This photo was taken by my friend, Susan. As you can see, I am a skinny guy. I am also a 45 year old guy. This year I have been trying to ride my bicycle for fitness, averaging between 50-100 miles a week. Not a huge amount of distance but enough to keep me limber. Or stiff. Or both. Some weeks I have to travel, so I miss a ride, but I try to keep with it, knowing that the more miles I accumulate, the stronger I should be.
The reason I am riding is that my doctor said I had to lower the ratio of bad to good cholesterol. I also noticed I had developed the slight belly you see here. I am a stick – how could I have a belly?
I shouldn’t be surprised. I wake up to a different body every day. Some mornings I feel great. Other mornings I feel sluggish, almost to the point of being drugged. However, there is no guarantee that either of these extremes or the range of sensation in between will result in a good or bad ride that day. I can feel like a lump of sludge and blow away other cyclists on the climbs. Or I can feel great and barely be able to move the pedals quickly enough to stay upright.
I’ve ridden in the sun, the rain, the cold, the hot, and even in a hailstorm the day all the trees got knocked down in Central Park. None of that seems to be a problem. While my biggest challenge is sometimes just getting my shoes on and getting my ass out of the house, my will-power for riding consistently is actually pretty good.
It is a mystery to me why some days my legs feel like all the riding I’ve done this year has been cumulative while other days all the riding I’ve done feels subtractive.
I am sure there is a metabolic reason. And I am betting someone has something for me to drink that will help me perform better and more consistently every day. But I already drink chocolate milk right after riding, followed by an electrolyte drink and a meal of some kind of protein. That’s about as complicated as I want to get.
Besides, even if I wasn’t cycling regularly, I’d still have good days and bad days. Not sure there is anything wrong with that. So whatever the case, I’d rather wear myself out on the bike than hanging around the house.
From my grandfather’s notes for his sermon of 07/30/72.
Robert Kennedy was a great young man. In his postscript to the book he called To Seek a Newer World, written shortly before he was murdered, Robert Kennedy was saying:
“The cruelties and obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans. It cannot be moved by those who cling to a present that is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement and danger that come with even the most peaceful progress. It is a revolutionary world we live in; and this generation, at home and around the world, has had thrust upon it a greater burden of responsibility than any generation that has ever lived.”
“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
To adhere to standards, to idealism, to vision in the face of immediate dangers, takes great courage and self-confidence. But we know that only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”
The sermon discusses the impossibility of achieving humanitarian ideals – or as my grandfather calls them, his “impossible dreams”.
Is it an impossible dream, that we shall forget our Koreas and our Vietnams? That we shall one day come to think of other men as brothers and not as Reds? That one day all men shall think of all other men as friends and not as enemies?
Is it an impossible dream, that one day you and I shall welcome another family, with a different color to his skin, as our next door neighbor, instead of setting fire to his home? Or that we shall welcome them as fellow members of our churches?
Is it an impossible dream, that some day another man or woman or child will not be hungry while I am well fed?
My expectation of this sermon was that my grandfather would offer hope and suggest that the honorable nature of these ideals somehow inoculated them from impossibility. That by their very nature as of the Holy Spirit and in keeping with the teachings of the Bible, these “dreams” would transcend impossibility. Other sermons I have read from his work have offered similar comfort.
Instead, this sermon says what might not be the opposite but is definitely a slight rhetorical shift brought on, I would expect, by the disheartening years between the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 and the massacre at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, a little over a month before this sermon was first delivered.
My grandfather suggests that indeed these dreams are impossible. That inevitably they are unattainable outside of the Absolute. However, this impossibility does not mean that one should not seek their fullfillment. Their humanity makes their unattainability meaningless, because of the possibilities created by the pursuit of these ideals for those who are held by injustice and oppression. The impossibility is beside the point. The attempt is what is important, because the attempt is the propellant of change.
As my grandfather wrote further:
Robert Kennedy dreamed impossible dreams. And in the memorial service held in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, his brother said of him, “He was a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”
He tried, even though his dreams seemed impossible.
