Making A Mark On The World

A very intelligent, able, enthusiastic student whom I admire very much said it to me exactly this way: “I want to make my mark on the world.”

Her words struck me as strange, even as incomprehensible, although I've heard them for seventy years. I've heard the expression many times and the sentiment is commonly held to be  good, normal, healthy, a sign of good promise and respectability.

It's not clear to me what “making a mark on the world” means. It could mean putting graffiti on a wall, or putting up a building in a beautiful field where there was nothing but green grass and trees and sunshine and vistas. It could mean getting yourself a tattoo or getting your name in the news or donating money so that your name appears on a building. It could mean getting noticed by others by some outrageous dress or act. It must be related in some way to “fame,” being “famous,” recognized, like becoming President of the United States of America. It could mean bringing children into the world who “amount to something.”

But if you take a large, long, perspective on things, say of one million years, it's obvious that any “mark” on the world that one makes is going to be erased without the slightest trace left. Actually, it will take very much less time than a million years for every trace to be erased.

Now, I can't believe that something this obvious escapes my bright young student. Yet she nonetheless acts as if it were not so, as is so very commonly done.

So, why is this? Why should the goal of making a mark on the world be so resistant to correction? 



My own best guess is that love is at the center of everything, including human consciousness!

Bernie Sanders' Age

Senator Bernie Sanders is the same age I am, seventy-four, so I always notice very quickly when someone comments on his age as if it were something negative about him. I think it is probably the standard, most widely-accepted, position in the U.S. that being young is better than being old.

I was accordingly surprised, for example, when I visited a warehouse in Houston a few times not long ago that was staffed entirely by Chinese people - not only “Chinese-Americans” but people native to China. Their respect, or lack of disrespect, for my old age was quite striking to me, and my first thought was “What’s this?!”

It has also been surprising to me to have found, and contrary to common expectation, my old age to be far better than my youth, in every way, even physically.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of old age is that you’ve had the time to integrate those aspects of your own life that are unique, differing from common interpretations. Coming to know yourself, and believe it, takes long experience and reflection. Noting down your dreams every night for fifty years and conscientiously working out what they are telling you are invaluable. Listening over a long time to what the fairy tales symbolize by “the little people” or “animals” or "those in need" is definitely helpful, too.

Then there is this matter of what I think of as an accumulation of burden and accumulation of strength. There is an accumulation of error and malice over the course of a lifetime, each lie or crime entailing a subsequent lie or crime, so that the burden after seventy years does in fact make one “out of it,” a mentally and spiritually deficient monster. And conversely, there is an accumulation of strength that follows every genuine act of love or truth, that brings astonishingly strong, delightful, helpful clarity with age.

Look at Me! Look at Me!

I was awakened one morning last week by loud, repeated shouts of “Look at me! Look at Me!" I got to the window and saw that it was a young boy of about six-years-old performing dare-devil maneuvers on his bicycle, for a somewhat distracted audience who was not paying close attention to his feats and person.

This group of children consists of five or six members, ranging in age from about three to ten years old. They all live within twenty-five yards from my house and run around the neighborhood wildly without any adult supervision or even knowledge. They seem to be very much on their own and get into whatever adventures and explorations or experiments present themselves. They have a really admirable curiosity about everything, lots of energy and no inhibitions that I can detect.

I always find them to be fascinating but what struck me strongly on this occasion was the great familiarity of the shouts of “Look at me! Look at me!” There was the immediate association to the Republican candidates for President of the United States who have been saying the same thing, although in different words and in their actions. “Look at me!”

I note in this connection how Bernie Sanders absolutely refuses to do the shout, and immediately tells the provocateurs and the audience that it is the issues, not himself, nor who is the greatest nor who is ahead in the horse race, that is important.

There is this fact, that I mentioned in a previous post, that the way one comes to know his or her self - the basic project since the Greeks of “Know thyself” - that the only way we can discover who we are is by taking a point of view outside of ourselves. The only way a point can see itself is from outside itself. That’s very basic, but usually completely dismissed or overlooked.

Children need to have someone look at them in order to find themselves. It has often been noticed that children’s attempts to have someone look at them are dismissed as “just trying to get attention,” and that they find it necessary to get in trouble rather than not to be noticed at all.

I also saw this last week the mother of two of these children - a little girl of about four and boy of five - yelling at them in a shrill, high-pitched voice: “Get in the fucking house!” She then slapped the side of the boy’s head. He put his hand on his head, looked down, and was about to cry and then she said: “Well? You fuck me over like that, what do you expect?”

I know, I know. The whole abuse of children thing is just too much for us to bear so I won’t go on about it.
 
It seems to me equally obliterating to think of all the reputed, assumed “adults” around who have never grown up and who are still desperately crying out in all but the exact words “Look at me! Look at me!” It’s not just the young man seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth.

Mikey Angry. Mikey Smash.

I often think of the fact that when children first begin to refer to themselves, they do so in the objective case. They use “me” where they later will use “I.”

This is one of those seemingly small realities which hardly seem to merit fifty years of thought, but the implications of this little fact are so fundamental, so numerous, that it would completely overturn present society if it were acknowledged.

It tells us that selfhood, self-imagery, dignity, is built, developed - not given at birth - by taking the viewpoint of the other.

This is why abandonment is so devastating to a child.

This is why “I don’t love you any more” is the most fundamental hurt that a child can think of to use, as well as to receive.

It’s why I just die inside whenever I see adults humiliating a child in public places.

It’s why the especially Anglo habit of input-output education produces such monsters.

