It occurred to me today that I’d rather just order from the menu and know what I’m getting, thank you very much.
When I was a kid, we would go to Ponderosa. It was AWESOME. I think my favorite part, in all honesty, was the ice cream machine that we were able to get ice cream out of, at the end of our meal, if we finished all of our food. It had vanilla soft serve on the left, chocolate soft serve on the right, and swirl in the middle. Then, we would pile the ice cream high with toppings of all kinds.
I don’t remember caring that much about the buffet.
Of course, everyone knows what a buffet is. If you’ve ever been to a Ponderosa, or a Golden Corral, or an Old Country Buffet, then you know what I’m talking about. Huge countertops that stretch for great distances, each countertop full of option after option for your dining pleasure.
I think that, if you’re like most people, there are probably a significant number of options at the buffet that you wouldn’t normally choose. In fact, I would tend to think that most people usually just go to a buffet to get the same things that they would normally get, which is pretty interesting when you think of all of the options that a buffet offers and how much we love our options.
I remember, as a kid, the gooey mac & cheese at the Ponderosa. I’m sure that there wasn’t ever a time that I passed that up.
* * *
The problem with a buffet/smorgasbord is that there might be other things that you don’t want to have there. Of course, you –being just one person– don’t fully represent what people are interested in eating as a whole group, so the things that are in the smorgasbord that you would never put on your plate could end up selling more than those favorites of yours that you always pick, if there are more people choosing those options than your options.
For the restauranteur, they have to make the decisions about the things to put on the buffet. If they leave out a container of candied beets and no one touches it all day long, it’s a pretty good indication that, as customers have come and gone, no one is interested in candied beets.
And, as much fun as it has been, thus far, to discuss the business aspects of the smorgasbord, I’m really more interested in pursuing the metaphor of the thing.
We live in a world that seems to push at us a plethora of options. I’ve often witnessed how this can make decision-making nearly impossible, and I’ve often wondered whether or not having fewer options, while not necessarily an attractive idea, would certainly make decision-making, and the stress associated with the difficulty of making decisions, less of a thing. The paralysis that comes when we have so many options that we come incapable of choosing is curious to me, as well.
Have you ever thought about this: it is most certainly the truth that, when we choose one thing, we are also –simultaneously– choosing to not choose a bunch of other options. When I ask for a dark cherry ice cream cone at the ice cream shop, I am also asking for a NOT rocky road ice cream cone, and countless other flavors that I am NOT choosing. With multiple options, we are more capable of choosing something that we will be happy about, right? Imagine the ice cream shop with two ice cream flavors –> one you hate and one you only slightly dislike? What would you do?
I can hear you saying, “I’d go somewhere else.”
What if this hypothetical ice cream was the last one on the planet? Would you choose the lesser of the two evil ice creams?
Or, think about it this way, using the above example.
What if my favorite thing to have in an ice cream cone is chunks of marshmallow? And, coincidentally, what if I also happen to love chocolate ice cream? Seems like it would be rocky road ice cream for me for the rest of my days, right?!?!
What if I hate ice cream with nuts in it? Do they make a rocky road ice cream without nuts in it? Doesn’t sound very ‘rocky’ to me?!?!
What if, despite my hatred of nuts in ice cream, I buy rocky road ice cream because it has the chocolate that I love and the marshmallow that I love, and I just tolerate the nuts?
This last question is an interesting one, because I think it highlights some of what is going wrong in our world of limitless options.
Have you ever made a decision to buy something, or involve yourself in something, that wasn’t entirely what you had in mind, just because you knew that you were going to be getting a lot of what you wanted, and you would just put up with the parts that you didn’t like?
Usually, we would call this ‘compromise’.
Ever go on a date with someone because they could get you into the concert of the century, but you didn’t really want to be on a date with that person?
Ever order a specialty pizza at a pizza place because it had pretty much everything you wanted on a pizza, but it also had the XXXXX topping that you were willing to put up with?
Ever vote for a politician because you agreed with them on several topics, although you also disagreed with them on this one particular topic?
Ever attend a church service because you loved to listen to the pianist play during the worship service, but you couldn’t stand to listen to the pastor speaking?
In these situational examples, we end up feeling slighted by a world that will, most of the time, offer us more options than we can shake a stick at, but in these particular circumstances, we get screwed into having to compromise to get what we want.
One of the other interesting things that is going on, in at least a couple of these examples, is that you could end up sending the wrong message.
Imagine that dating partner, who got you into that awesome concert. Now, they might believe that you are interested in them, when of course you are not.
Or the politician who ends up believing that they are more palatable than they really are, only because they were the option that was less awful?
I guess, in the end, our love of plenty of options makes situations, in which we don’t have as many options, feel disappointing.
Additionally, so many options make us less likely to understand the art of compromise. If I don’t have to compromise when it comes to the burger that I order at the fast food joint –“I don’t want pickle or lettuce, just ketchup and mustard, please.”– would I ever be okay with the concept of compromise in other parts of my life?
Between August of 1998 and May of 2001 –so almost three full years– I lived in the Boltwood apartment complex in Allendale, Michigan. Based on recent photos of the place that I looked up on the internet, it must be under new management, for it’s definitely changed a bit (what was I expecting after almost twenty years?).
Back in the old days, it wasn’t much to write home about.
Boltwood is an apartment complex on the northeast side of the Grand Valley State University campus, on the north side of Lake Michigan Drive, just a little bit east of 48th Avenue. Back in the day, it had a couple of things going for it; it was within walking distance of a pizzeria and a convenience store, so those were nice options to have nearby. It was also just on the outskirts of the campus proper, so it was close enough to be a quick commute.
I ended up in that place through an interesting set of circumstances. The first thing that happened was that I graduated from Notre Dame, earlier in 1998, without much of an idea as to what I was going to do. So, in short, I ended up following Jennie to Allendale; when she decided to enroll as a student at GVSU, so did I. But, whereas Jennie signed up to be a part of the campus housing scene, I went a different route.
