Grumpy Gringo Blog

This American Life recently launched a new podcast called Invisibilia. The show’s focus is on exploring “the intangible forces that shape human behavior – things like ideas, beliefs, assumptions and emotions.” Episode 1 introduces Daniel Kish, known as Batman, blinded at 13 months by a tumor, who “taught himself to see” using tongue clicks as a type of radar. But the episode really deals with the delicate balance between managing risk and danger, and Kish not only is willing bu insists on going beyond what many consider “safe.” Today in a special way it makes me think of my mother. She was not a stranger to risk nor did she overvalue safety. 

The podcast moves from the initial amazement of the sighted at seeing someone blind negate stereotypes by riding a bike, climbing a tree, or going for a walk in the woods, which I think Kish barely tolerates, to a serious conversation about risk. Kish, like Mom and Gramps, sees risk avoidance as a major problem. In fact, he sees sighted people often unconsciously oppress and limit the blind with their concern that for safety. Ahh, Mom so agreed with him on this. During the interview, reference is made to one of his colleagues, who worked in a paint factory prior to losing his sight. The blinded worker, and many of his co-workers, believed him capable of returning to that job. He want to an agency for the blind, and here’s what he was told

Oh, no. You can’t do that. Blind people can’t do those things. What we’re going to do is put you through a program of rehabilitation and then move you along to our sheltered workshop that manufactures mops and brooms.

Ahh, this rings true. There are stories of my Grandfather at the Association for the Blind only being allowed to cane chairs. Same gig. A “superior” sighted person informing the poor, misguided blinkie that it wouldn’t be safe for them to do anything outside of a sheltered workshop. 

Which brings me to the point of this walk down memory lane. Something I learned from my mother and I hope to pass on to future generations: 

Safe is not all it’s cut out to be. 

Kish talks about the importance of risk and taking chances in educating the blind. He tells the story of a godmother unwilling to let her blind godson get too close to the road as she feared he might possibly be hit by a car. Kish noted: 

Often sighted people will jump in a half a second too soon, and they rob the blind student from that learning moment. And that just keeps happening over and over again, and I think so many blind people’s lives, they never get that moment of what it is to really have that self-confidence to trust your senses to know, oh, if I do use my cane properly and I am listening attentively to information around me, I’ll be OK.

Frankly, my mother argued that this is true for her sighted children as well as for herself and her father. 26 years after Mom left us, I’m more convinced than ever that she’s right. All of us, sighted or not, can loose that “learning moment” if risk is avoided, if safety is the only concern, if there isn’t a focus on more than our comfort zone. Safe is not all it’s cut out to be. It can leave you blind and very alone. 

Mom was no fool, nor did she tolerate fools well. Managing risk is not foolhardiness or stupidity. It’s living. And until that cold March night 26 years ago tonight, how my mother did live. 

119 years ago today my grandmother, Betty Fedigan Miller, was born. Too little is known about her life, though I have many memories of her affection, love and car. She died on November 9, 1966. 

Her parents, my great grandparents, were married under “unusual” circumstances. The local paper notes that my great grandfather was arrested for “seduction under promise of marriage.” He was released, married my great grandmother, and they had nine children, one who died before living a full year. 

It appears my grandmother’s mother lived a very difficult life. Whatever the circumstances of the “seduction”, she eventually was badly burned in a fire and ended up in the Willard Asylum where she died at the young age of 36. Married at 18, she gave birth to 9 children 

My grandmother’s father and his mother (that’s my great grandfather and great great grandmother) lived at 301 Meigs St. in 1910 according to the US Census. Shortly thereafter the children were committed to an orphanage. Family oral history has it that Betty worked hard to get all of her siblings out of the orphanage. 

