It occurred to me today that I sometimes have good reasons, but at other times, I do not.

I’ve got my reasons for believing in the things that I believe in. Some of those reasons –that I have for believing in the things that I believe in– are very good reasons. Some of the things I believe in, I don’t have very good reasons at all for believing in those things.

When we think about why it is that different people believe the different things that they do, everybody has their reasons. I have a hard time believing that there’s anybody who believes in something without having a reason –no matter how insignificant that reason might be– so the question is what makes something a good reason to believe and what makes something a bad reason to believe.

For example, I can believe that the Chicago Bears are the best football team in the NFL. As I’m writing this post, they are beating the Carolina Panthers pretty soundly, but I probably could get a bunch of my friends together and beat the Panthers, so there’s that. Anyway, if I decided to believe that the Chicago Bears are the best team in the NFL, I would have to put up an argument about their record, which is currently 4 wins and 1 loss. Doesn’t sound too bad, right?!?! But, the combined records of all of the teams that the Bears have beaten this season is 4 wins and 15 losses, so someone could very easily argue that winning for the Bears, so far, has been a matter of succeeding over crappier teams, which isn’t necessarily a ringing endorsement of their dominance.

But, I have a different reason for thinking that the Chicago Bears are the best team in the NFL.

When I was in the fifth grade, the Bears won the Super Bowl, and my friends and I played out on the playground, pretending to be the ’85 Chicago Bears. My friend Chad was always Jim McMahon. My other friend Derek usually pretended to be Richard Dent. The rest of us would take turns pretending to be Walter Payton, or Refrigerator Perry, or Mike Singletary, or Jim Covert, or any one of the other players from that team, as we played out on the playground, throwing the football around.

We would do the Super Bowl Shuffle together on that playground.

When I look back on that memory, with all of the fondness that we often have for our childhood memories, it warms my heart; and that’s why I think they’re the best football team in the NFL.

Now, whether or not my emotional experiences, attached to the Bears in 1985, make them the best football team in the NFL, we could put together any interesting debate on either side of the assertion. In the end, though, we have to look at certain reasons for believing certain things as better than other reasons.

* * *

If I went around and told everyone that Doritos are the best snack chip and that no other snack chip can even compare with Doritos, someone would eventually ask me about my reasons for believing in the superiority of Doritos.

If I said that Doritos are the best snack chip because they are purple, and no other snack chip is, that would raise some eyebrows. Why? Because Doritos are not purple.

Believing that Doritos are the best because they are purple is a bad reason for believing in them. It’s not even true.

So, via this example, we’ve illustrated that there are bad reasons for believing in something. That then must mean that there are good reasons for believing something. What reasons could someone have for believing that Doritos are the best snack chip?

What if I told you that more Doritos are sold in the United States, more than any other snack chip? Would that be convincing to you?

Is that even true? How would you know?

I wrote my Master’s Degree thesis on a philosophical movement called relativism, and the effects that relativism is beginning to have in the classrooms of America. Unfortunately, at the time, it wasn’t well received by the university and its faculty in the Education Department, mostly because it tends to be a politically-charged topic. I actually had to argue with that university in order to eventually receive my Master’s Degree.

Relativism, roughly put (according to the philosophers at the University of Stanford), is “the view that truth and falsity, right and wrong, standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification, are products of differing conventions and frameworks of assessment and that their authority is confined to the context giving rise to them.”

In layman’s terms, this means that truth is not absolute. All statements of truth become relative to the person that makes them and the context in which they make them.

In a relativistic society, there are no good reasons for believing, and there are no bad reasons for believing. If the Bears never won another football game, ever again, I could go on believing that they are the best football team in the NFL, because –FOR ME– they are.

Does that sound right to you? Can we agree that there are good reasons for believing and then there are bad reasons for believing?

* * *

The idea that relativism is a plague on our society is a topic that I’ve discussed in previous posts, so I’m not going to continue to beat that particular dead horse.

Rather, I would like to make a final statement about the reasons that we are all choosing to believe the things that we believe.

I don’t know if it’s just me, or if anyone else is realizing this as well, but I’ve had a number of conversations with people who really do believe certain things, for the most ridiculous reasons out there. Whether that tendency is one of the unintended results of relativism, or whether people really think that it’s okay to believe what they do without a leg to stand on, the problem is that beliefs will normally lead to actions. What we decide is true in our hearts will cause us to behave in certain ways; if our beliefs are not properly founded, we end up with actions that are not properly founded, either.

I guess what I’m suggesting is a certain path for our lives. On that path, there are plenty of possible choices that we can all make that keep us on the path, while allowing for a diversity of options. But, when we start believing things without having any good reasons for doing so, what we’ve done is that we’ve purchased lies. Then, those lies affect our behaviors and our actions. Then, we end up off the path.

Check your reasoning, ladies and gentlemen.

It occurred to me today that we’re usually better off when we get it from the horse’s mouth.

So, something interesting happened to me the other day at work. A couple of my coworkers got involved in an argument, and one of them –in an attempt to win the argument– told the other one that I said something that I never actually said.

This story, told by my coworker about me, could be described as a canard. A canard is an unfounded story.

More specifically, Teacher A was using a piece of technology in the school district in an unconventional way, and had been doing so for some time. Teacher B told Teacher A that they ought not be doing that with the technology. When the argument ensued, Teacher B eventually told Teacher A that I’d told Teacher B that what Teacher A was doing was wrong.

