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.

The View from Your Window

Andrew Sullivan at The Dish often posts an item called “The View from Your Window.”  A couple of times I’ve copied him with a view from my window.  I’m going to do that occasionally, but mostly, these will be views from South Bend (unless you want to send me one from somewhere else).  Above is Andrew’s view today from Rome, Italy.  Some of his other views are here, here, and here.  On second thought, maybe I don't want to copy this feature.  Andrew has some fabulous views here.  However, it is interesting that the last link is a view from Decatur, Indiana.

Wanna be a Keynesian?

Paul Krugman explains this depression: 

Let’s start with what may be the most crucial thing to understand: the economy is not like an individual family.
 Families earn what they can, and spend as much as they think prudent; spending and earning opportunities are two different things. In the economy as a whole, however, income and spending are interdependent: my spending is your income, and your spending is my income. If both of us slash spending at the same time, both of our incomes will fall too.
And that’s what happened after the financial crisis of 2008. Many people suddenly cut spending, either because they chose to or because their creditors forced them to; meanwhile, not many people were able or willing to spend more. The result was a plunge in incomes that also caused a plunge in employment, creating the depression that persists to this day. 

The solution— 

So what could we do to reduce unemployment? The answer is, this is a time for above-normal government spending, to sustain the economy until the private sector is willing to spend again. The crucial point is that under current conditions, the government is not, repeat not, in competition with the private sector. Government spending doesn’t divert resources away from private uses; it puts unemployed resources to work. Government borrowing doesn’t crowd out private investment; it mobilizes funds that would otherwise go unused.

Bonus: Loudon Wainwright III sings the "Paul Krugman Blues."

Where Is the Science Lobby?

I like this paragraph from Sam Harris’s article “The Riddle of the Gun.” 

Unlike most Americans, I stand on both sides of this debate. I understand the apprehension that many people feel toward “gun culture,” and I share their outrage over the political influence of the National Rifle Association. How is it that we live in a society in which one of the most compelling interests is gun ownership? Where is the science lobby? The safe food lobby? Where is the get-the-Chinese-lead-paint-out-of-our-kids’-toys lobby? When viewed from any other civilized society on earth, the primacy of guns in American life seems to be a symptom of collective psychosis. 

Amen.  To read about Harris on the other side, go to the article.

Tired of Terroists and Guns

I’m tired of reading about guns, gun control, and the second amendment.  And I’m tired of reading about the Boston bombing and terrorism.  But still, I can’t resist posting a bit from the New Yorker website by John Cassidy called “What If the Tsarnevs Had Been the ‘Boston Shooters’?”  From the title you can tell you will be asked to make a strange leap of imagination.  If you aren’t too tired of reading about these things yourself, you can read this excerpt or the whole thing.

If you’re a terrorist, this will happen: 

Set off in a public space a couple of crude, homemade bombs that you appear to have made using a recipe on the Web, and the state will make you Public Enemy Number One. To insure that you are caught and punished, there are virtually no lengths to which the authorities won’t go. They’ll assemble a multi-agency task force overnight, calling on some of the enormous investments in hardware, intelligence, and manpower that have been made since 9/11. They’ll haul in anybody who might be remotely connected to the crime scene, and, if necessary, shut down an entire city. Once you’re caught, they’ll interview you in your hospital bed without reading you your legal rights and then charge you with using W.M.D.s. If you weren’t born in this country, there will even be talk about changing the immigration laws. 

On the other hand, 

If you systematically shoot a classroom full of defenseless six-year-olds and blow off your own head, things proceed rather differently. To be sure, you, or your memory, will be hated and vilified. But the political system, in hock to the N.R.A., will classify you as a nut whose deadly actions have few or no policy implications. (With the demise of the gun-control legislation, that’s what it did with Adam Lanza.) Life and politics will go on as normal. The President will probably visit the scene of your outrage and say consoling things to the families of your victims. He’ll mean what he says, but he won’t be able to do much about it, and nobody will ask why the F.B.I. or the C.I.A. didn’t realize you were such a menace to society and lock you up preëmptively. Crazed shooters, after all, are something we’ve grown used to.

