Commencement 2008: Advice for Extraordinary Circumstances

In one of my mental files I keep a folder labeled "What to Do If..." I do not keep regular housekeeping tips or money saving tips or life maintenance tips of any kind in it. I wouldn't go there, for example, if I was trying to remember how to get the smell of spoiled Alfredo sauce out of my car after an unfortunate incident with a take-out container and a red light. If I think you might be having a stroke, I wouldn't check that file to get any information on whether I should get you to smile, ask you to recite something from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer or encourage you to sing "I'm Your Venus".

No. That file is a resource to be consulted only for Advice in Extraordinary Circumstances. I save info bits there like "What to Do if You are Being Swallowed by a Giant Anaconda" and "Exercise Caution When You Need to Blow a Large Animal Carcass to Smithereens After it Dies Next toYour Tent." *

I sit up and pay attention when I learn of useful things that could go in my file. So, when I was listening to a radio talk show a few years back about how best to handle an alien abduction, I was alert. The broadcast, out of Bellingham or Canada, had a call-in format and callers were sharing their experiences of being temporarily captured by extra-terrestrial beings.

My overall impression was that interplanetary researchers were likely to treat you with a certain perfunctory attitude. They were not interested in getting to know the real you - I mean, they didn't want to know when you graduated from high school, if you had hobbies, what sort of music and books you liked, or if you preferred red wine to white. Aliens, apparently, aren't interested in your hopes and dreams, or your plans for the future. No, your off-planet captors are all about the biological and the word "probe" came up often.

I don't know why they are so keen on all that probing, but they seem very enthusiastic in their pursuit. Everyone who has ever been abducted in this fashion seems to refer to this procedure. It makes me think that off-worlders have some sort of inter-galactic research grant that allows them to keep coming back here and repeating an experiment that is bound to produce the same results each and every time. The abductees all had kind of a murky memory of the experience, and while they didn't find it particularly pleasant, they reported that the aliens returned them to Earth without them having incurred any structural damage.

One would imagine that, weirdness factor aside, being the subject of an alien probe was not a lot worse than, say, a colonoscopy. The general advice seemed to be, "Be as still as possible and go to your happy place."

But one caller, a woman, said something that stayed with me for future reference. After recounting her abduction trauma and her post-abduction-post-trauma, she said, "But, you know, I just decided that I wasn't going to be the victim of my life experiences."

I thought this was a pretty chipper outlook. The caller was saying that while she experienced an unfortunate event, she refused to slide into the ditch of victimhood. Stuff happens. Your life can turn on a dime. One moment, you're peacefully tending to your hydroponic contraband in your greenhouse, and the next moment you are on a spacecraft that defies the known laws of astrophysics and are having your body cavities explored by a luminescent creature with enormous dark eyes and long, thin fingers. One could get seriously mentally destabilized by such an event (if one was not prior), or one could choose to regard it as a life lesson.

Now that the season for graduation has come around once more and there is a whiff of well-meant advice to the graduates hanging in the air, I thought about this again. I was reviewing my commencement article from 2007 and asking myself if I had anything to add. And, thanks to that anonymous caller, I do. Hold on to your tassels.

I see the mantle of victimhood worn enthusiastically by adults, as well as young people. Hell, I wear it myself more often than I care to admit. While it comes in different colors and textures, the style is largely the same. It's the conviction that whatever is in your life that's not entirely welcome is out of your control. It is the belief that some external force is manipulating you and you are a helpless victim within its grasp. The particularly seductive power that gives victimhood its legitimacy is that you don't have to look too far to see shocking examples of injustice.

For example, Ellen Goodman, columnist for The Boston Globe, did a piece recently called "The Thief That Keeps on Taking" about equal pay for equal work. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed to enforce equality in the workplace, but the national wage gap between men and women still hovers around .79 for female labor to the dollar for male labor. A woman named Lilly Ledbetter worked as a supervisor for 20 years for Goodyear at a lower wage until she was made aware that she was making 21% less than male supervisors.

She took Goodyear to court and won repeatedly until the Supreme Court ruled that a worker has to sue within six months after first receiving unequal pay. Obviously, workplaces do not, as a rule, make salary information available to all employees; many companies forbid employees to compare or discuss wages with one another. As Goodman said, for the Court's ruling to have had a sensible affect on Ms. Ledbetter's case, she would have had to, somehow, deduce the wages of her colleagues without asking and file a suit for sex discrimination as soon as she started her job at Goodyear.

Ms. Ledbetter has been victimized by a form of discrimination that five out of nine Justices, presumably committed to righting the wrongs for harmed citizens, agreed to perpetuate into the future. That doesn't exactly shine a beacon of hope on the rest of us in the workplace.

Even though Ms. Ledbetter is in her 60s, injustice comes at you at any age. By 17 or 18 years of life, enough things have likely happened to you that make you feel like a victim. Some events are just imposed on you by the circumstances of your birth and you had no say in the matter. Sometimes, people treat you badly, and even if you have done nothing to deserve their mistreatment, you have to find a way out of the wreckage. Maybe your family is totally messed up and you have been victimized by adults with poor control over their own lives. Maybe you've already felt the unjust sting of racism or sexism. You should have gotten an award and you deserved a scholarship, but they didn't come through. Things should have happened and didn't, or things should not have happened, but did. Other times, you could have made better choices, but didn't or didn't know how to, and you're stuck with the undesirable results.

Then, there's the endless laundry list of things that are simply unfair, if not quite unjust. Phone companies have no trouble turning off your cell phone service even if you sent the check and it's shuttling around somewhere in the postal system in Everett (or Latvia). Teachers aren't very interested in your excuses, even if they are legitimate. Your employer may release you when his nephew comes to town and needs a summer job. The "No Parking" sign may have been partially obscured by a bush, but the parking ticket is still $25. Girlfriends dump you without an explanation; boyfriends promise to love you forever, then, mysteriously disappear.

It's really awful. I'm serious - it totally is. Nothing is apportioned evenly on this planet and you may begin to sense that you are just another tiny insignificant life-form in a neutral universe. This tends to get worse after you graduate. Without your school and your family to run interference for you, you end up having more complex and, possibly, negative experiences and may begin to think that the Fates have singled you out for an especially troublesome life. Victimhood may seem like a reasonable response to overwhelming adversity.

But victimhood has serious repercussions for anyone, and it can be especially paralyzing for you, the new graduate, who may not yet have enough strength to resist its seductive energy. Here's how it hides in you consciousness... Victimhood is a soft place; a place that assures you that you are right and smart and everyone else is an incompetent idiot. It's a good place to take your indignation and be reminded that you never had a chance or got a break. Victimhood is always on your side and always tells you that your excuses are completely reasonable.

Victimhood is very pliable and you can use it to cover almost any circumstance. But here's where it gets you...once you court victimhood and take it in your arms, you have to promise that you won't DO anything. Once you say, "It's not my fault and I am a victim of ____ (fill in the blank)", you have surrendered your power and agreed to just let life kick you around according to its whims.

If you keep this up long enough, your will gets flabby and you lose the strength of your resistance. You become as passive as a Portuguese Man O' War...incapable of directed propulsion and at the mercy of changing winds and currents. Events start invading your experience like opportunistic bacteria. It's like a self-fulfilling prophesy; the more you roll over to victimhood, the more it finds ways to make you a victim.

In its extreme expression, victimhood sucks the spark and vitality out of your life. It defeats you before you begin; it tells you that enormous forces are against you that are likely to lead to your failure, so why bother. It shuts you down.

The good news is that there is an antidote to victimhood; there is one sure way to repel it in all of its many guises and glamours. I warn you now, however, it's not popular and I don't much care for it either. But the way to dodge victimhood and its snaky charms is to recognize that you are responsible for everything that appears in your life. Not that you are responsible for bringing it in (although, that may be true), but that you are responsible for dealing with what walks through the door once it does.

This may sound terribly burdensome. After all, why should you be responsible to every problematic situation you encounter and every problematic person you meet if you aren't at fault? Aliens may abduct you and there appears to be very little you can do to prevent its occurrence. I should have been Miss Texas, but I'm not and my hopes are rapidly dwindling. Ms. Ledbetter deserved 20 years of higher wages that she is unlikely to ever receive. How are we to take responsibility for events that were not of our making?

Whether you are the proximate cause of unfolding events, or whether you just got hosed by extraordinary circumstances (who knew anacondas could slither so fast?), or whether it was a little bit of both is not my thought here. So many experiences don't give us fair warning and we may have been playing along happily, not seeing the perfect storm gathering around us. People you love or befriend sometimes operate at a very low level of consciousness, and it can be devastating to finally wake up to find your life being dictated by someone who was manipulating you out of their own dysfunction all along. The economy shifts and you may be unprepared for the new financial order; the electricity cut out in the middle of the night, so your alarm didn't go off, so you missed the exam...and on and on. Until you develop foresight, some things will just happen to you because you can't even see them coming.

It hardly matters whether we're victims of external forces or victims of our own making. The solution to avoiding becoming a victim to your life's experiences is the same - you step up. In a painful relationship with little promise of future happiness? It's your responsibility to end it, not hang on helplessly waiting for some sort of magical event that will make it all better. Hate your low-paying-never-going-to-amount-to-anything job? It's your responsibility to get an education or training or move on. Finding that your health is derailing due to lifestyle choices? It's your responsibility to eat the salad and do the exercising and respect your organism. It's your responsibility to reproduce responsibly, vote, look after your teeth, keep sober, drive safely, demonstrate courtesy toward others, conserve resources, act honorably and wash your fruits and vegetables before you eat them.

And where does that get you, young graduate? Will life just swing in your favor because you have a strong personal compass? Well...no. Not necessarily. We can certainly see that Ms. Ledbetter didn't get any satisfaction at the end of her struggle against discrimination (although, because she refused to yield to victimhood, she probably paved the way for future legislation and, hopefully, future justice in this area). I don't have a clue why things happen and why the distribution of things that happen appears to be so uneven. Maybe there's some sort of higher purpose; maybe it's all random chance. Maybe life was never designed to be fair, and we just continue to hold to the myth that it should be so.

But I am certain that taking responsibility gives you power. By rejecting the false promises of victimhood, you open yourself to all of your possibilities. You get to be in charge of the course of your life. You get to tell your alien abductors "you may have probed me for biological samples, but you did NOT make me a victim!"

Best of everything, Class of 2008. May your circumstances be extraordinary and stay alert for anacondas.

* A friend of mine was a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa. She told me that her Peace Corps manual included very specific instructions for saving yourself should you find yourself prey to an anaconda. This is particularly curious since anacondas are native to South America, and not Africa, but I suppose it's good advice for whatever continent you are on.

First Thing: Don't panic! (And really, why would you panic at the prospect of being squeezed to death by a 25' snake?)

Second Thing: Don't run! This, apparently, offends them, and they will feel obligated to start constricting you to mush.

Third Thing: Lie on the ground and remove your pocket knife, open it and hold it down at your side.

Fourth Thing: Allow the anaconda to start swallowing you from the feet up (which is their preference). Don't resist.

Fifth Thing: After your hands have been swallowed, thrust the knife into the anaconda's jaw and break it from the inside, then drive your blade upward into the snake's head. That should do the trick.

Sixth Thing: Extricate yourself from the dead snake as if you were pulling off your jeans, and go about your merry way.

Also, the U.S. Forest Service, via their Technology and Development program publishes useful tips for personnel. My January 1995 "Tech Tips" is entitled "Obliterating Animal Carcasses with Explosives." To quote:

"There are times when it is important to remove or obliterate an animal carcass from locations such as recreation areas where a carcass might attract bears, at a popular picnic area with the public might object, or along the side of roads or trails. Large animal carcasses can be particularly difficult to remove, especially if they are located below a steep cut slope or in remote areas.

Explosives have successfully been used by qualified blasters to partially or totally obliterate large animal carcasses (horses, mules, moose, etc.). It is important to consider location, time of year, and size of the carcass when selecting the quantity and type of explosive to accomplish the obliteration task. Consult a qualified blaster when explosives are to be used."

The "Tech Tips" brochure goes on to provide diagrams and a general outline of where to place the stick powder and how much to use. Forty to fifty-five pounds "are recommended to ensure total obliteration", but "water gel explosives are acceptable for use when the temperature is above freezing."

Write me if you need further information and I'll email complete instructions.

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Ingrid divides her life between the San Juan Islands (where her heart lives) and Austin, Texas (where her paycheck is generated). While Ingrid is spiritually promiscuous, she credits her guru, Jimmy Buffet, for her mantra ..."If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane."

Ingrid is an old-school Libra and believes that the Revolution should be a catered event.

Her column appears every other Thursday in San Juan Islander. To contact Ingrid, send emails to ingrid@sanjuanislander.com

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