Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Don Marquis and Stanley Kunitz

Today, folks, July 29, is the birthday of two of my favorite people, Don Marquis and Stanley Kunitz. I realize it's also the birthday of numberless others, including Alexis de Tocqueville, but for all his accomplishments Tocqueville occupies a smaller portion of my brain than do Marquis and Kunitz. That said, this birthday knowledge did not come springing into consciousness when I woke. It came thanks to the morning gift of Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac."

Having revealed that fact, I'll risk violating copyright law by including below the brief paragraphs descriptive of Don Marquis and Stanley Kunitz. Needless to say, they are no substitute for reading their work.

It's the birthday of newspaper columnist Don Marquis (books by this author), born in Walnut, Illinois (1878), who created the characters Archy the cockroach and Mehitabel the alley cat. Archy was a former free verse poet who "sees life from the underside now." He wasn't able to reach the shift key so everything he wrote was in lower case. And Mehitabel was an alley cat with questionable morals who insisted that she was Cleopatra in one of her former lives. Marquis was a champion of the underdog and not a fan of pretension. His columns were humorous, but had political undertones. His character Archy said once, "a louse i used to know told me that millionaires and bums tasted about alike to him." And, "what is all this mystery about the sphinx that has troubled so many illustrious men no doubt the very same thoughts she thinks are thought every day by some obscure hen." After using Archy and Mehitabel in columns for 10 years, Marquis made books out of their writing, beginning with archy and mehitabel (1927).

It's the birthday of poet Stanley Kunitz (books by this author), born in Worcester, Massachusetts (1905). His parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father committed suicide in a public park before Kunitz was born, and his mother, Yetta, erased all traces of Stanley's father from the house, and refused to speak about him. She opened up a dry-goods store and sewed clothes in the back room, working overtime to pay off the debts that her husband had left behind, even though legally she was not obligated to pay them. One thing his mother did not destroy were the books his father had left behind, books by Tolstoy and Dickens. One of Kunitz's favorite books was the dictionary. He said: "I used to sit in that green Morris chair and open the heavy dictionary on my lap, and find a new word every day. It was a big word, a word like eleemosynary or phantasmagoria - some word that, on the tongue, sounded great to me, and I would go out into the fields and I would shout those words, because it was so important that they sounded so great to me. And then eventually I began incorporating them into verses, into poems. But certainly my thought in the beginning was that there was so much joy playing with language that I couldn't consider living without it." His first job as a boy was riding his horse down the streets of Worcester and lighting the gas lamps at night. He became a reporter for the Worcester Telegram, went to Harvard, and stayed for his master's degree. He wanted to pursue his Ph.D., but the head of the English department at Harvard told him that Anglo-Saxon students would resent being taught by a Jew. So he moved to a big farm in Connecticut, and worked as a reporter and farmer. He sold fresh herbs to markets in Hartford. Kunitz was drafted into World War II, and when he came back, he was offered a teaching position at Bennington College. In 1949, the college tried to expel one of his students - Groucho Marx's daughter Miriam - right before her graduation because she had violated a curfew. Kunitz helped organize a protest of the decision, and the president of Bennington showed up at his house and told him to stop immediately. Kunitz took the plant that he was potting and threw it in the president's face, then quit. He published a second book, but it was barely noticed. He was so unknown that his third book, Selected Poems (1958), was rejected by eight publishers - three of them refused to even read it. When it was finally published, it won the Pulitzer Prize. When someone asked W.H. Auden why nobody knew about Stanley Kunitz, Auden said: "It's strange, but give him time. A hundred years or so. He's a patient man." It was more than 10 years before he published his next book, The Testing Tree (1971), and slowly but surely, people began to take notice. He was appointed the poet laureate when he was 95 years old. He died at the age of 100. He said: "It is out of the dailiness of life that one is driven into the deepest recesses of the self."

Gary Snyder's "Marin-An"

When he wrote "Marin-An," Gary Snyder was not far from where I now sit, similarly at peace in verdant surround. And yes, in the morning I too can hear what he heard, that soft continuous roar in the distance, "thousands and thousands of cars / driving men to work." The signal difference is that I don't roll a smoke.

