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 OTHER
WRITINGS
Following
are samples of columns that Neil Chethik has written for a
variety of newspapers and magazines. All are copyrighted by
Neil Chethik. Contact him if you
wish to reprint or excerpt.
KEEPING SON OUT OF
SCOUTS A TOUGH CALL
By Neil Chethik
I relished being a Scout. Thirty-five years later, I still
remember standing at our full-length mirror, admiring the
crisply ironed Cub Scout slacks, deep-blue cap, and yellow
kerchief. Once a week, I’d wear the ensemble to school
with pride, then join my pack-mates for snacks and adventures.
Through elementary school, I recited oaths, climbed the merit
ladder, and came to love the woods on autumn nights. Under
the command of a couple of den-dads, I learned to kindle a
fire, whittle a stick, tell a story, help a friend.
Given this, I shouldn’t be surprised about the conflict
I felt over a leaflet my first-grade son brought home from
school a few weeks ago. On plain white paper, with a typical
lack of fanfare, it invited my son to become a Cub Scout.
Five years ago, I would have encouraged most any boy to take
up this offer. These days, however – following the decision
by the Boy Scouts of America, which operates the Cub Scouts,
to explicitly exclude gays – I’ve found myself more
cautious. In reaching a decision on whether to enroll my son,
I’ve had to balance my high opinion of the Scouts with
my concern about the impact its no-gays policy might have
on him.
On a purely ethical level, my decision rides on the answers
to two questions: First, is the Scouts’ policy unfairly
discriminatory? And, second, if it is, is that enough for
me to steer my 7-year-old away from an organization that offers
so many apparent benefits?
The first question is the easier one. Do the Scouts unfairly
discriminate? To me, unfair discrimination is bias against
another person based on a characteristic over which that person
does not have control.
The question of whether gay people choose their sexual orientation
is not as clear-cut as whether any of us chooses our race
or national heritage. So I ask myself: Did I choose my sexual
orientation? The answer is no, I didn’t. Gradually, through
my childhood and adolescence, I awakened to a set of sexual
inclinations that only later did I learn were broadly defined
as heterosexual. I have seen no evidence that gay people come
to their orientation in any other way.
Could I have switched my orientation? Sure, I could have forced
myself to try. But I doubt that my basic drives would have
changed much. Instead, I suspect that I would have been miserable,
and frankly perplexed that nature would endow me with such
a compelling way to express love for another human being –
and then demand that I abandon it.
Of course, regardless of whether a gay person has a choice
in his sexual orientation, I wouldn’t want to send my
son into an unsafe environment. I’d want to be sure that
the Scouts had policies and procedures in place to keep child-abusers
and pedophiles away from the children in its charge. But ejecting
all gays is diversionary; the evidence is convincing that
gays are no more likely than heterosexuals to hurt children.
So if I believe the Scouts are unfairly discriminating, should
I still allow my son to participate, if that’s what he
wants? Should I work from the inside for change in the anti-gay
policy? Should I try to be part of a solution?
I have struggled with these questions since receiving that
Scouting leaflet. In the end, however, I find that to give
my son the experience of Scouting, I’d have to risk his
well-being.
I choose to imagine what would happen if my son one day discovered
that he is gay. If he were a Scout at that point, he would
already have gotten the message that he is morally inferior
to heterosexuals. And he’d be faced with a troublesome
choice: Either hide a significant part of himself from the
outside world, or face banishment from his chosen community.
I know I can’t protect my son from everything, but I
find that I can’t set him up for that choice.
Scouting has so much to offer. It’s fun, challenging,
and a great teacher of the values of service, courtesy, and
respect for nature. However, until the Scouts can add inclusion
to its ethical core, I’ll have to find other ways for
my son to experience the pleasure of the pack.
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DOMESTIC VIOLENCE ON THE ROAD
By Neil Chethik
I can’t forget the moment she almost launched herself
from that moving car.
One day last summer, I was driving southbound on one of the
main roads in my hometown. My son and his friend, both five-year-olds,
were in the back seat of my car, laughing and clowning following
an afternoon at a local swimming pool. We were taking my son’s
friend back home.
Suddenly, in the far right lane up ahead, I noticed a man
inching along in a Jeep. It was one of those Jeeps with no
top, no doors, no windows, so I could see the driver clearly
as I approached. He was a big fellow, nearly bald, wearing
a white t-shirt over broad shoulders.
