The Limits Of Empathy

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This blog attempts to capture my attitude toward the state of our country in 2019.  I first began to think about the country's demise in 1980, when Reagan was elected president.  My greatest fear with ultra-conservative policies is that they ultimately lead to a nationalistic, narrow-minded state that ceases to progress and thrive, when compared with much of the rest of the world.  Its evolution is slowed and even reversed.

Now, almost forty years later, we face that dilemma.  Despite all of the great things that individuals and organizations do, the country is run by a handful of ultra-conservatives who tweet, lie, and damage relationships with our allies.  In 1980, I gave the country 150 years of remaining life.  Because we still have the same dismal voting habits that we had in 1980, when only 52.8% of voting-age people actually voted, that trend has certainly not been reversed.

Ultimately this blog is about the actions I choose to take in a country that refuses to take action in so many things.  We choose what we deserve, and we deserve what we choose.

Venting On Facebook

For the most part, I don't listen or pay attention to political news.  When there is a newsworthy story, such as a hurricane's path and destruction, I watch a small portion of what's on TV--just to get the facts.  I read the top ten headlines of the New York Times once or twice a week, and occasionally I read their editorials, when they appear to have a unique perspective.  That is increasingly less frequent; it's difficult to say anything new about the state of this country, except that it is much closer to being a plutocracy--government by the wealthy--than a functional democracy.

I have an average number of Facebook "friends."  These are people with whom I actively stay in touch.  People with lots and lots of FB friends are invariably teachers, who really have connected with many hundreds of their students and stayed in touch with them, or artists, including many musicians, who are in the business of meeting hundreds of fans and professional contacts.  Some people use FB to accumulate acquaintances and thus have many hundreds of "friends," but that seems pointless to me.  Once or twice a year, I winnow my list by removing those who no longer use FB or with whom I've had no contact for ages.

In the last couple of years I've winnowed the list (or at least "hidden" the posts) for another reason: friends' non-stop indignation concerning the state of the country.

I check my Facebook news feed about twice a day. I want to hear about people's lives, including seeing all the food, baby, dog, cat, wedding and vacation photos they care to post.  All of that stuff is still interesting to me--Karen's trip to South Africa, Jack's raspberry harvest, Ken's new grandchild, Becky's new rescue dog.  I like the exchange of milestones and accomplishments, no matter how small or insignificant they may seem to others.  Those little things (and sometimes very big things, like George building a barn!) represent what people have done, what they've accomplished or hope to accomplish.  And in all of those things, there is joy!

But some of my friends can't resist posting several comments a day expressing their indignation over the current, highly-dysfunctional federal government.  It seems to me that these posts amount to nothing more than a daily dose of complaining--venting to the gods.  They are not only preaching to the choir over and over and over again, but their complaints accomplish the opposite of what they intend.  They don't unite people; they drive people away by desensitizing them.  Who really enjoys listening to so much angst?

My friend, Keith Taylor, is a world-class cartoonist in Chicago.  He has filled many sketchbooks with his political cartoons in the last few years.  His cartoons are funny, brilliantly-drawn, topical, creative, and spot-on with the day's news.  It seems to me that his efforts unite people, for they are interesting, concise, and funny.  He's sort of the Dan Rather of cartoonists.  Oh, and by the way, Keith and I have never actually met.  We share so many FB friends from the University of Illinois that he and I simply became friends by default many years ago.  I appreciate his contribution to my life each day.

That's the thing.  When you post something to Facebook that boils down to how indignant you are, does that really contribute to anyone's life, after you've already posted something like it twenty times?  Occasionally we all post things that reflect our sadness or disappointment or grief.  I've done it when my dogs have died.  We want connection with others in those times, support from people who understand.  And yet, we don't complain about a dead dog, or even a dead person, for weeks and weeks on end--even though they're still dead.  In fact, we begin posting good memories very soon after the tragedy, and we look forward to better times and plan how we're going to accomplish them.  Constant indignation does none of that.

There is, however, one interesting thing about viewing so many anti-administration posts from friends: I have a clearer idea of whose lives are filled with angst by choice.  Don't get me wrong; I think the current administration is the worst in my lifetime and maybe in the history of the country.  But I choose joy and action over angst.

Sympathy vs. Empathy

For every political post I see in one day (and there are probably only 10 or so), I am forever amused by the responses from my friends' friends (which may number one hundred a day).  "Oh, I know!  I'm so depressed!"  "I cry each day over this."  "It's the worst I've ever seen."  I read only a small portion, because I know the gist of most of the comments.  I don't read these comments for the content; I honestly read them for my amusement.

The indignation is so rampant and so unoriginal that it has accomplished an amazing thing.  It has moved my attention away from the original story line--whatever daily travesty the administration has committed--to being distracted by the daily circus of reactions.  And in that refocusing of my attention, I've found out a deep-rooted truth about life: there are limits to empathy.

If you look up the definitions of "sympathy" and "empathy," two words often used interchangeably (and incorrectly) by people, you'll find a simple comparison: sympathy is when you care about another person's suffering, while empathy is when you feel it.  (A third word, pity, is when you simply acknowledge another person's suffering.)  I recognize that I've backed away from being too empathetic, because that has some real pitfalls.  Truth be told, I mostly feel sympathy for the plight of others, not empathy.

