paulmuses

And an update on Rebecca’s preparation for the 2021 Des Moines Register’s Bike Ride Across Iowa

Euro 2020 and England vs. Italy

On Sunday, July 11, Italy defeated England to win the European 2020 soccer championship. The game ended in a 1 – 1 tie after regular time and two additional periods. In international soccer, penalty shootouts decide the winner. A penalty shootout is where five players from each team take turns from the penalty spot, 12 yards from the goal. Italy won the penalty shootout 3 – 2.

Three of the five England players Manager Gareth Southgate selected for the shootout are black: Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, and Bukayo Saka. All three missed their shots. A small number of fans used Twitter and other Social Media platforms to direct hateful comments at these players. And someone defaced a mural of Marcus Rashford. Southgate, who himself had missed a penalty shot against Germany in Euro 96, condemned these odious tweets and the England team and most of the country rallied around the players in the days following the game.

I watched 45 of the 51 Euro 2020 games, including this championship match. I wanted England to win but my stomach tightened an extra notch when England’s final three penalty shooters – Rashford, Sancho, and Saka – all missed. I worried about what might follow.

Where does the hate come from that would lead someone to post a vicious tweet or damage a mural? Thinking about this question lead me back to a day many years ago.

“You’ve got to be taught”

In 1958, two delivery men hauled a huge package up 25 steep steps through a little entry way into the living room of my parents’ house. Inside was something called a stereo, the iPod of the day. After supper, my parents, two brothers and me sat around the living room – we usually only used the living room at Christmas time – and listened to the soundtrack of the film South Pacific. I knew nothing of the story but one song stuck in my memory, “You’ve got to be carefully taught.”

I did not see the film South Pacific until the summer of 1980. I was living in Ann Arbor, Michigan where The Michigan Theater showed classic movies every weekend. I settled into my seat about 15 minutes before the film and was startled to see an organ piano rise from the theater depths with the organist playing the music I last heard in 1958. The film began and eventually wove its way to the”Carefully Taught” subplot. I saw the anguish of American Lieutenant Cable and Tonkinese girlfriend Liat. Cable decides not to marry Liat because love was not enough. Too many of his contemporaries had been taught to hate, in the words of the song,

“People who’s eyes are oddly made and people who’s skin is a different shade.”

Children notice difference

My mother too often told this story about me. “When Paul was three, I took him shopping to Walgreens Drug Store. We were in the check out line and Paul turns and sees a black man for the first time. Paul starts crying and pointing and would not stop until we left the store and got into the car.” Rebecca’s mom told a similar story about her three year old son Mike. They were at the State Fair in Illinois and Mike saw a black man and said over and over “he’s black, he’s black.”

Last summer Rebecca and I spent three months in Houston, Texas babysitting four year old Irene, one of Rebecca’s grandchildren. One day Rebecca showed Irene a You Tube video clip of a friend’s 4 year old Chinese granddaughter singing a song. After the brief clip, Irene said “I don’t like her.”

Apparently humans are programmed to start grouping people – making distinctions based upon physical characteristics – by the age of two.* Little Paul, Mike, and Irene did what all humans start out doing. They notice human differences and respond. I was scared, Mike was bewildered, and Irene was displeased. Yet, I did not become a hater. Nor did Mike. Irene, well, let’s just say the chances of Irene becoming an adult who hates Chinese people are slim.

But some little children do grow into adults who hate “those whose eyes are oddly made and people who’s skin is a different shade.” I know nothing about the people who felt the need to send out into the world venomous words and images directed at the England’s black players. Nothing, except their actions. But I also have seen the actions of the more numerous non-haters. Most Social Media messages after England’s loss to Italy supported Rashford, Sancho and Saka. And fans from across England rushed to bury the graffiti on Marcus Rashford’s mural in flowers and other tributes.

It’s not easy to teach people to hate

When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s I do not remember my mom or dad talking much about race. My mom did not describe the Walgreen incident until I was in my thirties. The only comment I ever heard my father make about race was that the singer Nat King Cole was a “good negro.” Yes, I know, cringe-worthy to our 2021 ears, but this race-language was enlightened compared to what I occasionally heard from his parents and brother Jim at Sunday dinners in Tipton, Iowa. Other than my dad’s judgment about Cole, my parents never taught their children there was anything wrong with people who did not look like us.

Rebecca’s mother and father spent one year in the 1940s in Georgia before moving back to Illinois to raise their six children. According to Rebecca, her mom would told her kids that blacks in Georgia had to use different drinking fountains and how wrong that was. Throughout the 1960s Evelyn Franklin would refer to that Georgia experience when talking with her kids about the motivations of those protesting for Civil Rights.

Irene lives in Houston, Texas with her mom Suzanne and dad Jonathan, Rebecca’s son. Houston is one of America’s most diverse cities and Irene’s daycare, preschool and neighborhood friends reflect that diversity. And the evening after Irene’s “I don’t like her comment” we all played the I Never Forget a Face Memory Game and all three adults took every opportunity to talk with Irene about how different human faces are and how that is difference is good.

Most people do not become haters because their parents and increasingly the society that surrounds them send too many messages into the “little ears” of children that are antidotes to turning those differences children note into fear and then into hatred. Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II published “You’ve got to be carefully taught” in 1949, the year I was born. How much has changed, for the better.

The little Paul’s, Mike’s and Irene’s of today learn in a world where the messages sent by haters are condemned by most adults. It’s never been easy to teach people to hate.

You’ve got to be taught from year to year; It’s got to be drummed into your dear little ear; You’ve got to be CAREFULLY taught…You’ve got to be taught before its too late; before you are six, seven or eight…

It’s even harder today.

