MEMBER MONDAY

A small group of members gathered last week to share self-penned anticipatory obituaries. My personal contribution featured three such life passings, one each for distinct lifetimes, with reference to catching the proverbial bus, as in waiting for, riding on, and getting off. Our discussion piece might especially resonate with those nearing the getting-off stage (click: Everything Is Fast).

It is then that the first two lines of that W.H. Davies poem ("Leisure") might finally come to life:

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

There was no time to stand and stare when you were "full of care" waiting for the bus, from that first breath through the process of becoming “civilized.” You were captured prey, pretty much told what to do, how to think, who to be. Your grades revealed your progress. You were convinced that the choice of career and whom you marry would largely define your future. Your hamster-wheel existence was largely consumed by checking the boxes, more reflex than reflection. Don’t fret about missing the present, though, as the future would no doubt take care of itself. So went that obituary…

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“A farmer got so old that he couldn't work the fields anymore. So he would spend the day just sitting on the porch. His son, still working the farm, would look up from time to time and see his father sitting there. "He's of no use any more," the son thought to himself, "he doesn't do anything!" One day the son got so frustrated by this, that he built a wooden coffin, dragged it over to the porch, and told his father to get in. Without saying anything, the father climbed inside. After closing the lid, the son dragged the coffin to the edge of the farm where there was a high cliff. As he approached the drop, he heard a light tapping on the lid from inside the coffin. He opened it up. Still lying there peacefully, the father looked up at his son. "I know you are going to throw me over the cliff, but before you do, may I suggest something?" "What is it?" replied the son. "Throw me over the cliff, if you like," said the father, "but save this good wood coffin. Your children might need to use it." (Zen proverb)

And so it seems with the estrangement of a family member, tossed over the metaphorical cliff. Whatever sentimentality that once bound us, whatever purpose you once served, has long been displaced by my accumulated resentments. Your very presence encumbers my emancipation. You are dead to me.

By one reckoning twenty-seven percent of individuals report being estranged from at least one family member, which can involve parents, children, siblings, grandparents, or other relatives. Parent-child estrangements are particularly prevalent and the subject of this NYT piece Is Cutting Off Your Family Good Therapy? Yes, maybe, but. One place to start might be to acknowledge those “interesting” family dynamics of your own…

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One reads the following words and somehow imagines them coming from the love child of Ayn Rand and Elon Musk (pardon the visual):

“The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans . . . . comes down to culture . . . and if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for far too long . . that doesn’t start in college, it starts with the YOUNG . . .

. . . A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers . . .

. . . More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.” . . .

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My own introduction to history came in those earliest elementary school years when we were to commemorate Thanksgiving with our own special drawing. I earned a gold star for my crayon depiction of the Pilgrims and Indians as they shared a feast at the community table, part of the cartoon historical narrative we had been fed at the time.

My drawing somehow missed this English account of 1610 Jamestown:

“Soldiers were sent out ‘to take revenge.’ They fell upon the Indian settlement, killed fifteen or sixteen Indians, burned the houses, cut down the corn growing around the village, took the queen of the tribe and her children into boats, then ended up throwing the children overboard ‘and shoteing owt their Braynes in the water.’ The queen was later taken off and stabbed to death.”

The textbook history of our great nation is the tale told by the victors (Churchill). Our traditional historical accounts somehow come across as refined, sanitized, packaged for consumption — like so much sausage — to be fed to a credulous public. Missing is any sense of how the sausage was made.

Howard Zinn sought to fill in such blanks with the book that inspired our very first MM session (click: MM 7/5/16 A People's History Of the United States (the source of that above-cited English account). His work was intended to triangulate on the truth by retelling the historical narrative from the perspective of the actual human dynamics underpinning the signature events…

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“Dare to Be Dull” by Joseph L. Troise is the satirical book from the 80s that advanced the notion of dullness as an aspirational lifestyle choice in response to the excesses of modern life. The deliberate embrace of simplicity, ordinariness, and lack of trendiness, you see, liberates individuals from societal pressures to be exciting or fashionable, a way to enjoy mundane pleasures and live authentically. Om. . . it is sitting after a club lunch in the garden.

