The Mystery of Love

In 1996 Mariana Cook interviewed Michelle and Barack Obama. Barack said this about Michelle.

Michelle is a tremendously strong person, and has a very strong sense of herself and who she is and where she comes from. But I also think in her eyes you can see a trace of vulnerability that most people don’t know, because when she’s walking through the world she is this tall, beautiful, confident woman. There is a part of her that is vulnerable and young and sometimes frightened, and I think seeing both of those things is what attracted me to her. And then what sustains our relationship is I’m extremely happy with her, and part of it has to do with the fact that she is at once completely familiar to me, so that I can be myself and she knows me very well and I trust her completely, but at the same time she is also a complete mystery to me in some ways. And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.

Joy

Yesterday's post was so grim, I need to show the other side of things today. I'm sure I've posted this flash mob before, but here it is again, today, bet flash mob I've ever seen.

Hell in Europe

I haven't posted much here for awhile, partly because I have been reading this tome. It my be the hardest book I have ever read. It's long, dense, and full of horror. Chapter 8, “Hell on Earth,” begins with this description of World War Two which is close to a summary of the book. I'm left marveling at the awfulness and amazed that Europe has recovered so well. 

For millions of Europeans the Second World War, more even than the First, was the closest they came to hell on earth. The death toll alone—over 40 million just in Europe, more than four times as high as in the first World War—gives a sense of the horror. The losses defy the imagination. The Soviet Union's alone were more than 25 million. Germany's dead numbered around 7 million, Poland's 6 million. The bare figures convey nothing of the extremities of their suffering, or the misery inflicted on countless families. Nor do they give any impression of the geographical weighting of the immense casualties....

Unlike the First World War civilian deaths in the Second greatly outnumbered those of the fighting troops. This was, much more than the earlier great conflict, a war that enveloped whole societies. The high death rate among civilians was not least a consequence of the genocidal nature of the Second World War. For, unlike the war of 1914-18, genocide lay at the heart of the later great conflagration. This war brought an assault on humanity unprecedented in history. It was a descent into the abyss never previously encountered, the devastation of all the ideals of civilization that had arisen from the Enlightenment. It was a war of apocalyptic proportions, Europe's Armageddon.

I was inspired to read this book after consuming a lot of both prose and fiction about WWII. The book provided an overall context, but it's a hard to comprehend so much suffering. What else can I say?

Decisions, Decisions

I have been rereading parts of Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. I guess it could fall in to the self-help genre, but what makes it particularly interesting to me is reports on research and studies that help us identify barriers to change. I have been reading it this time from the perspective of ways this research could help my dyslexic grandson improve his reading. As I watched him read and write today, I was aware of how many decisions he needed to make every time he read or wrote. “Is it this or that?” So much of it is not automatic to him. Over and over again, he must ask, “Is it this or that?” And over and over, he must struggle with self control. The authors emphasize that both self-control and decision making are exhausting. No wonder my grandson is reluctant to read and write; it's tiring work. And no wonder I'm procrastinating with a writing project right now. It's at the stage where many decisions are required.

Happy Sun-Day

The View

This window is at the Metropolitan Club Restaurant on the 67^th floor of the Willis Building (formerly Sears Tower) in Chicago. Directly under the window is the table where one of my daughters, two of my nieces, and I had dinner last Saturday night. The food was fine, but we chose the place for the view, not the food. We got to look down on tall buildings and Lake Michigan. Before dinner we were part of a swarm of people walking through Millennium Park. Coming from South Bend, Indiana, it was a dramatic change of perspective. That, I think, is a good and helpful thing.

Gabby Speaks

As you probably know, Gabby Giffords is the former member of the U.S. House of Representatives who was seriously injured in an assassination attempt in 2011. In 2013, she and her husband Mark Kelly started a political action committee called Americans for Responsible Solutions devoted to promoting gun control legislation. I donate a little money to their PAC and receive email updates from them. The mailing yesterday was mainly a plea for money, but with it Giffords included an op-ed she had written that was published in the New York Time on April 17, 2013. In that article she expressed her disgust at the Senators who blocked “common-sense legislation that would have made it harder for criminals and people with dangerous mental illnesses to get hold of deadly firearms.” In yesterday's email, she said her 2013 article “is as relevant now as it was on that day.” She writes,

Some of the senators who voted against the background-check amendments have met with grieving parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook, in Newtown. Some of the senators who voted no have also looked into my eyes as I talked about my experience being shot in the head at point-blank range in suburban Tucson two years ago, and expressed sympathy for the 18 other people shot besides me, 6 of whom died. These senators have heard from their constituents -- who polls show overwhelmingly favored expanding background checks. And still these senators decided to do nothing. Shame on them.