Rebecca’s Ragbrai update

In A Life Lesson from a Biking Grandma, I wrote about Rebecca’s preparation for the 454 mile bike ride across Iowa that starts a week from today, Sunday, July 25. She is now at 550 miles and probably will fall a bit short of the 700 recommended pre-Ragbrai miles. However, she says “I feel strong and think I am ready.” As the distance between us increases on our daily rides, especially up the Decorah bike trail switchbacks, I agree. And it’s been fun playing the part of trainer Rocky Balboa to Rebecca’s Adonis Creed.

* Kwame Anthony Appiah makes this point in The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity.

Wasting a moment

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” wrote Annie Dillard. When I read the Dillard quote a week ago, the image that popped into my mind was not about a day but a minute. The image was a clock that hung in the front left corner about 10 feet off the ground just over my high school Geometry teacher Mr. Deroin’s right shoulder as he stood behind a podium. I am sitting in the front desk in the row closest to the windows just under the clock. My 15 year old neck tilted easily upward urging the click that will signal the minute hand to thrust forward, from 1:12 to 1:13.

I wanted 1:12 to be 1:13. And then 1:14…until 1:21 and the end of Geometry class. I was living one minute in the future wasting away in Davenport, Iowa 14 years before Jimmy Buffet was doing the same in Margaritaville.

I am guessing Dillard meant the “of course” in the quote above ironically, at least as it applies to me. The idea that my life is best thought as the cumulation of increments – days, but also minutes and hours – is not obvious to me. Here are two practices that have helped me experience the wonder in each moment, hour and day. And that also serve as antidotes to despair.

How many days do I have left?

One way to think in life increments is to see the increments. I use the Days Calculator web site every so often to remind myself of the bits that have made up my life. When I checked it a few moments ago, I discovered that from my birth date of September 20, 1949 I have lived:

37,738,080 minutes

628,968 hours

26,207 days

And then I use the The Social Security Actuarial Table to tell me how much time I have left. From today, it offers me:

7, 057,440 minutes

117,624 hours

4901 days

4901 days remaining. Hmm. Seeing my past and future life in its increments, brought home the power of a favorite quote about the meaning of life, from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning:

We [The prisoners of Auschwitz] needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly…Life ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

When I behold each moment, each hour, each day of my life, I am less likely to starve it of meaning, to waste it away by wishing for the next moment.

The certainty of death

Of course, those numbers about my future minutes, hours and days are an illusion. Maybe I have more. My mother lived to be 96 and one of her sisters 103. Or maybe less. My father died of cancer at my age. But this chimera, that I have 4901 days left, is more useful than the default fantasy that purrs away in the background of my thinking. When I bring it to the foreground, it goes something like this.

Dying is something that happens to other people. Not to me.

The Population Research Institute estimates that 117 billion Homo Sapiens have lived on earth, including the 7 billion alive today. That means 110 billion people have died. Having been lucky enough to live, I am certain I will die. To combat my illusion about death, I occasionally use a death mediation I learned from the late Indian Jesuit priest Anthony DeMello who wrote in Awareness:

I’ve often said to people that the way to really live is to die. The passport to living is to imagine yourself in your grave.  Imagine that you’re lying flat in your coffin and you’re dead. See the body decomposing, then the bones, then it all turning to dust. Now look at your problems from that viewpoint. Changes everything, doesn’t it? Do this for a minute or so every day and you’ll come alive.

There is nothing more wondrous than this moment

I don’t want the 15 year old Paul sitting in Geometry class thinking about how many days he has left or the certainty of his death. He’s got to be in what the psychotherapist Irvin Yalom in Staring at the Sun calls the everyday mode. He’s just trying to figure out HOW to get through the world.

On the other hand, 71 year old Paul finds it useful to awaken to what Yalom calls the ontological mode. This type focuses not on the HOW of the world, but

The miracle of being itself and marvel THAT things are, THAT you are.

I have lived long enough to know that many of my moments, hours, and days have been filled with pain. Life is hard, for all of us. A brief survey of the news or of history offer too damn many examples. If the present is painful, yearning for the future is a rational choice. And despair is tempting.

Yet, moments are all I have, all you have. Even if some of them are full of pain. I have found that regular reminders of the miracle of my brief moment of existence are enough to balance the sadness, with wonder.

Have you ever been dogged by bad thoughts? Thoughts you could not let go. I have and it all started with a Superman comic book and a confession.

Confession # 1

I remember the week I rooted for the evil Superman. In 1962 I got my hands on the comic book that introduced the anti-Superman Bizarro. And didn’t let go, for about a week. I reveled in Bizarro’s nastiness and carried my well-worn comic book around as a talisman, even wedging it inside the New Math paper textbook my school handed out when I was in 8th grade. I did and felt all of this in secret, telling no one. Not my friends or brothers and certainly not my parents. This guilty pleasure was mine and I held it close. But the guilt soon overwhelmed the pleasure. “There must be something wrong with me,” I thought, “I am enjoying this bad guy too much.”

When Bizarro entered my life at 13, I had been confessing my sins for six years. Roman Catholic kids made their First Confessions and First Communions at 7. I don’t know where I picked up the phrases “bad thoughts” or “impure thoughts” but they became my go-to sins. I defined my sin repertoire by thoughts more than actions.

It’s not that I didn’t have behaviors to confess. I lied to my parents all the time as in “yeah, I finished my homework.” And at ages 9 and 12, I stole little items from a local drug store as part of the membership requirements of a neighborhood gang. Yikes, but it sounds worse than it was. Friends Vinny and Mark plus me were the gang and as I recall we didn’t do anything other than steal bubble gum or aspirin bottles from Smith Drug.

Then there was that day around this Bizarro-time when I went into four garages in an alley behind our house and knocked or pulled down anything I found. Double yikes, and fortunately, that was a one-off.

But I never confessed to lying, stealing or pillaging. What I did confess were bad thoughts, as in…

Bless me father for I have sinned. This week I keep thinking about all the bad things this Bizarro guy I am reading about does. I can’t stop these thoughts.

