Houdini

It was my dog who taught me
to love being alive on Earth,
to poke my nose with limbic abandon
into the good greenliness of the wild's unstudied
garden, throwing myself to the ground
under the sky and rolling on the earth as if
to get closer, to make contact with the teat
of something warm and long-forgotten:
so staggered by richness as to be helpless
and pained and greedy for the abundance
of abundance, all at once . . .

and it was my dog who taught me
to be content with sustenance and covering,
living as she did on the cheap dry kibble my father bought,
sitting quietly on the floor beside the table when we ate
though usually she had nothing for her pains,
but when she did get a bit - she had a special fondness
for bananas - she licked the very last trace
of it from the giver's fingers, and if you wanted to
anthropomorphize you could pretend it was gratitude.
She never had a bed of her own, but should a pillow
or blanket fall to the floor she would never fail
to enjoy a little luxury while it was there.

And as far as this very day,
when I bruise my senses trying to distinguish
the world God so loved
from the world that we're in but not of
(and friendship with which is enmity with God)
and I look in the mirror and see whole universes waiting in my eyes
I run to the hills
and smell the holy-incense of flowers in heat
or fallen leaves fermenting for a deep winter's
nepenthe: and the sun pierces the stained-glass
leaves of the silent cathedral, and I remember
how to love being alive on Earth.

For it was my dog who taught me
the secret of the heavens that tell the glory
of the one who created them:
to be passionately in love with the perfection that lingers
in all the corrupt and desolate things,
for this is the simplest way to love God,
and the delicate channel that nourishes all the others.

Lord, to Whom . . . ?

The words that he had spoken were shocking, even
obscene.  Eat my flesh, he had said, and live
forever!  Before he had even finished, some in the crowd
were already turning to go, the eagerness on their faces
turned to disappointment and horror, and a learned man
whose face had been starting to soften
was standing at a respectable distance from the masses
pursing his lips with contempt
and a kind of glee.

When he came back to his friends it was the same.  Some had
already gone, slipped away without a word; more than a few
were ready with the flimsy excuses he knew so well; two or
three had courage or audacity enough to look him in the face
and say "That was disgusting!" . . . Finally surrounded
by his most precious ones, he lifted his weary eyes to their wary ones
and asked the question that was on all of their minds.
You, too, now?

The twelve men remembered the days when living was simple.
One closed his eyes and sighed, remembering the salty smell
of the sea air, the motion of the boat, the camaraderie of
the crew and the satisfying heaviness of a good catch;
a cup of wine and a bowl of stew, the tenderness of a woman. . . .
He could go back to that.  Everything would be the same.
Like a fish gasping for life on the floor of a boat, thrown back overboard
by a merciful hand.  But a man wasn't a fish, and it wasn't the same at all.
There was nothing the same. . . .

Trembling he rose.  The others nodded open-mouthed as he spoke.
Where - to whom - shall we go?  There is nothing else . . . not
anymore. . . . He spoke with increasing courage
and certainty, for the next breath he drew
told him he was alive.

The Last Acceptable Prejudice

I've had the subject of "the last acceptable prejudice" in mind as a topic to write about for a long time, having heard that expression used several times in the course of a two- or three-month period last year, referring to a different "prejudice" each time.  As part of my research I Googled the phrase, and quickly discovered a whole website dedicated to the concept of "last acceptable prejudices."  It seems to be the personal project of one Adam Kotsko, who promises "Up-to-the-minute coverage of who it's okay to make fun of" (although judging from the tone of his commentary, his primary target of mockery is the persecuted, whiny attitude the phrase represents, rather than any of the allegedly mistreated groups).  Kotsko has managed to collect no fewer than fifteen "last acceptable prejudices."  Clearly the human tendency to divide the world into "us" and "them" isn't going away any time soon - and neither is the smug outrage that rises from a sense of being broadly and singularly persecuted.

Some of the prejudices that have made Kotsko's list clearly don't belong there.  If an "acceptable" prejudice can be defined as one that goes unchallenged by a majority of society, including those channels (such as the mainstream news and entertainment media) that speak for the culture as a whole, "anti-Semitism" and "homophobia" clearly don't qualify.  I'm not at all denying that bias against Jews or gays exists, or suggesting that there's anything trivial about such bias when it does manifest itself.  What I find hard to believe is that anyone could consider either one to be a socially acceptable prejudice.  If anything, these are two groups mainstream society - mainstream American society, at any rate, and much of European society as well - bends over backwards at every turn not to offend.  Of course, the condescending "tolerance" so often shown to both groups clearly indicates that we still see them as outsiders to a considerable degree.  It's increasingly hard to find a series on network TV that doesn't have a lovable homosexual or two among the cast of characters, but central characters are almost universally straight: gays may be good to have around, but we're not really expected to be able to relate to one.  The cause of gay rights, in particular, has a long way to go, with the debate still open as to whether marrying the person you love can authentically be considered a civil right.  On the whole, however, really cruel treatment directed at either Jews or gays is swiftly censured in this society.  Not so for several other groups.

Take atheists, for example.  If an American presidential candidate told a gay journalist that he didn't consider homosexuals to be real American citizens, his political career would be over - but that's exactly what George H.W. Bush allegedly did to an atheist news reporter on the campaign trail in 1987.  "I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens," Bush said, "nor should they be considered patriots."  The ensuing offended uproar was confined almost exclusively to the atheist community.  Twenty years later, Mitt Romney, defending himself against those who claimed that his Mormonism made him unfit for the highest office in the land, insisted that "the nation does need to have people of different faiths, but we need to have a person of faith lead the country."  "Freedom requires religion," he opined.  Anti-atheist bigotry isn't limited to the sphere of politics, either.  The Boy Scouts of America has been repeatedly condemned for refusing to allow known homosexuals as adult volunteers or youth leaders, but there's far less sound and fury about the fact that atheists and agnostics are barred from membership entirely.  (The BSA, as a private organization, has a right to set its own standards for membership and to exclude those who don't meet the requirements, but as far as "acceptable prejudice" goes, there seem to be far more heterosexuals who object when a private organization excludes gays than theists, however casual, who protest a private organization's exclusion of nonbelievers.)  Ceteris paribus, a churchgoing parent is often given preference over an atheist parent in a child custody case, and some schools have refused to support the formation of atheist student groups.  Although a handful of TV shows have featured atheist characters (including the protagonists of two of my favorite dramas, House and Bones), they're often, in the words of an anonymous Wikipedian, stereotyped as "profoundly emotionally screwed-up intellectuals" (in the shows I mentioned, Dr. Gregory House is a curmudgeonly, misanthropic antihero, while Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan is an outspoken elitist who disdains anything that smacks of sentimentality or superstition to her rational mind, but the audience loves her anyway because we can tell that her callous posturing protects a tender heart).

Then again, it's hard to find an intellectual on TV who's not "profoundly emotionally screwed-up," in one way or another.  "Bones" Brennan is typical of the way intellectuals are portrayed in the media: snobbish, out of touch with people and their feelings, and completely clueless about modern mass culture, while bursting with knowledge on more esoteric subjects.  Characters such as Dr. Spencer Reid in Criminal Minds and Dr. Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory may be quite likable, but they're presented as objects of admiration, amusement, and/or curiosity rather than truly relatable protagonists.  (Perhaps this is unintentional, but the fact that a number of these characters have been depicted as having the gift of eidetic memory only serves to emphasize how isolated they are in their ivory towers.  I'm not at all interested in the personal lives of celebrities, so it's almost embarrassing how many times I've found myself able to fill in the blanks for a more starstruck acquaintance trying to remember whatshisname, you know, the guy Britney Spears is dating now, simply because I skimmed an issue of People in a friend's bathroom for five minutes.)  Just as often, it seems, "nerds" are depicted as hopeless losers with messy hair and thick, ugly glasses: targets for mockery, pure and simple.  Does anyone stop to ask what message this sends to unusually intelligent children who love to read and study but also yearn for acceptance and respect?  Perhaps more crucially, what message does it send to people of more average intelligence about where their priorities should lie, and how it's appropriate to treat people they don't always quite understand?

How about introversion?  How often have you seen the word used as if it were synonymous with "shyness"?  How often do you see the assumption go unquestioned that introverts are either lonely losers, or antisocial misanthropes?  Motivational speaker Florence Littauer is perhaps best-known for her promotion of a system of personality typing based on the four humours of ancient medicine; in the assessment test she uses, the taker is presented with groups of four personality traits (not connected in any way, except that all four start with the same letter), and asked to choose the one most applicable to him- or herself.  There's a section for strengths, and one for weaknesses.  Guess what section "Introvert" appears in?  (Hint: the other items in its cluster are "Inconsistent," "Intolerant," and "Indifferent.")  "In our extrovertist society," writes Jonathan Rauch, "being outgoing is considered normal and therefore desirable. . . . Extroverts are seen as bighearted, vibrant, warm, empathetic.  'People person' is a compliment.  Introverts are described with words like 'guarded,' 'loner,' 'reserved,' 'taciturn,' 'self-contained,' 'private' - narrow, ungenerous words, words that suggest emotional parsimony and smallness of personality."  I've had people try to convince me that I'm not really introverted, in the same tone they'd use to contradict me if I'd said I was boring or physically unattractive - as if no one with a positive self-image could possibly identify as an introvert.  (Their evidence?  I'm friendly, caring, and interested in people.  I occasionally make small talk with a neighbor when I'm out for a walk.  I'm not particuarly shy, I can be quite outspoken, I enjoy the spotlight on occasion and I've never been nervous performing in front of a crowd.  None of this changes the fact that I am most refreshed and stimulated by solitary activities or one-on-one interaction with a close friend.)  This prejudice takes a damaging turn in the mental health system, where "isolating" is treated by default as a symptom of emotional disturbance.  I can't tell you how many doctors I've had observe that I'd been spending most of the day holed up in my hospital room instead of out in the dayroom associating with the other patients, and ask me if I thought maybe I needed a medication adjustment - only to hear me respond, "No, the meds are working great!  It's been so long since I had the peace of mind to lose myself in a book for hours!"

