To celebrate International Women’s Day, tonight In The Fraytweeted links from stories we’ve published over the past decade that relate to violence against women. We joined thousands of other individuals and groups in a twenty-four-hour, global tweet-a-thon to raise awareness about gender-based violence. In case you were asleep during our time slot, here are the links we tweeted:
My apologies for the procrastination — it’s an occupational hazard of volunteer work — but here are the editors’ picks for the best articles published in In The Fray magazine in 2012. (Actually, since December 2011, when we relaunched the site after a year’s hiatus.)
If you like the thoughtful, empathetic, international journalism that we believe these articles represent, please consider making a donation to In The Fray. Any amount helps. Thanks for your support!
Check out Rob York‘s new piece, Born This Way, about an American pastor who, from a barroom pulpit in Seoul, preaches a message of Christian love and acceptance of homosexuality, leading his mostly gay congregation in a David-and-Goliath struggle against South Korea’s conservative Christian establishment. Also featured on the site is The Chicago Way, an essay by Nicole Cipri about the long and brazen history of corruption in that city — a “place so crooked,” the Chicago Tribune once lamented, that “even the reformers are on the take.” If you like these or the other stories we’ve featured throughout the year, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to our nonprofit, which very much needs your support to continue publishing into the new year. Happy holidays!
The stories recently featured on the site — The Grapes of Graft by Karen Schaefer, Guitar Hero by Cherise Fong, and The Cajun Cellist by Eli Epstein — have something to say about virtues often forgotten in today’s competitive, frenzied society: humility, patience, hard work with no immediate gratification.
New York Times columnist David Brooks has made the case that today’s society has lost the sense of humility that once tempered the greatness of the Greatest Generation. Even on the day that the Allies defeated Japan, what was striking was the absence of gloating, Brooks says. Public pronouncements conveyed humility, a simple gladness that the suffering had ended, and a rejection of the tempting belief that the victors were God’s chosen. The Christian faith of the time saw such pride as the worst of all sins, Brooks says:
… what pride does is it estranges you from God. It makes you desire to be your own God. It weakens the resistance to your own weakness inside and it makes it hard to tap the larger blessings of life, which probably come from outside yourself, from your family, your friends, your neighbors, and your creator.
Even the politicians and celebrities of that era were largely obedient to this faith, Brooks says, believing it to be unseemly to promote themselves or think too much of themselves. For many — Brooks mentions presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower — that belief had been inculcated from an early age. In tight-knit communities that taught kids to remember where they came from from and to never get “too big for their britches.” In bible passages that reminded them that “he that ruleth his spirit” is better than “he that taketh a city.”
Perhaps some of this was false modesty, but the contrast with modern attitudes is striking. In 1950, a Gallup poll asked, “Are you a very important person?” Twelve percent of high school seniors said yes — compared to 80 percent in 2006. Brooks offers some other statistics that describe modern society’s bitter cocktail of self-regard. Troubling levels of narcissism. An obsession with fame. An inflated sense of our own abilities.
In other words, American Idol. Not to pick on that hit show, but, diminished ratings aside, it remains an apt symbol of today’s values, for better and worse. On one hand, Idol reflects the principles that makes the global economy so dynamic and exciting: the relentless search for talent (of the mass-marketable kind) and the reassuring optimism that anyone with ability and drive can make it. On the other hand, it peddles the delusion that anyone, regardless of ability, can make it — and that they should even try. That’s the guilty pleasure of the show’s first part, when we laugh at talentless rubes who somehow believe in their genius. But the “somehow” should really come as no surprise: in 2006, 51 percent of twenty-five-year-olds said that being famous was the most important goal they could have.
As Cherise Fong’s review of the documentary Searching for Sugar Man makes plain, Sixto Rodriguez is the anti-Idol. A Detroit singer-songwriter hailed in the seventies as a genius by music critics and a prophet by apartheid dissidents, he never made it big in the U.S. market, but never seemed to care. He went back to Detroit and took up a career in demolition and construction work. “Nothing beats reality,” he said, when his fans finally tracked him down. “Keeps your blood flowing, keeps you fit.” One reason his story is so compelling is that his humility and yearning for privacy are so out of place in an entertainment industry that increasingly sells the extroverted personalities of its artists — via tell-all interviews and confessional tweets — while focusing its marketing juggernaut on a few big bets, crowding out everyone else. Humble people aren’t usually good at selling themselves, after all.
