Mrs. du Toit - Personal Effects

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Gathering Pieces

The difficulty in learning something new is that you don’t know what pieces are valuable and you don’t know what the picture is supposed to look like in the end.

Let’s say you were starting to work on a jigsaw puzzle. You have in view a pile of pieces. You know there is more than one piece, but you can only focus on one piece at time.

You take in the shape of your piece, but a puzzle piece all by itself doesn’t do you any good. You have to make it fit with another piece, so you take in the characteristics of the first piece, perhaps laying out a view pieces on the table, and look for the relationships between the pieces… where one fits with another.

Now let’s say that we don’t have the box that the puzzle came in. The finished picture on the box helps us limit the pieces to categories or sections, knowing that the reddish pieces go in the upper right, or the blueish pieces go across the top. That helps us tremendously, because we can separate our pieces into piles and only look through a few in each pile when we’re looking for a match. Without knowing what the finished picture is, the colors of the pieces are meaningless to us in knowing where to begin placing them on the table. We can use the colors to help us find ones that match the color we need, but we don’t know where any of it belongs.

In addition, our puzzle pieces are a mess. We have the pieces for a 100 puzzles or more puzzles, and we don’t know which pieces will go with which puzzle. We don’t have all the pieces for all the puzzles. We have a few singles and a few doubles.

But we start to do it anyway, with all those deficits to make it more difficult.

In reality, we’re putting together a dozen or more puzzles at once, but we don’t know what the finished pictures are supposed to look like for any of them.

As we’re working through a few of them, we’re hoping that as we get more of the pieces in place that the final image will begin to appear to us, making it quicker and easier to complete the puzzle, by allowing us to focus on the pieces that make sense for that picture. If we focus too closely, however, it doesn’t allow us to get a perspective of the image.

We often refer to that phenomenon as “we can’t see the forest for the trees.” The film, Blow Up, was based on the premise that you can look too closely at something, zooming in too much, and lose perspective. The loss of focus was also an analogy. We can get stuck in the technical aspects of what we’re doing to the extent that we forget that the technology is a means to an end, not the end itself. We might be focusing on the roughness of the cuts or the style of the pieces, completely forgetting that it isn’t the reason we’re doing what we’re doing.

What we want is the finished picture, something we can look at and refer to, and anything else we do is a means to that end.

Analogy explained, I’ll continue…

When we study history, we’re caught in combinations of the above. We don’t know what our finished picture is supposed to look like, or even that there will be a “finished” picture. We’re working on multiple pictures all at once, not knowing if our various pictures will related to each other at all, or if we’re just picking up random pieces that don’t belong in any of our puzzles. We have no idea what we’ll do with the finished picture once its complete, or that it will serve any purpose to us at all.

That’s the state that children are in when we start teaching them history. They’re in a fact-gathering stage, not knowing why they’re learning what they’re learning and having no clue that there is a gold ring at the end. They’re doing it without any relevance, except to the individual pieces to the one next to it. For many, there is no gold ring at the end, because they don’t do it well enough, long enough, or have the sense to change the perspective of what they’ve learned to see the “finished” product. It is as if they only see this:

The finished product looks like this, if you stand far enough away so the details are obscured:

When you’re “done,” we have a picture, a pattern, and a reference that we can use. If we zoom in on any part of it, however, time has blurred the details for us, and those details aren’t as important to us anymore. We needed the details only for the purpose of placing it in our picture, but once that’s done, the details are superfluous…

They’re superfluous until we try to help someone else do it. Someone else needs the details to do what we have done. We don’t hand people finished pictures, because what the picture represents requires the understanding of the context of the details.

Details are important for context and trust. We want to make sure that we’re not trying to cram a piece that doesn’t belong in our puzzle. It might be the right shape, but the puzzle piece was a fake. We have to validate that each piece belongs in our puzzle. Once we’ve done that, however, the details provide no use to us at all.

In addition, knowing the details about a specific piece without the context of the larger picture (why we want or need to know that) details are just stupid. The only purpose they serve is to play Trivial Pursuit, or bore our friends at parties behaving as Cliff Clavens. For details to be interesting (and useful) and to be remembered, they have to be put in context and with the awareness of why we want or care about it.

But we don’t know that while we’re learning something new. We have, essentially, an empty basket and a process. We don’t know which pieces are going to be valuable, which are false/fiction, which belong to each puzzle, etc. We just have to work through it, hoping and trusting that at some future point an image will appear that we can use, and can refer to. Details are unimportant on their own, most of the time. They are only important in how they fit in the bigger picture. Once we know how they fit, then we can forget them.

When details become important is to flag us… to jar our memories of the larger context. We might say something like, “Ohhh, yeah, something like that was tried once and it failed miserably,” and we can look again at the details to refresh our memories to make sure the pattern we’re remembering from our picture matches the details we’re seeing in another context. We don’t have to go through the entire process again and relearn all the details.

History (and education, in general) is not a pursuit to remember with. It is a pursuit to teach us how to think. It might be fine and dandy to speculate on how something will turn out, but if there is plenty of evidence to suggest that when you do X, Y happens, then expecting Z this time would be stupid. That’s the only reason we study history (except, perhaps, as a hobby). Forgetting that, or not knowing that, is why so many people find the subject boring and useless… because they have nothing but details/pieces and no goal of having anything useful to look at or use when they’re done.

It becomes incredibly difficult to have conversations with people (especially arguments) when they don’t have a picture of their own, or have gone through the process of creating their pictures. They want a shortcut and for us to explain to them why we think something is this way or that way, down to the nitty gritty details of why we have come to understand and know what we do.

NO! Do your own homework and study. There is a minimum cost of entry into adulthood and the discussion realm, and if you haven’t done any of the heavy lifting first, then that person needs to “go away” until they’ve done it, not ask others to provide them with some sort of Vulcan mild meld of what they spent years and years learning. They shouldn’t trust what you say on faith alone, but until they have something with which to base an objection, or provide examples of pictures where the patterns were not the same, then they’re worthless, and provide nothing but noise.

I like to refer to history as a great big Gantt chart. You don’t have to fill in all the areas to see the finished product (to recognize it as a Gantt chart), and it is useful even with sections missing. You can fill in other missing sections later, if you want, but if you have a starting point and an ending point, you can safely assume that the two are connected. You just might not know all the details that went into their being connected.

The mistake we make, if we make one, is in thinking that our puzzle is ever finished.

Learning never stops, until we die, or we just act like we are.

Posted 08/27/2008 | 11:38 AM • Print Vers.
Category: The Big Picture

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Change Agents

Mrs. du Toit
From: Mrs. du Toit Weblog

Back when I worked at the Big U a group of people in high positions of management became partners. They decided that it was better to work together than to maintain the typical aggressive relationship between their various fiefdoms. In most companies, especially larger ones, the basic structure puts IT at odds with the functional departments. Budget is always fighting with Finance. Payroll is always fighting with Accounts Payable and Human Resources, and General Ledger fights with everyone. They’re turf wars, but it is simply how the game is played, and has always been played. But this group of people, at least at the highest levels of management, decided that it was time for a change… profound change in the way the university functioned.

Why did the university have to offer basic English classes when the local state colleges had the same courses? Why couldn’t they combine forces, providing courses in close proximity for the various required courses they all had to offer.

California has a university system (for graduate degrees), a state college system (for 4 year, undergraduate degrees), and a local college system (providing trade courses and certifications, and AA degrees). There wasn’t any reason why they replicated their efforts. The only reason was that it had always been that way, but there was no reason why it had to stay that way. Nothing was off-limits or out of bounds, except our fiduciary responsibilities, our integrity, and the constant awareness of the trust and duty that had been placed in us.

It was obvious to my bosses that things in California were going to change. These were very smart, forward thinking people. This happened at the local campus where I worked and with a handful of people at the level above (the University of California Regent’s office).

Most of them were about the same age I am today… in their 50s, having climbed the ladders in their respective fields to Vice Chancellor levels.

They knew from the research that college enrollment was declining and changing dramatically, as was the entire definition of education. The baby boom was over. The once overflowing ivory towers were now going to have to compete for students, and they were going to have to compete for a lower standard of whatever defined the cream of the crop. The fact that it was difficult for students to get into college had been maintained by marketing. The truth was, at the national level, that anyone who could pay full tuition would get in, even at the Ivory draped schools. At the same time, California had a Master Plan that made as part of the UC’s charter, guaranteed placement for the top 10% of students in California, in one of the UC campuses. These leaders knew that with the budget crises that were upon them, and would be upon them for decades, that they were not going to be able to meet that promise if they continued to operate with a business, as usual mindset.

So they set about to change it.

As one of their protégés it was interesting to watch. It was fascinating to see them set aside their grievances in this way, even if they had to struggle to do it. My own boss, for example, after another round of budget cuts, laid herself off, as well as most of my coworkers, and put me in charge of the department, with 50% of the budget remaining for contractors. I was to continue to do the work they started, but with no staff, but the money to hire the expertise when I needed it.

Her selfless act set the bar for how I approached work from that day forward.

It was also a way of thinking totally contrary to the way the public sector functions. Reward structures and promotions were based on how big you could make your empire, regardless of how big or small it needed to be to get the job done. It was backwards to the way that public monies should be handled. Instead, they put in efficiency and streamlining as the benchmarks for promotions, reversing decades of rewarding the least efficient and most bloated. You were not promoted if your empire got bigger. You were promoted if you did more with less.