As I passed him on his left, I noticed why he was driving
so slowly: He was talking with a woman on the sidewalk. I
figured that he knew the woman and was checking to see if
she wanted a ride, or that he was asking directions.
When I glanced into my rear-view mirror, however, I saw the
man, who looked to be about 40, abruptly stop the Jeep, scurry
around the back of it, and grab the woman hard by the arm.
As she resisted weakly, he tugged her to the passenger side
of his vehicle, pushed her onto the front seat, and scrambled
around to the driver’s side. Then, with two people on
board now, the Jeep lurched away from the curb and headed
in my direction.
By this time, I was stopped at a red light. I continued to
watch in the rear-view mirror as the Jeep swerved erratically
from the right lane into the center one (my lane) and then
to the lane immediately to my left.
The light changed to green, and as I started my car moving
again, I saw out of my side-view mirror that the Jeep was
approaching fast to the left of me. Because of its weaving
path, I was focused on the vehicle itself, and didn’t
notice, until he passed by my window, that the man in the
t-shirt was pounding on the woman with his right hand as he
struggled to steer the Jeep with his left.
My reaction was instinctive. I started honking my horn. I
kept honking, almost, it seemed, in time with the man’s
steady drumbeat upon the woman. I’m not naive about domestic
violence, but I found it shocking that a man would be pummeling
a woman while traveling 30 miles per hour in an open vehicle
on a busy stretch of one of the busiest roads in Lexington.
The man in the t-shirt apparently realized I was honking at
him, and he slowed his vehicle so it was immediately to the
left of mine. We were both still moving, now in lockstep,
probably at about 25 miles per hour.
It was here that I got my closest look at the woman. She looked
to be in her mid-30s, with dark, almond-shaped eyes, puffy
from tears. She looked at me pleadingly; without a seat belt,
she was able to turn her whole body in my direction. Then
I saw her feet, in brown sandals, slide toward the edge of
the Jeep where the door would have been. For a long moment,
her toes gripped the steel edge of the doorway, and it seemed
that in her desperation, she might actually try to jump out
of her seat.
Then I looked up at the man. His wide eyes were deeply set
in a face full of rage. And that rage now was directed at
me. With expletives deleted, this is the essence of what he
was saying: Stop your car, fella! I want to kick your butt!
At that moment, I remembered that I had two children in the
back seat. And instinct took over again. I twisted the steering
wheel to the right, and at my next opportunity, turned down
a side street, away from the raving man.
“This isn’t the way to my house,” my son’s
friend chirped pleasantly from the backseat. Apparently, wrapped
up in their clowning, the kids had been oblivious to all that
had just occurred – except for the wrong turn. “I
know,” I answered, and I drove, shaken, to the child’s
home.
It’s been six months since the incident. Since then,
I’ve replayed it dozens of times in my head. Though I
usually feel angry and helpless, I don’t second-guess
my decision to steer clear of that Jeep. To expose children
to such an irrationally violent person would have been foolish.
But what if those kids hadn’t been with me? What would
I have done then? What should I have done?
Last week, I posed that latter question to the chief detective
at my local police department’s family-abuse unit. He
told me that no member of the public should ever intercede
in a domestic-violence situation (of which there were 5,850
in Fayette County last year), and that I probably shouldn’t
even have honked my horn.
The most effective thing I could have done, the detective
said, would have been to write down the make, model and license-plate
number of the Jeep, as well as a description of the man, the
woman, and their location. Then, I should have sought out
a pay phone and called 911. In such cases, the detective assured
me, “We respond immediately.”
I’m certainly better prepared for any future incidents
of this kind. But I imagine it’ll be quite awhile before
the image fades of that woman in the Jeep, her dark eyes puffy,
her toes curled in her sandals, as she considered launching
herself from a moving vehicle onto the busiest street in town.
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PREPARING FOR THE DEATH OF A LOVED ONE
By Neil Chethik
How can we prepare for the death of a loved one?
That was among the key questions that drew nearly 20 million
Americans to their television sets last fall to watch Bill
Moyers’ special, “On Our Own Terms.” The six-hour
PBS documentary explored how we imagine dying, how we ready
ourselves for it, and how we actually get it done.
The large audience was good news. On the heels of the huge
success of Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays With Morrie, a book
about the death of Albom’s mentor, it indicates that
we Americans are beginning to face death more directly.
Our long-time aversion to confronting death is understandable.
Nonetheless, it has served not to insulate us from pain, but
to intensify it. By failing to acknowledge that a loved one
is dying, for example, we compromise our ability to bring
our relationship with that person to a graceful close. The
result, too often, is that our normal grief after a death
is aggravated by guilt and regret.
So how can we prepare for the loss of a loved one?
I recently finished writing a book on how sons deal with the
deaths of their fathers. In the process, I was able to ask
this very question of 376 men. How did they prepare themselves
for the loss of their fathers?
Many, of course, did not prepare, or could not. They were
estranged from their fathers, not in regular communication,
or the father died suddenly. But well over half said they
did prepare in some way.
One important preparation strategy involved talking with the
dying person about the death. While less than a third of the
men I surveyed talked with their fathers about the death,
more than 80 percent of those who did reported that it helped
them in recovering from the loss.
How does it help? In talking with his father, a motorcycle
mechanic I interviewed learned for the first time that his
dad was not afraid of death. The father explained how he’d
had a premonition that after death, he’d go through a
“doorway” into eternal acceptance and love. The
son recalled: “When (my father) died, I was sad, yet
I felt a sense of peace knowing that he wanted us to let him
go into that doorway.”
Other sons said talking about the death allowed them to learn
what kind of medical treatment he wanted late in life, what
kind of funeral he wanted, and what he wanted done with his
material possessions. Knowing these wishes, the sons were
able to make decisions in a way that eased their own grieving.
Another method of preparing for a loved one’s death is
to take part in the dying person’s late-life care. The
form of care varied widely in style and duration. Frank Hernandez
offered perhaps the most comprehensive care among the sons
I interviewed. He took his father into his house for the last
two-and-a-half years of the older man’s life.
Frank was thirty-two years old at the time, recently divorced,
the father of two, and less than thrilled to be opening his
home to a man he had not known well for most of his life.
The son felt an obligation, he told me, because in the Hispanic
culture, it is traditional that young people will provide
for elders in need.
For Frank, the job of caring was not a major burden at first.
But after a few months, as his father’s emphysema worsened,
Frank became responsible for feeding, medicating, and even
bathing his father each day. There were many times that he
resented his responsibilities. However, when I met with him
at his suburban St. Louis home eight years after the death,
Frank said he had no regrets: “It was an important period
because I had been away for a few years. I’d kind of
lost fellowship with my father. He was more of a stranger
than a father.... It was a time for me and my dad to get to
know each other again. I value that time we had.”
Shawn Martel also found value in caring for his dad. Shawn’s
father had battled prostate cancer for many months. It was
in the last thirty days of the father’s life that Shawn,
then a 47-year-old college administrator, began visiting his
dad almost daily at the hospital. In his father’s last
twenty hours, Shawn and his older brother stayed at the bedside,
moistening their father’s lips, wiping his forehead,
reminiscing about his life.
Shawn’s father was comatose at the time. But, as the
brothers told stories about the father’s intense work
ethic, his off-beat vacation destinations, his fear of flying,
his love of fishing, and other memories, Shawn sensed that
the dying man was enjoying himself, “and wasn’t
ready to go while the stories were good.”
Shawn said he was with his father until just moments before
the end. “I always had worried how I would react in the
face of death, but I was surprised at the calming effect it
had,” Shawn told me. “I lost some of my own fear
in the process. He died quite peacefully, as far as I saw.
I felt at peace, and I was very, very content that I had been
there.”
In the weeks after the loss, to comfort himself, Shawn would
remember moments from those last days in the hospital: “I’m
very happy about the fact that at one point in his illness,
I kissed the top of his head and told him I loved him. We
didn’t exchange emotions very readily, but I’m glad
I had the opportunity. That was very satisfying and healing.
I would regret it if I hadn’t obeyed that impulse.”
Gary Isikoff, the union official who volunteered at a hospice,
also enjoyed a new kind of affection with his father in the
final days. Gary recalled: “My dad was not a hugger.
The most physical contact we would have was a warm handshake.
A real blessing during that last month in the hospital was
that we both felt more free to display affection. It was unspoken.
I would kiss him on the forehead. I massaged his feet with
lotion. He liked that and so did I. That helped me make a
healing connection to my dad that had been missing since I
was a small child.”
In my survey, more than 90 percent of those who had cared
for their fathers reported that it helped them in their recovery
after the loss.
Perhaps the most important – and most difficult –
preparation for a loved one’s death is ensuring that
one’s relationship with the dying person is complete.
Sometimes, this requires direct expressions of long-held resentments.
The anger is released so the survivor can go on with life
unburdened by it.
Surprisingly, however, many of the men I spoke with found
their peace by expressing not anger, but gratitude.
One son, who had long resented his father for being uninvolved
in the son’s life, wrote a letter to his dying father.
“Dear Dad,” it began, “I understand you did
the best you could. All I want to do is say: Thank you for
being my father.” The two men were able to talk openly
in the father’s dying days, and the son told me he felt
at peace when the death occurred.
“One by one, we die,” Moyers intones in his PBS
show. We can’t predict exactly when death will come,
how it will occur, or what will happen afterwards. But we
can begin to absorb the truth of our mortality, and by acting
out of that truth, enrich the precious time we have.
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WHAT A DIFFERENCE A GENERATION MAKES
By Neil Chethik
Forty years ago, John F. Kennedy prodded America’s conscience
by suggesting that we ask what we could do for our country,
not what it could do for us. In the gleaming January cold,
he called Americans to look beyond their personal needs and
wants, and to engage in the building of great nation.
What a difference a generation makes. As we head into the
home stretch of the 2000 presidential race, the resounding
sound-bite of the campaign is one that’s just a bit less
compelling: Are you better off now than you were eight years
ago? Or, translated into voter-ese: What’s in it for
me?
Perhaps in these flush times for America, we should remind
ourselves of the state of the rest of the world. According
to the AFL-CIO, the assets of the three richest people on
Earth exceed the total annual incomes of the 600 million
people living in the world’s 48 poorest countries. In
other words, if you pooled the resources of the least fortunate
10 percent of the human population, it probably wouldn’t
match that of Bill Gates and a couple of his right-hand men.
This is no statistical aberration. In 1960, according to the
U.N., the wealthiest one-fifth of the world’s people
– that includes me, and probably you – earned $30
for every $1 earned by the poorest one-fifth; by 1997, that
disparity had grown to $74 to $1. Today, while America battles
obesity, 800 million people in the world are undernourished.
We haven’t heard word one about this from those who would
lead the free world in the new century. They’re betting
their political lives – not to the actual lives of a
good many fellow humans in far-away lands – that American
voters don’t care what’s happening beyond their
bank accounts.
Let’s prove the candidates wrong.
The U.S. is not a theocracy, but it has a religious base.
Most of us say we believe in God. Even those who supported
President Clinton’s policies were offended by his obvious
breach of personal morality.
But religion is not only about personal morals; it’s
about collective ones as well. Every religion I know of has
a social-justice mission. Even for us non-Christians, perhaps
the key question in this campaign should not be, Are you better
off?, but rather, What would Jesus do?
It seems obvious what Jesus would do if he were wandering
the globe on his 2000th birthday. And it wouldn’t
be to crusade for tax cuts for the wealthy, or even for the
American middle class.
With Tiger Woods-like intensity, Jesus would urge us all toward
lives of dignity.
For those of us in the top one-fifth in wealth in the world,
dignity implies a certain moderation in lifestyle. I’m
not suggesting that he’d ask us to take vows of poverty.
But he’d certainly point out the fallacy of our more-is-better
doctrine, and ask us to ask ourselves: What is enough?
Then, with our financial “surpluses” – or with
the time we freed by not pursuing a more-than-enough lifestyle
– we could do as Jesus always did, and surely would again:
search for suffering, and help to end it.
I know, we’re never going to end suffering. We should
acknowledge that fact going in. But we don’t have to
let it paralyze us.
We can think of ourselves as relay racers. Our activist predecessors,
including Jesus, ran their leg of the race, and passed the
baton to us. Now it’s our turn to run. Eventually, we
will tire, and pass the baton to the next generation. Our
obligation is not to succeed; it is simply to participate.
John F. Kennedy had only a short time in office, and yet his
legacy is enormous. That’s because he called us toward
our better selves. He asked us to count our blessings and
strengthen our country. It’s time for a new leader who
will challenge Americans to raise the stakes even higher –
to look at the whole world, and ask what we can do for it.
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