Excerpt: “To Nudge the World” - Winner of the CWA Book of the Year Award for Indie Non-Fiction

By Jim Slusher

 

On friendship: When the death count gets personal

 

I am alone in my kitchen, trying to load glasses from the evening meal in the open dishwasher and choking back sobs.

My wife sits under amber light at the dining table in the next room, texting furiously. One of our close friends is on a respirator with COVID-19, fighting for his life. Two days earlier, his family was told to “begin preparing.” They have not seen their husband and father for two weeks. Tonight, his oxygen levels have improved. His fever has decreased to a little over 100 degrees. His blood pressure is improving. There is hope, slim but real, and I am shuddering.

I have a revelation. The talk on television, on social media and in the newspapers is of flattening curves. Of opening up. Of defining, it seems to me, the number of infections, the number of deaths, that are unacceptable, so we can get below it and start singing “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

Suddenly, I know that number with acute precision.

A week and a half later, I learn some others are comfortable with less-definite math.

I see them in a video and news stories about partyers in Chicago defying the governor’s and their mayor’s stay-at-home orders. They are laughing and drinking and shouting, standing, in the words of the mayor, “literally cheek to jowl.”

They, too, apparently have computed a number that divides comfort from agony, or think they have.

Today as I write, I am reading about the order of a downstate judge declaring that the governor’s latest attempt to protect the citizens of the state is an infringement on the rights of a legislator. The lawmaker had sued to restore them. “Enough is enough!” he exclaimed in a prepared statement. “I filed this lawsuit on behalf of myself and my constituents who are ready to go back to work and resume a normal life.”

He, too, it seems, along with his constituents, has identified the line at which sickness and death are unacceptable, and has defiantly pronounced that we are below it. Or at least that he and his constituents are.

Hurrah for them, I think. Oh, for such moral acuity, such a head for what Abraham Lincoln called, in another war at another time, the “awful arithmetic.”

To do my figuring, I have only my friend and my kitchen and those damned clinking dishes I couldn’t seem to load properly and my wife in the next room with her own clenched throat and images of a family I love huddled at home for weeks as they strain for any signal that they may see their husband and father alive again.

I am no stranger to unjust tragedy. Nor to escaping it. No one gets to be 67 years old without being pierced by the cold breath of death or frightened by its proximate approach. Only a year or so ago, I learned at dinner with a friend from childhood, the best man at my wedding and I at his, that he had cancer. Thanks to the advances of science, he would go on to win his immediate battle, and this summer, if the current nightmare ends, we’re planning a canoe and fishing trip on the Mackinaw River. So, there I can place this medical numbers game in its profound perspective — the pain of a brush with the unacceptable alongside the gratitude to be part of a people that insists, against all logic and odds, that it knows very well where the line of tolerable tragedy is drawn and will stop at no expense, no level of study, no obstacle of technology, no cynical calculus to get under it.

This people now applies that resolve to an ominous new threat. A simple flu. Thousands, we are told, die of its viral cousins every year. This one has claimed its victims in the tens of thousands already and is trolling worldwide deep into the hundreds of thousands. By some accounting, it eventually may reach the millions.

There is a point, surely, at which we consider the number to be unacceptable. In a Clay County courtroom and a Chicago living room and no doubt hundreds of other locations across the state and nation, that point seems incalculably distant. But there in my kitchen, alone, with a fire in my chest and tears glistening down my face, the computation was only too near at hand.

It remains so still, two weeks on, with my friend now four days back at home with his family and, at 56, learning to breathe and eat and talk and walk, perhaps not yet aware, as will add to his sadness, that John Prine is gone.

I know the number at which unjust misfortune cannot be tolerated. You know it, too, I bet.

It is one.

Would that none of us ever had to be burdened with it, but, if we must, may our thankfulness never cease for those who dedicate their time, their careers and their blessed energy toward erasing that hideous sum.

 

Publication date: Thursday, April 30, 2020

 

Humanity and creatures in crisis

 

I have a personal memory that seems relevant to a recent story in the news.

I am called to my front door on a warm day in July. I look out to find four barefoot boys, ranging in age from 10 to 12 years old, standing in my front yard. Some are shirtless. Some wear T-shirts. All are in baggy shorts. They are smudged at the knees, elbows, cheeks and foreheads with the summer grime of suburban schoolboys. It is sunny, early afternoon. Arranged in a sort of semicircle and staring at me, they form a tableau something like an odd mix of a rock music album cover and a Norman Rockwell portrait. They all carry the plaintive, hopeful grimace of children resigned to the last resort of problem-solving, approaching a parent.

“What should we do?” my oldest son asks. “We found him under a tree.”

His friend is balancing a glassy-eyed rabbit the size of a house cat, its mottled gray fur a tempest of mange, in the crooks of two elbows. The animal is alive but clearly in shock.

I look in the eyes of the four children. They are weighted with sincere worry.

“I don’t know that we can help him,” I stammer. “But let’s get him to a vet to see.”

It so happens that there’s a veterinarian’s office a block and a half from my house. We rush in a grim parade to the building and shoulder our way through the front door, the friend still cradling the creature.

From behind a counter, a startled attendant gazes wide-eyed at the gaggle of urchins.

“They found him beneath a tree,” I say.

“Can you help him?” says one boy.

“Yeah, can you fix him?” says another.

The attendant asks us to wait. She returns with a veterinarian in blue scrubs. The boy holding the rabbit stretches out his arms, and the vet gently lifts the rabbit onto the counter.

“Let’s take a look,” he says, and he begins to prod the animal on its back and sides. He places a stethoscope against its chest.

At length, he allows that he needs more time to assess the damage. He tells the boys he will have to take the animal to the back. He promises to do what he can and says to call back the next day.

By the following noon, the boys are back in our kitchen. “Let me talk to him,” pleads the boy who had been holding the rabbit. It is 20 years ago, and we still have a landline phone. I punch in the number of the vet and hand the receiver to him.

“Yes,” he says. “We brought a rabbit in yesterday that was in trouble. You said to call back today.”

His face falls.

“Oh, OK. Thank you,” he musters and hands me the phone.

“There was nothing they could do,” he says. “They had to put him down.”

Young shoulders slump all around. I try to offer some consoling words. The boys turn and shuffle outside, lips pursed, heads bowed in grim acceptance of indifferent fate.

This memory comes to me as I reflect on the story we followed last week about the attempt to rescue a bald eagle that bird-watchers spotted New Year’s Day standing listlessly on a piece of ice in Waukegan Harbor. The discovery set in motion a chain of activities, including a call to a volunteer with a local group that stands ready to rush to the aid of birds in distress wherever they may be found. The group gets 10,000 calls a year.

Sadly, like that of my sons and their friends, this rescue attempt proved vain. The troubled eagle died a few days after being retrieved from the ice, the suspected victim of eating a poisoned rodent.

But we also report on many stories that have a happier ending. In December, we told of the successful move of a family of eagles at Mooseheart Child City and School near Batavia. Another story described the valiant rescue of a fawn that had fallen into a home’s window well. We’ve profiled the Kane Area Rehabilitation and Education for Wildlife and the work of Glen Ellyn’s Willowbrook Wildlife Center, which cared for more than 11,500 injured animals last year.

Invariably, these stories attract attention. Serious attention. Concern that belies the late Larry Lujack’s famously snide growl, “Animal STORRR-ees.” And this gives me a warm feeling, no matter how they end. We humans pose ourselves arrogantly at the top of nature’s “food chain,” but there is something in us, many of us anyway, that nonetheless expresses tender compassion for our fellow creatures.

Already in 2023, we have reported on monumental and important events. The anniversary of an insurrection at the nation’s Capital. The tortured process of naming a U.S. House speaker. The memory of a horrendous 1993 mass murder, and the prison death of a notorious suburban killer. Fires, crashes, controversies, war. All manner of shock and awe. “What kind of a species are we?” one well may ask.

And yet we have among us people who keep kayaks on top of their cars so they can rush at a moment’s notice to aid a bird in distress. Volunteers who bottle feed orphaned opossums. Children who scoop up injured rabbits and rush them to care.

It may seem such stories do not rank with the decisive news of our time. But look into the welling eyes of a tough 10-year-old with a dazed and mangy hare in his arms and tell me that is so.

 

Publication date: Thursday, January 12, 2023

 

A longing for eloquence to nudge the world

 

One gropes, one claws, one prays for eloquence.

For some of us, words are all we know, our only tool for taking the measure of an often beautiful, often miserable world.

How impotent they seem in the presence of awe.

A sunrise in the Rockies, for instance.

Or a concert of full-throated preschoolers.

Or the murders of scores of unsuspecting innocent, happy people.

But words are not totally without value. In Tom Stoppard’s play “The Real Thing,” a character who is a playwright declares words to have a sacred power. “If you get the right ones in the right order,” the playwright says, “you can nudge the world a little ...”

When they are all one has, one hopes.

But to nudge the world toward what? An appreciation of our shared humanity? An aversion to declarations of religious or social convictions through public displays of horror, hatred and suicide? Coping skills? Safety skills? Stricter gun laws? A well-trained citizenry armed to the teeth in preparation for the violently misguided? Compassion for victims? Compassion for each other? Compassion for the sick brutes of the world? Some sort of greater understanding that will make sense of the senseless?

All these things and more must be on the table, I suppose. They all play into media coverage of events that cannot be compacted into the logical framework of a coherent world view.

We tell you what we can learn of how events unfolded and who was affected.

We give you the names — in our case on the front page — and eventually the pictures and miniature profiles of the slain, so that you can know they were people, not mere digits in the ghastly, mounting arithmetic of mass murder in the 21st Century.

We let you vent, here on the Opinion page in our letters column.

We let prominent social thinkers examine all the questions from every angle.

And we try to remind you of perspective — as in this comment from comedian John Oliver on HBO’s “Last Week Tonight”:

“For right now, on a day when some (expletive) terrorist wants us to focus on one man’s act of brutality and hatred, it might be worth seeing this video which was posted to Twitter today. It shows hundreds and hundreds of people this morning lining up around the block in Florida waiting to donate blood and it kind of reminds you that that terrorist (expletive) is vastly outnumbered.”

We trust it all helps.

Perhaps somewhere among all of these torrents of expressions, eloquence will have a role and the world will be nudged in the right direction.

Though we must not forget that it is the nudging and not the words that matters.

 

Publication date: Thursday, June 16, 2016