 

sun breaks over the eucalyptus
grove below the wet pasture,
water’s about hot,
I sit in the open window
& roll a smoke.

distant dogs bark, a pair of
cawing crows; the twang
of a pygmy nuthatch high in a pine-
from behind the cypress windrow
the mare moves up, grazing.
a soft continuous roar
comes out of the far valley
of the six-lane highway-thousands
and thousands of cars
driving men to work.

 

"Marin-An" by Gary Snyder from No Nature: New and Selected Poems. © Pantheon, 1993

Barack Obama's Long Game

A friend sent me today the following article about President Obama's second term, and I want to pass it on to readers of Reckonings. I find it an admirable, thoughtful assessment and speculation. As we enter more fully the long season leading up to the 2016 presidential election, I find myself realizing how much I am going to miss Barack Obama's presidency, how grateful I've been for his leadership in many (not all) realms. With less than half of his second term to go, attention inevitably moves to wonder about his legacy, how coming generations will assess him.

As Todd Purdum writes of the last half-year, "Rallying his cabinet in January in the wake of the Democratic Party’s decisive defeat in last fall’s midterm elections, Obama himself maintained, 'Interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter.' This president has always been something of a clutch player, but his command of recent events—from his soaring eulogy for the victims of the Charleston church massacre, to his commutation of more sentences for non-violent criminal offenders than any president since Franklin Roosevelt—goes a good way toward proving the prescience of his words."

 

Barack Obama’s Long Game

A month of victories has transformed the president’s second term.

by Todd S. Purdum

July 16, 2015

POLITICO Magazine

Barack Obama is not a modest man, but when it comes to assessing his or any president’s place in the long American story, he has been heard to say, “We just try to get our paragraph right.” Yet the way a raft of recent events have broken sharply in his favor, Obama suddenly seems well on his way to writing a whole page—or at least a big, fat passage—in the history books.

From the Supreme Court decisions upholding his signature health care plan and the right of gay Americans to marry, to contested passage of fast track trade authority, the opening of normal diplomatic relations with Cuba and an international agreement to curtail Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Obama is on a policy and political roll that would have seem unimaginable to many in Washington only a few months ago.         

“Obama may be singular as a president, not only because of his striking background,” says Kenneth Adelman, who was Ronald Reagan’s arms control negotiator with the Soviets three decades ago, and who has his doubts about the Iran deal. “It may turn out that unlike virtually any other president, his second term is actually better than his first.”

Rallying his cabinet in January in the wake of the Democratic Party’s decisive defeat in last fall’s midterm elections, Obama himself maintained, “Interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter.” This president has always been something of a clutch player, but his command of recent events—from his soaring eulogy for the victims of the Charleston church massacre, to his commutation of more sentences for non-violent criminal offenders than any president since Franklin Roosevelt—goes a good way toward proving the prescience of his words.

For much of the last five years, it had seemed Obama’s peculiar misfortune that the biggest achievement of his time in office—the adoption of his health care plan—might also prove his biggest defeat, because of the bitter and unyielding political and legal backlash unleashed by its narrow passage on a strict partisan vote.

Simultaneously, Obama’s ability to take decisive unilateral action on foreign policy—often a source of succor and satisfaction to second-term presidents—seemed highly limited, if only because he remained saddled with the ugly aftermath of the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of the ISIL threat.

Not so long ago, much of the chattering class was reading the last rites over the Obama administration, and turning to the 2016 election as a test of whether anything would be left of the president’s legacy if a Republican succeeded him. That’s still an open question, of course. But the Court’s recent rulings and Obama’s own seemingly unplugged and swing-for-the-fences attitude on questions from race to criminal justice has given his presidency a sharply re-invigorated viability and relevance.

“It’s an unfinished chapter,” says presidential historian Richard Norton Smith, who is writing a new biography of Gerald Ford. “But he has already defied the second-term curse and the wisdom of just six months ago. ‘What can a president do if he doesn’t have either house of Congress?’ Well, guess what, he can reverse a 50, 60-year-old policy toward Cuba. But, more than that, he can still, even without the traditional televised Oval Office version of the bully pulpit, to a large degree set the terms of the national debate.”

