MY THREE DAYS AS A CUBAN

THEME: HEAR NO, SEE NO, SPEAK NO, YOU KNOW
"Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering." ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

          The email fairly screamed: Please take it down. You could be placing people at risk. Give us time to look at it first.

            Uh oh.  All I’d done is set up an online chronicle of my trip to Cuba.* I had to do something with the barrage of images and stories that woke me up every morning, to the Afro-Cuban beat of the music that followed us everywhere and then followed me home.

            As a courtesy, or maybe nagged by a vestige of the paranoia that hovers in the Cuban air, the first thing I did was send the link to my two tour leaders. And received this alarming reply.

            I had plenty of stories to tell. We arrived the day after the 50^th anniversary of the Revolution. Banners with Fidel’s likeness proclaimed its success. Our bus ride through Havana suggested otherwise. Dilapidated buildings, streams of vintage U.S. cars, and stacks of post-Revolution fortress-like apartment buildings lined our path to the Parque Central Hotel. We passed Revolution Square where officials once corralled tens of thousands of Cubans, some accounts say upwards of a million, to stand in the Caribbean sun to hear El Lider’s six-hour speeches.

            It sat empty today, a vast parking lot of a space. A tower, 358 feet of revolutionary fervor, rose in the center.  A tan office building that bordered the space on the right was decorated with a five story high metal sculpture of Che Guevara’s head. It seemed a high honor for an itinerant revolutionary who left Cuba after only six years for greener pastures in Bolivia, where he was executed after that revolution failed.  Still, his image is everywhere.

            We checked into our hotel, a replica of an older European hotel, with mahogany furniture and heavy draperies. We drew them open and gasped. We call it a slum; they call it normal.  Welcome to Cuba, the land of the-emperor-has-no-clothes.

            Before our departure from Miami, our tour leaders had given us just two pieces of advice:

1) Do not use the word “humanitarian” in front of the Cuban airport officials. They officially don’t need any help, and it might complicate our entry into the country to suggest that they do.

2) Watch the tour bus driver. Even though he claims to speak no English, he could easily be fluent and spying on our official tour guide Celia, an engaging single mom. If so, he would be ready to turn her in if she spouted any anti-regime opinions.

            Other than that, they were circumspect. Listen, they told us, talk to Cubans, observe, explore, and draw our own conclusions. At the end of the trip, they would be curious to hear our impressions.

I closed the email and reached for the phone. My tech person took down the site, and I waited for the verdict. In the few hours the site was up, who might have read it? Travelers and ordinary Cubans did not have access to the Internet, but such a state must have people monitoring chatter like mine.  I worried. I couldn’t sleep. What if something I said was turned against Celia? I felt watched. And controlled. And afraid. I comforted myself that I had taken care to change her name, and never identified the tour or leaders. Could they track them down anyway? What had I done?

            My worry took me back to what I’d learned about Fidel and his death grip on the country. He started out with the pure-sounding intention to overthrow the cruel and corrupt dictator Batista in order to create a fair society after centuries of exploitive rule. Once in power though, he leaped in another direction and announced that he was a Marxist. He took over private property and threw out foreign businesses. Affluent Cubans couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Cuba became the place where everybody gets the same and nobody gets much.

            To convince the rest of the populace to go along with the plan, he instituted public executions by firing squad, on TV for easy viewing, of people who disagreed. Here was a new incarnation of the powerful and bloody oppression they were used to, only this time it was of their own. Which brought me to my central – and very American - question:  how could this last after 50 years of disappointment?  Where was the protest?

            The answer was in the brilliance of that death grip. Each block has an official to monitor the compliance of the citizens. Children earn kerchiefs for learning devotion to the State, which helps get them into the best schools. The best jobs – like those in the tourist industry – go to favored loyalists. The lively black market is a back door operation that most participate in, but does not openly challenge the status quo. The whole structure of Cuban society was tilted, so that the balance of power stayed unbalanced.

            Finally, I got the call. Both of them were on the line. They liked the site. They were glad the trip made such an impression. They’d never had anyone go to such lengths to document a trip. And they were grateful for my willingness to alter it if need be.

            Their greatest concern, they explained, was for Celia. If one of her tourists left with a poor impression of Cuba, she would be blamed. I removed a few details, renamed a few other characters we’d met to make her more difficult to identify. The site went back up, and I exhaled, free again from censorship and worry.

            This final episode of my Cuba experience ended with a three-day taste of life as Cubans live it every day.  Now I watch with interest through the eyes of Cuban bloggers, and news reports of recent reforms.  Cubans can now have some types of small businesses, a million people are being removed from the State’s payroll. Cubans are promised the opportunity to travel. For our part, American travel restrictions are lifting, with brand new licenses being granted to tour companies for more than just humanitarian trips.

            It is change in its infancy, but maybe this time real change can come without a revolution and all its promises, but with gradual evolution of freedoms that allow more for more, instead of less for everyone. And eventually, the freedom to say what you see.            

*www.cubacurious.com

CBH – 08/11

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND ME

THEME: WELL, DUH
To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question. ~Eric Hoffer

I rented the office, then scoured used furniture stores and garage sales to furnish and decorate it. I even splurged on a painting of a rainy Paris street from TJ Maxx. I was ready. I was in private practice.

