The Future Past Can Be Cured

17 Dec

Over the weekend, I attended the funeral of a woman whom I held in great honor and respect because, among many other things, she was the epitome of the best of the South in which I grew up—a genuinely welcoming soul to everyone I ever witnessed her interaction with. I was close enough to her in spirit to have sat with the family at the funeral service, but at the last minute, I chose not to. Instead I sat across the aisle from the family.

When I first sat down, I was alone on the end of the pew in the chapel where the service was to be held. But soon I was surrounded by a group of women dressed in colorful hats and uniforms with badges. It took me a moment to figure it out, but the group was the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization in which the lady whose funeral it was had been an active member. Some years ago, she had become the formal or informal family archivist, as her son wrote in her obituary, and, to me, the most prominent item among the objects in her archive was a collection of letters written by an ancestor to his wife during the Civil War, on which the book Letters to Amanda was based. (It is co-written and annotated by Sam Hodges and Jeffrey Lowe, in case you’re interested in reading it, published by Mercer University Press).

The fact that my decision not to sit with the family had resulted in my being ensconced conspicuously bare-headed and badgeless amongst this colorful group struck me as humorous, but one family member thought it funny because of what she considered the irony, given the “liberal” things she has seen me post on Facebook before. I have to confess that that thought had not crossed my mind, mostly because I don’t consider what I post on Facebook as aligning with any political or other man-made group, and therefore not necessarily liberal or conservative. I am not the sum total of my opinions, mostly because they often change as new information is acquired, and although my views are dynamic, the basic principles I try to live by with respect to my fellow humans aren’t.

Granted, if you look at the political environment of the recent past, I understand why my view is seen as more liberal than conservative. There have been infinitely more opportunities for me to rebut the views of some “conservatives,” despite the fact that I consider other terms more accurately descriptive of some of those views. But, unless you’re stalking me (and free of confirmation bias), it is unlikely that you will have seen everything I post, and your assumptions about what I believe about things I haven’t written about are very likely skewed as a result.

But back to the Confederacy. In this sesquicentennial year of the march of Sherman through Atlanta, I have had reason to revisit a number of times the impact of the Civil War on my life and others of my geographic identity. Once again, arguments about states’ rights have reared their heads, this time with respect to voting procedures, same-sex marriages and learning standards.

I happen to have been born, raised and still reside in the southeastern United States. I am Southern through and through. I celebrate the fact that it is only in the South that people still pull their cars to the side of the road in honor of a passing funeral procession. It happened on Saturday even as we drove down a divided highway on the way to the cemetery, and at one turn, a man holding a sign for some sale in the strip shopping center behind him bowed his head as we passed. Excepting the gnats and mosquitoes, I’d much rather live in place that can’t justify buying a snow plow. There will never be anything to me that compares to the sound of crickets at dusk or the slamming of a wooden screen door or the melody of one-syllable words stretched into three. There will never be a more beautiful sight than a freshly plowed field of red clay mixed with beach sand from 10,000 years ago. Nothing will ever taste better than a watermelon straight from the field or peanuts boiled in brine. The history of almost 400 years is marrow in my bones.

But despite the fact that a glance at my personal ancestral history will find nothing but Confederate soldiers and sympathizers, including one who died at Gettysburg, I do not and will not swear my allegiance to the St. Andrew’s battle flag or the cause for which it stood. From 1957 when I was born to today in almost 2015, I have never been a Confederate American, an oxymoron if there’s ever been one. I am an American, period, who has spent a lifetime swearing my allegiance to a country in which people of character take credit for what they achieve and responsibility for the mistakes they make, ensuring that those mistakes are not continued. They make amends when they are proven wrong, even if the amends are simply the expression of compassion, the acknowledgment that another has been injured by something. They unite around the liberty of every citizen today, including the descendants of those enslaved or otherwise mistreated by members of their family trees, including those Americans interned during WWII and those whose reputations were besmirched by the likes of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose perverse spirit seems curiously alive in some today.

I don’t know what my attitudes or opinions would have been if I’d been born in 1857 instead of a hundred years later in the burgeoning era of the civil rights movement. I don’t know what I’d feel if it had been my uncle and not my great-great-uncle who likely died in Pickett’s Charge. But that is not the world or the country into which I was born, and many things have transpired to affect my perspective, including culturally-imposed restrictions on my gender for no rational reason–not the least of which was the fact that by virtue of having been born with two X chromosomes, I was considered a freak to have a high aptitude for math and incapable of assuming the top responsibility of spiritual leadership in the church I spent the majority of my adolescence as part of. It was only natural, I suppose, that I identified more with those who were not only prevented from eating beside me in a restaurant or studying beside me in school because they were dark-skinned and I am of Anglo-Saxon-Celtic origin, but actually beaten, tortured or murdered for daring to try and change it.

Let me hasten to say that there is nothing about the United Daughters of the Confederacy that offends me, but I’m not a member. I’m not a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, either, though I qualify via several branches. I appreciate history for its ability to illuminate why certain decisions were made by certain people at certain times under certain conditions, and the clues for decision-making today that it brings, both in choosing paths and not choosing paths based on the triumphs and mistakes of those past. One of the perks of reading Letters to Amanda for me is in getting a little closer to what it might have felt like for that soldier to be so far from home for so long and what it might have felt like to, in this case, be one of those at home who would not only never see him again, but would be denied the opportunity to lay him to rest in a known location. It gives me an idea of what it must be like for those families with MIAs from WWII and Korea and Vietnam and the Near and Middle Eastern wars in which we have involved ourselves. External things have changed, but the hearts of humans have not.

One of those characteristics of the human heart means it is not impossible for me to suffer inconvenience or to accept changes, even if it requires me to give up some privilege I have grown used to but am not entitled to, especially if it is in support of the “common defense” or “general welfare” of every American, even those who subscribe to different or no religious beliefs, manifest different skin pigmentations and hair textures than mine, or have an IQ higher or lower.

