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A Birthday Revery — October 5, 2022

In No Particular Path on October 5, 2022 at 11:16 am

Today it has been three quarters of a century since my birth.

Why does that sound like a lot longer than seventy-five years?

I suppose it might be, first, because our measurement of anything contains an attitude, an orientation, that helps us to think about it.  We measure our age in years because it keeps the numbers accessible, manageable.  We know that a century is a very long time, so three quarters of one seems enormous, also.  Seventy-five years since 1947 would also be 27,393 days, an impossible number to remain aware of and celebrate. 

Besides, anniversaries are always a day late.  Today, my seventy-fifth birthday, is actually the first day of my seventy-sixth year of life.  I finished seventy-five full years yesterday.  So, technically, today I celebrate a younger self.  Younger only by one day, but I’ll take that.

I don’t mind being seventy-five years of age.  I actually enjoy it.  I like it.  I don’t believe that I am seventy-five years old, though.  All my life, I think, I have felt either younger or older than my actual age.  At first, that always felt not-old-enough.  I wanted to be older, grown up, an adult.  Then, as I approached the years of life that have been called middle age, I briefly felt as though I were aging too fast.  I wanted to slow it down.  I wanted to give myself more time to learn, to do, to be whatever came into my mind I might be.

I was reminded this morning, that at eighteen I had just completed one year of college, but was not going back to the university, for reasons that are another story.  What I wanted to do was pack up a backpack and hit the road from Massachusetts to California.  I had some vague idea about being a movie actor; but mostly I just wanted to be grown up, to get free of a life that I found small, cramped, too-safe and too-slow.  But I lacked the knowledge of the world and of myself that would have given me the confidence and courage to risk it.

By the time I was twenty-five – the first quarter of my century – I had stumbled along far enough to have a degree plus some graduate studies, a steady job, and a family (one wife, three kids).  By my half-century, I had acquired a second wife, another kid, a career, and still no idea what I was doing most of the time.  But I had begun to realize that time was going too fast, not too slow.  I could see that the chances were rapidly fading of my ever being what my first-quarter-self had dreamed of being.  But I could also see more clearly how I had come to that place.  I could see the choices I could have made, for ill or good, and I could honor the ones I had made for how they had created who I had become.  And, over all, I liked who I had become.

Over the course of my third-quarter, I have encountered personal tragedy and triumph both.  Within the context of the life I have chosen, they carry equal weight.  They have spurred me to greater self-awareness, to clearer social consciousness, to a manageable balance of youth and age.  I have traveled across the country and back twice, I have been off the continent once.  I have retired from my career and have pursued other interests, such as writing, that I never took the time for before.  I have fallen in love and married for the last and best time.  And I am content that I am, at last, both grown up and not old.

I cannot, of course, predict what my next quarter of a century will bring, but I am ready for whatever it gives me time for.  When I was still in my pre-teens, I dreamed (literally, at night, while asleep) that I would live to be ninety-seven years old.  I now feel that I under-estimated.  I look forward to finishing this last quarter of my current century, and perhaps begin another.  But I have stopped growing old in favor of continuing to grow up.

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Just Do Something, Anything — except solve the problem.

In No Particular Path on February 27, 2022 at 10:28 am

The climate crisis is worsening, so we debate whether to pass a carbon tax or just keep recycling.  Should we go with wind power, solar, or thermal?  Maybe we should go back to building big dams.  Nah, let’s just call fossil fuels like natural gas “transitional,” and discuss the possibilities of “clean coal.”

Overt racism and misogyny are reenergized.  Let’s make a mixed-race woman Vice-President.  We’ll appoint an African American woman to the Supreme Court.  Nah, how about we just stop our kids from reading or talking about these things.  Also, let’s make sure they don’t see any of it on television.

Our LGBTQ+ youth are committing suicide at an alarming rate.  Let’s set up a hotline.  Or we could just make being trans illegal.

The country’s wealth gap is widening and the middle class is disappearing.  Let’s raise the minimum wage inadequately, let’s increase taxes tentatively on the super wealthy.  Or let’s just promote exciting stories about billionaires doing exciting things with their obscene wealth; like trying to end a disease somewhere or grow food somewhere else.  Or something really exciting, like building their own space ships and making even more money charging other super-rich people millions of dollars for space-tourism adventures.

Pick a problem. Any problem.  Now slip it back into the deck.  And is this your card?  The one that says, “All right.  Let’s . . . do . . . well . . . something.  Surely there’s a law we can pass, someone we can give an honor to, or a day or a week or a month we can spend talking about good stuff peripherally related to it.  Is there someone we can bomb?”  Or is it this one, with the picture of the ostrich looking for a hole to put its head in?  And the holes are labelled things like “ban it,” “oppress it,” “deny its existence,” and “call it socialist.”

We are most certainly a more polarized citizenry than I can remember our being in my lifetime.  Far too many of us are living at the extremes, and the things we want to do, believe we need to do, defy compromise.  But the fundamental problem isn’t our divided society, it’s something we all seem to agree on, though we may not realize it.

