Being Green

     It's not that easy being green, sang Kermit on Sesame Street.  And in today's world, hearing the words "being green" brings to mind everything from the Green New Deal to War Communism, which is not what you think (picture Kamala Harris vs. Joe Biden).  But I prefer to jump back to the words of Kermit: It seems you blend in with so many other ordinary things, and people tend to pass you over.  When my brother and I were much younger --he single in Hawaii and us driving past an endless array of bronzed, fit, and scantily-clad bodies of all sorts in Waikiki-- I asked him how he seemed to avoid all the temptation since he was looking to settle down.  "They all use the same toilet paper, " he told me.  "You need to look for something more."  And right there, he had summed up life in a nutshell.  Take everything away --the money, the fame, the beautiful body, the youth, the muscles, the whatever else you've been led to believe is important-- and it boiled down to...we're all the same.  Thus I was pleasantly surprised to find that the conversation between former-President Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen (depicted in the book, Renegades) was just that...two people just talking, two friends having a laugh and discovering that they shared more than they realized.

     Springsteen's reaction, when first approached by Obama was to think: Okay, I'm just a high school graduate from Freehold, New Jersey, who plays guitar...What's wrong with this picture?...We started at the start: growing up, our similarities, our differences, Hawaii, New Jersey...pretty different; absentee fathers...pretty similar.  Said Obama in his introduction: Good conversations don't follow a script.  Like a good song, they're full of surprises, improvisations, detours.  They may be ground in a specific time and place, reflecting your current state of mind and the current state of the world.  But the best conversations also have a timeless quality, taking you back into the realm of memory, propelling you forward toward your hopes and dreams.  Sharing stories reminds you that you're not alone -- and maybe helps you understand yourself a little better.

      This idea of lasting friendships emerged when my wife and I had a friend stay with us for a week; he was a skier and used our place as a base camp of sorts, something he's done annually for nearly a decade.  And it was during his stay that we began talking about long friendships, friendships built over years and how much time and work those took to build, and that they should be treasured for just that.  Part of this came up because of the divide that had been exposed in our country, a divide that had been there for a long time but one which was had seemingly never been deep enough to destroy friendships, now seemed to be happening.  Reflecting on their childhoods (Obama is 10 years younger than Springsteen), Obama wrote: We watched the same TV shows and listened to the same radio programs.  We loved Westerns and baseball, hot dogs and apple pie, fast cars and Fourth of July parades.  That's the story we told ourselves, anyway.  But it wasn't the whole story.  It left a bunch of stuff out...Bruce and I came of age as young people were challenging a lot of America's most cherished myths about itself.  The result was a growing bitter divide in the country.  A political and culture war that in a lot of ways we're still fighting today.

      One friend of both my skiing visitor and myself has essentially done that, sort of cut us off.  We're still quite civil but it seems that for him, meeting in the middle (or avoiding politics) is pretty much off the table.  And it puzzles us, not that we wanted to sway his opinions or change his views (or vice versa), but that he could seemingly sever something that took decades to build, to pretty much drop the good times of the past all for the sake of not wanting to "agree to disagree."  This is in sharp contrast to another longtime friend of mine who is also nearly 180 degrees from my political leanings (he feels that National Geographic is a bit too "left" to take seriously).  Yet we have vacationed together and traveled together as couples and guess what, the four of us had a great time.  We talked about a lot of subjects but things never got "heated."  We appreciated each other's viewpoints but treated all of it as bits of info that floated by while allowing us to take away what we wanted and providing insight into how our paths, after nearly 50 years, had taken such different directions.  But our friendship overrode the temptation to not be civil.  For some, wrote Obama, "...that kind of reckoning can be uncomfortable.  Even --or maybe especially-- when it's with people we love."

     Another friend of mine told me that she had no interest in reading the book because it was a "male" book, something I hadn't thought about.  But it's true in a sense, my wife being far less interested in hearing me quote a few sections, or at least less interested than I thought she would be.  Here's what I identified with (again from Obama): A topic that comes up between Bruce and me all the time is the message American culture sends to boys about what it means to be a man.  It's a message that, for all the changes that have taken place in our society, hasn't really changed all that much since we were kids: the emphasis on physical toughness and suppressing your feelings, having success defined mainly by what you own and your ability to dominate rather than by your ability to love and care for others.  The tendency to treat women as objects to possess rather than full-fledged partners and fellow citizens.  The more we talked, the more obvious it became how these narrow, distorted ideas of masculinity contributed to so many of the damaging trends we continue to see in the country...