Giffords is not radical. I think she is a gun owner herself. So when legislators listen to her tell her story and then vote no, I think she is right when she says that senators “fear the NRA and the gun lobby.” There is something wrong when a few gun deaths by terrorists is a huge issue and the rest of the thousands of gun deaths are not. Time to send a little money and take some of the actions recommended at their site.

What You Don't Know

My friend Lisa writes about getting new high tech contact lenses that do much to alleviate an eye condition she has long suffered from.  I especially like this paragraph.

My new clarity isn’t all about 20/20 vision. It’s also about realizing that no one knew, those months and years, how frustrated I was at my poor vision and how often my eyes hurt and how many times I debated, knowing that removing the old lenses would immediately relieve the irritation but also reduce my already poor vision even more. And mostly my new found clarity is about realizing that probably everyone I meet has some hidden pain or challenge that others rarely or ever know.

6:30 Mass

From approximately nine years old through high school, I often attended 6:30 weekday mass with one of my parents. I don't remember liking it or  making a choice about going, but I didn't hate it either.  I remember how dark it was in winter and how cold my legs would be in my school dresses.  I love this account below.  Some of it puts words to my memory, some doesn't.

Communion
By Lawrence Kessenich

During Lent, season of discipline,
I drag myself early out of bed, ride
to Mass with Mom and Mrs. Crivello,
warm in the front seat between their
woolen coats, soothed by familiar perfume.

Headlights carve the ebony darkness.
The women talk in low tones
about people I don’t know, the thrum
of their voices reassuring. I doze
for seconds that seem like minutes.

In the half-acre lot, we park among
a small band of cars huddled near
the entrance of St. Monica’s. Inside,
stained glass windows, a feast of color
in daylight, are black. The church is barn-cold.

Candles burn, bells ring, prayers are murmured,
songs sung. The church warms slowly. I sit,
stand, kneel between the two women,
rituals washing over me like soft waves
on Lake Michigan in August.

Later, I carry the sacred mood
out on my route, dispensing papers
like Communion to my neighbors.

“Communion” by Lawrence Kessenich from Age of Wonders. © Big Table Publishing, 2016. 
You can order that book here and others at Amazon.

Practicing Patience

I posted the above video in earlier in December. It seems connected to so many experiences. Recently, I had a difficult conversation with a person who seemed very angry with me. When I went to bed that night, I just kept thinking about the conversation. My thoughts seemed out of control. The old, “I said and then she said,” blah, blah, blah, on and on.

The next day, I had a little better control of my mind. I stopped much of the thinking and just tried to be aware of what I was feeling. It turns out, in this case, experiencing my hurt feelings was much more comfortable than replaying my thoughts. This experience provided just a little piece of information to tuck away about how to deal with painful thoughts.

Voting Advice

From Ta-Nehisi Coates...

...In the American system of government, refusing to vote for the less-than-ideal is a vote for something much worse. Even when you don’t choose, you choose. But you can choose with your skepticism fully intact. You can choose in full awareness of the insufficiency of your options... 

An American Export

Iain Overton (author of The way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey into the World of Firearms, explains some of the global implications of America's gun culture:

The right to bear arms, and the sheer number of firearms bought and sold in this country every year as a result, has undeniable global implications. For a start, Americans in effect support the world's gun economy. In addition to the 8.6 million guns made in the U.S. in 2012, 4.8 million more were imported from overseas. The U.S. import volume of foreign guns more than tripled between 2003 and 2012.

More insidious, though, is how the licit American gun industry affects the illicit Latin American gun market. The ease with which guns can be purchased in the U.S., and the fact that many sales may be conducted without background checks, has deep consequences. The majority of guns found in Mexico and Central America are from the United States. It is estimated that more than 250,000 guns flow south of the border into Mexico — a country with just one official gun retailer — every year. Roughly 45% of U.S. firearms licensees are believed to rely on Mexican trade for their survival. To the north, Canada estimates that 50% of the guns used in crime in Ottawa were smuggled across the border.