We prefer actions over solutions.

Solutions are hard.  Actions are easy.  Solutions can be expensive.  Actions can be cheap.  Solutions take time and patience.  Actions are quick and we can say we did something right away.  Solutions require all, or nearly all, of us to be part of them.  Actions can be done by those few people we elect to do those things so we don’t have to worry about them, or by those who want to do them.

So, we eschew solutions to our problems in favor of an action here, an action there; like taking one lick every few years at a lollipop, thinking we’ll eventually get to the special treat in the center.  Or our kids will.   Or their kids.  As long as we, and they, can keep licking.

And we think it’s a virtue.  Compromise and patience are always good things.  Better to do something than nothing.  And there is some truth in that.  Each extreme sees their actions as doing something good.  And the things we may do aren’t necessarily bad things to do.  Some of them make a real positive difference in people’s lives.  Maybe other people’s lives, or maybe just our own.  But they make a difference.

Allow me to interject here, that I am a progressive, and I have some very strong opinions about which actions are doing good and which are causing unconscionable harm.  I have debated these things elsewhere, and will continue to do so.  For the moment, though, I want to focus specifically on solutions versus actions.

Within the political divisions currently playing out, the differences in our actions have, themselves, become destructive, even deadly.  Now, more than ever, we need a larger plan.  We need to be working more comprehensively on solutions, not just chipping away at our problems on one side and trying to bury them on the other.

I have said before that there are no isolated incidents.  There are no problems that exist without context.  Like our natural world, our personal, social, economic, and political realities are an ecological system in which everything is connected.  The wealth gap, for example, is not simply a problem of our capitalist economic system.  It exists within a context of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, sexual and gender bias, religious intolerance and self-righteousness, white male privilege, and the destructive exploitation of the natural environment.  That isn’t even close to an exhaustive list.

And the effects are reciprocal.  Racism isn’t a separate problem that can be solved separately.  The climate crisis cannot be resolved in isolation from the economic imbalances or racial prejudices.  You see abortion as a problem?  You cannot ignore poverty, ignorance, racism, or misogyny.

This is what has been behind ideas such as the Green New Deal.  This is what we can learn from critical race theory (the real thing, not the bastardized versions being promoted on the right).  This is why we need science and the arts and history and philosophy, all of these, as part of the discussion.

We do need to prioritize, to triage, of course.  We do need to see that this will take time.  But we need to start seeing everything we do as part of a larger plan, a comprehensive solution that looks beyond the current actions and imagines a better world.  And our actions need to be larger, bolder.  We need persistence as well as patience.  We need courage to tackle the hard work, commitment to spend the necessary resources, the wisdom to see that the solutions will never be just about us, about what we will gain individually or group by group.  Patience isn’t license to procrastinate, it’s being willing to take the time to do it right.  Compromise, properly employed, isn’t about finding some imaginary middle between two extremes, it’s about being willing to see that there can be no solution that will not require something of us that we do not yet want to give.

It is way past time to stop taking actions, and start finding solutions.

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Teaching Real Life Skills

In No Particular Path on April 16, 2021 at 4:16 pm

I’m seventy-three years old.  I was educated K-12 in a public school in a small town.  During my lifetime, I have learned how to do, and have done the following:

Change a tire, change the oil, replace the spark plugs (and not mix up the wires), replace the distributer, and Gerry-rig, then replace, an accelerator cable, and repair and replace a muffler.

Replace the transmission and later the whole engine in a Volkswagen.

Repair and replace electrical fixtures, and electrical appliances.

Build a wall in my house, install different types of doors, paint inside and outside walls, and wallpaper a room.

Grow my own vegetables, gather my own food, and cook entire meals, from salad to desert.

Cut and chop my own firewood.

Balance a checkbook and do my own taxes.

Do my own laundry, make my bed, and clean my house.

Raise children, including changing diapers, and dealing with sickness.

Understand important issues, develop an informed opinion, and participate as a citizen in a democracy.                                                                                                                                                 

I was never taught specifically how to do any of these things in public school.  Aside from one course (usually “Home-ec” for girls and shop for boys – yikes!”), what I was taught were the basic skills of language and reason.  The language not just of reading and writing English (and in my case, some German and Latin), but also the languages of mathematics, and science, and history, and social studies, and the arts.  I was taught how to use those things to understand and analyze and solve problems.  And I was taught to find appropriate and useful information when I needed it to solve new problems and accomplish new tasks.

I have, of course, not done all of these things with equal skill, and have made mistakes along the way, but that’s how life is.

As an adult I have done a variety of jobs, from farm worker to short order cook to soda jerk to dishwasher.  I have participated in the arts in a variety of ways. 

And I eventually became a teacher, teaching both high school and college.

So, when I see someone talking about how they think our schools should be teaching what they call “life skills” such as the things I have listed above, instead of things like algebra II, or art and music, or foreign languages, because the students “will never use them,” then I want to tell them that they do not understand what education is, or what essential “life skills” actually are.

