Nuns and Nones

     First off, my admission is that I know next to nothing about nuns, or priests for that matter.  I couldn't explain the difference between a priest and a minister, or a preacher and a clergyman (or clergywoman).  And if you enter the field of pujari and imam. well forget it.  Come to think of it, I would likely confuse the teachings of Greek mythology with those of Roman mythology, and do the same with Chinese Buddhism and Japanese Buddhism; the Ancient History Encyclopedia said this about Buddhism: Although Buddha himself is said to have requested that, following his death, no leader was to be chosen to lead anything like a school, this was ignored and his disciples seem to have fairly quickly institutionalized Buddhist thought with rules, regulations, and a hierarchy.  At first, there may have been a unified vision of what Buddha had taught but, in time, disagreements over what constituted the “true teaching” resulted in fragmentation and the establishment of three main schools.  This "fragmentation" of thought seems to happen with most anything, often breaking down into the classic argument of "this might be what was said, but this is what was meant."  One could peek at the variety of long-dead writers and philosophers having others write about what those people actually "meant" (The Conversation tries to light-heartedly sort out a bit this, noting that: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the author of Crime and Punishment and other great novels about a world that has lost its way, once remarked in his 1864 novella Notes from the Underground that people are generally “phenomenally stupid” and ungrateful).   A bit harsh, in my opinion, but then on the other hand...

    Much of this came to the forefront when I heard a term which is now being applied by social media to that crowd born after 1996, Gen Z...nones (it should be noted that Gen Z is being followed by Gen Alpha...what??).  When it came to our recent Presidential election (and what a bizarre election, or at least that is what one is currently being led to believe), more Gen Z-ers listed their religion as "none."  But there was more, as noted by the Pew Research Center: A Pew Research Center survey conducted in January of this year found that about a quarter of registered voters ages 18 to 23 (22%) approved of how Donald Trump is handling his job as president, while about three-quarters disapproved (77%).  Millennial voters were only slightly more likely to approve of Trump (32%) while 42% of Gen X voters, 48% of Baby Boomers and 57% of those in the Silent Generation approved of the job he’s doing as president.  But there was more: One-in-ten eligible voters in the 2020 electorate will be part of a new generation of Americans – Generation Z.  Born after 1996, most members of this generation are not yet old enough to vote, but as the oldest among them turn 23 this year, roughly 24 million will have the opportunity to cast a ballot in November.  And their political clout will continue to grow steadily in the coming years, as more and more of them reach voting age.  Unlike the Millennials --who came of age during the Great Recession--  this new generation was in line to inherit a strong economy with record-low unemployment.  That has all changed now, as COVID-19 has reshaped the country’s social, political and economic landscape. Instead of looking ahead to a world of opportunities,  Gen Z now peers into an uncertain future. 

    I couldn't help but wonder if this was only a label, a shifting demographic of uncertain times in general as if this younger generation was watching to see how their "elders" were or were not adapting to a world now shaped by an unseen and little understood virus.  Holidays and gatherings were changing, school was changing, eating out and parties were changing, having enough money or a job was changing; and yet our government was crying out "elect me" and hitting the golf course as if little was changing.  PBS Newshour had a segment where field workers, many undocumented, were considered "essential" workers and thus had to work whether they were sick or not; there was no insurance for them, no sick leave, no job security.  It was the same with meat packers* and fast food workers (one employee at McDonald's said that even after nine years of work at the same franchise, the conditions were the same...no vacation or sick days, and $9.67 an hour; he and his wife didn't have health insurance but qualified for Medicaid for their children's coverage).  So in one sense, we could all be considered Gen Z and peering "into an uncertain future."

   So then came the "advice" of Lynda Barry and her popular freestyle method of drawing comics.  In a review in The New York Review of Books, it said: Barry wants all her students—and that includes you—to get back to the time in childhood “when drawing and writing were not separated,” when they were conjoined parts of an emotionally expressive language...all want you to find your own language, your “line-voice,” or, rather, to make sure it finds you...Sadly, most people don’t ever get to see (or hear) their “line-voice” because they are cruel to their drawings: they find their spontaneous productions “intolerable,” Barry writes. “It’s more than just feeling ashamed…It’s fear.  There is an urge to destroy the drawing—to snatch it and ball it up, and toss it.”  For such people, Barry has a plea: “Have mercy on the unspeakable monster who has no other way to tell you it’s you.”  Here's a small excerpt from one of her pages: Most people don't know they can draw with both hands at once -- until they try it.  Most of us can do this.  1. With two different colored markers draw a head to toe self portrait for the length of a three minute song.  Both hands must be drawing at the same time.  2. Repeat this but switch colors and importantly begin with your feet.  3. Walk around the room to see all of the drawing.  Take a look.

    Couple all of that with the words of Christian Donlan who wrote, The Inward Empire.  Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, he wrote that it's: ...a disease in which the body's own immune system decides to attack the fatty, insulating coating of the nerves in the brain and spinal cord...Imagine that the clumsiest cliché is correct and the brain really is just a computer.  Then imagine that you open the computer's case one day and discover that there are termites inside who have been eating the plastic coating on all the wiring.  What do you do?  Author Donlan discovered that he had MS (incurable, in his words) when his daughter was four: Diseases like MS live within the central nervous system after all, that complex tangle of 100 billion cells --every one a lightning bolt captured mid-strike-- that makes each of us, through thinking, the person we think we are.  When these diseases attack the brain, they cannot help but attack the person being endlessly remade within it.

    Being remade, a description that fits many of us these days.  At times we can feel that we are indeed being attacked by something unseen, whether it's a virus or due to the words of world "leaders."  Hunkered down in our homes it can feel as if, to use an old phrase, we're being "left to our own devices."  Do we search for another television series to binge?  Do we search for work?  Do we search for food?  Do we turn inward and search for something inside ourselves, a deep resolve?  Do we turn creative or do we turn stagnant?  As cartoonist and illustrator Barry suggest, most of us can do this.; that is we don't (won't) know until we try.  In some sense, we should question the labels being placed upon us, perhaps even question The Constitution, something so aptly done in the adaptation of the hit Broadway play, What the Constitution Means to Me.**  In the opening of his book, author and father Donlan wrote: My world used to be vast, but now it is small and strange and bright, and I exist within it in a way I never did before.  This is despite my current compromises.  Maybe it is even because of them.  My daughter sends me out into the world just as my illness is starting to shut that world down.  Together we explore a landscape so compact that I can imagine a map of it fitting into the endpapers of a novel, but simultaneously so vivid and interesting that it belongs there.

    We are in a world not only of hurt, but of change, and maybe we're only now realizing that it's a world that has always existed.  I recently heard about Omar Tello on a BBC broadcast, a man who was so disheartened at the rainforest being cut down at such a rapid rate that he decided to make his own "forest" on 7 hectacres he purchased in his native Ecuador.  He gathered the seeds and seedlings of threatened and endangered plants and trees (the government awarded him a special permit once it discovered what he had already accomplished) and kept at it over decades; he did all of this while the surrounding acreage around him filled with roads and buildings.  Now his forest is indeed a forest, one said to contain more bioflora than most existing rainforests (even birds and other species began returning).  Then came a piece in National Geographic about Machu Picchu that told among other things (such as an estimated 60% of the construction is underground) that the stones used to build the structures were built without mortar and designed to "dance," that is to wobble and settle with the two seismically active fault lines upon which Machu Picchu rests (earthquakes have leveled the nearby cities of Cusco and Lima in past years).  Perhaps that is how we should be, able to shake and adjust and settle as leaders and events change and seemingly crush things around us.  

    So I close with this on proprioception, what's defined by author Donlan as: ...the means --along with vision and the balance organs of the vestibular system-- by which the body creates a sense of itself in space.  Proprioception is a deeply physical business, and yet it's simultaneously a largely intangible one.  It is not just the brain's idea of where the body is from moment to moment.  It is part of what makes a person's physical experiences feel real and personal in the first place...Most people have little need or opportunity to acquaint themselves with proprioception, for the same reason you don't often ponder the dance of electrical energy and resistance that occurs when you fire up your kettle.  Generally, this stuff just works.  Proprioception is a guiding hand so deft and considerate that you might never come close to spotting it, and this is the tragedy of the body's most elegant systems.  You only learn how clever they are when they break -- and when it becomes a matter of how clever they once were...It is hard to spot the things that happen when your brain starts to go wrong, because your brain is the last thing that is going to be able to tell you about it.  I had also read that even today, a snake bite kills a person every five minutes (yes...minutes!).  And that a diluted portion of snake venom is injected into cows and horses to produce what saves people so bitten, antivenom.  Wait, isn't that how vaccines are made?  Ahh, there's that proprioception again, and something destined for another post...

*Said the NY Times, 44,000 meatpackers had tested positive as of last month and 200 had died due to the coronavirus.  An especially scathing report of the disparity in this industry (and our food supply) was highlighted in The New Yorker.  A completely different view featuring the pluses and minuses of the mostly all-inclusive health care system of Canada was featured in The New York Review of Books.

**Now on Amazon, this play brings up some serious questions, not only about our famous document but also of Supreme Court decisions and the rights of women to be protected from abuse (one example being that even with a restraining order from her violent husband, police refused to help as she watched her husband kidnap her 12, 10, and 8-year old children; he then drove to a store, bought a gun, then walked out and shot and killed all of them...the Supreme Court ruled that the police were within their rights not to interfere, a decision which was NOT overturned until some 20+ years later)...yes, THAT sort of revelation appears in the play.  As an added note, creator Heidi Schreck lets audiences know that the word "women" does not appear in The Constitution, but to be fair nether does the word "men."