All posts by Chelsea Rudman

Chelsea Rudman is an international development professional and freelance writer who lives in Washington, DC. Her writing has previously been published in the NY Press and Matador Travel.
The first girls to graduate from high school in Deh'Subz, an Afghan district outside Kabul. Photo by Beth Murphy, Principle Pictures.
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Reviews

Taught, Post-Taliban: A Review of What Tomorrow Brings

What Tomorrow Brings is an intimate portrait of a girls’ school in rural Afghanistan and the challenges its students face in trying to get an education.


In an early scene of What Tomorrow Brings, Pashtana, a seventh-grader at a girls’ school in rural Afghanistan, describes just how much her education means to her. “My biggest hope is to finish school,” she says, smiling brightly. “That’s how my life will turn the corner, and I’ll be on my way.”

Her smile fades. “But I’m worried there are people around me who will try to stop me.”

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Chelsea Rudman is an international development professional and freelance writer who lives in Washington, DC. Her writing has previously been published in the NY Press and Matador Travel.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Reviews

Getting negative about thinking positive

A look at Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest book on what’s been bringing America down.


 

About one-third into her new book, Barbara Ehrenreich recalls when she first lost hope in positive thinking while attending the National Speakers Association convention — the mecca of motivation. Leaving one panel, Ehrenreich asks one attendee if she is troubled by the use of quantum physics to explain how positive thoughts can manipulate matter. The woman, a “life coach” from California, smiles indulgently and asks, “You mean it doesn’t work for you?”

Aghast, Ehrenreich wonders, “If it ‘worked for me’ to say that the sun rises in the west, would she be willing to go along with that?” What empirical reality can we agree upon “if science is something you can accept or reject on the basis of personal tastes?”

What kind, indeed. But then, positive thinking isn’t known for its cozy relationship with science — or reality. So argues Barbara Ehrenreich, renowned muckraker launched to fame by her savage exposé Nickel and Dimed, in her latest work, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. In a punchy 200-page critique, Ehrenreich cracks open the sugarcoating of “Think Positive!” and shows us the poison pill underneath. At a time when more and more Americans are choosing their own reality, whether deciding which news to hear, which science to believe, or how much debt they can afford, Ehrenreich’s book is a much-needed call for us to, in all possible terms, get a grip.

What could be so bad about thinking things are good? It’s a question we rarely ask ourselves amid constant exhortations to find a silver lining, be a team player, and always look on the bright side. From Oprah’s inspiring guests to the syrupy tales of Chicken Soup for the Soul, we are told that we too will soar to new heights if we just keep thinking happy thoughts.

Sadly, this just isn’t true. Not that Ehrenreich would rather we celebrate hopelessness and despair. But positive thinking demands we focus on ideal outcomes at the expense of recognizing real problems. “A chief of state does not want to hear a general in the field say that he ‘hopes’ to win tomorrow’s battle,’” Ehrenreich observes. “He or she wants one whose plans include the possibility that things may go very badly, and fall-back positions in case they do.”

Yet in recent decades our fanatical devotion to optimism has led us pretty deep down the rabbit hole, into a world where Newtonian laws can be warped by our whims. Self-help guides like the 2006 bestseller The Secret promise that the “law of attraction” allows you to “visualize what you want and it will be ‘attracted’ to you.” Literally: Picture what you need, and the universe shall provide.

Ehrenreich traces the seeds of positive thinking to a group of 19th-century philosophers struggling to shake off the existential dread of Calvinism. Their New Thought movement held that “illness was a disturbance in an otherwise perfect Mind and could be cured through the Mind alone.” Ehrenreich attributes today’s industry of positive thinking — complete with books, posters, and 10-step programs — to social and economic change in the 20th century. As “more and more middle-class people were … employees of larger corporations, where the objects of their labor were likely to be not physical objects … but other people,” she theorizes, “interpersonal relations came to count for more than knowledge and experience.”

Being positive was a veritable survival skill during the 1980s era of downsizing. CEOs employed motivational speakers, self-help books, and company retreats en masse to placate survivors of these brutal rounds of firing. Three decades later, pep has become the norm, even as our actual happiness has declined. We’re the 23rd happiest country in the world according to a recent analysis, surpassed by “even the supposedly dour Finns.” (We also account for two-thirds of the global market for antidepressants.)

Unbridled cheer has spread far beyond office culture, greeting Americans in church and even through academia. Bright-Sided’s chapters on megachurch “pastorprenuers” like Joel Osteen and “positivity psychology” are Ehrenreich at her best, bubbling with undisguised contempt. At Osteen’s church, we hear Joel and his wife Victoria celebrating the victory God gave them over a flight attendant who sued her for assault. (Victoria had demanded the attendant remove a stain on her first-class seat, then tried to enter the cockpit to complain when it was not blotted immediately.) It’s hard not to share Ehrenreich’s disbelief: “I look around cautiously to see how everyone else is reacting to this celebration of a millionaire’s court victory over a working woman … The crowd, which … appears to contain few people who have ever landed a lucrative book contract or flown first-class, applauds Victoria enthusiastically.”

Much of Ehrenreich’s wrath, unfortunately, seems spent by the book’s final chapter, where she unveils the pièce de la resistance: how positive thinking created the recession. She makes a strong case for how deluded CEOs refused to heed clear warnings about the toxic assets we now know as subprime mortgages. And she shows clearly how we dug ourselves deeper by believing the gurus who encouraged us to dream of “larger homes, quick promotions, and sudden acquisitions of great wealth” even as wages declined.

But then she seems to give up. After eking out 17 pages on her theory of the recession, the seemingly exhausted Ehrenreich cobbles together an even briefer postscript and drops the pen. More effective is the introduction to the book, in which she rants about how positive thinking pastes over our deepest social problems: “[It] takes the effort of positive thinking to imagine that America is the ‘best’ … Our children routinely turn out to be more ignorant of basic subjects like math and geography than their counterparts in other industrialized nations … We have … the greatest level of inequality in wealth and income.” In other words, positive thinking encourages neglect of our deepest social ills.

Such big-picture conclusions, unfortunately, are rare. We’re left feeling as though Ehrenreich has held back in all the wrong places, pouring vitriol into her anecdotes but failing to tie them into the all-encompassing “screw this” indictment that she alludes to in her introduction.

Yet fear not, those looking for the activist who wrote Nickel and Dimed. While the book is more diagnostic than prescriptive, Ehrenreich does urge us to disengage from the self-absorption positive thinking requires and invest ourselves in creating a genuinely happier world. “Surely it is better to … search one’s inner self for strengths rather than sins,” she writes. “The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all … Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?”

We indeed have real work to do. And we need to start by facing reality.

Chelsea Rudman is an international development professional and freelance writer who lives in Washington, DC. Her writing has previously been published in the NY Press and Matador Travel.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Commentary

The Kotel

A return to the past.


I admit my instinct was to say no when two friends urged me to take a free trip to Israel my senior year of college. I had known for years that even as a half-Jew I qualified for Birthright, a program that uses a combination of funds from wealthy donors and the Israeli government to send young American Jews on a free trip to Israel. But I never thought I would actually go. Raised as a Unitarian Universalist by a Jewish father and lapsed-Catholic mother, I wasn’t sure that my self-prescribed brand of Judaism (Passover in spring, Yom Kippur in fall, little prayer in between) made me qualified to claim a trip to Israel as my “birthright.” And I was squeamish, to say the least, about Israel’s less-than-savory policies regarding the Palestinians. As I explained to my father, “I don’t really know if I agree with all of Israel’s … foreign relations.”

“I think you’ll find a lot of Israelis agree with you,” he said. “Look, not every American agrees with what the government is doing here, right?”

I tried again. “But I’m not … very observant.”

He shrugged. “Neither are they, for the most part.” I confirmed this with Thomas Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem, a guidebook to the 1980s Middle East that became my pre-trip primer on Israel. Friedman reported that Israelis tend to be more secular than American Jews, conceiving Judaism as a nationality besides a religion. “[The sense] in Israel,” Friedman writes, “[is that] the sky is Jewish, basketball is Jewish, the state is Jewish, and the airport is Jewish, so who needs to go to synagogue?”

Somewhat convinced, I signed up for Birthright. I pretended I would play reporter rather than pilgrim, picturing myself as a young, female Thomas Friedman who would jot dispassionate notes on the natives. Friedman, though objective in his coverage of Israel and its neighbors, is also Jewish, and, as it becomes clear in his book, viewed Israel as a possible prism through which to understand his own background. I wanted this too.

The much-feared test of my Jewishness came right at the beginning of my trip, when an Arkia flight attendant asked me for my Hebrew name at check-in. “I … I don’t have one,” I stammered.

She raised an eyebrow and asked softly, “And why is that?”

“Because … I didn’t make bat mitzvah,” I bumbled, unwittingly compounding my sin, as Hebrew names are given at birth. She scribbled something in Hebrew on a sticker and slapped it on my passport, then gestured me toward security. I stalked off, flushed and wondering if my passport now bore the Hebrew for “stupid goy.”

