Category Archives: musing

The Price of Shame

Monica Lewinsky, the onetime White House intern infatuated with Bill Clinton, has a great TED Talk called “The Price of Shame”.   In it she discusses her public shaming when details of her sexual affair with the president came out, including his semen on her blue dress, his penis in her mouth and his unlit cigar inserted tenderly into her vagina.   She was publicly humiliated and cyber-bullied as a result of these disclosures.  Her talk is excellent.

A friend of mine, also moved by her talk, tried to book her to speak at his local temple.   It turned out the temple did not have the budget to afford her speaking fee.  One of the prices of shame, apparently, if your shame has high enough public titillation value, is $20,000 to $50,000 per appearance.

I shit you not. 

Three short summaries

For those who don’t like to wade through long posts, here are capsule distillations of three recent ones I struggled to get right (and edited numerous times for clarity before and after posting):

I was hurt for weeks over an inability to salvage my oldest friendship.  I finally composed a question to put the final pieces to the troubling puzzle in my hands.   I asked the guy what my final unforgivable act was.   He told me: my wife told me you recorded our last conversation, she told me you said you were mad enough to punch me in the face, she told me you said I was a pussy and she won’t be married to anyone whose so-called friend regards him as an unmanly coward.   link

I pondered the two most common approaches to anger: getting angry and repressing anger.   I concluded that the advantage to feeling anger, and sitting with it long enough to understand why you were angry, is that it gives you the possibility of having less anger in your life.   Repressing anger cannot lead to that place.  I provided an illustration or two of each approach.    link

An aggravating medical situation persisted for an additional week as I waited for test results that would determine whether I needed to worry about late stage bladder or prostate cancer.  The cause for my aggravation turned out to be a failure of technology (Samsung phone will not display T-Mobile voicemail notifications) and poor office follow-up with the doctor.   I learned, a week belatedly, that the doctor had promptly left me a compassionate voicemail with all the info I needed, but the message was not readily available on my phone.  His staff took days to follow-up with him and I didn’t get his subsequent voicemails until days after that. Things escalated unnecessarily as I kept receiving bureaucratic stonewalling, instead of empathy and help and the doctor kept leaving me messages I didn’t get as messages from the insane patient grew increasingly hostile.   Everything was finally resolved amicably during a short talk with the doctor.   link

That post, which began with a sentence claiming “we were both right” now begins, more precisely:

A completely avoidable misunderstanding, made possible by a design flaw and human error.  The first party did exactly the right thing, the second party was continually misinformed, by day seven both parties were right to be indignant, both parties were right to think the other a complete asshole.

Sometimes things actually shake out that way.   Both parties wind up angry, and both have good reason to feel angry, based on what they are each being told about the other.  Cutting out the unreliable “middleman” is really the only way to resolve this kind of difficulty.

 

The lesson of my father’s life

The painful regrets and too late apologies my father recited the night before he died dramatically illuminated mistakes to try to avoid in my own life.    My father had a quick wit, was sensitive, well-read, thoughtful, well-spoken.    He also saw the world as black and white, a zero-sum game that had only winners and losers.

“That’s not really how it is, Elie,” he told me in that weak dead man’s voice the last night of his life.  “I wish I’d been able to see the many gradations and colors of the world,  I think now how much richer my life would have been…”

As he was leaving the world he regretted his maniacal focus on being a “winner”, a silly abstraction in a game that everyone, in the end, must lose by giving up life, consciousness, all possessions.  Being a winner to my father meant never tolerating disrespect, and, more precisely, never losing an argument.   He was a strong, confident debater, even if he reflexively exerted this well-exercised power on his young children.   He deeply regretted this lifelong mistake and the merciless burdens it placed on his children, expressing his sorrow in a weak voice about sixteen hours before he breathed his last breath.

He came by his obsession with winning honestly, early in his life, but I think the word ‘winning’ is more properly rendered ‘surviving’ or ‘maintaining integrity’.   He’d been born in desperate poverty, raised by a cruel, violent, religious mother and a father of few words whose main concern was not getting beaten any more.   My father told me that he and his little brother were earmarked as classic losers, the sons of a brain damaged man, from day one.  Their future was decided by their uncle and his brilliant son and daughter — the Widem boys would go to trade school, learn to work sheet metal.   They were fit for nothing higher, in the opinion of the people in charge of the family.    Both made it to college, graduate school and the middle class, in spite of the odds against them.

 The fear and the indignities of their childhood never left them.  It didn’t help, of course, that all but a couple of their many aunts and uncles were slaughtered in a Belarusian hamlet that was wiped off the world map forever.  

“Elie, not to be a prick or anything,” said the skeleton of my father from his grave in Cortlandt, New York, “but didn’t you recently write over a thousand pages about my life already?   Presumably there were lessons in there too, I mean, in a sense, wasn’t that why you started the process in the first place?”    

Yes, of course.   My focus today is a little different, though.    

“Not seeing the sad parallels between my essentially solitary life and your own?   Locked in an endless battle to be conclusively right, in spite of your dedication to non-harm, or what did that little Indian guy who slept naked with his naked teenaged nieces to show he could overcome lust call it– ahimsa.   You know, you can be absolutely right and at the same time blind to the effect your insistence on being right has on others.”    

Jesus, dad, you’re reading my mind.   What I’m thinking about glancing from the computer screen to the window out into the grey afternoon, are the choices we make, how we use our time.   Not everyone is wired to think deeply on the things that vex them.    

“Well, I had a large part in wiring your brain that way, providing endless vexations for a small boy with a curious, nimble mind to brood upon.   Your imagination is a blessing and a curse.   Imagine less, sometimes you’re better off.   Look, clearly, you’re imagining these words of mine now, I am now but a long-time skeleton, a literary conceit, and maybe, at this point, also a tired one.   A rubber crutch, if you will.”

Funny as a rubber crutch, the jokes that killed vaudeville… 

“Yeah, listen, Elie, you write everyday but nobody is all that interested until a book or an article comes out of it.  Nobody you know is capable of being interested in that ton of verbiage you produce, even if most of it is well-written, even if some of it is genuinely insightful.    As that alcoholic dispatcher at Prometheus used to sympathetically tell you all the time, whenever you complained —  ‘nobody cares, nobody cares.’  

“A writer writes not for the handful of readers he or she knows, they write for people they don’t know, and they get paid to do it.  You grasp this, and yet, you are constantly disappointed that nobody you know gives a shit.  Nobody you know gives a shit, only you can care about this uncontrollably prolific output.   Trust me on this.  Get some of your writing in print and they will be very happy to be happy for you, even read it.  Were they not all happy for you when you got a few words published and paid for?”