I answered an ad, placed by a group of three guys, who were looking for a fourth person to share their four-person apartment lease, in light of the fact that their original fourth person had backed out of the agreement.
Talk about awkward.
I was signing up to live with three guys who knew each other and presumably liked each other (at least enough to enter into an agreement to live together), while I was a total stranger. I remember feeling anxious and odd when I moved into the apartment that August. But, the three of them were great, and very friendly toward me, and I never felt as if I was an outsider. We got to know each other, in the manner in which many great friendships often start… by obligation.
One thing that made things a little less awkward was the fact that I was significantly older than these three friends when I moved in with them. When you are a college graduate, who is continuing with some more education, that puts you in the twenty-one or twenty-two age range, while these three roommates that I moved in with were sophomores, in the nineteen or twenty age range. Of course, this means that the three of them gained –by gaining me– a ‘legal’ roommate. While I can neither confirm nor deny that I bought any alcohol during those years that may have been consumed by someone other than myself, I can say that they liked how old I was.
* * *
It’s hard for me to remember some of the details, but I recall four buildings with twelve apartments per building. When I first moved in with Rob, Bill, and Tim, the four of us were in a second story apartment in the most northeastern of the buildings at Boltwood. Our balcony overlooking our parking lot was cool, and it was where the smokers (two of us) went out to smoke, because the other two of us (non-smokers) had equal say in the matter. Eventually though, three of the four of us became smokers, and that activity was allowed to move in-doors, at least some of the time.
Near the end of our time as a foursome at Boltwood, my roommates and I managed to get a handicap accessible apartment (despite none of us being handicapped) in the building closest to the pizzeria. This was great, because it resulted in us having an apartment on the ground floor, with walk-out patio access to the lawn in front of our building. All of the other ‘ground-floor’ units actually involved stepping down into an apartment that was slightly below the ground level.
That ground-floor apartment was the apartment that I moved out of when I left in the Spring of 2001. I drove away in a blue Chevy Corsica. I’d arrived, almost three years previous, in a Dodge Daytona. Bill drove a Dodge Dakota pickup during those years, Tim drove a Plymouth Neon (part of the time), and Rob drove a Buick Century (if I remember correctly).
* * *
We had some fun neighbors during this time that we spent in Boltwood. I remember, during that first year, we had a neighbor above our apartment who was an aspiring rap artist. We would often hear the music that he was working on producing, and a lot of it was pretty decent. I wonder whatever happened to that kid.
We also had a neighbor, when we moved to our second building in the complex (the one with the handicap accessible apartment) who was a former military guy. He was fun to hang out with. His name was Bill, and so was our roommate, so we called our neighbor Big Bill (he was a decent spot bigger than our roommate), and we called ‘our Bill’, Little Bill. He was fun. Big Bill and I both enjoyed karaoke and grilled liver and onions, not at the same time, of course.
* * *
Your average college guy isn’t concerned with cleaning a lot. I would say that the three of us, on average, were below-average when it came to cleaning. We had a large garbage can in the corner of the kitchen where we threw all of the recyclable cans that we emptied –empty cans of pop and empty cans of other types of drinks– the floor around that garbage can got pretty sticky after a while. It was pretty nasty.
We did dishes as often as was required for us to continue to have dishes to eat off of
It wasn’t always the most pleasant place for a guy to bring his lady-friends, so cleaning became more of a necessity when we knew in advance that we were going to be having women over to the apartment. According to my wife, who was my girlfriend –and then my fiance– at the time, she said that the worst part of the apartment was the bathroom.
I don’t remember the place being that bad, of course.
* * *
Those two apartments, and those three roommates, are part of a pretty interesting time in my life. As I was trying to find my way into the future, I found the three of them and that apartment complex. It will forever be a part of who I am, for better and for worse.
It occurred to me today that rules have been around as long as people have been around, and there’s a reason for that.
Yesterday, in Part 1 of this post, I opened with a discussion of how the creation of rules, after the fact, to try to control the behavior of people only really works in situations where there is a significant deterrent (a stick) to violating the new regulations. Also, I discussed the idea that there are people who are following their own internal sets of rules, that don’t need to be governed by outside forces for that very reason.
But, since this topic seems to fascinate me so, let’s keep the discussion going!
* * *
When you think about rules, and why people follow them, a lot of the time, compliance is the result of fear of punishment. I don’t want to end up with a $200 speeding ticket, so I obey the speed limits. I don’t want my dad to spank me, so I am sure to be respectful to my mother. But, each of these situations assumes an authority who carries a stick that is big enough to scare a person into compliance.
The other side of the coin looks like this: I will break the rules because the stick that exists isn’t a big enough deterrent to keep me from doing what it is that I really want to do. The guy who really wants to know what it feels like to go 110 miles per hour down the freeway might be totally willing to pay $200 for the experience.
So, we understand that there is a balance that must be weighed on each side of the scale; on one side of the scale is the question of whether or not a person is really desiring to do a certain (bad) thing, while the other side of the scale is the question of whether or not a deterrent (the stick) is scary enough to tip the scale.
Of course, this scale doesn’t serve to explain all of the examples that we have in our society of rule-breaking and rule-following, but it explains a lot of them. When people don’t follow the rules, you’ve either attempted to create a rule that seeks to condemn actions that are basic to the human experience (try punishing people into not breathing, for example), or your stick isn’t big enough.
* * *
It used to be, not so long ago, that people thought that they were responsible to an authority of ultimate power. This authority ruled over the peasants and the kings alike. Levels of authority were of relatively little importance, with respect to the question of whether or not one should follow the rules, since this authority was in a position of power over all.
Of course, I’m referring to God.
Now, whether or not you believe in God –Christians, like me, most certainly do, but others may not– the understanding that we were all beholden to an ultimate authority figure, it had a way of holding people to a certain level of responsibility, because they thought that they were going to have to answer for their actions, not to a judge, or a police officer, or a grand jury, but to someone whose judgement was not to be escaped, whose eyes were always watching.
More recently, however, the tendency in first world countries, to leave the faith of the forefathers has resulted in several issues. One of the most significant problems that can arise out of this change can be summarized by this question:
“Who stops the authority figures from breaking the rules?”
Historically, authority figures understood that they were subject to an ultimate authority, even if they weren’t subject to any other human authority, and that –at least sometimes– kept humans with a significant amount of power in check.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but there have been –in recent memory– a few examples of human authority figures who don’t seem to be beholden to anyone, in heaven or on earth.
* * *
Once the authority figures have decided that they aren’t going to follow the rules, or that they’re only going to follow the rules that they believe to be appropriate, then you start to have a breakdown in the system.
I’ve noticed examples of law enforcement officers recently deciding that they are only going to obey the laws, that they are charged with enforcing, when it works out best for them.
Of course, since there isn’t anyone in authority over them, they may be able to get away with this, for a while. But, when those under authority notice the example that is being set for them –an example that includes rule-breaking in it– there ends up being an integrity issue when those who don’t follow the rules intend to enforce rule-following by those under their authority.
I don’t know about you, but it’s SIGNIFICANTLY harder for me to follow the rules that are being set by the people who don’t actually follow the rules, either.
Another unfortunate side-effect of our abandonment of a faith in God is currently playing out all across the country, as cases of police brutality and administrative corruption continue to grab headlines.
Who can stop the authority figures from breaking the rules?
I was talking to a friend, just this evening, about the Jacob Blake case, and he said to me, “It just blows my mind that police officers continue to exercise brutality, especially in light of the current climate against police brutality. Do they really think that they can continue to get away with it?”
Apparently, they do believe that they will continue to get away with it.
* * *
When it’s all said and done, and whether or not you believe that God is keeping score, we should all be answering to an internal moral code that says that certain things are allowed, while certain other things are not.
Unfortunately, as time goes by, I am starting to become convinced that there are people out there that operate under no such moral code in their lives. And, while that reality might not be so disturbing if we are talking about Joe Blow from Idaho who has no real authority or social influence in his life, it becomes a much larger problem when we are dealing with people who are in charge of upholding the law or advancing the nation or raising the children who will become the future of the country.
I mentioned earlier that the world would be a better place if people were compliant, not because they were forced to be, but because they wanted to contribute to a society that was moving in a positive direction of growth and development. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like that’s where we are now.
It occurred to me today that we should stop it with all of these regs.
I’m a teacher, and as any teacher knows, there are two systems for controlling students –> they can either control themselves, or someone else will have to do it.
Read this post if you are interested in my classroom management style.
I was talking with a fellow teacher today about American manufacturing. During the discussion, it was suggested that American manufacturing has been disabled by governmental regulation that ties the hands of American companies, so that they can’t compete with foreign industry leaders who aren’t being hog-tied by the same rules.
It was at this point in the conversation that I realized that we all are bound to follow the rules. But, when some people don’t, then regulation comes in to control the group.
The problem with rules and regulations is that they won’t control the people who they were created to control in the first place. If rules and regulations were effective tools in controlling people’s behavior, one would hope that no such external rules or regulations would be necessary at all, since everyone would be following their own rules.
WHAT?!?!
Let me put it this way.
The easiest rules for us to follow are our own rules. For example, I have a rule that is called the Two-Syllable U Rule, which states that I only shave my face on days whose name has two syllables and whose names contain a ‘U’, which means that I only shave on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. I follow that rule, pretty regularly, week in and week out. If you ever see me on a Saturday evening and you think to yourself, “Phil should shave his face every once in a while”, it’s because I am following my own rules on the issue, thank you very much.
Whose was involved in the making of the rule? Me. Who is involved in enforcing the rule? Me. Who’s going to get upset if the rule is disobeyed? Me.
It’s a personal rule.
Now, back to the industry example that came up during this discussion that I had with my coworker.
Let’s say fifteen companies open up factories next to a river, because they need the water for the transport of their product downstream, or they need the water from the river for some part of their production process, or maybe for some other reason. And each of those companies has a CEO that decides, as a personal rule, that they are not going to negatively impact the river through the conduct of their business.
How much government regulation is necessary in this scenario? None.
But then, Business Number 16 moves into the neighborhood, and the CEO of Business Number 16 is a real piece of work. He decides, “Screw the river. Screw my neighbors. Screw what is right and decent and honorable. I’m going to dump waste in the river, and no one is going to stop me.”
Enter, stage left, some regulations, issued by some regulators.
Now, the question is this: “Who’s going to follow those regulations?” The fifteen pre-existing businesses are, but not because of the newly-created regulations. Those fifteen businesses are going to follow the regulations because they were going to do, what the regulations are calling for, anyway.
Who’s not going to follow the regulations?
The single business for whom the regulations were created.
Why not?
Well, if they were rule-followers in the first place, what are the chances that they would have done something that made it necessary for regulations to be created?
Do I, as a classroom teacher, need to make rules for Sally Sunshine, sitting in the front row of my class, paying attention 100% of the time and obedient 100% of the time.
No.
I make the rules for Donny Delinquent. But, he won’t follow them.
Unless the stick is big enough.
* * *
My wife and I have discovered, when it comes to our kids, that they only really listen to me.
Because I carry the stick.
Which isn’t to say that I carry an actual stick, or that I would ever actually beat my kids. Granted, they’ve each been spanked a time or two, but ‘the stick’ here refers to a metaphorical approach to parenting wherein I make the children suffer consequences for their bad choices.
Much as life will make each of us to suffer the consequences of our bad choices.
When I tell the kids, “If this room is not clean ten minutes from now, I will take every cellphone in this house and I will lock them all in the trunk of my car”, the room gets cleaned.
