bearing blog

Inside.

taps microphone

Hello?

Anyone there?

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I'm trying to imagine an alternate universe right now, one where we decided to have a Spring Break staycation for no particular reason; didn't feel like skiing or camping, just decided to hang out at home and chill all together.  I can't quite make myself imagine it vividly enough to enjoy myself.

Yesterday I made my last trip to a grocery store, not a big one, a small neighborhood natural-foods store, so I could stock up on the last few items for my freezer.  I didn't empty any shelves, but took one thing here and one thing there; the exception was milk, which I'd just that morning remembered you could freeze; that memory was why I decided on the "one last trip."

  I came home and was beset by anxiety for a few hours about having done it.  Even if I don't set foot outside my house for the next fourteen days, I think I'll still have little waves of anxiety about it.

Tomorrow it will be fourteen days since I worked the polls on Super Tuesday.  Thursday it will be fourteen days since the family went to the Children's Theatre.  Saturday it will be fourteen days since I last had breakfast out.  Sunday it will be fourteen days since H and I took four teens to see Twelfth Night at the Guthrie.  Ticking them off one by one.

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Whenever I actually spend time working on something that theoretically will Help Us Get Through This, I feel better while I'm doing it.  Early this morning I did laundry, extra focus on the towels and on the gloves we've worn in public places, and the scarf I used to grab all the door handles.  Later I went downstairs and took inventory of the freezer.  Then I made lunch for us to eat together as a family, Mark coming down the stairs with his coffee cup to sit with us, almost as if it were dinnertime. 

I thought that would be a comfort to me, having us all together; but it seemed only to remind me today how very disturbed we are:  we never sit down together for lunch on a weekday, I don't even sit down with the kids; I don't eat what they eat; the teenagers usually make frozen pizza or quesadillas and I usually eat leftovers or a salad.  And here we were all six of us, Mark and me and the four kids still living at home, eating waffles and sausage and a sort of peach topping I made out of an ancient bag of homemade peach pie filling that I excavated from the freezer.  

FIFO, y'all.

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I hope that after a few days it will start to feel like a new normal, and I'll cease being startled by it.  We'll start doing school again on Monday, a week away, somehow or another; we won't go to H's,  but we'll do something; I'll enlist the teenagers, hers and mine, to work out some kind of remote voice chat thing.  

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I feel kind of lame about my attempt to sit down and write a blog post.  I hoped I would write something different:  either something a little more inspiring, or else something that might actually help someone, information and recommendations; or a meditation on this long unchosen Lent we face, that will stretch on beyond Easter; or, I don't know, almost anything else besides what I'm actually writing about, which looks like a rather dry accounting of being home for one whole day with my family (most of it) but it's really not about that at all; in fact it's about a wrenching sorrow that I'm tamping down and trying to keep below the surface, a sorrow for missed chances, for lost data of all things, for future lives everywhere that spool out like threads, the frayed end tucked under the few turns that are left, not enough length to hold the seam.

My kind of pep talk.

I've been going around grumbling inside my head. "Our leaders suck and that sucks, and we can't do anything about it because everybody sucks."

Yes, I'm that articulate inside my head these days.

And outside my head?  Stunted, perhaps, by the lack of adequate vocabulary?

I haven't been saying much out loud, at least not when it comes to anything related to leaders and authorities.  Dinner table conversation in that direction has largely petered out, and not necessarily been replaced by anything more wholesome; given a conversational vacuum, the children will squabble, or talk about cartoons.  There's always the latest technical challenge from Mark's job, or what the kids' schoolwork is like, and other normal things; but there's a gap that used to be filled with "Did you see where...[political or legal or Catholic-church-related news item]?" and it's mostly empty, because who wants to ruin dinner?

Indeed, this post will also be short.

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Why?  Why do we have such bad leaders?  Why?  Why?  Why?

Even the "good" ones we have right now, or the good potential ones who might come along to replace the bad ones, well, likely they only seem good by comparison.    Add a little power to the mix and who knows what you'll get.

The answer comes back bearing either despair or hope, depending on which way the coin comes down, or is it which way we turn it:   

I, too, am a leader.  

And I know what's in myself, what I hide and what I display, what I work for and what I let fall.

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I saw a video clip of an ice tsunami yesterday:  a sheet of ice gently approaching a sloped pebbly beach, and suddenly crumbling on itself and piling higher and higher, shoving sand and pebbles out of its way, overflowing like foam, building into an unclimbable wall. 

Such is the effect of the force and weight of our small decisions, adding together.  

It's neither an absolution nor a condemnation.  It's just that however placed, we all have the potential inside us, the potential to do terrible things, at least things that feel terrible and look terrible to the inner heart of someone who depends on us.   To lead badly.  To lead directly into the abyss and to take others with us.  

Bloom where you are planted has a flip side.

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And the source of both the dismay and the hope is the apparent smallness of what I can or must do about it.

Our leaders suck, eh?  

That's a figure of speech.

Despair, the belief that everything, everyone, every system, is permanently broken, sucks too:  sucks you in, sucks the energy and light out of the room, sucks everything towards itself, creates an inflowing wind, one that's hard to push against.

But what is broken outside myself is the same kind of thing that's broken within myself, and---difficult as it is, I know something about how the little breach in me is to be repaired.   And I know, too, who looks to me.  I am a leader as well.  

So.  There's something I can do.   Now is the acceptable time.

 

Pivoting, post election.

I spent the last several months trying to convince people that Donald Trump's character, alone, was reason enough to deny him the presidency by voting for almost anyone else.

This was a bit of a departure for me.  I think that a lot of people have had similar experiences with 2016:  a shift in the possible.  Until this year I would have argued that character was not nearly as important as policy proposals when it came to evaluating a candidate for office.  This campaign season made me realize I was wrong.  Most of the time, it's a good rule of thumb.  But I had neglected to consider the depths to which character can sink.  I hadn't realized that character had a floor.  Most of the time, you simply look at the two or three candidates and pick the one with the best policies, or the least worst ones, anyway.  But it turns out that there is a sort of character that I look at and say, "I don't even need to know about your policies.  I don't want you or anyone like you in that office." As long as you meet a minimum standard of character, policy is more important.  But what I didn't realize is that I have a minimum standard for character -- and failure to meet that minimum standard trumps your policy positions, in my view.

So anyway.  My argument against Trump was essentially, This man is unpredictable.  He has no boundaries.  He reacts angrily to personal slights.  He encourages and emboldens a small but frightening set of vile racists.  He's dangerous.  

As for policy, he promoted a lot of bad ones (waterboarding; reneging on NATO; mass deportations) and where he promised "good" policies, he was vague (the best judges) or promised things that weren't even in his power (we'll make Mexico pay for the wall) or seemed not to understand the nuances (we'll punish women who have abortions).   The bad plans were very bad, and the theoretically good ones were literally un-believable.

But the main problem?  Character.  And I reiterated the character problem again and again, in the hopes of convincing other people that he couldn't be trusted with the presidency because he wasn't trustworthy.

