How Books Hook Us: It’s Not Always the Plot

Recently I read The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown. It’s the nonfiction narrative of nine young American men on the University of Washington rowing team. It follows their quest for the gold medal in the 1936 Olympics.

I already knew that the UW team had won, but the story of its characters still hooked me. The author traced the bonding that developed between these unlikely sons of depression era loggers and farmers and laborers.

The desire to know HOW the triumph happened and WHY the young men developed as they did kept me reading. I wanted to follow the dynamics binding this group together.

The suspense of character can be every bit as suspenseful as plot, in fiction and nonfiction.

I’m told that a few readers even look at the last few pages of a book before they begin the book. They wish to enjoy how the story and the characters develop, more important to them than the way it ends.

Why not? Good writing mirrors life, and the whole of life is important, not just the ending.

 

Why Our Politics Should Stop at the Water’s Edge

U.S. Senator Arthur Vandenberg is credited with the famous saying that our political differences stop at the water’s edge. He meant that though we may be on opposite sides of issues, we present a united front in our dealings with other nations. We do not let our differences impede our ability to carry out a strong foreign policy with diverse nations.

Americans have always celebrated ties to other countries. We are a nation of immigrants, after all. We talk of our special relationship with Britain. Though Saint Patrick’s Day is not a federal holiday, many Americans of Irish descent celebrate it. Mexican Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo. Jewish Americans celebrate Passover. Muslim Americans celebrate Ramadan. Chinese Americans celebrate the Chinese New Year.

Basing our foreign policies on subservience to a particular country is a more serious matter. When I served in U.S. missions overseas in the Middle East, newly naturalized Americans with ties to those countries sometimes wanted us to work for their countries at the expense of our need to retain relations with many nations in the region.

Refusing to act solely for the interests of a particular country is based on our requirement to put the interests of our own country first. We also seek broader policies that benefit as many nations as possible.

The address of a foreign prime minister to the U.S. Congress at the invitation of one political party set an unwelcome precedent. This has never happened before. To tie the foreign policies of the United States so tightly to the policies of another nation is unprecedented and weakens our ability to choose options. We are part of a global community, and our goal should be working for policies that benefit both us and the community.

 

Governments Grind Away in Neutral While Citizens Seek Alternatives

The gridlock in legislatures, both in Congress and several state legislatures, has led citizens to “legislate” by other means. Citizens in my home state of Washington filed a legal case against the state to increase funding for education. They alleged that the government failed to satisfy the state constitutional mandate calling for an adequate education for all Washington children. The state supreme court agreed and placed the legislature under orders to increase funding. The legislature is currently scrambling to find the funds, being placed under threat of fines if it does not.

We see increased use of ballot initiatives to allow citizens more input into the legislative process. Both governors and the president issue more executive orders. Court cases, ballot measures, and executive orders are attempts to detour around stalled lawmakers. Such measures will continue as long as our representatives are unable to compromise and pass legislation. Political hardening and name calling (hatred in some cases) make compromise appear as “giving in to the enemy.”

Polls indicate that legislatures are sometimes at odds with what citizens actually want. Perhaps contributions to election campaigns coming from moneyed interests are overriding the public will.

 

Five Reasons Not to Spend More Time at the Office

A nurse in palliative care, Bronnie Ware, has recorded the five top regrets of dying patients as listed in an article in the British newspaper, The Guardian. They are:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Apparently, we must intentionally direct our lives toward the more important values. Otherwise, the necessary but less important tasks will overwhelm us.

 

For Those Young Americans Not Voting in the November Election: Perhaps You’d Prefer a Country Where You Can’t Vote?

Raif Badawi, now thirty-one, has been held in a Saudi Arabian prison since 2012 for blogs considered insulting to Islam. Badawi was sentenced to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes, fifty each week until the number is completed. After the first punishment was carried out, reprieves have been granted, because, it is said, his body has not yet recovered from the first round. Badawi, of course, has never voted in a national election, nor have any other Saudis, young or not, since they aren’t allowed there.

