The Casual Blog

Category: moral causes

June 19, 2010

Liberation — death, sorrow, life

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been a big news story these last few weeks, but the news reports have given little coverage to the fact that millions of sea creatures that will die.  Our scuba experiences in the last couple of years have made us more conscious of the teeming life in the oceans, the unbelievable profusion, a cornucopia of bizarre, beautiful life.  The loss of life now taking place is impossible to fully grasp, and painful to consider.  I think it’s good, though, to try grasping it, and accept the pain of it.

We humans are generally deathophobes.  At the same time, it’s obvious that death is a fundamental part of life.  It’s in front, behind, and all around us, and avoiding it is really not possible.  We may as well have a little courage and honesty and figure out how to think about it.

I keep coming back to the line by Wallace Stevens in his poem Sunday Morning:  “Death is the mother of beauty.”  When I first read it, I thought he was just being provocative, but I now see he was struggling with something profound.  It isn’t that death itself is beautiful.  But it is an integral part of the natural cycle of change, which is a defining characteristic of life.  In Sunday Morning, Stevens asks, “Is there no change of death in paradise?  Does ripe fruit never fall?”  The Talking Heads got at the same idea with the funny line, “Heaven/ is a place/ where nothing/ ever happens.”  Such a paradise would be inhuman.  And very boring.

But coming to terms with this part of reality is not just a matter of working through the ideas.  It’s also accepting some unpleasant feelings, like grief and sorrow.  It seems natural to avoid such things, but it won’t work.  Those feelings are integral to the human experience; they’ll always be there.  We may as well face them with honesty and courage.  Opening ourselves to those feelings makes us more human.  It’s liberating.

Sally had a harsh and sad confrontation with one animal’s death this week.  She was monitoring her blue bird boxes at the Lochmere golf course for new for baby blue birds, which is usually a cheering thing.  She came upon  a young Canada goose that had had a horrible accident that destroyed its beak and left it bloody and mutilated.   It could still move, but was plainly suffering and unable to survive long.  The poor thing needed to be euthanized, but there was no practical way to capture it without making matters worse.  She had no confidence that the animal control service would be able to assist without increasing the animal’s fear and pain.  There was no solution, other than nature itself.

Sally began to cry as she told the story, and continued to wonder whether there was something else she could have done.  She is a tender-hearted soul, and I love her for it.  I was reminded of the time years ago when she arrived home in tears at having run over a little frog as she was parking her car.  I knew then, once again, that she was the girl for me.

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April 24, 2010

About cross-dressing for entertainment

We’ve been on a documentary kick recently, and saw a good one from Netflicks on demand last week. Pageant is behind-the-scenes view of  the Miss Gay America pageant, a contest for female impersonators. We meet and follow the paths of five or so contenders for the throne.

At first blush, the subject matter sounded a bit off putting.  Why would a male want to dress as a female?  Of those who would, who would want to go as public as possible with it?  I’d never given much thought to the subject of cross-dressing, but vaguely thought of it as a somewhat bizarre subculture. Plainly, cross-dressing violates a fairly powerful taboo. Again, without thinking much about it, I’d considered it as a little sad.

Pageant made me think in a completely new way. The contestants vary considerably in their looks, smarts, and manners, but they’re all completely sane and highly sociable. They’re all nice. And they’re all incredibly gifted in a particular way: transforming their appearance from male to female. The transformations are truly uncanny. Watching the various stages – choosing clothes, practicing movements, applying makeup (lots!) — it’s impossible not to respect their craft. These are very creative people with great eyes and imaginations. Artists, in an unusual form.

The Miss Gay America pageant followed the traditional Miss America format, with separate contests for evening ware, judges’ questions, and talent (lip synching, dancing, ventriloquism, etc.). The top contenders were professional drag show entertainers, and they were very polished, elegant, and funny.

The more surprising thing was how passionate they were about their art. In the behind-the-scenes interviews, we learned that most had spent years working on their personas and acts.  Some had spent many thousands of dollars on their wardrobes, and it didn’t look like any of them were getting rich. One noted that cross dressing is not a good way to get a date with a gay guy, who generally prefer guys who look like guys. From what we could see, these people just love what they do. And, although the film made little of this, they plainly have a lot of courage. The mainstream society isn’t about to get comfortable with what they do. Some people are violently opposed.

