[MD] A Better Place

[John Carl]

"WITH no question is the student of Philosophy more familiar than with the
inquiry: Of what bearing upon life are the studies in which you are
engaged?"

Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual

John]

Dan keeps generating resonance for me.  How does he  do that?  Ukrainians?
 I love those guys!  And thus begins the story...

It was 1998, I believe, that the whole thing started.  My brother told me
about a program he and his wife had heard about called "Children of
Chernobyl."  It was theorized that a small break in the summer would provide
children living downwind of the Chernobyl disaster a respite from the
conditions at home,  radiation, poverty, the collapse of the Soviet Union.
 That sort of thing.  The kids they sent us were big eyed, thin, small and
yet... demanding, in the way of Russian Children.  For while the girl we
hosted was from Belarus, which bore the brunt of the accident, and her dad
was Ukranian  pretty much everything in those countries is Russian.  The
culture the Soviet's instilled with their educational system was as
monolithic as the American system, and before the breakup, the differences
were small between regions - especially the european regions.

So for six weeks of our summer that first year, we got to experience the
joys of raising Ellen.  Liena in her own tongue, but she insisted we call
her Ellen to obviate the pain in her ears when we tried to pronounce
"Liena".

It was a challenging experience.  I enjoyed it.  My daughters found her to
be very annoying.  She had a way of pouting a lot which drove my wife crazy.
 She was very pretty and seemed to count on that to get her way.  She would
not sit for the dentist.  She had horrible problems with her teeth but as
Soviet Dentistry is evidently not much fun she wouldn't follow orders and
sit for free American dental experience.   They finally had to put her under
to get any work done, and it took two men clamping down on her just to get
her under the mask.  We got some chickens - six of them, at this time and
let her "adopt" one.  But that turned out to be a mistake because she wanted
to keep it in a cage always and take it home with her.  It took some
interpreter time to explain that chickens need to run around and scratch in
the dirt.
 After she left, I missed her.  She'd been under my roof and eating my food
long enough that she'd morphed into one of MY kids.  "Well what kind of
world is it?"  I mused, "When I have to send one of MY kids to go live in
radiation and abject poverty?"  All year I worried.  Funny thing is, "her"
chicken was the only one that survived through the winter.  Laying one egg a
day under the living room window, steady as clockwork.
Royce]
This challenge, when uttered by one not engaged in the study of philosophy,
comes home with especial force to the investigator of the fundamental
problems of metaphysics. For such problems are, upon their face, of the most
universal character. It would seem as if their significance for the whole
business of every man ought to be immediately obvious, unless indeed the
philosopher who expounds them has failed in his task.

What concerns any man more than his place in the world, and the meaning of
the world in which he is to find this place?

John]
Well we invited Ellen back again the next year.  It is seen by the children
to be a big deal to get invited back.  More than half the kids don't as lots
of families find the aggravation and bother not worth it.   She put in a
word for her sister to come as well.  "My sister speak fery good english",
she said. So we invited them both.    But as next summer rolls around, there
is some sort of epidemic at Ellen's whole school  and she can't come because
of the quarantine.  She sends letters in which she is very, very sad.  Her
older sister, Olia, does come.  And right away, Olia presents a problem.  A
problem for me this time, instead of the rest of the family.  I even had a
very telling, short dialogue with my wife that night as we went to bed,
"Honey.... I think I may have a problem."  And without even asking me or
even really guessing, my wife just knew.  She responded, "I don't blame you.
 She's gorgeous."
And she was.  Still is, I'm sure.  Some people are.  Olia at 14 looks about
19, with all the sophisticated assuredness of any beautiful female and all
the fresh spunk of a little girl.  It's a dangerous age.  I'm 39 and in my
own dangerous time.
It was a very enlightening experience for me, I'll tell you that.  I learned
a lot about andropause, just because information was the one thing that
helped me to keep from going crazy.  That, and a very sane wife who gave me
all the right support in all the right ways.  Mostly what I experienced was
intense emotional turmoil as I found myself caring way too much what an
adolescent's opinion of me was, and hating that fact, but being unable to do
anything about it.  If Olia had been just any old pretty girl, she wouldn't
have captivated me.  Fact is, she was at least as  intriguing
intellectually.  We argued and discussed politics a lot.  I learned a lot
first hand about the attitudes of the Former Soviet Peoples - their pride.
 According to Olia, Americans are very stupid and their children are not as
smart as Russian children and its very strange that for some reason, they
have all the money.
It was a very strange experience.  I loved looking at her.  I craved to pet
her, as you would a puppy or a kitten or a fawn.  It wasn't a sexual
longing.  The thought of sex  with Olia was about what I'd  feel about sex
with a puppy, a kitten or a fawn.  I just loved her and wanted her to be
happy.