There are really two types of empathy, but only one is useful.  The other one is easy to fall into, but it complicates and clogs a person's heart until that person is almost nonfunctional (and dysfunctional).  My mother was like that.  If she saw news of a disaster, she would get terribly distraught, and for many years I thought she had a good sense of empathy--feeling the pain of others.  But then I understood it one day: she was experiencing the disaster as if it had happened to her, losing sight of the fact that it had really happened to someone else!  She was projecting her own fears, feeling her own pain, not the pain of others, and she was sitting in front of the TV for hours to feed that quest for personal suffering.

That's the difference between the two types of empathy.  With one type, you feel the pain as if it's happening to you; with the other type, you're focused on trying to understand another person's pain.  Empathy can be selfish or selfless.  My mother's empathy was not selfless.

During 9/11 in 2001, my empathy was so strong for the people in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington D.C. that it was a devastating experience for me.  It was easy to feel the selfless form of empathy, because it was almost impossible to imagine it happening to myself.  I didn't cry for me and my family; I cried for others who had lost loved ones.  That is in stark contrast to what I feel now.  As a country, we've gotten ourselves into this situation by expecting sympathy from the rest of the world without returning (or deserving) it in kind.  We have cosied up to dictators and alienated our friends.  The current policies of this country are to try to win the sympathy game, allowing only a small portion to "trickle down" to how we treat immigrants and foreign cultures.  The "trickle down" policy doesn't work with economics, and it doesn't work with sympathy either.

Voting For Colonel Sanders

A good friend of mine has a term for those who buy into the administration's rhetoric: it's like the chickens voting for Colonel Sanders.  This is not applicable to the wealthy Americans who still vote Republican, because they still abide by those ideals and will be the last to feel losses.  I respect their conservative fiscal values and even agree with a few--like free trade.  But the middle and lower classes will suffer more and more, as our nationalistic policies continue.  And that's where sympathy comes in.

I have discovered that at least 90% of why I am a progressive is that I am naturally sympathetic toward others' plights.  I care deeply about voting rights and untainted elections and a woman's right to choose and climate change and accessible, affordable health care and our national education system and a free press.  I am empathetic in special circumstances, like feeling the pain of immigrants and transgender people who strive for nothing more than freedom and equality.  If I were, instead, to focus 100% of my attention on my own life, I wouldn't even vote!  What would be the point?  What would I ever gain except more wealth?

I am convinced that most people who vote for the far-right agenda do so from habit, peer pressure, fear, religious affiliation, and/or ignorance.  Probably a large portion of those people are single-issue voters.  The far-right made abortion the primary issue in the 1980's and 1990's.  Then the single issue became the economy, after the Dotcom crash, and now it has turned to the issue of immigration.  Perhaps in the next decade there will be a backlash against technology, as low-income people--those whose wages are mostly stagnant--can no longer afford all of the newest technological advances, nor find jobs that haven't been replaced by technology or China.

Progressives tend to not focus on single issues, but see a much broader spectrum of issues, and most of those issues are in the context of how other people will be affected, not necessarily themselves.  Progressives usually don't think about how life will be easier for themselves if things change; they think about how life will be easier for other people--how those in poverty will have health care, how young parents will be able to afford college for their kids, how countries on other continents will survive climate changes.

I don't like the current approach to public education, but it hardly affects me.  I'm not ever going back to school, so if schools are privatized, what does it matter in my life?  If abortion were to become illegal, it would not impact how I live.  If Medicare and Social Security were reduced or eliminated, we'd sell our home and live on the proceeds and our retirement savings in a much less expensive area, but we'd be fine.  In fact, we have the financial means to ignore climate change, trade wars with China and Europe, all of the destructive decisions of a conservative Supreme Court, and all of the nationalistic bigotry that is rampant in the United States.  We have the means to ignore all of the crap promoted by our current federal government and move to another country.

But most people don't have the means to make such sweeping, immediate changes in their lives.  And yet, a large portion of those people are careless in how they vote for their leaders, as if they could withstand any stupid decisions those leaders might make.  Where over 90% of eligible voters exercise that right in Australia, fewer than 55% do the same in this country.  Australians have learned how to vote; Americans haven't.

It's easy to become myopic if you're in a family that is poor and without opportunities.  It's easy to be swayed by bigotry, if it promises you something more than you have.  It's easy to be the chicken who is voting for a Colonel Sanders who promises a roomier coop, ignoring the man with the axe who will eventually show up.

The Loss of Empathy

For the first time ever, more than 100 women were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2018 elections.  That still is less than 25% of the 435 sitting House members, but it shows some progress in our country, although the progress has been incredibly slow.  The country had no women in the House of Representatives for 141 years, and it took another 101 years for women to top the 20% mark!  At that rate, it will take another 150 years for half of the House to be women, which would be a truer representation of our country's population.

I often laugh when conservatives deride progressives for their "radical" ideas, as if those desired changes are too sudden, too extreme and too unthinkable.  The reality is that none of those changes is sudden; they all have a history of gradual evolution through decades of ignorance and rejection, followed by a growing awareness, empathy and capitulation.  For more than half the life of this country, having women in the U.S. Congress was considered a radical idea, and now it would be a radical idea if there were none.

But to get from the state of empathy to acceptance of an idea, something strange has to happen.  I'm convinced that changes finally happen when there is a general loss--or at least a general dulling--of empathy, followed by a groundswell of real action.  It's almost counter-intuitive, but it's true.  Empathy leads to inaction.  One's daily dose of angst (and a prayer or two) is simply enough for most people.  Until it isn't.  Until the issue affects them personally.

