Butterflies are such beautiful creatures, bits of dancing color against the green of foliage. From childhood to old age, we are attracted to them, snapping pictures of their brightly colored wings and gasping with delight if one lands on a hand, arm, or head. Entire concessions have opened – “butterfly gardens” or “butterfly encounters” – that rely in the draw of these tiny insects with their brilliant wings.
I always loved butterflies too – heck, a butterfly was one of the primary things to blame for that back flip off the swingset that broke my wrist when I was about four. But recently, in my decade here in Florida, I have found myself less in love with the butterfly than with its insect neighbor the dragonfly.
When I first arrived here in Florida, I failed to grasp one of the cardinal facts of the state. Things are bigger here. With the primal heritage of the young state and the lack of harsh winters to push things back to what Northerners would consider their normal size, things are bigger here. The first time I spotted one of those fake rubber flies dispensed from K-mart vending machines on the sidewalk…and it flew away, I began to get some idea of the difference in Florida fauna, but it wasn’t until my first real summer here that I fully understood.
The air of a Florida summer is like nothing else I’ve encountered. It is a tangible force, a part of the landscape. It lies thick, hot, a weight pressing the heat of the sun against your skin, resisting your efforts to draw it in to steal its oxygen. It blankets the landscape, magnifying the brightness, a shimmering blanket beneath the pale blue of a sky already faded by the merciless sun. I remember standing out under the awning of my workplace in that heat, unsure which was more desirable to escape – the air-conditioned drudgery of the workplace behind me or the suffocating heat of the outdoors – when I saw them.
Back in Pennsylvania, we had had dragonflies – snakefeeders my dad always called them. They were delicate bodied little creatures, wisps of metallic color and iridescent wings that lit on fishing rods and blades of grass. Here, in Florida, I discovered that those weren’t dragonflies. They may have been damselflies or something else, but dragonflies…no. I can still remember the stillness of that hot afternoon, standing outside my job when I heard a deep thrumming. Looking down over the second story balcony, I saw them, dark bodies hanging in the air, round barreled extensions on both sides of their bodies, assumedly to support the muscles controlling the massive, flickering wings that moved faster than the eye could see. The dragonflies hovered in the air, dozens strong. They moved through the weight of the heat with strange, slow dignity, dancing a gravity-defying ritual with aeons old dignity. I forgot the heat as I watched them, fascinated as they spiraled through the heat, moving past each other only to turn and change places.
I never fell out of love with those dragonflies. I stop to watch them whenever I glimpse their slow dance or hear the impossible thrum of their wings. But I could never quite put my finger on what it was about them that drew me to them, more so even than to the bright splash of butterfly wings. And then, one day, watching the magical dance of dragonfly on the still Florida air, I realized why they fascinate me.
It’s the way they move.
Watch a butterfly. It flutters, flits, its path a wavering field of color and movement. Even in landing, the butterfly is not still; it fans its lovely wings; it is uncertain, delicate. It calls out the wonder within the human heart, reminding us to treasure beauty, for it Is a delicate commodity.
Watch a dragonfly. It hovers. It darts. It makes smooth, impossible arcs in the air, dancing in some mysterious pattern which, although I may not see it, seems to have purpose. It is smooth. It is sure, the impossible drums of its wing muscles buoying it up with seemingly effortless power in the still air. A dragonfly does not have the beauty of a butterfly – it is awkward, narrow with massive barrels of muscle, impossibly insectoid. Yet it moves so beautifully. Dragonflies do not flutter; they do not reveal their delicacy. They are impossible, gravity defying messengers of a lost world, reminders of nature’s mystery and the inadequacy of our understanding.
I know butterflies are beautiful. Their color and variety is breathtaking, but I would rather skip the butterfly garden to watch the humble dragonflies circle free against the pale shimmer of the Florida air. The butterfly charms me, thrills me when it lights on me as though I have been granted a privilege. The dragonfly blesses me with the wonderful impossibility of its movement and the certainty of its flight.
It is not its appearance, its physical beauty that calls me – it is its freedom to move with impossible grace through the unseen. It speaks to something primal within me, something that wants to leave gravity behind and move with ancient confidence on the unseen air, dancing beauty that transcends my awkwardness.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Windows
I always believed there was a world just to the left of ours. It was a place populated by all the characters of books and television, a place of heroes, villains, and wonders. I told myself stories about it as a child, dreaming that I would be one of the select group who could bring a character from there to here. I peered through the windows of books, consuming text and composing the vision in my mind's eye, always standing on intellectual tip-toe to catch a glimpse of that other world. Over the years, I stopped telling myself those stories, but I never stopped believing in that other place, glimpsed just out of the corner of your eye, never stopped standing on the tip toes of my imagination to peer through into a different world.
And sitting there, in the movie theatre, 3D glasses digging into my nose, catching a glimpse of the texture of the screen beneath the images of the film, I smile to myself. I know so many people who object to the modern rebirth of 3D, and while I too am painfully familiar with the ill fated fads of the 50s and 60s matinee, I am thoroughly enjoying this new variation of film in the illusion of the third dimension. It raises the blinds on a new frame around an old, familiar window.
