Desperate Solutions

September 6, 2011
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In 1981, I went with a group as an observer to El Salvador to stand witness to the massive atrocities that were happening during the very complex civil war in which the United States was playing a major role.  As Americans we were permitted to enter the country, but then, although the government knew of our presence, we essentially went underground to be escorted secretly from place to place to listen to people and to see what was happening.  Our sponsoring group The Center for Global Education had arranged a tight schedule of visits with people and groups trying to survive in a country that had imploded.  Here are just a few of the situations that remain burned on my memory:
  • Teenagers being kidnapped off the street and sent to be trained as government soldiers taught to kill without their parents being notified of their wherabouts.  Solution: A group dedicated to finding these kids and wresting them away from the government by claiming that their education could not be interrupted.
  • Men, women, children disappearing.  Solution: A group Mothers of the Disappeared  (Comadres) documented and protested cases of people who had disappeared and demanded investigations.  They took photos of bodies found along roadsides and in shallow graves.  They searched prisons and organized support for prisoners.  They held protest marches carrying placards with names and photos of the disappeared.
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Surviving in a time of great conflict where all the usual solutions are no longer adequate requires a different kind of thinking.  In El Salvador, where much of the countryside was being ravaged by the fighting, one of the most effective solutions for staying alive was the formation of rural communes with strict membership rules about who could be accepted and what needed talent they could bring bring to the group.  These were agricultural communes growing food for themselves and to sell outside their immediate needs.  They formed their own schools to teach basic skills to their children, and they made work assignments for adults specific and irrefutable.  Anyone failing to perform risked being expelled.
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Our group drove for hours to visit a farm commune where the members had agreed to speak with us.  When we arrived, we were greeted graciously, but clearly something was wrong.  The members of the commune were sleepless and exhausted.  The paramilitary death squads had invaded the commune the night before, killed one man, seriously wounded another, and had tried to drag away a woman. She was saved, but the members had not slept fearing that the soldiers would return. In a desperate effort to live another day, owners of small farms had joined together for mutual protection and support.  It was a desperate solution that required common folk working together in a tight reliable structure, something that had been unheard of before the war.
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During the years when I worked for a private child welfare agency, part of my job took me into the West Englewood and North Lawndale neighborhoods of Chicago where the agency had field offices. Remnants of burned and destroyed buildings from the 1968 riots after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination were still evident.  These were dangerous areas where individuals preyed upon decent people living there and upon each other.  Street fighting, shootings, and killings were common.  One learned to be careful.

