Author Archives: oinsketta
On Picking the Right Side
Many years ago my old friend’s father, a practical and even in some ways heroic man, caught me in a vestibule we were both passing through and told me something I will never forget. He congratulated me on my (misguided in hindsight) decision to become a lawyer. He told me he thought it was terrific that I was finally going to use my intelligence to its fullest. He encouraged me, telling me I’d be a great lawyer. Then he cautioned me with words that will live as long as I do: “One thing; don’t be a poor lawyer. Don’t let your ideals stand in the way of making a good living.”
My friend later described the kind of lawyers his father had in mind. These were sour-faced men in worn sports jackets, men who drank in the morning on their way to the dingiest agencies and hearing rooms in the world, doing the work that respectable lawyers would not touch. These were the kind of lawyer I indeed became, standing in the cracked shoes of the underdog, except that I never drank much, especially when making my way to these dungeon-like rooms where bureaucracies ground life into bad-smelling dust.
My father encouraged me to go to law school, even gave me most of my living expenses while I was reading an endless stream of cases, researching and writing a huge, unwieldy tome on the betrayal of 1877 and the ninety year sleep of the Civil War Amendments that I’d hoped to publish in the scholarly journal I was editor of. The law school tuition, however, was up to me, and so I took a loan and incurred the kind of debt I had avoided all my life. This is the kind of endless debt that crushes perhaps millions of young graduates, though I was forty when I graduated law school.
Had I not become a poor lawyer it would not have been very crushing to me. The amount I borrowed seemed manageable (before the interest on the long repayment plan kicked in) and the plan was to dispose of the debt in a few years. That plan didn’t work out. I am not crushed by the debt for my law school loan, but I’m angry every time I think about how I locked in the historic low 3.85% interest on the loan and watched the interest my bank pays go from 3% to 2.85% to 2.70% and all the way down below 1% now. This happened while the greediest and least ethical among us dragged the economy into the toilet bowl for their own obscenely large profits. In the years since, they and the rest of the richest 1% made 95% of the economic gains in the years that followed. (FN1) In terms of paying the mortgage on a house full of snakes and scorpions that I will never live in, I am better off than many.
That being said, the outrage of the interest government loans to college students being several times what banks pay in interest burns me every time I think about. The government, who owns the debts, could easily cut the rate in half, or tie it to the rate banks pay, or to the prime rate, or the rate of inflation. But nobody is going to do much about it, either; when you screw a class of powerless people there’s rarely any kind of accounting that needs to be made.
I am now self-employed, CEO of a phantom non-profit whose goal is to get into the worst schools in NYC and demonstrate how much creativity and expression there is in the doomed children in those schools. To shine a light on the true capabilities and aspirations of these children of the poor.
Most businesses, I understand now, get seed money for operating expenses before they begin. It is kind of a basic business principle, even in the world of charity: you figure out how to put your own oxygen mask on before helping the kid next to you into his mask. Most businesses also sell a product much more tangible, and easier to put a price on, than the one I am selling. No matter how much I understand, value and cherish the product.
When picking sides, and I will try to remember this in my next life, there is a side that wins and another side that loses. “Slaughter sides!”, as the kids protest when all the best players wind up on one team and the uncoordinated and slow moving kids are on the other. The best player on the team that’s about to be slaughtered usually calls out “slaughter sides!” and a few of his teammates join in, as the team about to do the slaughtering shrugs it off and walks to the other side of the field, smiling good-naturedly. Then the game begins, if we can call slaughter a game.
And of course, slaughter is a game, as old as life itself. If you align yourself with the team who is about to be mashed, you’d better have your philosophy in order. Rationales are one thing, and we tell ourselves many stories, some completely absurd, to justify our actions and get through the day. But a nourishing philosophy based on deeply held values must be called upon to sustain you if you play for the team that is fated to be destroyed. A constant challenge, but one must do it when playing for the losers. The only alternative is despair.
FN1:
ROBERT REICH: Yes. Since the film, actually we put the film together, there are new results that came out just within the last week or so show that in the year 2012 inequality reached a new peak in the United States. The previous peak, we thought was the peak, that is 2007 actually has been superseded by this new peak of inequality, concentrated income in 2012 that almost all the gains of economic growth have been going to a very small number of people at the very top.
BILL MOYERS: The figures are so startling, I had to shake my head in disbelief when I first saw them, showing that in the first three years of the recovery from the recession brought on by the financial collapse in 2008, the top one percent of Americans took home 95 percent of the income gains. Ninety-five percent?
source: http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-inequality-for-all/
And To Be Patient in An Emergency is A Terrible Trial
BILL MOYERS: When did you know you were free? And I ask that because of the poem you wrote, “The Peace of Wild Things.”
