Radical Hope

No one knows how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop and no one knows why it took so long for Erika Bsumek to receive a Shop Athlete Spotlight.  This is to the great loss of previous interviewers and to the vast benefit of yours truly.  Slowly sipping a high gravity beer at The Hyde Park Shop, this was one of the most educational athlete interviews I have ever conducted.  In truly professorial form, this wound up becoming the first ever interview with citations by way of links embedded within.  If you’re feeling down about the pandemic and the other stressors in our world, take a few minutes to read on for some deeply intelligent positivity!

I was thinking that because I’ve got three separate interviews this season, I’d like to frame each of these in a specific way.  For you the jumping off point I wanted to hit was simply history.

Okay!

We are obviously living through difficult times and the way that I process bad situations is often finding context and comfort through the lens of history.  You being a history professor, I thought that was an appropriate way to frame this.  So starting off, could you give us a very brief history of Erika Bsumek?

Ah, well I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah.  We moved to Pennsylvania when I was in first grade and then back to Salt Lake City when I was in 5th grade.  So I grew up in Salt Lake City and then went to the University of Utah; after graduation I really wanted to leave the city. I decided to go to graduate school at Rutgers in New Jersey- I had a few options but Rutgers was the furthest away.  New Jersey seemed very exotic — which people from New Jersey are probably not used to hearing.  I do think New Jersey is the antithesis of Salt Lake City. I traveled around the Southwest doing dissertation research, had a post doc in Newark, lived in NYC, and then I got a job at The University of Texas El Paso, then got a job at here at UT a year later.

How was El Paso?

I loved it.  The people were really nice- it was very interesting.  It was a strange year to live there because it was 2001 and 9/11 happened.  So, when I first moved there in July you could walk to Mexico and back — and then by September you couldn’t.

Can you tell me exactly what your field of expertise is?

I teach environmental history, Native American history, and the history of the US west.  I also work in the field of digital history.

I was reviewing your bio before this and that last one was the one that really surprised me. Can you tell me more about digital history?

Digital history and digital humanities are emerging fields and they revolve around the idea that digital tools can help us look at history and the humanities in different ways or extract more information.  In my case, I created some software for use in my own classes and then more people were interested in using it.  It is this program called ClioVis– Clio is the muse of history and vis signals visualization – so, true to its name, its software that helps you visualize history.  Students plot things on a digital timeline and then connect them through whichever analytical lens they want to use – and then they have to explain the connections.  The whole thing is based on the premise that sometimes things are connected in unexpected ways. It’s really a pedagogical (teaching) and thinking tool.

That is very cool- I did not know that you were a software mogul!  I don’t want to sully your interview with constant reminders that we are living in dark times, but when catastrophic things happen, do you have a touchstone of looking at history to comfort yourself?  Do you have any ways that you use history as a foothold?

Funny you would mention that!  Before COVID, the thing that seemed to me the biggest looming crisis was climate change.  There is this concept in philosophy and history called “Radical Hope”, which is sort of self-explanatory.  When is hope a radical act?  When it’s easier to turn to despair, how can you create hope?  I have a collaborator – John Barry – at the Queens University in Belfast and we ran a conference with scholars from all over the world to talk about how we can retain hope in the face of the changing climate – and how hope can help us inspire real change to stop climate change.

When was this?

The conference was 2017.  In 2018 we took all the work that the scholars presented and created a website called “Radical Hope” where  the scholars and activists who had participated actually created lesson plans based on their talks- it was a super cool project to be involved in.  It is now being used by scholars in 72 countries and it is a group-sourced resource, and anybody can use it to piece together teaching units.  So I’ve used that idea to sustain me through other dark times as well – politically dark times, environmentally dark times, pandemically dark times. To help me think about how humans are resilient. Or when I ask, how is society resilient?

So you’re a fan of hope?

I’m hopeful about hope.  I’m hopeful about the potential of it.  I don’t want to say I’m an optimist, but without hope I think we’re doomed.

So it is more productive to be hopeful than to despair?

I think so, but there is a debate around this. Some think that maybe we need to embrace the darkness and rally around it in order to spark change.  I fully understand that view and why people feel that way, but I also think about what’s going to motivate me (and others) to do something positive. For me, I have to believe that positive change is possible. If significant social change regarding the environment isn’t possible, I have hope that we can be resilient and create something positive in response. But, these things are pretty bleak to consider. Better to work for change.