I was even more determined to “catch up” with the “real” Jews. During a stretch of insomnia somewhere over the Atlantic, I spent a few hours learning the alefbet from my friend Jordan. By the time we landed in Israel, I was sounding out written Hebrew left and right, decrypting words letter by letter to anyone who would listen. “Yi-teuh-zu-ah!” I read off a sign as we stumbled sleepily off our red-eye into the Israeli morning.

“Almost. Yetzi’ah,” said Jordan, smiling.

“Exit.”

“Good!”

Our big orange tour bus was waiting for us at Ben Gurion Airport. We met our guide, Saar, a towering, camel-faced man who sported a full beard and a gnarled ponytail of dreadlocks. The Birthright itinerary wastes no time — our bus whisked us from the airport straight to Jerusalem for a day of touring. On the bus ride, I asked my friend Joelle to teach me the Hebrew numbers from one to ten. We didn’t have a pen or paper, so she taught me aloud, repeating the numbers again and again. Outside the windows, a brown land of pomelo and date trees faded into sparse desert and then finally gathered into a low ridge of hills concealing Jerusalem.

“Echad, shtayim, shalosh …” One, two, three … I frowned, not knowing how to say four in Hebrew. .

“Arba,” said Joelle, dozing against a window pane.

Just outside the city center, we stopped at an outlook to take pictures. Blocky white buildings crowded the misty hills. The black and gray shapes of squat domes and pointed arches dotted panorama of stone. In the distance, we could see the golden crown of the Temple Mount. It looked exactly like the pictures I had seen painted on plates at my father’s cousin’s house: biblical. It was the place to which all Jews vowed to return every Passover: “Next year in Jerusalem!”

Then we headed straight for the most sacred part of Jerusalem, the Old City. Its tiny quarters — 0.35 square miles — house five ethnic neighborhoods, a few shopping arcades peddling trinkets, countless archeological digs, and some of the holiest sites in monotheism. Inside its massive, 500-year-old walls, sand-colored arches frame the maze of alleys and stairwells that spill down Jerusalem’s steep face, funneling visitors from the modern to the ancient. Feral cats stalk courtyards. Arab merchants hawk T-shirts and pomegranates from tiny shops and stalls.

Saar led us between museums and falafel stands, stopping every 10 minutes to point out this historic tower or that holy monument, punctuating his words with wild gestures from his plate-size hands. “Yeh-ruh-sheh-lai-uhm,” I slowly whispered aloud, squinting at the inscription on a Roman-era frieze and realizing, with a tingle of pleasure, that I was reading the Hebrew word for Jerusalem.

Then we arrived at the Kotel, the Western Wall. The Kotel is all that remains of the Second Temple, the last Holy House where Jews worshipped together as a nation in the days of David. At 62 feet high, it towers above visiting pilgrims, but its 187-foot length is a mere fraction of its original span. The temple was built in 515 B.C. and stood for six centuries until the Romans destroyed it, save its western wall, in 70 A.D. This is why the Kotel is also known as the Wailing Wall: Jews are meant to bemoan the ruin of Judaism’s holiest place of worship. Ancient Jewish law decrees, in fact, that Jews should rend their clothing upon sight of the Wall.

Today, only the ultra-orthodox haredim wail and moan at the Kotel, but their long black skirts, hats, and suits go unrent. But ritual still dictates the movement of everyone who visits. The face of the wall is divided in two by a long fence — men go one way, women, the other. I stood at the entrance to the women’s side for a long time, staring at the scrap of paper on which I was supposed to write a prayer. Watching the tide of black-robed, plain-clothed, and long-skirted pilgrims ebb and swell around the foot of the wall, I couldn’t help but picture the millions of Jews who had bowed, sobbed, and prayed here, whispering prayers in the language still inscribed on the rocks at my feet. Some of those pilgrims, I realized, must have carried the very genes that had gone on to battle their way through pogroms and purges, escaping eastern Europe onto a boat carrying people to America, including my 14-year-old great-grandmother, who never saw her parents again, whose lineage was passed down to my grandmother, who passed it to my father, who passed it to me. They were once here. And now I had returned.

I wrote a prayer on my paper and folded it into a tiny square. I squeezed through the masses and reached the wall itself. The stones were huge, massive, each block as tall as I could reach. I slipped the prayer into a crack, a white speck joining thousands, then touched my fingers to the wall and kissed it, as one kisses a prayer book after touching it to the Torah. I stood for a long time. Then I walked away backward, as one must, keeping my eyes on the Kotel for as long as I could.

I am an atheist. But here, I prayed.

 

Chelsea Rudman is an international development professional and freelance writer who lives in Washington, DC. Her writing has previously been published in the NY Press and Matador Travel.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also: