Tragedy from Another Angle

Another week, another senseless act of gun violence.

This is a common occurrence in America and shouldn't surprise anyone. Americans deal with their interpersonal problems by grabbing a gun and shooting somebody. Maybe we are able to shoot the person who has provoked our ire, maybe we are not.

Each time after a life is taken by a person with a gun, we hear the same ridiculous conversation taking place among the chatterheads that dominate political discourse in this country, and it never gets us anywhere.

With that in mind, I want to completely ignore the problem that we have with guns and explore another ubiquitous killer of human beings: cancer. Every day, roughly 1,600 Americans die of cancer. I have lost people close to me to cancer, and chances are that you have, too.

My maternal grandfather died of leukemia three years ago. It was a punishing, debilitating disease that wrecked and ruined his body and mind. He was a large, solid, and strong man in life, but by the time the cancer had finished with him, he was 130 pounds and too weak to even drink the water that he so desperately wanted. We would put a wet sponge to his lips so that they wouldn't crack and bleed.

I'm imagining a conversation with a political pundit that mirrors the one that inevitably occurs after a gun murder takes place:

Me: Three years ago, my grandfather died of cancer. It was a terrible thing to see him die that way, and I wish that there was something that we could have done to prevent it.

Pundit (slamming the table with his fist): I am tired of everybody blaming cancer for these unavoidable deaths! It is an outrage that every time somebody dies of what may or may not have been cancer, we rush to judgment and turn this somber period into a game of political one-upsmanship and everybody points their finger at cancer. It's disgusting! It's un-American. It's a communist plot, I tell ya. Are you a Maoist?

Me: Wait, what? What else should we blame my grandfather's death on? He died of leukemia. It was a good diagnosis. His oncologist was treating him for leukemia.

Pundit (turning red and frothing at the mouth): Oncologist? I don't know what that is, but it sounds elitist. What, did he go to France for medical treatment? Was he puffing some grass? Did he have a naked shaman do a rain dance to cure him? Do you speak Arabic? Were you born in Kenya?

Me: I have no idea what you're talking about. An oncologist is a doctor who specializes in cancer. She treats people who have cancer. It's a noble profession.

Pundit (putting brass knuckles on his hands): A cowboy is a noble profession. A matador is a noble profession, though the name's kinda fruity. A roughneck working an oil derrick, that's a noble profession. You notice what all three of these professions have in common?

Me: Uh, they don't offer pensions?

Pundit (sharpening his Bowie knife): They're not oncologists! I don't care what some elitist, Ivy League educated doctor says to me. If I'm feeling sick, I throw on a leech or two, take a shot of whiskey mixed with rhino blood, and I'm tip-top again. Let me tell you something about these so-called cancer tragedies: the problem isn't too much cancer. The problem is not enough cancer!

Me: You want more cancer? How would that help?

Pundit (loading silver bullets into his six-shooter): When cancer is outlawed, only outlaws have cancer.

Me: I'm not sure that makes sense. Wouldn't that be a net positive, if only outlaws had cancer?

Pundit (loading a shell into his mortar): You shut your mouth, hippie! I've had enough of you. Let me explain this to you in a way that your green-tea-soaked brain can comprehend, you lily-livered fascist, communist, Muslim-lover.

Me: Those terms don't really go together, but I can see you're on a roll. Please, continue.

Pundit (brandishing a blood-stained machete): The only way to fight cancer is with even more cancer. Let's assume for a moment that your grandfather really did have leukemia.

Me: That's a good assumption, considering that he did have leukemia.

Pundit (sharpening his samurai sword): Silence, or I'll have your head. The only way to fight cancer is with cancer that's even more deadly. I want to infect cancer patients with strains of cancer that are so poisonous and deadly that the cancer that's killing them will be obliterated instantly. That's how we have to go about this. More cancer!

Me: But then wouldn't these patients just be infected with stronger and more virulent strains of cancer? Doesn't this leave them in a worse position than they're in now?

Pundit (accidentally shooting himself in the foot): Ow! That really hurt! Then we'll just invent even stronger strains of cancer that will kill those already-strong strains of cancer. It will be an arms race, and if there's one thing that America's good at, it's participating in arms races. Now let's move out, soldiers. On to Little Bighorn! We'll ride those Cubans down and create a republic that the rest of the world will envy! Forward!

Once More Through the Looking Glass...

On Death, Cookie Monster, and Other Curiosities

My family and I just returned from a week on the western shores of Lake Michigan. It was the first time that the four of us had all gotten away together, and it was wonderful and stressful. I am happy to be back.

While there, for no reason whatsoever, my older daughter, who will be turning four in about a week, walked up to me, looked at me with her big brown eyes, and said, in a matter-of-fact tone,"You're getting older."

I nodded. "That's right. We all are."

"But you're getting much older," she said.

"That's true."

"And you're gonna die soon."

Okay. I froze. How, exactly, does one respond to that? Keep in mind that this girl is three years old, and entirely incapable of grasping the metaphysical concepts that I find necessary in order to have a conversation about our frail mortality.

"Well," I say slowly, still feeling my way around this minefield, "everybody dies eventually. Everything dies. But that's not important right now, honey. The important thing is that right here, right now, we're together and I love you so much."

I reach over and hug her, but she's gone limp, and I can hear her crying. I push away gently and ask her why she's crying.

"Because I'm gonna miss you when you're dead," she says. "I want to be with you forever, Matty."

My heart breaks. I mean this is as close to a true, poetic heartbreak as I have ever experienced in my thirty-seven years of life. The truth of the matter is that I, too, want to be with her forever. At this moment, as she is standing next to me and talking to me and sharing her existential fears with me, I think that I've never felt closer to anybody at any point of my life. She and her sister have made my life complete and whole in a way that wasn't possible before they were born.

Up until recently, I was militantly agnostic and leaning towards atheist. Not long ago, my life situation has undergone a tremendous and traumatic upheaval that has required rethinking some things on my part, and I am no longer militant about anything in life. I have opened myself up to the wide universe of possibilities, and among these possibilities is the existence of a higher power of some sort.

Of course, being a lifelong non-believer, I had very often considered and planned how I would attack this inevitable conversation with my children, and I confidently assured myself that I would approach it with a cold but calm rationality, explaining to my children that life has no meaning and there is nothing to look forward to after our brief existence on this strange planet.

Right now, to be sure, it occurs to me that I used to be a complete and utter moron.

Now that we are here and my child is staring sadly at me, looking for comfort and an explanation that won't doom her to a life of anxiety and depression, my thoughts regarding the topic change instantly. My eyes tear up, and my throat begins to stiffen. I choke my reaction back and force a smile onto my lips.

"My darling," I say, stroking her long hair, "I want to be with you forever, too. The truth is that I will die eventually, but that day is a long way away. We have so many years that we'll be able to spend together, love, and I promise that I'll spend every day that I can next to you."

She nods. "But when you die, will we see each other again?"

God. This kid is just like me, and I hate it.

"I don't know, my love. I hope so. I really hope so. I don't believe that everything just ends when we die. I think that something amazing, something that we can't understand happens, and I believe that, one way or another, I'll find a way to see you again, my love. Okay?"

She nods and hugs me. And, as quickly as the conversation started, it is over, and her attention is focused on something trivial and more suitable to her four-year-old mind.

The fact is that right now, at this moment, I need something trivial to focus on, too, so I reach over, grab one of her Sesame Street coloring book pages, and begin to turn a colorless Cookie Monster into the fabulous blue eating machine that he is.

In no time, I am already feeling better. Thank God for Cookie Monster.

Miguelito

4:17 p.m.
As he walked home from school that summer afternoon, Miguel Illescas repeatedly stole looks over his right shoulder to make sure that he wasn't being followed. Though he didn’t see anybody behind him, he remained cautious. He stared up at the bright sun, shading his eyes with his right hand as he silently cursed it for the miserable heat that choked his pores and dampened his skin.
Although no one who saw the diminutive eight-year-old would have guessed it, Miguel had serious business to attend to, and he couldn't be late for his appointment.
He paused under the shade of the striped awning of a produce mart, looking hungrily at the mangoes piled on top of an open wooden crate as he caught his breath.
Think cool thoughts, he reminded himself, repeating a line that his mother had often told him when the summer days grew unbearably hot. Think cool thoughts.
But in Miguel's admittedly limited life experience, he had already decided that the entire idea of mind over matter was, to use a phrase dear to his grandfather, balderdash. In the end, only matter mattered, never mind mind.
While the human mind was capable of breathtaking feats of calculation and analysis, it could not control matter. He could not simply will himself to feel cold on a sweltering day like today, regardless of what his mother said.
He ran the back of his hand across his forehead once more, wiping away the sweat that threatened to cross the line of his eyebrows and invade his eyes.


4:32 p.m.
He glanced down at his digital wristwatch. He inhaled deeply and strode back out into the sun, ditching the comfortable cover of the awning's shade. He still had a long way to go and a shrinking amount of time in which to get there.
As he walked, he noticed an older man sitting on a bench on a bus stop, having an animated conversation with nobody. He stopped a few feet from the man and watched as the one-sided discussion developed, the man becoming more agitated as he argued with somebody or something that Miguel couldn't see.
"Who are you talking to?" Miguel asked.
The man was startled by the boy's interruption, and jumped out of his seat. He turned around slowly and eyed Miguel with squinting eyes.
"Who I'm talkin'' to?" he asked, looking around. He shrugged. "He was jus' heah a minute ago. Mus've left. Ah, well, I in't like 'em anyway."
Miguel smiled, nodded, and turned to walk away.
"Hey, young man," the man said in hushed tones, motioning for Miguel to move closer. "I got sumpin' fo' you, sumpin' you ain't gon' wanna pass up."
Miguel pressed his eyebrows down in curiosity. "What is it?"
"Man, what I got's a million dolla idea, but I give it to ye fo' fi'e dolla."
"I don't have five dollars," Miguel explained, fishing around in his pockets.
"How much you got?" the old man asked, peering suspiciously at the boy.
Miguel shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe fifty cents."
"Fiddy cent?" the man asked, raising his voice in dismayed shock. "Fiddy cent? What kind o' fool gonna sell you a million dolla idea fo' fiddy cent? Man, I ain't gon' let go o' dis idea fo' nuttin' less dan one dolla."
Miguel shook his head. "I'm sorry, but I don't have a dollar." He brought out a handful of change from his pocket and started to count it. "I have... sixty-two cents. Is that enough?"
"Man, hand dat munny ovah," the man said with a disgusted look on his face. "Carefu' I don' run down to da police station and file a report on account o' how you rob me heah."
Miguel handed over his change and looked eagerly at the man. "So what's the million dollar idea?" he asked.
"Man, looka heah. You evah hear o' sumpin' called col' fusion?" he asked, raising his eyebrows at the import of his own words.
Miguel shook his head. "No. Is it some kind of new refrigerator? We new a new refrigerator at home."
The man nodded sagely. "Man, e'ryone need a new fridge now wit' dis damn heat. It's hotta den a camel ass, I tell ya'. Heah," he said, handing over a tattered sheet of paper upon which he had made nearly-illegible scribbles. "You take care o' dat right theah, you hear me, boy? Dat right deah, in yo' hand, gonna change da worl' one o' dese days, an' you just stole it from me fo' sixty-two cent."
The man shook his head gruffly and walked away, muttering curses about the money he just forfeited in the transaction. Miguel glanced down at the paper, staring and squinting and trying to make sense of the letters, numbers, and strange symbols on the paper before folding it neatly up and putting it away in his pocket.

4:43 p.m.
As he continued on his way, Miguel again checked behind him, scanning the sidewalk carefully to make sure he wasn't being followed. While he suspected that he was being watched, there was nothing that he could do about it at the moment. He had to keep moving if he was going to make it in time.
Not seeing anything suspicious, the boy continued on his way, adjusting the straps on his Batman backpack so that it sat better on his shoulders. His hair was a damp mess from the humidity, and drops of dirty sweat continually dripped down into his eyes and onto his mouth, the salt blurring his vision and stinging a cut on his lower lip.
Unbidden, the thought of an orange popsicle entered into his mind, causing his tongue to swell and salivate with longing. Orange popsicles, in his opinion, were not only the best flavor of popsicle available - they were, in point of fact, the only popsicle worth eating.
Focus, he reprimanded himself, angry for the temporary lapse in concentration. He couldn’t afford the luxury of indulging a fantastical mirage of the sweet, life-saving goodness of an orange popsicle. This was serious business he was involved in, and giving in to childish habits could cost him his life if he wasn’t careful.

