View From The Left Coast

What is left behind

The death of a friend recently and the memorial service that followed reminded me of other lost friends and the vacuum left by their absence. I don’t know for sure what my thinking will be when I come to the end of the line, but as close as I’ve come a couple of times, it didn’t seem to make that much difference. But being the one left behind is another thing altogether. I’ve always thought the wakes, memorials or funerals are less about the one who’s dead than the people who are still alive. The living need comforting, and we come together to remind ourselves we are not alone. We go about our lives thinking of those around us as being touchstones in our lives: something that will always be there to secure our identity and existence. So how much diminished are we by losing them?

Then there’s the issue of. . .issue. Other than continuing our genetic lines, our family, by having children, how is the world changed, improved or diminished, by our having lived? What difference would it make if we hadn’t been born? If we create art that outlives us, if we build structures that endure 100, 200 or 2000 years, does that mean that’s how long we continue, or some piece of us continues to exist? Do we have to be in a body, or do we get some level of being from being in the hearts of living people?

At the memorial I went to, the man who died had many, many connections in the community, and though his body was gone, in many hearts and minds, he was still a presence. Assuming most of them will remember him 20 or 30 years from now, will his life be extended by that much?

I inherited a box of letters exchanged among my relatives between 1880 and 1947. In them are clues to what happened to them and why they did what they did. In a letter from my great grandmother to my grandmother, she explains why as a 17 year-old girl she gave her daughter up for adoption when her husband abandoned them. The fact that I’m descended from these people and can read these letters give them existence, to me, half a century after they’ve died. My wife has a maple table built by an ancestor, H. M. Hayes, in 1839 (signed, in pencil, on the bottom) as well as a painting of him and his wife. They have more meaning in the family than they would to outsiders: the table is simple and a little worm-eaten, and the paintings are not the work of a master. Did Mr. Hayes think that the table would still be used by family member 168 years later?

There's a stone with his name on it, alongside his wife's, in a little town in Vermont. The stone refers to his being in heaven forever, but I doubt it. As a human, the thought of an afterlife is so tempting, so comforting, it seems fabricating myths about the sweet by and by would be necessary for us to cope with something as scary and humbling as death.

And for me, I hope the houses I’ve built, the buildings I’ve had a hand in building, or the letters, blogs, and articles I’ve written will give me some degree of immortality.

But really all this talk of immortality is an attempt to negate the fact that we are temporary. Though we’re hardwired to procreate, there’s also a sort of existential compulsion to have children to continue the family, continue yourself, after you’re dead. Something there is in us that refuses to believe all this turmoil, all this joy, and the importance we assign ourselves will one day end and completely vanish.

Knowing this, it seems to me the quantity of life matters less than the quality. I doubt I’ll have scores of people show up to remember me, but to have had a positive effect on their lives, whether they know it or not, will have made

Posted by Walt Frazer at 09:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The weakest link in a democracy is not the institutions, like the legal system, congress, or the press. The point at which democracy falls is when the people themselves fall: when their self-esteem is so weak they turn their self-hatred to other-hatred. At that point the peddlers of hate, people like Adolf Hitler or Rush Limbaugh, realize they can get what they want by stirring up that hatred and thus acquiring money and power. Only then can democracy be replaced with totalitarianism.

Whether it’s Jews in Europe, blacks in the south, Christians or Jews in the Middle East, or Muslims in America, the dealers in hate prey upon fear, a self-fear that is easily converted (because it feels better) to other-fear. It becomes easy to objectify others, to say that they are non-human or sub-human. Murder or mass murder can become ethnic cleansing, holy war or jihad. Blacks or Indians or Chinese or Japanese in America have been traditional objects of hate and mistrust, although any minority is subject to murder, enslavement, concentration camps, or expulsion of the insecurity and low self-esteem of the majority warrants it.

At no period in American history has this urge to hate been as prevalent is it is today. Nor, considering the diversity of society here, have the distances between various ethnic groups been so great. For as white America excludes various minorities, segregates them physically and mentally, the self-esteem within those groups suffers, and they become that much more alienated from mainstream white culture. Soon they have so little in common they begin to see each other primarily AS other, as non-human, and negotiation and the understanding that is required for coexistence is diminished. This is the point at which hate mongers pop up to exploit hate for their own profit.

While it is true that institutionalized hate has been prevalent in America from time to time, that hate-mongers have sold concepts like “the only good Indian is a dead Indian," "the black man wants your wives and daughters," "the inscrutable Yellow Peril will overwhelm us," these have been mostly regional in nature. Japanese Americans were imprisoned in California, Indians were massacred in the west, and while slavery flourished in the south, the northeast was from very early times a hotbed of emancipation agitation.

Most importantly, though, in the dissemination and marketing of hatred are the mass media: television, radio, movies, and music. With the advent of corporatized national media, Rush Limbaugh is in every home, in every market. Over the past 40 years, advertisers have honed their art to the extent that subliminal and unconscious urges of the audience can be manipulated, and thus exploited. Rational thought is circumvented: we don't even know we've been programmed. With increasing corporate control of the government, the lessons learned by corporate leaders have been applied to news outlets, professionally and effectively.

The armed police turning back refugees from New Orleans flooding and the racist statements of celebrities like Mel Gibson and Don Imus are no fluke.

The linking of Iraq leader Saddam Hussein with the totally unrelated destruction of the World Trade Center, and the exploitation of the growing fear that Islamic “fascists" are poised to invade the US are illustrative of how effectively our fears can be controlled and exploited. There were no weapons of mass destruction, the proximal excuse for the American invasion, found anywhere in Iraq, but the endless linking of “terror," “weapons of mass destruction," a sprinkling of false “evidence�" through the government’s official organ, Fox News, and paid news “placement" in mainstream media, have been effective in stirring up fear of “terrorists" and their “sympathizers" (anyone who questions administration policy).

The final weak link is the human limit to how much negative news and despair of combating the totalitarian slide we are experiencing. There are only so many Amy Goodmans and Michael Moores and Molly Ivinses who can wallow in depressing news day after day. Most of us can only take so much bad news before we shut off the tube or radio or throw down the paper in frustration. When it comes to elections, when faced with a choice between pro-war, corrupt Democrats and pro-war, corrupt Republicans, many people turn away from the ballot box and say “What’s the difference"?

We used to wonder how Germany, Italy and Spain could have embraced fascism in the 1930s and spawned Hitler, Mussolini and Franco.

Now we're beginning to understand.

Posted by Walt Frazer at 03:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)