The Pursuit of Happiness

How does every modern fairy tale end?  Happily ever after.  Not so in many of the original versions such as those by the Brothers Grimm prior to their Disney makeovers.  The same is true for so many modern Hollywood films, television shows, and novels.

Our culture suggests that happiness is the natural state of the human condition and creates and expectancy that it can and should be consistently present in our day to day lives.  Furthermore, the absence of happiness is viewed as unnatural and individuals lacking happiness are seen as having failed to achieve something.  Our culture (indeed we as individuals) seeks to correct these failings.  Self-help programs, group therapy, pharmaceuticals, are all aimed at tipping the scales.  We seek to replace negative feelings with positive ones, which calls into question whether the positive can exist in any meaningful way without a counterpart.  How would we know we are happy?

The myth of continual happiness is further obstructed by the element of control, a simple cause and effect argument.  We can’t control other human beings and often other circumstances in our immediate environment.  Therefore, we spend a great deal of time reacting to things we have no way to direct.  Must we react only in the positive?  Is that achievable or is it a setup for failure causing a further downward spiral?

I had the good fortune to visit a friend’s theatre company last weekend and see a production of Lucinda Coxon’s play, Happy Now?  It’s a British import having premiered at the Royal National Theatre with an American premiere at Yale Repertory http://tinyurl.com/happynowreview.  Minus the dialects, the play’s message is universal.  It explores the painstaking side of the pursuit of happiness.  Specifically, the story follows its female protagonist through her numerous exhausting roles as caregiver to a dying father, mother to her two children, wife, and full-time businesswoman shouldering a workload that includes covering for her ailing boss.  At one point she utters to her husband, “I’m everything to you?  I’m everything to everyone.  I want to be everything to no one for twenty minutes.”

One of the most successful plot conventions is that it explores some of the supposed hallmarks of happiness, those that are assumed to make you happy but occasionally leave you unfulfilled.  These include marriage, parenting, career, and sexual intimacy.  The trappings of such pursuits within the play turn ugly as the characters become alcoholics, workaholics, adulterers, perfectionists… all in an effort to find greater happiness outside their current existence. 

The idea of measuring and qualifying happiness has also been on my mind a lot lately.  The wife of a friend of mine in New York was recently published in The New York Times responding to a Wall Street Journal article by famed novelist, poet, and essayist, Erica Jong http://tinyurl.com/motherjong.  One could argue that Jong has suggested there is a right way to parent in the modern era – specifically for women.  As my friend Jillian responded http://tinyurl.com/jongresponse, Jong attempts to set the social agenda for new mothers by blaming those engaged in attachment-parenting for pursuing bonds with their children that provide them happiness, choosing instead to label such pursuits as mere guilt.  Jong asserts that women are controlled by their role as mothers rather than being fulfilled by it.  Must we judge what brings happiness to a parent by debasing it in the name of feminism?  Jong ends the article suggesting “there are no rules,” but she implies otherwise in her condemnation of those finding the greatest happiness by forging their own path despite the judgment of modern society.

Simultaneously, my brother-in-law posted two articles to Facebook suggesting that parents tend to rationalize their decision to raise children in every conceivable way in the name of happiness or momentary highs http://www.slate.com/id/2274721/.  He also pointed to an article that suggested children with siblings are less happy than only children http://tinyurl.com/ukhappinessstudy.  First, it should be noted that my brother-in-law has no children nor is he married or in a significant relationship.  Secondly, the fact that he is my brother-in-law divulges that he was not an only child.  He was raised alongside my wife by a single mother and he experienced some significant periods of unhappiness along the way.

These posts interested me primarily for two reasons.  They both relate to the conditions under which happiness or lack of happiness is likely to exist.  I think that they suggest happiness is conditional given the environmental surroundings and motivations of others (i.e. siblings compete for attention; parents experience large amounts of dissatisfaction in exchange for momentary happiness). Also, I feel the articles weigh happiness by comparison.  That is they take groups (siblings, only children, parents, non-parents) and pit them against each other to measure happiness.  I find the whole thing very disturbing to assert that people should pursue or avoid what makes them happy based on the experience or opinion of others. 

