President Obama fired Stanley McChrystal, the general-in-charge in Afghanistan. For insubordination. For making insulting and competency-challenging remarks about much of the Washington civilian leadership. To a Rolling Stone magazine reporter, of all people. Remarks specifically cutting about Obama, his CEO/commander-in-chief. On a very personal level, not a conceptual or philosophical debate. And apparently not the first time he has tried to out-word his commander. So Obama fired him. Rightfully, in my opinion.
By all accounts, McChrystal is an excellent, dedicated soldier. A Special Forces alumni who sleeps 4 hours/night, and eats 1 meal a day after a morning’s run. A soldier’s solder who emphasizes “the team.” But perhaps crossing over into one of those overly gung-ho types that become a stereotype of “we versus them” toward outsiders. I.e. non-military folks outside of McChrystal’s circle just don’t get it and are a nuisance to “the mission”?
Comparisons have been made by various commentators to President Harry Truman’s confrontation with General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War. MacArthur famously saw all other beings as lesser than himself, including the president and generals in his chain of command. MacArthur wanted to take the war into North Korea to punish them for their unprovoked incursion into South Korea, arguing that there was no danger of China coming in to defend them. Truman argued for the more limited objective of simply pushing North Korea back to within its borders. (It was sort of like Bush 1 versus Bush 2: H.W. Bush wanted to just push Iraq out of Kuwait and stop there; W. Bush said go all the way to Bagdad as liberating heroes and throw Hussein out – with disastrous consequences.) After a number of blatant instances of personal disrespect to his superiors (including Truman), MacArthur opted to take to the press his disagreement with Truman on the fundamental objectives of the Korean War. So Truman fired him – not for his differences of opinion, but for taking his case outside “the chain” and publicly challenging the competency of the country’s leadership during wartime. By most historical judgments, Truman’s foresight and actions were the right ones on all accounts.
I am quite sure that Stanley McChrystal is an intelligent and honorable man. Apparently he has his concerns about his reporting line’s view of his job and his mission, versus his own view. Why he chose a Rolling Stone interview to publicly air those concerns, in the words that he chose, is a mystery, perhaps even to himself. But what does a person do when personal goals and beliefs do not seem to be matching up with the goals and beliefs of one’s superiors or the collective institution as a whole?
This is the recurring dilemma of the workplace. Be it the military, the multi-national corporation, the local franchisee, or the mom and pop pizza joint down the block. Ethical choices challenged some Enron personnel, some SEC inspectors who suspected Bernie Madoff early on, some oil drilling engineers who were told by BP to cut corners and hurry up their drilling in the Gulf, and an untold number of whistle-blowers who have sought to push out into the open questionable actions that some would have preferred to keep hidden.
The ethical dilemma in the workplace happens in 2 parts:
• Where to set the ethical line of conduct, that point at which actions and decisions become personally unacceptable;
• How to respond to that unacceptability – e.g. ignore it and go on; develop a scheme to go around it; raise it quietly up the ladder; raise it loudly across (&/or outside) the organization; quit and go elsewhere.
Setting the line is hard because ethics so often can be made to be “relative,” not absolute. Watergate, and more specifically its cover-up, crossed almost everyone’s line. The financial mis-dealings of the last decade became very relative, as the perpetrators seemed to easily pass the buck on to the next link in the chain. (Note how few of these individuals have ever said “I blew it and take responsibility.”)
If we do decide the line has been crossed, which action step do we choose in response? I personally have never had much trouble with the first decision – “the line” – even if my expectations were perhaps overly intolerant. The response part has always been more difficult to determine, and I have used each of the available options in one situation or another. I have done battle with the enemy within and without, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. But what I have learned over time and many experiences is that:
• No boss gets fired from the troops below, only the bigger cheeses above;
• The troops can sometimes make the impacts of a bad boss a big enough nuisance directly to the higher ups sufficiently for them to take an action;
• Complaining outside the chain may win you some supporters, but it is probably a sign that you’ve already lost the bigger battle inside;
• The ethical conflict is about TWO perceptions of ethics colliding with each other, so an internal debate about “who’s right” is usually fruitless;
• A leader cannot/should not expect everyone to agree with his/her every decisions and actions. And it can be OK if people acknowledge their disagreements openly. But every leader must expect that, once a decision and direction have been determined, people are supportive and capable of working together towards that objective without continued backbiting, arguing and turmoil (e.g. “I personally might have chosen a different option, but this is the decision and we all need to work together to accomplish it”);
• You always need to keep your life positioned so that when your response doesn’t change the landscape, you can know that it is time to go – and then go. Quickly.
I sympathize with Stanley McChrystal and his ethical conflicts, as I sympathize with all who struggle with such dilemmas in their workplace. He appears a man of principle and discipline who turned loose of both in one very bad judgment. He further made the disagreement personal, and he did so publicly and irretractably. In any work environment, when that happens HE now becomes the object of discussion, not the policy disagreement. But when the work environment is 90,000 troops under your leadership in a life and death situation, that moment of bad judgment is a moment too long. It was time to go.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Arizona Immigration
Arizona is a rugged place to live. A mix of mountains, desert, heat and barren from its southern border with Mexico to its northern mountains. You have to want to live there, because the weak of heart are separated out relatively quickly. Its vast, open expanses create a bigness of spirit, and its habitat conditions have created a strong sense of self-reliance and independence in its people over the generations.
Arizona is also now the Ellis Island of the southwest, the main port of entry for illegal immigration into the U.S. Immigration of one part drug and weapons dealers, and a second part of employable workers looking to earn a livable wage for themselves and often their families. (Unfortunately, in the dead of night, the U.S. Border Patrol is hard pressed to tell the difference between these two groups as they sneak across the southern border.) The drugs and arms dealers are a menace to the character and stability of this country. The second group typically consists of decent people willing to do credible work to improve their personal lives, for which they are needed by American employers. Just as millions of Asian-Americans, Irish, and Eastern Europeans before them.
Congress and the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) are supposed to manage this cross-border traffic. Its failure to do so the last 30 years has given us three kinds of residents of Mexican ancestry:
• descendants of those Mexicans living here before there was a United States, similar to the Native-Americans who predate the rest of us;
• legal immigrants who have been properly coming here within the rules, and are now as American as I with my Scot-Irish immigrant ancestors;
• those who have arrived more recently without authorization, unentitled to the rights and privileges of citizenship but welcomed by American businesses and residents for their services.
Why do we care about these illegals? Partly on economic principles. Ever since the War Between the States, America has had immigration quotas. We have tried to manage the flow of people wanting to come here, though the numbers often reflected our own prejudices about who would be allowed in and who would not. The quotas attempted to protect us from being overwhelmed by population growth and/or excesses of people vis-Ã -vis available jobs – particularly in difficult economic times like our current condition.
We have also been concerned that if immigrants are not self-supporting and contributing to the overall economic well-being, they will drain from and overwhelm our American “safety net” of social services – however incomplete those services may be. We also fear that illegal immigrants will remain “un-Americanized,” necessarily living in the shadows outside of mainstream America, thereby perpetuating old-country cultures, values, language, rules, instincts and assumptions.
And then there is the simple illegality of their situation: they’ve broken American law just by their presence here. Which means that every aspect of their lives going forward is tainted and influenced by this illegal core. Americans do pride themselves as being a law-abiding nation (even when we have regrettably not acted as such many times over). So our sense of fairness says, “be legal, no exceptions.” And we look to law enforcement agencies to correct this violation of our shores.
Unfortunately, Congress and the Executive branches that are charged with making and enforcing our immigration laws have been virtually ineffective with such enforcement. They have not stopped the flow (though our economic recession has slowed it down). Nor have they dealt with the estimated 10 million illegals already here, shy of some token headline-grabbing raids on a few employers. Congress, that land of no compromise, stands on opposite principles of inclusion versus punishment and passes no new tools to manage this problem. And the INS, Border Patrol, and IRS fail to enforce rules already in place. Employers (business and personal) continue to hire workers to do good work most current citizens are not willing to do.
