Author: John

Let’s End Our Fear of Wanting

~ John ~ Leave a comment

In my family mediation practice, I often encounter an inexperienced, fearful, person – frequently but not always a woman — who is trying to negotiate against someone perceived as a bully, over marital property or child support.   I will ask what her goal in the mediation is.  She will tell me, and then hopelessly shrug: “but there’s no way he’ll agree to that.”

I respond: “I’m not asking you what he will or won’t agree to.  My question is, what do YOU want?”

A light flickers in her eyes.  It seems almost a novel concept that she could WANT something, and be entitled to have it, without her desire being fundamentally limited by the boundaries set by her ex.

It’s my job to strive for fairness in the process.  That begins by each party defining what they fundamentally want, irrespective of what will “sell” in the other room.  The crucible of negotiation comes second, and it will always involve tradeoffs and compromise.  But unless each person comes to the table with at least a basic handle on themselves, then the conversation will be one-sided, and the outcome skewed.

The current debate among Democrats about whether our candidates are veering too far to the left reminds me of that person coming into mediation too scared to say what she wants.  Our concerns over “electability” are clouding our ability to have an honest discussion about more fundamental issues of income inequality, health care, immigration, the environment, and racial justice, that should drive our search for a candidate that can arouse the passions of the party.  And our hunt for a candidate palatable to a wide cross-section of voters distracts us from finding the person who, first and foremost, has a clear sense of themselves.

There’s new data to suggest that a bold agenda consistent with Democratic policy ideals has broad public support.  A New York Times/SurveyMonkey poll from early July showed majority nationwide support for a wealth tax on households worth over $50 million, Medicare for all, and free college tuition.  Of course these proposals are controversial, subject to withering attacks from the right, and endlessly mocked by you-know-who.

But that is how he sets the agenda in advance of the debate.  Trump is nearly the ideal type of what sociologist Max Weber called “charismatic” authority: “charisma is self-determined and follows its own limits. Its bearer seizes the task for which he is destined and demands that others obey and follow him by virtue of his mission. …  He does not derive his claims from the will of his followers, in the manner of an election; rather, it is their duty to follow his charisma.”

Our negotiating alternatives against this type of opponent are stark.  The most relevant historical examples are the efforts to deal with Adolf Hitler before World War II.  Neville Chamberlin attempted one approach, in which he let Hitler fundamentally define the discussion before it began.  The result came to be known as “appeasement.”  It is not fondly remembered.  Winston Churchill epitomized the other approach.  In 1938, he famously articulated the case for collective action against Nazi aggression: “You must have diplomatic and correct relations, but there can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force.  … Between submission and immediate war there is this third alternative, which gives a hope not only of peace but of justice.”  Many thought the speech reckless when he gave it.  But Churchill, who had known many failures in his professional life, also knew himself, and knew who he was dealing with.  The rest, as they say, is history.  If you want an overdramatized, but basically accurate, refresher, dial up “The Darkest Hour” on Netflix.

I’d love to say this is our darkest hour, except that it is getting darker by the day.  Now is not the time to appease, nor to allow a bully to define the agenda, nor to craft an agenda that we think will least displease the greatest number.  We must know our own minds, hew to the truth of our own traditions, speak from our own hearts, and reclaim the country — and the planet — that we want to see survive this ordeal.  Future generations, who depend on us to make it to the farther shore, will not look sympathetically upon our fear.

Epilepsy and My New Car

~ John ~ Leave a comment

Image result for toyota camry hybrid images

Five years ago last month, I woke up in the ER to a new world of epilepsy.  This spring, I bought a new car.

That night of my first diagnosed seizure – I’d had others but didn’t know what they were – a cranky ER doc shrugged, “It’s probably idiopathic,” and kicked us out the door.  My spouse and I, scared and confused, resented his flippancy, and do still.  But he was right.   Two years of intensive diagnostics were unable to identify a cause for my seizures.  This is actually common.  Epilepsy is sometimes undetectable on an MRI, and seizures can flash across the temporal lobe like summer sheet lightning without a raindrop in sight.  A puzzle as old as Galen, epilepsy is still fundamentally defined the way the Greeks did: by what it does, rather than what it is.  Unless there is a brain lesion, injury, or tumor that the docs can see, or some other illness of which seizures are a side-effect, then you’re basically dealing with a ghost.

What medicine offers now, if you’re fortunate, is the means to keep it at bay.  For that I thank Zeus, in his forbearing thunder, and every god since.  Not that finding effective treatment was easy.  During those same two years of fruitless diagnosis, I took drug after draining drug.  The seizures lessened, and I never again had one that blacked me out.  But the ghost did not go away.  Finally, I had a small joy-buzzer implanted in my chest that delivers a small shock to my vagus nerve where it crosses my larynx, every 2.5 minutes.  I found a drug cocktail I could tolerate with efficacy at least north of placebo.  And I took my diet to full-on paleo.  So, for the past three years, this triple therapy of implant, drugs, and ketogens has gotten enough of a collar on Casper the Unfriendly that I am returned to the ranks of the outwardly able-bodied.

