Though Cho Seung-Hui was not a teenager, he sure acted like one.
Neuroscientists have made much of the relatively late myelinization of the frontal cortex, so that teenagers often are lacking in frontally mediated cognitive skills such as perspective taking ability, empathy, and anticipation of consequences. Developmentally, such abilities often don’t come on-line until the late teens or early twenties. So, many teens who lack external controls are in essence developmental psychopaths - though, fortunately, it is rare for them to engage in the Columbine-like planning that is required for a murderous rampage.
But even a brief examination of Cho’s obsessive urge to film himself, his comic-book poses, and his inability to engage in any authentic encounters with others reveals that he was operating in a world of superficial images and neurological narcissim. He didn’t care about other people because, in essence, he didn’t know they exist. The statements of relatives indicates that Cho was “cold” since early childhood, suggesting that he was somewhere on the spectrum of autism. Autistic individuals often form a fascination with a single classification of objects - whether it’s table legs or weapons. One high functioning autistic man I evaluated in the past - and who engaged in an impulsive and dangerous assault - was fascinated by NASA and the space program. He knew the names and accomplishments of every astronaut but had little awareness on the inner life of his roommate.
David Brooks in an insightful column (NY Times; 04-19-07) discusses the genie that has been let out of the bottle in uncovering the neural sequences, or absence of such, that appear to facilitate criminal behavior. The blame your brain approach is the elephant in the room of the criminal justice system, and who will be surprised when every legal defense is accompanied by the appropriate magnitic resonance images? The truth of the matter is that the deck with which each of us is playing has more or less cards, or different cards, than the next man’s or woman’s. And thus the games that we play with each other are according to rules that vary from game to game, and even from hand to hand.
And that means that we are lost in a quandary when attempting to determine if Mr. Cho should be the focus of our anger or pity. Did he, indeed, ever stand a chance of becoming a complete, competent person? Or was he predestined to evolve involve into the one-dimensional rage-filled cartoon character that he eventually became?
If he was nothing more than a genetically programmed mass murderer, then what of our society’s much ballyhooed defense of individual freedom, of free will? And what of our rage at the terrible terrorists responsible for 9-11, were they too a few neurons short of a full deck? What of the child molesters who represent our society’s current scarlet sinners? There is neuropsychological reason to believe that the temporal lobes of pedophiles show grievous anomalies that may motivate their perverse preferences. Are they too truly mad rather than bad? And if that makes a difference, is it a difference that makes a difference?
The implication of neuro-biological determinism is that the medical and psychiatric paternalism of decades past could well return, for if it is forces external to your free will that determine your behavior, then it is forces external to you that must, in situations of danger, restrict your behavior. The moment that we discover that free will is an epiphenomenon of our capacity for self-consciousness is the moment that documents like the Constitution become extraneous, and liberty becomes a quaint concept, like the flat earth, that people believed before they knew the truth.
The irony is that the cognitively limited murderers like Cho may play a huge role in changing how we understand human behavior, and in this way his narcissistic rantings may capture an element of truth, and he will become the dark super antihero he always longed to be.
Earlier this month, in quick succession, two older men in the Boston area shot strangers with whom they had been involved in traffic related incidents. In one a 60 year old man shot and killed a father who was holding his infant daughter. In another, a 55 year old man shot a 17 year old boy and his mother.
The circumstances of the shootings were utterly different but of course they fueled a resurgence of media play about a supposed epidemic of road rage. As Michael Fumento pointed out in a 1998 Atlantic Monthly, article it was the invention of the alliterative term “road rage”, rather than a precipitant increase in traffic related homicides, that contributed to the elevation of this phenomenon to epidemic status. According to Fumento, the term first appeared in 1988 and its use increased incrementally in subsequent years despite a significant downturn in aggressive altercations on the nations roads. Like baseball fields, if you build a term that captures a socially dynamic concept, even if it is totally specious, they will come.
Similarly, a recent Harvard Medical School study determined that most Americans will suffer from a mental illness at some point in their lives. Of course this may be related to the fact that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders when first published in 1958 specified 60 mental illness; the newest edition, DSM-IV-TR, describes subtle variations in more than 175. DSM-V, due out in 2010, may break the 200 mark. Of course, many newfound mental illnesses present apparently systematic and “scientific” classifications of age-old, commonly understood behavioral patterns. Thus, a bratty kid suffers from Conduct Disorder, an inattentive boy who never finishes his homework from Attention Deficit Disorder, a cautious, fearful person from Anxiety Disorder, and a melancholic whining Irishman, such as myself, from Dysthymia or Depressive Disorder.
As sports fans flock to the new Gillette Stadium (will its name change now that Gillette is being bought out by Proctor & Gamble? Proctor & Gamble Stadium? Will they have betting windows at Proctor and Gamble Stadium?), newly clinically christened patients race to fill the diagnostic categories, and drug companies devise plans to match maladies to medications. The Boston Globe ran a recent story on Intermittent Explosive Disorder, a recently invented mental illness that may fit at least one of the road ragers mentioned above. IED describes a group of individuals who engage in repeated – but intermittent – acts of aggression that result in assaults to others or destruction of property. The intermittent part reveals the fact that it would be difficult and exhausting to explode continuously, though DSM-VI may unveil CED, or Continual Explosive Disorder, and dedicate it to former Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight.
The emergence of road rage as a familiar, if inaccurate, concept and the newly minted plethora of diagnostic categories highlight how market-driven forces interface with our need to impose conceptual structure on human experience. Bottom line, in a capital economy legions of advertisers and manufacturers strive to make money off our need to make sense. An orderly market abhors confusion and engages mystery only when it comes in a form, typically sexual, that can be vitalized through administration of a pill – like Viagra. Thus, if, in your senescence, you cannot perform in the sack like a 23 year old super-athlete, you must have a problem that can be rectified only through the administration of a mass-produced agent. Of course, this is nonsense. But America’s current preoccupation with formulaic modes of sexual performance is a topic for another, not too distant, day.
As we were taught in advanced statistics, of which I recall little, simultaneity does not equal causality, and the apparent magic of coincidence may say more about nature of random events than any deep underlying, or overarching, connectedness. Excessive interpretation or meaning-making may interfere with our ability to see what is happening now; as the man said, “Don’t just do something, stand there.”
I saw them there, in the back of the cupboard, hidden behind all the others as I hurriedly rummaged for a cup for my morning coffee. My eyes paused for a moment. One was adorned with a joyful purple elephant whose raised trunk formed the cup’s handle. From the other leapt out a bright orange tiger with black stripes and ferocious green eyes.
I stood frozen, my hand still sunk in the chaos of the cupboard, as I recalled mornings short years ago when my children, clad still in one piece pajamas, bounced up and down and shouted, “Daddy, I want the tiger cup! Give me the elephant cup!”
The adorning animals made their juice and milk immeasureably more attractive. Sitting at the table with their tousled hair and sleepy eyes, they held the cup out before them between sips, drinking in the wildness of their favorite beast along with the beverage. Then, the liquid half drunk, they dashed off to the next adventure, leaving the cups to be again collected and hurled into the sink for a later wash.
Now these same cups sat hidden behind the serviceable mugs and squeaky clean glasses, gathering dust with the terrible silence of all forgotten toys.
Hesitating, I pushed aside those in front and reached deep within the cupboard for these remnants of the past. Fishing in the dim light I grasped the elephant’s trunk as it had not been grasped in many years, then did the same with the tiger’s tail. I set them down on the table and sat down myself for a closer look.
I wondered what it was about these objects that infused them with such strange charm, for they were no more than trinkets, I saw, purchased when the circus came to town. I remembered how the two boys were amazed at the man on stilts, shocked at the bodies flying through the air, and, long before the last act was done, were sound asleep in their seats, half-eaten bags of cotton candy slipping from their grasp.
It was the joy, the way good feeling was spontaneously translated into movement, that made those moments special. It was the way a child was so possessed by inspiration that his feet would leave the floor in a sudden effort at levitation as he lumped with joy. Back then, small things, decorated cups and cotton candy, brought small people great joy, and joy had the power to raise people up from the ground.
But then one day, one morning, a child awakens heavy enough to hold him to the earth; his body mass passes an imaginary line that prevents effortless, unplanned movement, and, just like that, the long somber trek to adulthood has begun. The features thicken, a bridge arises to connect the forehead to that dimple of a nose, the body stretches, elongating like clay rolled upon a table until the regal head and vulnerable gaze meets yours eye to eye - or from above.
I held elephant cup in my hands, turning it slowly, as the world turns, and yet it took but a few moments to complete its revolutionary journey. Inside the cup were flecks of dirt and cobwebs, some no doubt dating from the last time it was held in small hands. Now the boy who for a few precious moments cared only for its contents was thinking not of chocolate milk but of social relationships, personal achievement, the future. The complete childish immersion in the present had been successfully turned toward the attempted mastery of what is to come, toward the creation of a life with purpose and meaning, toward the gruesome daily toil to forge his own life, his own world. He was on his way to becoming a man.
