The Screaming Lie

When I was six years old, my best neighborhood buddy was a five-year-old boy named Jimmy. We climbed the apple tree in my backyard together, and we watched television together at his house. (Our family had no TV.) One day Jimmy and I wandered up to little Maureen’s house to play in her sandbox while she and her family were away from home. 

There had been rain the night before, and the sandbox was uncovered, so the sand was soupy and wouldn’t hold shapes well in the rain-filled box. We enjoyed dribbling wet sand through our fingers for a while. Then we discovered — and oh, the joy of childhood discovery, independent of adult guidance! — that if we threw dripping globs of it onto the nearby asphalt siding shingles of Maureen's house, they would stick, like molehills on the vertical surface! Defying gravity! It seemed like magic! Intoxicated with our powers, we soon had a whole section of the lower back wall of the house pock-marked with lumps of sand. It was quite wonderful fun, and when the excitement wore off, we found our way back down the hill (all of eighty feet) to our own homes and thought nothing more of it. 

That was the prelude.

Later in the day — it must have been evening, because my father was home — Maureen’s father appeared at our back door, livid with rage, quivering with rage, and demanding to know the identity of the “delinquents” who had thrown sand on his house. In his rage, he was threatening to call the police and have the miscreants thrown in jail! Terrified, I screamed and sobbed repeated denials! Jail! Locked up away from my family! I knew that lying was wrong but  could not face the punishment threatened and the shame of being branded a criminal. 

All these decades later (and thinking of Mr. Rogers, too), I look back on that incident and am astonished by the lack of proportion and reason Maureen’s father exhibited. We were such tiny children, Jimmy and I, and we had not thrown paint, only sand. Water from a garden hose would wash it away! Police? Jail? Were these appropriate threats for a grownup to shout at a frightened little girl, his daughter’s playmate?

If anything, Jimmy and I had been guilty of poor judgment. Well, again, we were five and six years old! I don’t recall if “trespassing” was an issue. That would have been strange in our modest, lower-middle-class neighborhood of forty-foot lots, where we kids were always running from one yard to another and “cutting through” from one street to the next. The whole neighborhood was a "commons" for us then, as well as for unleashed dogs and outdoor cats.

What we had done was neither malicious nor irrevocable. We had had fun and made a mess, a mess that could be hosed away in minutes. Maureen’s father could have asked us to clean it up, but apparently he didn’t think of that. Only police and jail. 

So I lied. Now that was very wrong, and I knew it. I lied to my parents and I lied to this other suddenly threatening adult, and because I knew lying was wrong, I screamed and cried while persisting in my lie, both out of fear of discovery, for what had now been labeled a “crime” (the sand), and out of guilt for the lie.

After a while, after Maureen’s father finally left, my parents calmed me down and assured me that I would not go to jail, even if I had thrown the sand, but that I needed to tell them the truth. And so, tearfully, I did. 

That incident came back to me yesterday as, one by one, so many members of the House of Representatives lost control of their emotions and yelled and screamed in rage. At first I thought, they have to know [the truth], so why this  lack of self-control and dignity? That's when I remembered my six-year-old self, caught between lying and fear of punishment, screaming and sobbing uncontrollably. Oh, yes, I thought then. They know, all right. 

Je l'accuse!

If there is one single individual I hold primarily responsible for Congressional gridlock and the awful, yawning chasm of partisanship that divides our country today, for the deterioration of political civility and the abandonment of Constitutional duty by elected officials, that person is Mitch McConnell. I know many of my friends would give the current president shame (not honor) of first place in such a contest, but I see things differently. The current president would never have been a candidate had the divide not been already so deep. And even elected to the highest office, he could never single-handedly have achieved the levels of destruction we have seen without a Republican party united behind him, united for the sake of their party rather than the country, led in the U.S. Senate by Mitch McConnell. 