I have no comments;  I’m just too tired.

Song of the Week

Rest in Peace Richie Havens. "Here Comes the Sun."  is a song I heard him sing when I attended a Havens concert in South Bend long ago.   It was a good concert, but I was pregnant with Bridget at the time, and apparently the music made her kick up a storm. She was so active, it made us nervous, and we left before the concert was over.

Craft Project of the Year

Funky homemade storage units.  Wouldn't want it to seem like this blog has a theme.

Terrorism Here and Over There

Rafia Zakaria, writer for a Pakistani newspaper, says, “I’ve become adept at writing about bombings. Pakistan suffered 652 of these last year…”  She goes on to contemplate the response to the recent Boston bombing:  “Boston is no different, no more or less tragic than the bombings that have razed the marketplaces of Karachi, the school in Khost, the mosque in Karbala.  And yet it can seem so.”

Attacks in America are far more indelible in the world’s memory than attacks in any other country. There may be fewer victims and less blood, but American tragedies somehow seem to occur in a more poignant version of reality, in a way that evokes a more sympathetic response….Death is always unexpected in America and death by a terrorist attack more so than in any other place. 

It is this greater poignancy of attacks in America that begs the question of whether the world’s allocations of sympathy are determined not by the magnitude of a tragedy—the numbers dead and injured—but by the contrast between a society’s normal and the cruel aftermath of a terrorist event. It is in America that the difference between the two is the greatest; the American normal is one of a near-perfect security that is unimaginable in many places, especially in countries at war….  

Zakaria’s short essay covered some of what isn't usually covered.  Most coverage seemed to come from the perspective that only we suffer like this.  Other, less prominent coverage, offered no sympathy at all for Boston and implied the U. S. wasn’t entitled to be upset when other countries suffer so much more than we do.  Zakaria covers both perspectives sympathetically.  And, I want to add, so does my friend Rich.   Rich is a marathon runner himself who has been met by his kids at the finish line.  He writes about how painful it was to hear of an eight-year old boy killed in Boston.  But he adds this:  “That made me think of all the people in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and anywhere else where there's a war going on who didn't ask to be in a war zone.” 

There are many geographical and emotional reasons why it has been easier for me to relate to Boston than Syria.  These two writers gently remind me that the Boston bombing is a tragedy but can also be a bridge to empathy and concern for those suffering attacks outside our country.

Energy Efficient Food

For a while, I’ve wondered why, when we talk about using too much fossil fuel, we don’t talk about the fuel used to produce food.  According to the Dish, Michael Pollan is trying to remedy that in a new book Cooked.  Here is the beginning of his Dish interview: 

The way we eat now is having a profound effect on climate change, which certainly threatens to bring about the end of the world as we’ve known it.  For better and worse, the industrial food system has made food very cheap. The poor can eat a better diet than they once could. It used to be that only the rich could eat meat every day of the week. Now just about everyone can, three meals a day. Fast-food chains make it easy. It’s not very good meat, and most of it is brutally produced, but it is within reach.

 But meat has a tremendous carbon footprint: beef in particular because it takes so much grain to get a pound of beef. It takes about 15 pounds of grain to get 1 one pound of beef, and that grain takes tremendous amounts of fossil fuel—in the form of fertilizer, pesticide, farm equipment, processing, and transportation. All told, it takes 55 calories of fossil-fuel energy to get one calorie of beef. The average for processed foods is 10 calories of fossil fuel per calorie of food.

Oh, Little Bird

I discovered a birding blog recently.  I love its name:  "The Zen Birdfeeder."  Yesterday the writer, Nancy Castillo, gave a few facts about the ruby-throated hummingbird.  “While you were sleeping,” she writes “a Ruby-throated Hummingbird flew 600 miles non-stop across the Gulf of Mexico.”  This bird weighs about as much as a nickel and burns off about a third of its body weight during the flight.  Hard but wonderful to imagine.