Yes, they were unanimously happy for me, every one of them.    They read each of those hamfistedly edited thousand word pieces, loved ’em.

“I know what sent you to the keyboard to write this today.   You’re wrestling with a need to be right that suddenly seems to you uncannily like my need to be right, a need you correctly condemn as primitive and conflict-producing.   The need to be right is deeply human, it’s also at the root of most human conflict.   Most people when they begin fighting with an old friend, have the same fight a few times, conclude the other person is not worth fighting with and walk away.   The person who keeps fighting is an unreasonable jerk, not a friend.  Done.  

“You don’t do this, though, do you?   You’re always looking for some kind of deeper principle about the way friends should treat each other, why this person is not a friend but a deluded, clueless antagonist.   You write thousands of words about it, like you’re insane.  You think you are working out some dark puzzle about human nature, but, seriously, Elie, what the fuck?”

That is what I am wrestling with, all of the above.   If we are to live principled lives, isn’t it necessary to clearly understand the principles we live by?

“That depends on how many angels are dancing on the head of a particular metaphysical pin.  Yes, you’ve come to the same conclusions about particular people that I did when I was alive.   We disagreed about my need to condemn and walk away from them, and years later you came to the same conclusion I did.  So what?   Why should this concern you?   The old lady who constantly lied, taught her daughter to lie, who in turn taught her son and insane daughter to lie— where is the mystery in any of that?  The woman who did not know how to not fight kept irrationally fighting with you?   Quelle surprise, monsieur!   as we used to say in Peekskill.  What is this sudden torment today?”

I want to nail the lids on the coffins of a trio of glowering vampires.  

“God bless you, then, son, that’s what you do with vampire coffins.   Why even agonize a second about taking a stake to the undead?   Take a hammer, or a rock, and nail that shit closed, bang! done, next case!    Lights, camera, action!  Enough with the Hamlet routine– be done.”

The chill that is making the trees outside this window tremble creeps into this room.  The fading light outside a premonition, touching me lightly with Isaac Babel’s cold, dead fingers.    The imperative keeps goading me — to find a resting place for my thoughts.

A Modern Tragedy

A completely avoidable misunderstanding, made possible by a design flaw and human error.  The first party did exactly the right thing, the second party was continually misinformed, by day seven both parties were right to be indignant, both parties were right to think the other a complete asshole.  It took seven days for these things to shake out, once the truth became clear, and it is a modern tragedy completely of the digital age.  The whole ugly thing could have been avoided, but for a failure of technology (and, failing that, human follow-up).

When I was fifty my mother and Sekhnet ganged up on me to make me buy private health insurance [1].   One of the first doctors I saw was wiry a young urologist who introduced himself, with a firm handshake, as Matt.   He looked at my records, smiled and said “fifty years young.”   He was probably thirty-one at the time.   Matt was very good about returning an email.   If I had a concern or question I had his return email within a very short time.   This alert responsiveness to a patient’s concerns is an excellent trait in a caregiver.

Five weeks ago I had a single two-day incident of gross hematuria, blood in the urine (with clot).   The second day I painlessly passed a soft blood clot half the size of a Q-tip and that was the end of the bloody urine.   I went to Matt’s office and had a CAT scan and blood and urine tests at the end of October.   My last test was a cystoscopy (google it) on November 8, when I would also get the other test results and some medical insight, but the cystoscopy had to be postponed at the last minute, for a legitimate, unforeseeable reason.   My new test was scheduled for a month later.   I wanted to know the results of the CT scan and other tests, to know if those tests had ruled out the possibility the hematuria was a final symptom of late stage bladder or prostate cancer.

When the cystoscopy was rescheduled I called to ask Matt the results of the previous tests.  His receptionist told me he’d get right back to me.  When I didn’t hear back, I called the following day and the receptionist expressed surprise, told me she’d given him the message, that he was very good about getting back to patients.   I called back twice more over the next few days and on day four I asked for Matt’s email address to follow up (my last email to him was maybe ten years back and they’ve changed email addresses).  I was told they don’t give out personal email addresses for doctors.  I persisted and was reluctantly given the email address of  the director of the urology office.  She would forward the message to Matt, which was better than nothing.  I sent a detailed email.  I knew once Matt read the email he’d get right back to me.

On the fifth day, still having heard nothing, I was connected to the director of urologic delay who told me she wouldn’t be able to forward the email to him until two days later, when he was physically in the office.   This was some kind of semi-rational but inviolable protocol at the corporation that employs Matt.   When she told me this I restrained a snarl and told her to keep in mind that the next step for me, if I didn’t hear back two days later, was filing an ethics complaint.

In the late afternoon of the day the email was supposed to have been forwarded to Matt I found the number for the Patient Services Administration.   The woman I spoke to placed me on a long hold to speak to the urology department.   I hung up and waited for her return call, which came a few minutes later.   I was promised a call from her supervisor, probably the following day.    A few minutes later I got a call from Matt’s receptionist, telling me the doctor wanted to speak to me.   She put me on hold.  After a minute or two on hold I hung up.  Matt called back, but his number kept coming up “Scam Likely” on my phone and I ignored the first couple of calls.  Thankfully, he persisted.  

He was plainly aggrieved, since he had already done exactly what any patient would have wanted him to.  He didn’t know what was the matter with me, why I was threatening an ethics complaint.  An ethics complaint, seriously?   He told me he’d left me at least four messages since day five, the first time he’d heard that I’d called.  He had all the date and time stamps of his calls on his phone, in case I needed proof that he’d called me numerous times.   He then made an excellent, very cogent argument defending his behavior and questioning mine.  

I told him I’d had only one missed call from “private”, early in the morning of day five, but no message.   I get notifications of missed calls and I’d had only that one.   He told me that I need to learn to use my phone, because he’d left at least four voicemails.   He told me I should perhaps get a “second opinion” from another urologist.   He was clearly hurt and pissed, felt unfairly attacked.  We patched things up, he told me the tests had come back fine, gave me his email address (in violation of hospital policy, he noted), and we said goodbye.