Now, I’m no fool.
I understand that they are doing it because I carry the stick, not because they love me and they want to please me. And, while it would be ideal for them to do the right things because they want to do the right things, as a matter of some personal rule of theirs, or because they love me and want their father to be happy, you can’t argue with the fact that I can get my children to clean a room lickety-split.
* * *
The idea of rules and regulations, why we follow them and why we don’t, and whether or not there might be a better system for getting people to behave themselves, has always been very interesting to me, as a parent, and as a Christian, and as a human being. I will have some more to say on the topic tomorrow. At this point in the process, I think it suffices to say that I just wish that everyone would take it upon themselves to follow the rules that, not too long ago, we were all in agreement on.
Is it me, or have we recently been involved in a lot of ‘rule-breaking’?
It occurred to me today that adoption makes me smile.
Today, at work, I was completing an audit of student account information, looking to make sure that I’d made accounts for all of the new students entering our school district next week, making sure that I’d deactivated accounts for students who’d left the district over the course of the summer months. I do this audit three or four times throughout the year, to make sure that students who need access, have access. It’s really just a bunch of database searching and data manipulation.
But, I ran into a problem today that I don’t normally run into. A student, who last year had a certain student identification number, wasn’t in our student database anymore. This isn’t necessarily unusual, but when I went to see if the student had ever been in our database, the database said, “No”.
Now, it is not like me to lose track of students in my records. So, I went looking in the database for the student identification number that I’d recorded for the student last year. And, sure enough, I found that student identification number in the database, attached to a different student, with a different name. Our support staff in my school district are normally very detail-oriented, so I started to wonder what was going on. I called one of the support staff, a student database expert, and I asked her what had happened.
And she told me that the student, the one that I couldn’t find in the database anymore, didn’t actually exist anymore. Rather, that child had been adopted in the spring, and so the name of the student had changed in the adoption process. So, the person that I found in the database with the student identification number, and the former student that I couldn’t find in the database any longer, they are actually the same child.
Adopted.
So that, the previous child is gone. The new child –the adopted child– is the new student.
And the first thing that I thought to myself was, “Good for him. I’m happy for that kid.”
Right after that, I smiled.
* * *
And then, later in the day, I kept thinking about that student. I was so happy for him, and I thought about how his life-changing experience had been handled by our computer systems. I thought about how strange it would be to no longer exist in the old way that you’ve been previously existing, but rather, moving forward as a different person, in a sense. Different because someone cared enough to give you a place in their family, and a new name.
And yet, you’re still the same person, for better or for worse. The parts of you that were beloved by your adopting parents are still there, still lovable, for them, as your new mother and father, to appreciate. Additionally, the old mentality –the voice inside that told you that you weren’t good enough, that no one could ever love you enough to adopt you– is most likely still there, persisting despite of the new set of circumstances that speaks quite to the contrary.
And, since the dynamic ends up changing for the adoptee, there’s most likely a period of adjustment that happens. Putting away the old life, and getting accustomed to the new way of living, would most certainly not be something that would change overnight.
These opportunities that we have, in life, to make a course correction, to seize upon a different path to our goals, they don’t come often enough. It is much more likely the case that we tend to operate, as human beings, in ruts –> doing the same things that we’ve always done because the circumstances of life are as they’ve always been.
An adoption; now that would be a perfect opportunity to leave the past behind and start to lay claim to a new set of future possibilities.
* * *
Of course, as a Christian, my experience today of discovering that one of my students had been adopted got me to thinking about my own adoption.
By God.
Now, I usually try pretty hard to avoid overt religious messages on this blog, because I grew up in a church that taught me a lot of bad things, one of which was how damaging Bible-thumping can be for people who are hesitant to hearing God’s message. So, without getting too fired-up, I just want to talk about adoption a little bit.
The fact that I was chosen to be adopted continues to blow my mind, because I don’t think very much of myself. In fact, my adoption (by God) speaks more about my adoptive parent, I’m sure, than it does about me. Nevertheless, I am grateful for being chosen to be a part of something –part of a family– that I wasn’t going to be a part of otherwise.
And that adoption still fills me with a lot of different emotions. I am often disappointed in myself when I feel like I fall short of who my adoptive parent wants me to be. I also feel emboldened to continue the fight of being a different person than I was. The adoption made me a different person; I’m a person with a different name, and I belong to someone else now. I know what a difference adoption can make, if for nothing else, then for your peace of mind.
But, the battle is still very real. I don’t want to be a disappointment, so I keep struggling to be who My Father wants me to be.
Mostly, thinking about my adoption makes me smile.
It occurred to me today that we shouldn’t be fighting so much.
The fighting happens when we focus on our differences.
When we focus our differences, we lose site of what we all have in common.
Once that happens, we imagine that we are more different than we are the same.
I saw an ad lately. The ad had two pints of blood, in bags, next to each other. The ad said something to the effect that racists could feel free to identify which of the bags of blood came from a person of color.
The ad points out that we all have red blood. This, my friends is just the start.
Think of the person in your life, in your circle, that you feel is the most different from you. Maybe they’re a coworker, maybe they’re a fellow citizen of your town, maybe they run in the same social circles that you do. Don’t read the next line until you have someone in mind.
Ready?
You probably both have two lungs. You probably both have two nostrils. You probably both have ten toes, and a spleen, and two knees. You probably both have ears and fingernails and immune systems. You probably both have shoes and relatives and toothbrushes and shirts. You’ve probably both had birthday parties and favorite games to play and songs that you love to hear. You probably both have socks and underwear.
Part of me thought about making this blog post just a giant list of things that people tend to have in common with each other, to highlight the fact that we are all more alike than we are different. But, I think my readers are smart enough to get the point.
So, why is it that, in light of all of the things that we all have in common with each other, we tend to get so hung up on our differences.
