"There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so"

Now's the time during which all of my social media friends start posting about their year. A lot are already summing it up as a horrid one as a result of celebrity deaths. Some just had crappy years; others, not bad one. I haven't heard any really good reflections on the year.

For some reason, summing up a year has never worked for me. I am not saying it is bad or wrong to do so -- just that it has never been something I am inclined to do. And thinking about evaluating my year sort of makes me feel a little squirmy, if I'm being honest.

I think of bad events as bad events, but isolated ones. A year is an artificial construct of the human need to organize its existence. Maybe this is all just another manifestation of my often-visited concept of the real versus the unreal; the idea that there is so much that we see as hard reality that is just plain phony. A "year" is just bookends on the shelf. We just happen to place it between 365-day cycles. It could have been anything in terms of parameters... What's real is the death of a loved one; what's fake is that he died on a "Tuesday." It seems really -- at the lest -- unhelpful to call a whole 365-day cycle "bad" because within the same span in which one's car was "totaled."

Contrary to what I said above, maybe it is bad. It's really a kind of pessimism to label a year as bad because it contained a few -- or even a lot of -- bad events. Yeah...see? I was trying to be nice, but I think it is bad.

I think my other "problem" might be that I have always naturally done what a lot of people seem to have a hard time with. I really seem to "live in the moment." (Sometimes, this can be a problem...but that is another post.) For me, though, benchmarks have never really meant much. New Year's Eve means nothing to me. Graduations have always been something to get over with. I knew, sitting on the football field of Eastern High School in 1986, that I would be no different of a person the next day than I was before... There really is -- cliche, though it may be -- only now.

David Bowie, Gene Wilder, the all-of-a-sudden-beloved Alan Rickman and, now, George Michael were not killed by 2016 -- they just happened to die within the artificial frame created by humans.

So, no, it wasn't a bad year. Not to me. I'm sorry we lost those people -- especially Gene Wilder. But I just can't make it work out to a post about how mad I am at 2016. It's like blaming the shoe box for the shoes' fit.

As I looked up who died in 2016 for this piece, I saw an article for The Mirror: "Why have so many celebrities died in 2016?" Are people really reading stuff like that for "answers"?

Each of the people we lost is bigger than a calendar with inked borders, so let's not reduce them to some superstitious cause. We might as well go back to blaming fairies for stuff.

Pleasant Medicines

What we all need to do is find pleasant medicines. This is a little north of the whole idea of a spoonful of sugar helping the medicine go down. The things that are good for us can be pleasant.

People have found this, but very few talk about it. Devoted runners, for instance, almost always love running. Some athletes are forced to run for their sports, but runners do it out of love for the process.

But I hate running.

I also hate lifting weights. And most other forms of physical exertion. So, not pleasant medicines.

I was inspired to write this as I finished my last sip of cold green tea a few moments ago. I brew it each week and I drink it throughout my work day. Since I started this, my weight loss per week (something I have been working hard on) has doubled. The health benefits of green tea are almost universally supported by research. And I like it. Pleasant medicine.

I have also been practicing yoga. It is making me stronger and more flexible. I could get stronger and more flexible in a million unpleasant ways, but yoga actually feels good when I am doing it. I look forward to it each day. I have never looked forward to any form of exercise. WhemI was an athlete, it was just something that came with the territory, as it were. I did it because I was forced to.

Can't we all find pleasant things to do that make us more healthy? I sure can't be easy, because it took me forty-nine years to latch on to a mere two "pleasant medicines." But I intend to look for more ways to do things that are good for me that I actually enjoy.

Everyone talks about healthful living as if it is a burden. It really does not have to be. But, as I find with most things, you need to be philosophical about it to be happy and consistent.

Bigger Than Trump

So here we are. President Donald Trump.

I am tremendously surprised. Never thought it would happen. But I am certainly not going to contribute to the over-dramatics.

