FrauenTimes

Our Polar Bear

2011-10-30T21:44:00.000-07:00

There’s a polar bear in my closet.

A statue of a polar bear, that is, with its neck outstretched, its head twisted slightly in a quizzical look.

It’s a 10-pound statue of a polar bear. But it’s also my friend Josh.

Josh gave me the statue about 25 years ago. And both he and it have remained in my life since, each becoming a quiet but dear presence. Josh and his polar bear also have taught me unexpected lessons about self-acceptance and about persistence as a pal.

Let’s start with the polar bear. The thing is clumsy. Standing about 8 inches high and running about 15 inches long, the bear perches on top of the short dresser in my closet. And it’s often in my way. Even though it occupies the edge of the dresser top, the polar bear makes it harder to stack clothes on the dresser en route to putting them away. And since it is at the edge, I worry that it will tip over into the adjacent wall, making a mark and wearing down its own battered white coat.

I feel stupid, in a way, for having it there.

And that same sense of some shame goes back to the bear’s origins in my life. Josh gave it to me one day during our sophomore year in college. He said it reminded him of me. That made a certain sense. I was always asking questions--as this polar bear appeared to be doing. I stood out from Josh and our other two roommates for voicing many more questions than they did. Josh especially. He rarely articulated questions. He read voraciously but he was quiet. Inscrutable even.

He found my constant querries amusing. But I couldn’t tell if he was laughing with or at me. And so I could feel stupid around him. Did he appreciate my curiosity or look down on me as a rube? The polar bear gift neatly captured my confusion. Was it a sweet-hearted present or a mocking jab? Maybe a little of both?

If you would have asked me to predict which of my college friends I would have remained close to, Josh wouldn’t have made the short list. To get a sense of how I felt uncomfortable around him, take music. I considered myself to be open minded about music entering college. I had ventured, for example, into alternative, New Wave groups in high school when most of my friends were focused on classic, more mainstream rockers like The Who, Bruce Springsteen and The Police. I dug The Style Council. But Josh was way more alternative than me, and I felt him looking down on much of my music. To him, the Style Council was a travesty.

We just didn’t get each other on some level. I thought I was doing my sophomore roommates a favor one time by tidying up our bug-infested living room. Inadvertently, I tossed out some of Josh's “fanzines,” homemade newsletters central to the underground music scene before the Internet. Josh blew up at me when he found out. “I can’t believe you did that,” he screamed. My trash, his counter-cultural treasure.

Because of these differences and my discomfort, I distanced myself from Josh. I chose not to room with him junior year. We headed into different “eating clubs” at Princeton, the places where upperclass students eat and socialize. My senior year we grew even farther apart. I became a resident advisor living in an underclass student dorm, while he graduated early, moved into an apartment in town and took a job as a policy analyst.

Still, Josh and I maintained a kind of remote friendship. We never lived together again, but always stayed in touch. Eating together among friends at our eating clubs or his Princeton apartment. Seeing music acts every once in a while, like Prince’s Lovesexy tour in Philly in 1989. Going en masse to his parents’ farmhouse home in Pennsylvania.

The pattern continued after I graduated. He was a regular visitor at the Brooklyn apartment where a bunch of college friends and I flopped after graduating. The four of us sophomore roommates took an epic 6-week trip to Southeast Asia. And after I moved out to San Francisco and Josh settled in Brooklyn, we continued to look each other up on trips—meaning we saw each other about once a year. Through visits, email and ultimately Facebook, we have remained in each other’s lives.

It’s the same with the polar bear. I don’t quite know why, but it has persevered over the years. For a significant stretch, I think it sat in the dark confines of an old suitcase in a storage room. Even when it surfaced, I haven’t always known what to do with it. It’s been placed on the floor, where it got in the way, and on a desk, where it took up too much space. But I’ve never thrown it out.

And I’m glad I haven’t. For one thing, it proved useful when I rehabilitated a dislocated shoulder. I used it as a weight in my exercises.

But other knick-knacks collected over the years have played practical roles and haven’t made the cuts of multiple spring cleanings and home rearranging. Why has this statue of an endangered species survived as a personal item of mine?

I suspect the secret is that the polar bear is a mirror to me. Its expression captures a curiosity that I identify with at my core. I’m not sure I always valued that quality, especially when I occasionally felt foolish for asking a “dumb” question. But as I became a teacher and later a writer, I came to treasure inquisitiveness as one of my greatest strengths. A trait I’m trying to pass on to my kids, a key to world peace even.

This polar bear may be bulky, may trigger memories of mixed emotions, may have almost ended up in a landfill.

But it’s next to me now because it reminds me of my best self.

Like his bear, Josh also has come to occupy an important corner of my life. It started in college, when Josh helped teach me the importance of doing my homework. One time he and I attended a rally calling on Princeton to divest itself of investments tied to apartheid South Africa. A counter protester approached us and asked if we were sure the black citizens of South Africa really wanted international companies to pull out of the country. I didn’t know the answer to that question—I was there out of a vague sense that apartheid was wrong. But Josh knew the facts cold. He cited evidence that South African blacks backed divestment.

And even though I chafed against what I saw as his music snobbery, Josh has introduced me to some of the most important songs in my life. I might never have heard of Joan Armatrading, The Feelies or Big Star if not for him. But Armatrading’s “My Family” always renews my hope for humanity, The Feelies’ “Let’s Go” always raves me up and Big Star’s three albums remain among my all-time favorites. Big Star’s “Watch the Sunrise” has helped carry me through trying times, including the break-up of my first marriage.

In other ways, Josh has multiplied joys and mitigated pains. He invited me to go skiing in Utah when my first wife and I were on the verge of breaking up. He came to both my first and second weddings. I remember hugging him and our other college roommate Raul on the top of San Francisco’s Tank Hill at the close of the second one—tears of relief and happiness flowing and Josh able to appreciate those as well as anyone. I came to his Brooklyn home weeks after his first child Gus was born, my own son Julius mere months older. And for nearly a decade now we have continued to connect on the highs, lows and quirks of parenting.

Josh deserves more credit for the way the signal of our connection hasn’t weakened over the years. He has been the more likely to interrupt the silence between us with an email or Facebook message, often passing on news about mutual friends and asking what’s up with me. My trips back East grew less frequent, but Josh gets to the Bay Area every year to visit his parents-in-law in Orinda. He faithfully makes plans to get together.

I got a glimpse into his dogged nature at his wedding some 10 years ago. It was a blast of a nuptial gathering, a multiday affair at a family compound in Maine full of waterskiing, badminton, a campfire and Scottish dancing lessons. At one point, I told his mother that I was glad Josh hadn’t given up on me as a friend. “He’s loyal,” she explained.

I’m glad he is. And I’m glad I’ve been loyal in my way as well. Even today, I still have to overcome a hint of my old anxiety around him when we communicate. But I do. And I made sure to contribute to his 40th birthday video—one of those profile movies full of interviews with friends and old photos panned over in Ken Burns-fashion. I spoke about one of my favorite Josh stories. The time during our Southeast Asia trip when Josh, man of esoteric music, chose to sing the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” during a boozy evening of karaoke near the Borobudor Buddhist shrine. He belted out this rock classic with feeling.

That was a sign that it wasn’t entirely fair to see Josh as a music snob. I think any such snobbery in him has softened over the years. And in any event, another friend appearing in Josh's video helped me see his musical tastes in a different light. Eric Weisbard, a pop culture scholar and fan of eclectic music himself, recounted that Josh would listen to albums Eric and his wife, music critic Ann Powers, couldn’t bear to hear. Josh's attitude toward those far-out bands was fundamentally a generous one, Eric said. Josh gave them a chance.

Viewing others as worthy of attention--as likely to contain a compelling story or song--amounts to curiosity. Seeing Josh as a quieter kind of curious has reinforced my own version of wondering about the world.

In the end, Josh and I are bears of the same fur. We’re both that statue sitting in my closet.

Comes a Time

2011-08-16T17:03:00.000-07:00

Julius put his arms around me. I was facing the other way, so I turned to him and realized he was crying.

“Dada, I’m scared of dying,” he blurted out. Now he was bawling.

I had never seen him this terrified. My 8-year-old son was staring into the abyss of death for the first time as a not-so-little kid. And the gaping uncertainty horrified him. It was early evening on Father’s Day. A sudden challenge as a father.

Julius and my 6-year-old daughter Skyla have thought about dying before, but typically we’ve discussed it in a calm, clinical way. During those conversations, I’ve talked about my belief that we go to heaven after we die. But I’m not very definitive. I’ll say to them: “I believe we’ll get to see God and our dead relatives.”

It’s not “You will go to heaven and you will see God.” The sort of fully reassuring statement that, I presume, is the kind of message that my brother-in-law, Steve, and sister-in-law, Abbie, give their kids and possibly Julius and Skyla as well.

Steve and Abbie are evangelical Christians. Steve, for example, signs his emails with this Biblical quote: “Believe and be saved.” By contrast, I’m a lapsed Catholic who stumbled into a Protestant church in recent years. My spirituality also weaves in the Gnostic gospels, yoga-class Hinduism and a tinge of Buddhism. Although my wife Rowena and I faithfully attend Old First Presbyterian Church and love our preacher there, we have our doubts about the Resurrection. With such jumbled-up beliefs, we can’t offer our kids great certainty about what happens when they die.

We had just seen Steve and Abbie in Arizona, and during the visit, Julius apparently had been singing a religious song, “Hosannah,” either picked up in Sunday school or heard at Abbie and Steve’s.

Steve then made a CD of religious music for Julius to take home. Matters of the spirit also were central to our drive back to San Francisco. We read “The Green Ghost,” a book about a girl about Julius’ age who dies after wandering too far into the forest to cut down a tree at Christmas. It is an eerie yet sweet book. The ghost, years later, helps a family avoid getting trapped in a snowstorm. Along the way, the ghost reunites with her younger-and-now-elderly sister who had been with the deceased girl the night she died. The younger sister survived because the older one wrapped her in her coat.

Soon after we arrived in our apartment, Julius put on the religious CD from Uncle Steve. It is gentle, uplifting music. That only added to my surprise when I found Julius clinging to me.

The song didn’t soothe him, at least in this moment. As spiritual music it called attention to our mortality, and Julius had a flash of just how scary that concept can be. I imagine the explanations his mother and I have given him of what happens after death suddenly seemed flimsy. Perhaps he noticed the discord between our subjective statements and the greater certainty he hears from others in his life, including Abbie and Steve. Perhaps the story of a little girl about his age dying and becoming a ghost struck him not as charming but chilling.

I should add that Julius disputes most of these theories. I later asked him what had triggered his fear that night. “I heard the word ‘dying’ in the song,” he said. He flat out rejected any influence of the Green Ghost or the way his mother and I talk about heaven compared to the way others talk about it.

Whether my grander hypotheses hold or Julius simply latched on to a lyric about dying, his reaction that night was unusual. He admitted he hadn’t felt that fearful “since he was little.” In fact, the closest parallel I have to his spontaneous terror was when he was about three years old, and we witnessed a scary police action in our neighborhood. Several cops ran from behind a community center, guns drawn, to arrest a pair of teen-age suspects. Although he was so young, Julius intuitively sensed the danger in the air. As the police officers ran by us, he burst into tears.

I heard the same panic in his voice this Father’s Day. And for a split-second, I was rattled. Julius’ fear spoke to a parental helplessness that I hate. Ultimately, my determination—no matter how fierce—to guard my children against harm has to succumb to reality. They will die one day. And trying too hard to protect them backfires in paranoia. I can find that balance between safeguarding them and sending them into the world maddeningly hard to strike.

But somehow, as Julius hugged me in tears, a healthier paternal instinct kicked in. Just as I pulled him close when he was a frightened three-year-old, I picked Julius up by the armpits and held him on my hip. He has become so big, though, that I couldn’t easily hold him up with one arm. I propped one leg up on a chair to help support his weight.

“I understand, Peanut,” I said, using a nickname dating to his infancy. I told him death is scary to me too sometimes, and repeated my belief that when we die we will be with God and relatives who’ve died before us.

Rowena also sought to soothe him and joined us in an embrace. Then Skyla climbed onto my propped up leg behind Julius. She made it a full-family hug. Whether comforted by our physical presence or our words, Julius soon calmed down.

My Father's Day duties weren’t quite done, though. I took on bedtime songs later in the evening. At Julius’ request, I sang the two kids a version of Neil Young’s “Comes a Time.” I don’t know all the words by heart, so I often conclude the song—and my overall nighttime singing routine—by repeating the phrase “comes a time” over and over and over. Julius once told me he finds this relaxing, and he explicitly requested the ritual this evening.

So I granted his wish. And the recurring refrain seemed a fitting response to his earlier fear. Comes a time. Honest about the reality of death, but comforting at the same time. The very repetition of the phrase – the predictability – counteracting the utter unknown-ness of dying. In the face of a scary, solitary ending, a reminder that he is not alone.

Julius had thrown his arms around me, and I was hugging him back with a song.

Skyla the Social

2011-03-02T23:02:00.000-08:00

When Skyla Parris Frauenheim was 2 ½, she and I took a walk late one night to soothe her nerves. She had been on a crying jag, and my wife Rowena and I didn’t want to keep up her 4-year-old brother. Skyla was nestled into the scarlet red sling we would carry her in. And while we breathed in the brisk San Francisco air and looked at the starry sky, Skyla had a striking thought.

“Maybe everybody in the world is on a walk with us,” she said.

That comment gets at a cornerstone of Skyla’s spirit. She sees herself as fundamentally connected to those around her. And her vision that night reminds me of an old lesson: we human beings are ultimately one interdependent community. Recognizing that truth allows us to solve problems and satisfy our souls.

