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I’ve Lost My Keys

Oh God, I can’t find my car keys. Big problem since I need to get a few things from the store, not to mention just to be able to exercise the freedom mobility offers. I remember when my parents were marching towards forgetfulness themselves, taking pity on them and, to my shame, judging them for their seemingly compromised state. And here I am, on the same trajectory.

I see my own son and daughter-in-law with a similar disregard for me at times, much like I developed for my own parents so long ago. It’s frustrating in part because they cannot know their own vulnerabilities staring back from some unknown point in their future. It’s opaque and unseen much like able bodied folks disregard physical impairments in others!

Having faculties decline like a balloon’s slow leak is tough to watch but, dare I say, tougher to experience. I remember feeling pity, for my mother in particular, to a lesser extent, for my father. He had just enough bluster and brashness in his personality to sort of camouflage the state of decay. My mother, on the other hand, with a quieter personality, left too much room for others’ observations. 

I Think, Therefore I am!

Yes, we modern Americans prize the mind, and I’d have to say, even more than money, which I realize is quite a claim. Both my parents were well-educated, having advanced degrees, and teaching us all to think. They encouraged us to go to college and even once graduated from something or other, use it in ways that not just expanded our own life capabilities, but also society’s. 

I remember when I was in sixth grade, my dad chastised (I’m being generous here with his demeanor) me once for my attitude towards social responsibility. He quoted John Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Both he and our mother were involved in church and civic organizations to do just that—from the Lion’s Club, 4-H clubs, women’s organizations and other leadership activities to improve individuals and community well-being.

While all this sounds like a digression from “I can’t find my keys”, for me the metaphor is compelling. To help others BESIDES ourselves is a key to personal fulfillment. It’s enriching not just to a sense of community but also to one’s interior and, dare I say, spiritual life as well. How? We are a communal species. We live in packs, herds, as a way to protect ourselves but also teach and learn, passing it on to others. You don’t have to believe in God even (though I think it helps;) you just need to recognize there’s “an other” worth helping. We are all in this life together, or so it seems.


Linkages

What does this fanciful digression have to do with my lost keys? As it happens, it was the day and time my cleaning lady was here. Now, I live in a tiny house and you might wonder why I even need a cleaning lady. As it turns out, I have a physical condition that prevents me from bending over. I can easily do surface tidy-ups but scrubbing on hands and knees is not in the cards. Hence, the help. Anyway, there’s only so many places the keys could be in a tiny house. I knew they were there somewhere because my i-phone has a locator function for tagged people and things. 

Said cleaning lady and I looked in every crevice and corner. No luck! As night follows day, or as “phone trackers follow lost items” we finally found them in a little jar on my hutch. Ta Da. Had I not had the tracker I could have been looking forever. I only “remembered” putting them in the jar once we found them. In fact, it was not my “regular” jar I routinely put my keys in so that was the problem. Anyway, suffice it to say, my recall did kick in but only “after the fact!”

As I continue to age, marching toward “senile prevention” I remember years ago what one of my doctor’s told me when I told him of my fear of getting dementia myself after my mother’s early decline and Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Was my losing of keys a sign? He sort of laughed and told me losing track of your keys is not a sign of dementia; it’s not remembering what they’re for, their purpose, that’s the problem. Mercifully, I’m still well aware of keys’ purpose.

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Parallel Process

The concept of Parallel Process is much like what you think it is—the idea that one idea, thing or event mirrors another reflecting back and forth making their concepts similarly obvious and relatable. This is how I’ve come to view the physical “heating up” of the earth’s atmosphere parallel to so many political and societal systems that are doing much the same.

WHAT ALL FALLS APART

From Russia and the Putin problem fraying at the edges (the natives are getting restless) to France’s new retirement rules setting off demonstrations along with other grievances, to America’s rebellious adolescent behaviors of Trump and the “righteous indignation of the Rightists” as well as the disparity of writers and actors striking in the entertainment industry for decent pay, it seems like so many systems in our world are coming apart at the seams.

What’s an old, gray-haired lady to make of things such as this, let alone do anything about them? I swear, I thought things were rough in the 70’s but now? Somehow this feels so very different. I have to say, I’m glad I’m old at times like these. I can’t imagine much good will come out of all this chaos (because that’s what it feels like: chaos) at least not any time soon. I hope I’m off base with my outlook but sadly and warily, my natural optimism has waned of late. Yes, yes, history is littered with systems and civilizations morphing into something unrecognizable, seemingly falling apart, but I’d rather not have to watch in person!

ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT

I remember years ago reading a book—Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe—a story about his disorientation as his African village’s system and traditions are turned upside down and inside out when British rule gradually but insidiously dramatically shifts village life and traditions he has benefited from and relied upon his whole life. He denies these changes right in front of him, thinking they surely won’t last. He denies them until of course he can’t. And the result is death—his—as change marches on.

This dynamic feels to be operational in our national and even global systems to one degree or another. All around us systems, institutions and certainly technology prod us to rethink how things function and what they’re worth. Added to this dynamic is human populations displaced for various reasons, economies turbocharged at times, sluggish at others with institutions struggling to keep up. No wonder too many people want simplified solutions. And while simplicity has its place, it is rare indeed when complexity is managed by simplicity.

NOT A PANACEA

Take AI for example. There may be a way to manage and shepherd this incredible technology with a certain degree of forthright and responsiveness to its functional speed. Unfortunately, the technological “horses” have already stampeded out of the gate with no one really addressing how to corral them responsibly. With little to no oversight on its massive power how will management even happen? We need wise men and women to take the reins—ethicists wedded to highly sophisticated thinking in this science. Where do we even find them? And what structure is to do it? In the absence of a formal jurisdiction, we seem to remain stuck with this genius tool minus mature genius systems performing guardrails. It’s the “Oppenheimer syndrome” all over again! And this is just one of our many challenges facing us today!

