Category: RIP

So Was Picasso

I am the black sheep in my family. I have pushed back against the dysfunction in our family since childhood. I asked for my needs to be met. I was ignored or ridiculed. I asked for safety. I was thrust repeatedly into harm’s way by my parents’ ignorance and obliviousness. I sought relief from my pain. I was labeled histrionic and, most frequently, “dramatic.”

To protect my mother, the near and extended family clustered around her belief system as if it was gospel, and she the patron saint of non-conformity. “We weren’t dysfunctional,” the chorus would crow in unison. “We are special.”

Our academic and business achievements and worldwide travel thinly covered the truth of a family awash in pain and self-loathing and mutual disrespect. Our family was the living epitome of cognitive dissonance. We acted one way – successful and self-confident, especially in the public arena – and felt completely other in the tight-knit family system. Scared and broken little girls each and every one of us.

Tight-knit we were. To reinforce the themes of superiority and hide the abject vulnerability of each member of the system, no one outside our circle was permitted to get very close. Unless, like us, they were broken and needy and in awe of my mother. then they were granted full admittance to the so-called inner circle and gratefully did my mother’s bidding.

Sinead O’Connor died this week. I had mixed feelings. The musicianship of this Irish wildcat was unmatchable. But her very public pain and defiance against her own dysfunctional and abusive childhood alienated her from a large part of society.

The very public act of tearing in half a picture of the Pope that had hung in her wretched mother’s bedroom was widely misinterpreted. Many of us seeking answers to our upbringings know the misunderstanding that can come when sharing our private pain publicly. It is frequently misunderstood and rejected.

Especially when it treads on other people’s sacred cows and belief systems. Note how long it took the world to take sexual abuse in the Catholic church seriously. I know for a fact many Catholics do not believe beloved priests are capable of such heinous acts.

These song lyrics were recently shared in the wake of Sinead’s death. A tribute song Kris Kristofferson write for her when she was booed off the stage at a Bob Dylan concert in 1992.

Abused adult children desperate for answers and relief from their pain may see themselves in these lyrics. God bless Sinead O’Connor. She sure wasn’t wrong in her belief that child abuse is the fount and mother of immeasurable untold evils in this world. Would that she had an easier ride on this planet. She certainly will now. RIP.


Sister Sinead, Kris Kristofferson (2009)

“I’m singing this song for my sister Sinead

Concerning the god-awful mess that she made

When she told them her truth just as hard as she could

Her message profoundly was misunderstood

There’s humans entrusted with guarding our gold

And humans in charge of the saving of souls

And humans responded all over the world

Condemning that bald-headed brave little girl

And maybe she’s crazy and maybe she ain’t

But so was Picasso and so were the saints

And she’s never been partial to shackles or chains

She’s too old for breaking and too young to tame

It’s askin’ for trouble to stick out your neck

In terms of a target a big silhouette

But some candles flicker and some candles fade

And some burn as true as my sister Sinead

And maybe she’s crazy and maybe she ain’t

But so was Picasso and so were the saints

And she’s never been partial to shackles or chains

She’s too old for breaking and too young to tame.”


150 Years Ago

I often wonder what our ancestors would think if they miraculously came to life and wandered into our modern life. Culture shock in extremis, most likely.

How we fill our days is motivated by need. We all have to keep body and soul together. How we do that is 180 degrees away from the ways our ancestors worked and lived.

My people on both sides were working class and mostly rural. Some made it to the “big city” to find work. But when the population of your “city” is a fraction of 1873 New Brunswick Canada’s entire population which was made up of 35,000 souls, well … that’s tiny.

My great-grandfather Lemuel Parker Brower was a machinist. His job was taking care of the town clock in Fredericton’s City Hall. See it up top there in the picture below. Lemuel Brower was taking care of it daily around 150 years ago. The clock functions pretty much the same way today as it did back then.

Lemuel and his wife Julia had twelve children together. They were not French Catholic where large families were the norm. But they both came from the countryside and Lemuel was of Dutch descent. The Dutch farmers had passels of kids to help run the farms. As did many other European descendants.

