Category Archives: Ahimsa

The Opposite of Love

The opposite of love, it is said, is not hate — it’s indifference.   I think this states a profound reality– it is a very cruel fate to experience utter indifference to your suffering.    There is little difference, to the person suffering, between deliberately inflicted cruelty and that inflicted by nonchalant indifference to your suffering.   

Love and hate are related by a strong feeling towards another — indifference is the absence of any human connection whatsoever.  Indifference utterly erases the humanity of the subject of its neglect in a way that even hatred does not do.  Not to defend hatred, of course, but I’m trying to make this distinction between love and indifference as clear as possible.

It can be illustrated by a famous historical example.   The debate took place between former prisoners of the Nazis and former prisoners of the Soviets about which form of cruelty was worse.   The Nazis were known for expressing hatred and contempt for their captives, deliberately humiliating prisoners, subjecting them to sadistic treatment.    The Soviets were known for their utter indifference — to prisoners freezing in extreme cold, losing digits and limbs to frost bite or gangrene, to prisoners dying of disease or starvation.   The Nazi jailers made their hatred known, the Soviets made their indifference plain.   The verdict: pick your poison, both will kill you just as dead.

In comparing an administration that singles out a despised class of people for harsh treatment, as in babies ripped from their mothers’ arms at the border and sent to cages far away, with one that actually murders those babies in front of their mothers — well, obviously, the one that actually kills the children in front of the parents is worse.   

Though, of course, that’s not a thought that offers much consolation to the mother of the infant who is snatched and sent far away, never to be seen again.

Personality Conflict

If you are raised by a relentless bully there is a challenging process you must go through not to become a relentless bully yourself when you grow up.   Granted, it is not a process for everyone.

Under stress, we sometimes revert to type, in spite of what we may have learned to do better, through great effort.   Human.

I don’t want to argue with people all the time.  I try my best to avoid it, I really do. You want to argue me out of my desire not to argue, since it is a waste of a good skill set, to your way of seeing it.  I understand you can’t help the constant demand that I justify everything I say and do, but I don’t like it, can’t make you understand how much I don’t like it.

“You have an emotional blind spot,” I say, when subjected to this again, when I can see no other way out, no way to make you see my point of view.  

“I don’t see it,” you say, reflexively asserting your human right to see things as you do.  

Later, blood pressure rising as the futility becomes more and more impossible not to feel, I will make an ill-advised reference to tone-deafness that will send you into a rage, cause you to scream and slam down the phone.  

“I am neither tone-deaf nor do I have an emotional blind spot, I, in fact, love you more than just about anyone in the world,” you will write in a long, reasonable email a few days later.   “As for your ‘kryptonite’ — silence by way of response — I don’t get why your right to a response supersedes my right not to have my innocent silence misconstrued.   Further, my recent apology, which I found it unfair and unreasonable of you to demand,  was only given because you were so irrationally enraged…”

At which point my desire to continue reading fades, the stomach acid returns to my stomach and I reach for my guitar.  I play “That’s Amore”– now in the key of D, a much better key for a solo guitar version of this snappy tune, which I can’t seem to get out of my head.   Play it in D, you will like it very much.   

I later rescue from undeserved obscurity two paragraphs I wrote in closing a post I later deleted for fear of offending an old friend, my last words on the subject:

Silence, ideally, is the best remedy for unwanted silence, to demonstrate exactly how it eats at a heart that has posed an unanswered question.  To know how it actually feels, a thing difficult to explain in words.

Though here, in the odd event that my old friend who could be affected by this ever reads these words, I’d have to sacrifice the cold satisfaction of that beautifully symmetrical working of easy, elemental justice in the name of further digesting this true, hard stone — that professed love is worth little without a reflex to unconditionally empathize when your friend is in pain.  

 

It’s Essential to Have Words to Describe Tricky Things

Without the language to describe something, it’s hard to even conceptualize the thing we may want to talk about.   We see this everywhere.   In the absence of a good frame in language, you basically have to invent a way to talk about things that are hard to make clear.  When you have the phrase — voila! — it’s instantly much easier to have a meaningful discussion.

When I heard our scarcity-based economic system called “extractive” and the sustainable alternative called “regenerative” a light bulb went on — it’s a very clear, concise way to describe an energy policy based on burning up resources that can’t be renewed, a regime that has taken us a long way toward destroying the planet we all live on– and a saner alternative.   A fossil fuel run economy is “extractive” by it’s nature.

Yesterday I heard a great phrase that explains the forces that ensured the rise, and unchecked power, of the Mitch McConnells and the Donald Trumps — “Plutocratic Populism” — unpopular policies that benefit only the super-wealthy that are ushered in by mass popular rallies of galvanized angry have-nots funded by the plutocrats, who ride these tractable hoards, booted and spurred, as their kind was born to do, in their quest for ever more well-protected privilege.    

