Next Come Jet Packs
Antigravity devices, the stuff of science fiction.
According to an article at BBC news, Boeing is hoping to make them a reality, based on purported breakthrough research by Yevgeny Podkletnov in Finland.
Antigravity devices, the stuff of science fiction.
According to an article at BBC news, Boeing is hoping to make them a reality, based on purported breakthrough research by Yevgeny Podkletnov in Finland.
My brother has a doghouse in his front yard with MAGGIE on the front in big block letters, even though he's never owned a dog named Maggie.
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Right up until she died at age ninety-two, my grandmother had a big basket of books in the front hallway. Anyone who came to visit was invited to look and see if there was anything they wanted. All kinds of books were in there--mysteries, best sellers, science fiction, romance, thrillers.
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I was just watched the movie, 'Villa Rides' with Yul Brynner and Robert Mitchum. Villa waits to save a village until a certain number of people have died. Meanwhile, while he's waiting, a girl is raped. Robert Mitchum says it's partly Villa's fault. That she doesn't want a man. That she thinks no man will want her. Villa calls for a priest and marries the girl himself.
I can't figure this out. Is it supposed to be a noble gesture, supposed to reveal his human side? Now this poor girl has not only been raped, she's stuck married to a man she's never met and who, basically, kills people for a living. This should make her feel better? Do guys really believe this stuff?
I grew up on a farm at the end of a dirt road, ten miles from the nearest town. A number of years ago, the state in its wisdom decided to build a big prison (actually two big prisons) some three miles north of my parents' farm, down an unused dirt road. The prison would be in the country, more or less. Escaping prisoners could zip right up that unused road and find a number of isolated farmhouses, including my parents', within easy walking distance.
At public meetings, the proponents of the prison talked about what would happen should a prisoner ever escape (which of course, would be totally unlikely). We would have a rapid warning system, they said. We would call every single house in this specific radius; we would inform everyone quickly and efficiently; there would be no real danger.
What if that doesn't happen, my father asked. What if there are escaped prisoners headed our way and we have no idea? It will happen, the officials told him in reassuring tones, because we say it will and we're, you know, officials. Don't be so emotional, they said. How can we make progress here if you're not going to be rational?
The prison, of course, was built. Prisoners were trucked in by the busload from distant cities where the actual crimes had been committed.
Over time, prisoners have escaped. No calls get made. The prison tries to find them quick, like a bunny, before anyone finds out. Calls come unofficially from prison guards whose families live near by. But the official notification, the swift and efficient honesty, never comes. The promise isn't kept.
What do you do when people lie right out to your face? How do you have a rational conversation? If you suggest that maybe, perhaps, what these excellent people are saying isn't actually what's going to happen, they play the emotion card.
Emotion is not the opposite of rational; it's another field of response altogether. It is possible to be both rational and passionate. It's possible that rational calm consideration of differing points of view, of facts in evidence, and of your own experiences are the reason you're passionate in the first place.
A lot of people who profess to be all about freedom and democracy, don't want to deal with the people. They can't allow the process to work because the people might decide they don't want whatever it is that the project's proponents are trying to shove down their throats. It's the equivalent of scientists who say, people don't understand what we're trying to do here, never considering that maybe 'people' do understand. And they don't agree with it.
And so what happens is that officials or company reps spout an official line and don't really listen to the questions and they get huffy when the questioners, with real issues on the line, keep asking the same questions over and over. When you know human nature and the risk-aversion of organizations and how much is unspoken in the way the organizations work, it's beyond frustrating to try to have a reasonable discussion. If only one side is honest and the other side is not, things never turn out well.
Honesty. It's a choice.
I track with my dogs.
In tracking, a tracklayer goes out into a field or woods or community college campus and lays a track (walks a known path) a certain length (400, 600, 1,000 yards). The track has turns, it goes through different kinds of cover (grass, woods, ditches, pavement). The tracklayer leaves articles along the track (glove, belt, shoe, wallet, plastic lid). Sometimes other people walk across the track--sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. The only markers on the track are one or two flags at the beginning. After a half hour or an hour or three hours (depending on the kind of track), you and your dog go to the starting point, follow the track and find all the articles. It's all about the scent on the ground and the nature of the obstacles and the wind and the temperature and the dog and the handler.
A friend of mine asked me why once. "What's the purpose?" he said. "What's the purpose of basketball?" I asked him. Tracking is about being outside, about watching your dog do something you couldn't do even with mechanical enhancement, about trust, love, partnership, and communicating with alien beings.
The American Kennel Club sponsors tracking tests all around the country.
Want more info? Try here.
Let's choose health care over tax cuts.
