Jose, Maria, y Jesus

"A word on perspective: for this image, I chose very, very wide vanishing points. The result is what I occasionally call “middle-class white people perspective.” Rather than feeling immersed in the scene, the viewer is looking at it as if from across the street or from the warmth and safety of his or her passing car. I have a small hope that this Christmas image will come to mind when we see other “down and out” people huddling outside of gas stations, reminding us that our Savior’s parents (and indeed, Jesus himself) were at one time similarly troubled."

-Everett Patterson, illustrator of Jose y Maria

Worth considering again: would Jose and mother Maria find a place to stay for baby Jesus (pronounced here as Hey-Zeus for those who prefer to "speak American" only) this past Christmas Eve/Day?

Or would the town offer thoughts and prayers (and maybe send profits) to build a wall to keep them out so shop owners and employees can go home for the night without troubling themselves with someone else's problems?

Some people insist on celebrating Christmas while pushing to turn away refugees who seek a safe place to find a home for their children who are getting separated from them when they arrive at the border--despite the fact that coming to the U.S. border is a necessary step for seeking political asylum.

While there's relatively little most of us can do when a nation's population suffers from war, understanding the causes and developing ways for aiding the displaced with dignified hospitality is among the most visceral ways to take responsibility as someone who's part of the bigger world that more of us would like to create. A place where people do the right thing and can take confidence in finding shelter, knowing there are places that care for their children, a place where they safely find work and contribute to a society that once carried a reputation for bringing together cultures from around the world.

Domestically, a liquor store clerk or owner isn't in business to tell people where to find a place to stay, and probably isn't interested in letting a tired couple from out of town stay in the store for the night even if it's open 24/7. But one's job isn't the same as one's responsibility to others in the world. Profit isn't the same as prosperity, and true wealth can be found in our collective health.

We now have the benefit of lots of perspective to learn from: from retrospective allegory to lived and learned history -- all on our side in a way that at least gives us an opportunity to make better choices when national policy works against us.

As a son of South Vietnamese refugees from the Vietnam War, we would be wise to heed refugee stories and understand how delicate calling a nation the place of one's home can be. Knowing and witnessing refugees firsthand from Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, many of the unfolding stories in current and recent events echo the experiences I hear in my parents circles too.

Witnessing firsthand how gaps in payments from government shut downs or employer shortcomings can lead to missed payments, foreclosures, and evictions, the line between homelessness and someone who suddenly seeks help from people with different privileges becomes just as delicate and thin.

Having lived amid domestic abuse during the holidays, we also would benefit from knowing why people would choose to stay out of the house rather than come home to their family -- it's often the same reason a family would try to leave their neighborhood or country when gang violence gets so bad and look for help from others who seem to be doing okay. It's the same reason families will try to flee or--if they can afford it--fight when corruption and war sets upon their homeland and country.

People tend to shy away from issues like homelessness because the causes for the problem normally carry a bundle of nuanced root causes that are bigger than what one person or organization can carry and solve. It calls us to create and steward a cohesive community that's more committed to care than the stigmas that are associated with the problems.

It takes empathetic moral and ethical imagination to consider what the right thing to do and follow through. It takes courage for people who are insecure about trying to address more than what they're accustomed to dealing with to find assurance in learning how to navigate the consequences of their action or inaction.

But I imagine that when we don't learn from those consequences as individuals, as a community--or if we're really fortunate as a culture, there's a good chance others will meet an unnecessary suffering that one decision could have spared.

Or maybe we can just ask "what is the courageous choice?" before doing our best with whatever answer we may find along with our responsibility to the consequences that arise.

I'm not providing all the answers here, for most of us, this week is an opportunity to celebrate and reflect with loving moments away from our usual work pattern and that's important too. Heck, maybe it'll take a few people who actually read this the whole week to get through all this text I've written.

Yet the meaningful work and opportunities for change will continue exist beyond Christmas day just like any other incident that's notable enough to stir up "thoughts and prayers" for some group of people and merit sustained action.

But if the business you work for doesn't account for ways to care for the community it operates in beyond a bottom line and its usual budgeted priorities, it may be time to envision what the difference between profit and prosperity means and take steps to demonstrate it.

Meanwhile, there are many people and causes worthy of effort in Detroit and certainly around the world. You can help Dior Gabrielle and others with Operation Care Kit Detroit--which will continue to operate long after the holiday season closes and into the most critical winter months for survival that a homeless person will often face without sufficient aid.

You can read more about the picture used in this post and what went into the illustrator's story behind creating it here:

http://www.everettpatterson.com/?p=1835

Complex PTSD and navigating through it

This article succinctly sums up the arc of my own stumblings in healing in ways that I didn't realize would happen among relatively mainstream sources. Around 2015 was the first time I ever heard of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD), and even then it was through a friend who was going through her symptoms from experience that were far worse than what I had. I'm really glad to see more people working through it now, and also people critical about the way that psychology in practice traditionally approaches anxiety, trauma, and depression tends to be inadequate if not completely uninformed.

https://themighty.com/2018/06/anxiety-from-complex-trauma/

Everything from

Literal good grief
The conundrum of compassion
Emotional Numbness

Even with all the reframing and attitude to look beyond some of the ingredients, it's helpful to recognize the patterns to what you're dealing with.