It is not impossible for me to have an opinion or belief so far removed from another’s that I cannot conceive of how he came to have it, and yet be devoted to defending his right to have it, even while resisting his decidedly undemocratic intent to make laws that favor his view over that of others who don’t share it for equally valid reasons of their own.

It is not impossible for me to quietly honor in my heart the preachers and hard-scrabble farmers from which I received my DNA and their willingness to risk death for what they believed…and still state, absolutely and unequivocally, that they were 100% wrong, that no amount of economic dependence on cotton and tobacco would ever justify what they did to African men and women kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains to this land we occupied.

Now, that in no way suggests that I condone revenge-taking for wrongs committed. Nor does it suggest that I believe there should be reparations for slavery in any financial form. The idea of placing a dollar value on a human life based on what might have been in a world as unpredictable as ours is offensive to me, whether we’re talking about the opportunity costs of the centuries-long oppression of demographically-defined groups or damages in a wrongful death suit based on projected lifetime earnings. If God loves me so much that he knows every hair on my head, then he knows every hair on the head of every human who has ever graced this earth with his or her presence, and there is nothing—including the opinions of any other humans—that can separate him or me from that love, or raise or lower our value in the eyes of the only One who matters. As Jesus said, “The rain falls on the just and the unjust.” The sun shines on both, too. It’s the nature of life. The people to whom reparations might have been owed and the people who arguably might have owed them are long gone. And as Queen Elizabeth I once said, “The past cannot be cured.”

But the past can be studied, the accomplishments of our ancestors honored, and the mistakes they (and we) made acknowledged for what they are. And the future past—today—can be cured in advance.

If you think those views are liberal, so be it.

Tags: , , , ,

Ignorance of Our Ignorance

28 Nov

I was a math major before I changed my major to psychology, which makes it somewhat understandable that I was attracted to the study of statistics and their use (and misuse). That interest and the relative expertise I gained in the scientific method and its use in the social sciences has brought me a lot of joy, actually, as it continues to broaden my understanding of human nature and its impact on everything from perception to what we read, what we buy and ideas about why. It, unfortunately, has brought me a lot of pain and frustration as well, having now watched through the years how often statistics have been used to manipulate the general population to achieve an end that sometimes benefits and sometimes diminishes the lives of the very same people who fall prey to the manipulation in their ignorance.

I’m not sure if it upsets me more when politicians malign groups of their own constituents with meaningless statistics that are irrelevant to any honest attempt at improving their lives or the effect of unscrupulous marketing people whose primary focus is getting people to buy things on false pretenses or the astounding hubris of those who create the unending domino game of ignorance, posting incendiary garbage that no one seems to bother to question. It leaves me in a constant quandary of trying to figure out what’s driving the behavior, since the only way to stop something is to understand what motivates it, what the payback is, as Dr. Phil says. Is it ignorance or narcissism or sheer obliviousness to the connections between the fates of those outside our circles and those of our own fates? Most of the time I end up deciding that it doesn’t really matter—the results will be the same either way. And they won’t be good for anyone except a few unless we begin to focus on what we don’t know instead of what we think we know. The only thing more potentially damaging to our country than not knowing what we don’t know is not knowing THAT we don’t know in the first place.

For example, in a political poll, suppose that it is reported that 70% of women are in favor of or disapprove of X. (Fill in the blanks with your own X.) That’s a fact, based on a single snapshot, a single question asked in a single period from a hopefully random group of women—random because if you ask too many people within a group of people like Republican women or black women or women who’ve had an abortion or women who make over a certain amount of money, the answers cannot be extrapolated beyond that group. The statistics don’t reflect the wisdom or the rightness or the reality of the subject at hand—only opinions. And not only that, opinions derived from as many unique experiences and beliefs as there are women who share the view.

Then there’s the problem of the 30% who, for whatever reasons, don’t agree. And the rather obvious fact, if you think about it, that if you walk down any street and meet a woman you have never seen before, you could no more tell whether she’s in the 70% or the 30% than you can predict the weather next year on your birthday. And though some of you may want to argue the point to further some esoteric agenda, to say otherwise only proves that you fall in that narcissistic group mentioned above—those to whom it has never occurred there exist equally valid opinions other than theirs.

Statistics do not prove cause and effect—never have, never will. Just because 70% of women believe in a certain way does not provide any information about why they believe in that way or what they will do (or not do) because of their belief. Statistics show correlations, relationships between two variables—in this case that there seems to be a strong likelihood that if you are female, you will feel this way about X. Predictive probabilities, but not explanations for anything.

So, what good are statistics then? They’re invaluable in saving time, in benchmarking change, in understanding if the actions we take move us toward achieving goals or not. They help us predict results based on probabilities, and suggest pathways for further examination. If I give you a valid and reliable psychological test, the items for which are included based on statistics, I have clues to how best to help you, clues to how well you will perform in a given job, clues to whether or not you’ll succeed in college. And if I meet you on the street, I have some data—albeit unconscious—that may help me protect myself. If the statistics suggest that most murders occur at night, the fact that some don’t shouldn’t stop me from keeping an eye out when I venture out in the night to go to the grocery store alone. But that doesn’t mean the guy in the parking lot is out to get me, either.

What we get from statistics are only ever clues. No definitive diagnoses. No pigeonholes. No guarantees. No certainties. And thankfully so. If statistics provided end-all answers, there would be nothing further to investigate. If we were robots programmed only to act in a certain way, this would be one boring place—made up of nothing but Stepford know-it-alls. Ignorant, oblivious know-it-alls.

But we aren’t all Stepford know-it-alls, statistically speaking. And those of us who aren’t can repair our faults. But we have to recognize them as faults. And the fault we must repair first is the narcissistic belief that we know the truth about anyone but ourselves, and even that is questionable.

We must repair the ignorance of our ignorance.

The Wisdom of Fences

15 Jul


Twelve years ago, I wrote and published a book of my own called Simon Says: Views from a Higher Perspective, a set of essays “dictated” by my Siamese cat, Simon. Through the years, readers have communicated with me about particular ones that resonated with them, sometimes in ways that I did not—and could not—have predicted. I recently updated the eBook version, adding a couple of new essays left out of the original, and had occasion to re-read what Simon had said. To my surprise, even I came away from some of them with different or broader ideas from those that stimulated my writing them in the first place.