Against this governmental chaos, Arizona passed a recent law requiring state law enforcement officers to force anyone who “appears to be illegal” (read “Mexican”) to prove their citizenship. (Although the law is written generically, it is safe to say that Caucasians, Asians, Mediterranean and Arab-looking residents will be de facto bypassed in this proof process.) Notwithstanding the understandable frustration that generated this law, it is a horrible law. As a native southerner growing up in the 1950s, this smacks of the worst of the Jim Crow anti-negro laws and treatments of that period. Once again, we give away our innate sense of fair play and constitutional justice to our (mostly irrational) fears. Frightened people love the law – and they assume that they are exempt from it – and policemen hate it because they know they will be dammed if they do or don’t under it. A significant proportion of the rest of the country threatens to shun Arizona by economic boycotts.
I personally doubt that this law will stand up under court appeal – at least until it gets to the U.S. Supreme Court when it is anyone’s guess with Justice Roberts and company. Until then, Congress and the Executive need to set aside their rigid either/or orthodoxy and:
• build the deterrences and staff the border to stop the illegal traffic;
• accept the reality of the 10M already here and get them to citizenship and full economic contributors. We blew it, and we need to accept our culpability by acknowledging that we are not going to send all of those people back and disrupt our economy even more;
• create the “guest worker” program that American businesses, farmers and personal employers need;
• genuinely enforce the labor laws to prevent unauthorized work – the true root of the problem.
The current hidden subculture works for no one. Illegally entering the country is not American. But neither is guilty until proven innocent, selective laws by race, or carrying “identity papers.” Arizona passed a bad law that responds to the worst in us. Congress, on both sides of the political divide, needs to act for the national good, not for parochial political benefit. Let our conscience enforce the laws of the land. But let our hearts remind us that we are all immigrants in this country, and we should be guided by the familiar poem mounted in the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddles masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
We need fear not the stranger in our midst.
Arizona is also now the Ellis Island of the southwest, the main port of entry for illegal immigration into the U.S. Immigration of one part drug and weapons dealers, and a second part of employable workers looking to earn a livable wage for themselves and often their families. (Unfortunately, in the dead of night, the U.S. Border Patrol is hard pressed to tell the difference between these two groups as they sneak across the southern border.) The drugs and arms dealers are a menace to the character and stability of this country. The second group typically consists of decent people willing to do credible work to improve their personal lives, for which they are needed by American employers. Just as millions of Asian-Americans, Irish, and Eastern Europeans before them.
Congress and the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) are supposed to manage this cross-border traffic. Its failure to do so the last 30 years has given us three kinds of residents of Mexican ancestry:
• descendants of those Mexicans living here before there was a United States, similar to the Native-Americans who predate the rest of us;
• legal immigrants who have been properly coming here within the rules, and are now as American as I with my Scot-Irish immigrant ancestors;
• those who have arrived more recently without authorization, unentitled to the rights and privileges of citizenship but welcomed by American businesses and residents for their services.
Why do we care about these illegals? Partly on economic principles. Ever since the War Between the States, America has had immigration quotas. We have tried to manage the flow of people wanting to come here, though the numbers often reflected our own prejudices about who would be allowed in and who would not. The quotas attempted to protect us from being overwhelmed by population growth and/or excesses of people vis-Ã -vis available jobs – particularly in difficult economic times like our current condition.
We have also been concerned that if immigrants are not self-supporting and contributing to the overall economic well-being, they will drain from and overwhelm our American “safety net” of social services – however incomplete those services may be. We also fear that illegal immigrants will remain “un-Americanized,” necessarily living in the shadows outside of mainstream America, thereby perpetuating old-country cultures, values, language, rules, instincts and assumptions.
And then there is the simple illegality of their situation: they’ve broken American law just by their presence here. Which means that every aspect of their lives going forward is tainted and influenced by this illegal core. Americans do pride themselves as being a law-abiding nation (even when we have regrettably not acted as such many times over). So our sense of fairness says, “be legal, no exceptions.” And we look to law enforcement agencies to correct this violation of our shores.
Unfortunately, Congress and the Executive branches that are charged with making and enforcing our immigration laws have been virtually ineffective with such enforcement. They have not stopped the flow (though our economic recession has slowed it down). Nor have they dealt with the estimated 10 million illegals already here, shy of some token headline-grabbing raids on a few employers. Congress, that land of no compromise, stands on opposite principles of inclusion versus punishment and passes no new tools to manage this problem. And the INS, Border Patrol, and IRS fail to enforce rules already in place. Employers (business and personal) continue to hire workers to do good work most current citizens are not willing to do.
Against this governmental chaos, Arizona passed a recent law requiring state law enforcement officers to force anyone who “appears to be illegal” (read “Mexican”) to prove their citizenship. (Although the law is written generically, it is safe to say that Caucasians, Asians, Mediterranean and Arab-looking residents will be de facto bypassed in this proof process.) Notwithstanding the understandable frustration that generated this law, it is a horrible law. As a native southerner growing up in the 1950s, this smacks of the worst of the Jim Crow anti-negro laws and treatments of that period. Once again, we give away our innate sense of fair play and constitutional justice to our (mostly irrational) fears. Frightened people love the law – and they assume that they are exempt from it – and policemen hate it because they know they will be dammed if they do or don’t under it. A significant proportion of the rest of the country threatens to shun Arizona by economic boycotts.
I personally doubt that this law will stand up under court appeal – at least until it gets to the U.S. Supreme Court when it is anyone’s guess with Justice Roberts and company. Until then, Congress and the Executive need to set aside their rigid either/or orthodoxy and:
• build the deterrences and staff the border to stop the illegal traffic;
• accept the reality of the 10M already here and get them to citizenship and full economic contributors. We blew it, and we need to accept our culpability by acknowledging that we are not going to send all of those people back and disrupt our economy even more;
• create the “guest worker” program that American businesses, farmers and personal employers need;
• genuinely enforce the labor laws to prevent unauthorized work – the true root of the problem.
The current hidden subculture works for no one. Illegally entering the country is not American. But neither is guilty until proven innocent, selective laws by race, or carrying “identity papers.” Arizona passed a bad law that responds to the worst in us. Congress, on both sides of the political divide, needs to act for the national good, not for parochial political benefit. Let our conscience enforce the laws of the land. But let our hearts remind us that we are all immigrants in this country, and we should be guided by the familiar poem mounted in the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddles masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
We need fear not the stranger in our midst.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Reflections On 65
If you would, please indulge me in some thoughts of a more personal commentary. Last weekend, I hit another one of those birthday milestones. Admittedly, 65 does not have quite the be-all connotation it once had. Enrollment in Medicare arrives, but full-benefit Social Security retirement is now delayed to age 66. AARP enrolls you at 55; retailers offer senior discounts anywhere from 55 to 65; you can retire early with a partial social security benefit at 62. Conversely, mandatory retirement age in many companies has been pushed back towards age 70. Nevertheless, “65” still has that aura of being the doorway to senior citizenship status – a status with an ever-enlarging peer group.
From my vantage, there are really four key birthdays that are important to notice. The first is your Day1 original birthday when living starts. All the world is brand-new, frightening in its newness given your quick realization that you have no immediate context or self-coping skills for this existence other than inherited instincts. So the next 20 years are spent trying to figure out the structure and makeup of this human life, and the tools needed to survive – if not thrive – in it. The tools we ultimately choose are quite individual to our experiences, outcomes and the scope of our worldly education from those early years.
Which brings us to the 21 milestone. We have loaded ourselves (for better or worse) with what we think will be effective tools for making it in this world, coupled with what we think is a good understanding of how life works and the rules of the game. Then we set out on what we believe is our path to follow – maybe even with some glimmer of what the path’s end is supposed to look like. We rent apartments and buy houses, get jobs, begat a family, serve as parents, earn money and pay bills, and try to leave some room for fun along the way.
