Live out Loud!

Just came from Mighty Maddy's funeral...as funerals go, this one had it all...laughter, tears, wisdom, tender moments. "Live out Loud" is what was on the buttons that were on the tables at the reception after the service. What an exhortation! We, truly, are given nothing, and there's nothing like the death of a child to remind us all how fleeting life is...

Rest in peace, Maddy, and I wish peace for your family, and joy in their memories of you.

Rest in peace, Mighty Maddy...

About an hour after I posted last evening, Mighty Maddy passed away...I hope for peace for the family she leaves behind...

A Reflection on the Fragility of Life, part...?

It seems like yesterday, but in fact, it's almost two years ago since I wrote this post, after the sudden death of the son of a friend of mine in a tragic accident.



Tonight, again, I must reflect on how ephemeral, how short, and how...unfair?...life can be. Tonight, Mighty Maddy will come to the end of her year-long fight with leukemia. When, exactly, the end will come is not known, but during the course of this evening, it almost certainly will come, when the last of her life support is disconnected. Maddy is 8 years old...


As I sit here, in the comfort of my home, while my three children sleep upstairs, all healthy, I cannot fathom what it must be like to know that your child is going to die...not some day, not next year or in fifty years, but most likely tonight...or certainly tomorrow. How do you say goodbye? How do you make the terrible decision that the time has passed when perhaps there is yet more that can be done to save her, that the time has come to make the decision to let her go, to manage her pain, so that her passing will be as painless and simple as possible? How can you let go, believing, though you may, though you must, that her journey is not yet finished, but that she is moving on to another world, a better world? How, as a parent, can you cope with the desparate pain that you must let your baby make that journey into the unknown alone?

For oh so many reasons, as I have grown older, my faith in the God that I was raised to believe in has ...morphed...faded...transformed... In the days that followed 9/11, I began to draw a hard line between belief in God, and adherence to religion. I know that we humans need ritual in our lives. It helps us to understand, to grasp, to find comfort, and to find constancy, in all the terrible reality that life carries with it. But, as 9/11 so cruelly taught, religion is of man, and as with all things made by man, man can use it to do terrible things to his fellow human beings in the name of what he "believes."

The psychologist, Carl Jung, was asked once in an interview if he believed in God. His answer (my paraphrasal, anyway) was that he did not need to believe in God, because he knew that God existed. Somewhere, somehow, deep within myself, I, too, know that God exists...at least I cannot reconcile any understanding of my world if it did not, at some point, begin! What happens after I've breathed my last, I do not know... but I must believe that God did not create this life as a dress rehearsal.

Tonight, Oh Lord, from the depths of my soul, I invoke your love and your mercy. Carry Maddy safely to you, and bring comfort to her family and friends, who must endure this terrible, unexplainable loss...

Disconnect...

From time to time, I get to thinking about the power of language, and how different ways of speaking (whether out loud, or in your own head) about something can result in two people perceiving the same thing in diametrically opposite ways. Separately, but related, I'm often struck by the cavalier manner with which people use language. Language, speaking, actually causes and shapes real things in the real world.

Think about JFK promising that, within a decade, we would send a man to the moon, and return him safely to earth. Lofty, yes, but most importantly, much of the technology and materials needed to accomplish that vision did not exist when he spoke it. And we in fact did send man to the moon and return him safely to earth within that decade. That is the power of language to create...

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!!" ...'nuff said.

I got a letter the other day from someone I was close to many, many years ago, sparked, apparently, by my having made a connection request on LinkedIn. The details aren't important, but what's germane to this post is the language in the letter, and how it knocked me back on my heels. I read a fast, hard-hitting synopsis of the last twenty plus years (by the way, I'm paraphrasing a little here, since I don't remember the exact wording, and I threw the letter out)..."I'm Catholic, and I'm pro-life," and "I own firearms" and "I held the son of a friend of mine as he died after being hit with a terrorist IED," along with a lot of pain that's apparently been sitting just below the surface all this time. I got to thinking...

