Month: April 2023

May is Mental Health month in the US

During this past week, I read two pieces of writing, a substack essay by Mary Gaitskill and a novel by Abraham Verghese.Both hit the same place in my gut for very different reasons. I finished the novel a day before I read the substack so I had time to meditate on one of the messages the book held for me. Verghese’s novel, The Covenant of Water (due May 2), spans seventy-five years, revolving around a family living in what is now Kerala, in southwestern India. The family is not poor but not wealthy by any means. Most of it takes place while India was under the rule of the British Empire. Without going into too much of the story, the family suffers a lot of death, many of the characters suffer misfortune, and there is an air of sorrow throughout the book. As I was reaching the end of the book, I was struck by the sense of “Shit Happens” and “We Move On”. How best to describe that? In my life, a child of 1950s optimism and Father Knows Best TV, I believed that if bad things were happening to me, there was something wrong with me. I almost always saw the glass half empty and found ways to escape my reality as I was hurting all the time. In Verghese’s book, ‘reality’ was that ‘bad’ things happen – to everyone. It’s normal. Those that moved forward accepted life on life’s terms. Those that didn’t, go through some very tough times. No one had to like the hand they were dealt. They mourned but they didn’t end up in therapy wondering what was wrong with ‘them’. They weren’t the center of the universe. Love wasn’t bartered on how good a person was or was not. Hardship befalling one was not a moral issue. The matriarch of this family loved everyone in her family and everyone who became part of the family. They knew they were loved. Yet shit still happened. Many of the characters found purpose in their suffering and found a way to turn their sorrow and grief into something that was of use to the larger world. This is a very simplistic summary and I recommend reading the book.

Gaitskill’s essay, entitled The Despair of the Young…. and the madness of academia, (search on the substack search engine) is a heartbreaking look, from a creative writing teacher’s experience, at the nihilism that so many between the ages of ten and thirty suffer from today. In her writing classes, students wrote about suicide, murder, serial killing, rape, and violence of the most extreme sorts. Often from the first-person point of view. She has taught long enough to see the trend get worse over the years. Political correctness, lawsuits, and lack of “safety” have seemingly tied Academia’s hands to handle this trend in a way that might actually be helpful to a student. I am in my 70s. I felt despair in my teens and early twenties. Nothing I felt compares to what I was reading in her essay. Though I often contemplated suicide, I never would have followed through. It was a way out that I always had in the back of my mind that kept me from believing I was in a prison of misery with no exit doors. And there was a revolving circle of adults (not my immediate family) who listened to me, empathized, and allowed me to be seen no matter how self-centered my despair was. 

I have little first-hand knowledge of what Gaitskill was writing about. The closest I’ve come is my reading the news of mentally unstable young people being allowed to buy guns, and taking their despair out on schoolmates and whoever was near them. I would never doubt Gaitskill. She is a brilliant writer, able to translate much of her life experience into very readable, though not always pleasant, short stories. I’ve also watched many of my friends go into therapy since White Supremacy and Hatred have crawled out from under the carpet in the years leading up to Trump’s election and the seven years since. Most of my friends are adults and know ways of trying to cope. Some have fallen sick. None that I know of have resorted to self-violence or other violence. I, myself, have chosen to distance myself from the insanity of what’s going on in the US by living much of the year in France. 

Where am I going with this writing? The contrast between the fictional story of a family that managed to convey that things do pass and there was no belief that whatever was happening was so acute that the only way to stop the pain was suicide or homocide, and in the USA of today, where violence is a reasonable option to deal with despair. It is an option supported by the very same people that say killing a fetus is a crime. 

Gaitskill further says that her students are being let down by their schools. She gave some examples of times when she, the professor, or another staff member could be available to talk to a student. She was told not to. “The only thing I can say for sure is that the young deserve better.  It has become standard to complain about how inept and spoiled the young are but—my students were in some ways pretty great.  Their stories confronted not only suicide and violence but also dilemmas of artificial intelligence, gender animus, caring for a sick parent and sibling during the pandemic, the tenderness of asexual love, the awfulness of age, the timelessness of war—they were ambitious, humorous and bright in the face of everything.”

When I finished reading The Covenant of Water, I didn’t want it to end. I felt so satisfied and full from having read about generations of people coping with life. When I finished Gaitskill’s substack, I felt so powerless over this despair that is spreading amongst young people like the black plague. Covid didn’t help but it’s not an excuse for why adults are letting young people down, why treating the mental health of our young isn’t available everywhere. It’s needed now more than ever.

According to the Suicide and Crisis Center of North Texas, suicide is the third leading cause of death of young people between the ages of 15 and 24.

  • 5,000 young people complete suicide in the U.S. each year.
  • Each year, there are approximately 10 youth suicides for every 100,000 youth.
  • Each day, there are approximately 12 youth suicides.
  • Every 2 hours and 11 minutes, a person under the age of 25 completes suicide.
  • In the past 60 years, the suicide rate has quadrupled for males 15 to 24 years old, and has doubled for females of the same age.
  • For every completed suicide by youth, it is estimated that 100 to 200 attempts are made.
  • Firearms remain the most commonly used suicide method among youth, accounting for 49% of all completed suicides.

There’s not much more to say except to hope that mental health counseling in schools, universities, and everywhere gets better and becomes more accessible. What is happening today should be unacceptable.

A bientôt

Sara

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What’s going on in France?

As an exPat for the last nine and a half years, I encourage any of my readers and friends to chime in on this subject. It takes living in France a long time to understand the French.

One would have to be living in a bunker to not know what is going on in France. Transport strikes, garbage strikes, street protests, all in resistance to President Macron’s raising of the retirement age from 62 to 64 (at least that is the purported excuse though the french often don’t need much of an excuse to say they don’t like something).

The massive French protests against Macron’s pension

Macron no longer has a majority in the Assemblée Nationale, so he enacted the new law by special powers under Article 49.3 of the constitution. Last Friday, the Constitutional Council met to decide whether he was correct to do so and had France’s best interests at heart. As the sun set Friday, word came out that it was constitutional and the committee agreed with Macron 100%. He signed it into law within twenty-four hours.

People protest with a poster referring to the visit of Britain’s King Charles III – cancelled due to unrest in France – in Nantes, western France. [Jeremias Gonzalez/AP Photo]

People took to the streets in more protests. Monday night, Macron gave a pre-recorded speech meant to calm down the masses and urge everyone to move on. John Litchfield, who writes Opinion for The Local, an English language newsletter, had this to say on Tuesday:

“Yes, the pension reform is painful. But it was necessary. It’s all over now. Dry those tears. End the tantrums.  We can move on to things you will enjoy.

Higher wages. Sharing of profits. Better schools. No queues in emergency wards.  Expulsion of failed asylum seekers. Something for the Left of you and something for the Right.

Will it work? Probably not. The nationwide fit of shrieking and toy-throwing, some sincere, some synthetic and hypocritical, will continue for quite a while.

It is unlikely that President Macron will have much to show his wailing child at the end of the 100-day recovery period, ending on July 14th, that he promised on Monday night.

Superficially, this is just French politics as usual. France demands “change”. It opposes all changes.

France complains that it is slipping down the global league table of prosperity, influence and functioning public services. It refuses to accept that it should work longer or tax itself less to compete with its rivals and neighbours.

Superficially, we have been here before. All presidents for the last three decades have faced strikes and street protests against modest social reforms.

Some were withdrawn. Others such at retirement at 62 instead of 60 are now the “acquis” (status quo) which the new generation of protesters defend.

Others, such as the simplification of hiring and firing and reduction in pay-roll taxes, help to explain why joblessness in France has plunged from 9 percent to 7 percent in the last six years. Those reforms, started by François Hollande and continued by Macron, were opposed at the time by strikes, marches and scattered violence.

Surprise, surprise, no-one mentions unemployment much anymore.   

But there has been something qualitatively different – almost existentially different – about the pensions reform protests of the last three months. The language is different. There is an edge of hysteria in the allegations that the modest move in the pension age from 62 to 64 is “brutal”, “unjust” and “autocratic”.

The government’s use of its special powers under Article 49.3 of the constitution to push through the reform was predictable and widely predicted. It has happened 100 times before in the last 65 years.

This time 49.3 was presented as “an assault on democracy , “a trampling of the will of the people”, an act of “violence which called for a violent response”.

Close to my village in Normandy someone has erected a cardboard sign with the scrawled message in felt-tip pen: “49.3 = 1789”.  Revolution is in the air again, in the Gilets Jaunes rural heartlands, not just among the self-pleased, black-clad, young bourgeois anti-capitalists who smash shop windows and burn cars in Rennes or Lyon or Paris.

Compare and contrast this hysteria (I believe that the word is justified) with the unemotional language of the Constitutional Council’s ruling last week. The nine “sages” declared that the pension reform was reasonable and constitutional – and so was the manner of its enactment.  

The Council said that the increase in the official retirement age to 64 by 2030  would “assure the financial balance of the (state pension system) and guarantee its survival in the light of the increase in life expectancy”. The government’s use of several special powers to hurry and then force a decision was “inhabitual” but not contrary to the Constitution.

Normally the pronouncements of The Sages are accepted without much comment. On this occasion, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the radical Left, said that it was a “violent” decision which would encourage a violent response.

Macron’s decision to sign the pension reform within hours of the Council’s decision was presented, even by moderate union leaders, as a “denial of democracy” and an “autocratic” refusal to listen to the voice of the people.

All of this can be dismissed as the sour grapes of bad losers. Mélenchon, who has been stirring violence for weeks, has little right to talk of democracy.

But those who believe – like me – that the pension reform is modest and justified must also now accept that something is happening here which goes beyond the recent French cycle of reform and protest. It is something that also goes beyond rampant Macronphobia of many French people.

Solenn de Royer in a column in Le Monde said that this has become a revolt not just against pension reform, but against the technocratic, top-down, diluted democracy instituted by Charles de Gaulle 60 years ago. There is much truth in that.

Emmanuel Macron claimed in 2017 to be a suited revolutionary. He was an impatient young man with many good ideas but he was no revolutionary. He was – and he was seen by many to be – the epitome of the kind of technocrat who used to stand behind presidents. Now HE was the president.

The father-knows-best tone of his 15 minute address last night – “dry your tears; lets move on” – placed Macron firmly in the Fifth Republic tradition of paternalistic semi-democracy. In the age of social media and the collapse of old political allegiances, that no longer works very well.

The Gilets Jaunes movement of 2018-9 already revealed a formless hunger for a new, more direct kind of popular control of decision-making. It also exposed how dangerous that desire can be.

If the French people want to have more direct control of their lives, they also need to move on. They need to grow out of the child, or teenage-like, modes of thinking which the top-down Fifth Republic has encouraged.

“The state (like mummy and daddy) is all-responsible and usually wrong. The state should do more but we should pay less taxes.”

In sum, the crisis over pension reform is both absurd and profound. It is both Macron’s failure and France’s failure.

A drum-beat is already starting suggesting that Marine Le Pe and the Far Right will reap the benefits in 2027.  That is the subject for another column.

But I believe that, in four years’ time, the country may be  more likely to revert to the unthreatening immobilism of the Chirac years: someone who promises to “listen” and then delivers little.”—-The Local

A bientôt,

Sara

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After three months in stormy, wet, miserable California, I am now back in Paris. Question marks hovered over my head for days wondering what would greet me. I read that the garbage strike was over but….how many days does it take to clean up ten days worth of a strike that left streets unpassable and people holding their noses? Many as it turns out. By the time I was taxing from CDG to my apartment, garbage bags were off the street but still in piles on sidewalks. The news says the outer arrondissements are taking longer to clean than the inner.

Garbage waiting to be picked up on April 1, in the 16ème near Parc du Ranelagh

I wondered about the airport itself. Everything I read said only Orly and Marseille airport workers were striking. In France, it is mandatory to tell the police ahead of time where, when, and who is striking. But I was raised in the US where surprise is part of the strike so I expect things to happen that aren’t known. The worst thing that happened, the day of my return, was that there was no place for the plane to taxi to. We waited thirty minutes on the plane in Frankfurt until the pilot was assured of a gate and then waited another ten minutes upon arrival in Paris for the gate to free up. After that, it was easy peasy. The unplanned wait allowed morning rush hour traffic to disappear and I was in my apartment less than two hours after we finally got to the gate.

I stepped into my apartment and it seemed as if I’d never been away. Time is something I don’t understand. I find it fascinating that some hours seem like days and some days pass by so fast, it feels like just a few breaths. Here I was, back in Paris, after what had felt like a decade of horrendous storms and now it all felt like a dream. It wasn’t raining and, though the sun wasn’t out, it was clear.

Parc du Ranelagh April 2, 2023

I suffer terrible jet lag and the common sense wisdom says jet lag is always worse going west to east. I had cut out three hours (or three days) by stopping in Michigan to visit my sister. I decided not to try and plan the jet lag or outsmart it or any of the other attempts at controlling what I can’t contol. I would sleep if I felt like sleeping and take everything else easy. So I made a few commitments and had to apologize for most of them when I was too tired to follow through. I did get outside and walk my neighborhood. The world was green, young green, shoots of baby plants green, that light green that says it can only be Spring. After a winter of so much rain (yes, I was grateful for California rain and that the Bay Area is no longer in drought conditions, but that didn’t make it fun), grey in the sky, grey on people’s faces, carrying an umbrella and warm clothes everywhere, I was experiencing a literal ‘light at the end of the tunnel.’ 

Rue de l’Assomption April 2, 2023

I managed to make it out to Parc de Bagatelle in my first days back. I knew I had missed the fields of golden daffodils that had taken my breath away last year. But Spring was here and I wanted to see the peacocks and the cats. I could hear the peacocks ‘crowing’ before I even entered the parc. Mating season was officially open. The first peacock I saw had his fan tail completely open and was doing a cat walk for a number of people with cameras and phones, and for two females who were playing hide and seek with him. It was a wonderful show. I kept wondering where all the feathers go when the tails start to molt. All the times I went to watch the progress of the new tail growth, I never saw a single feather.

Male peacock putting on a show for people and females alike. You can see one of the females vehind him at about 2 O’Clock.

And though I missed the daffodils, the tulips were on display, tiny flowers of yellow and purple, red and orange, magnolia trees with purple flowers at its base, all sang of Spring. I was so happy to be back in Paris.

Fields of orange tulips replacing the plethera of daffodils
The albino peacock
One of two magnolias at Bagatelle

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A bientôt,

Sara

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