Look to the Bloggers

 I'm not bright enough to come up with a solution to the Hamas-Israel war/conflict, nor to the issues that existed before their Cold War became a Hot one. I wish i could claim to have one, since nearly everyone does. But the simple truth is that I can't even be certain which side has the lesser guilt.

That may sound like a copout. But there is no dearth of people, politicians, journalists, commentators, who are full of certainty. I am just saddened by the incredible loss of life. The killing has been indiscriminate and however and by whomever it is done, the result is the same. 

For my information I go to the BBC and The New York Times but they only provide me with the number of deaths and how they were done. The ways citizens celebrating or sleeping in their beds were killed or the ways citizens with no connection except they lived where missiles and rockets were killed. What I'm more interested in is in the people who are doing what I would be doing in their place: Reflecting out into the world what is happening all around me and what it does to me.

What I've been doing is looking for bloggers who are live in Gaza and the Israeli cities being hit. Thought experiment: Imagine yourself living your life day to day and suddenly bombs begin falling and people start dying all around you. What would you have to say?

I'm not listing any of the bloggers I'm reading, Palestinian and Israeli, because I want you to find them the same way I did. At random and through a lot of trial and error. What you will find is a lot of anger, hatred, fear, frustration, thoughts of vengeance; And you will find thoughts of forgiveness, exhaustion, pride, compassion, hope. No one has a monopoly on those, and certainly no state or group. 

Fred Rogers used to say, "Look for the helpers." I would paraphrase that to say, "Look for the bloggers," especially the ones who live in the areas under attack. They are the ones bearing the brunt of what is being done and blasting out, as best they can, what they experience. If we want the human condition, we can do no better than look to the humans under bad conditions.

 

Front lines

The corona virus pandemic which is making its way around the world has come to the little spot here in Wisconsin we call home. It's affected our employment, to the extent that my wife is completely working from the bedroom, and while I still have some patients available to me, most of them are in nursing facilities that have locked down, a few to the point where they won't allow our RNs inside. I go out almost daily, often to homes but sometimes to a facility or the grocery store. I have taken to occasionally wearing a medical mask, because I see so many patients.

But that's not what I want to talk about. The phrase "on the front lines" annoys me.

It's not just the use of military terminology, although that's a poor choice when it comes to healing. It leaves me at least with a feeling like being so categorized I should be up to my gaiters in mud and blood, bullets and shells whizzing past. The sense behind this phrase is we in healthcare, by dint of our continuing to practice, sometimes among people we know are infected, more often (since this is a novel virus as it's been called, and we're finding out just how it moves through a population with new permutations almost daily) among those who are susceptible, we are at the cutting edge of both the science and the danger.

I don't mind in my little way being at the cutting edge of technology. But I am not in danger. Or at least not more so than most people, and probably less than some.

Think of it. I'm given protection in the way of masks and sometimes gloves and gowns but more effectively in information. I'm updated daily on risks to others and to me, and when a new potential for risk is identified I'm warned of it. If anything, I'm in the rear, sort of a member of the DUO, helping to keep others calm and protected, serving donuts and pouring coffee.

But the misapprehension that bothers me most is that there is anything brave in what I do. What there is is care and training in my profession. I'm not brave. I'm not particularly cowardly--I'll own up to being what a recent New York Times essay referred to as the healthcare workers who aren't running from coronavirus but confronting it--but I have a good sense of my limits. And I know that, rather than running toward the choppers in the opening moments of M*A*S*H,  I'm likelier to amble along to visits like Jimmy Stewart walking Donna Reed home from the dance. (Yes, sometimes holding my pants up.)

Still. I walk into hospitals and facilities and homes where I'm unsure of what I'll meet because that is what I do. I comfort. I hold hands. I talk gently or I don't speak but listen or I sit while someone sleeps.

