Snapshots: Information Overload and West Point Ring Cycle

Not my mother-in-law's car, but it could have been.  Did you know there are several websites with photos of automobile crashes?  You can search by make. What a comment that makes, online ambulance chasing.

1. My mother-in-law calls us from her cell phone.  Her voice is a little harried, she's working on control.  She tells us she’s been in a car accident, that she’s fine, but can we meet her in Skokie? She’s been shopping at Old Orchard, and on the return seems to have collided with a Model T.

“I was too complacent,” she tells us. “Things were going too well. I was too complacent.”  As if you can always be in control.

Days later she’s decided she will not drive anymore. This is her wake-up call.
She is in her mid-eighties and can dance circles around anyone at a wedding. We see her as the new poster child for knowing when enough is enough, for letting people help her, having trust that it will be okay.

2.  That's Robert's Fish Store below.  Robert is on the left, Arturo on his right.

 I call her on a Friday morning. “I’m going to the fish store on Devon. Do you want to join me?”
Devon is a famous avenue in Chicago, known for the ethnic stamp of the markets, the bakeries, places of worship..  

“Sure,” she says.

We do a little independent shopping and meet at the fish store. Waiting at the counter is a Jewish woman with two lovely little kids, a boy and a girl.

I pay Arturo and turn to leave, but Mom can't stand it.  She has to approach the little girl.

“How old are you?” she asks exuberantly.

“Five,” the child asserts with pride.

Quietly I pipe in, “Have I got a boy for you!” thinking of my five-year old grandson.

The adults all laugh but as we walk to the car I think, How heterocentric was that? Even if I think I’m minority sensitive, I’m obviously not sensitive enough.  No, nobody else gave it a second thought, but that really is the point..

3. On Saturday morning I meet my young adult son at a senior retirement home for religious services. My kid has an important part in the service, and when he is guest reader, I like to hear him do his thing. I also like the way they run the service, how one resident calls out the pages, and the others giggle until they all agree. Being in their company feels right, being with people who have experienced life in full, great things, maybe, and much sorrow.

I take a seat near the end of the aisle so I can get up to look down from our level to the front entrance, the common room. The whole building is very beautiful and the high ceilings temper my usual institutional claustrophobia. The chapel doubles as a movie theater. Not many people under seventy here, only those who assist or bustle to get lunch on.

Three-quarters of the way through the service, a woman in her eighties in a perkie summer suit and straw hat asks if she can take the seat next to me. I'm in the row designed for walkers, and now I worry that I hogged a seat meant for someone else.

"No, please," I whisper, "Sit down."

First she apologizes that she doesn't use a prayer book. "I can't see, so there's no point. But I listen, and I enjoy the feel, the spirituality, just being here."

"You can be the ears of half the people here, and they can be your eyes."

"Exactly," she nods.

I tell her my mother is probably going to be moving here in a few months, and ask if she likes it. In Yiddish she answers, If you can't be at home, it's the next best thing. But she misses her home.

It turns out she has still not sold her suburban condo, like my mother hasn't sold her house. I don't ask if she's just lost her husband, or why she's here. To me it's fairly obvious that this "solution" is highly functional for people in her age group. It beats falling at home, and people check on you if you're not at dinner.

She asks me my mother's name and I tell her. She gets that look of recognition people get, but it's noncommittal. Maybe she knows my family and doesn't like them, I worry. I've learned to worry first, ask later. It's the Jewish neurosis.

"Seems to ring a bell for you," I observe.

"That's your father's last name, right?"

"Right."

"Did they live on the West Side?"

Sure did. Everyone did. Most of the Jewish Chicago immigrants moved to the west side of the city when they immigrated in the thirties, preceding the Holocaust.

"I think I lived in their building," she continues. "My family occupied three of the six units.  That would be your grandparents.  Are they still alive?"

"No, they've passed on.  But that's so coincidental, isn't it?" I exclaim in a whisper.  "You knew them.  What do you remember?"

She's embarrassed. I'm not sure if what she remembers is good or bad, or she just can't remember.

"I didn't see them as our landlords, they were just people. We were all just people." Before the services break, she tells me the name of the street.  She is spot on.

I tell the story to my son as we walk home and he laughs, says, "How random is that?"

It's not random at all if you have a critical mass of Jews. Happens everywhere in Israel, no matter who you talk to, and apparently, if you move into a retirement center, it will happen there, too.  I'm sure it happens wherever there are concentrations of the same tribe.

4. Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal writes about how our lives are controlled by technology, as an electronically informed culture, we're guided by what we read.  And this is something philosophers have noted hundreds of years ago, as well.. (Information Overload is Nothing New).

Ms. Noonan mourns our obsession with our electronic gadgets to the degree that we don't make eye contact anymore, we're busy with our virtual communication. A patient has just complained to me that it used to be, when you went away on vacation, you got away. No more. We commiserated about the constant barrage of communication, how our lives have to be stressed as a consequence, despite the tickling of the pleasure centers in the brain, the social connectivity.

Worse than the disturbance is the volunteered slavery, the phenomena that we are led by the nose by what is new.  We're no longer free thinkers. No longer is research under the purview of the PhD's.  Everyone has new information to post.  So we're always checking, checking, checking to see what others are saying before we make a move.

I read it and worry that I have guided people, not so well sometimes, here on the blog.

