Well, you know what they say about statistics, particularly when spun by partisans like this NRA speaker. If you throw in every third world sink-hole, countries in poverty with violent gangs, repressive governments, a lot of guns and low value on human life, yes, the US looks relatively OK.
Why impossible? I ask myself as 11:46 shows on the countdown timer. Once the impossible thing is done it is shown to be clearly possible. There are a million examples, like enormous, heavy hunks of metal flying through the air filled with people and luggage. A video phone in your pocket.
Technology is what comes to mind first, but the impossible things I’m thinking about are massive changes inside individual hearts, inside our collective heart. We are raised inculcated with certain truths, facts about us and the world that seem immutable. I argued with my father for decades over whether people can fundamentally change themselves. I believe we can, and don’t discount how difficult and sometimes painful it is. My father always argued that we can change only the superficial parts, our outward reactions perhaps. To him, the impossibility of healing deep wounds was a psychological fact. At the very end, with his last breaths, he regretted that he’d fought me all those years instead of doing the hard work to have a more joyful, generous, loving life.
I set out to do something impossible, set up a network of children’s animation workshops. To inspire children to show adults what children can do– to inspire change in the way things are done in schools, in our ass-backwards educational system. I take my inspiration in this from people like Sugata Mitra, Ken Robinson, Seth Godin, Vandana Shiva, people I’d never even heard about six months ago. I take courage from discovering new things that continue to help me as I go.
Is what I’m trying to do impossible? I can’t concede that, though the odds against me are pretty impressive. Is it impossible for one person to do alone? Yes, that is clearly impossible. So to gather a small group to help me push the project ahead I have to not only be inspired, I have to inspire them. I cannot complain, I can’t hesitate, must be calm and confident at all times. Hard! As annoying as it may be when a kid screeches into a microphone with headphones on, thrilled to be hearing the echo in his voice, I have to show no annoyance, realize the bigger picture is about letting children feel these thrills. Easier with children, to keep this philosophical stance. It is the adults. Man, the adults are the hard part.
Time to be grateful again. Easy to forget that, when health is good, the legs are strong, the will is there, fear doesn’t have its sweaty hand on your chest at the end of a quivering, demonically strong arm.
But I remember it now, remember to be glad, and grateful, and tick off the list in my head as I tap these keys. Near the top of the list I am grateful at how often I remain mild these days, certainly compared to days past.
Certainly compared to those days, for sure.
When I arrived in Florida, a few days after my father’s sudden hospitalization with undiagnosed end-stage liver cancer, a couple of days before he died, my father told me “you’re the only one who knows what’s going on.” Although everyone around him knew he was dying, and the look on the Emergency Room doctor’s face had made that unmistakably clear to my sister, who urged me to get on the next plane, he was somehow trying to give me credit he’d often withheld.
“I want to talk to you, I’m gathering my thoughts,” he told me a while later, and I bought him a tiny digital recorder to speak into, if he was moved to speak when nobody was around. He was beyond writing things down, and though he was an excellent writer, he rarely put pen to paper when he was able to.
We were fortunate to have that conversation, the thoughts he gathered were impressively organized, clearly expressed in that scratchy voice he had at the end. I don’t know if anyone could have written, edited and delivered those thoughts better. He always was an excellent speaker, and spoke virtually without notes. Lucky for us both I have always been a night owl and when I drove over to the hospital at 1 a.m. he was awake and waiting to talk. Turned out to be the last night of his life, he died before sundown the following day.
I am thinking about my father’s death because of something he said right at the end, it may have been the last thing he said. We were sitting around his hospital bed, he’d become agitated, grabbed my sister’s hand, and mine, and when he let go I got the nurse and convinced him to take a mild sedative, an anti-anxiety pill, atavan, that a friend of mine is fond of. I assured him it was fast-acting and would only take the edge off, since he was always very concerned with remaining in control and had never had so much as a beer, let alone a mind-altering pill. Reassured, and feeling desperate perhaps, he agreed to take it and quickly composed himself.
“I’m feeling much better,” he announced a few minutes later, sounding like his old self. “Why don’t you all go down and take a break and have a bite to eat downstairs, you’ve been sitting here a long time. Elie can stay with me, it’s OK.” My mother, sister, uncle and brother-in-law all got up and went down to the cafeteria. It was dinner time and outside the sky was turning into a beautiful painting of a Florida sunset. I recall the silhouettes of palm trees outside the hospital windows becoming more vivid as the light slowly began to fade.
