It's the Olympics

I spent last week in the hospital having some of my lower g.i. tract removed. It was a medical emergency; I almost died; and I narrowly escaped gangrene of my intestine.

TMI? I certainly hope so.

But the experience gave me some time to think. Hours and hours, actually, and in my ruminations I was only partially distracted by the television broadcast of the Olympic games out of London. NBC did an excellent job of bringing these games into our homes with only our remote controls to protect us.

Those who know me understand that I am not a sports fan. Never have been. Caveat: Cardinal baseball. But most sporting events, in my view, pale in comparison to watching paint dry as entertainment. So, I am not among the Americans who have been glued to the idiot box night after night in breathless anticipation of flying squirrels or feetless runners or any such thing. And the whole celebrity and hoopla surrounding these games leaves a taste in my mouth.

It occurs to me: is this really valuable ultimately? Millions are spent, so money changes hands, and at least the British economy gets a shot in the arm. But do we really want to send all the messages we are sending in this context? Let's take a look:

We are rewarding young people for devoting a significant part of their young lives training for thousands of man hours to do one small, simple, intrinsically valueless task very, very well. Okay, fine, self-discipline, a work ethic, a dedication to one's own passion, a sense of sportsmanship, fair competition, and the glamor of the world stage are all paradigms and experiences that are valuable to teach, if you can. Plus, there is a chance, while viewing this world stage, that we may come to feel a sense of community with the whole world,  a sense of community, of commonality, of shared humanity.

But from another viewpoint, do we want to send a message that after all these thousands of man hours of training, the athlete can flip around in mid air and plunge into water without making much splash. Then what? Can you get hired doing that? What is the value? What does that skill really get you?

Some athletes, I guess, parlay their medals into lifelong careers. Many, many don't. And after four or eight or 12 years or more of slicing into water splashlessly, what has been given to the world?

I would like to propose a different Olympics. I would like for us to reward our best contributors to the society with medals of gold, silver and bronze for competing and succeeding in feats of strength that include, for instance:

• finding a source of inexhaustible energy that doesn't tear up the planet

• destroying the HIV wherever and however it appears

• eliminating hunger all over the world

• finding a strong and inarguable reason why people should treat each other with fairness and justice — even when there is lots of money and power to be won by brutalizing people

• organizing working class people into a cohesive force that can resist the powers that be in industry — big money that can and will enslave us economically and in every way if it can

• curing cancer, diabetes and heart disease even though there is so much money to be made by somebody if we DON'T cure these diseases

The list goes on and on. 

Can we teach ourselves and our children that real achievement, real excellence may have little or nothing to do with athletics? It may have everything to do with a devotion of thousands of man hours toward math, science, social causes, and the academic disciplines that must be exploited to fix all of our many, many problems planet-wide.

Let's reward those real achievers with two weeks of prime time coverage and a fawning, worshipful audience of billions. Let's create mini-documentaries profiling real cutting edge scientists of a very young age and ask them to explain how their particular discipline stands a chance of improving life on earth.  Let's venerate the contributions of people whose contributions are valuable and leave behind the more questionable idolization of young people who render vertical dives with little splash.

My Heart is Breaking

There was an episode yesterday, and I want to talk about it. I've been up half the night, crying and remembering. My heart is breaking, and I'm not entirely sure why.

I may have mentioned some time ago that I became enraged by a co-worker, an elderly, fat, Germanic bigot who used to work with me at Costco. His racist, hateful remarks had for a long time been the source of unending aggravation to me, and I was not at all sorry to see him fired several months ago.

It may have been as much as a year ago when one of his remarks occurred that I will tell you about. There is a couple who frequented Costco who were of some other nationality. That's all it took for Ted. They dress in what I guess is traditional Pakistani garb. The man wore a fez of sorts, and carried a cane. She wore a sari of some kind. They were always together, inseparable. I was friendly to them, offering them samples, and they were friendly back, although the man did most of the talking.

On one particular day, they strolled by, and I was standing near Ted, the racist. He looked at me, then looked at the floor, shook his head, and lamented, "What is this country coming to?" His demeanor was one of disgust.

I took this episode, in combination with several similar episodes, as reason to take a thorough dislike to Ted. My positive reaction was to make it my business to be especially warm to this couple whenever they came thru the store.

She was in yesterday with her son (a stunningly beautiful man in his 30s. Breathtaking.) I almost didn't recognize her without her husband. Her son approached and I gave him a sample. She followed him over to me. She came very close to me and said, "You know my husband." It wasn't a question.

I nodded.

"Well, he died. His heart." Her English was limited, but she curled her hand up near her own heart. The look on her face was heartbreaking.

I was very stunned and quite upset. Abruptly, I was flooded with memories of the loss of my husband and the pain I went through. I saw in my mind's eye what this poor woman was going through and what she had yet to go through. I wept and hugged her. She wept, too.

I think the beautiful son (she has at least 2 sons, both handsome) was quite taken aback by my response. I explained that my husband died from his heart also, and I am so very, very sorry for her loss.

She walked away with the son eventually, but he came back in a few minutes to ask me where we keep something or other. I quizzed him. His father passed about six weeks ago (her wound is open) during an operation to replace a heart valve. The surgery went badly, and he died on the table. He had been married for 57 years. The son told me that his parents never left the house separately. They were together every day for 57 years, deeply in love.

He told me he is sorry for my loss. He wanted to know how long ago my husband passed. I told him six years. He asked me how long it took before the pain calmed down. I told him I'd let him know if that ever happens.

He told me he would pray for me, this Muslim man. How sweet. I am praying for his family, too, that their wounds would close.

I asked what his father's profession was. He was a college professor, very educated, very well read, very knowledgeable. The opposite of Ted, who reviled him for his ethnicity.

I suppose I am selfish and it is just the flood of emotions from my own loss that has me so upset. I've been crying since 3 this morning, and finally got up. I hardly know these people. I don't know their names at all. But the misery on that woman's face when she told me of her loss was so much that it all came back on me.

Why Christians Should be Liberals

I have to give the conservative Republican Party some serious kudos for the way it has seduced and exploited the religious citizens among us. Based on one solitary issue that got started in the 70s — the belief that fetuses have a soul at conception — the lovely GOP has courted and played the fundamentalist Christians like a fast-talking carny.

Good work. You have managed to parlay that one issue into a political platform that completely subverts almost all of the principles that Christians are supposed to embrace. What efficacious grifters you are.

Now the Tea Party comes along. This is a group that I think of as Xtreme Republicans. The main idea here is to cut taxes and get government out of our day-to-day lives. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Sounds like a trumpeted fanfare for religious freedom. Sounds like economic freedom too, huh?

But then wait a minute. We go on to cut these taxes by cutting social programs to those who need them most: poor people. We also fight valiantly the notion of increasing taxes on the wealthy. We attain economic freedom for ourselves — and by “ourselves,” I mean rich white people — by referring to these social programs pejoratively as “entitlements” with a sneer of sarcastic contempt. Rich people, it is pontificated, pay their own way and carry their own weight, and should be left to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Or investments. Or inheritances. Or whatever. To hell with those who can’t get hired, can’t get educated to get hired, or carry some offensive attribute like melanin that limits their potential for economic success. They deserve no pity, and we’re all sick of them.

Sound just like something Jesus would say, doesn’t it? Why, that sentiment is nearly a direct quote from the Beatitudes.

Not.

Even conservative economist Frederick Hayek some years ago advocated a sort of social insurance to guard less wealthy citizens against what he called “the hazards of life,” including health crises. But that was then. Today’s conservatives, while claiming to be followers of Jesus, eschew the cries of the poor and the weak while genuflecting to the rich and the powerful.

At a Tea Party debate recently, audience members cheered and yelled, “Yeah!” at the suggestion that an uninsured sick man should be left to die of his illness and the government should do nothing to help him. It was, after all, his own fault for not buying insurance. Stupid, lazy cretin should get what he has coming, I suppose. The nerve of this hypothetical guy, opting to buy improvident luxuries like food and electricity instead of health insurance.

Never mind about being a Christian. If you are a Muslim or a Hindu or an atheist, that sentiment — let people die if they’re poor— is just plain uncivilized in any worldview.

One school of thought says that God rewards those who please him with prosperity. Conversely, poor people must have done something to displease God, and poverty is their punishment. It’s just another variation on the old “everyone should be just like me” sanctimony that we have too much of already, don’t we? It also seems to ignore the parable about the poor widow who gave her last little bit of money to God. She was not rewarded with copious wealth. But she was held up as an icon of virtue, which should count for a lot.

I won’t belabor the camel and the eye of the needle.

I see Jesus telling His followers that we will always have the poor with us. He did not go on to say that we should ignore them, mistreat them, withhold help from them, or dismiss them as worthy of death because they lack resources. Quite the opposite. I see that the first century Christians pooled all that they had and shared it equally — a rudimentary form of socialism that flies right into the face of the Tea Party and its mandate to protect the wealth of the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

Let’s get this straight. The Tea Party and its friends in the GOP do not represent the philosophy of life Jesus set out for us. The timbre of these political groups is to keep everything for the “haves” and withhold from the “have-nots.” Don’t share. Don’t act with charity or generosity. If you do opt for generosity, do it through a church so that it is entirely volunteerism. Don’t tolerate it as a function of government. That way there is no danger of helping people on a mass scale, even though poverty has hit this nation on a mass scale. Protect rich people from all of that nasty noblesse oblige.

Why are Christians listening to this hatefulness? Why are they giving their money to support candidates of this ilk?

Statisticians report that in America today 80 percent of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of two percent of the population. The poverty line has now overtaken 15.1 percent of the American population — up four percent in less than a decade. There is something deeply wrong with that. It may remind the more cosmopolitan among us of the writings of Karl Marx who outlined long ago that Capital intends to drive down wages and funnel wealth to the top of the economic ladder. I regret to tell Mr. Marx that we are no longer funneling wealth upward. We are, in fact, shoveling it.

As the middle class disappears, enlarging the poverty-riddled class, and the chasm between very rich and very poor widens, Christians ought to be asking themselves: Is this what Jesus would do?

I don’t happen to believe the party line that suggests that the trumpeting Christians in the GOP actually want a theocracy. But it’s highly quotable from the pulpit. Church leaders who stand on pulpits and endorse the hateful, ugly, xenophobic, intolerant, uncharitable words of the Becks and the Limbaughs seem to think that a theocracy would be the way to go. Let’s return our country to Christian values. However, the disconnect between those Christian values and the intolerance of the Tea Party is glossed over with nary a thought.

Journalist and pundit Eugene Robinson wrote recently that “government is an expression of our collective values.” If our collective values are to be Christian ones, it is incumbent upon us to have compassion for those in need — especially as their numbers swell. Such values are clearly inconsistent with the extreme GOP who wants to write off the entire body of struggling Americans.

The conservative side of the aisle is well-named. Conservatives seem to want to conserve everything for themselves. Witness Mr. Behner who recently declared that he would oppose any debt reduction plan that increases taxes on wealthy Americans.

Mr. Behner needs to take note that as the funneling becomes shoveling and more American’s are forced to the poverty line, more public assistance will be necessary and more taxes will be required to meet the demand.

The craven fear that someone might receive something he didn’t (or couldn’t) work for has reached an alarming temperature. I hear conservatives loudly declaring their faith in Jesus Christ in one breath while they oppose every Christian principle with the next breath. A great strategy: we can get the religious right to put us in office while we simultaneously act in our own best interest and against the basic tenets of Christianity. And the church-going faithful have fallen for this malarkey hook, line and sermon.

Christians should fight this sentiment body and soul. Don’t, Mr. Preacherman, tell me we need to return to Christian values in our government, and then in the next sentence tell me that welfare recipients are lazy, feckless, and an unfair burden on the taxpayer. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t want a Christ-centered government without a Christ-centered view of the poor. Doesn’t track.

Christians should be liberals. They should be liberal in charity, in care for the disadvantaged, in love for all people regardless of their skin color, their sexual orientation, or the heft of their bank account.

Christians should be liberal in tolerance and understanding of folks who are made less successful by their culture, ethnicity, circumstances, medical needs, and intellectual equity.

I call on Christians in every church in America to get it right. The Republican platform is as far from the Jesus platform as it can get. We’ve been made into mindless flunkies by the likes of the Christ-proclaiming politicians and pundits who advocate every anti-Christian principle. They are a walking, talking obscenity. For many of them, the rhetoric is transparent. There is an inclusiveness that is exclusive. The message is to support values that protect those who are just like us while abandoning those who are different — those who don’t have the "right" values.

What??

Christians should reject this us-vs.-them philosophy that has taken over religious thinking — the notion that those who suffer present a threat to the rest of us. There is one race — human. There is one Lord, faith and baptism. It applies to everyone. There is no “those people.” We are all us, and we need to act the part. I don’t see that in the Tea Party, and I don’t see it in any political ideology that shores up the rich against the poor.

Why I Don't Understand Black People

Frank, my good friend who plays saxophone marvelously, called this week. He told me that he has been in touch with people he believes can help his music career. He is trying to think of ways to include me so that I can benefit from it, too.

I had an awful week, and was so out of energy and so despondent that his words just sounded to me like another potential disappointment. So, I began crying on the phone, which understandably shocked him.

But then, to cheer me, he gave me a compliment that was really from his heart, and while it was untrue, and meant nothing to me at the time, last night I began thinking about it while lying awake, staring at the ceiling fan. It may have been the nicest compliment I have ever received from anyone in my whole life, let alone from a middle-aged black man who has the experience and street cred to know whereof he speaks.

Frank told me that, even though I'm white, I GET black people.

Now, as I say, this is untrue. White people do not GET black people. It's physically impossible because of the continuity of being black. But it still warmed me immensely to hear him say that because it's what I have always wanted. I've always wanted to be a bridge between communities and to build understanding and intimacy. I think it's the only way to have a civilization.

I want to explain what I mean about the "continuity" of being black, as it was explained to me by a friend, Puddin' Pie Moss.

Pie told me that he is black continuously. There is no escaping it. When he walks down the street, people he sees a half a block away have formed an opinion of him, based on his skin, before he ever gets close enough to them to speak.

When he is in the black community surrounded by black people, there is a specific dynamic that whites can observe, but can't be a part of. And it's not always very good. This dynamic is both inclusive and demeaning. Some of these folks do, you know, call each other the "N" word, and it's accepted. But if I did it, it wouldn't be. That "N" word reinforces the sense of unity and community, but it also demeans and denegrates. It says, "Yeah, you're one of us, but as such, your're in the same sinking boat. It's us versus a juggernaut of white power."

So Pie, within the confines of his friends, family, and neighbors, is largely defined by something that is both strenthening and pejorative.

But, when Pie is in the white community, the dynamic changes in ways that are easier to predict, but sometimes very hard for whites to identify because it's a subtle dynamic. The little non-verbal messages that black folks get from whites all the time are often things whites don't even know they're saying or doing, but they come across loud and clear.

"You're probably a criminal, or at best, not someone I should trust." "You aren't as good as me." "I'll hire you if someone makes me, but you should view it as a gift." "You're gonna have to be twice as good to be regarded as half as valuable." "I'm afraid of you and what you may represent." "You and I have no common ground. None at all. We shall not talk because there's nothing to say."

Rick, a black man, once told me that at the hospital where we both worked, a place where he was as comfortable and relaxed as any place in his life, he stepped into an elevator one day. An elderly white woman in the elevator took one look at my friend's dark face, and clutched her purse tightly to her chest.

My friend felt like he'd been cold-cocked.

This assault certainly wasn't subtle to Rick. But it's pretty fair to assume that this frail little woman had no idea at all that she had hurt him.

Now, I'm a white person who has tried pretty hard for many years to understand how black people feel. The innate racism in this country is not that hard to document. Whoopi Goldberg does not have to scream at me on "The View" that racism is real. She's a black woman, albeit a wealthy one. I'm willing to take her word for it.

And I can also catch on that within the black community, there is another form of racism that suggests to young people that they will never be allowed to succeed in the white world, and if they do, it will be such a rare, miraculous thing that it will be tantamount to a Powerball win. "So, take our word for it. Limit your expectations, give the minimum effort, and ratchet back your personal goals, cause you aren't going anywhere."

If a young black man is convinced by his friends that the only way to get over in this life is to take short cuts that will borrow a lot of trouble for himself, that is destructive. But if he buys the party line, stays in school, gets the education, struggles to succeed and then goes off into a white-dominated world and learns to embrace the same hopelessness and inevitable failure there, that's just as destructive.

Which is worse? I don't know.

The only thing this young black man knows for an ironclad certainty is that he's black. And he always will be. He has the continuity.

White people have it another way. Ones like me who have been accused of being bleeding hearts can thrust our psyches into what it must be like to have these subtle, disheartening messages piled on top of our every-day struggles. We can tell ourselves, "Oh, my! How hurt and insulted would I be if a stranger clutched her purse to her chest when I got in the elevator."

But I'll never live it. Empathy and imagination nothwithstanding, I have no continuity.

We well-intentioned white people can try to walk in a black man's moccasins if we so choose, but afterwards, we can and will hide behind our white skin. We can stop being black with a toggle switch in our imagination. Even if we are white people who are poor and struggling, we don't have the continuity, the inescapability, of being black in culture that thrives on divisiveness. And without that, we can't really understand.

Death of an American Icon

As you know, the Lou was in the national news yesterday because of the sell-out of Anheuser Busch to InBev.

The InBev leader appears to be the only one happy about this. No one in the Lou is. To no one's surprise, the first change made will be to cut costs. That means labor, benefits, and probably charitable contributions. InBev in Belgium has no charity program, so it is unlikely that the $13 million/year that AB gives to local charities will not be affected.

There was a movement on to stop the takeover and my cousin, Dan, was on the front lines. It was a wasted effort, though, because the takeover was inevitable. In the end, InBev sweetened the deal considerably, and that caused the change to become a "merger" rather than a "hostile takeover." But I don't personally see the diff.

Things that make sense always take a back seat to things that make money. And if AB had been able to fight off this merger, it would have had to raise capital anyway by making the same cuts in salaries and bennies, etc. that InBev is making, so the end result would be the same.

The only thing that opponents could have achieved is keeping a foreign national from assuming ownership of an American icon. I think we should get used to this kind of thing, though. It certainly appears that America's tenure as a world power is drawing to a close. Our dollar is weak, our economy is shot, our leaders are stupid and our values are skewed. We place way too much importance on irrelevancies, and not enough on important matters.

In Memoriam: Customer Service

My bank did not do a mitzvah recently when the car burned up in August. It took seven weeks to get my insurance settlement. Shelter Insurance sent a check to my bank with dispatch to pay off what I owed on the car, almost $4,800. Three weeks elapsed and I called Shelter to find out why I hadn’t heard from them about my settlement. They had not received the title from the bank. I called the bank. They had never received the check.

Ms. Brooks assured me that this is not unusual. They misdirect, lose or else never recover bank drafts all the time. This appalled me. I told Shelter to send another check. A week later my bank had not received the second check. It was lost. A letter was sent to the bank from Shelter explaining what had been going on. The letter was lost. A third check was issued. It never found its destination. While all this is going on I am on the phone daily with this bank who assured me repeatedly that the address I had given Shelter was the correct address to send pay-off checks to. After seven weeks I was on a first name basis with the loan department’s supervisor’s supervisor’s supervisor. After the third check was lost I told Ms Really Big Shot to prepare the title for pick up, that someone would be there in person to get the title and drop off another check. This is against bank policy, I had learned by that time, but I didn’t care and Ms. RBS was too embarrassed to argue with me.

Then I had Shelter prepare another check. Then I sent a cab to pick up the check, take it to the bank, pick up the title from there and take it to Shelter. I forced Shelter to pay the $76 for the cab.

Now, let's not let Shelter off the hook here, either. They knew that something was not right with this entire procedure, and their office should have stepped in. So when I got the phone call from the claims adjuster that he wanted to bring me my check, I got ready.

He met me in the lobby of my office building. He had nerve enough to say to me, Well, Jana, we took steps to force your bank to release the title, so I am here with your settlement check.

"No, Ed. WE didn't. I did the work. I did your job. I forced the bank to act by sending a cab and instructing the driver to stand at the bank until those imbeciles did right. You did not. You didn't do ANYTHING to settle this. I did."

He was quiet after that, but he gave me my check.

Several weeks later, the bank headquarters sent to Shelter all three checks which they had had the entire time. Shelter called me and told me that.

Fermentation

I moved back in with my dad after my divorce, and the experience was good for both of us. He was less lonely, and I certainly was. One feature of my father's taste that will always stay in my memory was his fondness for pineapple-grapefruit juice. He always had some on hand. To lengthen its refrigerator life, he would pour it out of the can it came in and into a glass bottle with a screw-on cap. That way, it never tasted like the can, and was easier to pour.

Not long after I moved back home, I introduced him to Laura Haskell, and they were constant companions until she died. When she got sick with cancer, he moved to her house to care for her and left me to take care of our house. Me and the pineapple-grapefruit juice.

Trouble is, I didn't care for pineapple-grapefruit juice. It sat in the fridge for a long while, unmolested by me. I never drank it. I never opened it.

One day I came home from work, opened the fridge and found the result of the life threatening disaster that I had averted. The juice bottle had exploded. The juice had fermented, generating gas pressure inside the sealed bottle and on that particular day, the pressure exceeded the bottle's strength and an explosion occurred inside the refrigerator.

Tiny shards of glass were stuck to the inside of the fridge, glued on by dried juice. The shards covered much of the refrigerator walls, and all of the other items within. It was a horrible mess, and I took great care cleaning it up as the shards were tiny and very sharp.

I have thought many times in the years that have past what would have become of me if fate had dealt me a very bad hand and I had opened the fridge at the moment of critical mass. And I shudder. And I am thankful.