How to Be Compassionate AND Practical

Paul Krugman explains why the proposal to cut food stamps is so wrong. 

First, as millions of workers lost their jobs through no fault of their own, many families turned to food stamps to help them get by — and while food aid is no substitute for a good job, it did significantly mitigate their misery. Food stamps were especially helpful to children who would otherwise be living in extreme poverty, defined as an income less than half the official poverty line. 

But there’s more. Why is our economy depressed? Because many players in the economy slashed spending at the same time, while relatively few players were willing to spend more. And because the economy is not like an individual household — your spending is my income, my spending is your income — the result was a general fall in incomes and plunge in employment. We desperately needed (and still need) public policies to promote higher spending on a temporary basis — and the expansion of food stamps, which helps families living on the edge and let them spend more on other necessities, is just such a policy.

Bonus:  The Krugman Blues.

Hope: a Reasonable Response

I just discovered the website TomDispatch.com, and I’m in the process of deciding if the entire site is as useful as the first essay I've read from the site.  It’s called “Too Soon to Tell: the Case for Hope” by Rebecca Solnit.  I suppose writing this blog is a tiny act of hope.  Solnit’s essay teaches that hope is a step that leads to or allows action.  The excerpts below, however, mostly focus on rational reasons for hope.

If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change. Not by magic, but by the incremental effect of countless acts of courage, love, and commitment, the small drops that wear away stones and carve new landscapes, and sometimes by torrents of popular will that change the world suddenly. To say that is not to say that it will all come out fine in the end regardless. I’m just telling you that everything is in motion, and sometimes we are ourselves that movement…. 

 For a few years, I spoke about hope around this country and in Europe. I repeatedly ran into comfortably situated people who were hostile to the idea of hope: they thought that hope somehow betrayed the desperate and downtrodden, as if the desperate wanted the solidarity of misery from the privileged, rather than action. Hopelessness for people in extreme situations means resignation to one’s own deprivation or destruction. Hope can be a survival strategy. For comfortably situated people, hopelessness means cynicism and letting oneself off the hook. If everything is doomed, then nothing is required (and vice versa). 

 Despair is often premature: it’s a form of impatience as well as certainty. My favorite comment about political change comes from Zhou En-Lai, the premier of the People’s Republic of China under Chairman Mao. Asked in the early 1970s about his opinion of the French Revolution, he reportedly answered, “Too soon to tell.”... 

What You Said

If I could incorporate into my life Marshall Rosenberg’s ideas, expressed below, I would spend less time worrying and more time being happy.  As it is, I like what he says, but I'm not sure I believe it. 

…As we’ve seen, all criticism, attack, insults, and judgments vanish when we focus attention on hearing the feeling and needs behind a message.  The more we practice in this way, the more we realize a simple truth: behind all those messages we’ve allowed ourselves to be intimidated by are just individuals with unmet needs appealing to us to contribute to their well-being.  When we receive messages with this awareness, we never feel dehumanized by what others have to say to us.  We only feel dehumanized when we get trapped in derogatory images of other people or thoughts of wrongness about ourselves.  As author and mythologist Joseph Campbell suggests, “What will they think of me?” must be put aside for bliss.”  We begin to feel this bliss when messages previously experienced as critical or blaming begin to be seen for the gifts they are: opportunities to give to people who are in pain. 

From Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg.

Twelve Articles About Guns

1.  How Many People Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown?

Here, “Slate partners with @GunDeaths for an interactive, crowdsourced tally of the toll firearms have taken since Dec. 14.”  For example, the number for today, May 27, is 4,387.  It’s as simple as that and serves as a reminder of why something needs to change.

2. “The Cultural Fight for Guns” by Adam Gopnik.

Here Gopnik explains the tenets of our gun culture.  It’s an articulate argument written by an observer but not a member of the so-called gun culture.

3. “Armed Correlations” by Adam Gopnik.

Gopnik argues that there is a strong correlation between strong gun laws and less gun violence, and in this case, correlation is related to causation. 

4. “The Gun Report” by Joe Nocera.

Nocera provides a daily report of news about guns.

5. “Battleground America:One Nation, under the Gun” by Jill Lepore.   

This is one of those long New Yorker articles.  It was published in April of 2012 before Sandy Hook but after Trayvon Martin.  Lepore provides an interesting history of gun regulation, gun attitudes, and gun tragedies.

6. “Regulate Guns Like Cars” by Carl Gibson.

The title gives you the gist of the argument.  Gibson, unlike some of the other writers, owns and enjoys guns (and cars).

7. “The Simple Truth about Gun Control” by Adam Gopnik.

Gopnik talks about the element of opportunity present in criminal behavior.  More control of guns, he says, will lessen the opportunities for gun crimes.  