***

Skyla is a second child. That might explain the way she experiences herself as so deeply woven into a tapestry of “persons” -- as she often calls people. My friend Raul recently made this observation about second-born siblings: “They've always lived in a complex web of family relationships and bonds. First borns began with a one-to-one relationship with parents, second borns have only known one way.”

For Skyla, that has translated into a dear relationship with her older brother Julius. For the first four years or so of her life, she frequently ended her sentences with “right, Julius?” As in, “It’s sunny out today, right Julius?” or “We’re going to go swimming at Grandpa Carl’s pool in Arizona, right Julius?” It was if her observations and thoughts extended to include him. Making meaning for her was a social activity.

Skyla has gradually outgrown the verbal verification. But she’s hardly less linked to her brother. I recently overheard her tell Julius that she loved him the best in our family, followed by Mommy. I brought up the rear.

But even with my low ranking, Skyla shows me her affection constantly. Hugs. Kisses. A certain head-leaning-against-me, that you see her doing to Julius in the photo above. And requests for time on my lap--as she gets dressed in the morning, while I’m working in my home office and at the dinner table after we’ve eaten. Often, she’ll just climb on without asking. A human lap dog.

Skyla expresses her love for many people besides me. And has done so since she was a baby. “Mama, I love you so hard,” she said a few years ago. And the phrase captures the fierceness of her devotion to Rowena. When Rowena and I have argued and I’ve raised my voice, Skyla has bravely intervened. “Stop it, Daddy!” or “Leave Mommy alone!”

Skyla came up with the phrase “sleep-hugging” to describe a bedtime hug, a sign of how much she adores those evening embraces. While cuddling with her in the morning a few years ago, I told Skyla I was going to wake up. "You can't wake up,” she responded, while rolling on top of me. “You're getting bulldozed by a flower."

That line reflects her personality: assertively sweet and sweetly assertive. The quote also reveals her aesthetic. She is all about flowers. Flowers and hearts. Flowers, hearts and persons dominate her paintings and drawings. And her clothes. Half her shirts and pants have hearts on them. Her latest pajama bottoms read: “All we need is love.” Yes, most of the time grown-ups give her these items. But she’s choosing what to wear herself now. At her recent six-year-old birthday party, she picked a dark-pink turtleneck dotted with rows of white, pink and red hearts, over which she wore a pink dress with pink flowers.

Skyla isn’t alone in being a child full of love. Many kids have a similar sensibility. Her best friend Simone, for example, came to the birthday party dressed almost as a mirror image to Skyla, with a dark blue turtleneck peppered with light-blue hearts. Simone and Skyla met in pre-school, and no longer go to the same school. That caused Simone some trepidation at the start of the party. She clung to her father Nico at the foot of our stairs, worried about not knowing the rest of the guests, who were from Skyla’s kindergarten class. But Simone soon made friends at the party with a sweet girl named Althea. The two of them ultimately shared a seat for cake.

Here’s how Nico described the party aftermath for Simone: “On the drive home she told me that she was so happy that there were tears in her eyes.”

In other words, kids like Simone and Skyla wear hearts on their sleeve that are very real.

That’s not to say children are only about connecting. They can be plenty hateful. And teasy. And they can demand their personal space. Skyla, for example, went through a phase last year where she rejected hugs and kisses. At school, she has been cautious about making new friends. And she certainly has independent and selfish impulses. But most of her tantrums are less about self-indulgence than they are about fairness in the social fabric. Julius got an extra candy treat. Daddy got a Rockstar drink while she didn’t get an equivalent juice or chocolate milk. A promise by one parent was denied by another.

And even as she cultivates her individuality and demands her share, Skyla continues to define herself in terms of her relationships. Not long ago, for example, she woke up in the morning and began chanting: “Daddy, Mommy, Julius and me.”

These words embedding her in our family structure had a physical parallel. She, Julius and I all were lying in Julius’ top-bunk bed--I’d been summoned to the kids’ room by one of them in the pre-dawn hours. Julius and I lay on either side of her as Skyla declared our family-hood and her place in it. “Daddy, Mommy, Julius and me.” Her sing-song voice conveyed complete contentment. And it was contagious--I experienced joy rivaling any I’ve ever felt.

***

We adults are too quick to discount intense feelings of solidarity and affection. When we see them in children, we might call them adorable but usually in a patronizing way. We tend to be hyper-vigilant of sentiments that could veer into the sentimental. That could be cloying.

We know on some level that children possess a deep wisdom, but we’re terrified of appearing childish and overemotional. We ought to work harder to embrace a childlike mindset. A childlike heartset, of seeing ourselves as inextricably tied to others.

For one thing, it is surprisingly scientific in nature. Despite our Western beliefs in autonomous, rational individualism, we are more mutually dependent than we care to admit. New York Times columnist David Brooks is among those who have called attention to the way research in brain science and other fields has made clear that we are profoundly “social animals.”

“The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives,” Brooks wrote in the New Yorker earlier this year, “one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q.”

Similarly, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers shows that success in a variety of fields, ranging from law to computer science to professional hockey, has much to do with social circumstances and connections that we have tended to overlook. In one of the most intriguing anecdotes of the book, Gladwell highlights the way impressive health statistics in Roseto, a small Pennsylvania town, could only be explained by the strong community bonds there.

Despite such reminders, we Americans remain stuck with an unbalanced ideology. By overemphasizing “personal responsibility” and the power of “individual initiative,” we have failed to set up an economy that works for all. Squint at our society from afar, and you can’t help but ask how we could allow an unemployment rate of 9 percent--representing nearly 14 million workers--to persist this far along into a so-called recovery.

And that official figure fails to capture the full extent of U.S. unemployment or the dramatic rise in long-term joblessness. As of March of this year, 46 percent of those considered officially unemployed have been without work for 27 weeks or more. That figure had stayed below 30 percent from 1948 to 2009. In effect, we are allowing a minority of millions of people to bear the full brunt of the recession, with many of them falling through the cracks of a flawed social safety net.

And graver threats loom, especially when we widen the lens to consider the entire world. Nuclear annihilation remains a real possibility. As does the prospect of climate catastrophe.

Over the years, our wisest leaders have urged us to view all humans as one family. “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said. Buckminster Fuller spoke of “Spaceship Earth,” with its implication that we are all in it together.

There are signs that we are hearing those calls. In the book I’m co-writing about the future of corporate social responsibility, my co-authors and I document a rise in “ethical” consumerism. People are more concerned that the products they buy are not made by exploiting workers or trashing the environment. We also found found that people are increasingly likely to identify as global citizens. The Millennials are a “civic” generation. And the social media tools they helped make popular encourage connectivity and magnify its power. It seems, for example, that Facebook and Twitter played key roles in sparking the remarkable wave of political protests in the Arab world in the past several weeks.

Those protests and their success so far in Egypt and Tunisia serve as reminders that people can come together to solve apparently intractable dilemmas. And who cannot be moved by the generosity of the human spirit revealed by those demonstrators? They not only risked their lives but they see themselves as part of a wider liberation movement. “We are setting a role model for the dictatorships around us,” Khalid Shaheen, a 39-year-old Egyptian, told the New York Times. “Democracy is coming.”

***

With such inspirational examples, why is it so hard for us humans to remember our fundamental ties and common aspirations? Part of the reason, of course, is that we are unique individuals and rightly resist being forced to conform to others’ visions. And we can be so awful to one another, making us distrust people and limit our love to smaller circles.

Skyla herself has wrestled with how broadly to share her affections. The same morning she chanted “Daddy, Mommy, Julius and me” she also sang this: “I love every person.” When I asked who she meant by that, she clarified that she meant just our family. That’s not surprising, given that she’s been warned that strangers can hurt her and that she should be wary of them.

There’s more to the story of our anti-social impulses. The pain of losing each other also plays a role. If we let ourselves feel how much we truly care about others, it can overwhelm us to lose them. Lose them to a new job in a new city. To a different school. To death itself. So we harden our hearts a little to dull the ache of departures.

Once again, Skyla shed light on the subject for me recently. I had just finished telling Julius and her the latest in a series of stories I made up about a group of bugs living in the San Francisco Bay Area. After having “Crackey the Cricket” and his ladybug and butterfly buddies take trips to China, the White House, the Egyptian Pyramids, Alaska and the San Francisco Zoo, I figured they had about reached the end of their lifespans. So I had Crackey marry and have kids, had the the ladybug and butterfly couples have kids as well, and said the older generation died.

I tried to cushion their passing by saying the next installment of the stories would be about their kids, and I spoke a little about the cycle of life.

Still, the deaths hit a nerve with Skyla. “Daddy don’t die,” she said as we hugged goodnight. “Mommy don’t die.”

“I make magic spell so Daddy don’t die and Mommy don’t die and brother don’t die.”

In protesting the future loss of her beloved family, Skyla declared openly how much she cared for us. Her child heart was beating, bleating loudly.

Even so, the voice she used suggested that she too is “maturing” into someone a little more guarded. She adopted a toddler’s tone and syntax--“I make magic spell”--as if only the youngest of children can safely admit intense love and anxiety at the prospect of separation. By cloaking her emotion in the language of a younger self, she in a way shielded herself from attacks that she was acting like a “baby.”

Yet her sentiment is spot on. Yes, our different spiritual traditions help us make sense of dying. But are any among us immune from soul-wrenching grief when we lose parents, mates, siblings, children? If only we had spells to keep those loved ones alive.

***

Maybe sometimes we do.

A few weeks ago, I almost lost Skyla. We all almost lost Skyla, but for what seems to me a miracle. It was early evening, when our home street of 18th Street becomes a thoroughfare for commuters. Skyla, Julius and I were on 18th Street crossing Guerrero Street, mere yards from our apartment door. As she approached the far side of Guerrero on a two-wheeled scooter, Skyla started heading into 18th Street to get to a curb cut. Into the lane of 18th Street that is normally safe for people because cars are parked there. Just as she did so, an SUV switched from the central lane of 18th Street to that outer lane. It was headed right for Skyla.

“Skyla STOP!” I yelled. She did, and the big vehicle missed her by inches.

It amazes me she didn’t die there. I happened to be watching her rather than Julius at that moment. I managed to yell. She stopped, out of some combination of obedience and self-preservation.

Even so, I couldn’t fully appreciate what had happened right away. I was in shock. It was too much, initially, to contemplate losing her. Little by little it sunk in, in excruciating fashion. Because I realized that to lose Skyla would be to lose part of me. Part of my heart.

When I let myself imagine her dying that day, I suddenly appreciated the way the death of a child sometimes breaks up a marriage. Putting myself in that horrible hypothetical place, I wanted someone to blame for her death besides me and the SUV, and my thoughts turned to Rowena. It’s also hard for me to think about how our marriage could survive with Skyla missing from our family puzzle. Rowena and I have strong, healthy bond. But our littlest one would leave such a large a hole.

My appreciation of Skyla is not just existential. It’s practical. Mundane even. Most days when I come home from work, Skyla greets me with a smile, like so many other children do to their parents. “Hi Dad, look at the fort Julius and I made.” Or “Don’t come in yet, Dad, we’re making a surprise.” Or “Dad, can we play Tiger?” That’s our idiosyncratic game of chase where I’m the tiger in pursuit of Skyla and Julius.

In other words, she almost always brightens my day. Soothes my soul when it is less-than-sunny. Just as I calmed her the night we took a walk some 3 1/2 years ago.

She was right that night. In some sense, we all were out on a walk together then. We still are.

Photo by Pak Han

Masculinity at The Edge

2009-11-11T18:09:00.001-08:00

I'm at the edge of masculinity.

I mean that quite literally. The kind of man I am is epitomized by The Edge, the guitarist of rock band U2. I realized this about two years ago, while watching a U2 concert DVD with some friends. I realized my buddy was U2's lead singer Bono--a front man, often the center of attention, someone who thrives in the spotlight. And that I was The Edge--off to the side, happy to harmonize, the man behind the music.

Not being an alpha male hasn't always felt great. But I'm increasingly Ok with an Edgelike masculinity. My society and I are gradually realizing that guyhood at the edges is more than Ok. In many ways, it's central.

***

Categories like alpha vs. non-alpha males are messy and in many ways fluid. My friend Dana points out that in any group of nerdy guys playing Dungeons & Dragons, someone typically will try to assume the role of dominant male. Still, I think we can define alphas as men who generally seek out and seize leadership status. These guys exist--often winding up as CEOs, politicians and sports stars.

And in my 42 years as an American man, I've noticed various kinds of non-alpha males. There are geeks, who are typically peripheral growing up because of their social awkwardness or others' jealously of their smarts. There are men who consciously opt out of the social rat race as much as possible, solitudinal types that might be artists or curmudgeons. Then there are the emotionally sensitive males. The fellows who used to be called "nice guys" and lately have been dubbed "emo" men. However you want to name the category, I'm in there.

We emo-men aren't totally excluded as geeks or loners might be, but neither do we live at the center of attention. At times we may tangle with alphas to lead. But we often fall short, lacking charisma or athletic prowess or confidence. We may pull punches in social jousting because we emphathise with the other parties. We're supporter types. Less competitive than cooperative. Lovers more than fighters.

Some signs of my emo/edge-hood: I've rooted for the underdog as long as I can remember. In elementary school, I irked our visiting Congressman, the former Jack Kemp, by saying communism's philosophy of sharing sounded pretty good. Amid concerns about date-rape in college, I became a sexual harassment peer-educator. Although I've had opportunities to be the top dog at organizations like my college newspaper and a labor union at the Oakland Tribune chain of newspapers, I chose lieutenent-like roles.

To be sure, I've been plenty insensitive over the years. A jerk to girlfriends. Indifferent to a high school pal lower on the social pecking order. Unsympathetic at times to my young son and daughter.

But the callousness has had a lot to do with self-dissatisfaction. With frustration that I wasn't an alpha male. After all, I've grown up in a culture that has lionized the head lion, the solitary hero-winner. As a result, even to this day, I feel some regret and shame that I've been such a behind-the-scenes guy--that I didn't seize the chance to be editor in chief of my college student newspaper, to be president of the newspaper union, to be outright captain of a work softball team I resurrected with a colleague.

It also has gnawed at me that I have never won a championship as an athlete. Compounding the pain is the fact that the times I came closest to such a victory, I was among the leaders or the clear leader in terms of skills. In each case, team sports all, there were plenty of factors beyond my control that helped determine the outcome. But I have tended to view those losses through the frame of the potential hero--me--who chokes in the clutch. The alpha also-ran.

These experiences have intensified, if not caused, an inclination to doubt myself. And at times they have fed a vicious circle, of self-consciousness sabotaging performance, leading to additional doubts. The other night, my wife, Rowena, son, Julius, and daughter, Skyla, came to watch me play basketball for the first time. I wanted to make them proud. Instead, I immediately flopped, missing my first five shots.

So deeply have I identified as as a failed alpha that my devotion to underdogs has a subcategory: underdog alphas. They're people like former basketball player Patrick Ewing. Figures who are outstanding but never quite live up to expectations, never win the big one. New York Yankees baseball player Alex Rodriguez fit this category until this year's World Series. Despite years of cheering against the Yankees and the unfair way they buy talent, I rooted for them and reveled in Rodriguez' redemption as they won.

I also have faulted myself for not feeling comfortable with the competitive bantering you often find amid guys. The trash talk that runs across socio-economic and racial lines, that I've encountered in professional circles, on the basketball court and with some close friends.

One night recently, Rowena and I were talking about alpha vs. emo-male issues. "You're more comfortable in groups of women," she observed.

It's true. I have repeatedly surrounded myself with gaggles of females through work and through social circles. My current writing group, for example, is composed of me and four women I worked with at the Oakland Tribune chain of papers.

Rowena meant no harm with the comment, but it stung. A sexist and dated but nonetheless strong presumption in our culture is that being held in high regard by women is of little worth. That it is men's views that matter.

I hate this idea. But it has some power over me. What's more, when Rowena spoke those words, I immediately pictured myself as one of the "groomer" bonobo monkeys I'd learned about years ago. The groomer are males who tend to hang out with the females of the group, combing their fur. They get their share of sex with females, but it is on the sly, while alpha-male monkeys are duking it out.

I told Rowena about my bonobo association. "That's embarrassing," I said. "Groomers are cowardly. They're deceptive."

"But you're not doing things out of sight," Rowena responded. "Other guys can see you."

***

That helped me reframe the issue. Right. I am comfortable with women. Some alpha guys with few communication skills or little emotional intelligence might actually be jealous of that. I remembered that at my latest writer's group meeting, one of the women had joked that the group amounted to my "harem." It's not a bad place to be, really, in the middle of your own harem.

That epiphany is part of a broader way I've come to make peace with my emo-male personality in recent years. I've come to love "teamy" teams that I play on or watch. At my weekly basketball game a few Sundays ago, I was part of a squad that won a game despite playing a team with the top three scorers in our group of regulars. The key to our success was unselfish play: togetherness on defense and lots of passing to open players for easy baskets. Our opponents were done in by selfish play: not enough ball movement or collective efforts on defense.

Of course, that's the potential trouble with being an alphadog. You can slide into arrogance. Vanity. To being a boor--and being ineffective as a result. That was part of my problem the other night at basketball. I tried to do too much in front of my family. While my strengths are defending well and hustling for rebounds and loose balls, I tried to be "The Man" on offense. Only when I stopped worrying about impressing my wife and kids did I settle into a flow with teammates and start making baskets.

Even though we can try too hard to be alpha-ish, emo-edgers like me also have to fight the temptation to be timid. I have been afraid of the responsibilities and potential failure of being an outright leader. Timidity in my case also includes fear of physical violence. I've always been rather scrawny, and my legacy as a brawler is abysmal.

A skinny frame helps explain why the superhero I found fascinating growing up was Green Lantern. Green Lantern's power came not from his body but from a tool--a ring that allowed him to do things such as fly, create a force field and blast plasma bolts at enemies. Utterly buff Superman was too far a stretch for me to identify with, despite his mild-mannered alias Clark Kent. And Batman, though brainy, relied too much on his fists when battling baddies.

I think I also dug Green Lantern because he had a non-alpha-ness to him. He was part of a group of equals. Earth's Green Lantern was one of a number of Green Lanterns that made up an inter-galactic police force. There's always been an undercurrent of competition between those alpha-heros Superman and Batman, even when they joined forces against evil-doers. But Green Lantern never seemed to care about having to be top-dog.

***

Neither does The Edge. I didn't realize how true this was until I saw the movie It Might Get Loud earlier this year. The film revolves around a gathering of three famous rock guitarists: U2's Edge, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin and Jack White, formerly of The White Stripes. Differences between emo- and alpha-malehood are on vivid display. Jack White is classic alpha. Everything to him is a fight. As the camera follows him prior to the actual encounter, he reveals he wants to trick the other two into giving up their secrets. Page and The Edge, though, are all about the experience. They come in with an openness to learn from the others, with a cooperative spirit.

In the broader profile of The Edge that emerges in the movie, it's clear this attitude is fundamental to him and has been for years. He recounts that at one of U2's first concerts held at their old school, he took up a spot on the side of the stage. "I've been there ever since," he says.

You can imagine such a statement tinged with regret or shame. Not in his case. He seems entirely at peace with his edgeness.

By one definition, at the edge you are not central. But looked at differently, you may be profoundly so. An edge is always a border to something else. And intersections are often where the most interesting stuff happens. In their book See New Now, authors Jerry de Jaager and Jim Ericson cite a study finding that of the top 50 transformative innovations over a hundred-year period, nearly 80 percent were sparked by someone whose primary expertise was outside the field of the breakthrough.

Edges lead into new territory. U2's Edge has done that with the band's music--riffing off punk and playing with digital effects to establish a distinctive, ringing sound. And he's been instrumental beyond his instrument. Enraged by political violence in Ireland, a songwriting effort of his resulted in Sunday, Bloody Sunday--one of the most energetic refutations of violence in pop music and one of songs that launched the band into stardom.

Being on the cutting edge is probably what The Edge (really David Howell Evans) had in mind when he chose that moniker. The fact that he opted for a brash stage name is a reminder that we emo men have egos--we may not be alphas but we like attention too.

And the world, increasingly, is giving it to us. The release of It Might Get Loud itself is a sign that Americans and others across the globe are recognizing the value of more emotionally attuned, more collaborative maleness. Facebook and other popular social networking tools emphasize the power of communication and connectedness. Hyper competitiveness is under fire in the wake of a recession caused largely by an unregulated free market and to some extent by fraudulent alpha financiers like Bernie Madoff. The you're-on-your-own years of the Bush administration, as well as increased awareness of the perils of climate change have given rise to a more collective sensibility. Barak Obama is ambitious and a competitor, but he's got a heavy dose of emo in him as seen by his penchant for diplomacy and bipartisanship.

In business, it's widely accepted that a command-and-control leadership style--the overly alpha CEO--is less effective than a persuasive, inclusive approach. In sports, researchers in recent years have highlighted how crucial contributions can be from non-superstars. Houston Rockets basketball player Shane Battier, for example, isn't first in any league statistics like scoring or rebounding. But it turns out his presence on the court dramatically improves the performance of his team, because he does things like keeping the other team's best rebounder from grabbing the ball.

There's even a Green Lantern movie planned for 2011.

For sure, there are counter-trends to the all the love shown to emo, edge guys. Look at the popularity of the raw--some would say savage--contests of Ultimate Fighting. Or complaints that American men are being emasculated by an increasingly metrosexual culture.

But you might say we're recognizing an edge-is-central truth. Edge-like, Green Lantern-like, me-like guys are important. We don't always seek the spotlight. But we deserve our share of it.

Michael Jackson, manhood and me

2009-06-27T00:12:00.001-07:00

Like most of the world, I spent much of Thursday night thinking about--and, yes, mourning--Michael Jackson.

It started off cerebral. Marveling at the guy's weirdness and influence. Thinking about how not having a normal childhood may have made him obsessed in a warped way with children.

My setting was my San Francisco Mission neighborhood, on the eve of gay pride weekend. Hip hop kids of color, hipsters, heterosexual families, gays and lesbians all shared the streets. It struck me that Michael Jackson had a little bit of everyone in him, and yet remained apart. He was "gay" in his effeminateness and flamboyance, and his body transformations and fashion made him look female. But he never explicitly came out as a homosexual or transvestite. He was "black," but whether out of medical necessity or not bleached away from that race. And though he became "white" he remained rooted in African American musical traditions.

He may have been the ultimate misfit, and the world mocked him plenty. But last night, with hindsight, everyone claimed him as their own. "We love Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson," said a sign outside a bar that caters to the cool cycling crowd. (It somehow didn't seem fair that Farrah got upstaged in death.) The college-aged kids in an apartment down the block put up a sign commemorating Jackson and blared "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" out their window. That Jackson belonged to all of us was confirmed by graffiti I saw on the side of a stove left out on the street: "RIP Michael Jackson my nigga."

That told me that even hip hop culture--often macho--appreciated Jackson. And the tag changed the tenor of my reflections. I started to see the King of Pop through the prism of masculinity, a topic I've been exploring on this blog. And as I returned home and watched some of Jackson's videos on YouTube, I was moved by the way he tried on multiple versions of manhood.

"Don't Stop" shows him as an innocent lover. In what looks to be a pre-MTV video, with crystals and balls floating in the background and Jackson wearing a tuxedo with giant bow tie, he seems lost in the music and mood. The lyrics--"Keep on with the Force...this is love power"--mix the mystical and the romantic (and probably Star Wars, which made a splash two years earlier). The roughly 20-year-old Jackson dances awkwardly at times, putting his hand in his pocket. But his little hops and big smile convey a barely contained joy.

Three years later in "Beat It," Jackson moves on to embody an intriguing male peace-maker. "You want to be tough...No one likes to be defeated" he sings, looking frustrated while two street gangs prepare to battle. But he eventually defies the "beat it" warning to stay away. His character intervenes in a knife fight, transforming it into a dance joined by each combatant. The conflict is defused, but the movement remains primally male, with undulations and stacato moves of speed and strength.

This identity, though, gives way to hyper-masculinity in "Bad" several years later. In that video, Jackson leads a group of gang-bangerish guys through a subway station with a relentless refrain of macho-ness. He looks like nothing so much as the same pathetic toughs that he helped to reconcile in "Beat It."

It's dangerous to judge a person by their art. But the trajectory of those songs and videos suggest Jackson began to doubt his masculinity, and responded by going overboard in a show of testosterone. Perhaps that imbalance foreshadowed the way he later swung wildly between extreme images of male virility--witness his crotch-centric costumes--and femininity--such as the girlish hair.

***

By the time "Bad" hit, I was in college and past Michael Jackson. But he played a key role for me as I grew up--and I suspect he did so for many other men who came of age in the 1980s. He helped us dance. Made us want to, with Off the Wall and Thriller. We Amherst Junior High School guys got sweaty in Lisa Dux's living room to "Working Day and Night." And "Beat It" and the rest of "Thriller" served as soundtrack to hours playing basketball in my Buffalo-area driveway. Basketball was a way I funneled adolescent boy aggressiveness. There was something right about being physical and competitive on the basketball court, and "Beat It" confirmed that.

A few months ago, I found myself thinking about Jackson's song "Man in the Mirror." I was taking stock of life at 40, and it struck me Jackson was right on. Yes, the song has a cheesiness to it. But he hits on that timeless call to brotherhood with some clever lyrics. "I've been a victim of a selfish kind of love," he sings. And then there's that stirring key change and the rich harmony: "make that change."

Jackson's many changes amounted, at least in part, to an attempt to sort through what it means to be a man. The results were mixed, odd and apparently tragic. But I give him credit for trying, and for hitting some high notes along the way.

There's a moment in "Don't Stop" that broke my heart a little when I watched the video Thursday night. Jackson opens his arms widely. Not in the posturing way he later does in "Bad," but in an expression of pure vulnerability. Ready to embrace everything around him. I aspire to that sort of openness--it's a key to the big rewards in life of wisdom and love. But maybe Michael Jackson was too vulnerable, made to be too vulnerable, tortured somehow as a result.

In any event, much of the world is now embracing you back, Michael. As the tagger said, may you rest in peace.

Tagged

2009-05-25T22:05:00.000-07:00

On a recent evening stroll, something caught my eye.

What I noticed as I turned a corner shattered my pleasant mood. But the incident also proved to be a satisfying gift, one that deepened my resolve to be a certain sort of man.

What I saw was a tagger in action. A graffiti kid scrawling something on a newspaper box in my San Francisco neighborhood.

He had a friend with him.

Suddenly, I had a lump in my throat. But I had to speak.

"Please don't tag up our neighborhood," I said to them.

"Shut up, dude," said the friend.

The lump was now a bodywide heaviness, a nausea. Would the two of them attack me? It was a still-light 8 p.m., the corner of Valencia Street and 18th Street had cars and other pedestrians, and the Mission Police station was just a block away. But might these two feel they'd need to stop me from running to get the cops?

"I live on this block," I said.

"So do I," said the actual tagger, though I'd never seen him before. A biggish youth in a black hooded sweatshirt.

"Shut up," his pal said to me again. A smaller young man with a baseball cap.

The two weren't who I feared most in a street encounter. They didn't seem like members of the violent Latino street gangs of the Mission--these guys looked white, and appeared more punk or arty. Their sweatshirts were normal-fitting. The smaller one's baseball cap was stiff; I believe it said "New York" in glitter. He also had a bright yellow box that seemed like an arts supply case. The tagger carried what looked to be a small artist's portfolio.