As I say, history is littered with such inventions which often precede responsible management or use of same! And this is just one such problem facing us. In too many other realms the tension or growing pains precede—and too often, severely—predictable adjustments. It reminds me of when my son had pain in his legs as an adolescent suffering from Osgood-Schlatter where bone growth outpaces muscle and tendon growth in the knee. 

Osgood-Schlatter disease:

A childhood repetitive use injury that causes a painful lump typically below the kneecap that affects children’s untimely paced and incompatible changes within the leg system itself. Children who play sports in which they regularly run and jump are most at risk as the incompatibility clashes with usage pressure. That’s the crude definition and though it is very time limited, once all body parts catch up with one another proportionally, the syndrome still causes temporary pain and havoc. So too, social, cultural, scientific and political systems undergoing different rates of change in seemingly uncontrolled fashion.

HELP!

Anyway, here we are in a quandary throughout the world. As luck would have it, it’s this very dynamic that is occurring with America trying to massage relationships with Putin’s Russia while supporting politically modernized Ukraine. Is Putin mature enough to manage this growth spurt? Is he capable of evolving himself? No evidence of it so far. He’s still thinking he can take whatever he wants (i.e. Ukraine) while the rest of the world is way ahead of his intellectually stunted perception of things. He’s proverbially stuck in an outdated mindset similar to Achebe’s main character in Things Fall Apart.

OUR OWN BACKYARD

Back here at home in the US of A, the Republican Party suffers from the same inability to see a more diverse and sophisticated electorate with the R’s stuck in a previous era much like the lead character in Achebe’s African village blind spot. Sadly, the same Republican Party digs in because instead of “leading” their constituents, they’re following, ultimately becoming caught in an outdated political and maturational mindset.

Sadly, we’re stuck with only one functioning political party at this moment in America with no real replacement mechanism. Ditto, the ethical challenges confronting AI with our use and responsibility unpredictable. How this dilemma resolves itself in either case, no one knows. One thing’s for sure, new pathways and innovative solutions are required for most of the challenges above. But no one seems to have a clue. And if we compare it to evolution Darwin-style in which something better, more functional grows out of it, will society’s component parts have time to catch up? 

DENOUEMENT

The threads within each system, be they cultural, political, economic or societal, seem randomly at the mercy of different forces with outsized ability to evolve such things since power and force can be incongruous with one another. Power is integrous and authentic. Force is well, force, and typically not! So while things may operate as parallel processes with some invisible capacity to develop proportional management and functionality as they evolve, will they be beneficial, responsible? And so we wait, with an unknown resolution and unpredictable future like all pivot points for humankind. And yet I read somewhere we’re supposed to have dominion over all this stuff, right??

Big sigh!

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My Last Surgery Will Be a Lobotomy

I’m slated to have surgery soon on a particularly nasty fistula/hernia in a particularly unpleasant place (pelvis,butt). There’s a chance it won’t happen as I have an unusually nervous-about-lawsuits-PCP. She’s already expressed concern (liability risk) about my possible death on the table if she clears me. Sigh. While it’s frustrating (anger-producing) to have that possible decision in her hands not mine, a small part of me doesn’t actually care.

The irony here of course is the six-plus centimeters of bowel I sit on could blow open and kill me anyway even if I don’t have the surgery, but hey, I guess she’d feel vindicated! While I have spent several weeks fretting-and-stewing a good head of steam about it all, I’m beginning to be at peace either way. At least part of me is.

A New Medical Model

A few weeks ago I saw Dr Ezekiel Emanuel interviewed on a news show about a decision he’s personally made: to decline a good number of medical treatments and/or tests after hitting age 75. It sounded initially quite shocking to hear a world renowned oncologist and medical ethicist go public with his decision. But the more I think about it, the more understandable it might be, highly rational even!

Keeping people alive and doing whatever it takes, from carving up body parts to pharmaceuticals laced with life prolonging drugs is starting to feel crazier and crazier to me. I’ve had eight surgeries for a tumor that began in the rectum and traveled south to the anus, the body parts no one likes to mention. The whole problem began twenty-plus years ago though with far less invasive procedures. At some point however, and after two trans-anal surgeries, a zillion colonoscopies to scrape out double digit polyp growth, it had finally graduated to ever-greater proportions and invasions which, as night follows day, resulted in a permanent colostomy. The bag!!

After five years (which isn’t really all that long I suppose) of dealing with hernias and several complications such as a kinked colon, a skin separation that ended up with exposed flesh that then became necrotic (dead) and infected, etc. and now the worst complication of all in terms of discomfort and fright, there is a decision to make if not by my primary care doc, potentially by me. 

Expiration Dates

The lengths we go to in modern medicine to keep people alive is extraordinary and often wondrous. But it’s impressive and valiant efforts looking back seem more worthy of younger bodies sometimes. I’ll be 71 years old very soon and a part of me (if the decision is mine alone to make even) is inclined to let this ole’ animal let nature take its course. Dr Emmanuel’s cutoff is 75, I’ll be 71, both still arbitrary numbers.

I like to think in practical terms sometimes which can be disconcerting to many in the medical community. Most professionals are hard-wired to keep people alive. At whatever cost. While I too want to make prudent decisions to preserve life, including my own, at what point do we consider surrendering to the inevitable? And the inevitable for me does not include hastening death but does not include avoiding it either. I heard one doctor say that Medicare “requires keeping the patient alive.” I don’t know how it’s worded in the manual (do they have a manual?) but suffice it to say, we’re all caught between a perpetual rock-and-a-hard place loop of sorts.