That's what Vermont governor, Howard Dean, suggests in a recent Boston Globe article--Dean says US tax cut should be repealed
...via Cursor
I'm pretty gung-ho on this new bill in Congress that would let me hack other people's computers
That's right, I'm a copyright holder too. And this bill includes me, includes everyone, it looks like, who holds copyright to works they've produced or purchased. And, surprise, surprise, that doesn't just include big record companies and Jack Valenti. The wording of the bill as it stands now has left some of its proponents saying, Hey, wait! We have to talk.
Maybe that's because, when they thought of it, they didn't mean just any copyright holder.
Want to glue glass to metal?
This to That (Glue Advice) (whose mission statement is: Because people have a need to glue things to other things) will tell you how. For some reason, I find this fascinating. I particularly recommended visiting the Glue O'Month page
...via BoingBoing
I know a great many things. Some of them I learned from experience, some from books, some from experimentation, some from inductive, and some from deductive reasoning. Some of it I learned in school. Compared to all the other parts, considering what I know and don't know, how I see the shape of the world and my place in it, most of what I know, I learned on my own. Some people (people other than me) learned a great lot of what they know or at least a lot of what they use in their research and their work (or at least on their resumes to get jobs) from school. They have PhDs and MFAs and MDs and DVMs and post-docs. The knowledge that they have is certified. They have credentials.
Both kinds of knowledge are important. Both kinds are essential, in fact. And really, all of us have some combination of both, school and not-school learning, at our disposal.
The difficulty for me comes when we use credentials to divide who gets to participate, who gets to have a voice at the table and how we form our world view. It comes when we use old pieces of paper to decide who can be interviewed for jobs. When we look not at what people say and the evidence they bring to the discussion, but on whether they have initials after their name.
And it is a difficult issue in our current world of too much information. When knowledge filtering is essential, it's nice to have quick and easy ways to decide who to listen to and who to ignore.
Sometimes it's easy to tell right and wrong. Using pieces of paper exclusive of experience and capability is wrong. Say it with me--it's wrong, wrong, wrong. I have no objection to someone who says--someone with a Computer Science degree and one year's experience could do this programming job; someone without a Computer Science degree and three year's experience actually doing programming could also do this job. I do object, strongly, to someone who says, we won't interview anyone for this position who doesn't have a Computer Science degree.
It's wrong. It's not only wrong, it's stupid. If you only hire people with Computer Science degrees, then you get a narrower range of viewpoints, of problem-solving skills, of ways of thinking.
That's a simple issue, easy to fix and why people insist on doing it wrong boggles me. But there are other, much more complicated issues that don't resolve so easily.
We have to keep an open mind. We have to keep remembering that there are many ways of learning and many ways of knowing and we need them all. We have to continue to look at the structures we have, the futures we are capable of, and the ways we interact with each other. The world is not one thing or the other. It's a world of possibilities, of continuous recreation, and it's a place where all kinds of knowledge, all kinds of experiences, all kinds of credentials--those that do and do not involve paper--need to be welcomed and considered.
Everyone has a way they look at the world. From the very center of that way, especially if we're also at that time in the center of a culture that looks at the world the way that we do, it's extraordinarily difficult to see that we are looking at the world a certain 'way' and not simply seeing it as it is.
The word 'paradigm' has (as have many other perfectly good words) been co-opted by business where it seems to mean, 'really cool stuff that sounds like I'm important and should get paid a lot of money' but doesn't really change anything.
But paradigm shifts in the original mostly non-business sense are important. They mean, quite literally, seeing the world in an entirely different way. If, say, a hundred years ago, I had grown up taking for granted that black women had no soul, were not like you or me in any way, and then in some cataclysmic or gradual way discovered that they are women who bleed and grieve and sacrifice themselves for love and freedom, then the entire world changes, shifts beneath my feet and becomes quite a different world than the old one.
For me then, two questions arise--what causes a paradigm shift? And how does one explain a paradigm shift to someone else in a way that lets them see the new world too?
In the 1970s in the heyday of women's liberation and civil rights demonstrations and anti-war protests, people held consciousness raising sessions. The idea behind those consciousness raisings was to paint a picture of the world as it was (not necessarily as people saw it) and then to paint another picture of the world as it might be. It was done through question-asking, story-telling, group participation and bonding.
There are so many things I want people to 'see' as I see them: subtle, silent bias, the possibilities beyond production agriculture, the potential that exists in other ways of knowing, what the dogs have taught me, alternatives to large organizations,....