The president’s very demeanor in his White House news conference on Thursday bespoke a renewed intensity and determination to make the most of the time he has left.  Much of the time, he fielded questions in a relaxed posture, leaning on the lectern with one elbow, but some of his answers were emphatic bordering on brusque. As the session wound down, he canvassed the East Room for more questions about the Iran agreement with a kind of “Hit-me-with-your-best-shot” bravado, as if to show how important he believes it to be. With a blithe air that belied the seriousness of the issue, he quoted that noted diplomat Ricky Ricardo to say that if Iran mined more uranium than it was supposed to, “They got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

“It is a measure of the times in which we live that we start the legacy discussion a year and a half before the end of a presidency,” says David Axelrod, Obama’s former longtime strategist. “But he’s had the most productive period he’s enjoyed since the first two years: Cuba, the climate agreement with China, action on immigration, fast track on trade, the SCOTUS decisions on health care and marriage and now this agreement on Iran. These are big, historically significant developments, in most cases the culmination of years of commitment on his part.”

Obama himself said he hoped Congress would debate the Iran agreement on the facts and the merits, but added, “We live in Washington and politics do intrude.” The sharp and instantaneous denunciation of the president’s comments by Republicans was a sure sign of the parallel universes that constitute American politics these days. Former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show that Obama was a “very, very naïve man,” who “cannot put the dots together,” while Glenn Beck’s daily email newsletter subject line was, “Obama continues to destroy the country.”

The Republicans are not the only obstacle that Obama faces. He won his fast track Asian trade authority with largely Republican support, and the Iran agreement has stirred significant Democratic skepticism, among even the party’s leaders in Congress. If the Greek financial crisis engulfs Europe and spreads to Wall Street, there is no telling what the American economy might look like when Obama leaves office in 18 months.

By definition, the success or failure of the Iran agreement will not be known until long after Obama has left office, and critics like Adelman worry that even if Iran cheats on its obligations, international sanctions will never be re-imposed, because violations will be so hard to prove and the global investment in Iran will be so entrenched that it cannot be unwound.

 

 Todd S. Purdum is senior writer at Politico and contributing editor for Vanity Fair, as well as author of An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

 

Wendell Berry, "A Spiritual Journey"

A Spiritual Journey
 
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.
 
~ Wendell Berry ~

Fierce with Reality: Living and Loving Well to the End

When I was immersed in study and internship toward a Ph.D. in clinical and developmental psychology, I had the great good fortune to have among my teachers Erik and Joan Erikson. Erik remains well known for his conceptualization of the human life cycle, embracing not just the formative years of childhood and adolescence, but the whole of our lives; as his Harvard students nicknamed his famous course, from womb to tomb. Joan was Erik's wife and collaborator, like her husband an artist before becoming, with Erik, a student of the life cycle. Their work was the cornerstone of my teaching, first at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, then at the California School of Professional Psychology in Berkeley and Alameda. The culmination of their collaboration is a small, exquisite book called The Life Cycle Completed (extended version, W.W. Norton, 1997).

In the essay below, Parker Palmer adapts Erik's and Joan's model of human development to offer his own wisdom on how to live the whole of our lives more fully. My age-mate at 76, Parker Palmer is widely known as founder of the Center for Courage & Renewal, author, speaker and activist who focuses on issues in education, community, leadership, spirituality and social change. Reading and reflecting on his books have enriched my life and my vocation, especially Let Your Life Speak, The Courage to Teach, and A Hidden Wholeness. He is currently a columnist for Krista Tippit's wonderful program, On Being.

I can't resist, at the end of this introduction, offering some words from an earlier essay of Parker Palmer:

 

"What I know for sure is this: We come from mystery and we return to mystery. I arrived here with no bad memories of wherever I’d come from, so I have no good reason to fear the place to which I’ll return. And I know this, too: Standing closer to the reality of death awakens my awe at the gift of life.

 

 

Fierce with Reality: Living and Loving Well to the End

 by Parker J. Palmer 

 

You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done...you are fierce with reality.

