Ruth Bass

Berkshire Eagle column, Tuesday, April 11, 2023

 

 

Reflecting on mental health: Who's 'off their rocker?'

 

 

RICHMOND

Mental health. Everyone keeps talking about doing something about mental health, but doing little about it, perhaps hoping Pfizer or Moderna might come up with a vaccine that would take care of the malady with one shot plus a booster.

It seems that "they" – not the gender-defining "they," but the old, more inclusive definition – have something askew in their brains. We've always blamed a lot of stuff on "they." But perhaps it's we and us, not just they or them.

 

A young woman asked on TV the other day why Congress was talking about banning Tik Tok when she wanted them to concentrate on saving her life. She wasn't scared of social media or what the Chinese might know about her – she was afraid of being killed by a raging gunman. True, the potential shooter might need psychological care, but what about congressional minds that were focused on Tik Tok, running away from the topic of guns? That's crazy.

 

We often seem to be looking the wrong way. We say the AR-15 is totally secured in the house, forgetting that the offspring have always been remarkably clever at finding hidden Christmas presents, locating the extra car key, having secret parties when we're away and leaving no tracks. Are we trusting, blind or out of our minds?

 

We don't have any idea where the teen goes once the car leaves the garage or who gets into that car. We don't know whether homework is being done behind the closed bedroom door, or whether the kid is composing a journal of hate and a plan for violence. We don't know what's in the back pack. Years ago, a police officer announced with great pride that he left his gun on the bureau when he wasn't wearing it, and none of his kids would dare touch it. Because. Was he out of his mind?

 

We don't know if our kids smoke weed or take more consequential drugs when they're out of our sight, and we are loony if we assume they wouldn't lie to us. We lie to them, about things as silly and fun as the tooth fairy and about hidden family problems. People tell little lies for convenience and bigger lies for bigger deals. Kids learn early to tell the teacher that the dog ate the homework.

 

We listen to the powers-that-be talk seriously about a pistol in every teacher's drawer and how awful it is that kids know about hiding in closets, snapping to when the drill is on because we're afraid of the mentally ill invading. In their right minds, would those powers get a handle on prevention in addition to reaction?

 

The gunman in Uvalde was so motivated, so determined to carry out his plan, that he carried on even after crashing his car at the school. Dozens of police officers at Uvalde were so unmotivated, so scared for themselves, that they left school children to get shot, many of them killed, while they cowered. The gunman was mentally ill and focused. What were they?

 

Inconsistency reigns. Many conservatives want all babies to be born, regardless of whether they were conceived in love or in rape, regardless of whether the mother is endangered by the pregnancy, regardless of whether she wants a fifth child. But they can't bring themselves to think about protecting that baby from an obsessed gunman. That's nuts, as we are wont to say.

 

We talk of banning Tik Tok. I have no idea whether that's a good, bad or meaningless thing to do. But when two black reps who want assault weapons banned are themselves banned from the Tennessee House of Representatives for breaking a house rule, it's a little crazy. They were standing in the wrong place. It was an offense equal to Michelle Obama touching Queen Elizabeth, who smiled and moved on. She neither slapped nor shunned the offender.

 

 Mental health is a tough issue. It's often invisible until it's not. It's ignored. We used to lock up the mentally ill and hang up the key. We've moved on from that pat answer, but we still neglect or attach a stigma to this illness that we cannot see – no fever, no rash, no cough. But as we try to blame everything on "them," it's perhaps time to take a long look at "us." Perhaps get our heads examined.

 

 

Ruth Bass is an award-winning journalist. Her web site is www.ruthbass.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ruth Bass column for Monday, September 7, 2020

 

 

Not losers: Our veterans spend a lifetime with war's scars

 

 

 

RICHMOND

Sixty-nine years after my Army veteran husband was told he didn't have to fight the Japanese, he was still having nightmares connected to his service in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany in World War II. He was neither a loser nor a sucker.

 

Milt and his college friends enlisted in 1943, leaving their carefree college days behind because their country called. Their lives were put on hold, and once they were actually in the thick of enemy fire, most of them realized they might not be around to pick up where they had left off.

