October 8, 2012

“Modern Times” and “The Grapes of Wrath:” Films For the 99%

Their issues are simple. Equity. Fairness. Adequate food and decent shelter. A job with a living wage. Who am I talking about? I could be describing “The 99%,” the folks in the “Occupy” movement who have protested against the monied class of late. But movies that embody all of their concerns were created over 70 years ago. The first of the three I will discuss, Modern Times, ranks 78th on the American Film Institute’s list of the best American films ever made. And most of it is silent.

Charlie Chaplin’s comedy character, “The Little Tramp” — still said to be the most famous human figure in movie history — is a working man put-upon by a bottom-line-oriented, self-interested management. He works at an assembly-line on a mind and body-numbing job. He is the donkey upon whose back the higher-ups ride their way to great wealth. When they want more productivity, he is put in a machine that will reduce his lunch hour and force-feed him his food, until the machine goes awry.

It sounds grim, I know. But that scene is hilariously funny, because Chaplin’s object is to mock the rich men and women who believe that everything is fine so long as they remain on top of the world — the world of the 1930s Great Depression, in which 25% of the U.S. population is unemployed and 25% underemployed.

Soon Chaplin’s comic everyman character is driven over the edge and literally into the gears of a giant machine of which he becomes a moving part. It is one of the most famous and inventive scenes in movie history.

Although you might not notice it, a good part of the film has to do with food, getting it and eating it, an unfortunate daily preoccupation in a time of bread-lines; a society that lacked a social safety net. And there is a good deal of haughtiness displayed by the upper-class, who treat the unlucky with considerable disdain, as if they all deserve their sorry state. Sound familiar?

Chaplin’s co-star is his wife, the beautiful Paulette Goddard, who plays a young woman forced to steal to get a bite to eat for herself and her sisters. Her efforts to make her way through to a better time inspire the tramp’s own.

This movie gave the audience for Chaplin’s graceful pantomime a first opportunity to hear “The Little Tramp” speak, or actually, sing. The nonsense song he creates is a masterpiece of movement, facial animation, and shy humor.

Chaplin’s tramp appeals to us because of our identification with the good-natured underdog, his desire to help others no matter how downtrodden he is himself, and to share whatever he has. He often outsmarts those more powerful than he is, something nearly everyone wishes he could do. And, without words, he makes us laugh and conveys a human tenderness well beyond the capacity speech.

Chaplin wrote the music for this film, including the wonderful tune “Smile.” Despite the difficulty that the two stars have in finding jobs and a place to live, they strive to maintain an upbeat, can-do attitude toward their woes. In the end, though their future still is not clear, they have both their optimism and their relationship intact. A better day is surely ahead as Goddard and Chaplin, arm in arm, walk toward the horizon to the strains of Chaplin’s famous tune. Modern Times is a movie that treats grave social and economic problems, but somehow manages to make us smile.

Henry Fonda in “The Grapes of Wrath”

Another great film, but much darker in every sense, is The Grapes of Wrath, a 1940 movie directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda. It is based on the best-selling John Steinbeck novel of the same name. The political message is much like that of Modern Times, as are the parallels to today. The story recounts the journey to California of the Joad family following the loss of their “Dustbowl” home in drought-stricken Oklahoma. They find that the economic life of a migrant farm worker is no less desperate than the Depression-era poverty back home.

While the Joads receive help from kind souls along the way, they also encounter those who will take economic advantage of them. The family members inhabit a world where they are told that “A red (a communist) is any son-of-a-bitch that wants thirty cents an hour when we’re paying twenty-five.” Although most captains of industry might not use those words today, some of them can be every bit as ruthless in their attitude toward employee wages. This movie ranks 23rd on the American Film Institute’s list of best American films.

A terrific book on the history of the 1930s “Dustbowl” is The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan. It describes the environmentally tragic decision to cultivate the grassland in large parts of America’s Great Plains, ultimately stripping the earth of its top soil and causing dust storms that were felt as far away as Chicago and New York City. Those conditions led families like the fictional Joads to look for work in California. Again, the much milder drought conditions of today recall events of our parents’ and grandparents’ and great grandparents’ lifetimes.

A particularly sobering 1932 quotation comes from Hugh Bennett: “Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized.” Bennett would eventually take over the federal government’s attempt to stabilize the blowing soil.

Finally, you can view a 25-minute late 1930s documentary film about the “Dustbowl” by Pare Lorentz called The Plow That Broke the Plains. The music is by an important American composer and music journalist, Virgil Thompson. Even better I expect, will be Ken Burns’s four hour, two part documentary, The Dust Bowl, which will premiere on PBS on November 18 and 19.

April 24, 2011

Whatever Became of Miss Pancake?

Most of us are prone to judging people by what they look like or how they sound — how they pose and shape themselves for the camera of our perception and insight.

Many clever people can put on a good “show” and lead us to believe that the surface of things really does suggest something stable, decent, and worthwhile below the sight lines.

But, as Miss Pancake’s story suggests, sometimes what you think you see isn’t what you get.

The foundation underneath the surface makeup may not be nearly so pretty.

Indeed, outer beauty can suggest a fantasy, something that is very much “made up.”

Miss P was born in 1927, the youngest of her parents’ four children, both immigrants from Eastern Europe. Along with many other Eastern European Jews, they saw America as a land free of the most obvious forms of anti-Semitism and a place of great economic opportunity. Her father, as the story goes, traveled to the USA in 1912 from Rumania, after a brief stop in England.

Only one problem: he missed his boat to the USA. Its name? The Titanic, or at least, that is what he told everyone.

He went by the name Leo. A tall, dashing, easy-going man with a wicked smile, able to speak at least a little of several languages. His wife Esther was quite a contrast: homely, stocky, with a prematurely lined face; an argumentative woman who never mastered English and never met a person she could trust.

Leo, a Chicago house painter who was hospitalized and nearly died during the 1918 influenza epidemic, made a good living in the 1920s when money was easy to come by and as easily spent. But he was also unreliable, alcoholic; an embarrassment to his kids when he was loaded. Still, a funny, voluble, charming sort of inebriate, never mean-spirited. And always warm and affectionate with children.

The Great Depression was the ruin of Miss Pancake’s family. Nothing unusual there, since 25% of the country was unemployed. Failed banks, bread lines, “hey buddy, can you spare a dime?” Our heroine might have remembered the terror of bill collectors coming to their door and everyone inside pretending not to be home. At some point Leo couldn’t take the unhappy household anymore and left for Winnipeg, Canada, where he had some relatives, conveniently forgetting to take his wife and children along.

