Category Archives: Ahimsa

What am I trying to do?

I am looking for the kids the system is about to give up on, future public enemy types about to turn their back on a world that despises them.  In a way, they are making the only dignified move available to them by saying “fuck this” and walking away from a system practically designed to make them drop out.   The schools were not made for children who come from endless generations of poverty, certainly not now that there are no decent paying factory jobs left in America.  

Today smart entrepreneurs are using the failure of the public school system, and the drying up of real economic opportunity for millions born poor, to build their own alternative schools, making nice money as they shine a false light on what needs to be done, building small, elite, for-profit  schools, in public buildings, funded by vouchers that come out of the public school budget, instead of working to fix our larger problem– although there is a lot of good work that desperately needs to be done well in our society, there is nothing real for most poor children to aspire to in our kinder, gentler, more global nation.  

The public schools are built on the old factory model and while there are many good people working very hard in the system, it is set up to make many kids tune out and quit, especially the children of the poor, children who have the most reason to be discouraged when they start to fall behind.   These are the kids I’m looking for, trying to reach before they are beyond reach.

“What the hell are you trying to do that for?” virtually everyone asks, and there is nothing fake about how mystified they are.  I have no house, no car, I wear the same clothes I’ve had for years, same winter jacket, new boots once a year.  I don’t care about eating in nice restaurants or going to beautiful vacation spots where poor people will treat me like a king.  I don’t even care about having a really nice guitar, though I play well enough to have one.  I don’t say this out of any sense of virtue, I just truly don’t care very much for these things.  What I care about is becoming the change I want to see in the world– a mild, effective man, nurturing creativity instead of my own bitterness.

“What do you care for?” a caring friend asks, and I tell the story of the kid on the beach. A story I heard years ago at a conference for public school teachers I attended on a half day.  The kids were home, or running in the street, and the teachers were in a convention center, listening to a great speaker inspire us to be the best teachers we could be.

“So it’s low tide, and there are about a million star fish drying out on the rocks on the beach, as far as the eye can see.  And a little boy is bending down and picking up half dead starfish and flinging them back into the water.  ‘What are you doing?’ asks a man in a mildly derisive tone, ‘what difference does it make if you throw a few back?  Do you think you can save them all?  Look, there are millions, you can’t save all of them. What difference could it possibly make if you throw a few back?’  And the kid picks up a star fish and heaves it back into the ocean– ‘it makes a big difference for that one’ he says to the crusty old bastard.”

Only, of course, the man talking to the kid was the voice of reason, the voice of the world, and the inspirational speaker didn’t speak of the mercilessly realistic fuck as a crusty old bastard.  The speaker was probably being paid very well to talk to that huge room full of tired teachers, hell, most of the teachers were getting a hundred maybe two hundred dollars just to sit in that room for half a day, listening to this great speech.  I heard it more than twenty years ago, when I was an idealistic third grade teacher in Harlem, and it still resonates, sings.  It’s a bell of clarity, really.

It Should Be Noted

When delivering a low blow, timing is everything.

You can greatly enhance the effect by acting like nothing happened when the other person cries out.  If the person makes a scene, tell him to stop whining.

The opposite is also true:  I once almost took out an eye of my friends’ four-year old, horsing around at the dinner table.  I hoisted him into the air, from a seated position, and he howled in delight and squirmed in the air, until I lost my grip on him, he went eyeball first into the back of the wooden chair and began howling in agony.  

I was immediately on the verge of tears myself, as I leaned anxiously over him, apologizing profusely.   He bawled for a moment, then saw my distress and I watched him pull himself together, rather quickly.   He stopped crying and told me he was OK.  He was reassuring me.

Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen, and one of the most beautiful.

Rage on the rise?

I don’t know if it’s just me, or if the level of rage around us has increased dramatically.  I know why my father was in a rage much of the time, his mother whipped him in the face with a heavy cord from the time he could stand.   Anyone would be subject to rage with that kind of upsetting start.  I had some insight into my mother’s anger, though she’d get angry when I’d try to be sympathetic about it and I learned to change the subject, on a dime, when she got that look on her face.   My sister’s anger is not hard to figure out. But the most perplexing thing is the amount of anger simmering, some behind smiles and the best of intentions, in people around me, in the world at large.

