Today we are beginning a series of articles on Growing Older Gracefully which appear usually on Thursdays and perhaps other days of the week, but especially on Thursdays. You can access them by clicking “growing older” below the header.

Thursdays will be devoted to something that we all are experiencing all the time whether we are consciously aware of it or not, growing older.

All things grow older and wear out. For human beings, though, it’s not just a matter of growing older but “growing up.” Growing up means increasingly becoming consciously aware of the interdependent web of life of which we are apart. Growing up is not just learning more and attaining more understanding but coming to apprehend what matters. Some call this wisdom.

Some terms we might learn are “gerontology” which is the scientific study of the biological, psychological, and social aspects of aging. In the helping fields of medicine, nursing, psychology, Social Work, and education there are professionals who specialize in helping people in the later stages of their life course who are called “gerontologists”. I switched my primary care physician from an internist to a geriatric physician. Studies have found that people who receive their medical care from geriatric specialists are more satisfied with their health care, maintain their levels of functioning longer, and live longer.

Another term less well known is “senescence” which is the application of evolutionary principles to the understanding of the decline leading to the death of humans and other living organisms. Observing senescence might lead one to laugh quoting the slogan, “Growing older is not for sissies.”

Growing older is as much a social construct as it is a biological and psychological phenomenon. How old is old is culturally and individually defined. Some say that “old” is ten years older than you are at present. So when one is 50, 60 seems old. When one is 60, 70 seems old. When one is 70, 80 seems old.

In the US since 1935 65 has been considered old because it was used as the age of retirement for full Social Security pensions. In 1935 when Social Security first started the life expectancy for males was 59.9 years and for females was 63.9. Since 1935 life expectancy has increased by 16 years. Today, the full retirement age is 67 for anyone born in 1960 or later, and life expectancy at birth is 76 years for men and 81 years for women.

With advances in health care with such things as knee and hip replacements, heart surgeries, and organ transplants, people experience a higher quality of life into their later years.

Old is as much a matter of mind as anything. The old saying is “Use it or lose it.” A friend of mine, when asked to describe old age in two words, said “keep moving.”

Chronological age is not necessarily a good indication of vigor, functioning, and quality of life. There are people who are old at 55 and some still young at 85. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones did a music tour in the spring and summer of 2024 promoting their new album, Hackney Diamonds. Mick and Keith were both 80 and the tour ended on July 21, 2024, five days before Mick turned 81 on July 26th.

1. Do you feel your age? I look in the mirror and am surprised and say to myself, “Who is that old man?”

2. What are you still good for or have you gone out to pasture passing the time waiting to die?

3. What is the role the elderly are expected to play in your family, in your community, in your state, in our nation?

4. What are the things you can no longer do that you could do when you were younger and still wish you could?

5. What are the things that you can do now that you are in the later stages of your life that you couldn’t do when you were younger and are glad that you can?

6. Overall, would you want to be younger again? If so, what age do you want to be?

7. It is interesting that the young can’t wait to grow up to be older, and the old folks, some of them, want to be younger. How satisfied are you with your present age of life?

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Periodically, as humans in the twenty first century, it is a good practice to “take stock” and reflect on where we are at, where we’ve come from, and where we’d like to go.

I turned 79 on 12/25/24 having been born on Christmas day in 1945. It seems an auspicious birthday, the last in my 70s before I turn 80 if I get there and there is no reason at this time that I can’t think that I will.

Another reason that turning 79 is auspicious is that I have learned that the life expectancy for a Caucasian male in the US in 2022 according to the CDC (Center For Disease Control) is 74.8 years and so I am on borrowed time. I am living with gravy as Raymond Carver said in his poem. I think that every day is a gift that most men like me don’t get so out of gratitude for the gift I am given I should make good use of it.

Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living and the bumper sticker says that an unlived life is not worth examining. So wanting to live an examined life it is good to take stock and make plans.

Spiritually intelligent people know that they are called to become something greater than they are. They aspire to rise above their everyday self to their Higher Self where they become aware of their wholeness. Like the monk said to the hot dog vendor, “Make me one with everything.” And so it is good to practice CQI, Continuous Quality Improvement, and thus some of us make New Year’s resolutions to do better, to live better, to learn better, to love better in the coming year.

Having read some of the articles at this time of year that pop up like pop corn on the various media channels, I have picked up a few tips which I have practiced and know that they work at least for me. Here they are:

1. Keep your resolution small. Take your ideal goal and cut it in half.

2. Make it specific. The question is not what do you want, and what do you aspire to, but what will you actually do? Whatever it is, keep it brief, 5 minutes or under.

3. Set periodic dates and times to check your progress and adjust.

4. Share your intention with people who might care and listen to their feedback.

5. Plan a ceremony to recognize and acknowledge the achievement.

A motto for the coming year is “Coming more alive in 2025” 2025 is another year to become your better self that you were created to become. With the help and guidance of your Higher Power, whatever or whoever you conceive your Higher Power to be, you can be successful and this success will bring satisfaction, fulfillment, and peace.

Okay?

What do you think?

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AARP had an article a few years ago about mistakes parents make with their adult children. At the top of the list was trying to give the adult children our stuff because they really don't want it.

The value of our stuff is not the stuff itself but the memories we have attached to the objects. Our memories are ours and usually are not the same as our adult children and so the objects don't mean the same to them that they mean to us.

Our stuff then isn't really not about the stuff but the memories we have attached to them. The question then is not what to do with the stuff but what to do with the memories and stories that the stuff reminds us of.

The stuff itself could be very valuable to the right person who values antiques, classic, stuff. If the stuff is collectible or one of a kind it could be worth a lot to the right person or people. Finding them can be challenging but perhaps worth it, depending on how much time, energy, and effort you want to expend to find the right match between our stuff and someone who appreciates, not for the memories but for the object itself.

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What are the implications of the fact that more women are college educated than men?

On davidgmarkham.substack.com we track sociological trends that have implications for our culture.

What do you think the consequences of females being better educated than males in the US means for the future of our society?

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The Free State Of Jones came out in June, 2016 and I watched it today on Netflix.

From the IMDB web site:

Set during the Civil War, "Free State of Jones" tells the story of defiant Southern farmer Newt Knight and his extraordinary armed rebellion against the Confederacy. Banding together with other small farmers and local slaves, Knight launched an uprising that led Jones County, Mississippi to secede from the Confederacy, creating a Free State of Jones. Knight continued his struggle into Reconstruction, distinguishing him as a compelling, if controversial, figure of defiance long beyond the War.—STX Entertainment

The movie opens saying that it is based mostly on a true story. I looked it up on Wikipedia. It is not a happy story about American history other than the fact that it describes courageous people who stood up to oppression, abuse, maiming, and killing for social justice.

Is it helpful to witness America’s shameful history of racism, enslavement, subjugation, and injustice?

Yes, because without knowing our history and from where we have come as a nation, and the atrocities we are capable of, we cannot recognize, acknowledge, and rectify our evil shadow side. As we have seen glaringly in the Trump era, white supremacy is still a very strong dynamic in our national politics with negative consequences at the Federal, the state, the county, and the local level.

Newton Knight, played by Mathew McConaughey, is the hero in the film with some help from Malcom Washington, a black leader, and Rachel, a mixed race woman, who is an indigenous healer and helper. Rachel has a son with Newton who is still discriminated against in the late 1940s for being ⅛ black and married to a white woman in violation of Mississippi’s race codes which, as a side note, were copied by the Nazis in the late 30s and 40s in their treatment of people with Jewish ancestry.

The Free State of Jones is an upsetting movie to watch, but necessary if a person wants a better understanding of American history. We would be a better society if there more people like Newton Knight, Malcolm Washington, and Rachel in it.

I give the film a 4 out of 5 on my “worth the watch” scale.

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I found myself thinking about Raymond Carver and his poem “Gravy,” which was about being told he had six months to live and then getting an extra decade of life. The poem had been written when he knew his time had finally run out. Lung cancer had him in its grip and wasn’t going to let him go.

…“Don’t weep for me,” he said to his friends. “I’m a lucky man. I’ve had ten years longer than I or anyone expected. Pure gravy. And don’t forget it.”

That was a good way to think of it. Every day of life, now, was gravy. Thank you, Ray. And I too can “call myself beloved,” I have felt myself “beloved on the earth.” Hated, yes, that too, but “beloved” trumps all hate.

Rushdie, Salman. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (pp. 170-171). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

As one grows older and grows in wisdom, in spite of the ups and downs of one’s life, a person who experiences increasing levels of gratitude has lived the good life.

Brother David Stendl- Rast teaches that the best prayer is one of gratitude.

Salman Rushdie with all that he has been through living his life under the fatwa and then the knifing after 33 years is filled with gratitude for the “gravy” which he has experienced in his life.

What do you make of that?

To what extent do you experience gratitude in your life?

Me?

I feel more and more grateful every day, week, month, year that I live at the age, now, of 79.

Salman is my kind of guy.

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Most courses in high school and college have their “required reading” in their course syllabi. In our contemporary society we might adapt this “required reading” label to “required viewing” for movies, TV episodes, videos, and “required listening” for podcasts and audio shows.

A documentary which should be required viewing for all well educated people in the 21st century is The Social Dilemma.

From the IMDB web site:

Set in the dark underbelly of Silicon Valley, "The Social Dilemma" fuses investigative documentary with enlightening narrative drama. Expert testimony from tech whistle-blowers exposes our disturbing predicament: the services Big Tech provides--search engines, networks, instant information, etc.--are merely the candy that lures us to bite. Once we're hooked and coming back for more, the real commodity they sell is their prowess to influence and manipulate us.—Sundance Film Festival

The frightening idea from this documentary is how social media and search engines use our usage data to develop algorithms to feed us more stuff the AI thinks we are likely to engage with by giving our attention to that so the media platform can then sell our attention to advertisers.

Are you aware that to social media companies your attention is being monetized and sold to the highest bidder?

Are you aware of how you are being manipulated by clicking the “like” button and even the link to the site?

Are you aware of how the computer programming engineers and AI are modifying software to engage and retain your attention to generate profit for themselves by selling your attention to third parties?

Do you wonder what factors contribute to the increasing polarization in our society, and the rise of belief in disinformation?

Do you wonder whatever became of truth. Why do we fight over who’s right instead of what’s right?

The Social Dilemma explains how social media contributes to a deterioration in mental health, contributes to polarization and disintegration of democratic processes in our modern societies, and to an increase in beliefs in conspiracy theories and lies.

Learning how social media works and its negative consequences on individuals, families, and societies might lead a thoughtful person to wonder how to manage this social problem?

The quickest and easiest answer is to eliminate or minimize one’s use of social media and search engines fueled by algorithms.

Another strategy is to deal with people directly by talking to them in person or at least on the phone. We need to move back to the analog from the digital to restore our human connectedness.

What ideas do you have about how to mitigate the negative consequences of virtual reality?

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Across groups, social influences also produce noise. If someone starts a meeting by favoring a major change in the company’s direction, that person might initiate a discussion that leads a group unanimously to support the change. Their agreement might be a product of social pressures, not of conviction. If someone else had started the meeting by indicating a different view, or if the initial speaker had decided to be silent, the discussion might have headed in an altogether different direction—and for the same reason. Very similar groups can end up in divergent places because of social pressures.

Kahneman, Daniel; Sibony, Olivier; Sunstein, Cass R.. Noise . Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

Sometimes what Kahneman et al. call “informational cascades” is called “peer pressure.” Solomon Ashe and other social psychologists demonstrated this dynamic decades ago.

We have colloquial sayings like “Better to go along to get along,” and “When in Rome you do as the Romans do,” and “Why go against the grain?” and “Don’t upset the apple cart,” and “You shouldn’t disturb the status quo.”

Keeping with the title of their book, the authors write that informational cascades are “noise.” Indeed they are. A major contributor to informational cascades is power and what are sometimes called “opinion leaders.” The first story told about the incident, event, or topic "frames" the future discussion to which any subsequent offering will be compared. "Disinformation" often goes viral in this way with the first story constantly being spread as subsequent commentors try to rebut it.

There is a distinction between “misinformation” and “disinformation.” Misinformation is when a communicator is ignorant or not correctly informed. Disinformation is when the communicator is deliberately lying, manipulating with ulterior motives other than sharing accurate information and truth.

When posts on social media go "viral" they demonstrate what Kahneman is calling an "informational cascade."

To what extent are you an opinion leader in the groups you participate in? When have you been the leader and when have you been subject to another leader and group pressure? Have you ever participated in an organizational decision which didn’t seem right to you but you went along because you did not want to challenge the developing majority opinion of the group?

Noise is well worth reading as it provides a deeper understanding of the disinformation so rampant in our society in our digital age.

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Topic One

Making meaning of historical events

Q2.   The author argues that history is dangerous. What does he mean?

 The historian David Blight wrote that the Civil War is like “the giant sleeping dragon of American history ever ready to rise up when we do not expect it and strike us with unbearable fire.”1  I poked the Civil War beast, and it singed me. History is dangerous. It forms our identity, our shared story. If someone challenges a sacred myth, the reaction can be ferocious.”

1- The Civil War Lies on Us Like a Sleeping Dragon: America’s Deadly Divide - and Why It Has Returned,”  Guardian, AUg. 20, 2017, www.the-guardian.com/us-news/2017aug/20 /civil-war-american-history-trump

Becky

Hi Becky et al.

The old saying is that the history of war is written by the victorious. In the case of the U.S. Civil War it has been written by the losers.

People remember what they want to remember the way they want to remember it. Remember all that we have learned about cognitive bias and cognitive dissonance? 

It's not so much the facts that change but the interpretation and the meaning of the facts. Interpretation and meaning is always in flux and should be depending on the lens we are looking through which is often contextually influenced. The level of awareness and consciousness of the storyteller and the listener filter the meaning of the story. As Jesus said, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear." The observation though is that people only hear what they want to hear, have been socialized and conditioned to hear.

As Seidule writes a little later on page 40, " When I finally discovered the Lost Cause Myth, a manufactured past, I was stunned. Why did I believe the lies for so long? It took me decades to realize the truth because I ignored the evidence right in front of me."

It is not just Ty Seidule but many members of our society who are coming to terms with a self reckoning of what we have done and continue to do to our brothers and sisters. It is so shameful by today's standards that we would rather deny it and sugar coat it than face the barbarity of what we as human beings have done and are capable of.

Remember Joe South's great song, "Oh the games people play now.?"

David Markham

Topic Two

Would you rather be right or be happy and the "Lost Cause"?

In so many unfortunate ways, my life and career have traveled the roads of Civil War history. Actually, more than Civil War history, it’s the history of white supremacy. In telling my story, I hope to shed a different light on American history that many of us would sooner ignore: the histories of slavery, of Reconstruction, of segregation, of lynching, of corrupt economic systems, of the painful process of desegregation, and of the myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me (p. 8). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

I am amazed at Ty Seidule’s humility and willingness to change his mind about his understanding of American History. In A Course In Miracles one of its most famous passages is the sentence, “Would you rather be right or be happy?” It makes me so happy that  Seidule is choosing to be happy rather than right given his old way of thinking about the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. 

To what extent do you think that other people who believe in the Lost Cause will change their minds if they read Seidule’s book?

Topic Three

Calling a spade a spade and not a shovel.

Eleven southern states seceded to protect and expand an African American slave labor system. Unwilling to accept the results of a fair, democratic election, they illegally seized U.S. territory, violently. Together, they formed a new “Confederacy,” in contravention of the U.S. Constitution.7 Then West Point graduates like Robert E. Lee resigned their commissions, abrogating an oath sworn to God to defend the United States. During the bloodiest war in American history, Lee and his comrades killed more U.S. Army soldiers than any other enemy, ever. And they did it for the worst reason possible: to create a nation dedicated to exploit enslaved men, women, and children, forever.

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me (p. 9). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

This is as blunt a statement as I have ever read about the U.S. Civil War. It is the core belief underlying white supremacy. It is what led to the January 6th, 2021 insurrection when white supremacists attempted to end democracy by taking over the capital and lynching Mike Pence so he, as Vice President, could not ratify the election results certifying that Joseph Biden has been voted in as President of the United States.

It is interesting to observe that this element in our country not only still exists but attempts to maintain control of the country by any means possible including violence and assault. The Civil War is continuing in the US 156 years after it ended.

To what extent do you see a connection between the radical right in the U.S. today and the thinking of those who wanted to secede from the United States back in the mid 1800s?

Topic Four

Names matter

No, the boys in blue fought in the U.S. Army for the United States of America. The names we use matter. By saying Union and Confederate, Blue and Gray, North and South, we lose the fundamental difference between the two sides. The United States fought against a rebel force that would not accept the results of a democratic election and chose armed rebellion. At Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and a dozen other U.S. Army posts, the secessionists fired on U.S. property and then seized it. 

The southern slaveholders were not fighting some foreign or lost-to-history army called the Union. The Confederacy fought the United States of America, the country I spent a career defending. I will call those men who fought to save their country and, by 1863, end the scourge of race-based slavery by their proper name—U.S. Army soldiers.

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me (p. 22). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Seidule makes an excellent point. The confederates of the South declared war on the United States of America because they chose not to follow democratic rule. The same thing has happened in 2021.

The “Big Lie” has been promulgated by Donald Trump and his followers and it should be named what it is “treason.”

Do you believe “treason is too strong a word” for people who work to set aside a democratic election in 2020-2021?

Topic Five

The genesis of racism is economic advantages.

THE CIVIL WAR left between 650,000 and 750,000 dead because the Confederates fought to create a slave republic based on a morally bankrupt ideology of white supremacy. White southerners went to war to protect and expand chattel slavery but suffered a catastrophic defeat. Not only did they lose the war, but with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution they lost de jure white supremacy. Yet the former Confederates succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in changing the narrative of the Civil War. Lee’s biographer Douglas Southall Freeman wrote to the Pulitzer Prize–winning southern novelist Ellen Glasgow, “We Southerners had one consolation. If our fathers lost the war, you and Margaret Mitchell … have won the peace.”72 

When I finally discovered the Lost Cause myth, a manufactured past, I was stunned. Why did I believe the lies for so long? It took me decades to realize the truth because I ignored the evidence right in front of me. The underlying belief system in Meet Robert E. Lee, Gone With the Wind, and Song of the South is the ideology of white supremacy. My ignorance and then guilt in buying the Lost Cause myth and the tenets of white supremacy kept me silent for years, but no longer. I’m on a campaign to uncover white supremacy and the Lost Cause in the places I’ve lived and the institutions that educated and gave me purpose. As it turns out, the lies of the Lost Cause infused every aspect of my life—and that pisses me off.

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me (pp. 40-41). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Seidule was stunned by his belief in the “Lost Cause Myth.” I was stunned that he was stunned that there is such a thing. It’s like a light bulb has gone off in my mind and now I understand the grievance of the Southerners and other whites. I had never really understood it before. I was blind but now I see and it has been an amazing grace in my life.

The only question that troubles me now is whether the bigger problem is the desire to maintain a system of slavery or the desire to maintain their capitalistic system of economics. Without slaves and free labor the wealth of the 1%  would be lost. The same holds true today and into the foreseeable future.

Slavery was ensconced in America from its founding as part of a capitalistic system of economics which continues to this day in many different forms. Systemic racism maintains the caste system which is based on an economic system in which the haves exploit the have-nots. It’s how America works.

The thing that has come clearer to me is that this whole racism thing will never be dissolved without a change in our economic system which is fundamental to the whole situation.

Topic Six

The mythic figure of the “Southern Gentleman.”

To be a southern gentleman for me meant embracing one view of history, a skewed one, that placed the Confederacy front and center and willfully excluded the racial history all around me.

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me (p. 44). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

The mythic figure of the “Southern Gentleman” is immature imaginations similar to a child’s fairy tale belief in a Prince Charming. There is a gallantry, a chivalry, and romanticism which is very attractive and enjoyable and yet is childish in that it occurs at a level of cultural immaturity called egocentric and ethnocentric.

As consciousness is growing and developing in our postmodern world, American society is maturing to the worldcentric level of consciousness in which the shadow side, the dark side of this myth is illuminated.

This illumination is dislillusioning and just as children sometimes resist and grieve their beliefs in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairies, etc. there comes a time when young girls, as they mature, hopefully give up their fantasies about a Prince Charming.

Ty Seidule in his book, Robert E.Lee and Me, has burst the bubble of fanciful mythologizing and just as the person leaving Plato’s cave has looked outside from the shadows dancing on the cave wall and seen the reality and come back to report it. The other cave dwellers don’t believe the report of the real world, and many believers in the Lost Cause mythology and the Southern Gentleman don’t believe Seidule’s reporting of what he has seen and learned about the Lost Cause myth and the fantasy about the Southern Gentleman..

1. To what extent do you believe him?

2. Have his reports changed your understanding of the romantic southern gentleman and ladies?

3. As a child who mourns the loss of their belief in Santa, do you mourn your awakening from the enjoyable myth of the Southern Gentleman and the romantic south?

4. Have you told others just as there is not Santa, there is no “Southern Gentleman” as we have been taught to believe in?

5. How have others you have told taken the news?

Topic Seven

“Schooling” vs. “Education”

The general assembly then created a textbook commission to write and publish three textbooks for use in every public school in the state.57 

The purpose of the textbooks went beyond facts; the commissioners hoped “to instill in [schoolchildren’s] hearts and minds a greater love of Virginia and a perpetuation of her ideals.” The textbook commission wanted their selected authors to capture the genteel tradition of the Old Dominion known as the Virginia spirit. While the commission never explicitly defined it, one member emphasized the “generous and kindly traits in the Virginia spirit.” I understood. The commission wanted to create educated Christian ladies and gentlemen who looked at history from a positive point of view without being boastful. The commission told the authors to emphasize Virginia’s right to secede. Above all, avoid critiquing slavery. “Is the matter of slavery presented in the very ablest and best light?” they asked. The commissioners directed that the textbook authors “not give the impression that slavery was the cause of the war.”58

 While the books created an imaginary past, the legislature set its eyes firmly on present difficulties.

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me (pp. 63-64). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

What Ty Seidule describes here is an attempt by the Virginia General Assembly to create a commission to engage in designing a program of brainwashing and propaganda dissemination not education.

This has happened repeatedly in American history where school children are taught lies to support the normative mythology of those with political power. When this happens in other countries, Americans object that such methods are tyrannical and a form of mind control. When it happens in their own country, and serves their purposes, they see it as an appropriate activity of schooling.

There is a difference between “education” and “schooling” and what goes on in publicly funded government run institutions which purport to be for education but is in fact “schooling” which is designed to brainwash and control the minds of the masses upon which politicians depend for their power.

One of the most significant examples of this dynamic is the fact that schooling has become compulsory in the United States. True education can never be compelled.

1. What lies have you been taught by your teachers during your schooling? 

2. Were you aware at the time they were lies or only later when you got further information?

3. To what extent do you object to your children and grandchildren being taught lies? 

4. Have you done anything to provide the student with correct information to improve their understanding?

For more check out James Loewen’s classic book, Lies My Teacher Taught Me.

Topic Eight

The triad of prejudice, discrimination, and racism

In 1972, my fifth-grade year, the State Board of Education announced that the Virginia histories were decommissioned or, as one reporter wrote, “thrown in the trash basket.” Governor Linwood Holton, the first Republican to serve as Virginia governor since Reconstruction, tried to have them immediately removed, but he ran into opposition in the legislature and backed down. The books continued to be used at least through the late 1970s.60 The Virginia textbooks formed one of the most powerful testaments to white supremacy, an insidious monument that poisoned children’s minds for a generation.61

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me (p. 65). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

I added the bolding to bring it especially to the reader’s attention in order to ask what thoughts the reader might have about the systemic nature of racism?

A distinction can be made among the concepts of “prejudice,” “discrimination,” and “racism.” Using this triad, prejudice is an individual behavior while discrimination is social and racism is cultural.

People can deny being prejudiced but find it harder to deny functioning within discriminatory systems such as segregation and other exclusionary policies and procedures. Racism is in the water and the culture we share better conceptualized as a “caste” system as described by Isabel Wilkerson.

1. Have you been aware of this triad of concepts before?

2. Now that you are aware of them can you give an example of how they apply in your life?

3. Is Seidule doing us a service by pointing this white supremacist pedagogy which still persists in many areas of the country?

Topic Nine

The segregated south was a racial police state.

