Category Archives: Ahimsa

Encouragement

Notice how the word “courage” is the center of that word.   To encourage is to give courage.   Courage is the most important tool we need to forge through difficulty. Being discouraged is the end, temporarily or permanently, of one’s ability to soldier on.

Usually, weighed down with our own troubles, distracted by many distractions, we don’t notice how easy and essential encouragement is.   We may think that nobody encourages us, and we do fine, so what the hell?

I get a call from an old friend whenever his wife, an active volcano, erupts.   She broke the stained glass window of the room he rents to escape from her wrath.   I hear the story, try to be sympathetic, but do I really encourage him?   I give him advice about his strategy, tell him why answering her rage with his own anger may not be the best approach.   He gets slightly defensive, and it’s hard to blame him.   He called for encouragement, he got a bit of possibly helpful, definitely unwanted, advice.

“You are in a war, unfortunately, and every war is different.   I think you’re doing a great job finding ways to hold your enemy at bay.   I commend you, and strength to your arm,” would have been a more encouraging response.

When I told a friend recently that I, with an idealistic and so far unpaid program to save doomed children, am like the man on the falling plane exhorting others to put their oxygen masks on before helping others– while not wearing my own, I secretly hoped he would disagree.   He nodded sadly, thought the image was very apt.    It had the opposite of an encouraging effect, no matter how realistic the image might have been.

When a friend is engaged in a difficult or even impossible quest, do we encourage them or do them more of a favor by gently trying to bring them back into the real world, unacceptable as that real world might be?    Silence, of course the most obvious option, generally does little to advance either of these mercies.

Gratefulness out of the blue

On the way downtown, to do the animation workshop with a small group of women fighting chronic diseases:

Bellowing, barking, enraged
man paces short track on empty
uptown A platform
screaming and kicking

on the way down
I had to squeeze past
an oblivious young couple
blocking the stairs
with ten feet clear on either side
“excuse me,” I mumbled
not pausing as I passed
“YOU SHOULD SAY ‘EXCUSE ME”!”
the bellicose voice shouted after me
“I did,” I said
a moment before arriving
on the platform to see my train’s
tail lights
disappear into the tunnel

sat and struck up a tune
on the ukulele
man next to me, as soon as I paused,
went into a lusty falsetto improvisation
in another key entirely,
if any.

Zipped the uke back into its bag,
watched the screaming man
across the tracks
bark and dance to the duet
he was performing
with the falsetto singer.

Mercifully,
this super cool train
arrived within a moment
and I am grateful
for that
impersonal mercy.

Then, downtown, moments after my volunteer assistant cancelled at the last possible minute, and it seemed there would be only four of us (two more of the original 8 showed up late), to my great surprise, the five women made like a bunch of kids, working together and coming up with some very cool animation.  You can see it here (you might need dropbox to see it.  I’ll post it elsewhere soon):

adults playing like kids

 

Better Way to Think About A Situation

A situation is what it is, good and bad and also, seen dispassionately, just what it is, with no inclination either way sometimes.  Wise people teach us that the way we look at things makes them appear good or bad. As we look, so shall we see.  When we look with fear, we see reasons to be afraid.  When we look with compassion, it is easier to play nice.

I have a meeting tomorrow that could result in some good things at a time when the signs, laid out like the entrails of animals read by soothsayers at the time of Caesar, would appear to foretell mostly doom. I can tell this, in part, because my friends are at a loss when I myself am at a loss to enthuse about this unusual plan I am pursuing, with modest practical skills, that seems so at odds with the times we live in.

I realize there is no reason to see this meeting in a few hours as a high stakes poker game, though there will be some negotiation.   If it is such a game, I could say, I am playing with house money.   But that is only a way to rationalize, make myself feel more comfortable at a time when I feel challenged.

Here is a more important thing and a much better frame to look at it through: the energetic assistant of a very successful economic and ecological entrepreneur, based again in the impoverished neighborhood where she grew up, visited wehearyou.net and was excited about what she saw.  A meeting was arranged.  Tomorrow is the meeting.

I can think about my program, and present it, like this: I have been programming and refining the simplified animation workshop for almost two years now, have worked with around 80 public school kids, in seven or eight workshops, for a total of maybe 140 hours on a once a week basis.   It is not a gigantic sample size, but it’s enough to know that every place we do it kids respond enthusiastically and creatively.   This is not surprising, it is designed to let them play and learn in a fun, interactive, collaborative setting.

The workshop is non-hierarchic, everybody there is a participant, treated with the same respect, including the adults who are on hand to facilitate.  The adults are not teachers, they’re time keepers, organizers, assistants, enthusiastic supporters of the animation the children make.   That learning takes place without teachers systematically presenting material is a radical but also very natural notion, play leads to discovery, wanting to do something leads to invention and mastery of the skills needed.  Young animals of all kinds play, it is how they master many things they need to know how to do.   Human kids are no different, if given the chance to, they love to play.  Give children musical instruments, they will begin to play a kind of music.

In the typical American school play, invention, improvisation, dreaming up ideas, is secondary, if it is encouraged anywhere but at recess — the main work is learning to master the materials tested on standardized exams.  Exams designed by large educational corporations in a way that ensures many young humans are destined to fail.

I have the animation made by a relatively small sample of kids done in a short once a week time format, so far, and you can find many inventive and enchanting moments in that highly original animation.   But what I’ve assembled until now is merely a glimpse at the potential of the program.   I am looking for a few places where my philosophy and methods can be worked week after week, over time, where kids can make real progress in animation, teach each other, work on more sustained stories, if they like, really master the technical aspects to the extent that they extend the boundaries of what kids can do.   I want people to be amazed, the more cynical among them shocked, at what children can create on their own, with their creativity as motivation and just a little guidance.

People are doing this work here and there.   A brilliant and charismatic educational theorist, Sugata Mitra, embedded a computer and track pad in an outside wall of slums in remote Indian villages and illiterate children organized themselves to learn a functional English vocabulary and were soon surfing the internet and playing games.   Mitra calls many of the things that happen when a group self-organizes to learn “emergent”.   Emergence is the appearance of things not previously thought to be part of the system.

Collaboration, invention, increased attention span, peer-teaching and group problem-solving, are not usually thought of as express goals of a school day or even of an art workshop.   Our society stresses individualism and competition and children don’t often get a chance to work together collaboratively over time.   Teamwork is needed in  team sports and encouraged in that context.   It is also necessary for animation.

Children in the animation workshop begin working in small groups very quickly.   We encourage it and like it when the teams shift players regularly.   Animation is made by a small community of interrelated teams working together.  It calls for the integration of many talents and skills, and requires a good deal of learning and peer-teaching to accomplish.

Deceptively simple, what I have tapped into.    Now what it needs is fertile ground to plant the seeds and demonstrate the things it can grow into.   Tomorrow I may find one such plot in this remote community in the South Bronx.    Someone is interested in listening, and I will be interested in listening too.

Enraged customer at the car wash

The weather service had been calling for severe thunderstorms the other day, but as the sky was clear when I set out, and my errand not long, I didn’t go back for rain gear, which in retrospect was a mistake.

The walk home from the store was about 3/4 of a mile and as I hit the bridge on Broadway I saw that I was walking into a dark vault.  The sky ahead was dark grey as far as I could see downtown. The entire sky, in every direction ahead of me, looked threatening as a tumor.  There were virtually no places to seek shelter between where I was and my apartment, about fifteen minutes away by foot.  When I got across the bridge, the first large drops fell.  Within a block it began coming down with intent to drench.  I made a dash and took refuge in the store attached to the car wash, the only place within several blocks to duck into. I found shelter a moment before the deluge began.

The rain came down like it was looking to flood the earth.   Within minutes there was a deep lake in the street in front of the car wash.   Cars passing through it sent plumes of water up over the sidewalk.   I moved further into the store eventually taking a stool in the back, and I watched the rain, figuring it probably couldn’t rain that hard for much longer.  It did, though.