8. “The NRA Is Wrong: The Myth of Illegal Guns” by Matthew Parker.

Here Parker also makes the argument that serious background checks would create hurdles that could reduce some gun misuse.  Parker writes from the perspective of a convicted felon. 

9.  “Guns Need Food,Starve Them” by Marc Ambinder.

Ambinder suggests regulating ammunition.  Ammunition, unlike guns, deteriorates and must be replaced.

10. “So You Think You Know the Second Amendment” by Jeffrey Toobin.

Toobin explains how, in the 1970s, a new interpretation of the Second Amendment evolved.

11.  “Who Is the NRA Leadership.”

This site “shines a light on the background of members of NRA leadership, in large part by allowing them to comment on the issues of the day in their own words. It is intended as a resource for those who cherish moderation, civility and principled advocacy in American politics.” 

12. “How The Gun Industry Funnels Tens Of Millions Of Dollars ToThe NRA” by Walter Hickey.
Once again, the title explains the main point.

Another Song about Sunshine

"Your Are the Sunshine of My Life":  Stevie Wonder sings at an interesting venue.

Song for Sunday

To evry thing there is a season, turn, turn, turn, and the season is SPRING!

The Changing NRA

Five days after Oswald assassinated President Kennedy, Thomas Dodd, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, introduced legislation restricting mail-order sales of shotguns and rifles. The N.R.A.’s executive vice-president, Franklin L. Orth, testified before Congress, “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.” 

The above is from "Battleground America" by Jill Lapore, New Yorker, April 2012

How many people have been killed by guns since Newtown?

4,156.

From Slate.

The Little Hater

Jay Smooth describes the little hater in his head that tells him his work isn't good enough.  Can you relate?

How did they get to Sesame Street?

I love this account of how Sesame Street became Sesame Street: 

The name Sesame Street is credited to Virginia Schone, a writer for the show. Almost everyone on the staff disliked the name. There was concern that young children would have trouble pronouncing it. But time was running out and the show needed a name. Finally, Executive Producer Dave Connell put out a memo to the staff saying “if nobody came up with a better idea, as of Monday we were going to call it Sesame Street.” As Joan put it, “We went with it because it was the least bad title.” 

Creativity is a funny thing.  It’s hard now to imagine the show named anything else.  Now, of course, we associate the name with all manner of cuteness.  But still, The Video Classroom and 1-2-3 Avenue B., names that were also considered, just couldn't have been as catchy.

How Great Is Gatsby?

About a year and a half ago, I reread The Great Gatsby.  I had forgotten what a grim story it is.  A few days ago, I watched online a preview for the new Gatsby movie.  I’m sure the movie will manage some of the darkness of the story, but the trailer, in comparison to the novel, was outrageous, over-the-top, ludicrously extravagant.  It made my decision not to see the movie.  So I was pleased to read this in Ta-Nehisa Coats’ wonderful blog: 

Maybe because of its title, and Fitzgerald's outsized persona, people think that The Great Gatsby has to be a big budget extravaganza. But the book actually reads like a French film or an American indie. It's not so much that Gatsby can't be filmed. It's that it can't be filmed by this Hollywood. 

Kidnapped: Fact and Fiction

Yesterday I began writing an introduction similar to this one by Jon Michaud.. 

Since the news from Cleveland broke earlier this week, I have been thinking about Emma Donoghue’s novel Room. Published in the autumn of 2010, Room is narrated by a five-year-old boy named Jack who, along with his twenty-six-year-old mother—“Ma”—is imprisoned in a one-room structure by a man referred to only as Old Nick. Jack is the product of rape, but his mother strives to keep the truth of their situation from him, maintaining the illusion that their eleven-foot-by-eleven-foot prison is the extent of the real world and that everything else is TV.  

I imagine anyone who has read Room, has thought of Donaghue's novel as the painful details of the kidnapping in Cleveland emerge.  I read Room fairly recently, and the novel is a bizarre shadow to the Cleveland story.  Even though the novel is a story of a horrifying situation, it is told so as to leave the reader with hope.  I even found some of the scenes between Ma and Jack rather beautiful.  However, Ma's adjustment to freedom is quite painful.  I can’t imagine what the three Cleveland women are going through right now.  The similarities between fiction and reality are curious and unsettling.  

The Last Great Lesson

Yesterday morning, while driving my car, I heard a piece of an NPR interview with Amy Grant.  I’m not a follower of Grant, but I found very idea very touching. 