Same with racism.   One response to centuries of deep institutional racism in our great land, an organized movement to protest regular police shootings of unarmed minority citizens– “Black Lives Matter”– has been seized on by very fine people on both sides — an overdue demand for justice;  another example of unprovoked rage by dangerous, very angry people [1].  

I am thankful to a friend who, several years back, clipped out a little definition of an odd, ingeniously descriptive term for a tricky, but widespread, problem and called my attention to it.  The concept is called Complementary Schismogenesis, and it explained a lot about a certain kind of irreconcilable difference that only gets worse the more energetically both sides try, blindly, to resolve it.  

My every attempt to calm you down only makes you more upset, and vice versa. Seeing the other incomprehensibly more upset, instead of less, we redouble our vain efforts, to similar effect, our now mutually impatient, morally obtuse-seeming responses increasing the frustration between us.   Let me see if I can find the clipping, which was sent to me in digital form.

I can’t find it.  I did find this 2012 drawing, though:

what 2-19-11003

 

 

Turns out I’d written out my take on Complementary Schismogenesis pretty clearly four years ago:   

Complimentary Schismogenesis, I am told, is when two opposites are locked in some kind of conflict, neither getting what they need out of the arrangement, the attempts of each to resolve it, coming from opposite orientations, only make the problem more intractable, tighten the knot.   The schism continues to deepen as the two struggle cluelessly in opposite directions to heal the underlying fissure.

If we assume everyone is somewhat fucked up, damaged by life, laboring under certain sometimes vexing disabilities, friends are those whose asshole side we are able to overlook.  The friend has other lovable qualities we value that counterbalance the bad tendencies we all have.  We extend the benefit of the doubt to friends, a benefit we do not readily confer on random people we encounter.  

I told a friend recently that whatever other problems we may have had with each other over the years, we both are confident that neither of us would, seeing the other strapped in the electric chair, throw the switch before insisting that every single witness had a chance to speak.  He agreed.

 

Only one thing has changed since then, the guy who agreed that if I was strapped to the electric chair he’d let every witness for me speak before throwing the switch, may have revised that generous offer, the witness list might no longer be very extensive.  

The precipitating reason for this recent falling out — my attempt not to get angry when hurt wound up infuriating my friend who honestly had no way of knowing how upset I was since I didn’t even fucking scream at him like a normal person who claims to be so goddamned upset!   Plus, I was an aggressively self-righteous cunt about my “right” not to be “hurt,” even thoughtlessly, innocently.

My attempt to remain mild made him wild.  

If the glove don’t fit, don’t have a snit.

The Difficult to See Slow-Killing Murder of (attempted) Love (Part 2)

Love is what we all seek in life, what every living creature needs to flourish, even to survive, and I don’t mean to shit on anyone’s interpretation of love.   We all know what love feels like when we are loved, virtually every one of us has been blessed to feel this and remembers it gratefully.   I’m going to try to analyze how thwarted, frustrated or imperfect love can lead to anger, violence, lifelong hatreds and other terrible things.   Not thwarted in the sense of a hope for love that is rebuffed, most of us know how bad that kind of romantic strike-out feels, but love that is not given in a way the loved one can derive real support from.

I have to be fair.  Not everyone is always good at expressing their deep feelings for others.  I’m not.   We are all creatures of our upbringing, our genetic predispositions, society’s often unrealistic and harmful myths [1].    I’ve only recently made a habit of returning Sekhnet’s regular “I love you” greetings, and I’m glad I have, but it was something I had to learn.   My father, as he was dying, lamented that he had had no idea how to express love, never having seen it done in the miserable home he grew up in.   Made me feel great tenderness for the poor devil and even sadder about his last-hours’ struggle to make peace with a representative of the people he’d hurt by his disabilities.    It really was not his fault, in a certain very real way, as I finally came to see.

I woke up today an hour or two before I was done sleeping and couldn’t get back to sleep.  I woke up thinking about fairness, what it feels like to be the victim of unfairness.  A regular theme, of course, but as I was recently shrieked at by an outraged old friend who keeps a close watch on his emotions, I woke up wondering if I’d been unfair.   Was it really fair of me to ask for things this old friend was clearly incapable of giving?   Clearly he didn’t think so, nor would he admit he is incapable of anything– he’d always given me his best version of philia and agape (two crucial kinds of love that don’t involve romance) and I’d ungratefully, maliciously taken a greasy, prissy dump on it.   Incoherently demanding yet more of him, after all he’s struggled to give, over more than half a century, an intolerable demand that was irrational and fundamentally unfair.

I thought of a phone call I had a year or two ago.  The wife of another childhood friend I could finally not continue to negotiate the terms of a frayed adult friendship with.   She informed me that I had to remain friends with him, and her, and their two sons, because they loved me.   “We love you!” she told me, and I know she was telling me the truth, the deepest truth she knew, an undeniable truth.    I knew it myself, they clearly did love me.  Then she gave me the ultimatum:  forgive him immediately, I’m giving you this one chance, out of love, but if you don’t — you’re dead.  I told her what had become unbearably clear to me:  “forgiving” a person who can’t see he’s constantly hurting you, no matter how many times you try to make it clear, is kind of impossible.   We came to a kind of understanding, out of mutual love  — I am a dead man writing today.  

