The False Premise of the Abortion Debate

There are two vital elements that are missing from the current abortion debate.

The first problem is the lack of any real engagement between the two sides of the issue. The two sides are like train rails, stretching parallel towards infinity, never touching. Those on one side say they are for the sanctity of human life. Those on the other side say they are for a woman’s right to choose. But these two contentions have nothing to do with each other. Neither addresses the other’s point.

It wasn’t always quite like that. Around the time of the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, there would still sometimes be attempts on each side to take the other’s argument into consideration. For example, in response to the “pro-lifers” arguments about the sanctity of human life, the “pro-choicers” would advance the counter-argument that a fetus could not really be counted yet as sentient human life. The Bible, medical texts, and ancient wisdoms were cited for and against this view.

The debate did usually proceed along a predictable trajectory. The “pro-lifers” would contend that if sentience was the criterion, then one would be justified in killing bothersome seniors who were in advanced states of senile dementia. Or we would be justified in killing anyone who was in a vegetative state, terminal or otherwise.

That was a difficult argument to answer, but pro-choicers would sometimes take a stab at it, citing the high rates of spontaneous miscarriages that take place without the prospective mother necessarily feeling that a human life had been lost. In most such instances, the woman probably wouldn’t even have known that she was pregnant. No funeral ceremonies would be held. No one would consider that a human being with a history and an awareness of itself had passed.

Taking the argument in another direction, pro-choicers would often cite pro-lifers’ frequent support of the death penalty. In this case, the pro-lifers would respond by adding an adjective to what had been their abbreviated stand. They would specify that they had meant they were against the taking of innocent life.

And on it would go. There was never any meeting of the minds, never any resolution of the debate. It seemed likely that there could never be any intersection of the two points of view. But at least each side made some attempt to recognize the other’s concerns and to formulate some kind of a response. Ultimately, a concession was made to the pro-life side and a partial, uneasy compromise was reached by specifying that abortions would only be permissible in the first trimester or some other such period of the pregnancy in the bills passed by the various States.

Now, no such recognition of some right on the other side takes place. One side will just flatly state the superiority of valuing all human life – and the other side will just flatly state the need to allow women to have choice. These two sides simply repeat their respective priorities at each other - and never the twain shall meet.

The second problem with the abortion debate lies primarily with the side that emphasizes the right of women to choose. While this side fights for the right of a woman to choose whether or not she will bring a baby to term, it completely ignores the fact that women aren’t being granted an important precedent right of choice. That’s the right to choose whether or not to have intercourse in the first place.

That’s the elephant in the room, the issue that almost everyone in America refuses to even consider. The issue is sometimes raised as it applies to women in developing countries. There it is sometimes openly recognized that women have no choice when it comes to having sex. Many of these cultures virtually dictate that women be married at an early age and that an important part of their role as wife must then be accommodating their husbands’ sexual urges. It’s taken for granted that women must make themselves sexually available to their husbands at all times. In these other cultures, it’s virtually impossible for a woman to deny her husband “his privileges.”

In many cases, it’s also impossible for women to avoid being raped. Wars always have posed a special threat to women as invading groups take the rape of any available women on “the other side” to be their sexual prerogative.

There’s very little that outside agencies can do to liberate women in this regard. The most that United Nations aid groups and the whole gamut of humanitarian aid groups can do when they come into these cultures with the hope of improving the lot of women is to offer means of avoiding pregnancy and disease as the result of having sex. They can’t enable women to choose not to have sex in the first place.  

The most radical kind of aid an agency can attempt is to actively prevent the genital mutilation of women, a practice that continues in some cultures as a means of keeping women’s sexual experience the exclusive property of the men to whom they have been consigned. Educating cultures away from this practice is beyond the scope of most humanitarian aid societies. Agencies are generally limited to providing medical aid in connection with what will be the inevitable sexual experiences of most women in the culture. They can try to avert medical problems by offering papilloma vaccines and some techniques for avoiding the HIV virus and other STDs. After the fact, they can provide antibiotics and some palliatives, but often not any absolute cures.

They can also offer women discreet access to contraceptives. But this kind of assistance indeed often has to be very discreet. The men themselves usually can’t be enlisted into “taking precautions.” Many men in these cultures refuse to even consider the use of condoms. Condoms are seen, not only as interfering with their pleasure, but also as interfering with their masculine right to inseminate. Anything that diminishes their fertility is seen as diminishing their manhood.

So men are also often averse to having women avail themselves of contraceptives. If a man’s wife or wives don’t become pregnant, it reflects badly on his masculinity. But also, having children is positively encouraged in many cases. Having many children means having many helping hands and is also a perpetuation of oneself into the future. So if a woman seeks to put her own interests first and to deny the family unit the benefits of having many children, she often has to be secretive about it. Therefore, agencies can provide her with contraceptives only on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” basis. But that’s about as far as they can go.

They can’t give women the freedom to refuse to have sex. The rare instances in which such liberation is attempted is usually not undertaken on the behalf of women. It’s undertaken on behalf of accomplishing some more important project, of achieving some more important goal – such as peace. Women might be organized or might organize themselves to withhold sex until their men stop fighting. But such Lysistrata-like campaigns usually end up being comically impractical and short-lived. So while it might be acknowledged that women in these developing countries often don’t have the basic choice of whether or to have sex – there’s almost nothing that can be done to give them that choice.

In the U.S. and other Western cultures, it’s usually not even acknowledged that women are lacking the right to make this basic choice. Barring obvious instances of rape, it’s now generally assumed that any pregnancy has been the result of both the man’s and the woman’s choice to have sex. In western cultures, it’s now assumed that women ultimately want to have sex as much as men do and that the only elements of choice that need to be given, the only choices that count - are after-the-fact choices. Women can be granted free access to contraceptives (after the obvious choice to have sex has been made). Or they can be granted the right to have abortions (again, very much after the fact). So debate starts from the assumption that both men and women equally opted to have sex and that the only issue that remains is how to deal with resultant pregnancies.

Neither side considers that abortion would rarely even become an issue if women’s true instincts were honored. The fact is that very few women feel such an urge to have sex that they MUST have it even if it might lead to disease, dishonor, or an unwanted pregnancy. Very few women have an urge that screams, “I want it! I must have it!” regardless of the consequences. Only men generally feel that sort of imperative. If left to their own devices, most women would be content to have sex only if and when they were positively ready to accept pregnancy as the result.

A woman’s silent scream is “I want love!” But the only way for her to have any hope of being with a man long enough for that more difficult feeling to grow, is to accede to having sex with him. Yes, in spite of all our self-congratulation about how far we’ve come from the presumed oppressions of Victorian times, the fact is that those times actually defined women’s desires more accurately when it came to sex. It was assumed women weren’t going to be as desirous as men, that it was only her affection for a man that would lead her into any sort of contented accession to his desires. As we look back on that period from our new set of presumptions, we say that Victorian women were forced to fake reluctance. In actuality, it’s modern women who are forced – in this case to fake enthusiasm.

Many current male authors of books about evolution now advance the hypothesis that women really are biologically geared to enjoy sex as much as or even more than men do. Matt Ridley, the author of The Red Queen, cited as proof of this contention the wild shrieks of ecstasy that women emit during intercourse. When I wrote to him, suggesting that women may not be experiencing the level of enjoyment he is attributing to them, he wrote back, with perhaps some excess of typical male presumption, that all the women he’d been with had been notable for their exultant vocalizations in bed.

I could just feel female readers chuckling knowingly at this response. I felt it might be too deflating of me, or more likely, too useless, to try to advance any further contrary views on the point. However, I privately was reminded of the Seinfeld episode in which the extent of women’s deception is revealed to Jerry. As the gang is sitting around in the diner, Jerry expresses shock at hearing that a lot of women fake orgasm in such a way that their partners can't tell. He states that he's sure the women he's been with weren't faking. He's sure he would know. At which point Elaine neatly steps in with a corrective regarding their own time together. She says, “Well, you didn't know.” Aghast in disbelief, Jerry asks, “What about the breathing, the panting, the moaning, the screaming?” To which Elaine triumphantly ticks off “Fake, fake, fake, fake.”