https://themighty.com/2017/08/life-impacting-symptoms-of-complex-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/

Emotion state sketches
Here's a trio of sketches that captured some of the things I felt near or when I was working through them:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1t5mlf87Wzqy2EWpq2qp1RwrkA5AJawzXFmCr-0c69OQ/edit?usp=sharing

I was trying to compile whatever guides I came up with a while ago in a way that would make it easy for you to proceed through but struggled to allocate the brain space (or computing capacity) so this is the next best thing--you might need to just run with whatever embedded links are in one of these posts (I think it's the first one) to see how I mapped/linked various things I was working through circa 2014/15 and what I did for intervening with them:

https://lighttelecommunication.blogspot.com/2015/02/an-emotional-list.html

https://lighttelecommunication.blogspot.com/2015/01/coping-with-various-degrees-of-agency.html?m=1

Emotional numbness can feel like a blessing and a curse--it took a long time for me to "be okay" with the feeling. Though it's helped me keep the clearest mind when it was time to pull a friend out of a fight, I sometimes questioned whether I'd be able to be emotionally perceptive when it matters.

​There's a video floating around the internet about a Ukrainian physics professor who started recording his lectures and demonstrations for students who were sick. Interviewed about how he felt knowing that his lectures are now famous worldwide with physics students and aspiring physicists, and how he tries to answer all of their questions. His reply:
"To be understood is to be happy. This makes me happy to know that there are people who want to learn about physics and understand what I'm trying to teach with enthusiasm."
Having shared a meal with dear friends in the North End, I realize this is simultaneously one of those ways and special moments that let you see what's life like to break out--or perhaps more appropriately, grow out, of that numbness.​​


Be well or at least know you're on the path to better.

On Thanksgiving events: Chau, Carey, Communists, Capitalists and Culture

NOTE: Written in the spirit of light fragments--don't expect complete sentences and thoughts but consider the ingredients referenced and connect the dots for yourself.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice"

"What shaped the behavior of the man... systems, etc."

"we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderer." -Dr. King after four girls were murdered in an Alabama church

If you pay close attention to the name of the missionary, it's Chau--this is an Asiatic name.

Three levels
A Christian might view this as a loss of life and to the institution, maybe a moment of martyrdom

A pro-indigenous progressive
might see it as

"the arc of the universe" bending toward justice

how right the indigenous people defended their island, made it clear, and prevented a possible epidemic when the invader returned despite their initial act of dissuasion.

As the son of Vietnamese refugees,
I notice another thing: the missionary's last name is Chau.
Chau is an asiatic name, and his face--Vietnamese too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chau

Vietnamese descendents experienced a few things
1) If you have any connection to South Vietnam, I suspect there's a decent chance you might be related to a people called the Champa -- a muslim vietnamese population that was persecuted into genocide by the (?Tran dynasty?).

2) Vietnam was also colonized by the French, and Japanese, and some might argue the Russia + the U.S. as well
when we later examine the Vietnam War between its North/South with the various backing governments.

For any "colonized" nation, there's a category for something I call
colonial [perhaps to a country like England, Spain, China, or Japan]
and/or
institutional [i.e. if a church is the first to set significant colonial influence -- just as the Catholic Church did on many an occassion]

Applying the stockholm syndrome concept in psychology at a collective scale, :

when the population under former colonization becomes ardent supporters of the former institution they were once subjected to.

For examples in Asia, the French language and anything related are often held in high esteem by Vietnamese people. Under Chinese Communism, several religious practices were eradicated during their most recent cultural revolution within the past century. Or Japanese mannerisms get adopted as a value in South Korean diction.

So we must question: why did he feel so compelled to go to the Sentinel Islands?
Indoctrination is part of it--a relgious faith

But as someone who grew up in Michigan having lived, worked, in proximity to shootings, or staying in squats, or chose homelessness over conventional housing arrangements

there's a part of me that understands what it's like to be drawn to the possibility of finding acceptance in others


other places


other people


other challenges


other discomforts


other dangers






and Jim Carey.

"Your need for acceptance can make you invisible in this world."

The greatest dare just might be to do as Carey says:
"Risk being seen in your fullest glory."


Chau probably had a great heart for compassion and all the values that make the various Christian faiths compelling on face.

Yet organized religion frequently preys upon the vulnerabilities that come with basic needs -- especially when the ways of life, survival, and culture are systemically eradicated.

Christianity is no stranger to this: deuteronomy 12 gives explicit directions for what policy circles classify as cultural genocide: you've seen me write about this elsewhere before.

We may place issue on the conquistadors, but the ministers in the settlements have as much a role. Look to the boarding schools and how native peoples were often beaten and demeaned for speaking their original languages, eating their traditional foods, and partaking in their customary celebrations or ceremonies.

"we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderer." -Dr. King

And when the people who stand up in defense of their needs to the settlers:

Who becomes top priority for eradication?

Leaders -- of course the Generals, the ardent Warriors, and political leaders, but also the griots, historians, poets, musicians, scholars, doctors, architects, engineers, etc. anyone of significant influence

and if there's public concern, it's done by stigmatizing anyone whose work is easy enough to appear divorced from creating any tangible and practical value.

