Having My Say

I am so appalled by the attacks on teachers, teachers' unions, the right for public employees to collectively bargain, to say nothing of the assault on the Health Care Reform Bill, that I am left nearly speechless.  If not for Jon Stewart, I would be in a bad way.  What's important, though, is that our country is in a bad way, and every time I sense some improvement it only gets worse.

The Blogosphere is an important social force these days, and I encourage everyone who has a blog, is on Facebook, or has an email contact list to proclaim loudly and clearly that Americans are fed up with the Right's efforts to subvert our values of liberty, justice, equality, and social responsibility. 

Issue by issue:

Gun Control: some liberals may prefer a society without private gun ownership, but they are not, as a block, calling for nationwide disarmament.  I don't like guns, but I grudgingly accept that Americans who are not criminal or insane should be free to own them.  I would like a sensible system of gun registration and better oversight of the gun industry.  No one needs an automatic weapon whose only purpose is to kill or maim human beings.  No one has a right to stockpile a cache of weapons that poses a threat to unwitting neighbors.  The Right acts as if there were a plot to make all guns illegal.  There isn't.  The real conspiracy is the gun lobby's own propaganda machine.  As with most things, follow the money.

Gay Marriage: Freedom means, in part, not denying other people the chance to live as they wish and do as they want so long as it doesn't hurt you.  Simply by itself, being gay does not hurt anyone.  Denying gay couples the same rights, including marriage and its benefits, does hurt those who are being denied.  Homosexuality does not threaten marriage, and no religious group has the right to dictate how those outside its own community should live.  Racial equality before the law has not brought America to its knees, quite the opposite.  Sexual equality can only strengthen our nation, our families, and our own self-respect.  Live and let live--not a bad thing to remember.

Access to Health Care: government has an obligation to provide citizens with the necessities they cannot (or should not) provide for themselves, ie. police and fire protection, safe roads and bridges, effective drugs, uncontaminated food, education for all, and affordable health care.  Our system of health care delivery has been neither affordable nor accessible to every citizen.  We may have the best health care system in the world, for those who can pay, but it is a failure if people are shut out of it--for any reason.  I had a "phone call" yesterday from Mike Huckabee urging me to help repeal "Obamacare."  Why would any rational person want to do that, unless she were invested in the insurance industry or were in the pocket of "big pharma?"  Does anyone really want to drop their 24 yr.  old, unemployed son or daughter from their health care plan?  Does anyone really want to deny coverage to children simply because they are sick?  Does anyone want insurance companies to be able to drop a customer when that customer comes down with cancer or chronic mental illness?  I'm sick of hearing "we can't afford it" or "eliminate the budget deficit first."  Let's start with what we NEED.  Then let's find ways to pay for it.  That brings me to my next issue:

Increased Taxes:  We are grossly undertaxed as a nation, but more significantly the richest (let's be generous) 5% are making more money than ever and paying less in taxes than they did under Reagan.  Income redistribution is anathema to many Americans, but we're not talking about income equality, which would be impractical and counter-productive.  And we're not talking about removing the incentive of healthy competition.  A stable, fair society benefits everyone, even the rich.  One thing I have always admired about America is that our neighborhoods (for the most part) are wide open.  In many parts of the world the norm is for everyone with anything, from the lower-middle class on up, to live behind gates and walls.  Living in a compound is tantamount to living in a medieval fortress, with the hungry on the outside and the threatened elite on the inside.  No threat, no walls.  A picket fence is not a wall.  A fair society doesn't need them.

Collective Bargaining: Americans have short memories.  Very short.  Other cultures hold on to their past, sometimes to the point of desperation and madness.  Re-fighting the battles of the ninth century or the fourteenth is to cripple oneself in the present.  After a suitable interval, it is time to readjust one's outlook.  Our world has prospered because America, Japan, and Germany were able to lay enmity aside and get on with business.  This happened remarkably fast.  A short memory served in that instance, but our historical memory shouldn't be so truncated as to blot out events that still have an impact on us today.  The nineteen century provides plenty of examples of worker exploitation.  A factory worker in England in 1840 was no better than a slave.  Today, where workers are at the mercy of their employers (think Mexico or indeed any third-world country), people, including children, suffer.  The reason America has had a vibrant middle class is due in large measure to the rise of labor unions and collective bargaining that dispersed power.  I wonder how many revolutions might have been prevented if labor unions had been a force to contend with.  The attacks on teachers and public employee unions is an attack on the very thing that gave us a standard of living that has been the envy of the world.  More and more we are becoming a nation of the elite few and the struggling many.  If this continues, we will continue our decline.  We no longer own the ball, and when we go home to our gated communities and cadillac health insurance plans, the game won't stop.  We lived a Marie-Antoinette life for far too long.  She lost her head; we lost our economy, our security, our world reputation.  Now we must move beyond an "I've got mine; you get yours" mentality or our losses are only just beginning.  You heard it here.

"Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCan

"Let the Great World Spin" won the National Book Award in 2009. 

It is written by an Irishman about New York City.  It deals with prostitutes, pimps, drug addicts, mothers of dead Viet Nam soldiers, Jewish lawyers, Park Avenue matrons, a pair of Irish brothers--and Phillipe Petit (I think that's the right spelling), who walked across a cable strung between the twin towers of the World Trade Center before they were opened.  This stunt caused a sensation when it actually happened, and it links the various stories of the fictional characters in the book.  Mostly, this is a novel about the city itself.  I wish I could say I liked it, but New York comes off as hellish, and all the characters are frustrating.  And that is all I have to say.

Being a Woman of a Certain Age

This morning on the Today show ( I catch bits and pieces of it from time to time) Meredith Viera interviewed an "aging" 40-yr. old, Sarah Brokaw, about her new book on growing older.  Ms. Brokaw is 40, and I gather she's a therapist of some sort (didn't catch the whole interview), whose advice to women is to listen to their own voice, to see aging as an opportunity rather than as a disaster, to go forth with confidence and purpose.  Well.  I guess that's good advice, but I wonder.  Ms. Brokaw herself is beautiful, physically fit, financially secure, self-accepting (why wouldn't she be?), and she has great hair.  Is this someone who can lead the way for the pudgy, under-achieving, frazzled woman who is trying to cope the best she can?  Can thinking positively really solve our problems?  Yes and no.

The interview got me thinking about how I feel about growing older.  I wouldn't presume to speak for all women, or for anyone but myself, but I would like to share my perspective on the "age thing" and perhaps offer some comfort to those who might be worried about it.

I love being 65.  I am happier than I have ever been, and I believe that is due in part--in large part--to being the age I am.  If 35-yr.-olds look back at the teen years with horror and no desire to repeat them, then as a 65-yr.-old,  I look back at 35 and say, I'm glad I don't have to do that over.  Don't get me wrong.  When I was 35, I enjoyed most, if not all, of my life: grad school, three kids, no money, no secure future or any idea what the future might be.  I loved my work and my family, but I was still too green, too raw, too unfinished to be able to feel in control of anything.  The word I would use to describe my life from 20 to 40 is "intense."  I craved intensity and was embarrassed by my desire for it at the same time.  In college I had a reputation for being "artsy" and "intense," and I didn't believe those were compliments.  At 20 I was afraid my life would never be very interesting--to me or to anyone else--by 55 I felt I had enough material for a very long novel and didn't feel I had missed a thing.  Those years were difficult in many ways, and I struggled mightily to keep moving forward.  I look back now and ask myself how I did it.

What I now believe is that you get through intense times by simply living through them.  You don't fix them, pretend they aren't there, stop trying, or give in to despair though you may feel like it sometimes.
As Dilsey says in "The Sound and the Fury", you "endure."  In my book that counts as success.  The wonderful thing that I have discovered (and I attribute much of this to simple good luck) is that merely by growing older you are less and less plagued by the bogeymen that have haunted you--and I believe everyone has them.  They're what you worry about.  Am I good-looking enough?  Am I smart enough?  Have I done enough with my life?  Am I making a fool of myself?  Everyone has a different, unique list.  If you notice, the word "I" appears in every question.  Somewhere around age 60, I found that the answer to the first three questions at least is "no."  But you know what?  I no longer care, not as I once did.  After years of working, worrying, fretting, and fearing failure, I find the relief of not much caring a positive pleasure.

Beautiful women must fear losing their looks.  I'd hate to be Elizabeth Taylor and watch myself fall apart.  Ordinary women have an advantage; they have less to lose.  Take the British actress Juliet Stevenson for example.  Ms. Stevenson is a pleasant-looking woman, yet I don't think anyone would call her beautiful.  But she is interesting.  If she keeps clean and does something decent with her hair, she will always be interesting.  As I age, my cohort is aging too.  Interesting old men, if they have any sense, want interesting women, not just beautiful ones.  Friendship is easier.  Young men don't even think of you as a possibility, so you can be friends with them.  That is delightful.  Old men are as tired as you are, and friendship has the advantage over the sexual rat race.  That is comforting.  Intimacy is an investment that has matured and solidified (again, with luck).  Your life experience is money in the bank, and now you are free to spend it.

I was an academic, luckily at the tail end of what I consider a golden age in higher education.  I made it through on my teaching, without publishing the requisite book(s) required by the current system, before assessment became a pseudo-science rather than a matter of intelligent judgment.  I was free to love my subject, literature, and to put my energies into my students.  I look at those coming up behind me, the ones in their late-twenties and thirties, who are scrambling to squeeze through the door of academia before it slams in their face.  I see the anxiety when that book doesn't get published in time or the grant doesn't come through.  I see young faculty too overwhelmed by career demands to do more than the minimum with students.  Those young teachers who should be a model of what lies just ahead in life for their students, who remember most vividly what it is like to be an undergraduate or a harried graduate student, who have the energy to take on the world but have to spend it hunched over a computer, those are the ones I pity.  I wish the system were more humanistic, more liberal, less bureaucratic and commercialized, but it has always been true that the middle years of adulthood are the most difficult.  Maybe that is the way it should be.  One thing is sure: the relief of no longer having to fight to stay afloat is a positive pleasure. 

I am 65, not 85.  I will think differently in ten or twenty years than I do now.  I am interested to see how my perspective will change, and I hope I will find good things to replace the things I enjoy today.  When I was 35, I couldn't imagine anything that could take the place of raising young children.  I positively feared their growing up and away.  Then I found graduate school, and a new world opened up.  I wondered what would replace grad. school in terms of intellectual intensity, and eventually I found my feet teaching Honors students.  I wondered what would replace teaching, and I found that caring for grandchildren takes everything that came before and lets me relive it, albeit in a different (easier) way.  My experience as a mother, my years of learning, my marriages and my divorces all gave me, I hope, something I could pass on to the young.  I feel I have turned inside out and am now looking toward the world.  I am no longer paralyzed with insecurity, no longer on tenterhooks about how others see me, no longer trying on various personae in hopes of finding one that fits.  Now I find I can feel, really feel, for the young.  I don't have to compete with them, out-perform them, or be jealous of their success.  My greatest pleasure is in helping them insofar as I can.  I can listen.  I can care.  I can offer encouragement, which is what the young most need.  I can tell them that life does get easier, and that growing old is indeed a positive pleasure.  (Wish luck.)  I mistyped that; it should be With luck.  But Wish works too.

Finally. America wakes up.

I guess it's true that you reap what you sow.  After the last elections, I kept asking, "What were they thinking?"  How could voters send so many Republicans and Tea Partiers to Congress and state legislatures, knowing what they were going to do?  So much misinformation is swirling around, and has been for quite some time, yet who, besides Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, has appeared in the popular media to try to set the record straight?  Many Americans have been scared to death by the words "deficit" and "debt", as though Godzilla were breathing down our necks.  Yes, we do have to get a grip on our economy, but fear-mongering is not the way to go about it.

"Why aren't people taking to the streets?" I asked myself.  I remember the 'sixties, and while I don't want to go back to the days of free love and acid trips, I do like to see people stand up for their rights, as we are seeing now across the country and the globe.  It has always been the rich against the poor.  Always.  Sometimes the rich are more-or-less responsible and make sure the middle class is large enough to keep things in order; too often they cling to their wealth and its perquisites as if they alone were the entitled of the earth.  From the ancient Persian kings to feudal lords, French aristocrats, African despots, and today's big corporation CEOs, the rich have never loosened their grip until forced to, often with disastrous consequences.  Of course there are some rich folks who use their wealth wisely and for the good of others, but these are generally individuals, not institutions.  Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Bill Gates turned from money-making to philanthropy once they had enough, but history is replete with men who rape and pillage their populations--or workers--with never a flicker of remorse or responsibility.  As Americans we are not immune to this kind of abuse--obviously.