As an example, the country is in the middle of its empathetic phase regarding climate change.  Non-believers of climate change may have sympathy for victims of drought, frequent "hundred-year" hurricanes, devastating forest fires and massive floods, and their donations and prayers are plentiful--and they may even feel empathy.  But as all of those conditions worsen, the importance of empathy and prayer pales next to the need for action and change.  Right now there is a surfeit of sympathy and empathy, but slowly people are tiring of that habit and turning to action.

In a wonderful conversation with a good friend, he told me, "I simply don't care any more," and I knew exactly what he meant, because we had already discussed the state of the nation on previous occasions.  I have reached the point of not allowing myself to care as much as I did.  For several decades my personal motto has been "you choose what you deserve and you deserve what you choose."  The country chose the current administration, and the country deserves it.  The citizens of many other countries have made wiser, more conscientious choices, with much higher voter participation.  According to many metrics, their lives are better, and so they deserve that as well.

The average "middle-class" family in the United States is likely to experience stagnant wages, low personal savings, high debt, drastic climate events, uncertain health care benefits, high childcare costs, exposure to drug addiction, and an ever-growing distance from their dreams.  And yet, equivalent to the effects of chickens voting for Colonel Sanders, they continue to elect politicians who oppose raising the minimum wage, passing climate change laws, regulating the pharma industry, enacting common-sense gun laws, reducing education and childcare costs, and providing healthcare for all.

I used to agonize over such illogical views.  I know the fossil fuel industry prevents politicians from passing climate change laws, just as the NRA prevents those politicians from passing gun-control laws, but why do people keep voting for those politicians if they disagree with their policies?  Why does a middle-class family support elected officials who do very little for them?  The answer is complex but also obvious.  Inaction and believing in the status quo is a lot easier than action and changing the status quo.  As long as you have empathy and contribute a little money and prayer, you don't need to do anything else!  You feel you've done your fair share.

Oh, and there's one more huge reason why people so affected by destructive policies don't change how they vote: tradition.  In general, they believe that, if the system was good enough for their parents, it's good enough for them.  If they and their parents have always voted for a particular political party, it is extremely difficult to buck tradition, even if that party has changed and most of the policies they used to support are championed by the "other" party now.

While visiting friends in Germany in May, 2019, I had a very interesting conversation with our hosts, when they explained to me how the German political system works.  Vaguely speaking, they have six political parties--the far left, the mostly left, the center left, the center right, the mostly right, and the far right (each party has an ambiguous name that I still can't remember).  I asked which party they support, and their emphatic answer was that they don't support a particular party; they support specific candidates with whom they most agree.  In one election they might vote for a mostly left candidate, and in the next election they might vote for the center right candidate.  Because there are so many parties, Germans are less tied to the tradition of voting for one party, come hell or high water.  Their debates center on candidates and issues, not parties and ideologies.  If they are against nationalistic bigotry, for example, that might rule out two of the parties, but there are still candidates from four other parties who might be attractive to them.

With a two-party system, you are almost forced to be tied to one political party in America, although more and more people are identifying themselves as Independents now.  I like that idea of being an Independent.  In addition to a gradual political shift, more and more people (if comments on Facebook are any indication) are gradually becoming dissatisfied with the habits of empathy and much more interested in action.  To paraphrase one friend, "Screw empathy.  When's the election?"

The reading on my "empathy meter" probably started to decline about twenty years ago, although the decline of America certainly began many years before that, coinciding with voter apathy.  As fewer people vote, I become less and less empathetic.  If people don't care about themselves and their families enough to choose who represents them and leads the country, I have reached my limits of empathy for them when their lives are in turmoil.

Between 1840 and 1908, eligible voter turnout in the United States was always over 65%.  (Just remember that this was before automobiles and mail-in ballots!)  A century later, in 2016, voter turnout was down to 55.5%.  There was a huge 5-point drop between 1968 and 1972, as voters soured on all politicians during Vietnam and Watergate, and turnout dipped to 55.1%.  The turnout has not revived in almost 50 years, although the mid-term elections of 2018 may hold a silver lining.  At 53.4%, it was the highest mid-term election turnout since 1914--and it was 11.5% higher than mid-terms in 2014!

I like to compare America's voter turnout with that of Australia.  Since the 1920's, voting has been compulsory in Australia, but the penalty for not voting (and not submitting a reasonable excuse) is only $20 for a national election.  Voting is made to be fun in Australia.  Elections are always held on a Saturday, and most communities hold barbecues and parties on an election day.  As one Australian responded to a New York Times article, “Voting in Australia is like a party.  There’s a BBQ at the local school.  Everyone turns up.  Everyone votes.  There’s a sense that: We’re all in this together. We’re all affected by the decision we make today.”

If only America were like Australia!

The Arc Of Suffering

For many, many years I truly agonized over every event that impacted a woman's right to choose--the appointment of every Supreme Court justice or law passed by a conservative state or fake propaganda espoused by the "pro life" movement, most of whose supporters are pro capital punishment also.  As more and more countries passed "pro choice" laws, clearly separating church and state, America chose to regress.  In a May, 2019 Gallup poll, the country was split about 50/50 between "pro choice" and "pro life," but it's revealing that men now exceed women as being "pro choice"!  (Both genders are very heavily "pro choice" for people under 30 years old.)

The issue of abortion rights is one of many about which I have lost interest and become much less empathetic.  I will continue to vote, contribute money, and voice my opinions about those issues, but I have stopped agonizing over them.  I have stopped watching 99% of the political content on TV.  I have unfriended or hidden the posts from all far-right acquaintances on social media.  I get my news updates from the New York Times and some public television and CNN broadcasts (although I sneak peaks at the Washington Post and Reuters).  I have reached my limits of empathy for people I don't know, and I have increased my interactions and empathy for people I know well.