Until somewhere around 40, the 3rd major milestone. (For some it is as early as 30, or as late as 50, but this milestone inevitably shows up somewhere.) We have been diligently following our path, using our tools. But now we have a track record we can assess. And that assessment begins to raise doubts. Was this the right path for me, or were other choices possible which I may have denied or not even seen? Did my toolkit have the right tools in it, and/or did I use the right ones at the right moment in the right circumstance? Was my earlier understanding of life accurate, or did I miss a couple of key elements in that understanding? Have I been riding life’s wave, avoiding life’s wave, or has the wave been riding me? Doubts arise, basic truths get questioned, and dread grows that we may have locked ourselves into a play in which our role actually belongs to someone else.
In this phase we may plunge on and reach our greatest heights professionally as our hard work to date on this path begins to pay off. Or we may abruptly change directions to head down a different road, making a dramatic change as the only way out of the current play and into another. Or we make an uneasy truce – achieving a level of success on the current path yet all the while knowing that our ground work is weakening, out principles are bending, our needs are shifting. That which we previously clung to so tightly begins to move as we loosen our grip. Over time, recognition grows that our life is unfailingly morphing to a different place.
And then we reach 65, a progressive journey to a milestone that demands a choice: to hang on stubbornly to what was, or to let go what is no longer really important or truly needed and move into a clearer view of what one’s own life is really about.
Change has been pretty much a constant through my entire life. Surprisingly so, given my upbringing. At 21, 65 was a number with which I had no connection or meaning. At 40, 65 was a number visible on the radar but always still out there in the future, yet increasingly a marker of time left on a ticking clock. So much left to do.
But here I am. Arriving at 65, it is not the disaster I had once anticipated. Nor is it an end to life’s journey, though maybe a necessary end of what has gone before. It instead serves as a door opening into yet another phase of never-ending change. Jobs end, but careers continue even if in new forms. Doubts about what I could possibly do after 65 yield to doubts about how/what I will do with the opportunities in front of me. What I have learned yields to what is still to be learned.
My physical stamina is definitely reduced from 5 years ago. The soreness from a day working to maintain this mountain refuge takes a little longer to ebb. The impending finiteness of my life is more real to me now, given that 82% of my 79-year old life expectancy has already statistically expired. But death is not as frightening a prospect as it once was, though the manner of my death remains a concern. The timing is pretty much out of my hands.
I know the physical side of my life from this point will get progressively more difficult. That is a shame, since I just now feel like I am really understanding what my life is about. (As with the old saying, it is a shame that youth is wasted on the young!) I keep hearing that we are supposed to live “in the now.” Yet right now I have an advantage of seeing and understanding from an informed lifetime of experiences, answers, and learning. I think it is important to draw on those as I live through my now-ness.
65 is a milestone. One that demands a pause for deep reflection before proceeding. Because this upcoming phase can be radically different from all those many birthdays of before. My reflection says that life is pretty darn good right now. A settled-ness, clarity and peace not experienced before. And if I am perceiving current clues and insights correctly, what awaits around this corner can be better than ever. So I am embracing this latest change. And so would I similarly hope for you, at whatever your age.
From my vantage, there are really four key birthdays that are important to notice. The first is your Day1 original birthday when living starts. All the world is brand-new, frightening in its newness given your quick realization that you have no immediate context or self-coping skills for this existence other than inherited instincts. So the next 20 years are spent trying to figure out the structure and makeup of this human life, and the tools needed to survive – if not thrive – in it. The tools we ultimately choose are quite individual to our experiences, outcomes and the scope of our worldly education from those early years.
Which brings us to the 21 milestone. We have loaded ourselves (for better or worse) with what we think will be effective tools for making it in this world, coupled with what we think is a good understanding of how life works and the rules of the game. Then we set out on what we believe is our path to follow – maybe even with some glimmer of what the path’s end is supposed to look like. We rent apartments and buy houses, get jobs, begat a family, serve as parents, earn money and pay bills, and try to leave some room for fun along the way.
Until somewhere around 40, the 3rd major milestone. (For some it is as early as 30, or as late as 50, but this milestone inevitably shows up somewhere.) We have been diligently following our path, using our tools. But now we have a track record we can assess. And that assessment begins to raise doubts. Was this the right path for me, or were other choices possible which I may have denied or not even seen? Did my toolkit have the right tools in it, and/or did I use the right ones at the right moment in the right circumstance? Was my earlier understanding of life accurate, or did I miss a couple of key elements in that understanding? Have I been riding life’s wave, avoiding life’s wave, or has the wave been riding me? Doubts arise, basic truths get questioned, and dread grows that we may have locked ourselves into a play in which our role actually belongs to someone else.
In this phase we may plunge on and reach our greatest heights professionally as our hard work to date on this path begins to pay off. Or we may abruptly change directions to head down a different road, making a dramatic change as the only way out of the current play and into another. Or we make an uneasy truce – achieving a level of success on the current path yet all the while knowing that our ground work is weakening, out principles are bending, our needs are shifting. That which we previously clung to so tightly begins to move as we loosen our grip. Over time, recognition grows that our life is unfailingly morphing to a different place.
And then we reach 65, a progressive journey to a milestone that demands a choice: to hang on stubbornly to what was, or to let go what is no longer really important or truly needed and move into a clearer view of what one’s own life is really about.
Change has been pretty much a constant through my entire life. Surprisingly so, given my upbringing. At 21, 65 was a number with which I had no connection or meaning. At 40, 65 was a number visible on the radar but always still out there in the future, yet increasingly a marker of time left on a ticking clock. So much left to do.
But here I am. Arriving at 65, it is not the disaster I had once anticipated. Nor is it an end to life’s journey, though maybe a necessary end of what has gone before. It instead serves as a door opening into yet another phase of never-ending change. Jobs end, but careers continue even if in new forms. Doubts about what I could possibly do after 65 yield to doubts about how/what I will do with the opportunities in front of me. What I have learned yields to what is still to be learned.
My physical stamina is definitely reduced from 5 years ago. The soreness from a day working to maintain this mountain refuge takes a little longer to ebb. The impending finiteness of my life is more real to me now, given that 82% of my 79-year old life expectancy has already statistically expired. But death is not as frightening a prospect as it once was, though the manner of my death remains a concern. The timing is pretty much out of my hands.
I know the physical side of my life from this point will get progressively more difficult. That is a shame, since I just now feel like I am really understanding what my life is about. (As with the old saying, it is a shame that youth is wasted on the young!) I keep hearing that we are supposed to live “in the now.” Yet right now I have an advantage of seeing and understanding from an informed lifetime of experiences, answers, and learning. I think it is important to draw on those as I live through my now-ness.
65 is a milestone. One that demands a pause for deep reflection before proceeding. Because this upcoming phase can be radically different from all those many birthdays of before. My reflection says that life is pretty darn good right now. A settled-ness, clarity and peace not experienced before. And if I am perceiving current clues and insights correctly, what awaits around this corner can be better than ever. So I am embracing this latest change. And so would I similarly hope for you, at whatever your age.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Equality of the Dollar
Take a dollar bill from your purse/wallet. Examine it closely. Ask someone close by to do the same. Other than a different serial number on each, I am guessing that each bill looks exactly the same (wear & tear notwithstanding!). And I assume that your $1 bill looks exactly like mine.
When we each deposit our $1 bill into our respective bank account, the only thing that is recorded on our computer file is “1.00.” That’s it. Your digital “1.00” looks just like my “1.00.” There is no other tag attached to our 1.00s, no indication of our age, gender, race, religion, profession, marital status, etc. Just a generic lookalike “1.00.”
When we write our checks to pay our taxes – federal, state, county, local – our “1.00 without a suffix” goes into another bank account filled with lots of other 1.00s. Those 1.00s come from many people with a myriad number of backgrounds, demographics, personal opinions, spiritual/religious beliefs and affiliations; people who live their lives in countless different ways. All of those individual people are nondescript and neutral to the tax treasury – just a whole lot of identical 1.00s mushed together. In fact, our public treasuries are one of the great equalizers of our wide-ranging diversity. The commonality of our 1.00s makes us all equal, shared co-owners of the public funds, wrapped together across our individual human differences.
