allanhunter.net Blog

Some years ago there was a book that everyone seemed to be giving everyone else at around Christmas, called “All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” and its down-home wisdom and whimsical style charmed many.  For there are many basic understandings about social life that we take in at that tender age, such as to share things, take time for a nap, be nice, and so on, which is about all I retain from the book.

But there may also be another dimension to the lives of little children that the author missed out.  That is, simply put, that the child at that age is a true archetypal Innocent, one who can be authentically herself, and she will soon enough be corrupted into duplicity and manipulation, and will want what others have simply because those things convey status.  For a short amount of time the child will like what she personally likes simply because she likes it, and peer pressure about what’s acceptable is hardly considered at all. When the switch happens innocence has been, if not lost, at least compromised. It is the qualities of the Innocent that we may want to note before they are lost.  Possibly we may even want to honor them, too.

The Innocent is envied by adults. According to Emerson’s famous comparison, adults cluster around babies and admire them because the child is simply authentically being herself, and is not conforming to any social expectations, and the rest of us, who have society’s rules to care about, find this almost unbelievably enviable.

If we take this further then we’d have to say that children are, temporarily, allowed something that the rest of us struggle to achieve; a certainty about what we want and need. A child will almost always say what it needs, and expect that someone will do something about it.  Of course, sometimes the child will try to manipulate, but that’s a learned skill.  The basic pattern of ‘I need and I have the right to ask, even to expect decent treatment’ is what I’m talking about here. It presupposes that the child knows she has a right to ask, that she is loveable and loved.  If only some of the adults we know had such good self-esteem and could be as charmingly direct!  If only some of our professional colleagues with whom we work would do the same thing - and abandon their passive-aggressive silliness!  If only I could be as open, myself!

And perhaps that is the lesson that most strikes me.  Children who are just being themselves are direct, loving, and above all they know how to forgive.  Observe a small child who is hungry, who is wailing for food.  Tears!  Deep distress!  Then Mom appears, with food.  What happens?  Usually the young child will instantly forget the distress that had recently seemed so heart-rending.  There are no recriminations, there are no where-have-you-been-all-this-time pouts and withholdings. There are no scenes in which the child says she’ll never trust her mother again. That won’t come for a  number of years. Instead there is simply acceptance and love. And forgiveness. The child says, in effect, wherever you’ve been all this time doesn’t matter, because you’re here now.
If only the rest of us - all of us, without exceptions - could be so quick to forgive. Perhaps the lesson we can take form this is that forgiveness can’t happen unless we are loving, unless we are focused on the present, and unless we can access the Innocent that surely exists in each of us.

I’m interested to see that Batman is back in movie theaters, and just as Spiderman is fading from our memories, too.

As someone who is tracing the way the concept of the hero plays out in various cultures, I’m always interested by such things. Clearly the American public is, also (although perhaps in a different way), because the movie has made all sorts of box-office cash registers overflow.

At a time when such movies are so popular we have a right to ask whether they reflect some aspect of the American psyche, and if so, what?

The fight between good and evil is a perennial favorite, and casting the bad guy in the role of madman is a time-tested formula.  Having the determined fearless hero pursue right because it is good is a likewise sure-fire winner.

Unfortunately it’s the very same logical structure that we see our politicians use.  Saddam Hussein was a mad Joker; and now the whole country of Iran is cast in a similar role. They’re dangerous; they must be stopped, etc etc.  Bring out the marines!

When are we going to ask the difficult questions? When are we going to face that we helped make Saddam into who he became, and that we had a huge amount of input, over decades, in turning Iran into what it currently is.  The Shah of Persia was our, imposed, puppet ruler of that hapless country until even his own people could stand the corruption no more.

Superheroes in the movies are one thing, but let’s not get confused and think this is the only way to deal with problems in the real world of politics.  The best way is to try and make sure the problems don’t arise to begin with, of course, but when they do we can also engage in higher level dialog than we currently seem to be using.

Our politicians are capable (for the most part) of those higher level discussions.  But they are voted in by people who like Batman, who believe in simplistic moral structures, and who think wars can be ‘won’ in a decisive way.  These are the shareholders in the company that is the USA, and if they are ignorant then they decisions they will force their leaders to take will be similarly ignorant.  Because those leaders will do exactly what the voters want, for the most part.

I see that Batman has broken box office records and I tremble to think that this overwhelming preference may reflect on the quality of some of my fellow citizens’ moral awareness levels.  For they outnumber me, badly.

But it’s only a movie, right?

Karadzic has, finally, been arrested after some thirteen years in hiding.  It’s on almost all the front pages and it seems to mark a point of change - the Serbs who willingly hid this mass murderer for so long seem to have lost the necessary support to keep up the evasions, which may mean the lunatic nationalist movement that Karadzic whipped up to a murderous fury is, perhaps, abating.

Karadzic interests me because he was a pseudo-Monarch of the most clearly defined sort.  Almost devoid of real belief himself he used nationalism to gain power.  Nationalism is a bizarre idea since it pre-supposes that one has a ‘homeland’ or that one’s race (whatever that is) has some sort of sacred right to a specific space from which it can exclude all others who are not of that ethnicity.  Logically, then, one should lock oneself and those who are like-minded in a cage and exclude everyone.  As we know only too well from the religious cults around us here in the US, that sort of enclosed society leads rapidly to genetic problems.  So, in fact, nationalism when strictly followed, leads to unsavory birth defects and the implosion of the race that was supposed to be kept pure. How does that make sense?
Similarly, the idea of a homeland is against the dictates of nature.  Human beings have been migrating since before they were even recognizable as human beings, and we are still doing it. To claim that part of Serbia, or the Middle East, or the USA is someone’s holy homeland may be a statement that reflects on politics, but it doesn’t correspond to reality.

Similarly ‘race’ is almost impossible to ascertain, since most of us have all sorts of mixed backgrounds, and anyhow, we all started in Africa perhaps 4 million years ago, so race is a somewhat bogus construct at the best of times.

Nationalism therefore may be appealing to some, but it is based on a total failure to recognize some basic facts in nature.  No one has any indisputable right to any place; and racial isolation is self-destructive.

It takes a charismatic leader to peddle such untruths successfully, and those who most wish to accept such simplistic answers are surely Orphans at their most frightened.  These are the people who want to believe something, anything, as long as it’s not too complicated.  They clearly don’t want to examine the terms they use, or think about the logical implications of what they say. Such primitive thinking can only be successfully promoted through massive effort.

It’s time we all used our efforts for more productive ends, isn’t it? So why do so many people keep doing the opposite?  Fear will do that to us, any of us.

Which is why I’m so pleased that enough people showed enough courage to get Karadzic arrested.  It was time to turn the tide; Courage, not fear.

This weekend I was in New York City, a happy participant at the launch of Fred Matser’s new book Rediscover Your Heart, at which he urged us to do exactly what the title says.  That means we don’t act from what our head tells us, but from what our heart tells us - and since our heart is always loving and always in the present moment, we can let go of grudges, doubts, history, prejudices and so on…..  Those are all things created by our minds, not our hearts.
Fred wasn’t alone in saying this.  His book has a foreword by no less a person than Mikhail Gorbachev, and was introduced that evening by Carolyn Myss, Deepak Chopra and Jerry Jampolsky.  It was an extraordinary occasion, by any standards.

But the words that stuck in my mind most, amid so many wonderfully expressed thoughts, were these by Deepak Chopra, ‘You can’t fix the world if you don’t you fix yourself first.’

We can fix anything, but we must start with ourselves.  If we want to fix the problem of violence in our cities we must address the problem of the violence in our hearts first.  That doesn’t mean we don’t have police details and so on. It means that we must look inside our own hearts first so that we don’t just seek to repress whatever it is we don’t like, but we take the time to understand that it is a reflection of some part of us.

That’s puts Voltaire’s suggestion that we should cultivate our own gardens in a very different light, doesn’t it?

When thinking about how people act, perhaps when we hear about some event in the news, it’s worth realizing that seemingly unusual behavior may be much closer to what we ourselves do - except we haven’t noticed it yet.