(I told one of my doctors that I’ve had a “do not resuscitate” document signed for the past 10 years. He literally told me that in the OR, they’ll ignore it and try to resuscitate me anyway!)

Different Strokes for Different Folks 

My elderly friend Magie used to occasionally say to me “won’t this ever end?” She lived to be 96! My other elderly friend, Bennet, lived to be 94, which is nothing short of a miracle since he survived the holocaust which included several years of malnutrition (to put it mildly) while in the camps. But I think his drive to survive those years turned into an insistence on living well and long afterwards, a fierceness to go on with purpose and passion as an example of a different sort.

My role on the planet may be more nuanced. It may not require such heroic measures at all. Maybe, just maybe, letting the body run a natural decaying falling-apart course (which mine is clearly doing!) can also be an ethical example of not just choice or protocol but rather surrendering to the inevitable. I mean, come on!

Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t want to die at all, ever!! And actually because I believe in the eternal—of life before life as well as after death—my preference is to stay in this, oh-how-shall-I-put-this, “incarnation”. It’s all I know of me. But that does not mean there isn’t a “knowable me” in a different context, a different state of being. Just because I have no memory of existence other than the one I currently inhabit, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. How arrogant to think otherwise.

So I’m in a state at the moment that seems uncertain, to have this next abdominal surgery or not; to have doctors decide based on their best interests or mine. However it plays out, if the surgery does occur, I know one thing for sure it’ll likely be my last, or at least second to last. Unless of course there’s a lobotomy in the offing! I’d consider that!

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Learning Is As Learning Does

Good God! What a year, what a lifetime. In so many ways I’ve been incredibly blessed throughout. Trouble in the Middle East and what feels at times like a narrow escape out of it. Surviving my dysfunctional family of origin with reasonable wit, occasional depression, and believe-it-or-not optimism (which at times seems like a friggin curse!) A dozen moves in childhood that left me feeling nestless!

Fast Forward To Now

So here we are, here I am, entering 2023 with a bang or a whimper. I can’t decide what mood to settle on, instead lurching uncontrollably back and forth between the two states.

I won’t lie; I could but what would be the point?! I’ve always been too transparent even to myself. I’ve had a hard road these last few years with health issues, surgeries, occasional “ah ha” moments followed by self-doubt and dare-I-say again, optimism! At heart, I am a forager for the puzzle. And the lesson!

Why won’t it leave me alone; that pesky perverted instinct or drive to unmortify things, look for the lessons regardless of emotional states I inhabit, contained within an insatiable hunger to learn? I insist on looking for what I need to know. If I can’t find it initially, I wait (sometimes patiently, sometimes not.) Occasionally, I make it up, inventing a lesson, however small, until a greater insight arrives. I’m just that restless, driven.

What on earth do other people do with their heads if not trying to figure out what things are for, from personal and world events to good and bad people, triumphs or tragedies alike? What their meaning is to them subjectively or not, that deeper meaning? Growth is everything, why else would we be here?

Everybody Loves Raymond

I’ve been mainlining Everybody Loves Raymond recently for comic relief; you know, that sitcom of years ago that replays on one of the streaming channels. There’s so much wisdom besides insatiable humor, in most of the episodes. One I recently saw had the little girl Ally asking her dad (Raymond) why does God send us to earth? Why do we come here? Let that hang in the air for a second.

Of course Raymond, being the perpetually struggling simpleton that he is, actually has the most amazing and uncanny ways of learning himself, whether it’s through his wife, Deborah, or flat out events that demand he address issues in some way by their very existence, all by himself like a big boy. It seems he’s helpless on his own, but with the help of others (ding, ding, ding) including his family, which is dysfunctional as any in America, serves as the grist for helping him along to new insights, one way or the other.

When he goes to Deborah, the insight seems simple but profound. She tells him God just wants us to be with other people, to not be alone. Implied in that of course is the very earth school that is serving Raymond through Deborah in the whole crazy clan of his family. The metaphor is apt in the comedy and also apt for everyone’s individual life contained therein, subtle and obvious both.

All In This Together

Everything I see in the world around me is about growth, death, regeneration, and furthering more growth (evolution perhaps??) but all from learning some nugget, a component atom in the larger molecular structure of the small and big Self and the community it lives in. From a plant as a simple expression to holocaust survivors or the war in Ukraine; from the bottom of the food chain to the top. But always, always within the context of others.

My Own Classroom

Having been blessed to know a Survivor, and write about his life, Bennet mirrored that from his experience. One of my favorite speakers is Esther Perel. Both of her parents survived the Holocaust, which, of course was only but brilliantly the ginormous earth curriculum that they “grew up out of.” 

Perel describes other survivor friends of her parents, after creating new lives post-liberation, chatting about their concentration camp experience minus the drama of the tragedy but within its milieu. Instead, their intuition was to glean their own sustenance from it to forge new individual selves, transcending it, knowing somehow, some way they are greater than the sum of its parts, as a tribe which by definition includes “together.”

An Uncanny Therapy

In the very act of asking one another things like ‘whatever happened to so-and-so’ from camp ‘such-and-such’, their experiences become unmortified from the larger tragedy itself. While their experiences were gigantically large, I have my own Rosalie lessons as paltry as they seem in comparison, but included in an environment of people parts (as well as body parts.)

Fast Forward the Physical

My body challenges have surely demanded I pay attention to and learn what I need to know to grow emotionally, psychologically, but especially spiritually. It is my curriculum if you will, but too often have resisted. How many times have I spouted this little mantra while actually living from that belief and heavy identification of mySelf as “the body,” and therefore separate from others. My belief in “others as teachers” is heavily challenged.

For whatever reason, I am faced with more bodily breakdown, decay and surgeries, and cannot help but intuit this remains an opportunity for learning something I need to see but have heretofore denied.

The Excitement of the Drama 

It doesn’t need to be so hard, but we—I— insist on having tragedy even in the face of incredible gifts, because we—I—misunderstand the purpose and value of things including tragedy. Tragedy as well as comedy is a learning device. Just ask Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy can surely attest to. It (the war) may be couched in an oversized drama, but his drive to transcend it is clear, palpable. It is preceded by comedy, his earlier life’s work, but for whatever reason, a different “energy field” of tragedy has been required for him.

And so in an odd way, like Ally, Raymond, Zelenskyy, Holocaust survivors—pick a category—my seeming tragedy of yet more body breakdown is no tragedy at all. Nor is it a comedy either. It simply serves as a learning device, a vehicle for communication. Instead, it strikes me as I am greater than the sum of any of my individualized body parts. If I believe I am spirit as the real me—I must view “me” through the whole of those folks I know and love…and sometimes even those I don’t. Whenever I ultimately do leave the planet, I’m not hauling this body thing along with me. Rather, I will be in a field of spirit—not woo woo, mind you—but from that field of love which is the only true “me” there can be.

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The Water Not The Fish

Repeat after me, I am the water not the fish. On a daily basis however, I live my life like a fish. Oh how precious are my thoughts. Because they’re mine! And oh how very special they are. I hunt for more examples of ingrained thoughts, values, perceptions, and systems to sustain them.

Never mind they’ve been given to me by somebody else. Never mind I heard them on Fox News, MSNBC, read them in the New York Times, Newsmax, the Atlantic, it almost doesn’t matter, from whence they came. 

But of course it does! 

We are all programmed. We come into this world as a blank slate, the water as consciousness, hardware waiting to be programmed, ripe for being written on or formed by parents, by extended family, by society small and large. It gives structure and form to our lives, it provides direction impulses, goals, satisfaction, and pleasures. It can be benign, or odious. In short order we identify as a fish, which is to say, a physical being with a mishmash of content.

Where does it go wrong? As a little girl I went to school and learned many things. I learned about information, some real, some distorted, through no conscious fault of my own, nor my teachers or parents because they learned it before I, from someone and somewhere else. But more than anything I learned a set of rules, guided by how I was taught to perceive, on how to live and how to survive second, third, fourth grades, etc.

And The Hits Just Keep Coming.

I learned how to sit still, clean my plate after each meal, praying beforehand for where that came from. (I was hoping for more at the next meal, in secret, particularly candy!) I learned about comfort and I learned about denial of that comfort. I learned how to tie my shoes, button my shirt, walk straight ahead, finish my lessons.

As I grew, I learned how to absorb information around me, putting it into little cubicles of the mind for later retrieval when necessary. I learned how to tell the truth, but I also learned some form of distortion or self-promotion, as early as second grade! (Got cured when shamefully exposed the same year.) It really has become not just the American way but integral to the human condition. There’s no use pretending.

Subtle Program Shifts

It (the distortion) starts innocently enough—to be liked, accepted as part of the herd. Presenting some aspect of yourself that’s not quite accurate. Or as a member of the school of fish. Because we are communal beings.

Many years later I began to view the world, people, systems, humanity differently. Many years! As we grow we do two things: we become entrenched with old ideas and habits. But we also gaze upon new ones, trying them on for size to see if they advantage us in some way. Some new ideas are suggested by friends, schools, workplaces, mass media. Moving a lot and travel made a big difference in my life. By expanding my horizons, I was exposed to many new things.

Some Ideas or concepts felt/feel quite warm, authentic, comforting in the best possible way, providing peace, love, calmness, expansion of some sense of soul. Others are adopted, driven by a slow seduction of either fear, aggression, self-righteousness, perceived or actual, some threat of deprivation.

Oh I Am So Special!

Do you think you’re exempt? Do you think you haven’t been programmed in one way or another? Think about it. Sometimes it might be a religious tradition that becomes ingrained that serves a person far better than it harms. Still others chuck the idea of God, assuming the position themselves! The great wide middle in between is where most of us navigate. Yet this often is expressed dualistically (in tech terms its binary,) as if compartmentalized, resulting in the inability to see the nuances.

If you know anything about physics, including quantum physics and mechanics, you will certainly understand the concept of energy fields, attractor fields, and aversion principles. Like radar silently looking for atom particles to attach, so too, our thoughts and ideas are either positively or negatively charged to conveniently “dock” with preconceived belief systems. Or create new attachments one can enhance life or rigidly block or entrench old perceptions that no longer serve a new context.

Consciousness Is As Consciousness Does

In human terms, we begin perceiving life as primarily physical survival, perceived needs, and desires. it can include money, things that money can buy, and a means to an end for more money. This almost always includes the concept of power (or lack thereof). Power can be yielded for noble purposes as well as malevolent ones. But as we know, power corrupts, especially when base impulses of we humans drive it.

These attractor fields can also be quite positive, peaceful, calming, spiritual. If we humans over here on this side of the globe were instead born in Tibet as a Buddhist say, we would be subject to a different set of both attractor and aversion fields. Our programming would have been quite different, less outer world driven, more inner world cultivated and expressed.

Enter Mass Media: Tech World

Technology can be programmed for anything, as do the ethics that bind it (or not.) And the repetition. And addiction. Yes, there’s all that! The tantalizing effect of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram is ravenous, lying in wait for the next fix. Notice how it’s binary by its very nature. These are the tools of programming these days, of the drunken monkey syndrome. To imbibe or not. It’s a yes — not yes, a “this doesn’t fit my worldview, or it might.”

