Category Archives: Self

The Trouble With Being American

Posted on by under Self

I have no cultural identity other than “American.” I do not consider myself to be Irish-American or African-American or Hispanic-American or any other cultural identity that I can fall back on. So you can understand my displeasure at the current state of America.

The United States is my country. I was born here and have lived here all of my life. Going back to the early 1700’s, my ancestors have been born here, lived here, and are buried here.

This is the only criteria for American citizenship–be born on American soil (see the U.S. Constitution, 14th Amendment). There are no other criteria, tests, or qualifications.

Some people try to make the claim that “real” Americans are those who typically exhibit outward displays of patriotism, have a simplistic view of our nation’s origins, and hold narrow views of what an American should look like. But there is nothing to support that claim. It is just personal opinion (that can be safely ignored).

Singing the National Anthem more loudly does not make you more American. Waving the flag more vigorously does not make you more American. Having more ancestors here does not make you more American. Serving in the military does not make you more American. Being Christian does not make you more American. These things simply don’t.

Unfortunately, these same people also claim to know what America really is (as opposed to what?) and refuse to acknowledge that there is, or even might be, a more expansive, messy, diverse, and complicated understanding of our country.

And the sad thing for me is, that version of the “real” America–the one currently being heavily promoted by Donald Trump and his MAGA co-conspirators–is not my America. It is not the America that I see, or ever want to see in my lifetime. Instead, it is some strange conflagration of illusions, misinformation, wishful thinking, and self-righteousness with large doses of self-delusion, racism, and xenophobia mixed in. (MAGA Americans like to say that those critical of their political positions must hate America. In my view, the America in the “Make America Great Again” is a fictional, made-up place that they somehow think we can return to, making such criticism absurd.)

So where does that leave me?

I am an American in an America that I don’t recognize. When the stars and stripes is displayed, how am I supposed to feel? How can I say I’m proud to be an American when the America that is currently on display is a cruel, mentally unstable place that goes against my integrity and inner sense of what an American is supposed to be?

Sadly, I feel that the America I grew up in, that I learned about in school and on the street, and that I believed in, is rapidly disappearing. Once it is gone, and replaced with something unrecognizable, what then?

Non-Joggers of the World Take Heart

Posted on by under Health, Self

Ah-ha. I knew it!

Jogging for fitness isn’t so good for you after all.runner

To recap: the dominant public narrative at the moment is that if some running is good, more is better. As I have discussed before, this had led to an explosion of half-marathons, marathons, and ultra-marathons. And to what end?

Nothing, apparently. A new study from researchers in Denmark has found that while some exercise is good, more is actually worse. According to the Los Angeles Times, “high-intensity, high-mileage joggers die at the same rate as channel-surfing couch potatoes.”

I’m willing to bet that obsessive jogging and/or running has more to do with competitiveness and perceived self-worth than any actual fitness benefits.

Personally, I take my cues from the Chinese. What do they do for exercise? They get outside and walk every day. No fancy running shoes. No strenuous uphill runs. Just walking. It works for me.

I Awoke to See the Surgeon Leaning Over Me

Posted on by under Accepting, Family, Self

I awoke to see the surgeon leaning over me.

“It didn’t happen,” he said. “We had to cancel.” Then he disappeared.

I was in a fog of anesthesia so I had no choice but to accept what he was telling me. My memory of where I was slowly filtered in. A nurse handed me a bottle of sore throat spray and wheeled me into another room.

My wife was there, also struggling to wake up from the drugs. We’d scheduled to have my kidney transplanted into her, and now we were learning that it wasn’t happening. At least not as we had expected.

Doctors came into the room, while the nurses finished fussing with our IVs and blankets. My parents were summoned from the waiting room.

“I’m really sorry about this,” the lead surgeon said. “We didn’t have a sufficient supply of blood from the blood bank and I didn’t feel we could go forward with the operation.”

I tried to understand the situation, and I got more than my wife did, who dozed through most of it. Thankfully, my parents were there and lucid. I could compare notes with them later.

View of Bromo Seltzer Tower from my hotel.

View of Bromo Seltzer Tower from my hotel.

“We can reschedule for tomorrow, but I won’t be able to do it,” the surgeon went on saying. My parents grumbled about this, preferring–as we all did–to have things go as planned. We weighed the merits of coming back next week with the original team, or going with a new team the next day. Finally, we settled on a plan, thinking that we were already in Baltimore, all ready to do this, we might as well get it done now.

We were discharged for 24 hours. Thankfully, we had rooms only a block away. My wife and I roused ourselves sufficiently to walk back to the hotel, although I don’t really remember the walk. My parents told us to call if we needed anything, said they’d pick up the tab for the extra night. My wife and I went back to our room to sleep off the meds.

I texted a few key people–my sister-in-law who was watching our kids, friends who could spread the word–to let them know of the delay and then climbed into bed. The day moved about us as we rested. On the sidewalks below, people walked to and from work. Guests checked in and out of their rooms. The day moved to afternoon as we slumbered, with our hospital bracelets still on our wrists and gauze patching the IV holes.

We drank water, but food was of little interest. Our last full meal had been the night before, with my parents and mother-in-law in the hotel restaurant. It was good but I didn’t enjoy it much, feeling as it did like a last supper. Now, the only thing that sounded good was a granola bar; my wife had a bag of chips. Our systems must have been in low gear from the sedatives. It saved us the trouble of ordering a meal.

The day seemed in low gear too, and I decided to step outside and get some air. My wife continued to snooze as I left the room and walked out of the hotel.

It was on the warm side of normal for an August day in Baltimore. The city was preparing for the Grand Prix car race that was scheduled for Labor Day weekend. A racecar sat on display in the hotel drop-off area.

View from the hospital.

View from the hospital.

“This is your car, right?” I joked with the bellman on duty.

“Yeah, I wish!” he said.

I walked slowly on the sunny sidewalk. People passed me going both directions. There were a mix of tourists and folks going about their weekday routines. I wondered if anyone noticed my hospital bracelet. They certainly didn’t know that a few hours before I’d been deep in anesthetic sleep waiting for my kidney to be removed, only to learn that it wasn’t.

I had a strange feeling like I’d come to meet destiny but destiny was a no-show. What was I supposed to do now?

Of course, I knew that the whole thing would begin again tomorrow, but until then, there was open space.

I walked a few blocks toward Camden Yards, passing the Grand Prix barriers that were being placed along the race route. More hotels, and then the stadium was in front of me. The Orioles were not playing that day, but during summer, Baltimore is never more than a few hours away from the front end or back end of another baseball game.

Photo: Natalie Litz on Flickr

Photo: Natalie Litz on Flickr

I decided I’d gone far enough. It was time to head back to the hotel, to prepare for what still lay ahead.

This happened about a year ago, when we were in Baltimore, Maryland, to have the transplant operation, some details about which appear here.

Where Do the Days Go?

Posted on by under Loss, Self

If I had work where I felt fully engaged, where I felt that I was using my skills for some helpful purpose, where my efforts were recognized and appreciated, then I would be able to go home each night with a feeling of accomplishment, satisfied with the knowledge that I’d done good that day. Evenings would be relaxing down-time, and I would be available for whatever was needed, whoever needed me.

As it is, I feel that my work hours are wasted time. I feel that I’m making the trek each day to fulfill an obligation, waiting for the time when I can go home and when my real life will begin.

Unfortunately, the daily ritual, in all its unsatisfying ways, grinds me down, so that by the time I reach home again, I’m running on a nearly empty tank.

If we have something planned for the evening — a school activity, my son’s baseball game — then I go with it. It will provide meaning for the day.skycranes

When there’s nothing, though, I drink some wine before dinner to recharge. It helps to bridge the gap between my lost work hours and the precious few that remain in the day. And I find that I need to seek out a task. Many people plop down at the TV for the rest of the evening, but to me, that’s more time wasted.

So I pay bills or balance the checkbook. I help one of my kids with homework or organize my desk. During summer, when the days are longer, I’ll mow the lawn or do other yard work.

And when there’s none of that to be done, I’ll want to play my guitar. Except that my nails will be too long, so I’ll have to cut them. Then I don’t want to bother with pulling my guitar case from the corner and tuning up. So I don’t.

Or I’ll think of all the great writing I could be doing. But I don’t.

I just sip my wine and wonder where the days all go.

Honesty Is Not Always the Best Policy

Posted on by under Connection, Self

Promise?

When I was 18, I was naïve about many things. Prominent among those things was how to behave around girls. While most boys were busy learning the social rules, I blundered along in my ignorance. So the day when a pretty girl in my grade offered to give me a back rub, with my shirt off, I accepted without reading anything into it. Sometimes a back rub is just a back rub.

She had me lay face down and, using some lotion, she began the massage. Honestly, I wasn’t enjoying it much. I was having trouble relaxing as I wondered what to say when she was done. I’d had better massages before and I’ve had better since. I decided that I should just be honest.

“How was that?” she asked as she sat back.

“It was okay,” I said.

“Okay?!” she said, with a look of amused surprise, and perhaps a trace of hurt.

In hindsight, I should have lied. I should’ve said it was great, fantastic even. Anything but what I said. But I said what I was thinking. And I’ve regretted it for decades.

I guess that, sometimes, honesty is not the best policy.

Just to be clear, I’m not advocating deliberate deceitfulness. I’ve been around enough liars and truth-benders to know that it’s never a sustainable way to be. What I want to consider instead is the value of sticking to unvarnished honesty at all costs. Perhaps there is room for a place that exists somewhere between a hurtful lie and the brutal truth.

My dictionary defines honesty as “truthfulness” and truth as “honesty,” but perhaps it’s not as simple as all that. Gandhi understood that there exists a distinction between truth and full disclosure. “Who can say how much I must give and how much omit in the interests of truth?” he wrote in his Autobiography. To focus overly much on bald-faced honesty ignores that there are more subtle forces involved.

The Biblical Ten Commandments include the following: “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” All my life, this has been interpreted for me as “never lie.” Strictly speaking, this would require unvarnished honesty at all times. Under this scheme, the so-called “white lie” is still a lie and should not be tolerated.

Technically, though, the commandment is less universal than that, requiring only that no “false witness” be used against your “neighbor.” What about when talking with your husband or wife, for instance? If you tell them you are happy to be married in a moment when you are not entirely convinced of the truth of that statement, is that false witness? What about with your child? When you tell them their popsicle stick collage “art” is beautiful, is that false witness? Maybe an occasional dishonesty is okay, even in the eyes of God.thou-shalt-not-lie

In the farcical movie Liar, Liar (1997), Jim Carrey plays a man condemned to always tell the truth. Quickly, it becomes apparent that all honesty all the time leads to awkward situations and hurt feelings. Even when people say “be honest” they often don’t mean, literally, honest. The story implies that a little dishonesty once in a while acts as a type of social lubricant, easing the friction of our daily lives. Take that away and we are faced with the loss of a measure of civility.

Does this suggest that we will all descend down the slippery slope as we abandon honesty? I don’t think so for a few reasons. For one, with the exception of young children and those with mental health problems, people normally understand when a small lie cross the line into more sinister territory. As long as we have some kind of value system, we can maintain a distinction between the two.

For another, many people frequently find themselves in situations where they feel they have to “fake it.” As the author Susan Cain points out in her book Quiet, this is often true for introverts. It also can be true for those stuck in an unsatisfying line of work or difficult family situation. The trick is not mistaking a surface level of feeling false for a deeper-rooted inauthenticity. The inner compass should remain true, despite of moments of uncertainty.

Truth, honesty, lies, and deceit—there’s plenty of all of them to go around. So what is the best policy? In the end, I suggest a better guide is “Be polite and be authentic.”