In light of recent events in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and perhaps other states, I ask:

How many of those demonstrators who are vociferously objecting to budget cuts to education and an end to collective bargaining for government workers voted for Republicans in the last election?

If Republican policies were popular enough to get Republicans elected and Democrats thrown out of office, why aren't we seeing counter-protests defending these cuts and restrictions? 

If the Republican voice is truly "the voice of the American people", why is it we only hear that voice coming out of the mouths of politicians and the extremist fringe?

"A Happy Marriage" by Rafael Yglesias

In "A Happy Marriage" we have another fictionalized memoir, though because of the rawness with which it is written it seems like the only things changed are the names of the people involved.  This has to be one of the saddest books I have ever read.  From the outset we know it is the story of Yglesias's marriage and his wife's protracted, painful death from bladder cancer.  It seems obvious to me that Yglesias wrote this book in order to try to exorcise ghosts (his father's death figures in the story as well), and I hope it did that for him.  I have to ask myself, though, what the reader is expected to take away from this account of profound misery.

I am reluctant to admit it, but I sort of feel that Yglesias gives us too much information.  "The Death of Ivan Illych " is Tolstoy's meditation on death.  It is philosophical and universal.  "A Happy Marriage" is so private as to make this reader feel like a voyeur.  I even had to skip parts because they were simply too intimate--not sexually intimate, even more private than that.  There is nothing left to imagine about his wife's illness, operations, chemo treatments, bowel function, her body pierced with drains carrying unspeakable fluids.  We see her fear, her pain, the complete exposure of her being.  I know that Yglesias, like his writer parents, believes in unmediated realism, but realism to what end?  There are many literary references throughout the text, as if the author were trying to borrow seriousness from Zola, Balzac, and other 19th c. realists, but while Yglesias's prose is serviceable, it hardly approaches the stature of the greater writers he admires.  I prefer realism too, but with a subject like this it is art that makes it bearable and, perhaps more importantly, meaningful.

I feel churlish criticizing this book; the pain with which it was written is all too obvious.  I do not find fault with his reaction to the events depicted, nor with his need to write them out of his system, to the extent he ever can.  But what I got from the book has less to do with Yglesias than with what I hope for myself.

When I was a young mother, I was terrified of death, even the merest mention of it.  "Terms of Endearment" is a movie I truly wish I had not seen.  I hated visiting the cemetery where my beloved grandmother is buried.  The few funerals I had been to had upset me for days.  Things look different now.  While I certainly hope the end is not imminent, I do realize it's a lot closer than it used to be, when time seemed to stretch to an invisible horizon.  That horizon is not quite so invisible anymore.

My grandmother died when I was twelve.  I remember asking my mother, when I was about six, if Grandmother was worried about dying.  She might have been 70, an age I no longer consider old, but to me she was as ancient as the hills.  Mother told me to ask Grandmother herself, and I did.  She told me--and I remember this clearly--that as you get older your ideas about things change.  When you are old death doesn't seem like such an enemy.  She said that when she was a girl people would say that pneumonia was the old people's friend.  She showed me that what you fear at six or twelve or thirty-six is not what you fear at 65.  The worry now is how it will all play out.  One thing I am more certain of than ever because of reading Yglesias's book is that I don't want to go through what his wife Margaret did.  I do not want to be destroyed by illness or treatments that rob me of my dignity and autonomy.  I do not want machines to take over what I can no longer do myself, and I don't want the last thing I see to be the blank wall of a hospital room.  I'd rather go outside on some clear winter night and look up at the stars, wait for the chill to reach my bones, and forgo the antibiotics.

My other grandmother died when I was about four; I barely remember her.  But I do remember my parents and my father's sisters discussing her last day.  If they'd known I was listening so intently, they might have changed the subject, but I'm so glad they didn't.  It seems my aunts and perhaps some other relatives were gathered in the living room where my grandmother lay on a bed.  Picture a tiny house with no indoor plumbing, save for a hand-cranked pump in the kitchen.  I don't know whether there was electricity or not, but there was a pot-bellied stove in the middle of the room for heat.  I can imagine the quiet conversation of the relatives as my grandmother dozed in her corner.  Near the end she stirred and said she believed it was getting dark.  Then she was gone.  She was old, as one hopes to be.  She was at home in her own bed, beneath her own quilts that she and her daughters had made.  The last things she heard were the quiet murmurings of her grown up children, the ticking of a clock, the flapping of a curtain at the open window.  Obviously I'm adding a few details here, but my point is that my grandmother's death was peaceful.  She was not interfered with by strangers, however well-meaning.  There seemed to be no fear.

In today's world of high-tech medicine, world-class hospitals, and advertisers' promises of eternal health if we just spend the money, death has become an alien invader we don't know how to meet.  Dylan Thomas wrote, "Do not go gentle into that good night/ Rage, rage against the dying of the light."  He was a young man, with a young man's perspective, when he wrote that about his father.  For all of us there will come a time when raging against the dark will be as futile as Cyrano trying to beat back the waves of the sea.  Sometimes, Ulysses, it is time to yield.  I was so young when I lost my grandmothers, but I am grateful to both of them for showing me the way.

"Half Broke Horses" by Jeannette Walls

There are two reasons why I love Jeannette Walls's fictionalized biography of her grandmother Lily Casey Smith.  One is for what it shows about a particular slice of American history, the other for what it says about courage and determination.

West Texas and the surrounding area is the setting; late 19th c. through the 50s is the time period.  The "novel" is told in the first person in a succession of short, vivid chapters.  Each chapter adds a layer to the picture of the hard-scrabble, unforgiving land that was Lily Casey's home--as a child she lived in a dugout whose walls sometimes caved in when it rained--and the girl, who even as a young child, knew how to get things done.  We see what the lives of ranchers were really like, the endless hard work and sweat, the sudden disasters that could ruin a family.  Justice was still an individual matter much of the time, with scores settled violently and sometimes for good.  I won't go into detail about the book; you can find out about it on Amazon, or better yet read it yourself.  Instead, I offer my own reaction.

I love to look at old photographs.  I have one of my great-grandmother (maybe great-great-; I'm not sure) that was taken before the Civil War when she was sixteen.  She stands in her ruffled dress with its stiff voluminous skirt, carefully reading a letter that she holds in front of her with both hands.  Her dress is short enough to show her ankles, so she must be on the very verge of leaving childhood behind.  I wonder if the letter she is reading is from the man she would later marry?

My mother's family came from Richmond, VA, where I'm told they owned a plantation and slaves.  I don't know if they were true gentry, but family lore gave them an aristocratic aura.  When the war broke out, this girl, Agnes Singleton, and her two sisters were sent to live with relatives in Indianapolis.  These relatives were, I believe, the genuine article when it comes to pedigree.  They lived in a grand house with over-sized Victorian furniture, some of which ended up in my grandmother's house.  I inherited a sofa stuffed with horse hair that must have been a wonder in its day.  General Grant preferred to sit on it when he visited, and in our family we always referred to it as the General Grant.  I don't know how many pieces of furniture have names, but this one does.  It's an amazing piece really, with lots of carved wood details from periods as diverse as ancient Egypt, Greece, and the baroque.  At the top of the back there is a lion's head the size of a fist that comes out, to the delight of small children grown big enough to climb up on the upholstered but rigid seat.

But back to Agnes.  Like all good girls of the day, she attended church regularly and sang in the choir. Sitting in the congregation Sunday after Sunday was John McRae, a widower with small children.  He took notice of Agnes, who was pretty and genteel, and after the war was over and the Singleton girls had returned to Virginia, he made up his mind to act.  One day, the girls were looking out a window when they saw a horseman riding up toward the house.  "Who's that?" asked one.  "Why, that's John McRae.  I wonder what he's doing here?" said another.  In fact, he had come to propose marriage to Agnes.  I always thought this story incredibly romantic, until I learned that Agnes was already in love with someone else.  But John was rich.  He could not only provide for Agnes but also for her family.  Through his connections in Indiana he arranged for Agnes's parents to move onto one of the farms they owned west of Indianapolis.  Losing everything, hiding in caves from the Yankees, suddenly becoming the poor relations must have been a trauma shared by lots of families in the South.  I'm sure my forebears weren't alone in their plight, but having company in misery is cold comfort.  I believe this loss was felt down the generations and contributed to my mother's insistence on refinement and being "from a good family."