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There seemed to be no end to the violence in these and other Chicago neighborhoods until a physician,  Dr. Gary Slutkin devised a new and innovative solution:  Treat violence as an epidemiological disease whose transition must be interrupted. Through his program CeaseFire, the Interrupters program was begin and has been adopted by numerous cities in the United States, and in Iraq and South Africa with documented success.  When a call comes that a street altercation is taking place, the Interrupters rush to the scene and diffuse the situation, therefore little by little, one situation at a time, encouraging people to understand that violent behavior is not a desired solution. The goal is to turn around whole communities by stopping the self-destructive violence and by giving help in getting jobs, education, drug treatment, and counselling.
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How does a person develop acceptable solutions for desperate situations?  Obviously this will vary depending on the individual and the situation, but here are some guidelines:
  • Over time, prepare yourself in multidisciplinary areas that are of interest to you.  (See Dr. Slutkin’s background.)
  • Widen your focus to go outside the boundaries of an immediate situation so that your mind sees a broader perspective.
    Example:  I’m taking a series of classes called Citizen Police Academy.  This past week we learned about the S.W.A.T team, how it trains and what are its responsibilities and functions.  I asked what help a sniper is given if he kills someone.  The answer was that the sniper is not debriefed until he has gone through two sleep cycles.  The reason is that any person or policeman who has undergone this kind of trauma becomes so focused on the incident that his mind is fixated on it.  Not until he has had two sleep cycles does his brain open up to see the broader situation in which this incident occurred.  Then he is able to talk about it and remember details of what was happening in the wider arena including his own thoughts.The point here is that to develop solutions in desperate situations, we must go outside the boundaries of the immediate problem to see what possibilities or what relevant details lie  in the broader scene of action and only then bring them back into focus on the situation at hand.What happens during sleep helps the brain to reorganize.  Other ways to help the brain widen its focus are: meditation, taking a break from the current task or switching tasks, walking outside,  or just anything that relaxes you and lets your mind rejuvenate.
  • Practice whole-system analysis.  Not everyone is a big-picture person, and if you are not, then listen to those that are.  Not all big-picture people are able to implement their ideas, and they need others to do this for them.  This may be you.  Think of the joint planning and implementation conducted by the Salvadoran farmers as they developed their survival mechanisms.  You can be sure that this was a cooperative effort through and through with different skill levels and different personalities.
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We hear so much these days about the economy, locally and worldwide.  The phrase  ”jobs-jobs-jobs” has become a cliche spoken by those who don’t seem to have any clue as to what this even means.  Large batch solutions might be helpful, but it seems that this isn’t working too well in the present political climate.  What to do???
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Each one of us, potential employer and unemployed worker alike, might want to think about what a desperate out-of-the-box  solution would look like.  For example:
  • What product or service is needed in this community?
  • Is there potentially a paying market for this need?
  • What skills can I bring to the table to provide this product or service?
  • Am I willing to form a team to develop this into a small business?  What might the competition look like?  What funding is available?
  • Is there a possibility for long-term growth of this business?  Would this be a worthwhile endeavor to begin now?
I have a friend who saw a need for a certain type of specialized container, began a business on his kitchen table, and grew his company into a multi-million dollar enterprise.  This takes time, perseverance, and a belief in oneself.   He’s not as unique as one might think.  Others have done it too.  Women have started sewing businesses to provide lingerie, ties, and crafts.  Another friend of mine makes custom stuffed mice in all sorts of fancy dress for special events and gets handsome prices for them.  All of these businesses grew to employ others.
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I don’t know what your situation is, but if current solutions are not working, perhaps it’s time to start exploring other legal and creative avenues.  My best wishes for your success.
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On Being Norwegian-American

July 29, 2011

I have known for a long time that I was different, not only because I felt it, but because I was often told this by friends, co-workers, and acquaintances.  A little background might be in order:

I grew up on a small farm near a Norwegian-American town of 1,500 people in Wisconsin.  The entire county and beyond was predominantly of Norwegian ancestry and I was related, however distantly, to most. This was an enclave in the truest sense, so much so that when citizens of Norway first visited in the mid-twentieth century, they were surprised that the Norwegian language spoken in my hometown contained colloquialisms used a hundred years before in their own country and which were no longer heard in modern Norway.  I supposed that put us in a time-warp of sorts.

It was when I left home in the 1950s to pursue a higher education and to enter the workplace that I discovered to my shock that not everyone was like those of my Norwegian ancestry.  I was ill-equipped to deal with openly expressed emotions such as anger, sorrow, joy, prejudice, or foolishness.  Arguments and confrontations were foreign to me; I didn’t know how to respond to these so I retreated into silence and didn’t fight back.  If my friends of other ethnicities told me that they liked me or tried to give me a hug, they got little or no response in return.  I’ve since learned to put up with it through the use of humor and actually giving what I perceive as a rather wooden hug in return.  Uff da, whatever works. . . .

Norway is a quiet country, little understood by outsiders.  I’ve never been there myself, but I hope to visit someday.  It is because of the most recent tragedy that happened in Norway that I will try to shed some light on the Norwegian character as filtered through my own experience as a Norwegian-American.

We are reserved to the point of being stoic.  We prefer not to show emotion and tend to keep both joys and sorrows inside.  You are just supposed to “know” how we are feeling without our telling you or showing you.  If I am in pain, emotionally or physically, I am unlikely to let you know (although over time I personally have learned the benefit of telling a few appropriate individuals, and may lace the telling with wry humor).   We do not discuss our problems freely.

