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Saturday, January 7, 2017

台灣人, 外省人, 內地人, 外加灣生各自的世界

台灣人, 外省人, 內地人, 外加灣生各自的世界     


我說過, 愈禁忌的話題, 就愈要談; 認為辛刺眼的, 儘早刪去!



追憶年華似水──從一場喜宴談外省人的世界
非洲-新南非的純白人家園
http://www.chinatimes.com/newspapers/20170108000212-260209

台灣 ”玩“ ”完了“ ? /彭明輝   
讀完此文,只覺悲涼,台灣何去?何從?  我對台灣
有一份很深的感情,因為我從六、七歲到台灣,二十一、二歲離開至今,一生中
最好的少、青年都在那裡渡過。曾有一個台灣人朋友說我;你有甚麼資格說你 
[愛台灣]?我只感覺無言的淒慘和失望!  臺灣啊!臺灣,無論如何,還是希望
妳前途光明美好!  Wiki 維基百科:彭明輝,臺灣學者、作家、社會評論家。
新竹中學畢業、 國立成功大學機械工程學系學士、國立清華大學動力機械研究所
固體力學組碩士 ,英國劍橋大學控制工程博士。曾任國立清華大學動力機械學系
教授,目前為榮譽退休教授。
[1]彭明輝關注臺灣農業與發展問題,著有《台灣糧食危機關鍵報告》、《2 020台灣的危機與挑戰》等書。  

失去真相的台灣史--清大彭明輝的部落格  
在國民黨的遮掩與扭曲下,我那一個世代的「台灣人」很難了解真正 的台灣史;後來,在綠營各路人馬的遮掩與扭曲下,野百合和太陽花 世代很難了解另一面的台灣史。  當我看到年輕一代對日據時期的瘋狂愛好時,心裡很悲哀:台灣人似 乎永遠脫離不了「認賊作父」的史觀,永遠被愚弄,永遠感謝、 崇拜剝削我們的「賊」。當媒體與大學教授紛紛成為政黨的爪牙時, 台灣人永遠只有知的權利,而沒有知的機會。  別把日據時期浪漫化 年輕一代紛紛想要了解被國民黨遮掩掉的歷史,而瘋狂地迷戀跟日據 時代有關的故事。在海角七號等一系列「懷日」電影裡,台灣人跟日本人只剩浪漫或淒美的情感,而徹底忘記慰安婦的故事, 也忘記殖民與被殖民的關係。但是,容我跟你講幾個很簡短的小故事。我媽在日據時代拿到新竹州(桃竹苗)國小畢業考第一名, 而成為新竹州畢業生領證代表,日本人群起抗議——台灣人不是「 二等國民」,而是「被殖民者」,所以不可以當日本國小畢業生的「領證 代表」。  日治時代台灣的治安很好,是的。但是這故事沒講另一半。我爸在日據時代當學徒,因送貨而返店時間較晚,在街上被日本警察毫無理由地懷疑是賊,就被逮進警察局,毒打一頓到皮綻肉開, 然後才開始問話,並打電話到店裡求證——台灣人是沒有基本人權的 「被殖民者」。  請你記得這些事實,然後再去看看近年流行的「瘋日據」電影,看看 他們多麼歪曲史實,多麼地認賊作父。我沒有要鼓勵仇日,我只希望 台灣人可以客觀而完整面對台灣的歷史。  被浪漫化的日據史  我很早以前就聽過社會學界與人類學界的說法:日本人比國民黨更認 真地建設台灣,日據時代的台灣遠比中國更進步,日據時代的台灣有 很多項目甚至比日本本國更進步。我不否認這些事件, 但是很難認同這個「史觀」。  日據時代的台灣是全球熱帶流行病學最出色的地方,或許是事實,但 是動機呢?我相信是因為日本處心積慮地要進犯中南半島,因此他需 要研究熱帶流行病學——而「熱帶流行病學研究中心」當然不適合設 在酷冷或溫帶的北海道與東京。日據時代台灣有好幾個城市的都計規劃水準遠超過日本本土(譬如台中市)。或許這也是事實,但是原因呢?盡管日本政府從明治維新就開始積極引進西方的學術、技術與制度,但是日本民間的既得勢力一直都排斥自行流 洋的學生(政府派出國考察者例外),因此很多流歐的建築師與都市規劃專家在日本本國被排擠或找不到發揮機會,只好到台灣來發揮— —不是因為「愛台灣」。  日本積極地建設台灣的農業、礦業與經濟,是的。但是你聽說過這個 俗諺嗎:「第一憨(傻),種甘蔗去給會社(株式會社)磅。」—— 國民黨以「肥料換穀」、「青果合作社」等手段剝削農村應得的經濟 回報,其手段與日本如出一轍,甚至可以說是「以日為師」。日本建設台灣,是把台灣當標準的殖民地去建設,目的不是「 平等對待台灣人」,而是把台灣當作「香蕉共和國」一樣地供養日本,支持日本去侵略中國與東南亞 ——台灣 是日本的工具,而不是目的。  我同意「蔣介石把台灣當殖民地,而非中國之一省」,但是我希望年 輕人也別忘記「台灣是日本的殖民地,而非日本的一省」——我不希望有人為了反對蔣介石而去扭曲台灣被殖民史,甚至誤導年輕人去認 賊作父。我爸媽都對「外省人」心結甚深,也都常講日語,但是他們從來不曾說「日據時代我很幸福」,更從沒跟我說過「 我是日本人」。我媽倒是跟我講過:她跟日據時代的老師通信( 用日文),老師很得意地拿給他身邊的日本人看,並說:「你看,這 是我在台灣教出來的學生。」上面這一句話什麼意思?在日本人的心裡,台灣人就不是日本人!  「日本人李登輝」是一種非常奇怪的念頭。台灣人是不可能跟日本人 平起平坐的,所以不可能有「日本人李登輝」——「日本人李登輝」只存在於幻想或妄想的世界,而不可能存在於現實世界,所以光復之 初才會有全省同胞歡天喜地地到碼頭迎接國軍這樣的事。  誰在殘害當今的年輕人  我爸討厭外省人,因為他在法院工作的數十年內老是受到外省同事的 欺負。不過,他一輩子銘記在心並每年去探候的恩人也是外省人。我外祖父原本富甲一方,卻因三七五減租而家道中落,所以我媽討厭外省人,但她也沒一竿子打翻一船人。外省人中有好人,新竹中學校長辛志平就是全新竹人敬重至今的外省人。反過來說,本省人中有漢奸 與台奸,他們危害台灣之慘烈,猶遠遠超過外省人。  我爸媽曾告訴我們,今天台灣最著名的十大本省家族有哪些人是日據 時代當漢奸,而得到日本政府經商的特許權,從而發跡致富;又有哪些家族在蔣氏王朝裡利用特許權來擴張財富。外省權貴令人不恥與厭 惡,「本省」權貴又好到哪裡?解嚴之後「專業退位」與「黑金政治」傳聞甚囂塵上,使得黑道勢力大舉進入農會、漁會、 地方議會與國會,其危害台灣政治與經濟發展之深, 至今猶深入骨髓而難以治療。  陳水扁當權期間,各種綠營的新舊權貴以「小蝦米吃大鯨魚」之姿侵 佔公股銀行,趁著WTO逼迫台灣「公營事業私有化」的過程「賤賣國產」,以及通過「股票分紅費用化」和「內線交易」的模式, 進一步癱瘓台灣產業界「優勝劣敗,多元競爭」的市場機制。這些作為不但是貪污,甚至更扭曲了台灣的產業發展路徑, 毒害台灣的產業體質,導致今天台灣經濟疲軟無力,全台灣人看不到未來。其為害,遠遠超過蔣氏王朝。  自從解嚴以來,綠營奸商、權貴與政治人物相互勾搭成一個權勢龐大 的集團,集媒體、金融、房地產、新興科技產業於一爐,以媒體的扭曲報導、名嘴的巧辯歪曲和網軍的力量愚弄選民和無知的 大學教授(包括很多形象良好的綠營教授),以便從房地產、金融、行政院國發基金的補助、扭曲的產業政策等各種手段,侵佔國產,榨 乾政府的錢,更無法無天地炒作房地產。  平心而論,蔣氏王朝對台灣人的傷害是一時的,隨著他們的逝去而煙 消雲散;解嚴以後綠營政治人物、教授、奸商、權貴對台灣的傷害,卻是與時遽增,禍害無窮。今天台灣的非典就業已經高居就業者的7 %,幾乎都集中在年輕人;此外,全台灣除極少數人之外都深受高房價之害。這兩條大罪,完全跟蔣氏王朝無關,全部是解嚴以後綠營政 治人物與教授縱容(甚至勾結)奸商、權貴的結果。  可悲的是,許多年輕人卻誤把這些奸商、權貴、爛政治人物當作偶像 ,誤把殘害自己的賊人當恩人,這不也是另一種「認賊作父」?坦然面對自己的歷史柏林有猶太博物館,因為德國人願意面對醜陋的 歷史;波蘭把最血腥的Auschwitz集中營改建成博物館,因為他們願意面對自己曾經既被納粹蹂躪又曾協助迫害猶太人的歷史。  人必須坦然面對自己過去所有的歷史,不被仇恨蒙蔽地面對過去所有 的歷史。然而,蔣氏王朝遮掩了一部分台灣的歷史,解嚴以後的綠營教授和媒體則以另一種手段扭曲、遮掩了台灣的另一部分歷史。先是 為了「去中國化」,而故意美化日據來醜化台灣與中國的關係;接著,年輕一代因為「去中國化」,竟然把一切「非中國」的東西都 當作台灣史的珍貴過去,肆意美化而歪曲日據時代的事實。  綠營老是把政治、文化與血統三個問題混為一談,搞到最後,年輕人 根本就不認識真正的台灣和自己的血脈、文化。絕大部分「閩南人」和「客家人」都是漢人和平埔族(原住民)的後代,我們不該否認自己血液中的漢人成分。「撿骨」的風俗反應的是(國民黨治台以前)台灣人都自認為故鄉在中國的事實(鍾理和就曾把大陸當「原鄉」),我們也無法否認我們使用漢文,深受漢文化影響的事實(而且漢文化確實是值得我們珍惜與傳承的可貴人類文化)。我們不該美化國民黨治台史,我們可以在政治上主張台灣獨立,卻不該因而否認我們血液中和文化 中的漢元素。  我們是不該否認日本建設台灣的事實,但同樣地也不該忘記我們是被 當作殖民地的事實。一味排中、反中與去中的結果,年輕人搞不清楚自己血液與文化中的漢元素,甚至還把日據時代美化 、浪漫化。這真的是我們所要的「台灣史觀」?被埋葬掉的「後解嚴台灣史」綠營為了激勵年輕一代的仇中意識,來滿足自己對外 省人的仇恨,或者作為選戰中廉價地賺取選票的噁心手段,不但無所不用其極,甚至連許多大學教授都被愚弄而不自知, 甚至甘為犬馬供人役使。解嚴後,綠營媒體變成「本土」政治人物鞏固政治勢力的關鍵工具,他們用扭曲的報導來跟本土政治 人物交換炒地皮等牟取暴利的手段;當綠營官商勾結以侵吞公營銀行、賤買國產時,他們也以扭曲的報導、以偏概全的攻擊等手段,為本 土政治人物的貪污腐敗遮掩,至於換取到的是什麼利益,一般人更加 難以耳聞。  當年輕世代把綠營政治人物不分賢愚不肖地當英雄崇拜時,我很心痛 ;當綠營大學教授跟我說:「民進黨沒有黨產,所以不會貪污」時,我更為他們的幼稚無知感到痛心。一位年輕人看完我寫的「 了解時事與政治人物的幾個要領:一個教案」後,義憤填膺地寫信來譴責學術界沒有盡責協助台灣大眾釐清真實的台灣史, 並且欣慰地寫下幾位「有良心」的「學者」,而我卻發現這份名單裡至少有一半是「深綠教授」——這些人觀點偏頗, 只會挖藍營的瘡疤,而不願意客觀地看見綠營的醜陋,因此只能被稱為「教授」,而沒資格被稱為「學者」。  當媒體與大學教授偏頗到這種程度時,要期待綠營粉絲的年輕世代去 了解台灣史,恐怕永不可能。而在綠營教授不顧一切地去中與排中下,年輕世代難道真的要學「日本人李登輝」一樣地去歌頌日據時代? 這種「自甘為奴」的史觀,真的是我們要的「台灣史觀」?  結語:國民黨開始走入歷史,這是咎由自取。但是,如果台灣人不去 認識解嚴以來綠營政治人物、媒體、名嘴、教授、奸商、 權貴如何相互勾結來魚肉台灣人,則台灣將永遠走不出經濟與政治的 黑暗期。