Information does want to be free, you know. No matter how snidely one curls one's lip at that saying or what putdowns one flings in the direction of whoever it was who actually said it, or something like it, but different, the free exchange of information is an essential part of our strength, growth, and progress. The more we know, the more we have, the more we are.
And yet, it ought to be possible to get some kind of direct recompense for one's writings or one's music or other intellectual creations that are clearly someone's work--though not so clearly someone's actual material possessions in the way that property is.
Copyright has always been intended as the legal resolution to the tension between free speech (free exchange of information) and just recompense for labor and creation. It is intended to provide a balance--neither too much one way or the other.
Lately though the balance has threatened to become badly skewed. Not, as many loud voices scream, because the Internet makes it so darn easy to spread information everywhere (though this is an important thing to be aware of and to understand) but because corporate desire to grab and hold intellectual property for as long as possible threatens the free exchange of information all the way down to the basic stories that make us human and teach us how to live. There's another push on right now to raise copyright protection an additional 20 years, 20 years beyond the current law--life plus 70 for works created after 1978--far beyond the realm of just recompense and mostly for the benefit of packagers and distributors and corporations whose property it might now be, but who did not create or write or develop the intellectual property they're striving so mightily to keep out of the hands of others.
A successful writer, author of a number of cherished books, says why wouldn't I want my grandchildren to have that money? And the answer, or at least an answer is, you very well might, but how does it benefit not only your grandchildren (and actually your great- and possible great-great-grandchildren) but society at large? Isn't this kind of benefit vastly beyond what I would get for labor that is not intellectual? If I build a house and sell it, then it's sold. I don't get a little bit more money every time it changes hands for the next hundred years. I don't get a few pennies each time someone drives by and admires my design or takes a tour of the rooms.
And yet, life plus seventy years is merely difficult. Some parts of our heritage will be lost or untouchable for some long number of years. But it's not even close to the attacks going on right now over our rights to use the books and music and movies we read and listen to and view. What if you had to pay every time you read a book? What if you couldn't loan it to friends? What if libraries were illegal?
The free exchange of ideas. It's an essential cornerstone of this country. It's what we criticize in Cuba and Afghanistan and China. We honor writers and we honor ourselves when we find ways to stand up and say this is important--the free exchange of ideas. Balance must be maintained.
I like the movie The Deep Blue Sea.
It's a stupid plot. In order to cure Alzheimer's disease, scientists make genetic alterations to the biggest, meanest sharks in the ocean. And they do it in a lab in the middle of the ocean far from shore and other people. Sharks take revenge. People die. Disaster ensues. There is screaming and shouting and near-death experiences. The plot holes are big and obvious and not even that much fun to pick at, being big and obvious and all. Some people call it one of the stupidest movies ever made, but it isn't, really. There are some extremely stupid movies out there.
What I like about it, though, is the characters. They're smart and flawed and not particularly good (they're not particularly unique, well-drawn characters either, but I like them anyway). The woman in charge of the research operation is driven, we are meant to understand, to find a cure for Alzheimer's because someone in her family has it or had it or died from it. She will do anything, sacrifice anything--and as it turns out, anyone--to find that cure. And even when people have died all over the place and the lab itself is sinking and the sharks are circling ever closer, she's still all about the research and how she can get out of there with everything they've learned. She does make the ultimate sacrifice at the end, but it's tough to decide if she actually intended to or just did something really, really stupid.
The man financing the operation is an adventurer and a business man. He climbed a big mountain once and survived although there was a blizzard and people died. He is modest about the adventure as well he should be, since it turns out the survivors more or less killed the others so they would survive. He's also pretty smart, interested in everything and has a good sense of humor. He makes a terrific speech about halfway through the movie about overcoming fear and working together and going on in the face of almost insurmountable danger. And then he reminds us why one doesn't stand next to a window, or an underwater facsimile thereof, in a horror movie.
There is a cook with a smart mouth and a parrot. And you know from the get-go that that parrot is going to die. We're less sure about the cook, which, unless they're walking through the movie with big black X's on their clothes, is as it should be.
There's a professor who pisses into the wind and a marine biologist who just wants to be normal and safe and a little adventurous at the same time and a geeky, but good-looking guy who wants his excitement in the form of numbers and materials analysis, but ends up anyway in the middle of a terrifying place with monsters after him.
And then, there's the hero. He's been in prison and he's just there to wrangle sharks and all he wants is to be left alone. He also looks really good in a diving suit, a heroic pre-requisite, but not really central to the plot. What I find most fascinating about him, though, is that he never hesitates. He's not at all intellectual; you could never sit around and talk opera or Shakespeare with him. But he doesn't swagger either. He never threatens to beat anyone up or spends any time playing dominance games. But when it's life or death, he acts. No thinking. No ohmygod. No good lord, I could die. He does something. I'm not sure very many of us are that way in real life. Most of us curse fate or wring our hands or wish someone else would just fix things. And when we finally act it's often just about too late, having watched the developing disaster in horror and disbelief.