The breathtaking scale and connectedness of today’s world markets has made the likes of Lady Gaga and LeBron James into global superstars, growing the power and allure of celebrity. Technology helps, too, in that today’s aspiring celebrities just need one viral YouTube video to achieve notoriety. Oftentimes, truly talented people — neglected or fallen along the way — rise to the surface of this crowdsourced pond. But the ease of instantaneous fame makes us forget that much of it is just novelty — a quirky skill or salacious episode that draws clicks — while enduring fame requires exceptional ability but also an even more exceptional drive.
In today’s superstar culture, artists like Sean Grissom seem like anachronisms. In Eli Epstein’s profile of him, we learn that Grissom is a classically trained cellist who has played Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. Yet he still spends his days in New York’s subway stations, busking for stray bills and change. His performances underground help develop his craft, he says. “It’s important to be able to play for everybody,” he says. Craftsmanship, patiently paying your dues, slogging through the day-to-day grind of practice to achieve perfection — all of this is at odds with a marketplace that instantly grants a staggering stardom to the hint of promise.
With the rewards so high, and everyone else around them (adults included) grasping for wealth and fame, no wonder today’s young people come across as materialistic and self-centered in the surveys. And yet they might be happier, and their chances to make a real impact might improve, if they waited and let their talents develop before jumping into the latest get-retweeted-quick scheme. Attention can come too early, and criticism can be too cruel. People need the time and space to make mistakes, think crazy thoughts, invent and reinvent themselves.
Karen Schaefer’s profile of Cleveland writer and businessman Mansfield Frazier tells such a story. When he was young, Frazier saw himself as an outlaw, and he counterfeited credit cards across the country. He was arrested and spent years in prison. Once released, he turned his life around by doggedly pursuing his passion for writing, working his way up to writing for the Daily Beast. Now, in his latest incarnation as an entrepreneur, Frazier is transforming his poor, crime-ridden Cleveland neighborhood by bringing urban farming to its vacant city lots. His first venture: a vineyard.
Properly understood, humility is not about retreating into some corner and hiding your face. It’s not about hating yourself or resenting other’s success. It’s about taking yourself less seriously — maybe even reaching that potent state of mind where you lose yourself to your work — so that you can achieve something of genuine and lasting importance. Working hard at your given skills. Giving something of yourself to your family and community. Recognizing your failings and striving to be a better person. Humility in this way leads us down the path to craftsmanship and compassion, and hopefully, too, to a broader perspective on this life and its blessings. Seen from that mountaintop, the goals of fame and wealth seem nothing more than idols.
Sunset on a stretch of the Pripyat River, in the radioactive exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. (Andrew Blackwell)
In ITF‘s interview with Andrew Blackwell, the author of the book Visit Sunny Chernobyl talks about his travels to the world’s most polluted places. One point he raises is that there’s no way to return the environment to the “pure, pre-human phase” of its existence — and that this is a misguided ideal to begin with.
Inside the U.S., in the environmental movement, there is this foment right now with traditionalists, who draw their spiritual energy as it were from an idea of “pure nature” and restoring as much of the environment to a pure, pre-human phase as possible. That’s not the literal goal, but that is sort of the ideal that drives their entire enterprise.
Then you have these modernist folk, who believe that that is an impossible ideal: holding that ideal actually will leave you to miss out on all kinds of opportunities and will waste your time and energy on causes that aren’t worth it and harmful. They also believe that, yes, ideally it would be great to have that idea of purity and wildness at the center, but we are so far past that being the reality that there has to be something else motivating environmentalism. And what that is, is a recognition that human civilizations are part of nature and that there is no way of knowing what it means to have a pristine environment — and that it doesn’t exist anyway in an era of climate change.
Also, it’s just another form of separation. We’re still seeing nature as separate from human civilization, and that has been half the problem right there. And so the goal really is to find an integrated idea of what a healthy environment is.
Perhaps it says something about humanity’s self-centered view of the world that the catchphrase for the environmental movement is “save the planet.” Planet Earth doesn’t need saving. If life can survive in the pitch-dark, pitiless abyss of the deep ocean, or recolonize remote islands after volcanic explosions wipe the landscape clean, or — as Blackwell points out — thrive in irradiated zones where human beings now fear to tread, then you can imagine that life will eventually adapt to whatever nightmare scenario Homo sapiens visits on its terrestrial neighborhood. (Of course, species higher up on the food chain will vanish — as they already are on track to do — but give the Earth a few more billion years, and perhaps complex life can evolve once again even on an inhospitable, dangerously polluted planet.)
As Blackwell points out, the environment in the modern age is never “pristine.” And that seems to fit with the way of nature, with its (evolutionary) love of mixing and hybrid forms. Nature revels in the “impure.” As the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh writes, flowers arise from mud; the idea of “purity” is in our minds. Regardless of what we do, nature will find a way of dealing with it, because it is, at heart, impure and impermanent.
