Another Great Leveler

Death may be the great leveler, or perhaps “our courts are the great leveler” (Atticus Finch), or maybe the public schools are (my Uncle George). But I have another candidate: the Division of Motor Vehicles.

There’s something about these low, flat, uninspired buildings that cut us all down to size as soon as we pull into the parking lot. Once inside, we’re assigned a number that strips away any sense of self. We’re all the same when it comes to the DMV: a driver’s license number and a birth date.

Privacy? Forget it. At the Hillsborough office on Thursday, an officer asked all of us in the waiting room why we were there: a newlywed with a name change, a kid taking a road test, a traffic violator in search of a driver improvement class, a woman who finally found her social security card. We’d hoped to seem interesting or confident or aloof as we sat reading our magazines and checking our cell phones. Instead, we were revealed in all of our banality.

The drab, institutional feel of the officers lined up behind their desks is another immediate symbol that we don’t mean much. We may think we’re above this tedious exchange, but if we don’t have the right paper work or the required cash, we're no better than the guy with the slicked-back hair at station 2.

Maybe it’s a good thing, this reminder at least every 5 years that we’re really nothing special. It’s kind of like "pride goeth before a fall.” Start thinking you’re hot stuff and before you know it, you’ll find yourself pulling up to the DMV and all illusions will disappear.

Get the Lead Out of Lipstick

My Redken shampoo has over 40 ingredients in it, most of which I don't recognize. The first is water, but it goes downhill from there, with substances linked to cancer, hormone disruption, and immune system suppression. On the front of the bottle, the company highlights one ingredient--grapefruit extract--I guess because this sounds natural and healthy. But guess what? Grapefruit extract is the 43rd, and final, ingredient. I doubt that this small amount offsets the toxicity of the parabens, sulfates, and propylenes that precede it.

Redken and Procter & Gamble and lots of other skin care companies want us to think their products are filled with green, organic goodies, but they're not. Labels are misleading and ingredients are often known to be toxic and carcinogenic. How can this happen? The cosmetics and skin care industry is loosely regulated; FDA oversight is weak, and cosmetics firms themselves determine the safety of their products. Annie Leonard's new video, The Story of Cosmetics, gives an excellent overview of the current, dismal situation.

New federal legislation proposed last month hopes to change this. The Safe Cosmetics Act of 2010 will phase out harmful ingredients, raise safety standards, improve labeling, and fund enforcement. For those who wish to support this legislation, The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics is a good place to start.

In the meantime--while we're still unprotected--consult the Environmental Working Group's data base, "Skin Deep." It provides detailed information about known and suspected problems with a host of chemicals.

I've seen too much cancer in myself and in family and friends to think there's no correlation between our environment and our health. Profiteers will surely not look out for us. If we don't work to protect ourselves and our children, who will?

The Stuff of Life

College students moving in all over the country. We're all of us vagabonds at one time or another, our stuff reduced to cardboard boxes and trash bags.

It's just that some of us are luckier than others. We have a place to call home.

War Peddlers

Sometimes General Petraeus sounds like a door-to-door salesman. Especially when he peddles his wares--the war in Afghanistan--to a weary public.

I'm not sure if it's a deliberate tactic or not, but he uses words that can leave you dizzy. On Sunday's Meet the Press, he said, "Over the last 18 months or so, what we’ve sought to do in Afghanistan is get the inputs right for the first time. . . And, indeed. . . the inputs already are enabling some outputs."

He evidently likes this language. In June he told us that General McChrystal had "played a key role in helping get the inputs right in Afghanistan." And in March, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he said, "We've spent much of the past year working to get the inputs right in Afghanistan. . . And with those inputs now in place, we're starting to see the outputs."

My head spins with questions. What exactly are inputs? "Organization," "concepts," and mostly troops, as far as I can tell. What are outputs? Not clear. So far there don't seem to be any or he would have spelled these out, as any good salesman knows. And biggest questions of all, why has it taken 9 years to get the inputs right? And why have we tolerated a 9-year-old war that, to date, shows no outputs?

The salesmen have come and gone. George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Barack Obama, Robert Gates, brass and non-brass, all packaging and repackaging the same product--one that costs far more money and lives than we can afford.

Instead of shutting our doors and pretending we're not home, let's confront the salesmen and tell them we're not interested. We owe it to ourselves and our country to do no less.

A Dog's Life: Thunderstorms and Mondays

Sing to the tune of "Rainy Days and Mondays," as performed by Karen and Richard Carpenter:

Ripping up my toys and feeling scared
Sometimes I'd like to run
Thunderstorms aren't any fun
Tearing around, turning lions into clowns
Thunderstorms and Mondays always get me down.

What I've got they used to call plain fear
Thunderclaps are way too loud
Don't like what's behind those clouds
Tearing around, turning lions into clowns
Thunderstorms and Mondays always get me down.

Funny but it seems I always wind up in your bed
It's nice to know somebody loves me
Funny but it seems that it's the only thing to do
Run and find the one who loves me.

What I feel has come and gone before
Happens on hot summer nights
In the midst of flashing lights
Tearing around, turning lions into clowns
Thunderstorms and Mondays always get me down.

Summer Reading Picks: Graphic Literature

When I first heard about graphic novels, I thought they seemed silly. Glorified comic strips is all I could imagine. I ignored the genre for several years until I discovered Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, a witty, heartbreaking account of the author's childhood during the Islamic Revolution in Iran. I quickly followed up with Persepolis 2, which chronicles her exiled adolescence in Europe, and Embroideries, a frank and charming picture of women's lives in Iran.

More recently I've read two excellent works of non-fiction: The 9/11 Report by Sid Jacobsen and Ernie Colon and The United States Constitution by Jonthan Hennessey and Aaron McConnell. The co-chairs of the September 11 Commission endorse this book's lively, engaging format as a means for readers to understand the complexities of the attacks and the subsequent recommendations. Both it and The United States Constitution would make excellent textbooks; the material comes alive through unforgettable illustrations.

A simpler book, but no less remarkable, is The Shiniest Jewel, a memoir by Marian Henley. In it Henley tells the story of her efforts to adopt a child from Russia, while at the same time facing both the declining health of her father and the decision of whether or not to marry. Poignant, honest and funny, Marian Henley's story is--like a lot of good fiction--our own story as well.

Finally, my favorite: Maira Kalman. Though she doesn't use the traditional comics format in her work, her illustrations are essential. I came upon Kalman through her blog, And The Pursuit of Happiness, published online in The New York Times. She's funny and quirky and colorful, and she loves hats and chairs and old people. Read her book The Principles of Uncertainty, and you'll find a story on every page.

Impermanence

Other than my two hometowns of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and Durham, North Carolina, I have spent more time in Chincoteague, Virginia, than anywhere else on earth.



Every time I return, I look for signs that things are still the same. On this trip the ponies were still grazing on Assateague Island, the marsh mallows were bursting with color, the snowy egrets were hunched in the trees, and the seagulls--the seagulls--were still hoping for a free meal.


And of course the crape myrtles were in bloom everywhere,



and vacationers were still hanging out on their decks overlooking the bay.


But on this trip the bridge had changed. I had known that a new bridge was in the works for years and under construction this year, but to see it and travel on it was altogether different. By entering the island onto Maddox Avenue, you no longer get the same feel of the old fishing village that Chincoteague once was; rather, you enter on the beach road, the kind of road you might find in any resort town in Virginia or North Carolina.

So it wasn't the same. Chincoteague had changed once again. And while we'd like some things in life to stay the same. . .



they don't.

The Kite Koop moves, Etta's Channel Side Restaurant is no longer run by Etta, and the condo next door is for sale. The trees die off, the dunes disappear, and the coastline shifts.

And the people we love come and go.

Weight Matters

The scales don't lie.

Despite all the publicity and hand-wringing about American obesity, we're now fatter than ever. According to a report issued this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 30% or more of the people in 9 states are now obese. This figure is up from 2007 when only 3 states reported this rate.

The maps that accompany the report, published in The New York Times, show a fungus-like disease spreading throughout the South, starting in Louisiana and Mississippi and moving northward to Missouri on the west and to West Virginia on the east. The fungus skirts North Carolina, though we are just one notch below the others, with 25-30% of our population obese. Frankly, no state comes out a winner: not a single state met the "Healthy People 2010" obesity target of 15%.

When reports such as these are issued,I often think back to my childhood and recall that almost no kids were fat. Those who were would be considered, by today's standards, pleasantly plump. Why is it so different now? We see overweight children and adults everywhere we go, from doctor's offices to grocery stores to elementary schools.

It's odd, too, that obesity is rising in our culture at a time when abnormal and unhealthy thinness is still considered the ideal. Rates of eating disorders in the United States are alarming. The incidence in anorexia among young women ages 15-19 has risen every decade since 1930. And up to 24 million Americans of all ages and genders suffer from eating disorders.

Clearly we have an unhealthy relationship to food and body image, and these have only gotten worse. What will it take to change?

Complications at Monticello

When our family visited Monticello one summer, I was struck by the amazing mind of Thomas Jefferson displayed throughout his home and grounds. The entrance to his house is a museum in and of itself. Rooms show off his inventions and architectural brilliance. The grounds are filled with evidence of his botanical mind. And to see his library is to be reminded of the words he penned at our nation's founding.

Reading The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed doesn't diminish these recollections, but it does draw a much more complicated picture of the master at Monticello. As is well known today, the sexual relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, one of his slaves, produced several children. Sally Hemings was the half-sister of Martha Jefferson, the president's first and only wife, and from here the relationships grow only more complex. The common-place pattern of white slave-owners fathering children with black slaves produced troubling family arrangements.

As Gordon-Reed writes, "Slavery simply provided families in the South with many more ways to be bizarre than in regions where it never took hold or was abandoned early on. Fathers owning sons, brothers giving away brothers as wedding gifts, sisters selling their aunts. . . enslaved black children and their free white cousins, living and playing together on the same plantation--things that by every measure violate basic notions of what modern-day people think family is supposed to be about. This was one of the myriad reasons why slavery was a horrific thing."

It's enough to make Strom Thurmond turn over in his grave.

And it's enough to make me realize once again what a complicated history we Americans have with race. Slavery is a part of our ancestry, all of ours, and it's no wonder we struggle. The more we understand this history, though, the closer we'll come to understanding the present.

Gordon-Reed's book is an excellent step in this direction.