What Do You Do When There's Nothing You Can Do?

I have a friend who thinks homo sapiens are headed for extinction. He says we have evolved  to be able to invent ever more ingenious ways to consume our resources—essentially, the planet—but, like drug users and narcissists, without the wisdom or willpower to manage our addiction.

Found dead in a hot, dry ditch: humanity.

That long view is the most entertaining way to consider our maladies. It won’t happen to us, we can tell ourselves. Or our children.

But of course it is already happening to many of us. The low-lying poor are already drowning. Farmers in the American southwest and west are already parched; the general population may not be far behind. And the situation is worse in much of the world.

Which brings me to politics, because politics is how we solve problems, at least the ones that require government coordination and funding. I don’t have to remind you how that’s going. As usual, we can’t make up our minds how big the problem is or what to do about it. Slowly boiling frogs come to mind.

If we step back from existential problems and politics, to consider the stuff of everyday life, things aren’t much better. Over the course of the last few hundred years, we have made substantial progress globally on increasing literacy and reducing poverty. But our developed-world problems—like voting and women’s rights—are becoming more, not less, intractable. The world may be more literate, overall, but the Republican party seems to have lost its wits altogether.

Being in government now has got to be frustrating. Most went there, I assume, to make a difference. Few, not counting Mitch McConnell, will. And the only difference old Mitch is making is in making it harder for minorities to vote and women to have reproductive agency. Now his hand-picked Supreme Court has taken up doing the heavy lifting for him and his kind. His kind being old white men who used to rule the world—still do, unfortunately—and are fighting like Cersei Lannister to stay on the throne.

I have another friend whose approach to our looming climate disaster is to try to get arrested. He chains himself to pipelines and pickets the banks financing them. They keep pumping oil and cash while he makes bail.

Dramatic acts to call attention to problems only make a difference if anyone cares. That is, anyone who can do anything about it. See above about coal-country king McConnell.

We’re in a tough spot right now. Politics is the Hatfields and McCoys. Meanwhile the world burns, women are forced to have babies they don’t want and people in the south can’t find their poling place, which was moved miles away from their home and is closed by the time they get off work.

What can we do about it? Hell, I don’t know, but we’d better do something. At least we should try to make it a better, more compassionate place for those less fortunate than we are. That takes a village, as Hillary famously (and correctly) said. We may still slowly boil, but we might as well treat each other fairly and with dignity while we cook.

I guess that starts in the local coffee shop, next time we see someone wearing a mask, or not. Next time we walk past a homeless encampment and look the other way. Even, in my case, next time I feel the impulse to say what absolute jerks some people are. That might be making me feel better, but it’s not helping.

Pretty is as pretty does, my grandmother used to say.

Gone

Opening scene: a man texts his daughter a link to a story he thinks she might like. Above it, on his computer screen, can be seen other texts to her over a period of months. Cute dog videos (she has a cute one herself), messages to call when she would like to talk (her voicemail is full), other messages asking if she is ok. Mostly she doesn’t reply. Once in a while, for his birthday, for instance, she gets back to him with an apology for not staying in touch.

A gift painted when she was sixteen.

Her mother lives with her now. They share a tiny rent-controlled apartment in L.A., where his daughter moved twenty-five years ago to pursue her dream of being a film actress. She’s talented. She has an MFA in drama from a great university; she acted off Broadway. But she has a bad cocktail of brain chemistry that makes her too anxious to promote herself the way one must to succeed in such a tough occupation.

So her life has shrunk down to 430 square feet shared with her mom and an adorable dog.

Her mom is a godsend. His daughter might not be able to manage on her own. Or maybe she could, but her mom doesn’t think so, so she moved in. That’s both the good news and the bad news, in the father’s opinion.

He divorced her mom thirty-five years ago, when his daughter was fifteen. He thought she was happy and carefree then, but he later learned from her that she had been having problems with anxiety for years. She hid them well. He had no idea. Maybe he should have.

Those problems became brutally apparent soon enough. She tried to succeed. He tried to help. Neither was successful.

Now her mother has taken over his daughter’s care…and her life, it seems. Her mother lives in Atlanta but she hasn’t been home in over a year. His daughter wants nothing to do with Atlanta.

At every turn the father and mother felt the other’s choices weren’t the best ones for their daughter. For thirty-five years her mother has refused to to speak to him, so it’s been impossible to work through those disagreements in the normal way. It might have been impossible in any event; they have pretty different perspectives on how to help. 

And his daughter is her own woman. She’s anxious, but she’s otherwise smart and capable. She knows what she wants. The kind of help her mom is giving her.

So he sends her birthday and holiday gifts and texts her cute videos, wondering for the millionth time how it came to this. Wondering if he’s just a fool. If he could have done more, should have done more. Wondering whether his life with his daughter—the delightful, funny intelligent woman who in their times together has brought joy and light into his life—is essentially over.

Pass it On

I taught one of my boys to play chess. He was five. Within a shockingly short time, he was crushing me. 

I taught another how to improve his odds of getting what he wanted from a merchant...or anyone, really. Be charming and go slow, was the essence of it.

Fishing, tennis, basketball, golf. I taught them all that, with varying degrees of success. The fishing and a brief foray into hunting brought me around to feeling that I didn't want to kill anything, even for food. You can get food at the grocery store. You don’t have to personally murder it. Lately, it has gotten hard to think about anyone penning and slaughtering animals to feed me. For just that empathetic reason, one of my sons is a vegetarian. He taught me, rather than the other way around.

I taught them that their word is their bond. That their personal integrity is as important as eating and breathing. They embraced that lesson, with occasional youthful exceptions for Napster and BitTorrent.

I didn’t teach them math, even though all of them are great at it. I flatter myself that by staying out of their homework I was teaching them self-reliance. I think I was just lazy. Also, not good at math.

My kids are all grown now. None of them want me to teach them anything. I get it. These days I confine myself to lobbing in occasional bits of unsolicited advice. Much appreciated advice, I’m sure. “I’m aware,” one of them is fond of saying, in his charming way. The protege become the master.

I taught them to be kind, even though I was not always. That lesson seems to have stuck. Maybe when I wasn’t kind they saw first-hand how much better it is to be so. 

As I said, the proteges surpass the master.

That’s the best part of it, really: raising kids who are better than you. It’s like a last chance on this earth to atone for your sins, to correct your imperfections. To make the world a better place by leaving behind copies of yourself that aren’t copies at all, but are version 2.0, with more good features, better all around, just the way the original model should have been.