And so modern women are committed to a life of faking it, in bed, and on a deeper level. They have to pretend to the men in their lives, and more devastatingly, even to themselves, that they are desirous of having sex on a regular basis. They can’t even readily admit to themselves that they’d rather eat a chocolate bar, watch TV, or just cuddle. To openly admit that they are generally not enthusiastic about having sex, isn’t a possibility for them. That would be to significantly unravel all the presumed advances that women have won over the last century or so. It would be to deny that they have been significantly liberated. For most women to admit that they don’t really crave sex or even particularly relish it, would be for them to admit that they are acceding to men’s wishes, that they are shaping a large part of their lives around accommodating men’s desires, even to the point of submerging their own longings. That would blatantly cast them back in their old role as the givers, and men as the triumphant takers. That would be once again to admit inequality.

So women have had to convince, not only the men in their lives, but themselves as well, that they eagerly seek, or that they can at least be readily triggered into seeking, sex throughout their lives. If pregnancy is the result of this presumed overriding urge, of this mantle of desire they have felt it necessary to wear – then they enter the arena of debate about how it would be best and most liberating to deal with such consequences.

The point is that, in some sense, women have less reproductive choice now than they ever had. This will be true even if Roe v Wade is allowed to stand, or even if it is extended to make abortions more readily available for longer periods of time and in more cases. As evidence of this, one might cite the myriads of women who are struggling to raise a number of children, on their own, with their transient partners long gone. These women might have had the right to have abortions, if they so chose. But in some essential way, they were denied the precedent choice of whether or not to have sex.

There are classroom seminars held, aimed mostly at girls, telling them how to diplomatically say “No.” But it’s always understood that these taught tactics will at best serve as postponements, never as real allowances for the girls’ longings to be satisfied and assume primacy long-term in their adult lives. In reality, these lessons don’t generally even serve as delaying tactics. When faced with the boy’s urgency in the car after the date, the girl knows she has to say “Yes.” What’s more, she has to evince eagerness as part and parcel of her “Yes.” If she doesn’t, the boy will move on to the next girl, and she’ll be left without any hope at all of growing a “relationship” with him.

So most often now, acting against what she truly desires, the girl will accede and, all education about sex and contraceptives notwithstanding, she will evince that requisite eagerness and spontaneity, and will accept becoming pregnant as a result. Then all that remains to her will be the spare scraps of feminist “choice” - the choice of whether or not to have an abortion. She will have been granted nothing in the way of achieving her first choice, which was to love.

Oh, Rats!

I’ve always liked mice and rats. When I was young, I would set out traps to catch the occasional mouse that got inside my building, but I only did it because of all the warnings I’d heard indicting rodents as prime vectors of disease and as prone to overpopulating whole cities. I’m sure those warnings are legitimate. Nevertheless, every time I put down a trap, I’d root for the mouse to find a way of avoiding or defeating the contraption.  

Then came the night that put a stop to my using that method of control forever. I heard a trap in a corner of my kitchen snap. Afraid of what mangled little creature I’d find – dead, or worse yet, still alive - I went to look. Sure enough, there was a little mouse in the trap, thankfully already quite dead, the bar of the trap heavily on its neck. But as I started to reach down to pick up the trap for disposal, a second mouse darted out of a small gap at the door sill. It rushed practically under my feet and nuzzled its companion. Then it tried to leverage the trap onto its shoulders and drag it away! It tried a variety of hunching, contorting positions in order to hoist one end of the trap onto its back. It actually did succeed in moving the trap an inch or two towards the safety of that escape hatch by the door. It tried to effect this rescue for over a minute, persisting even after I stomped my foot to put an end to its pitifully futile attempt. Finally, it too realized the futility of its efforts, and disappeared permanently back under the door sill.

What a display of bravery and altruism! What superior willingness to help a companion, even in the face of danger from a monstrous creature a thousand times its size! I thought of a date my mother told me she’d had with a wealthy upperclassman from college. They had gone sailing on his family yacht. As my mother looked over the railing at the bounty of the blue water skimming under the boat – her date had cautioned her. He said, “If you fall over, I’ll throw you a life jacket, but that’s as far as I’ll go. I won’t go in after you. If you fall over, you’re on your own.”

Well, I guess the man was being sensible in a way, but hardly chivalrous. How much more gallant that little mouse had been, risking its own life so willingly for a fellow mouse.

I’ve read rats have been known to act the same way, especially when it comes to rescuing individuals they can identify as mates or offspring. Plus of course there is the high intelligence demonstrated by rats and mice, the quality that has caused them to be impressed into service for decades in labs around the world where they serve as stand-ins for humans in endless tests.

So all in all, rodents can be admirable. After witnessing that especially courageous display of first-responder effort on the part of the mouse, I never used another snap-trap to capture one. I turned exclusively to Have-A-Hart traps. That often made quite a chore for me. When I’d hear the Have-A-Hart trap snap in the middle of the night, in the middle of a snowstorm – Oh No! I’d sometimes keep the mouse in the trap until the weather let up a little, but I was reluctant to keep it isolated and hungry in the trap for too long. (The mice never seemed to eat further into the dollop of peanut butter or any other food in the trap once they’d been caught. They seemed to lose all appetite with the stress of the situation, just as humans don’t usually feel like eating anything while waiting in the Doctor’s office.) So the capture of a mouse often meant that I would have to go out in all kinds of inclement weather, and always in the dead of night when I wouldn’t be seen. I’d drive the mouse to one of several likely places I had scoped out for these occasions.

One of my favorite depositories was an old abandoned garage in a distant neighborhood – unconnected with any currently occupied human dwelling. The garage was falling apart, which meant it had lots of gaps into which a mouse could scurry. Rarely did a mouse head for any of those gaps though. When I’d open the door of the trap, most of them would perversely head the other way, in the direction of the highest snow drift in sight. (Maybe not so intelligent after all?) Well, I’d done all I could. I had to have faith that the mouse would double back and find the inviting holes in the garage once I’d left the scene.

And so it went. I had to smile ruefully at myself for undertaking these cold winter excursions, these sorties down dark alleys in the middle of the night. I thought if I expanded my impulse to be helpful to rodents, that impulse perhaps ought to take some less strenuous form. I saw there was a chapter of the “Rat Fancier’s Society” holding meetings in my area. However, as I looked over the membership on the Society’s Meet-Up page online, I began to have some doubts about joining. A number of the members were clearly into the “Goth” scene and showed themselves holding their pet rats as part of their Goth accoutrements. I didn’t know much about Goth enthusiasms. I’d never watched Twilight or gotten a tattoo of a skull on me anywhere. Nevertheless, I thought I’d give the club a try. I clicked that I’d be at their next meeting, to be held at one of the few big bricks-and-mortar bookstores that was still hanging in there in the face of online competition.

When I got to the bookstore the following week, I saw that a whole section of its first floor had been turned into a sort of Parisienne café setting. All sorts of drinks and noshes were available from the counter, and different sized tables were deployed around the space, clearly to accommodate different-sized groups. Apparently a lot of Meet-Ups were held here. I saw most of the tables were occupied by different clutches of people huddled in earnest confab over some obviously shared interest.

It struck me then that I had a problem. I had no idea which of these groups might be the Rat Society. Unless one of the Goth members showed up, I’d have no way of even guessing. I had no cell phone and even if I had, I hadn’t thought to take the number of the group’s organizer. So I went off into a corner of the café and sat at a small table, waiting for a sign. Nothing presented itself.

Finally, when it got to be about ten minutes past the meeting hour, I knew I would have to take action or else risk missing the whole meeting as it took place somewhere right in front of me. So I got up and started to circulate inquiringly. The word “Fancier” utterly escaped me for the moment. So as I leaned down to discreetly address what looked like an officiating member of each group in turn - I had no choice but to use the very un-euphemistic synonym. I whispered, “Excuse me. Are you with the Rat Lover’s Society?”

