Re-Solutions

     The new year came and the old year went, although we missed it; our local stations opted to drop the practice of showing the ball drop in Times Square (on the east coast and thus 2 hours ahead of us) in favor of showing the 10 o'clock news and how many highway patrol officers were out and doing DUI (drunk driving) tests.  My wife and I were already in bed reading.  Earlier I had struggled to open a new container of salad dressing, one with that plastic-sealed top that you peel off, the ones that sometime appear to be glued on.   How are the older people supposed to deal with this, I muttered to my wife, and then realized that perhaps I was struggling because well, I was that "older" person.  Dang.  But earlier we had had dinner, poured a glass of champagne, and settled in to enjoy "our" new year's by watching (again) the old Return to Paradise concert by the 70s group, Styx.  It only added to our break from scanning through all the new shows and instead re-watching some of the holiday classics (The Holiday, Love Actually, Notting Hill, The Wedding Date, Knight & Day...okay, I threw that last one in to see if you were paying attention) and we couldn't help but notice how young everyone onscreen appeared.  Twenty, even ten years, is tough if you're in Hollywood.  You face changes (or with an expensive surgeon, IS changed), your reflexes slow, and before long you're forced to realize that it's time to step off of the podium and just be thankful for having made it through all those years past.  Or not.  My mailman is a jokester, arriving each day with a new or fairly new joke, his humor often targeted to the time of year.  He recently arrived and excitedly told me how he was looking forward to the ball dropping at New Year's, partially because he had dropped the ball so often (that sort of humor).  So with all of that I had to wonder whatever happened to Basia, a Polish singer I found innovative and talented back in the day (she's now 68).  Add to all of that the subtle piano version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow in the Norwegian series, A Storm for Christmas (towards the end of Episode 5*), a drifting reflection of a professional solo artist finding himself in the throws of depression and snapped back to life by a child (as a bit of trivia, the studio making the Judy Garland original wanted neither the song nor Judy Garland for the movie...the rest, as they say, is history).

Post- New Year's Eve celebration, Times Square...Photo: Jeena Moon/Reuters

      The other side of this coin are the struggles faced by those past and present, the real life world where so many have anything but "a wonderful life."  Teen suicides are up according to the CDC, coinciding with the increase of guns among the same age group.  And that caused me to reflect on the horrors humans can inflict on fellow humans: the harsh colonial rule of Britain on India,* the Weeping Time (the largest "sale" of human bondage slaves in the South which sold babies as young as 3 months), and the terror of trying to escape Auschwitz and the "brilliant" ways the Nazis hid their actions from the world for so long (and which was so aptly described in The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland).  Such a horror as Auschwitz and Birkenau was perhaps overshadowed by the lack of empathy from much of the world: the papal hierarchy was outraged but couldn't get the support of the Pope; Churchill was outraged but couldn't get the support of his government (he was told it was "out of our power"); the U.S. was outraged but couldn't get the support of its President (bombing even the crematoria or railways was said to be "impractical").  Wrote author Freedland: As it happened, American bombers were in the skies over Auschwitz a matter of weeks later.  On 20 August, the 15th US Air Force unloaded 500-pound bombs on Monowitz, the place Rudi (one of the the prisoners who escaped Auschwitz and co-wrote the Vrba-Wetzler report that exposed Auschwitz's atrocities to the world) had known as Buna when he worked there as a slave during his first few weeks in Auschwitz: that's how close the US bombers would come.  To have struck the gas chambers and crematoria would have entailed diverting those aircraft all of five miles.  The bomber pilots would have known exactly where to direct their ordnance too.  US reconnaissance planes flew over Auschwitz taking aerial photographs often in the spring and summer of 1944, including on 4 April, the day Walter and Fred made their second attempt at escape.  The images were detailed and revealing.  The showed everything the Vrba-Wetzler Report described --the gas chambers, the crematoria, the ramps, the barracks-- if only someone had taken the time to look.  But no one did.  No one ever examined those pictures...Either way, the Allies never did bomb Auschwitz (except once, and that was by accident).

      Surprised?  What of the story by Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Okrent on the 30-year drive by wealthy influencers a hundred years ago seeking to promote eugenics and anti-immigration in the U.S?  They succeeded in their efforts when their proposed doctrine became law in 1921, a law which would stay on the books for over 40 years (it was overturned in 1965).  In his book The Guarded Gate, he wrote of people instrumental to such beliefs, people such as Madison Grant (founder of the Brooklyn Zoo) and his friend H. Fairfield Osborn (director of the American Museum of Natural History), editor Maxwell Perkins (whose clients included Hemingway and Fitzgerald), and Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Teddy Roosevelt who feared "race suicide."  Contrast that with what philanthropist Beverly Tillery told Bloomberg: Hate can be an important and powerful motivating tool, and at the same time, hate without the counter of love can be disillusioning and demoralizing.  Part of what has helped me continue in this work for so long is that I love even more than I hate.  I am driven by my love for my community and the power of people to come together to create beauty despite the pain and harm.  No matter how angry i am about the state of the world, ultimately my love for Black people, queer people, people of color, survivors of violence and other marginalized communities keeps me going.  Added fellow philanthropist Billy Shore: Go into communities you don't know to see what you haven't yet seen and feel what you haven't felt.  Bearing witness makes us complicit.  Whether serving food to refugees on the border in the Rio Grande Valley or trying to get school meals to hungry kids in New York, I've learned that what we see can't be unseen -- and we are left with a profound choice: do something or do nothing.

      A new year often presents us with such choices, all resolutions aside.  Deepak Chopra in his book Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul, wrote that changing our ways and habits requires us to discover what the real drive is behind our over-snacking or our procrastination or our fastidiousness or whatever it is that we seek to change, and that if we don't address the core issue behind it then nothing (or very little) will change.  As to something as horrific as violence (verbal, mental, physical) or even bigotry --or issues such as obesity or a few mental disorders-- he postulated that genes switch on and off constantly and that much of what we are born with is constantly adapting: who we fall in love with, what music we enjoy, what work attracts us, etc.  How else, he asked, could there be an average of over 3 million genetic difference between each person when our bodies only have 20-30,000 genes?  Can such genetic manipulation happening within ourselves and possibly being done by ourselves prove more effective than subjecting our bodies to artificial manipulation (that said, many diseases are genetically inherited and such self-manipulated genetic changes which Chopra postulates would possibly be questioned by medical institutions such as Johns Hopkins). 

The arrival of the 2nd storm brought this...

      My wife presented me with a few "home truths" the other night, those observations that sting because they're difficult, if not impossible, to deny.  She was letting me know that I am appearing to be either reading a book, or checking my email, or working on this blog for hours each day, gripped and entertained by a false reality and missing out on the world out there, on what is actually happening.  Wait, I walk the dog for a few hours (no ear buds ever), and I sometimes go grocery shopping or work outside.  I don't have any interest in video games or channel surfing, or social media (okay, minus writing on this blog) or any of a dozen other points I valiantly tried to bring up; but I knew inside that what she was saying was pretty much right on the mark.  It was too easy to peek at Amazon or gravitate to that clearance aisle in the store, that voice in my head saying, "I don't really need that but look at that price; how could I pass it by?"  The black hole of capitalism was pulling me in and I was indeed losing sight of what was once so much of my inner being.  It was then that I glanced at a piece from Amy Irvine which appeared in Orion: Here are some things I’ve learned.  Ninety-nine percent of U.S.-farmed animals live in crowded, inhumane conditions on factory farms.  Forty-eight percent of Americans admit they rarely or never seek information about where their food is grown or how it is produced.  And for all the science we have, all our fluency for describing the physical world, more than a third of the American public believes that food, even when it comes from living matter, does not contain genes...I have learned that “avoidance coping” is the term for choosing behaviors that allow us to escape distressing thoughts and feelings.  These behaviors incite the precise cognitive dissonance that drives eating disorders—the binge, purge, starvation.  In other words, if I think about food—having it or not having it, how much weight is gained or lost—I don’t have to think about my other problems.  I can forget that only 2 percent of Americans live on family farms now, or that the way we contain animals is paving the way to the next pandemic.  Avoidance coping breeds anxiety like E. coli in a feedlot.  The more I avoid thinking about something unpleasant, the more neurotic-compulsive-obsessive-hysterical I become.  The more I avoid my complicity in the suffering of animals I eat, the more I absorb the violence done to them...So, I think, as cheap vodka comes around again, it’s not about eating meat or not.  Mongolians—like so many other poor, Indigenous people living in increasingly harsh conditions around the globe—will never be able to grow tofu or arugula.  For them, it’s about living small so the animals can live large.  It’s about living so close you see the goop, the grit, the worm.  About not looking away when life drains out.  Being on your knees in that moment, a supplicant to life ending the way you were on the day the same animal was born.

      Basia co-wrote (in her song Promises): We could live our life from history, but there's no future in a memory...here and now is all that it's about.  So how on earth does any of this relate to Styx?  Founded early on and mainly by Dennis DeYoung, the band saw one of their guitarists leave and brought in Tommy Shaw, a gifted guitar player from Alabama who was also quite a songwriter.  The writing of DeYoung and Shaw began getting Styx on the charts (although it was DeYoung's songs that put 8 or their 10 songs in the top 10) but creative differences were brewing; in 1999, DeYoung contracted a virus and was unable to tour so...the band booted him out.  Said a piece in Music News: Although his former bandmates, guitarists Tommy Shaw and J.Y. Young forced him out of the band over 20 years ago, Dennis DeYoung still yearns for a final shot at fronting Styx.  We asked him what it would take to see that happen: “Those two guys.  I would always have been in Styx, except for their decision -- that's a fact. I don't have a grudge.  I have to ax to grind.  No hatchet to bury...You can’t find anywhere where I’ve ever said anything denigrating about what we created.  It doesn’t exist.  I just don’t believe it.  I think, by and large, we did really good work.  We stood for something; we stood for something positive in our music -- it’s a joy to do it (live).  To know I was part of all that stuff and here I stand and I can still duplicate it, so I think: ‘Hey, no complaints from me!'” 

Copepods in a droplet of water.  Photo: Angel Fitor

       Smithsonian featured photographer Angel Fitor and his capturing of the amount of life within each drop of water.  Said part of the article: "Copepods are the most numerous animal on the planet,” says Chad Walter, an emeritus researcher at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History who has been studying them for 40 years. “People think insects are.  But 70 percent of the planet is covered by water, and copepods inhabit all of that.”  These tiny invertebrates can be found in the deepest ocean trenches and the highest alpine lakes, even in damp mosses and wet leaf litter...It’s hard to avoid these relatives of shrimp and lobster—Walter has studied them all over the world, in the Red Sea as well as Antarctica.  Wherever there’s water, copepods thrive.  Considering that 60% of our bodies are water it becomes a bit easier to picture how we can affect change in other lives and within ourselves.  And the same magazine chose not to end the year on a down note but rather on naming five reasons why we should've been optimistic about 2022.  So when my wife and I also reflected on the past year, we also felt optimistic.  Things weren't perfect but on the grand scale, there were so many others facing far more difficult times, and in so many areas of life.  

     Editor Sylvia Killingsworth captured some of this sentiment in her opening remarks to the 2021 edition of The Best American Food Writing: It was a difficult year in which to write, but it was also one of the most urgent.  While making my way through my spreadsheet, I thought often of Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher's How to Cook a Wolf, a wartime volume dedicated to making do with whatever you've got left, in the cupboard and in spirit.  It is a survival manual, which relies less on recipes than it does wit and wisdom.  It is an absolute triumph, and a testament to the fact that good and engaging writing can sustain us for years to come.  It is also a reminder that we have been through tough times before --we likely will again-- and there are others who have gone before us, confronted these same thoughts of desperation, isolation, and loneliness...That you managed to put one foot in front of the other day after day is reason enough to celebrate.  When Dennis DeYoung of Styx wrote Come Sail Away, he also reflected on the good and the bad and on his outlook going forward: I look to the sea.  Reflections in the waves spark my memory, some happy, some sad.  I think of childhood friends and the dreams we had.  We lived happily forever, so the story goes.  But somehow we missed out on the pot of gold.  But we'll try best that we can...to carry on.  To all of you reading this, in all walks of life, I send my wish for 2023...to carry on.

*Although Netflix released this as a series for international viewers, the episodes were seamlessly combined into a movie for the U.S.  And I've thrown in the extra footnote of the somewhat fantastical but spectacular production depicting one version of India's quest to break out of British colonial rule, RRR (Rise, Roar, Revolt).  Suffice to say, the promotional wording says that the film is one of the top ten movies watched in 64 countries and was viewed 47 million times in its first month...