Things great and small

(If you received this blog by email, you might want to visit the actual site. The pictures work much better there. 

Just click on the title “Things great and small.”

As you likely know, Resonance Women’s Chorus, home to my major volunteer gig these days, just finished up the season with its marvelous concert on climate change. After being immersed in this earth-ish topic for months, it’s been fun to find myself stretched through other layers of reality by a handful of articles I've encountered—outward to this incomprehensibly vast cosmos of ours and inward to microscopic realms that touch on our very identity. Not trivial matters, but definitely fun.

(Before I get all wonky, check out these gorgeous roses I spotted on a walk the other day. If nothing else, they're testimony to two happy facts: it's spring and I'm out walking again. Hooray!)

So, as a hint of this perspective stretching I mentioned, I offer these few tidbits for your consideration. 

First, the microscopic: 

The first set of articles I read had to do with the relatively recent development of a new technique in the field of genetics. Not long ago, two geneticists developed a technique called CRISPR-Cas9, which gives scientists the ability to remove and add genetic material at will, altering an organism's genome—sperm, eggs, embryos—in a way that will be passed on to future generations. Here’s a video explaining it, if you're curious. The technique has already been used in rats, monkeys, and a few other species. Folks are pretty certain that it would work in humans. Genetic manipulation that is limited to non-germ cells (e.g., in GMO foods, gene therapy) already raises some ethical concerns. But this is about changes that will be transmitted to subsequent generations. Still unknown are how precise such changes can be (might I clip too much, insert too little?), how specific (what if I alter surrounding genes in the process?), and what the side effects might be (will eliminating, say, a gene that predisposes allergies also damage part of the natural immune response?).  

Aside from these technical issues, CRISPR raises huge ethical concerns—even theological ones. It could have great benefits in curing diseases, preventing birth defects, and so on. But it could also be used in questionable ways, like to engineer offspring sex, physical characteristics, intelligence, etc. Recently, a number of people working in the field called for a moratorium on this research in humans until these issues can be addressed. In the words of one scientist, “It raises the most fundamental of issues about how we are going to view our humanity in the future and whether we are going to take the dramatic step of modifying our own germline and in a sense take control of our genetic destiny.” Another comments, “I personally think we are just not smart enough—and won’t be for a very long time—to feel comfortable about the consequences of changing heredity, even in a single individual.”

Yet, just the other day I saw an article about scientists who had attempted to perform this research in human embryos. The experiment failed in most cases—the embryos died or the DNA was not altered as planned. In other cases, the results were as feared: in some, the DNA interrupted the process, resulting in some changed and some unchanged DNA. In other cases, non-target segments of the DNA were altered, a phenomenon some have called “collateral damage.” So the experiment basically confirmed that the scientists who had issued the warning were right. Still, this research also highlighted the possibility—even the high likelihood—that others will try again.

The questions this raises are just mind-boggling. What is identity? What does “I” mean if my DNA, the “building block” of my distinctive genetic makeup can be altered? And what does it mean to be a human being if the core features of human existence might be subject to alteration? If these techniques get perfected, who decides what traits are worthy of continuing and which are not? It is impossible not to hear the echo of early 20th century programs of eugenics in these questions.

But in a different microscopic domain, another story seems to bring good news: I wrote here before about scientists’ conclusion that viruses make up over 8% of our DNA. These viruses are evolutionary hitchhikers, organisms that infected our long-ago ancestors and that gradually became incorporated into our very genes. Now, that’s mind stretching enough by itself—nearly 1/10 of our DNA consists of viruses! But even more astounding is what these viruses do for us. In that earlier post, I noted that they may be responsible for the evolution of the placenta (the placenta! We’re talking here about the very beginning of our individual selves). And now, last week, I also learned that some such viruses—endogenous retroviruses—may “come alive” during the earliest stages of embryonic development. Retroviruses are not usually our friends—think HIV—but in this case, these endogenous retroviruses may actually serve to immunize the embryo against other viruses. 

Now, this is good news, but it still challenges any simplistic notions we might hold about ourselves as individual, self-contained, unitary beings. Just think about it … microscopic viruses—viruses!—stow-aways from pre-human history may be responsible for the placenta that supported our individual prenatal life and for our immunity to viruses that might otherwise have done us in. So don't you wonder wonder, where does the “I” in this process end and the “they” begin?

To leap from the microscopic to the telescopic ...

Two other recent stories escorted me back into my recurrent fascination with the cosmic. This past week was the 25^th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble telescope, which, as you likely know, has rewritten our understanding of the universe—and illustrated the book. The Internet was full of Hubble photo gems this week. In case you missed them, I’ll paste in a few, and you can click here for more and here for even more.  

