Stop the World (I Wanna Get Off)
It's 9 degrees F (-12.7 C) outside this morning, unusually cold for this time of year and definitely a temperature you can feel. Such temps also makes one appreciate being able to just run back into a warm house or a warm car or a warm anything, this after the chilly reception experienced when taking out the trash or taking the dog outside for the bathroom (it'll "warm" up today to 25 F or -3.8 C). Where do the homeless go and what do those who may be inside somewhere but perhaps without heat do in such temperatures? And there are parts of the country that are much colder. Shelters and such can take in only so many before they fill, and with these temps the demand is likely quite high. And while I continue to bring food and such to the outdoor shelter, I wondered what else could I do to help? So off to the thrift store I went, loading my cart with blankets and jackets and sweatshirts of all sizes, not caring if they had a weird logo or were a strange color, but that they were nice and thick and would provide some warmth. The cashier asked what all of my basket was for and when I told her, she was nice enough to throw in an extra discount. For the grand price of $75, I picked up 17 heavy coats and 3 blankets (our washing machine was quite busy). No pats on the back for me but rather a lesson at how little it would take to bring some humanity and dignity to 20 people. Just a thought of another version of how to "buy local."
So I jump to something else that may be familiar in this world, that of coping. There's a thing called a coping saw and such a saw will curve and bend around tight angles, in many ways reflecting what many people are doing just to make life normal. Author Cathy Guisewite* opens her new book with a description of clearing out her closet because things no longer fit, but goes on to add: This is worse than that. This is my whole life not fitting. My days are too short, my lists are too long. People aren't where they're supposed to be. Everything's changing without my permission. Children are moving away, friends moving on, loved ones leaving the earth, muscles and skin tone not even pausing to wave farewell before deserting me -- and after all I've done for them. Just when I think I can't possibly stand one more goodbye, something or someone I thought would be here forever isn't. Everyone I know is in some version of a great big life shift. Right in the middle of people and things that are changing and disappearing way too fast. An unrequested rearrangement of everything in our personal worlds -- as if there isn't enough that feels out of our control right now in the big world. It's unsettling and unnerving. And scary. Impossible to be everything to everyone, to reconcile all that's different, and to keep track of ourselves along that way. Mystery writer Lisa Scottoline may have summed it up when she co-wrote (with her daughter) another book on her similar reflections of life's changes and titled it "I Need A Lifeguard Everywhere But the Pool." Both books are rather humorous, as if reading a standup comedy routine of obvious (once you read them) differences between men and women and how so many of us age. So I didn't hesitate to also pick up the best-selling book by Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for A Reason...and Other Lies I've Loved.
Here's the premise...she's dying. No seriously, she gets the call that "it" has spread everywhere and the news is not good. So instead of a light-hearted follow-up to the other two books, inside I read this: These are the three life lessons people try to teach me that, frankly, sometimes feel worse than cancer itself. The first is that I shouldn't be so upset, because the significance of death is relative. I like to call the people with that message the Minimizers. Some people do it spiritually by reminding me that, cosmically, death isn't the ultimate end. "It doesn't matter, in the End, whether we are here or 'there.' It's all the same," writes a woman in the prime of her youth. She includes a lot of praying hand emoticons. A lot of Christians like to remind me that heaven is my true home, which makes me want to ask them if they would like to go home first. Maybe now? And atheists can be equally trite by demanding that I immediately give up any search for meaning. Someone else writes that my faith is holding me hostage to an inscrutable God. I should let go of this guesswork --these ridiculous theological reasons-- and realize that we are living in an uncaring and neutral universe. But the message is the same: stop complaining and accept the world as it is. Her words reminded me of an interesting piece in the London Review of Books, a tale of just one doctor's observations in treating veterans from the Vietnam War in the VA hospital, one 66-year old vet saying to him: My psychiatrist, he’ll put a hand on my arm and say “I know how you feel.” What do you mean you know how I feel? You weren’t even born yet, during Vietnam. How the fuck do you know how I feel?
They're all true, those words. We go through life observing, taking mental notes, and then deciding what fair or not fair, often feeling that we have a bit of control over it all; live a good life and all will be well. But then we see the news and have to wonder. Sometimes it doesn't seem to matter. We get cancer or we don't. We escape the freezing weather and sit comfortably in a warm house or we don't. We laugh at struggling to fit into now-tight clothes, or we don't. We think of how great life has been, or we don't. So as I gathered all these books at my library I jumped to another intriguing title by author Mike Pearl, The Day It Finally Happens. Wait, when what happens? A peek inside revealed an interesting list, from when we suffer a nuclear attack (which actually proved a bit less frightening than expected, as if a nuclear winter could be any less scary), to when the last fish in the ocean disappears to the day the internet crashes. Here are just a few tidbits from his one chapter on The Day the Last Slaughterhouse Closes: Cows and other ruminants (animals that chew regurgitated cud) produce about 37 percent of global methane emissions, and methane has twenty-five times the warming potential of carbon dioxide, So pastures laden with cattle may look nice and natural, but on a large enough scale (and 3.5 billion ruminants in the world is a pretty large scale), this is one giant grass-to-methane conversion operation, and it's warming the planet very quickly. But here's where it gets a bit interesting: A series of psychological studies carried out at the University of Oslo went to great pains to prove the obvious: it turns out that --big surprise-- exposing people to realistic images of the specific species of animals that died for a particular food tends to make people temporarily unwilling to eat it. The key word there, however, is "temporarily," because according to the University of Oslo's study, "culturally entrenched processes of dissociation found in the way we produce, prepare and talk about meat and animals sustain people's willingness to eat meat as they make it easy to ignore the meat-animal link...A puzzling 2018 US consumer survey from Oklahoma State University, partially funded by the US Department of Agriculture, demonstrated that while 90 percent of respondents eat meat "regularly," 47 percent nonetheless agree with the seemingly contradictory statement, "I support a ban of slaughterhouses." So these meat eaters are willing, it seems, to be thrown into a meatless world in which their diets would suddenly need to change drastically -- that or they literally don't know how meat gets onto their plates.
Some things may seem a bit strange in this world of ours but hey, it's the future and don't all of those versions and observations of life of what is or what may happen simply reflect pieces of what's inside all of us? We can laugh and we can cry, we ponder and dream, hope and pray, and sometimes --and for many people it truly is just "sometimes"-- life works out. But we are each looking at things from our own perspective. The person with cancer likely looks at things far differently than the person without it. The person happily situated in a comfortable home likely has no concept of a home without water or power (or insulation). The person looking at the veteran likely has no idea of what that person has seen or witnessed. As my retired police officer friend told me when he was still working, "We are the garbage collectors of society; we clean up the streets each night so that you don't have to see it." Our vision of the world, be it chaos or peaceful calm, may be little more than our ability to cope. It's easy to forget or to blank out the world or future we don't want to see...to not think about the homeless, to not think about growing older, to not think about how to pay that bill, to not think about what tomorrow may bring. Live for today, you only have the present, carpe diem...sometimes I wonder if Kate Butler got it right when she said in her title that these may be all "other lies I have loved." But I want to end on a high note, something to throw you completely off track and to demonstrate just how strange our perceptions of life can be. No matter your age, you have likely seen the image of the Woodstock album cover, the mud-filled couple huddled together some 50 years ago, and all in the embrace of youthful bliss, ready for the world but not quite yet. Check it out...life truly isn't all that it seems.
*You may be more familiar with the name from her syndicated comic strip, Cathy, which ran for 34 years in some 1400 newspapers. She "retired" and wrote this collection of "essays from the grown-up years," noting such things as all the fashion choices most women have to deal with on a daily basis while most men are limited to just a few pairs of shoes, pants and shirts (I can testify to that simplified selection bias when I first searched for our wedding rings...the choice available for men was a single tiny tray of rings while the rest of the jewelry seemed almost entirely dedicated to women).
So I jump to something else that may be familiar in this world, that of coping. There's a thing called a coping saw and such a saw will curve and bend around tight angles, in many ways reflecting what many people are doing just to make life normal. Author Cathy Guisewite* opens her new book with a description of clearing out her closet because things no longer fit, but goes on to add: This is worse than that. This is my whole life not fitting. My days are too short, my lists are too long. People aren't where they're supposed to be. Everything's changing without my permission. Children are moving away, friends moving on, loved ones leaving the earth, muscles and skin tone not even pausing to wave farewell before deserting me -- and after all I've done for them. Just when I think I can't possibly stand one more goodbye, something or someone I thought would be here forever isn't. Everyone I know is in some version of a great big life shift. Right in the middle of people and things that are changing and disappearing way too fast. An unrequested rearrangement of everything in our personal worlds -- as if there isn't enough that feels out of our control right now in the big world. It's unsettling and unnerving. And scary. Impossible to be everything to everyone, to reconcile all that's different, and to keep track of ourselves along that way. Mystery writer Lisa Scottoline may have summed it up when she co-wrote (with her daughter) another book on her similar reflections of life's changes and titled it "I Need A Lifeguard Everywhere But the Pool." Both books are rather humorous, as if reading a standup comedy routine of obvious (once you read them) differences between men and women and how so many of us age. So I didn't hesitate to also pick up the best-selling book by Kate Bowler, Everything Happens for A Reason...and Other Lies I've Loved.
Here's the premise...she's dying. No seriously, she gets the call that "it" has spread everywhere and the news is not good. So instead of a light-hearted follow-up to the other two books, inside I read this: These are the three life lessons people try to teach me that, frankly, sometimes feel worse than cancer itself. The first is that I shouldn't be so upset, because the significance of death is relative. I like to call the people with that message the Minimizers. Some people do it spiritually by reminding me that, cosmically, death isn't the ultimate end. "It doesn't matter, in the End, whether we are here or 'there.' It's all the same," writes a woman in the prime of her youth. She includes a lot of praying hand emoticons. A lot of Christians like to remind me that heaven is my true home, which makes me want to ask them if they would like to go home first. Maybe now? And atheists can be equally trite by demanding that I immediately give up any search for meaning. Someone else writes that my faith is holding me hostage to an inscrutable God. I should let go of this guesswork --these ridiculous theological reasons-- and realize that we are living in an uncaring and neutral universe. But the message is the same: stop complaining and accept the world as it is. Her words reminded me of an interesting piece in the London Review of Books, a tale of just one doctor's observations in treating veterans from the Vietnam War in the VA hospital, one 66-year old vet saying to him: My psychiatrist, he’ll put a hand on my arm and say “I know how you feel.” What do you mean you know how I feel? You weren’t even born yet, during Vietnam. How the fuck do you know how I feel?
They're all true, those words. We go through life observing, taking mental notes, and then deciding what fair or not fair, often feeling that we have a bit of control over it all; live a good life and all will be well. But then we see the news and have to wonder. Sometimes it doesn't seem to matter. We get cancer or we don't. We escape the freezing weather and sit comfortably in a warm house or we don't. We laugh at struggling to fit into now-tight clothes, or we don't. We think of how great life has been, or we don't. So as I gathered all these books at my library I jumped to another intriguing title by author Mike Pearl, The Day It Finally Happens. Wait, when what happens? A peek inside revealed an interesting list, from when we suffer a nuclear attack (which actually proved a bit less frightening than expected, as if a nuclear winter could be any less scary), to when the last fish in the ocean disappears to the day the internet crashes. Here are just a few tidbits from his one chapter on The Day the Last Slaughterhouse Closes: Cows and other ruminants (animals that chew regurgitated cud) produce about 37 percent of global methane emissions, and methane has twenty-five times the warming potential of carbon dioxide, So pastures laden with cattle may look nice and natural, but on a large enough scale (and 3.5 billion ruminants in the world is a pretty large scale), this is one giant grass-to-methane conversion operation, and it's warming the planet very quickly. But here's where it gets a bit interesting: A series of psychological studies carried out at the University of Oslo went to great pains to prove the obvious: it turns out that --big surprise-- exposing people to realistic images of the specific species of animals that died for a particular food tends to make people temporarily unwilling to eat it. The key word there, however, is "temporarily," because according to the University of Oslo's study, "culturally entrenched processes of dissociation found in the way we produce, prepare and talk about meat and animals sustain people's willingness to eat meat as they make it easy to ignore the meat-animal link...A puzzling 2018 US consumer survey from Oklahoma State University, partially funded by the US Department of Agriculture, demonstrated that while 90 percent of respondents eat meat "regularly," 47 percent nonetheless agree with the seemingly contradictory statement, "I support a ban of slaughterhouses." So these meat eaters are willing, it seems, to be thrown into a meatless world in which their diets would suddenly need to change drastically -- that or they literally don't know how meat gets onto their plates.
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| Cover photo from the Woodstock album |
*You may be more familiar with the name from her syndicated comic strip, Cathy, which ran for 34 years in some 1400 newspapers. She "retired" and wrote this collection of "essays from the grown-up years," noting such things as all the fashion choices most women have to deal with on a daily basis while most men are limited to just a few pairs of shoes, pants and shirts (I can testify to that simplified selection bias when I first searched for our wedding rings...the choice available for men was a single tiny tray of rings while the rest of the jewelry seemed almost entirely dedicated to women).
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