The 1920 census records tells us a little about her siblings situation at the time… 

• James L Fedigan lived in Auburn with his wife Irene
• John Peter and his wife Emma lived with their daughter Louise in Henrietta. 
• William Joseph Fedigan was 25 but does not appear in the Census. 
• Martha was married to Robert Cooper and lived on South Goodman
• Bud does not appear in the Census
• Lillian is at the Convent on Raines Park
• Betty does not appear in the Census
• Lucy does not appear in the Census

One possible scenario is as follows: James, John, Peter and Martha were on their own and married, Lillian was at the convert at Nazareth, and William, Bud, Betty and Lucy were still at the orphanage. I am not sure of this; perhaps someone reading the post can help me out. Shortly after the Census Betty and the rest were released from the orphanage and moved to Henrietta. 

My grandmother met, though I do not have any details as to how, when, or where, Lewis Miller. Lewis was 8 years older than Betty. Betty felt very at home with Lewis’ family, and especially with Lewis’ Mom, Caroline. There are pictures of the Betty and Lewis from this time frame with pencilled captions on them. These captions are a surprise to me: it is not my grandmother’s handwriting. It is Gramps. I will eventually post them all but they show a couple that were very happy, had a gang of friends and family, and the world in front of them. 

They married when Betty was 18 and Lewis was 26, on 30 June 1924. 18 months later, 3 days short of her 21st birthday, Lewis lost his vision in a construction explosion in Irondequoit. 

Funny, as often as I’ve thought of this event, I had not done the math for my Grandmother. 3 days before her 21st birthday. Ouch. And so her life, their life, took that unexpected turn. And somehow the two of them kept facing life’s challenges. But my grandmother never really got a break. In 1950 her only daughter began struggling with vision issues of her own. I believe that the final “bad news” that Betty Anne’s vision loss was significant and permanent arrived on January 11, 1952, 25 years to the day that Lewis / Gramps lost his vision. 

SO Betty had a difficult life to say the least. Her mother died when she was very young, a not pleasant death in an insane asylum after a terrible fire that left her severley burned. Her father appears to both have had a major drinking problem and to have left his 8 surviving children in an orphanage. When she gets free of that with her siblings and finds the love of her life, he loses his vision. 25 years later her daughter also loses her vision. And then, approaching 60, she is diagnosed with ovarian cancer, probably really breast cancer, and dies at 60. 

Yet I remember my grandmother as a very loving and devoted lady. She had phenomenal penmanship, which in itself is special as she was left handed and the nuns forced her to write with her right hand. She had many and good friends and worked very, very hard to care for her family and friends. 

She went too soon. All of us might learn much from her today. Happy Birthday!

It is commonplace to criticize those under 30 for their excessive use of texting and other social network tools. “These kids can’t communicate face-to-face anymore… They are so rude, they ignore friends and family siting right next to them to be on those damn phones.” Concern about social networking, technology, and the young has, ironcally, gone viral. Perhaps those ready to endlessly complain about the young might heed the advice found in Matthew’s Gospel: 

You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Mt. 7:5)

Strong words from Matthew. Do they fit this situation? Is there a plank in the eyes of those over 30 that prevents us from seeing clearly enough to remove the speck from the eyes of the young? 

I think there is. And it has a name. Jacob Burak wrote about “the plank” recently in Aeon (click here) and called it FoMO – the Fear of Missing Out. 

(FoMO) is the feeling that we’re missing out on something more exciting, more important, or more interesting going on somewhere else. It is the unease of feeling that others are having a more rewarding experience and we are not a part of it

We (us pre-texters) are all too familiar with this FoMO experience. As Burak points out, human nature itself is hard-wired with this dread. It is cross generational, and while social networking technology amplifies the problem, it is not the root cause. Blaming the technology misses the point: in the words of Pogo, “we have met the enemy, and he is us.”

FoMO has at its base unfulfilled psychological needs for love, respect, autonomy and security. Our young are using texting and social networks because, as Burak writes, of the anxiety that they are missing out on something more exciting, more important, or more interesting going on somewhere else. It is the anxst that others are having a more rewarding experience and they are not a part of it.

Here age does play a factor: many of us over 30 (and most of us over 50!) simply are not comfortable with all of those buttons and therefore have not tasted the anxiety of missing out on that one text, that one thread, that one new link that is the door to Nirvana. But we understand FoMO. We worry that we will miss out on a professional advancement, profitable deals, or accumulation of wealth. FoMO is painful, whether felt by young or old.