Even if they weren't gang-bangers, there was hostility, and my adrenaline was pumping.

"I've got two kids, and I don't want them to have to see this," I said.

"It's exposing them to some art," the shorter guy said.

"I love art," I said, sensing an opening. "I really do. But this isn't the right venue."

"Shut up, dude," the short one said again.

The tall one had finished or at least stepped away from the newspaper box. "Alright," he said. "We won't tag any more boxes here."

A concession. A resolution to our conflict. "Thanks, guys," I said, and headed up the block.

This encounter, though, left me feeling anything but grateful. I remained angry at them as I walked home. And somewhat fearful that they might come after me. But mostly I was disappointed in myself. Ashamed at having expressed thanks for such a small promise. For not challenging the "shut up." Why didn't I say, "No, you shut up." Or "Make me shut up, punk."

***

The answers to those questions have deep roots. I have a life-long fear of fighting. Apart from some scuffles with pals as a preschooler, I really only have had one fight in my life. A sixth-grade battle on the baseball diamond with Rob Muzzio.

I don’t remember the details of that tussle with “Muzz”—I think I had been teasing him about something and he got mad. He may have used that ultimate guy put-down, “pussy.” In any event, about all that I remember was that he was the aggressor. And that he won. It wasn’t the sort of fight that left me physically hurt, but my pride as a popular boy in a jock-y crowd was wounded. Friends tried to console me by saying Muzz unfairly tied me up in a boxer’s embrace. But I knew I’d been licked.

The incident essentially confirmed a pre-existing anxiety about fist-fighting, which about a year earlier led to a humiliating snow-ball pelting on the way home from school. (You can read about it here: http://frauentimes.blogspot.com/2009/02/copy-of-reparenting-bullied-trombonist.html.)

I carried that aversion to mano-a-mano violence into adulthood. It hasn't paralyzed me altogether: I've chosen to live in some tough urban neighborhoods, and I worked as a high school teacher with troubled, tough New York City teens. But my fear of getting into a conflict with someone that could escalate into fisticuffs or worse has bordered at times on paranoia.

Several years ago, before my wife Rowena and I had kids, I tried to address this problem head on by taking Aikido classes. Aikido is perhaps the most non-violent of the martial arts, with a focus on defense and redirecting an aggressor's force. I only took a few months of classes at a local dojo, but it was powerful stuff. The concept of keeping your enemy so close that they can't strike you struck me as profound.

Practically speaking, this helped me more with feline aggressors than those of the human variety. Instead of banning Rowena’s sometimes-vicious cat Gunter from the room when I went to sleep, I took to taking naps with him cuddled beside me. Our relationship improved immensely.

But I could sense Aikido’s benefits beyond Gunter. By repeatedly repelling attacks in class--even though they were choreographed punches--I gained confidence that I could protect myself.

I have been planning to send my six-year-old son Julius to Aikido to help him develop such skills and confidence. And I intend to return to the classes with him, to reinforce and deepen in myself that attitude of serene self-assurance.

***

I felt neither serene nor self-assured walking from the taggers to my apartment at the other end of 18th Street. Just as I reached my door, I saw them headed my direction about halfway down the block. I was sure they'd continue their graffiti-ing somewhere else in the neighborhood. I thought about calling the cops. But I didn't want the hassle of giving a police report, and I was afraid about potential retaliation should I become a witness against the pair. The fact that I failed to call the police added to the feeling that I'd flunked this test of masculinity.

I got upstairs and told Rowena of the exchange, my anger and--though it was painful to admit--my shame.

"You did the right thing," she said without hesitation.

"What do you mean?" I said. "I didn't even contest the way that guy told me to shut up."

"You spoke up," she said. "You stood your ground."

Suddenly, I began to see the incident in a new, nicer light.

Ok, so I hadn't told the short tagger to try to make me shut up. But I HADN'T shut up. I defied him just by continuing to talk with them.

I thought of something I'd heard about courage: it is not the absence of fear, but rather doing the right thing despite being scared.

Call it emo-guy masculinity. Dignity in different clothes from those of a street fighter. Maybe the robes of Buddha, or Jesus or Mohandas Gandhi.

It is ridiculous on one level to compare my brief exchange with a couple of grafitti kids with the epic trials of those religious figures or the bravery of Gandhi in the face of the British empire. And I was far from perfect in just that limited encounter. I think it would have been better to have called the cops and helped them catch the taggers—to have held those guys accountable.

Still, I feel some pride in having peacefully acted according to my principles. Over the past few years, I've become increasingly annoyed with graffiti. Seen it as a kind of anonymous bullying--especially the common nick-names as opposed to political or social messages. These tags rarely are aesthetically interesting and amount to a rude intrusion on everyone's environment--getting in your face through public defacement.

In the last several months, I've started to take responsibility for my building and the neighboring building, painting over tags on our walls and a flower box on the sidewalk. Now I'm more determined than ever to resist. The day after my exchange with the two taggers, I alerted my landlord, city officials and my neighborhood corner grocery store about graffiti. Since my landlord didn’t immediately fix the tags on our building, I covered over an ugly gold blob of graffiti today.

I later checked out what the tagger wrote that night--"Germs." Enclosed in quotation marks. In my experience with high school taggers in New York City, that’s a sign of the name of a tagger or tagging group, rather than an accusation like "Yuppie scum." Did he and his buddy see themselves as lowlife bugs? Or perhaps, more politically, as a dangerous scourge threatening society?

My friend Colette, in commenting on a draft of this blog entry, helped me recognize that these taggers may be stuck with their own limited vision of maleness. One that feels a desperate need to make a mark in the world. To be heard through vandalism, perhaps clothed in a pseudo-subversive sensibility.

Did my comments to them crack a door on reframing that gaze? Did I prompt them to think about joining the ranks of San Francisco's brilliant, creative artists who make murals—often provocative ones--rather than just litter the public landscape with name "tags"? I'm not sure if I had any impact on them. But I am reminded of the work needed, not just to clean up graffiti, but to guide such would-be artists toward a more-responsible, more-mature masculinity.

The tagger's mark may get painted over at some point. Even if it doesn't, the letters written on that box already fail to make much of an impression. But my protest that night made an indelible mark. If not on the taggers, at least on me.

From Weakenomics to We-can-omics: Toward a prosperity that’s shared, sustainable, secure yet full of surprises

2009-04-08T22:29:00.000-07:00

One good thing about this recession: it’s pulled back the curtain to reveal that we Americans for years have accepted an economy that’s fundamentally insecure, unsustainable and skewed to the wealthy. About the only redeeming feature of our runaway capitalism is the way it creates excitement in the form of new things to buy and consume, like iPhones, Twitter and Snuggies—those goofy, cozy blankets with sleeves.

But overall, we’ve been living for the last decade with a debilitating economy. Call it Weakenomics—it’s led to financially fragile families and firms, a fraying social fabric, and a dangerously damaged environment.

We can do much better. We can forge an economy that strengthens us yet stays full of surprises. Call it We-can-omics.

This name takes its cue from Barack Obama’s “Yes we can” slogan. And We-can-omics looks a lot like what Obama has proposed and done so far in office—but goes further and has some twists.

We-can-omics means:

* A stronger, springier safety net for those falling off the tightrope that American jobs have become. Improvements to the safety net would go beyond those included in the recent stimulus bill to provide for more generous, longer-lasting unemployment benefits.
* Universal health care.
* A major tax shift that eliminates payroll taxes—thereby promoting the creation of jobs—in favor of taxes on things we want to avoid, such as foreign oil, pollution and heavy use of natural resources.
* “Green economy” investments and policies, ranging from spending on lower-tech building weatherization to promoting what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman dubs “E.T.”—energy technology.
* Steps to improve innovation, ranging from a national system of entrepreneurial grants to greater investment in basic scientific research and a push to make teaching careers more attractive through higher salaries and merit pay.

The place that comes closest to putting We-can-omics into practice is Denmark. The Nordic country’s “flexicurity” system give businesses flexibility to fire workers, in contrast to the job protections found elsewhere in Europe. But Danish workers get security in the form of generous unemployment benefits –averaging about 70 percent of their previous wages in 2006—for several years if need be. And to prevent people from wallowing on the dole, Denmark provides substantial aid in landing new jobs and has strict rules to make sure the unemployed are available for new work.

In recent years, Denmark’s “flexicurity” system helped fuel strong growth even as it underpinned an egalitarian society. The Danish economy grew faster than the economies of both the United States and Europe as a whole during the three-year period 2005 to 2007. Denmark’s system also has the backing of a major industry association, the Confederation of Danish Industry, and its unemployment rate in February was 4.8 percent compared to 8.1 percent in United States, 7.4 percent in Germany and 8.6 percent in France.

The rub in Denmark is higher taxes, especially on high earners. But as Denmark shows, it’s quite possible for a healthy economy to combine market forces, relatively high taxes and a substantial social safety net. In fact, Denmark suggests those things go best together.

So does my own story. I am partly the product of capitalists. My great-great-great grandfather, also named Edward Frauenheim, founded Iron City Brewing Company in Pittsburgh. Later, my grandfather and great-uncle owned a malting company in Buffalo, and my father has started up businesses in fields ranging from video security to financial services to clothing design software. At the same time, my great-grandmother and great aunt were staunch New Dealers, and most of my mother’s family has been in “helping” fields such as psychology and education.

As a journalist, I’ve documented the way low-wage Americans put up with considerable hardships, exposed the myth of a level playing field for “little guy” start-ups in Silicon Valley, and called attention to holes in the U.S. safety net. And I personally experienced the way America leaves something to be desired when it comes to promoting entrepreneurship. Several years ago, I decided against devoting myself to a freelance writing business because the apparent dangers –like losing health insurance for my pregnant wife—were too high.

That choice came after losing a magazine job in the dot-com bust. My brush with unemployment fits into a broader pattern of what author Jacob Hacker calls “The Great Risk Shift” from businesses and government to individual families over a generation. And now it is apparent that America’s economy isn’t just rife with insecurity for average families, but overly unstable for companies whose revenues are cratering in the recession.

We need to move away from our legacy of market-worshipping Weakenomics. But to do so, we must strike a better balance on three fundamental issues:

* The individual vs. the collective. The Horatio Alger sensibility that that individual can pull himself up by his bootstraps runs deep in the American psyche. We all think we can get rich on our own. But we’re largely deluded. Sociological research shows America to be less than stellar when it comes to upward mobility, while the psychological evidence indicates people are much more social creatures than we care to admit. The Ayn Rand-ers are right that we all die alone. But we live together. And unless your idea of earning a living is complete self sufficiency on a farm, modern economic existence fundamentally involves other people.

* Competition vs. cooperation. America has been competitive to a fault. Despite--or perhaps because of--our largely Christian culture, we are fanatics about beating others. There’s a place for competition in bringing out something of the best in us, in creating moments of intensity and childlike euphoria. But we take things to an extreme, leading to childish petulance in our athletics, cheating in our schools and sub-optimal performance on the job. We are missing opportunities to be better sports and more creative collaborators.

* Consumption vs. conservation. The United States and most of the world’s nations have acted as if a rising standard of living—measured by consumption of stuff and services—trumps the environmental impact of our economy. Just as Americans have lived beyond their means financially in recent years, so too has our society overdrawn our ecological resources to the point of potential climate catastrophe. We need to reexamine our notions of progress to account for both the way conventional economic growth imperils the planet and the way human happiness ought to be measured by more than money alone.

These are not new questions. And for decades people have sought a middle ground between the stultifying central planning of socialism, the excesses of capitalism and the limits of strict conservationism. But there’s a now-ness about the principles of We-can-onomics.

They correspond with a shift in attitude that has accompanied the economic crisis. What might be called a “Three Musketeers moment” is at hand—a sense of all-for-one and one-for-all. Signs of it include both Obama’s election in November and a December survey of employees by consulting firm Towers Perrin that found 76 percent of workers were personally motivated to help their company succeed, up from 69 percent four months earlier.

Then there’s the populist outrage at obscene bonuses going to the same bankers who helped land us in this mess. People are demanding a sense of decency.

This spirit isn’t entirely a short-term response to the housing market implosion and broader economic collapse. A change toward more collective thinking has been under way in America for some time. A 2007 study by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found signs of growing public concern about income inequality and a pattern of rising support since the mid-1990s for government action to help disadvantaged Americans.

Even culturally, trends suggest a pendulum swing to a more communal mentality. Popular TV programming isn’t just about celebrities but the reality of troubled parents and people struggling to lose weight. Social networking technologies like Facebook and Twitter highlight the importance of connections and communication. Many of the professional sports teams that have succeeded in recent years emphasize teamwork over the contributions of a star or two.

The reining National Basketball Association champion Boston Celtics embraced an African philosophy along these lines last year. Their motto, “Ubuntu,” translates roughly to: “I am because we are.”

Mounting evidence of a looming environmental disaster—seen in scientific reports and images of stranded polar bears—adds to the realization that our economic system has been out-of-whack and threatens our future.

But a newfound focus on solidarity and sustainability in the economic arena does not preclude surprises. In fact, we need them. Constant economic tumult results in a spirit-sapping anxiety, but too much stability leaves us restless.

This is old wisdom understood by parents. Ongoing chaos is not good for kids, nor is unbroken routine. You blend the two to delight and develop children.

Think of We-can-omics as the Snuggie of economic systems. The fleece blankets with built in sleeves—which have hit a cultural nerve and inspired scores of Facebook pages--keep people comfortable while allowing them to cut heating costs and do things like read more easily while covered up. We-can-omics also is about sustainable, sometimes-fascinating progress while people enjoy a measure of security.

Peace of mind and a piece of the market.

