Our lives a metaphor for our times?
I used to think I was a trendsetter. Turns out I was only an early adopter.In my 20’s I felt that I was at the forefront of social movements and pop trends. I was the first white kid to room with an African American in my college in 1965. I was an early feminist and among the first to document “neo-feminism” in the film Cindy: Shadows, which debuted on May 15, 1969. My pivotal years were 1968 and 1969. Only asthma – and my mother’s persuasion of a doctor to certify it – kept me from dying in Viet Nam in 1968 (and believe me this unathletic, asthmatic, wide-eyed kid would have been fodder). I was greatly affected by ‘60’s assassinations, especially that of Bobby Kennedy; in fact, I was driving with Charlie Reum through Utah, headed permanently west in my ’67 Mustang toward Los Angeles on June 6, 1968, the day Bobby was assassinated in Los Angeles. Mine was a multi-racial marriage on the Ides of March, 1969 – I had my own Yoko – which would have been illegal in 16 states only two years earlier, and in California and Nevada ten years earlier.
On September 17, 1968, I was a walk-in visitor at 4115 S. Central Avenue, the LA headquarters of Huey P. Newton’s and Bobby Seale’s Black Panther Party, engaging a BPP member there in a brief conversation about police brutality, hunger, disease, ignorance, and the oppression of Black people generally (and buying a poster of Newton sitting proud in a wicker chair, a guerilla leader with ammo belts strapped across his ebony chest), a year before the LAPD shootout with BPP leaders and subsequent raids at that same Central Avenue location on October 18, 1969 and the five hour shootout on Central Avenue on December 8, 1969. “The day after the raid, Angela Davis and others set up a vigil outside BPP's Southern California headquarters, during which LAPD attacked, forcing people to flee in all directions.” In the late 1960’s I truly felt I was riding the Pilot Wave.
Fast forward 40 years. At age 62 I again find my life a metaphor for our times. Weeks after the September 2008 apex of the global financial crisis and the global stock market crash, I fell on a defective brick staircase and broke my right leg in seven places. The metaphor, for me, is powerful: the staircase appeared to be solid and safe but was critically flawed, like our financial system – a flaw that had been there for years, unnoticed or unacknowledged. That flaw led directly to my fall and the crushing of two bones which had held me upright and stable for 62 years, like our financial system. The result was enormous pain, loss of ability, loss of income and ultimately all this was tied together – personally and economically – in a significant loss of net worth.
During these past six months I have endured and overcome much of the pain but still find myself mentally diminished, physically unstable and working diligently to regain the strength and mental clarity I once took for granted. My real estate investments took the fall, too, and I’m gradually steering them toward a completely reorganized future; there’s healing – and still pain – all around me. Others in our society and our economy have suffered far more and continue to be disabled; I recognize that and count myself fortunate, so far. I am changing and I perceive our culture is changing, hopefully rapidly enough and deeply enough. We can no longer live disconnected from each other, from our deepest needs and values, from reality and from the consequences of disconnection. The consequences are “in our face” – both in the sense of being unavoidable and in the sense of revealing themselves in our physical manifestations.
I’m engaged in three initiatives of physical therapy: the traditional insurance-paid work-your-joints therapy, a highly-evolved Egoscue musculoskeletal alignment with a series of stretches and gentle muscle-training exercises, and often painful deep tissue massage to continue to relax the knots that still form in post-traumatic musculature. What is the corollary in our financial system’s recovery? Certainly not the bailouts and phony bank stress tests. Those are comparable to splints. De-leveraging is a therapy. As are new financial regulations. Bankruptcy and business failure – very therapeutic. In this one area, perhaps, my own life’s recovery and therapy is ahead of the culture.
And yet the future remains unknown and unknowable. And all we have is – dare I say it? – our health, our relationships, our ethics and values, and our sense of community to pull us forward. We’re riding the Pilot Wave again. Are we hitching our wagons to a star? Or are we like Slim Pickins in Dr. Strangelove, strapped to a plunging bomb? Gee-haw!
Labels: culture, finance, health, metaphor, pain, therapy, wave
posted by DanZ @ 1:19 PM
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