Happy to Be Alive

Brian Kimberling writes about watching birds: 

A Bird-Watcher is a kind of pious predator. To see a new bird is to capture it, metaphorically, and a rare bird or an F.O.Y. (First of the Year, for the uninitiated) is a kind of trophy. A list of birds seen on a given day is also a form of prayer, a thanksgiving for being alive at a certain time and place. Posting that list online is a 21st-century form of a votive offering. It’s unclear what deity presides.

Sleeping at O'Hare

Friday night was fun with a side of bizarre.  I met my sister Linda in Chicago.  She was there to attend a workshop Saturday at the O’Hare Hilton.  So my daughter, grandson, and I went in to spend Friday

afternoon and night with her.  There is a spot where the end of the CTA’s blue line, the airport, and the Hilton merge. So for about 14 hours, I was staying there at this unusual intersection of Chicago Transit, international airport, and upscale hotel.  I can see, under certain circumstances, this could be very convenient, but I’m enough of a small town person to find it strange, maybe even disorienting.

However, this is not the first time I’ve spent the night at O’Hare.  A few years ago I was flying back from Tucson.  The plan was to fly into O’Hare, and then I would catch ground transportation back to South Bend.  However, the plane was delayed and I ended up missing the day’s last bus to SB by about five minutes.  It seemed silly to go to a hotel at midnight and then try to get back to the airport by 6:00 AM, so I just decided to try and doze in the waiting room for ground transportation.  It turns out I spent the night with a few other travelers and a number of homeless people.  I spend an hour in conversation with a homeless woman who smelled from a lack of consistent bathroom availability.  She implied to me she could find shelters, but she wouldn't be able to drink her wine if she stayed in them.  There was something charming and dangerous about the live she described to me.

I’ve written before that one of the benefits of travel is the way it reminds us that there is so much in the world we don’t know or understand.  And yet I’m part of that world as are the people sleeping in the O’Hare Hilton and the waiting room at ground transportation.  Sometimes, I just don’t know what to make of these deep and strange connections.

(The picture above is a generic shot of walking from the CTA train into the airport.)

Song of the Week

"What a Wonderful World"
by
Louis Armstrong.

I keep forgetting I'm partly blind.

Jack Kornfield tells this story from Alan Wallace in his book The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace:

Imagine walking along a sidewalk with your arms full of groceries, and someone roughly bumps into you so that you fall and your groceries are strewn over the ground.  As you rise up from the puddle of broken eggs and tomato juice, you are ready to shout out, "You idiot!  What's wrong with you?  Are you blind?"  But just before you can catch your breath to speak, you see that the person who bumped into you actually is blind.  He, too, is sprawled in the spilled groceries, and your anger vanishes in an instant, to be replaced by sympathetic concern:  "Are you hurt?  Can I help you up?"  Our situation is like that.  When we clearly realize that the source of disharmony and misery in the world is ignorance, we can open the door of wisdom and compassion.

Dear Senator Dan Coats:

It’s a good thing there is nothing in the constitutions that says Americans have the right to own and drive cars.  If there were, you might want to ban automobile registration, license plates, driver’s licenses and tests, and mandatory liability insurance requirements.  You seem to be using the second amendment as an excuse to do nothing instead of an invitation to give serious thought as to how to deal with dangerous weapons.  It gives me the feeling you are working for the NRA instead of for me and my fellow citizens.

The Right to Not Get Shot

Andy Borowitz reports on action today in the Senate:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Senate Republicans today vowed to filibuster a controversial bill supporting the right not to get shot.

G.O.P. leaders lambasted the bill, arguing that the right to go to school, work, or one’s home without fear of being shot was not guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

Waiting for a Villian

Maybe like me, you want to know who committed the atrocity at the Boston Marathon while at the same time, you don't want to know.  Tim Wise speaks today about white privilege.  

White privilege is knowing that even if the Boston Marathon bomber turns out to be white, his or her identity will not result in white folks generally being singled out for suspicion by law enforcement, or the TSA, or the FBI. 

White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for whites to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening, or threatened with deportation. 

