winter break: A place to share insights about Winter Break and p...

winter break: A place to share insights about Winter Break and p...: "Deep in the snows of the Swiss Alps during her winter break, young Caroline Stillhart enters a mysterious world in which a master teacher, a..."

One of the things I enjoyed most about this book, aside from the wonderful teaching of Luma, was the interaction between Caroline (the heroine) and her "friend" Silvia and then in Part 2 between Caroline and Biancha. There's so much for young people of both sexes to learn about being an adult and dealing with crises and wrong attitudes. Wonderful book.

Living in An Adolescent Country

Compared to other countries, America is very young, only 222 years old, if you count from 1788 when the Constitution was finally ratified and took effect. Declaring independence, as we did in 1776, didn't make us a country, just a fetus in the womb of the world.

We are in fact an adolescent country. So, what are the characteristics of an adolescent? By definition, adolescents are not mature. They lack a sense of adult responsibility. They have trouble thinking for themselves, although they rebel against authority and think they know what they want and who they are. They often lack compassion because they think only of themselves and their immediate needs and desires. But most of all they lack judgment.

An adolescent lacks what Carl Jung termed individuation, a term describing the process through which an individual progresses toward maturity. In the process the individual integrates early growth and development into a coherent selfhood, becoming someone recognized as mature by virtue of acquiring responsibility, purpose, compassion, judgment, confidence, and self-mastery.

America lacks these mature qualities. We have moments, of course, rising to meet crises and behaving with heroic self-sacrifice, reaching out beyond our shores to help others, to meet threats and bring peace and order to the world community of nations. And we rightly treasure these moments: entering World War I to bring an end to the carnage and destruction. We rose again in World War II to bring an end to the evil of the Third Reich and to avenge the attack against our sovereignty at Pearl Harbor. But such heroics do not make us mature, witness the misadventure in Vietnam and now our two lingering wars.

We did not react with maturity to the direct attack on our shores on September 11, 2001. Like a wounded animal we responded with an overwhelming force possessed by no other country on earth, and the subsequent invasion of Iraq displayed a stunning lack of maturity and judgment. And now, we find ourselves fighting wars that have no viable end in sight.

But the strongest evidence of our adolescence is the tenor of our present political life, which displays a shameful immaturity on every level, from the halls of Congress to political gatherings. A mature country would not tolerate the level of discourse we find among those who profess to leadership and who claim to represent a political constituency. On every level political debate and dialog is a national embarrassment.

Obviously it is dangerous for adolescents to have power, to possess weapons and force enough to bring havoc and destruction to the lives of others. A mature individual possessing this level of force and power exhibits a thoughtful consideration of consequences, knowing that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. In other words a mature individual knows the laws that govern nature (including human nature) and behaves accordingly.

What do we do? It is the task of every individual American to find maturity within himself and herself and to reject adolescence in national behavior whenever and wherever it arises. It is not useful to be amused by childish behavior or to condone immature actions by those who represent our local, national and global interests. On the other hand, where we see maturity we need to listen and find strength in it. It's out there to be found in all those who labor in the quiet patience of public service.

The rest of the world, both old and youthful countries, look to America for mature leadership simply because we possess the wealth and power to preserve or destroy the planet. It's time for the country to grow up and assume its proper place among the other mature nations. Here's a bumper sticker:

GROW UP AMERICA!

Why the Tea Party Has No Poets

Why The Tea Party Has No Poets

It is a misnomer to call the Tea Party movement a protest movement. It’s just a bumper sticker movement spawned in irrational anger but without coherent protest. Genuine protest over war, injustice, racism, bigotry, and crimes of all kinds, produces great protest poetry, the outpouring of inspired language capable of moving others and producing genuine change.

I think of Allen Ginsburg’s “Howl,” which begins, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness....” or Lawrence Ferlinghetti singing, “I am awaiting a rebirth of wonder,” or Adrienne Rich saying, "The moment of change is the only poem." There’s also my friend Alec Emerson who wrote a poem in memory of Kent State.

A girl, half kneels, awkwardly, beside a corpse.

Looking up, in stunned agony, she

raises one arm.

The Ohio National Guard

reloads to protect itself.

These and other protest poems arise from outrage but are expressed in a quieter insight, using language to arouse feeling and to mourn or take action or effect a change of heart. But this Tea Party movement has no heart and thus no poetry in it. It has only bumper stickers, like

I Am Not Your ATM

I Voted for Change, Not more Taxation

I Voted for Obama, Not Debt for Our Children

I Want My Country Back!

I Will Keep my Freedom, my Guns, my Money. You Keep THE CHANGE!

I Will Not Grab My Ankles

What drives these people is anger generated not by injustice, war, bigotry, racism, or crime but anger generated by fear, the fear that their America is changing forever, that providing health care for all Americans, for example, will ask them to share what they have and that President Obama intends to level the playing field of opportunity for all Americans.

One of our great founding thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great, great grandsire of my friend Alec Emerson, spoke and wrote about America as Opportunity and because he had witnessed the destructive nature of illness, said this about the importance of good health:

...but I will say, get health. No labor, pains, temperance, poverty, nor exercise, that can gain it, must be grudged. For sickness is a cannibal which eats up all the life and youth it can lay hold of, and absorbs its own sons and daughters. I figure it as a pale, wailing, distracted phantom, absolutely selfish, heedless of what is good and great, attentive to its sensations, losing its soul, and afflicting other souls with meanness and mopings, and with ministration to its voracity of trifles.

Among the thirty-three advanced countries in the world, only America does not offer its citizens some form of universal health care, and if the Tea Party has its way, ObamaCare, as they call it, will die in the womb and be stillborn. Somebody find me a poem about killing health care or why illness is a good thing and should be cherished, or, perhaps a poem about denying an Hispanic child the right to a good education.

