Tag: Philosophy

3…2…1…Liftoff!

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In May my beautiful daughter graduated from high school. She is smart, talented, witty,  and clever. She is a hard worker who always got good grades and did as she was told. Just yesterday she was a tiny baby cuddled in my arms. Today she walked across the stage an impressive young woman. In the Fall she begins a new adventure at St. Olaf College. I could not resist, in such a moment, expressing to her how proud I was and to offer some small piece of advice for what it is worth. What I wrote is a tribute to her. It is also a tribute to my own parents who made me what I am today. I am fortunate to have such a family.

 

 

The Launchpad

Dear Chloe,

There are plenty of times in our lives when we have to do what we are supposed to do. As an adult you will be obliged to tow the line, to meet your obligations, to smile when you don’t feel like smiling, to laugh at jokes you don’t find funny. You will be asked to demonstrate your acumen, your diligence, your gumption, and your stick-to-it-iveness. You will be required to do the sensible thing, the rational thing, the thing calculated to achieve the maximum return on investment. In the words of Roger Hodgson:

They sent me away to teach me how to be sensible,
Logical, responsible, practical.
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable,
Clinical, intellectual, cynical.

There will be ample time for all that. For four years and more you have done that. You have learned how to do that. You have done what you ought. You have done what you were told. You have gotten the straight A’s.

I believe life must amount to more than that. I think there is more to be gotten out of it. I think that stuff is a foundation for building a more impressive structure. Even the animals work day-to-day to make a living. The nobility that is within us, if it exists, is not simply an extension of the economy of animals – getting and consuming. Nor is it the natural extension of that economy – the accumulation of wealth and dross. The truly noble things that people have accomplished, Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, Salk’s Polio vaccine, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Armstrong’s footprint on the moon, were not done for the money. They were not achieved by people obsessed with security or the accumulation of wealth.

Thoreau described what I’m talking about in Walden. He said about the average man:

He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance — which his growth requires — who has so often to use his knowledge?

At Cape Canaveral, in Florida, there is a place called complex 39A. Most days it is a quiet place. You can feel the salty breeze off the Atlantic here as it rustles the marsh grass. You can hear the squawk of the gulls and see the pelicans wheeling overhead. It is a place of beauty and silence. The manmade obtrusion into this place of nature is an industrial looking platform rising many stories into the air. Standing by it is a water tower. Beyond that are several smaller towers topped out with lightning rods. This complex stands on an earthen berm built up for the purpose many years ago. These skeleton-like structures, stark as they appear, have a purpose more noble and awe-inspiring than the pyramids. They are merely a foundation, sure, but a foundation assembled lovingly and with meticulous attention to detail. This is the place where thousands of individuals, dedicated to a dream, realized the aspirations of thousands of generations of humans who looked up at the night sky and thought “what if we could…” The summer your mommy was born this quiet place was the center of the world’s attention and imagination. The hard work of building the foundation was complete and from this little berm rose a rocket on a pillar of flame which carried with it the aspirations of those thousand generations.

On your graduation day this example may seem like hyperbole. It may seem a grandiose metaphor – the Saturn V launchpad and you, going off to St. Olaf. But I assure you it is an apt metaphor. All those visionaries I mention above, Thoreau, King, Twain, Salk, Armstrong, started from a firm foundation built up by their parents, and their parents, and their parents.

Mommy and I love you very much. Our aspiration is to be your foundation. We want to be your launchpad. We have worked every day and socked away money and planned and worried so that you can have this opportunity to be the rocket, to find your dream, to imagine a better world and do what you can to make it a reality. This is your chance to think big thoughts and explore the amazing worlds a place like St. Olaf can show you.

I know that everyone you meet today will ask you “so, what are you going to study in college?” This comes with the implication that you had better choose a major that “pays off.” I say “to hell with that!” Going to college is about building yourself as a human being starting with the foundation your parents laid for you. What if Martin Luther King had majored in accounting because there was a “good living” to be made? What if Mark Twain had become a plumber because there was a “lot of call” for that in Hannibal, MO?

You are smart. You are capable. You are a hard worker. You have good social skills. It would be a horrible waste for you to take on a mundane, work-a-day, “practical” profession that did not draw out and call upon your natural gifts. You may not know, right now, what will inspire you. You may not know, for awhile, what the world calls on you to do and to be. That is what education is for. That is what St. Olaf is for. That is what youth is for.

We are your launchpad but, more importantly, we are your safety net. Whatever I have accomplished, whatever chances I have been able to take to achieve my dreams, were made possible by the foundation laid down by my Mom and Dad and by the safety net they provided me while I was struggling to “figure things out.” My Mom and Dad lived in a mobile home when I was born. My Dad worked third shift in a machine shop to buy me toys to inspire my imagination. My Mom clipped coupons and made us beany-burger and skimped and saved. All of these things laid a foundation for me so that I could go to college, so that I could explore the world, so that I could find my place. They did not expect or ask me to pay it all back. They worked and saved and “did without” as a pure gift to me. It is an awesome responsibility.

The only way I have found to pay my parents back is to live by their example. Mommy and I have worked and saved and “done without” because we believe in the sacred obligation of building a foundation – a launchpad. I want you and your siblings to have the opportunity, the freedom, to be all that you can imagine. As my parents did for me we now do for you. Your only obligation is to do the same for your kids someday.

Love,

Your Daddy

 

Thank God?

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A massive storm swept through Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia recently. Twenty people were killed by a swarm of tornados including one which hit a mobile home park.
As always, brave and generous people rushed in to help the survivors and save those who could be saved. I find people to be universally good and kind to one other in such awful circumstances. I am inspired by this. I think it is the best part of human nature.

What I cannot always understand are the comments people make in these cases. Our need to explain tragedy often leads to a response which to me feels hollow, illogical, insensitive, or even cruel.
Here are some examples from that weekend’s news reports:

“God was with me that day .”
“I’m just blessed to be here.”
“God was in the room with us.”
“God was looking after them,”
“Is God mad at us?”

I wrote the following piece several years ago after a tragic outbreak of tornados killed 24 people in Oklahoma. I have been reluctant to post it for a couple of reasons. Firstly, matters of religion are sensitive. This piece, while it was not intended to be offensive, might appear so to some. I have no desire to hurt anyone’s feelings. There are quite a few “believers” whom I like, and respect, and count as friends.

Secondly, there is often a price to be paid, in this Christian dominated society, for even admitting that one is an atheist or agnostic. A young person who thinks differently, expresses doubt, or questions the answers his pastor gives him can be branded a trouble maker and ostracized. An adult who does so is subject to subtle, but very real penalties.

It is difficult for Christians in the United States to understand just how powerful they are. You sometimes hear them lament the“war on Christmas” or the “rise of secular humanism.” But, if you consider, for just a moment, the quantity of Christian references in our daily life compared to that of any other religion or set of beliefs it is overwhelming. As I write this the television is on. When I flip through the 18 channels I find fully a third devoted, 24 hours a day, to Christian programming. I find none dedicated to Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, or Atheism. When I drive to our local town to the store I pass 8-10 Christian churches, each with a billboard out front admonishing us to believe as they do. Do I pass even one center for agnosticism or free thought? Not one. In fact, I never have seen one.

The good thing about being an atheist is that we are not obliged to proselytize. I will explain my point of view to you here, and I might be gratified if you came to believe the same thing, but I don’t have to save your soul. All I ask of the dominant Christian culture is that my tax dollars not be spent to support religion and that kids who attend public school not be compelled to believe in it. That’s in the Constitution and that’s not a big demand.

On a personal level I generally like religious people and am fascinated by religion. If you approach me in a friendly way with a Bible tract in your hand or knock on my door, full of enthusiasm for your new devotion, I will smile and listen thoughtfully, as I have done for 30 years. It might be nice also, in an open and free society, for Christians to listen occasionally to those who think differently? After all, as the Turkish writer Elif Shafak has said, “If we learn anything, we learn it from people who are different from us.”

 

 

 

Thank God?

It is always troubling to encounter a concept I cannot grasp. The embarrassment is compounded when I discover, to my chagrin, that the idea is easily understood by others. There are many examples. My father-in-law can rattle off a list of numbers (rates, capacities, volumes, ratios, percentages) and within seconds arrive at a mathematical solution which is invariably correct while I am still hunting for the square root key on the calculator. Many times my father has tried to explain elementary radio theory to me only to leave me smiling and nodding like Dan Quayle at a spelling bee. And don’t get me started on quantum physics. Actually, you can’t get me started on quantum physics.

It is not so bad to be bested by intelligent women and men from time to time. How else can one learn? I will readily admit that there are things I do not understand and possibly will never understand. I am willing to concede that there are better brains out there than mine. What is truly unnerving, though, is to be at odds with a majority of the world’s population on a question of importance. Religion is such a stumbling block to me.

It is estimated that 89% of the U.S. population believes in a God, of one sort or another. That is a pretty resounding number and it suggests that I might be wrong in my thinking. I do not regard being wrong as a moral failing, since most people are from time to time. The remedy is simple; merely collect more information and revise the hypothesis. Yet my mental roadblock here is thick. The more information I collect the more I am convinced of my previous hypothesis. I am no more able to accept religion at face value than I can start a gouda mine on the moon.

I listen to the 27 televangelists on my TV, I read the Bible, I sit quietly waiting for my still small voice and…and…and…nothing. Nothing comes to me. Nothing persuades me to ignore the contrary evidence I see all around me. My own innate sense of what is true will not give credence to stories about a 6000 year old planet, nor all the earth’s creatures escaping a giant flood on a vessel built with hand tools by 5 senior citizens. I cannot comprehend a system of good and evil in which an omnipotent God allows the non-omnipotent Devil to get the upper hand even occasionally. I cannot adhere to a moral code that puts a book filled with contradictions and of unprovable provenance above other human beings.

When I look at the misery in this world which is the direct result of arguments over religion I am loathe to conclude that I want to be on their side, even if they are right. And how does one choose the one true faith if such a thing exists? As Professor Robert Price has said, “I’m going to hell according to somebody’s doctrine (Islam, Hindu, Christianity, etc). I may as well call them as I see them.”

The closest thing I have found to representing how I feel about religion is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut in his later years.
“I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.”

Still, being a humanist has to mean also that we show a decent respect to the thoughts and feelings of other humans. That means the other 89%. I have tried to do this throughout my life as I have been bombarded with Christian culture every day on the airwaves, on billboards, at public events, and in person. Christianity enjoys such hegemony in this society that it is an affront apparently to simply express your non-evangelical ideas in public. It is hard to be different, as we all know, especially when the odds are 89% to 11%.

Let me offer an example, from my personal life, where I have been at odds with the majority of people around me. The following story illustrates my difficulty, as a believer in logic and science, in coming to the same conclusion as the majority, who are religious believers.

Take the case of Officer Norman Rickman, a member of the Knoxville, TN police force. In a U.S.A. Today article about police officers embracing the use of bulletproof vests it was explained that Mr. Rickman had been shot twice in the line of duty while not wearing a bulletproof vest. The story says, “Yet he was on the ground within minutes, blood pouring out of bullet wounds to his chest and left arm as one of three suspects stood over him and fired two more shots into his upper back at point-blank range.” It continues, “More extraordinarily, perhaps, is that the May shooting marked the second time in seven years that Rickman had been seriously wounded while not wearing a bullet-resistant vest.”

The story includes two quotes from officer Rickman. One says that he will wear a bulletproof vest when he returns to work. The other, while it mystified me, was readily understood by others to whom I showed the article. It was this, “God was on my side that day.” This, to me, invites two questions and I do not mean them to be flippant or disrespectful. I should like to ask Officer Rickman the following:

1. If God is on your side, why did he let you get shot four times?

2. If God is on your side, why wear a bullet-proof vest?

I explored these questions for some time after reading the article. I concluded that there were four possibilities, logically, with respect to God and Officer Rickman. They are as follows:

1. There is no God and Officer Rickman was shot by a sociopath who himself had been created by a combination of his environment and genetics. Officer Rickman, in this scenario might have been saved by a bullet-proof vest. Logically Officer Rickman should place no faith in God and should wear his vest.

2. There is a God and he (or she) allows free will. In this case God allowed the sociopath to develop from his environment and genetics and shoot Officer Rickman without intervening. In this case, logic dictates that Officer Rickman should place no faith in God and should wear his bullet-proof vest.

3. There is a God who has malevolent aims for humanity. In this case God created the sociopath on purpose and sent him to shoot Officer Rickman. Logic dictates that Officer Rickman should actively oppose this God and wear his bullet-proof vest.

4. There is a God who loves us, but desires to teach us moral lessons through adversity. In this case God created the sociopath and sent him to shoot Officer Rickman, but did so for a noble objective. Whether Officer Rickman assimilated the lesson is unknown, unless that lesson was “Wear your bullet-proof vest!”

In only one scenario would I conclude that Officer Rickman might, and I emphasize might, thank his God for the treatment he has received. That is the benevolent God who continually treats us to his “tough love.” If God’s lesson was to wear a vest, which is a good lesson for policemen according to statistics, it seems a harsh form of instruction. The article states that 37% of the officers murdered in the line of duty in 2007 did not have on a bullet-proof vest. Those officers died. They had no opportunity to learn God’s lesson about vests, or any other moral instruction he might have been offering.

Are we to conclude from Officer Rickman’s statement and the opinions about it from religious believers that these unfortunate officers did not have “God with them.” Again, I do not wish to be flippant about so serious a tragedy. I am anxious that no one die under these circumstances. It is not I who trivializes this tragedy, but the people who chalk such things up to “God being with me.”

This same story can be seen night after night on the news with the names and locations altered slightly; A tornado rips through a subdivision in Oklahoma annihilating houses on one side of a street and leaving them standing on the other. Invariably a survivor from the “lucky” side will credit God and his love for her family’s survival. This explanation is accepted readily by the majority of conventionally religious people in this country who can be seen nodding their heads as the woman speaks. But is it not insulting, both to our intelligence and to the people who were killed, to credit God’s mercy for saving those who survived. In fact, it is a cruelty to say such a thing. Does God hate the other families?

We might be better off as a civilization if we worked out problems logically, with the human costs evaluated, than to offer credibility to supernatural sources. If we did not give the credit for good things to God and bad things to the Devil, we might conclude, rightly I think, that people are complex and must be dealt with (helped or punished) on an individual basis. God did not make us all either good or bad, but a complicated combination of circumstances did make some people more selfish, more corrupt, less empathetic, less kind than other people. Without the easy answer of religion and the stark contrast between good people and bad people, between believers and heathens, we might be forced to try to understand the problems we face. It is entirely possible that we might come up with solutions to some of them.

by: Dustin Joy

Trump – A Retraction

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I wish to print a retraction. It turns out I’m just not as good a person as I thought I was. I thought I had kindness and reasonableness and tolerance for all mankind in my heart. I wrote an essay about that, about being a good sport, about being a good loser, about giving Donald Trump a chance.