In 2014, El Salvador had almost 4,000 killings, a rate of about 62 homicides per 100,000 (in the U.S. it is about 4 per 100,000). Most of these slayings were committed with guns — and about 50% of guns traced in El Salvador that year came from the United States. The lifting of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban in the U.S. in 2004 resulted in more than 2,600 estimated additional homicides in Mexico.

Hmmm...

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” —E.L. Doctorow

“In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.” —Denise Levertov 

“Writing is…that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.” —Pico Iyer

From The Writer's Almanac 

About WW II

Curiosity

“Donald Trump is criminally uncurious.” (Mark Shields)

 I was surprised to hear this unusual criticism of Mr. Trump, but I appreciate the sentiment. I usually appreciate curiosity, and I am reminded that I could stand to be a bit more curious myself.

American Values

Ted Cruz suggested that we “empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” 

The NY Police Department Commissioner responded with this:

 I would remind the Senator he lives in the United States of America. We don’t need a President that doesn’t respect the values that form the foundation of this country. There are more than nine hundred Muslim officers in the N.Y.P.D., many of whom also serve in the U.S. military in combat—something that Cruz has never done, so the Senator basically is really out of line with his comments.”

From "Bad Choices" by Amy Davidson in The New Yorker

Quotation of the Day

From Kevin Drum...

That's life. In politics, you're always wrong according to everyone who's not you—and the more extreme you get, the wronger you are. That's the price of being in the arena, or even just being a spectator cheering against the Romans.

"Death alone is certain"

Here is an excerpt from an On Being. Krista Tippett is interviewing Stephen Batchelor

Ms. Tippett: “Since death alone is certain, and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?” You wrote, “Over time, such meditation penetrates our primary sense of being in the world at all.” And I wondered if you would speak, as we close, just about — in a very concrete way, whatever that means, yesterday or today, about how this observation, this questioning, penetrates ordinary life, an ordinary day in the world, your primary sense of being in the world at all.

Mr. Batchelor: Well, the meditation on death that you’ve just read out is actually an adaptation of a Tibetan reflection on mortality.

Ms. Tippett: Mm-hm

Mr. Batchelor: As a young man, I did this practice daily. I found, of all the Tibetan practices I did, it was the one that was most life-changing, to the extent that today, I find that my sense of being in the world is deeply infused with an awareness of how this may be my last day on Earth. And these reflections on death are not in the remotest sense morbid or gloomy.

Shameless Fairy Tales

Did you know the NRA has a website call NRA Family? There you can find fabulous classics such as “Little Red Riding Hood (Has a Gun)” and “Hansel and Gretel (Have Guns)."

Cheaper than a Prius

Here's an interesting and money-saving way to help the environment. 

Around 80 percent of the protein we consume comes from animals, he says, in the form of meat, eggs, or dairy. And those creatures need a lot of resources to become food. A third a pound of hamburger requires 660 gallons of water to produce, if you include the irrigation needed for the feed. Raising animals for people contributes to a bevy of environmental plagues, including deforestation, water contamination, loss of biodiversity, and desertification. Of the more than 25 percent of all greenhouse gases attributed to the food system, 80 percent come from producing livestock. (Maddie Oatman, Mother Jones)

This comes from a longer article that explains that most of us consume more protein that needed. Changing your diet--it's cheaper than a Prius or a windmill.

Happy Easter.

Managing the Paradox

Today I came across this article from 2012, written shortly after Sandy Hook by Dr. Ginny Whitelaw. Unfortunately it's even more relevant today.

For we’re dealing with a paradox here, and one that is core to the American psyche: that pits individual freedoms on the one hand and social safety on the other. Both are good and right and valuable things and, as we know from integral theory, both are facets of our humanity: we are both individual agents and social animals. We affect others through our actions AND we are affected by social context. Little wonder that if we ignore one side of our human equation and go to extremes on the other side, we get into trouble….
 Both individual freedom and social safety are valuable and, if we go too far in either direction, problematic. Too much focus on social safety and we get a police state that violates individual rights. We don’t want to go that far. But too much individual freedom, and we get nutcases wiping out swaths of society. And that, I submit, is where we are right now. We are not managing this paradox well.

