Tree of Life, the movie

For the last several days I've been trying to find a way to put into words the feeling of continuity that weaves its way through the chaos of our individual existence. It was brought on by watching the devastation created by one of the owners of what was previously a lovely piece of land where heron nested in the trees and generations of squirrels trained new residents how to feed them their favorite treats. His reasoning for cutting down every single tree, some bigger around than many of us could embrace in one hug, was that he was building a solar house and needed to remove the trees so enough light would get through. He doesn't plan on living in it. He's building it with the intent of charging more than average to someone who is "one of them environmentalist types."

He really doesn't understand the contradiction, just as he doesn't understand how far apart he is from what nature truly is and means. He doesn't understand that those so-called environmentalist types have no interest in buying from someone who has so little respect for nature, so little understanding of what it even means to care about the environment, that he would cut down every single tree just to make his ugly devastation marketable.

In so many ways he is the poster boy for what happens when humans become disconnected from nature. And this is what I wanted to explain, the chaos that ensues when, in spite our continuity, in spite of our continual presence on this planet, we become disconnected from the part of us that is also part of the natural world. It's like trying to live without an essential organ like the heart or the brain.

Then last night I watched the movie "Tree of Life"  and something fell into place for me. I previously tried to explain the lack of compassion and shallowness of many of those on Wall Street, Congress, and heading up corporations as a lack of introspection. They are, for the most part,  mean, self-centered, materialistic excuses for human beings. They are what happens when your drugs of choice are alcohol and cocaine, drugs that numb feeling, drugs that allow you to be cruel and uncaring because you can always wipe them away with another dose. They are no different than the soldiers dosed on meth and Wagner so they could kill without conscience. One of the earliest uses of methamphetamine occurred during World War II. The German military dispensed Pervitin which was methamphetamine. It was freely administered to both tank crews and aircraft personnel.

Every generation has its drugs of choice and for mine it was LSD and marijuana, both which tend to make the imbiber more introspective. The inner landscape becomes inseparable from the outer landscape, and that is something we've lost, something that builder of the solar house has lost. It is also a theme I felt was covered in  "Tree of Life" in an especially beautiful and haunting way.

But in a clear example of how disconnected many have become from nature, I read that when the movie first aired, lots of people booed and jeered during the screening. It appears the plot didn't move fast enough for them and they were forced to endure multiple and astonishing scenes of beauty that weren't computer generated, but instead were created by so-called old fashioned  special effects techniques, like running liquid through objects and filming it.

For those of us who grew up in the 1950's and 1960's, not only did the film remind us that no matter how awful our childhoods were for the most part, there were also moments when as children we lived in a sacred world untouched by the harshness of life. We played, laughed, felt, reacted to the world around us because we didn't have the filters of television, the internet, instant access to information. We had to dream and create and imagine.

In many ways the evolution of our consciousness had to create LSD and marijuana, just as the current generation and the one before it had to create drugs like Ecstasy as part of their mental development, and also as a backlash against the numbness and cruelty of those who escaped with hard and unforgiving drugs like cocaine and alcohol.

But that numbing and disconnect is also found in the prevalence of young heroin addicts and those who can't face the day without anti-depressants. We live in a disconnected world and everyone copes according to whether they want to retreat inward or blunt what lives within the recesses of those dark places.

In "The Tree of Life" the choice is between faith or nature, and while faith seems to drive most of the characters, it does so against the powerful continuity of nature. It is a movie that demands you sit patiently and wait for events to unfold, a task that in this world of instant gratification proved too much for those who jeered in the audience. Nature always takes its time. Faith demands instant answers, instant relief to specific situations. In nature we are part of the play. In faith, we are the directors of not only our own play, but also those of everyone else. Nature connects us, faith disconnects us.

Those of my generation were raised by men who saw the worst humanity can inflict upon itself. They saw things no human can see and still keep their humanity intact. Like the father in the movie, played by Brad Pitt, they wanted to toughen us up so we could survive the horror that life would throw at us. They wanted to protect us from it and at the same time, hide it from us. It's why we grew up wanting to know more, wanting to see the source of the contradictions. If anything, we children of war survivors knew there was more to the story and so we went looking through introspection and the kind of drugs that are conducive to looking inwards. We became a generation of seekers who knew there were answers and that they would explain the chaos inside, the angst we felt at knowing we were part of something and yet not knowing how to completely be part of it.

One thing we do learn as we get older is that even introspection reaches a point where it becomes selfish and indulgent. We can't all be monks on the mountain top perpetually seeking answers. At some point we have to stop, look around us and take our place in the world. As sometimes this came too late in life to accomplish much more than survival and perpetuating our own gene pool, the chaotic pendulum shifted to children coming from us that didn't want to look so deep inside, that didn't want to feel so much, that didn't really have the chance to live in the sacred world of childhood we may have been the last generation to enjoy.

 So the pendulum got stuck on the selfish swing, the arc failed to move beyond the gimme stage of existence and we ended up with the culture of greed that now permeates the planet. We ended up letting faith kill nature because it was just easier to swallow someone else's truth rather than discover the path to our own.

The backdrop of the movie is music as Brad Pitt's character gave up a career in music to become an engineer, the ultimate betrayal of the artistic self. His failing was in not understanding he didn't have to give up one for the other, that nature can weave through both truths and music is the pulsating universe both within and without us. Compassion and altruism can be as strong as steel and concrete if you grow them from within.

At the end of the movie I just wanted to sit for awhile and absorb what I had seen because while it was familiar, it was also like entering an astonishing exhibit of beautiful art whose technical mastery seemed to mock the easy solution of computer generated imagery we've come to expect when we say "special effects." In many ways, that to me is the true message of the movie, that we've moved so far beyond the simplicity of nature we've lost the meaning of it. Just like the man destroying nature to appeal to environmentalists.


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Tree of Life, the movie

Anna's lesson about selfish people

After a break to deal with present day issues, I spent some time today catching up on Anna's archive of memories. For those of you wandering by for the first time, I've been helping Ryan's daughter, Maria, sort through his sister's digital storage unit, which numbers hundreds and hundreds of entries.

We call it our five year project. She would have been fifty this year and this is our way of honoring her memory. Out of the twenty or so emails waiting for me today from the archives, one especially long journal entry that covered several single-spaced printed pages decided to make itself the topic of the day, because once again her uncanny ability to size up people amazed me.

It's about selfishness. I chose it because it was a topic she often went on about, and she was one of the first people who taught me that many people we consider unselfish are actually quite the opposite. Here's her rather prophetic description of someone she knew only from his emails to her, and a couple times when she literally hid behind a stage curtain to watch him to make sure what she was sensing about him was true. She did this because at the time he was someone I was fairly close to and her opinion of him mattered very much to me. I wanted her to like him. I remember being angry when she refused and told me I'd one day understand she was right about him and I was wrong.

(note: the original entry was written in German and was addressed to her brother. It was translated into English by Maria. I've cut and pasted it without fixing any of the errors.)

His emails to me are always about him and feelings he feels for me. It's why I don't want to meet him. It is always how perfect I am for him. He says I am his woman but he only writes about how I am his woman for him, not how he is man for me. There is no me in his talk. So I watched him dance tonight and it only makes me think even more this is true. It is how he approaches a woman like it is a special gift that he decides to present himself to her. You said he is dating both women he danced with. But he does not care enough about them. You can see it all in their faces. They hurt from sharing him and he doesn't care because their hurt is selfish to him. I am thinking anything someone else wants is selfish to him.

Do you know what I think this man will do? I think he will be in your life only as long as he has need of some favor you will do for him. He will pretend and say he does this for you, out of unselfishness and altruistic good boy fantasies. But with him always look deep to see who is really benefiting from his altruism. I will guess that he does.

I will say he is the kind of man who goes and buys a car for very cheap. Then he needs money. So he goes to a friend and says to him that he has this car that came to him as a good deal because he is such a good person and so he has good deals fighting to come to him. So he will make this man want to help him because he will help a good person by purchasing his car at a good price.

