Hasta La Gadget!

The traveling road show, known as absurdity, recently visited Baltimore. Like its antecedents in Ferguson MO, Beavercreek, OH, North Charleston SC, New York City, and elsewhere, once again an unarmed black man was killed by those sworn to protect and serve.

In this latest absurdity, how was it that 25-year-old Freddie Gray was taken into custody by Baltimore Police for possession of a switchblade and within an hour of his arrest had fallen into a coma with a spinal injury and subsequently died?

And like the absurdity in Ferguson, Baltimore became suffocated by rioting.

Absurdity is defined as the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and the meaning of life.

Assuming most can agree one should not become belligerent to police officers when asked to walk on the sidewalk, run from police officers while detained, or sell illegal cigarettes, can we not also agree such infractions do not warrant a death sentence? Is that not absurdity?

But the mission of absurdity does not stop with the death of unarmed black men; it seductively spreads to other areas.

The human condition desires linear comparisons so that it can understand in its own terms. It is to seek a cause-and-effect relationship, but absurdity does not play by such rules. Instead, it employs a beguiling influence on all sides so that they naively believe right exist only in their domain, justifying actions that have been dictated by the absurd.

The power of absurdity lies in the insurmountable quest to understand it. In order to pursue this unachievable goal, one must prune the complexity of issues. Some therefore seek to define this latest absurdity exclusively by the rioting.

The lawlessness in Baltimore becomes reminiscent of the riots that occurred there 48 years earlier in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The bombardment of coverage provided by the 24-hour news cycle makes it easy for those unaffected by this tragedy to conveniently use the conjunction “but” to see only that the law is being broken.

This law and order perspective, though understandable, can blind one to other variables such as the human dignity of Freddie Gray. At the time of this writing, no one knew definitively what occurred that led to Gray’s death, there was enough to conclude that something went horribly wrong.

It was an absurdity that awoke the hibernating “Bob Dylan demographic.”

Dylan famously penned the words, “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” Do those who destroyed buildings, hurled bricks at the police, and cut hoses while the fire department sought to extinguish a blazing CVS store not exhibit the behavior of nothing to lose?

Since 2011, Baltimore has paid roughly $5.7 million in lawsuits claiming police officers brutalized alleged suspects–an amount that exceeds the minimum for a community to distrust the police department.

Does this justify rioting? No!

I marveled at that who tangentially supported the violence in Baltimore. They too used “but” to offer an analysis that even called into question appeals for nonviolence.

But the most profound statement for nonviolence in Baltimore was not by those who made such appeals behind the comforts of a podium, but rather that courageous group of clergy, in the tradition of Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma, who were willing to put their bodies in harm’s way for the sake of peace.

Absurdity prods, pushes, and titillates us to take a specific side, to formulate answers that rely on speculation, creating a fog of obfuscation. The constant in this narrative is the underlying poverty associated with it.

Traditionally, most of the violence has been self-afflicted on communities besieged by nihilism, but what if that should change?

The human condition’s desires for linear reasoning is apt to ponder why destroy your own community? But the Bob Dylan demographic is exasperated. The death of Freddie Gray was not the reason per se, but instead was the spark that ignited the gasoline of frustration. Paraphrasing the words of James Weldon Johnson, for many, their unborn hope is already dead.

I suspect Baltimore is merely the latest stop on this tragic tour. We may even reach a point of disinterest. Somehow I don’t think absurdity cares.

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Freddie Gray, the drug war, and the decline of “real policing.”

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These words came out of my mouth several times this week.

“I wish I didn’t want to be a teacher.”

This weekend, I went to a brunch with one of my favorite momma friends and a couple of her employees. She is a wonderful boss of a wonderful company, and sitting around a table eating tartlets and fancy poached eggs and drinking bottomless mimosas, I thought, I wish I didn’t want to be a teacher. Because if I didn’t want to be a teacher, I would want to work here. I would want to sleep in past six and write pretty words on a pretty blog and go to brunches and have real conversations with women over the age of 10. And that’s where I get disappointed, because I do want to be a teacher.

For some insane reason, I want to be here. I want to be exactly where I am, sitting in this classroom, surrounded by construction paper and broken pencils and spilled apple sauce. I want to read storybooks and sit criss-cross on the carpet and have 30-minute meetings about how to show empathy.

Life would be easier if I chose a different profession. I know that.

Life would be easier if I chose a job I could walk away from at the end of the day, a job where I could put in my eight hours and head home without giving the lives of 44 others a second thought.

Life would be easier if I worked with adults, rather than ill-behaved fifth graders.

Life would be easier if my work friends didn’t have to ask my permission to go to the bathroom, and if I never needed to have a confrontation about the amount of Febreeze that is needed to make a room smell better. (Spoiler alert: It’s one spray, not the whole bottle.)

In sitting down to write this post, I have been interrupted every 30 seconds by the following questions:

Ms. Green, where is the tape?

Ms. Green, can I get water?

Ms. Green, where are the index cards?

Ms Green, can I go to the bathroom?

Ms. Green, will you sign my paper?

Ms. Green, is this right?

Ms. Green, are there any toilet paper rolls?

**wordless interaction: student puts paper and pen in my face, looks at me expectantly**

Ms. Green, so… where are the toilet paper rolls?

Life would be easier if I chose a profession that gave me answers, rather than endless questions.

Life would be easier if I chose a profession that didn’t involve bathroom passes and reporting evidence of lice.

But at the end of the day, coffee spilled down my shirt, marker stains on my palms, and mud splattering my shoes, I am full of life. I am more alive than I was when I began the day. I am tired, yes; exhausted, yes; wanting a tall glass of wine, yes.

But alive.

Fully and truly alive.

For some inexplicable reason, every fiber of my being is called to be in this classroom with these kids.

My freshman year of college, going through training to be a Young Life leader, Brett Rodgers would always ask us, “What makes you feel alive?”

Four years later, I have a clear answer to his question: teaching. Teaching makes me feel alive.

I have found a profession that makes my feet sore and my heart full. I have found a profession that isn’t okay with the easy route, a profession that forces me to make hard choices and spend way too much time thinking about others. I have found something that makes me feel profoundly alive, and God-willing, I will get to do it for the rest of my life.

So yes, sometimes I wish I didn’t want to be a teacher. Sometimes I wish I could sleep in past six (did I already mention this one?) and make my own hours and wear wedges and not worry about standardized tests. But at the end of the day, I am thankful. Thankful for the messy and question filled prepubescent little people who are giving me life.

This post originally appeared on ErinTaylorGreen.com.

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PARIS (AP) — A 15-year-old French Muslim girl has missed school for two days this month in a dispute over her long black skirt, seen as going against France’s law guaranteeing secularism.

A popular Twitter hashtag #jeportemajupecommejeveux (I wear my skirt as I like) popped up on Wednesday after the dispute was made public in the girl’s local newspaper in Charleville-Mezieres, in northeast France. The region’s Academic Services said it backed the decision, stressing that the student was not excluded from school but was asked to change her clothes. School officials want a dialogue with the family.

Academic Services said the student insisted on the religious symbolism of her long skirt — contravening the 2004 law banning headscarves and other “ostentatious” religious symbols.

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Actor, director and social activist Danny Glover is no stranger to the drug problem: His family of origin was directly affected by it. “All three of my brothers had issues with substance use,” he told me in an interview to help launch the Drugs Over Dinner initiative. “One of my brothers had gone to Vietnam. He was in the Tet Offensive at 19 years old in 1968, and he never recovered from that.”

A human being suffers and turns to drugs to soothe his torment: Such is what I, too, witnessed as an addiction physician. In all my years working with a population of hard-core drug-addicted people in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside, I did not meet a single female patient who had not been sexually abused, not a single male who had not endured some trauma early in life. Often the trauma was overt, occasionally it took the form of more subtle emotional loss, but it was always there in the background.

The pain may become too much to bear. “The drugs become a way of medicating yourself,” Glover remarks. “And sometimes people witness something on our behalf so we others don’t have to see it. They take in all the pain of what they witness. That’s how it may have been with my brother. I always thought that out of all of us children, he was the most remarkable, the most beautiful soul, the most sensitive one.”

It is the “beautiful souls,” the sensitive ones, who are most tormented in our society. “Look what some of the greatest artists of the 20th century had to go through,” Danny Glover points out, “the troubles Billie Holiday was subjected to. Or Louis Armstrong: He often made the statement that he had to smoke marijuana every day just to be able to endure life in the United States.” For many, he says, drugs become a way of “coping with the contradictions of racism and the exploitation, a way of soothing yourself.”

Glover, who as a young man worked in community development and whose parents were active in the civil rights movement, is keenly aware of the social and political dimensions of drug use and drug-war politics. He watched what he calls the dismantling of the communities he was close to “because of crack cocaine and the climate of mistrust created by that.” He echoes Michelle Alexander’s searing indictment of the drug war as it plays out in America’s black communities (in her book, “The New Jim Crow”). “The whole history,” he says, “has been of a tendency to demonize the victim.

“And that continues. It’s really part and parcel of the system itself. Black people have been demonized for being lazy or for being uneducable, or whatever… This demonization is a way of re-subjugating them or controlling them, of diminishing their expectations of themselves in some way.”

In my own country of Canada, I have seen the same dynamic inflicted upon our aboriginal First Nations peoples, who make up 4 percent of the population but 30 percent of the jail population: the results of historical trauma and state-inflicted abuse that drives them to drug use, and of racist policies that keep them stuck in abject suffering.

Thus substance use and addiction have broad social dimensions and cannot be reduced to the unfortunate “choices” or “diseases” of individuals. They are societal phenomena that appear when many people in a culture experience what my friend the psychologist Bruce Alexander calls dislocation, the loss of belonging, connection and meaning that are essential to a fulfilled human life. Such dislocation, though it burdens minority populations especially, knows no racial or class boundaries.

The system we live in, I hear Glover suggest, creates a lot of pain for people, a lot of dysfunction, a lot of distress. They turn to drugs and then they get punished for it. “And with that viewpoint,” he says, “comes an understanding and also tolerance for people’s suffering and, more than anything else, embracing that suffering in a spirit of generosity and acceptance. That doesn’t happen in this country, you know. We are afraid…

“The systems around us, whether it is the educational system or the stress that people go through in their lives to survive and to make ends meet… all those things play a role. Some are fortunate to find other ways to accommodate the pain. Consumption is an addiction itself. Consumption is a way in which you mute the pain. I know people who have plenty of resources by which they are able to subvert the pain or divert the pain: by consuming, buying unnecessarily. So there are different ways.”

Addiction, whether to drugs or other behaviors, Glover says, is always a compensation for the sense of being devalued as a human being. “That’s basically it. Feeling alienated within the system: a system that demeans people, marginalizes them, exploits them, and creates a situation in which our value depends only on our capacity to consume.”

The chief reason we condemn drug users so vehemently may be simply that we do not wish to see our similarities to them. We want to perceive our own forms of self-soothing as somehow morally superior, or we just do not want to recognize how much our entire way of life resembles the frantic search for relief of the user. I define addiction as any behavior that, for the short term, we crave or find relief and pleasure in, but we are unable to give up despite the negative consequences incurred in the long term. By that standard, how many of us are not addicted?

“Our narrative of substance use and addiction,” says Glover, “is not constructed around love.” Here he includes the dominant narratives popularized by his own film industry in Hollywood. “It’s a narrative constructed around fear. It’s not a narrative constructed around embracing people.

“We need to find a way of finding the commonality of our experience, of having empathy for people.”

Gabor Maté M.D. is the author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, and is on the advisory board for Drugs Over Dinner. www.drgabormate.com

This post is part of a series in a partnership between The Huffington Post and Drugs Over Dinner in conjunction with the launch of the latter’s new website, www.drugsoverdinner.org. DOD provides the tools and the inspiration to gather those that you care about, to break bread, and have a compassionate conversation about the role of drugs in our culture. To see all the posts in the series, read here.

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Need help with substance abuse or mental health issues? In the U.S., call 800-662-HELP (4357) for the SAMHSA National Helpline.

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