In the end, I found the stories in Pageant inspiring.  It’s a good reminder that some people who are really unusual like being unusual.  There are a lot of different ideas of fun and of beauty.  It makes the world interesting.

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January 16, 2010

The crucible of a massive earthquake in Haiti

Last week an earthquake hit Haiti with devastating force.  The destruction was so massive.  Airports, ports, roads, bridges, utilities, and communication networks were all shut down or disabled, and rescuers, aid workers, and journalists still cannot even see much of the area affected.  We know that the scale of death is huge, and the scale of suffering is enormous.  Reports yesterday said there had been 40,000 bodies recovered so far, and without food, water, or medical care, people will continue to die.

Disasters are natural crucibles.  They can reveal unexpected kindness and generosity.  At Red Hat, the population that insists on broadcasting company wide emails on their personal concerns is on an average day a minor but continual annoyance.  After the Haiti earthquake, though, there were many of those emails concerning how to contribute to charitable efforts effectively.  Many people everywhere pity the Haitians and wish they could help. For most Americans most of the time, if they think of Haiti at all, it is as a far away place of unfathomable poverty.  Some may be discovering, as I am, an unexpected feeling of solidarity, kinship, and shared sorrow with Haitians.

But disasters also expose character flaws and crazy ideas.  Pat Robertson, a well known religious TV personality, had this take on the Haitian earthquake:  that the Haitian people made a “pact with the devil.”  He was referring to Haitian slaves’ successful revolt at the end of the eighteenth century against their French rulers.  Robertson thus suggested that Haitian slavery was God’s will and that struggle against it was the work of Satin.  He implied that God personally gave the OK last week to kill tens of thousands of Haitians.  And God was justified in undertaking this slaughter based on the sins of ancestors several generations back.

To judge from press reports ridiculing Robertson, a great many people appreciate that such a view is morally demented.  But it does bring up in a starker-than-usual form difficult issue for religious people who are also concerned with ethics.  If  God is all knowing and all powerful, why would He trigger, or even permit, an earthquake to kill tens of thousands of innocent people?  Indeed, what possible justification could He have for the violent death of one innocent child?  Or for any of the other atrocities that we all see in the ordinary course of  life?  This line of questioning was really valuable to me in finding the courage to step off the path of conventional religious thinking.

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January 10, 2010

Reading the Confessions of Nat Turner

One of the rewarding things about travel is the flip side of downtime:   having substantial chunks of time to read.   Once I’ve made it to my gate and found a spot to stow my roll, I look forward to the part of the journey when there is nothing physical that needs to be done, no problems that immediately need to be solved, and no talking that is strictly necessary.  For lovers of books, it’s an oasis.  And reading makes the time valuable.  I really don’t know how non-readers can stand airplanes.

During our travels over the holidays, I managed to finish William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, which gave a shot in the arm to my sometimes shaky faith in the importance of the novel.  Sally read the book long ago and kept it, and it has sat on our various bookshelves as long as we’ve been together (27+ now!).  During all that time, I had no idea it was such a great book.  It turns out Sally always thought it was a great book, but we never got around to discussing it.

The book is based on an actual person (Turner), a slave who led a bloody revolt in Virginia in 1831.  Styron explains in “afterword” essay that the historical record of Turner is slim, and that he consciously made a character different in important respects from what he believed about the historical Turner.  (The real Turner was apparently a psychotic religious fanatic, whereas Styron’s is a religiously inspired poetic and practical genius.)  Styron’s aim was to illuminate slavery and race relations during that period, and his own.  He succeeded brilliantly in bringing to light multiple dimensions and paradoxes of the Peculiar Institution.

It is certainly a beautiful book in its details and its sweep, but also a deeply painful.  There is, of course, the sickening cruelty of some individual slave owners.  (The narrator Turner concedes that there was a wide range of behavior among slave owners, and some of them were thoughtful and relatively kind.)  There is the pain of Turner and millions of others who endured forced servitude.  There’s also the deep pain is that our forefathers with knowledge and intent supported and defended slavery for generations.  The anti-black racism that continues to plague us is proof that this legacy is still with us.

The book is a powerful example of how a work of fiction can bring to light certain truths that cannot be illuminated any other way.  History in its conventional form is distrustful of imagination, which means that undocumented feelings and behaviors can be completely lost.  But combining historical research with imagination and literary skill, as Styron did, opens doors to the past.

Styron’s essay recounts the strange history of the book itself, which was initially a critical and popular success.  It then became the target of fierce attack by a number of prominent black scholars.   By Styron’s account (which is obviously self-interested), most of the attacks missed the larger points of his work.  In any case, the attacks effectively marginalized the book by discouraging the attention of black readers.  It is a sad irony that this great book that could easily have been an inspiration for more great historical and imaginative work and another bridge over a racial divide became a point of division.

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December 25, 2009

An Xmas Carol

As a nonbeliever, I feel a deep ambivalence about Christmas.  The customs and traditions are strongly evocative of a many happy episodes in my childhood — longed-for toys, rich food, friendship and love.  But it also evokes memories and feeling of sadness and loss for loved ones now gone, who were integral to those early years.

And I’m deeply ambivalent at the sweet and absurd idea of Santa Claus.  The red felt suit, the jolliness, the limitless generosity are all great ideas.  But even now, I feel a slight bitterness and chagrin that my normally reliable and credible parents, when I put the “Is he really real?” question  to them squarely, gave some type of yes and set me up to make a fool of myself in defending the existence of Santa to the neighborhood kids.  I trusted them to tell the truth!  There may be, as recent studies suggest, some value in Santa for developing children’s imaginative powers.  But for me, even years later, there was a cost in terms of injured trust.  My Mom’s solution was to let me read the old chestnut Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus, which proposes to escape the problem of no Santa by redefining Santa as the Christmas spirit.  Really?

I know I’m not the only one with complicated feelings about Christmas.  Some love the shopping and the happy surprises, some love the story of the baby Jesus, some love being with family.  With all the pain and confusion in the world, I have no wish to add to the store without good reason.  I usually keep a low profile about my own irreligion, and especially so at Christmas time, when it seems that Christian beliefs are  for many on balance a source of joy.  But I don’t like flying under false colors, and I feel less than forthright when I say Merry Christmas.  There’s no problem with “merry,” but I don’t care to suggest I’m on board with the Christ part.  I usually go with “happy holidays” or something like that, but really, that just doesn’t sound as happy.  Yet another problem with no good solution.

Still, yesterday, after playing some really rich and beautiful music of Debussy, I found myself digging through the bottom of the music pile for my rarely used Xmas sheet music, and without any particular internal discussion I was soon playing through some favorite carols of my youth:  Angels We have Heard on High, Oh Christmas Tree, Oh Come All Ye Faithful, Joy to the World, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, and the Chipmunk Song.  It was a bit like Proust’s madeleine:  memories of family gatherings caroling, happy shopping, beginner band concerts, presents, vacations from schoolwork, trips to see grandparents, fresh smelling decorated trees, wrapping presents, and houses smelling of fresh-baked cookies hit me all at once.  I felt the pure childlike joy of Christmas.

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December 12, 2009

Christmas gifts and losses

Shopping is not something I do for fun.  But with the hard deadline of Christmas looming, today I finally faced up to the inevitable:  I needed to focus on buying some presents.  It is hard to think that anyone in my present-buying orbit really needs any material thing that I might give, but tradition is powerful.  I braved the traffic, the lines, and the bewildering cornucopia of goods, and found some things at last.  Whew.

One thing I like about the fall and winter holidays is childhood memories.  How wonderful it was to look forward to a visit from Santa Claus!  What fun to see relatives and friends!   Ah, the sweets and smells of baking cookies!  It is hard, though, to think of those I loved who are gone.

As I slowly made my way through mall-oriented traffic, I heard an unusual radio story on NPR’s This American Life.   A man explained how his mother committed suicide at age 79 with the knowledge of her friends and family and with his support.  She was not depressed or terminally ill, though she was conscious of struggling with dementia.  She read Final Exit and composed a plan involving an overdose of sleeping pills and a plastic bag.  Then she practiced the technique repeatedly, with her son’s supervision.  The composing and carrying out of the plan took place over many years.

