Give (Local) Peace (Work) a Chance

A friend, knowing my interest in supporting a culture of peace, recently sent me this link to an article by H. Patricia Hynes about a local peace project.  Hynes talks about getting a whole community involved in positive promotion of the culture of peace, which is helpful in building a proactive, pro-peace pattern of community interaction.  Shops in Greenfield, MA, participate in the "Shops for Peace" with signs posted in their windows with peaceful messages:  "Food for All, not War."  Hynes links to research that suggests that such activities are a means of building a peace culture.  Some of the features of a peace culture referenced in that research include:  

shared identity, interconnectedness, a positive history of relationships, prosocial norms, transcendent or caring values, peace symbols, governance, and peace leaders, and additionally, peace education, peace vision, positive reciprocity, and positive goals

Reading about this project and the support in recent research, gives me a little boost for my own Peace Charm Initiative.  By the time this post is published, I will be on a plane to New York City.  I will be visiting the New York Society for Ethical Culture to talk about a couple of other projects that I am working on related to the Ethical Culture Movement, and I will be packing Peace Charms to share during meetings with my fellow Ethicals so that we all will have visible reminders of our personal roles in proactive peace building.  

While in New York, I will also be meeting with folks to talk about a project to support "caring values." I have more to learn about the project, but I already know that it will include supporting women in India (and elsewhere, I would hope) in asserting the value of the care work that women do.  This will, I expect, involve enhancing the communities' understanding that care work is important, a valuable and essential contribution to the economic and social well-being of the community, and should be granted a higher status in any accounting for value of both the caregiver and the service provided.  Since we also have this set of social problems in the US at both ends of the spectrum, I can see some potential for "local" efforts to include communities here as well.  These problems usually diminish women, who are assumed to be the caregivers, which then encourages dismissal of the importance of giving care--and providing that service with paid and qualified workers. 

It's time to stretch ourselves to make a connection between the value of care and caring values.  This is a path to peace as well as a path to equity.

The Supremacy of Skin

The Sepia Rainbow

I've been thinking about skin.  It started when my great granddaughter discovered the skin on my arm.  It was wrinkled and loose--and made her laugh.  

Old lady skin is not really all that funny, but it is odd.  As we get older, our skin may get stretched and, eventually, lose its elasticity.  So it wrinkles.  Rapid weight loss, inactivity, deconditioning are among the factors that can contribute to the amount of wrinkles and general looseness, and I seem to have a lot of those contributions.

Another thing that happens with old skin is that it gets more spots.  Age spots.  Liver spots.  The barnacles of age (including skin tags).  A little sun can emphasize those spots, darkening them, but also highlighting the spaces where no pigment is present.  All those little scars now show up in bright contrast to any skin that begins to show its melanin levels.

Thinking about skin and all these changes, I also had to wonder why my skin--white skin--is so privileged in our American Society.  Globally, white skin is pretty uncommon.  There are only small areas of the planet where white skin naturally occurs, and, while the population that has white skin is quite numerous today, white-skinned humans are--today--still a minority of human inhabitants of Earth.  

The image I posted above should be credited to Gail McCormick, the artist who made this cut-paper illustration from a map by Nina Jablonski and George Chaplin.  The map shows the distribution of skin color that comes from the production of melanin.  Melanin is produced in response to ultraviolet rays, blocking the harmful effects of those rays.  We might think that the obvious reason for so much melanin in the tropical areas of the planet has to do with the effects of UV rays on the skin (think skin cancer).  Jablonski's research, however, shows a deeper (than skin) reason for the need for more protection from UV:  the production of folate, which is needed for human reproduction.  Too much UV, not so much folate.  A reversal of sorts occurred later, as humans migrated out of Africa and arrived in the colder, less sunny regions of the planet.  Too little UV, too little Vitamin D, lots of rickets and other bone density issues.  

Interestingly, high levels of melanin also tracks with lactose intolerance.  At the same time populations were evolving to get more benefit from UV (skin cancers tend to show up later, after the reproductive years) they also evolved the capacity to consume milk from herd animals to increase the Vitamin D in their diet.  (See Marvin Harris, Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture.)

I recently had a conversation with a dear friend about skin color and colorism.  He opined that eventually there would be enough intermarriage and mingling of populations that humans would all be a nice cafe-au-lait shade of brown and we could just be done with racism.  I agreed.  Populations meet, populations mingle, reproduction occurs.  The global majority is not white, so the chances are that, over time, there could be a leveling out of this skin color issue.  After all race and racism are both human constructs that contribute to violence and war, and we need less of both.  

Still, I couldn't help but think about what is happening on the planet right now.  We are seeing significant levels of migration away from the tropics.  The effects of global warming are real and intolerable.  As climate changes, more humans will seek to move to more tolerable spaces, farther north or south toward the poles, and right into those temperate bands where too much melanin becomes a health problem.  How will humans adjust?  Will we evolve toward less melanin?  That would really be an ugly outcome--the populations that are doing the most to destroy the habitat of melanin-rich populations occupy the habitat that is most inhospitable to melanin-rich skin.  

Jablonski is working to bring more public awareness and understanding of the issues that arise from skin color.  It's just skin, after all.  The surface.  Not the heart.  Not the mind.  Not the person.  We have so many, much bigger issues to deal with than how much melanin our ancestors gave us.  My great granddaughter's interest in the changes that age has brought to my skin makes me realize that now is the time to talk to her about the colors in my skin and where they come from.  Evolution might be a tough concept for a second grader, but human worth, regardless of skin color is an age-appropriate topic for discussion any time.  The sooner the better.

A Question of Balance

William James,
American Philosopher, Historian, Psychologist

I am overcome with the beginning of William James' speech, "Is Life Worth Living?" (Ethical Addresses, 12th Series, 1905, pp. 1-29).  I hadn't half begun reading it when I had to stop and absorb all that he had thrown at me (and initially at the Young Men's Christian Association at Harvard, c. 1895) in the introduction.  

James began with Walt Whitman's ebullient praise of life, which, of course, lifted me up; then he took me down to the depths of despair with a long excerpt from James Thomson's poem:  "The City of Dreadful Night."  Two pages worth of an excerpt, with this snippet of doom and gloom:

My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus : 

This life holds nothing good for us,

But it ends soon and nevermore can be; 

And we knew nothing of it ere our birth. 

And shall know nothing when consigned to earth ;

I ponder these thoughts and they comfort me.

And then he called us back to reality, more or less, with another excerpt from an unidentified source quoting [John] Ruskin, to remind us that joy and misery yet live side by side though one be out of the sight of the other.

And, with that, I had to pause and reflect.  The emotional rollercoaster created by these references took me from high to low to a stricken realization that at no time might we be wholly comfortable in our own lives, knowing that others are themselves suffering and miserable.  What to think?

Sometimes, yes, life is so wonderful we can hardly believe that we have been privileged to experience such moments as come to us with delight and wonder and sheer pleasure.  I can remember the day I was waiting for a Senate Committee hearing to begin, intending to testify in support of some bill or other, thinking:  "I can't believe they pay me to do this."  I can remember the peace and comfort of just leaning sideways slightly to touch my late husband's shoulder and feel the solid support of his presence.  I can remember standing on the back porch of my rented home as a student in Seattle, seeing Mt. Rainer, with sunlight gleaming on its snowy top--all that beauty practically for free!  I can sit here now, in a not wholly lit room, no views to speak of, just a keyboard and monitor to face me--and remember many such moments, delighted at having been given the chance to experience them, delighted still to have the ability to remember them.  (Memory is nothing to take for granted!)

But, yes, there are moments in life where we can hardly stand to bear what we must suffer now and, sometimes, forever.  The loss of loved ones will eventually come to all of us.  I sit here, with my husband's loving glance captured in a long ago picture, knowing that I will never see those eyes looking at me again.  The pain of walking from one room to another, sometimes worse, sometimes better, always a reminder of limitations, keeps me indoors and away from direct social contact--which even an introvert will eventually miss.  The careless insults and assaults that others may fling in my direction, seeking, perhaps to awaken my awareness, not realizing the deep wounds that they re-open.  My woes are few, but sometimes they loom large.  I can find myself descending into the Slough of Despond before I realize what's happening, if I don't carefully pull myself back from the abyss.  Still, rarely, but painfully, I sometimes find myself questioning whether my life is worth continuing.

It is, however, the last of James' three quotations that strikes me the hardest.  I cannot regret my happy memories; I have learned to back away from the abyss.  But how do we live in any comfort or ease, knowing that around us people are suffering?  These walls shut me in.  Now, however, I am reminded that on the other side a good neighbor has recently suffered a stroke.  A young couple have taken in their flags and signs, any indication of their non-binary identity, being now forced to hide who they are out of fear.  Farther away, I am told, young students are facing their own struggles to find their way forward in a society that pushes them in unhealthy and unsafe directions.  And we know that poverty and disease and violence and abuse and the whole litany of horrors that humans can manage to inflict upon humans (and non-humans and the planet itself) continue.  Once we become aware--awakened, if you will--how do we survive the onslaught?

James' address to the YMCA was about suicide--and how to avoid it.  I'm not sure that I am fully aligned with his answer (religious experience will give you a reason to live), so I will have to spend more time with James' work and ideas to see why it so appealed to the editors of Ethical Addresses when they republished it 10 years after it was first delivered.  In spending that time, I am not likely to be seeking an answer to the question at the heart of his essay:  Is life worth living?  (Hell to the yes, it is.  And I'm loving the living of it, aches, pains, stress, and all.)

The question, however, that is going to stalk me for quite a while is the one that struck me so hard in reading James' introduction and is, after all, the key question that faces us in Ethical Culture.  Not "is life worth living?" but "how can we balance our need to grow and change within ourselves against the need to help the world around us develop and change?"  We seek to become better human beings, better family members, better neighbors.  We also feel pulled to help relieve the suffering we see in the world, to help others find better ways to be human.  Do we have to choose between these needs?  Or can we do both?  What is the balance?

I take this issue as a "key question," because I feel that there is an ongoing tug of war ideas within the Ethical Culture Movement right now:  Should we focus our efforts on our individual inner development and not on Ethical Action that focuses on serving the broader community external to our Ethical Culture Societies?   Should we focus on our service to the planet and its inhabitants, or should we tend first to our own need for development as Ethical humans?  Frankly, I think Felix Adler answered that question both ways in the past, and I'm not sure how other Leaders have treated the issue since those early answers.  Perhaps that is why we continue to hear passionate statements like this:  "Ethical Culture Societies, not the AEU, should engage in Ethical Actions!"  "You can't do any Ethical Actions until you have worked on your own attitudes and beliefs!"  "The AEU needs to develop national Ethical Actions that Societies can participate in!"  And on and on, back and forth, with no particular forum or venue in which to seek consensus.

Perhaps it is time to have that discussion.  In the meantime, we must agonize within ourselves, knowing that others suffer, knowing that we can (try to) help, but that we also need to maintain a commitment to ourselves and our intellectual and emotional development as Ethical Humans.  How to do that remains the question, I think.

Ethical Eating with Barbara Kingsolver

Local Food from a Known Source

At some point in the next few months, I am going to be buried in research and writing about Ethical Eating.  That is the topic of an issue of a journal that I am re-editing for re-publication (it's a long story).  Maximizing the utility of that effort, I have committed to using this issue of the journal--and the issue of Ethical Eating--as the topic for a presentation at the Ethical Society of Austin in the spring.

In the course of re-editing a different volume of the journal, I encountered a reference to Barbara Kingsolver and her novel, Flight Behavior.  A comment she made about that book was quoted in the essay that I was correcting (typos, punctuation, red--or blue--pencil heaven for a former English instructor).  There was, however, no citation for the quote, and I really wanted to add the proper footnote for this reference.  I googled it--and the only hit was the online version of the very article I was editing.  Spftt!  I was apparently searching for a misquote.

TL;DR, I dinked around on the internet to try to figure out some way to find the comment without spending days on it and ended up at Archive.org, thinking I would scope out the novel and, by some miracle, find the quote.  Instead I all but tripped over Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:  A Year of Food Life, by Kingsolver, et al.  I have no idea why I would even give the book a second glance, much less start reading it, but suddenly I was two chapters in and realized that (a) I have completely missed an entertaining author and (b) this is the other half of what I know I will be talking about when I give the presentation on Ethical Eating.

Kingsolver's autobiographical book is about a decision that she and her family made to change the way they eat.  A major part of that decision was environmental.  She lived in Tucson, a desert area in the midst of a drought, where food and water had to be brought in from other areas.  She was concerned that our society--and her family--didn't know where the food we ate came from, how it was grown, or what it could be (tasty, nutritious) when at its freshest.  She--and her family--made the decision to move from Tucson to a farm in the Appalachians that her husband owned so that they could change that situation for themselves.  

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a book about a year in food during which the whole family had pledged to eat only locally sourced food.  That sounds simple enough until you take in account that this planet has seasons.  Everything, all at once, all the time is not how food  appears on our plates or even in our local grocery stores.  Part of Kingsolver's thesis is that we have lost our connection to the planet and the sustenance that we take from it.  The other part is that we are destroying the planet by taking too much from it and misusing what we take.  No doubt I oversimplify.  

No doubt either that these points sound negative while Kingsolver's book is positive and proactive and a delight to read.  The family's negotiations about one non-local luxury/essential made complete sense, as 21st century urbanized omnivores were suddenly faced with the loss of foods and beverages long taken for granted.  Kingsolver's husband chose coffee as his personal exception to the rule of consuming local products, and who could blame him?  (Not I, limited these days to one cup in the morning and sorely aggrieved about the whole thing.)  Kingsolver's long history of trying to grow asparagus was neither boring nor tedious.  Her tale was, in fact, heroic--and now I wonder what fibrous green thing I've been eating all these years.  Each chapter brings new insights into how American foodways have changed, what we are missing because of those changes, and what we might do differently.

The book is a delight to read; Kingsolver's style is light and a bit wry.  The message is more than timely:  We need to take as much petroleum as we possibly can out of our food supply.  The whole-family orientation of the book (Kingsolver's husband provides multiple "sidebars" filled with pertinent information; Kingsolver's oldest daughter provides personal narratives of her "adventures with food") and the shared commitment to locally sourced food are inspirational.  

Plus this.  Needless to say, I recommend the book as well as some of the strategies that Kingsolver and her family adopted in order to take petroleum out of their food.  I'm no gardener; I have a seriously bad history with plants.  However, with Kingsolver's encouragement, my grandson and I went to the local Farmer's Market to purchase free range eggs and in season vegetables.  We also found fair trade coffee, albeit sourced from both hemispheres.  It's a start.