White privilege is knowing that if the bomber turns out to be white, he or she will be viewed as an exception to an otherwise non-white rule, an aberration, an anomaly, and that he or she will be able to join the ranks of Time McVeigh and Terry Nichols and Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph and...

 I’m afraid there is peace in not knowing.

The Body and the World

Yesterday I wanted to write about walking and exercise, but I wasn’t ready to put it into words.  I find walks wonderful and magical, but that’s pretty vague.  I’ve been under the weather lately and not getting as much exercise as usual.  Without my usual exercise, my days can be too long, my mood less peaceful.

Yesterday, I joined a group at my gym called Citi-walk.  It was the first time for this group, so there were five of us starting in the lobby of the gym.  We took the stairs down to the sidewalk below and walked on Michigan Street towards Memorial Hospital.  We entered a building across the street from the hospital called Skywalk.  We took the stairs to the third floor, to the actual skywalk. We crossed Michigan Street looking down at the cars driving beneath us.  Then we walked through a few hospital hallways, down a stairwell, and came out in a different building.  It took me a minute to get back my sense of direction.  We continued walking through some neighborhoods around the hospital and almost exactly an hour after we left the gym, we returned.

I have spent weeks hiking in Spain, and it is indeed a profound way to tour another country.  Hiking the streets of South Bend is ordinary in comparison, but still, it makes me happy.  Rebecca Solnit says, “Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world” (Wanderlust: A History of Walking).  “Knowing the world through the body,” is a helpful explalnation.  Is there anything we do without the body?  But walking and exercise deepen the connection between world and body.  That’s a rich reward.

That’s mostly what I wanted to say yesterday.  Then, between then and now, a celebration in Boston, of the “engagement of the body and the mind with the world,” was attacked.  It adds an insurmountable layer to these reflections.

Song of the Day

"Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros--reminds me of Lucy L. and Tucson.

I Don't Ask for Much

A friend asked, “I don't think I understand what your position is concerning gun control. Do you think that individual, private ownership of firearms by US citizens is a good thing or a bad thing?

I think individual ownership of guns is an unavoidable thing.  I grew up on a farm and there were guns in the closet.  They were used to kill game which was part of our harvest.  I think some people have legitimate uses for guns, but too many gun owners don’t see to be responsible owners.

 I support universal registration of guns.  I think a registry of gun ownership would be just fine.  Keeping guns away from mentally unstable people requires a lot of thought, and I’d like to see a serious start to that conversation.

I support a ban on assault weapons. 

I would like to see present laws enforced.

As I study this issue, I will probably support some other restrictions.  Yesterday I read about safety latches on guns that would keep children from accidentally shooting people.  That sounds very helpful.

I would like to see our legislators operate independently of the NRA.  I would like to see my legislators earn a D or F from the NRA.  I would like to see a reduction of the gun culture.  I would like to see our legislators have sensible concerned conversations about this issue and not be cowed by the NRA.

 

The Gun Report

For approximately two month, Joe Nocera and his assistant Jennifer Mascia have been publishing a blog in which they “aggregate articles about shootings from the previous day.”  I discovered  “The Gun Report” at the New York Times website.  I don’t know how often I can stand to read their lists of shootings, but in my mind, it makes my congressman’s line about supporting the second amendment sound pretty lame.

 

Nocera writes, “Of all the stories we link to, the ones I find hardest to read are those about young children who accidentally shoot themselves or another child. They just break my heart. Yet Jennifer and I find new examples almost every day.”  He goes on to suggest that guns, like medicine bottles, should be child-proof.  The technology to do this already exists, but the NRA “claim[s], absurdly, that a gun that only can be fired by its owner somehow violates the Second Amendment.”

According to Nocera, "In mid-April, Representative John Tierney, a Massachusetts Democrat, plans to introduce a House bill requiring that all guns include personalization technology within two years."  Like air-bags and child proof lids, this change will require pushing and effort.

How many people have been killed by guns since Newtown?

3,367.

Home!

This is a picture of the earth from a distance of more than four billion miles taken from Voyager 1.  Earth is the dot showing in the middle of the bright right streak.

