Considerate judgment of mankind

I turned on ABC/Good Morning America to catch the local weather report, which then happened to fly by me without me paying attention till the last second.  Instead, I clued in to the next piece, a disturbingly familiar one these days:  an African-American father with his teenage son were passing through the lobby of a hotel in which they were guests when a young woman accosted the son, accusing him of having stolen her phone.  The short video clip shows a white woman raving and demanding intervention on her behalf by strangers; she appears to be certain, both in her claim of victimization and her belief that surrounding “witnesses” will automatically step in and take the young black man’s phone and hand it to her.  Each part of that is so troubling.   

It took the murder of George Floyd under the knee of a malevolent police officer in May of this year to force an uncomfortable national conversation about a loathsome pattern (and practice) in American society.  I can’t even bring myself to say “current” society, because, as much as I do believe our 45^th president has shown himself to be perfectly and embarrassingly giddy about the way his worshipful followers have carried out his own hateful designs, if there is one truth I have come to better appreciate this year it is that the components and characteristics of a racist society have always been there, waxing and waning in intensity. 

 

We are all complicit if we avert our collective gaze when, for example, neo-Nazis strut in our midst, aggressively wagging their AK-47’s (as if to proclaim, we know we’re inadequate; that’s why we carry guns). We are complicit if we tsk-tsk and mumble a how unfortunate – thinking that’s good enough to convey our opposition – when peaceful protesters are teargassed by federal marshals.  We are complicit each time a person of color is unfairly kept from profiting from the “American Experience” that the rest of us enjoy.  And, historically speaking, on every occasion when efforts have resulted in seemingly ironclad promises to level the playing field, the counter-response has revealed an ugliness about how we treat our fellow citizens.  

 

We never really did critically (and adequately) examine the Emancipation Proclamation when we studied it in 11^th grade (or, at least, I didn’t give it close scrutiny).  Crafted foremost with a mind toward potential military advantage, it was conceived for the wrong reasons; as such, despite Abraham Lincoln’s invocation of “the considerate judgment of mankind”, it didn’t free all slaves, only those in Confederate states, and it neatly avoided all matters of citizenship.  (The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution would have to legislate what should have come naturally in a so-called “evolved” and humane society.)  What the measure couldn’t adequately do was squelch the rise of Jim Crow laws.  In essence, what it couldn’t do was put into place safeguards so that freed slaves – ultimately all African Americans – wouldn’t be subjected to predictable, hostile acts of bitter resentment.  

 

Jumping ahead nearly one hundred years, a similar reactionary behavior was exhibited in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  (For an engaging read – but one that will break your heart, get a copy of Jerry Mitchell’s 2020 release of Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era).  Once again, we bear witness to our nation endeavoring to right a wrong, only to provoke repugnant displays of miserliness and indecency.   Apparently, we just can’t help ourselves; at every opportunity to right the wrongs, in every historical moment when the moral high ground generously presents itself as an option, we reflexively show cowardice.  Are we that afraid of forfeiting privileges that we merely inherited?   I freely admit that I have been a lousy Catholic; I don’t attend mass, so the practicing piece of my faith is regularly challenged.  I often, however, find myself saying, there but for the grace of God go I.  That’s not enough, though.  I shouldn’t simply be grateful that I don’t suffer the injustices that others endure by virtue of skin color.  I ought to be uttering these words, whatsoever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me.

 

As this distressing year comes to a close, I vow to more critically examine how I personally respond when witnessing instances of injustice, and to do a better job of voicing opposition.  Opposition is clearly not enough, however.  If I can say I’m part of the solution, then maybe that will put me on the right path.  Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?  Oh, and that young woman who ranted like a lunatic in the hotel lobby?  Her Uber driver found her phone in the back seat of his car.  Worth thinking about:  what if the roles had been reversed, and it was – in all its unlikeliness – the black man and his teenage son charging into a random hotel, grabbing the young white woman and accusing her of theft?  Right now, she’s not in jail (and would not even be under investigation were it not for the fact that a video of the event went viral), but would the black teenager have been graced with the same consideration, the same “deliberate and measured” approach? Moreover, shame on the hotel manager who insisted that the boy comply with the deranged woman’s exhortation that he produce the phone for her inspection when she wasn’t even a guest at the hotel.  Really!  Sometimes outrage is the perfect and necessary response.

