My dad was the first one to hand me an article about her in the spring of 2007. I kept hearing her on the radio. “They tried to make me go to rehab and I said ‘No! No! No!’” What a catchy song, I thought. She looked like nothing I’d ever seen: sporting a raven beehive, 8 mile long winged eyeliner and the striking face of a young woman who’d somehow already seen to much. She seemed mythical. “Who sings like that?” I wondered. My adoration of Amy Winehouse has spanned the past four years in a major way. Her albums “Frank” and"Back to Black" got me through my summer in South Africa. My rollercoaster of a senior year in high school. My loneliest of nights throughout college and my happiest of times while I lived in the UK. She was my all-purpose safeguard wherever I found myself and in whatever situation I encountered. When my friend texted me the simple but devastating phrase “Amy Winehouse is dead” my brain went blank.
It’s no surprise to anyone who’s ever heard of the woman or at least knows she popularized a song called “Rehab” that Amy had been troubled for years. She faced every issue one could imagine: not only was she addicted to hard drugs and alcohol but she suffered through eating disorders, self mutilation, and bipolar disorder. While many dismissed her as a wreck, I never could. I’ll admit that sometimes I wondered if her distress was all part of a tortured artist act that she’d made herself believe was a necessary part of being a famous singer. But whether she tricked herself into it or would’ve been as self-destructive had she stuck to small jazz shows in London, her work itself was incredible because it hit so deeply.
When she said “I brought you downstairs with a Marlboro Red” or “Yea, you know I’m no good” it made sense. Or “you should be stronger than me” and that “I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself” I got it. In spite of not having gone through many of the things she wrote about or having felt exactly as she did, her voice and her lyrics managed to transcend that disconnect between her experiences and my own. How could a person’s voice move you to hear them out in spite of not having been where she has?
Amy’s now a member of the “27 Club” of infamous and amazing artists like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Kurt Kobain who all died at this young age. As soon as I learned she died, I thought about her age and I thought back to my fear from a few years ago that she would die at this age either accidentally or deliberately (as I suspect in this case) because it’s a perverse part of being known as one of the greats who are gone too soon.
Aside from the great loss I feel for her as a human being and as an artist, I feel most troubled by the fact that this is all the result of addiction and mental illness. Her death, in some ways, serves as a reminder of the power of substance abuse and the constant struggle that Winehouse and millions of others face. What is it about brain chemistry, life circumstances, and cultural attitudes that destroy lives and leads people to early graves? Is there anything that could’ve been done to help this bright, talented and innovative young woman before it came to her being carried away in a body bag a few years prior to her 30th birthday?
It always seems to me that part of the issue surrounding the link between mental illness and addiction is that aside from the genetic predispositions people have towards these conditions, there is little social recognition of the seriousness of these topics. It’s obvious that there’s got to be a societal shift in the way we understand these issues. That instead of throwing the word “crazy” around regularly (which I’m guilty of) and seeing being unstable as laughable, we learn to alter our language and educate ourselves more generally about what these diseases mean. They don’t mean that Amy (or anyone in a remotely similar situation) is weak. It’s not a question of willpower alone or toughening up. No one wants to be dependent on a substance to get him/her through the day. We need to realize that shaming someone doesn't fix the problem, either.Though I don’t know enough about non-Western societies’ attitudes towards addiction, it does seem to be an unfortunate international trend to assume that this disease is a moral failure.
If Amy’s death can illustrate anything, it’s that substance abuse is a devastating thing that can destroy those with promise at any time. I don’t believe for one second that people shouldn’t learn to take accountability for their actions and that they shouldn’t seek help from others when they need it (as she often tried to through her multiple rehab stints), but it’s clear that one way to avoid losing people is to open up a social dialogue about where addiction comes from and about how to respect the challenges that people like Amy face. If any of us looked around, we wouldn’t have to look for very long to find someone close to us who’s hooked on something. It could even be you. Why haven’t we found a way to be more socially responsible about these issues? What’s up with that? R.I.P Amy Winehouse 1983-2011.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Justice or Skill?: A Perspective on the Casey Anthony Murder Trial
When I was little, I always had a hard time distinguishing between someone being found “not guilty” and being “innocent.” “Guilty” was clear to me: it meant a bunch of random people on a jury all came to the same conclusion that an accused person ought to be punished for his or her crime. The ideas of crime, court, lawyers, and the law itself have always swirled in my head. It might have something to do with the fact that both my parents are lawyers or that I grew up in a household with the nightly news always blaring. While my parents sat on our old gray-checkered couch, I’d do my little girl thing and bounce about on the carpet. But clearly the message that criminals existed infiltrated my mind and it was at this early age that I began to think, in the way a six year could, about the American legal system.
In fact, as I look back on it, one of the most frightening but necessary realizations I came to in second grade was that, unlike I had previously gathered, there wasn’t a 50/50 split between those who died of old age and those who died by gunfire. It took me a long time to realize that gun violence, while a reality, wasn’t a part of daily life for most people in the U.S. With all these things in mind, I can’t help but think now about what major cases mean for American society and for all those who watch them progress. How do we live in a world where a woman can murder her child, a jury can all suspect as much, and she ultimately escape conviction and be found “not guilty”?
I remember hearing about the disappearance of a little girl named Caylee Anthony a couple years back in 2008. At the time, I was wrapped up in college decisions, leaving a school I’d attended for 13 years, and generally just accepted this missing child as another young girl who’d met an unfair ending. Attention is always paid to the deaths of little girls of particular backgrounds (read: non-minority) and the hyper focus on her disappearance seemed no different. It wasn’t until this spring, though, that I began to pay any serious attention to the case. Her mother, Casey Anthony, seemed by all accounts to be at least partially responsible for her child’s death. It’s all too disturbingly perfect: her 2 year old goes missing and she doesn’t bother to call the police for 31 days (which, by the way, is a month for those who might be counting), chooses to go out and party instead (because what better way to help find your kid than downing a couple cranberry and vodkas), pretends the kid is with a nanny named Zanny (c’mon, please get more creative next time, Casey), there’s evidence of searches for ways to suffocate a human being and the child’s body is found with duct tape across her mouth, and the smell of a decomposing body in the trunk of a car is explained away as a bag of rotting garbage. If all of these pieces together don’t make a strong case for this woman’s guilt, what would?
After hearing that she was found not guilty, two things crossed my mind. The first was horror. The second thing I thought of, though, was my experience as a juror last summer. I couldn’t get out of it. I’d been summoned twice since I graduated high school and unlike everyone in the jury lottery who couldn’t serve because they had to stay home to feed their turtles, were 99 years old or couldn’t make it mostly due to disinterest, I had no real excuse. I was gainfully unemployed for the summer and it seemed like a good opportunity to see what court was like. Without breaking my oath to protect the details of the case, I can share that I had to judge whether the accused was guilty or not guilty of second-degree murder. In my head and according to the evidence presented both by the defense and the prosecution, I believed the man was not guilty. But more than that I trusted that he was indeed innocent, that, outside of the limitations of legal framework and binary guilty vs not guilty, he had not actually committed a murder. My peers didn’t feel the same way, though. We ultimately found him not guilty but hardly any of them believed he was innocent and had not killed a man. Here’s the distinction: there are two legal categories that purely access guilt or not guilt. The law requires jurors like the ones on the Anthony case to assume that the only thing that matters is whether or not guilt can be established by the lawyers in court. There’s no room to convict someone or exonerate them based on what they’ve actually done. Instead, jurors must muse about whether the prosecution proved its case.
This irks me because it means that the legal system isn’t designed to handle the truth but rather what representatives (i.e. the defense and prosecution) manage to present to the jury. A man could murder 15 people but if his defense lawyer can wring his or her hands to come up with ways to diminish the strength of the prosecutor’s presentation, the accused can walk free. Doesn’t matter that he’s torn however many communities and lives apart by his violence. The law isn’t concerned with that. It’s about how clever a lawyer is at evading or shaping or even misrepresenting what’s occurred. None of what I’m saying is new or groundbreaking but it’s important to ask if we can call what we have a justice system. If Casey Anthony can, at the very best, be apathetic to the loss of her daughter (as evidenced by her failure to report the kid missing for an entire month) and at the very worst, be responsible for her death and ultimately walk free after serving a few short years jail time, why do we bother with pretending that this is a fair allotment of justice? Why can’t we inquire about innocence and guilt rather than dolling out prison time according to how skillful a lawyer might be at casting or re-casting the accused's role in a crime? Why don’t we have enough room for truth in the American legal system? What’s up with that?
In fact, as I look back on it, one of the most frightening but necessary realizations I came to in second grade was that, unlike I had previously gathered, there wasn’t a 50/50 split between those who died of old age and those who died by gunfire. It took me a long time to realize that gun violence, while a reality, wasn’t a part of daily life for most people in the U.S. With all these things in mind, I can’t help but think now about what major cases mean for American society and for all those who watch them progress. How do we live in a world where a woman can murder her child, a jury can all suspect as much, and she ultimately escape conviction and be found “not guilty”?
I remember hearing about the disappearance of a little girl named Caylee Anthony a couple years back in 2008. At the time, I was wrapped up in college decisions, leaving a school I’d attended for 13 years, and generally just accepted this missing child as another young girl who’d met an unfair ending. Attention is always paid to the deaths of little girls of particular backgrounds (read: non-minority) and the hyper focus on her disappearance seemed no different. It wasn’t until this spring, though, that I began to pay any serious attention to the case. Her mother, Casey Anthony, seemed by all accounts to be at least partially responsible for her child’s death. It’s all too disturbingly perfect: her 2 year old goes missing and she doesn’t bother to call the police for 31 days (which, by the way, is a month for those who might be counting), chooses to go out and party instead (because what better way to help find your kid than downing a couple cranberry and vodkas), pretends the kid is with a nanny named Zanny (c’mon, please get more creative next time, Casey), there’s evidence of searches for ways to suffocate a human being and the child’s body is found with duct tape across her mouth, and the smell of a decomposing body in the trunk of a car is explained away as a bag of rotting garbage. If all of these pieces together don’t make a strong case for this woman’s guilt, what would?
After hearing that she was found not guilty, two things crossed my mind. The first was horror. The second thing I thought of, though, was my experience as a juror last summer. I couldn’t get out of it. I’d been summoned twice since I graduated high school and unlike everyone in the jury lottery who couldn’t serve because they had to stay home to feed their turtles, were 99 years old or couldn’t make it mostly due to disinterest, I had no real excuse. I was gainfully unemployed for the summer and it seemed like a good opportunity to see what court was like. Without breaking my oath to protect the details of the case, I can share that I had to judge whether the accused was guilty or not guilty of second-degree murder. In my head and according to the evidence presented both by the defense and the prosecution, I believed the man was not guilty. But more than that I trusted that he was indeed innocent, that, outside of the limitations of legal framework and binary guilty vs not guilty, he had not actually committed a murder. My peers didn’t feel the same way, though. We ultimately found him not guilty but hardly any of them believed he was innocent and had not killed a man. Here’s the distinction: there are two legal categories that purely access guilt or not guilt. The law requires jurors like the ones on the Anthony case to assume that the only thing that matters is whether or not guilt can be established by the lawyers in court. There’s no room to convict someone or exonerate them based on what they’ve actually done. Instead, jurors must muse about whether the prosecution proved its case.
This irks me because it means that the legal system isn’t designed to handle the truth but rather what representatives (i.e. the defense and prosecution) manage to present to the jury. A man could murder 15 people but if his defense lawyer can wring his or her hands to come up with ways to diminish the strength of the prosecutor’s presentation, the accused can walk free. Doesn’t matter that he’s torn however many communities and lives apart by his violence. The law isn’t concerned with that. It’s about how clever a lawyer is at evading or shaping or even misrepresenting what’s occurred. None of what I’m saying is new or groundbreaking but it’s important to ask if we can call what we have a justice system. If Casey Anthony can, at the very best, be apathetic to the loss of her daughter (as evidenced by her failure to report the kid missing for an entire month) and at the very worst, be responsible for her death and ultimately walk free after serving a few short years jail time, why do we bother with pretending that this is a fair allotment of justice? Why can’t we inquire about innocence and guilt rather than dolling out prison time according to how skillful a lawyer might be at casting or re-casting the accused's role in a crime? Why don’t we have enough room for truth in the American legal system? What’s up with that?
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better
My mother first noticed something was up when I was five. In fact, she knew she had a miniature perfectionist on her hands within the first few days of my kindergarten class. Apparently, we were all meant to draw a picture of a pig and I took the task a little too seriously. As I drew my pig I wasn’t content with my own depiction. What she observed in her little parents’ circle was that upon seeing others’ renderings of pigs, I slowly slid mine under a big pile of papers and began a new one to catch up to my tiny peers. Theirs looked like Cezanne's and mine like Keith Haring's. Within the short five-year period of my life, I had already demonstrated how seriously I took competition. It meant taking cues from others (no matter how small those cues might have been) to learn their understanding of a task so that I could come up with a way both to know their interpretations and to take them a step further.