Sunday's Song

I stumbled across this Holly Near song today.  I had forgotten about her power and how rousing a good activist song can be.

The Secret Life of Birds

My bird feeders are usually swamped by visits from house finches and sparrows.  They’re rather ho-hum in appearance, partly because they’re drab in color and partly because there are so many of them.  I have other more distinctive bird visitors, but my favorite is the cardinal.  I’m not alone in this; seven states have the cardinal as their state bird including Indiana.

 

The female cardinal is quietly elegant, but there is no doubting the male cardinal’s flamboyant grace as he flies into his landing spot on the feeder.  There’s a certain breathtaking beauty that continues to amaze me.  Time after time I spot him nibbling sunflower seeds from the food tray, and I break into a smile.  What, besides bright red feathers, is his attraction?  I've concluded that there is something in his demeanor that reminds me of a desirable human quality.  He seems to pay such good attention to his surroundings.  He has the curious and engaged look I like to receive from a companion.  I don’t mean to anthropomorphize him; it’s just how he appears.

 

This curiosity about the cardinal prompted a cursory Google search.  I was amazed by this short list of facts.  Cardinals in the wild have a lifespan of 15 years.  They weigh 1.5 to 2.0 ounces.  They have three clutches of eggs each season.  That last fact is practically amazing.  I’ve never seen a baby cardinal.  I’ve never even seen a cardinal nest.  This affirms the idea that precipitated this search.  These birds come to my artificial feeding station, eat their fill, and then return to what is to me, a secret life.  I don’t know where they live.  How far do they come to eat at my feeder?  What happens to all those baby cardinals?

 

One of the benefits of a bird feeder is the opportunity to watch an interesting slice of bird life.  Another advantage is the reminder, once again, of how much I don’t know.  “My birds,” especially the cardinal, serve as a gentle bridge to the unknown, and I think a reminder of this is a good thing.  Also my birds remind me of our connectedness too.  Trite, but true, we are all one.

 

 

How Does the NRA Rate Your Legislator? A to F

The New York Times answered this question last December 21 with this handy interactive map.  Let's hope some of the A grades have dropped in the last three months.

Reducing Gun Culture

This blog had been mainly inactive until the shooting at the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.  After that, I was doing so much reading about gun use and regulation, I decided I might as well report on my findings.  I’m not writing so much about guns now, but it’s still a recurrent thread.  A few days ago, I recommended an article by Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker website.  (Link below at “Guns, More that a Correlation.”)  I thought Gopnik’s article was so good, I barely quoted from it.  I just said “read it.”  Now Gopnik has another post, and I recommend it as well, but I’m going to try picking out some relevant quotations, ones I can send to my legislators. 

One of the oddities of the gun-control debate…is that the gun side basically gave up on serious arguments about safety or self-defense or anything else a while ago. The old claims about the million—or was it two million? It kept changing—bad guys stopped by guns each year has faded under the light of scrutiny. Indeed, people who possess guns are almost five times more likely to be shot than those who don’t….Far from providing greater safety, gun possession greatly increases the risk of getting shot—and, as has long been known, keeping a gun in the house chiefly endangers the people who live there.

And so the new arguments for keeping as many guns as possible in the hands of as many people as possible tend to be more broadly fatalistic, and sometimes sniffily “cultural.” Ours is a gun-ridden country and a gun-filled culture, the case goes, and to try and change that is not just futile but, in a certain sense, disrespectful, even ill-mannered

And so the real argument about guns, and about assault weapons in particular, is becoming not primarily an argument about public safety or public health but an argument about cultural symbols. It has to do, really, with the illusions that guns provide, particularly the illusion of power.  

As my friend and colleague Alec Wilkinson wrote, with the wisdom of a long-ago cop, “Nobody really believes it’s about maintaining a militia. It’s about having possession of a tool that makes a person feel powerful nearly to the point of exaltation. …I am not saying that people who love guns inordinately are unstable; I am saying that a gun is the most powerful device there is to accessorize the ego.” 