His friend purchases the car for double what the good fairies sold it to the man for. Then the car does not run so well. So the friend says hey you sold me car for too much and now it also no longer works and I have to spend rest of money owed to you to fix the car so I can drive it.

So this man suddenly becomes very angry. It does not matter that he has already been paid more than he paid. He has already earned profit. It does not matter that he sold a car that does not work and is too expensive. He is suddenly all angry and accuses the person buying of using him of taking advantage of his good kindness. It becomes a story all about his betrayal by others and how his unselfishness was used by other people.

One day he will say such a story about everyone in his life. He will talk about how he was used when all he wanted was to help others. He will gather points of unselfishness so all the world knows he has all the unselfishness points and everyone else is a bad person who has used him so badly for his kindness.

Eventually everyone will understand it was him and not them. I only figured it sooner than the rest of everyone so I will decline to meet and be friends with your friend.

It took a few years but I finally admitted she was right. It's not worth going into the lurid details and it's enough to say that this person is no longer in my life because she was absolutely right about him.

But I also have to say that he was not the only person who taught me there are some people who do good just because they want to portray themselves as someone who does good. It's an ego thing with such people. They will always tell you how unselfish they are. They will brag about it. They will parade it around like a trophy they've awarded to themselves.



Until they actually have to give, that is. And then they find some excuse to work on what really matters--getting more for themselves as their reward for being such good human beings. And if you can't give them what they want, then you become the user of their unselfishness. You become the bad person, the one who took from them instead of gave. For people like that, any giving at all has some very sticky strings attached. That's how you can tell the fakes from the genuine ones.

Anna was genuine. It's important to note here that while Anna gave away most of her fortune, she never said she did. We knew she helped a lot of people but every day more and more is revealed in her meticulous records of exactly how much she gave away and how she never once felt the need to use it as proof of her unselfishness. Those who talk rarely do was one of her favorite sayings. And Anna never talked. She just did. And she did it quietly, completely, privately out of the immense goodness of her heart. It was not an ego thing with her. It was real.

I've mentioned before that I learned she paid a very large hospital bill for me when I became ill. I always suspected her but until I saw a copy of the paid bill, I never knew for certain. It was just something she did because she cherished our friendship. That was something she did talk about. She never let a day go by without letting me know how much she appreciated me.

And that's why I spend hours on her archives, why I help Maria. Because I've never been good at expressing my feelings to others. In my own limited way I was able to let her know how much she meant to me, but helping with the archives will hopefully make up for the words I couldn't say then.

The really mind-boggling part of all this is how it helps me deal with the present world where selfishness is treated as something close to a virtue by so many. If I hear one more person say they need to focus on their own needs, grow their own self, feed their own desires in order to grow, I will probably vomit on them or something equally as rude.

Get a clue, folks! The world is in the mess it's in because too many people focus on themselves instead of others. There's awareness and then there's self-indulgence. Until you can let go of the self-indulgence, the perpetual gimme gimme me me me game, awareness will be just a concept in a book that has too many big words in it to comprehend until life teaches you want they mean.

I have a suggestion for people who are so obsessed with themselves and their own dramas that they can't even see how it affects those around them. Get over yourself. Once you're no longer wearing diapers, it's no longer about you. It's about your place in the world and how you can make it a better place for everyone, not just your own pitiful little needs.

We are all bigger than ourselves and if we don't start to understand that, if we continue to be the kind of people who can't think outside our own needs and desires, then we are doomed as a species and really, who would even mourn the passing of such a plague? I'm certain most of the planet would celebrate the demise of such parasites.

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Anna's lesson about selfish people

Love, Friendship, Harmony, and Peace makes a better world.

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Love, Friendship, Harmony, and Peace makes a better world.

Hanging With Dead People

For the last couple months or so I've been helping Maria, Ryan's daughter, go through his sister's journals and emails. We don't really have a method or a purpose other than wanting to organize what she left behind. Since she burned most of her writing and deleted a good deal of her emails, we both figured the stuff she left behind had some meaning we've yet to determine and that she left it deliberately for us to find.

It's fascinating reading until I remember how much I miss her and the confusion that made up the year we spent together as friends. Even now, after all this time, no one has come close to the pure honesty of our conversations. She had a way of putting things into words that was both a talent and a fierce determination to preserve the truth before it was polished into an acceptable memory. She had this eerie ability to stand outside a situation, look at it with the keen and brutal eye of the unvarnished observer, and lay it out in all its bare and hideous honesty.

I was often horrified at what I perceived at the time as her callous objectivity, and she was equally horrified at what she called my Pollyannish approach to the world. And yet, we both came to know the roots of those points of view and learned to respect their validity in each other. It makes reading her words now so much easier. I understand them more than if I didn't know what drove her to write them. And I know that when it came to altruism, Anna made Pollyanna seem like a self-centered little twit. My heart is a lot more open from knowing her and I thank her nearly every day for such a precious gift.

The emails Maria sent me today were mostly about her relationship with men, written in three different languages. Hard as they are to translate exactly, what comes through is that like so many intelligent women, she was absolutely stupid when it came to men. She preferred a certain type: intense, brilliant, and totally lacking in social skills. Of course, they made her miserable. Of course, she returned the favor. Of course, she believed if there was no passion, no pain, no remorse, it wasn't worth the effort. Of course, I understood this side of her completely.

For Anna, relating to anyone was a series of stripping away the dishonesty. I was always trying to get her to come to parties, to have dinner with a few close friends, to come dance or go see a play, anything to get her away from the dark world that had become her life. But she would see through everyone so completely with just a few email exchanges, a two minute phone call, a brief meeting in passing, that after a while I began to completely dislike everyone I knew. I had become friends with them through my heart and she forced me to look at them with my eyes. It wasn't always a pleasant awakening.

She had a tiny circle of trusted friends and an appreciation for what was then the forerunner of social media that was way before her time. This was 1989 into the early 90's. Instead of Facebook we had bulletin boards where we logged in and typed back and forth to each other. And email when we didn't want to make our conversations public with the other members of the community. And it all took so long and required so much patience and dedication.

She also had a wicked sense of humor and a chameleon like ability that allowed her to assume several personas and carry them all off credibly. One time she created two characters and had them relate first to everyone and then to each other in some weird sort of schizophrenic dialogue that as far as I know, no one figured out they were both her. There was no reason for it other than she could. And when I expressed some discomfort over it, she just shrugged and said there were far worse things to get upset about in the world, that it was a way for her to get to know what people were really like before she met them in person.

Anna would have loved Facebook. It was the world she imagined when she thought of the future, an online world community that was limited only by the individual desire to connect. Even with a computer that had less memory than a cheap calculator and a modem that screamed when it  finally connected with some duct-taped contraption in another part of the world, Anna was able to accomplish so much it is astonishing even now to read about it.

And reading her emails, the why of it all starts to make a strange sort of perfect sense. She had a focus that was driven by compassion. She truly cared about people and took an interest in the lives of people she would never meet but who touched her in some way. As she always told us, the electronic universe can be one helping big hand for humanity if you opened your heart.

And her hand helped so many. I am awestruck by how many people she was able to help. I always knew she gave away a very large fortune, but I never knew all the details of exactly what she did with the money. I know she paid my hospital bill even though she never admitted it. But other than that the pieces have had to wait years to fall into place so we could at least see some of the results. She never felt the need to explain or get any credit for it.

Somewhere in all the old diskettes that are being transferred over to online storage systems, there's probably a list of them all. She was that way. She would have kept track, if only to make sure there was a way to prove the recipient was entitled to the money and help. But for now, we can only guess until we find the actual files in the thousands that exist, or we find the occasional email we run across that explains how she was going to help the person writing to her, or the occasional legal document that spelled out the details. Few of the documents and letters are in English and so the process is more difficult to untangle. But Maria and I manage with our combined limited knowledge of several languages and some great online translators.

We know they were mostly women, mostly in countries that were at war or had been devastated by wars. She once told me everyone had their price, so she was able to accomplish things that were impossible because she used that uncanny ability to size people up to find whose palm to cross with some silver. There was always a palm and she had lots of silver. Ryan once joked that his sister helped enough people to populate her own village. I think even he would be surprised at what the final number will probably be.

