Doing Battle With Nature

Spring began today at around 1:30 p.m., and I am happy to report I already have a jump on it.  Of course, I’m kidding myself.

Last evening, taking advantage of daylight savings (another harbinger of the change in seasons), I laid out on my lawn the first application of fertilizer and weed control. And there are more chemical concoctions stored in my garage, including insect killer, Grub-ex, which purports to kill Japanese Beetle larvae before the grow into the much to be avoided white grubs that destroy entre lawns and villages.  That application comes later, when the weather turns summer warm.

By then, I (or my unwilling son) will have mowed the grass about two dozen times just to keep up with the rapid growth triggered in large part by the fertilizer I just put on the lawn.  It’s hard to say how much of this cycle of lawn care is nature at work and how much is the end result of the various chemicals in the fertilizer.  What I can say is that I have a responsibility to my neighbors to create a perfectly manicured, deeply green lawn and to maintain it that way until the first flakes of snow appear in the fall.  There’s nothing written anywhere mandating my compliance; but it is an immutable, unchallengeable fact of suburban life.

None of this can be good for the environment, broadly speaking.  The stuff I put on my lawn, for example, is banned in the state of New York, which says something.  I’m supposed to keep my Golden well away from the lawn until rain soaks the fertilizer into the earth.  Try keeping your dog off grass.  There are also strict instructions, right on the bag, warning you not to get any pellets on your shrubs, near trees, and on small children.

Flowers in My Yard

All of which makes me question, at least philosophically, whether battling with nature like this is really a good thing. In fact, every Spring I am beset with misgivings about using fertilizer to make my lawn grow faster and greener.  Besides which, the weed control element doesn’t work; I always get weeds.  If I blacktopped my yard, I’d get weeds. They’re definitely a part of nature no one has ever been able to control.

I’m going to attempt to relax about this and try to enjoy and embrace the advent of Spring.  I plan to do the bare minimum of lawn applications and hope for the best (which essentially means hoping that my front yard doesn’t end up looking like an arroyo in Arizona. About embracing Spring: here’s my plan.  As I walk behind my mower, or rake out shrub beds, or scoop up dog droppings, I plan to enunciate and repeat out loud, in the style of Professor Henry Higgins, the wondrous names of flowers, which I happen to believe are the eyes of nature.

Follow along, and add your own . . .

Jonquil.  Rhododendron. Hyacinth, Hibiscus and Hydrangea. Pansies. Crape Myrtle and Purple Coneflower. Lavender, Lilly and Liriope.  Aster and Anemone. Blue Dimple Hosta and sweet gentle buttercup . . .

A Voice for Reticence

Like many of you, I’ve attended my share of diversity or social interaction training sessions, and I always come away from them feeling embarrassed. I blame my mom for that.

My mother passed away three years ago at age 89, and while she had an enormous impact on my life, she was a modest, unprepossessing person whose political and social views were nearly always expressed — if at all — with the disclaimer: “I just don’t know.” As a child of the Great Depression and from modest means, Mom greatly admired FDR and Democrats generally, and she was never comfortable around wealth or opulence. She hated war and could have been a pacifist or an anti-war marcher (a scene I can’t even imagine). For reasons I never fathomed, she loved baseball. She held biases and prejudices, but never overtly, and like many people of her time, Mom felt that if you didn’t have something good to say about someone, it was better to say nothing.

I was thinking about my mom’s reticence last week as I sat through a mandatory meeting with 40 or so of my work colleagues. The people moderating the meeting and directing the conversation wanted — somewhat desperately, I thought — to get everyone talking and sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings about sensitive issues like racism, gender identity and empathy for people not like yourself. They went about this using several tactics. First, we were divided into sub-groups of three and invited to interview one another silently; that is, we had to answer questions about the other person (such as the kind of vehicle they’d like to drive, of what religion were they raised in) by sheer guessing. Following that was an exercise that involved choosing a life we’d least like to experience, and then one we’d most like to have among several not very attractive alternatives. I joined a large group who apparently felt it would be very bad to be an illegal immigrant in America, unable to speak English, and without a job. On the plus side, I joined a slightly smaller contingent who felt that to be a genius-level physicist, but also a quadriplegic, and out of work, wouldn’t necessarily be the worst thing in the world. And so on. The last exercise involved responding to a page of questions such as at what age did we discover that there are two genders, or when did we realize we were rich, or poor, or middle class?

