Uncomfortable

    When Cat Stevens (now renamed Yusuf Islam and out with a new album) first wrote and sang the song The First Cut Is the Deepest (later made popular by Rod Steward, Sheryl Crow and others), he was writing about heartache.  But the word "cut" has many meanings...a cut in pay, budget cuts, a paper cut, cut it out (a popular children's phrase to stop mucking about), to cut in line, and the phrase, "cut to the bone," which online dictionaries define it this way: Severely reduced, as in "During the Depression Grandmother's housekeeping money was cut to the bone."  The phrase to the bone, literally meaning "through the flesh to the inmost part or core," dates from about 1400.  This expression in effect means that everything extraneous has been cut away so that only bone remains.  

    One would think that as these re-formatted holidays brought friends and family picking and choosing just who to gather with (if anyone at all) that our conversations would grow deeper and more meaningful; and yet our "talk" still seems to be lacking something.  I don't say that lightly or from a high pedestal of my own making because during times such as these we seem to both need and enjoy such light-hearted chatter; after all it's a time to escape our isolation and to catch up on what's been going on: how are the kids, what changes have occurred, anything new happening.  But a quick glance at The Big Interview with Dan Rather (which I've mentioned before) sees that the questions he asks are very pointed but in a welcoming way.  Imagine sitting at a dinner table with your parents or neighbors and being asked this (two questions posed back to back by Rather to David Byrne): "what makes you angry?" and "tell me about a finny moment in your life."  What answers pops into your head?  (okay, STOP right here and think about what you would reply)  And what if the questions grew more involved such as (which I asked at the last dinner I went to), "do you think that you've died before?"

    Before you think that that was a morbid question (admittedly a better wording would have been, do you feel that you've lived another life before?) some of these thoughts seemed to be arriving because 1) I was now substantially older, and 2) thoughts of the coronavirus were indeed everywhere and hauntingly on everyone's minds.  But something else brought such thoughts about as I watched goofy mysteries such as Harrow and Midnight Sun, and that was the world of autopsies.  Yuck, another morbid topic you might say, yet I had to wonder what is it about a lifeless body that so haunts us.  Is it because we see what will eventually happen to us?  Is it because we mourn the loss of that person or pet, witnessing something out of our control, the ending of life?  Or is it something else?

    If you're the one having an autopsy, consider yourself one of the lucky ones...hospitals have gone from doing autopsies on 50% of patients, to 20% of patients, to 5% of patients (insurance doesn't cover the cost of autopsies); said Smithsonian, part of this was pressure from the Trump administration to remove a requirement: ...that hospitals attempt to secure an autopsy in cases where deaths were unusual or could serve an educational purpose like teaching physicians about how a particular disease kills patients.  Why?  As it turns out, autopsies are revealing the way coronavirus inches its way into our bloodstream and our organs.  As you can read in the above article, pathologists are finding the virus moving into our brains and heart, as well as our lungs, and forming clots in our vascular system.  But Covid-19 may be proving to be more of an accelerant, one that taxes and overwhelms our bodies.  Said part of the piece regarding heart inflammation: Instead, pathologists have begun to see evidence that the heart damage is caused by a variety of factors, including blood clots, ventricular strain --a condition in which part of the heart becomes deformed and struggles to pump blood efficiently-- and stress.  Each issue would require a different treatment.

    So this may be a question to ask friends or family members: How are you feeling?  Are you doing okay?  Here's New Yorker writer James Wood describing some of what he witnessed as a child watching his parents in church (this from a piece titled Creating God in print but re-titled Does Knowing God Just Take Practice online): As the chorus soared, earnest hands were raised heavenward—including the hands of my parents, who were always moved by this song to forgo their customary physical reticence.  I would glance sideways at them and then quickly look away, as if I’d witnessed the throes of some primal scene.  The extremity of emotion that pulsed through the congregation every Sunday alarmed me.  I came to think of that church as the place where grownups weep.  Charismatic or evangelical churches are theatres of spiritual catharsis.  You come to such places and lay your burdens before the Lord, open your soul to the Holy Spirit, and “let all the sadness and evil out” (as my mother once put it)...This was where perfectly ordinary English people seemed to lead a kind of double life, an existence that, in its strange abandon and abnormality, appeared almost criminally intense.

    In this case, church would also seem to be an accelerant (or relaxant), a parental "okay," a chance to break away from "normal" societal rules, a respite from the cultural prison bars that cause us to hold in our feelings.  But what happens when we leave church and get home, or go to a friend's house?  And what happens when we encounter people whose views and opinions differ from ours?  A recent anti-vaxxers/anti-maskers rally in Brussels draw 18,000 people (including the highlighted speaker, Robert Kennedy, Jr.) echoing their belief that there was no need to wear a mask (at last count, there were over 470 anti-vaccine/anti-mask sites on the web), perhaps mesmerized by the ultra-conservative Del Bigtree.   So what is the fuss about wearing or not wearing a mask?  For that matter, why does a surgeon need to wear gloves and a mask before operating?  

