In Vietnam, if you don't work, you don't eat.

Vietnam: Some Women We Met

Everywhere my daughter Margaret and I went in Vietnam this January, we met lively, friendly, fearless women. Given the Vietnamese reverence for family, strong women are probably not a new thing for them. But these women were powerful personalities far outside the family sphere. Or maybe, through sheer force of character, they become the mother or big sister wherever they are.

The first such woman we met didn’t even speak to us. I had contracted the norovirus on our long trip over. I was kneeling by the toilet in our hotel when the New Year’s fireworks began. Days after the worst was over, I still felt shaky and faint. We couldn’t decide whether I should go to a hospital. Margaret thought we could use a massage first.

I’m not even five feet tall, but my masseuse made me feel like a giant. Margaret suggested a Thai massage, which she said meant “they do yoga to you.” The hostess told us to say “It hurts” if the massage was too rough. I did say that a few times. My masseuse ignored me. She kept pulling, pushing, and twisting me as she thought best. After an hour of this, my dizziness was gone, and it never came back. That tiny beast of a woman had fixed me.

After the crowds, excitement, and smog of Hanoi, we went east a few hours to the fresh air and fabulous landscapes of Bai Tu Long Bay. Huge limestone karsts thrust up from the water like surreal sculptures, vertical, pocked with caves, crowned with greenery. Our guide to these wonders was a young woman named Windy. She told us her name in Vietnamese meant Number Four, so she gave herself a name she preferred.

Windy had been orphaned at age 12. She worked wherever she could, learning English by talking with tourists. She did not tell us how she lost one eye. She was neither pretty, graceful, nor ingratiating. She was just outspoken and hilarious. Her narration was full of jokes, many seemingly improvised on the spot. She treated all of her fellow crew members like younger brothers, and had several play fights with them from which she emerged grinning with victory. Among all the crews on all the boats in that popular bay, she is the only female. Windy: long may you wave.

In Hue, Margaret took a cooking class from Yong, husband of Lisa, another magnificent woman. They were among the kindest, most thoughtful people I’ve ever met. Lisa took us shopping with her after dinner, along a sidewalk market where everybody seemed to know and like her, and then to her local Buddhist temple where we could meditate for a while with the monks.

Lisa and Yong knew that visiting the war-ruined Demilitarized Zone would be a difficult emotional experience for us, so they decided to take a day off work to keep us company. It was a windy, rainy day when we went. Crossing the bridge dividing the North from the South, Lisa kept her arm around my waist. In the Vinh Moc tunnels where 600 villagers lived for six years 100 feet underground, she stayed close, along with Margaret, to keep me from slipping on the steep, mossy steps. We only spent two days with the couple, but their warmth made us feel like close friends.

I keep thinking of some people I never met or spoke with – the ones up to their knees in the rice paddies. They might find some comfort in the peaceful green landscapes around them. It’s likely, though, that the comfort doesn’t amount to much when your back aches, your feet hurt, the mosquitos swarm, in the broiling sun or driving rain. What chance do they have to escape such a life, in a country where most people’s education ends at age 11?

And I think of the people so old they couldn’t stand up, whom we saw sweep the sidewalks in front of some shops. In Vietnam, if you don’t work, you don’t eat. Their families must make sure they have some shelter, because you don’t see homeless people sleeping in doorways or on park benches. But in Vietnam, as in today’s United States, the government doesn’t do much for the oldest or poorest of its people.

In Vietnam, people are not free to demand change. In the US, we can still do that. The resilience of the Vietnamese people, after decades of horrendous bombing and poisoning by our country and others, should be an inspiration to us. All of humanity is our family, and the whole earth is our home. I hope the American people will begin to insist that our country act accordingly. The kind and hardworking women of the world, and the men and children they cherish, deserve better.

I Believe in Magic

I’m 76 years old. I’ve been homeless, crazy, sick, lost people I love, seen good things turn to shit. And I still believe in magic.

I believe in the magic of loving kindness. I have seen it, felt it. Tried to practice it. And I’ve been watching a long time, and it works. I’ve seen it work.

I felt it in the streets in the ‘60s and at protests and vigils and marches ever since. For every useless war, every awful court decision, people come out in the street to say no together: No, please, not again.

I’ve felt that magical fellowship in congregations of many faiths, at neighborhood barbeques, at music and art events, parks, and beaches. I even felt it once in the Manhattan terminal of the Staten Island ferry, when a woman’s parrot got loose and many teams of strangers instantly formed to get it back.

The meek are everywhere. We take comfort in one another’s presence. We get along peacefully. We’re all colors, genders, religions. We exist in every country.

Some big ape starts hooting and beating his chest, and all the other big apes start hooting and beating their chests. Usually it’s just noise, and boys marking their territory, but sometimes it gets serious and leads to war.