This attitude and world perspective has led me to many interesting situations in my life, ones which I am both immensely grateful for and ones which I lament everyday. Perfectionism, from the time I was a wee one up until now, has defined a great deal of my life. It compelled me to pursue my academics strongly at Trinity, it pointed me towards Harvard and has landed me ultimately where I am now, studying abroad at Oxford University for the spring semester of my junior year.
The most interesting thing to me about perfectionism, though, is that although the goal is to attain statuses or situations that palliate the human fear of incompetency, they actually breed insecurity with the false suggestion that once you reach a certain goal, you'll feel completely satisfied.
As I wrapped up my final essays at the end of last semester, I decided, both because of peer pressure and out of sheer curiosity that I would go see the movie “Black Swan,” which dealt with these very issues. Disclaimer: I hate thriller movies and I rarely pay for the experience of being made to feel uncomfortable. I get enough of that for free having lived in New York for roughly two decades and having experienced Harvard life since the fall of 2008. I went, though, with the anticipation that this ”visual masterpiece” (as it had been described) would turn me on to a whole new worldview about the sins of perfectionism. Not so.
I can’t quite tell if I hated “Black Swan” because it was too extremist in its portrayal of a very real, common issue that many of my peers grapple with or because it hit too close to home. I do know for sure that within the first 7 minutes, I wanted to escape the theater. It’s always a really dumb idea, though, to sit in the middle of the row in a theater because you most definitely cannot get out and you will have to get your 11 dollar’s worth whether you like it or not.
The thing that got me about that movie was the problematic quality of a lot of American movies: extremism. Rather than tell the story of a repressed young woman who centers her life around dance, it included insanity and excessive personal repression as a means to convey the fact that the main character struggled emotionally. Must a woman live with her mother into her middle 20’s, sleep with full array of Mattel’s stuffed animal collection, speak with the quiet voice of a seven-year-old, self-injure, endure schizophrenia, have suppressed sexual desires for both men and women, and starve herself before the American public can recognize that she’s a perfectionist?
Sitting through those two hours, it felt like the Hollywood industry was insulting the American audience’s intelligence by suggesting that the only way they could “get” the issue of perfectionism is by constantly reminding us just how infantilized, debilitated, and repressed the main character is. Unfortunately, it’s much easier to be a self-destructive perfectionist than people might think and it doesn’t take that many personal/emotional issues to set someone over the edge…as frightening as that might sound.
The thing I’ve found over the past few days of being in England on my study abroad program is that people all over the world regard American media, including movies such as “Black Swan,” as incredibly over the top. The English people giving our orientation meetings repeatedly commented on how loud Americans are and on how they always insisted on making their presence known. It seems like, as a nation, we haven’t figured out how to narrate stories, however serious or inane they might be, in a way that gets to the heart the matters involved without sensationalizing the problems involved.
The film industry seems to suggest in “Black Swan,” for example, that one of the only ways for women to feel repressed is by restricting what they eat. It's true that thousands and thousands of women feel this way but it only taps into one aspect of many that accounts for the way women encounter oppression. It’s more exciting to focus on the extreme demureness and frailty of a thin body in order to get across point that Natalie Portman feels like a weak woman than to grapple with the fact that modern women are constantly torn between performing the standard traditional ideals of passivity and the modern perspective that women “can do anything men can do.”
We need constant visual and social cues (e.g. her inclusion of dolls in her life past the age of 10) to indicate when someone’s feeling oppressed or treated subserviently. Sadly, there’s more to the picture of the damaging effects of perfectionism than we’re comfortable tackling in a two-hour movie screening. Instead, we pretend that the only people who deal with these identity crises are starved women who suppress their sexuality and who hide behind anorexia and their mommies to protect them. Again, not so.
I’m not sure if it’s my short time in a new environment or my pent up frustration with American media culture, but I’m growing increasingly tired of the way United States entertainment denies the complexity of American women and men’s issues by pretending that it’s super rare to face the inherent problems of perfectionism, suffering, anxiety or depression by portraying characters with these problems as social pariahs.
Why do we pretend that these stories of pain are purely for consumption and entertainment value when we know for a fact that they are not fanciful, rare issues but commonplace factors in many peoples' lives? What is it about the nature of perfectionism in American culture that incites our media to embellish its qualities and our societal members to feel ashamed of taking part in its results? And furthermore, what makes us hungry to hear more and more tales about perfectionism, regardless of what end of this workaholic spectrum we fall under? What’s up with that?