That has been our trouble, in trying to reach out we have been satisfied with reaching what we can.
But in a day which calls for reaching the impossible dream, we must strive to reach what we cannot.”
Lest We Forget
Saturday will be Armistice Day, a day on which we commemorate the pseudo-peace which in 1918 ended one phase of the fighting in a war which has now lasted for more than thirty-six years. Since then we have added other days, though we have not seen fit to name them as national holidays, V-E Day, V-J Day, and we look toward a V-K Day. And if some of our more pessimistic leaders are correct, we must look ahead to one which will celebrate a victory over China, and then Russia. Or perhaps one which they shall call a V-USA Day.
The war has broken out again in all of its fury. We watch the morning papers, and we listen to the latest radio news, always wondering if the conflagration has spread a little further. Certainly not for better, but definitely for worse, we are living today in a military atmosphere wherein the fog thickens day by day.
We are still free to speak. At the risk of being misunderstood, I wish that we might think together this morning of some of the dangers that we are facing, for the beginnings of some of these are already upon us in this military atmosphere.
First, we have already abandoned ourselves to a reliance upon force as the only way out of our dilemma. As one of the professors in our undergraduate college put it the other day, we have adopted a monist philosophy, accepting force as a necessity. And in accepting force, with preparations for producing more deadly weapons with efficiency, we are already giving up some of the more cherished attributes of our democratic system, being willing to give up fundamental rights in order to do things more quickly.
A second tendency is to give up the privilege of government by civilian officials. Already military men have taken over positions in the government which formerly were restricted to non-military. Our ambassadors to key posts abroad have been selected from among generals. And all of these assignments are made regardless of the fact that these men may not have had any training nor aptitude for the positions which they now hold.
Still more tragic is the fact that because of this crisis philosophy, we are ignoring basic problems which we ought to face as a nation. Gone is our national concern for the alleviation of slum evils, as housing programs go by the boards. Money which ought to be used for medical research goes into finding newer and deadlier means of atomic, hydrogen, chemical, and bacterial warfare. Federal aid in the building of better education facilities will be set aside to make more money available for airplanes and tanks.
Demands for the reduction of inequalities within our nation will be forgotten. We do not have time to talk about F.E.P.C. and other phases of a Civil Rights program.
In our desire to build up military strength, and to carry a big stick, we forget the better ways of diplomacy and the seeking of peaceful solutions for our world problems.
And with it all, we look upon our own nation as the Saviour of the World, and in so doing we completely identify might with right.
But the most tragic result of all is that life loses meaning in such a military atmosphere. Death is so constantly in the minds of our populace that strange reactions take place. Already rumors are beginning to circulate that in case of emergency large numbers of residents in coastal areas will be arbitrarily uprooted from their homes in a general transfer of available manpower and machines to the central section of the United States.
The hysteria reaches its height when select groups build atom-bomb-proof shelters, and even prepare to isolate themselves for their own protection in remote areas.
The fever strikes small cities and villages far inland, until at this time many such are setting up air-raid warning systems and selecting spotters to locate enemy airplanes.
The fear-atom becomes more deadly when it strikes schools and colleges with the futile search for security in an oath of allegiance which is pledged under duress by some, in meaningless patter by others, and in sheer hypocrisy by those whose activities are supposedly curtailed by such declarations of loyalty.
Most tragic is the loss of meaning for life to those young men who are the real victims of war fever. It was in the second phase of the present war, up to 1945, that this became evident. High School teachers, college professors, and religious counselors were overwhelmed frequently by the seeming diffidence and lack of interest on the part of young men with whom they were working. With out much doubt the uncertainties of compulsory military training through the draft, and the possibility of death or the maiming of bodies led many of them to adopt some measure of an “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die” attitude. Again the same unpredictable future has our young men bewildered, with a corresponding response in their unpredictability. At the best they are saying, “We must get as much out of life as we possibly can, while we are whole of body, and still alive.” Therefore sex mores, cultural and religious patterns cease to hold influence.