To manage it better, we have to move beyond one-sided arguments and embrace what’s right and good about BOTH individual freedom and social safety, and use the tension between them to reach a higher level goal: a society in which we are more free because we’re safe, and more safe because we’re free. The process of managing this paradox would have us set some limits – what’s free enough? Or safe enough? And what are some thresholds below which we don’t want to sink? We might be able to largely agree, for example, that police confiscation of ordinary, non-automatic weapons would be going too far on the social safety side. And that two rampages in one year crosses the threshold on the side of overprotecting the individual freedom to bear arms.

This entire article can be read here, but for those not versed in "integral theory," it may be confusing.

A few days ago, I read Grant Park, a novel by Leonard Pitts (reading some of it in a hotel room in Chicago across the street from Grant Park). The book was gripping, but when I finished, I didn't know what to say about it. I liked it, but it seemed a bit preachy. The story begins in 2008 when Malcom Toussaint, an African-American columnist for a fictional Chicago newspaper, sneaks into the paper an offensive column about how tired he is of trying to explain racism to white people—“tired of white folks bullsh--.” 

After Toussaint's late night sabotage of the newspaper's front page, he leaves the office only to be kidnapped by two crazy white supremacists. Since I couldn't find easy words to say how I felt about the book, I turned to Google. Vinson Cunningham of the New York Times says it nicely. “Pitts never manages to avoid didacticism” he says, but

Despite too many wince-worthy lines, the novel’s plot — jump-started by Toussaint’s unwilling inclusion in a white supremacist scheme to ruin Obama’s election night — is nicely wrought, and sometimes manages to surprise. Toussaint’s two-pronged story is placed contrapuntally against that of his white ­editor — fired as a scapegoat in the wake of The Column — whose life was also altered irrevocably by the ’68 strike. The resulting parallel lays bare the extent to which Americans, black and white, still struggle to articulate the basic elements of our shared past.

With these caveats, I recommend Grant Park.

Chicago Trees in March

 

Maybe I'm getting eccentric.

Gun Safety, the Missing Data

By some estimates...about 3,000 children are unintentionally shot every year in the U.S. — eight every day. About 124 of those children will die. That’s according to data from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. 

 However, 

No comprehensive statistics exist to tell us how many children are shot accidentally every year. The lack of data is thanks to the efforts of the NRA and other gun lobbyists. They promote a line of denial, blocking government funding for research into these shootings on the argument that they are rare.

Read the whole article by Mary Sanchez.

“Forests and meat animals compete for the same land. The prodigious appetite of the affluent nations for meat means that agribusiness can pay more than those who want to preserve or restore the forest. We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet – for the sake of hamburgers”

Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

Here is a link to the veggie burger formula.

Be a Tree

Ann, the teacher of my yoga class, said something like this today: “When you just don't know what to do, try doing the tree pose.” Here's how.  I'm going to try it the next time I feel crazy.

.

“What [w]ould happen if I heeded the admonitions of beauty? “

From “Opinion” by Baron Wormser

Awe, Awe, and More Awe

This is a sign, from one of the walking paths at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, stopped me in my tracks. Yet, maybe there is this awesome history for every path we take.

"Renew Your Spirit"

From Peter Morales

We need to remember...when we find ourselves becoming bitter, we need to remind ourselves of our most treasured experiences. Actually, we need to do more than remember. We need to experience life’s gifts and possibilities once more. Renewing contact with what is most precious in life is really a spiritual practice. It is an essential practice. If we do not feed our spirits, they will wither. Even the good deeds we strive to do will become acts of anger and joyless obligation rather than efforts to share and to heal.

We all need to ask ourselves, “What does my spirit need right now?” Perhaps it is quiet time in nature. Maybe a visit to a new exhibition in a museum. How about some time in the garden? Why not attend a concert by a favorite artist, or take a walk with an old friend? The possibilities go on and on.

Desert

I just returned from a six day visit with my sister in Tucson, Arizona. She lives in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains and a mile or so away from Sabino Canyon, a great park for hiking in the desert and mountains of the area. I spend a lot of this trip moved and awed by this beauty.

Interesting contrast between sunlight and shadow.

 From brown to bright green.

 Full creeks in certain seasons

 And the famous saguaro cactus, found almost exclusively in southern Arizona and western Sonora, Mexico--a few strays in SE California.  It doesn't get those arms until it is around 75 years old.