I don’t think I need to give the details of that situation beyond this restatement of what I was being asked to accept:  love is what we feel toward you, not how we may sometimes act toward you.   My husband and I, now long-since estranged and living apart, practiced our best version of love for years, fighting, making up, storing grievances, yelling at each other, hating each other, making up, storing grievances, etc.   We loved you the same way.   It was the best we could fucking do, and we fought with you MUCH LESS than we fought with each other, you judgmental fucking asshole!

I am not trying to sound morally superior to anyone (he said, unconvincingly).   It’s pointless to judge people on the basis of what they’re unable to do, just as it’s important to get away from them if it has a bad effect on you.   I guess I draw the line where someone demands the right, out of love,  to treat me in a way I can’t tolerate.   It’s a bottom line for everyone, I suppose, not accepting being treated badly, unfairly by people who claim to love you.   It may take a long time to get to that bottom line, but in the end, somebody you feel is treating you unkindly will not be able to convince you that they are treating you well.  Or that the treatment  is the best you deserve.  

Again, not to knock anyone’s life choices, many people come to accept that what they get from those closest to them is the best they deserve.   More power to them if they are comfortable in that belief.    My parents had a lot of personal demons, both of them had been ruthlessly subjugated by very angry mothers from the time they could sit up and look at the world.   In the end, I felt loved by both of my parents, nonetheless.   We fought constantly and at times I felt I hated them, but I know I was loved.   Funny how those things can all be true.   One thing I emerged from childhood convinced of:  I did not want to replicate the unhappy lives of either of my parents.

There is a subjective element of love, for sure.  When we are full of love for somebody we truly want only the best for them.   It is not always possible for us to give it, but we always intend to give it and we hope our intention outweighs our mistakes or failures.   We all have our limitations and our needs.   We have design flaws.  We can’t help being angry when someone we try to always show love and patience to is ungrateful for our best efforts.    None of this is hard to understand.

The hard part, it would appear, is not letting our disappointment show in a way that infuriates somebody who loves us, no matter how imperfect that love might feel to us.   A secret to avoiding their fury, I would guess, is never to expect more than the person who loves us is able to give.  

 

 

[1] One example: you must always forgive every hurtful thing that is ever done to you, it is primarily for yourself that you must forgive, to free yourself from the pain of what was done to you.   This sensible sounding idea is repeated in many forms, by many of our subcultures.  To forgive is divine, even if the ability to easily hurt is human.   Jeanne Safer brilliantly lays out the destructive fallacy of this A Good Person Always Forgives dictum in her book Forgiving & Not Forgiving: A New Approach to Resolving Intimate Betrayal.  

Look, it should be clear enough: you have no moral obligation to forgive the unrepentant serial rapist uncle who has only fond memories of raping you and keeps insisting you just have an irresistible ass, LOL!  Is it necessary to resolve things within yourself to close off the pain the evildoer caused, absolutely, but to forgive?   That’s some pretty divine ability to forgive right there.   Fuck that puto. Forgive him right after you forgive Hitler, or whoever else might have murdered your family in the name of bettering the world…

The Difficult to See Murder of Slow-killing Love (part one)

A few days after an unfortunate event at my sister’s wedding decades ago, my parents and I met in their living room for a violent confrontation.  There was snarling, bad language exchanged, overheated comments made on both sides, and once things became too much for me, physical violence — a single finger passed inexcusably across my father’s nose — to illustrate to him the real difference between physical violence and the emotional violence that was his specialty.

I have to back up for a moment, as I’ve tried to condense too much there.   The argument between my parents and me was over whether I had a right to be upset after an attempted beating, by the caterer of my sister’s wedding, who, by the end, had the assistance of three or four fellow off-duty cops who held me by my arms. True, he’d only thrown a dozen punches, or so, and I’d managed not to be hurt, though it was an undeniable ordeal, deserved or not, particularly while wearing a rented tuxedo I later got some of my blood on.  

My parents position was that, since I had clearly provoked the confrontation with this polite, smiling stranger, no matter how I might try to spin it to justify myself, I had only gotten what I deserved.  I found that position unfair, particularly coming from my parents, who I’d hoped would be at least partially sympathetic listening to my side of things.   Their unified, hardline attitude made it impossible for me to restrain myself from expressing my opinion at length, and with increasing conviction.

And so, because these two irreconcilable emotional positions could not be peacefully resolved, things quickly came to an ugly stalemate there in my parent’s comfortable living room.   After the illustrative pass of a single finger across my father’s nose, all hell broke loose.  It was like throwing a lit match onto a lake of gasoline.   The explosion of ugliness was not without an instant of timely, dark wit from me, but this story is not about any of that.