It's not brave. It's just what I and a lot of other people do. Thank us and pat us on the back (metaphorically, of course), but don't call us the front line. We aren't dodging bullets, even metaphorically. We're showing up to do what we know. In the worst instances we are reminding the suffering they aren't alone or forgotten. At the best we're comforting them. It's no more or less than you would do for your loved ones if you knew how.

Bunga uber alles

For a writer, the curse of living in interesting times is that so much happens, and on a daily, sometimes hourly, schedule that by the time you've given the event or statement any thought, something else has happened or been said, rending moot the previous consideration. This might be the contemporary condition: Too much happening all at once. Time condensed into only the "now," but not the now of zen, the NOW! of hype.

This is prelude to the observation that the current (February, although as a subscriber, I saw it and could have read it in late December) issue of Sojourners magazine offers the pertinent question, "Is This a [Dietrich] Bonhoeffer Moment?" The titular article, by Lori Brandt Hale and Reggie L. Williams, identifies such a moment as "living in a time and place in which 'the huge masquerade of evil has thrown all ethical concepts into confusion' and in which evil appears in the 'form of light, good deeds, historical necessity, [and] social justice.' [Bonhoeffer lived] in a time that required a radical form of ethical discernment, attuned to concrete reality, historical urgency, and the desperate cries of help from victims of the state." [Quotes are from Bonhoeffer's writings.]

This is a question that is uniquely church-related, its context coming from the experience of German Christianity identifying itself with and pledging fealty to the National Socialists, and especially to the person of Adolf Hitler. Taking a page from David Gushee's Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust, they identify perpetrators (in context, the Nazis), bystanders (Christian churches, especially the Catholic hierarchy), and resisters (Bonhoeffer's Confessing Church). In our contemporary state, the corollary would be Donald Trump and his supporters, the Christian churches who provide a home to much of his base, and those of us who take to the streets, write warnings, argue with the others (and I would even include the Black Bloc and Antifa).

Wisely, the authors leave it to individual readers to come to their own conclusions, although the two followup essays, by Wesley Granberg-Michaelson and Victoria J. Barnett, suggest the most common answer will be a resounding "Yes!" And I agree, in the sense that this moment asks of us to take on the question of why God became human (not so humans would become divine but so we would become more truly human; this is similar to Abraham Heschel's God who is in search of humanity, itself similar to the old rabbinic suggestion God created people so God could experience what it means to live and die. I also agree that we live at a time when it's incumbent on us to identify and label evil as it rises in the world, to point to racism or abuse of the poor and say, That isn't just. That isn't how we're meant to treat one another

But in the first analysis, the suggestion that Trump and his fellows are like the Nazis, I disagree (and to their credit I think the authors do also). Trump is less Adolf Hitler and more Silvio Berlusconi, less "Deutschland uber alles" and more "Bunga bunga." For one, there are much fewer supporters of Trump than are often credited (only 30% of the US electorate supports him at any given time, a number smaller than the number who believe in ghosts, and they aren't given a say in governance). There is also the sheer absurdity of his misbehavior; more often than not we're left to ask one another, Did he just say that? Let's be honest, while many of his policies hurt others, even I would have a hard time connecting a strong line between what he says and anyone's death. Perhaps most importantly, we live in a time when information is readily available and there is no paucity of real news reporting on his hypocrisies, lies, misdirection, blatant cronyism and self-promotion. While Fox News might want it otherwise, the Truth is Out There for anyone who wants to read it.

While the election of the cult of personality that is Trumpery is a stain on our nation we should neither be allowed to forget or to whitewash, it has a finite shelf-life, one which its adherents, in their display of panic, are recognizing and trying like mad to pretend they were never really a part of. In that, it is exactly like Nazism.

258 candles-days 143-150

An important benefit of this Information Age has been the identification of and accessibility to formerly hidden, in the sense that few people knew it was there, narratives. This is especially true of people whose existence in the past embarrasses us in the present. That the White House was built by many types of people, including enslaved blacks, has long been known but denied by euphemism, and that slaves themselves lived in the White House while serving the presidents, their families and staffs, was also glossed over. Through research and books like The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slaves in the White House, by Jesse Holland, we are being afforded the opportunity to enrich our history.

