Over the last thirty years, Americans have seen an infusion of market thinking into areas that were previously governed by collective ethics and morality. Today, the drive to make a profit dictates the way we view things like health, education, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection, and even procreation. In What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Harvard University professor Michael J. Sandel argues that markets have become detached from morals, and that it’s time we reconnect them. The book is an engaging exploration of where to draw the line between having a market economy and being a market society.
In the introduction, Sandel makes it clear that providing definitive answers to the questions he raises is not his intention. Instead, he views himself as the kickstarter of a much-needed, public debate on markets and morality, and offers a philosophical framework in which we might have the conversation. The inquisitive title of Sandel’s book reinforces this position. For now, his focus is on highlighting the questions we haven’t been asking over the last three decades, but probably should have been.
So, what does economics have to do with morality? Since he’s the expert, I’ll let Sandel explain:
“Some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if we turn them into market commodities,” Sandel argues.
If the role of markets were simply to allocate goods, Sandel would be hard-pressed to find an ethical objection to using an economic rationale to solve all our problems — but, he explains, the reach of markets goes beyond goods allocation to express and promote attitudes toward whatever is being exchanged. It is our job as members of a just society to interrogate what those attitudes are, and whether they reflect the values we want to promote in our culture. If we determine that the values are out of sync with the ethical standards of our culture, then we need to regulate the markets to avoid the unintentional promotion of morally questionable social norms.
For many Americans, regulation is a dirty word. But Sandel asks us to consider the idea of regulation in the context of the parameters we’ve already placed on things that currently cannot be bought and sold, such as human beings and civic duties. For example, it is illegal in the United States to sell one’s vote in an election or a child through adoption processes. These boundaries were not established by the rules of economics; they were established by our moral compass as citizens in a participatory democracy.
So, what values do our markets presently exude? And are we satisfied with that? Because Sandel isn’t. He believes we need more robust engagement in civic discourse around these issues.
“When we think of the morality of markets, we think first of Wall Street banks and their reckless misdeeds, of hedge funds and bail-outs and regulatory reform,” he writes. “But the moral and political challenge we face today is more pervasive and mundane — to rethink the role and reach of markets in our social practices, human relationships, and everyday lives.”
As funny as it is intellectually engaging, What Money Can’t Buy is an excellent point of entry for those concerned with addressing the challenges of markets and morality. It will augment your view of laissez-faire economics and what is a stake in our society if we don’t intervene.
I recently came to the realization that my life is full of extremes, and those extremes facilitate my work as a writer. This revelation struck while I was sitting in bed on a Saturday night, simultaneously editing an e-learning course on fair housing laws and watching the America’s Cutest Cat countdown on Animal Planet. This brief indulgence in the hilarious and heartwarming antics of curious cats provoked a moment of self-reflection. I was compelled to consider the ways my own curiosity drives me, personally and professionally. Writers are known to be troublemakers, after all — though perhaps this is an unfair casting unless viewed in the right sort of light.
As evidence of my unruly ways, I’d spent the previous weekend with a group of friends in San Francisco’s Castro District. I threw back doubles of Crown Royal in wonderfully seedy dives and chatted up the oddest strangers I could find. Essentially, I was looking for trouble. But in a way, I’m always looking for trouble, alcohol notwithstanding or required.
By all accounts, I am a responsible adult. During the day, I work, write, and volunteer for a women’s rehabilitation program. I go grocery shopping and cook for my aging father and great uncle. I walk the dog and feed the cat. When the sun sets, however, I get an all-too-familiar itch to seek out the untamed.
So, what does being a troublemaker mean anyway? For me, it means going places I’ve been told not to go, doing things I’ve been told not to do, talking to people I’ve been told not to talk to, and writing about it all with humility and compassion. This lifestyle is deemed unsuitable for a “good Latina” like me. Sometimes you have to toe the line, but other times you have to be willing to step over it and see where the other side leads.
My connection to outsiders started when I was young. I was always attracted to things that seemed out of place, pushed boundaries, or had clearly gone awry. When driving in downtown Los Angeles with my dad, he would lock the car doors and tell me to avert my eyes from the people who were struggling with homelessness, mental illness, addiction, and disease. But his warnings only widened my field of vision and amplified my interest in the troubled lives that were being vehemently ignored.
As a young adult, I spent hours driving around the same dodgy areas with a friend in the middle of the night. When that wasn’t getting me close enough to the action, I ditched the car to walk around on the streets. (This was about the same time Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez wrote a series about Skid Row that would become one of my favorite pieces of journalism.)
I developed an unquenchable desire to understand how this hell on earth came to be. My questions eventually led to anger that my city had failed so many. My anger led to me discovering that I had a gift for deep inquiry and exploration through writing.
Today, my curiosity fuels what I do for a living. It pushes me to want to know the who, what, where, when, why, and how of everything — the more disputed the topic, the more engaging it is to me. My goal is to write about people’s lives respectfully, never dehumanizing or exploitative. I want to tell their stories as honestly as I can and shed a bit of light into some of society’s darker corners.
In many ways, I have been lucky that my curiosity hasn’t gotten me killed. It has placed me in more than a few unsafe situations. I’ve been in cars I shouldn’t have been in, with people I shouldn’t have been with. I’ve been cornered in dark alleys. I’ve been followed. I’ve had my life threatened. My flirtation with danger wasn’t a healthy courtship, and I am fortunate to have sidestepped a messy ending. Still, I go on to the next story.
Not all of my work is focused on situations of heartbreak and melancholy. In fact, much of what I write to pay the bills takes a lighter tone. Juggling this odd combination has landed me with innumerable moments of absurdity. Accidental offense is an on-the-job hazard.
While writing an article for my local newspaper, I went to an elementary school to observe a class of fourth graders. When fishing in my purse for a business card to give the classroom teacher, I accidentally pulled out one for a self-proclaimed “anal expert” I’d met in a bar a week earlier. The card pictured the man in a latex dog suit. Although I quickly pushed the card back into my bag — hoping the teacher hadn’t seen it — the look on her face indicated otherwise. I smiled self-consciously as I handed her the correct one.
