Lying has been on my mind this summer. There is a presidential candidate whose brand is, literally, lying. The Washington Post fact-checked the number of lies he told during the years when he was in office:  30,573 lies. And yet, he is the candidate for a major political party. Apparently, people prefer being told what they want to hear, even when it isn’t true.
 
Then, a few weeks ago, I heard a news story on the radio. It stated that the average person tells fourteen lies a day. This surprised me. I have whole days where I don’t even make fourteen statements. An internet search turned up more realistic statistics. One study said people lie twice a day. Another asserted this: “The average person lies four times, totaling 1,460 lies each year. While men lie about six times a day, women lie three times a day, on average.”

And then…. I had a troubling  conversation with a young friend, a recent graduate of an elite college. We were talking about lying, and when I expressed my shock about the fourteen lies, she told me that she had no difficulty believing that at all, and that she probably lied that frequently… and maybe more. 

I was gob-smacked. She saw no problem and was actually proud of her facility in misrepresenting truth. She explained that people like to be told what they want to hear. In other words, it’s not her fault. It’s other people who have incentivized her to lie. And that led me to consider our respective situations. I am comfortably retired. She is just starting her career in a world that is many times more competitive than the one I faced at her age. Is honesty a privilege? A class issue?  Are my survival needs at risk when I tell the truth? Are hers? And does that require a tabling of judgement?

But here’s the thing: Once a person has been caught telling a lie, it’s rational to consider that anything else they say may also be a lie. Not a judgement, just a logical corollary. Also, in order to be accountable to ourselves and to others, we need to be working with our best understanding of the facts when we make our choices. Liars restrict our options in order to keep their own open.
 
But do we operate rationally? Thinking of this current presidential candidate, I would say that apparently half of the country does not. But maybe that’s too black-and-white. Maybe logic is subject to Maslov’s hierarchy of needs. That’s a theory of motivation which states that five categories of human needs dictate an individual's behavior. These are: physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs. Maybe we need to hear what what we want to hear. 

A dependent child, for instance, needs to know that their primary caregivers are reliable; otherwise they can become overwhelmed with anxiety and even terror. They need to protect themselves from knowing that their parents lie to them. I know myself, from growing up with folks in active addiction, that I learned to “fix” all the lies:  “I must have heard them wrong. It’s somehow my fault. They didn’t mean what they said.”  It was a survival strategy. In my early years in recovery, it would take me months before I realized that someone was lying to me. Now, with thirty-plus years in Alanon, I can allow myself to recognize a lie within a day, or even an hour.  I still have difficulty identifying the lie in the moment.

Yes. That’s the thing. And suddenly I knew exactly what I wanted to say to my young friend. And I knew the analogy I would use. It was mountain climbing. Both of us are avid hikers, and my friend will often choose the most challenging route up the mountain. Some of the mountains that we climb have roads to the summit. We could actually drive to the top, but we don’t. That’s not the point. The point is getting there by hiking.
 
For me, lying is like driving to the summit. If standing at the top is the goal, it makes sense to drive. It’s easier. I don’t get tired. And I get there a whole lot faster.
 
How can my friend and I explain why we choose to hike? What are the words? Joy, pride in achievement, exhilaration in pushing limits?  Are there words to describe the experience of being in nature, moving in nature without mechanical aids, being in communion with ourselves among other forms of life?

Lying as a way of life reduces the infinitude of life to a singular-dimension, board game of getting what you want. I can’t put it more plainly than this: You lose. You lose even when you win. You may not notice or even miss the people whose trust you have forfeited. You may be progressively extinguishing your capacity for joy in exchange for the cheap thrill of empty goals. You are definitely devaluing truth and authenticity every day.  And, by the way, you’ll need to make a lot of money, because lying cuts you off from the rhythms and flows of reality, which teem with serendipity, synergy and karma. You’ll be needing to pave your own road wherever you go.

The means are the ends. If you get where you’re going by lying, what you will get is a lie. And you better take a picture when you get there; because it's quite possible no one's going to believe you.

“Bernice Reagon is a living treasure in an institution used to dealing with static treasures. When you meet her, you know there’s something there – a vision, a focus, a drive, an intensity – and that’s never changed.”—Ralph Rinzler, Smithsonian Asst Secretary for Public Service

“For more than a half-century Bernice Johnson Reagon has been a major cultural voice for freedom and justice; singing, teaching—speaking out against reacism and organized inequities of all kinds. A child of Southwest Georgia, an African American woman’s voice, born in the struggle against racism in America during the Civil Rights Movement of the 50’s and 60’s. Reagon’s life and work supports the concept of community based culture with an enlarged capacity for mutual respect: for self, for those who move among us who seem to be different than us, respect and care for our home, the environment—including the planet that sustains life as we know it.”—from www.bernicejohnsonreagon.com

I live in Maine, and this change occurred in early March, when the temperature was mostly below freezing. It didn’t seem to be a time of year when fungus or parasites would be a thing.
 
But… the miracle of social media! A friend of mine, whose son is a professional gardener, explained to me that what I was seeing was the result of winter burn.
 
She explained that winter burn was a condition that develops in winter (duh), and it happens when there has been an unseasonably warm spell… maybe just a day or two. In the fall, this warm spell would delay the onset of plant dormancy, but in the case of my rhodies, it did the opposite. The warm spell was in early spring, and what it did was bring the top leaves out of dormancy.
 
Because the warm spell was so brief (just a day or two), it was not enough to warm up the roots and bring them out of dormancy. The rhodie roots were pretty clear that early March in Maine was no time to wake up. But, unfortunately, the leaves fell for it. They did wake up and were all ready for action. They started opening for business and waiting for the roots to send up some water… but the roots were unable to deliver. As a result, the leaves underwent a sudden and severe drought condition, causing the outer edges of the top leaves to turn brown and curl up. 

The good news is that it’s not systemic. It’s not something that’s going to spread, take over the whole plant, and kill it. The bad news is that I will lose the affected leaves, and the plant may look a little scraggly for a while. Also good news… I can prevent future incidents of winter burn by constructing a burlap teepee over the rhodie in the fall. (I always thought those were just to keep off the snow!)
 
But… what’s the human analogy—the lesson to be drawn, if you will?
 
Frozen roots and thawing leaves. Do humans experience a kind of “winter burn” for opening ourselves up to the warmth of human interactions before our roots have had time to thaw? I think we do.
 
I experienced a traumatic childhood, and it took me decades to understand and heal from the effects of it. Clinically, I had complex post-traumatic stress syndrome.  It’s a syndrome, not a disorder, because it’s actually a natural and functional response to chronic adverse conditions, especially in childhood. Something like plant dormancy to ride out a frozen winter.

As a young woman, I began to live in more nurturing environments, and I attempted to open myself to these warming experiences… but my roots were not ready yet. I had a long way before I could really accept that the winter was over.  In human terms, I had a long way before I was ready to trust again. And, yes, I believe I experienced a kind of “winter burn,” my outer self reaching for life while my roots were still shut down. I had searing emotional encounters on my way to recovery. And it wasn’t pretty. But you know what? It wasn’t fatal either.
 
What I needed was that little teepee of shelter, in a recovery program or with a therapist. I needed help moderating my core trauma response and my outer eagerness to live in the world as a person who had never experienced that winter of the spirit. I needed the support of folks who understood the process of gradual opening to new life. I needed help understanding that a disappointed expectation is not a permanent blight, but a reminder to recalibrate, to understand that deep healing takes time. A day or two of sunshine doth not a spring thaw make. And a warm human interaction does not necessarily signal readiness for full engagement.
 
Be kind, dear ones. Seasons change, and our psyches have wisdom beyond what we know.

In her concluding remarks in the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe took up the question regarding abolition that was on so many white people’s lips, “What can I do?” This is what she wrote:
 
“But what can any individual do? Of that, every individual can judge. There is one thing that every individual can do—they can see to it that they feel right.” [her emphasis]
 
I find myself thinking about this challenge, and her emphasis, during the bombing and invasion of Gaza. What does it mean for me to see to it that I “feel right” about what’s going on? And what qualifies as “feeling right?” Who can be the judge of what “right” means?

When I consider this directive to “see to it” that I feel right, the first thing that comes to me is to search out a wide range of perspectives on the situation. For me, that means to read the Arab world press and the Israeli press, and to read these publications across the right wing, moderate, and liberal spectrum. It means to seek out the opinions of the political leaders in my own country who have earned my respect for decades—and, sadly, they are a precious few.
 
It also means listening to my friends who are often expressing themselves with unfiltered rage, grief, and alarm and from every conceivable point of view. It means listening to friends who are triggered, who are in post-traumatic states. It means listening to friends who are absorbing and responding to horrific propaganda. It means listening to dissociation, demonization, dehumanization, projection, denial, and selective amnesia. It means maintaining compassion in the face of verbal abuse.  It means being wildly misunderstood and developing the algorithms for determining where, when, and how it might be productive to attempt to make myself understood.

This “see to it” business is very hard work, and I’m not good at it. I don’t enjoy it. I realize that I enjoy being righteous far more than I do this striving to feel right. But the longer I pursue this injunction of Harriet’s, the more clearly I see that it’s absolutely necessary. It is the price of wholeness.
 
And of course, in terms of action to take, she has been clear: “Of that every individual can judge.”                                

So, it’s finally happened. Russell Brand, comedian-turned-radical-political-podcaster, is being called out internationally about an alleged, decades-long history of sexual assault, rape, grooming, and predatory behavior toward women and girls. He was called out by an investigative article in the UK’s Sunday Times and a documentary exposé on Channel 4.
 
Here’s the Wikipedia condensed version:

Now, here’s the thing. Russell Brand has been in active recovery from substance abuse disorder—including alcohol and heroin, since he went into rehab in 2002. He’s been clean and sober for more than two decades, and he has shared publicly and generously about his journey in recovery. His book, Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions, was a best-seller. In 2005, he entered rehab in the US for sex addiction, and since then, he has been very open about the harms of pornography. In his autobiography he wrote about having drawn up an extensive ‘victims list’ of women he had “wronged” as a result of his sexual addiction.

In addition he has shared his history of sexual abuse. When he was a little boy, he was sent to a tutor who, according to Brand, "when I got a question right – by way of congratulation – stuck his finger up my arse and felt my balls."  He told his mother, who told his father, and the tutoring stopped, but nothing was ever done. When he was a teenager, his father took him on an Asian "sex tourism" holiday, and his father rented a prostituted woman to "teach him to be a man." The father stayed in the room to watch.  According to Brand, he was advised to leave his childhood abuse out of the book, but, he wrote, "The reason I left it in was because I thought, if in Chapter Four you see this happen, when in Chapter Twelve, I'm rampaging round having it off with prostitutes, you might see a corollary."

All of this is to say, I believed in Brand's recovery. My first reaction to The Times account was, "Oh, my god! He’s going to own it! He’s going to do something that none of these predators have ever done before! He’s going to model 12-Step accountability, and he’s going to do it on a public stage!  He’s going to walk his talk and set an example for the world!"

My second reaction reinforced my first:   "He's no Harvey Weinstein! He's no Bill Cosby!  The man has reinvented himself!"

Russell Brand is no longer a man-boy, mommy-shocker, BBC clown-prince, bad-boy comedian. He’s a political commentator, and an extremely competent one. He has rebranded himself as a whistleblower who is not afraid to take on the government as well as huge corporations. Some consider him the king of conspiracy theories, but, whenever I have watched his podcast, he brings the receipts, posting and citing all of his sources. Impressive. Oh, and he has attracted something like seven million followers… He is actually giving mainstream media a run for the money.

It is you who are being called to account for your past perpetration. Like the fashion giant, you are just wanting everyone to move on and celebrate who you are today. But, there were very real victims in your past collusion with a toxic, profoundly misogynist culture. And this time, Mr. Brand, it is we the people who have the receipts. There are dozens of videos of your comedy act, your hosting, your game show participation where you parade your history of misogynist predation as if it was a joke. There are videos of you grabbing, groping, kissing women. All of which are criminal acts, you realize. And then there are the women who were part of the BBC investigation. In the week following the publication of the story, there have been a half-dozen more who have come forward. And then there is the video clip from a talk show where you brag about having just exposed yourself to a woman in a bathroom minutes before going on air. In that encounter you called her by a name that was not hers and insisted you were going to continue calling her that and that you were going to "f*** her." She was terrified. It made a great joke on air.

Surely, with all that yoga, meditation, chanting, healthy lifestyle, recovery proselytizing, and especially with all of that whistleblowing, you are going to take responsibility for your actions... After all, you have made millions--millions!—by calling out the sleazy tactics of public figures who are trying to evade public accountability!

We are looking to you not to use the same-old, same-old, banal, corporate playbook of denial, lawyering up to intimidate and discourage potential witnesses, deflecting, and—of course—throwing the women and girls under the bus. We are looking to you not to take the easy way out, the rich man’s way out—which, of course, is to retraumatize your victims by discrediting them. Surely, you’re not going to play the victim, to pretend that these women are all gold-diggers or vindictive exes.  One of them was sixteen when you were thirty!  Surely you are not going to trash the child that she was!

Surely, with all of this, Mr. Brand, you are going to show up and own everything… You can’t possibly be that big of a phony and a hypocrite, can you?  Surely, now, with two daughters of your own, you can’t model this kind of misogyny? With all your pride about your working-class background, you can’t lean into the classism behind “out-lawyering” your victims? Surely, with two decades of sharing your recovery with the public, now that it’s crunch time, you’re going to “walk the talk,” aren’t you…?  Mr. Brand…?  Aren’t you…?

No, he's not.
 
And, actually, in anticipation of this kind of exposure, Brand has already been hiring high-power attorneys to threaten former alleged victims who have attempted to go public with their personal stories of rape and predatory behavior. He’s not owning a damn thing. He appears to feel completely entitled to retraumatize these women with legal threats.

Given the opportunity to respond to the allegations before the article went to press, Brand chose not to. Instead, he made his own video on September 16:

“Obviously, it’s been an extraordinary and distressing week, and I thank you very much for your support and for questioning the information that you’ve been presented with… But amidst this litany of astonishing rather baroque attacks, are some very serious allegations that I absolutely refute… These allegations pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies. And as I've written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous… Now, during that time of promiscuity, the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual… What I seriously refute are these very, very serious criminal allegations…”

Brand is revealing his defense strategy: The watchwords will be “promiscuity” and “consensual.” He is parsing his words to avoid libel. He says the “relationships” were consensual. He is not saying anything about the alleged acts. In fact, he has been accused of assault and rape within these relationships. These acts are criminal even if they transpire between married couples. He is leaning into the word “promiscuity,” which is defined as “characterized by many transient sexual relationships.” It’s also defined as “implying an undiscriminating or unselective approach.” “Promiscuity” would indicate that the only one harmed is himself, for dating women not in his league.  These words, “promiscuity” and “consensual” have been carefully chosen to counter the multiple charges of criminal behavior.

Predation, not promiscuity.  Nonconsensual, not consensual. According to the women coming forward, he ambushed women, he assaulted them, he propositioned them in the most intentionally vulgar and demeaning ways. He resorted repeatedly to coercive tactics, including emotional abuse, manipulation, physical intimidation, and force.

In addition to minimizing the allegations in his video, Brand  characterizes the professional investigation as some kind of conspiracy of “news media making phone calls and sending letters to people I know.” That’s actually what’s known in journalism as “research.” He goes on to say that it feels to him like a “serious and concerted agenda to control these kinds of [alternative] spaces and these kinds voices.” Then, to clarify, he adds, “And I mean my voice along with your voice.”  Summing up, he again qualifies his actions as promiscuous and consensual, but absolutely not criminal.   

After this, he went silent for a week as more women came forward and more criminal allegations were made. And then the hammer dropped: Youtube demonetized his channel. What does that mean? It means he can no longer earn ad revenue off his videos on that platform. (It’s estimated that he was making a million a year off Youtube ad revenue.)  In addition, his management company dropped him, his publisher is suspending any planned publications, and the remaining dates on his current tour have been postponed.

Anna Politkovskaya was murdered last week [October 7, 2006]—executed, actually. Someone followed her into the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow, shot her four times: twice in the chest, once in the shoulder, and a final shot to the head. The pistol, its serial number filed off, was left next to the body, the sign of a contract killing.
 
Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist whose fearless, behind-the-scenes coverage of the Chechen war had exposed human-rights abuses in Russia’s southern province of Chechnya, where tens of thousands have been killed during two Kremlin campaigns. She documented not only the brutality of the conflict, but also the massive corruption and moral corrosion that was occurring at all levels and on both sides. She was not afraid to name names, and, on at least one occasion, to print the official’s phone number, inviting her readers to register their disgust personally.

In the months before her murder, she had been focusing on the Moscow-backed, Chechen Prime Minister Ramsan Kadyrov. In fact, just two days before her murder, on Kadyrov’s thirtieth birthday, she made him the subject of her last radio interview. The date was significant because it marked the day Kadyrov met the age eligibility requirement to stand for the post of president. Politkovskaya was well-aware of this fact and of his aspirations when she chose to accuse him of torture.
 
"Right now I have two photographs on my desk. I am conducting an investigation about torture today in Kadyrov’s prisons, today and yesterday. These are people who were abducted by the Kadyrovtsi [members of Kadyrov’s personal militia] for completely inexplicable reasons and who died… " (Politkovskaya/ RFE)  
 
At this point, the interviewer suggested that perhaps these were individual cases, representing only a small percentage of abuses. Politkovskaya responded in no uncertain terms:

Her unfinished, final article was published a week after her murder by the biweekly, independent Novaya Gazeta, her paper for the last seven years. The story included testimony from a Chechen torture victim and still photos from a video, which, according to the paper, said showed Chechen security forces beating two young men, apparently to death.
 
The mystery is not so much that Politkovskaya was killed, but where she found the courage to continue working in the face of so much danger. After all, she had been receiving death threats since 1999, when she first began documenting human rights abuses in Chechnya. (WiPC) Members of her family had been threatened. A few months before her murder, unknown assailants tried unsuccessfully to break into a car her daughter, Vera, was driving. As the obituary in the Guardian comments,

"She had already used up several of her nine lives as a reporter. She had been locked in a hole in the ground by Russian troops and threatened with rape, kidnapped, and poisoned by the FSB [former KGB] on the first flight to Rostov after the Beslan school siege in 2004… Her husband left her. Her son pleaded with her to stop. Her neighbors, cowed by the attentions of the FSB in an upmarket street in central Moscow, shunned her."(Hearst)
 
Who was this woman Anna Politkovskaya? Where did she find her courage? Was she super-human, immune to threats of torture and death?
 
Certainly, she could have chosen a different life. Born in 1958 in New York, the daughter of United Nations diplomats from the Ukraine, she had a privileged background and dual citizenry. After graduating from Moscow University in 1980, she wrote for the national daily Izvestia before switching to the smaller, independent presses. She had a husband and two children. Never envisioning herself as a war correspondent, Politkovskaya stated, “I was interested in reviving Russia’s pre-revolutionary tradition of writing about our social problems. That led me to writing about  the seven million refugees in our country. When the war started, it was that that led me down to Chechnya.” (Hearst)

Her first book,  A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya, published in 1999, told horrifying anecdotes of human rights abuses perpetrated by the Russian military. This was followed three years later by A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, where Politkovskaya continued to put a human face on the horrors of war. Her latest book, Putin’s War: Life in a Failing Democracy, was published last year. According to  The New York Times, it was “a searing portrait of a country in disarray and of the man at its helm.”
 
But professional drive cannot explain the courage of Politkovskaya. There must have been something more, something deeper.
 
There are some clues in her account of the Moscow theatre hostage crisis in 2003, when renegade, Chechen hostage-takers, requested her as a negotiator. They had seized a theatre and were holding 850 people hostage. Unlike the sparse and impersonal accounts of her torture in 2000, this report is surprisingly subjective: