Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.  (Robert Louis Stevenson)

Along with debates, campaign speeches, and a slew of primaries, election years seem to bring out the cynics among us, all of them asking, “What’s the point?” Undoubtedly, there are some born-to-be-negative cynics, but I suspect most cynicism springs from disappointed idealism. People who hold a much-cherished Big Picture of a perfect world, and feel cheated and angry when it fails to materialize. All measures short of complete victory are tantamount to failure.

In all this, the Little Picture—the stories of real people in real time, their welfare, their fate—tends to get lost.

Let me be clear: Having a Big Picture view is essential to progress. Big Picture thinking allows us to see the connections between seemingly disparate events. It enables us to consider the extent of a situation: Is it local, national, global? An isolated incident, a series of coincidences, or a systemic issue? Grasping the Big Picture is key to formulating long-term goals and strategies. As the folk song says, it’s about keeping our “eyes on the prize.”

But, the Little Picture is where we live.

It’s where those featureless pixels in the Big Picture become recognizable faces, grow names, sprout human needs. Where a family of refugees tugs at your heart because you have a family, or have lived through a disaster, or are the child of immigrants. It’s the picture in which we recognize our humanity in the faces of others.

The Little Picture is not a selfie. It’s not about viewing the world from the comfort of your own armchair and asking “What’s the problem? I’ve got mine, Jack.” Not the egocentric attitude expressed by Mel Brooks’s character in The 2,000 Year Old Man: “Let ‘em all go to hell except Cave 76!”

It’s about seeing the actual lives behind the numbers. It’s about the significance of helping someone even when you can’t help everyone. It’s about remembering that someday, somewhere, that someone in desperate need of immediate aid may turn out to be your child, your parent, you. It’s the answer to “What’s the point?”

I was reminded recently of the significance of the Little Picture—how far its ripples on the larger pond can travel— in an e-mail from North Carolina Policy Watch. It seems that Americans tend to be pretty blasé about the routine nuts and bolts of our democracy, such as the selection of federal judges (which, by the way, is directly related to who’s in the Oval Office and who has the majority in the Senate). The federal judiciary is not the stuff of pumped-up passion and fireworks. Many of us would be hard-pressed to name even one federal judge. Yet, it wasn’t the Supreme Court, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit that struck an “… immense blow for the future of democracy, inclusion, and the effort to combat discrimination” when it ruled North Carolina’s voter suppression law unconstitutional on July 29 of this year (NCPW). Similar U.S. Court of Appeals decisions have come down recently in Texas and Wisconsin.

Are these individual state rulings as good as Congress restoring the Voting Rights Act in its entirety? No. Are these decisions, which enable several million students and non-white voters (both targets of voter suppression) to have a voice in our elections, better than waiting for Congress to restore the VRA? Undeniably.

Waiting for Godot: The Perfect vs. the Good

Voltaire wrote: Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The Big Picture is often the image of an ideal: Health care for everyone. Adequate housing and education for all people. Environmental standards that not only halt damage to the planet but actually reverse the destruction to our air, water, and soil. An end to all violence worldwide.

These Big Picture goals are admirable, majestic, profound. But the roughly 20 million Americans who now have health insurance, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, are not just numbers. They are diabetic teens and adults who did not die due to a pre-existing condition. They are children who did not die from a strep throat or a ruptured appendix because their parents cannot afford to pay $800 a month with a $3,000 deductible—in essence, paying an insurance company $10,000 a year and then having to pay for most or all of their healthcare expenses. They are people working 2-3 part-time jobs, whom no one will hire full-time because that would mean giving them benefits, including healthcare coverage.

So, is the ACA a failure because 30 million Americans still remain uninsured? As one of the millions of self-employed workers for whom it made healthcare possible, I am grateful every day. As one of the 7.4 billion human beings on this planet, I know we still need to do more.

But waiting for a perfect world, a perfect system, the perfect candidate—it’s like waiting for Beckett’s Godot. It just ain’t comin’. And nothing in history supports the idea that it ever will. So we can sit on our hands in protest at the imperfect or we can dive into the fray, do what we can to improve things for more people, and make good with what we get. In truth, I’m convinced it’s the only way to achieve anything. The journey of a thousand miles always begins with a single step. We start with the Little Picture and strive to paint a larger, wider canvas from there.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 speaks to this eloquently.

The CRA came about:

Because in 1961, black and white civil rights activists rode interstate buses into the segregated South. These “Freedom Riders” wanted to highlight the Interstate Commerce Commission’s failure to enforce earlier Supreme Court decisions that had ruled segregated public buses unconstitutional (Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, 1946; Boynton v. Virginia, 1960).

