Category Archives: Ahimsa
Being Tough
Just because someone can take a punch, doesn’t mean they like to be punched.
“Look, you didn’t go down and your nose isn’t even bleeding!” says the impressed face puncher.
People are tough because they have to be. It doesn’t mean the circumstances that make them so are to be prized, nor the ability to take a punch celebrated. The real celebration is reserved for when you are not being punched.
Letter to Poland
So here’s the deal. Over here a lot of bad stuff is going down, I think we are actually in the grips of a societal insanity that is rapidly approaching critical mass. I know you try not to pay attention to the news from here, being an expatriate and all that, but I’ll give you a quick run-down of what’s been shaking since you’ve been gone.
In 2000 there was a presidential election, another of those farcical exercises in mass-marketed democracy we have every four years. I heard the president described recently by the great Harry Shearer as the man (or woman) who has climbed to the top of greasiest pole in American society (listen to the first two brilliant minutes). Word. And, as you know, the higher the monkey climbs the more everybody can see the monkey’s behind, but forget that, if you can.
It was a close election in 2000. Goon squads were actually sent to disrupt the recount of votes in Florida, the state whose electoral votes would decide the election. A challenge was made by lawyers for the Republican candidate in the Supreme Court, claiming irreparable harm if the count was allowed to continue. It was decided on partisan lines for the Republican, in a one-off decision that oddly cast itself as setting no precedent. You know that we were attacked on 9/11/2001 by 19 Saudi fanatics. In the aftermath of that attack Congress voted special wartime powers for the president and we invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq. These wars were very costly, and bloody, and corrupt, and rage to this day, though we are no longer officially fighting in Iraq.
The war powers were abused, as war powers often are, and these abuses continue to this day in the name of The War on Terror. Things that shocked the conscience of many Americans no longer seem to bother too many people. The War on Terror is to our basic freedoms and general sense of decency what the War on Drugs has long been to people who like to smoke a joint once in a while– as well as to the many victims of violence by international drug cartels who sell pot and other drugs to Americans. Get as drunk as you want sometimes, that’s your right as an American, you know. Smoke marijuana and you’re a drug addict and probably a pervert. Everybody knows that.
Just like everyone now knows you have to rough up people you suspect of hating you. In fact, a jury just acquitted a hopped up, gun toting asshole in Sanford, Florida for shooting a black kid to death. This guy was patrolling his multiracial neighborhood one night when he saw a black teenager in a hoodie. He called the police to report the suspicious Skittles wielding young black man. The cops told the guy to stay in his car, that the cops would come. The guy followed the kid, got out of his car and confronted him. The subsequent fatal shooting of the young man was deemed self-defense by a jury of six white women. People are outraged and don’t know what to do. Officials are warning blacks not to think of rioting. Other people are rejoicing, that we are still a country that believes in laws, even ignorant laws like the Florida “Stand Your Ground” law that allows a person with a gun, who feels in danger, to kill the person he reasonably believes to be threatening him.
So, dude, if you come here, don’t hang out with your young black friends, at least not in Florida. Some disturbed asshole with a police record can stalk you, confront you, grab you, and if you defend yourself, can argue that he felt in danger and then be legally justified in killing you with his handgun.
Hell of a day here in the USA.
On the other hand, I felt an unexpected surge of pure joy today watching the naming and honoring of a young baby girl, the new granddaughter of old friends of mine. Impossible not to feel the love and good vibes in that room.
In other news, I got this mysterious email from an “edcsnowden@gmail.com”. Makes me want to find the perpetrator (the sloppiness is revealing, methinks) and confront him, if you know what I’m saying. I am, as you know, Ahimsa Man, but even I have my limits:
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| I saw your site and was filled with wonder. Do you need an event planner and fundraiser? As I am both I also have experience with volunteers. I currently work with homeless families as well as homeless individuals suffering with the HIV virus.I would love to work with you as your are doing amazing things with small ones! | ||||
Sincerely, Ed Snowden
Humid July Night in NYC
The new pedometer told me I’d put in 21,146 steps shortly before midnight when I reached the top of the stairs down to the A train at West Fourth Street. Many of those steps had been logged during a discussion of how to take a successful and unique program and make it a sustainable business, at least for the two of us who were discussing it. My Hawaiian shirt had not been dry since 5:40, when I stepped off a downtown A with about 6,000 steps on the pedometer.