Now, officially, I did not have, nor do I currently have, a problem with what Teacher A was doing. In fact, I’ve known for a few weeks that Teacher A was doing this particular thing with the technology, and I personally thought it was kind of ingenious, what they were doing. Why Teacher B thought it was their business to tell Teacher A what to do, or what not to do, with the technology, is beyond me.

The fact that Teacher B involved my name in this argument that they were having with Teacher A created a couple of different problems for me.

First off, Teacher A felt that, having heard from Teacher B that I had a certain opinion on what Teacher A was doing, it was necessary to come and find me –> to talk to me and to ask whether or not I had a problem with what they were doing.

Which, of course, I didn’t.

So, after the ordeal, Teacher A came to find me. Teacher A pulled me aside and said, “Did you say this?” To which I replied, “Of course not.”

But, I thought I saw something in the eyes of Teacher A that said to me that Teacher A wasn’t quite sure whether or not I was being dishonest, or whether it was Teacher B who’d been dishonest.

Frankly, the whole thing was ridiculous.

Mostly, it angered me.

I was made to look a certain way by someone who cast me in a particular light, in order to win an argument over this other individual. If I’d been misrepresented for a good reason, I may have been less upset, but to use me as a pawn in a petty argument made things even worse.

What Teacher B didn’t count on was that Teacher A and I have a pretty solid relationship. Teacher A knew enough to come straight to me, to get the necessary information from the horse’s mouth.

When we had that conversation, Teacher A didn’t mention the name of Teacher B. Part of me wishes that I knew who it was that was putting words in my mouth. However, when I told Teacher A that everything was fine and that I didn’t have any issues with what was going on, that seemed to be the end of things.

The other problem that this created was that it got me to second-guessing myself. I was thinking, for the rest of the day after this happened, whether or not I’d ever said to anyone, even to Teacher B, anything that could have been construed as disapproval of the actions of Teacher A. I couldn’t remember having done that, at any point, but I also wondered whether or not I’d said something to someone that could have been misunderstood, mistaken for my disapproval.

In short, this incident made me more aware of what I say to people, and how they might interpret what I say.

* * *

What this really got me to thinking about was God, and modern, western hemisphere Christianity, and the human tendency to judge others.

If you want to get something ‘from the horse’s mouth’ in Christianity, you have to go to the Bible. God doesn’t answer questions these days in an audible way –at least not in my experience– so reading the Bible in order to understand what He has to say is very important.

Especially when you have Christians, and others, running around, claiming that God has said certain things that He’s never said.

Why do Christians, and others, do this? To win arguments with other people about what those other people are doing, how they’re behaving.

Sounding familiar, yet?

Many times, Christians, and others, won’t even come close to accurately representing what God has said on a particular subject. They are so far off that anyone with a slight knowledge of the Bible would recognize their inaccuracies. Other times, Christians, and others, misrepresent God by suggesting that His utter focus is on something that the Bible only really mentions in passing. Or worse, they’ll use bits and pieces of the Bible, out of context, when the entire landscape of the Bible says something else entirely.

It’s unfortunately the case that many Christians, and others, are invoking God in their arguments with the people around them in ways that cast God in a light that isn’t very precise.

Anyone without a significant knowledge of the Bible should either 1) just stop trying to use God to win arguments about people’s behavior, or 2) get to a place where their understanding of the Bible is so significant that they can then accurately represent what God has said to others.

Christians, and others, need to stop playing the God card to try to affect the behavior of other people. Why do we do this? Is another person’s behavior, and God’s possible issues with that behavior, any of my business? I don’t know about other Christians, but I have enough of a mountain to climb, dealing with my own behavioral issues.

Aha! Maybe that’s it! Maybe some Christians are so judgmental because it distracts them from the real issues they should be solving… their own!

The other side of this situation is that people who aren’t sure about what God has said on a particular topic do have a place to go. If someone has misrepresented God to you, to try to win an argument with you, just go to the Bible. Read it and understand what there is to know. It’s not nearly as intimidating as you might think. Avoid the King James Version, and you’ll be surprised how approachable God’s Word actually is.

Finally, when I think about how angry I was the other day to hear that I was being misrepresented by someone, to win an argument with someone else, I started thinking to myself that God, who is being misrepresented thousands of times every day, must be furious with those people who are doing this evil work.

What if I’ve done this? What if I’ve tried to get people to behave a certain way by playing the God card on them? What if He’s mad at me for having done so?

Maybe it would be better for all of us if we spent less time condemning the behavior of the people around us, and more time with our mouths shut.

It occurred to me today that we’re going the wrong way.

I posted the first part of this two-parter on Monday morning, but I actually finished writing it Sunday afternoon. Not more than a couple of hours after that, on Sunday evening, my family and I went to our evening church service. During the sermon that evening, the pastor used the term ‘radical’, and I snickered to myself.

But, as I got to thinking about it, I started thinking about the very early church –> Jesus and the disciples and the early converts following The Way. As I was thinking about them, during the church service –totally not paying as much attention to the sermon as I should have been– I realized that the early church probably had a bit of a ‘radical’ feel to it.

Sitting in the church on Sunday evening, I was left to try to reconcile that understanding with what I’d written, with what I’d come to understand, about radicals.