Today, the more I learn about segregation and the Jim Crow system in Virginia, the more I agree with the great Virginia civil rights lawyer Oliver W. Hill Sr., a law partner with Samuel Tucker. Hill found a better way to explain the “Virginia way of life” that helped form me. In 1985, he described life for southern African American citizens during the Jim Crow era: “Virginia and the whole South were police states. There isn’t a question about that. Negroes didn’t serve on juries … You saw no blacks in places like city hall, or public buildings, unless, except, maybe an elevator operator or janitor. And that’s the way it was.”78 If the Virginia of my youth was no democracy, if I call a plantation an enslaved labor farm, then I should also call segregated Virginia by its true name—a racial police state. To be clear, the South of my birth was no democracy.

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me (p. 72). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Ty Seidule pulls no punches. Seidule doesn’t sugar coat. Seidule doesn’t equivocate or spin. Like a soldier, even though also a scholar, he calls a spade a spade and tells the unvarnished truth.

How many people would agree with his labeling plantations “slave labor camps” and the segregated states of the south “racial police states?”

Seidule ends chapter two with this sentence, “We find it hard to confront our past because it’s so ugly, but the alternative to ignoring our racist history is creating a racist future.” p.73

It seems that we have ignored our racist history and are living in a racist present. Confederate flags in a Charlottesville racist rally in August of 2017 led to people being killed and beaten by White Supremacists is a contemporary phenomenon along with Confederate flags being carried through the halls of congress on January 6, 2021 as rioters staged an insurrection to disrupt a democratic government. So I don’t know what Seidule means when he writes that ignoring our racist history is creating a racist future. This is not a speculative future but current behavior to subvert our constitution the same as in 1861.

The question is what should be done?

Seidule writes that the first step is to dispel the myth of the lost cause and get real about our racist past by labeling things appropriately and stopping the so-called “dog whistles.”

1. Is Seidule’s book a step in the right direction labeling historical events more accurately?

2. What do you think of his use of the terms “slave labor farms” and “racial police state” and southern soldiers especially officers as “traitors?”

3. How can we help Southerners who deny reality with the lost cause myth to redeem their souls so that genuine healing can take place?

4. Would truth commissions and reparations help?

Let's not forget George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, Travon Martin, Daniel Prude, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, etc., etc., etc.

Topic Ten

Despair or hope?

As mob violence became more widespread and effective in enforcing racial subjugation, lynchings became more public and more macabre. Huge crowds would gather for the planned events. Hanging proved too quick and efficient a means of death. Instead, lynch mobs turned to genital mutilation, dismemberment, and burning, like something from the medieval era. Crowds would clamor to take souvenirs of the hanging tree, rope, and even the fingers and skins of the victims. I remember the first time I saw postcards depicting a lynching. A young white boy smiled at the feet of a hanging victim. Lynchings became violent public spectacles that united the white community while ensuring the subservience of African Americans.23

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me (p. 84). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

I have seen the postcards and pictures of the lynchings too. The visceral reaction I experienced was the same when I’ve seen pictures of the Nazi concentration camps. It has led me to despair in wondering “What kind of a species of animal are we that we can do this to one another?”

I do not have an answer but I do know that we are capable of becoming better than this. What will it take to push the evolutionary project forward to develop healthier functioning human beings? Will it take better politics, better religion, better economic systems, better social systems, more spirituality, all of these things?

It seems to me using Ken Wilber’s AQAL model that it takes primarily growth in the interior realms of spirituality and culture. As advances are made in the interior quadrants, we will find the development of different kinds of social institutions and even a rewiring of the human neurology. One thing for sure, there is no quick fix, no silver bullet, no magic key.

Each one of us must take responsibility for our own interior spiritual development and join with others with similar goals to create our preferred society and world.

What do you do in this regard? What kind of spiritual practices do you engage in? What kind of fellowship and emotional support systems have you created that facilitate and nurture positive evolutionary movement? To whom do you look for spiritual leadership and inspiration?

Topic Eleven

Confederate monuments as a means of racial subjugation

As the historian Karen Cox has noted, a Confederate monument had the same purpose as lynching: enforce white supremacy. It is no coincidence that most Confederate monuments went up between 1890 and 1920, the same period that lynching peaked in the South. Lynching and Confederate monuments served to tell African Americans that they were second-class citizens.40

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me (p. 89). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

What do you think of Karen Cox’s idea that Confederate monuments enforce white supremacy? Seidule tying together the rise of lynching and the placement of Confederate monuments could be a coincidence and maybe indications of the same mindset meant to intimate and subjugate black Americans in its caste system.

Growing up in Western New York state I never saw any Confederate monuments but occasionally confederate flags. Confederate flags were frequently seen in mobile home parks and the word on the street is that they marked the drug dealers in the park. I don’t know if this is true but I thought it was interesting that those who flew Confederate flags in front of their mobile homes were stigmatized as being outlaws of some type.

Topic Twelve

State killing of black people as a means of subjugation and social control.

Capital punishment became the new means of enforcing racial control. Between 1901 and 1964, Georgia hanged and electrocuted 609 people. Eighty-two percent of those executed were Black men, even though Georgia was majority white.

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me (p. 90). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Ethnicity of defendants on death row as of October 1, 2020

• White: 1,076 (42.15%)

• African-American: 1,062 (41.60%)

• Hispanic: 343 (13.44%)

• Asian: 47 (1.84%)

• Native American: 24 (0.94%)

• Unknown: 1 (0.04%)^[1]

Comparatively, the U.S. population is 61% non-Hispanic white, 18.1% Hispanic or Latino, 13.4% African-American, 5.8% Asian, 1.3% Native American, and 2.7% mixed (per U.S. Census Bureau 2018).

Black people are way over represented on death row in the United States and are far more often executed especially in states like Texas and Florida and other Southern States.

This from the AP “Since the death penalty resumed in 1977, 295 Black defendants were executed for killing a white victim, but only 21 white defendants were executed for the killing of a Black victim even though Black people are disproportionately the victims of crime.”

1. To what extent do you think these facts provide evidence for white supremacy?

2. Do these criminal justice practices  attempt to intimidate and subjugate blacks as a means of social control?

3. Is state sponsored capital punishment a sanitized version of lynching used to intimidate blacks and “keep them in their place.”

Topic Thirteen

Awakening in a white supremacist and racist society.

07/24/21

Two of the three large army posts in my home state of Georgia remain named for secessionists who never served in the U.S. Army but who did kill U.S. Army soldiers. Benning and Gordon believed until the end of their lives that African Americans, who today make up more than 20 percent of the army, were not fully human. The U.S. Army gives its highest honor to unrepentant white supremacists. 

In my other home state, Virginia, three posts carry Confederate names. One is a fort named for A. P. Hill, West Point class of 1847, who fought as a division and then corps commander under Lee. Hill died in combat just a week before Lee surrendered. The second post in Virginia named for a Confederate honors George Pickett of Gettysburg fame, West Point class of 1846. Pickett summarily executed twenty-two captured U.S. soldiers who had previously been Confederates. He ordered them hanged as their family watched the gruesome spectacle. Pickett was a war criminal. 

The final and largest army post in Virginia is Fort Lee. Today, Fort Lee is the home of army logistics. While the U.S. Army has superb infantry and incredible tankers, our true claim to fame is logistics. During World War II, the army supported fighting in Italy, France, and all over the Pacific simultaneously. African American truckers accounted for nearly 75 percent of the famed Red Ball Express supplying George S. Patton’s Third Army in the march against the German Wehrmacht in 1944 and 1945.19

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me (pp. 149-150). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

As a kid growing up in the 50s and 60s and later as an adult and today as a wise elder, I have been perplexed at the monuments and naming of governmental installations after confederate war leaders. It never made sense to me, and now reading Seidule’s book I am coming to realize that white supremacy and racism is baked deeply into American culture, distorting an accurate view and understanding of our history.

With the deep cultural reverence and adulation for traitors and racists, it is perfectly understandable how President Trump would say after the murderous rally in Charlottesville that we have “good people on both sides,” and continue to perpetuate the Lost Cause Myth.

With the countryside littered with Army bases named after Confederate army officials and their monuments proudly revered on governmental properties and communities across the country is it any wonder that the country still is confused and in denial about our fundamental values as a democracy? 

Most of my life I have been confused as a northern boy raised in New York State in the later half of the Twentieth Century. I can’t imagine what I would believe if I had been raised and educated in the South like Seidule.

Culture heavily influences and conditions individual growth and development and consciousness. Seidule makes this point repeatedly that he has been miseducated and duped by a society and educational institutions which kept him in the dark about its ugly values, beliefs, and practices. Like John Newton, Ty Seidule and I both, can sing the great song, Amazing Grace, “I was blind but now I see.” How long before the rest of our fellow citizens catch up and come to know the truth?

1. In what kind of a culture and school system were you raised and educated?

2. How much did you know in your formative years about America’s white supremacist and racist past?

3. To what extent were you educated about accurate history of the Lost Cause myth if at all?

4. To what extent do you think you are woke? 50% 75%, 100%.

5. How much has Seidule’s book awakened you to the historical facts about white supremacy and systemic racism in America today? 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%?

Topic Fourteen

The back story: It’s not the principle of the thing, it’s the money.

While his regiment was on the Texas frontier, Lee stayed at the Arlington mansion, serving as a slaveholding planter. After 1857, he spent far more time running an enslaved labor farm (twenty-eight months) than he did with his regiment as an army officer (thirteen months). Officers like Braxton Bragg and Jefferson Davis left the army to seek their fortunes with enslaved labor farms, but Lee was the only senior officer who was actually in charge of hundreds of enslaved workers and in the U.S. Army in 1861.61 By the time he chose secession, Lee identified far more with the southern slaveholding class than he did with his fellow officers. He certainly spent more time managing enslaved workers than he did leading soldiers.

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me (p. 228). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

So often when you are reading or listening to the plot line of a story it doesn’t really make sense until you “read between” the lines and learn the “back story” or the shadow side of the situation.

After describing how Robert E. Lee was his hero from his childhood into much of his adulthood, Ty Seidule describes how disillusionment sets in and he realizes that his hero was a traitor to his country because he supported the slave economy of the south. And then on pg. 228, Seidule gives the back story which makes Robert E. Lee's values and decisions understandable. Robert E Lee ran several slave labor farms and profited greatly from them. Once again, the cynical observation arises when a person’s behavior is not about principle but about money.

1. To what extent do you think that money is the root of all evil?

2. If you do think that money is the root of all evil how does this idea apply in Robert E. Lee’s situation?

3. Have you ever been tempted or actually engaged in behavior that went against your principles for money?

4. To what extent does this back story of Robert E. Lee’s decisions and actions surprise you?

Topic Fifteen

Choosing profit over human decency

Instead, Lee chose another path, keeping the enslaved workers as long as he could to pay off Custis’s debts and build money for the family. To do this, he broke families apart using the hiring system. During Custis’s time running Arlington, he recognized marriages and kept families together, never selling them or hiring them out. By 1860, Lee had used the hiring system to such a degree that only one enslaved family remained together at Arlington. Lee separated husbands, wives, and children and hired them out across Virginia to make more money. Additionally, Lee used the hiring system to make “troublemakers” go away, or at least move them to another farm. He did this to a man named Reuben whom Lee called a “great rogue and rascal.” Whenever Lee made a decision regarding enslaved people, he chose profit over human decency.63

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me (p. 229). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Ty Seidule seems very disillusioned with his former hero choosing profit over human decency but isn’t this the primary principle of capitalism? Isn’t this just “good business” that happens all the time and is as American as apple pie? I am surprised that Seidule seems surprised in Lee’s choices and behavior..

1. Think of a current example of corporations or individuals putting profit over human decency?

2. To what extent do you find the “profit motive” surprising in America?

3. Have you ever put profit over human decency? Give an example such as taking an ex-spouse to the cleaner going through a divorce or cheating on child support or stealing from somebody to get something you wanted?

Topic Sixteen

Double standard in white outrage over miscegenation 

Here, Lee discusses what will happen if the United States wins and emancipates four million African American enslaved people. The loss of racial hierarchy would be degradation worse than death. The white women of the South would have to worry about the constant threat of rape or “pollution.” Black male sexuality, which Lee so openly fears, paled in comparison to the very real rape culture of white southern men against Black women.

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me (p. 231). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

There is enough to be appalled by when it comes to slavery but the hypocrisy by whites over misegenation takes the cake. The fear of white men that white women would have intercourse with black men would contribute to self righteous murderous rage on the part of the white male, but if a white male were to have sexual intercourse with a black female it was considered his prerogative and at times, a behavior to be bragged about.

A large part of the Lost Cause myth was the chivalry engaged in by white gentlemen to protect the dignity and safety of the Southern Belles. There is a charm to this story line which sold millions of Americans and people around the world on the myth of the Southern Gentleman white knight engaging in battle to protect the vulnerable, beautiful ladies. This myth was not only racist but sexist to boot.

The myth of the chivalrous white knight has provided the emotional glue to the stickiness of racist beliefs in traditional egocentric and ethnocentric world views which are indications of cultural immaturity. The signs that these myths are crumbling is a sign of the growing maturity of American culture. However there are pockets of the white knight chivalrous myth remaining in the white supremasist groups such as the “Proud Boys,” “Oath Keepers,” “Storm Front”, etc.

1. To what extent have you been charmed by the image of the vulnerable Southern Belle?

2. To what extent do you think white women need protecting by white men from people of color?

3. What do you think and how do you feel about miscegenation?
   
   

Topic Seventeen

The function of art to support systemic racism.

Everyone must understand what those monuments represent. A monument tells historians more about who emplaced it than it does the figure memorialized. While some memorials went up right after the war, especially in cemeteries, most Confederate monuments were built between 1890 and 1920, and those glorify white supremacy. Du Bois wrote in 1931 that the statues’ “inscription” should read: “Sacred to the memory of those who fought to Perpetuate Human Slavery.” The Confederate monuments that went up after World War II often serve as an argument against integration and equal rights.117

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me (p. 245). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

To those who say they don’t believe in systemic racism, all one need do is look at the function of confederate war monuments to see the institutionalization of the valorization of those who fought to maintain slavery as the law of the land in the United States of America.

These monuments are symbolic representations of the Lost Cause Myth. The use of art in the form of sculptures to glorify those who went to war to maintain laws oppressing and subjugating human freedom, dignity, and worth is a perversion of beauty in the service of ugliness.

Art can be used in service of the good, the true, and the beautiful and also of the evil, the false, and the ugly. In order to tell the difference one must look to the function and intention that the creators of the art and those who would display it have. Does it unify and uplift human kind or does it divide and degrade it?

The use to which art is put is a choice both at a personal and at a collective level. It can be objectified and institutionalized. At a personal level the use of art for evil, deceit, and ugliness is one thing. At a collective level it gains social influence. When it becomes “a thing” its power is enhanced in the minds and hearts of a community of citizens such as a state, a region, and/or a nation. As the collective influence of the thing grows, it can become institutionalized and with its institutionalization it becomes deeply embedded in a society and will take many generations to change or eliminate.

1. Besides the elimination of artistic symbols of human oppression and subjugation, what else will it take to change American institutions for the better when it comes to human rights?

2. To what extent do you support institutions which still have embedded in their structures and functioning elements of racism?

3. How has the book “Robert E. Lee and Me” helped you become more aware of the ways in which you interact with and perhaps, inadvertently support policies and practices that are racist? Give an example.

Topic Eighteen

To what extent are you woke?

In 1889, Virginia made Lee’s birthday a state holiday. In 1904, it added Stonewall Jackson to the celebration after someone realized his birthday was only two days after Lee’s. In 1984, the Virginia General Assembly created Lee-Jackson-King Day when it added Martin Luther King Jr.’s name to the holiday. Resistance to irony remains a strong part of white southern identity. In 2000, the law changed to separate Lee-Jackson Day from the MLK holiday. Finally, in March 2020, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam signed a bill into law ending the observance of Lee-Jackson Day and creating an Election Day holiday in its stead. All told, eleven states still have twenty-two Confederate holidays mandated by law.4

Seidule, Ty. Robert E. Lee and Me (p. 251). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

I am writing this on 07/27/21 at age 75 and as I review the above passage in Seidule’s book, I  am reminded that it was a only a couple of years ago that I became aware that in the South there are State holidays on various confederate leaders’ birthdays and the days of other confederate historical events which I thought was strange at the time. The states that celebrate these days, sometimes with paid time off and the closure of state governmental buildings and services are Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Virginia, Louisiana, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Texas. In our contemporary political landscape, all these states are Red states and home to white Supremacist groups, beliefs, values, and practices.

I was raised and have lived my whole life in Western New York State so when I became aware of these celebrations and commemorations of confederate leaders and events, it seemed odd to me, but I didn’t make much of it. It seemed to me to be a regional thing and kind of quaint.

It is hard to do anti-racist work when the collective culture supports and valorizes a racist past. Racist beliefs and practices are institutionalized in governmental, educational, and business organizations. While beliefs and practices are slowly changing, racist policies, beliefs, and practices are not simply individual choices but embedded in the fabric of the societies that children are raised in and adults function within. Racist beliefs, values, and practices are not insignificant and inconsequential but have a huge impact on the quality of life in our society for all Americans and even around the world.

Seidule, himself, was raised and socialized in a racist culture even though he was educated at West Point, was a history professor there, and rose to a rank of Brigadier General. His story is so significant because he states repeatedly that he was unaware of the structures and dynamics that contributed to his racist beliefs to the extent that he thought they were normal and acceptable. He even idealized them and glorified them albeit unknowingly.  He describes his questioning and awakening from his conditioning and came to a place where he could hardly recognize his new self compared to the old person he had been. Seidule became what we nowadays are calling “woke.”

1. To what extent have you traveled a similar journey as Ty Seidule and become more woke as you have matured?

2. While there are many things, what seems to be one of the most significant things that contributed to Seidule’s awakening to the racist history and structures in our society?

3. What have been some of the most significant things that have contributed to your awakening if you have awoken?

4. If you, and we, could hasten the awakening of our fellow human beings in our contemporary society, name one or two things that you think might help?

Ryan Holiday makes the point in his talk to the sophomore class at the US Naval academy in April of 2024 that whether Jimmy Carter was a great president is debatable but the idea that he was a great person is not when you look at this life and career through the Stoic lens of justice.

Holiday defines justice, as related to Jimmy Carter, as a personal virtue tied closely to honesty, integrity, and a desire to do the right thing even if it is not popular. Holiday makes the case that Carter tried to do his best and do the right thing and it cost him his re-election.

Americans have a history of killing the advocates for justice such as Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, John Lennon and many other lesser known honorable people who advocated for and acted on the right thing.

When you compare the integrity of presidents like Dwight Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama with the corruptness of presidents like Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump an observer might be mystified at the inability of American voters to choose leaders of integrity. It seems that integrity and politics don’t mix well in America and that says something about our culture and society build on slavery, genocide, misogyny, racism, homophobia, and a certain degree of xenophobia.

Americans don’t seem to favor justice when it is defined as personal integrity, honesty, fairness, and doing the right thing. Instead, Americans favor profit, winning, and status. This basic choice for bad values contributes to great pain, suffering, and harm in our personal, family, and social lives.

The problem in America is the low level of spiritual intelligence. Mother Theresa said that while the US is one of the richest countries in the world materially it is one of the poorest spiritually.

Jimmy Carter might not have been the greatest politician, but he, at least, had a modicum of spiritual intelligence which made him stand head and shoulders over most politicians.

Is there anything about Jimmy Carter’s character that you admire and would like to emulate and would like your children and grandchildren to emulate?

A person wrote in a post on a listserv I participate on for mental health professionals:

However, the actual political policy is not the main point of this post.

Rather, it is the growing atmosphere of divisiveness and exclusion in American society that concerns me, and especially, many of my patients. These include but are not limited to women, people of color, people with disabilities, people who do not identify as cys-gendered, people not born in the US, people with accents, and people who identify as non-Christian.

People who are many of our patients.

As a Social Worker I am proud of the Social Work Profession's long history of advocating and working for social justice, equity, and compassion in human relations. Our profession was founded in the earlier days of immigration in the late 19th century with the establishment of "settlement houses."

From a NASW web page on Social Work history:

Since the first social work class was offered in the summer of 1898 at Columbia University, social workers have led the way developing private and charitable organizations to serve people in need. Social workers continue to address the needs of society and bring our nation’s social problems to the public’s attention.

Today, Americans enjoy many privileges because early social workers saw miseries and injustices and took action, inspiring others along the way. Many of the benefits we take for granted came about because social workers—working with families and institutions—spoke out against abuse and neglect.

Social Workers have a long history and much knowledge and skills in working at the macro as well as at the mezzo and micro levels.

Social Work is the largest mental health profession in the United States and probably in the world. Our training is based on a systems model or person- in-situation. What is needed at this point in human history are professionals who are skilled at community organizing and advocacy.

As a Social Worker I don't think we are impotent in the face of the challenges you both describe. We are in strategic places to instill knowledge, skills, and opportunities to empower people to advocate and implement more socially just policies and programs.

The groups often described such as Christian Nationalists, white supremacists, homophobic, misogynistic, and racist proponents are a minority in the US but they get a tremendous amount of media exposure because advertisers have learned that media consumers like drama and the more dramatic the better. Our media environment has become like WWE and the more sensational the better because of its entertainment value that captures attention. The oligarchs fund this constant circus to distract people from their grift and to retain and enhance their power.

Those who control the algorithms that feed people their media content and frame their choices are now running the world. A couple of important steps we can take with our clients is to go underground, get off the media train that is conditioning people's thinking, and create new systems of opportunity for people to take back control of their own lives and well being.

There are many good people in our communities doing good work who are just, kind, and compassionate. They need to be recognized and supported by well meaning, compassionate people who are not part of the oppressive systems which are exploiting people in our society.

Just this past week, one of our own, mentioned the Open Path Collective which I joined. It is a small step forward to create more humane systems of providing psychotherapeutic services which are not incentivized by a desire to make a profit.

If you haven't seen The Social Dilemma on Netflix you should and we can discuss some of these issues further.

Bandy X Lee is not only a forensic psychiatrist but also has a degree in public health. She uses a public health framework often in her writing and speaking. She calls Trumpism a "contagion" that is infecting the body politic of the US which is toxic and can be managed with public health strategies. What do you think of this frame?

It would seem to me using a public health framework that the first thing that needs to be done is to identify the pathogens which have been released into the population. The next thing would be to protect people in the population from contracting the pathogen. The next thing would be to find a vaccination to bolster immunity. The next thing would be to develop treatment strategies to restore those who have been infected to health.

There are certain thoughts, memes, that have been injected and spread in the population such as:

"I am your retribution."

"When you're a celebrity they let you do it - kiss them and grab them by the pussy"

"I, alone, can save you."

"They're eating the cats. They're eating the dogs."

"I will be a dictator on day one."

Etc.

As mental health professionals we are trained to assess and treat grandiose and delusional thinking. The concept of narcissistic anti-social personality disorder is well known in our professions. How do we contain this kind of psychopathology to protect those around the person exhibiting this behavior from being harmed?

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The people from Venezuela are ruining our country?

“Americans are just stupid?”

“He’s an entertainer.”

Where are the informed and smart people?

“It’s discouraging.”

“She’s got all the GOP talking points.”

“I make Christmas cookies.”

“In AA they call it ‘stinkin thinkin.’

“You can’t correct false information.”

“Take people where they’re at not where you think they should be, ought to be, must be.”

“Let people be stupid. You can’t correct them.”

Jesus said, “Love your enemies.” How do you do that.

“The Christmas star is that Divine Spark in each person.”

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When are you as a helping professional afraid of engaging and helping someone because of the "gaze" of the criminal justice system?

How risk averse are you when it comes to lending a hand and standing in solidarity with someone in the minority?

Tim Snyder in his book, On Tyranny, calls it "Anticipatory obedience."

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (p. 17). Crown. Kindle Edition.

It is interesting that we are living in a society where the helpers are afraid to help because of being arrested, sued, and having their careers ruined.

We have created a society in which a person can no longer trust their doctor because the government has entered the patient - doctor encounter and dictated what the doctor can and cannot do.

The Hippocratic oath is “primum non Nocera” which means above all else do no harm, but withholding health care because of fear of governmental prosecution is doing harm and sometimes great harm contributing to death, This is where our society has come to. And the sad thing is that enough of our fellow citizens has voted for it to make it the law of the land.

There is a better way where doctors and patients interaction is confidential and sacred space which can be engaged in without governmental interference except in instances where the doctor harm the patient.

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Some people have asked what happened to my substack articles. I moved them to my Blogger blogs where the content was designed for more specific audiences.