4:54 p.m.
Miguel ducked into a shaded alleyway and sought refuge behind a giant green dumpster that stood outside of the building nearest the street. He removed his backpack and went through its contents, making sure that he had everything that he might possibly need. Satisfied that he was prepared for the confrontation, he slid his arms back into the straps, wiped his sweaty palms on his red shorts, and returned to the sidewalk.
He stole into the doorway of a white brick building, closing the door silently behind him and pausing, listening to the thumping of his heart while he waited to ensure that nobody was following him.
Confident that he was alone, he locked the door behind him and entered the empty office. He tiptoed toward the receptionist’s desk, careful not to make any noise that might announce his presence.
There, he thought, inhaling deeply with anticipation. The target was present, staring intently at an open manila file folder.

5:02 p.m.
"Hola, Doctór," Miguel said, flashing a cocky smile at the older man.
The man turned around and stared at the diminutive child standing in the waiting room, everything below the boy's neck hidden behind the receptionist's counter. The man stared and stared, trying desperately to place the face that he saw before him, unable to make the connection.
Finally, after twenty seconds, recognition flashed in the man's mind, and he dropped the file folder from his hands and began backing away.
"No," he whispered, his face a mask of mortal terror. "Miguelito? No. No puede ser. It cannot be. You, you, you were supposed to have been taken care of."
"Ah, yes," Miguel said, vaulting himself over the counter and into el Doctor's office. "Your dastardly partner, el Dentista. It seems he wanted a crown for himself, but instead I gave him a good drilling. We won't be hearing from him again, Doctór: I gave him a fatal case of hurt fillings.
"But enough about the dear, departed Dentista. Let's talk about you, Doctór. There’s an old saying, how does it go? Ah, yes: an apple a day keeps the doctor away. I wonder if that is true," he said, removing a shiny red apple from his backpack.
"No," el Doctór whispered, trembling as he tried to open the locked window in his office, to no avail.
"There is no escape, Doctór," Miguel said, advancing slowly, tossing the apple back and forth between his two hands.
"No, por favor, Miguelito. Por favor. You will see - I will change my ways. I will devote my life to helping the sick and the weak, those who are not able to care for themselves. Yes, yes, yes. I will be a good Doctór, Miguelito."
"A good doctor? It’s a little late for that, you villain."
"No, Miguelito," the Doctor said, falling to his knees and clasping his hands tightly in front of his face. "Please, spare me the ravages of your Big Apple, Miguelito. Por favor, Miguelito, have pity on an old man."
“You know about the Big Apple?”
El Doctór nodded. “Yes. Yes,” he sobbed. “Everyone knows about the Big Apple.”
“Tell me about it,” Miguel said as he continued tossing it back and forth in front of the trembling Doctór. “Tell me about the Big Apple.”
The old man sniffled and cleared his throat. “It’s… it’s… it’s a disease-infested, festering, pus-filled, scab of an object.”
Miguel nodded. “That’s right. The Big Apple destroys everything that it comes into contact with. Nothing survives it. But enough about the Big Apple. I want you to confess, Doctór. I want you to acknowledge what you've done. I already got the whole story out of the Dentista before I strung him up by his floss, so don't think about lying to me."
El Doctór began sobbing hysterically, screaming and crying and rocking back and forth. "Okay, Miguelito. Okay. The Dentista and I made an unholy alliance. It's true. We worked together. Our plan was to poison the town's water supply by flooding it with... with... with sugar."
"Not just sugar, Doctór."
"No, no," he pled. "Don't make me say it."
"I want to hear the words from your mouth, you miscreant."
"Okay, Miguelito. Okay. Sugar and... and... and high fructose corn syrup." El Doctór wailed and sobbed as Miguel stood in front of him, shaking his head in judgmental disbelief.
"You were willing to go to any lengths, just to ensure that your business was booming. You were even willing to poison innocent people, just to make a few bucks. And to think that you took an oath to do no harm, Doctór. I gotta tell you, Doc: your prognosis is pretty bad."
"No," he whispered, staring at Miguel. "No. I want to live. I want to live. I'll never harm another patient again."
"You got that right, Doctór. But from what I can see, you have less than two minutes to live. Don't worry, though: I'm a professional."
Without another word, Miguel pulled back his arm, the deadly apple palmed tightly in his hand, and hurled it at el Doctór’s tear-stained face with all the force that his little arm could muster. El Doctór opened his mouth wide to scream, but before so much as a squeak escaped, the Big Apple smashed against his nose, spreading its vile, rabid flesh all over his face. Instantly el Doctór’s skin began to bubble and ooze, the acidic chemicals of the apple turning his face to an oozing mush.