Boredom, in contrast, is characterized by restlessness, dissatisfaction, and a lack of interest in one’s current activities or surroundings. It is involuntary and often unpleasant, arising from a sense of confinement or lack of purpose.

Three aspects of boredom – it is bad, experienced individually and distributed equally – have helped corporations “weaponize” it for profit (click: Who's Boring Now? The Corporate Capture of our Fight Against Boredom). These are the mechanisms that keep us scrolling, watching, shopping. But what if the people took boredom back? “Boredom can signal that what we are doing at the moment is not meaningful . . it doesn’t have to be an opiate. It can be a smelling salt.”…

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Maybe start by considering the ease with which large segments of a population might be seduced. The classic example of this goes back roughly one hundred years to the work of Edward Bernays (Freud’s nephew and inventor of modern PR). He demonstrated the power of psychology in advertising by luring a generation of emancipation-seeking women into the world of smoking – those lighted cigarettes, you see, are actually torches of freedom. Bernays expanded this unseen mechanism as a way to mold public opinion for political purposes in his seminal work Propaganda.

Variations on the theme have been used to sell foreign policy initiatives (some may recall that tumbling domino imagery in the leadup to the Vietnam war by maintaining the equilibrium of the Dingdong by containing the ever encroaching Doodah). Others may recall the stagecraft behind the selling of that ill-fated Iraqi incursion in 2003 (U.N. address featuring the WMD blue-capped vial). Policy sold like dish soap.

Now add the power of the internet and social media to seduce a crowd. The opportunity for real reflection, once offered by legacy print media, communal discourse, and quiet contemplation has now largely been replaced by the incursion of those twenty-four hour nodal connections to hyperactive Ids. Reflex over reflection.

That brings us to our focus piece (click: Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment) on the collapse of the 20th-century media pyramid and its replacement by monopoly social media platforms to enable the Obama White House to sell policy and reconfigure social attitudes and prejudices in new ways…

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The MM search for the truth in the metaphysics of religion began eight years ago with our MM 9/12/16 God And Science session which featured the embedded essay by Lance Morrow In the Beginning: God and Science which begins:

Sometime after the Enlightenment, science and religion came to a gentleman’s agreement. Science was for the real world: machines, manufactured things, medicines, guns, moon rockets. Religion was for everything else, the immeasurable: morals, sacraments, poetry, insanity, death and some residual forms of politics and statesmanship. Religion became, in both senses of the word, immaterial. Science and religion were apples and oranges. So the pact said: render unto apples the things that are Caesar’s, unto oranges the things that are God’s. Just as the Maya kept two calendars, one profane and one priestly, so Western science and religion fell into different conceptions of the universe, two different vocabularies.

Morrow went on to cite Robert Jastrow, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space studies, to bridge the chasm between science and religion with that scientist’s “operatic” prose: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”…

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Of all the traumatic events that can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), whether it be sexual assault, domestic violence, warfare, natural disasters, serious accidents, or other life-threatening situations, certainly rape must be the most pernicious. Rape lives on in the anger and grief and depression and adhesive shame that it creates in one evil burst of violence. It can damage the very soul of an individual or a society in a way that is not addressable by mere time and money.

We will be joined by new member Amanda Dufresne Lee whose story (click: Amanda) highlights her strength in overcoming trauma and her dedication to helping others through advocacy and community engagement. Amanda is a survivor of a violent sexual assault that occurred in 2003 while she was a college student in Waco, Texas, as she was jogging in preparation for a half-marathon, in a way that brings to mind the 1989 Central Park case.

Amanda’s account could be anyone’s there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I story. We are indeed fortunate to be joined by this brave and resilient soul who has spoken publicly about her experience as she advocates for awareness and support for like survivors of sexual assault through such organizations as SOAR (Speaking Out Against Rape)…

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Warning: Do not open if offended by f-speak Give Us Our Money Back.

Check f-bombs at the door as we discuss the fury unleashed by this Canadian journalist as she howls at the moon over an alleged theft so large as to be unparalleled in world history. She is joined by others. Soon there is a chorus and, if you listen closely, you can make out the sound of that collective mournful wail, D . . o . . O . . G . . E.

So who is Elizabeth Nickson and why should we listen to her? This one-time journalist (Time; Harpers; The Guardian; the Sunday Times) and author (Monkey Puzzle Tree) abandoned the conventional publishing world for the freedom of the blogosphere with her Welcome to Absurdistan at Substack. Do not sniff at independent publishing – it represents a burgeoning power. Why so?

It’s no secret that legacy media is fast losing both credibility and circulation. Once upon a time, the viability of publishing rested on subscribers. Real, paid subscribers, that is. Ms. Nickson took on the role as a kind of informal investigator to answer the question of how it is that a paper she used to write for, The Globe and Mail (Canada’s “national newspaper”), was able to survive with a dwindling subscriber base of actual people. The answer, it appears, was heavy government “subscriptions.”..

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“By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll be happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher,” advised Socrates, with a line of thinking that perhaps offers some insight into a troubling issue with the philosophical tradition itself. Mary Midgley pointed this out as she cited the fundamental problem of philosophy is that it has largely been shaped by bachelors who have had no experience living with women or children (click: So Many Unmarried Men).

She submitted her hypothesis some sixty years ago to the BBC for a radio broadcast called “Rings and Books” but this Oxford-educated philosopher was rebuffed and the show never aired on the grounds that it was a trivial, irrelevant intrusion of domestic matters into intellectual life. Oh, the irony. The rationale for that dismissal illustrated her underlying point.

Philosophy at the time, you see, had been dominated by the likes of Descartes who questioned the existence of his friends, family, and everything external, concluding that his only certainty was “I am thinking.” Therefore I am (yes, a thinking machine)…

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I can still picture those six magnificent Rhode Island Reds, raised in my youth from hatchlings in the yard of the semi-rural home on the edge of suburbia – how those hens would lay blue eggs on account of eating too much fruit from the nearby mulberry bush. Such a contented clutch they were, sired by that one leghorn rooster. There they were, always scratching and pecking the ground while strutting about in that familiar fuddy-duddy way.

I can also see the bloody aftermath when a loose dog broke into their pen and summarily terminated that entire clucking/crowing community of seven. Life on the Serengeti.

That childhood memory came back in a flash after reading the focus piece by a one-time Brooklyn urbanite who followed her dream about going back to the land (Dreaming About Going Back To The Land? I did It). Her account opens the window to a world largely lost to those (of us) whose only contact with a farm is perhaps that annual visit to the pumpkin patch…

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Looking back on some of those formative years, I recall being asked about my taste in classical music to which I answered that I’d just enjoyed listening to The Four Seasons. “Yes, but – ahem – Vivaldi was Baroque, not classical.” That was the point at which music appreciation first came across like the subject of wine i.e. the object of a certain snob appeal for those who ape and fawn and aspire to a gentility not native to them and sniff and sneer at those who don’t share their pretensions.

One of the beauties of these nothing-left-to-prove autumn years of life is the chance to relax and fill in some gaps left over from all those emergency years of career and family. And so it is with Western classical music today where we are told younger and younger virtuosos are emerging with more people under thirty-five regularly listening to orchestral music compared to their parents’ generation. We are gathered here to honor classical music’s relevance even as performers and institutions face great financial pressures (click: Is Classical Music Relevant?).

So where does the wanna-be classical music autodidact turn? One might follow the suggestion in the focus piece and listen to what was labeled the best classical music film score of them all i.e. the orchestral piece from Howard Shore’s The Lord of the Rings movies. My mind wandered in that customary way as it powered through the entire three-hour-and-forty-minute score in one sitting (other than for a short Devo interlude), click: Lord Of the Rings Score). Perhaps a more disciplined approach was called for…

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Social Gospel was the label given to an early 20th century social reform movement to foster communitarian values in American life. Even the smallest actions, it maintained, created norms, norms created values, values drive behavior, and behaviors cascade. Out of a multitude of union halls, community centers, and dining rooms came what Robert Putnam (“Bowling Alone”) viewed as a moral revolution that changed a nation’s culture.

