to know is to something

I’m surprised every Advent at how much giving birth has changed my spiritual life. When we have actually done something, we know it in a way we can never know it second-hand. The body remembers.

And so when I meditate on the incarnation, I now have physical memories that go with. The sensation of a baby being birthed — I speak here not of pain, but of the pressure and movement and release as a the tiny person passes out of the pelvis. Then the warm, naked baby snuggling against skin, looking around quietly with those froggy newborn eyes. The way a baby fills the arms as it nurses, the rhythm of the industrious little mouth, the seriousness with which a newborn goes about the business of feeding.

If you have not done things, felt these things, then when you contemplate the birth of Jesus, you cannot understand it the same way.

But I would not tell you that you should, therefore, move on to some other mystery.

No, no.

To begin with, there is plenty to be gleaned from the Nativity without having the foggiest notion of childbirth or breastfeeding. Christmas is, after all, much more than a report for labor & delivery. Your own life, however un-motherly, and perhaps because un-motherly, has insights of its own to offer. And then, those of us who do know something of these activities can surely at least explain a little?

I mention this now, when Christmas is more or less over, because I’ve been getting a lot of “you can’t understand” messages lately. (Not to me personally, but to the world in general. And written by people I respect, which concerns me.) Bits along the lines of “you can’t understand what it is like to experience what I have experienced, so don’t even try.” “You’ll just come away with the wrong idea”. “You are not like me”. “You are a ______, _______, or _______, and therefore you are incapable of correctly associating with a person like me.”

Now if I were getting these messages from someone who wanted to wall-up in an isolated compound and never have to do with my sort of riff raff, it would make more sense. But I’m hearing it from some people whose usual message is just the opposite: that all people deserve respect and fair treatment, that superficial differences should not divide us.

And so my answer is: If I don’t understand it, explain it to me. No, of course I cannot know what your very life is like, any more than you can know mine exactly. But if you mean to make your cause more widely understood and accepted, then you must not give up on trying. Whenever social solutions are built on “those people are fundamentally different”, the results are disastrous.

So in the interest of averting disaster, please consider sharing your experiences. Which you cannot share the way you share a shirt or a lawnmower, but which you can share the way you share a conversation, or a friendship.

Not Amazing

William Peace rants here about misuse use of the word ‘amazing’. Hearty dittos — go read and be inspired to curmudgeonliness.

As long as we’re on the topic, here’s my list of a few more things that are not amazing:

Parenting more than two children. I have a mere four, and I get the ‘wow how do you do it??’ thing even from other Catholics. (My answer: Not that well, frankly.) Er, hey guys, I’m a married lady. It’s a normal biological function.

Homeschooling. Especially when you do it as haphazardly as I do. Might not be your thing. But again: It is entirely normal for parents to be able to teach their own children. You know back all those centuries when married couples were still in the habit of procreating regularly? Most of them also trained their very own children to follow in whatever trade they practiced. Now I don’t know how to weave or spin or farm, but I can read and write pretty well. So it isn’t particularly amazing that I can teach my children to do the same.

Teaching 5th Grade CCD. Sordid truth: 5th graders are the best. The rest of you guys are missing out. Actually I’ve only had one person tell me this was amazing — and that one person was someone who possesses a number of talents I only dream of. So her comment wasn’t really about anything being ‘amazing’ so much as recognition that we all have different skills and preferences.

–> I don’t suppose there’s anything really wrong with using the A-word loosely, to merely mean “you are able to do something well that many other people don’t do very well”. And certainly we shouldn’t lose sight of wonder of the every day world: flowers and children and birds and wideness of the sky are all amazing, when we are pulled out of our busy thinking and stop to consider them.

But back to my ditto, above. It is woefully patronizing to gush over non-achievements. If you’ve gotten into that habit, maybe not even realizing it, perhaps 2010 is the year for you to quit?

Pine Beetles and Climate Change

Listened to Marketplace last night on NPR. I almost never listen to the radio anymore, as it is difficult to hear an entire story with small children present, and I don’t think the part where I yell at the kids not to interrupt is all that healthy. So mostly I read.

But last night I happened to catch (most) of an article about how pine trees were dying in Montana due to global warming. I was stunned — are temperatures really getting so high that pine trees are perishing in the heat?? Maybe I should take this problem more seriously.

No no, it’s that pine beetles are eating them.

Ah. So, er, what do pine beetles have to do with global warming? Well, our reporters contend that the 1.something degree rise in global temperature over the past fifty years has suddenly made the pine beetles not get killed off by winter freezes, and hence the attack.