I’m not saying technology is bad in and of itself. Like so much in life, it’s to what purpose and to what end. The ability to program people, entrain people, etc. by false information is big business these days. But technology also serves us. The conundrum of its usefulness, its enhancement of life depends upon the integrity from which it is applied or operates from. And its user.

Context versus Content

The inability to tell truth from false is a profound problem in mass media these days, driven by split second technological downloads. And the repetition! Why, even Hitler would be impressed with the massive propaganda contained therein. With enough repetition of falseness a new dynamic takes root. It all too often becomes a kind of pollution from which we are unable to see clearly. A mass brainwashing or kind of hypnosis can result. 

Mixed with not just lies, but add absurd conspiracy theories and the false equivalent of contending it’s protected by Freedom of Speech, and rationality is thrown out the window. The defense of the “freedom” to say what you want and claim it’s protected by the first amendment has become distorted for spurious ends and the need for self soothing.

The Self Soothing Problem

Often self soothing is advantageous when the human organism becomes fearful. I quite like to hug myself at times. While self soothing is inherently benign, it all too often can be externally hijacked for destructive ends. Sadly, fear sells and can be exploited, and some entities are exceptionally effective at preying on those most vulnerable. Thus begins the cycle of puffed up self soothing in the form of self righteousness that is actually anything but, becoming a grotesque distortion of the very act itself.

When presented with a problem that I am fearful about, I forage for as much information as I can get my hands on. From Reliable sources. Facts, anecdotal information, others input who are experts, etc., these have been part of my program from childhood, further reinforced by advanced education. As a child, when I would ask either of my parents, say, what a word meant or about some subject matter, they would more often than not, tell me to look it up.

It was irritating at times but in short order, I became “hooked” on the power of knowledge, my ability to get it, and the inherent capability to expand myself the act entailed. It is no small miracle that I stumbled on some unquantifiable instinct to sort information, a kind of discernment within a “pool of water” in which I swam. It also became apparent that it was my responsibility.

Foraging Vs Being Fed

As I grew I began to notice some folks wanted to “be fed,” to not forage for facts, for information, for new ways of thinking. They only wanted to reinforce the same patterns, not curious at all, instead defaulting to a kind of mental and emotional rigor mortis, relying on what others proscribe as true or false, docking nicely with their previous programs. 

This contrast could be our downfall, the fed (and the feeders) part. The world has gotten increasingly more complex, and America along with it. It is so easy in a fast-paced world, to just let other entities feed us with what we think is true. All too many rely on passively being fed far too much, like baby birds, beaks open, waiting for parental regurgitation. And even the curious among us have a hard time keeping up, sorting and discerning the speed information erupts and accrues.

Rights, Responsibility and Privilege

On the other hand, to be a citizen in America, or anywhere else quite frankly, it’s necessary to forage for facts, to find out from multiple sources that are reliable where in fact the truth of the matter, any matter, lies. Besides legislation to curtail some of the excesses by certain social media companies—but equally by some television outlets—we owe it to ourselves to own up to the fact that not only have things become increasingly difficult to understand and sort out, but to know where the truth of it is is a personal responsibly as well as a collective one.

Confusion Is As Confusion Does

In a world where things move at breakneck speed both in terms of hard information, as well as delivery of that information, we are dizzied, grabbing onto the easiest conclusion that fits preconceived notion‘s failing to update context, let alone verify facts contained thereof. I get the overwhelming quality of it all. It is hard but it is also essential for the modern world.

Our democracy is fragile indeed. Yet if we don’t mature as citizens, taking more personal responsibility in the process, foraging instead of being fed, we will lose the democracy we have inherited. 

I am the water not the fish! Which is to say, I am the consciousness from which I gather information, that primal awareness, the hardware if you will. I am not a fixed set of programs others have proscribed me to think and operate from. This is my and our liberation but this includes our responsibility, individually and as a nation. Do you want to be just fed, not knowing what you don’t even know? Told what to think by others because it’s too hard to think for yourself? 

We all have not just an opportunity but more importantly, an imperative to dig more for truth, information, facts. Opinions are all fine and good but if based on madness we are doomed to repeat history in a way that serves none of us. It’s high time we sober up from self righteousness, arrogance based on ignorance provided by others, for their agenda and not remotely in our personal and group welfare. It is time.

Additional essays, articles and books by Rosalie Cushman available on this website.

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America’s Assignment

What is it you want, voter? Really, I want to know. Both sides.  I don’t want you to tell me you want a particular person to deliver that want, or a big overarching philosophy. I want you to tell me what you value, why it is important to your life, and what you lack if you don’t have something. How are you diminished? Be very, very specific.

ADOLESCENT REBELLIOUSNESS

It is obvious we are a divided country. I think there’s no disagreement about that. But why? Obviously the mechanics of programming, a.k.a. brainwashing, a.k.a. propaganda, on all sides is a delivery system as well as a consequence. It can be benign or malevolent. 

Regardless, it begs the question of what is it you see? Are you being told what you want to see, to reinforce your precious beliefs? What is missing in your life you think the government should provide? What threatens you?

WHO WANTS HELP

If you are a Trump voter and perceive you don’t like socialism and are in fear of that being delivered by Biden, are you willing to forfeit your Social Security? It is a social program, after all. If you are a farmer, are you willing to give up your subsidies? It is a social program, after all. 

Certain kinds of tax deductions function as a socialistic mechanism to benefit income levels, which is to say you can have more money in your pocket because of being able to claim them on your income taxes. This goes for corporations that get tax incentives too!

You don’t view these mechanisms as socialism because it’s indirect as opposed to direct as a benefit. Do you think it’s possible to have “social” and economic programs that are socialistic in nature but don’t define us as a socialistic country?

THE OTHER 

Are you afraid of Black people? Hispanics? Gays? Straights? Are you afraid of educated people? If so, why? What is it you think you risk, or lose by their very existence? 

For others, are you afraid of uneducated people? Are you afraid of the Christian right? Religious zealots? Search your hearts; those fleeting thoughts, the muscle tightening if “they” get too close, if they dominate.

If you could name three to five values that you feel have been lost or compromised, or fears you have about your world, what are they? Be very specific. I think it could help all of us repair this country. 

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Most Biden voters are afraid of autocracy or fascism, among many other things. Of that I know. From both ends of the extreme, there is an implied loss of freedom. But freedom of what, for what purpose?

What does freedom even mean? Do you believe there is a commensurate responsibility that accompanies such freedom? There’s really only one side here. But we have all been deluded, the left and the right, into thinking this is unresolvable. I don’t believe that it is. But we cannot continue even with a new president without addressing some of these questions.

Even if it’s just in our own minds and hearts initially, soul searching is required. Results will follow in due time. But here’s the rub: we have to be willing to discuss sanely, rationally without doing the “make wrong” or demonizing the other. And we have to be willing to compromise.

RECOVERING FROM ADOLESCENCE

If winning is the highest value, either by position or party, we all lose something, maybe even everything. If either side values winning a position above all else, worships a person above all else, is rigid, we continue to deteriorate as a nation. It can be the thing that breaks the country, possibly beyond repair. 

But we have an opportunity now. Dig deep. We are all required to grow—and grow up—and to stop viewing ourselves as so bloody precious and righteous. I suggest, hope, and pray that we take this opportunity to examine ourselves. Even with Trump gone, there is a diseased body politic just juicing itself, itching for the next fight. 

We all have to stop this madness. If not, we will be no more than children playing King Of The Mountain, illegitimate as a democracy, stuck in arrested development.

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Babel

I have tried many times to write another piece about what is happening in America today only to fail in delivering anything remotely cogent or meaningful. I keep trying to analyze it all in an effort to make peace with the insanity, death and destruction that I witness. Anything short of that has left me feeling helpless, struggling to accept the utter devastation that is occurring right in front of our faces.

BABEL

Ultimately, I have come to the conclusion, albeit temporary, there’s no sense to be made of what is occurring right now. Like the mythic Tower of Babel that God strikes down, forcing different languages on humanity, so too have we been struck incomprehensible to one another. Given this failure to communicate, it is the emotional and ultimately spiritual space that is the most appropriate place for my heart to reside.

Lately I’ve been re-reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning, a phenomenal depiction of humankind’s struggle to plumb the depths of one’s soul to survive extraordinary circumstances. While the current Pandemic and decimation of American society and political institutions can’t be compared to the Holocaust in any literal way, there are parallels to its “helpless/hopeless” effects on our psyches, as well as promise on how to endure it all with less damage.

PROVISIONAL EXISTENCE OF UNKNOWN LIMIT

It has become quite trendy in recent years to meditate, to practice living in the now, worthy practices to slow the mind and energy systems from the frenetic pace of modern life. A tension presents itself of course when one resumes daily activities that focus instead on some measure of future: Goals, activities, deadlines, etc. Without some aspect of ‘later’ or an endpoint, even if it’s a simple future orientation such as what to have for dinner, we are hard pressed to stay only in the now indefinitely.

With the pandemic we have lost a recognizable endpoint, a goal or destination of it being over, with a return to life as we have known it. In the Holocaust, prisoners lost all reference to the future or any endpoint. Similarly, though monumentally far from being as degrading as concentration camps, pandemic populations know not when any recognizable endpoint will occur. There’s always the tease of one, yet the infections rage on. Further, the chaotic and degraded democratic institutions and structure in America at this time makes nothing reliable. Nothing.

MAROONED 

Added to this dynamic is the disconnection of physical presence with others—particularly painful for pack animals such as humans. We know we are not alone yet feel alone regardless. Besides this psychic chasm, we struggle with an altered concept of time. Purpose for and faith in some goal or intention, has to be reimagined. Is it even possible for humans to not strive for something? And in what timeframe? Without these instruments from which to steer by, life seems rudderless and a kind of moroseness or depression sets in.

Frankl’s wife, imagining, remembering her without even knowing whether she was alive or dead in another camp became his salvation, at least in part. But it was more than her. It was the field of Love in which she resided that he cultivated access, to make it through the days, through the smallest and largest degradations of daily survival. A different perspective, a deeper one, was identified on which to focus, a new horizon from a different vantage point on which to set one’s eye.

A COMPASS

A few years ago I had the astonishingly good fortune to meet and work with Bennet Mermel on his memoir, an extraordinary man who survived the Holocaust himself. I witnessed first hand the field of Love—the goal or drive to help his younger brother, Kalvin, to stay alive as well. By trying to save Kalvin’s physical life, Bennet also helped save his own. It was a symbiosis that fueled surviving a horrific “now”, driven by suffering yet with a dignity that defied comprehensive description.

Yet there was still depression. Besides staggering constant physical exhaustion, depression was the emotional current that constantly served as undertow, threatening to suck him under due to death and degradation that was pervasive in the camps. Had Bennet not had Loves’ compass for his brother to steer by, he may never have made it. The magnet was challenged constantly by the sheer magnitude of a sense of no end in sight. Still, it was the engine that kept him going.

THE EXAMPLE 

I was very heartened by the fact that Michelle Obama and Michael Phelps have recently addressed the problem of depression and mental health issues consequent to the pandemic and the breakdown in our society. In many ways a sorrow for loss is the most appropriate response. Like losing a limb, one cannot help but feel sad for the absence of the thing itself, but more importantly for the value and use that predictability and hope heretofore provided to one’s life.