Neither anti-atheist bias, nor nerd-bashing, nor loner-labeling has yet made an appearance on Kotsko's site, although all three clearly, to at least some degree, fall into the category of socially acceptable prejudices.  One subject Kotsko does have covered - in fact, it has four entries in its category, more than any other single item on the list - is obesity.  Now, I'll freely admit that I could easily stand to lose about half of my body weight - and I want to.  I'm not going to argue, as some do, that morbid obesity is beautiful.  I'm not campaigning for wider chairs and doors.  I believe fat people should be encouraged to get their weight within a more healthy range.  That said, there's no excuse for some of the hateful invective that's been directed against the overweight.  Is it any wonder, though, considering how fat people are portrayed by the media?  In 2009, BBC News Magazine published an article on the subject of anti-fat bias.  Although the article is framed around the story of an overweight woman who was physically assaulted on a train by a fellow passenger, who berated her for being a "big fat pig" who took up two seats, Marsha Coupe's stunned, battered face doesn't appear until halfway down the page.  The first (and largest) picture included with the article is of a bare, hairy, bulging male torso, with a tailor's tape measure wrapped around the abdomen.  The "face" BBC News Magazine puts on the issue of anti-fat prejudice isn't a face at all.  Do a Google Images search for "obesity" and you'll see dozens of images of flabby butts and massive bellies with no faces attached.  These are images calculated to inspire disgust and contempt, not sympathy or interest - and yet a number of them accompany serious news articles.

If anything, the treatment given the overweight by our storytelling media is even worse.  You'll never see a fat person in a movie or on a scripted television program, particularly a fat woman, unless his/her weight has something to do with the storyline, and/or s/he is an object of mockery.  Even children's books get in on the act.  Writer and bookstore owner Elizabeth Bluemle has written about her disgust with "descriptions of fat used deliberately as shorthand to indicate a character's villainy, isolation, absurdity, and/or repulsiveness,"  which she claims to have seen with increasing frequency over the past two decades.  "Maybe it's just me," she writes, "but I've grown particularly weary of pudgy-fingered villains with small 'piggy' eyes in big moon faces.  And the fat kid who serves as clumsy comic relief, or is automatically assumed to have no romantic prospects.  Etcetera.  We all know the cliches."  I know exactly what she's talking about, and it makes me cringe.  In a day when one in three American youngsters is overweight, it's almost beyond comprehension that writers who claim to take a great interest in the emotional lives of children would continue to take cheap potshots at a considerable plurality of their target market - and yet they do.  It's no wonder that size-acceptance activists have dubbed anti-fat bias the last acceptable prejudice.

Do a search for the phrase "last acceptable prejudice" on Amazon, and you'll pull up two volumes with the phrase as subtitle.  The main titles are The New Anti-Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in America.  If you're interested in the subject but aren't willing to shell out fifteen dollars for one of the books, you can get a pretty thorough introduction by scanning the annual Reports on Anti-Catholicism issued by the Catholic League, each one an exhaustive collection of offenses divided up into categories such as Arts, Business, Education, Government, and Media.  Some of the so-called anti-Catholic activity seems rather more directed at conservative social opinions or Christians in general (and indeed, fundamentalist Christians have also laid claim to the "last acceptable prejudice" title), but the Arts and Media categories in particular are full of blatant examples of Catholic-bashing.  I can't help thinking the Catholic League can be a little hypersensitive; sometimes I get the impression they can't tell the difference between gentle ribbing, harsh but well-meaning satire, and brutal mockery, and the idea that sober and respectful criticism of Catholic doctrines and traditions has a legitimate place in a free society often seems to be lost on them.  But there's no denying that Catholicism and its adherents are fair game for derision in America these days in a way that other religions simply aren't - a point driven home by conservative activist Brent Bozell in a column titled "A Year of Anti-Religious Bigotry," in which he recasts some of the incidents described in the 2009 Catholic League report as if they'd been directed at Islam and Muslims.  "None of the foregoing was true," he admits at the end.  "Hollywood would never dare ridicule Islam this way."  He's right; anyone who dared to suggest in public that all Muslims were suicide bombers just looking for the opportunity to detonate would be immediately, harshly, and rightfully denounced as a religious bigot - yet pedophile-priest jokes have become a staple of late-night television talk show host monologues.

Catholic-bashing may result in a lot of hurt feelings, but in the case of transsexuals, hatred and fear can be deadly.  I hesitated to mention "transphobia" here, because there's been so much progress lately in the way transsexuality and transgenderism are treated by the mainstream media.  Several TV shows have featured transsexual characters, and a beautiful transwoman named Isis King appeared on the eleventh season of America's Next Top Model.  Except for conservative or religious news outlets, which regularly describe transsexuals in terms of chromosomal sex rather than gender identity (the most respectable organizations, at least, can usually resist the smug, hateful temptation to refer to a person as "it"), the media have generally adopted the habit of referring to transsexual individuals by their names, pronouns, and other descriptors of choice.  Yet beneath the surface, the transsexual-acceptance movement has a long way to go.  Even reasonably open-minded people often miss the point that transsexuality is about what's between a person's ears, not what's between his/her legs.  (The friend who told me about Isis King hastily pointed out that she wasn't "really" a woman "yet" at the time she appeared on the show because she still had a penis; my response was that the reason she didn't want a penis is that she's a woman.)  Transsexuals often have difficulty finding or keeping a job.  Few insurance plans cover sex reassignment surgery, as it's still widely considered, like cosmetic surgery, to be an "elective" procedure, instead of a form of reconstructive surgery (which many plans do cover).  Perpetrators of violence against transsexuals have used a "trans-panic" defense: the idea that a reasonable person, discovering that someone's (particularly a potential sex partner's) genitals don't match the gender s/he believed that person to be, could be provoked into such a state of shock and anxiety as to use deliberate deadly force - and that this mitigates his/her culpability.

Perhaps most horrifying, and least comprehensible, is the treatment some transsexuals have received at the hands of the medical profession.  When Robert Eads, a transman who still had female reproductive organs, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, over two dozen doctors refused to treat him, fearing that taking him on might harm their reputations.  Even more egregious is the story of Tyra Hunter.  When a firefighter treating her at the scene of a car accident uncovered her genitalia, he backed away from her and joked, "This ain't no bitch."  One of his colleagues mocked, "Look, it's got a cock and balls."  These professional rescuers abandoned her treatment while they stood around laughing at her.  There's no guarantee that either Eads or Hunter would be alive today if they'd received more compassionate and timely care, but the fact is that they're both dead and we'll never know if they would have had a chance.  What we do know for sure is that they both suffered more than they had to, emotionally as well as physically, because those they should have been able to trust as healers betrayed them.  Both these incidents happened in the mid-1990s, but it was only eight years ago that I was shown to my room in a psychiatric hospital and found several members of the staff taunting my new roommate, laughing and insisting, "You're a woman, Rosalyn," while my roommate earnestly protested, "I'm a man, and my name is Ross!"

Of course, in a long-term psych facility, a "woman" who thinks "she" is a man, no matter how earnestly and consistently, could very well pass for just another psychotic.  (Believe me, Ross had other problems.)  But even if we can safely assume that the hospital staff thought his masculine identity was a delusion arising from his mental illness, that raises another question: what were nurses and psych techs - licensed medical professionals - doing making fun of a patient?  Can you imagine a physical therapist mocking an amputee's clumsy walk as he stumbled around getting used to his prosthesis?  How about the career prospects of a hospital janitor who poked fun at the skinny bald kids on the pediatric oncology ward?  Over the course of my years in the mental health system, I have been mocked, been dismissed when raising a serious concern in a sane and respectful manner (including matters of health and safety, and provable inaccuracies in my medical record), had my personal preferences and values inappropriately disregarded (when I was served fish for dinner one evening and I protested that I was supposed to get a vegetarian meal, a nurse snapped "Vegetarians eat fish!" - shouldn't I know what I do and don't eat?), and even been lied to outright.  I find this disheartening, not only in its own right, but because I'd like to think that those who spend their days caring for the mentally ill would be at the front lines in the battle against the stigma that runs rampant in society.

Years before I ever heard anyone talk about "the last acceptable prejudice," I observed on my own that it seemed to be socially condoned to talk about and treat the mentally ill in ways that would be considered unacceptably degrading if they were directed at almost any other group of people.  "Dehumanizing slang still has a place in society," writes Jenny Westberg, "as long as you're talking about mental illness.  And it's not merely tolerated, it's defended.  If a reference to 'the crazies' hurts someone, that person is being overly sensitive.  They can't take a joke.  It's just a word.  They're getting upset over nothing.  They're - well, they're nuts."  Last summer, my mother and I were discussing unhealthy messages in advertising, when my brother walked into the room and heard what I was saying.  "You're mentally insane!" he sneered, before he launched into the reasons he disagreed with my position.  My mother didn't say a word; either it honestly didn't occur to her how an epithet like that would feel to someone with my history, or she was more worried about offending my brother by calling him on it than about reinforcing the insult by letting it slide.  (She's a lesbian, and I'm tempted to wonder how she would have responded if I'd stooped beneath my dignity and told my brother his use of degrading language was "so gay.")  I'm so used to hearing cruel slurs about mental illness and mental patients that I'm almost used to it.  Almost.  Nearly as bad, though much less frequent, are the times a well-meaning friend, whom I have trusted with the facts of my own condition, tries to convince me I'm not mentally ill after all, because I'm intelligent and a good person.  "If I hadn't known when I met you, I never would have guessed," a certain friend has told me more than once.  I know she means it as a compliment, but I can't help feeling like a light-skinned Negro trying to "pass."  The stigma isn't always just verbal, either; the dating service eHarmony refuses to provide matches for those who suffer severe depression, as if a person with a treatable chemical imbalance couldn't possibly make a good life partner.

Perhaps worst of all is the too-often unchallenged stereotype of the mentally ill as dangerous and violent.  This is inaccurate; the mentally ill population is only slightly more prone to acting out violently than the general population, and some mental disorders - including clinical depression, the most common mental illness - are associated with no greater risk of violence.  However, it's still painfully common to hear criminals described as "crazies" or "lunatics" even in cases when they were clearly motivated by some perfectly comprehensible motive such as greed, jealousy, or revenge.  Last year, mental health advocacy groups were outraged by a Burger King commerical that depicts the fast-food chain's cartoonish "King" character running through an office building, breaking windows, starting a fire, and shoving a man violently into a copy machine.  He's pursued by a team of white-coated psychiatrist types, shouting "Stop that king!  He's crazy!"  They finally catch up to him in the break room and tackle him to the floor.  "This king's insane," one of them remarks as they struggle to restrain him; he'd have to be out of touch with reality to offer his hamburgers at such a (debatably) low price while the rest of the world is cutting back.  Burger King has run some controversial, "edgy" ad campaigns before, but somehow I can't imagine even they would have dared to show the King being herded into a special education classroom, under the assumption that anyone who would set his prices so low must be retarded.  Perpetuating the stereotype of the violent mental patient is perfectly acceptable, however - and even some of the journalists who covered the story of the controversy generated by the "crazy King" ad couldn't bring themselves to take it seriously.  Washington Post staff writer Monica Hesse not only gave the official Burger King statement the last word in her article, she joked no fewer than three times in her article about the challenge of choosing language that wouldn't offend the mentally ill.  In the first paragraph, she claims that the ad "can best be described as completely bonk . . . er, nut . . . er, cucko . . . er, in poor taste."  There's more of same in the next paragraph, and then she turns her attentions to actually describing the ad and quoting some of the mental health advocates who were offended by it before concluding, "The real problem with the Burger King ads is that the King is a giant freak of nature with a grotesque plastic head, and that sane . . . er, normal . . . er, average people would look at him and be persuaded not to buy a hamburger but to sleep with a baseball bat next to their beds."  Apparently creepy mascots are a bigger problem than advertisements that stereotype and ridicule an entire group of people, or else we've got a case of socially acceptable prejudi . . . er, bigotr . . . er, journalistic bias on our hands.

Clearly the notion that there's any such thing in our society as a last acceptable prejudice, a single holdout against the all-encompassing wave of tolerance, is almost pathetically laughable.  Acceptable prejudices are a dime a dozen - if you know where to look.  The hardest part is looking there.

Actually, there's something dangerous about the concept of a "last acceptable prejudice" in the first place.  Too often, those who get swept up in this special kind of victimhood forget that there are other prejudices out there doing just as much or more damage, even those that aren't by any stretch of the imagination socially acceptable.  Those who harbor bigoted views about homosexuals or minority ethnic groups know that their opinions go against the grain, but that doesn't necessarily change the way they act.  Plenty of "unacceptable" prejudices are still very much a problem in the real world.  Jesuit priest James Martin, in an excellent article on anti-Catholicism, acknowledges the scope of the problem but admits that "anti-Catholicism is clearly not as virulent or violent as the prejudice directed against blacks, Jews and gays."  Of an archbishop who compared a Catholic-bashing television show with the Holocaust of Nazi Germany, Martin states, "This is solipsism at its worst and most dangerous."

You'd think that those who had been victimized by prejudice in any form would hate it enough to take a stand against it in all its forms.  Sadly, this is often not the case.  Hiding behind a notion of singular persecution only serves to isolate marginalized groups of people from each other, as well as from society.  The aforementioned Brent Bozell, who's written any number of columns about the media's repeated assaults on Catholics, Christians in general, and social conservatives, is a writer I can usually count on for logic and common sense, even when I happen to disagree with what he says - but he played right into another socially acceptable prejudice when  he reported on the BBC's "contemporary nativity play" depicting Mary and Joseph as foreign asylum seekers in Liverpool.  "Someone should be seeking asylum, all right," Bozell opined, "to put the BBC in a straitjacket and leave them there."  With that sentence, he managed to alienate me just as surely as he must feel alienated when Jay Leno makes a pedophile-priest joke.  Do we never learn?

That's the trouble with socially acceptable prejudices.  It's not always easy to recognize them for what they are, because they're so deeply ingrained into our collective consciousness that it's easy not to see them as prejudices at all.  As an overweight, depressive, introverted intellectual, I'm confronted on a daily basis with some of the biases I've discussed here.  Coming from a different background, I might have identified an entirely different set of "last acceptable prejudices" worth writing about.  I don't have any strong personal connection to the Catholic church, but discussions of anti-Catholicism have so often labeled it "the last acceptable prejudice" that I can't imagine any discussion of the phrase in question would be complete without it.  But I might never have thought to discuss bias against atheists and transsexuals, if it weren't for the years I spent in high school identifying as an atheist, or the dear friend who came out to me as transgendered a couple of years ago.

It makes me wonder: what have I neglected to include here?  Not for want of space, or because it was too esoteric or too similar to something else I'd already mentioned - but simply because it never occurred to me?  Whom have I been hurting unknowingly with my own thoughtless words?  What cruelties have I never opened my mind and heart enough to notice?

What is my last acceptable prejudice?

Beyond Life and Choice: A Call for Clarity

"Sometimes it is not what you say that matters but what you don't say," political consultant Frank Luntz wrote in the introduction to a list called "The 14 Words Never to Use."  Luntz specializes in emotional reactions and how they apply to political decision-making, and in particular, how the average person responds to the use of words.  Sometimes his polls discover markedly different percentages of the sample group supporting a particular course of action, based on the terminology used.  Far more people oppose a "death" tax than oppose an "estate" or "inheritance" tax.  "If you want to kill the estate tax," he advises his Republican readers, "call it a death tax."  The man on the street doesn't quite understand what "corporate transparency" even means, but everyone believes in "corporate accountability."  And the phrase "drilling for oil" conjures up images of "an old-fashioned oilrig that gushes up black goop," but there's something so clean and modern about "exploring for energy."

Perhaps no issue is more fraught with emotion than the abortion debate, and perhaps there is no argument in which both sides have engaged in quite so much verbal and ideological "framing" of this sort.  Both sides have been guilty of emotional appeals, selective use of evidence, red-herring arguments, and ad hominem attacks.  And each side seems to have its own language to describe what happens during an abortion, who and what is being acted upon, and even why it matters.  Sociolinguists have discovered that people feel more positively about an issue, whatever that may be, when it is framed in positive terms, so perhaps it's not surprising that both those who favor legal abortion on demand and those who oppose it most often prefer to refer to themselves as "pro-" something: "pro-choice" on one hand, and "pro-life" on the other.

I refuse to use either term.  I despise euphemism on principle; I believe in calling a thing by its name.  It's the words we're afraid to speak that have power over us.  Moreover, abortion is an issue that emcompasses both life and choice.  What's in dispute is the moral import of that life, and the moral significance of that choice.  To reduce the abortion question to a matter of either life or choice is an insult not only to well-meaning people on the opposite side of the issue, but to those who have been personally affected by it and didn't have the luxury of obviating the nuances with a neat turn of phrase.

I'm anti-abortion, but you won't hear me refer to myself as pro-life.  I believe that term is only correctly used by those who embrace a consistent life ethic, which, as I favor capital punishment in very select cases and euthanasia for those who thoughtfully request it, I cannot say I do.  In fact, there are many who lump opposition to euthanasia with opposition to abortion under the "pro-life" label, but relatively few of them take their belief in "life" so far as to oppose capital punishment, the slaughter of animals, or war, as a consistent life ethic would demand.  I've always considered it dangerous to lump issues together haphazardly in this manner (considering the number of Christians I've heard who always mention "abortion and homosexuality" in the same breath when discussing social evils, I'm not surprised how many gays and lesbians favor legalized abortion on principle simply because to oppose it seems somehow like being in bed with the enemy), and to slap a label on your platform that doesn't quite represent what it stands for is plainly dishonest.

I also despise the easy reversal employed by some self-identified pro-lifers (yes, I'm accusing people who share my viewpoint, on this issue at least, of low tactics!), dubbing the opposition "anti-life" or even "pro-death."  This is a gross reduction that aims to shut down thought by portraying a group of principled individuals, however misguided their principles might be, as cartoon villains, rejoicing in evil for its own sake.  I have a number of dear friends who identify as "pro-choice," and not one of them thinks of abortion as an innately good thing (though I know very well that there are people who do, which I have more to say about presently).

Using the term "pro-life," and denouncing the other side as murderous monsters, makes it easy for those of us who oppose abortion to rest smugly on our moral laurels, without taking it upon ourselves to promote and develop alternatives or work to change the societal norms that make abortion sometimes seem like a desirable choice.  How many folks are there who are positively aghast at the notion of teenagers being provided with condoms and taught to use them, who rant and rail against any family structure other than the traditional nuclear family presided over by a married husband and wife, then condemn the young woman who finds it easier to schedule an abortion than to let people she respects find out she's been sexually active?  Use of such weighted language makes it easy to demonize others, while doing nothing to examine our own attitudes.

I choose the term "anti-abortion" to describe my position.  Yes, I'm resigned to that politically off-putting "anti," because I think it's important to speak plainly about what I mean, and "pro-illegalization of medically unnecessary abortion" is just too wordy.  Ironically, even though framing one's position in "pro" terms is supposed to have a more favorable sound, I've never heard anyone object to being called "anti-abortion," even those who preferred to call themselves "pro-life" - but the moment I refer to the other side as "pro-abortion," I find myself in a heated debate over terminology.

"I'm not 'pro-abortion,'" I've been told, over and over again.  "I believe in a woman's right to choose."  I'm sick of hearing "choice" used as a euphemism for "abortion," as if that were the only kind of choice a person were ever faced with.  Whenever I hear someone say s/he believes in "a woman's right to choose," I always want to ask (and whenever possible, I do), "Choose what?"  "To choose" is a transitive verb, and "abortion" is the rarely-spoken object, the elephant in the room.

Self-professed pro-choicers often refer to their opponents as "anti-choice" or even "pro-coercion," and this is every bit as unfair as the use of "anti-life" or "pro-death."  I, for one, believe in choice.  I don't know anyone who doesn't.  I believe you have the right to choose soup or salad or spaghetti or a sandwich for lunch.  I believe you have the right to choose Verizon, Sprint, or AT&T, or to shun modern technology altogether.  I believe in school choice and cable choice.  I believe you have the right to choose if, when, and with whom you have sex, and what kind of sex (if any) to have.  If you're with someone of the other gender and both of you are of reproductive capability, you have the right to choose to conceive a new life together, or not.  If you choose not to, you have the right to choose the rhythm method, a barrier method, chemical contraception, permanent sterilization, or abstinence from any activity that could introduce semen into the vagina.  (I don't mean to state that all of these choices are equally wise, practical, desirable, or even necessarily in some cases ethical - just that they're legitimate choices.)  I also believe that some choices necessarily preclude other choices.  I choose not to go to jail, but if I commit a felony, that choice becomes meaningless.  Unwanted pregnancy is, in most cases, the direct and logical consequence of a person's choices.  (Fewer than ten percent of abortions, even according to the most liberal sources, are perfomed as a result of rape, maternal health concerns, or fetal abnormality; the actual number seems to be somewhere around two percent.)  I believe a pregnant woman has choices too.  I believe she has the right to keep her child or give it up for adoption.  I believe she has the right to be as involved in the adoption process as she wants to be, whether that means signing the papers immediately after delivery without ever looking at the baby, or cultivating a relationship with carefully selected adoptive parents who will encourage her to be active in the child's life.  If she chooses to keep her child, I believe she has the right to devote herself single-mindedly to motherhood or to pursue education and/or a career, and I believe she and her child deserve the social support systems in place that will keep them from falling through the cracks.

Abortion is just about the only thing I don't believe she has the moral right to choose!

Those who claim to be "pro-choice" surely don't believe that all choices are legitimate.  No one's speaking up for a thug's right to choose to make a living stealing cars, or a six-year-old's right to choose to have a beer with lunch, or a mother's right to choose to murder her ten-year-old child.  Granted, those are extreme examples - the equivalent of "But surely you don't believe a frail ten-year-old who was gang-raped by her father, uncle, and brother and ended up pregant with anencephalic quadruplets should have to carry that pregnancy to term?"  However, those who favor legal abortion often quite openly advocate restricting some kinds of choice.  For example, some of those who are most vocal about a woman's "right to choose" abortion staunchly oppose a pharmacist's right to choose not to participate in it by fulfilling prescriptions for chemical abortifacients.

"Pro-choice" sounds like a winning term, because in a society in which we are endlessly focused on individual rights, no one wants to be accused of limiting another person's freedoms.  The fact is, no one really believes there should be no limits on human behavior.  (Even the most flamboyantly nihilistic anarchist will take offense if you decide you have a right to steal his stereo or punch him in the nose.)  "A woman's right to choose" is simply a euphemism for "a woman's right to have an abortion."  If it really were all about personal freedom, pro-choicers would be as adamantly determined to make sure that no woman was ever coerced into an abortion as they are to keep abortion legal.  They would have been the first to express outrage when an undercover investigation by an anti-abortion group caught Planned Parenthood employees on camera offering advice to a man posing as a sex trafficker looking for confidential treatment, including abortions, for underage girls in his "care."  Instead, those who made the video were widely condemned for employing deceptive methods.

"But I don't believe women should be encouraged to get abortions, or anything like that," I'm told.  "So you can't say I'm 'pro-abortion.'  I just think they should be able to make the decision themselves."  To those who make this argument, I can only point out that to be in favor of something doesn't mean you believe it should be universal or compulsory, or even that it's right in every circumstance.  For example, I am pro-gay marriage.  That doesn't mean I believe that all gays should be encouraged to get married, or that any behavior is acceptable if it advances the gay-marriage cause, or that officiants should face legal repercussions if they refuse to solemnize same-sex weddings.  As a woman who was in an abusive relationship with another woman this time last year, and who is now very much in love with a man, I certainly don't believe that homosexual couples have any innate superiority to heterosexual pairs, or that only gays should be allowed to get married!  What I believe is that two people who want to spend the rest of their lives together, who happen to be of the same gender, should be able to get a marriage license - even though a same-sex marriage is not the right choice for me, or for a majority of the population.  If you believe that abortion is a valid option that should be available to those who feel it is right for them, you are pro-abortion, even if you'd never have (or encourage/support) one yourself.

Some who disdain the use of the term "pro-abortion" do so because they're well aware that there are people in this world who do view abortion as a fundamentally positive thing.  Radical feminists have repeatedly claimed that abortion is an empowering experience for women, a statement that is not only a slap in the face of every woman (I've known at least five personally) who has been tormented with guilt and grief in the aftermath of her "choice," but which also seemingly contradicts their professed intent to bring about a world in which abortion is "safe, legal, and rare" - if it's truly empowering, why should it be rare?  I've gotten into debates with trolls on an online anti-abortion forum who tried to persuade me that adoption is dangerous for the adoptee and for society as a whole; their arguments were transparently flawed, and it seems to me that if they really believed in women having choices, they shouldn't actively discourage an option that millions of women, unready for motherhood but uneasy about abortion, have embraced.  I'll never forget the time I brought the wrath of an entire college campus down upon my head (or so it felt at the time) for simply daring to suggest that abortion wasn't something to celebrate.  And then there's Ginette Paris, whose monograph The Sacrament of Abortion (later reissued under the much less offensive title The Psychology of Abortion) declares that abortion is a symbolic sacrifice to the archetypal principle represented by the goddess Artemis, and goes a long way toward making the absurd claims I've seen on some paranoid Christian anti-abortion websites sound almost plausible.

I can see why those whose support for abortion is much more reluctant, who've heard enough horror stories about wire coat hangers to conclude that legal abortion is a tragic social necessity, would want to distance themselves from adoption-bashers and Ginette Paris.  My knee-jerk reaction here - and yes, this is pure tu quoque with a hefty helping of overgeneralization on the side - is to tell "pro-choicers" that I will happily embrace their preferred terminology, so as to set them apart from the abortion-loving lunatic fringe, as soon as they learn to tell the mainstream anti-abortion movement apart from its lunatic fringe.  The overwhelming majority of abortion opponents soundly and unreservedly condemn any acts of violence against abortionists, abortion clinics, or the women who use them, yet regularly see themselves portrayed, in the mainstream media as well as in "pro-choice" propaganda, as murderous fanatics.  In my experience, there are more "pro-choicers" willing to use "celebrate" and "abortion" in the same sentence than there are "pro-lifers" who applaud the murder of a Barnett Slepian or George Tiller.  When you acknowledge that Eric Rudolph doesn't speak for me, I'd like to tell the indignant "pro-choicers," I'll acknowledge that Ginette Paris doeesn't speak for you.  Of course, this is an emotional response on my part, not a logical argument, and if that were all there were to it, I'd grit my teeth and leave the pro-abortion crowd to their euphemisms.