Norwegian-Americans are a rational and practical people who view the concept of society as taking precedence over any individual rights and believe that structure and rules are essential in freeing individuals to be themselves in a society which is orderly and understood by everyone living in it.  I am puzzled, for example, by those groups that rely on revenge to settle differences.  Common sense and their own history should tell them that this is futile.

Norwegians’ preference for practicality leads them to rely on creating plans, negotiating differences, and using compromise to come to agreements leading to solutions.  It should be no surprise that Norway administers and awards the Nobel Peace Prize or that it formulated the Oslo Accords to attempt to bring peace in the Middle East.  Norwegians prefer a peaceful society and are willing to help others achieve this too.  That the Accords did not work may be attributed to the chaotic situation in Israel/Palestine and the inability of these societies to think rationally about the situation that they share, and perhaps also to the inability of the Norwegians to understand peoples that do not function in an orderly fashion.

The egalitarian nature of Norwegian and Norwegian-American societies is such that men and women are considered equal and children are encouraged to think for themselves and are held accountable for their decisions and actions.  As a small child, I and the cousins with whom I was raised, wandered freely without supervision on the farm and in the adjacent forests, alone or with one another, the expectation being that we would know better than to fall in a well, or get tangled in the moving parts of farm machinery, and that we would stand perfectly still if we heard a rattle among the dry leaves.   When a neighbor’s young son fell into the moving belt of the silo filler, he was plucked out just before his feet hit the grinder, put on the ground, and told to get out of there.  The rest of us learned from his mistake and humiliation.

Norwegian-Americans may seem passive and even aloof to outsiders. This may be the only ethnic group to whom shyness is not considered a negative trait.  The unwillingness to speak aloud to share their thoughts is seen as reflective of a sensitive nature that does not want to push its opinions on others.  Eyes may be downcast when speaking to another person.  If given a compliment, the person may be self-deprecating, which carried too far can be annoying to those who are not used to this response.

Individuals vary of course.  There are many extroverts in my family who talk a great deal, but generally say little of importance.  Conversations may begin by stating the obvious:
“I see you’re wearing a red shirt today.”
“Yes, I put it on.”
“Oh.”  Head nods. . . .
Short conversations between friends or relatives might continue thus and not go any deeper even when the subject changes.

Other more quiet folks, when they finally do speak, might be direct, shockingly honest and expect to be heard and understood the first time!  That’s me, definitely, and it’s gotten me in trouble numerous times, but I can now hold an ongoing conversation out loud for up to two hours without getting utterly worn out, but if anyone cares to notice, the conversation is rarely about me.  At some point along life’s path, I discovered that people love to talk about themselves, and so I am able to get by with sharing little if anything about myself.  It is satisfying to leave a conversation knowing that I have given away very little and it’s unsettling if I have shared more about myself than that with which I’m comfortable.  I may even have a sleepless night or two after that.

We as Norwegian-Americans have problems expressing our emotions because they may be interpreted differently than we intend leaving us to rely, rather, on avoiding emotional expression at all by creating space between ourselves and other people, even those closest to us. In fact, some of us have become so skilled at this that our closest friends and even our spouses might be unaware of how objectively we might view them.  Achieving emotional intimacy with another person can be tricky, so we are more likely to show love by showing loyalty, consistency, and duty toward those that we have chosen.

The rise of a person such as Anders Behring Breivik in a society like Norway is an aberration.  Yes, there were mentally ill people in the Norwegian-American community in which I grew up too, but these people were more likely to destroy themselves through the excessive use of alcohol or through suicide rather than overtly hurting someone else.  To sink so deeply into isolation (aloneness) that one is no longer capable of receiving the necessary feedback to maintain psychological balance is a horror and not something to be desired.  Somehow, maybe because Norwegians have lived in a harsh climate in this mountainous and beautiful land for centuries that this has inured them to the realities of what it means to be self-reliant both in their inner lives as well as their day-to-day outer existence.

