Dear Young Therapist: Consider Your De Rigueur Requirements | The Post-Doctoral Tie Incident

image credit: Nicholas Ruiz. Bow Tie #10. Assembled November 2011.
 Acetaminophen pills, multiple adhesives, plastic knife. Forest Hills, Queens, New York.

The man interviewing me for a postdoctoral fellowship unwrapped the aluminum foil encasing his dry turkey sandwich and proceeded to stuff it into his mouth.

"Do you mind if I eat? Not that you really have a choice. I'm doing the interview and have the power in this situation."

He continued to masticate and fill his office up with the seasonally incongruent smell of Thanksgiving. This was going to be a fun filled interview.

"I'd like to ask you why you aren't wearing a tie today for your interview. Before you answer, I want you to know that as a psychologist I think everything has a meaning. I hope you have thought about the meaning of why you didn't wear a tie. If you haven't, then you aren't what we are looking for in a post-doctoral fellow. We'll end the interview here and I'll wish you good day."

I had a variety of inside-thoughts that I considered sharing. They included:

• Asshole. 
• Drop dead. 
• Who the hell do you think you are? I just had fucking brain surgery, a post-operative infection, and joint damage from an adverse reaction to the antibiotics that treated my infection. 
• Your turkey sandwich is making me want to throw up. 
• I'm scared because I can't find a job. 
• Do you know who the fuck I am? 
• Am I going to fail as a psychologist?

I took a middle course and smiled politely. I noticed the air flowing in and out of my nose. I watched as my agitated thoughts floated like clouds in the wind from the center of my awareness, to the edges of my mind, and then off into places where I can no longer notice them.

Dear Young Therapist: Allow for the Unexpected

Dear Young Therapist:

No graduate program can prepare you for everything that is going to happen in your career. As you embark on your journey as a therapist you'll want to be sure you make allowances for the unexpected to happen. It will--in ways that you'll never expect. 

My training did not prepare me for what happened on April 15, 2013. Bombs went off just two and a half miles away from my office in Cambridge. While I could not hear the explosions, I could hear sirens and helicopters as the day progressed. My heart sank hearing the news between my appointments: my city--my home--was under some sort of assault. 

I reached out to friends and family. I was safe. They were safe. 

My mind quickly turned to my patients--some forty people scattered across the Boston region who call me their psychologist.

Were they safe? 

Some volunteer every year at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Others live or work within the area of the blasts. Some, experienced survivors of all sorts of trauma, were likely to be stimulated and flooded with fear. I worried about them reliving their own personal hell from the past.

I wasn't trained to reach out to patients when I think they might be in distress. I wasn't trained to know what to do when bombs exploded just a couple of miles away from my office. What teacher could anticipate such a thing?

You'll learn in your practice that sometimes the right answer to the situation isn't the thing that your supervisors taught you. Ethics are important. It's important that you spend years studying your ethical code so you can develop a deep understanding of the complexities of being ethical in your practice. You'll need lots of colleagues to talk things over with. You also need to learn how to be responsive in ways that codes and protocols cannot teach you.

You've got to make allowances for the unexpected and know how to make decisions when the world around you has fallen apart. Days will come when you'll have no supervision, guideline, or protocol to follow. You'll be on your own. You'll know you've finally earned your license when you know how to make a path of your own that's strong, clear, ethical, and wise. 

Unbearable: Asylums in Serbia and Kosovo circa 2002

I was looking for some vintage images of advertisements for psychiatric hospitals this evening. Instead, I broke my heart. These haunting images were taken within the walls of a modern psychiatric facility in Serbia and Kosovo between 1999 and 2002 by the photographer George Georgiou. He writes:

For me, after the initial shock at the conditions and total lack of care, it became clear that the patients from all ethic backgrounds were able to display more community affection and care with each other, than the sad situation their "sane" countrymen were displaying to each other on the outside.

I have nothing to say other than this: we must do better.

Back to the Future: Thorazine for Sanity

healing or control?

I sat around in a circle with my cohort of post-doctoral fellows appropriately snickering. Our training director, Joe Shay, had distributed a list of hundreds of different types of psychotherapy. Many of them were laughable, sad, or just outrageous. How could anyone have practiced these therapies with a straight face? Didn't they know they were quacks?

With our recently minted doctorates in hand, we all looked smug and self assured. We were training to practice dialectal behavioral therapy--the state of the art treatment for people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Our mentors were elite luminaries in the field.  Our offices were in the heart of Harvard Square in Cambridge Massachusetts. I felt I arrived in the liberal elite intellectual promised land.

With a deft few words, our training director swept away my smug look of superiority and taught me an enduring lesson. This post today is what I came to know in thinking about Joe's lecture that day.

People have come for treatment for hundreds--if not thousands--of years for phenomena that we currently call borderline personality disorder. People have turned to shamans, priests, friends, psychiatrists, psychologists, and others to receive treatment. Many have gotten better. Some have not.

I walked into that training room as a post-doc thinking I was learning a superior treatment. I couldn't imagine that the treatment I was providing--DBT--could ever be viewed as ridiculous, barbaric, old fashioned, or just plain weird. I could never be seen like those people we were learning about in Joe's lecture. We were better. I was better. These are modern treatments.

As many do, I failed to look forward. I failed to account for the fact that society is evolving. What one considers humane now, will be inhumane tomorrow. What are considered unquestionable facts today will be seen as antiquated examples of magical thinking tomorrow.

I will become a dinosaur one day. The way I practiced psychology will be looked at by some (if I am even remembered) as laughable--or worse.

I had this in mind yesterday morning while I was looking at vintage advertisements for Thorazine.

Holiday Greetings: What if Jesus was Gay?

"What if Jesus was gay? Would you still be afraid? Would you torture and tease? Would you open your mind? Would you make him cry? Would you beat him the alley? Would you tell him to burn and rot?"

This little gem of a song, by Bryan McPherson, was recorded at Club Passim in Cambridge around the time same-sex marriage became legal in the Commonwealth on May 17, 2004. It's worth a listen this holiday season.

In listening to Bryan's song, I can't help but to think about how so many people make the conscious effort to bring hate and sorrow into the world. The choice of how are you are in this world is totally up to you.

Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. 

-- Viktor Frankl

Choose wisely.

Happy Holidays.

The Human Costs of Reparative Therapy

Have you hear about the so-called reparative therapy, in which unethical therapists attempt to change the sexual orientation of a person? Check out here and here if you are outraged and want to stand up for love, compassion, and what is right.

Four Noble Truths: Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

The Treachery of Images

I'm not sure why I haven't thought of this before. I should have. Really. I know this. At least I did at one point.

I'm talking about words here. The words we use represent agreed upon symbols for phenomena that occur in this world. A soda, for example, isn't really a soda. We've just all socially agreed that the substance we experience as a bubbly liquid will be called a soda (unless you are from Ohio, in which case you'll call it pop).

The symbols (words) aren't representative of real things that we have direct knowledge of. Rather, our symbols are representative of perceptions of phenomena that we only have access to from our own senses--not some direct knowledge of a "real" thing.

Have I lost you yet? At best I have a 50/50 chance of getting lost myself.

I've been thinking about this sort of things for years. Sitting under a tree in college (I'm being serious here, and no, it wasn't a Bodhi tree) the class read Alfred Korzybski and learned that the map is not the territory. Words (maps) do not entirerly represent the territory of phenomena that the maps (words) are trying to describe. Later in college I studied Rene Magritte's The Treachery of Images (1928-1929), and learned that the image, like the word, does not represent the "real" thing. Still later I studied Michel Foucault and read his 1968 essay "This is Not a Pipe." I thought more about language being symbolic representations of phenomena that are never exactly "real." Lastly, in my doctoral program I spent an awful lot of time reading and writing about social constructionism. Identities aren't real things, I wrote. Identities are stories we communally create to describe our perceptions of the phenomena that are around us.

I better come back around toward my point. Things get lost in translation. I've known this for a long time. I just forget that I know this.