This has nothing to do with protecting mothers and children. It’s anger, insecurity, arrogance, and pride, all the worst parts of our nature, roused up, encouraged. Feeling things are going their way, the big apes can strut their supremacy. They have the power now; they think it’s done. But this is not over.

We are the people of peace, and we must win. Magic lives in our hearts. The secret is to practice it together, in solidarity, across every issue, and to never give up.

Time to Grow Up

Our species has had a wild and crazy adolescence. These days we’re facing the consequences of our irresponsible behavior. We can now see that our bad habits will kill us if we don’t quit. It’s time to grow up.

Can we stop eating too much meat, using too much fuel, buying too much stuff we don’t need? Can we stop using plastic? Can we stop making war?

Many of us believe that only the rich have the power to change anything. This sense of insignificance is a delusion. Every person is just as significant as every other. Each of us offers a unique perspective that adds to our common understanding of our world. Whenever we listen to a new viewpoint, our culture shifts a little. We grow. Barriers fall; we make new connections. And anyone who has managed to kick an addiction knows that it’s not easy to change, but it’s possible.

We have a tremendous amount of work ahead of us. There’s no guarantee we can make the necessary changes. Maybe the civilization we have built is too powerful and its inertia too great, our addictions too ingrained. Maybe people are too greedy and violent to change our ways.

But we are much more than our bad habits. Every human survives infancy because someone fed us and wiped our little bottoms; such ordinary kindness is the neglected background of our lives. Nearly all of us are capable of caring for others, creating beauty, inventing new ways of doing things. And for the first time in history, we have the tools to take full advantage of these assets for the sake of all humanity: the internet and Artificial Intelligence.

In recent years, our culture has focused on our differences. We needed to understand how the spectrum of race, gender, and wealth affects individual lives. We needed to hear more voices than those of rich, straight, white men. With the internet, finally, all of us can speak. AI can tell us what people have already figured out about how to fix things, if we ask it the right questions. We are barely beginning to understand the power of this new tool.

The next stage of evolution is looking at common ground – what we share, how we’re all alike – instead of only at our differences. We can feel this common ground in a movie theater or concert. Everyone in the audience is at one with all the rest, in a way. Our attention has a common focus. Changing our culture means changing what we pay attention to. It’s time to focus on human survival.

Our attention is our singular gift, our most valuable asset. We can choose what we look at, what we like, what we buy – in both senses of the word. This is our vote. This is the direction we’re taking the culture, whether or not we want to admit our personal responsibility for it.

Status, wealth, nationality, and religion are things we made up, stories we tell ourselves about who we are. It can be hard to admit that we’re really just a bunch of panicky primates trying to figure out how to run the planet before we ruin it.

Our world is changing quickly. We now have the tools we need to organize ourselves for survival. Whether we can manage this or not is an open question. Let’s not give up before we try.

War of the Worldviews

Let’s deal in oversimplifications for this argument. Imagine an extremist Christian man and an extremist Muslim man talking about their beliefs in a living room somewhere. Their discussion grows more and more heated, and, depending on the men’s temperaments, might even come to blows.

Meanwhile, their wives are in the kitchen, fixing tea and a snack. Are they discussing religion? Most likely not. They’re talking about men, maybe even about the challenges of living with true believers. The men in the living room are fussing. The women are laughing. The real difference in this (terribly stereotyped) scenario, I respectfully submit, is not between the Muslim couple and the Christian couple, but between the men and the women.

Any time you try to talk about culture you are forced to generalize. If you constantly qualify your projections by acknowledging the wide spectrum of behavior in any one culture, you can’t reach any conclusions at all besides the fact that people are strange, which holds true everywhere. When it comes to human behavior, there are more exceptions than rules.

In general, though, there are two cultures in conflict in the world today. One is dominant, but unstable. The guardians of this culture tend to be “alpha males,” that is, men with a need to be on top of their worlds, who are aggressive, self-centered, ambitious, and willing to resort to violence. This culture has encouraged certain kinds of material progress but results in constant struggle and increasing divides between haves and have-nots.

The other culture is submissive but stable. This culture is maintained and propagated mostly by women. It is other-centered, conciliatory, patient, and prevents or tamps down violence wherever possible. This culture keeps the human world going, for without it, the dominant culture would tear everything apart.

I’m going to call the dominant culture male, though it includes many biological females. I’ll call the complementary culture female, though it includes many biological males. There is no question about which culture is uppermost today. Anywhere you find hierarchy, whether in a capitalist, nominally communist, or oligarchic society, the male culture rules. Wherever you find egalitarianism, cooperation, and collaboration, the female culture is in charge.

Not every society in history has been ruled by alpha males. Sophisticated justice systems; decisions by councils of elders; inclusive mores that provide for and protect society’s outliers; peaceful agrarian societies: all of these indicate the primary influences of women’s culture.