After enough screaming was done, I gave my parents the finger one last time as I left their home, a home I’d been told I was no longer welcome in, and rode off on my bicycle, through the rain, toward the subway for the long ride back to my apartment.   Passing the nearby home of an artist friend, a woman my parent’s age, I stopped by and rang the bell.   Florence and her husband listened to my story, troubled and sympathetic, and told me gently that time would heal this too, that these kind of mad family things have a way of blowing over and that I should not be too hard on myself.   All good to hear.  I hugged them and went on my way through the cold, dark, rainy night.

The point of this story:  the next morning I woke up to sunshine, birds singing, feeling unexpectedly light as a feather.   It was as though an immense anvil had been lifted off my chest, a tremendous weight I’d carried always, without realizing it, was suddenly gone.  I felt like leaping through the air, the relief was exhilarating. I remember the surge of energy I felt to be free of the kind of love that sadly concludes that if somebody wanted to punch you in the face over and over, they probably had a damned good reason for it.  [1]

Understand, I’m not trying to present myself as an innocent victim.   As you can probably conclude just from reading these words today, the words of a man who’d whip his own father across the nose with an outstretched finger, I am not a person who shrinks from a fight, nor any kind of angel.  When I was younger, if somebody told me I couldn’t talk to them like that I’d smile and tell them to go fuck themselves.  Cost me more than a few jobs in my day.   I have tried to learn to do better.  I’m pretty sure I do better, certainly in terms of not always giving vent to my anger, but that is not the point of this story either.  

People who insist they love you sometimes don’t really grasp what love is, and, in fairness to them, they may have come to their understanding of love honestly, never having experienced it.  The first requirement of love, it seems to me, is wishing no harm to the person, or creature, that you love.   First order of business, tend to the hurt they are expressing.   Feelings are real and can’t be dispelled by mere logic when they are enflamed.   Later order of business, once things are calm, if it will be helpful in the future, talk about the underlying issues involved, how to resolve things, etc.  But when you see a loved one crying, the first instinct must be to help them dry their tears and sit with them until they start to breathe normally again.  

That may sound kind of tender, coming from a man who’d slap his father across the nose with a finger, I know, but does it ring true to you?  

You come to me upset.  I say “before I hear your entire long story, let me quickly tell you five reasons why you really shouldn’t be upset, you need to let me finish — JUST LET ME FINISH–  before you can continue.  Try not to interrupt me, it will only take a few minutes and my calm explanations will clarify everything for you.  I have a right to tell you these things, because I love you.”  You raise a hand, extend one finger and slap me smartly across the nose.   Knowing what I know now, I really can’t blame you for that reaction.  

The thing to do, except in a situation where someone you love is about to hurt herself or somebody else, is let the person you love do what they need to do, say all they need to say, particularly when they’re upset.   The time may come, when heads are cooler, to discuss why I wasn’t actually wrong to insist on telling you the reasons you were wrong to be so upset.   But that time is not when you are upset.  

The immortal Charles Bukowski, in his immortal “The Shoelace” catalogues some of that swarm of trivialities that kill quicker than a heart attack.  On that list, and leaping off of it some days, are “people who insist they’re your friends.”   They claim to love you like family, and often they do.   It is good to remember that many assaults, most murders, and all incest, occurs in families, but that is a side note.

The main note is this — horrific as it also is, and upsetting to the stomach and disruptive to sleep as it is — if a person who tells you they love you does not treat you the way they’d want to be treated by the people they love, then that love is probably not the best kind of love for you.  

If they impatiently sit through your explanation of why you were hurt, when they meant only to help, and they insist on their right to tell you why they still believe they did nothing to hurt you, intentionally or otherwise, no matter how precisely you try to explain the hurt — and they wind up screaming at you and hanging up the phone because you have so upset them by denying their right to be just as upset as you are, in fact, more upset because your upset over an “accidental tasering” is such an irrational and unfair accusation of them… well, the best you can probably hope for is waking up the next day feeling a bit lighter.   As I can practically guarantee you will.  

 

 

[1]  This wonderful feeling of liberation would not last long, my father called a few days later to negotiate a peaceful return to the status quo, and after some wrangling over the course of several powwows, we went back to the way things had always been.  It would take until the last few hours of my father’s life, thirty years later, before he expressed his deep regrets about having been the way he’d always been.

 

How to Deal with Unintentional Tasering

This tricky subject is definitely a work in progress, though I have a few strong theories I’ve been testing.  I am referring to the best way to react after someone close to you, with the very best of intentions and full of love, accidentally tasers you in the genitals.  Intentional tasering is another subject for another day.

Undeniably, this unintended injury hurts like Evangelical hell, but what is the best thing to do when you have recovered the ability to speak, and breathe, and refrain from writhing on the floor in agony?

I’ve had the opportunity to ponder this from time to time during my more than six decades of the occasional tasering virtually all of us experience once in a while.   I am trying to hold myself to a difficult standard of peacefulness in my personal life, a standard I wish was more universal.   I try to live a life of non-harm, what Winston Churchill’s little brown man in the diaper taught the world is called Ahimsa.  