McConnell’s reprehensible and indefensible machinations began long before the current administration was in place. Never in my life (there may have been instances in history but never as long as I have been alive) has there been such disrespect for a sitting president as McConnell showed President Obama. Others in his party and in the Senate fell in line, but McConnell was the ringleader. Anything President Obama proposed, McConnell was against, not because any particular proposal was against his “principles” but simply because Obama proposed it. He made it plain from the very beginning of the Obama administration that he did not intend to let the president have a single “win” on anything, and the shameful culmination of this campaign of partisan Congressional dereliction of duty came when the Senate refused to hold hearings for Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, a moderate admired by Republicans as well as Democrats. Blocking those hearings was an egregious slap in the face to the president, and I call it a dereliction of the Senator’s duty under the Constitution, as well as a mark of disrespect I have yet to manage to forgive.

Now that there is a putative Republican in the Oval Office, McConnell has generally continued his lockstep partisan strategy, putting party ideology over ideals, principle, and even Constitutional duty. To bring civility back into our national discourse, we need to get rid of uncivil, power-hungry partisan ideologues in government and replace them with men and women of decency and dignity who will fulfill the duties of the offices to which they are elected.

Robert Reich has written a piece asking who is worse, Trump or McConnell, something I read it this morning while searching online for other opinions on the Senate Majority Leader. As I see it, the president is the Great Oz, a little man behind the curtain. McConnell is the curtain.

Dream #1: Choir of Wind-Blown Voices

It seemed to be a kind of music festival, but with band members milling about aimlessly, some in blue and gold uniforms, others in street clothes, some holding brass or woodwind instruments or drums, others empty-handed. In the background voices were singing. But was a choir performing or practicing? 

Either the piece was experimental — I found the music jarring and irritating and wanted only to get away from it or have it stop or at the very least cover my ears — or the conductor and various sections had completely lost track of each other. Musical phrases that sounded as if they should be sung in interlocking beats and measures were ahead of or behind each other, so that instead of harmonies the sounds came in unexpected, overlapping discords.

In a moment, then, my hearing of the choir changed, and the music came to me like ocean waves in a storm, each wave crashing over another before that other had reached the shore, although these waves of sound, being airborne, while still commanded by the winds as are ocean waves, were being blown about yet more haphazardly, and I realized that this was the intention of the music. And now I wanted the voices never to stop and never to sort themselves out and come together, because for now they were an entire universe of breezes and zephyrs, trying out what worlds they might make, and for now all was possibility, all was freedom, all was whirl, and no beauties had been foreclosed by the actualization of any others.

11/19/2019

Looking Back Can Be Fruitful

Recently on my Books in Northport blog, I added a new layout item, that of the "Featured Post." It's a way of not only looking back but inviting others to look back with me. Perhaps they missed something along the way that I believe deserves attention.

I am added a "Featured Post" to this blog as well. If you're viewing on a phone rather than a larger screen, though, you won't see the right-hand column in my layout, and I don't know how to adjust for that. Maybe you do. In any event, the "Featured Post" highlighted today (in future others will take its place) is this one.

Thanks for taking the time to visit.

Nature Owes Us One

After the leaves have turned beautiful colors, and after the first hard frost, we are supposed to get a stretch of mild, shirtsleeve weather. We expect it as our due. But what to call that late grace period that didn’t come (yet?) this year? 

The term “Indian summer” gets mixed reviews these days. Not all Native Americans find it offensive, but since it falls into a general kettle of questionable phrases, what else might we substitute?

As decades go by in my life (with increasing speed), the meaning of “old woman’s summer” becomes clearer and clearer to me. Old people want to be warm! Not all old people want to be called old, though. Anyway, old woman's or old wives' summer is European terminology. In England and also in Europe the welcome warm spell following frost is sometimes called St. Martin’s or St. Luke’s summer, but we are not in England, and those names have no familiar connotations for us.

“Last chance summer” works for me. In wintry northern Michigan, it sounds a especially poignant tone. Though "halcyon days" is awfully nice, too.

Please, Mother Nature, please give us one last chance! Even if we have no intention of raking leaves until spring, it would be good to get that lawn furniture put away!

A Great President

James Earl Carter, thirty-ninth president of the United States of America, has too often been called our best former president though a bad, i.e., ineffective president while in office. I wish to differ.

War and Peace

Our country was not at war during the four years of the Carter presidency. Stop and reflect on that for a moment. As commander-in-chief, President Carter called for the sacrifice of no American’s life.