Like millions before me I was both sad and joyful at what had been gained and what had been lost. The unmitigated joy of childhood, both experienced and witnessed, had now drifted into the fragile world of memory, theirs and mine. I wondered if I had honored it enough when it happened, back then when they were bundles of joy wrapped in their fluffy pajamas - or if anyone ever can.
A recent Friday found me motoring along I-93; then, benefit of the marvelous MapQuest, north through small towns and hills crimson with autumn toward Kittery, Maine. The trees were lovely, the sun was shining, and the traffic wasn’t too bad, but I wasn’t there to ogle the foliage. Rather I was on my way, as participant and presenter, to the Third National Conference on Domestic Violence.
This was a conference, however, with a twist. It was sponsored by two organizations that specialize in documenting domestic violence against men and providing support for such men. The director of one of the organizations, the Domestic Abuse Helpline for Men (1-877-643-2515, access code 0757) contacted me after reading a Ledger column. She asked if I would be willing to attend and present and, with some trepidation, I said I would.
The trepidation related to some of my past experiences with domestic violence advocates in general, and with fathering advocacy groups in particular. All too often they are reservoirs for the uncathected rage of those who somehow manufacture a lifestyle from their belief that they have been dealt with unfairly. As someone once said, they are the kind of people who will forward petitions regarding the conditions in heaven, should they ever make it there. By and large, when faced with one of these hate-motivated individuals, one quickly hear a voice in one’s head telling you to create as much distance from them as possible.
But this appeared to be different. The conference organizer had gone on a bit about the nastiness and bias of Aradical feminist groups. I had suggested that feminism was a wonderful philosophy that helped women discover their personal power and which supported, as I do, the goal that women shall someday share equally in civil and economic power in our society. What she was referring to, I said, was not feminism at all but simple anti-masculine anger voiced by those who need a target for the rage that roils around their insides. Indeed many, perhaps most, anti-masculine people are not women at all but rather are man-hating men, or rather males, who for divers reasons get an emotional jolt out of kicking the butts of those of their gender.
The director agreed completely and so changed some of the conference literature so that ir read anti-masculine rather than Aradical feminist. The director herself received phone calls daily of those who had personal experience with this process; she had just spoken to a man who , as a result of false accusations of abuse, had been separated from his children for more than seven years. Finally, on the day before the conference, after years of legal struggle, an enterprising attorney had gotten a judge to let the father see his daughter. On the night of my arrival we all went to dinner. The father had had his visit and, by surprise, his 10 year old son had shown up as well. There was an air of celebration and possibility. Because regional administrators in the domestic violence community had labeled the conference a gathering of batterers registration had been less then hoped for. Domestic violence workers knew that attendance was professional suicide. But who cared? At least one couple had persisted and succeeded, and through their efforts the lives of two children would be returned to something approaching normalcy.
The next day I presented a workshop on The Neuropsychology of Behavioral Control. Strategically, I wanted to remain apart from the gender-based battle, and both my experience and some preliminary research indicated that domestic violence, much of which is both impulsive in nature and accompanied by substance abuse, is not primarily related to one’s sex. Rather, the capacity and willingness to strike someone, again and again and on many occasions, may be related to a deficit in what is called perspective-taking ability.
Perspective-taking ability is a fundamental cognitive task that involves detaching from one’s one angle on the world and imagining, or hypothesizing, about how the world looks, and how it might be experienced, by someone else. This process of self-detachment and hypothesis-testing, research has shown, is largely mediated by the frontal lobes of the brain. To do it well, to use the complexity of our experience to imagine both the thoughts and feelings of another, is a demanding cognitive task that is as capable of being disrupted by brain damage, genetic factors, or neurodevelopmental influences as language functions or any other cognitive skill.
It is for this reason that people who are able to richly and deeply imagine the experience of others are less likely to hurt them. This imaginative, intersubjective skill is the basis of empathy, the capacity to see and feel another’s world. Of course, those less able to imagine another’s perspective are more likely to inflict harm, for they are essentially blind to the impact of their actions on those around them. They are neuropsychological narcissists, isolated on a cognitive island.
Thus, I proposed, the proclivity to batter one’s partner is likely not gender determined; the partner that has his or her feet on the ground@ and is able to see their own actions realistically probably is not going to cause harm to another. Ironically, according to this thinking, if you start a group of Avictims some of those who rush to join it will have perspective taking deficits, because narcissists habitually search for reasons to externalize responsibility for their own aberrant behavior. This has been the psychological basis (often inaccurate in actuality) of the long recognized relationship between seeing oneself as a victim and allowing oneself to be a perpetrator B of child abuse, sexual assault, or domestic violence.
It turned out that enough people attended to fill the room to overflowing and their participation was positive. As I drove back through the shining hills I realized again how much needs to be done to allow men to re-enter family life in America; change the consciousness of poorly informed probate and criminal court judges, work to induce government bureaucracies to allow themselves to be informed by empirical research on domestic violence, struggle to get people to sever their dependence on anger and resentment. It was a big job, but a small group in Maine had made a start, and maybe, in time, that will make all the difference.
It was the kind of encounter with an adolescent that has become all too common. The child, upset about family problems – or perhaps just displaying the narcissism typical of so many teenagers – was out of control. She began smashing vases, kicking furniture, all the while screaming out her rage. Not satisfied with the destruction, she began assaulting her mother, who, with some difficulty, was able to restrain her daughter.
But her daughter escaped and burst from the house. She ran to the local police station and told them her mother had assaulted her, showing off the small red marks that resulted from her mother’s restraint. In a matter of minutes the police were barging in the door of the house, where the mother remained with her younger child. They told her that she was under arrest for assault and battery. There were no injuries to the child, no history of domestic incidents. They put the mother, a local schoolteacher, in handcuffs, drove her to the police station, and put her in a cell.
The following day at her arraignment the mother was told by the judge that, based on the current charges, she could be fined and sentenced to two and one-half years in jail.
In a separate incident a ten year old child was throwing a tantrum in the back seat of his parents’ car. He was angry at them for not allowing him to do what he wanted to do. After yelling at his parents for a while, he played his trump card. He told them that if they did not relent, he would tell the police that they had abused him.
The parents knew what this meant; probable charges of assault and battery on a child, significant payments to a defense attorney, an invasive investigation by protective services workers, placement of their child in a foster home where, in all probability, he would be exposed to genuinely dangerous children, irrevocable introduction of their names into a criminal justice data register that purported to identify potential predators.
As any local police officer knows, the above scenarios are repeated hundreds of times each year in every community, hundreds of thousands of times across the country. Laws, originally created to address domestic violence against women, now require that an arrest be made in any circumstance in which allegations of assault have been lodged. In the vast majority of circumstances, this means that a man is carted off to jail. But the unintended victims of these laws are those most in need of protection: children.
Cartoons? What Cartoons?
By now even peace-mongering, Volvo-driving suburban Massachusetts residents are aware that Muslims world-wide are reacting violently to reported mocking depictions of Mohammed in various cartoons, originally published weeks ago in a Danish newspaper.
European Muslims initially – and appropriately – stridently voiced their displeasure, since, according to the dictates of Islam, any depictions of the Prophet are expressly forbidden. But as the protest spread it gained in virulence; Muslims first demanded an apology from the Danish Government – apparently for allowing such unpleasant freedom of expression in its nation – and then burned down the Danish embassy in Damascus, calling for the execution of those responsible for the insulting images.
But those of us in freedom-loving America can still ask – What cartoons?
That’s because we have never seen them. And we have never seen them because…
We’ll leave that sentence unfinished for now. The critical element in this debate is the assertion by Muslims that others who are not of their faith must nonetheless abide by its strictures – or die.
We of the West have long moved beyond such prosaic expressions of religiosity. A commentator recently described a European art show – in France, of course – which contained a depiction of Jesus with an erect penis compete with condom.
Offensive? Sure. But worthy of murder? That would hardly be Christlike.
And there is the rub. We in the West have engaged in our fair share of violence, but in the end we understand that, in other than the most extreme circumstances – and perhaps not even then - it is unacceptable, and represents a failure of the human spirit.
But Islam, at least in its more recent manifestations, appears to be more endorsing of violence. The rage and lust for violence expressed by Muslims in response to the cartoons is couched in ecclesiastical garments but in fact represents the individual anger of Muslims who believe they have been rendered an “unforgivable insult.” Young men, primarily, have long had a longing for riot and mayhem, and the licensciousness of the Danish press has provided the youth – and their spiritual mentors - with just the ticket for indulging those longings.