More on that in a moment…

* * *

The voices that we listen to, in the world around us, have a way of convincing us that things are a certain way. When ALL WE LISTEN TO are those certain voices, we lose touch with reality, because reality contains many, many voices — many, many points of view. Radicalization is the process by which people come to adopt extreme positions on political or social issues, and that process usually is the result of the programming that we allow into our minds.

Maybe, it’s talk radio. That used to be a big one, and I suspect that it still is for some people, but even bigger these days is probably social media. I’ve had a hard time with that one, in particular, over the last several months. When it comes to social media, the voices that we hear tend to be the voices of our choosing, and then we end up with slanted points of view that don’t reflect a reality where other perspectives are also valid and logical.

Wherever the voices comes from, and whatever they tend to tell us, we have to understand that they only represent a small section of available opinions on any particular subject. If we aren’t getting information from a variety of different sources, then we end up becoming radicalized. The worst part of this process, I think, is that it is happening to people, all over the world, and they don’t even realize it.

It’s a loss of perspective, really, on such a large scale that it carries us away from relatively moderate viewpoints, to the land of the radical thoughts.

* * *

During the immediate period of time after September 11th, 2001, I remember that we, as a nation, started to learn about the Taliban, and about Al Qaeda,  and about ISIS. In fact, I remember that there were many Muslims –peaceful, patriotic, America-loving Muslims, living in America in the fall of 2001, who were starting to get stereotypically lumped in with these extremist groups, quite unfairly.

I remember feeling badly for those Americans who were being treated unfairly because we, as a country, didn’t understand enough about them. No group of American citizens should ever suffer because of the ignorance of the masses; unfortunately, however, this tends to be a large part of the American historical narrative. 

News coverage of these radical terrorist organizations, during the first decade of the twenty-first century, skyrocketed, as Americans came to understand that these extremist groups were indoctrinating their members, that they were being radicalized, and that such radicalization could lead people to board a plane with the intentions of committing terrible acts of violence against others, and it could lead them to sacrifice their own lives in the process. I remember that it wasn’t too long ago when ISIS was recording the beheadings of American citizens and posting the videos on-line, to the disgust of the U.S. of A., but also for the pleasure of their own extremist membership.

America was outraged when this was happening.

But just look at what’s happened to us.

A decade ago, we were thinking about how horrible it was that these extremists were poisoning our world. Since then, we’ve started growing these extremists, these radicals, right in our own backyard. The difference between the terrorist extremist groups that would attack us from the outside, and the terrorist extremist groups that are now attacking us from within, is NO DIFFERENCE AT ALL.

We should be ashamed of ourselves.

* * *

I’ve often wondered what causes people to become extremists, and I can say that I am sure that part of the equation is the company that we keep. On Monday, I posted about the foiled plot to kidnap the governor of my home state; I am convinced, from what I’ve read, that the members of that particular group were all drinking out of the same pitcher of Kool-Aid, to be sure.

Another dangerous part of this complicated formula is the degree to which societal leaders seem to condone radical and extremist behavior, since these societal leaders tend to have a lot of clout with those members of society who would be easier to radicalize, especially since those same people tend not to have a strong moral compass.

I was reading yesterday that the terrorist group that was planning on kidnapping the governor have received in the past, and are receiving now, support from leaders in different positions of power in this state, and across the nation. When leaders in society appear to condone inappropriate behavior, with their words –or worse– their actions, the underlings of these corrupt societal leaders are left to try to figure out what their leaders are actually approving of.

Without the strong moral compass that I described above, their struggles to make decisions about the appropriateness of their choices are bound to be extremist.

* * *

I started this second post of the series talking about the Sunday sermon, and the mention of the word ‘radical’ in that sermon. In thinking about Jesus and the early church, and the extent to which they would have been considered radicals, it occurred to me that some people are going out on a limb, going to the extremes, for all of the right reasons.

Others, however… not so much.

On Monday, when I discussed the chemical understanding of the term ‘radical’, I didn’t discuss what radicals are capable of producing. As it turns out, radicals are responsible for some of the most important chemical reactions that we are aware of. They are, however, also active in some of the most destructive chemical reactions in the natural world.

Going out on a limb and adopting a radical, extremist position is dangerous inasmuch as there is always the chance that we might be wrong. But, if we are cognizant of our choices, and we measure them against the yard sticks of productivity, and of love, then I’m certain that it’s possible that we could be radicals of the most important kind.

Jesus was most certainly a radical, and His type of extremism is sadly missing from much of the world these days –extreme love– replaced with a radical hate and a radical destructiveness that is tearing our world apart.

It occurred to me today that things seem to be getting a little out of our control.

A plot was foiled this past week to kidnap the governor of Michigan and to violently overthrow the Michigan government.

Michigan. State in the United States of America. Domestic location. ON AMERICAN SOIL.

Some of my friends, people who may be reading this post, are people who have, over the course of the seven months, expressed negative opinions about the governor of Michigan and the job that the governor is doing in leading the state. They are within their rights to express such opinions, just as people who disagree have rights to express opposing opinions.

But, make no mistake: if you condone violence against others, you are off the path. You have become extremist.

The details surrounding the case of this plot, as I read about them earlier in the week, reminded me of a few different things. I’ll discuss these over a couple of different posts.

* * *

In chemistry, a radical is an atom or a molecule that has an odd number of valence electrons, to my lay understanding.