I really like that.  As a historically informed person, can you name a couple times in history that would have been darker to live through than this current time?

Yes, sure.  There have been some pretty dark times throughout history. I’m thinking about the small pox epidemics that wiped out Indigenous populations in North and South America. I’m thinking about genocide. One of the things I do in my classes when teaching Native American history is to ask students to imagine what it would be like to lose 70-90% of your population. That did happen to some Indigenous populations upon European contact when epidemics and wars ravaged tribes.  So, I ask students to look around the classroom and then imagine 70-90% of the people around them are just suddenly gone.  Then I ask them: How do you carry on?  What traditions do you carry forward?  How do you reconstitute your society and culture?  How do you survive? How do you retain hope?  There was long-lasting trauma associated with such events, but people didn’t give up, they didn’t abandon their cultures, languages, beliefs, etc.  I think it can be easy for some non-Native Americans to think about Indigenous people just “disappearing”, but that is not what happened.  The idea that they disappeared is a kind of myth that has been layered into American history so we don’t have to acknowledge the darkness of these events, but Indigenous people are still here and their cultures and languages are still here.  So what sort of lessons can we learn from that history? We need to acknowledge the horrors of the past, then we need to think about how we can acknowledge it in useful ways – and how we, as a society, have a responsibility not to let something like that happen again.

That’s my next question!  It being dark times, what sort of lessons can we bring forth from history?

That’s a good question.  I think history has a lot to teach us about contemporary society.  One of the things it teaches us is that there is evil in the world and, overall, I think we want to pretend that isn’t true. We want to pretend evil doesn’t exist.

You can trust me to sand off rough edges.

Okay, so here is a fun fact about Erika’s family history- my dad grew up in Nazi Germany and his father of course lived through the time and made the accommodations and compromises that go along with this.  The man I knew was a good guy. I loved him. So how does someone who is a fundamentally good person, yet who didn’t believe in the cause of the National Socialists get swept up in it.  He was drafted and sent to the Baltic sea, become a prisoner of war, etc.  In short, it was safer and easier for him and of course easier on his family— for him to go along than it would have been to resist.  I think that is one of the lessons that history teaches us- just because it is easier to go along doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t resist. He imparted that to my brother and I. He had regrets. Still, very few people had the strength to resist.

Yep.  I like that.  What do you think is the most important thing we should be resisting right now?

I think we need to resist the idea that everything is going to be okay regardless, that America is always going to come out on top.  I think that there is this idea that democracy will be okay regardless of what happens, and I’m not sure that that is true.  I think we need to resist the idea that democracy is strong, I think it we should embrace the idea that it is very fragile, and that we have been lucky for a long time.  I think we need to work to protect it. I think that is a lesson that people have forgotten.  We have had lots of groups who had to fight long and hard access to democracy, for democracy to be more expansive, and I think those are good fights and they aren’t over yet.

Yeah, I’m sure you’re familiar with this anecdote, but they say that after The Constitution was drawn up someone asked Ben Franklin, who was the elder statesman in the room, what they had.  His response was supposedly, “You have a republic, if you can keep it”.  That is the phrase I keep coming back to.

Right- if you can keep it.  That is a really important idea and I think people get complacent.  You don’t want to let somebody take your decisions away from you.

That is a great point and I think it is a nice segue in to talking about some more Shop related stuff.  I think what you’re giving voice to is the fact that democracy and liberty are something that we have to fight for and it isn’t just something that is given.  That is something that I try to impart to people with respect to fitness- that it is something that we all need, but something we have to work for.  So, being crass, we have a lot of eggheads at The Shop.  No offense intended, in fact in admiration, you are one of our longest standing eggheads so I am curious why do you keep coming to class?  What does this place do for you?

I’m going to put it this way, working out is a break from thinking about all the other stuff.  I like that the workouts here are so challenging that all I’m thinking about when I’m here is “can I do eight more deadlifts or twelve more burpees?”.  I like that it is hard and that it focuses my brain on my body and what I’m able to do because I think I spend too much in my head sometimes.  It is also the community; I really like the people at Dane’s.  I had only been a member for like two months and I sent Dane this email saying, “Thank you so much for opening up this gym in my neighborhood because this is like no other gym I’ve been to.  I feel welcome and pushed but I don’t feel judged”.  I grew up in Utah where women weren’t encouraged to be athletic or to be involved in sports so I had to find my own way to fitness.  You come to fitness on your own terms when you realize how important it is.  So for me it is a place I can go where I really like the people and I don’t feel judged.