Everyday heroes, people who come through despite their fears and their doubts, are amazing and grand. But in fiction, characters who act like we act come across as whiny and annoying and mostly we can't wait for them to get eaten by sharks. Fiction heroes are at their best when they are simply doing things. And the hero in The Deep Blue Sea does it as well as anyone I've seen.
And in the final analysis, that's what I like about this movie. That there's a hero and that he's both unassuming and active.
Though, the sharks are kind of cool, too.
Superpredators. Kids killing kids. Teen crime sprees. School yard killings. They're reported as if they happened next door, right down the street. Everywhere, really, and all the time. And we blame this horrible wave of evil children on things we don't much like anyway--fantasy, comic books, action adventure and video games.
But here are some facts: teen crimes are down all across the board; violent crime is down. Most assaults on teenagers are by adults. Most assaults on adults are by adults, too. Kids shooting up school yards are rare enough that we can name them: Columbine, Kip Kinkel....
In a book called, Killing Monsters, Gerard Jones tells us that far from being universally harmful, fantasy, including fantasy violence, in all its forms can often be beneficial. The world is a complicated and scary place. It always has been. As children much of it is brand-new and must be experienced, figured out and rendered manageable in ways that allow children to learn and grow and become adults. Fantasy, action-adventure shows on television and even violent video games can help kids deal with things that frighten them, things that make them feel helpless, or things that confuse them. Playing war games or identifying with the hero in a violent movie or becoming a first-person-shooter in a video game can help kids to manage their emotions, learn new skills, and gain confidence.
But what about all those studies that say that violent television makes kids violent? According to Gerard Jones, many of those studies are flawed, overinterpreted, or inconclusive. For example, one study was reported as finding that violent television made kids more agitated. The actual conclusion from the study? All television made the kids in the study (a small number in a lab environment) more agitated. Or it might have been the environment. Or it might have been the kids.
Not all violent television, scary comics, and gory video games are good for all kids. Kids with problems may get encouragement to violence and may find excuses not to learn to cope with the things they need to deal with, but the problems came before the entertainment not the other way around.
Stifling children's thoughts and expecting that they should only like what we think kids should like and only what we're comfortable with them liking, allows for no good way to see what needs to be seen. Kids need to learn the world in their way and though they surely need the guidance of adults to do so, they can't and shouldn't be expected to always do it in ways that make the adults feel good and safe and happy.
What is public science in the public interest? I don't know that there's an official definition. I suppose there is, somewhere, a definition, but really public science in the public interest is done openly, published freely, benefits everyone and is concerned with increasing knowledge and the general good.
It's also quite clear what public science in the public interest is not. And that is much of what passes for public science today. It cannot be conducted in secret. It cannot be conducted in partnership with businesses who sign on for cheap R&D and the chance to take control of commercial results. I'm not even completely sure it survives as well as it could when it's hemmed in by accountability and credentialism and enforced cooperation and partnership (as in you must involve three other colleges and cross two state lines and....).
A professor at a university in California made it a condition of his employment that all his software development be released as open source, had to make it a condition of employment if he wanted to see it released--the university was more concerned about partnerships and profit. We make deals with companies to give them all the intellectual property we develop from some specific project, forgetting that it's not the purpose of public science to confer advantage.
There are weaknesses in all types of scientific research. There are issues of risk-taking, understanding consequences, and interpreting results. There are difficulties in seeing and accounting for the values that permeate the process. But science is not and never has been--despite its often misleading billing--the realm of breakthrough innovation by eccentric geniuses. If it was, the scientific method would be built on different scaffolding. The key--the critical and important key--to scientific research is repeatability and verifiability. Science is incremental. Its progress is often based on the accumulation of information, on doing series of experiments just a little differently than the set before, and on happy--but repeatable--accidents.
I work with a man who talks passionately about boxes, about how important it is not to constrain researchers in boxes, to give them everything they need so creativity flows freely. You could make a case that the goal of doing public science in the public interest is a box, that it restricts funding and innovation and other important things. Maybe it is. But it's a vastly larger box than that which promises your results to a profit-making corporation, allowing them to review any papers before publication, or never releasing the results at all and removing that information from the sum of information that's available to all researchers in their pursuit of scientific learning.
We need public science in the public interest. We need to remember that it's important. We need to remember why it's important. And we need to find ways to fund it and promote it and to make sure it happens because it's critical to the kind of society that we believe in and say that we want.
Want to know how close you are to the proposed train route for carrying nuclear waste to Yucca mountain?
Check out: The Nuclear Waste Route Atlas
Me, I'm within .4 miles.
I believe that we have forgotten, and in particular forgotten how to talk about, public works and public goods. We've forgotten, I think, how to talk about anything that doesn't involve markets and trade and transactions. But the world, and particularly, community is built on much more than transactions. And part of what it's built on is public good in the public interest. This is more than government. It's about how we live, about what makes it worth living here.
We believe in public education because a democracy requires an educated citizenry. Because one of the requirements of the public sphere is that we be active and engaged. Public education shouldn't apologize for teaching values. It should be about teaching values. There are certain very important values that you agree to when you agree to be a citizen of the United States of America. Do we know these? Do we teach them to our children? They are not John Wayne in the old west. They are not make more money than your neighbors and buy a lot of stuff. They are not make sure everyone is just like you or like you wish you were.
No, this is what they are: Every person in this country has certain unalienable rights that cannot be abridged. Everything else flows from this. One other important piece: we are a government of the people, by the people and for the people (We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union...).
That's it.
Two things.
Pretty simple, really. Oh there are other important things--separation of church and state, voting rights, equal rights, Roe v. Wade--but most of these other important things follow from the big two:
Everyone in this country (every human being, really) has certain unalienable rights that cannot be abridged.
And,
Our government was created of the people, by the people, and for the people.
It's possible to build a pretty good country on those two things alone. But it's important never to lose track of them. It's important never to put business or profit or capital or partnership or new revenue sources or anything else in front of them. It's critically and vitally important to remember that we are a nation of people--not governments, not laws, not capital, and not corporations. In the end, when nothing else is left, what we have is not big cars and shiny suits or yachts or mansions. What we have is how we treated each other and what we did when it mattered.
So what does this have to do with education? How hard can it be to learn two short lines? But what we learn is what to do with them, how they look from day to day, whether they are words we mouth or important things we try to live up to. What the compromises and hard choices and gray areas are and how to deal with them. Our public education, when done well, teaches us how to be human. And it teaches us how principles, when believed in and applied with wisdom and grace make it possible to build a powerful, prosperous nation for everyone.
This wandered a bit away from public works and public goods, but trust me, I'll come back to them again.
I’m reading, actually just finished reading, a novel by Barbara Parker called Suspicion of Vengeance. Now I have to admit that I skimmed a lot of the last third of the book. Sometimes I do that. I skip ahead. Not because the book isn’t good (or at least not always) but because I start to get the feeling that the ending might annoy me and I don’t want to waste my time. It’s a bad habit and I wouldn’t recommend it, but I’ve learned to live with it.
Anyway, among the high points of Suspicion of Vengeance--a man is on death row convicted of killing a young mother whose baby then also died--an accidental, but related death. The convicted man says he was somewhere else at the time and now, eleven years after the conviction, a woman has come forward. She says that she was with him, was evicting him from her trailer, in fact, at the time an eyewitness who testified in the original trial says that he was lurking outside the murdered woman’s house. She tried, she says, to come forward at the time, eleven years ago, but, she says, the police threatened her with planted drugs and she didn’t want to go to jail.
It turns out she wasn’t just making it up, she was actually threatened by the police eleven years earlier, all in the name of we-know-we-have-our-guy-and-you’re-just-complicating-things.
But, of course, he’s not the guy. Which is, actually, why there’s a novel at all.
So, at this point, in comes the main character, a woman who knows the convicted man’s grandmother, roped into working on his appeal. She’s accompanied by her boyfriend, a pretty-danged-rich, high-priced defense lawyer.
In the course of their quest to prove the convicted man’s innocence before he’s executed, they (well, mostly the boyfriend) threaten to beat the living stuffing out of one guy in order to convince him to change his original testimony and they plant a shotgun in such a way as to point a finger at a man they have reason to believe commited four particularly hideous murders without any direct evidence against him.
In other words, they did just exactly what the police did eleven years ago.
Now this just bothers the heck out of me because what it says is: cheating is bad if you’re wrong, but it’s perfectly all right if you’re right.
Jeez, louise!
Cheating is bad because for one thing you have no way of knowing if this is the time you’re right or if this is the time you’re wrong. It’s also bad because it is unfair, unjust, and in this story it’s particularly bad because we’ve already got a bright and shining example of the evils of cheating as a means to an end. I mean an innocent man got killed for pete's sake!