Because in 1960, four black students held a sit-in at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. Within a week, the movement grew from four to 300, and the sit-ins fanned out to other segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, then to other cities and states across the Jim Crow South.

Because in 1957, the “Little Rock Nine”—nine black students, registered by the NAACP and escorted by federal troops—became the first black pupils to attend the all-white Little Rock Central High School.

Because in 1955, Rosa Parks sat down on a bus and refused to give up her seat to a white woman when the whites-only section was full, thus sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Because a woman named Sarah Louise Keys had done something similar in 1952, as had Bayard Rustin in 1947, and Irene Morgan in 1944. Back and back to Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass.

None of these actions freed all black Americans forever from discrimination and the savage violence of racism. Sadly, more than 50 years later we have ample proof of that. But that doesn’t diminish the significance of these advances or the courage of the participants or the outcomes of their actions. Taken separately, they are all Little Pictures. But they are also pieces of a much larger picture, one we are still painting. And despite setbacks, despite backlash, they have added up to real change for many, many Americans. That we still have a long way to go does not negate the lives improved, the lives saved. Each of them is, after all, someone’s only life.

The Starfish Story

I first heard the Starfish story when I was doing my M.Ed. It goes something like this:

A man is walking along the ocean and sees a beach where thousands and thousands of starfish have washed ashore. Further along he sees a young woman picking up one starfish after another and tossing each one gently into the ocean.

“Why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?” he asks.

“Because the sun is up and the tide is going out and if I don’t throw them further in they will die.”

“But,” the man says, “don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and starfish all along it! You can’t possibly save them all, you can’t even save one-tenth of them. In fact, even if you work all day, your efforts won’t make any difference at all.”

The young woman bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it into the sea. “It will make a difference to that one.”

Everything we do that makes life a little better for another person matters.

And that’s the point.

Source: All photos from the March on Washington, August 28, 1963:

http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/march-on-washington/pictures/march-on-washington/core-members-at-march-on-washington

“You’re in a mess, and in excess.”  Billy Strayhorn

I am a person who cares very deeply about the planet—how can I not? It’s my home. I also have a great fondness for humanity. As Ruth Gordon so aptly put it in Harold and Maude: They’re my species. I love cats and dogs, elephants, tigers, and the giant panda. I even have a soft spot—at a respectful distance—for the bees that pollinate the crops from which so much of our food comes.

Because of these various and numerous carings, I am the recipient of a staggering quantity of e-mail petitions and donation requests. Three-hundred is a “good” day, but a closer average is 500. More than that and you can hear me whimpering softly into my keyboard Please, let me have a life.

Well, problems demand solutions, so I have recently decided to weed through the druck and click on that little life-saver Unsubscribe Me. (I should have done it years ago, but I was too busy … answering e-mails.)

I’m not doing a Thoreau here and disappearing into the woods. I realize these are desperate times, and as such call for desperate measures. Or at least a quantity of $5 and $10 donations, and a daily dozen of signed petitions. So, how to separate the wheat from the chaff? Well, I believe there are situations where our democracy needs lawyers on the ground, sometimes hordes of them, so I won’t be axing the ACLU. Likewise, I won’t part company with Planned Parenthood, People for the American Way, Democracy Now, the Union of Concerned Scientists, or the World Wildlife Fund. And I want to reassure the Humane Society that I’m still going to donate my lovely 2001 Ford Focus. I just need the use of it for another six weeks.

But, not all that screams READ ME THIS INSTANT is gold. So, gone is the magazine I declined to renew back in 2009, but which continues to send me weekly come-ons. (Read this woman’s lips: No means no.) History, too, are the BIG! SALE! NOW! adverts for clothing, designer cookware, and high-tech gadgets from companies I’ve never patronized.  It’s also arrivederci to the guy who’s always yammering on about tinnitus (I can’t hear you anymore.)

And though it pains me, because I think many of them are very good people, it’s time to be honest with myself and confess that I cannot possibly fill the campaign coffers of all 187 Democrats in the House on a writer’s income. (Democrat #188, Rep. Fattah  from Pennsylvania, saved me the trouble by resigning in June after being busted on corruption charges.)

Don’t worry Lizzie Warren. You are my hero, and you will always have my heart, my vote, and whatever spare change I find beneath the sofa cushions.

This purging of my Inbox is no small task, but already I feel wonderfully exhilarated. It’s made me consider what else in life I might unsubscribe to. A sort of thinking outside the (in)box. So far, my wish list of things I’d like to vanquish with the click of a mouse includes:     

1)Any repetitive task involving cleaning—washing dishes, scrubbing toilets, mopping floors, sieving the cat box. Bye!