But then again, it wasn't long ago that I told you to throw your cell phones in the back seat when you drive, before Oprah did her show on it.  And haven't ranted about it for a long time because frankly, it feels that this is the wave of the future. Nobody looks out the window anymore.
Thanks, Ms. Noonan.

Below: President Dwight D. Eisenhower, West Point Class of 1915, with a 1960 graduate, admiring a ring.

5. On the opinion page of WSJ,  Margaret Lough, a recent West Point graduate, waxes on nostalgically (My Place in the West Point Ring Cycle) about the meaning of the class ring, how each class determines what theirs will say. Ordinarily the motto rhymes.  Class of 2008, No Mission Too Great. This year the class has chosen, For Freedom We Fight.

It's a beautiful piece of journalism foreshadowing young people, idealistic, risking their lives to defend the lives of other Americans, our constitutional rights, our right to freedom.

I was in tears.

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There's No Pill for This Kind of Depression

When you start a PhD program, the first thing you learn is that there is a world of difference between journalism and social science, and that difference begins with the way you write. Journalism is wet. The goal is to sell newspapers, to get to readers personally, to capture their interests, hearts, and emotions.

A lot like blogging for some of us.

And social science is dry. Research is dry. It is steeped in exacting, replicable findings, appeals to the side of the brain that demands significance, validation, logic. Science.

Some of us like both, and I happen to love Peggy Noonan, a political journalist for the Wall Street Journal. She is the Catholic sister I never had. I have Catholic sisters, Lutheran sisters, Episcopalian sisters, Muslim sisters, Korean sisters, Jewish sisters. We're all seriously middle-aged and own a perspective, a way of seeing we earned while toiling at books, people, and life. We've lived so we get to talk about it.

Generally Peggy spins a yarn as only she can (see last week's on the octuplets, just great) but today she dropped a stitch, providing me an opportunity to spleen about what to expect from medication and what not to expect. As a journalist I can't blame her for throwing her thoughts out there, for they're really easy going down, as always.

but they're wrong.

There's No Pill for This Kind of Depression is the title of the essay, page 9, section A, Saturday-Sunday, March 14-15, 2009.

Her metaphor about the economic blows we're suffering are perfect to a fault.

The heart-pumping drama of last September is gone, replaced by the drip-drip-drip of pink slips, foreclosures and closed stores. . . .

People sense something slipping away, a world receding, not only an economic one, but a world of old structures, old ways and assumptions. People don't talk about this much because it's too big, but I suspect more than a few see themselves, deep-down, as "the designated mourner," from the title of the Wallace Shawn play.

Ms. Noonan asked a friend of hers, a psychiatrist, if he sensed pervasive anxiety, as if everyone is "on thin ice," and he answered in the affirmative. We've talked about that here.

She goes on to tell us that the sale of antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs is widespread. (Big news, here). She feels that drug seeking behavior has become more common in New York since 9/11. Where she gets her statistics who knows. She doesn't need them, this is journalism, and opinion, no less. And you, the reader, should believe her, this goes without saying. You read it in the Wall Street Journal.

Fine, fine, fine. No harm done. But the following, Peggy, forgive me, begs an argument. As my sister, the one I can't wait to read on Saturday mornings, you should have called me, seriously, before writing this, referring to psychotropic medication as a cause of the crash.

We look for reasons for the crash and there are many, but I wonder if Xanax, Zoloft and Klonopin, when taken by investment bankers, lessened what might have been normal, prudent anxiety, or helped confuse prudent anxiety with baseless, free-floating fear. Maybe Wall Street was high as a kite and didn't notice. Maybe that would explain Bear Stearns, and Merrill, and Citi.

It would make a nice dissertation thesis, perhaps. But honestly, ill-conceived.

What would Ms. Noonan suggest? The half-glass of bourbon that Denny Crane and Alan Shore (the hot shot lawyers on Boston Legal) make look so psychologically appealing? America's favorite drug? Because that's so safe, after all.

Allow me this.

(1) Anti-depressants don't get you high. If you're lucky, when you take these medications properly, the weight sitting on top of your head disappears and you can get out of bed.

And suicidal people? They're less likely to shoot themselves in the head on anti-depressants, and less likely to take others down with them. Caveat here, of course, for some anti-depressants, taken by some people, can trigger manic episodes. But a real physician, one who performs an extensive evaluation before prescribing anything to anyone, knows this.

(2) Anti-anxiety medication that is taken as prescribed, does not interfere with reality testing. People who are on these medications as prescribed are still anxious, they still think about things that worry them. They still worry. But they can get to work. They learn, in therapy, not to obsess about what they cannot control, and we teach them how to do that. But prudent thought is not disabled with medication. And if you're on medications like these you are discussing what is prudent, what is not, with your therapist.

That's all I want to say. Depression, anxiety-- crippling disorders. Medicine helps people function, helps them manage their emotions. Therapy can, too. Together it all goes a little faster, is all.

I will grant that it's possible that the dayans of Wall Street may have used amphetamines and crack to stay awake, to keep up the energy necessary to be a mover and a shaker, a Master of the Universe (Ms. Noonan refers to Tom Wolfe). This will mess with a person's judgment, cocaine and dex, derivatives of amphetamines, anything that increases mania and a sense of omnipotence.

And hey, that's interesting, too, and sells newspapers.

But it might not pull at you, might not reach as large an audience, pull at as many heart strings, as only Peggy can.

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