WENDELL BERRY: You’re free when you realize that you’re willing to go to the length that’s necessary.
BILL MOYERS: Then read your own poem.
WENDELL BERRY: This….this was a long time ago. “The Peace of Wild Things.”
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free.
BILL MOYERS: The grace of the world, take that a little further for me.
WENDELL BERRY: I meant it in the religious sense. The people of, people of religious faith know that the world is, is maintained every day by the same force that created it. It’s an article of my faith and belief, that all creatures live by breathing God’s breath and participating in his spirit. And this means that the whole thing is holy. The whole shooting match. There are no sacred and unsacred places, there are only sacred and desecrated places. So finally I see those gouges in the surface mine country as desecrations, not just as land abuse. Not just as…as human oppression. But as desecration. As blasphemy.
BILL MOYERS: Let me read you this. “No amount…” This is you. “No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it … can for long disguise its failure” to conserve the wealth and health of nature. “Eroded, wasted, or degraded soils; damaged or destroyed ecosystems; extinction of biodiversity, species; whole landscapes defaced, gouged, flooded, or blown up … thoughtless squandering of fossil fuels and fossil waters, of mineable minerals and ores, natural health and beauty replaced by a heartless and sickening ugliness. Perhaps its greatest success is an astounding increase in the destructiveness and therefore the profitability of war.” That’s as powerful an indictment of the consequences of runaway capitalism as I’ve ever read and surely if that’s happening as we know it is, it takes more than reverence, and it takes more than words to try to reverse it. What do you say to those people who say Wendell, please tell me what I can do?
WENDELL BERRY: All right. Well, you’ve put me in the place I’m always winding up in and…that is to say well we’ve acknowledged that the problems are big, now where’s the big solution? When you ask the question what is the big answer, then you’re implying that we can impose the answer. But that’s the problem we’re in to start with, we’ve tried to impose the answers. The answers will come not from walking up to your farm and saying this is what I want and this is what I expect from you. You walk up and you say what do you need. And you commit yourself to say all right, I’m not going to do any extensive damage here until I know what it is that you are asking of me. And this can’t be hurried. This is the dreadful situation that young people are in. I think of them and I say well, the situation you’re in now is a situation that’s going to call for a lot of patience. And to be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.
source: http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-wendell-berry-poet-prophet/
A More Rational World Would Be Nice
I was directed to a right wing website just now to read about some legislation considered insane and outrageous by Rush Limbaugh. When I was done reading about three sickening bills a liberal governor had just signed, one involving illegal aliens, another promoting homosexual parenting and a third making early-term abortions easier to obtain and more affordable, I was invited to participate in this poll. Rather than participate in that exercise in democracy by knee jerk I copied the invite and share it here.
Our world is not run on a strictly rational basis. Still, I was struck by the subtle thumb on the scale of this VOTE NOW! popup. Without knowing anything about who these two are or what they represent, are you going to vote for the stubborn looking guy on the left, mouth drawn tightly into a hard line, who can’t even look at the camera? He’s in a pose everybody knows means he’s hiding something, probably because he’s so damned wrong and knows it. He’s been caught in a lie, and not for the first time either, by the looks of that closed face. I think most Americans, even minorities, would have to side with the forthright man on the right. He’s firm, and ready for a fight over important values. You can tell by looking at him.
That black guy, or South American, or Pacific Islander or whatever he is, is clearly wrong on this issue. I mean, just look at the two of them and decide for yourself.
Your vote is important, the exclamation point tells us, because that’s the cornerstone of democracy, people thinking for themselves, making the right choices, casting their votes and living with the laws that are duly passed. Although, sometimes millions vote, laws are debated and passed, challenged in the Supreme Court and left standing, and other means become necessary for forthright men like the fighter on the right side of the screen to stop a particular law from going into effect. You know, if some sweeping law like, say, the Civil Rights Act, really, really offends you, you need to take steps to make sure it can’t be forced on you or anyone else. Don’t rule out closing down the entire government, if that’s what it takes to stop it.
This is the hard business of having a vision, I suppose, and the kind of deep seated, firmly held belief that kept American heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr. going– just because something is the law doesn’t make it right.
Or maybe we need two other photos to help us decide which man is the embodiment of intransigent flagrantly anti-democratic assholes in this equation.