My very first client showed up on a Tuesday. I handed him the client questionnaire I had crafted, on a tasteful Lucite clip board. After the demographic info, I hit him with the big question: What do you hope to gain from counseling? I left three lines for the reply, but he only needed one.

He wrote: Peace of mind, and introduced me to the answer I would see far more than any other in the next 20-plus years of my practice.  It wasn’t happiness, or get my spouse off my back, or make my depression go away. It was a much bigger order, peace of mind.

At the same time, at the University of Pennsylvania, a rising star named Martin Seligman, Ph.D., who would become the guru of Positive Psychology later on, was setting up shop too. A research psychologist, he began seeing what he could learn from rats. He tells it all in his new book Flourish (2011).

You don’t get to be guru of anything without an outsized ego, and Seligman doesn’t try to hide his. He details his turning points from rat researcher to human researcher, and later from pathology-seeker to happiness-promoter.

In a rare burst of humility, he acknowledges that his earlier concentration on happiness research (reported in Authentic Happiness, 2004) was lightweight and misguided. In this new book, he sees the light – he has decided to move far beyond mere happiness.

In describing how he came to this recent turning point, he criticizes two common approaches used by his colleagues in the real world of therapy and life change: psychotropic medication and talk therapy. Why? Because, he says, they only target symptom relief, and then the effect wears off.  If that was the case, I wasted my time with that questionnaire and the considerable work that followed. But I have a question. What became of the research (not his) that shows that both approaches are effective for many people, giving the long-term edge to talk therapy?

While he made friends with his rats, I dug in at my office, pursuing one of those useless pursuits, trying to help my real clients find their peace of mind. We explored all the areas of life that I asked about in my questionnaire: their health, upbringing, daily stressors, family issues, spirituality, and others. We tried to bring all that together, locate their obstacles and strengths, and weave it together into a new life story. Quite often we succeeded.

Seligman tested me with this book. For instance, he and his editors might reconsider the section on his stint as a residence hall-based professor who found his students’ needs – over such matters as date rapes and suicide attempts – to be intolerable “hassles” for him. Don’t we want our gurus to be a bit more compassionate than that?

I also stuck with him through his reports of his grouchy, snarky, resistant, sometimes brittle and resentful behavior, even though we might hope for more positivity from our positivity gurus.

I was not an early adopter of Positive Psychology. I was exposed to an earlier generation of it when I worked in a project to provide job readiness training and support to “displaced homemakers.” I was committed to help these abandoned women step outside the narrow “housewife” role into career paths that would build their independence. It became clear early on that the director of the program and I differed on how to accomplish that.

She had run the first round of the six-week program before I came on board, and I was to follow her protocol. At the first session, each participant was to choose an adjective to serve as her nickname in class. It seemed lame but I led the group through the exercise.  The first client chose “Hard-working.” The next, “Feisty.” “Hopeful,” the next.

Wait a minute, I thought. I’d already worked in community mental health for several years and had known numerous women in this circumstance. Where was “Pissed off,” or “Depressed” or “Scared to death,” or “Exhausted”?

The answer was right before me. The clients had heard the line in the directions that I had missed even as I read it to them.

“Be sure you pick a positive word.” Oh. They were so compliant that they were willing to pretend positiveness.

Finally though, one of them came through.

“Hostile,” she said. The other members looked at me in alarm. She’d broken a rule.

“Okay,” I said, “Hostile it is. By the end of the class, let’s see if we can move that to – what would you like?”

“Able to sleep,” she said.

“Good then,” I said, “That’s a deal.”

I was called on the carpet as soon as the women were out the door.

“You allowed one of them to describe herself in a negative way,” said the director.

“But it reflects where she is,” I countered.

“We have to model positivity,” she said.

“But that would be false,” I said. I caught the this-is-only-going-to-get-worse look in her eye.

“You’ll have to help her choose a new word tomorrow,” she declared.

“Are you sure we don’t want to meet them where they really are?” I asked, pushing beyond the intelligent stopping point.

She was sure. The next day we settled on something like “Determined.”  By the end of it, she was sleeping better, but she and I both knew it would have been better to get there the honest way.

I was similarly unimpressed with the next waves of positiveness that washed through the therapy world: affirmations, self-esteem-building, and Seligman’s pursuit of happiness. I figured from the start of my career that the only realistic goal would include a balance between happiness and sorrow, and the resources to survive both. I just kept pursuing that peace of mind I’d been hearing about from my clients. I felt sure that concentrating only on happiness would deny the part of life that has the most to teach us.

As is often the case, science eventually catches up and proves what we already know. Now in Seligman’s new frontier he’s decided to shoot for well-being instead of happiness.  He says that it rests on positive emotions (including happiness), as long as other factors are present, things like engagement, relationship, meaning, and accomplishment. Sounds a little familiar to me  – an ambitious goal beyond symptom relief, created by weaving together a variety of elements. Well, duh, Doc, if only we’d been able to have this conversation years ago, maybe I could have been your guru.

In the end, I have to hand it to him. He’s gone far beyond the scope of what I accomplished at my little office. He’s now helping institute his principles in schools here and in Australia, and more recently in the Army to address the needs of returning war vets. And he has maneuvered his new passion for building resilience over treating pathology to the center of his profession.