I was talking to a friend on my late mother’s state of the art Motorola Razr as I walked up Sixth Avenue. When I headed toward the steps down to my cool A train home my way was blocked by four people arguing at the top of the stairs. A hot humid night, two couples arguing, one man stressing, rather pointedly, that the other guy should get out of his fucking face, he wasn’t doing nothing, back the fuck off.
Only the guy he was talking to was a young cop, maybe 25, who had to be hot as hell in that uniform in the brutal humidity, and he was one step below the angry guy. Next to the young cop was his partner, a blond female cop with her hair in a pony tail, a bit taller than the young male cop. I didn’t like the way things were escalating, but I also couldn’t very well push past the four of them and head down the steps under the circumstances. They were directly in my way, I had little choice but to watch and wait.
We live in a racist country, let us face that bitter-tasting truth like adults. The word “nigger”, once a staple of race relations, is now perhaps the most taboo word in the language. People get fired for saying the “n- word”. To me calling it the “n-word” is fucking obscene, excuse me, f-ing obscene, and the squeamish neologism makes talking about our deep history of racism more difficult, not less. But whatever you think about it, “nigger” is certainly not a word to calm the nerves on a hot and humid NYC night when things are escalating, particularly when two people are black and two people are white. The cops in this case were both white. Doesn’t that make things clearer, dear reader?
I’m not certain, but I think the man who was insisting on his right not to be harassed by the police finally crossed the line when he imprudently said “I told you to get out of my face, nigger.” He said this to the young male cop, who sprang like a lion, shoved the man who’d used that terrible word of disrespect against the chain link fence by the basketball courts, kicked his legs apart, roughly frisked him then shoved him on to the ground and knelt on the man’s back. He jerked, then twisted, the abruptly face down man’s arms behind his back, and applied the handcuffs. The woman who was with the handcuffed man said “Oh, I didn’t want this…” She may have wished misfortunes on her angry companion, but not this, face down on the filthy concrete with his hands shackled behind his back.
I narrated all this to my friend who was on the other end of the phone. She voiced indignation and horror. I turned to a guy standing next to me, a young black man, who was watching impassively. “You got a camera on there?” I asked, pointing to his iPhone.
“That’s foul, what you’re doing is foul,” he said softly to the cops. The cops were in no mood to hear softly whispered words of reproach. In fact, they didn’t hear them. The arresting officer’s partner was hovering near the prone, handcuffed man, ready with her nightstick if he turned out to be a foul-mouthed Houdini and slipped the cuffs and the young police officer kneeling on his back.
I noticed one more thing, kind of poignant. It will not show up in the arrest report or in court later on. The cop kneeling on the guy’s back redistributed his weight slightly and patted the man’s shoulder reassuringly, as though to calm him. His hand stroked the blue t-shirt the way you’d comfort an inconsolable child. It was the damnedest thing.
Feedback
No less an authority on having his ass kissed than Pablo Picasso, on the subject of an artist working purely for love of creation, without any need for feedback or praise from anyone who might experience the work: a false idea.
But don’t take it from him. Imagine hitting a baseball further than you ever have before, admiring the arc of the ball, trotting around the bases trying to suppress a smile. The crowd is large, among them many people you know (your ‘cheering section’) but they are talking among themselves, when you scan the crowd they’re not even looking at the field, most staring at electronic devices, nobody has any reaction to your clout. Does it diminish the hit? Not at all. Diminish the moment? Completely, transformed from a great high to a significant bummer. “Let them show me their latest poem,” you think grimly as you step on home plate, “I’ll show them how it feels”.
But once in a while you not only connect solidly with the pitch, but you get a spontaneous shout of appreciation. Here’s one, moments after sending a couple of demo tracks trying to convince an ailing musician friend to buy a small, cheap USB keyboard:
Haha love it- amazon.com here I come!
Started new chemo yesterday, 3 days in a row has me sleeping in fits and starts… Back to sleep with those mimgus like bass lines swimming through my head, you made my day
(night) thnks for sending
meefs
That’s what I’m talkin’ about.
Cain’t Leave It Alone
Thought experiment. Imagine:
Your father was brilliant and had a wicked sense of humor. Your father was angry, and prone to panic attacks he could only calm by seizing control. Your father was always alert, and on the defensive, because he perceived the world as a dangerous zero sum game, stark black and white, only one could win, everybody else: dead.
Your father had good reason to feel hopeless most of the time. Mistreatment as an infant, we’ll leave it at that. Brain research suggests that first-hand traumatic violence before the age of three can change certain souls into violent psychopaths. It is all in the wiring of the brain, who is prone to become a serial killer or a Hitler, when he is violated mercilessly, or witnesses butchery, at a delicate age. Let’s assume your father was not a psychopath, but that he shared several of the psychopath’s most salient traits.
Your father was brilliant, smart and cunning. Although he felt helpless much of the time, he was adept at projecting an air of confidence and assurance. He did this with his great intelligence, his antennae finely tuned to whatever emotions were stirring in the room. He was expert at keeping people off balance, at controlling conversation.
Most often he would take control of the conversation in the manner of Socrates, by directing the talk through a series of ever narrowing questions. The answer to each would lead to the next link in the logical chain. He was leading his adversary inexorably to a steep cliff, and would soon have him poised at the precipice, neutralized, at his mercy.
Arthur Kinoy, famous lawyer and lifelong freedom fighter, once pointed out the brilliant legal reasoning in the Dred Scott decision. The Dred Scott case was one of the judicial last straws before the so-called Civil War. Kinoy was near the end, a brilliant version of Mr. Magoo, when I knew him. “Read Dred Scott,” he told us, “you won’t regret it. It’s a wonderful piece of legal legerdemain. It’s extremely well-written and every link of the logical chain is perfectly connected to the one before it. There’s not a single fuzzy moment of logic, actually; the conclusion is unassailable. The only problem is the premise, the premise, as we all know now, is complete bullshit.”
Although Kinoy did not say ‘bullshit’, he found an equally forceful way to denounce the racist premise of Dred Scott. As I told somebody the other day, I have a tin ear for quotations. But that was Kinoy’s supremely important point, an unassailable legal argument, one that cannot be attacked from any legal angle, can be constructed on a pile of shit.
Let’s assume for purposes of this decision that (insert pile of shit here). The structure that can be built on top of it can be a fortress all the armies in the world could not topple. In Dred Scott the premise was the Negro’s natural inferiority to the White man. This gave the White man a clear moral duty to protect the Negro. From there it was a quick 90 page march to the incontrovertible conclusion that although Dred Scott, an escaped slave, was living in a free state he must be returned to his former master under the Fugitive Slave Act that was constitutional for most of the first century of our great republic. Some people found this unappealable holding an outrage big enough to give their lives to overturn.
Anyway, I have a bike ride to take and no time to waste, you will forgive me if I plunge ahead to my point.
Imagine your father is like Antonin Scalia, brilliant, trenchant, sardonic; a master at crafting an eloquent legal justification for his actions. Your father asks your opinion of a current topic of debate. Your father challenges you to justify your opinion. As soon as you do, he seizes on one aspect of your answer and begins charging toward his inexorable conclusion. Then you will be challenged to choose one of two answers to the question he’s been driving toward, a question only tangentially related to the original inquiry.
In weighing your answer you will realize that both answers are traps. If your father has had a particularly rough day, he will conduct this march to your capitulation in a very harsh manner.
Afterwards, you will take the high road. You will allow that as he’s framed the question, of course, he is completely correct, there is no possible argument. You will point out that reasonable people could disagree about any of several key points foreclosed by his constant narrowing of the question. Then you will tell him directly that you were perplexed to be asked for your opinion and then disrespected and browbeaten into answering an extremely narrow, re-framed question. Email it off, go ahead, we’ll wait. You’ll have the reply in seconds, no doubt.
Thanks. Very interesting. I’ll think about your take on all this. I apologize that our talk got so contentious. You deserve a more specific reply to your comments, one which I hope to tackle when things ease up around here, More later..
And you will sigh, not more of this fucking shit. And you will fashion, but not send, your heavy hearted reply.
Thanks. Very interesting. I’ll think about your take on all this.
Note: He does not specify what is interesting or what parts of your take he will think about.
I apologize that our talk got so contentious.
Elegant, the way the passive voice was used. This is a technique law students are actually taught to employ. “If your client is guilty, whenever you must make any kind of admission, use the passive voice. Not ‘he killed Tom with a knife’ but ‘Tom was killed with a knife’. Not contradicting a fact in evidence, something you can’t do in a legal argument, just not stating outright that your boy was the one actually holding the knife when Tom was killed with the knife. You may not be denying it, but it’s as close as you can come to leaving the person who did it out of the equation.
You deserve a more specific reply to your comments, one which I hope to tackle when things ease up around here, More later.
This is actually a mischievous, hipper way of saying “More never”. It’s also a classy and gentle way to issue a challenge to the other party: try to whine about it after I frankly admitted that you deserve a reply. What do you want from me? This is clearly your problem, not mine.
The bit about I hope to tackle when things ease up around here is another beautiful construction. “I hope” is excellent, since it is an aspiration, the expression of a fond intention, something more noble than a promise but without the expectation built into giving your word. “Tackle” is great, because it confesses that the work involved in giving the deserved reply would be strenuous, something of a challenge.
But best of all is ‘when things ease up around here.’ An inspired echo of one of my father’s favorite lines, from his The Jokes That Killed Vaudeville collection. “Let me borrow $20, I’ll pay you back as soon as my brother straightens up.”
And pocketing the twenty the vaudevillian gets ready to wink at the audience, “my brother the hunchback!”
Wink!
Why Smiling Anger Can Be So Dangerous
When somebody rages, with eyebrows drawn low over the eyes, teeth bared, facial muscles torqued into a mask of aggression, you have a good indication that you should be careful. People in this state can become violent, it’s called being “mad” for good reason. They are out of control in their anger. They may snap, they could have a heart attack. It’s fairly easy to recognize, when somebody is in this kind of rage, that care must be taken to avoid things getting worse.
Take rage to its extremest expression and you have murder. If an angry person kills you, it rarely makes everything right for them. They just have to start justifying themselves and getting ready to do the same to anybody else who backs them into an infuriating corner. And, of course, there are the police to worry about, and all the rest of the legal system.
There is another way of displaying anger, a bit more subtle and almost as common. It expresses itself without snarling, but is just as determined to exact its price. The real horror of anger? There is no price it can exact that will really make things better for anybody, outside of a sincere apology and promise to do better next time. And with this subtle kind of rage, it often has nothing to do with the person it is being visited on, so it cannot be placated.
When you see a genial person become intransigent, but continuing to smile, even as the intransigence escalates, realize what you are dealing with. If nothing you can say is having any effect, beware. It is not a situation worth staying in, if you have any way to leave.
Personal Manifesto — preview
From time to time, I’m told, it’s good to write a manifesto– a plan of action laying out the beliefs that animate it. I’m going to do that, if you watch this space you will see it soon. I hope you may even be inspired by it. But today I have only a few minutes. Somewhere I jotted a note the other day, I remember writing it down, and that it was a hook to a big part of the manifesto and my motivation. Let me dig it up.
“I don’t want to see stubborn, opinionated, pandering televised idiots having false debates about reality and the most pressing questions of the future– help create smart citizens.”
