One of the missions we fulfill in the Peace Corps is that of community service through secondary projects. “Community Service” implies basically the same concept to most people – hands-on volunteer work to assist others less advantaged than we. This inference, drawn repeatedly, becomes an expectation articulated as an ideal. Nevertheless, any externally based referent creates just another sustaining illusion to enable us to matter, if only to ourselves.
People pay a heavy price for doing this since these illusions often define their futures, deaden their pasts and deflect the presents. Recently, I listened to the Orquesta Filarmónica de Querétaro perform Ernest Bloch’s hypnotizing rhapsody of Solomon and meditated on the life of that savvy sovereign. He understood something from his cradle: more often than not, for me at least, wisdom entails the removal of distractions rather than requires a flash of insight. This gift to me was welcome in face of a recent summons to present on my project in “Community Service” to the new SEMARNAT Aspirantes.
That peremptory notice made the private language of “Community Service” dreadfully relevant to me as a man who is simply not a real hands-on guy, who is downright shy. Few are those who can say that they do not want to perform a “Community Service”. Like any group, there is something of a consensus here in Peace Corps / Querétaro of what Community Service is. Until Bloch’s work snapped me out of my fuzzy guilt, I had felt like I was coming up short in the ‘Corps’.
Yet the persistence of this uneasy feeling of not meeting others' standards begged the question of what exactly the Peace Corps meant to me. Finally, I was no longer asking the wrong question of why I would not conform to a consensus I had not really endorsed. My past lost its currency while the future merely was tomorrow. So now I could think about the right concern: what is “Community Service” for me? A quick inventory of my activities reveals that all of my present work –- four projects, three more than required -- flows through the same small national science center in which I am serving.
Four projects, that is. The three taken on at my own initiative built up gradually after my first by-the-book “Community Service” did not last very long. Next, I had lined up dutifully to work with a business incubator at a local University. That never materialized. And so I began to collaborate with a fellow in my center who wants to learn English but who is tinkering around with a new invention, a patented health care device. The Filarmónica quickly deepened my contemplative mood with the sublime Symphony #2 by Rachmaninov.
That is when the veil of those language games imposed by others’ values silently slipped away. For the first time, I realized my unromantic, hardly heroic, work of preparing financial forecasts and other elements of due-diligence to commercialize that invention actually serves the larger good. True, I would not be teaching grateful children, beaming at a camera while it clicked away. Equally true, however, is that my time and skill is granted, free of charge. Yet the numbers become compelling, at least to me: up to a thousand new jobs to be created across Mexico; up to a hundred thousand lives saved per year etc.
God then muttered in my ear through his long-dead go-between, Sergei Rachmaninov, “Son, let others teach and hammer the nails. Your mission is to enable people to earn the money that buys the books that your Peace Corps compatriots are teaching them so mightily to read. What’s more, you are letting one in seven people in Mexico live long enough to the savour the literature they purchase.”
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Monday, September 12, 2011
The 12th & 13th of September 2001.
Flights were grounded; military jets patrolled the breach. So, my sister and I drove East in our 'AVIS'. The rental companies had graciously permitted people to use their cars for long-distance one-way drop-offs in lieu of cancelled flights. We headed to Pittsburgh to spend the night at my Aunt Katie´s and Uncle Tucker’s house. The talk was of shock, anger and mystification of how and why these brutal attacks had taken place.
What had America done to deserve this savagery?
That question still haunts me today, ten years later, here in México.
The common feelings amongst us, beyond proper articulation, remained so paramount that the talk was filler to avoid rudeness at the dinner table. The next day, I drove my sister back to the Baltimore-Washington (Thurgood Marshall) International Airport, where she had left her car a couple of days before to fly out to Uncle Henry’s funeral. I dropped the car off at the AVIS lot.
At least, I could catch the next Amtrak to the City. On that routine ride up the coast, I read newspaper accounts of 'nine-eleven'. Some loud-mouthed woman yapped for much of the trip about how she was not about to be intimidated by “towel-heads” and other such non-sense, which (of course) I was thinking, too, but loath toward admitting.
Since she was attractive some men indulged and enabled her in holding court. Sobering was the realization that, had she not been young and attractive, she would likely have been shouted down by the rest of us, equally fearful as she. Life changes, not people.
As the train exited Newark, New Jersey and headed toward Penn station in mid-town Manhattan, I removed my nose from the newspaper at about the right time to focus on the traditional landmarks telling me I would be home soon.
Alas, the train must have been going slower or my timing was off; probably the latter as I felt very tired. In any case, I could not spot the twin towers anywhere in my visual range. Instead some factory was emitting large amounts of smoke.
What the devil? I had been on this route perhaps twenty times and could not recall that much smoke billowing out of a factory. I wondered, “This just doesn’t seem right and where are those damn towers, anyways?”
My heart freeze-dried. The train was not slowing down at all and my timing had been just fine. That smoke is – or WAS – the World Trade Center. The pain returned. We entered the Lincoln Tunnel for the home-stretch for Penn Station. As the mouth of the tunnel yawned before us, I noticed a welcome silence. The all-American magpie was quiet, her knuckles wrapped on the handle (used to help one get up from the seat) on the seat in front of her. Those joints remained white as American Standard porcelain.
Only then did I realize my previous exasperation with her lay more in my tendency to blame others for my unease than in her neurotic coquetry. The metro-liner entered the tunnel. The fear I had tried to keep away from me surfaced briefly. I said inwardly, “God, here's the deal: if now is my time to die, make it quick..." And I pushed the thought away; I do not fear being dead but dying scares me to...