There is a known issue with voicemail on my phone that is now also known to me.  It is known to Samsung, who makes my Galaxy S-8 phone, and known to T-Mobile, the company that provides my cell phone service.   It is impossible to get notification of new voicemails, somehow.   Frustrating, yes, and there are youTube videos and user forums about it, but nobody, including the tech experts at either company has a solution.   I spent almost two hours with experts at both companies and searching the web.   You can’t fucking do it.   Unless you periodically check for voicemail you have no way of knowing if you have any new messages or not.   I didn’t fully grasp this until Matt chided me for not retrieving his several messages.  I rarely check voicemail, most of them left by robots, because people who need to reach me send a text, an email or a WhatsApp and I get right back to them.

I went through my mostly robotic voicemails and found his first, not from five days after the postponed cystoscopy, as he’d told me, but from the moment I was supposed to have been having the procedure, less than half an hour after I spoke to his receptionist. He informed me that the CAT scan was fine, the urine cell test showed nothing suspicious, that to be thorough he needed to take a two minute peek into my bladder, but that there was nothing to worry about.   He said he knows how anxiety producing this kind of thing can be but that I should be reassured that the tests had all come back fine and there was no likelihood of a worst case scenario.

Now, a full week later, he was peeved because an insane patient, probably driven mad by unwarranted anxiety, kept calling, sent a controlled but clearly angry email and was escalating things in the bureaucracy and threatening to put him in front of an ethics board.    I was peeved because I kept being told that the doctor had my message and that I simply had to put my thumb back up my ass and continue waiting for his call.  

He was right to be peeved, since not only had he done nothing wrong, he had done the very thing you want your doctor to do, and he’d been compassionate in his message as well.   I was right to be peeved, because as far as I was being told by his staff, Matt was now simply acting like the bureaucratic, liability alert, ass-covering institution he works for and there was nothing I could do about it, except to stop bothering them.   Nobody I spoke to apparently even bothered to follow up with him until day five.  If his receptionist had talked to him the first time I called back, he would have told her to have the patient check his voicemail.  And — done.  I’d have left him a thank you note.  As it is I sent him an email clarifying and apologizing, though, based on what I was told every time I called his office, I hardly knew what else I could have done, given the information I was getting.

A modern day tragedy, seriously.   Each of us assumed the ubiquitous technology was working as designed, each of us assumed the other was acting badly.   The only saving grace that kept things from getting really ugly is that the doctor I was dealing with is a mensch, something that I also strive to be.

 

[1]  It was fairly expensive, even at the discounted rate for my low income, and my premiums increased by 10% to 20% every year, doubling within a few years.    I pay much, much less now under the Affordable Care Act.

Two Approaches to Anger

Anger is a complicated emotion most often triggered by feeling unfairly treated.   I don’t know that the exact recipe for anger can be arrived at, since it is a protean emotion that comes in many distasteful flavors.   A feeling of aggravating powerlessness is probably always present, as is fear and the associated fight or flight chemicals — and feeling hurt.   Having unfair things done to you that increase your feeling of powerlessness, of being disrespected, will almost certainly make you angry.

I knew a couple who rage at each other constantly.   When their children were young the man agonized about the damage they were doing to their growing kids by openly warring in front of them all the time.   Apparently they couldn’t help it, when the rage built to a certain point they simply had to start screaming at each other.    Unfortunately, this kind of thing sometimes happens in families.   I saw a lot of rage in my childhood home and, in spite of a lot of hard, conscious work, I am still not entirely healed from it.   I am 62, by the way, and have come to understand there is no complete healing possible, if you’ve been scarred enough by violence. You might learn to do much better, but that’s the best you can do.  The damage is always there too.

There are two common approaches to anger.   One involves feeling and expressing it and the other’s main concern is repressing it.   Anger is a supremely threatening emotion, and either way, express or repress, there is a cost.  

The only productive use for expressing anger in a relationship, it seems to me, is to let someone know (and this only works if the person cares about your feelings and is not enraged themself) why you got angry.   If you can make the reason you’re hurt clear, there is a chance the other person, being aware of your sensitivity, will do better to avoid doing the specific thing that hurts you and makes you angry.    That is the best case scenario.   It is hard to do, and is only effective if you can express what you need without anger.   That’s another good reason to calm yourself before attempting to talk to someone who has made you mad.   Feeling anger and being able to calm yourself enough to talk about the underlying issues is hard to do, hard to learn, takes a lot of practice.

I understand that this path requires sitting with a painful emotion, deep thought, difficult introspection, digesting how much of the anger-producing situation might be your own doing, figuring out what you could have done differently, better.  It means engaging with an extremely unpleasant emotion.   The upside is that if you can express your needs clearly and sensibly, and the other person is mature and not a jerk, things might be better in your relationships.  

The way of repression, suppression, denial is a lifelong trap, it seems to me.  When my warring friends make up they scrupulously pretend that everything is fine, speaking softly, walking delicately on yer proverbial eggshells.  The underlying things each does to provoke the other to rage are waiting, poised, sly, opportunistic, always at the ready.   They leap out at each other with teeth bared, ready to fight to the metaphorical death.   This couple has learned nothing about their mutual rage over the course of many years, except that pretending everything is fine is preferable to looking directly at the monstrous emotions that make them want to kill each other.  Until those emotions take over again and they are screaming at each other while their now adult children wince.

If you become adept at suppressing anger you inevitably suppress other emotions that make us human.   If you don’t allow yourself to feel the common human emotion of anger, something each of us has to struggle with, you also deny yourself the mercy to forgive, to fully and freely feel the many changing emotions that are part of life.  You must be eternally vigilant against anger, clamp down on every other strong emotion in the interest of repressing anger.

The most positive, grateful, peaceful person in the world will, from time to time, encounter aggravating and frustrating situations and people.    You don’t have to always express anger, it’s better to remain mild, sure, but you really do have to feel anger to learn to deal with it better.   Training yourself not to feel anger no matter what will make you a kind of monster.   That is because the anger is actually impossible not to feel once provoked and the feeling has to go somewhere.   If you suppress it, the anger can only go inside.   Anger turned inward produces depression, anxiety, self-justifying assholishness of every kind.

I knew a guy whose best friend in college, a writer he looked up to in the writing program they were in, was screwing the guy’s longtime girlfriend on the sly.   Apparently turned to him in a bar one night, smiled and sang “You’re Gonna Lose That Girl” to him before he quietly went off and seduced the young woman.   This guy wrote a reality-based novel about his college days, and his narrator agonizes for chapter after chapter about why his girl has suddenly, unaccountably given him the cold shoulder.   After page after page of self-torment it turns out the novel’s charismatic protagonist, the writer friend, had turned her into a party girl.    She was no longer interested in the bookish sidekick, she moved on while this guy wrote a doorstop of an unpublished novel about it.  