This summer my local newspaper and the hometown paper I check on-line have both been full of what I’ve come to call teen summer violence.  These are the confrontations between urban youths that have a habit of turning deadly.  It’s hot, the young people have nothing much to do apart from mull over old antagonisms or slights to their pride, imagined or real, and suddenly things get out of control.

It’s almost impossible to overlook the repeated components of these encounters – and yet in a very real sense we don’t understand them.  It’s not just drugs, gangs, sex and guns that make this mix so volatile.  What makes this a potential disaster for our young people is something that elsewhere in our lives we may actually cherish.  I’m talking about what is, by another name, a sense of pride, even of patriotism.

It may sound incredible at first, but think about it for just one moment and you’ll see that the same pride that causes a young man or woman (but it’s usually a man) not to back down from a confrontation could, by a very slight adjustment, be recast as the patriotism and heroism of our police and fire fighters, or the devotion of the soldier who sticks to a dangerous duty.

If we think of literature or legends that might mirror this situation there’s one that seems to jump out, and that’s the legend of the Flying Dutchman.  The Flying Dutchman is in fact the name of a ghostly ship, and legend has it that the young captain was eager to reach the European markets with his cargo of Eastern spices and silks, so he sailed in terrible weather around the Cape of Good Hope (this was before the Suez canal).  He refused to take in his sails as most prudent sailors would have done, because he wanted to get home at top speed, to wealth and to his promised wedding.  What determination!  What courage!  What foolhardiness! Well, the ship was wrecked, everyone was drowned, and the ghostly shape of it can still, so they say, be seen sailing on, always just about to round the Cape, condemned never to complete the voyage.

The foolish captain, you’ll notice, is set on a course of action he feels he cannot back down from.  His determination is astonishing, but his wisdom is sadly lacking.  He wants to get home, get rich, and get married: sex, money, and pride urge him on.

And that’s the whole point.  He may look like a hero if he succeeds in taking his ship safely round the rocks, but if he fails he still looks pretty good - at least to some people. He becomes a legend, a martyr.  He reminds me of some of those high flying businessmen we read about who have made huge amounts of money (which makes them enviable) and then have over-reached themselves to collapse into ruin, legal trials and sometimes prison time.  And there we have the crux of this tale.  The captain may look like a hero, but in fact he’s caught in a role of what he thinks a hero is supposed to be, and unfortunately his understanding is imperfect.  If we focus on street violence again, some of the young men who have died, according to the news reports, have greeted their fate with arrogance; and some of their killers have been equally determined to show that no one crosses them, no one, without paying a price.  Isn’t this disturbingly similar to our ship’s captain?  When the Flying Dutchman went down it took an entire crew with it.  When young people kill each other a whole neighborhood becomes haunted, too. When a Mortgage company goes bust it ravages dozens of communities.

So we have to work to explode this myth, which is a perverted version of the myth of the hero.  Let’s frame this another way: Whenever someone adopts a code of behavior, a determination to do something just one specific way or for one specific purpose that is inflexible (like the captain) then that person has stopped thinking, and is operating from something like remote control.  Such a person is no more capable of freedom of action, or of heroism, than a robot or a rock.  Yet we keep wanting to see this as somehow heroic.  So let’s apply this directly to ourselves: Which of us hasn’t stayed in a relationship, or in a job, saying to ourselves that we’ll just grit our teeth until things get better.  We hold on, we work harder, we give more, and perhaps we exhaust ourselves in the process.  We love too much, we try too hard.  This is noble, but it’s not always effective. Sometimes things don’t get better.  It’s not that we’re doing anything wrong, it’s just that we’re not doing things right.  I call this the trick of working harder when what’s needed is to work smarter. We can all get stuck in ways of doing things that mean that our real qualities are not used productively.  The Mother who works three jobs so her children can go to college may be doing a noble thing, but she may also be sacrificing herself when the healthier choice might be to get the children to earn some money for themselves.  She may find they actually appreciate their college courses more when they have to pay for them out of their own pockets, and they may begin to appreciate her efforts more, too.