When it comes time to dispense all of those collective 1.00s, we are all shareholders in those decisions. EQUAL shareholders, because such decisions are not based upon how many 1.00s you contributed versus I versus others. Unlike a corporation, a greater pay-in does not buy you greater shares of public stock and thereby give you greater voting control. My one vote is the same as your one vote for the Congressperson or city council member who will likewise each have one vote on how to spend the money.
While the majority of one-votes accumulated will decide how the money will be spent, such decisions need to still reflect and honor the individual sameness of all of those 1.00s that contributed to the pot. The time-honored American tradition is that, while the majority rules so that we can move forward, the rights of the minority must still be respected. So public expenditures must be as “category-neutral” on human criteria as possible. Funds provided from diverse sources should not be spent so as to favor homogeneity or favored groups. We are obligated to preserve the same neutrality going out as the 1.0s were neutral coming in.
Yet when large sums of public funds are dangled in front of adoring eyes, these principles of neutrality and the avoidance of favoritism seem to get quickly lost. A failure to proactively support one interest group’s cause over other groups is often seen as an attack on that first group, a limiting of its causes, instead of recognizing that a preferential treatment today can easily be tomorrow’s discriminatory treatment. Yet with public institutions supported by public dollars paid by taxpayers with different views and values, it is only by remaining neutral that we can ensure that all expressions can be made possible, all citizens/taxpayers can be included, and no one is legally preempted out of participation.
Instead we choose to argue about whether the Ten Commandments should be displayed in secular courthouses. These Jewish teachings may be 10 good principles for moral living, but only a few of them have been made into actual laws. (Maybe I should honor my father and mother, and proclaim only one particular god, but thankfully these admonitions have not been made into American statutory law.) Likewise, when an organization puts a cross on a hilltop in a publicly funded national park and then disingenuously claims it to be a non-religious monument to WW1 dead, it speaks in contrast to the many beautiful and moving memorials to our war dead that required no obvious symbol of only one religion in order to be meaningful – witness the Viet Nam or WW2 war memorials in Washington. When we eliminate the saying of prayers in public schools, we are thereby protecting our children and all religions from abuse by any one preferred religion – because who’s prayer would we use that would be applicable to all of the diverse children in the classroom? Which child would have to leave the room? When my county commissioners open a public meeting with a prayer that concludes “In Jesus’ name we pray,” are non-Christians thereby implicitly excluded from the subsequent political discussion? When students in a California law school seek to form a club open only to Christians pledging a non-homosexual lifestyle, AND seek to have the club funded from a pool of student fees paid equally by ALL students, do these would-be lawyers not see the inherent conflict of their request?
Some religious and lay leaders now claim that America is “A Christian Nation” and was founded as such. Just as I guess Iraq and Iran were founded as an Islamic Nation or Israel as a Jewish Nation. But nothing could be further from the truth about America’s founding or purpose. Our country was founded by men and women who predominately (but not exclusively) attended some form of a multitude of Christian churches, but whose personal religious views encompassed many different viewpoints and expressions. Given the experiences of their forefathers/foremothers in colonizing America to escape persecution and the abuse of state-supported churches, religious tolerance and religious freedom were in fact their over-riding concerns and what was collectively written into their Constitution for us. Promote none; allow for all. And over the course of our 200+ years, we have gotten better at extending such equality and neutrality in the public arena to differences of race, gender, economic wealth, and marital/sexual status.
If we want homogeneity of thought and a single point of view, that is where we have the power to utilize our privately-funded churches, schools, topic-specific clubs, and corporations. But when you take my 1.00 of taxes and merge it with your identical and no-more-powerful 1.00, please do not turn around and try to have it spent in a way that insults or minimalizes me. Let us instead respect and look out for each other in our common endeavors, and go our separate ways only in our private endeavors. Picking none, we are open to allowing for each of us.
When we each deposit our $1 bill into our respective bank account, the only thing that is recorded on our computer file is “1.00.” That’s it. Your digital “1.00” looks just like my “1.00.” There is no other tag attached to our 1.00s, no indication of our age, gender, race, religion, profession, marital status, etc. Just a generic lookalike “1.00.”
When we write our checks to pay our taxes – federal, state, county, local – our “1.00 without a suffix” goes into another bank account filled with lots of other 1.00s. Those 1.00s come from many people with a myriad number of backgrounds, demographics, personal opinions, spiritual/religious beliefs and affiliations; people who live their lives in countless different ways. All of those individual people are nondescript and neutral to the tax treasury – just a whole lot of identical 1.00s mushed together. In fact, our public treasuries are one of the great equalizers of our wide-ranging diversity. The commonality of our 1.00s makes us all equal, shared co-owners of the public funds, wrapped together across our individual human differences.
When it comes time to dispense all of those collective 1.00s, we are all shareholders in those decisions. EQUAL shareholders, because such decisions are not based upon how many 1.00s you contributed versus I versus others. Unlike a corporation, a greater pay-in does not buy you greater shares of public stock and thereby give you greater voting control. My one vote is the same as your one vote for the Congressperson or city council member who will likewise each have one vote on how to spend the money.
While the majority of one-votes accumulated will decide how the money will be spent, such decisions need to still reflect and honor the individual sameness of all of those 1.00s that contributed to the pot. The time-honored American tradition is that, while the majority rules so that we can move forward, the rights of the minority must still be respected. So public expenditures must be as “category-neutral” on human criteria as possible. Funds provided from diverse sources should not be spent so as to favor homogeneity or favored groups. We are obligated to preserve the same neutrality going out as the 1.0s were neutral coming in.
Yet when large sums of public funds are dangled in front of adoring eyes, these principles of neutrality and the avoidance of favoritism seem to get quickly lost. A failure to proactively support one interest group’s cause over other groups is often seen as an attack on that first group, a limiting of its causes, instead of recognizing that a preferential treatment today can easily be tomorrow’s discriminatory treatment. Yet with public institutions supported by public dollars paid by taxpayers with different views and values, it is only by remaining neutral that we can ensure that all expressions can be made possible, all citizens/taxpayers can be included, and no one is legally preempted out of participation.
Instead we choose to argue about whether the Ten Commandments should be displayed in secular courthouses. These Jewish teachings may be 10 good principles for moral living, but only a few of them have been made into actual laws. (Maybe I should honor my father and mother, and proclaim only one particular god, but thankfully these admonitions have not been made into American statutory law.) Likewise, when an organization puts a cross on a hilltop in a publicly funded national park and then disingenuously claims it to be a non-religious monument to WW1 dead, it speaks in contrast to the many beautiful and moving memorials to our war dead that required no obvious symbol of only one religion in order to be meaningful – witness the Viet Nam or WW2 war memorials in Washington. When we eliminate the saying of prayers in public schools, we are thereby protecting our children and all religions from abuse by any one preferred religion – because who’s prayer would we use that would be applicable to all of the diverse children in the classroom? Which child would have to leave the room? When my county commissioners open a public meeting with a prayer that concludes “In Jesus’ name we pray,” are non-Christians thereby implicitly excluded from the subsequent political discussion? When students in a California law school seek to form a club open only to Christians pledging a non-homosexual lifestyle, AND seek to have the club funded from a pool of student fees paid equally by ALL students, do these would-be lawyers not see the inherent conflict of their request?
Some religious and lay leaders now claim that America is “A Christian Nation” and was founded as such. Just as I guess Iraq and Iran were founded as an Islamic Nation or Israel as a Jewish Nation. But nothing could be further from the truth about America’s founding or purpose. Our country was founded by men and women who predominately (but not exclusively) attended some form of a multitude of Christian churches, but whose personal religious views encompassed many different viewpoints and expressions. Given the experiences of their forefathers/foremothers in colonizing America to escape persecution and the abuse of state-supported churches, religious tolerance and religious freedom were in fact their over-riding concerns and what was collectively written into their Constitution for us. Promote none; allow for all. And over the course of our 200+ years, we have gotten better at extending such equality and neutrality in the public arena to differences of race, gender, economic wealth, and marital/sexual status.