On the other hand, violence; the heedless destruction of human and other natural resources; the oppression of the lower classes: all these are sure signs that the male culture is running the show.

Clearly women’s culture evolved around the need to protect children from men’s aggression. If some sector of society did not propagate the values of caregiving, altruism, and sharing, that society would not survive two generations.

In a world of many languages, where communication was difficult, male culture evolved to settle disputes through physical violence. It would be up to the males whether a tribe’s territory expanded or contracted. The more territory, the more access to game, water, and fuel, the better the tribe’s chances of survival. If you see the world as belonging to “us” or “them”, you want the biggest, baddest guys on your side.

Our world today hangs in the balance in more ways than one. Scientists tell us that our behavior over the next decade or so will determine whether global climate change continues at a pace likely to doom our (and most other) species, or whether it will moderate to a manageable level. Nuclear proliferation proceeds at a rate where unstable regimes and non-state actors have access to weapons that could render the planet uninhabitable except by cockroaches and rats. Water pollution and over-use is at the point of making entire countries vulnerable to death by disease or famine.

Whether our species survives these crises depends upon another balance: the balance between male and female culture. Male culture has ruled, nearly planet-wide, for centuries, cementing its hold though tyrannies and then through the spread of capitalism, which values and rewards selfishness, aggression, and greed. But the destruction that attends these values is catching up with us. More and more people realize that we could very well do ourselves in if we continue on our current path.

Meanwhile, female culture has begun to strengthen in ways unimaginable a century ago. Women’s liberation has barely begun, but its effects are threatening male dominance in every society. Some ancient techniques (violence against women and LGBTQ people, veiling, double standards on sexual experience) and some new ones (high heels, sexualization of younger and younger women, co-optation of women leaders) work against women’s rise, but the trend continues. Women have gotten the idea that they should participate fully in public life, and they are insisting on their right to do so. What has given this idea such strength and persistence?

I believe that deep in our collective unconscious, we know that women’s culture must assume dominance if humanity is to survive. We must stop hurting one another and start taking care of one another; we must stop wasting resources, and learn to conserve; we must clean up the messes we have made; we must stop rewarding greed, and place more value on sharing. Only women’s culture carries the tools and techniques to bring about these changes.

This necessary revolution, which seems so radical, would actually require only a shift in the balance of cultures. We just have to listen more closely to what Jung called the anima, the feminine side of our consciousness. The center in us that corresponds to female culture – the center of nurturing, caring, sustaining values and behaviors – must gain our respect, as it is the key to our species’ survival.

The movement toward women’s liberation arises from the deepest place in ourselves: the part that wants to live, and wants our children to live. Right now, many of the stories we tell ourselves are generated from our fear that survival is not possible. Even though every one of us contains the seeds of a new world, we despair of the possibility that they will grow and thrive.

When we choose our leaders, we should ask ourselves which culture they embody. We need more representatives of female culture to set public policy, whatever their gender. We need more women in positions of power, not because women are that different from men, but because they have been the custodians of the set of values around which our species must reform its behavior.

Those women laughing in the kitchen do not need to come into the living room and argue with the men. No: it’s the men who need to come into the kitchen, drink the tea, eat the cookies, and learn to laugh with the women.

Quality of Life

We’ve been told it’s the things we have that make up our quality of life. That’s only part of the truth. We must have enough to eat and drink, and some place to get out of the weather. If we’re going to eat our food cooked, we need things to cook it in. Stuff does pile up around us; we’re messy, curious, greedy beasts like magpies or packrats, but we don’t have to make a virtue out of it.

Some things do make lives better, though they’re not usually the things advertisers are trying to sell us. Plumbing, for example, is a really good idea. Fashion is not only fun, it keeps clothing on everybody. The rich change clothes every season and their leavings filter out to everyone else.

Whatever we have, we can do without or make new, except for people. Only the people we’re close to are irreplaceable, our family and friends. We can lose a neighbor sometimes and go on all right, but it is devastating to lose a whole neighborhood.

Real quality of life depends on how we feel. If we’re healthy, and the people we love are healthy, and our household is peaceful, that’s worth any amount of money and any pile of stuff. If we’re suffering in mind or body, few things can comfort us.

Beautiful things soothe, please, and excite us, in the moments when we truly notice them. Art can improve our lives if we pay attention to it. Being in natural surroundings, where beauty continually renews and reinvents itself, comforts and sustains us. Many broken hearts have begun to heal in the woods and on rivers.

Community is precious. Fellowship is precious. That’s why a lot of people go to religious services. We get to feel kinship with the people around us. Community, fellowship, friendliness, peace: these provide real quality of life.

Networks of people are not material things. They are emotional and intellectual connections of shared experience. These invisible things, beyond what we can hold or measure, keep us alive.