They met weekly and I’d be asked to come to the meetings when something in my area would be discussed. I would often have to present them with something, or they would want a progress report on some initiative I was managing. At one of these meetings, before the meeting had officially started, we were chit-chatting a bit and somehow we got into a discussion of what the university would look like when they had done all they hoped to do was complete.

“Oh, we won’t be here” they told us, and they all nodded in agreement with the statement, as I stared at them in shock and awe. “Change agents are always destroyed and we will be, and most of what we have done will be reversed, but we will have set in motion a series of changes that will ultimately get us to where we need to be, but we’ll be long gone before that happens.” They went on to explain to me that those most responsible for change are always targeted, and their reputations were destroyed, and they would be forced to leave. It wasn’t a matter of “if” they told me, it was simply “when.” They were focused on doing as much as they could before the wolves who fought against changing the status quo found a way to destroy them.

And all of their predictions were correct. They were correct about California’s budget being a multi-decade nightmare. They were correct that the Master Plan would be revoked. They were correct that they would eventually be destroyed, and forced to leave, and those who remained (who were against their changes) set about to reverse as many of the changes as they could. In as short as seven more years they were all gone, and what they’d done was (as much as possible) purged from the record, so that very little sign of what they had set about to do would remain… and their ideas could be forgotten.

While few would remember their names and what they tried to do, their radical ideas corrupted those who came in contact with them.

If, for example, you are a writer or a speaker or a preacher, you put forth an idea which lodges in the Unbewußtsein of a casual member of the Remnant and sticks fast there. For some time it is inert; then it begins to fret and fester until presently it invades the man’s conscious mind and, as one might say, corrupts it. Meanwhile, he has quite forgotten how he came by the idea in the first instance, and even perhaps thinks he has invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting thing of all is that you never know what the pressure of that idea will make him do.
Isaiah’s Job, Albert Jay Nock, 1936

Planting seeds of change is probably the most a change agent can hope to achieve. They might never see the seeds they planted bear fruit, in fact that is most often the case, but they have to content themselves with knowing that some of the seeds will grow and fester in the minds of those with whom they came in contact.

* * *

It was not at all surprising for me that what Kim set about to do with seeding the Nation of Riflemen would be eventually forgotten. His way of breaking through boundaries and crossing lines was not an idea that some could find palatable. They have to think like us, too many would think or say, and try to maintain little fiefdoms and cliques in the old ways of thinking. Putting requirements on people to be polite and responsible, in all facets of their daily life, was something many more could not swallow either.

Day after day Kim lived, as best he could, the idea that a gun owning society was a polite, responsible society and demanded that of himself and others that he knew and associated. There was no except clause in that statement. Law-abiding didn’t have an asterisk, nor did integrity, duty, or honor or being a man. It had to be a pervasive way of thinking of ourselves and our duties as citizens. Now Kim was far from perfect himself, as we all are imperfect. But mistakes and falling off the wagon are not reasons to change the standard, only to work harder at trying to achieve it. Kim was the first to admit when he’d screw up.

Trying to live the ideals gets annoying for the people around you. The idea that there was no fine print in a handshake and that there is a code of behavior required to define oneself as polite or honorable was something that would be rejected by many, and disparaged by many more. They worked at the edges, generally, attacking the left- or the right- flank, depending on which you left open and vulnerable.

Folks would get upset when Kim would write things about how silly it is for adult men to wear baseball caps, respectable people not having tattoos, or lambasting young men for showing up for a date in shorts and sandals. They’d argue when he’d write about demonstrating proper table manners, or conducting oneself politely. That didn’t have anything to do with the Nation of Riflemen they’d say… it was just about gun ownership people would say.

But it wasn’t about just that. A law abiding, participating citizen is a complete package. It can’t be parceled out into pieces with compliance with only part of it, as one might order from a Chinese menu.

When Kim wrote a post about the kid in Alaska who was stealing bandwidth from the local library, that created one of the greatest rifts among those who read his blog. Who did it harm? folks would say, still not clear on the idea that it harmed the person doing it, and not clear on the difference between property owned by We, The People and personal property. We know the definition of is and the only person they were fooling was themselves. Integrity runs deep and there are no exceptions to it. The litmus test is not who it harms but what gives you the right, and without it being your personal property (bought and paid for personally), you have no right to anything else. We are entitled to nothing. We have to earn and pay for everything ourselves, or we can’t have it, use it, or call it our own. This American thing of being a nation of laws requires that we be a nation of law-abiding in the extreme, to the point of irritation, and without that, then it’s simply fancy words, a pipe dream, and an excuse to behave badly, because you have the freedom to do so.

That means that there is no falling into the ranks and allowing others to do for you, regardless of the situation. It means you always volunteer. It means that no one takes a lead role, because everyone has the duty to take a lead role themselves. It means that you never look to others to what needs to be done, as that is an anathema to the entire concept of what a nation of free citizens, of free agents, and a nation of and by the people is all about… and if you are able to do all of that, then you may exercise rights guaranteed and enabled by the rest of us who try to do that, too. Without the constant demonstration of responsibility and duty you have no rights, and exercising that which you have not yet earned is the definition of a scoundrel, and nothing that could be labeled American.

So, it did not surprise us that after we shutdown the GunThing that some folks would use that opportunity to criticize Kim (or me), for whatever they could come up with do it. It was sort of funny, really, because it was so predictable. These were folks who never got the idea that the Nation of Riflemen wasn’t about coming to the table for what you could get, but for what you could bring to it. The site closure didn’t enable people to behave badly. It just allowed us to identify the good and bad more easily. It was not at all surprising to us, although I’d be dishonest if I said that it wasn’t disappointing. It will get a whole lot worse when Kim stops blogging, too. A WHOLE lot worse.

Kim knows that he will be forgotten (eventually), and by extension (in my much more insignificant role), so will I. In 10 years, if the Nation of Riflemen continues to exist, it would surprise us, or it will have become something entirely different from what it was all about.

But the seeds are there, that tree will grow and bear fruit, and we won’t live long enough to see it, nor would we be invited to the party to celebrate if we were still alive. Our reputations will have been trashed and thrashed by then, some folks will chide themselves for ever reading what Kim had to say, and they’ll mock him whenever they get the chance… and you can bank on that. That’s all part of the job description and we knew that going into it.

But Kim (and I) can go back to the quiet solitude of our ordinary, anonymous lives knowing that we have corrupted the minds of a few.

And that’s the coolest thing of all. No one can undo that, ever, regardless of what they say about us… as he has quite forgotten how he came by the idea in the first instance, and even perhaps thinks he has invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting thing of all is that you never know what the pressure of that idea will make him do.

Posted 08/26/2008 | 09:59 AM • Print Vers.
Category: The Big Picture

Monday, August 25, 2008

Not So Sure

Mrs. du Toit
From: Mrs. du Toit Weblog

To admit that I’m not so sure about something is to show a bit of weakness… at least from an Internet perspective. Some folks will take any opportunity to blast you if you show weakness, but I don’t care anymore about that, and I won’t be blogging in less than 100 days anyway. There are a number of things I’m not so sure about anymore, and the idea that our way is the only way is one of them.

I’m not so sure that our style of Republic is the only successful model. In fact, I’m sure there are other successful models, depending on how you define success, and given the time and circumstance.

* * *

One of the things that struck me about India is how much infrastructure is missing. They don’t have so many things that we take for granted… national highway systems, potable water, constant and reliable power (of any stripe), paved roads, a population that doesn’t piss openly on the sidewalk, soap/toilet paper in public restrooms, etc.

In science fiction stories there’s always one about finding a place that is missing its people. I know there were Twilight Zone episodes that had that as a focal point. The protagonist finds themselves alone, or they land in a place where there are signs that people were once there, but they’ve vanished. There might be a hairbrush on a dressing table or a half-full glass of water… something that says “we were here, but we’re gone.”

That was the feeling I had when I visited some of India’s famous places. It is not a feeling I’ve had any place else in the world. It was an odd feeling, especially given the fact that I was completely surrounded by people… lots of them, as people is something that India is not lacking.

In many respects, India is being lost to the jungle, and I don’t mean that in a metaphorical sense. I mean it literally.

One weekend we traveled to the Palace at Mysore. Our driver took us to the palace as well as some of the other “tourist” sites in the area. Mysore was the Raj’s last stand, you could say, and is where the opulence of royalty and British rule came to an end.

But the British didn’t leave with a bang. They just left. And they left those half-full glasses behind, letters half-finished, pens with their tips still dipped in ink, and it is odd to see it, stuck in a time capsule of sorts.

It was so odd, in fact, that I don’t think I’ve written about it much, although I’m sure I touched on it in my India travels posts. I may not have written about it, but it has plagued my thoughts as I tried to come to terms with it, and find a way to reconcile it and have it make any sense.

As you wind through the corded paths through the Mysore palace there are artifacts under glass. Some of them are sketches of the royal family, and other dignitaries that worked in the seat of Mysore. After you’ve taken in the idea of it, and look past the images and personal belongings, details become apparent. All of the sketches were done at about the same time, by a British artist. All of the sketches are fading, but that’s not the worst of it. They’re molding at the edges. The glass display cases, as one might find in a department store, are not the stuff of museums that protect the contents from the elements.

And if India is anything, it is a nation of elements… a country that fights a continual battle to maintain man’s dominance over the weather, the slip into the past, and the jungle.

In another 25 years, the sketches will be dust… reabsorbed by the jungle and with that bit of artwork gone, so will be the proof that history existed this way or that way, and you could write anything about what happened without proof or contrary evidence.

It wasn’t just the main palace. We saw this all over the tourist sites. The summer palace was half gone, its inlaid ceilings were literally falling down, so much so, that it was too dangerous for tourists to go into the upper rooms. When something is “too dangerous” in India, you have to know how bad it really is.

Around the summer palace there had been set great arches, with Indian style sculpted rock tigers at their anchors. They were crumbling and some of them had fallen over completely, and you can see them being swallowed up by the soil.

This doesn’t seem to bother the Indians and I came to a harsh conclusion: India doesn’t care about its history. It only cares about today. That’s not something I can get my head around easily, as it is so contrary to our culture.

But beyond not caring about their history, they lack the skill and the infrastructure to do anything about it if they did. There are no sketch artists to take the place of the British art school graduate who had been busying himself for a few months or years recording what he saw. Then one day he got his orders to leave and he left everything where it was, and got on a ship, and sailed home.

At the library in Bangalore, a sight our driver thought we’d like to see, too, we walked through the various rooms and floors looking at the books. The smell of must and mold was strong and the books placed there by the British were still there, and no new books had been added since they left. Astronomy, geography, the world’s greatest fiction, world history, frozen in time on the day the British librarian got on the ship home.

I was struck with an incongruity… is there a difference between burning books or just allowing them to rot?

Surely the burning of books would have gotten notice, but if malaise and indifference replace the fury and haste of the fire, is the end result really any different?

In 20 to 30 years the few remaining books that are salvageable today will be gone. I felt this urge to pack them up and send them somewhere so they could be protected and loved, the way that books should be loved. But more than anything, I was angry. I was angry that they’d let these books disintegrate this way. In those books would be the reason not to allow them to disintegrate, but no one bothered to read them.

Indians don’t read literature.

* * *

In Amsterdam, the centuries of infrastructure is palpable. It isn’t just the fact that the land was not originally fit for man nor beast and they somehow managed to make it so. That’s plain. That’s obvious. But just like looking through the cracked glass display cases in India, if you look a bit deeper, beyond the veneer, there are hundreds of years of maintenance beneath.

There was a small section of one of the main canals sectioned off. It didn’t take much to divert the traffic under the other bridge. There was a man with two boats, one to carry himself, and another full of supplies… bricks, mortar, and hand tools. He was taking apart a section of bricks and replacing them with new bricks and new mortar. This allowed you to see the work beneath the surface.

It’s times like that in which you can allow your mind to ponder… who last repaired the section beneath? Did he, like the man we saw, have two boats, too? How did he learn to do these repairs? Did they always travel alone in this way, so skilled and confident in their craft that a single man could be entrusted with a repair of so old and so lovely a small bridge?

There had, obviously, been men like him for centuries, since the bridge was first built over 500 years ago, and before that, thousands of men dug the trenches that make the canal system today… men who were paid by the wealthy merchants to do more than their share of the work, work that all were expected to do. Paid conscripts, thousands and thousands of them, built the city and beat back the sea with hand tools… 700 years ago. And the city stands, as glorious as the day they built it. They built it to last that long.

I have no idea how long it had been since that small section of the bridge had been rebuilt. The older section below was darker, made with bricks from a different mold, perhaps by hand. There was a patchwork of different types of bricks, all put in at different times, during other repairs. Perhaps those bricks had been re-dried and repaired, taken from different, older sections of the canals before they were reused there. Perhaps the original builders of the canals had placed one of those bricks as keystones, some multi-hundred years ago.

The workman would not have known what he’d find as he took away the modern layers, but he touched a continuum, and the pride of workmanship of countless generations of men, just like him. He didn’t need to be told to be careful or to have pride in his work. He had the pressure of the ages on his shoulders.

Community works was taken to high art by the Dutch. Perhaps that’s a natural result of inhospitable places… perhaps those most social, most dutiful, are molded by adversity and the awareness that the survival of the one is dependent on the contributions of the many.

Our modern, failed socialist ideas took root in the working model of the Dutch, but the duty and the social obligation which gave birth to that idea depends on the work ethic that came about by the fight to survive against the harsh and cruel elements, and the never ending battle to control the sea.

A diamond without pressure is a lump of coal.

Perhaps the ease of every day life created by the machinery of man’s cleverness has had the unintended consequence of removing the social pressures that created dutiful, contributing citizens. The work ethic is being destroyed. It was in the 1960s that the Dutch decided that they no longer wished to do this hard work themselves and offered Middle Eastern men the brutal work, in exchange for Dutch citizenship. They came for a better life for their children, knowing full well that their lives would not be made measurably better. It was an act of future faith… that their children and grandchildren, people they might never know, would reap the rewards of their sweat.

* * *

When I lived in New York in the early 80’s, I lived and worked in the Chinatown area. At that time, there were more people from Mainland China in New York than anywhere outside of China. The Chinese were poring out of China, coming into the country illegally, and then going through the process to become legal, once they were here.

They weren’t entitled to refugee status and had to demonstrate the ability to work and support themselves. Low pay, unskilled jobs wouldn’t be enough to pass the scrutiny of the Immigration Department. Knowing this, many employers overstated their salaries and their job duties, and the people paid the extra taxes out of their own pockets to compensate.

It’s hard for younger people to understand that it wasn’t illegal to hire an illegal alien back then. Those laws changed gradually.

One of the women I worked with, “Mrs. P,” had been an English translator in China. She’d come over first, working for a year and setting up an apartment in Queens. Once that was done, and she had enough money, she sent the money for her husband and only daughter to come to America.

Mrs. P’s husband had been in public relations in China. He’d been a very social man, having a wide circle of business associates. I could imagine, from Mrs. P’s stories, that he’d sit in tea shops, whispering about the news and politics with his mates, but that was not the man today.

Mrs. P had made the decision to move to Queens, rather than staying in the Chinese ghetto that Manhattan’s downtown Bowery had become. It would have been easier for her to be among other Chinese people, but it would create a conflict for her daughter. Her daughter would always have one foot in the old world and one foot in the new, and Mrs. P and her husband wanted her to have both feet firmly on American soil.

Mrs. P’s husband took a job, any job, to help support himself and his family. He couldn’t speak English and his degree was not transferable to Capitalist America. He was, essentially, unskilled. That wasn’t the case for everyone. I knew physicists, engineers, and other skilled men who sold shirts on street corners, or worked as waiters in the co-op restaurants… their deficient English-language skills preventing them from working in their respective fields.

They didn’t care. They didn’t come to America for themselves. They came for their children.

The isolation and loss of social network was hard on Mrs. P’s husband. He no longer had the social standing or respect he left on the tarmac in China. He became a lowly factory worker, unskilled, working a brutal day of physical labor… but his daughter would be an American citizen. He traded everything for his faith in the future.

No one needed to tell Mrs. P’s daughter that she had quite a load to carry… that she had to do well in school and be successful. She had only to look in her parent’s eyes, see their forlorn faces caught between two cultures, to know that she had to repay their sacrifice, and she’d repay it by being happy, successful… and free.

* * *

When we were in Amsterdam, we were driven to the airport by a Muslim taxi driver. His father had been one of the workers who came to Holland for the public works projects of the 1960s. He was frustrated. We talked of the War on Terror and assured him that America’s desire was to reform the Middle East, not destroy Islam, nor we were desirous of creating little Americas all over the world. We would bring the tools and help build the infrastructure and they would design nations that took the best of what worked for their cultures.

He made a point of telling us that he was Dutch, having been born in Holland. He was not a citizen of any other country. His wife was a laywer and when people suggested that Middle Eastern men, like himself, engaged in barbaric practices of forcing their wives to be submissive, he laughed at the idea of trying to tell his head-strong, educated wife to do anything. They were both Dutch citizens. They were born in Holland. They were both Muslims, but Islam wasn’t so much a religion to them as it was a cultural identity. It is what defined their social circle, but it didn’t define their citizenship nor negate their pride of their nation of birth.

We could have spent hours discussing politics with this man, and I wished we’d had more time and the freedom to tell him to take us to his neighborhood and postpone our flight. We wanted the conversation to continue, to get to know him better, to meet his head-strong, lawyer wife, and share a cup of tea. But we were not free to do those things and so we shook hands with this stranger friend, and waved goodbye from the airport.

* * *

When we were in Zürich a short time after America invaded Iraq and began the shock and awe bombing of the cities. It was in a small café that we met Jimmy.

Jimmy is an Iraqi Kurd. In 1980 he and his brother were arrested in Baghdad, along with nearly two hundred others. Jimmy was “interrogated”, then pressured to work for Saddam Hussein’s regime. If he accepted this work, as a terrorist and saboteur in foreign countries, he would be freed. (As a Kurd, he was “expendable” to Saddam.) If he didn’t agree to do this, he and his brother would be tortured until they died, or until he changed his mind.

After four days of torture, Jimmy broke, and told his captors that he’d work with them. He was released from prison, as was his brother (who had been held there just as a threat), and given twenty-four hours to recover from his ordeal. He was also given four visas to various European countries, and told to report back to Saddam’s secret police for instructions.

Instead, Jimmy recovered his passport and went straight to Baghdad Airport, and took the next flight to Italy. For the next twenty-odd years, he’d move from country to country, not daring to contact his family, not knowing what had happened to them, and not being able to tell them whether he was alive or dead.

Eventually, he was able to call his elderly father and mother, who’d thought that he was dead. His father died soon afterwards. Jimmy went to Syria, then crossed the Iraqi border at night, and spent a couple of days visiting his mother in secret. He couldn’t stay too long—the longer he stayed, the more likely he was to be betrayed to the secret police—and so he left the country by the same method he’d come. While still there, by the way, he’d found out that none of the two hundred others arrested with him had ever been heard from again.

Jimmy was never to see his mother again. During the invasion of Iraq last year, a missile exploded about a hundred yards from his mother’s house, and she died of shock. He doesn’t know whether it was an American or Iraqi missile, and doesn’t care.

I think of Jimmy often. I thought of him and our cab driver in Holland when the Muhammad cartoon fiasco occurred in Denmark. I doubted they’d believe that we were interested in bringing liberty to the Middle East or acceptance of Muslims in Europe with all the hate that event created. I couldn’t even explain the shame I felt regarding it to my own countrymen, with whom I shared a culture, let alone justify it to those whose culture I did not share.

* * *

I’ve been studying a bit, as a described in one of my recent posts. Some of that has been studying culture… well, more than “some.”

Culture is an interesting construct. It is different from society, which is the amalgam of the residents of a place. Culture is something else entirely. It’s such a complicated mess of genetics, tradition, and habit. It has seen its big and small revolutions and what we know about most are the ones that involve blood and battlefields.

But there have been other revolutions and remaking of cultures. Cultures are not static things, as we’re often taught. Culture is the constant battle between the have and the have-nots to distinguish themselves from each other, and from within, and the traditions passed on that define it, and allow its people to survive and prosper.

I thought of all of that while I was watching the Olympics of the last two weeks. I thought of the Muslim woman who ran a race with a uniform that had her head covered. I thought of Mrs. P and what she’d think of seeing Beijing today. I thought of the little Chinese girl, far too young for the competition, whose family refused to allow her to leave the gymnastics training she was receiving, because it was through gymnastics that her family would have a future. I thought of her in comparison to Mrs. P’s daughter, and how people have a different cultural view of the responsibility of family.

I thought of the Dutch and their enormous infrastructure projects and how they didn’t come about at a time when there was so much freedom in Holland.

I thought about Kim’s post on Let Africa Sink and how folks unfamiliar with Africa view the post so differently. They don’t hear the angst and sorrow, combined with the shrug of Africa Wins Again. It is a different cultural construct, one that Americans and Europeans have difficulty relating to or even noticing. Indians would have no trouble understanding it.

I thought about Kim’s posts written as a result of our visit to Chile (The Pinochet Conundrum (1) and The Pinochet Conundrum (2)), and how the people there had an entirely view of Pinochet than we had come to believe through Western media:

I was puzzled, when we visited Chile a couple of years ago, why it was that Pinochet was not a reviled figure in Chile itself. In fact, if anything, the reverse was true. His house, a modest pension in Montevideo, was almost a shrine rather than a museum. Passersby would drop bouquets on the sidewalk outside, and people would cross themselves when they walked past his house. And these were ordinary (ie. poor) people who behaved this way—people whom one would think would be more likely supporters of “popular” (ie. Marxist) politicians like Allende.

But that wasn’t the case.

What has emerged is, for anyone who isn’t a socialist, a profoundly complex reaction to Pinochet. While he was in power, he did, or allowed to have done, actions which were reprehensible to any decent government: summary imprisonment, torture and execution of his more outspoken Marxist opposition; assassination of same (eg. the car bombing of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier, in Washington D.C.), and so on. In fairness, it should be noted that his Marxist opponents were not all folk singers and poets: most were advocating, and planning, violent revolution.

* * *

It is probably impossible for us to grasp the depth and breadth of the infrastructure that makes The West possible and keeps the wheels of our Capitalist economy’s churning. We don’t complain about having industry enough for all to find work. That we take for granted. We complain when it billows out black smoke and want it to be easier, less dangerous, and cleaner. We want to continually fine tune perfection.

India has not made a new truck design since WWII. In fact, they didn’t design the factory and assembly line they have. The British did. In the 70 years since, the Indians have not had the ability to change a single thing about the trucks coming off the line, nor much of a highway system to drive them on. Their drivers die in traffic accidents that we don’t have, simply because the trucks lack the safety features that have been in our designs for decades.

Then I looked at China from the helicopter shots of the Oympics, sans the billowing industrial smoke they knew would be unsatisfactory to their Western visitors. It wasn’t the picture they wanted to present, even if the one they presented was false. I noticed, too, that the road surfaces had been redone recently, probably also a result of wanting to show off for guests. In every face in the crowds I saw a little of Mrs. P and how proud they were in their country and opening their doors. It didn’t matter if it was contrived or false. I’ve been known to throw messes in closets when company comes, too.

China has a long way to go before they can even begin to compare with the infrastructure of the West. India has even further to go.

It occurred to me that the progress that China has made and the ability to organize a people around those Herculean public works projects is because they have the Draconian authority to do so, which is why India (which although leaning toward socialism, has a economics professor as their Prime Minister) cannot make the same progress. India hasn’t and won’t make the same progress in infrastructure that China can, simply because they don’t have the same kind of Draconian rule to force people to build the way the Chinese do, and the same way the Dutch did when they dug their first canal.

It occurred to me that everything I thought I understood just didn’t fit so nicely in its puzzle frame any longer, and that perhaps the freedom we enjoy today, made possible by our infrastructure and culture, was built by people who didn’t care about history, who didn’t care about books, and who cared more about the future than they did about lofty ideals such as liberty and freedom, or themselves.

Maybe caring about your grandchildren’s future is a loftier ideal.

I’m not suggesting that it would work for us, or anywhere in the West, nor am I suggesting that it is better. I’m just proposing that it is easy to put those ideals in the forefront when the water that comes out of our taps is safe to drink, and millions of our countrymen aren’t dying of easy to cure illnesses and diseases, because we lack the infrastructure to deliver the medicines or the food necessary to prevent them.

It’s easy to look askance at our less free brothers in other places in the world and suggest that what they need is a little more freedom, but the details tell a different story.

Perhaps what they need is less freedom, until they have the infrastructure to support it. Perhaps freedom is earned on the backs of tyranny and struggle. But I doubt I can make the case convincingly enough to soften the criticisms of places far away… it’s too complicated and I am not skilled in writing sufficient to make the case strongly- or well-enough.

But, I’m not so sure anymore. I’m not so sure that our way is the only way. Perhaps other cultures need to find their own way, with a different model, and get there via a route similar to the one our ancestor’s took, but forget about ourselves: and one that values today as much as we value yesterday… and puts faith in the future in a way that we can only barely comprehend. We can’t comprehend a life without freedom. We think of it as essential. They think of it as frivolous…

...and I’m not so sure that’s wrong.

Posted 08/25/2008 | 11:39 AM • Print Vers.
Category: The Big Picture

Friday, August 22, 2008

Value

Mrs. du Toit
From: Mrs. du Toit Weblog

I remember some statistic I read when my kids were babies that said that it cost something like $300,000 to raise a child. I thought that was high, because it didn’t seem like my diaper service and daycare added up to that much. That’s because my children were little and their appetites, even with expensive bottles of baby food, were as little as they were. The costs climbed a bit when they got a bit older when they began to go through shoes and clothing more quickly. Then there was the beginning of the teenage years, when food would disappear from the pantry, but you never saw it happen. That’s when Kim and I started calling the kids “ants.” We’d load the food pantry to overflowing and week later, with no sign that a child had even been in the kitchen, let alone the pantry, the doors would close again and the cupboards would be bare.

But even that doesn’t begin to compare to the balloon payment at the end. $300,000? Pshaw! Triple it, and it might come CLOSE.

What was once a few hundred dollars for the most expensive thing we could think of, has ballooned to nosebleed level costs. It isn’t food or shelter (although they take a bite out of a budget, too), but it is the cost of life. College tuition, books, cars, car insurance, etc., are just the beginning of the onslaught of costs that seem to come out of nowhere.

Kim’s father had an expression, “people who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.” Looking at the expenses of having children denies the value you get from having them--that far exceeds (a million fold) what it costs in dollars and cents. I would literally forfeit arms, eyes, legs, and both kidneys for the joy of having children.

Kim’s father also had another expression, “long after you’ve paid a high price for a quality item, you’ll still have use of it, long after you’ve forgotten how much you paid for it.”

I don’t think Kim’s father was speaking about the costs of raising children, but the general attitude that some have about the costs of things. I never met Kim’s father. He died when Kim was just becoming a man, but I know he knew value. He sent Kim to one of the finest boarding schools in South Africa, knowing that it would provide opportunities for his son that couldn’t be quantified. That was value that would outlive him, and would outlive even Kim, as the value of that kind of education puts in motion a series of generational opportunities that cannot be quantified.

As children get older the planning scales get longer, too. No longer are we looking at what they need to have in their lunches for next week. Now we’re looking at what they’ll be doing and where they’ll be next summer, or the year after that, or the year after that. We’re talking of their careers, their eventual homes and families, and how we position ourselves as a family to enable them to make the most of all of it.

I could probably say something here about hindsight, and saving more for this time in their life, but the truth is, even knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have changed a thing. I can’t think of anything that we wouldn’t have done that provided immeasurable value to our lives.

When my mother had our last house foreclosed, we still had season tickets to the Civic Light Opera. Long after the house had gone, the memories of the performances remained. That might not be a priority for other people, but the house loss was not traumatic for me for very long. Kids don’t like to move, but after a few months they get over it, and like where ever they are. Similarly, although the India trip cost us a car, I wouldn’t want to undo those memories for a car, even if the trip wasn’t what we thought it would be, or that we didn’t like India (although we loved the people). We learned that and that was only possible by going there. You can’t put a price on that learning. Buying our house, although it’s been difficult a number of times, was probably the smartest thing we ever did (especially at the time when we did it).

I don’t suspect I’ll have a home when I die, as Kim and I will likely find that our home will be the last resort for college tuition or some other equally compelling cost that we’ll choose over the house. Heck, I’d sell the house for a China tea set for my grandchildren, if we haven’t sold it long before then!

I’ve heard people criticize Thomas Jefferson because when he died he left debt behind. He was constantly improving his home and his life, until the day he died.

A man after my own heart.

Posted 08/22/2008 | 02:19 PM • Print Vers.
Category: PERSONAL & FAMILY | Musing

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Manners and Etiquette Rule #4

Mrs. du Toit
From: Mrs. du Toit Weblog

There is an implicit requirement for decorum and respect if you accept (or continue to accept) another person’s hospitality. If, for example, you accept a dinner invitation with someone, implied with that acceptance is that you like and respect the person (if you know the person and it wasn’t your first meeting). If you accept a person’s hospitality and you don’t like them (or respect them), that makes you a cad, a scoundrel, and a mooch (someone with whom all honor and decency is absent). The way you demonstrate that you don’t like someone is to refuse their hospitality, not accept it and then piss on their sofa.

Accept the hospitality of those you like and respect, only.

I will admit that the awareness that some people don’t know this rule (or do not abide by it) was one of the most shocking realizations I’ve ever had. Why would you want to associate and take from someone you don’t respect? That makes no sense to me.

Posted 08/21/2008 | 09:43 AM • Print Vers.
Category: LIFE AND STRIFE | Society | Manners and Etiquette

Blind Spots

Mrs. du Toit
From: Mrs. du Toit Weblog

There are many types of blind spots. There’s the blind spot of your car, where the roof connects behind the back windows. We’re aware of it, so we take extra precautions when changing lanes to try to overcome it. We have rules about driving in a another driver’s blind spot, to avoid the catastrophe that could occur. Sometimes we have blind spots when we’ve been washed in too much light, which seems counterintuitive if we think about it. We need just enough light, but not too much.

Blind spots are different from blinders that are put on horses to keep them from seeing things that might distract them and give them a fright. There are times when all of us put on blinders of a sort, to get through a difficult period, or to keep our focus on something difficult we must do without distractions. Blind spots are different, because unlike blinders, we can’t see what we are not seeing and we’re blind to them. In a way, they protect us from what we’re not ready or able to see and deal with.

All of us have blind spots, to some degree or another, and they’re not all bad. It is what allows us to encourage our children in activities where they may have no ability to excel, and perhaps by being blinded to that fact, they have a chance to surprise us and themselves. It allows us to deal with people in our methods, without knowing that someone else is operating with entirely different methods, and we function with a feeling of harmony with our fellows. It is easy to see the blind spots of others, but it can be very difficult to see our own.

During the 1970s there were many cults and Charlatans who sprang up with theories and techniques for discovering one’s blind spots. There were fad therapies, such as primal scream, hypnosis and regression, all with the intention of finding that thing, that dark, repressed memory that was thought to control us and keep us from living happy and productive lives. All we had to do was find it, they told us. The essence of psychotherapy is to allow the patient, with a guide, to explore blind spots, with the goal of putting light on what we cannot or will not recognize about ourselves, at a time when we’re able to recognize it and change it.

The problem with the fads of the 1970s, beyond the fact that this silliness continues to pervade our collective psyches today, is that it was a lie. There were any number of people who were taught the phrase, “I do this because...” as justification for continuing to behave badly. That’s the difference between real discovery of one’s blind spots with a therapist or a priest, versus the exploration for excuses to justify one’s continued bad behavior. Once we know why we’re motivated to do a particular thing, then it is no longer the reason why we do it. Once the blind spot has been removed then continuing to use it as a reason for our behaving as we do is just an excuse, or it wasn’t the real motivator in the first place.

Blind spots are a bit of an anathema to our understanding of Free Will, where Free Will is the constant awareness that we have choice in every action we take, regardless of our background or experience. Blind spots can be used as a crutch to justify or label what we might describe as dark forces, that unconsciously guide our actions.

We are, however, conscious beings. We are sentient, beyond the sentience of animals who have no knowledge or concept of the past or the future. There is only now for them… a constant, never-ending, now.

Just as the Love Story meme that so many got wrong about never doing anything to someone you love that would hurt them (because if you truly love someone you would know what that would be, and true love is not harming the one you love), many people continue to misunderstand the concept of “living in the now.” Living in the now is a restatement of, and recommitment to, the concept of Free Will--that regardless of what might have happened to us in the past, we are not a prisoner of the past, because we can envision the future. We can, without knowing what all our blind spots might be, act above the dark forces that might be trying to pull our puppet strings. We can deny them power over us by simply exercising our Free Will.

It’s easy to describe, but not so easy to do. We have to work at it.

* * *

The other day I went to the dentist. As usual, I arrived at my appointment time, rather than a few minutes early. I was hurrying to get through the door before the clock made me late. Another woman was hurrying toward the door too, and when I saw that she was also herding her daughter along, I stopped my haste to allow the girl to catch up to her mother. The daughter was a young woman, probably 18 or 19 years old. Her clothing was a bit tattered, of a fashion fad. Her hair was styled in the wrapped, but tousled banded style of her peers. Despite her mother’s haste and prodding, she wasn’t hurrying in the slightest. She continued to shuffle her feet, and her too long and tattered jeans legs were soaked with the water of the lightly falling rain. When it was clear that I was waiting for her, she didn’t respond by moving more quickly. At that moment I realized that was something terribly wrong, but I did not know (yet) what was wrong. As I considered blasting past her for her rudeness, I thought for a moment that she might be retarded or she might be drugged, and it was in that awareness that I chose to stay back, allowing her to continue to mosey in front of me, and accepted that I was going to be late.

The mother made her way to the recipient’s desk and took her time in signing in, also not hurrying a bit and then moving aside, so that I could sign in as well. The daughter seemed to disappear in the walls and it was only after I finished signing in, after waiting a few minutes for the mother to cease her hold on the station, that I saw that the daughter had taken a place in the corner of the reception area, and seemed to withdraw from the light.

The mother seated herself across the room, not near her daughter. She fumbled with her bags, and she had two large ones with her. She fussed a bit with their weight and seemed a bit focused on getting them in the proper position and in making all of us in the waiting room aware that she had them, and was burdened by them. They obviously contained important things to her that she had to carry on her own, or she would not have engaged in the theatrics of fussing, and placing them the way she did, nor showing how hefty they were with grunts and moans.

Either by gesture or words, I then came to realize that she also had a son in the waiting room, who sat in the opposite corner, across from his sister. There they were, the three of them, creating a triangle of the room in their choice of seats. None wanting to sit near or acknowledge the other. The boy sat, plugged in, staring forward into space, barely conscious of where he was.

The daughter and son were close in age to my daughter and son, and the difference between their age the same as my children, too. The mother was close in age to me as well.

It was incredibly odd.

After the mother stopped fussing with her bags, she began to survey the room and the whereabouts of her children. She had a dead stare as she looked at them and it was clear that she was angry.

Angry isn’t exactly the right word. Anger is something we think of us temporary, and a response to something that makes us lose our composure temporarily. There was nothing temporary about this woman’s mood. She was permanently fuming and you could see it in the way she dressed herself, her posture, and the way the lines had settled on her face.

It was at that moment, in glancing at her face, that chills ran down my spine. The hairs on the back of my neck literally stood up. The feelings were familiar. She did not look like my mother, but everything about her countenance and her expression had my mother all over it, and I withheld a gasp in that moment of recognition. She was a woman who was never satisfied or pleased. She was perpetually in control and out of control. It was madness personified.

I glanced at the son again and saw rigidity in his posture, to keep from taking in his mother’s presence. He was wearing invisible blinders. The daughter had folded herself somehow, too, completely withdrawn from the world, yet radiating a kind of shield around her that says, “I’m not here. I’m not with her. I do not exist.” She became very small, so small that she might escape whatever her mother could do to make her feel ashamed or embarrassed.

It was that feeling of rejecting and withdrawing from the world that was suddenly so familiar to me, and I felt cold and an overwhelming icy chill came over me. I felt myself begin to withdraw with the woman’s children and desired to close myself off from her, as they had done. My shoulders closed in and I protected myself chest as one might shield from a knife attack… Protect the heart from invasion. Keep everyone out.

I hoped that the dentist would call me soon so that I, too, might escape the mother’s attention.

And then I looked at the mother again, only this time I saw through her. I was no longer a willing victim. I saw her for the weak and mean=spirited creature that she was.

She didn’t know why her children were so rebellious and rude. She had no clue. They always made things difficult for her, even small things like getting to the dentist’s office on time. Everything was an ordeal, from getting the kids out of bed, to getting them out of the house, and she had a total blind spot as to why they behaved that way, and why her life had been a constant series of struggles. She had so much baggage, both literally and figuratively.

And then I relaxed completely. The initial panic brought about by my situational awareness subsided. My shoulders relaxed, my breathing calmed, and the panic was replaced with a kind of pity, combined with disgust. It was similar to how one might approach a diseased, smelly, and rabid animal.

There was helplessness involved, because I desperately wanted to say something to her daughter… something that would rescue her from the situation, and find words that might assure her that there was life after her mother’s house and her mother’s control. Her whole life wouldn’t be like that and there was light at the end of that tunnel. I was fully aware that not saying anything could mean that the young woman would never find that out, that she might not live long enough to get the opportunity to find joy in her life, so dark was her life. Even if joy was placed before her, her unfamiliarity with it might cause her to reject it. But I was powerless to do anything except feel empathy for her, and that left me feeling saddened. I wondered how many women had seen me behaving that way, when I was her age, and felt powerless to interfere.

Combined with that, however, I was aware that I was seeing a different path… a road not taken, so to speak. It was as if time had somehow collapsed and I could see what could have been, had the road taken been a different one.

When the nurse first brought me my baby girl from the nursery I, too, could have rejected her and seen her as a burden on my life… I chose differently. In that nanosecond between the nurse’s hands and mine and her little face came into focus, I chose to love that little girl and to accept her fully, rather than reject her. I did the same thing when they handed my son to me. He could be a burden, too, but he was nothing but a joy. They were innocent, little, helpless beings, entrusted to me as their steward, not their Lord and Master to be ruled over.

When I was involved in therapy I was concerned about my children having too much contact with my mother. My mother’s manipulations had been disclosed over many years of discussion, so there was a kind of shorthand with the therapist regarding my concerns. “Don’t worry,” she told me. “They have something you didn’t have” she continued. “They have you. They have their Rock of Gibraltar.”

* * *

As I said, we all operate with a few blind spots. Sometimes we have the chance in life to discover some of them. Their discovery might be caused by something dramatic or traumatic, or it could occur while doing something mundane, small, and trivial, such as an ordinary visit to the dentist.

I love my children without an ounce of malice or regret, and I have no more desire to control their lives and minds as I do to cause them any physical harm. Their every action delights me. I chose differently, and that, as they say, made all the difference. I was and am their Rock of Gibraltar, and until that moment when life provided a bit of light on the blind spot of that awareness, I was unable to comprehend what the therapist had meant by what she said, fifteen years before, even if I was able to understand intellectually what she was trying to tell me. I could act on it without complete understanding, and trust that someday I would understand it more fully.

We can close the doors on our past and in the patterns of behavior we learned, as a way of moving on, but we have to know we’ve done that. We sometimes have to come face to face with our dragons and demons, and best them. We transition from blind spots to blinders, but they are blinders of our making. We’re fully aware of what lies beyond them, of what we are choosing not to have in focus, so we can focus on better, more important things and as we say, get on with it. If not now, when? If not me to stop this pattern, then who? We can’t change the past. We can only choose differently now, and sometimes we need to blind ourselves from the past and not look back, while still being fully aware of the road we’ve taken from there to here, and all the pit stops we made along the way.

Orpheus ascends, but this time he keeps his focus on the future, regardless of how tempting it might be, or how loudly the past calls to us.

We have Free Will, regardless of our baggage. Every single day we have Free Will and can choose to do what is right, regardless of our patterns, our comfort level, or our history… until it becomes comfortable.

Posted 08/21/2008 | 08:41 AM • Print Vers.
Category: The Big Picture

Monday, August 18, 2008

Goals

Mrs. du Toit
From: Mrs. du Toit Weblog

I’ve thought about writing on this subject for a long time, but have set it aside numerous times. The problem occurs in that what I’m focusing on can be taken out of context, but more on that…

About 30 years ago I heard of a lovely interchange between the infamous Reverend Ike and one of the participants in his audience:

Reverend Ike: So what you do want?
Participant: I want a car.
Reverend Ike: What kind of car?
Participant: I don’t care. Any car.
Reverend Ike: In all my years I have never seen an “any car.” I’ve heard of Cadillac, Chevrolet, and General Motors, but I’ve never heard of “any” car company. What car do you want?

That exchange illustrates the component of goal setting that most people leave out. They aren’t specific enough. Their goals are vague and, as a result, their achievements and their ability to reach their goals are vague.

Perhaps it stems from our Puritan roots, when we were taught not to want or expect too much out of life, but this vagueness is self-fulfilling.

Not long after I heard about Reverend Ike (and he’s a character!), I also became aware of Terry Cole Whittaker. Terry, at that time, was head of Religious Science church in La Jolla, California. She broke off from the official Religious Science church and her ministry grew quite large, including a TV ministry that was quite successful for a while.

Terry made her living in the self improvement business, albeit with a religious twist. She, like many in the industry, had been an EST closer. She was one of the best motivational speakers I’ve ever seen. Through her church she offered a series of seminars. The ones she taught were taped and then packaged to be delivered by others in areas outside of La Jolla. I attended a few of those seminars (25 years ago). One of them had “Wealth” in the title, but I don’t remember the title beyond that.

One of the first things that was established is that wealth is different from money. That’s a really important distinction, as we each measure wealth differently. For some that might be having a quiet house in the country, with enough money to pay the bills, go hunting or fishing whenever desired, and be comfortable. Someone else might see being wealthy as having a job that pays well enough to afford a house, send the kids to college, or romantic vacations with the spouse each year. The point being that how much money you earn or have does not define if you are wealthy. Wealth is having and doing what you want and that will be different for each person.

Money is merely a form of exchange and it isn’t the only one. We could exchange services, possessions, or gifts. We could grow our own food and exchange our labor with the soil. There are more intangible forms of exchange, such as the air we breath giving us life, the food we eat giving us sustenance, the water we drink giving us refreshment, etc. Regardless, money is a form of exchange, just like those other examples.

In one of the taped-seminar segments in the course, Terry had an interchange with an actor (for the sake of this post, it doesn’t matter who it was, only that he was a recognized actor who was working in a TV series at the time). Terry asked him if he would like to have all the acting jobs he will ever have, right now. The actor queried her a bit for more explanation. Terry went on to explain that if he could have all the acting jobs he would ever have in his life this week, rather than spread out over his lifetime, if he’d want that. To that, of course, he answered “no.”

She went on to ask the audience if they would want all the water they would ever need or drink right now. To that, of course, the audience responded, “no.” She went on to explain that we want water when we need it. We don’t want to have to come up with storage facilities and techniques for dealing with all the water we’ll ever want or need today. We want it to be there when we want it, we don’t want to have to specify for all time how much we’ll ever want or need, and most importantly, we trust water.

We trust the universe in that sense. We trust* that we when go to our water faucets that there will be water to fill our tubs and our drinking glasses. We don’t trust that we’ll have the money we need, when we need it, and feel (somehow) that we must have all the money we’ll ever need now, or we’re stifled, and not wealthy.

*We realize, of course, that there is a finite amount of clean drinking water at any given moment. That’s the qualification I mentioned at the beginning. We also know that there are people whose job it is to make sure that water flows through our pipes, and that the water received is safe to drink. Taking it beyond that, to the absolute that it would be possible that we could, at a specific moment in time, run out of water, denies the progress that man has achieved in finding methods and techniques to keep it flowing. With that caveat, I’ll continue.

Money is just like water, but we don’t trust it. We don’t trust ourselves to make the money we need, when we need it, for those things we want to have the money to acquire. We hold on to money for fear that we won’t get more of it, or that we won’t be able to get more, if we need it. If we apply that to water, it would be silly. We’d be spending far too much of our time and energy on storing water for a later date.

Many of us have really goofy ideas about money. Some of this goofiness is related to the religious tenet that is oft misunderstood (and misquoted). Let me get that one out of the way. The quote is: the love of money is the root of all evil, not merely, money is the root of all evil. It’s prefaced with the love of and without that, it is not true. Context is critical.

There is nothing inherently evil about money. It is when it becomes an obsession--taken to a selfish extreme--that the love of money becomes evil. When money is loved it is hoarded and valued for what it is, rather than for what it does as a means of exchange. Hoarding money stops its flow and purpose.

It is also important to describe what evil means. For some (and it is their right to have a differing belief) evil is a tangible thing, or a being that represents evil. Others believe more as I do, as a metaphysical sense, evil is anything that is destructive to the soul, ie, not living in a state of Grace (being appreciative and acknowledging our bounty). Malicious acts that are unforgivable permanently scar or destroy the soul, and prevent the person from being happy.

In the Wealth seminar (or another one, I don’t remember), the facilitators had the participants engage in an exercise to test some of this. The participants were asked to write down five horrible things they’d done in their lives. We groaned, but we did it. Then we were told to pick one of the five and share that with the person sitting next to us, so each person had a confessor and they also acted as a listener.

[If you want to try this yourself, without the confessor, stop and do the first exercise above now, writing down five horrible things you’ve done. You have five minutes to do it. Time yourself.]

Now, with that done, we were ready for the next one.

In the same amount of time, five minutes, write down five wonderful things you’ve done.

Five minutes. That’s the limit.

What all of us confirmed was the purpose of the exercise. We had no trouble coming up with examples to prove what horrible people we were, but when it came time to write down wonderful things, it was much more difficult. Many of us were only able to come up with one. The weight of the bad was also much more significant than the good.

The exercises continued with only a slight variance. We’d write down five bad things that had happened to us and then were asked to write down five fabulous/miraculous things that happened to us.

All of this was illustrative of the point that we easily remember the bad (both things we have done that were bad and bad things that happened to us), but we were not very good a remembering good things we did, or good things that happen to us. Remember that day you were broke and couldn’t buy lunch and then found $20 in the gutter? Forgot that one, didn’t ya?

The tenet of “saying Grace” before meals is exactly for this purpose… to notice the bounty that you receive and to be thankful for it.

Now all of that, in a nutshell, is what describes the Science of Mind philosophy/religion. There is a voice in our head that works to convince us that we’re bad, the world is bad, and that bad things happen to us (in classic psychology, this is the ”Id”). How can we, the product of God/Universe, be bad? God/Universe doesn’t make mistakes. Believing that we’re bad is, by definition and illustration, the embodiment of evil. We’re no longer living in a state of Grace, and we deny Grace when we focus on the bad in the world and in ourselves.

This is why Reverend Ike demanded specificity in goal setting, because it is one of the ways that we change our minds. We change our mind to:

Set goals with the expectation of reaching them (because the universe is our ally not our enemy).
Experience achieving our goals (or modifying our goals when our wants/desires change and recognize the difference).
Pay attention to the good, rather than the bad.

If you do not have goals, for example, you have no ability to measure if you’ve reached any of them, or any evidence to bring to your head that says that the world is good, bountiful, and that you are living in a state of Grace. All you notice is the icky stuff… your car breaking down, getting laid off from work, etc. When you have a goal, you notice how far away you are from the goal (you are in a constant state of taking stock) and anything that puts you closer to the goal is a demonstrative of good things in your life. As long as you are moving forward to achieving something that you want, the bad things that might happen are not seen as debilitating or preventing you from getting to the goal. They are simply obstacles that you need to get over to get to what you want. Think of them as tests of your conviction.

The other exercise that we had to do was to take inventory/stock of our financial situation. We had to write down every single penny we had (and that includes the quarters in the bottom of our purses/sock drawers) and all the money owed to us. Then we had to write down all the money that we owed. It was painful, but what many of us found is that we had over-exaggerated our predicaments. For many, we were not nearly as in debt as we thought and taking the total debt divided by how much we could spend each month to pay it down, was much shorter than many of us realized. The next step in the exercise was to forgive ourselves for getting into the predicament we were in, and make a plan to correct it. The first step in launching the plan was to contact everyone to whom we owed money, and make a plan to repay it, based on a budget that was realistic and obtainable. The second was to forgive all the debts that people owed us (and make the commitment never to “loan” again--GIVE, and give freely, because you are able to). Forgive it. Forget it. We do not need to encumber someone with debt to us. It is a demonstrative of trust that we do not need another’s debt to make us wealthy. We can do it ourselves.

If you do not have what you want, it isn’t because you can’t have it. It is because you don’t want it. You aren’t willing to do whatever is required to get it. Say, for example, that you want a Maserati that costs $120,000. You can have that. It requires that you save the money to buy it. That might require that you take a second job or live more frugally. If you do not take the second job or live more frugally then it is because you aren’t willing to exchange your labor/spare time for the Maserati. You’ve placed more value on your spare time. You have other goals that are more important to you, and the exercise of goal writing helps you see that more clearly. If your spare time is valuable to you, know that, and own it. It is want you want and you have it.

With all of the above in mind then, goals should:

Be as specific as possible: If you want a love in your life, for example, don’t include that her name must be “Sally,” as that is beyond specificity to granularity, but including what characteristics and qualities the person must have helps in knowing when you’ve met him/her. You must also “clean your house” with respect to making room in your life for that person. If you are in a relationship that you want out of, to be replaced by the “love of your life,” then you must end the relationship you are in, BEFORE that can happen… making a place for that love of your life to exist. This can apply to making a place for whatever good in your life you want--get rid of the bad first, so you have a vacuum to fill with good.
Set a date: “Some day” is as vague as “any car.” “Some day” never comes, but April 10, 2009 will. Setting a date has milestones associated with it. If, for example, you want to “go to Paris by May 15” then anything you choose to do to prevent that from happening is recognized as a conscious choice, not the universe denying you want you want (and be prepared to have it happen sooner than you plan). That date has milestones associated with it, such as dividing the total cost by the number of months, and then creating a savings account to put the money for the trip. Do not commingle those funds. Open a separate savings or checking account for that specific purpose (and never, ever, have a “emergency” account because you don’t plan for bad, you plan for good.)

Your goals can be whatever you can dream. It might be a year off to travel or a year off to write. It could be that you publish a book, but you have to write it before you can publish it, so include all the milestones you need to accomplish to reach the goal. If you want to find a soul-mate, you have to get out of the house to find him/her. Go to the places you love, enjoying the things you like to do, to find the person who shares those loves. Introduce yourself to prospects, with the expectation that one will be the one, as casually as you turn the faucet, knowing there will be water. And, just like with debt, make sure you have taken stock of yourself, and made yourself worthy of the person you find worthy.

The Judeo/Christian philosophy of forgiveness is a good one. You can’t reverse time and undo bad things that you have done. Where possible, you can make amends (and that was part of the exercise in the seminar--to contact as many people who we wronged to either apologize or make restitution), but if restitution or apology is no longer possible with someone else, then forgive yourself. Commit to not doing those bad things again, and commit to doing X number of good things to make up for it if you need to (or whatever works in the situation/circumstances)… and then let it go. Set a date when all of that will be done, including the part of letting it go. Put evil/bad out of your life by refusing to allow it to control you. Make a goal that you will resolve/address all the “bad things” you’ve done by a certain date, and from that date forward, you commit to living in a state of Grace. If you fumble, fix it, forgive it, and move on. It is merely an opportunity to recommit to living happily.

I cannot think of a better goal with which to begin.

Posted 08/18/2008 | 12:12 PM • Print Vers.
Category: The Big Picture

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Balance

Mrs. du Toit
From: Mrs. du Toit Weblog

If we imagine a perfect world, each of us would not imagine the same one. In the world imagined by some, it would be a world where everyone shared what they had and, as a result, no one would be hungry. That’s not an ideal in another person’s world, where the ideal would be that everyone worked to earn their daily bread, so they would be responsible for taking care of their own hunger, rather than looking to another’s bread bin.

In both scenarios, hunger is eliminated. It is the method by which it is eliminated where there is the greatest division.

Both are flawed in the real world.

In the first example, it assumes that some would work, while others would do nothing, but those who do nothing would still get something (or some would be expected to work harder than others). In that scenario, sharing is not occurring; rather, someone is giving and someone is taking, but the latter aren’t giving anything back.

In the second scenario, not everyone would see the same benefits of their labor. In that case, some might not be starving, but some would be feasting. It also assumes that everyone is capable of earning their daily bread, when we know that not to be true.

When we talk about the concept of balance it can mean different things. In some concepts within it, we do not want balance, but an extreme: We want beauty, not ugliness. We want love, not hate. In others, we do want balance, but not necessarily at the same time. We want hot days, warm days, and cold days. We don’t want it too hot, nor too cold. Each of us would define the point at which something became too different. Too cold might be 50 degrees for some, while it might be 20 degrees for someone else.

We don’t really want balance in the scale of feast to famine. We don’t want some people to starve so that others can feast. We want everyone to have as much as they want and need. But there, too, we define it differently.

In some cases, however, we might need a little of the bad, at least temporarily. We might want to know hunger so we can appreciate full. We might want to know loneliness so we can appreciate others. In addition, we don’t want someone to be rewarded for sloth, as it demotivates them to find the means, stamina, and will to feed themselves. They should feel the results of their sloth in being hungry, because it was their decision to be slothful. In that case, doing too much for someone (denying them the chance to see the outcome of their choice) is harmful to their pride and their belly, and it prevents them from finding the motivation to achieve something themselves. Allowing the person to experience the consequence of their action (hunger), which we see as a bad outcome, is a good thing in small doses, because it allows the person to find the importance and the motivation to change their circumstance.

Eventually, we bring in the concept of fairness. If someone works really hard, working 60 hours per week, there is something in our internal scales of finding balance that says the person should be rewarded for that, beyond what someone who works 20 hours would receive. We know, however, that someone else might not work as hard, and end up being rewarded more, simply because they were more intelligent than the other person, or physically superior in some way (such as one person becoming a star basketball player, leaving a less physically gifted person on the bench, or out of the game entirely).