Eventually another guy who’d taken refuge there took the stool next to mine.  A moment later we exchanged pleasantries about the weather.  He was a sympathetic looking man, slight and brown, looking something like Gandhi, but from the Dominican Republic, he said, his English almost completely unaccented.  I’d have guessed his background was Indian, actually.

I told him this kind of summer shower usually doesn’t last very long.  I recounted how I’d once been soaked in a very quick summer downpour in NYC making a sprint to beat the rain.  I’d been on a bike and when I reached 8th Avenue and 47th Street the skies opened up. Instead of finding cover, I rode like mad and arrived at 47th and 9th Avenue, one block away, drenched, socks and shoes and everything in my pockets soaked, dripping wet.  When I entered the place I was going, water running off me, people looked at me in disbelief.  I looked behind me to discover the sun was shining brightly, the street hardly even looked wet.  I’d learned from that summer shower to duck under something and wait out these flash rains.

But this one continued full-bore for over an hour, and my neighbor and I passed the time in a most pleasant and far-ranging chat while the thunder thundered and the buckets of dirty water fell.   At one point an irate customer barged into the store where we were sitting and began screaming at the girl behind the counter. “IT’S NOT FAIR!!!” he screamed several times, snarling and glaring angrily between screams.   He was at a loss to make the unfairness of it clear.  He turned to scream at one of the African car wash attendants “IT’S NOT FAIR!!!”.  As he stormed out to where he car was he shouted it to everyone a couple of times.   

Evidently some terribly aggravating thing was being done to him, it was unjust, they’d lied to him and then screwed him and it wasn’t fair.   That much seemed clear.   But the ferocity of his screaming really was kind of amazing.   It was also, I realized, the self-lacerating bellow of helplessness– they are screwing me and there’s nothing I can fucking DO ABOUT IT!

My neighbor and I paused, exchanged philosophical looks, and I said they’d probably promised to do something like change his oil, but had run out of oil filters, and they’d kept him waiting over an hour to give him the disappointing news.   He agreed it must have been something like that.   As the enraged man passed us on the way to his car, still screaming, I said quietly I hoped he wasn’t going to get a gun.   It was the kind of blind rage that, silly as the immediate cause for it might have seemed, if he’d been holding a gun he probably would have used it to try to discharge some rage.

My neighbor opened his eyes a little wider, and said he doubted the guy was going for a gun.  I agreed that he was probably right.   As it turns out, he was correct and nobody was hurt, except for the man who had been screaming.   We chatted for another twenty minutes or so, as the storm continued to rage all around, until one of the workers told us apologetically that it was time to go, they were closing the store.   We thanked them for their hospitality, shook hands, introduced ourselves by name for the first time, and headed off in opposite directions to get soaked.

It rained hard for my entire walk home.   Luckily I’d thought to take a plastic bag to wrap my electronics in, because I and my groceries got drenched.   My phone, wallet and iPod did not get wet.   It poured and thundered for a couple of hours, and it was a cold rain.   Actually felt a little good to be wet and shivering on a brutally humid day that had recently been about 85 degrees.   Once I showered and wrung out my clothes I felt refreshed.

I don’t think anything felt very good that day to the man who’d been treated so unfairly by those otherwise decent folks at the car wash.

A little more love for Florence

I wrote to thank Florence’s children and grandchildren for a wonderful and inspiring celebration of a remarkable and brilliant old friend.  I’d been moved and distracted yesterday, when I spoke briefly at the memorial, during one of the breaks in the string ensemble’s performance of some of Florence’s favorite pieces, and wanted to make sure to add these thoughts:

Florence was an inspiration to many people, and to me in particular.  Her embrace of every aspect of creativity, and her nurturing of creativity in others, had a deep influence on me.  Her gentleness, her wide-ranging intellect, her humor, her love of life and her art work exerted a subtle but strong transformational force.  I attribute much of the best of who I am today to her generous, kind, whimsical influence, and her love.
 