* * *
Differences divide us, but only when we become fixated on those differences. People who focus on differences are, therefore, divisive. Outside influences (the media and the politicians come to mind almost immediately) that would have you pay more attention to differences than to similarities are schismatic.
Have you ever stopped to ask yourself, “Why are there entities within our nation that would have us all so focused on each other and our differences?”
The first thing that my child will do when I am looking at them to address their bad behavior –almost every single time– is to point out what their sibling did. It’s Distraction 101. “Daddy, I can’t have you looking at me, to notice what it is that I’m doing wrong, so let’s have you look over here, instead.”
Why are the divisive elements in our society trying to keep us from putting them under a microscope, hmmm?!?! What are they trying to hide by having us pointing fingers at each other?!?!
What might happen if we stopped hating each other, and we started ‘hating’ those institutions that would have us hate each other?
* * *
I asked you in the opening section to think of a person who’s different than you.
I think of Fred.
There’s a guy I know. We’ll call him Fred. I’m not going into any details about the nature of our relationship, for fear that it wouldn’t be too hard to figure out who Fred actually is, based on what I’m about to tell you.
Fred and I couldn’t disagree more on a lot of different topics. He’s a big conspiracy theory guy. I am not. He’s used the word ‘plandemic’ a few too many times in the past four months. He knows who he is voting for in November, and so do I, and they will most definitely end up being different people. He’s approached me in the past to tell me things that I can’t believe that he actually believes, since I wouldn’t have thought him capable of believing some of the things that he’s told me.
But, I talk to Fred, and he talks to me. We’ve had our differences before, because while I can allow a lot of what he says to just go by me without comment, I have on occasion found it necessary to correct him, on important matters. Just because we have differing opinions doesn’t mean that we don’t enjoy talking to each other. I am sure that he takes my skepticism with a grain of salt, just like he must be aware that I am taking some of his ‘theorizing’ with a grain of salt.
Fred and I have a lot more in common than what makes us different. One of the most important things that we have in common is a friendship, which is the landscape that allows for our exchanges, for better and for worse, to be just small components of a larger mosaic of human interaction.
Here’s to Fred.
* * *
After the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln caught a lot of flack for reaching out to the Confederate states, to try to help them to rebuild. During one such exchange with someone, who thought that Lincoln would be better served if he was more focused on the destruction of his enemy, Lincoln replied, “Madame, how can I better destroy my enemies than by making them my friends?”
Here’s the bottom line, people.
Racists continue in their racism because they don’t have friends of color. And you’re thinking, “Of course, they don’t.” But I’m thinking that the best way to have a friend is to be a friend. We need brave people of color to be friendly with racists. Sounds easy, right?!?!
I know Republicans who think that Democrats are the root of all evil, and vice versa. The Republicans, who believe this, don’t have Democrats in their circle of friends, and the Democrats, who feel the same way, have the same problem. So, where are the brave Republicans who are going to reach out to some Democrats?
We have become so isolated, haven’t we? I have my friends, and they’re just like me, so I don’t have to go beyond my comfort zone to be with my closest people.
But, to bring this full circle, WE REALLY AREN’T THAT DIFFERENT. It might sound scary for a person of color to befriend a racist, or for a Republican to cozy up with a Democrat, but the person of color is more than just a person of color, just as the Democrat is more than a Democrat. Beyond the labels, and the media telling us to stand guard against each other, is this truth:
We are all humans. We all have far more in common than can ever be different about us.
It occurred to me today that our focus is being taken away from where it ought to be.
WARNING: What I’m about to attempt to discuss in this article is a delicate topic, which is entangled in a couple of other delicate topics. This article could easily be confused with statements that I do not and would not condone, confusing especially for people who might read this without knowing my true heart. I will do my best in what follows to make my point, without being overtly offensive.
On Sunday (two days ago), in Kenosha, Wisconsin, police shot Jacob Blake, an unarmed man, seven times as he was getting into his vehicle, a vehicle that contained his three children.
On February 23, Maud Arbery, an unarmed man on a morning jog, was fatally shot in Glynn County, Georgia.
On May 25, George Floyd was killed by police during his arrest for allegedly using counterfeit currency.
On March 13, Breonna Taylor was shot eight times by police officers in Louisville, Kentucky, inside her own apartment.
Each of these stories is tragic and wrong, and these injustices have enraged a nation. They’ve captured the headlines of news media outlets all over the world. They’ve grabbed our attention, and they’ve begun, after far too long, to have a cumulative effect on some necessary changes.
But, they’re not the whole story.
Now, before you assume that what I mean by that statement is that these stories have different perspectives –mainly, the perspectives of the police officers involved– that should be given some credence, that is not at all what I mean. The police officers, involved in the stories above, are part of a much bigger problem that should be –THAT MUST BE– addressed.
Rather, when I say that those stories are not the whole story, what I mean to say is this: there is more to tell.
* * *
For every injustice that we end up hearing about, for every horrible sin that is committed upon a human anywhere that ends up grabbing the headlines, there are –more than likely– countless others that never get to see the light of day. For every George and Breonna and Maud and Jacob, there are dozens of other stories of people being cruel and evil to each other, to their fellow human beings, and those stories we will probably never hear.
Even so, that’s not even my point.
What outnumbers these stories –the ones about evil that we hear about and the ones about evil that we don’t hear about– are the stories of goodness.
But, you probably won’t hear about those stories, not by watching the sensationalist news media, anyway.
People don’t watch the news outlets to hear about the good stuff that is happening in the world everyday –> the thousands and thousands of good stories that are going on all around us. In the news industry, it goes something like this: “If it bleeds, it leads”.
So, they tell us the stories of hatred and war and racism and police brutality and rape because they know that those stories will make us afraid. Those stories are awful stories and I hate what I hear when I hear about those stories and (maybe this is the point) I hate those people that I hear about in those stories, those awful people who do those awful things.
And, by telling me those awful stories, they manage to distract me.