Like Jong, my brother-in-law seems to be seeking validation of his own life decisions and circumstances by blaming his childhood and the modern convention of parenting.  The grass is always greener.  I found it hypocritical.  I hope I don’t have to justify my happiness by pointing out that others who make different decisions in life are less happy.  I used a job seeking analogy to think further about this.  Some people switch jobs because they think another role or another company or another industry will be more fulfilling.  Others seek a job that will pay more because they feel more money will lead to greater fulfillment.  Still others seek jobs that give them greater flexibility and time off, possibly leading to early retirement in the hope that a lack of work will bring them fulfillment.  In each case, the job seeker looks elsewhere for fulfillment rather than finding it in his/her present situation.  I’ve been guilty of that before.  It’s a slippery slope.

Thomas Jefferson initially drafted the Declaration of Independence with the phrase “life, liberty and property.”  He later edited it to read “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  Why the change?  Scott Amorian examines it here http://tinyurl.com/declarehappiness.  He concludes that human beings have a natural, instinctive pursuit of happiness because we are living things.  The pursuit of happiness is a natural right because if someone denied you the ability to act with respect to your desire for happiness, you would be harmed.  Therefore to be truly independent, an individual must be free to pursue happiness.  It is also worth noting the difference between being granted a right and being promised happiness itself.

To me, the pursuit of happiness is a desire to find pleasure in given circumstances rather than the absence of something greater.  It involves hope and humility, faith and affirmation, confidence and tolerance.  With these values embraced, an individual is free to forgo control and anticipate joy without expectation, choosing instead to appreciate the present.  Carpe Diem.

We Must Never Forget

Writing about my grandfather's experiences as a veteran of World War II makes me look back on another experience I wrote about less than a year ago.  Some of the facts and circumstances were excerpted from the local newspaper and various online resources, but I'm unfamiliar with how to properly cite them on a blog.  Wherever possible, I have supplied links to the online resources.

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There on the cover of our little local newspaper was a picture of 76 year-old Gabriele Silten.

She grew up in Holland. Today she is Professor Emerita of European Languages at Pasadena City College. It reminded me how fortunate I was to receive an opportunity through the American Field Service to visit the Netherlands for a summer following my sophomore year in high school.

Ms. Silten and I stood on the same ground forty years apart under very different circumstances. Let me start at the beginning. I arrived in the Netherlands as a naïve American teen looking to broaden my world view. I had never traveled outside the United States. I was fascinated by art and soaked up all of the great Dutch masters in the Amsterdam museums. I lived with a family on a farm in Zuidbroek, a very small community in the north, and I watched as they tended huge greenhouses filled with the most beautiful plants and flowers you can imagine. There were four children in the family and they were very good about taking me to see and experience their country. I may have even been to a disco or two which is what they call a nightclub.

One day, we took a long bicycle tour. I remember it well. The land was flat and we passed miles of tulip fields occasionally stopping to see a windmill. The serenity on this clear, warm day was striking. But I also remember feeling tired and sore as the day wore on. I was not used to riding such long distances by bike and I was becoming thirsty and hungry as a blister developed on my heel from rubbing on my shiny white K-Swiss shoes (those shoes were so cool). I thought to myself, this ride is becoming torture.

Just then, we rode our bikes through a place in Northern Holland called Westerbork. I saw a set of rusty old railroad tracks there that had been cut and bent up toward the sky. There was a sign next to the tracks but I couldn’t read it. I stopped for a moment.

Upon further inspection, I noticed a sort of tower behind the tracks and a fence of barbed wire and some bricks arranged in a sculpted pattern on the ground. That’s odd, I thought. I got off my bike and walked closer. The bricks had stars of David on them.

I suddenly turned cold and felt my flesh crawl. The serenity I had felt among the tulips was met with dread. The bricks multiplied as my eyes got bigger. Suddenly I noticed thousands of them.

I found myself frozen in the middle of a Nazi concentration camp. I should mention that I am an American Jew although I most closely fit the term “assimilated” meaning that I studied Judaism as a child and had a bar mitzvah, but by age 16, I had stopped attending temple. I was not interested in observing organized religion. My spirituality at that moment was unimportant. I was focused myopically on my heritage. Culturally, I am always going to be a Jew and the land I was standing on is where many people died for that very same reason. In fact, my own grandfather almost died in World War II when he was shot by Nazis trying to cross the border from France to Germany with the U.S. Army. He was only 400 miles from Westerbork.

A wave of sadness and guilt fell over me: sadness because of the senseless deaths that had taken place on the ground on which I stood; guilt for thinking even for a moment that my thirst or hunger or pain on that bike ride was torture. What did I know about pain or hunger? What did I know about torture?