A place where you can “radically hope” that you can get through the workout?

That’s right!  Sometimes it is a radical act just to get myself here and the rest is good.  My day is always better after I come here.  Every single time.

That is great!  I’m glad we steered briefly into normal interview fare because I’m going to swing us right back into history.  I’ve realized recently that the reason I am so interested in presidential history is that I’m interested in leadership.  And presidential history is, at this point, dominated by white men.  Your area of expertise is very different than that, so I was curious if you had any historical leaders that you gravitate to?

Wow, that is a really good question- are the historical leaders I admire?  Well there are some badass women in history who are truly inspirational.  Shirley Chisholm is amazing so is Winona Laduke.

Who is that second one?

Winona Laduke is an environmental activist and helped found the Indigenous Women’s Network. There are some amazing women who are “unsung” heroines.  They aren’t the people that we read about all the time in books, but they are truly people who made a difference. I’d put my grandmother in here too. I know… It’s so funny that you ask me this because now I’m drinking this beer and I’m just (reaching)-

That’s how I work my magic!

You are working your magic!  And then there is someone like Susan B. Anthony who is pretty key as far as the people that I look to in history as leaders.  And all of these people are both strong and flawed individuals.  I think we have this tendency to want to idolize our historical figures without acknowledging their flaws.  One of the things you learn is that we are all flawed humans and just trying to do your best.

We should have some grace when we look back in history-

No one is above criticism.

Exactly.  And heaven knows when people look back on us in 200 years, supposing of course that the world has not turned into a molten fire ball, we will be judged on the standards of people more advanced than we are.

We will all be judged.

When you are Athlete of the Season, you are a leader.  I’ve made the mistake in interviews of asking members during this interview why they think they are a leader.  I think it is a bad question because people are bad at praising themselves generally- so I’ll answer that for you later on.  But what I’d like to ask you, because you’ve been at The Shop for how long?

When did the Shop open?

2010.

I’ve been a member since 2011 then.  I think I’m one of the old-timers!

You’re definitely a gap person who should have been Athlete of the month/season a long time ago.

I was picked once but then the coach who wrote my name on the board erased me and gave it to someone else.

They erased you!  That is fu**cked up!  This is why we need the living document of these interviews.  This is history right here!  So you’ve seen tons of leaders in our community over the year- not just Athletes of the Season- can you point to qualities you admire or individuals?

Okay, I like humor. I like it when people aren’t super serious.  I don’t think I come across as a super serious person but then I see pictures of myself and think people must be afraid of me!  *laughing*  I really appreciate it when people crack jokes to help others feel encouraged.  We can’t do it right now, but I like it when people are encouraging, the high-fiving stuff-

Some point in the future!

Yeah!  I have found lots of friendships since coming to The Shop.  I love Virginia and Janani- they are enthusiastic and work out really hard, but then it is fun to talk about food and politics with them. I love Lizette. Talking with Kirsten, etc. Just being lively and engaged.  But then sometimes people come just because they need to get through their day, they don’t want to interact — and I respect that too!  Really the ability to show up consistently is the thing I’ve learned that matters.

I agree- that’s right!  I think this a good time to transition to some random questions which are always different levels of zany.  The first one I had for you was, and this is a stock question, but I think you’re uniquely qualified for this, pick one figure in history to have dinner and spend an evening with- who would it be and why?

One figure in history… Okay.  Wow.  I’m going to go P.T. Barnum.  He is super interesting because he had political ambitions, which is something people don’t know about him.

I had no idea!

I have an op. ed. I’ll send to you.  He was a showman and he is someone who left a big imprint on American culture and society and I feel like I would want to know what he was thinking-truly thinking. I wonder if there’s a different side to him than the one we see in his autobiography.

