Aiyup.

We'd all look that good in navy windbreakers, I think

Jean of Ark

Fifty years ago, an ex-naval officer invited two men with mental disabilities to live with him. Now L’Arche has communities all over the world. Maggie Fergusson talks to its founder, Jean Vanier


From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, July/August 2014, at http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/content/features/maggie-fergusson/jean-ark?page=full

Late in the afternoon of June 22nd 1940, Hitler marched into a glade in the forest of Compiègne, 60km north of Paris. A giant swastika was unfurled as he saluted columns of Nazi troops, before hoisting himself into what had once been the private railway carriage of Marshal Foch. Inside this, on November 11th 1918, the Germans had signed the armistice that ended the first world war. So it was an apt spot for Hitler, sitting in Foch’s chair, and flanked by Goering, Ribbentrop and Hess, to witness the French surrender. Today, in a replica of the railway carriage, you can watch old newsreel of the Führer emerging into the evening sunshine and pulling on his leather gloves with an expression of grim satisfaction. This was a significant step towards the creation of his 1,000-year Reich. Four years later, of course, the Reich had collapsed, and Hitler was dead.

Less than an hour’s stroll through the beech trees, a rather different piece of history is unfolding. Fifty years ago this August, a 35-year-old ex-naval officer, Jean Vanier, bought a tumbledown cottage in Trosly-Breuil, a village on the edge of the forest. The cottage had no lavatory, one tap and a wood-burning stove, and he called it L’Arche—The Ark. He then invited two men with mental disabilities, Raphaël Simi and Philippe Seux, to leave the bleak, overcrowded asylum where they had spent most of their adult lives, and to make a home with him. “There was”, he says, looking back, “no huge idea of doing something special that might change the world.” 

He thought that he, Raphaël and Philippe might remain one small family, able to fit comfortably into his battered car for outings. But, like the biblical mustard seed, L’Arche grew beyond all expectations. Friends came to visit, and were inspired by Jean Vanier’s insistence that those with mental disabilities have gifts that many “normal” people lack. More houses were bought, more men and women rescued from institutions. Today, there are L’Arche communities in every continent of the world—146 of them, in 35 countries, from Bangladesh to Burkina Faso, Ireland to the Ivory Coast, Palestine to the Philippines.

Hitler’s visit to the Forest of Compiègne and Jean Vanier’s arrival in Trosly-Breuil are not as remote from one another as they might appear. When the second world war broke out, Jean Vanier was ten. His father, Major-General Georges Vanier, a much-decorated military hero who had lost a leg fighting in the trenches, was Canadian envoy in Paris. In May 1940, as the Germans advanced, the family was forced to evacuate by ship to Britain. From there, they returned to Canada, where Georges Vanier later became governor-general—a position once held by the novelist John Buchan. But something in the sea journey between Bordeaux and Milford Haven had fired Jean’s imagination, and when he turned 13 he asked permission to travel back to Britain and enter the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth.

Most parents would simply have said no. This was 1942, and crossing the Atlantic was treacherous. Hundreds of German U-boats lurked beneath the waves, intent on sinking Allied ships. Allowing a teenage boy to make a journey that was not strictly necessary was, as Jean admits, “a kind of madness”. But Georges Vanier was exceptional. A tireless promoter of unity between Francophone and Anglophone Canadians, he was, for Mountbatten, “the greatest Canadian of his time”, and for Lady Diana Cooper, speaking after his death, “the dearest man ever to be given to a generation craving something finer and nobler than themselves.” If Jean was certain that this was what he wanted, his father told him, then he must go ahead. It was a formative moment—“because if my father trusted me, then I could trust myself, and if my intuitions were true, then I could work with them.”

We are speaking in Jean’s sitting room in Trosly-Breuil, sharing a packet of Digestive biscuits I’ve brought over on the Eurostar, knowing that they bring back happy memories of his early childhood in a house near Regent’s Park in London. He is now 85, white-haired and slightly stooped, but still immensely tall, emanating both energy and peace. Dressed in the blue anorak he always wears, whether meeting homeless people or heads of state, he speaks steadily, using his long El Greco hands to illustrate his words. The demons of shame, regret, fear, sorrow and rage that prey on some old people seem strangers to him. Instead, he is filled with joie de vivre and openness, an appetite to keep on growing and learning and trying to make the world a happier place.

Scattered around him are some of the things he’s been reading, and they include—alongside piles of correspondence—“The Road to Canterbury” by Archbishop Justin Welby (“he’s super!”), the text of a talk by Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, and “Synchronicity”, a bestselling study of leadership by the American lawyer Joseph Jaworski. Next to him is a pinboard with photographs of family and friends, and some of the people he most admires: Aung San Suu Kyi, whose name we struggle to pronounce; Etty Hillesum, a Jewish woman who died at Auschwitz, and whose diaries he often cites; Sophie Scholl, a German student who was beheaded, aged 21, for resisting the Nazis.

The landline rings as we talk, and Jean makes meticulous pencil notes in a pocket diary. There’s no sign of a computer or iPad, but pencil and paper serve him well. In the 20-plus years I’ve known him, he has never forgotten a meeting, or been late for one. He is formidably disciplined. His naval training stood him in good stead.

Yet, as the second world war drew to an end, it became clear to Jean Vanier that the navy was not his ultimate vocation. Shortly after the liberation of Paris, in January 1945, he spent some leave at the Gare d’Orsay helping the Canadian Red Cross receive survivors from Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen and Auschwitz. “I’ll never forget the men and women who arrived off the trains—like skeletons, still in the blue-and-white striped uniforms of the concentration camps, their faces tortured with fear and anguish. That, and the dropping of the atom bombs, strengthened a feeling in me that the navy was no longer the place for me; that I wanted to devote myself to works of peace.” A committed Catholic, he imagined he would probably become a priest.

