Show Overview
On a train between Seattle and Portland, along the beautiful Puget Sound, University of Washington Teaching Fellow Michael Hebb had one of those serendipitous conversations that changed everything. In the salon car, Michael struck up a conversation with two strangers, both of whom were MDs, and learned two devastating facts:
- The vast majority of American bankruptcies are related to end of life issues, and;
- 75% of Americans want to die at home, yet only 25% actually do.
This provoked Michael’s question to the doctors: Do you agree that how we end our lives is the most important and costly conversation that Americans are NOT having? The resounding answer was “Yes,” and a few months later, a groundbreaking initiative, called “Let’s have dinner and talk about death,” was born.
In the years since that train ride, these innovative gatherings have taken place on five continents and have been exhibited in several museums, garnering coverage in The New York Times, W, Art Forum, The New Yorker, GQ, TedTalks, The Guardian and dozens of international publications.
Michael’s invite-only dinners and salons have been co-created with many notables, including Gloria Steinem, Ben Affleck, Spike Lee, Gore Vidal, Clive Owen, and more. The dinners take place around a table, where students and healthcare professionals share a meal talking about human life, cultural connections, and death.
Subjects I Talked About with Michael Hebb:
- Alvin Toffler
- Jae Rhim Lee’s mushroom burial suit
- Enlightenment Salons
- Jewish Passover Seder
- Convivial Clams like the Bloomsbury Group
- Keynesian economics
- Hogarth Press
- James Watson and the double helix
- Tuxedo Park
- My Big Fat Greek Wedding
- Everplans contain everything your loved ones will need should something happen to you. Securely store wills, passwords, funeral wishes, and more in your own secure and shareable vault.
- Greg Lundgren of Lundgren Monuments on Deathtown
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I Am a Racist
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain
I often hear nowadays, people being accused.
“He’s a racist.”
“She’s a racist.”
“Trump’s a racist.”
“So and so’s a racist.”
What I have yet to hear is: “I am a racist.”
So let me be the first.
I am a racist.
Yes.
I see the ugly thing, creeping around my soul like a roach in the kitchen. I squash it, but sometime later, there it is again.
I know there is a nest somewhere, eggs hatching, a source deep within me, hidden away where it’s easy to deny. There is where I'll find the library of my false beliefs, the lies I tell myself over and over, so often they become grooves cut into my gray matter, like fissures in rock where the water runs down, cutting deeper and deeper, until fissures become swales, and swales become canyons.
When did the first racist raindrop fall? I don’t know. As a child, for sure. How many drops of poison does it take to pollute the vessel of pure water of which we are born? When, exactly, does a person become a racist, and who gets to decide?
I don’t know, but then, neither does anyone else.
I don’t believe in permanence. That’s one thing the Buddhists have taught me.
Everything changes.
We can become aware of that library of false beliefs, that nest of nasties that colors our perception of things, often for the worse. Awareness alone brings change. We can cut new grooves. My challenge as a human being is not to deny that I am a racist, for that would be as foolish as denying I have cancer when I really do. My challenge is, rather, to stop the cancer from metastasizing and poisoning the whole man.
I doubt I will ever fully eradicate my racism. Unfortunately, I suspect some vestige of it will always be with me. But what I can do, and what I do do, is expose myself to experiences that lessen my racism, those being travel, kind and honest conversation, and breaking bread with “the others” whenever I can. These experiences, like wind and rain, smooth rock and, over time, lay low even the highest mountains.
So when I hear the angry crowd shouting, "He’s a racist,” I want to ask:
“Who among you is not a racist? Stand up then and take a bow...for you are surely a god.”
I moved to Substack!
Hi there. If you've read this far, then you enjoy, or are at least intrigued by, my ideas. If you want to learn more, jump over to my new website on Substack, where I continue to write about travel, the second half of life, and other mad musings.