Two nurses were in the room and one of them said to me “it’s almost time.” She pointed out that my father’s fingers were turning blue under the fingernails, something to do with the blood no longer delivering enough oxygen to the extremities, apparently a sign that Death is close by.
“If you pray, now is the time to do it,” said the other nurse. I told her we were not religious and she took it on herself to sing a Jewish tune she knew. The African-American woman sang a chorus of Dayenu, a song from the Passover service that indicates we’d be thankful for any fraction of the many blessings God has laid on us. Thinking about it now, the snippet of song was as good a prayer as I could have thought of, though it seemed a bit surrealistic at the time. She had a nice voice, and carried the tune well, but I remember thinking at the time that it was bizarre.
They helped me take down the railing at the side of the bed so I could sit closer to my father, then silently left the room. My father looked at me helplessly and said “I don’t know how to do this…” I assured him that nobody does, that it was OK. I sat close as he breathed a bit faster for a minute or two, maybe five, perhaps fifteen, and then breathed his last. His eyes were open, I closed them with two fingers of one hand, like playing a simple chord on the guitar or piano. It was eerie how natural the movement was. The nurses returned a moment later and I took the oxygen tube out of my father’s nostrils. “He won’t be needing this,” I said softly, handing it to them. I took his glasses and put them in my baritone ukulele case, where they are to this day.
I was amazed at how simple and graceful my father’s last moments were. I’d been told a day earlier that death by kidney failure, the way terminal liver cancer actually kills you, is an accelerating sleepiness that ends in a usually peaceful death, but it was striking how peaceful that final struggle was. A friend who read Jewish scripture for years quoted a line from the Talmud, I think, that stated it poetically and true to my father’s death: the moment of death is like lifting a hair off a glass of milk.
“I don’t know how to do this….” rang in my head just now, as I thought of the mountain I am trying to climb, an impossible one, really, for anybody but an exceptional being who is able to recruit exceptional helpers, and I thought to myself, with a sinking feeling “I don’t know how to do this.” Same phrase. It struck me. Now, the same mercy I gave the old man, I extend to myself, if such a thing is possible– “nobody does, it’s OK.”
Either way, there will be the last breath and then darkness. I’ll be happy to meet angels, and the souls of loved ones who have passed on, but I’m not expecting to. The only thing to see between now and then is how exceptionally I can climb in whatever time remains for me to climb.
It is easier to hold one thought firmly in mind than to have contradictory thoughts active in the brain. The nature of reality is complex, the nature of human opinion: simple. The human mind has been programmed to respond to slogans. It’s easier to rally under a banner with a few bold words on it than under one with a complex of equally true facts.
Joey Reiman (see Purpose) has a private jet he bought, presumably, because he is excellent at what he does and well-paid for it. He advises the richest businesses in the world about how to become richer, while having a work force that believes it is doing something to make the world a better place. He advises big business how to convince the public it is doing work to make the world a better place. This makes the world a better place and it also increases the profits of the company that does this well.
I struggle with bitterness sometimes, even with the several things I love to do and the good health I generally enjoy to do them in. Even in the face of slow, but great, forward progress of my dream from idea to reality, a certain malaise hovers. I have neither private jet nor any pay for what I do, however well I may be doing it. I have built no organization. I live on diminishing savings, unable to shift my focus from this dream long enough to figure out how to bring in more income. My thoughts tend to darken at times as I dream of things most people consider too abstract to shoehorn into their busy schedules. The darkness remains even as I realize how little I care about the details of what other people do for a living, and that this unpaid work I’m doing is also my livelihood and why should I expect others to be engaged by that? Time is money, after all, so if it’s not fun, or at least exciting, it better pay me something for my time.
Reading Reiman’s book I allow my distaste for Win-Win Kissinger and McDonald’s (though their products are, in my formerly carnivorous opinion, and in the opinion of billions served, tasty) to color something more complicated and important– how does one carry out a dream and where does one get help learning that difficult thing?
And Reiman has concrete recommendations– make a short, emotional one-minute purpose film that inspires people with your vision. Bring in outside experts to energize your organization. He points out the folly of expecting someone from inside an unworkable workplace to be able to fix the problems of that workplace. This is also basic common sense. If the people you have don’t care, find people who care. It may be easier to do when you can pay the expert consultant her enormous fee, but it needs to be done nonetheless. My program is designed for poor people and is all about workarounds, I have solved a dozen problems already, a dozen more await. There is a workaround for each one.