It's hard to stop quoting.  The article is so clear and insightful.  Gopnik believes we need to be open to understanding gun culture even when it is foreign to our own experience.  Then we to to work toward changing it.  He also points out that statistically, massacres such as Newtown are not the main danger of our gun culture.  But massacres like these, like 9/11, take a toll that goes beyond the actual loss of life as tragic and heartbreaking as it is.  Here is part of Gopnik’s conclusion. 

Our sense of what is an acceptable and unacceptable risk for any citizen, let alone child, to endure, our sense of possible futures to consider—above all, our sense, to borrow a phrase from the President, of who we are, what we stand for, the picture of our civilization we want to look at ourselves and present to the world—all of that is very much at stake even if the odds of any given child being killed are, blessedly, small.

How am I today? Just fine--wretched.

For the last few months, I've been surprisingly peaceful and happy.  However, through this almost blissful time, I have kept in mind the adage, “this too shall pass.”  Since Tuesday I have a hideous and at times alarming cough.  My temperature fluctuates between normal, chills, and fever.  Is it possible to be peaceful, happy, and sick?

 

I think, yes and no.  On one level, I’m miserable.  On another level, this is, in some weird way, fine because—hey!—it’s life.  And, this too shall pass. 

 

I went on line for some wisdom from Pema Chӧdrӧn and found this:

 

Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that's all that's happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction. On the other hand, wretchedness--life's painful aspect—softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody's eyes because you feel you haven't got anything to lose—you're just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We'd be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn't have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together. 

Her words are helpful, and I feel their truth.  I’m obnoxious enough as it is.  If life were glorious all the time, I know I would be unbearable.  So, I’ll drink some tea, take some drugs, and, as much as possible, accept my wretchedness.

Sam Harris on Wealth

This is an interesting article on fair taxation.

While the United States has suffered the worst recession in living memory, I find that I have very few financial concerns. Many of my friends are in the same position: Most of us attended private schools and good universities, and we will be able to provide these same opportunities to our own children. No one in my immediate circle has a family member serving in Afghanistan or Iraq. In fact, in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, the only sacrifice we were asked to make for our beloved country was to go shopping. Nearly a decade has passed, with our nation's influence and infrastructure crumbling by the hour, and yet those of us who have been so fortunate as to actually live the American dream--rather than merely dream it--have been spared every inconvenience. Now we are told that we will soon receive a large tax cut for all our troubles. What is the word for the feeling this provokes in me? Imagine being safely seated in lifeboat, while countless others drown, only to learn that another lifeboat has been secured to take your luggage to shore...

So what should we do?

A Little Music for Sunday

This is my favorite flash mob of all time:  Ode to Joy.  I love the music, the choreography, the background, the children, and the expressions on peoples faces.  I think it is sponsored by a bank.

Guns, More than a Correlation

Countries with stricter gun laws than those of the United States have fewer gun deaths.  Cause or correlation?  Adam Gopnik says, “it’s hard to find a more robust correlation in the social sciences than the one between gun laws and gun violence.”  Then he goes on to discuss all the reasons we should take this correlation seriously.  His article is so thorough, so well-written, I don’t want to say more.  I want you to read it; then take at least one small action.

 

Possible small actions—

 

Write or call legislator.  The group Moms Demand Action has instructions here.

 

Write a letter to the newspaper.  I have heard these letters get good attention from your legislators. 

 

Join a lobbying group such as Moms Demand Action above or Gabby Gifford and Mark Kelly’s group Americans for Responsible Solutions.

 

What else?

Unexpected Encounters of Urban Life

I am walking on the river walk along Riverside Drive, just a bit north of Angela Boulevard.  I see a man coming toward me on a bicycle, and I watch him because he seems a bit wobbly.  When he gets even with me, he stops and says, “Could you do something for me?”

I give him a questioning look.  “Will you pray for me?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say.

He holds out his hand, so I take it.  He looks at me expectantly.  I conclude he is waiting for me to pray, right here, right now.  “May you be blessed,” I say.  “May your needs be met.  May you find peace in your heart.”

He says, “Thank you.” We withdraw our hands.  He rides south and I go on walking north.  But I continue to ponder the touch of his hand and the sound of my words.

 

Moon from My Window

Ahhh...
7:30 A.M.,3/28/13, South Bend, Indiana

Needed--Universal Background Checks

In this video link, Gabby Gifford’s husband Mark Kelly goes to an Arizona gun story, buys a gun (video camera in pocket), and fills out the form for a background check.  The purpose of the video is to support “universal background checks” and show that it’s an easy process.  Kelly answers a lot of questions and then comes home with a new gun (to add to the other guns he owns).  I assume those answers went into a computer and no red flags were found.  The check is better than nothing, but I don’t think we yet have a system that flags all the things that need to be checked.  I think the mental health community needs to do a lot of talking.

Little Solutions

Last week I posted some quotations from Parker Palmer ("Politics and the Brokenhearted") and I ended with this one:  "Big problems are solved by a million little solutions."  I want to think about this statement everyday.  What are the little solutions I can partake of?  It's funny how satisfying it can be to read an apt description of a problem, how hopeless it seems to make the problem better.

Hanging On

Ta-Nehisi Coates, my favorite blogger went into anaphylactic shock last week while riding a train.  He remembers hearing a doctor and fellow passenger leaning over him and saying, “I can’t get a pulse.”  But he lived to write about the story.  He says, “…I have seen the elephant now. It would not have been the worst way to go--kinda quiet, as Biggie would say--but it would have been going all the same. And I am most happy to still be here, to be with my family, and my friends, to be in the world with you.” 

 

Sy Safransky writes, “And I marvel…that I’m now sixty-seven years old, which is inconceivable to some of my closest confidants…Then I notice the calendar: the first decade of the twenty-first century is already behind us, which means I’m that much closer to the day it all ends, my appeals exhausted, my friends in high places insisting their hands are tied, except to wave goodbye.”

Reading the obituaries today, I see that two of the deceased were born the same year that I was.  What can I say?

(This is the first time I’ve encountered the expression “seen the elephant.”   Here’s one definition:  “Experience more than one wants to, learn a hard lesson; also, see combat, especially for the first time.” )

 

Imagine, a song for Sunday

John and Yoko

A surprising twist from the Anti-Defamation League (Scroll down slightly.)--

Blame and Peace

The Sun magazine has a section on the last page called "Sunbeams."  Here are two sunbeams from the November 2012 edition.

We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who's right and who's wrong.  We do that with the people who are closest to us, and we do it with political systems....It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better....Blaming is a way to protect our hearts, to try to protect what is soft and open and tender in ourselves.  Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground.  (Pema Chödrön)
We have thought of peace as the passive and war as the active way of living.  The opposite is true.  War is not the most strenuous life.  It is a kind of rest-cure compared to the task of reconciling our differences.  (Mary Parker Follett)

People are so good at describing the problems.

Got Milk?

I grew up on a farm in southern Indiana where my family had a small heard of cattle with ten or so cows.  Some of our neighbors had larger operations, maybe twice to three times as many cows as we had.  These cows spend their days pretty much like the cows in the picture at the left.  Our cows had to be milked daily, a schedule that greatly restricted the lives of my dad and granddad.

Recently, on a road trip in New Mexico, I got a close-up view of the new factory farm method of milk production.  In 2009 NPR did a story on this area and called it Dairy Row.  “Located “along Interstate 10 between Las Cruces, N.M., and El Paso, Texas, more than 30,000 cows live in 11 farms located one after the other.”  As we drove, I smelled Dairy Row before I saw it.  The picture on the right (from the NPR site) is a typical view of these operations.  I don’t want to romanticize the past, but this is a far cry from the contented looking cows above. 

Odor and flies are a problem on these new farms, but even more serious are problems with water pollution.  The NPR article says, “The trend in the dairy industry, like the rest of commodity agriculture, is toward fewer and larger farms, which concentrates more manure in smaller geographic areas. Citizens are reporting dairies contaminating ground and surface water across the nation — in the Yakima Valley in Washington; Brown County in Wisconsin; Hudson, Mich.; and now Dexter, N.M.”  Our milk may be more expensive than we think.  The article also says, “Everyday, an average cow produces six to seven gallons of milk and 18 gallons of manure.”  That’s a lot of production for one animal.