From the good.
A police officer in Vandalia, Illinois helped a seventy-year-old woman with a flat tire on the side of the road today. You didn’t hear about it.
A teenager in Warrensburg, Missouri raised seven hundred dollars today for the local food pantry for low-income families. You didn’t hear about it.
In Keyes, Oklahoma, a local church pastor married his one-hundredth married couple today. You didn’t hear about it.
In Danville, Kentucky, a grocery store bag-boy gave half of his previous paycheck today to one of his coworkers who is battling Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. You didn’t hear about it.
Just keep watching the programming of the news networks. I’m sure that they just haven’t gotten to it, yet.
* * *
I would never –NOT EVER– suggest that we shouldn’t be paying attention to these horrible injustices, and the countless others like them, that have been grabbing our nation’s attention. We have, for FAR TOO LONG, decided that it was okay to turn a blind eye to the issues that we didn’t want to tackle, that we were too weak to tackle. We will never be able to handle the issues that exist –issues of racism, issues of police brutality, issues of hatred– if we don’t start bringing them into the light.
But…
What we pay attention to, what we focus on, really does make a difference in our perceptions of the world around us.
I know this is true because I can feel myself falling into the darkness when I pay too much attention to what the media would have me looking at. As a matter of fact, I’m becoming more and more convinced that we are all being programmed by the news media, by social media, by any and all media, to focus on the negative. And, I don’t know if that’s something that I want to do anymore.
Of course, this is coming from a white guy whose been living a life of privilege that he is only just now starting to come to terms with. Excuse me, my friends of color who may be reading this, if my call to focus on the positive hits on a nerve of yours that is raw because of the injustices that have been perpetrated against people like you for way too long. Hopefully, in your frustration and outrage, you can agree with me that, all things being equal, it is better to be focused on the positive things in life.
* * *
I guess what I mean to say is this: there is good, going on all around us, all of the time, even in the midst of the bad that is there, too. We have a choice, all of us do. We can chose to focus on what’s wrong with the world or we can focus on what’s working.
The fear-mongers in the media want you to remain ultra-focused on the bad. If you stay ultra-focused on the bad, then you will also have to stay tuned to the media while they offer you their answers. Vote for this guy, he has the answers. Listen to this expert, they have the answers. Stay tuned! After the break, we will welcome our guest who has all of the answers!
Get real.
Granted, we can’t ignore problems with our rose-colored glasses on –I’m not suggesting that– but I’m afraid that too many of us have bought into the lie that everything is broken.
Find the good. Focus on the good. See if you can’t, somehow, replicate that good. Help each other. Love each other. Be there for each other.
Less media (except for this blog; please keep coming here).
It occurred to me today that we often define things by defining them as ‘not other things’.
My wife and I have been arguing about melody and harmony for decades. She’s a soprano, and if you’re a choral singer, you know that means that she is accustomed to getting to sing the melody in most music arranged for SATB choirs. I’m a tenor, which means that, in SATB choral arrangements, I usually sing harmony with the altos and the basses.
The funny thing about this is that, in TTBB choral arrangements (these arrangements are for choirs with two tenor parts and a baritone and a bass part), tenors usually get to sing the melody. As a tenor, I can say that I understand what it’s like to get to sing the melody and also what it’s like to get to sing the harmony.
But, what most musicians understand is that the melody and the harmony are not necessarily better or worse than each other. From a technical standpoint, there isn’t anything about the melody that makes it more enjoyable to sing. In fact, many people who are accustomed to singing the harmony lines in music will come to prefer it, since it is often in the process of harmonizing with a melodic line that musicians will discover that music becomes even more beautiful than it was before.
Which brings me to my point for this opening section –> harmony is defined by melody and melody is defined by harmony. You can’t have a harmonic line without having a melody for the harmony to coexist alongside. A melody isn’t a melody if there aren’t harmonies going on.
The two of them lose their full meaning in the absence of the other.
* * *
Whenever my kids complain about how hot it is, or how cold it is, I usually make some reference to the relativistic nature of their claims –i.e. “If you think this is hot, you should live on the surface of the moon!” or “If you think this is cold, you should live on Neptune!”– and this rarely does anything but annoy them. It should does get the eye rolls, though!
But, when you come to think about it, a lot of things are like this.
When Guns ‘N Roses released the song, November Rain, in 1992, the length of the radio edit of the song was almost five minutes. Considering that your average pop song tends to be just over three minutes, that makes the song seem pretty long. However, the album edit of the song was almost nine minutes long. If that seems like too much, let me ask you this, “How would you feel about a song that was twenty-seven seconds long?”
The tallest people in the world have to duck to get through doorways, but the shortest people in the world have to use footstools to reach sinks. If we made all sinks so short that everyone could reach them
–even the shortest among us– then they would inconvenience the person of average stature, and they would absolutely confound the tallest people around.
In the darkest room, a single candle offers quite a glow, but that same candle in the middle of the afternoon on a summer’s day is of no additional consequence when it comes to lighting an open field.
If I say “up north” in Alabama, I might be referring to Tennessee, but “up north” in Michigan means the Upper Peninsula. It’s not likely that anyone in Alabama has ever said “up north” in reference to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
When it comes to many of these concepts, they are hard to fully comprehend without the understanding of their opposite.
What would ‘pretty’ look like if everyone was pretty? Who knows?
How would we understand ‘evil’ if no one ever did anything wrong? What if everyone did only bad things? Would that make all of us ‘evil’, or would it just then be what we considered normal?
* * *
My wife bought a new board game for the family to play the other night. The game involved trying to get people to guess a noun by using adjectives of different types, displayed on a board. You could choose to use any of about sixty different adjectives, and you could place these adjective tiles on the display board in sections that say, “Definitely”, “Kind Of”, and “Not”.