To share that sorrow with a wider audience is huge. It feels personal, intimate, communicating we are not alone in what we witness and feel. It recognizes our shared humanity and binds us together, exhausting out grief to arrive at the other side. Ultimately, we are left to acknowledge it, to discover our own compass and help others find theirs if at all possible. For while we may not perceive an endpoint to the pandemic, let alone imagine how to rebuild America, life continues and is made better in the process. On the other side of grief is an acceptance that facilitates a language all its own: a non-Babel speak that connects us all.

Rosalie Cushman is the author of several books, The Man Confused By God and Vibrating At The Speed Of Love. They are available on Amazon and at fine bookstores everywhere.

The Man Confused By God https://www.amazon.com/dp/1733802320/ref=cm_sw_r_em_tai_wAyoFbRKCWEQT

Vibrating at the Speed of Love https://www.amazon.com/dp/1733802304/ref=cm_sw_r_em_tai_3ByoFbX6ER6QT

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This Thing Called Hope

What be this thing called hope, this state? To wander back-and-forth between hopelessness and hopefulness, why at times it feels as crazy as the mad hatter in Alice in Wonderland. It is amazing how it seems to swing so slowly for a period. Yet at others, it lurches uncontrollably in staccato fashion between the two states. 

THE NATURE OF LIGHT

We sit confined, in a prism of our making. Yes, that’s the correct word: prism. Besides the traditional definitions of refractive light, the case I make for the word thusly is, “prisms can be made from any material that is transparent to the wavelengths for which they are designed…prisms can be used to reflect light, or to split light into components with different polarizations.” These latest words depict a state of both a claiming and rejection of elements of ourselves, as well as the implied polarization that is its consequence.

We will not always be home-bound. At some point we will be set free to roam the social gathering places, like gazelles to a watering hole but will not feel the same. For many, it may pale in comparison to the interior depths of ourselves we have plumbed during confinement, finding solace and comfort in a more authentic manner with those we hold most dear, including our own hearts. 

THE TEMPORARY IS JUST THAT

For others, being let loose will provide only temporary thrills, acknowledging a lack of appetite for the shallow and trite, intoxicating though it may be for a time. Somehow freedom to wing-spread will undergo a new definition, an acknowledgment of sorts. Given enough lack of interior sustenance they will begin to miss what began in their heretofore home-bound state, that unnamed itch for growth that has been awakened.

There will be those that carry on as if nothing has altered their perception of the world (and those in it), behaving like drunken sailors and raucous wenches, repressing the recent sting of social isolation, only to behave as before. Yet a seed will have been planted for future enlightenment, ripening once they have germinated long enough, whether in this lifetime or the next. 

ITERATIONS

Regardless, many things will be redefined, restructured and changed, for a quality left to the living will capture enough people’s imaginations to speak it, to live it differently. The “it” is that intangible and beneficent regard for others that acknowledges the depths of connections we all share as a species, regardless of malvescence by some, dependent on heroism by others. Those that have harmed the herd will endure accounting of it, there is no doubt. But with any luck, the subtle change in the refracted light of our better selves will triumph with enough heat and pressure of the current moment. 

And it is this process, the evolution of us as individuals and groups, having come out the other side to a new order of things that hope births. I see glimmers of it already: in nurses, doctors, deliverers of goods and services, in some public servants, and in the ordinary of us carrying on, socially isolating not just for ourselves but for the good of the whole. We KNOW inherently these acts are “in the service for more than us, they are for others too.”

THE PENDULUM SWINGS

Many will not be able to see this change but more folks likely will than not. Of that I am confident, hopeful even, regardless of the human, political and social “infection” we will have survived. Or because of it? While it may not be loud, there will be evidence. There already is in fact, in that subtle shifts are visible in the compassion shown by some media leaders, medical individuals interviewed, common neighborhood helpers and many ordinary people. The angry ones, the bitter and noisy gong people, critical and venomous will pale in comparison.

Not all moments seem to call for hope. There are times that call for despair, and we will have experienced the state far too often during this pandemic. Yet despair can be temporary at best, ultimately fostering hope from which emerges a slow but sturdy light refracted from the prism. After all, we do know why the caged bird sings.

AND SO MUST WE

And so we stand on the edge of sorrow and joy, despair and hope with the intuition that there will be better days, better angels and greater things to come. 

For we are not just refracted light. We are reflected light as well, created from a nature that in the end claims us all. Whether one believes in the divine or not, nature has its way with life, always continuing onward. Groaning though we may be in the current morass, hope is greater than even itself for it reflects something more. Out of it springs a faith in things unseen, of the promise by and for the living; for life ongoing forever after.

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Defending Your Life

 It is hard to make sense of things in the current situation with the COVID-19 pandemic. Especially when there’s no sense to be had. I’m not talking about all the instructions coming out from the CDC, Trump’s undermining of certain medical measures, and minimizing others, pitting constituencies against one another. Get a test, don’t get a test, etc. Open the markets, don’t open the markets ad infinitum.

Even in the best of times, let alone the worst of times, a new disease let loose on the population can certainly create their own contradictions when so much is unknown about the spread of it, how to contain it best. It is particularly challenging, however, when we have a president who has decimated certain aspects of critical governmental infrastructure ever since obtaining office.

THE DEEPER FISHERS

I don’t wanna talk about those. There will be time to do a postmortem after so much of the risk has passed. In the meantime, we are all challenged in the face of social distance, isolation, to reevaluate not just the bigger picture along with the key players. Just as importantly I suggest we look at our individual selves AND the aggregate of the same. It is an opportunity to go in. Not just to relieve anxiety, although that is true enough. But to really take stock of who we are, what we want, how we ferociously judge, what we value, and to look at what and how we want to be going forward.