Perhaps the young are more adept at trying to medicate FoMO using social networking and other new technologies. Like most medicines, social networking has side effects. The auto accident caused by the youth texting while driving is the best known of these side effects. Another side effect, ironically, of “social” networking is an “unsocial” disconnection with other human beings in physical proximity!

Burak’s article points to the work of Herbert Stein for a solution. It’s termed “satisfice” – a “portmanteau of ‘satisfy’ and ‘suffice’ – to suggest that instead of trying to maximise our benefits, we seek a merely ‘good enough’ result.”

It is our generation, not just the young, who are obsessed with missing out: of the perfect love, the perfect job, the perfect house, the perfect deal, the perfect life. Ironically this actually all but guarantees that we are missing out. And I fear we have passed this FoMO on to our young. Social networking is the latest way to try and scratch that itch.

The young are already sensing this, I think, with their interest in and drive towards minimalist. Rather than this anxiety on missing out, we need to get comfortable with “good enough.” Burak sites Emerson for wisdom on why “good enough” is the real solution to FoMO.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

Let’s take that beam out of our eye, share with our young the paradox of losing to gain, of satisfice. Perhaps social networking, when no longer used to medicate FoMO, will improve culture rather than threaten it. Maybe even to let the young satisfice their needs rather than live in FoMO. 

Borzou Daragahi in the Financial Times Thursday (June 12th edition) sees Iraq rapidly fragmenting into three distinct “ethnic and sectarian cantons” – Kurdish, Sunni and Shiia. Simon Henderson’s article in Foreign Policy (also published on June 12th, hopefully you can read by clicking here) describes the battle for Iraq as a Saudi war on Iran. Both of these establishment publications point to the West’s growing and grudging acknowledgement that the Middle East nation state structure is broken, fragmented. But perhaps the local populace does not have this same sense of national fragmentation. Perhaps for them the divisions remain sectarian rather than national. And the challenge remains finding, or more correctly, rediscovering, a political structure that functions with sectarian plurality. 

This whole concept of fragmentation hints at a confirmation bias in terms of whether these nations can or should continue to function. Jonathan Spyer in The Tower asks the right question: “Do Syria, Iraq and Lebanon still exist?” Click here to read his analysis. Spyer article points to an often forgotten reality: the “nation state” structure of the Middle East was imposed on the region by the West to manage the development of oil resources after World War I. The current crisis in Iraq is part of that ongoing, century long, projection of Western power into the region. 

Perhaps the sound and fury currently seen in the mainstream media starts from a false premise: that the regional populace bought into the Nation State structure imposed by the West. The reality is the populace in the region still identifies with traditional sectarian divisions (Sunni, Shiia, or Kurd) which are then projected into the geopolitical realm (Kingdom of Saudia Arabia, Islamic Republic of Iran, etc.).

Here is another way to view this: In the West, individuals and organizations look to accomplish their financial and political goals through the nation state, which united them regardless of, or in spite of, any sectarian membership. The Western populace acts financially and politically through the nation station, not through its sectarian groups and divisions. If the articles cited above are correct, this is not true in the Middle East, at least at the popular level. Economic and political activity begin with, and are expressed through, sectarian institutions, which then look for expression in some sort of geopolitical structure. 

The mainline media perhaps also misses understanding US interests are in the region. Increasing energy independence in the US and other industrial regions is resulting in a disengagement from the Middle East. If that disengagement continues on its current trajectory, then US interests are best served by a limited involvement, one aimed at making sure one of the two sectarian groups, or its geopolitical expressions (Sunnis –> Kingdom of Saudia Arabia vs. Shiites –> Islamic Republic of Iran), do not gain an advantage. In short, to maintain a stalemate. 

Let’s do something different today. Rather than talking about Mom’s death 25 years ago, let’s talk about her life, and an event in her youth, 50 years before her death, that perhaps helps us understand her a little better. In 1939, when she was 6, The Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow was released. I am not sure when she first went to see it but the movie and the song capture much of Mom.