Penn Station may have been crowded or it may not have been – I was oblivious. As I walked across town to my apartment, I heard many sirens. The City was different. I felt like George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life” when he returns to ‘Pottersville’ after being granted his wish never to have lived at all.
That feeling lifted quickly as the famous resilience and under-rated friendliness of New Yorkers shone through that twilight: an unrehearsed nobility evinced by my favorite people in my favorite place on the Earth. I was home. What still clings with me now, however, was the smell – one that took a week or more to dissipate. It crawled inside my nostrils.
At that time, with my penchant for exaggeration, I assumed that within those mixed odors of burned concrete, steel, plaster-board, asbestos, etc. was also that of incinerated flesh. That was almost certainly not the case, but the trenchant odor reminded me of the carnage that had just hit my city, New York City.
When I arrived to my apartment building, the doorman and I simply looked down in grief. My practice was to chat things up with these friendly professionals about recent events. One had tipped me off that Vice President Gore might lose the 2000 election; this man disliked the Democrat due to his towering over President Bush, trying to intimidate the Republican, in the second televised debate. This time, however, what was there to say?
After shedding my suit-case, I donned my running clothes and jogged to a few hospitals to contribute blood: “brother, can you spare a pint?” After the third and last hospital that I tried without success, I gave up. My fellow New Yorkers had rallied to the call overwhelmingly. Good for them. Sadly, however, few were injured since most had been incinerated on the eleventh. As I turned to jog back to my apartment, a woman reporter from Fox News and her cameraman approached me and asked to interview me.
Why not?
By then, it was very clear that a gang of young Arabs had perpetrated this mass-murder. The reporter asked me what I felt about the attack. Of course, I opened by saying I was disheartened by the event but had gained some strength from the response of my fellow New Yorkers. All right on schedule for the reporter.
Then I said, “I hope we can remember than many Muslims died that day, too…” Instantly her plastic smile morphed into open hatred. I thought to myself, “what a bigoted bimbo” and scat from her as quickly as she from me.
Only days later would it occur to me that she had likely thought I was expressing sympathy for the nineteen suicidal sociopaths when, in fact, I was thinking of the Bangladeshis and other Muslims working hard in the Trade Center, particularly in the top-floor restaurant, to give their children some of the opportunities denied to them. All were condemned to death simply for going to work on that day of ignominy.
Last time I checked, Muslim children cry, too.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
The 11th of September 2001
“Dammit, Edward, you’re forty-four f*cking years old," I chastised myself, "and you are worried about the goddam stupid knot in your neck-tie on the day you bury your god-father? Hey, pal, just grow up and go, already!” It was not an average morning. Normally, I would be walking up the Avenue of the Americas toward West Fifty-second Street and work.
No, this sunny Tuesday morning found me in Michigan, ready to attend the funeral of my Uncle Henry. In fact, at nine in the morning, the only element in common with my life in New York was that I was running late. As I strode past the reception area toward the hotel restaurant for breakfast, the Iraqi-American behind the desk, a very friendly acquaintance of five days running, said excitedly in a high-pitched voice, “A plane crashed into a building in New York!”
Too busy rehearsing an excuse for being late yet again for something important, I did not bother to break stride, figuring this nice man’s grim news was inaccurate – after all English was not his first language – or that it was something like the little plane that had smacked into the side of a hotel in Milan some time before.
As I escorted my sister through the lobby at about nine-thirty, the same gentleman, almost laughing it seemed to me, announced again in a high-pitched voice, “A large-jet has hit the other tower of the World Trade Center…” Now I realized, he was telling the truth. “Military?” I asked. “I don’t know, sir…” All these years later, I still wonder why that polite man was so out of step with the terrible tidings he was delivering.
Was he giggling because he had begun to connect the dots? Terrorism. That means it could be Middle Easterners. That means what happened in Iraq ten years ago could happen all over again, this time killing a lot more than the tens of thousands of civilians annihilated by Desert Storm. Thinking about it now, I can well understand the squeaky voice, the oddity of sideways laughter. That decent man was probably a harrowed witness of the past and scared witless for the future, as would I have been had I been an Iraqi-American living in Dearborn.
This was no accident. Nevertheless, we had to get to the funeral. During the fifteen minute drive to the church, my sister found a radio station reporting the “incident” in New York and the details of spontaneous crematoria began to focus themselves. We got to church about five minutes before the start of the ten o’clock service. My cousin Peter said, “One of the towers is listing heavily…You know what dad would be saying right now…” The priest intoned a spontaneous intention to prayer: “To the people of New York this morning.”
After the interment, we spent the day at Aunt Marion’s house just watching the television. About the only activity, outside of eating lunch, were my sister and my Aunt’s sister making frantic phone calls to see if everybody was okay. Betty Hilton, Marion McDonnell’s normally plucky sister, would spend the rest of that day in the Hell of not knowing what had happened to her son. He worked in or adjacent to the World Trade Center. A blessed e-mail came in from Westchester County later that evening; all her family was fine. The terror had worked its black magic.
People in Annapolis, where my sister lives, had heard that the Naval Academy was the target of the plane that had went missing in Pennsylvania and found as the detritus of death near some hick-town, Shanksville. Lifelong friends in Pittsburgh would later tell me how people had fled from U.S. Steel headquarters, the tallest building in town and the "probable target" of that mystery flight. Other friends in Chicago were convinced that the Sears Tower was in that unknown flight’s cross-hairs.
While these suppositions contain varying degrees of the incredible, who can blame these people for feeling this way? No one knew the location or the direction of intent of this missile of mass-murder. That not-knowing was the crux of the terror. Especially since the second mass murder in New York was replayed endlessly, often in slow motion. I remember watching that plane turning straight toward the tower to collide into it. My breath took a breather at that moment: witnessing unvarnished evil has that effect, I suppose.