This morning I thought “why not publish on both platforms?”

The answer that came to my mind is “Why not?”

Well, it’s a little more work and yet may be useful to people in different audiences.

So from now, 12/29/24, and into 2025 my articles will be on both platforms.

I hope the articles are useful, interesting, and occasionally entertaining.

Thank you for reading and sharing.

I am moving my articles from Substack to Blogger. So click on the link below for the article. While you’re on the blog davidgmarkhamsbehavioralhealth.com subscribe in the upper right hand corner to not miss any future article related to mental health.

https://www.davidgmarkhamsbehavioralhealth.com/2024/11/the-best-way-to-stall-dementia-quit.html

I am moving my articles back to my blogger blogs. This article is published on davidgmarkhamsbehavioralhealth.com.

If you go there and enjoy the article and want to be notified of future articles published there sign up as a subscriber in the upper right hand corner.

According to the Tarasoff decision in California which has now become a standard of mental health professional practice across the states in the US, mental health professionals have a duty to warn. How are we carrying out our responsibility to the public which we are licensed to serve?

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According to the Tarasoff decision in California which has now become a standard of mental health professional practice across the states in the US, mental health professionals have a duty to warn. How are we carrying out our responsibility to the public which we are licensed to serve?

Reporting from Brockport, NY where we have the lowest DWI mortality rate in the nation

David Markham, LCSWR

From Asha Rangappa’s Freedom Academy

One thing that I have been thinking about since my conference is how Trump and J.D. Vance’s xenophobic rhetoric hurts our economy by discouraging international students from studying in the U.S. Universities are economy engine-drivers for their respective states — it’s one of the reasons that they were among the first to push back against Trump’s ill-conceived travel ban in 2017. And not for nothing, but many universities — including those in red states — rely on international students, many of whom (though not all) have the means to pay full freight to get undergraduate and advanced degrees here, to offset the cost and provide scholarships to U.S. students. When these prospective international students see people like themselves being accused of eating pets and targeted for harassment generally, it doesn’t make coming halfway around the world so appealing. (The gun violence doesn’t help, either — many I’ve spoken to worry that it is unsafe to study here, and I don’t blame them.) One administrator from the University of Alabama lamented that her state’s anti-DEI laws have also made it harder to create programs to help international students adjust to life in the U.S. It’s just another one of the many ways that the Trump agenda is anti-American and incredibly short-sighted…and all the more reason to make sure we bring this election back to sanity on November 5.

Editor’s note: I live in the Western New York region with cities like Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo which are home to some of the finest educational institutions in the world and attract many international students. I had not thought before about how Trump’s xenophobic values impact our educational institutions and our communities.

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Hey Dave,

What is your attitude toward old age? Is it something to avoid thinking about, or a stage of life to be honored? Do you think most people are in denial about their own aging?

Becky

Dear Becky:

I have found that what people want as they age is meaning, purpose, and sense of somehow being useful.

The Surgeon General wrote a report describing the epidemic of "loneliness" in the US. I think that "loneliness" as the label for what ails us is a bit off the mark. What ails us the most is a lack of meaning, purpose, or usefulness to oneself and to others.

The worst feeling in the world is to be "put out to pasture", marginalized, silenced, patronized, condescended to, feeling powerless with little agency.

Gawande writes about this a bit in his book, Being Mortal,  that people want to maintain some sense of autonomy and self determination as long as they can.

The topic might be reframed as "When I get older what will I be good for?"

I can’t do a lot of things in my older age that I could do when I was younger, but I am still good for a whole bunch of things such as kindness, caring, compassion, understanding, generosity, and maybe, sometimes, unconditional love.

The biggest gift we can give to other people and the world is our attention.

Peace be with you,

Dave

Hey Dave:

How can the GOP remove so many voters from the voting rolls in states where the Republicans are in charge?

Tom

Dear Tom

1. You raise an interesting question about how voters can just be removed from voting rolls and apparently feel no guilt in disenfranchising thousands of people in their state.

2. Voting irregularities are extremely rare in modern elections and what irregularities have occurred the courts have ruled as being so miniscule they would not have changed the outcome of the elections.

3. The myth of voter fraud is perpetrated by the losers of elections. The partisans who promote the lies about voter fraud only complain about the irregularities in the elections they have lost, never the ones they won.

4. I have learned as a psychotherapist that when couples complain of "communication issues" what they are really talking about are power struggles.

5. People usually understand each other very well, they just don't agree, have a conflict, and the issue is how to resolve the conflict when communication, alone, doesn't resolve the conflict as is often the case.

6. The questions become who will dominate the other, how will the other respond to the domination, and how will the dominator manage the dominated's response to the domination?

7. I like the bumper sticker that states "Speaking truth to power has no effect if power has no use for the truth." Ain't that the truth?

8. So what is one to do when power has no use for the truth?

9. Look for the incentives that power might be interested in for recognizing, acknowledging, and accepting the truth.

10. Incentives vary greatly depending on the motivations, intentions, desires, and preferences of those with the power.

11. In short, those with power who don't recognize the truth have to be outsmarted, manipulated based on a deliberate, and purposeful strategy of the person who is leading the change effort. Sometimes accountability can be achieved through the courts, but court battles are often useless unless one has unlimited resources for legal bills.

12. Power who has no use for truth is not that smart because sooner or later the effects of not recognizing, acknowledging and responding appropriately to truth will be felt and pain will arise along with guilt and fear and the intransigence will implode and collapse.

13. The old saying is "The truth will set you free." Sometimes it takes awhile but Truth always wins.

14. Keep the faith, exercise patience and persistence, "the two Ps"

15. Organize and advocate for the right to vote and the adjudication of proper election processes. 

16. Use the courts when possible and vote for state government officials who will provide for free and fair elections.

Peace be with you.

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Hey Dave: 

What is your attitude toward old age? Is it something to avoid thinking about, or a stage of life to be honored? Do you think most people are in denial about their own aging?

Becky

Hi Becky:

I co-facilitate a "Growing Old Gracefully Peer Support Group" for people over 66. We are a small group of 8 people who are meeting weekly for 12 weeks.

The period of life from 65 - 75 is sometimes called "The Golden Years" and I recently saw a study of men in their late 80s who said that being 80 was the best year of their life.

How older age goes for a person probably depends a great deal on their health and their economic and social situation. 

I like to think of the later stage of life as the "harvest" stage where a person can reap what they have sown. You make your bed and lie in it. But I don't personally or professionally in my career as a Psychiatric Social Worker find this to be true. People experience great changes over the decades of their lives and new challenges are constantly arising.

I like Ken Wilber's observation about "growing old" and "growing up." If people have grown up as they have aged they are beautiful and inspiring to behold. If they had merely grown old without growing up, It seems somewhat sad to me but who am I to judge? I like to believe that whatever happens as time passes we all are doing the best we can do.

The loveliest thing I notice in myself and others as I have grown older is gratitude. When people are grateful and count their blessings however meager they may appear to be, they usually have more satisfaction, fulfillment, and peace.

Peace be with you,

David Markham

Editor’s note: This is a first in a series of articles in question and answer format which I am tagging as “Hey Dave.”

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During September 2024 the focus on my attention, energy, and effort has been on exploring the older stages of life. In my Allnonfiction online book discussion group we have been reading Being Mortal by Atul Gawande, and I have been co-facilitating a peer support group, Growing Older Gracefully, which has been meeting weekly for a period of twelve weeks.

In the Growing Older Gracefully Peer Support group we have been discussing the changes that we have experienced growing older physically, socially, psychologically, and spiritually.

The physical changes are the changes most readily apparent while the social, psychological, and spiritual changes are more subtle and culturally and lifestyle influenced.

The old saying is that “Growing older is not for sissies” and yet the period of roughly 65 - 75 are also called “The Golden Years”.

The social status of the seniors has changed significantly over the years both in the US and in other cultures around the world. In some cultures the aged are considered wise and revered and in other cultures they are dismissed, marginalized, put out to pasture, and ignored if not abused. The life expectancy in 1900 was 49 years and in 2024 it is 79. We now have two adulthoods, the period of 20 - 50 which is about mating and procreating and assuring the continuation of our species, and the period of 50 - 80 which is filled with existential angst about what do I do now. The first adulthood we are programmed by Mother Nature hormonally to assure the continuation, evolutionarily, of our species, homo sapiens. The second adulthood we are on our own with little if no help from Mother Nature about what will give our lives meaning, and purpose

For many people in the US growing older is something feared, and addressing the problems that come with older age are avoided and denied until there is a crisis of sorts when the lack of functioning and inability to care for oneself and meet one’s own needs can no longer be ignored.

Gawande writes in his book Being Mortal:

I wrote this book in the hope of understanding what has happened. Mortality can be a treacherous subject. Some will be alarmed by the prospect of a doctor’s writing about the inevitability of decline and death. For many, such talk, however carefully framed, raises the specter of a society readying itself to sacrifice its sick and aged. But what if the sick and aged are already being sacrificed—victims of our refusal to accept the inexorability of our life cycle? And what if there are better approaches, right in front of our eyes, waiting to be recognized?

Gawande, Atul. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (pp. 9-10). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition. 

As a culture in the United States is there a better way that we can live the last years of our lives? How do you want to live yours? I am reminded of Ken Wilber’s comment about there being a difference between growing old and growing up. All living things grow old, including human beings. Human beings, though, being conscious of their own existence, have the ability to not only grow old, but to grow up.

What does it mean to grow up, to mature gracefully, to realize and actualize one’s own potential in a satisfying and fulfilling way that brings one to the end of one’s mortal existence with peace of mind?

Editor’s note: Every Sunday, David G. Markham substack will feature an article about the developmental stages of life.

It’s been quite a week this past week in my Social Work Practice in Brockport, NY where I continue to meet with people three days per week for individual, couple, and family therapy. I also participate on a mental health professionals listserv which is called “Clinicians Exchange.” I also co-facilitate a group called “Growing Older Gracefully Peer Support Group” on Tuesday afternoons, and facilitate “Nurturing One’s Interior Spiritual Life Peer Support Group” every other Thursday evening for the North American Unitarian Association’s Circle program.

The biggest topics which have come up this past week are the confidentiality of patient records, how a psychotherapist should respond to a client request to appear in court for them in child custody disputes, and how therapists should handle patient’s request for service when they were seen previously in an agency when a therapist has moved to private practice and signed a non compete clause with the agency, their previous employer.

In private practice, the Licensed Clinical Social Worker has two jobs, providing the therapeutic services and running a small business. I, over the years, have observed that many Social Workers are good at one of the jobs, but not both. The two jobs require two different skill sets. I have done both successfully over 44 years.

Some things have changed drastically over those 44 years, the most significant of which has been the introduction of computers and the internet and smartphones. The impact of this technology has had many consequences for how a Psychiatric Social Worker such as myself goes about their work. Some of the areas affected in no particular order are:

1. Marketing

2. Client registration

3. Billing

4. Health records

5. Communication with clients, collaterals, collaborative partners

6. Confidentiality

7. Practice management

8. Evaluation of client outcomes as well as practice performance.

This article cannot describe all these impacts. To provide one small example, though, we can focus on client communication. If the therapist wants to contact the client should they call, text, email, snail mail, fax, provide a client portal into their office software platform? Just getting on the same wavelength between the therapist and the client is an enormous challenge as clients have different preferences as do therapists and the confidential nature of the communication is always an overriding issue.

Having tried all of the above communication methods, the one I find most effective is the good ole fashion phone call. Texting is only good for the transmission of very specific discrete information, but leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation and misunderstanding. Email should be a “no-no” because one never knows where it is being stored or forwarded to, etc.

People want communication that is fast, efficient, and effective, and accurate. It seems with the multiple methods of communication people can choose from today, these attributes are rarely achieved 100%.

And so a Social Worker is juggling many requirements and expectations from multiple stakeholders as they engage in their work. Human nature and their situations are almost always messy and things hardly ever go as they should. So a good Professional Social Worker has to be fast on their feet, flexible, creative, smart, wise, loving, and compassionate, and it helps to have a good sense of humor about the absurdities and incongruities that one finds in life.

I told my physician, a gerontologist, who I see now that I am 78, “I wanted to let you know that I reopened my office on May 1, and I am going back to work three days per week. How many more years do you think I can practice?” My doctor is a relatively young man, I would guess in his late 30s or early 40s and he looked right at me and asked, “Do you enjoy it?”

I said, “Yes I do. Very much.”

He said, “Well, you will probably practice as long as you enjoy it.”

I wanted to stand up and hug and kiss the guy. What a great answer.

Then, he said, “The oldest patient I have had still working was an accountant. She worked until she was 95.”

I thought to myself, “I don’t think I will still be practicing at 95 nor probably not even alive, but maybe I can practice till I’m 85.”

To have a career and/or profession with work that you enjoy, is meaningful, is useful, and gives one a sense of purpose is one of the greatest blessings in life. I have grown more and more appreciative of my profession over the years.

I look forward to sharing more with you next Saturday about Social Work A Lifetime Of Practice.

Editor’s note: On Saturdays, my substack newsletter will have an article about the Social Work Profession and what I have learned from a lifetime of practice.

There is so much nonsense and disinformation in the media these days, it is difficult and takes extra effort to separate the facts from the disinformation and misinformation. So today, as a service to my readers, i am starting a new service on my substack newsletter entitled “Know The Facts.” Please help me create a healthier society which is based on honesty, trust, fidelity, and authenticity by sharing these posts with others.

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Optimism flooded through me—optimism, my great weakness or my great strength (depending on whom you asked and on my own mood as well). In Voltaire’s Candide (whose full title is Candide, ou l’Optimisme), the hero’s positivity in the face of the world’s horrors is close to idiotic. (If this is the best of all possible worlds, then those parallel universes must be hellish indeed.) When I wrote my novel Quichotte I lampooned my own nature by making my title character an optimist of the Candidean kind. And now, bedridden and gravely injured as I was, I began to believe that the worst was past, that Milan’s arrival was a sign that a corner had been turned, and happy days would soon be here again.

Rushdie, Salman. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (p. 81). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Salman writes about his experience in rehab which I found interesting because I have spent five months in orthopedic rehab from September of 2023 to February of 2024. One of the things I noticed was how the nurses would frequently ask me to rate my pain on a scale of 0 - 10. Luckily my pain was usually minimal. However there were three other things that were very noticeable and troubling to me and I constructed my own scales to rate them daily and sometimes hourly.

After pain, my second scale was “mental clarity.” I often experienced a fogginess and lack of concentration.

The third scale was “energy level.” There were many times when I just didn’t have the energy to engage in minimal things like talking with visitors. There were many days when my energy level was at 2 and 3.

The fourth scale is “optimism/pessimism” which Rushdie describes in the passage above. There were days when my optimism was 0 and I wanted to die. Had MAID, medical assistance in dying, been available in New York State as it is in 17 other states and Canada I might have killed myself. I was that despondent and pessimistic. That’s when you need someone to love you. I am blessed by three good friends when my family abandoned me and I obviously got through that desolate period to write this post.

The turning point for me was finding an apartment I could be discharged to. Finding the apartment, a place to go, gave me something to live for. Also, the PTs and OTs were very helpful and encouraging. Without them I couldn’t have recovered to the extent I have. 

Yesterday, August 23, will be one year since I tore the quadriceps tendon in my right leg, and tomorrow, August 25th will be one year since I tore the quadriceps tendon in my left leg. On the 29th of August it will be one year since I had the surgery on both legs to repair the tendons and I woke up from the surgery in two leg braces from my upper thighs to my ankles at full extension with no flexibility for 6 weeks. I was a beached whale, totally bedridden, and totally dependent on others for even the smallest things like picking up things I dropped on the floor from my bed.

Optimism when a person’s life has been totally turned upside down is a huge thing. I am filled with joy to learn that Salman got his optimism back. Been there, done that as they say.

Editor’s note: I am a member of the online Allnonfiction book discussion group which discusses a different nonfiction book every month.

During August, 2024, we have been discussing Salman Rushdie’s book, Knife, which describes his attack by a man wielding a knife at the Chautauqua Conference Center in August of 2022 as a result of the fatwa proclaimed in 1989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini for what the Ayatollah said was blasphemy in Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses 33 years prior to the attack in 2022.

The book being read and discussed by the Allnonfiction book discussion group in September, 2024 is Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. If you would like to join the group go here.

From KFF health news.

By Debby WaldmanAugust 20, 2024

In the 18 months after Francine Milano was diagnosed with a recurrence of the ovarian cancer she thought she’d beaten 20 years ago, she traveled twice from her home in Pennsylvania to Vermont. She went not to ski, hike, or leaf-peep, but to arrange to die.

“I really wanted to take control over how I left this world,” said the 61-year-old who lives in Lancaster. “I decided that this was an option for me.”

Dying with medical assistance wasn’t an option when Milano learned in early 2023 that her disease was incurable. At that point, she would have had to travel to Switzerland — or live in the District of Columbia or one of the 10 states where medical aid in dying was legal.

But Vermont lifted its residency requirement in May 2023, followed by Oregon two months later. (Montana effectively allows aid in dying through a 2009 court decision, but that ruling doesn’t spell out rules around residency. And though New York and California recently considered legislation that would allow out-of-staters to secure aid in dying, neither provision passed.)

Despite the limited options and the challenges — such as finding doctors in a new state, figuring out where to die, and traveling when too sick to walk to the next room, let alone climb into a car — dozens have made the trek to the two states that have opened their doors to terminally ill nonresidents seeking aid in dying.

At least 26 people have traveled to Vermont to die, representing nearly 25% of the reported assisted deaths in the state from May 2023 through this June, according to the Vermont Department of Health. In Oregon, 23 out-of-state residents died using medical assistance in 2023, just over 6% of the state total, according to the Oregon Health Authority.

Oncologist Charles Blanke, whose clinic in Portland is devoted to end-of-life care, said he thinks that Oregon’s total is likely an undercount and he expects the numbers to grow. Over the past year, he said, he’s seen two to four out-of-state patients a week — about one-quarter of his practice — and fielded calls from across the U.S., including New York, the Carolinas, Florida, and “tons from Texas.” But just because patients are willing to travel doesn’t mean it’s easy or that they get their desired outcome.

“The law is pretty strict about what has to be done,” Blanke said.

As in other states that allow what some call physician-assisted death or assisted suicide, Oregon and Vermont require patients to be assessed by two doctors. Patients must have less than six months to live, be mentally and cognitively sound, and be physically able to ingest the drugs to end their lives. Charts and records must be reviewed in the state; neglecting to do so constitutes practicing medicine out of state, which violates medical licensing requirements. For the same reason, the patients must be in the state for the initial exam, when they request the drugs, and when they ingest them.

State legislatures impose those restrictions as safeguards — to balance the rights of patients seeking aid in dying with a legislative imperative not to pass laws that are harmful to anyone, said Peg Sandeen, CEO of the group Death With Dignity. Like many aid-in-dying advocates, however, she said such rules create undue burdens for people who are already suffering.

Diana Barnard, a Vermont palliative care physician, said some patients cannot even come for their appointments. “They end up being sick or not feeling like traveling, so there’s rescheduling involved,” she said. “It’s asking people to use a significant part of their energy to come here when they really deserve to have the option closer to home.”

Those opposed to aid in dying include religious groups that say taking a life is immoral, and medical practitioners who argue their job is to make people more comfortable at the end of life, not to end the life itself.

Anthropologist Anita Hannig, who interviewed dozens of terminally ill patients while researching her 2022 book, “The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America,” said she doesn’t expect federal legislation to settle the issue anytime soon. As the Supreme Court did with abortion in 2022, it ruled assisted dying to be a states’ rights issue in 1997.

During the 2023-24 legislative sessions, 19 states (including Milano’s home state of Pennsylvania) considered aid-in-dying legislation, according to the advocacy group Compassion & Choices. Delaware was the sole state to pass it, but the governor has yet to act on it.

Sandeen said that many states initially pass restrictive laws — requiring 21-day wait times and psychiatric evaluations, for instance — only to eventually repeal provisions that prove unduly onerous. That makes her optimistic that more states will eventually follow Vermont and Oregon, she said.

Milano would have preferred to travel to neighboring New Jersey, where aid in dying has been legal since 2019, but its residency requirement made that a nonstarter. And though Oregon has more providers than the largely rural state of Vermont, Milano opted for the nine-hour car ride to Burlington because it was less physically and financially draining than a cross-country trip.

The logistics were key because Milano knew she’d have to return. When she traveled to Vermont in May 2023 with her husband and her brother, she wasn’t near death. She figured that the next time she was in Vermont, it would be to request the medication. Then she’d have to wait 15 days to receive it.

The waiting period is standard to ensure that a person has what Barnard calls “thoughtful time to contemplate the decision,” although she said most have done that long before. Some states have shortened the period or, like Oregon, have a waiver option.

That waiting period can be hard on patients, on top of being away from their health care team, home, and family. Blanke said he has seen as many as 25 relatives attend the death of an Oregon resident, but out-of-staters usually bring only one person. And while finding a place to die can be a problem for Oregonians who are in care homes or hospitals that prohibit aid in dying, it’s especially challenging for nonresidents.

When Oregon lifted its residency requirement, Blanke advertised on Craigslist and used the results to compile a list of short-term accommodations, including Airbnbs, willing to allow patients to die there. Nonprofits in states with aid-in-dying laws also maintain such lists, Sandeen said.

Milano hasn’t gotten to the point where she needs to find a place to take the meds and end her life. In fact, because she had a relatively healthy year after her first trip to Vermont, she let her six-month approval period lapse.

In June, though, she headed back to open another six-month window. This time, she went with a girlfriend who has a camper van. They drove six hours to cross the state border, stopping at a playground and gift shop before sitting in a parking lot where Milano had a Zoom appointment with her doctors rather than driving three more hours to Burlington to meet in person.

“I don’t know if they do GPS tracking or IP address kind of stuff, but I would have been afraid not to be honest,” she said.

That’s not all that scares her. She worries she’ll be too sick to return to Vermont when she is ready to die. And, even if she can get there, she wonders whether she’ll have the courage to take the medication. About one-third of people approved for assisted death don’t follow through, Blanke said. For them, it’s often enough to know they have the meds — the control — to end their lives when they want.

Milano said she is grateful she has that power now while she’s still healthy enough to travel and enjoy life. “I just wish more people had the option,” she said.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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Memphis, TN – A former Memphis, Tennessee, Police Department (MPD) officer facing federal civil rights charges for the tragic killing of Tyre Nichols pleaded guilty in federal court today.

Emmitt Martin III, pleaded guilty to civil rights and conspiracy charges arising out of the Jan. 7, 2023, incident. Martin is the second MPD officer to plead guilty in this case.

On Sept. 12, 2023, a federal jury returned a four-count indictment against Martin and four co-defendants. The charges included using excessive force resulting in the death of Nichols; aiding and abetting each other in using that excessive force; failing to intervene to stop the excessive force; failing to render medical aid; and conspiring or taking action to cover up their misconduct. On Nov. 2, 2023, co-defendant Desmond Mills entered a guilty plea to civil rights and conspiracy charges.

The remaining three defendants will face a federal trial scheduled for Sept. 9.

In today’s court appearance, Martin pleaded guilty to counts one and three of the indictment. Count one charged Martin with using excessive force and failing to intervene in the unlawful assault. Count three charged Martin with conspiring to cover up his use of unlawful force by omitting material information and by providing false and misleading information to his supervisor and to others. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for Dec. 5. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after considering U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors. 

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, U.S. Attorney Kevin Ritz for the Western District of Tennessee, and Special Agent in Charge Joseph E. Carrico of the FBI Memphis Field Office made the announcement.

The FBI Memphis Field Office investigated this case. 

Assistant U.S. Attorneys David Pritchard and Elizabeth Rogers for the Western District of Tennessee and Special Litigation Counsel Kathryn E. Gilbert, Trial Attorney Andrew Manns and Deputy Chief Forrest Christian of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division are prosecuting the case.

For more about Tyre Nichols click here.

Editor’s note:

The news comes so fast these days and in disparate places that we don’t connect the dots. In other words, the news comes very fast. I like the term “slow news.” Slow news follows up on the original story of the event to describe what happened after the event. Slow news tries to answer the questions, “so what happened next,” and “how did things turn out?” Slow news also describes the “back story” and why things are the way they are. Slow news provides context to events so people can connect the dots.

I used to publish articles I labeled “slow news” on MarkhamsSlowNews on blogger. I moved my new slow news articles to substack on 04/13/2023. You can find the older articles still on the blogger site if you are interested.

