For years atheists, agnostics, and other freethinkers have been saying that you don’t need a god to be good.  Recently, they even tried to say it on the side of an Indiana bus.  More and more, they are finding ways to show it. 

Kiva.org is a matchmaking service.  It pairs up desperately poor people who need loans with folks who are willing to take a chance on them.  With as little as $25 in your hand, you can go to Kiva and help a farmer in Pakistan who wants a pair of goats, or a single mom in Peru who wants to invest in a new sewing machine for her home embroidery business,  or a vendor in Sudan who sells corn flour and wants to increase her inventory.  The borrowers request a specific amount through a local microcredit agency, often with a small group of community members who guarantee each others’ loans.   When enough lenders choose them, meaning the full amount is available, they get the loan, invest it in their venture, and begin making payments on an eight month schedule. 

On Monday, my 13-year-old daughter Marley bounced in the door from school and said, “Are you ready to go to Kiva?”  She and her older sister Brynn had emptied their banks—literally-- and bought me a Kiva gift certificate for Mother’s Day.  Marley inserted herself between me and my computer.  She pulled up the site and began explaining her investment criteria:  female (because females more often reinvest earnings in the family) no more than two kids (because they have a better chance to get ahead), and no beauty parlors (because that’s just dumb).  She showed me a cooperative in Tajikistan and a grandmother in Mexico.  But when I kept returning to Pakistan she assured me that I really could make my own choice.  Except—was I going to put the whole $50 into one person?!!!  She’d forgotten her final criterion:  spread the wealth. 

Last but not least, Marley proudly showed me how to credit my gift to a Kiva lending team:  Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious.   Does my daughter know me or what?

 In an article I wrote a couple of months ago, Atheist Arrogance, I encouraged non-believers to counter stereotypes simply by being who they are.  “Be out, be yourself.” In example, I mentioned a Seattle Atheists blood drive.  So imagine my delight to find that the AASFSHN team –yes, the acronym is pathetic—topped Kiva’s list, with over 16,000 loans made.  Not to be outdone, a group called Kiva Christians is hot on their heels.  Is it a competition?  Sure looks like it.  But can you imagine something better to compete over? 

Religious communities perform a valuable organizing function.  True, it can be used for harm—to organize a “Bibles for Afghanistan” crusade, or worse, a literal crusade.  But religious communities also activate people to feed the hungry or protest against nuclear weapons.  As nonbelievers are becoming more open, they too are beginning to coalesce into moral communities that talk openly about deep values.  My hope is that, freed from the constraints of dogma or the need to proselytize, these communities will be able to invest themselves in the simple process of doing good for goodness sake.   

What does that mean?  Primum non nocere  (First, do no harm).  The simple principle of harm avoidance is at the heart of humanity’s shared moral core.  But so is proactively nurturing wellbeing.  Healing harm. Creating delight and beauty and wonder.  Loving.  Truth-seeking.  Practicing random acts of kindness.  Our ancient traditions, both religious and secular converge on a shared set of virtues and moral principles that are probably built into our bodies by our ancestral history.  There is a lot we can learn from those traditions about how to be good with or without gods.  But, as Marley just reminded me, there is also a lot we can learn from our children.  We offer them the insights of our ancestors, and our own, but they are the ones who, as Gibran put it, dwell in the house of tomorrow. 

As parents, we want our children to be happy. We want them to achieve great things. But we also want them to be good people. We want to be as proud of their kindness, generosity and integrity as we are of their achievements. How do we help them get there?

Moral development

Each religion teaches that it is the source of morality. Christians perceive themselves as "a light on the hill" without which the world would fall into moral anarchy. As a freethinker, I have had people ask -- how can you raise good children without religion?

In one sense, this question is almost silly. Research shows us that healthy human children come into the world primed to become moral members of society, just like they come into the world primed to acquire language. Moral emotions, such as empathy, shame and guilt, begin to show their presence during the toddler years regardless of a child's cultural or religious context. A toddler may pat an injured peer, or offer a grubby toy to an adult who is distressed. A preschooler may hide in the closet to cover a transgression. As a child learns to think, moral emotions are joined by moral reasoning. By age 5 or 6, they can argue long and loud about fairness.

And yet, kids don't learn to be decent human beings without adult input any more than they learn to communicate without adult input. For a child to grow into an honest adult, for example, we have to model honesty, expect it and explicitly teach it. Traditionally, religious institutions are the place where we talk explicitly about moral concerns and ideas. Despite frequent hypocrisy, churches legitimate the idea that there is such a thing as moral community, and that it matters. So for parents who are not church goers, the question of where and how to have these conversations with our children is real. That's one reason I've been volunteering for the last year on an interactive website called the Wisdom Commons.

Virtue and morality

One way to think about moral development is that bad behavior is simply the absence of virtue. When a child hurts another, it may be that their internal sense of kindness, patience or self-control has fallen short. When they sneak or steal, it means their internal sense of honesty wasn't as strong as the external temptation.

Rather than making the bad behavior itself the focus of our attention and conversations with them, we can put our energy toward helping them to grow good qualities. This is not to say that bad behavior never needs labels and consequences. Rather, every time our child "crashes" is an opportunity to explain and encourage the virtues we are trying to cultivate.

Amidst the superstition and sanctified tribalism of our inherited traditions lie nuggets of wisdom that can help us in this endeavour. Our ancestors have struggled for millenia to answer questions about what is real and good and how to live in moral community with each other. If we approach our religious and philosophical traditions knowing we have a responsibility to pick and choose, we can glean the timeless useful nuggets and simply leave the rest aside. As individuals and parents, we don't have to start from scratch just because we seek to live in the light of reason and to raise our children there.

The Wisdom Commons

The Wisdom Commons is a non-profit interactive Web project that seeks to elevate universal ethics, or our shared moral core -- the ethical values that bridge across secular and religious wisdom traditions. It offers parents and educators a new tool for nurturing positive character traits. The Wisdom Commons is structured around a set of virtues that human beings generally agree are important, such as generosity, compassion and courage. As a way of promoting these virtues (and showcasing how widely they are valued), the site houses a library of more than 3,000 quotes, stories, proverbs, poems and essays from around the world. The Commons includes "god-talk" because when our ancestors valued a character quality, they often expressed this through the voice of a god or demi-god (e.g. Jesus says love your neighbor as yourself). But it also includes supernaturalism guidelines barring member/contributors from promoting otherworldly personages and ideas. The site is about what we humans can agree on, and supernaturalism is the topic of vast disagreement.

Once registered, you can click your favorite bits of wisdom to collect them in a "Personal Wisdom Page." Soon you'll be able to turn your collection into Mom's or Dad's Book of Common Wisdom, a print-on-demand book in which you can mix your collection with photos and a personal dedication. One easy way to find bits that are meaningful to you is to sign up for the "Daily Wisbit" sent out to members who request it.

Ideas for parents

1. Choose a "virtue of the week" to discuss at the dinner table. Why does this virtue matter? How is it honored in your family's spiritual or cultural tradition? How have family members demonstrated this virtue recently? When have they seen it in other people?
2. Ask each child to find a quote that they really like. Have them read it to other family members and explain why they like it.
3. Make a game of reading bits of wisdom aloud together and giving each one a rating, thus prompting whatever discussion is needed to reach a family agreement or average.
4. Find a special quote each week that reflects your family's values. Click the printer icon after the quote to print it out as an 8½ x 11 poster. (Available in late January.) Put it on the fridge.
5. Create a Wisdom Page and begin storing bits of wisdom you want to share with your kids. Alternately, create a shared family Wisdom Page together, with input from everyone.

When our kids start leading us

After watching me work on the Wisdom Commons with a team of software engineers and the wonderful volunteers who contributed the first 1,000 bits of wisdom to the site, my middle-school-age daughters, Bri and Marla, gave me a birthday present. Each of them adopted a virtue (justice and aspiration, respectively). They registered to create wisdom pages of their own and spent a morning researching their chosen virtues and entering quotes and poems they liked.

Then they went back to their other interests, or so I thought. Imagine my surprise and delight last month when I clicked on my "Daily Wisbit" email from the Commons and found a poem about confidence, secretly penned by Bri.

Our children not only learn from us about what it means to be good, loving, effective people, they also teach us -- if we are willing to be taught. But it's up to us to open the conversation.

This article is reprinted from the Huffington Post, January 9, 2009.

I just love Christmas!”  my friend Hannah confessed recently, “even though I’m appalled by Christianity.”  She sounded sheepish, as if loving Christmas somehow made her bad.  

Poor Hannah.  I understand her tone of apology.  What Hannah is appalled by isn’t the broad range of kind, thoughtful Christians in her community, but rather the thin cruel theologies that drive the Evangelical Right.  People like Bill O’Reilly have claimed Christmas for their own--deriding broader holiday traditions.  “It’s about Jesus!”  They cry loudly. “Jesus is the reason for the season!”   “It’s a Christian holiday (and this is a Christian country)!”  Who wants to be associated with O’Reilly and his minions?

Hannah’s Christmas isn’t about Jesus, and she doesn’t want to lend power to fundamentalists by joining in something they have defined as their celebration.   But she needn’t fear.   Jesus isn’t the reason for the season. 

Yes, December 25 has become the time that Christians express the joy that comes from a sense of unearned forgiveness and unconditional love.  It is a time when they relish the community of believers and family, and they look forward to a future when peace and joy will reign on earth “as they do in heaven” and the lion will lie down with the lamb.  And for them, this is the very heart of the holiday. 

That said, the Catholic Church chose December 25^th  (Winter Solstice in the Julian Calendar) to honor the birthday of the Christ for a very specific reason:  It was already a well loved holiday – a time of revelry, gift giving, and yes, celebrating the birthdays of gods.   

Early Christians recognized this:   Fourth Century Bishop John Chrysostom wrote: "On this day also the Birthday of Christ was lately fixed at Rome in order that while the heathen were busy with their profane ceremonies, the Christians might perform their sacred rites undisturbed. They call this (December 25th), the Birthday of the Invincible One (Mithras); but who is so invincible as the Lord? They call it the Birthday of the Solar Disk, but Christ is the Sun of Righteousness."  (The Fourth Century is our first record of a December Christ-mass celebration.)

Not only did earlier generations of Christians recognize this, some of them were offended by the holiday’s Pagan associations.   Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell outlawed the celebration in England, and his prohibition against Christmas was kept by the Puritan colonies in the New World.  Even Baptists in times past condemned the holiday, and to this day Jehovah’s witnesses and some other fundamentalists perceive it as contrary to Christian teachings.   And not without reason.

Christmas appears to have its roots in two Roman holidays:  Saturnalia (December 17-23) and Sol Invictus (December 25)  Saturnalia , the feast of the god Saturn, is said to have been the most popular holiday of the Roman calendar. People celebrated with visits to friends and giving gifts, particularly wax candles (cerei), that may have represented the return of light after the solstice.  Natalis Sol Invictus (Birthday of the Unconquered Sun) is when the births of solar deities were celebrated including Sol, Attis and the Persian Mithras (who was, incidentally, born of a virgin). At the time of Constantine, the cult of Sol Invictus was the official religion of the Roman Empire. Small wonder, then, that he pronounced the 25^th as the birthday of Jesus, center of the new official religion. (Excellent article here.)

The ways we celebrate Christmas reflect the intuitive, creative ways in which all human cultures and religions borrow, blend and adapt. We find what fits and make it our own.  It’s why French bread and coffee are part of Vietnamese cuisine.  It’s why T-shirts are popular in Kenya.  It’s why Egyptian hieroglyphs morphed into a Roman alphabet which then made its way around the planet.

My guess is that virtually everything Hannah loves about Christmas has roots that extend through and beyond the Christian tradition.  Here are just a few for fun.

·         Yule log – Ancient Norse tribes used  the Yule log to celebrate Thor.  The term “Yule” itself may mean “wheel,” referring to the sun and its cycle of return.

·         Holly  - This plant has been special to many people.  It was thought to ward off witches by Celts, and was used in Roman Saturnalia festivities.

·         Evergreen boughs – Branches from evergreens symbolized everlasting life for Romans, Germanic tribes and Vikings.  

·         Mistletoe –  This parasitic vine also known as “All heal” was sacred to Druids, because it grew in the sacred oak tree.  Early Europeans left it hung in the house all year to ward off fire and lightning.

·         Decorated Trees – Uncut, outdoor trees were decorated by European Pagans and Druids at solstice.  (The custom of cutting trees was brought to America by German immigrants and became popular during the 19^th Century.)