The rest is landfill.

After Trump

When America defeated Trump, the whole world danced in the streets. We have faced fresh horror every day for four nightmarish years. All we got from the leader of the free world was lies, contempt, indifference to suffering, incitement to violence, and a quick descent into fascism. That’s almost over. Even though the plague Trump ignored rages more fiercely than ever, Americans deserve to celebrate for bringing him down.

So now what? Two more months of Trump doing as much harm as he can. Local stop-gap measures until national leadership can bring the virus to heel. Coming up on January 5^th, there will be a crucial run-off election for two Georgia Senate seats. If Democrats lose even one of those seats, Senate leader Mitch McConnell will continue to block any help for increasingly desperate Americans and small businesses. McConnell could stop Biden from accomplishing much of anything at all.

But what has already changed is the mood. Trump made people despair. Now we feel like humanity might yet manage to survive. We know, however, that can only happen if we change the way we live, fast. Masks, distancing, and temporary shut-downs are part of our new way of life, maybe for a couple more years. The more basic change involves American consumerism.

The same capitalist system that produced Trump as its avatar has convinced us that we need new stuff all the time. That stuff requires energy to make and distribute. Burning fossil fuels to get that energy is broiling the whole planet on our watch. No alternate energy system can keep up with us if we don’t stop consuming at our present rate.

The current global economy assumes infinite growth, which is not health; it is cancer. Greed isn’t going anywhere. But basing our whole civilization on greed is killing us. We need to turn toward sharing instead of accumulating, toward healing instead of destroying, toward compassion instead of selfishness, toward making do with what we have instead of making more.

Such a turn depends on a change in our culture that no government can bring about by itself. Culture is formed by a billion choices made by individuals: what we watch, what we say, and what we buy. Already social media make clear that our attention – which can focus on only one thing at a time – is our most valuable asset. Let’s use this time of new hope to focus on things that nourish and heal us. Let’s make kindness fashionable.

Change isn’t up to Biden. It’s up to us.

An old friend

A friend of mine in her 80s has always been active in her community. She raised her own two kids and several others by herself in spite of never having any money to speak of. She’s a wonderful artist, an inspiring teacher, an ardent and articulate lefty, a doting grandmother. But her only surviving child and her grandchildren live far away.

Ten years ago, she was taking African dance classes and swimming across Walden Pond. Today, she can’t stand up straight. She isn’t sick but she doesn’t feel so good either. She still takes care of her old house and rents the extra rooms, so she’s eking out a living. But it’s getting hard for her to do simple things like grocery shopping.

When I spoke with her the other day, she was excited and happy. A purely accidental meeting led to a connection with local volunteers who are, she says simply, “helping each other.” This informal group started online in mid-March, when this country first began to take the pandemic seriously. Now they’re filling a few of the many needs that are not being met by either charitable organizations or government. For one thing, they’re helping her bring in the groceries.

The internet is an amazing tool. Maybe it’s the brain of our species, forming just in time. This network connects billions of us in ways never possible before. But a network of actual in-person humans is still the best thing of all.

My friend has been helping others throughout her long life. Sometimes it’s hard for such people to accept help when they need it. My friend, though, is a philosopher. She knows that kindness is its own reward. The folks who are helping her now are fortunate to do it. They are experiencing the warmth of real community.

May such kindness sustain us through these dark days: both giving, and receiving.

Live like it matters

Raise your hands in the air like you just don't care

Many of us know more about the rich and famous than we do about the people around us. We gossip about celebrities as though we were residents of the same small town. The trouble with celebrity culture is, we pay attention to this set of famous people, but they pay no attention to us. This can make us feel invisible. We come to feel like their lives matter a great deal, and ours don’t.

Some celebrities are talented, no doubt. But plenty of talented people live ordinary lives all around us, playing in local bands, painting in their basements, writing for little magazines. In these days of quarantine, most of this creativity remains invisible, but it continues. The main difference between our local artists and their famous colleagues is just fame.

If we list the people who make a difference in our daily lives, we won’t include many famous people. Trump has made a sad and frightening difference in all our lives, so he’d be on the list. So would our governors and mayors. But the people who really make this national nightmare bearable are our families, friends, and co-workers.

Other people who affect our daily lives aren’t even people we know. The grocery cashier who smiles warmly behind her plastic shield; the real human being we reach after twenty minutes on the phone with robots; the jerk who runs past us without a mask, coughing; people like these can make a tremendous difference in how we feel. If someone is kind to us, we will tend to be decent to the next person we meet. If someone is rude, we might very well take our anger out on whoever is unfortunate enough to cross our path next. In this way, a person’s smallest act can have consequences they will never be aware of.