Apparently, these are tried and true techniques that, when properly conducted, enable people in group circumstances (like the office) to find out if they are insensitive or culturally deficient. Once our individual prejudices, perceptions and biases are brought out into the open and people have bared their souls, the theory goes, the group can then move forward as a more cohesive, sensitive and empathetic unit.

I kept wondering whether any of this had a basis in quantitative and qualitative research. Was it proven, for example, that by guessing the kind of car someone I barely know was driving, I would be revealing my hidden away biases and pre-conceived notions about relative strangers? I didn’t ever really find out, in part because I managed to pick exactly the kind of vehicle — an SUV — the other person was driving. I even got her religion right. And what did that prove? Nothing much.

I’m not attacking the motives of the people conducting this meeting; in fact, they are in all ways professional. But I think what they are selling is suspect. Underlying this kind of consulting work is an assumption that there are methods that can be employed (like asking you to guess the religion of a person you don’t know) that will reveal your prejudices. And that, furthermore, getting out these prejudices and perceptions in a group setting is the first and necessary step on the path to reconciliation and understanding among individuals with widely varying backgrounds and experiences.

Is that really valid? For one thing, people can always lie, or say what they believe others want to hear. There’s also the presumption that people know how to get in touch with their real feelings, and can articulate them with and among others. Most people I know, including myself, struggle all the time to express their true feelings, even in the private conversations that go on only in our heads. I question the efficacy of building group training around the notion that individuals, sitting with their peers, will not just be willing, but also able to say what they really think.

But my largest objection is to the notion, which seems so pervasive these days, that it is always better — more cathartic, more empathetic, more useful — for people to “share” their feelings, whatever they might be. Doing so makes everyone know you better and helps engender a more “open” society.

I don’t buy it, and here’s why: I have my share of prejudices, like everyone, and I do not believe I am contributing to the world by uttering these views out loud. To the contrary, there’s much in my mind, and perhaps yours, that’s best left unsaid. What may be appropriate in the Confessional booth or the psycho-therapy session seems to me to be not at all helpful when shared among colleagues in the business or organizational environment. After all, what can they do about it? Or me? Revealing to my peers that I dislike short people (actually, my issue is with people who are taller than me) isn’t going to change their minds about me, about their attitudes towards short people, or their hidden prejudices about race or gender, much less mine. And so, what’s to be gained, collectively, by my personal revelation concerning the height of others? Very little.

These kinds of meetings also reflect the growing noise of public self-indulgence — the mindless chatter online and elsewhere by people talking and writing about themselves. Deeds, not words, the old saying goes. Many people, through the ages, have managed to make a mark on society and, at the same time, remain modest and reticent about themselves. We may not know everything about them, but we know enough to admire, respect and even love them.

Like my mom.

Could I Go Over the Top?

Nothing, to me, is as compelling as reading the accounts of men under the stress and confusion of battle: how they felt, how they reacted, what was going through their minds as they confronted the very real possibility of death.

A Union Cannon at the Angle on Cemetery Ridge

Now, just back from a tour of the great Civil War battleground at Gettysburg, these thoughts have taken on a more tangible dimension.  Away from the books, I stood in places where men shot at distant targets and were in turn shot at.  Many thousands were killed, many thousand more wounded in three days of fierce combat at places called the Devil’s Den, the Wheatfield, Little Round Top and Culp’s Hill. The question I asked myself, as I looked down the barrel of a cannon still poised on the Union lines at Cemetery Ridge, is the question that long has bedeviled me, and perhaps you: would I have the courage to stand and fight, to fix my bayonet, leave my shelter and attack the enemy?  Or would the instinct of self-preservation take over, causing me to stay hidden and out of the line of fire?