When I realized that I didn’t know enough about the subject to be able to write intelligently, I went to a high school science teacher in my school district, to ask some questions about the details. What followed was a significant philosophical conversation
–since this fellow and I share some common philosophy– and a little bit of a discussion on electrons.

Apparently, because radicals have this odd number of valence electrons, they are in a search for other entities, molecules or atoms, that also have the same condition, with which to connect and ‘bond’. The bond that is formed allows for the radical to relieve its ‘radical-ness’, by pairing with another entity that has an extra electron, as well.

This search is what causes the radical atoms or molecules to be highly ‘reactive’, in comparison to other atoms or molecules with paired electrons. Their reactivity means that they are involved in many different types of chemical reactions, many of which release energy, in the form of heat and/or light.

Maybe, when you hear the word ‘radical’, your first thought does not necessarily go to chemistry. However, there are a couple of interesting similarities here that are worth noting.

If you’ve ever been around someone, who is a little radical in their thinking or in their opinions, you’ve probably noticed the feelings that you tend to have, being around them. When they say things that seem ‘radical’, maybe you are a little disturbed to hear their thoughts, maybe you wonder whether or not they really believe what they are saying, or if they’re just saying them to get a rise out of others. Maybe you want to make a bee-line for the nearest path away from that particular person.

Radical people cause, in you, a reaction.

It’s also interesting to note that the radicals are searching for other radicals, because it is with the other radicals that they are able to make a bond that will complete their electron deficiency. A radical doesn’t bond with a non-radical, because the non-radical isn’t in the same situation as the radical; the non-radical is not missing the valence electron pair. When radicals find other radicals, the bond is formed because they share in a deficiency. It’s a deficiency that non-radicals don’t have.

I know that there have been times in my life when I have held beliefs that were radical, and in believing as I did, I sought out other people to help me to either 1) confirm that my thoughts were extremist and ought to be discarded, or 2) identify others who felt the same as I did. Being radical and alone is uncomfortable, because we don’t have other people to help us to determine whether our views are legitimate.

Additionally, have you ever noticed that people who tend to be ‘radical’ and ‘reactive’ tend to associate with, tend to pal around, tend to be interested in the company of, other radicals? When these individuals get together, the bond that is formed, from the common deficiency that they share, connects them in an amalgam that is significantly strong. It’s almost as if they find a sense of belonging in their shared deficiency.

Radicals.

* * *

In the days and weeks and months that followed the attacks on September 11th, 2001, our nation –to my recollection– was largely unified. Unified in its resolve to find the people responsible for the attacks, and to bring them to justice, unified in our identity as a nation and the degree to which an attack against any of us was an attack against all of us. I would imagine that it also felt like this, in the United States, after Pearl Harbor, not that I was alive at the time, to be able to say one way or the other.

But, the degree to which attacks that come at us from the outside cause us to rally together, this doesn’t seem to be true of the attacks that come from within.

I’m reminded of those family units, maybe just husbands and wives, or maybe entire groups of parents and their children, who will attack each other with a vengeance. But, woe to anyone who would attack them from the outside; a group of people who seemed to be lacking a target found targets in each other –> an outside attacker could become a common target for the members of the family who’ve just been looking for someone to fight.

I’ve heard it said that much of the twentieth century was so productive for the United States because we shared a common enemy. The common enemy –the Nazis or the Soviets or the North Koreans or the Viet Cong or the Iraqis– which Americans could all agree to be the target of our angst and animosity, allowed for us as a nation to not have to stoop to the level of in-fighting and back-stabbing. We knew who the enemy was, and we warred with that enemy. And not with each other.

As I am writing this, there seems to be no end to the division in our United States.

Abraham Lincoln once said that, and I’m paraphrasing here, we as a nation would be the authors of our own destruction, that we could never be taken apart from the outside. Check me on this, if you’d like; he said it in a speech in 1838 that’s come to be known as the Lyceum Address. It’s a great speech by a great orator, and it is very applicable to where we are at today, as a nation.

By the way, Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, the most infamous member of  a group of co-conspirators who put together a plan to kill the President in Ford Theater. Originally, they planned to kidnap Lincoln, but decided to just murder him instead.

Enemies within. Radicals.

It occurred to me today that love is supposed to be messy.

My wife and I, in the late summer of 2009, bought a house built in 1883. Let me tell you how that’s been going, these past eleven years.

On Wednesday night, we decided to rip up some old carpet, because we were wanting to get rid of the old, dingy mess that was in place, and because we were hoping to get at the beautiful hard wood that we believed to be underneath the carpet. We held this belief, that the hard wood was there, because we’d spied it by pulling up some of the corners of the carpet. We looked at each other, realizing that there wasn’t going to be any real discovery without removal, and we set about the work.

* * *

If you’ve ever watched a bit of PBS, especially during the daytime on the weekends, I’ll bet you’ve seen the show. It’s called, This Old House, and it used to be hosted by a couple of guys, Bob Vila and Norm Abrams, back in the beginning of the series. The show usually covered the entire renovation of a single house over the course of multiple episodes, and it was always fun to watch these old, decrepit homes regain their youthful charm and character, at the hands of some truly handy craftsmen.

When I was a kid, I may have wanted to look like David Hasselhoff, and I may have wanted to drive like Bo and Luke Duke, but more than either of these, I wanted to be able to fix things just like Bob Vila. I just checked, and according to Wikipedia, the show’s been on the air for forty-two seasons, which boggles the mind, in and of itself.