So, if I am trying to get people to guess “Grand Canyon”, I could put the adjective “SMALL” in the “Not” part of the display board, or I could put the adjective “HUGE” in the “Definitely” part of the display board. The rounds are timed, and you want to get your audience to guess as many nouns as possible.
What we noticed right away was that we tended to like to use the “Definitely” part of the board, even if it meant that we needed to search through the list of adjectives for longer to find what we were looking for. This is obviously a bad strategy, since it uses up the time element in the round. But, the inefficiency of it didn’t keep people from doing it.
Knowing that “SMALL” is available to use is great if I’m trying to get people to guess “lice”, but what if I’m trying to get people to guess “Mars”. Will I search for too long to find “MASSIVE” or will I just grab the “SMALL” and put it in the “Not” part of the display board?
Interestingly enough, we had a lot of fun playing the game, because it was challenging for us to try to discover ways to get people to guess the right answers.
* * *
I wrote in the opening section about melody and harmony, together, being more beautiful than they would be separately, and certainly more beautiful than the melody would be alone.
As I was writing that line, the following thought occurred to me.
We each have our own song to sing, in this life. We exist, during the singing of our songs, alongside other ‘song-singers’ whose songs occur next to ours. We can harmonize with them, as we allow for their songs to become the melody, and we can –selfishly– insist on our songs being the melody with which others around us are then forced to harmonize.
If it truly doesn’t matter what we’re singing (trust me, harmonies are as beautiful as melodies), then it seems like the right choice to put other people, and their ‘melodies’, in the spotlight.
To honor those around us, we should enjoy the opportunity that we have to harmonize with their melodies.
It occurred to me today that the comments section gets mixed reviews.
Get it? It gets mixed reviews. It GETS mixed reviews.
I happen to think that’s one of the funniest things that I’ve ever written.
Anyway…
Imagine walking down the sidewalk in your town and coming upon someone who is dousing themselves with gasoline. As you get closer, it seems more and more obvious to you that they are about to light themselves on fire. At about the moment when you are as close as you are willing to get to this scene, the person sets down the now-mostly-empty canister of gasoline and reaches for the lighter that has been sitting on the sidewalk this whole time.
Would you say something? If so, what would you say?
What if that didn’t go well? What if you were met by an angry torrent of hateful words, cries to ‘mind your own business’ and shouts of ‘it’s my life’? Would you stick with it? If it seemed that your comments were of no interest to this person, would you keep trying?
* * *
Wow, how was that for an opening section, huh?!?! I hit you with a joke and then a major downer. Hopefully, the two evened each other out.
Seriously though, what do we think about comments?
If you’ve never read much of the Bible, let me take a quick moment to suggest that you start with the Book of Proverbs. It’s not overtly ‘evangelical’, and it’s not ‘fire and brimstone’. If you are opposed to the idea of Christianity –maybe because you’ve noticed one or two Christians in your life who would appall Jesus himself– you could still find a lot to like in the Book of Proverbs.
The Book of Proverbs actually has a lot of advice about… advice. One of the things that it says, repeatedly, is that it’s smart to take wise advice.
One of the other things that it says, repeatedly, is that fools don’t follow wise advice.
That example from the opener, that poor unfortunate soul who is going to self-immolate, may or may not be a fool. They may or may not be willing to take the good advice that you might have to offer them as you walk up on them on the sidewalk.
Maybe you’ve had bad experiences giving advice before. I know I have. I’ve offered good advice –wise advice– to people before and they aren’t interested in what I have to say, and so we become a lot less likely to give advice in the future. Maybe there are thousands, or millions, of us who have good advice to give, but we’re just keeping our mouths shut because we’ve been told to do so.
I’ve lost friendships giving advice to people who didn’t want to hear what I had to say. The ends of those relationships are partly my responsibility, I guess; if only I’d kept my mouth shut it those situations, if only I’d minded my own business, I wouldn’t have brought down the house on top of my own head. When I think about those friendships, I have to be honest with myself –> they weren’t really strong relationships in the first place.
I’ve lost some mediocre friendships when I made the mistake of thinking that I could speak truth into a relationship that wasn’t strong enough to bear the weight of that truth. Conversely, I prefer to have friends in my life who will speak truth to me, even when it’s hard for me to hear it. My true friends –my closest friends– will tell me the things that I don’t want to hear and I’ll listen to them because I value their comments in my comment section.
* * *
A little over two weeks ago, I started advertising my posts on Facebook. Prior to that point in time, my daily posts were getting two or three or four views a day. Now, the posts are getting thirty or forty or fifty views a day.
Which is so freakin’ awesome!
The first one hundred days of my daily posts on this blog (from April 21st to July 29th) had a combined total of 710 views (averaging 7.1 views per day). Then, on July 30th, I advertised the post more widely on social media and I got 94 views on just that one day!
In the month of August, on 22 daily posts, I’ve received 965 views (averaging 44 views per day)!
When this first started happening, I was jazzed with all of the views –> jazzed that people were reading my writing. So exciting! I was also excited about the feedback that I was getting, via the comments on social media. And I swore to myself that I was going to try to engage everyone who left a comment with some replies, so people felt like their appreciation was, well, appreciated.
I’ve recently started falling behind on leaving comments and engaging these commenters in some ‘back and forth’. I feel a little guilty about that, actually.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I want everyone to feel free to comment in any way that they feel led to do so. But, it makes me wonder about comments that we receive from other people. Back to my example from the opener, imagine that you aren’t the first person to come upon that person who is thinking about the unthinkable right there in the middle of the sidewalk. Imagine that you are the tenth person –or the fiftieth– to come by with something to say to that individual.
It could start to become a little overwhelming.
* * *
I mentioned, once upon a time, that my favorite Pixar movie is The Incredibles (I talked about it in THIS POST). One of the interesting parts of the movie –and one of the things that I’ve often wondered about– is this: what if people don’t want to be saved?