(This search for understanding is different from, and much more personal, than my enduring fascination with the causes of war; the broader context of politics, economics and social currents that lead to the clash of nations and peoples. What I want to know is how, why and where ordinary men found the courage to go over the top.  Gettysburg helped me find an answer).

Much has been written over the years about why men fight (and some die) in war.  Until around the time of the Civil War, most explanations centered on a strong identification with an abstract cause (such as freedom or defense of homeland); Confederate troops were said to be more highly motivated than their Union counterparts because they were defending their beloved Virginia or South Carolina from the encroachment of the looming federal government.  Yet that explanation makes only partial sense.  Something more fundamental is required to fully explain why men do not flinch in the face of certain harm.

Gettysburg’s splendid new National Military Park Museum provides helpful clues.  The words of officers and soldiers who participated in the battle on both

A view across the battlefield to Little Round Top

sides are  widely quoted.  What emerges from the museum exhibits (and the narratives of highly trained and personable tour guides at the battlefield) is that there is a very thin line separating the fighters from the frightened.  Those who are able to overcome their fears do so not because they are especially brave (most expressed grave fears of combat) but rather, because they felt a sense of obligation not to let down the comrades in their squad or troop — their friends, their comrades in arms, the fellows who are beside them behind the parapet or crouching in the shell hole or shallow trench. Interviews with veterans after both World War I and II confirmed the finding: amid the horror of war, and perhaps compelled by it, men fight for one another.  This is especially true when there are common ties linking the men, such as home town, school or work place — anything that reflects common interests or backgrounds.  In the Civil War, units on both sides were composed of soldiers from the same state or city, or calling.  At Gettysburg on the third day, with Pickett’s famous charge close to breaking through the Union lines, New York City firemen, serving together in the same unit, helped sway the tide.

It surely has to be this.  How else to explain why at Gettysburg, men from Maine and Massachusetts and Mississippi threw themselves into the bloody fray. How else to  explain why, with Rebel troops surging towards their entrenched positions, soldiers from the 1st Minnesota Volunteers began a counter-charge in which 215 of its 262 men were killed or wounded in the space of a few short minutes.  What other motivation would compel the actions of a young Union officer named Patrick O’Rorke, out of the Irish diaspora struggling to gain a foothold of acceptance in mid-19th Century America, who led a counter-charge of fellow Irishmen to stem a Rebel advance on Little Round Top and lost his life in a hail of bullets. Ardant du Picq, a 19th- century French colonel and military theorist, explained the influence of common bonds forging a fighting spirit this way: “Four brave men who do not know each other will not dare to attack a lion. Four less brave, but knowing each other well, sure of their reliability and consequently of mutual aid, will attack resolutely.”

The answer, then, is so simplistic that it risks sounding trite:  soldiers do what they are trained to do, and they do what they are trained to do because they don’t want to let down the men they are with.  So it is both a professional (I am a soldier) and a personal (I’m going to do my part) rationale that appears to motivate men in battle. They are drilled to act, but to act, they must draw upon a deep and abiding willingness to sacrifice even their own lives for the sake of those around them.

Which makes the verdant fields of Gettysburg, nearly 150 years after three days of mortal combat, such a melancholy and yet uplifting place.

The Obsessions of Vacation

With my family, I spent most of the past week at the ocean, specifically the warm Gulf of Mexico, sitting on a beach chair under a sheltering umbrella, wondering why I found myself once again situated in the same spot, on the same stretch of beach, in the same “destination” with the same view of the horizon, that I had experienced the year before, and the year before that, and for several preceding years.

It’s got to be an obsession, is about all I can make of it.  Perhaps you have one, too.  All I know is I simply had to be there.

Matter of fact, everyone in my family appeared, at least during the week we were away, to have a similar disposition to want to do something repeatedly, which is a fair definition of “obsession.”  My son read three or four sci fi action adventure novels — in five days.  My daughter decided to be an artist, and so sketched out a view of our rented beach house’s kitchen, until the lure of riding the waves on a boogie board proved irresistible and became her obsession.  My wife seemed determined to bake in the sun, which she proceeded to do whenever she was not snapping photos with her digital Nikon — another obsession.