I asked the guy why his doppelganger in the memoir-based novel wasn’t at all angry when he found out the reason for his months of unbearable misery, the double betrayal by his best friend and his lover.   He told me he simply wasn’t mad, that’s what actually happened.  Not very satisfying from a narrative point of view, I told him.  But it’s exactly what happened in his life, he said, defending his choice to write an accurate, if thinly fictionalized, account of what actually took place.  Forty years later, he’s still good friends with the now professional writer, though he himself no longer writes.

This same guy suffers frequently from a particularly active case of Tension Myoneural Syndrome.   That is crippling pain, usually in the spine, that is (according to Dr. John Sarno, this man’s guru)  the body’s dramatic attempt to distract the consciousness of the sufferer from crippling, terrifying rage.   My insistence on talking about anger, and working on reducing its power over my life, has made this man decide to write me off as a person not worth knowing.    I have to laugh, though it’s not a pleasant laugh.   Fuck the guy’s wife, you’re cool.   Engage the subject of the anger that torments most of us, that actually physically cripples him regularly, and you are fucking out of bounds, sir, completely fucking out of bounds!

Oh.  So sorry!

Another sad illustration of one the many ways undigested anger can fuck you up.  

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The Saddest Punchline I know

It’s funny how much clearer a thing sometimes becomes once it’s dead, its lifecycle complete.   It happens with people, and beloved pets and it happens with relationships gone wrong.   You see the thing whole, finally.    I recently lost a friend I’ve known since we were eight and it’s been bothering me for some time, exactly how the friendship became toxic, why it is now so intolerable to me to be treated the way he continues to treat me.

Now that our long friendship is truly dead, the whole outline is there for me to see.  Today I got the last few elusive pieces to complete a sorry picture I could not, for the life of me, truly understand.   Now I finally get it.  The punchline is deep, but about the unfunniest one I can think of at the moment.

He seemed to look up to me and often competed with me, and I never knew why.   Years ago he told me to use a certain gauge of string on my guitar “you’ll feel better about yourself,” he told me unaccountably.   His vying sometimes took insane forms.   

At some point he found he could make me angry by being provocative and steadily ignoring my mounting aggravation.  As my feelings got more unpleasantly stirred, and he pressed on stirring, I’d eventually react with anger, restraining myself each time, but barely.   This sick pastime seemed to become a tic with him.   I really believe he actually could not help himself, it gratified him, somehow, to see me angry.

His wife, who I was quite friendly with [1], was often furious with him because he was not always honest with her. The thing she hated most was a liar, which I can understand, since without trust, what do you really have with another person?   Funny to say, his occasional untruthfulness never bothered me that much, though I prize honesty more than most things.  

It also outraged her that he never stood up for himself, except against her.  I think this enraged her even more than his occasional looseness with the facts.

My childhood friend’s wife weaponized a casual remark I made to her and deployed it to crippling effect during a marriage counseling session they were having.  “Your best friend says you’re a fucking liar too!” and she took my remark, which she bent to her use, and whipped him across the face with it until he was bloody.  

“And you’re not even man enough to stand up to him!” she later told him.  The therapist apparently agreed with his wife that if he didn’t confront me, his marriage was over.

He showed up in a panic to confront me, his right eye actually twitching as he leveled his accusation:  you deliberately or recklessly tried to destroy my marriage, our friendship is probably over, it all depends on your answers.   I thought hard and explained things as best I could, as friendship demands — when you see a friend in anguish you do what you can to help.  I agreed that if I maliciously or negligently undermined his marriage, neither he nor his wife should be friends with me.  I described how my casual remark was weaponized and gave him reasonable things to tell the therapist and his wife.  I did this under pressure, but though he seemed calmed down, gratitude wasn’t in the cards any more than an apology was for the wild accusation.

I realized afterwards that things had clearly gotten out of hand and we needed to either stop the ugly cycle or call it a day on our friendship.   We spent five hours or more trying to talk it out, but he could not yield.   He would not allow that he’d been a shaky friend, put me in impossible positions, returned acts of friendship with repeated senseless provocation.  He defended his actions in detail and when I remained skeptical (it was at the end of five hours of this) told me he loved me.   I told him love is how you act when someone you care about is in pain.  Doing a dance and singing a song and telling your friend he is not really hurt when he is, none of that is  love.  Merciful action is love.

Provoking, being unrepentant, though you apologize grudgingly, explaining why you really didn’t provoke, how there was actually an implied apology that you’re lying about not receiving, well, that’s not really love.

One thing bothered me more and more.   With our estrangement I’d lost the friendship of his wife, his two sons, great young men, and a mutual friend who appeared to have taken his side in our impasse.   I wanted to know what my final unforgivable act against him had been.  I suspected it was my exasperated detailing of many the reasons I don’t respect him, twenty minutes into our five hour marathon, but I couldn’t be sure, since he never contacted me or sought to reconcile after our meeting went badly.  “It was a bad day,” he admitted today with some sadness, as close to admitting he’d been wrong in how he acted as he can get.

It took some time, and some work on my part, a series of calls and emails, but today he called me back to answer my question.  He did not want to talk about the past.  He felt it was a mistake to go over the hurtful things again, it would only lead to more and more conflict to go back over those mutually aggravating things.  It was both of our faults, even though he admitted without condition that he’d been wrong too.   His idea was that we just need to put it all behind us and continue on as if none of it had ever happened, just be friends again, like we used to be.   It struck me as an impossibly stupid idea and I told him why.  

With patience, about forty minutes in, I was able to get the answer to my original question about my unforgivable final act.   When we parted after the long talk he had no particular gripe against me, he said, in fact, he was still hopeful about saving our friendship.   After all, I had been for the most part mild during most of that long, sometimes agonizing conversation on that bad day for him.   It was after his wife called a week later to give me an ultimatum about forgiving him immediately and unconditionally or dropping dead that he learned the reasons to be furious at me.

His wife told him I’d made a secret recording of our conversation, which was a betrayal he simply could not forgive.   I explained the difference between being a fucking fuck who wears a fucking wire (for purposes of making a tape for others to use to incriminate somebody) and recording a talk, for personal use, with someone who has a famously spotty memory, is addicted to equivocation and energetic and nimble disputing specific arguable details.   This guy, I must point out, while very emotional, is also highly intelligent and skilled in the art of verbal self-defense.