                                                                                  

Hubble had some struggles from its earliest days (I’m tempted to say it was star crossed, but that seems too easy), with a microscopic flaw in the mirror that caused blurry views of even nearby objects. But with some clever fixes over the years by astronauts turned telescope experts, Hubble has taught us more about the cosmos than we ever knew there was to learn. As you may know from previous posts, I’m a totally amateur but enthusiastic observer of things astrophysical, so I’ve been paying attention to Hubble’s discoveries for years. This anniversary provided a delightful visual memoir of Hubble’s life so far, and I’m hoping for more.

And then, just today, I came across a short story about another recent Hubble-fueled finding: out there in the universe, there are “runaway galaxies,” and with Hubble's help, we’re starting to understand them. Scientists have known for some time about runaway “rogue” planets, which have either been ejected from their orbits around stars or somehow never belonged to a star system. They’ve also suggested the existence of runaway galaxies that are moving so fast they sail free from the “local cluster” of galaxies whose gravity generally holds galaxies together in a group. And now Hubble has spotted a runaway galaxy and tracked its trajectory as it veers away from its orbit and heads off into … somewhere. I love that the universe is so unruly.

So, I find this stuff fascinating in its own right. But this week, with my thoughts shifting from the issue of climate change—which is global, but local, in the planetary sense—to matters larger and smaller, I realized that both directions of my drift these recent days—the microscopic and cosmic—raise very similar questions: Who are we? What counts as human if much of our substance is actually other organisms? Who do we become  if we alter the genome that defines who we "naturally" are? Where is our place in a universe whose early beginnings over 13 billion years ago is just now coming into sight and whose extent, some would argue, is infinite? And that remains stubbornly errant.

If I drift back from the vast, cosmic question to this smallish, ordinary planet, I wonder at our arrogance to think we matter at all. If I move the other way, to the microscopic, I wonder if we realize how tentative and ephemeral our existence is. Either way, I'm struck by the astonishing improbability of it all. Which cycles me back to earlier musings on this very question, shared here many blogs ago.

I float in these dilemmas for a while, and then go about my business as if none of these questions mattered, as if they hadn't come to mind. Until they do again.

I wonder what that means. 

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------

To comment on this post:  

If you got this blog via email, go to the blog website by clicking on the title at the top of this particular post.

To comment on this post from the blog website, click on "No comments" (or "2 comments" etc.) below. Comments from "anonymous" welcome.

Sea Change

In a couple of weeks, Resonance Women’s Chorus, the chorus with which I volunteer and about which I’ve often written, will present their spring concert. It’s been fun to hear the music come together and come to life over the past several months, so I’m looking forward to hearing it as a package, all polished up for show. My enthusiasm about this particular concert is heightened by the topic and by conversations among chorus members about its meaning. The theme, to oversimplify for the moment, is climate change. But that term doesn’t begin to describe the intent of the programming or the scope of the music. It’s not, as you might expect, a lesson about how we’ve all failed to tend to the planet. And it’s not, as you might also imagine, a lesson in what we should all be doing to prevent or accommodate to it. It's actually something else entirely.

So I want to talk about this concert and how I understand it—knowing full well that other folks will find other meanings in it. I offer this as a teaser, hoping you’ll come experience it for yourself and see what meaning you craft from it.

First, let me share the publicity about the concert to give you an idea of what I’m talking about here.

         

The concert is called “Sea Change: Love Song for a Warming Planet.” The text on the poster describes it as “… an exploration in sound and song of the emotional experience of living with climate change. It's an attempt to simply be with the 'not knowing' that underlies all of our wonderings and fears about the Earth's future and our own. Sea Change is a concert about nature, beauty, love, loss, and the extraordinary experience of being here now.”

Far from what you might expect, this concert seems to me like an invitation to become aware, to be open to the almost unimaginable experience of being witness to changes that surely signal a change in—and might signal an end to—human experience as we know it. To be aware of the sheer delight of this earth and, at the very same time, of the trembling forecasts for its future. The feeling that comes with knowing that we are responsible, each of us, for this situation, even as we stubbornly, unmindfully fail to change our ways of being. The consciousness of being in denial, yet of being terrified for future generations. Of simultaneously taking warm delight in a melody, a caress, or a cloud and sensing its impermanence. It’s about experiencing deep, gut-level fear and also breath-stopping amazement at the profound peace that remains to be found in nature. It’s about all of those or none of them or something else. But it’s not a predictable climate change program.

The concert promises a rich collection of beautiful, evocative music—evocative of a range of emotions including those I’ve mentioned and others. Everyone there, performer and listener, will likely find something different in it. At minimum, it’s an hour and a half of wonderful music. I can’t imagine that anyone would leave without being touched in some way. I know I have been, and I’ve only heard the rehearsals. So far.