Me?  As is always the case during these summer interludes, I had several obsessions to indulge:  I was determined to avoid wearing socks of any kind (check); seek and find the world’s best fried fisherman’s platter (nada), and somehow, in the space of a few days, conjure the plot and characters of the novel of the century while nursing a salty dog on a bar stool at a windswept beachside tavern ( I got the bar right; the novel waits still).

Other than becoming a Hemingway or Hiassen, my only other repeatable obsession is to relax, which I suppose is everyone’s ultimate goal.  Harder said than done, as they say.  I cannot relax as long as there is green algae bloating the ocean water.  I cannot relax with anvil-shaped clouds looming over the shore landscape, lightning spitting across the sky and thunder rumbling, the sound amplified and scarier because I am out in the open and vulnerable.  I cannot relax because it’s typically up to me to make the right restaurant choice for dinner.  This is a nearly impossible and always thankless task because the familiar places from previous trips are either “under new ownership,” or so over-priced that to eat there would be an act of colossal stupidity.  $36 crab cakes, anyone?  I also obsess over what book to read, and obsess about whether to forego reading to sit in my beach chair and ponder the meaning of life — an endeavor made more urgent and relevant by the repetitious lapping of waves on to the sand.

A finger-painted image of the ocean

However, this time, I am glad to report, I found an obsession that occupied my time, caused me to relax, and resulted in my family smiling at me sympathetically:  electronic finger painting on my iTouch.

Laugh not.  The iTouch/iPhone App Store sells an application called “Brushes,” and with it, you can with very little practice (and no appreciable skill or talent), paint Winslow Homer-like seascapes on your phone screen.  I learned, doing this, that fingers are imprecise paintbrushes.  But Brushes compensates with a variety of brush styles and widths from hairline to cover-the-sky.  Your finger points and glides, swirls and pirouettes, and the app does the rest, as if a brush were attached to the end of your index finger.  There’s also a virtually endless range of colors, opacities and shadings available.  If this sounds like an unsolicited plug for Brushes, it is.  Great fun, especially when the alternative — pondering the fates of humankind or choosing between grouper or pizza — brings on a headache.

Now, back home, I wonder whether this obsession with Brushes was just a temporary fling into my imagined world, sitting under a thatched lean-to on a beach in Tahiti with Paul Gaugin, sharing an easel and throwing caution to the wind in splashes of brilliant, surprising colors.

Can you do that on a PDA or a telephone screen?  Now there’s a question worth pondering.

Walking Capitol Hill

I’ve recently had the occasion to walk the halls of Congress on Capitol Hill, and the experience is comforting and, at the same time, unsettling.

Comforting, because office visits still seem to be the most viable way for ordinary citizens like you or me to directly contact our elected Representatives and Senators. It’s a tradition that stretches far back in our national history.  Even Presidents used to greet people at the White House; Abraham Lincoln set aside major parts of his work day to meet with job seekers, psychics, schemers and pastors.  Not many people get appointments with the President these days, but the labyrinthian buildings on each side of the Capitol where the Members have their offices are typically very crowded.  Wherever I went, I was preceded or followed by groups representing causes as varied as the protection of Israel, tax breaks for medical equipment manufacturers, pro- and anti-abortion advocates . . . and God knows what else.

Yet I had the distinct feeling that much of this activity, although earnest, was very much a pro forma ritual.  By that I mean that there appears to be a widening psychological and physical gulf between those who hold elective office and the voters who put them there.  It’s grown to such an extent that, in my view, the world of politics and government resides in a parallel universe with it own language, codes of behavior and established procedures.  We citizens are offered a glimpse into this world, but we seldom penetrate it.

Meeting Your Member of Congress

The sense of estrangement is accentuated by security concerns that have, since 2001, placed a series of access barriers between the general public and the offices of official government. You can still visit with your representative, but it takes some doing.  Scheduling is something of a challenge, and there’s never any guarantee that the Member will be able to keep the appointment.