Now if I lived in Montana, I might buy this. But as it happens, I’m rather familiar with the *southern* pine beetle, which has been on a feeding frenzy for quite awhile now. (Note to Montana: Start chopping. Do not leave those dead trees standing there.) And the thing is, the southeastern US hasn’t had a Montana-style winter in quite a while. [Thousands of years? Millions? Some geologist please quick speak up.] So apparently *our* pine beetles are much slower on the uptake than Montana’s . . . Or else no one is blaming our beetles on global warming, and it’s just a coincidence that Montana gets climate-change beetles, while ours are extra hungry for some other reason.

My reaction? Linking the pine beetle infestation to global warming is lousy science. We may or may not be experiencing some kind of human-induced climate-warming. Or maybe human activity is causing wider swings in weather patterns than in the past (hence, warming and cooling both.) I’m doubtful, but it could be — I won’t dismiss the possibility out of hand. But claiming anything and everything just must be due to global warming is silly, and ruins the credibility both of the scientists who make these claims, and the journalists who report on them.

That said, as I mentioned, I live with small children, and there’s a chance I missed some pivotal moment in the report when the Marketplace journalists displayed their healthy skepticism. In which case, good for them.

Depression & Creativity

Essay in the Journal this morning, in the weekend section, about the connection between mental illness and creative genius. I try not to pay too much attention to the WSJ’s Saturday essays, and my mental health is the better for it. But I thought today’s page W3 piece by Jeannette Winterson (“In Praise of the Crack-Up”) wanted a little reply.

[For a very thorough, sometimes too thorough, exploration of this topic, see Peter D. Kramer’s Against Depression. But my thoughts, different from his, are what follows.]

No one extols the virtues of depressed Pizza Guys. Read an essay like Winterson’s, you’d get the idea that writers and artists were the only moody people out there. Perhaps artsy people don’t have a very wide circle of acquaintance. So let me assure you: mental illness, including but not limited to depression, knows no professional barriers. Accountants, Wal-Mart Managers, Engineering Professors — keep an ear out and you’ll quickly discover these people, too, can suffer mood disorders.

The difference being, of course, that your average laboratory technician doesn’t get asked to write an op-ed about the experience. And no one pores through the details of the billing-clerk’s private life, in order to write a riveting biography about the “real story” behind that face we know so well. Thus we never ask ourselves, “But what would interstate commerce come to, if we didn’t have depressed truck drivers??” [Who would cover those long-haul routes without the work of those who long for solitude? Mmn, I suppose the guys who are so fond of CB radios, and, these days, cellphones.]

But in fairness, the nature of literature and art does mislead. I was struck the other month reading through a collection medieval poetry: it’s 98% about love, death, and combinations of love-n-death. And pretty much that seems to hold true through the centuries. As much as *I* like to write about exciting topics like doing the dishes, or changing diapers, apparently themes with a little more drama tend to be more enduring.

–> So whereas the janitor has little to gain, professionally, by letting his personal agony shine through in his work, a writer or painter can use the depths of despair or psychosis as raw material for a riveting masterpiece. Of course ordinary grief and heartbreak are plenty dark for those purposes, and most of us will get to enjoy a fair bit of both by the time we’re old enough to write decently; but sure, if you happen to have episodes of mental illness to draw on, that works too.

And it *is* consoling for other suffering readers to know they are not alone in their experiences. So not such a bad contribution to the art, if you go in for that type of reading.

Which leads to a final point: Writing about difficult experiences is helpful to the writer. Or painting for the painter, and so on, I imagine. (The other arts are beyond my skill, so I can’t be sure.) Though honestly, most of us, when we work through our feelings this way, end up with a piece that is dreadfully boring — ‘maddening’ you might say; it takes true genius to be able to write about the experience of mental illness without causing it to become contagious. For the average depressed person, best to keep those feelings in the personal journal, far, far, from an editor’s desk.

But none of that makes it necessary to keep around the assorted mental illnesses just for literature’s sake. Any more than we need to keep around cancer because it has produced so many great works of art (I like this one), or encourage warfare in the Mediterranean that we might get another Iliad in the process. Given effective, no-obnoxious-side-effects cures for mental illness, there will still be plenty to write about.

Health Care and the Living Wage

So when I started writing about the Just Wages, I intentionally left health care out of the picture. Why? Because health care is a virtually unlimited need.

I have no qualms about telling you that a person only truly needs so much living space, this much food, that much clothing, and so on. It is important that we not make an impossible wreck of a straightforward moral teaching, by trying to tack on burdensome ‘extras’, as if love of neighbor were synonymous with ‘upper-middle class 21st century American’.

But how much health care does a just wage pay for? Not so easy to define. Set aside all the debates about which care is most helpful, and which is not helpful at all — those are medical debates. Pretend you know what the useful stuff is, and focus on just the question of ‘how much’.

It can’t be nothing, we are certain of that. But does the requirement extend to providing every care that might possibly help the worker-patient? We have an arsenal of extraordinarily expensive tests, procedures and medicines that will extend life a few months or a few years; we have treatments that, in the event they work, will give back the recipient a nearly-normal lifespan, but for which the probability of sucess is quite low.

Those rescued months and years, those chances of success, are absolutely priceless. I am easily persuaded that, as a society, we should value the medical progress that cutting-edge technology offers. We should choose legal structures that encourage both doing the research, and making new forms of care more widely available.

But should every business owner consider it a normal cost of business, to provide wages that will cover high-cost-low-expected-return medical treatments?

I think that we need to fall back on the same pragmatic approach used for discerning just wages in other areas:

1) Remedy gross injustices. Keeping in mind that, say, access to a safe water supply remains a significant health problem for many workers around the world. Employers should begin there. I’m reminded of my friend Jenn Labit, whose factory in Egypt includes such basic amenities as a safe way to store lunches. Sounds self-evident, but it was not the standard local business practice.

2) Use the love-neighbor-as-self standard. If senior management and members of the board are willing to accept a given level of health care, it is reasonable to assume the company is making an honest effort at providing a just wage for health care.

Beyond that? We want to set up laws and regulations that make it possible for employers to efficiently provide a good health-care wage to workers. We can disagree over the details — I’m not convinced the current legislation coming out of Congress is going to be an efficient and effective fix. On the other hand, I’m entirely in love with my local water company, and do think that providing clean water is an appropriate use of community — read: local government — power. Assuming it is done well, as it is where I live.

–> The imperative to pay a just wage works both ways. On the one hand, it is up to local governments to set up community structures in a way that makes it affordable for businesses to pay a fair wage. Think: utilities, transportation, policing, insurance regulations, medical safety standards. On the other hand, the requirement to pay a just wage ought to spur businesses to use their importance in the community to push for change when the local government has fallen short of its mandate.

An MS suicide, and the cost of accomodations

William Peace has two posts up that fit together eerily well.

An MS suicide. MS can be a discouraging, depressing illness. And depression & discouragement can lead to suicidal thoughts much more easily than many people realize. But when someone steps up to the ledge of a building, what kind of monster stands beside and gives advice on the best way to jump?

And why are disabling illnesses so discouraging? In part because we all know that our society just isn’t all that concerned about accessibility.

The noise about cost is, in my opinion, a pretty weak excuse. You’ve got to put a door on the building, it really isn’t that much more expensive to have slightly more door and slightly less wall. There’s nothing magical about stairs that makes them so dramatically cheaper to build than a ramp. And most buildings that require an elevator for wheelchair access really won’t function efficiently unless you have an elevator for freight & furniture access.

Visited our local county historical museum with the homeschooling group the other day. Was appalled by the complete lack of wheelchair access to any of the buildings. (Well, except this one barn.) Outdoors was okay, if you can do gently sloping grassy terrain.

Now there are often good reasons historic buildings are inaccessible. For example, sometimes the only way to improve access to a building would be to make significant architectural alterations to a building that is being preserved precisely for its architecture. But I assure you, though the buildings we visited were authentically old, a well-placed ramp or lift would not have marred the educational and aesthetic value of these particular buildings. Nor were the curators especially concerned about that problem, seeing as they didn’t mind putting a honking big HVAC unit outside one of the buildings, in a visible-to-visitors location.

Which is the second point: Cost was not the concern. No one had any worries about the cost (let alone authenticity) of putting modern HVAC, plumbing, and electrical wiring into these historic buildings. Even though, being historic buildings that had been steadily used for over a century prior to the availability of those conveniences, they were actually designed to function quite well without modern amenities.

–> What it comes down to, is that people are perfectly willing to spend and accommodate for items that provide comfort and convenience for “ordinary” visitors and workers. But somehow, taking the time and energy to plan an installation so that it is workable for those-other-people-not-like-us* just isn’t a priority.

Which of course makes the prospect of future disability so dreadful, because you know that wider society has been built in a way that excludes your disabled self.

_________________

*This particular museum, which I will not name, apparently specializes in ‘those-people-not-like-us’. Witness the way we were all assumed to be able to imagine ourselves as white 19th century southern farm-owners, but when a bit of Native American technology was mentioned, it was “those people”. Not an intentional slight — I expect the volunteer-docent meant no harm, and was probably unaware of the shift in his point of view. But it was cringe-worthy all the same. [In double fairness, my guess is that our docent actually grew up on just the kind of farm, with just the kind of ethnic heritage, that he was presenting as the assumed “us”. So for him, us-v.-them might have been more accurate than not. But for the rest of us, not so.]