The contrast between reading her emails and remembering her kindness and willingness to help those less fortunate, and the selfish rich and callous little asshats that are so prevalent today often leaves me bordering on extreme depression and anger. I find myself asking why more people can't be like her, why can't they set aside their selfish little needs and help someone, give to others, share what they have, and help make the world a better place. She was able to do it with an ancient modem and an antique computer. It was so simple and yet so effective.

The world now has so many more options and yet, even with something like Facebook that can be and is often used for good, it often seems that her efforts were somehow different, somehow larger and more sincere. Maybe because it was more difficult. Maybe because she had to log on to her computer instead of just moving the mouse. Maybe because it took time to communicate with someone in another country, to learn their language, their culture, what made them special and unique. Maybe because it wasn't so easy to see how much evil there was in the world and so the effort didn't seem so worthless. Maybe it was simply because she knew one woman acting from the sincerity of her heart, really could change the world.

And when I mention that evil in the world, if anyone knew about evil it was Anna. You can't spend the majority of your adult life as a therapist for war victims and not hate what passes for humanity in so many parts of the world. But as much evil as she saw and tried to heal, I think she would be appalled and disgusted at the utter meanness and selfishness that is so prevalent nowadays. And yet, she would be the first to say stand up to it, fight it, don't let it win because you are better than evil, you are better than selfishness. Don't let the mean people win. You are better than they are. Own it.

I know that for certain because I just read it in an email she wrote to me in early 1990. It's one she didn't delete so she expected me to find it. In her own amazing way, she somehow knew how important it would be for me to find it now just when I was starting to let myself get discouraged, just when I was starting to feel like the mean people were just too mean for me to take on anymore, that I was too old to do battle for the planet, that it was the realm of the young, the strong, that the future belongs to those who have one. Reading those words today let me know there's still a fire burning in this old soul and a whole lot of fight still left.

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Hanging With Dead People

A story from Christmas 1989

Maria sent me a huge zip file of old emails, stories, ramblings, musings, and astonishingly perceptive writings from  Anna when she first moved to Bellingham in 1989 and we became friends. I've been reading them over the last few weeks and continue to be astonished at her ability to both sum up and accurately describe people and events. She could spend five minutes with someone, or read a few pages of their words and then describe them to me so accurately I was often left speechless and unable to respond to the accuracy of her insight. My favorites were what she called her "immorality tales." Here is one for you to enjoy. She wrote it about this time of year in 1989. I remember it as being a bitterly cold winter, her last one.

TWENTY THOUSAND POUNDS OF ORANGES, an immorality tale by Anna Winston, December 1989.

Once upon a time there was a man who thought his life would be oh so much better if only he could magically make all his debts disappear and have extra left to live easily without working. He was sure he deserved this because he helped people all the time and told himself he did it because he was a good man and didn't want anything back.

But it wasn't true he didn't want anything back. He wanted something back. He wanted proof that his goodness wasn't just for the sake of being good, that it would reward him for being good. He didn't want to work for it and he wanted people to think of him as a good person. He wanted to be rewarded for all the times he gave. He wanted his giving to be an investment in his goodness. There was nothing free about it. He expected payment, but was too ashamed to admit it. Besides it did not fit his image of being good for goodness's sake.

As he sat around one day contemplating how to get rewarded for being good and feeling sorry for himself because everyone he was good to was taking so long in being good back to him, another friend offered to sell him twenty thousand pounds of oranges for hardly any money as he was desperate to save his home where the oranges grew wild and free.

Our young man negotiated for the oranges. He knew how much he had to pay in order to turn a nice profit that would allow him to live comfortably without working. It was less than his friend wanted, but his friend was desperate and really, whose fault was it that his friend was desperate? Surely not our young man's fault. He had done nothing but good for people. His karma was pure. He told himself he deserved to pay less so he paid less. His friend's distress was not his fault.

So he ended up with twenty thousand pounds of oranges,more than he could eat in a lifetime. He carefully sat down and figured out the maximum he could charge for the oranges and it was a lot because there were no other oranges and he knew people needed oranges to be happy. He convinced himself he was selling happiness so he asked the most he could get.

It was predictable that hardly anyone bought the oranges, but soon word got around that he had the only oranges in town so the community selected one person to go ask him if he would sell them the oranges at a discount so they could go to the next town that was out of oranges for a lot longer and were more desperate to buy them at any price. Then they could take the extra and buy oranges for themselves too.

Since some of the oranges were starting to rot and he wasn't anywhere near his goal of living without working, he agreed to the discount, which wasn't really a discount since it was a whole lot more than he had paid for all the oranges. But he told himself it was his good fortune to have all the oranges, that he had helped so many people and received nothing in return, that he deserved the riches that came from others desperation.

At first it worked out well. He sold enough oranges to pay off his initial investment and soon it was all profit. He was on his way to his goal of living without working. But then he ran into a problem he never anticipated. The people he had helped, the ones he ended up selling the oranges to, found out how much he really paid for the oranges. They were angry and upset and felt horribly used.

It wasn't that they believed he deserved no profit at all, but that he wanted excessive profit as payback for being a good person. He had invested his goodness and expected it to pay off or why be good? This is what hurt them deeply, that his giving came with a price, that his help was not from the heart but from his ledger book where he kept careful track of what he gave and how and if it came back to him enough to make it worth it.

Many of his friends quit selling his oranges for him and made the choice to give up all oranges since now they tasted bitter with  betrayal and usury. Our young man's oranges began to rot and he began to panic . It didn't matter that he had already earned more than he paid. It wasn't enough that he had made a lot of money without working. He wanted more. He wanted full payment for all the good he had done. He wanted to be rewarded for being a good person.

But he didn't understand that people aren't good because they expect a reward. They are good because it is who they are and instead of expecting a reward, they assume from the beginning that their giving is reward enough. He would never understand this because deep inside of him he was not a good person. He was a greedy person who gave to get.

When his oranges rotted away unsold and uneaten, he told himself he was victim of other people, that he would never help people again because it didn't pay off. He locked himself away from everyone and began to hate the world for not rewarding him for being good.

He blamed everyone for taking from him and never giving back. Soon everyone that he originally gave freely to became in his mind, people who took from him. It was so easy for him to make this leap, this huge jump from altruism to unsatisfied greed because he was raised to believe only things had value.

He died a miserable and lonely old man who stank of rotted, uneaten oranges. But he died with a lot of things. A whole lot of things. Much more than he could ever use or appreciate in a lifetime. It was his reward for being a good person.

With his final breath he cursed those he gave to who never had enough things to give back. Their friendships meant nothing to him. Their love and loyalty meant even less. Those weren't things to him. They were excuses. All that mattered was that he died with the most things and they didn't get his oranges.

Red Fire Dragon by sun_signs
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A story from Christmas 1989

War of the Classes

Maria and I have been exchanging emails on what Anna would have thought about the Occupy Wall Street movement. On the surface, when you measure the response against how she lived her own life, how she gave away her own wealth to help others, it seems something she would have embraced wholeheartedly.

But, as I wrote to Maria today, Anna was much more complex than that. She detested simple categories and would have peeled back current events with the precision of someone peeling layers from the last onion on the planet, because she detested one class more than she detested the wealthy life of privilege she was raised in, and that was the middle class.

She believed everything about the middle class was fake and that it didn't really exist. It was an invented category to keep people working at jobs they hated,  a myth to keep them chasing a carrot on a stick that would always be just out of reach, and it forced people to live on credit to make up for the lack of decent wages and benefits they needed to support a middle-class lifestyle. It was all on the surface and there was no depth to it. It was a bridge built over someone else's dream.

I hate their perfect teeth, their boring clothes, their shallow friendships that ask only what you can do for them. I dislike their horrible little spoiled children they're inflicting on the planet, she wrote me when I asked why, as such a devout Marxist, that she detested the average person just struggling to get by.