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Now Donald J. Trump is going to be president, and I'm having trouble pivoting.  Because once he's already president, the character question is rather moot.

Much like "but he's better than Hillary Clinton!" is now moot.  There is now no Hillary Clinton to frighten the children.  There is only Donald J. Trump, and he has to stand entirely on his own.

And the character question is moot.  He has been entrusted with the presidency.  No arguing about his character will change the outcome.  Now there is only policy and choices and action.

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Before Donald J. Trump was elected to be our president, I could hope in good faith that the bully would crash and burn.  Nobody wants to see the bully win.  I certainly didn't.  But I'm having to stop myself now, because I don't want the bully to fail if it means America fails too.  I have to want the bully to succeed -- in the sense that I want America during his administration to grow more prosperous, just, and welcoming.  I don't want him to fail and take the rest of us down with us.

How can I hope that he succeeds in this way?

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I have to get rid of any vestiges that still want to see him fail so badly that he resigns or at least slinks away in disgrace.  Even though I warned that his terrible character risked failure for the country, and even though I would be "proved right" if the failure happened and Trump slinked away embarrassed,  I can't want that any more.  That would mean, more likely than not, that bad things will have happened to the country.  I don't want bad things to have happened.  Ergo, I can't want utter, embarrassing failure for Trump.  It is going to take me a few days to align myself to the reality that now, Trump's interests are partly aligned with the country's interests.  I can't want him to crash and burn unless I want the country to risk crashing and burning too.  I have to hope that he redeems himself.  That would be good, not bad, and to wish otherwise is to sink into revenge.

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But while I have a moral responsibility to train myself to hope that Trump succeeds in the sense that the whole country succeeds while he is at the helm,  I have a different moral responsibility towards hope in the other traditional measures of a president's success.

For example, one measure is:  was he able to enact his program of policies?

Now policy matters.

Donald J. Trump promised us many things, some of them bad, some of them good, some of them mutually contradictory, some of them impossible.

Where he promised bad things that are possible, I must oppose them.  

Where he promised bad things that are not possible, I must not be distracted by them, and must help others not to be distracted by them.

Where he promised good things that are possible, I must hope for them.  

Where he promised good things that are not possible, I must not be distracted by them, and must help others not to be distracted by them.

Where he promised things that sound good but have foreseeable bad consequences, I must point them out.

Where he speaks the truth, I must agree.

Where he speaks lies, I must disagree.

It's just the same as a politician with better character.

The fact that I expect a lot of bad things, and am highly skeptical of the promised goods, is almost irrelevant.

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Character still does matter -- because there will be more promises, and we must evaluate the reliability of future promises based on the track record of the past.

Character still does matter -- because one thing a president does is ask other people to help him with his inadequacies, and we must evaluate proposed helpers (the Cabinet, for example) in the light of the deficiencies that they are supposed to alleviate.  

Character still does matter -- because we're (finally) about to have a national conversation about how much power the president should have, compared to the power of our representatives in Washington.  It seems not so bad to hand over lots of power to someone who won't abuse it, or (apparently) who will abuse it only in ways that hurt other people, not ourselves.  Time to look bluntly at the character of the executive and ask, "Should the legislature have signed over so much power to the office now held by this man?"  We assumed the president would always have certain characteristics:  a certain wisdom, a certain discretion, a certain desire to do the right thing (even if different presidents disagreed on what was the right thing).  Do these assumptions still hold?  Time to evaluate.

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But arguing against Donald Trump's character is mostly pointless now, at least till 2020.  There is nothing in the Constitution that says the president must be of good character.  He will stand or fall in 2020 based on his actions.

And actions can be evaluated independently.

That's our job now.  

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I've been thinking a lot about the #nevertrump hashtag.  I was unapologetically #nevertrump, but now I am uncomfortable with the hashtag.  I would have been embarrassed by anyone who spent 2008-2016 claiming to be #neverobama.  It's too close to "Not My President," which to me is too close to refusing to accept a free and fair election.  

The hashtag #nevertrump meant, "I won't vote for this man, ever."  It can't mean that I will never support him, ever, now that he is already going to be president.  Because if by chance he does a good thing I should support him in that good thing.  We aren't allowed to call good "bad" and bad "good" based on how we feel about the messenger.

I feel like we need a new hashtag.  But I'm floundering as to what it should be.

Give me that week.  Maybe I'll come up with one.

From now until I'm forty-six.

I am so placed that the most power I have for good, on your average day that does not call for heroism, is:

• to raise my children to understand deeply the preferential option for the poor, to trust that God has already won the only lasting victory, and to choose kindness and good sense every day.
• to direct a stream of my own relatively substantial wealth and social safety net to people and to organizations that possess the skills and connections to use it for works of mercy.
• to exercise kindness myself, and to bear my share of the little burdens of life in order not to leave them for others to bear.
• to write and send my best thoughts out to the world.

Today will be a hard day.  It will be hard because I feel impotent.  But the reason I feel impotent is not because I cannot do the things in my power, but because the things in my power -- what Mark teasingly calls "fighting the forces of chaos and ignorance" -- seem small and confined today.

And yet, they are in my power.  It will take an effort, but the dismay and disappointment I feel, plus a little coffee, I will use.  I will finish this blog post.  I will get up from the desk.  I will look at the day's schedule and I will do the things on it.  

I will make the grocery list.  Heroically.  It's one of my least favorite chores.  I will make the list as if I can defeat Trumpism with legibility and thoroughness.

I will teach my son how to carefully attend to his negative signs when solving algebra equations.  I am relatively confident that if there is more mathematical thinking in the world, it will be a blow to Trumpism.  Very well, somehow.  And if I can do it with patience, there will be more love in the world, even if only at my own kitchen table.

I will go to a music class and watch three-year-olds dance with scarves and sing songs about barnyard animals while their mothers cradle newborn babies and wave scarves with just one hand.

I will write -- oh, this will be very hard -- I will write a high school civics exam for next week.

It's what I do.  It's all I can do today.  I have faith that it is something.

Here's the blog post.  It's my best thoughts.  I have other thoughts.  Those thoughts are not "best."  You get these instead, because I'm making an effort.

Now on to the rest of it all.

 

Intrinsic.

"We were promised an election, not a damned trolley problem."

Such has been my one-liner about the 2016 presidential race.

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The big problem with the concept of "choosing the lesser evil" is that, in speaking the phrase, we reduce a fairly complicated, nuanced and lengthy moral discourse down to four words.  There are, so to speak, a lot of conditions and considerations that go into the discussion before you come out the other side with the conclusion, "Thus, to choose the lesser evil is permissible" or even "Thus, to choose the lesser evil is a positive good."  

A moral argument in complicated circumstances is a structure built carefully upward from a firm foundation, all of its pieces working together like a truss to support one another and ultimately to support the weight of unforeseen future circumstances that will test it.  Having dismantled the relatively intricate structure of the argument, reduced it to nothing but its shadow painted on the ground, we dubiously free ourselves to follow the traces of that shadow and build upon it, taking "choose the lesser evil" as the postulate of a new moral system -- sometimes building a structure that would be completely unrecognizable to the original architects, unless they happened to peer at it from just the right angle -- and that, the direction from which the light fell upon it.