If we want homogeneity of thought and a single point of view, that is where we have the power to utilize our privately-funded churches, schools, topic-specific clubs, and corporations. But when you take my 1.00 of taxes and merge it with your identical and no-more-powerful 1.00, please do not turn around and try to have it spent in a way that insults or minimalizes me. Let us instead respect and look out for each other in our common endeavors, and go our separate ways only in our private endeavors. Picking none, we are open to allowing for each of us.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
A Uniform Betrayed
For the better part of the last decade, we have watched a very public agony of revelations regarding a major religious organization. Seemingly month after month, more stories of the sexual abuse of countless numbers of children over the past 60 years by priests of the Catholic Church have come forward. Originally this sad phenomena appeared to be a purely American aberration, albeit it a national one. But subsequently this story has become international, from Ireland to across the European continent.
For a long time I had avoided commentary on this subject. The severity of these actions by so many priests across such a broad geography seemed to speak sufficiently for itself; I had nothing to add to the revelations themselves. But as the stories of abuse continue to unfold, there is perhaps a broader theme of betrayal that emerges.
There are three stories of fact that have emerged from this religious debacle. The first is that thousands of children were sexually abused by church leaders. As bad as that story is, the second correlated story is that the abuse was not acknowledged by church superiors in spite of the documented evidence and victim telling, and in fact was denied and/or covered up by church officials. Disciplinary action, such as it was, meant no acknowledgment of the truth of these occurrences, but simply moving offenders to another locale, often in a similar capacity for access to new children, thereby allowing for a third story of the abuse cycle being continued unchecked. The priorities of protecting the image and reputation of the church and its priests trumped the physical safety and mental / spiritual development of these vulnerable children. We hear these very personal stories come forth, watch and judge the inconsistent responses of church officials, and wonder what lessons we should draw from all of this.
The abuse of a child – whether physical, emotional or sexual – is inherently a horrible thing. Horrible because it is a corrupt expression of adult power, made possible by the very vulnerability of a child. A vulnerability arising from: the child’s physical inferiority of size and strength (thereby lacking the physical ability to resist), as well as; mental / emotional immaturity – a lack of sufficient life experience to provide a context for understanding what is happening to him/her. Yet something deep inside that child, from some unknown source of being, alerted the child that something wrong was happening, caused by someone who should be doing no wrong. And that is the true abuse: the violation of trust by someone the child assumed to be his/her perfect teacher and protector. Which then typically leads the child to a lifetime of mistrust, confusion, and a false seeking of (defensive) control over one’s life instead of the trust to live one’s life fully as it comes.
In these instances with the Catholic Church, the sin of inappropriate contact between priest and child was doubled by the sin of its repetition, and of the silence and cover-up that followed. For that which the child inherently knew to be wrong, no punishment of the perpetrator ensued; no quick end of the activity came; and in all likelihood the child continued to be told what “a good saintly person” his/her perpetrator was, leaving the child in total confusion and self-blame. When a supposed institutional greater good (protecting the church) is built on a foundation of wrong (abuse of children), there is no greater good to be had. There is only an insidious cancer created and lurking inside that institution, chipping away like an unseen (unspoken) termite at whatever institutional good was previously there. The Catholic Church (or any number of other current institutions) risks being undone as much by its failure to address its wrongs as by the original act of indecency itself.
In these instances of abuse, supposed priestly goodness was all for show, a sham covering a very human weakness. Adorned in the special robes and collar, reinforced by pronouncements of supposed dedication to living in God’s way, the uniform of the priest is designed to separate one from normal adult roles and accountability. The uniform is intended to make an immediate statement about one’s self, even if no facts have yet been presented for substantiation. It is the same for me when I put on my special robe for meditation, or the pendant that I wear around my neck that garners so much comment. I wear these to help reinforce in my mind that I am not in my everyday doing of things, that I am spending a few moments to be in a different place mentally than usual, experiencing a different experience. And these adornments do in fact help me make that transition.
So it is with all of the uniforms that we wear, which is why we wear them. A policeman’s uniform to show invested authority; the military uniform and the distinctive service branches and rank within each; the uniform of the janitor, the fast food worker, or the IT geek; the pin-stripe suit of the business man or woman; the overalls of the farm worker; the apron or the cocktail dress of the housewife; the torn jeans and colored spiked hair of the adolescent; and the American flag lapel pin that seeks to proclaim one’s patriotism. All of these uniforms are worn to make immediate visible statements - to ourselves and to the world - about who we believe we are, who we associate with, and who we aspire to be. Carried to the extreme, even “no clothes” serves as the uniform of the nudists.
The problem becomes when we, the insider, begin to believe that those uniforms in/of themselves make us who we want to be. The other problem is when we, the outsider looking in, accept another’s uniform as a confirmation of whom one is aspiring to be versus who one is. We forget that is all about who one truly is inside, not who he/she claims to be on the outside. In the case of religious leaders, the need for us to look beyond the trappings is even more crucial. Most all of the great spiritual masters warned us against accepting false gods (Moses) or false teachers (Mohammad, Jesus and Buddha) who claim spiritual authority but live untrue and unspiritual lives. The challenge to us is to look beyond the frock and to ignore the nice words. We need to remember that whether priest or nun or pope, lama or roshi or imam, reverend or pastor or bishop – the uniform (and title) means little. We must not be cynical, but we must be vigilant in our questioning and assessment of those who seek to lead us.
As Jesus and Buddha told us in their different ways, look not at the robes but at the deeds, and whether those deeds have led to positive or negative actions. Where love and acceptance flows forth downstream, that is where spiritual and godly leadership can truly be found. It is in the actions of love and benefit to others, not the adornments of uniform, that trust is truly deserved.
For a long time I had avoided commentary on this subject. The severity of these actions by so many priests across such a broad geography seemed to speak sufficiently for itself; I had nothing to add to the revelations themselves. But as the stories of abuse continue to unfold, there is perhaps a broader theme of betrayal that emerges.
There are three stories of fact that have emerged from this religious debacle. The first is that thousands of children were sexually abused by church leaders. As bad as that story is, the second correlated story is that the abuse was not acknowledged by church superiors in spite of the documented evidence and victim telling, and in fact was denied and/or covered up by church officials. Disciplinary action, such as it was, meant no acknowledgment of the truth of these occurrences, but simply moving offenders to another locale, often in a similar capacity for access to new children, thereby allowing for a third story of the abuse cycle being continued unchecked. The priorities of protecting the image and reputation of the church and its priests trumped the physical safety and mental / spiritual development of these vulnerable children. We hear these very personal stories come forth, watch and judge the inconsistent responses of church officials, and wonder what lessons we should draw from all of this.
The abuse of a child – whether physical, emotional or sexual – is inherently a horrible thing. Horrible because it is a corrupt expression of adult power, made possible by the very vulnerability of a child. A vulnerability arising from: the child’s physical inferiority of size and strength (thereby lacking the physical ability to resist), as well as; mental / emotional immaturity – a lack of sufficient life experience to provide a context for understanding what is happening to him/her. Yet something deep inside that child, from some unknown source of being, alerted the child that something wrong was happening, caused by someone who should be doing no wrong. And that is the true abuse: the violation of trust by someone the child assumed to be his/her perfect teacher and protector. Which then typically leads the child to a lifetime of mistrust, confusion, and a false seeking of (defensive) control over one’s life instead of the trust to live one’s life fully as it comes.
In these instances with the Catholic Church, the sin of inappropriate contact between priest and child was doubled by the sin of its repetition, and of the silence and cover-up that followed. For that which the child inherently knew to be wrong, no punishment of the perpetrator ensued; no quick end of the activity came; and in all likelihood the child continued to be told what “a good saintly person” his/her perpetrator was, leaving the child in total confusion and self-blame. When a supposed institutional greater good (protecting the church) is built on a foundation of wrong (abuse of children), there is no greater good to be had. There is only an insidious cancer created and lurking inside that institution, chipping away like an unseen (unspoken) termite at whatever institutional good was previously there. The Catholic Church (or any number of other current institutions) risks being undone as much by its failure to address its wrongs as by the original act of indecency itself.
In these instances of abuse, supposed priestly goodness was all for show, a sham covering a very human weakness. Adorned in the special robes and collar, reinforced by pronouncements of supposed dedication to living in God’s way, the uniform of the priest is designed to separate one from normal adult roles and accountability. The uniform is intended to make an immediate statement about one’s self, even if no facts have yet been presented for substantiation. It is the same for me when I put on my special robe for meditation, or the pendant that I wear around my neck that garners so much comment. I wear these to help reinforce in my mind that I am not in my everyday doing of things, that I am spending a few moments to be in a different place mentally than usual, experiencing a different experience. And these adornments do in fact help me make that transition.
So it is with all of the uniforms that we wear, which is why we wear them. A policeman’s uniform to show invested authority; the military uniform and the distinctive service branches and rank within each; the uniform of the janitor, the fast food worker, or the IT geek; the pin-stripe suit of the business man or woman; the overalls of the farm worker; the apron or the cocktail dress of the housewife; the torn jeans and colored spiked hair of the adolescent; and the American flag lapel pin that seeks to proclaim one’s patriotism. All of these uniforms are worn to make immediate visible statements - to ourselves and to the world - about who we believe we are, who we associate with, and who we aspire to be. Carried to the extreme, even “no clothes” serves as the uniform of the nudists.
The problem becomes when we, the insider, begin to believe that those uniforms in/of themselves make us who we want to be. The other problem is when we, the outsider looking in, accept another’s uniform as a confirmation of whom one is aspiring to be versus who one is. We forget that is all about who one truly is inside, not who he/she claims to be on the outside. In the case of religious leaders, the need for us to look beyond the trappings is even more crucial. Most all of the great spiritual masters warned us against accepting false gods (Moses) or false teachers (Mohammad, Jesus and Buddha) who claim spiritual authority but live untrue and unspiritual lives. The challenge to us is to look beyond the frock and to ignore the nice words. We need to remember that whether priest or nun or pope, lama or roshi or imam, reverend or pastor or bishop – the uniform (and title) means little. We must not be cynical, but we must be vigilant in our questioning and assessment of those who seek to lead us.
As Jesus and Buddha told us in their different ways, look not at the robes but at the deeds, and whether those deeds have led to positive or negative actions. Where love and acceptance flows forth downstream, that is where spiritual and godly leadership can truly be found. It is in the actions of love and benefit to others, not the adornments of uniform, that trust is truly deserved.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Educate, Not teach
Much has been written of late about the Texas Board of Education’s rewrite of American history textbooks. In normal circumstances, this could be one of many “local actions” in the hinterlands that we could safely choose to ignore. Unfortunately, the reality is that “as Texas goes, so goes textbooks around the country.” Why? Because of Texas’ volume buying, publishers will do whatever Texas specifies, and then pass those changes on to all other states as the “standard text.” Only California has greater buying power and influence, but they will not make their next revisions until 2014. So Texas in effect sets the standards for all our kids for the next 4 years.
Why do we care? Because their changes are not being defined by academics, historians, or the teachers of this subject matter. Each change is being decided by majority vote of Board members, none of whom are academics, historians or teachers. They have expressly stated that their intention is to “correct” what they view as a “liberal bias” in existing textbooks. And what corrections need to be made to restore their version of “balance”? Examples:
• Removal of Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures who inspired the American revolution because he coined the phrase “separation of church and state” (apparently his authorship of the Declaration of Independence is an irrelevant qualification);
• Confederate President Jefferson Davis is to be treated as equally important to American history outcomes as Abraham Lincoln (even as a native southerner, that is hard to see as a “balanced” intention for what was clearly a poor performance as a president, regardless of his cause);
• “Capitalism” (apparently a negative term) is to be replaced by “free enterprise system” (thereby ignoring any goals of replacing rhetorical labels with substance);
• Studies of cultural movements in music will include Tin Pan Alley, the Beat Generation, rock ‘n roll, and country music, but hip-hop music was voted out as culturally unimportant (and American blues music – a truly indigenous musical form that has impacted all other American music forms – wasn’t even considered!);
• According to this Board, Joseph McCarthy’s slanders during the 1950s were apparently true (even though he never proved a single one of his “communists are everywhere” charges and ruined many countless innocent lives by his unsubstantiated accusations);
• Ronald Reagan was “our greatest U.S. president” (pushing aside the entire portfolio of presidents carved into Mount Rushmore); and
• Edward Kennedy and Justice Sonia Sotomayor will disappear entirely from view as irrelevant to our history (apparent figments of our imaginations).
Don McLeroy, Board member and former Chair, wrote that, “The theme of [American history] is freedom. [Our founders] understood America and the principles upon which she stood: self-evident truths; liberty, with its twin corollaries of limited government and individual responsibility; the embrace of Judeo-Christian values; and a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.”
Sounds nice. But a true student of history who has actually read the writings, actions and statements of our founders knows that every one of McLeroy’s statements (except for the first statement about freedom) is counter to documented truths, documented even by the founders themselves. And my freedom starts with not having my education limited to Mr. McLeroy’s personal view of our history. But such recorded history is apparently of little concern to Mr. McLeroy. Welcome to a white, protestant, single-culture view of America’s history that discounts all other cultural contributions not in McLeroy’s personal experience. A view based upon one’s personal learnings, perspectives, experiences and dream-scenarios that someone seeks to make everyone’s truths.
I could actually make a partial case for what the Texas Board is doing except for one thing. The problem that seems to be escaping Mr. McLeroy and his colleagues is not just that they are putting out shameful distortions of information they clearly do not understand. The bigger concern is that they are unapologetically committing the exact same sin that they are accusing the left-wing biasers of – including in textbooks only that information which one has personally chosen to believe. That would leave both sides in error. The error of believing that teaching kids is about presenting a point of view that is purported to be “the single truth.”
In reality, our schools should be about education, not teaching. An educated person is not really marked by memorization of a determined set of facts. An educated person is one who is open to and knows about many perspectives and aspects of a topic, and has developed the experience and skills to apply a good thought process to those perspectives in order to derive a personal conclusion. A conclusion that most often leads to ACTION – hopefully a wise and good action. On that basis, those who truly support “education” should feel a responsibility not to advocate, but to present all possible points of view to a student, and then help that student develop fact-finding, filtering and discernment skills to analyze those facts, and logic and intuitive skills to derive his/her conclusions.
We should not fear differences of opinions. The reality is that if we are truly comfortable in our own skin and beliefs, most of the time it does not matter if you and I believe the same thing. If you believe in evolution and I believe in a creation story, what impact do our differences really make to the way either of us lives our everyday lives? If you believe Alexander Hamilton was our greatest founder and I think the same instead about his arch-enemy Thomas Jefferson, and we both have read their life stories and their writings, should your support of Hamilton’s view of government cause me to treat you any differently? Even if he was president of a confederacy that supported an aspect of a way of life that we now view as abhorrent, shouldn’t Jefferson Davis’s influence on American history be assessed on his performance as a government leader rather than his support of the cause of that period?
We need to trust in our kids better than we do. The only “corruption of their minds” that I fear is that they will grow up not understanding that there are different points of view in this world, views that come from different experiences and thought processes, and they have a right to hear those differences and decide for themselves. I fear more greatly their lack of exposure to all ideas than I do their exposure to “the wrong ideas.” Truly educated kids are the ones who grow up to be adults that make high-quality informed decisions. And that is why freedom of speech and freedom of the press are formalized ideals in our American Constitution.
Our schools should be laboratories of ideas where students can experiment with and create intellectual outcomes. After their schooling is complete, these kids are going to spend the rest of their adult lives encountering situations, propaganda, self-advocating demagogues, ideas, and beliefs different from what they have been previously taught. We need to arm our kids not with seeming facts and conclusions that we believe, but with all of the information available from which they can develop their own opinions. And in that process, hopefully they learn tolerance and appreciation for the views of others, without fearing differences of opinion. As much as I am a lover of history, history is ultimately not about knowing facts. It is about knowing the many stories of our history, the different values that have clashed over time, and how the stories and values have led to personal or collective decisions of belief and actions. We need to not teach our personal views; we need to educate all people, regardless of age or backgrounds, how to learn for themselves. And then get out of their way.
Why do we care? Because their changes are not being defined by academics, historians, or the teachers of this subject matter. Each change is being decided by majority vote of Board members, none of whom are academics, historians or teachers. They have expressly stated that their intention is to “correct” what they view as a “liberal bias” in existing textbooks. And what corrections need to be made to restore their version of “balance”? Examples:
• Removal of Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures who inspired the American revolution because he coined the phrase “separation of church and state” (apparently his authorship of the Declaration of Independence is an irrelevant qualification);
• Confederate President Jefferson Davis is to be treated as equally important to American history outcomes as Abraham Lincoln (even as a native southerner, that is hard to see as a “balanced” intention for what was clearly a poor performance as a president, regardless of his cause);
• “Capitalism” (apparently a negative term) is to be replaced by “free enterprise system” (thereby ignoring any goals of replacing rhetorical labels with substance);
• Studies of cultural movements in music will include Tin Pan Alley, the Beat Generation, rock ‘n roll, and country music, but hip-hop music was voted out as culturally unimportant (and American blues music – a truly indigenous musical form that has impacted all other American music forms – wasn’t even considered!);
• According to this Board, Joseph McCarthy’s slanders during the 1950s were apparently true (even though he never proved a single one of his “communists are everywhere” charges and ruined many countless innocent lives by his unsubstantiated accusations);
• Ronald Reagan was “our greatest U.S. president” (pushing aside the entire portfolio of presidents carved into Mount Rushmore); and
• Edward Kennedy and Justice Sonia Sotomayor will disappear entirely from view as irrelevant to our history (apparent figments of our imaginations).
Don McLeroy, Board member and former Chair, wrote that, “The theme of [American history] is freedom. [Our founders] understood America and the principles upon which she stood: self-evident truths; liberty, with its twin corollaries of limited government and individual responsibility; the embrace of Judeo-Christian values; and a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.”
Sounds nice. But a true student of history who has actually read the writings, actions and statements of our founders knows that every one of McLeroy’s statements (except for the first statement about freedom) is counter to documented truths, documented even by the founders themselves. And my freedom starts with not having my education limited to Mr. McLeroy’s personal view of our history. But such recorded history is apparently of little concern to Mr. McLeroy. Welcome to a white, protestant, single-culture view of America’s history that discounts all other cultural contributions not in McLeroy’s personal experience. A view based upon one’s personal learnings, perspectives, experiences and dream-scenarios that someone seeks to make everyone’s truths.
I could actually make a partial case for what the Texas Board is doing except for one thing. The problem that seems to be escaping Mr. McLeroy and his colleagues is not just that they are putting out shameful distortions of information they clearly do not understand. The bigger concern is that they are unapologetically committing the exact same sin that they are accusing the left-wing biasers of – including in textbooks only that information which one has personally chosen to believe. That would leave both sides in error. The error of believing that teaching kids is about presenting a point of view that is purported to be “the single truth.”
In reality, our schools should be about education, not teaching. An educated person is not really marked by memorization of a determined set of facts. An educated person is one who is open to and knows about many perspectives and aspects of a topic, and has developed the experience and skills to apply a good thought process to those perspectives in order to derive a personal conclusion. A conclusion that most often leads to ACTION – hopefully a wise and good action. On that basis, those who truly support “education” should feel a responsibility not to advocate, but to present all possible points of view to a student, and then help that student develop fact-finding, filtering and discernment skills to analyze those facts, and logic and intuitive skills to derive his/her conclusions.
We should not fear differences of opinions. The reality is that if we are truly comfortable in our own skin and beliefs, most of the time it does not matter if you and I believe the same thing. If you believe in evolution and I believe in a creation story, what impact do our differences really make to the way either of us lives our everyday lives? If you believe Alexander Hamilton was our greatest founder and I think the same instead about his arch-enemy Thomas Jefferson, and we both have read their life stories and their writings, should your support of Hamilton’s view of government cause me to treat you any differently? Even if he was president of a confederacy that supported an aspect of a way of life that we now view as abhorrent, shouldn’t Jefferson Davis’s influence on American history be assessed on his performance as a government leader rather than his support of the cause of that period?
We need to trust in our kids better than we do. The only “corruption of their minds” that I fear is that they will grow up not understanding that there are different points of view in this world, views that come from different experiences and thought processes, and they have a right to hear those differences and decide for themselves. I fear more greatly their lack of exposure to all ideas than I do their exposure to “the wrong ideas.” Truly educated kids are the ones who grow up to be adults that make high-quality informed decisions. And that is why freedom of speech and freedom of the press are formalized ideals in our American Constitution.
Our schools should be laboratories of ideas where students can experiment with and create intellectual outcomes. After their schooling is complete, these kids are going to spend the rest of their adult lives encountering situations, propaganda, self-advocating demagogues, ideas, and beliefs different from what they have been previously taught. We need to arm our kids not with seeming facts and conclusions that we believe, but with all of the information available from which they can develop their own opinions. And in that process, hopefully they learn tolerance and appreciation for the views of others, without fearing differences of opinion. As much as I am a lover of history, history is ultimately not about knowing facts. It is about knowing the many stories of our history, the different values that have clashed over time, and how the stories and values have led to personal or collective decisions of belief and actions. We need to not teach our personal views; we need to educate all people, regardless of age or backgrounds, how to learn for themselves. And then get out of their way.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Sore Losers and Violent Threats
Last week, Congress passed and President Obama signed a final version of a major reform of health care delivery in this country. It culminated a contentious 13 month ugly legislative process that in many ways unfortunately showed America at its demagogic worst – for the world to see and for us to see in each other. Yet the process realized a goal of near-universal health care proposed by presidents (Republicans) Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, and (Democrats) Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. Whatever its details may or may not be, it is the most significant change in health care delivery nationally since Johnson got Medicare instituted in the mid-1960s.
Is it a perfect bill or an ideal solution to keeping America healthy? No. I do not think anyone at any point in the political spectrum is entirely satisfied with the outcome. That is probably one measure of a pretty good outcome: no one entirely won or lost, but all got something beneficial (even if some feel they cannot say so!).
For me, the downside is that the bill perpetuates two fundamental flaws in our health care delivery that I have discussed in previous blogs (see 9/8/2009 and 8/19/2009):
1. It leaves decisions about what health care one will receive in the hands of private insurance companies, whose primary and understandable obligation is to maximize shareholder profits and employee pay by either raising premiums or reducing payouts – a profit obligation diametrically opposed to my critical care needs;
2. It leaves intact the current system whereby the majority of access to that insurance is through employer benefit plans, benefits given significantly unevenly to the population at large and which are naturally a secondary focus of employers, and burdens those companies with a major pricing disadvantage in competition with the rest of the world – none of whom burden their companies with adsorbing the cost of employee health care.
But these flaws proved politically unapproachable at this stage of our social evolution, and must wait for another day.
What is sad to see is that the lies, misinformation, grandstanding, and denial of past speeches and records on this topic are continuing, all done simply for political gain. What has passed for informative debate would make a high school speech teacher flunk the whole class, and the civics teacher shake her head in embarrassment at current practitioners. From Sarah Palin’s notorious outright lies about “death panels” to the scare tactics of the “lost of personal doctor or one’s current insurance” and “employer bankruptcies,” the unanimous NO votes of all Republican representatives and senators confirmed that this was never a process or debate about how to improve people’s lives through better health care. It was only about defeating a popular president and avenging a brutal 2008 election loss. Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) famously predicted that “health care would be Obama’s Waterloo defeat,” and all Republicans rallied confidently around that primary political goal. But by trapping themselves into that all-or-nothing strategy they would up the big losers yet again, unable to deliverable to their shrinking base despite the bravado talk. DeMint et al as the defeated Frenchman Bonaparte, Obama et al as the winning Englishman Nelson.
Yet for those of either political extremes who seek to make all attempts at legislation and governance a blood sport of winners and losers, the expectation of good sportsmanship seems not to be a part of this winner/loser game. Truth is, there are some battles in life we win, and some we lose. Then we pick up and go on to the next confrontation of life. Two football coaches meet at midfield at the end of the Super Bowl and compliment each other for a great season and effort, win or lose. Silver and bronze Olympic medalists stand at the side and applaud the gold medalist standing on the center higher stage. Because it is the right thing to do.
