Blessed Are The Peacemakers

A peacemaker takes people in pain and anger and, if she is good, leaves them with less intense bad feelings, able to picture a time when they will reconcile and forgive each other.

Many people want to make peace, but it is an art few people master. Inartful attempts to make peace remind me of Rodney King’s “can’t we all just get along?”  Convincing people to pretend it was all a misunderstanding and that everybody actually loves each other is not peacemaking.  There are situations where this may be the case, mutual misunderstanding leads to war.   But until the hurts are acknowledged, you might as well just squirt lighter fluid on the smoldering ashes.

Making peace is hard, often impossible, but blessed work, and the principle is simple and universal.

The first requirements are humility and empathy toward the parties. Judging the angry parties does not help make peace, only understanding the harsh reality of their feelings does.   The peacemaker cannot make peace (except in the case of the Colt .45 sardonically named The Peacemaker, which left the quarrelsome party silent at the end of the session)– the peacemaker can only bring calm, patience and listening skills to a situation from which these elements have fled.

The power of calm, patience and listening cannot be overstated.  It is aggravating not to be heard.  “I know what you are about to say and you seem unwilling to admit the possibility that you’re completely wrong,” is a poor strategy for a would-be peacemaker.  

Good luck to those who would be peacemakers, the impulse is commendable.   Few things in this troubled world are more blessed than making peace where there was implacable hostility.  Don’t forget, though, to check your own frustration at the door before you attempt it.  That’s all I’m saying.

Excavation

I should be excavating the foot deep surface of my desk.  I have misplaced a very nice new 0.9 mm mechanical pencil and it’s bugging the hell out of me.  I hate losing things, and don’t often lose things, in spite of the swirling chaos in here.   I’ve looked everywhere, superficially.  It has to be somewhere under this nest of papers all around the computer screen.  Why this reluctance to tackle these heaps of papers?

Is it related to the reluctance to tackle more difficult things?  Brooding over an inability to tidy is preferable to thinking about the vexing impossibility of the larger challenge, I suppose.   People build huge edifices to protect themselves from the things they fear the most, like the reality of their eventual extinction.  Lives are spent busily making monuments to the self that will vanish without any other trace when the animating light goes out.  Denial of death is not just a deadly river in Africa.  

“You are riffing hard on the back pedal, son, because you fear to take even a mincing, tiny step forward,” says Hmmmm.  

A worn out device, like the rest of these devices… observes one to none.  

I give a fleeting thought to a lamentable thing.   In reaching the limit of my forbearance, when an old friend’s obliviousness finally cut me too deeply to tolerate, I lost something rare that I valued greatly.  Whatever else his flaws, he is a quick-witted fellow I never had to worry did not follow a divergent remark.   Lightning quick to catch on, which made it a pleasure to banter with him.   This feature, oddly, was one of the best things about my father, whose sense of humor was similarly dark, irreverent and instant.  Interestingly, both of them were often driven by self-hatred.

Speaking quickly and unchecked is a pleasure rare in this world, where we often have to explain, pull punches, consider the other person’s squeamishness and taste before riffing.  It was like rare moments in jam sessions where the kernel of an idea would pass, lightning quick, and we’d be on it at once.

Oh, well.  Time to get back to work rolling this hoop down the joyful road.

To Prove I Was Not Depressed

To prove to someone who loves me and worries about me that I was not depressed, I made a doctor’s appointment I had been putting off making.  

My ailment was digestive, or rather, excretory, and had not been particularly terrible, but was a change for the worse and had persisted for a few weeks.  She kept urging me to see a doctor, rather than find out, God forbid, I had colon cancer only after the disease had too firm a foothold to dislodge.  Since I kept mentioning it, she kept reminding me, with mounting exasperation, that I should see a doctor.