The second unforgivable thing I’d done, and again, he qualified it, this was admittedly second hand, from his wife again, was that I’d told her that shortly into his bad day trying to make me accept his apology without having to take full responsibility for his actions, he’d made me mad enough to feel like socking him, throwing him on the ground and kicking him, just to make it stop.  In his opinion, and in his wife’s, that is simply intolerable to say about a friend of more than fifty years, no matter how mad you feel, no matter what the provocation might have been, no matter how many provocations in a row you’d been hit with.

I didn’t bother pointing out that I hadn’t laid a finger on him, that I used the image of violence to convey to his wife how angry he’d made me.  Fuck him, you know? Plus, of course, his wife, who I said this to (“to whom I said this”…), has felt exactly the same way about him countless times and understood the impulse very well when I said it.

Now here is the punchline, and it is as horrible as I promised.   

The real reason he was so angry at me was that I’d told his wife, and I had this insight only at the very end of a long talk with her, that the reason he always feels he’s in an unfair competition with me is that he has trouble standing up for himself and believes that I don’t.   “Rob feels like he’s a pussy,” I told her,  as it dawned on me, “and he believes, for whatever reason, that I am not a pussy, and he’s very angry about it.”    

“You are definitely not a pussy,” she told me.

Then she told her husband that anyone who could be friends with someone who says he’s a pussy is a fucking pussy she will not be married to.

Yow.  

It also turns out she never conveyed my conciliatory offer, made several times and emphasized, repeated once more as I said goodbye.   I told her Rob was welcome to call me as soon as he made some of the progress he promised he was striving for in therapy.   He needs to develop some insight about the often provocative effect of his actions on those close to him.   “She never told me that,” he said, sounding sad.

Lady MacBeth got nothing on this girl, nor does her husband either, for that matter.

Thinking v. Selling

There is a big difference between critical thinking to solve problems, a largely neglected art, and selling, the most widely practiced art in the world today.    It extends far beyond politics, where the distinction could not be more clear.    To think productively, to actually solve problems, we need to be able to look squarely at facts and have as many relevant pieces as possible in front of us to consider.   Thinking well requires open-mindedness, intellectual honesty and a small measure of courage.  

In selling, certain facts need to be deemphasized, harmful facts removed entirely from the conversation.  The problem in sales is much more limited — simply to get the customer to buy — and the techniques used are infinitely more practical, with success or failure readily measurable, written in red or black.     One downside for us, as a society, is that being constantly subjected to the unabashed puffery of 24/7 sales pitches makes us question almost everything we hear as possible bullshit.

The imperative to learn, the thing that makes us wonder and think in the first place, often needs to be suppressed in the service of making the sale.   The art of persuasion, in the highest sense, requires laying out as much as can be known and allowing fairness to emerge organically from an open-ended dialogue.   The honesty needed for growth as a human is almost the opposite of the main quality needed for clinching a sale.

I don’t want to bring in our compulsive liar-in-chief, though he is perhaps the best illustration of this distinction that comes to mind, and of course, he’s ubiquitous.   Thoughtfulness, and reference to the observable world, is replaced, in every case, with the imperative to win, to clinch the sale, to “make the deal”.   You give a massive tax cut to the wealthiest people and “persons” in the world, selling it as a gift to the middle class.  It is clearly not, as almost all of the benefits go to the already fabulously well-off.  

At election time you swear you are about to pass a real middle class tax cut, in the next few days, in fact.   You swear to this even though Congress is not in session and no law can be passed when Congress is not in session.   When somebody from the press raises this obvious flag that you’re not being truthful, simply call them rude, stupid, fake, working for a failing outfit, an enemy of the people, tell them brusquely to sit down, scold them with authority, like you’d talk to a disobedient dog.   The angry base loves this kind of alpha dog behavior.  

The invading illegal caravan of smallpox, leprosy and tuberculosis infected raping child terrorists, same deal.   An immediate and terrifying existential threat to all of us, trumpeted hundreds of times in the days before the election, many millions spent to send troops to the border for a muscular photo op — nothing mentioned about this rapidly advancing murderous hoard since.  The art of the deal.

Writing, it strikes me more and more, is thinking made visible.  Blessedly, from time to time, we see wonderful, thought provoking (as we say) books and articles being published.   The art of selling is something I know almost nothing about.   Thinking as clearly as I can is something I try to practice every day as I set my thoughts down here.   My hope is that sometimes these musings can help shed light on what others are also mulling over.  The daily practice of writing/thinking has improved my life, I have to say.   I couldn’t put a price to it, though it certainly would behoove me to.  

I offer, once again, an example from my own life of the muddle of emotions that can blot out virtually all thought and possibility for insight.   By way of introduction, let us note again that emotion is almost always the deciding factor in life.   The way something makes us feel determines how we react to it.  The most intelligent argument is not often persuasive unless it is also engaging and emotionally satisfying.    Both strands, feeling and analytical thought, must be brought into play to make a persuasive case.   We humans love a sensible story that makes emotional sense to us.

So here’s a little story that may illuminate the difference between thoughtfulness and the unreasoning need to win at all costs.  I had a childhood friend who went to an Ivy League college where he made a friend, Andy, a brilliant guy with a history of periodic stints in the laughing academy.   Originally diagnosed as schizophrenic, Andy’s occasional spells of wild behavior were later classified as the manic end of Bipolar Disorder.   Psychiatry is as much an art as a science, though some scientists make arguments to the contrary.   Levels of various chemicals in the brain can be tested, neurotransmitter and other levels balanced, rebalanced, and so forth.  It can make a difference, or not.

For decades they did this to the brain of this fellow, who became one of my closest friends.  I was around for at least two dramatic episodes of Andy slipping over to the other side of madness, had to bring him to the mental ward myself the final time.    It was scary to be close to someone in the grips of full-blown mania, full of energy and far from reason, though it never caused me to question our friendship.

When, in the end, years later, he behaved with viciousness toward me, I did not attribute it to his mental illness.  I attributed it to him being an enraged asshole, pure and simple.   Our mutual friend was devastated to hear that I’d finally written Andy off and did his best to convince me, during a long phone call, that I needed to forgive and forget, that we all needed to be friends.  

I told him I appreciated the sentiment, and the peace-making impulse, but that I was too hurt and angry at the moment to consider any of it.  I explained to him that as far as him trying to be a mediator between us, he was in the worst possible position to do it.   The first requirement for a mediator is that she be disinterested in the issues and outcome, focused impartially on trying to help the parties resolve their dispute.   Here, his close involvement with both of us would make that disinterest impossible.  He said he understood.