I'm not shy about my anti-abortion views - I believe abortion is a craven, irresponsible act that destroys a human life - which is why I'm sure what I have to say next would come as a shock even to those who know me well: I actually have more respect for some pro-abortion folks than I do for certain wishy-washy moderates I've known.  I'm not talking  about hypocrites, trolls, or Ginette Paris, who needs to be (figuratively! figuratively!) taken out and shot.  I'm talking about the likes of Camille Paglia, who embraces the "pro-abortion" label and scorns the use of "pro-choice" as "cowardly."  Although she supports "unconstrained access to abortion on demand," Paglia has, in her own words, "always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful" and "results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue."  Her contention that the individual's "absolute right to control his or her body" justifies making legal "the extermination of the powerless by the powerful" is contemptible, but I can't deny that Paglia has genuinely grappled with the ethical ramifications of what she believes.  Compare that to, say, my mother, who claims to believe that abortion is morally evil, but considers herself "pro-choice" because it's not her business to try to force anyone to agree.  On the surface, that may sound exactly like Paglia's position, but Paglia, an atheist who presumably doesn't conceive of "evil" as a moral absolute in the religious sense, is weighing innocent life against individual liberty, while my Christian mother is weighing innocent life against . . . the possibility of offending somebody.  Hiding behind the concept of "choice," she doesn't have to think too hard about the ramifications of her position.  She can vote for candidates who proudly proclaim their belief in abortion as a right, while distancing herself from the ugly reality of what happens in an abortion clinic.

What I want to say to her, and to everyone else who claims to be "pro-choice," is this: if you think it ought to be legal, why do you distance yourself from it?  Why is abortion too terrible a thing to admit outright you believe should be legal, but not terrible enough that it shouldn't be legal?  Are you ashamed of the word, or are you ashamed of the concept?  Are you afraid that if you were confronted head-on with the reality of that "choice" you believe in, you might not find it so easy to believe in anymore?  Why are so many of you offended when anti-abortion activists distribute pictures of aborted fetuses?  If you believe it should be legal, why can't you bring yourself to look it in the eye?

If you believe abortion should be legal - own it.  Take pride in it.  Get out from under that spineless euphemism of "choice."  Maybe you and I will never find common ground on this issue, let alone come to any sort of agreement.  But however much I may hate what you espouse, at the very least you'll finally have my respect.

A Burning Hot Topic

It was about a year ago that my ex-partner and I got into an argument on the subject of flag-burning.  She wasn't the "America, love it or leave it," "my country, right or wrong" type - she respected governmental institutions, but didn't hesitate to criticize national policy.  However, she was disgusted by those malcontents who burn the American flag publicly in an act of protest, and then cite the "freedom of speech" clause of the First Amendment to those who would condemn their demonstration.  She was perhaps even more disgusted that the Supreme Court has their back.  "Can you believe anyone would think the Founding Fathers meant their words to be interpreted that way?" she asked indignantly.

It was a rhetorical question, but I answered it anyway.  "Actually," I said, "I believe that's exactly what the Founding Fathers would have wanted."

She wasn't particularly interested in what I had to say in support of my position; instead, she became increasingly angry and finally delivered what she thought was the death-blow to my argument: the accusation of hypocrisy.  "I bet you wouldn't be defending them if they were burning books!" she snarled.

My initial response was just what she had expected it would be: "That's different!"  Of course, she insisted that it wasn't different at all, and I was just being contrary for its own sake; troubled by a sudden unease with my own position, and unwilling to continue what had been an invigorating discussion as a hostile argument, I wisely decided to drop the matter - with her.  In my own mind, the subject remained open as I sought to reconcile my feelings about flag-burning and book-burning with my understanding of free speech in general.

My initial position, the one she didn't care to listen to, was hardly in favor of flag-desecration.  I think burning a flag is, at best, a rather juvenile way to make a point.  There may have been a time when it was a fresh and original statement; now it smacks of crass sensationalism.  Burning a flag is a good way to draw attention to yourself without needing to have anything new or insightful to say.  As political protests go, desecrating the flag is roughly equivalent to flipping your parents the bird when they won't let you borrow the car on Friday night: if we didn't think you were mature enough before, we're certainly not about to reconsider now.

If flag-burning isn't Constitutionally protected speech, however, then just what is it?  Criminal conduct, worthy of punishment?  Is that what the Founding Fathers would have wanted?  Their convictions spurred them to engage in outright rebellion against a government they had been taught to respect and a king they had been raised to revere.  As Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, George Washington was taking arms against a flag under which he had once fought.  Sympathizers to the cause of colonial independence weren't entirely above crass demonstrations; the Boston Tea Party comes to mind.  (Had their actions not been "vindicated by history," those who participated in the destruction of the tea would be remembered today, to the extent that they were remembered at all, as vandals and economic terrorists.)  I don't believe the Founding Fathers would have any more sympathy for flag-burners than I do, but I can't believe they would have any less, either.  The moment we bring the force of law against any ideological expression that poses no direct threat to the personal safety or property rights of another, the concept of free speech becomes meaningless.  Burning a flag may be profoundly disrespectful to those who fought and died to establish or preserve what that flag represents - but the Founding Fathers had seen firsthand the consequences of legislating respect.  They were born into a world where a person could be fined, jailed, or even executed for criticizing the British government.  They knew what lay at the end of that slippery slope, and they didn't want to go there.

There were times, growing up, that I told my parents, in a rush of anger, that I hated them.  My father would punish me for such an outburst.  My mother encouraged me to express what I felt, but she wasn't manipulated by it either.  Guess which one I have genuine respect for today?  The fact that a crass statement of contempt for the American government is treated as protected speech by that very government is central, in my mind, to what America at its finest is capable of being.  Flag-burners undermine their own argument when they turn for support to the very institutions for which they profess such disdain - which they must surely know isn't something they could take for granted in many other parts of the world.  There's a poem extolling the American soldier that ends with the stirring observation, "It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves under the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag."  It is the very fact that s/he is fighting for the right of others to express contempt for something s/he holds dear - because s/he's fighting for freedom, and that's what freedom means - that makes the soldier's sacrifice so very noble.

The day they take away my right to burn the flag is the day I burn one.

And what of book-burning?  Part of me believes that it truly is different.  To desecrate a flag is to show contempt for a nation; to destroy a book is to show contempt for an idea.  Nations are transient, even ephemeral, things, and they are only as meritorious as the ideas their governments and citizens put into practice.  Of course, some ideas most certainly are worthy of contempt, but we need them all.  To hide from an idea serves only to make it more dangerous.  One of the most powerful moments I've ever experienced on television comes at the end of an episode of The Waltons, "The Fire Storm."  The central controversy of the episode involves John-Boy's decision to publish excerpts from Mein Kampf in his newspaper.  Many of the townspeople, including the Rev. Matthew Fordwick, openly express the desire to remain ignorant of Hitler's ideas; they fail to make the distinction between information and propaganda.  At the climax of the episode, Rev. Fordwick gathers a bunch of German books, including Mein Kampf, and prepares to throw them into a bonfire before the assembled townsfolk.  After all, Hitler's been burning American books, and even Bibles!  John-Boy rushes over from the crowd and grabs Mein Kampf out of the Reverend's hands.  "I read that a foreign tyrant was publishing his plans to take over the world, and was carrying out those plans," he shouts.  "I thought you ought to have the opportunity to know about it . . . that's freedom, as far as I can see it.  And if you choose not to know about it, that's freedom too - but if you take a book, and if you burn this book, then you can't know about it, and you've had your freedom taken away from you, you understand me?"  He picks up another book from the pile, and offers it to a neighbor who can read German.  After she reads the first paragraph, he asks her to translate, and she does: "In the beginning, God created heaven and earth."  John-Boy walks away, but after a few moments Rev. Fordwick comes after him, holding both Mein Kampf and the German Bible.  "These books should be in good hands," he admits, "both of them."

One very real difference between flag-burning and book-burning is that a flag is a symbol, while a book is a medium.  Destroy every American flag ever made, and there will still be a United States of America.  Destroy every last copy of the Bible, or Mein Kampf, or The Communist Manifesto, or The Federalist Papers, or Pride and Prejudice, or even Chicken Soup for the Soul, Ramona the Pest, or Danielle Steel's The Promise, and something has been forever lost.  There's even a word, "libricide," that refers specifically to a regime's attempt to wipe out all books that they view as a threat to their power.  Etymologically, it means "the killing of a book" - as if a book were something that had a life of its own, that could truly die.  The novelist Ray Bradbury was inspired by the Nazi book burnings to write Fahrenheit 451, about a prospective future in which all books are banned and subject to burning.  In one stirring scene from this novel, a woman whose secret library has been discovered chooses to set herself on fire and burn along with her books.  Bradbury later wrote that "when Hitler burned a book I felt it as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of history they are one and the same flesh."

But I don't believe my ex-partner was really attempting to suggest, even in the full-blown irrationality of ideological smugness, that the act of burning a single flag was morally equivalent to massive state-sponsored censorship.  In The Waltons, Rev. Fordwick referred to his little ceremony as "a symbolic book-burning," even though he planned to throw actual books in an actual fire.  What mattered to him wasn't the destruction of the books themselves, but the rejection of what those books represented.  (Since there was only one person in town who could read German, destroying German books to censor their contents wouldn't have made much sense anyway.)  Late last year, Florida pastor Terry Jones announced his plans to burn the Qur'an on September 11.  (In the face of controversy and condemnation from political and religious spheres alike, he soon cancelled the demonstration.)  Jones wasn't making an attempt to wipe the Qur'an out of existence, however much he might have liked to do so.  His goal was to express and encourage hatred of the Islamic religion, not specifically to deny anyone access to its ideas.

