The Wal-Mart Stampede, and Reconsidering the Liberal vs. Conservative Debate

I was recently reading a commentary by Ken Conner on TownHall.com, a web site that offers a collection of conservative opinions. ( Two of the personal commitments I'm working on since the election are: 1- read a wider variety of thoughtful opinions from different viewpoints, and 2- stop participating in the bitter partisan divides and demonization of those who think differently.) This particular commentary by Ken Conner dealt with the recent death of a young man, Jdimytai Damour, who was killed in a stampede of shoppers at a Wal-Mart. Ken's "conservative" commentary included some of the following statements:

"This tragedy points to the selfishness of the human heart and demonstrates that greed is not confined to the scions of Wall Street. Quite the contrary, these Main Street shoppers pursued their own materialistic impulses at the expense of the needs of those around them. They were focused on themselves, intent on getting to the deals first. Their trampling of Mr. Damour, each other, and the employees who were trying to help him, exhibits hearts that care more about saving $50 on an HDTV than about the health and safety of their fellow man....

How did we get to this point in "the home of the brave"? Why do so many Americans exhibit so little concern for their neighbor? Doubtless, there are many causes, but prominent among them is our willingness to sacrifice core principles of human dignity on the altar of convenience...

The trampling of Jdimytai Damour should be a wake-up call to each one of us. It should cause us to pause and consider whether we place too high a value on our own convenience and our own possessions. We should examine our hearts and ask ourselves whether we any longer have the capacity to sacrifice our own desires for the good of another. We are missing the big picture if events like these capture our attentions just long enough for us all to gasp and say, "How awful!", then turn back to our shopping carts and our self-centered lives."

Wow, this was appearing on a conservative web site, but my first thought was that such commentary would just as easily fit in at any liberal web site. This appears to be an area where many conservative and liberals people can find some real common ground. (The article later goes on to criticize abortion, but let's focus on the above thoughts for now.)

When I was reading the above comments, I must confess that my first thought was that Ken Conner was going to admit that liberals were right about some things after all. Community spirit and caring for your neighbors was more important than the blind pursuit of individual self interest that is so often associated with conservatism. How could anyone possibly interpret what he was saying differently?

The comments section for the article contained an amusing spectrum of views. One common thread really grabbed my attention though, because it was the exact opposite of what I was thinking. For many people, the motivations and actions of the shoppers at the Wal-Mart were a perfect example of why conservatism was morally superior to liberalism. To them, liberalism represented a culture where "The right to pursue unrestrained pleasure is all that matters" and "responsibilities and duties are onerous and inconvenient concepts". This results in a decline of moral responsibility that the "sense of entitlement at the foundation of the welfare state certainly exacerbates".

Oh my, each side has such a dramatically different view of what the other side stands for, yet each side equally deplores what happened. It's clear that trying to characterize this incident as a liberal vs conservative thing just doesn't cut it. If anything, the resulting argument over ideology destroys any insight, agreements and common ground that may exist. Both the "liberal view" and the "conservative view" each contain a complex collection of differing attitudes that cannot be done justice too by the simple categories we tend to use. We need to move beyond these characterizations if we're going to move beyond the bitter partisanship of the past.

A good friend once told me that if you're going to break the world into two groups, don't do it along the conventional political spectrum. It's more useful to divide the world into people who care and people who don't. While that's not entirely correct since we all exist along a continuous spectrum of caring and our positions change with time and circumstances, perhaps it is a more useful way to look at things sometimes. Perhaps it can lead us to some common ground and common work on ways forward despite other differences.

By the way, did you know that Jdimytai Damour was trampled to death at that Wal-Mart while he was trying to shield a pregnant woman against the onslaught? In all the hand-wringing over that incident, we tend to forget that there was some real heroism involved. We need to emphasize that more as the real story of that day.

Transforming Your Life - Part 1

I spent some time browsing on the web recently on the topic of "transforming you life". I even purchased and read my first eBook Life Transformations by Michelle L Casto. It was a nice short 56 page one evening read that introduced several good ideas in need to think about more.

Two important thoughts came through from several sources, perhaps best summarized by an article titled The Science Of Transformation In Everyday Life. Major life transformations are generally not characterized by big changes in outward circumstances and behavior. They are better characterized by two important inner changes.