Now we can fairly consider whether I was right or wrong to feel so hurt by my mad friend’s betrayal, or so angry.  That is certainly a reasonable question.   Put it to the side for the moment and consider, for purposes of this story, that I was deeply hurt and very angry.   All you really need to know is that when Andy and I spoke to try to work things out, my old friend attempted to bully me over the phone.   It was an impressive demonstration of the opposite of good will.

I have learned, over the years, that you can’t argue with someone’s feelings. Feelings are real.   You must address those feelings first, if you care about having a relationship, or even a conversation.   If you tell me I hurt you, and I care about you, I have to accept, first of all, that you are hurt.  The impulse may be to say you’re crazy to feel that way, I never intended, I would never, blah blah blah, but that self-justifying impulse does nothing to help assuage the hurt your friend has expressed.   Only acknowledgment of the feeling can be of any help when strong emotions are in play.  It is a necessary first step to any real dialogue and sensitivity to a person’s emotions is a prerequisite for friendship.

I saw my old friend a few days after that phone conversation.   He once again began trying to convince me that I needed to forgive my former friend Andy, who had reportedly told him “I owe him an apology, but I’m too stingy to give it”.   I gave Andy’s advocate hypothetical after hypothetical to try to make him understand how hurt I was, since he could not seem to grasp it.  He brushed each one aside.  “That would never happen to me,” “you seem to have a fixation on that”, “well, that’s because you handled that completely wrong” “that’s your problem right there,”  “I’m not prone to violent anger like you are,” “you foolishly trusted Andy” and so forth.   I grew aggravated and told him so, but he would not relent.  There was an important point he needed to make, a point he believed would make me see how rashly I was behaving, mitigating facts I needed to know that might make me actually forgive poor Andy.    

In the end, in the face of my rising aggravation and finally real anger, he put the important facts on the table, Andy’s excuses for his final “betrayal”.   Andy claimed he’d left me a missed call, apparently, that I didn’t return for days,   He hadn’t slept for days before and had bronchitis on the day he promised to help me with a vexing programming problem he told me he could solve in a few minutes.   He couldn’t keep his promise to do that simple thing because he had several excuses, he was very sick, sleepless, tried to call, had obligations to members of his Zen cult that came first.   Why was I being so rigid, so petty, so fucking angry?

“Why didn’t you get the hell out of there?” a friend asked reasonably when I told him the story of my friend’s ruthless attempt to make me forgive.   I told him he’d picked me up and driven me to his house, I had no immediate way to leave his suburban enclave.  

Incidentally, all of Andy’s excuses were known to me, my friend and I had discussed them all a few days earlier.

Eventually, after a long negotiation that tested every bit of my resolve to be nonviolent, my friend apologized for his insensitivity.   We remained friends, but a troubling trend soon emerged.   He did not seem able to resist provoking me.  In the end, when I could not get past this tic of his, he admitted that he had only apologized about the Andy business because I was so upset at the time.  He had been right, he said, to insist, to try to bring facts to my attention that might help me forgive.  He would do it again, he said.

In other words, no matter how aggravated you may have been, no matter how many times you urged me to stop, or reconsider, or slow down, no matter how disturbed your feelings, no matter how angry you became, what I had to say was more important than any of your so-called feelings.  Your anger is your own problem, not mine.

Now at this point you may be thinking this person simply may not really know what friendship is.   Maybe he needs to be left where he is, done. Goodbye friend, as little hope for you as for peace in your endlessly contentious marriage, or easily healing the many harms you’ve done to your children by your long example.

Call it a snapshot of the definition of insanity attributed to Einstein, or some kind of sentimental Anne Frank-like naivete about long-time friendship, or me just being a fool.    A couple of months after our falling out I called a couple of times, left messages, and, at his texted request, sent this email:

It depresses me that people I was friendly with and had no quarrel with, your wife, your sons, R____, have all vanished from my life as a result of our falling out.  Not to mention you.   I understand your wife and kids have to take your side, whatever it is, but still.   And you can’t even pick up the phone and return a missed call? (that was a rhetorical question)

What was my final, unforgivable act against you?

What did you tell R_____ that made him cut off communication with me?   When he left the US we were seemingly the best of friends, he was apologizing that we’d only managed to squeeze in one quick visit when he first arrived.  Then, as a prelude to complete radio silence,  I got a reference to “other developments over the last year or so” that presumably magnified the differences between us beyond the point of possible friendship.

Did you talk to your rabbi in the days before Yom Kippur and, if so, what did he tell you?    I don’t think it’s possible that a rabbi would advise someone to make no further attempt at reconciliation with his oldest friend during the Ten Days of Repentance.   I conclude you didn’t discuss it with your spiritual adviser.   I think you should consider this seven minute discussion on apology, forgiveness and atonement: 

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/metoo-men-repent

It only took him a few days to craft this measured reply:

I do want to find a way for us to be friends again, but I suspect that responding to your questions will get us into the same back and forth mess that electronic communication had got us into earlier this year.  What I suggest would be for us to cut to the chase and for you to let me know what you are looking for from me?  If you are interested in exploring what Judaism would counsel us to do, I’d be open to sitting down with a Rabbi (like Rabbi P_____ from the Chabad) and put our situation before him.

Just one more test, I see, of my ability to rein in the impulse to dash an impossible person to the ground and deliver just enough kicks to let him know how I truly feel about his idiosyncratic take on love and friendship.

 

I’ve Waited Long

I am typing in the room where my mother’s ashes sit in a box in a beautiful paper bag.   The elegant bag is in the corner, out of my view, and I haven’t looked at it in a long time, but it is a distinctive bag.   The bag is brown paper on the outside, a pure slate gray on the inside.   My mother would like the bag.   She has no worries now, nor any wishes, either.  I decided years ago that I’d scatter her ashes in the Long Island Sound at the public beach at Wading River, but we haven’t done it so far, in eight and a half years.   I haven’t been to that beach in more than fifty years, who knows if you can even get on the beach now without a resident pass?   When I was there last there were swings, seesaws and a sliding pond on the sand, and a small parking lot with maybe eight spots painted on the once black shore road.

The idea of scattering my mother’s ashes in the water at Wading River was a sentimental one.  I  think of those months in that rented green and white bungalow a hundred yards from the lapping water as the happiest summers of her life, but who knows?   She always said she wanted to live near the water, and for a couple of summers we did.   I don’t know if she was happy there or not, hearing the waves breaking at night.  What I do know is that at the moment she truly doesn’t care.   Her concern at the end was about not being eaten by worms and bugs, the thought terrified her.  I assured her it would never happen and it will never happen.  