And yet, at the same time, without military action and through diplomatic efforts alone, he was able to bring about the beginnings of peace in the Middle East, a hard-won dream still to be fully realized. Carter’s intelligence, information, preparation, and patience were all at work at Camp David.

Energy and Environment

He took the long view on environmental issues and set us on a path of energy conservation and independence. President Reagan reversed that direction, and no American president since Jimmy Carter has been clear-sighted or determined enough to put us back on track.

Transparency

When President Carter held a press conference, he made every attempt to answer questions clearly and directly. I will never forget my astonishment the first one I watched him give a televised press conference. Has there ever  — in your lifetime — been a president more honest with the American people?

Crisis

Despite the taking and holding of hostages that guaranteed his bid for reelection would be defeated, ultimately the hostages came home alive, in large part because Jimmy Carter put a higher priority on the hostage situation than on campaigning for reelection.

Decency

That James Earl Carter has always been a decent, honorable man no one can deny. A naive visitor from another planet, looking at the burdens and responsibilities of leadership, might assume decency to be a minimum requirement for the presidency of the United States. History and experience, however, paint a very different picture, and decency is often mentioned as if it can only be, if not the opposite of greatness, yet a kind of honorable mention granted to someone who failed to achieve a place in the pantheon of greatness.  

Vision

The long partnership of Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter, the work of the Carter Center in Africa, the Carters’ hands-on volunteering with Habitat for Humanity — all those would attest to lives well lived, had the couple never lived in the White House. And yet I would have Jimmy Carter admired and revered not only for his basic decency and his charitable work and the teaching of Sunday school but for the vision that, as President Carter, he brought to the nation and the world. 

I feel privileged to have lived in an era that saw both Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama elected to the nation’s highest office. The true legacy of both men rests not on mere legislation (which subsequent leaders can overturn) but on a promise realized — that it is possible for good people, with vision, to rise to positions of leadership, that it is possible for citizens in a democracy to elect leaders who will serve also as examples to the rest of us of what it means to be a great American.

In a Holding Pattern

I’ve been searching for a way to describe my feelings, and all I can come up with is that I feel I’m in a holding pattern. Not waiting for any big event, just for clearance to land — finally! — and get on with ordinary life. Waiting for a return to normality, that is — which has enough problems and complexities and challenges of its own, God knows. I don’t kid myself about that. Normal life has enough craziness for anyone. But living in a country at war with itself, as we do now, goes beyond normal craziness (and I don’t mean that to be taken as an oxymoron) and into outright daily insanity. It either exhausts the heart or drives it underground, into hiding, but meanwhile we cannot afford to check out or let ourselves fall asleep. We still have to keep our lighted, fully equipped, and heavily freighted ships — our lives! — aloft, all parts running and in decent working order, and we have to remain alert and engaged and keep sending and receiving signals —. . 

So for now it’s the holding pattern and the quiet, sometimes desperate hope (one must maintain hope) that fuel reserves will hold out and that we will, one day, walk out on solid ground again. 

Strange Land on the Horizon

[NO PHOTOS WITH THIS POST!]

As a young woman, say, back in my twenties and beyond, I tried to hide my impatience when old people expressed astonishment at being old. How could they be surprised? Hadn’t they looked around since childhood and realized that anyone who didn’t die young became old in time? Aging hardly made a newsworthy story: “Woman Lives On and Becomes Old!” Really, why the astonishment?

And then people die. My grandparents went first. (Actually, two of that generation known to me were step-grandparents, as my father’s mother had died when my father was still a boy, long before I was born, while my mother’s biological father was someone our family never knew except for tantalizing story fragments.) For grandparents to go first was not surprising. My only senior cousin’s death, however, came out of season, years before aunts and uncles started dropping off the family tree. Then years after that, and after my father and his older brother and a younger aunt by marriage were pruned from the living family tree, my mother remained the last of her generation. Now she is gone. And now I, the oldest remaining cousin on both sides, am #1 lemming at cliff’s edge, staring into the abyss, the generations gone before me having vanished from sight, the crush from behind increasing every year.