Cripes, I thought I was done with this infernal election. I wanted to be. I thought I had resolved it in my own mind, or at least reconciled myself to it. But … I’m sorry; I just can’t do it. I can’t, and I won’t give Donald J. Trump another chance. What changed between the election and now? Me, I guess. Certainly Donald Trump did not change.

He is the same erratic, thin-skinned narcissist we saw during the campaign. His absurd “meeting” with news anchors and media executives, summoning them to Trump Tower to dress them down and gloat over his victory, was the act of a petulant child, not a serious adult man. His bizarre first press conference revealed the same sort of self-absorbed immaturity. I fully expected to see him wearing a beanie with a propeller on top and with a slingshot hanging out of his back pocket. His bile-filled Twitter feed is also playground stuff. (Did not!, Did too, Did not!) What the hell is a President of the United States settling scores on Twitter for, anyway? Even Nixon wasn’t that pathological.

Finally, we all held out hope, from his demeanor and statements on election night, that some of his vulgar, racist, cruelty had been blown out of proportion, sort of a cartoon superimposed upon him by the media and his political enemies. To quote myself, “No One could be that bad.” But, while he modulated his rhetoric for about a day and professed to want to be “President for everyone” in real life he plodded along his deplorable path.

He dropped the notion of putting his political opponent in prison (for now) but reserved the right to do it later if he felt like it (because that’s how America’s system of justice works, I guess). As if to double down on his own bigoted tendencies he selected for his Attorney General, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (and no, I didn’t make that name up to make him sound like an unreconstituted, confederate-flag-waving, southern racist). That is really his name and he really was denied a seat on the U.S. Court of appeals because of racist statements.

For secretary of education Trump has nominated a one-issue political zealot who was head of the Michigan Republican party for many years and who is, with her husband, the biggest Amway salesman in the world (And no, I’m not being metaphorical. Look it up.) She is a billionaire who never attended a public school, never put her own children in a public school, has no education degree nor experience working as a teacher or administrator, believes that teachers are overpaid, and has worked with great tenacity (and millions of dollars) to undermine the very agency she is now tasked to lead. Sadly that will become a theme as we examine Trump’s prospective cabinet; as will the billionaire thing.

This minority President’s pick for EPA chief has fought the EPA in court for most of his political life as Attorney General of Oklahoma and has advocated the agency be eliminated.

Texas Governor Rick Perry, a former presidential candidate, said this about Trump during the campaign:

“[He] offers a barking carnival act that can best be described as Trumpism: a toxic mix of demagoguery and mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued. Let no one be mistaken, Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded.”

It was not reported what Perry used as a condiment for his meal of roast crow when he accepted Trump’s appointment to be Secretary of Energy, a Department which Perry, naturally, has vowed to dismantle. Oops!

Perhaps his least offensive appointment, to me, you might be surprised to hear, is Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State. Tillerson, with a net worth of $150 million and Exxon stock worth about $250 million is filthy rich, of course, but not as filthy as Trump’s bevy of billionaires who are here to “drain the swamp” and represent the “Wisconsin working man.” Tillerson has no education in foreign language or international affairs or diplomatic experience but he actually has negotiated a bit with foreign leaders to benefit his multi-national corporation. Our Wisconsin working man may be troubled to note, however, that Tillerson is not at all in alignment with Trump’s protectionist rhetoric. He has said “I believe we must choose the course of greater international engagement.” and “One of the most promising developments on this front is the ongoing effort for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.”

Tillerson has also admitted that humans have effected the climate through greenhouse gas emissions and has advocated a carbon tax. In a 2013 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal Tillerson also defended the Common Core curriculum, a favorite bugaboo of the far right.

What the Republican establishment may find, to their continuing chagrin, is that Trump’s win was not theirs and that while most of his cabinet picks could feature in a Mike Pence wet dream Trump will do what he wants when he wants and they will not have the stomach nor the spine to oppose him. This is dangerous to everybody.

I might see my way past all of these things. I might tolerate childish behavior from our commander in chief and extremist political ideologies from his minions. I might even try to learn to sleep at night with the sabre-rattling rhetoric of a foreign policy novice who “knows more than the generals” about destroying ISIS but seems to focus most of his firepower and time on attacking impoverished Mexican immigrants and the cast of a Broadway musical. There is one thing I cannot forget and forgive with regard to this horrible man. The problem is that I have daughters and I love them.

After I publish my blog posts and essays I go back and read them over again. I review them, sometimes compulsively, to ferret out spelling errors, grammar mistakes, and faulty logic. I try to update the old ones with fresh data and revised perspective when it is called for. I did this for my Trump essay several times. I found a few mistakes with regard to spelling thanks to a faithful friend and loyal reader. I updated the number by which Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump in the popular vote (about 2.9 million, now). And I found a logical inconsistency which stopped me in my tracks and made me reconsider the “ahhh, give him a chance” idea.

Here are the two lines from my essay which I can no longer reconcile. They contradict each other in my mind. One of them is obviously incorrect.

  1. “My daughter cried when she heard about Donald Trump’s victory in the election.”

2. “We want you to succeed. Even many of us Liberals will give you a chance, if you give us a chance.”

I am simply never going to “give a chance” to a man so hateful that he made my daughter cry. I am never going to forget his horrible words and actions toward women. I am never going to forgive him for empowering the loathsome men around the world who think treating women poorly is sport. He has enabled every neanderthal misogynist and date-rapist in the country by his unpardonable example. He has made my daughters’ lives harder.

I would love to turn off the TV and pretend that Donald Trump doesn’t exist. For myself, a middle-aged white guy, I might make out okay under his absurd regime. But I cannot indulge my desire to close my eyes to this travesty. I have a wife and two daughters and a son. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let my kids grow up in a world where Donald Trump’s brand of misogyny is considered normal. I’ll be damned if he’s going to demonize immigrants and refugees in the name of my country without my objection. I’ll be damned if he’s going to turn back all the progress we’ve made on the environment and gay rights and inclusiveness. At least he’s not gonna get it for free.

In my blog post after the election, I counseled patience. I was dead wrong. This man does not deserve our patience. He does not deserve our respect. He has not earned “a chance.” He has won our scorn and our disrespect and our condemnation. That is what he will get.

by: Dustin Joy

President Trump – There, I said it!

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Denial

My daughter cried when she heard about Donald Trump’s victory in the election. She said, “I can’t believe such a hateful man is going to be our President.” It is an understandable response. Were I not trying so hard to be a “big boy,” myself I would have cried too. This result is stunning. It is stunning not because it was heartbreakingly close, nor because it was so unexpected given the two years worth of polling, nor even because a few votes in a few small states can shift power in this country in such a dramatic and perhaps draconian way. It was painful and traumatic because it revealed to me something I perhaps didn’t want to know about my country and about, specifically, my neighbors and friends.

Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance – Not Necessarily in that order

I have a file on my computer that I have labeled “Letters not sent.” I highly recommend that everyone make one like it. The file does not consist solely of letters. It is also filled with essays and blog posts and emails which I wrote in the heat of the moment when my emotions were raw. I wrote them and I put them in the file. I let them sit in the file for no less than two days; that’s a rule. And then I took them out and read them. Most, the vast majority in fact, were put back into the file and stayed there. A small number were rewritten, edited, and sent or published. Some I open from time to time in moments of self-indulgence to wallow in their righteousness. And then I close the file again and leave them in there.

Such a blogpost, about Donald Trump’s victory, now resides in my “Letters” file. As of right now I feel like it is one of the best things I ever wrote. It is titled “This Election Means What I Say It Means.” It’s too bad you guys will never get to read it. Did I say it’s really great? Man it is good. It is thorough, clever, insightful, and devastating. And it is mean. It is vitriolic and divisive and bitter. It appeals to the worst instincts of my fellow Liberals and my own sense of moral indignation. It sat in the file for two days before failing my test.

Still a Bone to Pick

Wikipedia says that since 1990 there have been 70 civil wars in the world and 69 coups. Sometimes the violence in these unfortunate countries has lasted for years. Angola’s bitter, bloody conflict endured from 1975 to 2002. Children of my generation born there knew nothing but war and heartbreak all of their young lives. In a violent unstable world we are the exception. Informed by the example of George Washington we have routinely transferred power from one President to the next, sometimes from bitter rival to bitter rival. Our democracy has weathered wars and depressions and political turmoil for 233 years not because of luck or even a superior Constitution (although I think ours is pretty good). The reason our democracy has persevered where others haven’t is because of our forbearance and tolerance and devotion to our form of government – when we lose.

Of the many profane, cruel, narcissistic things Donald Trump said and did during the campaign one stands out as particularly harmful to our republic. Bigotry, of course, can be overcome by love (read your history of the freedom riders in Alabama in the 1960’s). Cruelty can be overcome by kindness (Read about the Truth and Reconciliation Committees set up after the fall of the brutal apartheid regime in South Africa). Narcissism can be overcome by parody and humor (and what a rich target Donald Trump is for parody and humor. He is the joke which writes itself.)

The thing Trump did which worries me the most is that he undermined, publicly and unabashedly, that fragile, but so far durable, notion that our system works. Whatever candidates might say or scream at each other, they should never imply, without powerful evidence, that our system of elections is rigged or invalid. They should never suggest that they or their followers shouldn’t or won’t accept the outcome in a peaceable and respectable way. They should not incite their adherents to violence. They should never suggest “2nd Amendment remedies.” We are not stupid. We all know the note of that dog whistle. And there are dogs out there who hear that frequency.

The Upshot

Our devotion to our country and to our constitution and, ultimately to our leaders, is sacred and precious. It is the fabric which holds our system together. That tolerance and forbearance by the losers is what Angola lacked. Do we want to be Angola? For a candidate to tear at that precious fabric with unsubstantiated offhand comments and throwaway lines in the service of short-term political gain is, okay I’ll go ahead and say it, unpatriotic.

This election was quite obviously not rigged. There was never any credible evidence that it was rigged. There was no serious or statistically meaningful voter fraud. There never has been. Trump, the man who whined like a baby that it was rigged against him – WON! He won the “rigged” election. He should apologize and, just as publicly, say, “I was wrong and I am sorry. Our system is sound. Our elections are fair. They are administered by good people across this country from county clerks to neighborhood poll workers who volunteer to do this work out of devotion to our country.”

I still love Walter Mondale – It will be OK

I will admit that all of my vitriol has not dissipated. I am still angry about this election and, at times, fearful for our future. But I am making progress. I remember 1984. I remember the impassioned defense I made, in our eighth grade history class, of Walter Mondale’s candidacy. I delivered my speech with gusto, extolling the virtues of this plain-spoken, honest midwestern man who believed in the little guy and worked for peace and had the guts to say we were all going to have to pay higher taxes to address Ronald Reagan’s deficits. And then we lost. We lost big. The heartless, faux patriotic, war monger (my thoughts at the time) wiped the floor with us and in the next four years cynically used his popularity to make the noble title Liberal a bad word. It still hurts a little to hear jokes about Mondale. (Homer Simpson: “Where’s the beef! Ha! Ha! Ha!. No wonder he won Minnesota.”)

What I learned from 1984 was this; We will be okay. We survived eight years of Reagan. We survived eight years of George W. Bush. We will survive four years (please) of Donald J. Trump. And, for the Conservatives who have predicted the end of the world to me so many times in the last eight years; you are ok, too. You survived eight years of that Muslim, Socialist, anti-christ called Barak Hussein Obama. You survived eight years of the philandering, back-slapping huckster from Arkansas. You survived four years of the ennui-peddling peanut farmer. We will all survive. This country is too resilient to be brought down by one man, no matter who he is or what he tries to do.

What to do next

So, according to me, what are our respective obligations at this point in history?

To my Conservative friends: You have much to atone for. You, who frequently use the word “patriotism” as a cudgel to beat down Democrats and Liberals, have done a very unpatriotic thing. You, who knew better, cynically put your party above your country. All through the primaries I listened to the Republican echo chamber (Fox News et. al.) rail on and on about how bad Donald Trump was and what a catastrophe he would be for this country. And then ….you voted for him. You lied to the pollsters and voted for this man you loathed. It was almost funny and surreal to see Paul Ryan and Reince Preibus and Chris Christie and Ted Cruz kiss the Donald’s ring on or just before election night. The cacophony of Republican throat clearing since the election has been gratifying, too. I will give exoneration to a few of your number who held to their principles: Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, Colin Powell, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois, and the Bush family (most of them.) To the rest, enjoy the spoils of your victory, folks. They have cost you a great deal in reputation.

To my Liberal friends: Well, old friends, this is tough. But here is what we need to do. We need to lay down our protest signs, give Mr. Trump his due respect as our President, and get back to work. There is still a lot we can do to help the poor, care for the environment, work toward economic fairness, improve education opportunities, and protect the rights of every citizen, whether black or white, gay or straight, male or female, immigrant or citizen by birth. We are weakened and out of power now, but, despite the headlines, the people are with us.

Not only did Hillary Clinton win more votes than Donald Trump (2.9 million more at last count) but in states all over the country ballot measures calling for an increase in the minimum wage passed by landslides. The Republicans shouldn’t be too proud of the victory they sold their souls for – it was Trump’s victory, not theirs.

Finally, my fellow Liberals, failure is cathartic. We do have much to learn from this defeat. Some of our fellow Democrats (including the lady at the top) failed to recognize the suffering of a generation who has not seen a meaningful increase in their wages in thirty years while the rich got richer and richer. Bernie Sanders tried to warn us about this. My pet theory is that he or Elizabeth Warren would have cleaned Trump’s clock. A wise man learns from his mistakes, though, and failure makes that kind of introspection possible. Let’s do a little psyche-spelunking as a party and figure this thing out.

Finally, To Mr. Trump: SURPRISE US! Show us that the caricature of you we saw during the campaign was not the real you. No one is that bad. Show us that you possess empathy and humility and pity. Demonstrate by your actions that you are not a demagogue. We want badly to believe what you said on election night; that you want to be President for everyone. American’s are a very forgiving and tolerant people. We want you to succeed. Even many of us Liberals will give you a chance, if you give us a chance.

All Together Now

There is a quote I like very much from a politician I did not much like during his time in office. His clever turn of phrase did not quite convince me of his actual tenderness but did express what many of us on the left believe and, I suspect what many on the right believe, too. It goes like this:

How can we love our country and not love our countrymen, and loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sick, and provide opportunities to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory?
Ronald Reagan – first Inaugural Address

It will all be okay. There is still a lot more that unites us than divides us.