Top Jean Vanier at his home near Paris, in the blue anorak he wears to meet homeless people and heads of state. He co-founded L’Arche with Philippe Seux and Raphaël Simi (middle two)

Bottom Georges Vanier, who transformed Jean’s life by supporting his son in an “act of madness” 

 

While many of his contemporaries were getting married and settling down, Vanier resigned his commission and spent a number of years living in a community near Paris, combining a life of prayer with manual work and the study of philosophy. Following this, on the strength of a thesis on Ari­stotelian ethics, he was offered a post at the University of Toronto. He discovered that he had a gift for teaching, a gift that he retains in old age: an ability to hold large audiences rapt as he spoke without notes or hesitation, and with minimal amplification. But still he did not feel he was following his true star.

Then, in 1963, when Jean was 35, a Dominican priest, Père Thomas Philippe, chaplain to Le Val Fleuri, an institution for mentally disabled men, invited him to visit. It was a terrible place—“The men had a little work, but the doors were locked”—yet, despite an atmosphere of noise, depression and violence, Jean found it “beautiful”. “This is my experience of having been in many dark places—prisons, psychiatric wards, slums, leper colonies. There’s something frightening, but also something beautiful, a sense of wonderment. It’s mysterious. Maybe it’s the discovery that amidst all the chaos, these people are human beings. I saw anger and pain in the faces of these men, but also great tenderness. And each one of them, 30 in a constricted space, was saying, ‘Will you come back?’”

“They were literally saying this, or you felt that’s what they wanted?”

“They were literally saying, ‘Veux-tu revenir?’ And behind those words I sensed a great cry: ‘Why have I been abandoned? Why am I not with my brothers and sisters, who are married and living in nice houses? Do you love me?’ A great thirst for friendship.”

For several months, Jean devoted himself to finding out more about the treatment of those with mental disabilities. “I visited psychiatric hospitals and institutions, I spoke with families. And I discovered a whole world of suffering: these were perhaps the most oppressed and humiliated people of the world. They were called stupid, mad, imbeciles, foolish, idiots . . . All these words were used about them. They were not considered really human—so as long as you gave them food and lodging, you were doing a good act.” In Saint-Jean-les-Deux-Jumeaux, an asylum east of Paris, 80 men lived locked in a building made of cement blocks. They had no work, and spent most of their days walking around in circles. And those who remained with their families were not necessarily treated with more compassion. On a farm, Jean met a teenager who was kept chained in a garage.

Outraged by these discoveries, many people would have thrown themselves into pressing for reform. Jean’s background meant that he was used to mixing with people in positions of influence. Why didn’t he go straight to the top, I ask. Why didn’t he launch a campaign? “It’s good to campaign. But I could only do what I felt. All that I saw made me sad, maybe a bit angry, and all that I felt I could do was to start living with some of these people; to take a risk, and see what happened.”

What happened very quickly was that Raphaël and Philippe began to bring Jean Vanier fully alive in a way that neither the navy nor academia had. Raphaël had suffered meningitis as a child. He could speak only about 20 words, and his understanding was severely impaired. Philippe, a victim of encephalitis, talked over and over about the same things, and lived largely in a dream world. Both were physically as well as mentally disabled. Yet living with them, Vanier began to understand what it meant to be really human. “We did everything together—the shopping, the cooking, the gardening—but above all we had fun. We found we could really laugh together.” With other friends, Jean had been used to spending time doing things, achieving things, having intellectual conversations. “But with Raphaël and Philippe, I entered into a new kind of relationship. Before meeting them, my life had been governed largely from my head and my sense of duty; they brought out the child in me. I began to live from my heart.”
 
Although Jean had no grand plans, what he was doing chimed with the zeitgeist. In France and Italy, parents of children with mental disabilities were beginning to band together to object to large institutions. In America, Wolf Wolfensberger was advocating “normalisation” of the mentally disabled. The social services were keen for L’Arche to accept more people, and because the economy was strong they were able to support the fledgling organisation financially. Above all, though, there was an abundance of young people keen to join Jean, and try living by his example. “The 60s and 70s were the age of community: ‘Let’s get together and not be controlled by authority!’ It was the hippies in America, it was Woodstock. It was a huge moment.” Some stayed a short time, others for life. And so L’Arche grew, opening more houses in Trosly, then in other parts of France, then in Canada and beyond.

L’Arche communities are not uniform. Some welcome those so profoundly disabled, both mentally and physically, that they can neither speak nor walk, and the only means of communication is touch. In others, disabled men and women go out to work in gardens and studios. And, whereas Jean Vanier is a Catholic, Stephan Posner, the current head of L’Arche in France, is Jewish, while in Bangladesh and Palestine Christians and Muslims live together, and in India many in L’Arche are Hindu. People with mental disabilities can be a force for ecumenism: they tend to have an instinct for communion, and not to split hairs over questions of dogma and 
belief. What all the communities share, however, is a sense that they are not institutions but true homes—places in which those with mental disabilities live alongside “normal” people, all giving and receiving from one another. The actor and comedian Steve Coogan, whose brother and sister-in-law live and work in the community in Manchester, first visited Trosly as a teenager, and it struck him as “radical and ordinary, all at the same time”. “What L’Arche does brilliantly”, he says, “is to create the same sense of belonging as you get in a family.”