258 candles-day 12

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: KPISS Radio.

TMI in blogs?

I'm of two minds about self-disclosure in writing.  I'm all for, say, bits and pieces of someone's life or background when it adds to her being a fully realized character in his narrative.  I like to feature lots of my past in my own work, and sometimes the problems I currently face.  But I'm not entirely comfortable reading about somebody's issues when they're presented as the focus of a blogpost.

Having said that, I'm a regular reader of two blogs by writers who are undergoing health issues and whose issues have taken centerstage recently.  A part of me, maybe the writer part, is resentful because those issues aren't the reason I read those blogs and their admissions hit me as too much information.  But another part of me, the minister part, is aware that for some people writing about and publicizing what they're going through is helpful in their dealing with pain.  Montaigne's revolutionize of the essay came about by mixing his personal ills and traumas into the pot of reflective scholarship.

So count me as one of those readers for whom TMI is annoying but for whom What Someone is Going Through is instructive.  I'm not aware of this being a controversy except perhaps among those of us who take blog writing, and writing itself, more seriously than it might deserve.

the banality of enlightenment

One of the most profound bits of information to have an impact on the way I view the world was an article I read in the late 80s that reported that scientists had calculated that there was exactly as much matter present in the contemporary universe as there had been moments after the Big Bang.  This suggests that there is no destruction, finally, that everything continues in one form or another.  A kind of reincarnation, if nor exactly as the Hindus or the Buddhists have it.

This morning I started violently from a dream that was all Japanese characters and and symbols and requires I think a Japanese imagination to parse it, but I understood it all in my dream.  The upshot was that I was a harbinger of some sort, an icon who recognized in others their specialness and my touching them brought that specialness to fulfillment.  It was very comic book influenced and full of allusions to icons that I knew in my dream and that made sense there.  Ultimately, the icon I was at the beginning of this dream, a daughter killing her father, I became at the end, my daughter killing me.  I don't remember the personifications between those two but it doesn't matter.  I woke with a sense of both the impermanence of life and the permanence of--well, I don't know what to call it.  Existence?  Being?  Soul?

It all seems very banal now, drinking cold coffee and typing like a fiend, my head down and recalling my finger exercises from 10th grade's typewriter training in order to put this down.  Even minutes after waking, splashing water on my face and noticing the birds eating the seed I leave out for them, it didn't seem to matter.  That may be the thing about it, though.  We are always expecting epiphany to have life-altering consequences and a booming voice out of the clouds and it may be that it is the mirror image of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil":  call it the banality of enlightenment.  It comes, not with a mighty wind or a cracking like an inner egg opening and the chick of new information peeping out, but with cold water across the face and the familiar tired, unshaven face staring back, and the gentle words "of course."

"snitches get stitches" II

yesterday I was chitterchattering with ron who runs the local museum and who filled me in on some of the backstory to the recent murder.

the kid who lived in austin, it turns out, practically did move around town incognito as ron says almost no one ever saw him except as he was driving his dad and mom to the post office on a daily basis. "the only thing you ever got out of that kid was 'good morning' and 'hello' and 'sir.' seemed like a fine kid if a little lonely. but boy, the local kids saw a whole different side to him." [my mistake, too, on mentioning his assertion he was a crip on his facebook page; I was going by memory and as you can see on the link he very much identifies as blood. both are, of course, fantasy.]

as to the kid who is accused of having pulled the trigger: he, it turns out, is the nephew of a woman whose bed-and-breakfast my wife and I stayed at some years back. the boy's father and he moved out from salt lake city where, the father told him, "he had a run with some bad associates." the kid was almost immediately in trouble with the local law and had to put in some community service. ron took him on at the museum. "he was a pretty okay kid, I mean he did the stuff he was supposed to do and he did a good job, mowing the lawn and painting the porch. but you couldn't tell him he did something good. he'd do something and I'd say, 'great, that's a great job,' and he'd just look right through you or look at you like you'd kicked him. he just finally stopped coming by a few months ago and I had to tell his probation officer, 'I just don't know where he is, he hasn't been coming here.'"

