Department Of The First (And Likely Last) Time I’ve Ever Asked This Question
“What is your favorite mice curse?”
Dateline: Last Saturday evening.
Context: Don’t y’all worry your pretty little heads about that.
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Department Of I Can’t Believe How Good This Is…
And How, Ultimately, Heartbreaking
Best podcast episode…in a long time…or, ever?
This American Life: Ten Things I Don’t Want To Hate About You. From the intro:
TAL host Ira Glass:
I think we all have people in our lives who we love, but there’s no talking to them. They have their way of seeing things or doing things, and it’s hard to take. And no matter how you try to talk it out, it goes nowhere. It doesn’t get solved, even if they also want things to change.
We’re devoting our entire show today to a story like that from Zach Mack, who’s a reporter. And the story is about him and his dad and how they both wanted to mend a rift that had grown between them that had lasted for years, but they couldn’t figure out how until Zach’s dad offered a very surprising way out.
Zach’s (and his family’s) story is told in three parts (you can listen to them all at the link). Part 1: Zach and his father enter into an agreement that could change their entire relationship. (9 minutes)
Part 2: Zach’s mother and sister weigh in on the agreement. (28 minutes)
Part 3: With the year coming to an end, someone is going to have to say, “You were right, and I was wrong.” Will it change anything?
From the intro through the ending credits song ( Elvis Presley’s Suspicious Minds – gut-punchingly apropos, considering the subject ), this is one of the best, if not *the* best, podcast episodes I’ve ever heard. And I’m glad I made moiself listen to it, even as I was trying not to sob at the end.
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Department Of Not Only Is This Food For Thought, It’s So Much Food
That I Might Need The Heimlich Maneuver After Attempting To Ingest It All
We control nothing, but we influence everything.
I’m still mulling over that proclamation/observation, which I heard last week, along with its corollary – We should all focus less on control, and more on resilience – via the same venue: the Hidden Brain Podcast moiself mentioned in last week’s post.
This week on Hidden Brain, we…look at how we can come to grips with the unpredictable forces that shape our world and turn them to our advantage. We hear a lot these days about separating the signal from the noise. The idea is that there’s a deep order, a solid predictability we can count on, if only we can screen out distracting details, meaningless static. But what if those trivial random factors actually matter? What if they matter a lot? At University College London, political scientist Brian Klaas studies these hidden forces.
( intro to Hidden Brain: Wellness 2.0: The Art of the Unknown )
HB host Shankar Vedantam and guest Brian Klass talked about the intriguing story of Klass’s own history with random factors. First, they discussed stories of highly consequential historical events – including a phenomenon known in Japan as Kokura’s Luck [1] – which underline “…the fact that the interconnectivity of the world means that unexpected and sometimes deeply problematic things arise from the smallest of human choices.”
In 1945, nearing the end of WWII in the Pacific theater, [2] a change in the weather had huge consequences for the Japanese cities of Kokura and Nagasaki. Kokura was the primary target for the USA’s second atomic bomb dropping, but a change in Kokura’s cloud cover prompted the bomber crew to choose a secondary target. [3]
from the Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki archives
Klass goes on to tell a story from rural American, 1905. Clara Modlin Jansen and her husband lived on a farm in Wisconsin with their four children, all ages four and younger. Do that math: Clara’s been having kids basically nonstop. At some point the stress of gestating, birthing, and parenting four young children (it is assumed…who actually knows?) overwhelms Clara: she kills her four young children, then takes her own life.
Klass:
“And so…Clara’s husband comes home and discovers that most horrific thing that any human can experience – the single moment where his entire family has been wiped out in this intense act of murderous tragedy….all of them are dead…we can only imagine what that was like.
The reason I tell that story is because the man who came home to that farmhouse was my great grandfather. And what is really striking about it from my perspective is that, because my great grandfather remarried about a decade later to the woman that became my great grandmother, I literally would not exist if those kids did not die. It’s my sort of version of Kokura’s luck.”
Last week, the same day I listened to the HB podcast, friend CC and I met for one of our regular sushi lunches wherein we discuss and solve the problems of the world. [4] I brought up that story, about Klass’s family history, and we each noted our own versions of Kokura’s luck.
Mine included an insight MH shared with me about our family – him reacting as if he’d realized it for the first time – after I’d told him that, giving the current erosion of medical and personal autonomy, it was time to go public ( in my blog post, The Liberty Loss I’m Not Accepting ) about the fact that I’d had an abortion when I was in college. That was years before I’d met MH, [5] who seemed to gob-smack himself with the realization that it is almost 99% certain we would not have met and married, and thus our offspring K and Belle would not have been born – had I not had that abortion.
The “interconnectivity of the world,” meaning that the unexpected sometimes arises from seemingly random events, also means that the spontaneous abortion (lay person’s term, miscarriage) – I had not quite two years after son K was born, when MH and I were trying to have another child, means that daughter Belle is who she is her because of that pregnancy fail.
Of course, you can string this on add ad infinitum item into all sorts of areas (does the world owe the Theory of Relativity to the fact that Albert Einstein’s great great great grandmother existed? [6] ) until your cranium feels like it will explode.
One of the more powerful, cranium-exploding events I remember was from several decades ago, when moiself was reading about an innovative jailhouse group counseling program for sexual offenders. [7] The article, written by two of the program’s founders and counselors, spoke of how sexual offenders were one of the (if not *the*) most difficult class of prisoners to rehabilitate. This was because rapists ( like most of society at that time, to be frank) tended to blame their victims for the attacks, and thus were highly resistant to behavioral change therapeutic modes.
Somehow, no matter the circumstances, men imprisoned for assaulting women and girls [8] asserted that it was the fault of the females they’d assaulted. The cognitive gymnastics involved in an opportunistic predator managing to find a way to blame the 68 year-old woman he raped for being responsible for him breaking into her house and attacking her as she was asleep in her own bed, in her own bedroom – Simone Biles couldn’t do as many flips. Sexual predators are masters at the craft of speculative fiction.
The counselors wrote about a breakthrough they had one day, in a session of group counseling, wherein they got a convicted serial rapist to open up to the group. This man (“Y” ) was adamant about how every single one of his rape victims was responsible for him stalking and attacking them. The female counselor (“F”) asked Y to describe, to the group, the last assault he committed, after which he was caught, convicted and sent to prison. F said she wasn’t going to contradict or judge Y, she just truly wanted to know the details, from his POV, After all, he’d been a “successful” predator for years before being caught. How did he choose that victim (“X”)?
Y began relating the story, which in itself was a tacit admission of the willfulness of his act – he didn’t contradict F when, in her question to him, she stated that he *chose* his victim ( a fact some of the other men in the group called Y out on later). But Y didn’t argue with the phrasing of F’s question.
He described how he went out one night to the downtown area of the large city where he lived, and began following random women who crossed his path. He didn’t know where they were walking from or to – a restaurant, their place of work, a friend’s apartment? – and he mostly followed women walking alone but also honed in on a few who were in groups. Y followed one lone woman and told himself, “If she turns right at the next corner or keeps going straight ahead, I’ll ‘get’ her.” The woman turned left.
Y began following a group of four women who were chatting amongst themselves. He told himself, “If one of them breaks off from the other group, I’ll follow her.” At the next street corner, three of the women turned left, waving goodnight to their friend, X, who turned right. As Y followed X for another few blocks, he said to himself, “At the next intersection, If she turns left or continues straight on ahead, she goes free; if she turns right, I’ll get her.”
X was Y’s final assault; he was captured soon afterward. [9] At this point in Y’s narrative, F said to Y, “I am curious about something. You’ve said in the past that every woman you’d raped had brought on her own assault. What did X do to deserve this attack? What did X do that prompted you to attack her?”
Y looked at the floor for a good ten seconds, then looked up, squarely into counselor F’s eyes. Without a trace of emotion Y said, “She turned right.” [10]
All these years (decades) later, moiself still hasn’t gotten over the fact that, for one person in that story – the assailant – true randomness had nothing to do with him committing that most significant act of his life….and for the assault victim, randomness had everything to do with it.
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Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [11]
Many people worry about life’s “meaning.” Or perhaps they just pretend to worry about it, when they’re not engaged in other things. I’ve long been convinced that a concern about the ultimate “meaning” or “purpose” of life is a psychological problem masquerading as a philosophical one.
What could life mean? What does consciousness and its contents, at this moment, mean? What is its purpose?
Whatever is, all together, simply *is.* What meaning could there be?
It seems to me that meaning and purpose are just a distracted person’s imaginary friends. There is only reality…and we’re not separate from it.
Isn’t that good enough?
( Sam Harris, Waking Up moment 2-22-25, my emphases )
Or you could just consult Monty Python.
* * *
May your purpose be to *not* be separate from reality;
May you appreciate the connection between luck and reality;
May your luck include not having a loved one sucked into the vortex of religious certitude
and conspiracy theories;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
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[1] In Japan, someone is said to have “Kokura’s luck,” when they manage to avoid a catastrophewithout ever having realized they were in danger. It refers to the fact that when the US dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki in 1945, the intended target had been the city of Kokura.
[2] The Pacific Theater (of operations); The European Theater – who is responsible for giving bloody and devastating wars such benign logistical labels? “Uncle Sam wants you to join the theater!”
[3] As the B-29 was approaching Kokura, ready to drop its payload, the city was obscured by un-forecasted fog and clouds and haze – the crew couldn’t see the bomb site, and didn’t want to risk dropping an atomic bomb and missing. While they circled a few times, waiting for the weather to change, they realized they were running low on fuel and eventually decided to divert to a secondary target – Nagasaki.
[4] And, not to be snooty about it, but the world will be so much better off when it realized that its problems have solutions, and listen to CC’s and my answers!
[5] This was no big secret to close family members and friends; it was a personal matter. Nor was there any shame behind keeping it personal – I’d never felt a need to discuss my private medical history with strangers.
[6] Certain philosophical or spiritual traditions hold that Einstein’s “soul” would’ve found a way to be born into someone else’s body, in some other family.
[7] Moiself majored in Criminal Justice in college, and had intended to go to law school. For a few years after graduation, I still kept up with my two areas of special interest – feminist civil rights, and prison/sentencing reform.
[8] Of course, men can be assault victims and women perpetrators; the overwhelming majority of scenarios in sexual assault are male perp/female victim, and that’s what the group counseling article was about.
[9] Evidence emerged linking him to several other assaults, some of which he was tried and convicted for.
[10] The rest of the convicts participating in the group discussion had been bone-chillingly quiet during Y’s of how he’d chosen his victim, and at this point they began talking and shouting at once, calling him out on his self-delusion.
[11] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