But we want our philosophical structures to make sense from every direction, especially the directions that look toward it from the darkness.

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I find it interesting that "Choose the lesser evil" is being deployed both to justify voting for the GOP candidate and to justify voting for the Democratic Party candidate.  It is being deployed from both directions to say, "Even though you think you have to vote for [candidate] because [particular evil], I'm here to tell you that you may vote for [other candidate] because [different particular evil].  

I am detecting a common error in the arguments:  the notion that picking between the two major candidates is equivalent to some sort of referendum on which evil is worse (or which set of evils is worse).

As if "Choose the lesser evil" means "That which I choose, I declare its evils to be lesser."

Coming down to specifics right now because it's too exhausting to keep talking in generalities.  Here's the notion I'm talking about:

• That choosing Mrs. Clinton means "I say that mass deportations and other bad things that Trump champions are worse than abortion and other things that Clinton champions."
• And that choosing Mr. Trump means "I say that abortion and other Clinton-championed causes are worse than mass deportations and other Trump-championed causes."

We then devolve into an argument about which kind of devaluation of human life is the worse kind of devaluation of human life, complete with arguments that the other side is pro-degradation because it has a different favorite kind of degradation.

And that's not even getting into the wrinkle of both sides turning and attacking the ones who say, "I refuse to choose either."

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It's almost impossible to find a discussion of the moral nuances of voting that doesn't come at it from one side or another.  I thought this was a pretty good piece laying out advice from Bishop Flores of Brownsville, TX.  The direction it comes from is "You might think you have to vote for Mr. Trump because Mrs. Clinton clearly supports legal abortion.  But maybe that's not so, because it isn't that simple, and Mr. Trump's policies also represent an assault on human dignity."   I'm not highlighting the piece because I think this particular direction is the direction that most needs highlighting.  I'm highlighting it because it digs, a little, into the not-so-simple structure that gets simplified as "Choose the lesser evil":

Prudence judges circumstances in light of principles that are rightly ranked in terms of gravity. Keeping that in mind, circumstances are different this year. It is not possible now to take the issue of immigration policy only as a matter of having diverse positions on a badly needed reform of the system. One could argue that in prior elections there was a dispute between the parties about whether a reform was needed, and about what principles would guide a possible reform.

This year, there is a proposal on the table to proceed with mass deportations of undocumented men, women and children. One cannot in conscience countenance a program of mass deportation. It is a brutal proposal. In some instances, particularly dealing with the Central American mothers and children, and deportations into some parts of Mexico, we are dealing with placing them in proximate danger of death. I consider supporting the sending of an adult or child back to a place where he or she is marked for death, where there is lawlessness and societal collapse, to be formal cooperation with an intrinsic evil. Not unlike driving someone to an abortion clinic.

So, even as a Catholic finds the radical pro-abortion platform of the other party beyond reprehensible, there is no comfort for the conscience of a Catholic on the side of a radical program of mass deportation. Both positions are assaults on the dignity of life, and in the case of mass deportations, can be linked to no. 24 of Faithful Citizenship (FC), “treating the poor as disposable.” Overall, I think we have to look at nos. 35-38 of FC very carefully. We should all read it and think about its implications between now and Election Day.

I think it is worth citing number 36 in particular: “When all candidates hold a position that promotes an intrinsically evil act, the conscientious voter faces a dilemma. The voter may decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate or, after careful deliberation, may decide to vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods.”

It seems that if a Catholic votes for either major candidate, he or she must do so with a conviction that the evil the candidate supports can be successfully opposed, and that other aspects of their policy proposals are sufficiently good to warrant voting for them. Thus if a Catholic votes for a pro-abortion candidate or for a pro-mass deportation candidate, for what FC calls “morally grave reasons,” because the candidate is deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods there should be conscientious commitment by the voter to oppose strenuously the pro-abortion agenda or the pro mass-deportation agenda respectively And there are other factors that FC rightly asks us to think about, including a candidate’s commitments, character, integrity, and ability to influence a given issue.

And note, that I have not even addressed the issues of targeting innocents (who may be relatives of evil-doers) in military actions, or indiscriminate use of drones in warfare. Nor have I mentioned a great many important issues raised in FC and which we must take into account.

...

The bishop reminds us not to fall back on a simple formula, like "Choose the lesser evil."  Rather, we should return to the source (the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount) and to its development in American pastoral theology (Faithful Citizenship, a.k.a. Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship:  A Call To Political Responsibility, a teaching document to U. S. Catholics advising us how to exercise our political voice.)  

 

We are in the situation described by paragraph 36 of that document, but not in the way that faithful Catholic voters expected to be.  The document reads:

36. When all candidates hold a position that promotes an intrinsically evil act, the conscientious voter faces a dilemma. The voter may decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate or, after careful deliberation, may decide to vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods.

I submit that most pro-life voters imagined that this describes an election where every viable candidate is a pro-legal-abortion candidate.  

Instead we have the (much more realistic, technically ever-present, but now extremely obvious) situation where every viable candidate openly supports an intrinsic evil, but it's not the SAME intrinsic evil.

Thus we are divided, and distracted into arguing about which intrinsic evil is the worse intrinsic evil.

This is a fool's discussion.

"Intrinsic" evils do not permit us to distinguish between a greater or a lesser evil.  That is what "intrinsic" means.

It means that whichever way we go, we walk in the valley of the shadow of death.

We may as always distinguish prudentially between a greater or a lesser danger, but not between a greater or a lesser intrinsic evil.

And if you'll take a look at paragraph 36, you will note that the U. S. bishops do not advise U. S. Catholics to vote for the candidate whose evil is deemed lesser.

 Instead they advise us that we may (a) choose not to vote for either candidate or (b) may vote for the candidate that is less likely to advance the evil parts of his/her agenda and more likely to advance the good parts of his/her agenda.

In other words, if we are to vote at all, we are obligated to consider the structures of platforms and of power as wholes -- not merely their foundations.  How would each candidate be constrained in their political goals by opposing parties, by checks and balances, by the slow lurch of bureaucracy?  Who can inspire the masses to support them, and what can that inspiration accomplish?  Do the respective platforms contain (besides the rotted planks) sound, achievable goals that further justice and mercy?  What role will competence and incompetence play in the advancement of the good and evil parts of the agendas?  What role will self-interest play, and how strong is it in each candidate?

"Choose the lesser evil" is not going to work as a slogan this year.  We have a much harder decision ahead of us all.  

"A little knowledge..."

I don't believe in putting bumper stickers on my car.

The caveat here, before I explain myself, is that I don't care if you want to put bumper stickers on your car. Do it as much as you want. It is a matter of personal expression, and I am cool with that. But I don't put them on mine -- I guess you could say that an unadorned bumper is my personal expression.