The point is, life on Earth doesn’t need us; we need life on Earth. Other species on the planet can play a long game, and wait us out, with time and evolution on their side. We can’t. And yet in the United States and many other countries, the popular will is weak to do something about climate change and environmental degradation more generally.
In part, it may be a question of how we frame the problem. Two of the most potent symbols of climate change are melting glaciers and starving polar bears — not the kind of imagery that does a good job of drawing people to see the very real threat to their daily lives. Ironically, even phrases like “saving the planet” tend to make environmental problems appear distant from everyday, “real” concerns. They make environmentalism seem like something you do off in a forest somewhere, away from other people: campaigning to protect far-off waterways and species, crusading like some kind of modern-day monk on behalf of a utopian, preindustrial past. In reality, the core concern of the environmental movement is the most pragmatic of goals: ensuring that we human beings have the food, dry land, and clean water and air that we need, say, to live.
Perhaps it’s time to change the name of “Earth Day.” It’s not a day to celebrate some abstract ideal. It’s a day of judgment. It’s not about the Earth and its survival. It’s about human beings. It’s about whether we are smart enough to value the neighborhood we’re lucky to live in — or content to watch it burn around us.
The stories now featured on the site touch on many issues, but one theme they have in common is the role that religion plays in driving people to get passionately involved politics and activism — and how difficult it is to find secular ways to kindle the same fire. In Saving Souls, Benjamin Gottlieb profiles an enterprising humanitarian group that is busily educating poor children in Delhi’s slums. But the work of COI and other evangelical Christian groups continues to draw controversy in India, a once-colonized nation now booming economically and working mightily to assert its own cultural identity. In Losing Zion, Rob York reviews the book The Crisis of Zionism, which argues that the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is dying, ruined by extremism in Israel and the apathy of the liberal American Jews who could help bring about a broad-based peace movement.
Religious groups have been almost unmatched in their ability to train activists and build social movements. In America, the most obvious recent example is the pro-life movement and the cultural warriors it has drawn from the pews of evangelical, Catholic, and other congregations. But the civil rights movement, too, acquired its power and breadth by filling the streets with churchgoing protesters, and filling its rhetoric with the biblical language of freedom, struggle, and redemption.
Wherever people congregate, they organize. Social scientists talk about how churches (and other houses of worship) serve as reservoirs of social capital — the web of relationships that connect people and bring about various benefits, including the ability to rally around political causes. Generally speaking, this is great for democracy. And many religious groups have managed to find a balance between doing God’s work and respecting views that diverge from their own. But in America, Israel, and elsewhere, it seems the people getting inspired and engaged come from the extreme, intolerant ends of the political divide, trapped in their own dogma and their own sets of facts.
I used religion as a jumping-off point for my comments, but really the problem is not religion, but fundamentalism of whatever kind — religious or economic or nationalist or otherwise. The Tea Party, for example, is crusading on behalf of an uncompromising economic fundamentalism that verges on religious fanaticism, with its own patron saints in F.A. Hayek, Frédéric Bastiat, and Ayn Rand — ironically, a mirror image of the earlier cult of communism. But religion appears to motivate many of these true believers, too, and may help explain the movement’s success in organizing. On the question of Israel and Palestine, too, the same dynamic seems at work: the more devout and dogmatic speak louder.
Perhaps the recent wave of global protests against corruption and austerity — for example, the indignados demonstrations in Spain, or Occupy Wall Street and its related movements in America — will help balance the scales. Churches and synagogues have been heavily involved in the organizing of the Occupy actions across this country, reminding us that the religious right is not the only voice of faith in the streets and on the megaphone.
That said, younger Americans seem to be turning awayfrom religion, while the secular ways that ordinary people have traditionally gotten involved in politics are in decline. Labor unions have been dwindling away in America for decades — the one bright spot in recent years was public-sector unions, and the recent failed Wisconsin recall election may have been their Waterloo. Political parties rely increasingly on big donors and independently wealthy candidates, while the old political machines that groomed leaders out of local wards are disappearing. Young people continue to rally to various causes on college campuses, but it will be hard to fill in the hole left by these institutions, which could organize in a sustained, concerted fashion and appeal to broad segments of the population.
This is yet another reason that we can expect politics to become more partisan and extreme in the coming years. The hard-liners are hungry for power, while more reasonable men and women stand by and watch. It brings to mind words by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
The center cannot hold, as Yeats wrote. And things didn’t end too well in that poem.
Reading the recent remembrances of legendary broadcaster Mike Wallace, I was struck by a quote from his son, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace. Shortly before his father’s death, Chris Wallace talked about his father’s failing condition.
He’s in a facility in Connecticut. Physically, he’s okay. Mentally, he’s not. He still recognizes me and knows who I am, but he’s uneven. The interesting thing is, he never mentions 60 Minutes. It’s as if it didn’t exist. It’s as if that part of his memory is completely gone. The only thing he really talks about is family — me, my kids, my grandkids, his great-grandchildren. There’s a lesson there. This is a man who had a fabulous career and for whom work always came first. Now he can’t even remember it.
The stories we’re featuring on the site now touch upon the impact that fathers have — even in their absence. In Learned at My Father’s Feet, Kae Dickson remembers her experience caring for her “Daddy” at the end of his life, as dementia robbed him of his memories and independence. In A Circle, Broken, Amy O’Loughlin reviews a family memoir by CNN journalist Mark Whitaker, who describes his complicated relationship with his absentee father, an African American scholar who blazed trails only to see his career burn out amid his struggles with alcoholism.
For Mike Wallace, work came before family. After his first divorce, Wallace left his sons behind in Chicago to pursue a broadcast career on the East Coast. He had a famously cold relationship with his son Chris early on, though they reconciled and became close near the end of his life. “Part of it is, he was chasing fame and making it big and proving himself, and that was the motivating force,” Chris Wallace said. “Because I can see where it has taken him, I hope I’ve learned from his mistakes. I spend more time with my family and the relationships with my children.”
Many people would say that the tradeoff was worthwhile in Wallace’s case: his hard-nosed journalism helped usher in a golden age for broadcast journalism. But it’s telling that Wallace himself seemed not to care much for his success at the end of his life. And for the rest of us mortals, who lack Wallace’s once-in-a-generation talents, perhaps there’s all the more reason to question whether the ways that we prioritize career over family and friends are really, in the long run, worthwhile. That’s especially true for those of us who are parents, as the stories in the magazine remind me.
It’s hard to think of another role with as much impact as being a mother or father. For almost every other position, we are replaceable in the long term. Someone else will do our job, for better or worse, if we’re not there to do it. Someone else will eventually start our company or make our invention or sketch out our idea. Maybe it won’t happen for a long time; maybe it would have happened earlier, if we weren’t around to slow things down. But eventually, society makes progress, and the niches of innovation — in business or technology, art or politics — are filled.
It’s harder to say that about the gaps in our private lives. Steve Jobs by all accounts had loving adoptive parents, but even that was not enough, some say, to fill a void he felt because he was abandoned as a child. Civilization marches onward toward a predictable and rational future, but the trajectories of individual lives vary wildly, thanks to the influence, or absence, of family and friends.
I say this as a far-from-perfect parent, husband, son, and friend myself: how easy it is to forget the impact we have on those close to us, with all the incentives to see our worth in the job we have and the house we live in. Yet in our private lives we have more power than we may realize. Paradoxically, the real movers and shakers of the world, as Tolstoy once said, are perhaps the most constrained in what they can do, pushed and pulled by the forces of implacable history.
May is a time for college commencement speeches, and uplifting talk of making a difference and achieving success. Certainly our work defines us in many ways, and can be a vital source of meaning. Still, it’s worth considering whether the greatest difference we will ever make is one closer to home.
This week the magazine is featuring a trio of articles about prisons, real and psychological. In Freed, but Scarred, Francesca Crozier-Fitzgerald describes the post-prison lives of three men who spent, among them, forty-three years in New York penitentiaries for crimes they did not commit. After proving their innocence, Jeffrey Deskovic, Kian Khatibi, and Fernando Bermudez have returned to a changed world of broken relationships and lost identities, struggling to find the assistance and understanding they need to overcome their pasts. In an accompanying photo essay, Life after Innocence, Dana Ullman presents intimate portraits of the three men and their families, still scarred by absences and regrets.
Finally, in Across Oceans, Haunted by Memories, Susan M. Lee reviews the novel The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, a tale of two Vietnamese families flung across the globe, chased by their war-era remembrances of traumas endured and wrongs perpetrated — at times, on each other. This debut novel by Aimee Phan (disclosure: Phan is a friend) reminds us of the tensions inherent in our strivings to remember the past, and yet overcome it — to seek truth, and yet find peace.
Alone in the Forest, by Lita Wong. (Alastair Smith)
Hitchhiking has become an anachronism in many parts of the world, along with the trust of strangers that makes it possible, but inThe Road Less Traveled, Lita Wong hitches her way through rural Cuba and finds herself relying in unexpected ways on the kindness and decency of the people she meets on the road. (Wong’s personal essay is a companion piece to Alone in the Forest, previously published in the magazine.)
Also check out Havel: An Authentic Life, Jan Vihan‘s essay on the plays of Vaclav Havel, the Czech statesman, revolutionary, and writer who died at the end of last year. Havel’s legacy lies not just in his life’s work to overthrow communism and foster democracy, Vihan writes, but also in his many plays and writings, which have much to say — to readers of any language — about the meaning and challenge of living a life of truth and love.
A new year is a time for new beginnings, and in Girl’s Best Friend, Rebecca Leisher describes how friendship helped her to overcome a self-destructive lifestyle and learn to face life with an authentic confidence. In Rebecca’s case, her friends were dogs — first, her childhood companion Rusty, whom she turned to when she was a shy, lonely kid, and then Quilla, a dog she adopted from the streets of a Mexican beach town. Being content with life and those you’re lucky enough to love, it turns out, is as good as any philosophy.
Happy New Year to you and your loved ones (canine included).
UPDATE, 1/12: Changed “addiction” to “self-destructive lifestyle,” as the writer says she abused, but was not addicted to, alcohol and drugs.
Here are words worth pondering from the recent funeral service for Czech president Václav Havel:
Václav Havel has departed this world or, as we Czechs say, “he now sees God’s truth.” What does this really mean? In old Czech language, “truth” was not just the way things stood, it was also justice and supreme law. That is the meaning of the Hussite motto “God’s truth will prevail.”
Václav Havel, of course, knew that the word “truth” can have a very narrow sense. He also knew that truth, seen in a narrow, self-centered way as the one and only truth, is the cause of discord and intolerance. That is why he took “Truth and Love” as his motto, as only love can make us listen to the truth of another person, to the truth of others. Such love teaches us to be humble, and Václav Havel had more humility than we all do. This is the deep meaning of the motto “Truth and Love,” a motto for which he was sometimes ridiculed and so much criticized. And yet, it expresses the very substance of human struggle. We all know that this struggle will go on as long as mankind exists. We know that we must never give up the fight for love and truth.
Ben Breedlove died on Christmas. The Austin teen suffered from a heart condition that brought him to the verge of death multiple times over his eighteen years. He described his near-death experiences in this two-part video, posted a week before the heart attack that killed him. (First part | Second part)
In the video he doesn’t speak, but tells his story with note cards, from time to time flashing a smile that hints at the things his scribbled words leave out.
In Ben’s telling, what he felt as he drew close to death was an overwhelming feeling of peace. “I had no worries at all, like nothing else in the world mattered,” he wrote of a near-death experience when he was four. “I can’t even describe the peace, how peaceful it was.”
The feeling returned when he collapsed earlier this month. His heart stopped beating and he wasn’t breathing for three minutes before emergency personnel revived him. While he was unconscious, Ben wrote, he had a vision of an endless white room. At that moment he felt utterly content with his life, and all he had done: “I couldn’t stop smiling.”
Ben saw his brush with death as a gift. It brought to my mind a nearly fatal accident I had a decade ago. In my case there were no visions, no white lights — just the visions of heavy narcotics, and the flashing lights of an ambulance. But I felt I could understand, in part, Ben’s gratitude for seeing a mystery that few get to approach before the very end. I recognized, too, this desire to remember a sacred memory that drifts away with time, in all the pettiness of our day-to-day lives and selves.
Watching the video also reminded me of a book by the late journalist Studs Terkel. In Will the Circle Be Unbroken?, ordinary men and women talk about death — their fears and faith, their experiences caring for the dying, their memories of lost loved ones. One section of the book is devoted to interviews with people who went through near-death experiences much like Ben’s. Some of the stories are comforting, some less so.
But these are just shadows playing on a wall — suggestive but inconclusive. Perhaps near-death experiences are just hallucinations of a blood-starved brain. Perhaps they are something more. Shakespeare called death the “undiscovered country,” and said that our inability to truly know what comes after drives much of the folly, and heroism, of our ordinary lives.
The skeptic in me thinks of hard-charging Apple CEO Steve Jobs and his recent death from cancer. A lifelong spiritual seeker, Jobs continued to doubt the existence of an afterlife up until his death. As his time ran out, Jobs said he was “believing a bit more” in the possibility, but he added, “sometimes I think it’s just like an on-off switch. Click and you’re gone.” Yet Jobs, a man of tempestuous anger and energy, seemed to arrive, too, at a sense of profound peace in the very last moments of his life. The final words he spoke, on his deathbed, were almost exultant.
Watching Ben’s video, I found myself like Jobs — wanting to believe “that when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated. Somehow it lives on.” I wanted to believe, in my doubting heart, that there was something behind Ben’s Mona Lisa smile.
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