You see, we’ve all been in that trap at some point in our lives.  Whether it’s the kid from the projects who gets killed trying to be tough or the devoted mother who works herself to death, people are dying too early for all the wrong reasons, and they’re hurting others’ lives in the process.

The real hero is the person who knows when to back down for everyone’s sake.  Let’s put this in the strongest terms by looking at the street violence: getting killed doesn’t benefit the dead person or his family.  The killer is fairly likely to be caught, too, which brings misery to another person and to that family as well.  If this is heroism I’d have to say it’s a very peculiar version of it.  Similarly the mother who carries the whole weight of the family and then, after several years, collapses in exhaustion is not contributing to the long-term welfare of her loved ones, who sometimes do not know how to carry on without her.  She’s become a martyr. The business executive who works long hours ‘for the financial welfare of his children’ and dies young from hypertension is robbing his family of a far greater benefit than mere money.

So we need to rethink the nature of heroic devotion. Within the six archetypes of human development the hero stage can be seen differently, and this can help us. I describe it in my book Stories We Need to Know and the stage is called the Warrior-Lover stage for a reason.  It’s because one has to be willing to struggle for a cause that is ultimately one that brings more love into the world – one can be a warrior for peace, or a warrior for human equality, just like Martin Luther King Jr. or Mohandas Gandhi, or Nelson Mandela.  Notice that all of these figures are people of color.  I don’t know if that’s just coincidence. I can say for certain that all three are people who knew what it was like to be helpless before a rigid, brutal power structure, a way of thinking in which those who had the power really thought of themselves as ‘superior’ and ‘heroic’. Dealing with that sort of oppression required a different approach, a non-violent approach. Notice also how it is the people of color who presently are suffering disproportionately from the urban killings that fill the news, from the mortgage and home repossession crisis, and from the problem of single mothers and even grandmothers working extreme hours to raise the children.

If we are to understand ourselves the best place to start is at the crisis points of our  society, and these are pretty clearly crisis points.  Teachers I know who work in the inner city school systems say that by the time children reach tenth grade they almost all know someone they were close to who has been shot or killed.  Young people are depressed, desperate and scared, and yet they dare not show it. No wonder the scholastic and SAT results are so unimpressive.  Somehow we’ve created inner cities that are just like the legend of the Flying Dutchman, with young people who are so desperate for some sort of recognition that they’ll take on bizarre and dangerous behaviors in order to get it.  And the result is a deserted, ghostly ship - a haunted and blighted neighborhood.

At the other extreme is the driven business executive who turns to fraud and who has helped to engineer such things as our present mortgage crisis.  If he gets away with it he looks great.  If he’s caught he still gets to be famous.  Are these two situations – the street criminal and the white collar criminal, really very different?

The legend of The Flying Dutchman has existed in one form or another for several hundred years.  It was trying to warn us against exactly this type of ego and pride-based desperation, and what consequences it would create for everyone. A ship, after all, is a metaphor of a society. And then think of the bride of the ship’s captain, waiting, pining, heartbroken widowed before she was even married. That’s another image that should haunt us.

Reversing the present circumstances will be difficult, but at least we can see what the problem is.  And that’s half the solution. And we can begin to remedy things by starting with ourselves. Whenever we start to think of taking ‘heroic’ measures that we think we’re expected to take on we’d be well advised to ask, coolly, whether our action is indeed loving of others.  That’s why we need to remember that the Warrior is also a Lover.  Loving too much (that’s the self sacrificing mother) is as bad as fighting for no good reason, or gouging massive profits.  Balance is the key.

That’s the title of a splendid compilation of interviews I’ve been reading, put together by Michael Toms of New Dimensions Radio.  He’s interviewed some of the world’s most interesting thinkers about what 9-11 caused them to think.

It’s a fascinating volume.  I’ll just draw your attention to one aspect of it.  One writer suggests that what we have is a design problem within our society; we have designed a system in which money comes before people.  We could easily remedy the human problems if we were to design, and work from a design, that put people first.  If we took that as our axiom, of course, we wouldn’t talk about the stock market or business, we’d talk about whether or not human lives were positively impacted. And human lives were certainly impacted on 9-11.
What would this new design look like?  Well, the Globe two days ago had some commentators who said that the recent earthquakes in China might actually be good news because they would cause the Chinese to update their infrastructure and the rebuilding would boost the economy. So — all those lives lost, all that misery, and we should be happy because the economy will perk up?  THAT’S what it looks like when we have a world design that puts money first.

China’s various infrastructures could have been improved and set right in many ways, and I do not consider the recent earthquakes as some sort of free demolition project that we should all rejoice at.  Yet some people are doing just that. Isn’t it interesting how quickly some folks can forget about the corpses of hundreds of people, mostly children?
So, could we redesign the way we see the world, so that we put people first?  You bet.  Do we want to???

Imagine non-polluting factories that are designed to make work reasonably pleasant, where products are for our benefit, sustainable for the planet, and where the welfare of people was placed first, not profitability.  Imagine.

We know how to do this.  Here’s an example: in Europe the rail systems used to be nationalized because the thinking was that decent efficient transport made for a society we’d want to live in, where people could get to markets and to work and isolation would be a thing of the past, and social barriers would be eroded gently.  It worked. But it never paid.  And why should it?

Free libraries, and free museums, and free education all were based on the same thinking.  They cost money but are of immeasurable benefit to society and so it is government’s duty to supply them.  In the short term they don’t pay - - but in the long term they make for a far better society.

Money or people? Take your choice.

Today’s Boston Globe announces that the air quality in New England these days is alarming in terms of smog.  There will be more days, they say, when ‘residents are warned to limit their physical activity outdoors’.  This is because in ‘March the federal government lowered the threshold for declaring the air unhealthy’.

So they’re telling us that even the feds have awakened to the filth we’re expected the breathe, and that we should therefore stay indoors and, um, play video games, or watch tv, rather than being able to be outdoors and getting some healthful exercise, perhaps.

The news, as so often, is disappointing because the writers fail to pursue the points and ask why it’s taken us so long to notice the obvious (Bush refused to revise the levels) and why the remedy is staying indoors rather than getting rid of the smog.  New England doesn’t have that much industry any more, but it does have wind patterns that take most of the pollution from places like New York City and dump if squarely in central Massachussetts, for example, where those lovely expensive houses in the Hamptons can benefit.

Personally I don’t go outside that much at certain times of day because of lawnmowers with uncontrolled exhausts, and the cloying scent of too much barbecue lighter fluid slathered on briquets that neighbors seem to be unable to ignite. But that’s just a local problem….. perhaps.
I like clean air.  Does anyone else?

Tucked into a corner of the front page of today’s Boston Globe (I know:  I canceled it in disgust weeks ago.  But they keep delivering it, no matter how many calls we make) was a small column about Iran’s successful testing of strategic missiles of a potentially nuclear sort.  The main story is about unused baseball fields enmeshed in red tape.

That’s at least one reason I canceled this newspaper which, nightmarishly, continues to arrive.

The saber-rattling should be very frightening.  Israel says it will be forced to do something (by whom?), and Iran says that any action will be seen as coming not just from Israel but from the US as well, and they’ll act accordingly. Notice how this is all predicated on the assumption that everyone is expected to ‘do something’.

I can make a suggestion.  How about ‘we’ don’t ‘do’ a military action?  How about we try and defuse the Isreal-Arab world’s tensions? Wars are expensive and clumsy and no one really wants one unless it can be a neatly circumscribed action of limited duration (which is what Bush wanted in Iraq, and didn’t get).

Iran clearly wants to feel strong because it currently feels weak and under threat from the US. But we also know that it really isn’t a strong nation after its unsuccessful decade long war with Iraq, and we know it suffers from religious divisions every bit as severe as Iraq’s. It is struggling to define itself as a coherent nation its citizens can feel attached to, no matter what their creed, and the easiest way to do that is to create an outside enemy against which they can unite.  Do we really want to walk into that trap?

“The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance” as Prospero put it.  A magician, yes, but also a person of realistic, practical ideas.

I’m going to write some things here that may sound unpleasant, but they just may be what we need to consider.  Gasoline is still way too cheap.

At present we are paying more than ever before in the US, and yet that is barely half of what it costs in England and much of Europe.

The sad fact seems to be that we will never rethink our energy policies fundamentally until we are truly hurting, and we’re not truly hurting yet.  So we take corn stocks, which could be used for food, and turn them into ethanol for our cars, and wonder why there are food riots and starvation in countries that can no longer afford to buy our now scarce grains.  We don’t see or feel this directly.  All we feel is a few dollars lighter.  We aren’t going without our meals so it doesn’t really hurt us, yet.

If we were to raise the price of gasoline to reflect the true cost suffered by those in Nigeria, say, who see the pipelines for oil being constructed to fill the tankers, but who daily become poorer in a daily more degraded environment in which they cannot afford to buy the gasoline they see pumped to the waiting ships -  - then we’d have to factor in what it would take to feed them properly.  But no one has done that for thirty years.

If gas were to be paid for at something approaching its true price we’d scramble to find alternate, renewable energy.  We wouldn’t grasp at short term solutions such as McCain has suggested when he has stood behind coal power. Sure it’s cheap now but it’s not good news if in a few years (when it runs out) you want a decent earth or less global warming.  Oh, and if you like breathing right now it’s a poor idea too.

Yet our athletes will go to the Olympics and compete in one of the foulest public airspaces available on this planet, Beijing, and no one seems to have noticed one can’t see from one end of the stadium to the other because of industrial and vehicle-produced air pollution, or that the lakes for the sailing competitions are filled with algae that thrives on (oil-based) pollutants, rendering the waterways unusable. Why are we failing to acknowledge what’s in front of our noses?
Things may have to get nastier before they can get better.

Christine Harrington and others alerted me to the dismal fact that emails sent to me via this site weren’t arriving, because they were bouncing back. Thank you, Christine. I’d wondered why things had been so quiet for a while, although a number of determined souls had gone to the link to www.therapeuticwriting.com and used that, amongst other methods.

So I’ve got Yahoo working on it, as of yesterday. The good news is that they are working at this glitch. The bad news is that they couldn’t figure it out and had to refer to a higher (technical) power.

Funnily enough that very day I had a questionnaire from Yahoo asking me how well their product was doing. I had to give some very low scores for actual achievement, and some very high scores for the lovely people who attempted to put things right. I guess that averages out as in the mid range. Unfortunately I do not want a cozy and friendly relationship with the telephone help line people, delightful as I am sure they are outside their work. I want a web site that works and can receive mail, which is what I pay for and people expect.

Well, that aside, I enjoy questionnaires because they so frequently include forced answers and questions that cannot make sense. This is why I distrust completely and absolutely those ‘polls’ we hear on the TV news. So, getting back to Yahoo, they asked me if I wanted a fax system (yes, really, they asked me that) placed on my site. I said no. The next question was how much I’d be willing to pay for such an item. I typed in $0 - logical, I thought. Oh no. I had to type in a sum (and not in cents) or I could not continue. I forwent the temptation to type in 10 million and entered $1 instead. The point remains, though, that I am now on record as being willing to pay for something I don’t want and won’t use, rather than the record showing that for me at least a fax set up is inane.

These folks are obviously highly intelligent. How come they didn’t catch that slip? And if they didn’t then how about those political polls that say that 32% of the US thinks Bush is doing a ‘good job’ (whatever that phrase means)? I refuse to believe that nearly one third of this great country actually can be so stupid as to think that Bush has any idea what the job is, let alone that he’s doing it well. But let that pass…..

So now I must apologize to my correspondents for an error that is not mine, an error that has caused you frustration and made me look useless, and which the questionnaire will show as me being 32% happy with how Yahoo is doing its job (you see the connection, here?) when the reality is that I’m disappointed in their job efficiency and don’t seem to have a way to communicate it or alter the existing set up (ring any bells, there?).

Funny old world, isn’t it?