Ahimsa is a strong, principled stance against violence that resists violence without inflicting it.    It has its limits, as far as I can see, I certainly would drop it like a bad habit if somebody was coming to kill me or do me or a loved one bodily harm, but as a general principle of behavior that would vastly improve all life in this world, I can find no fault in it.

Violence comes in many forms, some of them devilishly sneaky.   Being acutely conscious of exactly what hurts me, in its many shades and nuances, I try my best not to do it to people I care about.  In the abstract, I care about all people.  So, since I try not to react truculently to things like an accidental application of electric current to my testicles — if I know the shock was delivered unwittingly — I should also be working on not lashing out angrily at misguided Nazi-admirers, though that will have to be a project for another decade, I think.  Certainly the subject for another essay.

Hard enough in my personal life, not to get up from a tasering and smack somebody hard across the nose, before remembering that the taser was not applied with any ill-will.   The person may not even have realized they were holding a taser.  The first things to do when you are angry, I’ve learned, at a high personal cost, are breathe, wait, and think.  Your head will clear and after some time passes you will have a better idea than your first angry response.   Hard to do, friends, but very important, if you don’t want to live in a shrinking world of constant, eternally justifiable conflict.

I’ll give you an example, if I can, of a subtle form of tasering that may be delivered inadvertently.   Each of us has been sensitized to certain mistreatment by our upbringing.  To some people, silence is a perfectly valid response to a question.   “Hmmmm… you have very much provoked my thoughts, excellent inquiry… wow… let me work this one between my silent lips for a while as I meditate on your provocative line of self-reflection.”   I can picture Shakers, or Quakers, or some silently praying sect, nodding sagely, exchanging small smiles, while they ponder something deep one of them has offered.   On the other hand, there are people, and I am one of them, who have had strategic silence deployed against them, sometimes in a cruel manner, from their earliest memory.   When I ask a friend “what do you think?” and I hear no reply, it has the effect of a hard, accidental knee to the groin.  

This is because my father, a deeply troubled man, lived his personal life with a helmet and flak jacket on, probing with his bayonet whenever he felt cornered, which was often, since he lived in a trench with an opening on only one side.  If I’d ask him for something that was impossible for him to give — like non-judgmental emotional support in a moment of fear, for example — if he couldn’t deflect my question by framing it as another instance of my sniveling emotional neediness (sadly, I began displaying this lifelong trait at a very precocious age) — he would set his jaw and say nothing.   “Dad,” I would ask, at five, or six, before I learned better, “you are seriously not going to say anything?”   Silence and a short thrust of his bayonet would be his only reply.  As a result, I became very sensitive to this kind of silent reply when I ask things of people.  

My father, a highly intelligent man who was able to present his point of view adroitly, always argued that people cannot change on a fundamental level.  I can grant him part of that point — our fundamental natures, our original impulses, are very hard to change.   We are born with certain traits, we emerge from our mother’s womb more or less emotional than others, more or less prone to fear, anger, violence, calmness, happiness, whatever.  Then, of course, how we are nurtured plays a large role in how powerful these impulses remain in us.  Then, ideally, if childhood works out, we become adults with choices, people free to learn crucial skills we realize we lack, work on improving the limitations that increase our suffering and the suffering of those we care about.  

On a fundamental DNA level, sure, one person will still feel a reflex to be angry while another, given the same stimulus, will be reflexively optimistic, or whatever. My father’s argument, if taken to the logical extreme, is ultimately a defense of the wisdom of hopelessness, a proof against our ability to learn and improve ourselves, no matter how miserable we may be in our current stinking foxhole.  We should note that my father changed his view on this, and sincerely regretted he had not examined the view more carefully, hours before he died.

So the question, after being accidentally tasered by someone close to you, comes down to this, as far as I can see: a short series of direct questions to be put simply to ensure against future accidental genital tasering, each hopefully to be answered with a clear “yes.”  [1]

Do you understand why that thing you pressed the trigger of sent an electrical current to some very sensitive nerve endings in my privates?  

Can you relate to a sensitivity in yourself that would react the same way, if I accidentally sent a small charge of electricity there?    

Do you see my “please do not taser” area clearly now?  

Will you kindly promise to refrain from sending another jolt there?  

Outside of that, I see only the potential for more shocks to what my eight year-olds in Harlem sometimes referred to as my privacy.   If what constitutes a taser to the good friend’s privacy is not made clearly understood between both friends, feel free to live your life flinching, ducking, ready to writhe.   It doesn’t seem a viable life strategy to me, though we all have our own opinions on such things, one supposes.  

If somebody cares about you, they should be able to understand your non-angry explanation of why their sincere attempt to help you hurt you so much.  They should then make an effort not to taser you in the same place, ever again.  Kind of a bottom line, I think, in what we should expect from our loved ones in this best of all possible worlds.