But Esther was tenacious and knew that Leo was her only meal-ticket, even if the meals he could buy were now pretty meager. She followed him to Canada, where Miss P’s older siblings remembered the fear that their classmates had of someone from Chicago, the city of Al Capone and his friends. Eventually, they returned to the USA with Leo coming along for the ride.

Esther was the powerhouse of the family. She could brow-beat her husband Leo, who never made a decent financial recovery from the loss of his painting business and whose alcoholism was always an easy target. And his late night carousing left the four children as fair game for Esther’s mix of claustrophobic love, suspicion, and withering criticism as she played one child against the other, leaving them all unhappy.

In spite of it all, little Miss P grew to be a beauty. Tall and leggy, buxom, with full lips and a toothy smile, she was quite a dish. You can see the beauty queen above as she looked in her hey-day.

But as the last one left at home when all the other children had moved out and gotten married, Esther held on to her like grim death. No one was ever “good enough” for her, at least according to her mom.

Miss P was witty, bright, and could play men to show her a good time. She worked as a legal secretary in a big deal La Salle Street law office for a wealthy and prominent Chicago lawyer at a time when such a job had a measure of prestige, before women had much access to the practice of law or medicine beyond being helpful to a male who did.

Miss P. could be generous, even if that devotion always had strings attached. She played the role of confidant to many of those she targeted, eagerly attentive until she figured out how she could use the information they were revealing to her — a tactic she had doubtless learned from her suspicious and manipulative mother.

So long as her beauty and charm lasted, Miss P enjoyed the company of well-to-do men who would shower her with gifts. But, as the bloom came off the rose, her life became stranger and stranger. For a number of years she continued working as a legal secretary. Finally, she decided that there were other ways to make a living than working for an employer who expected you to show up every day and collected your Social Security and withholding taxes.

At some point she was also hospitalized at a state psychiatric hospital with a diagnosis of Paranoid Schizophrenia. She was a reluctant patient, to be sure; not patient enough to wait for a medical discharge, she escaped through an open window.

By now Miss P had alienated all but two of her relatives, both nephews.

She would sometimes promise them that when she was gone they would inherit her estate, but it was hard to imagine that she had much of one. Nonetheless, they extended themselves to her out of their sense of obligation and good will more than any anticipation of a posthumous payoff; when she got cancer on her nose and sometimes needed help in getting to the doctor, they were there for her.

It is hard to characterize what Miss P then did for a living, but scamming people comes to mind. It seems that this took several forms. Variation One involved buying articles from one store, presumably on sale, and then either reselling them for more than the purchase price or returning them to another store in an attempt to retrieve the retail, non-sale price. Eventually some stores wanted no part of her business, having gotten wise to her scheming.

Variation Two required her to buy used merchandise or find things that others had discarded. I’m not sure to what extent this depended upon her ability to “dumpster dive,” but I’d be surprise if she didn’t claim some goods this way. Then she would run advertisements in places like The Reader, a free weekly newspaper that permitted ads she didn’t have to pay for.

On one such occasion Miss P sold some used stereo equipment that didn’t work to someone who, understandably, thought it did. When he called to complain and wanted a refund, she retorted, “Who do you think you’re dealing with? This isn’t Marshall Field’s!”

Variation Three had to do with her residence. Although she often rented apartments, sometimes she lived in the lobbies of posh hotels, washing up in the ladies room and sleeping in the lobby chairs, while her goods remained in storage. Again, eventually some of the establishments got wise to her.

Perhaps the most lucrative variation, however, might have been various nuisance law suits she filed against alleged “wrong-doers,” including the multiple land-lords she had over the years, perhaps against physicians who treated her, as well. These sometimes resulted in significant settlements.

In 2001 she soon expected to be between apartments and asked one of her nephews to pick up several suit cases, presumably all her worldly goods that weren’t deposited in a storage facility, and to hold them until she was settled in another rental unit. He dutifully did so, bringing the suitcases to his suburban home.

Several weeks later, however, when she asked that the goods be returned, Nephew #1 relied on Nephew #2 to deliver them. Miss P claimed that two suitcases were missing. A manipulation? A delusion? Who could tell? Phone contact with Nephew #1 didn’t jog her memory about the number of pieces of luggage she left with him, nor cause him to confess to the charge of theft that she was leveling against him.

Given how far gone she was, by now she probably believed her own preposterous story.

It wasn’t too many days before a police car appeared in front of Nephew #1’s home. Miss P was in the back seat. The officer rang the bell, only to find her nephew’s wife alone at home. He questioned her about the allegations and was satisfied that nothing untoward had happened, confiding to her that Miss P was, in fact, a pretty strange bird.

The officer wanted to leave, but the alleged criminal’s spouse insisted that he first search the premises, to satisfy himself and Miss P that nothing of her’s was in their home. But the beauty of paranoia is that evidence or its absence counts for nothing. Our heroine simply believed that whatever had been stolen from her had been sold before she and the police arrived.

Still, you’d think that with the police’s failure to find anything, Miss P would have been at a dead-end.

No one got off so easily once Miss P had targeted him.

Later in the year, claiming indigence, the Circuit Court of Cook County waved the filing fee that normally would have been required of Miss P to file suit against her relative. With Nephew #2 in attendance for the bench trial along with Nephew #1’s wife, Miss Pancake claimed $1200 in damages for the personal property that she alleged to have been “wrongfully detained,” namely, “two marble tables, one statue, nine pieces of luggage, one carry-on bag; and clothing.”

She lost.

Twelve days later her motion for a new trial was denied.

The judge in her suit was her next target. Our beauty queen completed a form entitled “Request For Investigation of a Judge or Associate Judge” that she submitted to the State of Illinois Judicial Inquiry Board. In it, she alleged that Judge Good (certainly not a good day for him):

…has a disability. He cannot read or has eye problems. He should use glasses. Also, he (sic) is known by Daley (Center) employees that he never reads evidence. He just judges people by appearance only.

Incoherently specifying various abuses she suffered at the hands of the judge, including being discriminated against as a senior citizen, she complained that the judge had stated in open court that

…he liked the defendant because he was rich. Then, he also (said,) “Boy, lots (of) money.”

