Month: May 2017

Mark Sappenfield, editor of The Christian Science Monitor, ended his introductory essay in a recent issue with these words: “…so long as the national conversation is bounded by absolutisms, common sense gets crowded out…In common sense politics, small steps are not cop-outs or the work of turncoats. They’re the path to something better. And taking that path often means finding a way to persuade people to take that first, small step together.”

In Seattle, my family regularly hosted Gabosh Singh Saul, a graduate student at the University of Washington, for holiday dinners. Mr. Saul was a Sikh. He and his religious colleagues did not celebrate the holidays we did, but Dad was always looking to befriend people who might be alone in our culture when the rest of us were celebrating. So, Gabosh celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas at the Seattle White House.

I have not known that many other Sikhs in my life. But, I remember Gabosh each time I hear about Sikh violence in India. Not him, I assure myself.

At the suggestion of a good friend, Judy and I read Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. Vance, proud of his origins (to a point), is a Yale-educated attorney, former Marine, now a best-selling author and, no doubt, financially well-off. For much of my life, hillbilly has been a pejorative term, signifying lower class. If people outside hillbilly land thought about hillbillies at all, a stereotype emerged; think of the opening scene of the old TV show, “Beverly Hillbillies,” where the family arrives at their new home in an old car piled high with their rickety possessions, crowned by Granny’s rocker.

Vance’s account of his family and his neighbors is a superb introductory for non-hillbillies to a culture and a set of values both praiseworthy and troubling. Strong family ties, but a pattern of contentiousness within families, often fueled by alcohol and opiates. Wanting the best for one’s children but too often using the phrase “remember who you are” as a way to discourage ambition. Wanting meaningful work but beaten down by an economic system that increasingly leaves them out of the benefits. Vance writes about his culture but, in many respects, could be describing many sub-cultures in the United States.

I wonder how many of us ever thought about hillbillies as a sub-culture in good standing? Have they not been “other-ized?”

I am a 70-(in July) year-old white male with a PhD, living in a nice house in Hawaii, retired from a career working in tuition-charging schools that depend for their survival on people financially well-enough off to pay large sums of after-tax dollars to obtain for their children entrance into four-year colleges, and someone experienced at asking many of those people to donate additional sums of money.

How much effort would it take to stereotype me? And as what?

People of a Certain Age, how much effort would it take to stereotype you? In being stereotyped, are we not being “other-ized?” What stereotypes do we hold dear, consciously or not?

In Erich Remarque’s book, All Quiet on the Western Front, the German solider we are following becomes separated from his unit and must spend the night in a foxhole in “no man’s land.” He is startled by another soldier jumping into the hole but is clear-headed enough to see that he is French. So the German stabs him, and the Frenchman takes much of the night to die.

The German searches the man’s pockets and finds pictures of the man’s family and girlfriend and, if my memory is correct, an address. The enemy has died as a real person to the German.

War is “other-izing” to the extreme; think of the names by which we have referred to enemies—Gook, Kraut, etc. Bias and prejudice are not war but they certainly are forms of “other-izing.”

When I was a child, I thought all Catholics were tools of the Pope, all Chinese were Communists, and all people from certain areas of town were drug dealers. Having friends in each of those groups shattered that stereotyped thinking, just like knowing Gabosh conditioned my thinking at a young age about Sikhs. Having friends with whom I can debate political topics while sharing a glass of wine, without either of us raising a voice or stooping to name-calling is my small attempt to fight the forces in our culture that would turn “us” into “other.”

The Monitor issue focused on a small island off Denmark that has been, for 10 years, completely “green,” in terms of energy production and consumption. It did not get that way by having any outside entity tell it what to do. It did not get that way because everyone agreed that being green was the political and economic goal.

It got that way because a few island people started talking with a few other people about things that the island community could do to lessen the impacts of external upheavals in the acquisition from energy off-island. Political beliefs took a back seat to common sense about a shared need.

