Mary had a tiny lamb,
Its fur the color snow,
And all locations Mary found,
That lamb would also go.
It took M’s trail to school that day,
Which did disrupt a law.
School kids all did laugh and say:
A lamb in school? A flaw!

What would we have without the letter E? We’d have gobbledygook like my rewritten verses, lipograms free of Es, stuck in a much less pleasant language. Realistically, trying to avoid that which is most common becomes extremely difficult. Imagine cooking without salt. It can be done if it must. Consider building without bricks or nails or boards. Again, difficult, but possible. Setting aside what is most common may engender creativity or build ingenuity, but at what cost? It might be desirable some of the time, especially when we try to invent or discover new ways to think or new approaches to problems, but forswearing the common all of the time seems foolish.

keyboard from hell?

It can even be arrogant. I knew people who referred to everyone of whom they disapproved as common, said with scorn. “Her writing is common.” “His clothing looked so common.” “Listen to him talk. He is really common.” This sneering usage is something like the change from the original archaic sense of vulgar which did not initially mean substandard but ordinary or standard. Those self-styled patrician folk who dismissed others as common, they were not nobility but ordinary folk themselves, who fancied themselves—well—fancy, bordering, it might seem, upon worthy of worship.

However, most folk are common, at least most of the time, and that is not a bad thing, just a reality. I recall from my late teens an alarmist newspaper headline over a worried and overwrought story. “Half of city students read below average.” I wondered if anyone had considered that that is precisely what average means, that if every youngster in the world improved reading ability markedly, half would still read below average, and half above. Most people are average, and there are times and ways that being average can be fun. Most students deserve the grade of C, but current academic culture makes that a reality tough to enforce.

Not everyone can be excellent, and very precious few can be excellent at a lot. No one is excellent at everything, not even the geniuses of the Renaissance who had much less to learn than there is to know and master nowadays. Leonardo today might feel trapped in a dead end job designing motors for new varieties of helicopters and lament feeling devoid of time to become excellent at everything. He would likely design brilliant helicopters, and he might even find the time to paint some nice tableaux, but he could be stumped by Sudoku or altogether unable to understand his daughter’s iPad, and maybe he would get lost without GPS trying to make his way to Schenectady.

Without that which is most common, we are lost. There would be no customers for shoemakers, no patients for psychiatrists, no passengers for airlines, no voters for the politicians, no politicians for the Wall Street gang to manipulate (oops—a different day’s blog), no smiling faces for photographers, no readers for writers, for all of us would be good at everything and never would we need anyone else. Lincoln might have said, “Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.” I recast that: God must have loved the ordinary and the average. She made almost all of us that way.

I don’t mean to extol mediocrity. Anyone who has a special talent is wise to nurture it. Even if one only suspects a talent, it seems reasonable to work on it. I try always to improve my photography, for example. Yet it is sensible also to accept ordinariness when it is appropriate. When asked if I would care to play tennis or racket ball with someone, I usually would answer yes, and when asked my skill level I would reply cheerfully, “I am striving to achieve mediocrity.” People thought I was kidding until we played.

It’s okay to be the letter E. What would we do without it? Now and then, it is good to be a Q or a J or an X or a Z. They improve the world and spice up Scrabble or my favorite word game, the truly excellent Jotto. But no one is a J or a Z all of the time and probably never in every way. We seem wise to accept ourselves as we are. Spare me, now, thoughts about Alphas and Betas and Epsilon minuses, and Brave New World. Write me off, if you will, as common, but I believe that no one has to be good at everything because no one can, and expecting it, even striving for it, is just plain irrational. It is silly, maybe even dangerous. I’ll explore another day the dangers of always expecting excellence.

America, America, God shed some grace on thee. And crown thy okay with whatever happens to be nearby or handy at the moment. It’s reasonable most of the time to be good enough.

Mother: Those bastards!

Me: They’re not bastards, Mom. At worst, they’re incompetent.

Mother: They’re bastards!

I changed subjects politely but quickly.

I understood her sentiments perfectly. I had grown up in a household and in an extended family where the primary emotion, almost all of the time about almost everything, was anger. There were love and the usual parade of family feeling, but anger was always near the surface. For my father it usually grew into rage. Uncles and aunts and their offspring were the same. Family with whom my parents associated most comfortably were usually angry about something. I have one first cousin who had a long list of business establishments where he was no longer welcome owing to displays of anger. An uncle was the same. He would drive miles out of his way because there were shops, even banks, that would no longer take his money, thanks to fits of anger, often over some minor slight, just as often over nothing.

When one grows up that way, there are two likely directions to take: become mightily passive about the behavior of others, or inherit what one thought was normal anger as one’s one primary emotion. I did the latter. However, I found it uncomfortable being angry much of the time, and usually after angry behavior I felt silly, childish, contrite. I had to apologize a lot. Apology, of course, can be good, but it is tedious for self and others when one must appear frequently hat in hand, begging forgiveness of someone who had the misfortune to get in the way of my family-learned anger.

Family-learned, I say, not family-caused. I do not blame my anger on anyone but myself. Once one realizes that people are reacting badly to it, the mature and wise course is to find a way to change it. That took years, but it came. It came after divorce, after coming out as a gay man, when I found myself in therapy with a psychologist who had me read Albert Ellis’s fine little book, How to Keep People from Pushing Your Buttons. Ellis’s insights developed in and from his intellectual invention, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, REBT, the cornerstone of a fine blog I recommend to my readers, jvbgetsrational, a periodic exploration of the ins and outs of REBT.

My push-able buttons ceded to others control over my behavior, even to the angry extended family I had largely left behind, even over parents who, although physically absent, were emotionally ever-present. Of course, I cannot blame others for their control. I gave it to them, letting those who were manipulative work magic on me that they and I rarely knew they were working. But my therapist, Roger, showed me a different way. I didn’t need to change them, their emotions, their behaviors, just my perceptions about my own life. Much earlier I had learned, but not internalized, Viktor Frankl’s lesson  that the last human freedom was the ability to find one’s own way, to assign one’s own meanings to the events of life. I had learned the lesson, but did not understand it. I had thought it applied to the horrifying kinds of choices one had to make in the concentration camps, from which Frankl’s logotherapy was born. And I thought it was about others, not about me. Of course it did apply to heavyweight misery and to others, but it applied equally to me and to the ordinary trials that all of us face, which sometimes we approach—without ever saying so, of course—as if they were ordeals comparable to those of Frankl, or Elie Wiesel, or any of the other death camp inmates, survivors and murdered victims alike.

I learned finally, thanks to Roger, that most of the troubles I faced really were trivial and manageable, not eights or nines on a scale of one to ten, but maybe twos and threes. For an individual, a ten, a truly awful event, might be more like being fed alive feet first into an industrial wood chipper, or having to choose, like fictional Sophie Zawistowski, in a death camp moment, which of one’s children will survive. But dealing with divorce, coming out, angry kids, work stress, loss of income, loss of prestige, these were not, as they had seemed, awful at all, just, at most, damned inconvenient, unpleasant but not unbearable. The best evidence that they are not unbearable is that we bear them. We survive, and if we are wise we assign rational and helpful meanings to such events. When we approach them rationally we grow from them, and they do not defeat us, even if they hurt us, even if they change us.

And change us they will, one hopes for the better, for we learn from our survival how to persist yet again, and we teach, if we are diligent, those about us how they, too, might survive. We teach our children, our coworkers, our clients, our students, the people whom we care about, the people whom we meet. We teach that when life seems awful—and truly it can be awful, albeit rarely—, usually it is at worst unpleasant. We define what events mean to us rather than finding ourselves defined by them. We control our thinking and thus our feelings. Anger goes away. People who might have seemed like bastards are just ordinary folk like you and me, no better, no worse, and life and the universe, even if they will never be truly and wholly excellent and altogether compliant to my wishes, are pretty darned good after all. I like that. I can live with that.

Slaves kidnapped from Africa and stolen away to North America regarded the story as one that foretold their liberation. The plaintive spiritual, “Go down, Moses…. Tell old Pharaoh, ‘Let my people go!’” was only one way the theme of the Jewish Passover resounded for them. It vibrated equally well for Martin Luther King who, like Moses, had “been to the mountaintop,” and had “seen the promised land.” During the Shoah (Holocaust) Jews imprisoned by Nazis asked Rabbi Ephraim Oshry whether it was permissible fully to celebrate the Passover in which we recite, “Once we were slaves; now we are free.”  Oshry reminded his followers that they were spiritually free even if they were physically constrained, such that Pesach and freedom were states of mind, states that helped those Jews who survived the Shoah maintain their human dignity and overcome the imposed degradation. Survivor psychiatrist Viktor Frankl taught that the last human freedom was the ability to determine the meaning of what happens to us.

If we read modern values or problems out of legend or history, what is the answer to this year’s fifth question? Who are the Israelites today?  A friend commented recently that he felt he had become a slave to the system of taxes in the US, that Democrats and liberalism had crafted a reversal of slavery to ensnare the rich and comfortable. While I can sympathize with anger, it is hardly a serious problem for the upper middle class and richer, no matter how loudly protestors scream, no matter how many epithets they hurl at members of Congress and no matter how many bricks they throw through windows. The assertion by the wealthy that they are oppressed today is as disingenuous—maybe even as racist—as the ruse that anti-white discrimination has warranted an NAAWP, a National Association for the Advancement of White People.

Incidentally, I supply the link with a little fear, but know that if I did not, those who want it could find it. Still, there is something scary about offering a virtual bridge to a source spewing hatred, especially at Passover. Reading back into history, adding my values to today’s recitation of the Pesach narrative, I feel a bit of fear about the people who think they are oppressed when, for generations, they have been the oppressors. At the very least, they have supported the oppressors. Look into their faces and at their clothes. They are white. They are rich. They are comfortable. They call themselves patriots, yet they behave nothing like the founders, the true and literal patriots who were the fathers (go look up “patriot” in a really good dictionary, one that provides etymology) and mothers of our country. Can we imagine Jefferson spitting on a representative? Would Hamilton address another by a homophobic slur? Or might Adams have used some colonial equivalent of the N-word to ascribe subhuman qualities to his opposition? Might Washington have hurled bricks through the windows of officials of the opposition party? Those who signed the Declaration of Independence pledged “to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” Many of them lost the first two out of three. The self-styled exploited patriots of 2010 risk nothing and demand everything.

As Passover comes, it bothers me to think about some of the people who imagine themselves oppressed today. There is real slavery out there. There is real hunger. If we are to read biblical legends and lessons into our world, then the freedom we seek must not be our own, not even our own freedom from feared inconvenience, but freedoms for those truly in need. The hunger we want to end is not our own relentless appetite for ever more comfort, but the hunger of those truly starving. And if we want to concern ourselves with local hunger, then let us feed our own hungry children who, despite complaints of the oppressed rich, are really in need in our inner cities, even in our suburban schools.

Perhaps there is yet a sixth question. What am I going to do about it? How might I best stop moaning about my own inconveniences and challenges and do some good for others, for those truly endangered and put to the tests of hunger or slavery? Early in the Passover Seder (the ritual meal of observance) we remember that “My ancestor was a wandering Aramean,” and declare, “Let all who are hungry come and eat.” Immigrants all, we are called at Pesach, Jew and Gentile, to remember our roots, to free and feed our neighbors.

While it’s true that inquiries after one’s health in the US are routines, verbal handshakes not really meant to begin communication, any more than a physical handshake forestalls a wrestling match, we have reached a day when customs and rules of interpersonal communication are changing more rapidly than our ability to adjust to them. A writer complained in the New York Times about the death of courtesy because people no longer respond appropriately to the request, R.S.V.P. His article brought a spate of letters from others, replies that ranged from a courteous translation of “get a life,” to elegant pieces bemoaning the defeat of decency. Sexting is another innovation forcing us to renegotiate—or maybe re-comprehend—the rules of communication, the practice of sending wireless phone text messages that include risqué pictures, perhaps of oneself, perhaps of another. Should such practices be prosecuted if they include photos of minors taken and sent by those very minors? What is the proper way for a girl to thank her boyfriend for a cell phone photo of his genitals? A larger question: what is the proper etiquette for cell phones when dealing with others?

However, is anyone really listening, anyway? And are we really speaking? Although we are wired and wireless and connected almost as well as hip Asians and Europeans, does all this connection bring us any closer to real communication? Do we think we communicate but suffer instead from failure to communicate? Such failure vexes us especially if entertain the mistaken impression that since we have so many communication devices , we do, in fact, communicate, even communicate what we think we are saying to others. But there’s an axiom among folk who study communication that you cannot not communicate. If no one listens to what we think we are saying, then what are they hearing, or what are we actually communicating? If much verbal social interchange has become as meaningless as the “high-how-are-you-fine-fine-fine” greeting, then what actually do we tell one another or learn from one another? Have we created an autistic society? We go through the motions of communication and have at hand the best in-touch appliances, but we only imitate intentional meaning and comprehension. We are really good at hardware but something is missing in the software.

It doesn’t have to be. Yesterday somehow—it was horrifying—my Blackberry battery almost died. The indicator became a bright red outline. I don’t know why. It has never happened before; I pray it never happens again. Just in case, I turned off the device to save precious battery life. Yet there I was in Uptown Charlotte searching on foot for a place, unable to call for help and—again, terrible to say—unable to receive e-mail, text messages, surf the web, or reach out to anyone, anyone at all. I couldn’t even use my GPS. What could I do? What did I do? I was reduced to old technology. I walked into a restaurant. Surely the proprietor would know the neighborhood. “Where is Trader Joe’s,” I asked. He told me, and I smiled and thanked him. When I got to Trader Joe’s I could see the car of the woman I was meeting across the street in a parking lot. I spoke to her. We had a conversation. I did not ask her how she was and she did not ask me. We drove to a meeting where, for almost two hours, my Blackberry could not beep even once tempting me to withdraw from real interpersonal exchange into the autistic thumbing of my touch screen. Then I got a ride back to my car and spoke to the other occupants. Only when I reached my car did I plug in my Blackberry and turn it on. I had missed twenty-seven messages but no calls, and I had survived. I drove home, relieved, put a movie in the DVD player and watched Adam one more time.

“Let me see your identity card.”

“I don’t have one. I’m a tourist,” I advised him, surprised that he hadn’t figured that out.

“Let me see your passport.”

“It’s at the hotel.”

“You need your identity card or passport to send a package,” he told me, and I resigned myself to walk back to the hotel, get my passport, and try again, and quickly, as the post office would close about noon.

Not forty-five minutes passed when I was in line again and greeted by the same clerk. “I want to send this package to Beersheba.”

“Go to the inner room,” again, where shortly he greeted me, “What do you want?”

“I want to send this package to Beersheba.”

Let me see your identity card,” he asked again.

“I don’t have one. I’m a tourist,” I advised him again, surprised that he hadn’t remembered or figured it out. The clerk just followed the rules of the bureaucracy. I learned that day that while the British invented bureaucracy, their one-time colonial subjects, the Israelis, had refined the system beyond any Englishman’s nightmare or parliamentarian’s dream.

We all complain about bureaucracies, institutions that lack imagination, apply too much focus, promote automatons, and preserve—no, ingrain—outmoded traditions. Recently my congressional representative, an opponent of health care reform and champion of big business and big insurance, complained about a new governmental bureaucracy that health care reform might bring. If you Google “bureaucracy,” once you get past the formal definitions, many of them correct, you will wade into a spate of complaints about ridiculous behavior and waste. If you Google for images you will find dozens of comical pictures, some wry, some angry, some with apparent built-in warnings, including one that looks like a photo of a soldier in a Soviet-era uniform, captioned, “According to company rules there can be no innovation, fun, creativity, change. Now run along.”

Nevertheless, I find myself ambivalent about bureaucracies. They could have merit. A goal of bureaucracy ensures that no government worker has too much power and none has too little. The supposed result is that participants, clients, bureaucrats cannot corrupt the system since all responsibility is divided and everyone is accountable to everyone else. And even if no one is watching, no one has to watch because the system is so convoluted that corrupting it requires machinations that would bring a blush to Rube Goldberg. Bureaucracies might be slow to change, impossible in the face of novelty, maladaptive, and even unintentionally abusive, but they generally do not let anyone steal the store. Their genius is inflexibility.

So if it is good for the civil service, inflexibility must be good for justice, too. At least that was the assumption that produced the era of zero-tolerance regulations in US education. Accordingly now we have school systems that have zero-tolerance for drugs (even birth control pills bring mandatory suspensions), zero-tolerance for weapons (so that a first grader with a folding spoon that also has a tiny food knife gets the boot), zero-tolerance for fighting, zero-tolerance for bullying, and on and on. However, zero-tolerance has brought us solutions that are worse than the problems. Tomorrow, the North Carolina Supreme Court hears the case of two students challenging a zero-tolerance action that resulted in a full-term suspension of children from their high school in Beaufort. As a New York Times article points out, no weapons were involved, no serious injuries ensued, and students were even prohibited from enrolling in a special school for troubled students. Yet nothing happened that had not happened decades ago in many schools that earlier adults handled with a trip to the principal, parental intervention, and some old-fashioned grownup judgment.

Zero-tolerance takes the supposed virtue of bureaucracy and raises it to an angry and destructive height. Moreover, it punishes African-American kids more than any other group and often provides a gateway to quick and final disenchantment with education, truancy, dropouts, personal failure, sustained poverty, even serious crime. Fortunately many school systems are reevaluating zero-tolerance and attempting to find ways to re-humanize education discipline.

However, zero-tolerance vibrates with Americans right now. Unfortunately, we have a chicken-and-egg problem. Has zero-tolerance developed out of US incivility or has incivility been the result of institutionalized zero-tolerance, bureaucracy, mandatory sentencing, and other devices meant to thwart human thought, human judgment, human wisdom, human reason? When you finish Googling “beaucracy” take a shot at “zero-tolerance,” for gems like this one: “Instead of having zero tolerance for toy soldiers and plastic butter knives, the schools should have zero tolerance for gang-related clothing, rap music, sagging pants, and homosexuality. Furthermore, they should have zero tolerance for students abusing teaches [sic], and for teacher [sic] abusing the minds of their students with Jewish/leftist lies.” Or read about educators with zero-tolerance for linguistic fads, or drivers who have zero-tolerance for other drivers who do not drive well, according to some personal intolerant standard. On another front, our town has a policy, honored in its breach, to promote affordable housing. A recent letter to a suburban newspaper complained that if affordable housing comes to one man’s wealthy community, Ballantyne, he will move out, since he relocated there to get away from the poor and middle class. Apparently he shows zero tolerance for you and me.

I’m personally glad that my teachers used discretion and taught with tremendous tolerance. And I’m grateful that most other drivers on the road make room for whatever mistakes I might make. We used to call that defensive driving, while now we’ve entered the era of zero tolerance vigilante driving. Oh, and I’m glad I moved out of Ballantyne.

Is this where bureaucracies have taken us? Maybe not, but bureaucracies and zero-tolerance thinking fit well into the angry culture in which we live, populated with tea partiers who mock the sick rather than seek means to heal them, a country of angry unemployed and furious wealthy, the latter who fear that their privilege might be harmed if we let the rest of the world in on the goodies. Now, when I look more closely at my benighted congressional representative and her supporters, I realize it is not bureaucracy they fear. On the contrary, they are the most eager supporters of inert bureaucracy, a system that protects their privilege by suppressing human judgment and simple decency. No, they fear change that might let the middle class and the poor—new poor and entrenched poor—into their doctors’ offices and their comfortable waiting rooms and neighborhoods.

“Mom, they’re not bastards. They’re just incompetent.”

“They’re bastards!”

Perhaps it was a little sick, but even if it was I had caught the disease early on. I, too, had strong opinions about everything and found it odd when there were people who did not. It confused me a lot when I married and my in-laws, intelligent people, really au courant, comfortable almost everywhere with almost everyone, just couldn’t seem to muster the same passion for opinion and controversy that I had known in the argumentative family that reared me.

So here’s today’s strange idea. Even today I remain a little perplexed when students tell me that they can’t think of anything to speak about. “Why not just give a speech about something you care about,” I usually suggest, only to feel yet more puzzled when I discover that, apart from their next meals and their grades, some don’t seem to care much about anything. “What do you love to do?” I might ask, or “What really makes you happy or gets you steamed?” Still they feel lost about controversy and disoriented that they should be asked to express opinions or hold forth with ideas. In some odd novel way they create a fresh definition for Luftmenschen; they are people whom the wind can blow about yet they feel unbothered by it. One might argue that there is air in their heads, even blowing through them, that we have failed to challenge them.

No. On the one hand it might be immaturity or failure to think, but on the other, it might also be humility, early recognition that a lot of the things that bothered ‘60s nuts like me just do not, in the long run, matter all that much. They’re as puzzled by my desire for opinion and controversy as I was in middle age by my mother’s zeal to find people to blame, to portray as today’s bastards, this week’s miscreants, the year’s true villains.

Many of my students are wonderfully calm about ideas, and when I compare them to the tea partiers, the crazies of this decade, I feel comfortable. For the screwballs on the far right with little bags hanging from their hats and nasty vitriol painted on signs with racist themes, they are the lunatics with whom I grew up, but in different guise and with different targets for their very strange strong opinions. Yes, I caught the opinion disease early on, only to become immune to it should it pass my way again, and to feel that I have seen it all before when I see it anew today. And I feel comfortable that like the ‘60s radicals the new nuts will grow up, too, even if already they are middle-aged, and they will become as mature and calm as my young students and maybe will realize that they have, after all, really nothing to say. That’s why they’re so loud. They have no real ideas. They have, after all, nothing to say.