On international television, innocents leapt from a thousand feet above the ground. Like a stupid ass, I thought 'compassionately', “Well, I would do the same thing if faced with the certainty of burning to death. I'd just get it over-with…” A dust storm in the City? No way. The towers were falling. Back came a very disturbing conversation some six or seven years before with one of the foremost material engineers in the East about the first bombing of the Trade Center.
That Ph.D. took the time during my family's annual Christmas party to explain to me in detail how dangerously close the blind sheik’s gangsters had come to compromising the structural integrity of the World Trade Center to tip it over in 1993. That kindly scientist, who had reviewed that bombing as an industrial ceramics expert, said that somebody had known his engineering.
No, this sunny Tuesday morning found me in Michigan, ready to attend the funeral of my Uncle Henry. In fact, at nine in the morning, the only element in common with my life in New York was that I was running late. As I strode past the reception area toward the hotel restaurant for breakfast, the Iraqi-American behind the desk, a very friendly acquaintance of five days running, said excitedly in a high-pitched voice, “A plane crashed into a building in New York!”
Too busy rehearsing an excuse for being late yet again for something important, I did not bother to break stride, figuring this nice man’s grim news was inaccurate – after all English was not his first language – or that it was something like the little plane that had smacked into the side of a hotel in Milan some time before.
As I escorted my sister through the lobby at about nine-thirty, the same gentleman, almost laughing it seemed to me, announced again in a high-pitched voice, “A large-jet has hit the other tower of the World Trade Center…” Now I realized, he was telling the truth. “Military?” I asked. “I don’t know, sir…” All these years later, I still wonder why that polite man was so out of step with the terrible tidings he was delivering.
Was he giggling because he had begun to connect the dots? Terrorism. That means it could be Middle Easterners. That means what happened in Iraq ten years ago could happen all over again, this time killing a lot more than the tens of thousands of civilians annihilated by Desert Storm. Thinking about it now, I can well understand the squeaky voice, the oddity of sideways laughter. That decent man was probably a harrowed witness of the past and scared witless for the future, as would I have been had I been an Iraqi-American living in Dearborn.
This was no accident. Nevertheless, we had to get to the funeral. During the fifteen minute drive to the church, my sister found a radio station reporting the “incident” in New York and the details of spontaneous crematoria began to focus themselves. We got to church about five minutes before the start of the ten o’clock service. My cousin Peter said, “One of the towers is listing heavily…You know what dad would be saying right now…” The priest intoned a spontaneous intention to prayer: “To the people of New York this morning.”
After the interment, we spent the day at Aunt Marion’s house just watching the television. About the only activity, outside of eating lunch, were my sister and my Aunt’s sister making frantic phone calls to see if everybody was okay. Betty Hilton, Marion McDonnell’s normally plucky sister, would spend the rest of that day in the Hell of not knowing what had happened to her son. He worked in or adjacent to the World Trade Center. A blessed e-mail came in from Westchester County later that evening; all her family was fine. The terror had worked its black magic.
People in Annapolis, where my sister lives, had heard that the Naval Academy was the target of the plane that had went missing in Pennsylvania and found as the detritus of death near some hick-town, Shanksville. Lifelong friends in Pittsburgh would later tell me how people had fled from U.S. Steel headquarters, the tallest building in town and the "probable target" of that mystery flight. Other friends in Chicago were convinced that the Sears Tower was in that unknown flight’s cross-hairs.
While these suppositions contain varying degrees of the incredible, who can blame these people for feeling this way? No one knew the location or the direction of intent of this missile of mass-murder. That not-knowing was the crux of the terror. Especially since the second mass murder in New York was replayed endlessly, often in slow motion. I remember watching that plane turning straight toward the tower to collide into it. My breath took a breather at that moment: witnessing unvarnished evil has that effect, I suppose.
On international television, innocents leapt from a thousand feet above the ground. Like a stupid ass, I thought 'compassionately', “Well, I would do the same thing if faced with the certainty of burning to death. I'd just get it over-with…” A dust storm in the City? No way. The towers were falling. Back came a very disturbing conversation some six or seven years before with one of the foremost material engineers in the East about the first bombing of the Trade Center.
That Ph.D. took the time during my family's annual Christmas party to explain to me in detail how dangerously close the blind sheik’s gangsters had come to compromising the structural integrity of the World Trade Center to tip it over in 1993. That kindly scientist, who had reviewed that bombing as an industrial ceramics expert, said that somebody had known his engineering.
With a relief removed from reality, I thanked God that the towers fell the way they did; at least they had stood long enough for most people to get out. Had they tipped, so many more would have died that day. We all watched the President state with a determination to reassure his shaken nation something to the effect, “Today was a not an act of terrorism, it was an act of war.”
Further, we felt gratitude of seeing American courage making a come-back when a politician whom I did not like, Mayor Giuliani, walked into the smoking wreckage, handkerchief over his mouth and nose. Greatness was certainly thrust upon the Mayor that hour and, as time would show, upon the President.
While I had missed Mom and Dad mightily, I was almost grateful they had not lived to see that day, the eleventh of September 2001. Time to get back to New York, now…
Saturday, September 10, 2011
The Tenth of September 2001
Please note a few changes in red-font, integrated after writing this essay to reflect information received subsequently. Links are in blue-bold font.
Things had been busy for the preceding couple of days, picking up my sister and a cousine at the Detroit-Metro Airport as well as getting ready for the funeral of my Uncle Henry McDonnell the next morning. I had been in Detroit for a few days because I visited my uncle at the very end of his life to thank him for being a good uncle and attentive god-father and to say good-bye. Of course, and again, I would show up in my father’s stead; this time for his beloved brother.