    A review in the New Yorker wrote: Fifteen years ago, in the first episode of "The Colbert Report," Stephen Colbert coined the term "truthiness," to distinguish those who "know with their heart" from "those who think with their head.".  So let's see, would I vote for someone who had filed for bankrupcy SIX times and was facing 26 women accusing him of sexual assault (not to mention some 4000 pending lawsuits)?   Uh, no...but 70 million people not only would, but did.  So who, if anyone, was right?  Endurance athlete Dr. Peter Attia said: When you stop caring about being right in the eyes of everyone --vs. being right in your own eyes and the eyes of those who matter to you-- it's amazing how little you care to waste energy trying to convince people of your view.*   Put like that, Zeus throwing down lightning bolts seems just as believable an explanation of lightning and thunder as electrons clashing with their positive and negative charges.**

 

    Reading the book Uncomfortable Conversations With A Black Man made me realize that there was much I didn't understand about a lot of things, as if my own "rightness" had built walls around me, walls that ended up not protecting me but isolating me.  As but one example, author Emmanuel Acho asks "what do you call a black person?"  It sounds simple but throw out the obviously hurtful and racially dated terms and you could apply that question to native Americans or Chinese or Inuit (yes, Eskimo has long since vanished from accepted usage).  Wrote Ocho: Remember in school, when a new teacher would ask if anyone had a particular way of saying their name or even went by another name?  Jennifer would say she wanted to be called Jen.  Some guy named Fernando said he preferred going by Flip.  Jonathan, Jr. wanted to be called JJ.  And the teachers, if they cared, marked those names in the roll book, and that was that.  They didn't question why the students had those preferences, they just respected them.  The question of whether to use black or African American is ultimately a preference, one that helps a person present their identity to the world.  Each person you meet might not have a preference, but maybe they do.  Trust me, language matters...again, just ask.***  Luckily, that's not you.  Or is it?  Harvard has a research test to help you find out, and the results may surprise you (it did me).  No data is shared and you can input as much or as little as you want (it's free).  

    We're scared, or appear to be, retreating back into our divisions and "tribes" and traditions and staunch opinions.  Back behind our walls, shields up!  But not all of us.  As the earlier piece in the New Yorker on evangelical happenings mentioned: What was unsettling to the child, in other words, was probably what was so exciting to the adult convert: the drama of transferred authority.  The believing adult, pulled toward the commanding Christ, felt the divine power of God’s call, and the divinely inspired power of the pastors and the elders who voiced that call: You must change your life.  But the unbelieving or skeptical child, with no great desire to change his life, felt abandoned by those who should have been in charge, and wondered furtively at the authority of that divine command.  Whether a parent or a pastor or a government agency such as the CDC, an article in The Conversation reminded us: If you wish to effectively counter misinformation, you need to pay more attention to your audience than to the message you want to convey.

Our latest rescued German Shepherd

    Said a piece in Washingtonian: Money can’t buy a vaccine (not yet, anyway).  But it seems it can buy all kinds of insurance—some psychological protection against the dark, haunting thought that parties and travel and big group dinners might be gone forever.  Take Amina Muaddi heels.  A pair of her sexy-high shoes can run to $1,000, yet Jahangeri’s ( "luxe" stylist, Rebecca “Bex” Jahangeri) customers have been on the stampede.  As soon as the shoes are in stock, they sell out.  “Buying things like that, for the clients,” Jahangeri says, “just kind of gives them hope.”  I mention that because young or old, black or white, rich or poor, mask or no-mask, are any of our conversations "cutting to the bone?"  And more importantly, are we even listening to another's point of view?  

    Your True Nature has a line of "advice" cards (among other things), one of which is Advice From a Glacier: Carve your own path; Go slow; Channel your strengths; Smooth the way for others; Keep moving forward; Avoid meltdowns; Be cool!   As the old adage goes, we can agree to disagree.  Joni Mitchell wrote: I've looked at life from both sides now, From win and lose and still somehow, It's life's illusions I recall...I really don't know life at all.  We'll soon have a new President, and a new occupant with him, a German Shepherd rescued from a shelter.  Perhaps while we sort through the various dialogues going on we can agree that this is something new, something fresh, something to give us all hope that lives, of all viewpoints, are worth saving...

*From the book, Tribe of Mentors by Timothy Ferriss

**Belief in gods and goddesses was well into cultures before monotheistic religions entered the fray.  Said Wikipedia, lightning and thunder gods included Raijin (Japan),  Perun (Slavic), Indra (India), and the well-recognized Thor (Norse).  And yes, I "get" the scientific explanation of lightning but put me on another planet and have me try to convince the occupants of how electrons   --something unseen and basically undiscoverable without sophisticated equipment-- and well, I'd pretty much find the Zeus-thing easier to get across...

***One point he emphasized which I hadn't heard or read before was this:  I've been careful to use the word enslaved to describe black people who were forced into bondage.  There is a big difference between slave and enslaved.  Calling someone a slave is like saying that's what they were, like they were born into this identity, like what's happening to them is in line with who they are.  Enslaved, on the other hand, puts emphasis on what happened.  Enslaved says black people weren't naturally born as slaves: they were coerced into slavery.  Enslaved puts the emphasis on what white people did to black people.