P.S. Thank you to good old sane, thoughtful Minnesota, a state I dearly love. You were with us again this year, as always. Some things you can count on. Walter would be proud.

by: Dustin Joy

Close the Door

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I was recently given an opportunity. I was given the opportunity to close a door. At first I didn’t see it as an opportunity. In fact, it felt more like a betrayal, or a slap in the face. Viewing the situation as a choice struck me as the kind of cock-eyed optimism that leads, inevitably to such bullshit as “when God gives you lemons, make lemonade.”

I will concede one thing, though. If you are going to get slapped in the face it feels a lot better to get it over with. What really hurts is to keep getting slapped in the face for years only to realize that the big slap is still on its way. It might be advantageous, sometimes, to give yourself a hard slap in the face and to wake yourself the hell up. Okay, enough potty mouth.

The door in question is one which I have held ajar with my foot for about twenty years. Behind it lay a cherished little fantasy that I have carried with me since graduating from college. I have had many opportunities over those years to let the door slam shut. I also probably had it within my power to prise it open and  to walk through it. Why I did neither is a question I have had trouble answering. How can a man who flies jet airplanes through thunderstorms be so indecisive?

These little fantasies that we carry with us throughout our lives are powerful. I suspect everyone has one, or two, or fifty. Maybe it’s the girl we broke up with in high school. Maybe it’s owning a Mercedes. Maybe it’s buying our own business. Maybe it’s punching our boss in the nose on the day of our retirement- see “Oney” by Johnny Cash.

Most of these fantasies never see the light of day. They run on an endless loop inside our brains, mostly in the background, but occasionally on the center screen. Sometimes they motivate us to action but more often they simply cheer us up or bring us down like a dose of melatonin or serotonin. Sometimes they are merely an escape from the drudgeries of our day to day life.

Letting go of cherished fantasies is a sign of maturity, I think. It is logical. It is reasonable. Unfortunately, it is against human nature. Economists have a concept called the sunk costs fallacy which we all, from plumbers to presidents, are taken in by. We have a very human propensity to base our decisions not on cold, empirical facts but on our emotional attachment to the past and our fear of loss.

Wikipedia says, “In economics and business decision-making, a sunk cost is a cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered.” The sunk cost fallacy is described by Economists Hal R. Arkes and Peter Ayton in their paper: The Sunk Cost and Concorde Effects: Are Humans Less Rational Than Lower Animals? They say:

“The sunk cost effect is a maladaptive economic behavior that is manifested in a greater tendency to continue an endeavor once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made. A prior investment should not influence one’s consideration of current options; only the incremental costs and benefits of the current options should influence one’s decision.”

By the way, if you were wondering if lower animals are more rational than humans, Arkes and Ayton say yes. “A number of experimenters who have tested lower animals have confirmed that they simply do not succumb to the fallacy.”

So, what does all this economics jargon mean? It means just what your old Grandfather said. To wit: “Don’t throw good money after bad!”  Also, “Know when to fold ‘em!”

I find it hard to give up my little fantasy because I have invested years of labor and time and money in its development. I have cultivated it carefully in my own mind. I made decisions, over the course of twenty years, which accommodated this fantasy but which made my life much more difficult and expensive. My wife and I made compromises to this fantasy which appeared to me to be investments but which, ultimately, were written down only in my own ledger book, not the one which mattered. It is probably time now to stop.

The door which I held open so long for myself, to benefit my indecision, was ultimately opened by another, a late-comer, who opened it by simply reaching out and grabbing the handle. The door opened for him and closed on my fingers while I wasn’t paying attention. I have been angry at him for doing that which I had neglected to do. I have been angry at him for taking my little fantasy away from me. I have been angry at him for betraying my good-natured sympathy for his situation. I have been angry at him for redefining my years of work and sacrifice as “sunk costs.”

My fingers are still in the door. I have a choice. I could shout my righteous indignation to the rooftops. I could demand satisfaction from the world. I could, in short, make an utter fool of myself and poison relationships that I have built over the course of a lifetime. Or…I could not do that.

Viewed correctly any choice is an opportunity.  It may be irrational to consider sunk costs when making future decisions. It is also irrational to let anger get the best of you. A quote, attributed to Mark Twain, says this:

“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”

However hard this aphorism is to accept and live by, I believe it to be true. It’s time for a new fantasy, I think. I pull my hand away now. The door is closed.

Eat The Pretty Ones

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Every day we see them,
In all the magazines,
They don’t look like anybody,
We’ve ever really seen,

They make us feel so ugly,
But now it’s time to stop,
They don’t look like that either,
Without the aid of Photoshop,

So, love your love handles,
Love your double chin,
And your receding hairline,
And all your saggy skin,

See your folds and creases,
In a whole new way,
Starting today.

Love Your Love Handles
by: Mitch Benn

It’s Not Fair

I am not a looker. I never have been. I was not “hot” in college. I was not a “handsome young man.” I’m pretty sure I didn’t win any beauty contests as a baby. I was a bony, skinny, scrawny teenager. I graduated into a pudgy, lumpy, bumpy adult. I have, you will note immediately, a big nose. I have gaps in my teeth, a ruddy complexion, and an aspiring double chin. My butt sticks out too far and, as a sort of hilarious joke by God (that trickster) my belly has expanded as a counterweight. I did not get my brother’s good looks nor my Grandpa’s stature (He was 6’ 3”). I am never gonna make the cover of GQ. And I am OK with that …now.

There is a time in our lives, though, when we certainly lament our genetic deficiencies. Adolescence is the worst, of course. Just at the point in our lives when we are most desperate to impress people (read that as the opposite sex) our bodies start doing weird and unexpected things. No one on the planet is crueler (more cruel?) than other teenagers. If we are not in that tiny club of genetic lottery winners, the cheerleader with the blemish-free skin or the football quarterback with the muscles and the freakish good looks, we begin to view ourselves as outcasts – garbage, to put it bluntly. We start to think that this is a judgement from an angry and arbitrary god, the jock god, if you will. We somehow start to think that we deserve this, that we deserve less happiness than these pretty people. Some people spend their whole lives in a kind of funk because of this phenomenon.

The Ugly Silent Majority

I am no Pollyanna. I understand that happiness is not distributed evenly on this cursed planet. I am willing to concede that some people are going to have an easier time of it by virtue of the height of their cheek bones or the slimness of their waist. Research demonstrates that the tips you get as a waitress have a great deal more to do with the color of your skin and the size of your breasts than the skill with which you do your job. I am prepared to admit that the “pretty” people will probably always have an easier time of it. What I’m not willing to concede, and you shouldn’t either, is the idea that they deserve more happiness than you or I. More to the point, I do not believe I, nor you, deserve less happiness because we have crooked teeth or little boobs (big boobs in the case of men) or acne. And the plain fact is – we have got them on the numbers.

Mitch Benn’s song, which I quote above, has another verse which set me to thinking the other day. It goes like this:

We feel like we’re abnormal,
But that’s ridiculous cause,
There’s maybe a couple of hundred of them,
And there’s six and a half billion of us.

That is the point. Look around the airports, and the parks, and the malls. We have the numbers. We are the ugly “silent majority” searching for a ski-slope-nosed, droopy-cheeked Nixon to lead us. Uh, ok, well he’s dead. But the point is that we, the big-nosed, overweight, uni-browed troglodytes should run this country. We should demand our share of happiness. We should redefine what beautiful is. The pretty people are the genetic anomaly and yet they have been able to perpetuate a state of, for lack of a better word, apartheid, on the rest of us.

Jupiter and Callisto by: Peter Paul Rubens

Jupiter and Callisto
by: Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)

The Three Graces by: Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)

The Three Graces
by: Peter Paul Rubens
(1577-1640)

 

Rubens and the Evolution of Pretty

Looking back through history there has been some evolution of “pretty.” Many of us, the gravitationally challenged, cling to the notion that in the days of Rubens “fat” was the standard by which women were measured. Plumpness was a sign of health and vivaciousness. His ladies were beautiful and confident and desired and, you know what, they looked like real women. Even in ancient cultures fertility icons were invariably statues of voluptuous women.

Ancient Stone Female Figurine Willendorf, Austria (24000 - 22000 BC)

Ancient Stone Female Figurine
Willendorf, Austria
(24000 – 22000 BC)

The ideal of beauty represented by the anorexic blond is an arbitrary creation. It has no more basis in objective reality than too-wide lapels did in the seventies or leg warmers did in the eighties or Kardashians do today. And while I would never be so callous as to call Jessica Alba ugly (it’s not her fault she looks the way she does) I will say that beauty, like many things, is a pendulum that can swing too far and hurt people. So, maybe beauty was once defined as something other than emaciated blondness. I hope it was. If so, I’m afraid that boat has sailed. So I say it’s time to swing that pendulum back the other way or sail that ship back into port or whatever metaphor applies best here. When the majority of human beings live their lives feeling “ugly” it is time to redefine “pretty.” Sorry pretty people, majority rules.

 

 

The Problem, as Always – Fox News

“Pretty” today can be ascertained by what is on TV. TV “news,” in particular seems to be leading this march away from meritocracy and toward bimbo ascendancy. You will get a whole lot farther today in “news” with big boobs and tantalizingly crossed bare legs than with hard work, good reporting, and brains. Don’t know what I mean? Tune in to Fox and Friends any random morning to get the idea. You don’t even need to turn up the volume. In fact, absolutely don’t turn up the volume. Better yet, tune in to the Fox News show Outnumbered and again, preferably, turn down the volume. You will notice some striking similarities in the 4 color-coordinated female “hosts.” Hint: It’s not their erudition or education or journalistic excellence. Fox has been the driver of this trend, like so many other harmful trends, since their debut in 1996. Sadly the other networks have fallen in line and cut their skirts shorter and shorter. From Lara Spencer’s vapid Betty Boop routine on Good Morning America to the nauseating spectacle of Savannah Guthrie sitting in the same chair formerly occupied by Barbara Walters, Jane Pauley, and Katie Couric on the Today show, this diminishment of Q and A in favor of T and A should be an embarrassment to our culture. Edward R. Murrow would be spinning in his grave. If we could hook a fan blade up to his corpse and prop him up in front of “The Kelly File” we would go a long way toward solving global warming.

But I Digress

My purpose here is not to decry the state of journalism in this country but to decry the unfairness that “looks” trump talent and hard work across the spectrum. Fat people, short people, and “ugly” people on TV are relegated to comedy relief, if they are relegated to anything at all. We must change that in order to open up new opportunities for the repressed majority called “us.”

What To Do

So, what do we do about this sorry state of affairs? How do we use our advantage? First of all, we don’t give away any of the power we have. Don’t give your hard earned money to Christi Brinkley for her Ab Stretcher, or to Cindy Crawford for her Skin Smoother or to Shaun T for his Paunch buster Polka DVD’s. We all know that the only thing that makes you skinnier is giving up bacon and, for God’s sake, it’s just not worth it. And we should know, if we don’t, that the only way to look young is to be friggin’ young – or to make a deal with the devil. (I’m looking at you Dick Clark. Oh, yeah, I guess the devil finally got him.) Also, don’t go see movies with “hot skinny young starlets” in them. If it doesn’t have Melissa McCarthy in it, boycott it. And, you know what, boycott her, too, as a traitor. What is she thinking, losing all that weight. Where is her pride?

Next, we have to organize. If Wayne LaPierre and the NRA can run this country of three hundred eighteen million people as their own private fiefdom and the AARP can spook legislators into a buffalo stampede by saying BOO! what could 317.9 million ugly people accomplish if we just voted our self interest and actually ran for office. And we already have a start in politics. Bernie Sanders is not exactly a GQ model and Mitch McConnell doesn’t have enough chin to put on a pillowcase.

We will call our group SOAP – Society Of Average People or maybe HISS – Homely Individuals Standing Strong or, how about UGLY – United Group of Lummoxes and Yahoos. So, lets get SOAP rolling. I’ll be the President (or Benevolent Dictator if you will) and we will draft a few of our talented brethren who have become famous to do PR for us. I envision a PSA starring Steve Buscemi, Dawn French, and Sandra Bernhard. In fact, why hasn’t somebody put them in a movie together already? That would be awesome!

600full-steve-buscemi

Steve Buscemi – No George Clooney in the looks department but one helluva actor!

Dawn French

Dawn French – Not sure if it’s okay to have a crush on a Vicar, but I always have!

bernhard-sandra-

Sandra Bernhard – A conventional beauty? Perhaps not. But smart, talented, and sexy as hell if you ask me.

Here’s a Modest Proposal for the twenty-first century; let’s round up those feckless, shallow, phony-boob-bearing, Escalade-driving, wheat-grass-chugging, sit-up-doing, little twits and turn them into Soylent Green (Google that one, youngsters. Who said Charlton Heston never made a good movie?) In honor of Jonathan Swift, our campaign will be called Eat the Pretty Ones and we will get a good New York advertising firm to market it for us – and then we will eat them, too. After all, if we are going to lift up and celebrate the persecuted big-boned American public we are gonna need a reliable protein source.

Finally, we need to heed the words of Mitch Benn. Love your love handles. Love yourself. We are who we are. We look like what we look like. We deserve to be happy. After all, our contribution to this world is just as important as, say Paris Hilton’s, isn’t it?

by: Dustin Joy

 

Love Your Love Handles – Full Lyrics

Every day we’d see them, in all the magazines 

They don’t look like anybody, we’ve ever really seen 

They make us feel so ugly, but now it’s time to stop cause 

They don’t look like that either, without the aid of Photoshop so 

Love your love handles, love your double chin 

and your receding hairline, and all your saggy skin and 

see your folds and creases in a whole new way, starting today

Some people try their hardest, to make all our lives hell cause

They’ve all got moisturizers, and diet drinks to sell

Don’t have to ask permission, to be heard or seen

Don’t need to make excuses, for being a human being, so

Love your love handles, love your laughter lines

Cause every one’s a medal, for all the happy times

Love your bumpy eyelids and your wonky nose, so everyone knows

All of our imperfections, all our asymmetry 

They’re an important part of, what makes us you and me 

Who cares what someone looks like, long as they have their health 

Be good to everybody, starting with yourself, cause 

We’re not all supermodels, we’re not all movie stars

Most of us look exactly, like what we really are

We feel like we’re abnormal, but that’s ridiculous cos there’s

maybe a couple of hundred of them and six and a half billion of us

Love your love handles, love your crooked teeth

Cherish that wobbly tummy, and whatever lies beneath now

Love your fuzzy nipples, and your droopy chest, and all of the rest

Love your love handles, love your dimply thighs

Lanky, dumpy, scrawny, whatever shape or size

You’ll find you can be happy and comfortable in, your own skin

The Boy in the Picture

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100_8036

The Boy (there is not really a ten foot trout jumping up the waterfall.) My boy added that.