In Westerbork, there is a small memorial center that documents the history of the camp. I learned that Anne Frank and her family were sent to Westerbork on August 8, 1944 and deported to Auschwitz a month later. Many more names were unfamiliar to me, but they accompanied pictures of real people in real pain with only glimpses of hope and happiness.

Westerbork was a transit camp. It was developed to hold Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and resistance fighters. From this location, its victims were loaded on cattle cars and transported to other camps. At the far end of the memorial center is a rusted metal sign indicating the transport to Auschwitz.

I took a close look and saw scratch marks that I later imagined were patterned as if an inmate had literally been pulled off the sign clawing it in vain with his fingernails as he may have been loaded onto a boxcar. I felt my stomach drop. From 1942 to 1945, a total of 107,000 people passed through the camp on 93 outgoing trains. Only 5,200 of them survived. The death rate was hundreds per day.

Flash forward to February 24, 2010 when I discovered Gabriele Silten’s story and then researched her online at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

Gabriele was the only child of Jewish parents living in the German capital of Berlin. Her grandfather owned a pharmacy and a pharmaceuticals factory, where Gabriele's father also made his living.

In 1938 the Nazis forced her grandfather to sell his businesses for very little money to an "Aryan" German. After that, her father decided they should move to Amsterdam where it was safer for Jews. Her grandfather stayed behind. In May 1940 Germany invaded the Netherlands. At just seven years of age, Gabriele was frightened by the German troops marching into the city. When she went to school she had to wear a yellow Jewish star, and she couldn't play with her Christian friends anymore.

She and her family chose not to go into hiding, but three years later Nazi soldiers went house to house rounding up the Jews. On that day, a Sunday, Gabriele’s family was arrested (by now she was age ten).

They were taken to a main square in Amsterdam and then to the Central train station where the cattle cars were waiting. They were loaded into the cattle cars by the masses and the train left for Westerbork.

At Westerbork, her parents and grandmother went through a registration process and then a medical examination. Then they went to the barracks to which they had been assigned; theirs was number 65. The barracks were very long buildings made of wood. Since they had been built in a hurry, they were ill constructed with doors and windows that didn't fit and holes where the rain, wind and dust would come in. On either side of the entrance to the barracks was a huge room, one for the men and the other for the women. Each held approximately 300 people. The beds were stacked three-high as bunkbeds, with strawsacks for mattresses and pillows. There were no sheets and only those who brought their own blankets had them.

Westerbork was overcrowded, so Gabriele shared a bunk with her mother and her grandmother in the middle "layer" of stacks. At the end of each room was a washroom, again one for the men and the other for the women. It held one long sink and had one toilet (remember this is for 300 people). There were no walls, partitions, sheets, etc. to maintain privacy. Anything and everything one did was out in public. There was no place to hang or store what few possessions they had; everything had to be kept on or in the bed. The mattresses and pillows were inhabited by fleas, flies, lice and other vermin. Since it was impossible to keep out dust and dirt, any time one scratched open a bug bite, infection resulted. There were inmate doctors and nurses, but few had any medications, so it was difficult to heal people.

The barracks housed inmates from all walks of life and all degrees of religious observance. Some inmates were orthodox; many practiced variations of observance; and yet others were totally assimilated Jews, as were Gabriele’s family. The differences between people gave rise to a number of quarrels and fights. A common source of strife was theft. Some people did desperate things in desperate times to stay alive. There was also no common ground about hygiene. Some people washed often and others not at all.

Adults were expected to work. Gabriele’s father, a pharmacist by profession, worked in the "metal industry" at the camp, which meant he had to flatten big metal sewer pipes with a hammer. Her mother, by profession a commercial photographer, was assigned to be a "kindergarten teacher" in the camp, but there were no learning materials or lesson plans. Many children regressed and began soiling their pants again, as well as their beds. The fact that many of them had diarrhea made conditions worse. They were given wooden shoes to wear when they arrived, which were hard on their feet and chafed open spots on their heels and insteps. When the children soiled themselves, these chafe wounds got dirty, then got infected and the children fell ill - more so than they already were.

Food was brought to the barracks, on a special small cart, pulled by inmates. The cart contained a large vat of soup, called potato soup, which Gabriele described visually as used dishwater. It had no taste and - probably - few calories. They also received bread rations, usually for 3 days at a time, with a bit of fat stuck on top. “I have no idea what the fat was,” Gabriele confesses. “I’m probably better off not knowing.”

