School’s out, school’s out … which means Jodi’s Bizzy Day Care is in full swing. I overslept a little this morning, took a late shower, and emerged to find 10 – count ’em, 10 – kids in the house. Our four, and six more. Ten.
Tomorrow I bet I get out of bed on time.
I’ve been stewing on a question for some time now – especially since this post got me to thinking about a conversation several months ago with Jinglebob regarding the war in Iraq. This question, however, can also be applied to political campaigns, labor disputes, and public disagreements of all kinds. The question is this:
At what point do good people make the choice
to fight dirty in order to win?
I remember the point at which, during the 2000 Republican Primary season, McCain started to get dirty, and the Straight Talk Express began to veer. I remember pundits saying, just a few months ago, that Obama needed to “get tough” to combat Clinton’s negative attacks. I’ve worked in communications for more than a decade now, and I’ve seen the daily headline wars won again and again by simplistic, and generally negative, messages – sometimes with little to no basis in fact. And I’ve heard friends and family advocate extreme measures to combat terrorists with no qualms at all about committing the worst sorts of atrocities against innocent people.
When confronted with such an adversary, it seems there is little room for negotiation, nuance, rules or truth. The faithful are often admonished to turn the other cheek – but once both cheeks are battered and bruised … then what?
This is the point at which the idealist in me says, Then you lose on principle. Die with honor.
But the body rebels. The mind justifies. The ego says, No way I’m going out without a fight. The gloves are coming off!
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Jewish psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl touches briefly on the lives of Jewish capos – prisoners who, in many cases, decided to survive the concentration camps by any means necessary. These prisoners acted as camp trustees on behalf of the Nazi SS and, Frankl says, sometimes became more brutal that the Nazi guards in their treatment of fellow prisoners. Frankl argues that these men sacrificed something more precious than life – their personal values. They were accorded special privileges and survived the camps, but many never recovered their humanity.
Public policy is rarely life-and-death, so this comparison is not exact. But the same questions apply to both arenas: Where is the line, and when should we cross?
Blogger’s Note: I don’t do many of these, but Jacqui did it with kind of a blanket tag at the end, and I’m a big fat copycat. Actually, I liked these questions. I’m not going to tag anyone else, but if you’re game, drop your responses in the Comments box.
What were you doing five years ago?
Almost to the day – I was packing essentials in my Focus and driving to Minneapolis to take a new job with a hip corporate marketing firm. I would live for a month in the Residence Inn, walk to work, and fly to NYC and Memphis on business during my first week. Important lesson: Do not tell your wife about your five-star Manhattan cuisine when she is packing up your life in Michigan, chasing kids and dogs, trying to complete the sale of your house, and subsisting on hot dogs and macaroni.
What are five things on your to-do list for today?
For tomorrow: leave the day job at or before 5 p.m.; enjoy a Cold Spring Pale Ale; read 75 to 100 pages of Don Quixote; brainstorm guerilla marketing tactics for the church’s new faith formation program; hug my wife and kids – tightly.
What are five snacks you enjoy?
PB&J, graham crackers and frosting, bananas, dry cereal, and cheese.
What five things would you do if you were a billionaire?
Pay off my debts, my families’ debts, and our church’s; endow scholarships to Yale and the University of South Dakota; buy a little place in the middle of nowhere and build a wired-enough house that I wouldn’t have to leave to work; take Dad and the boys on that Trans-Siberian railroad trip to Mongolia; and yeah, try to blow the rest on pet projects and good causes.
What are five of your bad habits?
Obsessively checking emails and blogs; obsessively needing to be understood; setting unrealistic goals; leaning on my spouse for schedules and directions; and sausage.
On my commute this morning, I was contemplating herons, and why they fly with their necks folded to a tight S, when cranes stretch long like geese. Any ideas?
I passed a dark pond backed with greening trees and was blessed to watched an egret descend on the water, uncoiling its long neck, heron-style, as dipped its feet lightly in the water. And I thought to myself, Startlingly white! To what end?*
And then occurred to me:
to fish, the egret
is a white cloud in blue skies
over green water
In fairness, it didn’t occur to me in 5-7-5 haiku format, although I do utter phrases of exactly 17 syllables more often that you might reasonably expect or attribute to chance.**
Anyway, it was more like this: an image of a fish from the egret’s viewpoint: bulbous eyes gazing skyward … Aha!
* * * * *
*The Jim-in-my-head talks exactly like this. Be thankful you don’t have to hear him all the time, like I do.
**And this is a prime example of a “poem” that is really just a somewhat interesting sentence with odd line breaks, right, Jinglebob?
Last night I read a book in a single sitting. That almost never happens.
Last night marked the fortuitous intersection of a quiet evening alone, the completion of a book on Mongol history, and the call of small book from 1928 called Mr. Blue. It was sent to me unprompted by a friend who has known about the book for years, and according to people better-read than me, is an account of a 20th-century St. Francis figure. OK – I’m late to the Catholic Church and poorly educated regarding the saints. At a glance, the online reviews of the book appear to fluctuate between loving Blue and his attempts to live his understanding of his Catholic faith authentically, and hating Blue for flawed and feel-good notions of Christianity.
Whichever. The more compelling figure, to me, is the narrator, who is admiring and incredulous, who sees wisdom and folly in Blue, who badgers him to make something of himself and yet finds himself almost irresistibly drawn to Blue’s ideas and lifestyle.
I wrote my friend afterward: “blue is what the jim-in-my-head aspires to be; the narrator’s back-and-forth (“blue’s so wrong! blue’s so right!”) is why i’m not more that man. (that, and jodi’s desire not to live in a shipping crate.)
I should say that I don’t literally aspire to be Mr. Blue. I don’t wish to live in a shipping crate, any more than Jodi does. But, like the narrator, I can admire a man whose vision and convictions guide him more than the expectations and norms of society, and who manages to live, more or less happily, beyond worldly concerns like stuff and money.
(Sure it’s a simplistic reading. But I’ve got enough complexity in my world right now.)
I also dig a story about people who try to follow “a Way” in a world that has apparently moved on. Perhaps that’s why (in a very different way) one of my favorite movies as a younger man was Ghost Dog. The faithful, the mafia, and the samurai all have their “Ways” to follow. The world doesn’t always understand or agree with those Ways. And sometimes, people die along the Way.