Royce]
But a confession of weakness is not a cry of despair. Part of the business
of life, and no small part of it, is to learn to live with our inevitable
defects, and to make the best of them. The inevitable defects of
philosophical study are to nobody clearer than to one who, sincerely loving
philosophy, devotes his life, as best he can, to seeking clearness of
thought and a soul-stirring vision of the truth.

John]

Since my new task in life seemed to be how to make Olia happy, I set about
that with a will.  The main thing she wanted in life, her one dream was...
"I want to chat".  As in internet.  There was no internet where she came
from.  Well... not much anyway.  And to her it was this all-consuming
desire.   For me, that was part of what attracted me.  Her sister wanted a
"spice girls cassetta" and Olia wanted to communicate with the world and
look up information.  To me, that was a worthy goal.

And I was uniquely suited to meet that particular need, having started
rather early with the geeky people in the county who thought that the
internet would be a cool idea; old bbs people mostly.  Whose expertise made
sense for Belarus where the cost of phone service was relatively expensive.
  Even a slow modem, transfering text instead of voice is much more
efficient than talking - if you're analyzing communicative traffic...  which
you tend to do when the person you'd like to communicate with is half the
world away and barely surviving on macaroni and rice and potatoes with no
fresh food of any kind - since all the farms have become contaminated, the
only way to get fresh food is to expensively import it.

But all this thinking occured over the year after Olia left.  I'd decided to
invite both girls and the father back for the next year.  It hadn't been
done thus before in the program, but everybody shrugged their shoulders and
said, "why not?"  And that's when I met Sasha.  MY Ukrainian.  He came to
fix my cars.  Like any self respecting ridge coyote, I have a lot of
not-running cars in case I wreck or lose one of my running ones.  Olia
surveyed the lot and said her dad was an ace mechanic.  He'd fix 'em all up
and running in no time.


Royce]
But when the layman listens to the actual teachings of students of
philosophy, as they discourse concerning knowledge and being, concerning
truth and duty, and when, after listening, such a layman then asks afresh,
“What is it that I have learned about *my* life, and*my* duty, and *my* world
of daily business?”—the answer of many a listener is too well known: “I have
learned,”such an one will often say, “not at all what I hoped to learn. I
have learned that problems are intricate, and that truth is far away. I have
learned how little the wise men see, and so I am fain to turn back again to
life, that I may there find how much the good men do.
The philosophers do not help me as they promised. Action is more
enlightening than speculation. I will work while it is called the day, but I
will not try, like the philosophers, to look with naked eyes upon the sun of
truth. Such researches only hinder me.”
John]
Well... there are many twists in a tale and many turns a story takes that
you don't expect when you're in the midst of it.  And being the kind of
person who has good ideas does not mean that one is any kind of person who
can implement good ideas.  Good ideas take a community, I think.  And often,
the guy who tries hardest to generate interest in an idea, identifies the
most with the idea and thus the more he shares, the more it becomes his.
 And everyone else is glad to say, "Yeah, that's a really good idea.  We'll
watch."  I think I'm such a person.  Its been my experience.  We did try and
help one family for a little while, but the networking communication
realities depend upon more than us.  Communication takes Community.  In more
ways than one.  And so our good intentions come to nought.  The world
suffers on, while we, with all the tools we have, do nothing.   Absorb the
karmic blows and console ourselves with philosophy.
And this is why I love Royce.  Josiah Royce, the true idealist, in all the
best meaning of the term believed that the Good was real, demonstrable and
attainable.  yay Josiah.
Royce]
The way of reflection is long. The forest of our common human ignorance is
dark and tangled. Happy indeed are those who are content to live and to work
only in regions where the practical labors of civilization have cleared the
land, and where the task of life is to till the fertile fields and to walk
in the established ways. The philosopher, in the world of thought, is by
destiny forever a frontiersman. To others he must often seem the mere
wanderer. He knows best himself how far he wanders, and how often he seems
to be discovering only new barrenness in the lonely wilderness.