 

The scars left on our veterans from the Vietnam War have become more visible as time has passed. Whether post traumatic stress disorder is disabling or not, it's hard to imagine any person in active combat not experiencing some PTSD. But while WWII vets were even more silent about their war stories than the Vietnam veterans – as well as those fighting our many "small" wars – their physical and mental wounds existed.

 

For one top editor at The Eagle, it was lifelong bouts with dysentery, an inheritance from his time as a German prisoner of war. He didn't talk about it. For my husband, it was a lifelong problem with legs damaged when American planes, unknowing, bombed a house where the Timberwolves were. And a lifetime mental slide show of searching through emaciated bodies in a field and stacked in buildings when his unit liberated a German concentration camp.

 

At college, Milt was majoring in zoology, aiming for medical school. When he returned to UMass Amherst, he switched to English and Comparative Literature as his major. Why? As a medic in the Army, he didn't want to see anybody die again. So he used the GI Bill to get a master's degree and passed the orals for a Ph.D – but didn't get it because he never wrote the dissertation.

 

Instead, he answered a family need and came back to Pittsfield where he was hired "temporarily" by The Eagle. Except for a brief intermission as program manager at WMHT, he wrote columns, reported on culture, reviewed movies and theater and only talked about WWII by recounting the hilarious moments that occur even in the worst of times.

 

His silence ended when Roselle Chartok invited him to her Holocaust history class at Monument Mountain Regional. Knowing he never discussed the horrifying aspects of his war, I was surprised he said yes. He came home, dismayed because he had broken down in the middle of his talk. Determined to finish, he left the room, pulled himself together and returned to tell the kids the rest of his story. The notes they wrote him afterward were extraordinary.

 

In an interview with Gene Shalit on the Today show, Milt confessed that he could still recall the stench of the concentration camp, and after the Monument experience, he wrote about war and the camp and the Holocaust, realizing the story had to be told by those who knew. He was not a loser or a sucker. He was an American patriot, increasingly an anti-war patriot, who had a flagpole installed near his vegetable garden so the flag he had defended was always there.

  

The president's irrational denigration of the military goes way beyond his abuse of protestors, the disabled and anyone who disagrees with him. Remember stones and glass houses. Remember bone spurs. It's Labor Day. Our soldiers are at work.

 

Ruth Bass is an award-winning journalist. Her web site is www.ruthbass.com.

 
 
Ruth Bass - Life up to now

This website is maintained by Ruth Bass, novelist, travel writer and newspaper columnist.
 

 

 

 
 

