, capable and cunning – at all times. With the full knowledge that I am getting older, I work diligently to fulfill that role. In the office early, energetic, alert and dynamic, active and present.

But the sad reality is to be seen as someone who was old enough to no longer produce eggs is, for the narrow minded, to be seen as old, weak, non-essential. That day at that moment, I knew that no matter what competencies and capabilities I brought to the table, I would never be looked at the same way again.

So I stood before my colleagues and took a deep breath. I dabbed the sweat from my brow and I made that presentation. I talked through all 18 slides with a furnace burning off and on inside of me. Because I had to. I was too scared that my professional career would be affected by letting them see me as “old.”

That fear, and the panic I felt trying to conceal what I was going through, makes me angry. Middle-aged women are hot flashing every day all over the world. In bedrooms and boardrooms, factories and churches, grocery stores and fitness clubs. It's what happens to us when we age. It's a natural process that affects half the population. Yet here we stand - there I stood - being made to feel broken for just being who I naturally was.