Well, you can guess what a reaction that drew. My question triggered shock, commiseration at having so revolting a fetish, hilarity, and recoil. Sometimes my question elicited elaborations of the inevitable “No, we’re not!” answer. The head of one group gasped, “Oh, no! Rats are exactly what we DON’T want to see any of. We’re quilters. We do everything to keep rats AWAY from our work!” This emphatic repulse started a chain of recollection in the group. Another member recalled how she’d peered into her cedar chest where she’d stored some of her most precious quilts – only to see that the quilts had been gnawed into tatters, obviously by some incursion of a rodent or of rodents. Upon examining the chest, she saw the small separation in two pieces of its wood that had allowed the invasion. Years of work ruined!

This tragic narrative triggered the memories of other group members as they recounted their own frustrating battles in their war with rodents. The topic drifted away from strict concern with quilts. Another woman at the table recalled her shock at finding the outsized, hand-made hemp hammock she’d lugged all the way back from Mexico – completely chewed away. Again, rodents the obvious culprits! (Although I privately thought moths might also have been implicated in some of these crimes.) As one-by-one, the women in this group were inspired to tell their own war stories in the unending battle against rodents – I myself drifted away – on to the next table.

At this next table I approached, I triggered an even more emphatic convulsion of disgust and autobiography. When I once again posed the question sotto voce, “Pardon me, but are you with the Rat Lover’s Society?” – my informant emitted a loud, bawdy guffaw. “God, NO!” she spat. “My ex was a real rat, and I can tell you – there’s no love lost there!” Turning to what she obviously felt were likely to be her compatriots in suffering on this score, she launched into a description of some of her ex-husband’s unsavory sexual practices.

Having extracted this final “No!” vote, it seemed I had polled all the possible tables in the bookstore. I retreated to sit for a few more minutes in a corner of the cafe, just in case an actual Rat Fancier (ah, now, too late, I remembered the more euphemistic term) should show up. When none did, I looked around the bookstore for a bit and then wandered back out into what was then solid night.

When I got home, I checked the Rat Fanciers’ page and found the meeting had been cancelled. Not having a cell phone really does put me incommunicado. But I took the chance to look more closely at some of the pictures that members of the Society had posted – pictures of themselves posing with their pets. One picture in particular caught my eye. It showed the aftermath of a birthday party that had obviously been thrown in honor of the woman’s large black “fancy rat.” There was a slightly nibbled little birthday cake with a now-quenched single candle stuck into it. And there was Damien, the birthday boy, lying asleep in sated bliss on a purple velvet cushion on its owner’s lap. The rat had a tiny, pointed wizard’s hat on, tied under its chin. You’d think a rat wouldn’t tolerate such a thing, but it apparently had found being the object of such dolly dress-up to be a small price to pay for the lavish lifestyle it enjoyed in return.

The day had indeed produced something to laugh at. Whenever I think back on my hour circulating around, unctuously asking people if they were “Rat Lovers,” I literally LOL. But then I almost always flip moods, thinking of some of the philosophical implications of the existence of those few, those lucky few who enjoy the patronage of members of the Rat Fanciers’ Society. While these rats are lying in luxurious splendor on velvet cushions – there are the vast majority of rats in the world, being hounded, beaten, poisoned into miserable deaths at the end of short, miserable lives. And really, there’s no appreciable difference between the two sets of rats. The celebrated, cosseted rat did nothing to deserve his loving treatment. By the same token, the rat who is being smashed under the shovel of a city worker did nothing to deserve his fate.

These considerations always lead me to recall the disparate kinds of treatment I’d seen given to another species – to ducks. I was the guest at the home of a pen-pal in rural Missouri for a week. The man turned out to have some decided likes and dislikes, some aggressive intolerances. One of his most obvious “pet peeves” was the tapping behavior of a wild duck on his acreage. The duck would appear a few times a day and tap with its beak on the glass of the man’s French doors. It would tap for a minute or two at a time, seeming to solicit either just some playful human companionship, or else the more mundane necessity of some food. Either way, I found the duck’s wistful appearance at the window to be very appealing.

My host took a completely different view of the duck. Every time the duck appeared (which I did not consider to be intrusively often), the man would roil in rage, yelling dumbfounding obscenities. Finally, on the last day of my visit, when the duck appeared outside the windows, the man had had ENOUGH. He rushed into his barn, grabbed a hatchet, and started to pursue the animal around his yard in a froth of fury. I cringed at the horror show in front of me. Instead of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I seemed to be threatened with witnessing the Missouri Hatchet Massacre.

Fortunately, the duck sensed its lack of a welcome in time and ran for cover. It tucked itself so far under the man’s porch that there was no way the fellow would crawl under and get it. But my host assured me that “the next time,” he’d make sure the duck didn’t get away. I was glad I was leaving before what seemed would be an inevitable bloody butchery.

Again, this scene conjured in my mind the stark, unjustified contrasts in treatment that exist in the world. Just before I’d come to this man’s house, I’d stopped in Memphis where I’d visited the Peabody Hotel. There, sharp at 11:00, I’d been in the crowd of tourists who come from all over the world to see the “March of the Ducks.” Some specially favored ducks come down from their palatial roosts on the Hotel roof, step off the elevator, and parade around the fountain in the center of the Hotel lobby – ducks in a row. An appreciative wave of “Ooohs” and Aaaahs” and picture-snapping runs through the crowd as these ducks strut their stuff. When the March is over, some of the ducks waddle back in military precision into the elevator that whisks them back up to their penthouse suites. Some stay behind and swim in the fountain.

These admired Peabody ducks are no better than the duck in the back yard of my Missouri host. If anything, that wild duck seemed more personable and intelligent than the trained ducks of Memphis. It was sheer luck that destined one to painful extermination and another to the cheers of multitudes.

All of which seems to me to further put the lie to the assurances of so many of Oprah’s guests and of Oprah herself – the fatuous assurances that we can all be anything we want to be, that we can all “become” what we dream. In the United States and many other democratic countries, people do have a large amount of self-determination. To a great extent, they are responsible for their own circumstances in life. However, there is still a large measure of fate that is beyond anyone’s control. One gets struck by lightning; one standing just six inches away doesn’t get hit. One gets caught in the cross-fire of a gang gun fight; one standing six inches away is safe. And so on through car accidents, the sweep of a wave at sea, the direction in which a deadly germ wafts, etc., etc.

Most people recognize how the luck of the draw has determined people’s fate in that kind of split-second event. But what people less often seem to acknowledge is how much of one’s life is determined by the attitudes of the surrounding people in power. While a healthy white male in 1850 in Virginia might have had some chance of realizing an aspiration to be President of the United States – a black slave in the same neighborhood would have had no such chance. While a Jewish man in 1940 in Los Angeles might have had a chance of realizing an aspiration to be a movie mogul – a Jewish man in 1940 in Auschwitz would have had almost no such chance. All of the positive-thinking guests holding forth on TV shows are talking twaddle to people in such circumstances.

Indeed, the “Anyone can succeed” messages of motivational speakers and life coaches can be worse than twaddle. If their message is that anyone can realize his or her dreams, then they must be implicitly laying blame on all the abject victims of others’ rampant cruelty. If the Jewish man in Auschwitz didn’t realize his dream of producing feature films – if indeed he didn’t survive through to the end of the week – it must be his own fault, according to these motivational gurus. The Jewish man must have failed to think positively enough. Or he must have failed to properly attune himself to the Universal Energy Force.

Again, in democratic societies, most people do have a lot of latitude to pursue any dream, to bring any talent they have to fruition. However, even in the most freedom-friendly societies, conditions can change with alarming speed. All the myriad possibilities afforded to individuals in pockets of the society or in the society as a whole, can be reduced to the single laser-point dreams of dictators, or simply of people in power who have adamantine prejudices and aversions. Evading the cruel impulses of those in authority can be impossible, as demonstrated through the ages by the deaths of millions upon millions of those caught in wars, holocausts, and genocides, or just in the sights of someone for whom an individual’s life has no value.

We are all in danger of becoming sitting ducks – or rats in a trap.

I'm Watching You Like a Hawk

My semi-feral cats were really desolating the wildlife in my garden. So, by blocking off the pet-door, I’ve been keeping the cats inside the house during the daytime while birds and squirrels are scavengering and vulnerable. Then I unblock the pet-door at night so the cats can still exercise their feral natures – and incidentally help keep the neighborhood clear of rodents.