Her beloved little brother told me, under a gentle interrogation, that she took some piano lessons for a while but never got that far on the instrument.  Still, this most musical painter’s love of music, and understanding of the underlying geometry of Bach’s music, was so profound that she could effortlessly put a counterpoint melody in exactly the right place against and among the beats and notes in a two part rock guitar jam.  It delights me as much now, remembering it, as it did when she sang that invention in real time late one night in the living room on Aberdeen Road, not long before her 90th birthday.
 
It could be said that her art deserved to be more widely known, and that she should have had some measure of fame and financial security from her brilliant, deep and masterfully executed paintings and other works.  Though she would have no doubt liked those things, I don’t think it bothered her very much as she went about her life and work.   She had more substantial things on her mind.   As Russ pointed out (and as she described in that wonderful piece about the creative benefits she derived from smoking), all of her many interests and loves seemed to focus themselves more and more into that hard to describe source of light and life energy that emanated from and flowed into the center of many of her paintings and her octamandalagons.  I watched happily as the mysterious force that Russ described shone out of the images in the slide show, as her favorite music was beautifully played and she was present, smiling, in that room.
 
I wrote this shortly after she died, and I meant to share it as well:
 
a few more words of gratitude about Florence
 
and two links to Florence’s work and words
 
two Florence links– wonderful stuff

A Deadpan Judge

I had a certain reputation, I suppose, that persists to this day, as a man with a conscience who would occasionally work for free.  This judge, who had seen me in action working in this capacity, had his friendly court attorney call and pitch me an easy pro bono case.  Would I mind if she sent me the file?  It would be a one appearance case, and the judge would consider it a great favor if I would consider it, and he would accommodate my schedule.   This judge was better than most.  We put the case on for a day when I was going to be in Brooklyn anyway and I appeared and met the tenant.

The tenant, who the law did not consider a tenant, was distraught, a man about my age, a combat veteran and a shell of the self he once imagined he might become.  He was about to be evicted from his home, the law on the case was open and shut.  It was not that he was behind in the rent, he’d been paying it all along, since he’d given up his apartment and moved in to take care of his aging mother almost two years earlier.  The judge’s hands were tied.   The story was rather simple and unfortunate for him, under the New York City Rent Stabilization Law.

If the tenant had been living with his mother for at least two years prior to her death, or probably also prior to a disability that necessitated admission to a nursing home, he would have had a clear legal right to succeed to the lease his mother had with the landlord, under the same terms.  This is called the Right of Succession.   He had given up his place and moved into his mother’s apartment to take care of her as her health deteriorated.  As her dementia increased he was forced to bathe her, feed her, carry her to and from the toilet, change her diapers and calm her when she got upset.  After about a year and a half he could no longer provide all the care she needed and had her admitted to the dementia ward in a public hospital not far from her apartment.  The poor person’s version of a nursing home.  

“I need you to visit the tenant, his mother, and come back and report to the Court if there is any chance of her moving back into the apartment to live with her son again,” I think is the mission I was given by the judge.  The judge was grasping at the last straw to keep this unemployed veteran from becoming homeless because he’d done the right thing for his mother, even if for a few months less than the law required him to do it in situ in the subject premises, her rent stabilized apartment.  

The hospital was a fifteen minute walk from the court house.  It was spring time, I remember pastel buds on the trees and a carpet of green buds on the shady Brooklyn sidewalks.  Birds and squirrels probably went about their business on this mild and sunny day, but I didn’t notice.  The man and I spoke as we walked the tree lined streets to the hospital.  The conversation was somber as I explained the legal situation and he told me more about his life and limited options.

We walked for what seemed like miles inside the hospital building.  The building was like something out of the Ottoman Empire, could have been hundreds of years old, with ringing corridors and a labyrinth-like structure inside.  We came at last to the ward where his mother was housed, a ward he visited every day.  The nurses greeted him by name, and he smiled back at them.  We entered a tidy room that smelled of urine and disinfectant.  He approached an old, smooth-faced woman in a wheelchair, pulled a chair next to her and leaned in to put his arm around her.  Her expression barely changed as he stroked her back and called her “mommy” and kissed her.  She seemed to like this, even as it was clear she had no idea who he was.  He began to cry quietly as he held her, tears running down his face.  There was no point asking her any questions, I’d arrived too late for that.  I probably spoke to the head nurse to confirm the medical situation that was plain enough for a child to see.   I said goodbye to the man, who remained with his mother, and walked back to the courthouse alone.