1. Deep changes in perspective - Major changes in the way you look at the world, altering one's core assumptions about the nature of things and the way the world works. This "shifts the entire landscape and one's trajectory through it."
   
2. A Changing Sense of Self - Changes in your sense of self, who you are, and your relationship to others and the world. These changes are sometimes referred to as a "spiritual experiences involving a diminished sense of personal identity and an enhanced sense of connection to others, an experience that became an enduring part of the transformational process."
   

More insights from the Life Transformations next time.

Local Discussions - What do we do now?

I had been planning a regular series of posts on how to use the recent election as a transforming event in my life. I posted some thoughts, and then I got stuck for a while and had to spend some time sorting things out. During that time we had a series of discussion with local progressive groups on the question - “What do we do now?” (i.e. now that the election is over). Let me summarize some of those discussions that could impact us on a personal level.

• People have hope now. There's a lot of optimism. We want to put our energy into something. But many of us are not sure what to focus on now.
  
• We need to take time to absorb all that happened and consider what our individual approach should be.
  
• There was a strong desire to approach our work with a win-win attitude involving people from across the political spectrum. People are extremely tired of polarizing politics and demonizing those who think differently. If we really want to change the system, we need to change that.
  
• Realize that for some people, the election didn’t bring hope - it brought anger and fear. There are good people, often friends and relatives, who did not support Obama and expect the worse now. Understand their emotions, don’t argue with them, but shed a positive light on the future and invite them to participate in a positive way.
  
• What happened was a change in direction for the country, and plausibly for the world. Changes in direction result in very big changes in the long term, but barely noticeable changes in the very short term. Don't get discouraged if nothing major changes in the next 3-6 months - big changes often take time.
  
• Think local. This time between the election and the inauguration is a good time to build and strengthen local community groups and organizations. Do what you can to help in your local community. With the downturn in the economy there’s more of a need for help in local communities than ever.
  

To me, one of the biggest changes we have to focus on is to move from a stance of “opposition of bad policies” to a focus on “promoting good policies”. On a personal level, that means making an effort to be as helpful as possible to your community in the coming months.

Thought for the Day - Before we can lead

Thoughts for the day ---

We must be silent before we can listen.

We must listen before we can learn.

We must learn before we can prepare.

We must prepare before we can serve.

We must serve before we can lead.

~William Arthur Ward

Bye to Anger, Resentment, and Fear

Day #8 of the new world - next in an ongoing series of thoughts on how to make the Nov 4th election transformative on a personal level.

I recently had some discussions with family members who supported John McCain. I was surprised at the level of anger, resentment, sorrow, and perhaps even a little fear about the future that was sometimes expressed when talking about the election. While I don't share those feelings now, I can't be too critical of them because I've felt the very same emotions myself many times over the past 8 years. But I can see more clearly now what an unhealthy situation this is. Decisions that are motivated by anger, resentment or fear seldom turn out to be good decisions. Time to put that behind and move on.

I've decided to let go of any remaining anger at the Bush administration. I'd like to see the mistakes they made acknowledged and corrected, but I don't think we have enough time to be distracted by a focus on punishment and revenge given all the other pressing issues. And of course, there's absolutely no benefit to holding any resentment against McCain supporters, though I'm not sure I ever did at a personal level. Time to focus on win-win solutions and move forward.

Bye to Rush and Sean

Day #5 of the new world - next in an ongoing series of thoughts on how to make the Nov 4th election transformative on a personal level (it's already transformative on a national level)

A confession - I used to occasionally listen to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity out of curiosity just to see what they're saying. I know a very progressive friend who listened to them for several hours on the day before and the day of the election. He has more strength and stamina than I do.

I have decided to end this practice now. I get essentially no real benefit for the time I spend on it. I find it somewhat toxic to my spirit and emotional well being. And most importantly, unless they change their divisive and polarizing ways, they no longer have any relevance to what direction this country will decide to take. Well, at least that's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.

I want to point out that they've also come under criticism from Daniel Larison of the American Conservative:

... that audience is part of what’s wrong with the Republican Party. Part of what has been wrong with the GOP is that its rank-and-file members take their political advice and insights from radio entertainers who seem to understand little about political reality and even less about policy, and who substitute bluster for understanding....