As my friend implied when he said that he's ceased to care, I cared for a long time while I waited for the chickens to not re-elect Colonel Sanders, and now it's up to them to get themselves out of the coop.  When the people of this country decide that voting is more important than rolling the dice, perhaps I will experience a return of empathy.  As he and I agreed, the best thing we can do now is take care of ourselves and our families.  Make sure our affairs are in order.  Save enough money to move to higher ground when the seas rise.

What will really change the country is when a LOT more people begin to suffer significantly.  The subject of medical costs is a good example of how people will be changed by the arc of suffering.  Unless we adopt a national policy that health care for all is a good thing, as many other countries have done, fewer and fewer people will be able to afford the high health care costs.  That's simple math.  Health costs are going up much faster than wages.  How high must they go before too many people are uninsured and suffering too much?

That's what I call the "arc of suffering"--when a problem gets worse and worse and, finally, affects too many people.  It's at the root of my lack of empathy, and it can be applied to many issues we have as a nation (and as a world).  The further along the arc, the more likely I am to withhold some of that empathy and act independently of others.

Choosing Action

When my Mom became more and more addicted to her indignation and TV viewing habits, which was her form of social media, I vowed to never be that way.  We can't make perfect choices to disengage from propaganda and engage in actions, but we can make good choices.  Over the last fifteen years, my wife and I have made decisions to mitigate some of the threats of growing old in a non-voting country.  Here's what we're doing and have done, together and separately:

• We learned how to save and invest our money.  I spent a couple of years studying how to invest and have always minimized risk.  In short, we are conservative but active investors.  Since we depend on our money helping us through old age, we pay attention to what we're doing with it.

• We've become as fully insured for the future as we can afford to be.  We don't have gold-plated policies, but we have good policies and have tried to insure for the worst cases.  Each type of insurance required research to find a good policy, which was our commitment to action.  Medical, dental, vision, homeowner, earthquake, umbrella, automobile, dog medical, long-term care.  Yup, we have them all.  Over-insured?  Probably.  Under-stressed?  Definitely.

• We stopped reading, watching, and listening to almost all political media.  We still watch some of the debates, and, as stated, I get my news from the New York Times, Reuters, and NPR News mostly.

• We vote by mail, and we ALWAYS vote.  For California ballot issues and political offices, we read the excellent analyses written by good friend, Michael Rosenthal, who spends many hours researching each issue and candidate and then writes a document with his choices and reasons for them.  We don't always agree with Michael, but I appreciate that he does exhaustive research and cuts through the fake news.  (Let me know if you want to be on his mailing list.)

• We recycle all political mail, without reading it.  There are good reasons why other countries have very short political campaigns.  Political mail dulls the masses.  It may be the biggest reason why people don't vote!

• We choose our friends wisely.  It used to be that a person who favored a different political party than I do was simply someone who had different opinions, and I could live with that.  But that's changed.  A person who supports the current administration now has different values than I do, and that has driven us apart.  Life is too short to willingly let someone else's values impact mine.  Where compromise is not possible, neither is conversation.  Seriously, I have the same feeling about people who support this president as I would have had living in Nazi Germany, for people who supported Hitler.  Where there is no morality in office, I have no respect for those who support immorality.

• I now work (at my leisure) with an organization called Vote Forward.  I write letters to encourage and help register people to vote.  For each letter, I add to Vote Forward's boilerplate, address the envelope, add the stamp, and mail it.  A person must commit to do at least five letters a month to be part of VF, and each letter takes about 3-4 minutes.  Currently I'm doing 30 letters per month.  It's my small way to be part of the one thing that will save this country--voting.

• We contribute money to organizations we believe in, with an emphasis on the environment, the arts, animal welfare, social justice, and feeding people.  If a non-profit doesn't use at least 70% of our contribution for the intended purpose, we don't contribute to them.

• We sign petitions to change things.  We have no idea if those petitions do any good, in the end.

• Finally, we volunteer where we can, especially in our little townhouse community.  If you have the time (i.e., don't work and don't have kids), then there are thousands of ways you can add to the lives of other people.

We are not model citizens.  We could do a lot more, I'm sure.  We have carved out a life where we are not constantly distracted by the endless, pointless cycles of empathy and inaction, because we realize that there are limits to empathy.  We are fortunate to have many, many friends, and we cultivate friendships with people who have similar values.  That, in turn, makes it easier to be empathetic.

The values of probably 30% of the people in this country are much more foreign to me than the values of all the immigrants who come here--immigrants who often make my world a better place.  It is for them I feel true empathy.

Sue

Sue and Steve in Rockford, Ill., circa 1958

My mother loved to exaggerate.  She was the Renoir, Picasso, and Dali of her art form.  She fibbed, she embellished, she imagined, she went to great lengths in telling her story. That is what I most fear in writing my sister's eulogy: exaggerating the tales of an unbelievable life.

Susan Sara Cowan died at 2:11 pm on Wednesday, October 23, in Tucson, Arizona, after a short illness--or, rather, the culmination of several long illnesses.  She was in hospice care and knew little if anything about her situation.  She had broken both of her hips in the previous month and had had two surgeries, and her body had finally closed down after the second one, after years of fighting epilepsy, schizophrenia, and advancing dementia.

Over the last five decades I have related some of Sue's adventures to friends, but I've never told the whole story.  I will try to minimize the boring details and not exaggerate details that are, in reality, difficult to fathom.  I am sure to leave parts out that I've forgotten, but I still recall most of what she did in her life.