I didn’t go to college to learn how to write. In fact, I didn’t finish college at all. Instead, I built my career on being curious and trusting my instincts. As a writer, the only thing about which you can be certain is that those two traits will guide you to where you need to be. And just like those comical kitties, I always seem to land on my feet.
It’s rare to see a macroeconomics experiment play out in real time in the way we are seeing it right now in Japan and Europe. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has embarked on aggressive measures to stimulate Japan’s long-moribund economy since he took office in December, and the result so far has been strong growth — and, perhaps, liftoff after a triple-dip recession. Europe, on the other hand, remains mired in the muck of austerity and economic contraction.
To briefly recap Japan’s economic woes: the Japanese economy has been largely stagnant for the last two decades. Since the financial crisis in 2008, it has gone through three bouts of negative growth. Its economic output per person — GDP per capita — was actually lower in 2012 than it was in 2008.
In the economics profession, this is what they refer to in technical terms as “not good.”
However, Japan’s economy surged in the first quarter of this year, growing at an annualized rate of 3.5 percent. For its part, the Abe administration credits a three-pronged economic strategy, dubbed Abenomics: “unprecedented monetary stimulus, a big boost to government spending, and structural reforms designed to make Japanese industry and institutions more competitive.”
Then there’s Europe, which refuses to shift away from austerity. Its economy shrank for the sixth consecutive quarter — its longest downturn since World War II.
“The real economy is responding [in Japan],” said Adam S. Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “The last five, six months, there’s been a mini consumer boom. All the things that people said could never happen in Japan have turned around.”
He added: “Japan’s central bank is supporting recovery, and it’s working. The European Central Bank is supporting stagnation, and it’s working.”
Some in Europe understand that austerity is the problem, not the solution. Unfortunately, that “some” does not include the people making the decisions:
“The elites in Europe don’t learn,” said Stephan Schulmeister, an economist with the Austrian Institute of Economic Research. “Instead of saying, ‘Something goes wrong, we have to reconsider or find a different navigation map, change course,’ instead what happens is more of the same.”
Schulmeister added that German Chancellor Angela Merkel — austerity’s champion and the one person who could push Europe to change course — is “not willing to learn” the lesson offered by Japan’s recent switch from contraction to growth.
Change in GDP, Japan: 2007-presentChange in GDP, Europe and the U.S.: 2005-2012
Apparently, Europe (read: Germany) sees austerity as a kind of “morality play” whereby the profligate must suffer for their sins. And yet the people most responsible for Europe’s economic crisis are the ones suffering the least from austerity. Although unemployment in the euro zone reached a new high in March, you don’t see bankers and politicians on the unemployment line. What’s really immoral is an austerity policy that punishes the innocent while one guilty party bails out the other.
Regardless of who is hurting, austerity is simply not always the best way to achieve its supposed goal: reducing government deficits. As Europe reminds us, it prevents recession-battered economies from growing. The alternative is to prime the economic pump by having governments engage in fiscal and monetary stimulus. When economies grow under this approach, Keynesian economists like Paul Krugman argue, governments collect more in the way of revenues, straightening out their finances faster than they would by reducing their spending.
Once a country’s economy is again operating at capacity, government should cut spending — and increase taxes on those who can afford it — in order to deal with the problem of deficits in a balanced, moral way that neither grievously harms the economically vulnerable nor sacrifices the long-term investments by government that are necessary to further growth over time.
The lessons to be drawn from the recession are counterintuitive. The dominant morality tells us to tighten our belts and save up. But if the government as well as the private sector hoards cash during a recession, the economy slows to a crawl. That is the kind of economic suicide that Europe has leaped into: painful cuts, no growth, and rampant unemployment. America has avoided the worst of Europe’s fate thanks in part to the stimulus passed in 2009, and Japan, at last, looks to be hurtling in the opposite direction due to its recent stimulative policies. The key question is whether the pro-austerity politicians who currently control the purse strings in Washington and Brussels will take a hard look at the evidence accumulating around them — or retreat back into their comfortable, self-righteous views of the world.
John Maynard Keynes, the father of the proactive approach to economic policy that now bears his name, had something to say on this topic as well. Responding to a critic who questioned his shifting position on monetary policy during the Great Depression, the British economist answered: “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”
Senator Rand Paul speaks at a town hall in New Hampshire. Last month the Kentucky Republican visited Howard University, a historically black college, to reach out to the African American community.
Senator Rand Paul speaks at a town hall in New Hampshire. Last month the Kentucky Republican visited Howard University, a historically black college, in an effort to reach out to the African American community. Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia
The U.S. Census Bureau just released its report on voter turnout in America’s 2012 presidential elections. For the first time, the percentage of eligible blacks who voted surpassed that of eligible whites. Meanwhile, explosive growth in the country’s Asian and Hispanic populations continues to mean that those who go to the polls are increasingly nonwhite.
The turnout story is not just about Barack Obama running for president. In 1996, when the government began to collect this kind of data, whites outvoted blacks by eight percentage points. Black turnout has increased in every election since then.
The turnout rates for Hispanics and Asians — both just shy of 50 percent — continue to lag far behind the other two groups, with much smaller gains over the years. And yet their share of the voting public almost doubled over that same span of sixteen years, even as the white share of voters dropped nine percentage points, to 74 percent.
Furthermore, partisanship is becoming more racial and regional. In the last four elections, Republicans have tended to get just under three-fifths of the white vote, while Democrats have consistently drawn about nine-tenths of the black vote (only slightly higher with Obama on the ballot). Meanwhile, Hispanic and Asian voters have moved significantly toward Democrats. Between 2004 and 2012, the Asian Democratic vote jumped 17 points, to 73 percent, while the Hispanic Democratic vote jumped 18 points, to 71 percent. Across that same period of time, the white vote for Democrats was lower in the South than any other region, and lowest in the deepest Southern states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama).