The scattering of her ashes is more a poetic matter, really.   Every so often it gives me a pang, that I haven’t managed to scatter her ashes into the gently lapping Long Island Sound,  that her ashes are sitting there in that elegant paper bag.  On the other hand, I am positive she doesn’t mind, even if she would chide me about my long failure to do it, if she were somehow able to.

That I can sit here, a few feet from her ashes, writing thoughtfully about it in words almost nobody will ever see, is a blessing and my form of daily meditation.   Thinking these thoughts, molding them into sections that I then comb carefully for readability, focuses my spirit, clarifies my beliefs, sharpens my sense of purpose.   That I have little clue about the only thing the world understands — attaining financial success — does not distract me while I work.  The hard work of vainly striving is not a remote consideration while I concentrate on making my words express my thoughts, my heart, as clearly as I can.

                                                                           ii 

I had a call just now from a one-time good friend of my mother’s, a woman a year older than my mother.   My mother would have been ninety last May, this woman was ninety-one last month, and still going strong.  God bless her, as we say.  Her mind is sharp, her language is crisp, she is upright and walking and driving great distances– still a force at ninety-one.   In the course of narrating a lot of horrors she asked me to keep to myself, while assuring me that she is up to the challenges, taking them one day at a time, she mentioned something that gave her a glimmer of hope in these dark times.

She attended an interfaith vigil the other day, the great throng of several faiths who had gathered was inspiring to her.   The hall was very crowded, with a big crowd outside also.   Somebody came through the mass of people outside and ushered her inside to a seat she didn’t want.  “I can stand, I’m perfectly fine,” she insisted, “give the seat to someone who needs it.”   In the end, she took the seat, though she felt bad about it.   Her ninety-two year-old friend, who had declined the seat in another part of the crowded hall, regretted it afterwards as her lower back tightened up painfully after standing on the concrete floor for a couple of hours.   Better to be seated than aching, I say more and more often now.

Small mercies take on a bigger and bigger significance as life goes on.   We see few enough of them in the world now, as so many nations stand on the brink of merciless horrors many of us believed were a barbaric relic of a bygone, insane age.  I’m talking about a small mercy like finding a vacant bench at the point of a walk when your arthritic knees are barking.   The relief you feel, taking the weight off your troubled bones, a gift you give yourself, provided by a merciful side of the universe and gratefully accepted.

There was a lot on this woman’s mind, and much of it I agreed not to share with anyone, so there’s that.   At one point, God bless her, she couldn’t resist giving me just a little shit about not calling her lately, after I’d spent hours on the phone last month advising her about some very vexing things– and sent her several more pages about my father’s life that she was too vexed to really take in.   

                                                                  iii

After the Saudis murdered a journalist in their consulate in Turkey last month there was a period of several weeks during which the vicious, smiling thirty-four year-old Crown Prince had his advisors and marketing folks make up and spin multiple lies about what happened to the disappeared critic of the regime.  Our president, also born to great wealth that made him feel truly exceptional since childhood, stalled along with the Crown fucking Prince of Saudi Arabia, a fundamentalist Islamic monarchy.   “We have to wait until  the Saudis finish investigating whether they murdered this vicious, lying journalist, which they strongly deny, look, they strongly deny it, like Justice Kavanaugh denied all those lies against him  — whatever happened to the presumption of innocence that liberals used to talk about?  Here they go, rushing to call MBS a murderer, which we don’t know, we may never know, certainly not until he’s done investigating whether he is or not, look, this kid is a gem, a great, great future king– no presumption of innocence for him?   Typical of the lying haters and hypocrites, funders and defenders of the raping, leprosy and smallpox infected terrorist hoards advancing on us …”

All we have, any of us, is the impression we leave behind on those who knew us. We are whispers, after our death, not even ghosts.   The example of how we lived is the only thing we leave to the world of people who knew us.   The power we may have wielded over others is nothing, it is how we used that power that is remembered, that lessons for the living can be drawn from.

I had an old friend who lives the frenetic, embattled life of a successful suburban citizen.   His many stresses and frustrations have few, if any, safe outlets.  It appears that I became his best option for relief.   More and more, particularly since I’ve devoted myself, from before my mother’s death, to restraining my angry reactions as much as I can, he took to provoking me.    I pointed this out to him each time he did it, but he always argued that he was not provoking me, that I just get mad unfairly, that maybe I was the one with the provocation problem, not him.    I had more than one opportunity to throw him on the ground and kick him, but I breathed and fought my way to remaining as peaceful as I could.   This restraint apparently goaded him to ever greater provocations.

In the end, he provoked me into detailing the many things I don’t respect about him.  I don’t know if I mentioned his lack of basic courage, which I think is probably encompassed in the unfortunate phrase I do recall using “moral retard”.   In the wake of this his wife called me, basically offering me an ultimatum.   You have to forgive him, she told me, because he loves you, we all love you.  

I explained why it’s impossible to forgive someone who takes no responsibility for hurtful things they repeatedly do.   Futile, really, since those hurtful things continue on and on into the future if they are not acknowledged and corrected.   The only option, to pretend everything is fine because people tell you that they love you, is not one I’m willing to take, even for the high moral cause of professed love.

Besides, I told her, love is the way you treat people, what you reflexively do when you see a loved one in pain.   Love is action, not a word.  I told her to let her husband know that I’ll be happy to hear from him once he gets some insight in the therapy he assures me he is working hard at.  “That’s not going to happen,” his wife told me, and it had the ring of truth.   He would rather lose his oldest friend than admit that the annoyingly superior fuck might have been even partially right.  Zero sum, baby, he can’t help himself.  If you don’t win, you lose.  What could be worse than that?  Ask the president.

It began to bug me more and more that because I’d taken a principled stance in regard to an old friendship I’d lost the longtime friendship of his wife and his two sons, as well as the friendship of a close mutual friend, apparently enraged at how badly I’ve hurt his troubled old friend.   I called the guy on Halloween (spooky, I know), to ask him three questions that had formed in my head.   I left a voicemail.   I heard nothing back from him, though I’d spontaneously left him the option of doing nothing, saying I’d email him the questions if I didn’t hear back.

A few hours later I rethought my offer.  What was the point of sending questions to someone who could not even reply to a voicemail?  It would only increase my aggravation if I never heard back, give him an easy, an effortless, final provocation.  I called again, left a second message, asking him to text, email or call me if he was willing to help me by answering three questions.  

Two days later, having heard nothing, I texted him, asking if he was out of town or too weak and unJewish to respond.   “Weak and unJewish”, an admittedly provocative formulation (especially to a Jew who fervently prays every morning), but, in context, restrained, I thought, particularly after two days of silence by way of reply.

I soon got the texts one would expect, explaining how he’d heard the first message and thought he’d be getting an email, and then no email came, and then, belatedly, he saw the other voicemail from me but didn’t actually hear it until after my recent text a few hours earlier and so on and so forth and so, you see, there was a rationale to all the delay, a hazard of digital communication (which is what I’d called to avoid in the first place) and, yes, please send him the three questions.

I sent this:

It depresses me that people I was friendly with and had no quarrel with, your wife, your sons, R___, have all vanished from my life as a result of our falling out.  Not to mention you.   I understand your wife and kids have to take your side, whatever it is, but still.   And you can’t even pick up the phone and return a missed call? (rhetorical question)

What was my final, unforgivable act against you?

What did you tell R____ that made him cut off communication with me?   When he left the US we were seemingly the best of friends, he was apologizing that we’d only managed to squeeze in one quick visit when he first arrived.  Then, as a prelude to complete radio silence,  I got a reference to “other developments over the last year or so” that presumably magnified the differences between us beyond the point of possible friendship.

Did you talk to your rabbi in the days before Yom Kippur and, if so, what did he tell you?    I don’t think it’s possible that a rabbi would advise someone to make no further attempt at reconciliation with his oldest friend during the Ten Days of Repentance.   I conclude you didn’t discuss it with your spiritual adviser.   I think you should consider this seven minute discussion on apology, forgiveness and atonement: 

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/metoo-men-repent

I heard back quickly by email.  He’d received my questions, but I’d have to give him a few days to answer them.

I took a breath and typed back: OK.

The Sins of the Fathers

The Holy One, Blessed Be He, in Leviticus 26, makes it clear that He will punish the children, grandchildren, yea, the great-grandchildren of sinners seven times over. OK, actually, I’m lying, He only implies it, merely hints at it in his final threat.   There will be no children or grandchildren left alive when the All Merciful is done with you, disobedient sinners.   As it is written:

27 “‘If in spite of this you still do not listen to me but continue to be hostile toward me, 28 then in my anger I will be hostile toward you, and I myself will punish you for your sins seven times over. 29 You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters.'”  [1]

As it is written (by me):

The father’s weakness
anger, vanity
visited as a curse
on the lives
of his children

It does not, of course, need to be written this way, though frequently it is.   Your parents are your first role models for how to act.  Sometimes they are the worst possible role models, in which case, you will have to take your lumps for having originally learned how to treat others from teachers who had a poor idea of how to do it.

It makes me very sad, because, though you can learn these things over the course of many years, given the time and inclination and the luck of finding people to support you in this difficult endeavor, the odds of ever doing so are greatly stacked against you if you’re raised by senselessly enraged parents, or terrified ones.  They can’t be expected to offer meaningful support because they don’t even understand what you’re trying to do.    Your parents’ poor teaching will, as Ha Shem threatens the willfully disobedient, eat your flesh. 

 

[1] The Lord’s truly divine punchline (you really should read the entire five or six paragraphs of unimaginable horror the Holy One threatens will befall the disobedient, if you want the full effect of the punchline):

36 “‘As for those of you who are left, I will make their hearts so fearful in the lands of their enemies that the sound of a windblown leaf will put them to flight. They will run as though fleeing from the sword, and they will fall, even though no one is pursuing them. 37 They will stumble over one another as though fleeing from the sword, even though no one is pursuing them. So you will not be able to stand before your enemies. 38 You will perish among the nations; the land of your enemies will devour you. 39 Those of you who are left will waste away in the lands of their enemies because of their sins; also because of their ancestors’ sins they will waste away.'”

Schematic of the previous post

A complicated, difficult dynamic can be reduced to simple terms.   This process is sometimes referred to as reductionism, which has come far from its original scientific/philosophical meaning of breaking a complex issue into its simplest component parts to understand its workings.  

In our modern political version of reductionism a long, complex history can be summarized in an easily understandable, if simplistic, concept:  liberty, or betrayal, or treason. Traitors have long been executed in front of cheering crowds, their heads set on pikes as a warning to anyone who might be thinking of challenging power.   The individual guilt or innocence of the decapitated party is far less important than the effect on the rest when a traitor meets a grisly end.

For most purposes in the larger world, the party with the loudest megaphone will define what is going on.   For example, Americans angry about a recent national disgrace involving a controversial Supreme Court appointment can be called an angry mob.   An angry mob can be dismissed, they are clearly irrational assholes.   The underlying events that made millions so angry?   Wah, wah, wah.

My old friend who felt disrespected by my late arrival has his story about the end of our long friendship, confirmed in its harshest detail.   Widaen told me he disrespects me!    

Widaen, for his part, had another story, my old friend simply doesn’t seem able to stop provoking me.  He seems intent on making me angry.   He surely sees that he’s aggravating me, or placing me in a brutally unfair position, and when I protest, he doubles down.  Gives a meaningless apology, to end the conflict, and then continues on the same way as if we’ve never discussed things.

There are facts, actual events, underlying this dispute, but those facts are in dispute.   If they are in dispute, they’re not really facts, are they?   

This is the self-justifying idiocy of the world.   If you find any mental construct to support your position (if there is a dispute, can there actually be “facts”?), you’re golden, just keep doubling your bet.   In the case of my once good friend, he was able to justify his own actions, become the victim of my brutality and get the sympathy of those who know us both.  

I think a lot of conflict between people who are close (and tribes and nations, for that matter) can be traced to lack of insight, a lack of actually listening to what the other party needs.    

My friend’s refusal to empathize with the feelings I expressed became impossible for me to tolerate. Ultimately it’s impossible to respect someone who lives in denial about how his actions affect others.   His years of constant fights with his wife?   Nothing to do with my disrespect for him!    

The good news, as far as I can make it out, is that insight can be developed.   There are things baked into us that are hard to change, but change is the nature of the universe, us included.   If you develop just a bit of insight, we can continue to talk. You need to have just a little insight, to have a good friend like me.

“You arrogant, pretentious fuck,” I can hear the words foaming on my once good friend’s lips.   My point is no less true.