Too much of the free market has left us frail as a society and planet. But it’s not too late to shape up. To shape our economy in a way that strengthens us all. We-can-omics is that way.

Reparenting the bullied trombonist

2009-02-15T22:55:00.001-08:00

I scared myself tonight with a flash of rage I felt toward my not-quite-six-year-old son. I gritted my teeth, gripped his arms and lifted him away from me.

"You just made me so mad," I hissed.

What had Julius done to trigger such a reaction? Not much, really.

It was bed time, and his mother and I were trying to wrangle Julius and his three-year-old sister Skyla into pajamas after a bath. Julius wanted to play chase with Skyla. Not Ok, I said. And I moved to corral him, even though Rowena and I had agreed she'd be in charge of Julius while I'd focus on Skyla. As Rowena called for me to stick to our plan, Julius put his face close to mine, waggled it back and forth and told me in a sing-song voice, "that's what you're supposed to do. That's what you're supposed to do."

I don't know if there was any malice in this bit of teasing from Julius. He was hoping, I'm sure, for me to stop trying to prevent him from playing. But he may have been coming at me with silliness more than any mean-spiritedness.

Somehow, though, that little five-year-old head bobbing touched off an explosion of anger.

I stopped seeing him, and saw instead a kind of abstract pure mockery.

And it hurt. So I lashed out, albeit in that controlled way. I didn't hurt Julius as I moved him away from me. But my lower jaw jutted out and I bared my teeth in a sort of primal expression of fury.

Rowena told me to leave the room, and I agreed I needed to cool off.

I left the kids' bedroom, walked down the hallway and took a seat on our piano bench. Within a few moments, it dawned on me that I'd done some classic projecting onto Julius. That his probably playful teasing had become a kind of pint-size bullying. That somehow he'd scraped a sore spot in my psyche.

At 41, I've gained enough wisdom to know I should go to those painful places rather than avoid the emotion. So I tried to see what was there. And all of a sudden I was back with Jimmy Stevens, on my worst walk home from school.

It was probably the most shameful moment of my childhood. For on this walk home, I let Jimmy walk all over me.

It's a winter day in the Buffalo suburb of Amherst. I am a fourth or fifth or sixth grader walking home in the late afternoon from Harlem Road Elementary School with my black trombone case. Did I have a lesson that afternoon?

For some reason, Jimmy (whose name I've changed here) also is leaving school at that late hour. Had he been in detention?

Because Jimmy was a troublemaker. He'd recently transfered to our school--I think because of academic or discipline problems or both in his last one. Jimmy wasn't big. He was probably shorter than me. But he could be a bully.

On this day, he started pelting me with snowballs.

"Quit it," I might have said, but not with any real authority.

Jimmy kept up the snowball attacks along Bernhardt Drive and its modest houses and snow-blanketed lawns. At one point, I think, he shoved snow right in my face.

I never fought back. Why not? Partly, I think, because by age 10 I'd become today's equivalent of an "emo" male.

I was a sports kid--playing hockey, football, basketball and baseball right along with the jocks--but a sensitive one. And my sense of personal power came from excelling in school, not from being tough on the schoolyard. I probably hadn't been in a fight since I was 4 or 5.

I have since stood up for myself when confronted with would-be-bullies. I've done it on a basketball court. I've done it as a journalist. I even took an Aikido class a few years ago to bolster my confidence around self-defense. But somehow that awful late afternoon in the 1970s planted a serious seed of doubt in me. Branded me as a wimp. Despite my intellectual commitment to non-violence as an adult, the possibility that I am fundamentally a fraidy cat has plagued me. Has made me, I think, hyper-sensitive to teasing.

But I don't want that plague or that hyper-sensitivity to harm Julius. I don't want to let those things limit my ability to be a good father.

It struck me tonight that parenting means having to "reparent" yourself. That I, at least, need to look back on shameful incidents and teach myself, correct myself. I should have told Jimmy to cut it out in a strong voice, in a dignified way. Or better yet, I should have thrown snowballs back at him. Been playful with him. Because I suspect he was probably looking for someone to pay attention to him more than anything else. Jimmy didn't shine in school, and he came from a big family.

Years later in high school, he and I became pretty good pals. He remained a prankster. But I came to see he had a good heart.

Just as I can look back on Jimmy now with empathy, compassion and forgiveness also are part of reparenting myself. Just as I hold my kids when they feel slighted or wounded, I am trying to comfort that young me who was paralyzed with fear years ago. What a crappy thing to have happened! Don't beat yourself up!

Proper self-help can help more than one self. If I do this feeling, figuring out and forgiving, my kids are going to benefit. And if I don't, my parenting--and my kids--will suffer. The bullying I bury will burst out in fits like it did tonight.

Thankfully, the night did not end on a frightening note. My anger faded away as I sat on that piano bench. Julius came into the room, and something like the opposite of that earlier encounter ensued. With my face soft, I gathered my son into my arms and pulled him to me.

"I'm sorry I lost my temper," I said.

I also I told him I loved him. He let himself melt into the hug.

Yes, I've got work to do as a parent. But I know I've got it in me to get better. Call it another flash--one more about light than heat. The rage was scary, but this insight--this faith, really--is reassuring.

Bedtime with Skyla

2009-01-30T22:48:00.000-08:00

My daughter Skyla can be a little devil when it comes to going to sleep. While brother Julius tends to nod off quickly in his bed just above her, Skyla, who's almost 4, typically takes longer to lull into dreamland. She calls for her "night-night drink." Becomes alert and chatty. Demands songs.

Not long ago, though, all my irritation slipped away. At least for one "bedtime." If parenting is a marathon, as my friend Holly recently suggested, then I experienced to the equivalent of "the Runner's high." A moment of fatherly euphoria that I hope to hold onto.

It began with me in our "front room"--that is, the room that doubles in our one-bedroom apartment as the grown-ups' bedroom and the living room. Recently, I heard the theory that small homes breed intimacy among family members. And the events of this particular evening suggest there's something to that idea. I was in the midst of writing an email to friends praising Leonard Cohen's song "If It Be Your Will" when I heard Skyla singing from down the hallway--something I probably wouldn't have noticed if we lived in a 3,500-square foot home.

Perhaps I was inspired by Cohen's lyrics: "If it be your will/That a voice be true/From this broken hill/I will sing to you." In any event, Skyla's singing struck me not as annoying like--I'm embarrassed to admit--it often does at bedtime. It struck me as interesting.

***

I walked into her room and was surprised to find that she was singing to herself. I continued through the kids' room into the kitchen and saw Rowena washing dishes. Rowena said Skyla didn't seem to need her, and that was certainly true. I decided on the spot to record her, and went in search of my digital recorder. I found it, but it was full and I spent several minutes trying to figure out if I should download some audio files from work, or if I should erase one of them, or if I should abandon the recording project altogether.

During this futzing, Skyla shifted out of self-sufficiency and into song-request mode. Rowena agreed to comply. Skyla then said something about how losing her "snuggy" turtle "would make me sooo sad,"--her voice an adorable combination of melodrama and innocence. I decided to erase a non-critical audio file and get recording.

After a bit of singing from Rowena, I agreed to take over the lullabying. But in keeping with the user-generated-content era into which she was born, Skyla had a highly participatory vision.

Me: "Papa sing you some songs?"

Skyla: "Um-hmm. But I'll think about some songs, and you do them, Ok?"

I said I would try. Now, I'd assumed Skyla meant she would name some familiar tunes and I'd proceed to perform them. But this underestimated her. By "think about songs," she meant create new ones.

Her first request: "Wide and Deep and Wide and Deep. Keep doing like that."

Skyla loves a church song titled "Deep and Wide." So I started singing: "Deep and Wide, Deep and Wide, there's a fountain--"

Her: "No, Wide--Wide and Deep."

Me: "It's a new one?"

Her: "Yeah. Wide and Deep."

So I start singing "Wide and Deep...," but Skyla soon provided a new direction.

Her: "No, Deep and White."

Me: "Deep and Wide?"

Her: "No, Deep and White."

That elicited from me a spontaneous song that, while clumsy in its cadence, had --I think-- the spark of an intriguing notion: that life is a journey from a brightly lit outer fold of God's robe through the darker valley of that fold and back to the other bright side.

Me: "Deep and white, deep and white, my lord wears robes that are deep and white.
Deep and white, my lord's robes are full of endless light.
His robes are deep as you move through them
all your life as you try to go
from the light back to the light
after you pass through some darkness of the fold
and sometimes seeing light
Deep and white, deep and white..."

Skyla didn't applaud the song, but neither did she boo. She moved on to some variations. There was a call for a "Feet and Deep and Wide." I did my best to make up such a song.

Then she riffed about the artistic process.

Her: "I'm thinking of a song."

Me: "What is your song?"

Her: "I don't know yet. I'm thinking of it. It takes a long time."

After a few moments, she burst out with "Deep and Wide and Head"!

And here she added a bodily dimension to the song-creation.

"Here is deep," she said, pointing to her belly. "Here is wide," she said, pointing to her chest. "Here is...," and she trailed off, but I think she realized her head was signaled by the fact she was talking with it.

The official lyrics of "Deep and Wide" are "Deep and Wide, Deep and Wide, there's a fountain flowing deep and wide." Skyla decided to map more of the song to her body. "Here is the fountain," she said, pointing to her throat.

I thought that was brilliant, and told her so. And to my delight she took the physical-musical connection one step further. She made another "Deep and Wide" request, but I couldn't make out what the added term was. "Car?" I asked. No, that wasn't it.

She began punching her finger through the air, saying "This one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one."

Her: "Dad, what do you tink that shape is?"

Me: "What's that shape that you made with your finger?"

Her: "Yeah."

Me: "Was it a fountain?"

Her: "Nooo."

Me: "Was it a car?"

Her: "No."

Me: "What was it?

Her: "Guess--because I can't really say it very well."

Me: "A star?"

Her: "Yes."

So the song was "Deep and Wide and Star." And I took a shot at a song about stardust and stars twinkling and the universe's bigness.

***

That pretty much sapped the rest of my song-writing energies. I figured we were ready for some preexisting songs. So I launched into an old bedtime standard for me: Neil Young's "Four Strong Winds."

But before I could get to much singing, Skyla reminded me that her brother had lost a tooth. This was the big news of the day in our household: Julius, almost 6, had lost his first tooth. And with the tiny incisor under his pillow, the tooth fairly would be visiting this very evening.

Skyla did some extrapolating about her brother's tooth loss. And in doing so, she led us into a conversation by turns sweet, existential, poetic and Tarantino-esque.

Her: "Dadda, one day I'm going to lost all my tooth-es."

Me: "Yeah, you are, Sky."

Her: "This one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one."

Me: "Yep."

Her: "I'm going to lost that many tooths. And I'll grow bigger tooth-es."

Me: "You will grow bigger tooths...tooth-es."

Her: "But if I don't have any tooth-es, I can't eat anyting."

Me: "That's a problem, yeah. You know, when you're old, you also lose teeth, Sky. You get two sets of teeth, and when you get real old they start falling out, usually. And some older people put in, like, fake teeth, so they can eat things. You still would be able to eat things like smoothies and orange juice, which is good."

Her: "Without teeth?"

Me: "Without teeth, when you get really old. Grandma Richie had fake teeth. Grandma Richie lost her teeth. Great-grandma Richie."

Her: "And she got fake teeth."

Me: "Um-hmm. That's what she used before she died to eat."

Her: "And does she still have them?"

Me: "You know, she's not really...not really, no. Because her spirit has left her body and the world, I think."

Her: "And did she die?"

Me: "When she died. Yeah."

Her: "I know people die and they aren't at home anymore."

Me: "They're not in their home anymore?"

Her: "Yeah. And she's not in her home any....She died where the people die. So when people die, they're in the hiding place."

Me: "They are kind of in a hiding place from us, because we can't see them. But I think they're sort of --"

Her: "-- Maybe they're upstairs."

Me: "-- in a special world."

Her: "Maybe they're in a special room that we are next to. Or...or on the moon."

Me: "Maybe they are on the moon. Maybe they are in that special room you're talking about."

Her: "Or in a special elevator that takes...that takes people that died."

Me: "Um hmm. I think they get to go be with God and the Goddess. And with other spirits. Other people that lived before."

Her: "Or maybe they are going to be living in the special elevator."

Me: "Maybe. No one knows for sure what happens. That's one of the, kind of--that's a mystery of life."

Her: "Yeah, if someone goes in somewhere, they will kill you."

I burst out laughing here. Despite the horrific vision, something about the abrupt turn in the conversation and the way Skyla said "Keeel" cracked me up. Eventually, I managed to respond.

Me: "I don't want to go there, then."

Her: "Me either."

Me: "I don't think there's an elevator like that, though."

***

At this point, I figured it was about time for Skyla to go to sleep. But she protested. So I sang some more of our standards, starting with John Lennon's "Beautiful Boy"--which becomes "Beautiful Boy and Girl" in our family. Then Sinead O'Connor's "In this Heart."

I've long loved this tune for its gorgeous harmonies and bittersweet lyrics. But this evening, the words spoke directly to my relationship with Skyla.

"This is my grief for you. For only the loss of you, the hurting of you," I sang. It was about the pain of losing every stage of Skyla as she grows up.

"There are rays on the weather. Soon, these tears will have cried. All loneliness have died." I saw us reconnecting time and time again.

"I will have you with me. In my arms only. For you are only my love, my love, my love." I've quarreled with this last section. Doesn't saying you are "only my love" reduce the other person? But tonight, these lyrics sort of worked. I saw Skyla always being with me, always having a place in my heart. Perhaps there is a piece of her that belongs to no one but me. And the "only my love" phrase got at the way she is this pure expression of love to me.