Two years later, no longer able to sue Nephew #1, Miss Pancake sued his wife over the same property, with the same result, although this time Miss P’s kinsman hired an attorney in the hope of ending the repeated confrontations with his aunt once and for all. This time Judge Plenty, obviously sensitive to the plaintiff’s peculiar and disjointed communications, requested that she be assessed as to her capacity for self-care by the Cook County Guardian’s office.

Nothing came of that assessment, other than, I suspect, a good deal of nervousness on her part at the possibility that she might lose her independence.

A month later, our inexhaustible protagonist consulted a private attorney of her own in an effort to continue the pursuit of her personal property, but that man wrote her to say she had no case, and that (having failed to persuade Judges Good and Plenty) she had exhausted all legal remedies with any reasonable likelihood of producing the compensation that she was seeking.

And that is the way Miss Pancake’s relationships with her family ended.

No contact with anyone ever again.

Time passed.

Nephew #1 would read of her death in the obituary column of the Chicago Tribune. A little investigation revealed that she had become a ward of the state and died of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Who would have thought that the story of the beautiful and clever Miss Pancake would end this way?

The moral: don’t judge a book by its cover, candy by its box, or a pancake by its package.

—

The photo just above is of Good & Plenty candy, taken by Glane23, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

April 1, 2011

Have You Had Your Daily Dose of Anger?

There is a test built into this essay, but not the kind you think.

There will be questions at the end, but they will make sense only if you read everything.

And even then, the questions are not the kind that allow for right or wrong answers.

Intrigued?

Read on.

—

In today’s bull’s-eye are teachers, unions, government workers, National Public Radio, and Washington politicians.

Yesterday it was bankers, stock brokers, deal-makers, hedge fund managers, and Wall Streeters in general.

It’s also been Obama for a while.

Anger doesn’t seem to be in short supply. And all these folks recently have been or continue to be convenient targets.

The argument pretty much goes like this: if only so-and-so (referring to an individual or group) were different, better, dead, living in another country, out of power, punished, making less money, or otherwise emasculated, then all the rest of us would be much better off.

They, the same so-and-sos, are the ones who are dragging us down, making the country worse, and so forth.

Of course, sometimes it’s true. But isn’t it interesting that even when the so-and-sos are disempowered, there are still just as many angry people around, looking for and finding another target?

Have you heard very many people deride BP (British Petroleum) lately? You know, the authors of that big Gulf of Mexico oil spill? No, the angry voices have moved on to other resentments.

Life is full of frustrations, a lack of control, and lots of unfairness. The highways are too full, the money we are paid too little, the bosses too demanding, the work too hard, the hours too long, the spouse uncooperative, and the kids are out of control.

Change alone can be frightening — enough to make a person angry — and, gosh knows, the country is certainly changing in ethnic and racial make-up, while the distance between rich and poor increases.

It did seem that people were quieter about their discontents a while back; certainly in the ’50s, not so much in the 1960s when the civil rights movement met the Vietnam War, and protests were all around.

I’m told the ’30s were pretty tame in the USA, despite the fact that people were out of work in large numbers (25% unemployed), many more than today. An equivalent level of hardship in 2011 might well generate a revolution.

What accounts for the change from mid-twentieth century America to today? Perhaps the after-glow of a shared national effort (World War II) and the prosperity that followed it made for less sense of grievance. But that wouldn’t explain the modest level of ear-splitting rancor of the Great Depression years.

Others would point to a subsequent loss of faith in government due to corruption or incompetence that made it an easier target, going back as far as the Johnson administration’s escalation of US involvement in the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal of the Nixon administration, or the nonexistent WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) we were told with certainty required the hurried invasion of Iraq.

Social critics would identify permissive child rearing which allowed children not only to be seen, but also heard and listened to, instead of “seen and not heard;” or the Freudian penchant for finding the roots of adult problems in one’s parents’ child-rearing practices (thus, shifting the blame from oneself to others who become the target of resentment).

Or perhaps it was the creation of a social safety-net that led people to believe that they were “entitled” to things they had not earned and encouraged them to “demand” more dollars out of other people’s pockets — which found those people not taking kindly to the idea and in some cases quite opposed to safety-nets in general; nor should we forget a legal profession ready to exact payment for real and perceived wrongs.

And some might point to public anger as the last vestige of the “Don’t Tread on Me” motto found on the Gadsden flag of Revolutionary War days, the thing that helped enable the colonists to fight the British. Surely, it was then a more than necessary evil.

But for whatever reason, among us are angry people who find lots of fault with others, less often than with themselves.

Few of the those most insistent that things be done their way seem to have read their history books; nor have they thought through the consequences of their actions down the road.

The notion that “IF IT FEELS RIGHT, IT IS RIGHT,” seems persuasive, until you realize that just the opposite position might feel just as right to someone else. And every self-righteous person always thinks as the WWII Germans did: “Gott mit uns” (God is with us).

The red-faced, clench-fisted, self-appointed defenders of all that is good and proper (as they see it) refuse to compromise on anything. Blustering assertion has replaced reasoned and well-researched argument.

Little time is taken to locate and read — yes read, not watch or listen to — a reliable and thorough daily news source. Instead, many of us hear and watch the “info-tainment” of the 10 O’Clock news, or partisan “news” reports and sound bites presenting arguments that are one-sided and sometimes factually inaccurate, becoming the pawns of someone else’s vision of the way the world should be.

If the fountain that you drink at makes your blood boil, should you come back for more?

Rallying cries to “preserve the constitution,” poor analogies to the Holocaust or the Soviet Union, and threats of imminent “dictatorship” or “tyranny” have all been used to justify steaming outrage and urgent action. The word “government” is treated as if it were spelled with four letters, just as word actually made of four letters, “B-u-s-h,” was used in a similar derisive, “dirty word” way before his page was turned by a new election.

“Liberal” policy threatens encroaching socialism to certain groups on the right, while the “conservative” agenda augers the creation of a permanent “underclass” and the domination of business interests over the little guy on the left.

We make improper use of the names we call the objects of our anger. For example, but for a few extremists, there is no “far left” or “far right” in this country. “Far left” is communism, “far right” is fascism. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see any major politician who resembles Lenin or Hitler, or who is advocating their policies.

Instead of thoughtfulness, there is a lot of venting. Anger, of course, is self-justifying, and fairness is in the eye of the beholder. Which is why the angry zealots do not usually seek psychotherapy voluntarily. Those few who wish to are advised to take a look at Ronald Potter-Efron’s Stop the Anger Now as a starting place.