The specific tasks of life will be different for each student.  Not all will need to grow food, not all will need to be DIY mechanics or carpenters, not all will need to cook for themselves or care for and raise children, not all will need to manage their own money or do their own taxes.  But every one of them will need to know what to do when life presents them with a challenge or an opportunity that their public-school education could not have anticipated with specific instruction.  Every one of them will need to know how to reason, and solve problems, and make good personal decisions, and live with other people as a citizen.  Every one of them will need to be able to communicate with others who will help them with the things they cannot, themselves, do.  Every one of them will need to know how to create a life that is greater than just eating and working and sleeping, but is fulfilling and creative in whatever ways they might desire.

The old saying “give someone a fish, they will eat for a day; teach them to fish and they will eat for a lifetime” leaves off the third option.  Teach someone how to learn, how to reason, how solve problems, handle challenges, create the life they need; and they will not be limited to eating fish just to survive.

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Notre Dame is Burning — Long Live Notre Dame

In No Particular Path on April 15, 2019 at 4:48 pm

Notre Dame de Paris is burning.

The date is April 15, 2019. The great cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris is burning. As I write this, the roof is destroyed, the great spire has collapsed. I do not yet know if the rose window remains, or the fate of the great works of art that lived inside the cathedral walls. Most are likely gone forever. The building itself may be rebuilt, the parts that survive the fire, the great stone works, may be restored. Yet what remains or what comes next will never be what was.
This is the way of the works of men.
An irony in the tragedy is that it seems likely that the fire struck as restoration on the cathedral was beginning. Notre Dame was dying, crumbling under the weight of more than seven centuries. And a decision had been made to restore it, to give it new life, to keep it a while longer.
I think we may suppose that, like so much else that humans have put upon the Earth, it was inevitable that humans would destroy it, or the Earth would bring it down and cover it over. But this was not supposed to be the time. This was not supposed to be the way. Surely, those who wanted to restore it must have believed they could give it at least some greater measure of immortality, of permanence, however illusionary they might prove in some distant end.
I have often wondered at this idea of the immortality of the works of humans. What is it that drives us to preserve certain select pieces of the past, with the expectation that the future will value them as we do?
There have, at times, been movements in the arts which have celebrated impermanence. The “Happenings” of the 20th century, the works of the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude are high profile examples. But how many of us have built sand castles, drawn on sidewalks with chalk, marveled at ice sculptures, or gasped at fireworks displays. Some arts are by their very nature impermanent. Any live performance is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Every time an actor or a dancer or a musician goes before an audience, the event is new, fleeting, impermanent. Even as long as there are humans to remember it, the memories themselves are shadows of the original.
We can, of course, record these things, just as we will continue to have photographs and paintings and literary descriptions of Notre Dame to helps us remember its grandeur. But our records and our recordings are not the thing itself, and neither will be what goes up where the fire has brought it down.
The truth is, I think, that our attempts at permanence, our striving for immortality for the things we create is a measure of the value we place on things precisely because they are not immortal.
We do not really value immortality for its own sake. Those things we make of plastic, which are virtually indestructible, are mostly utile, cheap, meant for ordinary consumption, meant to be discarded – how ironic to create indestructible objects for impermanent uses. And ironic, too, I suppose. To create impermanent objects for the ages.
It is our mortality, our vulnerability that makes our lives so precious, and that is also true of the things we create.
In Shelley’s “Ozymndias” we are asked to look at the arrogance and futility of our attempts at immortality. In Wilde’s “Picture of Dorian Gray” the titular character forestalls his decline and demise through artistic sorcery, but in the end is, as are we all, reduced to dust. The Egyptians mummified the dead, but what remained was no more than a preserved shell of its human occupant, and if exposed to the air for too long, it too would go the way of Dorian Gray. We surround ourselves in art and literature and architecture and all the other arts with reminders of the impossibility of immortality. But we try, anyway.
Cathedrals are especially reflective of the struggle between death and eternal life. This is the central theme of all major religions, that it is possible for us both to die and to live forever.
There will be mourning for Notre Dame, as there is with any great loss. There will be also be discussions of how it might be raised from the dead, what measure of eternal life might still be possible for it. The faithful will not lose their faith, for if Notre Dame can find a way to live forever, then there is hope for us all.
For these are the ways of humans, as it is of all our works.

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All Grown Up

In No Particular Path, Uncategorized on December 31, 2018 at 9:11 am

The old man asked the child.
What do you dream of doing in your life, what would you like to be?

The child responded.
Do you mean when I grow up?

And the old man shook his head gently, but smiled, remembering.
Grow up? Why on Earth would you want to do that?
Listen to me. I have become old learning this.
Some day; at eighteen or twenty-five or forty or eighty years of age, perhaps; you may get up out of your bed, or linger wistfully over your breakfast, or stop halfway through chewing a bite of your sandwich, or see yourself mirrored in a darkened window, or sit alone in your chair, and suddenly see that you are grown up. And you will wonder, oh my god, when did that happen? You may even feel a bit of panic, wondering if you’re ready yet, or if it is already too late.
But the truth is that there is no time or place in life where you will be grown up. For growing up is the work of your life, not the end of it.
Choose well who and what you want to be today.  Do as well as you can what you want or need to do today.  Grow a little more like yourself today than you were yesterday; and you won’t have to think or worry about what you will be when you are as old as I am now. You will simply be what you have always been and what you have wanted to be.
Whatever you choose to do; whatever goals you set; whatever your accomplishments, large or small; whatever titles or labels you accumulate, and whether you wear them with pride or humility or uncomfortably or with regret; don’t let them trap you into being all grown up. Don’t let them define you, for definitions can become limits.

And the child looked sad then, and the old man wished, for just a moment, that he had not asked the question.

Why, the child asked, have you never told me this before now?

And, alone in his room, sitting in his chair, looking out the window at the new day, the old man sighed deeply. And a tear ran down his cheek.
Finally, he stood up. He put on his jacket, opened his door, and stepped outside. He turned around and looked for a moment at the walls within which he had been living for so long.
Today, the child said, I will be brave. Today I will do something new. Today I will stop being grown up.
And tomorrow I will, if I can, be whatever tomorrow offers me to be, and I will do whatever tomorrow brings me to do.
So, the old man, with the child guiding him, faced away from the walls and stepped into the world.

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God, Biology and Choice: Perhaps I Simply Had to Write This

In No Particular Path on November 13, 2018 at 12:04 pm

It is possible that every choice we make is freely made at the moment we make it. This isn’t to say that our choices aren’t influenced by our biological make-up and our present physical conditions, our past experiences and knowledge, our perceptions, our psychological and emotional states, our beliefs and our relationships with others who are involved in the choice; but all those things are simply data we use in making a determination about our choices, not the choices themselves. And the degree of influence any one factor may exert at any moment will certainly vary. In the end, though, we choose, and the choice is ours to make.
Another possibility is that our choices aren’t choices at all, but are predetermined by the path set for us by a deity or deities. In that case, we are simply puppets of the divine, who is working out some plan beyond our influence or understanding. All the influences that may affect a free will choice would be part of the overall experience, but wouldn’t change the choice itself. We may ask ourselves why we chose as we did and what plan the divine is using us for, or why the divine has directed others to behave as they do; but the responsibility for the choice itself isn’t ours or anyone else’s. We also have to consider whether everything is predetermined: every triumph, every tragedy, every disaster and every celebration.
The third possibility is that our choices are biologically predetermined; we are genetically pre-programmed to behave in certain ways. In this case, there may be a certain randomness in the universe itself; the movements of the cosmos, for example, are events which may affect us, as are all the influences under free will, but our specific response to those influences at any one moment is predetermined by our biology and the biology of all our evolutionary and ancestral history. As with divine predestination, we have no personal responsibility for our choices, nor does anyone else; we are simply leaves tossed on the wind, vulnerable to the forces of nature, but unable to make a deliberate choice about what is happening to us. We can, if our biological make-up predisposes us to it, question how those forces led us to this place, but the questions and any answers we arrive at would simply be an extension of our biological predetermination.
It is also possible that we have some free choice, but it is limited. Either the divine or our biological nature gives us the ability to make choices, but only with regard to the details of the trajectory, not the trajectory itself. We have freedom to choose, but only within predetermined limits set for us according to our biological make-up or our assigned place in god’s plan.
In any event, the larger question, for me anyway, is “so what?” Does it really matter whether all this is “real” or not? If I walk out the door and decide to turn left rather than right, does it really matter in any practical way whether that choice was an event in the moment or a predestined action. I will, in any case, experience the action according to what I believe to be the reality. If I believe I am making the choice I will experience the process of consideration, weighing the relevant influences, thinking about the possible consequences, deciding on my course of action and acting. And while the discussion of the possibilities makes for a wonderful philosophical exercise, and is certainly useful as a way to try to understand what it means to be human, unless I am able to separate myself from my perceptions, it makes no difference.
In other words, there is really no practical sense in which the reality of free will or predestination changes my responsibility in this life for my actions.
Suppose I believe that everything I choose is predetermined. Then that belief would also be predetermined. If I then use that belief as a reason to leave my life to whatever happens, without trying to deliberately choose a course of action, telling myself that nothing I do is in my control, then I have a dilemma. The rest of the world may still assign credit or blame to me for my actions, and generate consequences based on that. I may not like the consequences, but really have no complaint, because all of this would have to be part of the same predetermined reality that I claim to believe in. If I believe that I have a choice, on the other hand, then I can certainly examine my choices to see if they fit some standard of ethics, morals, or logic; and use that to argue for their rightness.
In the same way, debate about god’s existence can make for an interesting exercise in trying to understand the nature of the universe and the place of humans in that universe, but my beliefs will be part of what creates my experience, and they will help to shape my choices, the consequences of those choices, and the direction of my path. I cannot, of course, no matter how devoutly I might wish it, impose my belief wholly onto anyone else and make them see the world as I see it, or expect them to act in the world according to my perceptions.
In other words, either god exists or does not. There are no other possibilities. The differences between beliefs are only in how we define god. Our beliefs are in our definitions and vice-versa. There are a great many ideas of god in which I do not believe; and I suspect that a great many people would not believe in my ideas of god. So what? We are all human beings, limited by our humanness to flawed perceptions of any god that might exist. And since our definitions and perceptions are limited and flawed, so are the choices we might make based on those perceptions. We can use our idea of god to explain our actions, but we cannot expect others to see things our way just because our beliefs are sincere.
If my actions lead to consequences that are harmful to others, it is unreasonable to assume that my religious beliefs and convictions are exculpatory. I am still responsible for my own actions in any practical interpretation of what that responsibility is. To come to any other conclusion would be to treat my religious beliefs as a form of mental illness (a conclusion to which far too many evangelical atheists are willing to leap), in which I would claim that I am not responsible for my actions because my god made it impossible for me to understand them, to make rational choices about them, to understand their consequences, and to choose to act any differently.
A belief in free will, the ability of humans to make choices as independent individuals, is necessary for any sense of morality, personal responsibility, ethics, and judgment. It is also, of course, the foundation of guilt, blame, shame, and regret. But it can be used, as well, for conscious change, for correction, for discipline, for redemption. Absent free will apology is just a mindless exercise, an illusion. Without free will, punishment is simply cruel and pointless. Without free will, we do not affect our existence, it affects us.
It doesn’t matter at all whether all of this is an illusion. It is within the illusion that we must live, by the very nature of the illusion itself and our limited ability as humans to perceive it (as opposed to theorize about it) or to act outside of it.

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The Learned Hypocrisy of Being Human

In No Particular Path, PeaceAble, Uncategorized on July 30, 2018 at 10:44 am

To be human is to live in contradiction.
Perfect consistency is impossible for us. We think too much; we feel too much; we believe too much. We invented philosophy and science, and art, and morality. And every time we think that these have given us an answer that is final, that is absolute, that we can rely on, that is true, the world changes and we change and the answers have to change as well.
But change is hard, so we cling as long as possible to the old truths, accepting only what in our pain and our grief and our fear we can no longer deny; and contorting ourselves to make everything fit. We shake our heads in disbelief at our own contradictions, and label others’ inconsistencies as hypocrisy.
But it’s really just all of us being human.
I just read something that asked the question, “How could we go so abruptly from Barack Obama to Donald Trump?” How could the same country elect an erudite, scholarly, compassionate and thoughtful leader, then replace him with a crude, anti-intellectual, self-aggrandizing, impulsive one? Which of these very opposite men really represents who we are?
The answer is, of course, that they both do.
We have evolved into creatures who deal with the natural conflicts and dangers of the world by contriving to make them more contentious and more dangerous. There are real solutions to the real problems of the world. There are more than sufficient resources. But we allow our worst traits, our basest instincts, our superstitions and prejudices and fear to rule us; we hoard our resources instead of using them, we reject comprehensive solutions to complex problems in favor of simplistic analyses and short-sighted solutions. We proclaim our desire for peace and understanding, we pray for the relief of suffering and ask why we can’t all just get along; but we refuse to do what is necessary to achieve those things. If we can’t see a way to fix something right now, for all time, without any sacrifice or compromise on our part, we tell ourselves that no solution exists at all.
We are simultaneously all that is good in the world and all that is evil. And every choice we make is a choice to turn in the direction of one or the other. Our moral compass is broken and we have lost our ability to find our way in the wilderness.
We are polarized because we have made a choice to declare ourselves only half of who we are, and to further assert that our chosen half of this bifurcated self is the only acceptable truth, the only reality.
The contradictions remain, of course, but rather than acknowledge them and try to understand how they make us whole, we either deny them or tie ourselves in knots trying to fit them into the incomplete self we cling to.
We do not live linear lives. Our stories are told first in stream of consciousness, and we try to understand who we are by rewriting the stories until they make sense; but each story needs to make sense on its own as well as finding a place in the whole anthology of our lives, and we need to forget so much to make that happen.
I am a man and a male. How can I change the normative misogyny and chauvinism of the culture unless I can acknowledge that it lives within me? I can’t remove it from my experience, from the teachings that shaped me. It’s there. It always will be. But when I allow myself to see it I am better able to see my way forward; so that there may come a time when we will have raised a generation that never learned it in the first place. I’m not a feminist because I have never seen the feminine as less, but because I have, and I am working to change that in me as well as in the society.
I come most directly from pink-skinned European ancestors. How can I change the normative xenophobia and racism of the culture unless I acknowledge that I carry within me the same learned fear of the other, of the different, that I wish to change? I don’t seek racial justice and equality because I have never felt afraid, but because I have, and I’m working to change that in me as well as in the society.
I am cisgender and heterosexual. How can I change the normative homophobia of the culture unless I acknowledge that I have feared and felt shamed by the feminine in myself, that I have questioned my own capacity for intimacy, both emotional and physical, with both women and men? I don’t fight for the humanity of those who are homosexual, or bisexual, or transgendered, or gender non-conforming, or to allow everyone to love whomever they love because I was never told that my feminine was weakness and abomination, but because I was; and I’m trying to change that in myself as well in the society.
If we are going to tell our stories authentically and honestly and make it possible for others to do the same, then we cannot forget, cannot leave out, the parts that make us contradictory, inconsistent, and even sometimes hypocritical.
There is no high road or low road; there is only the path we have walked thus far, with its hills and valleys, its twists and turns and detours, its dark passages and glorious vistas; for there is no way forward except from where we are right now.

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Media and Murder: Why “fixing” violence in popular entertainment won’t stop mass shootings, but we may want to do it anyway.

In No Particular Path, PeaceAble, Politics on February 28, 2018 at 12:39 pm

 

In the aftermath of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting there has been a new round of discussions about how to prevent such tragedies.  And one of the ideas being pressed by people who really don’t want to talk about things like gun control is the old claim that we need to do something about violent video games and movies.

 

The available evidence, however suggests two seemingly contradictory ideas: first, violence in video games and movies (or any other media) does not cause people to commit mass murder; second, we should nonetheless work to reduce the amount of graphic violence in entertainment media.

 

The idea that video games or movies are to blame seems to surface only when the killer is a teenager or very young adult.  The average age of U.S. mass shooters, however, is 35.  And, although the average age of video game users is around 31, the largest number (29%) of users are under 18; but that percentage is not significantly higher than 18-35 (27%) or 50+ (26%).  In addition, only 20% of video games are “shooter” games, and as video game sales have increased significantly, violent crime rates have remained steady or shown decreases.  And even in individual cases, there has never been any clear link between the actions of any mass shooter and his consumption of violent media.  In other words, there is no evidence that suggests the use of violent video games or watching violence in films or on TV has any causative relationship to mass shootings.

 

Most media studies seem to suggest that entertainment reflects popular attitudes and serves to reinforce them, but does not directly cause them. Think of it this way: if you are going to make a movie or design a game that will appeal to as large a segment of the population as possible, you won’t try to change what they want, you will try to discover what they already want and give them more of it.  In other words, people aren’t expressing themselves violently because popular entertainment is violent; popular entertainment is violent because people are expressing themselves that way.  And there are a great many social and cultural factors involved in that. 

 

It has long been observed that movies, in particular, reflect the times in which they are made.  During World War II, for example, Hollywood made a lot of movies showing the heroism of our fighting forces, the evils of our enemies, and the courage of Americans on the home front.  Following the Vietnam conflict, an unpopular war, there were a lot of films that showed the horrors of war, the physical and psychological effects of war on both troops and the general populace.  When Ronald Reagan was elected and the country seemed to be shifting back in a more conservative direction, we saw more movies about the cold war and home-town heroes rising up to defend against Soviet invasion, and movies that revised the Vietnam narrative and the idea of the super-soldier.  As things improved and the cold war ended, film began to reflect more positively on human relationships.  But since 9/11 amid renewed fears of terrorism and attack, we have seen a great many more movies about superheroes and the military, with ever increasing amounts of violence.  When people are afraid, Hollywood gives them superheroes of all kinds.

 

But there is in that realization cause for concern.  If the violence of our entertainments is a reflection of who we are, is this who we want to be?  And what is the danger in that?

 

One lesson of the women’s movement and its attempts to deal with misogyny in American culture has been that media is extremely important in the reinforcement of cultural norms, and that culture changes much more slowly than social awareness or changes in law or individual behavior.  Much has changed with respect to the role of women in the workplace, but events of the last two years have shown that the culturally normative idea that women exist subservient to the power and fantasies and physical needs of men remains firmly in place.  And just as the cultural norms cling to archaic views of men and women, it also clings to normative fantasies about the military, American exceptionalism, white supremacy, and violence as a solution to problems of violence.

 

American culture continues to tell us two things of relevance here.  First, it tells white, heterosexual, Christian, American males that they have reason to be afraid, primarily of the “other.”  And, second, it continues to try to frame the solutions to that fear in fantasies of superheroes and militaristic violence, weapons of enormous destruction, and personal heroism.  Notice, as something of an aside, that greater awareness of the ubiquity of violence against women has coincided with an increase in the number of movies involving female superheroes, females in the military, and female characters equal to men in their capacity for violence.  Our culture, as reflected in our popular entertainment, values the capacity for violence as a measure of our ability to respond to our fears.

 

The graphic and excessive violence of popular media shows us, in other words, that we have a much deeper problem of violence embedded in The American culture, and we need to address that.  So, what can we do?  How do we change the culture?

 

Media in America are profit driven.  They respond to what media consumers tell them they want.  If we tell them, through our purchase of video games, our attendance at movies, our TV habits, that we want more militarism, more police action, more superheroes, more personal heroism, more graphic depictions of more violent responses to conflict, more reinforcement of our fears about those who are different from us; then that is what  we will get, and we can expect that there will be more and more incidents of people trying to solve their problems by taking large, extremely deadly weapons to places where they can kill as many people as possible.  There is no reason, except the public’s appetite for it, that superhero films, or vigilante films, or action video games need to show scenes of extremely graphic, extremely destructive violence.  If the public were to decide, in large enough numbers, that they no longer want to be told that the solution to violence is more and greater violence; if they were to stop paying good money to go to the latest big-budget superhero blockbuster; if they were to not go out to get the latest version of Grand Theft Auto; then the media would stop making those things.

 

But that’s a hard thing to do.  Most of the people I know really love the latest dark manifestations of Marvel fantasy characters.  They like a good action movie with lots of enormous guns being fired, lots of big explosions going off, and lots of hugely muscled heroes killing lots of ugly, despicable villains.  And real cultural change would require us to give some of that up.  We would have to dial it down.  We would have to start playing games that require more nuanced solutions, we would have to start patronizing films, even superhero and military films, that require less graphic on-screen violence to arrive at a climax.

 

It is a myth that watching violence purges us of violent feelings.  Do you leave a violent game or a violent movie thinking, “wow, that’s great; now I don’t feel like I need to do that in real life,” or do you leave thinking, “I am so energized, so pumped up, that I think I could (or wish I could) be a hero like that in real life”? 

 

There is no single solution to the problem of violence and the increase in the kind of mass murder we have witnessed in Parkland, in Las Vegas, and in so many other of our schools, our malls, our concert venues, our churches and our public spaces.  We need a comprehensive approach that combines a variety of strategies.  Most of those strategies are well known, but cannot work in isolation from one another.  Certainly, passing a lot of new laws and regulations about violence in entertainment won’t make a huge difference by itself.  But all of these things can make a difference if we begin to take a hard look at how our culture, through it’s entertainment, its other public media, its politics and its policies, reinforces the idea that our problems can be solved by more and greater violence.

 

As consumers of public media and popular entertainment we can change the culture if we have the will to do it.  It won’t be quick and it won’t be easy, but long term effective solutions rarely are.  What ideas about violence are you helping to reinforce by how you spend your entertainment dollar and your leisure time?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Do Children Really Need to Know How to Grow Food?

In No Particular Path on May 5, 2017 at 2:28 pm

Our public schools should be teaching every child how to grow food in a garden.  They should be teaching every student how to change a flat tire, how to cook their own food, how to make change, how to balance their checkbook.  Comment yes if you agree.  Like and share.

Yeah, no.

While those are all admirable things for people to know how to do, they are also things that any adult can figure out and anyone with access to the internet or a library can find instructions for.  And that’s what we need to be teaching.

There is so much knowledge in the world; and new information, new discoveries, new important things to learn are being created every day.  This is the information age, and we are awash in things that it would be good to know.  But we don’t all need to know exactly the same things and we don’t all need to know them at the same time in our lives.

The biggest impediment to quality education for everyone is the belief that there are certain things, particular narrow ideas or “life skills,” that everyone needs to know.  What everyone really needs to know is how to think and reason effectively; how to ask effective and relevant questions; how to find relevant, valid, useful and credible answers; and how to apply those answers to the specific problems they need to solve or specific tasks they need to accomplish.

All the rest is optional.  Teach some of it so that students can see how to use the thinking skills they are learning, but focus on the thinking itself, not the specific tasks.

Teach students how to read well and nothing they need to know will be unavailable to them.

Teach them how to use numbers effectively and keeping track of their own money will never have to be a problem.

Teach them to think scientifically and they will be able to tell the difference between what they know, what they think they know, what they don’t actually know, and what they believe.  And they will understand the proper role of each in their lives.

Teach them how to think historically and they will be able to see how their own story intersects with the stories history tells us; and they will be able to use those stories to help make the world a better place.

Teach them to think and express themselves creatively and they will never lack for beauty or inspiration of their own, or for appreciation of the beauty and inspiration of others.

Teach them to express their ideas articulately and eloquently in speech and in writing and they will always have a voice that cannot be silenced.

Teach them to argue rationally and with civility and they will not need to follow demagogues or charlatans.

Teach them to think ethically and responsibly and they will become the leaders of a world with the potential for honest, compassionate and peaceable coexistence.

Teach them to listen effectively and the world will be open to them.

That does not, of course, mean that we might not choose to teach some “practical” skills.  But product should always be the servant of process, not the other way around.  If we teach students to garden it should be in the service of teaching them about other things.  A garden is, after all, more than just a collection of vegetation sitting in dirt.  There are reasons in science for why some plants need one kind of soil and others need something different.  There is a science to understanding why some plants should be paired with other plants, but avoid being too close to others.

There is much we can learn about gardens from the history of agriculture, from folklore and literature, from the politics of our relationship to the earth and its ecosystems.  There are ways to make a garden beautiful as well as productive, and to use what we grow to make aesthetically pleasing food served in beautiful surroundings.

In the skill of changing a tire there is much to be learned about applied physics, about risk assessment, about relationships between humans and their machines.

In balancing a checkbook, there is the application of mathematics, understanding of money and wealth as sources of power for both good and ill.  There is a chance for self-awareness in seeing how each of us thinks about money and possessions in our lives.  There are ethical questions that can be asked and answered.

All of these things are possible, but there are also a nearly infinite number of other ways to teach the same things, and we should be open to them all.

There is an old saying that if you give someone a fish you feed them for a day; if you teach them how to fish you feed them for a life time.  But fish is a very limited diet.  So, if instead, you use fishing as a way to teach them about a great deal more than that, then you will not only feed their stomach for a lifetime, you will feed their whole body, their mind, and their spirit.

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Go Ahead and Overthink It

In No Particular Path, PeaceAble on April 14, 2017 at 10:55 am

I have often been accused of “overthinking” something.  So, naturally, I cannot help but think about that.

Usually, the offense is committed when I have encountered something that is either intended as a joke, or a clever analogy, or a meme with a narrow scope and that has, I admit, a very clear intent.  But I will see something in whatever it is that seems to need further thought, a bit more careful examination, perhaps something that takes the meaning in an entirely different direction.

So.  Guilty as charged, I suppose.  I do “overthink” things.

And I will continue to do so.  I will proudly overthink things whenever I feel like it.  And I encourage you to do the same.

We currently live in a culture in which we are repeatedly told, both directly and indirectly, not to think very much at all.  We’re told to feel, to react, to seek truth and profundity in 140 characters or less.  Reason is too slow, analysis is the same as bias, facts are whatever we declare them to be and they mean, like Humpty Dumpty’s words, whatever the source tells us they mean.  We’re told to choose our side in any dispute and hold our position against all attacks.  Intellect is suspect, emotions are power, thinking wastes valuable time.  We must act, we are told, and thinking isn’t action.

Culture, however, is not created mainly by the big things, but by the ordinary.  We tell a joke, sing a song, use a common expression we picked up somewhere, buy a product because we remember the ad for it, click on a hyperlink, watch a television show or go to a movie, leaf through the tabloids in the checkout line.

People are amused, they’re shocked, they’re enthralled, they’re outraged, they’re inspired.  And they move on.  they let it go, get over it, wait for the next shoe to drop, shake their heads.  They react; then it’s on to the next meme, the next chuckle or shock or inspiration or outrage.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

But they don’t think.

Often, they don’t even know how.

How many common logical fallacies can you name?  Do you know the order of operations in solving a simple math problem?  Are you proud to tell people that you never use algebra?   Do you understand the difference between a hypothesis and a theory, between a theorem and a law, or between argument, persuasion, and propaganda?  Do you know the structure of a deductive argument and an inductive argument; or why the differences between them are important?  Would you be able to distinguish an empirical study from an experimental one, or know the appropriate use of each?

Does all of that sound boring to you?  Do you think that none of that has anything to do with you or your life?  The fact is that you either use or encounter all of those things, or their direct products, every single day.  They have consequences that affect you, for both good and ill.

Academics and intellectuals are often accused of not knowing anything about real life, as though thinking prevents us from experiencing the things that affect all humans.  Thought and emotion are not, however, enemies.  When properly applied they complement each other.  Problems that are solved with just logic can be dry, unfeeling, even cruel.  Problems solved with only emotion can be rash, clouded with bias, and even counterproductive.  When, however, we apply both reason and emotion, we have the opportunity for both pragmatism and empathy, for solutions that address the human condition realistically and practically.

There is no aspect of human activity or experience that does not require both the mind and the heart for its best expression.  Music is mathematics, sculpture is physics, art is geometry.  Planting a garden is both chemistry and aesthetics, biology and design.

Choose anything that either delights or disturbs you.  Take a moment to examine it.  Try to step away from your initial reaction.  Think about it.  Overthink it.  Practice patience with both ideas and emotions.  Don’t copy, share, like or comment until you have taken a least a few moments to try to understand it, and to understand your relationship to it.  Resist the urge to stop at feeling and go no further.

Hate, prejudice and discrimination are literally thoughtless.  They rely on the triggering of emotion, not of reason.

Compassion and empathy require thoughtful understanding, and the ability to both feel and reason.

There is far too much over-emoting these days.  A bit of overthinking would be a welcome change.  The best answers will usually be found, of course, somewhere between the two extremes.  But you can’t find the center unless you can recognize the poles.

So go ahead.  Join me.  Overthink a few things, or even a lot of things.  Do it for a saner, less polarized, and better understood world.

Or tell me I’m overthinking it.

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