A camouflage tablecloth on the floor

For the last nine months or so my wife has been mentoring a Syrian refugee family. The family has been in the states exactly one year, and we no longer refer to them as our refugee family. They're our friends.

The wife makes such tasty and healthy food, and my wife brings some home whenever she visits. The husband's English has improved immensely; he worked cutting chickens for a while, but didn't like (among other things) that he was learning more Spanish than English so he switched to a different job. He's still hearing a lot of Spanish.

The young kids are picking up English very quickly; one of them learned about diseases in school, but she didn't know how to tell her parents about it because she didn't know the Arabic word for disease. This made her parents smile.

They're our friends. They invite our family over about once a month to feed us. I'm amazed to have this opportunity - to give, to learn, to teach, to love, to connect, and to know I'm doing a good thing as a parent by bringing my kids into our friends' world. Because their world is our world.

Initially I was reluctant to visit them. They couldn't understand me and I couldn't understand them. During my first visit, though, the husband showed me a picture on his phone of a piece of his life in Syria. He owned a vegetable and fruit store. The colors of the food were vivid in the image, and he stood in the Syrian sun wearing a blazer and sandals, talking with a friend or customer. I think I understood that.

They spent nearly half a decade in a camp in Jordan before being approved to come to the U.S. One of their kids was born in Jordan.

My wife organized a potluck for Syrian and American families about a month ago. I met another chicken factory worker who used to be a baker in Syria. He showed me pictures of his work, some of the most intricate cake designs I've ever seen. Another Syrian man, a current construction worker I think, showed me pictures of dresses and gowns he designed in Syria as a fashion designer. I met the high school-aged nephew of another Syrian family at the potluck, and he seems a little too acclimated to his life in Baltimore - he's been held up at gunpoint twice and literally shrugs it off.

Our Syrian friends invited us over the day after Thanksgiving. They were given a turkey by the husband's employer, and the husband grilled it into turkey dogs. They were really good. The salads and tea were good too. And the wife's baklava makes my mouth water even now.

Sitting comfortably among friends and their kids, I looked at the worn walls and carpet and thought about the bugs and rodents this family has managed. I enjoyed sunlight coming through the blinds that they usually keep closed for privacy and out of fear for their safety. They want to move from their current neighborhood; friends of theirs have been mugged, and the adults are fearful.

We sat on their living room floor eating lunch. I can't sit very comfortably on the floor to eat. It became comfortable. It was a great lunch.

After lunch, our hosts having cleaned up and the four of us sitting on the couch and chatting, the kids played a few board games and card games, then moved on to hide and seek. Their oldest child was counting in English at the bottom of the stairs, and there was very little prior discussion of the rules of the game; all the kids know the rules and how to count to 30.

Watching that little girl count, I found myself briefly confused and saddened, pensive really about the situation I was experiencing. Such clear appreciation of new friends of ours, residents of Baltimore, and such palpable connection with them. Really just an authentic relationship among humans. And our fulfilling lunch, shared generously, served on a camouflage tablecloth on the floor.

Camouflage, a tool of deception with an apparent military connotation. Our kids, their kids, the smiling in our conversation. Camouflage and concealment, aiming for an advantage. Our kids, their kids, the food and hopes and dreams. Camouflage and families separated, lives ended or displaced. Our kids, their kids, and laughter that I couldn't distinguish as American or Syrian.

I really like our Syrian friends. And I feel honored and lucky to share life with a wife who connected us, with kids who get why we care, and for the luck that birthed my atoms onto a land called America instead of a land called Syria. I don't want there to be needless war as so much of it is. And I can envision a world without it.

And I'm committed to it. Join me.

The stuff they bring into the classroom

"I saw, not so much a culture of pathology, as a culture fitted for a pathological world."

- Ta'nihisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power

I taught in a Baltimore City public high school for five years before moving to a Baltimore County private school six years ago. The public school was the one I attended as a high school student, a science and engineering magnet school. It's one of the top-performing schools in the city.

Creating relationships at the private school is a faster, deeper, and more universal experience than it ever was at the public school for me. I connected deeply (one-to-one) with no more than a handful of the 1300 or so students I taught at the public school over those five years, while I connect pretty quickly and deeply with nearly half of my students at the private school.

Class size is a big contributing factor to this phenomenon - the time and attention that I can give students at the private school lay a pretty solid foundation for developing relationships. However, there's something more visceral at work too.