For the first time in my confession history, I took what I considered a sin seriously. Did evil thoughts mean I was an evil person? Did evil thoughts mean I could do evil things? I don’t remember what the priest said when I confessed my Bizarro thoughts. However, I do know now what I wish he had said then.

Confession # 2

“My son,

Thoughts are not actions. And they do not define the person. No one really knows where thoughts come from. Some religious traditions, Buddhism, for example, suggest thoughts come from nowhere. Psychologists have learned that thoughts are outside our control. Even Jesus had bad thoughts, temptations. By the way, the same is true for feelings and sensations but let’s stick to thoughts because that is what you have confessed to.

Everyone has 1000s of thoughts everyday. Some of these thoughts are what you might call fringe thoughts. These are weird thoughts, thoughts that have nothing to do with who you are or what you might do. Just this morning as Mrs. Smith was preparing my breakfast she put a sharp knife on the table. My brain sent me this thought, “I could stab Mrs. Smith.” I like Mrs. Smith and have never stabbed anyone in my life so I let the thought pass through my mind.

When you read about Bizarro, Evil Superman, it was natural for your brain to send you thoughts about how nice it would be to do evil things. In fact, I’ll bet you rooted for Bizarro for a week because you were resisting those bad thoughts and so they were sticking around. What we resist, persists.

Remember thoughts do not make the boy. Actions do.

Now, let’s talk about what you have been doing!”

Preparing for RAGBRAI 48

My partner Rebecca is preparing to ride her bike across the state of Iowa. Yes, the entire state, 454 miles in seven days. She will join 15,000 riders in late July on the 48th RAGBRAI, the [Des Moines] Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa. “Wow,” you say. That’s what I said two years ago when she did it the first time. COVID erased last year when she would have done it again.

How do you prepare to ride as many as 84 miles in a day? RAGBRAI officials recommend 700 miles of preparation. Rebecca has ridden 160 miles thus far this spring, usually 14 miles a day three or four times a week. Decorah’s 11 mile Trout Run Bike trail circles the city and offers steep switchbacks through the countryside that provide perfect training for this endeavor. “Every mile up these hills will decrease my pain in July,” said Rebecca to me yesterday at the top of the steepest switchback.

“For Sunday and most of Monday in 2019, all I could think about was that I could call Paul and he would pick me up. On Tuesday, I thought why would I do that?”

That’s Rebecca reflecting back upon her preparedness for Ragbrai 47 in 2019. Each of the 700 miles of preparation added to Rebecca’s capacity to bike across Iowa. Her leg strength, stamina, and confidence got better. But biking more than 400 miles for someone in their late sixties was still a formidable challenge.

“We had just gotten to the top of a very very steep and rather  long highway going into Keokuk on the last day of the ride.  I made it!  I did not get off my bike and walk as so many did.  But the comparison between myself and my team mates became evident when Colleen said “Whew, that was tough.  I actually slipped down into my granny gear.”  Hmmm.  I had been in my granny gear most of the week. But whatever.”

Better but still…

Yesterday I did a couple of things better than I would have done them several years ago. My improved performance on each activity happened slowly, incrementally, and intentionally. While better at each task, I am still a long way from where I want or, perhaps, ever can be.

Whenever you are faced with a challenge or frustrated with a ceiling on your progress, remember this life lesson from Rebecca, the biking grandma.

How America changes for the better

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” said a friend to me the other day. We were talking about breaking an old habit and trying something new. I chafed as it was me that suggested trying this new thing. Yet Barrie was right, no one likes to change, including me. But we are changing all the time. Not just you and me but America. We don’t see the change because we focus too much attention on the moment and too little attention on a longer time span. And we pay too much attention to old dogs and too little attention to new dogs.

A playground story

One of the advantages of living 71 years is perspective on the way things used to be. I recall two things from a lunchtime playground incident when I was 11 years old, in 1960. The 20 boys in my class were on an ice and snow covered parking lot that served as our playground. We were playing a version of tag, with a line of 20 boys running from one end of the playground to the other starting with one boy in the middle. Whoever he could tackle would remain in the middle for the next wave. The last boy standing would be the winner.

The first thing I remember was waking up in the school nurse’s office with my mother sitting on a chair in the corner and my head bandaged. I had been unconscious for about 30 minutes. Apparently when I was tackled my head hit the ice and concrete and this had knocked me out. The nurse told my mom to take me home and put me to bed. Can you imagine what would happen to school administrators today who allowed kids to play tackle-tag on an ice covered concrete playground? Or if a head injury did occur, have no concussion protocol in place? Regarding kid safety, America (and much of the world) has changed, for the better.

My second memory IS embarrassing but wasn’t when I and others gave a full-throated “tackle red man” shout to signal the next onslaught. We were just kids and didn’t know better, just as we didn’t know tackling on concrete and ice was dangerous. But we played that game all the time with adults supervising the playground. Not only didn’t they see the concrete and ice danger, they didn’t see how offensive this term was to American Indians.

From acceptable to unacceptable

Today, Dictionary.com defines red man as “a contemptuous term used to refer to a North American Indian.” In 1994, St. John’s University changed the name of their athletic teams from Redmen to Red Storm, in recognition of both Native American sensitivity and the fact that half their athletes were women. And two years ago America’s National Football League Washington Redskins became The Washington Football Team. Pressure by Native American groups and corporate sponsors after the George Floyd killing was enough to force the Washington team ownership to do what they had resisted doing for years.

It’s really all about the new dogs

“Time keeps on slippin, slippin into the future,” The Steve Miller Band reminds us in Fly like an Eagle. From a generational perspective, time is a friend. How does a society change for the better, as America has done regarding kid safety and what language is acceptable? Regarding language, the late Political Scientist E.E. Schattschneider* writes:

Old words are a revelation of the ignorance of people, their superstitions, folly, prejudices, [and] miscalculations…

How do words, like red man or redskin, become old? How do practices like slavery or Jim Crow segregation lose their force in the world? Many, many reasons, but one sticks out when we take a generational or time perspective. Sometimes old dogs learned new tricks but more often the world supplied new dogs who learned new tricks.

