Kathy Ewing

I guess I’m not the first to note that violence pervades our culture. Iraq, the streets of Cleveland, cop shows – everywhere you look, there’s killing. And somehow, those responsible for violence always find a way to justify it. “Thugs” deserve to die, as do neighbors who make too much noise, and so do other kids who pick on us at school. Walter Wink, the noted theologian, says that our culture is awash in the “myth of redemptive violence.” This is the idea that in killing bad guys, we redeem ourselves. Popular media drum this myth into our heads. When we kill a terrorist, we all win.

A few years ago I watched a cop drama that illustrated this principle.

The episode concerned the murder and rape of a little girl. A police map showed this girl’s home surrounded – surrounded – by child molesters. (In our current culture, archetypal evildoers.) Raines, a detective played by Jeff Goldblum, suffered from a psychiatric disorder that “enabled” him to see and interact with dead people. So, in this episode, Raines carried on cogent conversations with the articulate little victim of a horrific sexual assault and murder.

In one chilling scene, Raines hallucinated that the murderer was going after the little girl again, but this time, in his imagination, she was holding a gun. She turned on her killer and blew him away, then exchanged a victorious glance with Raines. It’s a lesson about what we need to protect us from the bad guys, isn’t it? We need guns. Even little children need guns, because good little children must kill the evil men.

But more horror is in store. By the time Raines has figured out who the killer was, the little girl’s daddy has already gotten to him. There’s one exquisite touch: the father didn’t just kill the sexual pervert. He drove a knife into his eye. The other guy is totally evil. The avenging father is totally good.

At the end of the show, Raines finds the dad holding a gun and planning to kill himself. Raines talks him out of suicide by saying, “The jury will be sympathetic to you.” The father walks away in handcuffs, presumably soon to be exonerated for stabbing a guy in the eye with a knife.

Wink’s essay, “Facing the Myth of Redemptive Violence,” is apropos. He argues that in popular culture, people are either innocent and good or guilty and bad. The good hero suffers the abuses of the villain for a little while and then, at last, destroys him and thereby triumphs. Good kills evil. No shades of grey. No negotiating. No compassion. No forgiveness.

You see the pattern everywhere, not just on TV and in Bruce Willis movies. The state of Ohio kills people on death row because they are evil, and they deserve it. We kill Afghans because some people in their nation helped plan 9/11, and then we kill Iraqis because they might plan something evil, too. And Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris, and Seung-Hui Cho? They also subscribed to the myth. Just read their words. In their own minds, they were the good guys: injured, bullied, ignored, and persecuted. They had internalized the moral – if you’re hurt, strike back. The other is evil. Destroy it.

Wink demonstrates how the complexity of life is reduced to a cartoon: Popeye pummels Bluto. We good people will shoot the bad men dead, or, if we have only a knife at hand, stab them in the eye. And after awhile, if enough of us kill enough bad guys, they’ll all be dead, and there will be only good people left in the world. It’s the dominant myth of our time. In Iraq, in our schools, on the streets of Cleveland, and in popular culture, we can see how well it’s working. The “victory” achieved by violence, as Gandhi said, is always temporary. Bluto takes many forms, but he always comes back for more.

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of my dad’s death. In his memory, I’m posting an essay I wrote years ago for Northern Ohio Live about him and his wheelchair. It’s also woven into my book Missing.       

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My father’s wheelchair was big and heavy, like a fifties car, and had a red leather seat and back. It was a presence in our household—an object to squeeze past at the kitchen table, heave into the back of the station wagon, and wheel around in at a breakneck pace when Dad was in bed. Most of the time, the chair was a part of my father. He set his beer down in the corner of the seat next to his right hip and draped his leg over the armrest while he watched TV, sometimes with me on his lap.

My father was a paraplegic for the last twenty years of his life and just about the first twenty years of mine, from the early fifties to his death from cancer in 1971. Paralyzed from a little above the waist down, he had the use only of his chest and arm muscles to get himself around. Although he could maneuver the wheelchair around the house and get in and out of bed by himself, he had to ask me or my sisters for help whenever he wanted to go outdoors.

Sometimes, when he asked, we would sigh. Then we would back him up to the side door and roll him down the ramp a neighbor had built for him onto the side porch. Turning a sharp right pivot, we rolled him backwards off the porch and onto the rough grass of the backyard.

He wasn’t a small man. The chair rocked heavily from side to side, bumping off the porch and over the grass. Sometimes it was easier to tilt it way back and let the large rear wheels take all the weight. Once, moving from the porch to the backyard, I lost control and tipped over the chair on its side, with my father in it. I panicked, while my dad, lying on the grass, was a little grumpy but calm. I ran to get a neighbor, who came to the rescue. My mother remained somewhere in the house, studiously uninvolved.