I’m doing it, B. I’ll get more into the details of this next time. There is one other matter and then I have to jump into the shower, get ready to go.
People, when they’re young, love to play. Without play, what does a young person have? Grim preparation for a life of unsatisfying drudgery. Seems pretty clear, when put that way, that children should be encouraged to make discoveries during play time. Got that one covered too. And older people, we need to keep playing too. You know what’s left if we don’t? You know what’s left.
Last point. You hear often from funny, successful people that feedback and support were key elements in their growth. I hear it loud and clear, even as I am put to the test, over and over, to prove that even without much feedback or support — if you have enough belief in what you are doing and in your creative power to do it — amazing things can still be done.
Now go forth and play, my friends.
Marketing 101
Among the several discreet skills the would-be smiling owner of a flourishing shop must master is Marketing. Although there might appear to be a moral component that could hold a scrupulous person back, it ain’t necessarily so.
For example, which would you rather find on your plate?
a) a perfectly seasoned and prepared dinner of succulent beef; or
b) a plateful of the sliced flesh of a badly treated and cruelly slaughtered affectionate cow
Only a fool would try to market the product as (b). Word to the wise, yo.
The Unexpected Reward for Mild Sincerity
I have been running an animation workshop for children ages 7 to 11. My plan, without any business experience, has been to scale up this successful experiment into a small but expanding business. A modest income for me and a fair wage for a few assistants who I would groom to replace me as the business grows. When adults see the workshop in action they are often amazed– the children are working independently and with great focus on any number of their own projects, a couple work at the computer editing, a few more wear headphones and record parts of the soundtrack. Other kids collaborate at the camera stand, lighting and moving things that will become animation. A couple of adults are casually interacting with the kids, but nobody seems to be in charge. “I love the way it challenges hierarchy,” commented one parent, an architect, a man more insightful than most.
At times singing bursts out, one kid starts singing some idiotic ditty and others chime in. It sets my nerves on edge, sometimes, but I resist stifling them. They are singing because they are happy, free, nobody is telling them to shut up. They take me aside to tell me inappropriate jokes, on the sly, because I never act offended. I don’t laugh, I nod and I agree with them that the joke is inappropriate, but I don’t censure or censor them. They understand I will nix such things in the animation they produce, but my theory is to leave them as free to express themselves as possible in the workshop. Creativity demands no less.
From time to time they’re wild. Part of this is my fault– in my excitement over how quickly they took over the various tasks of the workshop I neglected to install the crucial shut-off switch that is necessary for every teaching situation with young students. This switch is needed when they are wild– the reminder that they have to stop and calm down or there will be consequences they won’t like. It’s a trade off, freedom and order, and without the line they cannot cross being firmly etched, things will sometimes tip over into chaos.
As they did the last few weeks. Last week my strongest, most street-wise and no nonsense assistant was out. I was left with only my young, sweet, talented, easily manipulated assistant. Things got out of hand. Kids were yelling, running with scissors, calling out for me to press the TIME TO STOP AND CALM DOWN button, but it hadn’t been installed properly. Idle threats and the sense that no adult is really in control make them even more wild in pushing the limits. The thing it took me a while to realize, when I was teaching a few decades back, is that children need this control from an adult when they are unable to control themselves. They will push for it far beyond the limits of reason by acting nuts. Nothing they were doing the other day succeeded in actually bringing things to a boil, though. Eventually a seven year-old leaped at me from the chair at the camera stand, throwing his arms around my neck. I turned to catch him as he launched himself.
Unbeknownst to me, and probably to him, he was clutching a 0.7 mm mechanical pencil, point up, as he flew at me. The pencil’s sharp metal tip (which I later showed the kid is retractable and should be pulled in when not drawing with it) went into the skin of my neck and ripped a short tear upwards as I caught the kid in midair. There wasn’t much blood, but enough to smear my fingers with, show the kid as I took him with my other hand and guided him into a corner.