The movie marks the transition of cinema from black and white to color. For mom the visual splendor of Oz remained with her long after her vision had faded. The audio splendor of Over the Rainbow never left her. And the narrative of that song points at many aspects of Mom’s soul: dreams come true, life after death, unwavering faith.

So let me share a memory of my mother with you. Mom is at her piano, playing, “by ear,” with family and friends gathered around her. She played Chopin, Broadway, Gershwin, perhaps even Over the Rainbow. She’d take requests. She played the piano the way she lived her life. With gusto, conviction, passion, and love.

By the time her children were sitting around the piano listening to her play, her vision had faded, she saw at best some faint shadows, so she played by ear. Many, many pianists play by ear, and there are those of us too lazy to practice reading music, and playing be ear can be an easy way out. But for mom it was not just that she played by ear…

As a young child and into her late teen years, Mom studied piano, took lessons, and loved every minute of it. She read music. She loved playing sheet music and often went with her father (Gramps, Bapa) to buy newly released songs, including Over the Rainbow! All of that was shaken to its core and sorely tested as she began, at 17, to lose her vision. Soon she could no longer “read” music, she had to feel the music and play what she heard. Unable to “see” the notes with her eyes, she had to feel them. Play them. Even while losing her sight she found a way to adapt rather than quit and continued to play the instrument she loved. To the best of her ability, Mom, indeed, Mom’s family, lived by that creed.

As a young girl Mom saw her father, an extraordinarily strong man physically, a man with willpower and character in abundance, the son of German immigrants with perhaps just a touch of stubbornness, struggle against a crippling accident that robbed him not only of his sight but of many of his dreams. But Mom saw more, much more. She watched her father’s daily refusal to let the loss of his sight stop him from living as full a life as possible. She also watched as her father sensed, listened, and perceived much that the sighted could not see no matter how good their eyesight.

She also saw her mother, a woman forced by circumstance to find a way to make a living for her family. This woman, her mother, our Grandmother, had earlier refused to let her father’s behavior permanently separate her from her siblings. Nor did she allow that terrible accident to destroy her chance to build a family with her husband. Mom saw two parents who, though dealt a bad hand at the card game of life, not only did not fold the hand but played it for all it was worth.

So Mom was surrounded by this quiet determination in her home. It is no surprise, then, that she grew into a young woman with character, willpower, and determination. Of course a word of caution here. It was not good to be on the wrong side of Mom’s character, willpower and determination! I’ve often said that 9 years after Mom died I finally learned to tell her “no.” Disagreeing with Mom and her convictions was not for the faint of heart.

Mom also enjoyed an enormous well of faith and here I mean religious faith. How do I explain Mom’s faith? Well, on one level, Mom certainly was convinced that there was a special place, a technicolor paradise, over the rainbow. But Mom’s faith was much more than a belief in Oz (the afterlife or heaven). She was grounded in the values, traditions and practices of her faith and Church. Mom was serious in a way hard to explain today about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and imprisoned. And praying. She lived what she believed.

*Over the Rainbow* captures some of Mom’s spirituality.

And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true

Mom had big dreams, and many questioned how those dreams could come true as her sight continued to fade away. Nazareth College, marriage, and making a family, somehow they all did come true. Not without a fair amount of suffering and sacrifice, but they really did come true.

So today rather than simply remembering the day Mom went Over the Rainbow 25 years ago, let’s remember Mom’s life, how she lived it, her spirit and soul so captured by a song and a movie, released 75 years ago. A woman who saw much that those with sight did not. A woman of faith, character and determination, of strong opinions, who lived her values, loved her family and her Church, and who’s spirit remains with us today.

If happy little bluebirds fly
Beyond the rainbow who oh why can’t I?

Click here for the full text of Adam Gopnik (from The New Yorker Magazine) Point of View text in today’s BBC Magazine.

To begin with, I think the French view of sex and life is essentially right and ought to be universally applicable: Sex with children or by force is wrong, and the rest is just the human comedy, unfolding, as it will. 