Special Interest Group: Americans Who Don't Want to Be Shot

I haven't said much lately about U.S gun policy though I'm tired of the mass shootings and tired of hearing about crimes in Chicago being committed with guns from Indiana. Here satire writer Andy Borowitz has a few things to say:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – Americans who are opposed to being shot, a constituency that has historically failed to find representation in Washington, are making a new effort to make its controversial ideas heard in the nation’s capital....Carol Foyler, founder of the lobbying group Americans Opposed to Being Shot,...believes that the right to not be shot, much like women’s right to vote, the right to same-sex marriage, and other rights that were deemed controversial in their day, may be an idea whose time has finally come.“For years, we’ve been talking about the right to not be shot and people have been looking at us like we’re out of our minds,” she said. “But recent polls show that a vast majority of Americans, in fact, do not want to be shot.”

While Foyler and other anti-being-shot activists believe that Washington may finally be receptive to their radical ideas, Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association, is doubtful. “People who don’t want to be shot are a very narrow interest group,” he said.

I was struck by the last episode of Downton Abbey (Season 6, Episode 8). So much of the show revolved around showing compassion versus negative judgments. 

People are lined up along the rail of the ship waving good-by to those waving along the shore. This is the beginning scene of Brooklyn, a movie about separation and loss, about starting anew on a different continent. It represents the many whose immigration to America was bittersweet. There is a good trailer here.

Just So

Susan Werner, Part Two

This song goes well with this year's presidential election.

Susan Werner, Part One

Been listening to Susan Werner lately.  This is a good song for contemplating one's self-concept.

What Now?

In May of 2014, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic Monthly magazine. I have been rereading it recently, and I posted last week that I would try to write about it. I find myself unable to say much other than, read this article, just read it.

It has been controversial, and I wonder how many potential readers were turned off by the word reparations. It is difficult to imagine how reparations could work. But Coates believes something else is more difficult to imagine. If this country were to discuss reparations, we would have to look at things we don't want to look at. “For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for 'appropriate remedies'” (Coats). That bill has never made it to the house floor.

Maybe, if it were only about slavery, Coates might not have written this article. It is, however, as the subtitle states, more than slavery: “Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy.” It is a grim history difficult to coexist with our prized stories of freedom and equality. He continues.

Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate—the kind that HR 40 [Conyers' bill] proposes—we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion—and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper—America's heritage, history, and standing in the world.

I hope that those who disagree with the idea of reparations will first read Coates' entire article.

Imagine...

This meal arises from the labour of all beings,

may we remember their offering.

Above is the beginning of a chant we recited before every meal at the meditation retreat I attended recently. Rarely do I think about all the people who participate in making sure I am fed, partly because it's impossible. On a snowy day yesterday, I bought a bag of carrots. From the person who put the seed in the ground to the woman who took my money at the store, how many people were involved?  I can't quite imagine. (I tried unsuccessfully to find the source of the picture above.)

A Speck on the Time Line

A few weeks ago, I read Paul Krugman's review of The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon. I don't know if I will read Gordon's book, but the following statements in Krugman's review keep returning to me as I think about how much different my life is than it was for those living a relatively short time ago.

Robert J. Gordon, a distinguished macro­economist and economic historian at Northwestern, has been arguing for a long time...[that d]evelopments in information and communication technology... just don’t measure up to past achievements. Specifically..., he has argued that the I.T. revolution is less important than any one of the five Great Inventions that powered economic growth from 1870 to 1970: electricity, urban sanitation, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine and modern communication....

In “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” Gordon doubles down on that theme, declaring that the kind of rapid economic growth we still consider our due, and expect to continue forever, was in fact a one-time-only event. First came the Great Inventions, almost all dating from the late 19th century. Then came refinement and exploitation of those inventions — a process that took time, and exerted its peak effect on economic growth between 1920 and 1970. Everything since has at best been a faint echo of that great wave, and Gordon doesn’t expect us ever to see anything similar.

Indeed, almost half the book is devoted to changes that took place before World War II....I was fascinated by Gordon’s account of the changes wrought by his Great Inventions. As he says, “Except in the rural South, daily life for every American changed beyond recognition between 1870 and 1940.” Electric lights replaced candles and whale oil, flush toilets replaced outhouses, cars and electric trains replaced horses. (In the 1880s, parts of New York’s financial district were seven feet deep in manure.)