Learning things naturally

Some of the things I “understood” about the world when I was little:

·      The Bible was written by God

·      Heaven is reserved for perfect people, or people who die immediately after exiting the confessional

·      Whenever you said Jesus, you had to dip your head. . . or you would go to Hell.

·      There was an unusually high number of seagulls who had only one leg

·      Bringing volumes of Japanese Beetles and Gypsy moths into the house for scientific research made Mom especially angry

·      One can never catch up with weeding a garden enriched by cow manure

·      The best food in the world came from that garden

·      Some families served green beans from a can

·      Nana May and Papa Joe were real people; Nana Morrissey and Gamma were stern or unhappy, or both.

·      Having read “Odyssey of an Otter” is not in the same league as reading “The Odyssey”.  (Sorry, Mrs. Panza, for the misunderstanding in 3^rd grade.)

·      Being quiet and compliant in a classroom did not guarantee that the teacher would let you clap the chalk erasers.

·      In the absence of a road map, dead reckoning is a great substitute, and it doesn’t necessarily result in someone’s death.*

·      Lincoln Logs don’t stand a chance in a house where a dog lives.

 

*I had a paralyzing fear of becoming lost when I was little; I still become overly anxious if I don’t know where I am.  Whenever Mom and I were away from the house, if I sensed that she was lost I would begin to cry and beg her to tell me that she knew where she was going.  On one occasion, I demanded proof; she simply said, “dead reckoning, honey,” which to me meant somehow someone was going to die.  She appeared calm, and for the rest of the journey maintained an inscrutable smile.  I was worried.

Just stop!

Do you ever notice how there are just some days you can’t help but be overly annoyed by everything?  Behaviors and tendencies that on most days are tolerated reasonably well make your teeth clench and your face scrunch up unattractively and your eyes squint menacingly?  You can convince yourself on those days that there really oughta be a law against so many of society’s practices that are both common and accepted,but that – notwithstanding – enough of us can agree should just be stopped.  At the very least, public shaming should be encouraged.  Herewith I spill my own list:

1.    Pants with faux pockets.  Don’t ever buy them; the sheer disingenuity of them should be enough of a reason.  And insanely shallow pockets are nearly as bad – you will constantly worry that whatever you put in them will shimmy itself out.  Maybe you’re supposed to treat them like faux pockets anyway, and not use them. . . so don’t put them on the pants in the first place.  It seems an even greater betrayal when brands that have inspired your loyalty suddenly and without explanation or disclaimer produce the same style in all ways EXCEPT that now there are shallow pockets to replace the earlier reassuringly deep ones.  

2.    Webpage layout shifting.  You know how when you arrive on some webpage and your eyes start to feed your brain with the information, and then the information jumps, so that you have to reorient yourself.  This is especially maddening when the shift happens at precisely the moment when you click on a link, but because the content has jumped, you are clicking on an entirely different link.  It is not reassuring in the least to know the cause, which is that as asynchronous Ajax partials are loading, these little buggers are upsetting the initial render.  Equally unhelpful to know is that you can fix this source of irritation via some clever CSS’ing.  Don’t taunt me with words like “easy fix” if they’re in company with a word such as “CSS”.  My feeble adaptive strategy is that I now leave any site on which I am thus ambushed twice in the first minute.

3.    Personal fireworks late at night.  When people set them off after 11:00pm, I automatically suppose the revelers to be well “into their cups”.  If it’s close to my house there’s the added late summer stressor of, if one lands on the roof will my house go up in flames?  I am further aggrieved when my dogs then commence barking way too excitedly. . . and proceed to invite me to take them out for potty.  I wonder, too, when I hold my breath the next day as I drive over the duds with my lawn tractor, should I instead be stopping before each one of them, dismounting, and collecting them; i.e., will I blow myself up if I don’t?