This one, On Fences, which was originally focused on the importance of limit-setting for parents, set me thinking about the ideal purpose and need for “laws,” both in the secular space of democracy and the sacred space of spiritual and emotional health. “Murphy” in the story is Simon’s “brother,” a domestic shorthair. “M” is me.

on dignity 155x115

When we moved from our old neighborhood to a new house, M had a fence installed in the back yard before she would let Murphy and me outside. Whereas our old house had been way back in the subdivision, our new one was next to a very busy street.

Feeling that his freedom was being restricted, Murphy was quite upset when he discovered the fence. No matter how much he protested, however, M wouldn’t budge.

Murphy was still a young tom, with limited knowledge of the dangers of a busy street, and he just didn’t understand. He looked for holes in the fence and tried more than once to jump over it. Fortunately, M had paid for solid workmanship.

After months of frustration, Murphy learned that the limit to his exploration wasn’t going away, so he accepted the limitation and made the best of it. He played while I watched from the patio chair. Life was good.

Then one day M forgot that the yard maintenance crew was coming and left Murphy outside when she went to work. When the crew left, they accidentally left the gate open, and M saw it as she pulled her car into the driveway.

I knew she was upset because she left her purse in the car and the door open, and walked through the front yard, calling Murphy’s name. She was frightened that Murphy had gone into the street and been injured in some way.

But he hadn’t. As she rounded the house on the gate side, she saw him sitting just inside the fence. She cried a little when she picked him up and hugged him to her chest. I’m not sure why.

Later, I asked Murphy why he hadn’t gone out when he had the chance. Pensive, he told me that he HAD gone through the gate into the front yard, and had seen the rapidly moving vehicles.

“They were pretty scary,” he said, “and after I thought about it, I knew why M put up the fence. She wasn’t just keeping us in…she was keeping us safe.”

M didn’t know it, but at that moment, Murphy no longer needed the actual fence. He had built his own “fence” inside, one which I knew would keep him safe even when M and I are gone.

I thought about the whole progression of events, from the building of the fence to Murphy’s growing up, and I came to a conclusion that I know is true.

A wise parent knows when to build fences and when to open the gate.

 

It isn’t just the wise parent who knows when to build fences and when to open the gate. It’s the wise person in any position granted authority to govern others, especially those in political office who have been elected to represent the interests of each and every citizen within their jurisdiction, irrespective of whether those citizens voted for them or not. It’s the wise person appointed to the highest court of the land. It’s the wise person who runs a company, too.

But I still maintain that the person whose wisdom is more important than all is the parent, because the wisdom of all the others depends on it.

If I had to choose the most important responsibility of parents it would be to devise fences—“laws,” “rules of behavior” that exist in the home—that are broad enough to allow freedom for the emerging selves inside to develop to their maximum potentials yet provide realistic guidelines for living in a civil society where the fence not only protects that tender self, but the tender selves on the other side of the fence.

In psychological parlance, fences are called boundaries, synonymous with property lines detailed in titles. In political parlance, fences are called laws. In religious parlance, they’re doctrines. But no matter what, the same ideals apply in all cases. The purpose of fences is, as Murphy learned in the story, dual. In addition to protecting the authority of the person inside the fence over what happens inside the fence from assault from the other side, it protects those outside the fence from the same intrusion, intentional or otherwise, from us. Where one fence ends, another begins—and that’s true no matter which side of a fence one is on.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been a psychologist almost as long as I’ve been a Christian, but I see virtually everything that Jesus said or did as relating to one side or the other of the fence. If Jesus talked about anything, he talked about pumping up and respecting the soul-self inside the fence and the boundary that restricted behavior in relation to those on the other side.

The kingdom of heaven to me is simple in concept, but obviously excruciatingly difficult in practice. It is a “kingdom” in which every self inside his or her fence is fully and constantly aware of God’s unconditional, unchanging love for him or her irrespective of the noise or behavior exhibited by events and people outside the fence. It is a “kingdom” in which that loved self also recognizes and respects the boundary that exists between him- or herself and the other selves who are unconditionally, and unchangingly loved by God in equal measure. It is a “kingdom” where the application of boundaries is so well-ingrained that all energies are devoted to the raising up of the citizenry as a whole. If you can expect your fences to go unmolested without constant patrol, you can join together with others and create much more wonderful things.

Jesus said he came to fulfill the law and the prophets, and then quoted two simple commandments. Love God (which by the commutative property of addition means to love Love) and love your neighbor as yourself. I can’t think of a more complete set of laws, simply because abiding by those two alone relieves any worry of breaking the rest, whether we’re talking about the “big ten” or the 600+ rules made up by the ancient Hebrews. The most tangible manifestation of love is the respecting of boundaries, especially when the thoughts and beliefs of the person on the other side of the fence vary significantly from yours. If you love your neighbor, defined as anyone else whose yard exists outside yours, you won’t kill him, you won’t covet his wife or her husband or her lawnmower or her children. You’ll honor your father and mother, who ideally are two more separate people whose authority, once their children are adults, recedes to include only the area inside their own fences, not by deferring forever to their will, but by becoming the most fully creative human you can.

Unfortunately, where the fences actually “should” be varies according to where one is standing. And also unfortunately, the “belief” of a majority has nothing to do with the reality of where a fence should be or the amount of force that one should or can exert on the fence from either side. Jesus knew that, I think, else when asked by the disciples if he would teach them to pray, the part about forgiving trespasses comes pretty early. And what exactly is a trespass? It’s crossing a property line uninvited.

I am convinced that if we could get this one concept down, the kingdom of heaven would materialize right in front of us. But making more laws in an attempt to control someone else’s behavior just because you think it a bad idea or that you know where the line should be better than the person whose fence it is in the first place—especially if his fence doesn’t back up to yours—isn’t going to bring it about. Bringing the kingdom of heaven about relates more to what Simon said about Murphy, that he no longer needed the fence because he had his own fence inside. It is learning what it means to love oneself and each other by learning what it means to self-govern and asking forgiveness when we overstep our boundaries.

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive others who trespass against us.

Vally

P.S. If you’re interested at all in reading other things Simon said and you have a Kindle or Kindle app, click here: Simon Says: Views from a Higher Perspective.

I have a few copies of the printed hardcover book, too. If you’d like an autographed copy, click here to email me.

On the Way to Untangling the Knots in My Earbuds

6 Jul

I went to the gym late Monday, all the while thinking about the unGodly lack of wisdom displayed by the Supreme Court ruling on the Hobby Lobby case. In less than a few hours, I’d already gotten into two “fights,” one each with people about different facets of the argument and the tactics used in “debating” the issue.

Notably, the focus of the two arguments was not the same. So it is with virtually everything discussed in the political realm these days. “Pro-lifers” argue over the definition of when life begins; “Pro-choicers” argue over where the boundary that defines where the authority of one person or group ends with respect to another in a “free” society. “Liberals” argue for the precedence of that which has impact on the inalienable rights of human beings; “Conservatives” argue for the precedence of limited government over “big” government, irrespective of its impact on human beings. Both argue into an empty space where no one is listening. No discussion on either side considers and addresses the legitimate concerns of both. Instead, finding out who can shout the loudest about how evil or ignorant those on one side or the other are or who’s most to blame for what ails us is the strategy of the day. No resolution—just polarization—can come about. And here we are.

I can’t say how many times in the past decade or more that I’ve thought of the fable of the six blind men asked to describe an elephant. One said the elephant was like a wall, another a spear, still another a fan. They had each, of course, encountered a different part of the elephant, but were blind, both literally and figuratively, to the discoveries of the other five. The argument that ensued was vicious. One thing was clear — the original goal of accurately describing the elephant had been left in the dust.

A poem, based on the old Hindu story and written by John Godfrey Saxe in the mid-1800s, ends thus:

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

In the aftermath not described in the story or the poem, chances are that each became increasingly recalcitrant in defending their individual positions, perhaps calling each other, in modern-day parlance, dastardly epithets that elicit the beating of chests and the bravado of rulings on “our side,” whatever that side happens to be—raising the opinions of their blind observations to the level of God’s authority while loudly likening those of other groups to Satanic utterings.

In the midst of all of the chaos in my brain, I stepped onto a treadmill and reached into my bag to get my earbuds and iPod. I listen to a playlist of music I like when I walk, varying the speed of my steps with the beat of the music. I do this for two reasons, one because I have never enjoyed walking for walking’s sake. It quickly becomes too monotonous to me and I need a distraction. It’s the “spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down.” The other reason is that I avoid watching any of the array of televisions the Y has made available—democratically tuned in to CNN, Fox News, ESPN, a local channel, and HGTV—unless the U.S. Open or Wimbledon or the World Cup or some other sporting event I care about is on ESPN. I generally hang on to one set of the bars to keep my balance, and close my eyes.

But this time, when I pulled out my earbuds, they were snarled. I’d been in a hurry to get somewhere the last time I’d gone to the gym and stuffed them into a pocket. I stood there on an unmoving treadmill for several minutes, undoing the knots, unthreading this strand of cable from that tangle. Sometimes, I’d pull one of the buds through a hole I’d created only to discover that I’d made another knot somewhere else. I got more and more frustrated, until it occurred to me that I was dealing with a tangible example of exactly where we are with respect to the issues we face, except that the “American way” is for one group to untie its knot, with no concern whatsoever for the knots created somewhere else—largely because we seem at best, like the men of Indostan, oblivious to the very existence of other views, based on other experiences, or at worst, have become narcissistic caricatures, who are not only oblivious, but wouldn’t give a damn if a bomb went off in front of them as long as none of the shrapnel touched them. What WE see and what WE believe is all there is, and if you describe something else that stirs the possibility of some negative impact or egocentric leanings of our views, you are the scum of the earth. “You’ll rue the day you changed that filibuster rule,” said the Republican senators. What hangs in the air is the unspoken end of that sentence—“because if we can regain the advantage, we’re gonna stick it to you, just as you stuck it to us.” Never mind what the issue is – we’re gonna get even. It is both the figurative and literal blind leading the blind, adolescents playing football with the lives of the millions outside the fence. And now the Supreme Court has joined the game.

I considered leaving some of the knots and just going ahead with plugging in my earbuds. But I discovered quickly that, in order to fulfill the greater purpose—that of my recent decision to improve my health—I would have to do the work to untangle all the knots and not just some. Unless I did, the cords weren’t long enough to reach the iPod in its cubbyhole…and my ears at the same time. Yes, I could’ve walked without the music, but I live in America, where I’d always been free to choose the path I took as long as it didn’t affect anyone else in a material way. Or so I thought.

So, I took a deep breath and spent the time necessary to investigate all the knots and their interrelationships and untangle each of them while examining how different approaches would affect the tangles in other places. In every instance, the best approach turned out to be tracing the cords to their original tangles. And to my pleasure, what I discovered was that when I did that, most of the other knots disappeared as a matter of course.

The moral of the story, of course, is that I had to remember the reason I’d gone to the gym in the first place. And only then could I begin to determine how to smooth the path to fulfilling that purpose by sucking it up and carefully, cautiously examining the mess, taking time to sort out the knots, trace them to their origins, and also devise a plan to increase the likelihood that the mess I’d created this time wouldn’t happen again.

Or, as we seem so prone to do these days, I could’ve just thrown the earbuds across the room, stomped out of the gym, and sued the manufacturer of the mess, neglecting the reason I was there in the first place. Which was not a good idea, if I was honest with myself, because the manufacturer of the mess, whether I’d done it blindly or with intent, was me.