·         Twelve Days of Christmas–  The sacred significance of the number twelve traces its roots back to ancient Babylonian star worship.  It made its way into a 12 day Egyptian solstice festival, the early Hebrew religion (12 tribes of Judah), the Roman calendar (12 months), early Christianity (12 apostles) and –low and behold—modern star worship (12 signs of the zodiac).

So, I say to my friend Hannah:  Love any Christmas tradition that is dear to you, including the ones that originated in Christian cultures and stories.  And no more apologies!  We all are borrowers, and especially at this time when people around the world celebrate the renewal of warmth, light, and life, we are all the richer for it.      

Good and Evil and Bus Stop Benches

About four years ago, a Seattle woman bought a small granite bench and installed it at a bus stop near her house.  “It’s my neighborhood,” she said in response to comments from friends.  “Who better to tend it than me?”  

The bench sat, and people sat on it:  art students, coming and going from their classes; a mother and her kindergartener who huddled under an umbrella on rainy mornings; the occasional homeless person who stopped to rest; a cluster of teenagers piled on top of each other, waiting for a parade. 

One morning the bench was covered with bold letters in black and fluorescent pink.  Somebody’s spray paint signature.  The woman bought some solvent, put on a mask and gloves, and scrubbed it off with a steel brush that left little pink and black shadows.  Another time it said “Fuck Jews.”  She put on the mask again and scrubbed until only shadows were left.  And another time and another.   “I bought it,” she said.  “Who cares about it more than I do?”  One day, the bench lay on the ground, its mortar joints broken.  She re-mortared it.  

Bus passengers came and went.  Some read, some listened to music.  Some simply sat and waited.   Some left garbage:  orange peels, Starbucks cups, paper bags, soda cans.  The woman picked them up when she walked past.  “I want it to be beautiful and clean here,” she said.  “Who can I expect to pick up the garbage if I don’t?”

Recently, it lay in pieces again.  This time, a part of the top slab was broken off.  The woman cursed and cried, and her children cried because she was crying.  She wasn’t quite sure what to do, so the bench parts sat for a week, the legs and broken slab stacked by the sidewalk.  Young people with iPods sat on the stack and waited for buses. 

Finally the woman recruited neighbors who helped her load it into her beater station wagon.  She drove it to a mason who said he could cut off the broken part and make the bench shorter.  He did, beautifully, apologizing that he couldn’t get off the shadows.  He reinstalled the short bench, drilling rebar into the legs and the cement on which the bench rested.  “There,” he said.  “Now it won’t go anywhere.”  That afternoon people began sitting on it again.    

Five days later, the slab was off of the legs again, tested by vandals who found that the joint adhesive hadn’t adhered properly.  The woman sighed and pushed on the legs.  They weren’t going anywhere.  She bent and ran her fingers across the shadow of graffiti tracery that made a soft, multi-colored patina on the slab, which lay on the ground beside the legs.  Then she walked home and fetched her husband to help her set it back in place with another round of mortar.

---------

Goodness is often painstaking.  “He who would do good must do so in minute particulars,” said one of the Medieval Church fathers.  Evil—destruction--is easy.  It is fast and frequently dramatic.  It is bold and sure of itself.  But goodness is tenacious.  It grows out of the humble, persistent efforts of individuals (often unseen and unsung) who are determined to bring beauty and caretaking to the people that they touch and the communities in which they live. 

2005  

On Loving Life and Leaving It

            The name of Terri Schiavo is seared into our collective consciousness.  Her personhood is not, because by the time she became a celebrity she had none.  Terri was bulimic, and, whether her body draws its last breath this week or twenty years from now, bulimia killed her.  It killed a college friend of mine.  It almost killed me. 

            There’s an old saying that comes to my mind, occasionally.  It goes something like this.  “In some ways, I am like every other person.  In some ways I am like some.  In some ways I am like nobody else who has ever lived on this earth.”  To the extent that Terri was like nobody else, I cannot speak to her life experience or her desires.  But to the extent that Terri shared with me the disorder of bulimia and the complicated yearnings of personhood, I can and must. 

Sometime close to fifteen years ago, Terri Schiavo stuck her finger down her throat and retched the partially digested remnants of her last voluntary meal into her toilet, or a bucket in the closet, or the kitchen sink or a hastily scraped hole in the back yard.  Or maybe she tried to drink a gallon of water, or swallow a box of laxatives and another box of diuretics to get rid of sense of bloated contamination she felt whenever she ate.  She messed up her electrolytes – potassium I assume—and her heart stopped working.  So did the vast majority of her brain, the part that made her Terri, and bulimic and a person. 

Somebody found her and, using extraordinary measures, after ten minutes got her heart to start beating.  Unlike a brain, you can shock a heart muscle into functioning.  Fifteen years ago that probably meant that a strong electric current contorted Terri’s waxen body.  It lurched.  It seized.  And her damaged heart started beating again.  Somebody forced air into Terri’s lungs.  They got her onto a stretcher and into a hospital where they cleaned off whatever vomit and urine and feces had oozed out of her orifices.  They’ve been doing so ever since. 

From my own experience with bulimia, and my experience as a therapist working with bulimics and my experience being a friend of bulimics, I can tell you this.  Unless she was unusual, Terri had mixed feelings about being alive even when she could walk, talk, think, feel, and eat.  And unless her parents were unusual, too, they felt horrible about that—anxious, frightened and determined to keep their daughter alive.  The defibrillator may have done its job, but they, as parents, failed.  They failed because what they really wanted was Terri – their beloved daughter, who could laugh and learn and love.   What they got was Night of the Living Dead – a marginally animated corpse, the jerky spasms of which have nothing to do with laughter or love or the person Terri had been. 

It is an ageless story.  Monkey’s paws and magic wishes.  Journeys across the River Styx.  Grave robbing and pacts with the devil.  Miracles, witchcraft, and stolen souls.  Parents desperately want their children alive, and when they are dead, they want them back.   Terri’s parents are Christians, and it may seem odd to some that rather than have her in Heaven, they prefer their daughter vegetative and drooling, with a feeding tube poking out of a tracheotomy or PEG, and a catheter, and a colostomy or diapers, and white patches of gauze covering layers of antibiotic ointment covering deep bedsores.   But the news pictures tell the whole story.  They don’t show the drool or the tubes or the pressure points where Terri’s skin dissolves.  They show a face, eyes open--a pretty face.  It is the face of a dream, the shared dream of Terri’s parents that she herself – not just her body – is alive somewhere behind those eyes.  It is the dream of a parent who touches the soft cheek of a sleeping child and is flooded with memories and love and the promise of morning.

What would Terri have wanted?  Her husband says:   the permission and blessing to continue her journey.  Her parents say:  to be loved enough that she be counted among the living.  In other words, the people who knew her best disagree.  But you know her, too.  Terri was a person, and you are a person, which gives you also a basis for offering up an answer to this difficult question.  So, look in your own heart.  Don’t ask what you would want for your child, because often we love our children more than life itself, and this question can be only about life itself.  What would you want for you?

In the past fifteen years, brain imaging has allowed doctors to map precisely which cells are active at any given moment and which are not.  They can map activity, functions, scarring, regions that are altogether dead, and those that are simply not working.  In the case of Terri, fifteen years of technological advances have only allowed physicians to assert with more confidence that Terri is gone and she’s not coming back. 

  But, assume you could be in her situation, not gone, but conscious.  Would you want fifteen years of the feeding tube and catheter and bedsores, of mute paralysis in a wind-up bed between four white walls and a white ceiling?  Or, rather, would you choose it over death and whatever comes after?  Would those visits from your achingly loyal family and the chirpy nurses who put fluid in your IV and sponge bathe your genitals and carry away your baggies of excrement—would they be enough?  Would they be enough if you had a television on 12 hours/day or a radio or some other form of passive stimulation?

What would you want for your family – the tenderness and anguish of those visits, the sweetness of hope, their lives lovingly built around yours--or the freedom to move on, to let you fade, to remember your good times and to grieve your irrevocable absence?    

And if, dark moments aside, you are a lover of life – of that around you as well as your own – how would you measure the other real life costs of holding on? Money is a place marker, a way that we bank and trade our efforts; consequently it gives some measure of the societal effort required to extend life.  In Terri’s case, a million dollar malpractice settlement was spent on attorneys’ fees and medical procedures; millions more in Medicaid dollars have paid for the room and those nurses and those disposable tubes and bags.  Additional millions have been spent on a prolonged and excruciatingly public debate over what should be done with the doe-eyed sleeper, the soft shriveled body that lies on Terri’s high-tech mattress. 

Would you hold onto life, if life was only knowing and staring and breathing?  What if it was only staring and breathing, as it seems to be in Terri’s case?  How else might you wish that those millions be spent – On children with cancer?  On grade school playgrounds?  On wilderness that will delight future generations?   On loving care for orphans?  On peacemaking?  On a cure for the malaria that has killed millions while Terri lay breathing?  On a recreation center for your community?  On a home town carnival to rival New Orleans?  On a nest egg for your children or grandchildren?  What is your wish list?  And would prolonging your own life be at the top? And, if so, for how long?    

These are hard questions, and yet we must ask them.  We must for several reasons.  First, because right now, each of us has a choice.  Not, perhaps, where the money will be spent, but whether it will be spent on feeding tubes and catheters.  And whether those we love will ever face the anguished questions that have haunted Terri’s loved ones for more than a decade.  A living will is a gift to anyone you care about.  Second, these are conversations we need to have about each other, for each other, with each other.  People make end-of-life decisions for mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, grandparents, siblings, daughters and sons every day.  Every day.  Third, when we face life’s dark possibilities together with eyes wide open, we immerse ourselves in our deepest spiritual values in all their complexity.  We anchor ourselves to those values.  In doing so, we strengthen our collective voice so that the meaning in and implications of our love for life cannot be blurred by dogma or political opportunism seeking to trivialize that which we hold most precious.      

March 2005

Be the Media

It was May; despite all the marches and pleas, and against the weight of world opinion, we were bombing Iraq.   In footage on the BBC, in Reuters Feedroom,  it looked like, well, war:  messy, bloody.  Ordinary people doing what scared people do:  waiting in hospitals, buying the only weapons they could get their hands on, single shot rifles, huddling with their kids in the dark.  But here in the U.S., the war looked like a video game.  Unrecognizable objects erupted into cool explosions at a distance.  Beautiful tracers crossed the night sky above Baghdad, and the horizon glowed red.

I found myself huddling in the dark.  One morning, I woke up and stared bleakly at the computer.  The screen was black, but it still reminded me that somewhere on the other side of the world people were screaming.  I shuffled to the shower and thought, I have to either do something or get Prozac.

That afternoon, I found three pictures on the web and took them to a print shop.  By tomorrow?  By tomorrow, they promised, two foot by three, laminated.   When I picked them up, they were better – or worse—than I had imagined.  The child with lacerations all over his face cried out in reproof or pain.  The burned child, those empty eyes, was he dead or alive?  The acutely beautiful grey haired man who held a girl – he held me accountable.  And you could see that the colorful shreds hanging from her colorful pants were the shreds of her foot itself.

I got scared.  I sent out email and made calls asking if any of my friends wanted to come with me.  No one had the stomach.  So the next morning, I put my kids on the bus, taped the signs to tall poles, two facing forward, one back, and started walking.

“Ugh!  What’s that?” was the first reaction I got.  (A homeless woman.)  I explained.  “We did that?!”  She walked away, shaking her head, stopping several times to look back.  An aging black man crossed the street to look closer and to encourage me.  “You go girl!”  I kept walking, across Capitol Hill and down into the heart of Seattle.  The business district.  The tourist district.  “Do you think I want to look at that?” snapped one woman.  “No,” I answered.  “I don’t think the Iraqis do either.”

From nine to four, I walked my home town.  Several people said thank you.  Several said fuck you.   Some stopped to tell their stories.  From the print shop, the Pakistani man who had done the lamination came downtown and stood by me for several hours.   Mostly people looked and looked again and looked away.  I figured by the time I reached home, exhausted and shaky and not needing Prozac, between five and ten thousand people had seen those pictures.  I am the media.

TIPS: 

1. Engage someone new.  Your friends probably know what you think, and they probably think like you.   Push outside your comfort zone.
2. Go boldly.  What you have to say is crucial.  What you have to show is powerful.
3. Go in peace.  If someone engages you, either positively or negatively about what you are communicating, they already hold strong opinions.  Those most open to your message and in need of it will pass in silence. 
4. Remember, you are planting seeds, not changing minds.   Small bits of information and experience accumulate until they trigger radical shifts.

