Category Archives: musing

Why Give A Crap About the War on Wikileaks?

The U.S. government may be telling the truth– Bradley Manning, who disclosed, among other things, classified video of the U.S. military murdering  unarmed civilians, and two reporters from Reuters, in Baghdad, is a traitor, a frustrated homosexual from a broken family engaged in a prolonged hissy fit; that Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, is a deranged enabler of world terrorism, a rapist and dangerous fugitive— but this 2010 TEDtalk is worth watching before you make up your mind– if you are disposed to have any opinion at all about such matters:

http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_assange_why_the_world_needs_wikileaks.html

Asked to state his core values, Assange says “capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture victims.”  

These days he lives under 24 hour surveillance in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he was given political sanctuary.

Auto-focus

It would be nice, I think, as the counter ticks 14:51 on its way to zero, to have a session at the start of each day to calibrate the mind, the mood, set the proper tone, remember to be grateful for the many gifts given for free when you open your eyes.  Auto-focus, in a word.  I know people who begin with meditation, or a religious ritual.  I think these are probably good ideas, though the results are mixed.  On the other hand, these guys might be much more nervous, or distracted, without their daily auto-focus sessions.

I mean, if you think about it for even a second, we are still hard-wired to run from predators.  Predators come in every shape and size and our reflexes are designed to twitch us instantly away from danger.  We are tuned to existential threats, and eventually, every life succumbs to one threat or another, no matter our level of vigilance.   The odds are against a focused, calm mind, for any of us.  

I need only scan the sides of this computer screen to survey the odds.  Yes, a clean desk is the sign of an empty mind as often as not, but still.   Beside a bit of dusty metro shelving, between the couch and the wall, we have a five foot pile of file boxes, covered with a dusty tarp and unopened for perhaps five or six years.  Next to them, an expired fax machine, duffle bag with broken zipper (and lifetime warranty, waiting to be sent back for its replacement), expired printer, boxed piece of crap computer guitar/keyboard/mic interface that never fucking worked and cost a lot of money, on top of that glossy box advertising “legendary tone” (the merciless pricks) a pile of beautifully colored foam rectangles, for occasional home animation use.  

Moving toward the computer screen things take a precipitous turn for the worse.  I will spare you a description of the devastation there on the desk top.  An immense tangle of papers, wires, books, headphones, devices, metal cups, sheet music, drawing pads– my goodness, what is that sock doing there?  It seems I did not spare you a description.  I am still surveying the horror of it.  There’s a plastic yogurt container top, clean, but, I mean, what the fuck?  

I had a productive day yesterday, pushing this immense rock several feet up the slippery hill I’ve been straining against for the last year.  I am steady on my legs, riding the bike four out of seven nights a week the last four weeks.  But I can no longer ignore the obvious (ah, I probably can…)– it will help my concentration to organize some of the chaos around me.  

On the other hand, with only fourteen seconds left now and the alarming buzzer about to sound, what can I really say?

My Father’s Death

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.

Throwing out baby und bathwater

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.

It’s your problem, pal

“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.

The Cull

During a restful day Sunday I stretched out on the bed in the dim light and listened to Christa Tippet in the middle of a conversation with a woman whose life’s work was listening to and studying the songs and habits of the whale, and more recently, the elephant.   A fascinating woman with a real love for life and a great capacity for study and learning.  She ended by talking about the enormity of the ocean, how being on a small boat is like clinging to a cork bobbing in the vastness of it, and how the largest creatures in the world swim in it, singing.  Human knowledge, she said, is not at any pinnacle, it is only now beginning.  There is so much to learn, for sure, before the lights wink out forever.

This blessed woman got to know several elephants, by their voices, their looks and their personal habits.  Who knew elephant individuals were so different, one from the other?  She suggested there is more individuation among elephants than among people, or at least as much.  Do you think you could put a human being on a space ship and send him to another planet to accurately represent us all?  

You could do it, I guess, but you’d be an idiot to think he or she could represent you as well as me, as well as someone on a continent we’d never visited, someone living a life we cannot imagine.  Where the perfect representative of mankind might have no fear , you and I would be crippled by it; where the perfect representative was grim, we might be cracking jokes.  Where the perfect representative could dance pretty well, she could not invent spontaneous, manic dances the way you can, or draw like I can.  It makes sense, if you think about it for a moment, that there might not be a typical elephant.

Anyway, the famous memory of elephants is also not something someone just made up one day.  She tested it by playing a recording, to a group of elephants in a zoo, of a long-dead matriarch vocalizing in her distinctive voice.  This female had been gone several years, many of the elephants who knew her had still been calves, or whatever young elephants are called.  To an elephant, they perked up their ears, became agitated and started making a racket.  They clearly recognized this voice and knew it was their departed leader, even the youngest ones seemed to know it.

