cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
OBAMA
How can Obama be the president you want him to be when he’s facing this Republican Congress?
I’ll put it this way, brother: You’ve got to be a thermostat rather than a thermometer. A thermostat shapes the climate of opinion; a thermometer just reflects it. If you’re just going to reflect it and run by the polls, then you’re not going to be a transformative president. Lincoln was a thermostat. Johnson and F.D.R., too.
— Cornel West, interviewed in the NY Times
PRAYER
I once tried to pray away the gay. But sometimes a houseguest just won’t leave.
— Frank Bruni
VOICE
Male logic, or a man’s voice, tends to be based on terms of autonomy, justice, and rights; whereas women’s logic or voice tends to be based on terms of relationship, care, and responsibility. Men tend toward agency; women tend toward communion. Men follow rules; women follow connections. Men look; women touch. Men tend toward individualism, women toward relationship. One of [Carol] Gilligan’s favorite stories: A little boy and girl are playing. The boy says, “Let’s play pirates!” The girl says, “Let’s play like we live next door to each other.” Boy: “No, I want to play pirates!” “Okay, you play the pirate who lives next door.” … Gilligan says that the boys will hurt feelings in order to save the rules; the girls will break the rules in order to save the feelings.
— Ken Wilber, summarizing Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice
PAIN
Pain is weakness leaving the body.
— US Marine Corps saying
GIVING AND RECEIVING
How exactly do we give and receive? The first way is a simple/difficult technique: Ask for what you want and listen to your partner. Asking for what you want combines the most crucial elements of intimacy. It gives the other the gift of knowing you, your needs, and your vulnerability. It also means receiving the other’s free response. Both are risky, and therefore both make you more mature. You learn to let go of your insistence on a yes, to be vulnerable to a no, and to accept a no without feeling the need to punish.
To listen intimately to a partner asking for what he wants is to pick up on the feeling and need beneath the request. It is to appreciate where the request came from. It is to feel compassion for any pain that may lurk in the request. It is to give the other credit for risking rejection or misunderstanding. We hear with our ears; we listen with our intuition and our heart. Giving and receiving entail the ability to accommodate the full spectrum of a partner’s fears and foibles and to distinguish between needs we can and cannot expect to see fulfilled.
A second way intimate adults give and receive is through mutually chosen sex and playfulness: You make love when both of you want it, not when one of you push the other into it. You can be intimate without having to be sexual. You know how to have fun together. You play without hurting each other, without engaging in sarcasm or ridicule, without laughing at each other’s shortcomings.
Finally, we give and receive by granting equality, freedom from hierarchy, to our partner and ourselves. Only the healthy ego, and not another person, is meant to preside over your life. In true intimacy, partners have an equal voice in decision making. One partner does not insist on dominating the other.
— David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Relationships
another eye opens 