Every mob needs an enemy, a clear focus for its collective - and individually unreasonable – hostility. Supposed leaders, many of them simple psychopaths, must find a reason to collect the unemployed, vagrant masses in the public square so they can display themselves at their head. And if some people must die and some freedoms be trampled upon in the process, then so be it.
It is ironic that the same dynamic occurs in American Rapper culture as rap “artists” manipulate their genitals on stage and prate endlessly about gang rape and gangster violence, the better to empty the pockets of their naïve, libido-driven audience.
The truth of the matter is that we in America have not seen the legendary cartoons because American editors have been intimidated by the threats of faraway zealots. Even the Catholic Church, to its shame, appeared to legitimize the violence in releasing a statement that “The right to freedom of thought and expression…cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiments of believers.” Does that include Satanists and the Jonestown cult?
It appears that a line has been drawn in the battle of cultures, and, silently, tacitly, we have agreed not to step over it. I for one could care less about seeing the cartoons, one of which supposedly depicts a guy in a turban with fuse attached, but I am concerned about swapping the freedoms we have spend centuries evolving for a fear based reaction to mob justice.
Now, in response to bad art and parody, the purveyors of a sham Islam want blood, but are in reality exploring how far brute bullying will get them. If personal experience, as well as history, has told us anything it is that indulging bullies does not placate them and make them sensitive citizens. It merely ups the ante in a circular game of extortion.
So, America, print the cartoons, so I can ignore them – but feel better for retaining the freedom that makes us who we are.
When carrying out my obligatory post-graduate European wanderings decades ago one thing I ran into a lot was Australians. These Aussie youths of yesterday – and they were overwhelmingly male – were invariably courteous, kind and deeply sincere. They explored the world with a quiet respect for other cultures. And they were only too willing to share a sandwich or a Kronen.
I was mildly surprised when, while trekking through the hills of northern Thailand two years ago I again found myself accompanied by young Australians. As a lone American, and by far the oldest person in the group, I was the odd bloke out. As sweat pored off my brow like rain – of which there was not a drop - the gracious young gracious Thai guides watched my face concernfully, for they didn’t want an American tourist experiencing a major cardiac event on their watch.
With the Australians, many of them couples, I was less impressed; they clung together clannishly and guffawed endlessly, as we sat around campfires in villages that had never seen an electric motor, about the beer halls of Sydney or Melbourne. Conversationally and imaginatively, they seemed to rush back to their native land at every opportunity. They played the cliquish social games appropriate to an upper middle class high school, and they had less curiosity for the remarkable foreignness that surrounded them than for frolicing at the next bar bash.
I realized, sadly, that these were the children of the Aussie wanderers I had known a generation earlier, and, walking through the village of one of our guides, I imagined the quiet torment of their parents, who undoubtedly thought that their children were soft and hollow in the places where they need to be hard and full, and visa-versa.
So I was not entirely surprised when I read of the recent violent assaults by gangs of Australian youths on minorities they discovered at local beaches. The photos showed masses of pale porcine kids pounding anyone darker than themselves, and later expanding their aggression from the beaches to the buses and streets and beyond. Of courage, fighting skill or physical strength they had none, but they had numbers, and they were using their advantage to the fullest.
When I saw their baggy, drooping pants and slack tattooed arms I noted an element of this shocking social evolution that was not being discussed in the endless self-examining diatribes in news reports. It was the fact that these youthful pack-maulers were a long-overdue Australian import of the current American fascination with the culture of crime and violence.
American suburban youths who have never made association with a belt and who import hand gestures from the ‘hood are themselves desperately searching for an identity that, to an immature but over-indulged mind, appears to provide a shortcut to power and significance. Why face struggle head-on when you can cop a piece and cap some poor slob from a far distance, and thus earn mass respect? Why work ceaselessly and earnestly toward some grand goal, when, like Tookie Williams, you can be a cold hearted killer to the end and millionaires and movie stars will burst their lungs singing your praises?
So what if, every week in the local jails, I talk with recovering gangsters who would gladly surrender the Lexus and the bling and would happily work fifty hours a week as a housepainter if only they could start again with their freedom? The global uber-culture commands that bad is good, and assault, rape and murder are merely means of gaining your props - and someday, if you are lucky, your glorious misbehavior will be commemorated on Oz.
I would venture to propose that the current Aussie adolescent palace revolution is not primarily a manifestation of racism but rather represents a simple expansion of the dominant media culture into the southern hemisphere. The lonely, welcoming, open-minded Aussies of the previous generation are watching themselves slide into the Pacific as we of the colder northern climes have been washed into the Atlantic. Youth rules, and youths, in general, are challenged in the wisdom department. The best pub or crack-pipe are not goals worth living for, at least if you want to live for anything beyond the merest sliver of the present.
The conflict is thus more generational than ethnic; if we Boomers offended our elders with long hair, promiscuous (if all too rare) sex, and ragged clothing, and we therefore accepted such in our offspring, they will find something worse to elicit that response of shock and reprobation, and, for the moment in Australia, pummeling minorities will do the trick.
Australia’s elders can look to America’s young men, more likely to go to jail than college, for a glimpse of the near future. And, in time, as they struggle to contain their own over-indulged generation, they will someday look back on the beach brawls of the present as a quaint prelude – for the worst is yet to come.
I recently came across a review in the Atlantic magazine of two timely books; The Bitch in the House, authored by a prominent New York editor, and it’s accompanying volume, The Bastard on the Couch, by her husband. The books, currently racing up the best-seller lists, are collections of essays by UAYP’s (Upwardly Arrived Young People) describing their struggles with life, parenthood, and what, these days, passes for marriage.
Of course I haven’t read both books, or even one of them – who has time? In fact, I neglected to peruse much of the rather lengthy review. But I took in enough to get the general idea, and, for a guy, that’s enough.
The gist is that contemporary UAYP women are, shall we say, profoundly discontented with having it all: big time job, kids, husband, house, cars, money. Having everything, of course, turns out to be not all that it was cracked up to be. Everything is, by a long shot, not enough. There is still fatigue, exasperation, disappointment, pain, mortality and, let’s face it, an unyielding bout of profound existential rage. Thus, the bitch in the house.
But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is the bastard sitting on the couch, feet up on the light colored fabric, watching a baseball game, who smiles and says, “Yes, dear,” - but doesn’t move - when he is presented with a carefully delineated list of 50% of the day’s domestic responsibilities. It seems the New Man – sensitive, verbal, good hygiene – isn’t really all that much different from the Old Man; he rolls with the punches, gets the job done, understands that saying less is more supportive of communication than saying more, uses what works when what is wanted is not available, and generally finds life, even when it is most arduous, pretty enjoyable. That, it turns out, is the most exasperating.
The Gen X’er’s reluctant realization that strife and struggle are an essential element of the full life was discovered – albeit tardily - by the Boomers before them, and by countless generations before that. The surprise is that – well, the surprise is that it’s a surprise to so many to discover that unremitting bliss is not among the options presented to us in this veil of tears.
The issue then becomes how well even privileged Americans cope with the vicissitudes of life; women have been set up, if you will, to believe that they can, and even should, have it all. This expectation predisposes some women to feel disappointed, short-changed, downright ripped off, when they realize that what they have is less, maybe even much less, than all.
Men, conversely, have for generations put little widgets together in factories, dug holes, painted houses, fixed toilets and in general performed tasks that, while not inherently all that gratifying, made loaves available for consumption on the family table. Survival was the goal. Anything beyond survival was a bonus and even, perhaps, vaguely sinful.
This was the Lesson of the Nuns; they invested great effort in convincing the sixty of us crammed into our fourth grade classroom that we were scum, and we deserved to suffer, and if we suffered with a sufficient degree of silent nobility we might, if we didn’t swear too much or enjoy sex or make too much money, earn a reward in some other place we could not even imagine. Pain and frustration were the normative human condition; pleasure, surreptitiously obtained and enjoyed, was always accompanied by a degree of surprise. There’s nothing like winning when you expect to lose.
This orientation, while, admittedly, one of significant maladjustment, has its upside. It engenders patience, tolerance, acceptance. Most of all, it leads one to try to make the best of a mediocre, or even bad, situation, and to realize that some lemonade may be able to be made from all those lemons. This is not the UAYP attitude.
What else apparently is missing from these books – not having read them, I only surmise – is a deep discussion of the effects of UAYP’s attitudes on children. It seems to me that excessively positive domestic expectations contributes to two classes of child maladjustment, both of whom end up in the same place. I see many adolescents, rained in such unchallenging environments, who appear to believe that life should be easy, and therefore distress is a sign that something is wrong. Thus they pursue constant good feelings through television, fantasy sports (rather than the realistic struggle of genuine athletic effort), food, sex, and drugs – not always in that order. A second group, with less demanding expectations, still experience a world without real limits and thus find their way to peer-induced drug abuse and dependency. They both, eventually, end up talking to me in jail.
