Fault Lines and Earthquakes

We were awakened this morning by a 4.2 earthquake centered about ten miles from our apartment.  No damage, just jangled nerves as we leapt out of bed and went to check our home seismograph more commonly known as the light fixture over the dining room table.  Swaying, it was, confirming that we were not dreaming.

“This, too?” I mumbled to myself.

This morning, I watched the funeral of John Lewis, beloved Civil Rights icon and congressman.  Speaker after speaker reminded us that democracy is a work in progress.  We who live in this country should always be striving to “form a more perfect union.”  The wording is clear:  we strive to form a more perfect union, meaning that perfection will never be achieved.  It is the eternal struggle of democracy to fight to be better, more inclusive, more just.  That is the nature of things.

Struggling to form a more perfect union means that like all Californians, we live with upheaval.  We tolerate the earthquakes because we live in this state, and earthquakes are a fact of life.  We live in this country, and therefore, equality, social justice, and equal representation under the law are achieved only at a cost.  We will never erase a hateful heart or one bent on violence and oppression.  We must be willing, as John Lewis was, to take the blows and wounds in the fight to fulfill the promise of the democratic, multi-cultural collage that is America.

The war for justice never ends.

However, the war is beautiful in its heroism.  The friction brings glory and truth and pain and suffering to the forefront.  Nature mirrors this.  The Grand Canyon represents a war between water and stone.  It has lasted for millennia.  What remains in that perpetual conflict is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.  It is the earth showing us that change is not always easy and never complete.  It simply is, always.

What is more explicit in this natural wonder is the power of a malleable substance—water—to wear away stone that seems impervious to all forces acting upon it.  Yet, here is water carving its way down the canyon and creating this beautiful cataclysm of time and substance.  We are the water; the injustice is the stone.  Water will drip and flow around the rock.  Water will diminish in the heat of the desert.  Water is soft and splashy and mutable—liquid, steam, ice.  But water prevails because it is patient and consistent.  Given time and tide, water will bore right through the rock.

So be like water.

We survive earthquakes but they are a part of our geology.  We are never done with them as we will never be a perfect society or a flawless world.  There will always be those who threaten to upend our rights, throw us into prison, bring down the club upon our skulls.  We go on.  We stand witness to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and we fight for human rights and the end to racism, environmental destruction, oppression, discrimination, violence, and the rape and pillage of our world.

Today, we said goodbye to a righteous man.  We will not easily replace him as an advocate for “good trouble.”  In the same breath, we have been threatened by a man who would destroy our civilization, our culture, our tired and poor.  He is trying to stop anyone who dares to lift a “lamp beside the golden door” to sanctuary and opportunity, hallmarks of the American Dream.

We will fight on with words and bayonets.  We will strive to create a more perfect world. We will hold fast to the earth as it heaves and bucks.  And we will survive.  We will flourish.

We will miss you, John Lewis.  However, you did your part, and may angels sing you to your rest.  Now, the fight goes on, and it is up to us to carry the torch.

 

 

Random Notes On a Summer Night

It is absolutely quiet with only the sound of the city rumbling in the distance.  Then the siren, the horn, somebody is in jeopardy somewhere.  The walls pop and crack as the heat escapes and is vented into space.  Outside the kitchen window, an opossum stares at me intently, resting on the top of a fence layered with ivy, wondering who I am and why I am standing in my kitchen looking out at him.  His eyes glow in the dark.

I read and read.  I journey into the darkness to find the light.  I marvel at the ideas, the insights, the communion with the mind of the writer across time.  This book is about murder, about disembodied voices, about unexplained noises on the street or in the alley.  There are those who prowl the night like predators, but my doors and windows are locked.  The A/C is on and for a brief moment there is no pandemic, no uprising, no unidentified forces taking people off the street.  I am alone in the night.

I never feel entirely safe anymore.  I trust no one.  I marvel at the strangeness of the times in which we live.  We whisper about the new normal.  Will the pandemic die out?  Would we take the vaccine if one were available?  I would be hesitant.  Again, the trust factor.

Should I try to sleep?  I have appointments with students in the morning.  I must sit in on a Zoom meeting with others from the university.  I need to be fresh and focused, but here in the middle of the night, my mind is running through the past, the future, and back to the present, all jumbled together.  What do I know?  What do I know?

I know this is all not business as usual.  What will happen in the months to come?

I hear muffled footsteps outside and go to the window to see what is happening.  A man is jogging down the street in the darkness.  I wonder about his intentions, but it does make sense to be running at this late hour:  no need for a mask and no encounters with other people.

In the distance I hear fireworks or gunshots again.  They had tapered off after the fourth of July but every night a few small explosions in the distance, ominous and muffled.