In the way Red communist doctrine interpreted "revolution(s)", one of the first tasks at hand is to eradicate the intelligentsia--the kind of people I listed above.

That's not too far off from what Christianity does too.

Among hard-line capitalist advocates, you'll hear justifications in a similar form-- the near-sightedness for quarterly and annual profit often blinds them from the recognizing the deeper, interconnected values that come with culture.

The culpable behaviors are transcendent across too many ideologies, but we must not let the systems that send people to their deaths escape our gaze for critical amendment and learning.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=V80-gPkpH6M

Sun rises soon, rest.

Last Autumn, I wrote a haiku late at night:

Shattered, we lose sight.
Chasing the restless answer.
Sun rises soon, rest.

Coming round from a sort of episode between current events with U.S. immigration policy, I've been thinking about the effects of complex PTSD and the patterns that appear during an episode after the major traumatic incidents -- by the way, to anyone reading who might be sensitive to heavy topics like this, what I'm writing might not be for you to read.

How many people, including many friends and colleagues, appear to function in society, show up to work, and either get ostracized, shunned, or simply choose to cope in isolation so that they don't appear in public because they could be a danger to other people?

It feels like there's a part of life that's getting cheated in trade for some semblance of safety. Yet courage often happens at the threshold of comfort and necessity, and living life fully to overcome that existential shearing point normally means eventually choosing to move forward consistently enough that you don't let your perceptions of life collapse on itself. So we decide to push, we show up for other people and execute as high performers when we can see it really counts as long as we can focus on looking forward outside of ourselves. But when it comes to connecting with who we are and directing care inward, it's often a failing point. Someone who works with impeccable precision and attention to detail when intervening with crisis shuts down for days or, if they're isolated, weeks and months under normal circumstances.

There's a haunting word sitting firmly in my memory from part of the *internet version* Hopi Prophecy about people who are born with "sampacu -- no light in their eyes" -- I think about how the children of substance abuse, kids who grew up or the effects of young children separated from their parents as a result of the way our nation's current immigration policy is interpreted and enforced. People who self-medicate with cannabis, alcohol, or other substances also come to mind--where the goal is to slow oneself down enough that they numb the anxiety or edges of life's pains.

You probably have a stereotype or image in your head from seeing movies or reading articles that portray the condition in its extremes--flashbacks, someone reacting violently without reading the situation well, etc.--but what happens when someone is functionally working through an episode while working in the midst of other people that I think is underrepresented.

It shows up in subtle ways, maybe illogical spurts and fits in disproportionate response to another person's current or past actions which one thought they left buried long ago only to realize they've incubated the same alertness to similar kinds of pain.

For the individual experiencing those symptoms, it can feel like stepping into an intense stance is compelling and necessary. In some ways, it very well may be--at least if they're able to examine and understand how the dynamics of their present episode echoes unhealed moments in their past. The truth, with proper context, is always good. Yet when it burns brightest, it's often challenging for most people to engage it in its rawest state--there's too much to fit in a brief conversation, meeting, or decision. So the proper context will ultimately become one of your own making, and I like to believe that it sometimes comes after the fact that you may or may not have burned people during your efforts to illuminate the roots of your reality while simultaneously igniting the debris that hampered your capacity to genuinely engage others who may be near with clarity and truth from your being.

The best answer I've seen to this is to recognize the moment, learn what you can before you choose to dive in all the way, rest in reason remembering that another opportunity to move in rooted passion will arise soon with each new day.

Sun rises soon, rest.

* * *
"Rest in reason, move in passion." --a line from the poet Khalil Jibran

"Many of people in this will be empty in Spirit they will have Sampacu. No life force in their eyes."

Side note: Sampacu shares a very similar context and definition to sanpacu in Japanese -- I'm wondering if it's a typo or a common term.

Anger and actions

This February I walked with someone who noticed an unconscious youth and identified it as alcohol poisoning--when he kept walking by and justified leaving the young man behind with a cynical remark ("survival of the fittest"), and onlookers also left the kid, I became extremely angry--relentlessly angry. It was around then that I realized a lot of the people I was around also kept a similarly apathetic attitude.

I since adapted a framework used for intervening with bias (e.g. racism/unconscious bias) in professional environments (initially developed by Cook Ross) and applied it to doing something a bit better with that anger than trying to destroy things or getting myself into accidents with my rage:

1. Identify
Whatever makes you angry/how it impacted you--(this is a first step where you can take out the anger and feel it through unbridled) -- express it in a way that safely calls attention to the issue, while remaining consistent with your ethical and moral values.