Meanwhile, internal inconsistencies in one’s world view are ignored by those who are most incensed. Social conservatives who wish to legislatively forbid Gay marriage or abortion are attempting to regulate some very private events, but generally wish less government control over health care and fewer national rules for business and finance. Meanwhile, those who are socially liberal want their private lives kept private, but look to more constraint and control over health care and business practices.

In effect, the social conservatives want the government into the bedroom and out of your wallet, while the liberals want it out of the bedroom, but into your wallet.

Since 1940, significant groups within the good old USA have voiced strenuously opposition to:

Japanese Americans (who were interned in concentration camps if they lived on the west coast during World War II, even though most were US citizens), people who might have dabbled with Communism during the Great Depression (many intellectuals did), and “pre-mature antifascists” (who were suspected of being Communists after World War II, despite their prescience and courage in taking action against the Spanish and German fascists during the Spanish Civil War).

Others with a bull’s eye on their backs have included Blacks, civil rights activists, hippies, the “military-industrial complex” during the Vietnam War, anti-war protesters in the same period, doctors who perform abortions, Mexicans, Muslims, illegal immigrants, Gays (especially after the Iron Curtain fell and a new object of enmity was required to replace the USSR); and, of course, Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Nixon, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama.

Not to mention Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Chaney.

I’m sure I’m leaving some important people out.

Clearly, some folks earn our intense dislike.

But many of those listed above simply seemed to be easy targets or had ideas or origins that were “different.”

My point is that there is a lot of misplaced anger out there — a bit like kicking the dog when you walk in the door because your boss gave you a hard-time at work.

Even where anger is justified, it can go off the rails. As John Dower notes in his brilliant book War Without Mercy, the Pacific portion of World War II was a race war. Both sides dehumanized and demonized the enemy in caricatures and words. One can only imagine what U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry felt when they looked at posters such as this, a buck toothed, saber toothed, drooling, myopic, dog-eared, satanic travesty of their image:

Even in less fraught times, in-groups commonly defend against out-groups, while out-groups are trying to get in. The pie that represents the “American Dream” seems to be getting smaller, and everyone wants a pretty big piece. I suspect that some of the rage we see today is in response to the precarious, dangerous, and competitive nature of life itself: the daily indignities, the feelings of helpless, and the sheer dazzling and frightening speed with which things change faster than we can keep up.

And perhaps some other part is just our biological and genetic inheritance — the “fight or flight” capacity for anger that our ancestors had to have in order to take on the real threats to their existence and protect those they loved.

As an old 1960 Twilight Zone episode illustrated brilliantly, we are prone to believing that The Monsters are Due on Maple Street even if there are no monsters. If you haven’t ever seen it or haven’t watched it in a while, it shows how chaos and unpredictable change added together can trigger the search for scapegoats, even among the innocent in an average suburban community.

If instead you consult Brigitte Gabriel, author of They Must Be Stopped, you will be told that “America has been infiltrated on all levels by radicals who wish to harm America. They have infiltrated us at the C.I.A, at the F.B.I., at the Pentagon, at the State Department.”

And who are “they?” Muslims living in the U.S.A.

Really? Or is Ms. Gabriel simply Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy in a dress? McCarthy was the man (eventually censured by the Senate) who told us of the non-existent infiltration of the government by Communists back in 1950:

The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.

McCarthy never came up with hard evidence for his claim and sometimes changed the number of alleged traitors in government. Nor has Gabriel offered such evidence for her accusations.

When will Ms. Gabriel mention that the independent research group Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, affiliated with the University of North Carolina, Duke University, and RTI International reports something rather different? It indicates that Muslims provided tips that helped thwart 48 of the 120 U.S. terror attacks planned by their co-religionists since 9/11/2001 .

Long story short: beware of angry people. Their anger just might be turned in your direction. Today, perhaps, they are your friend. But tomorrow?

Beware of those rabble-rousers who stir up the discontented. Enough of them can be found on cable TV, talk radio, and on the Internet. They aren’t your friends either.

Be careful of those who only occasionally see more than one side to any story; and the only side they tend to see is their own.

Be on guard against the people for whom angry expression and impulsive action are the solutions and not the problems.

If you are attracted to someone who appears to be your big, strong, and powerful protector, remember that your only real protection is in yourself and the rule of law; and that one day you may find that the fearsomeness of your companion has become a threat to you.

Beware, too, of angry people with a drink in their hands (McCarthy was one such), unmindful of the disinhibiting potential of alcohol to set their rage loose.

In 1919, just after World War I, William Butler Yeats wrote in The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…

Are we are in one of those moments again?

I guess that depends on how the quieter voices respond.

The future is up to every one of us.

Make the future.

End of today’s sermon.

—

Now for the test questions.

Have you found yourself muttering under your breath as you read the above?

Have you cursed to yourself about the opinions I’ve expressed?

While I don’t claim impartiality, in more than one case I have pointed at difficulties on both sides of American politics. Have you been able to see the other side’s point of view even a little?

Do you believe that anyone who leans in a different political direction is unworthy of your respect or your ear?

Do you have good friends who look at politics from other than your perspective?

Can you have a well-reasoned, honest, and civil conversation with someone who does not hold your position about any of the issues described above? And, if you do, do you permit the possibility of altering your stance a bit?

Do you search for the facts that are available from non-partisan news sources and do they ever persuade you to change your mind about something?

Is there anyone on the other side of the aisle who you admire? Even a small amount? Is there a single writer from the opposition party who’s regular column you read?

Have your past judgments about others, as well as your personal and business decision making, been so good that you are utterly certain of the validity of all of your political opinions today? Put differently, has your life been such a shining example of wisdom and inerrant behavior that it is impossible that you are wrong?

No one on earth has ever been all-knowing in the arena of world affairs and even those solutions that work tend to have a short shelf-life. Angry self-righteousness, however, can last rather longer.

If you are unwilling to change course (in politics or anything else), consider new information, or compromise in a rapidly transforming world, you will have taken the fixed position of a stopped-clock — right only twice a day.

But, no matter your political persuasion, you will be angry all day.

—

The top image is A (gentle)man giving the middle finger angrily by Mgregoro. The second image is that of a Vietnam War Protest in Washington D.C. by Frank Wolfe, October 21, 1967, followed by the Gadsden Flag by Lexicon, Vikrum. The next photo pictures Protesters at the Taxpayer March on Washington by dbking, which occurred on September 12, 2009, after which is a U.S.A. propaganda poster from World War II: Tokio_Kid_Say.png. The final image is a 1954 photo of Senator Joseph McCarthy taken by United Press. All are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

March 24, 2011

Searching for Sanctuary and the Kindness of Strangers

Sometimes it is the next door neighbor or the checkout lady at the store. Sometimes it is a friend’s mom or dad. Sometimes it is an aunt or an uncle, a grandparent or a teacher.

