ONE THING AT A TIME

There she was in the bookstore staff break room: watching a DVD, talking to a friend on the phone, eating and reading a magazine--all at the same time! I watched this exercise in multitasking with utter amazement. How is it possible to be present to each task in such a situation? For sure, I was acutely aware of age. I am 64 and she is 21. Is my generation as comfortable with multi-tasking as her generation apparently is?

Even during the day, as a bookseller, I wear an earpiece and there are simultaneous conversations occurring on it while I am working with customers. Often I just yank it out because I have trouble doing more than one thing at a time.

Is this because I am a guy? I read somewhere that women are more prone to multitasking because of their multiple responsibilities in work and at home. That sounds plausible. But I am thinking that age is now more of a factor. Listen to the while doing homework. Watch TV while reading . . . . . .

It now seems that in America multi-tasking is the big thing. And yet, I am happiest and feel most inner harmony when I can give full focused concentrated attention to single tasks.

This becomes clear to me when I am involved in my other part time job as a cleaner of downtown residences. I love this work. The reasons are many. I can see a concrete difference in the looks of the house when I leave. I enjoy the people I clean for. Sometimes the activity of cleaning houses makes me feel cleaner.

The business of cleaning in silence involves working out strategies for reaching a goal (a beautiful polished and clean home). You can't do this by juggling three things at a time. It is only accomplished by one small task after another. Dust the baseboard. Polish the table. Disinfect the toilet. Vacuum the carpet . . . .the tasks are multiple but they cannot be done in groupings but only one after another.

So cleaning has taught me the wisdom and discipline of one thing after another. Of one thing at a time. This is how life works.

In silence I clean. I am present to single tasks aimed at a final goal. I take it one thing at a time.
You can't have it all at once.

WATERBOARD BUSH AND CHENEY

In the mid 1960's, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Brazil. This was at the height of the American-sponsored military dictatorship in that country. During that period, many people who were opposed to the military simply disappeared and many others were detained without habeas corpus and experienced torture. This was not a secret. Everyone in Brazil and the world outside of Brazil knew what was up.

The ideological self justification of the military was anti-communism and the Cold War. They were fighting against radical terrorists who were threatening the order of things (meaning the very wealthy and landowning oligarchs).

Naive Peace Corps volunteer that I was, I believed that the U.S. supported the Brazilian military but that we ourselves would never practice torture on opponents. Of course, Brazilian slums in the state of Pernambuco were a long way from Viet Nam and it was way too easy just to remain ignorant of what our troops might be doing over there. So I was permitted a
smugness that more or less persisted in my mind until post 9/11 and the resulting huge flow of information on how our own government, in the name of another big ideological struggle, deals with detainees.

During the past several weeks, I have become very alarmed by pronouncements from government officials regarding torture. Calling waterboarding anything other than torture seems to me just to engage in games of opportunistic euphemisms. I was surprised, as were many other Americans, to learn that the candidate for attorney general of the United States (subsequently confirmed) stated that he didn't know whether or not waterboarding constituted torture. President Bush himself states that the U.S. simply does not practice torture but that we do waterboard. This week there were many media interviews of persons who have administered waterboarding to detainees and even our own soldiers. At least one of these persons stated that the method, sometimes euphemistically termed "simulated drowning" was in fact torture. He mentioned that it is a method that was used in the Inquisition.

My proposal is this: Since there are soldiers and other government officials dealing with waterboarding who must undergo the experience themselves and since the Bush administration asserts that this is not really torture, why not demonstrate the benign nature of it all by publicly undergoing the exercise. Yes, I invite Bush and Cheney to undergo waterboarding and then I will listen, maybe, to what the have to say. Since they consider it relatively harmless, they might consider it just another day's work, say, something like taking a flu shot as an example fo the American public.

Hey, George and Dick, what about it?

P.S. A final thought: It seems to me a very short jump from waterboarding foreign detainees for whatever reason and finding that this is an acceptable practice within the United States on Americans themselves. Just a pause for thought . . . . . . . .