Because there’s such demand for visits, and with so much else to do, it is impossible to accommodate everyone who wants a meeting and still leave time for the representative to carry out official duties, such as voting or attending committee hearings. The most common result is the five to 10 minute fast-track meeting, in which the Member quickly shakes hands and extends best wishes to the visiting delegation, and then exits through a side door, leaving a staff person to politely take notes. No wonder Congressional staffers appear glassy-eyed by mid-morning.

There’s nothing at all odious or objectionable about this situation; much of it is unavoidable.  And to be fair, many such meetings are pre-scripted by the visitors with “talking points” about whatever issue or cause has brought them to Washington. Members and their staffs have their own repertoire of practiced or canned responses designed to placate the visitors without committing to any particular action.  So there is little spontaneity. The result is that many meetings are not much different from those you might have when you exchange pleasant “hellos” with someone you pass by on the street whose name you can’t quite recall.

You could say that Hill visits are mostly all show, but there’s more to be said on this subject.  And that is that while we value Congressional visits as our right as citizens, even if they end up being pleasantly perfunctory, there are many others who rely upon these brief interactions as opportunities to influence government policy for themselves and those they represent.  Highly paid and politically astute professionals (many are attorneys) representing untold numbers of special interest causes, foreign and domestic, ceaselessly make the rounds of Congressional offices. It’s their job. The good ones, whose names you never see or read about, make comfortable livings securing legislation that benefits or protects small, narrow slices of the American population:  ethanol producers, for instance, or insurance carriers, or assault weapon manufacturers.  With so much at stake and with so many causes competing for access, money and power frequently determine the winners and the also-rans.

None of this represents an earth-shattering revelation.  Lobbying and special interest pleading are as much a part of the fabric of our democracy as Memorial Day parades. But it does help illuminate a cold, blunt reality of the political process in these times:   money and power still speak louder than the voice of the common citizen.

We should all expect more, probably, for our five minute appointment.

Grading the Band

I found myself, with family, seated in the local high school gym for our daughter’s season-ending fifth grade band concert.  It is an event — a ritual, really — that is repeated inumerable times across America as spring rolls toward summer and another school year winds down.  I’m sure many of you have attended one of these musical events — no doubt many times, if you have several children — and if you’re like me, you probably don’t have much in the way of expectations that there will be soaring music or startlingly original solos. Instead, you count on your son or daughter doing well, not dropping the instrument on the gym floor and completing the evening with pride intact amid a light rain of polite applause.

These concerts are worth noticing for what they may say about how the ebb and flow of household life in America unfolds in such a surprisingly uniform way. How everyone ends up at one of these concerts on a mid-week May night — students, teachers and family members alike — is the culmination of many individual and community decisions stretching back months:  the decision that your son or daughter is going to play in the band; the choice of instrument that will be played (flute or saxophone or drums or violin or trombone), and the over-arching decision of your child’s school district that band is a desirable and necessary component of a elementary school education. (There is, of course, the even farther back decision to have children and see to their upbringing).

Kids play in band, school administrators insist on having band, and band teachers teach band earnestly if not entirely successfully, because there is a fundamental belief that youngsters need to be exposed to music.  What better way to learn about music than to play an instrument, even if it is not one of your child’s choosing!  Once, in the fourth grade, someone had the bright idea that I was a tuba prodigy and so, for six agonizing months, I twisted myself into the giant instrument and nearly blew out my innards attempting to create the sound a tuba makes.  I wanted to play the clarinet (then and still), but apparently there were already sufficient numbers of clarinetists in the band, so tuba it was for me.

Fifth Grade Band Concert

As parents, we must support band, and of course our child’s participation.  However, support in this sense is largely one of logistics, in that parents are expected to drop off and pick up their children for band practice. Parents are also expected to be on hand whenever a concert is scheduled, even if it conflicts with soccer, private piano lessons or fast pitch softball practice.  Somehow, everyone gets to where they are supposed to be, more often than not. I sometimes feel that delicate surgery would have to be postponed if it meant missing a performance.