Monday February 18, 2013
A few wishes
from the land
of Camelot

RICHMOND
Sometimes, a bit of Camelot would be a fine thing. Not all that kingly nonsense about a legal limit on how much snow may fall, but just a few Camelotty things like rain holding off till after sundown. That would lift the spirits of humans and newly transplanted lettuces alike -- most everyone, in fact, except for people on the lawn at Tanglewood, would go for night-rain only.
It matters little when the fog lifts here since it’s rarely so thick that it’s dangerous. King Arthur wanted fog only at night – we’d actually prefer it in the daytime. Coming back from Amherst one night, with a visiting Russian journalist in the car, we were suddenly enclosed in the dense fog of Route 9 at the top of Windsor.
“Pea soup,” I said, and he said, “What?” So I tried my best to explain that silly idiom. The thick part was easy, but why green? He didn’t know and certainly I didn’t, either. Then he wondered if I could navigate the pea soup. We made it.
BULLET HERE PLS
Camelot had its beautiful moments, even when a variety of human appetites threatened to storm the castle. My smallish Camelot would have a law against a glassy driveway, gleaming with scary ice. You can leave the car in the garage, but you can’t tell the Sheltie that his morning outings are no go. At least he’s polite enough to take it easy, taking his cue from the unaccustomed ski pole and the inching-along gait on the other end of the leash.
Lots of people would like Camelot’s law about winter exiting “March the second on the dot,” but not me. When March runs away too early, the shoulder season is mush and mud, bad for skiing, for walking, for driving, for looking out the window.
My Camelot would have lots of eggs but no chickens, more fields than lawns, landscaping on the moonscape that now surrounds the Pittsfield “Municipal” Airport. (The quotation marks indicate that it’s not much like other municipal things – you can use most of them, but the airport is more exclusive than the Pittsfield Country Club was in days gone by.
A hoary redpoll would show up among the 50 or so common redpolls in our yard if this were Camelot. I’d even settle for a pine siskin, but so far these flighty adorable birds are keeping their own company. Something about the red cap and the black chin strap gives them a bit of a frown, but they chatter cheerfully.
My Camelot would have a Fed Ex delivery person who rings the doorbell. A knock won’t be heard over the TV or in the far reaches of the house. But the doorbell goes everywhere. A Valentine box of flowers and a box of ripe plums nearly came to grief because the bell did not toll for us.
A single sheet – well, maybe both sides – for tax returns would be the legal limit in my Camelot. Just put down the income, list the allowed deductions, multiply – and pay. And sign a pledge that you’ve told the truth.
A bit of Camelot would mean no bad hair days, no cavities and no three-putt greens. It would mean those marvelous snowdrops not buried in snow and a brave daffodil or two by mid-March.
If we were touched by just a smidge of Camelot, the summer rains would slide over instead of through the driveway, a pileated woodpecker would pause on our fence post, the maple trees would shed all their leaves in a pile, the bluebirds would again approve our housing, and no one we know would get shingles.
As for finding a “more congenial spot” for all of this, the king had it quite wrong. We have the Berkshires, and we’re pretty sure it’s as congenial a spot as any, real or fantastical.
Ruth Bass mows maple leaves and monitors bluebirds in Richmond.

Home or away,
all mothers
deserve respect

RICHMOND
Perhaps since time began, the term “working mother” has meant a woman who has children and a paying job. The phrase was never intended to denigrate those women who focused on home and raising children. What is true, in the midst of what is close to an absurd “issue,” is that some “working mothers” would give their right arm to stay home with the kids and others would give their right arm to not stay at home with the kids.
Both kinds of mothers can bring up great kids, and both kinds can fail miserably. So when the stay-at-home trumpets the success of her offspring, it’s ridiculous. Having a job doesn’t make or break a marriage or a kid, nor does staying home guarantee virtue all around.
Amazingly, with all that women have achieved in recent decades, many still don’t accept that it’s fine to stay home or it’s fine to work. Some of these (Lucy would call them blockheads) are men, like the Richmond town official who once remarked that we didn’t need to pay market rates to the town treasurer and tax collector because these were pin money jobs for women. (But they were expected to perform as professionally as if they were in the marketplace.)
Remarkably, some of the naysayers are women, like the prominent local resident, gainfully employed outside her home, who scornfully asked at a public meeting, “What do those women who stay home do all day?” One thing they do is drive the car pools that take working mothers’ children to after-school activities.
They are also volunteers. Professional women may pitch in, but the stay-at-home mom is far more likely to be involved not only at school but in a host of other community activities. More working moms may be one reason we have trouble finding volunteers these days.
Just before our first baby arrived, I quit my job, knowing I was the appointed caregiver. It was upsetting. I didn’t even know this small person, and I was giving up a career I loved so I could feed him, bathe him, change his diapers, accept the fact that it would be months before he talked to me – and hope five o’clock would come quickly so I’d have an adult to talk to.
It turned out to be a fine experience, certainly enhanced by the fact that I quickly became a free-lancer who could work at home. That baby must have wondered why the other women in his life weren’t attached to typewriters. His mother was. Later on, when I had to be away from home free-lancing, it was obvious that some of the stay-at-homes were clucking a bit with disapproval.
BULLET HERE PLS
We have a long way to go, not just on the equal pay issue, before women will be properly recognized for what they do in either milieu – at work or at home. The mother who is at home “don’t get no respect,” as Rodney Dangerfield used to say. And the mother in the workplace, who still has to field calls about problems her offspring are having, may put up with a lot of junk from the unmarried professional females around her.
What a stay-at-home mother deals with all day is what working mothers have to handle after their work day. And in many workplaces, no quarter is given for issues that may arise on the home front. Both have pressure cooker days, but the stay-at-home mother has little fear that a mistake will get her fired.
I’ve stood in both places and in between. None of it was simple, especially when a 40-hour job came along and the family had the crazy idea that mom would be gone all day, but nothing would change in their lives.
That’s ages ago. In the meantime, we apparently haven’t gained much in the way of respect for our decisions. It’s not an “us and them” thing. It’s we.
Ruth Bass, a former Eagle Sunday editor, is author of two historical novels.

