Through the Prism: Stories | Perspective

1. Kid Stories

When I arrived to pick up the six-year-old from his summer day camp one of the days last week, I observed him opening his backpack and warily watching something crawl out before he gathered his things and came to the car. When I asked him about it, he said he had captured and assassin bug but decided to let it go. That name was new to me, so I asked him about it. He said one of his counselors told him the name, that it looked cool, and it really hurt when it bit him. Later that night we looked up some information--including "rough handling can invite an intense and unforgettably painful 'bite' from the powerful fang of an Assassin Bug juvenile or adult"--and watched some videos. They were fascinating to learn about.

Last night when he got in the car he asked me what the name "assassin" meant. That led to an interesting 20-minute conversation. Over the course of our drive we: defined the word, delved into the idea of stealthy murder, visited some presidential assassinations (and attempts), and considered the morality of assassinating.

Always new things to learn and ponder . . .

One of the days I picked him up a couple weeks ago, he climbed into the back of the car but didn't sit down like usual. I didn't even notice at first because we were catching up about his day like we normally do. As we talked, though, I became aware he was standing on the floor of the car right next to my shoulder, squirming around. "Sit down and get your seat belt on so we can get going."

"Just a minute; I have to do something first." More squirming, which I realized a few moments later was digging in his pocket. "I want to show you something."

I turned around and let out a little yell at the lizard in his palm, inches from my face.

"It's okay, it's dead."

"Did you have a dead lizard in your pocket?"

"Yeah, I just told you I found a lizard today."

"But I didn't expect you to pull it out of your pocket. . . . Say, was it alive or dead when you found it?"

"Dead."

"And you decided to put it in your pocket to bring home?"

"Yeah. Well, first I had it in my shoe, then I moved it into my pocket."

"You put it in your shoe at first because you didn't realize your pants had pockets?"

"No, I just thought my shoe was the best place to keep it. But then it started feeling squishy after a while so I decided to move it to my pocket."

The other day when we got home he opened his backpack as soon as we got out of the car, excited to show me something.

"What is it?" I said.

"One of my favorite things! A beautiful monarch butterfly; or, at least, a butterfly that looks like one."

"Oh! Uh. Hmm. I hope it didn't get crushed inside your backpack."

He dug through the backpack and pulled it out. "See?"

"Yeah. That's really neat. Oh, look there--it looks like one of its wings is broken. I hope it can still fly."

It fell from his hand and spun to the ground.

He picked it up and carefully set it on a rock in a flower bed.

"It should feel really special. It's the first butterfly I've ever caught and brought home."

"Uh. Hmm."

Hmm.

A great anecdote to illustrate the five-year-old's personality and character.

We had to pick him up early from school yesterday after we got a message from his teacher that he started causing trouble during nap time with an assistant and it escalated badly. Her message included:

"When I came into the classroom, he stuck his leg out to trip me. Now we are in the hallway as he clearly lost the privilege of getting up during nap time and he's threatening to throw a walnut at me. . . . He is absolutely defiant with me right now and there's nothing I can really do about it. He literally has his arm back ready to throw a walnut at me."

When my wife talked with him after bringing him home, he said from his perspective his actions were an attempt to defend a classmate, to protect him from having to go to the office due to misbehavior.

"Because he is such a good friend I can see him thinking that would be the best protocol," the teacher wrote back when we messaged her about it later. "Apparently they were feeding off of each other."

While we clearly don't condone his behavior--and had a serious talk helping him see the situation more clearly and other ways he might have dealt with it, followed by consequences--part of me appreciates his motivation. It's so very much his character to be willing to do anything to protect a friend.

Stepping out of shower. "Dad! We think we see a bobcat in the backyard!"

Grabbing a towel to go look. "Is it there now?"

"Yeah!"

Screen door slam.

Walk down the hall and look out the window to see two children sprinting across the yard to peer under and around bushes at the fence.

Though there are stealthy and reclusive bobcats in our area, I didn't worry for a second that's what they'd actually seen. I did worry, though, that they did think that's what they were seeing and that's how they reacted. In talking with them after, we established: A) this was definitely a domestic pet, and B) bobcats are most definitely not cute, fuzzy, and friendly, and should never be approached unless they want to be eaten.

2. Book Stories

"You appear furious."

"I am. I'm enraged by a being in this narrative."

"An actual being?"

"The being is fictional. My anger is real."

"OK."

"This is how I relax."

"I was half asleep but I smiled. In spite of all his irritating qualities, I couldn't help liking a man who despised a fictional character with such passion."

- David Benioff, City of Thieves

Exile from Eden

This is me.

I am a story.

All stories are true.

A review of Exile from Eden: Or, After the Hole, by Andrew Smith:

This is the story of a boy trying to make sense of himself, humanity, and existence, after having spent his entire sixteen years locked away with just seven other people, hiding in an underground complex while the destruction everything at the hands, er, mandibles of giant praying mantises raged outside, by setting out to explore the shell of the world that remains, accompanied by his only female peer, in search of his missing dads.