When I got to the end of the book, my doubts evaporated. This touchy, self-aggrandizing researcher talks not about the pathology of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but about the strength and wisdom that comes from Post-Traumatic Growth.

            So we agree. For the best life, go ahead and assemble those positive emotions all you want, but add engagement, throw in some relationships and accomplishments, and wrap it up with meaning. When things really go wrong and life gets as bad as it can, look for strengths to emerge.  Yes. After all our problems, Dr. Seligman and I have ended up on the same team.

CBH 07/15

GYM SHOES SPEAK

THEME: SAYING TOO MUCH
If you wouldn't write it and sign it, don't say it. 
~Earl Wilson

My friend Carol and I walked home from school down 111^th Street. We made it almost to the bus stop a block from my place. It was a Friday because I carried my white Keds home for their bi-weekly cleaning, as required by the gym teacher. My name was neatly printed along the side, and I had them tied together by the laces because they looker cooler that way.

I know I was in fifth grade because I remember the cocktail of growing freedom that fall  – I could take unapproved routes home, pick up candy at the school store with my babysitting money, climb on the giant boulders where the vicious dog lived – without anyone telling me I was too little. Life was already good, and getting better.

As usual, Carol was preoccupied with the fact that she was adopted. She was bewilderingly resentful of the gentle older couple who revolved around her wonderingly. My favorite thing at her house was the Christmas table display that included a mirror posing as an ice skating pond, complete with motorized skaters. I could watch it for hours. This girl had no reason to complain. Her kind dad even made overtures to me, offering a little fathering.

For my part, I was preoccupied with the fact that I was fatherless. If  I couldn’t have my own father, I certainly wouldn’t consider siphoning off someone else’s, so I declined his offer, politely.

As Carol and I walked along kicking acorns and rehashing the day, the subject of my father’s absence, something I rarely discussed, came up.  He died before I could remember in a plane crash, blameless in my view, and permanently heartbroken that he couldn’t see me grow up.

Carol wanted to explain something to me that she’d been thinking about ever  since Sunday school the week before.

“Your father,” she opined, “must have done something really bad.”

I stopped. Nobody had ever said anything bad about my father.

“Because God had to punish him by making him die,” she explained.

I sputtered in outrage. Words fled. How could mere words ever bridge the gulf that opened between us, anyway?

She stopped too, waiting for my reply, wise in her own mind, satisfied that she had enlightened me.

I let my gym shoes speak for me. I took aim at her smug certainty. The right one connected with her cheek, bounced off , and headed for the ground, the left one hurrying to keep up. They landed behind her so that I had to step closer to retrieve them. She flinched.

“That’s not true,” I managed over my shoulder as I took off.

I wasn’t known for acts of physical violence, in fact this was my first one. As I ran home to lay all of this at my mother’s feet, I felt a frisson of satisfaction that I had taken such radical action against Carol’s slur. I hadn’t had many opportunities to stick up for my father.

In subsequent years, I haven’t pursued the violence, but I am still on the run from platitudes that issue forth in response to a loss. Since that fifth grade day, I have sat witness to my own grief, that of friends and loved ones, and of many counseling clients. I know we can do better.

Our society has trouble with grief.  We can’t stand pain, and we want the bereaved to get over theirs before it upsets us. The few standard responses that people offer to the bereaved prove it. In fact, they aren’t much better than Carol’s childhood attempt. And the bereaved are usually too stricken, or too polite, or without their gym shoes, to respond as they’d like. Allow me to stand in for them.

He’s in a better place, the probably well-meaning comforter says. 

What the bereaved would like to say: Oh yeah?  His place is here by me. Spare me your easy version of heaven. And spare me the suggestion that I should feel guilty for my own pain. I have a big job to do – to come up with my own understanding of where he went and how I’m supposed to live without him here. And you’re not helping.

Another frequent attempt is: It’s God’s plan which you can’t yet understand.

To which the griever would like to answer: Since you seem to have a

 straight line to God’s inner workings, can’t you do better than this flimsy attempt to make my tragedy palatable? My question is not how you explain this theologically. It is how I am going to make it through tonight.

Another common one: He wouldn’t want to see you suffer like this.

The unvoiced response from the bereaved: Don’t try to shame me into shoving my feelings underground. She didn’t want to die, and of course she wouldn’t want me to suffer, but she did and I am. Try to understand how connected I was to her and therefore how deep my feelings run.

The next is an imperative: You have to let go.

The griever’s response: Never. My job is to create a new relationship with her, now that she is no longer physically present. She will always be emotionally present for me. It is how she lives on. Don’t take that away from either one of us.

I have a suggestion for those who wish to offer comfort.  Take up Frank McCourt. His book Angela’s Ashes recounts the endless suffering and tragedy of his poor Irish mother and her large brood. The words he remembers hearing beat the feeble lines above hands down:

I’m sorry for your troubles, the women say to each other with each new loss. Acknowledgement and caring. As simple as that. No pat explanations, no rush to judgment, no hurry.

           If I had the chance to talk to the Carol of today, I would thank her for the nudge she gave me toward my life’s work. Chances are she would not even remember the incident, as it couldn’t have had the emotional punch for her that it did for me. But I wouldn’t apologize for the gym shoes. They taught me that even when words fail, I can still have my say.