5:14 p.m.
“Four out of five doctors know better than to mess with Miguelito,” the boy said as he turned to walk away. “I wonder what Mom made for dinner?”

The Pixar Theory

I first ran into the Pixar Theory a few years back, and I admit that I wasted the next two days trying to piece it all together in my head. Basically, the Pixar Theory goes something like this: all of the movies made by Pixar work together as a kind of mythological collage to tell the story of the development of human and post-human life in an alternate universe. That is, every Pixar movie takes place in the same alternate reality, one removed from ours. So Brave, Incredibles, Toy Story, Monsters Inc, etc. are not individual, unrelated stories, but rather all snapshots of a larger, comprehensive history of evolution as it occurred in a different world.

Check it out and be prepared to have your mind blown.

By the way, linking to this page will obviously result in a lot of spoilers if you haven't yet seen all of the Pixar films: user beware.

Click Here: The Pixar Theory

Our Founding Fathers

I'm attempting to pen a song about the founding fathers for a YA book that I'm currently writing. A group of twelve-year-olds at an urban park district summer camp will be singing it during a Fourth of July pageant that they're putting on. Here's what I have so far:

Big George Washington, who never told a lie,
Stood tall with his troops and the King they did defy.
The Gen'ral of the army and our first President,
Gained freedom for all, 'cept those of African descent.

Then there's Jefferson, a warrior with his pens,
Wrote the Declaration of our Independence.
A man of eloquence, his words saved and engraved,
And fathered several children with a girl who was his slave.

Slave-owner James Monroe, President number five,
Fought against the British and a wound he did survive.
Claimed for our dominion the Western Hemisphere
And made sure that we were the only colonizers here.

Little John Adams, a man of principal
Champion of rights for all who were invisible.
Never owned a slave, which was a point of pride,
The first President in the White House who did reside.

Benjamin Franklin, the only self-made man
He was a thinker and a doer, not a Minuteman.
He fought for democracy and wanted rights for all,
But the slave-holders said "No" and laughed in their southern drawls.

The Fourth President, a man named Madison,
Inherited his land and slaves and annexed the Cajuns.
He thought Africans against the whites might rise,
And that's why he supported the Three-Fifths Compromise.

I'd like it to be lightly humorous and to poke fun at the glaring inconsistencies that these men exhibited, preaching about freedom and equality while holding firmly to their ideas regarding the place of those who weren't born as landed white males.

Certainly, the song needs to be rewritten, but hopefully it's not a horrible first draft...

All the Pretty Horses

Last weekend, my wife asked me to go through several boxes of books that hadn't been opened since we moved into our house three years ago. I trudged upstairs, sat down in the closet, and peeled open the first box, assuming that the process would take two minutes before I decided to sell everything inside to a used-books store.

As with most things in my life, I was wrong.

Twenty minutes later, I was forty pages into All the Pretty Horses, a wonderful, engaging book by the fantastic writer Cormac McCarthy. I would guess that I've read the book three or four times in my life, and it gets better each time that I do. Of course, the book itself doesn't change - the words have been the same since it was first published in 1992, when I was fourteen years old. But the experience of growing and aging and maturing and using a specific piece of art as a kind of milestone along the way is a rewarding experience. I see and understand things at thirty-seven that I couldn't when I was fourteen or twenty-two. This isn't to say that the things that matter to me now are more important than those that caught my eye as a teenager - the needs and wants of a teenager are just as valid as those of an octogenarian.

But I digress. The story of John Grady Cole and his flight from the South Texas town of San Angelo into the expansive and dangerous freedom of Northern Mexico is thrilling, compelling, and so well-written that it hurts to read it. For the record, I have never read a Western novel save those of McCarthy, and am resolutely uninterested in the genre when he is not the creator. That said, as a life-long city boy who doesn't find the story of cowboys and ranching and desolate desertscapes interesting or romantic at all, I salivate at McCarthy's intense physical descriptions of horses as though I had been raised on a ranch.

If you haven't read this book yet, do yourself a favor and read it. It's one of those rare books that can change your life in a small and subtle way, and any work of art that can accomplish that is worth your time.

August 6, 1945

70 years ago today, the United States dropped an atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima, Japan, killing an estimated 150,000 human beings before the end of the year. I think that it's important to recall the social and cultural context in which this horrific act occurred. Too often, when we Americans consider our history (when, in fact, we deign to consider it at all), we tend to whitewash out uncomfortable details that might cast a pall on events which many believe merit nothing but proud celebration. When we talk about the Constitution, we often can't be troubled to speak about the abhorrent fact that black people weren't even considered human beings by our founding fathers, and that the full-out genocide of the native population of North America was already well under way.

When we think about the end of the Second World War, and about the decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, we must recall the unspeakable racism against the Japanese that had become commonplace since the surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Caricatures of Japanese men with Coke-bottle glasses, buck-teeth, and squinty eyes were everywhere during the early 1940s, and American pop culture staples such as Loony Tunes and Mickey Mouse proudly joined the raucous chorus of hateful, racist tirades against the Japanese. All of this served to dehumanize the Japanese, which made it acceptable to treat them as animals, undeserving of the rights and consideration normally granted to human beings.

Consider the shameful internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans that began in early 1942 with President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066. The American government rounded up over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, most of whom were American citizens, and herded them into camps in the interior of the country. The reason given was that they were somehow a danger to the war effort against the Imperial Japanese government, though no proof was EVER offered to justify this claim. To its everlasting shame, the Supreme Court upheld this grotesque practice in 1944, pointedly avoiding issuing an opinion on whether the United States government could simply round up American citizens and imprison them without providing them with due process.

Given this atmosphere of lawlessness and rampant racism, it is no wonder that most Americans were perfectly okay with dropping an atomic fireball on a densely-populated city and incinerating its people. After all, they were only Japanese, and Americans had greedily sucked in years of anti-Japanese propaganda designed to turn them into lesser creatures.

We could tell ourselves that this little boy deserved his pain and suffering because he was only a Jap. We could celebrate our deep commitment to freedom and human rights and self-determination while simultaneously ignoring such images because these weren't people. They were savages, they were barbarians, they were animals, they were Japs.

70 years ago today this happened. The United States dropped an atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima and killed 150,000 human being. Human beings just like you, just like me. Vile, racist propaganda made this abhorrent act acceptable. Do not allow such propaganda to skew your view of the Other around the world.

People are people, no matter where they're from or how they look. Don't let this happen again.

The Subtle Joys of Illiteracy

Last night, older daughter got out of bed at around 9:00 and came to the top of the stairs.

"Daddy?" she called down.

Being a complete and total sucker, I arose from my position on the couch and made my way upstairs to see what she wanted.

"What is it, sweetie?"

"Daddy, I can't fall asleep."

This was cute the first time she complained about it six months ago. Ever since that first night, it's become a wearisome part of our nighttime routine.

"Okay, honey," I said, walking her back to the room she shares with younger daughter. "Let's get you back in bed."

I go through my nightly spiel about how it's okay if she can't sleep, that sleep is something that you can't force, that the important thing is to just rest and to keep quiet so that she doesn't wake up her sister. She stares blankly at me and nods complacently, ignoring me completely.

She lays down and I pull her blanket up over her just the way she likes it. She reaches over, picks up one of her books, and opens it up.

"Sweetie," I say calmly, successfully hiding the fact that I want to start yelling wildly, "it's time to go to sleep. This isn't the time to read."

She nods patronizingly. "It's okay, Daddy. It won't take long: I can't read yet."