 —Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days

 

Florida Scott-Maxwell was 85 when she wrote those words. I first read them when I was half her age, but I knew she was speaking directly to me.

At age 43, I was succeeding and failing as a husband and a father on a daily basis, had done battle with the evils of racism as a community organizer while ignoring the cocoon of white privilege that protected me from them, was alternately laid low and energized by the rejections I received en route to becoming a writer, and had drowned and then surfaced from my first deep-sea dive into clinical depression. I was, in short, a reasonably normal person: a complex and conflicted soul who yearned to be whole.

I wanted a life of personal fulfillment that served others well — a life of love of self and others — and I knew that getting there would require me to be “fierce with reality.” But I devoutly wished for an easier path than the one Scott-Maxwell recommends! At age 43, I didn’t have the courage required to “truly possess all [I had] been and done.”

Today, at age 76, I know Scott-Maxwell got it right: there are no short-cuts to wholeness. The only way to become whole is to put our arms lovingly around everything we’ve shown ourselves to be: self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy. We must be able to say to ourselves and to the world at large, “I am all of the above.” If we can’t embrace the whole of who we are — embrace it with transformative love — we’ll imprison the creative energies hidden in our own shadows and flee from the world’s complex mix of shadow and light.

Of course, naming, claiming, and loving the whole of who we are is easier said than done: honest self-examination is a well-known source of human misery! Yet the alternative is more painful still. In Erik Erikson’s scheme of adult development, he argues that if we can’t accept all that we’ve been and done, we’ll age away from "integrity" and toward "despair.”

As I look around at my age-mates in late midlife and beyond, it’s not hard to witness despair and its sad consequences. Some consequences are personal, as people who try to deny their inner darkness carry resentment in their hearts and leave it in their wake. Some consequences are political, as people who fear whatever feels alien in themselves project their fear on “the alien other” — while shameless politicians cynically manipulate that fear to play the divide-and-conquer game.

But if we are willing to move through the pain of honest self-examination toward the grace of compassionate self-acceptance, the rewards are great. When we can say, “I am all of the above,” we become more at ease in our own skin, more at home on the face of this richly diverse earth, more accepting of others who are no more or less flawed than we are, and better able to live as life-givers to the end of our days.

How can we learn to embrace with love the whole of who we are — a task that need not and should not await our elder years? Of course there are tried-and-true aids such as meditation, journaling and therapy, all of which have been helpful to me. Here are three others that I’ve found equally helpful, sometimes even more:

1. Spend as much time as you can experiencing the natural world. Nature constantly reminds me that everything has a place, that nothing need be excluded. That “mess” on the forest floor — like the mess in my own life — has an amazing harmony and hidden wholeness to it.
2. Move toward, not away from, whatever you fear. I try to remember the advice I was given on an Outward Bound course when I froze with fear on a rock face in the middle of a one-hundred-foot rappel: “If you can’t get out of it, get into it!” If, for example, you fear diversity, get to know “the other’s” story face-to-face and watch your fear shrink as your empathy expands.
3. Reach out to the younger generation—not to advise them but to learn from them, gain energy from them, and support them on their way. That’s a life-enhancing act that Erik Erikson called “generativity,” an alternative to the “stagnation” of age that sooner or later leads to despair.

Wholeness is the goal, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. The sooner we understand this, the better. It’s a truth that can set us free to live well, to love well and, in the end, to die well.

I can't think of a sadder way to die than with the knowledge that I never showed up in this world as who I really am. I can’t think of a more graceful way to die than with the knowledge that, as best I knew how, I showed up here as my true self — able to engage the world in freedom and with love because I had become fierce with reality.

 

Oliver Sacks's 82nd birthday - Part Two: "My Own Life"

Three days ago I noted Oliver Sacks's 82nd birthday, but I didn't write that it was likely to be his last. This passionate and prolific author, neurologist and physician has terminal liver cancer. How one chooses to live with the knowledge that one's time on the planet is predictably short tends to focus one's mind;  that process is particularly vivid and clear for a mind as capacious as Dr. Sacks's. He wrote about his experience in the extraordinary essay reprinted below. See also Maria Popova's birthday tribute to Dr. Sacks.