On the wall of my bedroom is a picture. It was given to me by my Mother who took it, had it enlarged, and had it framed. It is on the wall where I see it first thing in the morning when I swing my feet to the floor and stand up.

The picture is of a boy. The boy sits on a rock looking at a waterfall. Because I know a bit of the history of the picture I know that the rock and the waterfall and the boy are in Yellowstone National Park. The boy faces away, always, with his back turned to the camera. He is pensive, silent. It is clear to me that he doesn’t know about the camera. He is oblivious to everything around him but the waterfall. Waterfalls can do that.

The boy is a teenager. He is thin and gangly but not slouchy. He sits up straight (as his mother undoubtedly told him to) because he is a good boy. He is a good boy and he is a smart boy but his clothing reveals that he is not a “cool” boy. Here in the middle of a forest in the middle of a national park in the middle of the Summer he is wearing a button down shirt and blue jeans. His “cool” brother is undoubtedly clad in shorts and a t-shirt.

The boy sits on the rock watching the water flow down through the canyon and he holds his jacket folded in his lap. He is calm, you might say serene. He seems at ease here in a way that he is not anywhere else. Being here in nature, watching the simple, eternal cycle of water evaporating up and running back down gives him a respite from the ceaseless barrage of teenage thoughts and the endless interior monolog in his head. Here on this rock he can forget about the compulsion to behave and to do well and to study hard and to achieve great things. In this place he can stop the flow of hormone-driven nonsense that colors his view of the world and the other people in it; girls, jocks, bullies, teachers, adults. I think the boy on the rock, in that moment, wishes he could stop the relentless flow of time and sit there, if not forever, then at least a little bit longer.

I wake up every morning and I look at the boy sitting on the rock. There are times I wish I could talk to him. I wish I could tell him a few things that I know about the world but he doesn’t. I wish I could make his life easier. What would I tell him? I would tell him that a lot of the things he worries about just aren’t going to matter in a few years. I would tell him that some of the people in his life that he trusts or admires will let him down or hurt him. I would tell him what moves to make and perhaps what moves not to make in this great chess game called life. I would like to save him some grief. I would like to help him find more joy.

Mostly I would like to offer him some valuable knowledge that he will otherwise acquire through pain and embarrassment. There is so much a teenage boy thinks he knows that just isn’t so. His certitude primes him for disappointment and mistakes. He needs somebody who has experienced the world to help him navigate this perplexing place. But he won’t listen. He won’t hear it even though he is a good boy. He didn’t listen to his Mom or his Dad. He had to make the mistakes on his own. He is a silly stubborn boy!

All of us grizzled and jaded adults want to talk to the boy in the picture. We have seen suffering and we want to save him from it. We have tasted defeat and we want to rig the game in his favor. We have felt heartache and we want to help him dodge it. We want to trim the gristle off of life for him so he can enjoy the steak. But life is a marbled piece of meat. The good times and the bad times are inextricably intertwined. The people who give us the most pain are capable, at times, of giving us the most joy. Decisions which were clearly mistakes teach us something of value, even if it’s only the mundane lesson not to touch a hot stove a second time.

And if we could talk to the boy in the picture would we really know what to tell him? Have we learned anything true from our own experience? Would we tell him how to avoid our fate? As I lie in this bed snuggled against my wife, the absolute joy of my life, or stand silent in the hallway in the middle of the night listening to the most profoundly wonderful sound I will ever hear, my children’s breathing, I’m not so sure. Would I dare lead the boy away from a path which might be difficult but which will ultimately bring him to the warm place next to his soul mate, a woman who loves him and understands him and forgives him? Would I dare divert him even one degree from the true course that leads here, to this quiet hallway, to this bed?

When I consider, from the vantage point of age, what I would like to teach this boy about the world, I am troubled by a fleeting thought. What if the truth of the matter is this; I wish I didn’t know some of the things he doesn’t know. Sometimes I wish the boy could untell me things. I wish he could unteach me some of the bitter lessons I learned along the way. I wish he could teach me instead to trust people again. I wish he could help me forget all those things I know about the cruelty and greed and pettiness of other people. I wish he could teach me the pleasure of sitting on a rock.

The boy in the picture never changes. He is fifteen years old forever and there is no way I will ever teach him anything. But there may be, just possibly, a way for him to teach me a few things by his serene example. Maybe if I study the picture I can unlearn the cynicism and sarcasm that separates me sometimes from the ones I love. Maybe I can learn to forgive the people in my life who have let me down or disappointed me. Maybe I can learn, from the boy in the picture, how to just sit on a rock sometimes and let the world flow around me like a waterfall.

by: Dustin Joy

Tiny Glowing Screens

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And when the sun burns out
We’ll light the world with tiny glowing screens
Tiny glowing screens, glowing screens

-Tiny Glowing Screens, Part 1
by Watsky

A stocking frame is a long way from a modern smart phone. It was a kind of a wooden knitting machine invented in 1589 by William Lee near Nottingham, England. It was one of the first machines to replace human workers in the textile industry, but far from the last. The first stocking frames, while doing the work of hand knitters, did a fairly crude job. They would be refined over the next couple of centuries and by 1850 there were a quarter of a million power looms in England, each doing the work of 40 or 50 workers and often operated by children. As with the remarkable rise of the iPhone, not everyone was sanguine about this development. There were people who liked to weave fabric, or more precisely, had worked their whole lives to get good at it so that they could make a living.

In 1799 such a man named Ned Ludd was fed up enough to take a sledge hammer to a couple of these stocking frames in a futile but symbolic gesture akin to John Henry and the steam drill. Others who shared his ideas and fears took to smashing looms and stocking frames, too. These “frame-breakers” soon became known as Luddities, a term which lives on today to describe people who fear and oppose technology. I’m trying to decide if I’m a Luddite.

Bleary-eyed and not yet fully capable of rational thought I climbed aboard the hotel van at the Holiday Inn Philadelphia at 5:00 AM the other day (which I will remind all you Central Time Zone dwellers is really 4:00 AM.) It is customary on such journeys, particularly at 4:00 AM, for crews to be somewhat taciturn. Later showtimes will often call for conversation. We trade stories and grievances about airline life, the dreaded scheduling department, unions, and management. Pilots are notorious complainers (witness the famous old joke: Q: What is the difference between a pilot and a jet engine? A: The jet engine stops whining when you reach the gate.) It is enjoyable and sometimes informative to talk to other crews and get their point of view on recent events in the industry or occasionally a joke such as the one above. Sometimes we talk about favorite layovers, good restaurants, hotels with generous breakfasts, and sights worth seeing.

But this morning there was no talk, not one peep among the seven persons comprising the van-load. And despite the early hour these aviation professionals were not cat-napping on the way to the airport. They were, each and every one of them, except me, looking at their tiny glowing screens. What they looked at or thought about or communicated I could not say. Some seemed transfixed by a single image or text and stared at it relentlessly. Others flipped madly from page to page. Some typed away with their muscular thumbs. All were entranced to the point that we almost drove off and left one of the other crew’s flight attendants.

I would like, here, to portray myself as something of a hero, a defender of the cherished traditions of human interaction through speech. But the truth is that I had already spent 15-20 minutes in my hotel room staring at my own little glowing screen and gathering “information” about my flights for the day, the weather, and, of course, the latests comings and goings of one Mr. Donald Trump. I watched these digital slaves in the van with a sense of superiority, like a teetotaler looking down his nose at the local sot; but I was little better.

So, is texting the death of small talk? If so, do we care? Is there still merit in talking to people other than your friends and family? Do we gain by the conversation of our seat mate on the airplane, in the van, in line at the theater, in church? Will humanity fall into chaos if we text a few lines to our windbag coworker instead of talking to him for an hour on the phone? For truly the little glowing screens are an escape. They are an escape from the demands of civilization, from the boring and the foreign and the scary. When we are waiting in a queue at the airport or for the bus or at the DMV we are in a state of suspended animation. We are bored and perhaps we are lonely. Anthropologist Amber Case says, “People in lines have been put on pause and the thing that reconnects them to some sort of humanity is to look at their phones.” True enough, but people have always waited in lines and people have always dealt with that boredom in different ways. One would like to say, “well, in my day we talked to other people.” But to be honest we didn’t, always. Bored people who had been put “on pause” read a book, looked at a newspaper, or did a crossword puzzle. These are all anti-social activities akin to looking at one’s phone. And in a way “looking at the phone” is a less anti-social activity than reading a book because in many cases the person in question is communicating with someone, just not someone here.

In the local context, looking at the phone is exactly like putting up a barrier and if you are in close proximity, perhaps even alone with, someone looking at his or her phone it can be rather alienating. It is hard not to take the person’s devotion to his little glowing screen as a sort of insult to the real living breathing person in the same room. So if a phone can keep us connected to those we love, it at the same time, separates us from the world of interesting people around us. It encourages clannishness and I can’t help thinking it reinforces the polarization we increasingly find in this country, socially and politically. These are feedback loops and they amplify our biases and opinions. We talk to the people we like and who think like us and block out the voices who sound different.

Here is where I think the little glowing screens do us some harm. “Small talk,” for lack of a better word, is good. It does benefit us. Some of the most interesting conversations I have ever had were with people sitting next to me on airplanes. In that “phone-free” venue people sometimes share thoughts and ideas which would not be shared in the gate area where everyone is busy texting their friends.

I offer another 5:00 AM example. A Flight crew is picked up at a Hotel in Peoria, Illinois for a taxi ride to the airport. The crew says hello to the driver as they approach the taxi. She, preoccupied by texting on her cell phone, says nothing. The driver allows all passengers to load their own bags in the rear of the taxi. She settles into the driver’s seat and continues to text. The driver is visibly irritated to find that the Flight Attendant has failed to get the rear door latched properly and grudgingly gets out to re-close it, texting all the while. To her credit the driver does not text while driving, although I have seen this on numerous occasions with hotel van drivers and taxi drivers. When they reach the airport the driver leaves the taxi only to open the rear door but then stands by and texts while said crew removes their own suitcases.

The average modern traveler will attest that this recitation is a true and accurate representation of life today. The names of businesses or “associates” may change, but the omnipresence of the cell phone and its role as a palpable barrier between people cannot be denied. On its face it is difficult to assess whether this localized “rudeness” results in a net loss in civility in the world. For all I know our taxi driver may well have been communicating something very important. It is possible that she is a key player in a charity organization that helps the homeless. Maybe she was coordinating important scheduling or maintenance information with her company to facilitate other customer’s experience. Or maybe it was an emergency. All of these are possible, but not plausible. We all know who she was texting at 5:00 AM, if not the name of the person, then the category into which they fall; friends or family. And is this wrong?

The reason that sociological study is so difficult is that it is hard to establish a baseline. Are people ruder than they used to be? Is texting with your friend truly an insult to others? If the taxi driver gives us less of herself, perhaps she is therefore giving someone else more. Is her friendship or kinship strengthened at the cost of irritating a few “customers?” Surely her boss would object. I know we did.

A man doing a crossword puzzle at the airport may be doing so for entertainment. He may have no other agenda than to fill boring “pause” time with mentally stimulating activity. I have seen times, though, when a magazine or book or crossword was used as an intentional barrier, kind of a “do not disturb” sign. These barriers are effective. Cell phones are even more so. I have observed, in cities with a high load of panhandlers, that one of the surest ways not to be approached by a panhandler is to pretend to talk or text on your cell phone. This is fascinating to me. The idea that someone who has the effrontery to walk up and ask you for money will be deterred because he doesn’t want to interrupt your cell phone conversation is interesting. Panhandlers will approach two people talking on the street and interrupt their conversation. They will interrupt a man reading a newspaper. The cell phone, somehow, acts as a more definitive barrier.

I blame cell phones for destroying the valuable social interaction of strangers in public places. We can’t very well “reason together” as the Book of Isaiah suggests if we are playing Words with Friends with friends. Texting is all too often a way of blocking others out more than it is a way of communicating.

So, I hate cell phones. The problem is I love my cell phone. This is not exactly a contradiction. We all love our dogs and hate other people’s dogs. Congress’ approval rating is 14% according to Politifact, but 95% of Congressmen were re-elected in 2014. We love our own congressman but we think everyone else’s congressman is a scoundrel. This is not about the cell phone or dog or congressman in question then; it is about us. It is about human nature. My theory is that we all suffer from a prima donna complex. The things we do and say and think about are important. What others do and say and think about are abstractions, at best. The problem, if there is one, is not in the technology but in the people who operate it.

When I was seven years old my parents were dogged by a tenacious encyclopedia salesperson. I was far too young to remember, or understand the subtlety of her sales pitch. Perhaps she thrilled them with tales of inaugurations thirty years hence. Maybe she applied liberal amounts of guilt, contrasting for them their children’s education with the extravagant central air unit we ultimately did without for ten more years. I believe guilt was the right motivator to separate my thrifty mother from her money as the only thing in my Mom’s psyche surpassing her frugality is her selflessness. Perhaps she feared for my immortal soul, worried that I would end up in jail, or perhaps law school, without this intervention. Whatever the woman said obviously worked because our family was soon the proud owner of a complete set of 1975 World Book Encyclopedias.

Whether my mother would today conclude that the purchase was economically sound I cannot say. There have been no inaugurations as yet. Whether my father’s ten year dearth of air conditioning was assuaged by seeing his sweaty little boy read about stink beetles and comets is hard to determine. I can say, with conviction, that those 26 brown faux leather books did change my life. They made me whatever I am today and I thank my Mom and Dad for foregoing the air conditioner.

The owner of a set of 1975 World Book Encyclopedias was allowed to drink from a fountain of knowledge that children of the internet age cannot now appreciate. Information which is available today in 4 nanoseconds required a drive across town to that receptacle of human knowledge called a library, an arduous search through a medieval torture device known as a card catalog, a trudge through a dank, moldering labyrinth of shelves clutching in your hopeful hand a piece of scrap paper bearing the cryptic symbols 123.657 LGA scrawled with a broken stubby pencil, and then the withering look of a horn-rimmed harpy whose intimidating glare made the Wizard of Oz look like the man behind the curtain.