I ran a meeting recently, thinking it was very snappy and productive as I went from one agenda item to the next, succinctly, leaving space for discussion, nodding sagely at every criticism, no matter how slapdash, wrapping up precisely when I promised I would. I presented a lot of information, laid out immediate goals and challenges and succeeded in everything but recruiting anybody to help me in any facet of the work. Or even getting anyone to respond to a series of subsequent emails about it. When I got home, still energized by what I thought of as a productive meeting, I had an email from one of the directors.
“When you’re feeling overwhelmed” was the subject line. Under it was a long forwarded email about the many exertions the successful, well-to-do business woman turned energetic social entrepreneur had ahead of her in coming days; proofing the new product, expanding the line to Canada, exploring cheaper production of the product line in Canada, hiring a new North American liaison and raising the money for her salary, breaking in a new secretary, meeting with the powerful partner social entrepreneur from India, accepting another award from the Prime Minister. The email, intended to give me the inspiring idea that I wasn’t the only one with a lot of work ahead of me, was forwarded to me, I noted, (not without a bitter aftertaste), at the exact epicenter of the meeting, when this tired director was reading her friend’s email and forwarding it to me from her Blackberry.
You can see dynamic speakers at TED talks speaking eloquently of the need for a program exactly like the one I am running on a small scale, in one school, with ten kids. They talk about the need to allow children to experiment, follow their imaginations, create, problem-solve and collaborate. The model of schools in our grim, divided, fearful, murderous society is a holdover from factory days when industrialists needed millions of literate High School graduates who could follow instructions, repeat those instructions in unison, if prompted.
No Child Left Behind, a program with a stirring slogan/name with unintended irony as great as the old Arbeit Macht Frei sign worked in metal atop the gates of an infamous death factory, is a remnant of this factory school mentality. (OK, this comparison might be unfair, there is no evidence the Nazis didn’t intend the irony of their slogan, they were famous, after all, for practical jokes with a big punchline. I should also give the designers of No Child Left Behind the same presumption of irony.)
Like all visionary programs to deal with longstanding problems, the basics of No Child Left Behind (since rebranded as Race to the Top) were clear and simple. You give standardized tests that measure how every student compares to every other student, you do this often, focusing the children’s attention on the importance of these tests and how to do as well as possible on the tests. If a kid fails, force them to learn the stuff the second time around, the third time. If the teacher fails, fire that teacher. If the school fails, close the school and let a private outfit run it better. Clean and easy to monitor, just hand out boxes of number two pencils and fire up a bunch of computers to do the scoring and tabulating.
If you watch the TED talks of Ken Robinson, Seth Godin, Sugata Mitra and others you will wonder how, in actual practice, we carry out the ideal of having public education where children, motivated by their imaginations, reach for things considered impossible in a society that values things only in terms of its market sale value. Externalities like the world’s largest prison population, no decent jobs for most graduates, a dispirited electorate who don’t even bother voting for the corrupt politicians that represent our democracy, well, these are just things to get over, eh?
Here’s another thought to keep in your head at the same time:
Every positive vision of the future began as a dream in somebody’s head, spread because it was a good idea that flowered in other people’s imaginations. Every organization promoting such ideas began with one or two people. What luck it must be to have a second person! But the fact remains, we are set here briefly between two dates, one that we celebrate every accelerating year and one we do not know, unless we are sitting on Death Row, our last appeal denied, date set. Better, I am thinking to myself alone, and for a clear reason, to be a small light someone might some day read by than another hissing passerby, rushing headlong in the darkness.
All to say, I’m making my way through the rest of Reiman’s book. He’s a smart guy, no matter how stupid some of his examples and quotes are (e.g., Henry Kissinger as the ultimate win-win guy), and I need all the help and inspiration I can get at the moment.
“I’m sorry you’re upset about what you think happened to you. I really am, but now, for the sake of all of us, and I’m asking you nicely, please shut the hell up, you don’t have to go on and on trying to make me understand what you’re upset about, like you always do. I understand– you’re upset. I told you I’m sorry you’re upset because you think I did something that I didn’t actually do.”
The look on your face might not convince the other person you accept the apology, so they might feel compelled to add: “and don’t tell anyone we had this conversation, it is nobody else’s business what we talk about.”