This attitude and world perspective has led me to many interesting situations in my life, ones which I am both immensely grateful for and ones which I lament everyday. Perfectionism, from the time I was a wee one up until now, has defined a great deal of my life. It compelled me to pursue my academics strongly at Trinity, it pointed me towards Harvard and has landed me ultimately where I am now, studying abroad at Oxford University for the spring semester of my junior year.
The most interesting thing to me about perfectionism, though, is that although the goal is to attain statuses or situations that palliate the human fear of incompetency, they actually breed insecurity with the false suggestion that once you reach a certain goal, you'll feel completely satisfied.
As I wrapped up my final essays at the end of last semester, I decided, both because of peer pressure and out of sheer curiosity that I would go see the movie “Black Swan,” which dealt with these very issues. Disclaimer: I hate thriller movies and I rarely pay for the experience of being made to feel uncomfortable. I get enough of that for free having lived in New York for roughly two decades and having experienced Harvard life since the fall of 2008. I went, though, with the anticipation that this ”visual masterpiece” (as it had been described) would turn me on to a whole new worldview about the sins of perfectionism. Not so.
I can’t quite tell if I hated “Black Swan” because it was too extremist in its portrayal of a very real, common issue that many of my peers grapple with or because it hit too close to home. I do know for sure that within the first 7 minutes, I wanted to escape the theater. It’s always a really dumb idea, though, to sit in the middle of the row in a theater because you most definitely cannot get out and you will have to get your 11 dollar’s worth whether you like it or not.
The thing that got me about that movie was the problematic quality of a lot of American movies: extremism. Rather than tell the story of a repressed young woman who centers her life around dance, it included insanity and excessive personal repression as a means to convey the fact that the main character struggled emotionally. Must a woman live with her mother into her middle 20’s, sleep with full array of Mattel’s stuffed animal collection, speak with the quiet voice of a seven-year-old, self-injure, endure schizophrenia, have suppressed sexual desires for both men and women, and starve herself before the American public can recognize that she’s a perfectionist?
Sitting through those two hours, it felt like the Hollywood industry was insulting the American audience’s intelligence by suggesting that the only way they could “get” the issue of perfectionism is by constantly reminding us just how infantilized, debilitated, and repressed the main character is. Unfortunately, it’s much easier to be a self-destructive perfectionist than people might think and it doesn’t take that many personal/emotional issues to set someone over the edge…as frightening as that might sound.
The thing I’ve found over the past few days of being in England on my study abroad program is that people all over the world regard American media, including movies such as “Black Swan,” as incredibly over the top. The English people giving our orientation meetings repeatedly commented on how loud Americans are and on how they always insisted on making their presence known. It seems like, as a nation, we haven’t figured out how to narrate stories, however serious or inane they might be, in a way that gets to the heart the matters involved without sensationalizing the problems involved.
The film industry seems to suggest in “Black Swan,” for example, that one of the only ways for women to feel repressed is by restricting what they eat. It's true that thousands and thousands of women feel this way but it only taps into one aspect of many that accounts for the way women encounter oppression. It’s more exciting to focus on the extreme demureness and frailty of a thin body in order to get across point that Natalie Portman feels like a weak woman than to grapple with the fact that modern women are constantly torn between performing the standard traditional ideals of passivity and the modern perspective that women “can do anything men can do.”
We need constant visual and social cues (e.g. her inclusion of dolls in her life past the age of 10) to indicate when someone’s feeling oppressed or treated subserviently. Sadly, there’s more to the picture of the damaging effects of perfectionism than we’re comfortable tackling in a two-hour movie screening. Instead, we pretend that the only people who deal with these identity crises are starved women who suppress their sexuality and who hide behind anorexia and their mommies to protect them. Again, not so.
I’m not sure if it’s my short time in a new environment or my pent up frustration with American media culture, but I’m growing increasingly tired of the way United States entertainment denies the complexity of American women and men’s issues by pretending that it’s super rare to face the inherent problems of perfectionism, suffering, anxiety or depression by portraying characters with these problems as social pariahs.
Why do we pretend that these stories of pain are purely for consumption and entertainment value when we know for a fact that they are not fanciful, rare issues but commonplace factors in many peoples' lives? What is it about the nature of perfectionism in American culture that incites our media to embellish its qualities and our societal members to feel ashamed of taking part in its results? And furthermore, what makes us hungry to hear more and more tales about perfectionism, regardless of what end of this workaholic spectrum we fall under? What’s up with that?
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