The first group has a poor prognosis; every twinge of physical or psychological discomfort elicits anger and panic, and a demand for an immediate solution. Many of them will have great difficulty understanding that tolerating discomfort is essential to long term success at anything, and will lurch again and again toward short term gratification.
Individuals of the second group are often a joy to be with; they take responsibility for their actions and wonder if they have what it takes to undue the wreckage that an excess of freedom has wrought. They have to learn to be 100% responsible for supplying their own limits, and for that the UAYP lifestyle has not prepared them well.
The bottom line is that, whether your in the house or on the couch, or both, life is, at best, an intermingling of joy and suffering and - if you’ll promise not to tell the nuns – learning to appreciate both is the secret to another level of satisfaction that the UAYP’s may never discover.
People have been begging me not to write about divorce. But I can’t help it. My fingers dance over the keys, reflexively typing out the word: divorce. It’s a rich topic.
I have written often in these pages that I was born in a crowded urban neighborhood where divorce was unknown. Pain, loss, even violence, yes, but no divorce. Kids grew up in a troubled family, a family that was familiar, then ensconced themselves on the psychotherapist’s couch to discuss their family engendered neurosis. It was a sweet life.
Women assert that divorce has liberated them from the confining bonds of the past. Men, conversely, must have enjoyed losing their fingers in the factory or wrestling with angry dogs as they delivered the mail. The conjugal agreement of the past was one of finely shared misery. Life dealt the blows, and families contained them, progressing across the course of time with an innocence that has been forgotten in today’s take-charge, fate-free culture.
Back then, divorce carried a stigma resonant of the Christian stigmata, the spiritual wound that originates from the inside. Now, the media mega-stars, celluloid figures of television and movie fame, marry and divorce with the seasons, exchanging mates like N.B.A. teams trade free agent forwards. The chemistry is bad, so move on. Now, most people are divorced, remarry, divorce again, marry again in a wild, heavily spiced soup of names and homes and offspring that sorely challenges the geneological skills of the lawyers hired to sort out the mess.
Many of the young people I talk to today appear to have emerged from Hillary Clinton’s amorphous village, drifting toward adulthood and the strange stresses of autonomy while wondering how they can leave a place they have never really been. The ancient familial archetypes of mother and father have faded to a nebulous, ghostlike status; old people who drop into your life, hang around a while, only to drop out again to be rediscovered in Phoenix or Miami or Chicago entwined in some new network, with new cousins or half-siblings you most likely have never met. Little do you know that the man who fixes your car or the woman who diagnoses your flu might have emerged from the same gene pool as yourself. But you walk on, just another stranger in the great grand modern extended family.
Recently I talked to a woman who had some problems in her marriage, went to therapy with her spouse, had five or six good years, then things went south again and she sought a divorce. I wondered; what if you went back to therapy, had a second five or six more good years before the next crisis? That’s twelve good years out of fourteen; not bad, in my book. Today, a fifteen percent misery rate is grounds for divorce.
I wonder if the casualty of easy divorce is mature love; the tolerance of another person’s imperfections because you value their assets, the unique gifts they bring to the game. To know someone is surely not only to love them, but also to see their weakness, their fatigue, their long passages of struggle. All of us are born flawed and, sadly, remain so throughout our lives. These days, to be flawed is to tempt rejection, so the great modern game is to shine like a movie star every minute of your life.
What happened to the great, moribund figures of the past, Tolstoy, Twain, Fitzgerald, who somehow gave human misery the stamp of greatness? The gambler, the idiot, the social misfit each carried a complexity born of the tolerance of struggle, a willingness to wed themselves to an identity that shone as clear as the stars on a winter night. The consequence of divorce is the belief that people can swap personalities as easily as they do marital partners; always merry and bright.
Now it is struggle, tolerance, and pain that carry the stigma, not divorce. It is bad to feel bad, a double dose of self-rejection that sends the sufferer sprinting for those imaginary greener pastures that live in the media-compartmentalized half-hour segments radiating softly into our living rooms.
But after the set is off and we sit staring out the window, watching the snow cover a browning lawn, growing old with each passing moment, then we wonder what all the fuss was about, why we worried that the future would be no better than the past, when in reality all we ever had was the present, a present that was lost before it was even possessed.
Now we realize that mid-life divorce is the modern rite of passage, the crisis that is the opportunity to grow way more than you ever wanted to. Change is good because it avoids the terrible stresses of tolerance and keeps us flitting about the surface like figure skaters performing pirouettes on thin ice. When the collapse comes the immersion is sudden and cold, the edges fragile, the consequences of frantic, and tardy, struggle simply more fractured ice.
Stillness, and sameness, lets the ice grow thick so you can drive a truck on it, drill a hole and maybe catch a trout. It takes time and patience and a willingness to put the tedium out of your mind. After divorce you wonder where you are going to get your sameness, or if you will once again be caught up in the surface dance with all the other wounded skaters.
There; I wrote about divorce again, maybe, my friends hope, for the last time. Or, judging the depth of this quintessentially modern phenomenon, maybe not.
Anyone who has read or seen Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove knows something about the complicated nature of second chances. The story opens with two old codgers, former Texas Rangers, whiling away their golden years drinking and herding cattle around their dusty ranch on the Mexican border. The many heroic feats they performed to help settle the West are drifting ever further into the past, and it looks like their adventurous lives will end with a whimper rather than a bang, in a more or less pleasant, if tedious, retirement.
But then one of the two hears tales of a lovely land to the north, where wide streams of cold water rush out of the mountains, where land is there for the taking, and where the grass is lush and green. It takes a while, but eventually he is able to drag his buddy out of his comfortable drunken lethargy and embark with him on one, last, gigantic adventure.
The consequences of the decision are huge. Men, both good and bad (Including his partner who was so reluctant to set out in the first place), die, and much is lost, but, with the sacrifice, comes the beginning of something new. The horizon of knowledge is pushed a bit farther west, and the great wheel of life keeps turning.
McMurtry is not naïve enough to suppose that courage and steadfastness necessarily bring material comfort and rewards. Instead, as the tumultuous days pass those who do the right thing quite frequently suffer dire consequences. The good die young, middle aged, and old, and they suffer a good deal in between. To know this, and to nonetheless continue to strive to act rightly, is the moral lesson of the story.
These lessons shine brightly as I, and so many other men and women, decide how to handle a massive mid-life shift. In the past, for eons, mid-life and seniority primarily involved carrying on, guiding a new generation, and putting the final touches on a legacy. Now, when most middle aged men find themselves cast into the street, battered by a rapacious court system, and systematically degraded by a megalopic anti-masculine cultural power complex (more on that another day), there are tough lessons to be learned about good and evil.
The good part is that as we middle aged drifters consider our new adventures we can now bring to the decision making process some of the wisdom that we lacked back when we made those same choices the first time around. The tragic truth is that wasted and misspent youth cannot be reclaimed; it is gone forever, and while divorce formally ends something it does not change history or its effects. But eventually we lost men must set about the task of creating a new life, and while the passage of time has narrowed some possibilities - some have become so narrow they are utterly invisible (becoming a brain surgeon, a world class journalist or musician, raising a family on a ranch in Uzbekistan) - those that remain have deepened, exposing subtle tones and qualities, echoes that the haste of yesterday left us deaf to hear.
The central challenge of mid-life change is the same one that has faced humanity forever; when you finally get old enough to see the truth, you may find that it’s not too pretty, and you wonder if you have the remaining courage and fortitude to confront it. Shakespeare poetically described “the proud man’s contumely” and the famous “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” After you’ve been mugged, and you hear the joyful laughter of those who have plundered you, its hard not to organize your energy around fantasies of vengeance, or silent sleep.
Part of the problem is that vengeance and justice can, if looked at from just the right angle, bear a striking similarity. There is no such gratification as thinking we are doing the right thing and, in the process, thoroughly besting our tormenters. This prosaic formula has driven a thousand best selling novels and television shows. But there is a saying, I think it is by Byron, that “it is the highest treason, to do the right thing, for the wrong reason.” McMurtry would drink to that, for it is, unfortunately, true. We can’t serve two masters, and vengeance’s mastery is all-consuming.
It’s a strange thing to know what you know in mid-life, and nonetheless to sally forth to joust with new windmills that one is too old to believe are dragons. As wizened, damaged veterans, we understand how much, in the past, we relied on the blindness of youth to provide us with the initiative to stumble forward. To know what one is doing is a great blessing that becomes a heavy burden as the decades slide away.
McMurtry’s heroes probably knew that they, like us, will never get to revel in the luscious green grass of paradise, or, if they do, it wouldn’t be for long. That’s the price we pay for experience; and, when all is considered, for us, as for his heroes, it is still not a good enough reason for not setting out at all.