There were no books or toys and the children mostly just tried to stay out of everyone's way. There was a small "playground" with a sand box, a swing, and a teeter-totter. But the sand in the sand box was polluted since the children soiled their pants in it and there was no one to clean it up or to put new sand in. It became unusable and unhealthy.

On Tuesday nights a list was published with names of those who would go on transport (to Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, and other camps). If your name appeared on the list, you went immediately the next morning. One night Gabriele’s grandmother saw her name on the list and she decided to kill herself rather than go to another camp. She committed suicide in July 1943. Only months prior, Gabriele’s grandfather was arrested back in Berlin and threatened with deportation. He, too, committed suicide rather than face his executioners.

Gabriele and her parents stayed in Westerbork until January 1944 when they were further deported to Theresienstadt (a.k.a. Terezin). Twelve-year-old Gabriele and her parents were liberated from Terezin sixteen months later in May 1945. That June, the Silten family returned to Amsterdam. In total they spent two long years in the camps and experienced horror we cannot imagine.

When I visited the Netherlands as an impressionable sixteen year-old and when I look back again now as an adult I am struck by how hard it is to humanize the tragedy of war, and hatred, and genocide. We study the numbers, the events, the victories and the losses, but none of that seems to keep us focused on what is really important – each and every person. We must value life. We must value humankind. We must never forget those we lost and how it happened so we never repeat the near extinction of an entire people. One of the lessons, as Gabriele defines it, is that “sometimes there is a disconnect between what we’re learning in the classroom and what actually happened.”

My children are likely the last generation to benefit from meeting a holocaust survivor. The youngest survivors with living memory of the camps are now in their seventies. I tell my kids never to be too thirsty, or too hungry, or too sore to stop their bike and listen – to hear the echoes of the past as I once did in the Netherlands and to fight for peace and human rights whenever possible.

Stories like Gabriele’s make me feel so privileged to live the life I was given, and with privilege comes great responsibility. Each of us owe it to ourselves and to all people who suffer to be active defenders and proponents of peace. The 1994 Rwandan genocide and the current crisis in Darfur teach us that genocide still exists today and people need our help. We must never forget.

He Almost Died for Me

My grandfather is 95 years old.  He is not a man of great stature standing approximately 5'4" but he always had the body of scrappy fighter.  He used to remind me of Jack LaLanne.  Now he lives in an assisted living community fighting a losing battle against Alzheimer's Disease.  It's not the first battle he's fought and it's not the first time he's been wounded in action.

My grandfather and daughter

Today is Veteran's Day and I can't help but think of my grandfather as a young soldier lying there on the border of France and Germany shot by the Nazis and left to die.  My mother, just an infant then, at home with my grandmother in New York, the two unaware of the trauma that had occurred.  Fortunately, he survived.  Throughout my life we would ask about the war, and he would answer very generally.  He never shared such details as whether he had to shoot anyone.  I would listen in awe, but it was not until much later in life that I grew to appreciate the sacrifice he made for me and for every American.

As he used to tell the story, my grandfather was hiding with his men behind a barricade of steel drum barrels when automatic rifle fire from the enemy swept the line.  He was shot in the forearm which shattered his bones and caused considerable bleeding.  As the story goes, the man next to him was shot between the eyes.  Those that survived were captured and held on the field of battle by guards until they could be taken as prisoners of war.  This is where the story begins to get a little fuzzy. 

My grandfather spoke a little bit of a few languages - not enough to be a translator, but enough to piecemeal a message to his captors.  He warned that U.S. forces were approaching and that death would be imminent if these guards remained.  Whether or not this was a bluff is not clear.  He would then tell that the soldiers ran off in the middle of the night in fear of their lives.  Later versions of this story made it seem that the guards were just boys, possibly Nazi youth.  Other versions suggest that the U.S. prisoners overtook the Nazi guards and possibly killed them.  I have never felt completely sure of the reality.

Regardless, my grandfather was taken to an Army hospital in France where he was treated and eventually released back to New York with a Purple Heart and a grateful family.  My uncle was born shortly thereafter.  World War II ended and the U.S. and it's allies were triumphant in ending the attempted genocide of so many innocent victims of Hitler's reign.  The casualty of the war was nevertheless catastrophic.