No, the so-called Tea Party movement will die childless because it has no soul as well as no heart. And as to its political prospects, as we say in sport, it hasn’t a prayer of winning the game.

Emerson and America - a Review

As a start, I'd like to post a review of my new book entitled Emerson and the Dream of America. The review by Robert Lamb appeared today (June 16) in The New York Journal of Books. As the author, I am grateful to Lamb for his clear and relevant sense of the book and its relation to what is taking place today in America. I will have more to say about Emerson and America in subsequent posts. Here is the Review:

New York Journal of Books Review

Emerson and the Dream of America: Finding Our Way to a New and Exceptional Age by Richard G. Geldard

(Larson Publications, June 16, 2010)

Richard Geldard is either wonderfully prescient or tragically late with his message in this thought-provoking book. The message is that Emerson, who challenged a young and Euro-centric America to seek its own national identify, its own soul, its own manifest destiny, is just the man we need to help us find our way again.

Geldard’s premise is that the American Dream and the Dream of America are two very different things, and that the former, with its emphasis on materialism, has made us forget the idealism of the latter. If he is right, he has put his finger on the failing pulse of a nation in decline, a nation already being written off by self-appointed soothsayers proclaiming that China for one, India for another, will eclipse America in the new millennium—and thus a big dose of Emerson is just what the doctor ordered. If Geldard is wrong, then a refresher course in Emerson, that quintessential American, is long overdue anyhow.

Though an ordained minister, Emerson was less a preacher than a philosopher. In fact, his address to the Harvard Divinity School in 1838 was deemed by his orthodox audience as so irreligious that he wasn’t invited back for 30 years. But in that 30 years, Emerson’s reputation as an orator and Thinker with a capital T soared to Olympian heights. And it’s still there today, 172 years after his death at age 79. There must be good reason for that rarefied esteem, and Geldard spells it out in the best exposition of Emerson’s thought that this reviewer has seen, and Emerson is not the easiest of Thinkers to understand, let alone explain.

Simply put: Emerson understood America better than anybody before him—and, so Geldard believes, understood it far better than we as a people do today. Emerson saw America not as some Darwinian scramble for the Main Chance, which is exactly the way many Americans do see it, but as something wholly new: the only country on earth with freedom as its raison d’être and individualism as the natural expression of that freedom.

But that was then and this is now. How, one might ask, could a nineteenth century concept of man’s place in the scheme of things help us today? Emerson lived in an agrarian society of about 23 million people; today we’re an urban society of more than 300 million. In truth, we now live in a world that even the genius of an Emerson could not have imagined.

But Geldard believes that Emerson remains not only relevant but vital to the future of America, especially now that Barack Obama is President. To Geldard, Obama’s election signaled an end to the long winter of our national distemper and a rebirth of the idealism that made both Emerson and America great. We now have a chance, Geldard believes, to regain our credibility among nations and to retake the moral high ground.

No doubt, such a notion would curdle the cream of, say, a modern Tea Partier, and might even bring wistful smiles to those who would if they could wish it true tomorrow. But every good idea has its detractors. Indeed, if the idea is good enough, opposition merely gives it traction, and we as a nation could not help but benefit from revisiting Emerson.

True, some of us in these cynical times might need breathing apparatuses to make the labored climb to Emersonian heights, but, wow, what a view when you get there! In fact, Geldard, who obviously has made the climb often, put it perfectly: “We need a point of observation, that higher platform above the floods of experience.” And with Emerson as your guide, higher is just where you go. What reader could forget the awe with which he first read the great man? And if you still haven’t gotten around to it, begin before sundown today with one of his seminal works, for instance that great essay “Self-Reliance.” You’ll be glad you did.

It’s not Geldard’s intention, perish the thought, to depict Emerson as some flag-waving patriot. What Geldard wants the reader to see is that Emerson’s exceptional high-mindedness is synonymous with the spirit found in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, and is identical to that intuitive presumptuousness with which the Founding Fathers could declare “truths” that they held to be “self-evident.”

That’s Emerson up and down, and his was indeed a transcendent wisdom, for to the idea of freedom and individualism he urged us to see a one-ness in the universe, a connectivity in all things. Say to yourself “I am my neighbor and he is I—literally, not metaphorically—and we’re all in this thing together,” and you’ll be on the right track with Emerson. And if you still need help on this mystical idea, open up Leaves of Grass, by that most American of poets Walt Whitman, who was Emerson’s soul mate. Indeed, the two men together form the beating heart of a latter-day Platonic idealism that Geldard sees as reborn in the election of Barack Obama.

It’s possible, of course, that to modern readers Emerson is (gasp!) passé. If so, more’s the pity, for Geldard, IMHO, is right: Emersonian idealism could refill the sails of our drifting Ship of State and it is tailor-made to rekindle the passions of the socially conscious generation of the 1960s and 70s (provided they can remember where they dropped their banners and are not too arthritic to pick them up).

But even if none of this comes to pass, if it’s all pie-in-the-sky idealism, Geldard’s book is well worth the reading, for it’s virtually impossible to come away from a visit with Emerson without feeling spiritually enriched. In his more mystical reaches, Emerson can be difficult to understand, so take along this book. Geldard’s knowledge—and understanding—of Emerson is second to none, including the inimitable Harold Bloom.

Go also with these sobering words of Emerson as your mantra: “I am here to be worked upon.” You’ll feel better in no time.

Reviewer Robert Lamb is the author of two award-winning published novels and short stories. He is also a freelance writer for the New York Times and Dow Jones.