Is there not a great possibility to consider the other person, to practice compassion and forgiveness even with those we can’t stand, not to let them off the hook for we can illuminate accountability later on. That has to happen. But just as importantly if not more so, we need to get micro as well as macro, to look at our own role and dare I say, responsibility to our neighbors as to ourselves. I know not everyone has the capacity to take this kind of self inventory, but those of us who can would be better served to examine ourselves and the society at large by taking a steely-eyed look at what we value and why. Who do those values hurt sometimes and who do they help, besides our own self-interest.

DELAYING GRATIFICATION 

We are a very spoiled nation in so many ways. What’s more, very few know it. How is it that too many grumble, unable to comprehend the concept “for the good of the whole.” When my son was in college and there just happened to be for the millionth time a flare up of tensions between Israelis and Palestinians he started a film treatment about God making both sides have a time out, effectively isolating them to opposite corners until they could think through the folly of their behavior, their untenable positionalities. 

I likened his idea in certain ways to Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life film where Brooks’ character has to defend himself in the afterlife for being driven by fear, afraid to really love, afraid to look at the other. In his case it was fear of loving a woman, fearing a risk of rejection, an ultimate loss of himself in some way. As a collective, our American fear is about losing things, money, our precious comforts, possessions, status, power, whatever externals that too often drive us apart instead of together. 

LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID-19

And now, through the pandemic we all are on the brink of possible redemption juxtaposed with destruction. Do we have the courage to take stock of our values and the fear that drives too many of us apart heretofore isolating from one another in other ways, suckling our precious opinions, greed, judgments, attachments to things or belief systems as our identity. The metaphor writ large NOW is being forced to isolate physically so as not to contaminate one another. Can we not see that we have been isolating ourselves by class, fear of otherness, fear of not keeping up, fear of losing power or influence—the list is endless but still all driven by fear. What a golden opportunity we have now to examine ourselves and what we truly value and exercise compassion and sacrifice. There are great examples in truckers, nurses, doctors, cleaners but they are not the end of it. We are called to make our own.

And so we continually stand on the precipice waiting for a collective aha moment. Otherwise, we will continue to repeat the same lesson through catastrophes such as this or others we can’t even imagine be they physical, financial, societal, political, whatever, until such time as we come to understand how we have created such incredible comfort and privilege – – even those of us in the middle class – – that this is just that: a privilege. But it is more than that. It is a responsibility. And to deny the least among us out of fear we might lose something at the expense of truly loving our brothers, our fellow countrymen, why, we’ll just keep having to repeat “4th grade” lessons of caring compassion, EQUITY, etc until we ultimately learn and live it. 

ON THE EDGE

Bizarrely, we have the choice right in front of us reflected in two “characters” that represent these options: the grotesque distortion of greed, deceit, and self-absorption in our current President on the one hand, and a compassionate scientist in Dr Fauci, looking out for the good of the whole on the other. One defends his “30 pieces of silver” like Judas while the other defends his love of life itself for the true good of all and asks us to do the same via social distancing. What will we do with this golden opportunity of a “time out”. Can we stand the individual discomfort for the good of the whole? We will all have to decide, for this problem runs far deeper than the current pandemic and will only resurface again and again until we truly move past the isolation of too many hearts and minds that exist in this country today.

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Have We Lost Faith In Ourselves?

I don’t know how I feel about the recent article below and its position. It strikes me as a chicken and egg debate and therefore a bit fatuous, intellectually self-serving. So many things have broken down in our culture, and institutions seem symptomatic of that. As highly educated elites, and let’s face it that is what we are—well educated, ponderous, separated in so many ways from those who aren’t—I think we also have to look at ourselves and our own self absorption, our own precious positions that we cling to. We are those institutions—we are them and they are us.

America has gotten so big, so unwieldy, so degraded on so many levels and not just institutions, I don’t know how we change our perspectives. Sometimes rot and decay take on lives of their own. Can this very large ship be turned around, chart a new course? Is anyone reading this article willing to change and volunteer or go work for any of these structures?? Not a criticism; just a question we owe ourselves to consider.

I have no answers, no recommendations other than taking a steely eye turned inward to examine our own participation or lack thereof. What does it mean to love our neighbors as ourselves? What is the difference between equality and equity? They are not the same. Equity is providing resources, financial as well as modeling behaviors/examples to those who are deprived, and provide them with what they need to sustain and flourish their lives. Equality assumes that everybody has to have the same $10 no matter what. It’s absurd.

One of the things I’ve always loved about Joan Dideon is her talent to hold a mirror to my generation, our generation. I miss her voice. We have been as selfish and self-absorbed as what came before ours. We also inherited highly virtuous qualities and values as well: hard-working, commitment to community to some degree, a reasonable sense of right and wrong. How we apply these positives has to be recontextualized, however, which is the rub. 

Obviously not everyone has the same talents, expertise, aptitude or abilities. Yet can’t we all see we needn’t not “self-segregate” from those we perceive as having less, or who are not like us? If we have no courage to be the change, that is what our institutions will mirror back. Helen Keller’s quote springs to mind at this time in our national crisis:

“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.” 

If we are not dead there is likely something all of us can do as individuals to “be the change.” It is our charge to figure out what that is, large or small. After all, if we have lost faith in our institutions like the title of the Op-Ed below suggests, that also implies we have lost faith in ourselves. Yet only we can regain that faith. It is high time we held ourselves accountable as well.

To access article below, press graphic to select link using touch screen or right click with mouse.

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