From Whining to Gratitude

This month I had a colonoscopy for the first time. I’d heard people talk about the pre-procedure cleaning, and how that was the hardest part. I read online about the drink that you take to empty your bowels, and how awful it tasted.

So I approached the cleansing day with some trepidation. My experience? It was easy. The drink tastes a little salty, that’s all, and if you’re prepared and spend the evening near a bathroom, the cleansing is a minor inconvenience, even funny if you take the right attitude.

The next day, while we were waiting for the doctor to come into the room, I told the nurse-anesthesiologist that, in my opinion, the cleansing experience was minor and that people were whiners. She replied “YES!!”

Afterwards I thought about it this way: modern science has developed a technology that can reduce the incidence of colon cancer (a very nasty and painful disease) to almost zero, and our part in the equation is to spend a few hours going to the toilet every fifteen minutes. But what part do most of us put our attention on? The small amount of discomfort. We whine about how much we suffered.

Because of my GLACHH (gratitude, love, acceptance, compassion, humility, honesty--see blog post) work, I was instead capable of putting my attention on the amazing gift to my health the colonoscopy represented. I could feel gratitude.

Everything is a mix of good and bad. In this dualistic world there is no free lunch, there is nothing that is all positive. In this country we have become so spoiled by the good life that we seem to be expecting life to have no down sides.

Genre-less Music

There’s something new happening in the world of acoustic music. Last weekend I went to see Noam Pikelny and Stuart Duncan—a duo of banjo and fiddle. When I first heard about the concert, I wondered how those two instruments could possibly make for an interesting evening of music. But recently I’ve been listening to a lot of music on YouTube with Chris Thile, Michael Daves, Brian Sutton, Noam Pikelny, and others, and these musicians are playing together in all sorts of combinations.

 

Chris Thile has been pushing the boundaries of musical categories for some years now, ever since he left Nickel Creek. You never know where he’ll turn up and what kind of music he’ll be playing; right now he’s touring with Edgar Meyer—that’s a duo of mandolin and acoustic bass. Their song, “Big Top” doesn’t fit any music genre I know—jazz bluegrass would be about the closest you could come to a category.  He’s also playing Bach sonatas on his mandolin. Maybe we’re almost to the point where we can throw the concept of genre out the window: it doesn’t matter any more what instrument you play, you can create music in any style you like or create a new one of your own. It feels so free and fresh. 

In the concert I heard, Mr. Pikelny and Mr. Duncan played bluegrass, but they also played a Scottish reel, Django Reinhardt-style swing, and some haunting waltzes of Mr. Pikelny's composition. The instrumentation was sensational; they are both masters on their instruments (Mr. Pikelny just won banjo player of the year from the International Bluegrass Music Association). Sometimes I shook my head in wonder at the amazing runs Mr. Pikelny did on his banjo. And there was something wonderful in just having the two instruments; instead of a band passing the solo lead from instrument to instrument while everyone else plays rhythm, there were a lot of times when both men were playing lead at the same time and it was marvelous.

Do yourself a favor and click on some of these links and start exploring this new world of music!

Update: Thanks to my friend Arthur for reminding me to say that both these men are also in bands: Mr. Pikelny is in the Punch Brothers and Mr. Duncan is in the Nashville Bluegrass Band.

Also, I did not watch the tour video I linked to above until after I wrote this post. When I did watch it (linked again here), it was interesting that the men brought up two points I’d mentioned.

1. could these two instruments fill an evening?
2. with only two instruments there’s “no place to hide.” No playing background rhythm.

Another feature of this music is that the musicians often share a single microphone, creating an acoustic, “living room” feel. Instead of having separate microphones and listening to a tailored mix through earbuds (each person has a mix with their instrument/voice a little higher), these musicians are listening to each other acoustically. This creates a realness that is lost in all the electronics. Mr. Pikelny and Duncan had individual mics, but there were no floor monitors or earpieces.

Another group that plays this way sometimes is the Milkcarton Kids. When I saw them earlier this year they used only one microphone, and faced each other. It was as if we in the audience were sharing an intimate musical experience that the two men were creating together. Exquisite. 

Ebola Demonstrates the Need for a World Government

Last week Ebola made it to the United States. It was only a matter of time. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts a “worst-case scenario” of 1.4 million cases (worldwide total) by early 2015.