 

 

[1]  Practice tip:  if these questions are not asked carefully, with supreme humility, they will result in the opposite of the intended effect, if the person you are seeking peace with is prone to flying off the handle when angered.    Live and learn…

We must often make do with the best we can do

Dr. Pangloss, an absurdly optimistic character created by Voltaire, famously lived in the “best of all possible worlds” where everything happened for a preordained purpose, even the most senseless and horrific things.  As I recall he kept this belief even after half of his ass was removed by cannibals for use as a ham (and many other equally atrocious things befell him and his student).  Easy to laugh at a panglossian chap like that as we look around at a world that could certainly be better in many obvious ways, but I mention him to remind myself that sometimes doing very little is actually the best we can do in this world, and doing that little takes us, in a real sense, to the “best of all possible worlds.”   Under less than ideal circumstances, of course, but still, by far the best alternative available to us, the little we can do.

Being able to transmit complicated thoughts and difficult emotions in words is a gift of being human.    It is among the miracles of being a “wise ape.”  True, it exists along side our susceptibility to mass terror, mass murder and so forth, but our ability to speak, to read and write, is, in itself, a great blessing.   Words that literally change the world can sometimes be conceived and written.   Words can save a person from despair when she reads them, actually save a life.   Save a single human life, say the sages, and you have saved all of mankind.

Many of us write here on the internet [1].  We write for many reasons — to entertain, inform, make our opinions known, for attention, the illusion of writing for a readership, to brag, to show off our skills and our humility, to pretend to wisdom or expertise, to sing, to play, to force ourselves to write as well as we can, to drum up business, to gather an army of followers to invade and conquer other websites, to pass the time, etc.   But every one of us knows, I think, that, confronted by a sudden vexation, it is a great advantage to be able to write it out clearly.  

The ability to write clearly allows us to set things out for others to share and also, to see things more clearly ourselves.  Often this thinking-writing process is the best we can do and the time we spend here becoming better at writing with clarity is time well-spent when the last seconds are ticking away on the clock and the game is on the line.

You get screwed by a bureaucracy, say you lose your health coverage, without warning, during a deadly pandemic (to take a random example).   Frightening, disorienting, unfair, possibly illegal — just writing these words provides the beginning of relief.  Putting a scary or aggravating scenario into clear language does something to neutralize panic.  The practice of writing an aggravation down, tweaking the lines for clarity and brevity, adding helpful details, deleting distracting ones… an excellent discipline for taming thoughts and feelings that might otherwise run amok and rob you of rest in your slumbers. 

We’re living in a fucking worldwide plague, literally, with cynical, calculating, clueless cretins in charge of Federal Emergency Management and many other areas of public health, safety and liberty.   The thought that the forces of greed and death are exploiting this tragedy to gain even greater advantage over the masses of us worldwide is objectively horrifying.  There are many reasons to be concerned, afraid, magnified by disorienting loneliness during this time of “social distancing” when the closest to socializing many of us can get is the telephone or “social media” which is a shorthand for how to be in touch without actually venturing anything personal that you wouldn’t want the entire world to know about.  

Social media fosters the actual opposite of intimacy, it creates the superficial illusion of connection.  Intimacy is a rare and life-sustaining form of friendship that can only be achieved one on one, over time, with the ongoing sharing of vulnerabilities, values and trust.  You cannot, strictly (or even permissively) speaking, share real trust via social media, trust me on this.

Being old school, you reach out in your isolation to write a personal letter to an actual flesh and blood friend, knowing that she has a tendency to freak out sometimes and suffer in silence, to make sure she’s okay, extend a hand for mutual support.   “This plague is a disorienting ordeal, n’est-ce pas?  I hope you and your pup are OK” you write in a hand-written letter that sets out some of your own worries.

The answer comes directly a few days later, typed and delivered on your phone’s beautiful, glowing screen.

“Me and Bonesy are fine, old friend, thank you for asking, and, as you know, even if I was struggling and terrified, which I am not, thankfully, I wouldn’t be a whining, self-pitying wuss like you and make a squealing incoherent federal case out of bad luck that is entirely of your own making, pal.  Thanks for reaching out! Always great to hear from you.  Please keep in touch.”  

You might think, poised over the tiny keys of your phone: it appears my old friend might be in  trouble, I wonder — is there anything helpful I can do from here in my own quarantine?   Well might you wonder.   You might want to write a few hundred words, to make the wonder something you can set out in front of you, organize, study, explain a bit to yourself, mull over.   Edit, clarify and repeat.   Word to the wise.

 

 

[1] It occurs to me from time to time that I need to figure out how to collect the probably millions of words I’ve composed and posted here on this website the last few years and save them in a format I can store on various hard-drives.   If I had a mass of readers I’d ask for any ideas about how to do this, but since few stop by, I’ll keep the question to myself.  On second thought, anyone have any ideas?  Does WordPress still have something like that old RSS feed that can be copied and pasted easily?