The French Priest and Norman Morrison

"I have seen my faithful burned up in napalm. I have seen the bodies of women and children blown to bits. I have seen all my villages razed. By God, it's not possible. They must settle their accounts with God."

A French priest in Viet-Nam said those words during an interview with Paris Match in 1965. I. F. Stone reprinted them in his I. F Stone's Weekly, which is where Norman Morrison read them and then immolated himself about 100 feet from the office window of Robert McNamara at the Pentagon, November 2^nd, 1965. That was fifty years ago.

The final sentence, “They must settle their accounts with God,” is usually deleted when you find the quote, but it will never die.

There is now a literature about what seems to be the “amnesia” concerning such contributions as Morrison's self-immolation, and the atrocities, but I trust the next fifty years will bring out more scholarship and understanding. A long period of reflection and development is necessary after such events in order to break through the excuses, rationalizations and defenses to settle those “accounts with God.”

I recently finished Deborah Nelson's 2008 book,“The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth about U. S. War Crimes,” in which amnesia or cover-up is the central theme, and also Andrew Preston's 2006 book, “The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam,” in which we see how Bundy's brilliance, immense talent, connections, experience, information and determination played a crucial part in creating and continuing the war - the connivance and collusion of the “best and the brightest” is not as forgotten as it might seem.

The cover-up of the U.S. killings of innocent Viet-Namese, planting weapons on them, and then claiming them as enemy kills in order to boost one's body count and thereby to look good to one's superiors and thereby to advance one's military career, is much more comprehensible to me now after having experiencing forty years of conscious, progammatic, you-are-on-your-own, selfishness in every aspect of US culture. The recent videos of U.S. police killing unarmed civilians within the US itself also help one to face it and to believe it.

U.S. Ret. Brig. General John Johns has a prominent place in Nelson's book because he was so well-informed, mindful and articulate about U.S. crimes in Viet-Nam. He tells Nelson in an interview why he had not wanted to discuss them in public but then became disillusioned. She writes, p. 181:

“The Iraq war to me is one of the great blunders of history,” he says, and a watershed in his own thinking. He had supported dealing with atrocities internally. But the war in Iraq showed that the government and military leaders had forgotten the lessons from Vietnam – or never learned them. He now believes that the public must be informed and enlisted to avoid another Vietnam in Iraq and prevent similar mistakes in the future.

“We can't change current practices unless we acknowledge the past. If we rationalize it as isolated acts, as we did in Vietnam and as we're doing with Abu Ghraib and similar atrocities, we'll never correct the problem.”

Avril Lavigne and the Doctors

Avril Lavigne comes from that Napanee-Kingston area of Ontario that I like so much, and so I was especially interested to learn of her experience with the bumbling doctors who couldn't  diagnose her Lyme Disease:

I, also, had Lyme Disease about ten years ago and went through a similar experience with doctors as she did. I went to four different doctors who had no idea what was wrong. One of my symptoms was that I had swollen, sore joints such that I could hardly move my right arm and my knees. One doctor said I had “water in the joints” and sent me to a joints specialist. The specialist got mad at me and said “You don't have water in the joints” and just ordered me to wear an arm sling and sent me a huge bill. I didn't have insurance at the time so he was able, like the other doctors, to bill me three times what the insurance schedules specify for his “work.”

Ultimately, it was a nurse friend who correctly diagnosed that I had Lyme Disease. I think that most people who have had Lyme would have a special feeling for Avril Lavigne through this. Her bit about the “computer” is a whole additional story that is worthy of the era's deepest criticism and scholarship.

There was another incident this last week which caught the reality of the medical care experience as I know it. This incident got national attention in the US because it was the subject of a Washington Post article. Many elements of that incident ring exactly with my own experience, but especially the bit about the doctors' contempt and hostility. It's as if doctors, like the police, consider the people as the enemy.

I've thought a lot about that over the years - why it is that they are so contemptuous of us when it is supposed to be their vocation to help us in our hour of vulnerability and need. Avril Lavigne very clearly picked up the contempt and hostility of the doctors.

The best explanation I can come up with is that the “social” philosophy, particularly for the last forty years, has been programmatic, conscious selfishness and being ill, vulnerable, in distress, issues a demand for compassion and otherness and anti-selfishness. These qualities are the exact opposite of the ethos of the era, on which the doctors' substantial incomes depend.

Another partial explanation is that they themselves know at some level about their incompetence and inadequacy every bit as much as we do, probably even more than we do.

Perhaps you can offer an explanation. I think people are often hesitant to speak out the way Avril and the Virginian spoke out, because we think that no one will believe what we are saying. I get that all the time. Whenever I point out incidents like these two that I have mentioned here, or of my own similar experience in the medical world, I find that no one believes me. The usual response I get is complete silence. But I hear Avril's heart in that video. I refuse to say that I don't hear it.

Are They Progressives Or What?

There is now, strangely, a “progressive” theme among “conservatives” that goes along the lines that society is getting better, people are getting nicer, that we have surmounted racism and sexism, and that there is such a thing as Progress in human affairs.

There is this astonishing popularity among them of Stephen Pinker and his book, saying how much better things are today. Maybe that's even where they are getting the theme.

Normally, conservatives deny the possibility of progress, and are fond of Stop!, taking us back to the way things were, taking back their country, citing how human nature doesn't change and what it was that ruined Rome.

So what's going on with this?

Is it simply that the present inured state of inequality and degradation of the poor so flatters themselves?

And then, strangely enough too, I find myself (a Progressive) thinking from time to time that, yes, the Viet-Nam war fifty years ago pretty much exposed the reality and what we are seeing now, even in this instance, is evidence that things don't really change in any fundamental way.