Okay. It’s about me.
7 January 2019 Leave a comment
I don’t typically write about myself. Actually I don’t even think of myself that much, except perhaps to coach myself about what I eat, how much exercise I am or should be getting, or when I have to start moving in order to be on time. Yes, self-discipline is a conscious effort. That sort of thinking however is attuned to the idea that this life is what we have. I believe there is more to be gotten from good quality life even if it means there is less of it. Anyway, living longer won’t get me into any post-mortal resident’s housing any more easily.
The payoff for quality of life is like an annual salary. Let’s say I’m earning at a rate of 50,000 smiley faces a year, and I live my last twenty years at this rate, right up to the end. I die a smiley millionaire, and while the faces surrounding my last hours may not be smiley faces, they are at least there. Now let’s say I’m living out my last years in a life conserving way, not exerting myself, not remaining active, not engaging in new and interesting adventures – basically, not taking risks. Sensible, perhaps, but a sacrifice of quality for quantity of life, this plan only pays about 40,000 smiley faces for the first year. Because the return to the world from such a life is weak, that rate decreases by about 5% in smiley faces each subsequent year. When I do the math, I see I’ll be able to live ten years longer enjoying what I can of an ever decreasing rate of smiley faces. That decrease will allow only a poverty rate for the last ten years of so, leaving me with under 700,000 smiley faces for enduring my extra, impoverished years. I will have out worn or out lived some of the faces that would have been with me at the end.
So when I think about myself, I think about things like this. I spend little time in such contemplation. I just get on with trying to live my life out at the highest quality I can achieve, and set about working to do that. But once in a while, my attempts to impose the sort of order that is the goal of self-discipline is knocked out by the relentless, entropic forces of the cosmic chaos. I contracted a case of what was probably gastroenteritis, something I had not suffered for about fifteen years. The rug came well and truly out from under my quality of life, two days before Christmas while out of state visiting my angelic wife’s family. I’ll spare you the details which did nothing to ameliorate my quality of life level – au contraire. By the end of the week, I was pretty much well again. I had only to endure a very busy day of air travel, which I consider a violation of human rights under almost any circumstances. (I would as soon prepare for and accept a colonoscopy as fly within a week of Christmas or Thanksgiving.) I could then however look forward to the New Year’s week with my wife working from home and part time. This would certainly be an increase in life quality.
Then, on an achingly cold New Year’s Day, as we were assembling a fairly easy jig-saw puzzle, I found my nose running, my eyes straining and my energy flagging. I was ushering in an upper respiratory infection as severe as any I can recall. I work in close contact with elementary students, and sometimes bring home their little colds, but this one should have been stricken the rolls of viral variants. So much for divine oversight. Now, seven days in, I am waiting for at least a decent night’s sleep, if not a surcease of post ocular pain, congestion, sneezing and coughing.
In the last two weeks that include two holidays and air travel, I had what amounts to four good quality days. I don’t count the air travel day. So, yes, I am writing about myself today, because I’m hurting and miserable and am indulging in a very low life-quality inactivity, feeling sorry for myself. And I am steeped in indignation that all life on the planet, which I regard as sacred, has ascended from organisms much like the miserable viruses that have had their way with me these last two week, and which are dancing around my head even now in sarcastic glee.
And don’t pity me. It won’t help.
A Tribute to Dr. King
22 January 2019 Leave a comment
I have just been listening to a couple of African American guests on a talk show. Both, as far as I could tell were perhaps in their 30’s and roughly comparably educated.
The first identified many ways that our U.S. society has been structured to maintain an inequitable and unjust system that uses race as a lever for applying power. He suggested that we must change the culture, and suggested some broad ways this might be done. Our culture – a complex cultural milieu, I would say, as there is no uniform cultural state for all the people – is the ultimate driver of any systemic or institutional change. Changing culture, under the best of circumstances, is a challenge.
The second speaker spoke about the inequities, largely in access to realizing aspirations, and generally economically expressed. Her general message seemed to be that things were worse now than they had been in her past – presumably the 90’s, and that it felt very defeating. Whether she got to what should be done to change things, to stop and perhaps reverse the decline, I don’t know. I was frankly unimpressed by what sounded like a complaint against not having gotten the fortune she deserved from life. This was a seemingly healthy, educated young woman who had recently had a book published, but the closest she came to speaking out for those very oppressed by conditions was her use of the first person plural pronouns.
When I was teaching, roughly half of my students were African American, many from low income or homeless/highly mobile situations. I sought readings by writers whose backgrounds were not unlike my students. I once asked if, in their experience, the students thought things were getting better, worse or staying the same for people of color. I didn’t ask this question again, however. Most of the students said nothing, but a couple took angry exception to having such a conversation.
I didn’t pursuing the topic. It was moving farther from our academic goals, but I wonder now about the reticence. Was I out of bounds for opening this discussion? I enjoy (albeit ashamedly) white male privilege. There are many accidents of birth that burden us with guilt. Or was their reluctance from a sense of pointlessness, bitter resignation to society’s chains? Or was it something else? A fear that it could become an avouchment of the guilt of their “accident of birth?” Was it that, as a representative of the system, I held power, not to be relinquished, and therefore not of any benefit to the African American case, and possibly a harm. Yet I was really, perhaps selfishly seeking affirmation of my observations from outside the situation that things really were, or seemed to be in decline.
Open forums are of course necessary, complex and difficult. But recognizing that a problem exists certainly is a good first step. Better still is envisioning a goal – one that is rewarding, but realistically achievable, generally legitimate and challenging enough to engage thought and energy. Then the problem becomes more clearly definable as what is keeping us from that goal. After that, developing and carrying out a plan to resolve the problem and achieve the goal become the hard work of positive change.
These are ancient algorithms, and on this day after Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2019, it seems a blind miss not to point to the great leaders of our Civil Rights Movement were by whatever avenue informed on moving against the problems that kept people from that mountain top. It was an historic period of our history as well and a significant and powerful action. Where has it left us though?
Perhaps we should stop worrying about whether things are better or worse; they’re not there yet. Perhaps it’s not so important that life isn’t fair or that the tangibles of injustice spring from the ephemerals of culture. Perhaps having a plan isn’t enough if we haven’t defined and generally agreed to a clear destination. Dr. King moved the plan forward toward a destiny. Yet that plan lost steam when the destination became increasingly unclear, fragmented and divergent. We make our own destinies, but when those are unaligned, we’re on the way to destiny in a bumper car ride.
Right now, it seems like more than anything, we need to get our destiny, which is not just the destiny of Black people but of all people, back to a rewarding, achievable, legitimate, challenging and defined destination. If it holds all of these conditions, its attainment will be so empowering that it could spark the further march to solving some of the even more daunting problems, such as saving the planet. The hardest part will be effectively redefining and agreeing upon our destiny, our mountain top. This will probably require another charismatic leader. When has this not been the case?
jcritterson@gmail.com
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Filed under Critical thinking, Racial Issues, Social Commentary Tagged with MLK