A few weeks ago a friend set a misunderstanding into motion for seemingly inexplicable reasons.   He later had an insight — he was provoking a fight between his two older brothers by his actions.   His brothers were each over a thousand miles away, so others were cast as gladiators.   He cast me in the role of the tougher of his two brothers, I imagine.   I had a friend years ago who bizarrely mistook me for his father, unbeknownst to me, and was enraged, for years, apparently, that I never praised his teaching.   Many of us seem to spend a good deal of our lives playing out scenarios with surrogates standing in for dead abusive parents, absent abusive siblings.

I blame nobody for being enraged in a world like the one we live in.  People are livid all over the place.  Look at the highways in Florida, general incivility, the unsportsmanlike behavior of trash talking millionaires on TV, the wars raging on several continents, the indifference to the death and torture of innocents done in our name, the bitter zero-sum impasse in our government, the continued war against the weak while the richest grow much, much richer as the world becomes more and more crowded, warm, polluted.   You may have a nice group of friends, a supportive community, a sanctuary from the violence and hatred afoot everywhere these days, but the murderous rancor in the papers every day is hard to ignore.   A wit, Harry Shearer, tweeted today:  On FTN, Colin Powell calls Assad a “pathological liar”. I clearly remember when Assad assured the UN that Iraq had mobile bioweapons vans.

Of course, there were no mobile biological weapons vans in Iraq, nor any other signs of a nuclear weapons program, no ties to the 18 or so Saudis who were the suicide pilots on 9/11, but, for some reason, a lot of death was rained down on Iraq, in my name and yours — countless Iraqis and thousands of dead, maimed and permanently disabled American veterans of a war as senseless, and brutally patriotic, as World War One.   The wartime president who ordered the pre-emptive attack on Iraq recently told a group of Shock and Awe veterans with prosthetic limbs that he deeply appreciated their sacrifices and that he’d tried diplomacy to avoid going to war with Saddam Hussein.   

Maybe it’s true we can do little to change the big things.  Change starts with ourselves.  I have to be thankful that I’m able to remain mostly mild, instead of flying into rages.   Hard work, and good work, and I’m glad and grateful to be doing it.  Maybe it’s true the only thing we should focus on is taking care of the people in our lives, being kind, and helping, and always giving the benefit of the doubt to our friends, until they prove us wrong. 

It isn’t easy to be consistently kind and empathetic when things are difficult.   It’s hard to be patient when events press in on us, or to be mild when people treat us badly.   Kindness and mildness are more important than most people know.   Like hope, they are the things that remind us that life is good, they make an unbearable situation worth enduring.    

A friend wrote recently of a yoga tale in which the snake, badly beaten, complains to his friend the guru, who finds him bloody in the road, that the guru told him not to strike back.  “Christ,” says the guru, “I said don’t bite. I didn’t tell you not to hiss!”

Sometimes it is necessary to hiss, I suppose.  But when confronted with things we can recognize as expressions of generalized hostility, my approach nowadays is to walk away, remain silent, there is no last word to be had worth the letters it takes to spell it.  There is usually little to be gained by talking to people who will argue to the death that you are nuts to be hurt by things that were not intended to cause harm.

My elbow that accidentally broke your nose?   What is mysterious about “accidentally”, asshole?

We get variations on that from angry people sometimes and experience teaches that the best response is to seek medical attention and stay out of harm’s way in future.  You will not win any arguments with people like that.

Nor is there any point in trying to.

I began writing this musing over whether people who were the victims of angry people when young are attracted to each other.  The little brother who was sucker punched by his older brothers, the middle sister who never got a dollar, nor any credit, from her parents, the older brother who bore the brunt of his mother’s rage and her random slaps across his face, the little sister terrorized by her insane bully brother.   There may be a magnetic force at work, drawing a certain type together.  I hate to think that is so, but it’s hard to imagine that everyone out there is the victim of some kind of crime against them when they were a child.

On the other hand, take a look at the world we live in.  Sadly, you will not have to look very far.

Creativity

You may not consider creativity very important, but think of a world without it.  No music, comedy, repartee, great food, no movies, books or even articles, no television worth watching, no mischief, nothing worth laughing at, no cause for that deep cry that is lurking always.

