Tales of Resilience:

 

 

Psychological resilience is that rare quality that enables some survivors to prosper after devastating trauma or misfortune, millstones that would sink most people.

Jaime Harrison, chairman of the Democratic National Convention, is a living example of such resilience, the details of which he shared during their recent convention: “A Black man, from South Carolina, raised by a single mother — that was me.”  But despite a dreadful childhood: “When our power was cut off, when there was nothing in the fridge, when we lost our home to a con man, I never lost hope.”^⁠1

Despite the obstacles, he always had the ability to reach out fearlessly, defying all the odds. For instance, as a teenager, he reached out to Congressman James Clyburn, somehow persuading him to attend Jaime’s induction into the National Honor Society, thereby forging what would become a lifelong friendship. When he got accepted at Yale but had no money to attend, he had the gumption to reach out so convincingly to a member of his church the individual not only gave him the money he needed but also a summer internship.

Harrison’s story vividly reminded me of Gail Sheehy, a writer of my generation and the author of the best-selling book Passages, which traced how we all go through “somewhat predictable, somewhat manageable phases and points of crisis”  in our lives. One typical stage is emotional turmoil at midlife.

When on an assignment to write about Cambodia in the aftermath of Pol Pot’s genocidal reign, Sheehy was facing her own midlife crisis: the last thing she expected to find was a daughter. But that’s what happened when she forged an instant attachment with an eleven-year-old refugee named Mohm, who had suffered immensely during the genocide: she had survived by eating roots in the jungle after witnessing the slaughter of her grandparents, her parents, and every one of her siblings. 

But like Harrison, Mohm was bold and spunky, a testament to the power of the human spirit to prevail against unimaginable odds. When Sheehy visited a refugee camp, most of the children retreated to the shadows, wearing blank expressions. But she spotted one little girl who had “hungry eyes, darting behind bamboo fences… following me like a deer through the forest.”^⁠2 

Soon after, when that little girl was introduced to Sheehy, they bonded instantly. At the end of their brief encounter, the girl asked Sheehy to take her with her to a free country. In essence, Mohm adopted Sheehy, not the other way around.

Of course, Sheehy’s best seller was not just about adopting a daughter. It was about the stages everyone goes through in the course of their lives, which can’t be done in a vacuum. Inevitably, she was talking about her generation, which also happens to be mine. Sheehy was able to resolve her own midlife turmoil by taking dramatic action. In her case, she learned to attend to the needs of others by adopting Mohm.

 I would like to close by switching the topic from individual psychology to society as a whole. When we widen the lens in this way, we see our country, like a person, has also moved through stages since its birth. Looking at it this way, we can explain the extreme polarization we face today as a result of collective anomie at midlife. No longer are we a brash young country pumped up with testosterone like an out-of-control gang of adolescent boys primed to dominate and plunder. Like Gail Sheehy, we are now searching for a sense of community and ways to better take care of each other.

Sheehy wrote that “the best way to defeat the numbing ambivalence of middle age is to surprise yourself - by pulling off some cartwheel of thought or action never imagined at a younger age,’’^⁠3 During my own midlife turmoil, I was able to cartwheel back to graduate school and become a psychotherapist specializing in helping folks with PTSD.

And, just in time for our presidential election this year, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have cartwheeled onto the scene to lead us toward a more gentle, kind, and hopeful future.

xxx

¹ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/22/jaime-harrison-inspirational-grandparents/

² https://www.vogue.com/article/gail-sheehy-book-daring-my-passages-a-memoir

³ https://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/25/books/mohm-pat-in-america.html

Photo credit: Apple tree in  my neighbor's abandoned orchard

Meditating on a Bitter Dock

 

Standing as a sentinel at the foot of my drive, I took this photograph of a bitter dock, a common weed in NH. The Bitter Dock is foreign to our state and, like many other immigrants, is considered to be an invasive pest; however, in the more-than-human world, it is held in high esteem by both birds and animals, who hanker after its seeds.

At first glance, my photograph only captures a moment, as Claude Monet set out to do with his paintings. But his work has become more than that: Revealing a depth revered by people all over the world.^⁠1

In terms of my own life, my bitter dock picture is equally profound.

When I took this shot, I meant only to document the bitter dock’s colorful autumn garb. But the longer I looked at it, the more memories it brought back, starting when I was a little boy of six. That’s when the loggers came to clear-cut the majestic stand of white pines adjacent to my home, changing the whole ecology of my personal landscape.

Cutting these massive trees opened up a clear view of the sky, inviting in a smorgasbord of sunshine-seeking species, including bitter docks and high-bush blueberries. After a few years, my mother and I were able to go there berry-picking, gaining access to the land through the same gap in the stonewall where the bitter dock now guards my driveway.

It was a different time.

When those white pines were harvested around 1950, timber had monetary value, while land in rural NH had virtually none. A few years later, this allowed my father to buy the land under the trees for the princely sum of one hundred dollars—land that soon would become mine.

Over the years, mixed hardwoods grew back where the pines once stood, gradually shading out the blueberry bushes and restricting the bitter dock to a roadside plant. For the last fifty years, I have shared this land with the maples, oaks, and birches, cutting their wood to feed my woodstove. I am aware that, as a human being, I am so much more of an ecological threat than my little bitter dock plant could ever be.

While many consider this little plant to be a pesky weed, for me, it represents a higher truth. It reminds me of Buddha’s Flower Sermon, a wordless talk he gave to his disciples by holding up a white flower.^⁠2 Only one person understood his message, signaling his approval by smiling.

Within Buddhism, the Flower Sermon signifies the direct transmission of wisdom without words; it is based on first-hand experience rather than rational creeds, intellectualism, or analysis.^⁠3 

The photo I took of this bitter dock is my wordless transmission of t his truth: It represents the primordial cycles of nature, grounded in my real-life experience during the short span of my 78 years on Earth.

I honor this wordless transmission by smiling.

xxx

¹ https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/interactive/2024/claude-monet-impression-sunrise/?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f010

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_Sermon

³ http://www.davidlai.me/2017/02/09/flower-sermon/

1968: What a Year It was!

A Photo I took in 1966 outside Nhr Trang

As the Democratic Convention unfurled this week in Chicago, everyone is comparing it to the 1968 convention in that same city. But for those who lived through it, the convention was but one example of how crazy 1968 was: It wasn’t just Chicago: the whole year was a house on fire, exploding with unprecedented chaos. 

Here’s how I remember it. 

I was a returning Vietnam vet, getting out of the service on February 3, 1968, the bloodiest year of that seemingly endless war.  Four days earlier, the North Vietnamese had launched the infamous Tet Offensive in Nha Trang, a place in Vietnam I knew well. 

Tet, as it turned out, was the beginning of the end of that meat-grinder of a conflict, sacrificing the lives of 58,000 young Americans, while Vietnam, counting civilians, lost a staggering three million^⁠1. Tet was a turning point, prompting CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,”^⁠2  to finally confirm that Vietnam was an unwinnable debacle. 

As if to buttress that claim, the photograph that won the 1968  Pulitzer Prize, graphically depicted a South Vietnamese General executing a Viet Cong prisoner. A quote by an Army major during Tet aptly summarized the damage we were doing to  that small, third-world nation: Referring to a town he and his troops were trying to retake:  “We had to destroy it to save it.”^⁠3

Then, the My Lai massacre happened on March 16. US ground troops from Charlie Company rampaged through the hamlet of My Lai

killing more than 500 Vietnamese civilians, from infants to the elderly.

The Vietnam War caused a degree of polarization drawfing anything we are seeing today, including upending the presidential election. A virtual unknown, Eugene McCarthy, came within 230 votes of defeating Lyndon Johnson in NH. 

I happened to be watching Johnson give his address on March 31 when he unexpectedly – and shockingly – announced his decision not to seek reelection because of poor polling numbers.

 That starkly contrasts with President Biden, who had to be forced by his fellow Democrats to stand down. I’ve always had a soft spot for Johnson. He thought getting involved in a land war in Asia was folly but was talked into it to avoid being accused of being soft on communism.

There is this touching story, probably apocryphal, that he went down to the operations room in the White House at 4 AM each day to see how many of ‘my boys’ had been killed that day. The weight of Vietnam weighed him down, resulting in his premature death, a broken man.

On April 4^th, Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis by James Earl Ray, sparking riots in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Newark, Washington, D.C., and many others. Early in the morning of June, on the night of the California Primary, RFK was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, apparently angered at several pro-Isreali speeches Kennedy had made during the campaign.

On August 26, Mayor Richard Daley opened the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Demonstrations were initially peaceful but became increasingly violent over the next two days. By most accounts, on Wednesday evening, Chicago police took action against crowds of demonstrators without provocation. The police beat some marchers unconscious and sent at least 100 to emergency rooms while arresting 175.

On October 3, George Wallace, a staunch segregationist, running an independent campaign for president, named retired Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis E. LeMay as his running mate. 

When the general was asked about his position on the use of nuclear weapons, he responded: "I think most military men think it's just another weapon in the arsenal... I think there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons.” When Trump was president, like LeMay, he failed to understand why we couldn’t use our atomic weapons.

The Democratic convention will be over by the time you read this. While there are parallels with the 1968 convention, this one should be peaceful and healing for the party and the country.

The biggest danger is how to handle Gaza. If President Biden fails to rein in Netanyahu and demand a ceasefire, he may ignite a regional war in the Middle East, which would be disastrous for Israelis, Palestinians, and the Democrat’s chances of winning in November.

xxx

¹ https://study.com/academy/lesson/casualties-of-the-vietnam-war-causes-statistics.html#:~:text=The%20Vietnam%20War%20began%20in,of%20200%2C000%20South%20Vietnamese%20soldiers.

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Cronkite

³ This 1968 timeline is where I got much of my information:

https://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/1968/reference/timeline.html

 

The Paradoxes of Tribalism

 

CC Jean Stimmell

I had an epiphany watching Kamala Harris’s first campaign rally in Atlanta: It came to me that tribalism can be a good thing, a position I would have previously considered unthinkable. In fact, I will go further and admit that I now feel tribalism has some major advantages over rational, intellectual discourse – along with potential dreadful liabilities.

I confess I got so carried away listening to the rally that I found myself chanting along with the crowd. I felt as if one with Harris and her rapt audience. What was happening to me, the reserved, bookish person I usually am?

Obviously, becoming one with the audience is not a solitary, individual response but flows out of community. It was in the air around me: it was emotional and transformational. Indeed, it was “tribal.”

I’m not the only one to feel this surge: my friends and acquaintances tell me they are feeling it, too. (Of course, the MAGA folks have long felt it. But that is a story for another time.) Michelle Goldberg, NYT columnist, calls the Harris excitement “infectious.”

She quotes a Harris rallygoer, who is a pediatrician: “Things can happen and turn around in just a moment that can change everything. And I feel like that’s what’s happened. And this is not only a political movement. This is a social movement. This is an inflection point. And this is, to me, a spiritual movement.”^⁠1

Goldberg thinks this excitement at the Atlanta rally could be “really durable:” “The reason is that people underestimate how much of getting involved in politics has to do with becoming part of a real-life social movement, making those connections, joining those groups, being in community.”

I agree. This type of public campaigning in the town square is an excellent example of an oral tradition, harkening back to the first humans who gathered together in dangerous circumstances for support and protection. 

This ancient oral tradition is fundamentally different from what came later: the written word.

Oral societies are social by nature. They are most often associated with indigenous people, who are considered primitive by today’s standards. Cultures that live by the written word are a modern development, valuing the individual over society. They are thought to be more sophisticated and reliable in our modern world.

Whether we follow an oral or a written tradition has huge consequences: it determines how we view reality.

 Walter Ong, an American Jesuit priest, English professor, and cultural historian, is a fascinating character and an acknowledged expert on this subject. His major interest was how changing from orality to literacy influenced culture and human consciousness.^⁠2

While he agreed that so-called illiterate Indigenous people did not think in abstractions, he demonstrated that they enjoyed a major, complementary strength: they were intimately connected to the physical world around them. In other words, they were mindful, living in the present, totally in tune with the rhythms of Mother Nature.

This illuminates a fundamental difference in the group dynamics between oral and print cultures.

 As Ong notes, “when a speaker addresses an audience, the members of the audience normally become a unity, with themselves and with the speaker. If the speaker asks the audience to read a handout provided for them, as each reader enters into his or her own private reading world, the unity of the audience is shattered, to be re-established only when oral speech begins again.”^⁠3

The difference is stark: an oral culture brings people together, while a print-oriented culture like ours pulls people apart.^⁠4 That’s why political rallies can be such high-octane unifiers.

But they come with a warning…

Rallies are a potent way to build community but come with the ever-present danger of ceding control to a charismatic dictator like Hitler who would command absolute power at the expense of our individual freedom and inviolable human rights.

 xxx

Photo Credit: I took this photo at Hampton Beach on Christmas Day 2014.

Footnotes:

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/03/opinion/kamala-harris-president-support.html?showTranscript=1

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_J._Ong

³ https://archive.org/stream/OngWalterOralityAndLiteracy/Ong%20Walter%20%2C%20orality%20and%20literacy_djvu.txt

⁴ https://blogs.ubc.ca/shaminakallu/2015/01/16/assignment-13-oral-vs-written-cultures-the-imagined-binary-question-1/