 

My Own Life

by Oliver Sacks

New York Times, February 19, 2015


A MONTH ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. The radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye. But though ocular melanomas metastasize in perhaps 50 percent of cases, given the particulars of my own case, the likelihood was much smaller. I am among the unlucky ones.

I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”

“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”

I have been lucky enough to live past 80, and the 15 years allotted to me beyond Hume’s three score and five have been equally rich in work and love. In that time, I have published five books and completed an autobiography (rather longer than Hume’s few pages) to be published this spring; I have several other books nearly finished.

Hume continued, “I am ... a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions.”

Here I depart from Hume. While I have enjoyed loving relationships and friendships and have no real enmities, I cannot say (nor would anyone who knows me say) that I am a man of mild dispositions. On the contrary, I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.
And yet, one line from Hume’s essay strikes me as especially true: “It is difficult,” he wrote, “to be more detached from life than I am at present.”

Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.

On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.

This will involve audacity, clarity and plain speaking; trying to straighten my accounts with the world. But there will be time, too, for some fun (and even some silliness, as well).

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

 

 

 

Ten images of summer in Mill Valley

 Double-click to enlarge photos

 Photos by John R. Boettiger

 

Cactus bloom

 

Bridge

Summer colors
 

Watercourse

 

Live oak

 

Floral dance

 

Valleys, mountain, clouds

 

White bloom

 

Spirit of summer

 

 

  Family Colors

 

 

 

 

Practicing Truth and Reconciliation

Editor's note: As Fania Davis writes at the end of her brief reflections on truth and reconciliation commissions in South Africa, Canada and the U.S., "Healing is long, slow work. But if we start with authentic truth-telling and engage in an inclusive search for solutions, we can begin to transform relationships and move step-by-step down the path to reconciliation." Reading Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela introduced me to the practice of truth and reconciliation in South Africa, and the experience, however partial and flawed, struck a bell in my soul that has—quietly but persistently—never stopped ringing. Truth is complex, more manifold and elusive than I imagined earlier in my life. But I am more convinced than ever that reconciliation is the natural outcome of living truth.

 

Truth and Reconciliation at Work: How These Commissions Help Heal Wounds From Racial Injustice

Fania Davis 

Jul 10, 2015, from Yes! Magazine

On November 3, 1979, Ku Klux Klansmen and [homegrown] Nazis opened fire on a group of protesters in a black neighborhood in Greensboro, North Carolina. Local police stood by and watched. Five protesters died and at least 10 were wounded.

Two criminal trials resulted in acquittals by all-white juries. A civil trial held the police complicit in one killing. The community was deeply divided over the outcome, and lingering tension led a group of Greensboro citizens to form a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 2004. According to its mandate, the TRC’s aim was to look into the past “to provide the best possible foundation for moving into a future based on healing and hope.”

Although city authorities declined to participate, the commission held public hearings, reviewed historical documents, and interviewed hundreds of people. In 2006, the TRC issued a report calling for official apologies, public monuments, a community justice center, a police review board, and anti-racism training for police and other officials.

Some of these recommendations were or are being implemented. Despite the city government’s lack of participation, the Greensboro TRC opened dialogue and increased trust, according to residents. Some of those responsible for the violence apologized.

Truth and reconciliation processes hold special promise for addressing the U.S. epidemic of racial violence, exposing its deep historical roots, and working toward reconciliation. Truth-telling encounters between those who have caused harm and those who have been harmed can promote accountability, address the needs of everyone affected, and lay a foundation for reconciliation, justice, and transformed social structures.

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the best known of about 40 truth commissions formed between 1980 and 2010. The commission investigated human rights abuses from 1960 to 1994, heard victims’ and perpetrators’ stories, and considered amnesty petitions.

Like the outcome in Greensboro, the results of South Africa’s TRC are mixed. The expected reparations were not made, and apartheid’s legacy of extreme poverty remains intact. Nonetheless, South Africa’s truth and reconciliation process established a spirit of forgiveness that helped the country transcend hundreds of years of hatred and violence and liberated millions of Africans from the yoke of apartheid.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was created by the federal government in 2008 to investigate the legacies of Indian residential schools. Beginning in 1874, aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their homes and taken to residential schools, where they were punished for speaking their language and practicing their traditions. Many suffered physical and sexual abuse; thousands didn’t survive. The last school closed in 1996, and to this day much of the alcoholism and drug addiction found in Native communities is attributed to the trauma suffered at these schools.

Truth and reconciliation processes hold special promise for addressing the U.S. epidemic of racial violence.

The TRC of Canada’s interim report from 2012 said these schools “constituted an assault” on First Nations children, families, culture, and autonomy. Survivors say this acknowledgement begins the healing process, although much more is needed. The commission, after traveling to more than 300 communities and taking testimony from 6,500 witnesses, will issue its final report this June.

The Ferguson Truth-Telling Project (FTP), for which I am an advisory board member, was formed in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown to initiate a process of truth-telling in which victims of police violence and their families share their stories—stories that will serve as documentation to support structural change. The FTP is also planning to create community groups to provide a space for empathetic listening and identifying solutions.

Healing is long, slow work. But if we start with authentic truth-telling and engage in an inclusive search for solutions, we can begin to transform relationships and move step-by-step down the path to reconciliation.

Fania Davis wrote this article for the Make it Right issue of Yes! Magazine (Summer 2015). She is a civil rights attorney and co-founder and executive director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth. Davis is an advisory board member for the Ferguson Truth-Telling Project.

Oliver Sacks's 82nd Birthday - Part One

 From Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of the man the New York Times called "the poet laureate of contemporary medicine," neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, born in London (1933). Sacks's mother was one of England's first female surgeons; his father was a general practitioner. His parents were not demonstrative and treated their children like colleagues: Sacks was dissecting human tissue with his mother by the age of 11. As a teenager, he became fascinated with chemistry, a subject he later explored in his memoir, Uncle Tungsten (2001), the first draft of which topped out at more than 2 million words.

Sacks fled England for Canada in 1960, sending his parents a one-word telegram, "Staying." In California, he dabbled in drugs, developed a taste for motorcycles, and befriended the poet Thom Gunn. Sacks cleaned up his act and by 1965 was in New York, failing miserably as a research scientist. Once, he forgot to tie his lab notebook tightly enough to his motorcycle rack and his papers blew over the Cross Bronx Expressway. His supervisors said: "Sacks, you are a menace in the lab. Why don't you go and see patients - you'll do less harm."

In a dilapidated Bronx hospital, Sacks found his calling. "When I wandered in there, on my first day, I saw these frozen, transfixed people in the corridors. I had never seen anything like that. I thought, 'These are my people.'" His patients were victims of encephalitis lethargica, or "sleeping sickness," which had swept the world in the early 20th century. Sacks turned his findings into a best-selling book, Awakenings, blending the role of physician and writer, a stance that proved popular with readers, but not with the medical establishment, which questioned the quality of his science.

Sacks's books have raised awareness of brain disorders such as Tourette's syndrome and autism and are, at root, about people who have suffered loss to their identities. About using medicine as storytelling, Sacks said: "My patients come to me with stories. They have predicaments. They have plights. They come searching for ways of dealing with these things. There is something dramatic in all this."

Only Once

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Only Once
 
All which, because it was
flame and song and granted us
joy, we thought we'd do, be, revisit,
turns out to have been what it was
that once, only; every invitation
did not begin
a series, a build-up: the marvelous
did happen in our lives, our stories
are not drab with its absence: but don't
expect to return for more. Whatever more
there will be will be
unique as those were unique. Try
to acknowledge the next
song in its body -- halo of flames as utterly
present, as now or never.

 
~ Denise Levertov ~

 

An Epidemic of Reason?

An Epidemic of Reason?