When she finally picked a day, she let those close to her know, and had final visits.  The last person she saw was her son.  She was concerned that he not be exposed to legal risk, and so he left her for some period while she carried out the plan.  He said that he was worried, when he returned, that she might have taken the pills but been unsuccessful.  She was, however, dead.  In recounting this, he was clearly moved and sorry she was gone, but he was neither critical nor admiring of her decision.  It was her decision, he said.  She lived life on her own terms.

The interviewer observed that it was highly unusual for people to be able to talk about death freely and deal with it with such directness.  The son noted that his mother spent time working on it, and it got easier.  They also discussed how unfortunate it was that our legal system makes it impossible for persons who choose the terms of their death to be with family at the end.

I found all this both unsettling and encouraging.  It would be good to be as comfortable with death as with other fundamental facts of human existence.  I’m certainly not there yet.  But it sounded like the mother, and to some extent the son, made it.

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December 6, 2009

The China Study Shows Why We Should Eat Plants

Anyone who is interested in health and nutrition should read The China Study by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell.  http://tiny.cc/rnQye The Campbells bring good news and bad news.  The good news is that by changing our diet, we can dramatically improve our risk profile for the deadliest diseases in the developed world.  The bad news is that if we continue eating a normal American diet, we will continue to increase our risk of cancer, heart disease, obesity, and other killers.

The basic message of The China Study is simple:  a plant-based diet is much healthier than an animal-based diet.  The book backs up this claim with abundant scientific research.  The China study of the title was a huge epidemiological study of diet and health, but a number of other studies cited.  What is striking is the coherence of the results over time and different populations.  There is massive support for the proposition that eating animals and their products as food is bad for us.

Admittedly, as a vegetarian I was particularly open to this message, but my reasons for adopting this diet were primarily ethical rather than nutritional.  If the Campbells are right about the science, and we want to take reasonably good care of our health, we need to find a way to quit eating animal-based food.

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November 22, 2009

How can we eat animals?

Not eating animals is, for me, a matter of conscience.  It seems to me plain that unnecessarily killing sentient creatures for human consumption is wrong.  I’m very conscious that this is a minority view.   That’s being too kind: this is a fringy view.  I feel good — that is, both healthier and happier — about eating plants rather than animals.  But it’s not pleasant to take a stand on this that is at odds both with the majority of the community and with most of the people I care about and respect, and I would not do so if I saw a principled alternative.

Because the topic is a difficult one, I was heartened to see in today’s NY Times an opinion piece by Gary Steiner setting out the animal rights point of view._ http://tiny.cc/GfNrJ Steiner is a professor of philosophy at Bucknell who’s written extensively on animal rights.   His basic argument is that animals possess inherent dignity, and that human desire cannot justify their slaughter.

Steiner has trouble explaining why most humans seem untroubled by this.  As he notes, the classic arguments that support treating human animals as privileged to cause unlimited suffering on other animals are embarrassingly weak.  It is difficult to square our general understanding of ourselves as beings embodying and constrained by morality with massive indifference to the pain of our fellow creatures.

Part of the answer is that the problem is at once overwhelming and easy to ignore.  According to Steiner, there are 53 billion animals slaughtered each year for human consumption, which is more than enough misery to inspire hopelessness.  There are also nested issues of economics and tradition. Humans have lots of other problems.  This week the NC press had stories about NC pork farmers going bankrupt, who were pleading for people to save them by eating more pigs.  It would be wrong to dismiss the plight of the farmers, but their voices at least get a hearing — unlike the pigs, who would undoubtedly prefer to live.  Steiner also alludes to the Thanksgiving turkeys who will be consumed this week recalling happy memories.  How could we give up such a joyful tradition?

The answer is, it isn’t really that hard, once the horror of the slaughter is brought into view.   There are many intractable problems of human society, but this one is not intractable.  It’s just difficult.

