Danielle Levy

It takes Eric, the mail carrier, an hour and a half each way to drive to work. He wishes he could instead spend that time with his family, and even though the drive is becoming expensive given the price of gas, he considers himself lucky. There are 6 people in the station where he works that have commutes longer than his. And never does Eric complain about his heel. The doctor told him the only way to make it stop hurting and stop the damage would be to stop walking, which is of course not possible. Mariza, another mail carrier can’t lift her arms above her head due to the heavy loads she’s been carrying and lifting. She had her hair cut almost to a shave so she wouldn’t have to comb it since she can’t. My neighbor Rachel met a woman at the park who spends most of the day there waiting for her husband who works nearby. They live about 2 hours away and have a small child. By the time he would get home the child would be in bed and not see his father. This way they drive to and from work together and have their family time then, thinking that in the car is better than no family time at all. Sometimes they can even have lunch together. Keena, who works in my dentist’s office, has no car in a city like Los Angeles where public transportation is so inadequate it takes quite a long time to get anywhere. She leaves home with her two young children, takes a bus to drop one off to school, then another to drop the other off to day care, then takes 2 more buses to get to work. The dentist told her it would be fine as long as she wouldn’t get to work later than 10am, but she makes sure she gets there by 9am otherwise her salary would be even smaller. Working people can’t help to be inspiring, ordinary human beings who in order to work do things that are far from ordinary.

I was reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and had reached a place when I thought I ought to give up the book when I came upon the phrase, the impudence of ignorance, words used to describe a character. I perked up. I’d just been listening to some commentary about Representative Akin’s statements on rape and abortion. A perfect fit! Thing is the phrase applies to more than this one incident, it applies to statements made by many in ads or in promoting a given point of view about the deficit, Medicare or taxes. To what appears to be an increasing number of our fellow citizens, positions are not born from facts, they are faith based. With due respect to their freedom of both speech and religion, a faith based position may make sense within a given context but is still based on faith rather than on fact. What evokes one to think of the impudence of ignorance when hearing these statements is that not only do they not acknowledge the role of faith, they also ignore facts. If there is a divergence between faith and facts, shouldn’t the issue of reconciling the two be the responsibility of those who make the statements? Since that’s not likely to be, the responsibility falls on the rest of us to indeed make sure we know the facts. At the risk of sounding cute, I’d suggest that would be a good way to turn impudence into impotence.

The Olympics are over yet still fresh enough for us to be reflective. It’s impossible not to be impressed by the feats one witnessed, by the records that were set, by the achievements of the human body doing things that weren’t thought possible. Each time a record is set, the bar is that much higher, and the challenge that much keener for the next group of athletes. A Los Angeles Times op-ed by Chris Berdik cites research that there may come a time when the human body will have reached its limits and no more records will be set. He suggests that regardless, he for one, will still want to watch the games. I suggest that that will be the time to begin setting new kind of rules, games even. The Olympics highlight physical prowess, but what of our emotional stamina, our psychological endurance, our practice of higher values, our inner essence whether or not we think of it as spiritual. Being human is more than our physical manifestation, it is also our ability to link our inner and outer selves, our capacity for cooperation, self forgetfulness, our needs to go beyond our ego, our capability to include the abstract aspects of who we are. Couldn’t there be games that include a way showing how these can and do prevail, a way to better represent what it means to be human?