Based on current death and birth numbers, 85,645,140 Americans will die in the next thirty years and 112,426,200 will be born. The 85 million who will die – most of them old dogs – will take old dog tricks – opinions, prejudices, and votes – to their graves. The 112 million who will replace them – the new dogs – will learn new tricks. Many will develop different opinions, prejudices and political preferences.

This is one way America changes and one reason children are safer today and offensive terms like red man or Redskin are unacceptable. With new people, old language and ideas are discarded. New ideas are accepted and new ways of acting toward others become achievable. And America’s vision of who is part of the American community and thus worthy of respect expands.

_______________________________________________________________

*The idea for this blog came from E.E. Schattschneider’s Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government.

Two Questions

Can you think of the last conversation you had where neither you nor any of your partners interrupted the speaker? Or tried to finish someone’s sentence? Or followed without missing a beat Bill’s story with one of your own? Or responded to Maria’s question with “well, what do you think?” instead of effortlessly moving into advice mode with “let me give you my two cents.”

Me neither.

Can you think of the last time you felt completely at ease in a conversation knowing your conversation partner would not: interrupt, try to finish your sentence, follow your story with her story, or jump quickly to offer advice?

Me neither.

If my recent conversations were recorded, you would hear me: prudently interrupt, helpfully complete sentences, constructively add a story, and sagely offer advice. I do all these things with the perverse idea that my conversation partner needs my mind more than her own.

Rubbish

Says Nancy Kline in Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind, a terrific book I wished I had read 20 years ago, the first year it was published. If I had and taken the content to heart, I would have been a better partner, father, son, teacher, and friend. It’s not too late for me or you. Three sentences from Kline early in the book grabbed my attention.

Everything we do depends for its quality on the thinking we do first…The quality of a person’s attention determines the quality of other people’s thinking…Attention, the act of listening with palpable respect and fascination, is key.

Listening and thinking

“Think before you act.” My mother said that to me a lot. So Kline’s first sentence was a nice reminder of a truism born out time and again throughout my life. See a stick on the sidewalk and it feels like a snake. But, pause, take three breadths, and the thinking and judgment part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, kicks in and tells you its a stick.

How does the quality of my attention, my listening, make you a better thinker? About 25 years into my 40 year college teaching career, I decided to move from a lecture format to a more Socratic question and answer pedagogy. Jenna, an excellent student, came to my office when I sent her a brief email asking why she was missing so many classes. “I came to Luther to interact with my professors,” she said, “not to sit in class and look at one power point slide after another.” I thought about what she said for a week and decided no more power points. Over the next couple of years I developed a more interactive class format that included questions on the day’s assigned material and mini-lectures for context.

More questions meant more student responses. And more opportunities for me to interrupt. Always with the best of intentions, of course. I thought interrupting to help finish a thought or guide a student to the correct interpretation of an idea or gently nudge them to an insight was proof I was a good listener. Perhaps, but my job was to help my students become better thinkers. Imagine, Kline writes, what it means to be in conversation with someone you know will not interrupt.

To know you are not going to be interrupted allows your mind to dive, to skate to the edge and leap, to look under rocks, twirl, sit calculate, stir, toss the familiar and watch new ideas billow down. The fact that the person can relax in the knowledge that you are not going to take over, talk, interrupt, maneuver or manipulate is one of the key reasons they can think so well around you.

The key to all of this, says Klein, is attention, “the act of listening with respect and fascination.” I describe two examples, one from film and another from personal experience, of Klein’s ideas about how better listening can help encourage better thinking.

42

There’s a great thinking scene* in the film 42, about Jackie Robinson’s 1947 experience as the first African-American to play in America’s baseball Major League. Robinson’s (played by the late Chadwick Boseman) Brooklyn Dodgers were playing the Philadelphia Phillies managed by Ben Chapman. Chapman had been shouting racial epithets at Robinson and after making an out Robinson carries his bat into the tunnel leading from the dugout to the dressing room. Furious at this treatment, Robinson smashes the bat against a wall and lets out a wail. Dodger owner Branch Rickey (played by Harrison Ford) stands watching in the tunnel and then begins to move toward Robinson.

Smashing the bat and emoting a cry of emotional pain gave Robinson time for the thinking part of his brain to assert itself against the feeling part. And the Rickey character stands back and watches and as he watches he is listening to Jackie. He then moves forward and listens some more and then finally offered Jackie some advice. Rickey’s advice was for Robinson to channel his rage toward beating Chapman’s team which was what Jackie did. But Boseman and Ford played this scene in such a way as to suggest Robinson came to this solution on his own, with Rickey mostly an observer and listener.

An electrician thinks

“[Quality] listening is enzymatic,” says Klein. What better proof than to try it and see listening in action. Last week an electricians arrived at 8 AM to put in two or three new outlets. We have a house built in 1890 with an unfinished basement and thick sandstone walls. Electrical work has always been a challenge. We explained what we wanted but I had another agenda. Rebecca went up stairs to finish some work leaving me alone with Kyle. For about 30 minutes I observed him working out loud the various basement and wall problems. I did not interrupt and when he asked a question I responded with “what do you think?”

Ease

I enjoyed observing Kyle’s mind at work. I tried to create an atmosphere full of what what Klein calls ease. Ease is “a presence defined by an absence…[and] allows the human mind to broaden and reach.” Regardless of intention, interruptions create a sense of urgency. And Klein rightly says that “urgency keeps people from thinking clearly.” Unlike urgency, ease is a catalyst. Here’s Klein again.

Ease conceives and grows cymbal-crashing exciting thoughts from the thinker. The loose, leaning-back, breathing-out, smiling, keenly attentive, confident, unrushed presence blasts lucid ideas out of otherwise impenetrable vaults of confusion and doubt…Ease creates…Urgency destroys.