In the last few years, just through different circumstances, I've learned some really amazing tools in life. The biggest thing is framing difficult circumstances in a way that helps you see the value can change everything. And the first time that I really was stopped in my tracks with that experience was when I was really having a throw-down fit one night with a trusted friend of mine. It was late one night. We were outside. This was a few years ago. My mom and dad both needed 'round-the-clock care, and I'm frustrated and angry and they didn't deserve this. And my friend, who had already buried both of her parents, she just looked at me and said: Take a deep breath. She said: Don't you see, this is the last great lesson your parents will teach you?

Who makes the most money?

This link is to a map that shows the "highest paid employee" of your state.  For my state and most other states, that person is a football or basketball coach.  Of course, for Indiana it's a basketball coach.  This is unsettling, even discouraging news.  But I suspect something is missing.  It misses the "workers" who receive part of their compensation in stock options and other perks.

Songs My Mom Used to Sing

It was interesting listening to "I Love You a Bushel and a Peck:" Mom only knew some of the words. I don't know if I've ever heard the whole song before I looked it up today.  It's kind of cool.

It was harder to find a video of "You Are My Sunshine."  The one I found is a bit strange.  I also learned that this is the state song of Lousiana and you can get is as a Ricky Nelson ring tone.

Oh my gosh!  I found this video of "Maizy Doats" and started crying.  It's a regular time travel machine.

Jill Lepore wrote a lengthy article in the April 12, 2012 issue of the NewYorker magazine.  The facts below look like something I’ve posted before, but they stand out as an important part of the strange incongruity of our national discussion about guns. 

There are nearly three hundred million privately owned firearms in the United States: a hundred and six million handguns, a hundred and five million rifles, and eighty-three million shotguns. That works out to about one gun for every American.…The United States is the country with the highest rate of civilian gun ownership in the world. (The second highest is Yemen, where the rate is nevertheless only half that of the U.S.) No civilian population is more powerfully armed. Most Americans do not, however, own guns, because three-quarters of people with guns own two or more. According to the General Social Survey, conducted by the National Policy Opinion Center at the University of Chicago, the prevalence of gun ownership has declined steadily in the past few decades. In 1973, there were guns in roughly one in two households in the United States; in 2010, one in three. In 1980, nearly one in three Americans owned a gun; in 2010, that figure had dropped to one in five. 

However, this minority of gun owners seems to have disproportionate power.  I says seems because it looks to me like the NRA is the group with the power—that is, they’re the group with the money.  And, according to Walter Hickey of Business Insider, “The bulk of the group’s money now comes in the form of contributions, grants, royalty income, and advertising, much of it originating from gun industry sources.”  Hickey goes on to say, 

There are two reasons for the industry support for the NRA. The first is that the organization develops and maintains a market for their products.  The second, less direct function, is to absorb criticism in the event of PR crises for the gun industry. 

This sounds like a great deal for the gun industry, a strange and possibly compromising arrangement for the NRA, and a set of handcuffs for politicians worried that the NRA will spoil their chances for re-election. 

Please, tell me you don't know.

“I don’t always agree with me,” says Tim Kreider of his own writing. I like that.  I think there is value in writing, even when you haven’t yet resolved the issue being explored.  He continues on this theme. 

The one thing no editorialist or commentator in any media is ever supposed to say is I don’t know: that they’re too ignorant about the science of climate change to have an informed opinion; that they frankly have no idea what to do about gun violence in this country; or that they’ve just never quite understood the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in all honesty they’re sick of hearing about it. To admit to ignorance, uncertainty or ambivalence is to cede your place on the masthead, your slot on the program, and allow all the coveted eyeballs to turn instead to the next hack who’s more than happy to sell them all the answers. 

I don’t completely agree with that.  The part I don't agree with is that all writers are like that.  I follow some writers who don’t proclaim to have all the answers.  But I could stand to see more “I don’t know.”  Ta-NehisiCoates is one writer who is open about what he doesn’t know, and below he expresses some unusual ideas about writing.

[To write for others], you have to actually be curious. You have to not just want to be heard, but want to listen. [David] Brooks makes the point that the detached writer's role should be "more like teaching than activism." I would say that it should be more like learning than teaching. The stuff you put on the page should be the byproduct of all you are taking in -- and that taking in should not end after you get a degree from a selective university. Keep going. You must keep going.

Some times I look at what I post here and wonder, what am I doing?  Even if it doesn't look like it, learning and curiosity are a big part of it.

Energy Efficient Food, continued

“The fastest way to reduce climate change…just requires us all to eat fewer animal products,” says an article at Salon.com.  David Sirota says, 

[W]hen you account for feed production, deforestation and animal waste, the livestock industry produces between 18 percent and 51 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Add to this the fact that producing animal protein involves up to eight times more fossil fuel than what’s needed to produce an equivalent amount of non-animal protein, and you see that climate change isn’t intensified only by necessities like transportation and electricity. It is also driven in large part by subjective food preferences — more precisely, by American consumers’ unnecessary desire to eat, on average, 200 pounds of meat every year. 