The pace of preparation had finally slowed during the visitation at a local funeral home. Toward the end of the evening, I took a few moments for myself to look at the photo portrait of my Aunt Marion and Uncle Henry on their wedding day. Since a decade has elapsed, the timing of events have scrambled from memory to meaning, from sequence to significance. They looked young, lovely, expectant – my Aunt Kit and Uncle Hank did.
Years later, I would watch a scene in the movie “Letters from Iwo Jima” with Sam, the mortally wounded United States Marine, speaking with the Japanese Colonel who was comforting him with the last of the morphine available. Sam asked that officer, “Are you somebody famous?”
The pace of preparation had finally slowed during the visitation at a local funeral home. Toward the end of the evening, I took a few moments for myself to look at the photo portrait of my Aunt Marion and Uncle Henry on their wedding day. Since a decade has elapsed, the timing of events have scrambled from memory to meaning, from sequence to significance. They looked young, lovely, expectant – my Aunt Kit and Uncle Hank did.
Years later, I would watch a scene in the movie “Letters from Iwo Jima” with Sam, the mortally wounded United States Marine, speaking with the Japanese Colonel who was comforting him with the last of the morphine available. Sam asked that officer, “Are you somebody famous?”
Within three years, I would spend several hours in the combat hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, watching over another young United States Marine – Lance Corporal Langley – as he slowly slipped away from doctors who had tried everything to assure this boy a full life. The infantry squad whom that young man had saved single-handedly, with singular virtue and sacrifice, were hurting. Theirs was not yet the glory of combat in that room but the very human mixture of guilt, gratitude and grief.
Indeed, Sam’s wonderment in that cave in 1944 haunted me now six years before the Eastwood film flashed across the screens. You see, Hank McDonnell was much like Sam. He had learned to do the right thing – and he did so by joining the United States Army as a sergeant, fresh out of college. The differences were two. Hank McDonnell survived and he was gunned down on the beach, not of Iwo Jima, but of Okinawa, during that very bloody Spring of fifty-six years before 2001.
Hank’s squad had not made much headway when he watched the head of his radio-man shatter just feet away from him under enemy fire. Hank was soon to follow, striking the ground with at least one bullet inside him. He was probably dying and he could not move. For hours he lay there, exposed. For hours, he heard the dull thuds of bullets hitting the soil around him. Hank prayed and through the battle-field courage and medical know-how of others, he lived.
Such bravery, perhaps inborn or perhaps the grace of the moment, set Hank McDonnell above most and apart from almost everybody. My Uncle Henry took that image of a friend severed savagely, of waiting for his turn to die, with him for the rest of his life. Dancing as they do, my memories quickly shifted ahead to the quiet celebration of Henry McDonnell's eightieth birthday in Tucson, where I showed up in the stead of my father.
My birthday gift for this occasion was a thin envelope, much like the one containing the rejection letter Hank had received from Yale when he was graduating from Andover; I suffered the same tritely teen-age agony four decades later at Choate. An envelope? And a thin one? Not much. But Henry McDonnell had earned everything I could afford to buy that he might value.
After a low-key dinner with Aunt Marion, my cousin Peter, and his truly magnificent wife, Paula, I gave my gift and held my breath, anxious to make the right impression. Uncle Henry opened the envelope perhaps annoyed that I had lamely given him $80 for eighty years. He read the form-letter from one of my heroes, then recently retired Senator Robert Dole, thanking me for a $100 contribution -- in the honor of Henry Egglesoe McDonnell, Jr -- to the World War II Memorial under construction in Washington, D.C.
Hank McDonnell welcomed that gift: I had made my father proud. Two months later, at a much larger family reunion to celebrate Uncle Henry’s birthday, I happened to be alone, walking out of the powder room, when Hank McDonnell, as close to crying as the night he said good-bye to his ‘kid’ brother, just hours before my father departed, said, in what sounded to me like a stern tone, “Ned, come here.”
Anxious as always and more than a little insecure, I watched my uncle reach into a drawer and take out a leather-bound box, the type that has the royal blue velvet lining, usually containing jewelry. Opening that box, Hank McDonnell showed me his medals: a bronze star and a purple heart and one other I did not recognize. His words were barely audible, “I have hardly ever shown these, Ned, but I wanted you to see them.”
The announcement of the brother of my Aunt Marion, an Episcopal priest of many years in South Carolina, that he would lead a time of prayer to honour my uncle, snapped me out of that momentary reverie. That an Episcopal priest – my Aunt’s brother – would exhibit the grace to salute Henry McDonnell by leading a prayer made me realize that Hank had been very fortunate. The wealth he had married into turned out to be as real as it had been apparent.
After the prayers, my sister and I were walking out of the visitation room to return to our hotel, since the emotion of the past days had left me tired. My cousine, Nancy McDonnell, who had – like her father – succeeded in business and, much again like Hank, understood the importance of a personal reserve, stood near the entrance, briefly alone. My intention had been to offer her a ride to the airport after the funeral, hoping that she would somehow decide for me whether I would head back to Manhattan tomorrow, the eleventh, or wait until the twelfth.
Instead, she stood there, her eyes deep in a daughter’s grief. Notwithstanding my stupid Charlie-Brown look of not having the words to say what I should be saying, Nancy McDonnell looked at me, winced in shaking her head subtly, and said,
“You know, Ned, it’s the end of an era…”
Indeed, Sam’s wonderment in that cave in 1944 haunted me now six years before the Eastwood film flashed across the screens. You see, Hank McDonnell was much like Sam. He had learned to do the right thing – and he did so by joining the United States Army as a sergeant, fresh out of college. The differences were two. Hank McDonnell survived and he was gunned down on the beach, not of Iwo Jima, but of Okinawa, during that very bloody Spring of fifty-six years before 2001.
