I know Jonathan Franzen chiefly by his being the only author on the planet to have stiffed Oprah Winfrey.  Not very smart, I thought, whatever his reasons.  But that didn’t seem to have hurt his sales on that book, Corrections, or his excellent reviews.  And now comes another really fat book from the same author.  “Can he do it again?” the critics wondered.  I mean, once you write one fine book, the creativity needed to produce the next one often seems to get stuck in the flotsam and jetsam of the first.

The answer is, yes, he did it again.  Though I didn’t read Corrections, and I hesitate these days to read anything over 350 pages, I read all 562 pages of Freedom and found it fascinating.  It is about our crazy, life-denying culture.  It is about people I know.  Ultimately, it is about me (sigh).

The title Freedom is perfect, for all the characters are floating loose in a sea of freedom, awash in freedom–but with little notion of how to handle it to their advantage.  In a culture with no controlling narrative, no compelling story to guide us, we have to discover the meaning of our lives by trial and error.  And for all of the characters in Freedom, there’s plenty of experimentation and plenty of error and all the suffering that goes with it.  Patty is free to have an affair with her husband Walter’s best friend, Richard; Walter is free to fall in love and mate with his much younger assistant, Lalitha; their son Homer is free at age 16 to move in with the girl next door; the people next door are free to build a very, very ugly addition onto their home; and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.

We watch in wry amusement as these characters stumble through their lives; nevertheless, we come to love them in their helpless thrashings about.  Like us, they can’t see their way so clearly.  Like us, they are moved by forces they hardly understand.  Like us, they have some honor, they try to do what is right, and often fail.  They suffer mightily.  Like us.

Each of the three main characters was fascinating to me, because I know people like them: Patty, the perfect mom, who is making cookies for all the neighbors, and dying inside; Walter, the liberal do-gooder who naively sells out to the corporation; Richard, the gifted musician who speaks clearly, with great integrity, but is supremely cynical about his fans and the world in general.  Not only do I know people like them, but there is a part of each one of them in me.  In the end, they seem to learn and grow from their suffering.  Sometimes, yes, that happens.

Questions emerge about marriage and relationship.  What is love, anyway?  Patty wonders what sexual chemistry has to do with it–she wants to desire someone more than she desires her husband, Walter.  Does “the movement in his pants” define love, as Richard believes?  Are Walter and Lalitha true “soul mates,” because sex and work blend into a life for them?  How do kids fit in?  When Patty finds she misses Walter and wants him back, does that mean she loves him?  Is love just the history they share?  Does she lose her concern with desire as she ages?  How does Walter come to forgive Patty and love her once again?  How does Richard reconcile his anger with the world as it is, and settle into a relationship?

One of the encouraging aspects of the book is the author’s perspective on young people.  The Berglund children, Homer and Jessica, seem to have their heads on straight, more or less.  And Lalitha, the young Indian woman who works with Walter, is all business when she needs to be, and yet loves deeply and well.  Is Franzen hopeful about the next generation?  Have they learned from our folly?  I guess the question for me is whether or not our young people can be sustained, with parenting as uneven and values as shaky as those received from their elders.

I want to speak to the style of the book.  It’s all plot-driven.  You simply read about what people do, by themselves and with one another.  Descriptions are cut to the bone, and the reader does not have to languish in paragraphs of self-conscious purple prose–or even clever phrases that draw attention to themselves.  Franzen allows us to just be there with the characters and forget about him and his craft–as of course, the best writers are able to do.

This is a book that makes me want to talk about it.  It is rich not so much with answers, but rich with the most pertinent questions of our time.  What makes a good life?  What gives meaning, ultimately?  How do men and women choose one another, and partner well?  What is our responsibility to the larger culture, as the powers that be ravage the environment and misuse people?  How do we know when we are doing the right thing, and not just more of the wrong?  Read it, and get a group of your friends to read it, and let us consider our lives.

Last week Debbra Wallace asked members of our community to place purple light bulbs on our front porch, as a symbol of peace and reconcilation–purple, as the mixture of red (the color of the Bloods) and blue (the color of the Crips).  Her great-nephew is being threatened by a gang, and Debbra herself was confronted by four gang members in the middle of the night last week.  They called for “the purple lady” to come out of her niece’s house, and when she did, they fired four shots in the air and told her that this was another warning to her niece’s son.  (Read the full story at http://tinyurl.com/28c2kfs)

The Oregonian ran a story on Christmas Eve about Debbra’s courageous stand,as so many of us, ironically, were preparing to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace.  Even as the lights on Christmas trees twinkled, and houses sparkled with the season’s cheer, Debbra was asking us to put up one more light, that the violence terrorizing the African American community might stop, and young lives might be saved.  “We are losing our children!” she told me, in anguish.  The daughter of a former minister, she believes that God is calling her to spread the light of hope and change in what often seems a hopeless, intransigent path of violence and death for young black men in her community.