It’s not me it’s you

The secret to quality attention and quality listening is to switch my focus from me to you. That’s a skill and takes practice. I can focus inward, on my thoughts and ideas. And that leads me to want to interrupt you. Or I can focus outward, on your thoughts and ideas. And while I am doing that, search for questions that encourage you to keep thinking. In the Art of Loving, Erich Fromm said “it is not possible to respect another person without really knowing him.” I can only know you if I listen well. And by listening carefully, I inevitably see your interesting mind at work.

You have my permission to return the favor.

__________________________________________________________

*Apparently the bat breaking incident never happened. I include this fictional scene because it depicts a form of what Klein calls a good thinking environment.

“They tried to eradicate us”

When I asked a young man guiding Rebecca and me through America’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice what should we read, he mentioned two book titles after a glance at his phone. And then he looked at us and said through his COVID mask:

They tried to eradicate us.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice memorial was the last stop on an eight day trip visiting civil rights museums and memorials in Memphis, Jackson, Selma and Montgomery. It honors the 5000 known and the many unknown African-Americans lynched in the United States of America.

Two weeks returned and our guide’s words triggered thoughts of another place I had been that helped me understand the power of hatred. The animating idea of the National Memorial to Peace and Justice and Auschwitz-Birkenau is what human beings fueled by hatred do to their victims.

To be hated

What does it mean to be hated? To be despised because of my religion or ethnic identity or race, with no recognition of either the content of my character or my shared humanity. My stomach tightens in anxiety when I am disliked or ignored or misunderstood. But to be hated, that’s beyond my experience. What must it be like to be our National Memorial guide who could reasonably say “they tried to eradicate us?” To know what it means to be hated, I needed to listen to the stories of the victims of hate.

And if the eyes of those men had had the power to pulverize that car, it would have been done, exactly as, in the Bible, the wicked city is leveled–I had never in all my life seen such a concentrated, malevolent poverty of spirit.

James Baldwin, No Name in the Street, p. 78

This was James Baldwin’s description about how he felt on a visit to Alabama in the 1960s as three white men in the Montgomery, Alabama airport followed his movement through the terminal to a waiting car. Later, Baldwin mistakenly walked into a “whites only” restaurant.

Every white face turned to stone: the arrival of the messenger of death could not have had a more devastating effect than the appearance in the restaurant doorway of a small, unarmed, utterly astounded black man.

p. 71

Baldwin once said: “What is most terrible is that American white men are not prepared to believe my version of the story.” The National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Auschwitz-Birkenau tell versions of stories all of us need to hear if we are, in the words of our Montgomery guide

To face our past to move forward from our shared pain.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

“They are all honored here.” This is what our young guide said when I asked him why he worked at this place. The memorial includes 800 steel monuments representing the 800 counties in America where 5000 African-Americans were lynched. We descended as we walked through the memorial and finished with the monuments over our head, the height of a hanging body.

John Hartfield was one of those honored. He was lynched for having a white girlfriend in Mississippi in 1919, the year my mother was born. A blink of an eye ago and 54 years after America’s civil war ended. Michael Donald was the last American lynched, in Mobile, Alabama, on March 21, 1981. My son would be born at the end of the last decade of lynching in America. Grandmother and grandson, two generations, and hundreds of lynchings apart.

This paragraph, from Wikipedia, is instructive. “Hartfield was hung in a tall sweet gum tree, then his body was riddled with bullets, then brought to the ground where men cut up the corpse for souvenirs, finally burning what remained. Afterward, commemorative postcards of the lynching were created and sent out.^[5]A story circulated among whites that Hartfield had been hanged from the very same tree where the confederates had hanged three insurgents in the civil war.^[1] Governor Bilbo declared “This is a white man’s country, with a white man’s civilization and any dream on the part of the Negro race to share social and political equality will be shattered in the end”.^[6]

Auschwitz-Birkenau

In the fall of 2004 I twice toured Poland’s Auschwitz-Birkenau’s Memorial and Museum. Two impressions from those visits linger: the massive pile of victims’ shoes behind a glass window and the silence. No one among the 30 people in either tour group said a word.

A friend and one of Rebecca’s son-in-laws, Aviv Hod, listed below in a Facebook post the members of his family killed in a German concentration camp.

These are my family members that were cruelly rounded up and killed. Family members that the survivors like my grandmother mourned all her life.

Avraham Tratsch- maternal great grandfather, Sarah Tratsch- Mother of my mother’s grandmother, Yodel Tratsch- brother of mother’s grandmother, Peeyga Tratsch- sister, Hanyiah Tratsch-sister, Michayel Tratsch-sister, Chaiya Tratsch -sister, Bracha Tratsch- Grandma from mother’s side aunt, Yankele Tratsch- Grandma from mother’s side uncle.

From my maternal grandfather’s side:

Alec Pakentregar, Leizer Pakentregar, Avraham Pakentregar, Rosa Pakentregar, Sheyna Pakentregar, Motka Menachem Pakentregar, Phela Pakentregar, Sruleek Pakentregar.

Extended family from paternal grandparents:

Moshe Fox, Itzik Heller

Aviv’s grandmother, Hanah Porat, and her sister, Aliza Hamer, were the only members of Aviv’s family to survive the holocaust. In Aviv’s words:

They were forced to march from their home in Moldova to the Chelmo concentration camp in Poland. Many died along the way from starvation, exposure, and disease. They were 12 and 13.

Sacred Places

“This memorial is a sacred place.” So read a sign at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. I felt a sacredness at Auschwitz as well. In the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, we stood on the ground where slave auctions took place. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, a crematoria sat in rubble unchanged from Allied bombing.

10,000 people watched John Hartfield die, not 3,000 predicted in the New Orleans States newspaper. Google ‘crowds at lynchings’ and look at the image-link and then at the faces of those present at the lynchings. Isabel Wilkerson in Caste describes these horrors as “part carnival.” After observing Adolph Eichmann on trial in Israel for war crimes, Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil. And just before he died in 2006 Alabama sheriff Roy Clark said he “would do it all over again.”

Buddhists tell us evil comes from ignorance. In these memorials, we pause in silence and stillness to open ourselves to what happens when we hate.

What hate takes away

In one of those still-moments, I imagined a John Hartfield who was not lynched. He has lived a long life and is holding a grandchild.

Like Aviv’s grandmother and great aunt.

The power of story

The beginning

I remember the moment in 2020 I knew COVID was a big deal and not a big deal. My partner Rebecca and I were standing with our landlord Horia outside our apartment in Timișoara, Romania. It was the morning of March 12, 2020 and I had just learned from my phone that America’s National Basketball Association had just suspended its season. “The NBA has shut down its season,” I exclaimed expecting at least raised eye brows. Rebecca, to be fair, not a sports fan, shrugged her shoulders as if to say “what’s your point?” Horia, a sport’s fan, bridge aficionado, and Florida regular, shrugged his shoulders and said “shit happens.”*

Americans believe history should bow to them. Romanians know otherwise. To Horia, perhaps, COVID was just the next big thing. He was old enough to remember life under Nicolae Ceaușescu. What could be worse? Since “shit always happens,'” why dramatize? To Rebecca and me, particularly me, the natural response was to dramatize, as in “how dare COVID change our plans?” And then it did.

On March 27, we reluctantly packed up and left Romania, after only 33 days of what was supposed to be a four-month Fulbright-sponsored stay. Horia took the loss of three months rent in a shoulder-shrugged sort of way and offered to drive us to the airport. As I look back over this year, Horia’s colloquialism loomed large in my assessment. Assume life will throw hard things at you. Focus your energy on managing life’s challenges. It turns out I’m better at this than I thought I would be 12 months ago. Maybe you are too.

As of this writing, more than 50 million Americans have been fully vaccinated, with millions more added every day. So many, like me, can now begin to put COVID fear behind them. And we can reflect on what a COVID year taught us. And use what we have learned to help with life’s next challenges.

My initial response to COVID

When COVID started spreading in March 2020, I was teaching two classes at the University of West in Timișoara. The university’s first move was to suspend in-person classes for a month. Some instructors immediately began virtual meetings. I had never used any webinar software and so my initial response was to ride COVID out using email, a technology I had become comfortable with.

It soon became clear COVID would not accommodate my fear of transitioning to something new. And so I began meeting my Romanian students on Google Meet and this would continue through June long after we had returned to America. Today, I am a virtual veteran having taught six online courses and participated in 10’s of Zoom conversations with family and friends.

My first response to all the changes in my life COVID would demand was NO. To put it in Horia’s terms, it’s a way of saying “shit should not happen to me.” Where did this NO come from?

Self-doubt

How have you responded to new things? For me, they’ve always been a challenge. Google Meet or Zoom technologies were only the most recent. I fought email for years. I let my first mouse languish in a drawer resenting its intrusion into my comfortable keyboard command world.

From the time I was a kid, everything new has seemed overwhelming. Maybe it was because I started kindergarten at 4. Or because I was always the the second smallest boy in my Sacred Heart elementary classes. And the smallest, Greg Melroy, had broken both his legs when he was four or five and that, I thought, slowed down his growth. Otherwise, I’d be the smallest. Regardless of the why’s, I have always carried this sense of being overmatched by life. This has lead to built-in self-doubt and a default position of NO on anything new or challenging that comes my way.

I used to think others did not doubt themselves. Lately, I have begun to reassess that notion. My Romanian students were open about their doubts about how they would handle online learning. From April through June we met weekly on Google Meet and something went wrong every session. The same has been true with the Zoom sessions for the Life Long Learning courses I have been leading. Nothing ever worked perfectly and everyone was open about their Zoom insecurities. So I no longer felt alone with my self-doubt. More important, as I reflected on this COVID year, I encountered a new friend, self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy

In Late Bloomers, Rich Karlgaard writes that everyone has self-doubts but not everyone develops self-efficacy which he defines as

Confidence in one’s abilities to develop strategies and complete tasks.

How do we develop self-efficacy? Karlgaard says we learn to tell stories about our lives. Stories “offer a framework for enduring the vagaries of life.” In telling stories, we find meaning “in progression from one event to another.” That’s what I have done in this essay. I have reminded myself of my ability to “develop strategies and complete tasks.” Muddling through Google Meet and Zoom sessions, and reflecting on this muddling, helped me tap into a deeper vein of competence that has always been there competing with my nemesis, self-doubt. Maybe you have a similar story. I suspect my Romanian friend Horia’s “shit happens” comes from a life of successfully managing difficulties.

The Power of Your Story

Think back over your COVID year and select your own examples of how you surmounted challenges thrown at you by this pandemic. Perhaps you too experienced initial doubt about wearing a mask or shopping online or spending more time at home or waiting for your COVID year to end. I’ll bet in each case you followed this doubt with some experimentation until you developed a new habit. Beneath the vagaries of everyday life, you too can discover a narrative of resilience that will put you in good stead for whatever the future brings.

So, my friends, use and reuse this COVID year by reflecting on your success stories.

_________________________________________________________

*Rebecca writes about this conversation in “Being a Stoic in Romania.”

INSPIRED BY THE BRITISH FILM RED, WHITE AND BLUE

Two weeks ago I watched the British film Red, White and Blue directed by Steve McQueen. McQueen directed 12 years a Slave which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2014. The setting of the film is London in the 1980s. The plot centers on a conflict between Afro-Caribbean Ken Logan and his son Leroy.

Ken drives a haulage truck and one day two cops beat him for disputing a ticket. Leroy has earned a Ph.D. in forensic science but decides to join the police force to, in his words, “bring change to this organization, from the inside.” When Ken learns of this, he confronts his son and calls him a traitor, for joining the enemy.

It is the film’s final scene that haunts and triggered this blog about race in America. Ken and Leroy are sitting alone across a table in Ken’s small kitchen. What Ken does not know, but the audience does, is that Leroy’s police colleagues commit several acts of racism against Leroy during his first six months on the force.

Ken: You know I find. The world, it just moves forward. Always do. Big change. That is a slow turning wheel.

Leroy: Sometimes I think. The earth needs to be scorched. So something good will come of it. Something good.

The second time I watched the film, I noticed something more than words. When Leroy says “the earth needs to be scorched,” for the first time in the film Ken looks directly at Leroy and lets Leroy’s words come inside him. Racism’s different disguises has brought father and son together. Ken and Leroy raise and touch their whiskey glasses and the film ends.

Red, White and Blue is about the lives of Afro-Caribbeans in Britain in the 1980s but the ideas stated in the final scene dialogue apply to America in 2021.

1. “Big Change”

I am a white man born in 1949, two years after Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball. I remember one of my father’s brothers in the 1950s casually using the n-word and my father in the 1960s referring to Nat King Cole as a “good negro.” I had no black friends, no black classmates in grade school and one in high school. I wept when Barack Obama won the presidency on November 4, 2008 and again the next night in LaCrosse, Wisconsin as Bob Dylan finished a concert with Blowin in the wind.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris

Thinking back over America in my lifetime, big changes have occurred giving African-Americans more choices for how to live their lives. Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are the most visible figures of these changes.

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free

I wish I could break the chains holding me

I wish I could say all the things I could say

Say em loud, say em clear

For the whole world to see

In 1967, Nina Simone sang these words from the song “I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.” This song became an anthem for America’s civil rights movement. When I listen to this song, I feel Simone’s pain and yearning. I ache for her and wish America had been better for her and millions of others THEN. But it is better today. The chains are fewer. Without this change story, without this reform story, cynicism and hopelessness reign, making further reforms impossible.

2. “Slow turning wheel”

George Floyd

In Red, White and Blue, two white police officers beat Ken Logan and two white police colleagues choose not to back up Leroy Logan when a burglar Leroy is chasing beats him. In America in 2020, George Floyd dies at the knee of Derek Chauvin. After Floyd’s death, the Washington Post interviewed Sociologist Orlando Patterson about what hasn’t changed between the 1992 beating death of Rodney King and George Floyd.

The common denominator is police violence and brutality. We have these brutal acts and killings, and we have outrage, protests, commissions, recommendations, and again and again, the police still continue in their old ways. They don’t seek to respect life and are prepared to brutalize someone for something as minor as passing a counterfeit $20 bill or jaywalking.

From the perspective of George Floyd, how much progress has really been made in America? An African-American colleague told me he had been stopped for speeding on Decorah’s College Drive on the way to Luther several times his first year. I sped down College Drive most days during my 33 years at Luther and was never once stopped. From the perspective of that black man, how much progress has really been made in America?

Plantation, Plantation, Plantation

“I need everybody to stay on the plantation. I can’t have anybody leave the plantation.” Creighton University men’s basketball coach Greg McDermott about a week ago spoke these words to his players after a loss. McDermott apologized, offered to resign, and was temporarily suspended. America’s institution of slavery and plantation system died in 1865. Moline, Illinois’ Plantation restaurant where I ate many times with my family in the 1950s and 1960s closed in 1983.

Shereef Mitchell spoke these words when asked about his coach’s plantation comment. “For slaves, life on the plantation was filled with mental, emotional, physical, psychological and sexual abuse. Slaves had no rights and no voice. They were branded like cattle, forced from their homeland, and stripped of their culture, language and basic human rights.”

America’s Union Army destroyed slavery and the plantation institution. Restaurants named plantation are unimaginable. Coaches and others who use the word get in trouble. Derek Chauvin is on trial for the murder of George Floyd. And with the backing of President Biden, the congress will soon begin debating The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act that among other things would ban chokeholds.

But America’s racial history has not gone away. One’s race still impacts too many facets of life, including the chances of dying of COVID and of receiving the vaccine. Historian David Blights puts the power of history this way.

Slavery, Civil War, Reconstruction, and segregation are never purely historical. They still haunt the air we breathe. or cannot breathe. They are our present-past. They are a history never to be erased.

3. “The Earth needs to be scorched”

New police recruit Leroy continues, “so something good will come of it.” What must it be like to be Leroy? Or Nina Simone? Or George Floyd? Or my African-American colleague? Or Shereef Michell? My 26,107 days have included no race-related insults or degradations. 400 years after the first slave arrived on America’s shores, race still matters, in too many negative ways. Racism is still here but in different disguises. Just as it is in Britain, as the recent Oprah interview with Meghan Markle about the Royal Family’s concern about the skin color of Harry and Meghan’s son Archie suggests.

If I was Leroy, or Nina or George or Shereef or Meghan, or any of the millions of others who still are not as free as I am because of their skin pigmentation, maybe I would see ridding the world of all humans and starting over again as the only way forward. Maybe James Baldwin was right about America when he said a few years before his death in 1979…

America changed all the time without changing at all.

BETTER BUT STILL TOO FAR AWAY

But maybe not. While teaching at Luther College I took six student groups to Northern Ireland to study the peace and reconciliation process. One of my favorite speakers was Reverend Harold Good, a Methodist minister who was the Protestant witness to the decommissioning of arms by the Irish Republican Army. I always asked Rev Goode how far Northern Ireland had come since the peace agreement in 1998. His answer was always the same.

On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being worst and 10 being best, from where Northern Ireland was during the worst of the Troubles, we are at an 8. From where we want to be as a fully reconciled society, we are at a 3.

