Category Archives: Ahimsa

I Mash Yer Fez– rewrite

There is irony that flies and irony too heavy to leave the ground.  Sometimes you can tweak the flightless variety a bit, sometimes not.  I tried and failed in my first attempt at this one a couple of days back, to the horror of more than one reader.  I will give it a more straightforward shake, lose some of the italics, try to say directly what I meant to say the first time.

I endorse gentleness and mildness, and strive to maintain these qualities above all, although it is not easy work.   Our society is violent, competitive and challenging, for one thing.   Most humans are prone to anger when mistreated or frustrated.   It is an almost irresistibly good feeling to be right, to feel justified, to prevail.  This reflex to prevail is a common cause of friction and leads to righteous anger when we feel wronged or victimized in our zero sum society.   Wars are fought, faces punched, prisons filled, lives destroyed, out of righteous anger.    

Our society’s laws, not always designed to ensure fairness, can be seen as the organized expression of this rage to be right.   Follow me here: laws are made by those with the power to institutionalize their unfair advantage, no matter how grotesque, and to enforce it by deadly state action, if necessary.  The penalty for looting after a natural disaster and making off with a bag of groceries — prison, if you’re not shot first.  The penalty for participating in, and profiting handsomely from, billion dollar financial fraud — it’s complicated.

Our land of the free and the home of the brave, the worlds’ first modern republican democracy, was for a century a land of slavery.  This history is considered ancient and is rarely discussed at any depth.   The arguments against slavery are many, well-known, have in recent times won the day. It seems beyond dispute now that slavery is evil, morally repugnant and illegal.  The single compelling argument for a century of American slavery was this:  we need them to make ourselves wealthier by having a slave economy, fuck you, stay out of our way of life.  

The bitter, bloody struggle that resulted in the abolition of American slavery was over for less than a decade before a legally sanctioned new version of The Peculiar Institution was set in place for a century by Supreme Court skullduggery and racist codes of strict segregation violently maintained by terrorism winked at under the laws of the former slave states.   The struggle for freedom for the descendants of slaves during that century cost many brave lives.  

Today many Americans feel satisfied that slavery is deep in our past, some consider us a “post racial society”, since we now have a half-black man in the White House.  Can anyone really say with a straight face that our ongoing history of racism at law and in practice has ever been seriously addressed in this country?

Slavery and racism are considered by many as elements of ancient history, and they are hot subjects that raise hackles on both sides.  Fine, then, let’s grant that American racism is all in the past, for the sake of moving on and take a look at more recent outrages at law.  

We have been, since the devastating, coordinated terrorist attacks of 9/11/01, engaged in a permanent war against terrorism, The War on Terror, a war that is used to justify many excesses including the murder of many blameless civilians in a number of countries, right now.  

Soon after the 9/11 attacks Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld  fired chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Hugh Shelton, a commander reluctant to abandon legal safeguards designed to minimize the deaths of innocent people and ensure a solid intelligence foundation before employing elite, secret black ops squads to kill suspected terrorists.   Rumsfeld replaced him with a new general who agreed with the sleek, muscular, infinitely flexible new black ops policy the Bush administration had in mind to go after al Qaeda and similar groups.

They sincerely believed that preventing the killing of innocent civilians was a meaningless consideration in an all out existential world-wide War On Terror.  Collateral damage, Rumsfeld and the Bush administration believed, is inevitable and, if kept secret, not something many Americans would get excited about.  They were correct in that calculation.  What you don’t know, you don’t want to know, even if you thought you might have needed to know it, if you know what I’m saying.

Before circumventing the letter, spirit and intent of national security and anti-torture laws and treaties, the administration hired a team of lawyers to write preemptive justifications detailing why they are legally allowed, even obliged, to not follow the laws they were willfully violating.

What makes all this intolerable for an idealist who believes, Anne Frank-like, in spite of it all, in democracy, is that these legal justifications are classified, state secrets kept from the citizens of the world’s greatest democracy.   And once these secret policies are given a fig leaf of legality and put into motion, it is almost impossible to stop them.  Our current president has stepped up the secret killings and prosecuted journalists under a 1917 anti-espionage statute carrying the death penalty to prevent the release of truths about our policies that might embolden our many enemies.