And I tell you, it is astonishing. Not only being the oldest but the whole business of being old. 

The year I had my first vegetable garden out at the farm, before we had moved from Leland to the old farmhouse we’ve now occupied for almost two decades (is that really possible?), summer was a season of drought and the new well we needed before we could live there yet in the future. My solution was to carry buckets, two at a time for balance and efficiency, repeatedly downhill to the little willow-bordered, no-name stream and back up to the garden. I was learning my home ground back then, and water-carrying during the drought taught me that the little stream, while it never went completely dry, sometimes ducked underground for long stretches, so that fetching water could sometimes mean searching for it first. Downhill, uphill, over and over, not counting the trips. The job did not feel easy, even back then: my realization today is that it was then possible. 

One afternoon following a tremendous thunderstorm the little no-name stream became a raging torrent, its usually soft, burbling voice the thunder of a cataract. Amazed and intrigued, we followed its course upstream, against the current, and into the edge of the woods, where a waterfall had appeared to cascade into a deep, dark pool. All that noise, depth, and energy! All temporary….

“Everything is temporary!” a character in one of my favorite movies memorably exclaims — a truth that did not remain for the 20th century (now past!) to discover. Socrates believed in eternal, unchanging essences he called Forms, but Heraclitus before him saw a world of continuous change. Many of the enormous old willows have lost large branches in storms or even fallen to ground themselves, pushed down by winds off nearby Lake Michigan. There is no path remaining downhill to the stream, and the accumulation of obstacles would put old ankle, knee, and leg bones at risk, were I to attempt to repeat that old après-storm exploration or even my former daily water-carrying expeditions.

And how can certain dear friends be dead and gone forever? Grandparents, yes, but how is it possible that contemporaries can have vanished, when they are so present to our thoughts on a daily basis? The unfairness of it, the unreality, is staggering! As if the stream were one day to disappear completely. But no, it is more as if the neglected garden were to go back, as it has done, to grass and violets, only rhubarb at one end and giant herbs at the other remaining as witnesses to the past.

In reality, youth and vigor, like the raging high waters following the storm, are the aspects of life most strikingly and obviously temporary. — And yet, strangely, it is the insults of age that we experience as if they should be transient. In our hearts and minds, we remain young — if not sixteen, then at most fifty — and surely this aching creakiness upon rising in the morning will pass eventually, will it not? Like a bad case of the flu? All these conversations focused on illness, weakness, surgeries, and medications are not really about us, are they? Isn’t this all no more than a patch of rough weather we just have to get through with good grace and humor? Go away for half the year, and when you come back you see that friends have aged perceptibly. Then catch sight of your reflection when you aren’t expecting it, and you see yourself as those friends see you and realize that your appearance too has changed. Year by year, you are growing older, and then one year you realize you are old. Astonishing!

Along comes another crop of high school graduates, another flood of college graduates, wave after wave of weddings and babies (and weren’t we just yesterday in the midst of all that?), and the crowd behind us gains increasing magnitude, while ahead of us the group thins out until we are — that is, I am — looking over the edge, into the abyss, knowing our, my, turn to be pushed off the cliff will come next. 

Here we are, old. Astonishing! Well, now I get it!

---

Postscript after receiving a comment on Facebook (from a younger person in the family) to the effect that "nobody is pushing anyone off a cliff." I should have made it clear that the "pushing" isn't personal -- I didn't mean that at all. It's just Time hustling each generation in turn off the stage to make way for the next.

“We Want Tick Shots! We Want Tick Shots!”

Mine is no scientific hypothesis. I’m not a scientist. Maybe it’s nothing but a hare-brained notion? Bear with me. (Or don’t.)

Start with what seems to be a rising incidence of Alzheimer and Alzheimer-like dementia in the U.S. Add the fact that ticks are at work enlarging their continental territory. Now turn to an article on ticks and tick-borne diseases in the July 2018 issue of Consumer Reports, where we see that symptoms of Lyme disease can include mental confusion and memory problems. 

“Most of the time,” the article notes, “Lyme symptoms resolve after a short course of antibiotics.” 

