To Higher Ground

The polarization of our society is accelerating, sadly, not diminishing. As the protests over police violence against minorities continue and the political stakes rise in advance of November's elections, many are clearly tempted to take sides and demonize those who disagree with them.

At times like this, excess can become the norm:

* Two progressive Brooklyn lawyers are arrested for allegedly throwing an incendiary device into a vacant police car.

* President Donald Trump labels peaceful protestors "domestic terrorists."

* Muriel Bowser, the mayor of D.C., has the words Black Lives Matter painted in large yellow letters on the pavement outside the White House.

* Right-wing conspiracy theorists circulate preposterous rumors, including that George Floyd is still alive.

But cooler heads speak out as well: 

* Melania Trump, the First Lady, says: "As a nation, let's focus on peace, prayers & healing,"

* Roger Goodell, the head of the NFL, reverses course and recognizes the rights of players to take a knee to protest racism and police violence during the playing of the national anthem.

What is at stake amid this turmoil and extreme rhetoric is the soul of our civil society. We need not agree about very much to nevertheless respect one another and defend each other's freedom of speech.

In this regard, journalists have a responsibility. Our code is to report stories fairly and accurately, and to do so in a transparent manner with attribution, so anyone can check the fairness and the veracity of our sources and the documents we cite.

I'm personally disappointed in the recent tendency of nationally recognized journalists to use their platforms to take uncompromising positions and make gratuitous pronouncements. Sarcasm and sermons are not helpful in this environment.

The line between making things better and making things worse is razor thin. That D.C. Mayor Bowser had that street renamed is a lovely and righteous act; that she chose to rub Trump's nose in it  with the huge sign seems excessive and unnecessary.

There is a false choice being offered in many quarters: That we either support the protestors and oppose the police, or the opposite. Why? There is no rational argument against supporting both the protestors and the police. The vast majority of them all are good people doing what they believe to be right.

This reminds me of the Vietnam era, when demonstrators were told they could not both oppose the war and support the troops. Those who made that claim were patently wrong, and the war ended when a coalition of anti-war groups, including the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, prevailed over the U.S. government.

Once again, the government, at least the administration, is on the wrong side of history. But social change in a democracy requires building a majority. That work is peaceful and it is in process right now. We will find out whether it is successful come November.

***

The number of new cases of Covid-19 is spiking. This cannot surprise anyone, given the large public gatherings that have become routine in this country and also around the world. As people rightfully march to oppose oppression, the risks of spreading the disease increase as well.

If, as I believe, the emergence of the virus is related to global climate change, this is a preview of what the world could look like if humanity cannot unite to fight a much greater enemy than those who happen to support a rival political party.

In fact, under the most likely scenario, democracy might not survive climate change. Freedom may prove more fragile than many of us hope it will be.

Or perhaps not. Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s greatest speech , IMHO, was not the "I have a dream" performance in Washington, D.C. but his prophetic sermon his last night alive in Memphis:

"...(S)omewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of 

speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is 

the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren't going to let dogs or water hoses turn us 

around, we aren't going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on...

"...Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!"

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Walking for Justice

The most enduring image for me of the past week is of young people wearing backpacks walking. Nationally, we've seen this in many cities, but especially in Los Angeles, with its sprawling basin set against the San Gabriel Mountains.

Up north on Wednesday, from 10-16,000 people marched through the streets of San Francisco, converging on the Mission Police Station. There was no violence.

Three of my children were in that crowd, along with their friends. They are in their 20s now, ready to assume a greater role in how our society conducts itself. They don't condone racism or injustice of any kind; they abhor war. Their voice is firm.

Some might consider them privileged but they are not rich. They've been working for years, at or near the minimum wage, as grocery store and bakery clerks, office workers in a synagogue, babysitters, camp counselors, construction work helpers, cat sitters, drivers, personal assistants, soccer coaches, art gallery assistants, EMTs and on and on.