This one review has changed how I view the many conveniences that now seem necessities.

Yep...

Roz Chast tells it like it is.

White Privledge, Part Four

Early on during Debby Irving's process of Waking Up White, she describes watching the film Race: The Power of an Illusion. As the film begins to focus on the GI Bill, Irving gets uncomfortable. She describes it like this.

I remember thinking, Hmm, my father and uncles talked about that bill, about how great it felt to win the war and come home to free education and a housing loan. My father's law school education had been paid for by that bill. My parents' first home had been subsidized by it....But all of a sudden, the film started talking about the bill not being accessible to black Americans....The chilling reality is that while the American dream fell into the laps of millions of Americans, making the GI Bill the great equalizer for the range of white ethnicities in the melting pot, Americans of color, including the one million black GIs who'd risked their lives in the war, were largely excluded. The same GI Bill that had given white families like mine a socio-economic rocket boost had left people of color out to dry.

It was interesting to read this account from someone who benefited from the bill and felted naively foolish after learning this new information. And it motivated me to go back and reread “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Atlantic, May 2014).  Once again, this article left me feeling sick.  And it made me think that the government backed loans that helped my father buy farm land and invest in production where part of this process, part of the reason why "white households are worth roughly 20 times as much as black households..."(Coates).

Coates' article is so full of depressing statics like the one above, that I don't know where to start.  If I can manage it, I'll write sometime soon about Coates' argument for reparations.  Right now, I'd just like to conclude with this reflection from Coates about our willingness to celebrate some of our history while other pieces of it we hide or deny.

One cannot escape...by...disavowing the acts of one's ancestors, nor by citing a recent date of ancestral immigration.  The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time.  The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer.  To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte....

Meanwhile, I think that every American should read Coates' article.  It's a brilliant and depressing piece of American history, and I'm afraid many will avoid it because of the word "reparations" in the title.

White Privelige, Part Three

Debby Irving, in her book Waking Up White , introduces readers to Peggy McIntosh who has compiled a list of ways she enjoys certain privileges because of being white. McIntosh says, “I have chosen those conditions which I think in my case attach somewhat more to skin-color privilege than to class, religion, ethnic status, or geographic location, though of course all these other factors are intricately intertwined.” Some samples from her list are below. More can be found here.

• I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time...
• If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live...
• I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed...
• I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented....
• When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is...
• Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability...
• I can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race....
• I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race....

"Don't do it"

On January 23, I posted Gail Collins' fantasy of going back in time to deliver messages. Here is another fantasy of carrying messages back to the past, one with an entirely different flavor. The narrator of Sharon Olds' poem imagines her parents meeting:

...they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,...

Read the entire poem here.

Just This

Last week I posted that I was leaving for a silent meditation retreat. I got home Sunday afternoon. I wanted to say something about those days but fount it difficult. Meditation doesn't lend itself to words, and it is, after all, very personal. I decided I would like to briefly share three ideas that I found moving and helpful.

• Listen to the silence. The silence from which all sound arises. The silence of the night sky. The silence of the room, the floor, the ceiling. The silence of the universe. My own silence.

• Just this. That's all, just this. This tea. This chore. This conversation. This step. This moment—just this.

This retreat took place in a lovely area, and I was aware of how much the beauty of nature makes mindfulness easier for me. (Right now, back home, a woodpecker is eating suet from a bird feeder about eight feet from where I sit.) Surprisingly, I was quite moved by the beauty of leafless trees and bushes. These are just some of the insights I will try to carry with me as I step forward.

White Privilege Part Two

Some folks find the idea of white privilege offensive. After all, I'm white, and I can look around and see scores of people more privileged than I am. But that's not what it means. It just means my default setting, in terms of race, is an easier setting than most other races. I think science fiction writer John Scalzi has a clever way of expressing it

Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

Get it? You can still lose. You can still be clumsy, lazy, crazy or whatever. And you still have that white advantage.

Just Sitting

I'm taking with me these words by Barry Magid as I prepare to leave for a four-day silent meditation retreat:

Imagine sitting down in front of a mirror. Your face automatically appears. There is no effort required; the mirror is doing all the work. You can’t do it right or wrong. The Zen Buddhist practice of “just sitting” is like that. When we sit, our mind automatically begins to display itself to us. Our practice is to observe and experience what appears moment after moment. Of course, just as when we look in a real mirror, things don’t stay that simple for long.