This Plague Too Shall Pass

In the end, at the end of our widespread terror and disorientation, the vast majority of us —  at least if we are not homeless, destitute, imprisoned, illegally detained, already ill with something else, housed in nursing homes, forced to work without personal protective equipment, or foolishly expose ourselves to known risk —  will survive this deadly pandemic.  It is terrifying, it is hard to adjust to living in a plague.  Some days will be better, some days will be worse.  

It is good to remember this:  in the end, this too shall pass, as all things, and even all of us, inevitably do.

When the deadly threat has passed we may find ourselves living in a society that has made significant institutional changes for the better.  Perhaps this horror will cause Americans to finally force lawmakers to recognize everyone’s human right to have health care in this country, and an affordable home, and access to a good, healthy diet.  

Chances are equally good, of course, given the energetic organizing on, and far above, the ground to keep things as they are, we could find ourselves in the Fourth Reich, since Nazi-types are much better at mobilizing their true-believers who know exactly who they hate and blame, than are ordinary people just trying to live decent lives.   We need to stay vigilant, and organize to fight for what we must — for example, the right not to live in a failed state ruled by remorseless kleptocrats where millions starve and tens of thousands die in the name of maintaining a brutally unjust “status quo”.

When you take stock of the major stresses that we are actually up against at the moment, this may be the most stressful non-holocaust moment in recorded human history, for the most people, all at the same time.   I took a few of the top reasons for our reasonable terror and despair and put them in a paragraph.   It might help you keep some perspective — or it might just add to your nightmares.   I hope it helps you feel better, to see how much we are up against right now and how gigantic your right to feel upset really is.

Random footnote from a deleted email response whining about something or other [1].

[1] short evocation of selected horrors from previous, rejected draft:
 
We’re living in an extraordinarily fucked up moment in human history: foreseeable end of the habitable planet, fascist-type strongmen in charge of most countries, totalitarian types who rule by dividing populations along ethnic and racial fault lines, a ruthless and unrestrained global economy now in free-fall, doomsday clock set to mere seconds to midnight due to unprecedented nuclear threat, this wicked plague where asymptomatic people are infectious and immunity may or may not occur after recovery from the disease, instant mass unemployment, the potential for sudden mass starvation (even for average Americans in a nation that produces vast amounts of often uneaten food) — the weird, sudden attenuation of all social ties, nobody making eye contact in the public space, even from 20 feet, the world’s most powerful maniac lying openly and dementedly on State TV every evening to keep his zombie base jacked up to the max, a gaffe-prone, sometimes lying (though genial and nicely toothed) husk of a compromiser being proffered as the opposition’s best hope ghost candidate — this list can literally go on for another twenty lines.   The stress is palpable, unbearable some days, and people are not holding up well under it.   It certainly doesn’t always bring out the best in most of us.
 

Now Good Americans are actually happy about the deaths of Bad Americans during a plague

I don’t consider myself a particularly evil person.  I get angry, for example when I’m overpowered by somebody who grabs my arm and keeps slapping me hard in the face with my own hand, asking solicitously why I keep hitting myself.   I may have a lower threshold for being bullied than a more highly evolved earthling, but I do my best to remain as mild as I can, under circumstances that sometimes make mildness seem a very unappealing option.    Anger is a good warning system, it seems to me, not to give in the urging of righteous, enflamed feelings and do something outright evil.  And yet…

The other day I saw a piece quoting the evangelical minister of a mega-church, telling his flock, in a packed church, at a time when more reasonable people were “social distancing” all over the world, that faith protected him from COVID-19, that the Lord would protect all the faithful.  He added a nice underscore to the effect that AND YOU CAN TAKE THAT TO THE BANK, PRAISE GOD!   A couple of weeks later this man of God was dead of COVID-19.   It immediately struck me as a rare instance of justice, a wonderful “good for you” joke on a pompous, influential, ignorant jackass.   I posted the short news item here.  

So a fellow citizen, as opinionated as any of us have an absolute right to be, died a horrible death in ironic circumstances and I took in his death only as a great punchline.   Never thought about it any other way.

Served the ignorant snake-oil selling motherfucker right, was my only thought as I posted it here, thinking myself wry, for the few and the misguided to read.   Good joke, no?   “God loves and protects righteous people like me, this so-called virus is God’s message to the accursed non-believers, ignore what these people of no faith are telling you… oh, shit, I … I … can’t breathe…. what in Lord’s name?   Ahhh, get me… to … the h-h-hospital…” 

Is it really funny?  Yes, and definitely also not funny at all.  Is it funny to laugh about a death sentence someone got just for being a fool or a blowhard?   Laughing about it reminded me of what I read years ago about the officially approved humor of the Third Reich, at a time when other humor was increasingly punishable by death [1].   Nazis were not without humor, many of them loved to laugh.  What made them laugh?   A good, spicy Jew joke was surely a winner at the old brauhaus. A joke about Hitler being a little nuts?  The weakest penalty for that was referred to as the “Hitler Cut”– castration.

Hoo, boy, right away, a bee line to that dark place with the Nazis…

Am I saying it’s wrong to laugh when a bully of some kind, while berating you and brandishing a club to beat you with, slips on a banana peel and lands wrong, cracking his skull and spilling his brains out on the sidewalk?   Of course not.  I’m just saying… what have we come to as a species when we “wise apes” celebrate the actual deaths of people who espouse views repugnant to our own?     Put the shoe on the other foot, picture a death sentence for someone you agree with for expressing what you both believe, it’s easy to see the sickness of it.    

Hypocrisy is not a crime, though, in the absence of all other sports and most entertainments during this plague,  it’s become something of our national pastime here in our gruesomely divided states of America.

 

[1] Richard Grunberger had a chapter on Nazi humor, if I recall correctly, in his The Twelve Year Reich, A Social History of Nazi Germany 1933-45.  

About the tome, from Jeff Bezos’s ad:

“In chilling detail, this social history brilliantly demonstrates the awesome power of a brutal government to corrode the human spirit.”–Wall Street Journal
 
“Invaluable for every student of the Nazi era.”–New York Times Book Review
The 12-Year Reich, the first comprehensive social study of the Third Reich, shows what the Nazi regime proffered as the “ideal” society and how the German people responded. Along with the violence, corruption, persecution, public extravaganzas, the ever-present Party, and the cult of the Fuhrer, a ghastly imitation of ordinary life went on.
How did people talk during the Third Reich? What films could they see? What political jokes did they tell? Did Nazi ranting about the role of women (no make-up, smoking, or dieting) correspond with reality? What was the effect of the regime on family life (where fathers were encouraged to inform on sons, and children on parents)? When the country embraced National Socialism in 1933, how did that acceptance impact the churches, the civil service, farmers, housewives, businessmen, health care, sports, education, “justice,” the army, the arts, and the Jews? Using examples that range from the horrifying to the absurd, Grunberger captures vividly the nightmarish texture of the times and reveals how Nazis effectively permeated the everyday lives of German citizens. The result is a brilliant, terrifying glimpse of the people who dwelt along the edges of an abyss-often disappearing into it.

A Vision of Heaven

As a child I had a picture of heaven as a place of eternal peace.   I’m sure this came from my father, who, though angry and embattled while he was on this earth with the rest of us,  is living in such a place now.   My child’s image of heaven was of old enemies meeting on a cloud, embracing and laughing off their old, earthbound enmity.  Their old reasons for hating each other now delicious jokes to be shared and laughed about together in the ever-after.

I was reminded of this today, when I had a wake up call from Elaine at Healthfirst, the health insurance company that has done so much to impersonally fuck me over lately.  Apparently my DFS complaint, which I had attempted to revoke by email on Tuesday, had been quickly assigned to an investigator who contacted Healthfirst.  Good to know that process still works so quickly, anyway.

The last time Elaine and I spoke, things had not gone well.  I had asked her pointedly several times if she was drunk.  I eventually hung up on her after one too many incoherent, drunk-sounding answers from the Resolution Specialist.  That was back on March 7, I think, the last, and ugliest, of several long conversations we had.

She began our conversation cautiously, as you might imagine.   I immediately informed her that I’d contacted DFS to retract the complaint (I believed I had finally successfully done that last night on their website).   I told her that this time Healthfirst was not to blame for the termination of my health insurance.   I told her I wished Healthfirst had contacted me on March 11, when they were informed that they needed to terminate my insurance effective March 31. I could have prevented the cancellation of my health insurance if I’d had a heads up from them in time to stay insured.

She explained that the March 11 notice Healthfirst got contained the same claim my on-line, inbox-posted version had — that I’d received two notices to remedy my easily fixable error, one the day after I re-enrolled and the March 11 notice I was never notified of.   Healthfirst was in the same boat as I was, it seemed.   No other notice had been sent to anyone, I never got the March 11 notice in any form, until after my insurance was terminated and it was too late to do anything about it.  Unlike Healthfirst, only I had had my health insurance interrupted for a month during a plague, but that wasn’t Healthfirst’s fault.  

The odd thing is how gentle our conversation was.  I had no animus toward poor Elaine, a native Russian speaker doing her best in a difficult language.   Her promised written summaries had been the best she could do, subject to redactions from “regulatory”, I grasped that now.   It was not her fault that NYS does not provide consumers with the laws that protect them from, for example, termination of health insurance without notice.  

“Did you call the New York State of Health?” Elaine asked sympathetically.  I explained to her that on a good day one cannot easily get through on the phone, during the pandemic wait times are much longer.  The reps one eventually speaks to there are as limited in their knowledge and their power to help as the ones at Healthfirst, they cannot see the entire picture or explain difficult things that are difficult, or even impossible, to explain.  She seemed to understand this.   I told her I’d found and fixed the mistake easily on-line.  If only I’d had notice to do it sooner!

Thinking about the surprisingly pleasant call afterwards (she’d been palpably relived to get no fight from me), and how we wished each other well, and spoke for the first time without defensiveness or anger on either side, two humans in very similar little boats, I was reminded of my childish view of heaven.   From the minds of children…