10/22/03

India  October 23, 2004

Part I:  I'm sitting in a scruffy internet cafe on my last morning in Delhi.  I had my chai and puri (lentil stew) accompanied by a book of Pakistani short stories at a stand by the train station while bicycle rickshaws and motor rickshaws and people on foot and the occasional cow slid  past stirring dust and scattering yesterday's garbage.  That was at 6:30, with the city just coming to life.  Now it's 9:30, I've since had a nap, and it seemed like a good time to reflect on the trip. 

India is, as always, intense in every way imaginable.  In the ten years since Brian and I were here last, more than 100,000,000 people have joined those already crowding the continent.  High tech centers have sprung up on the denuded plains, surrounded by middle class housing blocks-thousands of units, some rising ten or more stories, and glittery malls.  Yet still, dark faced children, dark by Indian standards, rattle the car windows begging for rupees, and empty lots are scattered with old plastic bags and human feces.  Even the cows seem to prefer the city streets; being wise and holy, they should know. 

I woke my first morning in Delhi, and peered out my third story window at the Jama Masjid, a regal red sand-stone mosque built by the mogul conquerors almost a millennium ago. Its open courtyard holds 20,000, and a fluted minaret rises above graceful domes.  Down below, the sidewalks were lined by sleepers, each person wrapped tightly in a thin blanket as if shrouded for burial.  The sun was a dull red ball, though well above the horizon, all light filtered by dull yellow air.  Delhi's air quality is impressively bad; it burns your eyes, scrapes your throat, and leaves black dirt in the creases of your neck and on your handkerchief.  Residents here, however, find it relievingly good since all city buses and motor rickshaws were forcibly switched to compressed natural gas a couple of years ago.   As the sleepers woke and bathed (clothed) at public faucets, shopkeepers emerged and then shoppers, and the streets filled with human traffic, shoulder to shoulder, bicycles and rickshaws and motorbikes and push carts squeezing past each other in an intricate shuffle that almost never resulted in collisions or conflict. 

The shops of the old city are crammed with everything from electronics to used ball bearings, with battered bumpers and custom party invitations and enormous aluminum water pots and cheap watches and stainless steel dish racks and tiffin tins.  Most dramatic, perhaps, were the jewelry stores proudly displaying wedding sets that look like museum pieces made of intricate gold work inlaid with colorful gem stones.  Narrow alleyways along Chowdry Chawk (the old bazaar) are lined with fabric stores, each a small padded cubicle stacked floor to ceiling with everything from the cheapest synthetics to beaded and embroidered silks, all in bright colors, with fine wedding saris gleaming red and gold displayed proudly as space allowed.  Slip off your shoes and step inside.  The proprietors don't mind unfolding length after length of dazzling fabrics, confident that they have something for everyone, or else that indebted gratitude will eventually require a purchase.     

My second morning in the capital, I woke to sheer elegance at the five-star Trident Hilton where Microsoft had graciously decided to house the upper management people sent for a week of Indian immersion. (In fairness, the most important aspects of the immersion were the functionings of the Indian government and global corporations, and this immersion was effective and thorough.)  Built on the scale of a mogul palace, the hotel has soaring domes lined with gold leaf, expansive reflecting pools from which leap flames of invisible torches at nightfall, impossibly long halls that seem like mirrored illusions but are not.  Line and curve are impeccably scaled, ornamentation is spare, and the whole is stunningly beautiful, evocative, inspiring.

The Spanish have two words for poverty.  Pobreza is poverty, pure and simple.  It is an economic status.  It need not lack dignity.  Miseria is wretched, vile poverty, degraded and desperate, the kind that makes you beg or sell your body or that of your child or drink water you know is contaminated with animal filth or live with open sores.  India creates two things like no where else I have ever been:  elegance and miseria.  It has throughout recorded history.  Both are overwhelming. 

Part II: 

From the confines of my prosperous, American experience, India's popular culture and politics are as radical as her extremes of elegance and degradation.  Headline news this week was the shoot out that killed India's most wanted bandit, Verapeem?, who was flushed out of his jungle lair in a masterful sting operation by joint police teams from the southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu.  Infiltrators arranged a fake ambulance to carry him in secret for diabetes treatment and eye surgery.  Alas for him, they were met by a truck full of central police armed with automatic weapons as were he and his cronies. 

 Newspapers showed his mottled face, the fatal bullet hole a dark dimple above the left eye.  Behind him in the morgue could be seen the profiles of three gang members who joined him in death.  After almost forty years of terrorizing two states, it is hard to think he deserved better.  During that time he is said to have poached 200 elephants and, then, when the international ivory trade was banned, he switch to sandalwood, shipping an estimated 10,000 tons out of India's  patchy jungles.  He killed 123 people, mostly law enforcement and forestry officers (forest rangers) who got in his way.  He kidnapped an ex-minister of Kerala and executed him when his demands weren't met.  It is said that he kept the head of one forestry officer as a trophy.  Thanks to Robin Hood manouvers that kept some villagers on his side, and thanks to infighting among law enforcement agencies, he managed to evade arrest for decades.  20,000 people converged to celebrate his removal.

Had Verapeem only surrendered and served time twenty years ago, he might be a politician by now.  Other bandits have made the transition quite successfully.  Indians, especially in poor states such as Bijar, have an astounding history of electing thugs to office.  There are people in state government with links to fraud, smuggling, even murder, - an unbelievable array of felonies either charged or suspected.  Our own history of back room deals, graft and privilege pales by comparison.  Ignoring the international behavior of the United States, we are weenies when it comes to racketeering and thuggery.  Same with election fraud.  A friend who worked for USAID once commented that there is no form of election fraud that wasn't invented in the United States.  But India is, as in all else, dramatically impressive. 

The same is true for nepotism.  We may think it peculiar that our two presidential candidates are from the same university and the same secret society.  We may comment on the fact that a number of political appointees were college buddies and Texas colleagues of the president .  We may note that a high percentage of fundraising "pioneers" are now diplomats.  But Indian politicians overtly groom their offspring for dynastic succession.  People complain, but the populace gives the green light with their votes, and so the practice continues.  The current president of congress, Sonja Gandhi, for example, is the Italian born wife of prime minister Rajiv Gandhi (assassinated)  who was the son of Indira Gandhi (assassinated) who was the daughter of Nehru.  Nepotism trumps sexism. 