Generally, we’re not as bothered by physical superiority as we are intellectual superiority. We can see physical abilities as tangible and it is easier to define and measure. Intelligence is less obvious, and can be clouded by things like cleverness and fortitude. We’re not troubled by physical superiority if it allows someone to be a great dancer or athlete--a skill-based physical superiority. We may be bothered when beauty is the benefit, such as someone being given greater opportunities because they’re pretty, when they did nothing other than be born to achieve it.

Where many people cringe is when the superiority came to the person through birth, rather than a specific learned or acquired attribute of the person themselves. Someone who is smart and works hard, working his way through the ranks (from the bottom), thrills us, because in that person we can see our own possibilities. It reinforces the ideal that through hard-work comes reward. When another person doesn’t work their way through the ranks, but is handed the reigns of a profitable company because their parent’s owned it, something in our fairness desires is alarmed by that. It doesn’t seem fair. What becomes more unfair, and tested and tried in various methods, is to try to correct that unfairness. That becomes unfairness of a different flavor.

When we talk of lofty ideals such as equality, many of us think of it in terms of fairness. It could mean that, depending on the context, in the sense of the outcome being equal, and therefore, fair. If two men hold the same job and perform it the same, we expect their pay to be equal. And we’re happier with that, even if the circumstances of the people are not equal.

We know, for example, that a man supporting a family (with a wife and two children) has greater needs than a single man. If our goal is fairness, the man who feeds his family on the same money that a single man earns is unfair in the outcome (the same salary having to feed four instead of one). The single man might be willing to earn less, if his workload was reduced, thus allowing the married man with more people to feed the opportunity to take up his slack to earn more. The unfairness of this outcome is not caused by the single person earning the same money for the same work. The unfairness is in the family man working for four, but that was his choice to do that. There are four people in his family (including himself) and only one person out of four is earning a salary.

These examples help illustrate the difference between equal outcome and equal opportunity. Both men, in the above example, had the same opportunity to earn the same salary for their same work, yet one has a full fridge and the other is barely able to feed his family. In the latter case, the outcome is not the same when it is applied, although the opportunity and the pay is the same. The family man made a decision to support his family, working for four. The single person made the decision to support only himself, working for one, and not have a family. Choice, ie, free will was shared by both men equally.

In our American system of government, we are equal in opportunity, but we cannot measure how well we’re doing against the objective by looking at outcome, as the above example illustrates, because it is complicated by the other choices people make that cloud and distort the results.

If we alter the ideal we’re describing from one of fairness and equality, to liberty and freedom, the same paradoxes exist. These paradoxes exist because (again) of choice and free will.

A man can murder someone. The fact that we have laws against it does not provide a magic shield from the behavior or the action being a impossible choice. There is a punishment for the act, but the punishment is a deterrent, not a preventative. That is the extreme example of behavior that we do not tolerate in society and so we punish it. We decided, collectively, that it is behavior that cannot be allowed, but in reality, the behavior is allowed, because there is nothing we can do to actually prevent it. All we can do, collectively, is to punish it if it occurs, and make the punishment severe enough to provide a deterrent, or the person the chance to repeat it.

Once we move away from something as clear cut as the prohibition and punishments for murder, our collective will begins to degrade. There are any number of examples where we do not agree that an action/behavior is criminal or non-criminal (recreational drug use, abortion, etc.). In others, we agree that the behavior/action is criminal, but we do not agree on the severity of the punishments necessary to provide a deterrent, nor do we agree that the sentencing for the crime exists to provide a punishment as a deterrent, or a period of time set aside for behavior modification (prison as rehabilitation vs. punishment).

In these situations, we each define the ideal balance differently, having to do with our individual attitudes about the action, and what to do about it, of if we believe that something should be done at all.

As actions and behaviors become less severe it becomes all the more difficult to find consensus. We attempt to find a balance between an all-authoritarian (Draconian) method and life-and-let live approach, but we do not agree where the balance is.

This consensus is what defines a culture. Where we have one group of people believing that the balance is Y, and another believing the balance is X, we have two different cultures.

Getting back to imagining our perfect world, it might be the best idea if people were able to create small (or large) enclaves, where people of a similar culture were able to live in a way that matches their ideal of balance. We might have Americans moving to Japan, or Japanese moving to Britain or Cuba or America, with each person able to find a cultural mix that comes closest to their own balance ideal.

But that openness frightens us (often for legitimate reasons). We also realize that there is more to culture than the balance of freedoms and restrictions, and so we might favor ethnic identity, religion, sexual lifestyle, or cuisine, as being more important to us in defining our culture than we do limiting or restricting it simply to the action/behavior of criminality, and we find a compromise mix.

Essentially, the Founders gave us a system of government in which we could achieve that ideal balance, with each of us able to form small enclaves where we could establish our own laws and codes of conduct, with the major ones (those oft violated and abused) denied to us universally. One enclave could establish laws to prevent dancing, while another could require it of everyone. One enclave could demand church attendance (at a specific church), while another could choose a different church, or none at all. What was denied to us universally was in demanding that we had to agree on those matters, universally. We could not, universally, determine that everyone had to be Methodist, but below the level of universal (to state or local) we could.

What has happened over time, however, is that the ideal has been denied to us, because what was once below universal, has been elevated to universal.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way.

If [God] has made it a law in the nature of man to pursue his own happiness, He has left him free in the choice of place as well as mode, and we may safely call on the whole body of English jurists to produce the map on which nature has traced for each individual the geographical line which she forbids him to cross in pursuit of happiness.
--Thomas Jefferson, 1817

Balance, and as a result happiness, is denied to all, universally, in favor of fairness and equality.

Whether the blinds of bigotry, the shackles of the priesthood, and the fascinating glare of rank and wealth, give fair play to the common sense of the mass of their people, so far as to qualify them for self-government, is what we do not know. Perhaps our wishes may be stronger than our hopes.
--Thomas Jefferson, 1817

Posted 08/16/2008 | 12:13 PM • Print Vers.
Category: The Big Picture

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Olympics

Mrs. du Toit
From: Mrs. du Toit Weblog

I love the Olympics. I’m not a sports fan of any other sport or at any other time (and I detest professional team sports of all stripes), but there is something so different about the Olympics. Perhaps it is because it only happens every four years. I love the idea of it. I love the sudden death of it… that you can be the best in your sport and still not qualify because you didn’t perform at your best on that one day you needed to.

It mirrors everything about all of life in that way. You can do your best preparation, work hard, and still not shine during the moment you must. That allows someone else, who found their purple patch on that day, to beat you. The alternates are exactly like the understudies who sit in the wings, seldom getting a chance, but if they do, and if when they do they excel, they achieve greatness and a kind of immortality.

It’s order out of chaos. Hope from hopelessness. It’s fair play.

There may be financial rewards for some, but that is not why they do it. It’s all about striving to be the best, for no other reason than the sake of it.

When the Olympics came to Los Angeles in 1984, it was the best time to be in Los Angeles. All the Olympic cynics and people haters left the city because they were worried about crowds and traffic (idiots!). They’re like the rude assholes who leave a play during the last 5 minutes so they beat the crowds out of the parking lot. The folks who remained, like myself, were absolutely thrilled with the honor of hosting the Games, and the spirit of goodwill and excitement was tangible.

The people who can’t get excited about the Games have no heart. The cynics have no soul.

Posted 08/14/2008 | 08:00 AM • Print Vers.
Category: PERSONAL & FAMILY | Musing

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

The Case for War

Mrs. du Toit
From: Mrs. du Toit Weblog

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait the United States set about making a case for war. We were told horror stores of babies being discarded from incubators, woman raped on the streets, and other tales of woe to pull at our heartstrings.

That is not a case for war. That is a pitch for a TV melodrama. I wanted no part of it then and I want no part of propaganda today.* I want facts. I demand facts and if a case is going to be made for war, it damn well better be one devoid of emotionalism and slogans.

Kim wrote a post today regarding the war in Georgia that he was certain would be unpopular. The truth is often unpopular.

There are wars all over the world today. There is the War on Terror that we’re fighting on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in covert actions that we know very little or nothing about. The Chinese, last I looked, still occupy Tibet and the Dalai Lama is still in exile. Israel is in a constant state of war with its neighbors. The Sudan gets media attention, too. The Russians have been dealing with Chechnyan terrorism for a decade. And those are just the highlights. There are small fires that could become raging war fires all over the world, every single day, and we watch the embers and smoke and do nothing.

I was not the first to say it (and I certainly won’t be the last), but war is a constant part of the human condition, despite our fanciful desires to wish or think otherwise. War, like crime, poverty, death and disease is the whole picture of what makes up life on this planet earth.

Americans have not fought a war on our soil for more than a century. Yes, we were attacked on 9/11. Yes, the Japanese b

Retirement Countdown

Member:

About

Site Support

Navigation

Original Intent

Countdowns

20 Recent Front Page

Frontpage Calendar

Search

Mrs. du Toit Weblog

From the U.S. Constitution...

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Gathering Pieces

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Change Agents

Monday, August 25, 2008

Not So Sure

Friday, August 22, 2008

Value

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Manners and Etiquette Rule #4

Blind Spots

Monday, August 18, 2008

Goals

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Balance

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Olympics

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

The Case for War