2)Junk mail consisting of credit card come-ons, solicitations for “free” dinners to discuss investment strategies for the 401K I don’t have, and ultra-posh catalogs ($275 for a pair of shorts? I’ll think about it when I stop laughing).

3)All yardwork that involves heavy weeding. We have—and I want to emphasize this—a very, very small yard. We chose our house with its wee lot because we DO NOT LIKE yardwork. We like writing and reading, bicycling and enjoying a gin-and-tonic on the deck. Yet, despite the terraced garden I created to cover the front lawn, and the pavers we laid down for a patio to cover the back yard, I still dig and clear 35-40 giant bags of what our landfill correctly labels “yard waste.”

How is it possible that palm oil deforestation is wreaking havoc on half the world and here in my puny 4,000 sq. ft. lot, a jungle abounds?

4)Speaking of havoc in the larger world, unsubscribe me from TV, radio, and print pundits who just spout whatever outlandish drivel comes into their heads for the sole purpose of ramping up their ratings, while sowing discord, escalating tensions, and mongering fear (I’ve always wanted to use monger as a verb!).

5)Related to #4, I would like to cancel the 24-hour news cycle, period. Possibly the worst innovation to come out of the media explosion cable TV introduced, it leads otherwise reasonable newscasters to say things like, “Michael Jackson will only die once.”

6)Also high on my list of things to delete is that phone-answering set-up where an improbably zombie-like computerized “woman” asks you questions, then insists you speak your answer into the void. No matter how slowly and clearly you enunciate, “she” never quite “hears” you.

Sample “conversation:”

Zombie woman: Are you experiencing any fever? Just say yes or no.

You: Yes.

ZW: I’m sorry. I didn’t quite understand your reply. Could you repeat that?

You (perspiring heavily): Yes! My temperature is 104!

ZW:  I’m sorry. Can we try that again?

You (swooning): 104! My temperature is 104! I’m burning up!!!

ZW: Let’s try a different question.

You (dead):

7)And last, but certainly not least, please save me from any political “debates” where candidates compare the size of their hands, ears, nose to any other part of their anatomy as if it had any relevance to world hunger, global warming, or the desperate needs of refugees.

I mean, seriously, Beam me up, Scotty!

And while the future’s there for anyone to change, still you know it seems
It would be easier sometimes to change the past. . .

(“Fountain of Sorrow” Jackson Browne)

Sometimes, it’s something we truly earned—and didn’t get. The career-making job that would have launched our dreams. Sometimes, it’s something we never had, but always craved. Parents who could love us. And sometimes it’s just one terrible moment: The car we failed to see in time. Whatever it is, in most of our lives there lurks The thing that cannot be changed. It’s the moment, the decision, the situation that all our effort and talent and endurance cannot alter or undo.

Successful writers and actors, business people and ballplayers, if they’re honest, often mention the role luck played in their achievement. Along with the hard work and long hours, they confess to being in the right place at the right time. No one mentions the opportunities that went to someone else, the love that never materialized, the awful accident of standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And that’s the hardest part about The thing that cannot be changed. It’s almost never the result of our own doing. Perhaps that’s why it looms so large. It lies outside our control, and people like to control their own lives. When someone else denies us our most basic needs, tramples our dreams, we experience it as an injustice, and injustice bites deep. Its grip is tenacious.

Yet, we must learn to live with The thing that cannot be changed. Thrive in spite of it. Not let it swamp us internally or accept it as a judgment of our own worth. There’s a myth that only losers suffer from The thing that cannot be changed. That successful people simply leave adversity in the dust. Would that it were it so easy.

“The Places That Failed Us Before”

Tennessee Williams was a two-time Pulitzer prize winner and hailed as one of the greatest dramatists in 20^th-century American theater. Decidedly a brilliant writer and a great success. But he was never able to stare down The thing that cannot be changed.

 For Williams, The thing was twofold: The abusive, alcoholic father who disdained and bullied a son he considered weak; and the controlling, puritanical mother horrified by all things sexual. Williams heard their message loud and clear: “You are wrong as you are.”

In one particularly harrowing incident, his father hauled him out of the University of Missouri after he failed a military training course in his junior year, and put him to work in the factory of the International Shoe Company where the senior Williams was an executive. Tennessee hated the daily grind and eventually suffered a nervous breakdown.