Creativity is mandated by educational bureaucrats nowadays as a possible remedy for the torpor of failing school children poised to leave schools in record numbers.  We now hear terms like “critical thinking”, “higher order thinking” and “problem-solving” bandied by these dead souls.  All of these involve creativity– you have to imagine possibilities that are not in front of you and then imagine where those possibilities will lead.

The kind of creativity I love involves a certain amount of spontaneity.  It is play.  John Cleese captures a great deal about the conditions necessary for it here.  The five factors he talks about are:  place, time, time, confidence and humor.   If you are too serious your fingers are stiff, you will not play fluidly unless you surrender to the joyfulness of playing.  Singers often smile as they sing, it helps to relax the face and vocal chords.

For young children, who are naturally creative when given the slightest chance to be,  I’ve reduced the formula to this:

Have fun and help each other.

You can’t have fun if people are bothering you.  Don’t bother anyone.  If you can’t help, don’t hurt.

When it’s time to be quiet, be quiet for a minute or two.

Cleese locates the creativity, you need a space to do it.  How about a room filled with art materials and a camera stand to shoot frames?  With a recorder to make soundtracks and a computer to assemble the animations.

Cleese discusses the importance of a time set aside, a time with a beginning and an end, ideally about two hours later.   He points out that it takes up to a half hour to leave the pressures of life outside and begin to play.  With luck you will play 90 minutes or so.  Then play must end, as play always does, because it doesn’t feel like play forever.   This is exactly what happens in the animation workshop.  For ninety minutes the kids have all the time in the world.

The other aspect of time is patience, taking your time, having a block of time you can use for play or to dream up ideas for play.  You cannot be creative while watching the clock, just like you can’t productively meditate keeping an eye on time.  You have to let things develop in their time, comfortable with not much happening sometimes.  Asked what she liked best about the workshop, the Idea Girl said “it gives you plenty of time”.    

Confidence is necessary, because if you think you can’t dance, or sing, or draw, or animate, you probably won’t be able to.   What gives a person confidence?  Another one smiling and giving a thumbs up when the idea is presented.   What takes away confidence?  A logical asshole positing failure as a real possibility at every stage of an undertaking.  There is no shortage of such superior, logical creativity underminers.  They believe they are speaking the truth and this gives them license to piss on things they have no insight into.

The last part, humor, well, what can we say about that poop?  A laff clears the mind, and it can come from many places.  I try not to laugh as I picture the horror on the seven year-old’s face, and it is kind of disgusting, in a way, but the favorite moment of a prolific young animator?   “That time I farted in Max’s face,” and I nod, with the faintest smile, and try not to chuckle at the recollection of it.   This is called sound pedagogy.

IMG_8312

Food for thought

There are big differences between thoughtless insensitivity and cruelty.   Thoughtlessness happens quite often, and it can be considered an accident when it does.  Mindfulness is rare, we live in a world of clashing, competing distractions.  Everyone is sometimes thoughtless.  The best of us apologize when our thoughtlessness hurts somebody else.

Cruelty is planned to inflict pain.  It is almost always done out of a sense of justice, but there is little justice in cruelty.  Cruelty is dreamed up by people who suffer, and it leads to more suffering.  Bad shit, cruelty.

Aspiration

Image

When I state my desire to remain mild in the face of aggravation I express an aspiration.  That I’m often able to remain mild is a source of happiness to me.   When I am less than mild, I understand I need to do better.  It is an ongoing aspiration, difficult but well worth cultivating.

I have to believe that as I master remaining mild fewer people will feel compelled to test my resolve.  Like a yogi in the forest calmly regarding an approaching tiger.  Except, that comparing those who provoke to approaching tigers is an insult to a great cat.

A Short Discussion about Proportionality

We have a political culture, for lack of a more accurate term, in which the nuance/complexity of a given issue is generally crushed under the dualistic false equivalency favored by corporate sponsors and those millions who crave certainty and don’t like a lot of confusing detail.  Raise the issue of massive American poverty, the shrinking middle class and the increasing income chasm between the super-wealthy and everybody else?  Class warfare, unless you’re on the winning side, in which case, taste dictates not bringing up the ugly subject.

This automatic black and white analysis with its bogus equivalencies is not done by chance.   It is supported by research– people want their answers simple.   If 99.5% of climate scientists have documented the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere, rising ocean temperatures, the melting of polar ice, the cluster of alarming evidence that we are heading toward a man-made tipping point on the way to massive earth-wide disaster, there is another side to the story.  

For one thing 99.5% is not 100%, let us not forget that.  And then there’s the machine that influences public opinion, and it runs on millions of dollars.  It provides comforting certainty in an uncertain world by confirming what we’d all like to believe.  

The fossil fuel industry and others profiting handsomely from the status quo have the dough and the motivation to dispute burning carbon’s role in Climate Change.  The rest, as they say,  acrimonious, corporately sponsored public debate between Climate Change Skeptics and Global Warming Alarmists.  

Al Gore, with his depressing Power Point presentation?  Alarmist.  Guy with an on-line doctorate from Holy Trinity University reassuring his audience that man’s activities have nothing to do with global warming?  Skeptic.   Now, be logical: who do you believe, an alarmist or a skeptic?

The alarmist is emotional, the skeptic rational.  So who’s more credible on such an important and potentially frightening issue?   Of course, victims of crime tend to be alarmed and emotional, but why bring that up?   The tens of millions spent by the main polluting industries have influenced a large segment of the American populace to believe that the “liberals” and their godless scientists are alarmists perpetrating a hoax.  Manipulating the true facts because they hate our freedom. Case closed, next.

Theory of evolution vs. Intelligent Design– an unproven “theory” vs. God’s infinite wisdom as the ultimate genius designer.   Death Tax vs. Paris Hilton Tax–  a ruthless tax levied on your death by a relentlessly invasive government vs.  a tax effecting only the heirs of the very wealthy, an affirmation of a dead billionaire’s right to pass along every hard-earned cent without inheritance tax.   Collateral Damage vs. War Crimes– bad things happen during war vs. the quaint notion that killing innocent non-combatants is often a war crime.

My father died full of regret that he’d seen the world as black and white, rather than the full-color, vibrant, finely gradated world it truly is.  There are plenty of desperate idiots here, no doubt, and violent people, and even the most evil convince themselves they are doing the right thing.  But the world itself, as God made it, is an endlessly fascinating kaleidoscope of color, a cornucopia of subtle and sometimes wonderful textures, tastes, smells, things to touch.

To proportionality, then.  If someone hurts you, a friend of many years you rarely see, and you are committed to mildness, what to do?   If you never get a chance to talk about it, and are feeling overwhelmed, you might write about it, try to comb through what happened.  I have a blahg with two or three regular readers.  I posted something about inexplicably insensitive behavior I experienced at the hands of two friends recently.   The post may have stung the anonymous persons described unsympathetically.  

The stung party writes something in return, an email from a conspicuously fake address.  Knowing that I am having a devilishly hard time rolling the massive rock of my idealistic program up a hill alone, and how impossible it’s been so far to find true allies, he sends the kind of note I’ve been longing to receive, someone who gets the program’s potential, loves it, offers some of the very expertise I’m seeking.  

And in the body of the email, while he is dancing out, in the manner of the dancing sadist in Reservoir Dogs, on his toes and grooving as he cuts off the ears of his bound, gasoline soaked victim,  this “don’t you wish somebody actually cared like this?”, he turns his stiletto heel once, twice, comparing his fictional self to Mother Theresa, and mocking the program I have been working on, unpaid, for three years, the program I am staking my life on.

A proportional response?   Only if you believe a ten year war in Iraq was a proportional response to the 9/11 attack justified by WMD, Saddam’s connections to Bin Laden, Freedom on the March, Oil to pay for the War, strategic geo-political considerations, Supporting our troops, war on those who hate our freedom, war on terror, war to end war, shock and awe, whatever.   “Whatever”, by the way, is the most convincing rationale of those listed above and one of the few that is not either an outright, intentional lie or a tissue of smelly ruminant feces.

If my friend was hurt by my confusion as to why he’d lie to me, stated so bluntly and inappropriately in this “public” space, there were many less bitchy ways he could have brought my insensitivity to my attention.   But that surely couldn’t have been as much fun as dancing like that.  Hurt real good, must have been very satisfying, even if a bit cowardly.  Rage is rarely pretty, even when it feels justified.