A Different Reality

One of my favorite TV shows is Mythbusters, and for the first few seasons it would open up with a clip of Adam Savage saying “I reject your reality, and substitute my own.” I love that line, because it comes in handy so often. There are many times when someone else’s reality just doesn’t line up with what mine is. It’s not necessarily that their reality is wrong, but it’s different from mine.

That’s the case with Eric Deggans. In a piece he did for NPR earlier this month, he says that interracial couples on TV live in an all too perfect world, where the “elephant in the room” of their racial differences is almost never an issue. He says that he makes this observation based on his 20-odd years of experience as a black man married to a white woman.

I reject the reality of Mr Deggans…or at least I reject it as being universal. I’m also a black man with 20-odd years of experience being married to a white woman, and I can tell you that we don’t spend a whole lot of time discussing racial issues. Currently our biggest ongoing issue has been getting our eight-year-old daughter to practice piano and clarinet without whining and dragging her feet. In fact, in the almost 23 years that we’ve been married, there have been very few times when the fact that I’m black and she’s white have ever been points of contention. Not from our families, not from our friends, not from our co-workers. There may have been a few comments from strangers, but even then, if we had five bad experiences in the past 23 years, that’s saying a lot.

Of course, location probably matters a bit. I’ve lived in the Northeast all of my life, and in a college town for the past 38 years. I suppose things might be a bit different in Missisippi…or Florida, where Deggans writes from.

I think that who your friends and acquaintances are matters a lot too. If most of the people you know are fairly open-minded, then being an interracial couple isn’t going to be any more of an issue than being an Italian-Norwegian couple…and talk about the cultural differences there.

Moreover, as long as we’re talking about different realities, there are as many different realities here as there are people in relationships. Just looking at five of the white girls I’ve been involved with during the past 38 years, I can say that things have run the gamut from “Paula” who couldn’t even bring me home to meet her parents (that lasted about three weeks) to “Lisa,” whose Italian mother loved me like one of her own kids, and for six years always made a point to try to make my favorite food when I came over for dinner. Sometimes it really is that easy, and really is a non-issue.

Which brings me to my next point: as relatively easy as it was for me 30 years ago, things have changed a lot. I can tell you, from 19 years of being a teacher, that among the students and families I know, interracial relationships are no big deal. The people on the shows that Deggans complains about, and indeed the writers of these shows, reflect this new reality; they came of age in a much different era.

So, to be fair, as I’ve said before, I’m not going to reject Deggans’ reality out of hand. For surely there are people for whom his reality is their experience. Instead, I’ll just say, again, that he hasn’t considered that his reality doesn’t necessarily reflect that of the rest of us who’ve been in interracial relationships. There’s a lot of variation out there.

And that’s the reality.

Material Things

A friend of my posted on Facebook:

Children will not remember you for the material things you provided but for the feelings that you cherished them with.

I don't know. I remember the material things, and the trips. That's why I didn't want to have three, four, or more kids; I wanted to be able to do the same things with them that my parents did with me and my sister, and for them to enjoy it as much as the two of us did.

I remember the Playmobile dashboards that my sister and I each got one Christmas, and that we played together with all the time. I remember being the first family at our school to discover Lego, and introducing both Devra and Sofie to it decades later. I remember the Kenner girder and panel building sets that my father and I worked on, and was disappointed to find out that Kenner no longer exists. I've since found out that they've been revived by Bridge Street Toys. And of course, I remember something that wasn't even mine; the Magnus chord organ that my sister got for Christmas. This is what I taught myself how to play piano on, and we know how important that was.

What about the trips? We didn't venture far out of the northeast. Heck, we didn't venture far out of the NYC metropolitan area. But there was Palisades Amusement Park; the Flemington Fair (which is the closest thing New Jersey had to a state fair); three visits to the 1964-65 New York World's Fair; and a long vacation trip to Quebec, by way of Buffalo, Niagara Falls, and Montreal (which included my first pass by Syracuse, and seeing the big General Electric sign from the Thruway). There were also day trips to Bear Mountain, Gillette Castle, and Mystic Seaport.

And of course there was the beach. Unlike Jerseyans now, we didn't call it going to the shore. Our regular beach was Sandy Hook, but we also visited Lake Hopatcong, Cheesequake (which my sister and I always mispronounced as "Cheesecake"), and one visit to Cape May, which hooked me for life. Now that's the beach that the Gatlings of Syracuse have been going to for almost 25 years.

Let's not forget trips to New York (actually the St Albans section of Queens), Pittsburgh (really Braddock and Monroeville), Washington DC, and Hampton VA to visit relatives. That first three-day weekend in Hampton led to my sister and I spending the summer there a year later.