Although frankly, I feel just about as sad about a rodent falling prey as I do about a bird or squirrel. I have seen compelling instances of bravery, altruism, and intelligence on the part of rats and mice and I came close to joining the “Rat Fanciers Society” once. But I have to yield to community opinion that rodents can create unique health hazards and can overrun a neighborhood if not checked by chemical means or by roving colonies of feral cats. I hear there is now a waiting list of neighborhoods in Chicago that have put in bids to have feral cat colonies relocated onto their blocks for purposes of rat patrol.

But this new routine I have of keeping the cats indoors during the day and letting them out at night has been a good compromise – except, it has been grueling for me. I have to get up just at dawn and corral the cats. They come in to be fed, but then caterwaul when they find they can’t get outside again. It’s a chorus of crescendoing caterwauls. So it’s hard for me to get back to sleep. Usually I don’t even try. I straggle blearily through a few chores until the cats accept their enclosure and settle down for the day. Then I can take a nap. At dusk I let them out again. I’m looking forward to winter when dawn comes later and when I’ll be able to sleep later.

Even though this routine has been rough on me, it has paid off. The variety of birds who have come back to feed at my birdfeeders and flowers has increased enormously. What’s more, I haven’t had the heartbreak of tripping over the corpses of squirrels I befriended whenever I walk through the garden. Nor have I seen any more squirrels making their way piteously, through what would surely prove to be very brief lives, on three legs and one bloody, hanging stump. My yard has become the kind of haven it was before the advent of the cats.

This proliferation of wildlife in my yard has in turn helped draw a family of four Cooper’s hawks into the area. These birds are of course also top-of-the-food-chain predators, but they haven’t been doing nearly the wanton damage my cats did, and the presence of the hawks itself contributes to the diversity of my garden’s ecosystem. I’ve been surprised at the restraint the hawks have shown when it comes to predation. During all the weeks they have been frequenting the high branches of my trees, I have only seen one pigeon fall victim. For the most part, the hawks seem to be making a living posing for all the neighborhood shutterbugs that their majestic presence has drawn out.

However, I’ve witnessed some heart-stoppingly close calls. One of those squirrels that my new routine had undoubtedly saved from the cats – seemed on the verge of falling prey to the hawks. I stood looking on in fear and trepidation as the squirrel scampered up the maple tree where a hawk was perched and unbelievably approached the hawk, tapping it on the talons, and then looking up at it as if inviting it to play! When I told an acquaintance about this bizarre bravado, he took it as a commonplace. He told me that squirrels often like to befriend pigeons and this squirrel must have thought he’d found the King of Pigeons. Well, I don’t know. I had never seen squirrels soliciting the companionship of pigeons. But my friend said it was so.

However, the scene grew more threatening still. The squirrel continued to try to engage the hawk in fellowship, looking up appealingly at it, when a second hawk flew in out of the blue and perched on the other side of the squirrel. The squirrel looked from one to the other, still in an attitude of having found a gang it might like to join. My friend, maintaining his whimsical, children’s-book view of the interaction, projected a likely ingratiating dialogue for the squirrel. “Hey, you are two big, strong pigeons! You guys must be from the South Side. Haha.”

But as the two hawks closed in on the squirrel, beetling down on it – it became clear that the squirrel was having second thoughts about engaging them. Continuing to project a train of thought for the squirrel, I believed I could see it re-thinking its enthusiasm. “Well, haha, I can see you guys don’t have time to play right now. Ahem, come to think of it, I have an appointment. I have to be – somewhere else. I really should be going. See ya…”

The squirrel high-tailed it off farther up the branch. It looked back at the hawks as they craned menacingly after it, still not attacking. Then after that one backward glance, the squirrel clambered up and away – amazingly safe.

I wasn’t able to get a picture of that moment when the squirrel stood hemmed in by the two hawks as they bent down in increasingly intense inspection of it. But I got my camera in time to catch a picture as the squirrel looked back at where it had been, and the two hawks flapped a fierce “Good riddance” after it. I have included that picture here. It is hard to see the squirrel who is way off to the left of the picture. You can just make out its pointy ears and its one foreleg braced over an intervening branch.

The other pictures I’ve included are all of the largest of the hawks, posing in lone magnificence. I made a copy of the picture I took of the hawk standing on a neighbor’s tree stump. I had the picture framed and presented it to my neighbor before I realized that everyone in the neighborhood was snapping pictures and that there was a glut of these nature studies all up and down the street. I also snapped a close-up of the hawk’s head on the day it did catch a pigeon. There’s a small pigeon feather visible in the hawk’s beak.

Finally, I took close-up pictures of the hawk’s talons as it perched on the edge of my building gutter. Occasionally, the hawk would flex its claws, in the way an arthritic person might clench and unclench his hand when he first gets out of bed in the morning, in order to get things moving again. So there’s a picture of the hawk’s talons straight – and then a picture of the clenched clump the hawk made as it exercised them.

That neighbor to whom I gave a framed picture runs a tattoo parlor. I also gave him copies of the close-up pictures of the hawk’s talons. I thought he could design a good tattoo using them as reference. Perhaps we can start our own gang – The Talons. What an intimidating name! But instead of being a “gangsta” gang – we could be a gang for the good of the neighborhood. We could menace all the human rats into cleaning up their act.

Candidates for the Presidency 2020 - Going Down the Rabbit Warren

None of the individuals in the large field of candidates running for President this year are very inspiring. They are all starting from pretty much the same premises and are proposing pretty much the same programs. All that distinguishes one from the other are slight differences in the way each would tweak tax rates to pay for these programs. However, some of the candidates have distinguished themselves by some specific lapse of logic they’ve demonstrated in the course of their campaigns.

For Elizabeth Warren, this lapse is evident in her proposal to subsidize childcare for everyone. Her plan includes providing a network of government-supported childcare facilities, paid for with a 2% tax on those in the highest income brackets. But the problem(s) with her proposal should be apparent from the moment she introduces the topic in the many public forums where she has appeared. Listen again to her introductory remarks when she appeared on the TV show The View.

Warren launched into her proposal by recalling the frustration she had experienced getting childcare as she was pursuing her political career. She said she went through a series of childcare providers, but none of them proved to be suitable. Potential sitters and nannies would appear – then disappear. Or else they just weren’t equipped to responsibly care for children. Warren followed up with her proposal for universal subsidized childcare.

But isn’t it obvious that there’s a disconnect, a non sequitur, implicit in her proposal? Warren always had the money to pay for the best childcare. Funding wasn’t a problem for her. And yet she couldn’t find suitable caregivers. If she, a relatively wealthy person, couldn’t find a single acceptable childcare provider long-term – how can intelligent, capable caregivers be found for a whole nation of families?

While paying for childcare is a problem for many people, the more fundamental problem is the sheer lack of decent, loving people willing to commit themselves to caring for other people’s children. A single father I know summarized the situation as it is faced, not in theoretical proposals, but on the ground, in the lives of real people on a daily basis.

My friend was also fairly well-to-do and was willing to pay top dollar for help caring for his two young daughters while he was at work. He thought he had exercised reasonable care in selecting people from the job applicants available. But what he faced was a procession of irresponsible, incompetent, and uncaring people. He gave me a litany of his childcare woes.

One person he hired brought a stack of religious pamphlets with her to the job the first day and concentrated on proselytizing his children into “The Rising Moon Cult” or some other such absurdity, rather than simply, sanely seeing that they got a hot lunch. Another caregiver stayed a few days, then disappeared. She walked out in the middle of the day, leaving the door wide open in her wake. (His children thought she met a boyfriend who drove up in front of the house – someone who naturally took immediate precedence over the children.) Another caregiver could be seen after-the-fact on the nanny-cam slapping his daughter smartly across the face when she wouldn’t finish her peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Another immediately filled his medicine chest with anti-fungal creams, something that bode a problem he didn’t want to invite into his house. On the first day of another caregiver’s employment, my friend came home and found the back of one of the sturdy family chairs had been snapped off. The caregiver said it had simply “fallen apart.” But when a second chair lost its back on the second day, and then a bit later, when a third chair turned up backless – my friend got the creepy feeling that some secret, bizarre ritual was being enacted while he was out of the house. And on and on and on.