Goodbye to hate radio, and on to more nurishing uses of my time.

Making this Election a Transformational Event

It’s Saturday evening, Nov 8th, or as some of us call it, the 4th day of the new world. Now that I'm able to focus on something other than an uncontrollable compulsion to check the latest poll numbers every 2 hours, or to read the latest episode of "The Miss-Adventures of Sarah from Wasilla" (man I'll miss watching Tina Fey), I can finally write some blog entries.

The election on Nov 4th was certainly a transformational event for our political system. It was more than just a change of administrations; it was a change of direction for the country. Changing directions means the immediate impacts may be small, but the long term impacts can be enormous.

Clearly it energized and empowered the progressive movement. There is a true sense of hope, optimism, and even renewed pride in the air. There is also a growing consensus that now the hard work begins if we really want to make this election a transformational event for the society. In that spirit, I would like to exploit this opportunity and make this be a transformational event for myself too. But how to best do that?

There is a “Coming of Age” class for teenagers at my congregation that is meant to help them in the transition from childhood to the next stage in life (not quite young adults yet, but no long a child). As part of the process, they bring in something from their childhood that is relinquished and taken away during a ceremony to symbolize leaving that prior life behind.

I thought that was a neat idea, and wondered if I could do something like that to symbolize leaving the pre-election Bush years behind, and moving into the new era symbolized by Obama’s election. The first act I’ve decided to do is to remove from my browser the pointers to all the political blogs and web sites I obsessed over before the election. I’ve wasted way too much time on them with no benefits to show for it. Time to put that behind me and move on now. Instead I'll limit myself to tracking a very limited number of web sites and blogs that I get some true benefits from. More steps to follow….

Morning Affirmation from Mahatma Gandhi

A morning affirmation from Mahatma Gandhi. The first line in particular really struck me as something profound if you were to actually follow it.

- I shall not fear anyone on Earth.
- I shall fear only God.
- I shall not bear ill will toward anyone.
- I shall not submit to injustice from anyone.
- I shall conquer untruth by truth. And in resisting untruth, I shall put up with all suffering.

- Mahatma Gandhi

Morning Affirmation from the Dalai Lama

This is a good one for the morning:

“Everyday, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others; to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.” - Dalai Lama

Do five simple things a day to stay sane

We all know many of the basic daily routines needed to maintain physical health as we grow older: proper diet, exercise, sleep... As you might expect, there are a number of basic daily routines for maintaining mental health too during our lives. A recent article in TimesOnline outlined five recommended steps for maintaining proper mental health and balance. The article discussed them in more detail, but I'll post a quick summary of them below.

Connect
Developing relationships with family, friends, colleagues and neighbours will enrich your life and bring you support

Be active
Sports, hobbies such as gardening or dancing, or just a daily stroll will make you feel good and maintain mobility and fitness

Be curious Noting the beauty of everyday moments as well as the unusual and reflecting on them helps you to appreciate what matters to you

Learn
Fixing a bike, learning an instrument, cooking – the challenge and satisfaction brings fun and confidence

Give
Helping friends and strangers links your happiness to a wider community and is very rewarding

I found that I actually did fairly well following most of these in may daily life. How about you?

The 80-20 Rule of New Projects vs Maintenance

I was reading a recent article about people managing large computer departments. The main point of the article was:

IT business priority #1 - free up money for new projects.

Basically, too many companies spend 80% of their computer department's programming budget on maintenance of old programs, and only 20% of their budget on new projects. The article suggest that this ratio needs to be inverted to realize the full benefit of the computer department.

That got me wondering. Consider my "discretionary time", that which is left after my job, sleeping, eating, etc. Shouldn't I ideally be spending 80% of that time on new projects, learning, preparing for a 2nd career, or doing something else to improve myself? And should the remaining 20% be on maintenance activities? I'm sure that the amount of my discretionary time spent on routine chores around the house, running errands, going through my email, and taking care of assorted other ongoing obligations adds up to much more the 20%. In fact, it's often more than 80%.

So the question for the day is - how do I reverse that ratio? Obviously it means cutting down the time spent on maintenance chores. This summer for the first time in many years I paid a local high school student to mow my lawn. That's one example, one which I've decided was well worth the money. I'm searching for others now.

