Recent disclosures in my karate life have led me to reflect on the impossibility of knowing what’s in another person’s heart.  I believe in the goodness of people, at least that all people are capable of heart-felt connection to others that makes our humanity possible.  Capability, however, does not equal reality, and sometimes those among us who are most willing to believe in the best people have to offer are therefore vulnerable to the realities created by those whose hearts are driven more by a desire to dominate, control, or manipulate others in ways that are entirely self-serving.  Unfortunately, the short-sightedness of this self-serving approach to life can be concealed in a world where the easy momentum of day-in-and-day-out of life allows us to live within our hopeful presumptions rather than examine our relationships themselves — because it is only in relationships, active, involved communicating relationships, that we can come to see beyond our presumptions (often hopeful, idealistic) to the realities that are present.  This helps me to understand moments in my life when I have recognized a certain toxicity in a group of people working in close proximity.  It is like a slow gas leak, I suppose.  One is breathing just fine.  The headache that starts as the atmosphere becomes more toxic is easy to dismiss.  As the headache persists, and aspirin is easy enough at hand.  So, just take it and the presumption that all is well remains.  But then the drowsiness sets in and if we haven’t recognized the toxicity of the very air we are breathing, then we will lay down to rest not realizing that death is nearby.

When it comes to human toxicity, actual death might be a good outcome compared to the alternative.  Because in human environments we adjust to the toxicity, and in doing so forget what the air felt like going into our lungs prior to the toxic fumes invading our atmosphere, and our presumptions about our own health remain in tact.  Denial about this toxicity, or hopefulness that it will simply go away is a common response.  And, sometimes the toxicity runs itself out, or the non-toxic air overwhelms the toxicity.  But in cases where the toxicity has abundant resources (like the trust of the leaders of the community), failure to act against that toxin, or hoping that it will go away is a retreat from the human responsibility we have to each other.

It’s not that these things are easy to sort out.  Assessing the health of a community, its relationships and communicative practices is the central driving feature of the manuscript I have been working on for the past eight months.  All this involves making judgments.  Judgments can be very dangerous because they tend to close us out from seeing alternatives.  People who make snap judgments and then doggedly refuse to consider other possibilities are toxic.  People who refuse to re-examine their own presumptions about others, or who assess situations and position themselves as knowing better than anyone else, are toxic.  To be around these kinds of people and to support them even in the most general ways — like socializing and cultivating friendships with them — gives their toxicity more potency and more reach.

It takes courage to act in response to a toxin that is hidden because it is concealed within the healthy aspects of the environment.  Let’s just pretend it’s not there.  Let’s just wait and it’ll go away.  These are dangerous responses.

Acting against human toxins like this is not straightforward.  It requires a great deal of involvement in those very relationships.  It involves a dedicated effort to examine relationships and practices to try and discern what makes the difference between toxic and healthy.  And, it requires that we be open to seeing and doing things differently.  We live in a world with so much inhumanity.  Why would we not take every opportunity to look, see, and live in ways that allow to keep re-seeing the possibilities and the limitations of each of us and the communities in which we live?

I welcome your thoughts.

It’s pretty common for people in positions of leadership to invoke the metaphor of “family” to suggest a set of relations among a group of people who are not family in the strict sense, but who share some common endeavor or identity.  Often times, this metaphor is invoked during times of crisis or strife within a group to suggest a boundedness that extends beyond the immediate struggles, contention, or grief and into a shared and more peaceful future.  President Obama recently invoked this metaphor in memorial for the three Muslim students who were brutally murdered in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  President Obama asserted that in our grief, “we are one America family.”

President Obama’s appeal in invoking the  “one American family” metaphor was certainly aimed at uniting all Americans in the U.S. in grief at the loss and share the outrage at these senseless murders.  And while there is something soothing about hearing our President assert our unitedness in grief and outrage, there is another sense, far less comforting, to which this metaphor aptly applies.  Because, it is true that family members do sometimes murder each other.  Sometimes the meaning of “family,” far from being a term that signals a fundamental love and caring connectedness, instead signals a lack of care or regard.  For many people, family signifies places of violence and abuse, of disregard and spitefulness. And this, too, is part of our “American family.”

The man who murdered Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha was nurtured in a “family” bound less by care and love than by violence and spitefulness.  How can I know this?  I know nothing specifically about this man or his family.  But, I am a member of the “American family,” and this “American family” exists within a world community where we are at war, that at every moment of every day is poised to kill those with whom we are at war, that at every moment at every day makes millions of calculations over the tiniest bits of information that might tell us how to deploy our power to kill and destroy those who we determine to be our enemies.  The “American family” is a violent family, and despite the fact that we can find many places within our “family” that are quite nurturing and loving, our “family” cannot separate itself from the fact that to have a name like Deah Shaddy Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, or Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha places one in the category that everyone in our family recognizes as those with whom we are at war.

I am not a pacifist, and the inhumanity of the laws and customs sought in ISIS’s “caliphate,” particularly as they relate to girls and women, cannot be allowed to exist freely. The US military is one of the institution that must take on this fight.  The US military is the part of our family that is decidedly capable of violence, and when it is called on it is compelled to use violence.

My point is that in offering the metaphor of an “American family” united in grief, we cannot forget that there are other, far less comforting aspects of this “family” that also unite us.  Whether we “agree” or not with President Obama’s orders taken by our military and intelligence organization in the fight against ISIS, is irrelevant to the fact that this is OUR family from which the killing and destruction are being carried out every moment of every day.  My point is that we like to invoke the idea of family to give ourselves some peace or comfort.  And while I, too, am comforted by such words, if those words allow me to forget the fact that there is more to my family than just that, then in the end I am doing nothing but embracing a willful ignorance that allows my sense of righteousness to dominate even while members of my family are killing, maiming and destroying other human beings.  My willful ignorance does not erase the boundedness I have to our “American family” that is united in our war against “Muslim extremists.”  It is much better if we chose to recognize our condition of war as something essential to our boundedness here, at this time, in 2015.  This is not the kind of boundedness I want within my family, but it is the reality of what we live today.  Examination of that boundedness as it reaches from our most public declarations to our most private feelings must be the call for the day.  Had that kind of examination been at work for this man who coldly murdered three innocent people, perhaps his internal rage would have been tempered by an understanding of the difference between those he killed and those with whom we are at war.  Only then, with this kind of reflective understanding, might we imagine a future where that boundedness can be transformed into something characterized less by war and more by love.

I welcome your comments.

Some little girls grow up imagining their wedding day with great excitement and anticipation.  Me, not so much.  I just never “got” what the big deal was, and anything having to do with me wearing a dress and being in a spotlight was the last thing I wanted to imagine for my future!  And, wearing a tux instead of a dress didn’t help much either.  Such is the life of a tomboy and nascent lesbian growing up in the 1970s.

Lisa and I have been together for over 17 years.  We met at Purdue University, where we were both professors, and we both came into the relationship cautiously.  Neither of us was interested in making West Lafayette, Indiana our permanent home, and so we weren’t planning too far ahead.  I think we both just wanted companionship and connection.  The last thing we did in those early days was talk about commitment or a long-term future.

The big “commitment” came when we moved to Arizona together, where we both secured jobs as professors at Arizona State University.  We bought a house together, and that, more than anything else was our formal or legal assertion of commitment to our relationship.  The idea of marriage had been circulating in the public for quite a while even then, but given my childhood feelings about it, it was never something I wanted even though I sensed that Lisa did.

Then we came to a point where the momentum for the Federal recognition of gay marriage was gaining tremendous momentum.  I finally asked Lisa to marry me.  It wasn’t anything like a romantic, down-on-my-knee event.  In fact we were driving in the car–very unromantic.  But there was something very special about that moment because we had been talking about it, and there came that point when I uttered those words, “Lisa, will you marry me?” in a way that was absolutely real.  And it was very special because at that moment Lisa knew that I meant it, that it conveyed something of my love for her that couldn’t be expressed in any other way.

So what’s the point of my going on and on sharing my personal life in this blog?  The point is that I think that what the Federal recognition of same-sex marriage gives us is a chance for all of us to rethink what marriage is as we live it with our intimate partners.  Too many marriages are less than happy or successful.  Too many marriages are places of distress, violence, and abuse.  We need to all re-think marriage, not as a matter of the sex of the partners, but more as a matter of what our particular “marriage” is, as we live within it through the everyday mundane aspects of life.  We need to think about the reality of what happens and what we experience in our “marriage” relationships.  Because, the word “married” ultimately means nothing outside of the relationship to which it is applied.

Thus I’ve come to re-imagine marriage.  It’s no longer for me what I saw as a little girl tomboy and wanted nothing to do with.  It has taken me a long time to re-imagine marriage in a way that befits how I feel about Lisa and having her in my life.  And that I’ve been able to do this is largely because our dear friends, Lewis and Jane Gordon, offered to hold a marriage ceremony for us in conjunction with the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s annual meeting at UCONN in 2016.  Lewis himself offered to marry us, and upon his doing so I was immediately struck by the gift that we give to each other through our relationships–that Lewis and Jane gave to us, that Lisa and I could give to each other, that we could share with a community gathering with a common sense of care and recognition.  The reverberations of those gifts move in every direction — from couple to community, community to couple, person to person within and outside the couple, and person to community and back.

It says a lot about a scholarly community that wants to celebrate the lives of its members in such a way.  Jane and Lewis are, of course, two key leaders of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, and it is their deep and abiding sense of humanity and human recognition that literally births relationships capable of sustaining the best in all of us.  Lisa and I together do that as well, but we do it better with others doing the same.

What if we re-imagined “marriage” like this?  Far from being the end of anything, it could, instead, cultivate more humane communities where the valuing of each other is what sustains the connections that bind us.

What do you think?