It isn't that I don't appreciate a well-turned, pithy statement. I am fond of KILL YOUR TELEVISION. I like very much WHO ARE YOU TO TELL ME TO QUESTION AUTHORITY? I wholeheartily agree with LOVE THEM BOTH. I have a special appreciation for outrageously large window decals of Our Lady of Guadalupe. You have a lovely stick figure family.

I just ... don't want such things on the outside of my car. Not even the tiniest, most unobtrusive rosary sticker in the corner of a back window. Definitely not anything political. There may be a sticker out there that I would be comfortable putting on my car, but I have not yet seen it.

Once, without consulting me, Mark put a sticker on the Volkswagen supporting a particular vote on a local ballot-initiative. Given that he knew I was planning to vote the same way he was, I think he was probably surprised by how annoyed I was that I had to drive around town in a car with a political bumper sticker on it. I made sour faces, I drove the minivan instead as much as possible for the next several weeks, and I made him peel it off the car on the first Wednesday in November. I didn't just feel annoyed about it, I felt unreasonably angry, and I spent a lot of time behind the wheel trying to articulate to myself why. I didn't quite come to an answer.

The other morning when Minneapolis and St. Paul woke up to the viral video of Phil Castile dying of five bullets in the front seat of his car while a panicked policeman shrieked "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" I briefly wondered -- as I have wondered about various political and philosophical statements over the years as they became timely -- if it was maybe time to get a Black Lives Matter sticker. Some of my neighbors have the signs in their front yards. I don't mind signs in my yard as much, we've had candidate signs in the yard and that has never bothered me. I wondered very idly if I, bearing such a sticker, might be more likely to be pulled over. I wondered, too, if the same neighbors would see such a thing with appreciation or with derision, now that virtue-signaling is A Thing.

Two days later after the five Dallas murders I waded into one too many comment sections and I knew from my reaction to them that however sympathetic I may be to #BlackLivesMatter -- and even though I could still do the yard sign thing, like I said, I don't have the same feeling about yard signs -- I wasn't going to put any bumper stickers on my car, not of any sort. And I think I have figured out why.

It isn't that I don't want you to know what I think.

It's that I don't want you to think you know what I think.

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Last December Ken White, an attorney who blogs at Popehat, published an op-ed in the L. A. Times about "culture-bundling." He was writing about the unproductivity of most debates about gun control -- and it's a useful contribution to the discussion on that subject, too -- but what really stuck with me was just one of his three points, namely, the "bundling" concept. Bear with me, I know this passage uses gun control as its example, but I'm quoting it not for that particularity but because of the general concept that I have underlined.

We culture-bundle when we use one political issue as shorthand for a big group of cultural and social values. Our unproductive talk about guns is rife with this. Gun control advocates don't just attack support for guns; they attack conservative, Republican, rural and religious values. Second Amendment advocates don't just attack gun control advocates; they attack liberal, Democratic, urban and secular values. The gun control argument gets portrayed as the struggle against Bible-thumping, gay-bashing, NASCAR-watching hicks, and the gun rights argument gets portrayed as a struggle against godless, elitist, kale-chewing socialists.

That's great for rallying the base, I guess, but that's about all. When you culture-bundle guns, your opponents don't hear “I'm concerned about this limitation on rights” or “I think this restriction is constitutional and necessary.” They hear “I hate your flyover-country daddy who taught you to shoot in the woods behind the house when you were 12” and “Your gay friends' getting married would ruin America and must be stopped.” That's unlikely to create consensus.

The original blog post , not bound by external editorial standards, uses a bit more colorful language. I think I prefer it. About an example of a pro-gun-control meme, White writes,

The intended message may be "fuck the people who don't seriously debate gun control because they accept vast campaign donations and they are afraid of NRA-led primary attacks and who refuse to even consider whether there's something we can do about madmen spraying crowds of innocents with bullets." But your message is "fuck you and your flyover-country Daddy teaching you to shoot in the woods behind the house when you were twelve and fuck the church you went to afterwards."

And about an example of a pro-gun-rights meme,

Your intended message may be "the government doesn't get to determine my rights based on its assessment of what I 'need," nor do fellow citizens who may arbitrarily determine I don't 'need' a wide variety of things based on their concerns." But what you are conveying is that "the people who want gun control are God-hating, kale-chewing, coastal-elite socialists who want to imprison your pastor for not marrying gays."

I encourage you to read the whole thing there.

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Even for straightforward messages that one might think could not be misinterpreted, the phenomenon of culture-bundling means that people are tempted to make assumptions about each other. The Jesus Fish drags a trail of associations behind it like so much grimy seaweed. The Black Lives Matter sticker is smugly, mentally, made to bow and scrape as a mere corollary to All Lives Matter. Every car can be neatly shunted into the left and right lanes.

Such assumptions are not warranted, ever.

Yes, but...

No. They are not warranted. Not ever. The environmental-responsibility sticker doesn't also mean "People are bad and abortion is good." The second-amendment sticker doesn't also mean "Gay marriage is an oxymoron." The Jesus-loves-you sticker doesn't also mean "Keep evolution out of the schools." The support-our-troops sticker doesn't also mean "I -heart- the death penalty." The opinions behind the strawmen may be correlated one way or another, but human persons are not correlations.

The assumptions aren't warranted. They aren't warranted because when we make them we are seeing a human being as an object: an object of our own self-gratification, the pecular good feeling because it reinforces all the things we already think.

Bumper stickers tempt people to see each other as objects.

Bumper stickers tempt people away from compassion and toward derision.

And that is not even counting the occasional sticker that actually expresses something that's not just unpopular, a minority opinion, or countercultural, but actually vile.

+ + +

And what about Christian witness? Have I got something against proclaiming Jesus Christ on the outside of my vehicle?

Yes, I do. I do not deserve to prominently display the Holy Name on the outside of my car. I have a lead foot. I have a big scrape on my minivan door where I hit a pole in the co-op parking lot on the day before Thanksgiving. I accidentally cut people off while shouting at squabbling kids. The best I can do for a justifiably pissed-off fellow commuter is that super-apologetic "Sorry! My bad!" wave. I don't think my displaying a Queen of the Rosary sticker is going to do either the Queen of the Rosary, or myself, or the guy leaning on his horn, any good in that moment. My mishap may do more damage because of it.

There are shades here of Luke 18:9-14. Being a Christian behind the wheel should mean driving with awareness, attention, and courtesy, not driving the right car or having the right sticker. I need the mercy of God inside my car.

+ + +

And the world needs the mercy of God outside it, too, which is one reason I don't want to tempt anyone to think nasty thoughts. There are plenty of other places to speak the truth: places where, unlike on the bumper of my car, I get to speak the whole truth, put things in context, show my face, be seen as a whole person and not a hashtag.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. We have seen that this week, to our national grief.

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Unreasonable expectations in design.

True or false:

It is irresponsible and negligent for a parent to take a picture of his or her small child in public, especially at a crowded, dangerous place like the zoo. Every photograph of grinning, sticky-faced siblings, posing in front of the aquarium or the cat house, is evidence of the crime of child endangerment.

Silly?

Well, let's think about what has to happen for a parent to take a photo of her child in public. First the parent has to let go of the child. She needs both hands to manipulate the camera or the smart phone. Then she has to step a few feet away -- maybe a dozen feet or more, certainly out of arms' reach. She has to take her eyes off her charges for long enough to select the proper settings or apps before finally locating them in the viewfinder. Once the picture is taken, she may pause to stow the camera away before returning and once again securing the child in a firm grip.

She lets go. She steps several feet away. She looks elsewhere. It is long enough.

+ + +

What I see in the great rush to condemn the mother (it is always the mother) of a small child who crawled into the gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo this week: a widespread refusal to believe that bad things can happen to "good people like me." She MUST have done something wrong (i.e., "something I would never do") for a terrible thing to happen to her child.

It's very important for some people to put distance between the grieving and themselves. I see this elsewhere; I often read articles about cycling accidents, because I am interested in traffic safety in my town, and let me tell you, getting hit by a drunk driver when you had the right of way is no excuse: you should have been more aware or you shouldn't have been on that road, you two-wheeled freak. We all know that many cyclists today completely ignore the law. So it goes.

I think we can extrapolate from the evidence (many small children at zoos, the existence of preschool educational programs at zoos) that it is widely believed (whatever some folks may think) that a zoo is a good place to take small children for a fun family outing. So to go so far as to say "well, of course you don't take a 3-y-o to a zoo, that's for older children" is, shall we say, OUTSIDE THE MAINSTREAM of thinking.

The notion that no reasonable parent would ever enter a situation where a 3-year-old might escape her notice long enough to get into serious trouble is a little more understandable, given the low amount of experience that many people have with the wide variety of three-year-olds. Most people only ever parent zero to two of them.

Some commenters who take a position closer to my own have been focusing on "It's not possible to keep your eyes on a three-year-old 100% of the time so they can't escape." I'd like to point out that we don't really WANT mothers (it's always mothers, isn't it) to do what would be necessary to prevent three-year-olds from escaping. Because we would have to do more than just watch them all the time. We would have to grip them all the time. That is why I began by having you think about picture-taking, how it is an utterly normal thing for parents of children to do at zoos, take their child's picture; and how the act of taking a picture contains within it all the possibility that allows for an escaping child.

There's this strange thing about children: they want to explore the world around them. They will pull and actively try to escape you. The zoos, along with science museums and other places that attract children, incidentally, have this odd feature (often, not always) -- they have exhibits here and there that seem to encourage children to explore the environment. "Please touch," they will have signs up for the petting zoo, or they will have fish tanks that are down near the eye level of toddlers, or they will have buttons to push and things like that. It seems almost as if the zoos.... EXPECT there to be three-year-olds with their parents, three-year-olds who are not buckled into strollers! I think the last few times I've been to the zoo I've even seen groups of preschoolers on a field trip, not with their parents, but with teachers and chaperones!

+ + +

I'm very sorry that the zoo had to shoot the gorilla. I'm thrilled that they apparently had a backup plan with a "dangerous animal response team" that included a take-down-the-animal plan. This was good planning for a situation that, however unthinkable it may be, clearly someone had thought about it in advance. It's the zoos' job to keep people away from the animals and animals away from the people.

And yet... sometimes people get in.

Isn't it also the zoos' responsibility to protect the animals from people who might harm them? Is it really reasonable to assume that visitors will police themselves sufficiently that the exhibits need not be made secure?

I'm thinking back to the last time a determined adult got into an exhibit (it does happen) and wondering if anyone was discussing whether zoos have a responsibility, grounded in the welfare of the animals, to make it impossible for determined persons to get into the exhibits. I think they do have a responsibility to make it very difficult for a determined adult to get into an exhibit. It is a completely foreseeable risk that a determined adult will TRY to get into an exhibit, and it really ought to be harder for a determined child to get in than a determined adult -- so if the zoos designed to make it extremely difficult for determined adults to get in, it ought to be that much harder for a determined child to get in.

It is a known risk that people occasionally attempt to breach the barriers -- not just children, but also adults. Zoos face a design problem that we should probably acknowledge: their mission is to bring us close to the animals while their responsibility is to keep us separated from them. I have some respect for the argument that this design problem, with its inherent tension, represents a set of risks that is not worth the benefits; that is a value judgment and we can come to different conclusions about it. I don't have any respect for the argument that this design problem doesn't exist.

Without saying anyone was at fault, I'm going to say that the design of the exhibit is probably the ultimate cause of this disaster.

OK, then... why don't you go so far as to say "the zoo was at FAULT," then?

Because design problems that involve inherent tensions between two design goals are notoriously difficult, and designers can act in good faith from start to finish, with the best of analyses, but still bad things can happen. I simply don't know enough details, and likely you don't either.

Is it possible to design a zoo in which all barriers CANNOT be breached? Yes; would people want to go to that zoo? Would those who argue for better habitats for the animals' welfare be pleased with that zoo? It's possible that the designers really did act in bad faith, that they designed an exhibit that they knew was not up to whatever the commonly accepted standards of zoo barriers were at the time. That would be a kind of fault. It's possible that the zoo staff acted in bad faith: that they disabled safeguards that were part of the system put into place by the designers, or that the barriers were not well maintained, or something like that. That would be a kind of fault. But it's possible to have a design that turns out to BE FAULTY (in retrospect) without any person actually being "at fault."

The public may have unreasonable expectations of the designers here. Not that it isn't reasonable to have as your GOAL "no one shall breach this exhibit." But that the public hasn't taken the time to really imagine what the tradeoffs would be that would make it literally impossible for no determined person to breach the exhibit, and they haven't considered that some of the things that make exhibit-breaches possible would make them enjoy the zoo less. Might even make them complain about the poorly-designed exhibits.

Here are some links for your perusal.

Last week at the zoo in Santiago, Chile, a determined man got into the lion enclosure, and the zookeepers shot the lions.

Last month a determined woman got into the tiger enclosure at the Toronto zoo.

This one goes the other direction. Less than three months ago, at the same zoo in Cincinnati, the polar bears breached their first enclosure.

About six months ago, another woman was determined enough to pet a tiger that she got into the enclosure at the zoo in Omaha.

2014. Copenhagen. A determined man entered the polar bear enclosure.

2009. Berlin. A determined woman entered the polar bear enclosure.

In the last link, a zoo official says of the exhibit, "It is already safe... People who want to jump in will always find a way."

For the sake of the animals as well as the people, maybe we should be asking why that is good enough. It simply isn't true that a zoo can't be built with barriers that visitors can't breach. We certainly try to manage it in prisons that hold human beings and in museums that hold valuable artifacts.

To ask why we accept risks is not necessarily to mandate that we remove risks. I respect those who argue that the benefits of zoos aren't worth the risks of bringing the public in close contact with animals. That Even though we don't come down in the same place, they and I recognize that there is a tension between the risks and benefits of zoo design, that it is acceptable to run some risk in order to reap some benefit, if the benefit is good enough.