One windmill became many. Before long, the people of the island were producing energy surpluses they could sell. No mass movement. Just neighbors getting beyond political disagreements, absolutism, thinking about political rivals as the “other,” coming together to solve a common problem. They moved from other to us.

As hard as it might be, a worthwhile goal.

Daniel E. White

June 13, 2017

A friend of mine was in Honolulu December 7, 1941. Recently, she wrote about that day and the days that followed for a writing group where she lives. She lived in Nuuanu, so the attack was not apparent to her until her Mom found out by accident that Pearl Harbor was being bombed. My friend wrote about the dislocating effects of the war on her family, their move, the loss of her father’s business that had depended upon tourism, and so on.

I live in a house from which I see Pearl Harbor every day. When I visited the Arizona Memorial, I learned that a spotter plane for the Japanese was circling somewhere not far from where my house is located. I have wondered what it was like for that pilot, watching his countrymen rain bombs and torpedoes down on unsuspecting men and women, knowing that lots of people who were anticipating a quiet Sunday morning, were being killed with his assistance.

My friend wrote about the rumors that swept across Oahu that Sunday—the reservoirs were being poisoned, the Japanese Army was landing on the shoreline—and how fear dominated the citizenry until more facts emerged.

It would have been unimaginable that December day that, years after the attack, at Pearl Harbor, pilots from Japan who had participated in the bombing would embrace American service personnel on whom those bombs had been dropped.

In my line of vision from my window, beyond Pearl Harbor, stands a pu’u called Punchbowl. Inside its volcanic crater is the military cemetery that is the final resting place of many of the people killed at Pearl Harbor. Their graves lie mingled with the graves of other men and women who, whether or not killed in battle, gave some of their time living on earth as members of U.S. armed forces.

We set aside a day each year to remember those people. Coincident with that date, there is a lovely and moving tradition in Honolulu, carried out at water’s edge. Floating lanterns are launched, each to remember someone who has died—relative, friend, ancestor, whomever. As a people, we are good at setting aside days and at preserving moving traditions.

Pearl Harbor and Punchbowl are in my line of sight every day.

“War is politics by other means.” So said Clausewitz. I think war is a failure of politics by which I mean the spirited exchange of ideas in the process of hammering out policies to govern the polity. And so Pearl Harbor and Punchbowl can elicit a twinge of sadness that, as humans, we have failed at politics so much. For at least 30 of my seventy years, the U.S. has deployed soldiers and sailors to fight a war, declared or not.

The optimist in me points out that, for 58% of my life, we have not been adding people killed in action to our cemeteries.

The historian in me reflects back on the overseas wars in which the U.S. has been engaged since 1900. World War One stands out as a series of miscalculations by European governments. There is some evidence that British commercial interests maneuvered for twenty years to get the British government to fight Germany. The issue was Germany’s growing colonial interests and commercial power.

Whatever the roots, it was the British government, through its alliances with continental powers, France and Russia, that jumped at the chance to go to war with Germany. Haven’t we all seen depictions of the British as they went off to war in 1914 declaring that they would be home by Christmas, so confident they were of their military prowess and political rightness?

Three years and hundreds of thousands of dead later, the U.S. got involved to protect the rights for its ships to traverse the Atlantic without being sunk.

There is a strong academic argument that World War Two was chapter two of World War One and that the issues causing powers to fight in 1914 lingered through the Vietnam War as well. If that argument is true, a lot of people have died as a result of the machinations of British economic interests in the 1890s.

Those specific interests did not prompt Japan to attack Pearl Harbor or the Iraqis to invade Kuwait. The governments of those countries made decisions to go to war for purposes defined by the governments.

And therein lies the genesis of most wars. People of a Certain Age, can we recall a time that the people of any nation coerced its government to go to war?

I do not intend an anti-government screed. There is a significant list of ways in which my life directly benefits from the governments under which I live at the national, state, and local levels. I take seriously that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and wish that were true for all people.