This is how we make the world: one act at a time. If we drop our candy wrapper in the street, the world gets a little dirtier. If we teach a child to use waste barrels, the world gets a little cleaner. These acts might seem insignificant. But they add up; they matter.

American culture encourages greed, selfishness, arrogance, rudeness, and general lack of shame. Our current chief executive shows the result. Celebrity culture rewards the flashiest, not the best. The benefits of virtue are personal, like having good friends and a happy family. The people who treat others with kindness and respect often have no fame or fortune to make us notice them. Without their quiet work, though, civilization of any kind would be impossible.

It hurts not to be able to hug the people we love

So if you feel insignificant, you are wrong. What you say and do affects everyone around you, whether you know them or not, and what they say and do affects you, whether or not you’re aware of it. You are part of the fabric of this world as long as you live. You make it stronger and more beautiful, or weaker and meaner. That is your choice. Choose wisely. It matters.

Put Women in Charge

We’re in an early stage of civilization, if we survive it. We’re going through a dramatic adolescence, as a species learning how to organize itself. We’re like bees before hives, or ants before hills. We’re hormonal, lust-driven, reckless, grabbing what we want without regard for consequences, taking chances with our lives as though we were immortal, invulnerable. These are our crazy teenage years. Clearly this is no way to run a planet.

We’ve been ruled by testosterone – that surge and scourge of teenage boys, our culture’s ideal essence, source of so much activity and trouble. Male aggression has been our operating force. It’s a great force – it gets things done – but it needs to be balanced. Estrogen provides the balance.

Without female nurturing, there’s too much aggression and the fear and hatred it can engender for society to function. We fall apart from our unrestrained aggression. Caring is the side of our humanity that has been suppressed, discouraged, discounted, disrespected. We have mocked loving as weakness. So we become, as a society, sicker, more poisoned by the imbalance in our natures. Women are the cure, or part of the cure, for what ails us – not the gender so much as the repository of ideas and values we store under the rubric “woman.”

So just as the voices of young and old, white and black, all genders, all classes, are required in order for our species to understand our situation, so the presence of women in our politics is a sign of improving health. Balance, which is peace, which is harmony, health, and wellbeing, must be restored, or maybe, as a new era dawns, achieved.

It has always seemed to me that women are going to have to lead the way toward real revolution. Not the violent kind, which is just more of the same damn thing, but true revolution – big change in the right direction.

I don’t think women are naturally better than men. It’s just that for centuries, women have been the custodians of the values our culture now desperately needs. It is mostly women who take care of children, the sick, and the elderly. It is mostly women who teach. It is mostly women who clean up men’s messes. Not being allowed to speak, we have been forced to learn how to listen. Not having access to power, we have learned what it feels like to be powerless. Women have learned to have compassion the hard way. Now we need to show the world how it’s done.

There’s a flip side to compassion, though. If we really want to alleviate suffering, we have to find ways to stop people from needlessly and cruelly making others suffer. When the struggle is nonviolent, and we’d better hope it is, humor is one of the best weapons we have against the oppressors. Let’s be funny when we can, and make it sting.

The Bible says the last shall be first. That sounds like women to me, especially poor women, and most especially women of color. Just because it’s in the Bible, doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Why women need abortions

Let me start by pissing everybody off. I think both sides of this debate have important things to say. If women have no access to abortion, they have no freedom to determine the course of their lives. But when the anti-choice people tell us the fetus should be respected as a human in progress, we should listen. Even if we must take a life, we should recognize that it is sacred, and grieve the necessity of its loss.

Being a mother is a heavy responsibility. The pregnancy is the least of it, though being pregnant is uncomfortable, inconvenient, and challenging to your physical and mental health. By the time a baby is born, you are tied to the child forever on an emotional level, whether or not you keep it to raise. You brought a new person into this difficult and dangerous world, and the fate of this tiny being in large part depends on you.

If a woman is not ready to take care of a child, either financially or emotionally, forcing her to bear one is a cruel and unusual punishment.

In America, it’s a struggle for families to stay together. Many jobs pay barely enough to support one person, never mind two or three, and lack of money can ruin even relationships that began in love and tenderness. There is not much corporate or governmental support for pregnancy and child-rearing, and little access to help of any kind if financial disaster strikes. When a couple breaks up, most often it’s the man who leaves and the woman who is left with the child.

Even mothers with money have a hard time. The focus of news and gossip has been the fathers and potential fathers as they compete for money and power. The needs of mothers have not been foremost, never mind the needs of children.

But women and children without money, without men? That’s a disaster. Much of the misery in pre-pandemic America came from trying to raise families without enough money. If the father is not able to make enough money to help support the child, the man’s hurt pride is often enough to make him take off. But even if the men stick around, it’s hard.