Will purple light bulbs stop gang violence?  Some say it’s foolish to think so.  Note the following statistics:

• 56% of black males were working, as of October 2010
• 38% of the prison population is black, although blacks make up only 12.4% of the population
• nearly 1 in 3 African Americans aged 20-29 are either in prison, jailed, on parole, or on probation
• a black male born in 1991 has 29% chance of spending some time in prison
• the leading cause of incarceration for African American males is non-criminal drug offense
• only 47% of black males graduate from high school

It’s clear that we as a nation have a problem that’s not going to go away quickly or easily.  It has to do with an underclass that has no way of being integrated into the larger society, and so takes the only way that is offered–the drug culture, a culture of violence, crime, and early death.

What the purple light bulb does do, however, is to call our attention to the problem as it is manifested–very personally and concretely–in our specific community.  Sad to say, the white majority and the white political establishment really don’t want to concern ourselves with black on black violence.  If white boys were being shot on a regular basis, families threatened by gangs shooting up white homes, how do you think citizens would respond?  How do you think the mayor and the police department would respond?  I think this city would be shaken to its roots, and resources would be focused on change and prevention.

We have to shift the way we are viewing gang violence: it is not “their problem,” not “those people” on “that side of town.”  These are children killing children, and all children are our children. Until we see ourselves as one, accept our common humanity, the violence will only grow.  Don’t think it will stay “over there.”  It’s a huge and growing rip in the social fabric that will make us continue to pay more and more taxes to fill larger and larger prisons, trying fruitlessly to contain what we have neglected to heal.

Symbols are important.  The flag is a symbol.  So is the cross. So is the stand that Rosa Parks took when she decided to sit in the front of the bus.  She had had enough.  When will we have enough black on black violence, to make the changes in our educational system, our “justice” system, and the terrible economic inequity in this country that leaves so many desperate and hopeless?

So yes, light your purple light bulb.  Wake up, Portland.  The first step in healing a wound is knowing where it is and how much it hurts.

To write Debbra, to order a light bulb, or to donate, e-mail her at purplepassover@gmail.com

The film “Black Swan” (director Darren Aronofsky) is one of the most unsettling pieces of art I have encountered in a long time.  The principles give fine performances: Natalie Portman as the ballerina who is challenged to look at her dark side and Barbara Hershey as the mother, who failed at dance herself and is now trying to live through her daughter.  But it is the craft of the director that is the source of the film’s psychological power.

 The camera takes us right into the action–from the opening shots, we literally walk with the characters, bounce behind them as they move from place to place, in an unnerving fashion.  The dancer soon reveals that she cannot tell fantasy from reality, and of course neither can the viewer.  Did that really happen? we are always asking, as is she.  Because she has been unable to crack the shell of her surface perfection, she is stiff and cold, not erotic and juicy, like the friend she fears wants to steal her lead in “Swan Lake.”  She wants to hurt someone–her domineering mother, of course–but she cannot, and so she herself must bleed.  This is the stuff of tragedy.

This film has the potential to reach deep into the psyche of every viewer, because these forces are present in all of us.  It was Freud who first put forth the theory that every human being has a death instinct and a life instinct.  When the death instinct is turned upon one’s self, it leads to self-destructive acts, including suicide.  When Eros, or the life force, wins out, the death instinct is sometimes displaced onto others in the form of aggression.  But Eros can express itself in human creativity and love instead of warring against the death instinct, he believed. 

That is the challenge of our ballerina in “Black Swan,” and indeed is the challenge of every human being.  First of all, we must become conscious of the dark side–whatever is unacceptable to us and we don’t want to acknowledge as part of us. It can be negative impulses like jealousy or it can be talents or desires that we don’t want to recognize, for one reason or another. 

But we are afraid–we don’t want to go there, because we might lose control, we think.  To acknowledge the dark side is not the same as acting upon it–it is merely bringing it to consciousness, so that we are not driven by our more unconscious motives.  Then we know what is real and what is not real.  Then we will not hurt ourselves or others and wonder why we do these things.  Then we are free to choose, to say yes or no, to go with love and creativity and to grow in ways we never thought possible.

For those of us for who celebrate Christmas, it is a holiday rich with potential–potential for joy and potential for angst.  I have experienced Christmases all along that continuum.  This Christmas some will be reminded of those loved ones who are gone from us and will be present in spirit but no longer in body; some of us will be far from our children; some of us will find it stressful to get into the Christmas festivities, while others will find it fun; some will be reunited with those they love and haven’t seen for a while; some will find their usual loneliness only the more acute; other will receive an engagement ring and the hope of love that will last so long as they both shall live.  Yes, the whole human catastophe! 

That’s what Jesus was born into, as well.  Mary’s long ride on a donkey, in the bitter cold.  No room in the inn.  The loving arms of Joseph.  Shelter in the stable.  The miracle of the star that brought promise to those struggling.  The wondering eyes of the shepherds.  The gifts of the Magi.   

I have had–well, I suppose it is 69 Christmases!  On the whole, I’d have to say that they weigh in fairly heavily on the sadness scale, for all the usual reasons: alcoholism in the family, divorce, separation from loved ones, loneliness.  But even the childhood Christmases, problematic as they were, had their lovely moments.  We never bought a tree–we went out into some farmer’s field, crawled under the barbed wire, and cut a tree down, which is what everybody else did, too.  The aunts and uncles and cousins came to my grandparents’ home, where we lived, and amazing smells emanated from the kitchen, while the men smoked, joked, and told stories in the parlor.  My little sister, Donna, always woke me up at 5:00 AM on Christmas morning, to see what Santa had brought.  My grandfather always gave each one of us children a shiny new silver dollar.  We children always gave our father, who worked in the oil field, a metal lunch box, which he promptly “lost.”  Years later, he told us that those metal boxes rattled in the car when the roughnecks returned from the oilfield, preventing them from sleeping. 

Now I’m finding that it’s the simple things that seem to hold me close and keep me warm: making gingerbread cookies with my grandchildren; seeing the Christmas boats go by on the Willamette; wrapping little “secret Santa” gifts; planning the details of a Christmas dinner; talking on the phone (unlimited minutes!) to those far away; seeing a dog in a silly Santa hat; trimming our tree; hearing the familiar carols; and most of all, feeling safe and feeling loved. 

That’s the prayer, then, that I’m sending out for the whole wide world during this special season: I wish that every single person–every man, woman, and especially every child, could be warm and safe and loved.  That’s the heart of Christmas for me.  Amen and amen. 

I’m concerned.  Really concerned.  We are creating two classes in this country of ours–the struggling middle class, plus those more affluent, and then a desperate underclass whose inhabitants have no way of being successfully integrated into our society.  And we’re not talking about a small number of people. 

Consider the following facts.  Around 30-40% of students, depending upon how you count them, drop out of high school.  And far too many who graduate from high school cannot read. ( I don’t mean “read well”–I mean “read.”)   Unwed mothers now account for 40% of births in our country.  One out of every five children is born into poverty–and that would be the Federal poverty level, which is actually far below what a family can actually live on. 

What happens to people who grow up in a highly technological society, and who fail to gain even the basic skills and knowledge expected of a high school graduate?  They go to prison, that’s what.  One out of every 100 of our citizens is incarcerated–the highest percentage, as we say, in the civilized world.  And our prison systems have become a big business, totally draining the tax coffers of resources that could be used elsewhere–perhaps in preventative services and in education, so that more people could stay out of prison.

The fact is that our prison systems have become so expensive to maintain that we’re having to let prisoners out early–there’s no more room for them, and no more money to build more prisons.  A study done in 2005 of the California prison system, one of the most overcrowded in the nation, revealed that one inmate per week was dying because the state failed to provide adequate health care–for example, failed to treat an out-of-control infection.  Our prison systems all over this nation are overcrowded and rehabilitation is practically non-existent.  So what the state is doing, of course, is simply turning petty criminals into hardened and habitual criminals. 

What is the answer to this dilemma of the two Americas?  I hardly think the answer is to continue tax cuts for the rich, while the poor languish in poverty and hopelessness.  Do we really think we can keep these desperate and alienated citizens “over there”?  Read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”–no, we will be visited by our neglect, many times over. 

I don’t know what it will take to wake up this country.  Our soldiers in Iraq traverse the landscape in fear–every object might contain an IED.  We should know that this country is filling up with human IED’s–that is, people who have nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no dreams left to dream.  When they explode, no one will be safe.