Day: May 8, 2018

I tell my writing students all the time that good writing is about being authentic, showing vulnerability, having a strong point-of-view. I am feeling vulnerable at the moment, as if I have lost my bearings and am struggling to locate my center. What does it even mean to be a man any longer?

I am not a naive or innocent person, I was a reporter for a good long time in some dreadful places, I saw horrific things all the time that damaged me and made me realize I needed to change, and see different things. So I became a book writer instead, and eventually moved to the country.

I felt safe and smug up here, I am not feeling that now. I feel at times now  that I am losing perspective, my grip on the world around me is sometimes slippery. I am stunned quite often by what I am seeing, disbelieving and uncomprehending. That is a new feeling for arrogant me.

I grew up in a Jewish working class neighborhood in Providence, R.I., although I left the faith a long time ago, I was raised by a Jewish middle-class family, my grandparents were devout orthodox Jews, my neighborhood was overwhelmingly Jewish, with some Irish families sprinkled in.

I have never identified with Jewish ritual, I joined a Quaker Meeting when I was a  teenager and have been comfortable in that faith, although I  rarely go to Meeting any longer. The Quakers mirror my values more than any other faith I know, they helped to shape my ideas of morality, as did Judaism. They actually taught me what it really means to be a Christian.

I am not easily shocked, but I was made speechless once more by the revelations yesterday about our now disgraced Attorney Genera of New York Statel, who was accused of savagely abusing four different women in both physical and emotional ways.  These ways  made me physically ill, my stomach had the decency to weep and cry out.

Things have come a long way since the me.too movement. This deeply troubled and broken man, a hero to many people before yesterday,  resigned just a few  hours after he was accused. Nobody doubted the stories of these women, meticulously documented by the New Yorker Magazine.

He just sputtered a bit and left. His life was destroyed in minutes, everything he had worked to gain lost. And it seemed to be pure justice.

It seems that nothing in my previous life – I thought I saw a lot in my previous life – prepared me for what i am learning about the violence men have done and are doing  and have been doing to women. As a reporter, I saw abused women in court and in hospitals all the time, I know how much violence is done to women in America.

But I am jarred quite personally and deeply as I learn every day about the depth and range and  arrogance and brutality revealed by the women now coming forward to tell their awful tales about the things men have done to them.

I will be frank, it is bewildering to me to see how many of these men are Jewish, especially in Hollywood and New York.

I have had my differences with Judaism, but it always seemed grounded in a moral perspective, Jews are taught early on to love the earth, to value education, to help the poor and the powerless. That was the one thing i loved about Judaism, and perhaps the one thing I took from it.

When I was a boy, we didn’t talk about the Chosen People, we talked about the Chosen Boys. The special ones, the gifted ones, the beautiful ones. They were different from us. They were not bookish or pale. They were smart, athletic, handsome, they always got the grades and they got the women. They were adored, the light always seemed to fall on them. They were heading to Harvard and Yale (I was  not), teachers fawned on them, the angels seemed to swirl around their heads.

It was only later I learned that Chosen Boys were not only Jewish. Every culture and faith and race had some.

Needless to say, I was not a Chosen Boy, I did not do well in school, I was pimply and skinny, could not dribble a basketball or swing a bat, had no friends and girls ran  from me as if I had fleas. Maybe I did. But I did have a sense of right and wrong, my own idea of morality, my own innate gift of empathy. I thought about it all the time, second guessed every decision, looked in the mirror daily to see if I liked the person I saw there.

So here we are, it’s the Chosen Boys I keep seeing in the news, keep reading about, who are slapping and beating and raping women, who e-mail their penises to children on the Internet, who expose themselves to the young women who work for them, or  drug and rape them, or threaten and intimidate them. It seemed to me they had everything, it seems to me they had nothing. It seems to me they have nothing now.

The Chosen Boys are now the Predator Men.

It seems to me that the world is turning itself upside down, hopefully in the cause of long overdue justice and decency. If that’s where it lands, it was worth every second. Men have blown their shot at ruling the world.

Faith seems to have failed these powerful, educated men, almost all of whom claim to be religious. Faith did not guide them or inspire them.

There is something enduring about Judaism, something noble, something smug, something superior. I remember my grandmother telling me once, Jews don’t beat their women. Jewish men don’t do that. That, she thought, was something only gentiles did. She never lived to learn that this was something all men do, of every faith.

There is something smug about all of the major faiths, they all believe they talk directly to God. It seems they are all incorrect.

it never pays to be smug, we are all too human. These Predator Men teach us this every day. Their falls are swift and brutal and Biblical. So many chickens coming home…Don’t cry for the Chosen Boys And Men, they will find their way back, they always do, that’ sone of the laws fo the earth. But it will never be the same.

I know these things I’m talking about are a series of crimes and sufferings that belong to women, not to me.  Who can possibly calculate the damage done to women all these centuries? The lives diminished, degraded, brutalized, exploited,  lost forever.

This has gone on forever, and exists everywhere. I have no right to complain about anything, this is not my tragedy, not my suffering. I’ve been going blindly along.

But I am struggling to grasp the dimensions and cruelty of what I  see almost every day. Aren’t they almost all Chosen Men, these social monsers? In a small town deli today the wife of the butcher was nearly crying talking about Bill Cosby. “He was the real father of our country, wasn’t he?,” she pleaded, hoping for commiseration. “What happened to Dr. Huxtable?,” she asked. Nobody knew what to say.

I pray it is cleansing and healing, and that it brings peace and justice to the countless victims, most of whom still  dare not speak up. I think this revolution is for real, I think this one won’t fade away. Mostly because I know now there is an inexhaustible supply of damaged men to still face their reckoning, I suspect none of us will live long enough to hear all of the stories of all of their crimes. Every time I think we are nearing the end, I am reminded we are just at the beginning. This is not just a women’s problem, this is a men’s problem.

I can’t grasp the moral emptiness of an educated, successful, powerful man who would slap a woman he supposedly loved so hard she bled from her ears. I can’t comprehend a man who calls employees to his home and walk around naked. Or lures them into the shower and shows them his penis. I can’t fathom a man who shows unspeakable brutality to a woman by hitting her and calling her a whore,  a man who has built a political career on fighting abuse and speaking out on behalf of the rights of women.

Another Chosen Boy fallen and disgraced.

I always knew this was wrong. Almost every man I ever knew this was wrong, or so I believed. I guess I didn’t really have any idea what most men knew then, or know now. I guess I never made it as a real man..

I was not a Chosen Boy and had no great love for my father, but I will say for  him that he would have beaten me bloody if I harmed a woman or another human being. It was wrong, it was so clear it was wrong.

I wonder if hypocrisy is a flaw or a biological trait in many men.

It is, in my view, the lowest form of life.

I wonder if faith means anything to people any longer, or if it  ever did.

There is  not a major religion on the earth which does not preach that the savage mistreatment of other people is wrong and immoral. Christianity teaches that, the Koran  teaches that, so does the Old Testament, so does the Dalai Lama. In our world, sexual predators are not only tolerated, but loved.

Does faith mean a thing when it comes to truth and morality?

We live in lies, we accept them and expect them.

Around me,  I see the pride of the Jewish middle class  and the pride of many other faiths committing the worst and most evil degradations upon women. I see Muslim teenagers slaughtering innocents all over the world. I see vast numbers of Catholics ignoring Pope Francis’s exhortations to save Mother Earth and be tolerant of one another. I  see Evangelic Christians who only believe lies, and do so in the name of loving Jesus Christ, who always told the truth, even unto pain of death.

When the Attorney General of New York State slaps a lover so hard she has to go to the hospital, does faith play any role? Did anyone teach him about ethics or morality? Does morality live anywhere inside of his head, these ancient, timeless, boring and cliched notions of morality and good? Did they every matter, or did people just pretend that they did?

Does a monster’s heart ever rest?

I admit, uncharacteristically, to being flummoxed, completely stumped as to how the men I have been reading about for many months justify themselves and look in the mirror every morning. How brave and giving are these women who come forward with their gut-wrenching stories. They are the heroes we have all been waiting for.

I just can’t fathom it. I have nothing very insightful to say about it.

These men are the best of the best, yet they are the worst of the worst. How does one square that?

It must have to do with power, it really does corrupt and corrode, we really should be aware of its power to undermine and destroy.

I don’t know how that happens, how that works. People tell me we are all human, but that seems to fall short. People who slap lovers hard in the face or rape them are not humans, they are something else. It is an  insult to humanity to call them human. They are inhuman.

I am coming to see that faith is truly an internal matter for me, not an external one. I could never do what these men do, I cannot comprehend it. Has any religion told my heart what is right or  wrong?  Am I too old to see  this all clearly? Or too dumb? Or too blind? None of the options are good.

When I go into my heart, I know what is really wrong and right. The heart gives me the eyes to see the reality of my existence. The purity of heart allows me to see more clearly.

From the heart arise deep and unknowable instincts, it is the center of perception and understanding, the source of good and moral  decisions. My God lives there.

The heart is the central and unifying organ of my personal life, it shows me right and wrong, and calls upon me to respect myself, and to show empathy and respect the dignity of others.  And to do good, not harm.

So now, as I struggle to understand the things I see and read almost every day, I’ll go inward to the heart and search for understanding there. I don’t think it exists for me in the world beyond, it is nowhere in the news.

So there it is, I am here to tell you what I don’t know, cannot comprehend, do not understand. I am beginning to believe that I will never know, never understand these Chosen Men. They had it all and threw it all  away just to dominate or cruelly hurt another soul.

But at the other end of my life, I do finally see one thing: I am grateful not to be one of them. I might have actually been one of them and didn’t see it.

On one of my sudden impulses, I ordered 18 T-shirts for the soccer team. I decided to get one for Ali, who is the Coach. He will love this, he has a used Ipad 2 he  uses to keep track of each player’s scoring and play (thanks, Susan Popper), and a used but loud megaphone I found online, and he deserves a shirt that says “coach.”

Ali brings both an old-fashioned and scientific approach to coaching – he hugs,  yells and exhorts, but also looks for modern tools to enhance performance and skills.

The front of the shirt says “Albany Warriors,” the former name was “Bedlam Farm Warriors,” and I encouraged Ali to change it as soon as it was possible. One reason is that the team is not sponsored or officially affiliated with RiSSE, the Army Of Good is the primary sponsor,  and while the affiliation with RISSE, the refugee and immigrant support group might change one day, Ali agreed that the team should reflect a local interest.

Few people in Albany have heard of Bedlam Farm, and I didn’t like my role with the team being personalized. I like being a shadowy figure in the background, and many more people than I contribute to the soccer team.

The team overrode my objections, so this time we didn’t ask them.

The team will keep on playing in the black-and-white uniforms that say “RISSE” on the back and “Bedlam Farm Warriors” on the front, it cost nearly $900 for those uniforms (the Army Of Good paid for them) and we’re not about to throw them away.

The T-shirts are for practice games and warm-ups. I’m bringing them to Albany tomorrow along with some multi-colored headbands. The soccer leagues are rough, and well financed, we have to hold our own. Maybe we can dazzle them with color.

We had one miracle recently, we found a van in great shape for $2,500. That was my gift to the team. Last week, we landed another, I found a former surgeon and English As Second Language ESL tutor, a former Army surgeon named Suzanne, she will be meeting with the soccer players who need tutoring starting a week from next Wednesday.

She has worked with refugees and their families for several years. I tried doing this through RISSE, but we couldn’t agree on how to do it. I am not good with bureaucracies.

We have signed up with a inner city branch of the Albany Public Library system, we have a private conference room as long as we need it, and as often as we want to use it.

This is a major development I think. At least six of the soccer team players are in urgent need of English language lessons, and it took me nearly a month to find Suzanne. I told Ali she was our newest miracle. The soccer plays are no longer in the RISSE school program, they are too old.  Ali is working on that.

Tomorrow, I’m going to Albany to see Ali and SAAD, the Iraqi man I wrote about last week. Last week, we gave  him a $400 deposit so he could move into his new apartment at a senior housing project. He has lost  his family, and all of his money in the transition to America, rushed because he had been targeted by religious extremists. He has absolutely nothing left.

This week, we scoured churches and thrift shops and brought him chairs and sofas and tables, enough to fill his apartment.

Wednesday, Ali and I are going to meet at an Albany grocery store and bring Saad a months’ worth of groceries. We’ll see how he is doing and what he needs and keep an eye on him for the next month or two.

Then, he is on his own. Almost all of the refugee aid programs are being slashed or dropped by the federal government, the needs among these people are just bottomless. We have no hope of filling them all, just helping where it is important and makes a difference.

The next person I’d like to help is a Syrian refugee mother with two children.  Her husband had an accident soon after they arrived here, and he is a paraplegic, confined to a  wheel chair. Because she is alone, she can’t get out to look for a job. In the midst of these, she has been threatened with eviction because she is $75 short of the monthly rent.

We are helping her to get the children into a day care program and give her several hundred dollars to pay her rental for the next few months, until she finds work. She is looking every day for a job she can get to without a car.

I’ve been working hard for months to meet the refugees and immigrants in need, and am now meeting a lot of people. They are good, hard working people who want only to give their children better and safer lives than they had. They love this country, and want very much to be good citizens and learn what they need to learn. They also struggle daily for survival, a grueling balancing act.

I’ll report back on our visit with Saad on Wednesday.

 

I took the photo above this morning, Gus is buried in the Dahlia garden, right under these pansies sprouting up. We hope his mother Hannah will be bred tomorrow, but Robin Gibbons, the breeder is still working through Gus’s death. She doesn’t want it to happen again.

Robin, a friend of ours by now,  stopped by this morning. I could see the anguish in our face. I thought she was telling us she couldn’t do it, she couldn’t breed her dog again..

Tomorrow, she is scheduled to breed Hannah, Gus’s mother. She is, she said, still torn about breeding after what happened to Gus. She was very torn, she just needed to talk about it.

Robin Gibbons, who works as a bartender at the American Legion here, is a great dog lover and conscientious breeder. She doesn’t breed for money, but for love.

She works hard, is extremely ethical and moral, and researches her breeding thoroughly.  She is not in it for money.

Our vet has great praise for her dedication and thoroughness.

Robin told us she is worried about having another puppy with megaesophagus, this was a torment for her, and she felt worse for us than we felt for ourselves. She isn’t sure she wants to go through with it.

We told her it was up to her, of course, we would support whatever decision she made. She said although researchers don’t know what causes megaesophagus, some think it could be hereditary. Most say they don’t know. She says she would hate to have another of her puppies go through anything like that.

I could see the uncertainty in her face.

Here’s what Maria and I told her.

We said we would understand whatever decision, she made.We said we hoped she would breed again as we were eager to bring home another of her puppies.

We said we had full faith in her, and that we loved having Gus,  we never regretted having him for one second. We would do it again in a flash.

I told her that there is a far greater risk of cancer in most litters than megaesophagus and researchers said the disease was rare in Boston Terriers. It could have been caused by a number of things – animal feces, anesthesia, different viruses.  We would keep the new puppy out of the pasture until he was older.

It is more likely, we told her, that we were responsible for the disease than that she was.

I said I  had faith that this would put the experience behind both of us, her and us, and she could also move past it. Any breeder knows you need luck. People as honest and conscientious as Robin should be owning and breeding dogs. I said it felt good to me, I had faith in this process.

And  Robbin. Unlike many people,  takes responsibility for her life, more, perhaps, than she deserves.Life happens,  it brings risk and joy. I hope call let go of Gus’s experience, he brought is great happiness. There is nothing  to look back about. Pain is inevitable. Suffering is a choice.

There is nothing worth doing in the world that is not difficult or does not pose risk. We hope she decides to breed Hannah, but we will be with her no matter what she decides.

We both said  we would be happy to take our chances, there is always a risk to life. Last week, I said, 1,000 big trees fell down in our town. I could have been standing underneath any one of them. There is always risk in life, we take a risk every time we  drive a car down the road or cross the street.

I did not want to put any pressure on her, this is her decision. We did want to make clear to  her that we trusted her, no matter what she did.

We said we would be available to talk to her anytime. She said she was going to do some thinking tonight, she would let us know. I wish for Robin to be comfortable and  happy, and I wish for us to get another of her dogs. Are the two really compatible, or am I just kidding myself in a  cause o saalsovelldkIt’s in the hands of the Gods now.

When they first organized as a soccer team, Ali recalls, they were pretty rag-tag. Back in their original countries, they played soccer barefoot, sometimes with balloons, usually in their backyards. when they came to America and played, they were up against lavishly funded teams with performance coaches, large teams, and European soccer clothes.

Since then, we are adding to their pride and sense of teamwork. We got new soccer uniforms, sneakers, and tomorrow, I’m bringing the team T-shirts  and sweat bands.

This is not for decoration, it speaks to team’s  identity, pride and sense of themselves a a unit caring for one another. I got a special one for Ali, it says “coach.”

I think it is fair to say that these children, who suffered greatly before coming her, and have often lost parents, brothers and sisters and friends, have not always been welcomed in America. They face a hostile government which demonizes them as threats and job-stealers, and taunts from school mates and athletic competitors, more and more, young people seem to feel they have a license to be cruel, even racist.

Now, more than ever, I am committed to our notion of small acts of great kindness, I am committed to doing good, I am more committed than ever to keeping good alive.

If you wish to support my refugee work, you can contribute by sending your check to the Gus Fund, , care of me, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816,

This photo is for sale for $130. You can buy it either by e-mailing Maria at [email protected] or from her new etsy page later today. It will be sold unframed, on the best quality rag paper, 8 1/2 x 12 1/2. I think it would be a lovely thing to hang on a wall.

You can also see it on my photos-for-sale page gallery.

The photo is a tribute to the Humble Pansy, which bridges the gap between winter and true summer, and brings us color and light.

I offer it in honor of the idea of keeping good alive, a challenge that now faces us every day.