Sue led the most unusual, singular life I've ever known.  See if you don't agree.

Early Years

Sue was a tomboy.  Being only eleven months younger than I, she grew up almost in my shadow.  We were always together, and my friends just accepted her as one of the guys.  She was very good at baseball, basketball, and touch football.  She threw a ball right-handed, but kicked a football left-footed.  Our father had forced her to be right-handed, but her ambidexterity helped her throughout life.  She and I were constantly together.  When we couldn't play outdoors, we created our own games, collected baseball cards, played chess, read childhood mysteries, and tormented our dogs, Buddy and Peppy.

Just a day after Sue turned nine and three weeks before I turned ten, we met our half-brother, Mike, for the first time!  The photo below was taken in our backyard, probably on September 5, 1959.  Mike was nineteen and going to college in Detroit, and we adored him.  Sue and I are wearing our summer baseball uniforms from the Walker Wildcats, the neighborhood team my mother organized.

Sue and I grew up in a fairly poor family, although we always had enough food and clothing.  We shared a room together until our family moved to a larger house in Rockford just before she turned ten, in 1960.  Regardless of where we lived, Sue had very few friends except for my friends.  When I renewed contact with my best friend from childhood, Len Schmeltzer, in 2019, he recalled Sue as being "pretty and feisty."  That was Sue.

An average student, Sue was often criticized by her teachers as "not applying herself"--not trying her best.  My grades in school set too high of a standard for her to match, and perhaps her feistiness came from her wish to be recognized on her own merits.  Of course, none of the kids knew she had learned to play chess at age 5.

Teenage Years

One day Sue and I were playing basketball in our family driveway, when she crouched down as if she were dizzy.  She had to pause for several minutes before we continued playing.  She was about thirteen years old, to my best recollection.  It was her first epileptic seizure--not a grand mal seizure but a rare form of epilepsy where the seizure only occurs inside the brain.  Years later Sue described it as "two great armies having a battle" in her head.

Sue did not tell anyone about the seizures for over three years.  In fact, she had self-diagnosed it by the time she told our mother.  Sue had had bacterial meningitis when she was a baby, and she thought that had led to the epilepsy as a teenager.  Regardless of the cause, Sue's personality changed almost immediately.  She became much more intense and began doing things by herself, not being tempted to follow in my footsteps any longer.  Our parents imagined that she was a rebellious teenager, but I knew there was something else going on with Sue.

My first memory of Sue after the onset of her epilepsy was a day when she came home from school and told us that they'd studied the Declaration of Independence in social studies class.  She then proceeded to recite the entire Declaration, without notes.  It was astounding (and somewhat irritating to my parents).  Sue had a good memory, but not that good.  The epilepsy had changed her brain to be able to recall everything--not a photographic memory, but a complete memory.  It also made her a quieter person, because she couldn't understand her seizures and wanted to hide them.

Over the next five or six years, until our father died when Sue was eighteen, she carved out a pattern of living that stayed with her until she died.  When she found something that interested her, she'd focus on it intently for the joy of personal accomplishment, and ultimately she'd abandon it, when she knew she could master it.  This pattern played out in many ways during her teenage years.  Here's what I recall about those activities:

• When Sue was eleven, our father taught her to play golf.  I had already been playing for a year, and she wanted to join Dad and me on our weekend golf outings.  In the winters we would go bowling with our father, but in the spring that would switch to golf--and we played a lot of golf together.  Without any formal lessons, Sue got really good, and she won two city-wide women's golf tournaments for her age group.  She stopped playing when she was sixteen.

• Sue was about thirteen or fourteen when she got her first guitar as a birthday gift.  She already loved folk music, especially Peter, Paul and Mary albums.  Quickly she taught herself how to play guitar; her finger-picking abilities were extraordinary, and she learned to play most of their songs.  She also played the music of Donovan, Eric Andersen, Phil Ochs, and Judy Collins.  By the time she was sixteen, she began performing in school talent shows and the area coffeehouse, Heather on the Moor.  Her singing was not great, but her guitar-playing was superb.

• Sue always loved to read, but after her first epileptic episodes she began reading the family's encyclopedia.  She'd pick out one of the volumes, open it, and start reading.  This led to a game we started playing with our good friend, Jill Meyer, during summer break.  We composed our own Jeopardy! boards and tailored the format for three people, each giving answers and asking questions.  I'd give a clue from my board, and Sue and Jill would race to answer it.  Then Sue would give a clue from her board, and Jill and I would compete, etc.  We'd play our game in the morning and spend the afternoon creating our boards for the next day.

• When I was sixteen and Sue was fifteen, we wandered into a used bookstore called "The A" and met the owner, Paul Anderson.  "The A" stood for "The Arts."  Paul had already graduated from college and had opened his eclectic bookstore with thousands of his own books.  He always had classical music tapes playing and two or three chessboards set up in the store.  He sold his books and anything legal that a hippie might buy--posters, beads, pipes, incense.  We were beyond captivated and spent many, many hours there with Paul.  Sue and Paul played chess continually, and Sue set aside her encyclopedic reading for serious books.  She tore through Faulkner and Hemingway and Wolfe, Shakespeare and Pinter and Beckett, Plath and Whitman and Eliot.  Paul introduced Sue to Bertrand Russell's writings, and Sue dove into philosophy, devouring the books of Nietzsche and Kant and Schopenhauer.