Their role is to provide a glimmer of hope, kindness, and a little bit of the love that by rights should come from the parent, but doesn’t; just enough to make life tolerable; just enough to get the child through the bitterness of life at home with some small sense of self-worth and the hope that the future might be better.

Benign and caring adults are remembered all your life, even if you passed through a less than dire childhood.

I can recall two men in my own life who showed kindness and an interest in me, whose connection felt good to me, who offered respect and seemed to enjoy the times that we talked. One would play catch with me on occasion, something I dearly treasured because my father was often at work. Mr. Maddock, our next door neighbor, was a handsome man with two sons of his own, but always had a good word and took the time to say it.

Another, Bob Hanel’s dad, a man tall and slender, talked baseball with me when he walked down the alley with his small dog. “Such a big man and such a small dog,” I remember thinking. He was blond, like his crew cut son. The younger Hanel, my older buddy Bob, became a dentist, I believe.

And, now that I think of it, there was the owner of a soda shop/candy store on Lincoln Avenue near Washtenaw, Mr. Sharon, who was loved by all the kids who frequented his establishment. A roundish and white-haired man with a warm and soothing manner, and a ready smile. He called me “son,” a common mode of address from a “stranger” to a male child in the ’50s and ’60s that implied a certain kind of protective relationship between a man and a boy.

A heart condition eventually laid Mr. Sharon low and he had to sell the store.

Ironic that his heart should have caused him trouble, because — for me at least — his heart was the best part of him.

I’m sure that adults who fill this saving role in the lives of troubled kids think nothing of what they are doing. They probably don’t know how tough it is for the child.

Parents usually succeed in hiding these things from the public. The household ethic is to keep up appearances. And the warning is never to talk about what happens inside the house while out of the house. Most children keep to this admonition, honoring the parents’ concern for reputation over reality, not wishing to disappoint mom or dad by an act that would be considered disloyal.

So much can be achieved for kids like this, just by being stable, smiling, asking a question, offering a cookie or a soft drink.

It means the world:

My last name begins with the letter “M.” Jane’s begins with “N,” so she sat behind me in the first grade. We lived just a block from each other. We became friends.

The first time I was allowed to go to Jane’s house, I was amazed at how different it was from my home.

Janes’s mother was out of bed, dressed, made meals, did laundry, cleaned their home and took Jane and her siblings places outside their house. I felt terribly sorry for them. Everyone knew that moms were supposed to lay in bed all day and give orders!

Making meals, cleaning, laundry, etc. were what the maid did. They didn’t even have a maid!

As I later realized, my mom’s illnesses were the kind that no doctor could diagnose, nor persuade my mother that they did not exist.

My family had more money that Jane’s. In retrospect, it must have been a hardship to keep feeding me, year after year, yet Mrs. N never even hinted that I should go home. Not even once.

Jane’s father came home every evening and had dinner with the family. Very strange. I wondered why he wasn’t always at work like my dad. Jane’s father wasn’t all that fond of my omnipresence, however.

I’m guessing Mrs. N never let him tell me to go away.

Over the years, Jane and I became inseparable. We spent almost every waking moment together. We did this at Jane’s house, rarely at mine. My home was bigger — had more room and more quiet. Neither one of us wanted to be there, although it was never discussed, simply understood. We played at her house, we ate dinner at her house, every weekend I slept at her house. This went on from age seven to approximately age 16.

During all this time, I never realized what a gift Mrs. N was to me. It was only much later that I came to understand that this woman probably saved me. I had a safe place to go. I had a place where no one criticized me. Where people were alive, not constantly “dying.” It was a relief not to be in the tomb I called home.

My mother believed that if something was easy for her, it should automatically be easy for me. One day she wanted me to swallow a Coricidin capsule. I couldn’t. My usually “bed-ridden” mother chased me around the house trying to force me to swallow. At last I was backed into a corner in the kitchen and told that I was going to swallow that pill or “I am going to know the reason why!”

It wasn’t a pretty day. Pill swallowing was enormously difficult for me. I don’t remember if I ever got that pill down.

As soon as I could, I fled to Jane’s house. Mrs. N made no comment about the incident. I’m not sure if it was then or a little later she suggested that if I put a tablet in a little applesauce, it might make it easier to swallow. It worked and mother never gave me grief about pills again.

As a young adolescent, I would run away from home, usually leaving in the middle of the night. I’d walk the streets of our neighborhood. Eventually, I’d head for Jane’s house and climb in the front window.

The first time this happened, Mrs. N was up waiting for me. My mother had called her looking for me. Somehow Jane’s mom knew that I’d show up at her house. She immediately called my mother, who had called the police. Mrs. N then said she would put me to bed with Jane.

For a couple of years, I ran away a lot. The police told my mother not to call them anymore. Eventually, she stopped noticing that I was gone. So, when I was ready to come back, I’d just crawl in through the window in Jane’s house, not my own. Mrs. N let me.

No critical comments.

She never, ever told me I was a bad kid who should stay home.

She never told me not to do it.

She simply accepted me.

On rare occasions, she would very subtly say something that led me to believe she didn’t approve of the way my family treated me. However, she never put down anything my family did.

Twice a year my father would take me shopping for seasonal clothes, to up-scale stores like Marshall Fields and Saks Fifth Avenue. I had nicer clothes and many more of them than Jane and her siblings. When, on occasion, Mrs N would be taking Jane and her other children shopping for clothes, she took them to what we called “schlock shops.” Basically, these were the counterparts of today’s Loehmann’s.

She would take me also. I wonder if she knew how wonderful it was to have a woman’s point of view and a “family” experience?

Mrs N never said a word, really. There was just her unending acceptance. I actually thought it was normal, unremarkable. After all, Jane and I were best friends. She never let me believe that I was getting anything special.

Mrs. N allowed me to be in every part of her family life throughout my entire childhood. I never wondered, until this very minute, if she loved me. Perhaps so. Perhaps not. I was not exactly a lovable child. Yet, she saved me. I don’t know if she did it consciously. Although I think she knew how desperately I needed her.