I believe this is a reasonable way of thinking about America and the three stories about race. From where America was, it is now much better. From where most of us want America to be – where all, in Nina Simone’s words will “feel what it is like to be free” – America is still too far away.

ABOUT HOW TO HAVE HELPED MY MOM WITH DEMENTIA

MY MOM’S QUESTION

On a visit to Decorah in the summer of 2015 and after emptying her small suitcase and settling into her favorite lazy boy recliner, my 94 year old mother turned to me and said, “I’m worried about my father and think I need to go home to see if he is OK.” My brother Pat had given me a heads-up about this issue, as mom several months earlier had started talking about caring for her father and mother. Albert Thomas died in 1942 and Florence Thomas in 1979.

MY THEN ANSWER

“How do I answer my dad with dementia when he talks about about his mom and dad being alive?” This question from an Alzheimer’s Association post on Facebook triggered the memory of that August 2015 visit and my mom’s father comments. But it was the author’s answer to the question that seized my attention and suggested how wrong my first approach to my mother’s dementia had been.

Enter into his reality and enjoy it. He doesn’t need to be oriented…If dad spends most of his time in 1959, sit with him…If he tells the same story over and over, appreciate it as if its music, and you keep coming back to the beautiful refrain.

This simple advice, “enter into [her] reality and enjoy it,” is what I wish I had known then. Instead, I fought her reality, tooth and nail. Another brother even took mom to her parents’ graves to prove to her they were dead. “How could he?” I now think. Yet I know I would have done the same if her parents had been buried in Decorah. Instead, feeling desperate on that August 2015 day, I said “let’s call your sister Fawny, Sister Marilyn Thomas, and she will tell you the truth.”

MOM’S DEMENTIA JOURNEY

In March 2016 my brother Pat put our mother in a memory care unit. A neighbor had found her wandering around outside her house late at night. During the month before this event, Pat would check on mom every day and usually find she had set the dining room table for guests who would be arriving “very soon.” He would tell her they would be coming “tomorrow” and “not today.” He had learned to “enter her reality.”

Mom would spend a little over a year at Senior Star at Elmore Place before she died on June 25, 2017. I recollect two conversations during her stay relevant to the theme of this blog. The first occurred as Rebecca and I walked with mom back to her room. She told us she was going to England the next week. We asked her why and what she was going to do and other questions you might ask someone who really was going to England. Those questions were better than “you can’t go to England.” But still short of taking mom’s reality seriously.

The second conversation took place in her room and included Pat. Our mother described herself as the leader of a group of angry residents who were planning to take over the facility. We knew she hated every minute at Senior Star, despite the staff’s competence and kindness. Mom did not want to be there, away from the home she had lived in for 65 years. Pat and I listened in awe as our mother before our eyes turned into the TRIUMPHANT CHE GUEVARA OF SENIOR STAR. We had rarely seen her so alive.

MY NOW ANSWER

As I thought about how to enter my mom’s world, I recalled the 2014 film Glen Campbell: I’ll be me. This film chronicled Campbell’s final concert tour as he descends into the mire of Alzheimer’s. Walking off stage after singing Gentle on my mind, By the time I get to Phoenix and other standards, Campbell would be confused about what city he was in. One of Campbell’s doctors was interviewed and said the last memories to go are those most deeply imprinted upon a person’s brain. For Campbell, it was his music.

For my mom, it was care for her parents, hosting friends and family, traveling with to England, and running an institution. Her father died of a heart attack in the middle of WWII with only mom and her mother at home. Brother Al was off fighting in the war and sister Fawny was in the convent. It must have been hard for mom and grandma to make arrangements. Maybe mom never had a chance to say good-bye to her dad. I don’t know because I never asked when she said she needed to get home to take care of her father.

Mom and her sister Fawny made the difficult decision to put their mother in a nursing home when she started falling at age 93. Dad talked mom into going on a short vacation to South Dakota the winter of 1979 and her mother died while they were gone. I know mom always felt guilty and when in 2015 on another visit to Decorah she talked about needing to get home to take care of her mother who had died in 1979, I could have said “what kind of care does she need?”

When mom started setting the dining room table, we could have asked “will you be serving your famous chocolate pie? or will you be playing bridge? or Uno, if grandchildren are coming?”

“Oh, so you are planning a trip to England.” And instead of the generic questions I asked I could have been more specific. For example: “Will you be going to London where you always wanted to go and finally did with Al, Jackie, Fawny and me in 1999? Will you see the Queen? Or Houses of Parliament we were not able to see in 1999? And “Is dad (who died in 1993) going with you?”

During the last 15 years of her life, mom repeated this story more than any other. I heard it hundreds of times, as did my brother Pat. Mom worked as a bank teller during WWII. Because she was a college graduate she was quickly made head of the department. This promotion put her briefly in the hospital with anxiety but she recovered and went back to her position until the end of the war. She met my dad in 1947, they married in 1948, had me in 1949, Peter in 1952, and Pat in 1954. Mom never again worked outside the home.

Mom’s Che Guevara moment at Senior Star gave me a new perspective on her bank teller story. I had often wondered “why that story?” Maybe if I had asked – “Do you wish you had continued at the bank after the war ended?” Or “Would you have liked to run some business after your three kids left home?” – I would have learned something valuable about my mother.

“MEET THEM WHERE THEY ARE”

My friend Nori Hadley is a health professional and has worked at a Decorah nursing home for 10 years. She has lots of experience with residents and their families dealing with dementia. I asked Nori what advice she would have given me in 2015. She said:

Meet them where they are. If they are searching for cows that got out of the barn, look out the window and ask about the farm.

I pride myself on being curious about the lives of people I meet. When my mom entered the world of dementia, my curiosity fled and was replaced by denial. I look back at mom’s stories and see now they were her attempts to make meaning of her life. For Glen Campbell, the last to go was music. For mom, it was these stories.

They demanded THEN a hearing I am giving them NOW.