I am a recipient of the characteristics of my Norwegian ancestors even though I was born and lived my life in a land far away.  So I will say this only once and I expect to be heard: I am proud to be a Norwegian-American.  We are good people.  We love the world, our place in it, and we will do what we can to make it a better place for all peoples everywhere.


Insight

July 11, 2011

Depending on others for insights into concerns that trouble you can be essential,  frustrating, or impossible.

Case 1: I asked three friends for help in determining an approach to speaking with a relative about a severe health problem that was being ignored.  Implicit in my request was that

  • I cared deeply about this person
  • I was definitely going to speak with her.
Before I could finish telling my story, the three friends were interrupting with their opinions about the health problem and how nothing I could say or do would help.  Several times I said I was looking for help on the approach to talking with this person not on the problem itself, but they could not hear that.  They were too busy reinforcing their opinions that I should do nothing.  I gave up and my mind slunk away.  (Impossible).

Case 2:
Married to  a seriously brilliant businessman, I would sometimes try to tell him about concerns that I had about various issues, often about the children.  He tried to help by giving advice on how to fix the problems, but never seemed to be able to just listen and help me to work out feelings and frustrations or to discuss interim approaches that would give me the confidence to move forward in my own way to an achievable goal.  (Frustrating).

Case 3: Years ago I accepted school-age foster children into my home, sometimes one child at a time and on one occasion a brother and sister.  As neighborhood mothers often do when getting together, we discussed our children and helped each other work out ways to deal with issues that came up.  While this was fine when I talked about my own biological children, it completely fell apart when I tried to get insights about my foster kids.  Now, I have to tell you that any children that have been removed from their homes and their parents will have emotional issues to work out.  This becomes compounded if there has been abuse or inappropriate sexual behavior in the home or constant lying and betrayal.  These kids come with serious behavioral problems, and it becomes very difficult to understand them and to help them.  To seek insights from parents who have never dealt with disturbed children is futile.  They simply cannot relate.  (Impossible).

Eventually I discovered a family who was in the process of adopting a foster daughter who also had behavioral problems, and it was like coming up for air.  For both of us mothers, it was a genuinely relief to talk with someone who knew what the other was going through even though the personalities, ages, and behaviors of the children were very different.  We understood each other.  (Essential).

I could go on with the many times throughout my life when I’ve needed insights that I couldn’t generate on my own, but I think I have finally learned that to seek help from another person needs to be done very carefully.  One doesn’t get such help on one’s own terms at one’s own convenience as I tried to do with my three friends.  It’s better to think ahead and plan who might have a similar background and knowledge and try to seek help there.  Such an approach might not always give what is needed, but generally one gets at least a partial insight that may point a way to proceed.

Best of all is when two friends spontaneously ‘connect’ in their thinking and mutually wanted insights go flowing back and forth between them.  What a joy indeed!

After Life

June 19, 2011

Some of us think about what happens after life more than others.  Many dismiss such a future as ludicrous believing that there is nothing, that what we have right now is all that there is.  I am one who believes that all of us are created for a reason, and that this reason does not disappear when any one individual dies.  We may not be given to know what happens to us after life here on earth, but we CAN determine why we were allowed to evolve into the human beings that we are today.  To explore this thinking is why I’m writing this.

I recently ran across my notes from a lecture given by Dr. Ron Miller in a series that he was developing about death and the afterlife, and as I was as shocked as everyone else who knew him at his death in May, I felt that sharing these thoughts might be useful.

This is not Dr. Miller’s full lecture by any means, just the snippets that made it into my notebook on that day in Elliott Chapel, Evanston, Illinois when he spoke to a rapt audience about a year before he died.  Make of them what you will.

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Death is a mystery that we need to confront.  We are always a heartbeat away from death.
Attack of nothingness: death, meaningless, guilt.  Tillich spoke of the courage to BE.

Gabriel Marcel said that there is “more to life than problems.”    Where in life do I make a difference?  A mystery can’t be reduced to a problem because you can’t objectify it.  Can’t isolate it.
Participate in the mystery.
Marinate in a mystery.
The Divine is a mystery.  To experience the Divine, you have to participate.
Encounter the mystery of a person.
In the West, we try to reduce everything to a problem, and therefore nothing important can be defined.

The way non-being threatens us:

  • Death: Not taking for granted that we wake up.  ”This is the day the Lord has made.”
  • Meaninglessness: How do we make meaning.  What is the graph of my own life?
  • Guilt: The creeping sense of inadequacy.  Am I doing what I’m supposed to be doing? Am I a good person?
  • How do we view this?
  • Distraction: Television, drink, sleep, medications, busyness, noise.
  • Denial: Jog? Cult? Wheat germ?
  • Stoicism: Stiff upper lip; can’t do anything about it; grin and bear it.
  • Participate in the mysteries and somehow penetrate them: The ultimate role of faith; trust; approach

We approach God as a problem that we need to prove.
The idea that God belongs to us.  Particularist.
God is a part of a larger reality.  God is an object.  Traditional theist.
The God beyond God.  ”God” is a symbol pointing to God the mystery.

I have never doubted God.

What God don’t you believe in?

When you’re ready, the teacher will appear.

The mystery of existence.  I don’t have to exist, but I do.  Nothingness makes sense.  Existence doesn’t.  A mystery.

Why IS anything?  We exist AS something.  Your WHATness is the same as your ISness.

Jewish mystics: God is all, kindness, compassion, what we emerge from, to what we return.

The horns of a dilemma: There has to be a third way.

Pan-entheism.  The wave is water.  We are what we are and at the same time we are to-be-ness.

The deepest mystery is our existence.  The ground of being.  That in which we are rooted.  That out of which we grow.  The reality of participating in the Divine mystery.  This is true in all religions.

In the book Strong Religion, the authors show fundamentalists are all so alike.  God is an object, a problem, to which they have the answer.  There is no sense of mystery.  There is a negative way of looking at other groups.  It doesn’t matter which religion.  They’re all playing the same game: milking the mystery out of everything.

Pseudo-religions make sure we have the right God in our lives.
Why am I here?  Why, why, why?  When you can’t get any more whys, then set up an altar and worship it.  Money?  Power?  Prestige?  What is your ultimate concern??  What if that God is the real God?

You don’t know God.  If you think you do, it’s heresy.  The paths that don’t go anywhere.  Dead end.

Consciousness, compassion, having our roots in the ground of being.  Deeply rooted.  Be connected to the ultimate reality.

A biblical verse can’t exist in a vacuum.

Strong religion vs strong faith.

Martin Bubor, wrote his essay on existence,Ich und Du (later translated into English as I and Thou) in 1923.  Feeling the other side.  We have lost the “Thou” in the United States.  Tu (close) vs Usted (distant).

Problem = I/it,  and refers to how we relate to the world.

I/thou receives the mystery of the other: Divine, human, and all the rest of creation.  We need to FEEL the other side.  Turning.  The possibility of turning to the Divine reality.

Bubor is a lone voice.  The “I” in “I/Thou” is different from the “I” in “I/it”.
The mystery of the “we” community and the “I” individual.
Society = I/it = problem solving.

I//Thou = silence, art, music, feeling the other side.  There is no recipe for achieving it except to be around people who have it.

Memory is the enemy of wonder.  The clutter of memory.  A child doesn’t have the memory so be like a child.  See with fresh eyes.  Put our face right here.  The more we exercise the I/Thou, the stronger it becomes.

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Again, the above notes are just scribbles that were found in my notebook.  They may or may not trigger further thinking on your part.

For me, God is here, in everything, in us, in all the universe.  God gives us strength to deal with what comes our way because we have been allowed to evolve and continue to evolve for a purpose.  We may not understand that purpose because it may lie on the other side of life and death, and we are not given to know what it is.  We must take it on faith.  The trials and challenges that we undergo here in this life are ours to figure out, individually and collectively as we try to work toward compassion, justice, and harmony here on earth.  God gives us the strength to do this whether we are believers or not or whether we belong to a religious institution or not.

We are not excused because we are not a part of organized religion.


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