There have been many, many times during the course of ownership of this home, over these past eleven years, that I have wished for Bob and Norm to come and help me with all of these problems. Of course, they would swoop in, gather me under their wings, show me how to do a little bit of the work while taking the big responsibilities on their own shoulders. It would be great, and magical, and in the end, I would have solutions to these problems.

Of course, it doesn’t work that way.

In the same way, you can’t be physically fit without the arduous work of exercise. You also can’t be very knowledgeable on something without study and practice. You also can’t be the most talented athlete in the arena without the drill and dedication that puts you among the elite.

Excellence takes work. So does a 137-year-old house.

* * *

So, back to the story of our flooring adventures.

If you’ve never removed carpeting before, there’s really not that much to it. It tends to be held down, at its edges, by tack strips that attach to the sub-flooring at also poke into the carpet above with these little pins. Once you’ve removed the carpet, and the tack strips, you’ll also need to remove the padding, and the staples that were probably used to attach the padding to the sub-flooring.

Did I say there wasn’t much to it?!?!

What we discovered, after the removal of the carpet and the padding could have been worse, but also wasn’t the best. Isn’t that how it always goes? We probably removed about three hundred square feet of carpet, and we discovered that about two-hundred and fifty of those square feet were in pretty decent shape. An eighty-three percent success rate isn’t that bad.

But, we’ve got to figure out some solutions for the other fifty square feet. Ugh.

* * *

It occurred to me, in the midst of all of this; I think love works like this. Love involves discovery, and it is not always the case that the discoveries are good.

Jennie and I have been together for more than a quarter-century, and married for almost two decades. Through those years, I’ve come to discover so many things that I love about her, along with the occasional discovery of something about her that rubs me the wrong way. But, what are you going to do? I’m sure that she didn’t have any idea about some of my least adorable qualities right away, either. But, you commit to the adventure, and for all of the discoveries that come along, most of them end up being enjoyable.

But it’s not just romantic love, either. Think about any person that you have strong feelings of love concerning, and you can probably think of a few things about them that aren’t what you would have them to be. Family members, close friends, they all come with certain drawbacks; love works its way through the negatives because there’s more to love than there is to despise.

Additionally, when it comes down to it, sometimes love means getting messy. But, during those times, when love means rolling up your sleeves and getting dirty, you do it because of the commitment, and because of the value that love has.

On a grander scale, grander than just this one journey involving some hardwood floors and some carpet removal, I’ve been ‘loving’ this house for the past eleven years. Loving, as in enjoying time on the front porch watching the cars goes by, as in laying in my hammock in the back yard, as in sitting around a fire in the fire pit near the bench swing. I love our upstairs bedrooms, and I love our location in town. I could probably continue to go on, but you get the idea. There’s a lot to love, to go along with the issues that need to be addressed and/or tolerated.

Now that I’ve come to think of it, building a love, whether it’s with a lover or a friend or a family member, or whether it’s with a house, is a process by which we work and we get dirty and we have to solve problems, on occasion. But, hopefully more often, we enjoy and we benefit and we find comfort and solace.

I wonder what Bob Vila and Norm Abrams would think of that.

It occurred to me today that a change might not always “do you good.”

WARNING: THIS ONE IS A LITTLE LONG.

Sheryl Crow, great singer and song-writer, has been writing wonderful music for many, many years; she wrote a number of very notable songs, especially in the nineties and early oughts, and if you were really into music during those years, then you probably know a number of them. The song that I’m thinking of, as I’m starting to write this blog, is probably in her top ten or top fifteen, depending on which list you are looking at. It’s called A Change Will Do You Good, and it was catchy and fun, in its own particular way. I just listened to it again, for the first time in years, and I was transported back to the last decade of the twentieth century, as much fun as that was for me.

Despite how I might receive this song when I hear it, or how much it takes me back to a pleasant past, I must disagree with Sheryl Crow.

Sometimes, change is not appropriate.

* * *

I’m a teacher, and in education, we seem to be particularly susceptible to the ‘flavor of the week’ syndrome, whereby we will try this thing and that thing and the other thing to try to help us in our work in reaching young minds.

Every couple years, or few years at the most, there comes along a new theory in the world of education that is begging to be tried. Rather than sticking to our guns and riding a particular theory out for long enough to discover whether or not the approach might have any legitimacy, we change our approaches and our methods so often as to beg the question, “Is it just the case that we are having problems being effective because we can’t stick with a singular approach for more than twenty-five seconds?”

This doesn’t just happen in education, but rather, I think it’s a symptom of a disease that is eating away at our nation. We tend not to be very good at committing to things, so we try something for a moment or two, and when it doesn’t work, we change our approach.

I saw a meme on Pinterest a while back about a person who has worked on their physical fitness for two weeks and is disappointed with the results that they’re not seeing. I wish that it only took two weeks to get back in shape, believe me. Instead, it is an arduous journey that probably has as many steps in it that there were in the journey that I took to get ‘out of shape’.

The sad truth of the matter is that we have usually further to go than we wish we had, in order to get where we want to be, and usually less stamina than what is required.

* * *

We live in a neighborhood with a rental property; who doesn’t these days, am I right? The thing about a rental property is that tenants come and tenants go. Whenever a change in residency comes to this house across the way, my wife and children and I become significantly more interested in the situation than we are when there is someone living there who happens to be a known entity.

A few years back, the situation was not good in the house across the way.