Anyway, don’t take my word, or hers, as your spaceship hurtles toward the distant galaxy where you will be the ambassador for all of us.  You can go to the NPR website and scroll through for Tippet’s recent shows, find the one I’m talking about, listen to it yourself, follow the links to associated scholarship, read up on it.   I’m writing about this to make a point.

After spending a long time observing and learning about several individual elephants she went home, where she did the other part of her work, probably raising money for her research so she could return to the land of elephants.  When she got back there, and began looking for some of her old elephant friends, she learned they’d been culled.  

Culling is a word, like the neutral phrases ‘collateral damage’, or ‘friendly fire’, that, by a marketing-style legerdemain, changes killing into an abstraction that is easier to deal with.  These elephant individuals had been subjected to the natural process of culling, thinning the herd by shooting certain individuals to cull them.  There were too many elephants where there were now too many people, problems were arising and it was necessary to cull the pachyderms.  Nothing more complicated than that.

Learning that these individuals she’d looked forward to spending time with had been culled was crushing to her.  She went into a depression.  All she could do, she reported, was write a book, which turned out to be a very good thing.  When I went into a depression all I could do was write and record songs late at night, not a bad thing, but not really a very good thing, either.  Writing and publishing the book helped her make some sense of her torment, allowed her to pass from depression back into productive action.  I imagine its a book worth reading and I salute her.

I had something else to add, another track, but, as I looked away it seems to have been culled, like a big, extroverted elephant with a loud voice, a direct individual who looks you right in the eyes, and then is gone like smoke in the wind.

Mark But This Flea

Back in an early writing course at City College the professor, a young, dynamic guy with the torso of a stocky man and the lower body of a powerful goat, read John Donne’s famous poem The Flea.  His eyes glittered during his excellent reading of the flirtatious poem, as he no doubt took a survey of the new young women in his class.  He explained to his impressed students that he was originally an actor, had become a novelist and then a college professor.  He was an inspirational teacher and a great reader, and he brought the wooing words to memorable life as he began:

“Mark but this flea, and mark in this, how little that which thou deniest me is”

The line rings in my head today as I ponder how little the smallest things we deny each other actually are.  Invisible to the naked eye, these tiny, crucial things.

The Oshpah Pit

I don’t know the exact meaning of “aspah” (phonetically OSH-pah), but I can tell you about the Ashpah Pit.    It was in the woods, at the end of a long muddy road that would shine with small puddles after the rain.  It was lush there, and smelled of earth and trees, until you got close to the pit that guys with a bulldozer and a dump truck had dug.   This pit was huge, the size of an amphitheater, and filled with the summer time garbage of a small community of a few hundred people.

It was at the end of a long dirt road cut through the trees.  For days after it rained it was impossible to walk as far as the ashpah pit without getting your feet wet.  Your clothes would be damp too, the air was always moist and clammy under those dense trees.  It was paradise for the mosquitoes who bred, thirsted and lived their short lives there.  Born at dusk by the millions, and feeding, courting, mating and dying throughout the night, they were looking for whatever action they could get as time ran out.  

These mosquitoes were so voracious, and so desperate, that they would land on you as you slapped at them, sometimes five or more at a time, the others hovering, singing their horrible songs of desire.  And they were tenacious, these strapping young mosquitoes.   You could slap at one, narrowly miss, and the insect would do a little somersault, literally turn a tiny circle in the air, land back directly on the arm, or neck, or your face.  Meanwhile, another would be sucking lustily at the back of your neck, near your earlobe.  You could try to keep them away by smoking, and back then many of us did smoke, but it was best to complete the business at the ashpah pit quickly.   Dump the garbage and get back down the road.

There’s the famous story of how I met my old friend Meefs, a story for another time and another place, the story about his deadpan slyness and those two long walks to the ashpah pit and back.  But what I want to point out is that the mosquitoes at the ashpah pit are the strongest examplars I know of that fierce, wildly energetic desire to live, and somehow dominate, in a world of death where the odds are a billion to one against you living out the night.

Doesn’t mean I’d invite any of them to my house.

A Funny Thing

Outside the roofs nearby are white, a flutter of snow has been swirling around ineffectually for the last few hours, dancing over the St. Patrick’s Day parade wending its way down Fifth Avenue, I suppose.  They say it will turn to rain after a while, I can hear cars splashing in it as they pass outside.  But the roofs look nice and there’s a dusting of white over parts of the garden.

Somewhere a lion yawns.

A clever woman in law school wrote a student note for one of the scholarly journals, discussing the then frontiers of the internet, dubbing cyber space Cyberia.  I don’t know if that was her coinage or not, but it seemed clever to me at the time.  One reaches for things like cleverness as a law student; I recall one project we had that first year was called “Treasure Hunt.”  The treasure in question was a bunch of tricky to find statutes, case citations and even some dicta.   Fond of drawing as I am, it was hard to resist, during Torts or Contracts, drawing a scandalized guy pointing at a steaming pile of shit, flies buzzing around it, saying “Hey! That’s not treasure!”  The girl next to me, who was beautiful, smiled and wrote an approving note on the bottom of it when I slid it over to her.