Column for January 26, 2009

Stirring up
grandkids
catches on
RICHMOND
Lots of people say they can’t cook, which either means they won’t, they don’t want to, they are afraid to, or they can’t follow directions. Reading is the basic talent needed for cooking, and if a translator is present, even those too young to read can cook.

For children, it can be not only fun but one of those things that fills up the part of the day when everyone is a little tired and a lot hungry. The most inventive cook among our offspring is the one who was rolling meatballs at the age of three, basically because of a need to fill the time before lunch and a nap.

Making meatballs isn’t all that far from making mud pies – nicely messy and absorbing – and far more productive. Her next major foray into cooking was making Christmas cookies with a babysitter, who probably had a similar need to use up a quantity of time and also achieve something.

To this day, the increasingly inventive cookies are turned out every December –from traditional gingerbread boys and girls to wreaths, dreidels and stars, each painted or frosted or decorated with the hard silver balls that she favors and that we all remove so we won’t break our teeth.

The grandchildren have stirred a thousand batches of pancakes here and during the annual Cape Cod vacation. They graduated from standing on a chair to needing only a stool, to being tall enough to reach. After a number of admonitions, they learned to hold the bowl with one hand and the whisk with the other. They moved from mere stirring to measuring to – sometimes with parental disapproval – to cracking the eggs (and immediately washing their hands).

Some have made whipped cream. Some have made brownies or the time-consuming meatballs. One made strawberry jam, then labeled Sam’s Jam, almost as good a marketing name as being a Smucker. With all this, it was no surprise in November when one of them accepted an invitation to help prepare chicken at our son’s house. Minutes later, Emily joined Summer, and we formed an assembly line.

After the chicken was pounded into submission, the girls coated the pieces with flour, dipped them in beaten egg, then into bread crumbs. Fingers thick with eggy crumbs, they transferred the cutlets to the pan.

Back home, Summer announced that she could make Chicken Milanese now, and when could they get the ingredients. From memory, she took her mother through the process and produced the dish. Time-consuming, not difficult, messy, delicious.

Then Emily became chief assistant for the same dish on New Year’s Eve at her house. And Summer wanted another round at the other end of Connecticut, which is when Max, previously a mere pancake maker, wanted to help. His sister, known to be a little imperious at times, said, “Max, you have to learn from Grandma first.” She shut him out totally, moving his mother to ask when he might serve his apprenticeship.

The dish is a tradition at my husband’s birthday, something that goes back to the memorable day when he and Don Miller, late publisher of The Berkshire Eagle, were introduced to it at Alfredo’s in Rome.

They were served by Alfredo himself, the very man who made Fettuccine Alfredo a household word and who tossed the Americans’ introduction to cheesy noodles with golden utensils given him by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

We just toss ours in the pan they were cooked in and heap all the chicken and fettuccine on a big platter so everyone can get at it. But everyone knows the story of when Chicken Milanese was introduced to the patriarch.

So in mid-January, there was Max, dipping chicken in flour and egg, periodically running off to get the goo off his hands and start over again. There was Summer, managing to get out of doing the sticky part but tall enough to turn the pieces in the skillet.

At one time, it took longer to make anything if the grandchildren insisted on helping. Now they make things more efficient.