My World Books avoided all that. I had this fountain of knowledge in my own house and I drank from it daily. I would often pick a letter at random and sit down in a comfy chair or on the foot of my bed and enter the world of the World Book much as a boy today might Google googol. My mind flitted alphabetically from topic to topic; aardvarks in Africa, The Ancient Mariner and his Albatross, Armstrong, Neil and Apollo. In this way I developed a mind full of trivia. I learned a little about a lot. But the World Book made me fall in love with the World. It opened up to me vistas that I could not see with my own eyes. I read it from cover to cover to cover and I am consequently condemned to be fascinated by everything. I want to know three succinct paragraphs about the universe.

Little did I or anyone else know that my beloved World Books would be surpassed by many orders of magnitude. Our children are growing up in a world where all human knowledge is available in the palm of their hand. They do not have to drive to the library. They do not have to look through a card catalog. They do not have to send away for more information. How can this not be a good thing?

Amber Case studies human interaction with technology. She calls herself a Cyborg Anthropologist because of her hypothesis that glowing screens and the internet therein constitute a sort of extra brain which we carry around with us. We are half-human, half-robot. She says, “Mental tools extend what our brains can do. Our phone is our mental exoskeleton.” And Cyborgs are, mostly, stronger than humans. We are better for having all human knowledge in the palm of our hands, obviously. But there may be a price for this, too. Case makes the argument that we can get too enraptured by our knowledge and technology, much as I got absorbed to the point of distraction by my World Books. A fine example of this can be found on You Tube. Simply type in “Texting man walks into a bear.”

What may be lost is “down time” and I would argue “small talk.” Case says, “People aren’t taking time for mental reflection. When you have no external input that is the time when there is creation of self. Then you can figure out who you really are.” How does she deal with this overload? “I take road trips and use paper maps,” she says.

Which reminds me of an anecdote of my own. I was standing in a store in the Mall of America with my son (A girl’s clothing store. We boys were obviously “on pause”). I was looking at a road map of Minnesota and trying to cipher out a route to escape Minneapolis with minimal frustration. I was approached by a young sales clerk (maybe 19) who stared in wonder at my map. “Is that what I think it is,” she said, “I didn’t think anybody used maps anymore.” I was tempted to retreat into the old person’s mantra “well in my day, young lady…..” But I didn’t. I showed her the map and we talked about the area and she pulled out her “map app.” She actually had some good ideas for getting back to the highway. And it wasn’t that she didn’t know what a map was, or that she didn’t use maps.

The thing is: maps are different today and in many ways they are better. Encyclopedias are better, too. And we can still talk to each other today, even about maps. We just need to take the time to do it. So I guess I won’t take a sledge hammer to my iPhone. There may be some good to come from it. Rest in peace Ned Ludd.

by: Dustin Joy

Glacial Erratics

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My Pet Rock

About ten years ago, I was operating the chisel plow on our farm in Western Illinois when the whole machine suddenly lurched and there was a loud bang from somewhere behind the tractor. I stopped and raised the implement out of the ground to see if there was any damage. What I discovered was a broken, but replaceable, shear bolt and partly buried in the newly worked soil, a big rock. The rock was unremarkable. It was grey, as many rocks seem to be, and round mostly, and scratched up, at least partly from being hit by a chisel plow. Its most remarkable feature was its size. We don’t see many this big around here. I made a half-hearted effort to kick it loose from the soil but discovered that gravity had a determined hold on it. It was not going to be kicked out of the way. I went on about my plowing and forgot about the rock.

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My Pet Rock

Our farm is not a “rocky” farm like you sometimes see in Minnesota. It has pretty good soil and is fairly productive by modern corn and soybean yield standards. This rock definitely didn’t belong. It was an alien. In the Fall, my daughter and I took a shovel and our little wagon and dug the rock out of the hillside. I could not lift it but, using the tilt mechanism, was able to roll it into the wagon’s bed and rotate it up into place. We hauled the rock up to our house yard and dumped it near our campfire ring as a place for kids to sit while roasting marshmallows. I didn’t think too much about the rock after that except that I did a little investigation to eliminate the enticing possibility that it was a meteorite. No such luck. A meteorite that big would be extremely interesting not to mention extremely valuable. But, despite being terrestrial, my “pet” rock, it turns out, has a name, and a story as interesting as any space rock. It is called a “Glacial Erratic” and it’s story is about geology and history and travel.

When I say Rock, I Mean Rock

For many years my family has taken an annual fishing trip to Lake of the Woods in Ontario, Canada. I love nearly everything about Lake of the Woods. The fishing is great, the people are friendly, the weather is generally cool and dry when ours is hot and humid. But the thing I really like about Lake of the Woods is the austere, almost harsh beauty of the place. It is a tough environment for both plants and animals. The winters are brutal and the insects can be fierce. But what makes Lake of the Woods a truly harsh place for life boils down to one thing, soil, or rather, the lack of soil. Plants don’t grow well without soil and animals do not live very well without plants.

Lake of the Woods is famous for rocks. The incautious boater can be skimming across Whitefish bay over 180 feet of water and a few seconds later can be surprised by the silence of his now absent outboard motor which has been sheared cleanly off the back of his boat by a boulder. The islands here are rock, the shorelines here are lined with rock, the houses here are built on top of rock. There are no wells. Septic tanks and drain fields simply don’t exist. Bedrock defines this place because that is what you can see.

When you spend a bit of time on Lake of the Woods you begin to notice interesting things about the terrain. One thing you notice, right off the bat, is that there is no dirt, or almost none. The reason you can see the bedrock, and hit it with your propeller for that matter, is that there is no dirt to cover it. When you pull up on an island to have a shore lunch you unload your snacks and cooler and so forth and you sit down on a rock to contemplate the beauty. What you notice, often, is that the rock you are resting on is itself resting on an enormous dome of granite sticking out of the lake. This rocky island frequently seems to be one big rock polished almost smooth across its surface but frequently bearing deep scratches, mostly parallel, and mostly aligned in a southwestward direction. This observation can be repeated all over northern Lake of the Woods and it gets a thoughtful person to thinking. As you ponder the scratches, and possibly scratch your own head, you might begin to contemplate the big round rock you are sitting on. It doesn’t seem to belong in this spot any more than a big, roundish, grey rock belongs in an Illinois cornfield. It is rock, of course, much like the island it sits on. But it is different in color and texture and appearance from the rock of the island. And it sits so oddly upon this smooth dome of rock that it appears to have been dropped here by some larger power as a sort of practical joke. The out of place rocks here and in Illinois were indeed placed by a larger power, larger than us, anyway. They are, quite literally, out of place. And they both share that same unusual name, “Glacial Erratic.”

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A Lake of the Woods island showing the effects of glaciers

As we sit upon this glacial erratic and nibble a piece of cold walleye, our thoughts turn back to the mystery of the missing soil. We ask ourselves questions. Where is the soil? Was it ever here? What could possibly move so much soil and scour the rocks so clean?  The answers are quite interesting. The soil that is not here on the Canadian shield did not disappear, it was hauled away and with it many, many little grey rocks. The soil, and the gravel, and the rocks were moved, as it turns out, to Illinois. The fertility which we do not find in northwestern Ontario is now producing 200 bushel/acre corn near Rockford. Left behind are rocky islands covered with scratch marks and an occasional giant boulder sitting incongruously atop a flat bedrock shelf. The trees which make up the “woods” of Lake of the Woods must make do with wind-borne accumulations of dirt which have collected in cracks in the rock. Limited in nutrients and susceptible to erosion these little “planters” make poor growing places but, as I noted in my essay The Sycamore, nature makes use of whatever is available to it. The trees here do grow tall, but they do it very slowly. Often there is not enough soil on a barren rock to hold up a sixty foot pine in a wind storm. You can see examples all over the lake of horizontal trees with their entire root ball and attached soil thrust up into the air.

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An Excellent Photo by my Aunt, Judi Roberts, shows exactly what I’m describing here. Notice how this 50 foot pine grew from just a few inches of soil. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough.

A Larger Power

If you can picture in your minds-eye a mountain of ice nearly a mile thick where Chicago sits today, you have a better imagination than me. And yet, during the Illinois Glacial Episode (About 125,000 – 300,000 years ago) and the Wisconsin Glacial Episode (About 10,000 – 25,000 years ago) such was the state of affairs in our neck of the woods. During the height of the Illinois glaciation ice sheets hundreds of feet thick extended all the way to Carbondale. This was the farthest south glaciers ever penetrated in North America. The ice covered nearly 90% of what is now the Prairie State sparing only extreme southern Illinois and some high elevation areas near Galena. Up in Canada these ice sheets grew thicker yet, up to 8,000 feet deep in places. (Think of 125,000 years of snow falling but never melting). This dome of ice thickened and as it thickened the weight of the ice and snow compressed the earth beneath it and caused it’s lower margins to be pushed outward and begin to “slide.” This movement ultimately became a glacial front pushing relentlessly southward, sometimes at a third of a mile per year, like an unbelievable bulldozer. These lobes of ice representing billions of tons of pressure scoured the surface of the land in what is now the Canadian Shield (places like Lake of the Woods). The expanding glacier carried away the soil and through a process called “plucking” quarried out and picked up great rocks and boulders and ground them along the bedrock, rounding and polishing them and leaving parallel scratches on the rocky islands of Lake of the Woods. Smaller stones were ground into pebbles, pebbles were ground into sand and sand was ground into fine particles of clay. Moving southward over Canada and Minnesota and Wisconsin and the basin of Lake Michigan these glaciers accumulated great “loads” of soil and rock. This load of material and debris is called “drift.”

The bulldozer/glacier analogy is imperfect. Although glacial fronts did “plow” rock and soil ahead of them much like a bulldozer a great deal of the drift was ultimately carried inside the glacier. Glaciers are ice, after all, and subject to freezing and thawing cycles. Most boulder “plucking,” for example was caused by melt water beneath the glacier freezing in cracks in the bedrock below and splitting off pieces which became imbedded in the overrunning ice. Sometimes landslides from nearby higher elevations fell onto the top of a glacier and were carried along, not in front of the dozer, but far back along the glacier’s side.

And there was not one massive dozer of a glacier which pushed down to Carbondale, Illinois and then disappeared. At least four, and possibly eight, times Illinois was partly or mostly covered with ice. Even these measurable events did not represent single glacial fronts, but many lobes advancing and retreating, advancing and retreating. When the temperature fell over a long period the ice would advance and the bulldozer effect would be an apt description. When temperatures rose, the ice would melt back leaving a ridge of soil and debris called a moraine. Though you may never have noticed them, Illinois is covered by moraines. The moraines southwest of Chicago left behind by the last Wisconsin glaciation event are the most prominent in the state. And glaciers don’t just melt on the southern leading edge; they melt on top, also. At times great rivers of melt-water flowed on and over the glacier itself, carrying their own loads of soil and flowing down into crevasses in the ice to emerge from under the glacier. In some places, the gravel and sand carried across and through the ice by these melt-water streams ultimately settled to earth to form gravelly ridges called eskers.

Making Topsoil

Ultimately the glaciers did retreat. They melted and the drift they carried was dropped on the sandstone and shale underlying Illinois. This “dropped drift” is called “till” and it is estimated that this till layer made up of soil, gravel, clay, pebbles and rocks, covers nearly 90% of the state and averages 100 feet deep. It can, in places reach 500 feet. When we drilled a water well at our house some years ago, the driller went down 485 feet to find the purest drinking water. It is this layer of drift which filters our water.

Glaciers did not merely drop their load. The enormous volume of water generated by melting hundreds or thousands of feet of ice moved soil, too. As water flowed out from the glacier, it carved great valleys and small stream beds. The present course of the Mississippi, Illinois, and Ohio rivers were determined by glacier outwash. As the melt-water ebbed, and the sediment left in the smaller stream beds and larger valleys dried out, the wind tended to pick up the smaller, lighter particles and scatter them across the thick layer of drift. This fine soil is called loess and it covers much of Illinois, often to a depth of 20 feet.

Farmers today often think of themselves as stewards of the soil. This is, indeed a noble idea. But the amazing fertility which makes Illinois a “rich” state is only marginally related to agricultural practices. Illinois’ amazing crop yields and subsequent wealth (The average price for an acre of farmland in Illinois in 2014 was $7,700) are a direct result of this glacial windfall (loess being literally a windfall). Rich till and loess hundreds of feet deep were the perfect substrate for the forbs and grasses which ultimately covered Illinois and made it The Prairie State. Thousands of years worth of living and dying prairie plants generated thousands of years worth of organic matter which was stored up in the form of rich, black topsoil which now grows 200 bushels of corn per acre.

And what of Canada? Our gain, crop-wise, was their loss. You cannot grow corn, or much of anything, on a rock. But while row upon row of golden cornstalks reaching to the horizon do have a certain esthetic beauty, a bald eagle, perched on a pine tree does, too. If the Canadian Shield had kept its soil the austere beauty of Lake of the Woods that I appreciate now might have been simply a continuation of the vast wheat fields of Saskatchewan further west. I guess I like the way things turned out.

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A Bald Eagle perches on a Glacial Erratic – Lake of the Woods, Ontario, Canada

The Wanderer

A glacial erratic is a rock that differs from the size or type native to the area in which it is found. It can be as small as a pebble or as large as a house. The name erratic comes from the latin term errare which means to wander or go astray. I like that. I like to think of my little glacial erratic as I sit by the campfire. I like to imagine my pet rock being liberated from some shelf along the shores of Lake of the Woods and rolled and rounded in the belly of a mighty glacier for hundreds of miles across Minnesota and Wisconsin. And I like to imagine standing on the terminal moraine of this glacier as it slowly melts and recedes, leaving a hill which today comprises our cornfield. On the crest of the moraine sits a little rock left behind by the ice. It is covered, over time, with windblown loess from the nearby “new” Mississippi River. Generations of men plow this soil and plant corn and pick corn and plant again until one day a young man on a John Deere tractor plows deep enough to bring the little rock to the surface again.

The Philosophy Bit

My Mom and I sometimes like to look up into the night sky and watch for meteors. There is something about witnessing these little wanderers that makes one feel simultaneously very small, but also very lucky. We feel small because compared to the scale of the galaxy our little soap opera represents nothing. We are a blip in both time and space and the things that we worry so much about mean nothing to the universe. But we are lucky, too. And we are special, in a way. When my Mom and I sit outside at midnight watching for a falling star we are witnesses to nature’s power. We, unlike any other creature or thing, have the unique ability to see, understand, and assimilate these wonderful forces that swirl all around us. In his poem The Star Splitter Robert Frost says “The best thing that we’re put here for’s to see.” I think there is something in that. Whether it be a falling star or a rock carried by a glacier the world, and indeed the universe, is filled with things worth seeing and worth trying to understand. Until I learned a bit about glacial erratics I knew next to nothing about this farm we live on and why it is so good. I did not know why the Lake of the Woods was so beautiful.

Does it benefit our appreciation to also understand? I think it does. I think I appreciate things more when I can comprehend also the amazing power and endurance and scale of this incredible world. It is a cool place and it is worth knowing. Sometimes that starts with a little grey rock.

 

Text by: Dustin Joy

Photos by: Judi Roberts and Dustin Joy

Being Ward Cleaver / A Letter to my Kids

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Ever since I became a father I have really only had one ambition- to be Ward Cleaver. Ward was the complete package as fathers go. He was handsome, of course, and made a good living. His wife adored him and his business partners respected him. He raised his kids to be polite, competent, thoughtful, and intelligent members of society. He instilled wisdom in Beaver and Wally without screaming insanely or being reduced to tears of frustration himself. He was never sarcastic or cruel when the Beaver cheated on a test at school, suggesting that he would never amount to anything and should probably grab a broom handle and start practicing holding up a sign along the side of the road.… etc., etc., etc. If Wally backed the car into the garage door and then tried to hide the fact, Ward did not blow up like some kind of lunatic scarring Wally’s fragile ego for life, but steered him gently in the direction of honesty and responsibility. He never cussed in his kids’ presence or cheated on his golf score or flung his @#$%# backlashed fishing reel out into the middle of @#$%@ Lake George …… ah, forget that last example. There are a lot of reasons I want to be like Ward Cleaver. They are the same reasons I want to be like my dad and I want to be like my grandpa. All these guys were solid and steady and competent and smart. To distill it all down to a single phrase, these guys “Knew what to do, always.” There never seemed to be any moral flailing about with these guys. If the car broke down, they fixed it. If they had a new wife and child they went out and got a better job and earned more money. If their kids got into trouble at school they new what to say or do ….every time. The truth is that I don’t always know what to do, and you can ask my kids about this (or, rather don’t do that). I do a lot of moral flailing and philosophical questioning. I do give contradictory answers and uncertain instruction. I am sometimes sarcastic and unnecessarily cruel. I do sometimes shake my head and walk away in frustration and I have been known, on occasion, to throw a @#$#% fishing reel out into the middle of the lake. If I can’t be Ward Cleaver, at least I can say that I have studied on how to be Ward Cleaver. I do try to be calm in a crisis and thoughtful in assigning punishment and loving and supportive whenever I can. But it is hard. And it is trying. And I never seem to live up to my own expectations. So what is a guy who wants to be Ward Cleaver but knows he never will be, supposed to do? I decided to write about it. I decided to think about what has worked for me in life and what hasn’t and to try to write a “Leave it to Beaver script” that I can use as a cue card for my own role as a father. Here is what I have come up with so far. It is in the form of a letter to my kids.

A Letter to my Kids

Advice is almost always unwanted. The rules by which one person lives his life cannot and should not be a template for anyone else’s. Though I have endeavored to teach you all some knowledge and skills which will serve you in the pursuit of what ultimately makes you happy, I hope that you will, at length, find your own course. And while I hope that your course ultimately brings you joy, I hope that you make a wrong turn along the way, as well, for serendipity is not found on the straight and true path and serendipity is worth the occasional inconvenience.

Having said that, I do know that the advice of my elders, what little of it I took, was worth the trouble, too. And their advice which I did not take sometimes looks smarter in the rear view mirror. If I had known then what I know now, I might have done some things differently. I certainly would have saved myself some trouble. While I would not prescribe a direction for your life, I would offer some tips of the trade, if you will, that I have learned the hard way. While I do not expect you to heed them, perhaps you will look back at these words someday and say, gosh, I guess he wasn’t so dumb, after all. So, here goes nothing. My tips for a better life:

1. Cultivate an interest in other people – The world really is a marvelous place and nothing in the world is as interesting as people. I have been interested in people all of my life and I love to learn about them and about their lives. I often approach people in airports and ask them where they are going, where they live, what they do for a living. If they don’t call security (ha ha!) we sometimes have an interesting conversation. I am always amazed at the variety. You might even discover a new way of living from talking to people. This interest can pay off for you personally, also. No present you can bestow on a person is better or more treasured than a simple and sincere interest in them. If you show people that you are interested in them, they will think kindly of you. It is difficult for even the most curmudgeonly old fool to be cruel to someone who shows a genuine interest in him. It is a kindness to bestow this interest on others and it is indeed its own reward.

2. Let people help you – This is related to the advice above. People often think that giving a present will endear them to the recipient. Perversely, I have found that the opposite is actually true. When receiving a gift, many people sense an unwelcome obligation. I am sure you recognize the feeling of disappointment when a gift you have put much time and thought into elicits a guilty tepid response and a hasty, awkward attempt to reciprocate. Reciprocation was not your intention, but sadly, that is what your friend feels. Giving is a nice feeling and something that should be liberally indulged. But accepting gifts or help from others is what actually endears you to them. Bizarrely, it is not easy to learn to accept others charity with equanimity. You will do well to learn this skill, however.

3. Doing better is always a victory- The bad things that happen to us, the choices, and situations and company we find ourselves in usually don’t happen suddenly. They evolve over time and cannot be fixed or changed overnight. But, however far down the wrong road we are, stopping and turning around is a victory. Striving to improve is the victory. The results may not come immediately, but they will follow inevitably. Never despair. There is always something you can do to make things better. And often, that is enough.

4. Be kind – I am not enthusiastic about the teaching of moral obligation. But I have noted from long experience and observation, that certain ways of behaving seem to make life easier and, for lack of a better word, better. Some people call what I am talking about the “Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” I have no problem with that. It seems to me that being kind, especially to those less fortunate than you, is the best and simplest way to make the world we live in a better place. That is good for the people around you and that is good for you. If there is anything I have observed about human nature that I believe to be true, it is that attitude is contagious. If you are kind, others will be kind to you. This is a corollary of my point above about cultivating an interest in other people. I would encourage you, also, to surround yourself with kind people and to avoid the company of cruel people whenever possible. While friendliness and kindness are contagious, you cannot convert everyone with your smile. Simply get away from these people and minimize your exposure to them, for surely cruelty, anger, and bitterness are contagious, too. When you encounter new people, make friends, or even, perish the thought, choose a mate, surround yourself with kind people. If you are dating a new guy or girl watch how he or she treats others, especially weaker people. Observe how he treats the waitress in the restaurant, the clerk at the store, your classmates who are not socially popular. If he is cruel in these situations, he will be cruel to you eventually. You do not need this in your life.

5. Surround yourself with intelligent, talented people- Their company will make you better. They will up your game. You cannot get intellectually lazy if the people around you call you out for such behavior. Don’t shy away from productive and challenging competition. It makes you strong. But avoid petty rivalries and pointless one-upmanship. Make talented friends but avoid the temptation to constantly compare yourself to them. Everyone has his own cross to bear.

That’s about all I have for you at this point. I will keep working on it. It is important to remember that with seven billion people on our planet, no one has figured out the meaning of life or how to live it. Your guess is as good as Einstein’s. What to do is make your own way and never give up. Emerson said  “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Whether you are on someone else’s trail or are blazing your own, if you find yourself on the wrong path (for you) turn around and regret it not. It was a learning experience. And, finally, try to have some fun. I don’t know if this is the advice Ward Cleaver would have given Wally and the Beaver, but, you know what, to hell with him. He’s a fictional character.

Dustin Joy

Deriving an Ought from an Is / My Father Hates Thoreau

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As I look back over the entries I have made in this blog, I am struck by a pattern. I have written about nature and travel and friends and family and gardening and geography and politics and getting abducted by a Chinese submarine while skin diving. Recently, I discovered on my blog setup page that I could tag topics or items of interest to advertise the individual blog posts on the home page. You will see this as what they call a “Tag cloud” along the right side of the home page. When I use a “tag” that word appears in the tag cloud and, if I use that tag on multiple blogs, that tag becomes larger in the tag cloud. As you can see, there is one tag in my tag cloud that sticks out prominently.

It shouldn’t surprise me, I guess, to see philosophy play an important role in my writing. I have always been interested in philosophy in one way or another. When I reflect on the writing I have done, I suspect nearly every blog post should include the tag “Philosophy.” I took courses on the subject in college, of course, and “studied” Mill and Hume and Sartre and Plato and Nietzsche and Freud. But looking further back, I think I have always been interested in what things are and what things mean and, of course, what to do about them. With apologies to David Hume, Philosophy is, to me, “how to derive an ought from an is.” The fun thing about philosophy is that no one agrees about the oughts and in fact, no one even agrees about the is’s.

There is philosophy everywhere, I think, and I suspect nearly everyone is an amateur philosopher. The other fun thing about philosophy is that everyone who does it, even the professional philosophers, are really amateur philosophers.

There is a philosophy to flying airplanes. To an airline pilot that encompasses many things. It involves, in my case, a striving for “smoothness.” That means more than keeping the aircraft straight and level and trying to “grease” the landings. It means running an organized and “effortless-looking” cockpit. It means trying to learn about your crew and their differences so that you can best utilize their strengths and mitigate their weaknesses. It means trying to be on time, when you can, and trying to be safe always. It means making hundreds of judgements a day and dedicating yourself to making them based on the best information available and in a calm, dispassionate way. Will I attain the results my philosophy calls for every day? Of course not. But I will try and I will be guided by my philosophy and I will feel a pang of guilt if I fail to live up to it.

Every profession calls for philosophy. There is no endeavor, I think, so menial or unappreciated that it cannot benefit from a philosophy. Whether you are the President of the United States or the guy that cleans the toilets at O’Hare, it behooves one to have a philosophy and it behooves us all to respect the guy who has one. Our society is greatly enhanced when the guy who cleans the toilets at O’Hare believes in his work, feels valued, and wants to do his job well. We must honor that.

I don’t trust a person who lacks a philosophy. Anyone who has not considered, seriously, the ramifications and meaning of his work is foolhardy at best and a danger at worst. Whether you fly airplanes, sew quilts or erect skyscrapers what you do is important and “requires” an ethic; that ethic gives dignity to your work and makes your life worthwhile.
Since I’m thinking along these lines anyway and, after all, my blog is called stuffiminterestedin, I think I may include, in the next few posts, some more direct thoughts I have had about philosophy and what it means to me. For those of you whose eyes are glazing over already, I promise I won’t be quoting Schopenhauer or Ayn Rand (Eww!) but I may well quote some others who are more easily digested. As always, please feel free to contribute your opinions. I love talking about and thinking about and even arguing about philosophy.

My first post along this line is one I call “My Father Hates Thoreau.” It is an effort to examine “happiness” and how it can be achieved by looking for insights from people I respect.

 

 

My Father Hates Thoreau

My father hates Thoreau. This surprised me at first. All his life, my father has loved the outdoors. He has always been independent minded and is every bit the free-thinker that Thoreau was. He revels sometimes in going against the grain and taking contrary positions. He has always lived a self-reliant, somewhat minimalist lifestyle. Thoreau should have been a perfect fit. But when I, for the first time, loaned him my copy of Walden he returned it later with a complaint. “I thought I would like this,” he said, “but Thoreau was a jerk!”

And so he was. It is hard to read Walden, or some of his other work, without concluding that Henry David Thoreau might have been one of those people you would try to avoid in your daily life. He was obviously arrogant. He was self-absorbed. He was abrupt and direct and tactless. In my father’s apt description, he was a jerk. Yet I still imagined that, looking past Thoreau’s harsh rhetoric of trees, a man like my father would find much philosophical forest to agree with. Having read Walden many times myself, I frequently go away with a sense of longing- longing for simplicity and the courage to embrace Thoreau’s ideas in a material way. I find much truth in that book.
Still, I see why some would not be able to tolerate the haughty style. I think I know just the passage that sealed Thoreau’s fate with my Father. It was in the first chapter, Economy:

Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my mentors said nothing about.

I think Thoreau’s point here is that the world is new for each of us and we must live it ourselves. The young must make their own mistakes, not simply as a reproach to their elders’ advice, but because “their world” has never been experienced by anyone before. This meaning is obscured, though, because Thoreau does seem to carry with him a personal animus to the old that he wears on his sleeve. His words betray an old wound he suffered from an elder.

I’m in both camps on this one. I am pretty sure, having seen what I have seen of this world, that there is no one way to live. I’m glad that’s so. Yet, I find a persuasive case to be made for the value of my elders’ experience. I believe I learned much of value from my father and grandfather. Furthermore, I learned things of great value from Thoreau, who is quite obviously my elder. I would be hard pressed to say that I know, in the present tense, what to do with such advice as these sages gave me. Still, I think it’s accumulation over time helped me to make better decisions, when I heeded it.

Be it Thoreau, or Buddha, or my dad, we come back always to the question of how to live. That is what Walden is about. All literature is about that topic really. All movies are. All paintings, too. Furniture, clothes, the way one man shovels the snow off his driveway, the way a girl braids her hair, these are all answers to the question “How should we live?”

It is reckoned that about 106 Billion people have lived on this planet since Homo Sapiens evolved. Though there has been some fleeting consensus from time to time, no one has definitively answered that question. It seems unlikely that anyone ever will. It is hard to answer that question for yourself. It is trouble when you try to answer it for someone else. Really, all the war and bloodshed we have ever known was about one group trying to tell another group how to live. That’s what religion is about, I think.
So how should we live? Thoreau would say honestly and simply. That seems about as good a piece of advice as we are likely to get. I’m certain my father would add his voice to this. Yet, there are many to whom that advice is obvious anathema. There are people who live amazingly complicated lives and seem to be happy.

If the goal is happiness, we could be democratic about it. Let’s vote on what makes us happy. A natural question presents itself. Is pursuing happiness the best way to live? For purposes of this discussion I will take for granted the fundamental utilitarian principle of Jeremy Bentham that happiness, presumably the most happiness for the greatest number of people, is a worthwhile goal. How to get there is the question. Ignoring Thoreau, I look to my elders here for advice. I have assembled quotes from many renowned people suggesting strategies for achieving happiness. These tend to fall into a number of loosely defined categories which I call: Work, Giving to Others, Family and Friends, Attitude, Contrast, Being Satisfied, Not Being Satisfied, Living Honestly and Sincerely, Serendipity, and I Don’t Know.
Try these axioms on to see if they fit (or perhaps you will not agree to call them axioms).

WORK:

If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.
– Andrew Carnegie

If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator.
– W. Beran Wolfe

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.
– Albert Schweitzer

What is happiness; to be dissolved into something completely great.
– Willa Cather

Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
– Helen Keller

Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
– Benjamin Disraeli

The true way to render ourselves happy is to love our work and find in it our pleasure.
– Francoise de Motteville

To fill the hour — that is happiness.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
– George Burnap

If thou workest at that which is before thee, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract thee, but keeping thy divine part pure, as if thou shouldst be bound to give it back immediately; if thou holdest to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity according to Nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest, thou wilt live happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this.
– Marcus Aurelius

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
– Charles Kingsley
Existence is a strange bargain. Life owes us little; we owe it everything. The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.
– William Cowper

 

GIVING TO OTHERS:

Happiness comes when your work and words are of benefit to yourself and others.
– Buddha

Happiness cannot come from without. It must come from within. It is not what we see and touch or that which others do for us which makes us happy; it is that which we think and feel and do, first for the other fellow and then for ourselves.
– Helen Keller

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
– Tenzin Gyatso
14th Dalai Lama

Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others, cannot keep it from themselves.
– James M. Barrie

There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life — happiness, freedom, and peace of mind — are always attained by giving them to someone else.
– Peyton Conway March

Happiness is not so much in having as sharing. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
– Norman MacEwan

When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter.
– Albert Camus

Love is a condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
– Robert Heinlein

I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.
– Albert Schweitzer

 

 

FAMILY/ FRIENDS:
The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.
– Thomas Jefferson

The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?
– Henry David Thoreau

 

 

ATTITUDE:

Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.
– Groucho Marx

Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
– Abraham Lincoln

The basic thing is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering. And happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than from external factors. If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy.
– Tenzin Gyatso
14th Dalai Lama

People spend a lifetime searching for happiness; looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is the only place they ever needed to search was within.
– Ramona L. Anderson

The greatest part of our happiness depends on our dispositions, not our circumstances.
– Martha Washington

The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.
– John Milton

 

 

CONTRAST:

There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state to another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
– Alexandre Dumas

Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.
– Carl Jung

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
– Carl Jung

Happiness is the interval between periods of unhappiness.
– Don Marquis

 

BEING SATISFIED:

Gratefulness is the key to a happy life that we hold in our hands, because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy — because we will always want to have something else or something more.
– David Steindl-Rast

Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.
– Edward de Bono

The world has to learn that the actual pleasure derived from material things is of rather low quality on the whole and less even in quantity than it looks to those who have not tried it.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.
– Eric Hoffer

The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people.
– Mark Twain

That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest.
– Henry David Thoreau

Being happy doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. It means that you’ve decided to look beyond the imperfections.
-Unknown

A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants, and how much more unhappy he might be than he really is.
– Joseph Addison

The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
– William Saroyan

Even if we can’t be happy, we must always be cheerful.
– Irving Kristol
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
– George Santayana

Happiness comes fleetingly now and then, To those who have learned to do without it and to them only.
-Don Marquis

 

 

NOT BEING SATISFIED:

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
– Bertrand Russell

 

 

LIVING HONESTLY AND SINCERELY:

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
– Albert Camus

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
– Mohandas K. Gandhi

The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live.
– Bertrand Russell

Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.
– Sophocles

 

 

SERINDIPITY:

Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn’t know you left open.
– John Barrymore
Fate often puts all the material for happiness and prosperity into a man’s hands just to see how miserable he can make himself with them.
– Don Marquis
I DON’T KNOW:

It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.
– W. Somerset Maugham

The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase, if you pursue happiness you’ll never find it.
– C. P. Snow

Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
– Nathaniel Hawthorne

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.
– M. Scott Peck

There is no duty we so underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.
– Robert Louis Stevenson

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.
– Anne Frank

Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.
– Mark Twain

Independence is happiness.
– Susan B. Anthony

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
– Albert Schweitzer

It is only possible to live happily ever after on a day to day basis.
– Margaret Bonnano

It’s pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness. Poverty an’ wealth have both failed.
– Kin Hubbard

Why not let people differ about their answers to the great mysteries of the Universe? Let each seek one’s own way to the highest, to one’s own sense of supreme loyalty in life, one’s ideal of life. Let each philosophy, each world-view bring forth its truth and beauty to a larger perspective, that people may grow in vision, stature and dedication.
– Algernon Black

Happiness is a mystery like religion, and it should never be rationalized.
– G. K. Chesterton

 

Sooooooo,
work hard at something that interests you, give of yourself to others, maintain a good attitude, enjoy a change of scenery from time to time, appreciate what you have, and live honestly and sincerely and you will find happiness – if you are lucky. Heck, it’s crazy enough that it just might work.

P.S.. You didn’t really think I was going to tell you the meaning of life, did you?

Dustin Joy (With help from the Dalai Lama, Hellen Keller, and Mark Twain)

A Force of Nature

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The truth is that I don’t know much about happiness. It’s not that I’m a sad person. I’m not, though I love a good wallow in self-pity as much as the next guy. But, I’m starting to see that I’m no closer to a clear definition or strategy at age 46 than I was when I was a kid.

If happiness is a ratio between things planned and things achieved then I think I should be a basket case by now. My vivid childhood fantasies starred me, the boy genius, as a millionaire by thirty, best-selling author and governor of Illinois by thirty-five, and the genial and beloved, yet tough as nails, President of the United States by forty-five.

Just to keep you up to date I’m a wee bit short in the millionaire department, and if I’m going to be President on my schedule I’m going to have to crack that time travel nut pretty soon. I don’t drive a jaguar, I’m not a good public speaker, and I’ve written no best sellers to date.

Why I’m not a basket case (or perhaps I flatter myself) remains, to me, a mystery. Maybe life’s compensation for dashed hopes is a comforting drowsiness of the spirit that falls over one in middle age. About the time that famous athletes and movie stars become younger than us we begin to make adjustments to reality. Our goals become more reasonable, perhaps. I may not be a millionaire, but maybe I could afford to retire someday. I don’t have a Lamborghini, but I don’t have to drive a bucket of rust, anymore. I’m not married to Claudia Schiffer, but my beautiful and brilliant wife loves me and she’s still here after twenty-four years of my ridiculousness. To sum up life at this juncture I would have to quote the Barenaked Ladies. “I feel fine enough, I guess, considering everything’s a mess.”

What troubles me now, is not my own happiness, or lack of it, but the fact that I am responsible for the happiness of others. I guess I have been culpable in some vague way for my wife’s happiness or unhappiness for years. But, she is a big girl and in most key metrics more stable and sure-footed than me. The problem is these kids. I have discovered, in my new found adulthood, that I have a persistent and powerful desire to have my kids be happy. Unfortunately, I have no clue how to accomplish this and my efforts thus far have backfired worse that a 1972 Pinto in need of a tune-up. In my typical self-absorption I assumed that what made me happy as a kid would make my kids happy. For those of you taking notes this is not necessarily the case.

When I was a child I loved the company of adults. I needed, at some visceral level, the approval and recognition of these authority figures. The constant stroking of my little ego by my parents and more often by my grandparents made me conclude, apparently in error, that I was really something. My Grandparent’s apparent belief that I was a talented artist, a gifted writer, and an all around boy genius met with my approval from the start. The fact that they doted on me and showered me with laurels seemed to me no more than I deserved. I was going to be the millionaire President. Already, the powers that be (the adults) had recognized greatness in me and were giving me my just rewards.

What they had actually recognized in me (and liked, I might add) was obsequiousness. I was a more subtle Eddie Haskell and my earnest interest in and imitation of their views and values met with their approval from the start. I was able to validate their own notions about what a good boy should be. I sat and watched Lawrence Welk with them, for goodness sake. My cousins, who did not stoop to such obvious flattery, must have found my Grandparent’s favoritism alienating and unfair. I can only say that my cousins were right. In my own defense, I was just a kid.

Now I find, as an adult with kids of my own, that my daughter is a very different child than I was. She is headstrong where I was pliant. She is determined, where I was malleable. She is as eager to assert her own will as I was eager to please. She flies at the world with fury and righteousness. She speaks truth to power. I love her so much but I don’t always understand her.

It is well known that people, at a certain age, begin to live vicariously though their children. I never thought that would happen to me when my daughter was four. At this tender age she did something I have been too scared to do all my adult life. While we were visiting the Library in Muscatine, Iowa on May 5 2003 a local band had blocked off the street and were warming up with a few numbers in preparation for the Cinco de Mayo celebration. The avenue in front of the Library had been roped off for the street dance and nearly a whole city block was empty with pedestrians standing outside the roped area watching the mariachi band playing on the back of a flatbed semi trailer at the head of the street. Before we could stop her my daughter ducked under the rope and ran out into the vast expanse of empty pavement and proceeded to dance. My wife was chagrined and worried as our first born writhed and twisted to the Latin beat and to the gratification of a hundred bystanders. I will now admit that my weak paternal response was not fear, nor embarrassment, but sheer jealousy. I would have given any amount to possess the courage and lack of self-consciousness that celebration of joy required. In her exuberant dance I could see the shortcomings of a life lived on the safe side. I decided I could do worse than live vicariously through this little force of nature.

Now she has purple hair; or is it green today? And she lectures her Republican grandfather about gay marriage and a woman’s right to choose. She is brilliant and tough and unyielding and witty and clever and manipulative and logical and emotional and she loves little kids and she is kind to old people and she gives money to the poor and I watched her warm a little kitten’s cold, lifeless body in her hands and bring it back to life. And she doesn’t give a damn what you think about any of that.

Thinking back on our time as parents my wife and I say to each other, “what are we going to do with her.” I still don’t know. But the idea I’ve come up with lately is this; I’m going to encourage her. My daughter is not me. I desperately want her to be happy, and I know that butting heads is not going to be an easy path. I can only assume that she will get knocked down and bloodied as often as she does the knocking and bloodying.

But I have no monopoly on wisdom. Most of us are able to see the world through our own rose-colored glasses and we accommodate ourselves to the necessities of living. Some people, though, see the world as it actually is and feel a compulsion to tackle it and wrestle it to the ground kicking and screaming. My daughter is of the latter school. It is her nature as surely as grass is green and sky is blue. I have always been a mutable fellow. Why should I fight against this force of nature. I might as well be on the winning team. I love my daughter so much. If she has to wrestle the world, I aim to help her. I hope she puts a full nelson on the son-of-a-bitch.

Memory

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I have sometimes heard people say, “I will remember that if I live to be 100.” It’s one of those statements that breeze out the mouth and disappear into the air without meaning much. Or, somebody might say, “I will never forget the time …..” Again, the listener, with no prior investment in the story may or may not retain it for five minutes. But it is doubtless the teller does remember, with a vividness that the original event may have lacked.

We all remember things that, indeed, we will remember if we live to be 100. Some are remembered because of their novelty, or due to some physical impact which left us shaken, or elated, or ….. name your emotion. Strong ones are remembered. This, according to the Fundamentals of Instructing, a flight instructor’s handbook, is called the Law of Effect. We remember those things which, for us, have a strong emotional impact, usually pleasant, but nearly as often unpleasant.

We also remember things which are vivid. Flight instructors call this phenomenon the Law of Intensity. A student learns more easily how to fly an airplane by flying an airplane than by an equivalent period of time reading a book about flying an airplane.

The Law of Primacy is another which effects our learning and remembering. It says, “Things learned first create a strong impression in the mind that is difficult to erase. For the instructor, this means that what is taught must be right the first time.” This, too, is common sense. We see it in ourselves daily as we continue to do a thing incorrectly despite understanding our error. After all, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

We remember things well which are nearest us in time. This is the Law of Recency. It is elementary that one remembers a magazine article that one read yesterday better than the details of a book read last August. Memory, to be sure, is a volatile substance and it tends to evaporate and diminish with time.

That is all well and good and we are all familiar with these phenomena. Having said that, however, one is compelled to observe that not all memory is like that. There are indeed episodes in our lives that we will remember with incredible detail until we die and nobody, not even the almighty and intrepid flight instructor, can explain why. There seem to be outliers, memories that stay with us no matter when they happened, no matter what they consist of. One assumes that they follow the Laws of Learning in some complicated way that is not clear. It can only be said that the particular anecdote in question flips a switch in the mind that all the others have not. Some very vivid memories fade with time. Others, which seem to have less import, are retained throughout life.

When I was seven I broke my finger. Actually my good friend struck the blow which broke it with a little shovel as we were digging together in a sand pile. I retain the scar to this day. This experience should live prominently among the memories of my childhood. Why? Well, for one thing, it was presumably painful. Not only would the initial blow have hurt but there were complications with setting the bone. After weeks in a pseudo-cast the bone was not healing properly and had to be reset with a metal pin protruding from the end of my finger. All this would seem significantly vivid and emotional to trigger the Laws of Intensity and Effect. But I remember very little of the experience and much of the detail I do remember may have been supplied by my parents. I don’t remember getting chopped by a shovel and I don’t remember two hospitalizations. Granted, they are there in the little gray cells, but they are foggy, shrouded, and patchy. Oddly, though, I remember in great detail a trifling episode which happened concurrently involving my third grader teacher.

Mrs. Spence had sent me to the office with a note of some kind, not concerning me. Instead of delivering the note promptly, I got sidetracked and spent considerable time talking to my second grade teacher, Mrs. Pinger, in the library. When I did not return with the expected response Mrs. Spence came looking for me. I will always remember the words she used when she finally found me. She said, “Mr. Joy, I have a bone to pick with you.” There are a number of theories I have developed to explain the retention of this meaningless experience for forty years:

1. I had never been addressed as Mr. Joy before, it was a novelty.

2. I had never heard the term “bone to pick” before. Perhaps I took it to be a more menacing phrase than it actually is and remembered the incident with fear.

3. It may have been the first time I got “in trouble” with a teacher. Perhaps the reproach of an authority figure, whose approval I sought was traumatic enough to etch the incident in my memory.

4. Perhaps my undeveloped social sense had for the first time recognized a crack in the previously monolithic world of adults. I definitely understood that Mrs. Spense was not only angry at me, but also at Mrs. Pinger. This may have constituted a remarkable discovery.

All these theories contain possibilities, but none seems more substantial than having your finger mashed by a spade and being put to sleep in an operating room. Certainly the event meant nothing to anyone else. Mrs. Spense, if she remembered me even, would never recall the incident in the hundred years that I will retain it.

If you think I’m exaggerating a bit, consider this. My Grandmother often related to me the story of an insult she fancied had been made against her by a teacher in high school. That would have been about 1935. Until dementia overtook her in her nineties she could describe in exacting detail the stitches her home economics teacher made her cut out of a garment she was sewing. That was almost eighty years ago. People who can’t remember their own blood type will have such incidents seared into their memories until they shuffle off this mortal coil. Sometimes these trivial incidents are all that are left for an Alzheimer’s patient when even the names of their loved ones have faded.