In the winter, the wheels dug into the snow and slush and skidded a little. Getting out to the driveway took extra finesse, requiring the pressure of your foot on the rear of the chair for traction. No wonder that back then, as my father often pointed out, many disabled people stayed inside most of the winter. My dad, resolutely independent, had hand controls installed in the car so that he could drive.

Determined to get out of the house, he took us on a couple of driving vacations. We went to Niagara Falls from Canton in 1960. Finding a motel that could accommodate a wheelchair was a major struggle. My dad would pull in to a likely place, my oldest sister Betsey would run inside and ask the manager, and she’d run back out to say, no, their doorways weren’t wide enough. At one place, the manager assured us that his place was accessible. We unloaded my dad and the luggage and went inside, only to find that my dad couldn’t fit into the bathroom. We had to load everything back into the car to search for another motel. I don’t remember my mom ever pushing the chair or trying to load it in the car. My dad felt that she had enough to bear, and so, any task that we kids could do, we had to do. At home it was always one of us who helped him in and out of the house.

In nice weather, going outside often meant playing catch. Thus, my father saved his three girls from lifelong embarrassment in neighborhood softball games. Playing catch was a kind of drill, my dad alternating pop-ups, grounders, and line drives. We learned to catch and throw, and you have to throw accurately to a guy in a wheelchair. If you missed by only a little and the ball landed right next to the chair, my father could reach down and get it, but if it landed a few feet away, you’d have to retrieve it yourself. With a really wild throw, into the shrubs or trees, my father would look bewildered and joke, “Who was that to?” I can still picture his throw–all arm, overhand, rocking his powerless legs and hips.

When the sun was setting and the air grew colder, it was time to go back inside. I’d grab the white plastic handles on the back of the chair and push hard up the slope to the porch. I’d tilt the chair back to lift the front wheels up onto the concrete porch and then raise the heavy back wheels. Then we’d turn sharp to the left and align the wheels with the ramp. Pushing the chair up the ramp took strength, but my dad could stop the wheels with his hands to keep from rolling backwards if I had to take a breath halfway up. With the final push into the dining room he’d take over himself. And always, he’d say thank you.

Stan with my kids

I recently read a brisk discussion on Facebook about whether Democrats could be friends with Republicans. Many posters, liberals all, felt that Republicans are just too close-minded and cold-hearted to be friends with. Republicans are other.

Before I married John, I was inclined toward those posters’mindset. My parents were liberals. My mom boasted that her first election was Franklin Roosevelt’s first election, and she proudly voted for him in four presidential elections. My dad, nominally a Republican, had a liberal bent and turned solidly against the Vietnam War before it was even on my radar. So I come by my Democratic leanings honestly.

Coming of age in the late sixties as I did, my political identity is important to me. It caused me, when I was younger, self-righteously to condemn (at least in my head) people to the right of me – supporters of war and racism and police violence, unsympathetic to the poor, narrow in their social and religious attitudes. I’m still sometimes tempted toward these biases.

But I’ve been in recovery ever since 1978, when I married into the Ewing family. For over thirty years, I’ve had to break bread with Republicans, worship with them, swim with them, vacation with them, and open Christmas presents with them. Observing them at close hand, I couldn’t help but notice how nice they were. Nicer, I couldn’t help noticing, than me.

Stanley C. Ewing

I’ve been thinking about these matters in connection with my father-in-law Stan, who died on Tuesday at the age of 90. One of the first things I heard about him, circa 1975, had to do with a political argument. He was telling John, during Sunday brunch, that Nixon wasn’t so bad. He had just gotten caught. My mild-mannered boyfriend, who’d already strayed from the Republican fold, had to leave the table to end the argument and compose himself.

But I don’t want to talk politics. I want to talk about kindness. I want to recount some of the stories that keep recurring in my mind – stories that illustrate his goodness and sometimes downright sweetness.

When Stan came to visit me in the hospital after I gave birth to our son, the first grandson in the family, his cheeks were wet with tears. The biggest Indians fan on earth had come bearing a little baseball-uniform onesie and a big stuffed baseball.

In January, 1983, I went on strike with other teachers in my district. The Ewings aren’t wild about unions in general and don’t approve of teachers striking. During that long, cold, harrowing strike, my mother-in-law watched my baby son while I picketed in the mornings, and my father-in-law Stan never breathed a word of criticism to me about striking. Through it all, my in-laws continued their habit of calling us on Friday nights to take us out to dinner.

My mother-in-law died suddenly right before Christmas in 1993. Christmas was her thing, and she always purchased a sweater (among many other gifts) for each member of the family. That sad Christmas, we gathered soberly at the Ewing home on Christmas morning, and the women of the family all got a package from Stan. Each contained a lovely sweater he had picked out himself.

Stan used to send me Mothers Day flowers and personalized cards, with certain words, like “love” and “special,” underlined.

My son reminds me that when my mom died in 1995, Stan, then a widower, came to her funeral and to the restaurant afterwards with my family. When my sisters and I asked the waitress for the check, she told us it had already been taken care of.