It's no secret I don't like the man. He is, as far as I am concerned, a horrible role model for our country and for our kids. But that does not matter anymore. It has not, for awhile. Bill Clinton was up to all kinds of inappropriate hoo-ha in the oval office, and it didn't put an dent in his presidency or his legacy.

I still think The President of the United States should be a gentleman/lady, but I am in the minority.

I haven't had to think about that much, because our last eight years have seen a true gentleman in office. Many disagree with his actions and policies, but it would be hard to say he was not the consummate gentleman.

There are those who argue that it does not matter; that a worm can, in fact, be a good president (which, at this point, I certainly hope is true). But I still have a problem with the fact that my countrymen elected a man who refers to grabbing women "by the p--." And, no, this is not standard locker-room talk. This is misogyny. If you disagree, you are like Trump.

All that aside, I think we all need to calm down. We have spent months as ants under the proverbial sun-focusing magnifying glass.

We have a system of checks and balances. Trump will not become a dictator.

True -- it has happened in the past. But, in the past, the governments in question have not been as brilliantly conceived as ours. I still have profound faith in the work of the Founding Fathers. Their foresight will hold things together. I have never had less respect for a president, but I do not believe he will be allowed to run rampant.

The pendulum is at the top of its rightward swing. It will, as it always has, go back and find itself in an equally ridiculous leftward place and everywhere in-between, over and over, even after we are all long-gone.

But, most importantly, I would appeal to everyone's innate ability to perform a lost art: transcendence. Life is so much bigger than politics. Yes, I know -- politics in the hands of evil people can lead to the end of life or even to life-in-death. When it gets to that level, we fight. Before it gets to that level, we should fight with pens and protests, but, in the end, we still have something much bigger than laws and court rulings and unfair taxes. We have lives.

One human soul, "like gold to airy thinness beat," stretches wider and farther than politics, elections, government or the whole stretch of human history. Real change will come when we harness that; not when we strap ourselves into a flawed system and then complain about where it takes us and then argue about it on Facebook.

But, in the meantime, the morning after the election...

...love remained. Husbands and wives kissed each other goodbye. Music was beautiful as ever. Babies still smiled. And children woke up recharged by their dreams and hopes as they trudged with backpack-drooped shoulders through the crackling leaves. Dogs stretched as they did yesterday and cats cleaned themselves on window-ledges, as ever before. God sat, chin on one hand, smiling gently, waiting. 

What will we do now? Each of us? It is easy to vote. It is harder to do stuff to make things better.

The Yellowing Pages

I used to escape from the loud house-full of happy Philadelphia-area Italians into my grandmother's basement. Down I would float down over stairs that were wearied over the years into a flexing, barely perceptible bounce by playing shoes and late-to-work shoes and furniture-moving shoes. Down, I'd go, into the deep smell of earth, books, boxes and gently musty air that floated cool between cinder-block borders broken only by thick block glass squares in rectangular rows that let in just enough light to color the basement into more of a secret world than a scary place.

My retreat spot lay over by the little book case filled with aging paperbacks standing at attention under the shoulder-to-shoulder pressure of each other. I'd sit on the carpet under rafters hung with aged and drying red peppers...but first, to re-inspect the weathered half-barrel that hung on the wall.

It look very much like this more famous book. 

I'd open the clasp on the front and it would swing open to reveal gold-rimmed shot glasses and Scotch glasses and tumblers in neat semicircular rows, each half-sunken into its wooden nest. Just a peep, to see the secrets inside and to hear  the echoes of parties that had been centered around it as my impossibly-young grandparents poured ice-tinkling drinks for guests whom I pictured to be composed of black and white movie flickers; the women trim and jaunty in their wide hats, like Lois Lane from the George Reeves Superman show; the men in double-breasted suits with hats cocked sideways. The laughter muffled itself as I pulled the sides of the barrel to; stopped as I fastened the clasp.

Below crouched the book case, itself, swirled in antique yellow, its outer frame planed into symmetrical undulations, little circles carved into the corners by the cabinetmaker's hand. Sitting Indian-style (it was okay to call it that, then) on the old, green, sculptured carpet, I could see the book I had left from our last trip to visit Grandmom here in Northeast Philly. I'd left a toothpick in it to mark my place. On the cover was a painting of four men in a life raft, sprawled and tumbling, mouths shaped into replica fear as they tumbled amid white-capped oil-painted waves.