I got back to the court room shortly before the lunch break.  As I walked in the judge nodded, raised his eyebrows and motioned for me to come forward.  As I did I said “Judge, if I had a heart that could still be broken, it would be in fifty pieces right now.”  

He looked at me with sympathy and said “I have no doubt of that, counselor, but I also have no idea what you’re referring to.”  He had about fifty other cases before him that day and the details of the one I was there on were not something he could call to mind instantly.  I refreshed his recollection and he sighed.  We both knew I’d have to surrender the apartment now, and arrangements were made, either that day or on a day a week or two later, with the landlord, a very sympathetic man who owned a small building, and his attorney, who was also pleasant and respectful.  I don’t recall the details now, the son probably got a couple of weeks to move out.  It must have been on a subsequent court appearance, because I’m quite sure he thanked me and we shook hands.

The Customer is alw…, well, can sometimes be… uh, can I get back to you?

 

 

Image

 

“How can I help you?”

“Well, first, I’d like to access the remaining 5.5 ethics credits I bought from you two years ago,” I say.

“OK, so how many do you need for this cycle?” he asks, drawing his calculator close to figure his commission.

“Before we get to that, I’d like to access the 5.5 credits I already purchased from you.  It says in the email you sent me just now ‘Credits Never Expire!’ and I haven’t been allowed to access the remainder of the 12 ethics credits I bought from you.”

“Well, that actually means per two year cycle, but I can see how you could read it that way.”

“It’s not possible to read ‘Credits Never Expire!’  any other way, it’s kind of unambiguous,” I say to my Dedicated CLE Manager.

“Well, in the future it will be specified more clearly what is meant, they’re going to make that more clear…”

“‘Credits Never Expire!’ with an exclamation point and the word ‘never’ in bold, they’re going to explain what that actually means?” I clarify, bitchily, “if I log on and am informed that the remaining credits I purchased, the ones that never expire, are not available to me, you would have to call that false advertising, wouldn’t you?”

At this point he realizes he’s talking to some disgruntled smart ass lawyer who will insist on the supposed plain meaning of the advertising claim that appears, in this guy’s stilted reading, not to be true.  False advertising is such a harsh thing to accuse somebody of.   Untruthful, or inartfully drafted advertising is not lying, per se, or if it is, why is that my problem?  I don’t write the copy.  I only get paid when I sell these credits to these lawyers forced to take these courses every two years.  What’s he going to argue about next?  Riveting Course Content!? These wildly entertaining lectures on the mechanics of legal work are not riveting enough for him?  Give me a fucking break.

“Let me get back to you,” he says.  “Give me five minutes to get this straightened out.”  I know I should have better things to do, and many larger fish to fry at the moment, as another CLE speaker drones on in another window on this computer I’m pecking at, but I can’t help but notice that promise was made more than twenty-five minutes ago and the clock is creeping toward 5 pm on a Friday.  I wonder idly what it is that he is straightening out.

“So strict!” they are thinking, “you are so STRICT!!!  You really should get a life and be happier, it’s not possible to be healthy being so strict!”

I call back, am asked my name, when I give my name I’m told my Dedicated CLE Manager is assisting another customer and this friendly fellow walks me through the log-in and assures me that my 5.5 credits have been restored.  I can’t see them until I try to use them, he tells me, but my account at least is not showing up the way it did when last I checked.  Thanks all around and I get on to other things.  A moment later the phone rings.  My Dedicated CLE Manager, apparently having asked his colleague “did the asshole sound mad?”   He got the all clear, we had a pleasant 20 second chat, told each other to take care and on with the rest of today’s fun already in progress.

“So strict!” they are thinking, “you are so STRICT!!!  You really should get a life and be happier, it’s not possible to be healthy being so strict!”

Dream

Remembering more dreams lately, a flurry of them in recent nights, as my imagination seemingly tries to recharge itself in the face of objectively dispiriting circumstances that call for heroic feats of imagining.  

At the end of last night’s I was, for the first time in years, back in that phantom second apartment of mine, the large space connected to my own cramped apartment where I stumble from time to time, wondering that I never use those rooms.   In the bathroom of the second apartment there was a dark blur of movement and a rustle behind the towel hanging on the rack.  It was a brown cat, at first afraid and then reassured by my quiet and calmness.  I kneeled and it came over, affectionate.  Petted the cat as I thought of the unused resources in my life and the sometimes terrible burden of our personal histories.

History can, and often does, repeat itself, but it is a mistake to feel that parallels between things happening now and things that happened in the past make the same outcome inevitable.  Dream and continue to breathe, sleep, eat well and exercise, only time will tell.

Cultivate Mindful Empathy

I urge myself today– take a calligraphy pen and write it again, as handsomely and lovingly as you can:  cultivate mindful empathy.

Though it’s difficult, particularly when feeling dispirited and abandoned by friends and family alike: remember to be aware of the troubles of others and not to minimize them.   Remember to be sensitive to what others are suffering, even when it may seem senseless to you.  Yesterday a friend, thinking of people who mistreated him decades ago, expressed understandable thoughts of revenge.   As one of the most remarkable people I’ve met, the late, great Fran MacDonald, often said, to great effect: “I understand.”  

Think about the power of that simple response:  I understand.  I hear you, I feel what you’re saying, I have digested the import to you.   On the other hand, it may have been Fran’s way of gently telling me to shut up whenever I complained, which was often.  

A talent for complaint, a genius for it, really, runs in my family.  It just comes naturally to some people.  “You’d complain if you were hung with a new rope,” my father observed to his only son more than once.

Just the other day, in the context of complaining about the many weaknesses of the so-called Affordable Care Act,  I compared our brilliant president’s many laudable speeches with his many less laudable actions, to the great annoyance of a friend who thinks Obama is a great man.  The president has spoken eloquently about the need for a transparent government while invoking the 1917 Espionage Act to intimidate leakers and maintaining an administration more opaque, less accessible to journalists and seekers of information under the Freedom of Information Act, than even the secretive Cheney’s administration was.  Net neutrality, equal access to all websites, at equal speed, is something the president has often correctly called a cornerstone of democracy.  He has pledged over and over to defend it, his ominous appointments to the board that will decide who can sell what at which internet speed and service notwithstanding.  His first official act as president was symbolically closing Guantanamo Bay prison, showing that his heart is in the right place; never mind the devilish details of the many uncharged prisoners, detained now for more than a decade, that we are force feeding there as they try to starve themselves to death.  A commitment to renewable energy, laudable, and new records for petro-fuel extraction quietly applauded by the oil companies.   Add the boom The Wall Street Journal crowed about: pumping thousands of gallons of secret, highly toxic chemical stews into the earth in order to extract trapped, and highly profitable, natural gas from deep inside the earth.  The worrisome Keystone pipeline that will transport tar sand sludge thousands of miles, from Koch Brother owned land in Canada to refineries in the American Gulf of Mexico that will extract gasoline from it, so far Obama has only approved the southern half of it for operation.    No reason, but past experience, to believe he will OK the crucial northern half of the pipeline.

By the way, I learned recently that the Koch Brothers’ father was a founding member of the John Birch Society, the outfit that contended then president Dwight D. Eisenhower was an agent of Communism.   The old reactionary is smiling in his grave at how skillfully his billionaire sons are advancing his old agenda.   Breeding will out, I suppose.

I say these critical things about our president sadly and fully realizing the virulent hatred this half-black man faces, the troubled, divided, ravished country he inherited and the additional pressure to accommodate that is placed on him, as a half-black man and our first “post-racial” president.

But I was talking about empathy a moment ago.  I can hear the haters, and I should pause to understand:  

Whoa, nothing “half” about it, dude.  We are stricter here than the good folks who made the Nuremberg Laws.  One half black equals black.  Shoot, a damn quadroon is black!  Same for an octoroon, damn it.   We American racists are strict, son, what the hell you talkin’ about “half-black”?   Did you bother taking a look at him lately?  The only half-black thing about him is his damn policies, and his embrace of virtually every policy G.W. Bush ever enacted, and that’s the only good half.  The indisputable fact is: the man’s still black.