High time, perhaps, for a New Social Gospel to address where we now find ourselves in this (click: The Anti-Social Century, also appearing elsewhere in the Weekly). Consider how we’ve devolved. The first half of the twentieth century was extraordinarily social, whether measured in terms of church membership, marriage rates, union participation, branch-library visits. Compare that to an America today sometimes characterized as populated by home-bound, phone-tethered, get-off-of-my-lawn secular monks.

Let us gather together, indeed commune, to discuss whether such self-imposed solitude is indeed the most important social fact of the 21rst century. Perhaps the phenomenon goes far deeper than the oft-cited effect of our car-enabled suburbs and passive embrace of television. Don’t look now but maybe our screen-o-centric lives have been hardwired into our very souls…

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A genealogy search revealed a paternal line that ran through a Michael Peterman, immigrating to Philadelphia from Rotterdam in 1751 along with 486 other passengers aboard the ship Osgood in a horrific voyage including numerous deaths, then joining the 3rd Battalion of York in 1776 and deeded 150 acres, a plot later known as “Lovely Springs” located adjacent to a prisoner-of-war camp for British troops, which he farmed, and then signing his will in 1784 bestowing his widow Anna Maria a third of his estate unless she remarried (which she did), in which case she would receive only “a cow, a chest, a bed, and some pots and pans.”

Brutal times indeed. Family history, though, like old pots and pans, then generally fade into the mists of time. But sometimes events conspire to beckon one out of that contemporary stupor to remind us that we were not simply placed here as whole cloth – that each of us is a miracle of luck, often a product of great sacrifice and hardship, the net of innumerable contingent outcomes.

Sometimes circumstances force us to make a literal split-second decision about whether to retain tangible items that represent various life markers…

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Luigi Mangione’s assassination of UnitedHealthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson somehow brought to mind the Aztec ritual sacrifice in which the victim’s still-beating heart is ripped from his chest to be offered as an appeasement to the sun god.

Nothing personal. Mangione apparently neither knew his victim personally nor even had any interaction with the company he’d led. The sacrificial temple was that Manhattan doorstep to an investment conference. The act, we are led to believe, was fueled by blind revenge, for what is not entirely clear.

More telling and troublesome, though, was the public reaction to the hit. A study from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) revealed an alarming surge in anti-civil activity following the Thompson assassination (click: Hashtags and Hit Lists: Social Media's Role in Justifying Violence). Social media, of course, was the first tell, with all the fancam edits and viral videos that glorified Mangione as an anti-establishment icon.

The transition of violent rhetoric from online spaces to real-world actions, however, was the most troubling revelation of the NCRI study (Killing with Applause: Emergent Permission Structure for Murder in the Digital Age) as it cited real-world behaviors among those gathered to celebrate and parody the assassination, glorifying a so-called permission structures that could inspire others to perceive violence as a legitimate form of activism…

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Culture is but one generation deep. The Conversation Project heralds the way each life story may become part of the intergenerational connective tissue.

Each conversation, however, starts at the most basic individual level by assisting participants in defining their desired end-of-life care no matter how distant that might be seen from their current life stage, whether measured in terms of days, months, or decades.

Where does one even start? Some sort of go-it-alone reflection may be tempting but prove ultimately daunting without a structured approach. Our session opens the way to identify those resources that have proved so helpful to the many others who have traveled down the same path.

Joining us at our session will be Becki Parr, the project coordinator of The Conversation Project in Boulder County (TCPBC), a program of TRU Community Center, and Jean Abbott, a retired physician who practiced and taught emergency medicine for 48 years and helped start TCPBC eleven years ago. Becki and Jean will introduce the various free resources available to initiate that all-important conversation with spouses/partners, parents, children, grandchildren, close friends, and those others who might be involved in making decisions on one’s behalf. Consider this a gift to your loved ones who otherwise might be befuddled not knowing of your desires in your now-lucid state…

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Our focus article is but a basic primer to a phenomenon one may have experienced directly or witnessed on the periphery as collateral damage (click: I Hate That I Love You).