The new spate of films presented in digital 3D fascinates me because, for those directors who understand their medium, the dimensionality of the media is treated far differently from earlier 3D. Gone are the cheap gags and the notion of objects hurtling into the audience's field of vision. Such images are reserved for theme park shows and remakes of unspeakable James Cameron films (I have still not recovered from the trailer for Piranha). In their place is a strange new artistic convention - a conscious framing of mise en scene in a way that gives the illusion that the movie screen has become a window - a view into another place populated with heroes, villains, and wonders. We, as the audience, are not thrust into that place; there is no attempt to create the illusion that the two worlds are invading one another's space; rationality tells us that the wonders of the world beyond the screen have little place in our reality, and, much as we may regret it, we have little place in theirs. Instead, these films create a breach between the worlds, a way of seeing what lies on the other side of the wall between story and reality. They are windows, and we are given the opportunity to peer through into a place newly given dimension and depth.
Certainly, not all these new films are created equal. Some are merely films rendered into 3D - a simple window into another time and place. Others are conscious of their role, framing their images within windows and clouds, creating a deliciously voyeuristic sense of peering through into another world, of stealing a story through reflected spaces and from unsuspected corners. In those films, there is a sense of the furtive wonder and belief in story that I held so fervently in the green and brown world of my childhood. There is a sense of opening a door and finding a place of wonder just beyond its sill.
Perhaps, once again, rendering film in three dimensions is no more than a fad, a desperate attempt by a film industry that is again feeling threatened - this time by digital media rather than the advent of television, but threatened nonetheless. Perhaps it is no more than a last ditch attempt to offer audiences something, anything, that they cannot find on personal screens. But I do not view it in quite that way. Regardless of its origins, I find myself enjoying the new interpretation of an old medium. I find myself again a child, face plastered to the glass of reality, peering into a place of dreams. And when I catch a glimpse of the screen, I cannot help but smile, because to me, it is just the light glinting off the glass of imagination, reminding me that the blinds are open, and I can see through that window into the world I have so long dreamed.
And sitting there, in the movie theatre, 3D glasses digging into my nose, catching a glimpse of the texture of the screen beneath the images of the film, I smile to myself. I know so many people who object to the modern rebirth of 3D, and while I too am painfully familiar with the ill fated fads of the 50s and 60s matinee, I am thoroughly enjoying this new variation of film in the illusion of the third dimension. It raises the blinds on a new frame around an old, familiar window.
The new spate of films presented in digital 3D fascinates me because, for those directors who understand their medium, the dimensionality of the media is treated far differently from earlier 3D. Gone are the cheap gags and the notion of objects hurtling into the audience's field of vision. Such images are reserved for theme park shows and remakes of unspeakable James Cameron films (I have still not recovered from the trailer for Piranha). In their place is a strange new artistic convention - a conscious framing of mise en scene in a way that gives the illusion that the movie screen has become a window - a view into another place populated with heroes, villains, and wonders. We, as the audience, are not thrust into that place; there is no attempt to create the illusion that the two worlds are invading one another's space; rationality tells us that the wonders of the world beyond the screen have little place in our reality, and, much as we may regret it, we have little place in theirs. Instead, these films create a breach between the worlds, a way of seeing what lies on the other side of the wall between story and reality. They are windows, and we are given the opportunity to peer through into a place newly given dimension and depth.
Certainly, not all these new films are created equal. Some are merely films rendered into 3D - a simple window into another time and place. Others are conscious of their role, framing their images within windows and clouds, creating a deliciously voyeuristic sense of peering through into another world, of stealing a story through reflected spaces and from unsuspected corners. In those films, there is a sense of the furtive wonder and belief in story that I held so fervently in the green and brown world of my childhood. There is a sense of opening a door and finding a place of wonder just beyond its sill.
Perhaps, once again, rendering film in three dimensions is no more than a fad, a desperate attempt by a film industry that is again feeling threatened - this time by digital media rather than the advent of television, but threatened nonetheless. Perhaps it is no more than a last ditch attempt to offer audiences something, anything, that they cannot find on personal screens. But I do not view it in quite that way. Regardless of its origins, I find myself enjoying the new interpretation of an old medium. I find myself again a child, face plastered to the glass of reality, peering into a place of dreams. And when I catch a glimpse of the screen, I cannot help but smile, because to me, it is just the light glinting off the glass of imagination, reminding me that the blinds are open, and I can see through that window into the world I have so long dreamed.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Dreams Come True
I stood there in the morning sunlight, tears running down my face, feeling the fool, yet at the same time filled with the fierce joy that made my cheeks wet. Around me the crowd chanted along, and I joined them, words strong in spite of the tightness in my throat; “Dreams come true.”
In front of me, the stage erupted in pyrotechnics and the final number of the show kicked into high gear. I wiped away the tears, feeling foolish. It was just a kids’ show at the Magic Kingdom. Yet for all the ridiculous costuming and simplistic story, there was something there that touched deep. I believed, have always believed, in the power and importance of dreams. Audience participation gimmick it may have been, but the sound of hundreds of voices raised, chanting “Dreams Come True” with the conviction needed to vanquish a character whose villainy rose from the assertion that the world no longer believes in the power of dreams, struck me as a beautiful metaphor.