I invite you to come if you can. Three opportunities: April 11, 12, and 18. For more information and to order tickets, visit the Resonance website at www.resonancechorus.org and click on “Performances.” 

On not losing the sky

On Friday, before the weekend snow storm started blowing in, I went with a friend to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge, where I’d never been. To tell the truth, I’ve never felt drawn to this place, despite its handy proximity to Denver (and to a slightly lesser extent, to Boulder) and its reputation as home to a range of wildlife. My strongest association to the arsenal comes from my childhood, when I remember it as a sort of mysterious place where important wartime activities occurred—though I never knew what sort of activities those were. Then I remember a period when they were pumping waste into the ground, and Denver suddenly experienced a rash of small earthquakes. My mom told a humorous story of being in a sort of … um … compromised sitting position and getting, in her words, “jostled” from her throne by one of those small tremors. The next thing I recall was the plan to clean up the arsenal, and then tales of eagles and deer making a home there, along with other winged and four-footed creatures.

When my friend suggested a trip to RMA NWF, I was more than willing because I’ve been hankering to get outside, having been cooped up by my lingering orthopedic miseries. My friend, with whom I’ve walked many, many miles over the years, was game to make it a mostly-driving and light-walking outing, so off we went. Sure enough, we saw flocks of assorted species of ducks on the lakes, lots of red-tailed hawks, a couple of harriers, a slew of magpies, a kestrel, many mule deer and a few white-tail deer – and other stuff I’m not recalling now. We also heard a lot of meadowlarks, whose lovely liquid song always signals the arrival of spring for me. Every year, my heart smiles the first time I hear it, even as I realize I’d forgotten to notice its absence over the winter.

But maybe best of all, we saw a blue, prairie-wide sky, saw sky and clouds reflected off of lakes, felt the breeze in our faces and watched it in the grasses and cattails. I hadn’t realized just how much I’ve been missing the wonderful, complicated Colorado sky. I’ve written here before about how much I love this sky, and this blog is splattered with sky pictures in assorted hues. Still, like the meadowlark’s song, I hadn’t realized how much I missed it until it was there, above and all around me.

Then, serendipitously, today’s New York Times carried an article called “What If We Lost the Sky?” This article was prompted by a recent report by the National Research Council exploring the possibility of “geoengineering,” artificially changing Earth’s climate—especially techniques for cooling the climate through artificial means. Among these would be introducing aerosols into the sky to reflect back some of the sun's radiation and thereby reduce the incoming heat—a strategy that might turn the sky white. The idea of fixing through human intervention what we’ve broken by human intervention carries a whole host of promising and frightening implications, which I’ll save for another time. But the title of this article really caught my attention, took me back to Friday’s excursion and then to many other days and nights beneath gorgeous skies.

What if … ?

Although some folks might turn immediately to practical questions prompted by the notion of messing with the sky (what would that do to agriculture?), I was especially struck by a different question raised by this article: the question of awe. It turns out that some folks have studied the importance of awe in our lives, that sense of feeling connected to something much larger than ourselves, of being a (small) part of the vast cosmos. It seems that this experience of awe is especially evoked by the sky—in fact, a clear starry night sky, the Milky Way arrayed overhead, is sort of the prototypic source of that feeling. Awe may also come in moments viewing the ocean, the Grand Canyon, the open rolling prairie, the mountains, and more. But the sky seems to be the premier source of awe.

Maybe this is what I’ve been missing, I thought. Not only the fresh air and scenery and the wide sky, but that sense of vastness, with me tiny in its presence. Interestingly, this research has also shown that the feeling of awe may be an antidote to egocentrism, may form a foundation for our connection to others and our commitment to our collective well-being. Hmm. Maybe I’ve been short on that, too.

So, it seems that the clear recommendation for our individual mental health and the collective good is simple: spend some with the sky. If you’re interested in taking on this project, you can warm up to the task by watching a short video embedded in this article, which shows 365 days of hour-by-hour videos of the sky over San Francisco. Nice. Nice music, too.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

To comment on this post:  

If you got this blog via email, go to the blog website by clicking on the title at the top of this particular post.

To comment on this post from the blog website, click on "No comments" (or "2 comments" etc.) below. Comments from "anonymous" welcome.

The view from the other side

A couple of weekends ago, we went to the annual Creating Change conference put on by the National LGBTQ Task Force, in my opinion, the grassroots heart of the queer rights movement. At the conference and since, I’ve thought a lot about how rapidly and how dramatically the movement is changing. I’ve also been reflecting on what it’s like to be more an appreciative observer than an active participant in the energetic directions I watched unfold there. And this train of thought, in turn, reminds me of my recent intention (largely successful) to look differently on the expansive life behind me from the perspective of the foreshortened one ahead.