Sue didn't do anything half-way.  She didn't dabble.  If something interested her, she dove in, much to the detriment of her school studies and social life.  She refused to follow anyone's lead unless it was in something she was totally interested.  That was part of the pattern for the rest of her life.

New York City

Sue never considered going to college.  She said it would slow her down, that she could teach herself much faster than a college professor could.  My father learned that he was terminally ill the week that Sue graduated from high school in 1968, and he spent most of his remaining time in the hospital, so he didn't encourage her to go to college.

Not knowing what she wanted to do, Sue opened her own little bookstore in Rockford the summer of 1968.  Called The Book Nook, it carried only the classics.  She had few customers, which was fine with her, because it gave her more time to read.  Sue closed her bookstore a couple of months after our father died in December, 1968.  She took her two guitars and headed for Greenwich Village in about February, 1969, when she was eighteen years old.

I don't know why Sue chose New York, because she could more easily have chosen Chicago for her folk singing endeavors.  I think she wanted to totally get away from Illinois and live on her own.  She found a tiny apartment on Jane Street in the West Village, and she quickly located all coffeehouses within walking distance.  She began playing at Cafe Feenjon and The Olive Tree Cafe.

She lived over a decade in New York City, interrupted by a month in San Francisco in the late 1970's.  Here's a synopsis of her activities:

• Sue did continue to play her two Martin guitars and even began writing songs.  She played in coffeehouses and busked on the streets for spare change.

• Sue's first job in New York City was working as a taxicab driver.  She liked the work because she could "check out" a cab any time of day or night and drive as long as she wished.  She was initially told to not drive outside Manhattan, but her first fare asked her to drive out to JFK Airport, and he'd give her directions!  She made it to the airport and back within an hour, with two fares and $40 in tips!

• Soon after arriving in Greenwich Village, she met an older man named Yonnel, who ran a chess studio.  Sue dove into studying chess, which came very quickly to her, since she could easily memorize historic chess games.  At one point I asked her how many chess games she had committed to memory, and she said, "Oh, about 10,000."  I asked her to show me some, and she did.  She would quickly move through a game by Capablanca or Tal or Fischer.  (She actually played Bobby Fischer a couple of times in Greenwich Village coffeehouses, always playing to a draw!)  Sue specialized in "speed" chess--playing three- or five-minute games against an opponent and a clock, often for money.  When I visited her in the summer of 1970, we spent a lot of time in chess studios.

• For steady work Sue got a job as a typesetter at a small publishing company.  That allowed her to set her own hours and work at her own speed.  As a manual typesetter she was also allowed to do the work of a copy editor, fixing typos and grammatical errors.  That was right up Sue's alley, because she was already an expert in grammar and word usage.

• Sue did write some songs, which were fair, but her main writing interest was fiction.  She wrote part of a novel, called "The Book," and sent a couple chapters to me.  It was a combination of fiction and philosophy, and it was very well written.  The book posed some very interesting questions.  What would happen if you answered a knock on your door one day, only to find a book left there that was the script of your entire life?  How much of it would you read?  Would you finish it?  The novel confronted those questions.

• Sue was "mugged" multiple times while in New York City, so she decided to take up karate to defend herself.  She chose the Shorei Kan system in the Okinawan Goju-Ryu karate tradition.  Goju-Ryu stands for "hard soft".  Sue achieved second-degree black belt in four years of work.  Her sensei was the founder of Shorei Kan karate, Seikichi Toguchi, shown in this photo:

• Sue was asked by her sensei if she would accompany him to Okinawa to give a demonstration at an international karate exhibition.  While there, she was given private instruction in Okinawan weapons at a Buddhist monastery.  She was also given a special invitation to lead a karate calisthenics class at the U.S. Marine Base.  The Marines thought it would be easy and even laughed at the prospect of a woman leading their calisthenics, until she explained that the first exercise would be fifteen push-ups done on fingertips, each push-up four minutes long.  She told me the last Marine dropped out after about twenty minutes, and she alone finished the hour.  Everyone paid attention to her after that. 

• When Sue returned to New York from Okinawa, she concentrated on Okinawan weapons kata (exercises).  There were six weapons (bo, tonfa, sai, kama, nunchacku, and one other I don't recall), and she became a black belt in each one.  Okinawan weapons were derived from old farm implements.  She would practice in Washington Square Park, and I would watch her when I visited.  In fact, lots of people watched her run through her exercises, and only one person attempted to disarm her, thinking she was only for show.  She bonked him hard on the shoulder, and he ran off.  Below are photos of Sue practicing three different types of weapons—tonfa, sai, and bo.

• As Sue got better and better in karate and weapons, she decided to offer private instruction to students.  All sessions were done in Washington Square Park, where you could find people playing guitars, playing chess, doing drug deals, or enjoying a comfy park bench.  Here's the business card that Sue had made to advertise her services:

• In the mid-1970's, Sue determined that she needed more physical exercise, so she began running long distances.  She'd do loops around Washington Square Park's eight square blocks, often running six or eight miles.  She did this almost every day.

• Studying was always Sue's main focus.  Between her chess and karate phases, she mostly stayed in her tiny apartment and read books.  On one visit, I noticed that friends of hers would bring food and books, so she didn't have to leave her apartment.  She taught herself enough to read books "in their original form," which meant that she could read in Hebrew, Aramaic, and German, in addition to English.  At her most intense period of studying, she was reading five books a day!  I witnessed that this was pretty easy for her.  During this phase in her life, she told me that studying was the only thing that ever gave her true enjoyment in life--and she could be studying anything.
  