The number of 18-29 year old Americans (millenials) who bothered to vote in the November 2014 election hovers around 21 percent, according to an article by Froma Harrop. (Published in The Seattle Times on January 25, 2015.) That’s not even one out of four. In some countries where I”ve lived, the idea of not voting when you have the privilege is beyond comprehension.

Harrop scorned the idea of some young Americans that their government doesn’t care about them, or that their voting doesn’t make a difference.

Older people vote in larger numbers. That’s why we have Social Security and Medicare. Or, as Harrop said, “You don’t get served till you enter the restaurant.”

 

Do You Have a Home to Take You In?

An adult cousin of mine developed rheumatic fever many years ago. With financial resources dwindling, his wife drove him and their two little girls back to her mother’s farmhouse in Tennessee, where she had grown up. Her three brothers were supportive. They stayed until my cousin recovered. He resumed his livelihood, and the family returned to a normal lifestyle.

Home, the saying goes, is where, when you go there, they have to take you in.

This homespun saying has never been true of all homes, of course. Some families experience rifts that separate them. However, a great many of us head home to family when trouble strikes: death of a spouse, illness, divorce, financial reverses.

What will happen as families have fewer and fewer members? What happens after young adulthood when parents die or become incapacitated? More families have only one child. What happens when we do not have brothers, sisters, or cousins to lean on in hard times?

The lack of brothers and sisters, of kin, may leave us short of homes to take us in when trouble strikes. We will need to develop communities that support members during those times, not only physically but emotionally as well.

 

Different Solutions for Different Kinds of Homelessness

The other day I pulled out a faded newspaper clipping about homelessness in Atlanta, where I lived several decades ago. That’s probably about how old the clipping is, demonstrating the tenacity of the problem. The article discusses the reasons for homelessness.

One of the speakers in the Atlanta group suggested specialized shelters instead of generic ones. For example, the mentally ill require treatment not needed by those temporarily without funds for shelter because their job was downsized. Those addicted to alcohol and other drugs need rehabilitation centers, but women and their children who are homeless because of abuse may require a different kind of help. Some conditions overlap, of course.

The idea is to treat conditions that cause homelessness. Some cities, such as Salt Lake City, appear to have made progress in reducing homelessness by offering a room with basic amenities to any homeless individual without requiring changes in the individual. The idea is that getting people into safe spaces solves an immediate problem and may make them easier to reach to solve chronic homelessness.

The need for those of us who have homes is, as it always has been, to grasp the need for investment in long term help for the homeless among us.

 

Should Our Schools Begin Educating in Chinese?

The world used to be divided into Western, Communist, and nonaligned nations. More recently, the division has been between developed and developing countries. Lately, a new separation has appeared. The separation is between democracies and those countries, like China, whose leaders think democracy does not work and have instituted a more autocratic form of government.

Democracies stress open elections, freedom of the press and of religion, and an unbiased judiciary, among other requirements. Autocracies think the liberal ideas of democracy have failed. They point to dysfunction, partisan politics, the recent economic recession, and the importance attached to money in winning elections. They prefer a small group of elites who can, they believe, operate more efficiently, not to mention more cheaply.

Believers in autocracy don’t think the liberal ideas of the democracies work any longer in the world as it is. The more orderly, economically viable life of an autocracy like China supposedly compensates for the lack of individual freedom.

The survival of democracies may hinge on their ability to handle the polarization of the last few years between citizens with widely differing ideas of what a government should be and do. Perhaps playing to one’s base in a democracy doesn’t work as well as playing to the common good.

Zorba the Greek Changes Partners

Greek DancersUnless you are an American with Greek roots, you probably didn’t notice that voters in Greece elected what is called a “far-left populist party.” The voters favored a government for the average citizen, not the bankers. They saw the past government as too interested in cutting as much government spending as possible in order to pay debts, no matter the harm to average citizens.

This kind of policy is called “austerity” and was demanded by the European Union for loaning the Greek government money to keep it going. It was hoped that austerity would promote economic growth by cutting spending. As it turned out, massive unemployment from the job cuts offset any growth.

Past Greek governments borrowed more than they should. Also, of course, creditors lent more than they should. Corruption leading to massive avoidance of taxes by the wealthy contributed as well. Those are legitimate targets for fixing.

But citizens in a democracy will take only so much unemployment and austerity, especially if they perceive that the wealthy are not paying their fair share. They will then search for relief at the voting polls. As the Greeks did.

 

Why THE SILVER CHAIR by C.S. Lewis Is My Favorite of the Narnia Series

The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis tells of two children helping a prince escape a dark witch’s underground kingdom. It includes my favorite Lewis character, Puddleglum, a gloomy marsh creature.

Despite Puddleglum’s ongoing pessimism, he’s the one who stays the course, an encourager. He rallies the children when they are caught, forever it seems, in the underground kingdom, wondering if an outside world really does exist.

The witch taunts the children. She says this outside world is only make believe.

Puddleglum answers: “Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun . . . Suppose the black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. … four babies playing a game can make a play-world that licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world.”

I don’t think the scene is telling us to forgo our reason. It does mean, to me, that faith—in the superiority of goodness over badness, of love over hatred, of mercy over revenge—is worth holding on to. We still grieve over horrible tragedies, and doubts are a part of any pilgrim’s life. But we hold on to and practice the good things, out of season as well as in.

We get no credit for faith in goodness when times are going well. We demonstrate our real character when we hang on to the good things when the times are out of kilter.

 

Don’t Think You Owe Me Any Favors Just Because I’m Supporting Your Campaign With a Few Million Dollars

Does anyone remember when Senator John McCain pushed election campaign reform? People’s eyes glazed over. How short-sighted we were.

To decry money’s power is not to encourage class warfare or demonize the wealthy. Rather, it is to understand the lure of money and the human temptation to want it. If our laws allow money to be spent freely with, in many cases, no information on who’s funding which candidate, our politicians will favor laws which benefit those who give them money, not the average citizen.

Some who study the progress of democracy in the world claim the United States no longer is, in fact, a democracy. They point to the power of money to call the shots in our elections.

How to change this mockery of democracy? Some candidates will support reform if they know people want reform AND will bother to vote for candidates favoring it. A large turnout of voters is more likely to vote in officials who favor election reform than a smaller turnout, which tends to favor the status quo.

In the last national election, only about a third of eligible voters bothered to make that trip to the polls.

 

Maybe the Digital Age Began When Pens Became Obsolete

In the novel Gutenberg’s Apprentice, by Alix Christie, the protagonist, Peter Schoeffer, a scribe in the year 1450, is shown a few printed pages, heralding a new age of inexpensive books. His father, a businessman, is excited and is considering investing in this new business of printing books. Printing would mean the end of copying them with pen and ink. He asks how long it would take Peter to scribe a copy of these pages by hand.

Peter not only can scribe manuscripts quite rapidly, but he is proud of his profession as well. It would take him, he says, two days, at most.

His father responds: a half dozen copies can be “printed,” a new word, in the time it takes Peter to scribe one with pen and ink. And in an instant, Peter sees the eventual end of his profession, the profession that created beautiful works of art.

In those few paragraphs is the pattern of a story stretching through today. Computers, the Internet, and countless digital inventions strike down the old, both good and bad. They create the new, both good and bad.

Old beauty was lost, but the ability of anyone who could read to buy books and exchange ideas was born. Though artists learned how to create beauty in printed form, too, something was lost. Something was gained. As it is today.

 

Let’s See, Why Are We in the Middle East Again?

When I worked at the U.S. consulate in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, I often visited the nearby Saudi Aramco oil complex. I was told that the first productive oil well, Dammam No. 7, struck in the mid 1930’s by U.S. oilmen, was still flowing. Whether this was true or not, I don’t know, but many other wells certainly were. They produced the black gold that grew a fortune for Saudi Arabia.

Until the discovery of oil, the United States had little interest in the Middle East. World War II called for oil to fuel war efforts. Then followed the American love affair with suburbs and the automobile.

The Mideast had oil, and we wanted it. A half century later, we were in the midst of oil wars and terrorism. Now Arab protestors want change, but brutal dictators don’t want them to have it.

We yearn for a perfect solution or merely to forget about the place. But harsh events draw us back. Baggage from our past involvement prevents us from walking away.

We are annoyed because easy solutions can’t be found. It challenges our can do attitude. We thought we could solve the problems of Afghanistan and Iraq as easily as we invent digital gadgets.

We broke the Taliban (so we thought) in Afghanistan and brought down Saddam’s Iraq. Unfortunately, we began wars in both places with little knowledge about the history of the region and its multitude of tribes and languages and its ancient hatreds.

Why should we be surprised at the ethnic mayhem that resulted?

 

Becoming Our Enemy

 

Strange how we sometimes become what we fight against. Some Protestants, freed by grace from what they perceived as a legalistic church of works, developed their own legalistic ways to salvation.

As a child, listening to a preacher click off the “steps” to become a Christian, I wondered whether I had repented enough. Was I sorry enough for my sins? My simple realization of finding Jesus wasn’t enough. It didn’t fit someone else’s way of finding Jesus.

Revolutionaries can become the governments they replace. I lived for a while in the North African country of Algeria. Algeria continues to suffer from the aftermath of its revolution against France half a century ago. After gaining freedom, Algerian freedom fighters became more despotic than the colonial power they supplanted.

The early Puritans sailed to the New World to free themselves from the established church. Yet they soon developed a theocracy to rival the one they left.

Today’s freedom is threatened by tomorrow’s tyranny the minute we think we have arrived.

 

Losing/Winning the Super Bowl; Losing/Winning Elections

So the Seattle Seahawks lost the Super Bowl in a heartbreaker. This part of the world is in mourning. Folks have been living and breathing Super Bowl mania for, it seems, years, even before the Hawks went to the 2014 Bowl.

New England, of course, is ecstatic. They’ll be having the parades Seattle had last year (when the weather allows).

Elections resemble sports events. When I was young, winning both elections and sports contests was more important to me than winning is now. Especially with elections, I’ve seen too many defeats turn into later victories and victories descend into defeat. The United States hasn’t missed an election since the country began them back in the eighteenth century, so there’s always next time.

It’s the work in between that’s important. So can we stop obsessing about who’s going to run late in 2016?

 

Why I Had My Children Vaccinated

The only available vaccine I remember in my early childhood was against typhoid fever. A great aunt had caught the disease in her teen years and almost died. My mother made sure my brother and I were vaccinated against it.

I contracted whooping cough when I was a few months old. I caught it from my brother who caught it from school classmates. I don’t remember the illness, of course, but my mother certainly did. She remembered listening to the “whoop” of two children struggling to breathe, fearful she would lose them.

I remember the measles I got when I was three or four. Mine was a mild case. My brother’s case was quite serious. He lay for days in a darkened bedroom to avoid harm to his eyes.

When I was about two, my parents cut short our family vacation. I had developed fever and vomiting, and they were terrified that I might have caught polio from an outbreak not far from where we were staying. Fortunately, I did not have polio, and years later, my mother’s voice still reflected relief when she told of that time.

I have vague memories of a funeral for a neighborhood child who died of polio. I remember pictures of children encased in “iron lungs,” the mechanical devices that breathed for them for however long it took to recover chest muscles paralyzed by polio.

When the polio vaccine became available, my mother rushed us to the nearest vaccination center. It came too late for a classmate, who had caught the disease earlier and walked now with a twisted leg.

Of course I brought my children to the doctor for vaccinations against those diseases.  I didn’t want to know the fear my mother knew.

 

Trapping Bunnies

I take a break from politics in the other Washington (DC) to observe those of my hometown’s city government. That would be Langley, Washington, population somewhere between 1,000 and 1200.

The town council meetings are lively at times—heated arguments over building an elevator, or maybe a funicular, from the harbor up the bluff to the town center. What changes should we allow to historic buildings? How do we manage parking in an increasingly crowded downtown? Should we allow portable food wagons within the city? If so, all year or just in the summer? And so on.

Recently, Langley has experienced a growing problem with our rabbit population. Some of the town’s citizens are irked because the bunnies enjoy munching on landscaping and vegetable plants in their yards. Many others defend the creatures.

The mayor says the town is not going to become involved in euthanizing or otherwise harming the bunnies. “It would upset too many of our citizens,” he says. He obviously knows which side his political bread is buttered on.

Too bad election to national public office requires the contributions of wealthy individuals in the billions of dollars. Otherwise, elected officials in the other Washington might listen to their less wealthy constituents the way our council members do to Langley’s citizens.

 

A Left-Handed Christian in the Religiously Right-Handed World

A Sense of MissionI have difficulty pinpointing where the ideas for my stories come from. A Sense of Mission, my favorite, is the only one written in first person.

At one point, Kaitlin, the main character, says “I felt as if I were a left-handed Christian in the world of the religiously right-handed.”

Maybe that was the germ for the story. I often feel like a left-handed Christian. I suppose most of us, Christian or not, feel out of synch with the drummer at times. For one thing, I’m too serious. My mother was always encouraging me to “get out and have some fun.” To this day, “getting out” requires effort. Sometimes I should exert the effort. Too easy for a writer to stay stuck in solitude.

But sometimes solitude is what I need. I no longer apologize for that. The choice is not cut and dried. Whether we crave solitude or the next party, we strive for the right balance.

Kaitlin, whose life circumstances were far different from mine, found her way. She took wrong turns, for all the best reasons, but finally discovered how to live as she was meant to live.

I doubt any of us has a perfect life, though some seem more blessed than others. Regardless, write with the hand given you.

 

What Do You Know About Our Immigration System?

Amy Chua, the daughter of Chinese immigrants to the United States, wrote an article several years ago, which I found the other day. According to the article, Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, believes in our immigration program—but with changes. She suggested that our immigrant visas award ability and job skills needed by the U.S., more than family preference, as it does today.

As a U.S. visa officer overseas, I interviewed applicants for immigrant visas to the United States, leading to permanent residence here. Those visas were typically awarded to a wage earner, a spouse, and minor children. Others went to brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens, unrelated to job skills.

Chua believes the practice of sibling immigration tends to keep immigrants in enclaves instead of assimilating more quickly into the country’s culture.

I favor, as Chua does, the elimination of sibling visas (after current ones in the pipeline pass through) and their replacement with an increase in immigrant visas related to job skills that are in short supply. Spouses and minor children would continue to be included.

In addition, entries to the U.S. should also include refugees. “Huddled masses yearning to breathe free” are part of our national fabric.

Fairness also should guide our decisions about undocumented residents. Many of them have been here for years and are contributing valuable skills. Some were brought here as children, have assimilated into American culture, and are studying toward college degrees.

[Amy Chua’s article was printed in the Seattle Times on February 3, 2008.]

 

American Atrocities at Abu Ghraib and the Paris Murders

According to news reports, one of the terrorists involved in the January 7 attacks on journalists and a kosher market in France was angered years earlier by pictures of the Abu Ghraib prison atrocities.

Americans appear to have forgotten those images of U.S. soldiers humiliating Iraqi prisoners in 2003. Prisoners were stripped naked, forced into humiliating positions, and otherwise inhumanely treated. The resulting scandal tarnished the reputation of the United States as a defender of human rights. China noted the hypocrisy of our issuance of human rights reports, detailing abuses in virtually every country on the globe, when we, obviously, have our own problems.

Nothing excuses terrorist murders, but sins (and the atrocities at Abu Ghraib were certainly sins) tend to breed consequences spilling over into later suffering of innocents.

The talk of American exceptionalism signifies nothing if we don’t acknowledge that we have failings. Repentance for such failings is not a sign of weakness but a path toward a stronger nation.