By Jacob GardenswartzAugust 23, 2024

“We’re losing 300,000 people a year to fentanyl that comes through our border. We had it down to the lowest number and now it’s worse than it’s ever been.”

— Former President Donald Trump at a July 24 campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina

Former President Donald Trump claimed at a recent campaign rally that more than 300,000 Americans are dying each year from the synthetic opioid drug fentanyl, and that the number of fentanyl overdoses was the “lowest” during his administration and has skyrocketed since.

“We’re losing 300,000 people a year to fentanyl that comes through our border,” Trump told his supporters at a July 24 campaign rally in Charlotte, North Carolina. “We had it down to the lowest number and now it’s worse than it’s ever been,” he said.

Trump’s figures appear to have no basis in fact. Government statistics show the number of drug overdose deaths per year is hovering around 100,000 to 110,000, with opioid-related deaths at about 81,000. That’s enough that the government has labeled opioid-related overdoses an “epidemic,” but nowhere close to the number Trump cited.

Moreover, though the number of opioid deaths has risen since Trump left office, it’s incorrect to claim they were the “lowest” while he was president.

Numbers Are High, but Nowhere Near Trump’s Claim

Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt wouldn’t comment specifically on the source for Trump’s statistics. She instead sent KFF Health News an email with several bullet points about the opioid crisis under the heading: “DRUGS ARE POURING OVER HARRIS’ OPEN BORDER INTO OUR COMMUNITIES.”

One such bullet noted that there were “112,000 fatal drug overdoses” last year and linked to a story from NPR reporting that fact — directly rebutting Trump’s own claim of 300,000 fentanyl deaths. Additionally, the number NPR reported is an overall figure, not for fentanyl-related deaths only.

More recent government figures estimated that there were 107,543 total drug overdose deaths in 2023, with an estimated 74,702 of those involving fentanyl. Those figures were in line with what experts on the topic told KFF Health News.

“The number of actual deaths is probably significantly higher,” said Andrew Kolodny, medical director for the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University, noting that many such overdose deaths go uncounted by government researchers.

“But I don’t know where one would get that number of 300,000,” Kolodny added.

Trump’s claim that fentanyl deaths were the “lowest” during his administration and are now worse than ever is also off the mark.

Overdose deaths — specifically those from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl — started climbing steadily in the 1990s. When Trump took office in January 2017, the number of overdose deaths related to synthetic opioids was about 21,000. By January 2021, when he left the White House, that tally was nearing 60,000, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Vital Statistics System shows. Deaths involving synthetic opioids continued to increase after Trump left office.

“There’s some truth to saying that there are more Americans dying [of opioids] than ever before,” Kolodny said. “But again, if you were to look at trends during the Trump administration, deaths just pretty much kept getting worse.”

In the last year, though, statistics show that overdose numbers have plateaued or fallen slightly, though it’s too soon to say whether that trend will hold.

Given that Trump’s claims about fentanyl came when discussing the southern border “invasion,” it’s worth noting that, according to the U.S. government, the vast majority of fentanyl caught being smuggled into the country illegally comes via legal ports of entry. Moreover, nearly 90% of people convicted of fentanyl drug trafficking in 2022 were U.S. citizens, an analysis by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, showed. That year, U.S. citizens received 12 times as many fentanyl trafficking convictions as did immigrants who were in the U.S. without authorization, the analysis showed.

Our Ruling

Trump said, “We’re losing 300,000 people a year to fentanyl that comes through our border. We had it down to the lowest number and now it’s worse than it’s ever been.”

Annual U.S. fentanyl deaths have increased since he left office, but Trump’s claim about 300,000 deaths has no basis in fact and is contradicted by figures his press secretary shared.

Trump is wrong to assert that overdoses were the lowest when he was president. Moreover, Trump continues to link fentanyl trafficking to illegal immigration — a claim statistics do not support.

We rate Trump’s claim Pants on Fire!

Our Sources

Cato Institute, “U.S. Citizens Were 89% of Convicted Fentanyl Traffickers in 2022,” Aug. 23, 2023.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “U.S. Overdose Deaths Decrease in 2023, First Time Since 2018,” May 15, 2024.

C-SPAN, Former President Trump Campaigns in Charlotte, North Carolina, July 24, 2024.

Department of Homeland Security, Fact Sheet: DHS Is on the Front Lines Combating Illicit Opioids, Including Fentanyl, Dec. 22, 2023.

Email exchange with Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for Donald J. Trump for President, July 29, 2024.

National Vital Statistics System, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Provisional Drug Overdose Death Counts, July 7, 2024.

NPR, “In 2023 Fentanyl Overdoses Ravaged the U.S. and Fueled a New Culture War Fight,” Dec. 28, 2023.

Phone interview with Andrew Kolodny, medical director for the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University, July 31, 2024.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

Editor’s note:

I, personally, have known over 20 people who have died from opioid overdoses both in my personal and professional life. Donald Trump is well known to be a pathological liar and so his lying has become normalized but still surprises when it is about something with which one has personal experience. Tragic deaths are nothing to play politics with. Please, please, please vote for Kamala Harris.

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The stories we tell ourselves about what our lives are about create a moral model of the world that we think we are inhabiting.

Perception is reality. What shapes our perception? The stories we are told about what we are expected to see. Remember the fairy tale of the Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson? 

The stories we tell ourselves and others becomes the lens through which we perceive what we think is real. Remember Plato's cave?

The bumper sticker says "Don't believe everything you think."

And then there is the idea of the "self fulfilling prophesy." The saying is “be careful what you wish for because you might just get it” like the person who hates someone so much that they wish they would die, and then they do, and then the wisher feels guilty as if their thinking it so caused it. Or you fear certain things and the fears seem to draw those things closer and make them more real like the spouse who accuses their partner of cheating on them, and it causes such a breach in their rapport that the partner does actually get involved with someone else.

Stories are an attempt to make sense out of our experience so we can explain things to ourselves and then to others. The postmodernists say that reality is socially constructed.

Trumpists and the MAGA crowd don't seem to understand that lying, cheating, hate, contempt, disdain, abuse, and violence: verbal, emotional, and physical, matter. They create a society of ugliness, pain, suffering, anguish, and death. Thank goodness we are seeing an awakening in America and a new story of hope, joy, inclusion and love for one another is being told.

Which story do you like best? Which story do you think will prevail?

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Wednesday, August 21, 2024

For Immediate Release

U.S. Attorney's Office, District of Columbia

USADC.Media@usdoj.gov

            WASHINGTON – A Texas woman pleaded guilty today to felony and misdemeanor charges related to her conduct during the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol. Her actions and the actions of others disrupted a joint session of the U.S. Congress convened to ascertain and count the electoral votes related to the 2020 presidential election.

            Kellye SoRelle, 45, of Grandbury, Texas, pleaded guilty to a felony charge of obstruction of Justice—tampering with documents and a misdemeanor charge of entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds before U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta. Judge Mehta will sentence SoRelle on Jan. 17, 2025.

            According to court documents, SoRelle was an affiliate of the Oath Keepers and the Oath Keepers' founder and leader, Elmer Stewart Rhodes and is an attorney who has previously worked as a prosecutor in Texas. In the days following the 2020 U.S. presidential election, members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group, led by Stewart Rhodes, began discussing the necessity of opposing the transition of power from President Donald J. Trump to President-Elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr. This opposition extended to advocating for the use of force if necessary.

            On Nov. 5, 2020, Rhodes sent a message to an encrypted group chat titled "Leadership intel sharing secured," which included other key figures in the Oath Keepers organization, such as Kellye SoRelle. In his message, Rhodes emphatically declared, "We MUST refuse to accept Biden as a legitimate winner," and further escalated the rhetoric by stating, "We aren't getting through this without a civil war. Too late for that. Prepare your mind, body, spirit."

            While some members of the Oath Keepers distanced themselves from the group due to the increasingly violent and radical tone, others, like Kellye SoRelle, continued to collaborate closely with Rhodes. SoRelle, a Texas-based attorney who had become increasingly involved with the Oath Keepers, worked with Rhodes on various projects aimed at opposing the election results.

            On Jan. 3, 2021, SoRelle traveled with Rhodes from Texas to Washington, D.C., where they planned to be part of the Oath Keepers' operation on January 6. During the journey, Rhodes purchased or picked up over $20,000 worth of firearms-related equipment. By the morning of January 6, SoRelle and Rhodes were in the vicinity of the U.S. Capitol, ready to take part in the day's events.

            As the riot at the Capitol began to unfold, SoRelle messaged the "Leadership intel sharing secured" group at around 1:31 p.m., declaring, "We are acting like the founding fathers—can't stand down. Per Stewart, and I concur." Rhodes, for his part, directed his Oath Keeper followers to the Capitol, leading to at least 20 members of the group breaching the building. At approximately 2:12 p.m., SoRelle, Rhodes, and another Oath Keeper affiliate entered the restricted areas of the Capitol grounds. Video footage captured the group passing barriers that had been set up by law enforcement to protect the Capitol.

            As she entered the restricted area, SoRelle live-streamed a video to Facebook, expressing her support for the actions of the rioters and urging others not to be afraid. She described the scene as one of the "coolest damn things" she had ever witnessed and framed the riot as a necessary step to prevent the United States from descending into communism and tyranny. SoRelle continued to document the riot over Facebook live-stream as she moved around the Capitol building with Rhodes and the other Oath Keeper affiliate. The group eventually made their way to the Upper West Terrace of the Capitol, where they watched as rioters continued to stream into the building.

            As they stood on the terrace, another Oath Keeper affiliate remarked that the people inside the Capitol "gotta be shitting their pants right now." SoRelle laughed and agreed, while Rhodes responded with the Latin phrase "Sic semper tyrannis," which means "Thus unto tyrants," a phrase famously shouted by John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.

            After the events at the Capitol, SoRelle joined Rhodes and other Oath Keepers for a celebratory dinner. During the dinner, the group received word that law enforcement was either arresting or searching for individuals involved in the Capitol attack. SoRelle, and the others then left the restaurant, returned to their hotel, packed their belongings, and regrouped at a nearby gas station.

            At the gas station, Rhodes turned off his cell phone and handed it to SoRelle, fearing it might be tracked by law enforcement. He then left with another Oath Keeper affiliate while SoRelle drove separately. They later rendezvoused in Tennessee before continuing to Alabama and ultimately back to Texas.

            As they traveled, Rhodes and SoRelle sent messages from SoRelle's phone, since Rhodes' phone remained off to avoid tracking. These messages urged Oath Keeper affiliates to delete any evidence of their involvement in the January 6 events. In a Signal group chat named "DC Op: Jan 6 21," SoRelle wrote, "Please delete any information you've posted regarding the DC op and your involvement. This thread will be deleted when possible." She also relayed instructions from Rhodes to "clean up all your chats."

            SoRelle further directed, "YOU ALL NEED TO DELETE ANY OF YOUR COMMENTS ABOUT WHO DID WHAT," explaining that only the comment authors could delete their posts. Oath Keeper members and affiliates complied, deleting messages, photographs, and videos from their devices that could serve as evidence of their participation in the Capitol attack.

            The FBI arrested SoRelle on Sept. 1, 2022, in Junction, Texas.

            The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia and the Department of Justice National Security Division's Counterterrorism Section are prosecuting this case. The U.S. Attorney's Offices for the Western and Eastern Districts of Texas provided valuable assistance.

            This case is being investigated by the FBI’s Dallas and Washington Field Offices. Valuable assistance was provided by the U.S. Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police Department.

            In the 43 months since Jan. 6, 2021, more than 1,488 individuals have been charged in nearly all 50 states for crimes related to the breach of the U.S. Capitol, including nearly 550 individuals charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement, a felony. The investigation remains ongoing.

            Anyone with tips can call 1-800-CALL-FBI (800-225-5324) or visit tips.fbi.gov.

Contact

USADC.Media@usdoj.gov

Updated August 21, 2024

Vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to preserve our democracy and encourage others to do so as well.

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What makes hospitals happiest is when the patient says he is having bowel movements. Hospitals really don’t like it when your bowels are not moving and they give you medication that causes diarrhea and you ask them to please stop and you promise in pleading tones that your bowels will move soon, they really will, and then, finally, they do move, and everyone cheers up.

Rushdie, Salman. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (p. 66). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Rushdie’s writing, at least in Knife, is plain spoken and to the point to the extent that some of his sentences and paragraphs make me laugh with knowing recognition of what experience he is articulating.

Having spent 08/23/23 - 02/03/24 within a hospital or in orthopedic rehab, the staff’s seeming preoccupation with my pain level and bowel movements seemed to be the topic of frequent staff inquiries every couple of hours for over 5 months.

In the hospital I was in leg braces from my upper thighs to my ankles at full extension as well as on huge doses of IV antibiotics. My bowel sensations were a constant worry to me because of my fear of not being able to control them and either needing a bed pan or to defecate in my adult diapers which, in either case, required staff assistance with the going and with the cleaning up afterwards. 

At first, being modest  and ashamed for such intimate ministrations, I severely restricted my food intake not wanting to provide fodder for the cannon. I lost 60 lbs. which I needed to lose anyway, but after I lost the weight people would comment on my change in appearance, congratulate me, and ask how I had done it. I think to myself, “You don’t really want to know.” But now you do, and when Rushdie mentioned this in his memoir that hospital staff are happiest when the patient is moving their bowels, it made me laugh. 

It’s one of those things that you might not think is funny unless you have been there. You ever been there?

Here at davidgmarkham.substack.com we keep track of good news and lift it up as compared to contemporary news which focuses on the negative and sensational. As Johnny Winter sang, “Bad news travels like wildfire. Good news travels slow. That’s why you hear that bad news everywhere you go.” This might be true in the world of the ego, but in the world of Spirit there is only good news. So control your mind and recognize and acknowledge the good news, pause, savor it, and express gratitude for the abundance which is all around us.

I wanted to say: I believe that art is a waking dream. And that imagination can bridge the gulf between dreams and reality and allow us to understand the real in new ways by seeing it through the lens of the unreal. No, I don’t believe in miracles, but, yes, my books do, and, to use Whitman’s formulation, do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I don’t believe in miracles, but my survival is miraculous. Okay, then. So be it.

Rushdie, Salman. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (p. 63). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Some people think that a miracle is walking on water, multiplying the loaves and fishes, raising someone from the dead, healing the blind, and doing other supernatural magic tricks.

In A Course In Miracles a miracle is a shift in perception from the world of the ego to the world of the Spirit. Unlike the definition of “miracle” in colloquial language, “miracle” in A Course In Miracles is the awareness arising in consciousness of the Truth of the non dual Oneness of all creation. When the monk asks the hot dog vendor to “make me one with everything” the monk is asking not just for a hot dog but spiritually for a miracle.

Rushdie writes that he doesn’t believe in the miracles usually associated with the world of the ego, but in his books, which he creates with his imagination, he perceives miracles in the aesthetic world of the art of literature and poetry.

Remember that the meaning of Love can not be taught but the blocks to the awareness of Love which is our natural inheritance can be removed usually one by one. The opposite of Love is fear so what are your deepest fears and how can they be minimized if not eliminated?

How does Rushdie minimize his fears and try to eliminate them in his writing? If he, or any writer, can accomplish this, the elimination of fear, in their writing, they have worked a miracle.

Miracles are there for our realization all the time. Becoming aware of one’s consciousness, itself, is miraculous isn’t it?

There are certain politicians, mostly in the Republican party, who fear monger turning groups of people against each other. These folks have turned politics into a us and them game. This is zero sum economic model of winners and losers. Don’t forget that as human beings we are stronger together than we are divided.

With declining fertility rates in the US America will only stay strong and vibrant if it welcomes immigrants to our country. Politicians who gin up fear of the immigrant do the country and humanity a significant disservice.

Let your elected representatives know that you support a rational immigration policy and to stop with the fear mongering.

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• "NASA collaborates with numerous countries through the Artemis accords. Currently, 43 countries have signed on to the Artemis accords. There are ten articles to the accords to help reduce challenges and build cooperation: 1. Peaceful Purposes; 2. Transparency; 3. Interoperability; 4. Emergency Assistance; 5. Registration of Space Objects; 6. Release of Scientific Data; 7. Protecting Heritage; 8. Space Resources; 9. Deconfliction of Activities; 10. Orbital Debris and Spacecraft Disposal. And the US does collaborate with Russia in space exploration, even though they have yet to sign the Artemis Accords."

  – Author Jeffrey Gillis-Davis on the story Chang'e 6 brought rocks from the far side of the Moon back to Earth − a planetary scientist explains what this sample could hold

Can the nations of Earth get along in space even if they can’t get along on their home planet?

Christians pray as Jesus taught them the prayer known as the “Our Father” which is in part, “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed by Thy Name. They kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven.”

What do you suppose God’s will is for human evolution?

For more click here.

Did you notice that the 10 best states for women’s health and reproductive care outcomes are blue states?

Blue states value women’s freedom of choice over what happens to her own body without government restrictions and constraints.

Women and their families have more freedom to live their lives with less governmental regulation in blue states than red states.

I love living and working in New York State. It is one of the best states in the country on just about any indicator you pick to measure. I am very grateful and count my blessings every day to be living in and able to say that I am a proud New Yorker.

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Salman Rushdie writes in his book, Knife, "I'll just say: we would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays."

Okay. I get that. Maybe that's true, but then again maybe it isn't.

One of my favorite bumper stickers says, "Good judgment comes from experience. Experience sometimes comes from bad judgment."

Okay, I get that too, but then again what about forgiveness?

Forgiveness, according to Gary Renard, a teacher of A Course In Miracles, is "being willing to give up making other people and circumstances responsible for your unhappiness."

Okay so maybe the calamities of yesterday do not have the last word about our happiness and peace. Maybe it's up to us to make what we will of them.

What, if anything, haunts you, and can you ever forgive them?

In my Altar Boy days in the Catholic Church back in the 50s when the Mass was still said in Latin, the phrase Pax vobiscum ( Peace be with you) appeared a few times in the liturgy and the expected response was "Et cum Spiritu tuo" ( And the Spirit be with you as well.)

I have been signing more of my letters and posts these days, "Pax vobiscum" and in English, "Peace be with you."

Nothing real can be threatened. (Referring to the non dual Oneness.)

Nothing unreal exists. (Referring to the impermanent forms of the world of the ego.)

Herein lies the peace of God.

From the Public News Service on 08/08/24:

Pittsburgh is emerging as a leader in innovative solutions like electric vehicles and clean energy to combat the climate crisis. The group Elected Officials to Protect America says in 2022, electric vehicle registrations increased by about 82% from the previous year.

Rep. Emily Kinkead, D-Allegheny County, envisions Pittsburgh as a future leader in the green economy, bolstered by strong labor unions and academic institutions.

"So whether it's solar for schools, or capping oil wells or any number of things that move us away from fossil fuels, transitioning over to electric vehicles. Transitioning away from fossil fuels is a huge way that we can make sure that we are protecting our citizens now," she explained.

The state is using funds from sources like the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes a historic investment of $370 billion to fight climate change over the next decade. Pennsylvania's goal of reducing emissions by 50% by 2030 is the same target President Joe Biden set for the nation.

Erika Strassburger, Pittsburgh City Council member, said the biggest benefit of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure law - especially in western Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh - is that they've been major job creators.

"You don't have to go too far outside of Pittsburgh, to the Mon Valley, to see 600 new jobs created in a battery manufacturing plant that will help the electrification of our vehicles and of our systems. And those are jobs that wouldn't have otherwise been created without these federal investments," she explained.

Strassburger pointed out federal funding will allow Pittsburgh to invest $15 million in electric vehicles for its city fleet, and she added that the transition is expected to save energy, reduce gas consumption, and ultimately save taxpayer dollars in the long run.

"If we can expand that, which is our intention to reduce the energy burden - for starting with 100 City of Pittsburgh residents by the end of this year, and then over the next six years, do so for 10,000 residents across the region - that means that the greatest benefit we're seeing is people paying less out of their paycheck toward energy" she continued.

Pennsylvania has seen a significant increase in EV purchases. At the start of this year, more than 47,000 electric vehicles were registered in the state.

If Western PA can do this, why can’t other parts of the country? Perhaps it is only a matter of will and time and increasing popular support. 

Can the US lead the way in the development and implement the use of renewable energy and mitigate carbon emissions? Yes we can!

Editor’s note:

Today we are adding a new tag to our davidgmarkham mstthead called “Good News.” When you click on the tag in the masthead all the articles with that tag will load.

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If you find the articles here informative, interesting, entertaining, please subscribe and share and spread the knowledge and good will. Let each become all (s)he is capable of becoming.

After the years of Trumpism people are weary of polarized politics. There is a new vision arising that moves the American people beyond right and left to a transcendent synthesis of “us” instead of “me and you.”

We are moving beyond the zero sum game of “one or the other.” The new game is “both and”. Ken Wilber teaches that it only takes 10% of the population to generate a cultural shift, and things are shifting to the transcendent politics that McIntosh envisions.

This cultural shift will grow with the enhancement of spiritual intelligence of the population which involves Cindy Wigglesworth’s model of 21 skills of spiritual intelligence of which the 6th, Awareness of the interconnectness of life, and the 7th, Awareness of Worldviews of Others or the most relevant for this shift to political transcendence.

As Rodney King said when the police were beating him, “Can’t we all just get along” and John Lennon composed and sang his great song, Imagine, we are encouraged to raise our consciousness to a new level of inclusiveness creating a better world for not just some, but for all.

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The generalist model of Social Work methods conceptualize service delivery at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels of human social systems. In the old days, people pursuing a graduate degree in Social Work were asked to choose a specialty in learning service delivery methods as a caseworker, group worker or community organizer.

As the Social Work field evolved it became apparent that Social Work skills and processes were the same such as assessing, planning, implementing, and evaluating service delivery regardless of the level of social organization. Thus, the “generalist model” was created and developed.

The “person in situation” concept was very important to Social Work theory because Social Work did not limit its assessments, planning, implementation,and evaluating simply to intrapsychic factors of individual functioning but also applied these processes to the context or social factors that the individual participated in. Courses in human development  and psychology were called “Human behavior and social environment”.

While Social Work has appreciated and learned from reductionistic and linear scientific findings from its beginning it highly appreciated the idea of systems and realized that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.

The emphasis on social policy has been an important part of the Social Work curriculum in its educational and training programs. Attending to the macro as it impacts and influences the mezzo and micro adds a dimension to Social Work practice that distinguishes it from the other helping professions.

The National Association of Social Workers, NASW, has a program called PACE which stands for Political Action Committee or Political Action for Candidate Election. On August 5, 2024 NASW - PACE endorsed Kamala Harris for President of the U.S. Here are some of the statements that NASW - PACE made in their endorsement:

Harris is a dedicated supporter of policies that aim to expand access to healthcare, which is crucial for the well-being of individuals and families. Her advocacy for the Affordable Care Act and efforts to make healthcare more accessible and affordable align with the goals of social workers who strive to ensure that everyone has access to essential services. Vice President Harris is the right person to lead ongoing efforts that address our nation's mental health crisis.

“Vice President Harris recognizes the significance of addressing mental health and substance use issues, which are crucial areas of focus for social workers. NASW-PACE is excited to support her candidacy,” said NASW-PACE Co-Chair Brian Romero, MSW. She has backed legislation to enhance mental health services and increase funding for treatment programs, which social workers provide.

The Biden-Harris Administration has prioritized investments in mental health, as outlined in the Unity Agenda. Major successes have included enacting the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) in March 2021. ARPA aimed to improve access to mental health services and substance use disorder treatment. The act allocated funding for community mental health centers, crisis intervention services, and telehealth resources, especially in underserved areas.

……

Harris has also been a consistent advocate for social justice, addressing systemic issues that align with social work principles such as equity, diversity, and inclusion. She has worked to stop hate crimes and advance LGBTQ+ equality. Her efforts in criminal justice reform, including her support for measures to reduce mass incarceration and implement police reform, directly affect the communities that social workers serve.

Harris has continued to empower marginalized communities through initiatives addressing racial and gender inequities. Her efforts to fight discrimination and promote equal opportunities directly align with the values, goals, and ethics of the social work profession.

“It is clear that Vice President Kamala Harris is the woman for the job. NASW-PACE is proud to endorse her for President,” said NASW-PACE Co-Chair Kelli Soyer, LMSW.

