Tao of K-drama: The Rough Rock Project

In Season 3 of Dr. Romantic, teacher/philosopher Dr. Kim Sabu, speaking as images of disaster scroll past, says: 

Abnormal climate, natural disasters, the climate is rapidly changing for the worse, forest fires, earthquakes, and wars. Many unexpected incidents, accidents, and man-made disasters. We will be engulfed in these suddenly and without warning. At this point the world has become a place where, no matter what happens, we wouldn't find it surprising. Now, we have to prepare for that kind of world. Our Rough Rock Project will become the cornerstone for that. 

During the season, various people pause to look at notebooks labeled "Rough Rock Project," but it is a loose thread that is never tied up -- maybe something that will be taken up in Season 4, should we be so lucky. I found the proposition irresistible -- that our work is to prepare for a world in which nothing, however outlandish and horrifying, would surprise us. 

Whether we are surprised or not, we will have to name the things that are happening. Listening with friends and family to Donald Trump's inaugural address today, we heard a long series of policies he plans to implement that run counter to the kinds of acts that would prepare us to meet the unexpected. Perhaps chief among them was his pledge to "Drill, baby, drill." 

As one colleague remarked, that is running towards Death -- Sigmund Freud noted that EROS and THANATOS form a major dialectic in human life. This offers a useful frame for the emphasis on LOVE offered by the clergy gathered with Bishop William Barber to respond to the inaugural address. 

Teacher/philosopher Dr, Kim represents passionate and uncompromising love for his patients, colleagues, hospital and community. He is completely committed to the fight against death -- he is ready to operate on a woman with dementia, and cries when she says she just wants to sleep. He demands this level of commitment from his team, as well. Older surgeons from Seoul are terrified by what they see as his recklessness. Their practice is to avoid malpractice charges by walking away when patients have little chance of survival. 

Dr. Kim doesn't see it that way: he wants to take the risk, because the patient might live, and he is dedicated to that. This commitment is what brings him to the new Rough Rock Project, as the path to survival will be made complicated by the unexpected. Just as the trauma center, founded on sound study of surgical and emergency procedure, is the outcome of the Cornered Stone Project, some new way of organizing and thinking will be the outcome of the new project. I am with Alathe, the Dramabeans recapper, who wrote:

But highs and lows aside, I still get shivers down my spine when our doctors race to the OR in determined slowmo! And so, against all better judgement, I’m invoking the jinx. It sure is quiet here without a Season 4, huh? (Somewhere, perhaps, a distant studio executive’s phone rings…)

I do hope there's a Season 4, which lays out the Rough Rock Project.

But I don't think that lets me or any of us off the hook -- Dr. Kim is talking about the world in which we live -- all of us. And therefore, the Rough Rock Project has plenty of room for us to join. How is Rough Rock different from Cornered Stone? What tools are the tools for worldwide levels of destruction and upheaval beyond any we've ever seen? These are open questions, left for all of us to take to heart and to our offices so we can do the work -- the work of being on the side of LOVE and LIFE for all. 

The Day the Sun Disappeared

I had that terrible "my best friend just died" type feeling this morning -- just a powerful feeling but puzzling because it had NO basis in reality. I wandered from room to room and tried to think why I felt so dismal Molly happened to call and I shared my confusion and dolor. She said she was miserable, too, and that Doug, her partner, said it was because of the forest fires in Canada and the smoke that blotted out the sun for us last week.  Here's how the NY Times depicted it:

It was the opaque orange that was so terrifying. I talked to Molly at the time and we commiserated about how scary it was. But thinking about that moment as the source of my despair, I can see why I feel such terrible mourning: I really liked our climate -- no, I LOVED our climate -- and this slap in the face that it's gone is both a terrible loss and a harbinger of even worse to come. Who knows what? I don't know. 

I used to say to students wanting to plan their careers, "How can you plan decades out? Do you know what will happen with the weather?"

Even then we knew something would happen. But I'm here to say that having a suspicion and not being able to see across the street are two completely different things. But what makes me feel so terrible is that I don't know what to do. I read in the paper that Greta Thunberg has finished school, so no more school strikes. Yikes. Not that I went on school strike, but it was something. 

I am often reminded that I am powerless, but watching the sky darken took that to a whole new level. 

If I'm any indication of the human response to looming terribleness over which I am powerless, we are in for not just erratic weather, but also erratic emotions. That a third of the nation is clinging to the belief this is not happening is going to make matters -- they will push for autocratic strongmen who say that they will be able to manage this. [snort]

What the strongmen will manage is their profits and our freedom. 

I heard a remarkable sermon yesterday by Reverend Darrell Berger, who was the minister for our Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Orange and came back as guest lecturer, you might say. He wanted us to know that UUs don't sit on the sidelines at critical moments. During the Civil War, for example, they were leaders of the Abolitionist Movement and joined the fighting for the Union. He gave the example of Robert Gould Shaw, a white Unitarian who led the first all-black regiment in the Civil War, the Massachusetts 54th. They were in the second battle of Fort Wagner, and took massive casualties. Colonel Shaw was one of many who died in that fight. The bravery shown by the regiment inspired the nation -- in its aftermath, a hundred thousand black men enlisted in the Union Army. 

Frederick Douglass's son, Lewis, wrote home: 

Saturday night we made the most desperate charge of the war on Fort Wagner, losing in killed, wounded and missing in the assault, three hundred of our men. The splendid 54th is cut to pieces…. If I have another opportunity tonight, I will write more fully. Goodbye to all. If I die tonight, I will not die a coward.

The battle for our climate is heating up -- sorry for the pun! -- and leaders will offer us new ways to join. In the meantime, remind your network to wear masks when the air quality takes a nose dive. Doug said that being of service by distributing masks helped him feel better that terrible day. There is always something we can do and this is a lesson that will come in handy as the best friend of homo sapiens, the climate in which our species evolved and thrived, pushes upheaval and change we can't even imagine.