2. Inquire
Ask/humanize/try to empathize with the cause of anger--talk to someone, or investigate (this is where grounding again with reason becomes critical, and disarming the situation with genuine curiosity)


3. Innovate
Create ways to handle & prevent future situations from happening, if appropriate & feasible, invite the person who angered you to come up with a solution together(this is when peacemaking/peacebuilding happens by co-creating solutions)


Since then, I've learned it's exactly what many people do to end abusive behavior or relationships (minus the inquiry step, depending on the situation), especially the subtler kinds of abusive behavior:


For recognizing behaviors that tend to go under-the-radar but eventually don't sit well:
http://coda.org/index.cfm/meeting-documents/patterns-of-recovery/ or (printable version)

For a guide on how to intervene with those tendencies minus a lot of junk psychology (on using anger to inform how to end a codependent relationship, not necessarily ending all relations with the individual):

http://mindfulconstruct.com/2010/07/09/end-a-codependent-relationship-the-healthy-way/

I've yet to synthesize the following article into the above frameworks, though I believe it's worth posting because it was thoughtfully created and includes in-process guides that appear to be written from experience (e.g. don't exhaust your mind + body at the same time when channeling anger):

http://www.fastcompany.com/3048912/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/how-anger-can-help-unlock-your-creativity

Allston & Ann Arbor

Still piecing the tune (working title, Grasping Oppression) together--there's a rambling story in its origins which someday will come together:

If you've ever been to Allston, MA--parts of it can be a really heavy town depending on where you live. Even though it was a good experience, the place had a weighty, almost burdensome or oppressive quality to the environment.
e.g. 100% pavement-to-brick urban apartments, almost no space to breathe in hot humid summers, nearly zero trees for shade.

A friend living there and I jammed and I came up with the second quarter-whole note motif while there. My friend and I were both figuring out how to work our ways out of abusive situations at the time too.

Later, I came up with the opening motif while exploring an open stairwell in Ann Arbor and was recovering from various health challenges. During that time, I also started remembering and realizing things I was unable to recognize from the past that had a lot to do with how I saw and experienced the environments I grew up in.

For both places where the music came from and the travels in between, it was an endeavor in grasping oppression in a very domestic sense.

So perhaps the tune's a story about blind determination and the intention that goes behind stewarding one's recovery.

Desperation, "American Beauty"

I saw American Beauty for the first time this weekend at a house screening as a friend's guest. The person who chose the film explained it was "a classic", and another mentioned it was a "dramedy"--humor to be found in the absurdity of emotional extremes.

Desperation was a key theme to a lot of the behaviors that drew most of the snickers and laughter. If willing, conscientious choice is fundamental to dignity desperation then serves as its converse.

Example: an insecure suburban WASP mom archetype forces a smile and recites capitalistic mantras for success as her work in real estate continues to fail.

For those who rely on one belief or another as a way for finding self-worth and meaning in life, ridiculing desperation quickly skirts the line toward becoming a demeaning and disempowering act. It's mean-spirited if not cynical humor shrouded in the laurels of being an iconic film for mainstream U.S. Cinema.

It's also a negative feedback loop [here's a place better suited for diagrams than text]:
A desperate individual's chosen actions for self-preservation are demeaned when subject to ridicule (bullying). If it's vicious enough, giving up on the practice out of fear becomes a probable outcome, further reducing their choices for a willing existence.

Also, what happens when the topics and subjects of laughter are current and real for members of the audience?

For the sake of self-preservation, the characters are constructed to have little to no choice--they operate from a default stance of desperation--and as a result, little room for realizing dignity. The few who embody a glimpse of dignity are killed or kicked out from families unable to cope with the way their perception of the world unfolds around them.

It's not far from me either: what difference does it make if someone like me ascribes to outdated religious and moral codes like Bushido, or draw from Buddhism's principles, or Christianity's in the hopes that ancestors and family knew what how to cope with their reality in resilient grace?

The answer comes from asking another question I've overheard Cesar Gonzalez emphatically ask: What is the courageous choice?

The courageous choice doesn't involve choosing a particular religion for the sake of having to believe in--unless you have to. If one recognizes holes in any of the religious and spiritual frameworks above, it is courageous to forgo holding onto an ineffective and rigid belief for the sake of faith in oneself and one's capacity to engage the future by embracing the present.

As easy it is to write, that's a tall task for one, myself included, to instantaneously take to heart and keep.

Similarly, is it better to leave a familiar source of suffering for peace of mind or choose to endure it for the sake of seeking meaningful actions out of repetitious exposure?

Side note:
Circa 2011/2012 I adapted Hamilton's Rule from evolutionary biology:
(Relatedness * Benefits)-Costs >1 for altruistic behavior to be likely
as a way to roughly rank experiences with a film:
(Relevance x Benefits) - Costs > or = to 1 for a good film

If it's really relevant, and it benefits you in some way which outweighs the costs of cognitive/emotional/time/physical load, it's a good film.

Definition: good? I'll reference Aldo Leopold's characterization of good:
A thing tends to be good when it preserves the integrity and beauty of the human and biotic community.

American Beauty, at least on first impression, does almost the exact opposite. We find glimmers of hope in one or two individuals, not the community.

Originally I adopted the rule out of anger at Pan's Labyrinth--which takes viewers through a fantastical and terribly oppressive world, and the end reward for the audience is a glimpse of the protaganist entering eternal life as she leaves the rest of the real world behind to carry on in dystopic chaos. It was a disproportionate benefit and the movie left a bad taste...

Just as Pan's Labyrinth, American Beauty was a relatively disempowering film. Yes, grace in American Beauty could be found in the protagonist's moment of transcendent acceptance (to paraphrase: "there's so much beauty in the world, you just have to let it flow through you"), and two teenagers deciding to leave abusive households. However, the overwhelming chain of events in the film lead to negative and destructive fragmentation of many relationships and some resulting in killing. The reality depicted in the film echoes much of what we already see in the world or grow up with. The emotional impact calculus burdens the viewer with more vivid problems than they can engage or resolve, and the "one to many" nature of communicating content in film and television to large audiences more often than not makes it an isolating endeavor.

Honesty without humanity is brutality, to paraphrase...

Forgiving

"I agree that you will be happier if you are able to forgive. You are not condoning or accepting her behavior if you forgive her. Instead you are making a choice not to allow hurts from the past to steal your joy in the present and in the future." -Mara (in comments about emotional abuse in childhood from here)
I've gone through a lot of statements about forgiveness, most of them tend to be glib and life-coachy in the sense that they're removed from practical focus.

The above characterization by Mara reminds me of mercy and subtle forms of courage.

A Conundrum of Compassion

... there's more to this notion of love for sustainability (I feel like the ideas are 3/4 baked at this point).  In particular, the role of concepts like compassion, love, hocma, and their relation to appropriately bringing one's courage,  wisdom, and capacity for expressing it in life that signify the significance of an individual in the world.  I can see it, but it'll take me a while to put it all down into writing.  For now, here's something I call the conundrum of compassion: How an unsustained instance of kindness can create tremendous pain through disempowerment.

Good education allows us to discover, and some of what we learn from discovery enables us to wisely live through whatever truly matters in life.  Oddly enough, increased exposure to the sensations of a holiday like Valentines day, or for those who experience it, exposure to loving people (even those with non-amorous intent) can be painful and disheartening.

When suddenly lifting the burdens of oppression and anticipated threat creates trauma in itself. When realized opportunities for that kind of reprieve are unsustained or non-existent, it doubly serves to break one's hope. It's a different kind of growing pain.

Sometime last year I started to realize it was very likely I was still clenching a few grudges so closely that they might have influence over how I trust and engage other people.  I know of a few people who always have "an ax to grind", and could feel myself teetering in and out of bearing preemptive hostilities in almost every situation I came across.  I frequently considered it mandatory that I prepare something to validate and assert about myself or my presence before I engage another person, or whatever event or activity before me.  I'd come to an event out of curiosity, but find ways to point to bigger responsibilities or obligations beyond self-interest.  For the most part, it works--people might know there's something more to what you do or they'll find out if they do something to trigger the unveiling of whatever you had to say for yourself.  Yet working in many public forums and among passionate and injusticed community activists, I also recognized that this kind of armed or hostile mental mechanism quickly becomes a detriment to the intended consequences that people seek.

Exposure to a genuinely compassionate person or event that makes any anticipated hostilities pointless can become profoundly painful experience of remorse.  You spend so much of your life living in anticipation of hatred only to realize that some people currently don't or never had to deal with systemic injustices the way you had to for all or most of your life.  You also realize that their life and community might actually have all of the things that allow them to express themselves in ways that you'd have never conceivably done before.

If you carry a burden on your shoulders for long enough, your body undergoes a kind of traumatic shock from its sudden release and removal.  I've experienced this physically several times in my life, but taken as a metaphor, it's a fairly new phenomenon that arose for me in 2012.

The best illustration of this experience might be seen in a film.  To make this a bit more realistic, imagine a film where a malicious dictator was apprehended and eliminated from a country, or where the oppressed people were extracted and rescued from the grips of the regime.  After having endured and been rescued from a terrible situation, a person of few words and grim resolve suddenly breaks down even though they're in a safe environment and one would think that they should be overjoyed about their favorable new circumstance.

To the casual observer, it's a bizarre token of sadness in humanity, but sometimes it represents something really profound:  suddenly lifting the psychological burden of living in anticipation of threat and oppression creates trauma in itself.  It might be good, but it's almost unbearably profound and it hurts almost as much, if not more than being in a state of consistent oppression.  In essence, they're growing pains, but the brevity of the phrase doesn't do justice to the extent of the challenge some people have to endure.

I most keenly realized this phenomenon last year after speaking with a person whom I initially was extremely guarded around and was taken by surprise when she allowed a long phone discussion for me to address a lengthy array of personal concerns, and much later I realized she had sincerely entertained the possibility of being a girlfriend to me.  Months before, as smitten as I might have been, I was convinced that people were more disposed to using each other for temporary personal gain and let that overshadow and sabotage the reality and opportunity presented in our relationship.

I later noted something similar when I shared conversation with a few people who considered me a friend over drinks in Detroit as we discussed transformative ideas for social justice and proactivism.  Simple acts, but a taste of ambrosia--you've discovered a brutal possibility about compassion, love's prerequisite.  It's something that everyone should be able to live with, but for some, it's rare to find in the environment they live in.  A moment of genuine reprise from a struggle so constant, you never knew there were other ways of living life that don't require hindrances from hostility as a preemptive defense.  Instead, you discover what it's like to live with a part of yourself that's exposed and unfamiliar.  For some, it triggers an overwhelming kind of grief that results from suddenly lifting decades, lifetimes, or generations of burden.   It's a traumatic appreciation--good grief in a literal sense--that has you wishing you had found and embraced the opportunity to act without hindrance or burden sooner.  It's a naked consciousness that's as fragile in its being as it is mysterious in its resilience.  At the same time, I think some people, myself included, are inclined to fight the signals of reality so as to minimize the pain of trauma--especially when we see those opportunities to openly live remain rare, inconsistent, or non-existent.  We uphold facades of hollow identity to keep excuses at the forefront of our existence to the world that we're willing to engage.