Later I saw the apartment building in Fredericton where Lemuel and Julia raised those twelve kids. Think of a modern two-bedroom apartment. It wasn’t much bigger than that. The urgency to launch those kids into their own lives once they were of age was not only an economic but a space imperative.

Their eldest – my grandfather Orlo Lemuel – found work in the Hartt Boot and Shoe factory. He worked there all of his life until he finally retired well into old age. That option has also changed dramatically in our modern era.

People hopscotch from job to job today like kids in a schoolyard playing the old hop, skip, and jump game. The idea of loyalty to a company and vice versa is a long-dead value that went the way of the dodo bird with the introduction of the microchip. Where steady, meticulous, quality work was the agreed-upon social standard for work products in days gone by, now it is speed and profit.

I am reminded of Bill Gates’ strategy when he started Microsoft. Gazillions of buggy Microsoft Office products were released and sold worldwide deliberately for sound business reasons. Create a dependence on “our” product and get to the market first. We’ll fix any problems later.

And so it is the norm now that we see version after version and upgrade after upgrade of our commonly-used tech products and software. iPhone is on Version 14. I swear Version 13 came out six months ago. Whether the changes are significant enough to justify the cost of upgrading is an individual choice.

Often the changes are as insignificant as a few more pixels in the phone’s camera or a marginal increase in the size of the screen. I’ll stick with my trusty old iPhone 11 until it no longer serves the functions I use it for.

Need expands to fill the space allotted. When my great-grandparents were raising 12 little kids in a two-bedroom apartment in the “big city,” they made it work. Astonishingly.

In rural New Brunswick, Canada, where small family farms were the norm, it took some time for the notion of smaller families to take hold. It would take the social upheaval of the Industrial Revolution and World War One and the Great Depression to alter society significantly enough to pare down the expectation of how many kids a family should have.

I think of my grandparents Lemuel and Julia often. They made do and raised a solid family who went on to do solid working-class work for most of their lives. Their lives were not flashy nor vital in the grand scheme of things but they were important: to their community and to their family.

One hundred and fifty years ago, there wasn’t a single piece of bling amongst their possessions nor had a single article been written that mentioned their existence. Until now.

Shout Out to Relief

There’s no denying that when bad things don’t come to pass – as you feared they might – relief floods in with a welcome physical response.

The shoulders drop. The breaths get deeper again. The nerves – if you are prone to them – begin to quell. I tend to tears sometimes. Pent-up emotion seeking an outlet.

So if you have been following me at all in the past few days, you’ll know I just faced what was in my life a barrel drop over Niagara Falls. With me in it, if that isn’t belaboring the obvious.

How many of these periods of terror and relief have I gone through? Seems like thousands but was probably only a few hundred or so.

The exam you are sure you weren’t well enough prepared for. The first date with someone that you really, really like. Sitting in the doctor’s office fearing the worse but hoping (praying) for the best. The interview for that job that you really want.

I am reminded of Sally Field’s Best Actress Oscar win for Norma Rae. In what was possibly the most public display ever of insecurity and vulnerability, she spouted out to the august assembled audience from the podium, Oscar in hand: “You like me. You really, really like me.”

Full confession. I know the feeling.

So today when an important meeting determining many of my future choices went very well today, I was tempted to blurt out those very words to the interviewer.

But given the stakes and a certain sense of decorum I am able to deploy – if and when necessary – I did not do that. I shook hands, walked out, and did the secret Laura Linney happy dance from Love, Actually in my mind when Linney actually manages to get Hugh Grant home.

I mean, I am not quite foolish enough to ACTUALLY get into a barrel and – as it were – barrel over Niagara Falls.

I like myself way too much for that. And for what I was able to pull off today, I like myself even better.

Imploding

I both love and hate confrontation.

I love it because I am standing up for myself.

I hate it because it makes me feel uncomfortable things I don’t normally feel and don’t want to feel. It is an area of life in which I require considerably more finessing.

I am accustomed to deceit and trickery in social relations, and most frequently in family relations. Whether members of my family practiced deceit and trickery deliberately is almost beside the point. I remember the sickening sloshing about of unwelcome emotions in me as I stumbled upon one sad realization after another.

In many confrontations, I always hold out hope that I am about to discover someone made an “honest mistake.” For this mistake, they would rush in rapidly to own up and correct it. That’s funny, not funny.