You know the drill; right after the new associate is hired your marriage partner begins spending late nights at the office, first one, then two, then four. Finally, you notice that the suitcases are gone and you find a note on the kitchen table: Honey, color me gone.
Or you support the spouse through long years of law school or a medical degree program, sharing the search for paper topics, offering advice on delicate negotiations with faculty members, racing to the library in panicked all-night searches for data. Shortly after the joyful degree-granting ceremonies, though, the good doctor makes a house call, and never returns.
Or, the love of your life decides to take a break from the grind, try massage or art therapy or drama class, go smell the flowers in Sri Lanka. They assume the lotus position and months later, years later, you’re still waiting for payment of the VISA bill, forget a note of thanks.
The wonderful thing about women’s lib is that it has democratized the occurrence of the above situation, each of which has as its ambitious adventurer a women, and as its faithful domestic a man. We still live with the stereotype of the craven Casanova, slinking out the back door to two-time his dutiful damsel. We feel certain that a guy, any guy, driven by hormones more powerful than the loudest Concorde, will throw it all over, wife, kids, house, future, for a ten minute flop with a stripper named Suzi.
Wrong. My experience, both personal and professional, is that if you want to find a man you need look in only two places; at work or at home. Occasionally, and in a hypnogogic funk, you may find him traversing between the two. But even the time spent in transit will be restricted to the minimum necessary to get from point A to point B, or back. When Suzi flutters her alluring eyelashes he will be utterly absorbed by Karen’s soccer game and will not even notice. When the new associate sits fetchingly on the corner of his desk he will have eyes only for the family photos hard by her left thigh. Not only will he not plunge his teeth into temptation’s apple, he won’t even pluck it from the tree.
The truth is that, in the majority of circumstances, it is the woman who leaves, and more and more often she is leaving behind not only her painfully inadequate spouse but her children as well. A friend’s wife, a mental health professional, recently abandoned the offspring of her second marriage, twenty years after leaving the child of her first, to get it on with a guy twenty years her junior. Another friend’s wife, also a mental health professional, left to shack up with her long term female client, leaving their two adopted children. Now dad has to pay for ex-wife to live with former patient in a far-away city, as youngest adopted son ragefully steals his way into jail. Social work licensing boards are not interested in egregious violations of ethical conduct if the perpetrator lacks the required male sexual equipment.
Recently a colleague - a woman - wondered aloud why so many nice, nurturing, nebishes like myself end up twisting our spines trying to yank the knives from our backs, stilletos sunk in by spouses whose trust we thought we had earned through years of fidelity. Do nice guys have some kind of karmetric magnetism for knife wielding women? While I didn’t relish being included in this none too studly population, the question is a good one. For many men the choice is a simple, if painful, one; get used or get lost.
The problem is that even if a guy is willing to sacrifice most everything, including much of his masculinity, to save his family, it still doesn’t work. The women who used to love too much knew well that however precious is the gift offered to a narcissist it will invariably fall endlessly into a void of rage and pain. No matter how much you do, it is never right, no matter how much you give, it is never enough. When the time comes, the men who love too much, like the women of old, will be thrown in the garbage like yesterday’s lunch, there to be sundered by raccoons and stray dogs.
But besides that, everything’s fine, thanks, no bitterness here, no resentment, no grief among us guys who loved too much, just the rapidly evolving realization that the naïve dreams we dragged with us into paired adulthood were just that; the naïve dreams of guys who believed that, when the bell rang, you could trust the person supposedly closest to you to watch your back, to take care of you like you took care of them. You imagine, some years hence, the cool compress on your forehead, wielded by a warm and familiar hand, as you pack it in with the Big C. Tis better to have loved and lost and all that, but at least you thought you were going to get to play nine innings.
One of the things we yupster rejects learned in all this is that just because we think a deal is done doesn’t make it so. Like they say, love is not enough, sometimes it’s not even close to enough, so you pick up what’s left and go on a wiser man, maybe even a better man. One of the buddies described above is worried that maybe he’ll love too much again; once burned, twice shy.
But then again, what he fears most that he may never get the chance.
A few short months ago, I visited New York City with my family. We laughed and clapped at the circus, watched enrapt at a Broadway Show, laughed till our stomachs hurt at a comedy club on Times Square. Oh, yes; and we meandered through the business district, walking through the lobby of the Trade Center’s twin towers and gaping up like hicks at their astounding elevation. For more than one reason, there will never again be another trip like it.
Since then my family has fallen down into dust like those towers. I live in a different house, have been disenfranchised as a parent to my children, and stumble through a legal system as tortuous as it is blind. Perhaps it is only the distinctive madness of a lost man, but I wonder about the coincidence of these events, one so global and historical in its causes and implications, the other so deeply personal and intimate. If fate has chosen to radically alter not only the skyline of New York but also the horizons of my world, is there some deep, secret meaning in its turnings?
The men - and women - who were responsible for the chaos of September 11 have been well described. They were born in a distant land, raised on a stereotype of Americans as demons, hurled toward death with a firm though insane belief that the torture of others will somehow contribute to a just future. Many of them may not have ever met an American before they killed some, and all of them have certainly never loved an American. Known as “sleepers”, their relations with Americans had the as-if quality of dreams, where the only imagination at work is one’s own. The subtle shadings of everyday life could not be allowed to interfere with the florid hues of extremist ideology.
Most terrifying, before we came to know the unreal images of crashing towers and burning rubble, had been the screaming, flag-burning masses from Tehran or Bagdhad or Afghanistan, the twisted masks of rage that shocked us as we sat in our living rooms, good decent people who go forth to do what we can each day. Why would they want to destroy us, we who have never done them any harm, who would give them a free meal or a job or the shirt from our back if they needed it? But nonetheless here it comes, that tower piercing plane, over and over again, reducing our dreams of safety and simplicity to ashes.
I watched these gruesome images flicker across the screen of a strange TV set, seated on a different couch, the light from a new lamp illuminating the unread newspaper before me. It was a weird, unsettling moment. Disaster echoed through the world and resonated down to that belly-level reverberator we call a self, thrusting forth a strange consistency from the colossal stage of grand events to the small domestic miseries of personal alienation.
Has some wave begun to pass over the world, I wondered, has evil found a way to annihilate us not only from the outside but from the inside as well? It seemed to me that the superficial stereotyping that is so characteristic of global jihad is not different from the mundane domestic assassination that happens, household by household, in a million American homes each year. You demonize the other, you make them small and strange and insignificant, and then you destroy them. You destroy them with a sense of virtue and passion, perhaps backed up by the rule of law, you destroy them with a razor or a bomb or a plane or a judge’s ruling, and the wreckage that results is seen as no more than collateral damage in war that the self-righteous will call just.
It’s called externalization, and it occurs whenever we take the evil within us and project it onto someone else. It can happen between nations, and it will happen between spouses, and it is a legitimate question which is the more disastrous. When we take our hate and anger and shoot it like a doctor’s inoculation into another, we provide a stern test for their moral immune system. Will they be able to resist the viral urge to vengeance, to do unto others as has been done unto them? Will we? Will I?
Towers, of course, can be rebuilt and new planes will be fabricated and the walls of the Pentagon will look just like new. But what really is lost is the sense of safety that we shared when we believed that the sky would not fall, the security that allowed us to lose ourselves in a movie or a good book, the sense of closeness that developed when a group of warm bodies came together and called themselves a family.
For better and for worse, for richer and for considerably poorer, the jihad goes on in theatres both large and small. We have done wrong, and wrong has been done to us, and for reasons related to the unknowable twistings of the universe we are now the ones left with the smoking rubble. In the end, it is no more than that. In the end, and in the beginning.
One of the hardest kernels to come out of the recently collated national census data is the fact that now less than one in four American households contains a biologically related mother, father, and child or children, or what used to be known, before it exploded, as a nuclear family. This is the kind of information that makes perenially sophomoric scribes like myself lunge forward with factoid lust. Nuclear family, begone!
Informationally jaded readers will gloss over this new nugget as we must a thousand others every day; a bomb in Jerusalem, captives in Columbia, a shootout at the local high school. Among the lurid tales of the FBI’s latest screw up, NASA’s most recent metallic gift to the universe, or the story of some southern preacher discovered en flagrante with his son’s mistress, the blasting of the nuclear family seems small news indeed.
But it is hard to believe that in the cramped neighborhoods of my youth the home that did not house an intact family was a rare exception. In my childhood, divorce was not only unusual, it was unknown. Up and down the pavement of the tenement laden avenues the family stories raged; alcoholism, infidelity, mental illness, death, all were common. But through it all there was no question among the horde of us youth screaming through the streets that the family and all its parts, for better and for worse, would be there when we stumbled in at night.