Anna believed the middle class was actually the servant class putting on airs of superiority to hide the fact that everyone was their master, unlike the poor who knew they could always get another shit job, and if that didn't work out, they could find another one and other one. There wasn't any shortage of shit jobs, she always said, and being able to walk away from one was a freedom the so-called middle class has long forgotten existed. The middle class couldn't walk away because all that mattered to them were things and more things. They could care less about people unless those people bought them new toys that were bigger and shinier than their neighbor's toys. They were owned by their things. People didn't really matter much. They could always be exchanged for someone new if the old friend or lover didn't work out.

But she also knew it wasn't always this way, that there was a time when people could work and not need credit just to survive. It was when jobs came with union wages and benefits. The tax base was strong because  the jobs were there to pay into it. That meant roads were fixed, bridges kept in repair, and schools well-funded.

We had many discussions about this because she was the ultimate realist and saw deep through the superficial perfection of the time. Yes, it was a better time in that way, but it was also a time when racism was considered normal, women who wanted something more than marriage and a family were considered psychologically ill, and when the kind of small town mentality that festered under the guiding hand of some unholy intermediary preaching fear from the pulpit, made the churches of America the most segregated buildings in the country.

Anna was an Atheist but she truly believed Ronald Reagan was the devil because it was under his presidency that the real decay started. She had a magazine cover from one of the subscriptions her father read religiously. It was right after Reagan was elected and it had a woman in a mink draped over an expensive sports car and the headline said it was okay to be rich again. That's when the war really started. And it was a war against those who were poor, those who thought that if they worked hard enough, they could reach the mythical middle class that awaited them just beyond the horizon.

For Anna it was a war that became extremely personal. She never thought much about the source of her family's considerable wealth. She grew up with the children of other wealthy parents. She went to the private schools they all went to together. She described her early life as uneventful.

What changed it for her was an internship she did for her PhD that sent her into poor sections of the country. She didn't know poverty like that existed in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. She was ashamed for America, embarrassed that so many of its most vulnerable citizens, the young and the old, were forced to live in conditions unheard of in many parts of the civilized world.

Shortly after this experience, her grandfather died and while going through his journals and translating them, she discovered he'd been a Nazi and the source of the family wealth more than likely came from unsavory business dealings he made during the war in Germany.

You would have had to know Anna to understand how this devastated her, how completely it destroyed her emotionally. This was a woman who was kind, generous, compassionate, and didn't have a bigoted bone in her body. The realization that this man's blood ran through her own veins horrified her so much that she had nightmares of draining all the blood from her body and replacing it with someone else's. The self-hate was so thick it filled the room with her agony. Everyone was afraid she would kill herself to escape the pain.

But Anna didn't die right away.  I'm convinced it was during this time that she became an addict because nothing else numbed the pain. She went through rehab three times but each time the pain would win, the emotional devastation would keep her from being able to get out of bed in the morning. But one day she woke with a sense of purpose, a desire to make up for the harm her grandfather had inflicted on humanity. It gave her enough strength to crawl out and then spend the next two years undoing what her grandfather had spent decades putting together.

I will never know the complete list of places that benefited from her generosity, but I do know that many domestic violence shelters received anonymous donations, usually in small towns she had traveled through on one of her extended backpacking trips across America. I know that some promising, but poverty stricken young women, found themselves with hefty college funds. On a personal level, I know that a very large medical bill I had suddenly disappeared one day. She never admitted it but there was no one else who had that kind of money and wanted to just give it away without expecting anything in return.

One of the most important things she did was train a group of colleagues in Europe on how to work with children of Holocaust victims and the children of those who put them there. She believed if the hate was stopped at the children of war victims, then maybe there was hope for peace on the planet, so she worked on teaching them how to forgive, how to move on, how to stop letting the past cripple them emotionally, while at the same time never forgetting the evil that had caused it.

She was fairly controversial in her methods because she blamed wars and the hate they spawned on the greed of the wealthy and the lack of honor and ethics money inflicts on people. In this she was inflexible. She truly believed you couldn't be both a good person and wealthy because what made you good was destroyed by the greed that takes root when you have so much wealth. She said it was like drugs, that you wanted more and more and more because it was never enough. And like drugs, it made you not care who you stepped on and what you destroyed in order to get more wealth.

In the last year of her life Anna became rigidly inflexible in how she perceived the influence of the rich and powerful on the world. She refused to meet any of my friends who had trust funds or who had inherited more than a few hundred dollars  from a dead relative because she believed inheritances planted the seed of greed in them, that they would someday sprout that seed over some money issue.


The poor, she wrote me once, they forgive you not having money. They understand when you can't pay back that twenty dollars. But those little trustafarians, they'll cut the friendship off if you don't pay them back their dollar. And the wealthy, they'll make you sign a note and charge you interest and if you don't pay them back, they'll take something from you, like your house or your car. Like gangsters. Or drug dealers. Or bitter exes.


Anna did a lot of good with her wealth. She spent it well. She gave it freely. She washed the blood from it and made it work for good instead of evil. And one day, it was gone and she was living on the proceeds of her cabin she sold the winter before, in a tiny studio apartment with a computer and two cats. We had spent the winter on her final project helping women from the Bosnian war learn skills to teach them how to survive on their own after losing the breadwinners in the family to genocide. She helped children of war find homes where they would hopefully one day heal from the wounds of hate.

Maria was one of those children and when I think of Anna, I think of Maria and her sisters and countless other children. I believe Anna would be out there with the Occupy movement because there is no more middle class. There is rich and poor. There is ruling class and working class. The world she always told me really existed beneath the facade has come to pass and she would be the first one out there telling people to wake up, to take back their lives, to value each other, to honor friendships, to forgive but never forget, and most importantly to never forget the power of love because it can't be bought, it can't be traded, it can't be lost. In the end, it is all any of us ever have that truly matters.

Starry Night by orsobear
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War of the Classes

Love, Madness, and Altruism

Sometimes, when we least expect it, the past comes calling and expects a response. Today it came in the form of a very sweet and lovely email from the youngest daughter adopted by Stanis and Ryan in the early 90's. She was barely five years old then, a shy and traumatized victim of  atrocities only war can inflict upon a sentient being still forming the basics of who she would become. For two years she refused to speak. She was Ryan's silent little ghost who followed him all over the house when he was there, and cowered under blankets in her room when he had to go out for even a few minutes. It took nearly ten years for her to feel safe without his continual presence.

Maria grew into an amazingly kind and compassionate young woman who wrote to me when she read my blog entry on Anna's 50th birthday. Ryan was Anna's brother and he died in a motorcycle accident a year ago last September. He never meant to die stupidly, but he did and he did it willfully because he was tired of his own demons, the continual gnawing inside of mistakes he thought he made, people he couldn't save, and guilt that never belonged to him but he took on as if it were tailor-made for him. I couldn't judge him for this because except for the part about the motorcycle and dying stupidly, I could write those same words about myself.

When I first heard he was gone, my first thought was for Maria, for the horror, the unfairness of it, the unspeakable nightmare of once again being the sole survivor of all those she loved. And yet, even then, through all the sadness, the incredible despair of her siblings as they made funeral arrangements for the man who gave them a new life when their old one died, she demonstrated a strength that astounded all of us. In her words, in her actions, in the self-less, compassionate way she turned her grief into a soothing hand to help the pain of others, she embodied the spirit and energy of the man who raised her. But more than anything, she reminded me of someone she never met and knew only through mine and Ryan's stories: her aunt Anna.

Maria never met Anna, and she believed the grief over her death left Ryan unable to share much about his sister. She never pressed him too hard because she knew the kind of pain that comes from such unspeakable loss. Maria lost her entire family in one cruel battle for the soul of her country. She told me she stays strong to honor them so they didn't die uselessly, a concept I think I understand but am afraid to explore too deeply. I only know I am not that strong. In spite of how painful memories can be at times, I can say with certainty I have not suffered enough to find my strength that way. I can never be as strong as this beautiful young woman who wears the love of two people I cared for very much in her eyes.