I opened it and fell back into its story of four American pilots shot down over the Pacific -- this book written decades before I was born by someone nobody remembers -- whose name might not even have been what was written -- but who managed to crank out solid pulp fiction for a living. The characters wielded names like "Nick Andersen" and "Captain Buck Blake" and they talked about cigarettes and "dames" as they snagged sea turtles and drank their blood or after they'd paddled off a school of tiger sharks. You could almost see the aesthetic way their shirts frayed; how they fiction-burned, instead of suffering under the misery of bubbling skin and cracking lips. They endured heroically in that silver-screen way.

But I don't remember the story -- that one or any of the other dozens I read -- much. What I do remember is how I always noticed the way the pages were framed in yellowing age. I would wonder how many year that took to happen; how old you'd needed to be to own a book that had turned yellow... Then, in the low light, I'd sink back into the adventure, still aware of the darkening edges cupping the words like, hands full of water, on the page.

Now, unlike most grown-ups, each year I suffer that same, sad, downward tug at my heart as the school year stands only a tomorrow away from me. And as I wait, inhaling the coquettish scent of fall that teases the time for school, I then exhale and look at the book I am now re-reading; a book that hand-holds its reader barefoot through the grass of summer into the day before the stiff new shoes of September have to cage the toes: Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine. And I feel the hearts of Douglas and Tom Spaulding as their summer of 1928 closes like my Grandmother's old barrel. I feel like a boy each year at this time, filled with the leaden resignation that the freedoms of July and August are soon to be no more.

But as I look at the pages, a book that I bought myself, brand new, I see what I once used to think the province of those born in the black-and-white days: alas, the pages are beginning to yellow. My own pages. And so, the words in my own little boy heart are cupped by the gentle but ever progressing yellow edges of time...

The bookshelf is mine, now, and it stands in my living room, filled with books of poetry. Some day, my sons will find Keats there. Or Sandburg or Heaney. But the men in the life raft have long since gone to dust.

An Ent-at-Heart Speaks on Political Correctness

I am finally ready to say what I think of the idea of "political correctness." It has taken me decades to come to a conclusion. Entish of me, I know, but I am reluctant to speak before I am sure of not only what I feel, but of what I think.

In order to remain rational, we have to define not only what "political correctness" is but what it is not. (Which is hard, because, what the hell does that phrase mean, anyway? -- "politically correct"? It really is doublespeak in the truest sense. It's horrible, linguistically.)

Edward Hopper

At any rate, political correctness is not some system that is in place with a head office, a list of bylaws and delineated consequences. Yet, people seem to see it this way. It is not an active governmental program designed to suppress free speech. Yet, people seem to see it this way.

Political correctness is a concept. And like many other artificial social constructs, it wants to be seen as a structure of stone and steel; as something real. In the end, it is no more than an idea. Ideas are important, of course -- maybe the most important force in the world, but an idea that is seen as a rulebook, when it is not, is, at best, imperfect, at worst a virus (for good or ill, depending on your view) in the program that is the collective consciousness of a culture.

Generally, PC seeks to define what is okay to say and what is not. It is not about choosing what to say based on your values and emotional intelligence, it is about prescribing what is allowable to say. Not that there are any teeth in it, mind you....it is just an idea. 

That is what we do with language in 2016. We depersonalize and we prescribe. We move things away from personal responsibility and into some hazy entity of a program we ought to follow -- that we wind up feeling pressured into following; in this case, a program that does not exist in any official sense; a program in which broken rules have no tangible consequences.

The problem is that the more we depersonalize, the more we become empty rule-followers; the spirit is no longer behind the actions; the actions are performed just out of a vague sense that the rules simply must be followed. Don't think; do or do not. Sounds a lot like what people criticize religion for. (Though, at least in terms of Christianity, one glance at the Adam and Eve story will clearly tell you that a blind following of the rules is not what God wants...He wants voluntary good behavior, or He never would have made it a choice.) 

What was wrong with "having manners"? Think of the difference between parents and grandparents telling their beloved children what is polite and people following a list of politically correct terms. Think of the difference in tone between "having manners" and "being politically correct."

My wife and I ate brunch at a great restaurant in Philly, two days ago, but we had a waiter who depersonalized everything. Some waiters say, "I'll be taking care of you." He said "I will be your server." When he asked how he meal was, he didn't say, "I am glad you liked it." He said, "I'm glad it was enjoyable." Everything he said kept us at arms' length. A week earlier, we had had a waitress who was such a warm and witty sweetheart, that a stark contrast was all the more vivid... We engaged with her in our dining experience, but this guy basically just put the plates down for us: the difference between human interaction and mechanical action. He was doing his job; she was being friendly, for her pleasure and for ours.

Rubens

To paraphrase George Carlin -- who was referencing Vietnam vets -- if we still called the condition soldiers suffer after battle "shell-shock" and hadn't changed it to "post-traumatic stress disorder," the soldiers might have gotten the help they needed faster. Plain language is more personal; a more poetic phrase -- an onomatopoetic one like "shell-shock" -- is no+t just for the brain, it is for the heart. It begs for engagement and shared feelings. 

In the process of depersonalizing, we weaken the connection of our intentions to our words and to our actions -- and to each other. Once we lose the connection between words and sincerity, the action that follows them becomes a simple laying down of the plates; there is no shared humanity. 

As a teacher, for instance, I never have made (and never will make) a student apologize for having done something. What good is an apology that is not meant? I will ask a student if he thinks he wants to apologize. And often they do. A forced apology, however, is worthless -- an empty action. 

So, instead of giving people a list of things that are "politically correct" to say, what is wrong with stressing manners? Be nice. Treat others with respect. Old fashioned, I know. But so is sitting on the front porch and talking to neighbors on a summer night. 

One argument in favor of political correctness is that one group gets to decide what they would like to hear or to be called. But long before political correctness existed, people told me, as a child, what was polite and not polite to say -- people I respected taught me to be respectful; that every human deserves some respect for being a human. Sure, it is the lowest level of respect, but it amounts to human decency. It is simple respect for life. (Hell, I even have respect for trees.) 

I know, I know...some people don't have that kind of guidance. So what? Let's work more on developing values than on creating lists. Let's offer parenting theory courses in high schools. Let's bring our kids back to church. Whatever it takes to focus on values and the concept of respect for our fellow humans. If you roll your eyes at this, then, yes, you're right; it's too late, I guess. If you consider it possible, there's hope.

If our child-rearing concept is to collapse, then, what's wrong with sorting things out through people's reaction  to what we say? What's wrong with hearing, "Hey, could you not call me that?" For that matter, how about a nice brawl over an insult. Someone has to learn something from that, in the end.

Once, in class I taught at Rutgers, we were discussing the term "African American," which I was defending, and a black man in the class sat in the back shaking his head. I asked him what he wanted to say and he declared that he hated the term African American, because, although he is black, he was not of African descent. He preferred "black". See, I had to engage with him to find that out. This conversation hurt no one and now at least 25 people knew what he preferred. No bloody noses; 100% real human interaction; point made.

People defend political correctness and people call it the great plague of free speech. But I think that those who call it the plague of free speech are almost seeing it as something that is concrete. What that makes is a kind of gaseous cloud of language-bullying. It floats over our heads and we bow to its gloomy weight. Political correctness is only as powerful as we make it and we make it too powerful.

Manners. We need manners. We need to interact more as if we live on the same planet. Right now, political correctness is the teacher holding two kids by the backs of their collars three minutes after fisticuffs on the playground and forcing them to be friends again. If that teacher would just talk to them...like human beings...they might actually wind up seeing how silly their conflict was; they might even walk out of the room arm-in-arm.