If the transgressor’s intention was benign, they would have thought through and been aware of how their actions were going to hurt and undermine you. If their intentions were honorable and honest, they would not have let it happen in the first place.

When my father died, I repeatedly encountered this. My youngest sister was the sole executor. She had a “fiduciary” duty to treat her sisters – the two other beneficiaries – with an even hand. I knew what was going to happen from the minute I heard that Dad chose her as his representative.

She had treated me with disdain and disrespect for the previous 30 years. She hid this fact from my father. When he asked about our relationship, she lied to him and presented us as “best buds.” Her lying and deceit didn’t end there.

As the estate inexorably made its way through the legal system in a protracted start-stop process over the next 13 years, my sister made sure she profited handily from the arrangement. She loaned herself money from the estate while denying the same privilege to my sister and me.

She seconded all of my father’s personal effects without offering to share or allow access to select favored items for ourselves. Not even items that we had given Dad as gifts. She lied blithely to the estate attorney, the judges, and to me.

Any of my attempts at asking for parity or “fair dealing” were treated like so much dust and air. Even the most inconsequential of items – Dad’s old computer or special furnishings like a wooden coat rack – were withheld in the same manner as Aesop’s fable about the dog in the manger who hoarded hay he couldn’t eat.

In campaigning to become Dad’s executor in the years leading up to his death, she presented him with a special book as a Christmas gift: You Can’t Take It With You. It carefully detailed all of the horrors that could ensue without a proper estate plan and the “right” representative in place. Perhaps I see that more cynically than others might.

As it turned out, she disappeared on a Caribbean vacation in the days leading up to his death. She could not be reached by anyone for four days after he died. She swears she put her contact numbers on a Post-It note on her computer screen. It seems she forgot to tell anyone.

She left my father’s law books in a place where they went moldy and had to be trashed. She put all of his office furniture into a dumpster refusing all pleas from me to hold them. The buyers of the business building said they would happily have held on to those items for me “had they but known.” Having lost their parents themselves, they knew the sentimental value of the items my sister got rid of.

There were many confrontations in the aftermath of my father’s death. Mostly useless. The courts and society treat power with the same even hand. In spite of the evidence, no one would call out my sister for her shifty management of Dad’s funds and property.

I did learn one thing from that sad situation. In the end, Dad’s things didn’t really matter all that much. I grieved them and got over it. Less clutter to deal with.

It was the deeper wounds of treachery, deceit, and cruelty that hurt and caused the most longlasting damage. Mostly, the dissolution of any future facade of family. Permanent estrangement from both sisters was the final consequence. That is not said with bitterness but sadness. It was a preventable tragedy.

I had to walk away for my own self-protection and the preservation of my mental health. When I hear the stories of pettiness and fighting that still goes on among them, I sigh with relief. I no longer want to live or choose to live like that. Hurt people hurt people they say.

I also walked away with certainty about one thing. Whatever else underpinned the cruelty, deceitfulness, envy, and greed in the family situation, it was not solely my fault as my youngest sister was desperate to believe.

It is sad when families learn – like the stranded crew on Apollo 13 who struggled to maintain their cool in a life threatening situation – that after any degree of the fighting and conflict, we end up back in the same place. It is well to remember that in the aftermath of such conflict, our relationships might not make it intact.

Wells From Which We Spring, Pt. 2

When Grace and Scott realized their marriage would not be blessed with children, they had little choice but to muddle through. In those days, any magnitude of domestic betrayal would not deep-six a marriage. Not socially or legally at any rate. 

Happenstance would step up to deliver them a child. A blood relation but not of their mixed bloodlines, however.

In 1930, in the capital city of New Brunswick about an hour away from Grace and Scott’s country farmhouse, young Jacqueline was still reeling from the recent news of her father’s untimely death. 

Frank Webster had been a cook at sea. One night in a savage and malevolent storm, Jacqueline’s father and all hands on board drowned when their small fishing boat was overwhelmed by a rogue wave. Jacqueline was only eight years old.

Her mother, Lillian – now widowed – simply couldn’t cope with raising three young children in the aftermath of this tragedy. The famil breadwinner was gone and with him her social status as a respectable married lady. 

Lillian took to her bed in what we might now describe as nervous shock. In dire straits, she polled relations and the community for temporary housing and help with her three young children. Montclair James was a couple of years older than Jacqueline. Scott, her little brother, was a couple of years younger. 

Scott fared well. He was placed with a benevolent family who treated him as a part of the family and with love and kindness. Montclair James did not fare as well. He landed in a cruel and demanding family whose only real interest in the boy was the labor he contributed. The beatings and cruelty he endured in that home would play out across his life for the rest of his life. 

When young Jacqueline learned who had stepped up to take her in, she felt she had won the lottery. She was placed with Aunt Grace and Uncle Scott at their farm in Nashwaak Bridge. Into her nineties, she sang their praises as “perfect parents.” 

Returning to live with her natural mother at 13 to attend Normal School (what high school was called then) registered as another loss of beloved people to whom she was deeply attached.

Divorce would have been out of the question for Grace and Scott. Marriage was one of the few certain routes to respectability for young country women. Their worth was usually measured by their ability to create a family. So much so in a rural community that it was not unusual for pre-marital pregnancy to be covertly encouraged to ensure the prospective bride was fertile. 

Grace never had that option. What happened when in her particular tragedy is not at all clear, of course, and like most stories, we are only left with the consequences. 

Young Jacqueline believed she was steeped in Grace’s love and undying devotion as a young girl. It is more likely Jacqueline was doted upon with great urgency by a devastated young wife, devoid of options to extricate herself from a disappointing and unsatisfactory marriage. 

Grace developed a razor-sharp tongue. She exercised it indiscriminately in cutting stories about all the locals that fell out of her favor with her. Given her own losses and betrayal, her anger and bitterness weren’t surprising. An evening’s entertainment would consist of putting down all and sundry and laughing uproariously.

It imbued young Jacqueline with a rather lopsided view of herself and the world. She lauded the McPhersons as somehow superior and above all others in the community. It was an unfortunate perception that isolated young Jacqueline from her birth mother, herself, and some of her children for the rest of her life. 

Wells From Which We Spring, Pt. 1

Grace Smith came from a small Canadian town near the border between Canada and the US. The Canadian province of New Brunswick and the American state of Maine, to be clear. Grace was born in 1900. Her life and Canada’s were at the same starting gate of sweeping social change brought on by the industrial age.

As did most young girls of her era, young Grace anticipated entering a marriage and having a family of her own when she grew up. Several hours away in Nashwaak Bridge, NB, Scott McPherson was born somewhere in the middle of a passel of Scottish immigrant descendant kids – eight in total. He had older brothers and sisters. Younger ones, too.

The original McPherson clan were retired Scottish military who were given land grants along the Nashwaak River in the late 1700s as a pension for their service. By the early 1900s, most of the McPherson military cachet had worn off. The family mostly made its way through farming and supplemental seasonal work.

It was clear from early on in his life that young Scott would follow in the family logging tradition to earn his keep and make his way. When and where he met young Grace Smith is unclear. But it is pretty safe to assume it was at a church-related function.

For girls and boys in rural New Brunswick just after the turn of the twentieth century, opportunities for social intercourse were strictly contained and chaperoned. Young Grace and Scott probably met up at a Saturday night or Sunday afternoon social.

The girls would have brought baskets full of homemade baked goods as their offerings to the refreshments table. Each food offering was clearly marked so all and sundry would know who had prepared what and how well. The boys had likely washed their hands and hair and even put on a clean shirt for the occasion.

Whatever young Grace Smith was offering, young Scott McPherson took a liking to. Their courtship was focussed and brief. A wedding and casting off into married life ensued pretty quickly.

All and sundry waited patiently – as was the tradition – for news of a blessed event that would herald the start of this new branch of the McPherson family tree. For an unseemly number of years, everyone waited in vain.

Grace and Scott lived through the Great Depression in the early days of their marriage. Scott worked seasonally and with little enthusiasm. Country people generally fared better than city folk in those dark ten years. At least on a farm, there were cows for milk and meat, and chickens for eggs. The bread was homemade and a yeast cake cost four cents. Sweet baked goods were part of the daily fare.

It turned out the delay and eventual abandonment of hoping for that “blessed event” were based on a medical condition. The condition was not that Grace was barren.

Scott’s shiftlessness did not apply to what they called “the pretty ladies” where he was reportedly quite industrious. He was a great flirt and quick with a story and a laugh. Good-looking and well-built, he apparently had a stable of young farm wives and ladies of lesser social standing who were happy to share their baked and other homely goods.

The ultimate outcome, however, neither he nor Grace wanted nor could have they easily foreseen. Scott contracted a venereal disease. He passed it to Grace. Scott’s dalliances and the disease he had caught passed to Grace and rendered her sterile. It is hard to imagine that it was all hearts and flowers in the McPherson marriage.

It is hard to impossible in our modern era to imagine the obstacles young Grace was up against as a young married woman in a rural conservative community. First, she would only have had access to rudimentary medicine. Her life and Scott’s were spared by whatever treatment methods were available at the time. Their potential future progeny were not.

TO BE CONTINUED …

The Unknown

Every day is basically an unknown. I remember periods in my life when it seemed things would always be the same. But it turned out they weren’t.

I think about the leap of faith it takes to jump out of bed each morning and face the day. We really don’t ever know what is coming.

I am presently grieving over the fate of a beautiful young black single mother not too far from where I presently live. She was killed in cold blood by an irate neighbor. A white lady if that matters. Guess it does around these parts of the American South.

The single mother’s kids had been playing outside and drifted onto the white lady’s lawn. The white lady threw a roller skate at one of the kids. She scooped up another kid’s iPad that was laying on the grass. Naturally, the kid ran to his mother for help.

When the beautiful black mother went to the white lady’s house to retrieve her son’s iPad, the white lady fired four shots through her unopened door. The white lady then claimed “self-defense.” Didn’t seem to matter that the white lady was the one that was aggressive to the black lady’s kids. The white lady told the 9-1-1 dispatcher that she “felt threatened” by her neighbor’s presence at the front door.

I listened to an interview yesterday with Christian Cooper, the black birdwatcher who in NYC in 2020 was falsely accused of harassment by Amy Cooper, (no relation) a white woman who refused to leash her dog in an on-leash section of Central Park. Cooper calmly recorded on his phone the white woman’s hysterical phone call to police complaining “a black man was threatening her and her dog.” The video recording told the tale. The white woman lost her job, was roundly condemned, and faded into infamy.

Christian Cooper wrote a book on birdwatching and just landed a gig as host of a National Geographic birdwatching show. Finally, at least one story of a white person and a black person’s confrontation ended well. For Christian Cooper at least.

I don’t get racism. Not saying I have plenty of best black friends. Not saying I can comfortably put myself in the shoes of a black person’s day-to-day reality in North America.

It’s just that I know and have met too many wonderful people of all races and nationalities. Standards of decency for humans are pretty much the same around the world no matter what color their skin is. Character, class, and manners count more in any individual than their race.

So my heart is heavy and grieving for that beautiful young black woman’s family. I don’t know how her kids will make sense of their mother’s loss as they grow up. No more than their bereaved grandmother can make sense of the loss of a beautiful daughter.

And then there is the unknown of how justice will play out in this case, as if that even matters to those most intimately affected. This is the land of Trayvon Martin, a skinny 15-year-old black kid who was shot dead for just walking around his neighborhood. His murderer got off scot-free based on the infamous “Stand Your Ground” laws that exist in Florida.

And so it may well be for this murderer – already charged with the lesser violation of manslaughter. It is an unknown almost too terrible to contemplate. That she might walk free.

Whichever way it goes for the hate-filled woman who coldly and viciously took this young woman’s life, it won’t matter to her kids. All they’ll know is facing the unknown every morning of waking up for the rest of their lives without their mother.

Under Thirty

I heard an odd story today from a Home Depot “associate,” or whatever elevated term they are calling them these days. I remember when labeling theory was all the rage and it was somehow believed that calling something “lesser than” a different name would elevate the dignity of work. That is when janitors became “sanitary engineers.”

So when I heard this story today, I flinched a little. We hear that millennials suffer from being overcoddled as children. These are the graduates of kindergarten programs where “everyone got a medal” or positive feedback no matter how dismal their performance. “Every child is special,” intoned educators. “Every child deserves praise and recognition.”

Granted that is hard to argue until it goes beyond the beyonds. How that somehow got translated into no longer letting children experience the consequences of their actions beats me. In my book, it defies nature.

So this associate told us today about a young person/millennial employee who got angry at a customer. Apparently, he turned on his heel, in front of the customer, “left his post,” as it were, and walked out of work and went home. I was speechless for about a milli-second then rolled my eyes and shook my head. Customer service has been reduced to a level where it often feels as if the person serving you expects you “to make their day,” and not the other way around.

The story got better. This young person showed up at work the next day, unapologetic and worse, endured no consequences for his behavior from management. Not even a stern lecture or reprimand. Perhaps they gave him a medal for being “so special.”

I rant about this not from the perspective of a horrified person, but a deeply saddened one. I do meet upbeat and positive salespeople of all ages. We seem to make each other’s day. Banter and problem-solving together. Considering options. This color or that.

But human nature is such that it takes something like – in truth, I don’t remember how many exactly – 90 or so positive statements to make up for a negative one. This is particularly directed at parents with a view to imbuing their offspring with a positive self-image.

But does it really? What did it for me was accomplishment. Or handling a delicate interpersonal situation well. Like telling someone something hard that had to be said but leaving them with their dignity. I was terrible at all of that as a young adult. It took years and tons of mistakes to wrap my head around it.

I often muse about the unjust society young people are presently stewed in. Paris Hilton is a role model? Because of an accident of birth and good marketing chops? The Kardashians? Marketing on steroids.

It is cruel and unfair for young people to think they can all become rock stars or models or actresses and make a million dollars before their thirtieth birthday. If that is their goal and belief that they deserve it, it is not hard to imagine why they are short-tempered and churlish with the masses they must serve while waiting for their breakthrough contract to be signed.

No doubt countless numbers of ambitious cute guys feel ripped off when it dawns on them their boy band isn’t going to make it in music’s big leagues. They are in for a world of disappointment unless that perspective gets turned around.

Tonight my husband and I ordered takeout pizza. I was exhausted. we had been schlepping around Home Depot all afternoon. I was probably unnecessarily short with the young lady. Certainly not friendly and engaging.

As I was leaving, she walked away from the cash register, waving a hand with acrylic green glitter nails, and sneered, sarcastically: “Hope you have a better day, ma’am.” It was not said kindly. It was unnecessary. A missed opportunity for kindness and compassion.

I was hurt by her dismissive attitude and gratuitous unkindness, and as I said, exhausted. I thought I might call her or her boss to tell them that. But I didn’t. First, I didn’t expect my concerns would be taken seriously. Second, I knew once I had had a good night’s sleep, the slight and the person who made it would fade into oblivion. Green nails and all.

But I did note it as a distressing pattern I encounter too frequently among “service associates” these days.

I admit the tables have turned for this Boomer. I now rarely trust anyone under thirty.

RIP Tina Turner

Talk about a blast from the past. Some can hit you harder than others.

I was scrolling through my news feed. There was Tina Turner whose image has been ubiquitous since her death last week at 83 years old.

The voice I heard in a piece circulating through the CBC television newsfeed was mine. I was a little stunned. That was a while ago.

I remember that night well. I remember cajoling the CBC TV assignment editor into letting me cover the Turner concert. As I recall, he didn’t get what all the fuss was about her.

As I also recall, he only deemed covering Turner newsworthy if I could score an actual face-to-face interview with her. “Okay, “I said. “I will.” But I did not. Getting close to King Charles might have been easier than getting near Tina Turner in the wake of her multiple Grammy award-winning album and single, What’s Love Got to Do With It.

So here is my original piece on Tina Turner’s Fredericton concert in 1985 – blurry camera work and all. A little bit of history about an amazing entertainer and woman. RIP Tina Turner. What a powerhouse she was!

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2212942403853

Lived Experience

Does anyone else have the same problem I have? I am dumbstruck by the number of people who have lived and died on Planet Earth. Neil deGrasse Tyson says approximately 10,000,000,000 (that’s 10 billion for those of you who, like me, are numerically challenged.) Given the world population is hovering around 7 billion. or so, that represents some intense population growth in the past couple of hundred years.

All we can ever know of people who went before us are what we hear about them or stories we read about them. We make huge assumptions about who they were based on hearsay and material artifacts and what people of an earlier time wrote. Our imagination of the lives of our forebears is largely apocryphal.

Understanding how others live today is a lot like that, too. We make assumptions about people that are based on scant and usually superficial information. Or more likely, curated information. I have seen resumes that are the greatest works of fiction ever published. Scandal du jour joker and “alleged” felon George Santos is only the most recent public offender.

I often wonder what daily life must have been like in the old days. Television and movies are great for filling in holes in our imagination. In movies and on TV, we are served curated scenarios that allow us to imagine the lives and lifestyles of those who lived long before we did or very differently. And in astonishing variety. Courtiers, family farmers, aristocrats, or maybe the occasional itinerant pastor who roamed the countryside with his horse and buggy spreading the word of the lord.

What fascinates me are the assumptions we make from what we observe. We can only speculate what is going on intellectually or emotionally inside other people. Past and present. I sometimes feel this frustration watching Holocaust footage. It is not only what you see, that is horrifying, but what you can’t see. Broken, skeletal, barely-clinging-to-life bodies twisted in pain convey some of their reality. But not everything.

One can only imagine the terror and humiliation of young Jewish females shaved bald and stripped naked before being paraded in front of leering Nazi camp guards. What must those young women have been thinking? What questions must they have asked themselves? What panicky racing thoughts did they have? Was their imminent demise clear in their minds or were they actually lulled into the delusion of the gas chambers as showers?

In the Steven Spielberg movie Schindler’s List, there is a particularly poignant scene – among many – where an elegant and clearly wealthy young woman disembarks from one of the trains at a camp. She dismissively gives a healthy handful of Reichsmarks as a tip. Her Jewish compatriot is already wearing the trademark black and grey striped pajamas and humbly takes away her bag. We have only the sad look on his pained face by which to gauge his reaction.

I do not understand evil very well. I do not understand what causes a teenager to walk into a building full of precious human beings with a semi-automatic weapon and deliberately start spraying bullets. Worse, I do not understand how a creature like Alex Jones who identifies as a “broadcaster” could consistently call the Sandy Hook massacre of innocent children a hoax, let alone have anyone believe him. I cannot imagine being a bereaved parent of a child victim futilely defending against that level of evil insanity. Those parents were bullied by people who believed Jones! I often wonder how those parents have made sense of their lives.

The only explanation I can come up with is that when nature is out of balance, life goes out of balance. We are a society wildly out of balance. Important institutions that were nurseries for human souls like communities or churches or extended families and even steady consistent parenting or any kind of certainty have broken down. Combining that with the information overload of our current epoch and mass breakdown was all but certain.

How is anyone supposed to internalize enough sense of self to navigate the exceptionally murky water and future that is presented to young people today? My daughter tells me that is why “mid-century” chic is so popular. People are looking backward more than forward. She also says it is why young people spend sinful amounts of money on gaudy self-care such as colored hair and three-inch acrylic nails. It is a world of “Why not?” and “What does it matter?” It is also a world of addiction. a teen suicide epidemic, easy divorces. All are indicative of a nationwide – even global – and communal loss of direction and purpose.

All of this external frazzle puts the onus back on us to create a better way of being for ourselves and our loved ones. Find a healthy and productive path and walk it with like-minded individuals who want to live better, richer, saner lives. I have a mountaineer friend who cured her booze addiction by climbing on rock and ice faces. I saw many brave if tremulous individuals surrender their to take the white chip in AA meetings as a first step toward sobriety. I know single mothers who go without to give their children everything they can give them.

Pain and obstacles are part of life. But so are joy and love. At an earlier time and maybe still in some places in the world, the interwebs of love in which people live function well enough to hold communities and each other together.

It wasn’t so long ago that a sense of community was widespread and dependable. Not without their own issues or problems to be sure. Where they don’t exist today, it behooves us to keep our counsel and to keep looking for one or create one that works for us.