I think that is a great answer- finding those people who are associated with one thing in history and are almost cartoonized and then finding the actual humanity in them.  I’ve been taking in a lot of Roman history, so right now mine would probably be Diocletian.  Okay so my workout play list, which is up to something like 370 songs that I play on shuffle, is informed by various things and one of those is member recommendations.  You’ve given me a few over the years, so I’m guessing you’ve seen some live music in your day.  What is your most memorable live music experience as we sit here in the “live music capital of the world”, with no live music because of the fucking pandemic- give us a memorable experience.

Oakland Coliseum, Grateful Dead,1988.

So Garcia is still alive?

Garcia is still alive.  I did not have tickets for the New Year’s Eve show, but I had all the tickets up to the New Year’s Eve show.  I was with some friends camping in the parking lot and feeling bad that we couldn’t get in and then all of the sudden we saw someone prop the doors open to the coliseum and signal to us to run. So we did, we ran we down the hill across the parking lot, up the hill and then popped into the coliseum to see the Grateful Dead for the New Year’s Eve show.  To get Grateful Dead tickets there used to be a lottery and they were beautiful tickets- iridescent, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory tickets –  it is goofy that it was The Grateful Dead, but it was magical.

Were you a Dead Head?

Not a Dead Head exactly.  I had a lot of friends who were Dead Heads.

So now the title of the interview is “Not a Dead Head Exactly”!

*laughing*  So I went to a decent number of Grateful Dead Shows, but I wasn’t a true Dead Head.  So Dan is a musician and my son is a musician.  I love live music, but that was truly memorable.

That does sound like a beautiful moment.  Real quickly, what does Liam play?

Liam plays the piano and the guitar and he sings.

That is awesome.  Do you have a go to pig out food?

Pasta.

Do you have a recommended spot for pasta?

My mom is Italian, so homemade.

Wait, your mom is Italian and your dad is German?  You’re all Axis!

All Axis baby!  You might be the one few people who gets that joke –  I actually joke about that with my students sometimes!

Wow.  All Axis… but also all American now right?  

Yes!  Erika Amerika!

So it is an election year, so I’m asking all the athletes this- if you could nominate anyone in the Dane’s Body Shop community to be president of The United States, who would it be?

*laughing*  Wow!  This is super interesting- I need to think about this for a moment because we have some amazing members here.  We have people who are crazy smart and creative… I’m going to pick from the coaches though.  Hmm…

And since this is a thought experiment, for anyone in the community who wasn’t born in this country, you can pretend they are eligible.  So if you wanted to nominate any nutty Canadians or anything…

Beth would definitely be on the ticket-

People have definitely picked her before, so feel free to go another direction if you want to go with something different.

Beth Reyburn would be on the ticket… And I’m going to say Shelley Adair.  I think Shelley Adair as president and Beth as vice president.  I think Shelley is incredibly savvy and super compassionate, which I think we need in a president.  She’s good at thinking outside of the box.  She’s a problem solver. She gets things done. She is someone who created an entire business for herself based on need, she’s helping stroke victims recover their language skills.  I mean, I admire her.  

That is another classic tentpole of leadership- being able to correctly identify problems.  Okay Erika, the note I always end on is- now that you’ve been vaulted to the pantheon- do you have any wisdom, pleas, or stern edicts?  Final words as Athlete of the Season?

My only advice is what I give my students- just show up.  It doesn’t matter if it is working out or voting- just show up.

I love that.  And I’m actually not going to end it here.  Earlier I let you off the hook for accounting why you are a leader, so I am going to account for that.  A part of that really is showing up.  Part of the reason you were such a no-brainer choice for us when we were selecting Athlete of the Season is because you showed up for virtual workouts and you showed up when we reopened.  There was a moment for me that clinched it.  We had just reopened and everything was new and scary- people are nervous to be around one another.  We have this strict rule about masks inside and one of the members came back from a run and they just forgot to put their mask on-

Which is just completely normal.

Right!  And you didn’t say anything to the member or make any big deal, you just made eye contact with me and gave me this subtle little nod in their direction.  The I was able to discreetly remind the member and no one was embarrassed.  That was the moment I keep going back to.  We are thriving as a community under these difficult circumstances and that was an incredible moment of leadership- judicious and subtle, not self aggrandizing, but essential.

One of the things I always think about is I feel like Dane’s is my community.  I feel really attached, I’d be really sad if it didn’t exist.