That is an impressively convoluted sentence. It took a long time to write. It's my best attempt to capture the wild combination of elements blended together into this story, a yearning need for identity and connection and meaning in an almost nonsensical, insane setting.

Welcome to the experience of being sixteen.

It's not as angry and cynical as its predecessor, Grasshopper Jungle (from which it can stand alone). It is just as endearing and moving and meaningful.

It was a perplexing pleasure to read.

All stories are true the moment they are told.

Whether or not they continue to be true is up to the listener.

Like all self-portraits, this is a true story.

Exile from Eden is a sequel. An unexpected one, for a favorite book. I waited a while to read it, until I was ready to really enjoy it. I did.

I also just finished the finale of a trilogy I've enjoyed, and did the same thing--waited a while to read it until the moment felt right. It, too, is about stories. I shared extensively after reading the second one in A Glossary of Enchantment, including the predecessor poems for the one at the end of what follows.

A review of The Storyteller (Sea of Ink and Gold #3), by Traci Chee (including a spoiler):

A substantial, intricate, and exciting finale to the trilogy that brings everything to an involved, satisfying conclusion.

Particularly interesting is the tangled nature of magic in this world, as the characters discover the book at the heart of it all is the one they are in.

All the things that had happened to him. All the things he'd done and become. All the beatings, the fights, the kills, the suffering . . . it had all been planned. Orchestrated. Intended.

Written.

It didn't make sense.

Someone had done this to him? Someone had wanted this to happen? Who?

Tears slipped from the corners of his eyes.

How could someone be so cruel?

If he'd written this story, he would have eliminated every hardship, every illness, every conflict. He would have written it with kind, loving people, and he would have made it so not a single one of them died.

If he'd written this story, everyone would have lived.

Happily.

Ever after.

It's a fascinating dynamic. Who controls the story?

This is a book, and a book is a world,
And words are the seeds in which meaning are curled.
Pages of oceans and margins of land
Are civilizations you hold in the palm of your hand.

But look at your world and your life seems to shrink
To cities of paper and seas made of ink.
Do you know who you are, or have you been misled?
Are you the reader, or are you the read?

This is a word, and a word is a spell--
A promise to keep or a secret to tell.
Controlling the word means the power to frame
How the ages of history remember your name.

Are you hero or villain? A savior or spy?
Some titles are lovely. Some titles are lies.
You can claim who you are, now that you've found your voice.
But those who are chosen will not have a choice.

This is a story as vast as the sea,
But on its waters, you'll never be free.
No matter your course, your future is set,
And destiny laughs as she tightens her net.

Words to Kelannans are breath on a glass,
But if it is written, it will come to pass.
Is your sight growing clearer, the closer you look?
The Book is a world, for the world is a book.

I shared previously this bit from the book Yours Sincerely, Giraffe, by Megumi Iwasa. I love what it has to say about perspective. Everything is part of a story. Stories provide perspective for everything.

In the daytime, when the sun shines, the sea looks blue. But in the morning and the evening it looks completely different. And at night, it's different again.

And that's not all. No matter whether the sea looks blue or green or orange, when I scoop up a bucketful the water becomes transparent. Isn't that strange?

Perhaps it isn't looking that's strange, but the sea itself.

Or maybe it's the bucket.

All stories are true the moment they are told.

3. Magic Stories

Perspective. What you see.

Do you see the magical creatures in these pictures of the ground?

This is an interesting perspective from Mark Manson. It's about seeing needs clearly.

Knowing the need is necessary to knowing how to meet it.

Our lives are controlled by a sense of scarcity. We mistake the objects that provide for our needs as the needs themselves.

You don't need your lover.
You need to be loved.

You don't need your job.
You need to feel secure.

You don't need to be beautiful, cool, or popular.
You need to feel appreciated.

Ultimately, what you need is you.

I'm not fully on board with the concluding sentence, as you need more than yourself to have those other needs met; but I do think it's wise to be able to distinguish the deeper needs from the objects that meet them.

The last few posts I've delved into a need to adjust my perspective to be able to see more wonder, joy, love, and magic in the world as necessary for my mental health. Someone has been reading. Recently I received an anonymous package in the mail that offered me and my family a quest to seek magic. Each member of the family had tasks to complete, and the box provided tools for accomplishing them. I was sent on a day-long journey to a scenic natural spot, along with prompts to help me see the magical beauty all around me. It was a wonderful thing, and the thoughtful person behind it has our immense gratitude. Most of the pictures throughout this post come from that day.

4. Race Stories

Any conversation of race issues is dynamically woven through with considerations of poverty, as one of the greatest impacts of racism in the U.S. is the financial inequality created by racist policies, institutions, and structures. This meme gets at related cultural dynamics.

What's considered trashy if you're poor, but classy if you're rich?

The meme's answer, plus others added in the comments when I shared on Facebook:

Being bilingual
Getting money from the government
Backyard chickens
Breastfeeding
Homeopathic medicine
Buying second hand
Haggling
Homemade anything

There are many more. An integral part of U.S. culture is blaming the poor for their status and looking down on them. This goes double for Black, indigenous, and people of color. So things might be good from one perspective and bad from another, depending on whom they're associated with.

