The Power of Words

We are seeing how words can mislead, wound, charm and heal these days. A phrase that some use to seek justice make others feel threatened. Words can suggest a context that excludes. Historians have pointed out that the first characters that some children met in books caused the readers of Dick and Jane to feel excluded, because their lives were not like those of middle class suburbia Nearly all such books were boring. There wasn’t much to observe except to see Dick run. Jane and Sally apparently didn’t.

But one author changed everything. Instead of green lawns with no weeds we were catapulted into the world of an invasive cat who made a mess of the house when a mother left for the afternoon – and not even a fish in a bowl could save it.  It didn’t take a ton of words to tell an interesting story for us and a different Sally – and rhymes made The Cat in the Hat memorable using only 222 different words. In a later triumph, the legendary Dr. Suess won a bet of fifty dollars when Bennett Cerf challenged him to write a book using only 50 words.  He did even better by using only one word of more than one syllable – anywhere.  Remember Green Eggs and Ham?

The Beginner Books were fun – both for parents to read and children to listen to at first -and then recite. It changed the children’s book publishing in terms of illusrations and it made reading fun. I notice that many Suess books can be downloaded and listened to on a tablet rather than being read by absent mothers and fathers. That’s rather too bad when those early readings created family bonds and bouts of laughter and maybe the Cat should point that out.  The Suess texts later became much more sophisticated and handled topics like disarmament and the environment.

They still come back to me with a line or two from Too Many Daves whose mother lacked imagination in giving her twenty-three sons the same name – which meant they never came when she called them. Some more interesting alternative names were suggested . . .

“And one of them Shadrack. And one of them Blinkey.

And one of them Stuffy. And one of them Stinkey.”

The last word here was always well received – but my all-time favourite was – and still is:

“Another one Putt-Putt. Another one Moon Face.

Another one Marvin O'Gravel Balloon Face.”

 It was good to imagine calling people funny names - even insulting ones in a story, even though you weren’t supposed to do that in real life.. Maybe the other lesson was that Mothers didn’t always get it right,

Two visions

There are a lot of articles about the two American parallel universes that we are going to have to live with for the coming months. I’m already trying to wean myself from any political articles on this without total success. I was nevertheless impressed by another duality that Tom Friedman talks about in the the New York Times this morning - These are networks of nations with opposing battlefronts. He calls them “resistance” and “inclusion”.

They also have some common elements, One tries to bury the past. The other tries to work toward a more connected and balanced future. Russia and Ukraine are one pair. The Middle East is more complicated but also has opposing forces. The same alternatives might be seen in the United States.

Life is not quite that simple, of course. There are elements of the past that we are discarding and immediately adapting the new thing - like an acquaintance who thinks AI can solve all kinds of things that it clearly can’t. We have abandoned some of the civility that creates a greater degree of trust. On the other hand we hang on to things that don’t seem to please anybody in a new and changing world. But perhaps “either-or” needs to give way to “both-and”.

To Start Another Year

Happy New Year!

I am told it is inappropriate to offer such wishes after January 7th - but I don’t know the source of such rules that carry any weight. So Happy New Year to you, as I move into another year well beyond my three score and ten - and celebrate my 39th year of blogging. In those days in 1995 on Blogger, the options were pretty limited to black and white text - and probably the content wasn’t very nuanced either.

The new year has started well with the arrival of a great niece as the first baby to be born in her city. I could continue by quoting from all the year-end reports that promise either relief or disaster for the planet, but I won’t for today at least. What did strike me in one newsletter was encouragement to enter the fight for climate change - in this case by a bunch of seniors against a a major Canadian bank. I wonder about the wisdom of war and battle metaphors for change of any kind. If all our relationships with others, whether individual or corporate, are to be primarily adversarial, is this the right approach? Making war is literally not working out well for many who have life within our planet right now. Is this the right way to move hearts and minds? Are there other and better options? That’s going to be something to explore this year.