One of the big time consumers of my evenings is email. Sometimes it seems that getting that down to 20 minutes a day would be wonderful (for non-work email). I'm not sure how to accomplish this yet though.

A Big Part of Success is Showing Up

You can make detailed plans for your future, but often times the best opportunities show up unexpectedly and are not something you plan for. They don’t show up at random though. On the contrary, I’ve realized that they tend to show up for people who tend to show up. In other words, if you make yourself a visible, active, hardworking participant in some field, people looking to give someone an opportunity will be much more likely to come to you. The result can be a totally unexpected chance to move your plans forward in a new direction.

Let me give you a recent example from our town. One good friend - let’s call her Anne (because that’s her real name), was a housewife with two young children. I am on our town’s Conservation Advisory Council, and I invited Anne to attend one of the meetings. She got very interested in one of the local environmental issues and did an enormous amount of work on it culminating in a presentation to the town board. Soon after that she joined another town council and became active there too.

When people were looking for some new to run for our State Assembly seat, guess who they decided to ask? One year ago Anne was a housewife taking care of two young children and getting somewhat board with the lack of activities in her life. Now she’s busy running for State Assembly, something neither she or her husband had in their plans. If she wins, that's a start of a major political career for her. If she looses, the contacts she made and the reputation she built up in the process will open up many new doors for her.

And all because she showed up and started to get involved on a small scale to begin with.

When does mid-life start?

The following notes are from a CD I listened to a while ago on "Mid-life Issues". I'll try to dig up the author's name and post it here, but in the mean time I thought I'd share this with you.

• Mid-life starts when yo realize your time is limited and you stop thinking about how far from birth you are and start thinking about how far you are from death.
  
• Are you reaching your goals, and if not why? If you have, why aren't you enjoying it more? There is a growing need to find meaning in what you're doing.
  
• You've already proven you can make it. Now there's an awareness of legacy issues.
  
• These transitions are inevitable. Part of the normal development process
  
• An important realization is that you're never going to be famous. Sometimes this can cause people to loose their passion. Sometimes it can cause people to loose their stress over unrealistic expectations and envy, and thus to enjoy work more.
  
• You have to learn now to do things just for the sake of doing them, because they're fun or you find personal meaning in doing them.
  
• You need to let go of your younger juvenile goals. Meaning in jobs becomes more important that promotions. Much of the meaning comes from giving back to others, including mentorship.
  
• Transitions always mean a loss, a loss of "what was", which has to be given up in order to become "what will be".
  
• To examine mid-life transitions, look at three things:
  
  
  
  1. How you're doing now
     
  2. What you'd like to be
     
  3. what you need to do to get there.
     
  
  

The Role of Advertising in Free Markets

Alice Flynn, who works for a yellow pages publisher, responded to my previous appends on the evils of advertising by saying the following:

Advertising helps people find what they need. I have also seen the manipulative use of advertising, as we all have, by political campaigns, cults, con artists and quacks. But please, be reasonable. It is not advertising in itself, which is basically communication, that is the problem. Any tool can be used for good or evil.

She has a reasonable point, but let me digress a little to discuss the role of advertising in a truly free market. When I took my economics classes in college, I remember a long series of "proofs" that a truly free market would allocate goods and services in a highly efficient way in order to satisfy our needs and desires. Then, the course took a long look at the unstated assumptions needed for this to be true. One of them was that people always acted as informed rational consumers. As an illustration of how far this assumptions is from being true, the professor stated that if this assumption were accurate, advertising as we know it would not have any effect and would not exist. All that we would have are basic "yellow page" type ads offering information on goods and services available with contact information for the company.

So in a sense, I agree that with Alice Flynn that there is clearly a place for such informative type of advertising. But I stand by my argument that most of the advertising we are exposed to on TV, radio, and to a lesser extent in magazines and newspapers tends to be highly manipulative. If we were acting in our own best interests in the way free market theory says we should, we would do our best to limit our exposure to such advertising.

Is Advertising by Non-Profit Organizations Evil?

After my last post titled Advertising is Evil, Robin Edgar posted an interesting comment about a highly misleading, if not outright fraudulent ad. It turns out to be one of the latest new magazine ads for the Unitarian Universalists. It starts with a very provocative statement for shock value, then goes on to discuss it in a more reasonable tone.