Sadly, there are too many places where the consent of the governed does not mean much. There are too many places like Punchbowl where real people are buried, men and women who chose to serve their country in wars they did not want but fought as a matter of duty.

Punchbowl is not far away from Nuuanu, where my friend was living in 1941. She has reminded me that war has many costs beyond the lives of our military, costs worth remembering on every memorial day.

Daniel E. White

May 28, 2017

Before each piece is played, the concertmaster faces the orchestra. An oboe calls out a note, an A. A is the note because every string instrument has an A. Each member of the orchestra then adjusts his or her instrument to that note. To be certain, the process is repeated. And then repeated again, this time with nearly every section playing the note. Silence follows. All the tuning must end before the conductor will enter from the left.

Whenever the orchestra piece involves a piano soloist, the concertmaster goes to the piano to strike the A, foregoing the cue from the oboe. The process is the same, though. Everyone plays his or her version of the same note. Everybody in the orchestra thus begins the piece in tune with each other.

I like the metaphor. You and I benefit from adjusting the tone of our lives from time to time to a reliable tuning note.

Your note might be similar to mine but it is not necessarily the same. The important point would be that all of the “instruments” of our lives are in tune with one another. There is much to be said in favor of being in harmony with others, too.

Recently, a friend shared an article about a favorite teacher from his graduate school days. The teacher taught at the same small university for his entire 30-year career, preferring to work with students in a liberal arts college rather than at a research university.

The professor retired early, at age 63, saying that he had collected enough alumni students by that point. There was a more serious point to his early departure from full-time teaching. He envisioned, and now inhabits, a “spacious world of retirement.”

In his spacious world, he has pursued the learning of another language, playing a musical instrument new to him, and writing about new things he is learning. He speaks about his students and his teaching with great fondness. It is also clear that phase has ended. He is doing other things.

Without question, those of us blessed with the chance to enjoy a spacious world in our retirement gain the freedom to choose our daily activities in a way that is often unavailable for those still employed, or for those whose retirement circumstances are more pinched.

I wonder, though, about the oboe’s A and the note that helps us periodically to re-tune our lives. In moving from one phase to another, such as from the world of work to the privileges of retirement, does our tuning tone adjust as well? Do the present circumstances of our lives create some difference in our personal note, just as the location of a piano, its altitude or the relative humidity or whatever might require a re-tuning?

In the concert hall, it is significant that, without a piano, the oboe’s A is the standard. Once the larger, more formidable piano is involved, the orchestra adjusts to its interpretation of the A.

Do our lives require us to make similar adjustments? People of a Certain Age, what is the tuning note of your life? And who plays it, the oboe or the piano?

In your life as in mine, there might be varying ways of re-visiting your tone to center yourself, bringing the myriad activities and demands of your life into some harmony. Perhaps yours is a belief system or a spiritual practice like meditation or prayer. Perhaps it is a relationship that is so stable and dependable that reconnecting on a regular basis serves as the needed re-tuning. Maybe it is a place in which you can re-introduce yourself to yourself after a period during which the “performance” of life has somehow knocked something out of tune.

Harmony might seem a strange word to use in the context of the pace and demands of daily living. Yet when we are at our best in handling whatever stresses and challenges there might be, isn’t there a sense of harmony? And, what a great wish for each other; harmony.

The various instruments make different sounds. Another friend once observed that those who have found the right “instrument” to play in their lives were fortunate, indeed. It is under the hands of the composer and the conductor that those many sounds combine to create a symphony.

I suspect the professor might consider his professional life to have been successful, like the music of a symphony. Certainly he had a vision of his next phase, the spacious world of his retirement, which suggests the probability of a sense of harmony. He has become the conductor of this new phase of his life.

I know from the article that the professor spends much time in the woods of Vermont. So it is fair to speculate that the woods play a role in the A of his life. John Muir thought that the clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

What is your metaphorical walk through a forest wilderness? Have you heard your oboe’s A recently?