And it is to her children that a mother owes her first allegiance. Once you give birth to them, you are theirs for life, no matter what happens. You and the father, whatever your relationship – you were volunteers. Your children came into your hands completely at your mercy, through no fault of their own.

Because raising a child is such an enormous, costly, exhausting responsibility, people should be willing and ready to do it – at least as ready as you can be for this stranger who will remake your life. If a woman is not ready to take care of a child, either financially or emotionally, forcing her to bear one is a cruel and unusual punishment. Of course she most likely will love the child, but that is hardly the point.

To bear a child you can’t feed, can’t keep safe, whom you can’t be there for – that is a terrible kind of pain. Society has no right to make you bear it. In either sense.

Abortion is far from the worst thing we have to worry about, this year or any year. Actual, born, no-argument-human beings are getting killed every day, including infants. Yet somehow, the anti-abortion people don’t view war or domestic violence as a larger problem. They see abortion as the murder of innocents. Does a fetus lose its innocence once it is born?

So let’s try to retain some perspective on abortion. The alternative is for a woman to continue a pregnancy she does not want and bear a child for whom she is not ready. That child will be a burden on her life and her heart, no matter if she keeps it or gives it away. That child will begin life with a big count against it. And if society forces a woman to give birth no matter what the circumstances, will society then help her deal with the consequences? Let’s not kid ourselves, if you’ll forgive the pun. That woman and her child will be on their own.

Poem for Cockroaches

It is quiet in dark places.
Through a crack comes the smell of food.
Without volition, the cockroach moves
with a swiftness that’s been honed for ages.
Sometimes one of the brotherhood
is caught by sudden light, halfway back home.
Ancestral memory of man
awakens. The cockroach, handless,
knows somewhat of hands.
There is a laden silence.
A wasp, in such a situation, panics,
blunders into walls, at last attacks.
A fly would be long gone.
But calm as one
who’s been in tight spots before,
the cockroach waits, being nothing but aware.
When the shoe falls, the roach is no longer there.
Three things have sustained the roach through every era:
a fondness for copulation;
a taste for garbage;
and a stillness that unnerves predation
by saying: Look: this too is Buddha
This too
This too is Buddha.

Temptation Song

You offer me your diamonds and your rubies
You tell me I’m your darling, I’m your joy
You offer me your precious stolen moments
You think I think my life is just a toy

You offer me an office and stock options
You dress me in Armani and Laurén
You let me drive the newest car sensation
But baby, please just be my friend

There used to be a moment when I wanted
All the things you say I have to have
There used to be a time, but now it’s over
I tell you, honey, it’s too late for that

Give me some heart-to-heart action
Give me some relief
Give me a little satisfaction
Let me live in peace

Don’t elect me president or put me on TV
Spare me all the interviews and things to get for free
Dust your victim’s clothing off and give him back his hat
Don’t you dare apologize, it’s way too late for that

Just give me some heart action
Show me a little pink
If you can’t pour out your feelings, honey,
Pour me another drink

Grateful to Everybody

Civilization continues, due to the determination and courage of millions of ordinary workers. People in the background of our lives have leapt into the foreground. Suddenly we have new heroes, and they are everywhere.

Who knew how much was precious in our daily lives? Casual greetings, chats with cashiers, gossip at work, drinks with friends afterwards. Losing these things even for a few weeks or months turns out to be more painful than we could have guessed.

We used to take these face to face encounters for granted. We did not consider it rude to be on our phones with others even while a friend or family member was sitting right there. I wonder if we will still do this when we come out of quarantine. Or will we start to pay more attention to the people we’re actually with?

Rich and middle class people used to take their health care for granted. So long as it was mainly poor people who could not get help when they needed it, most of the non-poor didn’t care very much. Now we are all anxiously watching the overflow at hospitals, the lack of life-saving equipment. It turns out our health depends on other people’s health. Who knew? Will we come through this feeling like everyone has a right to care?

It used to be that nearly half the people in the US had trouble paying their rent or mortgage every month. Now many more will be falling behind. For decades, both federal and state governments have cut housing subsidies and failed to keep market housing affordable. Will we come through this feeling like everyone has a right to shelter?

Children have hated traditional schooling, having to sit in chairs and be quiet all day. Now they’re missing it. So are their parents and their teachers. When this is over, will joy return to the classroom? Will our gratitude lead to better teacher salaries, more curricular freedom, adequate materials?

Mainstream news coverage has hardly told us anything about all the goodies in the 880 page rescue scheme just passed by the federal government. All we know is most of us will get a check. Hooray for that. We’ll need another check next month. But who benefits from the biggest chunk of the $2 trillion giveaway? What good will come of rescuing the cruise ship industry? Did the top 1% really need another tax break?

We’re being reminded of how much we depend on others for food, electricity, everything we need. We remember why we have government in the first place. In the absence of sane federal leadership, governors and mayors are filling the gap. When the present crisis passes, we will compare and contrast.