It turns out that there is also a tension between the risks and benefits of bringing children out into the world. If we are going to cut the zoo enclosure designers any slack here, if we are going to say about those who build barriers to protect the animals "You can't be expected to stop every determined person from getting in," then we also have to be ready to say about all those charged with children, "You can't be expected to stop every mischief that could possibly happen."

In both cases, we could. But we choose not to. Because there are risks in that direction too.

 

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Debugging Grandma.

"We really won't have time to miss any school this year," I remember saying at the beginning, "we'll have to make up any time we lose."

Remind me not ever to say something like that again.

+ + +

So, I am in a hotel suite just outside my hometown with my sleeping toddler and my sleeping 94-year-old grandma. I found a place with separate sitting rooms and a pullout sofa, so the baby would not disturb Grandma, and a full-service restaurant, so we could stay here all day.

We are here in this hotel because today Grandma's house is being treated for a massively terrible bedbug infestation. Do you know what a scourge bedbugs are? If you do not, now is the time for you to take a side trip to Google and educate yourself. I have dealt with roaches, and I have dealt with mice, and I have dealt with head lice, and I would take all of them over bedbugs in a hurry (I guess as long as the mouse infestation did not give me hantavirus; one thing that you can say about bedbugs is that they do not carry disease).

My grandma is really a very remarkable lady. She is frail now, but has only really been frail since she was 88 or so; up till then she always seemed the same to me, although maybe my cousins and brother would tell me that my memory is off or that my impressions were poor. She moves around by herself slowly, and you think she is tottering and in danger; but as you watch her, you see that she moves carefully, and pays attention to where she puts her feet. If you walk with her and give her your arm for support, you find (because with your arm out you are thrown a bit off balance) that you are struggling a little to keep up. She keeps track of her medications by lining them up in order on the kitchen windowsill, and every morning and evening after she takes her pills she sits down and enters them by hand in a notebook log, and marks the date. (The log also records COFFEE in its proper place, between the meds that must be taken on an empty stomach and the meds that don't have to be.) She keeps her checkbook register meticulously, paying all her bills and carefully entering them, along with $5 checks to every direct-mail charity who asks her for money and the occasional $11.49 payment to random sweepstakes contests, which my cousin had warned me Grandma thinks she's really going to win (more on that later).

Grandma was widowed 35 years ago; my grandpa, a plumber with his own business, died at 59 when I was five. I barely remember him, but he is legendary, and my impressions from the family stories are of a man who could be loving and exasperating, rough and gentle both. My mother often reminisced that he would shed tears whenever he saw anyone perform anything well or beautifully. There is also a story that he refused to leave a baseball game (or some other sports event?) when my grandmother went into labor, and the baby -- I don't remember which of her three children -- was nearly born on the way to the hospital. I really only remember sitting on his lap, playing with him with a deck of cards marked on the back with the name and address of the plumbing business.

After he died, Grandma became a world traveler. She took at least one trip a year throughout my entire childhood, with the same tour group. She never made it to South America, but she has been everywhere else. Stacks of photo albums prove it. She took my older cousin to the British isles, she took the next cousin to southeast Asia, she took me to the Iberian peninsula and North Africa, all when each of us were fourteen. Her last trip was to London to go Christmas shopping. I don't remember when that was.

+ + +

So, another relative whom I love very much, who values privacy, has been living with Grandma and watching out for her for several years now. This relative has had some health problems of late that got worse and worse over the past few months and maybe 5 weeks ago became uncontrollable and dangerous. The relative was then suddenly hospitalized, although not so suddenly that there wasn't time for the relative to line up half a dozen of the relative's own friends to bring Grandma groceries and check on her every day. (Everybody who meets my grandma adores her. It was not hard to get people to promise to bring her food and fix her thermostat when it went on the fritz.)

One of my cousins who, of the four grandchildren, lives closest (same state, different city), and on whom a lot of the responsibility has fallen because of that proximity, went to visit Grandma at Grandma's house and discovered the bedbug infestation. They had had them before, and it had been treated by Terminix twice, but apparently neither treatment eliminated them completely; and when the population grew a third time, the health problems of my relative had interfered with her ability to act promptly, and so the infestation had grown unchecked for several months.

So my cousin contacted the rest of us, and for a variety of practical reasons, it turned out that Mark and I were the ones best able to respond. We were delayed about three days because of some of Mark's work responsibilities. Then we piled everyone in the hastily-packed car and drove out of town.

+ + +

The bedbugs in Grandma's house being descended from the badasses that had survived two applications of pesticide, my cousins had selected a different kind of treatment. Heaters and fans and blowers are to be brought in to raise the temperature to 140 degrees everywhere in the house.

Mark and I left the kids with his parents and showed up Wednesday morning with the checklist that the new exterminator (not from Terminix) had given us. We needed to remove all loose items from the rooms, take all the clothing (except hanging clothes in closets) away to be dried on high (the kill step) and washed and dried again, disassemble all the beds, empty all the drawers, take everything off the walls, remove all papers and books to be later fumigated before returning to the house), remove all outlet covers and switchplates, unplug everything, and take the wallpaper border off the upper walls.

Since Grandma's house, though tiny, was packed top to bottom with her collections of antique glassware, porcelain plates and figurines, photo albums, and travel souvenirs, this was a formidable task.

It took three days. We fell into the traditional roles that seem to work so well: Mark mostly dealt with the furniture and switchplates and things, and I dealt with the clothes. There wasn't time to sort, really, so I packed all the clothes and towels and bedding in the house into thirty clear kitchen garbage bags, tied them shut and marked each with a knot of orange ribbon, and piled them in the living room. The next day I piled them on the lawn, put them four at a time into clear contractor bags, tied those off, and tossed them in the tarp-lined back of my van. Then I spent six hours at a laundromat with wifi, although there was little waiting time. It takes so long to load that much laundry into machines that by the time the last load was in, the first load was done. I hardly stopped moving for six hours.

One bright and pleasant spot: my best friend from high school stopped by between places she had to be, and kept me company folding clothes with me for an hour.

Those done, I bagged the clothes back up again, this time marked with a knot of green ribbon, and hauled them back to the house, to be stored in the bug-free basement until the treatment ended.

+ + +

Meanwhile Mark busied himself at the house. The second and third day, we brought our 15yo son to help. He moved furniture, scraped wallpaper, fetched and carried. He also spent a fair amount of time with his great-grandma, asking questions about the items he was helping pack into boxes, sorting the old foreign coins. He was delighted to discover a small container full of steel pennies from World War Two; when Grandma offered them, we gave him permission to accept these as a gift in exchange for his work.

Mark told us later, "I can tell that it was a plumber who hung that curio cabinet, with the figurines." It had been attached to the wall bolts with the kind of nut you use to install a toilet. We assumed it had been my grandpa who hung the cabinet, but Grandma told us my uncle -- also a plumber/pipefitter -- had done it.

I do not get back to my hometown very often, mostly on busy holidays. We all spent more time talking with Grandma over those three days than we had in the past several years. As the days wore on, I grew to realize that she really is still on top of everything. Mark had to ask her a lot of questions about various papers he came across, so he could store them retrievably; she carefully explained details about each insurance policy (sometimes misremembering the most up-to-date name of the insurance companies, due to mergers and takeovers across the generations, but remembering accurately the value of each policy and an overview of the coverage details). Occasionally she picked up her checkbook register to confirm dates and amounts. Wanting to know if Grandma would need to be taken to the bank to move money from savings into checking, Mark asked about her accounts, and received more details than he needed about Grandma's system of automatic deposits.

At the end of the third day Grandma and I decamped for the hotel, while Mark stayed to meet the exterminator.

We couldn't settle in until I made Grandma change all her clothes. Nope, I said, you can't change into new pants and then change your shirt. Nope, not even your underthings. Everything off and into the bag to be sealed, and then you can have your new things out of this sealed bag of clean clothes.

"Really?!" She gave me an unmistakeable I'm too old for this look.

"Really."

That done, with minimal help, she combed out her hair, put it back up in a bun, freshened her makeup, got into the bedroom slippers I had bought for her that morning, and picked up the new purse I had bought on the same errand. I gave her my arm and we went down to the hotel restaurant.

I tweeted a picture of smiling grandma to my cousins.

 

And then a picture of my glass of wine, which all agreed I deserved.

+ + +

Partway through dinner Grandma looked straight at me and said, "Now Erin, I know I'm probably not going to win those sweepstakes. I have enough money, and it's something to do. Same with giving money to my charities. It's only five dollars for each of 'em. I don't have a lot of things to keep me busy anymore, and I like it. So I'm going to keep doing it."

I looked her in the eyes. She meant it.

Well, okay then. She knows what she wants. I'm going to listen a little harder from now on.

 

 

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Silent is deadly.

"People talk about racism and "reverse racism," but if you’re a white lady like me, what you get to see most is not incidents of probable racism against any particular person, but all those things white people say and do when they’re left unsupervised."

--Jen Fitz, writing here at Sticking the Corners

+ + +

 

"This is where the party ends."

-- They Might Be Giants, "Your Racist Friend" (Flood, 1990)

 

+ + +

The following is not a question of equivalencies. It is a question of consistency.

+ + +

Catholics who try to be faithful to the Church's teachings speak and write a great deal about sending messages with our actions.

To make an example of current events: It's not a simple matter for Catholics to decide whether to attend a ceremony celebrating a sexual union (of any kind) that we know isn't a valid marriage. Even if everyone knows our beliefs -- we aren't supposed to leave people confused in any way about what we stand for. We may not say a word; but our silent presence may be taken as assent and acceptance; in fact it is a kind of assent and acceptance.

Conservative Catholics know this. Liberal Catholics know it too. We each of us, if we have integrity, behave accordingly, maybe with some internal struggle, to send the message we believe we should send, by providing or withholding our presence.

+ + +

Silent presence happens in other contexts, too, where actors wish to promote a view of human nature that is patently opposed to the teaching of Christ.

And by "contexts" I mean holiday dinners with relatives, meetings with co-workers, drinks with your buddies; and by "a view of human nature that is patently opposed to the teaching of Christ" I mean all sorts of notions that are contrary to human dignity.

Notions that entire groups of people deserve blame for the actions of some of their members.

Notions that individuals can be judged by the characteristics of a group.

Notions that demeaning language -- objectifying language -- mocking language -- language that fails to treat persons as individuals, individually redeemed by Christ, individual agents working toward their own salvation in the context of the world -- is harmless if none of its targets are there to hear it.

Are we sending a message that might confuse people into thinking that, because we are there, we agree? Are we endorsing this language without meaning to?

+ + +

I have been the nice white lady standing uncomfortably -- and yet silently -- in the presence of another who is telling a story about Those Blacks, You Know How They Are. I have stayed in the meeting when the female speaker makes the crack about how a bunch of women will not be able to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time. I have done the thing where you don't laugh at the disgusting joke about gay people, or whomever -- the thing where you remain silent, because it's polite and you have reasons not to cause a scene, and maybe the teller will notice that you don't, actually, think it's funny -- but it is, in the end, the "thing" where you remain.

Silently, but you remain.

That too, my friends, is sending a message of acceptance. Acceptance of a seriously distorted view of human nature and of human dignity. Acceptance that is in no way reconcilable with the teaching of Christ.

The teaching of Christ is the teaching that welcomes the stranger, the person who is different, frightening, repulsive.

Welcoming the stranger is, as the nation learned to its grief in Charleston this week, not without personal risk.

+ + +

I had a moment of clarity around Christmas, as often happens around the holidays, when I found myself in a Nice White People situation. The kind where a forceful, humorous personality, the life of the party, feels himself safe, among people who will not challenge him. He's just messing around, after all! It's just a joke! And in this case, the joke involved dehumanizing slurs directed at gay people.

(But he has Democrat cred! Everyone knows he is a supporter of gay rights! Of same sex marriage and antidiscrimination statutes! ... Nonetheless, I am here to tell you that on occasion such people will still, if they are among a safe crowd, tell crude and dehumanizing jokes. I don't understand it, but it is true.)

I must have stood by silently a thousand times before, in this and other situations. It is not my job to set people on the right path. I may be opinionated, and I am free with my opinions on this blog, but I am not eloquent on the spot. I am reluctant to make trouble, at least when it comes to people that I have to get along with in the future for some reason.

The difference this time is that in the circle, in the conversation, in the party, I was standing, a drink in my hand, right next to my two oldest sons.

I heard the slur.

I saw my teenaged son look away, down into his Coke.

And in that moment -- and hours later, too -- I understood that I had been placed in a position where silently remaining was not acceptable, and that to silently remain would be a direct violation of my duty towards the young people in my family. The people I am charged with raising, and teaching.

+ + +

This is where the party ends

I can't stand here listening to you

And your racist friend.

I know politics bore you,

But I feel like a hypocrite talking to you

And your racist friend.

+ + +

Like I said, I am not eloquent on the spot. So I didn't speak up, not then.

But I let the expression of contempt and disgust play across my face. It was real, not faked. I don't have much of a poker face anyway.

And I left the room. (Yeah, I know. My kids were still there in the room, with the joke hanging in the air like the smell of a fart.)

And I did not look the speaker in the eye again. And he knew I was not looking him in the eye.

+ + +

That night I dreamed I was driving a car on an empty road, and up ahead curious clouds roiled into the sky. I was studying them and wondering what they were, wondering if a thunderstorm was brewing, when -- too late -- I realized I was driving straight toward a towering cloud of volcanic ash, and it was pouring over the road in front of me, obliterating everything in its path. I swerved the car to the right, I felt my body thrown to the side by the force of the turn, and the wall of ash flooded over my car and into the windows, snaring the tires, dragging my car along with it, enclosing me in darkness, suffocating me.

I woke up still suffocated.

I got up out of the bed, leaving Mark sleeping beside the baby. I went downstairs and found my boys and I told them: Last night you heard some vile language about people who don't deserve to be talked about in that way. I want you to know that it wasn't right. No matter who says it, it isn't right for people to use language like that about other human beings.

They listened to me with serious faces. "We know," they said.

"I know you know," I said. "And I also want you to know that I didn't say anything about it last night because didn't know how to respond last night. But that I am going to respond now, and I am going to let that person know that I do not want him to talk that way where you kids can hear."

And then I went upstairs and I wrote an email, and I hit Send.

+ + +

It was the loveliest party that I ever attended

If anything was broken, I'm sure it could be mended

My head can't tolerate this bobbing and pretending

Listening to some bullet-head and the madness that he's saying.

+ + +

So it's like this. I am one of those people who has no sense of humor. I am unacceptably self-righteous. There is no getting around it.

God give me the courage never to find that crap funny ever again. God give me the courage, if not to speak up, then to leave the room, again, and again, and again.

+ + +

Sometimes, Nice White People get together and they say objectifying things that they think are harmless. I think they think they are harmless because everyone else in the room is also a Nice White Person. Or occasionally it is Nice Straight People. Sometimes it is A Bunch Of Great Guys. Occasionally it is women objectifying women, not always Those Other Women either, believe you me; I have been in these rooms.

No one whose feelings might be hurt is there. Ergo hurt hasn't happened, right?

 This is wrong. Because

    (a) it normalizes the objectification of human beings,

    (b) it is always an offense against human beings because it is an offense against truth, and

    (c) sometimes the Nice White People who can hear are not, in fact, particularly nice. Sometimes they are disturbed people. Sometimes they are impressionable because they are young. Sometimes they are vulnerable. Sometimes they are vile racists who add what they hear to their experiences that tell them racism isn't so vile, that they are among friends even in their vile racism.

+ + +

Serious Catholics know that silent presence sends a message of acceptance and assent. We know this!

We know it is important not to confuse people about the truth.

Can we just try not to leave them confused about all the truths as well? Like the truth that a human being is an entity to which the only appropriate response is love? And that dehumanizing use (as the butt of a joke, as a scapegoat, as an outlet for sexual urges, as a political point, as a means to an end) is never the right response?

Why are we only worried about confusing people about part of the Christian message? Can we come up with a way to make it not at all confusing that we believe in charity towards all?

Out through the kitchen, to the bedroom, to the hallway

Your friend apologized, said he could see it my way

He let the contents of the bottle do the thinking

Can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding.

+ + +

My heart is heavy this week. Pray for Charleston, and give thanks for people who welcome the stranger and who will go on welcoming the stranger, in everything they say and in everything they don't say.

 

 

 

-----

*Since this was first posted I elected to adjust slightly the wording in the paragraph about ceremonies, to reflect the fact that, while there's plenty of advice to be had out there, and maybe individual bishops have advised their faithful on it, I don't know of any explicit direction in Catholic doctrine stating what particular Catholics must do or not do with respect to social invitations, the circumstances of which can vary greatly.  It's not a matter to take lightly, but as far as I can tell, it remains a matter of conscience.  Everyone, however, appears to agree that the reason it is not to be taken lightly is because presence speaks.

"He's not himself."

This week the 15-month-old was sick, sick, sick. The illness began back around Easter, probably on April 3rd; lasted a bit more than a week; seemed to be over by Monday, April 13, lulling us into thinking we could safely resume our normal schedule; returned with a vengeance on Sunday the 19th and continued until just now.

I think the little guy had rotavirus, because he had the classic symptoms (key among them the copious and foul, foul diarrhea) and none of the rest of us fell ill. Most people get this before age 6 and after that have immunity. The one-two punch took us by surprise; maybe he mostly shook it off, but not entirely, and we were just too quick to jump back into regular activities; or maybe the second wave, which did look a little different, was from an imbalance of gut flora. Who knows.

It was H who suggested that it might be rotavirus, since her twins fell ill at the same time with the same symptoms -- one much worse than the other, with my baby having it to a degree that fell between the two. We ended up cancelling a total of three co-schooling days (not in a row). I think we will be back in business on Monday.

+ + +

So, of course I spent the week with a feverish, listless baby sprawled or curled in my lap, buried in towels and spare old sheets from the basket we keep high up in the linen closet, only for births and for mass gastrointestinal illness. The washer and dryer ran constantly. I changed my clothes three or four times a day. I lived on chicken soup from an enormous pot that I made on the first day of the second wave, when I worried we'd all become ill. I offered the baby store-brand, pediatric electrolyte solution.

(A side note: Why, why, why must they put brightly colored dye in a drink that is meant to be given to vomiting toddlers?)

I offered him lots of nursing, too, and stayed close by so he could always have access to me, with a few breaks to run to the drugstore or grocery. I slept with the baby on a stack of towels and diapers. Even though (thankfully) he mostly slept at night and didn't throw up, I started awake at every cough, ready to leap into action. Tied-up garbage bags full of disposable diapers accumulated next to the changing table. The kids, not allowed to go to friends' houses or activities lest they pass the bug on, festered and whined and eventually settled in front of video games, and I quit making them stop.

+ + +

None of those are fun. They are miserable. But honestly, the worst part of it all is how the familiar little guy just... disappears, replaced by a limp changeling. Unable to use words yet, he cannot meet you on the verbal level and let you know that the "he" is still there, the mischievous, affectionate baby who knows you and whom you know. Eyes glassy, lids drooped, drifting in and out of a feverish doze; or arching his back and howling in pain and dismay. The only thing that remains is that he wants to cling and cling and cling to me; and that proves I am his mother and he is my baby.

I find myself singing favorite songs, trying to catch his eye. Sometimes, sometimes, a little smile plays across his lips and the eyes dart to make contact, briefly, and there he is, for just an instant. And then the eyes close and he's submerged again.

The peculiar uneasiness of the ill baby not being "himself" is something that mostly passes by the time they are able to verbalize. Even though you might say "She's just not herself this week," a child old enough to talk has to be very ill indeed before her personality entirely disappears under her illness. That happened to Maryjane when she was seven and her appendix ruptured; the first couple of days after her emergency surgery, she drifted in and out of consciousness, heavily sedated, and she really was not available to us. That was hard, because we were terribly concerned about her -- it would be several days before we would have confidence that the infection was clear -- and we couldn't really even ask her anything, or know that she understood what we told her.

I cannot imagine what it is like for parents of children who suffer from chronic illnesses that rob them of access to their child's personality, repeatedly or for longer. I know that many adults, too, face such a disappearance at the end of their lives, something I have not yet had to face closely.

When it comes my turn, I hope that things can never get so bad as to destroy my faith that "himself" or "herself" really is present -- somewhere submerged, sometimes permanently submerged, as long as breath remains in the body. Obscured, but still real.

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