“Look, I’m sorry I don’t have your money I promised to repay today, I know it puts you in a tight spot. And I’m sorry I won’t be able to pay you back any time soon, because I owe a lot of other people money too, and I’ve owed it to them longer so I have to pay them first. Once I finish paying the boss back we can start talking about when I’ll be able to start paying you. Don’t mention this to the boss, or to anybody else.”
If you agree to stay silent, or if you go right in and complain to the boss, the outcome is likely to be similar. There are people who will urinate on your leg and tell you it’s raining. This is, sad to say, part of the Human Condition we sometimes hear about.
“Be mild,” you tell yourself, “anger helps no-one, but be direct”.
“Don’t be direct,” a nervous person will tell you. “Look, I admit I lied, and I know you feel it put you in a bad spot, but there was a good reason, a reason I can’t tell you because you always judge me. I am not a liar, by the way, though I know you think I am because of that one untruth, but it was an emergency and I had to say something fast. Who knew it would be a lie? I didn’t plan to lie, and it was the only time in my entire life I ever did, and I wish we could be done talking about this, I don’t know why you insist on talking about it. I already told you: I admit I lied, now I’ll tell you I’m sorry it friggin’ bothers you so much, even though it’s none of your business and had nothing to do with you. And now, for the love of God, get over it and stop frikking bringing it up.”
The problem will be yours to deal with as best you can, don’t expect help from the people who put you in the middle of it. After all, you’re the one with the problem, not them.
“Look, I know you think it put you in a difficult position, but all you have to do is keep your mouth shut. The lie doesn’t even involve you, and, really, it wasn’t even a lie. I don’t even know why we’re still talking about it, why you’re so hellbent on discussing it. You are so judgmental, you always have been, that’s why I can’t talk to you. I don’t judge you, even though you do plenty of bad things and constantly judge everyone else. You’re the only person in the world who would keep bringing something like this up. You have some kind of agenda and no freakin’ shame.”
“So you had to go talk to the boss, I see. You couldn’t work this out like a man, you had to go talk to the boss, like a little boy with a poopy diaper. Nice. Very freakin’ nice. Imagine how much of a hurry I’ll be in now to pay you your stinkin’ money back. People like you, all you care about is money, and crying about it.”
The rain continues to pound down your leg, soak into your sock, your shoe. It doesn’t smell like water. What they hell?
“You want people to share in the blame for your problem, but it’s your problem, you’re the one with the problem, deal with it. Don’t tell anyone about this, or, so help me God, I will dig up your father’s skeleton and do shameful things to it.”
Now, wait a second, what kind of sick idea….
“No, you wait a second. The sick idea comes from you, pal. That’s right, if you could have kept your stinking mouth shut I’d never have had to come up with methods to make you keep your mouth shut. You know, you’ve got a lot of problems, my friend.”
A host of problems, yes indeed. Unreasonable expectations. They started young.
“Quit staring at me from that crib with those big accusing eyes!” said the man in the bed. I couldn’t answer, not because I didn’t have anything to say, but I was too young to speak. I had no idea what my father was talking about, truly.
“Oh, sure,” my mother called out, “make it sound like it was his fault, like he was the one staring at you with that challenging, angry expression. The pediatrician said you were having a temper tantrum at ten weeks old. Ten weeks old! You think we are making this up?”
“I think a good pediatrician might have tried to determine what was making a ten week old infant so upset, rather than concluding that the kid was just an irrationally angry baby. Doesn’t that make sense to you?”
They never told me if the pediatrician was a human or a jackass. He laughed like a jackass when he saw the baby rigid, red, fists clenched and screaming. “Wow, I’ve never seen it so young, this infant is having a temper tantrum!” and his long ears went back and he honked out a good jackass laugh.
“Oh, sure,” the ghosts of my parents as young parents would have said, “You’re the only one who’s not a jackass.”
Though I wouldn’t have phrased it quite that way, they did make a reasonable point, at least between me and the pediatrician.
My only advice when people try to make something into your problem that is not your problem– shrug that mess off of yourself and go somewhere where people don’t urinate on your leg and insist you tell them it’s raining.
Many times every day people urinate, and it often rains, but when it’s on your leg, and it’s body temperature, and it stinks and is some shade of yellow or brown, it’s not really that hard to know the difference, though it can take many years to learn the most productive reaction.
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