It’s time for another dog story
I am through with my daily external beam radiation and I’m resting up. Resting up means working from home, not schlepping into the office every day. It also means trying to get back to my normal life, which includes occasional walks with the dogs.
Yes, I wrote dogs, not dog. While we have one dog, Snowy, we share the joys (and struggles) of dog walking with our neighbors.
This is the two of them this morning, nearing the end of the walk.
We’re going through flash flood warnings today due to all the rain we’ve been getting. Our back yard flooded for the forth time.
But, dogs are dogs. They need exercise, both physical and mental, so out we went.
Now, looking at these two, you can see a few differences immediately, right?
Lirael, our neighbor’s dog, has black hair while Snowy, our dog, has white hair.
Some other things that jump out are that Lirael has straight hair, while Snowy’s is curly. The difference goes a little deeper there, though. Lirael has two layers of hair, a common coat for dogs, while Snowy has a single layer of hair, which he got from his poodle father.
Lirael also doesn’t like the rain while Snowy, usually, doesn’t mind it, and sometimes he really enjoys it. He’s a bit of a water dog, actually, going out of his way to walk through puddles and sometimes even lying down in them, while Lireal does her best to keep her paws dry.
We make a funny crew, I’m dressed up in a full rain suit, Snowy is leading the way, excited, nose twitching, looking for the next exciting thing that’s washed down the hill, I come next, pulled along by Snowy’s lead, leaning into the rain and wind, Lirael is trailing behind, picking her places oh so carefully, giving me sad eyes, asking me if we can please go home?
Eventually we turn around to go home. I’m the same, but the dogs have reversed. Lirael is leading the way, because she’s happy to be heading home. Snowy is trailing behind, giving me sad eyes, because he wants to go further.
If you just want to focus on the dogs, you probably want to stop here.
“But Steve,” you say, “what about your cancer, and what about President Trump, and what about the refugees …”. Good questions, good questions. Simplistic thoughts on that follow.
Immigrants and refugees and cancer and stuff
For all their differences, in appearance and behavior, Snowy and Lirael are both just dogs. They do doggie things. They get along just fine. They are dogs, though, and dogs are different from people, right?
In this case, though, they aren’t that different than us. For all of our differences, in appearance and behavior, we are all just people. Being afraid of other people because they look or behave differently than us never solved anything. In fact, it’s led to most of the suffering we see in group dynamics in our world history. That fact is even more pronounced now.
There is more than enough of everything to go around, yet many of us live in fear that we won’t have enough, or that someone is getting more than we are getting. The latest example of that is fear of “illegal immigrants” and refugees. There’s been a lot of talk of violence or “sponging off the system”.
Let’s be clear — immigrants that come into this country aren’t coming here because they want to take something from you, they are coming here because they are fleeing something, whether it’s poverty or violence or natural disaster, it doesn’t really matter. The best way to ensure that refugees from violence or poverty do not cause us harm is to welcome them with open arms, to share with them, to teach them to love our country the way we do. Just like every wave of immigration in our country, they will make us better.
On the other hand, if we treat them as dangerous or somehow unworthy, we force them to remain separate, and besides, they will not want to join us, they will despise us, and rightly so. We have so much, and we aren’t willing to give them an opportunity to make a better life for themselves?
In your heart you know this is true. That is why every major religion, yes, even that one, teaches us to love one another. But go beyond religion, householders welcoming those in need, while traveling, has deep roots in every society. It’s a key part of human civilization. Unwillingness to welcome traveling strangers, not homosexuality, is what led to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
It’s hard not to be scared, though. That also has deep roots in society and within each and everyone one of us.
I have cancer. It’s increased my chances of dying at a younger age than if I didn’t have cancer. If that happens, what will happen to my family? That’s a scary thought, and many people ask that same question about refugees and immigrants; “What if I lose my job to one of them?” or “What if they shoot up my kid’s school?”.
Let’s remember these words, from nearly 85 years ago,
So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
Many people think President Roosevelt is talking about the war. He’s not. This is in his 1933 inauguration address. He’s talking about fear of poverty:
In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things.
Further into his speech, President Roosevelt says,
If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective.
I wish President Roosevelt’s words still spoke for all of us, but they don’t. The temper of our nation is not one where we realize our interdependence. It’s very much focused on “us” and “them”. Only by realizing that there is only “us” that there is no “them” can we move our society forward.
It didn’t completely speak for the people in the 1930’s either. There was still a great deal of discrimination, especially against blacks, and we shouldn’t forget that, but the lesson of the Great Depression and World War II is that fear and separation bring on exactly the problems that we fear.
We made great strides towards inclusiveness in the 60’s and 70’s, and we’ve made slow progress, with some notable spikes, especially about homosexuality, since that time.
The attacks on 9/11 hurt that, though. It was such a shocking event, and we got angry. We wanted to blame someone, so we blamed the Muslims for what was not a Muslim act, but the act of a small group that tried to justify their violence with Islam, the same way Eric Rudolph tried to justify bombing the Atlanta Olympics with Christianity.
Once we define a “other” to be scared of, as so many defined Muslims, it’s hard to change our belief of that other, and so, even though right wing American born white Christians have been responsible for far more acts of terror in the USA since 9/11, many Americans are still more scared of Muslims.
That fear has pushed our government leadership to make very poor choices related to Muslims and immigrants in general.
President Trump’s executive order banning many Muslims from entering our country, and his plan of spending billions of dollars in a symbolic effort to block immigration from the south, are divisive and, if allowed to stand, will cost us billions of dollars and will lead to exactly the thing that many people fear — a less integrated society with more violence.
They also won’t make us feel safer, because our fear doesn’t come from outside, it comes from inside of us. Before we feel safe, we will need to become a nation of compassion, where we realize our interdependence, and we welcome refugees and immigrants.
Before I can feel safe, I need to accept my cancer. I need to accept that focusing on the fear keeps me from being present with my family and my world. It’s easier now, because I’m not visiting a hospital every day, but there’s always something I can look at in the future to be afraid of; next week I have a procedure that’s pretty scary, every three months I get a shot, and every night I take experimental drugs. In two years, that all stops. What then?
I don’t know, and that’s really scary. But that’s scary for everybody, including you. You don’t know what’s going to happen to you two years from now. You really don’t. It was 6 months ago when I was diagnosed with cancer. A teacher of mine was diagnosed with cancer in December and died in January.
Moving beyond that fear is the only way to find happiness. When we do that for ourselves, then we can do that with others, and our interdependence becomes not something to fear, but something that supports us.
Okay, that’s way, way, too long. Thank you if you made it this far.