I suppose someone might say that anyone can be nice to family members and friends. What’s important instead is “systemic change” and the big picture and the huge problems of poverty and the environment and war and peace, and maybe they’re right. All I know is that Stan’s thoughtfulness, generosity, and simple love for his family have humbled and inspired me.

I warn my students not to trust the internet.

John Dryden (1631-1700)

Last week, I received a student essay with this quotation, attributed to the English poet John Dryden, “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”  That doesn’t sound like Dryden, I thought.

Googling the quote, I found it attributed to Albert Einstein instead. I googled the quote along with “John Dryden” and found it attributed to John Dryden. I searched a little more and found this version, “Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught,” attributed to George Savile, a 17th century British statesman. I poked around a little to discover the quotation’s real source but gave up. If you figure it out, let me know.

I advised the student to write something like “attributed to many.”

I met someone yesterday who said I had a cool job — teaching Latin. That reaction is a little unusual. Though many people say how much they love Latin or make a positive but somewhat inaccurate remark, such as, “That’s the root of all languages!,” I occasionally pick up that “dead language” vibe, as in “Does anybody still speak that?”

For whatever reason, Latin teachers like me feel a little defensive. I believe that studying Latin, though not for everyone, is immeasurably valuable, but in ways that are hard to quantify or explain. Often, I feel, Latin provides a deeper way of understanding something about the world.

This example occurred to me last month. March 20th is the vernal equinox, a term which I explained to my Latin 102 class. Equinox is a compound word meaning “equal night.” It’s the 24-hour period divided equally between sunlight and darkness, and from then on the days begin to get longer. Vernal comes from ver, the Latin word for spring and also for green.

Autumnal equinox has a similar root; autumnus, of course, is Latin for autumn. A little research tells me that new terms — March and September equinox – are gaining ground, because the seasonal terms are prejudiced in favor of the Northern Hemisphere.

Anyway, this discussion leads naturally to two other dates in the calendar: the summer and winter solstice. (June solstice and December solstice are the more politically correct terms.) These are, respectively, the longest and shortest days of the year. Solstice combines the Latin words for sun and stand still. These days mark the time the sun is at its northernmost and southernmost points. At these points, it appears to stop and change direction.

I can recall getting all these terms and days of the year mixed up until I understood the etymology of the words. Understanding the Latin root words has that practical outcome. Besides, it’s just cool that the Latin uses the same words for spring and green and that our scientific, Latinate word solstice preserves an ancient observation that twice a year the sun actually stops in the sky.

My daughter recently visited the College of Wooster with forty-some students from Bronx Preparatory Charter School, where she teaches, all of them African-American or Latino. Wooster is a small town about 90 minutes south of Cleveland. It’s in farm country, and Margaret said her thoroughly urban students were a little creeped out by all the empty space and cornfields.

After the campus tour, a panel of minority Wooster students met the visitors and advised them while at Wooster to take care not to pass beyond certain boundaries on campus and in town. (Never go past the Wendy’s, they said.)

I don’t know if a black student has been beaten up or if young people of color are just made to feel uncomfortable if they stray too far from campus, but it’s shocking and distressing information in 2011.

John recently bought me a tape (used…discarded by the library) of Patti Smith’s Dream of Life. I loved her recent memoir Just Kids and have been listening to her a lot.

The first song, “People Have the Power,” seems to have been written for the protests in Wisconsin and Ohio (not to mention the Middle East). I’m playing it over and over. Here’s an inspiring rendition from 2004 (sans Patti, unfortunately) and the lyrics below.

Let me know what songs inspire you. What do you watch on YouTube? What do you listen to over and over?

People Have the Power
I was dreaming in my dreaming
of an aspect bright and fair
and my sleeping it was broken
but my dream it lingered near
in the form of shining valleys
where the pure air recognized
and my senses newly opened
I awakened to the cry
that the people / have the power
to redeem / the work of fools
upon the meek / the graces shower
it’s decreed / the people rule

The people have the power
The people have the power
The people have the power
The people have the power

Vengeful aspects became suspect
and bending low as if to hear
and the armies ceased advancing
because the people had their ear
and the shepherds and the soldiers
lay beneath the stars
exchanging visions
and laying arms
to waste / in the dust
in the form of / shining valleys
where the pure air / recognized
and my senses / newly opened
I awakened / to the cry

Refrain

Where there were deserts
I saw fountains
like cream the waters rise
and we strolled there together
with none to laugh or criticize
and the leopard
and the lamb
lay together truly bound
I was hoping in my hoping
to recall what I had found
I was dreaming in my dreaming
god knows / a purer view
as I surrender to my sleeping
I commit my dream to you

Refrain

The power to dream / to rule
to wrestle the world from fools
it’s decreed the people rule
it’s decreed the people rule
LISTEN
I believe everything we dream
can come to pass through our union
we can turn the world around
we can turn the earth’s revolution
we have the power
People have the power …