• Catholic and Pro-Life, own firearms, apparently have been to Iraq or Afghanistan or both. What does "Pro-Life" mean exactly? Pro-all life? Or just one specific kind?
• Doesn't owning firearms on some level make you pro-death? I mean, they're kind of a single-purpose device, they accomplish exactly the same end as suction or the morning after pill, only by different means. Mind you, I'm not anti-gun...not by any stretch of the imagination. But I'm also acutely aware that I can't (and don't) claim that I'm pro-life if I'm pro-gun!
• Is a yet-to-be-born life intrinsically more valuable than one that's gone on for 19 or 22 or 25 years? It's ok to kill and be killed in a war fought by a government, but it's murder if it happens in a war between rival gangs? What about a prisoner, convincted in a trial by a jury, whom science later proves was not guilty? (There's a good book called "Picking Cotton" which talks about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony in the context of a story of a man who was convicted of rape, and convicted again in a second trial, based on the eyewitness testimony of the victim, and ultimately, DNA evidence proved it wasn't him, but someone who looked very much like him. What if he had been executed?) Why, exactly is one form of killing wrong, and others are right? Seems to me, the dead are still dead, and as far as I know, that's still an irreversible condition.
• What about embryos? Those which are used become people...those unused are discarded...like garbage...not buried, not given a funeral. Is one life, the other not? Who gets to draw that distinction? The Bush administration drew one, albeit weird and twisted...these embryos were, in fact, life, and so could not be "destroyed" for stem cell research...yet they could be discarded like garbage if not implanted in a uterus and brought to term.
• Holding someone dying from injuries from an IED...is that qualitatively or otherwise different from holding someone dying from a gunshot wound on the street, or holding someone dying from cancer, or not being able to hold someone who died when the airplane they were on vaporized in the World Trade Center? Is one experience morally superior to the other? Does one give you some bona fides to speak morally that the others do not?
• In case the pro-choice nuts take solace in what I wrote about what it means to be pro-life, just what the hell does "pro-choice" mean? Yes, I understand the usual exceptions for rape and incest. Life of the mother presents some interesting dilemmas. BUT...the choice was exercised in the instant the decision was made to have unprotected sex. To pretend that there's yet another choice to be had about that decision after it's been made...is hypocrisy. And the idea that somehow or other it is about the woman's choice about what to do with her body completely ignores the fact that there were two involved in creating that life that grows within her...what to do about what two created is not solely the choice of one, is it?? Again, I don't state this like it was handed down on stone tablets...I could be (and maybe am) wrong, from one or more points of view...

Apparently, the letter-writer has also read things I've posted online, like this blog, and made a random comment about, essentially, defending my right to spew my left-wing blather...and how my travels have been to "tourist destinations" while the writer's have been to other, presumably less-pleasurable, destinations. I've traveled extensively in my work, and the effect that has had (and you can get some of this from previous posts I've made here) is that I've realized that the world is way smaller than one might believe, especially if you have remained coccooned within a couple hundred miles of where you were born your entire life. And in an odd way, the more of the world you see, the more you realize what a lunatic fringe radical Islamism is...it would sort of be like judging that the United States is nothing but a bunch of white supremacists because your only exposure to the people of the US is from something you saw about some Aryan group in Idaho. Here again...language can be used in such a cavalier fashion...with such powerful results, positive or negative!

I ...we all... owe an unpayable debt of gratitude to those who've made the choice...the commitment...the sacrifice to join the nation's armed forces, and who are then obligated to go where they are ordered to go, and do what they are ordered to do. But please...don't presume moral superiority over me because you've chosen to go, while I did not, and don't put your choice in my face, because it was your choice...nobody forced that decision on you, nobody made the choice on your behalf.

The decision to go to Iraq and not to pursue bin Laden was a political decision, and I don't accept that had we not gone to Iraq, somehow my freedoms would have been challenged. Nor, frankly, do I accept that my freedoms were in peril when the towers fell. In fact, my government has done more to restrict my freedom since 9/11 than Al Quaeda did. In a perverse way, my government has become Al Quaeda's instrument to undermine the American way of life, and the freedoms we...to my letter writer's point, perhaps...take for granted.

So thank you for your service to our country...sincerely...but our children dying in Iraq is not making me more free or even preserving the freedoms I already had, and that, in my humble opinion, is a far greater crime... Ending the scourge of Nazism and Hitler in WWII, especially because Hitler got so close to achieving his goals...that was a question of preserving our freedoms. Going to war with Japan because they bombed Pearl Harbor...that was a question of preserving our freedoms. Going into Afghanistan to crush Al Quaeda and find bin Laden...that would be about preserving my freedoms...Iraq was a disastrous decision, and mind you, not one I pin on our military, anymore than I blame our military for the fiasco in Vietnam.

One last point about this...the recent stream of revelations about how we tortured people in our custody has made the world considerably less safe for me as an American, and considerably less safe for my children...as Americans, perhaps as future soldiers, sailors, or marines... The game that is ongoing around whether or not it was torture, whether or not what we do can be called torture, even if it resembles in every way the same activities conducted by other governments which we have unequivocally labeled as torture...is really a vile, dangerous game, and is completely about shaping perception with language...attempting, in a very real and concrete way, to change reactions and behavior by changing the speaking about it...

But back to the main reason I began this post...it blows my mind that two people can share an experience (as in the ongoing torture conversation), and yet have completely unrelated perceptions of that experience...or worse still, believe that two separate things took place. It is all about how we choose to talk about it, and how we shape our perceptions, our memories, and our judgments, based on the language we use to describe it.

As for my letter-writer...I can only profess my contrition for unwittingly causing pain, the more because my experience of those events could not possibly have been more different than described...that they were is perplexing...and makes me wonder how I could have "spoken" differently...and why our separate language about the shared experiences could be so different...

Random Thoughts...

I guess I'm not really much of a blogger...just realized I haven't blogged in about three months...

One of my intellectual heroes, B.F. Skinner, used to say that if you wanted to become a good writer, you should write every day. He believed that writing was like any other behavior...the more you practice it, the more skilled you become, and that it is self-reinforcing.

The "stimulus" bill has passed, and the president will sign it tomorrow. Not a single Republican vote from the house, and just 3 in the Senate. I get really irritated seeing key Republicans (John Boehner, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, as my favorite examples), men who led us down the path of ruin over the last 8 years, stand in the well of the Senate and bloviate about the bill, how it's just another Democratic spending bill that will put us in debt. Hello, McFly? Just what the hell do you think a stimulus is? I particularly enjoyed Congresswoman Candice Miller (R-MI) standing in front of the cameras to declare that this bill was full of pork, like high-speed rail from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and that Michigan was being railroaded with this bill. OK, lady, first of all, if you can't do word play as well as Jesse Jackson or Johnny Cochran, then don't try, because you sound stupid. Secondly, I'll grant you that there are probably more useful and justifiable places to put high-speed rail than between LA and Vegas. BUT...think about the number of jobs that will be created to build it...and jobs are important, especially when we're losing 500,000 of them a month in this country...

I think people under-appreciate the economic peril we are in. And I think that the failure to grasp how close we are to the precipice is a failure of intellect or honesty or both. If you're much over the age of 30, and haven't suffered a major head trauma sometime in your life that's caused you to forget the past, you don't need to be a Harvard-educated economist to know that there's never been an economic condition like this in your lifetime. And you also don't need to be exceedingly bright to realize that if we've slipped further and further in the last eight years, then whatever we were doing during that time must not have been working very well. And that if you try something over and over and it doesn't work, then you stop trying the same thing, and try something different!

I think what Obama's done is the right thing, and even yet, it could fail. It COULD fail...but certainly, doing nothing, or continuing to do the things which got us into this mess WILL fail...

There are times when I wish I could just retire...walk away, and spend the rest of my days reading, relaxing, and cooking in my own restaurant...and then I reflect on just how unrealistic that dream is...maybe some day I'll hit the lottery...