Hank’s squad had not made much headway when he watched the head of his radio-man shatter just feet away from him under enemy fire. Hank was soon to follow, striking the ground with at least one bullet inside him. He was probably dying and he could not move. For hours he lay there, exposed. For hours, he heard the dull thuds of bullets hitting the soil around him. Hank prayed and through the battle-field courage and medical know-how of others, he lived.
Such bravery, perhaps inborn or perhaps the grace of the moment, set Hank McDonnell above most and apart from almost everybody. My Uncle Henry took that image of a friend severed savagely, of waiting for his turn to die, with him for the rest of his life. Dancing as they do, my memories quickly shifted ahead to the quiet celebration of Henry McDonnell's eightieth birthday in Tucson, where I showed up in the stead of my father.
My birthday gift for this occasion was a thin envelope, much like the one containing the rejection letter Hank had received from Yale when he was graduating from Andover; I suffered the same tritely teen-age agony four decades later at Choate. An envelope? And a thin one? Not much. But Henry McDonnell had earned everything I could afford to buy that he might value.
After a low-key dinner with Aunt Marion, my cousin Peter, and his truly magnificent wife, Paula, I gave my gift and held my breath, anxious to make the right impression. Uncle Henry opened the envelope perhaps annoyed that I had lamely given him $80 for eighty years. He read the form-letter from one of my heroes, then recently retired Senator Robert Dole, thanking me for a $100 contribution -- in the honor of Henry Egglesoe McDonnell, Jr -- to the World War II Memorial under construction in Washington, D.C.
Hank McDonnell welcomed that gift: I had made my father proud. Two months later, at a much larger family reunion to celebrate Uncle Henry’s birthday, I happened to be alone, walking out of the powder room, when Hank McDonnell, as close to crying as the night he said good-bye to his ‘kid’ brother, just hours before my father departed, said, in what sounded to me like a stern tone, “Ned, come here.”
Anxious as always and more than a little insecure, I watched my uncle reach into a drawer and take out a leather-bound box, the type that has the royal blue velvet lining, usually containing jewelry. Opening that box, Hank McDonnell showed me his medals: a bronze star and a purple heart and one other I did not recognize. His words were barely audible, “I have hardly ever shown these, Ned, but I wanted you to see them.”
The announcement of the brother of my Aunt Marion, an Episcopal priest of many years in South Carolina, that he would lead a time of prayer to honour my uncle, snapped me out of that momentary reverie. That an Episcopal priest – my Aunt’s brother – would exhibit the grace to salute Henry McDonnell by leading a prayer made me realize that Hank had been very fortunate. The wealth he had married into turned out to be as real as it had been apparent.
After the prayers, my sister and I were walking out of the visitation room to return to our hotel, since the emotion of the past days had left me tired. My cousine, Nancy McDonnell, who had – like her father – succeeded in business and, much again like Hank, understood the importance of a personal reserve, stood near the entrance, briefly alone. My intention had been to offer her a ride to the airport after the funeral, hoping that she would somehow decide for me whether I would head back to Manhattan tomorrow, the eleventh, or wait until the twelfth.
Instead, she stood there, her eyes deep in a daughter’s grief. Notwithstanding my stupid Charlie-Brown look of not having the words to say what I should be saying, Nancy McDonnell looked at me, winced in shaking her head subtly, and said,
“You know, Ned, it’s the end of an era…”
Monday, August 29, 2011
Letter #39 (and holding to keep it young) to FIENDS and familiares
Estimadas voluntarias y respetados compañeros,
As I stated in the PCM-connect web site, I am asking my younger Peace Corps brethren to suffer an old man’s fleeting fit of wisdom to be passed along to his counterparts of succeeding generations be they millennials or Gen-Xers or whatevers. I am asking you to consider reading through three writings, the links of which are posted in this letter. They discuss three key aspects of our world that my generation will leave to yours. Two writings came, as always, through the thoughtfulness of my generational contemporary, Mr Roy Rajan.
The first article is a brief history of the U.S. by the Strafor private intel service. It explains how we got to where we are today. Beautifully written and insightful, beware of Strafor’s ever-persistent bias of characterizing U.S. power and conduct as inevitable or somehow accidental. Duplicity and diplomacy were not quite so innocent as this re-issued Rudyard Kipling would have us believe. If you can not get directly to the article, please let me know and I will cut-paste the text directly below the torpor of this dismissive missive.
http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20110824-geopolitics-united-states-part-1-inevitable-empire
The second selection is a series of ten articles from “Slate Magazine” studying the inequality that grew under my generation’s watch. This article remains relatively free from bias and even ventures to diagnose the root-causes. Though a long read, this series is well worth the effort since this inequality is becoming serious. Not only do the poor remain invisible – many by being in jail for petty crimes – the middle-class is becoming isolated, too. The fact that a disenfranchised middle class has engineered the majority of revolutions, often among the most blood-drunk, is reason enough to sit up and take notice.
http://www.slate.com/id/2267157/
The last article is a typical anxiety spill over the perils of technology. Steven Vincent Benét held a prophetic distaste toward the information age and the Cold War during a short life that preceded both. But Mr Benét forgot one critical differentiator between man and machine: each one of us remains responsible for his or her privacy or lack of it. Neurotic needfulness is no excuse for forfeiting privacy. Accordingly, I sincerely implore you to think about the possibility that, as a people, we have, in our everyday preferences, effectively nullified the right of privacy – or shown its falsity – through the proliferation of social media, e-mails, blogs, etc.