It is this sort of book-burning - the destruction of individual volumes for the purpose of making a statement, not for censorship - that I have to compare to flag-burning.  Even reframed in these terms, I want to say that book-burning is different.  The sight of a book on fire is literally painful to me.  I can't even bring myself to throw away a book that's falling apart and beyond repair - whether or not it's a book that I have any desire to read.  When one of the stepsisters in Ever After, a film based on the story of Cinderella, throws the protagonist's cherished copy of Thomas More's Utopia into the fireplace, I shudder.  I feel sick inside just watching and knowing what's going to happen.  Reading Fahrenheit 451, I want simultaneously to weep and to cheer at the martyrdom of that brave woman who stands among her kerosene-doused trove of forbdden books and sets herself on fire.  I'd like to believe that I would do the same.

But all of this, I am forced to admit, is sentiment.  You can't base principles on sentiment, not if you believe in some degree of absolute truth and you're trying to get at it.  I'm a writer, an intellectual, a borderline bibliomaniac.  Books have always been my sustenance and joy, my dearest friends in a hostile world.  Of course I feel an intense connection to them.  It's just as natural that my ex-partner would feel strongly about the flag.  Her father had been in the military, as had her first husband, and her two sons were currently enlisted.  At the time we had this argument, her younger son was in Iraq on active combat duty.  Watching a protester burn the flag of the country her son was fighting for must have felt like an attack on everything she loved.

(It may be unduly crass of me to point this out, but I believe most of the Founding Fathers would have had a stronger emotional distaste for book-burning than flag-burning.  The Revolutionary War was fought for an idea, not a country.  There was no United States as we know it until some years after the colonies were granted their independence, and it was still the better part of a century before most Americans learned to think of themselves as "Americans" first rather than citizens of their various states.  As for the seven key Founding Fathers identified by historian Richard B. Morris, only two of them had any military experience, and only George Washington was anything like a career soldier.  The others were intellectuals, writers, statemen, political philosophers, lawyers - men who understood and lived by the power of words in the finest sense.)

Perhaps it was foolish of me to attempt to engage her mind on a topic so close to her heart.  Certainly I shouldn't be surprised that she wasn't in a mood to listen to logic or subtlety, or that she turned on my reasoning with an emotional red herring.  (I'm not above that kind of thinking myself; it's easy for me to feel smug when I consider that she wouldn't likely get at all worked up over the burning of an Iraqi flag, while I wouldn't support the burning of, say, The Sacrament of Abortion any more than I would the burning of the complete works of Shakespeare.  Doesn't that just prove I've got the moral high ground?)  But that red herring gave me a lot to think about, and I've come to a conclusion, one which I don't much like.  But then, there's nothing about what's right that's inherently pleasant or expedient.

Book-burning is contemptible.  For reasons both emotional and ideological, I consider it an abomination, far more so than the burning of a flag.  As an ideological gesture, however, I am forced to admit that "symbolic" book-burning does fall into the realm of free speech.  Maybe I wouldn't pour water on a book-burner if s/he were on fire, but I would protest the jailing of one.  As a writer, I must support the biblioclast for exactly the same reason that the soldier spills his/her blood for the ingrates who desecrate the flag: because it's freedom I'm pushing for, and that includes the freedom to be wrong, to be contemptible even - and without that freedom, everything I am and believe in is meaningless.

Traces

Tell me, who can read
the ripples in the water
when the wind sweeps low?

Flower in the Crannied Wall

This poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, may be short, and, like the flower of which the poet speaks, deceptively simple, yet there is a world of truth in it.  An unusually metaphysical poem for the nineteenth century, it is possessed of a timeless impact.  It has long been one of my favorites.  I hope it inspires you.

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower - but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

A Tale of Two Smart Women

Once upon a time, there was a smart woman who gave birth to her first child, a girl.  With her background in child development, this woman was able to recognize very quickly that the baby was quite brainy in her own right, and to nourish her daughter's infant intellect.  The mother's fondest hope was that the child would grow up to be a creative, independent, and ingenious thinker, capable of making sound decisions and contributing meaningfully to the world around her.  The woman soon discovered that her daughter, despite her docile temperament, would prove a challenge not only to her parents, but to educators, agemates, and innocent bystanders, due to her unique worldview and nonconformist streak.

When she was little, the daughter more or less trusted the adults around her in matters beyond her comprehension.  When she was in first grade, there was a presidential election, her first for all intents and purposes, and although she knew nothing of politics she was fascinated by the spectacle.  When she learned that the candidates were named Bush and Dukakis, she immediately threw the full weight of her support behind the former, for good reason: her personal experiences with shrubbery had taught her that "Bush" was a name that could be trusted.  Occasionally, she wondered if she was making the wrong choice.  After all, "Dukakis" was a pretty nifty name, a nice crunchy name like the sound of biting into a pickle.  But her concerns were eased away when she learned that her mother intented to vote for Bush.  Her mother wasn't much concerned with the candidates' names, though; apparently Bush was a Republican and her mother was rooting for the Republicans to win the election, the same way her grandfather was always rooting for the Red Sox to win the baseball game.

Of course, as she got older, this bright girl came to understand the Issues - what they were, if not why anyone really cared about some of them - and since it was usually her parents who explained what they were all about, it was only natural that her parents' positions on the Issues made perfectly good sense to her (most of the time, anyways).  As the years passed, she found herself more and more often exposed to viewpoints that differed from what she had been taught.  Some of them made more sense to her than what she had been told by her parents.  When she discussed these different viewpoints with her mother and father, sometimes they were able to point out something she hadn't thought of, some sort of weakness in the argument.  Other times, they couldn't - not to her satisfaction, at any rate.

She arrived at puberty right on schedule, but unlike many on the cusp of adulthood, she never developed a rebellious spirit or felt the need to reject the values with which she had been raised solely because they were her parents' values.  In fact, possessed of a strong need for harmony and the approval of others, she tried to rock the boat as little as possible.  On the other hand, her intellectual and moral maturity far outstripped her emotional growth, and she did feel a compelling need to re-examine and evaluate nearly everything she had been raised to believe - if only in the privacy of her own mind.  It was somewhat comforting, perhaps, when the conclusions she came to happened to be in line with the opinions of those around her, but when they did not, she had enough faith in her own moral compass to take a stand, however tremulously.

Although they often came to similar conclusions by different methods, this young woman was growing up to be very much like her mother in her political thinking: practical yet compassionate, able to consider both sides of an issue and seek a rational solution that would take into account the needs of everyone involved.  Both these smart women knew that life is less fair than it should be, and that change takes time to become entrenched, and that sometimes you just have to settle for a compromise.  They believed in living and letting live, and agreeing to disagree.  And when the day came, nearly eighteen years after the daughter's birth, for the mother to wrap her in one final embrace before she boarded the airplane that would take her to college three thousand miles away, it was true that the two of them had agreed to disagree about a number of things in life, but when it cames to politics, they were more or less both on the same page.

As fate (and the Constitution) would have it, that happened to be another presidential election year.  Now, although they were good citizens who tried to stay basically aware of national affairs, both mother and daughter were a little too busy to get swept up much in all the political hoopla.  The daughter was, much to her dismay, one day too young to vote at all - and she was more focused on adjusting to all of the wonderful and terrible changes that come with young adulthood.  The mother planned to vote, and gave much thoughtful consideration to the candidates and issues - but she was more focused on her new job teaching third grade at a Protestant church-affiliated private school, and on the lovely woman which whom she had unexpectedly fallen in love the previous spring.

Although neither mother nor daughter had a particular interest in politics just at that moment, they were both to have politics thrust upon them.  As a student at a highly-regarded women's college, the daughter had hoped to find herself surrounded by mature, thoughtful young women.  Much to her disappointment, she found that many of her new schoolmates were little more than overgrown adolescents; heady with a newfound freedom expressed in smoking, screwing, and swearing; professing their opinions with a swagger that belied their unwillingness to think too much.  "Often in error, never in doubt," one of them boasted in the signature to her e-mails, and the young woman was bewildered: was admitting to uncertainty supposed to be a greater shame than being shown up as flat-out wrong?  Although she hadn't immediately found the campus to be the haven of intellect and reason that she had at first hoped, it wasn't until she had been there about a month that she learned just how vicious her schoolmates could be.

It was that September that the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of the drug mifepristone as an abortifacient, and when the news hit that college campus, the online bulletin boards lit up with excitement.  Students hailed it as a great step forward for women's rights.  One young woman even proclaimed that she was "celebrating" the news.  Now, much like her mother, our young protagonist thought abortion was the wrongful destruction of a human life.  But she also, much like her mother, had the greatest sympathy for those women whose lives were turned upside-down by an unexpected pregnancy, and she certainly believed that no woman should be forced to continue a pregancy that endangered her life.  She'd never really come down hard one way or the other on the matter of abortion, but the idea of "celebrating" an abortion method made her sick to her stomach.  She posted to the bulletin board, reminding her ebullient schoolmates that abortion is an ugly and painful matter for all involved, and ought to be regarded with appropriate solemnity.  The replies to her post came fast and furious, attacking and denouncing her as ignorant, uncaring, and backwards.  When she tried to defend herself, it only got nastier.  One poster made reference to our heroine's "gun-toting friends, hiding in the bushes in front of clinics."  If she hadn't been so shocked and wounded by this outpouring of hostility, this could have been amusing, considering her stance in favor of gun control.  (Those theoretical gun-toting friends most likely wouldn't have looked too kindly on her vegetarianism, either, or her wholehearted support for her mother's lesbian relationship.)