In my composition class, I assign an in-class essay as part of a student exam. The students may write an essay inspired by an image or a poem, and one of the poetry choices is Langston Hughes’s “A Dream Deferred.” The simple, vivid language of the piece, combined with its human and cultural messages seems a powerful inspiration to me. Every semester, students write about the psychological consequences of forgetting what our minds create while we sleep and ponder the question of what happens to those dream images when we wake up. And every semester I am horrified. “It’s not that kind of dream,” I think. And yet I am forced to face the reality that for some people, those are the only dreams of which they are consciously aware.
We all dream. As children, we choose careers on the basis of heroism, excitement, and service to others. We spend long hours playing out what we think our futures will bring, or at least imagining that our future will be what we desire – empowered, like our parents, nothing like our parents, shaped by hopes and by greatness. But years roll by, and reality intrudes. Responsibility rings us in, and we become habituated to the rolling cycle of busy-ness that fills our time. Our dreams get buried.
I do believe that is villainy. Perhaps not as tangible as a green-skinned Malificent rising from a Disney World stage in a puff of green smoke, but something far more insidious. We give up; we forget; we relegate dreams to the realm of childhood and fools. But by doing so, we lose our chance at greatness. We lose our chance at completeness and at a better world. We give up our greatest power and isolate ourselves from our fellow humans and from our own potential.
Dreams are the things that have shaped our world. From the ancients who dreamed the shapes of the stars into legends that revealed human nature to the ragtag assembly of farmers and lawyers who proposed a new country in the British colonies to Martin Luther King Jr to Shakespeare to his queen and her armada. Those men and women doubtless had night visions like the rest of us, but those were not the dreams that they paid a personal price to pursue; those were not the dreams that changed the world.
But those were great men and great women, destined for great things. Perhaps, but they were great because they were dreamers and doers. They believed strongly enough that dreams come true to pursue what they believed in, to push beyond the mundane into the places that societal common sense tells us are the realm of children and madmen. They refused to put childish visions behind them and “face reality.” Instead, they believed that human dreams could make reality. They believed in their dreams, and the world, sometimes hesitantly, sometimes violently, sometimes joyously submitted the power of those dreams.
Standing there, in a make-believe land where adults feel separated enough from reality to chant along with a person wearing a mouse costume, I felt a shiver of an arcane truth. I wondered how many of those gathered in front of a forced perspective castle in the Florida sun took a second to think about the words they tossed out into the clear morning air. How many of them really did believe, even for a moment, that dreams come true and that they have the power to overcome skepticism and apathy? Did they recognize the metaphor behind the power of their voices, raised in faith in an ideal, to vanquish an idea that has been dragging mankind to a lower denominator for millennia? Or did they merely parrot what they were told for the sake of conformity and the happiness of their children?
I’ll never know, but I do know that I choose to believe in dreams. I refuse to stop believing in possibility and heroism. I refuse to give up being a heroine in my own fantasy world. I do not believe that docile acceptance of our circumstances and the adoption of behavior that allows us to get by is the only way to live our lives. Certainly, I live a life filled with the mundane and with responsibility, and those small things fill my days. But I believe that cover of the ordinary stretches over a mighty framework of dream and possibility, and even though I cannot always see the frame, I have faith it is there, waiting to burst through, waiting for humanity to be ready for it. I do believe that dreams come true, not free, but True, and that faith is what carries me past the mundane and into the morning sunlight.
In front of me, the stage erupted in pyrotechnics and the final number of the show kicked into high gear. I wiped away the tears, feeling foolish. It was just a kids’ show at the Magic Kingdom. Yet for all the ridiculous costuming and simplistic story, there was something there that touched deep. I believed, have always believed, in the power and importance of dreams. Audience participation gimmick it may have been, but the sound of hundreds of voices raised, chanting “Dreams Come True” with the conviction needed to vanquish a character whose villainy rose from the assertion that the world no longer believes in the power of dreams, struck me as a beautiful metaphor.
In my composition class, I assign an in-class essay as part of a student exam. The students may write an essay inspired by an image or a poem, and one of the poetry choices is Langston Hughes’s “A Dream Deferred.” The simple, vivid language of the piece, combined with its human and cultural messages seems a powerful inspiration to me. Every semester, students write about the psychological consequences of forgetting what our minds create while we sleep and ponder the question of what happens to those dream images when we wake up. And every semester I am horrified. “It’s not that kind of dream,” I think. And yet I am forced to face the reality that for some people, those are the only dreams of which they are consciously aware.
We all dream. As children, we choose careers on the basis of heroism, excitement, and service to others. We spend long hours playing out what we think our futures will bring, or at least imagining that our future will be what we desire – empowered, like our parents, nothing like our parents, shaped by hopes and by greatness. But years roll by, and reality intrudes. Responsibility rings us in, and we become habituated to the rolling cycle of busy-ness that fills our time. Our dreams get buried.
I do believe that is villainy. Perhaps not as tangible as a green-skinned Malificent rising from a Disney World stage in a puff of green smoke, but something far more insidious. We give up; we forget; we relegate dreams to the realm of childhood and fools. But by doing so, we lose our chance at greatness. We lose our chance at completeness and at a better world. We give up our greatest power and isolate ourselves from our fellow humans and from our own potential.
Dreams are the things that have shaped our world. From the ancients who dreamed the shapes of the stars into legends that revealed human nature to the ragtag assembly of farmers and lawyers who proposed a new country in the British colonies to Martin Luther King Jr to Shakespeare to his queen and her armada. Those men and women doubtless had night visions like the rest of us, but those were not the dreams that they paid a personal price to pursue; those were not the dreams that changed the world.
But those were great men and great women, destined for great things. Perhaps, but they were great because they were dreamers and doers. They believed strongly enough that dreams come true to pursue what they believed in, to push beyond the mundane into the places that societal common sense tells us are the realm of children and madmen. They refused to put childish visions behind them and “face reality.” Instead, they believed that human dreams could make reality. They believed in their dreams, and the world, sometimes hesitantly, sometimes violently, sometimes joyously submitted the power of those dreams.
Standing there, in a make-believe land where adults feel separated enough from reality to chant along with a person wearing a mouse costume, I felt a shiver of an arcane truth. I wondered how many of those gathered in front of a forced perspective castle in the Florida sun took a second to think about the words they tossed out into the clear morning air. How many of them really did believe, even for a moment, that dreams come true and that they have the power to overcome skepticism and apathy? Did they recognize the metaphor behind the power of their voices, raised in faith in an ideal, to vanquish an idea that has been dragging mankind to a lower denominator for millennia? Or did they merely parrot what they were told for the sake of conformity and the happiness of their children?
I’ll never know, but I do know that I choose to believe in dreams. I refuse to stop believing in possibility and heroism. I refuse to give up being a heroine in my own fantasy world. I do not believe that docile acceptance of our circumstances and the adoption of behavior that allows us to get by is the only way to live our lives. Certainly, I live a life filled with the mundane and with responsibility, and those small things fill my days. But I believe that cover of the ordinary stretches over a mighty framework of dream and possibility, and even though I cannot always see the frame, I have faith it is there, waiting to burst through, waiting for humanity to be ready for it. I do believe that dreams come true, not free, but True, and that faith is what carries me past the mundane and into the morning sunlight.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Oddity
We are creatures of habit. We adhere to schedules, both because they comfort us and because they are necessary, but sometimes those schedules bind us. They dull our vision and let us settle into the stupor of familiarity. It takes something...different to get us to pay attention and begin thinking once again.
The stoplight was part of my routine. At an intersection less than 15 minutes from home, it is a light that I have been waiting at for the past 14 years. Familiar territory, a space where my primary thought is safely navigating the snarl of traffic on its way to the K-12 school down the road. I don't pay much attention - it's a similar scene day in and day out.
This morning I sat there, nursing my travel mug of coffee and waiting for the light to change, sparing an occasional habitual glance to ensure the hood behind me didn't come too close to my bumper. And then I heard the sound of music from another vehicle nearby. Really, at an intersection less than a block from a high school, that's not unusual. I'm quite accustomed to being jarred by the vibrating bass of someone's car system blasting out rap. But this shared musical selection stopped me in the middle of a sip of coffee. Someone, in the immediate area, was blasting opera loud enough that I could actually make out the words. In Italian.
Jarred out of ritual, I began, circumspectly of course, craning my head in an attempt to find out who on earth was blasting...opera. It took only a moment to determine it was a blandly beige Toyota behind me to the right. The windows were tinted, preventing me from glimpsing more of the driver than a lightly conducting hand in the window.
The light turned, and I watched with considerable amusement as, to the applause following the aria (still audible in my car), the Toyota peeled out of its spot, speeding past two cars and pulling in a few spaces ahead of me, cutting off a high-school driver. I followed more slowly, eventually finding myself behind the car again, drifting along in the wake of a rousing choral number until the driver again sped ahead, this time on his way to tailgate a school bus.
Sometimes I forget, in the ritual of habit, what amazing creatures we humans are, how quirky and how diverse, not merely in skin tone or culture or physical characteristic, but in who we are and how we choose to express ourselves. I wish all the best to the Operatic Kamikaze, and I thank him for starting my day, instead of with ritual, with a smile.
The stoplight was part of my routine. At an intersection less than 15 minutes from home, it is a light that I have been waiting at for the past 14 years. Familiar territory, a space where my primary thought is safely navigating the snarl of traffic on its way to the K-12 school down the road. I don't pay much attention - it's a similar scene day in and day out.
This morning I sat there, nursing my travel mug of coffee and waiting for the light to change, sparing an occasional habitual glance to ensure the hood behind me didn't come too close to my bumper. And then I heard the sound of music from another vehicle nearby. Really, at an intersection less than a block from a high school, that's not unusual. I'm quite accustomed to being jarred by the vibrating bass of someone's car system blasting out rap. But this shared musical selection stopped me in the middle of a sip of coffee. Someone, in the immediate area, was blasting opera loud enough that I could actually make out the words. In Italian.
Jarred out of ritual, I began, circumspectly of course, craning my head in an attempt to find out who on earth was blasting...opera. It took only a moment to determine it was a blandly beige Toyota behind me to the right. The windows were tinted, preventing me from glimpsing more of the driver than a lightly conducting hand in the window.
The light turned, and I watched with considerable amusement as, to the applause following the aria (still audible in my car), the Toyota peeled out of its spot, speeding past two cars and pulling in a few spaces ahead of me, cutting off a high-school driver. I followed more slowly, eventually finding myself behind the car again, drifting along in the wake of a rousing choral number until the driver again sped ahead, this time on his way to tailgate a school bus.
Sometimes I forget, in the ritual of habit, what amazing creatures we humans are, how quirky and how diverse, not merely in skin tone or culture or physical characteristic, but in who we are and how we choose to express ourselves. I wish all the best to the Operatic Kamikaze, and I thank him for starting my day, instead of with ritual, with a smile.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
The Death of Responsibility
It’s bubbling up again. The questions of health care and the debate over its reform is once again finding its way onto the air waves and into the “top headlines” on my Google homepage. The debate has thundered on for months, each side seemingly believing that volume rather than substance will win support. Yet in all of the voices I’ve heard promising plenty and predicting pogroms, only one has made perfect sense to me.
The person interviewed was, surprisingly enough, a doctor. Questioned about the practicality of the lumbering behemoth of a bill that was, at the time, working its way through the legislature, he gave his interviewer a single, simple answer: nothing will fix the problem as long as demand is so outrageously high. He went on to explain that, in his opinion, much of the difficulty with healthcare, and the reason that American healthcare is proportionately outrageously priced and overloaded is that Americans expect healthcare to take care of every problem they or their family might have, and doctors want to make money, so they meet demand with supply. He also pointed out that doctors feel the need to meet demand because they fear legal repercussions from failing to test everything and provide the medication results promised in a pithy television advertisement.
I remember the doctor’s words because he reached beyond political partisanship to point out a deeper, simpler truth. Part of the problem with healthcare is cultural, not financial. We can legislate the hell out of our system, but until we can change cultural attitudes, costs are not going to drop.
The cultural attitude that costs us so much in medical bills is one that frightens me. It is an attitude of entitlement; a slide of responsibility out of individual hands and into the hands of some, not quite defined beneficent power that has, despite its human origin, risen above human concerns to absolute altruism.
Practically, such an idea sounds ridiculous. Ask just about anyone, regardless of political leanings, whether they trust the government, and you’ll get a hoarse laugh and an incredulous look. Trust the government? Of course not. Yet many of those same people are more than willing to allow the government to assume responsibility for their safety, their medical care, and their job security. That rising gap between practical understanding and government responsibility is chillingly visible to me. Every semester my students tell me that the constitution guarantees them the right to happiness; they justify everything from gay marriage to carrying a gun under that promise. You can chalk that up to the failure of our education system; you can laugh at student ignorance, but in the end, I believe that the mistake is the highest form of Freudian slip. It represents an increasingly prevalent attitude in American society; we have the right to be happy, and someone needs to make it so. Whether that happiness is the result of financial disbursements of money, the guarantee of safety for a small price of privacy, or pills to make us happy and well behaved, more and more people believe that happiness is a right, not a responsibility.
In those three small words, “the pursuit of,” the founding fathers definitively put happiness in the hands of individuals. They guaranteed us the right to chase our dreams, to pursue happiness with all of our substance, but they did not guarantee we would get it. Obtaining happiness is, in the end, up to us. It is our individual responsibility and choice – and in the grander scheme of things, history teaches us that it is often the pursuit, not the obtaining, that makes men great.
Yet that greatness is increasingly lost. Many authors have speculated on the impact of antidepressants on creativity and suggested that many of the great artists in history, had they lived today, would have been medicated out of their misery and, along with it, their creativity. More and more often, our culture focuses on a top heavy structure of responsibility that promises the right to happiness guaranteed by a well organized social system that increasingly combines with science to take the place of religion. Individual greatness and heroism is good, for what it is, but such greatness (particularly when based on actual actions rather than media creation) is damaging, for it makes others more responsible and less happy, wishing for something they may not have. Take, for example, the attempted bombing at Christmas this past year. The bombing was foiled by individuals on the plane, individuals who took responsibility for their lives and that of their fellow passengers. Those women and men acted heroically. Yet I do not know the name of a single one of those people. Instead, modern culture immediately sought a hierarchical response. Rather than focusing on the heroism of the individuals who stopped the bomber, cultural media immediately began contemplating what part of the machinery of airport security had failed and how the government could step in to guarantee safety. It was not enough to honor the idea that individual responsibility saved lives. It was the job of some great benevolent machine to prevent the need for individual heroics because, of course, individuals cannot always be counted upon to be heroic.
On the radio several weeks ago, I heard a commentator discussing an article which examined the overall negativity of American culture. “I don’t see a difference,” he declared, “being critical of the country and its leadership is a healthy part of our culture. We’ve always done that.” Indeed, we have, but as I told my uncaring radio, the sense of helplessness, of loss of ownership, has never been so intense. As we lose individual responsibility as a cultural value, we also lose our sense of cultural empowerment. The idea that the government actually represents the people in any meaningful way is fading, replaced by a sense that there is an inevitable power structure, having very little immediate connection with the people, whose purpose is to enable the individual right to happiness. There is a rising sense of fate, a notion that the leviathan of government is far too massive for individuals to influence, and that notion of accepting the inevitable seems to be rapidly tumbling into nationwide depression and the evolution of a culture of systemic, rather than individual, responsibility.
Ironically, that loss of responsibility finds expression in practical terms as well. We find ourselves in the grip of structural responsibility, in a place not unlike that created by Soviet authority. In his book The Unquiet Ghost, Adam Hochschild tours a Russia emerging from the shadow of Stalin, and he notes the general state of collapse of the cities and even the public areas of the apartment buildings. He writes that in stark contrast to the squalid public areas, Russian homes are immaculate; those spaces are theirs. It is their “feeling about public property that was the problem. Until this changes, real democracy in Russia, a democracy that does not just go through the motions of holding elections but is built on people’s confidence that they themselves control the state, and not somebody else, is far off” (187). Sadly enough, the same could be said of modern America. We have lost the confidence that the people control the state. Instead, we feel impotent, coddled in the promise of happiness provided by the state, yet frustrated by the endless ineptitude of a bureaucratic dragon we feel we cannot slay. We are not emerging from the shadow of some tangible regime; we are sliding into the shade of cultural irresponsibility, seeking happiness that we view as a right, yet have no desire to pursue and make our own.
So when the radio begins to tell me about the impact of healthcare reform, I switch to the 80s station. It is not that I don’t care – quite the opposite. It is simply that I do not believe that healthcare, or much of anything else, can be meaningfully reformed until someone has the courage to face up to the cultural illiteracy that lies beneath the partisan dog and pony show. Until Americans realize that they are responsible for their own health and that their time is better spent in pursuit of happiness than pursuit of populism, legislation isn’t going to change a thing. People will continue to demand pills to solve everything and social safeguards to protect them from failure – and from spectacular success. As long as we live in fear of the effort and risk it takes to pursue happiness, we’re never going to catch it, and we’re never going to be mentally or emotionally healthy from the effort of the pursuit – no matter what they legislate.
The person interviewed was, surprisingly enough, a doctor. Questioned about the practicality of the lumbering behemoth of a bill that was, at the time, working its way through the legislature, he gave his interviewer a single, simple answer: nothing will fix the problem as long as demand is so outrageously high. He went on to explain that, in his opinion, much of the difficulty with healthcare, and the reason that American healthcare is proportionately outrageously priced and overloaded is that Americans expect healthcare to take care of every problem they or their family might have, and doctors want to make money, so they meet demand with supply. He also pointed out that doctors feel the need to meet demand because they fear legal repercussions from failing to test everything and provide the medication results promised in a pithy television advertisement.
I remember the doctor’s words because he reached beyond political partisanship to point out a deeper, simpler truth. Part of the problem with healthcare is cultural, not financial. We can legislate the hell out of our system, but until we can change cultural attitudes, costs are not going to drop.
The cultural attitude that costs us so much in medical bills is one that frightens me. It is an attitude of entitlement; a slide of responsibility out of individual hands and into the hands of some, not quite defined beneficent power that has, despite its human origin, risen above human concerns to absolute altruism.
Practically, such an idea sounds ridiculous. Ask just about anyone, regardless of political leanings, whether they trust the government, and you’ll get a hoarse laugh and an incredulous look. Trust the government? Of course not. Yet many of those same people are more than willing to allow the government to assume responsibility for their safety, their medical care, and their job security. That rising gap between practical understanding and government responsibility is chillingly visible to me. Every semester my students tell me that the constitution guarantees them the right to happiness; they justify everything from gay marriage to carrying a gun under that promise. You can chalk that up to the failure of our education system; you can laugh at student ignorance, but in the end, I believe that the mistake is the highest form of Freudian slip. It represents an increasingly prevalent attitude in American society; we have the right to be happy, and someone needs to make it so. Whether that happiness is the result of financial disbursements of money, the guarantee of safety for a small price of privacy, or pills to make us happy and well behaved, more and more people believe that happiness is a right, not a responsibility.
In those three small words, “the pursuit of,” the founding fathers definitively put happiness in the hands of individuals. They guaranteed us the right to chase our dreams, to pursue happiness with all of our substance, but they did not guarantee we would get it. Obtaining happiness is, in the end, up to us. It is our individual responsibility and choice – and in the grander scheme of things, history teaches us that it is often the pursuit, not the obtaining, that makes men great.
Yet that greatness is increasingly lost. Many authors have speculated on the impact of antidepressants on creativity and suggested that many of the great artists in history, had they lived today, would have been medicated out of their misery and, along with it, their creativity. More and more often, our culture focuses on a top heavy structure of responsibility that promises the right to happiness guaranteed by a well organized social system that increasingly combines with science to take the place of religion. Individual greatness and heroism is good, for what it is, but such greatness (particularly when based on actual actions rather than media creation) is damaging, for it makes others more responsible and less happy, wishing for something they may not have. Take, for example, the attempted bombing at Christmas this past year. The bombing was foiled by individuals on the plane, individuals who took responsibility for their lives and that of their fellow passengers. Those women and men acted heroically. Yet I do not know the name of a single one of those people. Instead, modern culture immediately sought a hierarchical response. Rather than focusing on the heroism of the individuals who stopped the bomber, cultural media immediately began contemplating what part of the machinery of airport security had failed and how the government could step in to guarantee safety. It was not enough to honor the idea that individual responsibility saved lives. It was the job of some great benevolent machine to prevent the need for individual heroics because, of course, individuals cannot always be counted upon to be heroic.
On the radio several weeks ago, I heard a commentator discussing an article which examined the overall negativity of American culture. “I don’t see a difference,” he declared, “being critical of the country and its leadership is a healthy part of our culture. We’ve always done that.” Indeed, we have, but as I told my uncaring radio, the sense of helplessness, of loss of ownership, has never been so intense. As we lose individual responsibility as a cultural value, we also lose our sense of cultural empowerment. The idea that the government actually represents the people in any meaningful way is fading, replaced by a sense that there is an inevitable power structure, having very little immediate connection with the people, whose purpose is to enable the individual right to happiness. There is a rising sense of fate, a notion that the leviathan of government is far too massive for individuals to influence, and that notion of accepting the inevitable seems to be rapidly tumbling into nationwide depression and the evolution of a culture of systemic, rather than individual, responsibility.
Ironically, that loss of responsibility finds expression in practical terms as well. We find ourselves in the grip of structural responsibility, in a place not unlike that created by Soviet authority. In his book The Unquiet Ghost, Adam Hochschild tours a Russia emerging from the shadow of Stalin, and he notes the general state of collapse of the cities and even the public areas of the apartment buildings. He writes that in stark contrast to the squalid public areas, Russian homes are immaculate; those spaces are theirs. It is their “feeling about public property that was the problem. Until this changes, real democracy in Russia, a democracy that does not just go through the motions of holding elections but is built on people’s confidence that they themselves control the state, and not somebody else, is far off” (187). Sadly enough, the same could be said of modern America. We have lost the confidence that the people control the state. Instead, we feel impotent, coddled in the promise of happiness provided by the state, yet frustrated by the endless ineptitude of a bureaucratic dragon we feel we cannot slay. We are not emerging from the shadow of some tangible regime; we are sliding into the shade of cultural irresponsibility, seeking happiness that we view as a right, yet have no desire to pursue and make our own.
So when the radio begins to tell me about the impact of healthcare reform, I switch to the 80s station. It is not that I don’t care – quite the opposite. It is simply that I do not believe that healthcare, or much of anything else, can be meaningfully reformed until someone has the courage to face up to the cultural illiteracy that lies beneath the partisan dog and pony show. Until Americans realize that they are responsible for their own health and that their time is better spent in pursuit of happiness than pursuit of populism, legislation isn’t going to change a thing. People will continue to demand pills to solve everything and social safeguards to protect them from failure – and from spectacular success. As long as we live in fear of the effort and risk it takes to pursue happiness, we’re never going to catch it, and we’re never going to be mentally or emotionally healthy from the effort of the pursuit – no matter what they legislate.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Reach
It juts up out of the earth, silent, stark. No one heeds it; it is part of a forgotten landscape, a footnote in a cow pasture along a side road. A palm tree grows along its base, crowding against the thick swell of its emergence from the sandy soil. Cows graze around it, oblivious to “might have been” in their essential animal concern with sustenance. Yet it remains.
It stretches out of the ground, gnarled swells like arthritic joints, curving upward at an unlikely angle, its tip shattered, stretching toward the pale blue of the Florida sky. In this primal place, it feels as though the past is not so far gone. Its magic still clings to the saw edged leaves of the plants and the thick morning mist. The spirit of the land still moves here, barely lulled to sleep by the encroaching anesthetic of car exhaust and chemlawn, and sometimes one is reminded of the magic below the surface, the magic that the modern world reminds us not to see.
I call it the giant’s finger, the broken twist of tree bone, jutting harshly out of the open pasture behind barbed wire and road shoulder. It curves upward, forever caught in some final rigor, reaching for the sky. I know that its owner is long dead, claimed by the triumph of rationality, the glory of Lilliputian man over the primal giants of the land. Yet there remains a chilling vitality to it, a stretching of the gnarled, arthritic finger joints, an appeal to the pale sky above and the live oak behind. There is memory there, in the last remnant of the fallen titan, silhouetted against the sky. There is determination, still stretching from the ground, reaching for the stars it could once almost touch. I look at it in awe, remembering that there are things beyond our ken, things greater than mere human logic.
The field was empty on the frosted morning when I crept out of my car, braving the strange looks of the drivers whizzing along the narrow strip of pavement in the middle of nowhere. The iced weeds along the road fringe crunched under my boots, and I shivered. Leaning low, I pushed the button on my camera, the click of the shutter loud in the still, cold air of the morning. Practically, there was no reason to stop, no reason to shiver in the cold air, but I needed to take the picture, to remember the honored dead. And I needed to remember that for the giant, even in defeat and death…it was still important to reach for the sky.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Green
People tell me that we have no seasons in Florida, and I smile silently. I know, when they say that they do not live here. We have seasons. Certainly, they are not the cycles of my childhood, and I do sometimes miss the classical turn of the year. I miss the smell of fallen leaves and the spice of false death as the plants withdraw to wait out the winter. I miss the crisp, shivering smell that heralds new snow. I miss the shimmering green and white of snowdrops braving the cold to whisper the promise of summer. But the turning of the year is not gone here, far from it. It is, like so many things in this wild, young place, simply different, unsympathetic to the puny creatures that reside on the primal land, so desperately trying to tame what is not so easily dominated. Here the year turns from unbearable jungle green, bathed in shimmering, tangible air supporting the almost invisible wings of the dragonflies as their heavy bodies hang beneath a sky bleached from blue to white in the heat, to a muted carpet of browns and grays, pitifully unclothed without a forgiving blanket of snow – a denuded land waiting beneath barren tree branches with Spanish moss waving like grave clothes in the wind.
The seasons are less dramatic here, one of the few things that is less dramatic in this wild landscape. They turn quietly, shifting hue without the breathtaking show of leafy color or dazzling snow. I often think that people claim there are no seasons here because their turning is so quiet, and in our day to day lives we are so distracted that it takes the excitement, and sometimes the inconvenience, of dramatic season shift to make us notice them. Yet sometimes there are reminders we cannot ignore; sometimes the inevitable cycle of nature presents us with something so simple, so primal that we cannot ignore it, even in the grip of modern hustle and bustle.
Take the color green. In Florida, green is inevitable. In a “land of perpetual summer” (whoever said that wasn’t here this January), green is stock in trade for attracting tourists and setting social standards for suburban lawns. Mid-range golf courses trying to be upper crust paint their greens…well…green. It’s a part of life here. Florida is green. Until winter at least, when the greens fade into brown and olive, their gradual transition barely noted by those of us who live here; for us, the landscape is familiar, habitual, and we tend to let it blur past our car windows, not really considering its subtle shifts in color.
But spring is upon us. I hurried home yesterday, piloting my metal chariot past acres of Florida countryside, my mind already miles ahead of my spinning wheels, considering all the minutiae that seem to fill our every waking moment. I was planning dinner, television viewing, class material for the next week, and suddenly I was confronted with green.
Along the side of the road, an early crop had been planted; the huge chunk of farm equipment that had done the sowing was still resting in the corner of the field. Behind the machinery, the field stretched back from the roadside, redolent in fresh growth that spurted up from the dull ground in a defiant riot of color. I have no idea what the plants were, and I have no need to know. What I do know is that they were green as only new life can be, riotous with the color that allowed them to live and grow in the light of the sun, jostling for its rays, competing with every ounce of chlorophyll to take and use more of the light to thrive. The color was breathtaking, standing out like neon against the suddenly noticeable brown and grey world around it, reminding me how beautiful life is and whispering the promise of new life that sometimes seems a cliché part of the spring.
That green stayed with me through the barren branches and brown woods of the trip home, reminding me of hope, of the desperate joy of reaching for the light and soaking it in – the need to grow. It was green, not in the painted status-conscious perfection of manicured lawns and golf tees, but in the wild, true way that only the hand of nature colors the world around us. It was the promise of spring and the reminder that life, even just for a moment, can be green.
The seasons are less dramatic here, one of the few things that is less dramatic in this wild landscape. They turn quietly, shifting hue without the breathtaking show of leafy color or dazzling snow. I often think that people claim there are no seasons here because their turning is so quiet, and in our day to day lives we are so distracted that it takes the excitement, and sometimes the inconvenience, of dramatic season shift to make us notice them. Yet sometimes there are reminders we cannot ignore; sometimes the inevitable cycle of nature presents us with something so simple, so primal that we cannot ignore it, even in the grip of modern hustle and bustle.
Take the color green. In Florida, green is inevitable. In a “land of perpetual summer” (whoever said that wasn’t here this January), green is stock in trade for attracting tourists and setting social standards for suburban lawns. Mid-range golf courses trying to be upper crust paint their greens…well…green. It’s a part of life here. Florida is green. Until winter at least, when the greens fade into brown and olive, their gradual transition barely noted by those of us who live here; for us, the landscape is familiar, habitual, and we tend to let it blur past our car windows, not really considering its subtle shifts in color.
But spring is upon us. I hurried home yesterday, piloting my metal chariot past acres of Florida countryside, my mind already miles ahead of my spinning wheels, considering all the minutiae that seem to fill our every waking moment. I was planning dinner, television viewing, class material for the next week, and suddenly I was confronted with green.
Along the side of the road, an early crop had been planted; the huge chunk of farm equipment that had done the sowing was still resting in the corner of the field. Behind the machinery, the field stretched back from the roadside, redolent in fresh growth that spurted up from the dull ground in a defiant riot of color. I have no idea what the plants were, and I have no need to know. What I do know is that they were green as only new life can be, riotous with the color that allowed them to live and grow in the light of the sun, jostling for its rays, competing with every ounce of chlorophyll to take and use more of the light to thrive. The color was breathtaking, standing out like neon against the suddenly noticeable brown and grey world around it, reminding me how beautiful life is and whispering the promise of new life that sometimes seems a cliché part of the spring.
That green stayed with me through the barren branches and brown woods of the trip home, reminding me of hope, of the desperate joy of reaching for the light and soaking it in – the need to grow. It was green, not in the painted status-conscious perfection of manicured lawns and golf tees, but in the wild, true way that only the hand of nature colors the world around us. It was the promise of spring and the reminder that life, even just for a moment, can be green.
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