Un-civilizing

The anniversary of my mother’s death is in seven days. The anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing is in eight, and that of my first brother to die, nine.

This is a difficult time of year for me, compounded by the sheer beauty of the season — even the floods and tornadoes are gorgeous.

But I’m not here to wallow in the contradictions of my own emotions — I’m my mother’s daughter, after all, and the older I get, the wiser I see that she was.

This fact was brought home to me yesterday when a friend told me her husband’s sister had died early that morning. You see, my friend’s sister-in-law — let’s call her Louella — shared my mother’s peculiar wisdom, a wisdom entirely contradictory to everything we Americans have been taught.

The death of Louella wasn’t unexpected. My friend told me several weeks ago that she was terminal as a result of diabetes. What I didn’t know was that she had denied all treatment, and even though she’d been stricken by the absolutely poisonous kind of diabetes that plagues Native American communities, she’d refused drugs, dialysis — even amputation.

Needless to say, her family was in an uproar, and for good reason. When the kidneys fail for a diabetic, dialysis is critical. It may be extremely unpleasant, it may prolong life by only a few short years, but without it, death in a very short time is certain and what precedes that death can be gruelingly predictable: blindness, seizures, dementia, among other things.

She was at peace with the decision. Granted, it could be argued she’d lost her senses, as out of control diabetes and poor renal function can cause a person to think in ways which don’t conform to our expectations. But, although I was stunned when I learned about her refusal of treatment, my immediate response was “Well, I can understand that.”

My understanding didn’t come from being uber-Buddhist or so nihilistic that life means nothing to me. Nor has seeing the ravages of diabetes and kidney failure firsthand, watching people whose legs have been amputated to the hip slowly lose all sense and regress to childishness, not even that is the source of my understanding. My mother did the same thing, you see, and I’ve never faulted her for it. In fact, I feel like I understand completely, and not because I’m suicidal.

I haven’t untangled all my feelings about it, but I do know it has something to do with American willfulness, our determination to beat death, defy the odds, outlive not just ourselves, but everyone else, to have it our way or the highway, and supersized at that. And I suppose my own comparisons of the deaths of my mother and my first brother to die with that of my father, who fought it to the very end, have led me to believe that there’s a profound difference between a will to live and the willfulness to live, dammit.

All of these thoughts have gotten themselves entangled in my crazy personal ruminations about blogging and the state of things and what the hell are we doing to ourselves and the world? kind of thoughts. It started the other day when I read that an exhibit about “an already-existing circuit of food production in a rural community in Mexico” at the San Francisco Art Institute was cancelled because of animal rights activists.

The animals were raised for food, purchased, and professionally slaughtered. In fact, what causes the controversy is that Abdessemed, an artist, entered this exchange, filmed it, and exhibited it.

Here, then, is a case where highly local assumptions about how things are produced have come to inform how the world itself is seen. In general, consumption in the US is fueled by things produced out of sight and from far away. In many cultures, particularly those of the global south including Mexico, the killing of animals for food is often direct and present, not concealed from sight as is the case of industrialized food production here. This distinction is certainly relevant to Don’t Trust Me. Admittedly, this is an uncomfortable confrontation for some, but is nevertheless a real condition not only for animals, but also for the people whose lives are bound up with them. Simply stated, it is an outrage that threats of violence have, in this case, succeeded in derailing a public debate on issues that are critical to our everyday lives.

Highly local — and puritanical — indeed. But is it any different when we fail (or is it refuse) to understand why people living in abject poverty might aspire to even a millimeter of the riches in our bank accounts and refrigerators?

And blogging — wtf? I read the New York Times article about the correlations between death and blogging, and dKos’ limpid front page response to it — not that I’m interested in devoting my time to dKos bashing. But the NYT is right, blogging is an imminently unhealthy activity to engage in — and what does that have to do with the decisions of a group of people to go on strike against dKos?

The disconnects abound. Our own denials about what is, even about the inevitability of death, will be our – well, our death knell. And I find myself thinking that we can go through the motions of eating in the most humane and healthful and sustainable ways possible, and we can talk the talk, but until we really change our minds and upend the culture in our brains, it’s all just hot air. More of the same.

It’s time for a change of mind.