It does not bode well for the GOP that its voters were almost 90 percent white in 2012. If America’s minority voters continue to turn out for Democrats, and their share of the population continues to grow as rapidly as projected, it will become ever harder for Republicans to win the White House.
I am a progressive, but I don’t celebrate these trends. For the sake of this country’s multiethnic democracy, I want Republicans to do better among nonwhite voters. A society where ethnicity defines the political parties is doomed to disaster. The political process becomes a zero-sum game where each ethnic group fights for its share of the pie. Any commitment to a broader common good is lost, as is any sense that citizens of different backgrounds can come together and feel a strong patriotic bond.
My hope is that the GOP’s leaders read these numbers and adopt both a tone and policy stances that unite rather than divide. Too many on the right — from Rush Limbaugh to Mitt Romney to Sarah Palin — have sought to gin up white anxiety over demographic changes, to motivate white voters by fear.
Giving up this losing strategy is the best way to win over the growing ranks of minority voters. We’ll see in the coming months whether that happens. The impending vote over immigration reform will be a crucial test. But for the health of their party — and the health of our country — Republicans need to change.
Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness By Susannah Cahalan
Free Press. 288 pages.
What does it feel like to go insane and not know why? In her memoir, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, author Susannah Cahalan describes what it is like in terrifying detail: “My body continued to stiffen as I inhaled repeatedly, with no exhale. Blood and foam began to spurt out of my mouth through clenched teeth.… This moment, my first serious blackout, marked the line between sanity and insanity. Though I would have moments of lucidity over the coming weeks, I would never again be the same person. This was the start of the dark period of my illness, as I began an existence in purgatory between the real world and a cloudy, fictitious realm made up of hallucinations and paranoia.”
At the time, Cahalan was twenty-four years old and working at the New York Post. Having climbed up slowly from an intern to a full-time news reporter, she was young, ambitious, and known for being confident and professional. Cahalan’s future was bright when she was suddenly struck by an affliction that stumped her, her family, and most medical professionals.
Cahalan uses her reporter’s skills to knit together the incidents surrounding her downward spiral. She tries to piece together a time about which she has little or no recollection. Her few existing memories range from fuzzy half-truths to full-out hallucinations. She recounts the experience of paging through her father’s diary like she was reading about a stranger.
Cahalan deftly weaves together intimate moments with intricate medical explanations of her condition, which at times reads like a detective story. By meticulously retracing her own footsteps through seizures, rampant paranoia, and delusions, Cahalan engages with her passion for research. She walks readers through her various misdiagnoses — including one doctor who insisted that alcoholism was to blame — and eventually reaches the point of an accurate diagnosis, treatment, and recovery.
Brain on Fire makes for a gripping read. As Cahalan describes in her introduction, the book is “a journalist’s inquiry into that deepest part of the self — personality, memory, identity — in an attempt to pick up and understand the pieces left behind.”
After interviewing a host of doctors and experts around the globe, Cahalan was able to report every aspect of her illness and treatments — including her own brain surgery — in detailed yet accessible terms. “With a scalpel, Dr. Doyle made an S-shape incision, four centimeters from the midline of the scalp over the right frontal region. The arm of the S extended just behind my hairline,” she writes. “He parted the skin with a sharp blade and gripped each side with retractors.… The whole procedure took four hours.”
Divided into three parts, the first section of Brain on Fire leads us from the murky confusion of Cahalan’s initial seizures and bouts of paranoia through the fragmented and reconstructed memories of her time in the hospital. Cahalan writes with flagrant honesty, piecing together hospital records, her parents’ shared diary, video footage from her time in a monitored epilepsy ward, and her own disjointed scribblings. This timeline of events is combined with the narrative occurring within Cahalan’s own distorted mind, which is set apart in italics to differentiate the two realities.
During these highly personal accounts, Cahalan describes her hallucinations and paranoia. At one point, she obsessively searches her boyfriend’s apartment for proof of his alleged infidelity. We feel her panic and confusion escalate as the book progresses, and Cahalan struggles to maintain a sense of her authentic identity. “No one wants to think of herself as a monster,” she writes.
As Cahalan’s situation worsens, the heroic Dr. Souhel Najjar arrives on the scene. After seemingly endless tests using the highest technology, Dr. Najjar is able to solve the puzzle. Cahalan is diagnosed with a little-known, recently discovered autoimmune disease called anti-NMDAR encephalitis.
“Her brain is on fire,” Dr. Najjar tells Cahalan’s parents. “Her brain is under attack by her own body.”
Cahalan goes on to detail her bumpy road to recovery, in which she deals with the burden of “survivor’s guilt” — a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder — and a fear of relapse that is said to occur in twenty percent of cases. It is frightening how little is known about this rare disease, and as Cahalan writes, “It just begged the question: If it took so long for one of the best hospitals in the world to get to this step, how many other people were going untreated, diagnosed with a mental illness or condemned to a life in a nursing home or a psychiatric ward?”
Aside from being an excellently written memoir, Brain on Fire is also a valuable case study of a rare neurological disease. Cahalan is the 217th person to ever be diagnosed with anti-NMDAR encephalitis, and her diagnosis occurred just two years after the disease was discovered. Brain on Fire and “My Mysterious Lost Month of Madness,” the article from which the book emerged, have been instrumental in helping more people receive a correct diagnoses and treatment for the disease.
Cahalan’s work raises many questions about the root of “madness” and how easily we sling the term about. For those struggling to make sense of a disease like hers, Brain on Fire offers guidance and understanding. For the rest of us, it’s a fascinating and well-told cautionary tale.