Top Helping hands: Jean Vanier makes a point over lunch at Le Val

Middle Great and small: Jean with Marc, “le petit baron” 

Bottom With Mother Teresa, who helped set up L’Arche in India



 

L’ARCHE CAME INTO my life slantwise, through a series of nudges. While at university, I made friends with someone working at Oxford High School. Over supper one evening, she told me she was giving up teaching the academic daughters of dons to go and live with mentally disabled people in France. She told me about Jean Vanier. Impressive, I thought; but perhaps a bit extreme. Then, the morning after I finished my finals, I had a call from my mother. My brother and sister-in-law, who were living in Tokyo, had had their first baby, a daughter called Mary. She had Down’s syndrome, and multiple complications with her heart and lungs, and was not expected to survive her first night.

Mary was lucky to be born in Tokyo. The doctors there were prepared to perform surgery that would not have been attempted in Britain—partly because the Japanese regard people with Down’s syndrome as special. Tenshi, they call them: angels. Mary found it hard to breathe, so the paediatrician constructed a tiny tent around her, pumped in cold, damp “English” air, and weaned her, slowly, off a respirator.

While Mary was still in intensive care, it happened that Jean Vanier visited Tokyo to give a talk. My brother went along. “If you ever have a chance to hear him,” he wrote home, “I urge you to take it. His holiness is almost tangible.” My brother is a career diplomat, careful with his words, so this was pretty striking. Spool forwards a few years, and my cousin Jock, a priest in Edinburgh, mentioned that he knew Jean Vanier. “I’d like to meet him,” I said. So Jock wrote a letter of introduction, and I headed off to France with a friend.

These were the pre-tunnel days, and we were in high holiday spirits as our ferry arrived in Calais and we drove through the vast, flat expanses of northern France. It was only as we turned off the autoroute into the Forest of Compiègne that we began to lose our nerve. In Trosly-Breuil, as we parked, a tall, thin man with very few teeth folded himself through the open car window. “Tu fumes?” he asked. What on earth were we doing here?

But that evening, and in the days that followed, our fears subsided. We ate together in Le Val Fleuri, home to a number of men who had lived in L’Arche for many years. Some, like my niece Mary, had Down’s syndrome, others, like Raphaël and Philippe, had suffered brain damage in the womb, or from infant illnesses. There was tiny Marc, who by birthright should have been heir to rolling acres in the Dordogne; Etienne, who looked like Ugolin in “Jean de Florette”; Patrick, the cadger of cigarettes; Dudule, Jean-Claude, Olivier, Didier, Pascal. Some were irrepressibly gregarious, others quiet. But all of them welcomed us, laughed with us, were patient with our rusty French. After supper, Jean Vanier tossed out tea-towels, and we all did the washing-up. Then we sat around a log fire, chatting. Somebody produced an old trumpet, and we cried with laughter as we tried in turn to play it.

“I could never prove this,” one of the assistants told me on that first visit, “but I have a strong sense that these people know and understand me at a deeper level than ‘normal’ people.” I began to have that feeling too. On our second evening, there was a birthday party for one of the men. Supper was followed by music, and dancing—which I’ve always hated. Feeling self-conscious, but thinking I was putting on a good show of enjoying myself, I saw Marc approach me. “Ça va, petite journaliste?” he asked, with a wry smile, and came to sit with me. On the final evening, overwhelmed by all I’d experienced, I went and sat for a while in the little chapel. Didier, who walked and spoke with great difficulty, found me there, sat with me, and rested his hand on my shoulder. People say, and rightly, that one of the advantages of becoming middle-aged is that you cease to be anxious about what others think of you. But I feel I had an early taste of this in Trosly-Breuil in my 20s. Nothing I’d ever learned or achieved could have impressed these people; they simply wanted me to be myself.

Rowan Williams, former archbishop of Canterbury, has been close to L’Arche since the 1970s, and has found it similarly liberating. “What L’Arche does is to question our assumptions that, in order to be living a life of worth and beauty, we need to be fluent and successful. The affirmation of everyone, whatever their capacity, allows those of us who think we are in control to face our own vulnerability and failure.”

It’s easy, of course, to be idealistic. Community life is tough. It offers no shelter from the tedious, everyday challenges of irritation, jealousy, exhaustion; and living with the anguish of men and women who have been rejected can awaken feelings of anger, even violence. There is a danger that “normal” people can be drawn to L’Arche in a search for meaning in their lives, only to move on when their needs are satisfied. “And for the people with learning disabilities,” one long-term assistant points out, “this can feel like a double-
rejection.” Her words strike an uncomfortable chord: I for one have dipped in and out of L’Arche. Nevertheless, that first visit felt to me like a kind of homecoming. “Come back!” the men called as they waved us off, and I knew that I would.

Top House mates: Patrick (left) and Dudule have lived in Trosly since the early 1970s

Middle Bien dans sa peau: Emilie baking with the residents of La Forestière

Bottom Michel at home in Le Val



 

For the poet Michael Symmons Roberts, who last year scooped both the Costa and Forward poetry prizes with his collection “Drysalter”, an initial visit to Trosly-Breuil was so life-changing that he’s never felt able to return—“for fear of overwriting the memory”. He went there during the mid-1990s, a confirmed atheist working as a documentary-maker for the BBC. Commissioned to make an “Everyman” programme about genetic futures, he interviewed scientists who argued that pre-natal screening would allow us to eradicate suffering caused by inherited illness and disability. Parents would have many more choices to make about whether to continue with a pregnancy. But some philosophers were worried about a future “eugenics of choice”, so Roberts looked for a counterweight in the film, someone with a different vision of the future—“and somewhere I read about L’Arche, and was struck by Jean Vanier’s claim that ‘in a healthy society, the strong need the weak as much as the weak need the strong’.”

With a BBC crew, Roberts spent a week filming in Trosly, and from the first morning he was amazed by the “extraordinary ordinariness” of the place. “There were these young assistants from all over the world looking after men and women some of whom were very profoundly disabled—unable to walk or talk or eat by themselves. But there were no white coats; the place wasn’t institutionalised, or medicalised, or advertising its own holiness. It was just a group of people who wanted to live together. And there was a sense of love that was almost tangible. I come from a loving family; I’ve loved and been loved. But I’ve never encountered a pervasive atmosphere of love like that before.”

Film crews are pretty cynical, says Roberts—“to do their jobs, they have to remain objective and slightly cold. You cannot move them. But they were moved by L’Arche.” What moved them most? “There was a phrase Jean Vanier used when we interviewed him. He described people with mental disabilities as ‘teachers of tenderness’—and that’s what we experienced. Here were these men and women who had no interest in social veneer, or education, or achievement. They forced us all to take off mask after mask, until we faced one another as human beings: a mutual transformation.” In the course of the week, the filming became “almost irrelevant” to Roberts, and after he came home “nothing quite looked the same again”. He no longer felt persuaded by his atheism. While one of the film crew left the BBC to live in L’Arche, Roberts later became a Catholic.

IN NOVEMBER 1994, I took a short sabbatical from work and spent a month in Trosly-Breuil. I lived in a house so close to the forest that at night it felt as if the owls were hooting in my room. In the morning, I cleaned and shopped and cooked while the six men and women I was living with went out to work—making pottery and candles and mosaics, or gardening. Jean-Pierre worked in the woods, and he’d come back at lunchtime and explain what he’d been up to in a series of cartoon exclamations: “baf! boom! craack!” Sometimes, in the afternoon, I’d wander through the village to visit my friends in Le Val. Trosly is a beautiful place: thick-walled stone cottages with crow-stepped roofs, hens clucking in back gardens, little plots of land lovingly cultivated. All the toil and fruitfulness made me feel I was living in the Book of Hours.

On my last evening, while I was doing some ironing, Jean-Pierre came and propped himself in the doorway. “Reste avec nous!” he said. English sound and French meaning merged poignantly: I’d rested, but I couldn’t stay. Next day, I headed for Paris. In Trosly, November had been purely November: misty mornings, still days, cold evenings. At Charles de Gaulle airport, Christmas was already in full swing—bright lights, tinsel, noise. Re-entering the “real” world, I experienced the bends.

I’ve been back regularly to Trosly since, and from time to time I’ve met Jean Vanier off the Eurostar and driven him to give talks in different parts of Britain: he is in constant demand as a speaker, whether to groups of prisoners, or businessmen, or to the Anglican bishops at the Lambeth Conference, all compelled not just by the story of L’Arche, but by Jean’s ability to communicate from his heart as well as his head. And, though his courtesy and serenity are unassailable, I’ve always suspected that he too finds leaving Trosly unsettling.

“Yes, it’s true,” he says. “Somewhere I feel a little bit awkward.” 

It’s partly to do with the praise lavished on him when he’s introduced to audiences. “I feel that people are saying, ‘You’re doing beautiful work’; and that doesn’t interest me because what they are really saying is, ‘I’m glad you’re doing it, not me.’ But it’s mainly that I find I have more fun, I’m more myself, when I’m with people who are a little bit crazy. And our people are a little bit crazy. I mean that they are not bothered by the need to conform—to be dressed as they should, to do as they should. I don’t want to be part of a world where every­body has to be the same, and to win—‘I succeed, therefore I am.’ I don’t want to live under the tyranny of normality.”

Wherever possible, therefore, he travels with his L’Arche family. In 1997, invited to receive an honour from the Vatican, he flew to Rome with a group from Trosly. Pope John Paul II, already frail, was visibly moved as they gathered round him. Then, just as he was about to leave, he turned and shuffled back towards them. Addressing the whole group, he appealed to them to “conduire l’église au nouveau millennium”. Then, in 2003, Jean was invited by the French government to receive the Légion d’honneur at the Elysée Palace. “They knew that I lived with people with disabilities, so I said, ‘Could I bring 40 or 50 people with me?’ They couldn’t say no.” Pascal, one of the men from Le Val, sought out President Chirac and “threw himself into his arms and embraced him. Of course, Chirac wasn’t really prepared for that, but there was such openness and love . . .”

Top En famille: Jean Vanier believes in Aristotle's maxim that we cannot know one another until we've "eaten salt together"


 

On March 21st this year, World Down’s Syndrome Day, Jean visited Pope Francis, accompanied by members of L’Arche’s community in Rome. Italian news cameras captured an encounter of extraordinary joy: a meeting of twin souls, radically committed to the poor and the marginalised. But implicit in the news coverage was a challenge. How would Jean respond, I ask, to those who admire what he’s done, but who feel that they as ordinary people, with jobs to do and children to look after, cannot hope to change the world?

“You know,” he says with feeling, “I think people don’t believe in themselves enough. Maybe they’ve lived setbacks, complications in relationships, and it’s left them with a latent depression—‘I’m no good.’ But at the heart of L’Arche is the belief that every person is precious, and if I believe that every person is precious, I have to believe that I am precious too. Every one of us can make a difference, even if only in the way we look at people. Walking in the streets, passing a homeless person for example, it’s not so much a question of ‘Do you give him money?’, as ‘Do you really look at him as a human being?’”

It sounds straightforward enough. But these words—and the full implication of failing to recognise some people as human beings—are brought home to me a fortnight later when I visit Richard Keagan-Bull in L’Arche in south London. More able and articulate than many in the community, Richard lives independently in a little flat. Over a cup of tea, carried in on a William and Kate tray (“my favourite couple”), we chat about his early life, and his travels around the world as an ambassador for people with learning difficulties. He’s humorous, intuitive and very good company. Then he tells me about his holiday in Poland, which included a visit to Auschwitz. “What shocked me most was that everyone had labels pinned to their prison uniforms. I was there with my friends from L’Arche, one Polish and one German. And I asked my friend what label I would have had. I don’t think I would have been here today, nor none of my friends. I think that if I were there, they might have decided to do some tests on me in their so-called ‘hospital room’. It made me quite angry, it did. I wanted to kick something, I did. I feel quite angry now, I do.” I felt angry too, thinking of my friends in Trosly-Breuil, and of my niece Mary. She’s 27 now, with a bunch of younger siblings, and, as her brother Joe says, “she’s taught us all more about warmth, openness and enjoying the moment than anyone else we know. Wherever she goes, and whoever she meets, her joy is infectious.”

SO WHAT OF the future—is Jean hopeful or fearful as he looks ahead? In the 50 years since its foundation, L’Arche has never been without challenges: shortage of money, and of assistants, ever more constricting health-and-safety regulations, and, in some countries, political upheaval and even war. Through his communities, Jean has been directly involved in some of the great conflicts of the past half-century—in Ireland, Israel, the Balkans, Rwanda. When we meet, he is particularly concerned for the communities in Ukraine and Syria; shortly after I return to London Frans van der Lugt, the Jesuit founder of L’Arche in Syria, is murdered in Homs. But a lifetime of facing apparently insurmountable difficulties has given Jean Vanier a kind of pragmatic equanimity. “Our world is a moving world,” he says. “So the question is not, ‘will the future be good, or will it be bad?’ The question is ‘what can I do today to accept myself as I am, to accept others as they are, and to help one or two people to fly?’”

While I was in Trosly this spring, a group of young people were there too, spending a few days finding out about life in L’Arche. The old farm building where visitors stay, normally deeply peaceful, thrummed with hip-hop and games of football. On my last evening, as I sat upstairs transcribing my interview, the teenagers were gathered in the room below talking to Jean. I could hear his steady voice, occasional silences, much laughter. Eventually, he walked back across the courtyard towards his little house. Watching his towering figure disappearing into the dusk, I thought of a line from a 16th-century Spanish mystic, St John of the Cross. “A la tarde,” he wrote, “te examinarán en el amor.” In the evening of life, you will be examined in love.

Top A man with a mystery: Etienne, who lives at Le Val, fell silent for many years. Now he is speaking again

Maggie Fergusson is literary editor of Intelligent Life and director of the Royal Society of Literature

Photographs Romain Staropoli

Images © Getty, CIRIC

Read this

• on saturday, august 9, michael brown was shot and killed by a police officer for jaywalking in ferguson, mo.
• the police have refused to take the statement of the number one eyewitness to the crime, though he has continuously made himself available to do the same through his attorney.
• police attacked peaceful citizens who had gathered at a candlelight vigil to grieve and seek solidarity, firing teargas and rubber bullets and arresting folks who didn't disperse "fast enough."
• the police began arresting journalists covering the story, flashing lights toward their cameras so they couldn't capture the image and firing teargas at them. 
• police began confiscating camera equipment from the journalists. 
• on friday, almost a week after the murder had been committed, the police department released the name of the officer.
• at the same time, they released what appear to be stills taken from security footage of a man who resembles brown grabbing at a shorter, smaller white man, allegedly as brown was fleeing a convenience store after shoplifting a box of cigars. 
• the police department admitted that at the time the shooting officer did not believe brown was connected to the shoplifting; this means they released the security camera stills to prejudice public opinion against brown and to get us to forget that the officer shot the boy because he jaywalked.

sources: http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/eyewitness-michael-brown-fatal-shooting-missouri, http://jezebel.com/ferguson-disgrace-police-fire-on-unarmed-crowds-attac-1621352164, http://jezebel.com/how-fergusons-twitter-users-woke-the-media-the-fuck-up-1621710724, http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/15/us/missouri-teen-shooting/index.html?hpt=hp_t1, http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/15/us/missouri-teen-shooting/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

more on the ferguson, mo, PD: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/15/the-day-ferguson-cops-were-caught-in-a-bloody-lie.html

Keys to a Successful Marriage or Relationship

1. They are gentle with each other.
2. They spend time in one another's company and enjoy conversation with each other.
3. They allow for influence by their partner.
4. They do keep score by remembering the good things their partner does for them.
5. Each partner knows themselves reasonably well.
6. Each partner honors the other's dreams.
7. There is a positive sense of humor in the relationship.
8. There are shared goals and a sense of team work in the relationship.
9. There are good conflict-resolution skills in the relationship (sometimes this means doing something, and sometimes it means letting things take care of themselves).
10.  There is a sense of continued romance in the relationship.
11. Contempt, for the partner, in all its forms, will more than anything else bring the relationship down. It needs to be avoided or worked through.

 

thoughts by john gottman

A beloved man remembered

Kelley strived for a better city: Rare illness claims life of community pillar at forefront of service, revitalization work.
By Ken Stephens and Kathy Hanks - The Hutchinson News

A brain disease that strikes one in a million took the life of Ron Kelley on Saturday.

Kelley, the retired Dillons executive and relentless civic and community volunteer, was 74. Family and friends were stunned by his diagnosis with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in late August and his rapid deterioration.