I've considered that it was racial - I'm white; the public school was a large majority black; the private school is a large majority white. While I think (and not so much feel) that the racial differences between my students and me played a role in my lack of connection in the public school (as did my less developed teaching skills and philosophy at the time), I'm much more aware of a sense that it was something else. The students at the public school seemed to bring a lot more 'stuff' into the classroom with them - a lot more stuff between me and them, not because I'm white and they're black, but because the nature of their lives leaves them with a lot of 'stuff'.*

The stuff that my private school students bring into the classroom is a different kind of stuff in general. It's of a more material nature, less of an emotional and existential kind. It's $30 t-shirts paid for not as a symbol of status or a financial facade, but because they're the kind of clothes they wear (ie. afford and value). It's conversations about MacBooks vs. Razer Blades. This material stuff brings with it its own relationship challenges, but these are relatively easily surmounted compared to the existential stuff my public school students generally brought into the room with them.

Regardless of what people walk into the room with, I notice that I seem to have a choice about what I bring into the room with me. Whether it's a rich lax bro, a recently homeless girl, a kid on scholarship, or a recent gang initiate, I have a choice about what I bring into my interactions with them. So many of the students at both schools have no idea that they're carrying palpable (though invisible) baggage into the room with them. Alas, perhaps I have no idea of the emotional and spiritual baggage that I'm carrying either.

The world and its people need us to step it up, and while illuminating all my dark corners is an ongoing and important task, it isn't always an immediate requisite. Whatever they're bringing into my classroom, my commitment is to bring compassion, engagement, and integrity. That's my best. And I want to bring my best.

Though I'm sure that on some level I brought this into my old classroom, I sometimes wonder what if did a better job in the past of communicating through my own baggage, through their baggage, with compassion, engagement, and integrity as my medium and a transformed, just, and enlightened future the content...what if.

So I'll bring it the best I can, and in the end at least I'll know I played hard even if I didn't win. The invisible stuff we bring into the classroom is worth breaking through for the future we can forge together.

The problems of education are merely reflections of the deepest problems of our age... Education which fails to clarify our central convictions is mere training or indulgence. For it is our central convictions that are in disorder... Education, far from ranking as man's greatest resource, will then be an agent of destruction.

- E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered 

* Yes, the nature of their lives is in large part a result of their blackness (or, perhaps more accurately, a result of white people's whiteness), but I mean here that it wasn't an us vs. them kind of racial experience for me.

Slipping on the faculty room floor

Slipping on the faculty room floor
This morning I stepped into the faculty kitchen to put my lunch in the fridge. One step onto the tile and I slipped and went down; there was a puddle with water and coffee in it at the entrance to the room. I got up and cleaned up the mess.

If the person who made the mess had cleaned it up, I wouldn't have slipped. And because I cleaned it up, people after me wouldn't slip. Although our mere ideologies may prevent us from being the one to clean it up in either case, life is better for those who come after us when we take positive action now.

A bundle of sticks
A few days ago I had a conversation with one of our school's Chinese exchange students. He told me a story about a bundle of sticks:

A man had sons who always quarreled. Before dying, the man called the sons to his room and told them to bring a stick. When they got to his room, he instructed them to tie the sticks into a bundle. Each son then took a turn at trying to break the bundle. None could do it. He then instructed them to untie the bundle and break their sticks. The sons were able to easily break their individual sticks.

Eating less meat; being more compassionate; making ethical choices; educating ourselves; committing to actions; stretching ourselves and others; talking about climate change, pollution, poverty, hunger, and war. Actions to affect those things that matter to us are less likely to break us if we bundle up with others.

I'm growing in my willingness and ability to connect and work with people who value what I value. I'm excited for the start of the school year, another year to shift the compass needle. Thank you for reading.

And if I just don't care enough about dolphins?

While sitting on the beach I'm always hoping at least a little bit to see dolphins. I find it thrilling to find them. I call to the boys, 'look, dolphins!' My kids are barely interested. 

Yesterday after the dolphins glided away and I continued to look for more, I realized that I wouldn't care too much if I never saw them again. Sure, it would be a little sad if they went extinct, if we lost the chance to see them ever again. We'd talk about what a bummer it was, how our kids and grandkids would be innocently missing out. We'd tell ourselves it sucks, that unfortunately this is just the way things are, and too bad for the planet that this is the economic system and these are the modes of production we inherited, for better and for worse. I might mention virtual reality, and how one day we'll get to experience them again. We'd get over it pretty quickly.

Really, if our loss of dolphins too became a cost of this modern American life, oh well. This is a great life, and I don't usually think about dolphins much anyway, so no big deal. 

I tried to think of reasons to care about them, reasons I could use to argue for efforts to keep them and literally countless other creatures around, to not add them to the growing list of casualties of human consumption. They're beautiful, they're exciting, they increase the quality of our lives. 

But the truth is they don't add much to the quality of our lives. They don't add much to my life, and I consider myself a fan of dolphins. 

So why should I care enough to take actions I otherwise wouldn't, all for the welfare of a creature that I don't care much about?