“When you act like an out of control baby you get treated like one. You have time out. Do not move from this chair.” I left my young assistant as the only adult in the room and walked down the hall to the sink where I washed off the gash and threw some cold water on my face for good measure. The kid hadn’t moved from the chair, but he was fidgeting with some blocks that were nearby.
“Time out means no playing,” I said, pushing the box of blocks out of his reach. I reminded him that there is something you say to someone after you accidentally hurt them. He managed a sheepish, insincere apology, accompanied by a variation on the simian fear grin. A few minutes later I set him to work cleaning up, and he did so without complaint. When his mother came to pick him up and expressed horror at what he’d done, he was defiant, hit her and shoved past her. I was too tired and disgusted to intervene, beyond calling after him with a rhetorical question as he rushed out the door: “You hit your mother?”
The whole incident left me in a foul mood. There was absolutely no pain from the scratch and within a couple of days it healed without a trace. But the incident left me with a certain bitterness. The reward for my inexhaustible patience and this innovative program that allows kids to grow their little wings and fly is a kid slashing my neck? Fuck this, fuck them, I thought. The email from a parent who runs the program that was waiting for me when I got home did little to change my feelings. She asked for an incident report and it was followed by a lecture about consequences for misbehaving children, like my tiny assailant, who has apparently been out of control in every one of the other after-school groups he attends. Inquiring as to how I was after the slashing would have been a nice touch, regrettably it was neglected.
“Fuck her,” I recall thinking. The next day I wrote her an email describing the chaotic situation her own son had done so much to foster with his surliness, uncooperative attitude and racing around after the other seven year-old who provided a bit of my blood for the actual “incident”. I never heard back from her.
I did hear back from a woman who runs a summer day camp for an organization that has a number of after-school programs for the fall. She was interested in having the animation workshop at the camp. She asked me to prepare a bid, a detailed proposal laying out all kinds of things. She needed it immediately, although she could offer no guidelines for what they pay, I would have to include the price in my proposal. I spent the last twelve hours of my birthday and the first few of the next day writing a proposal and reaching out for advice on pricing. I got several pieces of wildly divergent, mostly passionately stated, opinion. I gave the most weight to the advice of a self-made millionaire businessman friend of mine, and an even older friend who has been in high end sales for years, and made my proposal. I noticed an increasing flow of stomach acid and distress as the process wore on.
The price I quoted them was based on the value of this innovative program and also on what this group can afford, based on the tuition that kids are paying. I quoted a fair price, much higher than they probably want to pay, and more than twice what the PTA pays for the current program, but not inflated to leave room for much negotiation. The floor and ceiling price are fairly close to each other. If they won’t meet the floor price I have to walk away, since I didn’t quote them an arbitrary price but one based on my actual expenses, the value of the program and their ability to pay. But so far, no reply at all. The only urgency, apparently, was an immediate price quote from me.
As I made my way to the workshop yesterday it was with great reluctance. Usually I look forward to it, for the first time yesterday I’d rather have not gone. I gathered the kids and reminded them how fortunate it had been that I was the one whose neck had been gouged the previous session, rather than one of them. They would have been very upset, and their parents would have been very upset. I pointed to where the metal tipped pencil had gone into my neck and showed them that one inch over it would have gone into a major artery, and that my blood would have sprayed into the air, my hand traced the spurt so they could picture it, and I’d have had to go to the hospital, in a hurry. Or, a few inches higher and the pencil would have gone into my eyeball, and I’d be in the hospital with the possibility of losing my right eye, depending on how the pencil went in. This is what can happen when people are out of control, I pointed out. They were uncharacteristically pensive after this little speech.
“Would you sue Max?” a kid asked a couple of times. I turned to him and said if I lost an eye I’d have to sue Max’s parents. “If I sued Max what could I get? His backpack?” The kids agreed I’d have a better shot suing the parents. I reminded the group that anyone who was wild and could not calm down would be escorted out, that there was no room for wildness in the animation workshop. Then I told them to get busy.
They did, and there was no wildness.
gratuitousblahg 