and as to the 15 year old girl: her mom was a physician's assistant and doing pretty well until she started using the drugs she was supposed to be prescribing, and then she lost her license and did time and nothing's been the same since. ron had much to say about that story too as it turns out he's related, like almost everyone around here is, to that family. "I feel for her grandmother, but her grandfather, her father, they've been in and out of prison for molesting their own kids, and her brother, when he got out, he was making to do it again and this guy whose son he'd molested just came up and put a gun to his head and now he's due to get out in a couple years. there's just nothing but bad news for that family, and it's not even the whole family just the family in that 1 house. all of them, just makes the whole family hurt."

"it is just 1 big mess," ron says, "and it hurts whenenver something like this happens. it just hurts the kids and it hurts the people around here and makes it harder to grow up here. it's just bad news all around. no one escapes it."

"snitches get stitches"

the wireless connection in austin has been getting less and less certain so I'm traveling around the thick visiting different town libraries to use their wifi services, and to get out of the house. I've been with him nearly a week and am not impatient with him yet, but I suspect that is because I am getting away every few days.

today I am in emporium, a town that to get to I needed to drive up and over a mountain, passing through flyspecks like keating summit and portage, unincorporated areas with few yearround residents but many camps and cabins and lodges, most of them looking abandoned in early summer. the library here is on the main street but I passed it 4 times before finally locating the sign camoflaged into the surrounding wall.

about a week before I arrived a teenager's body was found in prouty run, the creek running through the edge of austin. the kid was 18 and had been there a week. he was almost immediately identified as were his accused killers. it's made for interesting reading for me, and here are some articles.

of the 3 people charged, 2 lived in coudersport and 1 in austin. no one I've spoken to admits to knowing the kid from austin, though it's a tiny enough borough he'd have to have been living under a tin sheet in the woods and come out for 10 minutes at a time, and then wearing a tattooed dog costume, to have been so utterly unknown. the 15 year old girl, however, is related to a friend of my father's, or her grandmother is.

the kid from austin bragged on his facebook page of his affiliations with the crips although that seems to have been at best fantasy and at worst self-destructive delusion. that's what's gotten me thinking harder about this situation. this little area, a godsend for people like my dad and my cousins and, to some extent, my wife and me, is a hell for kids to grow up. the old refrain "there's nothing to do," heard everywhere by every kid no matter the situation, crops up even more handily here. sure, there are places to hunt and fish and ride 4-wheelers--this last an aural invasion to those living in town and within spitting distance of the street--and woods and creeks and hollows to explore and bikes to ride and so forth. and there's tv and internet connections and dvds and books (although precious few of those), and there's alcohol when all those don't make it and meth and some pot.

but there's not much else. there's sports and music and plays when school is going but a lot less of those with budget crunches. there are libraries available, but less so as money dries up. there are ymcas and boys and girls clubs and the such but you often need your own car or your mother to drive you to those places. cycling and walking to many places have become less prominent the more adults worry. the sad truth is there are fewer and fewer places for kids to congregate with other kids where there is no pressure on them to spend money or behave like anything other than kids.

that might not have had any effect on this case. for all I know, kaylyn and her salt lake city boyfriend accused of pulling the trigger may have met as part of a church group. but that these kids managed to find one another in such an otherwise huge expanse, and that the 2 planning the murder could talk about it publically for a couple weeks and have it not somehow make it back to the target of their talk, and how they could have come together without the benefit of cars and cell phones and the internet and a .22 rifle, I can't say. another sad truth is that sometimes kids commit destructive acts no matter what's available to them.