In case that sounds a bit morbid, let me elaborate. Hopefully, with succinct clarity.

Lately, partly because of some persistent orthopedic problems, I’ve found myself slipping easily into regret for all the things I know I can’t do any more—and fantasizing, in an admittedly neurotic way, about all the things I fear I won’t be able to do any more. I’m enough of a psychologist to know that this sort of preoccupation isn’t going to help much of anything. So, I’ve been trying—with greater or lesser success—to transform my regret into gratitude. As I’m reminded of things I can’t do, I try to focus my thoughts and feelings on the pleasure I’ve gleaned from all the years I could do those things. This seems so simple as to be trite—but it has actually helped a lot. I have spent many happy moments recalling past adventures with great pleasure—an experience that would be nice enough if it happened against a neutral background, and it’s really wonderful happening against the alternative of moping regret.

So, I’ve been thinking about this reframing as I’ve pondered my response to the conference. First, let me tell you a bit about Creating Change. During the conference, some very engaged, very vocal, very dedicated folks basically claimed the conference stage and the attention of about 4000 people in the name of causes about which they were passionate. The first such event happened during the opening gathering, when a large group of trans activists spoke for about half an hour about the need for the movement to recognize the dire plight of trans people, especially trans women, especially trans women of color, who are being murdered at a terrifying rate and largely outside public awareness. Or even the awareness, they pointed out, of people in this progressive wing of the LGBTQ movement. The next morning, another large group—this time people from Ferguson, joined by other people of color—similarly claimed the stage and our collective attention for a large chunk of time, this time with a plea for the movement to pay more attention to the plight of people of color, especially (but not solely) queer people of color.

In each case, the conference organizers granted them time and space, uncontested. In fact, subsequent speakers, including the mistress of ceremonies (comedian Kate Clinton) and the ED of the Task Force, thanked them for demanding our attention. (As an aside, can I tell you how great it is to be affiliated with an organization that so totally walks its talk, that actually wants to be held accountable, that wants to grow with the movement?) But the protests were only one part of Change. There were also workshops on all manner of topics from intersex identity through inclusionary language and strategies for responding to anti-LGBTQ rhetoric to the role of faith in queer lives and of queer people in communities of faith. And then there were the colorful, performative gatherings in the lobby, the excited greetings and comfortable chatter among folks who likely can rarely be so open about their identities and their preferred manners of being in the world.

In all of these—and, in fact, throughout the conference—the buzzing energy of young LGBTQ people was rich and commanding. For one thing, they simply have more energy! Heck, their masqueerade ball was just starting about the time I crashed for the night. But beyond that, they are so alive with the enthusiasm of being relatively new to the movement, of being in a place where they could be fully themselves, whatever that means, surrounded by people who will accept that. A place where their voices were actually being heard. I, on the other hand, was aware that I wasn’t part of that energy—much as I respect and delight in it. My days of being at the leading edge, the surf in front of the wave, are (comfortably) behind me. This is partly because of changing priorities, movement fatigue, the physical realities of my particular aging trajectory, and likely a bunch of personal peculiarities. But it’s also because I’m simply not that wave. I’ve never been and will never be a queer youth coming of age in 2015, an era of same-sex marriage and growing emphasis on trans issues, diversity, and intersectionality. That experience—the experience they’re having that is constructing the movement and their place in it—is not an experience I’ve had. For me to presume that my particular take on the meaning of the movement should somehow shape its direction now, in a moment so startling new, would be, well, bizarre.

That's not to say that old people like me (and the many others who were there … although definitely not as many as the young people who were there) have nothing to offer. That, too, would be a misrepresentation of the vibrancy and depth and texture of this movement. But it is to say that this time is youth’s turn, youth’s wave, not ours. They are the ones who will live out their lives in this shape-shifting movement and in this world so ambivalent toward their realities. So, instead of bemoaning how the movement has “passed me by,” I choose to take pleasure in their joy in this moment and mine in recalling my time in the heart of the movement—and that includes lots of years of feeling like my cohort was hot stuff. Moments as a queer lay person and a queer professional when I felt like what I was doing would matter, big time. Now, other folks get to have that feeling—and they can do it partly because we did, when it was our turn.

None of this is to say that I can’t be actively involved, still productive in moving LGBTQ equality forward—just as I can continue to have life adventures, if in a different way. Heck, I contribute to a weekly radio show on these issues, I occasionally do professional writing about them, and in my daily life, I still talk and write about these topics at the drop of a hat. But the edgy stuff I saw at the conference—including the protests, but also the creative self-presentation, the linguistic complexity, the comfortable ease with things that still feel awkward to me, all of that—is theirs, not mine. And I’m fine with that.

For me, part of taking pleasure in my life is recognizing that the struggles of old age—or any other age, for that matter—come with a flip side. I’m not talking here about the silver lining school of aging. I don’t mean (only) that growing old has its merits and its particular strengths, although I do think that’s true. Instead, I mean that even the flat-out losses of aging can be signals for joy, cues to recall and celebrate the things that I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing in my life. I would never have noticed that I can’t backpack for days in desert canyons any more or travel hundreds of miles through the mountains by bike if I’d never done it. And I would never notice that the queer movement has wonderful new, sparkling treasures to reveal if I hadn’t been involved enough to be at this conference and notice the remarkable changes we’re now witnessing. Considered this way, recalling those now-past experiences isn't sad; instead, it lets me smile through them again, gives them another spin in my mind, invites another spark of joy. It's like a bonus ride. 

Sometimes I think the view from this side is so expansive because it lets me see the other side, my younger years, with such heightened clarity and gratitude. A fringe benefit of watching the movement grow, right on past me, bearing the mark of its generations of forebearers. Knowing I've been there, too. 

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2015. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------

To comment on this post: 

 If you got this blog via email, go to the blog website by clicking on the title at the top of this particular post.

To comment on this post from the blog website, click on "No comments" (or "2 comments" etc.) below. Comments from "anonymous" welcome.

Grounded between good and evil

“The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being,” wrote the Russian author and historian Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Mary Chapin Carpenter expanded on that pithy statement in her song “A Dream Like This,” written for the “Dead Man Walking” album:

We’re neither light nor darkness

We’re neither night or day

We’re neither kind nor heartless

We’re neither lost or saved

We’re neither still nor moving

We’re neither held or free

Oh to be so human

Oh to be

We all want to—maybe even dream that we can—transcend that often-fine line between good and evil, harboring only good, or at least only good intentions, in our hearts. But if we look carefully and consider honestly, few among us would deny that less noble impulses sometimes creep in. Solzhenitsyn and Chapin may have something here.

That line between good and evil has been much debated in the public sphere of late. The recent dispute about the meaning and merits of the film “American Sniper” has inspired lots of thoughtful people to examine what it means to celebrate an “authentic American hero” who killed a record of number of people during his tour in the Middle East, and by doing so, saved countless lives of American service members and of local civilians. Or to denounce the glorification of killing, even (or especially) by one of our own. To honor the warrior, perhaps especially because he was subsequently murdered by a vet he was trying to help, or to insist that war is rarely glorious and that these wars have certainly not been. An interesting piece in the New York Times encapsulates the arguments about this film between “hand-wringing lefties and chest-thumping righties.” It’s worth a read, and you’ll find it right here.

Left unaddressed in most of this is the complicated urge to claim that both arguments can be true—or, correlatively, that both can be false. The line between good and evil runs through the heart of this nation just as it does through each of ours.

A similar ruckus, which has simmered for several years within the American Psychological Association, my own professional org, has recently spilled out into the mainstream media. In this case, the issue is the participation of psychologists in torture—in the originally denied, later acknowledged, and subsequently forbidden program of torture enacted against “enemy combatants” held at Guantanamo and several “dark sites” around the globe. If you haven’t followed the story of some psychologists' role in this, you’ll find a pretty thorough overview of it in this New York Times article.

This controversy, too, pits “good” against “evil.” Early revelations of psychology’s apparent organizational complicity several years ago inspired many to withdraw from the association in protest. Then, as now, many people insisted that psychologists’ participation in the program of “enhanced interrogation” violated psychology’s core ethical principles, not the least of which is the ancient medical dictum to “first, do no harm.” Others insist that psychologists’ participation in interrogation ensured that prisoners would be treated humanely and that their well-being would be of primary concern. How much worse would it be, these folks asked, if there were no one there who understood such issues? In those early years and even since this controversy reached the public sphere, these claims and their advocates have failed to convince those representing either position of the rightness (the righteousness?) of the other.

Left largely unaddressed here, also, has been the possibility that both positions are justified in some sense, and both are flawed, that neither side can know all the things that the other side knows, that even knowing everything about everything, one can be left ambivalent about such complicated issues. That the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of this discipline as it does through each of ours.

Oh, it’s easy enough for each of us to be sure that she is Right and the “other side” (as if it were that simple) is Wrong. I made that very claim when I resigned from APA in protest over the organization’s failure to confront this issue directly, and I remain convinced that my decision was right. But what do I know—and what do I not know—from my safe and comfortable vantage point as a concerned but distant observer? What would I think if I were actually there, in the actual mortal battle or in the position of making decisions that would determine the fates of countless people?

How can I possibly know what I would know with great certainty then?

I had thought about this occasionally over the years, even though I was clear that snipers are not my heroes and torture is not OK. And then I was reminded how simplistic my absolute conclusions might be when I saw a play by George Brant called “Grounded.” The play has just one character—a woman pilot who leaves her position flying fighter jets in the Middle East to have a child. Back in the States, she finds that despite the joy she takes in her marriage and her daughter, she misses flying terribly. Well, actually, she misses the sky and the feel of flying. So she re-ups and gets assigned to a base in Nevada, where she will fly drones long-distance all day, 7 days a week. She’ll technically live with her family, but that possibility quickly morphs into added stress as she tries to live two very disparate lives—think loving and gentle vs. intentionally lethal. During the day, she “flies” drones by watching a screen and manipulating a stick that guides a drone over the desert 7500 miles away. By night, she sees her daughter and husband briefly and sleeps. The commute across the desert—a different one, to be sure—is her only break between those two lives.

Early on, although she’d deadly bored with “flying,” she is pleased, even jubilant, at opportunities to take out “guilties.” Then she starts noticing body parts flying from the blasts. Slowly, initially subtly but increasingly blatantly, her world begins to unravel. She is less sure, less committed in her work as a long-distance warrior, more disconnected and distant from her nearby family. She searches, painfully, for some sort of solace, maybe even some resolution to this impossible dilemma she faces: killing “guilties” by day and nurturing a family by (brief) night. Especially when the bad guys turn out to have body parts, and then friends, and then families. I don’t want to tell the whole story in case you get to see it. (Watch for it! I would go again, and then again in an instant if it returned.) It’s just that it all comes together—or apart—as she confronts this awful dilemma of finding both good and evil in herself, in her government’s actions, in her enemies, in the world.

I saw the play at the Dairy Center in Boulder, where the pilot was played by Laura Norman, who occasionally performs with the Boulder Ensemble Theater Company. She was just extraordinary in her depiction of this woman—her early thrill at flying, her delight in her new family, her begrudging move to piloting drones, and her gradual descent into … what? The line between good and evil. As one reviewer wrote, Grounded “lets no one off easy… Clap all you want—and you’ll want to clap a lot—but the game stays with you.”  The game stays with you.

None of this makes a sniper a heroic figure for our children or torture an acceptable strategy in my mind. But I have to consider the likelihood that reality is not as simple as my mind.

A fuller rendition of the Solzhenitsyn quote above goes like this:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

I imagine that if he saw Grounded or read about the flap surrounding American Sniper or APA’s now-public turmoil, Solzhenitsyn would be stroking his beard and nodding, knowingly. 

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2014. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------

To comment on this post: 

If you got this blog via email, go to the blog website by clicking on the title at the top of this particular post.

To comment on this post from the blog website, click on "No comments" (or "2 comments" etc.) below. Comments from "anonymous" welcome.

Readings for a foggy day

In the past week or so, I’ve come across three very different publications, each of which seemed particularly profound to me, so I wanted to pass on the recommendation that you catch them when you can.

The first is an amazing issue of National Geographic, “The Firsts Issue.” They had me with the cover. The lead story is “The First American,” and the cover shows a drawing of a teenage girl based on a 12,000-year-old skull recently discovered in a cave in Mexico. The girl’s DNA confirmed that contemporary Native American populations are descended from a Eurasian/East Asian population that was isolated (between the current continents) for about 10,000 years before making it to this continent—although many of her physical characteristics look very different from contemporary Native peoples. There’s much more to that immigration than I ever knew. I found it fascinating, speaking straight to my curiosity about human evolution and archaeology. 

But there’s more. An associated story explores the “first artists” and the “birth of art”—including evidence of symbolic expression long before the famous caves of Europe. My favorite line: "The beauty whipsaws your sense of time. One moment, you are anchored in the present, observing coolly. The next you are seeing the paintings as if all other art—all civilization—has yet to exist.” It gave me goose bumps. 

Computer simulation of one of the first stars in the universe,
exploding through dark matter to seed the universe with elements

Then there’s the article on a “first glimpse of the hidden cosmos” – which is about another of my favorite topics, the evolution of the universe. Another explores the “first year,” with interesting new findings and a range of stories about the importance of the first year of life. And more – the first city of Nigeria (Lagos), the first artificially conceived penguin (Magellenic), the first continent (called “Pangaea” by Wegener, who, in 1915, first theorized the existence and movement of tectonic plates), the “first bird” (bald eagle, in much less glamorous form than usual), and on it goes. It’s so great!

The second piece was a great column by David Brooks—who so often makes me think, hard, about complex topics (even though I disagree with many aspects of his political leanings). This was an article called “The Child in the Basement,” a commentary on Ursula Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (which you can read right here).  Brooks’ brief overview of the story is gripping itself, and his analysis has left me thinking all day. He explores the parable beneath this story—on one level, a cautionary tale about who we are willing to be as a society (a species?). And on another level, one about who we are willing to be to ourselves.

Brooks doesn’t tie this story or his commentary to any particular current event, but the connections seem clear and multiple to me: Ferguson, New York, Cleveland, Paris, Gaza, Syria. Maybe next door. Almost certainly in each of our own lives, the risk of losing the “idealism and moral sensitivity” represented by “the shivering child in the basement.” Be prepared to be stretched.

And the final piece caught me off guard. I was actually set up (unknowingly) for my strong reaction to this column by my recent struggles with orthopedic problems. After weeks (heck, months) of very distressing limitations on my activities, I’m gradually (very gradually) getting way better, and gradually coming to accept that this is the body I’ll have now. It’s actually not going to be fixed up “as good as new.” Nope. “Life miles,” in my orthopedist’s words, will mean that this is how it will be. I realize that my limitations, the consequences of my “life miles” are really quite minor. It’s just that they sometimes feel so demoralizing. So I’ve been in a funky mood about this, but I keep reminding myself that I’m in a funk about this, not in general. Or, as I said to my partner, I keep reminding myself that I’m distressed about this turn of affairs. I’m not depressed. To which she responded: Right, that’s not depression. It’s loss and grief.

So, I got a serious lump in my throat when I read this piece, “Getting Grief Right.” The column, written by a therapist, is actually about dealing with the loss (death) of a loved one—an experience that folks in my generation are becoming increasingly familiar with. This piece challenges the sometimes simplistic models of how grief necessarily happens—in stages, in sequence, with a definable ending to each and a process that brings us to “acceptance.” Preferably soon. I appreciated the openness of this discussion of grief, the space it gives to each individual's path. The story at the heart of the column put my own distress in perspective. At the same time, noticing my strong reaction to that story, I knew it was tapping into my own sorrow—about multiple recent and potential losses, including the loss of robust physical health. The invitation to deal with loss in your own way and at your own pace applies, I realized, to all forms of loss, including to losing the physical well-being that you’ve taken so for granted. Grief is what it is. There’s no “right” way to do it. The process is like a story, not an examination, and you write it yourself. The piece quotes the Danish author Isak Dinesen: “All sorrows can be borne if you tell a story about them.” So I’m now trying to craft a new story of my life that includes the the costs of glorious life miles. Maybe I'll get to acceptance as the story unfolds, but not because it's time to “get over it.” I’ll likely be writing more about it here. Meanwhile, check out this column. Worth the read, whether or not you’re currently dealing with loss.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2014. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post.

 -----------------------------------------------------------------

To comment on this post: 

 If you got this blog via email, go to the blog website by clicking on the title at the top of this particular post.

To comment on this post from the blog website, click on "No comments" (or "2 comments" etc.) below. Comments from "anonymous" welcome.

Amazing race - Part 2

The other day, I posted a quick note encouraging everyone to visit the History Colorado exhibit on “Race: Are We So Different?” I hope some of you saw it—whether with or without that bit of encouragement. Since then, I’ve come across two columns that spoke exactly to some of the points raised in “Race.” The whole experience—the exhibit, the articles—has been eye opening for me. Even though I’ve thought quite a lot about these issues, I keep encountering new ideas that stretch me.

 First, a few comments on the exhibit, then some reflections.

This was a traveling exhibit created by the American Anthropological Society—which helps explain why it’s so remarkably thoughtful and thought provoking. I was especially struck by how well it avoids the easy slippage into focusing on racial categories in favor of challenging the very concept of race itself. That’s a stretch for any of us who were raised in a culture that categorizes people by race at every turn. And to convey this idea, the exhibit has tons of interactive features and cleverly designed, concrete ways to illustrate the point. But it didn’t avoid challenging concepts in the service of simplicity.

For instance, the introductory video dismantles the notion of race as a real “thing,” explaining in straightforward terms how race doesn’t actually exist, how we have come to believe that it does, and what are the underlying dynamics (economics, power, privilege) that generated and still perpetuate the illusion of racial categories. This isn’t necessarily an easy set of concepts to introduce to an audience many of whom may have little experience in thinking deeply about race—except, perhaps, to be well aware that racial bias is problematic.

The central theme that runs through the exhibit is this: the social and economic differences that we observe today are direct results of our belief that racial categories are real. Those beliefs have fueled actions like these: generations of genocide practiced against Native residents of America, theft of their land, and “re-education” efforts to “kill the Indian and save the man”; wartime internment of Japanese citizens that required them to leave behind their businesses, homes, and possessions; “red-lining” that prevented non-white servicemen from using the GI bill to buy houses in the suburbs, when home ownership in those areas would have allowed them entry to the emerging American middle class. Over time, such differential treatment and its material and psychological toll unavoidably resulted in social and economic divisions marked by “race.”

I’ve known about this train of thought for some time, this argument that categories of people are invented rather than discovered. That once created, these categories have real, concrete impacts on people sorted into them. It’s directly related to my own academic work, so I get it, and I am convinced it’s correct. Still, once in a while, someone presents it in a way that’s especially striking. A few of these moments came up at this exhibit:

You could look at an individual from Kenya and an individual from Norway and easily believe that they represent two different races. But if you walked from Kenya to Norway, there would be no point along your route where you could say, “Here it is—the dividing line where people change from one race to another.” There is no dividing line because there are no actual categories.

Imagine sitting on a bus going to, say, Disneyland. Regardless of who the person next to you is, somewhere around 93-97% of your genes are identical to theirs. Regardless of their nationality, racial or ethnic category, or sex/gender.

We know that the human species first emerged in Africa and migrated from there through the Middle East and into Asia, Europe, the Far East, and the Americas. Only a small sample of the African population made the trip—which means that only a small slice of the full human genome made the trip. As a result, despite subsequent mixing, the largest proportion of human variation is found among Africans—which is to say, Africans have virtually all of the genes of other groups, and those other groups have just some of the genes that Africans possess.

Still, illusory though race may be, these categories have huge impacts on our lives. Some of that impact is seen in privilege, some in oppression. Some of it is overt, some more subtle. Some of it is intentional, some is non-conscious. It’s this latter sort that’s tricky: the “stuff” we all carry around that we aren’t even aware of, biases that we would in fact deny if asked our conscious beliefs. One person in a video at the exhibit called it the “smog of racism.” We all breathe it in and are damaged by it, whether or not we acknowledge it. Acknowledging it, he said, is the first step.

This is where those two recent articles come in. The first was a New York Times column, “Racial Bias, Even When We Have Good Intentions” by Sendhil Mullainathan, a Harvard economist. It’s a good, brief article—well worth the read, and you’ll find it right here. Mullainathan summarizes several studies that show inadvertent racial bias, and then points out that most people are unaware that they carry these biases. These attitudes are so well learned that they affect our actions even without our knowing it. Here’s a telling line from the column: “Even if, in our slow thinking, we work to avoid discrimination, it can easily creep into our fast thinking. Our snap judgments rely on all the associations we have—from fictional television shows to news reports. They use stereotypes, both the accurate and the inaccurate, both those we would want to use and ones we find repulsive.”

And the second was another NYT column called “Privilege of ‘Arrest without Incident’,” this one by regular columnist Charles Blow—which you can read here. Blow describes an incident that happened just over a week ago in which a white woman drove around a southern city, shooting at people from her car, then leading police on a chase and even aiming her gun at an officer. The news story reports that she was “arrested without incident.” This is a good outcome, Blow agrees. But, he asks, shouldn’t everyone have the right to an “arrest without incident.” Consider the starkly different fate of black men who have done far less in recent months but have not had that right, that privilege. He notes that every case is different, and we cannot know all the relevant circumstances. Still, he writes, “Police officers are human beings making split-second decisions—often informed by fears—about when to use force and the degree of that force.” Those are the split-second decisions, the “fast thinking” that Mullainathan talks about in his column. 

Hanging out in this topic area for a few days has got me thinking about my own responses, the “fast thinking” moments when I realize that I’m not finished with my own work here, not by far. How often I try to wish away the thoughts I don’t want to have, the things I wish I’d thought to say differently, the tiny actions that reveal my unthinking biases. And how often I must miss those things, not realizing that my actions don’t always match my conscious beliefs.

But smog causes lung damage whether or not we admit it, and I’ve been breathing in racial smog for a lot of years. Acknowledging it is just the first step.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2014. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post.

 -----------------------------------------------------------------

To comment on this post: 

If you got this blog via email, go to the blog website by clicking on the title at the top of this particular post.

To comment on this post from the blog website, click on "No comments" (or "2 comments" etc.) below. Comments from "anonymous" welcome.

Amazing race!

I'll follow up soon with a longer discussion of this, but I wanted to pass on a quick heads up. We just returned from the History Colorado exhibit on "Race: Are We So Different?" It's an excellent exhibit, and you really want to go. Quick!

The urgency to get this posted comes from the fact that it only runs through January 4 -- that's this Sunday. So, if you get this in time and can possibly arrange it, GO! Trust me: it's well worth postponing that movie or whatever else you were sort of considering for the weekend.

For more information, visit the History Colorado site by clicking right here.