My friend Alyce recently said to me, 'When your values are clear, your decisions are easy.' It's true for me. In any situation, if I remember to check in with my values, what I've committed to as a bigger picture, the choices ahead are generally clear, easy, and undoubtedly fulfilling. 

Above all I value the well-being of life. I'm committed that my actions improve the well-being of life, and I consider this my life's top priority.

So I guess it doesn't matter much what I or you get out of the existence of dolphins, birds, bears, trees, other humans, or any other living creature. If I'm out to improve the well-being of life, there's just the next action to take to move in that direction.

Like writing this blog post. I'm a little embarrassed to publish it because it's not as insightful or thought-provoking as I'd like it to be. But it was the next action for me to take. 

What is it that you value above all else? Are you allowing it to move you to action you otherwise wouldn't take?

Thank you for reading. :)

Unhooked from the feelings

Empathy

The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another. (Source.)

Compassion

Sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it. (Source.)

One of my kids is spending tonight in the hospital. He broke his arm/elbow badly today and had surgery to install a couple pins to hold his bones in place. He can't swim for the next 6 weeks, or do anything very active. And this is one active 8-yr-old!

Just writing those thoughts out has me feeling again so many disconcerting and sad feelings. I'm feeling very sad for him, and I'm feeling nervous about his upcoming dealings with additional pain, discomfort, awkwardness, and fears. I'm feeling sad for my wife having to see her boy hurt so much. I'm feeling frustrated that I can't do more to help, and I'm feeling resolved to be a better dad.

After digesting it for a while and talking with a few people to get straight on my feelings and thoughts and fears, I'm also feeling grateful. It could always be worse. Thankfully it's only his arm. Thankfully he'll heal. Thankfully I've got a great wife who will drop everything to be with our boy. Thank goodness for health insurance. Thank goodness for Michael Bloomberg and the kick-butt facility at Hopkins. Thank goodness we live in the West, with the roads, water, facilities, technology, and institutional integrity that will continue to make his suffering minimal. Thank goodness it's an injury from having fun and not due to a chemical attack or shrapnel.

All of those feelings, so natural and instinctual. And the feelings were overwhelming at times today. Would I change that? No way. Looking back on it, I'm glad to feel so strongly for my son's well-being. It validates that I am a loving dad and that I do care deeply for my boys and their mom.

But are those feelings necessary, as a prerequisite, to caring? If I didn't feel that way, would I somehow be less capable of being there for my son?

Paul Bloom, Yale professor of psychology and cognitive science, argues that my positive impacts on others could be even further reaching by shifting gears from empathy:

...empathy is surprisingly bad at making us good. It's a spotlight focusing on certain people in the here and now. This makes us care more about them, but it leaves us insensitive to the long-term consequences of our acts and blind as well to the suffering of those we do not or cannot empathize with. Empathy is biased, pushing us in the direction of parochialism and racism. (Source.)

In a podcast interview here and in a short text interview here, Bloom summarizes this argument expounded upon in his latest book: Against Empathy, the Case for Rational Compassion.

If we rely on empathy to determine our moral actions, we are limited in the breadth of possible people we are capable of caring for. Empathy is inherently biased; it's a clearly beneficial, though limited, evolutionary response to those close to us hurting. It matters with the people close to us, but we can't rely on those feelings to push us to act for the well-being of those outside our close circles.

What if instead, or in addition, we allowed our moral compass to be moved by rational compassion? Rational compassion: compassion guided by reason and other cognitive skills. 

I'm referring here to concern for others, wanting their pain to go away, wanting their lives to improve—but without the shared emotional experience that's so central to empathy... it turns out that compassion is superior in just about every way. It's less biased and innumerate, less upsetting and exhausting. (Source.)

Developing our experience of compassion cognitively, compassion could become an act of the will, a result of choice that we can point toward anyone, near or far. 

How much bigger can we care? Empathy may say, as Bloom's research implies, 'not too far.' But rational compassion - if you can think about them, you can care for them and the improvement of their well-being.

As I was driving to the hospital tonight to drop off bear, blankie, and some warm clothes for my wife, I thought about empathy and rational compassion. I realized that I could let all those feelings I described above settle into the background for a while, and I could think about how I can best relieve my son's suffering. I thought about how I could best serve the needs of my family. I thought about who I could be for him and my wife to brighten their experience. 

I'm so thankful for those feelings of empathy for my son, for the validation of my humanity, instincts, and love. And those feelings had me swirling in their depth and questions. When I put aside empathy and its attachment to feelings and instead turned on some rational compassion, I got to create new actions to make a difference.

And I'm committed that the actions of my life mitigate the suffering of kids all around the world, whether their suffering is from hunger, thirst, war, greed, pollution, religious dogma, political ideologies, or anything else. And I don't have to feel any particular way about any of it. Nor do you. We can all choose rational compassion and watch our circles of caring expand to make the world a better place not just for our families, our people, and our nation, but for all.

I'm thankful for the feeling, and I'm proud to not be hooked on it.

Source.

The Privilege of Place

Extractivism is also directly connected to the notion of sacrifice zones - places that, to their extractors, somehow don't count and therefore can be poisoned, drained, or otherwise destroyed, for the supposed greater good of economic progress.

- Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything

The Privilege of Place

I grew up middle class and white, and I usually felt uncomfortable in situations when self-consciously my being white met someone else's being black. For example, when I was about 10 my sister and I wandered farther in a particular direction from home than we previously had. We ended up in an apartment complex's parking lot, and there were about 15 black kids there hanging out. We looked at them, they looked at us, and I felt uncomfortable.

Until recently, I always looked back on my feelings from that and similar experiences as feelings of fear for my safety, born from a racist perspective. But I can now see that the feeling then is one I still feel at times, and it's not mainly fear. It's discomfort, sometimes thick discomfort, at being privileged and not knowing what to do about it. And that discomfort is always flavored with fear, guilt, shame, pride, arrogance, or other feelings.

I'm glad to finally now see that privilege isn't a bad thing. It doesn't mean I did something wrong or that there's something I should feel ashamed of. In fact, privilege could lead me to feel all sorts of valid ways and they're all okay. I don't have to do anything with those feelings.

However, the most empowering perspective on privilege that I now take is that privilege is an opportunity - it's an opportunity to use fortunate circumstances to affect meaningful change.

Not In My Back Yard - NIMBY

It was easier to be okay with U.S. slavery as a white person in the 1830s. It was easier to be okay with anti-semitic laws as a Catholic Italian or a Christian German in the 1930s. It was easier to be okay with the Iraq War as an American in the 2000s. And it's easier to be okay with past, present, and future environmental degradation so long as it's Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY).

Our willingness to be okay with devastating extraction -> processing -> manufacturing -> and transporting effects on humans and non-humans is a result of our dissociation from the places and people directly impacted. This is the privilege of place - we are privileged to remain detached from the continued negative impacts of our society's way of life.

In the fairly affluent community where I live, it would be preposterous to consider the construction of a waste incineration plant (a plant where trash is burned for energy, like Baltimore's conspicuous one in the image below). A few years ago, however, Maryland approved a permit for an incinerator in Curtis Bay, Baltimore. NIMBY = it's fine with me, so long as it's Not In My Back Yard.

The Curtis Bay community, however, successfully organized and effectively fought the permit. To keep this from being solely a NIMBY battle, though, unclean incinerators need to be fought everywhere.

Baltimore stands apart as the American big city with the most deaths caused by air pollution, and Curtis Bay is its dirtiest community. Several years ago, the air there stood to get even worse when the state approved a permit for a giant incinerator that would burn 4,000 tons of trash every day and emit up to 1,240 pounds of lead and mercury every year.

- This Washington Post article

Baltimore's waste incineration plant.

Privilege as an Opportunity

There is no middle of nowhere, nowhere that doesn't 'count'... On some level we all know this, that we are part of a swirling web of connections. Yet we are trapped in linear narratives that tell us the opposite: that we can expand infinitely, that there will always be more space... more resources... more people.

- Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything

Becoming aware of our privilege of place does not necessitate caring or commitment. There isn't a 'should help' inherent in any privilege. However, I think that becoming aware of our privilege of place is likely to awaken latent compassion for those we are impacting.

Having the right line

"It felt like the difference between one or two drops in an otherwise empty bucket."

- Jonathan Smucker, Hegemony How-To 

I think I've been struggling the last couple months with my identity as an "activist". What should I be doing as an environmental activist? How should I be being as an environmental activist?

In a country where Donald Trump can be elected President and fill his cabinet with vocally short-term-thinking stooges of the fantastical promises of free market capitalism, what do I have to say that's worthwhile for another to read?

Tonight my inspiration to write comes from the same book referenced above, Hegemony How-To:

"It felt as if having the right line about everything was more important than making measurable progress on anything."

I don't know what the most effective actions are that I can take to curb the trajectory with which we're heading into the future: a future of continued, rapid degradation of Earth's ecosystems and communities as a result of exploitative economic practices and policies that put profits before Life.

But I do know that a better future is possible, and even the quietest whisper of an inner calling to work toward that future is worth answering: speaking up even if I haven't thought of the right line to use yet.

Maybe the verse below speaks to more than just me tonight:

"But Moses said to God, 'Who am I, that I should go to Pharaoh, and that I should bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?'"

- Exodus 3:11