In his book “Sirens of Titan,” Kurt Vonnegut invented a creature that could only say two things: “Here I am,” and “So glad you are.” When the present crisis passes, will we all be saying these things? Will we remember to be grateful for civilization?

Self-Medicating

Why are so many Americans self-medicating? What kind of pain makes people do drugs?

There’s a hole in people’s lives that no surgery can close, the hole where meaning ought to be. We see what a mess humanity has made of the world. If we thought our actions could help, our lives might mean something. Instead, we feel useless. Worse, we feel we are part of the problem whether we want to be or not.

Our civilization is built on violence and greed. It oppresses billions so that thousands can be unimaginably wealthy. America has benefitted more from this system than any other country. Any sensitive person will feel this, and suffer for it.

There used to be a drug designed specifically to ease moral suffering; it was called religion, and it worked quite well as long as people believed in it. Once we stop believing impossible things, however, that drug stops working, and the pain returns. There is no grand plan to justify things being the way they are. There is only humanity to blame, so we hate ourselves.

Since we have ceded moral leadership to religions, it’s hard for young people who don’t believe in any religion to find spiritual guidance. The current Pope’s been pretty good. Thich Nhat Hanh died, dammit. There are probably more religious leaders out there who rise above politics, but they don’t get much media attention. What young people need to know is that humanity urgently requires each one of them to take action.

Nobody can tell anyone else exactly what they should do. All our circumstances are different, and we each have unique histories, talents, and skills. But the work that must be done is clear enough. On the environment, social and economic justice, and peace, there are groups doing effective work, and far more tasks than there are people willing to do them.

The missing piece, the piece that will connect young people to the necessary work they can do, is hope that this work will make a difference. It is the hope that humanity can save itself, and be worth the saving.

Lacking hope, lacking meaning, lacking connection, people do drugs. Drugs make the pain bearable. But only hope for the future can make the pain go away.

“Blessed”

I’m starting to feel bugged by the word “blessed.” The way it’s used more and more seems to imply that people who are lucky to escape harm are “blessed”…which also implies that people who experienced that harm were cursed. That’s the flip side everybody ignores. It’s a backdoor way of blaming the victim. God must be punishing these people who suffer, and clearly God loves me better than them, so I must be a better person than they are.

Life is chaotic and dangerous, and more so all the time, thanks to the actions of humanity and not any supreme being. We can be grateful for our own well-being without claiming we earned it by being especially virtuous, or having been “blessed.” Those of us who are doing okay are mostly just lucky, to be born where and when we were, to the families we have, and with the gifts bestowed by our genes and upbringing.

This word “blessed” is especially beloved of broadcast news reporters, who feed the word to people who have just survived a fire or flood and are bewildered by trying to understand why they lived and their neighbors didn’t. I would like to see people just acknowledge their gratitude for their good luck and not have to tie it to morality or religion. Even at Christmas. Don’t take credit for any mercy you have been shown. Just love, and show mercy to others who have not had your good luck.

Here’s a suggestion: instead of bragging about being “blessed,” live so that you’re a blessing to other people.

Guru Blues

As I wander through this valley of disaster and ennui,
I keep looking for a teacher with a clue on how to be.
Sometimes a fellow seeker sends the message, “This is it!”
But I haven’t met a swami yet who wasn’t full of shit.
Some are into ice cream sundaes. Some are into Cadillacs.
Some are into all the groupies they can charm onto their backs.
Some can monologue for hours on their detailed talks with God,
Some can doodle on a zither with their eyes rolled up like cod.
They’re exotic and mysterious, and they know just how to please
the petitioner for glory who approaches on his knees.
But they rarely stop to listen, and they never pause to doubt,
and they can’t agree among themselves what life is all about.
They won’t sleep in someone’s hovel if the palace has a room.
They expect surroundings tidy, but they won’t pick up a broom.
So if I find a teacher with the word on how to be,
I will pour us both a whiskey and go sit upon his knee.
But until the day I find the way and all my wandering ends,
I’ll put my faith in kindness, and seek wisdom from my friends.

Almost Exactly the Same

People are all almost exactly the same. I say almost because, even though we are 99.9% alike, that one-tenth of one percent difference is very important to us. That’s how we tell one another apart. Since we’re social animals, we depend on knowing exactly who another person is, even though she is almost exactly the same as we are. So we make a big deal out of that one-tenth of one percent difference.

Race, gender, class: these things help us tell one from another, along with details like body shape and facial features. But the differences are tiny. If you’ve ever seen a montage of many diverse faces, you have seen what Human looks like. In the same way, if you read the literature of any language or time, you know what Human behaves like. We are fascinated by our tiny differences; we obsess about them. But they remain tiny.