Finally, while there were a few caregivers who might have been more grounded and sincerely caring, my friend found their inability to drive to present more of a problem than he initially thought it would be. Or else, their English was much more limited than it had seemed during their interviews, something which he felt could present a real problem during emergencies or during any unforeseen situation.

My friend starkly summed up the situation. He said real life is NOT like television. TV sitcoms are filled with witty, wise, responsible, and often beautiful housekeepers – from Hazel, through Alice of The Brady Bunch, down to Fran Drescher’s depiction of The Nanny. But in reality, he concluded – “Such people do NOT exist!” So if my friend, like Elizabeth Warren, couldn’t find even one competent childcare provider at top salary - where can we find several million of them to satisfy the demand that Warren’s proposal would create?

It’s true that Warren’s proposal generally envisions childcare that takes place in credentialed facilities. That would bring a degree of professionalism to the occupation of childcare provider. There wouldn’t be lone sitters bringing their individual derangements into a home. Presumably each childcare facility would have a staff of people who had been qualified in some way. Being part of a staff would also help drown any individual’s potentially dangerous quirks in the general pool of activity and supervision that exists in places of business.

There’s still a glaring problem though. Elizabeth Warren tells about the problems she had finding childcare in the context of the necessity she faced of leaving the house in pursuit of her career. She gives off the bustling vibe of someone who has places to go, people to see - of someone who has an important contribution to make in the larger world. She wants all women to be put on a more equal footing with men in their ability to be released from strictly housebound occupations so that they can express themselves in more diverse ways, so that they can paint on a larger canvas.

But that sort of attitude automatically assumes or creates an underclass of people, inevitably consisting mostly of women. These women presumably wouldn’t have places to go and people to see, and presumably wouldn’t have contributions to make in the corridors of power. Caregivers who work in credentialed facilities might be given somewhat higher status than those individuals who work in private homes, the more so because the latter often are drawn from pools of immigrant workers without green cards and without the ability to demand perks such as health insurance, paid vacations, and a minimum wage. 

Whether Warren’s projected army of caregivers consists of professionalized caregivers or whether it would continue to include many catch-as-catch-can laborers – the fact remains that this army must consist primarily of women who have few pretensions or aspirations to make “important contributions” to society-at-large. They will necessarily be women who don’t want to run for higher office, who don’t feel a calling to climb any corporate ladder, who aren’t inspired to lock themselves away in laboratories to research the causes of cancer or in observatories to contemplate the nature of the universe. Instead they must necessarily be women who are either satisfied with or who are bound to the traditionally circumscribed role of tending children. They must be women who have little ambition beyond the walls of the playroom. Implicit in Warren’s proposal is the creation and relegation of all such women to second-class citizenship. For every handful of Warrens who importantly rush out of the house each day to make contributions and to express themselves – there must be at least one woman with no such pretensions, one woman who is acknowledged as having no larger contribution to make, no important seat of power to occupy.

But assuming our willingness to create such an underclass of women, who is going to willingly consign herself for any length of time to that class? Most Americans, fired by the motivational speaker’s ringing assurance that “You can do anything – you can be anything!” – do want to be out there running for President, or designing the next new fashion craze of a shawl, or driving in the Indie 500, etc., etc. There aren’t nearly enough Americans to fill the care-giving jobs that already exist in this country. Almost everywhere, there are severe shortages of teachers, nurses, senior care facility workers. (Which last point incidentally highlights another logical and practical gap in Elizabeth’s Warren thinking. If it’s important that parents be freed from the confinement of around-the-clock childcare so that they can go out and express and create in the larger world – isn’t it just as important that people be freed from around-the-clock care of aging or disabled relatives so that they go out and express and create on a grand scale? However, a subsidy to make universal senior care available doesn’t seem to figure large in any of the candidates’ platforms.)

Getting back to the main point, it’s this unwillingness of most bright, energetic, educated women to limit themselves to traditional childcare roles, whether in the home or in day care centers, that has created the existing shortage of caregivers and that will make such shortages even more widespread and apparent if Warren’s (and the other candidates’) plans for quality universal childcare are enacted. Furthermore, the need for more and more childcare providers will exacerbate the kind of hand-me-down society that we are already generating when it comes to childcare.

The parents who went to Yale and who believe it is their calling to lead busy lives of importance – will avail themselves of the government subsidized daycare centers and will leave their children at the most highly-rated of these centers. These centers will generally be staffed by women (again, it will usually be women) who did not go to Yale and whose backgrounds and circumstances generally seemed to foreclose them from having exalted ambitions. However, these women will in turn be faced with the same problem the Ivy League parents have - where to put their children while they themselves are working at the centers.

These staff members will in turn enroll their children in the subsidized daycare centers. But the daycare facilities left to these workers’ children likely won’t be such topflight centers. The centers that this second tier of children are consigned to will likely suffer from even more acute staffing shortages. Many of those staff members who are available will be a more fluctuating lot. They will be young women who take the job as a stopgap, until they can get jobs in fields that really appeal to them. These centers’ employees will be like the waitstaff of many typical restaurants in Hollywood. These employees are simply marking time until their big break comes, however the “big break” is defined.

Alternatively, the more permanent staff members in this second tier of centers will be one of three kinds of people. They might be simple souls without urgency and without packed schedules in their private lives. Or, they might be rather embittered individuals who are chafing at their low status in life and who could conceivably take this resentment out on any child left alone with them. Or, they might be foreign-born individuals whose green cards haven’t been examined too carefully. In any of these cases, they won’t be the kinds of people whom upper tier parents would invite into their homes or associate with in any meaningful way. They’d constitute a separate class of individuals, existing in a different realm from the privileged parents.

However, the step-down declension will not stop there. This above group of staffers will in turn have their own children. These children will also need to be put somewhere while their mothers are working at the daycare centers. Even under Warren’s idealized plan of providing universal daycare, it’s still likely that the children of this last set of caregivers might not find places at any credentialed center. Again, there simply won’t be enough workers to tend to everyone’s children. But also, this last set of workers might include people from more family-bound cultures and individuals less oriented to leaving their own children in abstracted, business-like settings. They might tend to do what a lot of mothers are currently doing. They might leave their children with neighbors or grandparents or other members of their extended families – with people who might be chosen at random out of exigency rather than because of any real care-giving skills or temperament they might have.

So there will be this passing along of children, with one group of children jostling another set out of place with their parents, and so on and so forth. Like dominoes, as one set of children falls into the hands of strangers’ care, that will push another set of children into stranger’s care, on until the last domino child is pushed off into some very random kind of care.

This resultant situation reminds me of a parable I once read in an economics textbook about a poor Irish village. As one luckier segment of the population garnered a bit of money, these families payed to have their wash done by the women in some less-well-off families. As the women in this second set of families earned a little income from doing washing, they in turn passed along the onerous job of doing their own wash to a set of families still less well-off. And on it went, with everyone passing off their clothes to be washed by women in successively less favored circumstances. Everyone did someone else’s wash. Instead of doing it herself, every housewife paid someone else in turn to do it.

I don’t remember what the author of this economics text was trying to demonstrate with this parable of the poor Irish village and its long relay of dirty laundry. The author might have been suggesting a way that a poor, stagnant village suffering an economic depression could generate income for every household by monetizing the act of doing the weekly laundry. Or the textbook author might have simply been illustrating how an economic folly gets perpetuated. Maybe a little of both. The point might have been to illustrate how an economy could be artificially, but needlessly, stimulated by turning a routine household function into a “job.”

In any case, the parallel with Warren’s proposal is apt. But here’s a revolutionary thought. Why not just return to a state in which everyone does his or her own laundry? Why not return to a State in which every set of parents takes care of their own children – except with the expanded awareness that “it takes a village” to raise a child. This expanded awareness could spur, not a succession of paid employments, but a free-spirited, interactive community of endeavor in which both men and women share equally.