By Michael Specter

The New Yorker, 1 July 2015

Perhaps the planet has just gone through a few anomalously thoughtful weeks, or perhaps rational thought is making a desperately needed comeback. Credit: photograph by Max Whittaker / Getty

 

For most of the past decade, only a delusional man could have believed the following sentences:

• The Pope, in a hundred-and-eighty-page encyclical addressed to “every single person on the planet,’’ described climate change as one of the world’s most pressing moral, ethical, and religious challenges.
•  In California, which last year registered its largest number of measles cases since 1995, and the worst rate of pertussis since 1958, the state legislature Monday passed the strictest mandatory vaccination law in the country—which, pending the governor’s signature, will eliminate all exemptions other than those based on medical need.
• Despite more than fifty Congressional attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court last week upheld one of its central provisions: the ability of the federal government to provide subsides to people who cannot afford to pay.
• After a decades-long struggle that even devoted activists often doubted would succeed, the Supreme Court last week ruled that no two people can be prevented from marrying because of their gender or sexual orientation.

Until recently, I would have considered any one of those statements more a hopeful fantasy than an obtainable fact. Yet over the past two weeks all of them became true. And so did this: A New Jersey jury decided that a group of therapists had committed fraud for promising “gay conversion therapy,” a dishonored theory which had long been recanted even by Robert L. Spritzer, its best known advocate.

Journalists have a habit of trying to package four or five unrelated events as a meaningful trend. And perhaps this planet has just gone through a few anomalously thoughtful weeks. But I cannot help wondering if these developments, while seemingly unrelated, suggest that rational thought might be making a bit of a desperately needed comeback.

I know—America is still a country in which a racist gunman can wander into a church, listen to a Bible-study meeting, then pull out a gun and begin to murder people. And that happened just one city away from where, earlier this year, a white police officer was videotaped shooting an unarmed black man in the back. (Nor was North Charleston the only city where crimes like that occur.) But it is at least a relief to see that politicians throughout the South, shamed by the shootings, have begun to take down the Confederate flag. (Walmart, Target, and other chains have also finally agreed to stop selling one of the country’s principal symbols of slavery, racial oppression, and hatred. And, as Jelani Cobb points out in this week’s magazine, that is what the Confederate flag is. People may claim it as a legitimate part of their heritage. But that heritage was never legitimate, as the Civil War and the civil-rights movement ought to have amply demonstrated.)

All these decisions should have been reflexive, because they are all so obviously right. But that doesn’t matter to most people, nor does the fact that the Pope, who in many areas adheres to tenth-century notions of justice, is far more insightful and humane about the inevitable impact of climate change than the current leadership of the United States Congress.

As James M. Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, so subtly put it, “Let the Pope stay with his job and we will stay with our job.” But it’s hard to invoke morality and religion in opposing abortion, as Inhofe and so many of his colleagues do, and then tell the Pope that he ought to leave science to the scientists. Republican Presidential candidates, in particular, seem to have fallen into a deep morality trap. Rick Santorum, a devout Catholic and possibly the most avid opponent of abortion among the many Republican candidates, often invokes the moral power of the Pope’s position on the issue. But when it comes to climate change the former senator from Pennsylvania says this: “The climate does indeed change over time,’’ but it’s crazy to think that man is “somehow the tip of that tail that wags the whole dog.”

Much to the consternation of nearly all these candidates, gay life has been transformed in the decades since an unknown virus started killing thousands and then tens of thousands of men in New York, San Francisco, and other American cities. It was an epidemic of death, but also one of hatred. From the early nineteen-eighties, I covered AIDS for the Washington Post. I watched men die and then saw their lovers and those who took care of them denied even the right to attend their funerals. It was one of the darkest periods of modern American life. Gay activists, like Larry Kramer, first struggled for their medical rights, then for their basic human rights—then, seemingly impossibly, for their right to unite legally with whomever they chose. Last week, finally, in a stroke both banal and profound, the Supreme Court of the United States, governed largely by conservatives, agreed that they have that right.

If it took the AIDS epidemic to help alter American attitudes toward gay men and lesbians, and a measles outbreak earlier this year at Disneyland to make legislators see the power of vaccines, maybe it’s not too much to hope that one day soon even the most hidebound among us will begin to acknowledge how climate change will affect us all.

The Pope, of all people, has taken a giant stride in the right direction—the rational direction. Who knows? Maybe Jeb Bush or Scott Walker will be next.