"What makes it so unbelievable is that he was in perfect health," said his wife of 52 years, Lovella Kelley. "It is absolutely, devastating."

Kelley had been an active participant in a Housing Commission meeting on July 24. He missed the next meeting on Aug. 24 because he was in Boston, where he was diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob, an always fatal disease that is characterized by rapidly progressive dementia and has no known treatment or cure.

Whether it was his church or his city, when there was a job to be done, Kelley was willing.

"He was always there," said Downtown Development Director Jim Seitnater, a longtime friend.

Kelley was a member of the Trinity Catholic school board, an organizer of the Ulster Project and a founder of the Catholics United Credit Union.

He served several stints totaling more than a decade on the Hutchinson Planning Commission and was chairman in 2009 when the commission began work on the first major rewrite of zoning regulations since 1987. Those new regulations were adopted in 2010, shortly after he left the Planning Commission.

Kelley moved, almost without a break, to the Housing Commission when he could no longer serve on the Planning Commission because of term limits.

He served on a committee to select a new city manager twice, once in 1991 and again in 2004 when the city hired the current manager, John Deardoff.

Kelley's priest, Father Joe Eckberg, was also shocked at how quickly Kelley, a man so vital and with such a brilliant mind, could perish from the horrific disease. When Eckberg first arrived in town, he quickly learned what an impact Ron had not just on the Catholic community, but the Hutchinson community.

"Ron touched a lot of lives," said Eckberg. "Just after I came, he opened Sarah's Catholic Bookstore, named after his oldest child. It was his dream to have the store in Hutchinson, and he made it happen."

The book store was his legacy, Lovella said.

"You would never make money in a bookstore," she said. "The legacy was that people came because they knew he was there and if they needed something he would help them get it."

Starting a local Society of St. Vincent de Paul, an international Catholic voluntary organization dedicated to serving the poor and disadvantaged, was also Kelley's brain child, said Eckberg. Instead of giving the poor money, they go with them to the grocery store and buy food, or fill up someone's car with gas.

There was much he did to help others quietly behind the scenes. He was always trying to make the world a better place for everyone and began with his own six children and 23 grandchildren. A gentle man, they can't recall him ever raising his voice.

He and Lovella took guardianship of a man known as Willie, who walked Main Street pushing a shopping cart and feeding the cats in Avenue A Park. They began feeding Willie lunch every day and got him into a local assisted care home, where they continued to visit him.

An unabashed promoter of downtown Hutchinson, Kelley was a member, and later chairman, of the Mayor's Task Force on Downtown Revitalization and then became the first chairman of the Downtown Hutchinson Revitalization Partnership, an organization he continued to serve until his death. In 2003, he was honored as a Kansas Main Street Volunteer of the Year.

For years, Kelley also was involved in efforts to redevelop the Wiley Building at First and Main.

While he was chairman, the DHRP unsuccessfully tried to purchase the building from George Nerhan on behalf of one potential developer. He also was a member of the Wiley Task Force, appointed by the City Council in 2008 to study the feasibility of renovating the building into a new City Hall. Because of his illness, it was uncertain whether he knew that another developer finally was able to complete a difficult purchase of the building on Aug. 26.

He also served on the Reno County/Hutchinson Intergovernmental Commission, which in the 1980s recommended consolidation of the Reno County Sheriff's Office and the Hutchinson Police Department, though nothing ever came of that recommendation.

Seitnater agreed that Kelley's involvement in civic affairs was so pervasive that it likely will take more than one person to fill his shoes.

"He was very much giving of his time and talent and his resources," Seitnater said.

But, he also took time to enjoy life.

Kelley learned to waltz so that he could play the commanding officer in the biennial production of the Prairie Nutcracker. Lovella played the officer's wife. It became their special time together during rehearsals and the performances. For several years, his officer's boots were too small. Other men in the cast would have to pull them on and then after the performance it took two or three strong men to pull them off.

"Ron was one of the most virtuous men I have ever met," said Betsie Andrews said. "I will miss his warm, encouraging-to-all smile."

Kelley would forever be the Prairie Nutcracker's commanding officer emeritus, Andrews said.

To find the exact words to describe her husband was difficult for Lovella.

"He taught me that faith and hope are who we are," she said.

Their strength came from reading the Liturgy of the Hours together. They would pray together three times a day, and were able to continue almost to the end. Many friends came and prayed with them.

It all was so sudden. A month ago, he was reading at Sunday Mass, and then two days later he lost his balance and was unable to remember things.

Through it, he remained a man of "silent, steady, courage," said his sister-in-law Lou Irwin.

A grieving daughter asked how her father could be stricken with this disease that only effects one in a million. A grandchild answered, "Because he was one in a million."

"Look for the helpers."

Boston. Fucking horrible.

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, "Well, I've had it with humanity."

But I was wrong. I don't know what's going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

But here's what I DO know. If it's one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we're lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they're pointed towards darkness.

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We'd have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, "The good outnumber you, and we always will."

—Patton Oswalt, c. 6 p.m. EST, on his Facebook account

Whole health

so, recently i've been trying to better train my focus on making healthy life choices—everything from eating more veggies to cross-country skiing more to being aware of my attitude. my awesome BFFy sister-in-law jak just sent out a vid she found on reddit about a guy who lost MASSIVE amounts of weight through sheer force of will (and conscientious eating and exercise and flicking off some unhealthy habits). but no personal trainer, purchasing of diet books, or special pills. 

i confess when i watched this i was basically failing at not crying (tense jaw, burning eyes, sureptitious wipes of face . . .). basically i just think it's so amazing that this guy went from a place of self-loathing and hopelessness to SOMEHOW finding it in himself to treat himself with respekk. so amazing. so beautiful.

then, kitty kat, jak's sis and another bff, send on a second video, equally teary-making, which follows. not only had this guy given up on himself, but basically the entire medical community and fitness community had, too. until he found one ally who helped him turn his life around. gah. allergies. 

shout-out to this dude. and that other dude. and to any of all y'all who are trying to figure out how to live a healthier life.

lovin',
dj and eusebia

Waterworld

my sister-in-law just told me that a good friend of hers just saved two kids from drowning today.

Jak wrote:

[My friend] was walking by a pond near her house to check in on her son and saw the one boy in the middle struggling. She asked the brother on the shore where his sister was, and he said she went under and didn't come up. So she dove in and rescued both kids.

ugh. i get chills. apparently the little girl was on the bottom of the pond when jak's friend got to her. both kids are fine now, but that was a really close call. thank goodness for vigilant adults. apparently, the friend said that it didn't even look like drowning. i had never heard that drowning doesn't look like drowning, and i've been a lifelong swimmer. so jak sent me this wonderfully informative article. 

please read it, and please stay safe this summer. get yourself and your kids into swimming lessons, and always wear approved flotation devices when playing in open water.

Drowning Doesn't Look like Drowning

from http://mariovittone.com/2010/05/154/

The new captain jumped from the deck, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the couple swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. “I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine, what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. ”Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not ten feet away, their nine-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”

How did this captain know – from fifty feet away – what the father couldn’t recognize from just ten? Drowning is not the violent, splashing, call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television. If you spend time on or near the water (hint: that’s all of us) then you should make sure that you and your crew knows what to look for whenever people enter the water. Until she cried a tearful, “Daddy,” she hadn’t made a sound. As a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer, I wasn’t surprised at all by this story. Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for, is rarely seen in real life.

The Instinctive Drowning Response – so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D., is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind. To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents) – of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening (source: CDC). Drowning does not look like drowning – Dr. Pia, in an article in the Coast Guard’s On Scene Magazine, described the instinctive drowning response like this:

1. Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled, before speech occurs.
2. Drowning people’s mouths alternately sink below and reappear above the surface of the water. The mouths of drowning people are not above the surface of the water long enough for them to exhale, inhale, and call out for help. When the drowning people’s mouths are above the surface, they exhale and inhale quickly as their mouths start to sink below the surface of the water.
3. Drowning people cannot wave for help. Nature instinctively forces them to extend their arms laterally and press down on the water’s surface. Pressing down on the surface of the water, permits drowning people to leverage their bodies so they can lift their mouths out of the water to breathe.
4. Throughout the Instinctive Drowning Response, drowning people cannot voluntarily control their arm movements. Physiologically, drowning people who are struggling on the surface of the water cannot stop drowning and perform voluntary movements such as waving for help, moving toward a rescuer, or reaching out for a piece of rescue equipment.
5. From beginning to end of the Instinctive Drowning Response people’s bodies remain upright in the water, with no evidence of a supporting kick. Unless rescued by a trained lifeguard, these drowning people can only struggle on the surface of the water from 20 to 60 seconds before submersion occurs.

(Source: On Scene Magazine: Fall 2006 (page 14))

This doesn’t mean that a person that is yelling for help and thrashing isn’t in real trouble – they are experiencing aquatic distress. Not always present before the instinctive drowning response, aquatic distress doesn’t last long – but unlike true drowning, these victims can still assist in their own rescue. They can grab lifelines, throw rings, etc.

Look for these other signs of drowning when persons are in the water:

• Head low in the water, mouth at water level
• Head tilted back with mouth open
• Eyes glassy and empty, unable to focus
• Eyes closed
• Hair over forehead or eyes
• Not using legs – Vertical
• Hyperventilating or gasping
• Trying to swim in a particular direction but not making headway
• Trying to roll over on the back
• Appear to be climbing an invisible ladder.

So if a crew member falls overboard and everything looks OK – don’t be too sure. Sometimes the most common indication that someone is drowning is that they don’t look like they’re drowning. They may just look like they are treading water and looking up at the deck. One way to be sure? Ask them, “Are you alright?” If they can answer at all – they probably are. If they return a blank stare, you may have less than 30 seconds to get to them. And parents – children playing in the water make noise. When they get quiet, you get to them and find out why.

(See a video of the Instinctive Drowning Response)

He is best who can forgive easily

Mark Stroman Will Die Tomorrow
from http://gawker.com/5822733/mark-stroman-will-die-tomorrow


Brandon K. Thorp — Tomorrow, the state of Texas will kill Mark Stroman by means of lethal injection. Today, a man he tried to murder, Rais Bhuyian, is praying Texas will spare Stroman's life.


Prayer is about all that's left. In the weeks after September 11, 2001, Mark Stroman raged through the convenience stores around Dallas, looking for "Arab" shopkeepers on whom to exact revenge. He found none, if that matters. What he did find was a Pakistani shopkeeper named Waqar Hassan and an Indian named Vasudev Patel. He killed them with a double-barreled shotgun. When he visited a Texaco station manned by Rais Bhuyian, a Bangladeshi Muslim, Stroman shot him in the eye.


Bhuyian cried out for his mother, and felt the sting of "a million bees" before collapsing on the floor, clutching his face to keep his brain in his head. He played dead until Stroman left the store, and ran to a nearby barbershop where he was picked up by an ambulance. Nine years and many surgeries later, he is partially blind, and his face is full of shotgun pellets.


The decision to execute Mark Stroman was an easy one. Texas justice is not known for leniency, and even compared to most murderers, Mark Stroman is eminently killable. After his apprehension in October 2001, he bragged to police about his ill deeds, which he called patriotic, and flashed a glib thumbs-up to reporters in the courtroom where he was tried. He was, by any sane measure, an embarrassment to Texas, humanity, and carbon-based life.


But Rais Bhuyian didn't care about that. Quietly at first, he initiated a campaign to save Stroman's life, petitioning Texas to commute Stroman's sentence to life without parole. On his website, Bhuyian wrote "that by sparing his life, we will give Mr. Stroman a chance to realize, through time and maturity, that hate doesn't bring a peaceful solution to any situation. Perhaps, if given the opportunity, it might generate such a positive influence on him that he may want to become a spokesperson against hate crime."


Nice sentiments, and utterly unlikely to move the heart of the Texas legal apparatus, if it can be said to have one, even though the widows of Stroman's other victims support Bhuyian's cause. Stroman supports it too, naturally enough, and convincingly testifies to his change of heart on the Huffington Post. "I received a message that Rais loves me and that's powerful," he says. "I want to thank him in person for his inspiring act of compassion … If I don't make it, I want Rais to carry on his work teaching people not to be prejudiced."


If he can't get Stroman's sentence commuted, Rias Bhuyian wants at least to meet his attacker in person. This is apparently Bhuyian's legal right, but he may have learned about it too late. Bhuyian has now initiated a lawsuit against Texas, demanding a stay of Stroman's execution until the meeting can take place; Dallas Magazine reports the case was bumped to a federal court, which shall convene Wednesday morning. If they don't grant the stay, Stroman will die at 6 p.m. tomorrow night, Texas time.

World Without Hate
from http://www.worldwithouthate.org/3.html


My name is Rais. I was born in Bangladesh. I came to the United States to fulfill my lifelong dream to pursue higher education and to experience the American Dream. But within a short time my life was completely changed due to one single incident. The lesson I learned from that incident transformed my life and motivated me to educate people against hate crime.


It was Friday 12:30pm, September 21, 2001. A man with a gun entered the gas station where I was working. He asked me -


“Where are you from?”


The question seemed strange to ask during a robbery, which certainly this was -- the man wore a bandana, sunglasses and a baseball cap, and aimed the gun directly at my face as I stood over the gas station register. “Excuse me?” I asked. As soon as I spoke I felt the sensation of a million bees stinging my face, and then heard an explosion. Images of my mother, my father, my siblings and my fiancé appeared before my eyes, and then, a graveyard. I didn’t know if I were still alive. I looked down at the floor and saw blood pouring like an open faucet from the side of my head. Frantically, I placed both hands on my face, thinking I had to keep my brains from spilling out. I heard myself screaming, “Mom!” The gunman was still standing there. I thought, “If I don’t pretend I’m dead, he’ll shoot me again.”


This was not a robbery but it was a hate crime. It was just after the tragedy of the World Trade Center on September 11th. The man with the gun was Mark Stroman, a white supremacist, and he was in the middle of a shooting rampage to express his anger towards those of Middle Eastern descent. He shot and killed Waqar Hasan, a man from Pakistan, on September 15; he shot me, a man from Bangladesh, on September 21, 2001, and shot and killed Vasudev Patel, a man from India, on October 4. All the victims were shot while working at gas stations and convenience stores in Dallas.


This incident changed my life, and has helped me to realize that hate doesn’t bring a peaceful solution to any situation. Hate only brings fear, misery, resentment and disaster into human lives. It creates obstacles to healthy human growth, which, in turn, diminishes society as a whole. Mark Stroman’s hate only brought more pain and suffering to an already mourning nation.


For his actions, he was found guilty on April 4, 2002 in the death of Mr. Patel, with a scheduled execution date of July 20th, 2011.


I am requesting that Mark Stroman’s death penalty be commuted to life in prison with no parole. There are three reasons I feel this way. The first is because of what I learned from my parents. They raised me with the religious principle that he is best who can forgive easily. The second reason is because of what I believe as a Muslim, which is that human lives are precious and that no one has the right to take another human’s life. In my faith, forgiveness is the best policy and Islam doesn’t allow for hate and killing. And, finally, I seek solace for the wives and children of Mr. Hasan and Mr. Patel, who are also victims in this tragedy. Executing Stroman is not what they want, either. They have already suffered so much; it will only cause more suffering if he is executed.


The other victims in this tragedy are Mark Stroman’s children. Not only have the Hasan and Patel children lost their fathers, but, if executed, Stroman’s children will lose their father also. I forgave Mark Stroman many years ago. In fact, I have never hated him. I never hated America for what happened to me. I believe he was ignorant, and not capable of distinguishing between right and wrong, otherwise he wouldn’t have done what he did. I think about him waiting in a cell to be executed, and can feel the pain of how ignorance can be driven by such hate, and cause somebody like him to murder two completely innocent people.


I believe that by sparing his life, we will give Mr. Stroman a chance to realize, through time and maturity, that hate doesn’t bring a peaceful solution to any situation. Perhaps, if given the opportunity, it might generate such a positive influence on him that he may want to become a spokesperson against hate crime.


I strongly believe that there are important reasons why God spared my life. I feel driven to bring an awareness of hate crimes to others. Hate crimes of ALL types. To educate those who may be as ignorant as Mark Stroman, and raise a consciousness among people that hating others can never bring lasting peace and satisfaction.

If this makes you angry, please don't just discount it; quietly read it again, and think about it

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