Life loses its meaning. And when it reaches the extreme of killing or being killed, then many an individual may cease being a man, and turn into an automaton whose purpose it is to kill as many of the designated enemy as he can before he himself is no longer able to kill. And there is not much meaning left to life when one exists in the stench of dead and decaying human bodies in the midst of battle-caused rubble.
We need to cry, “Halt” to this desperation philosophy of force to which we have fallen victim. We as leaders of the Christian church must work untiringly in a ministry of reconciliation within our local communities, and to arouse our people out of the lethargy which they now are in, as they think that there is no other way.
It will not be through blind preaching about love, for such is meaningless. They will love their assigned enemies to death. But it will be through a demonstration of Christian agape, with all of its accompanying good will among men, which will lead out people to see higher and better ways of solving the problems of a sick world.
Above all we must not only help our people to find their way today, but also to prepare them for the days when we will find ourselves in a more temperate zone of attitude. Some leaders are predicting a great crash which will end all of our military striving and bungling. Who then will be prepared to guide a nation filled with people from whose lives all meaning has been crushed? It is up to us as religious leaders to keep a light burning through these hours of materialistic night, that the world will have light in such a day.
Dr. Harold Fildey, Chapel Meditation, 11/09/50
I have been reading some of my grandfather’s sermons. Most of them were written during the 1950’s while he was a traveling minister in New York and Ohio. Here is one passage that, as someone living in New York City, resonated with me. And resonance is perhaps the first goal of a sermon. The sermon was first delivered in 1947, just a year and a few months after my grandfather and his family were liberated from a civilian prisoner of war camp in Manila, Philippines. The shift must have been cosmic.
“Are we making a force out of our religion? Are we positive in our faith?
You know, I get a little bit worried about that. I’ve been living around this New York area too long. Sometimes I become a victim of that subway psychology, and start pushing around and looking out for number one all of the time.
What kind of force is that? Of all the arguments that come up, almost every day. We all want to be first. I suppose it’s because we have been taught that way. And would never get anywhere in New York unless you did . But is that all there can be to life, getting a spot in a subway car, or a seat at a lunch counter? And going around with a chip on the shoulder all the time, ready to pick a fight at the dig of an elbow or a foot on the toe.
Our faith ought to be a little more positive than that, with a little more good will as part of it.“
Dr. Harold Fildey, Yonkers, NY, April 13, 1947
Veteran’s Day 2009, originally uploaded by Jorn Ake.
A facsimile of a page from my grandfather’s notebook detailing the years he and his family spent in civilian prisoner of war camps in Manila, Philippines from 1942-1945. The page shows a hand-drawn map of Camp Holmes, one of the camps in which they were interned.
From an email in which I try to explain my reservations about e-book devices like the Amazon Kindle.
If these devices propagate information more thoroughly, that would be terrific. But the way they are being packaged is as a business plan for keeping newspapers and publishing houses solvent against the onslaught of digital media – i.e. an e-savior for businesses whose primary product has not been electronic. And I think the message that this will increase ready access to the written word for people who may not have it now is part of a marketing strategy to alleviate guilt in a group of people who both have strong convictions in the necessity of language & literature and a strong social conscience, and who also just so happen to be the target market for this device. Unless Amazon can alleviate the guilt, they won’t be able to sell these people a Kindle.
A seduction, in other words. Like the Product Red program that “allows” people to buy highly discretionary items under the cover of making a (minuscule) donation to Africa. Absolution has become a major marketing tool in this era. In many ways, it is almost like the selling of indulgences by the church during the time of Erasmus.
Long way around, but what I think is this: don’t by a red sweat shirt – send the entire purchase price to Africa and do without the sweat shirt entirely. Or set yourself an hourly rate where if you spend $100 on discretionary items, you then need to work in community service for 5 hours at an imagined $20/hour.
The language associated with e-books is the same language associated with computers 20 years ago, and yet there still isn’t the democratic device in terms of computers. The OLPC is trying, but it faces many obstacles, the most complicated to solve being that the many people who would be its beneficiaries would benefit more highly from things like food, clean water and medicine.
As members of the first world, we, like Donald Rumsfeld, have a strong belief that technology is the answer to many of our issues. But as the AK-47 proves over and over again, sometimes technology pales in comparison to good old analog steel. Sometimes a book is just better. Longevity, durability, transportability, universality, etc. To read an e-book, you need electricity and an e-book reader compatible with that e-book’s file system. To read a book, all you need is a little light.
If some sort of pay-to-play were worked out – Amazon and its brethren must provide unlimited access for public schools to every e-book produced in order to use the public airwaves to transmit its content to all the Kindles running through the NYC subway – I might feel more comfortable about it. Of course, they’d have to promise to keep all the e-book reader interfaces up and running. I know from many friends in academics that while school systems have little problem getting computers, maintenance is a whole other ball of wax. Lots of broken computers sitting in back closets waiting repair due to lack of funds or languishing unused due to obsolescence.
The reality is that the people who benefit most highly from e-books are the book manufacturers and Amazon. Warehousing and shipping books (along with the employees required to manage this process) must be a tremendous expense that not even just-in-time warehousing/publishing can offset sufficiently. E-books would create the possibility for greater control over profits for those entities, whether or not they would actually benefit the consumer. So all the rhetoric around e-books is suspect until the benefits to consumers can be shown to at least equal the desire of the producers to cut their overhead by eliminating warehousing, reducing employees, and cutting brick & mortar retailers out of the income stream.
Finally, because I like words and deal in their nuances, I can’t ignore that while the word “kindle” can connote germination of an idea, it also means starting a small fire for the purposes of burning something larger and more resistant to flames. And that sense of the word is a bit too close to my flammable library.
I like technology and gadgets as much (or perhaps more) than the next guy. I am much more of a fan of the book publishing robot that the NY Public Library recently obtained. In 20 minutes, it can publish a book from an electronic file, allowing the library to dispense far more books in physical form that it could ever stack on its shelves. A physical book that can be read by anyone without the necessity of batteries or a device.
I was sitting in a gallery yesterday while listening to a docent explain to a kaleidoscope of high school students that a photo of a white person and a black person that hung on the wall before them required the photographer to compensate for exposure based on the meter’s reading of the light so that the black person’s skin would not be too dark and that this made the photograph more complicated. And it occurred to me that even light meters were calibrated to one thing in order to measure another and that right now somewhere in Washington DC there is a room full of photographers fidgeting with their cameras as one of them steps forward to the empty podium with a meter in their hand. They call out the reading, and each photographer does their silent calculations for exposure, turning a knob, twisting a dial and compensating.
This issue has been rattling around in my head a bit lately. I think it has always been there. People have told me that I tend to over-complicate situations through an excess of empathy. And I worry that sometimes I border on unfairly paternalistic in my concern about the impact of my presence on other people. I try to recognize that everyone has their own lives that they live as best they can and from that they generate a sense of pride and accomplishment that is wholly and 100% their own. And that this self-possession is something that I can not diminish with something as insignificant as my appearance on a street corner in their neighborhood.
But I have been struck over the last several years while traveling by the relative materialism of tourists from the developed world, especially while they are visiting third world or less developed destinations. They arrive in sparkling new clothes, with lovely new backpacks carrying one or two new cameras, maybe a laptop, cell phones, pdas, chargers, batteries, and so forth, in countries where the average salary per year is less than the contents of said backpack. Perhaps even less than the cost of the backpack itself.
The places these tourists (and I include myself in this category of tourist) visit are more than happy to see us. We bring money to areas that desperately need money, provide jobs, development, infrastructure, that would otherwise not be there.
But you do not have to dig too deeply to feel that along with this welcome is a thin layer of resentment (is that the right word? discomfort at least) created by the ostentatiousness of these accessories carried by tourists from developed countries, who, in turn, barely recognize these items as anything other than the standard equipment of travel.
So there is the welcome extended and your visit graciously received for its benefit, but along with that comes a sour bite from the economic chasm between you and the people you meet as you travel.
I am not sure if I am making sense. Friends have said that I am just feeling guilty for where and into what circumstances I was born. And that potentially I am transposing that sense of guilt onto people who are independent and proud of who they are, their country and their lives. That I am being paternalistic, perhaps even colonial.
But I have had opportunities to talk to people in the countries I have visited, and I have heard them suggest that the feelings are just as complex on their end of things. Like I said, they see the benefit to having tourists come and visit, economically and politically. But they also see the incredible materialism exhibited by these tourists, and they wonder why just a fraction of that wealth expressed by giant digital cameras, laptops, cell phones, jewelry, could not instead be invested in their countries where it might make the difference for some people, not just between happiness and sadness, but between life and death.
You cannot imagine how much you stick out like a sore thumb in a third world market place. There isn’t one thing about you that isn’t entirely foreign in appearance. If you were dressed in dayglo orange you wouldn’t be any more apparent to the people who live there.
When I worked in outdoor equipment retailing, we had some t-shirts that said something like “Leave only footprints, take only photographs.” A friend of mine said he thought that in some places even footprints were too destructive. I think he used the White Mountains as an example of a place that gets so many footprints, everything is getting a bit worn away. The landscape is being changed just by the footprints left behind.
At any rate, footprints are inevitable if you go places. What I have been thinking about lately is the kind of footprints you leave. Or the depth of them. And I think this expression of materialism that is made by all the things we carry with us when we travel is a sort of footprint, a deep one that could perhaps be made a bit shallower without diminishing the experience of travel or our ability to remember what experience was had.
I don’t know. I definitely have come to think less is more when it comes to travel. I have tried to reduce what I bring to what I need and not what I might need. I resolved to stop looking for the perfect camera bag and just use what I have until it falls apart. My experience on a trip is not going to be adversely affected by whether or not I can get email. Or make a phone call from a mountain top. Fill a frame with a lion’s head and post on Flickr that very night. Reduce reduce reduce.
Above all, my goal is respect. If you have clothes made of gold, you don’t wear them to visit your friend who has clothes made of rags. At the same time, you don’t wear clothes made of rags when that is not what you wear regularly. What begins as respect can become an insult if taken too far.
And I don’t expect everyone to share my concerns. Travel as you will. Just that this is something that I have been thinking about – before during and after travels – and I guess in a way I haven’t really come up with a suitable answer for myself.
You wouldn’t know it by looking at me, but I have always had at least a passing interest in fashion. Friends kept mentioning this site, and I finally spent some time looking at it. I must admit I have a certain amount of envy when I look at these photos (if I had only, to borrow Nike’s slogan, just done it,) but I am not sure whether I would take these photos necessarily myself. Or whether I like the work of Bill Cunningham, the venerable street fashion photographer from the NYTimes to whom these photographs owe a sizeable debt, better. They feel, to me, to lack a certain vitality, if that makes any sense. Or rather, they feel shot with a bit too much sang-froid. I do like very much that the subjects often feel like collaborators or at least, co-celebrators, in their appearance. Happy in their skins, emphasis on the plural. That must be a response to the care with which they are approached by the photographer. And no matter how or in what you dress yourself, happiness should be the measure of (fashion) success I think. A pair of Converse All-Stars and a favorite pair of jeans is often enough to make a bad day better. But then, sometimes there is that little nuance that makes those All-Stars and jeans even better than that.
I have never understood this antagonism towards intelligence. One, I think there is a disconnect when people vote for people “like them” and then complain about the poor quality of elected officials and two, I think Americans have a giant intellectual inferiority complex, complicated by a diminished set of expectations for themselves that developed during their experiences with education.
I have met many people who do not think of themselves as intelligent who are in fact, intelligent, but simply because they do not have the confidence to believe in their own abilities, they tend to defer to those who seek power. And that deferral sets them up for a cycle of belief and betrayal that further diminishes their expectations.
On the other hand, when I taught a class on the Renaissance, I took my college students to the Phoenix Art Museum. After walking through the exhibits and showing them the PUBLIC research library in the museum, one of my students turned to me and said, “That was really cool. I didn’t know that we were allowed to come here.” I thought at first she meant the research library, but then I realized she meant the entire museum itself. This was a smart kid, a good kid, and she didn’t know that she was allowed to go to a PUBLIC art museum.
I think the careful erosion of quality education by conservative (I won’t say Republican, because that’s not correct) entities in this United States has led a lot of people to feel like there are a lot of places they are not allowed to go. They are not smart or cultured enough. Because education funding has been continually gutted, people without extra financial support or academic traditions already part of their family’s resources had mediocre instruction in school: it wasn’t interesting, it didn’t serve their needs, etc. And as a result, their only experience with the place where many of us gained a solid sense of our intelligence and developed a reasonably healthy and reliable relationship with it (as opposed to Homer Simpson’s relationship with his intellect – “Brain, I don’t like you and you don’t like me…”) was unsatisfactory and unfulfilling. At the same time, the educationally under-served are smart enough to see that having that solid relationship with intelligence is the membership card for doing a lot of really desirable things in this world.
I think the conservative degradation of education funding has its source in an antiquated idea of labor, and what is a suitable expenditure on education for the labor force, based on labor price and expectations. This antiquated idea still clings to a split educational path where workers work and the intellectuals lead. In short, no one believes more in an intellectual elite than the conservatives who use it as a rhetorical pry-bar on those who might otherwise vote against their designs.
In the old USofA, the people who now feel denied this membership card by a lackluster educational experience would have then gone into industry and worked in an auto plant or other factory work where their skills and intelligence that were not perhaps measured well by books & grades could be developed, giving them a sense of honor, identity and self-worth. But conveniently for the captains of industry, they were still undereducated, and therefore their wages would never be more than a certain level, assuring industry a ready supply of labor at a good price to profit ratio.
But those jobs are gone. We don’t make anything anymore. We are now a country where the two industries are retail and Wall Street. And there are very few opportunities to develop a sense of honor and identity if you are working in retail or service. The wages required to make a profit for the retail industry are so low, they are insulting even to the worst educated. We have people discussing minimum wages as living wages when the minimum wage was originally meant to be like the minor leagues in baseball. It isn’t supposed to be comfortable, because you are supposed to go to the major leagues. You weren’t supposed to stay in the minors for your entire life. Now we have way too many people stuck in the minor leagues.
Where the frig am I going with this – just that I can see where a candidate like Palin is the backlash to the death of the industrial revolution in this country, just like the defeat of the bail-out package is a denial of the new central role of the investment industry to our national economy. We are going through a major transition in national identity, very similar to some of the adjustments that people in Eastern Europe had to go (and are still going) through when the “new” international economy arrived after the Wall went down.
Those people in Eastern Europe who have language skills, who are resourceful and resilient are doing really well. They are the burgeoning middle class. Those people who have no language skills, who are conservative in their ability to shift with the times, who are middle-aged or from families whose identity is linked with industry & mining, are having a tremendous difficulty. As a result, there is backlash of conservatism and ultra-nationalism, along with a tremendous amount of nostalgia for a system that was proven to be economically bankrupt in the 1980’s. In Eastern Europe, this means communist parties get perhaps 20-30% of the vote in elections on nostalgia & backlash alone. Here, it means that candidates that espouse conservative recidivist ideas like “family values,” traditional simplistic responses to new multiplex issues, and maintain a belief in fundamentalist power structures, probably get about 20-30% of the vote in elections from a group of people who are totally under-served by an economy in which factories no longer have a place.
I think that’s Palin’s role here. To make solid a 30% of voters that McCain can add 21% to by convincing a few slow-moving moderates & paranoid senior citizens and thus eek out a win. And I am going to bet, that it will be McCain, not Palin, who will fail to hold up his end of the bargain.