So here I am up late watching a documentary by David Grubin called The Buddha and was reminded that what we think to be true isn't exactly true. The first twenty times I've learned this lesson was not enough. Apparently I need a little more reinforcement.

The four noble truths of Buddhism, as they are popularly taught, are that (1) Life means suffering; (2) The origin of suffering is attachment; (3) The cessation of suffering is possible; and (4) There is a path of the cessation of suffering.

Suffering, of course, isn't actually suffering. The original meaning here has gotten lost in translation. I know this, or at least knew this, but forgot it at some point or another. The Grubin documentary reminded me once again that suffering is a translation of the word dukkha. Suffering is one understanding of the word--and an appealing one. It's short, simple, and speaks to all of us. Who doesn't want to have less suffering in their lives? Dukka, however, isn't exactly suffering. It means something more akin to dissatisfaction. The word speaks to our experience of never being quite happy--and if we do experience happiness it tends to disappear in an instant. Dukka speaks to our experience of dissatisfaction with the constantly changing experiences of our lives.



You say suffering, I say dissatisfaction. Let's call the whole thing off? Hold on a second more. If you stick with me I might convince you that we better call the calling off, off.

I wonder if the Gershwin brothers were trying to teach us the Four Noble Truths. They certainly captured some of the dissatisfaction that occurs when two people, with two different ways of understanding the world, come grinding together in a relationship (the first noble truth, suffering is inevitable). The brothers also got that we can let go of  this dissatisfaction about day-to-day gripes for a greater goal.

But oh if we call the whole thing off than we must part.
And oh, if we ever part than that might break my heart.
For we know we need each other,
we better call the calling off off,
let's call the whole thing off.

Back to the documentary--the Grubin documentary interviewed the Dali Lama. He said that many read the four noble truths and attempt to wipe out suffering and wipe out desire. "Where does enlightenment fit in without desire? Without desire, how how do we lead our life? Without desire, how can we achieve Buddhahood?" The Dali Lama goes on to talk about being cautious about choosing the right kind of desire. "Desire to be harmful, no that's bad."

I'm going to hazard the guess that the Dali Lama isn't suggesting that the right kind of desire to have here is for wanting the thing of romantic love, as the Gershwin brothers suggest. I'm going to guess that the Dali Lama considers the desire for compassion and joy to be the good desire. 

What's my take home message here? Look toward joy and compassion. Cultivate that if you want to have the good life. 

What's compassion and joy, you ask? I'll have to tackle that another time.

A Call to Action/Shine Brightly

This  morning I came across a video produced by the Family Research Counsel. I found it to be a particularly repugnant piece of propaganda and live tweeted my responses to the video. I felt that in good conscious, I couldn't let out-right falsehoods go unchallenged. I strongly encourage you to watch the video for yourself.

Interested in encouraging these folks to move from hate toward compassion? Consider an e-mail, tweet, phone call, or letter. Share with them the importance of love, compassion, and acceptance of all of our humanity. Tony Perkins, near the 26:50 mark, says that it is important to be "letting your light shine before men in such a way that they can see your good works." Show them all your good lights. Shine bright. Our futures--your futures--depend on it.

Rev. John Rankin
Theological Educational Institute
P.O. Box 297
West Simsbury, CT 06092
tei@teii.org
860-408-1599

Jeff Buchanan (or here)
Executive Vice President
Exodus International
1-888-264-0877

Joe Dallas
email here
17632 Irvine Blvd.
Suite #220
Tustin, California 92780
714-508-6953

Tony Perkins
Peter Sprigg
Chris Gacek
(email here)
Family Research Counsel
801 G Street, NW
Washington, D.C., 20001
203-393-2100 (p)
202-393-2134 (f)

Redeemed Lives
Rev. Mario Bergner
(email here)
P.O Box 451
Ipswich, MA 01938
978-356-0404

Massachusetts Family Institute
(email)
(web)
781-569-0400

Liberty Legal Foundation
Kelly Shackelford
9040 Executive Park Drive
Suite 200
Knoxville, TN 37923
324-208-9953
(web)
(email)

Carol M. Swain
Vanderbilt University Law School
131-21St Avenue South
Nashville, TN 37203
615-322-1001 (o)
615-310-8617 (c)
615-322-6631 (f)
(web)
(email)

Rep Vicky Hartzler
(web)
(email)
1023 Longworth HOB
Washington, DC 20515
202-225-2876 (o)
202-225-0148 (f)

Alliance Defense Fund
Austin R. Nimocks
15100 N. 90th Street
Scottsdale, AZ 85260
1-800-835-5233
(web)

Mass Resistance
P.O. Box 1612
Waltham, MA 02454
781-890-6001
(web)

Julie Harren Hamilton, Ph.D., LMFT
P.O. Box 1382
West Palm Beach, FL 33402
561-312-7041
(email)
(web)

(read my letter to Dr. Hamilton here)

The Human Face of Same Sex Marriage

I recently became involved in a discussion on Facebook about same sex marriage. I generally avoid these sorts of situations. Discussions such as the one I got myself involved in generally become banal and rather frustrating. They usually don't end up very well. Sure, the back and forth is interesting, for a while. In the end the narrative is always the same: one side blames the other for being (circle one: ignorant, uneducated, defensive, stupid) while the other side generally resorts to accusing the other as (circle one: ignorant, uneducated, defensive, stupid). Facts are provided. Facts are disputed. Both parties, in the end, become something akin to a dog, tied to a stake, running around in circles tearing up all the grass.

The end of the conversation went something like this:

Don't Let Anybody Make You a Nobody: In Honor of MLK

What a treat I just discovered. I hope you all take the time to listen to this speech. It is especially nice to listen to it after my previous blog post Shit Homophobic People Say. Which one calls you to be a bigger person? Which one inspires you to be more?

An art teacher in Cleveland, Jayne Sylvester, discovered some dusty old tapes hidden away is a pile discarded junk in a high school library. What did she discover? A little known speech that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered on April 26, 1967.

What a great find. If you listen to it--and I hope you do--I hope you share your thoughts as you reflect on Dr King's message.

"I would like to suggest some of the things you must do, and some of the things all of us must  do, in order to be truely free. now the first thing we must do is to develop within ourselves a deep sense of somebody-ness. Don't let anybody make you feel you are nobody."

Slave Narratives: Sarah Frances Shaw Graves

Sarah Frances Shaw Graves

It looks like I'm going to be a regular visitor to the digital archives at the Library of Congress. Did you know they have a collection of oral histories taken in the 1930s by people employed by the WPA (Works Progress Administration)? They make for riveting, harrowing, and enlightening reading.

Personal narratives like this are like opening a little tiny window in the fabric of time. Through that window I get to glance back and see an unvarnished, unprocessed, and unadorned view of life at it was. These windows are irresistible--when I find it I need to open it and look through it. Whether it be historical narratives likes these, or more contemporary narratives like the ones told by patients in my office, I'm transfixed. Each window opened gives me another perspective to understand the complex fabric of our shared experience.

Sarah Frances Shaw Graves was born sometime around 1850 somewhere near Louisville. She told her story to a WPA interviewer in 1937. The nameless interviewer wrote this of Sarah:

"Her life story is one of contrasts; contrasts of thought; contrasts of culture, beneficial inventions and suffrage. Not far from her home the glistening streamlined Zephyr speeds on twin rails beside the Missouri River, near the route of the slow-moving, creaking wagons on the ox-road of the 1850s."

Let's open up one of those tiny little windows in the fabric of time and let Sarah speak.

"My name is Sarah Frances Shaw Graves, or Aunt Sally as everybody calls me. Yes'm that's a lot of name an' I come by it like this, My husband was owned by a man named Graves, and I was owned by a man named Shaw, so when we were freed we took the surnames of our masters. I was born march 23, 1850 in Kentucky, somewhere near Louisville. I am goin' on 88 years right now. I was brought to Missouri when I was six months old, along with my mama, who was a slave owned by a man named Shaw, who had alloted her to a man named Jimmie Graves, who came to Missouri to live with his daughter Emily Graves Crowdes. I always lived with Emily Crowdes." 

"Yes'm. Allotted? Yes'm. i'm goin' to explain that," she replied. "you see there was slave traders in those days, jes' like you got horse and mule an' auto traders now. They bought and sold slaves and hired 'em out. Ye'm, rented 'em out. Allotted means somthin' like hired out. But the slave never got no wages. That all went to the master. The man they was allotted to paid the master." 

"I was never sold. My mama was sold only once, but she was hired out many times. yes'm when a slave was allotted, somebody made a down payment and gave a mortgage for the rest. A chattel mortgage." 

A down payment!! 

"Times don't change, just the merchandise." 

I am amazed at how connected I feel to Sarah. Despite having been born more than seventy years before I was, and having died on July 3, 1943, when my grandparents were in their early 20s and neither of my parents were born, I can feel her presence here in my living room as I sit on my couch writing this in an undisclosed location in the Merrimack River Valley. That's the power of a personal narrative.

Sarah gives us a glimpse into the life of a person in slavery that we don't read about in history text books. Her personal story gives contour, shape, and texture to the disembodied facts our teachers lecture about. Sarah also offers us so much more. She was a simple woman. She worked hard and struggled to survive through an era of history that was not kind to people of color. She received no formal education, won no prizes, and left no inventions, books, or other intellectual products behind.

Yet reading her narrative, I'm incredibly moved the the gifts I have received. Sarah mattered not for what she left behind. She mattered because she was here. Her story illuminates her humanity that, in the end, is all we ever really have.

Compassion Round Up: Trains, Columbine, Inner Gardens, and More...

Compassion on the 10:40 Train

My heart smiled at this simple act of kindness. I'm still not sure why I was so surprised. Maybe I've just had skeptics around me for too long...you know, the people who assume that every homeless person is just a lazy drug addict with no desire to ever get a job and contribute to society like the rest of us hard-working Americans. Whatever the reason may be, I was thankful to have witnessed it.

'Rachel's Challenge' brings a message of compassion

Following the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, the father of 17-year-old Rachel Scott, the first student killed in the massacre, began an organization called Rachel's Challenge, which tours the country promoting an anti-bullying message of kindness and compassion for others.

Finding love and compassion in our inner garden

Readers will find much to reflect on, especially on the subject of the inner garden. After all, this seems the only place to find understanding and compassion. While we'd all like to do a walking meditation in the woods, pick wildflowers along the way as well as bamboo branches for flower arrangements, the majority of us cannot afford the time to enjoy that environment. So it is incumbent on each of us to find our own gardens, and appreciate the peace and miracle of where we are.

Happy Birthday, Ryan

Happy birthday, Ryan White. Today would have been your 40th birthday.

I recently came across a BBC story about Ryan's life. It dawned on me that most people under 40 have probably have never heard of Ryan. If you have, you probably know his name as part of the federal government's Ryan White CARE Act.  You probably don't remember the raw hate that was directed toward this little boy.

I remember hearing about him on the periphery. He and I are of the same generation. As he was using his life to "stand in solidarity with thousands of HIV-positive women and men," I was just starting to emerge from my own self-centered adolescence and waking up to the world around me. It really wasn't until two years after Ryan died that I understood what HIV/AIDS was.

I didn't learn about HIV/AIDS from a comprehensive sex education program in my high school. Things like that weren't discussed in my public school. How did I learn? I literally tripped over it. Just barely 20 years old, I was living in a tiny one room apartment on 44th and Broadway in New York City. In order to go grocery shopping, I walked down 44th across Broadway over toward Hell's Kitchen.

On July 14, 1992 I literally tripped over one of the largest AIDS protests of the time. United for AIDS Action and ACT-UP timed a massive gathering to bring awareness to the needs of people with HIV and AIDS to coincide with the Democratic National Convention held in Manhattan that week. The protest brought, depending on the estimate, between 10,000 and 50,000 people.

I never got to the grocery store that day. When I tried to cross Times Square a sea of people had gone down on the ground to stage a die-in. I looked for some images but couldn't find any. It was an amazing sight. These were in the days before digital photography and cell phone cameras.

It was a strange time. Fear was abundant as well as an ample amount of hate and ignorance. Death permeated that air, too. Not a day went by without a news report of the death of a famous person from AIDS.

It's worth taking the time to listen to the ten minute BBC program if you haven't heard of Ryan White. If you do remember him, it's worth listening to again.

In 1984, the year Ryan White was diagnosed with AIDS, I was in an American history class. While Ryan was living a life that would become all of our shared history, I learned an important lesson (yes, there are a few important lessons from junior high history!). Dorothea Krenz, my teacher, walked around shaking each of our hands. She rattled off various important figures from history. Most of them, I believe, were notable figures from World War II. The details have faded over the past 27 years, but the point of the exercise has stuck with me. History is personal. It connects and links us together across space and time.

History serves as a good reminder about where we were, where we are, and where we might still yet go.

Christian Terrorist

So those of you who closely follow my Twitter stream have likely discovered that I'm now on Tumblr. I use that space to keep track of things that I'm reading and thinking about. I've been reading a lot about the notion of compassion recently. One of those articles was by Martha Nussbaum.

In 2002, Hindu extremist organizations in India spurred attacks that killed over 2000 Muslims. "Approximately one-half of the dead were women. Children were killed with their parents; fetuses were ripped from the bellies of pregnant women to be tossed into the fire." p. 358 

Nussbaum, M.C. (2008). The Clash Within: Democracy and the Hindu Right. Journal of Human Development, 3, 357-357

If you are interested in hearing Martha Nussbaum deliver this speech, click here on this link. It's a poor quality video--you'll need to skip about 6:30 minutes until there is actual talking.

My Tumblr is linked to Twitter, so whenever I post something there a tweet is generated and sent out into the universe. Generally I think this is a good thing: I read some obscure things; many people don't read obscure things; the bits and pieces of what I read might spur others to think about things they wouldn't otherwise consider. All good, right?

The Nussbaum tweet quickly brought me to my new title, and the title of this blog post, Christian Terrorist. How did this happen? 

indiaandislam Sandeep Singh 

@ 

@jaypsyd Hey Terrorist of CHRIST ..Why not have a Debate on New Testament "the 

BOOK OF HATE " Vs the BOOK of LOVE GITA

Of course, why send one Tweet when you can send two.

HinduIDF Hindu IDF 

@ 

@jaypsyd Hey Terrorist of CHRIST ..Why not have a Debate on New Testament "the BOOK OF HATE " Vs the BOOK of LOVE GITA

1 hour ago

Probably what happened is that someone set up a program to search for any mention of the word Hindu on Twitter. My tweet, mentioning Hindu extremism, got the person's notice. What I should have done was ignore the tweet. It would have been easier. However, I have documented difficulty not responding to things such as this. I always think I'm going to be helpful.

jaypsyd Jason Mihalko 

@ 

@HinduIDF I'd be happy to have a real dialogue with you, but let's start by not assuming I am Christian. Polarization gets us nowhere.

11 hours ago Favorite Reply Delete

It's hard to have a complete thought in 140 characters. I probably came on too strong.

HinduIDF Hindu IDF 

@ 

@jaypsyd When U call Hindu militants ? & wht is the Problem when we call Christian Militants ? wht Polarization ? Just debate ? rt ?

jaypsyd Jason Mihalko 

@ 

@HinduIDF The quote made reference to an extremist organization, not all Hindus. I would never group all people into one category.

11 hours ago Favorite Reply Delete

Things went downhill pretty fast.

ProudArya Puneet verma 

@ 

@jaypsyd @HinduIDF These are abrahaminic faiths that polarize. You may as well be a marxist pseudo-Hindu trash.

rajdeepsardesai Rajdeep Sardesai 

blocked @jaypsyd . A true bigot who believes 2000 muslims were killed in 2002 gujarat riots.