If indeed comedy, used in the classical sense, is a celebration of human sexuality and the triumph of eros, Gopnik makes a telling point. Too often Anglo Saxon morality views sexuality as a sort of tragedy, a Hamartia if I remember my Greek, where a  error or simple mistake can lead to the final catastrophe.

But if eros is the attempt to achieve fulfillment through a relation with another, then the French phase for sexual fulfillment, la petite mort, describes the paradox of our sexuality: surrender to the other, losing one’s self, a surrender that even flirts with death itself. Again, if I remember my Greek, Thanatos. 

Anglo Saxon morality, on the other hand, insists that the decision to marry settles the matter: one’s spouse is the person capable of bringing complete fulfillment. And it insists that the surrender to the other, the passion involved as two lose themselves in one, that Thanatos, will last a life time. This does happen, but the French (and the Classic Greek authors) are perhaps a bit more astute in noting that this process is comic in nature. There is no guarantee that it will happen with one’s chosen spouse. Indeed, many spend their lives moving from partner to partner seeking this eros.

Moreover it is not easily subjected to reason. It is instead sentimental, emotional, and unruly. Merlin, in Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and His Nobel Knights, puts it this way. 

In the combat between wisdom and feeling, wisdom never wins.

Apparently there was no combat between wisdom and feeling when Steinbeck wrote this, as his observation of the human condition is indeed wise and to an understanding of comic as understood in the Classics.

But Gopnik’s article doesn’t stop at simply observing the life and sexuality perhaps are better viewed as comedy. Noting the presses call for higher ethical standards of behavior by world leaders,  he goes on to face the question of character, specifically of those with power and authority. 

… by character, I think, we simply mean the power to refrain – to not do the things that we have every right and reason to do because there’s some other larger reason not to do them. And by character in leadership we mean just having the unusual capacity of being able to ask other people to refrain, without looking a prig or hypocrite while doing so

My own observation is that today’s powerful all seem to have NPD – Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The powerful seem obsessed with themselves and their own appetites. Perhaps it started as part of a balancing mechanism after the 60s. But it is about class, the powerful, the few. 

Right now, in France and elsewhere, ordinary people are being asked to take less from the state than they quite expected, and the rich are being asked to give more to the state than they quite want to. When the leader shows himself unable to control his own appetite, the symbolic message, larger than any political speech, is that the indulgence of appetite is not one among many goods, but an absolute good – one that trumps prudence, caution and risks, signalling that everyone needs to curb their appetites except for those with power.

Amen. But we’re not done. I’ve often noted that technology is born naked; it is up to humanity to clothe it. This is how culture is created. The French, at least according to Gopnik, look at appetite. They do not succumb to appetites, nor ignore them. Instead they are seen as normale. 

The point of great French dining is not that we should simply sit down and celebrate our appetites, but that we have to transform our hungers into civilized desires. Learning which fork to use means learning when not to. Self-righteousness about other people’s appetites is uncivilized. But not being able to control your own when the social occasion demands it is very bad manners.

Vive la France!

U.S. Poised to Overtake Russia as Largest Oil-and-Gas Producer

The U.S. is poised to overtake Russia as the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas this year, a startling shift that is reshaping energy markets and eroding the clout of traditional petroleum-rich nations.

Shale-rock formations of oil and natural gas have fueled a comeback for the U.S. that was unimaginable a decade ago. Russia meanwhile has struggled to maintain its energy output and has yet to embrace the technologies such as hydraulic fracturing that have boosted U.S. reserves.

Last night Ana and I went to see “The Glowing Lady” at Vicka’s Old Home site here in Medjugorje (click here to get more information). We were finally led into a small room where there is a statue of Our Lady of Lourdes. The door is closed, the lights go out, and the Statue glows, very similar (though not as green) as the picture in the link above. 

If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.

During the Bosnian War Medjugorje remained in the hands of the Croatian Defence Council and in 1993 became part of the internationally unrecognized Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia. By the Dayton Agreement in 1995, Medjugorje was incorporated into the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, populated mostly by Bosniaks and Croats. It lies within the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton, one of ten autonomous regions established so that no ethnic group could dominate the Federation.