Prodigal Prophet

As a young woman, I used to imagine that the downfall of my beloved country would come from our participation in wars that were not ours to fight, the investment of too much in human life and money for goals that are impossible to attain. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq.

Then, as I grew older, I became concerned about the declining wisdom of our children, their abilities, as well-rounded individuals, to think critically, to perceive with a high probability when they’re being manipulated, duped.

To accomplish the first requires the second, whether we’re talking about battles fought with guns or weapons of mass manipulation. To evaluate with wisdom which battles to fight and which to stay out of requires a shrewd, incisive capacity to evaluate all of what might be at stake in every decision, especially as an unintentional side effect.

I have always delighted in what I considered the hand of God in science–the frequency with which the most life-changing things are discovered by accident, in the unexpected side effects of experiments designed to test completely different hypotheses. The discovery that led Tom Edison to the incandescent bulb after he’d gone down another path for years; the fact that Hans Selye, who documented the "fight or flight" response of the human nervous system and its effect on the immune system, was actually trying to isolate what he thought was a brand new hormone when he happened to notice a pattern that would illuminate the role of physiological effects of stress on illness, emotional and physical. (He failed to find a new hormone, by the way.)

If they hadn’t been paying attention to the small things, they might have missed the discoveries that would improve all our lives. If they hadn’t been looking at all of the possible implications of their experiments, who knows where electricity and medicine would be now?

But side effects are not always good ones. As with drugs, where, for instance, we make decisions about whether keeping our blood pressure controlled is more a priority than avoiding the need to pee at inconvenient times, we must evaluate all our decisions, predicting as best we can what the positives and negatives will be and judging whether or not to proceed on the basis of whether achieving happiness (assuming we can) or avoiding suffering is the more important goal, the more far-reaching in its consequences if achieved.

It’s the paradox of duality–we humans can focus on achieving happiness or avoiding suffering, but not both at the same time. When we elect people to make decisions that benefit the majority of us, we must be able to trust there is someone looking at both and that the decisions will be made, not on the basis of who has the most money, but the most character and compassion.

I think that’s what Albert Einstein was getting at when he said, "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking…the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If I had only known, I should have become a watchmaker." Had he known that his discoveries would help to lay the foundation not only for the power of good but for weapons of mass destruction, he would have pointed his focus of study toward another aspect of the measurement of time.

While we’ve been focused on similarly unsolvable battles over abortion and whose rights come first, or the intent of our founding fathers when they wrote the 2nd Amendment, and while we wait with baited breath, more interested in whether the "liberals" and "conservatives" will "win" the battle over universal health care than in helping those innocent bystanders who are dying of diseases that might have been cured if they’d been able to afford a doctor’s care…the Supreme Court decided that the voice of money is equal to the voice of human conscience–that the "collective bargaining" power of money united trumps the "collective bargaining" power of wisdom united. All at the behest of men whose goal is to use the power of money to manipulate the masses through sleight of hand to support the maintenance of their money and position and power.

The ideals of democracy depend on the individual’s freedom to vote his conscience on the basis of his own truth, but a vote purchased is no vote at all, much less one of conscience or truth.

Man does not live by bread alone, Jesus said. But I submit that he’ll die trying to, especially if he has a barn full of bread and has been convinced that someone is trying to steal it from him.

As an American woman, I can live with whatever decisions are made about abortion, about who gets what financial support from the government and who doesn’t, about immigration, about same-sex marriage, even if I fall into the demographic group affected most negatively by the decision of whomever is in power, because the results do not threaten to affect all Americans or the principles on which our country was founded.

But if we allow it to stand, I’m afraid we will rue the decision of Citizens United, and that day will one day be counted among the signs that the end of the age of America had come. Pray that Alexis de Tocqueville was right when he wrote, “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”

I was talking with a soon-to-be 92-years-old veteran the other day, and our conversation ventured away from the memoir I am publishing for him to a discussion of the tough decisions of Presidents.

I told him that, in my lifetime, I thought the most courageous act of a President had been Ford’s pardoning of Richard Nixon. He’d done what he believed the responsibility of a President was—to make decisions for the good of the country as a whole regardless of their personal impacts. The decision to pardon Nixon, whose albeit illegal violation of the boundaries of common decency pales in comparison to the barrage of garbage we are subjected to daily, did, I think, render him unelectable by a bloodthirsty public.

My older friend has a different perspective. “For me,” he said, “it was Truman. I think Truman may have saved my life.”

Of course, Mr. Harris referred to Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb. Mr. Harris had flown over “The Hump,” the range of mountains over which US flyboys had flown supplies from India to China after the fall of the “Burma Road.” He felt sure he would have been reassigned to fly fighters over Japan had the war in the Pacific Theatre continued into the fall of 1945.

I had to agree that his choice of impactful decisions trumped mine, at least overtly. Whether or not the impact was, in net result, good or bad, will have to be determined by somebody better than I.

We talked on about other military decisions our feet-of-clay Presidents have had to make in isolation, final calls based on a mix of opinions and opposing views from advisors—Obama’s decision to pull the trigger, sending the Navy Seals to get Osama bin Laden; Carter’s attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages; Eisenhower’s pre-Presidential decision to proceed with the D-Day invasion.

The weight of responsibility is unfathomable. In light of that, it is easy to understand why dark-haired men (so far) have “won” the office only to leave four or eight years later gray and haggard. A million little details out of one’s control, some monitored, some unknown, serve, in a NY minute, to render you forever the focus of disdain or admiration, the visible monument to courage or debauchery.

As I sat there with Mr. Harris, though, I realized that in truth, these sorts of decisions were and are made every day by every man or woman who has served in a military conflict. Do I turn right or left? Do I fire or not? Do I kill another whom I will never see, much less know? Will the end justify the means? Will I die instead, the object of someone else’s scope? Mr. Harris was sent out in a fighter to see if he’d draw ground fire, but fortunately, he hadn’t.

Whether they talk about it or not, whether they returned in body or body bag from Valley Forge or Yorktown, Gettysburg or Manassas, Okinawa or France, Seoul or Saigon or Da Nang,  Kuwait or Iraq or Afghanistan, every one has made the decision, right or wrong in the judgment of arm-chair heroes, to do what they thought best for the others in their units, best for a nation of other men and women, instead of themselves.

For that “full measure of devotion,” to borrow a phrase from another President who would also be called on to make a decision in isolation, I salute you all today and every day.

Dear President Obama:

There is obviously something in the water in Washington that has turned intelligent people into fools, especially about education.

There are no easy or pat answers to the closing of the income/achievement gap in education. As a former testing professional, I can tell you that test scores certainly reflect progress toward those goals just as they can a student’s progress toward mastery of a subject, but only that. Data that inform decision-making are wise; data that drive it without the influence of common sense are dangerous.

What standardized test scores measure today is not how teachers perform, but how poorly you and policymakers of the past who presume to be experts have performed in identifying and addressing the substantive issues underlying the gap. Data suggesting that NCLB has failed are piling up; “Race to the Top” will soon follow suit if it continues the way it is going.

Public education is not a business. Admittedly, the administrators of education can learn some things from the best practices of business in how to treat employees and financial management in general, but the Boston Consulting Group has no business defining the metrics of great teaching. The goal of education is not to create homogenous widgets with cookie-cutter skills; every “product” that rolls out of this “manufacturing facility” is “one-off” by design. Nor is democratic government a business—few CEOs in corporate America would remain in office for long if each employee’s vote carried the weight of an equal shareholder’s in the company.

There is an epidemic in this country of individuals who project onto others accountability for what others do. You are held responsible for raising the deficit as if you’d inherited it at $0 and for being unable to reverse the financial disasters of President Bush as quickly as we might have hoped. I would hope that you, in particular, would take care not to do to others what has been done to you—that of projecting onto teachers the full load of responsibility to overcome the effects of things over which they have no control—parents who abdicate their roles as the instillers of values, the impact of hunger and homelessness on student attention spans, and the burden of administrative busywork required that usurps the already finite time and energy teachers once had to interact authentically with their students.

Everyone knows you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink. I would think you would know, too, that you can lead a student to the edge of learning, but you can’t make him learn, and you can’t make him want to. The job of the teacher is to lead students to the edge of a river and coax them to take a drink. If they succeed in getting him to taste the water, and the student discovers for himself the refreshment and satisfaction that it brings him, he will determine to drink again of his own accord. But no matter what, there will be some who, for reasons neither s/he nor you nor I will ever fathom, will never take a drink. To make teachers responsible for that is unconscionable. They, alas, are not magicians.

What happened here in Atlanta is not diagnostic of the honesty of teachers and administrators as much as the narcissistic ignorance of policymakers out of touch with reality and common sense. I’d be interested in seeing your scores and theirs on an SAT taken today. I’m curious—if lower than when you were in school, would that be your fault or the fault of your teachers?

Great teachers have administrators who support them when they demand good behavior in their classes. Great teachers shouldn’t have to unionize to be paid a decent wage, but as citizens of this country should be free to do so if necessary. Great teachers deserve acknowledgement and respect as the trusted authority in the lives of children and young adults. You will find them in every urban high school, every rural community. You will find them in “underperforming” schools and schools from where high risk students are mysteriously absent and test scores high. You will even find them in charter schools and private schools, but not as many, because anyone can teach the gifted.

A great teacher is one who loves learning herself, who knows the satisfaction of mastery. She longs to see the look in the eye of a student when he makes the connection. That look is the carrot for which a great teacher works.

A great teacher is relentless in his efforts to provide opportunity to his students to experience success and knows that no triumph is too small to celebrate, even if the clowns in the federal government disagree.

A great teacher commits to do everything in her power to engage students in the process of learning, even when they don’t know they’re learning. He’ll show up in a Civil War uniform, stand on his desk reciting a soliloquy from Hamlet, go over multiplication tables for the fifteenth time, buy extra supplies and not get reimbursed, and pray (in whatever words he chooses) for the wholeness of every student he touches. And never be voted Teacher of the Year.

President Obama, restore to teachers the freedom to do those things they are meant to do and student test scores will take care of themselves. But continue to oppress them with bullshit, persecute them by taking their livelihoods on the basis of political grandstanding and you will break their hearts. And with them, the institution that has taken care of the heart of America itself.

The “opportunity costs” of having the wrong people in the wrong jobs are enormous. Not only do outcomes desired have no chance of manifestation, but those who have a chance to bring them about are denied access to the opportunity to do so. In the end, everyone loses.

But I’m not talking about teachers here. I’m talking about you. The opportunity costs of having the wrong person in the job of President, as representatives, as senators, as head of the DOE, are astronomical, and we don’t have time to wait.

We’ll find out in a few short months what your board of directors (all 300 million members) thinks of you. Either way, in a matter of years, you will be gone and your legacy recorded in those history books that no one will bother to read because they’re too busy being drilled so they get the right multiple-choice answers on their standardized exams.

I voted for you. I’ve defended you. And I’ve been disappointed. Don’t embarrass me by being just another President who spit in the face of those who gave you the foundation to become who you are. Put the governance of public education back in the hands of those in whose hands it belongs—the hands of those who know what the hell they’re doing —the ones who know what’s really on the line.

Put it back in the hands of the teachers themselves.

And do it now. We don’t have time to wait for you to evolve on this one.

For some years now, I have attempted to “play” golf. On some days, things have gone better than others, especially if I’ve had a chance to practice with some regularity, and my “muscle memory” is, as a result, well exercised.

Let me get out of practice, though, and my performance becomes nightmarish. I go for a lesson and things get even worse. It’s generally because I get tight, tense, sure I’ll forget something. Sometimes I find myself holding my breath as I run through the things I’ve been told to do and the things I’ve been told not to do.

Keep your head down and your knees bent. Or is it keep your butt down? Keep your left arm straight. Don’t rock and don’t steep your shoulders as you hit the ball. Hold the grip loosely in your hands and let the club do it. Oh, and don’t forget to follow through.

Do it all at the same time and all will be well.

In contortions, every muscle on edge, I swing the club and its head slams into the ground behind the tee. The ball dribbles 25 yards ahead and I grimace.

Oh, yeah, I think. The weight shift. I forgot the part about the weight shift.

Each hole after that presents a new challenge. One time I forget not to rock. The next time to keep my head down. By the time I reach the 18th tee, I’m tired, I’m cranky, my elbow hurts, and I’m acutely aware that I spent a fair penny to have this much fun.

On this last hole, I decide to stop thinking about all the rules. I relax, grip the club, step up to the ball, and just swing.

In a near-perfect arc, the ball shoots from the tee, flies straight down the middle of the fairway, bounces and rolls and finally comes to rest 175 yards away. And I laugh out loud.

The concept is simple, really. All those rules were intended to help me accomplish one thing—to swing the club along an imaginary plane and let it propel the ball by whipping it up and out as the head of the club passes through on the way to the end of its journey.

A friend of mine who was studying the Old Testament once counted the laws in the Torah. There were more than 600. Do this. Don’t do that. Eat this. Don’t eat that. Wear this. Don’t wear that. Say this. Don’t say that.

I came to fulfill the law and the prophets, said Jesus. Which laws? asked the disciples.

The greatest commandments are these, said Jesus. To love the Lord God with everything you are (since he already loves you, it’s only natural). And then, love yourself and your neighbor according to the same measure (if God loves you, then who the heck are you to NOT love you? And, while we’re on the subject, your neighbor is every other human, even the ones you don’t like and the ones you will never meet).

If God is love and Jesus and God are one, then love is the fulfillment of the Torah and the prophets. In other words, learning to love is the point of the rules—all 600+ of them. Paul seemed to think so. “Owe no one anything except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”

When playing golf, it doesn’t matter what you do or how you do it as long as you swing your club in the plane. The ball flies every time. If you practice that, pretty soon all you have to do is take a deep breath and swing away.

You will know the truth and the truth will set you free, said Jesus. Relax and just love away.

Wow. What if it really is that simple?

Mark Twain is quoted as having said, “When you find yourself in the majority, it’s time to rethink your position.” Increasingly, I’m wondering if he wasn’t right on the money. Jesus reportedly alluded to the same thing in a different way. “Wide is the road to destruction,” he said, and “narrow the way to life.” It doesn’t take much to figure out which road will accommodate the majority and which won’t, and sometimes that makes me nervous. Jesus himself was clearly in the minority—I dare say that it was majority opinion that resulted in his death.

Because of that, I’ve always thought the Achilles heel of democracy, and equally so of republics allegedly based on democratic principles, is that there is no guarantee that the “majority” is made up of the wisest or most emotionally mature folks among us, much less the most moral. Just because the group of people yelling about something happens to be larger in number doesn’t automatically make them wrong, but it certainly doesn’t make them right, either. We’ve got plenty of examples of that in history—laws that flew in the face of the words of the Declaration of Independence about our being endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights. We all know that even the majority of the founding “fathers” of our country—those property-owning, Anglo-Saxon, XY-chromosome-bearing fellows—weren’t thinking of people like me, a woman, or the ancestors of Martin or Barack, when allusions to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness were made.

I think—I hope—that most of us know they were wrong about that.

But I think they were right about a lot of things, and one of them was the separation of church and state. For the sake of repetition, that was church, not God, a distinction few of those so fired up about the concept seem to make.

Church is a man-made thing, forever limited in its ability to define universal truth and morality because humans are forever limited in our perspectives, our experiences, our conclusions, our opinions. A white woman born in the South in the 1950’s, though I may live to be 100 years old, I will never completely understand what it is like to be black or Asian. I will never completely understand what it is like to be male. I will never know what my experiences might have taught me if I had been born on Long Island, much less in Pakistan, or Indonesia, or South Africa. Nor will you ever completely understand what it is like to look through my eyes, if you aren’t female or Caucasian or Southern, and weren’t an adolescent during the turbulent 1960s. And you won’t, even if you are female and Caucasian and Southern and born in 1957, because you are not and will never be…me.

Accepting that, our only recourse is to hold the uniqueness of every “other” in honor, and listen to each other, seeking those characteristics, those traits, those rights that belong to each of us, all of us. Among those is the freedom to worship as we choose, so long as our own brand of “churchianity” does not impede the rights of others to worship as they choose, no matter how wrong we, in our self-assigned omniscience, think they are.

There’s no doubt—the ideal of American citizenship is just that. An ideal. It requires a certain emotional maturity, a recognition that just as I am unique and special, so are you, and your rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (however you define it) are just as important as mine.

Perhaps I’m crazy, but I would swear that that’s what Jesus was trying to tell us, too.

I had the honor and privilege to co-facilitate a strategic planning retreat for the vestry of my church. (The vestry of an Episcopal church, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the administrative team, made up of lay members, that has oversight of the “business” affairs of the congregation.)

My role was to lead an exploration of the talents of individuals and how they could best be combined to produce the most well-substantiated, innovative and tangible plan for fulfilling the goals of both spiritual contemplation and “right” action.

Preparation for the retreat gave me the opportunity to revisit my past experiences in team-building with families and in the corporate world and applying what I had learned in the context of the human spirit. In the process, I realized that it is the reverse of that, the attempt to bridge the gap between my spiritual “knowledge” and experiences and my everyday life, that has consumed me for the better part of 40 years.

I have to admit that I am a bit jaded, having swung from what Parker Palmer describes as idealism to corrosive cynicism many times. A child of the 60’s, I’ve watched a similar progression in American society that sometimes seems unending. My heart grieves that it is the source of my original idealism, the church, that became the focus of my cynicism, because it seemed and seems that when we exit our services, we leave our kindness and regard and our honor of other humans at the doors. It is as if we deposit our souls inside for safe-keeping instead of “going in peace to love and serve the Lord.”

What attracted me most to Jesus as a child were the stories of his living what he said, not in the synagogues, but down by the rivers, on the edges of the seas, on the dusty trails of Judea and Palestine, in the cities and the countryside, in the family compounds and marketplaces—those very places we walk every day as well. I have been Zaccheus, disenfranchised but still hopeful enough to climb a tree and watch, just in case there was something to talk about, only to be seen and acknowledged. I have been the woman at the well, anxious about the transparency of my failures, yet heartened to learn because of another’s encouragement that the penalties of those mistakes might not be the portent of my unworthiness of abundance. I have been paralyzed, and had the words, “Pick up your mat and walk,” stimulate my bravery to break free of the binding.

I have been crucified, too. I have offered the best of who I am, the best of what I know, the best of what I have to give and had it turned into an aberration. I have been accused, indicted and convicted by others of motivations that I do not own. I have been humiliated and ignored, raised up and applauded.

Each of us has at one time or another. Certainly the disciples and apostles had. We know Jesus was. We stop there, focused only on ourselves. We lick our proverbial wounds and parade our triumphs and accomplishments as if we were the centers of the universe.

But Jesus didn’t. And thank God he didn’t, because if he had, there would have been nothing to talk about.

Jesus the man knew well that a carpenter from Nazareth, a man of questionable origin born to a woman whose only claim to fame (in fact, her only claim to existence) lay in the fact that she had a very unusual son, was hardly the center of the universe. Paradoxically, it was the fact that he knew that he wasn’t the center of the universe that paved the way for him to become the center of the universe for thousands to come, an anointed representative of not just the center, but the very source of the universe. “The last shall be first,” he said. “The first shall be last.”

Jesus knew something.

I think it has something to do with empathy, his attention to those around him. I think it was an automatic response, when he saw the pain of others, to ask himself what he himself might need if he were in their condition, their circumstances—what he had needed when he’d felt that way himself. And having isolated for himself what those actions would be, he carried them out. Having identified what words from another might soothe a hunger, he said them. He was the hands, the feet, the voice of God.

He called us to do that too. For each other. For all those whom we touch. To offer each other, in each moment of encounter, the grace of being, for that moment, the center of another’s universe.

If we commit to do it—to think about it on the other side of the church threshold—it isn’t hard. He didn’t ask that much of us.

Sometimes, it’s a simple acknowledgment—a smile or nod at someone we pass on the sidewalk or meet in the doctor’s waiting room. Sometimes it’s noticing someone else approaching a door with a load and opening it. Sometimes it’s forgoing the movie we were planning to watch to attend a wake, or holding another when she cries. Sometimes it’s sharing half a sandwich with someone who didn’t have time to make lunch or giving a new winter coat or a set of dishes to a domestic violence shelter.

Sometimes it’s a word of congratulations to your sister, a word of thanks to the rector, a card unexpected, a public accolade for a job well done. The message is a simple one—I see you. You are important, valued, loved and I want you to know it. Funny, but when you feel loved, you want everybody else to as well. That’s an epidemic I, for one, would love to see.

Jesus was not loved because he was the center of the universe.  He was loved because he wasn’t—everybody else was. But the funny thing is that because he wasn’t…

He is.

I was scanning Nutshell Mail, an aggregator of various social media engines, and came across Yahoo Shine’s Question of the Day:

Herman Cain’s alleged 13-year-long affair: Should it matter?

I thought about posting a comment, but decided to write about it here instead. I haven’t posted a blog in a while, and my answer to the question has a lot to do with why.

Perhaps it is just a sign of the continued naivete of an adolescent idealist of the 60’s and 70’s, but on the surface, my answer is “No, it shouldn’t matter.” In a world of emotionally mature individuals, agreement or disagreement with the sexual practices of consenting adults should have no impact on our judgment of whether or not a person is capable of addressing a country’s economic and social problems and leading his or her constituents to a new tier.

But that’s where the naivete part comes in. To answer in that way, I have to start with the assumption that this is, indeed, a world of emotionally mature individuals, an assumption that has in recent years, and in recent weeks, taken a beating, and the idealistic 12-year-old in me has finally given up on that delusion. What I see in place of a world of emotionally mature adults is instead a fractured group of little kids, myself included.

The potential for individual growth and the success of relationships depend on there being a level of maturity in understanding and practicing the art of boundaries. It doesn’t matter if we’re husband and wife, parent and child, manager and employee, President and constituent, friend and friend, it’s all about boundaries. We act as if we’re shocked when the atrocities of Penn State and Syracuse are brought to light, yet don’t think for even a minute about humiliating a friend or co-worker in front of others, we don’t think for a minute about touching the belly of a pregnant woman, we don’t think for a minute about whether our behavior intrudes on the boundary of another, or whether we use the position of power we hold in a relationship (which includes the power to abandon) to diminish another. We argue on the one hand that we have the right to bear arms but in the same breath claim the right to tell a woman what she can and can’t do with her body. Or conversely, we argue that a woman’s right to choose is a prerogative of the state, but yet seek to restrict another’s right to purchase and carry a gun during deer season. Unless it (whatever it is) affects MY rights, MY opinion, MY freedom to do whatever I want, I don’t give a rat’s ass. But I’ll come to blows over it, whether verbal or physical, if I perceive that it does, with no concern at all about whether, by my very words and actions, I have trounced on yours.

Sorry, guys, but emotional adulthood does its best, imperfectly, to walk the tightrope that maintains my boundaries AND yours at the same time. And that requires that we are, in fact, our brothers’ keepers, even when our brothers don’t know what’s best for them or where their boundaries are.

No, what in theory should matter about Herman Cain is whether or not he can explain how his plan to boost the economy and get people back to work will work, why it will work and where its weak spots are. But what does matter, and not just about Herman Cain, is whether there is anyone out there who has a clue to where the boundary of his power ends or the character to demonstrate self-restraint. The problem is that if you can’t be trusted not to “throw your weight around” in the workplace or at home, it’s hard to believe you can be trusted not to throw it around in Washington.

V

Back in the 1970s, when I was an undergraduate psychology student, I took the basic courses, where I learned about the nervous system and “dry” stuff like how the sodium and potassium balance in a nerve cell influences whether it “fires” or not. I taught rats to press levers and run around in mazes for little food pellets and studied the scientific method as it applied to the “soft” social sciences. But my primary interest was in the development of self-esteem and human to human interaction—social psychology.

So when I looked at the list of courses my faculty advisor told me I had to take and saw the class called “Sensation and Perception” on it, I sighed. What in the world did the way rods and cones worked in our eyes have to do with anything? Why should it matter to me whether depth perception and concepts like size constancy were inborn or learned?

Of course, I registered for the class, albeit begrudgingly. At least, I thought, the class would be taught by Dr. Rogers, the professor I’d taken “Statistics” from—I’d loved that class and he’d been really good at explaining how random sampling and central tendencies and the normal curve had to do with the measurement of human behavior.

As it turned out, he was also quite good at planting the seeds that would ultimately inform my approach to working with everyone from stress management clients to corporate executives tasked with strategic decision-making. What we think we see has an awful lot to do with what we think we know and choose to do, and so does what we don’t see. The great thing about perception is that virtually everybody has a different one—not necessarily right or wrong, just different. The tragedy of perception is that people are often hurt, maimed, even killed because of what we don’t see.

When I saw this photograph on Facebook, I was reminded of a group of “illusions” I’ve used with various groups to demonstrate how two people can look at something and see very different things, and yet both be right. Once you see both perspectives, you can’t go back. And yet, I think that’s called growth.

Maybe, just maybe, if we could look at life, and realize that we don’t always see all that is right in front of us, we could listen to each other and devise rich, effective, enduring solutions for everyone.

Vally

Here are a few examples, beginning with the photograph borrowed from Facebook:

Straight ahead or profile?

Hag or young girl?

Three legs or two?

Bunch of blocks or the word “LIFT”?

It all depends on what you see…

If you can rebut any of this, please do. That’s why I posted it.

Use facts, though.

Wednesday 12 October 2011 

by: Robert Reich, Robert Reich’s Blog | News Analysis

The President’s Jobs Bill doesn’t have a chance in Congress — and the Occupiers on Wall Street and elsewhere can’t become a national movement for a more equitable society – unless more Americans know the truth about the economy. 

1. Tax cuts for the rich trickle down to everyone else. Baloney. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both sliced taxes on the rich and what happened? Most Americans’ wages (measured by the real median wage) began flattening under Reagan and have dropped since George W. Bush. Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke.

2. Higher taxes on the rich would hurt the economy and slow job growth. False. From the end of World War II until 1981, the richest Americans faced a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent or above. Under Dwight Eisenhower it was 91 percent. Even after all deductions and credits, the top taxes on the very rich were far higher than they’ve been since. Yet the economy grew faster during those years than it has since. (Don’t believe small businesses would be hurt by a higher marginal tax; fewer than 2 percent of small business owners are in the highest tax bracket.) 

3. Shrinking government generates more jobs. Wrong again. It means fewer government workers – everyone from teachers, fire fighters, police officers, and social workers at the state and local levels to safety inspectors and military personnel at the federal. And fewer government contractors, who would employ fewer private-sector workers. According to Moody’s economist Mark Zandi (a campaign advisor to John McCain), the $61 billion in spending cuts proposed by the House GOP will cost the economy 700,000 jobs this year and next.

4. Cutting the budget deficit now is more important than boosting the economy. Untrue. With so many Americans out of work, budget cuts now will shrink the economy. They’ll increase unemployment and reduce tax revenues. That will worsen the ratio of the debt to the total economy. The first priority must be getting jobs and growth back by boosting the economy. Only then, when jobs and growth are returning vigorously, should we turn to cutting the deficit.

5. Medicare and Medicaid are the major drivers of budget deficits. Wrong. Medicare and Medicaid spending is rising quickly, to be sure. But that’s because the nation’s health-care costs are rising so fast. One of the best ways of slowing these costs is to use Medicare and Medicaid’s bargaining power over drug companies and hospitals to reduce costs, and to move from a fee-for-service system to a fee-for-healthy outcomes system. And since Medicare has far lower administrative costs than private health insurers, we should make Medicare available to everyone.

6. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. Don’t believe it. Social Security is solvent for the next 26 years. It could be solvent for the next century if we raised the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax. That ceiling is now $106,800. 

7. It’s unfair that lower-income Americans don’t pay income tax. Wrong. There’s nothing unfair about it. Lower-income Americans pay out a larger share of their paychecks in payroll taxes, sales taxes, user fees, and tolls than everyone else.

Demagogues through history have known that big lies, repeated often enough, start being believed — unless they’re rebutted. These seven economic whoppers are just plain wrong. Make sure you know the truth – and spread it on.

I read an article, a homily of sorts, I suppose, the link to which was posted on Facebook by my friend, Lori Lowe. The article, written by a reverend, was about her reactions to the “spiritual-not-religious” crowd. Click here to read it for yourself.

I understand and share some of the author’s opinions. I understand and share also the opinions of those she described–the ones who, on Sunday, attend the “Church of the Inner Springs.” For 30+ years, I went to that church, religiously. (That’s a euphemism for staying in bed, by the way.)

I read a fair sampling of the comments in response to the article, too, which ranged from thank-yous to challenges, from applause to defensiveness, and then did what Lori suggested in her post. Chewed on it.

I found it interesting that I’m in the throes of writing a book, and hopefully a series of workshops, about the connections I see between the results of major psychological experiments of the last century and what Jesus and others reportedly said 20 centuries ago. My motivation is similar, I think, to the author of the article/sermon, Lillian Daniel—born of a frustration that the Christian church as a whole seems to be losing ground in terms of membership and for no good reason. In my opinion, Jesus’ message is as vibrant and relevant as it has ever been. It’s ours that is flawed.

My approach is different, though, in that I see something else at the core, not only of the attrition in the church, but in the words of Lillian Daniel–the reflexive response to perceived criticism or attack into positions of “we” vs. “them.” And the equally divisive automatic suggestion of superiority of “we” over “them.” Doesn’t matter which “we” you perceive yourself as being part of.

The tragedy to me is that I perceive the message of Jesus to be, first and foremost, one of unity and the equality of every soul in the eyes of God, the differences among us (especially in belief) a reason for celebration, not rancor.

I, like everyone else, need to be a part of a “we,” and I long for that “we” to exist in the absence of a “them.” Maybe it comes from being a little girl who stood on the fringe of every group, so different in some ways that the ways I was similar weren’t so obvious.

I write in an earlier blog about the fall of 1991, when I went to a World Series game at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium and literally “drank in” the sound of 50,000 people singing the “tomahawk chant” in unison. I stopped singing for a moment and the goose bumps shot up my arm. Don’t get me wrong, here. I love baseball, especially the Braves, and I enjoy immensely being part of the Braves-loving “we,” but what I felt had nothing to do with the Braves or baseball. It had to do with the fact that 50,000 people, each unique in a variety of ways, each members of different “we” groups, for one moment in time merged into one voice. The power of that voice was incredible, reverberating out of the stadium and beyond.

I realized that night that the feeling I experienced was the one I had expected and sought in the church, thought I’d found, but really hadn’t, as a child, a teenager, a young adult. I would leave the church, searching elsewhere for that sense of belonging I so craved. Even so, it would be another 17 years, in the wake of grief, before I would, by choice, trade the “church of the inner springs” for the one I now drag myself out of bed to attend almost every week.

Though I am no longer a child, teenager or young adult, I still go in search of that feeling, the sense of a place where despite my individual successes and failures, joy and despair, I am equal to those around me. And most importantly, equally loved. As before, there is no shortage of arguments and misunderstandings, no scarcity of criticism–no lack of “I like this rector better than that one, that altar dressing isn’t as pretty as the last one, that sermon was better than this one, she’s a better teacher than he is.”

Though I’m Episcopalian now, I share some of the beliefs, but not others. I share some of the beliefs of the UCC Church (where Lillian Daniel is a pastor), but not others. I even share some of the beliefs of the Baptist church, from which I originally came. Obviously, there are some there I don’t share.

None of that matters when I am kneeling at the altar, with one person to my right and one to my left, when, like them, I extend my hands to receive the symbolic bread and wine of life offered to me by yet another human. I am reminded, instead, of a cool night in 1991. Sometimes the person to my left is a person of color, sometimes white like me. Sometimes the person to my right is Jamaican-born, other times Canadian, and sometimes even a Yankee! Sometimes that person is female, sometimes male. Sometimes a judge, sometimes even a math teacher. Sometimes he’s conservative, sometimes liberal. Sometimes, she’s physically or mentally challenged in some way. Some will spend the next week deciding whether to buy a new car or house. Others will spend the next week wondering where their next meal will come from.

For a moment in time, there is only one “we.”

And my hope survives.