But it’s more than logistics, of course. By some cultural imperative, parents are all but required to cheer and applaud at the appropriate moments, and bestow praise on their children afterwards.  Truth be told, if you can make out even one note played by your child, you have the ears of a field hawk.  The point of it all is the show of support for the effort expended, and it’s not just applicable to band, but also to the science fair, the Holiday pageant, the book fair, and so on.  You could reasonably conclude that much of elementary school is a series of showcase events, with our children playing the lead roles before a ready-made, captive audience.

No one really likes any of this, candidly.  You see a lot of fixed smiles on the faces of parents at band concerts.  And who can blame them; very few mothers are excited, at the end of the typical school year day, to check the calendar and see, with dismay, that the spring concert — all hands on deck — is starting in just 45 minutes and dinner prep hasn’t even begun. Parents can become nearly unglued trying to leave work on time to make the drive through rush hour traffic for two or three minutes of actual playing time.

Yet we all do it, every day, in cities and towns all over the United States. These school-related activities are an integral part of the lives we lead, like it or not. They represent the compact we have made that our children have priority status in everything we do, and we would not want it any other way. We gather together, us parents, like atoms collecting, to hear the muddled, halting renditions of “Home on the Range,” or “Ode to Joy,” with our eyes and attention fixed on our son, our daughter — the flautist third from the right, second row — who is sitting on the edge of her folding chair, precisely as instructed, blowing air into a perforated pipe.  Maybe she’s not Jethro Tull, but from where I am sitting, her playing is perfect, as good as good can be.

What’s Your Theme Song?

Traveling the other day, I was struck, once again, by the overwhelming percentage of passers-by who wear earphones or buds. At a busy airport concourse, I guessed that probably six out of every 10 people were listening — to what?  Rock music? A book on tape?  An NPR podcast?  The Vienna Symphony?  No way to know.

The cumulative effect of this phenomenon is that it creates a privacy zone around anyone who happens to have earbuds lodged in their ears.  It’s a much more formidable “don’t bother me” barrier than, say, a scowl, because you can defuse a mean glance with a pleasant smile or a nod of passivity.  But someone who is lost in sound is usually oblivious to the sea of humanity surging by.  It really becomes challenging to even gain their attention, much less eye contact. The result is like the proverbial ship passing in the fog. People with earphones move near by, close and yet distant: there, but practically speaking, not.

Well and good.  However, the widespread use of ear devices does suggest yet another diminishment of what we used to call “society,” as the term was employed to describe the interactions and communications among neighbors, colleagues, and even total strangers.  Think about it:  how many times in the past week have you actually said “hello” to someone on the street, standing in line at the grocery checkout, or waiting to pass through airport security.  We’ve apparently concluded that extending such an old-fashioned pleasantry might be construed as something more sinister, like a pick-up line at a bar, or that there might be some sort of hidden agenda lurking behind the greeting.  Better not to become involved.  Earphones help create and maintain the proper distance.

I prefer a more benign explanation:  folks wrap their heads in earphones because they need background theme music to get them through their mundane days.  Thanks to movies, especially, we’ve become accustomed to “theme” music to drive our emotions and signal our thoughts. Hollywood producers are especially adept, these days, at choosing just the right cuts from just the most appropriate pop artists to help set off or accentuate the expressions of the actors on the screen.  The effect, I think, is to prompt the rest of us non-actors to conclude that if it works in the movies, it can work for us.  The results are magical: we’re sitting in a plane awaiting take-off and a song pops up on our iPod (one we forgotten we had downloaded). Suddenly, we are transported to some plateau that is clearly different and much less boring than we would normally experience as the jet trundles down the runway.   Music pulsating into our ears helps define who we are and, more fundamentally, who we had once set out to be.

It’s a wondrous transformation, like moving from gray winter to green spring.  The only problem is that, with earphones, it’s like being in the movies by yourself.