Educated Indians, like people all over the world are watching the upcoming U.S. election closely.   Indians typically prefer Democrats in office, seeing themselves more closely aligned with the Democrats than Republicans on issues such as distributive justice, internationalism, the environment, and education.  However, in this election, they are one of two recently surveyed countries who are evenly divided.  According to local analysis, one factor that has played into the split opinion is that Indians think it may be harder to get the Democrats to sell recent weapons technologies that they want for their arms race with Pakistan.  This administration is seen as a strong supporter of the international weapons trade.      The other factor is that  Kerry has taken a hard line on outsourcing.  Outsourcing has been a huge boost for the Indian economy.  Not only in high tech and manufacturing, but in customer support and indirect sales, India has become a big player.  If I have my numbers correct, India is home to about 50 million English speakers, second only to the U.S.  With call centers being located here to take advantage of high levels of education and low wages, training courses have sprung up to help Indians replace their characteristic accent with a southern drawl.  Some, with dubious ethics, even help call center staff to develop personas.  "Hah, Ahm Susi from Amarilluh, Texas.  What can ah do for y'all t'day?" 

Part III:

As in all else, environmentally India is a land of extremes.  The vast majority of the continent is stripped, consumed as if by a plague of human locusts and rapidly headed for salinization and sterility.  From a population standpoint, India is slated to outstrip China soon, and a Calcutta family that hosted me one night commented that population growth is India's biggest problem.  This perspective is widespread.  (Interestingly, I have yet to met an Indian with any amount of prosperity, from motor rickshaw drivers up, who has more than two children.  Even within the religions that discourage family planning - Islam and Christianity - educated adherents practice birth control.  The growth is all in the lowest socio-economic layer, no small source of social tension.)  But here is the contrast:   Brian and I spent our week together in the State of Sikkim, in the foothills of the Himalayas, surrounded by natural beauty that rivals anything I have ever seen. 

Sikkim is bordered by Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan, and culturally reflects this convergence. Buddhism is the majority religion and Nepali is the majority ethnic-linguistic group.   Until the '60's I believe, Sikkim was an independent monarchy.  But in the aftermath of China's annexation of Tibet and systematic program of cultural displacement, the Sikkimese voted overwhelmingly to join India, which promised them a substantial degree of cultural and political autonomy.  The government of Sikkim has strongly socialist (if not Marxist) leanings, with all of the positives and negatives implied.  Public works are a priority, as is universal education -- and the dream of universal employment means that people are employed in wildly inefficient occupations such as cutting roadside grass with hand-scythes. 

Overall, socio-economic status, the status of women, and the quality of the environment are dramatically better than in the surrounding regions. Environmental protection is promoted- plastic bags are banned, ecotourism development subsidized, and cutting of trees without permits forbidden.  Pro-social and pro-environmental slogans, some hilariously contorted, line the roads.    "You sleep, your family weep" cautioned one roadside sign.  "Plant a tree for meditation; plant a tree for future generation," advocated another.  "Cut a tree, win a landslide for free," quipped a sign in front of a bookstore.  

From Siliguri - a hot dusty town on the plains, we flew to Gangtok (6000 ft?), the capital of Sikkim by helicopter.  During the thirty minute ride (a ridiculous, subsidized $30 U.S.) we rose over thickly forested near-vertical "hills," with winding mountain roads emerging below us and disappearing again on the contorted hillsides.  The town of Gangtok is perched on a steep slope, crowned by a ridge that is lined with gardens and capped by the (modest) palace of the ex royal family.  Streets run in wide switchbacks, layered down the mountainside, and stairs connect one level with another for foot traffic.  Gangtok is a mix of ugly cement tenements and quirky local architecture with traditional Tibetan boxiness.  But whatever the town lacks in architectural beauty, it makes up in setting.  We woke one morning before dawn to watch the sun rise over behind snow capped Kachenjunga and the next did it again. 

From Gangtok, we hired a car and spent two days winding through river valleys, over precarious ridge roads, through tea plantations, past monasteries and dramatic waterfalls - to Pellnig and Nemchi, both more modest than Gangtok from the standpoint of human creations and proportionally more dramatic in natural beauty.  And always, we were welcomed by  fluttering prayer flags, in a flurry of color or in dingy white, on bamboo poles ten feet tall or twenty, or strung between trees and houses and fences. I wondered - is it too trite to ask? - if we had chanced across the most beautiful place on earth. 

Giving Children Giving Skills

“I told the kids where you were, and they are very proud of you,” my husband commented.  I had just returned from a small bookstore in Santiago, where we were vacationing.  I had been buying books and making arrangements to deliver them to the local library.  “Why?” was my first reaction to his comment.  Not why are they proud, but why did he tell them.  I felt awkward.   “Because,” he responded.  “It’s important for them to know.”  “I guess,” I said, sounding as uncomfortable as I felt.  But I recognized that he was right. 

It surprises me how reluctant I feel about explicitly exposing our two daughters to our giving, both to individuals and to organizations.  I should know better, because I see parents pay the price for not doing so.  But calling attention to it seems so, well, self promoting.  I was raised on a Bible story in which Jesus stands outside the temple with his disciples watching Pharisees enter, dropping their coins with loud clanks and rattles into the tithe box at the door. Then a poor widow comes along and discretely puts in a mite—a small coin of little value.  Jesus says first of all that the widow has given more than any of them, because she gave what little she had while they gave out of their surplus.  But he also says that the Pharisees will get no reward in heaven; their only reward is the attention that they have sought and received.   “When you give, go into a dark closet,” says the gospel writer.

Now, I’m not worried about gaining or losing rewards in heaven.  But the sense has stuck that putting my giving in the public eye somehow diminishes the gift.  It’s true even if those “public eyes” belong to one five-year-old and one six-and-a half year old.  It’s true even if the gift goes on to do exactly what it was intended to do.  I’ve wrestled and wrestled with my feelings about this, and have finally decided that I need to let the exposure diminish the gift in whatever way it may and “just deal with it.”    Here is why.

