Alone Again, Naturally

   It's that time of year, a time when many are festive and giving of time and money to rendezvous with family and friends; but many are also finding themselves alone.  As one resident at my mother's facility told me, her family all heading out of town for other obligations, "Don't let me be an orphan this Christmas."  I couldn't help but think of this, the song by Gilbert O'Sullivan which went in part: In my hour of need, I truly am indeed Alone again, naturally.  That applies to the individual, of course, and there are many; but what of the group or of an entire population?  Having just finished a series of lectures on death and dying as viewed in different parts of the world,* one comment caught my attention, that of the "former" caste system in India (says NPR, it's still going on), in particular the "untouchables."  Described in the Britannica site, their job in life: ...involved ritually polluting activities, of which the most important were (1) taking life for a living, a category that included, for example, fishermen, (2) killing or disposing of dead cattle or working with their hides for a living, (3) pursuing activities that brought the participant into contact with emissions of the human body, such as feces, urine, sweat, and spittle, a category that included such occupational groups as sweepers and washermen, and (4) eating the flesh of cattle or of domestic pigs and chickens, a category into which most of the indigenous tribes of India fell.  In the lectures, when a Hindu person dies, their body is prepared for the traditional burning on a wood pyre...except, no family member would dare touch the body or do such a job; it would all be left to the "untouchables."

    This puzzled me, but upon further reading I discovered that there are many throughout the world where history and society has deemed people untouchable.  In China, Tibet, Japan, France, Nigeria, Spain.  By the way, the untouchable group in India numbers somewhere around 170 million people or basically half the U.S. population.  Some of this made me look into one of those news events that seem to blip by without much attention...Myanmar.  The Rohingya.  The name comes and goes and soon, is left alone; but imagine this, a people so despised by another group that women and children would be targeted, either to be killed or used for purposes most of the world would consider reprehensible.  Al Jazeera uses such terms as "genocide" and "sex slaves," highlighting a situation that even the United Nations and the Pope's protests are unable to affect.  Already 600,000 have fled for their lives fighting a military that far overpowers and outnumbers them (the Rohingya population is estimated to be over 1,000,000 people).  This is nothing new in our history, this segregating and supressing and eliminating.  One can look at Syria or Poland, Palestine or Catalonia, or Iraq/Turkey/Iran and the Kurds.   In an editorial  from the London Review of Books on the recent Kurdish referendum for independence, reporter Tom Stevenson wrote: Iraq’s vice-president, Nouri al-Maliki, has called the vote a ‘declaration of war on the unity of Iraq’, and the Iraqi parliament has approved sending troops to Kirkuk.  Baghdad has succeeded in closing Erbil International Airport to international flights and with Turkey and Iran’s help there are the makings of a blockade.  Iran is tied in to a network of powerful militias within Iraq, and Turkey already conducts regular airstrikes on Kurdish positions in Iraq.  Erdoğan might well remind the Kurdish leadership how precarious its geopolitical position is by cutting off the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline, through which the Kurdish authorities export their oil and collect their only real revenue.  The Kurds in Iraq alone number over 8 million people.  In another piece in the same magazine, staff writer Neil Ascherson wrote about the WW II museum in Gdansk and said in part: War is not the same as wartime.  In wartime there is more silence than uproar, more dogged waiting than running about, more resignation than rage,  There are things you don't say and questions you don't ask.  There are absurd men and women telling you what you can't eat and where you can't go.  That's hard for museums to show.  They can show you some of the lies: the fake news, the doctored film, the phony triumphalism of politicians. They are less good at recording the post-war fakery, the rapid construction of false memory about the conflict.  One Syrian media "organizer" told a reporter for the NY Review of Books: What's crucial in this whole proces is that you don't matter...You as an individual --your aspirations, your ideas about what is right-- mean absolutely nothing.  And that's when you understand why people get radicalized...You are in dire need for a narrative that can justify this futility.  There has to be a point.  So you become radical.  This suffering has to be for a reason.  Otherwise it's too painful.

   This holiday season has been feeling a bit lonely for my wife and I, perhaps because we are dealing with some family issues with both of our mothers getting up in age and in the resultant health problems that come with those ages.  Maybe lonely is not the right word, but it's a feeling of not being part of the crowd, not being into the crowded parking lots and the even more-crowded stores, or having the urge to buy-buy-buy in meaningless fashion, not when there are so many people truly needing so much (American credit card debt soared to its highest level ever and that was before this holiday season began).  In a story on the late Lou Reed, author David Yaffe noted Reed's "Perfect Day" lyrics: Just a perfect day/You made me forget myself/I thought I was someone else/ Someone good.  But the author added this: Some people thought the song was about addiction -- how a junkie escaping from reality also feeds on the escape of romance.  But the song could also be about how pleasurable, yet impossible, it is to escape from your true self, and about how easy it is to deceive yourself when you've disappointed your own expectations.

    Being or feeling alone has no boundaries; one can feel that way at school or work, even at home.  One doesn't need war or old age or the holidays to bring those feelings out.  Being gay, or unhappy with your weight, or lacking money, or not feeling smart enough, or feeling too little/big, or being a single mom, or even something as simple as asking why so many are so happy and you're just "not feeling it."  Just when you think that the world is progressing and that we are all becoming equal, we have incomes and power-hungry (or power-starved) people displaying the opposite.  Here's one example, again from the London Review of Books: In 2015, the novelist Catherine Nichols sent the opening pages of the book she was working on to fifty literary agents.  She got so little response she decided to shift gender and try as ‘George’ instead.  The difference amazed her.  ‘A third of the agents who saw his query wanted to see more, where my numbers never did shift from one in 25.’  The words, as written by George, had an appeal that Catherine could only envy.  She also, perhaps, felt a little robbed.  ‘He is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book.’  This was hardly a scientific study, but it is tempting to join her in concluding that men and women are read differently, even when they write the same thing.  

    One can see aloneness almost daily, my most recent sighting being down the street when Hispanic workers were finishing work on a roof; it was rainy and cold and by the next morning, frosty.  It was not a safe or comfortable place to be working.  But they were inexpensive (we were told some $3-4,000 lower than a competing bid).  One tree person told me that his efforts and pay are dwarfed by his boss, he making $20 an hour to risk his life while his boss goes around doing bids and bringing home over $500,000.  Dangling in that tree or working on that frosty roof, there must be a feeling of being alone.  The struggling waitress, the worker putting in long hours, the clerk ringing up your purchases, each smiling at you but perhaps feeling alone and wishing things were different.  It reminded me of when my wife asked why I sometimes watch a film like Ip Man 3 (a true story of the grandmaster of the form of martial arts, Wing Chun) and I had to wonder myself since I have no knowledge of any such moves, even as I admire the fluidity and flexibility of the range of motion.  Donnie Yen and many others well-versed in such arts seem to have one trait; despite the flurry of hands and feet moving in all directions and striking at stomachs and shins and coming with seemingly unending speed, their eyes never waver.  They are focused solely on the other person's eyes, they see only that and the rest is on the periphery, even as they block and strike back.  It's a nice way to look at this season, to see only one.  As John Lubbock is so often quoted, "What we see depends mainly on what we look for."

*Despite sounding maudlin, the viewpoints presented throughout the lectures were quite fascinating and covered not only differing religious views, but also current societal world views on such topics as suicide, euthanasia, killing animals for food and the killing of people in war.  This was a no-holds bar series of lectures but one that kept you curious rather than turned off; why do we have so many view points on such a singular topic and why does it so fascinate us (and yes, Professor Mark Berkson does tackle the subject of immortality...hint: it would be boring).  On another note, the charity BRAC has dispatched over 1,000 doctors, health workers and volunteers to help the Rohingya refugee camps, focusing mainly on creating safe areas for children and mobile health clinics; it might be one alternative to your gift giving this year.