Maria told me she didn't want to hurt Ryan by forcing the memories from him so he could tell her about his sister, because there were many times when it was painful to even remember she once had another family, much less talk about them.  And like all of us when the people in our lives are still relatively young, she thought she could afford to be patient, that eventually he would be able to fill in the blanks for her about the auntie she knew only through photographs and brief slips of memory that came from Stanis, Ryan, and her two older sisters--and I also wanted to tell her, every time she looked in the mirror. She has her mannerisms, her expressions, a way of gazing at what interests her that is eerily similar to Anna. But they never met. It is a mystery I've tried to explain to myself in many ways and none of the ways end up fitting.

So she wrote to me and suggested we trade stories. I would tell her about Anna and she would tell me about Ryan because we both have holes in our memories and sometimes you just need to fill those holes in order to move forward. I am convinced that loss makes us confront all the unfinished conversations, all the words we were so sure would wait for another day, a better time and place, a more appropriate situation. Because of this, I saw it as a noble offer and I accepted.

And as I did so I thought of how I am currently writing my memories of Lydia for her daughters, and now I will be writing my memories of Anna for her niece. It makes me wonder how I ended up with so many memories that belong to other people, how I became the place others stored such valuable pieces of themselves. However, I know I am no different than anyone else in this way of collecting those we love and cherish when they are no longer with us, but we aren't able to let them leave us completely. Everyone has something to leave behind. I've learned that time and again.

We are all made up of those who came through our lives and left something of themselves behind. It can be as powerful as a life-changing experience, or as simple as it was with one person in my own life--just a scent, a certain faint memory stored in my senses  from a man whose name I never knew but whose delicious scent will be with me for life. I know nothing about him, of his life, who he loved or how he lived. We shared an elevator many years ago and he found a way to crawl into my tissue forever. Choice had absolutely no say in the matter. Why should it in anything else?

We tell ourselves it's our choice what we remember, but it isn't. Those memories don't go away. They are dormant little weasels ready to break through the ice of our consciousness when we least expect it. When I took that first crack with my ax of memory and freed the first weasel, what came out was a moment that at the time seemed so insignificant, I barely noticed it. And yet it became a defining piece of self that shaped, molded, and continues to direct who I am.

It was the first warm day in April after a bitterly cold winter. I had helped Anna transcribe the video testimony of a man whose mother survived the Nazi death camps. It was an angry, depressing session filled with his rage at all Germans. He repeated over and over again that everything Anna was doing was ridiculous because there were some things that could never be forgiven and no amount of forcing him to interact with the children of those who had committed such horrors would change that. I will never forgive!


It depressed me because Anna was German  and I knew other Germans who were kind, loving human beings. And no one was forcing him to take part in her project. He volunteered. But his rage was so total, so complete, so much a part of who he was, it was as if all those things had been done to him instead of to his mother,  and he blamed an entire country, even those who weren't even born,  for what was done to her.

In retrospect, I remember how much I focused on his anger, his inability to forgive, and how little I focused on what I felt in my response to him. I know now I went numb. I shut him out emotionally so I could continue to write down his angry words, his outbursts, the tears that were not from sadness or compassion, but a rage so deep inside him it poured out as tears.

Don't!


Anna's voice startled me. She never raised it, never let on that she was angry or upset or annoyed. Anna was an even rising and falling of whatever wave existed. She rode it and didn't let it wash over her. I asked her "Don't what?" thinking I was transcribing the words wrong.

Don't do what you're doing now. Don't become them. Stay true. Always stay true.


I've thought of those words a lot in the time since. There's so much of me that always existed outside the herd that I couldn't fit in even when I wanted to. People sensed I was different and it made them uncomfortable just as their embracing a lifestyle that was mostly self-indulgent made me uncomfortable. I've differed with most people in so many ways most of my life, that I'm always surprised when I meet someone who understands my differences, perhaps shares some of them, and most certainly doesn't run away screaming and shouting phony excuses to justify their own discomfort at having to confront themselves through my view of the world.

Most of my life, if I saw injustice, I spoke up and tried to see where I could fit in, what I could do to right the wrong. If I saw someone that needed help, I offered my hand because that's what it means to be human, to care, to share the planet with other sentient beings. If I had one piece of bread and someone else had none, I had to share it because I couldn't eat it if I didn't. It would taste dry and hard and would never nourish me as much as half a piece shared.

It  has been both a blessing and a curse to go through life this way. A blessing because I met people like Anna, like Ryan and Stanis, like Lydia...the list of amazing, kind, and loving people is endless and each day it grows longer. But it is also a  curse because it's an open doorway to those who know only how to take and use and never to give or reciprocate. It's not true that I don't see them coming. It is true that I won't allow myself to sink down to their level. I stay as I am, no matter how devastating the consequences could possibly be, because I can't imagine living any other way. I don't see other ways as living. I see them as existing on the most shallow surface possible and not caring enough to live any other way. But I've learned how to protect myself from actual tissue damage. The rest of it is just things and those are meaningless to me. If they ask, I'll give whatever I have to give. No one needs to take or lie or cheat or bullshit me. All they have to do is ask and it is theirs. But they take and lie and cheat and steal anyways. That always astonishes me.

 Anna called people like that "empty souls" because everything they put in ran out on the ground without those necessary stoppers of sentient beingness in place. They failed to understand it was their own selfishness, their own greed, their own need for vengeance, their own desire to always be one up on someone else, that left them with such an insatiable hunger. It was easy to avoid becoming them. It was easy to dismiss them as not worth the energy it took to relate to them in any way.

But Anna's scorn, an emotion she rarely let loose, was reserved for those who portrayed themselves as givers, as kind and loving people, but who were so focused on keeping the give and take balanced, that it eventually became the most important thing. She saw them as always keeping score, as having an emotional balance sheet that was every bean counter's fantasy.

So to Maria, I share this important piece of who Anna was that mattered the most: if your love, your compassion, your ability to share has limits, it is not love. It is not compassion. It is not altruism. Limits are for sane people, she always told me. But to live without limits on your heart is to leave yourself open to pain, to disappointment, to betrayal. It's pure madness to live in such a way. But can you really call it living if you live any other way?

I personally can't. I have to live this way because it is who I am. Maybe people who are selfish, who are unable to give of their hearts and themselves, maybe it's just who they are and  a whole lot of us weirdos may be wrong in insisting there is a better way. Maybe for them, there is no better way. Maybe that is where their own personal evolution ends. They are like that man long ago hating people who weren't even born yet for things that happened not to him, but to those he cared about. He didn't know the important thing Anna saw in him, the thing she told me kept her going back to try again with him: he hates them not because they hurt him, but because they hurt someone he loves. As long as he can feel pain over someone else's pain, he still has his humanity intact..


It really is that simple.

Sea Birds and Boat by northwest_photograph
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Love, Madness, and Altruism

Eat the Rich

The rich have always stolen from the poor. It's how they became rich. But most of the time they stole just enough to buy themselves all the wealth and privilege they needed and the rest of the world plodded along with the plumped up scraps they were given to buy food, shelter, and a sense of security.

With their own needs taken care of, most people didn't really care about the rich, other than as a sort of strange fairy godmother who might one day, in spite of all evidence against it, gift the lower beings with some of her treasure. This was a message the power elites fed to the people in shovelfuls. One day, you too can be rich like us if only...


It was that "if only" that was the killer. If only you were fortunate to be born into it. If only you were fortunate enough to marry into it. If only you were fortunate enough to learn how to steal quietly and efficiently. Money became the new holy grail, not just money but wealth, mountains of wealth so you could buy mountains of power to enable you to make even more money.

But that part wasn't talked about openly. Instead people were fed the lie that if only you worked really really hard for whatever meager pay was thrown your way, and if you went without, and if you lived like an exiled monk in a threadbare sackcloth bag and ate grass and berries, if you sacrificed everything, then wealth was within your grasp.

But of course it was a lie. You couldn't work your way to wealth. You had to inherit it, marry it, steal it, sell yourself for it. By making it nearly impossible,short of winning the lottery, most people were content with what they had and they willingly and happily shared with the elderly, the sick, the less fortunate. It's how people defined themselves and others as good people: they shared what they had because they knew how lucky they were to have more than enough.

But every so often, something comes along to upset that blissful state of ignorance where people are happy working just for things as proof they really do work hard for their money. The house, the car, the family, the vacations, the toys. There's a transition that happens when they stop being just things but instead become something that is not enough. Greed starts to filter into the formerly satisfied dream state most of the working and middle classes were content to wallow in while they filled up on cud.  But then they started to want more. They started to want power. They started to want prestige. They started to want to live in a world beyond the pretty little prisons created for them.

Greed doesn't just grow overnight. It takes root when money becomes the most important thing in people's lives because it starts to mean they can buy more things, they can buy bigger houses, more expensive cars and toys. It starts to set in when people begin to feel the emptiness of working at a meaningless job for money that lets them survive but does nothing to fulfill the dreams They just know the unhappy relationships, the shallow friendships, the tedious boredom of existence can all be fixed with more money. They wake up from their hunger and demand more.

At this point is where most people are easily manipulated by the power elite. The power pigs know how to play with the angst of not having enough. They're experts at it. It's how they became even wealthier themselves, by knowing how to play those beneath them. The more unhappy someone is with their existence, the more the message goes out that money can heal that unhappiness. Money starts to take on a new value. It becomes a mean of power and salvation. It becomes something people will do just about anything to get more of so they can ease the emptiness of their lives.

And that's the moment greed takes over. No longer do people consider such a thing as having enough to live on comfortably. Nothing is ever enough anymore. If they have extra, rather than share it as they once did, they hide it or sell it to the desperate for more than it's worth. If they have a car about to die, they know there's a poor, desperate person who can only afford to buy it.

Both the buyer and seller know the car is a piece of crap, but justification is an amazing thing. The seller convinces him or herself that the buyer is somehow at fault for being poor so they deserve to be cheated. And the poor person is so used to being cheated that they hand over the money and hope the car won't fall apart too soon and hopefully will keep driving until they can find a better job so they can buy a better car.

That mentality is how mortgages were sold to people who couldn't afford them, and then created rich people who bet on how many of those bad mortgages would go into default. Greed created an industry that basically bet on human misery. There's no going back from that. It's the total and complete abdication of anything human in the being.

So much money was being made that the pool of gullible people had to be kept stocked, so that meant formerly good and decent human beings had to be turned against each other. Suddenly it wasn't the insatiable greed of the wealthy that was responsible for people losing their jobs and homes. It was the fault of the poor, it was the fault of the middle class, it was the fault of those who now had nothing and were desperate for any kind of help to survive, whether it was food stamps or social security or health care. Those things that were nothing more than basic survival to civilized nations, became the new pariah class. It took the attention off the out of control thievery of the rich. They couldn't afford to have anyone notice how much they were stealing.

But then people started losing their jobs. People started losing their homes. People started losing their health care, their ability to survive. Houses were foreclosed on and boarded up while the poor slept in the streets. And it became their faults if they froze to death for being dumb enough to be poor.

This is the mentality that grows and is fed when fearful and stupidly educated sheeple march in the streets in support of huge corporate insurance and health care industries while they can't even afford a doctor's visit for basic care. Of course they are going to be well-funded. Of course they won't be tear-gassed or beaten. They're the property of corporate America and are needed to keep the attention off their thievery.

That's why an organic movement such as Occupy Wall Street terrifies the power elite. They desperately want to find out who the leaders are, who the organizers are, who the financiers are because the Tea Party was funded and manipulated by them and so they can't imagine anyone taking to the streets on their own.

But we are and that scares them and they will fight back. They will attack. They will lie. They will manipulate. And the way to fight back against them is to be what they are not because they can't grab hold of that. They can't fight against someone who shares their meal with a stranger, someone who reaches into their own closet to help a stranger stay warm with an extra coat they aren't using, someone who sees extra in their lives and shares it happily because they really don't need more than they have.

The power elite are afraid people will quit valuing things and start valuing each other. They are afraid people will give away their extra instead of selling it or throwing it away because that cuts into the profits of the powerful. They are afraid people will realize they don't need to own a huge McMansion and are content to live in shelter that is easy to support and maintain and leaves enough left over to help the sick, the needy, the elderly, the less fortunate. They are afraid people will become givers instead of takers, that they will see stop seeing the poor and unfortunate as the problem and instead start looking for the source of the problem.

Once the people start looking for the source of that problem, there is only one place it will lead: to the thievery that's been going on for far too long, at the theft of our humanity, of our compassion, of our generosity, and of our purpose on this planet. Once people's eyes are open they are going to demand answers. They are going to demand change. And they are going to do it as one, powerful unified voice that no amount of money can buy. That's what the powerful fear the most: people who can't be bought. People who know the real value of life is sharing with each other so we all rise up together as a unified and powerful force for change.

Godless Damned Liberal by godless_heathen
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Eat the Rich

Happy Birthday, Anna

You would have been fifty today. We were ten years apart, a decade of differences that we managed to bridge because we both cared about the same things.  I've been remembering how we talked about this magical transformation then, about the party you would have, the places it would be held, the people you would invite. If you were the kind of person who suddenly overnight decided you liked parties. But I think you would have made an exception for your 50th.

It's interesting to me, as a devout Atheist, how strong your presence is in the last few weeks. I will not insult your memory by calling your presence angel or god or any of those imaginary hallucinations you detested and blamed for all the ills of the world. I completely agreed with you then and now, which is why I'm more inclined to believe I reshaped you from your ashes because I needed the purity of who you were to keep me company in what has been a confusing time for me.

Or maybe it's because Lydia's choice was taken away from her, because she wasn't allowed to exit gracefully as she planned. I wanted to fight for her. I wanted to bring up the explicit instructions she left. But in the end, I couldn't do it. I gave in to the grief of others who were with her, who spent their lives loving her. There are moments when I feel as if I betrayed her by not sticking up for her wishes. And there are other times when I think, well, maybe she waited too long on purpose. It could have been her choice at any time. Who am I to say it didn't end exactly as she wanted it to?

Maybe that's why I feel you so strongly. It's not just the whole milestone birthday thing. It's remembering how passionate you were about the right to choose anything and everything. The whole idea of someone making decisions for you was an impossibility you refused to allow into your life. I respected you for that because at the time I was still looking for my strength as a person. I was still letting others define me and my life. It was a confusing time, just like now.

You hated rich people. I always thought that was funny since you came from a very wealthy family. It seemed strange to me that you would feel so strongly about it. I envied you at times, being able to travel, to buy anything you wanted, to be able to help people and not think that feeding the hungry meant you couldn't pay the power bill. Those weren't choices I didn't think you ever had to make.

But I was wrong about you. I didn't know until your brother told me, that you had given away most of your money, that the truth was you had less than I did at the time. I didn't know the grant you said funded your project came from your own pocket, that you spent everything you had to tell the stories of war victims. I didn't know it was your money that bought all the equipment we used, all the clothing we bought for the refugees, all the deposits and rents and food supplies we filled their rented apartments with. I just didn't know.

I do remember you telling me it was a good thing I didn't have extra in my life because I would just give it away to the first person with a sad story. I wondered how you knew me so well. Now I know. You gave all yours away to a whole lot of people with sad stories. You used what you had to help a small piece of the world heal.

Maybe that's why you're so much with me now. I look around at the appalling selfishness of the wealthy, of the whiny little complaints of the privileged little divas too many of my friends raised because they thought if they gave their kids everything they wanted, they wouldn't turn on them as teenagers, that everyone would be pals forever. Now it's my friends who want to turn on their kids and are ashamed of their selfishness, of their shallowness. And all of us look to their children, the grandchildren we would have had if we had children,  instead, the ones who started the Occupy Wall Street movement, the ones who really are unselfish and altruistic and truly care about the planet more than themselves and their own needs.

But it's how we were too. We rebelled against our parents and embraced the wisdom of our grandparents. You told me once that the grandchildren would save the world and I didn't really know what you meant. I do now. Sadly, I do now. But at the same time I have hope. Yes, my dear and closest friends have children they love but don't like. It's the relationship you had with your parents and my parents had with me. It takes skipping a generation to be understood. It makes old people relevant again at a time when we start to feel like useless burdens on society. Maybe that's why my friends appreciate their grandchildren so much. They know in them is the planet's salvation. As we both often said, altruists aren't born; we need something to object to, something so foul it awakens the humanist in us and propels us to act.

I think back on one of the last conversations we had. My father had just died. You knew we weren't close, that I had run as far away from his violence as I could without leaving the country. You knew how his abuse turned me into a fearful creature who was always afraid of upsetting people because my life taught me that upset people inflict pain. We talked a lot about that, about the people I chose to surround myself with, the users, abusers, and as you said, the ones with hearts like parking meters. Those were the ones you told me to look out for because until I learned that I wasn't a bad person who didn't deserve better just because I'd spent a life time getting that message, didn't mean I couldn't one day find my strength and walk upright.

You would enjoy my uprightness these days. I still have my moments. I still don't fully trust people. But I'm working on it. I let more of my friends in than I work at keeping them out. And I've done the necessary pruning you long ago suggested would improve my life considerably. I grew strong just from that one decision.  I thank you for maybe not planting the seed, but at least providing the nourishment that helped it grow.

So happy birthday, dear Anna. I've known some amazing women in my life and you're at the top of the list. And your work lives on. You'd be happy to know that. The people you chose to take it over for you did a fantastic job. Your wish that world peace would grow from the money that came to you from sources you considered too evil to spend on yourself, have been scattered as many small seeds and they've taken root. The world benefitted from your life. That's more than many people can ever say.

Rose Bud by northwest_photograph
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Happy Birthday, Anna

And so it ends again...

When someone decides to go for a motorcycle ride in the middle of the night after spending the last five years trying to drink himself to death, does it really qualify as an accident or is it just suicide by another name? And when you add various substances said motorcycle rider probably injested as well because he learned a long time ago that after alcohol doesn't really numb the pain of too many wounds on the soul, the question becomes more complicated.

It's that complicated thing I'm dealing with right now. I want to be angry at him. I want to be sad over him. I want him to still be alive but I also feel the truth of that stupid and trite saying "he's now at peace." I hate saying that. I hate feeling it because it really explains so little.

He told me suicide ran in his family a couple weeks after we scattered his sister's ashes in 1990. She was my friend and I tried to save her. I was young and foolish then. I really did believe people could be saved from themselves. Anna proved me wrong. She showed me that sometimes salvation is taking yourself out of the picture of human life. It took me a long time to forgive her but I finally did. I haven't changed my mind that suicide is the most stupid and selfish thing you can do to those who love you, but I forgave her. Mostly because her brother asked me to.

He had a kind soul. A very deep and vulnerable soul. He had the kind of openness that people zero in on and immediately find a way to take advantage of it. We had that in common and we exchanged many mournful and supportive emails over the years on how people needed to come up to our level and not force us to sink down to theirs. We wrote each other and said be strong, hang on to your principles, be a person of integrity and compassion, even if others are not, even if others use all that in your for their own purposes. We assured each other the occasional using was worth the good we could do in the world just by staying kind, compassionate, caring, and strong.

Ryan was a lot more optimistic about it than I was. Often he was the one who wrote me and begged me not to give up, not to isolate myself, not to run away from people who were mean and selfish, that I had to let them see the other side of life, even if it hurt and cost me a few pieces of skin. "Skin is ego," he was fond of saying, "and road rash is humility."

But in the end it was he who suffered over what the rest of the world did. He was not the type of person to stand back in silence when wrong was being done. He spent most of his considerable fortune helping others, mostly children in countries torn apart by war. He had a soft spot for the innocent victims in everything and he spent his life saving them.

But in the end, he simply felt too much. I read the downhill slide in his ever more infrequent emails. Where once there was hope and optimism there was far too often despair and depression. He took far too many drugs to cope with what he could no longer face. His nightmares took over his days. I often wondered how far it would go before he killed himself.

I always thought it would be by something clean and efficient, an overdose from the many bottles available. A staged and dramatic setting that wouldn't  inconvenience anyone too much. He didn't want to leave a mess for someone else to clean up.

A couple weeks ago he wrote me a rambling email that covered much of his life. I remembered thinking it was the kind of thing one wrote after drinking all the alcohol in the house, swallowing the pills, and typing furiously before it all kicked in.

It was probably that way. But it was a beautiful night out. The moon was full. And the road called to him, the winding mountain road in a northern Italian setting. I imagine it was beautiful. I imagine there was a moment of elation, a moment of fear, of sadness, a thought of those like me who would be hurt. But his pain was too strong and the night too beautiful and he knew I would forgive him.

Right now I'm not sure. It's only been a week. I still think of him in present time. I still want to write and talk him out of it. I want to leap through time and take his keys away. But Anna taught me such things wouldn't change a thing and my only option was forgiveness.

Maybe that is the story of my life. Maybe that is what he left me with, that often in life the only option we are left with is forgiveness. I have to accept that for now.

And so it ends again...

The Company We Keep

I've always believed that we are known by how we treat others on our way through the maze of life. There's nothing more revealing of character defects than how those above the crowd treat those below them in status, wealth, power, and dignity. It's why we elected a President who represented the paradigm shift many of us already felt and wanted to make the norm instead of a quaint idea embraced by an idealistic few.

We knew that treating others with dignity and respect were the keys to creating a better, kinder and more gentle world. We knew that a planet that was lacking in humanity would soon cease to hold anything resembling the enlightened and wise human being. It would deteriorate into an us vs. them, me first, take it all before someone else does jungle of savage and cruel excuses for human beings.

I've tried most of my life to only be around those who are kind, who care about others more than they care about themselves, who are supportive of endeavors without being enablers of bad habits and ideas, who say good things about those who are not in their presence rather than spread mean and self-serving untruths.

I haven't always been successful as I'm one of those people who prefer to believe the best of someone before I accept the worse. And of course, love is the great blindspot that filters all truths, as is the need for survival, the ache for friendship that won't betray you, and the idea that won't turn out to be something other than it claimed to be.

But I'm a fast learner and definitely can say that no one has ever fooled me twice. And along with that learning came the shaping that made me who I am today--someone who will not compromise on her ethics and expects others to live the same way.

For several years I've had many Cafepress shops. I was okay with some of their merchandise as I didn't believe college students who were looking for a beer drinking party shirt cared much if some poor Guatemalan villager made 10 cents for the shirt they just paid 30 dollars for. It didn't seem important that a shirt be 100 percent organic and sweatshop free if it was just going to be used as a limited message against a political candidate I detested. It seemed fitting in a way to use it for that purpose. I always figured people voted with their wallets anyway so if the origin and distribution of the merchandise was offensive to them, they'd simply walk away and buy it elsewhere.

But when I opened a shop that reflected the passion I felt over our need to save the environment, to fight against the corporate takeover of our limited and precious resources, and to promote a healthy lifestyle through the choice of organic food, vegetarianism and other issues that affected me directly, then it began to matter.

I justified my shop at Cafepress even though I was not completely happy with their reluctance to come right out and say these products are not made by people we exploited for a large profit margin in a third world country. I felt they allowed individual artists the opportunity to promote their message in a supportive and like environment. The people who are and were shopkeepers at Cafepress were individual small business owners, the kind of people I support in my everyday life when I choose where to spend my money. I don't shop at Wal-mart, don't eat at McDonalds, and I buy my lattes from my neighbor who is feeding her family with the profits from her personally owned stand instead of Starbucks.

That has all changed. Cafepress is no longer the small shopkeeper many of us prefer to support. Their front page now sports Coca-Cola designs and other corporate contracts. The small shopkeeper is being squeezed out and replaced with those who will work for far less and stay within the corporate lines. Artists are no longer allowed to set the price for their personally created works. Cafepress will do it for them and will also only pay the individual artist 10 percent and no more. This means that the average artist will make about a dollar on every shirt they sell and pennies on buttons and stickers. And worst of all, that doesn't mean lower prices for the consumer. It means that Cafepress is giving themselves the profit we once made.

Of course, this is all within their right to do so. It is their marketplace, their business, and their problem. But for me and other shoppers who take into consideration where the merchandise comes from, how the employees are treated, and how exploitive and corporate-owned the business is, shopping there is no longer an option. In my mind they are no different now than Wal-Mart or their new BFF, Coca-Cola.

Therefore, I and many others are moving many of our designs away from them. And in the way life has of making lemonade, I found the perfect venue for my Environment designs. Skreened.com represents everything I believe a company can represent and still make money. Take a look at their statement of purpose:

Here's what excites me about offering these products through Skreened:

"Everything SKREENED offers is made in the United States byAmerican Apparel.

Since we take a strong stance against any kind of exploitive labor practices, we have chosen to print on American Apparel. Their employees are paid fair wages and have an excellent work environment.

After it's all said and done, wouldn't you rather pay just a little bit more for the peace-of-mind that comes with knowing that no one was exploited to put a cheap shirt on your back? read more

I am looking forward to helping them grow their business with my many designs devoted to saving the earth and each other. I encourage you to shop there and support them because we all need to put our money where our personal beliefs and ethics are or why have them? Here are a couple offerings to get you started, and note that you can take the design that is on this product and put it on one of their other offerings if you wish. You can also add your own text to it. Have fun folks. I am.

This shirt is available at Ursine Logic's Environment Store.

This shirt is available at Ursine Logic's Environment Store.

Later I'll tell you what I really enjoy and appreciate about Zazzle. They are embracing Cafepress shopkeepers with open arms, lots of support, and a cool range of products. They're a great place for those special gifts.

Cafepress, Skreened, Organic, American Apparel, Sweatshop Free, Environment, anti-corporation

The Company We Keep

Dear Ms. Selfish Asshat

I received an email this morning that left me shaking my head at the total and utter selfishness of some human beings. I'd post it, along with the name, but I'm one of those dinosaurs who believes an email sent between people is a private conversation. But that doesn't prevent me from responding publicly. Names changed to protect the clueless:

Dear Ms. Selfish Asshat:

I read the tragic tale of your lost trust fund and how after three whole years of your life depending on it showing up in your bank account, you now find yourself in the job market with no skills, no ambition, no desire or ability to work and you want President Obama to help you instead of, as you so eloquently put it: "...all those welfare queens who sit on their fat asses all day."

Ms. A, you stated in your email that you are 38 years old. Who supported your privileged little ass for the three years before the free money kicked in? Did it ever occur to you to use the education your grandparents endowed for something besides a four year long fashion parade?

No, I can't relate to you not being able to buy any new clothes to go job hunting. I spend most of my time figuring out if the money I have left after paying bills will feed us for three days or four. Some months I actually have to decide if I want to eat food or late fees. And besides, I'm sure your closet is overflowing with suitable job hunting clothes because you did mention that being nicely dressed is vital to your self esteem.

Well, my selfish little friend, being able to pay my bills is vital to MY self-esteem. There are people every day losing their jobs, their houses, their retirement funds and you're whining because you can't afford an expensive new outfit? What the fuck is wrong with you?

But there is a bright spot in your utter and clueless selfishness, and that's knowing that there's lots of people like you who will be finding out exactly what I'm talking about. Right now you're still living on what your parents give you out of their rapidly draining savings account because as you said, there's nothing left of their investments except savings. You whine because you have to cut back on what you want. Wait until their savings is gone, and then you'll learn, as many of your privileged, selfish little peers will learn, that cutting back is nothing like you thought it would be.

I hope that moment of awakening will make you more compassionate, more tolerant, more able to take charge of your own life and grow some responsibility for your lazy, incompetent ass. If what is about to happen to you will also happen to a lot of other people who are in your position right now, then maybe we will grow up to be a better nation, maybe you'll understand how you and others like you represent the dying, failed and cruel policies of the mean and incompetent Bush presidency.

If not, then you'll just go hungry and your soul will be as empty as your heart is now.

selfish, lost trust funds, bailouts, economy, compassion, tolerance, job market

Dear Ms. Selfish Asshat

Mean People Still Suck

One of the things I really enjoy about getting older is that a lot of what was once important just seems so godawfulfuckinridiculous now. Often it's a source of amusement to remember an event, a person, an emotion related to a time and laugh at how insignificant it is now, how small a thing it became when once it was so important. Even that is an awakening because there was a time when I'd have been outraged at the overwhelmingly large becoming the humorously small. I would have been insulted to waste my rich emotional life on piddly crap. But the truth is I did. I wasted a lot of me that could have been spent better elsewhere. I gave my heart to so much piddly crap that I could wear a crown of insignificance with all the pride of someone who had devoted her life to earning such a trophy. I really could. And yes, I earned it. Damn straight, I earned it.

I could cry over it, but now I just laugh. I laugh at a lot of things. I laugh at people who take themselves so seriously there's no wiggle room for them to be anything else. A creative grave is still a hole in a ground with dirt. But they can't see it. The grave is the thing you see, these people say with all the intensity of the armchair philosopher with credentialed thoughts leading the marching band in their brains.

I am always left exhausted arguing with people like that because their entire lives are talking points. They can't go beyond them. They can't stretch them. They can't question them. They can't interpret them. But they gather up each other like a big old sticky ball of tape rolling down a hill.

They're what's happened to this country in the last few years. I blame these sticky ball folks' appalling lack of ability to think outside their own grave for the appalling  talking points mentality that has taken over this country like dirt shoveled on that grave.

People are  burying themselves in the emptiness of ideologies that don't come from anything they believe. It comes from their masters, the ones that keep them afraid and weak and insignificant. It comes from those they envy, those they covet, those they resent for freedoms and intact dreams they no longer have.

I haven't seen anything like it since the ant farm I had as a kid, the one I continually messed with in the hopes of getting the ants to do something, anything other than the regimented pattern of their existence. But it never happened. The ants remained ants.

That ant farm prepared me to meet people who couldn't think beyond their own immediate needs, who couldn't conceptualize beyond their own wants, and who desperately sought the path of least introspection. It's the only reason I didn't become an antisocial grub-eating, grass-munching, cave-dwelling hermit. The ants warned me about such people. I knew them when I met them. I was emotionally prepared for their emptiness. I knew they would never give back even a fraction of what I was capable of giving. I just saw it as an unfair way of the world. There's lots of things like that. I can't let myself get beaten up over them.

But I was never adequately prepared for the selfish cruelty of people. I'm still appalled and shaken to the core of my idealistic self when I am confronted with it. I just don't understand people who think only of themselves and no one else. It seems like such an empty way to be, such a hollow excuse for what could be a rich and meaningful life. Part of me wants to feel sorry for them and the other part of me sees them as undeveloped two year olds who never set aside their emotional diapers for the real world.

I've met more than my share of backstabbing losers and unfortunately a lot of them convinced me they were my friends. The older I got the more I pruned them away like the dead growth they always were but I couldn't always see. I wanted them to grow, to change, to evolve, but sadly they never did and in some cases just became even more selfish, even more mean, even more petty, even more ridiculous  excuses for human beings. I had to let them go or they would take me down with them.

But I've learned that when you let something bad go, you often make room for something good to grow in its place. I've learned that most people are inadequate in some way. I can deal with that. I don't judge the inadequacies of those I love and respect. I see it as part of their charm, their humanity. What I can't deal with is mean. Mean people suck. They really do and they always will. It takes a real snake of a person to be mean when there's so many other options.

But you know, in an odd sort of way I think we are nearing the end of that time when mean people ruled with such power and authority. It's crazy to see it but what brought them down in the end was their own meanness, their own selfishness, their own greed, their own shallow belief that everyone owed them something and they owed no one anything.

Just as those I cut ties with eventually had to start feeding on each other because I was no longer there as an option, so did the culture of greed, the spoiled brats that never grew up had to start feeding on each other. And that's what brought them down because greed will never satisfy hunger. Only introspection and emotional maturity can do that. Only compassion and altruism and thinking beyond yourself can do that. Only a world where we value each other more than we value things or power or vengeance can keep us from becoming those regimented ants trapped between two pieces of glass and a great big pile of dirt.

Canvas tote bag from Ursine Logic.

altrusim, compassion, culture of greed, selfish people, ant farm, mean people suck, talking points

Mean People Still Suck