When we study quality of life indicators on a state by state and country to country basis we find that different social policies contribute to different quality of life consequences. The Social Work Profession has a long history since its beginning in advocating for good social policies that enhance human welfare, satisfaction, and fulfillment. Let each become all (s)he is capable of becoming by helping each other not only thrive but flourish.

In Narrative Therapy we talk about the telling of the story, and then the retelling of the telling of the story, and then the retelling of the retelling of the telling of the story, etc.

Each reiteration has its own significance and value.

Michael White, one of the founders of Narrative Therapy, describes the story as operating at three levels: the landscape of action, the landscape of meaning, and the landscape of identity.

The landscape of action is the events that occurred over a period of time involving certain characters and objects in certain places.

The landscape of meaning is superimposed over the landscape of action and describes the meaning or interpretation of the significance of the elements of the landscape of action. In other words, what is the moral of the story, or the lessons to be learned? What do you make of the story of the landscape of action?

The landscape of identity is superimposed over the landscapes of action and meaning and explains what the stories of the landscapes of action and the landscapes of meaning say about me and the world I am living in.

And so in Narrative therapy the narrative operates at least on three levels. The therapeutic levels are meaning and identity. As a clinician I listen to the client describe the landscape of action and then I will ask, "What do you make of that?" People often stop, pause, and become pensive. And then I will ask, "If that's what you have been telling me means, what does it say about who you are as a person and the world you are living in?"

Michael White, introduced the concept of the "absent but implicit". This refers to the idea that within every problem story, there lies an implicit, or unspoken, alternative story. It's like the shadow to the problem's light.

Key Points about the "Absent but Implicit":

• Contrasting Background: The problem story is often defined against a backdrop of preferred experiences and values. These are the "absent but implicit" elements.

• Double Listening: Therapists use "double listening" to hear both the problem story and the underlying, preferred narratives.

• Rich Source of Preferred Stories: The implicit experiences can be a powerful starting point for developing alternative, more preferred stories.

• Trauma and Pain: White often applied this concept to trauma, suggesting that ongoing pain can be seen as a testimony to the importance of something precious that has been violated.

How it Works in Therapy:

1. Identifying the Problem Story: The therapist helps the client articulate their problem in detail.

2. Listening for the Implicit: The therapist carefully listens for hints of preferred experiences, values, or strengths within the problem story.

3. Externalizing the Problem: The problem is seen as a separate entity, not defining the person.

4. Building Alternative Stories: The therapist and client collaboratively construct new stories based on the discovered preferred experiences.

5. Thickening the Preferred Stories: The new stories are strengthened through evidence-gathering and support.

In essence, the "absent but implicit" is a powerful tool for uncovering hidden strengths and resources within individuals, allowing them to rewrite their life stories in a more empowering way.

Narrative therapy is based on a presumption that the therapist takes a non expert role and the services are very client centered. The client often comes with what is called a "problem saturated story" and the therapist, through scaffolded questions, attempts to elicit the client's preferred story.  In Narrative Therapy the therapist is listening for what White calls "the absent but implicit." It is hoped in subsequent retellings, new perspectives, meanings, and preferences will be made explicit. In this activity the client's identity, self concept, self worth and esteem may shift from a negative to a more positive place. Narrative therapists value most highly what they call "local knowledges" which makes the client the expert of his/her life. The therapist’s job is to recognize, acknowledge, validate, and celebrate this local knowledge which often is achieved after much effort, struggle, and sometimes suffering. I tell my clients sometimes that they have earned a Ph.D. from the college of hard knocks.

I also often ask, “Who else knows what you have learned and now know? Would you want to share it and teach it to others?”

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On August 1, 2024 Christine Emba’s article, “The Real Reason People Aren’t Having Kids,” was published on The Atlantic web site. In the article Emba describes the below replacement levels of fertility in developed countries.

Emba writes:

In 1960, American women had, on average, 3.6 children; in 2023, the total fertility rate (the average number of children a woman expects to have in her lifetime) was 1.62, the lowest on record and well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Meanwhile, rates of childlessness are rising: In 2018, more than one in seven women aged 40 to 44 had no biological children, compared with one in 10 in 1976. And according to a new report from Pew Research Center, the share of American adults younger than 50 who say they are unlikely to ever have children rose 10 percentage points between 2018 and 2023, to 47 percent.

Reading Emba’s article lead to me asking if there are differences in fertility rates across the 50 U.S. states and where New York State in particular stands. What I found is that the 5 states with the highest fertility rate in 2022 is South Dakota with a rate of 2.01, followed by Nebraska at 1.94, Alaska at 1.89, Louisiana at 1.85, and Utah at 1.85. The population replacement level is 2.1 children per female between 15 and 42. Even the states with the highest fertility rates are below replacement levels.

The 5 states with the lowest fertility rates are Vermont with 1.35, Oregon with 1.39, Rhode Island with 1.40, New Hampshire with 1.41. And Massachusetts with 1.44.

My state, New York State, is 12th lowest with a rate of 1.56. (For more click here.)

What are the consequences of the people in the various states not replacing their populations? What are the reasons for these low fertility rates? What, if anything, should be done about states and the country maintaining its populations? How has the Covid - 19 pandemic and anxiety over climate change affected these rates?

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When I was in graduate school getting my MSW in the early 70s our class was divided into groups and we had to pick a social problem area to research, study, and report on to the whole class. My group picked suicide.

In my career I worked for 18 years as a "psychiatric assignment officer" in 3 large urban hospitals doing mental health and substance abuse evaluations and dispositions. I estimate over those 18 years I did over 14,000 suicide evaluations.

Over my 54 year career I have continued to follow the suicide data and recently found the suicide rate for 2022.

The states with the lowest suicide rates are NJ with 7.7/100,000 followed by MA with 8.3, NY with 8.5, ML with 9.5, and CA with 10.4.

The states with the highest suicide rates are MT with 28.7, AL with 27.6, WY with 25.6, NM with 24.7 and ND with 22.5

It is very interesting that suicide rates vary by as much as 3 - 4 times as much in the highest rate states from the lowest rate states.

Why do you suppose the rates vary so significantly from state to state?

The rate of gun fatalities varies widely from state to state. In 2020, the states with the highest rates of gun-related deaths – counting murders, suicides and all other categories tracked by the CDC – included Mississippi (28.6 per 100,000 people), Louisiana (26.3), Wyoming (25.9), Missouri (23.9) and Alabama (23.6). The states with the lowest rates included New York (5.3), Rhode Island (5.1), New Jersey (5.0), Massachusetts (3.7) and Hawaii (3.4).

For more click here.

Editor's note: This past election cycle, the 2022 midterms, it has become more apparent than ever that the political campaigns and voting is based more on celebrity status and entertainment value of candidates than their policy positions. In fact, especially in the GOP, policies no longer matter and campaigns are run more based on the entertainment value of conspiracy theories than facts.

Therefore, Davidgmarkham. substack.com will be devoting our publication to providing more facts about social indicators which are influenced by policy decisions at the state level. Sometimes there are social indicators significantly influenced by even local levels at city and county levels.

This article describes the significant differences in gun fatalities between blue states and red states. Gun fatalities are five times higher in some red states than blue states. For example the highest rate of gun fatalities is in Mississippi with a rate of 28.6/100,000 while the rate in Hawaii is 3.4/100.000.

I will often reference New York State because that is where davidgmarkham.substack.com is located and where circumstances are the best known to the author.

In terms of gun fatalities New York is in the top five best states with a a rate of 5.3/100,000.

Gun policies do make a huge difference in protecting the well being and safety of state populations.

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Social policies make huge differences in the quality of life for the citizens influenced by those policies.

When I was in orthopedic rehab I was consistently asked by nurses to rate my pain on a 10 point scale with 10 being the worse possible and 0 being non existent. Fortunately, I didn't have much pain but there were other measures I thought were more relevant to my experience and wondered why they didn't ask about them? So I developed my own model of relevant factors which wound up numbering 4. The three indicators in addition to pain were cognitive clarity and concentration, energy level, and optimism/pessimism.

So I could imagine the nurse coming into my room when I was bed ridden with my two leg braces at full extension and my gall bladder infection raging and asking:

1. "Mr. Markham, please rate your pain on a scale of 1 - 10?

2. Mr. Markham, please rate your thinking and concentration on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being confused and disoriented and 10 clear as a bell?

3. Mr. Markham, please rate your energy level on a scale of 1 - 10 with 1 being inert totally lethargic and 10 being rip roaring ready for anything?

4. Mr. Markham, please rate your level of optimism/pessimism on a scale of 1 - 10 with 1 being "wish you were dead" to 10 the world is your oyster and you have everything to live for?

So right now on August 1, 2024, at 10:19 AM I would give the following ratings:

Pain = 1

Thinking = 9

Energy = 9

Optimism = 9

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The four indicator rating system recognizes and acknowledges that there more kinds of pain than just physical. If health providers are to serve the whole person they need to assess more than just physical pain.

Eric Hoffer in his book, The True Believer, provides a frame of reference to understand how mass movements form and what contributes to the development of a true believer. Usually true believers are driven to their beliefs and values by fear. The question that Ruby Sales says we should ask if we want to understand people is "where does it  hurt?"

If we are to understand where people hurt we need to understand their values.

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Editor’s note:

One of the first skills in spiritual intelligence is to understand what makes you tick? Where do your beliefs, opinions, values and practices come from?

Good social policies produce good outcomes. Good legislators design effective and efficient social policies. Good legislators are elected by intelligent voters. Who voters elect to craft their social policies is directly related to the quality of life of the population.

There are some politicians who like to bash and criticize the government in New York. They seem to not know or dismiss the fact that the quality of life in New York State is usually in the top 10 of the 50 United States.

I like paying my taxes as long as there is value for the taxes that I pay for myself, my family, my community, and my fellow New Yorkers. New York is a very high value state that is recognized and acknowledged not only across the nation but around the world. Rather than bad mouth New York we should brag about our accomplishments and the high quality of life we enjoy.

There are a series of articles planned for davidgmarkham.substack, com which highlights the accomplishments of providing a high quality of life in New York State.

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Suppose lying was outlawed in politics? Legislation is seriously being considered to do this in Wales.

In an article on the Positive News website it is written 

Public confidence in lawmakers plunged to a record low last year in the wake of Partygate and other scandals: only 9% of British adults polled by Ipsos said that they trust politicians to tell the truth. Without trust, says Jennifer Nadel of the thinktank Compassion in Politics, faith in democracy is undermined. “If we can’t trust what politicians are saying, how can we decide who to vote for? We need to be able to rely on our politicians to tell the truth,” she explains.

The article further states:

The campaign sprung from concern at the rapid normalisation of lies in politics. “We are slipping at an alarming speed into a post-truth era,” says Nadel. “We only have to look at what is happening in the United States.” Fact-checkers at the Washington Post found that Donald Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his presidency, averaging about 21 a day. “America is a warning of what can happen if this problem is allowed to go unchecked,” Nadel believes. “[Our proposals] are designed to stop [the UK] from getting to that stage.”

And further:

“You couldn’t function as a society if you constantly distrusted others,” says Andrew Chadwick, a professor of political communication at Loughborough University. “If you walk out of your front door, and you don’t trust that there’s a pavement to walk on, you’ll never get anything done. When intentions to deceive become normalised, people start to question the trustworthiness of all entities … You can’t believe anything you hear.”

Increasingly, intellectuals say that we are living in a “post truth” society where disinformation is routinely practiced and public trust is eroded. Lies are like a cancer in the body politic strangling the life out of it. 

Increasing the immunity of the body politic from lies through efforts at teaching media literacy is a protective activity but doesn’t eradicate the source. Making it illegal for politicians to lie and barring them from office eliminates the source of the toxin.

Compassion in Politics has long been campaigning to introduce criminal penalties for political lying, with a petition launched in 2019 attracting more than 200,000 signatures. In a surprise move two days before the UK’s general election, the Welsh government committed to passing legislation that would make lying illegal for Senedd members and candidates, having previously opposed the measure. Under the plans, those found guilty of deliberate deception by an independent judicial process would be disqualified from office.

Should lying to the public be a disqualifying offense for holding public office in the US? Yes, if we are to restore faith and trust in our democracy.

To read the article in Positive News click here.

Consider signing the ProTruth Pledge.

Even if your spirituality does not include a Supreme Being, children need to feel that the universe smiles on them. Einstein said that the most important decision each person makes is deciding whether or not this is a friendly universe.

Dr. Laura Markham, Great Spiritual Lessons Every Child Should Learn, 

Laura Markham is no relation to me and I don’t know her. However, I admire her work.

As I read and think about this quote, it seemed to me that this is an important decision for adults as well as children. To what extent is one of the foundational purposes of psychotherapy to help people shift their perception from a world of malevolence to one of friendliness? How do we help our clients shift their perception from a malevolent universe in which they feel victimized to a benevolent universe in which they are loved unconditionally?

One of the most important contributions to this mind shift from the negative, fear based perspective to a positive, optimistic perspective is the cultivation and expression of gratitude. Before bed, it is suggested by the positive psychologists that we reflect on the three good things that have happened to us during out day. What have we been blessed by? Identifying these things fosters an appreciation that allows us to become aware that we are loved by the Universe. 

At any age we can intentionally choose to recognize and acknowledge the blessings in our life. What greater gift could a parent give a child that to facilitate the child's awareness and expression of gratitude?

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The ethical problems of the Supreme Court are multi-dimensional which can be boiled down to two categories: structural and systemic factors, and individual characteristics such as integrity and honesty.

Clarence Thomas was suspect from the beginning with the Anita Hill testimony as was Alito who was not a first choice after Harriet Myers, and more recently the Brett Kavanaugh shit show.  Then there was the Mitch McConnell stunt that blocked Obama’s Merrick Garland nomination and gave us Gorsuch instead.

The selection of the Supreme Court justices depends on the ruling parties in the Senate and the House, and the Republicans have moved the worst of these justices through the selection process. What can voters do about this? Make sure that the House and the Senate are populated by Democratic and not Republican majorities. The Republicans seem to have understood and campaigned much more effectively on this issue of stacking the court with partisan judges than the Democrats. Trump brags that he gave us the Dodd decision because he chose and promoted three of the Supremes. He did. It's true. How did this happen?

What has become increasingly apparent is how corrupt and hypocritical the Republican government officials are. The strategy of the present day GOP to stay in power is to lie and engage in violence. Will they be rejected in the 2024 election at all levels of government? It is up to the voters what kind of representatives and people in the executive branch they want representing and working for them. The key to positive change is to vote out Republicans and vote in Democrats or Independents up and down the ballot starting with school board up to Governor and President.

In America we get the government we vote for and deserve. We have no one to blame but ourselves. What can you do to get people to make good voting choices this fall? The future of our country depends on it.

I am reading Ryan Holiday's new book, Right Thing, Right Now, just published two days ago on June 11, 2024 and it covers the four cardinal virtues: Courage, Temperance, Justice, and Wisdom. Holiday writes that of the four cardinal virtues justice is the most important. Justice is broadly defined as doing the right thing, right action, which is also one of the eight practices of the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path. How many of our politicians manifest this virtue of doing the right thing? Very few. Making this observation might make one wonder how these people get voted into office? Who wants these people to represent them? People at very low levels of spiritual awareness who don't care about right action as a prime value.

I was listening to a podcast today where the person interviewed did focus groups with Trump voters and she said that many said that they voted for Trump because he was entertaining and not boring. Yesterday I watched a very good TED talk on leadership entitled Are We Celebrating The Wrong Leaders by Martin Gutmann. It is well worth watching. Americans love a shit show because of the drama. Good, effective leadership is boring. So in our days of ennui, voters choose entertaining. It's like watching WWE wrestling. People supposedly know the violence isn't real but they like the show and root for their heroes and boo the villains. Unlike WWE wrestling, in America’s political system, the lying, fakery, and violence is real

Same way with the Supremes. It no longer is about justice or wisdom or courage or temperance. It is about power and greed. We voters elected people who selected them so who is ultimately responsible for the lack of ethics in the highest court in the land?

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In a democracy where the people vote for their representatives, intelligence of the voters is critical to good government. As we watch the machinations of our current elected officials it seems that the election of many of these people was a mistake. How quickly will American voters learn from their mistakes?

It is hard to understand what one doesn’t know

He (Eric Kalenze) also discovered books by E.D. Hirsh Jr. and Diane Ravitch that reinforced his initial feeling that what was called “progressive” or “constructivist” pedagogy didn’t place enough value on building students’ knowledge through explicit instruction “ Wexler, Natalie, Why So Many Kids Struggle To Learn, American Scholar, Winter 2022,P. 41

The basic idea is that reading comprehension depends on stored knowledge so that the reader has a context for the new information being obtained. Without this context the reader is confused or bypassed as the information goes over their head. Explicit instruction of primary concepts and knowledge is needed for understanding to be achieved. Merely decoding words with phonetic articulation doesn’t provide the meaning of the word.

In other words it is important for a person to know stuff if they are to learn more about it.

The even more problematic situation is when people think they know stuff that they don’t. This is a common phenomenon called the Dunning Kruger effect. The Dunning Kruger effect is acknowledged in the slogan, “A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.” 

The Dunning-Kruger effect also highlights the difference between being “dumb” and “stupid.” Dumb is when a person is ignorant and doesn’t know. Stupid is when a person thinks they know but doesn’t.

Dumbness can be easily dealt with. Stupidity, however, is a whole other challenge.

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With all the disinformation and misinformation available now on the internet stupid people are a bigger danger now than ever because they think they know things but are really way in over their heads. When these folks are in decision making positions where their decisions affect the welfare not only of themselves but other people society has a huge problem. The biggest threat to our democracy at the current time is people who elect people to office who are incompetent. The test of competence is outcomes. Does the person’s efforts produce good results, no results, or bad results? Sometimes this is referred to as the person’s record. Records don’t seem to count much anymore in ascertaining a person’s credibility to make good decisions and function in a competent way. Without considering a candidates record, the voter, themself, is incompetent and we have a situation where incompetents are supporting incompetents.

M. Scott Peck called it a therapeutic depression. What he meant by that is the idea that once a person extricates herself from a dysfunctional system of relationships, she looks back and realizes just how dysfunctional the system is. She may want to tell this to the people stuck in those relationships, but knows that, more likely than not, this information will fall on deaf ears and be rejected, leaving her feeling sad and impotent.

Karl Jaspers said one time that his definition of tragedy is "awareness in the excess of power". In other words, to know how things should be, could be, ought to be, but not having the power to make it happen, leaves one in a tragic situation. That's why they say that "ignorance is bliss", because what you don't know can't bother you, but once you do know, things will never be the same again.

To have one's consciousness raised while others are left behind because they don't get it, they don't see what you see, they don't understand what you understand, is a lonely position to be in. Many people don't want their consciousnesses raised. They are perfectly happy with their status quo. Any attempts to raise their consciousness irritate them because they feel threatened, their peace is being disturbed.

Jesus says in Luke 12: 51-53, "Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."

Keep your own counsel. It is best to be mute unless there is a person who can benefit from your awareness. It is difficult to share your wisdom unless people are ready; they are in the same place that you are. Traveling a spiritual path is a lonely, and solitary business. Occasionally we can help others along the way, but to walk along side is a rare experience. Better to find someone a little further along the way that can encourage and enlighten you.

Did you hear about the farmer who tried to teach his pig to sing? It frustrated the heck out of the farmer, and annoyed the heck out of the pig. As M. Scott Peck tells us, having chosen the Road Less Traveled to take through life can lead to great joy and satisfaction, but as we view the situation around us with compassion, it also can contribute to a therapeutic depression, one which Prozac will not help, but prayer, hope, and encouraging words judiciously shared when the timing is right, might.

Perhaps therapeutic depression are not the right words. It is not depression but grief. We grieve the loss as we rise above the situation and move on with our lives.

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As a Social Worker, I have been trained in Social Policy development, enactment, and evaluation. I have taught Social Policy to BSW students as an adjunct professor. One of the things that has concerned me over the years is the lack of understanding that social policies have consequences which are usually long term as compared to short term resulting in lack of understanding about the relationship. In other words, most people don't have the knowledge and context to connect the dots.

Policies promoted by the NRA and other advocates for second amendment rights restricting background checks and making guns freely available to people not properly trained in their management and storage has lead to the high prevalence of gun deaths not only of children and adolescents but of adults mostly from suicide because of the efficiency of the means used by people so inclined to end their lives.

The United States is unique in this phenomenon of high rates of gun deaths among all countries on this planet. From a public health perspective the proliferation of guns among the populace is a major toxic factor contributing to this sickness in the public health of Americans.

One of the primary factors contributing to the advocacy of gun availability is fear, insecurity, and lack of trust in other people in our communities, states, and country. This high level of social anxiety is a symptom of low levels of spiritual intelligence among the members of our society who have made an idol of guns, seeing them as an instrument of their salvation. Statistically nothing could be further from the truth. Owning a gun makes it more likely the gun owner will die from a gun than if they did not own it. Guns do not make the gun owner safer. A person might say that the idea that owning a gun will make the owner safer is the work of the devil who has tricked the person into believing this lie.

Where does a person's true safety lie? It is in believing and acting on the injunction to "love thy neighbor as you love yourself." You mean I have to love him? I have to love her? The answer is that love has to begin somewhere. Why not with you?

We have a lot of work to do to raise the level of consciousness in our society. Only then will we see the demand that our legislative representatives improve our gun safety laws. The citizen demand will not occur until those citizens become wiser and understand what policies are really in their interest and in the interest for the common good.

According to the Fetzer Institute’s Study of Spirituality in The United States done in 2020, 86% of people consider themselves to be spiritual. 88% of people engage in some religious or spiritual practice such as attending a religious service, praying, meditating, spending time in nature, with art, etc. at least once per week. 75% believe in God or some Higher Power, and 68% believe that their spirituality guides how they act in the world.

People who say that they are spiritual but not religious has increased from 1998 from 18.5% of Americans to 33.6%. (Fetzer, Spirituality In America Today, March 10, 2020)

It is interesting to note that as the mainline churches in Europe and the United States are losing members. People report that they are not religious, but they still report that they have some sort of spiritual life. If religion no longer serves the function of encouraging spirituality in our society, what part of our secular society does? How is spirituality nurtured and facilitated? Sports? The Arts? Politics? Civic organizations? Media? Health Care? Educational institutions?

To what extent does the failure to provide more intentional and predictable nourishment for spiritual development manifest in the poor mental health of the population resulting in the deterioration of public health? The rise in suicides, anxiety and depressive disorders, addiction and gambling disorders, use of pornography, social media and internet addictions, political polarization, authoritarianism, consumerism, and causing harm to the climate and ecological systems might be accounted for by low levels of spiritual intelligence in the members of the society. If there is any merit in this diagnosis, the question might be asked “how do we provide the resources to enhance the spiritual intelligence of the members of our society?” How do we promote the true, the good, and the beautiful?

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There will be a series of articles on spiritual intelligence coming up. To access the articles on spiritual intelligence on this site, click the link spiritual intelligence in the upper right hand row under the banner.

There are many models of personality and social dynamics to explain human behavior. In psychiatry some of us use what is referred to as the bio-psycho-social-spiritual model. While each of these domains: the biological, psychological, social, and spiritual are important, no one alone is usually sufficient to explain motivating causes for behavior. While individual factors are important, social psychological research such as the Asch and Milgram experiments have shown that social factors often overshadow individual factors. Social pressures explain why good people do bad things.

In our individualistic culture little attention is paid to the power of socialization and conditioning on groups of people. These forces for most people operate at an unconscious level and seem to the person questioned about them as "normal" or "just how things are." It is the rare person who is mature enough to have a mind of their own, stand on their own two feet, and take responsibility for their own behavior in spite of the group norms and attitudes or the expectations of authority figures.

So, it is interesting to study how group dynamics are created, operate, are sustained, and change. This study of group dynamics involves "metacognition" which means thinking about how we think and believe. The simplest way to get to this question is to ask a person, "What makes you tick?" Most people can't tell you. They get scared and defensive and some will say things like, "Well, I don't know. That's the way I was raised," or "doesn't everyone think/believe that?" 

One of the first skills of spiritual intelligence is understanding the factors that have contributed to and maintain our own worldview. As Cindy Wigglesworth states it in her book, SQ21: Twenty One Skills of Spiritual Intelligence, " Do you feel that you can explain to others the impacts of your culture, your upbringing, and your mental assumptions on how you interpret the world around you?" Low, Medium, High.

People who get caught up in social movements, conspiracy theories, cults usually don't have enough self awareness to know that they have been brainwashed. So to what extent do they have free will and are able to function with responsible agency?

Personality models explain some of individual behavior but they may be limiting at explaining the broader social forces at work in group behavior.

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Why do good people do bad things? Because of social pressures and the expectations of authority figures who can punish and reward them. Few people have the maturity to function based on their own reason and moral understandings.

One of the models that describes the human capacity for agency is spiritual intelligence. Spiritual intelligence is the capacity to function with wisdom and compassion, while experiencing inner and outer peace, regardless of the situation. This capacity is based on high levels of self awareness and understanding of oneself and relations with the world one inhabits.

Spiritual intelligence can be thought of as low, moderate, and high. How would you rate the spiritual intelligence of yourself and other people you observe?

In recent years, there has been a noticeable increase in the popularity of the philosophy of stoicism. This ancient Greek school of thought, which emphasizes self-control, resilience, and acceptance of the present moment, has gained a significant following in Europe and the United States. This phenomenon can be attributed to the decline of organized religion in these regions, as people seek a moral compass to navigate the complexities of a postmodern world.

The decline of organized religion in Europe and the US has been a gradual process, with more and more people identifying as non-religious or unaffiliated with any specific faith. This shift has left a void for many individuals who once found guidance and moral direction in religious teachings. As a result, people are turning to alternative sources, such as philosophy, to fill this void and provide a sense of purpose and meaning in their lives.

Stoicism, with its emphasis on personal responsibility and inner strength, has become an attractive option for those seeking a moral compass in a postmodern world. Its teachings align with the values of self-reliance and individualism that are prevalent in Western societies. Additionally, stoicism offers practical tools and techniques for coping with the challenges of modern life, such as stress, anxiety, and uncertainty.

Moreover, the rise of stoicism can also be attributed to the increasing disillusionment with traditional religious institutions. In recent years, there have been numerous scandals and controversies surrounding organized religion, leading many to question its moral authority and credibility. As a result, people are turning away from these institutions and looking for alternative belief systems that offer a more personal and individualistic approach to morality.

In conclusion, the rising popularity of stoicism can be seen as a response to the decline of organized religion in Europe and the US. As people search for a moral compass in a postmodern world, they are turning to this ancient philosophy for guidance and inspiration. With its emphasis on personal responsibility, resilience, and acceptance, stoicism offers a compelling alternative to traditional religious teachings and has become a source of moral guidance for many individuals in today's society.

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On May 28, 2024, On Point, a radio program of Boston’s WBUR public radio, had a program entitled “Why the ancient philosophy of stoicism is having a modern revival.”

The host of the show Meghan Chakrabarti asks Ryan Holiday why more people are turning to stoicism and he answers “We've seen a collapse in trust in so many different institutions, schools don't teach the humanities the way they once did, and people have turned away from the church.And so philosophy as a guide to the good life, how to be a good person and how to flourish as a person. I think takes on a new residence and a new urgency in a world of similar sort of decline. And then also, as you said, turbulence and dysfunction.”

People want help with the three big existential questions: “Why was I born? What is the purpose of my life? What happens when I die?” Beyond these big three are two more: “What is the good life? How should I live?”

In today's society, there is a significant need for local journalism and solution-focused journalism that is based on ethical principles and practices. The pursuit of profit has led newsrooms to prioritize entertainment over journalism, which has had a detrimental effect on the functioning of our democracy. In order to ensure the optimal functioning of a democratic society, there must be a shift towards emphasizing facts and truth in journalism, rather than entertainment.

The role of journalism in a democratic society is crucial. It serves as a watchdog, holding those in power accountable and providing citizens with the information they need to make informed decisions. However, in recent years, there has been a decline in the quality of journalism, particularly at the local level. This is due in part to the capitalistic requirement for profit, which has led newsrooms to prioritize sensationalism and entertainment over factual reporting.

This shift towards entertainment has had a negative impact on the public's trust in the media. When news outlets prioritize profit over ethical journalism, it erodes the credibility of the media and undermines its role in a democratic society. This can lead to a lack of trust in the information being presented, which can have serious consequences for the functioning of a democracy.

In order to combat this issue, there needs to be a renewed focus on ethical journalism. This means prioritizing facts and truth over entertainment and sensationalism. It also means adhering to ethical principles and practices, such as fact-checking, avoiding conflicts of interest, and providing balanced and unbiased reporting.

Local journalism is also crucial in a democratic society. It provides coverage of issues that directly impact communities and holds local officials accountable. However, the decline of local journalism has left many communities without a reliable source of information. This has led to a lack of transparency and accountability at the local level, which can have serious consequences for the functioning of a democracy.

In conclusion, the need for ethical journalism in a democratic society cannot be overstated. It is essential for holding those in power accountable, providing citizens with accurate information, and ensuring the optimal functioning of a democracy. Newsrooms must prioritize ethical principles and practices over profit and entertainment in order to fulfill their crucial role in society.

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Today, May 30, 2024 there is a good article on the Rochester Beacon by Smriti Jacob entitled, “Help Foster The Next Generation Of Journalists” which is well worth reading.

One of the symptoms of totalitarian social movements is the denigration, castigation, and attack of the fourth estate, journalism, which reports facts and truth which can be used by citizens to hold government officials accountable.

Ethical journalism is the antidote to misinformation, propaganda, and conspiracy thinking. Ethical journalism is essential to a well functioning democracy. It is, in a democracy, a patriotic activity to support good journalism. Join us in supporting local journalism in our community and society.

What kind of social movement is the MAGA movement: democratic or authoritarian?

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This is the first of several articles about Eric Hoffer’s classic book, The True Believer, first published in 1951 after the Holocaust and the beginning of the Cold War. Hoffer’s book, The True Believer is about social movements: how they are born, what fuels them, how they develop and are sustained.

I found very interesting and helpful in understanding the MAGA movement in the Republican party today. The book was first published in 1951 and yet Hoffer's observations and insights about social movements seem just as relevant today as they were back in the mid twentieth century. It is written in the preface, "This book deals with some peculiarities common to all mass movements, be they religious movements, social revolutions or nationalists movements. It does not maintain that all movements are identical, but that they share certain essential characteristics which give them a family likeness."

What Hoffer is describing are social processes. The process of mass movements are very similar even though the content is different. Having always been interested in sociology, I want to know what these characteristics are that mass movements share.

Our modern media focuses on the content but rarely reports on the process and therefore the public is ill served by the reporting of the fourth estate. The media focuses on sensationalized aspects of current celebrity behavior and fails to highlight the social process which animates the content. For example, Donald Trump's and Marjorie Taylor Greene's antics are the symptoms not the cause of what ails us as a society. Who are the people and what is their mindset who support them and vote for them? Hoffer offers some ideas about the mindset of the people who support the leaders of these mass movements.

The characteristics of mass movements and the mindset of the people who create them and sustain them will be described. These series of articles might be described as “metacognition” which simply means how do we think about what we think. As the bumper sticker says, “Don’t believe everything you think.”

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Everyone has their beliefs but not everyone understands where their beliefs come from and why they believe what they believe. In philosophy there is a sub discipline called “epistemology” which is the philosophy of knowledge. What are the different kinds of knowledge? How do we know what we know and to what extent are we consciously aware of how and why we know what we know?

In psychology there is the recognition of different kinds of intelligence such as cognitive, social, emotional, spiritual, musical, artistic, athletic, mechanical, mathematical, etc. These different kinds of intelligence was popularized by Howard Gardener when he named 8 different kinds of intelligence. Ken Wilber in describing Integral Theory calls these kinds of intelligence “lines” meaning lines of development.

It has been four years since 05/25/20 when Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin and three of his fellow police officers, killed George Floyd leading to the Black Lives Matter marches throughout the United States and Europe. 

To what extent has the social consciousness of Americans been raised? Terrance Floyd, George’s younger brother who started We Are Floyd, a non profit organization dedicated to social justice and police reform, said, “Slow motion is better than no motion,” during a CNN interview on a segment on the fourth anniversary for George Floyd’s killing.

One might like to think that social consciousness has been raised about the systemic racism in American society and that people with such a rise in consciousness would be working for systemic change. 

One might also observe the backlash of the white supremist elements of American society that seek to censor the information about discriminatory behavior and even misinform and spread disinformation. Over 96% 0f 7,300 BLM demonstrations were peaceful.

How can the life of George Floyd and hundreds of other black Americans killed by police violence be honored? By changing the racist policing and carceral system in the United States. How can a person best do that? By police monitoring and providing public witness to injustice when it occurs and advocating for reform involving equity, and compassion for all people especially those who have been enslaved, subjugated, and oppressed.

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One might like to think that a life, any life, but especially one ended by tragic and avoidable circumstances could count for something. What is the legacy of such a person’s life and how can that life be honored and remembered in ways that exalt its meaning? It is up to us, the survivors, to craft this meaning in such a way that it benefits the people who live on.

James by Percival Everett is a retelling of the story of Huckleberry Finn and his adventures with Jim, the runaway slave. Jim in Percival’s retelling can read and write and speak the King’s English when he chooses.

Everett’s retelling of the story from Jim’s perspective illuminates the overt and hidden social dynamics of slavery. Those social dynamics are pernicious to all parties involved in the slavery system.

James is an adult and Huck is a child. Huck, as a white person even though a child, has much more privilege than James, a black person, and so can protect James from the harmful dynamics of slavery as they travel through a highly racist America. James as an adult and Huck as a child calls for James to often act in a protective and paternal manner towards Huck. The roles of protector and protected oscillate throughout this narrative.

James hides his literacy from Huck and for most of the story plays the role of the illiterate, inferior, albeit kindly slave. This juxtaposition of role performance between an illiterate inferior role to an equal and at times superior role highlights the social forces that contribute to self censorship to hide and marginalize one’s strengths, talents, and abilities under a slave system.

In the end, resentment and anger fuel an extraordinary effort to act to pursue freedom from the constraints and abuses of the slave system to achieve opportunity for growth and development as human beings for James, his wife and his daughter.

This novel can be read on multiple levels. The writing is easy to read and entertaining. As the story develops, the hidden aspects of the slave system and its ramifications become apparent. This book could be the basis of a good discussion of racism at its multiple levels of prejudice, discrimination, and systemic.

The title alone hints at the nuance being suggested about human dignity in the main character’s name not being “Jim”, but “James.”

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Does reading fiction makes us more empathic? Do we come to better understand ourselves, and others, and the world through experiencing the world through the eyes of others? Does fiction provide us an opportunity to be voyeurs of worlds we would never personally experience? Does reading fiction help one become a more well rounded person who experiences more joy, understanding, and peace in one’s life? Has reading James contributed to my being a better person and fellow citizen? Yes.

The Truth in every mind is identical and not-Truth in every mind is the same in content, though different in form. Boundaries between minds collapse for you. You realize that there is only one “dreamer of the dream” that just takes many forms. You stop thinking in terms of “my” mind, “their” mind, and “your” mind and you think simply in terms of “mind”. You accept, without guilt or judgment, that if it is in your awareness it is in your mind. You are the dreamer of the dream.

You do not have to make any of this happen. It is the natural result of inviting Truth into your awareness and choosing to undo your obstacles (guilt, fear) to being aware of Truth. You only have to be willing; Truth does the rest. In time you accept that only the Truth is True. You recognize that the dream is meaningless and you let it unfold without judgment or attachment. The dream does not really change but you become a happy dreamer because you recognize that it is a dream and not reality. P.46 - 47

Cronkhite, Elizabeth. The ACIM Mentor Articles Volume 2: Answers for Students of A Course in Miracles and 4 Habits for Inner Peace . Kindle Edition. 

The non dual Oneness of our Transcendent Source is the Truth of Creation. This metaphysical awareness of  a non dual Oneness is foreign to our usual awareness of our bodily existence which is based on separation and division. However, once we get a glimpse of this higher level of cosmic consciousness, our experience of Life will never be the same again. Liz Cronkite tells us that we do not have to do anything to make this awareness happen. It is our natural inheritance and has been True all along but forgotten while we detoured onto the path of physical existence separating ourself from our Transcendent Source thinking that we are capable of creating our own existence and self sufficiency. When we see the absurdity of this belief we are filled with laughter at our silliness. As Liz writes, we become a happy dreamer because we recognize that what we think of as our life is a dream and not reality.

The spiritual practice of laughter at the absurdity and incongruity of life brings great peace and joy. As Richard Carlson wrote in his book, “Don’t sweat the small stuff and it’s all small stuff.”

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These series of articles based on the metaphysical understanding of Life based on concepts from A Course In Miracles are not everyone’s cup of tea. However, if you are drawn to the ideas presented in them, stick with them because they will change your life.

The metaphysical thought system presented by A Course In Miracles is foreign to the usual thought systems into which human beings are born and then socialized, and conditioned.

We are socialized to think ourselves as separate from others with our primary reference point being our physical body. As we mature we become less identified with our physical body and come to realize that our witness is the primary source of consciousness. The witness is that part of ourselves that can observe our cognitive, emotional, social, physical, and spiritual functioning.

At more advanced levels of consciousness we become aware that our individual self is part of something much greater and awesome than our separate body. Awareness of the non dual Oneness, at first, is fleeting and rare. As we pay attention to this experience, our awareness expands and becomes present for extended periods of time.

When the non dual Oneness is experienced, the drop of the ocean rejoins the ocean and realizes that all the drops are just part of the same thing. The drop, thinking it is separate and self sufficient, is deluded and is experiencing an illusion forgetting from whence it came and to which it is destined to return.

This awareness of the non dual Oneness brings peace and dispels guilt and fear born from the separation.

The practice of re-membering is fundamental to advancement in spiritual intelligence as one realizes one’s essential nature.

Today, re-member that of which you are a part and experience the peace of being One with the All.

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Do you know other people who might be interested in learning about this revolutionary thought system? We are all in this thing called “life” together but we forget this fact, thinking we are separate individuals each with his/her own interests. This divisiveness contributes, at both a conscious and unconscious level, feelings of fear and guilt. Our experience of life changes when we change our thought system. Remind yourself and others who we are and where we ultimately belong.

Turn it over.

I have been a student of A Course In Miracles for over 35 years. The Course In Miracles provides a framework for spiritual development based on a non dual philosophy of the Divine, God, Truth, Higher Power, Transcendent Source, Ultimate Reality, whatever people call “God.” 

The non dual frame of reference is best summed up in the joke about the monk who asked the hot dog vendor to make him one with everything.

The original sin in the non dual frame of reference was when human beings separated themselves from the unconditional love of God because they thought they didn’t need God and could go through life without God on their own. 

On top of this crazy idea that human beings can exist totally on their own and self-sufficiently, we forgot that we did this to ourselves when we separated ourselves from our Transcendent Source and thought we were fine by ourselves. When we get this situation in perspective, we realize how crazy this self serving idea is. 

It is written in the Course, “Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects. Together, we can laugh them both away, and understand that time cannot intrude upon eternity. It is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity which means there is no time.” T-27.VIII,6: 2-5

In Alcoholic Anonymous, the Twelve Step program, one of the best spiritual development programs in the world, the third step is to make a decision to turn our will and lives over to the care of God as we understand Him. In other words we decide to  return to the non dual Oneness with our Transcendent Source and give up our willfulness. In AA a wonderful distinction is made between “willfulness” and “willingness.” The AA slogans “Turn it over,” and “let go and let God” make it easy to remind ourselves to call on the Holy Spirit for guidance. As the joke reminds us, “If you want to hear God laugh, tell God your plans.”

I have been practicing turning to the Holy Spirit for guidance several times throughout the day. The more I do this, the more natural the practice becomes and the greater confidence and peace I experience as I go through my day. I highly recommend this practice to you.

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This post is one in a series on A Course In Miracles and Spiritual Intelligence. These posts can be accessed as a group by clicking on the link ACIM, or Spiritual Intelligence in the masthead.

There is in us a tendency to locate the shaping forces of our existence outside ourselves. Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change. The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health and so on. “If anything ail a man,” says Thoreau, “so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even … he forthwith sets about reforming—the world.”3

Hoffer, Eric. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (Perennial Classics) (p. 7). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

Hoffer describes how we, as human beings, tend to blame external circumstances for our assessment of our success and failure. And yet, it is apparent that often we cannot control external circumstances while we can always control our response to them.

The ability to monitor and witness our functioning in response to external circumstances is one of the major components of spiritual intelligence. Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living. How many people do you know that live examined lives? It is in the living of an unexamined life that it becomes easy to blame others for one’s unhappiness. The failure to take responsibility for one’s choosing the responses to life’s circumstances that leads to increased unhappiness and suffering. We have the choice of whether we would live as victims or agents.

Joining a social movement is giving up responsibility for one’s own agency. We throw ourselves into the dependency of the group. We are no longer ourself but one of them.

The step to spiritual growth is the willingness to give up making other people and circumstances responsible for our unhappiness. The giving up of making other people and circumstances responsible is called “forgiveness.” We no longer are holding other people responsible but rather ourselves for our response. We choose to be an agent rather than a victim.

Most political problems can be reframed as spiritual problems and until they are dealt with as such, efforts to ameliorate them will continue to fail. In other words, the problems we face are not external to us but they are internal. It is in enhancing the spiritual intelligence of the members of a society that that society will grow and flourish. The cornerstone of spiritual intelligence is self understanding and self management. Our efforts to improve the world would be more effective if we focused on raising the level of spiritual intelligence of society’s members rather than changing the aspects of the unjust world that we hate.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene could be considered  a case study about a person who assumes the role of a fanatic in a social movement.

Eric Hoffer writes in his book The True Believer that social movements go through three phases: the production of words, the materialization of fanatics, and the implementation by people of action. The second phase, the materialization of fanatics, is characterized by the true believers. True believers have no interest in logic, reason, or correspondence with reality. The believer is interested only in hatred of an enemy, often fabricated, based, perhaps, on a kernel of truth. The true believer is interested in protecting and promoting their belief not truth and reality.

Here is what Hoffer writes about the fanatic: "Chaos is his element. When the old order begins to crack, he wades in with all his might and recklessness to blow the whole hatred present to high heaven. He glories in the sight of a world coming to a sudden end." p.143

Elaina Plott Calabro writes in her article, "Why Is Marjorie Taylor Greene Like This" that Marge was an unhappy woman, bored perhaps, mediocre, frustrated, looking for a cause to devote her empty life to. While she had never been political earlier in her life, she got involved with the election of Donald Trump whose MAGA movement seemed to give her life meaning and she became what Hoffer calls an imitator. 

Greene started imitating and even expanding on the MAGA memes which provided her increased attention and ego stroking leading to expanding MAGA themes that even embarrassed and scared her supporters and collaborators.

The downside of Greene's fanaticism is that it is not sustainable as her recent attempt to unseat Mike Johnson, the current GOP speaker of the House, demonstrated when it failed. What happens to fanatics when the movement they have attached themselves to fail? They either fail with it, or convert to a new cause. Greene is still a young woman in the prime of her life and it will be interesting to see what she chooses to do when the bandwagon she has attached herself to goes off the road. There is probably not much of a future in QANON.

The more interesting consideration is not Greene's fanaticism but the people who elected her to represent them. To what extent does Greene's pronouncements and activities provide benefits to the people who elected her? Are they bored and frustrated too and hoping for some future that is exciting and entertaining to fill the vacuum of their nihilistic narcissism? Is the theater of MAGA and QANON the best that can be offered to them? What other scenarios might be offered to enhance their hopes for a better future? From where and from who will those scenarios arise?

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I have been a Psychiatric Social Worker for 54 years starting in the field in 1968 at Kings Park State Hospital on Long Island, New York State. In over a half a century, I have been a witness to extraordinary changes in the mental health system in New York State and the country. Currently, there is constant media attention to a mental health crisis for children and adolescents in this post pandemic era. On May 14, 2024 Lucy Foulkes, an academic psychologist at Oxford University, posted an opinion video at the New York Times entitled “High - Functioning Anxiety Isn’t A Medical Diagnosis. It’s a hashtag.”

Foulkes states three important points in her opinion piece. The high rates of anxiety and depression in children and teens can be accounted for by increased awareness, overinterpretation, and self-fulfilling prophecy. This editorial video is making the point made in my earlier post about dynamic nominalism and labeling people who then have to live up to their label.

The psychiatric labels though are not being assigned by professionals but by web sites and social media where signs and symptoms are described and the consumer of the media is encouraged to diagnose themselves or their family members and friends.

There is no psychiatric diagnosis of “high-functioning anxiety” in the DSM - V, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fifth edition, promulgated by the American Psychiatric Association which is the “bible” of psychiatric diagnoses in the US. However, it shows up as a hashtag on social media sites.

Psychiatric diagnoses are known to be contagious and spread through populations of like minded people who take on the signs and symptoms exhibited by others in order to belong to the group and communicate sympathy for the person afflicted by the named disorder.

Be careful when consuming mental health information from the internet and applying it to oneself and to others. Mental health diagnosing is not a parlor game and it is best, if the situation is serious, to consult with a professional.

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There is an interesting article in the May 13, 2024, issue of The New Yorker entitled “Read The Label: How Psychiatric Diagnoses Create Identities” by Manvir Singh in which Singh describes how psychiatric diagnoses influence the development of the phenomena they name. 

Singh writes “As the philosopher Ian Hacking observed, labelling people is very different from labelling quarks or microbes. Quarks and microbes are indifferent to their labels; by contrast, human classifications change how ‘individuals experience themselves - and may even lead people to evolve their feelings and behavior in part because they are so classified.’”

Singh writes further, “Hacking referred to this process, in which naming creates the thing named - and in which the meaning of names can be affected, in turn, by the name bearers - as ‘dynamic nominalism.’”

A client asked me last week, “My husband said that his therapist told him he was borderline. What does that mean?”

What does the name a client is labeled mean for them and for their relationships? A new identity for the individual and the people they are in relationship with is being constructed. Is this labeling helpful or harmful or both?

Three new books—Paige Layle’s “But Everyone Feels This Way: How an Autism Diagnosis Saved My Life,” Patric Gagne’s “Sociopath: A Memoir,” and Alexander Kriss’s “Borderline: The Biography of a Personality Disorder”—illustrate how psychiatric classification shapes the people it describes. It models social identities. It offers scripts for how to behave and explanations for one’s interior life. By promising to tell people who they really are, diagnosis produces personal stakes in the diagnostic system, fortifying it against upheaval.

From “Why We’re Turning Psychiatric Labels Into Identities” by Manvir Singh in The New Yorker, May 13, 2024

The concept of dynamic nominalism means that people tend to turn their labels of identity into a lived experience. One of the tools that fuels the development of dynamic nominalism is the depiction of psychiatric labels in artistic works such as novels, films, song lyrics, memoirs, autobiographies, etc.

Sometimes the depictions of psychiatric labels are helpful to people and other times they may be harmful. The depiction itself is neither good or bad but rather how the consumer of the depiction uses the depiction.

Do you ever talk about depictions of psychiatric labels with friends, family, or professionals, and if so, what has been your experience doing this?

Just as personality tests (see, I’m an introvert!), astrological signs (I’m a Libra!), and generational monikers (I’m Gen Z!) are used to aid self-understanding, so are psychiatric diagnoses. When Paige Layle was fifteen, a psychiatrist told her that she had autism spectrum disorder. She describes the rush of clarity she experienced when hearing the DSM-5 criteria: “I’m not crazy. I’m not making it up. I’m not manipulative or trying to fake anything. . . . There’s a reason why I’m the way that I am.” 

From “Why We’re Turning Psychiatric Labels Into Identities” by Manvir Singh in The New Yorker, May 13, 2024

The key words “dynamic nominalism”  indicate how a person tends to create the characteristics that the label assigned to them describes which then contributes to the person’s self understanding and their identity. The assignment of the label is an act of power on the part of the expert who is performing the assignment function. This power is given to licensed mental health professionals who have the social sanction to diagnose. With this power we create schizophrenics, depressives, borderlines, autistics, psychopaths,  and any number of other identities. To what extent is assigning a psychiatric diagnosis like an astrologer assigning a person to an astrological sign, or the person who administers some sort of psychological screen or test and assigns a personality type to the person such as introvert or extrovert?

Mental health professionals may be reluctant to assign a psychiatric label to a patient being aware of the iatrogenic consequences of such an act, and yet in order to get paid for the service they are providing, they must assign a diagnosis required by the insurance company for payment. This label then becomes a permanent part of the person’s medical record which will influence the perception of the person by other people with access to that person’s medical record for the rest of their life.

