Cetaceus

Every so often I get into a discussion with someone about the state of helplessness that abounds among various groups of people, individuals and the like. This usually goes for people I personally know, but can be applied across the board and goes back ultimately to a conversation my father has been having with me my entire life about being able to take care of oneself. What he specifically means, and I agree, lets be clear about that, is the ability to do physical, survival-related things for yourself without having to depend on others.

Now, to be clear again, we are both saying this in a way that is more focused on a kind of salt-of-the-earth self-sufficiency, relating to stuff along the lines of being able to navigate, fix things, and general resourcefulness in any situation. One might argue that looked at in a different way, a businessman is not helpless, but quite self-sufficient because he has taken the conditions presented to him and used them to his advantage. While this may be true in one sense, in what I think is a more important sense it is not. Namely that said businessman is wholly dependent upon those social conditions for his survival, and removing them (which is a very real possibility) would most likely reduce our straw man to a Straw Man.

When I talk about general resourcefulness therefore, I mean it in two ways: one, the ability to bring enough with you internally to survive and do what’s needed in whatever circumstance one might find oneself. One practices this sorts of skills when, say, camping, urban hiking, international travel, etc. Two, sufficient knowledge of the sorts of day-to-day survival things that many people now pay others do to for them. By this I mean things like how to properly wash clothes, cook a good meal with whatever ingredients, fix a flat tire, etc.

It’s really the second that I think about most. My sister used to go out with a guy whose parents had money and who had never washed his own clothes in his life. Some part of me wants to be fair, but most of me can’t help but loose some respect for someone like that. More so because he didn’t just figure it out. The fellow was truly helpless, and I found this pathetic.

Now, I’m no carpenter, plumber or mechanic, but I have tried (much of any success in any of this relates somehow to the influence of my parents, both of them to be fair) to get the basics down on at least a few everyday life survival things. I am a confident cook, I can change a tire or oil in a car, I’ve replaced a starter by myself and helped replace an alternator once (that sucked). I am good with maps, and I can improvise in foreign lands when I don’t speak the language. If push came to shove, I could replace a roof if I had to. I think this might be a good mix of tangible and intangible self-sufficiency.

This odd random stuff aside, there really are so many things I wish I could do but can’t. Also, I think there’s a difference between working together with others and paying people to do things for you.

Once I have some children, boys or girls, I would like to make sure that they can do the following things:

1. Change a flat tire.
2. Change the oil in a car (hopefully cars won’t use oil by that time).
3. Cook, and bake.
4. Sweep and mop a floor properly.
5. Speak another language with at least intermediate fluency.
6. Wash clothes properly.
7. Drive a manual transmission.
8. Swim.
9. Make hot coco from scratch.
10. Build a fire properly.
11. Read a map.

The problem with domestic life is that there is rarely anything to update. That is, anything that I feel is particularly worth updating. I mean, look, I could write all day about my job, but I hate when people go on and on about work in person, so I have no interest in subjecting anyone to that online. To be fair, my job is pretty interesting, so thinking it over I will make it a point to mention anything particularly cool or weird or whatever that happens to happen to me in the course of my work day. For example, today, all in the same day mind you, two interesting things happened.

An extremely sweet African American women in her 70s that I am helping with her reading called me “Prophet Daniel.” I was flattered, made awkward, and humbled beyond anything I can describe. The sweetness and goodness of people, and the kindness that someone can extend when you extend it to them in one form or another, is overwhelming. I could not for the life of me think of what to say, so I said “I hope they don’t put me in the lion’s den,” and we had a good chuckle together. I had to give her and her friend a reading diagnostic test this morning, which isn’t in any way “graded,” but rather is meant to determine someone’s reading level. Before beginning, they held hands and prayed. It was one of the sweetest things I’ve ever seen.

The second thing that happened was weird to me, but maybe not for you. One of my co-workers, a grown man, told us today that he had never heard of or eaten bruschetta until yesterday. He was raving about how good it was, and man I was glad he liked it, but to me it was as if he had just tried bread for the first time.

Life is a series of bloated and emaciated moments.

While ago I wrote elsewhere about the special relationship that one has with friends you meet traveling. I was thinking today that I must indeed tip my hat to the technologies that have allowed such far-flung chance meetings with particularly amazing people to transcend the “fleeting moment” category they may have been relegated to at some other time. These days all manner of machines may be arrayed in the cause of maintaining something like contact with others. The most important things about this, I think, are the possibility of both seeing and hearing people on the other side of the world. Email is no better than a letter, and probably less better, but I do like to look at people’s photos and listen to music they make.

I am just not built for this domestic life.

Something I feel I’ve been increasingly sensitive to lately is the inability for many people that I talk to about all kinds of things to really parse their thoughts and ideas–and the actions that stem from them–in practical ways. This goes for all kinds of things, and I’m as guilty as anyone. I mean in particular people allowing emotional or dubiously ethical issues to stand in the way of concrete economic or social action, change, whatever. Let me give a few examples.

The other day at work, one of my colleagues, charged with acting in an official capacity to represent the organization, making a routine phone call regarding scheduling, directed an emotional torrent against the person she was talking to. Without going into precise details, the educational fate of about 25-35 pre-literate adults rested on this extremely mundane phone call about scheduling. My colleague, having a pre-existing reputation for some minor volatility, took some perceived slight (never explained or clarified) by her interlocutor to heart and decided to explain to the “ignorant” person on the other line that she was in fact “a grown-ass woman” and would not be talked to like that. From what I heard, including from my colleague’s own mouth, it was she who began the conversation with a confrontational tone and she who made the annoying mountain out of this mole hill. The person she was addressing, incidentally, was a public school principal who is, by all accounts, extremely professional and proactive in impressive ways regarding the educational situation at the school.

What really struck me about all this, aside from making my job much harder for a week because it fell to me to perform damage control, is the complete and utter lack of any kind of foresight on the part of my colleague in initiating this battle over some non-existent slight to her dignity. Even in the event that the principal of a school that has reached out to our organization to help better the lot of the parents of the school community did in fact insult her, no where in any of the internal calculus involved did the fate of the population we are trying to serve even remotely enter into it.

To me the math is obvious and straightforward: we’re trying to break the cycle of illiteracy here, who gives a goddamn about who’s “ignorant” or a “grown-ass woman”? There is a major difference between my mood at a given time and whether or not people should get help with their reading. Am I just stating the obvious when I say that this kind of thing goes on all the time?

As I was saying to someone the other day, I really don’t give a shit about people’s attitudes, ethics or whatever when it comes to either economic justice or things like reading, which are the basic right of any human being. Not to mention the very real relationship between whether or not people can read, the jobs available or unavailable based on that, and the dire economic and, therefore, crime situation in the city. These are the things we’re dealing with, how hard is it to see all this as wholly apart from one individual ego?

Here’s another example. I was speaking with an African American colleague that I respect greatly about the issue of reparations the other day. For the record, I am strongly in favor of a strict and specific sort of reparations, which of course (and he strongly agreed) does not take the form of cash handouts. That aside, I was saying that, look, one problem that I think needs to be addressed is that many middle-class (or even wealthy) “white” Americans (that term means less and less to me every day) are very sympathetic to the plight of poor urban African Americans, but don’t really know how to directly address the issue in a way that is comfortable for everyone. My meaning was that there are people who have what other people need (money) and want to productively redirect some of that in the right direction. To me this is a cut and dry economic issue, and the very problem is the emotional/attitudinal side of it. Feeling awkward, uptight or whatever on the one hand, and denying a helping hand because it doesn’t come with exactly the right tone or whatever on the other, are both absolutely stupid. However, the point my colleague seized upon was that “what we need is not sympathy but rather empathy.” An assertion I met with a blank stare for what I think are obvious reasons. I didn’t press it, but what I wanted to say was “no, you need money, jobs and a fair shot at the best education,” not for me to have some randomly selected appropriate attitude. What on earth is the point of arguing semantics or psychology when there are people–hell, they may very well be pedantic assholes–who are interested in offering up real tangible help with that bad attitude. Which should be the priority? Seems obvious enough to me.

Similarly, when I first took this job I had an odd conversation where my boss said that the problem with college students tutoring our low-income population is that they have a paternalistic attitude often, even if they mean well. Frankly, if people are learning to read, get better jobs or go back to school because other people with real skills are lending a hand, who cares what kind of attitude the latter have? Sure, maybe a student will be annoyed at some point, but how can anyone with this attitude unlearn it anyway, except by really sitting down, face to face, with folks they’ve never interacted with before and getting to know them as people? And if in the meantime this attitude (which ultimately is egalitarian) doesn’t impede the learning process, then isn’t it the case that everybody wins in the end?

Back to work now, where I am sure things like this will keep coming up. What we do and the results that issue out of those actions just seem so much more important than how we feel when we do them.

It’s strange I guess, but this domestic life (in both senses of the word) leaves me with little to report, and despite plenty of thoughts on plenty of things, to little of that is organized enough to really get abstract here. I go to work, hang around, argue with people on the internet. The latter has been taking up some time, but as my interlocutor, a great person who I think puts too much of himself into his politics, seems not to want to respond at least for the time being, this has dried up a bit.

The crux of the issue, as I see it, dovetails well with one of the most important points I find myself going back to regarding the possibility of democracy in the big sense. Namely, that if we do not really trust each other, let alone really allow ourselves to listen and divorce our emotions from a practical dialogical approach to problem solving and political thinking, we are essentially fucked. I find myself in the midst of a heated debate with someone over things that I think are non-issues, or that I assume are tacitly agreed upon at the outset. My friend, as smart, well read and decent as he is, and I seem to be engaged in some cross talk however. He, I guess, doesn’t see these things as undergirding what’s being said and as such is reading other people’s responses frankly inaccurately. The combative and personal tone he brings to every discussion are really repellent and definitely impede what would be an exchange that could otherwise be extremely intellectually fruitful to everyone involved.

I and others have tried explaining this to him, but I think we’ve failed. The real issue is whether or not he can master his emotions. I know for sure, for myself, that this is no small task. My passions consume me on certain topics, and I come off a raving lunatic. I am trying, but it is hard.

The thing that worries me the most is that I cannot, in good intellectual or ethical faith, hold back from calling him out on these things. The problem being that because his own thinking and speaking come out so personal and combative, I think he reads what others say in the same way. If this is the case then, again, I think we’re all fucked and I worry about loosing touch with someone I like and respect because we have a shitty culture of discourse in this country.