The years went by. Jane moved out-of-state. The only time I saw Mrs. N was when Jane came home for a visit with her husband, and later, their children. Once again, I fell back into Jane’s family. I hung-out at Mrs. N’s house whenever I could. She was still welcoming and accepting.

When I got married I asked Jane to be the matron of honor in our very small wedding. My husband and I had no plans after the ceremony. The next thing I knew, there was a luncheon following — given by Mrs. N at her home.

Mrs. N died a while ago. In adulthood, I often tried to tell her she saved me and how much I had come to appreciate her. She pooh-poohed me. Yet, she was always there for me, without my really knowing it.

That, I think, was the greatest gift of all.

—

The above image is I Wait, an 1872 photo of Rachel Gurney by Julia Margaret Cameron, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

October 24, 2010

My Dad is Bigger Than Your Dad! Contemporary Politics and the Moral Superiority of Six-Year-Olds

Lincoln-Douglas Debate

Bluster. Bullies. Big Mouths. Fulminating, furious, fanatics. The world of politics and political attack ads is a lot like the playground.

Lots of assertions, name calling, and one-sided arguments intended to support my candidate’s moral superiority over yours:

Party A: “So-and-so never met a tax or a spending proposal he didn’t like. Who would you rather trust with your money, you or a government with guys like him in it? And he is an ex-trial lawyer and a tree-hugger!”

Party B: “He only cares about rich people. He wants to cap your Social Security and increase your age of eligibility to receive it. He’s a global warming denier who is in bed with the insurance companies and the gun lobby, too!”

Party T: “So-and-so is a communist, a Muslim, a socialist. Where was he born, really? He isn’t a U.S. citizen! The son-of-a-gun just wants to control your health care and dismantle the Constitution!”

And then there is the worst indictment of all: “He is a career politician!!!!!”

Yes, dear, the world of work would be better served by the amateurs, rather than a career surgeon, a career therapist, or career auto mechanic. The next time I go to a concert, I’d like to pay to hear a singer who only performs in her spare time for friends.

I recently had a conversation with a very intelligent man who believes that we would be better off if every one of the current incumbents is thrown out of office, to be replaced by whomever. “It couldn’t be worse,” he said, “regardless of who replaces them.”

Well, actually, it could. How about the Third Reich, Hitler’s Nazi state? Or Cold War Communism under Stalin? Millions and Millions of the enemies-of-the-state being murdered by each of these leaders. Or perhaps life in genocidal Darfur today?

Or maybe you would prefer to live in the 1930s, our own Great Depression, with 25% of the population unemployed, no Social Security or Medicare or Unemployment Insurance, the down-and-outers coming to your back door for food, and another 25% of the population under-employed? Even in 1937, eight years after the Stock Market Crash, President Roosevelt could describe “one-third of a nation” as “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.”

Of course, it is not that things today are terrific or that our legislators are doing such a bang-up job; and there are some really bad guys on the ballot.

But, “throw the scoundrels out,” is not much of a political agenda. Anger is a self-justifying emotion, without a plan for governance by itself.

“Let’s cut government spending and lower taxes,” doesn’t tell you which programs will be cut, or how to pay for our collapsing infrastructure. “I’ll eliminate waste and fraud,” is an old standby promise of political challengers which, however good in principle, rarely seems to be accomplished very well once they are in office themselves.

As the election campaign boils over, many of us begin to resemble little boys:

“My dad is stronger than your dad!”

“Oh yeah? Well, my dad is smarter than your dad!”

We seem to see only perfection in the candidate who resonates with us. We overlook his limitations. And we magnify the defects in the flawed visage of the other guy.

The good news is that the six-year-olds will grow up and many of them will realize that dad isn’t Superman.

The part of us that yearns for someone of absolute moral purity — someone who is smart enough and strong enough to take care of us forever — finally realizes that dad (and mom) probably won’t fill the bill.

The bad news is that many of us just transfer our unquestioning allegiance from parents to candidates, rendering ourselves as naive as we were at age six.

Angels and devils. Bad guys and good guys.

If only the world were always that simple.

—

The above image is Robert Marshall Root’s painting of the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debate at Charleston, Illinois.

September 29, 2010

On Sacrifice

Would you like to know who you are? Then it is essential to know what is of real value to you. One way of finding that out is by asking the question, “What would I be willing to give up for something that I claim is important to me? What would I be willing to sacrifice for love, or great wealth, or power, or honor, or for my child’s well-being?”

What we are willing to sacrifice defines us, both as individuals and as a society. But first, let’s look at what the word sacrifice means:

The on-line Merriam-Webster’s dictionary gives the following definition of the noun sacrifice:

1 : an act of offering to a deity something precious; especially : the killing of a victim on an altar
2 : something offered in sacrifice
3 a : destruction or surrender of something for the sake of something else b : something given up or lost <the sacrifices made by parents>
4 : loss <goods sold at a sacrifice>

Thus sacrifice involves loss and giving something up.

In primitive societies, it often included murder.

Human sacrifice was intended most often to appease a God, win the God’s favor, or avoid the God’s wrath. Igor Stravinsky wrote a famous ballet about this, The Rite of Spring.

More recent depictions of this sort of behavior have included Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1956 novel, The Visit. In this story a wealthy woman (Claire Zachanassian) returns for a visit to her home town, a place that has fallen on hard times. She departed in disgrace many years before when she was impregnated by her young lover. This person denied the charge of paternity and bribed two people to support his case by claiming that they had been intimate with her. Shamed by the townsfolk, Claire eventually turned to prostitution.

Her return home is noteworthy for a “proposition” she has for the town where her former lover continues to live as a respected businessman. She will bequeath an enormous sum to the hamlet if it will do one simple thing: put to death the man who caused her disgrace. In effect, the book asks the question of what this woman is willing to sacrifice for revenge (her money, her morality) and what the town’s people are willing to give up for money. The movie of the same name starred Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn.

More recently, a very different sort of sacrifice is depicted in a 1967 episode of the original Star Trek TV series, The City on the Edge of Forever. While in an irrational state, the ship’s physician enters a time portal on an alien planet, one that takes him back to 20th century USA in the midst of the Great Depression.

At the instant that this happens, the Enterprise starship disappears from its orbit of the world on which the time portal exists. Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, already on the planet in pursuit of Dr. McCoy, recognize that he must have altered history in such a way as to result in a universe in which their space vehicle never existed. Kirk and Spock therefore enter the time portal themselves at a moment in history slightly before they believe that McCoy reached 20th century earth, in order to prevent whatever action he took that changed subsequent events.