In the first few minutes of the aforementioned film, one of the superheroes in the movie tried to save someone who was trying to kill themselves. That person ended up suing the superhero that saved him, for “ruining his death”. Because the government was on the hook for covering the legal fees of the superheroes who were just helping the government with protecting the masses, such lawsuits against these superheroes ended up costing the government too much. This sets the stage for the rest of the film, where The Incredibles, and the other superheroes like them, are forced to stop ‘saving people’.
There is an equation here that we need to think about, I believe.
If you are responsible for ‘doing you’, then that might include some inner conviction that you have to give advice to people. In certain situations, you might be wise to offer advice, while in others, you’re being foolish. Nevertheless, your responsibility is to do what you can to try to speak truth into the lives of the people around you.
That’s one part of the equation.
Of course, the other part of the equation is how that advice is received. Inasmuch as we would all love, when we offer advice, if the advice would be received and heeded, that’s not how it works. Furthermore, how other people receive your advice isn’t your responsibility –> it’s there’s. Your responsibility is to ‘do you’.
When I reach that guy, with the gasoline and the lighter, on the sidewalk, I will give him advice. That’s my responsibility. He may take it, or he may reject it.
It occurred to me today that there are worse things than failure.
Did you know that the singing gazelle in Zootopia is none other than the Columbian signer, Shakira?
I mean, I knew that she did some of the soundtrack music, and I’ve only seen the movie once or twice, so maybe I missed it somehow, but I only just realized, the last time I saw Zootopia, that Shakira is the gazelle. She features in one of the last scenes, during the denouement.
Try Everything is the hit song that Shakira put together for the movie. Its lyrics discuss the advantages of trying new things, even if those attempts end in failure, and the song ends up seeming revolutionary somehow, inasmuch as it forwards this idea that… hold on to your butts… it’s okay to fail at things.
That is not what we are teaching our children here in America, thank you very much, Ms. Shakira; you can take those crazy notions of yours right back to South America.
‘Failure is okay’, are you kidding me?!?! Everyone knows that “failure is not an option”. Everyone knows that failure is that thing that you get yelled at for, by your parents or by the school teacher. Everyone knows that failure starts with ‘F’ and an ‘F’ is the worst grade you can get on a report card.
But, here’s the thing –> I just did a Google search for “quotes about failure”, and they all came back with all of this ‘Shakira-esque’ inspirational drivel about positive attitudes and never quitting and getting up more times than you get knocked down and all of this non-sense.
So, where do we stand on this? I thought for sure that, in America, we were opposed to such radical and revolutionary ideas.
* * *
In a more serious approach to the topic, let me say this, as a school teacher for almost two whole decades: I’ve had students who wouldn’t even try because trying included in it a chance of failure. However, it is impossible to fail if you don’t try. Because failure is so undesirable, even more undesirable than being labeled ‘lazy’ or ‘negligent’, students who are trying to avoid failure will pick not trying every time.
This is one of the saddest things to watch happen, as a teacher, because at some point, this student learned that there’s nothing worse than failure.
Which isn’t true, of course.
When it comes to watching my students, who just don’t try because they don’t want to fail, you can see it in their eyes and on their faces –> they think that it might be worth trying, that maybe Mr. Brackett has a point when he says that they should try. In their eyes, you can see that they want to try. But, then that sparkle in their eyes goes dark, and their face droops a little bit, and then they say, “No, I’m not going to try.”
In their minds, they believe that they can’t fail if they don’t even try. However, they believe this because they’ve believed the lie that there is nothing worse than failure, that failure should be avoided at all costs. But, I can think of one thing that’s worse than failure, and a certain Columbian pop star would be able to read my mind right about now.
Not trying is worse than failure.
Not trying is worse than failure because you might not ever know how wonderfully talented you are at something until you’ve tried to do it. Granted, you may be horrible at this thing that you’ve never tried, but, if all things are equal, then at least the person who has tried knows –one way or the other– whether or not they are good. The person who tries has the knowledge of their skill level.
The person who does not or will not try does not have that knowledge. The have their cowardice and their ignorance.
So, as Shakira would say, “Hips don’t lie.”
Oops.
So, as Shakira would say, “Try everything.”
* * *
But what about that feeling that you get when you try something and you fail at it. As horribly embarrassing as that is, it’s no wonder why people are afraid to try. I hate to tell you this, but that feeling isn’t natural. You, at some point in your life, learned that failing at something is embarrassing. Like with most things, you probably learned this at a young age. You were unfortunately influenced by an adult in your life, probably an adult who didn’t understand what they were doing to you, when they taught you that failure is bad, is embarrassing, is to be avoided.
I know I’ve done it to my kids, because I’ve seen the hesitance in their eyes when it comes to trying new things, when it comes to the possibility that they might fail.
Now, before I start whipping myself for my sins, let me say this: I don’t know if you can really blame adults for the way that they instruct children about failure. Parents, for example, often feel like their children are reflections on them –to what extent this may or may not be true is up for debate– and so, they are somewhat concerned about the failures of their children and how those failures will make them look. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s happening.
Teachers have a similar problem, inasmuch as students who fail are usually factored into some equation that schools have been using to calculate teacher effectiveness. If I thought that I could ever get away with it, that I could run a classroom experiment and not have it negatively affect my performance review, I would shoot for having a classroom full of students who have learned to at least try new things, over a classroom full of students who suggest that their teacher can teach them a few things when they’re interested in learning.
* * *
The even more unfortunate side effect here is this –> our society has become wary and hesitant about looking at different approaches, about trying new things, and I wonder if it’s not because of some collective fear that we have about failure. I’m not calling for us, as a society, to throw caution to the wind and run around trying every dumb idea that crosses our mind. I happen to believe that there are things that we ought not be doing or trying.
But, I also think it’s time to think of some different approaches to some things.
If not trying is really worse than failure, and we have noticed that there are things that aren’t working so well in our world, what do we have to lose in attempting some changes?
It Occurred To Me Today 