I'd rather not go into a discussion about the effectiveness of this approach at the moment. It does bring up an interesting thought though - if advertising is evil, does this apply to ads from religious groups or non-profit organizations in general? This is somewhat of an intellectual game, but after giving it some thought I came up with the following answer. Advertising by commercial entities can be considered evil because they are trying to change your thoughts without regard to the harm it may cause you or society, motivated solely by their own profit. Non-profit organizations, including religious ones, are by definition not operating only for their own financial gain. They are much more likely to be concerned with benefiting society in general or you in particular, at least according to their view on what is beneficial.

Now it's certainly possible of course that they can end up using unethical and deceptive methods for doing this. No organization is perfect. So I'll view advertisements from non-profit groups as being potentially good or evil, needing evaluation on a case-by-case basis. I think political advertising also falls into this category, though given recent history I'm likely to consider them guilty until proven innocent.

Since I don't know of any TV or radio show supported only with non-profit advertising (with the possible exception of some PBS and NPR shows that have non-profit underwriting), this doesn't really change anything. I'm still left with the big question - what to do about watching the upcoming Olympics? I'm guessing that it will be a commercial advertising extravaganza setting new records for at least the amount of advertising money spent, and possibly the amount of total time devoted to advertising. Ugh.

Advertising is Evil

In my last post I wrote about the 100 Possession Challenge that some people are attempting in order to radically simplify their life. I've spoken to several people about this, and while none of us are willing to try the actual 100 Possession Challenge, it has inspired myself and others to consider significantly decluttering our lives.

This motivated me to think about what other radical ideas I could come up with to significantly simplify and declutter other aspects of my life, both physically and mentally. I eventually started pondering an old idea that advertising is evil. But I don't mean evil as in "really really annoying", I mean evil in the sense that slavery or child pornography is evil.

What in the world am I talking about? Why would I consider this radical notion that advertising is actually evil? Consider the basic goal of advertising. Someone else is trying to modify your thoughts, desires, and even your values for their own financial benefit. They typically use subtle and difficult to counter appeals to very basic emotions, appeals that people are often not even aware of. And they attempt to cause these changes in your mental outlook completely without regards to any harm they may be causing you in the process. Such actions are evil, pure and simple.

But isn't advertising is part of our culture, something we all learn to tolerate? Besides, how could our economy possibly function without it? Well, the exact same thing was said about slavery by its supporters in the early 1800s. People who did not grow up in a culture of slavery could easily see that it was evil, but it took a rare and courageous person who grew up in this cultural tradition to recognize it for the evil it was. And the economy did fine after it was abolished.

But isn't advertising different because it's a voluntary activity for all parties? If you tried to make the same argument about certain forms of child pornography, people would quickly and correctly object because of the harm it causes to individuals and eventually to society in general.

If I focus on the biggest culprits, TV and radio advertising, I can avoid all advertising (or at least the most obnoxious forms of it) by limiting myself to NPR radio, PBS-TV, Book-TV, CSPAN and assorted recorded music and podcasts. That's not that big a change from my current habits, so it's feasible. There are two problems though. What about my family members? I can't insist that they change, and I have to respect their preferences. Does that mean I get up and leave the room every time they turn on a commercial TV station? Maybe so, and just ask them to understand and respect my preferences. The other really big challenge is.... the Olympics start next month. I haven't decided how serious I want to be about this yet, but showing integrity would seem to suggest that I avoid watching the "plausibly live" commercial TV coverage. Hmmmm....

The 100 Possession Challenge

I've been interested in decluttering my life for a while, and in spurts I give it a try (though often not getting beyond one room). It turns out that some people are willing to try taking this to the extreme in the "Olympics of decluttering" and reducing their personal possessions to 100 items. Gulp! My family had an interesting conversation about it over lunch today, and decided that it would have to be 100 items per person, and jointly owned family-stuff wouldn't count. But still, getting down to even 200-300 items would be an extreme challenge. I'm not sure if I'll give it a try, but at least it give me great inspiration to work on decluttering my life more. By the way, did you know that ancient Buddhist Law of Possessions allowed a monk to have only 8 possessions? Interesting.... I believe that is roughly what Gandhi owned when he died.

