The cursive is to stimulate my brain around the other three. According to experts, when I use longhand, my brain’s neural pathways can be “stimulated, changed and reorganized, even to the point of developing new brain cells.” (American Association of Handwriting Analysts) It has to do with contraction (the downstroke), release (the up) and the neural plasticity they foster.
A boy who’d brutally killed his underperforming fight dogs was recruited by a Chicago dog school funded by the Michael Vick case. There he learned to groom, feed, discipline and provide vaccinations for his pet pit bull, no longer a fighting tool.
A seventeen year old Pakistani defied her family’s plans for her marriage; her father and uncle applied electricity to change her mind and killed her, calling it a matter of family pride.
The thirteen year old daughter of Amy Chua, today’s Chinese-American lightening rod for world-wide parents and pundits, humbled her tiger mom by insisting on a degree of self-determination, whereby Amy Chua encountered the limits of her good intentions.
Control and freedom, contraction and release, are inextricably bound like downstrokes and upstrokes on a handwriting sample. Animals and children need guidance and teaching, boundaries and rules, standards of conduct; but caregivers need elastic brains that understand the difference between obedience and oppression.
Hearing of tortured dogs and a murdered daughter has me questioning the culture norms of the dog fighter and the Pakistani family. How did the line between decent and heinous behavior get drawn so far from basic humane instinct? What would it have taken for the Pakistani father and uncle to have questioned the pride and tradition that struck down their own and their own kin’s freedom to live in love? How did the Chicago boy change his mind about dog fighting?
Seemingly on the opposite extreme, the tiger mom prods her daughters to fight for the freedom to perform magnificently. “Chinese parents understand that nothing is fun until you’re good at it,” writes Amy Chua. Culture norms at work again, downstroke, upstroke, downstroke, up...
As certainly as there are merits to hard work, there is a plastic, elastic, expansive perspective that honors inner space for contemplation and self-knowing. “You are magnificent even if you never play your violin at Carnegie Hall,” goes the mantra. Goofing off is fun too, says the mellow parent.
If journalism is the art of putting moral dilemmas in bold relief by means of effective storytelling, certain practitioners have mastered the art. As consumer of this content, I have a choice to tune in as fleeting voyeur with a hard wince, or to engage my brain with the deeply human questions these stories raise. How do we sink to depravity? How do we rise to greatness? What is the measure of our success and who is the arbiter of our happiness?
Ponder onward, my human kin, in preservation of our signature virtue. Downstroke, upstroke, downstroke, up...
Photo Sannse, Staffordshire Bull Terrier, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
