Feeling small

Hi. I'm posting this in honor of Memorial Day. It's based on a recent visit to Battleground National Cemetery. All images were captured in the cemetery by my good friend Brandon Bieltz. 


It's not hard to feel relevant. You can access a car that runs well. You can afford the occasional luxury. Family members call you on the phone to check in, old friends enjoy your company, and new friends aren't rare.

Nobody likes to feel unimportant.

Few aim for a trivial life.

Yet, sometimes insignificance creeps in. Like when you're lost in a crowd. Or looking out an airplane window.

Or standing in a cemetery.

Even a one-acre military cemetery. Where less than forty-five are listed on death's roll call.

Translating insignificance is tough. Feeling small is hard to deal with because we are so used to feeling big. 

But we can't be big all the time. We can't have an answer to every question. 

Being small is just fine. It can be simple. Elegant. Just like a tiny military cemetery.

Like a single day in a simple year. This day. A day to be small. 

At the end of this day the sun will set. But we know it will be back - it always is. 

And when it does come back we'll feel bigger. Stronger. Significant. Because we spent time with those who won't feel another sunrise on their skin or can't hear the laugh of an old friend.  

Because we allowed ourselves to feel small.

In the Streets: James Buchanan

He was a member of the House of Representatives, a U.S. Senator, Secretary of State, and then our fifteenth president.

He was given the keys to the ultimate bachelor pad in 1857.

During his inaugural address happily announced he would "cheerfully submit" to the whatever decisions Congress made regarding the admittance of Kansas into the Union. He'd be cool with slave or free.

J.B was a laid back guy, apparently.

The street named after him in Washington stretches across the northeast and northwest parts of the city.

The street to Kansas statehood was coated with blood. Senators violently attacked each other in Washington. Militant groups clashed in the Midwest.

People actually died when Buchanan took his nonchalant approach to our nation's growth. And whether he wanted it or not, the blood was largely on his hands. Lots of blood.

Because lurking around the corner from this violence in Kansas was years and years of violence throughout the country.

And lurking around the corner from Buchanan Street in DC is Crittenden Street.

John Crittenden was a Kentucky Senator who proposed a really crappy bunch of constitutional amendments in 1860. Collectively, they were known as the "Crittenden Compromise". 

Want to know how bad this proposed compromise was? One of the amendments would have made Congress unable to abolish slavery in DC if it still existed in Virginia. 

Ha, good one, John. 

By 1860, I wonder if James Buchanan had a clear view of the street the nation was heading down. 

Because lurking around the corner from the failed Crittenden Compromise was, well, the Civil War. 

Fearing the Free: Part 3

Nineteenth century medicine was terrifying.

Okay, maybe cutting into the human body is a scary concept in general. Regardless of the setting.

That said, if I was dying and had my pick of a doctor, I would pick one from 2013 to try and save me over one from 1865.

Back then, medicine was really terrifying.

The room Abraham Lincoln died in was likely quite the opposite of terrifying, though. I'm talking about the physical makeup of the room. It was a small room in a modest Washington boardinghouse. Victorian decor was dark and sometimes depressing, but I like it.

Now, the emotional ambiance of the room where Abraham Lincoln died - my word. That was terrifying. Watching the life drain from the president and knowing there is nothing you can do about it. Must have been tough for the doctors in the room with Abe. That's like finding the only copy of one of the most fantastic books ever written, hardly making it halfway through, and then watching it burn right in front of you with nothing to put the fire out. A slow burn. A slow, terrible, awful burn.

Did Lincoln feel a terrible burn in his head after Booth pulled the trigger in Ford's Theater? Maybe. He lived for many hours after he was shot. Well, his heart was still working. Whether he was conscious of the pain, who knows.

What was causing any pain he may have been feeling was pretty obvious. There was an entry wound, but no exit wound. The area around his right eye was starting to swell and turn a weird color. A foreign object was somewhere inside his head.

At one point during that horrible night, doctors used something called a Nelaton probe to, well, probe the president's brain. No x-rays back then. The Nelaton probe was inserted into the hole in the back of Lincoln's head and the doctor poked around in his brain for a while. The instrument was supposed to turn a different color when it encountered lead and thus the bullet.

The Nelaton probe, courtesy of the
National Museum of Health and Medicine. You can
read more about its back story here.

Yeah, terrifying.

So, since we're probing Abe's brain, I'm wondering - did any other sort of burning sensation exist there?

Maybe the vision of an entire race of people, by and large completely enslaved until he took office and because of him made free, caused the man anxiety. This was big. One of those unprecedented changes in the history of the country.

I wish we could probe deeper. Dig around in his brain a little while longer. Figure out his game plan, how he would have handled the pressure of this monumental decision.

I want Lincoln to teach me a little more about how to live with fear.

Fearing the Free: Part 2

The tall, haggard man stood at the second story window of the big white house and looked out upon the throng of people gathered on the lawn below.

The colored man too, in seeing all united for him, is inspired with vigilance, and energy, and daring, to the same end. Grant that he desires the elective franchise, will he not attain it sooner by saving the already advanced steps toward it, than by running backward over it? 

The idea of black people voting in America. There it was, suggested and supported by the man who was probably most capable of making it happen.

In the crowd below, another man's blood pressure rose. His muscles tensed. Tiny alarms went off in his brain. There was danger nearby. He was afraid.

In a discussion on the science of emotion, one doctor describes the marine snail Aplysia to his listeners. According to the doctor, this snail has a very simple nervous system that shows differing responses to varied levels of fear.

During a test, one particular part of the snail was lightly stimulated and then the creature was immediately given a shock to the tail. It learned to associate the first signal with the second. Eventually, even when the first signal was given without the second, it still gave signs of anxiety. If the first signal was given repeatedly, the animal could develop chronic anxiety that might last for days.

This is signal anxiety. A conditioned fear.

Here, John Wilkes Booth's compass points south.
Through his final days, he never stopped searching
for direction.
Library of Congress

And here, on that April day in Washington City, a similar experiment is repeated.

The first signal is given. It's the notion of black enfranchisement.

Somehow John Wilkes Booth was conditioned to associate that signal with anguish. He learned to connect it with misery.

This conditioned fear really messes with him. His anxiety is tormenting. Que his body's chemical response. The sweating. The shaking.

The irrational thinking.

What he'd give to stop that terrible signal from being given.