Parents come in to my psychology practice – good parents, moral parents, generous parents, pillar-of-the-community parents, activist parents, even philanthropist parents, with children and teenagers who have never much considered what or how to give to the world around them, or even whether they should.  They don’t know if it’s a part of their values.  They don’t know if it is a part of their parents’ values or, if they do, they know so only in a vague, background sort of way.   They definitely don’t recognize the importance their parents place on supporting the community outside of the family. 

I suspect that many of these parents have a notion similar to my own about calling attention to their giving.  Unfortunately, their modesty backfires.  Rather than learning discrete generosity, their children learn no generosity, because neither the discretion nor the generosity is apparent to them. 

A few months ago, I sat in my office with a high school junior who had just returned from a Habitat for Humanity trip in Mexico.  He was talking about what it was like to experience the poverty of the families who were receiving the new houses.  He was talking about what it felt like to be helpful to them.  “Where did you get this energy from?” I asked him, somewhat surprised by his intensity.  “How did this come to be a part of who you are and what matters to you?”  “From my mother,” he answered immediately

I realized there was a part of his family experience that I didn’t know.  He was in my office because his parents had gone through a difficult divorce, and each family member was, in his or her own way, struggling.  We had been focused on declining grades, behavior problems, and conflicts.  Pain makes us self absorbed, and he and his sister and parents hadn’t been very focused on the well-being of the world around them in the months since they had first come in to see me.  It was all they could do to muddle their way through the emotional upheaval.

“From your mother,” I repeated.  “How is that?”  “Oh,” he responded, “She used to take us to serve holiday dinners for homeless people, and she helped with fund-raising for the PAWS shelter, and we were involved in our neighborhood clean-up. . . .”   By the time he finished describing the many ways that his mother had involved him in her community service and giving, I had learned an important lesson.  Giving was second nature for him, instinctive, like brushing his teeth.  It was part of his normal equilibrium.  As soon as he began emerging from the divorce process, it was there waiting for him.  And I got it—why he was so different from other teenagers I had met who would have been puzzled or turned off by the Habitat trip.

It makes sense, of course.   If we want our children to make their beds, we show them how it’s done, we coach them through it, and we nudge them along.  If we want them to be readers, we read to them; we tell them it is important; we read together so that reading becomes part of our bond.  If we want them to be kind to animals, we teach them how to pick up a cat, we remind them what it feels like for an unfed pet to be hungry, and we talk to animals in peculiar ways, pet them, and invite the children to join us.  In all of these we model, teach, and encourage the desired habits.    But if we want them to be civic minded or charitable, we expect them to pick it up by osmosis.

Let me tell you what happened as a result of my husband’s dialogue with the children.  Not long afterward, back home, our six-year-old picked up a book about manatees.  She has always been fascinated with marine mammals.  In fact, her stated goal in life at one point was to become an Orca whale.  And she always gets upset about the thought of them being endangered.  This time, she came down stairs crying, saying, “Mommy, I want to send money to the manatees.  I don’t want them to be extinct.” 

She painstakingly dictated a letter to her aunt in Florida, asking about how to help manatees.  She drew pictures of manatees being hit by boats, with a big circle and slash around them.   And she set about raising money by pulling weeds, picking up messes, and making a one-box garage sale in which she sold—this is the bonus part—her only Barbie.

When she was still at it two months later, I helped her to sell drinks and brownies at a local parade.  By then she had involved our next door neighbor girl and her little sister.  A friend of ours dropped by, and, as he was leaving he drew five dollars out of his pocket.  “This is for Bee’s manatee fund,” he said.  “The boys pulled weeds in our back yard because they wanted to contribute.”

Now, I’ve never really focused before on helping manatees, but I’ll confess, I love it.  I get that warm, I’m-in-love-with-my-kid feeling whenever I think of her sticking it out.  “She’s becoming a regular mooch,” my husband said when he came home from work to find an elaborately decorated ‘change for manatees’ box on top of our drier.  “No,” I reminded him.  “It’s not mooching, it’s fund raising.”  It was his turn to say, “I guess,” in that reluctant voice.  He hates begging favors as much as I hate the public eye.  But if we both have to squirm a bit along the way so that Bee can grow her helping instinct into a giving habit, so be it.  

2001. 

When Boasting isn’t Bragging

“I’m worried about Devin,” my friend Nella confessed recently.  We were sitting in my kitchen enjoying one of those quiet interludes that are so rare since we both became mothers.  Our children were running wild in the yard, giving us a few minutes of solitude.  “He comes home from school bragging all the time lately. ‘I spelled more words than anyone.  I was the best when we were kicking the soccer ball.  Nobody could run as fast as me.  Look at this great picture I made.  I’m a really good artist, aren’t I.’ He goes on and on.  I want him to tell me about his day and about the things he is good at, but I don’t want him to be a bragger.  I don’t want him putting himself above other people.  I try telling him, but I’m not sure that is the right thing, because I don’t want him to stop talking to me, and I do want him to feel good about what he is learning.”

Devin is like Nella herself: a competent little guy, sturdy and smart.  And very sensitive about other people’s feelings.  Like her, he cares a lot about doing the right thing, and I felt sure he would take her responses to heart.  I, myself, don’t worry at all about Devin becoming a self promoter.  But I wasn’t particularly surprised by Nella’s concern, because questions about boasting or bragging have come up so many times over the years in my psychology practice, where I work with children and families. 

Children come into the world celebrating their successes, and celebrating them loudly.  They are excited, and they want other people to notice as they revel in their mastery and in their creations.  Think how many times we hear, from the moment they can talk, “Look Mama, Look Daddy, Watch me, Did you see it?”  or “Look what I made, Look at this one. And this one. . .”

Over time, they learn to keep their accomplishments to themselves, because –Nella is right about this—there is a high price to pay for being perceived as a bragger.  Frequently, a child who other children believe to be bragging and gloating will be pushed to the margins socially. 

There are at least two reasons for this.  One is that other children who have internalized the “No Bragging” rule feel uncomfortable and even vicariously ashamed to have it broken.   Secondly, we all, including children, like to feel good about ourselves and our own accomplishments.  We don’t want to be around someone who makes us feel small, who makes us think less of ourselves.  If I just got a hard earned ‘B’ on the test, I don’t want to hear about your perfect score.  If I just succeeded in stacking twelve blocks, I don’t want to hear about your seventeen. 

We especially hate having someone make us feel lesser if we think they are doing it intentionally.  And children tend to assume intent even when there is none.  If someone does something that hurts me, physically or emotionally, they must have foreseen and intended the harm.  ‘He/she did it on purpose’ is a frequent howling refrain throughout the preschool and grade school years.   So lauding your own accomplishments among your peers is risky.

But the problem I see in my psychology practice, is not one of people bragging too much.  Instead, by the time many of us get to adulthood, we have learned the “No bragging” rule so well that we don’t pause to revel in our accomplishments, even alone or with a partner or friends.  In fact, we don’t take time to relish them at all.  Often our successes get brushed aside as we focus on the next milestone or worse, on the things we ‘should have’ done better. 

It’s a problem because we need those accomplishments.  We need them to be as weighty and substantial as they really are.  We need them to hang over us in the way our dreams can hang over us – like some vague sense or mood at the edge of our consciousness as we go about the day’s tasks.  Because if we are pushing ourselves hard, we are going to have a lot of failures.  A lot.  And it is the weight of the successes that give us the energy to keep trying, to keep hoping and persisting against the odds.  They are our buffer against depression.  They provide one of the foundations of our self-esteem:  the sense that I have the power to accomplish what matters to me and, within my value system, what matters in the world.

Here is what I told Nella:  Devin’s impulse to celebrate his successes is a gift, it is a treasure.  It is something to be protected and nurtured.  Right now, at age 7, he still has the ability to bask in his attainments, to say, “Wow, I am really something!.  I am great!  Being Devin Swiggett is one of the coolest, most awesome things in the world.”  He doesn’t need to be taught that this exuberant-expression-of-his-own-amazing-fortune-at-being-himself is wrong.  But he does need to be taught how and when to express it:

The “when” part is pretty straight-forward.  It depends quite simply on whether there are other people around who might feel worse about themselves after hearing you talk about your success.   If so, hold on to it.  In fact, if there are people around who may be feeling shaky about their own successes, this may be a time to sing their praises a little bit.  They may have a hard time spotting whatever it is that they have to be proud of.  Or your recognition may give them permission to feel pleased with themselves.  You want people to feel good about you?  Help them feel good about themselves.  In an honest, real way, of course.

The “how” part is more complicated, because celebrations pretty easily evolve into comparisons.  Then, getting to feel good about yourself depends not on what you have mastered or created but on what others are doing.  It means you only get to feel good if you do “better than,” which means that other people’s accomplishments become a threat rather than cause for gladness.  It can become important or even necessary to diminish other people, in order to keep from feeling rotten about yourself.

The fact is, that in a world of – are we six billion now? – there are going to be many people who are better than you on any dimension you can think of, many people who are better and people who are way, way better.  So, if the focus is on being the best, in the long run you are toast.  Fortunately, creations and accomplishments have value in their own right. 

Also fortunately, almost everything worthwhile that gets done in the world gets done by people who are not the best at it.  If physicists only got to do research if they were as brilliant as Albert Einstein, they would all be sitting on their haunches.  If only the best basketball all star got to feel good about how he played the game, there wouldn’t be any basketball.  If only the best physician bothered practicing medicine, we would be hurting.  Cities are built, gadgets are invented, whales are saved, countries are run by ordinary people doing what they can in whatever matters to them, and getting satisfaction from it.

I said it is complicated, because some our successes involve competitions, in which case, doing “better than” is what it’s all about.  Also, it is impossible to get completely away from measuring yourself against other people, and probably undesirable as well.  We learn from those measurements what directions we want to move in and what is possible.  We get inspired.  But rare is the person who needs to be taught to do this kind of comparing.  It seems instinctive.  In order to truly take pleasure in most of our accomplishments, what we need is to drop the comparisons and look at the attainment in the context of our own development and priorities.   

So that’s the goal.  To be able to look at what you’ve done, independent of those six billion people, and to ask, “Is it growth, is it cool, is it worthwhile?” and to be able to celebrate when the answer is yes.  But the celebration definitely doesn’t have to be alone.  Not everybody is vulnerable to feeling threatened by whatever it is that you just accomplished.  That is one of the great things about having a parent or being a parent.  A parent gets to listen and take it all in and be unabashedly delighted.  They can whoop and cheer right along (and, secretly, of course, give themselves a little kudos too).  A parent is one of the safest people in the world to draw into your celebrations, because they haven’t quite figured out that they aren’t you.  (We parents never completely do, you know.)

There are other people too, who can join you when you know how to select them.  Frequently this depends on what exactly it is that you are celebrating, how accomplished the other person is in that area, what their goals are, how they feel about themselves.  You can also teach other people what you need in the way  of their participation.  My husband has figured me out, over the course of ten years.  He finds me staring happily at some landscape rocks I have just rearranged, and I say, “Aren’t they great? (Translate: Aren’t I cool?)” and he says, “They look great!  You are so cool.”  And then I go back happily to digging in the garden, working away contentedly at my next major project,  with his kudos and my own hanging over me when the sun gets hot and the weeds keep growing and I have to move a perennial five times before I decide it’s in the right place.

That is what I said to Nella, and this is what more I want to say to you:  Kids are smart, explain it to them, they don’t need the bragging rule to be all or nothing.  Then, label what you see them doing when things go awry:  “Hmm, I think I hear gloating.”  Or “I know you beat your sister, but that sounded like a put down.”  Or, “Look at Marley right now.  You are really proud of your picture, but how do you think she is feeling.  Let’s talk about hers for a while.”   They need you to stop them cold when celebrating turns into jockeying for status or even cruelty.  Children are perfectly capable of using their accomplishments in these ways, often with a surprising amount of subtlety and finesse.

Coach them on how to celebrate well.  Script it if you need to.  It’s ok to tell them, “Say this:  I really like my picture.” (Rather than “My picture is better than Darcy’s, isn’t it, Mom.”)  Model with words of your own, both when they have cause to be proud and when you do.  Amplify their pleasure:  if something is a big deal, then make a big deal of it with a ritual or a treat, or a gift of your time.  Help them to  recall the process of getting there, to remember the frustrations they overcame and times when they thought they wouldn’t succeed.  Guide them in thinking more complexly, in considering different skills they used in a game, different aspects of color and form in their artwork, different projects in a history class, and so on.  That way they can focus on the parts that please them.  

And take time to revel in your own successes.  There are more than you realize.