Daniel E. White

May 15, 2017

A friend responded to a recent About Aging piece musing about his legacy. That is a word we have heard a lot. In the last year of the previous presidency, pundits prattled on about Obama’s leaving a legacy, and now there is an equally frenzied look at how the legacy might be undone.

The target is too easy, to make fun of those wise souls who inform us that so-and so is adding to her legacy and the legacy of the other so-and-so is being undone. They clamor for attention so that their paper, or station, or cable service, or blog can get notice, meaning financial support from advertisers. For better or worse, that is our system of informing the public in our country.

At least, though, couldn’t we being encouraged to think about something we could actually affect? How many people, if any, can control their legacy, at least as conventionally defined by the media folks?

For example, my friend noted that creating a school contributes to a legacy. My response as one who helped to create a school? You might get a plaque on a wall, and you could cite your role on your gravestone. But some years after you are gone, no child is going to remember who you were unless the school is named for you. You played a role, yes. But the legacy in that school, such as it might be, is the one built by the people who inhabit the school year after year.

People often forget that Thomas Jefferson created a school and even etched that fact on his gravestone. I bet most of the people attending University of Virginia would miss that fact if his statue weren’t on the campus. (Note: Jefferson did not include being President of the United States on that tombstone.)

People of a Certain Age, I don’t doubt that we have all engaged at one time or another in speculation about whether or not we will be remembered after we die and, if so, how. I am hopeful that we seldom take action with our eyes on future critics; we live here and now with today’s problems and possibilities. As Kenny Rogers’ Gambler advises “you never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table…” There’s time enough when the dealing is done, and then you are dead anyway.

My friend’s question arrived as Judy and I were reading what could be the most profound cautionary tale about building legacy in a book called The Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf. The book is about Alexander von Humboldt.

Here’s a challenge: Name three important facts about Alexander von Humboldt. If you cannot, you are hardly alone. Only one of our friends (who are a well-educated bunch and a few educated in science), knew more about him than about the Humboldt Current off the Pacific Coast of the U.S.

So, it will surprise you to learn that Humboldt, a Prussian, was the most widely read and universally respected scientist in the world for the first half of the 19^th century. Charles Darwin carried Humboldt’s writings with him on The Beagle and based much of his theorizing on thoughts Humboldt had as well. Name a scientist–Planck, Lyell—of that era and they all owed something of their thinking to Humboldt.

Humboldt got right the shift in tectonic plates, the relationship between the heavens and the tides, the fact that plants at the same altitude but on different continents tended to be more alike than different, that nature was one big interwoven web of complex systems.

He was called the first ecologist (although one of our friends noted that her college professor said that the term was invented in the 1970s), one who took the disparate elements of the physical and biological scientific worlds and made clear how affecting one area impacts another. He was a friend of Goethe and Gallatin, a correspondent of Jefferson’s, a highly sought-after speaker so generous with his financial support of aspiring scientists that he could not afford to purchase a complete set of his own writings.

On the 100^th anniversary of his birth, in 1869, there were large festivals thrown in his honor in the United States.

So what happened to Humboldt? Two main things: increasing specialization in science in the latter half of the 19^th century and into the 20^th; and 2. World Wars One and Two when Germans and their achievements were not popular in the U.S.

I’ve been reading another book, too, called Old Herbaceous by Reginold Arkell about a fictional Head Gardener for an English manor who, now that he has retired, has time to think a bit. Early in his reminiscences, he says:

“Funny that! You planted a tree; you watched it grow; you picked the fruit and, when you were old, you sat in the shade of it. Then you died and they forgot all about you—just as though you had never been…But the tree went on growing, and everybody took it for granted. It had always been there and it would always be there…Everybody ought to plant a tree, sometime or another—if only to keep them humble in the sight of the Lord.”

Happy is he who is more concerned with how he lives than how he will be remembered. Happy is she who, whoever she was so many years ago, planted the tree that now gives me shade.

Daniel E. White

April 2017