Monthly Archives: November 2013

Making Memories and Making Them Over

24 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by in What I'm Seeing

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If you’ve reached the age when you’re starting to doubt your own memories, don’t worry. It really doesn’t matter.  In fact, it’s a complete waste of time debating whether leaves were beginning to fall or there was already snow or the ground, or whether it was Aunt Bess or Cousin Margaret or even if it was just an awkward choice of words or a calculated verbal assault designed to ruin your holiday.  The part you recall, and the part with which no one can argue, is how you felt about the event, not how it happened.

Timothy Leary explained that other kind of truth saying “we are each the stars our own life story,” unable to see beyond the prism of our own experience. But, there’s more to it than that. Our life stories are, by definition, works in progress.  To retain any relevance at all, events are continually reconsidered and revised. The past is influenced by the present as much as the present is influenced by the past.

Now, neuroscience has begun to catch up with what psychology has known for decades.  Memories, particularly important ones, are not like photographs that freeze a moment in time: they are more like keepsakes that are reframed with each new look. Studies by Karim Nader, at McGill University, indicate that each recollection of a significant memory triggers the production of new proteins used to store that memory.  The chemical process of recalling a memory is not unlike the process of creating it in the first place.

He says important events, the “flashbulb” memories thought to consolidate over time, are actually most susceptible to change since we replay them over and over. That, by the way, is not a bad thing; it’s essential to managing Post Traumatic Stress.

But  even innocuous recollections are subject our value systems.  For my niece, a sweater I passed on to her years ago was navy blue, well-worn and meaningful.  In my mind it was black, rather new (laundry mishap) and Armani. I’ve no conscious purpose for altering that image; there was no consciousness involved at all.  Yet, there I stand, lead actor in this little movie in my head, pulling the practically new, black, turtle-neck out of bag in her living room.

Poetic license allows the replacement of items that don’t resonate with a particular audience with ones that do to convey the most accurate meaning in a particular medium.  Telling the truth, you might say, sometimes requires tweaking it.  Although I’m certain that I hadn’t tweaked anything, I even more certain that the neurological/psychological process of developing our own storylines is far more complex, multi-layered and pluralistic than anything Miramax could imagine.

Legendary film director, Luis Bunuel, writing his autobiography in his eighties, offered up this disclaimer: “Our imagination, and our dreams, are forever invading our memories; and since we are all apt to believe in the reality of our fantasies, we end up transforming our lies into truths…I am the sum of my errors and doubts as much as my certainties. Such is my memory.”

So, next time a family member, old friend or classmate shares a memory you find utterly absurd, anachronistic, uncharacteristic or just plain stupid, remember: you’re hearing the review not the script.

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Harry T. Moore Still Matters

18 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by in Tales from the School Yard

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My God called to me in morning dew; the Power Of The Universe knows my name. He gave me a song to sing and sent me on my way; now, I raise my voice for justice and I believe.*

Harry_Tyson_MooreOn this day in 1905 teacher, Harry T. Moore, was born.  He went on to put his considerable talents to use with the NAACP, establishing 50 branches in the state of Florida.  His Florida Progressive Voters League would register over 100,000 black voters, more than in all the other southern states combined.  He was, as Bernice Johnson Reagon said, “so successful they had to kill him.”

He and his wife, Harriett, died on Christmas Day in 1951 when a bomb, planted beneath their bedroom floor, exploded.  The Moores’ assassination predates what the Southern Poverty Law Center considers the Civil Rights Era. So, he wasn’t included in their Memphis memorial and still lingers deep in the shadows of iconic figures like 14 year-old Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, and, of course, Martin Luther King Jr.

Harry T. Moore didn’t single handedly start the struggle for voting rights, but he was putting up one hell of a fight, long before politicians or the press seemed to care, while the KKK’s own Warren Fuller served as Governor of Florida.  Moore was a rare figure in history who walked onto the battlefield not knowing if a single soul would follow him.

They did follow and over the next 17 years shots rang out across Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida and Texas.  Incidents seared into our national psyche, would eventually command attention of the highest levels of government, but not before 39 names were added the list of Civil Right Martyrs.

Most of them, like Moore, walked straight into the fire. None could have doubted the credibility of the constant threats. Recalling the event years later, Myrlie Evers hadn’t thought a car backfired, or children were playing with fire crackers or that there was anything remotely unequivocal about the sound she’d heard in front of her Mississippi home in 1963.  When asked what she thought at the first loud bang,  she answered flatly,  “I knew they killed my husband.”

I’ve poured over photos from that era and, lately, am more drawn to the personal ones.  There’s that famous shot of a beaming Martin Luther King on the courthouse steps while Coretta plants one on his cheek and Medgar Evers, looking like any other groom cutting the cake while Myrlie leans into him. There’s Moore resting on his lawn while Harriett nuzzles against his neck.  Like men dream of becoming heroes, I wonder of these heroes ever dreamt of just being men.

There’s one photo of Harry T. Moore that compels me the most, though. Leaning on the hood of a car, wearing a bright white shirt and tie flying in the breeze, his eyes seem focused on something distant, but clear. His eyes seem to answer all the questions I’ve ever had about him and the others.  It’s a look that makes it almost possible to understad how they did it, how they pushed passed the instinct for self-preservation, how they didn’t recoil from the heat, how they resisted telling their children it would stop and they’d live quiet subservient lives, how they already owned a victory they’d never see.

His eyes pierce right though the clutter and the excuses, the convoluted babble and inconvenience. They focus, laser-like, on one indisputable fact: The right to equality is inherent.  It needs no defense, no explanation, no postponement and God knows, it needs no compromise. For anyone. Ever.

* “I Remember, I Believe” Bernice Johnson Reagon

Actually, it is a “damn game.”

02 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by in The Road to Equality

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I’m not sure if it’s just me, but Mitch McConnell always looks like he’s been crying.  Beyond the puffy damp cheeks, he’s got that befuddled look in his eyes. It’s as if someone suddenly flicked the light-switch on, exposing him sniffling and teary-eyed and struggling to get his bearings.   Whenever I see him, I feel like I should look away and give him a few  moments to collect himself.

He reminds me that politics is hard. It requires a certain constitution, especially when it doesn’t go your way.  Being good at it means, not just knowing how to win, or even how to lose,  but how to constantly negotiate the in-between. In fact, that’s what politics is, negotiating the in between.   So, when John Boehner, who also looks like he’s been crying–usually because he has been, said “this isn’t some damn game,” he just sounded like a sore loser. In fact, it was nothing but a game when he strategized to force the Administration out of the in-between and off the field completely.

If Boehner doesn’t seem to like the game very much these days, it’s just because he sucks at it. Legislatures are places where people fight to get the most of what they promised while doing the least amount of damage to the relationships and process on which they survive. At any other time in history it would have been too obvious to be worth saying,  but politics requires nimbleness, fair play, discipline, institutional respect and delayed gratification.

The problem for the current Republican leadership is these are the very qualities on which the tea-party has declared war.  If Boehner and McConnell had seen this less as less of a holy war and more like a game, they wouldn’t be in this position.  Now, they can’t seen to put the fire they started.

When I was a kid, the comparison between political leaders and sports figures wasn’t that much of a stretch, even here in the home of John Havlicek, Carl Yastrzemski and the Boston Bruins.  Kevin White was mayor and in my memory he’s in perpetual motion, zig-zaging across a Washington St. parade route.  White shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows and sinewy forearms in constant flex, he gripped hands, flashed grins, and moved with supreme confidence.

In New York, John Lindsay was mayor.  Looking far more like a basketball star than a politician, Lindsay too embodied all “the right stuff.” Both of them new how to rally their troops when the odds looked impossible and how to pull them back when the game was over. They looked measured and capable.  They looked like people you wanted to be like.

I don’t want to romanticize the past, though.  Boston and New York were far more dangerous, troubled cities than they are now and neither White nor Lindsay were without fault.  In the midst of failing schools, urban flight, racism, police bias and uprising for every sort, they each made their share of miscalculations.

Lindsay was badly wounded by a series of labor crises, including the strike that would shut down the NYC transit system.  White faced a school desegregation plan that tore his city in two, pitting allies and neighbors against each other, leaving scars that would last for decades. And, whether or not he did anything wrong, the appearance of impropriety certainly hurt him with his essential liberal base.

They lost sometimes and, although they understood the difference between quitting and knowing when the game’s over, their constituents often did not.  Both Kevin White and John Lindsay frequently found themselves under fire from their own side.

I’d record these kinds of events in a scrapbook my mother and kept when I was 10-years old. She had filled it with presidential biographies that ran as series in The Boston Globe.  Later, we’d add quotations, trivia or news articles.  People sometimes smirk at the thought of just how much of a geek you’d have to be to sit at the kitchen table with your mom carefully transcribing lines from Barry Goldwater into your “Political Stuff Scrapbook”. So, I get it. It’s hard for people of this generation to imagine that there were once politicians as dynamic as sports figures, and even at that, it was still a little geeky. But, public service could attract these kinds of all-stars.  Many of them really were the guy you wanted to be like when you grew up.

I recently shared this idea with Michael Dukakis. A spry and optimistic eighty-year old, he shot back, “you gotta remember that there were a some real bastards back then too.”  I don’t think I’m missing that point, or even the fact that the bastards won sometimes.  But watching Republicans change make the up of D.C. Circuit Court simply because this President shouldn’t have the right to make appointments, making filibustering status quo because this president shouldn’t have the right to govern and shutting down the government because this president shouldn’t have been elected…I’m pretty sure that these bastards are different.