I am an introvert and a Capricorn. I also am a dysthymic. I also laugh, guffaw actually, because in my heart of hearts I know that I am none of these things. They are just labels and the meanings they may carry for a perceiver have consequences only in certain contexts and are temporary.

What psychotherapy is about is the ability of people to explore and disclose what they really think, how they really feel, and what they really want without the fear of being assigned a label that will limit their ability to be understood and appreciated at a deep and cosmic level by another human being who will stand in solidarity with them.

So, labeling people is a powerful act with wide and long ranging consequences and should be done with a degree of caution, trepidation, and self awareness. It is not simply a bureaucratic act done for money without a price to be paid by the person so labeled.

Perhaps the motto for mental health professionals should be, “Label with care.”

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An estimated 321,566 children in the United States lost a parent to drug overdose from 2011 to 2021, according to a new study. The rate of children who experienced this loss more than doubled during this period, from approximately 27 to 63 children per 100,000. The highest number of affected children were those with non-Hispanic white parents, but communities of color and tribal communities were disproportionately affected.
From Science Daily 05/08/24

As I have become more familiar with the key term, ACE, adverse childhood experience, the above fact jumped out at me this morning. Having a parent with a substance abuse problem is an ACE in and of itself, but to lose a parent to their addiction takes the trauma to another level.

The question was raised on the list last week about how to help families deal with grief from the loss of a family member. How does a therapist help a family deal with the loss of a parent to an overdose? How much of the grief becomes disenfranchised and unattended due to the shame, guilt, and ambiguity of such an event?

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In Social Work education there is a huge emphasis on systems thinking. Our human development courses are usually entitled something like "Human behavior and Social Environment I, II, III. The jargon phrase is "person - in - situation".

Having been trained to think in systems terms, I am always alert to the social influences on individual behavior and this morning I was reminded of this quote from an interview that Yascha Mounk did with Richard Reeves about his book, "On Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What Tod Do About It."

As a 78 year old white cis male born at the end of 1945 on Christmas Day, 12/25, I was right at the beginning of the "baby boomers", and grew up with Leave It To Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and Father Knows Best. The changes I have seen in my lifetime brought about by the birth control pill introduced in 1960 have been seismic in social arrangements. As a Psychiatric Social Worker, I have watched these social forces influence my clients, their families, communities, and society at large in the Western world.

There are so many observations that are worthy of making note of. Perhaps one of the most significant is the increasing number of fatherless children growing up in our society. I am wondering what other people are observing as a result of the change in the role of the male in our society?

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That ecofascist thought would surge in our particular historical moment is, sadly, predictable. We live in a time when having two jobs is no guarantee of affording a home and many of our governments consider bulldozing homeless encampments to be a viable policy solution. Meanwhile, every day brings us closer to a future of climate breakdown that, if it is not slowed and reversed, will surely lead to the culling of large parts of our and other species, hitting the most vulnerable first and worst. The process is already well underway. Being alive in a knife-edge moment like this, being forced to be complicit in it, while our so-called leaders fail so miserably to act, unavoidably generates all kinds of morbid symptoms. Inevitably, people reach for narratives to make sense of this reality.

Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (pp. 166-167). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

So much of Klein’s book, Doppelganger, is disappointing. She engages in a stream of consciousness musings that don’t lead to  any kind of coherent understanding of underlying dynamics at a deeper, more serious level.

Klein writes in the above passage that ecofascist thought is predictable. Really? What would make one think that? We are told that our climate is warming which will have significant influence on our ecologies and there are frequent media reports of out of control wild fires, huge rainfalls, sea level rise, species extinction, etc. but most people in the world go about living their lives while tsk, tsk, tsking at the misfortune that we see people in other places suffering from. We want our leaders and other people to do something about this state of affairs, but if it's not affecting me there is not much I can do about it. It’s for other people to work on a fix.

With the attitude that it’s not my problem, other people have to do something. We assume a role of passive victim waiting for the suffering to reach us and hopefully we can find ways to insulate ourselves and our loved ones before it gets to us. 

We can amuse ourselves by making up stories about other people who, by their actions or inaction, conspire to engage in perfidy. It’s the old good guy, bad guy plot line where the problem is addressed not by taking responsibility but by blaming others.

Meanwhile, power hungry demagogues are more than willing to play the role of savior if only we will make them king or queen and put them in charge. Klein seems to not get this and would rather explain the failure to act in solidarity with others by setting up a nemesis or doppelganger as she prefers to call it who is disrupting and disturbing her personal brand, the way she presents herself to the world.

The rise of ecofascism is not predictable and in fact may never come to fruition because as conscious beings we have a sense of responsibility that will contribute to our rising to the occasion and our better angels will guide us safely home. As the wonderful line in the movie Best Exotic Marigold Hotel says, “Things will be all right in the end. We’re just not at the end yet.”

A field of study I have been interested in and can't find a lot of good material on is "environmental sociology". The topic is how groups of people adjust to changes in the environment. It would seem that some of these adjustments could be proactive, constructive, and actually improve the quality of life for groups of people, or they could be destructive, harmful, and diminish the quality of life.

There are several topics that are interesting to observe such as diminishing availability of water in certain areas for certain populations. The other big one, of course, is energy, especially electricity and how electricity is being generated, transmitted, and utilized.  The topic we have been discussing is land use and housing as well as infrastructure like stores and other services in coastal areas. There are people who are studying these topics and designing the structures and systems for the future but we don't hear much from them unless a catastrophe occurs. Then we hear about the failures instead of the successes. When catastrophes are prevented people don't seem all that interested in how they were prevented, but if crises and mayhem occur they are newsworthy.

I don't know what Klein means by her term "ecofascism" which she states is predictable. I could guess what she might mean, having read her previous book "The Shock Doctrine," where she describes the capitalistic vultures waiting for catastrophe to cash in by rigging the economic processes that are utilized to respond to the catastrophe and how people let them do it even if its not in their best interests because they have no other choice and are desperate.

Our capitalistic system is designed to profit the shareholders and profit is their primary if not only objective. Will the capitalistic systems in place seek to aggrandize profit over other human needs and values when catastrophe strikes? What other strategies of managing crises and catastrophes might we design that would respect other values and needs than just the desire to profit? Is ecofascism predictable or simply a choice among management strategies as we adjust to the world that climate change is bringing us?

The United States is the richest country on planet earth currently, and in history, and yet a significant percentage of its citizens live in poverty. Poverty is usually seen as a personal failing because the person doesn’t work hard enough, isn’t smart enough, or has some sort of moral failing. Poverty, to assuage the guilt of the not-poor, is seen as a personal, individual thing when in fact the factors contributing to poverty are part of the social structure and system. These factors contributing to the phenomenon of poverty amidst abundance are usually below the level of awareness of the population and being unrecognized, unacknowledged, they are not effectively managed and minimized or eliminated.

One of the purposes of davidgmarkham.substack.com newsletter is to highlight the structural and systemic factors contributing to poverty as they can be effectively and efficiently managed at a macro systemic level.

One of these factors that maintains poverty in the United States is the “benefits cliff.” The safety net in the United States, compared to other first world democracies, is not only extremely inadequate but often punitive. Eligibility to receive societal support is tightly managed and in many instances counter productive. Individuals and families are eligible for support at certain levels of deprivation, but if they reach the upper range of eligibility are abruptly cut off and thrown back into poverty.

The question before us is how can the benefits cliff be managed in a more effective and efficient manner so that as people improve their ability to be self-sustaining, the decrease in societal support is graduated in its withdrawal rather than abruptly discontinued?

From the Public News Service 04/24/24 “CT Day of Action raises awareness on 'benefits cliff'

The benefits cliff is when a person might get a raise, have a kid with a part-time job, or some other income increase which then makes them ineligible for certain benefits. The changes can have severe impacts on communities and disproportionately affect families with children.

Stephen Monroe Tomczak, professor of social work at Southern Connecticut State University, said it is part of a larger workforce problem.

"People, particularly people of low income, are in a sense disincentivized to participate in the labor force and denied adequate jobs and income when they try to do that," Tomczak explained.

Thomas Geoghegan was written an article entitled “Leviathan” which is published in the April, 2024 issue of Commonweal magazine. The subtitle of the article is “How Trump liberated the religious Right from religion.” Geoghegan writes:

Erik Erikson’s classic religious study, Young Man Luther, argues that a new religious leader can arise by working out an identity crisis in the culture. Of course, Trump is no Luther, and he is certainly not working through any religious crisis of his own. But his cult ends the embarrassment of following Jesus, of taking as a model someone whose mission ended in failure, and whom Trump would call a loser. Instead of following Jesus the loser, Trump’s followers seek someone who can win “bigly,” and claim to have won even when he’s lost. It’s in Trump’s interest that his supporters leave the churches. Doing so strips them of even the small social capital that comes from attending church. He wants them isolated, with no connection to each other, and with no trust in anyone but him.

Further, Geoghegan writes:

Now that Trump himself has become a kind of religious leader, he is liquidating the authority of Evangelical ministers. There is no longer any need for them, as they merely offer more secular political ideology, and as Trumpism itself has become more like a real religion. The secular Left may take satisfaction in Trump wiping out the churches, but they shouldn’t: Trump grows stronger by atomizing everything around him and leaving his supporters with no alternative to him. This makes him a bigger threat.

In case you missed it, Donald Trump has published his own edition of the Bible which at Easter time he started marketing for $60.00.

Many people have observed that many so called Christians don’t follow the teachings of Jesus and even more concerning don’t seem to understand the most basic principles of His teachings like caring for the poor, being kind to immigrants, and most fundamentally loving not hating one’s enemies. Being alienated from the fundamental teachings of Jesus it is easy for people to attach themselves to a false leader, an idol.

Church attendance in mainline Christian churches is falling precipitously in the last few decades and people report increasingly that while they are spiritual they are not religious. This raises interesting questions about where these disenchanted people turn for fellowship? The answer is no where and that is why there is concerns about an epidemic of loneliness in the United States especially among middle aged members of the society. It is understandable how all these lonely people turn to Trumpism and QAnon to provide a sense of belonging.

More than ever there is a need for people who actually understand and follow the teachings of Jesus to reach out to the Trumpers and people caught up in conspiracy theories and let them know that while we may not agree with their beliefs we love them and want to hold them in fellowship with us. All we can do is offer them love. Whether they accept or not is not under our control.

Quotes are from a Public News Service article published on 04/22/24.

New York towns are reaping many benefits since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed.

Along with funds for larger clean energy projects, the state was awarded $158 million for the IRA's Home Energy Rebates program.

Smaller towns and villages use these grants to implement their climate action plans.

Editor’s note: It is wonderful to learn that local communities in New York State and Pennsylvania are using funds from the Inflation Reduction Act to reengineer their energy sources from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

This collaboration between the Federal government and local governments is a good example of the principle of subsidarity which is described in Catholic Social Teaching. Anthony Annett describes the history of Catholic Social Teaching in his article, The Theology Of Social Democracy, in the April, 2024 issue of Commonweal magazine.

The principle of subsidiarity is often paired with solidarity. Some Catholics have argued that subsidiarity requires that the state take a hands-off approach to economic life. This isn’t quite right. Subsidiarity means that higher-level associations like the state must actively help and support lower-level associations like families, unions, and civil-society organizations. As Pope Francis puts it, subsidiarity means that “when single individuals, families, small associations and local communities are not capable of achieving primary objectives, it is right that the highest levels of society, such as the State, should intervene to provide the resources necessary to progress.” This is why unions, for example, are—as Pope John Paul II put it in his encyclical Laborem exercens—indispensable elements of social life. But there are still things that only a state can do to help individuals and families.

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Quotes are from a Public News Service article published on Monday, April 22, 2024.

A new study suggests laws in New Mexico and 22 other states to protect school-aged LGBTQ youth are having a positive impact.

According to research by the Trevor Project, suicide attempts in states with specific protections for LGBTQ youth were 18% lower, and physical violence reported by those youth was 3% lower.

Katalina Hadfield, a member of Equality New Mexico's board of directors, said she believes the state's progressive protections are due to a community-centered culture.

"Where folks are really willing to help each other out, and look out for one another," said Hadfield. "And I think that is part of what helps students in a lot New Mexico schools feel more included."

…………………………….

The Human Rights Campaign says in 2023, more than 550 - a record number - of anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced across 43 states, and more than 80 were passed into law.

Both Florida and Texas are among the top ten for introducing and passing hostile laws.

Hadfield, who grew up in New Mexico, knows several people who have left those states because they feel unwelcome and scared.

Editor’s note: One of the purposes of the davidgmarkham substack newsletter is to report on social policies and programs that get good outcomes. In our postmodern world of alternative facts there is a belief that one person’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s based on the thought that there is no truth and that good reporting has to be fair and balanced. This postmodern belief is untrue and has led to a crisis of legitimacy in our culture. Some policies and programs get good outcomes while others don’t. If we are to improve the quality of life in our society, we need to know the difference. The effort of davidgmarkham.substack.com is to contribute to the flourishing of the people in our society. Your support of this purpose of reporting on outcomes and results is much appreciated and helps make our world a better place

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We are all called to leave the world a better place than we find it. We can start right where we are, right now. The most important thing we can do is replace fear with love.

Mother Teresa said, “Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love.”

Can I get an “Amen?”

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What do we do when important ideas and concepts are being distorted in this way, when absurdity seems to take over, making serious discussion impossible? What do we do when we seem to be surrounded by warped doubles and imposters?

Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (p. 71). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

When faced with a double threatening to engulf you and your world (or an army of them), distance offers no protection. Far better to radically upend the table and become, in some sense, their impersonator, their shadow. That, at least, is how I rationalized listening to so much Steve Bannon.

Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (p. 72). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

Klein raises an interesting question of how to manage misinformation and disinformation. The answer is not straight forward. Other information is needed to answer the question such as whether the misinformation is intentional and known to be false or whether it is unintentional and genuinely believed.

There is an interesting article in the 04/22 - 4/29/24 issue of the New Yorker entitled “Don’t Believe What They Are Telling You About Misinformation” by Manvir Singh in which Singh cites the work of French Philosopher, Daniel Sperber, who makes a distinction between factual beliefs and symbolic beliefs. Believing that gravity is real and that people will fall if they jump from high places is different from believing in the resurrection of Jesus after He was crucified.

Symbolic beliefs are often shared and are the ticket of admission to belonging to groups who promulgate and subscribe to them. In fact, the stronger the belief, the more the group member is accepted as a “true believer” and attains higher status in the group and benefits more from the rewards of group membership. Even if the person starts to doubt, they are reluctant to share their doubts fearing punishment from the group members up to and including ostracism and death.

People who understand these group dynamics often counsel concerned out - group members about how to deprogram the beliefs of the ensconced person. There are many methods and tactics of which perhaps the most important is to offer the doubter a “permission structure” to which the person can shift their identity and attachment to enjoy a sense of safety in belonging to the new group.

When the believer in the misinformation no longer identifies with the group spreading the disinformation, it is more likely that the mistaken beliefs will be set aside so that more appropriate and constructive beliefs can take their place.

The definition of a delusion in psychology is “a fixed false belief.” Presentation of new information and rational argument does not minimize or eliminate delusional beliefs. A competent therapist knows this and does not argue with the person about delusional material. Rather, the person’s attention is redirected to topics and content more appropriate and constructive.

So, I am concerned about Klein’s idea that Steve Bannon’s approach of mirroring ideas and concepts in a distorted way is an effective way of countering them. The countering of the falseness of the ideas backfires and they only become more visible and reinforced and the holder of these beliefs becomes defensive, digs in their heels, and advocates for the misinformation more vociferously. The parties involved enter into a “pissing contest” which has great entertainment value for an audience emotionally aroused by the conflict with its reciprocating attacks, and those engaged become increasingly polarized and adamant.

When a young congressman asked Lyndon Baines Johnson one time what advice he had for him as a young politician, LBJ is reported to have said the most important thing he learned in politics is “Never tell a man to go to hell unless you can make him.”

One of the interesting findings about  changing people’s beliefs is that they are willing to do it when you offer them money for the correct belief. Here’s how Singh describes the research: 

On the other hand, there’s research implying that many false beliefs are little more than cheap talk. Put money on the table, and people suddenly see the light. In an influential paper published in 2015, a team led by the political scientist John Bullock found sizable differences in how Democrats and Republicans thought about politicized topics, like the number of casualties in the Iraq War. Paying respondents to be accurate, which included rewarding “don’t know” responses over wrong ones, cut the differences by eighty per cent. A series of experiments published in 2023 by van der Linden and three colleagues replicated the well-established finding that conservatives deem false headlines to be true more often than liberals—but found that the difference drops by half when people are compensated for accuracy.

So while LBJ had good advice about not telling a person to go to hell unless you can make them, it may be more likely for a person to change their beliefs if there is something in it for them. What can the believers in false information be offered as an incentive to be more accurate and truthful than membership in their reference group that supports their false belief system?

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Everybody wants to be happy. The question is, what will bring happiness?

The marketers have all kinds of answers to that question. We chase after more money, better relationships, more status and prestige, a better job, a nicer car, house, furniture, clothes, etc. And yet, happiness eludes us. Even if we initially feel happier with the latest acquisition, hedonic adaptation sets in and like addicts we feel we need more of the thing or something even better.

We finally realize that we don’t know what will make us happy and where to find it. This realization leads us to wonder what it is that we really value? What is really important to us. The activity called for is what is called “values clarification,” and the setting of priorities.

We might ask ourselves, “The three things that matter the most to me is _________,________, and _______.” Answering this question provides us with focus and a sense of priorities in how we spend our time, energy and resources as we go about living our lives. 

The question, “What are the three things that matter the most to me in my life are…” is an ongoing question because the answer may change as situations, relationships, and stages of life change.

Once we have clarified our values and priorities then the use of the PERMA framework can be helpful. PERMA is an acronym from positive psychology which denotes positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.

In spite of what our materialistic culture tells us, acquiring things will not make us happy in the long term. Happiness comes from a state of mind we cultivate and sustain as we engage in the activities of our life. In other words, happiness does not come from things, what we have, but from activities, what we do that is meaningful to us.

Having clarified what matters to us, and pursuing it in ways that are meaningful, we find ourselves feeling peace and gratitude and it is peace and gratitude that makes us happy.

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Prior authorization denies patients health care and becomes profit for health insurance companies. Here is a great 8 1/2 minute video that describes the system skewed in the favor of profits over human health and well being in the United States.

Bureaucrats wind up second guessing physicians and practicing medicine to the detriment of patients.

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A Good Person

Allison and Nathan were engaged to be married. Allison and Nathan’s sister and her husband are on a shopping trip to try on wedding dresses when Allison, texting while driving, crashes into a backhoe in a work zone and Nathan’s sister and brother in law are killed in the crash. Allison sustains a head injury and is prescribed the opioid pain killer, Oxycontin, to which she becomes addicted.

Nathan’s father, Daniel, played by Morgan Freeman, is a Vietnam vet and in recovery from alcoholism helps Allison get into recovery. The plot is thickened by Daniel raising his granddaughter orphaned by the crash in which her mother and father were killed.

Allison goes from a successful, happy young woman at the beginning of her adult life to a suicidal, extremely distressed woman whose life appears to be ruined. Is there any possibility of redemption entangled in such a web of painful and conflicted relationships? How does a person manage such a tragedy of being the party to the deaths of two people and then caught up in addiction to a substance meant to treat the pain? How do the other people involved in such a situation deal with their very conflicted thoughts and feelings about the person at the center of the situation which has caused such life shattering losses?

The question explored is this film is “given the enormity of loss and suffering subjected on this family is there any reason to hope for the creation of a satisfying and fulfilling lives thereafter?

This film is distressful to watch due to the subject matter and yet the performances are excellent and the story development very credible. The film may leave the viewer with the knowledge that there is reason to believe that things can become better in the end if we can endure the pain to get there with the support and good will of people we meet along the way.

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One of the challenges of older years is watching people die. James W. Harris  has written on his blog, "Would you rather be remembered or do the remembering?"

Husbands and wives probably have the most intimate discussion of these considerations.

Part of my spiritual practice is to do a daily reading and today's topic is on the spiritual dimensions of grief. There were a few quotes offered for consideration and the one that struck me as most interesting and applicable to my life is "Though painful and unwanted, grief has unexpected creative and transformative power. It is not just an emotional response to loss but a deep unsettling of the soul. In grief you realize that you can't go on as before, and some of the pain comes from losing familiar sources of meaning. You have to reinvent life, imagine it differently. At the same time grief ties you to the past. Because of grief your life remains whole, even when events seem to tear it apart. Grief won't let you forget what life has been like. ..."

Being remembered means we are gone and don't have to do any work any longer on understanding ourselves and life,  but having to do the remembering puts us in the position of having to make some sort of sense of the loss and the meaning for our current life. Making this meaning can have tremendous power in facilitating growth and pushing us to higher levels of awareness of the interdependent web of this thing we call life.

This process of interpretation and meaning making takes a tremendous amount of energy and leaves us innervated for mundane things. Observations when incongruous and absurd aren't funny any more but rather more annoying and not worth a laugh. We become more serious about prioritizing what really matters and attending to that. In the end, most people say that what matters the most to them is family and beloved friends and when they are lost to us, that just leaves us with Love in a rarefied form no longer attached to egos but unconditional from the Transcendent Source that sustains all things.

Doing the little things with great love is what sustains us as we move forward through our grief creating a new life without the physical presence of those we’ve lost. While the physical body is gone, the spirit of the person lives on in the stories we tell about our experience of them. The challenge is to incorporate these stories into the new life we are creating as we move into the future, unknown in its differences without the one we have become accustomed and attached to.

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Now that I am home again after 5 months in orthopedic rehab and having a brief hospitalization for gallbladder surgery, I am back to watching movies again. When asked about my hobbies, I have sometimes answered that I am a bit of a film buff.

Watching movies and reading good books serves me well in learning more about human nature, life, and the world we are living in. This understanding and appreciation not only serves me well personally, but helps me be more empathic, understanding and compassionate in my work as a Social Worker. I am reminded of this benefit of watching movies when two days ago I stumbled across “The Peanut Butter Falcon” on the Video Prime streaming service.

The Peanut Butter Falcon is a movie about Zak, a man with Down Syndrome living in a nursing home, who escapes and meets up with a small-time thief on the lame, Tyler. An unlikely pair, they become buddies and Tyler helps Zak realize his dream of becoming a Professional Wrestler by training at the wrestling school run by the Salt Water Redneck. 

This movie is funny as well as poignant as the friendship develops and the adventure proceeds. 

Can people with developmental disabilities have high quality lives? Absolutely yes as demonstrated by the activities depicted in the movie. Is our society better because of the inclusion of people who are neurodiverse? Yes, again. The proof? Watch the movie and decide.

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Cha Cha Real Smooth

Andrew is 22 and has graduated from college and is back living at home in New Jersey with his mother, his step father, and his younger brother, David. Andrew is working at a fast food restaurant during the day and starts his own business as a party host at Bar Mitzvahs while he continues to look for his real life’s work..

This is an Indie film focused on character development and subtle emotional conflicts created by the different kinds of love between the characters. There is the love between the mother and her son, between her son and his brother, between a student and a teacher, between romantic partners, between a depressed divorced woman and a second husband to be.

Andrew tells Domino, an older woman he has fallen in love with who is engaged to be married to Joe, that people can love several kindred spirits in their life. The problem is you can’t form a long term committed relationship with them all. To form a long term committed relationship involves other factors than just romantic love. The attachment and loss of relationships as part of the ebb and flow of life is depicted with grace in such a way as to bestow a blessing on the viewer.

Watching this movie for full benefit  takes openness and patience to appreciate its meanings. There are things that are funny and things that are sad but the takeaway understanding of love in human relationships is genuine and wise. The viewer will be a better person after watching this film.

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Erik Erikson’s classic religious study, Young Man Luther, argues that a new religious leader can arise by working out an identity crisis in the culture. Of course, Trump is no Luther, and he is certainly not working through any religious crisis of his own. But his cult ends the embarrassment of following Jesus, of taking as a model someone whose mission ended in failure, and whom Trump would call a loser. Instead of following Jesus the loser, Trump’s followers seek someone who can win “bigly,” and claim to have won even when he’s lost. It’s in Trump’s interest that his supporters leave the churches. Doing so strips them of even the small social capital that comes from attending church. He wants them isolated, with no connection to each other, and with no trust in anyone but him.