After he recovered, Williams enrolled in another college, and later studied at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York City. Speaking of his early days as a dramatist, collaborating with others on a play for an amateur summer theater group, Williams wrote, “The laughter … enchanted me. Then and there the theatre and I found each other for better and for worse. I know it’s the only thing that saved my life.”

The hope in that last sentence is moving; its subtext, haunting: If I just work hard enough, long enough, I can write my way free of my pain. But he never did. Despite using that pain to create some of the most memorable characters on the stage (Big Daddy, Amanda Wingfield), he remained trapped within The thing that cannot be changed. Elia Kazan, who directed many of Williams’s plays said, “Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life.”

In 1939, with the assistance of his agent, he received a $1,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for a play he was writing, Battle of Angels. The play foundered when it opened, but Williams was on his way. And yet, a poem he penned that same year reveals how badly The thing that cannot be changed dogged him. Cried the Fox speaks of an animal, running in ever-narrowing circles—frantic, desperate, lonely—always coming back to the places of past hurt and doubt.

Williams once remarked that “A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.” But the undertow of those experiences finally claimed him. He died of asphyxia, an accident related to the quantity of alcohol and drugs he consumed over the last 30 years of his life. His obituary in The New York Times (February 27, 1983) paid homage to him as “a master of dramatic moments who created lost, tortured characters struggling for dignity and hope in a world that often denied both.”                                                                

Beyond Her Own Pain and Anger

Helen Keller became acquainted with The thing that cannot be changed at 19 months, when a severe illness left her blind and deaf. Imagine the terror of that. Your world goes dark and silent, and you are too young to even grasp why. By all accounts, Helen spent the next five years in a rage, rejecting every attempt to reach her. It was only when the young teacher, Annie Sullivan, at last broke through that dark silence and communicated with her, that Helen understood there might be something beyond her own pain and anger.

As an adult, she used that discovery to help other people afflicted with blindness. She joined the American Foundation for the Blind. For 40 years, this organization served as her global platform to advocate for people with vision loss. She saw to it that state commissions for the blind were established, rehabilitation centers were built, and education was made accessible to children without sight. She also championed the rights of working people and women’s suffrage.

It is a hard thing for us humans to accept, but the bottom line is this: We cannot control other people and we cannot change the past. We can only control our own actions and responses. So when The thing that cannot be changed brings us to our knees, as it sometimes will, we must learn to breathe with it. As Helen Keller discovered, it is one aspect of our personal story, but it is not our whole story. So we own it, and then we rise up. And carry on.

“History is for human self-knowledge … the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.”      (R. G. Collingwood) 

I have always loved old things. The ghostly line of columns—all that remains of the Temple of Saturn—in the Roman Forum. The hand-made red and yellow fleur-de-lis tiles in Westminster Abbey’s Chapter House –tiles that Henry III walked across during The King’s Great Council of 1257 (in effect, the first English Parliament). I confess, I once laid my cheek against those tiles. I wanted to feel the heartbeat of the ages. Feel the thing that connects me to all living beings past and present.

Okay, so we’ve established I’m a little weird. But everybody’s got to be something.

This past May, Ed and I spent three weeks traveling through Greece. I was really psyched because it was a place I’ve always wanted to visit. Of course, we trudged up the long hill to the Acropolis to see the Parthenon. The place where Socrates and Plato walked. The source of the famous marbles that Lord Elgin saved or stole (depending on your viewpoint). And it was worth it, but what really blew me away were the Minoan ruins at Akrotiri, on Santorini, and the Palace of Knossos outside Heraklion, Crete.

Just to put things in perspective, habitation at Akrotiri goes back to the 5^th millennium BC, and the first settlement of Knossos predates even that by 2,000 years (though the Minoan Palace wasn’t built until 1900 BC). About 400 generations of men and women have been born, flourished or flailed, and died since the first Neolithic settlement there. We are talking old.

The staircases and roads and walls and rooms of these ancient places are open to wander through and marvel at, but the fragile stuff—the urns and pitchers, the bowls and murals have all been moved to museums. So, after touring the ruins, we headed to the modest Archaeological Museum of Thera and the much bigger Heraklion Archaeological Museum. As women keep telling men, size doesn’t matter. Both museums were filled with treasures that constantly made me stop to think. Call them love letters from the dead.

NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION

The first item I saw at the museum in Heraklion was an intricately decorated plate that was made 7,000 years ago. The second item was a “bee smoker” of similar vintage. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It’s the kind of object that contains a whole story in itself and offers a huge window on humanity. It’s the moment the light bulb went on. It’s the invention necessity was the mother of.

At some point, people noticed that beehives yielded delicious honey. They started keeping hives. Obvious problem: Bees get feisty when you mess with their hive. Question: Who’s going to sacrifice himself to collect the honey? Not a popular job. So, they argue and maybe draw straws, and each day some poor guy braves the angry buzzing and the stings.

Until …  the light bulb goes on. Someone notices (over a cooking fire? Smoking a cheroot?) that bees get really groggy with smoke. Fly slower. Don’t raise such a fuss. So this someone thinks, If I make something I can carry, something I can put a little fire inside, give it holes to let the smoke out  … Problem solved.

It’s how water jugs got spouts. And handles. It’s how the wheel got invented—and wasn’t that a red letter day, because people were already planting crops and herding domestic animals. You can almost hear some yeoman in the background, tired of hauling twice his weight over hill and dale, complaining, Come on, hurry it up already. We need that wheel!

Take a moment to look around you and imagine all the light bulb moments that occurred to invent all the stuff that fills your home. Necessity is the mother of invention. The mother of creativity. That we can respond to it is what separates us from the amoebas.

NATURE ABHORS A STRAIGHT LINE

The sort of glossy western civilization or world history surveys most of us got in high school laid out the timeline of humanity something like this: There were a whole bunch of millenniums of Neanderthal guys before the Egyptians settled the Nile for farming, domesticated cats, and built the Pyramids. Then nothing much happened until the Romans showed up with their grid-based cities, inter-linked sewage lines, and aqueducts. After the Romans (up to their necks in economic troubles, government corruption, and an over-reliance on slave labor—sound familiar?) took a fatal series of beatings from the Goths, Vandals, etc., the “Dark Ages” settled across Europe in murky mysteriousness for nearly 800 years. Until Michelangelo, Leonardo, and the Medicis brought the Italian Renaissance into glorious light in the 14^th century. After that, the printing press gets invented, Shakespeare bursts onto the scene, and then it’s pretty much a straight shot, an unwavering true line of progress from about 1700, growing ever more brilliant—and still rising.

Only it wasn’t. It isn’t. Progress in human history is NOT linear. It’s not even entirely cyclical, although that would be closer to fact. Consider that more than 10,000 years ago, people were cultivating crops in the Levant. Rice had been domesticated in China. And the people of Mesopotamia were already old hands at raising pigs and sheep. It’s not like people used to be so stupid and now they’re so smart. (I could offer you many examples to back this from contemporary society, but I feel certain you have a few of your own.)

Walking through the ruins of Akrotiri—streets and multi-room dwellings with windows and doors and frescoes—I saw a sophisticated Minoan Bronze Age city that enjoyed trade relations with other cultures in the Aegean until it came to an abrupt end with the Theran eruption around 1627 BC. 

Plague, famine (blame the weather gods), earthquakes. These unforeseen, and largely unpreventable, disasters sink civilizations. Stall or retard progress. Turn it in a new direction. Send it another people’s way. More cyclical, or at least predictably always in the wings are: Power struggles, corruption, jealousy, wars—all destroyers, or at least retardants, of civilization and progress.

Which brings us to the third lesson the dead have to teach us: The greatest number and magnitude of advances in human history occur in times of peace, tolerance, and cultural inclusion.

WANT TO GET AHEAD? TRY TOLERANCE. TRY INCLUSION.

We saw two amazing exhibits at the British Museum that underscored this truth: Sunken Cities (Egypt’s Lost Worlds), and Sicily: Culture and Conquest. In both cases, a long string of rulers had to govern societies that included citizens from multiple cultures (Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans), with religious customs and beliefs that embraced Greek gods, Egyptian gods, the Hebrew god, and eventually the Christian Holy Trinity. It wasn’t always easy, and those who were successful understood the value of good propaganda—one Greek ruler of the lost Greek/Egyptian settlement at Thonis-Heracleion had his public image chiseled sporting a traditional pharoah’s headdress.

The best rulers may have kept the peace (and inclusivity) to preserve their highly profitable trade with the Mediterranean world, but it permitted people dignity and art and invention. Men like Archimedes, advancing mathematics. Playwrights like Aeschylus. In 398, visiting Syracuse, Plato said that his Utopia could best be imagined, perhaps even realized, in Sicily.

So what brings the cultural co-existence, and its resulting progress, crashing down? Someone gets hungry for empire, and instead of inventing things or making art or legislating democratic laws, it’s war again. And everyone loses. Even those who think they’ve won, because they’re the targets of tomorrow’s predators. Archimedes was killed by an invading Roman soldier.

These are the things I thought about on my summer vacation. The lessons I learned from the dead.