CBH 06/11

THE FINE ART OF EAVESDROPPING

THEME: AUTHORITY
He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak. 
 ~Michel de Montaigne

Ask any writer where their material comes from and the honest ones will tell you it’s from a lifetime of eavesdropping. Sitting in a coffee shop you can land like a paratrooper in the middle of the life of a stranger and find out more than you know about your best friend. Whatever you hear yourself, you have on good authority, I figure.

Sometimes you get only hints and have to construct the story yourself. Like the time I sat near an apparently former priest and an older woman breakfasting together. I got an earful about “that business” that caused him so much trouble in recent years in the church. I pegged her as a former parishioner, based on the delicate balance between devotion and flirtatiousness that ran between them.

Would that I’d had the opportunity to spy on the formerly up and coming Miami priest Fr. Alberto Cutie instead.  He was seen making out on the beach with a comely parishioner. He apologized, resigned, and soon married his love. He just missed his calling the first time around, apparently. He has fleshed out the story in his new talk show and book called Dilemma, so there’s little mystery left there.  

Back in the coffee shop, I had no such help. She was the listener and he was the talker, and they conversed carefully, as if in code, using vague references and generalities. Since they weren’t providing the specifics I craved, I had to run through a series of “what-ifs” until I came up with my own.

Was he a pedophile priest? No, too obvious. Maybe he’d covered up for another one and got caught in the crossfire. Maybe he had seen this companion through a crisis, and her loyalty caused her to give the bishop a piece of her mind in his defense. Maybe he refused to be sent away for reprogramming. And she defied the authorities and kept up contact with him. How’s that?

Thanks to eavesdropping, I do know for sure what it’s like to get a job in Hollywood. Last year I spent a Happy Hour at an upscale L.A. restaurant. While Dr. Drew of TV therapy fame sat at the bar head-swiveling to see or be seen, I concentrated on the group of three behind me. My husband kindly switched seats so I could zero in. Two name-dropping producers (“Harvey”, “the Network”) chatted with a young woman in a simple dress and heels, no hose.  It all sounded like platitudinous cocktail talk, and I was drifting and about to actually talk to my husband when I heard The Ask. “”If you think you’d like to work on the project, we’d like to see it work out.”

What project? They’d been talking about how hard it is to stay in the good graces of former coworkers. It must have been code again.  

“Yes, let’s have your people work it out with my lawyer,” she said. And she stood, shook hands, and was out the door. No gushing, no thank you for the opportunity, no money demand, no air kisses.

In my extension of her story, she jumps in her car, drives around the corner, stops under a palm tree and dials her boyfriend or her mom or bff and screams, “I got it. They want me. Omigod!” 

Yesterday at the airport I had to work harder than that. I sat within range of a casually dressed middle-aged couple – shorts and a Hawaiian shirt for him, modest sundress for her – who chatted amiably about hometown stuff. They were on their way to Washington D.C.

A stocky man strode up and stood too close, right between them. He was dressed to kill in a blue blazer, yellow tie and lapel pin the size of a dime. Try as I might, I couldn’t read it, but you could tell it was saying something significant about him.

Right away he took a phone call and talked for five minutes at a volume just loud enough for passengers three banks of seats away to look up.

“Are you telling me that law enforcement officers failed to pursue their investigation?” he yelled into the phone.  Pause. “You need to run this down for me.” Pause.

His ruddy cheeks glowed, a fine contrast with the yellow of his sideburns and moustache (think Yosemite Sam) and his tie.

“If the officers are going to be charged with any impropriety, I need to know it.”

Now that’s an episode of Law & Order right there.

But he was only beginning. Off the phone and still hovering over the couple, he addressed them in turn. It emerged that they were going to the same place for the same event, and that Mr. Important was in charge.  He pointed his finger in her direction.

“Now Louise, you are just going to have to be satisfied on your own. It may not look like it when we’re at the bar at 11 at night having our beers, but we are Doing Business.”

“Don’t you worry about me, Bob,” she said, seeming to bask in his attention. “I haven’t been to D.C. in 15 years. I have a lot to explore.”

Her husband and his Hawaiian shirt were shrinking by the minute in the face of this windbag, and his wife’s engagement with him.

“And you, Jim,” Bob said, leaning even closer, “You will see just how hard we work at these things. It’s not a vacation, that’s for sure.”

Bob’s jaw tightened as he shot a glance at his wife, who continued to smile adoringly at guess who.

Damn. Boarding started, which allowed me only a moment to spot a crocheted cross dangling from Windbag’s roller bag. If only I’d had another ten minutes, I might have learned enough to put it in context .

After the flight, I witnessed the three of them walking through the terminal. Bob, still talking, strode along in between the couple, and took Louise’s elbow. Jim looked straight ahead. Questions presented themselves.

Would Louise secretly slip into Bob’s room while her husband was laboring at the bar? Would Jim finally punch his boss in the nose for his various humiliations? What was their business in D.C.? And why was he so LOUD? I was tired, so I settled for my best guess, that it was a plain old business trip and the nice couple doted on the overbearing boss to stay in his good graces. Not everything has to be a drama.

My final example is the most cringe-inducing. I waited in an upscale coffee shop for a writer friend for our monthly meeting when I heard one of those shrill voices you can’t ignore. It belonged to a woman I almost knew, who was married to an acquaintance of mine. Theirs was one of those matches that makes you wonder – the modest bookish man and the tight skirt-wearing, attention-seeking athletic woman.

I quickly gave up trying not to listen, as it immediately became clear that this was one intimate conversation, with her sister. There were many complaints – not enough time to train, being neglected while he was out of town, a lack of understanding of her needs. Her sister, probably working from a lifetime of listening to such, said little. I felt humiliation on his behalf, and sadness that he had to live with this resentment every day. And of course, a small recognition that she might know her marriage better than I did.

If it had been an episode of ABC’s What Would You Do? with John Quinones, I would have been expected to stride over and denounce her for inflicting the details of her marital dissatisfaction on a roomful of strangers. Luckily, my friend showed up and I switched my attention to my own business. By the time I left, the complainer was gone, her table cleared and waiting for the next occupant.  

I know the outcome of this one. I heard several months later that the couple was divorcing, which maybe was a relief for all concerned. Easy for me to say, but I know now that better days followed for both. Was it a thrill to be inside this story as it unfolded? Decidedly not. I definitely prefer the ones I make up myself.

I don’t know how much actual knowledge I gain from my listening, but it is fun to practice attentiveness and give my imagination a workout. The next time you are offered an eavesdropping opportunity, I say seize it and let your inner storyteller out. It beats playing Angry Birds.

 CBH 05/11

HITTING MY POLITICAL BOTTOM

THEME: CHEAP THRILLS
The only thrill worthwhile is the one that comes from making something out of yourself. ~ William Feather

Hello. My name is Carolyn and I am a recovering political arguer. To qualify as recovering, I had to prepare a searching and fearless inventory of my p.a. past. Let me share the highlights:

At age 8, I canvassed the neighborhood with my mother for the Republican candidate for mayor of Chicago. His name was Bob Merriam. He was an author and reformer, a war veteran with a Bronze Star. The Democratic candidate, slated for the first time, was Richard J. Daley the Original. It is said that Merriam actually had a chance. Imagine what Chicago might be like by now if he had won. That day, people were either polite or not at home, and I got ice cream on the way back. I rather enjoyed it.

In college, I would entertain myself at parties poking at the politics of certain boyfriends of certain friends. But only if they started it. It was funny, mostly, a parlor game. It was a cheap thrill to have the power to get someone else so worked up. I was, of course, right. 

Also in college, early in my budding relationship with my eventual husband, I was invited to dinner at the home of his aunt and his uncle, a WW II Marine. I’m not sure who started it, but by the time he had set me straight, I was in tears over the stroganoff. Lesson learned: politics can hurt.

In early adulthood, I was busy. We were no longer at war, nobody was getting drafted. Who had time to dither over politics?

Then came the Clinton administration, which put me through a lot. By the end of it I was of several minds. I was indignant that Hillary had been so pilloried.  And disgusted with the weasely baseness of Bill’s sexual conduct with a girl close to the age of his own daughter for pity’s sake, and with his refusal to own up. At the same time I was impressed that he managed to dismantle some of the dependence-inducing welfare system without stripping the entire safety net, and that he pulled off a balanced budget on his way out.

To some people he was a disappointment. To others, he was the worst creature to ever walk the earth. It was then I noticed that people were suddenly delivering their opinions at the top of their lungs.

The Bush years only magnified the tension, and that polarizing trend really took off. There were only good guys and bad guys, and you were one or the other. I noticed that I didn’t like the attitude of the people I mainly agreed with any better than the ones I didn’t. Everybody was nasty.

Then the TV pundits came into their own, and built their little kingdoms of the air by attacking anyone who they could catch on tape, whether office-holder, candidate, spouse, minister, hanger-on, whoever. Then the pundits started in on each other, convincing journalists that what they said was news.

By the way, do you know what those pundits make per year from their fear-mongering and hate speech? Why, it’s an…..

No wait. I’m in recovery. I really am.  Hold on. Deep breath….Another…Okay,  I’m better now.

As I was saying, the byproduct of the ascendance of the pundits was that once we had watched them go at it for a time, we started in on each other. But this was no parlor game. This was for blood.

That’s when I began to retreat in earnest. I was sick to death of having to defend my beliefs, as if I’d somehow volunteered for the debate team and every day was a meet.

And now, I have retreated entirely. Because now I see clearly that in this climate, once anybody gets started, they can’t stop. Their positions migrate to the far ends of the spectrum, and the gulf opens even wider. Once the name-calling starts, I want to be in the car, speeding off.

When the political phone calls started up again this week – I got three in one day – to herald the opening of our upcoming 18-month descent into another presidential campaign, I decided to opt out from each one.

“Please take me off your calling list,” I say.

“But why?” they sputter, as if it’s a surprise that one of their targets has had enough. “I’m not going to change my mind,” I answer.

 They hesitate, deciding whether to try to lure me back or move on. Before they can, I wish them well and hang up. It’s very liberating.

But I must be rigorously honest in my recovery, and must admit there is more to it than that. I also don’t want to participate in these exchanges because I don’t have to. We’re supposed to be free to disagree.

Don’t misunderstand. I vote. I care. I’m not shirking my civic responsibilities. I’m just abstaining from the conversation. I have never seen a political argument result in new learning or a changed position anyway. Ever.

I voted this week in a minor local election. Afterwards, I was chased to the parking lot by a middle-aged woman whose accent told me that she’d come here from halfway around the world.

“Can you help me?” she said. “I can’t tell which of the candidates are from which party.”

I told her it was a local school board election, and candidates didn’t run on a party ticket.

By that time, her husband joined us. He declared their party affiliation, and said, “So you see, we don’t want to vote for the enemy.”

Here they’d gone to all the trouble of finding a new country and becoming citizens of it, and they couldn’t vote without suspecting that their enemy was lurking. Did we instill that in them, or was that a vestige of what they’d left behind in their old country?

I kept to my pledge. “There are no parties for this,” I repeated.

“Who did you vote for?” she demanded.

“That’s private,” I said. “Besides, no one is supposed to try to influence someone else’s vote this close to the polling place. It’s a law.”

They backed away, exasperated, looking for someone else to ask. They were disappointed in me. But I wasn’t. I did have a preference in that election, but there’s a reason why voting booths have curtains.

I’m sure I’ll encounter temptation in the next 18 months, but I plan to maintain my silence. One day at a time. 

  

 CBH - 04/11

RUMORS OF ALICE SPRINGS

THEME: RUMORS
Rumors generally grow deformed as they travel. ~ Edward Counsel

We arrived in Alice Springs on a jet plane. The airport was a modest affair with one building and a few luggage carts. We could barely breathe in the heat as we walked from the terminal to our bus. On the way to the hotel, our tour guide Mark lavished praise on us, for being the kind of travelers who would brave the Outback, not just luxuriate in the coastal cities of Australia.

          All we could see outside the window was red sandy soil and scrub brush, and the occasional scruffy tree. The sky loomed large above us. It was bright blue, speckled with filmy clouds, and vast.

All we could think was the hotel must have air conditioning, right?

          We reached the outskirts of town, expecting a dirt track of a frontier town, a simple crossroads in the Outback. What we saw instead was KFC, McDonalds, Target, T-shirt shops, and two indoor malls with food courts. What? It looked like a mini-U.S.

As we learned in the next few days, what we saw was a far cry from the beginnings of Alice Springs. We heard the tale of the early European settlers who set out expecting to work their civilizing magic on the primitive Outback. In the mid 1800s they planned to string it with telegraph lines and railroad tracks, and shorten the time it took for messages and goods to travel from Melbourne in the south all the way to Darwin in the north, eventually to England, and back. It turns out that they made some unfortunate assumptions, and that the Outback tamed them instead.

          A set of early explorers found an area in the middle of the country surprisingly lush, and fed by an apparent underground spring. It was determined that this would be a fine place to locate the work teams that would build the telegraph line. Too bad that those explorers had visited briefly on the wettest day of all time, and that the spring had not been a spring but a puddle that was long gone by the time the settlers showed up.

I tried to imagine the settlers who finally arrived and found only scrub and red sand and no water, no spring.  They must have looked at the same giant blue sky, felt the searing sun on their skin, and wondered what they’d gotten themselves into. Was it really worth risking your life in this harsh climate so that other people could get their messages around faster? Three weeks, three months, really what’s the difference?

Alice might have said the same. She was the wife of an early stationmaster, and naming the settlement after her was a customary courtesy. Even without a telegraph, she’d apparently heard rumors of the hardship in the bush. She never even came to visit, they say, and may have even found her way back to England where the lifestyle was more to her liking. The name stuck even if she didn’t.

The settlers were planning to impose their ways on the locale, but the task was greater than they imagined. They were invading an ecosystem that had evolved over thousands of years, made up of the hardiest of species. Plants that asked little from their surroundings, an odd assortment of animals, and the short dark-skinned aboriginal people all managed to survive here. Darwin would have had a field day studying how they managed.

In this world, the people didn’t wear clothes. Much of the animal life was hidden under the surface of the ground, like the four-foot long slugs that were a staple of the diet. That dried-out looking vegetation yielded the necessary amount of moisture, if you knew how to get it out. And those people had developed the right skin tone and habits to survive.

The aboriginal people were judged by the colonists, in the habit of colonists everywhere, to be uneducated savages, yet they had language, art, music, social structure, and a belief system that was expressed in intricate and carefully guarded ceremonies. They’d had 50,000 years to develop what they needed to live out here, and it didn’t include telegraphs and trains.

The day we visited the original site of Alice Springs, it was only 110 degrees. Five buildings sat facing each other, each still equipped with enough artifacts to reveal its use. The office looked like the sheriff’s office in every U.S. Western you saw on TV growing up – wooden desk, small window, and the tools of the trade. In the Westerns, it was a couple of jail cells, here a wall of first generation telegraph equipment. A wagon sat in the blinding sun in front of the stable. The stationmaster’s house, plain but for the chintz curtains, looked livable enough.

A framed picture captured the culture clash. The stationmaster stands proudly, shaking hands with a visitor dressed in a jacket and tie. To the side stands an aboriginal man dressed in the starched white uniform of a house servant. He looks absurdly out of context, his eyes fixed past the camera, maybe gazing out the window at the land he belonged on. There isn’t much said about this clash. You have to dig a little to find stories of the Europeans and the aboriginal people massacring each other, since they don’t fit the usual tourist-friendly narrative, but they exist. I’m sure there were also many heart-warming stories of attempts at mutual understanding, but in the end it is clear who came out on top. Masters at adaptability, the aboriginal people seem adept at resisting the influences of the dominant culture to this day.

It wasn’t only the aboriginal people who impeded the progress the colonists had in mind. In addition to the English officials, Australia was mainly settled by European outliers.  Contrary to the dominant myth, the country was not a penal colony peopled by actual hard-nosed criminals. Instead, it received the results of a lower middle class purge that cleared out an unproductive layer of English society. Their crimes were largely petty crimes, not violent ones. Shipped halfway across the world and lacking the funds to return, they settled in and made the best of it. Understandably, they doubted very much that governmental edicts were designed to benefit them.

Therefore, when it was decreed that a national rail system would be built to enhance transportation of goods throughout the country, each of the five regions dug in. They each chose a different gauge for their railway that would extend only to the regional border. When they were done there was a country three-quarters the size of the U.S., crisscrossed with railroad tracks that could not connect with one another.  You can just hear them chuckling under their breath, “Okay Mate, there’s your railroad. Happy now?”

So, the colonists got what they wanted. Aboriginal people wear clothes now, though there is still plenty of space between them and the dominant culture. The telegraph line got completed, and they had their new link to the world.  A national railway was eventually constructed to supplant the five regional ones.

The yearning for connection continues. Internet cafes dot every city. Our great communicator Oprah visited as one of her final acts before her decommissioning, and travel reservations are up 30%.

Our last day in Alice Springs revealed the reason for the downtown concentration of fast food and retail giants. It is whispered that outside of town sits a joint secret defense base – secret only to incurious tourists, I think  – where “scientists” (read “spies”?) monitor activities in the skies. How do you keep 2000 Americans happy in the middle of the Outback? You do the same things the colonists tried to do – provide the comforts of home.  Which these days happily includes air conditioning.

Walking back to our hotel from town, we crossed a broad bridge that spanned a dry riverbed, the red sandy soil dotted with spiny light green bushes and the occasional tree. We heard voices in the dusk and looked to see several groups of 8 or 10 or 12 aboriginal people sitting in a circle.  Dressed in bright colors, some of them wearing U.S. sports jerseys, they sat as if planted in the soil.

Sometimes one group would call to another, conserving the energy it would take to walk all the way in between. They were engaged with one another, and seemed oblivious to the passing tourists. We felt that we were intruding, and that our curiosity put them on display when they were just following their longtime daily habits. But really, how could we look away?

Our guide told us later that evening that seeing such a different and ancient way of life was part of the privilege of visiting the Outback. Just like we couldn’t overlook the urges of the colonists, and of the forced immigrants, we had to consider those of the people who had been there all along. What rumors must have spread among them when the pale visitors with their great plans arrived? And more recently, when the construction of a giant base is begun, or a KFC arrives? We can only guess.

CBH - 03/11

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

THEME: FIGHTS
It's not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog.
~ Mark Twain

As soon as we landed in Christchurch, New Zealand our group of 44 piled into a luxury bus equipped with soft seats in a flashy fabric and a bathroom. We met our driver Malcolm, a strapping blonde gent who over the next week was to narrate our way across his country. You could quickly see that Malcolm was not a chatterbox, but one of those folks who was worth listening to when he spoke.

          It was January 22, 2011. He loaded our bags and we headed out of the airport on the exit lane. As he approached the traffic circle that would lead us to town, there was a loud clunk and we stopped dead. He shifted, and tried and this and that, but there we sat.  His jaw twitched, he traded a couple of quiet comments with Mark, our cheerful guide, and got on the phone.

          In ten minutes, a new bus pulled up and all able-bodied passengers were recruited to shift the bags into our new bus. It was a lovely example of patience by all concerned. We were on our way in about 20 minutes, start to finish. We didn’t think of our breakdown as an omen.

He drove us through the outskirts, neighborhoods of tidy small stone and frame houses divided by brick fences, each shielding a garden bursting with veggies and blooms. It was summer there so we saw the best of the vegetation, we were told. It felt very English.

When we reached the downtown, he pointed out the contrast between old buildings – old to them is the late 1800s – and stark modern structures that look like they snuck into all the spaces between the old ones. Some buildings had tarps over their top floors and were currently not occupied. One lot had a considerable pile of concrete blocks and slabs. We were told that a building had recently been removed from the site. The streets were busy with traffic and pedestrians. This was the central business district, Malcolm he said, in the middle of a workday.

          He explained the damaged buildings and the rubble. On September 4, 2010 a 7.1 earthquake had hit Christchurch. While there had been extensive damage, most buildings were still in place. It had struck on a Sunday morning when the area was not crowded, and there was no loss of life. A 7.1 earthquake and no one was killed? Amazing. They had dodged a bullet there.

          You can’t be in New Zealand for long before you hear about two things – volcanoes and earthquakes. The country sits on top of plates and faults and amid volcanoes, defunct and active. It is why their country is so mountainous and therefore so gorgeous, and why their lakes are the brilliant aqua color that makes the photographs look as if they’ve been doctored, from the volcanic minerals washed down from the mountains with their rains.

          That very morning, Malcolm told us, there had been a 4.1 aftershock from that September earthquake, that shook things up for a few moments. If you live here, he said, you have to get used to the frequent aftershocks. With a tourist’s detachment, I thought, “Darn. I would have liked to see what that was like.” We wondered at the seemingly intact city – how could it survive such a strong quake and look this good?