The man who was living there with his girlfriend, the two of them were in a bad way. He had a bit of a rage issue, and a fellow neighbor and I were responsible, it seemed, for keeping an eye on this property, and the goings-on, from different sides of the street. The cops were called on multiple occasions, and that man was not nice to his girlfriend, for sure. For the few short years that the situation across the street was problematic, we were certainly looking for a change to take place.

And the good news for us was that the change eventually came. The previous tenants moved out, and the new tenants have been much more enjoyable.

The particular property that I’m speaking of is owned by a friend of mine who rents his property out through a management agency, and has done so for almost as many years as we’ve lived across the way from his house. But, come to find out, this summer my friend decided that he was done with the rental property process and is deciding to sell the place.

So, it seems like we are going to be getting some new arrivals in the neighborhood soon (again). The problem with this is that, I liked these last tenants. I don’t want a change, because I recognize that there are situations in which change could lead to something worse than what you have now.

But, truth be told, I’m pretty sure that this is always true.

* * *

I saw that a coworker of mine, a fellow teacher, posted on social media their support for a particular candidate for the school board where we work. In this coworker’s post, I noticed the phrase, “It’s time for a change.”

Now, considering that the person, that this coworker of mine is suggesting for the school board, is not a person that I think would be a good school board member, maybe it’s the case that I’m just being disagreeable. But, when I look at the way that things are going for my school district right now, we are finally starting to get to the place where things are going well, where we are starting to fire on all cylinders. I would imagine that this coworker of mine, who is a bright young educator, must not be in agreement with me; otherwise, why would they want to change a good thing.

As often as anyone has ever used the phrase, “It’s time for a change”, I suspect that there have been other people who’ve disagreed. This fellow coworker of mine is probably thinking that the candidate for the school board that they are condoning will bring some of that positive change.

Just remember, not all change is progress, just as not all steps are forward steps.

* * *

Try to think of a situation in which you believed that change was necessary. Maybe you’ve been opposed to a person in a position of leadership (perhaps political) over you or the people of your particular municipality, and you thought that it was time for a change. Maybe your favorite sports team, who has been starting that certain player over and over, despite the fact that THEY SUCK, and you thought that it was probably time for the team to head in a different direction. Maybe you’ve become tired of the vehicle that you’re driving, and you thought that “a change would do you good.”

The problem with this line of thinking is that the people who are normally in the mood to feel this way have become desperate, and their desperation has convinced them that things are currently so bad that there really isn’t much of a chance that things could be worse.

Trust me, things could always be worse.

In Michigan, at this present time, everyone in the state is of one of two possible opinions: you either like our current governor, or you don’t. For the people in the state who don’t like her, they’d just as soon have her ousted as ever look at her again. As a matter of fact, come to think of it, the current political landscape in America is one of polar entrenchments everywhere you look –> you either like the governor, or you don’t; you either like the President, or you don’t; you either like a certain political party, or you don’t.

What I’m afraid that people are loosing sight of is this: don’t you think that a move for a change is necessarily a dangerous move? Who’s to say that, when we get rid of something that is unpleasant, we aren’t just opening ourselves up for something more unpleasant?

Maybe, what we really need to change, is our minds.

It occurred to me today that I like to look down the road a little bit.

My favorite Robert Frost poem is “The Road Not Taken”. I have it committed to memory, and I think that the theme and the morals in the poem are important lessons for life. One of my favorite parts of the poem is in the very first stanza, when the narrator says, “…long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth.”

In the poem, the narrator is trying to make a decision about which road to take and –prior to making the choice– the narrator wants to try to gather what information they can before making a choice. Can you relate to this sentiment? Have you ever wondered what you might be missing –or what you might be getting yourself into– by choosing to do one thing, rather than choosing a different way?

Picking one path over the other can involve, if you make the wrong choice, some serious consequences. No one wants to make the wrong choice, but when you are standing at the fork, you really have no idea which of the roads is the right one, because you can’t really know.

The situation that Frost describes in this poem, as far as the metaphor is concerned, is a tough one; we can’t ever really know what lies down a certain road unless we head down that road. That’s the actual point that Frost is trying to make. While there might be certain indicators that would suggest that one choice might be a better one than any other –for example, the paths that fewer people take often make for better choices– we make the choices on the directions that we head in life, sometimes with precious little information.

* * *

My sudoku puzzle for Friday (a few days ago), from the daily sudoku puzzle calendar that I have, was a tough one. It was so tough, in fact, that I’d reached an impasse on the thing. No matter how I looked at it, no matter what techniques I tried to employ, to figure out how to get the puzzle finished, I couldn’t see a way forward.

When it gets like this, and I get frustrated trying to figure it out, my wife will usually offer to look at the answers that are printed on the back of each of the puzzles and give me a hint. I refuse to allow her to do this, for that would be cheating.

Normally, when it gets like this, it’s a matter of me knowing that there is a certain cell on the puzzle that can only be one of two possible numbers, and I have to make a choice between choosing one number and solving the puzzle with that combination, or choosing the other number and solving the puzzle from there.

The comparison between this situation, and the Frost poem that I described above, is pretty interesting.

Part of the problem is that I fill out my sudoku puzzles with a pen, always have. If I make the wrong choice, I am going to end up with a huge mess of ink when I put the wrong number in that particular cell. I guess I could do things in pencil; if a mistake gets made, you do some erasing, and it’s like it never happened.

But, life doesn’t work like that; in life, I feel like we are all doing the puzzle in pen.

Whenever I end up getting stumped like this, I will usually write out the puzzle on a scrap piece of paper, and then I can solve the puzzle with a certain number in the cell in question, to see how far it goes. Assuming that the solution is one number or another, then you would think that, approximately fifty percent of the time, I am able to solve the puzzle on the scrap paper with the number that I choose to try out. Then, when that succeeds, I just copy the answers from the scrap paper to the puzzle proper.

Otherwise, I end up getting to a point, in trying to solve the puzzle, where I realize that my choice was the wrong one. When I figure that out, then I know that the other number was the right one –the one that I should have chosen– and I can go back to the puzzle proper with that knowledge, moving me forward.

* * *

Don’t you wish you could do that with life? Push the pause button for a moment, so you can take a peek down the road a ways, investigating whether or not one choice would lead to a better outcome than the other. Then, with the knowledge that you need, un-pause things and do what you’ve learned to be the correct approach.

I’ve been in certain situations in life where I ended up making a bad choice. Of course, I only knew that I’d made a bad choice after the whole thing fell apart, sometimes many, many steps down the road. It certainly would have been nice to look down the road a little bit.

I guess the trick is to not end up in the situation, where you have to guess, very often. For me, when it comes to sudoku, I probably only run into a guessing situation once every couple of weeks. In life, I try not to end up in guessing situations any more often than what’s absolutely necessary.

Unfortunately, sometimes, it’s unavoidable.

In those situations, where you have to take a guess, you should do your best to guess well, ladies and gentlemen. According to Frost, it will make “all the difference.”

It occurred to me today that some simple math can help to keep our pride in check.

There are approximately 7,800,000,000 people alive today. I am only one of those. You are only one of those. That means, besides you and I, that there are 7,799,999,998 other people on the planet.

But, maybe you think of yourself as a big deal; my pride makes me think of myself as a big deal. So, let’s say there are a thousand people (if you or I are lucky) that agree with me (or with you) that I’m pretty hot stuff (or that you are).

7,799,999,000 aren’t even aware of your existence, or of mine.

Additionally, global estimates on the number of people who have ever lived, depending on how you might go about trying to estimate that number, put the number just slightly above, or slightly below, one hundred billion. So, assuming that there are a number of people –whatever that number might be– who were once alive who knew you/thought highly of you/were touched by your existence, let’s add that number to the number of people that you have in your ‘living entourage’.

Then, subtract that new number from 100,000,000,000.

In short, there are more than one hundred billion people, who have lived or are currently living, that know nothing about you. How important can you really be?

If you’re starting to get lost in the numbers a little bit, let me paint a picture for you.

Imagine a cube-shaped container, one hundred feet tall, and one hundred feet wide, and one hundred feet long. Or, if that’s hard to imagine, imagine instead a container that is about the same size and dimensions as a ten-story building in a city.

The container, no matter how you’ve imagined it, is filled with sand.

Then, imagine removing from that massive container of sand, a single teaspoon of sand.

That teaspoon, if you used a standard teaspoon, would have about 40,000 grains of sand in it.

Imagine all of the sand that would remain in that container (one hundred feet tall and one hundred feet wide and one hundred feet long, approximately the size of a ten-story building) if you only took out a teaspoon of sand. All of that sand in that massive cube, and quite honestly, most of the sand in the teaspoon that you’re holding (since you probably don’t have 40,000 people who are aware of your existence) represents the people who have no idea that you exist.

If that doesn’t humble you, then think of the famous people, the names that are constantly topping the news.

There probably isn’t a person in America who hasn’t heard the names Donald Trump or Joe Biden lately. There are currently about 328,000,000 people in America. Or, take Cristiano Ronaldo, a Portuguese soccer player, who has 237,000,000 followers on Instagram (more than anyone else on Instagram). And, of course, there are other famous people all over the world, of whom hundreds of millions of people are aware of their existence.

There are two million grains of sand in a cup of sand.

So, if the world’s most famous Portuguese soccer player removed one and a half five-gallon buckets of sand from the structure that we were describing a moment ago, what a much more significant removal of sand that would be, compared to my fraction of a teaspoon of sand.

Would it even make a dent in the structure?

None of us –not even one– ever really amounts to much of anything, mathematically speaking.

* * *

If you object to this approach to attempting to calculate how insignificant each of us is –> and who wouldn’t — it’s humiliating to think of how out of proportion my pride really is –> then maybe something more complex could do a better job of giving us a good reason to be proud of ourselves.

I’m thinking of a formula that incorporates 1) the number of people who know us, and 2) the significant impact that we’ve made on the lives of the people who would fall into the first category.

For example, Cristiano Ronaldo and I happen to fall in completely different categories when it comes to ‘fame’. So, when you think about the number of people who know of him, and the number of people who know of me, of course the proportions are way off. But, a more intricate measure of my impact, and of his impact, might change things.

For example, let me ask the question, “Who counts on Cristiano Ronaldo?” Maybe his teammates and coaches do, on the team that he plays soccer for. He’s not married, as of the moment that I’m writing this, so he is somewhat detached in that sense.

Did you ever wonder why the government calls them ‘dependents’? Because they depend on us.

We’ll call it a reliance factor. It’s a measure of the extent to which someone relies on you.