We were scandalized, a quarter century ago, by the information that 30% of minority births were to single parents, and ten percent of teen age girls would have a child. As adolescent boys we searched endlessly for such girls, but find them we could not. For us Catholic schoolboys, rebellion consisted of slyly substituting check socks for the uniform required grey.
Now, more than two thirds of all minority births, and more than a third of Caucasian births, are to single mothers. You don’t have to be a Rhodes scholar (I’m not) to predict what the percentages will be a quarter century from now.
We are left with the question: is that a bad thing? If we indeed take the time to notice that the nuclear family is disappearing, is its loss something to be mourned?
As a step-adoptive-biological father, and with deepest apologies to step-adoptive parents everywhere, I can tell you there is a difference, and it’s a difference that makes a difference. Noticing your genetic heritage in the shape of an infant’s ear or in the tenor of her cry has an odd and deeply modulating effect on the nervous system of the receiving parent. And sure enough, rates of abuse of all sorts are markedly higher among step and adoptive families, not because step or adoptive parents are bad people but rather because the ratio of stress to attachment is stretched toward discomfort, and there is no access to the cooling waters of the reservoir of biological similarity.
But the most significant implication of the census data is what’s missing; fathers. For fathers, the destruction of the nuclear family means one thing: you’re gone. Either you were never there - single parent birth - or you are escorted out the door - more than nine in ten divorces, more than eighty percent of which are filed by women, result in mother custody.
For men, the nuking of the nuclear family means choosing between never forming a lifelong bond with another adult human being, or returning in mid-life to the lone wolf status appropriate to teen age years. For all too many men the death of the nuclear family means that life is circle from adolescence to adulthood and back to adolescence again.
The myth of the happy-go-lucky fifty year old divorcee dancing merrily with his twenty five year old secretary is just that - no more than a myth. The truth is that men are creatures of habit, searching desperately for a need to fill, for whom the precipitant mid-life discharge from the nuclear family is a prescription for death. Men want attachment, and will suffer anything to preserve attachment. Don’t believe me - just go ask one.
The blowing up of the nuclear family is essentially a strike against men, a statement that in the great lifeboat game of family, men have been voted overboard. They will prowl the streets and sleep in the dumpsters, but in the present and even more so in the future, the man who grows old at his family’s hearth will be a rarity.
What is missing from the discussion about the disappearance of the nuclear family is a genuine, heartfelt examination by men, and among men, of our role in the present and future domestic scene. As we fade from the family, replaced by day care centers and serial surrogates, do we reappear somewhere else, fulfilling some other social function, or do we dematerialize like some Star Trek warrior as he is transposed to the planet Zargon? Is the man of the present and the future a being who needs to learn to enter and depart families, playing the role of father like Broadway stage actors, before moving on to the next opening night in Phoenix or Sacramento?
The role of man as serial father, and short term husband or consort, requires very different skills than the role of father as lifelong model of male identity. Such a role requires a degree of detachment and flexibility that, to say the least, has not been characteristic of the average man of the past. The man cast off from the nuclear family must develop resources of psychological autonomy that are a challenge to even most self-examining male.
The current confusion about the structure of a healthy family, recorded in the census data, reflects men’s ambivalence about male identity, and the fragility of the fathering role. Only one thing is certain; men while have to make up their minds, or learn how to swim.
You know the drill; right after the new associate is hired your marriage partner begins spending late nights at the office, first one, then two, then four. Finally, you notice that the suitcases are gone and you find a note on the kitchen table: Honey, color me gone.
Or you support the spouse through long years of law school or a medical degree program, sharing the search for paper topics, offering advice on delicate negotiations with faculty members, racing to the library in panicked all-night searches for data. Shortly after the joyful degree-granting ceremonies, though, the good doctor makes a house call, and never returns.
Or, the love of your life decides to take a break from the grind, try massage or art therapy or drama class, go smell the flowers in Sri Lanka. They assume the lotus position and months later, years later, you’re still waiting for payment of the VISA bill, forget a note of thanks.
The wonderful thing about women’s lib is that it has democratized the occurrence of the above situation, each of which has as its ambitious adventurer a women, and as its faithful domestic a man. We still live with the stereotype of the craven Casanova, slinking out the back door to two-time his dutiful damsel. We feel certain that a guy, any guy, driven by hormones more powerful than the loudest Concorde, will throw it all over, wife, kids, house, future, for a ten minute flop with a stripper named Suzi.
Wrong. My experience, both personal and professional, is that if you want to find a man you need look in only two places; at work or at home. Occasionally, and in a hypnogogic funk, you may find him traversing between the two. But even the time spent in transit will be restricted to the minimum necessary to get from point A to point B, or back. When Suzi flutters her alluring eyelashes he will be utterly absorbed by Karen’s soccer game and will not even notice. When the new associate sits fetchingly on the corner of his desk he will have eyes only for the family photos hard by her left thigh. Not only will he not plunge his teeth into temptation’s apple, he won’t even pluck it from the tree.
The truth is that, in the majority of circumstances, it is the woman who leaves, and more and more often she is leaving behind not only her painfully inadequate spouse but her children as well. A friend’s wife, a mental health professional, recently abandoned the offspring of her second marriage, twenty years after leaving the child of her first, to get it on with a guy twenty years her junior. Another friend’s wife, also a mental health professional, left to shack up with her long term female client, leaving their two adopted children. Now dad has to pay for ex-wife to live with former patient in a far-away city, as youngest adopted son ragefully steals his way into jail. Social work licensing boards are not interested in egregious violations of ethical conduct if the perpetrator lacks the required male sexual equipment.
Recently a colleague - a woman - wondered aloud why so many nice, nurturing, nebishes like myself end up twisting our spines trying to yank the knives from our backs, stilletos sunk in by spouses whose trust we thought we had earned through years of fidelity. Do nice guys have some kind of karmetric magnetism for knife wielding women? While I didn’t relish being included in this none too studly population, the question is a good one. For many men the choice is a simple, if painful, one; get used or get lost.
The problem is that even if a guy is willing to sacrifice most everything, including much of his masculinity, to save his family, it still doesn’t work. The women who used to love too much knew well that however precious is the gift offered to a narcissist it will invariably fall endlessly into a void of rage and pain. No matter how much you do, it is never right, no matter how much you give, it is never enough. When the time comes, the men who love too much, like the women of old, will be thrown in the garbage like yesterday’s lunch, there to be sundered by raccoons and stray dogs.
But besides that, everything’s fine, thanks, no bitterness here, no resentment, no grief among us guys who loved too much, just the rapidly evolving realization that the naïve dreams we dragged with us into paired adulthood were just that; the naïve dreams of guys who believed that, when the bell rang, you could trust the person supposedly closest to you to watch your back, to take care of you like you took care of them. You imagine, some years hence, the cool compress on your forehead, wielded by a warm and familiar hand, as you pack it in with the Big C. Tis better to have loved and lost and all that, but at least you thought you were going to get to play nine innings.
One of the things we yupster rejects learned in all this is that just because we think a deal is done doesn’t make it so. Like they say, love is not enough, sometimes it’s not even close to enough, so you pick up what’s left and go on a wiser man, maybe even a better man. One of the buddies described above is worried that maybe he’ll love too much again; once burned, twice shy. But then again, what he fears most that he may never get the chance.
I needed some advice about parenting the other day so I went to my most reliable source - the woman who cuts my hair.
Now, if I were a truly new age man I would say “hairdresser” but the fact is that she doesn’t dress my hair, she cuts it, and well.
Like most exclusively healthy relationships, it is one that has developed free of the onerous obligations and restraints of daily life. I show up, she trims my hair, I give her some money. We’re both satisfied. It’s a relationship that works.
What we talk about each month as she clips away is our children; not that we share any, but hers, and mine. We talk about how it is a struggle to be parent these days, that even when you think you’re doing the right thing it can turn out wrong, how a complex modern world, while protecting children from the risks we see, may expose them to dangers we never know.
We talk about the old days, how we banged around in our respective youths, making the mistakes that humans make before they know which end is up. She acknowledges a wild early chapter in her own narrative and wonders, as we Boomers will, whether to share with her children that a backward glance would reveal errors much greater than their own. Like most of us, she had lived, and learned. She said she thought that kids today are overprotected and so they don’t learn things; a fine parental net is extended around children and the net catches kids before they can experience the firm thump that will wake them up. I thought this an insight worthy of a Harvard ethnosociologist, and chimed in that when I was young for five years I rode my bicycle across the seamier parts of town to football practice at the local field, and during those years I pedaled around, through and sometimes over dangerous situations. Each day involved the assessment of risk and the deployment of strategies to handle risk, and over the years this process formed an integral part of my character, such as it is.