But little Hannah is coming – she’s not yet two, but she’s observant. Whenever the kitchen counter is uninhabited, she pushes the step stool over and climbs up to look around.

She’ll be wanting her fingers on the whisk soon. As for me, I’m thinking of introducing the big kids to knives, now that their parents have stopped fussing about the cracking of eggs.

Column on patriotism, November 3, 2008



Of flags,
patriots and
politics

We fly the flag. It’s not a conservative flag. It’s not a liberal flag. It commemorates forever the courage of thirteen colonies who chose freedom over a king’s rule, and it has 50 identical stars to represent 50 non-identical states. The flag is American. It’s patriotic.

We’re patriotic. Liberals are patriotic. Conservatives are patriotic. Women are patriotic, feminist or traditional. Evangelicals are patriotic, along with American atheists, agnostics, Catholics, Congregationalists, Hindus and Zoroastrians.

Patriotic Americans come in all sizes and colors, from many countries and cultures, from poverty and from wealth. Trying to define them politically is nonsense. Being a patriot means believing in the nation, and that belief will engender a variety of visions for the country.

While still known for generosity to those in need, at home and far from home, we have somehow lost our sense of generosity toward each other.

Differences of opinion do not define patriotism. It is OK to be against a war. It is OK to be pro-choice or anti-abortion. It is all right to be for or against gun ownership, stem cell research, the death penalty, gay marriage or regulation of corporations.
These are matters for debate, not pillars of patriotism.

Under the banner of unpatriotic are things like bigotry, hatred, misogyny, greed or outright treason, as in the Benedict Arnold tradition. It’s worth remembering that in Canada, statues honor Arnold, making clear that one country’s traitor is another’s hero.

“We patriotic Americans,” our Texas nephew started to say, a number of years ago, after he had delivered a long diatribe that pretty much indicted everyone in the northeastern United States. We had listened politely, New Englanders taught not to raise prickly subjects at the Sunday dinner table, but that phrase tore it.

My usually mind-mannered husband, a World War II veteran who pushed through Holland, Belgium and Germany at an ugly and dangerous time, abandoned Emily Post and made it very clear that all patriots do not live in Texas. When he was finished, it was a few silent seconds before we could comfortably get back to the superb potato salad.

The man who married one of my aunts was a World War II conscientious objector. That didn’t mean he wasn’t patriotic, although some members of the family seemed dismayed. He was morally against killing people for any reason. So he took on whatever the government wanted him to do and was never forced to carry a gun.

Sometime during the Vietnam War, a visiting friend was stunned that an American flag was attached to our split rail fence. She had been taken in by the idea that the flag belonged to the hawks, and she was worried we had turned into warrior birds.

“It’s our flag, too,” my husband reminded her. “I won’t let anyone take it away from me.”

The hawks tried to brand those who objected to the Vietnam War as anti-American and themselves as patriots, defenders of the flag. But whenever the nation absorbs itself in the “I’m a patriot, you are anti-American” thing, it gets nasty, with those claiming exclusive rights to the term creating a situation not far above the level of a playground fight or a game of King of the Hill. Whoever shouts the loudest or who has the most strength at the moment prevails, only to be toppled another day.

If the discussion were more elevated, people could think about what it means to love one’s country and recognize that it’s not the same thing to everyone, any more than it was for my uncle who chose a hard road during what many choose to call “the good war.”

Despite swift boats, nephews and present-day naysayers, there’s nothing in the word patriot that puts it in the conservative or liberal column. A patriot can be either. It is shameful in a country that boasts of free speech that we have patriotic souls who have no space for anyone who doesn’t agree with their political agenda.

Like my parents and grandparents, we fly the flag. With the help of our incomparable neighbor Roy Rawson, we eventually installed a real flag pole and held a special ceremony when it was ready, complete with a somewhat astonished girl who was here for a sleepover, a daughter playing the clarinet and a Shetland sheep dog sitting at attention as the flag rose for the first time. It was a very American scene, both solemn and funny.

To keep that banner waving, America’s patriots – a motley crew – must vote tomorrow. Patriots vote – and pay their taxes.