My doctor was on vacation, but his nurse practitioner would be able to see me fairly soon.   My experience with this woman was mixed, she was defensive, short-tempered and had a wavering attention span.  She asked questions and did not listen all the way through the answer.   She scolded and defended herself instead of cutting to the chase and solving the problem.   I’d felt very mature overlooking what an unlikable person she could be on a previous visit.  My gut told me not to bother with her, but my gut was also giving me problems the internet had no ready answers about.  

In any case, I knew my doctor would probably only refer me to a gastroenterologist.  One of my hesitations of getting involved with doctors was paying unknowable fees of hundreds of dollars to a referring doctor, and even more to a specialist, to have a series of diagnostic tests I’d also have to pay for “out of pocket” though I pay a premium to an insurance company every month.

I purchase Obamacare, a small, deeply flawed step towards controlling health care costs and lessening the unconscionable number of Americans who die for lack of affordable health care.  One frustration of this Great Compromise is that a consumer can’t find out the price of an office visit until the office she or he visits submits a bill to the private health insurance company.  The insurance company sends a copy of the claim to the patient and informs the doctor’s office of the negotiated rate and the patient gets a bill.  I have a folder full of these bills, many of which I am not responsible to pay, some of which are in collection against me.  The difficulty of finding out which I owe and which I don’t is a vexation that is bad for the health of everyone effected by this complicated private health insurance law.

The nurse practitioner spent much of our twenty minute meeting searching the internet for information on an odd symptom I had already researched: pink mucus.  She meticulously typed in every aspect of our conversation for her on-line records but, although bowel conditions are often effected by such things, never asked about changes in diet, circumstance, stress, sleep, mood.  She had never heard of pink mucus in the stool.   She was concerned that she’d never heard of this.  

“Shall I do a rectal exam to see if you have a hemorrhoid?” she asked.

“Would an external hemorrhoid cause this symptom?” I asked.  

“No,” she answered, “but an internal hemorrhoid might.”  

“Would your exam be able to tell you if I had an internal hemorrhoid?” I asked.  

“No,” she admitted.  I declined her invitation for a rectal exam.  My rectum was already fairly sore, in any case, inflamed, in fact.  She advised me to use soft, moist wipes instead of toilet paper and sent me for a blood test.

She had no other advice whatsoever, except to get to a GI doctor ASAP.  I reminded her I’d had a recent colonoscopy (a “fully covered” preventive service they are still billing me for…) and that it was therefore unlikely that I’d developed a serious condition in a matter of months.   I also knew, from my research, that diagnosing bowel trouble was a matter of ruling out a number of conditions and a likely diagnosis of IBS which is famously triggered by stress.  

I was also not looking forward to paying hundreds of dollars to have these things ruled out.  In any case, it didn’t feel like an emergency situation and the symptoms had not become any worse over those weeks.

A snippy phone message arrived two days after the visit urging me to get to the specialist ASAP.  A couple more snippy messages followed, one informed me there was an inflammation shown on the blood work.  Each message urged me to go see the specialist ASAP.   I’d been out of phone range, upstate, and didn’t get these until I got back to the city.  I called the office a few days later and had a copy of my blood test results sent to me.  They were mostly within the normal range and arrived without any accompanying comments.

Punchline # 1:  consciously changed my sloppy diet back to a more regular high fiber one, got some more physical exercise, completed some challenging work that had been dogging me, got a few nights of decent sleep: pink mucus and other symptoms gone, problem solved.

Punchline #2:  bill from Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act for twenty minute visit to distracted nurse practitioner, plus three scolding voice mails: $180.  

Everybody’s got to make a living.  God bless America, y’all.

Five Year Anniversary of my mother’s death

May 20th, 2010, was my mother’s 82nd birthday.  She was in a quiet room in Hospice by the Sea, fading fast.  Her angry, haggard, bitter upstairs neighbor slipped a card under the door that morning, wishing her a happy birthday and wishing her many more years of health and happiness.  I brought the card to the hospice and gave it to my sister.

“She’s nuts,” said my sister handing the card back to me next to the bed where our mother was asleep, the expression of death already on her face.  Toward the end of her birthday our mother slipped into a coma.  

A religious Jew my mother had long known, and fought with regularly, but with great affection, called to check in on her.  I told him she was in a coma.

“It’s the mark of a tzaddik (righteous person) to die on their birthday,” he told me.   A woman who didn’t believe in God, intensely disliked the often false piety of religious people, was dying as a tzaddik.   The thought gave me a smile, would have tickled my mother, perhaps.

I told the man that we’d decided to honor her wishes and have my mother’s body cremated.  He tried to talk me out of it, saying she’d want her skeleton to repose forever next to her husband’s in the plot reserved for her.   I told him she’d talked about her desire to be cremated several times over the years and recently expressed a terror of being buried and eaten by worms and insects.  I had assured her this wouldn’t happen.  He told me that Jewish law was against cremation, and so on.   To his credit, he didn’t insist beyond a few short arguments.  

When I mentioned that the cemetery where their burial plot was forbade burial of ashes (many Jewish cemeteries allow this practice) he said: “that doesn’t mean you can’t bury her ashes there” and described a stealth burial.   I liked him for that.

My mother, always somewhat stubborn, refused to die as a tzaddik.  She truly didn’t believe in that kind of thing.  She breathed through that last night, into the morning, and died today, one day after her birthday, five years ago.

I don’t recall feeling gloomy or somber on the previous anniversaries, perhaps I did.  But this one has got me a little bit glum, I have to say.

Happy Birthday, Mom.

Why would it bother me?

My father never bought products made in Germany.  It was because of German industry’s involvement with the death camps.  IG Farben paid the SS $1 a day for slave laborers from Auschwitz, they were marched from the death camp to the nearby factory until they couldn’t be profitably used anymore, then they went into a gas chamber.  Mercedes-Benz, according to my father, a student of history who read the NY Times every day, built some kind of killing machine (I forget exactly what he told me), possibly the gas chambers or ovens for The Final Solution.  I may have them confused with BMW, who also used slave laborers from the death camps.  The drivers of both brands, to this day, tend to be unyielding at crosswalks, I’ve noticed.

“Is it right to hate the children and grandchildren of people who made money working for Hitler?” I asked, a bit rhetorically, when I was in high school.  

“It’s justified,” said my dad, “and I hate them.”   

“Would Viet Namese people be justified, 50 years from now, in hating us and boycotting American made products because of what the government of the USA did to their parents, grandparents, their countryside?” I asked him.  

“Yep,” said my dad.   I think he was right, too.  Particularly if you live in a democracy– the government speaks for the electorate.   In spite of literally millions turning out to protest Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Bush’s march toward war against Iraq, our government visited hell on that nation.  Do Iraqis have a right to hate America?   You bet your ass they do.

One of my problems is that I never get over certain things.  I find myself thinking of the calculated and bogus case that was made for raining death and destruction on the population of Iraq.  I think of how President Obama generously turned the page on recently committed American war crimes, while justifying his own highly classified murderous practices.  

The final “evidence” of the connection between Saddam and 9/11 that was trumpeted by the Bush Administration was from an al-Queda prisoner we’d secretly shipped to Egypt to be tortured.  In order to get the torture to stop al-Libi said Saddam was training al-Queda in the use of poison gas and other chemical WMD.   When he was released by the Egyptians he immediately recanted, admitted he told them that to make the torture, the super-super enhanced interrogation, stop.  Yet his information, extracted under torture, was the lynchpin of the entire falsified case for invading Iraq.

Then you have the war, the debates, the traitors, the people who hate our freedom, freedom on the march, torture redefined as necessary to use against people who hate our freedom, we call it “enhanced interrogation” now and we only did it a few times, destroyed videotapes of the worst of it, pretended (as Cheney continues to) it had extracted “actionable intelligence”, though it’s highly unlikely it ever did, classified memos relating to its use, blah blah, economic disaster in 2008 orchestrated by powerful elites who profited handsomely from systematic fraud and were never punished for any of it …. so really, who today can be expected to get excited about this paragraph?

 There is a sad postscript to the story. Al-Libi is the only “high-value” detainee who was not sent to Gitmo for eventual trial before a military tribunal. Instead, he was quietly turned over to Moammar Gadhafi’s henchmen in Libya, and just days after being visited by Human Rights Watch, was found hanging from his neck inside a Libyan prison. His family believes he was murdered to cover up the true story of what happened to him. We’ll never know the answer to that, but we do know with certainty that an American president used bogus intelligence from a tortured detainee to make a false claim to the American public and to the world.

source

Ho hum.  Maybe some day I’ll grow up, I can only hope.

Paul Krugman chimes in

It is now generally admitted, most recently by the brother of former President George W. Bush,  that the decade long Iraq war was a wrong-headed trillion dollar disaster (that killed and permanently disabled tens of thousands and displaced millions).   Now, we are told again, by a profit hungry media eager to get on to the next sponsored event, to simply move on.

Not so fast.  Here’s Paul Krugman, jumping in with some intelligent points worth making.   At least from my constantly griping point of view.

NY Times on the importance of play in early childhood education

A friend sent me an article from today’s Times, making the same point I’ve been trying to make for the last few years.  Play is a key to getting young kids interested in learning and interacting as part of an inventive, inquisitive group.  I was glad to get the piece, which supported my thesis, though it also aggravated me slightly to read it.  

Written by a freelance science writer in the well-balanced style that is the Times’ trademark, it quoted several educational researchers who believe that more play should be part of early schooling, instead of the accelerated academics pushed by our country’s misguided, corporate-driven educational mandates.  “No Child Left Behind” (surrrrrre…), the article suggests, may underestimate the academic value of young children discovering learning in joyful play, rather than by forcing them to do cognitive tasks at an age when they cannot fully understand or participate in them.

True enough.  Play is crucial for a lot of reasons, at all stages of life, but particularly for kids beginning school.  Glad to see the NY Times printing an article about it.  Here’s the thoughtful, well-written piece.

A sardonic tendency, ingrained by my father, no doubt, twitched after reading an article which, to me, stated the painfully obvious and brought this unfortunate analogy to mind:

“Seven-year multimillion dollar Harvard study of 100,00 children and young adults strongly suggests that children forced by abusers to engage in sexual activities are far less likely to be enthusiastic about sexual intimacy later in life.  Researchers debate….”

I know, I know.

We get to the heart of the discussion on play vs. academic tasks for tykes with this paragraph:

The stakes in this debate are considerable. As the skeptics of teacher-led early learning see it, that kind of education will fail to produce people who can discover and innovate, and will merely produce people who are likely to be passive consumers of information, followers rather than inventors. Which kind of citizen do we want for the 21st century?

The answer really depends on who you ask, as many answers do.  Those who profit from a passive, easily manipulated consumer society have a vested interest in keeping masses of Americans as stupid and gullible as possible.  Which kind of citizen do we want for the 21st century?  It depends on who “we” is.  If it’s the good folks who make billions on ever more sophisticated standardized tests for tykes?  No brainer.  If it’s those who believe that democracy can only work properly with an educated, thinking populace able to intelligently discuss and creatively tackle problems?  

Well, you and I know which side we’re on– but then, nobody is paying us the big bucks to be on the side of profiteers at any cost.  Easy to condemn educational profiteers, I suppose, but, on the other hand, everybody’s got to make a living.

Grow Up or Throw Up

 A child raised by angry parents spends a lot of time wondering what they did wrong.

“You did nothing wrong,” a rare, compassionate friend of the parents might eventually tell the kid.  “I love your parents, you know they’re my best friends, but they are unhappy people.  Unhappy people get mad a lot.  There is nothing you could have done differently.  It’s not you, it’s important for you to know that.  It’s just that your parents have their own frustrations that have nothing to do with you and they often took them out on you.”

Holy shit, you think, I’m fifty years old and just finding this out.  Wow.

My father remained in his terrible twos until he was eighty and hours from death.  Then it hit him.  “Goddamn it,” he wheezed, “I’ve been a horse’s ass.”  Never heard him use the phrase before, but he was at a loss, I suppose, to explain why he’d been such an implacably choleric two year-old his whole life.   A few moments later, there it was again: “I feel like a horse’s ass.”

It hit me recently, how destructive, if understandable, my anger at my father was.  Once I realized how much it hurt me to carry it, how reasonable I was to feel hurt by his actions and refusals, how incapable he was of doing any better, I was able to start letting go of it. Not of the damage his rage had done, only a bit of that ever slipped away, and it waits like a nightmare to leap out at me in moments of weakness, but I was done with my need to carry anger at a father who was not able to do any better than he did.

“He was a grown man, a father, he lived an otherwise responsible and moral life, why let him off the hook after he cursed at you and your sister every night, screamed and threatened and undermined, did his best to make you cower, even if you didn’t cower, even if you turned the rage against yourself sometimes, even as you banged your head against a wall.  Why let him off the hook for what he did?” says an angry friend.

Because he’s dead, dude.  Because, based on what was done to him when he was a baby, he couldn’t have done otherwise.  Because, lucky for me, and for him, I had let go of that anger at him by the time I was standing by his death bed hearing his last confession like a priest who’d never dream of fondling a parishioner.   He was contrite, apologized for the first and last time for his inhumanity.  I reassured him that he’d done the best he could.  I have gone over this many times in my head, here on this blagh.  The main thing, though, was that seeing him as incapable of doing better made me realize how pointless it was to be mad at him for it.  It’s like being mad at a cat for not addressing you in perfectly accented French.

I thought of it just now because I’ve been angry sometimes at people who have not helped me advance my idealistic plan.  The insight came late — they have no idea how to help me advance my idealistic plan, nobody helps them, life is hard.  Their incapacity to help makes it ridiculous for me to be disappointed that they don’t help.  They cannot help, even if they wanted to, except in the rare case when they actually can, but the rare case is extremely rare.  They have less of an idea than I do about the best way to proceed doing something that is most likely impossible for one person to do.

“But what about me?” snarls an angry former friend. “You pretend to be Jesus Christ to everybody else, you talk a good game about mercy and forgiveness, but you could hardly have been less merciful to me.”    

Ah, yes, there is that.  Aware of the harm that was done to me I’m determined never to be treated that way again.  My father apologized as he was dying, an apology that was perhaps 45 years overdue.  My sister never got any apology.  If I tell you time and again that you are harming me, and you justify yourself and plead your case instead of acknowledging that a friend should have acted less hurtfully?  

Well, my father was my father, I had strong reasons for trying to look beyond his faults.  But in the case of someone I am friends with, someone I’ve told multiple times that just because I can take a punch doesn’t mean I like being punched?  Well, “but, I don’t get to hit anybody, and I’m mad as hell, and you can take a punch, and I really didn’t mean to hit you in the face again…” only means one thing to me in the end.   Time to go.  

But that popped into my head just now in answer to an obvious question.  What I really intended here was to acknowledge, in black and white, how silly it is to expect people to do things they are not capable of doing.  If they don’t do something they have no idea how to do you can’t be mad about that.  They can do many other things, many of them good.  Don’t get hung up on the one bad one, I remind myself.  It is a relief to remember this.

Unless the hurtful thing they do is bad enough, objectively, and they make a habit of it and won’t acknowledge they’re acting hurtfully.  Then it is probably best to take a two second break from trying to be Ahimsa-Boy and say, with all necessary mercilessness: sayonara.