How to Confront a Racist National History

In her 2019 book, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, the philosopher Susan Neiman examines the different ways in which Germany and the United States have confronted their past sins. Neiman, who grew up in the American South and now lives in Berlin, describes how Germany has reckoned with the Nazi era, through memorials, official acts of remembrance, and various forms of reparations. Indeed, just as the Nazi period has become the ultimate example of unadulterated cruelty, postwar Germany has become the paradigmatic example of a country that has fully considered its past. Could something similar be possible in the United States? . . .

The change was from seeing themselves as the war’s worst victims . . . But the move from seeing oneself as a nation of victims to a nation of perpetrators is one that the Germans finally and with great difficulty made. And that’s a historical precedent.

I think one really important thing that happened was the beginning of the publication of memoirs of survivors. That presented a picture, particularly in West Germany, that wasn’t available. In East Germany, by the way, there were over a thousand books and a thousand films made about the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes. I think art has an enormous function here, as it should, in simply helping us to see things from another perspective. And I think it is playing a big role in the renewed civil-rights movement in America. I think that the work of our greatest writers, like Toni Morrison, but also many, many others, has really changed our view of what it is to be an American, and what black Americans have been through. . . .

What I think we can learn from that example is that anti-racism, or facing up to your past, is not a vaccine. It’s not a one-shot option. It’s a process that you need to continue to go through, and it will change generationally. People will see history differently. Generations will have different needs. I also want to emphasize that it’s not just revision of textbooks. I really think popular culture is at least as important as what gets taught in schools, perhaps more so.

Some perspective on civil rights history. It wasn't that long ago.

Pictured: White high school students cursing black students on the first day that public schools were integrated in Montgomery, AL, 1963. This means they were born between 1945 and 1949, which means they are aged 69-73 today. Many are most likely still alive. (Also pictured: a mirror image of one of the president's rallies full of what could be those women.)

An interesting side note related to Ruby Bridges, who was the first Black student to integrate an elementary school in New Orleans, LA. From Wikipedia:

Concerned white parents began picking up their children. A group formed and began chanting "segregation forever". They also cheered for every white student who left school that day.

Soon a group known as "The Cheerleaders" formed. They were a group of mostly middle-class housewives, outraged by the schools' desegregation. Leander Perez, a popular white supremacist leader held a meeting in which 5,000 people attended. . . .

See also: My Mother the Cheerleader, by Robert Sharenow

A new perspective for the word "cheerleader."

In Historic Move, North Carolina City Approves Reparations for Black Residents

The unanimously passed resolution does not mandate direct payments. Instead, it will make investments in areas where Black residents face disparities.

"The resulting budgetary and programmatic priorities may include but not be limited to increasing minority home ownership and access to other affordable housing, increasing minority business ownership and career opportunities, strategies to grow equity and generational wealth, closing the gaps in health care, education, employment and pay, neighborhood safety and fairness within criminal justice," the resolution reads. . . .

Increasing generational wealth — something African Americans were deprived of through economic and regulatory discrimination — should be the focus, he said.

I previously broached this topic in Models are Opinions Embedded in Mathematics, in which I considered the book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, by Cathy O'Neil, one of this movement's leaders.

Why Hundreds of Mathematicians Are Boycotting Predictive Policing

Several prominent academic mathematicians want to sever ties with police departments across the U.S., according to a letter submitted to Notices of the American Mathematical Society on June 15. The letter arrived weeks after widespread protests against police brutality, and has inspired over 1,500 other researchers to join the boycott.

These mathematicians are urging fellow researchers to stop all work related to predictive policing software, which broadly includes any data analytics tools that use historical data to help forecast future crime, potential offenders, and victims. The technology is supposed to use probability to help police departments tailor their neighborhood coverage so it puts officers in the right place at the right time.

"Given the structural racism and brutality in U.S. policing, we do not believe that mathematicians should be collaborating with police departments in this manner," the authors write in the letter. "It is simply too easy to create a 'scientific' veneer for racism. Please join us in committing to not collaborating with police. It is, at this moment, the very least we can do as a community."

Some of the mathematicians include Cathy O'Neil, author of the popular book Weapons of Math Destruction, which outlines the very algorithmic bias that the letter rallies against. There's also Federico Ardila, a Colombian mathematician currently teaching at San Francisco State University, who is known for his work to diversify the field of mathematics.

Future Teachers More Likely to View Black Children as Angry, Even When They Are Not

“Racialized anger bias means that people are seeing anger where none exists,” says Amy Halberstadt, corresponding author of the study and a professor of psychology at North Carolina State University. “We saw this happening to Black adults in earlier research. Now this finding highlights the urgent need to address conscious and unconscious bias in educators.

"The level of bias we found here could have significant adverse effects on children in classrooms. We already know that Black students experience many more suspensions, expulsions and disciplinary actions than white students, often for the same behavior. And this study suggests that misperceiving anger – even at an unconscious level – could play a significant role in that disparity.”