Month: June 2017

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Ooh! Tasty!

When you come to know Big Blake, our muscular English Lab, you quickly learn three things.

First, that he is enthusiastic, as befits a dog who is 11 years old going on 2. He never descends stairs when he can charge them. He neve lets out one bark when 75 will do. And why simply greet someone when you can knock them right off their feet?

Second, that he is a coward about water. I don’t mean the baths that every dog dreads. I mean that he won’t go outside when rain is falling, and that even dashing through a sprinkler is a traumatic event that has to be worked up to.

Finally, and most importantly, he eats. Anything.

Big deal, I hear you see, he’s a Lab. Let me repeat: AN-Y-THING.

Entire bag of chocolate chips? Check.

Enough crayons to decorate the yard? Double-check.

So many baby wipes that he turned into a canine Kleenex box at the other end? Check and mate.

So when my wife Heather called me at work and told me that Blake might need a vet run, I was anything but surprised.

“I think he ate a bunch of aluminum foil while I was in the bathroom,” she told me.

Mind you, aluminum is not a Typical Dietary Supplement(tm) in this house, even for our canine trash compactor o’doom. But Heather had been making no-bake cookies and disposed of a fair amount of aluminum wrap afterward. When she came out of the bathroom, she saw that there was no longer any wrap in the bin … and that Blake was enthusiastically licking the last piece of thin metal on the floor until it gleamed.

And thus did Blake resume his starring role at the veterinarian, induced to bring up what had been down.

In retrospect, this should not have been a surprise. Blake smelled cookies. Blake had the physique and opportunity to pursue the wonderful smell. And given that his first impulse is to turn anything remotely edible into Blake fuel, he wasn’t going to care that the remnants of sweet-smelling goop still had thin metal attached.

At least, not until he was made to care. Rather abruptly. And then spent the afternoon woozy and sulking.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

I don’t mean that any of us are in the habit of eating aluminum. (Though if you find the cans to be the best part of a refreshing Dr Pepper, the Weekly World News is on line two.) But as a species, we do have a habit of jumping to decisions that seem oh-so-good at the time, only to discover that there’s stuff attached that doesn’t feel so good later.

It might be the attractive face that (poorly) hides the toxic personality. The anti-terrorist laws that say “Quick, be safe! And don’t worry about that silly Fourth Amendment.” And the ever-familiar candidate who has your best interests at heart, really, and then does a mile-long swath of damage that anyone with a newspaper subscription and a fourth-grade reading ability could have anticipated.

I’m not saying that we should never compromise on anything, that nothing less than perfect is acceptable. That way lies paralysis, and possibly a career in Congress. What I am saying is that too often, many of us don’t even think about whether compromise is necessary at all or consider what’s being traded off. We simply act, and then deal with unpleasant consequences later.

And “later” has a way of arriving sooner than we think.

Forethought isn’t as fun, I know. Especially in a world where everything demands to be done now-now-now. But it’s worth taking the time to consider, to weigh, to discuss. When you articulate what you want, you force yourself to think about what you’re getting. And what comes with it. And whether it’s worth it at all.

That’s valuable, no matter what you’re doing in life.

After all, no one wants to be foiled again.

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Hearing Through the Storm

I wanted to write about Adam West this week. This was going to be a warm and fuzzy farewell to TV’s Batman, full of  the echoes of “BAM!” and “ZZONK!” and maybe even a “KAPOW!” or two.

But then shots rang out. Again. And it’s been a little hard to think about anything else.

This time, it crossed the country in a single day. The sites couldn’t have been more different. A baseball field in Virginia where congressmen were practicing for a charity game. A UPS center in San Francisco, where it was just another working day – until suddenly, it wasn’t.

Until the anger reached out. Again.

I used to write about these more. That was when the announcement of a mass shooting was a punch to the gut, a painful shattering of an ordinary day. It demanded to be grappled with, even if there were no clear answers to offer. (Are there ever?) Even if all that could be offered was comfort.

Now it seems more like an old wound, poked and prodded to life again. They’ve not become normal – please, let them never become normal – but the pace has increased and the alarm bells have started to blend with the overall noise. Now, we pay lasting attention mostly when something raises the bar, with maybe a high profile victim (the baseball shooting), or a strange setting (the Aurora movie theater), or a huge casualty list (the Orlando nightclub).

I almost wrote “… or a place we expected to be safe.” But that’s the point, isn’t it? We used to expect safety. Now, we seem to expect anger. No, shootings like this aren’t normal yet, but now they’re punctuation marks rather than breaks in the narrative.

When I was a kid, we used to play a storytelling game called “The Boiler Burst.” It was a narrative version of musical chairs, where whoever was up had to tell a story, usually long and rambling. Sooner or later, the person would have to call out the words “the boiler burst” and everyone would move.

After you’d played a while, you became harder to surprise. You learned how to listen to the story, to listen for the cues that would suggest the punchline was coming. You knew which players would jump to the punch line as quickly as possible, and which ones would draw it out to the point of agony. The more closely you listened, the more ready you were.

I think we need to do some listening now. Because the pressure keeps building. And if it doesn’t stop, the boiler will burst again.

I’m not naive enough to think that we can ever completely scourge this kind of thing from the nation, or that we can ever understand every last motive of every last shooter. But we can grapple with the national anger that gives them a space to grow and flourish. The rage that has touched all of us, even those who have never heard a single shot.

Some of that anger comes from understandable places. There are many among us who fear for their families, or their jobs, or their rights, or their place in the world. When the conversation seems to stop, when those who might be able to help turn into stone walls – or worse, seem to add to the pain – the fear turns to anger and the anger grows.

Some of it is manufactured. From ancient times to now, people have found it convenient to stir up anger and point it at a target – an “other” who can be safely blamed for all their woes. That rage can build mobs. It can build camps. It never, ever builds solutions.

We need to hear where the anger is coming from. We need to listen for the real worries and fears that generate it, and to know when we’re being sold an easy answer. We need to be more aware of each other and our hurts, so that no one has to shoulder their burden alone.

We won’t prevent all the crazies. But we can stop helping them flourish. And if we turn down the volume, maybe, just maybe, we can better hear them coming.

Batman’s not going to burst through the door this time.

This time, we have to come to our own rescue.

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Teaming Up

The threat of rain had passed. The clouds lingered, leaving a perfect day for softball. Missy and her friends were all geared up, and nothing could stop the launch of another great season.

Not even a little thing like having enough players.

Some of you may remember the Monday night softball league from previous columns. The rosters feature disabled players, great enthusiasm, and absolutely no concern for strikes, balls, outs, or even runs. It’s an hour in the sunshine to hit, throw, and run (or walk, or wheel) to the cheers of friends and family as each lineup makes its way around the bases.

“There’s a lot of love on this field,” one parent told me at the season opener. I had to agree.

It’s a couple of steps beyond informal, and that’s its glory. Sun Tzu once called a formless strategy the pinnacle of military deployment. I’m not sure how many softball teams Sun Tzu coached, but the same idea applies here: things are so loose that anything can be adapted to.

So when one team showed up with practically every member who had ever worn the jersey, while another had a bare handful signed up and ready to play, the answer was obvious. No, not forfeit.

Share players.

Minutes later, about a third of Missy’s teammates had crossed to the other dugout. The uniforms no longer meant a thing. The game had always been friends playing with friends, now it became even more so.

The different teams didn’t matter. The game was more important. And the game went on.

That’s an example to learn from.

It’s easy to get attached to teams. One way or another, we do it most of our lives, and not just in Bronco orange or Rockies purple. We stake out grounds based on politics. Creeds. Histories. Origins. We find a thousand ways to draw the line and define who we are – or, sometimes more vividly, to define who we’re not.

Now an identity is not in itself a bad thing. I’m not advocating that we all join the ranks of the formless, the gray, the uncommitted who just move through the background and leave without a ripple. Ideas CAN be important; concepts CAN be urgent enough to fight for or toxic enough to oppose with spirit and conviction.

But when the team becomes more important than the game, something is out of balance.

