Living

Thursday I woke up with less sleep than I would have liked, but I’m used to it by now.  Someone rang the doorbell at 2 am, and I couldn’t believe it.  After all, the roommate who always did that had just moved out.  How could it be?  After refusing to give in for ages, I finally got up and saw that it was my other roommate, who for the first time had forgotten his keys.  I lost my keys a few weeks ago, but it was in the afternoon.  Even so, I was just relieved it was him and not my crazy ex-housemate or her boyfriend.  Anyway, because of that, I was very tired this morning.  But it’s a Thursday, which is always good.

                Well, mostly.  We began the day with a team assignment related to the week’s themes of morality and World War II.  The mission was that they had to come up with an advisory proposal to the president before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.  I gave them the basic choice before them:  we can potentially end the war now by killing almost two hundred thousand civilians with one move, or we can do a land invasion which will take much longer to end the war and cost tens of thousands of American lives.  I had them work with partners to write a ten sentence proposal using vocabulary words from the Morality section of the book and give me a moral argument for their decision, as opposed to a strategic argument.  Either way, a lot of people were going to die in a horrible way, since it was the end of the worst and largest war ever, with war being widely acknowledged as the worst activity there is.

                After they thought about it, wrote it down and presented their statements to the class, I explained to them what happened: the US dropped the bomb, it achieved its purpose of instant destruction, but Japan did not surrender.  So they dropped another bomb, and finally the war was over.  Then I explained that as horrible the bomb had been, history did proceed the way it did afterward, and we haven’t had any atomic bombs or nuclear weapons dropped on anybody since.  We’ve come up with all sorts of terrible ways to erase each other from the imagination, but it hasn’t come to that again.  Hindsight bias is a powerful thing.

                To lighten the mood but stay on topic we played a quick vocabulary game with the morality words, and then I played a song on my iPod for them and had them fill in the blanks on a lyrics sheet to practice listening.  Someone told me the previous teacher used to do that, and there was already an iPod stereo in the class.  Beautiful.

                We listened to “Dig a Pony” from the Beatles:

                Well you can celebrate anything you want

                After the half hour break we returned to yesterday afternoon’s survey about often-discussed moral “issues” in American society.  Today I had them approach their judgments differently.  Instead of hearing each issue as it came and deciding based on that, I had them rank their top three “bad actions” and top three “good/least bad actions”.

                After I collected the anonymous surveys, I read the class a few quotes about morality from my wisdom packet that I’ve always got with me.  I don’t read it every day, but it’s always there if I get the idea.  I began with All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum.  Find it somewhere and read the first couple pages.  It’s hard to disagree with him.  I then followed it up with a sample from Carl Jung, a German psychologist.  He explained how Hindu and Chinese philosophies explained good and evil.  From there I touched on Taoism, which says that life is balanced out by opposing forces that are necessary for the cycle of life to continue.  These forces are represented in the Tao symbol of the yin and yang.  After that I read one from Einstein, a German who lived in America during World War II, and whose e=mc squared theory enabled the atomic bomb.  He also wrote the president a letter saying we had to start a program to build it before Germany did.  Twenty years earlier he’d gone to Japan and told his step daughters that “striving for morality in our actions” is the most important thing in life.  Everything, including our basic existence, depends on it.  He didn’t believe in free will though.  He said there were physical rules and you couldn’t break them, so everything has to happen the way it does.  His religion, Judaism, doesn’t believe that.  Jews believe that we can change the world and improve it.  Conversely, Hindus say that it’s all an illusion and you need to transcend it through meditation.  According to the German Carl Jung, the Chinese say that good and evil are in nature and are “merely varying degrees of the same thing”.  Good and evil then become “my good” and “my evil”.  Fulghum says that we shouldn’t hit people, and we should share everything, and that warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.

From there we discussed the different ways each of the listed survey issues could be perceived as “morally wrong” because they hurt the world.  Keep in mind that that is different from avoiding an action because you don’t find it attractive or it doesn’t serve you strategically in your life game.

                I did my best to balance the discussion, and try to give voice to all of the points of view.  Every once in a while someone would respond to an issue by saying “you shouldn’t do that” and when asked why they said, “because."  Overall I found the discussion amusing, although I was aware that it might not be for some of the students, so I treated it that way.  But I thought it was fair game because that was the text book topic and most of the resources the school provides that I use to balance out my original approaches tend to have disturbing representations of the world in them.  Whether it's the recent newsletter, reading explorer, History of US videos or grammar book, we always seem to be discussing something deep, which at least keeps me interested too.

                The reason I found all of the issues humorous were that I knew I'd been guilty of most of them, and would again be soon, if not that same day.  I knew most of the students did too.  And my friends.  And all sorts of people, American or not.  Even better, at one point, I'd taken a different side of the issues and thought that I would never do them, and judged other people who did.  A lot of my experiences around the world have helped me to be less judgmental because there's just so much going on in the world all the time.  Note I said "less judgmental" and not "judgmentless."  After all, nobody's perfect.  You can't use that excuse for everything though...

                After our discussion of the most pressing individual moral dilemmas facing our society today, beyond the obvious old news ten commandments type stuff where you're clearly hurting someone else directly, we had an experience that made all of the “issues” of the day appear pretty trivial.

                The mother of an older teacher came in to give a 45 minute talk about her experience as a Jewish refugee from Austria during World War II, entitled "My Journey Through World War II".  It was strangely fitting to hear her Holocaust story as we entered Memorial Day weekend.  A German man named Hitler had tried to erase all of the Jewish people from the earth.  He didn’t erase her though.  With help from the Jewish community and later other communities, she (age 7) and her sister (age 10) escaped to and survived in France after the Nazis occupied Austria, were reunited seven years later with their mother in England, adjusted to a new life in the United States and eventually California.  She spoke eloquently about dealing with all of the anger, resentment, confusion and hurt from the experience.  She was a confident speaker, humorous, kind and radiant.  Often she used the words “yin and yang” to describe anywhere you could be in life.  “Wherever you are, there’s the yin and the yang.  There are good people and there are bad people.  Wherever you are.”  

She began the talk by saying that her sister “exists” but does not “live” because of her pain, and then proudly stated that she herself used to merely “exist” but now she “lives”.  Her remedy was facing her pain head on and expressing it and dealing with it, instead of hiding from it.  She feels very positive about life now.  She lives in Santa Cruz, which is about as beautiful, relaxing and laid back as it gets in northern California.

                At the end of the talk she took questions, and I was lucky to get to ask her about her purpose.  During her talk she had mentioned that during such a hard situation, you have to have a purpose to inspire yourself to do what you have to do in order to make it through.  I asked her what she thought her purpose was after all of these years (she’s 81 now).  She said that it was about telling the story to everyone and letting them know that it really happened.  She said she had to share her voice with people while she still could because she was still here when she easily couldn’t have been.  After class she asked why I spoke such great English, and where I was from.  I said New York, and she laughed and hugged me because she didn’t realize I was a teacher.  We had squeezed three classes into my classroom for the talk, and we hadn’t been formally introduced yet.

               After all of the intensity of atomic bombs and human holocaust and playing counterpoint to every opinion in the room, I was able to tally up the morality survey votes from my wise international peers.  This time around, students ranked supporting companies that use sweatshop child labor and abortion as the biggest sins.  Speeding in a car was still near the top at third.  They still thought it was bad to eat too much.  And although many people ranked them as “okay” on the previous survey, this time several more people ranked viewing sexually explicit material, abortion and smoking marijuana in their “top three bad actions.”  To be fair, there were several students missing today, and several ones who weren't here the other day, and there were only about seven guys out of the twenty students.  Also, out of those seven, three were Muslim, and had already openly stated that their religion prevented them from doing those things.

                With “morality week” complete, I had time to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles again.  I’d been there just two days before and stood in line for 90 minutes only to find I’d misplaced one of my three documents to get registered.  I was reading a book in line, so it wasn’t a complete waste, and the walk there was great exercise, but still.  

When I was a kid I remember watching one of my favorite comedians, Jerry Seinfeld, complain about the DMV as just about the worst experience in America.  He’s Jewish and has a good life.  He made a lot of money making fun of all the little things in life that really annoy you but aren’t really that important.

I didn’t get any new material myself this time, because I had barely any wait in line.  I got my car examined and registered.  I didn't even bring my car last time, so I would have had to come back anyway.  Then I put new California plates on it.  Don’t worry, New York.  You still have my heart.  But I need new plates to keep driving here.  Plus there’s one section of my new plate that says “BGO3”, which isn’t exactly this web address, but close enough.

                I celebrated having all of that taken care of by strolling through the park and enjoying the fact that life was very peaceful and calm and sunny.  Then I went home and cleaned out my car to get it ready for some kind of adventure this weekend.  I'm very tired now, and very ready for a vacation and seeing some of my favorite familiar faces of all time in Cabo San Lucas at my cousin's wedding Wednesday through Sunday.  We're all staying at the Dreams Los Cabos Resort & Inn, so I imagine it's going to be more comfort than I'm used to, which is what a vacation should be.  Before then, I'm thirsting for some camping on this long weekend, but my body isn't agreeing today.  We'll see what tomorrow brings.  It's always revealing new ways of experiencing things.

                Whatever I do, I'll try to be “alive” as opposed to simply “existing" in this thing.