Back on the other side of the country, the mother wasn't finding her place of employment any more comfortable, politically speaking, than her daughter was finding her college campus.  She'd been in the staff room one day, and one of her coworkers had mentioned a relative who was struggling with a risky pregnancy - and it prompted another coworker to go on a long rant about the evils of abortion.  As the election approached, the political feeling in the school grew even more fervent.  When they were planning their fall carnival, a sort of substitute Halloween party without the pagan overtones, one of the teachers suggested using a picture of Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore as a dartboard.  When her mother mentioned this during one of their nightly telephone calls, the daughter forwarded her a glurge e-mail she had received from her aunt.  The e-mail told the story of a seminary professor who had had all his students throw darts at pictures of people they disliked, only to take down the dartboard at the end of class to reveal a picture of Jesus underneath, torn and mangled by the darts his students had thrown.  The mother appreciated the e-mail, but didn't share it with her colleagues, reluctant to rock the boat.

It was almost a shock to the daughter's system to hear that somewhere out in the world, there were masses of people vilifying Al Gore.  In her world, it was the name of Republican candidate George W. Bush that was mud.  She'd learned from her experience in September not to get into political discussions on the school bulletin boards, but when one brave Republican posted her opinion, only to be subjected to ad hominem attacks, our heroine could keep silent no longer.  Brimming over with sweet reasonableness, she posted a reply in which she made it clear that she didn't agree with the Republican on many of the issues, but she didn't see any need to insult the young woman for speaking her mind.  After all, the free exchange of ideas was historically one of the things that made this country great, and the balance of opposing viewpoints was necessary to prevent either side from spiralling off into extremes.  "Besides," she concluded, "if there weren't two sides to every issue, there wouldn't be intelligent, well-meaning people on both sides."  Surely no one could object to that?

Surely they could.  "I have freedom of speech too and I reserve the right to call her an idiot if I want to!" one student proclaimed, in a truly impressive display of maturity.  Almost as much invective was heaped on our heroine, for defending the Republican's right to speak freely without harassment, as had been directed at the poor Republican in the first place.  Somehow, in this community that prided itself on its open-mindedness, it was possible to be ostracized, not only for disagreeing with the majority position, but for simply standing up for the right of others to do so.

The election came and went; the daughter woke up on her eighteenth birthday to the news that George W. Bush had won the election, and rejoiced at having attained the age of majority while her schoolmates mourned.  Campus Republicans enjoyed a moment of triumph and went out to proudly chalk the letters "GOP" on the sidewalks; disappointed Democrats grabbed some chalk of their own and converted "GOP" into "GORE."  Three thousand miles away, another smart woman grappled with her new role as the mother of an adult, while her coworkers whooped and cheered at the election results.  Mother and daughter: the one too liberal, the other too conservative, two of a kind, with the same brown hair and the same gently bewildered smile.

Truth to Power

They that have power to hurt, and will do much,
Who do the thing they most do show, a lot:
The wrath of heaven rightly rests on such.
I think they should be taken out and shot.

Redefining Failure

This article by Julia Baird appeared in the September 20, 2010, issue of Newsweek.  I don't particularly care for Newsweek and I don't generally post the recently-composed works of others to my blog, but Baird's thoughts on failure thrilled me, perhaps because they (and the framework in which she expresses them) provide an interesting comparison to my own.

We've spent more than 60 years dissecting Willy Loman, the character artfully sketched by Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman.  Willy is, perhaps, America's consummate loser, a failure to his family.  But if you can bear with me for one moment, imagine he lived in current times, not amid the postwar prosperity of 1949.  Sure, his career was ebbing, but Willy kept a job for 38 years, he owned his house - he had just made the last mortgage payment - and had a wife and two children.  Today he'd be a survivor.

Has our view of failure softened since Willy Loman's day?  Ina a country with a level of unemployment so high that it is likely to determine the outcome of the midterm elections, and where promotions, bonuses, and retirement savings seem like relics, failure is something many of us are wrestling with right now.  But if we begin to accept that success is not a simple, upward career trajectory, this economic crisis may not just reduce the stigma of being sacked but transform the way we think of failing.  Shocking as it sounds, failure can be a good thing.

It's true, recessions can wreck self-esteem.  In a nation built on success and a gloriously entrepreneurial spirit, the prospect of failure can make people fearful - and shameful - even when it is not their fault.  "There is a crash in every generation," wrote Arthur Miller in 2005, just before he died, "sufficient to mark us with a kind of congenital fear of failure."  Miller was commenting on a wonderful book by historian Scott Sandage called Born Losers: A History of Failure in America.  Sandage believes Willy Loman was a success.  But the message of the play, he says, is that "if you are not continuing upwards, if you level off, you have to give up.  You might as well not live."

We did not always believe this.  In his book, Sandage argues that America's ideas about failure were formed between 1819 and 1893, as busts followed a series of speculative booms.  Before then, failure was not associated with individual identity.  It just happened to you.  Bankruptcy was thought to come from overreach - living excessively - not from lack of ambition.  By the end of the 19th century, says Sandage, failure had gone from being a professional mishap to "a name for a deficient self, an identity in the red."  Ralph Waldo Emerson encapsulated this in his journal in 1842: "Nobody fails who ought not to fail.  There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune."  By the middle of the last century, at the time Willy Loman was hawking his wares, Americans could not face "the possibility of defeat in one's personal life or one's work without being morally destroyed," according to sociologist David Riesman.  (Which may be one reason why the suicide rate in the Great Depression was remarkably high.)

This foolish, dangerous idea is under assault right now.  Should financial success really be a moral imperative?  Why do we think that an ordinary kind of life is of lesser worth?  Studies have found that our most potent emotional experiences come from our relationships, not careers.  Those who work in palliative care report that, on their deathbeds, most people don't regret not having clambered a rung higher, but having worked too hard, and having lost touch with friends.

And history shows that it is only when the economy is in the mud that Americans feel free to do what they want to do.  As the author J.K. Rowling said so succinctly in her 2008 address to Harvard graduates, failure can mean a "stripping away of the inessential."  When she was an impoverished single mother, she started to write her magical tales: "I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.  You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity."  This doesn't mean it is an uplifting experience to be unemployed, of course.  But it may mean we ease up on some of the judgment that springs from the false idea that a person without a job has not just hit bad luck or a poor economy - but is a failure.  Having a job is hardly the only, or best, measure of a life.

It may also mean we can accept plateaus, understand that a life has troughs we can climb out of, and that a long view is the wisest one.  A recession is a great reminder that all of us need to learn, as Samuel Beckett said, to "fail better."  Which means rethinking what we really want to do with our lives, who we want beside us, and how we measure worth.  Think of poor Willy Loman.  Today his grandchildren might be proud.

In Defense of Pessimism

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If We Must Die

I've never been particularly tuned in to slang. When I was in high school, someone asked me why I was "cheesin'." I couldn't for the life of me figure out what she meant. "Maybe she wanted to know why you were smiling," my mother speculated when I told her. "You know, like smile and say cheese." According to Urban Dictionary, my classmate must have thought my smile was intense and a bit odd. If the kids in school liked something, it was "da bomb." I thought that was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard. What's so great about a bomb? It hadn't been so very long ago that a bomb in Oklahoma City killed over 150 people . . . and now "da bomb" had become the height of cool? I don't know . . . I just wasn't - how you say? - down with that.

Lately, though, there's a certain phrase that's been edging its way into my consciousness - and although it makes the grammarian in me cringe, and there's no absolute consensus as to what exactly it means, I've found myself growing fond of it. Although in some circles its overuse has caused it to lose its original geek cred and take on a certain air of lame loserdom, I for one would hate to see it go.

I'm talking about "epic fail."

As far as I can tell, the phrase came from the game Dungeons and Dragons, and was popularized through such avenues as the cable program Attack of the Show! and the notorious, hilarious Fail Blog. There are some who define "epic fail" as a funny failure, or a failed attempt to be funny. Others insist that epic fail requires the failure to be in a venture in which it should have been reasonably easy to succeed.

Most definitions, however, agree that "epic fail" is simply the highest - or should I say lowest? - degree of failure possible: the devastating, soul-crushing experience of putting your hand to the task before you, and seeing all your efforts prove completely, utterly, and forever futile. This is the definition I prefer. We all fail, often, and for the most part we get back up, dust ourselves off, learn what we can from the experience, and keep on muddling through life much as we did before. Epic fail allows no such luxury. Epic fail requires you to rebuild yourself, not from the ground up, but starting from the bottom of that hole you dug yourself into. You may learn what you can from your failure - to do so, in fact, may become a matter of survival, spiritually if not literally - but you can never go on again exactly as before. Something dies with every epic fail: a bond, a dream, a bit of our faith that the world will be kind to us and gentle with our hearts.

There's another aspect, though, reflected in numerous definitions of "epic fail," and this gets to the heart of why I love this phrase so very much. There's a kind of inherent irony to epic fail: something almost beautiful about devastation so complete, something purifying about having been stripped so bare. We've all heard, a thousand times, that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but how many of us have taken that thought through to its natural conclusion, incontestable under the rules of formal deductive logic (so long as we accept the premise to be true), that what doesn't make you stronger must perforce kill you? Epic fail is just that moment of truth. There's something about seeing your world lie in ruins around you that makes you think, I don't know how the hell I'm going to live this down, face other people again, repair my reputation, regain what I've lost, make up for the harm I've done, get over this hurt. Maybe I won't. Maybe it really is as bad as it feels. But if I somehow manage to make it through this, I have nothing left to fear. Not because of anything we've done, but simply because the mean business of living hasn't killed us yet, epic fail ends up feeling strangely like a victory. A hollow victory, a Cadmean victory perhaps, but - in the words of the geek subculture that spawned "epic fail" - nevertheless a win.