echoing myself from the other day, sometimes the honest answer is "I don't know," and I think when it comes to such experiences as an 18 year old shot in the head by a couple guys and a 15 year old girl because they suspected him of being "a snitch and arrogant"--the girl's boyfriend having warned her off telling what they'd done because "snitches get stitches"--in such circumstances "I don't know" may be the only possible answer.

walking and evolution

I'm in the process of writing a sermon for tomorrow's evolution sunday and, in order to explain the background to the importance of lucy and selam to the anthropological record, and thus the importance of friday's science article about hominid metatarsals, I quote myself from a 2008 sermon about walking. I am rather proud of this writing and, in the spirit of telling my students they ought to bring attention to the things they do that make them proud, I've reproduced it below.

"That our earliest known progenitor is Lucy, the skeletal remains of Australopithecus afarensis found in Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974 by Donald Johanson—now joined by another Australopithecus afarensis found in Dikika, Ethiopia, and nicknamed Selam, the so-called Lucy’s Baby, although Selam is approximately 120,000 years older than Lucy and so would be Lucy’s multiply-great grandmother, except that she was killed when 3 years old—these facts are unassailable. When [Rebecca] Solnit [the author of the seminal book Wanderlust: The History of Walking] wrote, only Lucy had been found, and she describes her thus:

"'[Lucy] was apelike in many respects; she had little in the way of a waist or neck, short legs, longish arms, and the funnel-like rib cage of an ape. Her pelvis, however, was wide and shallow, and so she had a stable gait with hip joints far apart tapering to close-together knees like humans and unlike chimps (whose narrow hips and far-apart knees make them lurch from side to side when they walk upright). Some say she would have been a terrible runner and not much of a walker. But she walked. This much is certain, and then come the arguments.'

"The arguments Solnit refers to relate not to the how our progenitors walked, but the why. On this few concur. Solnit, in reporting on the 1991 Paris-based Conference on the Origins of Bipedalism, call these
'a kind of academic stand-up comedy routine. [The] ‘schlepp hypothesis’…explained walking as an adaptation for carrying food, babies, and various other things; ‘the peek-a-boo hypothesis,’ which…connected bipedalism to penile display…to impress females rather than intimidate other males; ‘the all wet hypothesis’…involved wading and swimming during a proposed aquatic phase of evolution; ‘the tagalong hypothesis’…involved following migratory herds across the…savannah; ‘the hot to trot hypothesis,’ which was one of the more seriously reasoned theories, claiming that bipedalism limited solar exposure in the tropical midday sun and thus freed the species up to move into hot, open habitat; and the ‘two feet are better than four’ hypothesis, which proposes that bipedalism was more energy-efficient than quadrupedalism, at least for the primates who would become humans. '

"Whatever the reason we started walking upright, albeit in an ungainly manner, it is important to note that doing so is the single development that made us what we are: separate from the other animal species. It’s what made possible higher-brain development and, ultimately, a sense of entitlement that led to permanent homes, agriculture, the five-day work week, the Humvee and the Mall of America."

what's hidden

this is from the essay "I can find out so much about you" by ada calhoun who did internet background research on people, usually recently dead, for a tabloid (presumably the nypost).

"Sometimes, I found useful things hiding in plain sight: the wedding photo of the Times Square Bomber on his brother-in-law's abandoned MySpace page, for example, or the name and number of the anonymous guy whose fistfight during the U.S. Open went viral on YouTube...Plenty of what I found was noise, but sometimes there was something that provided a useful lead -- say, a killer's high school baseball team picture, with captions that led to a good interview. Any original trace of information, I learned, could be a place to start tracking down someone's bitter ex-girlfriend, or paranoid, self-published novel.

"Particularly in the case of Internet-addicted 20-somethings, I often wound up with way too much information. Sifting through some young people's mountains of blog posts and photos taken with their iPhones has taken me a full workday of nonstop reading. At the end of those days, I almost felt like I knew them.

"But the Web tells only a limited story, and its common wisdom is often painfully, stubbornly wrong. I've conducted enough celebrity interviews to know that even the most detailed, oft-visited Wikipedia pages have major errors. Still, I don't know that a profile gleaned from online information would be any less accurate than one created by talking to your neighbors. We hide parts of ourselves from both, or try to...

"The supposed overexposure of young people, the 'sexting' and the bong photos and all the rest that suggest we are too dumb to realize that human resources people can Google, too, may not be so stupid after all. Maybe it's a modern-day defense mechanism, a fortress of voluntary exposure. The more stuff we put out there, the less of what other people put out there about us dominates our online identity...[W]hat happens on the Internet (lunatics post crazy rants) and what happens in the real world (lunatics murder people) are very, very different. The Internet is a shadow of the real world, not the real world itself.

"Maybe that's the moral for those of us who have Facebook pages and other online profiles: to put any stock in our online identities is wrong. The creations we, or others, build up around our user names and profile pictures are shadows -- sometimes a close approximation of the truth, sometimes deeply distorted by ourselves or others, sometimes so appealing to us we prefer them to the messy realities of our flesh-and-blood selves. But they are not real.

"What is real: our bodies, our families, our friends, our co-workers, the thoughts and feelings we have that never see a computer screen. What we do in the world is real...In October, I was put on a story that was almost the mirror image of [Tyler] Clementi's. In researching a wild person, I found a quiet one online. The porn star Capri Anderson, found cowering in Charlie Sheen's Plaza hotel room, has the online profile you'd expect: making out with other girls on Twitter, covering herself with whipped cream on her club site, leering on MySpace.

"But then I found public photos posted online years ago by a relative, and there she was in photo after photo, untagged, smiling and without makeup. She was at a relative's wedding, mugging with her father. She was at a restaurant, smiling on her sister's shoulder. Maybe those photos aren't any more 'her' than the vixen ones. But to me, they felt more real. Maybe it's because she'd tried to keep them secret."

(it might be relevent to note that, while I had no trouble coming up with dozens of photos of capri anderson in her 'vixen' poses and of her giving interviews, I could not locate a single one of the "more real...secret" ones calhoun describes. maybe what's meant to be hidden can stay hidden.)

who needs to know?

Lee Siegel in Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob:

"'Convenience' is also the rote answer to another fundamental question: Why does anyone not employed in the news media need a constant flow of news and information? One of the Internet boosters' proudest claims is that the Internet can deliver the news to its users with unprecedented immediacy. If someone gets shot in a supermarket parking lot in Flagstaff, Arizona, an Internet user in New Jersey will know about it hours, maybe even days before someone who depends on his local evening news. But who really needs to know that?"

siegel's question sounds like a tossoff but it's a legitimate one we oughtn't take for granted. what difference does it make that I know about the cop shootings in oakland, ca, this past sunday morning or that the shooter was, according to his mom, motivated by his recent news-watching to take up a gun? in my specific instance it might make some difference--I can use the information to jumpstart a classroom or sermon conversation about the way we react to things or what we do with what we know. but that's just my making use of the information for my particular situation. in general, what does it mean that a guy living on the rim knows in real time about something happening elsewhere?

the flippant answer to who needs to know and what good does it do might be "no one and nothing." it might mean something somehow if you know nothing about the case of angel torres and I introduce you to the video of his hit-and-run. but really, what are you going to do with that information? can you do anything with it, besides use it to bolster your already solid sense that the world is chaotic and people suck?

my sense is that it does matter that I was aware of neda agha-soltan's death within minutes of its happening but I don't have any method for quantifying that sense. unlike siegel's contention, raised elsewhere in the book, that information is only good in culture if it's profitable--a concept he does not approve of--I think information is valuable for its own sake if for no other reason than that it informs our experience of the world. it's a question of what we do with that information that says something, not about the information or its practicality, but about us.