    It would be difficult to lead a country, much less a country the size of the United States.  I can witness the diverse attitudes that exist just within our local community meetings: should an office building be allowed here, should a business get out of paying taxes,* should homeowners be allowed to run an Airbnb from their homes, that sort of thing.  But jump to a state level or a national level and the problem becomes exponential (think mask and vaccine mandates).  So part of the insight from this book, Renegades, was reading the thoughts of a former President about guns and access to assault weapons when 20 children, ages 6 & 7, (as well as 6 adults) were gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, CT. by a 20-year old.  Said Obama: I thought, "All right, Congress is gonna do something about this."  And the closest I ever came to just losing hope about this country was probably after efforts for modest gun safety laws were defeated.  They never even really got called up in the Senate.  After twenty children had been slaughtered like that.  The only time I saw a Secret Service person cry was while I was speaking was at Newtown.  So it happens again, (not long after, a mass shooting occurred at a Bible class in South Carolina) and I say, "You know, I'll want to go to the funeral, but I don't want to speak.  I don't have anything left to say.  I feel like I've used up all my words.  I made practical, rational arguments, emotional arguments.  I've shown anger in speaking about this topic.  I've shown sorrow, and nothing seems to have any impact.  I'm out of words."  Reported Reuters only a few days ago: Already, campuses have been the site of 141 shootings so far during the 2021-22 school year -- more than at any point in the previous decade, according to Everytown for Gun Safety.**   Manhood on display...

     Sang The Four Tops: Now if you feel that you can't go on because all of your hope is gone; and your life is filled with much confusion, until happiness is just an illusion.  And your world around is crumblin' down.  Now darling, reach out.  In an article mentioned in an earlier post, The Atlantic wrote: America has made itself more vulnerable to scourges, even as those scourges grow more potent.  But scourges are also an opportunity: They call on us to reexamine how we live.  Until we begin to look out for the most vulnerable among us, there’s no reason to expect them to abate.  Palliative care physician BJ Miller said on TED: For most people, the scariest thing about death isn't being dead, it's dying, suffering.  It's a key distinction.  To get underneath this, it can be very helpful to tease out suffering which is necessary as it is, from suffering we can change.  The former is a natural, essential part of life, part of the deal, and to this we are called to make space, adjust, grow.  It can be really good to realize forces larger than ourselves...Now, another great thing about necessary suffering is that it is the very thing that unites caregiver and care receiver -- human beings. This, we are finally realizing, is where healing happens.  Yes, compassion --literally, as we learned yesterday- suffering together.  Now, on the systems side, on the other hand, so much of the suffering is unnecessary, invented.  It serves no good purpose.  But the good news is, since this brand of suffering is made up, well, we can change it.  How we die is indeed something we can affect.  Making the system sensitive to this fundamental distinction between necessary and unnecessary suffering gives us our first of three design cues for the day.  After all, our role as caregivers, as people who care, is to relieve suffering -- not add to the pile.

The basic idea of my game, Perceptions...

      Another former President, Jimmy Carter, wrote A Full Life when he was 90, his thoughts having had a long time to simmer.  His summary?  Our government should be known to be opposed to war, dedicated to the resolution of disputes by peaceful means, and, whenever possible, eager to accomplish this goal....We should be willing to lead by example in sharing our great wealth with those in need...There would be no sacrifice in exemplifying these traits.  Instead, our nation's well-being would be enhanced by restoring the trust, admiration, and friendship that our nation formerly enjoyed among other peoples.  At the same time, all Americans could be united in a common commitment to revive and nourish the political and moral values that we have espoused and sought during the past 240 years.  Columnist Timothy P. Carney seemed to add to this thought in his book, Alienated America: Much of America has been left abandoned, without the web of human connections and institutions that make the good life possible.

     But imagine that timeline, now nearly 250 years later.   All that time to build and to impart, to live and to re-live, to pass down generation to generation.  So much time but we, in our individual lifespans, have only a limited amount of it.  Dr. Bruce Greyson, a practicing psychiatrist and for over 40 years, has approached the near-death experience with an open-minded but scientific viewpoint.  Said Greyson in his book After: A lot has been said and written about dying and what may come after, much of it pitting scientific and religious viewpoints against each other...This journey has taught me that approaching the world scientifically, basing our beliefs and understanding on evidence, doesn't have to stop us from appreciating  the spiritual and nonphysical aspects of our lives.  And on the other hand, appreciating the spiritual and nonphysical doesn't have to stop us from evaluating our experiences scientifically, basing our beliefs and understanding on the evidence.  Though I learned a lot about dying and what might come after, this is not a book solely about death.  It is also a book about life and living, about the value of compassion and our interconnectedness with one another, and about what makes a life meaningful and fulfilling.  

     We don't have to die to lose that connection, said Emily Remkina in The Sun as she watched Parkinson's slowly take her father: Recently someone asked me if he died of COVID, and I said no.  She said, “Well, that’s good anyway,” as if there were a hierarchy of ways to die and his were somewhere above COVID.  I imagined a committee sitting around a table, arguing about whether getting hit by lightning was better or worse than starvation, whether a bear attack came above or below breast cancer, where Parkinson’s and dementia fell in relation to dying alone on a breathing machine or in a forest fire or suffocating from a lack of oxygen in the water.  I don’t know whether it matters much which is worse.  I do know that to have a degenerative disease is to lose and lose and lose: abilities, memories, jobs, hobbies, friends, places, freedom.  I know that to love someone with a degenerative disease is to feel those losses every day, to fear them, to plan for them, to be shocked by them.  And yet.

     It all boils down to communication, doesn't it, to talking and sharing and exposing, even if it's only to oursevles.  For us males, that can be difficult.  What, us open up?  One company trying to change that hesitancy but in a fun way is Authentic Agility; their stated goal in creating their games is to spur communication, one of their games titled, Can't We All Just Get Along?  I understand the concept, something I also had as a goal when I created a similar game decades earlier (Perceptions).  Get people to talk, to open up, to agree to disagree but in a fun and innocent manner...even guys (gasp!)  The thing is to do so before it is too late...

     Echoed Obama in the book: Our greatest wish is that our conversations inspire you to go out and start one of your own -- with a friend, family member, coworker, or someone you know only in passing   Someone whose life intersects with yours but whose story you've never really heard.  We're betting that if you listen hard enough, with an open heart, you'll feel encouraged.  Because at a time when it's easy to talk past each other, or just restrict our conversations to those who look or think or pray like we do, the future depends on our ability to recognize how we're all a part of the American story -- and that we can write a new and better chapter together.

     Looking back I never meant this to be an extended review of a single book, nor to take sides or widen a divide.  Rather, this was meant to show that whether you're a former President, even one who is now 97, or a famous rock icon playing in front of hundreds of thousands of people, the sentiments --the hopes and frailties, the parents and spouses, the childhood memories and teenage desires, the upbringings and obstacles-- are all pretty similar to our own.  In the end, when stripped down of all the bravura and power, the rags and riches, the thousands listening or not listening, we all use toilet paper.  Sometimes, as my brother said, we just need to go back and see the basics in order to look deeper, to look for more in people and in us as individuals, to remind ourselves that we became friends with someone for a reason, and that it took time to build that friendship.  And if we can do that, maybe we can look at other issues in the same manner.  A long time ago, the group War asked, Why Can't We Be Friends?  Maybe the question to ask should have also been, why can't we stay friends?

*Salt Lake county proposed giving Facebook $260 million in tax credits to locate one of its facilities here, next to the large already-built NSA government facility; after much debate --water usage being one factor-- that proposal was defeated.   

**My state no longer requires training or a permit for someone to carry a concealed weapon; USCCA puts my state (Utah) as having the highest percentage of people carrying a concealed weapon, over 1 out of every 5 people.  But those are only people who have been issued permits as such.  Since passage of the no training/no permit law, estimates put the figure at nearly 1 out of 4 people in Utah carrying a hidden weapon (yikes!).  Overall, close to 22 million concealed weapon permits have been issued, said The Crime Report...but bear in mind that 21 states no longer require permits to carry a concealed weapon so the totals could be much higher.