Back in the day, when I had to help milk our tiny collection of cows, we milked them twice a day.  Cows now get milked three times daily and research is being done with four to six milkings for cows who have just calved.  I don’t want to anthropomorphize these beasts; I’m not against animals serving humans, but this sounds too much like animal slavery cruelty for comfort.

The View from My Window

Copied from the Dish

Why We Write

I found this explanation by Andrea Barrett at "The Dish":

I’ve never known a writer who didn’t feel ill at ease in the world. Have you? We all feel unhoused in some sense. That’s part of why we write. We feel we don’t fit in, that this world is not our world, that though we may move in it, we’re not of it. Different experiences in our lives may enforce or ameliorate that, but I think if they ameliorate it totally, we stop writing. You don’t need to write a novel if you feel at home in the world. We write about the world because it doesn’t make sense to us. Through writing, maybe we can penetrate it, elucidate it, somehow make it comprehensible. If I had ever found the place where I was perfectly at home, who knows what I would have done? Maybe I would have been a biologist after all.

Politics and the Broken Heart, continued

After yesterday’s post, a friend wrote this:

 “I can see that many idealists in this country are brokenhearted, and consequently become very negative and angry.  But that doesn't necessarily mean that they are right, any more that the KKK was brokenhearted and subsequently very angry with the passage of civil rights legislation.  Muslims may be brokenhearted that the West wants to give women equal rights, and thus become very angry.  But being brokenhearted doesn't necessarily mean that your solution is the right one.”

This perspective worried me—I was afraid that I had chosen Parker Palmer’s quotations without enough context.  I never thought he was saying being heartbroken made your behavior correct.  I assumed he meant that if you want to communicate with people who have very different political views that you do, you need to understand where they’re coming from, and it may be from a broken heart.  Many of the ways we discuss (or argue) issues don’t work because we ignore the broken hearts, our own and others.

I was taken by Palmer’s choice of the word brokenhearted.  It sounds old-fashioned, and I seldom hear it used.  I wouldn't use that word to describe much of my own experience, but maybe I should consider it.  It has a poignancy that could be useful.  Am I brokenhearted by certain political perspectives?  Maybe.

Politics and the Broken Heart, continued

Here, Andrew Sullivan looks back at his support for invading Iraq ten years ago.

I was an integral part of the problem. I drank deeply of the neocon Kool-Aid. I was also, clearly countering the trauma of 9/11 by embracing a policy that somewhere in my psyche seemed the only appropriate response to the magnitude of the offense. Prudence, skepticism left me. I’d backed Bush in 2000. I knew Rummy as a friend. And my critical faculties were swamped by fear. These are not excuses. These are simply part of my attempt to understand how wrong I was – and why.

Politics and the Broken Heart

“I propose that what we call the ‘politics of rage’ is, in fact, the ‘politics of the brokenhearted,’" says Parker Palmerin an interview in the November 2012 issue of The Sun.  I was introduced to Palmer during my teaching years and have read his books on education and vocation.  I was surprised to see that his latest book is about politics:  Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit.

The ideas presented in The Sun interview are a different take on our current dysfunctional system, and I’m not sure what to think.  I am going to look for the book.  Below are a few more quotations from his interview:

If Americans don’t understand that radical Islamic terrorists are heartbroken about what’s happening to their people, we’re missing the point.

Violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering…When individuals don’t know what to do with their suffering, they do violence to others or themselves—through substance abuse and extreme overwork for example.  When nations don’t know what to do with their suffering, as with the U. S. after 9/11, they go to war.

 [S]uffering is an aquifer on which we all draw. 

 When I’m talking with people whose views I regard as wrong but not evil, I need to ask myself: Am I here to win this argument, or am I here to create a relationship? 

 Big problems are solved by a million little solutions.
 

A Song for Sunday

It's sunny today and the birds are singing:  "Let the Mystery Be."