Barnett Weekly

A recent report indicates that as many as one-in-five high-school-age boys have been diagnosed with ADHD and many of them are being treated with drugs like Adderall and Ritalin. Clearly, either there is a growing epidemic of ADHD of unknown causes, or diagnostic criteria and social standards have changed. In either case, what used to be a case of “boys will be boys” has become a social and medical problem.

Certainly, there are legitimate cases of ADHD, and the use of drugs has been shown to be effective in helping those in whom ADHD has become problematic. However, now that the use of such drugs has reached eight billion dollars per year in America, and 20 percent of young boys are diagnosed, one must consider what other factors are at play.

When I was growing up the boys in my suburban New York school were a mixed lot. Some were shy and studious, quiet in class, not terribly athletic and even socially awkward. Others were “leaders” – good athletes, good students and good-looking boys who garnered lots of positive attention. Then there was the group in the middle, in which I placed myself; average students, average athletes, socially capable but not necessarily the most popular. Finally, there were the outcasts who constantly acted-out inappropriately and seemed unable to control themselves; they’d disrupt classes, make funny sounds, throw balled-up paper, never do homework, cut school and spend an inordinate amount of time in the vice-principal’s office. I’d put their number at one-in-50, and I suppose today they would be diagnosed with ADHD.

In grammar school, there was one boy named Michael who chased our fourth grade teacher around the room and down the hall by wielding a yardstick with a nail pierced at one end. He’d make goofy sounds, whoops and grunts, and get hysterical nearly every day. By fifth grade, he was gone. But every boy, from time to time, was capable of getting wacky, and I loved that wackiness. There is something about sitting in class hour after hour that runs against the grain of boyhood, and I suspect that today’s epidemic of ADHD may have something to do with a lack of regular physical activity that provides the outlet for raging hormones at work in young boys.

At one level, school is about socializing individuals and teaching them to conform to the rules and regulations of group society. In some sense, this runs against the grain of individuation and autonomy, natural forces that arise during the psychological development of boys and girls both, but is necessary for society to function in an orderly manner. Taken to excess, however, it overly suppresses healthy initiative, imagination and experimentation, forcing these qualities to express themselves through the shadow-self of personality in anti-social and even destructive impulses or in some cases, I suspect, ADHD-like behavior.

That the purpose of schooling has been wedded to future livelihood has not helped. To many businesses, good workers are compliant workers, willing to do what they are told without question or complaint, and this seems to have become the definition of a good student. Thus it is no surprise that tolerance for variations in behavior and personality has decreased while diagnoses of ADHD have increased. This is more a symptom of a confused society than anything having to do with boyhood.

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A tremendous amount of energy and attention is focused on providing a path to citizenship for America’s many immigrants, and appropriately so. Citizenship provides, first and foremost, the protections of the Bill of Rights and laws granting access to legal representation, governmental programs and so forth. But lost in the immigration/citizenship debate is the bigger question of what it means to be an American citizen in the 21st century, let alone a citizen of the world.

If asked, most Americans would say citizenship means the right to vote, and of course that is true. It was not always thus; the right to vote has been variously denied to particular elements of society during the past 200 years. Women, minorities, those not owning property, those without money — restrictions on voting have been applied in order to maintain status quo, secure power, increase or reduce influence, and of course, get rich. Though most of the gross abuses focused on restricting voting have been eliminated, unfortunately subtle and malicious efforts to disenfranchise citizens continue.

Our 21st Century democracy is under assault; Supreme Court decisions pertaining to campaign financing which define corporations as having the free speech rights of individual citizens have corrupted and undermined the efficacy of one-person one-vote, granting the prize of permanent political power to those with the means to buy it. Highly paid lobbyists purchase and shamelessly peddle influence with national, state and local politicians. Combined with technological prowess and sophisticated data-mining techniques used to target individual voters, deceptive and manipulative “Astroturf” campaigns mock true grass-roots efforts geared to overcoming the power of big money in elections. It’s no wonder that so many ordinary people feel helpless, powerless and depressed about politics and choose to opt-out of politics.

Ironically, the technology that allows nearly instantaneous world-wide communication is and cannot be used for voting, except in the case of mass entertainment like “American Idol.” Though the entire global financial network has been deemed secure enough to be routed through the Internet, electoral politics remains a cumbersome and clunky affair, and as recent elections have demonstrated, vulnerable to fraud and hacking, not to mention “hanging chads.” This is not to say technology is the holy grail of voting, but it’s clear that little effort is going into making voting easier for citizens; it is much to the contrary.

In California, even the initiative process, once envisioned as a way to engage the citizenry directly in setting critical public policy, is sometimes used as a tool of wealthy and powerful interests. When used this way, the public’s confidence is further eroded, lending cynicism and a sense of defeat to one of the last remaining vehicles available for direct citizen involvement. Despite this, the initiative still remains one of the few modes of public policy expression that can liberate voters from the stranglehold of money-driven power-politics.

For citizens who have participated in a genuine grass-roots initiative effort, the sense of potential and possibility is exciting. People who felt helpless suddenly feel empowered; the voiceless gain confidence, the depressed feel cheerful, those who gave up find courage. A lack of a sense of worthiness is replaced instead with dignity; the deepest meaning of one-person, one-vote becomes real. This is the wisdom of America’s founders: at its honest and uncorrupted best, democracy liberates the spirit and uplifts both the citizen and society.

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For nearly 10,000 years human beings have lived in a land of milk and honey. Milk and its derivatives are used ubiquitously as food, and the importance of cattle made them one of society’s first forms of money. Old African tribes like the Maasai still measure wealth by number of cattle and notably, the earliest minted “coins” in the ancient Mediterranean included the image of the head of an ox. I could go on about cow culture for pages, but this column is devoted not to milk, but honey.

Life as we know it would be impossible without honey bees. The beginning of bee-keeping parallels the origins of fixed agriculture, agriculture that is responsible for the vast explosion of humanity and continues to feed billions of people and livestock. For ancient people, bees and the honey they produced were sacred mysteries; it is told that Zeus, king of the Olympian gods, was raised on honey.

Bees, as we know, are social insects, forming large colonies organized around the needs and survival of a queen. Thus, the first bee cults were goddess cults, and the mysteries of honey were secrets guarded by bee cult priestesses. Well before grape vines and fermented grape juice were introduced to Mediterranean culture by Crete, alcoholic honey wine (called mead) was widely used as an intoxicant by oracles and in sacred ceremonies. Later pejorative Biblical references about bees betray an effort to supplant such “pagan” cults with that of a monotheistic God.

Today, the food of Zeus is available at every supermarket, and bees continue to play an essential role in agriculture by fertilizing a wide variety of crops. However, honey bee colonies in North America are collapsing, and unless reasons for it are identified and mitigated, agriculture may collapse as well. Recent reports indicate hive losses in California of over 50% year-to-year, and central valley farmers have resorted to importing hives from Iowa to meet their needs. At suspect are genetically engineered seed food crops that incorporate nicotine-based compounds for added pest protection. These compounds end up in every part of each plant, including pollen and nectar, and it is suspected that continuous exposure by bees to these compounds is making them more vulnerable to early and sudden death. However, the precise cause of colony collapse is not known as of yet.

In a quest to create our “green revolution” people have resorted to many techniques, beginning long ago with the plow. By breaking the bonds of topsoil and repeated cycles of planting, nutrients and minerals are lost; our response has been the widespread application of artificial fertilizers and soil amendments to support vast monoculture plantings. As this, too, reached its limits, genetic engineering was introduced to improve yields and resistance to “pests.” Industrialized farming is now accepted as normal and necessary, but it’s actually destroying the basis of its own success, the vitality and health of Mother Earth herself. In nature, there are no “pests.”

Much agricultural effort is focused on crops for feeding cattle, which brings us back around to milk. The original blessings of milk and honey have been exploited by avaricious Kings of Commerce into a food-producer race for profits, accompanied by environmental damage, clogged arteries, morbid obesity, epidemic diabetes and a poisonous assault upon the natural world.

Bee colony collapse is a warning. Long live the Queen!

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All seemingly stable systems are subject to perturbations and disruptions; what we perceive as stability is only the temporary emergence of fixed patterns within a container of unfathomable complexity, or what we commonly call chaos. We begin to think we can control chaos by adapting ourselves to fixed patterns, but this illusion is quickly shattered when “accidents” or unforeseen outcomes arise.

Our attachment to fixed patterns is largely emotional. Intellectually we know that we live in a complex natural world subject to invisible forces. Before the advent of fixed satellite imaging from space, weather itself was one of these invisible forces. Metaphysical forces are also at play, which is to say, human imagination. Our imagination produces an endless stream of actions, each of which adds to the infinite complexity of existence. Between the hidden physical and metaphysical forces at play in each moment, it’s actually miraculous that fixed patterns arise at all.

Of course, on a cosmic scale, fixed patterns emerge as well. Our solar system, with its planetary orbits is one such pattern. For that matter, the Milky Way Galaxy is another. From the smallest to the largest, temporary fixed patterns establish themselves, but all are subject to the truth of complexity and all are temporary and impermanent. Billions of years from now our galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy, and the temporary, cosmic fixed patterns will undergo change.

On a human scale, civilization is our attempt to futher a fixed pattern. We use laws, cultural conventions, habits, manners, governance, and so forth to try to stave off the “chaos” of complexity in which our patterns of stability reside, and when those patterns are threatened or challenged we struggle to maintain the established order. Resorting to force, aggression, coercion, bribery, seduction, logic, lawsuits and the like, the established order resists change by all means available.

Any disturbance to established order generates turbulence, the re-emergence of complexity within a pattern of stability. Whether physical or metaphysical, an obstruction creates turbulence. In a physical system, obstruction disrupts flows and established patterns, like a large tree falling in a creek forces water up and over its banks. In the metaphysical system created by human imagination, obstruction disrupts as well, and often it disrupts the flow of money. Money is the water-flow of society; it’s called “currency” for a reason. The metaphysical nature of money is virtually a physical phenomenon, which is to say that any obstruction is perceived as tantamount to a threat to survival.

When the established order of money is threatened, those potentially affected respond by trying to remove the obstruction. In conventional terms, obstructions to the flow of money are called regulations. Put in place to preserve the stability of a fixed pattern, regulations are seen by some as blocking the free flow of currency and are resisted. The established financial order, of course, is metaphysical, which means it resides in the collective imagination. It has no fixed nature, and represents a measure of human attachment to and confidence in fixed patterns.

Those who disturb the established order are labelled “trouble-makers” by those who stand to benefit by its continuance. But “trouble” is the truth of systems, metaphysical or otherwise. Galileo Galilei, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs…the emergence of “trouble-making” system disrupters is, in fact, the history of the inexorable emergence of truth.

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If you’ve gone out to buy a coffee table or a dresser, you’ve most likely come across some with a “distressed” finish. Banged, scraped, rubbed, chipped, and worn, distressed furniture is new furniture intentionally made to look used and old. Setting aside the question “why not simply buy an old beat-up dresser at the thrift shop?” it is worth considering the sales logic of making a new piece of furniture look old. The answer is a simple one; some people like things that feel “lived with.”

I am one such person and my wife shares an appreciation of age. Our house is filled with old things, including us. The passage of time in a household naturally adds the after effects of banging, scraping, rubbing, and chipping, most of which come with a story; the ballpoint pen wielded like a pick-ax by a two-year-old at the dining room table, wooden tools darkened through daily handling and natural oils in the palm of the hand, a chip in the spout of an old tea pot. In some sense, these are tokens of simple living, the marks of existence.

There is a softness that comes with age; even metal softens as its surface changes from shiny glossiness to dull patina. China absorbs air molecules and changes color, panes of glass “melt” into watery waves, wood dries and splits and warps. These changes in the character of things become the thing itself, slowly revealing time at work within artifacts of culture. Antiques have value for precisely this reason.

Towns and cities also age; sidewalks crack, paint peels, gutters leak, and fashions change. Just as with the contents of a home, the contents of a city reveal real history, contain stories and carry meaning. In older cities, the physical becomes the metaphysical; with each step or turn one walks in the footsteps of others long gone, who walked in the footsteps of ones before them and so forth to the original people who walked in nature. We call this “historic” but it’s more than that; it is the continuity of society, the continuity of self, our very own story.

We live in the age of new and shiny. New cars, new appliances, new this, new that, form the basis of our consumer economy. Planned obsolescence pushes oldest into the trash bin and replaces it with newest, garnering nary a glance of dismay. To the contrary, people are excited by new and some are actually afraid of old. To some, old seems dirty and dangerous, in immediate need of disinfection. Thus a new coffee table made to look old is a perfect solution for which people are willing to pay extra.

Towns and cities are prone to new and shiny too. Here in Sonoma there was a serious proposal made in the 1950s to put a gas station within the Northwest corner of the Plaza Park; it never came to pass, obviously, and thank goodness for that. Over time, even buildings of the 60s and 70s, emblematic of a period when old buildings were even less popular than they are today, attain the patina of age.

Faux historic architecture is like distressed furniture, playing on sentiment but ultimately fake, empty of history or meaning. Old and shabby may be old and shabby, but at the very least it’s real. And that makes it worth preserving.

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