“Leviathan,” Thomas Geoghegan, Commonweal, April, 2024, p.17

Donald Trump’s relationship with his base is similar to the relationship of a domestic abuser to their victim who they attempt to control to do their will by isolating them and cutting them off from any outside sources of support. Trump has isolated Christians from their churches where they no longer turn to for support.

At the same time, Bellah and his colleagues argued that Americans were becoming more isolated from each other, especially as they left their churches. In the decades since the publication of Habits of the Heart, that isolation, especially in Trump country, has gone much further. This isn’t just because people are losing trust in our institutions, but because, even in Trump country, people have lost their trust in each other. The House GOP majority is a case in point: it does not trust itself. Members of the House Freedom Caucus don’t even trust each other. Like Trump himself, they all see political treason everywhere.

When people no longer value the common good beyond their own individual self interest, the society becomes unglued. Not being able to join with others in solidarity, they look for outside forces to protect them. This is a regression to mythical and superstitious thinking of a 3 -10 year old who believes in “Power rangers” and mythical avatars to protect them from whatever they fear.

If we Americans became so isolated from each other that we were incapable of running free institutions, we might easily turn to a dictator.

The authoritarian dictator, the all powerful one, is believed to be necessary to protect and save them. They have lost faith in their own capabilities and those of their neighbors to work together to provide security.

How ironic that a republic conceived in a distrust of concentrated power by Federalist and anti-Federalist alike would now have so many hoping for a strongman to protect them from their neighbors. If there is hysteria over migrants, who seem so far off, it is because they are stand-ins for people living next door, or down the street, or in those blue states far away. Unable to act, the MAGA base has decided there is no alternative but to vest absolute power in Trump. And if people are really incapable of operating free institutions, what’s the point of keeping them?

The mindset that leads to the support of a character like Trump is one that is based on fear of the other, and fear of the institutions that can be built together. This mindset is based on a belief in individualism taken too far, way too far, resulting in vulnerable isolation needing the protection of an outside arbiter who will take their side to protect them from the other since the other is not to be trusted. This is the pinnacle of a zero sum game where there will be no winner, because even in winning, the winner loses.

Tocqueville wrote, “It must never be forgotten that religion gave birth to Anglo American society. In the United States religion is therefore commingled with all the habits of the nation and all the feelings of patriotism; whence it derives a peculiar force.” Well, we have forgotten. The Left has forgotten; the Right has, too. Now that Trump himself has become a kind of religious leader, he is liquidating the authority of Evangelical ministers. There is no longer any need for them, as they merely offer more secular political ideology, and as Trumpism itself has become more like a real religion. The secular Left may take satisfaction in Trump wiping out the churches, but they shouldn’t: Trump grows stronger by atomizing everything around him and leaving his supporters with no alternative to him. This makes him a bigger threat.

Without realizing it, religion has been a glue which has bound Americans together. Religion, while itself an institution, has given birth to many other institutions like healthcare, education, social welfare, recreation, and entertainment. As secularization has arisen and participation in religious organizations decreased, the bonds that religion has provided for American institutions have weakened and people are left isolated, unsupported, lonely, and feeling more vulnerable. As a result, people feeling vulnerable have turned to the religion of Trumpism not having many other options for protection in their isolated state of vulnerability. (Interestingly this same kind of attachment to reference groups such as sports teams and celebrities manifests the same fervor and security provided by the identification. Do more people attend and watch NFL football games on Sunday than go to church?)

“...whether it was the United States in the New Deal or totalitarian regimes abroad—was trying not just to govern but to change the moral character of its citizens.”

What we have seen currently with the polarization of America  is not simply a political phenomenon but a moral one. The strain between individualism and the common good has been stretched tautly where the right trusts no one and sees anyone not aligned with their values as enemies to the left where inclusivity at all extremes is seen as the panacea for human happiness. What is the proper moral position is what is being worked out now as these two social values: individualism vs. common good struggle.

What moral position will the American people vote for when they elect their policy making representatives in our republic? The two positions for individualism and the common good must be reconciled if homo sapiens is to survive in its evolutionary journey.

There is tremendous power in recognizing, acknowledging, and acting on, not only respect for,  but a love for the interdependent web of all existence of which we all are a part. It is in expanding our thought system to the ecological awareness of life that we come to understand that the viable moral stance is one for all and all for one.

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My doppelganger trouble was definitive proof that I had flunked at one of the most valued activities of contemporary capitalism: developing, maintaining, and defending my personal brand.

Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (p. 47). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

Klein’s discussion about personal branding bothers me in that a person is trying to perform for an audience in a way that captures their attention and maintains it based on providing something that the audience perceives as having value for them. This something is held up as something desirable and worthy to attach oneself to. It is in a capitalist society where likes and the number of followers matters because the viewer’s attention that has been acquired and can be sold to advertisers because that attention has value no matter how good, true, or beautiful that something is. The criteria of success is acquiring and maintaining the greatest number of fans possible to obtain advertising revenue.

It seems that one’s soul is for sale and what one presents as part of their brand does not need to be authentic, genuine, sincere, honest, but rather to the liking of the person being performed for. This turns branding into a con game and can easily slide into fraud.

Turning ourselves into something we’re not is a path to distress and mental illness which may be why so many celebrities have substance abuse and other emotional and interpersonal problems. Turning ourselves into something we’re not is a form of disingenuousness that is based on lying and deceit in order to manipulate.

A doppelganger by definition is an imposter, a fake, something other than the real thing, which we might realize if we know what the real thing even is.

Naomi Klein is lamenting the fact that Naomi Wolf is stealing her show leading to a loss of attention by an audience which has been lucrative for her in terms of book sales, talks, endorsements, etc.

Social media have turned persons into brands that are created by performing for their audiences in the hopes of garnering likes, followers, and subscribers. The folks who engage in this kind of behavior are now called “influencers.” I have heard young people say that this is the job that they aspire to, to be an influencer. Is this any kind of job for a grown person to be doing?

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There is a certain inherent humiliation in getting repeatedly confused with someone else, confirming, as it does, one’s own interchangeability and/or forgettableness. That’s the trouble with doppelgangers: anything you might do to dispel the confusion just draws attention to it, and runs the risk of further cementing the unwanted association in people’s minds. 

In this way, confrontations with our doppelgangers inevitably raise existentially destabilizing questions. Am I who I think I am, or am I who others perceive me to be?

Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (p. 27). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

Getting confused with someone else is similar to being falsely accused of thinking things, feeling things, doing things which one has not thought, felt, or done.

People often blame other people and attribute motives to them that are not accurate. This false attribution can arise from many things, but perhaps the most common is that a person, wanting to be a victim, looks for a perpetrator to blame their unhappiness on. 

“My happiness is all your fault because of something you did or didn’t do.”

These false accusations can make a thoughtful person doubt their own sense of identity. Am I the person who did these things which the person is accusing me of? We may look to others for corroboration, asking bystanders and onlookers whether the accusations could possibly be true. The person experiences a split between the person that they think themselves to be and the person the other person sees them as.

Other people are our mirrors, our looking glass, because their feedback and perception of us help us form our own self understandings and identity. Is the feedback we get from others validating of our sense of self or mystifying?

When a person experiences themselves as other than what other people perceive them as being it often creates distress and anxiety. When false perceptions and accusations occur how can the person targeted best manage them?

Klein writes that to engage with the false perceiver to clarify often makes the false perception more real because the false perceiver now has to justify, protect, and explain their false perception and judgment making it even more manifest. The situation can quickly become polarized and adversarial. Perhaps it is better to leave things alone and rise above it. In A Course In Miracles, this rising above it, and not responding is called “forgiveness.” Forgiveness is giving up making other people and circumstances responsible for your unhappiness. Jesus says as he is being crucified, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

What have you done when you have been falsely accused and what thoughts were behind the path you chose?

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When you catch yourself acting like your mother, especially doing the very things that she did that you didn't like, it's kind of unnerving, isn't it? 

When people have this kind of experience they can laugh, blow it off, deny or minimize it, and do an honest appraisal and decide how they would like to do things differently.

Murray Bowen, the father of family systems theory, called a person's ability to do this "Differentiation of Self" meaning that the person becomes consciously aware of how they can choose to have different thoughts, feelings, preferences, and practices than the people and group with which they identify. At this point the person comes into their own, stands on their own two feet, and takes responsibility for their own functioning rather than just being blindly influenced by the beliefs, values, and practices of others. Sometimes we refer to the person's degree of DOS as "maturity." In spiritual models, the part of the person that is able to nonjudgmentally observe one's own functioning is called "the witness."

The witness is more highly developed in some people than in others. The ability to which a person can nonjudgmentally observe their own functioning is directly related to the person's level of mental health.

AA is one of the most accessible and successful programs for spiritual development in the world. The greatest benefit from the program for people who work the program are the 4th and 10th steps.

The advice of the Oracle at Delphi which has stood homo sapiens well for millennia is 'Know thyself."

The first skill of 21 in Cindy Wigglesworth’s model of Spiritual Intelligence is the ability to describe and monitor one’s own world view. Wigglesworth suggests that we rate as low, medium, or high the extent to which we can explain to others the impacts of one’s upbringing, one’s culture, and one’s thought system on their personal identity and the way they see the world.

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I have been a fan of Naomi Klein since I read The Shock Doctrine and then No Is Not Enough, and On Fire. So I was interested in Naomi’s new book, Doppelganger.

From the introduction I am getting the sense that by Doppelganger what Klein is referring to is our shadow side. We all have one and so do societies. The shadow side is usually unconscious or barely conscious although it manifests from time to time in ways that fill us with shame and guilt. If you ask yourself, "What am I ashamed of about myself and society?" you will come into awareness of your shadow. Ken Wilber teaches that if we are to enhance our functioning, we have to become aware of our shadow parts and clean them up.

Naomi Klein who is a liberal has met her shadow side in the person of Naomi Wolf who is a conservative. Examining Wolff's beliefs and values has helped Klein become more aware of her shadow. Klein writes:

Yet what drove me to write this book, sticking with it against all good judgment, is that the more I looked at her—her disastrous choices and the cruel ways she was often treated by others—the more I came to feel as if I were seeing not only undesirable parts of myself but a magnification of many undesirable aspects of our shared culture as well. The ambient and all-pervasive hunger for ever-more-fleeting relevance; the disposability with which we treat people who mess up; the trivialization of words and displacements of responsibility, and much else. In the end, looking at her helped me see myself more clearly, but it also, oddly, helped me better see the dangerous systems and dynamics we are all trapped inside.

Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (pp. 10-11). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

Human beings project their beliefs onto others. As Jesus said in Matthew 7:3 And why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank that is in your own eye?

In our current times, the pundits complain about the high levels of polarization in our country. We have regressed as a society to identity groups and you are either with us or you're against us. The MAGA thought system fuels this kind of ethnocentric thinking. There is me and the other. There is no us.

Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf are the yin and yang, the opposites, but together they make a whole. Naomi Klein calls Naomi Wolf her doppelganger and comes to realize that Wolf exemplifies her shadow side, and Klein, to her credit, wants to understand the characteristics of this shadow better so she can resolve the conflicts and contradictions.

We all have a shadow side which we project on others whom we dislike and attack in numerous ways. This month we will explore Klein’s exploration of her shadow side as a way of learning more about the shadow and how we, too, might learn about the shadow and how we might manage it to enhance our level of functioning.

During April, 2024, Naomi Klein’s book, Doppelganger, is being discussed by the Allnonfiction book discussion group. People are welcome to join.

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One of the benefits of being a member of the on line non fiction book discussion group, Allnonfiction, is that books get chosen for the month’s discussion that I would have never read otherwise. The book chosen for March, 2024, was Nature’s Temples by Joan Maloof.

Joan Maloof Ph.D. is a professor emerita of biological sciences at Salisbury University and the founder of the Old-Growth Forest Network. Maloof has written a book detailing the components of the ecological systems of what is called an Old-Growth forests which are quickly disappearing on planet Earth. Maloof makes the case that the biological diversity of living things in Old-Growth forests are much richer and vibrant than in managed forests from which many products such as timber has been extracted.

Maloof sheds light on the complex ecosystems of old-growth forests, explaining how they differ from younger forests and why they are irreplaceable. She describes the unique species that thrive in these ancient environments and the delicate balance that sustains them.

The book makes a compelling case for protecting old-growth forests. By highlighting the ecological benefits they provide, Maloof encourages readers to think about the consequences of deforestation.

Maloof weaves together scientific research from various fields to explain how old-growth forests function. This approach makes the book informative and engaging, even for those without a scientific background.

Maloof's writing style is evocative, allowing readers to connect with the beauty and wonder of old-growth forests. The book may even inspire you to visit one yourself. Visiting the forest is like entering a temple of Mother Nature and can fill one with wonder and awe realizing what Unitarian Universalists call the “interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”

As we become more aware of the impact that human activity has on Gaia, mother Earth, we have a need to be more respectful and better stewards of the earth we have been born onto. Nature’s Temple should be required reading for all high school students and their parents and grandparents to raise their consciousnesses about the systems of life they inhabit.

There are several things we can do to enhance the quality of our lives:

1. Raise our level of consciousness of the interdependent web of life of which we are a part.

2. Become more intentional in the ways we interact with the other components of the ecological system we are a part of in nurturing rather than exploitive ways.

3. Give thanks for the abundance of life we enjoy by nurturing and not exploiting it.

4. Join together with others to validate and uplift our appreciation of Mother Nature’s gifts through group and organizational activities.

5. What other activities would you add to the list?

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In the Spiral Dynamics model of societal evolution there is a stage called “ethnocentrism.” Most individuals pass through this stage in their individual growth and development as well as in their participation in the ethnocentric stage of their society.

Ethnocentrism is the identification with one’s tribe, one’s group, and it is born out of an “us vs them” comparison. Ethnocentrism can contribute to dominator hierarchies, the so-called “pecking order,” where societies are composed of classes and groups with some classes dominating and oppressing other classes to control resources and coerce inferior groups to obey the will of the superior groups.

Ethnocentric conflicts are very common in human societies which in their extreme are manifested in slavery, war, and genocide. Like all the stages of individual and societal development, each stage has its benefits and its liabilities. Ethnocentrism characterized by its group identification, bonding and mutual support contributed to the survival and flourishing of the individuals within the group. However, when the identity group comes into contact with another group perceived as a competitor for resources, conflicts manifest leading to domination or elimination and great harm and destruction ensue.

The movie Belfast, released in 2021, nominated for seven academy awards and the winner of one for best original screenplay, is a story about The Troubles in Northern Ireland in August of 1969 through the eyes of a 9 year old boy, Buddy,  and his family. How will they manage the threats to their will being as this conflict invades their neighborhood and country?

The mother wants to stay in Belfast with family and friends while the father wants his family to move to England where he is working for their safety.

The conflict, simplified, in Belfast, is between the Catholics and the Protestants. The Protestants in Northern Ireland identify with the English while the Catholics identify with the Republic of Ireland in the South. The 9 year old boy, Buddy, doesn’t quite know what to make of this conflict which is threatening the welfare of his family and neighborhood. In addition to the forces impacting his family Buddy, a Catholic, is smitten with a fellow student who is Protestant.

The father is at the world centric level of consciousness and refuses, even when threatened by gang members, to get involved in the ethnocentric gangs which are engaging in violence to advocate their political advantages.

In spite of the conflicts and violence, this film, in many ways, is heartwarming.  In the end, the family does move to England to escape the conflicted but beloved city and community in which they have lived for several generations. One moral of the story may be that there comes a time when we have to rise above our ethnocentric values, beliefs, and attachments and move on to a bigger, and hopefully better world.

Belfast gets an 8 out of 10.

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One phrase that names the experience you describe in your post "Thoughts on cancer" is anticipatory grieving. As human beings we, or at least some of us some of the time, are self conscious, and based on past experiences we know what lies ahead. Is this ability to anticipate future events a blessing or a curse or more likely a little of both?

Anticipating losses in the future based on our experiences of losses in the past, initiates an emotional process that most people aren't aware of or even if they are somewhat aware, they can't name it.

Colloquially, we sometimes in a dismissive way, say things like "Been there. Done that." And here we go again.

There are many other aspects of anticipatory grief that we can make note of like "disenfranchised grief" or what is sometimes also called "unattended sorrow." Anticipatory grief, not being recognized and acknowledged, is sequestered down in the psyche to be acted out in all kinds of ways, one of the most notable of which is somatization. It makes people physically sick.

What, then, is to be done with anticipatory grief? We need shoulders to cry on. We need people we can express it to who will understand and support us with their non anxious presence. I am blessed by the sharing of anticipatory grief. I think to myself, "You too?" It must be going around. I am reminded of the Beatles great song lyric, "I'll get by with a little help from my friends."

We are all in this thing we call "life" together and when we recognize and acknowledge the spark of the Divine in the other we join together in something that is holy.

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Based on my recent hospitalization and orthopedic rehab for quadriceps tendon repairs in both legs, an expertise has been developed on my part with pain scales.

Following my surgery on 8/29/24  opioids were prescribed for the pain and the nurses were constantly asking me to rate my pain. I guess I tolerate pain fairly well so at first my answer to the  1 to 10 scaling question was  "Oh, I don't know, maybe a 5 or 6." 

I had no idea how to rate the pain, never having had to do this before as a way of determining the need for pain meds. They were giving me hydrocodone and once Dilaudid. I overheard one nurse tell the other nurse in the hall outside my room, "We don't give opioids unless the pain is 8 or above. When she came back the next time, my reply to the question about the intensity of my pain was "8! It's definitely an 8".

After a couple of months, bedridden in rehab, I wondered why they didn't ask me other scaling questions pertaining to my well being besides my pain level. So I came up with three other scales that I thought were just as relevant.

Energy level - "On a scale of 1 -10 what is your energy level today? Many days it was 2 to 3.

Clarity of thinking - "On a scale of 1-10 how clearly are you thinking and organizing your thoughts?" Many days it was 2 to 3 and a couple of days when my gallbladder perforated and my abdominal infection sent my white blood count into the septic range I was 1 but would have had a hard time answering if even comprehending the question. Another way of putting this same idea is "On a scale of 1-10 to what extent are you back to your old self?" I am still not at 100% but getting there. Currently I would say I am at an 8 but clearly have a way to go.

Optimism/pessimism -  "On a scale of 1 - 10 to what extent are you optimistic as compared to pessimistic?" There was days I was a 1 and wanted to kill myself. Had MAID been available in New York State I might have chosen it, but I am much more optimistic now, maybe about a 7.5.

So, I wonder why health care staff, in addition to the pain scaling question, don't ask the other three questions which seem to me just as important. The answer probably is that there is no pill that can be given to immediately ameliorate a low score on the scale so why bother to ask.

I don't like pain any more than anyone else, but I think I can tolerate pain better if my ratings on the other three scales are at least above 5 or 6.

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Tom Nichol’s wrote a book entitled, The Death of Expertise, in which he describes the waning respect that Americans have for experts and the institutions they work in and represent.

Ken Wilber has a different take on the subject. Wilber writes in his book, Trump and the Post-Truth World, that we are living in the age of postmodernism whose main idea is that there is no truth. Truth is merely a social construction and one person's truth is as good as anybody else's. Postmodernism has brought us the world of "alternative facts" and what Wilber calls nihilistic narcissism and aperspectival madness.

If we believe that there is no truth, then how can there be experts based on knowledge which is true?

How can we know what is true personally and collectively? The scientific method is one such approach to measurable phenomena, but when it comes to aesthetic judgments and value judgements what are we to do? 

The moral compasses of old are badly broken when a man who brags about grabbing pussy when you're a celebrity is okay because "they let you do it," and "I could shoot someone on fifth avenue and they still would vote for me." And they did and made him their president. Moral accountability has been dispensed with because God is dead, or perhaps better stated, the belief in God (the good, the true, the beautiful) is dead. 

With God dead, that leaves us with the law, legislated in a democracy supposedly by consent of the governed, but then Citizens United led to the decision by the Supreme Court which, deciding the supreme law of the land, opined that corporations are the same as people and money is free speech. Legislators can now be bought by those with the funds to buy them to make the laws the corporate interests prefer and the welfare of the people be damned. And so in this moral environment, money is power wielded to enable the incentives of those who pay for it.  Accountability and justice can be thwarted by legal maneuvers and justice delayed is justice denied as we are now observing in the machinations of Donald Trump and his minions.

Truth is to be found eventually in results, consequences, and outcomes. The ability to see the truth requires the ability to observe systems, patterns, and longer term outcomes, to connect the dots, which is a competence few humans have achieved. The truth, it is said, will set us free, but most of us are so immersed in our own narcissistic thought system that we cannot find a place to stand to observe things in perspective. It is not expertise that allows a person to see the truth but objectivity and perspective giving one understanding of system dynamics and functioning.

Like the person who turns from Plato's cave wall and looks outside into the light, those of us who have seen the truth find it difficult, if not impossible, to communicate it to those who still are enthralled with the dancing shadows. Wilber states that only 5% of the population is at this level of consciousness. The rest are at a lower level of consciousness and like children at concrete levels of cognitive development still function with beliefs about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. 

How do Tom Nichols experts explain to a four year old that there is no Santa but actually it is the parent or other caring adult who brings the presents? The challenge in our modern society is to facilitate the further growth in consciousness and awareness in the bulk of the population. This facilitation is the work of the media and art. The media is failing and art has devolved to entertainment for “likes” rather than goodness, truth, and beauty. What is badly needed is for the 5% to continue to encourage, communicate, and create incentives for growth to increase its population share.

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It Could Happen To You, debuted in 1993, starring Nicholas Cage and Bridget Fonda is a story about a police officer who, having no money for a tip, tells the waitress he will split the winnings if he wins the lottery. She, of course, laughs him off and then he wins 4 million and splits it with her much to the chagrin of his wife.

This story is very uplifting and restores one’s faith in the goodness of people. Charlie, the police officer, is true to his promise and is intent on doing the right thing even though his wife and other people, including Yvonne, the waitress can’t believe he would actually follow through on his promise. Do people really do the right thing especially when there is money involved? Charlie is adamant several times that money doesn’t mean that much to him and that other things like honesty, loyalty, integrity are much more valuable.

Yvonne, the waitress, is, at first, reluctant to take the money but when Charlie insists that fair is fair, and a promise is a promise, she graciously, and gratefully accepts and a friendship ensues as Charlie and Yvonne come to know and respect each other better.

Can commitments to promises have negative consequences for the person who made the promise and others affected by it? And how should these negative consequences be managed and handled? The conflict engendered between Charlie and his wife, Muriel, leads the two of them to go in two separate directions with Muriel pursuing the pleasures of consumerism and buying things with her winnings while Charlie, not interested in material things, gets involved in community activities with the youth in his neighborhood.

So is winning the lottery a blessing or a curse? How does it change the winner and those close to them? If you promised someone, in passing, that you would split your lottery winnings with them if you win and you won, would you? What impact would your decision have on your life.

I give this film and 8 out of 10. It is worth watching and discussing.

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Anxiety is often an indication that our intuitive sense is out of sync with our conscious mind. Our heart is telling us one thing while our head is telling us something else. Anxiety, in this context, is our very best friend. It is our soul or spirit trying to get us to consider the path we are on and perhaps to change course.

Nowadays anxiety is seen as pathological and we are encouraged to medicate it away either with prescription drugs or street drugs: legal and illegal. Medication, though, blurs our perceptiveness of our inner compass and can do our souls a disservice. The mature soul knows that anxiety for the spirit is like pain for the body, it is a warning that something is wrong and encourages us to check.

If we take our aches and pains to a doctor for a check, to whom do we take our anxious spirit? Who, in our society, is the doctor of the soul? It might be a professional such as a counselor or psychotherapist of some sort. It might be a member of the clergy. It might be a trusted friend or relative. Usually we seek relief in reverse order to the one above first seeking help from friends and/or family, then from a member of the clergy, and then from a mental health professional.

Anxiety, while painful, is good for us. Rather than avoid it, and medicate it, and distract ourselves from it, we are usually better off to acknowledge it, accept it, reflect on it, and learn from it.

Anxiety is an ambiguous form of fear. We feel afraid but we have nothing to tie our fears to – we can’t identify an object triggering our fear. So it may help next time you are feeling anxious to ask yourself, “What am I afraid of?” Being able to identify the object of our anxiety is the first step in rectifying our discomfort and distress. And then find someone to talk to about it. Grace occurs in our support and understanding of one another in such a way that what is bothering us becomes clearer as we are able to find words to name the trigger. Once we can name it, we can manage it. Without naming it, we are lost in our confusion, frustration, and fear.

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