最後一代的內地人
後一代NDR,指的是我們這批1937到1950年在中國大陸或香港出生, 臺灣長大, 長住 美國的「內地人」(Nei-Di-Ren) 。我們是少數中的少數。  50 年後,當後世的中國人回頭 研究這一段歷史,他們會發現我們這些「內地人」,是卡在東西文化的夾縫裡,遊走與外來與本土間,在新舊交替的時代中,對中華文化抱殘守缺,對西方文明汲汲經營,非常特別的一代。逐漸地我們這代都會隨風而逝。  我們那一代生於戰亂,早生的遇到抗日,晚生的遇到內戰,很多生在四川,所以名為「渝生」、「蓉生」、「嘉陵」的很普遍。  我們雖然生於戰亂,但卻因年齡太小而對逃難沒什麼印象。我們跟著父母到了臺灣,變 成「內地人」,那不是我們的選擇,但回頭來看,這可能是我們命運中的一個 break。  如果我們沒去成臺灣,我想我們至少有三分之一的人活不到今天。就算活到今天, 我們子女的一生絕對會完全不同基楚上我們是虎口餘生非常幸運的一群.  我們的童年是在臺灣過的;有的在北部的城市,有的在南部的田間。穿過木屐,打過赤腳,玩過官兵抓強盜,睡過「榻榻米」。雖然物質的享受很貧乏,但我們沒有餓過肚。  我們這一代,很多是在「眷村」長大的,有人怪我們住在臺灣那麼久還不會說台灣話,不夠本土。我們不會說臺灣話不是我們的錯,那時候的政治大環境,在學校不准講,回家不會講,這筆帳沒理由算在我們頭上的。  我們也可能是中國歷史上最會讀書的一代。從小學、初中、高中 、大學到留學,一路考下來,過五關、斬六將,個個身經百戰,久「烤」成精。  大學畢業後,我們大多都選擇出國留學的這條路,學理工的特別多,有幾個理由:  受到當年楊振寧,李政道榮獲諾貝爾獎的鼓舞,家庭,學校,社會都鼓勵我們"理工報國", 在 科技上光宗耀祖。 家長們大多對政治沒興趣,對法律,醫科不瞭解。大多不推崇這些科系。 留在美國找事容易。但當年看起來很正確的選擇卻埋下了後半輩子在美國沒安全感的種子。 風鳴兩岸葉,月照一孤舟,「美國」非吾土,「臺灣」憶舊情。  在臺灣,他們早些時候叫我們內地人,後來又找我們外省人。到了中國大陸,他們稱呼我們為臺灣人,在美國我們是第一代移民。中國人的子女,美國人的父母,我們的一生 ,不管住在那裡,始終還是過客而非歸人。  在政治認同上,我們對臺灣早年「白色恐怖 」沒好感,因而對毛澤東式的共產主義不能認同。 我們愛臺灣也愛中國大陸,但我們不是新臺灣人而是身上有中華民族血液的美籍中國人。  大多也對鄧小平的改革開放政策持支援的態度。對90 年代以後臺灣的紛亂憂心忡忡。40歲以前,我們多半是「有心腸」的自由主義者。 40歲以後,我們多半變成了把票投給美國民主黨但思想行為追隨共和黨的「有頭腦」。我們這一代有一些人在保釣運動中熱情過,但大多數對政治運動選擇旁觀者的冷漠。  在我們的一生中,曾經目睹三個極為荒唐的政治鬧劇:毛澤東和其信徒搞出來的「文化大革命」幾乎革掉了中國的命。  李登輝一個沒有誠信又搞「黑金」的政客,又以國民黨黨主席的身份居 然把自己的黨搞垮;民進黨的陳水扁,滿嘴謊話,作盡了貪汙腐敗和禍國殃民的事,竟然還賴在位子上想把臺灣徹底弄垮為止。也難怪我們這代,大多數的人政治人物不信任。  和我們這輩的女孩子們,年輕的時候多半穿過「蓬蓬裙」,跳過「吉路巴」,聽過「康妮弗蘭西斯」,迷過「詹姆斯· 迪恩」。  在計程車還沒出現的時候,約會路近靠走,路長坐三輪車。那時臺北市新生南路路旁的大水溝還沒蓋上。  我常想,現代的年輕人,把男女感情的境界看得太開放,太直接。一般講起來,我們這代也是最後一代的「純情派」,是不合時宜的浪漫主義。  我們對上要生養死葬 我們的父母,對下會把最好的給子女。當我們老了的時候,我們不會將負擔加諸在子女的身,我們是最後一代的「三明治」。  我們希望我們的小孩對中國文化多一些瞭解和認同 ,但12年中文學校下來,能認得「王大中」、「李小明」就不錯了。我們可能是13億中國人中,中英文都還可以的一代。希望不是最後一代。  我們生的太晚,錯過了北伐、抗日、內戰、成大功、立大業轟轟烈烈的時代。但我們也生得太早,臺灣經濟起飛的成果沒我們的份。在某種程度上,我們仍保留了一些中國人士不可弘毅,任重而道遠的美德。  我們不是中國人中最偉大的一代,我們是「最後一代的內地人」。


名家論壇》唐湘龍/該為田中實加平反了
文/唐湘龍

    台生與灣生,合起來就是台灣生。 以出生地來說,台生與灣生都一樣。都是台灣。
五年級的外省第二代不只是台生,許多名字就叫台生。以今天身分證只填出生地的文書登載模式來講,台生與灣生都是同一國的雖然,歷史上,台生與灣生的背景登載都有祖籍。
    最近流行灣生,那是指在殖民時代在台灣出生的日本第二代。最近不流行台生,那是指在台灣出生的外省二代。 日本是外國,但是,在戀殖民的情緒裡,彷彿被拆散的家。外是本國,但是,在深綠台獨意識高漲的年代,這些被異化成
成了外。外成了家。出問題的不是被當家的灣生,也不是被當外的台生。出問題的,有病卻找不到醫生可以治的,是那些覺得自己有資格界定誰是愛台灣的灣生、誰是不愛台灣的台生的“台灣”。
我訪問過田中實加。“灣生回家”剛出書,我就訪了。訪問中,我懷疑過這位“灣生後代”為何毫無口音?但我沒想要懷疑這個故事。我只覺得,故事情節雖然不同,但“灣生回家”發酵的社會情懷和“海角七號”是一模一樣的。 一個是假戲真做, 一個是真戲做假。但不管是宣稱為真的紀錄片, 或是以假亂真的商業片,最後,都滿足了某種政治正確的情感依托。
這種依托所產生的強大力量極煽情。但只要看看整個台灣政治氛圍那種恨不生為日本的“戀殖民”情緒,連每年八月十五日日本投降,都要日化成“終戰”。最後竟然發展成“國家論述”,在去年的反課綱微調運動裡,努力在反撲的,都和這種“捨不得”承認日本對台灣的殖民與迫害有關。
“親日”和“反中”是一整套獨派政治論述裡都不能缺少的元素。越反中,就越親日。要努力醜化中國,就要努力美化日本。這是政治宣傳的對照組。對中國有多醜化,對日本就有多美化。醜化中國和美化日本,在政治溝通上,是同一個群組,隨便怎麼荒謬的發言,在群組裡都是一呼百諾。
    “灣生回家”光是書就賣了五萬多本。在這個低迷的出版市場, 你是很難想像五萬多本所代表的商業利益,和背後的政治背書力量有多麼強大。“灣生回家”、“海角七號”能夠帶著大家快速入戲,最後用一種懷舊的感動,或是歡樂團圓的氣氛來結束滿滿的遺憾,那是因為台獨運動所主導的政治洗腦已經培育了豐厚的政治土壤,對這種在偽歷史和謬史觀基礎上發展出來的文化產品有不小的情感需求。這種一切都必須在“愛台灣”這個梗上頭嘎然而止的戲劇或是類戲劇,是最當紅的政治正確,文化八股。
在標榜“自自冉冉”的台灣,彷彿已經不存威權時代的政治宣傳。政治宣傳總給教條、虛偽和威權的壞印象。樣板戲劇、愛國電影,都是一種看多了會反胃的過度宣傳。典型“文化為政治服務”。
    但其實,以文化八股來說,當下的台灣空前囂張。
    什麼是政治正確?就是真假沒管;什麼是文化八股?就是結論都一樣。
日本戰敗之後,從台灣“引揚(遣返)”的日本大約28萬。從日據時代的官方史料來看,二戰爆發前,台生日估計不到10萬。這些數字遠比外省第二代的台生少。而且,台日通婚的更少。但灣生對照的台生,離開台灣的灣生是令傷感的。居住在台灣的台生是被嫌惡的。這是台獨道德化之後必然出現的政治正確。
這一百多年,中國確實不爭氣。這種不爭氣,讓台灣這個移民社會的政治情感受了委屈。委屈是可以理解的。但委屈到需要偽造歷史,惡意美化殖民帝國和醜化原生母國,努力清洗自己的血統,自欺欺,讓自己“政治勢利眼”找個振振有辭的理由,讓自己的“斯德哥爾摩症候群”自自冉冉釋放,這實在是當代台灣最可笑的一幕。
我想為這個女生說幾句公道話。“田中實加”不過是個現代皇民的“皇名”。當整個課綱充滿了為當下政治服務的虛偽,“田中實加”說的謊實在不算什麼。硬要編一段假身世來提高自己說故事的說服力,難道不是投這些年政治市場之所好?這些年,政治上,好多皇民都“出櫃”了。談起自己家庭的皇民史,哪有委屈?每個都驕傲死了。因為“田中實加”,讓灣生與皇民在情感上團圓了,“田中實加”絕對是台獨的英雄。現在,台獨是最高道德,和台獨牴觸者無效,政治物鬼扯無罪的情況天天都在發生,像“田中實加”這種“投台獨之所好”小小錯誤,讓台獨的“戀日癖”完全釋放,難道不是“情有可原”?
    你難道沒有注意:在這個事件裡,樣板皇民和深綠獨派都是沈默的。
有些為“田中實加”背書的藝文界士,有被欺騙的憤怒感。這是因為把“田中實加”當文史作家所產生的價值判斷。未來,“田中實加”只要轉型成政客,絕對潛力無窮。
經過20年台獨教育的洗禮,在台灣,“戀日癖”的商業市場是非常強大的。“田中實加”是這個市場創造出來的。“海角七號”和“灣生回家”都是成功的商品,形式上是歷史,但其實是為當下的政治市場提供浪漫。用一句金融市場的名言:市場永遠是對的。
    未來,會“下市”的,是“田中實加”?如果你這樣想,那你真是太不懂台灣了。難怪你活得這麼辛苦。
    我是非常看好“田中實加”的。


【我們這一代:三年級作家之5】
張系國∕又見台客.又見台客 張系國/聯合報 
我們「三年級生」和其他的「低年級生」,要怎麼給年輕人好榜樣,讓他們有更遠大的目標和希望,重新拾回台客的樂觀進取隨機應變和台客文化的「彈性求存」精神…… 雖然我是「三年級」的外省人,可是對台客和台客文化一直很有興趣。2008年大膽跨界寫了本小書《帝國和台客》,由天下文化出版,後來由Readmoo出了電子書,最近正在修訂,趁此機會談談我對台客和台客文化的一些看法。  在《帝國和台客》的自序裡,我解釋書名所說的帝國至少有三種含意。「帝國可以指中國,也可以指美國,還有可能並指美國和中國。有一個帝國或許將會衰落,另外一個帝國顯然正在崛起,而台灣正好夾在中間。所以《帝國和台客》一書所要討論的,既是台灣和一個帝國(中國或美國)的關係,也是台灣和兩個帝國(美國和中國)的關係。」  今年是2016年。不過短短八年,美國顯然已在衰落,所以競選總統的川普才會大聲疾呼要使美國再度偉大。如果它沒有衰落,何須再度偉大?中國無疑已經崛起,而且無論在哪一方面都重新獲得自信心,例如高鐵、航母、世運。而夾在中間的台灣也換了當家的。這裡倒不想談政治,而是反省這八年過去,我對台客及台客文化有沒有新的看法。  一般的看法,所謂的台客就是具備質樸爽快、純真可愛、聰明伶俐、腦筋靈活、隨機應變、山不轉路轉、兵來將擋水來土淹、自行動手解決問題的行事風格的人。他可能是台灣的本省人,也可能是台灣的外省人或外省第二代,又可能是生長在台灣卻在外地或中國大陸旅居生活的人。  台客文化有它的特色,我在《帝國和台客》裡有詳細的討論。我認為台客文化一言以蔽之,就是「彈性求存」的文化。彈性求存當然在中國文化裡也有,「好漢不吃眼前虧」就是彈性求存。但是台客文化的確把彈性求存發揮得淋漓盡致。另一方面,「好漢不吃眼前虧」的意思就是好漢遇到強大壓力時會低頭。但是如果好漢沒有遇到強大壓力呢?  這就是台客文化的另外一面了。如果好漢沒有遇到強大壓力,當然可以繼續充當好漢下去!這就包括誇張的姿勢、誇大的語言、硬拗和裝模作樣等等。裝模作樣就是所謂的「坎普」camp,在大眾文化裡有一定的重要性。例如大字腿型騎機車就是身體語言一種誇張的姿勢(當然這樣的姿勢也可能很舒服)。「彈性駕駛」的互動禮儀也是不到最後關頭絕不輕易讓人。  至於誇大的語言,我曾用「滔滔邏輯」來形容。滔滔邏輯是從西方亞里斯多德邏輯的tautology演變而來。西方的tautology是邏輯上的恆等式。滔滔邏輯類似語言上的恆等式,但是主要用來填充空白的時間,也可以用來硬拗。舉個例子。記者問水災的災民說﹕「你爸爸媽媽都淹死了,你難過不難過﹖」這就是滔滔邏輯的廢話,因為答案是完全可以預期的。又如國防部長對遇難漁船船長的家屬說﹕「飛彈誤射只打死一個人,已經把損失減少到最小了。」這也是滔滔邏輯的廢話,因為家屬反應是完全可以預期的。誇張的姿勢和誇大的語言結合在一起,就是台客的裝模作樣了。  台客另外一個特徵就是有情有義,這其實也是中國民間一代代堅持的傳統。台灣人的祖先裡包括海盜。海盜喜歡使用誇張的姿勢和誇大的語言,應該是一點也不奇怪的,即使西方電影裡的海盜也有類似的特徵,例如強尼戴普演的海盜船長。海盜打不過人家的時候,就會展現彈性求存的一面,也就是一般所謂的「西瓜靠大邊」。海盜是不會計較身段和面子的,只求活下去。以上所述絕無負面批評的意思,事實上彈性求存的台客文化正可表現台客的充沛活力。  但海盜或者被官兵捕捉、或者被殺死、或者接受招安,最後都逃不過失敗的命運。海盜的下場多半是不幸的,海盜永遠打不過時間,這是海盜的悲劇。既然台灣人的祖先裡包括海盜,那麼不能不追問,台客文化裡是否也存在著這種悲劇意識?  仔細閱讀台灣民間故事和歷史故事,就會發現台客文化從一開始就充斥悲劇意識。根據王詩琅所著《台灣歷史故事》(玉山社出版),最早的台灣歷史故事當屬海盜林道乾的故事。林道乾得到神人賜給他三根神箭,打算在清晨射死大明的皇帝,卻不幸因妹妹過早拿開雞籠的罩子,錦雞受驚而鳴,林道乾聽雞鳴就將三根神箭射向空無一人的皇帝寶座,因而失敗。這故事既是人力干預天意的悲劇,也無疑是錯過時機的悲劇。  類似林道乾這樣錯過時機的故事充斥台灣民間故事和歷史故事以及通俗歌曲。例如鴨母王朱一貴的故事,講的也是錯過時機的悲劇。延平郡王鄭成功的父親鄭芝龍也是海盜,鄭成功北伐的故事同樣是時不我與的故事。當然〈望春風〉的歌詞不消說也是對時間流逝的感嘆。  錯過時機的悲劇意識是台客文化的基調之一,對這悲劇意識的掌握是台客藝術創造的基本動力。但悲劇意識並不表示人生必須悲觀。台客文化同時也是彈性求存的文化。什麼時候能掌握時機在灰燼中復甦,再度變成少年台灣?二十年風水輪流轉,壓不扁的玫瑰永遠有翻身的機會,這就是海盜不服輸的樂觀本性。  檳榔西施能不能代表台妹甚至台客文化?或許可以,因為檳榔西施無疑必須彈性求存。檳榔西施大都非常敬業,不論清晨深夜都在工作。檳榔西施作為台客文化的代言人並非貶損。檳榔西施的客人多半是卡車司機。根據建築學者希德布蘭有關隱蔽所和光明地的理論,對卡車司機而言,隱蔽所可能是他開的卡車,光明地是路旁光明奪目的西施屋。對檳榔西施而言,隱蔽所是鄉下公路旁的西施屋,光明地就是她嚮往的城市。隱蔽所(芎林鄉下的西施屋)與光明地(新竹科技城市裡的高大建築物)的對比、西施屋與科技城市的互動、台客和台妹對隱蔽所的懷念和對光明地的憧憬,都是值得進一步探討的原型。  這幾年來我時常思考台客和台妹對隱蔽所的懷念和對光明地的憧憬,這也成為我創作長篇小說的動力之一。但是關於台客和台客文化,我倒開始懷疑台客文化的「彈性求存」是否逐漸喪失它的力道。  近年中國無疑已經崛起,台灣則不幸和美國一樣在衰落,雖然原因並不相同。這種情況在留學生的人數多寡就看得很清楚。比如說我自己本行是計算機科學,通常我的實驗室的學生絕大多數是香港、台灣、大陸來的學生。這兩年情況改變,台灣學生越來越少。去年就出現一個新的現象,沒台灣學生了!現在我的實驗室裡面,除了一位印度碩士生﹐其他兩名博士生四名碩士生一位訪問學者,統統是大陸來的。  而且大陸生不以留在美國作為人生最後的目標,以後統統要回去。大陸叫作什麼呢?就變成「海龜」。「海歸」是很有趣的新名詞,就是從海外歸去。我們中國人喜歡把一個長的詞縮短變成短的詞。比如說英文叫作「Male Chauvinist Pig」,男性沙文主義豬。七十年代我發明一個新詞叫「沙豬」,還寫了一本短篇小說集《沙豬傳奇》。現在台灣常用「沙豬」一詞,因為「沙豬」叫起來很好聽,跟「殺豬」一樣,所以女權運動者也能夠接受。  我有一位女博士生,從西安交大來的。她的未婚夫在隔壁校卡內基美隆大學念研究所,也是西安交大來的,很傑出,還沒畢業紐約大學就給他助理教授,這不容易啊!我就問他,你要不要去?他說,老師我不去。我說,這麼好的機會你怎麼不去?他說他要去加州大學,那邊有位大師搞人工智慧學,要去那邊跟大師學,寧可不做教授。我聽了就跟我的學生說,這個人妳真的該嫁了,他有很大的志向。她說,老師你不知道他是書呆子。我說,書呆子沒關係,妳只要把他抓住了,他就不會變心。這書呆子真的就去加州大學當「博士後」。可是紐約大學知道了,為了等他,把職缺保留一年。現在大陸年輕人有大志,眼界放得很高,開公司也是一樣有大志。你看前一陣子,馬雲的公司一天收入將近一千億人民幣,不是開玩笑的。  再看台灣呢?台灣小孩好得很。我最喜歡用台灣人,他們都很忠誠,會跟我很久。可是我有一個台灣學生現在終於畢業了,他每次出去面試每次都失敗,怎麼會呢?我幫他改履歷也都改得很好,後來發現怎麼樣?他太老實了。他每次去面試,人家問他說三年之後你會怎麼樣﹖如果問大陸生,大陸生一定講﹕「三年之後,我會是你們公司的總經理也不一定。」他竟然說﹕「我三年之後可能回台灣。」這怎麼行呢?講完之後人家一定覺得你沒有大志。但他是非常誠懇的年輕人,他說三年之後,我父母親年紀也大了,我就要回去了。每次去,人家送機票請他去,回來,沒有給他職位。  以上是我的直接觀察﹐從書報雜誌媒體上可以找到更多例子。海盜絕不敢意識形態掛帥﹐可是現在台灣有它的「政治正確」新標準﹐因此往往遷就意識形態而喪失彈性。至於個人更容易灰心喪志。我開始懷疑台客文化的「彈性求存」是否逐漸喪失它的力道。所以我們「三年級生」和其他的「低年級生」,要怎麼給年輕人好榜樣,讓他們有更遠大的目標和希望,重新拾回台客的樂觀進取隨機應變和台客文化的「彈性求存」精神。

一碗「老芋仔」的陽春麵 天下雜誌……陳文茜   作者:陳文茜 2016-07-06 天下雜誌601期     
人的本性是觀照自己,難以跳脫去為他人設想,非我族類者往往被貼 上標籤,埋下仇恨的火種。「同理心」填平人性缺口, 為創傷世界帶來解藥。   如果人生你喊苦,而你不是難民、不是乞丐、不是無家可歸者;甚至 你仍擁有家人、擁有健全的四肢,我想大膽地說:你的痛苦,可能一 大部份來自你欠缺「同理心」。你無法換位思考,永遠只能站在自己 的角度,觀看他人,因而放大了自己的「不幸」與「不平」。   仇恨來自同理心匱乏   托爾斯泰有句名言:「每個幸福的家庭,故事都是一樣的;每個不幸 的家庭,各有各的不幸。」   現代人的仇恨,輕微來說是彼此之間的「誤解」與「隔閡」,許多正 來自於欠缺同理心。我們看到一個老榮民的背影,刻薄者稱其「 中國難民」,勢利者認定為「底層窮人」;有多少人在一個榮民擦身 而過時,想到他所屬的時代悲涼,感念其奉獻與卑屈, 反省我們的殘酷與冷漠。   「同理心」的建立如此匱乏,世間有這麼多的兄弟鬩牆、社會仇恨, 因為「同理心」,不是我們的本性,也不是社會教育的主題。   我們的本性是觀照自己,非理解他人;我們的本性在不知覺中自私且 無情;除非透過反省、學習,承認且意識此「人性的匱乏」, 我們才能盡量避免「平庸之惡」。是的,平庸之惡, 當我們將人性停留於直覺的平庸時,我們的本性便會惡罪其中。 我們甚至不自覺,理所當然。   這是著名學者、也是我研究所第一任校長漢娜鄂蘭對極權主義起源的 精準描述。人,不用太壞,只要沒有為他人設想,只要愚魯且自私, 便可能成為邪惡之人  而克服這種人性之惡的方法,正是「同理心」。   我人生第一個同理心「大事件」,來自外婆的重病。十一歲前,外婆 對我疼愛無微不至,直到她突然心臟腫大,住進台中中山醫院加護病 房。   那是某個傍晚,外婆突然喘不過氣來,四阿姨一看不對勁,趕緊帶著 外婆住院。我看著救護車呼嘯,笛聲回鳴,好像準備穿透我的一切, 永恆隔下一道分割線。   之後,我又跑又走了約三十分鐘路程,不斷問路邊人:「請問中山醫 院在哪裡?」那是我的第一次「流浪」,我明白十一歲孩子在醫院裡 不能做什麼,但我必須抵達那裡,那是我在人間唯一的依靠, 她躺在隔著一個高牆厚門的病房裡,她正被急救, 醫生說她可能度不了。   我茫然地回家,口袋只有五塊錢,飢腸轆轆,到了家門對面的麵攤子 ,點了一碗陽春麵。   麵攤老闆是一個外省退伍老兵(即 “”老芋仔“” 之意,煮得也桿得一手好麵;外婆疼我,常常瞞著阿姨們帶我至麵攤 子點滷蛋、海帶芽、滷豬耳朵,加一碗陽春麵。那個深夜, 老闆看我一個小孩走進來只點陽春麵,便慣常地問:「滷蛋?」 我平靜回答:「不要。」   第二天,中午當然沒有人幫我準備便當,正在長大的孩子,到了放學 ,已飢餓難忍。又走進麵攤,問老闆:「我可以只要半碗陽春麵, 付一半的錢嗎?」我的聲音平靜,表情更平靜;可能自小倔強, 不輕易流露情緒吧!老闆想了一下:「好。」   沒多久,他給我一整碗陽春麵,我愣了一下,因為我狐疑他耳朵聽不 清,而且我口袋鐵定付不出一碗陽春麵的錢。沒敢動筷子, 走到正熱騰騰煮麵的攤子,我拉拉他的手,「老闆你搞錯了……。」 他立即以濃重的四川鄉音回答,「妳先吃,我忙,待會兒再說。」 我坐下來,還沒吃完半碗,老闆突然扔了一顆滷蛋到我碗裡, 轉身又走了。   我靜靜坐在那,想等他忙得告一段落再問。約莫黃昏五點,客人少了 些,他走過來問,「小女孩,妳的外婆呢?」我據實以告。他說,「 妳以後天天來,外婆會好起來,不要怕,她回來了,我再和她算錢。 」   陽春麵背後的故事 那一夜,三阿姨從台北趕回來探外婆,我趕緊告訴她我欠麵攤錢,她 當晚帶我向老闆致謝,並還了錢。隔幾天,老闆告訴我,他十六歲就 被抓伕當兵,一路打仗逃難,靠許多不認識的人接濟,才能活到今天 ,「你這女娃兒聰明,好好讀書,孝順外婆。」   十一歲的我沒有太多同理心,受到一個中國戰亂孤窮老兵的照顧,我 沒明白,當他說「好好讀書」,因為他沒有讀書的機會;當他囑咐「 好好孝順外婆」,是因為他被迫和父母離散,已無孝順的機會。 那孝順叮嚀是遺憾,是另一種想家的表達,是深沉的嘆息。   四川外省麵攤老闆在我們這本省家庭口中,一直以來綽號就叫「老芋 仔」。芋仔是一種不需施肥的根莖植物,扔在哪就長在哪。長相不好 ,烤熟吃起來卻甜甜鬆鬆,滿山遍野,只要挖個洞,就可找到鬆軟芋 仔。芋仔命賤,「老芋仔」型的外省人,命也薄得很。   過去光顧他的麵攤無數次,我們沒關心他從中國大陸哪個省份來,怎 麼和父母失散,好似他是個石頭蹦出來的怪物。他在我們生命中的意 義,只有陽春麵特別便宜好吃。   外婆後來果然安然回家,牽著我向「老芋仔」麵攤老闆致謝。   一年後,有天麵攤門口特別熱鬧,原來娶親了;姑娘從梨山山上買來 ,清瘦嬌小的女子。沒隔多久生了小孩,小姑娘常背著小孩在攤前燙 麵。麵攤老闆難得經常帶著笑意對人說話,這遲來的幸福,滋味應該 特別甜。   我之後常常特別光顧麵攤,標準菜色「陽春麵加滷蛋」,像一種感念 儀式。幾次聽到他教太太,麵要煮得好,放下去得立刻撈起來, 再擱回去;千萬不能燙太久,否則湯糊了,麵也爛了。   有天老闆不做生意,關了門,哭嚎聲穿透薄薄的夾板。隔壁雜貨店老 闆娘轉告外婆,「老芋仔」梨山小老婆跟人跑了,兒子也帶走了, 還把他長年積蓄、擺在床底下的現金全偷光。過了三天, 老芋仔上吊自殺了。上吊時,繩子掛在違章建築樑上,臉就對著後牆 的蔣介石遺照。   小人物也是人生導師 這是我的第一堂「同理心」之課。我的「同理心」導師,讓我終生深 刻難忘,恩情似海。他的故事以如此悲慘的驚嘆號結束,更令我難以 忘卻他曾在我寂寞困難時給我的溫暖。   他是個小人物,而他的一生,在哭嚎中,在一切絕念中,在一切棄絕 後也就結束了。屍體沒有送行隊伍,沒有人為他至少煮一碗麵、 丟個滷蛋送行……。警察局、收屍者,一個卑微「老芋仔」, 一朵比雲還輕的生命,走了。   他的身影,那些溫暖的囑咐,帶著鄉音的安慰,打破我們家中長輩灌 輸在我腦海因「二二八」事件而深植的族群偏見; 也使我後來在參與的政治行動中,絕不同意任何族群的政治語言。當 然也自然形成我曾與島嶼上熟識的朋友們,重大的政治隔閡。   近日因某事件,人們又談起榮民,談起那些被時代徹底犧牲的人。我 想說的是:其實他們一直在我們身邊,每個人不管本省、外省、富貴 貧賤,都會遇見類似人物。他們開計程車,當大廈管理員,在河床搬 石頭做苦力,橫貫公路開通成冤魂……,那些悲慘時代的卑微人物, 一直在我們身邊。   而我們對待他們的方法,大半擦身而過;因為我們社會不只沒教導我 們「同理心」;相反地,它教導每人觀看的都是自己的、家族的、 同一村落、或者同一族群的痛苦。   漢娜鄂蘭論述「極權主義之惡」時,對此特別指出,那些信奉納粹主 義的屠殺者,只是沒有深度,他們沒有我們想像的邪惡,單單只是「 不願意設想他人的處境」,「因為所謂的人性, 如果完全不設想他人的處境,會有非常嚴重的後果。」   同理心,知易而行難;甚至有時候教育體系的大道理,例如「民族」 、「愛國」恰是相反的「非同理心」,我們的「團結」來自拒絕理解 和我們處境不同的人;「我們」的認同,凝聚於排斥驅逐「他者」 的行動。   同理心,不只要「捨不得」別人,更要「捨得」自己。不去苦苦追問 自己曾經的痛,而設身處地理解別人的苦。   同理心,不需要偉大的理論,它是一種學習、一種徹悟、一種跨越人 性障礙,理解和你不同的人。   這個世界、社會、哪怕一個小家庭,都是由不同的人組合而成,每人 都有每人難處。我們在提出任何主張或結論時,至少要有警覺心, 世界若由一個人、一群相同血統或語言的人做主,一定有邪惡排他性 。   同理心,不需大道理,就是暫時放下自己,換位在他人處境思考,有 時它只是一顆滷蛋、一碗熱騰騰的陽春麵、一點適時溫暖的微笑。   同理心,不需語言,就是一個使自己變得更有人性的過程,如是而已 。  

 - See more at: http://www.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=5077239&from=line#sthash.o63kJXQ2.dpuf     

愛人如己是第二條誡命, 但這與第一絛誡命, 要盡心, 盡性,  盡力愛造人的神同樣重要. 同理心, 是換位思考的果子. 這 要經過認己罪肯悔改的過程. 但作起來卻不是件易事. 因人人都 有自巳為是的本性. 基督耶穌的捨己所付出的代價與痛告沒有同理 心的人是体驗不到的. 我們是否肯換位思想耶穌捨己為人愛心付出 呢?

陳文茜--啊! 外省哪⋯!
2016-02-14 陳文茜 静安台商
--- 其實,老蔣總統和國民黨只有對不起大陸同胞,丟下他們受苦數十年;
所謂的「台灣欠他和他帶到這個當年一片殘敗的島上後來又協助重建的「外省軍民太多了,如果不是他們在古寧頭擋住了解放軍,你以為毛某會放過台灣嗎?
如果不是集中了當時來自全中國「所謂外省」文化教育/經濟建設菁英,又何來日後的經濟奇蹟和今天令對岸稱羡的中華文化傳承?
更不要說屬於時下沾沾自喜的「小確幸」的鼎泰豐小籠包、四川牛肉麵與永和豆漿了 ---
一個集體「選擇性失憶」的社會,遲早是會要為此付出代價的。

啊 外省
外省難到沒有權利 在台灣活下去?
我的生活裡很少很少出現【外省】這樣的字眼,如果沒有提,有誰會特別去注意,那家特別好吃的牛肉麵館是外省開的,你會因為是外省開的,而排斥他不去光顧嗎?如果你的同事的父母親是所謂外省,你會排斥你的同事嗎?
不會吧?我就是搞不清楚,到底我們這些住在台灣的有什麼兩樣。
那些所謂【外省】,除了有鄉音以外,也大多漸漸凋零了,他們的第二代第三代第四代,大多在台灣出生,不就是台灣嗎?跟一般的普羅大眾有何兩樣嗎?
到底是誰一直在提醒我們,外省外省這幾個字?
就是有一些,不斷不斷地講這幾個字,導致那些已在台灣落地生根幾十年的擺脫不掉自己與別好像不一樣的命運。
誰在挑撥,請大家一定要用你的腦袋想一想。

一九四七年三月七日,蔣介石派遣二十一師登陸基隆港口。依監察院楊亮功公布的二二八事件調查報告,艦隊才開到港口,便接獲情報「島內均亂民」。
艦長於是下令「見就掃蕩。」一九四七的基隆港,沒有太美麗的走道,時間也非夕陽西下。
風有點大、雨飄得細細,不知情的民眾在港灣散步著。機槍掃射初始,打出來的砲彈和太陽一樣亮,穿著拖鞋,老台式短褲的男女老少,只聽聞轟的一聲,倒躺於地,死了。
 
著名的二二八事件,就此開始了最高潮的國家暴力鎮壓。
沒有知道,乘著軍艦開槍的士兵,如今在那裡?
他還安在嗎?他的後代還住在台灣?
還是中國大陸的某個角落?
那艘軍艦,著著實實打出了台灣歷史中最重要的第一槍,從此之後的台灣史,悲情且仇恨地發展了五十多年,至今未歇。
開槍的軍隊,沒有名、沒有姓,只有二十一師代號。兇手名字未知,本地只能辨認他們是「外來省份的」。
半個世紀以來,「兇手」被連結一個等同擴大數萬倍的符號:外省
 
二二八事件兩年後,中國內戰中全然敗退的國民黨政府,倉皇帶著子弟兵渡海遷台。
新一批的外省,有的只十六歲,可能早起才走入田埂,就被強拉當兵。
一輩子沒出過洋,從沒聽過二二八,第一站就穿著草鞋來台灣。 
往後的日子裡,他們多半躲在台灣的竹籬笆世界,多數退伍了,才花盡畢生積蓄買個姑娘,守個家。
六歲起,這群就沒有爸爸媽媽。國破山河,他們的世界只有蔣公,也只能跟著蔣公!
竹籬笆外的世界,對他充滿了強烈的敵意, 他們是飄洋過海的外省,和當年軍艦上「相同」的外省
 
外省綽號「老芋仔」,芋仔是一種不需要施肥的根莖植物,扔在那裡就長在那裡。長相不好,烤熟吃起來卻甜甜鬆鬆,削皮時手摸著,有點發麻。滿山遍野,只要挖個洞,就可找到幾顆鬆軟芋仔。芋仔命賤,「老芋仔」型的外省命也薄得很。
我台中老家對面就住著一位老芋仔,煮麵一流。關心他從中國大陸哪個省份來,媽媽住哪裡,好似他是石頭蹦出來的怪物,對我們這些本省家庭,外省不是混蛋,就是可憐蛋。
混蛋在台北當官,欺負台灣;可憐蟲就在市井街道裡,擺攤賣陽春麵。
老芋仔賣的陽春麵特別便宜好吃,夜市裡搭個違章建築,就可以從早賣到晚。

有天門口特別熱鬧,原來娶親了,姑娘從梨山山上買來,清瘦嬌小的女子,後來生了小孩,小姑娘也常背著小孩在攤前燙麵。
我喜歡買他們家的滷蛋,幾次聽到他在旁邊教他太太,麵要煮得好,放下去的時候,得立刻撈起來,再擱回去;千萬不能一次燙太久,否則湯糊了,麵也爛了。
麵攤老芋仔有日不作生意了,哭嚎的聲音,穿透薄薄的夾板,凡路經夜市的都聽到。隔壁雜貨店老闆娘轉告我們家長輩,老芋仔梨山小老婆跟跑了,兒子也不要了,還把他長年積蓄、擺在床底下的現金全偷個精光。過了三天,老芋仔上吊自殺,孩子被送進孤兒院。

上吊時,繩子掛在違章建築樑上,臉就對著後牆的蔣介石遺照,死,也要跟著蔣公。
麵攤老芋仔死後四十年台灣盛行本土運動,家鄉中國大陸危險擴軍,飛彈部署天羅地網,對著另一個家--台灣。四十年前的老芋仔上吊了,其他老芋仔活下來,眼看兩個家對打。
於是台灣需要飛彈情報員。誰願意在「承平時刻」仍為台灣死?沒有名、沒有姓、逮到被打毒針、可能接受酷刑、被剝皮,死了也進不了忠烈祠,誰賣命?
薪水不過一月五萬,到大陸路費四十萬,買一條命,幹? !
還是那批老芋仔的兒子!
還是那群當年飄洋過海的外省! 
從老子到小子,一代傳一代,生就是要報國;沒有國,那有家?
 
竹籬笆內的子弟,活著,永遠都要跟著「蔣公」!
被吸收的情報局員,擔任情報工作那一刻起,真名就消失了。生從此只剩化名,除了軍情局簡單記錄事蹟外,出了事,不敢鬧、不能說。
台灣天天逍遙,十幾年來,台海平靜到民完全感覺不了戰爭的威脅。

只有這群傻外省,老覺得國家危難,他們得前仆後繼。 
老的上一輩犧牲不夠,小的還得賠上一條命。有情報員家屬向我哭訴陳情,我很慚愧,也很感慨。慚愧的是,我們常覺得自己已幫國家社會做過多事,很了不得;但站在你面前的這群,他們怎麼從不談了呢?

他們的傻,造就了我們自私的空間。但令感慨,這些外省無論累積多少英雄事蹟,他們的命運總陷在一九四七年二二八的那一槍,他們永遠都是「飄洋過海」的外省
五十幾年下來,八二三砲彈死的是外省;空軍公墓前走一遭,戰死的飛行員個個才二十出頭,也是外省;為台灣蒐集飛彈情報,保護台灣本土運動,死的也是外省。我無法衝口說出的是,外省為什麼那麼笨?國家多數並不承認他們,怎麼還願意替國家去死? 

外省啊!外省!原罪有多深?多少付出,才能償還當年歷史的錯誤? 多少前仆後繼,多少代,才能換取本省終究的接納?
台灣的外省無法支撐任何一個有意義的政治力量。
 
隨著台灣民族主義崛起,只占口百分之十五的外省政黨如全然反映這群對歷史的認識、對故鄉的鄉愁,贏不了。
任何一場戰役中,外省都得當默默的犧牲者,從戰爭到選舉,他們不能大聲說出母親的名字,不能哭嚎他們的鄉愁。
他們的一切都是錯,生的時候錯,死的時候也錯;
為國家錯,不為國家也錯!
 
西元1894年,一位猷太裔的法國陸軍軍官德雷福(Dreyfus),被控出賣法國陸軍情報給德國,軍事祕密法庭裁判國罪,德雷福遭流放外島。這是法國近代史上轟動一時的德雷福事件。整個事件後來被証實是假的、捏造的;
它可以成立只有一個前提;這位陸軍上尉德雷福是猶太不是正統法國,他是法國的「外省」。
 
在當時舉國面臨共同敵德國情況下,法國德雷福身上的猶太血統成了祭品,目的是撫慰普法戰爭中嚴重受創的法國心。其後法國社會分成兩個政營,雙方在報刊上相互攻擊,在議會中進行政治鬥爭,在街頭上發起群眾運動。
事件在小說家左拉發表的著名文章【我控訴】後,達到高潮。
 
「最後我控訴第一軍事法庭,他違反法律……,我控訴第二軍事法庭,他奉命掩飾 …… 不法行為,判一個無罪的有罪……,我的激烈抗議只是從我靈魂中發出的吶喊,若膽敢傳喚我上法庭,讓他們這樣做吧,讓審訊在光天化日舉行!我在等待。」--左拉,【我控訴】一百多年來,德雷福事件在每個社會上演著,這是左拉在【我控訴】文章中最後的預言。
 
民族主義者並不關心案件的法律細節、身生命權,他們只關心事件給自己帶來的後果。「德雷福」的影子,如今被流放到台灣。我的朋友周玉寇,
曾經對我說:「你可以大聲講話,因為你是本省,不是外省。」
左拉死後一百年,二二八那一槍後五十年,我們本省該輕輕自問一句了:
外省,該不該是有權利在台灣活下去的

 話說, 從前的從前, 南海的一鬼島上, 住了群豬腦猴​身的物種, 自稱智慧人, 自認 高人一等, 睥睨一切, 熱衷于製造風潮, 玩弄假議題, 玩得不亦樂乎; 這些年來, 更發明一種新遊戲, 名為 ''神鬼交鋒', 整個遊戲的玩法, 就是先派出一批屁小孩, 先到網上人肉搜尋, 上天下地, 把你的祖宗八代, 外加你外婆那邊的十八代祖譜, 擺到電子顯微鏡下, 開膛破肚, 狠狠地爬梳, 非要在雞蛋裡找出根骨頭不可,  找不到? 没关係, 硬塞幾具狗屍塊進去; 然後, 大叫一声! "我找到了!",   不信青春喚不回,不容青史盡成灰。  低回海上成功宴,萬里江山酒一杯。  開國於今幾歲更,艱難日月作長征。  元戎元老騎龍去,我是攀髯一老兵  
To Kill the Mockingbird (Full Film) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CsN7jDgwSU                        
To Kill the Mockingbird (Audiobook) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3BrIM4LxJ4                             
【心牆高築 如何治國 】 台大數學系教授陳金次 
牆有兩種,有形的牆和無形的牆。有形的牆, 肉眼就可以看得到。無形的牆,悄悄地在心中築起,無形無影,不易察覺。  有形的牆,因需要而建。無形的牆,因意底牢結( ideology )而起。  有形的牆,可以阻止外人穿越。無形的牆,能夠蒙蔽人性的光輝。 有形的牆, 無繁殖力,隨時間的推移,逐漸傾頹衰老於歷史長河中。   無形的牆,具感染力,可以匯聚成河,載舟覆舟,億萬生靈,家破人亡。  在德國,曾經有一道種族主義的牆,造成猶太人的悲劇與德意志民族的大浩劫。  在中國,曾經有一道階級主義的牆,把同胞分成紅與黑,造成億萬人頭落地 與中華民族的沉淪。 世間有兩種力量莫大無比:愛與恨。愛是生,恨是滅。 愛能使人性發光,無怨無悔。恨能使人性抓狂,玉石俱焚。   真愛無界, 無分別心,不能用來築牆;無形的牆,築於人心,既能成牆,必不是愛。  如果只看到中正紀念堂開放式的圍牆,而看不到台北賓館莫測高深的圍牆, 此人內心必已抓狂。如果只在意中國帝王式的牌樓,而無視於殖民者  象徵權力的高塔,這樣的人必定是政治騙子。   我成長於戰後困頓歲月,對國民黨的貪汙腐敗和特務統治深惡痛絕,我不齒的 同學,一個個變成國民黨的知青,年輕的我就和國民黨劃清界線。心中築起 一道厚厚的牆,能量很高。   我曾出錢出力支持黨外民主運動,國外留學時,常寫文章修理國民黨的特務, 打得特務臉色發青。 三十年過去了,強人也走入了歷史。 台灣人執政也已超過十八個年頭,新的執政者給人民帶來什麼?過去所反對的, 有多少更勝於過去?今天的台灣,還能維持一片榮景,難道不是前人的遺澤?  那些在美國留學時被我修理的特務,許多人回到台灣,在各個領域奉獻所學, 作育英才,他們多半是外省人,心繫國家,並沒有留在美國享受人生。 我為 什麼會去打這樣的人呢?  我常反省,想到國家目前的困境和年少的輕狂,不禁熱淚盈眶。牆,未必 都是障礙。帝王的牌樓,未必都是孽種。殖民者的高塔,未必都是罪惡。 歷史如是走來,無不留下痕跡。緬懷過去,開創未來,才是健康態度。  滿清入主中國,並沒對明十三陵動手。日本殖民台灣,並未毀壞布政使司 衙門。這是一種胸襟,一種智慧,也是自我信心展現。  只有對自己沒信心的男人,才在乎妻子婚前的男友。 北京,因拆除城牆, 今天懊悔莫及。平遙,因保存城牆,而成世界文化遺產。平遙城怎能和 北京城相提並論呢,一時偏見,造成無可挽回的破壞,殷鑑不遠,為政者 不可不慎。   或許有人認為,開放性空間看起來舒暢。我相信這個人, 一定沒到紀念堂池畔沉澱靜思過。 我曾經立志不進中正紀念堂,但是在 一個偶然的機會來到紀念堂,心想強人都已作古了,何不進去看看。  於是來到國家戲劇院旁的水池邊,但見青杉林立花木扶疏,奇石錯落,曲橋 影蕩鴛鴦情深,蝶影翩翩。心想風景何辜!我為什麼要拒絕它呢? 於是在 池畔選一塊石頭坐了下來,只見池中白雲飄飄,錦鱗游泳,悠哉悠哉,塵俗盡忘。  忽然間遠處傳來京胡的聲音,好似四郎思母。抬起頭來,夕陽掛在國家劇院的 飛簷下,與園內的青杉一紅一墨,相映如畫。   啊!台北市區竟有如此美好的地方,我辜負它了!是什麼樣的人,有此才華, 留此妙筆?我想當初庭園的設計者,一定考慮到圍牆的必要,才能營造這樣 的氣氛。 設若無此圍牆,喧囂盡入,幽靜盡失矣。 民進黨人啊!你們見識 這麼淺,心胸這麼窄,頭殼又燒壞掉,如何治理國家?

聯合/他們把魯莽當有趣 
http://goo.gl/F1BL2Q                           
2016大選/寓言2016 牛鬼蛇神的選舉 |  
http://udn.com/news/story/7339/1042109                            
日本「蟄居」男性達百萬 數年不上班不社交 
http://www.chinatimes.com/photo-app/20150711002307-260802    
蔡英文,台灣最大黑箱 
http://goo.gl/68Jllw                             
反黑箱課綱真相 民進黨私下資助 
http://goo.gl/cgQ7qB      
推反課綱 蔡英文「黑」學生 
http://goo.gl/8u2CRw    