White Privledge, Part One

I just finished reading Waking Up White, and at first, I didn't quite know what to think of it. It's a memoir organized around Debby Irving's understanding of race and how it changed. Much of the book involves discovering how much she benefited from being white, a tough, sometimes even taboo subject. So Irving is writing about sometimes cringe-inducing moments. At times I was embarrassed for her.

Feeling confused about my own thoughts, after I finished the book, I read a few reviews at Goodreads.com. Many were complimentary. Some complained that she started out so unbelievably naive that she was disqualified from having anything to say. Others said it was a good book for those (ignorant souls) who knew little about white racism. After this, somehow, I felt a little surer of my own conclusions.

Irving grew up in an elite New England town. Her family had a nice house plus a vacation cottage, membership in a country club, and access to excellent schools. Through her parents and her culture, she absorbed the belief that people like her parents inhabit that position because they and their ancesters have worked hard to earn all that they have. In contrast, people who have less have worked and tried less.

Then, in 2009 at age 48, Irving starts a master's degree program at Wheelock College in Boston and finds herself in a class called “Racial and Cultural Identity.” There she is thrust into a new and disturbing understanding of white racial identity in the United States. The book is the story of her journey plus a report on ways race has influenced life in the United States and its history.

Here is a short excerpt.

Prior to the Wheelock course, my attempts to make sense of racism had been akin to trying to understand a game just by watching the plays. I made guesses based on what I could see. In contrast, the course asked me to study the rules—centuries of law and policy—see how players had gotten into their present-day positions. Suddenly every player appeared in a new light.

The game, it turns out, offers different rules and different starting points for different people. It's drastically uneven contest in which I am among the more advantaged players. Advantage in the game can take several forms: male trumps female, straight trumps LSBT, able-bodied trumps disabled, Western religions trump Easter religions, higher class trumps lower class, and so on. But nowhere, as far as I can see, is any advantage as hard-hitting and enduring as skin color. My white skin, an epidermal gold card, has greased the skids for a life full of opportunities and rewards that I was sure were available to everyone. My notions that America offered a level playing field disintegrated.(36)

I found this an engaging story of Irving's transformation. Also, it provides some helpful information about structural racism. Much of this information was not new, but she presents in a way that is understandable, so that now, it is easier to discuss and explain.  Unfortunately, it doesn't offer a lot of hope for eliminating racism any time soon.

A Soft Heart

I own three books by Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. Over the years I've read some of her other books too. It seems I can just open one on any page and find something meaningful. Yesterday I picked up this one, and right away, I wanted to post everything I read.

She talks about war and peace, a bit in the broad sense, but quite quickly, she get personal. “War and peace,” she says, “start in the human heart....as long as we justify our hard-heartedness and our own self-righteousness, joy and peace will always elude us (26-27). She reminds us “that the people who we get so upset at, they eventually move away or they die...but the negative seeds that are left in our mindstream, the impact of our hatred and our prejudice is very long-lived. (27-28).

Here is what she suggests.

[W]hat I'm advocating here is something that requires courage—the courage to have a change of heart. The reason this requires courage is because when we don't do the habitual thing, hardening our heart and holding tightly to certain views, then we're left with the underlying uneasiness that we were trying to get away from. Whenever there's a sense of threat, we harden. And so if we don't harden, what happens? We're left with that uneasiness, that feeling of threat. That's when the real journey of courage begins. This is the real work of peacemaker, to find the soft spot and the tenderness in that very uneasy place and stay with it. If we can stay with the soft spot and stay with the tender heart, then we are cultivating the seeds of peace. (28-29)

This presidential election process we're in the midst of seems like a mini-war. I read or listen to certain candidates, and I do harden my heart. Can one actually find tenderness in politics?

Gail's Little Fantasy

Today Gail Collins is writing about the strangeness of having Trump as a presidential candidate, but it is her little fantasy about going back in time that amuses me most:

Did you ever fantasize about being able to go back in time and tell people from the past what’s going to happen in the 21st century? I like to envision telling Vincent van Gogh how much his paintings will be selling for. Or I inform George Wallace that he never gets to be president, but a black guy does.

Right now, I’m imagining going back to 1990 and telling my colleagues on the Donald desk that they are chronicling the love life of a future presidential front-runner. They were a pretty cynical crew, but still.

Nourish Your Brain

The most recent issue of National Geographic has an interesting article called “This Is Your Brain On Nature” by Florence Williams. She reports on numerous studies showing that people are healthier in many ways if they live close to green space or spend time in nature. They're not sure why, but some researchers suspect that “nature works primarily by lowering stress.”

For me, this just reinforces some of my own experiences.  The morning I walked though city streets and along the St. Joe River, all edged with snow.  Very nice,  And an extreme example of this is the first time I did a long hiking trip in Spain (over 400 miles).  After that five week walk, I felt as if my wiring had changed. It was hard to describe, but I felt more peaceful and happier. It's nice to know that this has been studied and verified. And it reminds me to continue walking in the neighborhood and beyond.

This link connects to the article and beautiful pictures of outdoor scenes. The article says even pictures of nature can help.The picture above is a view of a train chugging over the snowy St. Joe River. It was taken while sitting at the bar of The Crooked Ewe Brewery and Ale House in South Bend, Indiana.

Same As It Ever Was?

I heard this song yesterday for the first time.  It goes well with yesterday's post.

That Damn Whistle

Last week I was surprised to find this book in my mailbox--a gift from my sister.  It's a tough read, dense and long, but it makes the strong point that racism is still strong in American politics and American life.  It isn't always that people are consciously racist, but in many ways we live in a racist culture.
"Dog whistle" refers to political statements that never mention race but are often heard, if only subconsciously, in racial terms.  For example, complaints about welfare and other government "handouts" are often heard as complaints about blacks even though whites may benefit just as much or more from these policies.

Here is a startling statement from page two about the 2012 presidential election that pulled me right into this book.

 If only white people [as opposed to whites and other groups] had voted...Mitt Romney would have carried every state except for Massachusetts, Iowa, Connecticut and New Hampshire.

I am now reading the next-to-last chapter.  I hope the conclusion "To End Dog Whistle Politics" will offer some hope.

Good Writing

Before he wrote the controversial “Case for Reparations” and Between the World and Me, I have been a fan of the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates.  I have pondered from time-to-time what it is that is so compelling about his writing.  The best I could come up with was curiosity--he writes from a perch of curiosity. Then yesterday, I stumbled across an interview at the Harper’s Magazine site with Osita Nwanevu interviewing Coates.  It strengthened my conclusion that curiosity was a key to Coates' writing.  The question and answer below provides a touching and amazing account of a writer driven by his personal desire to find answers.  

[Nwanevu] You’ve said time and time again that writing is an “internal process” for you, which is to say that ultimately you write about and try to understand history and the underpinnings of race relations in America for your own education. Any effect your writing might have on your readers—positive or negative—is incidental to that project. Has the reception of this book and your more recent writing for The Atlantic changed that at all for you? Is writing still an entirely personal process, or do you think more about how readers will respond?

[Coates] I just can’t. I can’t. I mean, I’m just doing my writing. I’m not called to that. If you start writing in that direction, you’ve gone down a very, very dark path. I just write. I enjoy the process of it. It’s personal to me. It’s very, very important to me. It’s bad for writing, and it’s bad for truth. If you start writing for other people, you start losing your own independence, your ability to come to your own conclusions—like for example in this book. If I were writing to effect change, maybe I would write more about the black church. One of the largest vehicles for the struggle. But then it would have been a very, very different book. You’ve got to speak your truth, man. You’ve just got to. Not what a thousand or ten thousand or twenty thousand people want to hear. What you feel. You shouldn’t hand that over. And by the way, people in the movement shouldn’t want you to hand that over. I don’t want them to become artists.

I was introduced to Coates in April of 2012 when Hendrik Hertzberg wrote, “The blog of Ta-Nehisi Coates is one the half-dozen best in the English-speaking world.”  At that time, Coates didn’t have the notoriety he has now.  He did write for The Atlantic, but I enjoyed most the blog he wrote at the The Atlantic online site. (At that time he blogged four or five times a week; now he rarely blogs that much in a month.)

Books Read During 2015

Here, in no particular order, are my favorite books read in 2015. I was surprised to see that most of them are nonfiction.  I read more fiction this year; it just wasn’t that good.

Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown

This is an account of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a rowing team from the University of Washington, and a government on its way to World War II.