Righteous rage can be intoxicating to a maniac.  While intoxicated with what feels to him like righteous rage, spraying machine gun fire at inhuman enemies seems like a reasonable thing to do.  After that, though, the let down often comes quickly.  After a moment’s reflection the maniac is as likely to turn the gun on himself as to do anything else.  

Personally, no matter how provoked or worked up, I would err on the side of pausing to take a few breaths before capitulating to rage and smashing someone’s fez.  

Unless under direct physical threat, being gentle, calm and soft-spoken is usually much more productive than being righteously enraged, agitated, loud, and ready for justifiable violence.  

Of course, I know where I live and I fully realize how idiotic what I’m saying sounds.  Even if I’m totally right.

 

On the other hand — I smash yer fez

[warning:  this post contains violent, heavy handed irony which does not always work in written form.  In fact, it didn’t fare much better in an out loud reading, where it caused a tearful plea to please stop reading it (right before the too late redeeming ending, too).  Abhorring slavery, assassination, lynching, maniacal use of firearms, it uses violent language to try to show the amount of righteous rage violence unleashes, but it is a dangerous game not to be played lightly, as I have attempted to play it here.   I regret any upset this post may cause, even as I leave it here, for whatever redeeming social value it might have.  A less visceral, more humane version is here if you prefer your points made less brutally.]

 

And, with accursed French nuance, I confusingly add that, naturally, it also feels almost irresistibly good to be righteously outraged, you fucking fuck!  

What are the laws, after all, but the organized expression of this rage to be right?   They are made by those with the power to institutionalize their unfair advantage, no matter how grotesque, and to enforce it by deadly state action, if necessary.  Slaves?  We need them to make ourselves wealthier, fuck you.  Free the slaves?  Fuck you, get a rope, we’ll show you how we deal with fucks like you.  Oh, go ahead and call the damn sheriff, he can hold the end of the damn rope we hang you from, Mr. All Men Are Created Equal Pantload, sir. 

Or even better, and a more recent example– Rumsfeld, after 9/11, facing a reluctant chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Shelton so concerned with legal safeguards for protecting the innocent and due process when using elite, secret black ops squads to kill foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism.  “You’re fired, general,” said the jaunty Secretary of Defense, hiring a new guy who agreed that all terrorists and potential terrorists, everywhere on earth, must be hunted down and killed and the more secretively, the better. Any collateral damage?  Also secret.  State secret.  Classified.  Need to know. Don’t ask, we kill you.

The funny thing, if it is funny, is that even those circumventing the letter, spirit and intent of even the most high minded laws, or especially those, will hire the best lawyers in the world to write a preemptive justification for why they are legally allowed, even obliged, to not follow the law that they are willfully violating.

Where can we find these legal justifications, we citizen members of the general public of the world’s greatest democracy?  Top secret, bitches.  We have a 1917 anti-espionage statute carrying the death penalty, you want to be charged and prosecuted under that deadly law, journalist bitches?   I don’t think so!  You want to act like the truth doesn’t embolden our enemies?  Get the rope!

Righteous rage feels good for a second, while you are spraying machine gun fire and screaming at the top of your lungs at inhuman enemies, real or imagined.  After that, though, if you reflect for a moment, you’re as likely to turn the gun on yourself as to do anything else.  I would err on the side of pausing to take a few breaths before capitulating to rage and smashing your fucking fez.  

I would argue, if I was an arguing fellow, that, when not under direct physical threat, being gentle, calm and soft-spoken is usually much more productive than being righteously enraged, agitated, loud, and ready for justifiable violence.

Of course, that’s just me, fucking Ahimsa-Boy.  What the hell do I know?

 

Remain soft-spoken and forgiving

Of course, it’s natural to want to defend yourself when you are in the right. It’s particularly hard to resist making your case in our competitive society, where it is an applauded tic to lustily plead one’s cause in a no holds barred, zero-sum game of winner take all.   In fact, if you fail to make your case, you not only lose, you’re a loser.  If the game is zero-sum, as this one here is, losing is a big deal.  If you lose you do not survive, except as a grim cautionary tale.   Yet, consider:

…if you could remain quiet, even though reason was completely on your side, even though you had every right to be be angry and nobody with a heart could fault you for being mad as hell — if you could speak softly and not argue your case, imagine the different outcome, the good will and friendship that could possibly be preserved?    You’d still be seen as a loser, of course, but the quiet victory over the reflex to self-righteousness would be yours and no harm would be done by your justified venting.  Good might possibly result from your kind example, for it feels very good to be forgiven.  Remaining soft-spoken and forgiving means that you’ve gone past the need to prevail, be right, win, convince, justify or rationalize anything.  Remaining soft-spoken and forgiving is the work of a lifetime, it would appear. 

 

                                                                 ii

My mind leaps sideways, on this 76th Anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night when the proverbial gloves came off in Nazi Germany and Jews were finally starting to be killed outright, and the first 30,000 rounded up and sent to prison camps, in a night of national rioting against the Jews, to the outskirts of Vishnevetz, in the Ukraine, not far from Khmelnystkyi, on a particular August day in 1943.   Nazi motherfuckers, working with local Ukrainian red-neck motherfuckers, marched the Jews out of the hideous Vishnevetz ghetto in orderly fashion, to the banging of drums.  

The Jews of Vishnevetz and the surrounding areas had been rounded up into the ghetto only a few months earlier. The Jews had been required to finish this work of creating the ghetto boundaries and kissing their chains in three days or else my grandmother’s brother, (or possibly her uncle or father– there’s no one left to ask)  who was one of the two Jewish hostages being held by the Gestapo, would be executed.  My grandfather’s father’s house had been designated as the Eastern edge of the fenced ghetto, and so it became.  The work was done on time and my grandmother’s loved one presumably released, or maybe shot by the Germans just for laughs.   Many Jews had already died in Vishnevetz under Nazi occupation, several summarily shot, others starved to death or dead of disease, or, one suspects, suicide.  Most of the survivors, always hungry, and, if sick, soon dead, lived the half-lives of the living dead, expecting their murder at any moment.

To the edge of the ravine, then, the Ukrainians have been preparing it for you all day.  All rocks and roots removed, the dirt combed nicely back from the hillside.  A soft bed of dirt, freshly turned, with that fresh earth smell. Perfect.  OK, clothes in neat piles, please.  You can leave your underwear on, it’s OK.  First group of Jews, please.  Yes, right this way.  OK, face to the left, that’s right, excellent, now slide down a few feet, there are a few more people here on the side who could fit in.  Yes, that’s good, well-done.  OK, lie down, it will all be over in a second.  A line of Ukrainians steps forward and shoots each Jew once in the head.  They then scramble over the bodies, straightening limbs and covering the freshly killed bodies with a fresh layer of dirt.  The drumming continues, to cover the sounds of the shots, the screaming, the wailing.  It’s like a parade for the Ukrainian onlookers, already starting to gather up the clothes to sell.

OK, next group!  Thank you all for waiting, next group, this way please, come on, step up, please!  The Jews in their underwear stumble forward into the ravine, walking sideways in the narrow row to be lined up behind the barely buried layer of dead in front of them.  Thank you all for waiting. OK, here we go, lie down, please.  Make yourselves comfortable, and goodbye.  The Ukrainians step forward, pap-pap-PAP! and then they are nimbly dancing over the dead bodies, straightening limbs, neatening the stacks.  Their wives, meanwhile, have finished tying into huge bundles the first of the murdered Jews’ best clothes, which the Jews had been urged to wear for their relocation.  Relocation from life to death, OK, we lied just to get you to wear your good clothes and all remaining jewelry.  We’re fucking Nazis, what do you want?   Next group, please.

 

       iii

This is, obviously, not what I started out to write when I chose the title remain soft-spoken and forgiving.   The forgotten slaughter at Vishnevetz is nothing to remain soft-spoken and forgiving about– it is about the worst example I could find, although I did not find it so much as it found me, clearly.  It is only an example of something that burns the soul, presses hard against any vow to remain soft-spoken, forgiving, decent, human and kind.   It cries out loud for a different response.

When someone comes to kill you, if it is within your power, do not let them kill you. Nazis, although they take care to arrange things to make resistance as difficult as possible, must be resisted (not that the persecuted Jews of the Ukraine were in any position to resist).  Of course, this leads to the famous problem of specific cases, murderous laws like “Stand Your Ground” and things like that.  The clear right to avoid your own murder is an extreme case of having reason on your side, soft-speaking and gentility aside.

On the other hand, an in extremis situation like the grotesque events in that Vishnevetz ravine that August 1943 day is often used by philosophers to illustrate and test their points.   If a Vishevetz Jew could remain soft-spoken and forgiving… a far better universal moral principle than an unslakable thirst for vengeance.  The sickening slaughter does provide a good snapshot of how difficult it is not to rage sometimes, with reason screaming on your side.

I will try this post again with a better example, a smaller scale, more personal example having nothing to do with the mass murder of my family and many other families.  Right now, I’m still unaccountably lingering by the edge of that long-forgotten ravine full of the bones of my ancestors.

Scoring Political Points

A friend who sits far to the right of me on the political spectrum (as so many of our fellow Americans seem to) sent me an adorable short animation yesterday she thought I’d enjoy, even though it blames the poor for being lazy and greedy and shows how the hard-working wealthy are persecuted and exploited by the progressive tax system.  You can watch that delightful proof of the case here.

Although I have many things I need to get myself do today, every day, and am languishing at the moment, on many levels barely functioning, even though Sekhnet correctly growled when I mentioned it, I had to send this response to my friend.  Part of my effort to preserve our friendship and  to ward off future emails like the one she thought I’d like, the oversimplified and therefore irrefutable cartoon about the unfairness of a progressive tax system (or a progressive anything else, I suppose) in a magical world where everyone is born with the identical chance to prosper, if only they’ll stop being born in toxic slums and get a decent home to grow up in so they can embrace hard work and smart investment.

I wrote to my friend:

The problem with this kind of hypothetical is that it sets up an artificial, conveniently over-simplified example that can rarely be seen in real life to “prove” a proposition about the complicated real world.   If the set-up in this cartoon was the case in even one out of 100 cases it would be a lot.   
 
It sets up a straw man (the demanding lazy brother happy not to work, spending every penny and feeling righteously entitled to his rich brother’s forced charity) on an absolutely even playing field, excluding all inconvenient, complicating facts, to stand in for all the parasites, you know the ones– they are out screaming every time a policeman enforces the law and one of their illegitimate kids die, and those with guilty consciences who don’t believe the police always act with justification, even when the person they kill isn’t shown to have posed a lethal threat — and the wealthy, every one of whom, as we all know, got their money from their hard work and smart investing.  The wealthy who are persecuted and exploited by parasites and hated and envied for their every hard-earned advantage.
 
It always surprises me when, because you agree with the conclusion of some political piece, you send it thinking I will find it convincing.   I try to remain mild, and Sekhnet curses me for spending any time at all responding to these things whenever I mention it to her, but I really do find it amazing that you can’t see these things for the preaching to the choir they are.  And that they are also provocative (the kid in Missouri bashed the cop/racing car driver’s face in before the cop shot him to death, Obama lost the war in Iraq after Bush won it, etc.) especially when they turn out to not be true.
 
And, not to belabor the point, but you agreed not to send me these political things.  
 
Love,
[name withheld by request]

Formula for Fighting Dread

Easy to forget when discouraged, and annoying to be reminded of when filled with dread:  

Each thing you dread, that you manage to do, will remind you that the dread is almost always worse than the actual doing of the thing you dread. Often, doing the thing you dread turns out to be nothing at all.

Can you feel the weight of dread lift off you?

Not in advance, of course not, it’s unimaginable.  But afterwards, probably so.

 

Try Again Tomorrow

A force stronger than you are stays your hand as you reach for the tiny mobile phone.  The phone is an anvil you are powerless to lift.  It’s OK if you could not do it today.  Try again tomorrow.

Tomorrow will be a little different from today, maybe the sun will be out, instead of a cancer grey sky.  You never know.  You can try again tomorrow.

You keep your own counsel instead of calling others who will ask you questions you don’t really want to deal with.  Ideas off the top of other people’s heads won’t help, and that’s basically what anyone has for something you’ve been studying hard.  You have to compose your thoughts to put things across in the way they need to be put across.  Not easy work, it’s OK to try again tomorrow.

Muhammad Ali talked about fighting for the heavy weight crown a third time.  He remains the only heavy weight to  regain the crown twice (for a total of three times).  In the days leading up the fight Ali reflected that everybody loses.  We lose our mothers,  friends, our fathers.  Some lose legs, or arms.  But the real fighter, Ali said, is not afraid to lose.  He keeps on fighting.  If you cannot fight today, rest, train, try again tomorrow.

I mention Ali, a man I admire, not because I am a fan of violent sport.  When I was a kid Ali was a symbol and an inspiration, not just to me, but to young and old all over the world.  Whether he said the memorable  “no Viet Cong ever called me a nigger”  or not, the world remembers he had no quarrel with little brown people ten thousand miles away, had no intention of going over to Southeast Asia to kill poor people he had no quarrel with.[1]

I’ve got no quarrel with anyone I know.   I am tired as hell, and it is time to rest, gather my forces and peacefully continue my conquest of the world.  Tomorrow, hopefully, if you know what I’m sayin’.

 

[1]   No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger. (Sometimes quoted as “No Viet Cong ever called me a nigger.”)

  • Ali biographer Thomas Hauser searched extensively to verify this popular quote’s validity, but found no evidence of Ali actually saying it or anything resembling it, as documented inNice Guys Finish Seventh : False Phrases, Spurious Sayings, and Familiar Misquotations (1993) by Ralph Keyes
  •  What Muhammad Ali actually said was “My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father… Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.” as shown on [2] at 0:15 mark.

for source see misattributed box toward bottom of page

Trying to Get the Bigger Picture

If you are observant, it is not hard to familiarize yourself with the monsters that stalk those closest to you.  If we know people well we can follow these battles in detail, even place bets on the next turn with pretty good confidence.   These predictable turns are far easier to observe in others’ lives than in our own, for sure.  For one thing, most of us are masters of rationalizing our own actions, if not always having useful  insight into the things we do.   People don’t do things without a good reason, we almost always believe we are doing the right thing as justly as we can.  It’s much easier to see cause and effect in the lives of friends since we are not always as compelled as they are by what motivates them.   I think of this as I make my way through deep, cold water lately, trying to keep my eye on the bigger picture.

I knew a guy who was a living poster for ‘repetition compulsion’– he relived the same traumatic story over and over again with a new cast each time.   The story became so familiar to me, the build-up, the second act and the terrible betrayal of the third act, and so consistent, that eventually I’d interrupt these long, detailed re-tellings (this was toward the end of our friendship) to predict precisely what happened next.  I was always right, which was infuriating, but it was like taking a test I’d taken many times, answers exactly the same, coming instantly, no need for scrap paper.  It became harder and harder to resist blurting them out.  Which, of course, was maddening to someone caught in an endlessly replayed bad dream with a wise-ass close friend not even letting him tell the goddamned story anymore.

There are probably freelancers who truly relish their freedom, are delighted on a day they can relax and play their banjo all day instead of hunkering over a day job, but most freelancers I know live with the anxiety of not earning a living anymore.  No work calls in a few days is the long-dreaded harbinger of slow starvation, no matter that the yearly average workload and income have been constant for some time.   A black mood descends after a week when the phone doesn’t ring.  The feeling of impending disaster can be difficult to overcome.  With practice they may get better at having shorter and shorter spells of despair, but it’s hard to hear their bleak predictions without reminding them, lamely, of the last time they said the same things, right before that long, dizzying spell of work that made them schedule a vacation.  They are convinced each time that this time the work really has run dry, that it’s all over.  It feels like near folly to remind them of their predictions in every previous situation that has worked out fine.  Their black mood will convince them that this situation is different, the final reckoning, where the bottom falls out of their livelihood for good.

People with well-paid, important, fulfilling jobs may find themselves tormented to one extent or another after they leave work, when there is nothing worth watching on the screen, no good book at hand, when music just isn’t what they want.   They may be prone to argue, pick fights, become listless, drink too much, overeat.  It goes as well for people with shit jobs, tormented with too much time on their hands and events and personalities aligned to make a difficult situation impossible.  It goes famously for the unemployed, those with the most free time and the least money to spend diverting themselves and staying out of trouble.  There is something to be said for keeping yourself busy, it distracts a person from the things that might devour a soul, given enough hours every day to gnaw.  Soul sucking lurks in any life where it is prone to lurk, and can sweep in on a moment’s notice, slurp lustily for as long as time allows.

Each of us carries our own burdens, sensitivities, hurts, angers and fears.  The better we know people the more we will be able to see these at work.   The more stress people are under, the more easily we can see these things pulsing under the skin.  In the world viewed under stress we are skittering around on the ocean floor, surrounded by countless wily and dangerous predators.  We connect momentarily to other skittering creatures, shuddering together against the inevitable, but there is little we can do and a bad end is in store for each of us.  We know it with absolute certainty, and there is not a damned thing we can do about it.  Nor much we can do for the others we care about, particularly as we are being taken.

In our darkest moments we may still be aware of a world of sunshine, though it seems remote and unreachable.  It appears as a realm of mere theory, this place where we laugh, make music, make love, float on perfect water under the ideal sky.  This perspective can’t always be reached alone, sad to say, nor is being content merely a habit of good character.  I think idly how much I wish someone had been present to reach Robin Williams, David Foster Wallace, many other bright examples of the human spirit, right before that terrible, last hurried moment before the belt goes quickly around the neck and everything is thrown into a frantic desperate jerk, to end the torment.   

I try to cultivate empathy as deliberately as I am able these days.  I try to listen more, talk less.  The more I take in, the better I understand how to be gentle with other people’s feelings, especially the harder ones.  I strive to be an example of the change I’d like to see in the world, no matter that it may seem foolish.   Giving in to despair unconditionally is one feeling I find impossible to truly wrap my head and heart around, no matter how affectionately fucking despair may nuzzle and paw at me sometimes.

 

Self-love and avoiding human toxicity

In a poisoned world a baby must learn what to avoid in order to survive.  Avoiding what will kill you is as important as acquiring what nourishes you.  The adults around can help or hinder that learning, or, more commonly, do both.

“You’re seven years old, for Christ’s sake, it’s time to stop acting like a chid. Start acting like a man.  I can’t stand that whining.  Man up, for fuck’s sake.”   There’s a clue for a bright young kid that something in this relationship should be avoided, or at least discounted.  A more subtle clue, perhaps, than several grunting lashes across the child’s face, but a strong clue anyway.  

“You’ll be whining to some shrink about how your parents ruined your life,” he predicted through the door, locking the latch on the outside of the punishment closet.  “‘It was all my parents’ fault‘,” he said raising his voice an octave into a sniveling whine.  “You keep wailing and see if you get out of there today” said dad. 

Humans are not primarily rational actors.  We like to think we are, but the things that drive us are largely irrational.   Fear drives us, rational or not, it is a powerful mover of people and nations.  Fear’s first cousin, Anger, drives us to do irrational things with an urgent sense of righteousness.  Other emotions not amenable to any sort of logical review are frequently at play in human affairs.

Driving to a friend’s funeral on a busy interstate in Connecticut in January, hours ahead of schedule, the driver plunged across a white lane to enter the HOV lane.  The passenger behind the driver noticed we were accelerating past 80 to enter the HOV lane.  The white lane turned out to be white because it was a thin layer of snow over a five mile long sheet of ice.   Invisible under the ice was the herringboned “do not cross” lane between the traffic, doing close to 80 on a dry highway, and the cars in the HOV lane moving slightly faster than that.  When we hit the ice the car skidded, swung, did a 360.  It is a miracle that the driver was able to pull out of the skid, do another donut among three lanes of speeding traffic, and get us safely to the far shoulder.  

A second equally gigantic miracle: that none of the drivers catapulting along were looking at their smartphones, GPS maps, video screens or other glowing devices instead of directly at the road ahead of them during those perilous seconds.  Our survival was miraculous, and I wrote about it at the time, and when we got to Boston I praised the driver over and over for saving our lives, when, of course, (though it didn’t dawn on me til later), her unthinking idiot move had put us in mortal danger to begin with.  She knew it, though, and winced every time I recounted the story, thanked her for saving us.  She asked me not to talk about it any more.  

Turned out her father, invariably described as a dangerous maniac, had taught her sister and her, every icy weekend during their teen years, how to master an out of control car skidding wildly on ice.  This exercise was done in frozen parking lots in New Jersey until both of the young drivers mastered it.  Hearing this, the only explanation for our survival, I said “Hail Murray!”  I owe my life to Murray and will always be grateful.

The other day, offered a ride home by the husband of this same driver, our mutual friend jocularly asked who was driving.   The driver who’d performed the miracle on ice flashed angry, betrayed eyes at me and hissed that I had apparently told everybody the story.  I smiled, pointed to heaven and said “Hail Murray!  God bless Murray!”  I later thought of how difficult it would have been, for anyone, when asked about the funeral, to omit the dramatic story of how we had nearly died on the way there, but for the divine intervention of the dangerous Murray who’d prepared his daughter to perform the miracle that saved us.

It put me in mind of my brother-in-law, to whom I’d innocently loaned my life savings after he lost a well-paying  job for a fraud that wasn’t his fault, the first of several identical cases over the next thirty years.  This was before I learned that this highly intelligent, funny man was also insane.  After spending all the money I’d loaned him he announced that he couldn’t pay me back for a long time, he owed many people money and he had to pay them back first.  My father was among his creditors, my money had gone, in part, to repaying part of my father’s loan to this con man.  

“Don’t tell your father,” he told me sternly, and then, when I expressed disbelief that he would have the gall to demand this, he made the case that I was a whiner who couldn’t keep a confidence.   Which put me in mind of the sexually depraved priest, righteously instructing the boy that God would be very angry at the boy if he told anybody what the priest, a man of God, had caused the boy to do.  

The world is strewn with booby traps, thin ice over a toxic lake waiting to dissolve your bones.  It is the work of many years to learn to navigate these dangers, unless we have an excellent teacher, like Murray was to his daughters in the realm of driving on ice.  Murray, clearly, did other things to make things much more difficult for his daughters.  But in that respect, teaching them to come out of a skid on an icy road, “hail Murray!” I say, and thank God for his excellent, life-saving instruction.

Murray, of course, also instilled that reflex to anger, which flashed in his daughter’s eyes at the betrayal of someone who would cavalierly reveal such embarrassingly personal details to everyone.  “You can’t keep a secret!” the eyes screamed, as righteous as a priest betrayed by a seductive young parishioner.  

My commitment to mildness dictates that I do not blast back, tell this overworked, striving person on multiple treadmills that she’s ridiculous to express anger at something anyone would have done, chide her for her many promises unkept, important emails unread, her half dozen soft and harder betrayals.  

“You should have told her,” insisted Sekhnet, thinking about a specific, inexcusable promise unkept, even after I pointed out that she was literally in the hallway outside the apartment when this five second exchange took place.  Avoiding toxic exchanges is as important as learning which frozen lakes not to venture out on to.   Learning, learning all the time, the best we can do in this world of a million designer poisons.  It is far better than giving in to righteous rage and setting traps for those who have done us wrong.