Last summer, Willie of the Wellness Center at UM-Dearborn had said to me: "some people don't know what love is, or how to love--they never grew up with it" (paraphrased).  In the context of his story, he was talking about juvenile delinquents in Detroit but it was profound to me given my circumstances. Thrashing through a mix of hardened oblivion, self-hatred, and what almost certainly amounts to an iteration of unknown behavioral triggers for acute-traumatic stress coupled with behaviors to patch disingenuous actions [listen to Paper Cuts by Broadcast for a sense of this "the things you miss out when you try to mislead..."], I know I've squandered even simple friendships.  From here, the only solutions amount to giving up—which doesn’t fit with my ethical framework—or belief in ideals that hold little other than disparate possibilities.  Belief, and perhaps faith then becomes a requisite for social sustainability as well.

Plan to Overcome

"Today there is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence." -Dr. Martin Luther King

"It springs rather from my conviction that, if our civilization is to survive, we must break with the habit of deference to great men." - Karl Popper

I think Dr. Martin Luther King Day (which I learned is not his birthday! That happened January 15th) is an appropriate opportunity to reflect upon and reinvigorate our commitment to the timeless legacy and vision of justice exemplified by Dr. King instead of giving deference to him as an idol of noble aspirations.

More than that, I think we foremost benefit from recognizing our ability to empower ourselves and each other (all people, of course not just men).

Another quote, this time from the living Bill Moyers, shares this belief that action is up to you: 
“What we need to match the science of human health is what the ancient Israelites called ‘hocma’—the science of the heart. . . the capacity to see. . . to feel. . . and then to act. . . as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does.”

In that regard, all of us are capable of discovering greatness in ourselves and one another.  Among their accomplishments, civil rights proponents like King succeeded in empowering people by promoting awareness and opportunity to engage in justice through democracy with disciplined planning and steadfast implementation. I recently met the Reverend Dr. James Lawson, who worked closely with Dr. King, in the autumn of 2012 after he gave a speech about non-violence. By miraculous coincidence, I met him one day after I tasted the gunpowder from a gunshot meant to kill a person less than 8 feet away.

At first blush, non-violence can seem like a fairly simple, even vague if not hollow, term.  If someone draws a gun with malicious intent, what other choices do we have?  Guns, much like nuclear weapons, can almost guarantee mutual destruction.  Yet if we ask why one would draw a gun to potentially kill extended family, or even carry one in the first place, the answer had to revolve around personal security and insecurity when you boil the situation down it to its essence.

Security is a sophisticated need.  It’s inherently dependent upon complex systems which are beyond the full control of an individual.  Even one’s perception can skew our judgment of an already shifting reality.

I suspect an answer to dealing with potentially absolute violence lies in interventions that meet the following condition: overcome our human tendency to engage in rules that necessitate the reciprocal escalation of powers.  Undermine or reshape the entire premise of our value system for fighting—the “rules of the game”—by changing the perceptions and paradigms which shape how and why we think about combative engagement in the first place.

People are complex; fortunately, science helps us find ways to effectively work with complexity, including social codes and personal beliefs.  Complex systems scientists recognize tangible behaviors as necessary for persuading peoples’ values, paradigms and worldviews  (see the list of 12 leverage points for intervening in a complex system here: http://www.sustainer.org/pubs/Leverage_Points.pdf ).

When appropriate, non-violence may need to employ the use of non-lethal protective use of force (check out Marshall Rosenberg's well-earned wisdom: http://youtu.be/21g1S7stoQI ), but no matter what, non-violence is exercised without malice in our actions.  The way we communicate ideas, or even notions, in language (can we speak without engaging in abuse or instigating escalation?) usually becomes the first symptom for a potential intervention. To astute observers, it may be expressed visually in our physical posturing and gestures (can you assert your presence without resorting to making it threatening to others?) as well, and of course in how we physically interact with one another (can you embrace and redirect a person's attack rather than impose force onto them? That's what the martial art Aikido focuses on).

Adding Popper’s contention about the notion of “great men”, I gleaned another note for non-violence from Dr. Lawson:  Non-violence operates via empowerment as its primary principle.

“Non-violence is premised on the idea that all people have power to act beyond the influence of their circumstance.”  But in this, there's a challenge: unlike violence, which can quickly and easily interfere with the integrity of an ideal like peace, trust, or love, non-violence requires discipline, careful planning, and patient dedication.

We must act from a hope to overcome, we must plan to overcome.

Which leads us to another nuance of non-violence from Reverend Lawson: 
“Non-violence is the moral equivalent to war.  It requires organization and discipline.” 

Consider the planning and commitment that went into what we now see as watershed events:  Coordinated planning took place for the sit-ins from 1959-1964.  The Montgomery Bus Boycott officially began on December 1st of 1955, some of us heard that in the history books or on television programs, but few of us realize the tenacity of the cause: the boycott was sustained for over a year—381 days.

An ideal is a lot like other life-processes: education, communication and the arts, design, even ethics.
All of these activities involve intentions, actions, and consequences.

Among seasoned practitioners like Reverend Lawson, the term "non-violence" actually isn't representative of what people really strive for. Non-anything implies reaction and work that runs directly against something. If anything, I suspect people really strive to love--create it and do it. It's a noun, but most importantly a verb.

Love exists as a plausible ideal. We may bear compassionate and loving intentions. Caring actions may manifest loving intentions, and perhaps the desired consequence of compassion and love creates a legacy that reaffirms the intention and fosters more love.

Yet as an ideal, it becomes so expansive to act upon that many find--and take--temptation in believing ideals cannot happen in reality.  Furthermore, it's possible, potentially even reasonable [using the word in a very strict sense, link goes to various definitions] though never justifiable, that a person can love the person whom they abuse. Their intentions may be true, but the actions they know or choose to express care through compromise the dignity and autonomy of another being.

This remains the challenge of Dr. King and many other notable living visionaries of our time: to truly validate worthy ideals such as peace, justice, and love all three aspects of the ideal must be good and present. That takes visionary planning to manifest dreams from ideal to real. When society-shaping, you need to do so with people, not just on behalf of them, and certainly not independent of them.

Keep it up, we shall overcome someday, but let’s discover the someday together, every day in our actions with one another.


.  .  .


Notes about music in the video above:

Minor variations and improvisations on the Civil Rights song "We Shall Overcome" recorded in the University of Michigan-Dearborn Wellness Center on January 21st 2013.

A few weeks ago I played it spur of the moment and it was a profound rendition if I say so myself, but I don't remember what I did and I didn't have anything to record it with at the time.  There's some irony to the notion of playing a social justice song, solo, to no one but yourself on MLK day.  I was somewhat disappointed that I missed a few opportunities including a symposium on social justice that day, so as I practiced other tunes, I decided to give the song another try in observation of the day as well.

I suspect playing a song used for civil rights alone doesn't quite contribute to making the dream manifest, but hopefully sharing it here might be worth your while. I'm drawing memory from a rendition I heard on a cd by Peter Paul and Mary when I was in second grade-fifth grade, and hadn't really prepared my playing as much as I now think I should have. Ongoing process...

Speculating suicide and swingin' the night

A jam-packed day, but I'll start with the evening's events:

Into the evening, I received a text message from a friend who had reached out for help.  He was fighting long-standing suicidal desires and a on Sunday evening/Monday morning I reached him as I suspected and realized it was severe.  We hadn't spoken or seen each other possibly since elementary school-he was the older brother of a classmate of mine, but he reached out to me sometime during college and I accepted his invitation for the opportunity to touch base, and then between late in December and mid January I finally communicated with him.

On Monday morning (as in 03:00-06:00), he mentioned his frustration with life and his ongoing turmoil between severe anger, angst and depression.  He was, sometimes maybe is still, feeling  despondent--so much that he wondered if he should "take a mouthful of sleeping pills" to end his life.  Yet he also expressed to me that he knew it wasn't good, knew there were people who love him, and he actually wanted to live.  With a few exceptions to my circumstances, I had recently gotten over that sense of despondence.  This winter, I was surprised and rather glad to realize that one who endures--and possibly the privileged few who overcome--prolonged suffering earns more than a sense of pride that comes from enduring hardship.  Eventually, some find themselves endowed with a new caliber of empathy and humanity that allows them to work with others who have suffered similarly.

Today I briefly sent him a message after realizing he tended to stay up very late: I recommended ways for him to sleep earlier (research points to less severe/reduced frequency of depression for those who sleep well and earlier at night).  I lost contact with my friend for approximately 6 hours, and realized he had written a confusing statement on his social network profile.

After attempting to reach him and his brother by every means I could find between phones and the internet, I finally called 911.  When I called 911 to request for the police to check on him, I was asked by the dispatcher if my friend had mentioned anything about how he might have planned to commit suicide.  The police do this for several reasons, part of it involves safety--for the officers to prepare appropriately--and part of it is probably to screen the severity of a case.  I knew and gave a likely means: a potential overdose on sleeping pills.  My friend later (around 11:30 pm) sent me a message to inform me that he was well and that he appreciated my concern and initiative.  Ironically, he told me he was sleeping--early during all of the commotion until the police came to his house!

Had anyone asked me in December through March of 2012 where or what I would do a year from then, meaningfully empathizing with people who'd trust me enough to express their concerns and anguish was far from my imagination.



I also wouldn't have thought I'd be fit to participate in swing and blues dancing either.

.   .   .

As another poetic loop, I realized that the elements of the earliest ballroom dances I had ever learned trace their steps to Lindy Hop (dancing with my mum at Eastern University when I was in second grade) and the Tango (dancing with a South American friend at a time that I had never been so close to a female before, not to mention in a situation where I was attempting to learn dance steps from a very competent dancer).

From performing with Amanda Palmer as part of the Grand Theft Orchestra, I learned a valuable nuance about professional rock stars:  they know and live all-out at the times that it matters most.  In other words, they recognize their "greatness", and can tap into it in relatively short order so that they operate at their best by burning through any anxieties almost right away.  The music they (professional celebrity musicians in general) play might not be the most intricate or thoughtfully crafted, but they know how to "maintain the energy" throughout the performance (as articulated by the ladies of the phenomenal Norwegian band Katzenjammer in some interview seen online).

With blues/early swing dance, it's very similar.  Even though I was brand new and was content to hang out at the edge of the dance floor to watch and learn the history of the dances, I was pleasantly--warmly--greeted and asked to dance by many people, several of whom were outstanding dancers in their own right.  In many cases I had long since lost track of the steps and made up my own motions.  Because I've long appreciated the goofy and exaggerated swinging motions and bounce of dances like Lindy Hop and Charleston (there exists a more subtle form of Charleston), I had some exciting moments doing things that seemed like they would make sense.  That said, I suspect it's similar to the principle gleaned from the Amanda Palmer gig I played at St. Andrews hall this past November.  Within reason, I remained rather energetic throughout and probably spent over 4 hours doing dance related things.

At the same time, I realized that I occasionally had no conception of what I could/should/wanted to do next with many of my motions.  This can be scary--I recall realizing that the biggest differences between those on the politically conservative/liberal identity spectrum was their degree of exposure and emphasis of value to possibilities--when we refer to a conservative disposition, it sometimes happens because we really have no way of imagining/conceiving the possibility of an alternative opportunity and/or reality.

With both events said and examined, I think it's really important to know the people in your community--especially those whom might consider you a friend--well enough that you can help

I started this day at 06:28, had a brief but powerful nap, and it's now 02:15.  Easy day, onward to the next!

Hope before peace

Drawing from the public's attention on the violence of recent events (particularly talk of escalation between Israel and Palestine, the shootings at Sandy Hooke, and a shooting I was in), I wrote a note to colleagues encouraging them to familiarize themselves with the emergency procedures, and to begin developing a department-specific emergency plan.  However, I still think the best thing we can do comes from being kind and sincere in our encounters with people.

This year I've been around malicious gunfire that was so close I could taste the gunpowder shortly after the aroma reached my nose.  The incident I was in happened between extended family members, and it didn't surprise me to see and hear it happen.  Violence swiftly escalated from language into physical pushing, shoving, and punching which eventually turned into gunshots and a brutal beating in response to the shooter.

I suspect the notion of love is antithetical to this situation.  I understand compassion, it's been illustrated in tremendous experiences for me this year.  Yet what if people don't know love?  I appreciate peace, but similarly, what if most people actually don't know peace?

Despite popular assertions that they can be found in simple expressions, peace and love are complicated concepts to substantiate, and it's almost inconceivable for those who lived much of their lives with an oppressive and abusive environment.  If anything, we human beings fundamentally understand the notion of hope before we understand the nature of peace and love.

I'll say it again: More people probably understand hope better than they do love.

Truly, not everyone knows what love is or grew up with meaningful exposure to it and therefore, more people lack meaningful understanding of it than we’d assume or wish. People do, however, recognize compassion and reprieve from hostile situations on a more frequent basis.

Look at international relations as an example of a similar misunderstanding between war (analogous to hate) and peace (analogous to love):

Reprieve from dire hostility (i.e. war/sectarian violence, etc.) becomes labeled improperly (and thereby assumed/presumed understood) as “peace”; similarly, peace-keeping forces (actually security forces) designated by the UN aren’t actually an authentic indication of peace, they provide a crucial opportunity for fostering authentic peace by creating a more secure environment.

Hostility, and hatred, both still allow for hope—a special kind of opportunity with positive possibilities, at least for a particular individual or group of entities who carry the same hope(s).

Hatred is a choice to engage in certain behaviors present within our nature, but does not constitute our nature in its entirety. Hatred operates upon unreasonable hostility, and a deep inclination for humans (and other species) to reciprocate perceived behaviors tit-for-tat.

[War: communication and artificial environment (creates structure)
Hatred: unreasonable consciousness/mindset/worldview that perpetuates the circumstances necessary for war.]
For local examples of environments and histories that have strong influence over how an individual perceives their choices and behaviors:

A few friends of mine confessed to me that they had seriously considered suicide in the past, or present.  One of them considered it out of shame,  the other out of frustration in knowing that his intimate partner only wants the relationship to satisfy her physical desires. The first lived in a neighborhood of Detroit where the average lifespan of his friends and family was about 35 years old due to systemic violence. The other also grew up in Detroit, and has a family history of suicide, bipolar disorder, and/or manic depression. Those are real questions: will I need to accept the legacy of the place I grew up in or family I come from as the trajectory of my own life?

In retrospect, both of them are the first in their families in several generations to leave the area they grew up in, graduate high school or earn a G.E.D., they're also the first of their families to attend a University.

I considered the same and share the same question too, though I know I'm about 8 steps ahead thanks to a few friends who've astutely pointed out that: you are not your family. Similarly, we, as individuals, aren't our cities or communities. We have choices and new opportunities 

While I'm not vigorously trained in the physical aspects of the martial art known as aikido, I strive to live its principles.  In aikido, one acknowledges and embraces an assailant's momentum to direct it elsewhere for a mutually favorable outcome. It's a profound alternative to traditional thinking in fighting and conflict resolution: normally the only way to end a fight is to prevent it or combat power with power to win. That's how war and most fights start to devolve until threats are eliminated.

We have choices and new opportunities now. Let's start with the hope we'll create peace for everyone involved.