The refrigerator hums and periodically drops ice into the reservoir.  The yellow light from my lamp falls all around me, concentric circles of shadows flow from my fixed position in my reading chair.  I harness the artificial sun over my shoulder to illuminate the page.  I am reminded we have had two power outages since the stay-at-home orders were put into place.  More than a few times, the internet has gone down.  These failures take on ominous pretensions in this time.  When the power went out on the first occasion, I could not find my keys and began scouring the apartment.  I never lose my keys.  I have never lost my keys.  I simultaneously try to reassure myself and chastise myself.  How could I have been so careless?  But my entire daily ritual and procedure has been thrown out of whack by this pandemic.  I panic.

I open the door and go out into the night.  They cannot be outside.  It is an impossibility.  I notice the hot wind has picked up a bit.  I go to my car and shine the flashlight around the driveway.  I spot something near the driver’s door:  my keys.  I stand there in the darkness, mesmerized.  How did they get there?  I do not even remember going outside before this moment.  It is an unsolvable mystery, but I am relieved to have my keys back and my car secure.  I go back inside and deadbolt the door.

Several times over the last month, I pass a room in my apartment on my way to the kitchen or to check the street and I see my father-in-law standing in my den or sitting on a couch in the living room.  I don’t see him clearly; he exists in my peripheral vision.  If I look right at him, he is not there.  I am not scared or creeped out.  I know he is trying to figure out his status, his new existence as memory and shadow.  I am reminded how much I miss him.

Do I see the soft glow of light beginning at the edge of the window?  Is it morning already?

The mourning dove begins the day with a sad song.  Outside the kitchen window, the opossum is gone, off to raid an uncovered trash can.  Squirrels begin to poke their heads out of the ivy and junipers that run along the driveway.  More joggers materialize.

In this night-into-morning, everything happens and nothing.  The universe did not pause.  The stars kept whirling around in the sky.  They are composed of dead light—some of them have already burned out and the light I see in the sky is only their light echoes through time.  I am only now getting the news that the star is dead and gone.  For now, the light remains in the heavens, a reminder.

And dawn comes.  The world awaits.  I close my book and put it aside next to my chair.  I will revisit it again in the night, when all is silent, and I can focus on the circle of light and the print on the page.  In communion, I am alive in the darkness with the dead, the memories, and the future, all at once.

Mindhunter

Recently, in this very hot summer in Los Angeles, I found myself up late one night binge-watching the David Fincher-produced Netflix show, Mindhunter (2017).  From the credits, I was led to two books that tell a reader everything about the development of the FBI Behavioral Science Unit and how agents profile killers by studying the crime scene, talking to witnesses, and interviewing past serial killers in prison to understand their behavior and thinking.

Robert K. Ressler and Tom Shachtman in their book, Whoever Fights Monsters (St. Martin's Paperbacks, 1992) traces the development of the BSU and focuses on interviewing some of the “monsters” who kill.  We see how the agents in the unit build their profiles and assist police agencies in running down clues and ultimately, locking these disturbed individuals away from society.  The cases are gripping, as one might expect, and not for the squeamish.  We also get a healthy dose of cultural criticism and criminal detection history.

Many of the perpetrators of these heinous crimes live in relative anonymity.  Neighbors often do not realize the horror next door.  But the writers take pains to debunk the bulging-eyed monster killer as a construct of horror films.  “Most people conceive of the murderer as being a kind of Jekyll and Hyde,” they write.  “One day he’s normal and on the next a physiological drive is taking hold—his hair is grown, his fangs are lengthening—so that when the moon is full, he’ll have to seize another victim.  Serial killers are not like that.  They are obsessed with a fantasy, and they have what we must call nonfulfilled experiences that become part of the fantasy and push them on toward the next killing.  That’s the real meaning behind the term serial killer.”

We learn how a case is broken down into four phases: precrime behavior, commission of the crime, disposal of the body and evidence, and postcrime behavior.  There are also two kinds of perpetrator approaches to the murder:  organized and disorganized.  This goes to motive and premeditation.  The organized killer comes prepared for the crime and has studied the situation over a span of time to figure the best method of execution.  A disorganized killer is one who murders on impulse, in the moment.

The writers see criminal profiling as an art, not a science, although there are aspects of science present, especially psychology.  It is true, though, that some people are good at putting themselves inside the head of the killer and the victim to fully understand how the horrific scene went down.  The investigators often suffer from burnout, PTSD, and physical manifestations of their intensive, job-related stress resulting in debilitating illness.

Mindhunter:  Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit (Gallery Books, 1995), by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker, was used as the foundation for the Netflix show, and Ressler and Douglas are the models for the central characters.  Many of the same cases are covered in both books, but the differing points of view, and the individual characters of these two detectives are interesting in comparison and worth the reading of both books.

Douglas and Olshaker touch upon the cultural aspects that make these true crime stories so interesting to the average person.  It is not all blood splatter and tragedy, or monsters who come alive in our dreams and haunt the earth.  Murder originates in the human condition:  a lovers’ quarrel, a neighbor dispute, a cheating spouse, a need for drugs or money.  Serial killers are different.  Over the years, the profilers found that the three most common motives for these crimes are domination, manipulation, and control.  The murder is usually set off by a triggering event, like losing a job or breaking up with a lover.  These commonalities, when compiled, help law enforcement capture the culprit before he can kill again.  By nature, a serial murderer is manipulative, narcissistic, and egocentric.  He will tell people what they want to hear, and he is an expert at aping human emotion and normal behavior in an effort to control the situation and the participants involved.  The FBI’s BSU focuses on a simple equation:  Why + How = Who.  The agents ask themselves:  What took place?  Why did it happen?  And, who would have committed this crime for those reasons?

Behavioral science is an important tool in solving these murders.  These books present a full analysis of cases and techniques used to catch the perpetrators.  The reading is grisly but interesting, a rare look inside both the minds of killers and the detectives who chase them down and bring them to justice.

Teachers Will Soon Be Frontline Workers

By mid-August, teachers will be the new frontline workers, joining nurses, medical technicians, hospital sanitation workers and doctors fighting against COVID-19.  Like any other soldiers, these dedicated classroom educators will be exposed to injury and death to teach children.  The question will haunt us:  is it necessary?

Most schools will be reopening around August 18.  Teachers will start working on their classrooms in the next week to be prepared to greet students.  With social distancing and a mask, experts are sure that we can reduce infection and death, but right now, adults are not following those guidelines.  Drive down any street in one of the many coronavirus hotspots in the U.S. and the evidence is clear:  people are not taking the guidelines seriously.  No masks, no distancing, no concern for others—it has become the American way.  So are we now to expect students of all ages to follow the masking and distancing guidelines?

In the classroom, younger children thrive on social and even physical contact with each other.  In a good year, flu and virus as well as lice and conjunctivitis flourish.  It is not about cleanliness or preventative health care; it is about students running, jumping, and physically interacting with each other in the classroom and on the playground.  Colds run through them like wildfire.  A teacher usually can predict when peak flu season arrives based on how many students are sniffling, coughing, and running a fever.

High school and college students can maintain social distancing and be required to wear a mask in the classroom, but they present difficulties because we do not know where they go outside of school.  Theirs is a mobile lifestyle—out with friends, studying in the library, meet-ups, dates, and working jobs to pay tuition and expenses.  They bring all of these contact possibilities to the classroom as well as to the home where they might infect elderly parents or grandparents, neighbors or friends.  Put up plexi-glass partitions between desks; allow no more than half occupancy in the classroom.  Doing face-to-face class still remains an inherent danger to students and teachers because there is no way to mass test them for each class meeting.

If we were to shut schools down for the fall and move to remote learning, we are also facing enormous consequences.  We know from last spring that keeping students motivated, on task, and in the virtual classroom is an overwhelming challenge.  Students can manipulate the technology.  After logging on, the student can shut off the video and microphone leaving a blank screen for the duration of the class.  Is he or she there?  Are they listening?  It is difficult enough to keep students focused in class during normal times.  In this extraordinary situation, teachers face overwhelming obstacles to keep students in learning mode.  Grades suffer, test scores drop, and we could face the consequences of this for years to come.  Right now, the ideal education modality is face-to-face in class learning.  COVID-19 upends that modality.

It is clear that doing remote learning does slow the spread of COVID-19.  That is something to pin our hopes to as we face some tough choices.  We have seen, quite clearly, that easing restrictions too soon is a recipe for disaster.  This disease is simply too deadly to risk the lives of teachers and students when an alternative, granted not a perfect one, is available.

However, there are some difficult questions to answer.  If students stay home and dial in remotely, how does that impact childcare for parents who must return to work?  How do we continue to improve the delivery of lessons and ultimately offer a solid education to students?  How do we serve students who lack a stable internet connection?  How do we provide them with food and other necessities normally available on campus?  Even if working remotely, how do we insure safety and limit exposure when students are not in class?  Students could still be out and about in contact with others and spread the disease.

In this case, we need to err on the side of caution.  When the pandemic started, we were worried about having enough personal protective equipment for health care providers.  There is no way to remove them from the dangers when treating COVID-19 patients.  But teachers and students have other possible methods; they might be difficult and only partially effective at delivering an education, but we can continue to refine and improve them.  Online and remote learning have been discussed as the educational strategy of the future for some time now.  Maybe it is time to really explore those options and embrace a new way to teach and learn.  Epidemiologists and medical professionals are telling us our lives may depend upon it.