Justice Denied

JUSTICE DENIED

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

January 13, 2014

                This morning as I heard Patrick Bellegarde-Smith describe “Living Vodou” to Krista Tippett at www.onbeing.org, I finally connected my thoughts enough to recognize the nub of my logical problem with the idea of “doing justice,” implicit in “struggles against injustice” all around us.  In a justly ordered world, “You get what you deserve.”  The world of giving and receiving justice assumes consensus on what “you deserve.”  Patrick-Bellegarde helped me see the contrast between trying to establish this kind of social order, and trying to accept and respond to “what you get.”  What you get cannot be changed; you may on the other hand come to recognize many options you have what you as a matter of fact have gotten for your efforts or simply for being what you are said to be.

                I accept the Darwinian proposition that the species traits that survive evolution are those that happen to be available to adapt to unforeseen, let alone unplanned, environmental contingency—from weather to war to impoverishment to accommodating diversity of species members’ responses to external stimuli, including our attempts to control one another.  I also recognize the capacity in every human being to defy doing what we want them to or demand that they do as long and however confined as s/he may be confined or physically and emotionally manipulated.  That perversity, that indefatigable capacity to disobey orders, is in itself a source of diversification that strengthens individual and group resilience and resistance to being torn apart from inside and outside ourselves.  In this vodou world view that I share, individuality in the face of pressures to believe and feel rightly instead of wrongly, is a cause for exploration if not celebration.  And as in victim-offender mediation as I have enjoyed it, what people do as a result of having hurt and been hurt by one another lends a greater sense of control and security to all concerned once what now gets done is detached from the wrongness or rightness of what has happened, where past becomes prologue rather than something undeserved that requires fixing by giving and receiving just deserts.  Synergy among species members driven apart by the entropy of distrust requires letting go of notions of what must be done, to focus instead on what each of us might offer next.  Resilience implies acceptance that in the face of violence as in responding to all misfortune, trial and error promises more than trying to make wrongs right.  In the vodou world view I share, justice is beside the point, a distraction from promoting human trust, honesty and resilience.  Love and peace--hal

love as attachment and possession

LOVE AS ATTACHMENT AND POSSESSION

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@Indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

December 7 (Pearl Harbor Day, my Grandmother Pauline’s birthday), 2013

                As memories of my mom return, I recall how bewildering, even painful it was that it was for her to let me kiss her on the lips—how tightly she compressed her lips when she did.  I recall her stiffening when I hugged her until pretty late in her life.  Today, “This American Life” (thisamericanlife.org) focused on attachment and childrearing.  In the opening segment, they recalled how in 1950, the president of my mom and dad’s primary professional organization, the American Psychological Association, had been among experts admonishing parents that open physical affection would damage their children, rather than preparing them for the vicissitudes of life.  I imagine my mom tried so very hard to follow that “scientific” advice.  I never doubted she loved me.  She taught me to share her belief that God is love.  I came to recognize how hard she must have steeled herself against crossing what she was taught to believe was an incest taboo.  She devoted considerable attention to exposing me to the learning of others and attending to my reading, writing, and most profoundly, attending to manners and protocol in my relations (which extended to the importance of saying ma’am and sir when in and around her Louisiana homeland).  I came to see her manner of attachment as a balancing act between love that connected us, and self-possession.  Even now among condolences, as from her nursing staff, I hear what a gracious lady she was.   As part of that self-possession, she remained acutely sensitive to my feelings and respectful of my beliefs (albeit critical of my claims to knowledge); as an act of self-will, she encouraged and celebrated my intellectual and emotional autonomy.

                I’m sorry my mother carried the cultural burden of refraining from emotional and physical displays (except with my dad when presumably she thought I wasn’t listening).  Happily, she brought my dad with her, who taught me that a man could kiss, hug and be vulnerable, and loved and respected all the same.  And both were professional iconoclasts (in the name of science and logic).  In so doing, as autonomous actors rather than a monolith, they struck their own balances between self-possession and possession of others, me included.  That left me with considerable room to turn my life and understanding of our lives into my own balancing act between separation from and attachment to others.

                Trying to balance self-possession and possession of others’ lives is the central problem of social control, as individuals and in groups.  The legal word for possession is “ownership.”  From owning our own behavior as duty to others, to ownership rights as against others, whatever we possess is called “property.” In his 1957 speech “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions,” Mao Zedong contrasted the correct handling of conflicts “between the enemy and ourselves,” with the correct handling of conflicts “among the people.”  Among the people, Mao embraced the Chinese tradition of mediation.  Law, defining property and rights of ownership and wrongdoing, was properly reserved for handling disputes with one’s enemies.  The law had created a class of landlords in China who presumed to own the working lives of their workers.

                The history of the Great Leap Forward and later Cultural Revolution that followed Mao’s speech suggest that using the law to destroy property creates what Milovan Djilas termed a “new class.”  Proprietorship may be diverted but not destroyed.  Personally and socially, the human quest to gain trust and a sense of safety and security is an intergenerational experiment in adjusting our boundaries between accommodating conflict and carrying through one’s sense of duty—of doing what needs getting done for or to oneself and in turn, to others.  The balance resolves to one between love as empathy, and love as possession, of ownership, of control over oneself and others.

                Buddhists are said to preach non-attachment, but I don’t think that is quite true.  Rather, in a Dalai Lama or a Thich Nhat-hanh, and in the story of Buddha’s life, I see a struggle to free attachment from possession both of others and by others.  I infer that violence—enforcement of property claims—is transformed as a sense of ownership gets taken out of the attachment we call love.

                 I have been a bit perplexed by heartfelt consolations I have received for losing my mother last week, as curious as anything about how I can feel no loss at her death—in fact to feel a burst of attachment to her in the moment.  I never possessed her; now as always, I live and learn from her always loving ever changing presence.  That love is a force flowing through me—and between me and myself—that will not be possessed.  Therein lies the trust and security I enjoy in my relationship with her.  Therein lies the trust, safety and security I enjoy in all my relations.  Love becomes what I call “peacemaking” when it loses all sense of ownership.  Like the copies of my parents’ rings Jill and I wear,  attachment without possession has no beginning or end.  Love and peace--hal

Pauline Wright Nichols Pepinsky, June 27, 1919-November 25, 2013

PAULINE WRIGHT NICHOLS PEPINSKY-June 27, 1919-November 25, 2013

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

November 25, 2013

                My Mama died this morning.  She died having held her great grandchildren, Mila, 5, and Evan, 3, of Durango, Colorado, as recently as last summer.  She died at peace.  Her eyes had closed, and she had stopped eating and drinking, 6 days ago, probably the result of another in a years’ long line of strokes.  She was well attended her last several days, and kept comfortable till her heart stopped, by Hospice.  I thank them for ensuring that my mother had a good death.  Hospice is indeed a blessing in all their work.

More profoundly, I thank the staff of the Laurels of Worthington for the last 3 years of such loving, tender care they offered my Mama.  As they know, I will return to join Director Kristine Provan there Thursday mornings on the north sun porch for sing-alongs.  For more than a decade before retirement, I joined a friend in Bloomington, Indiana, Mable Linder, to sing in nursing homes and at an adult day center.  Kristine and the Laurels have given me a home near home in Worthington to continue to enjoy the closest thing to a worship service I have found for myself.  I have special respect for all those who care for the aged and the dying, and the Laurels of Worthington is the most special place of its kind I have spent time in.

                In 1951 when I was 6, my Mama sent me up the hill from our apartment at 81 Selby Blvd. in Worthington, to Sunday school at the Methodist church now 2 blocks from Jill and me, to “learn about the Bible.”  In recent months of bringing memories of her back into my mind, I have remembered asking her early on whether she believed in God. Her reply: “God is love.”  It occurs to me that I have spent my entire life trying to discover what “love” entails—to identify it, and as my parents never ceased asking me to figure out, to notice violence and human separation and how to transform it.  At root, it has been the challenge of redeeming myself in the eyes of her God and mine, that has become the calling I refer to as “peacemaking,” her greatest gift to me.

                I will in due course write an obituary celebrating a range of my mother’s talents, insights, gifts and generosity.  I have asked the funeral director to divide her ashes in two: half to be laid beside my dad’s ashes in the graveyard among Pepinsky’s at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church near Paoli, PA; the other half for Jill and me to spread here at Mama’s home and ours, 519 Evergreen Circle.  In late April or May, as spring blossoms, Jill and I will host a memorial party celebrating my Mama’s life.  Love and peace--hal

Opioids

OPIOIDS

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

November 4, 2013

                I heard it on NPR: We in the US are in the midst of an opioid epidemic.  Ironically, opium is among common drugs in a harmless class by itself.  It is the herbal equivalent of a hormone, endorphins, our own minds produce, and so is non-toxic (unlike pharmaceutical “equivalents”).  Our bodies metabolize endorphins by blockers, to maintain homeostatic balance.  Symptoms of rapid drop in endorphin/opioid levels are well known as “going through withdrawal,” or more dramatically, “going cold turkey.”  Too rapid a rise, and you stop breathing.  Pioneering drug researcher Alfred Lindesmith documented these realities in his 1940 work on the Opiate Addict and the Law.  There he reported that those who had been given morphine in hospitals without being told anything about addiction withdrew without problems as they recovered their health.  Late in life Al was a volunteer driver for the Monroe County, Indiana, Red Cross.  He told me about driving a pregnant heroin addict to Indianapolis to receive morphine maintenance so that her baby could be born safely.  No local doctor would treat her, so Al found one up the road.  He explained to me that if the mother had been deprived of opiates, her fetus probably would not have survived, or worse.  As it was, the newborn could be weaned off opiates in the first few months, with no ill effects.

                When I became a criminologist forty years ago, the fad treatment for heroin addiction was methadone maintenance.  Methadone had been created by Germans during WWI to serve the troops when opium supplies were cut off from Asia.   Today opioids created in drug company labs have become abundantly advertised, consumed, and illicitly sold and used, and behold:  we have an opioid epidemic.

                Colorado has shown that a medical, now even a recreational, cannabis market can be safe and well regulated.  Switzerland has shown that heroin addicts can be safely maintained in public clinics, with among other things drops in street crime, and in addicts who are socially dysfunctional.

                I’m a political realist.  If the Swiss example ever catches on in my home country, it won’t be anywhere close to my grandchildren’s lifetimes, I know.  But it is crazy that we create such a mass of pharm lab concoctions and wars against them, when we could be raising poppies in our own communities and learning how to use their medicinal and spiritual powers.  I repeat: it’s cultural insanity.  Love and peace--hal