While back in time, Kirk and Spock meet a social worker named Edith Keeler, who runs a soup kitchen for the down-and-out victims of the Depression. Soon, Mr. Spock uses his technological prowess to discover that Dr. McCoy will eventually have something to do with Edith Keeler herself.

In one possible historical thread, Spock finds a newspaper obituary for her. In another, however, he discovers that she will lead a pacifist movement that delays the USA’s entry into World War II, resulting in Hitler’s victory and the very alteration of events that prevented creation of the star fleet of which the Enterprise starship is a part. Thus, in order to create the more benign future known to the three officers, Edith Keeler must die.

There is only one complication. Captain Kirk and Edith Keeler (played by Joan Collins) have fallen in love.

The climatic moment comes when Dr. McCoy and Captain Kirk see each other across the street for the first time on 20th century earth. As they rush to reunite, Edith Keeler (on a date with Kirk), attempts to cross the street to join them, heedless of the fact that a fast-moving truck is headed toward her. The doctor attempts to rescue Kirk’s love, but is restrained by Kirk from doing so. Edith Keeler is killed.

The heartbreak is heightened by the incredulous McCoy’s indictment of his captain and friend: “I could have saved her…do you know what you just did?.” Unable to speak, Kirk turns away while Mr. Spock says quietly, “He knows, Doctor. He knows.” Thus, Kirk has sacrificed Edith Keeler’s life and his own happiness, to prevent her from actions that would have led to world enslavement by the Third Reich.

—

I have always been troubled that two of the most important biblical stories involve human sacrifice. The tale of Abraham and Isaac finds the former, the founder of the Jewish faith and monotheism, asked to sacrifice his son Isaac in order to prove his devotion to God. As he prepares to do this, an angel appears and stays his hand. A lamb is slaughtered instead. Rembrandt depicted this beautifully in the painting reproduced above.

Remember now, that I’m a psychologist. I cannot look at this painting without wondering what the child Isaac might be thinking and feeling in the aftermath of this moment. How will his relationship with his father be changed? Might there have been other possible ways of testing Abraham without permanently scarring his son?

The foundation story of Christianity poses a virtually identical dilemma, with the sacrifice of Jesus to pay for the sins of humanity. I fear that we are so used to abstracted representations of these events, that we have become inoculated against the trauma depicted by them and the human, societal, and theological implications of such horrors, reportedly authorized by God.

Of course, most of our sacrifices are much less dramatic. Do we give up eating what we might want in order to be fit and live a longer and healthier life? Do we brush off the attractive member of the opposite sex who “comes on” to us, in order to maintain our marital fidelity, avoid injuring our spouse and children, and keep whole our integrity? Do we sacrifice time having fun or attempting to climb the career ladder in order to go to our child’s boring orchestral recital and enduring hours of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” played by tiny violinists, all of whom are out of tune?

I’m sure you can imagine many more such choices and sacrifices of your own.

We make decisions, all of us, about the question of national sacrifices too. Jobs vs. clean air, tax cuts vs. social services, giving to charity vs. keeping the money for ourselves, liberty vs. the promise of security, and most poignant of all, the decision of when war is necessary despite the sacrifice of the unlived lives of our young adult children.

Just as an exercise, you might want to make a list of all those things you spend time on that are inessential, all the things that you could live without if it came to something really important.

Or, still another exercise: if you could only take 10 things or 10 people with you to a desert island, who or what would they be and who or what would you leave behind? And what cause would be great enough for you to agree to go to a desert island in the first place?

Who are we as a nation? Who are you as a person?

We might know more about our country and ourselves if we first ask what we are willing (and unwilling) to sacrifice.

—

The top image is the Sacrifice of Isaac by Rembrandt. The second picture, taken by Michael Gäbler, is of Adi Holzer’s hand colored etching Abrahams Opfer from 1997. Finally, Caravaggio’s version of the same scene Die Opferung Isaaks from 1594-96, sourced via the Yorck Project. All of the above come from Wikimedia Commons.

February 27, 2010

Experience and Memory

The last Canadian World War I veteran, John Babcock, is dead. He passed away at age 109 in Spokane, Washington on February 18, 2009. Frank Buckles, also 109, remains the sole surviving American veteran of the “War to End All Wars,” according to The New York Times.

With Mr. Buckles inevitable departure, we will all lose contact with what happened in Europe between 1914 and 1918 within what is called “living memory;” the contact that can only come from the direct experience of the world-changing event that shaped the lives of many of our grandparents or great grandparents. Our only available sources of information will then be in the form of books, stories that the survivors told to those still alive, old silent movie film of some of the battle action, recorded reminiscences, journals a few of the combatants kept, accounts from war correspondents, and the like.

All of which leads me to think about memory and experience. And why understanding them is important.

Experience takes a number of forms and, when the experience is past, it becomes a memory. Simple enough on the surface, but not simple at all.

First, there is the “living” of the thing, actually participating in an event. In the case of Frank Buckles, that meant driving an American Army ambulance in France during the conflict itself, witnessing the carnage, hearing wounded men cry for their mothers, making and losing friends, feeling the “pee-in-your-pants” terror of it, getting shot at, carrying a gas mask or perhaps being exposed to poison gas, ministering to the wounded, jumping into fox holes—eating, drinking, and sleeping it all. But once Mr. Buckles returned home from the front, his time there had become a memory and was now different from the actual, in-the-moment intensity of the lived-experience, an intensity that nothing in his long life after the war could match.

At another level, more removed, there are the spectators to events. We all achieve the status of “watchers” when we attend a sporting competition. We see and hear a good deal of what is happening, even if we don’t ourselves play in the game.

At even more distance from the event are those who watch at home. They will miss some of the “atmosphere” of “being there” unlike those of us independent of TV cameras, who will see the event naturally, in the way it unfolds in real-life (without the mediation of a cameraman or the interruption of commercials). And the “at-home” audience will not experience the same roar of the crowd, the heat of sun on skin, the faces of the beer vendors, and the thousands of movements and sounds of the athletes and spectators that the cameras and microphones do not record.

More distant still from the actual experience is a radio broadcast, where one’s imagination and memory of events like the one being reported tend to fill in the blanks where no visual representation of the event is present. At a further remove might be a newspaper account of the game or a friend’s description of what happened from his memory of being there himself.

