Tuesday, May 21, 2013

By Doug Cabral
Published: June 11, 2009

Despite what you've read, and no matter whether you've received the news with enthusiasm or despair, it is not true that California will soon disintegrate. Californians certainly worry about their futures, but based on a week of close observation, they shrug off the dire predictions and soldier on in their peculiar ways. They drive, in great numbers and very fast. They buy cars - and not necessarily compacts - every chance they get. They, poor things, think that buying gasoline at prices of Vineyard proportions amount to a discount. They take lunch al fresco, eating Thai, Indian, French, Mexican, Italian, as well as a fused combination of these and other cuisines, with a diversified gusto that boggles East Coast sensibilities. Nothing disconcerts these bring-it-on Californian creatures.

On a brilliant Sunday, dry and warm, graduations occupied lots of them, but not all. In Berkeley, there was a parade of members of the Bay Area Sikh community. They tramped near the university campus, where on the steps of Sproul Hall, the scene of sit-ins, love-ins, speech-ins during the drug fueled derangement of the sixties, no one sat, loved or speechified, outrage and disaffection with the system having decided to take the day off.

The marchers, saber wielding honor guards, and floats snaked through the snarled Berkeley traffic, blocking a lane here, a street there, were just a few hundred of the 40,000 or so Sikhs who participate in the multi-cultural chemistry of this geographically blessed part of the country. Saffron robes and ruby turbans, drummers and recorded music, even a street cleaning machine, operated by a be-turbanned Sikh to cleanse the street in front of the marchers - it was a moveable circus of devoted celebrants. The occasion was the commemoration of the martyrdom of guru Arjan Dev on May 30,1606. The Sikhs, Hindus, did not want to become Muslims, despite the urging of Muslim authorities, and Sikh demurrers often precipitated their own martyrdom, not to mention five days of persecution and torture, and not to mention being made to sit bare naked on a red hot sheet of iron or being dipped in boiling water, misguidedly intended to sooth the previous, I suppose.

Despite the underlying sadness of the occasion, the parade made its way ultimately to a park, where under tents and over the green lawn and the saffron cloths spread for picnics, there were music and speeches. A young man in a dark blue turban explained that he and his family attended because he wanted his young children to understand the history of the Sikh people. He was afraid that they would lose the thread of it as their lives in America swept them into its heterogeneous goulash.

Known as a peaceful people, the Sikhs are hardly abject, this friendly young man explained. The sabers of the honor guard are one of four characteristic parts of the Sikh costume, the others being facial hair, a comb to attend to it (often carried in the turban wrap), special undergarments, about which we did not inquire further, and, in deference to Berkeley's rules forbidding one to tote arms except on occasion in parades, a small replica saber, not intended for action. Their sabers did not come into play in the disagreement between two Sikh celebrants who had it out at the edge of the park.

The parade ended, the festivities ultimately took place across the street from the graduation of the Wright Institute, which confers doctoral degrees on students of psychology. There were 30 of them in gowns and mortar boards, and each doctor of clinical psychology's dissertation title was included in the program, next to the name. Many of the students, now doctors, had probed the psychic and emotional issues embedded in the human nature of this American heterogeneity, the issues facing mixed race couples, their children and families, the gender confusion and gender jumping that can trouble some of those who will be the new psychologists' patients in their coming professional lives. Considering the mixture of human types among the graduates and among the Sikhs across the street, some in robes and turbans, some in shorts, flip-flops and Led Zeppelin T-shirts, one has to conclude that these young men and women with their doctoral hoods and diplomas, will have plenty of work to do.

Except for the featured commencement speaker, the other talks were for the most part impenetrable and disturbing when you consider that these will be the counselors we will all turn to in emotionally troubled years to come. There was no benediction (in keeping with the Berkeley tradition, one suspects), no poetry, only a little Bach to march to, and sadly, very little of that. But, Thomas Lewis, a psychiatrist, had some intelligible and heartening things to say. He told the graduates they must at all costs avoid devoting themselves too enthusiastically to what they've learned, because so many settled understandings arising from the science done in their fields over the years will become unsettled by fresh science, which is having a boom just now.

More important, at least to this husband and I suspect to many of you who may have been wondering about new uses to which you might put kissing in your daily lives, he described research that has discovered that allergic reactions, induced in adults by subcutaneous injections, may be alleviated by 30 minutes of kissing between loved ones. (I suppose this applies also to those tangled among the myriad gender choices we enjoy in this modern world.) He did not say that the salutary effect can only be achieved with respect to allergies, so I expect to conduct experiments of my own on a variety of stresses common in life at home, and I urge you to do the same.

And finally, on this typical Berkeley, no California, afternoon, there was a charming bit of scientific news out of the same study and perhaps more rewarding than even her doctoral hood to Emily and her two month old Isabella. Dr. Lewis explained that a mere mother's smile and, I venture to propose, a snug embrace, will alleviate the allergic discomfort of an infant, for whom her mother's embrace and smile are certainly the universal antidotes.