But my point, and I do have one, is that it’s not a simple choice between material things on the one hand and feelings on the other. Yes, there are far too many families where the parents try to replace affection and attention with the latest expensive gadget. I also know too many people who grew up with very little money, and seem almost perversely proud of the fact that they and their 11 loving siblings only had a rock and twig to play with…between them. They seem to believe that families with some disposable income can’t possibly be as happy as theirs.

But I think that the most fortunate people are those who, like me and my sister, grew up in families where we had both; where the material things we got and the experiences we were able to have were signs of our parents’ love, and not attempted replacements for it.

And those of us who remember, and treasure, those gifts and experiences will try to do the same for our own children.

Hmm…I guess that means it’s really time to plan that trip to Quebec with Sofie.

The Mother of Invention

No, I'm not talking about Frank Zappa.

I got a Facebook message from someone I knew in high school, asking why I didn't invent Facebook. My answer was very simple: I didn't invent it because I didn't need it.

Think about it, we tend to invent, or want to see invented, things that we see a personal need for; and I didn't have a personal need for something like Facebook. At least not from where I sat.

Mark Zuckerberg, on the other hand, was in a different seat, in a different world. Actually, his seat was in a world that I belonged to almost 40 years ago: that of a college student.

I don't remember what the official name of the 1974 pictorial guide to the freshman class at Syracuse University was called, but I do remember its nickname: The Pigbook, a nickname I heard it got because so many of the girls in it looked like pigs. Many other colleges had something similar, some other version of a "facebook" that was given out to all the freshmen. Back in the 70s, no one could've imagined turning the campus facebook into something you did through the school's computing systems, and definitely no one thought of connecting all the colleges, and even the whole world the same way. The technology just didn't exist. But the 21st century is a far different place than the 1970s, and now the idea behind Facebook seems like a no-brainer.

But still, it's not something that I particularly had a need to invent; because I wasn't a freshman guy trying to find out about that cute girl on page 43 anymore. Heck, the few times I actually tried to meet someone from the SU "facebook" ended up in disaster.

But there are things I would have invented, and actually did invent, because they were important to me.

First of all there's the backpack. Now I know what you're thinking. I can't possibly be taking credit for inventing something that soldiers and Boy Scouts had been using for decades before I was born. And you're right, I'm not. What I invented was using them for carrying books around in. After breaking off the handle of yet another briefcase by carrying too many books in it, I decided that I needed something that could handle all the stuff that this little geek was hauling around. So I went to the Boy Scout department at Muir's (our local department store), and got the smallest backpack I could find. After all, I wasn't going for a week-long hike, I was just carrying books and stuff around East Orange High School.

I was made fun of at first, but within 10 years everyone was using backpacks to carry their school stuff in.

Then there's the Walkman. Yes, I'm actually going to claim to have invented the Walkman...or at least to have come up with the idea behind it. I needed a way to listen to my cassette tapes on choir tour without disturbing anyone else on the bus. So I went out and bought a small cassette player and some large stereo headphones. Worked like a charm.

Sony introduced the Walkman a year later. I swear, someone from choir must've told them about it.

But the one really big thing I would've invented, or at least wanted to see someone invent, came from the fact that my house was being taken over by my collection of almost 1000 45s and a couple of hundred LPs and CDs not to mention 100 or so custom mix tapes by year or artist. Not only were all these records and tapes taking over my living room, but I had no good way to keep track of them. Even my Library Science skills couldn't help me.

Then in 2001 the iPod was introduced. I knew exactly what this was when I saw it. I knew that this would not only allow me to eventually get rid of every piece of vinyl in my house, but it would also allow me to clear out the space that had been taken up by $1200 of stereo equipment. An iPod and a set of $20 speakers from Radio Shack would do the trick.

Forget Facebook, the iPod is the thing I would've invented, not Facebook. Because this was the thing that was important to me.

Besides, with my teenaged history of stalking girls, it would've been just a little too creepy if I had invented Facebook.

Watching Dick Clark

I haven’t watched the ball drop on New Year’s Eve in a long time. It might have been sometime back in the 20th century. Although when I was in college, I remember staying up to see the new year arrive not just in Times Square, but in Chicago too; these days I’m usually in bed before the new year is even official in Nova Scotia.

Which brings us to another New Year’s Eve tradition: Dick Clark.

When Dick Clark first gave us New Year’s Rockin’ Eve in 1972, it was as an alternative to Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians, the band for “old people,” playing Auld Lang Syne. It was a New Year’s Eve celebration for us young people. Well, now, 38 years later, we’ve become the old people, and quite frankly, we wouldn’t mind a bit of Lombardo, when you consider what popular music sounds like today.