HinduIDF Hindu IDF 

@ 

@jaypsyd U Stupid Lawyers is more authentic than Government of India & Other resources provided Indian's ? Racist Bastard..that is wht U R

rajdeepsardesai Rajdeep Sardesai 

@ 

This @jaypsyd guy does appear to be a bigot. Ill block him now.@HinduIDF @NishkaK

12 minutes ago

HinduIDF Hindu IDF 

@NishkaK True...A racist is a Racist and this Guy is a Racist@jaypsyd and no amount of Data or Books will change his Mind set

14 minutes ago

NishkaK Nishka Krishna 

@ 

@jaypsyd you guys @rajdeepsardesai @HinduIDF r wasting ur time. This person is brainwashed & will just use ur argumnts agnst hapless indics

How did I go from a Martha Nussbaum quote, to being called a Christian Terrorist, to being called a racist bigot, brainwashed, and let's not forget my favorite, pseudo-Hindu Marxist trash?

I mistakenly entered into a geopolitical argument. I'm not Indian, I'm not Hindu, and I'm not Muslim. I'm a psychologist writing a book about compassion who happened to dig up an article about a 2002 riot in India. I was interested in what Nussbaum had to say about compassion. I also wanted to keep track of that quote because I really don't know much about the politics in India. I wanted to come back to the quote so I could learn more.

From what I can best gather, there was an explosion on a train and many Hindu pilgrims were killed. Some say that a Muslim organization planned the attack. Other's have concluded that a cook stove that a pilgrim brought aboard caused the explosion. What international observers have documented is that in the ensuing confusion and violence, over 2,000 Muslims were killed along with many Hindu people.

The quote from Nussbaum was heartbreaking--hate and anger directed toward any human life is always something that breaks my heart. There is not excuse for it, and I see no place for it in our modern world.

So back to being a Christian terrorist and pseudo-Hindu Marxist trash.

I asked for dialogue. I tried, as best I could, to be open to listening to another person's viewpoint. I also asked for references. I asked my twitter dialogue partners to provide me documentation that might support ideas that were being presented as facts. When presented with propaganda, I called it as such, and asked for resources that could be verified.

I responded like a Western academic. Many of you might have done the same. This is not likely a particularly helpful move. Please make a note of it.

What I didn't do was respond with compassion. I didn't hear the fear and anger in the voices of my twitter dialogue partners. In responding to their deliciously ridiculous claims about me, I ended up becoming slightly protective of my own position. An honest thing to do, Not a productive one. I chose to try to teach here rather than listen.

I could have done better. While my twitter dialogue partners were rather insistent that if I didn't see it their way, I was seeing it the wrong way, I didn't need to come from the same stance. I got into a situation where I was on the defensive, being asked to prove I wasn't a bigot, and only being allowed to do if I agreed with what someone else was representing as truth.

There isn't really a good way out of that situation.

Does this make me a Christian Terrorist, pseudo-Hindu Marxist trash, or a bigot? Not really. At least I don't think so. In the end, however, I really need to let other people decide this based on my behaviors and actions.

Dialogue is hard. We all are prone to engaging in the eternal game of "Who is right?" or "My idea is better than your idea". It's painfully difficult to enter into a polarized dialogue where both sides want to see the other as the other.

That's important enough that I want to say it again: It is painfully difficult to enter into dialogue where both sides want to make the other side into "the other". What does that mean? In order to be right, to be important, to be safe, we human beings tend to make what is different from us into "the other." The other is a thing to be hated. A thing to be diminished. A thing to be ignored. To accept the other can be a threat to self. A threat to our own existence.

Did I "other" my Twitter dialogue partners? Not too  much. I was annoyed and frustrated, yes. I failed to take a compassionate stance toward their experience. I didn't hate them, objectify them, or intentionally turn them into an other -- I felt though that I was becoming the other in their eyes.

It makes for some difficult times. We can make another choice and become open to vulnerability--we can be open to the other and in doing so, can help recognize our common shared humanity.