One Man's Quest to Change the Way We Die

One Man’s Quest to Change the Way We Die

First, the back story, because, B.J. Miller has found, the back story is unavoidable when you are missing three limbs.
Miller was a sophomore at Princeton when, one Monday night in November 1990, he and two friends went out for drinks and, at around 4 a.m., found themselves ambling toward a convenience store for sandwiches. They decided to climb a commuter train parked at the adjacent rail station, for fun. Miller scaled it first. When he got to the top, electrical current arced out of a piece of equipment into the watch on his wrist. Eleven-thousand volts shot through his left arm and down his legs. When his friends reached him on the roof of the train, smoke was rising from his feet.
Miller remembers none of this. His memories don’t kick in until several days later, when he woke up in the burn unit of St. Barnabas Medical Center, in Livingston, N.J. Thinking he’d resurfaced from a terrible dream, he tried to shamble across his hospital room on the charred crusts of his legs until he used up the slack of his catheter tube and the device tore out of his body. Then, all the pain hit him at once.
Doctors took each leg just below the knee, one at a time. Then they turned to his arm, which triggered in Miller an even deeper grief. (“Hands do stuff,” he explains. “Your foot is just a stinky, clunky little platform.”) For weeks, the hospital staff considered him close to death. But Miller, in a devastated haze, didn’t know that. He only worried about who he would be when he survived.
For a long time, no visitors were allowed in his hospital room; the burn unit was a sterile environment. But on the morning Miller’s arm was going to be amputated, just below the elbow, a dozen friends and family members packed into a 10-foot-long corridor between the burn unit and the elevator, just to catch a glimpse of him as he was rolled to surgery. “They all dared to show up,” Miller remembers thinking. “They all dared to look at me. They were proving that I was lovable even when I couldn’t see it.” This reassured Miller, as did the example of his mother, Susan, a polio survivor who has used a wheelchair since Miller was a child: She had never seemed diminished. After the operation, when Miller was rolled through the hallway again, he opened his eyes as he passed her and said: “Mom, Mom. Now you and me have more in common.”
It wasn’t that Miller was suddenly enlightened; internally, he was in turmoil. But in retrospect, he credits himself with doing one thing right: He saw a good way to look at his situation and committed to faking that perspective, hoping that his genuine self might eventually catch up. Miller refused, for example, to let himself believe that his life was extra difficult now, only uniquely difficult, as all lives are. He resolved to think of his suffering as simply a “variation on a theme we all deal with — to be human is really hard,” he says. His life had never felt easy, even as a privileged, able-bodied suburban boy with two adoring parents, but he never felt entitled to any angst; he saw unhappiness as an illegitimate intrusion into the carefree reality he was supposed to inhabit. And don’t we all do that, he realized. Don’t we all treat suffering as a disruption to existence, instead of an inevitable part of it? He wondered what would happen if you could “reincorporate your version of reality, of normalcy, to accommodate suffering.” As a disabled person, he was getting all kinds of signals that he was different and separated from everyone else. But he worked hard to see himself as merely sitting somewhere on a continuum between the man on his deathbed and the woman who misplaced her car keys, to let his accident heighten his connectedness to others, instead of isolating him. This was the only way, he thought, to keep from hating his injuries and, by extension, himself.
Miller returned to Princeton the following year. He had three prosthetics and rode around campus in a golf cart with a rambunctious service dog named Vermont who, in truth, was too much of a misfit to perform any concrete service. Miller had wanted to work in foreign relations, in China; now he started studying art history. He found it to be a good lens through which to keep making sense of his injuries.
First, there was the discipline’s implicit conviction that every work is shaped by the viewer’s perspective. He remembers looking at slides of ancient sculptures in a dark lecture hall, all of them missing arms or noses or ears, and suddenly recognizing them for what they were: fellow amputees. “We were, as a class, all calling these works monumental, beautiful and important, but we’d never seen them whole,” he says. Time’s effect on these marble bodies — their suffering, really — was understood as part of the art. Medicine didn’t think about bodies this way, Miller realized. Embedded in words like “disability” and “rehabilitation” was a less generous view: “There was an aberrant moment in your life and, with some help, you could get back to what you were, or approximate it.” So, instead of regarding his injuries as something to get over, Miller tried to get into them, to see his new life as its own novel challenge, like traveling through a country whose language he didn’t speak.
This positivity was still mostly aspirational. Miller spent years repulsed by the “chopped meat” where his arm ended and crushed with shame when he noticed people wince or look away. But he slowly became more confident and playful. He replaced the sock-like covering many amputees wear over their arm stumps with an actual sock: first a plain sock, then stripes and argyles. Then, one day he forgot to put on any sock and — just like that — “I was done with it. I was no longer ashamed of my arm.” He became fascinated by architects like Louis Sullivan, who stripped the veneer off their buildings and let the strength of their construction shine through. And suddenly, the standard-issue foam covers he’d been wearing over his prosthetics seemed like a clunky charade — Potemkin legs. The exquisitely engineered artificial limbs they hid were actually pretty interesting, even sexy, made of the same carbon fiber used as a finish on expensive sports cars. “Why not tear that stuff off and delight in what actually is?” Miller recalled thinking. So he did.
For years Miller collected small, half-formed insights like these. Then, he entered medical school and discovered palliative care, an approach to medicine rooted in similar ideas. He now talks about his recovery as a creative act, “a transformation,” and argues that all suffering offers the same opportunity, even at the end of life, which gradually became his professional focus. “Parts of me died early on,” he said in a recent talk. “And that’s something, one way or another, we can all say. I got to redesign my life around this fact, and I tell you it has been a liberation to realize you can always find a shock of beauty or meaning in what life you have left.”
One morning in July 2015, Miller took his seat at a regular meeting of palliative-care doctors at the University of California San Francisco’s cancer center. The head of the team, Dr. Michael Rabow, started with a poem. It was a tradition, he later told me, meant to remind everyone that this was a different sort of hour in their schedule, and that, as palliative-care physicians, they were seeking different outcomes for their patients: things like comfort, beauty and meaning. The poem was called “Sinkhole,” and it seemed to offer some sneaky, syntactically muddled wisdom about letting go. When it was over, there was a beat of silence. (It was kind of a confusing poem.) Then Rabow encouraged everyone to remember any patients who had died since their last meeting. Miller was the first to speak up.
Miller, now 45, with deep brown eyes and a scruffy, silver-threaded beard, saw patients one day a week at the hospital. He was also entering his fifth year as executive director of a small, pioneering hospice in San Francisco called the Zen Hospice Project, which originated as a kind of compassionate improvisation at the height of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, when members of the San Francisco Zen Center began taking in sick, often stigmatized young men and doing what they could to help them die comfortably. It is now an independent nonprofit group that trains volunteers for San Francisco’s Laguna Honda public hospital as well as for its own revered, small-scale residential operation. (Two of the facility’s six beds are reserved for U.C.S.F., which sends patients there; the rest are funded through sliding-scale fees and private donations.) Once an outlier, Zen Hospice has come to embody a growing nationwide effort to reclaim the end of life as a human experience instead of primarily a medical one. The goal, as Miller likes to put it, is to “de-pathologize death.”
Around the table at U.C.S.F., Miller stood out. The other doctors wore dress pants and button-downs — physician-casual — while he wore a sky blue corduroy shirt with a tear in the sleeve and a pair of rumpled khakis; he could have come straight from camping or Bonnaroo. Even just sitting there, he transmitted a strange charisma — a magnetism, people kept telling me, that was hard to explain but also necessary to explain, because the rapport Miller seems to instantly establish with everyone is a part of his gift as a clinician.
“It’s reasonable to say that it’s impossible to describe what it feels like to be with him,” Rabow told me. “People feel accepted. I think they feel loved.” It’s in the way Miller seems to swaddle you in his attention, the way his goofiness punctures any pretensions. (Miller, who has an unrepentant knucklehead side, habitually addresses other men as “Brother man” or “Mon” and insisted to me many times that he hasn’t finished a book in 20 years.) For people who know him, his magic has almost become an exasperating joke. When I spoke to Miller’s childhood friend Justin Burke, he told me a story about Miller running around on a beach with his dog in San Francisco years ago. A man came hobbling over and explained that he was about to have his own leg amputated and that just watching Miller run around like this, on two prosthetics, had instantaneously reassured him that he was going to be O.K. I told Burke to hang on: Someone at Zen Hospice had already told me this story, except that in her version, Miller was running on a trail in Texas. “Ask him how many times it’s happened,” Burke deadpanned.
Now Miller also seemed to be on the cusp of modest celebrity. He’d started speaking about death and dying at medical schools and conferences around the country and will soon surface in Oprah’s living room, chatting about palliative care on her “Super Soul Sunday” TV show. Several of Miller’s colleagues described him to me as exactly the kind of public ambassador their field needed. “What B.J. accomplishes is to talk about death without making it sound scary and horrible,” Rita Charon, a professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical School, says. “We know from seeing him standing in front of us that he has suffered. We know that he has been at the brink of the abyss that he’s talking about. That gives him an authority that others may not have.” Vicki Jackson, the chief of palliative care at Massachusetts General Hospital, agreed. Nobody welcomes conversations about dying, she said, not even about making the experience less miserable. “But people will listen to B.J.,” she said. “They want to.”
Jackson pointed to the talk Miller gave to close the TED conference in 2015. Miller described languishing in a windowless, antiseptic burn unit after his amputations. He heard there was a blizzard outside but couldn’t see it himself. Then a nurse smuggled him a snowball and allowed him to hold it. This was against hospital regulations, and this was Miller’s point: There are parts of ourselves that the conventional health care system isn’t equipped to heal or nourish, adding to our suffering. He described holding that snowball as “a stolen moment,” and said, “But I cannot tell you the rapture I felt holding that in my hand, and the coldness dripping onto my burning skin, the miracle of it all, the fascination as I watched it melt and turn into water. In that moment, just being any part of this planet, in this universe, mattered more to me than whether I lived or died.” Miller’s talk has been watched more than five million times. And yet, Jackson told me: “If I said all that — ‘Oh, I could feel the coldness of the snowball ...’ — you’d be like: ‘Shut. Up. Shut up!’ But no one is going to question B.J.”
Now, at the morning meeting, Miller began describing the case of a young man named Randy Sloan, a patient at U.C.S.F. who died of an aggressive cancer a few weeks earlier at Zen Hospice. In a way, Sloan’s case was typical. It passed through all the same medical decision points and existential themes the doctors knew from working with their own terminal patients. But here, the timeline was so compressed that those themes felt distilled and heightened.
And then there was the bracing idiosyncrasy of everything Miller’s staff had been able to do for Sloan at Zen Hospice. Rabow told me that all palliative-care departments and home-hospice agencies believe patients’ wishes should be honored, but Zen Hospice’s small size allows it to “actualize” these ideals more fully. When Miller relayed one detail about Sloan’s stay at the hospice — it was either the part about the sailing trip or the wedding — one doctor across the conference table expelled what seemed to be an involuntary, admiring, “What?”
Everything Miller was saying had a way of sharpening an essential set of questions: What is a good death? How do you judge? In the end, what matters? You got the sense that looking closely at Sloan’s case might even get you close to some answers or, at least, less hopelessly far away.
This is the story he told.
It started with an email late one night, in April 2015. “I’m the mother of Randy Sloan,” a woman named Melany Baldwin wrote to Miller. She reminded Miller how he met her son the previous year. And then: “Anyway, last week my dear son was diagnosed with mesothelioma,” a rare, terminal cancer. “We are devastated. He is only 27 years old.”
Miller got emails, texts and calls like this almost daily from friends, friends of friends or total strangers. And he put pressure on himself to help as much as he could. But it was also exhausting, and he put equal and opposing pressure on himself to live his own life fully — a byproduct of his extreme intimacy with mortality. “The lessons I get from my patients and their families, and from this work,” Miller said, “is to enjoy this big, huge, mystical, crazy, beautiful, wacky world. And I’m too often not doing that. That can feel distressing to me.” A few months earlier, Miller had another brush with death — a pancreatic-cancer scare that turned out to be nothing — and he told me that “it was interesting to watch myself play with that thought. Where my mind went was: ‘Cool. Now I get to quit all this work.’ ” Maybe he would just disappear, get weird, grow weed.
And so, as it happens, Miller didn’t get Baldwin’s email for several days, because he’d decided to experiment with going off the grid. He went on a weeklong, aimless road trip around the West with his mutt, Maysie, riding shotgun, and he rode his treasured motorcycle — a sleek, black, heavily customized Aprilia — up to Sonoma for a weekend with old friends. He was pulled over for speeding on the bike twice. The first cop approached a little freaked out; unable to compute a one-limbed man riding a motorcycle, he mistook Miller’s prosthetic arm for a weapon.
“I love bikes,” Miller told me. “I love gyroscopic, two-wheel action!” Mountain biking had become his way of releasing pressure in the turbulent decade after his accident. (Miller sued Princeton and New Jersey Transit, which operated the train, charging that they failed to make safety upgrades after similar accidents in the past. He won settlements totaling nearly $6 million, but was blindsided when some in the press excoriated him as a symbol of America’s binge-drinking youth and their lack of personal responsibility.) He had returned to cycling quickly, tooling around trails with a specialized arm clipped to the handlebar and two prosthetics pedaling. It allowed him to be alone without being lonely, to remind himself that his life still allowed for adventure and risk. Soon, he was wandering into motorcycle dealerships, explaining how badly he wanted to get back on a motorcycle too, asking if anyone could build him one. But for years, none of the mechanics Miller approached would touch the idea: Engineering a machine for a triple-amputee seemed nearly impossible, the potential liability too great.
Then, in late 2013, Miller checked out Scuderia West, a boutique motorcycle shop not far from Zen Hospice, in the Mission District. Scuderia was staffed by a crew of young, wisecracking gear-heads, who, after finishing their shifts, stayed late drinking beer and rehabilitating decrepit old bikes for fun. Right away, Miller noticed a different vibe. They were excited by the challenge of retrofitting a bike for him. This was especially true of the young tech who ultimately volunteered to take the project: Melany Baldwin’s son, Randy Sloan.
Sloan grew up in Texas. He was bald, with a bushy, reddish beard and a disarming, contented smile. His social life in San Francisco revolved around Scuderia, and he was the baby of the group: not just younger, but more sensitive and trusting. “He was way too nice to work here,” his friend and co-worker Katie Putman told me. Sloan’s closest relationship may have been with his dog, a husky named Desmo, whom he rescued from a disreputable breeder. The dog was weird-looking: It had one blue eye and one eye that was half-brown and half-blue. (“He would always select the misfit,” Baldwin said.)
Sloan threw himself into overhauling a bike for Miller. For six months, he confronted a cascade of problems — like how to run all the controls to a single handlebar so Miller could accelerate and brake with one hand — while Miller made excuses to check in on his progress. “It was just an immediate man crush,” Miller told me. “The guy was helping me build this dream.”
Sloan was feeling it, too. Everyone at Scuderia was. They stalked Miller online, learning about his career at Zen Hospice. His work with the dying impressed them as fearless, just as his conviction to ride a motorcycle again did. Sloan never carried on about people or even talked that much, but he frequently referred to Miller as “a legend,” and those close to him knew what that meant. “There were not many ‘legends’ in Randy’s eyes,” Putman said.
Sloan finished Miller’s motorcycle in April 2014. A crowd gathered at Scuderia to watch Miller take possession. Sloan had him climb on, then clambered around and under the bike, making final adjustments. Then he stepped back and started, quietly, to cry.
Miller was tearing up under his helmet, too. But he didn’t drag things out. He started the engine, said thank you, then streaked down the alleyway at the back of the shop. Everyone hollered and applauded as they watched him disappear down Valencia Street — very fast, but with a pronounced, unsettling wobble.
Miller had been lying. He’d never ridden a motorcycle before.
A year later, Miller got Melany Baldwin’s email. Once he was back from his road trip, he contacted Sloan’s doctors at U.C.S.F. to learn more about his case.
Sloan was walking Desmo up a hill a few weeks earlier, in April, and found he couldn’t catch his breath. He was rushed into surgery, to fix an apparent collapsed lung. But the surgeon discovered a raft of tumors spread across his lung, diaphragm and heart: mesothelioma. The diagnosis alone was improbable. Mesothelioma is typically seen in older people, after long-term asbestos or radiation exposure. And the way the cancer was moving through Sloan’s body was shocking. A subsequent PET scan revealed it had already spread to his pancreas and brain.
His doctors at U.C.S.F. believed the tumor on his brainstem would paralyze him within weeks. And so, Sloan underwent whole-brain radiation to shrink it before attacking everything else. He didn’t want to be cut off from his body — he wanted to be as much like his old self as possible. “I’m sick of being sick, and I’m sick of talking about being sick,” he kept telling his mother. He insisted that she go back home to Illinois while he returned to the small apartment he shared with two roommates, waiting to start chemo.
The next two weeks were grim. Tumors crusted over Sloan’s heart, hindering it from pumping blood through his body. His capillaries began seeping water into his tissues. Soon, his feet were literally leaking, and the retained water cracked his skin from the shins down, mashing him with pain. Sloan’s ankles grew as wide as logs. He started walking with a cane. And because the pain in his torso kept him from lying down or even sitting comfortably, one night he fell asleep standing up and cut his head open when he collapsed.
Putman, Sloan’s friend from Scuderia, had swept in to take care of Desmo, the husky. Now she transitioned into Sloan’s de facto nurse. But Sloan was a bad patient. He played down his condition and seemed to resent Putman’s help, out of shame or guilt. Several times, Putman told me, she had to race to his apartment and take him to the emergency room: “I started calling it our date night.” Finally, she asked Sloan if she should just sleep over. Sloan accepted her offer this way: “I think Desmo would like that.”
Early in June, Sloan was readmitted to U.C.S.F., and Baldwin, his mother, returned to San Francisco to be with him. Miller saw both of them for an appointment that morning, and when he walked in, it hit him how quickly Sloan’s body was failing: In roughly six weeks, Sloan had gone from a functioning, happy 27-year-old, walking his dog up a hill, to very clearly dying. His decline was relentless, by any standard. At no point had any doctor been able to give him a single bit of good news. Even now, Sloan’s oncologist was reporting that after the first dose of chemotherapy, his heart was likely too frail to take more.
Still, Sloan talked to Miller about “doing battle” with the cancer and “winning this thing”; about getting back to work at Scuderia and flying to Illinois, where Baldwin would remarry later that summer. He also wanted to go to Tokyo Disneyland, he said. Miller looked at Sloan, then looked at Baldwin, trying to intuit who knew what and who might have been pretending not to know and how best to gently reconcile everyone’s hopes with the merciless reality.
Good palliative-care doctors recognize there’s an art to navigating clinical interactions like this, and Miller seems particularly sensitive to its subtleties. In this case, Miller realized, his job was to “disillusion” Sloan without devastating him. Hope is a tricky thing, Miller told me. Some terminal patients keep chasing hope through round after round of chemo. But it’s amazing how easily others “re-proportion,” or recalibrate, their expectations: how the hope of making it to a grandchild’s birthday or finishing “Game of Thrones” becomes sufficiently meaningful. “The question becomes,” Miller says, “how do you incorporate those hard facts into your moment-by-moment life instead of trying to run away from them?”
At an initial appointment with Sloan, two weeks earlier, Miller made the calculation not to steer Sloan toward any crushing realizations. He worried that if he pushed too hard, Sloan might feel alienated and shut down. (“I needed his allegiance,” Miller later explained; it was more important, in the long term, that Sloan see him as an advocate.) At the second meeting, Miller remembered, “I felt the need to be more brutal.” And, he imagined, by now Sloan would have started to suspect that the story he’d been telling himself didn’t fit the reality. “I just said, ‘Randy, this is not going like any of us want for you,’ ” and Miller began, calmly, to level with him.
Traveling was out of the question, Miller explained; best guess, Sloan had a few months to live. “You could just watch his world collapse,” Miller recalled. “With each sentence, you’re taking another possibility away.” Sloan started crying. And yet, Baldwin also knew that her son had been waiting for his doctors to say this out loud. Sloan couldn’t understand why, if he had Stage 4 of an incurable cancer, he was still taking 70 pills every day, with the doses laid out in a dizzying flowchart. And as Miller went on, he was stunned by how well Sloan seemed to be absorbing this new information, without buckling under its weight. “He was actually kind of keeping up with his grief, reconciling the facts of his life,” he says. “It was a moving target, and he kept hitting it.” Baldwin told me: “Randy was a simple guy. He would say to me, ‘Mom, all I want is one ordinary day.’ ” He was sick of being sick — just like he’d been saying. He wanted to go back to living, as best he could.
Quickly the conversation turned to what was next. A standard question in palliative care is “What’s important to you now?” But Sloan didn’t muster much of a response, so Miller retooled the question. He told Sloan that nothing about his life was going the way he expected, and his body was only going to keep breaking down. “So, what’s your favorite part of yourself? What character trait do we want to make sure to protect as everything else falls apart?” Sloan had an immediate answer for this one. “I love everybody I’ve ever met,” he said.
Baldwin had heard her son say this before, with total earnestness. And he said it with such conviction now that Miller immediately believed it, too. Besides, Miller had already felt it to be true, a year earlier, when he drove his motorcycle away from Sloan at Scuderia. “He was an amazing person that way,” Miller told me.
Sloan got apprehensive when Miller started telling him about Zen Hospice’s residential facility, known as the Guest House; it sounded as if it was for old people. But Miller explained that it was probably the best chance he had for living the last act of his life the way he wanted. His other options were to tough it out at home with two weekly visits from a home hospice nurse or go to a nursing home. At Zen Hospice, Sloan’s friends would always be welcome, and Sloan could come and go as he pleased as long as someone went with him. He could eat what he wanted. He could step out for a cigarette. He could even walk up the street and smoke on his own stoop — the Guest House was just two blocks from Sloan’s apartment. Besides, Miller told him: “It’s where I work. I’ll be there.”
Sloan agreed but didn’t seem entirely comfortable with the idea. He told one of his friends from Scuderia: “I’m moving in with B.J.”
Sloan arrived at the Guest House with his mother five days later, on the morning of June 9. He insisted on walking there, trundling the two blocks from his apartment with his cane.
The Guest House is a calm, unpretentious space: a large Victorian home with six beds in five bedrooms, vaulted ceilings, slightly shabby furniture and warm, Oriental rugs. There is a large wooden Buddha in the dining room. The kitchen is light-filled and bursting with flowers. There’s always a pot of tea and often freshly baked cookies. And while Zen Hospice has a rotating, 24-hour nursing staff, the tiny nursing station is literally tucked into a kind of cabinet in the hall upstairs; the house, in other words, feels very much like a house, not a hospital.
You don’t have to spend much time there to realize that the most crucial, and distinctive, piece of the operation is its staff of volunteers. Freed of most medical duties by the nursing staff, the volunteers act almost as existential nurses. They sit with residents and chat, offering their full attention, unencumbered by the turmoil a family member might feel. The volunteers are ordinary people: retired Macy’s executives, social workers, bakers, underemployed millennials or kibitzing empty-nesters. Many are practicing Buddhists. Many are not. (Miller isn’t.) But Buddhism informs their training. There’s an emphasis on accepting suffering, on not getting tripped up by one’s own discomfort around it. “You train people not to run away from hard things, not to run away from the suffering of others,” Miller explained. This liberates residents to feel whatever they’re going to feel in their final days, even to fall apart.
At first, many volunteers experience a confused apprehension. They arrive expecting nonstop, penetrating metaphysical conversations with wise elderly people and instead just wind up plying them for recipes or knitting advice or watching “Wheel of Fortune” with them or restocking latex gloves for the Guest House nurses. But one especially well-liked volunteer, Josh Kornbluth, told me that, after a year working at the Guest House, he understood that the value of Zen Hospice is actually “in the quotidian — the holding of someone’s hand, bringing them food that’s been beautifully arranged on the plate, all the small ways of showing respect to that person as a living person and not as ‘predeceased.’ Those are actually deep things. And I say that as the least Zen person!” In fact, Kornbluth was raised by Jewish Communists in New York City, and once, after a woman died at the Guest House and no more-senior volunteer was on hand to take charge, I watched him — adrenalized, uneasy, perspiring — fumble around on his iPhone for something to say over the body before they wheeled it away, then mangle the pronunciation of Thich Nhat Hanh.
Sloan didn’t appreciate any of this at first; the Guest House creeped him out. Shortly after he arrived, a nurse showed him to one of the smaller rooms at the top of the stairs: “Bed 5,” it was called. It had a twin bed, an ornate wooden chest and a large framed photo of a Tibetan boy in a red robe. The rest of the rooms were occupied by old ladies: one who spoke no English and kept her television tuned to blaring Russian talk shows; a retired teacher in the final throes of cervical cancer; an unflappable, perpetually crocheting 99-year-old who had recently gained back some weight and taken to playing piano and who, everyone suspected, wasn’t actually dying anymore. Sloan worried that he had exiled himself to a nursing home, and nothing he was seeing now reassured him. He told his mother he needed to “take a day off.” Then he went downstairs and walked back to his apartment. The staff of Zen Hospice, considering it part of their job to accept his trepidation, let him go.
He returned the next morning. He was ready to move in now, he said, and came trailed by a swarm of friends who’d tossed his possessions into boxes and were now hauling them up the Guest House stairs. They started hammering things into walls, mounting Sloan’s flat-screen television, wiring his stereo and gaming console, claiming unused furniture from elsewhere in the Guest House. Soon the room was filled with Sloan’s motorcycle-racing posters and helmets and a small garden gnome lying in a provocative position. Erin Singer, the house’s kitchen manager at the time, loved watching it happen. “All of a sudden, it was a late-20s-dude’s room,” she said.
Once Sloan was settled, the feeling was one of profound relief. His little collective had been caring for him as best they could. But now he had chefs eager to cook for him and nurses and volunteers to ensure that he was comfortable. His mother and his friends didn’t have to nag him about taking his pain medication anymore or try, ineptly, to clean and dress the wounds on his feet that caused him such shame. Baldwin told me, “At Zen, they talk about being unburdened and unburdening.” And that’s what happened: They could just be Sloan’s mother and friends again, and Sloan no longer had to be their patient, either.
From then on, throngs of co-workers and friends passed through the Guest House. Desmo, the dog, hung out, too. “His entourage was either one-deep or 10-deep,” Jolene Scarella, then the director of nursing, told me. They sat around playing video games and drinking Bud Light, just like they always did, or they swept Sloan around the city for dinner at his favorite restaurants. The Guest House isn’t a somber place, but still, the volunteers weren’t accustomed to this level of freewheeling autonomy or raucousness or youth. “They brought so much joy to the house,” Singer said. And yet, some volunteers also had a hard time shaking the acute tragedy of Sloan’s case. All that Buddhist, contemplative nonattachment was easier to buy into with the elderly; with Sloan, it was hard to feel as if you were helping someone transition through a cosmic crescendo at the end of a life well lived. Some of the staff, like Singer, were only slightly older than Sloan. Others had children his age. It felt cruel.
Sloan’s body, meanwhile, continued to fail faster than anyone had anticipated. Within days, breathing became more onerous and the weeping ulcerations on his feet became rawer; there was blood draining from his right foot now, and a terrible odor. On Thursday, just three days after Sloan arrived, he needed to transition from OxyContin to methadone.
The next day, he went wedding-dress shopping. Baldwin and her fiancé had scrapped their wedding plans in Illinois. But a chaplain at U.C.S.F. volunteered to perform the ceremony at the tiny park next to the Guest House instead, and Singer offered to throw together a little reception inside. For Sloan, the best man, planning the wedding with his mother became a fun distraction. He was too swollen to wear a suit, but found a purple-and-gold velour tracksuit he liked online — the tuxedo of sweatsuits, called a “Sweatsedo.” Baldwin ordered one with “Randy” embroidered on the breast.
The wedding was scheduled for the following Thursday. The Friday before, Sloan’s fourth day at the Guest House, Baldwin drove him to a David’s Bridal and helped him arrange himself on a chair. He seemed much foggier all of a sudden. As she came out of the dressing room, modeling each gown, Sloan mostly managed a thumbs up or thumbs down.
That night, Baldwin called Sloan’s sisters in Texas and his father in Tennessee and said that it didn’t seem as if Randy had months anymore, or even weeks. She told them to come right away.
Miller hardly saw Sloan at the Guest House. As Zen Hospice’s executive director, he was consumed by fund-raising and strategic planning or throttled by administrative work. The week Sloan arrived, Miller was courting producers from “60 Minutes,” hoping they would do a segment on the Guest House, and meeting with the Silicon Valley design firm IDEO, which he had retained to help put Zen Hospice forward as a national model for end-of-life care. IDEO, meanwhile, was calling Miller to consult on its own projects — helping entrepreneurs disrupt what some had taken to calling the “death space.”
And yet, Miller’s rising prominence made him uneasy. “If I want to keep doing this work, I have to be seeing patients,” he told me. “It’s really easy to get unhelpfully abstract.” In short, he was spending too much time in the wrong death space.
Still, it wasn’t that Miller was too busy to visit with Sloan. He stopped by his room a couple of times, early on, but eventually made a therapeutic decision to keep his distance. It was obvious to Miller that he upset the fragile sense of normalcy that Sloan and his friends were managing to create. As soon as Miller poked his head in, someone from Scuderia would start retelling the motorcycle story, saying how much Sloan loved building that bike for him, how he was “a legend.” “No one knew what to say,” Miller remembered. “Their suffering was palpable, and some of their suffering was these spastic efforts to put a smiley face on things.”
It was also easy to wonder how much of Sloan’s own composure was projected for their benefit. A friend from the shop, Steve Magri, told me that even when Sloan was healthy, “he would never let you feel uncomfortable around him.” Moreover, the whole-brain radiation had clearly changed Sloan, sent him deeper within himself. The pain medication had, too. He occasionally said things that even he seemed surprised by or that seemed ludicrously out of character. He had always been a vulnerable, childlike man, but there were moments, in his last days, when his mother couldn’t tell whether he’d achieved some higher state of openheartedness or was just disoriented. At one point, Sloan asked her to drive him to Scuderia so he could tell his boss, a friend, that he was sorry, but he probably wouldn’t be coming back to work after all. “I hate to let you guys down,” Sloan said tenderly, as if he were breaking this news for the first time.
I never met Randy Sloan. But as I heard these stories in the months after his death, it became impossible for me not to fixate on the unfathomability of his interior life, or anyone’s interior life, at the end — to wonder how well Sloan had come to terms with what was happening to him, how much agony he might have felt. Erin Singer, the kitchen manager, told me that Sloan seemed intent on keeping his distance from the Guest House. Usually, she said, he sat under a tree in the park next door, silently smoking a cigarette. And it struck Singer as significant that Sloan “didn’t sit looking at the street or the garden. He always sat looking at the house,” as if he was wrestling with what it would mean to go inside.
The question that was unsettling me was about regret: How sure was everyone that Sloan didn’t have desires he would have liked to express or anguish he would have liked to work through — and should someone have helped him express and work through them, instead of just letting him play video games with his friends? My real question, I guess, was: Is this all there is?
Later, when I admitted this to Miller, he told me he understood this kind of anxiety well, but was able, with practice, to resist it. “Learning to love not knowing,” he said, “that’s a key part of this story. Obviously, I don’t know the depths of Randy’s soul, either. Was Randy enlightened or did he just not have the right vocabulary for this, if any of us do? We’ll never know. And maybe the difference between those things is unimportant. I think of it as: Randy got to play himself out.”
This is a favorite phrase of Miller’s. It means that Randy’s ability to be Randy was never unnecessarily constrained. What Sloan chose to do with that freedom at the Guest House was up to him. Miller was suggesting that I’d misunderstood the mission of Zen Hospice. Yes, it’s about wresting death from the one-size-fits-all approach of hospitals, but it’s also about puncturing a competing impulse, the one I was scuffling with now: our need for death to be a hypertranscendent experience. “Most people aren’t having these transformative deathbed moments,” Miller said. “And if you hold that out as a goal, they’re just going to feel like they’re failing.” The truth was, Zen Hospice had done something almost miraculous: It had allowed Sloan and those who loved him to live a succession of relatively ordinary, relatively satisfying present moments together, until Sloan’s share of present moments ran out.
By Sloan’s sixth day at Zen Hospice, he’d become unsteady on his feet and was falling asleep in the middle of sentences. But when a nurse went to check on him at the start of her shift that morning, he smirked mischievously and told her, “I have cancer, so my mom wants me to go sailing.”
In truth, the trip was Sloan’s idea. The Scuderia gang had a tradition of Sunday trips to Angel Island, a forested state park in the middle of San Francisco Bay. And so, that morning, they met on a dock in Sausalito, motored over, dropped anchor and started barbecuing and drinking Coronas — a low-key “simulated rager,” as one friend put it. Sloan barely spoke. He smiled occasionally. He pounded his pain medication. He returned to the Guest House that evening, sunburned and dehydrated and three hours later than he promised. (The nurses were upset, concerned mainly that Sloan could have been in pain all day.)
Then he went out to dinner. After days of driving, Sloan’s father, Randy Senior — Big Randy, everyone called him — had reached San Francisco from Tennessee, and Sloan was adamant that the two of them get some food. They ate huge plates of eggs and hash browns at a nearby diner. Big Randy noticed that Sloan was struggling to grip his fork and that he ordered a beer but didn’t touch it. Big Randy was recovering from foot surgery — he was hobbled himself. So when they were finished, he found he had to prop Sloan against a tree outside while he staggered to the curb to hail a cab. “Like Laurel and Hardy,” Big Randy said. Sloan, slumped against the tree trunk, lit a cigarette and couldn’t stop laughing.
He died 36 hours later, early on Tuesday morning, his eighth day at the Guest House. Baldwin hadn’t yet arrived for the day and Big Randy, who spent the night with his son, had just left to take a shower. Two nurses were changing Sloan’s clothes when it happened, and one of them, Derrick Guerra, who’d grown particularly close to Sloan, told me that, until the last instant, he could feel the young man’s hand gripping his arm. The strength still left in his body, Guerra said, was unreal.
Sloan’s family arrived. Scuderia people arrived. As Sloan’s body was wheeled through the Guest House garden toward the back gate, they all placed flower petals around his head and over his chest — a ritual at Zen Hospice known as the Flower Petal Ceremony. Desmo, the husky, leapt up and licked his face.
“It was amazing,” Miller was now telling the doctors around the table at U.C.S.F., summing up Sloan’s story. And there was a postscript, too. Two days after Sloan died, Baldwin and her fiancé woke up and decided to go ahead with the wedding they’d planned, in the park next to the Guest House. Afterward, the hospice staff invited everyone in for what can only be described as a joint wedding-reception-funeral.
One staff member later told me that the Guest House felt a little like a house on Thanksgiving that day — full and bustling, in a comforting way. Upstairs, the same women were still moving through the ends of their lives, each in her own way. But downstairs, there were tubs of beer and cheese plates and a handle of Jameson and someone playing guitar. Miller, who made a point of riding his motorcycle to work, invited Big Randy outside to see it. There were toasts to the happy couple. There were toasts to the dead young man. And there was his grieving mother in a new off-white gown.
The scene was all mixed up, upside-down and unexpectedly joyful, Miller told the doctors: If you’d walked in off the street, it would have been impossible to explain. “It makes you happy for a place like the Guest House where such things can happen,” he said, “a roof where these things can coexist.”
“Have you had many weddings?” one of the doctors asked.
“Not a ton,” Miller joked. “We haven’t put it in the brochure yet.”
It was a Wednesday, the day Miller had his cancer clinic at the hospital, and he excused himself from the meeting to dash to another floor. His first patient, heavily medicated but still tearing up from pain in his spine and legs, fumbled through his symptoms and worries, still wondering how this had happened to him. Miller mostly listened and said things like: “There’s nothing you could have done to cause this, pal. That’s important for you to know.” A lot of his patients were like this, he later told me. He couldn’t do much for them, medically. “But I’m letting them know I see their suffering,” he said. “That message helps somehow, some way, a little.”
It did help, all morning. It was an astonishing thing to witness. Over the previous weeks, I noticed Miller struggling with his administrative role at Zen Hospice, looking depleted after a long lunch with a donor or while being talked at about options for optimizing the Guest House’s automated phone directory. Now, he seemed in his element: the bedside was his natural habitat. When his next patient, a hunched older woman arrived, Miller started by asking her not just about her pain, sleep and meds but also about how she was doing since her dog died. “It’s a big hole to fill in the heart,” Miller told her. She whimpered, “The space is just so big.” She seemed relieved just to admit that.
Not long after that, Miller decided to step down as Zen Hospice’s executive director. He spent months trying to create the right part-time role for himself — something less administrative and managerial that would get him back at people’s bedsides again — but finally resigned. He continued to see patients at U.C.S.F., began co-writing a kind of field guide to dying and started raising seed money for a dream of his, something he’s calling the Center for Dying and Living: a combination “skunk works and design lab,” as he puts it, to dig into more imaginative possibilities for palliative care. He also ramped up his public speaking, and as he traveled around the world, he usually did so wearing Randy Sloan’s favorite, beat up belt, a gift from Sloan’s mother. Only Miller, with his mischievously counterintuitive style of insight, his deep appreciation of one, maybe trite-sounding truth — that the dying are still very much alive and we all are dying — could have thought about Sloan’s life, even the last phase of it, and decided, without hesitation, to wear that belt “for good luck.”
He was still hopelessly busy, still chastened by the volume of good work he saw in front of him but couldn’t do. But it felt right. Miller hadn’t unburdened himself, exactly, but rearranged and rebalanced the weight. He was committing to the parts of himself that felt most meaningful and trying to shake free of all the other, unhelpful expectations. “It’s the same thing I would counsel a patient,” Miller told me. It’s what he had counseled Randy Sloan;