But that’s not what I’m talking about here.

Dick Clark is famously known as “the world’s oldest teenager,” and with a nod to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, many of us surmised that there was a painting hidden in his attic that had seen better days. However, his 2004 stroke may have changed the state of the painting, as he finally began to show his age, and it’s been painful for many of us to watch. In fact, I’ve heard people even mention feeling guilty about watching Dick Clark struggle to get through what used to seem to come so easily for him.

I thought about this a bit, and considered that after more than 30 years as host of American Bandstand, he had decided that it was time to step down and have a younger person host the show – a show that was aimed at young people. Knowing that, it just seemed natural that rather than wanting to become Guy Lombardo, he would realize that at some point he should step down for a younger host. And perhaps he had thought that…before the stroke. But the stroke became a game changer.

Before the stroke, he could simply have announced his retirement, done one last ball drop, and all would’ve been well. After the stroke, everything was different. Now, despite any plans he may have had before, he had to come back next year, just to show that he could do it. And so he does, and so he will…until the day he dies on-camera doing the countdown to the new year. And it’s painful for all of us who stay up late enough to watch.

But there are two other perspectives that I hadn’t considered. The first is the amount of encouragement his post-stroke appearances have provided for other stroke survivors. The second is how much being there on New Year’s Eve means to him personally; he said that he wouldn’t have missed the countdown to 2006 for the world.

There’s one more thing that I hadn’t thought of until just now. Maybe he understands that he has become Guy Lombardo, and not only accepts it, but is proud of it. After all, even though he may not have been cool to us kids, for decades Lombardo was synonymous with New Year’s Eve.

To his credit, Dick Clark has handed off most of the hosting duties to Ryan Seacrest (who I hope will pass it along to someone else before he hits 60), and has pretty much become the voice and face of the midnight countdown; making him our generation’s Ben Grauer.

So rather than feeling guilty or uncomfortable about watching him, or wishing that he’d take himself off the air, let’s wish him many more happy countdowns.

Of course, they’ll still all be way past my bedtime.

Have Yourself An OK Little Christmas

Last week I was talking to a friend of mine about how she had always been trying to create the "perfect Christmas" for her and her family, and seemed, to her mind, to be failing at it every time. She could never quite get the magic that she remembered from her childhood and when her now-grown children were younger.

This reminded me of a clip from The Daily Show that my daughter Devra showed me. It was called Even Better Than The Real Thing, and was all about how all these pundits are saying that things were better back in the 80s, the 70s, the 60s, the 50s, the 40s, etc, but when people who actually lived as adults through those eras were interviewed, they told about how many things were wrong back in "the good old days," and that there never was any "golden age" when everything was perfect.

The conclusion that the correspondent for the piece came to was that each of the pundits who referred to a particular time as one when things were "better" was referring to the time when they were kids, and didn't know or have to know all of the gritty stuff that was going on in the larger world around them. So of course things seemed better to them.

So what does this have to do with the price of a bagel in Brooklyn?

When we think of our "perfect Christmases," we almost never remember the ones we had as adults. It's the memories we have from childhood, when we didn't have to do any of the preparation; when Christmas, along with all the presents, all the relatives, and all the food, just sort of magically appeared in front of us, and we participated without really having to help create it. That's why, as adults, the magic seems to fade, and we can't quite get the perfect Christmas anymore...because now we're the ones doing the work behind the scenes to create what will become someone else's memory of a perfect Christmas.

So to all of you and especially my friend, I say, sit back, relax, don't stress yourself out. Don't worry about having or creating a perfect Christmas. Instead, let yourself have an OK one. I'm betting that you'll feel a lot better about it.

The Milgram Effect

Two weeks ago I talked about unspeakable things. That is, I talked about people who insist on going into the gory details of what I would consider to be unspeakable things. I expected some responses to that, and I was not disappointed.

I didn’t have “time” to distinguish between the types of situations where people might feel obligated to give the gruesome details, and I also didn’t have the time to connect them with what I call the “Milgram Effect.” I’ll do that this week.

I’ve mentioned the Milgram Experiment before, in my entry on “obedience to authority,” but in case you’ve forgotten, let me recap for you:

In response to the recent war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, Yale Psychology professor Stanley Milgram set up an experiment in which he told volunteers that he was testing the effect of electrical shocks on memory. In reality, his goal was to test people’s obedience to authority, even when what they were being asked to do went against their personal morals.

In the original 1961 experiments, only 35% of the volunteers refused to continue administering the shocks (which unbeknownst to them, were fake) after the person in the other room started screaming, while 65% went on to the final 450-volt shock.

Ironically, after he saw how disturbed the first batch of volunteers were at finding what horrible things they were capable of doing, Milgram continued running the experiment with more people; obeying the “authority” of academic inquiry, rather than saying “enough already” to human suffering; and in the TV movie version of this, once he realized what he had done, Milgram was quite distraught.

So what does this have to do with the workshop I went to? It depends on the reason why the speaker decided to take us all the way to “level 11” in hearing the horrible details of what was going on in the Congo.

If the speaker’s goal was simply to educate us as to the horrors going on there, then that goal could’ve been reached by simply telling us that women were being sexually tortured in unspeakable ways, and not citing chapter and bloody verse, while we sat there, flinching, unable to leave, and unable to stop ourselves from hearing.

Instead, the speaker ended up doing a Milgram on us; continuing to “run the experiment,” and giving us more details, despite seeing the obvious pain of the audience, and the person doing the reading. The speaker went all the way to that last 450-volt shock, by forcing us to hear details that 99% of us never need to hear.

The first one or two shocks would’ve been enough for most of us. But according to the people who replied to me, there is a group of people who definitely need that last 450-volt shock, and maybe even higher ones, administered. These people are what we would call “The Deniers.” These are the people who either deny that the Holocaust happened or that it was really that bad. These are the people who make the same denials about other documented and unspeakable cases of man’s inhumanity to man.

Clearly, to a denier, you have to provide all the gory, disgusting, graphic, unspeakable information, not giving them a moment to flinch; in order to make it clear to them that these things did and do happen. But is everyone a denier? By no means, and the people in the workshop that day were not a bunch deniers.

How would I have reacted had I been chosen to read those passages that day? I've thought about this a bit, and I’d like to think that after the second sentence, I’d have to stop and say that I could not and would not read any more to the audience, citing the Milgram experiments on obedience to authority, and not inflicting more pain as my reason.

I’d like to think that, but maybe I would “simply follow orders,” and keep reading too.

And I wouldn’t like myself very much when I realized what I’d done.

Unspeakable Things

My wife’s family plays a game that I call “One More Terrible Thing.” It’s not really a game at all, but when the family gets together, talk will inevitably turn to some horrible news story that one of them read or heard about, and then that will remind Cousin Jane about some other tragedy that she now has to talk about, and that will remind Uncle Bob about a horrible thing that he has to tell everyone; and it all goes on in a tragic version of “Can You Top This?”

When the game starts, I leave the room. The tragedies I know about, I prefer to keep to myself; and I don’t want to add any new ones to anyone’s collection.

Why? Have you ever heard the old saying that if I have a good idea and I tell it to you, then we both have a good idea? It means that telling that good idea spreads it. Well, similarly, I believe that the same thing applies to misery; and that spreading a tragic story that you have no real connection to, merely spreads the pain. Why should I tell you about a horrible thing that happened to a friend of mine in Minnesota, just to “make conversation?” Why should I add her misery to what you already have on your plate, and then have you spread it later on to some other totally unrelated person.

Maybe I’m just too sensitive a person, but I really believe in spreading no more misery than is absolutely necessary.

Which brings us to the workshop.

A while ago I was at a workshop in which the speaker asked one of the attendees to read few passages to the audience from a book that described in gruesome detail some of the unspeakably horrible things that are being done by both sides to women in the Congo in the midst of war.

As I sat there listening to a game of “one more terrible thing” that would make my wife’s family sound like pathetic amateurs, I wondered just how much of this detail was necessary for us to hear in order for the speaker to make her point, and spur us to want to change the situation. At what point did it become overkill, making some of us think, “Just kill them all and let God sort them out,” or even to question God’s existence in the first place? And not to try to make our discomfort seem at all equal to the very real pain of the people we were being told about, did giving us all of the gory details simply end up spreading the misery further?

You will notice that I mentioned “unspeakably horrible things” that were being done. I didn’t give you the details, because to my mind, just that phrase should be enough to make you wince at what the possibilities could be, without putting actual images in your head that can never be erased.

I also used that phrase because the things that were read to us that day were indeed unspeakably horrible. As I posted on Facebook later on that day, “We need to know that the Holocaust happened, we don’t all need to know every gruesome detail of what the Nazis did.” To force people to see and hear every detail of what was done is to spread the pain that they inflicted even further.

I believe that there are some evils that should remain unspeakable, unless you have specifically asked for the information, or have a real need for it. I have heard more than I needed to know, and starting with me, it will become unspeakable, so that I don’t spread the pain any further.

And yet, it remains that something does need to be done about the situation in the Congo.