• For light recreation, Sue earned some extra money by composing chess problems for various magazines.  The harder the chess problem, when verified by masters, the more money she'd make.  She'd typically do the "White mates in three moves" problems, but occasionally she'd do a "White mates in four moves" gem.  A couple times she showed me her all-time favorite chess problem done by someone else--"White mates in eight moves!"

Of the several times I visited Sue in New York, she always lived alone in a small apartment.  She was primarily asocial; she didn't have time for other people, although she enjoyed my occasional visits.  We would typically talk for several hours without a break.  We might talk about mathematical puzzles, chess problems, classical music, our parents and childhood memories, her noisy neighbors.  All we needed was some coffee and floor space to weave a conversation that lasted all afternoon or evening.

When I think of my visits and our marathon chats, the photo below is iconic for many reasons.  Sue smoked her entire life, from when she was 18, and her drink of choice, if not coffee, was Pepsi.  Her only source of entertainment was a radio and cassette player.  The radio was usually tuned to the local classical music station, and it played twenty-four hours a day!  (Not surprisingly, her favorite composer was Mahler, who led an angst-filled life.)  Also, while in New York City, she kept her Okinawan weapons mounted on the wall of her room and within easy reach.  She always slept on the floor or on a very thin futon cushion.  This is Sue at her most relaxed, "I'm at home" pose.

Jerusalem

In the early 1980's, Sue became disenchanted with Greenwich Village.  Even for Sue, it had become too dangerous and toxic.  Her studies had evolved from novels and philosophy to the next logical area--religions.  She and I had grown up in the Reform Jewish faith, although neither one of us had been devoted to it.  She did a cursory study of Buddhism and Hinduism, but what really captured her was Orthodox Judaism.

Before making the decision to move to Israel, Sue became a practicing Orthodox Jew.  She ate only kosher food and did morning prayers, using the Tefillin boxes and straps to wrap her head and arm.  We never discussed her return to Judaism, although I thought it was more of an intellectual journey than a religious one.  Sue bristled at the suggestion that anyone or anything could determine her life path; she attacked something purely from the joy and challenge it brought her.

Since Sue always had very few possessions, explained by her as "traveling light" in life, moving to another country was not a big deal.  She already had a passport from travels to Europe and Okinawa.  She sold her guitars and weapons, gave away her sparse furniture and bedding, packed her few clothes, and got on a plane for Tel Aviv.  Her plan was to find a small apartment in Jerusalem and to look for a part-time job.  I believe she traveled with a friend, who stayed for a week or two before returning to New York.  Below is a photo of Sue when she arrived in Tel Aviv's airport.

 

For the most part, Sue communicated "newsy" letters with our mother, but I heard very little from her while she was in Jerusalem.  [I may add to this blog when I find letters my mother saved from Sue's travels.]  What I know about Sue's three- or four-year stay in Jerusalem, which I found out from her after her return, were the following remarkable points:

• Sue pursued her interest in Judaism and, in particular, Orthodox Jewish law, as avidly as she had pursued every other endeavor in her life.  She studied the Talmud especially, which is written in Hebrew and Aramaic.  The Talmud is the primary source of Jewish religious law and practices.  She spoke mostly Hebrew and Yiddish in Jerusalem, with some Arabic mixed in.  She began to dream in Hebrew, she said, which was her criterion for really knowing a language.  Most remarkably, she became such an authority on Jewish law that she often had rabbis come to consult her interpretations of the Talmud.  This was technically forbidden at the time, because women could not be Orthodox rabbis or scholars.  Sue didn't care about rules!

• Because she couldn't find the same degree of intellectual stimulation in other endeavors as she had found in New York City, on a whim she began to study thermonuclear physics!  I asked her why she chose that, and she said she was bored and needed something completely new to study.  After six weeks, according to her story, she went to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, one of the top-ranked research universities in the world, to be assessed.  They evaluated her knowledge and told her that she was ready to begin her PhD thesis.  That was Sue's normal pace in acquiring knowledge.

• Sue explored Jerusalem thoroughly and eventually met members of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), which is a radical pro-Israeli group.  She did not like what they stood for, nor did she join them, but she learned much about them.  She did not like the violence they proposed for solving problems; her mastery of Shorei Kan karate was fundamentally based on the concepts of non-violence.

Sue moved back to New York City a few years after she'd left.  She confided in me that the main reason was the amount of anti-Semitism she found in Israel.  It exceeded any other place she had visited.  Jews of one sect hated Jews of another, and there were dozens of neighborhoods and sects.  It so disillusioned her that she ended her study of Jewish law and daily Orthodox practices.  She would rather put up with the dangers of Greenwich Village.

Tucson

In the mid-1980's, Sue's epilepsy got worse, turning into grand mal seizures, and she was forced to take medication for the first time.  She'd always resisted taking medication, because the side-effects would dull her mind.  She would no longer be able to learn disciplines at a fast clip, at least not as fast as she'd like to.  After she'd returned to New York City for a short time, she decided to move to Tucson, Arizona, because the medical center there was known for its epilepsy research.

It was in the early 1990's when I visited her in Tucson to find out her situation.  The place where she lived was safe and secure, but I was shocked at all the Post-it notes she had placed on her cinder-block walls.  She explained that her short-term memory was really damaged, and she had created a system for handling her memory issues.  She kept copious notes and a diary for everything, and she would often consult them to remember something.

Sue was also occasionally delusional on those visits, telling me things that I knew had not happened.  It made me question whether things she'd told me in the past were really true, but I also had proof that they were, mostly in photographs, letters, and statements from other people.  That was the thing about Sue--the things that happened in her life were so fantastic that one could easily think they were fantasy.  Unintentionally, I had already substantiated most of what she'd told me.

When she reached Tucson, her life became more "normal".  She wasn't a stranger in a strange land, as the book title states.  She had met a very odd fellow while playing her guitar at her "station" on a Tucson street, and he helped her get settled in Tucson.  He took this photo of her.

Sue was not like other street musicians; she had transposed several Bach pieces for her guitar, and she would play them at his request.  He turned out to be an attorney, and he helped Sue find safe places to live.  Although she didn't like the hot summers, Sue did like Tucson very much.  She knew the bus routes, spent a lot of time at the University of Arizona main library, and found people to play chess with, including the attorney.  People were relatively sane, compared with New York City.

One day Sue got angry at her apartment manager and started swearing at him.  She was promptly told to vacate, and so the attorney found her another place to live.  This studio apartment was much more convenient for Sue, because it was next door to a grocery store and on a major bus line.  Here are a couple photos in her studio.

Although her seizures really limited what she could do in her life, she did partake in a couple of truly remarkable activities.

• Sue decided to learn to knit, which led to her extensive interest in crocheting.  She worked non-stop on each new project, and soon she decided that the common stitches were boring, so she began to develop her own.  She showed me many formulae that she had devised for her own stitches, and she sent me a couple of her larger pieces.  Below is a photo of some of her smaller projects.  You can see the complexity in the stitches she developed.
  

• For the last ten or fifteen years of her life, Sue returned to studying philosophy and linguistics on her own.  She had once been interested in creating her own language but decided to focus on several existing languages.  She and I had long amused each other by trading linguistic and language puzzles we came across.  (She gave me this puzzle first:  Name a set of homonyms in which there are four words.  Answer:  Right, write, rite, and wright.  I later came up with a second set of words: Raise, rays, raze, and res.)  Sue began to study the only linguistics philosopher who challenged her--Ludwig Wittgenstein.  She read dozens of books and made hundreds of pages of notes on Wittgenstein--probably all of them unintelligible to anyone except her.

Last Years

In the last three or four years of her life, Sue declined very quickly.  My wife, Suzanne, did an incredible amount of work for Sue, providing her with food, transportation, doctor appointments, and cell phone.  Sue was on Social Security Disability from about 2000, and I set up a bill-paying service for her that gave her a weekly “allowance”.  The various medical agencies in the Tucson area were excellent, and finally one agency stepped in and obtained housing for Sue in an assisted living facility.  Unfortunately, in that moving process, all of Sue’s notes, diaries, and small crochet items were lost somehow.

In our last few visits, Sue and I mostly enjoyed reminiscing about our childhood.  She remembered those years quite well.  She remembered less well her years in New York City and Jerusalem.  I would bring up a particular incident that she'd once told me about, and occasionally she'd recall it.  Then something would spark in her and she'd suddenly recite a very long poem or demonstrate one of her chess compositions.

Sue was a remarkable person for her personal accomplishments, but she was never interested in applying her brilliance to significantly help other people or contribute to the world.  She was never interested in marriage or having children, nor was she interested in academia or earning a degree.  She had no interest in the business world or working a nine-to-five job.  She earned money seven different ways in her life, as a bookseller, taxi driver, print typesetter, club and street guitar player, speed chess master, karate instructor, and Jewish law consultant.

Sue did have an odd view of the world.  Seldom did she really know what was happening outside her own existence, nor did it ever occur to her to go out of her way to help others, not out of meanness, but out of not understanding the worth and benefit of such actions.  I think of one particular anecdote....

At one time she decided, while in New York City, to take a two-session class to learn CPR and the Heimlich Maneuver, in case she might ever see someone "choking in a restaurant or dying on the street."  When she got to the first session, they asked for her $40 fee for the class, and she was totally stunned.  She honestly thought they'd be paying her, because she would then be able to help other people.  Immediately she walked out in a state of complete indignation.  When she told me that story, she was still indignant.  That was Sue.

I still have old letters, many photos, and two or three afghans that Sue crocheted, and I still have a thousand memories.  One of my favorites is a story I've told to many people.

In about 1972, Sue and I both decided to surprise my mother for her birthday without telling each other.  She flew in from New York City, and I drove up from Champaign-Urbana to Rockford.  We arrived within the same hour and were delighted to see each other as well as our mother.  After dinner and a couple hours of chatting, our mother went off to bed, and Sue and I continued talking.  This is how the conversation went:

Steve:   Sue, I have to tell you about this incredible dream I had this morning.
   Sue:   You dreamed about when you were in kindergarten and built little toy ships--and how ironic it is that you went on to compose The Ship.  [It was exactly what I had dreamed!]
Steve:   How did you...how did you know that?
   Sue:   Oh, that was pretty easy.  You've been thinking about it all night.

What could explain the event but that she had read my mind?  The dream had been especially vivid.  I had not consciously thought about kindergarten for many years, and I had completely forgotten about the little toy ships I built in that basement classroom, before I had the dream.  And, I had not had the chance to tell anyone about the dream, since it had only happened that morning, before I drove 185 miles to see my mother.

Sue proceeded to tell me about a group she was part of in Greenwich Village.  They would get together every week and practice reading each other's mind, and she'd become good at it!  As the weekend progressed, she read my mind a couple other times, much to my amusement.

Sue was the epitome of "practice makes perfect" throughout most of her life, whether it was guitar-playing, chess, martial arts, linguistics, language, crocheting, or mind-reading .  I guess that's how I'll remember her.