Vally

P.S. Two days later, I went to the gym, pulled out the earbuds, plugged them into my iPod, and no sound came out of one. Somewhere in the fray, I’d broken the delicate wires inside the sheathing on that side. I stuffed the broken earbud in my ear anyway, and proceeded to walk, now not just “blind” but effectively deaf in one ear too. I noticed that the music wasn’t nearly as beautiful in mono, so on the way home, I stopped by Walgreen’s and picked up a new set of earbuds.

Unfortunately, America is not, despite the apparent belief of some, unbreakable. Repairing the mess we’ve made won’t be as easy as buying a new set of earbuds, no matter how much money a few of us have. And if we are so blind and deaf that we forget the primary mission of our government—that of forming a more perfect UNION, of promoting the general welfare of ALL citizens and preserving the blessings of liberty for ALL the selves who reside under the protection of the UNITED States of America, it will be impossible.

Image

On Not Knowing That We Do Not Know

8 May

Some thirty years ago, one of my roommates brought a guy she was dating to dinner at our apartment. While we were sitting around talking, one of our cats misbehaved and I popped it lightly on the nose to discourage whatever behavior it had displayed.

My roommate’s date proceeded to lecture me on how what I had done was incorrect, according to something he’d read somewhere. I elected to let him go on with his dissertation with respect to animal behavior without challenge, intentionally not revealing that for a year, I had been the graduate assistant in charge of the animal conditioning and learning lab back in college, and had taught the students under my charge about negative and positive reinforcement and punishment and supervised their training of the rats in my lab.

It was sometime later, after we’d dabbled in conversations about the weather and restaurants in Atlanta and who knows what else, that he asked me what I did for a living.

“I’m a psychotherapist,” I said. “And, in my last year of college, I was the graduate assistant in charge of the rat lab.”

“Oh,” he said, turning a slight hint of green as it dawned on him that I probably knew a lot more about training cats than he did.

At the time, I was mildly offended, but I didn’t care about his opinion of my pet management skills, and I had long since blown him off as someone to whom I would not turn for advice. I’m not inherently a mean person, so although I could have taken him down a notch or two in his self-estimated expertise in animal behavior, I didn’t.

That’s not to say that I wasn’t influenced by the exchange, however. Social scientist to the end, although I quit the explicit practice of psychology over 20 years ago, it reminds me even today of the blindness of human narcissism—the tragedy of missed opportunities for connection and the failure to show respect to others for what they’ve learned and experienced that we have not and perhaps never will. I pledged to myself that very day to do whatever it took not to discount what another had been through or what he or she knew by virtue of occupation, vocation or personal experience that I could not possibly know.

That whole line of thinking, for me, was further expanded a few years later when I left private practice and entered the corporate world. One of my specialties in private practice had been stress management counseling, which involved teaching my clients about their bodies and how to eliminate or manage physical symptoms like headache or panic attack or non-systemic high blood pressure, followed by insight psychotherapy as it related to the perceptions and thought processes that had precipitated their stress-related disorders.

As you might imagine, many of my clients described their stress-related problems as originating in the workplace. Some were entry-level people, others were middle managers, still others were executives in charge of major departments in Fortune 500 corporations. I remember having a conversation with one of the latter about conflict resolution. I “prescribed” a course of action that involved addressing a conflict he had with his superior that made perfect sense to me in the context of everyday one-on-one relationships.

He took it all in and smiled. “I can tell you’ve never worked in corporate America,” he said. I was a little taken aback.

Within only a few short months following my entry into the corporate world, I understood exactly what my client had meant. I was humbled by the fact that he had not knocked me down a notch for daring to think I knew anything about the practical application of my limited knowledge in the context of a situation I had no experience with.

The issue was that, at the time of our conversation, I had never worked in an environment where the hierarchical organizational chart defined authority and responsibility and held sway over my livelihood. Having never had to negotiate the paradox of balancing the dual yet overlapping boundaries of interpersonal vs. workplace relationships, I had no expertise in the subject. No matter how hard I might have tried or how many business management books I might have read, I could not have learned from them what I did while being an employee and later a manager. As I look back now, the massive difference between what I knew looking in from the outside before and what I would come to know once I was inside was not unlike that between looking at a photograph of Ireland and standing at the Cliffs of Moher.

Those two incidents have remained a constant reminder to me of three interrelated things:

  1. The more I know, the more I am humbled by what I don’t know and either can’t know or never will.
  2. No matter what I do know, even if it is my area of credential, there is someone else who knows something more or something different or something more valuable about that subject area in question that would benefit me. And, perhaps most importantly, that person could just as easily be the cashier at the grocery store, the immigrant roofing a house or the roommate of a friend as it could be the CEO of Microsoft or the Prime Minister of Egypt.
  3. The day I become certain that I “know” everything about anything based on the snapshot I see and show blatant disrespect for the truth those who’ve stood where I can only dream of going can teach me…will be the day I become dangerous to myself and everyone around me, especially if given a little authority.

Far too many of those we have elected to power, giving a little authority by virtue of our votes, appear either to have never known or to have forgotten these things.

And I struggle not to be afraid.

Tags: , ,

Aside

Rest in peace, Fred

26 Mar

I was thinking about Fred Phelps this morning. You know, the guy who started the hoopla of protesting during funerals.

In the process, I thought about the vast number of people I’ve known during my life who have died, ranging from a beloved woman here in Asheville to people I didn’t know personally but knew of, like Philip Seymour Hoffman or Osama Bin Laden. When I flash back to that last one in particular, I remember that I didn’t feel like celebrating. I watched a few videos of people who had rushed down to Lafayette Square in D.C. and were dancing in the streets. I, on the other hand, felt mostly nauseous, sad, contemplative. I sorta felt that way about Fred Phelps, too, when I heard that he had died and watched the range of emotions expressed on Facebook.

Perhaps it’s the fact that I lost 10 people I loved before I was 20, but for me, even the death of an adversary is nothing to celebrate.

Am I glad that Fred Phelps died? On some level I suppose that I’m glad that the negativity of his message is gone. But I am far more sad. Sad that there are some among us who, for whatever reason, project the misery of their own existences—and the responsibility for it—outside themselves. I’m especially sad when the people who do that represent the loving God I see and experience as a hater of any kind, because I just can’t figure out what might have happened in their early lives that would have cemented such a disdain for other humans. I can’t figure out how one gets from the message of love presented over and over by the man many call Christ to the idea that any one of us beloved is the “keeper of the truth” for anyone else but himself. There are at least a couple of times in the New Testament when Jesus was obviously frustrated at the fact that the guys right there with him, who heard him speak day after day and interacted with him around the campfire at night, didn’t “get” what he was talking about. How in the world does a thinking person in the 21st century actually come to believe he or she has the absolute understanding of what he meant and the authority to rain down judgment on others we not only do not know but will never know?

I don’t know why exactly, but although I grew up in what has become one of the most restrictive, rule-bound fundamentalist denominations, I’ve never accepted that humans are unworthy by virtue of birth or that any human, including myself, is capable of understanding what drives another’s beliefs and perceptions unless we ask them. And even then, the answer isn’t definitive, because we do a damn good job of hiding who we really are even from ourselves.

Back in the day when I was a counselor, my approach to helping my clients started with a comparison of what they believed about themselves with what I considered a loosely ideal model of adult emotional health. Goal-oriented as long as I can remember, it always made sense to me that I couldn’t go anywhere unless I started with a picture in my mind for how I would know when I got there (Point B), honestly considered where I was relative to the same metrics (Point A), and then made some informed guesses about how to best get from Point A to Point B. I knew that life had a way of interfering with the best laid plans, so if I got new information along the way that a bridge was washed out or a gang of thieves was up ahead, I adjusted the plan accordingly, often on the fly.

The process had always worked well for me, whether I was studying for an exam (Point B was an “A” and I knew what I had to “know” to make one) or planning a trip from Atlanta to Arizona or saving money for a new car, so it was only natural that I would employ the same rubric in counseling. I dare say that when the majority of my clients left me, they were emotionally stronger, so I guess the process worked there too.

I’ve always thought of the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God in that way too. If the kingdom of heaven was at hand when Jesus was alive as a man, it is certainly still attainable, right now, right here, today. But we have a problem, in that the views of some of what it would be like if the kingdom were manifest “on earth, as it is in heaven” are vastly different from the views of others. And until we make progress toward the simple goal of agreeing on how we would know if we got to Point B, we’ll certainly never get there. As the old career-guidance book said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else.”

Suffice it to say that Fred Phelps and I had a very different idea of what the kingdom of heaven looks like. But he was a child of God, just the same. Rest in peace, Fred. And now, perhaps, so will we.

 

 

Tags: ,

The Other Brother

30 Aug

I popped onto Facebook to wish someone a “Happy Birthday” and read one or two posts by somewhat fundamentalist Christian friends along the way. Both were busy telling others how they were “less than” in God’s eyes either because of what those others thought or how they’d spoken in favor of another group “bound for hell” based on some relatively obscure verses in the Old Testament that have been taken out of context.

I found myself feeling sad, as I usually do after reading posts like these, though there are times when my frustration pops through in something I write in response, and I’m as guilty as the next. Once my anger dies down, I’m usually even sadder, discouraged even, because I think that if those fundamentalist Christian friends would only stop and think about what they’re saying, they might see that they’ve bound themselves up into rule-ridden boxes. I always go back to the fact that Jesus reportedly said that knowing the truth would set us free—not tie us up.

I almost always come around, too, to the parable of the prodigal son. But it isn’t the prodigal that I think of—it’s the other brother, the one who is outraged at the very idea that his father would make so much over the prodigal when he was the one who had been there. He was the one who had followed the rules, who’d stayed behind to do his father’s bidding (or what he thought was his father’s bidding). He was the good son. At least that’s how he’d thought of himself before.

I imagine that if there were other siblings in the family, he’d pontificated many times about how one was supposed to act. He’d probably talked about how that prodigal brother of theirs was evil and how he’d squandered his birthright. He was proud of the fact that he’d never strayed away. And on one level, I believe he should have been.

But the problem, I think, is that the older brother had made a mistaken assumption about his father’s love. He thought it was to his credit that he’d stayed at home and done the “right” thing. To say that something is to one’s “credit” is an accounting term, suggesting that on the score card of debits and credits, he’d deposited “cash” in his account that would be there when judgment came to call—leverage against the day when he’d be called on to pay a debt.

And then the prodigal came home. And his father, instead of demanding payment, had had the audacity to run out to meet the prodigal on the way. And then, OMG, to throw a party for him! Because the older brother had made that misassumption about his father’s love, everything on which he had based his sense of security, his pride in himself, his plans for the future crumbled right there in front of him.

We don’t know if there was more to the parable. We don’t know what happened in the days and weeks and years after the party was over. But I know what I hope happened, because it’s what I hope every day will happen to those fundamentalist friends of mine. You see, I hope that it dawns on them one day that although it is wonderful that they live what they consider to be “clean” lives—because they save themselves a measure of pain by never waking up in a pigsty—that that fact has nothing at all to do with their father’s love. I believe that if the older brother had waked up in a pigsty, his father would have responded in exactly the same way for him, but they never seem to think about that.

I’ll go out on a limb here and confess that I don’t believe the often trite pronouncement that Jesus came to “die for our sins,” so any argument based on that falls flat for me anymore. I don’t think Jesus came to die, though because he was human, he would’ve eventually anyway, like the rest of us.

Rather, I think Jesus came to show what it is like to live absolutely, positively, unconditionally loved—freed by the assurance that there is nothing we can believe or stop believing, nothing we can do or refrain from doing, zero, nada, nothing (which encompasses what anyone, including my fundamentalist friends, has to say about it) that can separate us from God’s love. (Paul said that, by the way.) My God doesn’t love us because. My God loves us, period. End of story.

So why am I sad? At the thought that anyone is so focused on following (and trying to force others to follow) a set of rules that he’ll never know what it is to live loved and discover the joy of living a “clean” life for no other reason than because it feels good. And I’m sad at the paradox that, of the two of them, it was the prodigal son who really understood the meaning of God’s grace.

Manning, Snowden and Me

22 Aug

Someone stated in an article I read this morning that more people have been tried under the Espionage Act during Obama’s administration than all other presidents combined. On one hand, that bothers me a lot. On the other hand, I find it akin to saying that President Nixon watched more television during his presidency than Abraham Lincoln. It’s the reason laws must be re-examined every few years — a side effect of technological progress. The more rigidly unthinking we are about what has gone before or the fact that unintended consequences of our actions often occur because we can’t predict the future of that technology, the more often the laws need to be re-examined.

I remember being a little unsettled about the embedding of journalists with military units in Iraq back in 2003-2004. I found it curiously like putting a fan with a mike in the dugout of a baseball team reporting for all to hear what the signs the third-base coach keeps making mean, and how indignant the team would be that their opponent had stolen their signs. It’s okay, too, to put a speaker and microphone in the helmet of a football player, because of the surprise.

I wrote a blog back in July about my database years in the telecom industry. I had access to literally thousands of telephone call records and charges for them that I was searching through to find opportunities for cost-savings. It would have been just as easy for me to sort the data by the telephone number called or the extension from which the call had come, yet I can assure you that 99% of the people who worked in the company and made the calls had no idea that an outside contractor was analyzing that data, much less that I could just as easily have analyzed their individual calling patterns if I had been asked to answer a question about them.

During college, I worked at a telephone company as a switchboard operator. Back then, the way you were billed for calls depended on the physical stamping of a key-punch card to define when a call started and finished. The only way for an operator to know, especially on coin-phone calls, was to “listen in.” I usually erred to the side of the customer — if the caller was saying “goodbye” and I saw that the last breath was going to extend into another minute (which meant being charged for another minute), I usually went ahead and stamped the call as completed.

There were always accusations that operators were “listening in” on calls by some who knew that we had the ability to do it, but what was interesting to me was that the people who complained usually turned out to be “up to something,” as Lewis Grizzard might have said.

As a 17-year-old, I was in no place to decide what qualified as “up to something” and what didn’t, much less tell anybody else about it. In that small town, where everybody mostly knew everybody else, the word about those who were “up to something” usually got out anyway through other “vines.”

These days, I often wonder what I might have done back then if I’d happened to overhear someone planning something illegal (or immoral according to my particular code of morality). I’ll never know the answer to that question. I don’t know the answer to the question of what I would do if it happened now, 40 years later. Nor am I so clear on whom I might trust to tell.

It’s the double-edged sword of the “right” to privacy vs. the “right” to safety, a debate that’s been going on longer than any of us have certainly been alive and will outlive us. Our Constitution does not suggest that privacy is a right protected under the laws of the U.S. The right not to be searched or have our things seized without evidence of wrongdoing, on the other hand, is. Call records and emails and texts are now part of that world of evidence, but not all. And anyone who has any experience with databases knows what I know — that there is no way to collect data on specific call records or emails without first collecting data on ALL call records and emails.

I guess it comes down to whether we trust the judgment and intent of people like me and the “bosses” of Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning.

Then again, maybe it really comes down to whether or not you’re “up to something.”

Tags: , , ,

Smart Windows and Teddy Roosevelt

15 Aug

I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR, where I heard part of an interview done by Joe Palca, a guy on the Science desk there. He was talking with a scientist about a “smart glass” technology she and her staff have been working on for a while. Its application would be in “smart windows,” which would control the amount of sunlight and heat coming through into a building and theoretically reduce the amount of energy required to heat or cool the inside.

As usual, in addition to the express topic of the conversation, I heard something else. Here’s the transcript from the clip I’m talking about.

MILLIRON: In terms of demonstration products, I think it would be reasonable to see something even in the next three years or so.

PALCA: And when I talked to her last week, she said there was progress but still a ways to go.

MILLIRON: We’re discussing with very large scale glass manufacturers what really needs to happen to make it viable for broad deployment in architectural glass.

PALCA: The point here is that getting a good idea out of the lab and into the show room requires patience, hard work, and yeah, maybe even a bit of luck. When Milliron talked to Richard, she spelled out for him the hurdles that lie ahead: finding the right materials, scaling up the manufacturing process, making glass that’s free from defects.

What did I hear in that? An expert in science say that she’s “discussing with very large scale glass manufacturers what really needs to happen to make the [smart windows] viable for broad deployment…” An expert in one field quite freely and quite reasonably admitting without shame that she isn’t an expert in everything. There is someone who knows something she doesn’t know. Her expertise in nanotechnology doesn’t impact her ability to recognize that she doesn’t know the ins and outs of manufacturing. And as a result, someday soon—though maybe not in the three years Milliron hopes—the day will come when smart windows are introduced into the marketplace. If all goes well, they will provide a service to homeowners (more efficient and lower energy bills), a profit to those large scale glass manufacturers and a host of wholesalers and retailers and installers down the line (supporting the capitalistic drive), and a patent and more money for research for Dr. Milliron. A bunch of experts on different sides of things who know what they know and what they don’t, and are strong enough in character to go to those on the other sides to get their input in how to best produce a solution that is a win-win for all concerned. Wow. How refreshing.

Our government was, in theory, designed to operate like Dr. Milliron. People, from different states, with different topographies, different cultural challenges, different sizes, different populations, different livelihoods, were to come together and talk about solutions that allowed EVERY represented citizen to come away from the discussion satisfied that the needs of their states had been acknowledged, and the needs of every constituent considered.

But it doesn’t operate that way today. The agenda is increasingly clear—our representatives, specifically in the House, but not limited to them because state and local governments who operate with the same agenda are popping up all over, are after only one thing: “solutions” that benefit them and only them right now. If you’re not in the groups they’d describe as “we,” your needs, your privileges of citizenship, and your right to equal consideration under the law irrespective of any number of irrelevant demographic characteristics is dismissed. Your ideas, no matter how well thought out or defended are not only ignored, but attacked with arguments only a full-blown psychotic would make, believing that nobody’s on to them.

I recently re-read a speech given by former President Teddy Roosevelt in Paris one hundred years ago. It’s the same one that the well-known quote called “The Man in the Arena” was excerpted from. I was impressed with a personal anecdote he shared later in the speech:

A number of years ago I was engaged in cattle-ranching on the great plains of the western United States. There were no fences. The cattle wandered free, the ownership of each one was determined by the brand; the calves were branded with the brand of the cows they followed. If on a round-up an animal was passed by, the following year it would appear as an unbranded yearling, and was then called a maverick. By the custom of the country these mavericks were branded with the brand of the man on whose range they were found. One day I was riding the range with a newly hired cowboy, and we came upon a maverick. We roped and threw it; then we built a fire, took out a cinch-ring, heated it in the fire; and then the cowboy started to put on the brand.

I said to him, “It So-and-so’s brand,” naming the man on whose range we happened to be.

He answered: “That’s all right, boss; I know my business.”

In another moment I said to him: “Hold on, you are putting on my brand!”

To which he answered: “That’s all right; I always put on the boss’s brand.”

I answered: “Oh, very well. Now you go straight back to the ranch and get whatever is owing to you; I don’t need you any longer.”

He jumped up and said: “Why, what’s the matter? I was putting on your brand.”

And I answered: “Yes, my friend, and if you will steal for me then you will steal from me.”

Now, the same principle which applies in private life applies also in public life. If a public man tries to get your vote by saying that he will do something wrong IN your interest, you can be absolutely certain that if ever it becomes worth his while he will do something wrong AGAINST your interest.”

I have only one thing to say to those who pretend they are public servants in today’s legislatures:

I am not fooled. If you will steal FOR me, then you will steal FROM me. And you have. So go get whatever is owing to you; we don’t need you any longer. You are an empty bag taking up space that could be better filled by someone like Dr. Milliron.

The Tyranny of the Knowledgeable Ignorant

5 Jul

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
― Aldous Huxley

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
― Stephen Hawking

“He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.”
― George Bernard Shaw

Now over a decade ago, prior to September 11, I developed a software application with the help of my business partners, the purpose of which was to extract data from telecom billing records, analyze it, and create streamlined reports our auditors could use to more quickly identify areas where our large corporate clients were paying for unnecessary or obsolete features and could reduce their expenses. The size of these clients and, by default, the number of individual call records for their employees was enormous, which meant that trying to comb through the common 20+ boxes of paper bills was impossible to do with any efficiency before the next month’s 20+ boxes arrived.

It was a valuable service—sometimes the savings for dropping something as simple as fees, legitimately charged before Ma Bell’s court-ordered divestiture, as insurance against “inside wiring” faults, amounted to as much as $20,000 a month. I felt good about it.
But there was always the knowledge, lurking in the back of my mind, that those other bits of data that I didn’t use could be used by someone with another objective, perhaps less “principled” than I with respect to individual privacy. Just by sorting that very same information in another way, I could have had access to every local and long distance phone call made by every employee of the company. I could have identified where a call had originated, down to the individual station/cubicle. I could have known where every call had terminated, how many calls had been placed to that same number, what day they had been made and what time to the millisecond. Sometimes I had the length of the call, too, but simple subtraction of the contents of one database cell from another would have yielded the same information.

I was never tasked with doing that—usually the information was already organized in that way on the paper bills for the company’s accountants to allocate expenses to the its various internal departments.

Another division of our company installed and monitored the computerized “switches” that resided on premise at large companies. The purposes of the monitoring was to ensure the switches were working properly and to troubleshoot things like circuit boards gone bad so the ebb and flow of normal business operations went uninterrupted. It, too, was a valuable service. It, too, had access to individual call data—they could even tell when an individual phone was “off-hook” whether a phone call was placed or not.

Then, one day, they were contacted by the police and asked to report on a particular station and a particular number called. If I remember correctly, there was some evidence that a certain employee was involved in illegal activity of some sort and, though doing work for the employing company, was running the business of another on the first company’s wallet. It was exciting, no doubt. Like participating in a realtime NCIS or CSI operation. Our new-found power was exhilirating. The next thing we knew, the marketing arm of our sister division was suggesting that we offer a service to monitor and report when similar activity might be occurring. And the hair went up on my neck.

Only one thing had changed—intent. In a New York minute (apropos since the companies monitored by our sister division were actually in New York), the very same data we had used to identify cost-saving opportunities would now be used to monitor the behavior of people. Someone sitting in her cubicle in a high-rise office building who called home everyday at 3:00 pm for a 30-second conversation to make sure her kids had arrived safely after school would now be the target of scrutiny—tasked, without even knowing it, with proving that she was innocent of anything other than assuring herself that her children were safe. And all because an IT guy sitting in New Jersey thought he’d found something sordid.

Now, 12 years later, we have an IT guy named Edward Snowden supposedly sitting in an airport in Moscow, having stirred up all manner of ignorant people. The question is not “Were we collecting data?” because only an ignorant fool would even bother to ask. The question is “Why?” And then whether or not the answer to “Why?” crosses a line of human dignity, human decency, human authority over other humans. I didn’t say “the” line, because recent events in our country pretty well suggest that there is disagreement about where that line is and perhaps whether or not such a line exists. The tyranny of the ignorant is that the very same line that “protects” them abuses others equal to them in right and privilege, at least according to the Declaration of Independence.

Benjamin Franklin is alleged to have written a few years prior to the day whose anniversary we just celebrated, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Insert “have” in place of “deserve” and I think it much closer to the truth of humanity. Assuming, of course, that either, in an absolute sense, is possible.

My own personal jury is still out on Edward Snowden, because I have pitifully little knowledge of actual fact. In a country where 16-year-old cashiers are deemed experts in handwriting and TSA agents frisk 90-year-olds wearing soiled undergarments and presidents wage war on the basis of weapons of mass destruction that do not exist, I do note, however, that in the midst of all the partisan bickering and nonsense, the Congress has become curiously quiet.

And the hair has gone up on my neck.

Tags: , ,

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →