What They Need's a Damn Good Whacking--Boycott BP

I've been keeping the TV on today, checking in every so often with CNN for news of the "top kill" plan to deal with the oil leak that got underway a couple of hours ago.
It's not often that I turn on TV during daytime, except possibly to check in on the markets. I think now I remember why.
As I waited for British Petroleum to get things going, I heard the following:
*Q and A with a financial guy on whether the USA could become the next Greece (not that likely), along with another story wondering if Italy will be the next Greece.
*A leaked BP memo that explained a cost analysis on worker housing to find the cheapest dwelling structures acceptable. The on-site trailers chosen allegedly put the workers at higher risk for injury if there was an explosion. Incredibly, that's not the worst part. The worst part is BP used the Three Little Pigs as a twisted analogy to decide "which type of houses should the piggy build?"
*The investigation into plant conditions that led to a recall of children's name-brand medicines widens. This one has been off my radar because we no longer use children's medicine at our house. But people have complained of becoming ill, smelling an odd odor in the medicine, small black flecks that are possibly metal, and an unnamed bacteria contamination.
*There's some kind of drug war starting in Jamaica now. The one in Mexico has border people so scared they've convinced President Obama we should put up a wall and have National Guard troops patrolling the border.

Every so often, someone writes a beard-scratcher asking why Americans are so fearful.
Well, ahem....
Maybe it's because we realize we're hooked into a type of capitalism so extreme that it is immoral. This type of capitalism doesn't care about your sick children or the ecosystem or whether the products are good for you. It doesn't care about the long term. It exists only to earn the maximum profit for business owners or stockholders. And it had a part in every one of these horrible things that have happened.
In this type of capitalism, government (in other words us, the people) has no will to regulate the financiers who brought down economies, or raise taxes to enforce drug laws or inspect medicine plants. Ideally--for the corporations--we'd have no control at all.
Proponents of this type of capitalism have been working a long time to get things to this point. Some of them will tell you that the free market will take care of itself. In this world of unicorns and waterfalls, business will not behave badly because they won't want to be shunned by customers later when they're found out. Right. Excuse me, hippies, while I go bake some hash brownies.

Now we see that those boys and girls in suits need some tough cops on the job just as much as anybody else. Trouble is, we aren't showing any signs of a backbone yet.
So how to be empowered, as an optimist?
Well, yesterday I signed the petition to boycott BP. I know, I know. It's largely symbolic. (In fact, CNN also ran a story today about the many invisible arms of BP and how we're powerless against them.)
But then, I am a consumer who knows how to hold a grudge. Remember Rely tampons? The ones that caused all the deaths from toxic shock syndrome in the early 1980s? I held a personal boycott against Procter and Gamble--widely mocked by my co-workers--for two or three years. I got a list of products. I bought only Lever Bros. soap. It wasn't all that undoable.
The Internet has made it much easier to get that same product information. Maybe my pocketbook voting won't do anything. But it will make me feel good.
Now, off to check on progress on the oil leak.

Mixed news: Can I be optimistic?

"Used to be you talked about IN-flation. You didn't have to worry so much about DE-flation," my friend Myron said as he stepped up to the spin class bike next to mine.
Actually, I'm not all that worried about deflation. In fact, I'm quite enjoying it. Deflation is my friend.
I know this is not the politically correct attitude. Economists and people with a larger view would tell me I should root for prices to go up. The assumption, I guess, is that business owners and executives would share those profits with me in the form of more jobs and raises. Trickle down economics.
But if there's one thing I've learned in the past year, it's to value my own short-sighted personal economics first, just like the big boys do. In my micro-economy, anything that helps me end a bill-paying session without tears is a good thing. We can all gather around and sing kum-ba-yah later, after I've eaten.
That's an example, though, of how confusing optimism can be. Lower prices...Good! No, bad! The sinking value of the Euro...Good! Maybe we can sell more goods over there. No, bad! The stock markets are in a swoon. Oil prices down...Good!! No, it means we're worried about China. Consumer confidence up...Yay! It means people think there will be hiring soon. But what's that voice I hear whispering, "Yeah, and they're going to be hiring 20-year-olds, you dope."
[Insert Neanderthal scowl here. Optimism hard. Brain hurt.]
Meanwhile, we continue with our plans to move ahead on the assumption that things will get better. We're long overdue for a trip out of town, and our daughter isn't going to be living at home that much longer. So we sucked it up and bought tickets for a vacation--one that involves staying at a relative's house, true, but it's a big trip nonetheless. Yes, the money's scary. It's already reduced that security cushion I so treasured by quite a bit. Things could still get worse, so it's a risk.
But then again, it's amazing how much more optimistic you can be when you know there's something good on the horizon.

Optimism sneaks into my reading list

Piano recitals, Keyboard Merit, gardening emergencies, job applications, end-of-school events. They all add up to one thing: Not enough time to post about my optimism efforts. (And, evidently, not enough time to ruminate on worries and bad people.)
So I find myself on an even keel for a week running. Read a depressing story in the New York Times about how many jobs will never come back and how baby boomers laid off will be replaced by younger workers, resulting in a destruction of personal wealth beyond all imagining. Well, actually, the story was only about the jobs never coming back. My imagination skills added the rest.
Looked out my window at a garden full of food growing (notable exception: Sugar Snap peas.)
Applied for a job and wasn't ruled out immediately (still waiting for that call, though).
But although I have been too busy to think about my thinking, I haven't been completely oblivious. Optimism has walked up and slapped me in the face a couple of times, in places I wouldn't have thought to look.
Exhibit A: The Coming Population Crash : and Our Planet' Surprising Future, by Fred Pearce (Beacon Press, 2010).
The first pages of this book, before the table of contents, are a world map with countries distorted to reflect how the population is growing or shrinking. At the top left, "How the boom is turning to bust. Half the world's women are having too few babies to sustain present populations."
The inside is filled with stories and statistics about how economics and lack of social support are causing women in many countries to choose to have fewer children--to the point that the present population will not be replaced.
Clearly, this is not something I picked up with hopes of finding...hope.
But Pearce is very optimistic. He believes innovation will prevent us from disasters caused by climate change and post-peak oil (not so sure about this myself). And then he makes an interesting prediction about the future. Because fewer children are being born, and because women generally live longer than men, the world of the future may be one in which older women have more power, because of their higher numbers.
I am so completely on board with that! Now, if I can just get to that golden time, where old women will be queens of everything! Bwa-ha-ha.
The second book (yes, I do like to keep up with my reading) is Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, by Ethan Watters (Free Press, 2010). Watters' premise is that US drug companies and psychiatric researchers have held sway over the definitions of mental illness to the point that they've overriden the differences between cultures in how the diseases present themselves. And that this has been, in part, planned by the drug companies to increase their profits.
Again, not the place you'd normally look for something on the effects of "positive thinking." Strangely, I found just that in a chapter on schizophrenia.
Watters quotes studies that have shown that people with schizophrenia in developing countries do better over the long run than people in wealthier countries like the US. Researchers have focused on the reactions of family and society to the disease in each type of country, and they've come up with this: Family members in places like the United States seem to be more critical and anxious about the patient's inability to get better than they do in more "fatalistic" countries of the Third World.
All that hyper, macho "we can do it if we put our minds to it" attitude the positive thinking industry is so fond of? It's actually harmful when it comes to the mentally ill. One researcher quoted said this: "Because our culture so highly values self-control and control of circumstances, we become abject when contemplating mentation that seems more changeable, less restrained and less controllable, more open to outside influence, than we imagine our own to be."
So then, to help these people get better, we need to embrace suffering as an inevitable part of life. Hmmm. Sounds like Buddhism.
I'm not sure if I can draw any grand conclusions from any of this. Except, maybe, that it's time for a trashy summer novel. Where can I find one without a hidden lesson on positive thinking?

Mantra a la carte

Well, it's been a couple of weeks and I can't say I've made a whole lot of progress yet on the Buddhism.
I checked out a couple of books from the library. First, Buddhism for Beginners by Thubten Chodron (2001; Snow Lion Publications). Then, the intriguingly titled Without Buddha I could not be a Christian, by Paul F. Knitter (2009; Oneworld (!) Publications.) [exclamation point, mine]
The second book interested me more, since it is written by a Catholic theology teacher. Unfortunately, it is very, very dry going and I have not made it through more than a couple of chapters.
The Chodron book has been more useful, supplying the basics for people who know nothing. The whole thing is a book-length FAQ. The opening question: "What is the essence of the Buddha's teachings?"
The answer is contained in this often quoted verse, says Chodron:
Abandon negative action,
Create perfect virtue;
Subdue your own mind.
This is the teaching of the Buddha.

The line that caught my attention was "Subdue your own mind."
To be able to do that would be...awesome. Because if there was ever a mind that needed subduing, it's mine.
It's been more than a year since the big market meltdown, the cutback and all the other bad things that have been flung our way. Things have evened out. Yet I still find myself stuck in a sort of cyclical panic mode, with some horrible mood swing dips.
Layoffs rumored--stomach churning anxiety.
Layoffs pass us over--whew, now I can move on.
Fight with my daughter--no sleep for me.
Warm fuzzies with the family on Mother's Day--wow, I feel good.
Later that night--Oh look. Here's a rerun of the Tom Brokaw piece on boomers. Here's a guy who had a $200,000 job, got laid off and can't find another, and now he grinds his teeth and there won't be any money left in Social Security, cut to expert saying we don't have an answer and--for God's sake please turn off this channel!
So yeah, subdue this thing. Pronto.
The main thing I get from the Buddhism book, so far, is that you have to get rid of your desire for control and accept that bad things are going to happen, but they won't change who you are. Or maybe you have to be centered enough to not let them change who you are. Because clearly, people do change as a result of bad thing happening to them.
To stop that happening I guess you need to somehow stop the excess empathy. I think I'm going to be a while figuring out how to do that.
There's a lot of other stuff about Buddhism I'm not so sure about, though. For instance, the whole thing on rebirth. I'm not sure why all religions have to be so concerned with the afterlife. But it seems to be a central tenet. I wonder if I can just accept the things that help me and leave the rest.
If you try this with Christianity, you'll get a lecture about being a "cafeteria" Christian. I don't know if there's similar scorn about being a cafeteria Buddhist. I do know that it's a belief that, like Judaism, seems to encourage questioning.
So on with the questions.

Someday, yeah

Sometimes, when pain and suffering are all around you, there's just nothing adequate to say.
More layoffs today. I'm supposed to be an optimist. But today I don't feel like trying.
It's times like this that I'm grateful for music--specifically my favorite comfort song of all time, "Ooh, child." I've put together a little sampler from the YouTube. Let's hope that someday we really will walk together in the rays of a beautiful sun.

First, the Five Stairsteps. Whatever happened to them?




Nina Simone




Hall & Oates. Wait...Hall & Oates did a version?





And finally, Cundi Lauper and Destiny's Child



It helps. But only a little.