Against The Grain

Peter Coyote’s description of addiction as “the pit bull that’s been chewing on your innards your entire life, the one you’ve been bribing to stay out of your consciousness,” has stuck with me. My son is a heroin addict (one year sober) and I am a food addict (sixty days abstinent), and this describes both our conditions exquisitely. Coyote is correct that without a community, twelve-step or otherwise, to keep you straight, recovery is almost impossible.

J.C. Saint Louis, Missouri

Peter Coyote responds:

Rachel Kathleen Chan is correct about pit bulls. My dad had a white pit bull, Knappy, a fabulous animal. But they have been bred for five hundred years as a “dead-game” breed, meaning they will fight until they die. There is a deep genetic history in these animals that needs to be understood and approached with caution and respect.

I am happy to stand corrected by Nancy Roth and thank her for the link. I am often asked about communal living today, and now I have a source.

I am not a pessimist, as Tom Bloch says. I practice what I call “radical optimism,” which is based on the indisputable fact that we never know how things will turn out. I never confuse my personal predilections with objective analysis, however. The facts look bad, and there are no guarantees that wisdom will triumph over ignorance.

Byron Case is right in parsing what I wrote, but I didn’t express myself very well. I don’t think that anger and hope are mutually exclusive. I have found, however, that expressing anger rarely solves anything. It makes us feel powerful but also draws lines between people, subtly reinforcing one’s own “correctness” at the expense of others. If we look deeply, we’ll see that we possess the same noxious qualities and practices (expressed differently perhaps) that we target in others. By placing them outside ourselves, we make ourselves feel purer. My model is the Dalai Lama and not John Lydon. Hatred is an energy, too, but . . .

I’ve read that 30 percent of Israelis are in the Israeli-Palestinian peace movement. Perhaps they are all as naive as Carol Green Ungar suggests, but perhaps not. If not, what would that mean? Can there be a “Jewish” state and a democracy that equally includes non-Jews? I don’t know. Can there be a democracy in Israel in which the government is an honest broker in a pluralistic, multicultural society? I don’t know, but if South Africa, Ireland, and the Serbs could do it, I would bet that my own people are capable of such an act of transformation. I don’t think that it’s “dangerous” to discuss the issue. I think it’s dangerous to have a closed mind about it.

I am saddened that such a thoughtful and sensitive man as Peter Coyote could espouse such naive and dangerous views about Israel. It is the Palestinians who have repeatedly torpedoed peace initiatives by refusing to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. The Palestinian leadership has failed to condemn terrorism, and the Palestinian people are veering dangerously toward fundamentalism, which brooks no tolerance for the Jewish state and holds that all Jews must be driven into the sea.

Carol Green Ungar Kiryat Yearim
Israel

I found your interview with actor and activist Peter Coyote to be one of the better ones of the past year. Just one thing troubled me. Coyote says, “All the kids I have met who look like punks have been, without exception, sweet people, but they are not hopeful. I think they are trying to keep a part of themselves sacrosanct from the culture by violating norms of fashion and behavior, making music that is so angry and unbeautiful.”

As one of the pierced and unconventionally dressed punks, I have a problem with his implication that anger and hope are mutually exclusive. I have many proudly iconoclastic friends whose anger about the state of the world only fuels their work for a better tomorrow. To quote old-school punk John Lydon, “Anger is an energy.” I challenge Coyote to show us a revolution that wasn’t based on people’s frustration boiling over.

Byron Case Cameron, Missouri

In “Against the Grain” Peter Coyote implies that the age of “communes” is past. Not so! The Fellowship for Intentional Community (www.ic.org) publishes an excellent quarterly magazine, Communities, about the many intentional communities that are blossoming all over the world today. These groups are full of idealists who have chosen to live sustainably and according to their values. They give me hope in today’s world.

Nancy Roth Oberlin, Ohio

I had decided not to renew my subscription. The human condition can be so hard, and The Sun is so honest — at times whining, but also loving and painful. I thought that by not renewing, I would find time to focus on more important things. In the June issue, which was to be my last, the closing paragraph of the Peter Coyote interview [“Against the Grain” by David Kupfer] suddenly turned much of my midlife angst into understanding. And when I got to the last few paragraphs of the “Dear Sugar” advice column, a lifetime of family confusion made sense. Even if only one issue a year has this impact on me, I had to renew.

Diana Renison Olympia, Washington

I love the interview with Peter Coyote, but I have to comment on his metaphor for staying clean: “taming the pit bull that’s been chewing on your innards your entire life.” The media have given these dogs an undeserved reputation as savage beasts. I own two pit bulls and know firsthand the social ostracism they face and the institutionalized prejudice of breed-specific legislation. I challenge Coyote and The Sun to think about the effect this kind of language has before you use it.

Rachel Kathleen Chan Oakland, California

While I am a hopeful realist and not a pessimist like Peter Coyote, he makes an excellent point regarding capitalism as we currently practice it. Its bedrock principle is: more.

Capitalism requires more land, more water, more energy, and more people. It is this last element that will lead us to face overpopulation in the near future. I hope that we can avert impending disaster, but I am far from confident.

Tom Bloch Ashburn, Virginia