Depending on how much you enjoy eating meat, this is good news.  It doesn’t require a lot of infrastructure investments, just a change of cultural habits.

Song of the Week

This is the Leal School Song, and it is surprisingly sweet.  Cheryl Silver of Urbana posted this on YouTube.  Cheryl went to high school with my daughter Bridget, and I'm pretty sure Cheryl's son is in this video.

Let Rumi Speak

 THE GUEST HOUSE

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

-- Jelaluddin Rumi,
    translation by Coleman Barks

Head Over Heart

I just read yesterday's post about compassion and wondered, will I ever move compassion beyond the intellect and into the heart?

Look at the Sky

My health insurance company has started a new program called “Positively Well™”.  They sent me a kit yesterday which includes a little journal where I can record my positive feelings. The first targeted feeling is compassion.  I’m ambivalent about my insurance company’s foray into my personal life, but I’ve been thinking lately about compassion and what often seems its opposite, judging.  I spent many years as a writing teacher, a job that involves so much judging.  Many of the excerpts I include in this blog are judgments about the state of the country.  Can I write about these things and still be a compassionate person?

I guess I should start with how I define compassion.  I once mentioned compassion to a friend, and she asked, “Do you mean pity?”  No, I do not.  Some describe compassion as empathy which is a pretty good synonym.  However, I think it means understanding the shared humanity between myself and others, understanding that they, like me, struggle.  They experience the same joy and suffering.  I think this understanding can move from an intellectual idea to a knowing in the heart.  When I manage to feel compassion for Wayne LaPierre, president of the NRA, I’ll understand compassion much better.  I want to spend some time contemplating and writing about this compassionate way of perceiving the world.

There is a song that says, “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.”  Peace with what exists seems also a form of compassion, especially compassion for oneself.  Of course I want to be more peaceful, but will it make the world more peaceful too?  I like this suggestion about making space for peace by Pema Chӧdrӧn from her book Taking the Leap. 

The next time you’re getting worked up, experiment with looking at the sky.  Go to the window…and look up at the sky.  I once read an interview with a man who said that during the Second World War, he survived internment in a Japanese concentration camp by looking at the sky and seeing the clouds still drifting there and the birds still flying there.  This gave him trust that the goodness of life would go on despite the atrocities that he was witnessing. 

Looking at the sky, even thinking about looking at the sky, reminds me that we all live together here under the sky and all alike celebrate and struggle.

I keep revising this post.  There must be a better way to describe this.  There probably is.  What helps you practice compassion?

The Weird Times We Live In

Yesterday, my six-year-old grandson went to the post office with his dad.  They bought some stamps and then went over to a table to put the stamps on envelopes.  My grandson put his backpack down, apparently not near enough to himself and his dad, and soon, a PO employee came out to warn Dad that unattended backpacks were not allowed.  Dad apologized, Grandson put on his backpack, and the frightened customers relaxed.

The Great Migrations

I was leaving the South
To fling myself into the unknown….
I was taking a part of the South
To transplant in alien soil,
To see if it could grow differently,
If it could drink of new and cool rains,
Bend in strange winds,
Respond to the warmth of other suns
And, perhaps to bloom.
                        —Richard Wright 

This is the first page of Isabel Wilkerson’s book The Warmth of Other Suns.  I started reading it last night, and at 538 pages, I’m not sure I’ll read the entire book.  But so far, I’ve found it very moving.  Between the years of 1915-1970, “six millions black southerners left the land of their forefathers and fanned out across the country for an uncertain existence in nearly every other corner of America.”  Historians called it the Great Migration.  On some level I vaguely knew this, but I hadn't attached this movement from the south to the concept of migration.  I didn't know the vast numbers.  Moving is an interesting change; migration is a leap.  Fifteen pages into Wilkerson’s book, I felt as if I had important new information about how this country developed.   

The initial quotation from Wright spoke to me personally.  In the last year I’ve studied the history of my own family which appears to be entirely Irish in its origins.  I’ve read some 19th  century Irish history.  I (and most Americans) come from people who flung themselves into the unknown hoping to be nurtured by the warmth of other suns.  There is much to relate to.  But I am expecting to find that those with dark skins found it more difficult to transplant themselves in alien soil than those of us who are “white.”

Still, many of our ancestors shared a common motivation.  Wilkerson concludes an early section with this: 

The actions of the people in this book were both universal and distinctly American.  Their migration was a response to an economic and social structure not of their making.  They did what humans have done for centuries when life became untenable….They left.