Obsessive love was the subject of an expanded book club discussion we had years ago featuring an extraordinary article (National Geographic, February 2006 cover story, Love – The Chemical Reaction), describing more fully the biochemical foundation of this powerful yet mysterious force, together with two animating novels, The Great Gatsby and Lolita (no need to (again) read those three cited works for purposes of this discussion).

Referencing the National geographic article, "love is a chemical reaction" primarily driven by brain chemicals like dopamine, norepinephrine (noradrenaline), and oxytocin, which create feelings of pleasure, excitement, and bonding when we are attracted to someone, similar to that of one suffering an obsessive-compulsive disorder, giving special meaning to "madly in love." As a relationship develops, the oxytocin plays a greater role in fostering long-term commitment and security…

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In the face of a question about belief in God, one possible answer, while not trying to make the response sound too cute or cynical, might boil down to “Well first define God . . . . ” followed by “. . . . yes, no, or need more specificity.”

In any event, the whole matter is likely to then be filed away for consideration later, labeled as important but not urgent, even as Pascal’s Wager looms in the background i.e. if God exists and you believe, you gain eternal happiness in heaven; if God exists and you don’t believe, you risk infinite loss like eternal separation from God or hell; if God doesn’t exist, you’ve gained or lost little.

Now in these autumn years with the arrival of Later and Urgent knocking at the door, what’s sometimes heard is a different sort of hedge with the declaration that while one, perhaps not particularly religious, is deeply spiritual.

What does that even mean as we discuss the role that spiritual actually plays in the rational age in our focus article (click: The Spiritual Is Not Weird) i.e. “The spiritual is not weird because it is completely familiar (emphasis added). We become acutely aware of this dimension of reality when struck by a piece of music, moved by a great piece of art, overcome with a love for someone, engrossed in a work of literature, or witnessing profoundly heroic or altruistic action.”…

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Calling on all you Highland members in pursuit of that elusive quality called excellence in your chosen field – whether it be music, painting, architecture, writing, sculpture, film making, photography, visual or performance art – to ask whether you identify with a trait cited in the focus article (click: Divine Discontent):

The most fulfilled people I know tend to have two traits. They’re insatiably curious – about new ideas, experiences, information and people. And they seem to exist in a state of perpetual, self-inflicted unhappiness.

Please share your perspective on whether your own unambiguous pursuit of excellence means that you fling yourself into those pursuits destined to make you unhappy – gloriously and sublimely unhappy. Steady as you go, dogged determination is the key. Discipline, aspiration, and revision. Never give in, never, never, never, never, never. It’s what makes life meaningful…

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The focus article (click: The Forces Of Chance) recounts an example of that capricious, unknowable, yet all-powerful force known as chance – the way a casual tourist visit to Kyoto led to the eventual sparing of that city from its incineration almost twenty years later in August 1945, or the way a momentary cloud clearing led to the destruction of Nagasaki a few days later (sparing “lucky Kokura”). As Melville wrote, “chance . . . has the last featuring blow at events.”

There seems to be an ongoing hubristic notion of man’s ability to tame, even domesticate, this world of contingency and probability. Perhaps impossible, it is submitted, in that we produce too many models that are often wrong and rarely useful. When we try to explain our social world, we foolishly ignore the flukes. Confidence in a predictable future “is the province of charlatans and fools.”

We’d last discussed man’s reach for probabilistic certainty in our MM 11/20/23 Free Will discussion, with the surface appeal of causality, and thus god-like foresight, by simply knowing the positions, direction, and velocity of every particle in Newton’s deterministic universe. Whoops. Confidence in that so-called Laplace predictive model went out with the introduction of quantum mechanics which shifted our world from determinism to indeterminism (cue, again, the charlatan quote)…

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