It happens when winning becomes more important than how you win. It happens when rules, or consideration, or even simple civility become less important than self-aggrandizement. It happens when conversation stops and the participants begin talking past each other – beyond not seeing each other as equals, all the way to literally not seeing each other.

It happens when “I” becomes paramount. When “we” becomes the people that agree with me. And when “they” ceases to exist in our awareness altogether.

Each of us could quote a dozen examples in just a week’s headlines. I won’t waste the space here. But we all know the atmosphere it creates, as deadly as any greenhouse gas.

The thing is, teams are temporary. The Federalists were once the hottest thing going. Now they’re a line in a Broadway musical. Parties, movements, loyalties of a hundred kinds are born of a moment in history. They change, they grow, they merge and split, they even disappear – and the players almost always find another team.

But the game has to go on.

Without the game, there’s no reason for a team at all.

I’m hoping that most of us believe that. If we do, if we act on it, the toxic clouds can lift again. We can have disagreement, even passionate argument, without the discord that drowns out any useful theme.

We can walk in the sunshine again. I think we will.

Maybe we can even play a little softball.

Batter up.

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Threats and Deadlines

I don’t anger easily.  But every once in a while, somebody will push the wrong button and Bruce Banner will turn into the Hulk.

Right now, I can feel my skin turning green.

The last several days have seen windows shot out at a newspaper office. They’ve seen a bomb threat at a newspaper printing plant. And most famously, of course, they’ve given us the reporter that was knocked down by an angry Congressional candidate (now Congressman). Incidents aren’t automatically a pattern, of course, but these sorts of incidents put my teeth on edge.

I spent too long in the profession to react any other way.

I worked as a newspaper reporter for 16 years. It’s a fascinating profession that can tap you into the beating heart of a community. It also means you can wind up on the edge – or in the middle – of a number of risky situations. You may be witnessing a fire, a police standoff, a tornado, even a 500-year-flood that’s swallowing up the roads as you watch.

And once in a while, the risk comes to you instead.

I was one of the lucky ones. Over my career, the worst I ever ran into was occasional harsh words (amidst many kind ones) and one flaming bag of dog poop left on my front porch.  But it can get worse very easily. Newsrooms aren’t high-security areas, and more than one paper can tell stories about the angry reader who got within three feet of a reporter’s desk before anyone knew he or she was there. Those sorts of moments leave you anxious afterward, and watchful.

And sometimes watchful isn’t enough.

The Committee to Protect Journalists publishes a list each year of reporters and media workers around the world who have been killed as they did their jobs. They’ve tracked over 1,800 since 1992, including over 800 murders. Small numbers in a global sense, perhaps, but sobering as you read the names and stories of each, and realize how quickly a situation can turn bad.

Why make the list? Because press freedom is important. Because someone has to be able to tell the stories that a country needs to hear, without fear of reprisal or intimidation.

Don’t get me wrong. I know the press corps isn’t full of Woodward and Bernstein clones. We all know the ones who are superficial, or lazy, or heartless enough to ask “How do you feel?” to someone who’s just lost their family in a hurricane. We know the mudslingers and the loudmouths. Crackerjack reporters are still out there, doing more with less every year, but as in any profession, they often share space with the mediocre and the outright bad.

None of that justifies a blow, or a threat, or a shot in the night.

It’s OK to get angry at the press. I’ve been there myself. It’s all right to be upset with an outlet, or a media chain, or even the entire institution. Sometimes anger is justified, a necessary step in order to bring about change. It’s true of government, so why not of its watchdogs as well?

But when that anger crosses the line into violence, that’s it. The story is over. At that point, you are not my friend, nor any friend to democracy.

It’s been said that politics is based on the conviction that talking is better than fighting. Arguments need not bring warfare, disagreement need not provoke violence. That’s an ideal, of course – our country has seen the process break down into duels, riots, and even civil war – but it’s a vital one to hold.

And once held, it must be defended. Or else the conversation cannot happen at all.

I hope these are isolated incidents. They’re certainly good reminders. No rights are guaranteed; they must be claimed anew each day or they become simply words on paper. Someone will always test the boundaries and the boundaries must hold.

At its best, our country is a Banner achievement.

Don’t let Hulk smash.