The inner wounds for those involved would forever remain.  I know this from having met a number of holocaust victims and veterans.  My once proud and authoritative grandfather is no longer in control of his mind and his body has become feeble.  His memory slips from past to present illogically and those mental war wounds prove as deep if not deeper than the physical scars which prevent him from turning his arm.  It is not unusual for him to barricade himself in his room to keep the staff out or to challenge a caregiver or even another resident if he feels he is being threatened.  He is fearful and cautious in a way that I believe transcends aging or Alzheimer's.  His military training and his experience on the field of battle taught him to protect himself and those around him... and he does just that as best he can.

Here we are 65 years after World War II in a war against terror and I am too often apathetic.  I don't feel the impact of this war in my daily life.  I don't suffer it's consequences.  But I know that others do feel its impact and do suffer terrible sacrifices.  I know that my peace of mind and my very freedoms come with a heavy price.  My grandfather almost died for me and many more brave men and women will ultimately meet that fate in the name of honor, courage, freedom, and democracy.  To them and to my grandfather I am eternally grateful.

Fairness

How often do you hear people, grownups and kids alike, complaining that something isn't fair?  And you want to scream out that cliche parenting response, "life's not fair."  What does that really mean though?  Can fairness be measured?  It's like talking about moral values in decision making.  How do you tell a right from a wrong?  To some extent the answer demands knowledge on the part of the decision maker.  If it is against the law to drive while talking on your cell phone without a hands free device, why do you do it?  Does the fact that so many people break that law make it acceptable?  Do we forget it's against the law?  No.  We choose to do the wrong thing because we make a moral judgement that it is a minor infraction.  Yet, it's still wrong.

Fairness works much in that way.  Why does one kid get ten M&Ms in his fun-size halloween bag and another kid gets twelve.  "It's not fair," the kids with ten candies will say.  Then some quick math reveals that if the kid with twelve candies gives one to the kid with ten they will both have eleven.  Has fairness been achieved?  Or is it some evil plot at the assembly line of M&M Mars Co.?  Another cliche parenting phrase creeps out of your mouth: "You get what you get and you don't throw a fit."  Huh?  So fairness is acceptance of life's inequities?  Maybe so.

All of the examples thus far are trivial which makes the discussion much less complex.  However, I often think back to my volunteer work with FOCUS (Families of Children Under Stress) in Atlanta, GA. FOCUS provides emotional, informational, and physical support to parents of children with disabilities or with ongoing medical needs. FOCUS families deal with a variety of developmental delays, including rare syndromes, cerebral palsy, heart problems, immune deficiencies, and neurological involvement.  FOCUS provides a network of parents who share common experiences with each other. FOCUS families provide each other with a sense of community, sharing the joys and frustrations of parenting a child with extra-special needs.

This voluntary work was incredibly rewarding to me and I was honored to serve in any capacity.  It was at this same time that my wife became pregnant with our first child.  I remember thinking that we were uniquely qualified to handle anything life threw at us even if it meant a child with special needs.  My wife and I would look at each other and reaffirm our commitment to parenting no matter the circumstance.  Now that I see how hard it is to raise children without special needs, I beat myself up for ever thinking I was "qualified" to handle a special needs child.  The parents of these children are superheroes.  They didn't qualify nor did they ask to be extraordinary parents under extraordinary stresses.  And when they are not donning a cape and moving mountains for their offspring, they are tired and vulnerable and anxious.  That is their reality.  And when they say, "it's not fair," the stakes are a little different.

Today I read a story about a family that has been selling a little boy's monster drawings on Etsy to pay for his leukemia treatments.  The family had already run through their savings and they were in danger of losing their home despite having health insurance.  The mother left her job with a newborn.  The copays were adding up.  The husband was losing wages because he chose to hold his son's hand during a spinal tap rather than report to work.  To them I nod and say, "life's not fair."  And yet, this story has a uniquely happy ending.  2,500 people bought this young man's monster drawings for $12 each totalling $30,000 and the orders keep coming from all over the world.  [Update: His blog indicates the number of orders is now 4,000]  Better yet, young Aiden's particular type of cancer is more than 90% curable and doctors are hopeful that the treatments are working.  You can read the story here.

In this context of genetic, viral and traumatic inequality I must concede that fairness is simply absent.  But it is the hope, the love, the generosity, and the endurance of the human spirit that can, on occasion, triumph over adversity.  And I hope to remind myself of this fact regularly.  To the child missing an extra M&M I say, be thankful.