          We passed by a cathedral and were told that visitors could climb all the way to the top of the tower for a birdseye view of the city. We stopped for a traffic light nearby, in front of a seven-story building with a giant sign that said CTV, the Canterbury TV network. I peered into the windows at people at work inside. We’d barely looked at TV on the trip and it reminded me to tune in to see what it was like.  

On another block, a striking modern house made up of poured concrete and windows was sandwiched in between a gray office building and a church. A dog looked out the window at us. None of the buildings were very tall it seemed. I’d have to ask if that was due to zoning, or earthquake threat, or both.

As we took the turn toward our hotel, we circled a giant stretch of parkland that included a golf course and multiple athletic fields. Banners announced a regional meet for disabled athletes. The signup table was a mob scene.

We passed by the hospital. A series of mismatched additions ringed the original old buildings. Even without the signs, it would be easily recognizable as a hospital. It was late afternoon, and nurses in scrubs hurried by on their way home,  outpatients waited for the bus, an ambulance pulled in.  This was nothing like the quiet orderliness of the suburbs.

At the hotel we checked in at the same time as a group of disabled athletes and watched as they sorted out their various types of wheelchairs, recumbent bikes and other equipment. We stepped back to get our wheeled suitcases out of their way.

Later that night, I read in the local paper about tussles between local officials and others who felt that bureaucratic delays had stood in the way of the repair of damaged buildings. Local politics, I thought, were the same everywhere, citizens always fighting about something. Tradesmen who had traveled to Christchurch hoping to help with the rebuilding were quoted in the article as being ready to leave in frustration because of the delays. I put away the paper and thought nothing more of it, until I went through a museum exhibit a few days later that included a simulation of an earthquake. Twelve of us entered a replica of a small house and the attendant closed the door behind us. It was set up with all kinds of familiar items, couches, tables, vases, picture frames, a TV set, all anchored down. The floor started to shake, the walls shifted, the floor tipped, and I lost my desire to experience an aftershock.

With 14,000 earthquakes a year, New Zealand has to be equipped for the 10% or so that may result in damage and possibly compromised buildings. After a quake, local engineers peruse each affected building and tag it green (okay), yellow (needs some reinforcement), or red (cannot be used without major structural work). This applied to Christchurch too.

During the whole trip, there was a hint of danger in the air. In the Australian outback we were regaled with stories of how well the Aboriginal people had learned over the centuries to withstand the harsh conditions, while newcomers, from the early Europeans to current travelers, repeatedly underestimated the heat, the dryness, the distances and ended up sprinkling their bones across the land.

And during our visit to the Great Barrier Reef, snorkelers had to wear special suits to fend off painful jellyfish contact.  We learned too that Australia has the greatest number of lethal creatures on earth. And since the Aussies drive on the left, every time you stepped off a curb you had to calculate which direction the speeding cars you might walk out in front of were coming from.

Before we arrived, the Queensland region of Australia had been hit by massive flooding. While we were still on the trip, but had moved on to New Zealand, Yasi, a Katrina-sized cyclone, hit the same area. Towns were severely damaged and the flooding resumed.  

For the rest of the trip, we watched TV in earnest, the news reports bouncing between protests in Egypt and weather in Queensland. Maybe the workers in the Christchurch TV office building were working on those stories. We didn’t think of ourselves, or them, being at risk. The town survived the big one, so what could an aftershock do?

We returned home with pictures to download and stories to tell and jet lag to overcome. Two weeks later, on February 22, 2011, Christchurch was hit with a 6.3 earthquake, midday on a work day. I found out about it on Facebook, from a relative’s post that his son, who was also traveling in New Zealand, was safe. I rushed to CNN and saw that many of the buildings we had seen were in ruins. The cathedral was the backdrop for every news report. Its steeple was down, the roof caved in. Only rescue workers were allowed inside, to see if any worshippers or tourists were trapped.

The priest, the mayor, terrified mothers searching for their children were interviewed. On the next report, the death toll was mounting from the initial 20. Two hundred were missing, then 300. It brought back the memory of September 11 in New York, with hope in the beginning that people would be rescued, saved by a desk, or a doorway. It soon became clear that only a few people would emerge from those ruins alive.

The third report showed a pancaked office building where the bulk of the missing were thought to be. It was the CTV building, that housed not only the network, but a foreign language school and other offices.

Those workers I spied on through my bus window, had they been out for lunch or in there with the flattened building coming down on them? The mother of one of them told a reporter that she kept calling her daughter’s cell phone, hoping that even if she could not answer it, a rescuer might hear it and know where to look for her.

After official analysis, it turned out that the February earthquake was really an aftershock from the September quake – unfinished business from the initial event that hadn’t seemed so bad. And that the buildings that came down this time had stood there damaged and waiting for disaster for months. It could have happened while I was riding by on the bus, while the nurses were walking home, or during a visitor tour of the cathedral. But it waited for lunchtime on a busy work day on what everyone assumed was just another normal day.

Those fights over buildings and repairs and delays weren’t just about politics or bureaucracy. They were about life and death. And unfinished business that was worth fighting about.

I’m haunted by the mother, calling her daughter again and again, not giving up hope until she had to. I wish she knew that another mother halfway across the world remembers her, and her daughter.  


CBH - 02/11