If you doubt how much we are the same, remember what it is like to go to a movie in a theater. You laugh and gasp in the same places as everyone else there. You like the same characters and have no trouble identifying the bad guys. Also consider the fact that a good actor can play almost any role and make us believe it. How is that possible, unless we each contain in ourselves the whole range of human behavior?

There are other ways to tell how small our differences are. We think race, gender, and class are very important, and in some ways of course they are. Yet when you know someone’s race, gender, and class, you still know almost nothing about them that really matters. You don’t know if they’re kind, for example. You don’t know if they’re funny.

We will always be fascinated by the details of how each of us is unique and different from all the rest. We will always be interested in the soap opera of our secret, special, individual lives. But there come times when we have to look up from these details. We have to look at our civilization as a whole. We have to look not at personal behavior but at the behavior of our society.

When civilization has behaved so badly that we have begun to threaten our own survival, it’s time to think about what we can do differently.

Because each of us can be anybody. Each of us is capable, under the right circumstances, of every kind of human behavior. We contain in our own secret selves the complete spectrum of human behaviors. Which of the many possible behaviors we enact in our own lives is decided by our imagination of ourselves and of our circumstances.

Our imagination is tremendously powerful, though we often discount it, and even refuse to believe it affects anything. In our urban world where everything except the sky is a product of people’s imagination, maybe the power of imagination is so obvious that we take it for granted and so fail to see it. Yet imagination is the key to our future. How can we imagine ourselves saving the world?

Instead of thinking about how to change individuals, we should think about how to change culture so as to encourage the creation of healthy, sane, loving, humorous, careful human beings; how to change people’s environments so as to encourage healthy habits; how to create the people humanity needs to become.

How to make it easier to be creative, and not kill imagination first thing in school. How to make it easier to raise a family, to learn new things, to grow old. Movies, tv, video games: what do we need to teach, show, tell one another? What message are we broadcasting? What will it do to the people it reaches?

False optimism is not going to work. We can’t slap a happy face on things: life is too awful for too many. We can’t keep distracting ourselves from what we can see happening more and more clearly: the poisoning of the planet, the whirlwind we have reaped through our bad behavior. The longer we ignore the consequences of our greed, the harder they will be to make right.

If the species is going to survive, it’s time to get serious about it, and figure out how to save ourselves from this mess we have created. We have to look at exactly what our culture is: what we glorify, what we despise, whom we imitate, what values we adopt. This is crisis time. We need to pull an intervention on ourselves.

Anyone who has spent time with babies knows how smart we are and how much we can learn. Our bodies stop growing but our minds never stop. We can learn new ways of doing everything. That’s culture; we do it all the time. Every day we sing a new song.

Until recently, most of us have appeared to be frozen. We’re so used to watching life instead of living it, we’ve become passive. We have forgotten that everything around us has been formed from the action of human imagination upon the materials of the earth. We, ordinary humans, have invented it all. Our power is tremendous when we agree on something to do.

Some events in recent years indicate that we might be waking up to the crisis, and responding appropriately. Our most powerful moments have been singular and quite spontaneous. Look at how we’re self-distancing, in the complete absence of national leadership. The Arab Spring, undermined by the usual gangs of thugs though it was; the Occupy movement; the Women’s March; the appearance at U.S. airports of tens of thousands of people to support Muslims when Trump announced his travel ban; these are symptoms of a vital resilience, a resistance to the forces of death.

If we can ever convene the species and discuss the situation with everyone at the table, it is entirely possible that we can agree on our mission and our direction. We will understand one another. Because in spite of our splendidly elaborated cultures, our fascinating personal uniqueness, our endless variety of experience, we are all, finally, almost exactly the same.

Neighbors bringing food

We see feel-good stories at the end of our news broadcasts, right after they have scared the crap out of us. But the news has come home, good as well as bad.

We have neighbors and friends who are sick. When we leave our home, we walk large circles around other people, hoping we don’t get sick too. We use Zoom instead of hugging. We lay in supplies, trying not to be piggy about it.

And the friend down the street who has gotten the virus? We make soup and use our gloved hands to drop a container of it on her porch. We made enough to freeze, just in case.

Thank You

We are grateful for many people right now. Grocery store stockers, postal clerks, truck drivers, couriers, restaurant workers, farmers, doctors and nurses, police and fire people…It’s a long list. These are today’s heroes. They keep our civilization going.

To the people who maintain our internet, our electricity and heat, and our tap water: thank you! To news staffers, late night comics working without a live audience, techs at their stations, road repair crews, government contact persons: thank you so much!

And to all neighbors, friends, and family who are missing the presence of others like crazy, thank you too, for staying inside and dealing with the loneliness somehow. You are keeping us all as safe as possible. May you be well. This situation is temporary. I hope our gratitude is permanent.

Alice T4

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