I like my mystery stories to be about good triumphing over evil. Call me naïve and foolish, but hey, that’s why I read ‘em. Now I also like complications and dealing with shades of gray and the flaws and weaknesses of character. And I might not mind cheating in a good cause if it was set up and presented in a way that worked. But setting up the ‘good’ solution so that it’s the same as the ‘bad’ is not an example of a story where it works.
My mother just lost her health benefits. The school district she retired from just voted them away with (though there’s still some argument on this) the cooperation of the teacher’s union who voted for bigger raises instead--too bad, so sad, we’re in a bind so screw you. My sister-in-law says that her retirement health benefits are already gone (she’s not due to retire for twenty years or so). When she retires there will be no health benefits and whether she’ll be able to afford to retire at sixty-five is a big open question right now. In a suburb west of Des Moines, Iowa, the city council has voted not to pay half the health insurance for early retirees, something they had been doing. ‘This will double my payments,’ says one woman. Double them, she says, to $16,000 a year. Sixteen thousand dollars a year. For health benefits. The mind boggles, actually, at $8,000 a year which she was already paying to cover half of her health benefits. She’ll have to go back to work, she says. But who on earth earns enough even working full-time to cover $16,000 a year in health benefits?
Every budget, every year--you can have a raise, three percent, let’s say, but insurance costs are up, you’ll have to pay some of that too. And that’s not to mention all the people who have nothing. Twenty-three thousand dollars for routine angioplasty. Ten thousand dollars for a broken ankle. Don’t lose your job. Don’t take a risk. Never, ever think about trying to go out on your own with that great business idea you had.
Medical care and health insurance are a genuine four-fold crisis in this country. We say we’re a land of opportunity, that creativity and genius can give anyone the American dream. But the strain of health care, of providing for yourself and your spouse and your children and parents keeps us blocked and stymied and stressed and docile so corporations and other large organizations can buy us cheap, steal our ideas, and give us nothing by a tiny, momentary respite from our fears.
Hillary Clinton was right. We need health care reform. And I hope the people who blocked it and shut off the discussion and the chance to figure something out that’s better than what we’ve got are proud of themselves. I believe that the lack of health care reform impacts our democracy and our freedom. Personally, I think we need a single-payer system. Would it be perfect? No. Would it be better than what we’ve got? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
We were told a lot of things that weren’t true the last time health care and insurance reform came up. We were told it in shrill voices with anxiety-provoking music in the background. And we were told it because profits were at stake not because any of the people telling us really cared whether you or I could get health care when we needed it or could raise our voices without fear.
As someone said to me quite recently--a guarantee of profit in the past is not a promise of profit in the future. It’s not the function of a democracy to guarantee that profit, especially that of one company at the expense of another. And even more at the expense of its citizens. In the movie, Hoosiers, the mother of Barbara Hershey’s character says to the basketball coach--the sun don’t shine on the same dog’s ass every day. It ought not shine on the same company every day either. And you can say that letting companies fail also hurts citizens. And that’s so. We must pay attention to that too. But we can’t let ourselves protect hard-working-people-with-money at the expense of hard-working-people-with-nothing. It’s nice to think that people with nothing are used to nothing and therefore won’t mind being stepped on by the people with money who, after all, are accustomed to more. But it’s wrong. Change for simple redistribution of wealth is not what I’m talking about here. What I’m talking about is not refusing to change just to prevent a redistribution of wealth.
So we don’t--or shouldn’t, at least--decide the changes to health care because insurance companies want to stay in business or want to continue to make x-level of profits. We decide what makes us better people, community and country. What makes us safe, healthy and free to pursue our lives without the huge cost of health care hanging over our heads like a giant hammer set to swing. We recognize that there is a great task here that needs doing and we enter into that task with open minds, straight un-spun talk, and a minimum of scary music.
The problem is:
While a great many people in a great many places do heroic things every day, collectively we don’t think that we have the power to change our environment and, worse, we don’t feel that we ought to or need to stand up for justice and ‘right.’ I’m not even sure that some of us know what justice and ‘right’ and ethical is anymore. It doesn’t mean that we don’t want to be ethical and ‘good.’ But the path--which is never absolute and is always filled with difficult choices--has been obscured by information overload and commercialization and rapid change.
A few months ago, a young man on a web site was talking about being fired from his job with a large company. He had worked in some kind of computer support and had escalated what he, at least, perceived as a large customer problem to get it resolved. He cited as his inspiration the company’s Core Values and Beliefs, 14 Deadly Sins and Call Center Tenets. He kept trying to solve the problem until he found a solution. He was fired. He posted about this on a web site and an astonishing number of responders told him that he was foolish and naïve to even think that the things his employer told him were important were, in fact, important. Many of them said things like, ‘make your boss look good,’ ‘don’t worry about this stuff if you want to keep your job,’ ‘what were you thinking?’ Along similar lines, I recently saw a survey that said that 60% of college freshmen cite as their biggest goal when they graduate a comfortable life with sufficient material goods.