Just this week a law was passed in New York requiring children to wear helmets as they ride scooters. Sounds like a good thing, considering the fragility of the human skull and the impetuousness of Gotham’s drivers. The problem is that research has shown that bicycle helmet laws have vastly reduced the time kids spend on bikes. When a child is presented with the option of parading past his friends on the streetcorner with a huge glistening egg-shaped object adorning his skull versus reclining as he absorbs the latest MTV video he will invariably choose the latter, much to the detriment of his cardio-vascular conditioning. In this case, as in many others, the very effort to protect children from a short-term risk may expose them to greater long-term dangers.
Years ago, during my tenure as a protective social worker for a contract agency of the Department of Social Services I had to think about the both delicate and devastating decision to remove a child from his family. Once removed from his family, the consequences of this event will probably form the central psychological and emotional issue for the rest of a child’s life. While there are foster parents with the moral character of Mother Theresa - I have met them - there are also those who believe that six foster kids can purchase an easy life, and while the chance that a child removed from his home will then find his way to a warm, supportive, permanent, consistently loving environment that will see him through the long haul of life is slightly better than that of winning the Lottery, it is not better by a wide margin. The public is often understandably upset when they discover later that a child was exposed to risk by remaining in an unstable family; but when the uncertain danger of remaining is balanced against the certain danger of removal, the equation becomes much more complicated. Children themselves don’t much care whether they are scalded by a frying pan or a fire.
The problem is that human development, spiritual, physiological and emotional, happens only when the boundaries of an individual are stretched, when experience occurs that is beyond the common ken, when the comfortable regime of sameness is overthrown by the sometimes terrifying dominance of the strange. Whether Johnny goes to Camp MumboJumbo for two weeks or embarks on an exploratory journey down the Amazon, it is when he is exposed to healthy - that means not deadly - risk that he comes home a different, bigger person.
Basic training for the armed services used to offer just such a situation of controlled risk, back before everyone learned that the training officers can’t hit you and the pools are not deep enough for you to drown. Twenty five years ago I jumped out of an airplane 3000 feet up and for an infinity of split seconds before the rip cord pulled and caught I knew the immensely rejuvenating experience of certain death followed close by quick redemption. Every cell in my cerebrum screamed “Don’t jump! This is insane!” but, sheep that I am, I did. I had time to tumble head down before the big curtain flopped open, jerking me upright again. It was a blast.
Brain research shows that the right hemisphere, the “novelty” hemisphere, is most active during new experiences, and the responsibility for cerebral management shifts to the left hemisphere as the activity becomes more routinized. When I feebly plunk single keys on the piano my right hemisphere is glowing like a pinball machine, but when Stravinsky races through the 88’s the right is dark, and the left hemisphere is calmly burning.
Brain development itself requires a high level of novel experiences; new, strange things blaze neuronal pathways that would otherwise be left unformed. Interestingly the right hemisphere is also associated with negative emotional states, and the left with positive. This says something about the natural offensiveness of the odd.
The other way we screw up kids, my hairdresser said, is by anticipating their needs and giving them what they want before they have a chance to struggle for it. Johnny mentions at the dining room table that he thinks it might be cool to play the trumpet? The next afternoon the gleaming $500 instrument is in his hands, and by the one after that he has realized that distance between sounding like an angry goose and sounding like Wynton Marsalis is covered with pain. The parents yell at the kid to practice for six months before giving up, and the trumpet joins all the other momentary fantasies deep in a closet.
The key, she said, is that over-involvement and overprotection can be as dangerous as neglect. It takes a strong parent to let a child struggle his way to self-knowledge. Kids, bless their hearts, will find their way to the risks they know they need to develop. All we big people can do is guide, and pray.
A most fortunate, and serendipitous, event of my life was seeing a Hollywood epic about an Italian who dispassionately chops his fellow Romans down to size.
Teenage boys being who they are, my sons sprinted to the local Blockbuster when the brawling saga Gladiator came out on video. The movie tells the sad but visually stunning story of the bold protégé of the last great Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. As played by the handsome and morose Russell Crowe, the protégé, General Maximus, sees his family slaughtered as a result of the soulless greed of Marcus Aurelius’s evil son Cattalus, and he then fate carries him toward the gruesome business of vengeance. Of gore there is plenty, as I suppose there was back in the day, and in the end, as is often the case in life, the great Maximus both wins and loses.
But much more important is a personal, and philosophical, subtext of the film; this theme has less to do with the sensational struggles of the gladiator than with profound teachings of his mentor.
Marcus Aurelius, of course, was a real person, the second century ruler under whom the Empire reached its greatest size. But despite the massive bloodshed invariably involved in the gruesome project of empire building, he knew that soon enough his domain, like all things, would crumble and its mighty battles would be forgotten by all but a few historians. He knew this because he was more than an emperor; he was a man, wise and wry enough to write that “wherever man can live, there he can also live well…He can live well even in a palace.”
As the moribund Maximus slew his last and greatest opponent and the credits rolled I was moved to assail my bookshelf, and there, after a brief tussle, I extracted the text that was the dimly recalled goal of my search; a dense tome called Meditations, authored by none other than the great emperor himself.
I had not touched it since some freshman survey class a quarter century before and so the pages were thick with dust but, fortunately, the wisdom within was hardly damaged by the years of neglect. As I at last turned those pages I learned that Marcus Aurelius was a devotee of Stoicism, a philosophy that sternly preaches the big three; understanding, acceptance, rationality.
Of course in hyper-expressive America Stoicism has all the appeal of an IRS audit, an afternoon of root canals, or a six hour cross-examination by an ego-deficient attorney. Stoicism says to live as a member of society but nonetheless to examine all with a wisdom tempered by an awareness of our transience; “Constantly remember how many physicians are dead after contracting their eyebrows over the sick so many times; and how many astrologers, after predicting with great to-do the deaths of others; and how many philosophers, after endless discourses on death or immortality; how many heroes, after killing thousands; how many tyrants, after using their power over men’s lives with terrible insolence…”
All the boisterousness, all the vainglorious straining after glory, or love, or justice, all of it alike will in time come to the same dust that now lines the pages of his writings. Death, when befriended, is a most trusted and faithful advisor. He voices the Samurai philosophy to follow centuries later on the other side of the world; “Consider yourself to be dead, and to have completed your life up to the present time; then live out according to nature the remainder which is allowed you.” The loathsome turmoil of life is a product of brevity of vision; “This is the chief thing: Do not be perturbed, for all things are according to the law of nature; and in a little time you will be nobody and nowhere, like Hadrian and Augustus.” It is a sign of the elevation of his philosophy that it allows one to look upon a great and powerful emperor with pity and compassion.
Marcus Aurelius would no doubt appreciate the irony that within a gory profit driven Hollywood spectacle is his hard kernel of philosophical detachment; “Be like the cliff against which the waves continually break; but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it.” The Stoic does not seek revenge, and would take no pleasure, unlike the movie’s protagonist, as he sinks his knife into his adversary, for it represents a failure to perceive one’s role in the complex workings of the universe; “Does another do me wrong? Let him look to it. The disposition was his and the activity was his. I have what universal nature wills me to have; and I do what my own nature wills me to do.” And then he continues on to define the sweetest reward; “The best way of avenging yourself is not to become like the wrongdoer.”
Maintaining the balance of a Stoic in the face of life’s vicissitudes does require the ferocity of a gladiator, but the gladiator’s fury is directed toward restraint rather than attack, toward acceptance rather than agitation; “Nothing happens to any man which he is not framed by nature to bear.” There is a sense in all things, but we are not privy to its essential structure, so a faithful acceptance of our lot is our refuge and our greatest achievement. Long before the day of the cognitive behavioral psychologists he understood that our power is founded on what we allow to occupy our minds; “Such as are your constant thoughts, such will be the character of your mind; for the soul is colored by the thoughts.”
So this is the word of the real gladiator; if you lose your wife or husband, do your best to continue to be kind and compassionate. If your kids grow up and forget to call home, try to bring your hard won wisdom to those who might hear it. Forgive others. Forgive yourself. Remember, you’re part of something much larger than yourself, larger than yourself or your family or your community or your country or your world, and it’s going where it’s going whatever you do. But in hard times take comfort in the hard wisdom of Stoicism; “Soon you will have forgotten all things; and soon all things will have forgotten you.”
So sad about the gladiator. Long live Marcus Aurelius!
There are some people who need to spend some time behind bars to gain a bit of wisdom, or, as Steve Miller put it so succinctly as he flew cross-country on a 707, “sometimes you have to go through hell before you get to heaven.”
Kids, in particular, may need to stop whatever they’re doing before they can consider doing something else. Teen-agers and those who continue to be teen-agers long into adulthood are prone to be carried away, and the carrying all to often deposits them behind the walls of a prison.