A wildebeest passes gas.  “What’s gnu?” the punster asks blandly.

On a day like this, and outside the flakes are now fat and fluffy, falling in a great 3-D display, alone in Cyberia, it seems pointless to dream that my plans will ever be more than the distant daydream they are now.   More than pointless, really.  Without money you might as well (insert your favorite substitute for the vulgar phrase about taking a lustful leap after a rolling donut).

“Your best words, my friend, not worth the air it takes to expel them, even though that air is CO2 and useless to anything but a vegetable,” says the tired voice of experience.

And, sad to say, it’s true.  A word to the wise will suffice, but the best words in the world, addressed to inanimate objects, or immovable ones, or ones prone to silence, or to multitasking or….

“Pipe down, man,” says the voice of experience.  Right again.

Bullies, Manipulation and Unintended Consequences

We live in a society that produces bullies, as much as large segments of our society hate bullies and try to prevent the spread of abusive behavior.  How does our society produce bullies?  By its values, or lack of same.   Flip the channels, one zero sum game after another where one individual wins everything while all others lose, often humiliated in the process.   Our prisons are overcrowded with largely petty criminals while criminality, on an enormous and destructive scale, proceeds at a record pace for a class that is never held accountable for their third party abuse of the rest of us.  

Those who spent careers working for Enron and got screwed out of their pensions by the greed and malfeasance of Enron’s executives, remember them?  The tip of the iceberg, as it turned out.  Those folks at Enron were merely the vanguard of the millions whose lives and dreams were plundered by the most rapacious among us.

Blah blah blah.  Yes, my grandmother was a leftist, a lifelong trade unionist, she celebrated when the Czar fell and for a while it looked like the People were seizing control of Russia.  She was a girl during the Russian Revolution and can be forgiven for excitedly believing the best, though she wound up bitter in the end.  There is nothing inherently wrong, one could argue, with one person owning 100,000 times more than the next ten million people have.   Our society rewards success, hard work, risk-taking of the right sort, drive, ambition, inherited wealth and social class.  

Anyway, my point is about bullying, and the background is that it’s institutionalized in a competitive society that extols the mythic rugged individual above all else.  Paris Hilton, for example, is one such rugged individual.

I am working with a group of children that has recently changed composition.  Five children from the original workshop now work together with five new participants.  I am focused on improving the program, making soundtracks during our limited time together, improving the quality of the animation, getting kids to buy into the idea of refining their work.   I noticed some tension, the new kids not integrating seamlessly, and set on an idea I thought would help.  I needed a creative and often disruptive kid from the original group to buy into helping others.

I dislike manipulators almost as much as I hate bullies.  It serves me right, in a way, what happened when I decided to deliberately manipulate this kid, though others would suffer for my action.  I saw how important it was to this guy to feel appreciated, so I took him aside, told him how important he is to the workshop, that he’s a natural leader, that he’s the best animator in the group.  I asked for his help.  He was flattered and immediately responded by changing his attitude.  He began to lead the clean-up effort at the end of the sessions and has been a big help.

Last week one of the new kids was lying on his back, the front of his shirt wet, foam all over his chin.   I asked if he was OK and he began laughing, told me he was fine.  I gave him a napkin and he wiped away the drool, then drooled again.  Soon he was lying in the hallway, crying inconsolably.  I couldn’t glean exactly why he was so upset, he wouldn’t say.   It turned out he was a victim of blow-back, the unintended consequence of my manipulative intervention.

The nine year-old I’d taken aside for special attention has, it would be appear, been crowing over the recognition he’d long been craving.  He became, according to three or four different sources, an insufferable prick to his classmates.  Lord of the Flies!   He’d been mocking this kid, who has trouble using a pair of scissors bordering on a kind of phobia.

I must start each session, as I did last term at a certain point, with the reminder that everyone is there to have fun.  And that you can’t have fun if somebody is bothering you or being mean to you.  We are doing animation, something with a lot of moving parts, parts that require looseness, concentration and teamwork.  The workshop doesn’t work unless people are helping each other.   If you can’t help, don’t hurt.    Simple to say, a little hard to do sometimes, but essential.

Unlike in the real world, I have the ability, in this group, to swoop down and gently but firmly intervene.  I can stop a bully in mid-attack, if I see it happening.   The worst bullying often happens behind the scenes, where the deals are made, and merciless rules are set that insure the bully will never be accountable for the pain he causes his victims, karma or no karma.   Playing God in this little group, I will nip this in the bud, as the cliche goes.  Nip it, I say, in the hideous bud.  Watch.