4.    Saying irregardless.  Don’t.  No matter that its nonstandard overuse has resulted in it becoming an acceptable variant of the word.

5.    Scratchy labels on clothing.  Typically these are made of course, sharp-edged “fabric” and are permanently fastened to the article of clothing with plastic thread (of all the stupidest innovations, and I say “innovation” scornfully.)  The odds are better than even that you will cut into a sweater’s carotid if you try to surgically remove one.  Ironically, seams can come completely undone, but a label “ain’t goin nowhere.”  I may be imagining a kinder, friendlier time, but it seems to me that couture clothing companies once upon a time attached their labels with easily removable stitches.  Snip, snip, and done.  And long before there was mass production (or fashion houses), and people made their own clothing, this wasn’t an issue.  The clothing, too, was meant to last, I mean really last.  In fact, during colonial times when people wrote out their wills, along with their dwelling house, commonage interests, and iron tools; they cared deeply about the fate of their “wearing apparill”.   Imagine seeing Caleb Pike 3^rd, sauntering around the Village attired in the late Walker Buswell’s great coat and best leather breeches.  While it probably provoked a few tears of remembrance among some and a few raised eyebrows among others, and then again, maybe not; I doubt anyone was overly concerned about how to most expertly excise a brand label.

6.    Shaken-up seltzer bottles.  They look harmless enough, sitting silently at attention on the store shelf, blending in with their innocent neighbors.  Your first thought, though, is: I hope this isn’t one of “them”.  Appearances will tell you nothing, however; you won’t really know if it is one of “them” until it detonates in your kitchen.  It doesn’t stop you from studying the bottle from all. . . well, not angles per se, but by rotating it as if one hopes to find some small portent of what is to come.   If only we had a way to signal when a bottle has previously been dropped on the floor.  Perhaps the bottle would change color, or the offender – following the honor system – could flip a switch right on the bottle that indicates that it has become one of “them”.  My suggestion here is that we hand off the problem to an M.I.T. student.  But aren’t Coke and ginger ale bottles the absolute worst when it comes to the deadly carbonation ambush?

There’s a sense of futility inherent in an exercise such as this, for once you’ve begun a list of grievances, you quickly become aware that there will be no end. . . at least if it’s one of those days when everything grates on your nerves.  Imagine if I had chosen to include other people’s annoying driving habits or grocery store tendencies or cell-phone usage.  To be sure, I am not without my own annoying foibles; just ask Megan about my talking while chewing. . . or asking over and over while watching a movie, “what did he (or she) just say?”.  Now that I think about it, the list of my irritating behaviors might be pretty long, too.

Life in the Era of Coronavirus

It’s April 21, 2020.  We in Massachusetts have been under a governor-mandated  “stay at home” advisory for almost one month.  While I hadn’t been considering any moves to memorialize these surreal times, an episode on a podcast that I often listen to made me reflect and pivot.  The interviewee was a writing professor who, in the course of the interview, read on air an email correspondence that he had recently sent to his students.  The upshot of it was that as wont as we might be to desire to put as great a distance as possible between ourselves and this cataclysmic event laden with worry and blame fixing and uncomfortable changes in behavior, we may at some point want – or need – to give finite shape and substance to it all.  In other words, we may arrive at a point in time when we wish to draw parallels or simply give adequate expression to a particular context.

If I were to be asked to capture (in general terms) what changes this crisis has wrought, or what the outward and most visible signs are that we’ve been yanked out of our customary behaviors and thought processes, I’d put it this way: I see more people outside in my neighborhood, more families walking or cycling together and having conversations, more people running (either solo or in pairs), more dog-walking, more children playing in their own yards.  Throughout the day I hear voices from all quarters of my neighborhood, voices on top of voices: laughter, measured tones, angry outbursts, crying from babies, barking – ranging from high pitched to deep-throated.)  There are, as well, expanded and earnest efforts in social media to engage other media users; people want to understand each other better, they want to encourage participation, and they want to feel that despite the fear that they’re experiencing, they won’t be having to endure this crisis alone.  Yet inasmuch as the outward signs should make manifest greater connectedness, we continue to wage a battle against feelings of loneliness and isolation that result from living under a “stay-at-home” mandate.

For better or for worse, I’m the first one to declare a partiality for solitude and alone time.  My inner thoughts are my greatest companion (to the detriment of my social relationships).  I was in conversation with my sister the other day when I admitted that with all this imposed social distancing, even I was beginning to fray at the edges, and I regularly limit my interactions with people.  It’s somewhat of a tired joke that family members are surprised when I actually do answer my phone.  I can tell, because there’s a split second of silence, followed by a stuttering and sometimes inarticulate conversation preamble.  With such people-avoidance skills to my credit, I am thus qualified to speak with authority about “social distancing in the time of corona”.

My healthy way of coping and staying in control is to make lists.  So, I will provide here my gratuitous list of recommendations, what I choose to call “How to Navigate a World Replete with the Deadly COVID-19” (because everything should be given a name):

1.    Avoid places and events that draw large numbers of people.  (For me that’s been a snap, I do that naturally.)  For others, stay away from Walmart – that’s a large group magnet.

2.    Before ever leaving the house, measure out six feet on the floor; the impression of what that distance looks like might stick better when you’re in a real-world context.  Now go forth and always maintain a separation according to the following chart:

Population	Min. distance to be maintained
Adults: ages 18-20	6 feet
Adults: ages 21-39	At least one state or 100 miles, whichever is greater*
Adults: 40 +	6 feet
Children: ages 0-11	25 feet**
Children: ages 12-15	Should not be anywhere in sight or within hearing distance***
Children: ages 16-17	6 feet

*This group has no regard for human life other than their own (as shown by most recent “Spring Break” gatherings in Florida and St. Patrick’s Day bar-hopping in Southie.)  This recommendation is purely punitive.

**Have you ever witnessed the distance that a cough or sneeze can travel among this demographic?

***Although not proven to be any more threatening as a transmitter of potentially deadly viral particles, the sheer contrariness of this population will put your teeth on edge.

3.    Wash hands after contact with any surface that has been touched by any other human ever.  Moreover, don’t touch any part of your face, even when trying to excise a dog hair from the food you’ve been chewing.

4.    Make ample use of hand sanitizer. . . if you can find it.

5.    Wear a mask when away from the house, and not the kind that conceals your identity as you protest “stay-at-home” mandates.

6.    Use bleach as the preferred disinfectant. . . again, if you can find it.  Vinegar won’t disable a virus, but you will probably lick any mold problem with it.  And unless you just can’t stifle your curiosity about an ammonia-vinegar combination, don’t mix those two and think that it will somehow miraculously become an effective disinfectant; you’ll just end up with chlorine gas (which may trigger coughing and/or breathing difficulties).  Hydrogen Peroxide and vinegar?  Nope.  Those two produce a toxic peracetic acid, irritating to the eyes, skin, and respiratory systems¹  And, if you’re successful in sourcing hydrogen peroxide, you should be overcome with guilt that you’re bringing harm to the “home-style colorists”, depleting product for an entire target market of women scrabbling for viable alternatives.

7.    Avoid heretofore serene, bucolic, undisturbed (by humans) areas, such as rail trails, nature preserves, and wildlife refuges.  They have now become the destinations of every family on earth, whether they lived sedentary lives before or not.

8.    Either take up cooking or subscribe to one or several cooking blogs.  Maybe you can push yourself to start your own “plate up” blog and stage singular and imaginative and evocative photos on Instagram.

9.    Take advantage of newly-offered delivery services from your favorite wine & spirits shop.

10. Remember that you’re not alone. . . although you should be for the sake of everyone’s health, including your own.  With equal parts irony and reassurance, it’s still good to know that we are in this together; otherwise, the frightfulness of this pandemic would paralyze us.

When all is said and done, we should marvel at our own ability to adapt.  Regardless of the occasional snit or outburst, we harbor a genuine sense of hopefulness, we persist in believing that a new normal will establish itself, one that allows us to re-engage with family and friends in meaningful and enduring ways, and restore both our collective and individual sense of purpose.  This beastly COVID-19 virus may bend us to its will for a while, but I refuse to allow that it will permanently cow us.  

¹This information to make me appear smart came from devonlive.com.  I wouldn’t recall anything that required 11^thgrade chemistry mastery.

Split Leash - a dubious solution

Two dogs technically don’t comprise a collection, or – to be more precise – a pack, but when I head out the door with Mona and Bowie for their daily walk, it has that feel.  There’s the initial search for harnesses; Bowie’s habit of plucking them from the hall basket and depositing them who-knows-where has me combing several rooms for the first few minutes; it’s fortunate that they’re fluorescent (the harnesses, not the dogs.)  Next is the floor routine in order to attach a split leash.  Mona, older dog, always gets clipped first.  Despite her eagerness, she will sit patiently while I root around in her mass of fluff for the ring on her collar.  Bowie is meanwhile performing back flips, alternating them with valiant efforts to free Mona from her harness.  Bowie’s turn.  He dutifully sits on command, gives me one-and-a-half seconds to find his collar ring and properly affix him to the second lead, and then charges to the door. . . usually still “unaffixed”.  With nose pressed to the glass storm door, he allows himself to be tethered to his best pal.  (Mona’s joy is tempered as she is reminded once again how times have changed; she muses, not too long ago Mommy loved just me, and took just me for long, uncomplicated walks, and if I wanted to stop and sniff something interesting, I could do that. . . in an uncomplicated way.)  

Before we leave the house and stutter-step our way down three short flights of steps (and not in a way that suggests that I’m striving to warm up my core), my pockets bulge with poop bags, treats, tissues, house key (with an attached sharp-eared kitty charm-slash-personal-protection-weapon that reassures me that I’m well-armed should another dog attack my pups or a psychopath ambush me), and cell-phone (to track my steps, as well as comply with my daughters’ demands that I be reachable.)  Anyone with small children understands the complexity of “leaving the house”; whenever I leave the house with these two small dogs it invariably calls to mind those early days with Megan and Lindsey.  Back then, just as excited about the possibilities that “leaving the house” implied, my girls – especially Lindsey – would bounce around and wriggle with delight, but they would never spontaneously (at the very moment when one’s foot was reaching tentatively for the next step), jerk on their leash and catapult you into the bushes next to the front steps.  

The split leash is in some ways ingenious, but also cruel.  If you’re unfamiliar, it is a “V” attachment for the lower end of a single leash, converting it into a double leash.  I had tried the two separate leashes and found that entanglement was a recurrent problem.  I wearied of the constant exertions to creatively and gracefully extricate myself once encased.  (There was no one better way to do it, whether I twirled in a 360-degree circle, or sumo-stepped my way over this leash first, only to find that I’d literally stepped into another trap.)  One day on a section of rail trail in the South End of Newburyport, I ran into an older couple who were intrigued by the split leash.  Is it easier to walk two dogs that way, they wanted to know.  From my vantage point it’s easier, I sheepishly admitted.  Rather than “guiding” me first in this direction, then immediately in that direction, Bowie (because that’s usually who’s doing the “guiding”) instead tugs Mona.  In a way, they move together. . .  symbiotically, one could say.  In truth, Mona will be trotting along, in front, trying to enjoy our outdoor time, when a sudden jolt will launch her sideways; only residually will I feel it as it travels up the rest of the leash.  To the older couple I simply explained that this was a pleasanter alternative to engaging in an interminable game of Chinese jump rope.

I look deep into Mona’s eyes, sense the unformed question, and assure her, he won’t always be a puppy.  Wishing for it, not wishing.  And Mona remains skeptical.