Saving A Life
I was running late for the children’s animation workshop today. The weather service had put the area on tornado watch, I heard on the radio. We have tornadoes now in NYC. One ripped through here a couple of years ago, tore hundreds of trees out by the roots. There was talk of drenching rain. I had a call, talked for a few minutes, looked at the clock, realized I just had time to make it, if I ran, and if I also got lucky. I jumped into the shower when I should have already been on the train.
As the water began to hit the tub I saw a spider down near the drain trying to scurry away, but she couldn’t get any traction with the droplets gathering on the side of the tub. I shut the water, with the thought that I was crazy, I was already late. Reached for a piece of toilet paper, coaxed the spider on to it, put the spider and toilet paper on the sink. Showered. When I got out the spider was walking on the sink, kind of shaking the water off its legs. I smiled, jumped into my clothes, put on the heavy back pack and ran down to the subway which I caught with 5 seconds to spare.
Rushing to the workshop, and arriving, dripping with sweat, four minutes before I had to start it, I didn’t stop to think that the ahimsa bit wouldn’t have worked out so well for me and my little friend if the critter at the bottom of the tub had been a cockroach.
It Makes No Sense
Had lunch yesterday with an old friend from High School I haven’t seen in decades. He was going to our fortieth HS reunion, I wasn’t, so he stopped in for lunch on his way to the reunion. His life has gone in a logical line, the next in several generations of engineers, he’s been studying or working, mostly happily, in the field for several decades since graduating high school. For the last twenty years or so he’s been at the same company, working on inventions that will do many things, including make smart bombs smarter and more precise in their targeting. There is good money in those government contracts, the company he works for values his work, and many of his co-workers there feel like extended family to him. He can narrate the events of his resume over appetizers, as he demonstrated nimbly over the vegetarian lamb satay.
When it’s my turn, I am at something of a loss. Neither my life nor my description of it goes in a straight line, it jumps from my years as a bike messenger, too angry to consider any way to participate in a society that seems sick beyond redemption, to the 1981 meeting I had with a dean at CCNY who told me it was no problem to waive some requirements so I could get the remaining seven credits on my BA (magna cum laude, it should be noted). He could not waive gym, he explained, so I took volleyball and led my team to the championship.
The dean, a physics professor, if I remember correctly, a kind looking man with a resemblance to Kurt Vonnegut Jr., took care of the paperwork quickly and then gave a concerned look. “That part’s easy,” he said, leaning forward and looking mildly concerned “but, I have to ask you, on a more personal level– what is someone as obviously intelligent and thoughtful as you are planning to do with your life?”
My companion at lunch nodded, his eyes wide open. A scientist and human being, approving of the humanity of his fellow scientist, going beyond his role and asking a good, compassionate and very logical question. I proceeded to try to answer, weaving the story of my father’s life and death among the different periods of my life and times. There was no line to follow, except for the evolution of my resolve to avoid argument and conflict, to be direct, and remain as mild as possible. There was no pay-off to any of this, certainly nothing monetary, outside of a life with somewhat less anger and violence.
Odd to say, while we walked after lunch and chatted, never once did the image of, not three generations of engineers, but three generations of angry, depressed people, seventy years ago virtually all of them murdered in ditches, burned, gassed, one of the lonely survivors whipping and sobbing over her first born, clinging in fear to a God who had clearly turned his back, come into my head.
Just a single brief description of this enraged little redhead I know so little about, other than how she violently sowed the seeds for her baby’s tormented life, the baby who grew up to be my father.
I had a pleasant few hours with my HS friend and was left with the feeling I haven’t figured out how to make sense of much of it. My HS friend looked at my current program through logical eyes and didn’t see why I wasn’t working as a middle school art teacher. Better pay, benefits, same basic work.
The finer distinctions I tried to draw about the uniqueness of my program, the integration of teamwork, children taking complete ownership of the collaborative process, peer-teaching, creative problem-solving, seemed pretty much lost on him, reminding me again how important it is to find a few people who grasp essential things about the program that cannot be quantified in a lab.
Having said that, and not to suggest an inherent contradiction, I also need to quantify the claims I am making in a lab, in order to demonstrate to people who have money that this idea is worth funding.
That said, the only logical conclusion might well turn out to be that it makes no sense, this flickering idea of mine. In time I will either discover this for myself, to what end I know not, or be pleasantly surprised to see a program I’ve long dreamed of alive and walking among the living, and inspiring them.
A Little Wisdom under the menu
There is a vegetarian Chinese restaurant that we love, on Main Street just north of the LIE. A few years ago, during some very vexing days, when we sat down to eat there I was struck by an aphorism under the glass my menu had been covering:
Remain soft-spoken and forgiving, even when reason is on your side.
I copied it in Chinese with my brush pen and the waitress, like a beautiful deer trying to make herself understood in human language, smiled happily and praised my calligraphy. I told her I write Chinese the way a parrot speaks, but she was undeterred, pointed to each character, trying to explain its deeper meaning. I left the restaurant feeling I’d learned something important to remember. I rewrote the phrase many times over the next few days.
Yesterday, in the midst of new vexations, which grow like weeds in most of our gardens, this was under the glass where I sat:
When doing something, instead of worrying or being vexed about it, we should just be mindful.
A reminder: we cannot change what is happening in this troubling world while we work: better than vexation is careful attention to doing the work as well as we can.
Chained to my old Rockin’ Chair
Beautiful song by Hoagy Carmichael, called Rockin’ Chair. Louis Armstrong did several great versions of it over the years, with his friend Jack Teagarden and with Hoagy himself (Teagarden sang much better than Hoagland) among others. Jerry Garcia did a plaintive version with David Grisman. The point is, the old guy narrator sings about how he can’t get out of his cabin, how’s he’s grabbin’ at the flies round his old rockin’ chair, and chained to it and so forth.
I hit on this line because I’m chained today to my desk chair and this old typer. Every time I get up to go outside, get a little air, a constitutional, run an errand or two, clear the head, it’s a few circles around the crowded apartment and plop, back into this ol’ swivel chair. A few times I picked up my guitar (I feel like playing Rockin’ Chair now, all of a sudden, I dare not) but most times I did things I needed to do, checked off a few items on my checklist, moved things incrementally forward, with any luck.
Devised a trick to get my fevered self out of the cabin just now, well, almost six minutes ago. Grabbed the timer off the refrigerator, set it to ten, told myself “go!” and off I went.
Forget Hoagy, Louis, Jerry, music, the soul, the rest of it. Forget everything but the 4:40 left on the clock and a little tale to tease out. Walking down Broadway last night with a friend of more than 40 years I mentioned something about a post here on this covert blahg. “I don’t read the blog, I haven’t been able to find it lately, I’m sorry to say,” said the American I assumed was my other reader– most days there are the American and the Polish reader, two pinpricks on the map each 6 hours to one side or the other of NY time.
“Who the devil….?” I began musing. No idea who that second sphinx on the grassy knoll is anymore. The likeliest suspect is mildly apologetic, telling me how much he used to enjoy the old blagh, look forward to it each day, but somehow…. and his voice trails away.
“Who the devil…?” I ask the cluttered desk, the groaning shelves, the overburdened Lazy Boy. Ninety seconds on the clock means I’m unlikely to solve this puzzle any time soon, but at least, with luck, I’ll be up out of this chair, like a NASA space craft being launched, straight up in a foamy jet of smoke and steam, into the atmosphere and into a shirt, down the two flights into the street and saying “damn, why the hell did I not do this five hours ago when I first proposed this excellent idea to myself?”
Time.
Sometimes it takes a long time to see the obvious
There are things we say, thinking they are everything we need to say. A year or more later, sometimes, we realize there was something important we should have added, but left out.
I’m thinking about this, oddly, as I begin to keep a Gratitude Journal. I’ve written down about, well, let’s see, 28 things I feel gratefulness about so far, collected last night during a long train ride home. I hope to form the habit of noting my good fortune, and increasing my ability to see the small miracles that are quite common, but easy to miss if you’re not looking for them. The love between that child and his mother on the train the other day, for example. Or the fleeting smile on the face of the tough guy on the other side of the subway car when he saw the same thing I was smiling about, a second before he put his mask back on.
Out of the blue recently I thought of a missed chance to add a sentence or two when I should have, and it haunts me slightly that I didn’t add the important sentiment I realize now was missing from my answer. Sometimes, in the effort to come to the point smartly, the larger point is missed.
An old friend was in town, a very talented musician and wonderful improviser, someone I love to play music with. He was moving to the other side of the world, I don’t know if he was truly happy about it, but he was gamely moving to the other side of the world. It would be a long time, if ever, until I saw him again.
He and I had a mutual friend, a very good friend for many years, famously demanding and difficult. This friend was increasingly unhappy as the years went by, and critical, and humorless. His demand for attention, inflexibility and inability to listen made him more and more difficult to be around. He called at the worst times and always needed to have a long conversation, he always had a long, usually aggravating, story he needed to tell. He was angry when he was not depressed, and expressed his disgust at a series of betrayals that began to look eerily identical. He fought about being angry, claimed he was not at all angry. Although he was extremely intelligent, quite talented and had other good qualities, those things became harder and harder to see. The relationship became toxic to me and it finally came to a head in the weeks after my father died.
I’d tried valiantly to have a better friendship with him, over literally several years, long letters, long conversations, but in the end I could not save the relationship. We brought out the worst in each other and it was time to stop being constantly reminded of what he considered my failures, hearing over and over about his endlessly repeating betrayals at the hands of virtually everyone he met. His mother was very understanding of my position in the end and asked helplessly what, if anything, she could do to help him.
My friend the musician was in NY visiting an old friend who has always been an older brother to him. He and his wife stayed with this old friend on the eve of their move to the other side of the world and while they were in town I was invited to join them for a quick lunch and then, a day or two later, to spend an afternoon walking over the Brooklyn Bridge with them.
At the end of that nice walk, as we drove up the West Side Highway, my friend mentioned he was probably going to visit this former friend of mine. They’d been out of touch a long time, he said, but he was planning to drop in. I told him and his wife that the guy would be delighted to see them, lived in a beautiful place they should not miss while touring America, would surely show them a good time.
The driver, my friend’s older brother, smiled at me from the rear view mirror and asked me pleasantly why it was I’d stopped being friends with him. I smiled back and said “Truthfully, I came to realize we brought out the worst in each other.” And that was that. I never heard from any of them again.
I might have added that it pained me greatly to have things come to that sad end after decades of friendship, and that I’d tried mightily, and made every effort to improve things. I might have spent five seconds to impress on them how seriously I take friendship, that I am not the categorical, black and white hanging judge who cuts off an old friend the way saying “we brought out the worst in each other” might have made me seem. Probably would have changed nothing, but I regret not adding that bit of my humanity as my character was being weighed.
Truthfully, it was long in dawning on me that I was on a kind of trial in that moment.
Why We Don’t Talk about Poverty
Here’s the thing about poverty– it’s terrible, traumatic, scarring, bad for the health, reduces hopes for the future and life expectancy considerably. Like the intractable and uncomfortable subjects of Death, Religion and Politics, it is one of those things we are advised not to discuss in polite society.
Poor people in the US have TVs, cellphones, air-conditioners. Yes, some of them do. Most people who are not poor also have these things. I’m not judging, just saying.
My mind is flipping around a bit today, I just sat through a webinar about how to retain donors to a nonprofit cause. It takes, among other things, a constant flow of gratitude, which comes naturally enough when someone is moved enough to open their wallet that your idea might move forward into the world. Did you know that 70% of first time donors do not donate a second time? Or that a 10% increase in donor retention increases revenues by up to 50%? Neither did I.
It was suggested by one of the experts in the webinar that a nonprofit consider hiring a special consultant to coordinate the thanking and stroking of donors. We will get on that right away, once we raise some funds to pay that professional.
Here is a free piece of advice: if you want to help the children of the poor, do not be poor yourself. Poor people, let’s put it this way, are not as credible as billionaires who can buy teams of marketing geniuses to make them mayor of any city they fancy.
Here’s another piece of disjointed opinion: don’t get upset by what you hear in the media. If you hear, say, an interview by a reporter you respect (Warren Olney) of an ideologue like Jim DeMint, current president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, in which DeMint repeatedly calls Obamacare the most destructive legislation in American history, and the journalist never asks for any clarification of the grounds for this rather incendiary assertion, don’t think too hard about it.
Perhaps it was one of the conditions for the President of the Heritage Foundation to come on the show: absolutely no requests for clarification of any statements. It is clear that right wing types are desperate that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) not be implemented, lest it succeed in saving consumers of health care a lot of money and become widely popular, like Social Security and Medicare.
Though not the plan many would have hoped for, it appears more and more clearly to have been the best Obama could do, as seen by the determination of the right to defeat its implementation by any means necessary. It has personally saved me about $700 over two years, ACA-mandated rebates from the outfit that gave its CEO a 72 million dollar golden parachute when Obamacare was approved.
Perhaps, if you qualify for low-cost NY State Health insurance that costs a full 25% of the maximum allowable income to qualify, you should be happy and just shut the hell up. You know why? Because truly, and sincerely, and from the bottom of their hearts, anyone not effected by it does not care.
Live long, prosper, have a nice day.