MS & The Dreadfulness of Being

So in my very sporadic reading lately, MS & assisted suicide seem to be frequent partners. Take a look here, for example. Ironic, since multiple scelrosis is not a terminal illness, and people who are in favor of assisted suicide and euthanasia usually use ‘terminal illness’ as the excuse for their position.

Which got me to thinking . . . what is it that makes MS dreadfuller-than-average? Not worse, necessarily, but more dreaded? A few brainstorms:

It won’t kill you. Not usually, anyway. Catch a nice case of terminal cancer, and you can be dead in short order, without having to a lift a finger. Come down with MS, and you’ll probably live about as long as previously planned. So if you develop a death-wish, your disease won’t fulfill that desire for you.

MS is very unpredictable. Will you develop horrid symptoms? Which horrid symptoms? Nobody knows. Until diagnosis, you had a life map all planned out. Now it isn’t just a matter of changing plans, but of not even knowing how to make your new plans. Losing the illusion of control is very stressful, and stress can be depression-inducing. Depression, of course, being what leads people to suicide.

The unpredictability can be very discouraging. Unlike once-and-for-all disabilities, with MS you never know what is coming next. Which makes it hard to know what rehab efforts will turn out to be worthwhile. Your right hand is acting up — do you learn to write left-handed? What if your left hand goes next? So you decide to try a nice dictation software — but what if your speech becomes affected? And yet you feel a tad silly preparing to blink as your attendant points to a letterboard, when so far all you’ve got are some numb fingers . . . It isn’t that the disabilities associated with MS are impossible, of course they aren’t. People manage just fine with equally disabling non-MS conditions. It’s that it is discouraging to work crazy hard to adapt to the current symptoms, knowing that at any moment all that work might come to naught, and you have to start over from the beginning again.

–> Curiously, people without MS-type conditions are also prone to having all their hard work wiped out in an instant. It’s just that they enjoy a more insistent illusion of control than a person with a known dreadful disease. No one says, “Darling, are you sure you want to take up archery? What if you lose both your hands to that nasty strain of meningitis tomorrow?”

The unpredictability is hard on bystanders, too. The family members in particular who may have to provide care, pick up slack, and spend financial resources, also lack that pleasing notion of predictability. There’s no getting into a comfortable routine, confidently determining that x,y & z are going to be needed, how can we provide for x, y & z in the most efficient, family-friendly way possible?

(And of course, your loved one *isn’t* likely to die soon, so you can count on this unpredictability to go on indefinitely, with none of that desperate emotional force of caring for a person actually on their death bed. It is wearying.)

MS happens to adults. Which means the raw parental passion isn’t there to fight desperately for the sick person. Sordid truth: parents will fight to the bitter end on behalf of a sick or disabled child, in order to give that child every possible chance at life, to help that child thrive and live life to the fullest, despite whatever obstacles. That’s how parenthood is. (Not actually due to the disease in question — parents generally work crazy hard for all their children, regardless of health status.) But by the time you develop MS, you usually don’t have Mom and Dad there to clear the path at every turn. And there just aren’t many good substitutes for good ol’ Mom & Dad, when it comes to being a sick person.

And then of course, there’s the actual suffering. MS has a deservedly bad reputation — it can be a truly vile illness. Kinda like polio: a lotta people are exposed to the polio virus and are none the worse for wear; but if it decides get you, it can get you good. Depending on your luck, patient and loved ones might actually have a hard time of it with MS, with the all the difficulties that come with any disabling injury or nasty illness. Not all cases turn out to benign, or painless, or something-I-was-ready-to-deal-with.

So in all, it is a recipe for stress and discouragement. This for the person with MS — who already is prone to depression just as a symptom of the disease, aside from everything else. And then also for the near family members, the people who, when the depressed patient begins to think about suicide, are *supposed to be* the ones who help the patient get treatment for the depression. Except that if you, the caregiving family member, are yourself suffering from situational depression, you are hardly in a position to think clearly on matters of life and death.

And hence MS shows up in the news, wound up in the politics of suicide and euthanasia. Not because it is a terminal illness — precisely because it is *not* a terminal illness.

Killing People Is Not The Solution. Emotional support, social support, practical help with day-to-day problems: *these* are actual solutions to the problems related to MS. [Hey, living wages, real health care reform, and accessible community design would be useful here! Hint hint.] Treatment for depression, for whichever members of the family are suffering from depression, is essential. A strong legal framework that protects vulnerable people from the temptation to suicide and euthanasia is part of the package, too.

–> Legislators, judges, and medical professionals who encourage death as the solution to discouraging medical problems are, frankly, a bunch of cowards. Wicked evil cowards. Deal with the actual problem, don’t try to sweep it under the tombstone.

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