Should this assertion of a negated right of privacy prove to be true, questions and implications galore will trouble your thinking in the years ahead. Did such a right of privacy ever really exist, at least implicitly? Or was it invented, not inferred, to suit political expediency? The answers might be unsettling for you. A couple of examples will suffice.
If the right to privacy has been devalued or belied, what will that mean for the widely accepted concepts underlying the Roe-versus-Wade Supreme Court decision or the popular aversion toward the “U.S.A. Patriot Act”? What will it mean for your children as they face the tasks, travails and bullies in the school-yard or on the inter-net? Could they become the road-kill of the information super-highway?
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/how-google-dominates-us/
Finally, I ask you to indulge this, my, dubious invitation. Such a request on my time, when I was young, would have made me chafe or, worse, sniffle in contempt. Since, many (if not all) of you are destined to assume leadership responsibilities of some kind as your lives manifest continually, the few hours invested in these essays may give you a sense of what you are getting yourselves into through the mere slippage of time.
Thank you, adios…over and out.
As I stated in the PCM-connect web site, I am asking my younger Peace Corps brethren to suffer an old man’s fleeting fit of wisdom to be passed along to his counterparts of succeeding generations be they millennials or Gen-Xers or whatevers. I am asking you to consider reading through three writings, the links of which are posted in this letter. They discuss three key aspects of our world that my generation will leave to yours. Two writings came, as always, through the thoughtfulness of my generational contemporary, Mr Roy Rajan.
The first article is a brief history of the U.S. by the Strafor private intel service. It explains how we got to where we are today. Beautifully written and insightful, beware of Strafor’s ever-persistent bias of characterizing U.S. power and conduct as inevitable or somehow accidental. Duplicity and diplomacy were not quite so innocent as this re-issued Rudyard Kipling would have us believe. If you can not get directly to the article, please let me know and I will cut-paste the text directly below the torpor of this dismissive missive.
http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20110824-geopolitics-united-states-part-1-inevitable-empire
The second selection is a series of ten articles from “Slate Magazine” studying the inequality that grew under my generation’s watch. This article remains relatively free from bias and even ventures to diagnose the root-causes. Though a long read, this series is well worth the effort since this inequality is becoming serious. Not only do the poor remain invisible – many by being in jail for petty crimes – the middle-class is becoming isolated, too. The fact that a disenfranchised middle class has engineered the majority of revolutions, often among the most blood-drunk, is reason enough to sit up and take notice.
http://www.slate.com/id/2267157/
The last article is a typical anxiety spill over the perils of technology. Steven Vincent Benét held a prophetic distaste toward the information age and the Cold War during a short life that preceded both. But Mr Benét forgot one critical differentiator between man and machine: each one of us remains responsible for his or her privacy or lack of it. Neurotic needfulness is no excuse for forfeiting privacy. Accordingly, I sincerely implore you to think about the possibility that, as a people, we have, in our everyday preferences, effectively nullified the right of privacy – or shown its falsity – through the proliferation of social media, e-mails, blogs, etc.
Should this assertion of a negated right of privacy prove to be true, questions and implications galore will trouble your thinking in the years ahead. Did such a right of privacy ever really exist, at least implicitly? Or was it invented, not inferred, to suit political expediency? The answers might be unsettling for you. A couple of examples will suffice.
If the right to privacy has been devalued or belied, what will that mean for the widely accepted concepts underlying the Roe-versus-Wade Supreme Court decision or the popular aversion toward the “U.S.A. Patriot Act”? What will it mean for your children as they face the tasks, travails and bullies in the school-yard or on the inter-net? Could they become the road-kill of the information super-highway?
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/how-google-dominates-us/
Finally, I ask you to indulge this, my, dubious invitation. Such a request on my time, when I was young, would have made me chafe or, worse, sniffle in contempt. Since, many (if not all) of you are destined to assume leadership responsibilities of some kind as your lives manifest continually, the few hours invested in these essays may give you a sense of what you are getting yourselves into through the mere slippage of time.
Thank you, adios…over and out.
Letter #38: Greed and Grief in modern Mexico
Walking into the science center where I serve in the Peace Corps this morning, I noticed the ordinarily jocund guard in a rather subdued state setting the three flags – those of the country, the national science council and the center itself – at half-mast. After I asked who had died, the kindly elder stated humbly, “Para las victimas del casino en Nuevo León…”.
Of course, three days before, I had heard President Calderón over the radio giving an impassioned speech out of step with our unfeeling time. The flags unfurled in the mournful remembrance of fifty-plus people burned to death by a narco-syndicate (i.e., the Zetas or the Gulf cartel). Analyses abound about whodunit and why (e.g., to knock off its balance the spin cycle of money-laundering through casinos); apparently what happened in Vegas did not stay in Vegas. This penetrating pedantry, nevertheless, misses the point.
In a speech coloured by its somber eloquence, el presidente Calderón not only called on his countrymen to rally against this state of 'anarco', he also called out United States of America as the root-cause of such grim criminality. Not the U.S. government as much as its drug-users. That’s right: our country, high-or-wrong. Would organized crime still exist South of the border without the unrelenting demand for drugs from the North? Certainly. But nothing on the scale witnessed in that casino, on the streets and during the years of fear.
El presidente Calderón’s question here becomes obvious with even the slightest reflection. Why has American leadership – Democrat, Independent and Republican alike – been intent on trying everything to stop the commerce of drugs except to address the root-cause? When will a leader risk his or her popularity – even re-election – to call us all to account? Where is the statesman needed openly to ask that hardest of all questions: Why do so many of our fellows, living in the epicenter of the American Century, find their lives so empty that they resort to drugs?