I say outwardly, because for many people who have it, epilepsy is also defined by the things we are not permitted to do.  Two generations ago it was immeasurably worse: we were castrated and sterilized, locked in segregated wards of asylums lest we infect the insane.  Now we are mostly prevented from getting conveniently around town.  I couldn’t drive for those first two years, and it was an enormous education.  A trip that takes 12 minutes by car takes 45 by foot and bus.  A 45-minute trip across town drags to over 2 hours.  That wasn’t the real learning, though.  A local bus in a western city, stopping every two blocks through a working-class neighborhood, affords views you don’t get from the highway.  And when you ride that bus for a year, watching the guys in winter bundled up for a workday they will spend outside, savoring the ride because it is the warmest they will be all day — when you watch underdressed moms and kids get on that bus after frigid waits in the blowing snow when the bus is 20 minutes late — when you you spend one of those waits yourself, after walking half an hour in dress shoes on an unplowed sidewalk, contemplating how you would have been able to get through those snowdrifts if you’d been in a wheelchair — then you come to think of driving, even walking, as indeed a privilege.

I’m not complaining — far from it.  My time out of the driver’s seat turned out to be only a field trip.  I’ve been released from driving restrictions for some time now, and because my job takes me to five counties every week, and because I can, I just bought a new hybrid sedan.  I chose it for the mileage and the semi-autonomous safety gadgets.  But what I guiltily love is the quiet.  The world outside, that on a sidewalk or bus felt so fulsome to the senses, is now muted to a simulator.  My music gently croons.  The temperature hovers at an amniotic 70 degrees.   Scenery – and thoughts – that used to linger and penetrate now barely register.

What remains is a sharpened sense of the contingency of living that epilepsy shocked me into five years ago.  It suits my current work as a family court mediator: I move from one half-day block after another through successive worlds of domestic sorrow, as though between rocking compartments of a fast-moving train.  The job is to be intensely present in each room, and then just as intensely to exhale in the corridor between.  And pulling out the courthouse parking lot I pause to notice the guy sitting at the bus shelter where I used to wait, sometimes five minutes, sometimes an hour, for the local bus whose driver will spout off about libertarian politics to anyone who’ll listen, or just to the rearview mirror if nobody will.   And I thank Zeus, and all the gods.

God Bless Us Everyone!

~ John ~ Leave a comment

For those not already convinced of my hopeless sentimentality, here’s the most damning evidence yet: I’m a lifelong Charles Dickens fan.  My defense is that – especially at Christmas – we historicize Dickens as this smarmy old chap like something from a painting of dogs playing billiards.  In fact, he was the Bernie Sanders of his age.

So on this unquiet solstice, let me conjure three of Scrooge’s ghosts that Dickens might select, were he alive to consider our world at the turning of this year.  For the ghost of Christmas Past, a President laid out for his state funeral; for Christmas Present, a child starved to a leathered skeleton in a Yemeni hospital; and for Christmas Future, the blue-gloved hand of a rescue worker protruding from a charred sedan in Paradise, clutching fragments of bone.

Even in death, Dickens wouldn’t romanticize the presidential policies of Bush the Elder.   George the First would get the sharp end of a merciless caricature no Dana Carvey could touch.  But in old age Bush’s personal decency would be sticking out like the knobby elbows and kneecaps of an old man in a nightshirt.   As a ghost, he’d rise from his coffin, an Uncle Sam from the old recruiting poster, his long bony finger pointing, pointing, pointing everywhere, so many things askew to point at, so many missions overlooked, unstarted, bickered to a useless draw.

As Bush’s coffin is drawn off on a caisson hauled by a spectral team of black horses, the Yemeni child limps into view, her skeletal fingers reaching up to take my fleshy hand.  “Where are you leading me?” I ask, as we walk into a featureless horizon filled with blinding white light.  “This is the place of no more choices,” she responds.  “Every choice is the cancellation of another choice.  Every road has been traveled. They all lead here.”  I look around.  Everything is sunlight, but there is no sun, no shadow, no direction.  Only more and more children, starving, looking at me.  They are whispering the words “never again”, over and over, in many languages, Yiddish, Khmer, Spanish, Rwandese, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, and a hundred thousand dialects lost to time, syllables blending like a breeze, then a wind, screaming at the top of their voiceless lungs the single word forever. Then silence, and dark.

Out of which comes a blackness, of which Dickens himself wrote: “Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, as one might imagine, for the death of the sun.”  Dickens roamed London by night, and if he were to walk the streets of Paradise he would smell its ghosts rising from the sooty mud.  And a thousand other smells: collections of 1970s LPs, burned; dashboards of old cars, burned; bookshelves filled with “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” and “Atlas Shrugged,” burned; leveraged home equity and inadequate 401Ks, burned; a generation raised to believe its works would be the flower of civilization, burned.

Because the real point of “A Christmas Carol” is to force us — the Scrooges of the ruling class — to stare on Christmas Eve into our own graves.

And for what? At the pealing of bells, Scrooge rises from his bed to send the largest turkey to the home of the Cratchits and then walk out to greet his neighbors on a bright Christmas morning.  And here’s where the book makes its delicate pirouette, so often confused with smarm.  The thing that saves Scrooge’s soul is the mere delight that he is alive — the pleasure in life itself.  And realizing this, his gratitude overflows, and he cannot stop laughing.  “For he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter at the outset; and knowing such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms.”

You could say that, having conjured up this horror, to conclude with laughter is an offense, if not a sacrilege.  But laughter, honestly found and felt, is the orgasmic eruption of a deeper human love.  And that’s my best hope and wish for you, at the turning of this year.