And yet, collectively, we admire heroic action in all its forms. We’re most comfortable with it in film and fiction and sports, but we still respond to rescue workers and people who struggle against adversity and spontaneous acts of bravery with celebration and support. I once rented a series of training and development video tapes for my students. Some of them were good, some of them were silly, but the one that had the greatest impact was one called, ‘Creating the Heroic environment.’ People want to be heroic, they dream about it and read about it and write about it. A lot of people recreate themselves everyday trying to at least make themselves the heroes of their own stories. But, really, very few of us anymore know how to be involved in the ongoing actions of the world, how to make any kind of important difference that doesn’t involve making more money or making sure our child gets more advantages than that other kid or following the rules in a way that works for us and lets us keep our jobs. We don’t even know sometimes that we get a say. And the portrayal of heroes in film and fiction and sports generally tells us that heroes are people who are many things, but mostly they are ‘not-us.’
I want us to glory in the idea of standing up again. I want us all to understand that we don’t have to be afraid to want something more, that we don’t have to defend corporations, that we don’t have to be cynical. I want to promote the idea of imperfect people doing good things. And I want to show people that we can build this off what we have right now. ‘Doing good’ is not dependent on strict codes or condemning others or saving only the righteous. We have the pieces right here at our disposal--in our myths and our history and ourselves.
I want to help create the space where these things can be imagined, where the idea that we have some measure of control over our destiny, that we can stand up for things, that, indeed, some things are ‘wrong,’ can take root and grow. And it’s not about how easy and wonderful and glorious it would be if we had more heroes in our life. It’s about how complicated and hard and difficult, but also how possible. And we lose something and we gain something, but we’re all important and we all contribute and we all get to ask questions and we all count.
More specifically, I have Rottweilers.
Contrary to most people’s ideas and according to the official standard, Rottweilers are not large dogs. They are medium-large, ranging in size from about 80 to 120 pounds. My current dogs, Charming Billie and John Henry, weigh 75 and 95 pounds respectively.
Rottweilers are, however, strong, powerful, protective and smart. They are not dogs who should be owned by just anyone. They are not, as some people insist on telling me, sweet, gentle creatures who wouldn’t hurt a fly (though some of them are incredibly sweet and many of them intend, at least, to be gentle). They are also not, or at least are not generally born that way, stone killers who would rip a person to shreds as soon as look at them.
So, why do I live with Rottweilers ?
In the twelve years I’ve had Rottweilers I’ve found them to be tough and full of heart and to dearly love their people. Their personalities can vary from out-going to reserved (aloof), from energetic to couch potato. I have not yet met one who wasn't very intelligent in some way (but then, I think most dogs are smart. Just not ‘us.’). Riley (my first Rott) never forgot anyone she ever met. John Henry (my second Rott) knows by the shoes I put on whether I’m going to work or taking him for a walk. Charming Billie is...well, she’s charming. And she refuses to learn what ‘no’ means which takes some kind of brain power, though I’m not sure exactly what.
They are tremendously powerful dogs. Even Charming Billie at a mere 75 pounds, a mini-Rott if ever there was one, could yank me off my feet if she wanted to. The pure massive power of a Rottweiler took me more time than I thought to get used to. Training them and living with them has given me a whole new understanding of my own body and strength of will and while I don't have Rottweilers to protect me, particularly, I love all that muscle and power walking beside me and knowing that they are with me because they want to be, that they let me control the leash because they trust me. It’s a partnership that acknowledges on my side that they are not people with fur and on theirs that I am the one who calls the shots when it counts.
But here’s the bottom line:
I cannot own a Rottweiler and not be alive. They bring me out into the world and make me pay attention. They show me what heart is and sacrifice and joy. Rottweilers live in the now. They always go for broke and they never worry about whether they care too much or try too hard or if the neighbors will think they are silly. And, honestly, I cannot do anything in the face of all that, except love them.
I am a liberal. I prefer the term progressive for lots of reasons, but liberal is a perfectly fine word and it ought to get more use than as a casually flung pejorative. Unlike a lot of people who say, yeah, I’m a social liberal but I’m economically conservative, I gotta say, I’m an economic and a social liberal, perhaps more economic than social when all is said and done.
I believe in individual responsibility. I believe we have too many laws and that many of them are excessively stupid. I believe we must treat people fairly and with dignity. I don’t believe in class warfare and I wish the rich guys who harp on the poor all the time and push for punishing, restrictive legislation would cut it out. I believe that everyone has certain unalienable rights that cannot be abridged.
Everyone. I believe that this not only trumps ‘majority rules’ but that democracy in this country has been and has the potential to be far greater than just a bunch of people who get to vote. I believe that the law is not there to tell everyone to live like me. Or like you. Or like all of us together living all the same forever. I believe in individual choice, personal freedom, and privacy. I believe that mistakes are made, that people make foolish decisions, that sometimes bad things happen. I believe we can learn from these things.
I believe we need more space for people to come together that is restricted by neither government or business. I believe the world of business works best when fairness and ethics and the true costs of things are important. I believe that if it’s not possible to make money off something and to act ethically and honestly at the same time then one ought not to make money off that thing. I believe that there is such a thing as having too much money. I also believe that there is such a thing as having too little.
I believe that discrimination exists, that diversity is important, and that there are certain principles of behavior, ethics, and responsibility that ought to be universal.
I believe that it’s possible to hold two contradictory thoughts in my head at the same time. I believe that the subject of individual freedoms is a complex one that is not well served with sound bites and sensationalism. On the subject of individual freedoms, I choose to come down on the side of more, not less. I believe in the Constitution of the United States of America. I believe that we better oughta make choices that are to the benefit of our community (whatever that is) as well as ourselves. I believe that the decisions I make as part of a greater whole can be different than those I make as an individual and that the difference between the two is one of the places that government matters.
All the knowledge in the world divides into the following four categories:
I was in a leadership development group once where we got into a big discussion about these four categories and what they mean. Unhappiness abounded. Angry words were spoken. "What does that mean," people said, "we don’t know what we don’t know? It doesn’t make any sense."
Exactly.
Okay, not exactly. It does make sense. It’s just kind of ...twisty. And maybe, I don’t know, uncomfortable, too.
So, what does it mean?
The biggest and the most dangerous category by far is the one that contains things that you don’t even know you don’t know. You can’t discuss them. You can’t ask questions about them. You can’t develop a plan for gaining knowledge with a comprehensive set of classes, outside reading and helpful discussion because you Don’t Know these things are out there. You don’t know these things even Exist. You don’t know. And if you don’t know, you can’t take any of these things into account when you make decisions, you can’t adjust your world view. These things are simply missing, like black holes in the overall picture of life. I can’t give you examples of things that I don’t know that I don’t know because I Don’t Know Them.
The second pretty big category is the one that contains things you know you don’t know. This one’s easier to define and not as frustrating. I know I don’t know Japanese or Russian (though I once learned the alphabet from a book) or how to play contract bridge (though my mother does which is why I know much more about what I don’t know about contract bridge than I ever used to). What I know that makes this category different from the category of Things I don’t know I don’t know is that I know this stuff exists. And I don’t know anything about it. I know that somewhere there is information about building nuclear weapons and operating on brain tumors and installing fiber optics cable through an existing parking lot. And because I know, I could, if I needed to for some reason, learn this stuff. Which I can’t do for the set of things I don’t know that I don’t know.
Then there’s the (relatively) smaller category of things you don’t know you know. Some of these things hop back and forth between the category of things you don’t know you know to the category of things you know you know when, for instance, something happens to dredge up that particular bit of information (like remembering all the words to the Gilligan’s Island theme song whenever I hear the first five notes of the tune) or when someone points out something that they see in me but that I’ve never particularly noticed, like "Do you know you always interrupt me when I’m talking to you?" (Note: I don’t actually do this, it’s just an example. At least, if I do do it, it’s not one of the things I know).
Finally, there’s the set of things you know that you know. You hope that this is a constantly changing set of things. And not because things you used to know are dropping out of this category into things you used to know but have forgotten, a subset of things you don’t know you don’t know (or, alternatively, a subset of the set of things you don’t know you know if they’re things you would remember if someone just reminded you).
There’s a subset--things I think I know--that fits and doesn’t fit because a lot of the things you think you know are opinion, which you know (as in I know what my opinions are right now). But opinion is based on a combination of values and experience and facts and can only be formed by things you know, influenced by things you know you don’t know and things you don’t know you know and changed by things you find out later, but right now are in the category of things you don’t know you don’t know.
Whew.
Everything you learn, everyday, gets moved from one of the other categories into Things you know you know. Everyone’s set of things is unique too. And one of the ways we contribute to the world is passing on the things we know we know to other people.
That’s what this blog is.
Me, talking about things I know I know and, inevitably, things I think I know.
...though in the way of all things I could be wrong.