The ancients understood epic fail, certainly. So did Shakespeare. Great writers always have. Think of Oedipus, a favorite subject of ancient Greek playwrights. He's the king of Thebes - not a bad gig if you can get it, and all he had to do to get it was show up shortly after the last king disappeared. He didn't exactly marry for love, and his wife, a good twenty or so years his senior, is hardly the stuff that fantasies are made of, but they've had four children together, so it seems they're getting along, at the very least. Then he consults an oracle about ending a plague, and before he knows what's hit him his whole life unravels. Turns out he was adopted and some old guy he killed (pure self-defense, mind you) on the road to Thebes was his biological father, and that woman he's married to now was . . . well, you know. His mother/wife kills herself, he blinds himself and goes into voluntary exile, his sons fight for control of the kingdom and both end up dead (along with who knows how many of their followers), one of his daughters also commits suicide after being sentenced to be buried alive, the daughter's fiance kills himself out of love for her, and the fiance's mother (Oedipus's sister-in-law/aunt by marriage) kills herself out of grief for her son. How many people had to die because Oedipus got into a tussle on the road all those years ago without stopping to notice that the guy he was getting the best of looked an awful lot like him? Epic fail.

How about Hamlet? The last scene's a bloodbath. Everyone dies. Hamlet's father is dead before the play even begins. (So is Yorick, of course.) After that, all the loss of life that follows is, directly or indirectly, Hamlet's fault. By the time the grand finale comes around, the hero has already driven his girlfriend to suicide, perhaps because he killed her father. Even a couple of courtiers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are done away with for no particular reason, and the play ends with four dead bodies littering the stage. It would be five; Hamlet's best friend nearly commits suicide - for no better reason, apparently, than that he feels something of an anachronism in modern Denmark - but Hamlet talks him out of it on the grounds that somebody who knows what happened needs to be left behind to explain this massive scene of epic fail.

Hamlet is only trying to do the right thing, of course. He isn't about to go into the throne room and stab his stepfather/uncle (who happens to be the king) on the word of some ghost - after all, it could have been a demon trying to make a murderer of him, couldn't it? It's probably wise not to take the word of a ghost at face value. You never know with otherworldly beings. It's reasonable to want confirmation of some kind. Of course, after he gets the confirmation he needs, Hamlet has the perfect chance to take a (literal) stab at Claudius when he catches him off-guard, at his prayers - but then again, it really isn't so perfect, because killing a man in prayer is a pretty sure way to send him to heaven, and that's not exactly the destination most of us have in mind for the murderers of our loved ones. He may have a perfectly good reason for his hesitation, but unfortunately, the longer he waits and worries, the more time Claudius has to grow suspicious of his unusual behavior and plot to get him out of the way - so by the time Hamlet is ready to act, he has the other people drawn into Claudius's schemes to reckon with, as well as the others around him who have been hurt or misled by his own actions as he prepares to do what he must.

The harder Hamlet tries to get it right, the more tangled the whole situation becomes, until finally there's no way out at all. I've never been in line for the throne of Denmark, never seen a ghost, never had to watch my mother warming my uncle's bed before my father was cold in his grave - but all of a sudden I get the feeling I've been there.

Of course, Shakespeare, the ancient Greeks, and your eleventh-grade literature teacher had a more proper name for this sort of thing: tragedy. Strictly defined, tragedy is the story of the downfall of a great man or woman, as the result of his or her own actions, resulting in far more painful a consequence than those actions would seem to deserve. The Greek word for the action on which the tragedy hinges is hamartia. In the Bible, this is the word rendered in English as "sin"; in discussion of the classic literary tragedies, it's often described as the "fatal flaw," or the one defect in an otherwise noble character that brings about tragic consequences. In Greek, the word simply refers to an act of missing the mark, as in archery. It has been suggested that a better interpretation of hamartia, in the tragic context, is simply "mistake." The tragic action may arise out of some defect of character, or even from a positive trait, but in a true tragedy, the action is wholly in line with the character of the individual who does it, and, once it begins, the course of the tragedy is inevitable and irreversible. Not every epic fail is a tragedy in this classical sense, but every tragedy is the story of epic fail. I don't suppose many literature teachers or Greek scholars would be amused to see "epic fail" replace "fatal flaw" as the standard translation of hamartia, but somehow it seems to me . . . well, not too far off the mark.

More than ever (if such a thing be possible), we in the Western world live in a culture of success. Children grow up hearing that they can become whatever they want to be, regardless of gender, disability, or family background. The nonfiction bestseller lists are full of helpful guides promising the ambitious reader the secrets of success: financial success, romantic success, social success - the quicker and easier the better. On TV we have American Idol, America's Next Top Model, The Apprentice, and their ilk; we can't seem to get enough of those ordinary folk whose talent and/or cleverness open the doors for them into fame, fortune, and glamour.

Yet even our most cherished success stories are inseparably bound up with failure. The catchphrases of our reality competition shows are taglines of shattered dreams: "The tribe has spoken." "You're fired." "You are the weakest link - goodbye." How many of these shows would be as successful if there were no vote, no boardroom, no tribal council - if there weren't a dozen stories of failure behind every tale of rags to riches? We love to watch people fail. We need to watch people fail, and spectacularly. It's reassuring. It's entertaining. It's brutal, and it's honest. Like pornography or a train wreck, you know it's a damn shame, but for some reason you just can't tear yourself away.

Now more than ever, we need epic fail. In a culture of success, we need to be reminded of our limits, our humanity, our frailty. Just as every death calls our attention to the inexorable ticking away of our own mortal hours, every failure forces us face to face with our own weakness and vulnerability. In a culture obsessed with success, failure is as great a taboo as death. We wish to distance ourselves from our own failures, to justify or explain them into something more innocuous; we look away uncomfortably from our uneducated or unemployed or unhappily-single friends, muttering under our breath that's it's okay, when we both know really it isn't, that it does make a difference, whether it ought to or not. We all say it's okay to fail, but we know in our heart of hearts that it's simply not socially acceptable. Like death, failure makes us intensely uncomfortable, even as it utterly captivates us.

There's a word in German, "schadenfreude," that refers specifically to the satisfaction we feel in the sufferings of others - not a keen, sadistic kind of pleasure, but rather a primitive, cheerless sort. Jane Kenyon wrote of "the cheerless satisfaction we sometimes feel when others fail." The offspring of schadenfreude and empathy is what the ancient dramatists called "catharsis": a powerful emotional purge, an intense swell of feeling that breaks the tensions building up under our civilized facades and reduces us to our most primitive reactions of laughter and tears. Catharsis leaves us emptied, cleansed, and new, refreshed in spirit just as we feel queasily, tentatively refreshed in body after vomiting. It's the same feeling that comes in the end to those who have failed mightily, and lived to struggle on.

The word "epic" was associated first with stories of fundamental human struggles: the struggle for love, the struggle for greatness, the struggle of good against evil. In recent years, it has come to encompass any story vast in scale, broad in scope, and touching upon universal human experience, yet transcending it: not merely heroism, but heroism above and beyond the call of duty; not merely love, but love in the face of opposition, cruelty, and death; not merely effort, but utter absorption and devotion to a cause; not merely failure, but utter devastation and loss. We may never experience a threat so dire, a love so profound, a cause so moving, but we need these stories nevertheless, the stories that remind us what we, as humans, are capable of, for good and for ill. We need epic love, epic heroism, epic struggle, and yes, epic fail. That which is epic speaks of and to a thousand human experiences of less staggering import.

What would Elvis Presley mean to us if he were (indisputably) still alive today, a stately gentleman in his mid-seventies, living comfortably off his old royalties? As talented a musician as he was, our fascination with his life is less about his art than about the story of a young man who had the world at his fingertips and ended up dead on his bathroom floor at the age of forty-two. Would the stories of Oedipus and Hamlet resonate so strongly over hundreds, even thousands, of years if the Theban king and the Danish prince had been able to muddle through the hard times, sort out their troubles, and restore order without recourse to the utter devastation of themselves and everyone around them? Oedipus is the successful CEO whose accountants are found out cooking the books and whose lovely wife of twenty years leaves him the day he files for bankruptcy. The high school valedictorian who drops out of college to raise a baby she didn't plan for is Oedipus too. Anyone who ever set out into the world with the best of intentions, only to be misjudged, thwarted, and ultimately dismissed, is Hamlet in spirit. When Scarlett O'Hara runs through the mist in Gone with the Wind, having just discovered herself to have been passionately in love all along with the husband who has adored her for years, only to get home and find him packing his bags to leave her, she stands for the soul of all of us who have ever given our best efforts, only to find them too little, too late.

Ultimately, though, we need epic fail because without the potential for disaster, there can be no great triumph, no "epic win." Experienced investors know that the riskier the stock, the greater the potential payout. No one ever went broke playing penny-ante, but no one ever made his fortune either. We need to embrace the challenges, make intelligent decisions even when the answers are uncertain, preparing ourselves to hit the ground even as we set our sights on the heavens. It's better to fail at something worth doing than to succeed at nothing worth mentioning.

My friend, I wish you the greatest success on the road ahead, whatever form that may take for you. But I wish you something more. I wish you to know the rebirth that comes in the wake of devastation. I wish you to understand how empty the human soul can be, and to discover the fresh green tendrils that sprout up from the ashes of the human heart.

My friend, I wish you epic fail.