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October 25, 2009

Human beings in our prisons

The Raleigh News & Observer’s headlines for the past few days have blared the news that several dangerous persons in the state’s prison system are about to be released.  I ignored the story initially, on the theory that this surely happens every day without devastating consequences.  Prisoners serve their time, and they get out.  It’s very common.

Thinking about prisons and prisoners is painful, and it’s easy not to think about them.  They’re usually well out of sight.  I drive past Central Prison on the way to work every day, but I barely see it, because it’s unsightly and I’ve gotten in the habit of looking the other way.  But the N&O stories reminded me that we need to deal with a terrible situation.

Imprisonment as we in the U.S. now practice it is in many cases horrific for the prisoners and it’s hard to say if it makes us any safer.  It locks away some dangerous people, but it also creates more dangerous people. We lock people up for years in dehumanizing conditions, which has a tendency to make people angry and violent, then let them out.  Many then commit more crimes, so we send them back to prison, and repeat the cycle.  Multiply this by millions.

Depressing as it is, it’s even worse that our governor and our newspaper are seeking to whip people into a frenzy about particular convicted criminals getting out.  The particular circumstances relate to a new case interpreting the meaning of  a “life sentence.”   For a lot of years in many places, it didn’t mean “till the prisoner died.”  The North Carolina courts found it didn’t mean that for these prisoners, but rather meant 80 years minus good behavior time.  So a group of felons who’ve served at least 40 years are due to get out.

The problem is similar to Guantanamo, where even after we admitted what we did was wrong, we’ve got a problem with outplacement of the prisoners.  They may not have been dangerous when they went in, but in whatever case, they’re likely to be more dangerous having spent years with fellow prisoners who are violent jihadists for their only friends.

In terms of human misery, the U.S. prison system is enormous.  We’re at or near the top in per capita rates of imprisonment.  We have no concept of what we’re trying to accomplish other than punishment.

We need to reserve our prisons for the truly dangerous.  And we need to treat those people humanely to see if we can help them become less violent.  It doesn’t matter whether you argue the point in terms of human rights or pure self interest — the result is the same.  But we’d feel more like decent human beings if we got rolled up our sleeves and got to work on this.

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September 26, 2009

Death is the mother of beauty

Wallace Stevens writes, “Death is the mother of beauty.”  The line, read in context in the great poem Sunday Morning, is dense with meaning.  I’ve pulled it from its context (sorry, Wallace)  to illustrate the difficulty of thinking and talking about death.  Doesn’t just saying the line make you feel strange?   Think of saying it to a group of friends.  A conversation killer, for sure.  The point is, it’s hard to talk seriously about death.  Bringing up the subject in polite conversation is generally taboo.  If you insist, you may be viewed as lacking in good taste, morbid, or depressed.

Artists are given special license to deal with death.  Where would art be without it?   Count the crucifixions in the Metropolitan Museum.  Or the great books, plays, and operas in which death is the central event.  And death is very common.   As Lenny Bruce famously said, we’re all gonna die!

It is kind of funny that death is so ordinary and so frightening at the same time, but not laugh out loud funny.  For most of us, death is scary.  In fact, terrifying.  It serves to define the ultimate in fear:  to be frightened to death.  It’s emotional in other ways, too.  To think of the death of someone else causes feelings to sadness or despair.  Death is not to be trifled with.

Even so, avoidance is not the best strategy.   Not thinking about it will not make the problem go away.   Not talking about it will not help anything.  We need to deal with death like grown ups.

The current health care debate provides a case in point.  Right wing opponents of reform cleverly started a false rumor that reform would make euthanasia official policy.  This outrageous and on its face absurd, lie set off a huge panic reaction.  The reaction suggests how hard it will be to address the real problem of our spending enormous sums to put off death when it is inevitable and the amounts spent yield nothing in terms of quality of life.

I was happy to see that last week Newsweek had a cover story entitled “The Case for Killing Granny:  Curbing Excessive End-of-Life Care is Good for America.”  It is possible to discuss this issue and to make good choices.  It is possible to be sensible and courageous.  Both my parents, when confronting terminal illnesses, thoughtfully and courageously refused low-probability-of-success treatments.   Others have done likewise.  Maybe good sense and strength will increase and spread.  One can always hope.

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