Often, however, the tick victim is unaware of the bite — or perhaps aware of being bitten, but then no rash appears — and in either case, Lyme disease may occur but not be diagnosed, let alone treated. 

Now you see where I’m going with this. 

The article concludes with the terrifying statement that “we still haven’t even begun to grasp the extent of the [tick[ problem” (given that the tick’s ability to spread allergy has only recently been discovered). Far-from-simple-or-inexpensive measures may offer hope in the future by reducing deer and mouse populations, editing tick genes, etc. What made me exclaim out loud in disbelief and frustration, however, was this parenthetical (can you believe it?) paragraph: 

(A previous vaccine was discontinued because of a lack of demand and reports of side effects such as arthritis, though research showed that arthritis wasn’t in fact more common in people who had been vaccinated.) 

Did you read that paragraph carefully? You might, possibly, have developed arthritis after having had this vaccine, but you would have been just as likely to develop arthritis without the vaccine! Was it reports of arthritis that led to “lack of demand” (as specious claims linking autism to childhood immunizations kicked off a wave of childhood vaccination-avoidance among impressionable parents), or did the Lyme vaccine simply come out before the spread of disease-bearing ticks (and accompanying tick anxiety) reached levels high enough to generate demand? Because I ask you, who would not want a vaccine against Lyme disease?

I realize I’ve strayed from my original idea about a possible connection between ticks and dementia. Forgive me. Tick-phobia makes me a little crazy here in the “Upper Midwest,” one of the regions noted for spreading tick-borne diseases. But can we start a movement now? 

“We want tick shots! We want tick shots!” 

Let me through, please, to the head of the line!

Go With the Flow! Or, Why So Stuffy, Old Lady?

Something I’ve noticed in American discourse in recent years, from statements by scientists to speeches by politicians and penetrating news media and commercial messages, is a decided shift away from formality, not only with reference to the citizens of the United States but also with reference to residents and citizens of countries world-wide. In statements by scientists (and reports of same to the public), “humans” or “human beings” have become “people.” A certain substance, for example, may be “toxic to both domestic pets and people.” Formerly, we would have been told the substance was “toxic to humans.” Does “people” sound more immediate, more personal?

At the same time, in other contexts, “people” have morphed into “folks.” We are still “the American people,” but when the national adjective is dropped, and especially when reference is made to groups of citizens, we become “folks.” A more casual, folksier term? Does “Folks are hurting” bring the pain into sharper focus than “People are hurting”?

What do you think? 

(The increasing informality in public utterances was preceded by a long trend toward familiarity in other situations. Bank tellers and receptionists in medical offices have been addressing customers and patients by first names, regardless of age, for quite a while now, although I’ve noticed that the more wealthy depositors sometimes escape familiarity. As for the disrespect some of us feel in our doctors’ offices (in general, doctors still expect to be called “Doctor”), that is often explained away by confidentiality requirements — supposedly, calling us by our first names protects our privacy in the waiting room better than if we were addressed more formally — but which came first, HIPAA or first-name-calling? And how would our privacy be threatened if we are called Mr. or Mrs. in the examining room? Waiters and waitresses don’t usually know the first names of diners, unless they are regulars, and in restaurants it is staff, not customers, who are reduced to their first names. “I’m Wendy, and I’ll be your server.” Are we still kings and queens, with personal servants, when we go out to eat? Is that how we’re supposed to feel?)

Does the general trend in public statements signal some underlying intent? If so, what could it be? 

Are we supposed to feel that science and government are not distant powers but groups of “people”/“folks" close to us, wanting to work with us? Is the newer language an attempt to bridge a gap in trust? 

Or, on a darker interpretation, are we being talked down to, made smaller, when we are called “folks”? Is an attempt being made to control us better?  

— Or is neither of these conclusions correct? Do both read too much into simple changes in language?

Whatever the original intent, if original intent there was (and how would we ever know?), I suspect the spread of the new usages is a simple matter of human beings/people/folks following trend leaders. We hear the new way of speaking over and over and gradually, without reflection, adopt it in our own speech. 

What do you think? Have you noticed the trend? Do you read anything at all into it?