Instead, the supporters of the “you lie” and “baby killer” screamers, and the followers of the “party of no” vow to fight a continuing rear-guard action to repeal or void what has just passed. Attempting to void the decision on the field by Monday-morning quarterbacking appeals to the off-court judges. Changing the accepted rules in place after-the-fact. Overturning “majority rules” (a concept that the U.S. Senate seems to have long forgotten) by minority subversion. Isn’t this kind of political terrorism exactly what the now-defeated brethren would have screamed about when they were in power?
More frightening still is the continued call for revolt that is being spoken in greater and greater violent terms. The previous pictures of Obama as Hitler are being replaced by Speaker Nancy Pelosi in front of a wall of flames, calling for her “to be removed.” Calls for bricks to be thrown, office glass to be broken. Exhortations of “you should be angry” urged upon a near-mob already more than angry enough. Threats and epithets (racial, homophobic, and political) shouted to elected Congresspersons on their way to vote. Future election outcomes and TV ratings still trump Truth. Pelosi correctly said recently, “Words matter. I believe that words carry great weight.” And so they do, as most every great spiritual teacher has reminded us.
It is time for everyone to now quiet down. The dozen Attorneys General threatening to sue the bill on unconstitutionality grounds need to get back to get back to the more pressing fight against white collar financial crime. Congresspersons need to move on to other great issues the people need addressed – financial/banking reform, energy needs, and most importantly, our jobs and economic health. To paraphrase the Kenny Rogers song, “You [no longer] hold ‘em, [so you gotta] know when to fold ‘em.”
For people like me who lived through the late 60s/early 70s, the threat of violence on our American institutions is all too real. We have seen what violence our citizens are capable of doing to each other by murder, lynching, assassinations, and mental and physical cruelty. Back then it was civil rights and Viet Nam that were creating hyper-emotionalism, and we watched our TVs in dread of the next outbreak of news stories. Today it is high anger over two questionable wars, a threat against our way of life by foreign faceless terrorists, and the near collapse of our economy with incredibly unequal and immoral consequences that are not being addressed. In both decades, it is the collapse of institutional trust and confidence that incites our emotion. I have genuine fears that the violent outcomes we saw 40 years ago are dangerously close to being repeated again in 2010.
Our leaders owe us more than petty foot-stomping like kindergarten kids. There are very positive lessons we need to be showing out kids, lessons taught by example, not words. We had our debate, it came to conclusion by the same rules used in the past by all political parties. Let us now move on, stop the finger-pointing, and play nice before something very serious happens. There are more than enough nut cases out there who cannot separate reality from rhetoric, sports metaphors from battlefield tactics. Will someone now have to die to show us anew how to speak and act responsibly, and that “words indeed do have power”?
Is it a perfect bill or an ideal solution to keeping America healthy? No. I do not think anyone at any point in the political spectrum is entirely satisfied with the outcome. That is probably one measure of a pretty good outcome: no one entirely won or lost, but all got something beneficial (even if some feel they cannot say so!).
For me, the downside is that the bill perpetuates two fundamental flaws in our health care delivery that I have discussed in previous blogs (see 9/8/2009 and 8/19/2009):
1. It leaves decisions about what health care one will receive in the hands of private insurance companies, whose primary and understandable obligation is to maximize shareholder profits and employee pay by either raising premiums or reducing payouts – a profit obligation diametrically opposed to my critical care needs;
2. It leaves intact the current system whereby the majority of access to that insurance is through employer benefit plans, benefits given significantly unevenly to the population at large and which are naturally a secondary focus of employers, and burdens those companies with a major pricing disadvantage in competition with the rest of the world – none of whom burden their companies with adsorbing the cost of employee health care.
But these flaws proved politically unapproachable at this stage of our social evolution, and must wait for another day.
What is sad to see is that the lies, misinformation, grandstanding, and denial of past speeches and records on this topic are continuing, all done simply for political gain. What has passed for informative debate would make a high school speech teacher flunk the whole class, and the civics teacher shake her head in embarrassment at current practitioners. From Sarah Palin’s notorious outright lies about “death panels” to the scare tactics of the “lost of personal doctor or one’s current insurance” and “employer bankruptcies,” the unanimous NO votes of all Republican representatives and senators confirmed that this was never a process or debate about how to improve people’s lives through better health care. It was only about defeating a popular president and avenging a brutal 2008 election loss. Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) famously predicted that “health care would be Obama’s Waterloo defeat,” and all Republicans rallied confidently around that primary political goal. But by trapping themselves into that all-or-nothing strategy they would up the big losers yet again, unable to deliverable to their shrinking base despite the bravado talk. DeMint et al as the defeated Frenchman Bonaparte, Obama et al as the winning Englishman Nelson.
Yet for those of either political extremes who seek to make all attempts at legislation and governance a blood sport of winners and losers, the expectation of good sportsmanship seems not to be a part of this winner/loser game. Truth is, there are some battles in life we win, and some we lose. Then we pick up and go on to the next confrontation of life. Two football coaches meet at midfield at the end of the Super Bowl and compliment each other for a great season and effort, win or lose. Silver and bronze Olympic medalists stand at the side and applaud the gold medalist standing on the center higher stage. Because it is the right thing to do.
Instead, the supporters of the “you lie” and “baby killer” screamers, and the followers of the “party of no” vow to fight a continuing rear-guard action to repeal or void what has just passed. Attempting to void the decision on the field by Monday-morning quarterbacking appeals to the off-court judges. Changing the accepted rules in place after-the-fact. Overturning “majority rules” (a concept that the U.S. Senate seems to have long forgotten) by minority subversion. Isn’t this kind of political terrorism exactly what the now-defeated brethren would have screamed about when they were in power?
More frightening still is the continued call for revolt that is being spoken in greater and greater violent terms. The previous pictures of Obama as Hitler are being replaced by Speaker Nancy Pelosi in front of a wall of flames, calling for her “to be removed.” Calls for bricks to be thrown, office glass to be broken. Exhortations of “you should be angry” urged upon a near-mob already more than angry enough. Threats and epithets (racial, homophobic, and political) shouted to elected Congresspersons on their way to vote. Future election outcomes and TV ratings still trump Truth. Pelosi correctly said recently, “Words matter. I believe that words carry great weight.” And so they do, as most every great spiritual teacher has reminded us.
It is time for everyone to now quiet down. The dozen Attorneys General threatening to sue the bill on unconstitutionality grounds need to get back to get back to the more pressing fight against white collar financial crime. Congresspersons need to move on to other great issues the people need addressed – financial/banking reform, energy needs, and most importantly, our jobs and economic health. To paraphrase the Kenny Rogers song, “You [no longer] hold ‘em, [so you gotta] know when to fold ‘em.”
For people like me who lived through the late 60s/early 70s, the threat of violence on our American institutions is all too real. We have seen what violence our citizens are capable of doing to each other by murder, lynching, assassinations, and mental and physical cruelty. Back then it was civil rights and Viet Nam that were creating hyper-emotionalism, and we watched our TVs in dread of the next outbreak of news stories. Today it is high anger over two questionable wars, a threat against our way of life by foreign faceless terrorists, and the near collapse of our economy with incredibly unequal and immoral consequences that are not being addressed. In both decades, it is the collapse of institutional trust and confidence that incites our emotion. I have genuine fears that the violent outcomes we saw 40 years ago are dangerously close to being repeated again in 2010.
Our leaders owe us more than petty foot-stomping like kindergarten kids. There are very positive lessons we need to be showing out kids, lessons taught by example, not words. We had our debate, it came to conclusion by the same rules used in the past by all political parties. Let us now move on, stop the finger-pointing, and play nice before something very serious happens. There are more than enough nut cases out there who cannot separate reality from rhetoric, sports metaphors from battlefield tactics. Will someone now have to die to show us anew how to speak and act responsibly, and that “words indeed do have power”?
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