Now, most jails are not populated by the death dealing psychopaths of television’s OZ; stabbings, even fights, are rare, and rape is even rarer. Jails are generally places where lost kids and drunks and drug addicts gather because society has no other place to put them and they persistently lack the organizational ability to structuralize a productive life; no mean feat these days - I know from hard experience. Kids then gather in jails, usually among friends, and do the things they would be doing if they were “on the street”; they play cards, watch television, and gossip. Every once in a while they hatch a hare-brained scheme like trying to sneak cigarettes onto the wing or short-sheeting a particularly vulnerable cell-mate. Sometimes the cell-mate decides he doesn’t like being designated the vulnerable one (”They mistook my kindness for weakness,” he says afterwards), and a fight ensues. Officers rush in, everyone goes to segregation for a week, and the drama rolls on. Kids will be kids.
Sometimes caring people are nonplussed that so many kids are expending their precious youths bouncing in and out of institutions like these; after all, most of them find themselves in their situation because they grew up poor and uncared for, or they have some cognitive disability that put them behind in the human race from the start. And that’s where the age old struggle again ensues; we’ve got to find a way to insert the wisdom of age into the mind of a child.
Socrates thought that the best way to reach young minds was to gather in green glades and “dialogue.” But then, his society countenanced sexual exploitation of the young and slavery, so something better had to be found. Rousseau thought that man was perfect as created and just had to be placed in a perfectly natural environment for his perfection to emerge; however, feral children know how to catch rabbits but are distinctly lacking in social sensitivity. Hume thought that people were a tabula rasa, or blank slate (not the Middle Eastern grain dish, that’s tabbouleh), just waiting to be written into mature form. But all of these approaches had one effect on teen-agers - they put them to sleep.
In the effort to make two thousand years of hard won wisdom palatable to the young it is boiled down in the jailhouse steamer to a series of aphorisms, each of which is capable of being discussed for decades or until your release date, whichever comes first. In the modern boot camp program the young novice will question why he has to make his bed just so, address others as “sir”, maintain impeccable hygiene, and organize the contents of his box according to a formula that could challenge a nuclear physicist, just as kids outside will wonder why they have to learn geometry or English grammar or European history. Why do I have to know when the War of 1812 happened? What good is that going to do me?
It is then, and only then, that the wizened veteran will toss out the well worn aphorism that seeks, in one or two phrases, to communicate how you should live your life: “Do the small things right,” he says, glancing out the window because he doesn’t want his message to be mitigated by power struggle motivated by a direct gaze, “and the big things will take care of themselves.”
If the saying has been deposited at just the right time, then the mildly startled recipient is momentarily struck dumb; “Do the small things…” he is heard whispering to himself, again and again. Yes, he slowly realizes, this is rock hard wisdom, as neat a nugget as you are likely to find in a lifetime; “Do the small things right, and…”
There are elements of the realization that are odious, even burdensome, for now you have to attend to the small things, life becomes a moment to moment process of decision making in which the events that you ignore will come back to haunt you. Great wealth is comprised of making one dollar a million times over and a great work of literary art is constructed of word upon word… A healthy child is nurtured in a hundred thousand thoughtful, kindly moments, a roof is shingled with hundreds of accurate whacks of a hammer… And if you stay sober for one day you will eventually find that you have been sober for a lifetime.
Suddenly you find yourself walking with care, talking with care, even looking at others with care. Small things done right are piling up and becoming big things, and you look at the big things with admiration and you are admired for them.
But then you begin to take the small things for granted, or you let someone else do the small things because you have become too important to do them, or you become so involved in the big things that the small things zip by before you can even notice them. And soon the big things become hollow and treacherous and they collapse and you find yourself back again, back again in the tightly restricted land of those who have forgotten the small things.
The main thing about small things, you find, is that they are small, and therefore easy to ignore or overlook. To become grand - and all of us harbor a desire to be grand - is lose oneself and the many small details of which one is comprised. And the kids, like all of us, need to learn to pay attention, or pay again and again for the blindness to small things.
The nationally known FBI expert on youth gangs, doing a presentation at my workplace, talked about Crips and Bloods and hand signals and dress codes and graffiti that, if crossed off a neighborhood building, could cost you your life. CK, he said, stands for Crip Killer. The innocuous greeting “all is well” indicates you are a member of the fearsome gang called People Nation. Black and gold are the colors of the Latin Kings, recently involved in a huge drugs and weapons bust. Adidas and Nike are the chosen footware of the rival Folk Nation gang. The insignia and colors of our poor Boston Celtic basketball team, which can’t seem to threaten anyone on an NBA court, have nonetheless been appropriated by the Spanish Cobra gang. Think about that the next time you approach the consignment stand at the Fleet Center to purchase an emerald green jacket for your youngster.
We were told that gangs have invaded small towns and large, the inner cities and the suburbs, the west and the east coasts and everything in between. Look away for a second and your smiling, baseball card collecting, bubble-gum chewing eleven year old is a heavily armed gang banger initiated until death. Gangs are about the ultimate media eye candy: they are about guns and drugs and sex and violence. That sucking sound you hear, the literature says, is our adolescents being drawn into the great, inescapable vortex of youth gangs.
We were then told what we can do to try to stop this menace; talk to your kids, know their friends, form neighborhood coalitions, communicate with the local police. Above all, don’t be naive enough to believe this peril has passed you by.
It was a good presentation. But nowhere was the real, final ultimate reason for youth gangs proposed, or even mentioned.
The former FBI agent was smart enough, and politically savvy enough, to understand that revealing the real reason for the emergence of youth gangs might offend his audience and ultimately result in his removal from the lecture circuit. Instead, he voiced the popular rallying cry; more organization, more attention, more money. If we just do some more of the same, he seemed to be saying, maybe eventually something different will happen.
His problem was that to reveal the real reason for youth gangs is both boring and, probably, hopeless. And that’s because youth gangs have developed due to one fundamental and widely supported social change: because fathers have disappeared from the American family.
Recently a colleague described a television show on a nature channel in which a group of young male elephants were transplanted and introduced to a new area of a vast African national park. The adolescent behemoths ran amuck, attacking the adult female elephants already living there and tearing apart the local vegetation. Naturalists were about to liquidate these excessively wild young animals when someone finally had a bright idea; they trucked in a group of adult male elephants.
The older males did not attack and destroy the adolescents like some grand Stallone movie climax. As a matter of fact, they didn’t do much of anything at all. They just stood there, looking very large, and very male. But the adolescents immediately calmed down. Their testosterone induced friskiness began operating within acceptable limits. The elephant show went on.
This will not be the first analogy comparing your typical American male to an elephant, but it does clarify a basic and easily overlooked truth; most thirty or forty or fifty year old fathers are not afraid of their twelve or fifteen or seventeen year old sons. If push came to shove, and pushing and shoving usually involves approaching within approximately one foot of each other, most fathers possess sufficient mass to bring their sons to the floor and sit on top of them until maturity once again reigns in the adolescent brain.
A son who lives in the presence of a father knows that certain things are possible, and other things are not possible. It is possible to choose not to become a brain surgeon, to be moderately disrespectful, to while away long hours in pursuit of absolutely nothing. It is not possible to assault people, violently exploit others, knock down senior citizens and steal their purses. There is a line where your garden variety adolescent obnoxiousness becomes truly threatening to the well being of the clan, and when that line is crossed the adolescent’s elbow is seized and the bringing down process begins. To have the older male’s presence render the bringing down possible at least in concept, has been the historical role of the father.
Now, in response to violence-phobics, the key is that because this bringing down is possible, it very rarely needs to happen in reality. As with the elephants, the simple presence of a father is a statement that certain behaviors are not acceptable. Therefore they do happen. Probation officers have smaller caseloads, the foster care mill has fewer customers, and gangs are left without enlistees. The usually ignored converse of this axiom is that the absence of the larger male actually facilitates more violence and destruction. When the older male is absent from the world of the uninhibited adolescent, bad things happen. Fathers support and nurture peace by one huge but unspactacular act: being there.
I know that some fathers are now urgently voicing their helplessness, asserting that they have been present and involved but nonetheless their child has been sucked into the orbit of the gangs. And I know that boys join gangs for a variety of reasons in addition to fatherlessness; group fidelity, search for identity, the paradoxical but situationally understandable belief that gang membership is the only route to personal safety.
But that is because we as a society have reached a critical mass of fatherlessness; now an individual father is pitted against an already existing gang of father-deficient youth. There are no more father networks whose very presence holds youth in check. If a particular father happens to exist and care enough to act he is invariably cast as the Lone Father, isolated and unwanted, striding threateningly into the chaotic mass of father-deficiency. If he chooses to make a stand he may find himself as close as he can be to the gang culture – in an American prison.
However, one basic fact remains obvious: The most powerful contributant to gang membership is father absence. That doesn’t mean that an individual father can dissolve an existing gang like a sugar cube tossed into a cup of hot tea. However, it does mean that, as a society, we have made a choice.