"She has consistently, for so long, lived justice, in her very body, as it were" -Steven S

An invitation to contribute to an electronic festschrift for Vanessa Merton has been generously extended to everyone, even those who might be a bit odd, or might say something to match.

I'm perhaps one such person. I want to say something about Vanessa, but in order to do so I must first say something about myself. Whether in reality or in presentation, by conceit or by conviction, I'm a bit of a dissenter to lots of commonly-held beliefs. Some identify these as being on the political "far left," but for me they are halting expressions of a kind of quixotic non-violent Christian anarchism – I am anti-war, tend toward being a prison abolitionist, inclined towards open borders, anti-statist (a non-pledge sayer/stander forever, at the most trivial level), and one who tries – quite futilely, I must say – to mitigate the deeply disturbing on-going legacies of racism in the carceral state in our own back yard, among other impossible or outrageous or irrelevant commitments. Given these relatively marginal ideas, I've come (actually, starting early, encouraged by a childhood where I spent the first 18 years of my life in Japan, in a family of the only gaijins [foreigners] in a town of 60,000) to feel relatively comfortable having no one agree with me, or even really caring if they did.

Except for Vanessa. It's always somehow mattered what Vanessa (and only Vanessa, really, strangely, as best I can remember) thought of my weird ideas. (And that's true even though she disagrees with me more often than not.)

It's not because she is famous (that matters not at all), or very smart (this matters more), but because she has consistently, for so long, lived justice, in her very body, as it were. She's the real thing, and I am in awe of her.

Steven S