Other Ebola outbreaks have happened in rural villages and were relatively easy to contain. But this day was inexorably coming when an outbreak would spread into urban areas, making it much more difficult to contain. So why wasn’t there a UN plan in place for exactly this kind of situation, with mobile hospitals and protective suits ready to deploy? There doesn’t seem to have been any contingency plans ready to handle a health emergency of this scope. So far most of the foreign aid workers are nonprofit groups like Doctors without Borders, and these people must be getting exhausted. The U.S. is deploying 3000 troops to Liberia, but this effort will take weeks or months before making any difference.

In my mind this event has exposed the fundamental weakness of our current global governing systems. The world is interconnected now. More and more problems are global. We can’t say any longer that, for example, this Ebola outbreak is just West Africa’s problem. It’s our problem too. One person gets on a plane and the virus is here.

And Ebola is just one example. Climate change is another. Syria is another. Allowing the Syrian civil war to fester allowed ISIS to gain power.

My husband tells a great fable: Imagine a rubber lifeboat, afloat in the middle of a vast ocean. The boat is filled with passengers, each one representing a nation of Earth. The boat’s rule is that each passenger has the sovereign right to do whatever he/she likes in his/her seat. If a passenger wants to take out an ice pick and start poking holes in the boat, that’s her right. But everyone in the boat—that’s all of us—will go down together.

 We live on a small planet in a sea of darkness. We better learn to start thinking of ourselves as the same people, as citizens not of the United States or of Liberia but as citizens of Earth, recognizing that my interests are yours and vice versa. If I hurt you I hurt myself. We’re that connected now.

It’s time we developed a global governing system with true power. The UN was a good beginning, but it was deliberately made weak so it couldn’t interfere with the business of most nation-states. We need a real world government.

Ignorance of Income Inequality is Damaging to our Society

Three years ago the Occupy Wall Street movement got America’s attention with the cry of “We are the 99%.” Income inequality was put under a spotlight for a time. But how far did the understanding penetrate? Unfortunately, not very far.  

First, in a recent poll the average American thought CEOs made 30 times the wage of their employees, which hasn’t been true for 50 years. Today the figure is ten times as much—over 300 times.

Second, most people are completely unaware of the extent of wealth inequality, which is much worse than income inequality.  The wealthiest 20% in the U.S. own about 84% of the wealth. Think about that for a moment: only 16% of wealth is left for over three-quarters of the population. When you get to the bottom half of the population, those 155 million people own only about 2% of the total wealth.

To see an illustration of the income and wealth inequality in the United States, watch this episode of a TV show I did with Arthur Hancock in 2010.

The chart above, created by Pavlina Tcherneva, an economics professor at Bard College, vividly shows one of the contributors to the rise of income inequality in the last few decades. The graph portrays the distribution of national income growth during economic expansions since WWII. The blue represents the bottom 90%, the red the top 10%. In the last thirty years all the gains have gone to the wealthy, in fact, in the latest expansion most Americans have been losers—the truth is most of us don’t even realize we’re in an expansion, the Great Recession hasn’t ended for us yet.

In a recent column, “Invisible Rich,” Paul Krugman asks:

So how can people be unaware of this development [massive income inequality], or at least unaware of its scale? The main answer, I’d suggest, is that the truly rich are so removed from ordinary people’s lives that we never see what they have. We may notice, and feel aggrieved about, college kids driving luxury cars; but we don’t see private equity managers commuting by helicopter to their immense mansions in the Hamptons. The commanding heights of our economy are invisible because they’re lost in the clouds…

Does the invisibility of the very rich matter? Politically, it matters a lot. Pundits sometimes wonder why American voters don’t care more about inequality; part of the answer is that they don’t realize how extreme it is. And defenders of the superrich take advantage of that ignorance. When the Heritage Foundation tells us that the top 10 percent of filers are cruelly burdened, because they pay 68 percent of income taxes, it’s hoping that you won’t notice that word “income” — other taxes, such as the payroll tax, are far less progressive. But it’s also hoping you don’t know that the top 10 percent receive almost half of all income and own 75 percent of the nation’s wealth, which makes their burden seem a lot less disproportionate…

Today’s political balance rests on a foundation of ignorance, in which the public has no idea what our society is really like.

And the wealthy, in control of the media and the government, have a vested interest in keeping us ignorant.

Greed is a Killer

Recently I watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a story of three men prospecting for gold in the mountains of Mexico. It’s a tale of greed; how the lust for money corrupts the human heart. All of the men are affected to some degree, and the character played by Humphrey Bogart is driven insane by the power of his greed. In the end it kills him.

I related this to a friend of mine who is a devotee of a guru in India. She said, “My guru tells a story of greed too!”

A yogi went into the woods to find a cave to live in. At the same time, a group of four thieves were walking through the woods on their way to find something to rob. The yogi went into a cave, and just as the thieves passed by came running out, yelling “There’s a killer in there!” The thieves were intrigued and entered the cave. There they found a pile of treasure. Each of the four immediately started plotting how to get all the treasure for himself. The two senior members sent the younger ones off for a cart to haul the loot, and then lay in ambush and killed them on their return…

My friend couldn’t remember all the details, but the end result was all four of the thieves lay dead. The treasure was indeed a killer.

The Importance of Hard Copies

Recently I watched the film “V for Vendetta.” The movie is set in an authoritarian future, and dangerous books and artwork have long ago been eliminated from people’s lives. But V, the hero who is resisting the authoritarians, has an underground home filled with books and art that he has “rescued” from the censors’ vaults. Seeing the books piled high in one of the rooms, I was reminded of the importance of hard copies.

When information is digital, access to it can be taken away very easily. For example, if you own an e-reader, you don’t really own the books on it. The Kindle Store user agreement makes that very clear: “Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.” Amazon can remove a book from your device at any time.

Ironically, the premier example of this so far are some George Orwell books. The person who uploaded them for sale on Amazon did not own the copyright. When Amazon realized the error in 2009, those books just disappeared from the Kindles of the people who thought they’d purchased the books. And there was no notice or explanation from Amazon.

Maybe this seems insignificant now, but if at some future point we have an authoritarian government, any books that that government disliked could be disappeared at the stroke of a button. It’s not so easy to collect and burn every book.

I like reading on my Kindle; I like the convenience of looking up words and making notes onscreen. It’s nice being able to pack just one small device that holds multiple books when I travel. It’s nice not having to dust more books on my bookshelves. Yet understanding the importance of hard copies makes me resolve to keep buying physical books.

This Mark Fiore cartoon illustrates the importance of another object that is being made obsolete by our new devices: printed maps. Who needs to worry about carrying maps when you can just use your GPS or pull up the map on your phone? But devices and Internet connections fail, and if you’re out in the wilderness that failure can be fatal. 

Nickel and Dimed - On Not Getting By in America

Mike Lukovich of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

This cartoon really impacted me because I saw it just after finishing Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.

This book was inspired by the welfare-to-work reform of the 1990s; it attempts to answer the question: can a person live on minimum wage? Ms. Ehrenreich courageously endeavored to find out by actually living the life of a low-wage worker (she was in her 50s which makes her willingness to undergo the humiliations and physical strain even more admirable). She spent a month in three different cities, working as a chain restaurant waitress, maid, and Wal-Mart associate. She lived in housing and ate the food that was affordable at her wages. She lived in horrible places—a tiny trailer, a squalid motel, and ate fast food because of a lack of kitchen facilities. Working one job full-time, she could barely afford to cover her most basic expenses, and she had a lot of advantages: no children, and because this was a short-term experiment, she didn’t have to worry about medical expenses or things like clothing (other than what she had to purchase for the job).

This experiment was done in 1999 and 2000, before the bursting of the dot-com bubble, when the country was experiencing prosperity and jobs were easy to get. This was also before corporations learned that they could save money by not hiring people as full-time workers. Ms. Ehrenreich tried to work two jobs so she could afford a better apartment; she just didn’t have the stamina required to pull off cleaning hotel rooms in the morning and waiting tables in the evening.

She also discusses the psychological effect of low-income work, that it encourages submissiveness and lack of initiative. At the same time, she makes clear that these are hard-working people, doing their best with the pitiful resources at their disposal.

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, things are much worse, which after reading her account, is hard to imagine. Certainly, jobs are much harder to get. Ms. Ehrenreich was able to get a job almost instantly in 1999; today she might have spent her entire 30-day allotment just finding a job (if she was lucky).