***

As I finished singing "In This Heart," I moved onto humming. But I quickly decided I should sing another song with lyrics before Skyla complained about the lack of words--as she has in the past. So somehow I hit upon the middle of "Close to You." The Carpenters' classic is a fitting song for her, and was a fitting song for the evening. Fitting for Skyla partly because when she was in the womb, I would sing it to her. We had been concerned that Skyla was in a breech position, and we therefore would not be able to have the home birth we were planning. Singing from the end of the birth canal was supposed to encourage a breeched fetus to flip around.

But besides that history, "Close to You" fits Skyla because the lyrics capture her physicality and her spirit: "On the day that you were born, the angels got together, and decided to create a dream come true. So they sprinkled moondust in your hair, and golden starlight in your eyes of blue." Skyla's eyes are green-brown, but they sparkle. And her hair can have a silvery glint as she sprints down the block.

"Close to You" belonged this evening because it is about gratitude, about praise. And beginning with the way I heard Skyla singing from the other room, the night was about appreciating my little lady. On this night, I felt moondust and starlight were real in her. I recognized her miraculousness, her cosmic power and presence. Her divinity. I was awed to be Close to Her.

So much so that I came in late on my favorite section: the "Waahs" as in "Waaah, ah-ah-ah-ahhhhh, Close to You." What should have been a "Waahh" turned into an "Aaaah."

I finished the song. And what do you know? My little angel was asleep.

Yes we can create tidings of comfort and joy...version 1.1

2008-12-20T19:56:00.000-08:00

This is an updated version that better characterizes my relationship with my first wife Kay. She felt I portrayed us as more serious than we were—and she had a point.
--Ed

There’s a lot of losing going on this holiday season. Loss of wealth. Loss of jobs. Loss of life. I have little stories that go with those big ones. My retirement savings has cratered with everyone else’s. One of my best friends lost his job and I’m worried about losing mine as a business journalist. My grandmother-in-law died just before Thanksgiving, a relatively peaceful death but still a painful one.

Amid these losses, though, I’m finding myself gaining. Or perhaps better said, regaining. In recent weeks, hope and idealism that had quietly ebbed in me over the years washed back. I am feeling once again a fundamental faith that we can and must comfort each other. And an essay I read about the importance of teasing jolted me back to the deliciousness of romantic ribbing and led to a wiser take on playfulness.

These positive personal tales also fit into some bigger, public ones. For many of us, it seems, tis’ the season to be both melancholy and jolly.

***

My gift of newfound optimism has to do with the big O. The big win of the big O, really. Because if Barack Obama had lost Nov. 4, I would probably be feeling pessimistic big-time right about now.

Like some other liberals, in the days before the election, I was paranoid Obama’s lead in the polls would somehow disappear and our team would fail. This fear of faltering in the fourth quarter, in the clutch, runs deep in me. Not only have I failed to decisively win any organized sports championships in my life, but I hail from Buffalo. The city where the Buffalo Bills hold the dubious honor of being the only professional football team to make it to the Super Bowl championship four straight years only to lose each time.

I tried to compensate during this year’s election with effort. I made more than 500 phone calls from my home for Obama. I spent a Saturday with my friend Monique in Nevada, amid llama farms and lots of angry dogs, asking voters in the swing state to back Barack. The last days before Nov. 4, I campaigned for Obama at his downtown San Francisco headquarters. Many of my 11th-hour calls were to voters in Florida. The state I’d spent hours calling for the doomed Kerry campaign. Where the Dems came up short in 2000.

I secretly worried I was cursing Obama’s chances even as I dialed for voters.

But he won. And that win suddenly made concepts like hope and community and sacrifice real again, grippable—like the way Oprah Winfrey apparently just grabbed and held onto a stranger at the victory celebration in Chicago’s Grant Park. Obama really won. By a lot. Americans not only were willing to put a legacy of racism aside, but cast their lot for the man and the party saying “yes we can.”

A night or two after the election, I suddenly made the connection that Obama’s mantra is the same as the morning chant at my son’s elementary school. Grattan Principal Jean Robertson starts each day by assembling all the students on the playground, sharing announcements and then asking the kids, “What’d you come to school for today?” Students, teachers and parents answer, “To Learn.” And Jean shouts back, “Can you do it?” And about 350 voices belt out: “Yes we can!”

In the weeks since school began for my kindergartener, I’d appreciated the morning call and response as a nice, motivating ritual. But now I saw the richness of this every-day articulation of hope and determination, its elevation of a collective, ambitious philosophy. It dawned on me that the kids could have said “Yes I can.” The Grattan go-get-‘em pep talk was not just sweet but bordering on sacred.

Of course, Grattan isn’t perfect. My wife and I have already butted up against bureaucracy and questioned some of the school decisions. But something democratic and deeply hopeful is alive at this little school, which has attracted growing numbers of families in recent years. Grattan prides itself in part on the Grattan Way, a four-part code of respectfulness, responsibility, safety and kindness.

I now find myself having more faith in the good stuff going on at Grattan, and wanting to get more involved in it. The Grattan Way, after all, is my way too—ideals I’ve held since childhood and eventually shaped a political philosophy around.

***

That philosophy—pretty much a traditional liberalism—has taken a beating over the years. Like other liberals, I was stunned that the country could reelect George W. in 2004, even though he’d misled us into the Iraq war and botched that mission terribly.

Not only did I worry that Rove’s “permanent Republican majority” was a real possibility, but my own professional choices over the past two decades have distanced me from my college-era activist bent. Yes, I taught public high school in New York City for four years and interned at both The Nation and The Village Voice. But for the last 13 years I’ve been a journalist writing for the mainstream media or the business press.

That can be a noble pursuit, and I’m proud of a number of investigative articles that I’ve written—stories that may have reached a wider audience than if they’d appeared in a lefty publication.

Still, there’s been a cost to where I’ve hung my byline. It has to do with the “objectivity” demanded by the mainstream media. Despite writing probably upwards of 2,000 articles over the years, I can feel that my voice and--my passions--have been silenced some.

The sense of having been gradually quieted politically and professionally is partly why Obama’s win was such a satisfying present, such a poignant payoff. I kept crying in the wake of the victory. Tuesday night, I pumped my first and hissed out from clenched teeth “We fucking won Florida!”—but did it with my voice breaking. I teared up during the acceptance speech. I wept in the following days at stories of Obama breaking barriers. I choked up as I thought about my mother voting for Obama despite her pro-life position.

There was some serious grief being released here. A store of sadness I was barely conscious of, that I believe came from hope dying to some degree over the years.

The same surprisingly intense crying overtook me when I began dating my wife, and I recognized that I’d settled for a less-than-full level of happiness in my first marriage.

You see this overwhelm turn athletes to mush when they reach the top after a long journey. Kevin Garnett of the Boston Celtics was a seven foot-tall baby after winning the National Basketball Championship earlier this year, rocking and crying and shouting, “anything’s possible!”

Maybe it takes tears to clean off dusty but dearly help dreams—whether they be of a basketball title or a big love or a better world.

Because apart from making weepy, Obama’s win has awakened my political passions. I feel inspired to take on projects like creating a more just economy, tackling the violence and poverty of my own neighborhood, and staving off climate disaster.

I don’t think I’m alone. I’m sure most McCain voters aren’t nearly as pumped up as I am, but I suspect many agreed with McCain himself who said in his concession speech that Obama’s election says something great about America. And many McCain-Palin people may have been stirred when Obama called on all of us to get ready to pitch in during his acceptance speech.

In fact, even though Obama got less than 55 percent of the popular vote, a recent CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll indicates that 79 percent of the public thinks he will do a good job as president.

Those who voted for Obama, meanwhile, feel shaken, not stirred, and in the best way possible. Election night, throngs of people in multiple American cities including San Francisco erupted in spontaneous street parties. My wife and I celebrated with champagne, leaning out our window to join in the cries of “woo hoo”, “yeah!” and a more primal “HAHHHH!”

Those yells weren’t just about relief, joy and silliness. On some level we were restating a serious resolve. We were shouting “Yes We Can.”

***

It’s tempting to call that phrase an empty slogan. A recent profile of leftist author Naomi Klein in the New Yorker quotes Klein along these lines, as she points to more conservative Obama stances on issues including war in Afghanistan.

But to minimize the motto ignores how powerful it is to highlight the social over the individual for a change. Talk about the change we need--virtually all the ills wrought by the Bush Administration stem from prizing the individual at the expense of the group. The cowboy foreign policy in Iraq. The you’re-on-your-own economic policies that widened the wealth gap and ignored the perils of unfettered markets. The disregard for future generations or the global community when it comes to the environment.

In fact, reconnecting with the basic idea of collective action is the only way we will get out of the economic crisis upon us. Consumers and businesses are reining in spending and retrenching in ways that may make sense for them individually, but are sending us as a whole into a self-perpetuating spiral of reduced demand and layoffs. It’s the recipe for another Depression.

Thankfully, though, we went through one of those already. And Americans appear to be remembering that people can solve problems together. A study published last year by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found “increased public support for the social safety net, signs of growing public concern about income inequality, and a diminished appetite for assertive national security policies.”

In other words, there seems to be a yes-we-can spirit in the air.

That spirit was reinforced for me recently in the realm of religion. I have been attending Old First Presbyterian Church in San Francisco for the past few months, and a sermon two Sundays ago by pastor Maggi Henderson reminded me of the spiritual, moral component of community. Henderson spoke about the prophet Isaiah’s words, “’Comfort, O comfort My people,’ says your God.” We often think of comfort as a lack of pain, as in comfortable shoes, Henderson said. But, she said, there’s a more active, communal meaning: the idea that collectively we fortify each other.

Henderson’s sermon was another gift of the season. Her call for a kind of solidarity to transcend tough times gave me a greater appreciation of the well-worn holiday phrase: tidings of comfort and joy. The good news is that we’re stronger together.

***

But there’s more to the comfort-and-joy story. Part of what makes us happy is a little discomfort. I was reminded of this wisdom by a Dec. 7 New York Times essay by psychologist Dacher Keltner titled, “In Defense of Teasing.” It highlighted the way teasing—as opposed to bullying or humiliating—is a key component of pleasure and even human connection.

“Teasing is the stage for the drama of flirtation, where suitors provoke in order to look for the sure signs of enduring commitment.,’ Keltner wrote. “…Studies find that married couples with a rich vocabulary of teasing nicknames and formulaic insults are happier and more satisfied.”

The essay struck me partly because it reminded me of some delightful give-and-take from an old romance. My old girlfriend Marlene once called me “scrawny”, and I think I responded by calling her “skinny” and a chase ensued. The jabs had points—I am a slender dude and she had rail-thin legs. But given the affectionate way we spoke those words, the put-downs acted as cupid arrows. The thrill of that exchange is partly why I still get nostalgic about her.

My first wife Kay called me “scrappy” based on the way I played basketball. It was an affirming description, but it symbolized the way our relationship could err on the side of seriousness. Kay has a clever, dry sense of humor. And we did poke fun of each other a fair amount. But there was a way in which we pulled our playful punches. Our preoccupation with taking care of each other limited the teasing, and that helped crimp the joy I felt with her.

I recaptured a sense of delight with my wife Rowena. When I met her nearly nine years ago, she struck me as a perfect balance of Marlene’s extreme romanticism and Kay’s anti-romantic realism. We also share a playfulness around movement, a hungry curiosity about the world and a sense of wonder about our two kids.

But we haven’t found a groove when it comes to romantic teasing. Often we feel sensitive to each other’s digs. Or maybe we haven’t found a way to deliver them in the right way. Rowena’s got a sarcastic, sometimes raunchy sense of humor. She shared this style with her first husband, though the common ground didn’t ultimately keep them close.

Rowena thinks our senses of humor may never click exactly. She may be right, but I’m not willing to give up yet. I at least can thicken my skin and lighten up more. I’ve long had a “safety first” mantra which can drive my kids batty during rough-housing and get in my own way of having fun. My buddy Joel once called me his “earnest” friend. I cringe a little at the description, which was spot on. Too much safety and seriousness veers into the dull and somber.

***

So I’m grateful to Keltner for refreshing my memory that relationships can be deepened by both heartfelt hugs and light-hearted zingers. But his words offer a still larger contribution. As a society, we should be concerned about going too far when it comes to comforting our brothers and sisters. By seeking a pain-free society, we may create a sterile one.

Economically speaking, I think you can see risk-taking as roughly analogous to a kind of societal teasing. A new business venture amounts to a challenge to established firms. During the past decade, such economic “teasing” was taken to the level of “tricks”. Unscrupulous lenders pushed mortgages on consumers with payments destined to mushroom to unaffordable levels. Largely unregulated financial services firms peddled new, little understood investment products that depended on a housing market bubble.

All the dubious activity enriched a few, but led to an unstable financial system that has required billions in public bail outs and helped send the economy into a deepening recession.

To go to far in the other direction though—to banish risk altogether—would result in an economic system that’s likely to be not only less prosperous but even dull. Through entrepreneurial or investment risk, an individual sticks his neck out from the group, in a sense mocking the more powerful or status quo as inadequate. My friend Art recently observed that the U.S. is the most fascinating country to watch with its booms and busts—we should retain something of that dynamic story.

Preserving a degree of public playfulness is about more than just the economy. There’s been concern that jokes cannot be told about Obama, who can come across as a serious dude. Even amid our crises, we ought not to take ourselves too seriously. It may be more important than ever to be able to laugh. In the hard road ahead, laughter will be a rare luxury.

***

It’s fitting that the economic crisis is coming to a head of sorts in winter. The season of darkness, when we lose light, lose the life of plants, lose the comfort of warmer weather. The holiday rituals are an elaborate effort—not always successful—to pick up our spirits with lights and social gatherings. The best of the holiday music nods to the downerness of the days. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” by the Vince Guaraldi Trio is a case in point, with the bittersweet “Christmas Time is Here” offsetting more upbeat songs like “Hark, the Herald Angles Sing” and the classic piano rave-up “Linus and Lucy.”

Maybe the truism is right—we need some bad times to bring out our best. We have to face loss to experience the gifts of brotherhood and communal cheer.

In “Christmas Time is Here,” the kids on the recording sing: “Oh that we could always see such spirit through the year.”

That oft-repeated sentiment has a larger significance amid today’s recession. We can’t afford to lose the holiday spirit this year. We need collective hope and compassion and playfulness.

Can we do it, as Jean Robertson might ask? Can we create tidings of comfort and joy out of the current gloom? Even a Grattan kindergartener knows the answer: Yes we can.

Yes we can create tidings of comfort and joy

2008-12-14T16:00:00.000-08:00

There’s a lot of losing going on this holiday season. Loss of wealth. Loss of jobs. Loss of life. I have little stories that go with those big ones. My retirement savings has cratered with everyone else’s. One of my best friends lost his job and I’m worried about losing mine as a business journalist. My grandmother-in-law died just before Thanksgiving, a relatively peaceful death but still a painful one.

Amid these losses, though, I’m finding myself gaining. Or perhaps better said, regaining. In recent weeks, hope and idealism that had quietly ebbed in me over the years washed back. I am feeling once again a fundamental faith that we can and must comfort each other. And an essay I read about the importance of teasing jolted me back to the deliciousness of romantic ribbing and led to a wiser take on playfulness.

These positive personal tales also fit into some bigger, public ones. For many of us, it seems, tis’ the season to be both melancholy and jolly.

***

My gift of newfound optimism has to do with the big O. The big win of the big O, really. Because if Barack Obama had lost Nov. 4, I would probably be feeling pessimistic big-time right about now.

Like some other liberals, in the days before the election, I was paranoid Obama’s lead in the polls would somehow disappear and our team would fail. This fear of faltering in the fourth quarter, in the clutch, runs deep in me. Not only have I failed to decisively win any organized sports championships in my life, but I hail from Buffalo. The city where the Buffalo Bills hold the dubious honor of being the only professional football team to make it to the Super Bowl championship four straight years only to lose each time.

I tried to compensate during this year’s election with effort. I made more than 500 phone calls from my home for Obama. I spent a Saturday with my friend Monique in Nevada, amid llama farms and lots of angry dogs, asking voters in the swing state to back Barack. The last days before Nov. 4, I campaigned for Obama at his downtown San Francisco headquarters. Many of my 11th-hour calls were to voters in Florida. The state I’d spent hours calling for the doomed Kerry campaign. Where the Dems came up short in 2000.

I secretly worried I was cursing Obama’s chances even as I dialed for voters.

But he won. And that win suddenly made concepts like hope and community and sacrifice real again, grippable—like the way Oprah Winfrey apparently just grabbed and held onto a stranger at the victory celebration in Chicago’s Grant Park. Obama really won. By a lot. Americans not only were willing to put a legacy of racism aside, but cast their lot for the man and the party saying “yes we can.”

A night or two after the election, I suddenly made the connection that Obama’s mantra is the same as the morning chant at my son’s elementary school. Grattan Principal Jean Robertson starts each day by assembling all the students on the playground, sharing announcements and then asking the kids, “What’d you come to school for today?” Students, teachers and parents answer, “To Learn.” And Jean shouts back, “Can you do it?” And about 350 voices belt out: “Yes we can!”

In the weeks since school began for my kindergartener, I’d appreciated the morning call and response as a nice, motivating ritual. But now I saw the richness of this every-day articulation of hope and determination, its elevation of a collective, ambitious philosophy. It dawned on me that the kids could have said “Yes I can.” The Grattan go-get-‘em pep talk was not just sweet but bordering on sacred.

Of course, Grattan isn’t perfect. My wife and I have already butted up against bureaucracy and questioned some of the school decisions. But something democratic and deeply hopeful is alive at this little school, which has attracted growing numbers of families in recent years. Grattan prides itself in part on the Grattan Way, a four-part code of respectfulness, responsibility, safety and kindness.

I now find myself having more faith in the good stuff going on at Grattan, and wanting to get more involved in it. The Grattan Way, after all, is my way too—ideals I’ve held since childhood and eventually shaped a political philosophy around.

***

That philosophy—pretty much a traditional liberalism—has taken a beating over the years. Like other liberals, I was stunned that the country could reelect George W. in 2004, even though he’d misled us into the Iraq war and botched that mission terribly.

Not only did I worry that Rove’s “permanent Republican majority” was a real possibility, but my own professional choices over the past two decades have distanced me from my college-era activist bent. Yes, I taught public high school in New York City for four years and interned at both The Nation and The Village Voice. But for the last 13 years I’ve been a journalist writing for the mainstream media or the business press.

That can be a noble pursuit, and I’m proud of a number of investigative articles that I’ve written—stories that may have reached a wider audience than if they’d appeared in a lefty publication.

Still, there’s been a cost to where I’ve hung my byline. It has to do with the “objectivity” demanded by the mainstream media. Despite writing probably upwards of 2,000 articles over the years, I can feel that my voice and--my passions--have been silenced some.

The sense of having been gradually quieted politically and professionally is partly why Obama’s win was such a satisfying present, such a poignant payoff. I kept crying in the wake of the victory. Tuesday night, I pumped my first and hissed out from clenched teeth “We fucking won Florida!”—but did it with my voice breaking. I teared up during the acceptance speech. I wept in the following days at stories of Obama breaking barriers. I choked up as I thought about my mother voting for Obama despite her pro-life position.

There was some serious grief being released here. A store of sadness I was barely conscious of, that I believe came from hope dying to some degree over the years.

The same surprisingly intense crying overtook me when I began dating my wife, and I recognized that I’d settled for a less-than-full level of happiness in my first marriage.

You see this overwhelm turn athletes to mush when they reach the top after a long journey. Kevin Garnett of the Boston Celtics was a seven foot-tall baby after winning the National Basketball Championship earlier this year, rocking and crying and shouting, “anything’s possible!”

Maybe it takes tears to clean off dusty but dearly help dreams—whether they be of a basketball title or a big love or a better world.

Because apart from making weepy, Obama’s win has awakened my political passions. I feel inspired to take on projects like creating a more just economy, tackling the violence and poverty of my own neighborhood, and staving off climate disaster.

I don’t think I’m alone. I’m sure most McCain voters aren’t nearly as pumped up as I am, but I suspect many agreed with McCain himself who said in his concession speech that Obama’s election says something great about America. And many McCain-Palin people may have been stirred when Obama called on all of us to get ready to pitch in during his acceptance speech.

In fact, even though Obama got less than 55 percent of the popular vote, a recent CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll indicates that 79 percent of the public thinks he will do a good job as president.

Those who voted for Obama, meanwhile, feel shaken, not stirred, and in the best way possible. Election night, throngs of people in multiple American cities including San Francisco erupted in spontaneous street parties. My wife and I celebrated with champagne, leaning out our window to join in the cries of “woo hoo”, “yeah!” and a more primal “HAHHHH!”

Those yells weren’t just about relief, joy and silliness. On some level we were restating a serious resolve. We were shouting “Yes We Can.”

***

It’s tempting to call that phrase an empty slogan. A recent profile of leftist author Naomi Klein in the New Yorker quotes Klein along these lines, as she points to more conservative Obama stances on issues including war in Afghanistan.

But to minimize the motto ignores how powerful it is to highlight the social over the individual for a change. Talk about the change we need--virtually all the ills wrought by the Bush Administration stem from prizing the individual at the expense of the group. The cowboy foreign policy in Iraq. The you’re-on-your-own economic policies that widened the wealth gap and ignored the perils of unfettered markets. The disregard for future generations or the global community when it comes to the environment.

In fact, reconnecting with the basic idea of collective action is the only way we will get out of the economic crisis upon us. Consumers and businesses are reining in spending and retrenching in ways that may make sense for them individually, but are sending us as a whole into a self-perpetuating spiral of reduced demand and layoffs. It’s the recipe for another Depression.

Thankfully, though, we went through one of those already. And Americans appear to be remembering that people can solve problems together. A study published last year by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found “increased public support for the social safety net, signs of growing public concern about income inequality, and a diminished appetite for assertive national security policies.”

In other words, there seems to be a yes-we-can spirit in the air.

That spirit was reinforced for me recently in the realm of religion. I have been attending Old First Presbyterian Church in San Francisco for the past few months, and a sermon two Sundays ago by pastor Maggi Henderson reminded me of the spiritual, moral component of community. Henderson spoke about the prophet Isaiah’s words, “’Comfort, O comfort My people,’ says your God.” We often think of comfort as a lack of pain, as in comfortable shoes, Henderson said. But, she said, there’s a more active, communal meaning: the idea that collectively we fortify each other.

Henderson’s sermon was another gift of the season. Her call for a kind of solidarity to transcend tough times gave me a greater appreciation of the well-worn holiday phrase: tidings of comfort and joy. The good news is that we’re stronger together.

***

But there’s more to the comfort-and-joy story. Part of what makes us happy is a little discomfort. I was reminded of this wisdom by a Dec. 7 New York Times essay by psychologist Dacher Keltner titled, “In Defense of Teasing.” It highlighted the way teasing—as opposed to bullying or humiliating—is a key component of pleasure and even human connection.

“Teasing is the stage for the drama of flirtation, where suitors provoke in order to look for the sure signs of enduring commitment.,’ Keltner wrote. “…Studies find that married couples with a rich vocabulary of teasing nicknames and formulaic insults are happier and more satisfied.”

The essay struck me partly because it reminded me of some delightful give-and-take from an old romance. My old girlfriend Marlene once called me “scrawny”, and I think I responded by calling her “skinny” and a chase ensued. The jabs had points—I am a slender dude and she had rail-thin legs. But given the affectionate way we spoke those words, the put-downs acted as cupid arrows. The thrill of that exchange is partly why I still get nostalgic about her.

My first wife Kay called me “scrappy” based on the way I played basketball. It was an affirming description, but it symbolized the way our relationship could err on the side of seriousness. Kay has a clever, dry sense of humor. But our preoccupation with taking care of each other meant mischievousness often went missing.

I recaptured a sense of delight with my wife Rowena. When I met her nearly nine years ago, she struck me as a perfect balance of Marlene’s extreme romanticism and Kay’s anti-romantic realism. We also share a playfulness around movement, a hungry curiosity about the world and a sense of wonder about our two kids.

But we haven’t found a groove when it comes to romantic teasing. Often we feel sensitive to each other’s digs. Or maybe we haven’t found a way to deliver them in the right way. Rowena’s got a sarcastic, sometimes raunchy sense of humor. She shared this style with her first husband, though the common ground didn’t ultimately keep them close.

Rowena thinks our senses of humor may never click exactly. She may be right, but I’m not willing to give up yet. I at least can thicken my skin and lighten up more. I’ve long had a “safety first” mantra which can drive my kids batty during rough-housing and get in my own way of having fun. My buddy Joel once called me his “earnest” friend. I cringe a little at the description, which was spot on. Too much safety and seriousness veers into the dull and somber.

***

So I’m grateful to Keltner for refreshing my memory that relationships can be deepened by both heartfelt hugs and light-hearted zingers. But his words offer a still larger contribution. As a society, we should be concerned about going too far when it comes to comforting our brothers and sisters. By seeking a pain-free society, we may create a sterile one.

Economically speaking, I think you can see risk-taking as roughly analogous to a kind of societal teasing. A new business venture amounts to a challenge to established firms. During the past decade, such economic “teasing” was taken to the level of “tricks”. Unscrupulous lenders pushed mortgages on consumers with payments destined to mushroom to unaffordable levels. Largely unregulated financial services firms peddled new, little understood investment products that depended on a housing market bubble.

All the dubious activity enriched a few, but led to an unstable financial system that has required billions in public bail outs and helped send the economy into a deepening recession.

To go to far in the other direction though—to banish risk altogether—would result in an economic system that’s likely to be not only less prosperous but even dull. Through entrepreneurial or investment risk, an individual sticks his neck out from the group, in a sense mocking the more powerful or status quo as inadequate. My friend Art recently observed that the U.S. is the most fascinating country to watch with its booms and busts—we should retain something of that dynamic story.

Preserving a degree of public playfulness is about more than just the economy. There’s been concern that jokes cannot be told about Obama, who can come across as a serious dude. Even amid our crises, we ought not to take ourselves too seriously. It may be more important than ever to be able to laugh. In the hard road ahead, laughter will be a rare luxury.

***

It’s fitting that the economic crisis is coming to a head of sorts in winter. The season of darkness, when we lose light, lose the life of plants, lose the comfort of warmer weather. The holiday rituals are an elaborate effort—not always successful—to pick up our spirits with lights and social gatherings. The best of the holiday music nods to the downerness of the days. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” by the Vince Guaraldi Trio is a case in point, with the bittersweet “Christmas Time is Here” offsetting more upbeat songs like “Hark, the Herald Angles Sing” and the classic piano rave-up “Linus and Lucy.”

Maybe the truism is right—we need some bad times to bring out our best. We have to face loss to experience the gifts of brotherhood and communal cheer.

In “Christmas Time is Here,” the kids on the recording sing: “Oh that we could always see such spirit through the year.”

That oft-repeated sentiment has a larger significance amid today’s recession. We can’t afford to lose the holiday spirit this year. We need collective hope and compassion and playfulness.

Can we do it, as Jean Robertson might ask? Can we create tidings of comfort and joy out of the current gloom? Even a Grattan kindergartener knows the answer: Yes we can.

Super Boy

2008-04-24T22:08:00.000-07:00

I was struck by the words on a package of underwear I bought the other day for my son Julius: “Super Boy.”

Most papas think their sons are Super Boys to some extent. I’m no exception. I take great pride in the way Julius Randall, 5, syncopates and does double time as a drummer, swings across rings with such grace and power as to regularly elicit compliments from the playground parenting crowd, and grills grown-ups about what they are up to. This last habit may grate on some friends’ nerves at times, but as a journalist I love seeing him demonstrate such curiosity and tenacity.

I also see some amazing things from him when it comes to words. Julius has this striking way of employing phrases beyond his years—often beyond even my years. One example is the way he can announce bad news, as in: “Mama, I’m so sorry, but Skyla (his kid sister) just poured paint on the carpet.” When he was at the beach with other kids making tunnels and pools in the sand, he said: “Guys, this calls for some tools.”

The “this calls for” phrase was straight out of an old superhero cartoon. That’s not a complete surprise, since he loves watching old Superman and Aquaman cartoons on YouTube.

But Julius doesn’t just imitate. He innovates. The boy who made up some of his own sign language signs as an infant now makes up his own words and turns of phrase. Like “Bizday” as a day of the week in addition to the usual seven. A “double push-up” is when one person does a push up while a second person does one on the back of the first person (I don’t think he and I have managed this yet, but we’ll get there). “The Russian flier” refers to the paper airplane design we learned from the Russian immigrant mother of a circus-school classmate.

In this same spirit of naming, he’s given me a moniker. My wife Rowena and I decided to call ourselves “Mama” and “Papa” before we had Julius and Skyla, and that’s how we refer to each other. But Julius has taken to calling his mother “Mom” much of the time. And much of the time he calls me “Dada”—pronounced “dad-ah.”

He may have picked up this term from his dear friends Isa and Felix. In any event, it is about the last name I would have given to myself as a father. It doesn’t have that hipster/retro flair that partly drew me to “Papa.” And it can come across as babyish. Only it doesn’t when Julius uses it to give me precise, elaborate directions, such as “Dada, put the blanket over your head and pretend the piano is me and the TV is Skyla.” And who cares about hipsterhood when Julius says “Dada” and nuzzles me with his wiry-haired head, or reaches out to hold my hand from his loft bed.

Dada is now one of my favorite words in the world.

Some of my others are ones he mispronounces. Like “breakrast” for “breakfast” and “pokskible” for “popsicle.” Part of me hopes he never gets those “right.”

There's also "hostible" instead of "hospital." However you pronounce it, that word was on our minds today, because Julius spent a traumatic few hours in the local emergency room. He had to get three stitches after splitting his forehead open on a stone wall—as he put it to the ER staff, he was “running on full speed” and didn’t look where he was going.

Julius can be shy and fearful at times. But today he showed he also is courageous. While he lay on a gurney, we talked about how courage means going through something even though you are afraid. Despite some tears and his fear of stitches, he held totally still while his half-inch gash was cleaned with saline water, numbed up, and sewn up.

Our wonderful nurse, Teo, called Julius a superhero. I couldn’t agree more.

From Tough Luck to Tough Love--the updated version

2008-04-11T21:35:00.000-07:00

Below is an updated version of my essay introduction—one that tries to address any confusion over the phrase “tough love” from the get-go.

Usually in America, when someone loses their job or has their fledgling business go belly up, we respond with a collective, “tough luck.”

What we ought to be giving is tough love.

The tough luck approach contains a smidgeon of empathy. But mostly it means the individual is on their own. Society doesn’t feel much responsibility, nor does it offer much help in terms of handling the resulting unemployment and related risks of home loss and deteriorating personal relations.

Saying “tough luck” borders on cruel in today’s global economy, which is ever-more turbulent and in which corporations frequently layoff workers even in good times.

When I call for “tough love,” I mean equal parts care and accountability. Conservatives can define this term to mean that virtually any help given to someone undermines self-reliance. For that reason, I think, liberals who focus on the connectedness of individuals can find the phrase distasteful. I aim to reframe “tough love” as a term that succinctly captures the importance of both personal responsibility and collective aid.

Tough love, in this sense, would mean showing enough compassion to truly help an economically displaced person get back on their feet—even giving them a job if they couldn’t find another. It would mean recognizing that we as a whole share some responsibility for the person’s problem, because society created conditions in which they failed or found themselves without a job. But we’d set limits on how much we would shelter or aid them, to avoid coddling people into dependence or passivity.

Tough love also might mean a different attitude about people before they get into an economic pickle. It might mean doing more to nurture their creativity or talents, such as a universal system of sabbaticals.

Tough love might seem soft-headed or sentimental. And there is a moral component to a social safety net that better protects fellow human beings when they’re blown off the economic ladder. Over the past few decades, economic risk has shifted from companies and government to individuals. The result is increasingly volatile incomes for American families and a kind of mass callousness toward the “losers.”

But a kinder, more proactive safety net also can serve as a springy catalyst for hard-headed economic growth. A degree of economic security can lead to inspired work by employees and individuals. At the very least, it would temper calls to close off global trade in ways that are short-sighted and selfish as a nation. And fostering people’s innovations, including artistic ones, has become vital in an economy where “human capital” is rising in importance and right-brained, conceptual thinking is seen as the future.

Denmark offers a case study in the promise of economic tough love. The country has combined generous unemployment benefits with restrictions on public aid and the ability of businesses to hire and fire with ease. The results of Denmark’s “flexicurity” are stellar economic growth and a highly egalitarian society.

To be sure, there are pitfalls to putting tough love into practice. Taxing the populace too high to pay for the safety net threatens to repel entrepreneurs or others keen on growing wealthy. Denmark is currently wrestling with this issue.

America, though, has a long ways to go before it creates a safety net so expensive that it pushes key talent abroad. By far our bigger hurdle is helping our existing workforce both avoid devastating economic setbacks and reach its highest potential—in part by reducing the fear of such setbacks.

Focusing on Americans’ economic confidence and seeing a significant societal role in their development isn’t easy to do, though, because of some powerful myths at the center of our national culture. Horatio Alger and the story of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps has long steered us to view Americans as solo heroes on very individual paths.

There’s also an American penchant for the all-or-nothing, for betting everything on a dream. These narratives contain kernels of truth about the importance of the individual and the thrill of the extreme. But they romanticize risk and hide the help people get from those around them.

As the United States has become more of a winner-take-all, tough-luck economy over the past few decades, Americans have responded in some dysfunctional ways. We’ve literally turned to luck, spending money on gambling as never before. And we have gravitated to the mean-spirited, fantastical theory of “The Secret,” which claims individual success comes to those who wish hard enough—and implies the unsuccessful are to blame for their misfortune.

But there are signs we’re ready for a new, more social story. That we are starting to remember America’s communal heritage, with its barn-raisings and civic traditions. That we’re more open to learning from other cultures that put more emphasis on the collective than we do. Natural disasters and the potential for them are bringing us together as a country and a globe. Social networking sites are highlighting the fact that other people are not just consumers to be sold to or job competition, but critical supports in one’s career. The populace is shifting leftward politically, even if policies aren’t yet.

Marketers are ahead of our political and economic policies. They seem to sense the greater openness to brotherly- and sisterly love welling up in the country. An Adidas storefront recently had this written on its window: “Every team needs a hero. Every hero needs a team.”

From Tough Luck to Tough Love

2008-01-30T19:42:00.001-08:00

Usually in America, when someone loses their job or has their fledgling business go belly up, we respond with a collective, “tough luck.”

What we ought to be giving is tough love.

The tough luck approach contains a smidgeon of empathy. But mostly it means the individual is on their own. Society doesn’t feel much responsibility, nor does it offer much help in terms of handling the resulting unemployment and related risks of home loss and deteriorating personal relations.

Saying “tough luck” borders on cruel in today’s global economy, which is ever-more turbulent and in which corporations frequently layoff workers even in good times.

Tough love would mean recognizing that we as a whole are accountable to a degree for the person’s problem, in the sense that we created conditions in which they failed or found themselves without a job. We also would show enough care for them to truly help them get back on their feet—even giving them a job if they couldn’t find another. But we’d set limits on how long we would shelter or aid them, to avoid coddling people into dependence or passivity.

Tough love also might mean a different attitude about people before they get into an economic pickle. It might mean doing more to nurture their creativity or talents, such as a universal system of sabbaticals.

Tough love might seem soft-headed or sentimental. And there is a moral component to a social safety net that better protects fellow human beings when they’re blown off the economic ladder. Over the past few decades, economic risk has shifted from companies and government to individuals. The result is increasingly volatile incomes for American families and a kind of mass callousness toward the “losers.”

But a kinder, more proactive safety net also can serve as a springy catalyst for hard-headed economic growth. A degree of economic security can lead to inspired work by employees and individuals. At the very least, it would temper calls to close off global trade in ways that are short-sighted and selfish as a nation. And fostering people’s innovations, including artistic ones, has become vital in an economy where “human capital” is rising in importance and right-brained, conceptual thinking is seen as the future.

Denmark offers a case study in the promise of economic tough love. The country has combined generous unemployment benefits with restrictions on public aid and the ability of businesses to hire and fire with ease. The results of Denmark’s “flexicurity” are stellar economic growth and a highly egalitarian society.

To be sure, there are pitfalls to putting tough love into practice. Taxing the populace too high to pay for the safety net threatens to repel entrepreneurs or others keen on growing wealthy. Denmark is currently wrestling with this issue.

America, though, has a long ways to go before it creates a safety net so expensive that it pushes key talent abroad. By far our bigger hurdle is helping our existing workforce both avoid devastating economic setbacks and reach its highest potential—in part by reducing the fear of such setbacks.

Focusing on Americans’ economic confidence and seeing a significant societal role in their development isn’t easy to do, though, because of some powerful myths at the center of our national culture. Horatio Alger and the story of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps has long steered us to view Americans as solo heroes on very individual paths.

There’s also an American penchant for the all-or-nothing, for betting everything on a dream. These narratives contain kernels of truth about the importance of the individual and the thrill of the extreme. But they romanticize risk and hide the help people get from those around them.

As the United States has become more of a winner-take-all, tough-luck economy over the past few decades, Americans have responded in some dysfunctional ways. We’ve literally turned to luck, spending money on gambling as never before. And we have gravitated to the mean-spirited, fantastical theory of “The Secret,” which claims individual success comes to those who wish hard enough—and implies the unsuccessful are to blame for their misfortune.

But there are signs we’re ready for a new, more social story. That we are starting to remember America’s communal heritage, with its barn-raisings and civic traditions. That we’re more open to learning from other cultures that put more emphasis on the collective than we do. Natural disasters and the potential for them are bringing us together as a country and a globe. Social networking sites are highlighting the fact that other people are not just consumers to be sold to or job competition, but critical supports in one’s career. The populace is shifting leftward politically, even if policies aren’t yet.

Marketers are ahead of our political and economic policies. They seem to sense the greater openness to brotherly- and sisterly love welling up in the country. An Adidas storefront recently had this written on its window: “Every team needs a hero. Every hero needs a team.”

Welcome to FrauenTimes!

2008-01-30T14:39:00.000-08:00

My name is Ed Frauenheim. My full name is Edward Edmund Frauenheim IV. I say that to distinguish myself from my dad, Edward Edmund Frauenheim III, a Chicago-based entrepreneur who also calls himself Ed Frauenheim. I like my full name and am proud of my lineage. But it has seemed pretentious to me to use that full name or even the “IV” in a byline.

And I’m a byline guy. I’ve been a professional journalist based in San Francisco since 1995, writing for newspapers, magazines and Web sites. I currently am a Senior Writer at business publication Workforce Management magazine. At Workforce Management, I work with excellent editors and reporters, and I’ve been able to publish some of my best writing there.

But I have long aspired to be more than a traditional reporter. I hope also to be a “public intellectual.” In other words, I want to come up with and express ideas that affect public debate and change attitudes. What’s more, I have found that my work as a traditional journalist can stifle the activist in me. And limit the topics I write about.

That’s where this blog comes in. On it, I plan to articulate ideas and explore topics and advocate positions in ways I haven’t up to now. One of the main topics I’ll write about is economic policy. And on that topic I plan to publish an essay that I’m currently calling “From Tough Luck to Tough Love.” It calls for treating Americans with both care and accountability when it comes to the economic realm, with greater recognition of the way individuals in today’s turbulent global economy need help from society and the way society can prosper through a stronger safety net. This essay will grow over time, I hope, and may eventually take the form of a book.

“From Tough Luck to Tough Love” and other items published here may include bits of memoir. That’s a choice inspired partly by my wife, Rowena Richie. In her writings and dance-making, she has shown me the power of combining conventional research with personal stories. Of seeing the big story in the small one, and vice versa.

Besides a writer and a husband, I’m the father of two young kids. Julius and Skyla not only amaze me with their antics, observations and curiosity, but inspire me to speak “authentically.” To be true to myself. To be my best self.

I think psychologist Abraham Maslow was on to something with his notion of “self-actualization” as the peak human state. Reading about Maslow on Wikipedia recently, I was struck by this description, attributed to him, of self-actualization: “an episode or spurt in which the powers of the person come together in a particularly and intensely enjoyable way, and in which he is more integrated and less split, more open for experience, more idiosyncratic…. He becomes in these episodes more truly himself, more perfectly actualising his potentialities, closer to the core of his being, more fully human.”

I felt something along these lines when I first hit on the gist of “From Tough Luck to Tough Love” last October. A way to combine journalism with my interests in economics, intellectual history and cultural analysis. And the essay feels tied to goals I hold dear: to make the world more just, more loving, more peaceful and more joyous. I hope this site more generally will help me achieve that more integrated, true-to-myself state.

At FrauenTimes, I am taking myself seriously enough to get my ideas out in the public. But I aim not to take myself so seriously that I can’t be playful or “punny.” And I recognize that my ideas are bound to improve with responses from readers. So, any questions? Comments? Nasty remarks?

Thanks for visiting.

Ed