Now they are marching for peace in our cities and justice on our streets. They are continuing the work my generation was known for in the '60s.

The San Francisco Bay Area is frequently recognized as the cradle for social movements that later sweep the land. This was demonstrably the case for decades; lately, I believe many parts of the country have populations and activism similar to San Francico's.

Our youth are multiracial and multicultural; they are black, brown, Asian, Latino, white, gay, straight, trans, gender-neutral, well-educated, hard-working, thoughtful, opinionated and fun. They have a sense of style as diverse as their orientations. 

As one who is much older, and not only a parent of Millennials but worked as the supervisor of many as well, I love this generation. I love the way they think and talk; I love their music and their art.

Now they are walking through our streets, masked, mostly in silence, sometimes chanting and singing; some carry signs, some raise their arms, all walking for justice. 

In the words of the 19th century processional hymn:

We are not divided;

All one body we:

One in hope and doctrine,

One in charity.  --Sabine Baring-Gould

***

Reports indicate the new cases of Covid-19 are spiking in various parts of the nation. It is not unreasonable to suppose that mass gatherings may be contributing to the spread of the disease. 

Our EMTs patrol our streets, caring for Covid-19 patients, accident victims, elderly people and in the Bay Area and elsewhere, many 5150s. The latter are mentally disorganized individuals, often young and often suicidal.

"Some of them don't want to talk," my son tells me, "But others will and I try to cheer them up. I'll tell a joke, try to get them to smile."

This is in the back of an ambulance, where the patient is lying on a stretcher as he checks their vital signs.

It's the essential message, of course, to someone who just tried or threatened to end their own life.

"Life is weird, but you are not alone."

We are social creatures; isolation doesn't suit us. There are many things we need and want to do alone -- writing is one example -- but most writers want to meet a friend at a coffee shop or take a walk or share a drink when the writing is done.

Many writers find their way to San Francisco, either to visit for a while or to stay. Mark Twain is famously credited for commenting on our summer weather; over the years I have met descendants of his who still live in the area.

Twain, of course, was the ultimate humorist and influenced every other American writer of his time and since. One of my favorite stories about Twain is that he noted he had been born soon after the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1835 and he predicted he would "go out with it"  as well. Accordingly, he died the day after the comet reappeared in 1910.

The man sure knew how to write a kicker.

Many young writers have asked me for advice over the years. It's easy to spot the ones for whom this is a dream they can achieve. There are two tell-tale characteristics. One, they just know instinctively how to tell a story. Naturally, I ask them to tell me their story, and that reveals what I need to know.

The second is an irrepressible sense of humor, the wackier and more profane the better.  Taking yourself too seriously is not a good sign, but telling a good joke about yourself most definitely is.

Of course, why should these young writers listen to me; what do I know?

As the great Robert Frost wrote, "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by,"

That's what *he* did. But my name, on paper, is Weir, D. I -- I walked straight into the tree.

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Storage Locker #102

The Right Story

"You can't help nobody if you can't tell them the right story." -- *Walk the Line*

Every journalist in America is struggling right now over how to tell this story. It doesn't matter which form we choose, text, audio or visual, with data or only anecdote, everyone is trying to make sense of all this.

All stories have a beginning, a middle and an end, of course, and according to classic structure the second act -- the middle -- is twice as long as acts one and three.

So here we all are stuck in the middle of the second act of this story, with few clues as to the outcome.

Complicating this process is the reality that over the past quarter-century, most media companies have become multi-media operations. The New York Times, for example, used to be a newspaper. But today, a story will appear there and elsewhere in several forms, with an increasing emphasis on digital video. This development had to wait until bandwidth increased to be able to support video, and the miniature cameras built into mobile devices improved in quality.

During the protests of the 1960s, it was mainly only television crews or the occasional documentary team that filmed events. The 8 mm "Zapruder Film" that captured the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 was highly unusual. When Oliver Stone released his film, "JFK" including Zapruder footage in 1991, it so thoroughly confused the public that by the time I was teaching journalism at Stanford in 2002, a majority of my students believed that Kennedy's murder had been broadcast live on TV (it was not).

In 1982, "camcorders" started reaching the public.

In 1991, a man named George Holliday videotaped a group of  LAPD officers beating Rodney King from his balcony, over a decade before the first cameras in cellphones became publicly available in 2002.

Now, virtually anybody can shoot a video anywhere, so the likelihood that an incident like the George Floyd killing will be recorded has increased exponentially since the King riots or the Kennedy shooting. It has almost reached the point that today if there is no video, there is no story.

***

Yesterday, out front, I saw a hummingbird visit a clump of wisteria in the heat of the day. I didn't shoot a photograph or a movie; the subject would have been too small to capture the magic.

But it did happen, you have me to testify to that. Of course, I may have been day-dreaming, we have to take that into account.

Before I published my first story in Rolling Stone in the '70s, I published photos in the magazine. That certainly amounts to a footnote in my career -- nobody will ever remember anything I did with a camera.

But sometime it is a writer's fate that he is rewarded for words when his passion is actually for images.

At CIR, my colleagues and I obtained declassified footage the Navy had shot of early nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific in the '50s a quarter-century after the fact.

Several of us collaborated on an investigation, which resulted in a segment on ABC's "20-20"; it then fell to me to write the magazine version. In order to do so, I watched that old footage over and over until I could accurately capture the visual narrative in words.

When Hollywood came calling in the '80s, I happily migrated from journalism and its vigorous fact-checking dictates to the relative freedom of fiction and feature films. This is where creative license to play with the facts comes into play. when the ordinary rules no longer necessarily apply.

One of the main things I love about film is the role actors play. Many may consider acting the art of faking something -- pretending you are somebody you aren't, for example.

I have a different view. When actors achieve their best work they may succeed in pretending they are someone else but they are not pretending the emotional state they are evoking in the process. My favorite moments are those that unleash feelings inside of me, the viewer.

"Do you feel that? That's emotion." -- Tiffany Maxwell (Silver Linings Playbook).

There is nothing fake about the emotion.

***

Academics assure us there are only seven types of stories:

• Overcoming the Monster.
• Rags to Riches.
• The Quest.
• Voyage and Return.
• Comedy.
• Tragedy.
• Rebirth.

Despite any personal preference to merge fact and fiction, we as a people have a deep stake in our ability to separate the two.

Some of us will fixate on the facts. What do the videos of our city streets document? Who did what when and how?

But that approach leaves out the why.

To grapple with that, maybe we need to venture beyond the facts to a less tangible place. Like how all of this makes us feel.

What do we see when we watch a white policeman suffocate a black man? What do we see when we see a protestor taunt the police to hit him?

What emotions come to the surface for us?

Do you feel that? That's emotion.

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Holy Books

In Afghanistan, villagers often asked me if I were a man "of the book." I told them that I owned a Bible, and that pleased them enormously.

"The best is if you were a Moslem," they often said to me. "But if you are a Christian or a Jew, that is good also, because you have a book. The worst would be if you were an infidel (کافر)."

I thought about this recently when we were cleaning out my old apartment and sorting my books. My kids discovered that I had kept two Bibles from my boyhood in Michigan, one from Royal Oak and one from Bay City.

They decided to save them as family heirlooms.

As a teacher in Afghanistan I learned to speak, read and write the local dialect of Farsi, which is known as Dari. The language is not difficult to learn, as languages go; it follows the pronunciation rules of Arabic largely, which has only a few guttural sounds that prove difficult for native English speakers to master.

There were three main radio signals that reached our village -- the BBC, Radio Moscow and the Voice of America. There also were occasional government broadcasts from Kabul and Beijing. There were no commercial stations like back home. So for me, no Motown, no rock 'n roll, no country.

As I listened to the BBC's proper English and compared it to my dialect from the Midwestern U.S., it became easy for me to identify with Dari speakers. I, too, spoke a colonial version of my mother tongue.

Takhar (تخار) Province is far to the north and east of Kabul, on the other side of the mighty Hindu Kush (هندوکش) mountains. The name means "killers of Hindus," and history reveals they are well-named. It was a deeply religious region, where Islam was embedded in every aspect of daily life.

Peace Corps Volunteers were carefully trained in cross-cultural sensitivities and in Afghanistan that included religious sensitivity. Before arriving in Central Asia I knew very little about Islam, so I decided to read the Koran (Quran).

It reminded me of the Old Testament of the Bible, which naturally stirred my curiosity about the historical accuracy of accounts of the lives of Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. So I read other books as well. 

Anyway, once I had read the Koran, and could quote from it, I gained major street cred with my students. (The literacy rate was extremely low in Afghanistan at that time; even today it stands at less than 50 percent of the adult population.)

Interestingly, it was some of my other readings -- Marx and Lenin -- that helped me with the most precocious students. Education was doing what it does best, opening up their minds, and they were playing around with idealistic and in my view unrealistic ideas like Communism and socialism.

It was clear to me that some of their ideas originated with those radio broadcasts from Radio Moscow and Radio Beijing, because I recognized the talking points. These were the boys who frequently ignored or even belittled the Mullahs who taught their religion classes.

At that time, circa 1970, Afghanistan was a kingdom with a benign monarch, M. Zahir Shah, who had been educated in Europe and favored Western-style reforms. No one knew it at the time, but he was to be the last Afghan King. Before long he would be overthrown and a pro-Communist regime installed in his place.

Subsequently, the Soviets invaded and a long era of war without end ensued, which has not subsided to this day, four decades later.

***

All of this history, including the personal aspects, rushed back to me yesterday as I watched the President walk from the White House to a nearby church, where he held up a Bible for photographers.

In order to accomplish this photo op, the law enforcement forces guarding the President from protestors fired tear gas and rubber bullets into the peaceful crowd and forced it to vacate Lafayette Park, across from the White House.

Once the protesters had been chased away, the reality show commenced.

***

The sun is out, the light is bright. Birds are singing, my grandchildren are dancing into their summer. The coastal sky is blue, the fog of recent days is a distant memory, and a gentle breeze flows in from the west.

My reporter friends have sent me videos they shot with their cellphones over the weekend in Atlanta and Oakland. I've seen other videos from all over the country courtesy of CNN and other purveyors of the news.

Sheltering in place has become a lifestyle. Multiple cups of coffee are noticeably more important to my mornings. Romantic movies span my afternoons and sometimes leak into my dreams at night.

Life proceeds. The elderly, the poor and minorities are disproportionately being weeded out of the human race. Memories only they can give voice to are being lost, one family at a time.

I'm the custodian of memories only I can give voice to for my family. You are the same, at any age. Cherish your memories, cherish life and if you are a religious person, cherish your faith. Don't let a charlatan steal that from you.

These are the times we all need every prayer we can get.

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Overloads

When it comes to Western medicine's ability to diagnose mental disorders, I'm not particularly impressed. Most of my adult life, I've known people who have been treated for diagnoses including depression, anxiety, bipolar, ADD, ADHD, and so on.

Those are the people who sought help and advice. But the people who assumed they were "sane" and didn't need help or advice often seemed in fact to be the most troubled ones, in my view.

Over time, the "disorganization" aspect of ADD/ADHD intrigued me. And the "above-normal levels of hyperactive and impulsive behaviors" part.

These "illnesses" have become more prevalent during my lifetime, if you trust the published statistics, and might be considered rampant in certain communities.

Meanwhile, in our work environments, what used to be a predictable, repetitive routine in most jobs has been displaced by the need for multi-tasking. Disorganization has happened  I've watched several generations of people cope with this development in disparate ways.

Many complain, but others have embraced the new reality, which seems due as much to technological developments as any other factor. I am one of those who enjoy multi-tasking; in fact it brings me comfort and joy.

Juggling email, writing, meetings, coffee, unexpected encounters, making payments, sorting papers, programming my fantasy baseball lineup, reading the latest on a list-serve, checking the website, talking to my kids, eating whatever, keeping the TV news in view (maybe on mute), thinking about which movie I'll watch tonight and on and on suits my personality just fine.

I certainly don't miss the old days, the boring days before the Internet turned that world upside down.

Therapist visits can be uncomfortable events; couples therapy must be one of the hardest types for counselors. One counselor labeled my partner and me "lovable neurotics" -- I kind of liked that diagnosis.

This morning, I sat for a long time unable to think of anything to write. That is not my favorite kind of. moment.

It's not like there aren't plenty of topics. The peaceful demonstrations and the violent riots continue, the arrests continue, the political rhetoric continues. There are reports that perhaps 30 percent of the Covid-19 deaths so far have occurred in nursing homes.

As a cooped-up population tries to process all of these inputs, an overload button lights up inside some of us. Suddenly it struck me: I knew what kind of movie to watch and I knew what to write about.

If it's me reading the signs, we are in a whole lot of trouble here. The collective insanity of this moment is much more frightening than the individual kind. There are medications for individuals; how effective they are is up for debate.

But the collective breakdown may prove less treatable. The "opiate of the masses" may not help in this case. This kind of story really needs a happy ending.

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Crumbling Boundaries

It's good and it's bad, what is happening, and I know to some it is probably politically incorrect to say that. The terrible violence sweeping the U.S. is something nobody should celebrate and I never will but the collective act of speaking out against racism, abuse of police power and the needless pain families are suffering is the right thing to do at this moment.

Compassion for the victims and a renewed commitment to change this society is the right thing to do. And there is nothing wrong with anger.

What always happens at times like this is the political leaders blame outsiders for the violence in their communities. "Outside agitators" were denounced half a century ago for the violence around the edges of the civil rights and anti-war movements, and they are being blamed again today.

As if isolated acts of violence were the problem.

There may even be some truth to the claims. Perhaps the main instigators behind the violence in Minnesota come from Wisconsin, the Dakotas and Iowa, But even if so, what would that mean?

Does anger at the killing of an innocent man by police know any borders? Is the main problem we face that certain individuals will use peaceful gatherings to commit criminal acts of looting, breaking windows and setting police cars on fire in one place as opposed to another?

Does a police car in D.C. burned by a person from Virginia look different from a police car in Detroit burned by a person from Ohio?

The worst type of political leader exploits moments like this one by actually inciting violence, making a difficult situation worse than it already is. The truth and the complexity of what we are facing need to be spoken plainly, free of rhetoric.

Almost overlooked in the chaos, the boundaries of masks and social distancing are crumbling around us. If public health officials are right, new peaks of illness and death will result. This is a scenario they didn't plan for.

***

Today I got to see all seven of my grandchildren play together for the first time in months. They are growing up in a pandemic and it is affecting them in noticeable ways, even et the age of 19.5 months, not to mention 13.5 years.

Our children and grandchildren are inheriting this crisis. As I've noted before, they are also inheriting a flawed political system that is cracked and broken in so many ways. I'm not sure which is worse actually: The virus or the politics.

***

The first crop from the community garden out front has been harvested -- radishes. Tomatoes, lettuce and carrots are growing.

The quail are living in their outside run, surrounded by fencing to keep predators at bay.

The natural world is part of the pandemic (see recent reports of which animals are believed to have harbored the virus before it jumped to humans) and also persists in spite of it.

The agricultural/gardening world flourishes around us.

Lately what I've been focusing on is how much beauty remains in spite all of everything. My grandchildren jump and cheer. Astronauts travel through space. Most protestors remain peaceful.

I am quite sure people are still falling in love -- with each other, with ideas, with the natural world.

Artists persist. Beauty is all around.

You just have to look for it.

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