Experience is one thing, memory another. Memory can only approximate the event itself and can alter or fade with the passage of time. Remember your first kiss—all the thousands of sensations happening all at once—the rush of being alive, the smell of perfume or aftershave or the person’s natural scent, the touch and texture of skin, the moistness and softness of lips, your own heartbeat, body against body—firmness, roundness—the moment before and after, the placement of your hands, the color of your partner’s eyes and their expression in those same moments? Now, as you think about it, however good your memory, I think you will admit that remembering is not the same as living it.

At least in the case of memories of things like your first kiss, you have an advantage over others’ understanding of that experience because it was yours and not theirs. It becomes a good deal harder to relate to the experience of others, especially if they have lived through something wholly unlike what has happened in your own life. The most dramatic examples I can think of come from those who have experienced severe trauma. Take the testimony of a Holocaust survivor, Magda F., from the Fortunoff Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies quoted by Lawrence Langer in Holocaust Testimonies: the Ruins of Memory, as relatives implored her to talk about her experience:

And I looked at them and I said: “I’m gonna tell you something. I’m gonna tell you something now. If somebody would tell me this story, I would say ‘She’s lying, or he’s lying.’ Because this can’t be true. And maybe you’re gonna feel the same way. That your sister’s lying here, because this could not happen. Because to understand us, somebody has to go through with it. Because nobody, but nobody fully understands us. You can’t. No (matter) how much sympathy you give me when I’m talking here, or you understand…you’re trying to understand me, I know, but I don’t think you could, I don’t think so.”

And I said this to them. Hoping (they) should never be able to understand, because to understand, you have to go through with it, and I hope nobody in the world comes to this again, (so) they should understand us. And this was the honest truth, because nobody, nobody, nobody…

Those of us who are the children of Americans who survived the Great Depression got a little bit of this kind of understanding, I think, in late 2008, when the economy fell off a cliff and looked like it was going to continue falling and possibly repeat the Great Depression. We’d heard the stories our parents or grandparents told, we’d read the history books describing the period between the Stock Market crash of 1929 and the beginning of World War II, but we hadn’t lived in a period anything like that. Now, we were getting a taste of it, even if, for most of us, it was only a taste and not the whole meal. Now we know more, and better, what it was like for our elders (and what it is like for our fellow Americans who are losing their homes along with their livelihoods right now).

Sergiu Celibidache, the Roumanian symphony conductor, put very well the difference between direct experience and some form of pale attempt to duplicate that experience in a different time and place. Celibidache believed that it was impossible to accurately render the transcendant impact of musical performance except in a concert hall. He thought that recordings were a fraud, because they attenuated this experience and altered it, didn’t duplicate the physical and aural sensations present sitting in the hall, listening to the full dynamic range of sound as that sound was being made in the same acoustical environment as the musicians themselves. Therefore, Celibidache refused to make recordings for most of his career. And, in the days before anyone ever considered the possibility of experiments in virtual reality, he said that “listening to a recording is like making love to a picture of Bridget Bardot,” the gorgeous French model and actress of the 1950s and 1960s.

Adlai Stevenson II, as I’ve quoted elsewhere, captured the impossibility of fully communicating an experience he’d had to those who had not yet had that experience in a 1954 speech (made when he was 54) to the senior class of his alma mater, Princeton University:

“…What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable. The laws, the aphorisms, the generalizations, the universal truths, the parables and the old saws—all of the observations about life which can be communicated handily in ready, verbal packages—are as well known to a man at twenty who has been attentive as to a man at fifty. He has been told them all, he has read them all, and he has probably repeated them all before he graduates from college; but he has not lived them all.

What he knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty boils down to something like this: The knowledge he has acquired with age is not the knowledge of formulas, or forms of words, but of people, places, actions—a knowledge not gained by words but by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love—the human experiences and emotions of this earth and of oneself and other men…”

So, put another way, for example, no one who hasn’t been in love can know what love is; no one who hasn’t experienced discrimination or fought against it can really understand it fully; no one who has only watched a travelogue about the countryside really knows what it is like to be in the country; just as those who observe from the sidelines and never have played the game cannot completely grasp the clichéd expression about “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.”

No, life is about the living of it, not the reading about it or the watching of it. And, so too, it is about knowing that you don’t know fully about the experiences you haven’t had. It is about knowing that you can only approximate a real and complete appreciation of another’s life; knowing that some of those things the other has witnessed or lived through are frankly unknowable without their experience; knowing that the depths of human personality, emotion, and incident are infinitely great and that one can only approach the deepest point in knowledge and understanding even as we reflect on our own live’s through the lens of memory; and knowing that the death of the last veteran of World War I robs us all of some element of connection to history and, therefore, to the forces that shaped us, our parents, and their parents.

Life is infinitely humbling, fascinating, terrifying, and touching. I imagine one could live a dozen lives, some in one gender, some another; some straight, some gay; some black, some white, some yellow; some married, some single; some in this time, some in the future and the past; some here, some there; and still not achieve the richness that is possible.

But, of course, we only get one, so far as anyone knows. That means we must get on with things.

The day is short and there is much to do.

—

The photo above is of Frank Buckles with Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates on March 6, 2008 by Cherie A. Thurlby of soldiersmediacenter, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

August 13, 2009

“The Only Thing We Have to Fear is…”

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 inaugural address, given in the terrifying midst of the Great Depression, is quite well-known for the line: “The only thing we have to fear is, fear itself.” With 25% of the work force unemployed, there was much of which to be afraid.

Less well known, but no less eloquent and telling a comment on fear came from his widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, when she was asked late in her life to give a radio audience some guidance based on her own life experience. Recall that Mrs. Roosevelt was a timid, unattractive, and lonely child, afraid of many things; left by her widowed father to be raised largely by her severe grandmother. She eventually became world famous, not only because of her husband, but because she became a champion of the rights of disadvantaged groups and a spokesperson for the United States. Eleanor Roosevelt was a public woman known for her actions and her voice when most women stood in the shadow of a husband.

The quote? “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

Good advice for just about everybody.

Dr. Gerald Stein

Blogging About Psychotherapy from Chicago

Great Depression

“Modern Times” and “The Grapes of Wrath:” Films For the 99%

Whatever Became of Miss Pancake?

Have You Had Your Daily Dose of Anger?

Searching for Sanctuary and the Kindness of Strangers

My Dad is Bigger Than Your Dad! Contemporary Politics and the Moral Superiority of Six-Year-Olds

On Sacrifice

Experience and Memory

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