Which puts me in mind of my friend, the fan of Obama’s, and his measured, reasonable sounding point about incrementalism.  With all the faults of Obamacare, he said, it’s a step in the right direction that was made against unprecedented, rabid opposition and something that no previous president had the courage or political will to do.  Leaving aside that it may in many ways favor the profits of private insurance companies over the needs of American medical patients, that it leaves millions of Americans without insurance, that it makes no sense compared to a public option, it is still a step, an incremental improvement over what came before.  Of course, he works for a corporation that provides his health insurance and so is not directly effected by it, but he’s read a great deal about the details and knows many things about the law that he’s sure even those suffering under it don’t know.

I gave him an example of incrementalism from history that caused him to crease his brow and agree to disagree.  After the Civil War the 14th Amendment guaranteed the rights of citizenship to all Americans, promising due process and equal protection of the laws [1].  It also granted Congress the power to pass any laws necessary to enforce its provisions against recalcitrant states, formerly in rebellion and forced by economic necessity to ratify the amendment as a condition for federal aid, that might be intent on violating these rights.  

Within a few years of the Amendment’s ratification, in the depths of a severe economic depression caused in large part by the war to preserve or abolish slavery, the Supreme Court clarified matters.  The privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States were spelled out explicitly by the wise and unappealable jurists of the nation’s high court:  the right to migrate freely from state to state, the right to freely use navigable interstate waterways and a third, equally important right of citizenship.  

The remaining privileges and immunities of American citizenship, the Court held, were the business of the States, and if the Ku Klux Klan itself ran the damned state, well, that was not the business of the federal government, unless, of course, the State was trying to abridge any of those three enumerated rights.  Case closed.  “Call me pisher,” as my grandfather used to say.

That remained the constitutional law of the land for more than 90 years, talk about incremental.  It remained so until some clever New York radical attorneys came up with a way to invoke the long slumbering century-old enforcement statute, never repealed,  to enforce the 14th Amendment, after the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman in June 1964,  down in the bowels of Mississippi.  Courageous southern judges on the federal bench ruled that the old statute could be used to bring such cases into federal court.  It has been used, literally millions of times, since, after a refreshing almost hundred year nap, to enforce the original intent of the 14th amendment. 

In that Mississippi trial, by the way, seven of the nineteen accused members of the lynch mob who murdered Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, after indictments against them were dismissed and the dismissal was overturned by the Supreme Court, eventually were convicted and sentenced to three to ten long years in prison [2].  The grinning sheriff was not convicted, though his deputy eventually served four years of his six year sentence.  Incrementalism, my man, something to be happy about — if you live to be 150 or so.

It is easy to be distracted, that’s for sure.  What is hard, and well worth doing, is cultivating mindful empathy.  It is at times very hard.  I suppose those are the times when it is most worth doing.  Today would be a good day for me to work on it.  It’s either that or jump out of my skin, leap onto my skeleton, already posed horse-like, and gallop off howling.

Come to think of it, that might be a better idea.

 

[1]  No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

[2]  On December 29 (1967), Judge Cox imposed sentences.  Roberts and Bowers got ten years, Posey and Price got six years, and the other three convicted defendants got four.  Cox said of his sentences, “They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man– I gave them all what I thought they deserved.”   source

 

Letting Go of the Dying

Four years ago today my mother died.   She had been in a deep sleep at the Hospice by the Sea (miles from the sea, but a nice place nonetheless) for almost 24 hours, sleeping through her 82nd birthday.  She eventually breathed her last and was gone.

Last night I spoke to an old friend whose mother, at 90, has been suffering from Parkinson’s Disease for many years.  She long ago lost the ability to move without pain and has been bed-ridden for the last few years.  In recent months she has virtually lost the ability to speak.  When she could still speak she would frequently tell her daughter that she wanted to die.   Of course, dying is not as easy as merely wanting to die.

“She makes her wishes pretty clear though,” my friend complained, after confirming that her mother is silent most of the time, except when crying out in pain.  It bothers her, the way her mother clenches her teeth against food and water, for example.

My friend’s sister is a doctor, she arranged for intravenous hydration and nutrition for the dying woman, as well as blood thinners and other medications to prolong the dying woman’s life.   The bags of nutrition cost $100 a day.   There has been trouble getting people to keep the port clean, very hard to find skilled nursing people who will also stay for a 12 hour shift, and overnight.  Unless one has unlimited funds, of course, which my friend and her family don’t.  So the two sisters perform most of the medical procedures.

I spent some time listening to my friend’s intense frustration with Hospice, which was reluctantly invited into the picture last week.   The social worker and nurses, as described, sound like a bunch of insensitive bureaucrat assholes.  On the other hand, they are dealing with two adults who will not honor their mother’s expressed wishes and are doing everything possible to keep her alive as long as possible.

“My nephew’s graduation is June 4,” my friend tells me wearily, and that’s one reason they want their mother to live a few weeks longer.  Not that she will be at the graduation, but it would be very inconvenient for everybody to have a funeral in the short time between now and the graduation.

On the other hand, two weeks is a lifetime of misery for a woman in chronic pain whose daughters are spending thousands of dollars to make sure she lives until at least June 5th.

“She’s so angry,” observed my friend.

I told her the story Mickey Rourke told to James Lipton.  He’d been very protective of his little brother for the kids’ entire life.  The younger brother had some deadly disease and clung to life for a long time after he should have been dead.   Rourke sat by his bed every day.  The hospice nurse called him into the kitchen.

“And I knew what she was gonna say.  She told me my brother had lived months longer than anyone she’d ever cared for with his disease and told me he was clinging to life because I wouldn’t let him go.  She said I had to tell him it was OK to go.”

“Jesus,” said Lipton, “she said that to you?”

“Yeah, so I went in and said ‘it’s OK, I love you and you can go.’”

“How long did it take him to die after that?” Lipton asked.

“About 20 seconds,” said Rourke.

She was impressed by this story.  It is an impressive story.   But she is not ready to let her mother go.

I told her the story from the beginning of Sherwin Nuland’s excellent How We Die.  I admitted to her that I’d never read much of the highly lauded book, but told her about the unforgettable opening chapter.   

Nuland, a resident, emerges from a hospital room drenched in sweat and close to hyperventilating.   An older doctor calms him and asks what happened.  Nuland described a terminally ill patient, in his nineties, who went into cardiac arrest while Nuland was making his rounds.  He’d spent twenty minutes frantically performing every heroic measure possible to bring the man back from death, but had been unsuccessful.

The older doctor reminded him that the patient was in his nineties, waiting to die from a wasting disease.   He asked Nuland what kind of favor he would have done the old man by reviving him to live a few more hours or days when his wait to die was now over.

My friend was impressed by this story too.   But she is still not ready to let her mother go.

I told her other stories, about my father’s death, and my mother’s.  About how hard it is to let someone you love go.   I told her that as they approach their deaths their final autonomy is all they have left, that it must be about their wishes, and not our wishes for them.  And how approaching death from a terminal disease often follows a pattern.  The person begins withdrawing from the world and eventually loses the desire to eat or drink and just wants to be done.

“If you expressed a wish not to eat and drink, which is one of the final signs that a person is ready to die, and you were hydrated and given nutrition against you will, you wouldn’t like it,” I pointed out.

“No,” my friend said, “I wouldn’t.”

We spoke a little longer and in the end, before wishing her strength and urging her again to get rid of the Hospice if they didn’t quickly shape up, I stated the obvious.  “You and your sister are not ready to let your mother go.”  She agreed.  I wished her a good night’s sleep and told her we’d talk soon.   She sounded grateful for the conversation in an otherwise terrifying void.

But I’m sure another box of nutrition and hydration supplies is being ordered today, as I reflect on the relentless sorrows of this world.