My parents raised me alongside them in a family printing business in which I participated from the time I could toddle. This was the greatest gift that my parents gave me, and I believe the greatest gift that any child could receive. My parents didn’t mete out “quality time” with me. They didn’t ever give the impression that they had more important places to be, more important people to see. We were there for each other’s company and each other’s contribution to the whole. I was never “placed” anywhere, in any pre-school, or daycare center. I was never handed-off to stranger people. We were in it together, heart and soul.

It’s outside the scope of this essay to suggest the many ways in which more children could enjoy such childhoods, while still enabling the work of the world to get done – while seeing that corporate decisions get made and sewer lines get laid and asparagus gets grown. For now, it’s enough to say that Elizabeth Warren’s plan, and the parallel plans of most of the other candidates, is not the way.

Candidates for the Presidency 2020 - Kamala Overboard

None of the individuals in the large field of candidates running for President this year are very inspiring. They are all starting from pretty much the same premises and are proposing pretty much the same programs. All that distinguishes one from the other are slight differences in the way each would tweak tax rates to pay for these programs. However, some of the candidates have distinguished themselves by some specific lapse of logic they’ve demonstrated in the course of their campaigns.

For Kamala Harris, this lapse occurred when she reacted to Jussie Smollett’s claim of having been the target of a racist, homophobic attack. Harris jumped on Smollett’s report as evidence of widespread prejudice loose in the land. There was actually a note of satisfaction in her voice, a note of triumphant “I told you so!” as she waved the presumed attack as a flag of proof that vicious prejudice was ubiquitous. The attack provided her with a platform from which she could demonstrate the superiority of her indignation. As she ringingly declared that the attack was nothing short of a “modern day lynching,” she raised herself head and shoulders above all those lesser beings who didn’t perceive the profound seriousness of the threat.

The only problem was – it should have been obvious to anyone who logically considered Smollett’s claim for a moment, that it was all a hoax. I laughed it off and presumed everyone else would immediately do the same. I was shocked when I saw how seriously the police and politicians such as Harris were taking Smollett’s claims.

There were a couple of reasons why I immediately wrote-off Smollett’s report as just so much self-dramatizing fiction. First of all, it reminded me of the 1987 Tawana Brawley case. I’m old enough to vividly remember the nation-wide uproar that occurred in the wake of then 15-year-old Tawana Brawley’s claim that she had been raped by a gang of white racists, including policemen and an attorney, near her New York State home of Wappinger Falls. After being missing for four days, Brawley was found, seemingly in a daze, in a wooded area. She was stuffed in a large bag of feces. Her clothing had been partially torn off and some of the feces had been used to smear her body with racial epithets.

At the time, I thought it sounded rather unlikely that there would be a gang of would-be Klansmen wilding their way through rural New York, singling out a passing black schoolgirl on whom to perpetrate such a bizarre attack. Primarily I wondered how and why any group of men would be carrying a large bag filled with feces. Or, if they hadn’t been carrying the bag in preparation for a planned assault, where would they have found pounds of feces on short notice for an impulse attack?

Besides, I didn’t think that true racists, animated by a seething hatred of black people, operated that way. I thought of the tragic death of Emmett Till who’d been beaten and dragged to death after allegedly whistling at a white woman. I thought of the deaths of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, the civil rights activists who’d been overtaken in their car at night along a lonely Mississippi road and beaten, shot, and crudely buried. The racist attacks on those individuals had been stark and brutal. There had been none of the juvenile elaboration that characterized Brawley’s alleged attack. In contrast to real racist attacks, Brawley’s attack seemed to be a highly exaggerated form of a swirly or a wedgie cruelly delivered by a bullying gang of teens in a locker room. It just didn’t seem as if white supremacists would pause to include such confounding humiliations in their generally raw attacks.

However, so many people used the occasion of Brawley’s report as proof of the ongoing undertow of savage racism in our country, that their vehemence had me half-convinced. When I heard people ranging from Al Sharpton to Bill Cosby rallying to make the Brawley case a cause célèbre and to defend her during the long succession of court cases that ensued – I began to doubt my own sense of something amiss in her testimony.

However, something amiss there was. Although to this day, Brawley maintains the validity of her account and although she still has a few supporters, it is now generally accepted that her report was fabricated. All the evidence pointed away from there having been any rape or indeed any assault of any kind. There were no wilding racists and the feces might have been supplied by Brawley’s own dog. Many believe that Brawley was indeed a victim, but not a victim of white racism. It seems likelier that she was the victim of her stepfather’s abuse. She was so afraid of the beating he’d give her when she came home late after partying with some boys, that (possibly with her mother’s help), she concocted the dramatic predicament in which she was found.

After almost a year, even Al Sharpton had to somewhat back off his efforts to make Brawley a symbolic victim of white racism. A general skepticism arose when it came to any such claims involving twisty attacks. But time has passed, and most people now seem to have forgotten the cautionary lessons taught by the Brawley case. When Smollett advanced his claim, even Al Sharpton charged once more into the fray in full battle regalia.

It seemed to me though that it shouldn’t take familiarity with the Brawley case to make people skeptical about Smollett’s accusation. There was a much more obvious problem with his charge. Simple logic should have alerted police and politicians alike to the sheer phoniness of it, before squads of personnel were diverted from more urgent duties in order to investigate Smollett’s claims which, even if true, would have represented a relatively bland confrontation. Having a rope hung mockingly around his neck and having some harmless, watery liquid splashed on him could hardly be counted in the same category as the searing racism that had been faced by Till, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman.

The underlying failure of logic in the Smollett case becomes apparent when you consider - either the presumed attack was premeditated, or else it was spontaneous. If it was premeditated, that meant that the attackers would have had to walk back and forth, night after cold night (the attack occurred in the winter), along a desolate Chicago underpass, waiting to intercept Smollett. Smollett didn’t make a habit of going out to get a late snack from that nearby convenience store, so the attackers, armed with their paraphernalia, would have had to haunt that stretch near Smollett’s apartment – in the hopes that they could catch him sometime or other. It would be a very improbable duo of attackers indeed who would take so much time and trouble over the perpetration of such a trivial attack.

On the other hand, if the attack was spontaneous, that would have been a remarkable coincidence. The attackers would have to have been standing around with a rope and bleach in hand at just the moment that someone they could identify as a gay black man walked by. Then they had to have immediately thought up the symbolic threat they could lumber the man with, referencing old Klan tactics. Why would men even be standing around with newly purchased rope and a bottle of bleach/acid/water late at night in the first place? None of it makes sense.

So either premeditated or spontaneous – the attack doesn’t hold water. I would expect someone running for President to have the sense to recognize that. Yes, this actor’s allegation is a minor matter in the larger scheme of things. But if someone like Kamala Harris exercises such poor judgement in the face of a minor hoax, how can she be expected to exercise good judgment when it comes to major international threat? If countries inimical to the U.S. start to rattle their sabers (as will almost certainly happen) - could she be counted on to distinguish an obvious hoax, an empty threat – from a real threat? Or would she continue to put political correctness and a desire to showcase a pandering support of beleaguered minorities ahead of logical appraisal?

Based on her over-the-top reaction to Smollett, I don’t think Kamala Harris could be counted on to make such crucial distinctions. There has to be a better alternative candidate out there.

An Odd Inventory in Bangkok

Two members of my tour group and I were walking down one of the main streets of Bangkok. It was probably Sukhumvit Road, often billed as the longest street in the world, stretching through Bangkok all the way to the Cambodian border. Like many of Bangkok’s busy streets, this was a formidable, 6-lane expanse. It certainly wasn’t like the streets in the old sections of European cities where tourists wander.

The sun beat down on us along the treeless stretch. Occasionally we’d see a person hurrying along, wearing a mask, an obvious precaution against Bangkok’s notorious smog. The street was not particularly pedestrian-friendly not only because it posed such a hazard from traffic exhaust, but also because it couldn’t be crossed. When some shop on the other side of the street caught our attention, we looked in vain for a way to get to that other side. We found that there aren’t frequent traffic lights in Bangkok as there are in most U.S. cities. There was no question of trying to dodge across those six lanes of traffic. That would have been a death-defying, Evel Knievel feat. We saw we would have to walk the equivalent of four or five blocks in order to get to one of the steel bridges that span the street at rare intervals. So we contented ourselves with what was on “our side.”

We imagined the people whose shops lined the sidewalk would similarly make the distinction between “our” side and “their” side.” The traffic lanes created two different turfs with very little easy, friendly interaction between the two. We even fancied that if you were born to parents with a shop on one side of the street, it was likely you might never venture to that other side, a permanent “terra incognita.”

But there was plenty to see and do just sticking to the one side. The work-a-day world is much more open to view in places such as Thailand than it is in the U.S. where work and home are strictly separated and where work is most often restricted to shops and offices behind closed doors. In that sense, Thailand is the ideal setting for home-schoolers. Children can see what their parents do for a living and can even participate in the work, learning “on the job.”

We passed by a number of mechanics’ shops. Greasy engines and auto parts spilled out onto the sidewalk, looking like a bunch of captives making a break for it. The cars that the engines had come from were also often astride the sidewalk and were being operated on by individuals sprawled under them. So we had the interesting experience of stepping over supine bodies as we walked along. Sometimes it wasn’t cars being operated on, but tuk tuks, Thailand’s famous electrified rickshaws.

Some of the shops had roll-up doors raised as if inviting an audience to view a stage show on which the curtains had been raised. We saw a woman pedaling furiously at a fabric being fed through an old-fashioned treadle sewing machine. Another shop featured a performance by two workers dipping rolled T-shirts and scarves into vats for tie dying. Some of their finished products were pinned up, brightly waving at us. In still another shop we saw a blender whirring away on a counter making bubble tea to which tapioca pearls would be added.

Farther along, we saw a man engaged in some dovetail joinery project. He was deftly attaching wooden boards to each other at right angles, obviously making some sort of box. As we paused, he looked up and gestured us to come in and watch. We gleefully took the chance to make contact with a real native. The man spoke perfect English and we immediately started to pepper him with questions about what it was like to live in Thailand. He was apparently a more affluent entrepreneur because he told us that he sometimes would take the summer months off, get away from steamy Bangkok, and go to his second home in Germany. We later learned this was a common practice among wealthier Thais. There’s a mass exodus from Bangkok in the summer as everyone who can afford to goes to relatively cooler Germany or other European countries.

The man stopped his work and escorted us down a breezeway to the back of his building to see his garden. He proudly pointed to the frangipani, hibiscus, and rhododendron that were in lush line-up along the borders of his yard. It was hard to focus on the beauty of these blooms though because our conversation was being conducted to the accompaniment of a steady, loud chorus of yapping. One side of the man’s yard was taken up by a dog run which had several scrawny dogs racing up and down its length, directing their fusillade of noise at our intrusion. The man explained that he often took stray dogs off the street. He said he tried to do something for them, but it was hard because there isn’t a strong tradition of adopting dogs as pets in Thailand. Dogs are left to scrounge and suffer injury on the streets against a background of most people’s indifference.

As we walked back through the shop, we noticed several racks of umbrellas standing at attention against one wall. The senior member of our little troop commented on this array and especially admired one frilly, flowered parasol. The man smiled benevolently at our companion. He took the umbrella off the rack and handed it to her with a little bow of respect. He said, “Here Madame, it is yours. No charge. It is such a hot, sunny day out. You need something to protect you from the sun.”

Our friend thanked him profusely, but then wondered how he came to have so many umbrellas for sale.

The man said that he came by all these used umbrellas at funerals. He said that mourners often carry umbrellas to shade themselves when they walk behind the casket as it is taken to the place of cremation. During the days of chanting and other rituals that precede the cremation, people often put down their umbrellas and forget them. If they were not very expensive umbrellas, no one ever comes back to claim them. So the man said he retrieved those umbrellas and sold them as an adjunct to his business.

Our friend was a tad less enthusiastic about her umbrella now that she knew it had been connected with a cremation. The man had said these umbrellas were left behind by mourners. But we could imagine that sometimes an umbrella might have belonged to the actual deceased, part of the individual’s worldly belongs that were shed. However, our friend was still appreciative of the present. But she wondered how the man happened to attend so many funerals.

“Oh, I thought that was clear,” he said, surprised at the question. “That is my main business. I make coffins.”

We looked at the “box” we’d seen him fashioning with tongue-in-groove precision, and now recognized it for what it was to become. It was the start of another coffin to be added to his inventory of coffin boxes we newly noticed stacked up in an alcove of his shop.

“Yes,” he summarized. “That is my business. I sell coffins and umbrellas.”

We exchanged a few friendly farewells, and then went back out onto the sun-drenched sidewalk. Our friend opened her parasol and twirled it coquettishly as we proceeded down the street. We laughed in celebration of the glorious incongruity of our encounter. What an incredible inventory of goods the man sold. Imagine! Coffins and umbrellas! Somehow that seemed to sum up Bangkok - a wildly unpredictable mix of livelihood and life.

College Bound - The College Admissions Scandal

The real shame behind the current scandal over parents’ manipulations to get their children into Ivy League colleges is not so much the cheating they’ve been doing. It’s the fact that they place such importance on getting into prestigious schools in the first place.

These parents have such tunnel vision. They are locked into struggling to achieve something that doesn’t matter or that shouldn’t matter. The fact is that having a degree from an Ivy League University is usually not necessary to lead a happy, productive life. In fact, graduating from Harvard might actually limit one’s possibilities in some perverse way. The high school drop-out might feel psychically limited to flipping burgers. He feels the job of being a corporate executive is closed to him. But the MBA from Yale is equally psychically limited. She doesn’t feel able to entertain taking a long-term job as a burger flipper. She feels that she must be on the fast track to advancement in the corporate realm.

I’m reminded of the Mary Tyler Moore sitcom. Once Mary’s TV character became fully established and successful in her career as television producer, she felt she really had to move out of her convivial studio apartment with its pull-out bed – into the sterile, removed high-rise apartment we saw her occupying through the last years of the series. The only reason her home life continued to have any interest at all is that she imported many of the characters from her old, still congenial, work life into it.

As it went in fiction, so it typically goes in fact. The poor man might feel he will never be free to drive a Mercedes and live in an 8-bedroom mansion in the suburbs. But the rich man probably will never feel free to drive an old Toyota and to live in an apartment over a tavern in an ethnic neighborhood. Each one is operating under certain ultimately self-imposed constraints. A Yale education, or the lack thereof, doesn’t necessarily have much to do with an individual’s prospects. In the relatively prosperous and safe United States, it’s the extent of each person’s imagination and spirit that will play the biggest part in determining whether he or she is successful in ways that count.

Just looking at practicalities, it’s not true that a degree from a notable university is the only on-ramp to a distinguished career. I went to a 4-year State-supported community college that didn’t have much cachet in the larger world. I went for the fun of it, not caring about what it would do to advance my earning capacity or my status farther down the road. However, my closest cohort in college, Linda Winer, was perhaps a little more concerned about what she could do when she graduated.

As it turned out, our school’s status had absolutely nothing to do with her eventual success. In her senior year as a music major, she saw an ad announcing a seminar that was being offered in California to train music critics. She wrote the requisite autobiographical essay and sample critiques of some local musical performances she attended. She had the ability to encapsulate opinions in snappy phrases. The rather indifferent production of the Puccini opera she saw got the title “Blah Bohéme.” She bundled up all this application material and sent the packet off to Martin Bernheimer, the already established critic who would be heading the panel conducting the seminar. She was accepted, and off she went for a season in Los Angeles.

Her ability was recognized; her student articles got circulated beyond the confines of the seminar. When she returned to Chicago, she was readily taken on as a second-string music critic for The Chicago Tribune. But it wasn’t too long before she became one of the Tribune’s lead music/theater critics. From there she went to on become the music/theater critic for New York’s Newsday. Along the way, it mattered not one whit what college she had attended. I don’t think anyone ever thought to ask her. That’s probably the way it is for most people who have independently launched themselves by one route or another. Their schooling becomes largely irrelevant.