Jo Magpie Jo Magpie is a freelance journalist, travel writer, and long-term wanderer currently based in Granada, Spain. Blog: agirlandherthumb.wordpress.com
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Serb leader Slobodan Milošević, who died in 2006. Via Wikimedia
After protracted, months-long negotiations, Kosovo and Serbia recently agreed to a compromise on sovereignty and autonomy that would end two decades of conflict. In extinguishing the last embers of war in what was Yugoslavia — the volatile, ethnically divided nation where the assassination of an Austrian archduke launched World War I, and where civil war throughout the nineties led to ethnic cleansing and other atrocities — Europe is nearing the end of its long journey to overcome its tribal enmities and build a cohesive, peaceful civilization.
These hopeful developments overseas have been on my mind recently. This semester, I’ve been teaching a course built around on the debate within the West over human nature: What are we? What can we be? Why do we act the way we do? John Locke argued that we are born a blank slate, that our experiences and interactions form our character. Overall, Enlightenment thinkers believed people could, if properly educated, learn to act solely based on reason.
My students later encounter Friedrich Nietzsche, who praised the “will to power” as motivating the strong to dominate, and Sigmund Freud, who feared that our inclination toward aggression could destroy civilization. Freud believed that although we could be rational at times, we’d never “enlighten” away our instinctual impulses. He recognized Nazism as the extreme manifestation of these impulses, a system based on hate that rejected the idea of justice — that the strong must be prevented from subjugating the weak — on which rested his definition of civilization.
Centuries after the Enlightenment, we’ve arrived at a more humble view of the possibilities of reforming human nature. We’ve seen too much evil — above all, in the cataclysm of World War II — to expect a paradise of reason. Yet democracy, significant warts and all, stands virtually alone in a West that has rejected Nazism and communism. Although they don’t always live up to them, democracies operate from principles centered on equality before the law. Democracy proclaims that the strong cannot — by virtue of their will to power — claim the right to dominate the weak.
Serbia holds some of the last vestiges of Europe’s ancient blood feuds. In the 1990s, Serbs clung to the idea that racial superiority justified their rule over supposedly inferior neighbors. Serbian ethnic nationalism stirred up people’s base instincts, fomenting hate as a motivation for murder and conquest.
The European Union, alternatively, appealed to reason. It offered little in the way of emotional attraction or visceral triumphs, and drew on no traditional identities. During the 1990s, the EU’s expansion into Eastern Europe stood alongside the tribal bloodshed unleashed in the former Yugoslavia by Serb leader Slobodan Milošević.
One question I’ve posed in my class is whether Europeans will ultimately choose EU integration over ethnic nationalism. Membership in the European Union — which, despite the travails of Greece and Cyprus, offers the promise of greater prosperity — is a strong incentive to choose peace. And yet Freud’s concern about humanity’s indelible aggressive urges remains relevant. One country can drag a continent into darkness.
The key question for Serbia, in Freud’s terms, has been which part of its “mind” will triumph: the id — its nonrational instincts — or the superego — the part that suppresses those instincts in favor of pursuing the norms of “civilization” and the material benefits that accompany it.
The compromise between Serbia and Kosovo is a sign that reason has won out. The EU brokered the agreement, and made clear that its acceptance removes the existing roadblocks to membership for both countries. Each one moved off its maximalist positions — despite the emotional cost of those concessions — because the benefits outweighed that cost. That’s a rational decision of the kind Freud wasn’t confident societies would make.
Civilization will always have challenges to overcome, but the end of racial wars of conquest in a continent long riven by them gives hope that humanity is, finally, making progress.
Best of In The Fray 2013. In search of healing, I took a three-month trip to South America after my marriage ended. But the memory of my divorce was never far: in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, Peru and Chile, it seemed that almost everyone I met was recently divorced. And then, I met Hugo.
Story and photos by Alexandra Levine
Weeks after I ended my marriage, I headed off to South America to clear my head.
Yelling over the loud rock music in the small border patrol office of the Chilean desert town, San Pedro de Atacama, the tan, jolly officer looked at my paperwork and asked in English:
“Married?”
I nodded.
He raised his eyebrows in surprise and looked around for evidence of a husband. Not finding any, he asked, confused:
“Happy?”
I shook my head.
“Por qué?”
Why? All the Spanish in the world wasn’t enough to explain why I found myself alone in the middle of a Chilean desert on the opposite side of the planet from the man with whom I’d shared more than a third of my life.
Having grown up in a divorced household, I had always been so terrified of divorce that for years I didn’t want to get married. But eventually, on one sunny afternoon, I uttered the words I do and till death, only to discover a few years later that I no longer meant them.
After a ten-year relationship, our divorce came as a complete surprise to everyone close and far, and although it was my decision to leave, that didn’t make it any easier. It felt like getting off a bus at the wrong stop. The bus pulls away and suddenly you stand there wide-eyed and alone, in the middle of nowhere, not knowing where to go, unsure whether this detour will lead to a serendipitous discovery of something new and amazing — or a sluggish struggle to get back home.
After the first few weeks of oscillating between the ecstasy of newfound freedom and pangs of loneliness and failure, I decided to make the best of my predicament and skip town. I wanted to go somewhere far away from the epicenter of my former life, leaving everything familiar in hopes of forgetting, distracting, discovering, healing, and eventually moving on.
I looked at the world map and saw South America, which beckoned with the promise of untamed nature, sexy music, exotic fruits, and tropical heat. The fact that I didn’t speak Spanish or know a single person on the continent wasn’t a problem. I had been comfortable far too long. Now I needed an adventure.
Traipsing through five countries in three months, I climbed huge mountains, gasped at divine waterfalls, danced until the wee hours, and ate a lot of strange things. But the memory of my divorce was never far.
No matter where I went, I seemed to meet other young divorcés.
Hours after my plane landed in Uruguay, I met Ignacio, a thirtysomething local businessman who married his young girlfriend after she became pregnant. The marriage didn’t last long, but he didn’t regret it because of the beautiful daughter they share. He told me my situation was easier because we didn’t have any children.
Then, at an expat happy hour in Buenos Aires, I met Leo, a freckled New Yorker who needed a drink after the latest frustrating attempt to divorce his Argentinean wife. She was ignoring all his communications, thus solidifying his belief that all Argentinean women were crazy. Not surprisingly, Leo’s advice to me was to get a lawyer.
Being a crazy Argentinean woman was exactly why my other new friend — Ana, a tall and striking redhead — was forced into a divorce by her Spanish husband. Two years earlier at work, she had a breakdown that turned into a bout of depression, and he wasn’t willing to deal with it. Ana told me she would never love again, and although I’m sure that won’t be the case, I knew exactly how she felt.
In the Buenos Aires neighborhood of La Boca, I spotted this mural by the graffiti artist Stencil Land. It perfectly captured my mixed feelings about marriage.
Another friend I made in Buenos Aires, Pablo, told me his marriage ended after he started his business, a neighborhood pub. Or at least that’s what I understood from his long, Spanish-only monologue over two bottles of wine we shared in an old San Telmo restaurant. Having started a business with my husband, I knew more about that than I could express in my limited Spanish.
Then, in Chile, I met Raj, a Canadian entrepreneur of Indian descent, who told me about his marriage to an Indian high-caste girl, his first love, who wasn’t willing to stand up for herself — or for them — to her strong-willed parents. He said that after he left her, he was certain he had made the right decision because she never asked him to come back. Ah, I know the feeling, I thought.
In Peru, my Spanish teacher revealed that she had left her partner of fifteen years — the father of her two children — after he decided to have children with someone else. Naturally, our lessons quickly devolved into exchanging post-divorce dating stories, which left me with some unique Spanish vocabulary.
In Rio de Janeiro, my youthful, blond roommate Leticia turned out to have a twenty-year-old son, whom she’d inherited from her first husband. She has had many lovers since but never remarried. On the night I received my divorce papers, she took me to a bar and said Brazil was one of the best places on earth to get served. I couldn’t agree more.
Although these people’s circumstances were different from mine, I was starting to feel much less alone as my divorce became just one dot on a world map of broken hearts. And then, I met Hugo.
A tall and soft-spoken man with red hair, Hugo was a friend of a friend who owned a mountain lodge in a small resort town in the lake region of the Argentinean Andes. I went up there for a weekend to ruminate. I was the only guest, so while cooking dinner in the kitchen, he took out two beers and asked for my story.
As soon as I got to the “I’m getting divorced” part, he stopped, turned from the stove where he was stirring something in a pot, and said, “You too?”
He told me he was also getting divorced after also spending a decade with his wife, who was also my age. It was starting to sound familiar. Then, he sat down opposite from me, took a sip of beer, and told me his wife had left him because he’d been addicted to drugs.
I was shocked. Not only because of the courage it took to admit that to a complete stranger, but also because it was the exact same reason I’d left my husband.
We both fell quiet, as the boiling water gurgled on the stove. This is what it must feel like when two soldiers from the opposite sides of the trenches meet after the war, I thought.
Slowly, Hugo began telling me the story of his transgressions: how his wife found out, how he kept promising he’d change, how he kept lying, and how finally she stopped believing him and left. I was listening to the story of my life.
He told me she was still angry with him. Check, I thought. He told me that she doesn’t trust him even though he no longer lies. Check and check.
It was the lying that was the worst, I explained.
“I know,” he said. “I wasn’t just lying to others but also to myself. I thought I could stop anytime I wanted to, but instead I kept going.”
Why couldn’t I have heard this from my ex-husband? God knows we tried to talk it out, but anger, shame, or pride would always cloud our minds. Instead, here I was having one of the most intimate, gratifying conversations I’d ever had, with someone I’d just met.
We moved to the living room, where Hugo, a father of two young children, told me about the guilt he was now feeling for having lost his family because of a substance. His words reminded me of my ex-husband’s post-divorce confession, “How am I supposed to live with the guilt?” I could see the agony in Hugo’s blue eyes, and it made me empathize with my ex-husband.
It was getting late and we were both exhausted by the emotional conversation. After Hugo went to bed, I sat on the terrace gazing up at the unfamiliar South American constellations, bright and clear in the cold mountain air. How was it that despite being half a world away from my former life partner, I felt I understood him better than ever before?
It was a therapeutic weekend for both Hugo and me. We took his kids sailing around the mountain lake, hiked through pine forests, and went to a party where he introduced me to other business owners in town. It was more than I had expected from my short getaway. And yet, when I was leaving, it was Hugo who was full of gratitude: “Thank you, it has been a very long time since I had such a nice, peaceful weekend.”
Even though I’ve now left South America, its magic is still with me. I keep in touch with Hugo and other divorced friends I made on that continent, and I know that no matter where we are, eventually we’re all going to be all right.
Pseudonyms have been used to protect the identities of the individuals mentioned in this story.
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:
In The Fray is seeking submissions on the theme of transience. The chaos of our lives can be difficult to reconcile, and it is hard to find comfort in knowing everything is in a constant state of flux. For some of us, the experience of transience is more apparent. It is a way of being — sometimes chosen, sometimes not — that defines us.
Note: In addition to the theme below, we welcome submissions on all topics. In particular, we are seeking photo essays on any subject matter.
In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | May 2013: Transience
In his essay, “On Transience,” Sigmund Freud relates a walk he once took through the countryside with a poet friend. This companion told Freud that he could not enjoy the natural beauty when he considered its impending doom. Freud found it incomprehensible that the transience of beauty should interfere with our enjoyment of it.
“A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem on that account less lovely,” he wrote.
The chaos of our lives can be difficult to reconcile, and it is hard to find comfort in knowing everything is in a constant state of flux. For some of us, the experience of transience is more apparent. It is a way of being — sometimes chosen, sometimes not — that defines us.
In The Fray is seeking submissions on the theme of transience. This might be a travelogue from a meaningful journey, an essay about migrant workers who see something new with each passing season, contemplations on how changes occur over time, or a humorous story about a short-lived job.
Please email submissions@inthefray.org with a well-developed, one-paragraph pitch for your proposed piece — along with three links to your previous work — NO LATER THAN JUNE 30, 2013.
We are open to submissions on any other topics that relate to the magazine’s themes: promoting global understanding and encouraging empathy.
Sticks and Stones By Emily Bazelon
Random House. 400 pages.
Emily Bazelon began reading about the way young people treat each other online in the most apt location: the Internet. The mother of two adolescent sons, Bazelon was interested in how using technology to bully peers made the experience different for contemporary youth. She was deeply curious about how her own children’s lives were affected by bullying, and decided to write a book to aid a generation of parents who grew up without social media or texting.
In this interview, Bazelon spoke with In The Fray about how the Internet has transformed bullying and why Americans have only recently begun addressing the problem in young people’s lives.
Although bullying has been around for centuries, how did the Internet create a new incarnation?
Prior to the Internet, if you were a target of bullying, you would get a break from the harassment when you came home from school. You had a chance to put yourself back together. The social media aspect of bullying can be really devastating because Facebook and Twitter make kids feel like bullying is happening 24/7. Also, there’s a sense that a lot of other kids are witnessing your humiliation, and that is really difficult for targeted kids to deal with.
Are all bullies the same?
There are different types of bullies. One type is physically dominating, the old-fashioned big kid who steals your lunch money. Another type is what we often think of as “mean girls” — though they can be boys also. These bullies use a particular kind of harmful aggression in order to score social points. They are mean to become more popular, and they’re often the hardest for adults to spot because they’re clever at manipulating people and disguising their behavior.
Then there are kids who are both bullies and victims. These kids tend to have the biggest emotional problems, and they all struggle socially. They end up doing the dirty work for the mean kind of bullies. It’s important to understand the distinctions and figure out which intervention makes the most sense for each kid.
How does bullying in the adult world affect adolescents?
Adults are modeling a culture of enormous conflict and aggression for kids. When they watch [characters on] Jersey Shore, and see the uncivil way people comment anonymously online, they learn people can be incredibly cruel. Kids absorb that from adult culture, and it makes it seem like it’s okay for them to talk and act in those same ways.
Why is it important to show that bullying isn’t just about victims versus offenders?
Almost all kids are capable of empathy, but kids who act like bullies are cutting themselves off from those feelings. I wanted to understand why this behavior is going on and what motivates it. It’s only when we understand kids’ detrimental behavior that we are able to help them stop doing harmful things.
A recent study shows that, twenty years after childhood, the people who were bullied, or people who were both bullies and victims, are more likely to have depression, anxiety disorders, and suicidal thinking. That is the best evidence we have of bullying having long-term, adverse psychological consequences, and it underscores the importance of taking this problem seriously.
Facebook has put various methods in place to oversee cyberbullying. Should they be doing more to regulate what is happening on social media?
I was struck by the enforcement challenges in addressing cyberbullying. For example, Facebook has a rule against bullying, but millions of complaints come in every week, and they have a relatively small staff to monitor those complaints. This raises questions about what Facebook’s responsibility is to enforce their own rules.
Also, Facebook cares a lot about building brand loyalty among teenagers and doesn’t want to do anything that’s seen as uncool. But it wouldn’t be that hard for them to have an early warning system, or even respond more quickly when schools complain.
What role do school administrators and teachers play in preventing bullying?
Schools can effectively reduce bullying if teachers and administrators take the issue on. Adults are really crucial and set the tone of the school. They can help kids by leading the way, setting a good example, and responding when they see bullying. We still have the problem of adults turning a blind eye.
The most important thing a school can do is figure out which problems are worth addressing and come up with a strategy. Isolating the problem makes it more manageable and allows the school to throw more resources toward the kids who are acting out.
The second step is giving kids the tools to regulate and express their emotions. Some families do this intuitively and don’t need a curriculum, but other families are doing less in this domain, and the schools have to figure out how to do more.
Susan M. Lee Susan M. Lee, previously In The Fray's culture editor, is a freelance researcher and writer based in Brooklyn. She also facilitates interviews for StoryCorps, a national oral history project. In her spare time, she maintains the blog Field Notes and Observations.
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Prejudice can kill. George Zimmerman saw a young black male wearing a hoodie, and made a decision that reflected the dictionary definition of prejudice — a “preconceived judgment or opinion … An adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge.” Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch coordinator of a gated community in Sanford, Florida, didn’t know Trayvon Martin, the teenager he followed. Martin didn’t do anything specific that would have been suspicious to an unprejudiced observer. He was unarmed and gave no indication that he harbored criminal intent of any kind. Zimmerman simply prejudged him. And it cost Martin — a seventeen-year-old out to buy some Skittles — his life.
Prejudice killed Trayvon Martin. But there are other, less obvious forms of prejudice, ones that even those of us who would rightly condemn a man like Zimmerman might be tempted to practice and justify.
Recently, I had a disagreement with friends over the PBS documentary Kind Hearted Woman, which profiles the Oglala Sioux woman Robin Charboneau, a divorced single mother and recovering alcoholic living on North Dakota’s Spirit Lake Reservation. The filmmaker, David Sutherland — who also made the celebrated 1998 documentary The Farmer’s Wife — is white.
My friends argued that only someone who was Sioux — or at least Native — could do justice to the life experience of this woman, who as a child endured repeated rapes and molestation at the hands of her foster family and as an adult struggles to win custody of her kids and take her ex-husband to court over the abuse of her daughter. They were particularly upset that someone like Sutherland was doing the film, given the centuries of injustices that white men have inflicted on American Indians. For his part, Sutherland has said that he originally meant for the documentary to focus on the theme of abuse on the prairie — “My thought was, middle-aged white men have caused [Native Americans] enough trouble” — but after interviewing fifty women, he settled on Robin. (Since the film’s completion, Robin has decided to go by Robin Poor Bear, using her mother’s last name rather than her ex-husband’s).
I can respect and sympathize with the criticisms that my friends made. There is understandable sensitivity about who tells the stories of historically disadvantaged groups, given the barriers they have faced in telling their own stories in Hollywood and elsewhere. For American Indians, these concerns are all the more poignant: well into the twentieth century, the U.S. government sought to wipe out their tribal cultures (a campaign darkly remembered in the phrase, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man“).
But fundamentally, this line of criticism — that artists or writers can’t tell a particular story because they are of a different ethnic background from the subjects of the film or history — is a form of prejudice, too. It may not have the life-and-death stakes of the kind of prejudice that motivated George Zimmerman, but it is prejudice nonetheless.
This is a topic I’ve written about in the past. When his book The Corner was turned into an HBO miniseries, David Simon came under fire. The plight of black drug addicts in Baltimore was not “his story to tell,” critics said, because Simon is white. What I wrote back then applies to today’s criticism of Kind Hearted Woman as well:
This assumes that only black people can or should write about black people, and implies that there exists a single, unanimous perspective that all black Americans hold.
Many black Americans did not grow up in an inner-city community, so they would not be any better ”witnesses” than Mr. Simon to such a story. If this philosophy is pushed to its fullest conclusion, only autobiographies will become acceptable representations of life. If we accept that race and ethnicity have trumped our ability to understand, empathize and write about the sufferings or joys of those with whom we share this country, we are finished as a society.
Of course, The Corner would go on to inspire Simon’s critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire, which the current president and prominent African American scholars alike have lauded as a deeply realistic and moving portrait of inner-city America and a groundbreaking analysis of the roots of urban inequality.
And that is my point: if someone of any background tells the story of a community or ethnic group in a way that is disrespectful or just plain wrong, by all means call them out on it. Yes, history has countless examples of stories that have been misused, misappropriated, or simply stolen for personal gain. But assuming that there is one acceptable perspective (or that all or most people from a particular group share that perspective) is prejudice, any way you look at it. And if we argue that prejudice is acceptable in the “right” circumstances, then how do we, as a society, determine which are those circumstances? This kind of thinking just provides intellectual cover for those who would justify racial profiling. It becomes harder to argue that prejudice is wrong in certain cases when you insist it is okay in others.
In short, we have to take a morally consistent approach. We should judge people based on what they do, not on a simplistic group label. We must loudly condemn prejudice of all kinds, and not just the kinds that seem the most harmful to us. That is the best way to overcome the strain of deluded and dangerous thinking that led George Zimmerman to get out of his car that February night in Sanford.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder dominated my life until the birth of my child pushed me to find sanity.
By Abby Sher
Abby and Sonya.
From the time she was born, my daughter Sonya has watched me kiss our mezuzah one, two, sometimes fifty times as I walk through our apartment door. I kiss that prayer scroll before I kiss her, most often before I even say hello. She also knows that Mama prays once a day, which means I go into our basement with a candle, and no one disturbs me for thirty minutes.
“Why Mama pray?” my four-year-old Sonya asked last week.
“Because she has to. Because she wants to. Because — I’ll be back in a little bit.”
I’ve been in treatment for severe obsessive-compulsive disorder for most of my life. I’ve cut myself, starved myself, and scrubbed my hands raw. Daily prayer is the one healthy practice I’ve kept the longest, and it’s grounded me when I feel most unmoored. It’s also been the hardest to explain.
I had a mezuzah in the house where I grew up, but I never saw my parents kiss it. We belonged to a Reform Jewish synagogue and had chicken soup and challah for Shabbat every week. My mom taught my brother, sister, and me to say the Shema prayer before bed each night. It gave closure to each day and made my mom smile, and that was all I needed.
But soon one Shema wasn’t enough for me. When I was eleven years old, my aunt and father died in quick succession. I was sure I’d made them die, and I had to atone before I struck again. After Mom tucked me in, I added five, ten, twenty recitations of the Shema, a song of thanks, and a list of sick people I needed to heal. I remember nights when I woke up frantic and hot, furious that I’d fallen asleep despite more prayers to say, more kisses to blow to the heavens.
Did I do it right? Did I do it enough? Did I sound devoted? Did I please Him?
In high school I snuck into dark closets — not to kiss boys, but to chant Psalms. I went on medication briefly in college, but took myself off for fear it was blasphemous, and my mom would die next. When I moved in with Jay, who is now my husband, he watched me kiss my mezuzah urgently.
“I wish you felt like you had to kiss me 250 times when you walk through that door,” he said sadly.
My prayers got longer, my lists and songs multiplying. If Jay wanted me, he had to accept my beliefs without question.
Our daughter Sonya was born on October 5, 2008. As I lay with her slippery skin pressed to mine, I knew this would be the scariest day of my life. It was the first day in twenty-five years that I ever willingly skipped prayers. There was no place to cloister myself in a shared hospital room, much less with a seven-pound newborn mewing for milk. Sonya was someone I had to take care of with my hands, instead of with my pleas.
I looked through the hospital window and smiled shyly at the sky. I wanted Him to know I was so wildly grateful for this child that no words could suffice. I held Sonya tightly and babbled at her to fill the empty space of my fear. I could no longer try to control the universe from behind a closet door. I was a mother with vital responsibilities.
Those first twenty-four hours were a terrifying relief. As it turns out, no one died because I skipped my prayers. But the bliss of those first coos and milky grins soon hardened. On the fourth day of Sonya’s life, I left her upstairs with Jay while I went down to our basement and sat on a pillow, sore and shaky. I wanted desperately to thank Him for this miracle, to pray with an honest, open heart. No mindless repetitions and rituals would suffice. I was too evolved, too in love with this new human to simply follow a pattern blindly.
Yet, motherhood could never be a remedy for a mental health disorder. Everything about being a new mom felt groundless and out of control. I left Sonya in Jay’s arms each morning so I could pray regularly, insistently.
My life outside the basement became a series of new, unwavering practices too. Repetition was supposed to be comforting for children, I reasoned. Every evening, I massaged Sonya’s toes and sang a series of lullabies. When I felt too exhausted and cut off a verse, the tug of fear closed in.
If I don’t sing to her, I’m unfit to be a mother. If I don’t beseech G-d, Sonya will disappear too. Cradling my daughter fiercely, I read the same book in the same cadence night after night for an entire year:
Somehow the soothing part got away from us. Sonya wasn’t following my lead. She fell asleep in the middle of a meal or refused to nap in her carrier. One night I tried to light the Shabbat candles with her, and she banged on her high chair howling until I blew them out. She had her own rhythm, her own needs, and they were completely out of sync with mine.
Each time she squirmed away during the massage, I pinned her down and started again, both of us whimpering. I coped in the only way I knew how — by adding more ritual and repetition. Sonya followed my lead, running headlong into the spiral I know too well.
Our bedtime routine turned into a one-act drama: kisses on her toes and lotion on her belly. A review of her day and an outline of how her sleep would unfold with fairy-tale dreams. After two books and a cup of water, turn out the light and tell a story. Walk to the crib, press play on her lullaby CD, then one kiss for Waldorf (her toy duck), one kiss for Pepto (her toy pig), and one kiss for Sonya.
We added a kiss for each palm, in case she got up during the night and needed another. Then there was the butterfly kiss and the kiss through the bars of her crib. Finally, there was the kiss called Last Kiss. We said (in unison) as we leaned in to touch lips, “I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you.” Five times. A tight, fast hug. Then I would close the door to the sound of her wails.
Sometimes I didn’t even make it out of her room before she started crying. I pulled away from our goodnight hug just in time for her to yell into my face, “Lastkisslastkisslastone!”
With her tiny shoulders hunched and her lips pinched, she panted as if being hunted by wildebeests. I explained firmly, “We just did a last kiss and a last hug. Three of them, actually.”
“Last ooooone!” she moaned.
“Last one,” I repeated.
I leaned down to give her one more. But she still screamed as I left.
Some nights I went up there three or four more times, trying to slay both our demons. Other nights I sat at our kitchen counter and came up with all the fatal illnesses she could have.
Hours after I’d been up, I heard her whimper drowsily, “Lastkisslastonelast …”
The crucial task left unfinished.
I worked with my doctor, tried new medications and breathing exercises. I started with a cognitive behavioral specialist and added exposure to my therapeutic tools. As always with obsessive-compulsive disorder, it took lots of lurches and stumbles to get to more stable ground. I knew I was working not only for myself, but for my child too.
There did come a day — not too long ago — when I was able to tuck my daughter into bed, read her two books, sing her a lullaby, and simply walk toward the door.
“Wait!” Sonya yelped. “Last —!”
“If you say last kiss, it has to mean last kiss,” I said calmly. “Otherwise it’s just words.”
“But that kiss wasn’t a good one it was —”
“Stop.”
I cut us both off. We waited in the dark, hearing each other pant. Then I landed a question: “What do you think happens after last kiss?”
This was the open-ended unknown she had witnessed in me every day. The tension and also the hope.
Sonya thought for a moment, and then said, “Mama go to sleep and have cup of tea.”
“Exactly,” I told her proudly. Chronology was unimportant. It was her trust that meant everything. We were both here for each other, the world would keep spinning, and it was safe to close our eyes.
Civil rights activist (and future congressman) John Lewis at a 1964 meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress.
I have a remarkable story to tell you about forgiveness. A week ago, a man named Elwin Wilson died. A member of the Ku Klux Klan, Wilson was part of a group of white men who attacked two Freedom Riders in South Carolina in 1961. The victims, one white and one black, were traveling together throughout the South to protest Jim Crow segregation laws, and had stopped in a bus station in Rock Hill. When the two dared to step foot in a waiting area marked as “whites only,” Wilson and his group jumped them, leaving them bloodied.
The two Freedom Riders, Albert Bigelow and John Lewis, refused to fight back and did not press charges. Lewis, a pacifist, later became the chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and a major leader in the civil rights movement. Decades later, he bears visible scars from having his skull fractured on “Bloody Sunday,” when Alabama state troopers beat civil rights protesters during the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches.
Four years ago, the story took an amazing turn. Wilson, then in his seventies, sought out the civil rights protesters he had harmed and asked for forgiveness. He learned that one of them was Lewis, now a Georgia congressman.
Lewis not only accepted Wilson’s apology — the first one, he noted, that any white supremacist had ever offered him — he also went on the road with his old nemesis. The two appeared on Oprah and accepted recognition from various organizations. Lewis said he wanted to use the occasion as an opportunity for racial reconciliation. It brought to mind words that the Reverend Martin Luther King once spoke of the day that “the lion and the lamb shall lie down together” — the one-time oppressor and one-time victim now hailing each other as “friend,” with the irony that their positions of power had been, in many ways, reversed.
At the end of his life, Wilson revealed a fundamental decency. If we had grown up in the same climate of hate, how many of us would have had the strength not just to overcome it, but to reach out to those we had wronged so many years ago? We should recognize men and women like Wilson who radically change for the better, who embrace love and reject hate.
But I also want to emphasize the courage it took for Lewis to accept that apology. Forgiving someone who not only beat you but rejected your very humanity takes tremendous character. It requires denying a very natural desire to hurt the person who hurt you, to inflict some of the pain that person inflicted on you, even if not through an equivalent act of violence.
Rather than taking his crimes with him to the grave, Wilson repented. Rather than indulge the impulse for vengeance, Lewis forgave. We could all learn from their example.
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Over the last thirty years, Americans have seen an infusion of market thinking into areas that were previously governed by collective ethics and morality. Today, the drive to make a profit dictates the way we view things like health, education, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection, and even procreation. In What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Harvard University professor Michael J. Sandel argues that markets have become detached from morals, and that it’s time we reconnect them. The book is an engaging exploration of where to draw the line between having a market economy and being a market society.
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