To her credit, Secretary of State Clinton has begun to say publicly that the U.S. bears at least some of the responsibility for Mexico’s tragedy. One reason that the obvious question remains unasked reflects the likelihood of no answer. Until an incumbent national leader cries out with the pain afflicting his people, as have great leaders through the ages from King David to President Lincoln to Prime Minister Churchill, the suffering will continue. My upbringing included a stricture that I not criticize the status-quo unless I had a solution. Of course, I have no solution, either.
While many leading citizens are proposing the legalization or de-criminalization of drugs, I remain uneasy with that approach because distribution channels are already in place to encourage consumption in the future of 'black-market' substances (i.e., stronger than allowed) by under-age users (i.e., children in junior high on up). In any case, the perspective of focusing on behavior patterns still fails to address the void inside most people – that quiet desperation Thoreau could not finesse – that seduces many into looking for oblivion, god, rapture, peer approval or allayed curiosity, whichever comes first.
One used to say that when the United States sneezes, Mexico catches pneumonia. The Mexican dictator of the nineteenth century was far keener with his wit: “Poor Mexico, so far from God but so close to the United States.” Perhaps we can change that ugly fact of life, not only for our neighbors but for ourselves by treating addicts and recreational users as people in pain, defenseless against the nothingness or the hopelessness that stalks them patiently, day in and day out.
There are no magic answers here because drug users have as many reasons for, and behaviors associated with, drug consumption as there are users. But recalling the pragmatism of F.D.R. in the face of a darker challenge to our national well-being presents a refreshing response. We take our best shot at giving the poor hope, the wealthy purpose and the middle class a future.
If a national system of rehabilitation centers does not work, then we try stay-home-approaches. If de-criminalization does not diminish crime, we start indicting drug dealers to under-age kids for human trafficking as well. If schooling the poor does not curb use, then we offer scholastic aid to those making the effort to stay clean. For the poor at least, up-or-out has an entirely different meaning than for untenured academics or foreign service officers.
In short, we do what it takes within the limits of democratic constitutionalism. America has a reservoir of goodwill within her people that, once properly stimulated, can better the lives of diverse Americans of all flags, taking Bolivar’s dream to a long-delayed destiny.
Of course, three days before, I had heard President Calderón over the radio giving an impassioned speech out of step with our unfeeling time. The flags unfurled in the mournful remembrance of fifty-plus people burned to death by a narco-syndicate (i.e., the Zetas or the Gulf cartel). Analyses abound about whodunit and why (e.g., to knock off its balance the spin cycle of money-laundering through casinos); apparently what happened in Vegas did not stay in Vegas. This penetrating pedantry, nevertheless, misses the point.
In a speech coloured by its somber eloquence, el presidente Calderón not only called on his countrymen to rally against this state of 'anarco', he also called out United States of America as the root-cause of such grim criminality. Not the U.S. government as much as its drug-users. That’s right: our country, high-or-wrong. Would organized crime still exist South of the border without the unrelenting demand for drugs from the North? Certainly. But nothing on the scale witnessed in that casino, on the streets and during the years of fear.
El presidente Calderón’s question here becomes obvious with even the slightest reflection. Why has American leadership – Democrat, Independent and Republican alike – been intent on trying everything to stop the commerce of drugs except to address the root-cause? When will a leader risk his or her popularity – even re-election – to call us all to account? Where is the statesman needed openly to ask that hardest of all questions: Why do so many of our fellows, living in the epicenter of the American Century, find their lives so empty that they resort to drugs?
To her credit, Secretary of State Clinton has begun to say publicly that the U.S. bears at least some of the responsibility for Mexico’s tragedy. One reason that the obvious question remains unasked reflects the likelihood of no answer. Until an incumbent national leader cries out with the pain afflicting his people, as have great leaders through the ages from King David to President Lincoln to Prime Minister Churchill, the suffering will continue. My upbringing included a stricture that I not criticize the status-quo unless I had a solution. Of course, I have no solution, either.
While many leading citizens are proposing the legalization or de-criminalization of drugs, I remain uneasy with that approach because distribution channels are already in place to encourage consumption in the future of 'black-market' substances (i.e., stronger than allowed) by under-age users (i.e., children in junior high on up). In any case, the perspective of focusing on behavior patterns still fails to address the void inside most people – that quiet desperation Thoreau could not finesse – that seduces many into looking for oblivion, god, rapture, peer approval or allayed curiosity, whichever comes first.
One used to say that when the United States sneezes, Mexico catches pneumonia. The Mexican dictator of the nineteenth century was far keener with his wit: “Poor Mexico, so far from God but so close to the United States.” Perhaps we can change that ugly fact of life, not only for our neighbors but for ourselves by treating addicts and recreational users as people in pain, defenseless against the nothingness or the hopelessness that stalks them patiently, day in and day out.
There are no magic answers here because drug users have as many reasons for, and behaviors associated with, drug consumption as there are users. But recalling the pragmatism of F.D.R. in the face of a darker challenge to our national well-being presents a refreshing response. We take our best shot at giving the poor hope, the wealthy purpose and the middle class a future.
If a national system of rehabilitation centers does not work, then we try stay-home-approaches. If de-criminalization does not diminish crime, we start indicting drug dealers to under-age kids for human trafficking as well. If schooling the poor does not curb use, then we offer scholastic aid to those making the effort to stay clean. For the poor at least, up-or-out has an entirely different meaning than for untenured academics or foreign service officers.
In short, we do what it takes within the limits of democratic constitutionalism. America has a reservoir of goodwill within her people that, once properly stimulated, can better the lives of diverse Americans of all flags, taking Bolivar’s dream to a long-delayed destiny.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Letter #37 to Fiends and Familiares: Mexico at one year
My group of Peace Corps is bumping into its first anniversary in Mexico. Before I arrived here for this tour, I had private fantasies of Hesse’s Siddhartha, not tending the ferry across the river, but teaching in some pueblo lost somewhere on the Baja peninsula.
Well, wisdom attained on other people’s money has not quite come to pass. Truth is that I am basically working on a traditional capacity-transfer project, living in a cosmopolitan city and enjoying the symphony with my novia at seven bucks a pop.
Nevertheless, in an engaging spirit of public service combined with a simple sense of a destiny not mine, I am writing down ten lessons from my first year so those who follow me have absolutely no excuse for being pathetic human beings.
PASCAL’S PAINFUL PARADOX. “Man is neither angel nor brute. The misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.” Learned that one the hard way this past year.
KILLING TIME, KILLING ME. Beware if you have not enough to do at first. Inventing activities to fill the time can wreak a peculiar vengeance. When you are ready to let the activity fade away, feedback comes galloping in, begging for the brain-murder to continue.
WHY MEXICANS ARE FRIENDLY. Because they are, stupid gringo.
NO ATHEISTS HERE. Gone are the scintillating sociopaths born without conscience, living without consequence and ready to die without continuity. Most so-called atheists here are people struck dumb, perhaps damned, by scrupulosity with no way out.
TRUTH of CULTURAL ASSIMILATION. Giggling punctuated by intermittent, delicately timed one-word slurs like ‘bueno’; ‘bien’; and, ‘verdad’. “¿And what do you do, blend?”
VINDICATION of SHAKESPEARE. "Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them." Twelfth Night. Included to make me look like some intelligent visionary and other good stuff.
THE GREATEST GAUNTLET EVER THROWN. “Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth…”
TIME TAKES TIME. I thought after a year, I would be fluent in Spanish. Nope. People often try my patience by urging my patience.
The SECRET behind PREENING POLITICOS: Intellectual struttiness where neurotic exhibitionism amazingly morphs into self-actualization.
TRITE NOISE. People my age may believe that “children should be seen and not heard”. The young volunteers have a better point. Oldsters should not be heard, either: they snore.
Some of these lessons come from fashionably disdained sources as most people are too modern to admit to the truth of anything written before 1900. Yet these same, these dull, lessons remind ‘yours truly’ that humility really is the currency of the realm during this magical Mexico tour.
Mexico labours under the heavy burdens of a withering despair always whispering: drug wars, acute poverty affecting 45% of the population, etc. Yet her people rarely fail to help me when I ask; her women know that dainty art, long lost in the United States, of making any man feel special; and, strangers invite me to parties at least once a week.
In closing, let me affirm that I fall so far short of reciprocating all that these lovely people do; one would have to resort electron microscopes to discern what, if any, progress I have really made. Mexico will certainly not make me a Saint or even a Mexican. Yet she will continue to make me happy. Thank you: good-bye!
Well, wisdom attained on other people’s money has not quite come to pass. Truth is that I am basically working on a traditional capacity-transfer project, living in a cosmopolitan city and enjoying the symphony with my novia at seven bucks a pop.
Nevertheless, in an engaging spirit of public service combined with a simple sense of a destiny not mine, I am writing down ten lessons from my first year so those who follow me have absolutely no excuse for being pathetic human beings.
PASCAL’S PAINFUL PARADOX. “Man is neither angel nor brute. The misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.” Learned that one the hard way this past year.
KILLING TIME, KILLING ME. Beware if you have not enough to do at first. Inventing activities to fill the time can wreak a peculiar vengeance. When you are ready to let the activity fade away, feedback comes galloping in, begging for the brain-murder to continue.
WHY MEXICANS ARE FRIENDLY. Because they are, stupid gringo.
NO ATHEISTS HERE. Gone are the scintillating sociopaths born without conscience, living without consequence and ready to die without continuity. Most so-called atheists here are people struck dumb, perhaps damned, by scrupulosity with no way out.
TRUTH of CULTURAL ASSIMILATION. Giggling punctuated by intermittent, delicately timed one-word slurs like ‘bueno’; ‘bien’; and, ‘verdad’. “¿And what do you do, blend?”
VINDICATION of SHAKESPEARE. "Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them." Twelfth Night. Included to make me look like some intelligent visionary and other good stuff.
THE GREATEST GAUNTLET EVER THROWN. “Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth…”
TIME TAKES TIME. I thought after a year, I would be fluent in Spanish. Nope. People often try my patience by urging my patience.
The SECRET behind PREENING POLITICOS: Intellectual struttiness where neurotic exhibitionism amazingly morphs into self-actualization.
TRITE NOISE. People my age may believe that “children should be seen and not heard”. The young volunteers have a better point. Oldsters should not be heard, either: they snore.
Some of these lessons come from fashionably disdained sources as most people are too modern to admit to the truth of anything written before 1900. Yet these same, these dull, lessons remind ‘yours truly’ that humility really is the currency of the realm during this magical Mexico tour.
Mexico labours under the heavy burdens of a withering despair always whispering: drug wars, acute poverty affecting 45% of the population, etc. Yet her people rarely fail to help me when I ask; her women know that dainty art, long lost in the United States, of making any man feel special; and, strangers invite me to parties at least once a week.
In closing, let me affirm that I fall so far short of reciprocating all that these lovely people do; one would have to resort electron microscopes to discern what, if any, progress I have really made. Mexico will certainly not make me a Saint or even a Mexican. Yet she will continue to make me happy. Thank you: good-bye!
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