Ticklish Ideas

Bill Moyers is back and doing incredible work. Go listen to his "Buying the War" - it's available as part of the Bill Moyers Journal podcast and probably through PBS too.

We've got a real voice of oversight again, and my god it's a relief.

Kurt Vonnegut just died.

"You are not enough people" reposted - original is here.



In the introduction to God Bless you, Dr. Kevorkian, Kurt Vonnegut tells us what he has learned about discord in relationships:

OK, now let's have some fun. Let's talk about sex. Let's
talk about women. Freud said he didn't know what
women wanted. I know what women want. They want
a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to
talk about? They want to talk about everything.

What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and
they wish people wouldn't get so mad at them.

Why are so many people getting divorced today?
It's because most of us don't have extended families
anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman
got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to
about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell
dumb jokes to.

A few Americans, but very few, still have extended
families. The Navahos.The Kennedys.

But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just
one more person for the other person. The groom gets
one more pal, but it's a woman. The woman gets one
more person to talk to about everything, but it's a man.

When a couple has an argument, they may think it's
about money or power or sex, or how to raise the
kids, or whatever. What they're really saying to each
other, though, without realizing it, is this:

"You are not enough people!"

I'm grateful to live in a world with Kurt Vonnegut's ideas in it. He shakes things up in my mind and the pieces fall into place better afterwards.

Here's me and Matt and Sue and 300,000 densely packed books.

S.E. -     Hey Miriam! How was band practice?

M.D. -   Good. We worked on the same piece for an hour tho, it wore me out.

S.E. -     What's the weather up to now? d'you think it's done raining? I've gotta
                go back to the library tonight and find a couple more sources.

M.D. -   [scrunching up her face] It's wormy out there.

[Dissolve into giggles and guffaws]

Three and a half hours ago I was walking a first-timer through the steps of getting online at the library. He was a new American, from Africa, about thirty, with confident limited English.

I was standing at his elbow as he typed the access number and I noticed his hands. Hands that had been tortured. Joints distorted, digits askew, both hands, systematic slow painful injury. I noticed but put the information away, and it surfaced twenty minutes ago in the grocery store. Torture. What a horrible thing, what a far-away thing, and just today I was working with someone who survived it.

I talked to Amigos de Sobrevivientes and thought about volunteering with them when I lived in Eugene; I thought of them tonight. No working website tho, I just found directory entries and broken links. Looking for them, I found these guys: The International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT).
I'm going back there just after I hit the publish button, I need to learn something, put together a way to think about this.