Imagination deficit

I’ve enjoyed listening to Adam Gopnik read from his book, Through the Children’s Gate, written some years ago, after he and his young family returned to New York City from Paris - not too long before the horror of 911. The children are grown up now, but the author brings them to life in a way that is charming and revealing for as long as readers continue to meet them.

At age three, his daughter Olivia developed accounts of her interesting imaginary friend named Charlie Ravioli. The parents listened to long telephone calls on a toy phone that somehow revealed the patterns of their own New York lives. Charlie was usually too busy to play or grab lunch. He was constantly in meetings. Eventually Olivia had to try to connect with Charlie through an administrative assistant - something of an anomaly in the world of imaginary friends. One day there was a surprising report that Charlie had been married - to a woman with an exotic name, that made her sound like an African princess. And even more surprising sometime later, there was a report that the wife had died. What did she die of, the parents asked. The answer was Bitteroscity.

Gopnik goes on to say how Bitteroscity afflicts us all - resentment, disappointment, jealousy, A good word indeed. How will we escape it? Probably the answer is Olivia’s. When we are three, we can imagine a really interesting world and pick and choose elements of the real one to create something totally new. When we’re decades beyond three, we lose our ability to imagine something better in the real one. We spend most of our time on the screens and social media of a digital one.

The next time you go to Twitter or Facebook, check out how you really feel as you exit - more imaginative, more inspired, ready to think of something to create a better future - or more envious, more exhausted, more jealous, more depressed, My guess is that Bitteroscity has more likely hit home. There’s a remedy for that. We all know what it is.

News - Bad and Good

The morning paper contains news of a tragic accident in Manitoba killing several seniors and wounding others. Their small community is grieving and we must join them. Hidden behind the main outline, though is another tragedy. The seniors were travelling two hundred kilometers to visit a casino - ‘for fun’.

As a senior myself, I would never suggest that seniors don’t deserve travel or pleasure. My guess is that the casino in question probably pays for the cost of the bus as they do in Ontario to lure seniors to casinos here. Sitting around a group some years ago, all of us confessed we had never been to a Casino and decided as a group to go one summer afternoon. We had agreed that our spending limit was $30 each. Among the six of us, we paid $180. One of us lucked out by winning $75. She noted that this gave a rush of pleasure, which made her feel guilty - but it didn’t occur to her to share the proceeds with the rest of us. Most of us were losers. We could, in fact, afford to lose the money on one afternoon of experiment. But what we learned was what a joyless place it was - subdued lighting, no sense of time or place, and too many vacant senior faces with no sense of joy or fun whatsoever - and less money than they came with, which most of them, unlike us, could ill afford. They had been brought in by a bus that probably cost the Casino about $300. Significantly the date was one day after old age pension cheques arrrived. To question it takes less than an ounce of moral courage to question this as a system on my part - but I do and more today than usual.

Better news came in a story about seven-year-olds learning about climate change in a school in New Jersey. The teacher had told the kids about penguins in Antarctica ; the warming of their environment meant that the penguins had to charge accordingly. What might they do?

Seven-year-olds are nothing if not inventive. Solutions ranged from penguins migrating to the US in winter to their building igloos. One thought she could keep a few in her fridge. It is the wife of the state governor who encouraged the school system to have children start to think seriously about the climate emergency, because they are the ones who will have to deal with it. Unlike others, who want to protect children from realities, this program encourages them to enter it now - not to scare them, but to become aware and to consider local solutions. While there were naturally dissenters, 70% voter in favour and the subject penetrates several curricular areas.

They are learning close to home:

“Outside, in a corner of the playground, there’s a fenced-in butterfly garden, a compost bin, and a soil bed where kids have tested which type of fertilizer, a chemical commercial variety or a natural blend, best helped plants (the natural one came out ahead).”

They are starting local and exploring a much larger framework. Would that we all did the same.