Memory is a fickle student. Try as I might I cannot retain certain facts that would serve me well in my career. Yet I’m sure that on my deathbed I will be able to sing the theme song from Gilligan’s Island. Neuroscientists tell us that it is possible to train the memory for improved performance. Techniques exist to organize information in the mind for recall of facts, figures, and even faces. The resilience of Gilligan’s theme song tells us that this can happen naturally. If one person could demonstrate the focus required to replace the cobwebs and augment the trivia of daily life with useful and pertinent information he or she would be the literal King of the World. In the meantime, “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip…”

Postscript: I am very interested in these memory conundrums. I would be interested in your experience, also. Please feel free to share in the comments section of this article any odd experiences you might have had with memory (insignificant incidents which were burned into your psyche, or vivid and impactful events which didn’t make the cut.) And, if you want, speculate why this might be. Thanks for reading.

A Step Forward

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I do not intend for this website to be a political blog. While I’m sure that I have already betrayed some of my leanings, I do not intend to make a habit of beating my readers over the head with my ideology. Still, today I cannot resist celebrating a piece of news which made me very happy- the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling on gay marriage. I do not mind talking about it here because I regard this remarkable step forward not as a political thing, but as a victory for kindness and tolerance and dignity and indeed civilization.

Four years ago, when it became legal in Illinois, I had the honor of participating in the ceremony of civil union between my great friend and his long-time partner. My wife, our kids, and a small group of their friends and family assembled at the courthouse on a nice day in July. It was a lovely day, and it was a lovely and dignified event. As they offered their vows, their little boy stood with them. They exchanged rings and said the words that we all know by heart and we signed papers signifying our witness to the event.

And then we went home and they went home and began the commonplace work and extraordinary joy of married life together. They have built a wonderful life in the intervening years, making a home, raising two bright and outgoing boys, advancing their careers, struggling through some serious medical issues, and doing all of those things which my wife and I have done and which all married couples who stay together must do.

And I remember thinking as we drove home from the courthouse that day that I could not understand how anyone could object to the thing we had all just been a part of. I, who want to think the best of people and their motivations, decided that anyone who objected to this ceremony simply did not understand it. Any kind and thoughtful and, yes, Christian person could not oppose this wonderful thing except through ignorance of it.

We all fear the unknown. We all are apprehensive about things which seem foreign to us. But I am here to tell you, as someone who has seen and participated in this joyful event, that gay marriage is not scary. It is not weird or foreign or disrespectful. It is the most normal thing in the world to want to build a life with the person you love.

This is a fundamentally good thing. It is good for families and it is good for children and it is good for our society. It is fair and right to afford the same opportunity for joy (or misery, as a divorced friend reminds me) to gay couples that the rest of us take for granted. And it is, I think, another step in the long march of civilization. It demonstrates that we continue to create a kind and humane society in the United States where dignity is respected and diversity is honored.

To all who are afraid of gay marriage I tell you that the earth will not fall out of its orbit because of this. The economy will not crash and our republic will not be brought to its knees. What will happen is that there will be more happiness in the world and more dignity and more understanding. And, wonderfully, there will be one more group of our friends and neighbors who can move from the category “them” into the category “us.” To me, that is what the United States is supposed to be.

Dustin Joy

Weeds

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My Little Prairie Plot — Coneflowers, Bergamots, Queen-Anne’s Lace, Black-Eyed Susans, and many others.

When one considers nature the dominant color is green. It is the floras of the world that provide the stage for the dramas of their more animate cousins. Unless you live on a polar ice cap or the remotest reaches of the desert the primary backdrop to all your activities consists of plants. Their presence is so ubiquitous that we generally do not even notice them. We take them for granted. Plants do not capture our attention easily. Until a tree falls on our house or poison ivy plays its cruel trick upon us we mostly see the world of plants as a green blur. They are not cuddly like puppies; they do not speak, bark, or purr. They are as indifferent to our existence as we to theirs. To us they are, as a group, Weeds. And yet without their activities we would perish. They feed us, clothe us, provide us with oxygen to breath, and lift our spirits with their brilliant flowers. So why weeds? A few years ago my daughter gave me something to think about on this topic.

I was spraying musk thistles in the little pasture south of my house. This import from the old world has invaded our farm with a vengeance. Like most thistles this one is characterized by spiny leaves. Unlike many other thistles the musk thistle also contains spiny bracts around the circumference of its purple flower head. It is truly a marvel of plant evolution; a fully armored plant. None molest the musk thistle without sustaining injury himself. Even if one succeeds in grasping the thistle with enough force to uproot it, it sacrifices part of itself for ultimate survival. Its long taproot inevitably breaks off, like a dandelion, at the surface of the soil. The plant withers and dies, but the taproot sends up another shoot and starts all over again. It is the thistle’s spiny defenses that make him unwelcome in the yard, and his tenacity that wear out his welcome in the garden. And though tenacity is a virtue in human beings we have little admiration for the obvious pinnacle of evolution represented by the thistle. My daughter made me “see” the thistle that day in the pasture as I was spraying them with Roundup.

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The Musk Thistle – A Fully Armored Plant

“Whatcha doin Daddy?” she asked as she ran across the pasture to observe me. I told her I was spraying weeds. “Those are thistles,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Yeah,” I said, “I’m spraying thistles.” “Are thistles weeds Daddy?” “Well yeah, I guess so,” I said. “Are dandelions weeds?” “Well yeah, I guess they are.” “Are roses weeds?” “Well, no, roses aren’t weeds.” “But Daddy, you sprayed those roses the other day.” “I never sprayed roses, did I?” “Those pretty roses down the trail.”

I had to think about it a minute. Then I remembered. I had sprayed roses; multi-flora roses. Multi-flora rose is a pernicious weed introduced by farmers as a natural fence. Good intentions soon led to problems as multi-flora rose galloped over the countryside filling pastures with impenetrable thickets of thorns. Soon farmers were fighting a hopeless battle to undo the damage. Today this pretty white relative of domesticated roses is a fact of life – a highly evolved, highly successful weed.”

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A Teasel – Evolution at Work Again

“So, Daddy,” she said, “What’s a weed.” She had me there. No matter what ground rules I laid down in my mind to separate flowers from weeds there was always an exception. Let’s try a few:

Thistle – Weed, right. Even though their seeds are valued by birds for food.

Dandelion – Weed. Yet they are quite pretty . You can make wine from them or use their greens for salad.

Jimson Weed – Even named Weed, must be a weed. But few cultivated blooms rival the beautiful flower of this tough weed.

Corn – Ha. Ha. That’s not a weed. But ask a farmer with a soybean field full of volunteer corn. Farmers spend millions of dollars a year to defeat the dastardly weed – Corn.

So what are we to conclude. A weed is merely a plant growing where it is not wanted. There is no other difference.

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Chicory – A Weed, Right?

My father once asked a nursery owner for chicory seeds. “Why that’s just a weed,” came back the quick reply. In a sense it is. Chicory grows along most of the roads in our area. It is tenacious, pushing its way up though gravel beds that other plants cannot begin to breach. For a brief span in the Summer it seems that chicory is everywhere. Of course the plants are there for much longer. It is only when the brilliant cornflower blue blooms unfold that one takes notice of chicory. The way they light up the roadways at that time of the year you would think the Chamber of Commerce had hired a landscaper. But the chicory offers up this service for free, no contracts, no bids. It only requires the use of some unused space for a few weeks. Not a bad deal. If you don’t mind doing business with a weed.

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Some of “My” Compass Plants

In my part of Rock Island County I have identified 5 patches of Compass Plant. These patches represent a few tiny islands in the vast sea of corn and beans that Illinois now represents. They are minute representations of what Illinois used to be. The vast rolling prairies which gave Illinois its nickname, “The Prairie State,” and its fertile soil are reduced now to these roadside refuges. They have not been spared on purpose. Their savior is the County road crew’s restrictive budget. They can only afford to mow these roadsides once or twice a year. The compass plants spend two months building long notched leaves and finally, in mid July start growing a tall vertical flower stalk, sometimes 7 feet tall. On the top forms a series of pretty sunflower looking blooms. Then, just as they are forming their seeds the road crew or local farmers mow the road banks. The compass plants in the patches, along with the black eyed susans, wild bergamots, and teasels start over, pushing up a new crop of green leaves and finally, a less robust flower stalk. Smaller, and shorter, this new flower stalk sometimes sets new blooms about the time of the second mowing. In our area that is all the road crew can afford. It has not been enough to obliterate the tiny islands of prairie, but they are not getting any bigger. Since I have been watching them, about ten years, they seem to shrink a little each year. A couple of the patches eluded the mowers several times because they are on steep slopes. But about every other year they too get cropped by some diligent public servant who is justly proud of his skill, precariously edging the tractor up until it teeters on two wheels.

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Compass Plant Refuge – It’s too steep to mow

Please don’t think I am disparaging these workers. Until a few years ago I didn’t see the compass plants, either, even though I drove past them hundreds of times. I didn’t see them because they were not a personality to me. They were part of the blurry green backdrop of my life; grass and weeds. They became real to me, individuated, because of a book I read by Mr. Aldo Leopold; A Sand County Almanac. Since reading the chapter called A Prairie Birthday I have learned to see many different plants that were once just weeds to me. I have learned to know something of their habits.

Knowledge of something brings a sense of ownership and I now own some of these beautiful plants even though they are on another man’s property. In this way we all own the natural bounty around us. Sometimes I wonder how I will feel if “my” compass plants finally succumb. I suppose I will feel sad, but that is not the true emotion. I will feel robbed. That is what this ownership of nature is all about. That is the only way to save a piece of nature in this busy world. We must own it in our hearts and see its destruction as a violation of something inside of us. People who mow compass plants or build high rise condos on top of wetlands are not to blame for their actions. To them they destroy nothing because they see nothing to destroy. In their minds they are building. They do not own the nature around them because they do not see it. The challenge of all environmentalists must be to help people see. We must share our sense of the beauty around us and when other people begin to see the world around them as a personality, they will care, and they will save it. As Leopold said, “We grieve for what we know.”

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Dutchman’s Breeches in woods on our farm

Part of our farm today is a nature preserve by virtue of its inconvenience. Ditches and wet patches and narrow necks of fields are too troublesome to farm, especially as machinery gets bigger and bigger for efficiency. Most wild areas remaining on Earth today are such. They have not been farmed over, grazed over, paved over, or drained only because it is too hard to do so at this time. Such areas will continue to shrink, as they have for generations. Inaccessibility is slowly overcome by technology and the economic feasibility of such development increases as more easily developed areas are exhausted.

When I fly over America I see this slow, relentless process wherever I go. I notice it in North Carolina, a state once almost completely forested in the western parts. Now, as you fly into Raleigh or Greensboro you still see big expanses of trees but you also see unexpected “cutouts” throughout these forests where housing developers have bulldozed the “big trees”, built houses, then planted “little trees” in the yards.

When you fly over West Virginia you are amazed by the endless, rolling mountains covered uniformly by dark green forest. I have sometimes said that if you could pound West Virginia out flat it would be as big as Alaska because there is not a flat spot in it. But I have to revise that a bit because when you fly over this amazing pristine maze of mountains and valleys today there are flat spots. There are barren, “dirty-looking” areas where entire mountaintops have been bulldozed down into the adjacent ravines. This is called, aptly enough, mountaintop-removal coal mining and from 37,000 feet it sticks out like a sore thumb in West Virginia.

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A Weed? – Purple Coneflower with bumblebee

When you fly over what used to be the austere grandeur of the vast western plains of Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming you are struck by how the landscape, even again from 37,000 feet, looks geometrical; man-made. And, as it turns out, it is. the terrain in western Kansas and eastern Colorado is now made up of vast circles; center pivot irrigation systems, dotted with hundreds of rectangular gravel pads; oil and gas wells.

For now, midwest farms, and the southeast forest, and the hills of West Virginia, and the plains of Colorado are still a haven for the wild animals and plants that once made up all of America. Despite the necessity of feeding the human race, and lighting our homes, and fueling our cars and, yes airplanes, we still have space left for plants and animals and even beautiful vistas. We might think of these things, and value them, in the same way we do these other crops and commodities.

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Weeds in Winter – My Prairie

We harvest from them a crop as valuable as corn or soybeans or coal or oil. These places have value because they lift our spirits, refresh our souls, connect us to the past, and renew our connection to the Earth. We harvest this crop not once in the Fall but continuously throughout four seasons. It is ours to harvest even though we did not plant it. It is not diminished no matter how often it is reaped.

If you love the land, if protecting it is your goal, there are only two possible avenues to pursue. You can individually or collectively buy land and manage it for wildlife. The efforts of organizations like Ducks Unlimited and the Nature Conservancy are prime examples of the success of this approach. Such a process, is however, obviously limited. There is too much land and too few resources available for such efforts.

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Queen Anne’s Lace (Wild Carrot) – A Pretty Immigrant

The other choice is to teach people who own land to love it and respect it as we do. It need not be a hard sale. Most of the people, farmers and ranchers, who dislike environmentalists, don’t hate the environment. There is a reason farmers live in the country. There is a reason most of them would shrivel and die in the city. It is precisely because farmers love the land that they choose to be farmers and live on the land. And the farmers I know, like most people, will do what they can to protect the land if they know how.

Each one of you will find nature to love and nature to nurture no matter where you live. The other day in the heart of St. Louis I stood beside a drainage ditch which had been built to receive wastewater from a parking lot. In the wide ditch I counted some 50 species of wild flowers, numerous trees, countless insects, 4 ducks, and a muskrat. How many people drive by this nature preserve every day? I do not know. But most of those people do not “see” it, even if they see it. The amazing variety of floras and faunas that make up our world are everywhere. If we notice them, and take notice of them, we go a long way toward insuring their continued survival. That includes weeds.

Postscript: All these pictures were taken by me in and around a little native prairie plot that I planted about seven or eight years ago. It has been a great pleasure to watch it develop. For the first couple of years I saw mostly grasses (blue stems) and then some of the more robust forbs (black-eyed susans, coneflowers.) Finally, after a couple of years I saw compass plants growing in the plot. Their germination requires winter temperatures and abrasion (some prairie plants even require burning to benefit seed germination.) In what may seem a contradiction I have had to “weed” my plot from time to time to eliminate persistent and successful invaders like giant ragweed and musk thistle which threatened to “take over”. I am glad to say that as the plot has matured it has, on its own, eliminated the contradiction. I almost never have to weed anymore since the “native” plants now form an equilibrium that doesn’t exactly keep the invaders out but holds them to a level where they are simply another part of the community. And I have decided to welcome some local “invaders” who are not strictly “native prairie” species simply because I like them (common milkweed and Queen Anne’s Lace.) This is what I mean when I say that everyone can find nature to love and nature to nurture in their own lives, be it a prairie restoration project or building a bat house to put in their yard.