From time to time I gaze at this old photograph of my great-grandmother, who looks amazingly like my mother and my aunts, and try to imagine her life.  She was a part of history as surely as Grant or Lincoln.  It is people like her who interest me, people whose stories can tell us so much more than the size of battles or the signers of treaties.  They show us the past as a living thing.  In "Half Broke Horses" Walls has created--or re-created--her grandmother's voice, and as readers we get as close to what it was like inside that dugout, how it felt to be so dirty your jeans became waterproof, and where an indomitable spirit can lead you as it is possible to be.

Lily's story is one of both success and failure, but no failure was ever complete, and she never lacked for a way out of her difficulties.  She was one strong lady.  She didn't care what other people thought; she did what was best for herself and her family--as she saw it; she never felt sorry for herself, and she never gave up.  Her story inspires me not because it is a triumph over difficult odds, though there is that.  She makes me want to (as Miss Brodie would say) brisk up, to get on with business, to shake the possibilities out of life before time defeats me.

        

What Can I Do?

I fear my comments will sound like a rationalization, and perhaps they are, but I came across the following sentence in the latest "Harper's" and would like to share it.

"I shall always believe that our own humanity depends upon the accuracy with which we are able to perceive the suffering around us, and to be witness to it."--Richard Selzer, former surgeon and professor of surgery at the Yale School of Medicine.

How might this be a rationalization?  Because it makes simply standing by and feeling bad equivalent to taking action.  I have always wondered if that is enough.  The same issue of "Harper's" contains an essay by Wiliam T. Vollman in which he gives an account of his efforts to help the homeless in Sacramento, more specifically in his own backyard (actually a parking lot he owns).  Vollman, 51, "feels sorry" for the motley crew that camps out on his doorstep and, despite police efforts to run them off, allows them to stay and befriends some of them.  He even goes out from time to time to camp with the homeless himself at various campsites and church basements, sleeping sometimes on the bare earth.  He seems to me to be a man who is living his beliefs, in deed as well as thought.

We all know people who do what seems to us incredible things: doctors who eschew a lucrative practice to serve on Native American reservations, social workers who deal with families in crisis, a coach who donates a kidney to one of his players.  Should I feel guilty because I don't want to do any of these things?  I don't think so.

I've pondered this issue for a long time and am still not sure I have completely settled it in my own mind, but for now I am inclined to say that extraordinary sacrifice that brings you actual suffering is not required in order to be a moral person.  I'd better define what I mean by "actual suffering."  I don't necessarily mean physical pain.  Women in childbirth feel pain, but I don't consider this "suffering."  It is a condition of life to feel pain.  Not everyone who accepts it is a hero, nor is everyone who avoids it a coward.  I guess what I mean by suffering is anything that breaks your spirit, that makes you feel helpless or deeply depressed.  If I were a physician (fat chance), I could no more practice on a reservation than fly.  Living in relative isolation in what to me seems a desolate landscape would kill my soul.  I was a teacher, and I loved my job.  Some people say they could never be a teacher in a million years.  Does that make me morally neutral because I enjoyed teaching?  If I hated it but did it anyway, would that make me a better person.  No.

I'm not religious, but I'll borrow from the Bible anyway, as it contains much wisdom.  "The Lord loves a cheerful giver."   Recognizing your own limitations and needs is perhaps the first step toward living a moral life.  Doing those things you WANT to do, with a passion that comes from somewhere deep inside, is what you SHOULD do.  This is not to say that we should never do anything unless we want to.  Of course there are many times when we shouldn't put our own convenience first, as every parent well knows.  But the big heroic acts, the grand gestures of altruism, should not seem heroic to those who perform them.  We do the things we do--donate to charity, donate blood, give to the Goodwill--because it makes us happy to do them.  And that is right and proper.  For most of us that is enough.

There is still something more we can do, however, and I think it's more important than most people realize.  There are times when simply bearing witness is the only moral act possible.  I read a story once (by the writer who used to work with Merchant and Ivory; I've forgotten her name.  Ruth Something) about living in India, where streets teem with homeless, desperate people and suffering is visible everywhere.  The narrator was advised to imagine herself living atop an elephant, but she was never to look at it or acknowledge it was there.  The elephant was the starving hordes upon whose backs the privileged lived.  The only way for the rich to stay sane was to ignore the truth.   So many times I've heard people say, "Well, there's nothing I can do, so I just won't think about it."  I've felt that way myself plenty of times.  But my point is, there is something we can do; we can acknowledge the suffering of others, accept that it exists, and be sorry.  It may not be much, but I believe it is a moral obligation nonetheless.