If you want to read more, try the Zen Habits web site article here. ( The Zen Habits site is an incredibly wonderful site in general when it comes to decluttering you possessions, your mind, and examining your priorities.) There is also a guy blogging about his efforts. And finally, surprise, there was even a recent Time magazine article about this movement.

Spiritual Intelligence

I was trying to look up Spiritual Activism on Wikipedia recently. While they didn't have an entry on that, the did have one on Spiritual Intelligence that was rather interesting. Spiritual Intelligence is considered to be one of the several types of intelligences, such as emotional intelligence, social intelligence, etc.

There were several definitions of Spiritual Intelligence given in the article, some of which struck me as too vague to be of any meaning to me. Here's a collection of some of the more interesting and meaningful ones though:

[Spiritual Intelligence is]the intelligence with which we can place our actions and our lives in a wider, richer, meaning-giving context; the intelligence with which we can assess that one course of action or one life-path is more meaningful than another... [It]allows human beings to be creative, to change the rules and to alter situations. It allows us to play with the boundaries; it gives us our moral sense; it allows us to wrestle with questions of good and evil and to envision unrealized possibilities.

The article goes on to list a set of practical aspects of spiritual intelligence:

1. Acceptance of adversity rather than raging against it. Not resorting to blame, guilt, rationalising, anger, despair, denial and other typical defense mechanisms.
   
2. Using materials preciously and avoiding waste. Recycling, reusing things wherever possible, reducing waste and repairing things instead of replacing them.
   
3. Being grateful for everything including adversity.
   
4. Having the capacity to see one's ego (Witness Consciousness) and choose whether to go with the ego's habitual tendency or do something different.
   
5. Apologising for one's mistakes and making amends wherever possible.
   
6. Seeing the inherent beauty of everything and everyone.
   
7. Having a positive attitude.
   
8. Treating everyone and everything with compassion and gratitude including tools and machines.
   
9. Leaving every place you go better than you found it.
   
10. Respect for the environment and bio-diversity as having inherent as well as practical value
    

It sounds a lot like the list of characteristics of a well rounded mature personality.

Winning the Debate vs. Finding Common Ground

I attended my son's college graduation last week, after having skipped my own more years ago than I care to mention. The speaker, Dr. Stanley McKenzie, gave an interesting speech - much better than most people were expecting. Most commencement speeches have some memorable thoughts expressed, and this was no exception. While I didn't write down the exact words, here is one simple but important comment he made that stuck with me.

When two people with different views are discussing a topic, our cultural tendency is to try to refute the other person's argument every way we can and win the debate. The expected outcome is that the other person will concede and adopt your point of view. Experience will tell you that such an outcome is exceedingly rare of course. In reality the more useful approach actually is to (1) try to first understand why the other person is holding their views, and (2) see if there are any points of agreement that you can work together on. ( Note that I did not say compromise on what you think is right. )

It's interesting that in our hyper-individualistic and competitive culture, trying to "win the debate" seems like the only possible approach to disagreements. In reality there are other approaches, and if we were more logical about things we might admit that experience shows that other approaches can be much more useful. It just takes some time to overcome our cultural habits.

Showing up, and Generating Opportunities

It’s been a while since I posted – I had three major presentations to give in a four week period, plus attending college graduation ceremonies for my son. Giving these presentations was a big step forward with my career goals, and these opportunities all came about because of efforts I made at giving previous minor presentations. Woody Allen used to say that “Eighty percent of success is showing up”. In a way it was true in my case. If you show up at gatherings and make yourself known as someone who has something to say about a topic, opportunities will start emerging. As a result of these most recent presentations, I was invited to review an article, review a book, and give a presentation at a conference in Beijing. (Unfortunately I had to turn down the Beijing presentation because my company wouldn’t pay for it). The more you show up and make the effort, the more opportunities present themselves.

This gets me to my son’s graduation from college. I was trying to decide what words of wisdom I could give him at this transition point in his life. I came up with the following thoughts:

You know those quotes about “opportunity knocking”? Well, it doesn’t really work that way. Opportunity doesn’t knock on your door, but it does hang around the area for a while. You have to go out and do a little exploring to find it. And sometimes what you find are the pieces that you have to put together yourself.