The irrelevance of a college degree becomes even more apparent when I consider the “home-schooled” people I know. Not only did most of them never go to any college, prestigious or otherwise - but most of them never went to any high school or even any grade school. Their resumes are blank on that score. However, not one of them that I can think of ever had any trouble getting any job he or she sought.

It’s true that none of them attempted to practice medicine, engineering, or any profession where public safety is significantly at stake and where formal educational credentials are therefore necessary. None wanted to burst in off the street and claim a position in the higher echelons of a Silicon Valley corporation. None wanted to jump into practice at a prestigious law firm, although there is still a means of becoming a lawyer without attending law school. Four states still allow aspiring attorneys to take Abe Lincoln’s route to that career. They allow individuals to enroll in apprenticeship programs with established lawyers (at a cost of a few hundred dollars a year), and then to take the Bar Exam. If they pass the Exam, they’re qualified.

So perhaps my home-schooled acquaintances were simply lucky that they didn’t want to engage in an occupation for which a degree is immediately required. But none of them “settled.” They are all working at jobs they truly enjoy. One is head of the accounting department in a California casino. Another one, a self-proclaimed “car nut,” is working at his dream job. He is chief mechanic for his city’s police department, responsible for maintaining and repairing all their rolling stock.

Surprisingly, these home-schooled individuals generally didn’t encounter any difficulties when they applied for their respective jobs. If anything, their lack of any formal education might have given them an edge in the application process. The novelty of those blank spaces on their resumes got their applications kicked off the normal assembly line assessment process. That home-schooling background suggested they might have the kind of “fresh approach” to offer that so many bosses say they are seeking. So, while other applicants’ resumes were tortuously being processed through computer-aided elimination protocols – my home-schooled acquaintances got right in to see an actual human being who assessed them personally from the start. Then their enthusiasm, their articulateness, and the scope of what they had learned independently, won the day for them.

A number of the candidates running for President this year are adding weight to the false idea that a college education is the royal road to success. They are perpetuating the myth that a college diploma is the only way to boost a person’s earning capacity over a lifetime. These candidates are strengthening that unimaginative, limiting assumption by making “free college for all” a major plank in their platforms. When Herbert Hoover promised voters “a chicken in every pot” if he was elected, he was promising something that truly was necessary for a person’s well-being. He was promising FOOD! If our current crop of candidates really wanted to make a freer, more equitable America - instead of promising free college, they would advocate spending those taxpayer billions on providing people with a plentiful variety of healthy food, decent shelter, an urban landscape with a well-maintained infrastructure, a clean and safe environment, and access to free, unlimited learning through well-stocked libraries.

Alternatively, the politicians could work to bring the cost of going to a liberal arts college down to earth by recalling the basics of what learning entails. Hardly anyone has ever gotten a better liberal education than Socrates’ students. This simply involved their wandering around under the trees with Socrates, engaging in conversation with him and their fellow students. That kind of ideal and idyllic education could be replicated for mere dollars today. What has caused universities to elaborate themselves into massive building programs and bureaucracies, and consequently into massive expense?

Even in those cases in which an individual’s career ambitions do require a college degree, particularly a degree from a college with some expensive facilities - it still rarely matters which school an individual attends, as long as that school is accredited. Most of the Doctors I had to choose from on my HMO plan have come from rather obscure foreign universities – medical schools in the Philippines, Mexico, or the Middle East. But they maintain their patients’ loyalty and are generally being advanced within their departments according to their attitude and skills, not according to the prestige of the schools they attended way back when.

My mother graduated from Northwestern. But thinking back on it, she realized that as she subsequently applied for and got jobs such as translator in the foreign department of a large commercial firm – not once had anyone made an issue of which university she’d attended. Ultimately, it didn’t matter whether she had gone to Northwestern, Harvard, or Podunk U.

Again, the key is to get in to be interviewed at the outset by an actual human being, just as the key to getting any problem a person might be having with a company (regarding billing or service or the like), is to get past the robo-menu on the phone and to get through to an actual human being. Instead of spending thousands upon thousands of dollars bribing and cheating to get their children into top-flight universities – ambitious parents could just spend a few dollars on a “hack” book that tells how to get through to a live person. Then of course another hack book might be helpful in telling the applicants how to present themselves once they are seated in front of a hiring executive.

Coincidentally, just before this college admissions scandal broke, I had finished reading a book co-authored by Northwestern’s current President, Morton Schapiro. The book is cleverly titled Cents and Sensibility. Its main theme is an advocacy of letting the humanities more fully inform the study of economics. But along the way, the authors offer some astonishing hacks about getting into college and getting good deals on tuition.

For example, they reveal the little-known fact that most universities will charge students different tuitions (or, what amounts to the same thing, will offer them different sorts of scholarships and other attendance stipends) depending, not on need, but on the way the student approached the university. If the student scouted the university by coming on campus with parents for a tour – that student will likely be offered few incentives to matriculate. In short, they will be charged more if they end up attending. That’s because the student showed an obvious interest in that university, an obvious preference for it. If accepted, that individual would be much more likely to choose to enroll there than a student who had not shown such previous depth of interest. There’s no need to offer scholarships or other incentives to the tour-taker. Such a student will likely find a way to afford the university without aid.

But the main point I want to make in this essay is not that it can be easier and cheaper to enroll in the university of one’s choice than most people imagine. Nor is my main point that it doesn’t matter in the long run which college you attend, or whether you attend any college at all. I want to make a larger point about the kinds of human failings made evident by this recent college admissions scandal. The main criticism I have of those feverishly bribing, cheating parents caught in the current scandal is that they demonstrate a regrettable propensity for a very limiting sort of self-assertion. They say a resounding “NO, not for me or my children!” to all the everyday opportunities that are at hand for them. They show how neglectful they are of the present in favor of some propulsion into the future.

This attitude on their part flies in the face of the philosophies many of them probably espouse. It’s likely that many of these celebrity parents go to yoga classes, spout about the importance of “living in the moment,” and endorse an “Eat, Pray, Love” attitude towards life. But that sort of all-embracing philosophy is apparently not what they live. They are very far from lending themselves to the moment or “going with the flow.” Instead they divert and dam the flow of possibilities at every turn.

There are cases in which parents might recognize their child has a very specific talent or enthusiasm that would require attendance at a specific school in order to be fully developed. Perhaps it’s plain that a child is another little Mozart and it would be a loss to the world if the path wasn’t cleared for that child to get access to the best music schools and the best teachers able to give instruction in the instrument the child wants to play. Or perhaps a child has a sincere and singular enthusiasm for studying supernovae at the edges of the known universe. It’s understandable that such a child would want to be admitted to a school such as Caltech where she could have regular preferred access to the Mt. Palomar telescope. However, such obviously committed and talented young people would probably have no trouble being accepted at Julliard or Caltech simply on their own merits. It would not only be wrong, it would be unnecessary, for the parents of such children to bribe and cheat in order to get their children enrolled at these specific schools.

But little Mozarts are rare. The average youngster, as well as the average adult, has a flexible genius. It could be applied in many different settings to many different ends. The talents of most children don’t require being nurtured in any specific school or, often, in any school at all. Talent, enthusiasm, and interest are free-wheeling, unpredictable qualities that only require self-discipline to bring them to productive focus. Self-discipline isn’t something that can primarily be acquired in a costly, prestigious school. So it’s senseless for parents to try to stoop to all kinds of chicanery to get their pluripotent children into Harvard. Their ambitions in this regard are a sign that, like a Gucci bag, they view education as just a status symbol. It shows they view learning merely as a way of keeping up with, and indeed outdoing, the Joneses.

Worse yet, the actions of these parents show how they are given to flying through life like sharply-pointed arrows. They fly past what is, toward some small circle of a bull’s eye. Far from living in the moment, they harshly judge the present and find it wanting. They see nothing in it for themselves or their children to linger over. They are not the kinds of people for front porch friendships, or sunset reveries, or any kind of abiding. They are people who are always busy, always on their way to somewhere else. In the largest sense, they demonstrate how oblivious they are to the grand, wondrous “all of it,” – and that’s the real shame of their misdeeds.