Maybe it’s the case the Cristiano Ronaldo has more followers on Instagram than there are grains of sand in a five-gallon bucket, it is probably not the case that he has a significantly higher number of people relying on him than the number of people who are relying on me, is there?

When it comes down to it, those are the people that really matter, aren’t they?

Does it matter that there are multiple continents of the world where all of the inhabitants of that continent are unaware that I exist? Not to me, it doesn’t. The people that matter the most are the closest to me.

But, since this is a post about pride, and how ridiculous it is, let me make a final point.

The world existed before me, and it will exist after I’m gone; the same is true for you. Things seemed to have been going pretty well leading up to my birth, and the planet will continue to spin on its axis after I’ve shuffled off this mortal coil.

Humility seems to make a lot more sense, when you really stop and think about it. Pride is probably the most common form of foolishness.

Feel free to call me a fool the next time to you see me.

It occurred to me today that we’ve lost our perspective… on ourselves.

NOTE: THIS WILL BE A TWO-PART POST (live on 9/28 & 9/30)

I have a pride problem; it’s my greatest sin. I’ve known for some time that it’s my greatest sin, but I can’t seem to stop involving myself in things that feed my pride. I want to be praised, so I do the things that will get me the praise. Sometimes, I will even neglect –somewhat subconsciously– what will not get me praise, in favor of choosing to do something else instead, something more praiseworthy.

I especially enjoy doing things that I’ve discovered that other people think I’m good at, because then they will praise me for doing so.

Take this blog, for example. For one hundred and fifty some blog posts now (aren’t you proud of me?), I’ve been sharing my thoughts with the world. Sometimes those thoughts are humble and unassuming, but other times, they are not. I’ve bragged about regaining my physical fitness, I’ve bragged about how good I am at sudoku, I’ve bragged about other things, as well.

While blogging might be slightly different, it’s really just a social media outlet. The trouble with social media and pride is that it doesn’t feel that bad for me to be writing blog posts where I talk about the great things I’m doing, despite the fact that there would normally be something in my head that would keep me from being a braggart if I were talking to someone in the real world.

As I’ve sat at my laptop, alone in some room, bragging in the past about how awesome I think I am, I wouldn’t normally be comfortable about being so ostentatious in speaking with other people.

At least, I didn’t used to be.

But I’m not speaking to other people; that’s the thing. When I’m on social media
–whether it’s me on this blog or you on Facebook or that other guy on Twitter– we are all imagining ourselves as alone, at least that’s my theory.

The person who wouldn’t say boo to a goose in the real world, but has plenty of hatred on Facebook, is stuck in the same conundrum that I feel like I’m stuck in.

There’s just something different about social media. You and I do things on social media that we wouldn’t normally do out in public, because we feel like we’re alone when we’re on social media…

But, we’re not. It’s as public as a conversation at the grocery store in the salad dressing aisle. Maybe even more so.

* * *

The worst part of my pride problem is that, when I think I am doing something good, for the right reasons, when I think I am being of service –and then someone recognizes me for my service– all I can think to myself is about how awesome I am and how right people are when they praise me for what I’m doing.

And then, the service is tainted. Whatever I did, whatever I was able to accomplish to try to move my family forward, or my workplace forward, or my church forward, or my community forward, those accomplishments are stained by this smear of pride on them.

I almost think that I would be better off if I could hide all of the things that I am able to accomplish from the eyes of people. Then, the accomplishments would stand on their own, and people would be happy for what was accomplished. The people around me would be better off, for the contributions that my actions could provide, but they wouldn’t be able to attribute them to me.

Sometimes, it is easy enough to avoid the eyes of others as we do good things in the world around us. You have no idea how much I tip when I’m at a restaurant. You have no idea what percentage of my income I donate to charitable organizations. Easy enough to hide.

I never could figure out, though, how to keep my left hand from knowing about the activities of my right hand. 

I was discussing with my psychology students this week the importance of anonymity when someone is a test subject in a psych experiment. I don’t necessarily want the whole world to know what my IQ score is, especially if it’s low, so I want the psychological researcher to promise me anonymity. But, what if I IQ-tested really high?

Wouldn’t you want those results published, right next to your name?

One of the downsides that I’ve discovered from pride is pressure. When people find out that you’re good at something, and they praise you for it, then comes the pressure. Pressure to do it again, just as well as you did it before (whether or not the previous performance was a fluke). Pressure to do what you did before whenever someone asks you to do so. Pressure to do whatever thing you’re good at for the purposes of someone else.

Anonymity sure would help, sometimes.

* * *

I suspect, deep down inside, I’m not alone on this one. I think pride was in the Garden. I think pride was at the Cross. I think pride is polluting our politics, and our churches, and our families, and our workplaces. It’s everywhere, and we’ve become addicted to it –many of us– in a way that we don’t even recognize our addiction.

Additionally, humanism, which gained in popularity in the late twentieth century, with its focus on the self, has had certain negative effects, IMO, on our society, which now promotes –much more than it used to– an arrogance and a hubris which, while it might be beneficial in certain, moderate amounts, has gotten completely out of control.

People who think more of themselves than what they ought are working everywhere in our society, from lowly blog writers to national leaders. The fact that pride and conceit are so common in the world today are indications that this is the default of man. Without working very hard at it at all, I’ve fallen into these sinful patterns when I should be actively pursuing a mindset that is more modest.

On Wednesday, in Part 2, I’ll explore an alternative to haughty arrogance.