Monday, December 12, 2011

Duh. Of course the answers are outside the envelope.



Have you, by any chance, checked out the tabs across top of this blog?  One of them is EcoCurious, my blog about matters of the environment and sustainability.   If you've visited EcoCurious, you might have noticed a flip comment across the top, "If only the answers really were inside the envelope."

Well, duh.  Of course the answers are outside the envelope.

If we look at the world we know as though it's the only possible world, if we look at the rules we operate by as though they are the only possible rule set, then we will remain stuck inside the envelope.

To find solutions that could create a different, better, healthier, more sustainable world, we have to believe that our world is just one possible version, that our rules are just one set of possible rules.  We have to shake it up and find the alternatives.  Shake it up!

Today I bring you Anthony Weston, a philosopher who spends his professional life helping people see beyond our mental obstacles to enable us to rethink our biggest, most complex ethical and practical dilemmas.  He's mastered a method for enlarging the realm of choices, figuring out how to apply different sets of rules than the "usual set" to expand the possibilities for ethical problem-solving.

Let me give you a quick Weston example. You may have heard about the Heinz dilemma.  It's an ethical quandry used by psychologists to test children for their level of moral reasoning.  Since it's written for kids, it's will be easy for us to follow Weston's logic, as he deconstructs his process.

A woman is dying of cancer.  There is a medication available to her, but she needs several treatments at $2000 per treatment, and she and her husband do not have that kind of money.  The husband counts all his resources, sells what they don't absolutely need, asks his family to help,  but the money he can scrape up does not amount to enough money to cover her treatment.  He goes to the pharmacy and pleads that they sell the medicine for what he has, or she will die.  They tell him, "no."  The dilemma:  Should the husband steal the medication so that his wife may live?

Let me simplify:  Steal or die?

Weston asks his students to back up from the question, and see whether they can enlarge the realm of possibilities.  They come up with these sorts of answers:

He could offer the pharmacist something he needs or wants, maybe trade his skills to make up the difference.

Maybe the wife could go to the pharmaceutical company and offer to be part of a follow-up study, in exchange for the medication.

In one of his workshops, a group of nurses even suggested that the wife steal the drug, specifically to get herself arrested, because the law requires medical care for all prisoners, and that way the state would pay for the drug.

What about the community?  Could it band together to raise the money?

So now that we're brainstorming ideas, I bet you can come up with a few yourself. 

Weston's point is this:

What if, instead of distancing ourselves from the question, and asking, "What should he do?" we ask, "what can we do?"  Or even, simply, "what all could be done?"  The realm of possibilities expands beyond "steal or die," both of which are not ethically acceptable or morally desirable.

This made me think.  Weston's simple dilemma is really not very different than the way we've taken to laying out our most difficult dilemmas.  Look how some of our current policy debates are framed:

Affirmative action or fewer minorities admitted into programs and hired into jobs?

Drill for oil in the United States or continue to be dependent upon foreign oil?

Keep shipping soldiers to the middle east or be subject to the murderous intentions of extremist Islamist fundamentalists?


And so on...  We have become a nation of simplifiers, a nation of sound bites and political slogans.  We scream, it's either this way, or it's that way!   It's my way, or no way.  We are so polarized.

What if, what if.  What if we could get good at backing up from the either this, or that solution envelope?  What if we could get outside the envelope altogether?

To read more from Anthony Weston, check out Creative Problem-Solving in Ethics, http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Problem-Solving-Ethics-Paperback-Reference/dp/0195306201/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_5


Have you, by any chance, checked out the tabs across top of this blog?  One of them is EcoCurious, my blog about matters of the environment and sustainability.  (In CuriositySquared, I write about stuff .)  If you've visited EcoCurious, you might have noticed a flip comment across the top, "If only the answers were in the envelope."

Well, duh.  Of course the answers are outside the envelope.

If we look at the world we know as though it's the only possible world, if we look at the rules we operate by as though they are the only possible rule set, then we will remain stuck inside the envelope.

To find solutions that could create a different, better, healthier, more sustainable world, we have to believe that our world is just one possible version, that our rules are just one set of possible rules.  We have to shake it up and find the alternatives.  Shake it up!

Today I bring you Anthony Weston, a philosopher who spends his professional life helping people see beyond our mental obstacles to enable us to rethink our biggest, most complex ethical and practical dilemmas.  He's mastered a method for enlarging the realm of choices, figuring out how to apply different sets of rules than the "usual set" to expand the possibilities for ethical problem-solving.

Let me give you a quick Weston example. You may have heard about the Heinz dilemma.  It's an ethical quandry used by psychologists to test children for their level of moral reasoning.  Since it's written for kids, it's will be easy for us to follow Weston's logic, as he deconstructs his process.

A woman is dying of cancer.  There is a medication available to her, but she needs several treatments at $2000 per treatment, and she and her husband do not have that kind of money.  The husband counts all his resources, sells what they don't absolutely need, asks his family to help,  but the money he can scrape up does not amount to enough money to cover her treatment.  He goes to the pharmacy and pleads that they sell the medicine for what he has, or she will die.  They tell him, "no."  The dilemma:  Should the husband steal the medication so that his wife may live?

Let me simplify:  Steal or die?

Weston asks his students to back up from the question, and see whether they can enlarge the realm of possibilities.  They come up with these sorts of answers:

He could offer the pharmacist something he needs or wants, maybe trade his skills to make up the difference.

Maybe the wife could go to the pharmaceutical company and offer to be part of a follow-up study, in exchange for the medication.

In one of his workshops, a group of nurses even suggested that the wife steal the drug, specifically to get herself arrested, because the law requires medical care for all prisoners, and that way the state would pay for the drug.

What about the community?  Could it band together to raise the money?

So now that we're brainstorming ideas, I bet you can come up with a few yourself. 

Weston's point is this:

What if, instead of distancing ourselves from the question, and asking, "What should he do?" we ask, "what can we do?"  Or even, simply, "what all could be done?"  The realm of possibilities expands beyond "steal or die," both of which are not ethically acceptable or morally desirable.

This made me think.  Weston's simple dilemma is really not very different than the way we've taken to laying out our most difficult dilemmas.  Look how some of our current policy debates are framed:

Affirmative action or fewer minorities admitted into programs and hired into jobs?

Drill for oil in the United States or continue to be dependent upon foreign oil?

Keep shipping soldiers to the middle east or be subject to the murderous intentions of extremist Islamist fundamentalists?


And so on...  We have become a nation of simplifiers, a nation of sound bites and political slogans.  We are so polarized.

What if we could get good at backing up from either this, or that solution envelope?

Saturday, December 3, 2011

Mystics, musings, and why #Occupy has no demands.

"Tsimtsum"  - by Jim Davis-Rosenthal
"Life is pretty bleak at the top too.  All of the bobbles of the rich, they're kind of this phony compensation for the loss of what's really important:  the loss of community, the loss of connection, the loss of intimacy, the loss of meaning.  Everybody wants to live a life of meaning.  But today we live in a money economy, where we don't really depend on the gifts of anybody.  We buy everything.  Therefore we don't really need anybody.  Whoever grew my food or made my clothes or built my house, well, if they died or I alienate them, if they don't like me, that's OK.  I can just pay somebody else to do it.    It's really hard to create community if the underlying knowledge is, 'we don't need each other.'"   ~ You Can't Evict an Idea

# # #

Yesterday my friend Cathy Wiken shared an #Occupy movement video (embedded below), "You Can't Evict an Idea," by economist Charles Eisenstein. My friend was raised in a conservative household in a conservative town, and she is still very much a conservative. But she is also an expansive thinker, and she can see past labels. The video reached her in a place of higher humanity - a place that transcends politics and ideology and talks to us about what is becoming of our world in terms of human experience. Regardless of one's politics, it is impossible not to be moved by the slide of our global community into economic decline and therefore human impoverishment in all its multiple manifestations.

Today is the Jewish Sabbath. The Sabbath - Shabbat - was God's way of urging us to regularly step back from the rush of our lives across the fulcrum from birth to death, to ask ourselves if the path we are taking to that eventuality is the one we want to be on.  This Shabbat, I feel grateful to Cathy for giving me pause to think about our greater purposes, to ask myself whether I am contributing.

So, Cathy, this blog is for you.  I want to share with you - a non-Jew - the Jewish mystical view of the human condition, of why we are here.  And crazy enough, I want to connect the deeper urges of the #Occupy movement with a longing to act upon the oldest and most sacred obligation of humankind.

To put this in context: I worry about the power of language to shape our reality, and in fact to lead to the ultimate destruction of society.  Jewish mystics would likely not be surprised if the world's end is facilitated through the power of words. Such is simply the logical flip side of this Jewish belief:  the word is so powerful that God created the universe by speaking it into existence.  We are all familiar with the fable where a woman's cruel words have scattered like scrap paper to the winds; there is no way she can reclaim them to undo the damage caused. Words are not simply mouth noises controlled into formulaic emissions. They are powerful tools of construction and destruction.

Today's political parties and their operatives are experts at the use of language. Specifically crafted language, slogans and framing are artfully employed to manipulate opinions. The best arts, science and tools that marketers and demographers have to offer help us agree on policies that sometimes stand directly in opposition to what is good for us, and for humanity generally. Plenty of research has explored the reasons why people often support social policies that appear to be contrary to their own interests. While academically this is all very interesting, practically speaking we have endless examples of the destructive outcomes from using language manipulation for political power and control.  Outcomes ranging from national paralysis in the face of economic disaster to jihad to genocide.

What if we could somehow strip away all the lingo? What if we could strip away the anger and disagreements that tear us apart as a nation, and as cultures fighting over a planet? What if we could shed the stylized, formulaic and strident speech imposed upon us by those in power, rhetoric that allows for little conversation or disagreement?

"Anything people can articulate can only be articulated within the language of the current political discourse, and that entire political discourse is already too small. And that's why making explicit demands kind of reduces the [#Occupy] movement and takes the heart out of it. It's a real paradox. I think the movement understands that." ~ video "You Can't Evict an Idea"


If we strip away the rhetoric, the demands, aren't we likely to find underneath it all that we are all much the same? That we are all, more or less, simply yearning for the opportunity to get by in peace, to do our best to be good family members, neighbors, community members? To self-fulfill through relationships and finding purpose and meaning in our work? Oh sure, we come from different cultures and celebrate different holidays, but how is it that we are different, really? At base, we are human animals. What gives us the illusion of difference is our verbal insistence that we are. Why cling to these verbal representations past the point of sanity?

I'm not suggesting that we return to the melting pot, trying to assimilate the black and the brown and the foreign and the native into the majority culture as though all vanilla all the time is better than 31 flavors.

Instead, I'm asking whether we might do more justice if we could shed the human-contrived definitions of truth, definitions keeping us perpetually angry at one-another for failing to see it my way. I'm asking whether we might do more justice if we come at our earthly problems from a sacred place, a universal place, a place that employs rhetoric of healing and wholeness, from which we could begin to work things out among us.

Jewish mysticism has a metaphoric explanation for our world that goes roughly like this (I am about to way oversimplify here for the sake of getting a point across):

God was always everywhere and took up all the "room" in the universe and beyond, and in fact is the universe, or rather the universe is part of the everything that is God...

Then it arose in the Divine will - e.g. God decided it was time - to create our finite Universe. To differentiate some of God's being into us. There are some who say God was lonely and others who say the Universe is simply the evolution of God's will over time.

In order for the finite Universe to be created, God is said to have 'constricted' God's self or pulled inward (in Hebrew, tsimtsum), and then re-expressed outward, resulting in the creation of a "first" Adam (adam is Hebrew for earth), a prototype, if you will. Some say the constriction was to 'make room' for the finite.

A series of these constrictions followed by re-expressions is said to have lead to the creation of our finite world. It's a hard idea to follow. I like to think of a metaphor where a baby is born through a series of contractions, each of which pushes the baby closer to its birth. The finite world in this view could be said to have been pushed through a series of heavenly "contractions" into being.

Like a baby is not yet an adult, this heavenly birthing exercise did not complete our finite world.

It is said that during these holy contractions, if you will, God's holy light, the force or energy necessary to propel and complete the finite world, had to be gathered. I guess another way to say this is that, prior to this gathering of light/energy, one might think of God as undifferentiated holiness.  To create something as uniquely differentiated as our finite world required God's energy and holiness to be corralled.  It was corralled into ten "vessels" representing ten attributes of God that must have been necessary to the creation. I do not pretend to know exactly what is meant by the word vessel, for while you would think that God's energy could not be contained by anything like a ceramic vessel, on the other hand, the finite world IS made of destructible materials like board and brick and flesh and bone. SO apparently these vessels were destructible. In fact, the light pouring into these "vessels" was so intense and the energy so strong that the vessels did shatter. God's energies remained "above" (in the heavenly realm?) but the vessels exploded into pieces.  Permeated by holy light, the vessels' shards scattered about our newly formed world like so much sacred shrapnel.

The Jewish mystics say that these ten attributes of Divine energy now infused into shards, must, for the completion of God's creation - our world - now be collected and reclaimed by we sons and daughters of Adam.

Are we here to collect the shattered pieces, or are the shattered pieces here so that we may collect them?

Because everything is by Holy design, we can surmise that the infusing of the vessels with holy light and energy, and their breaking and scattering, was not accidental. Our world was intentionally broken into tohu, or chaos, shaping our existence here.  The mystics say that our job on earth - our reason d'etra if you will - is to collect the shattered pieces of vessel, and "lift them back to holiness." Lifting each piece to holiness will in some way complete the human connection with the Almighty, and will help to finish creating and making holy - you could say "healing" - our broken, unfinished, finite world.  My apologies to any Kabbalists who find themselves shaking their heads, muttering "that's a vast oversimplification."  Well, yes.  http://tinyurl.com/shatteredvessels

What is involved in "lifting the shards"?   To find and lift the shards, we must learn to recognize the pieces of the vessel when we see them. These pieces are not actual shards laying around like pottery. Rather, they are the opportunities for interaction with one-another, with the earth, with God. How will we treat these relational opportunities? With anger? With kindness? With impatience? With arrogance?With mercy? With selfishness? With empathy and compassion?

If we choose to live our lives in a way that promotes healing and wholeness, then we sanctify the shards. If we choose to live our lives in a way that promotes only self-aggrandizement, selfishness, the destruction of "the other," then we miss an entire lifetime of opportunity to help finish God's creation.

I'm pretty far away from my original proposition about the #Occupy movement, so let me bring this back to where I started.

"This movement isn't about the 99% defeating or toppling the one percent.  You know the next chapter of that story, that the 99% create a new one percent.  That's not what it's about.  What we want to create is the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible, a sacred world, a world that works for everybody, a world that is healing, a world of peace.  You can't just say, 'We demand a world of peace..."  ~ "You Can't Evict an Idea"

I truly believe that the political rhetoric and labels and framing and slogans are keeping us from sanctifying the shards. That the rhetoric and formulaic ideologies keep us from seeing the holiness in the relationship opportunities we have - with each other, with the earth we were given to live on, with God, Him(Her)self. I believe God wants us to get out from under the rhetoric and see our relationships as opportunities to bring God's energy back into alignment and finish this holy creation. To heal and finish making whole.

Ideologues are people who can only see the world in one way and would discard everything and everybody who does not fit this limited vision or agree to conform. Ideologies - like communism or capitalism, either one - are just man-made theories that ask us to believe there is only one way to put the vessels back together. But these are human blueprints, and they fall short of offering a way to put God-made vessels back together. Human ideologies are not encompassing enough, any of them, to be a blueprint for a Holy creation.

One of the reasons I love the #Occupy movement is because it is self-organizing. By that, I mean that in its emergence, it is following its instincts rather than any ideology. In fact is refusing to be co-opted by ideologues. While embracing all who wish to help or join, it has refused to adopt or become a tool for a single perspective. It has refused MoveOn.org. It has refused the Obama-ites. It has refused to wear the union label. Refusing these labels, refusing to grant these formalized organizations a place of leadership, creates room to follow our God-given human instincts.

Some of these instincts will be base. The media likes to point its cameras to the basest parts of humanity. But some of its instincts will be holy - or you could say "transcendent."  By refusing a single ideology, #Occupy asks us to look into the deepest parts of ourselves, beneath the many unholy grails that pervade our media, into our souls. To reconnect with our deepest sense of humanity. And to lift up what we find there out into the light of day. To become something better, more humane, more giving and therefore more sacred.


And if that's not why we're here on earth, I really don't know what else God might have intended.

"You have necessary and important  gifts to give...as more and more people wake up to the truth, that we're here to give, wake up to that desire, to the understanding that the other way isn't working anyway, the more reinforcement we have from people around us, this isn't crazy, this makes sense, that this is how to live, and as we get that reinforcement then our minds and our logic no longer have to fight against the logic of the heart which wants us to be of service.....An economist says that essentially more for you is less for me, but the lover knows that more for you is more for me too."  ~ "You Can't Evict an Idea"


Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Don't just dream it. Achieve it.

Inspirational video by consultant Hildy Gottlieb suggests that the future we achieve is the one we envision. For me, the most important message she puts out is that we can't be flummoxed by obstacles, or by our preconceived notions of what should work. If the first path isn't getting you somewhere, simply find another path.





Monday, October 24, 2011

Choose to Risk




The following poem, by Dr. Dawna Markova, expresses beautifully the expansiveness of spirit, the passion for healing, I feel all around me these days.  So fabulous, I just needed to share it...to scatter it further out into the universe.




I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid, more accessible,
to loosen my heart until it becomes
a wing, a torch, a promise.

I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came 
to me 
as blossom
goes on as fruit.

~ Dawna Markova

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Rethinking the Feminist Position on Choice

While doing some research on freshmen trends for a class I teach, I ran across a 40 year trending report published by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program [CIRP], a project of the Higher Education Research Institute out of UCLA.  CIRP surveys 300,000 incoming freshmen annually, at over 600 colleges and universities nationwide.  

Buried among much fascinating data I found a graph depicting the shift in student views on abortion.  The question asked was a simple yes or no question, "Should abortion be legal?"  It was not confounded by nuances like health of the mother, pregnancy as the result of rape, number of weeks to viability, parental consent or issues of the various medical procedures.




There's a myth among women of my and my mother's generation - the generations that actively fought for women's rights, including control over one's own reproductive system:  today's women - the GenX and GenY women - don't get involved in the issue of choice because they perceive the matter as settled.  Such a belief, if true, would indicate that most women are comfortable and have acclimated themselves to the existence of an abortion option.

This chart belies that belief.  

Just for grins, I decided to see what today's women are talking about.  What I found surprised me - putting aside altogether the arguments of the religious right - two opposing but feminist positions.  I'm going to lay them out and then posit that we need to dialogue ourselves to a third, more equitable position.

The first, the one I am most familiar with, was the one rung out with the full feminist furry of my generation, the pro-choice position: 

A woman's ability to exercise her full citizenship rights requires her to be able to determine when and if she wants to have children.  Anything less relegates her - without choice - to the kitchen.

The other, more current, opposing feminist, pro-life perspective: 

The idea that women need the option of abortion in order to participate fully in society outside the home in fact is dictated by a male-centered world view that values commerce more than motherhood.  

To speak the pro-choice position another way, if women are to be valued in the workplace, we must free ourselves of the women's work of motherhood that splits our loyalties between our children and our jobs, freeing us to work with as singular a purpose as any male toward society's goals, whatever they be.  

To speak the pro-Iife position another way, if, to be rewarded with opportunity and money like men in a man's world, we perceive the need to give up or perhaps put aside - for now? for ever?  - the very thing that makes us uniquely women - the ability to carry children - then abortion is a solution that accommodates a male-dominated - not a feminist - view of the world

I find I am strongly drawn to the rationale of the latter view, while yet denying that the right solution is the outlaw of choice.  I prefer a third viewpoint, "reproductive justice," that emerged first from the Black Women's caucus in 1994, and has since been put into succinct language by an organization called the Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice:


"Reproductive  justice  exists when  all people  have  the economic,  social  and  political  power,  and  resources  to  make  healthy decisions  about  our bodies, sexuality and reproduction for ourselves,  our families,  and our  communities."   

SisterSong, a reproductive justice movement (and much more), illuminates this idea, 

"Human rights provide more possibilities for our struggles than the privacy concepts the pro-choice movement claims only using the U.S. Constitution. Reproductive justice emerged as an intersectional theory highlighting the lived experience of reproductive oppression in communities of color. It represents a shift for women advocating for control of their bodies, from a narrower focus on legal access and individual choice (the focus of mainstream organizations) to a broader analysis of racial, economic, cultural, and structural constraints on our power."

For me, this perspective makes sense for all women, regardless of skin color.  The good fight for the right to make choices about my own reproductive path still has to be made in the court system, of course.  But in a way, my generation's perspective was one deeply embedded in the male world view - one in which we felt the path to success was paved by the opportunity to put aside child-rearing in order to do what - they - men - were doing.  Still, that left us with gut-wrenching choices about parenting versus getting ahead.


As I reread my own writing, I am bothered by the mere fact that I identify the possibility of "getting ahead" as an alternative to parenting.

My friends and I experienced these choices repeatedly and painfully.  Some could afford nannies but still anguished over what they missed.  Most, including me, couldn't afford or didn't want a nanny to sub for us.  We used day care, or worked part time, regardless of the loss of income.  


Personally, I wrestled with it the best I could.  I hurried a wedding and put off law school when I discovered I was pregnant.  By the time I got to law school, I was single again.  I took only those classes that did not interfere with my children's school schedules.  I took a reduction in pay at my first job in exchange for the guilt-free freedom to come and go for my children's assorted needs, even though I put in as many hours as everyone else in my firm - many of those hours from home, after my girls slept.   Later, I slowed and eventually put my practice aside - gave away excellent clients - to care for my adolescent children when their lives got complicated and they needed me.  


Their father never saw any of this as his role.   Today, like many, many women, my lifetime earnings, my career path, my current work are all impacted by the choices I made.  Their father's earnings, career path and current work were not impacted by parenting obligations.

This is wrong-headed and oh, so short-sighted.  Bearing children is the path of survival for our species, and women are uniquely gifted with the ability to bear our future.  Yet, society has not figured out a way to reduce the conflict between bearing and caring for children, and taking an active, participatory monetarily rewarded role in the workforce, in policy-making, in communal and national leadership.  


It's a good thing baby-making is an instinctive urge, because if more and more women simply shook the urge in order to have what men have, society would eventually wither away.


There are those who will read this and cry foul.  They will say that they've managed to have brilliant careers and feel very good about their parenting too.  And I applaud all of you who've managed that.  But the numbers belay.  Click this sentence to read a study that shows women's but not men's income is negatively impacted by childbirth.  Click this sentence to read a study that shows the lifetime earnings gap between men and women continues despite the progressively larger number of female entrants into many fields.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm still all for choice.  I'm simply saying, we need to rethink the rationale we've accepted for needing choice, and work toward a system of commerce that embraces true choice - the choice that rewards women for being vibrant, active, fully rewarded societal participants, with or without children.   

Thursday, September 22, 2011

YOUTH, SPEAK OUT!



With the National Conference on Citizenship being held at A.S.U. this week, it seems a good time to write about the future of citizenship, something I explore each semester in "NLM 160: Voluntary Action and Community Leadership," an introductory nonprofit class I'm teaching for the second year at Arizona State University.

My class is mostly full of 18 and 19 year olds, with a smattering of older students.  When I was asked to teach this course, I was charged with the hope-filled task of exciting my students to the power of volunteerism to change the world, so much so that they want to remain volunteers for the rest of their lives.

Although power of participation in the political realm is not the only volunteerism we will study this semester, the first thing we read in this class is Russell Dalton's "The Good Citizen: How a Younger Generation is Reshaping American Politics."

In other words, they're reading about themselves.

Before I share more of what Dalton has to say about this generation of citizens, I want to describe my class.  To start with, it's large.  This semester I have about 60.  One semester, I had maybe 75 students.

It's very enlightening to have a large class.  Even though, looking around the room, checking their dress, their backpacks, their cell phones and laptops and mp3 players, it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that these kids are all cut from one mold, one of the first things we discover in this class is just how different we all are.  Learning about our differences, yet seeing ourselves as a community, is the very stuff of democracy.

One of the semester's first exercises asks the students to circle each demographic they fall into on a chart containing an assortment of categories touching race, gender, ethnicity, religion, athletic ability, attractiveness, weight, sexual identity, disability and more.   I use a slightly edited chart borrowed from Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Bell and Pat Griffin's text, "Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice."  As I called each of the 30 or so categories, students who are willing to self-identify are invited to rise.  The complexity of our class make-up became clear.

The exercise always pushes the envelope.  While a few students will decide not to acknowledge one or more of their demographic identities, most do.  We discuss the ways each of these demographic categories creates opportunities and privileges, and the ways in which each category might create obstacles.  For example, being Latino creates rich cultural opportunities, but some of my Latino students say they find it intimidating to live in Arizona after the passage of SB 1070.  

The exercise gives us a chance to talk about identities we can't hide.  We can hide our sexual identity, but we cannot hide the color of our skin.  We can hide our ethnic background, but we cannot hide our gender.  

The exercise also gives us an opportunity to explore the concept of labels.  The demographics chart asks students to identify themselves as Black, White, Native American, Hispanic, etc.  I always ask these students, after they're standing up, whether they are comfortable with the labels on this chart.  Labels are a touchy subject, and racial labels have changed many times in my own lifetime.  When I was small, "Negro" was still a politically correct term.  I believe "African American" is still currently politically correct, but sometimes my students say that they don't relate to the "African" part.  They feel American.  Pure and simple.  It's my understanding that "Native American" is still politically correct, but some of my students in Arizona prefer to refer to themselves as "Indians."

At some point along the line, I changed "Hispanic" to "Latino" on the chart because so many of my students with Spanish-speaking origins rejected the term "Hispanic."  Often, the Latino students want to be recognized for their family's country of origin, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico, Argentina.  Cultural pride is alive and well.  This year, one of my students said he did not prefer the term "Latino," and wanted to be called "Hispanic."  Labels are very personal.  We prefer to select our own.

Oh, and of course, after hearing this discussion, my "White" students want to point out that their skin isn't white.  And that the term "Caucasian" doesn't really apply either.

"The Caucasus are somewhere near Russia, right?  My family is from Italy."



I have discovered that many students are remarkably brave.  One semester, a woman stood to the term, "gender queer."  While my students expect me to know everything, I had to screw up my own courage to admit I did not know the term's meaning, and to ask this woman to define the term for us.

Similarly, a small handful of students will stand up to the term, "overweight."  The first thing I notice is that this makes the rest of us uncomfortable.  It feels like some sort of public humiliation, because being overweight is considered a character flaw in our country.  But students have been given express permission not to stand unless they wish to.  And, some students who clearly are overweight do not stand up.  The students who stand want to stand.  They do not want to be invisible just because of some media image of acceptability.  Over the semesters, some students have commented that they have shaken off the norm, have come to love and accept themselves.  These words are refreshing, and free the rest of us from our embarrassment.  Later, it will turn out that the ability to speak them aloud is also freeing for the student who does.

This year I have a deaf student who does not stand up when I call the category, "disabled."  He sits in the front row where he can see two signers, looking at me intently, maybe challenging me?  Had he kept his head down, his gaze averted, I would have known that he did not want to talk about this.  But his bold stare told me otherwise.   I turned to him and ask him, "You look like you want to comment.  You've chosen not to stand.  I'm interested in whether you'd like to talk about your choice."  Through his interpreters, he eloquently explained that he does not see himself as disabled.  He does not let his condition get in the way of his achievement - ever.  He is as inspiring as E.T. jumping through the moon, or Lance Armstrong taking an impossible hill.

This year, I am surprised by a young woman who stands up for "Other" and says she is an orphan without a family.  She has been in and out of foster homes.  There is one foster family with whom she still spends holidays, but they don't feel exactly like parents.  She tells about her determination to get an education and to help others whose stories are similar to her own.  The class is very hushed for this story.  Most of us cannot imagine a world without some sort of family, at least one caring parent.

What does all this have to do with citizenship and civic dialogue?  My students walk into the room thinking they are part of a pretty homogeneous group.  As they hear each other's stories and begin to look at the world through widely differing eyes, they are readying themselves for civic dialogue that is empathetic, compassionate, and more inclusive.

One of the ways I make a conversation about diversity safe is by speaking out loud what other people only think - speaking in normal tones and with obvious curiosity.  As the instructor, my speaking makes it acceptable for others to talk about issues that our society generally considers taboo.  I learned this skill not in diversity class, but while raising my daughters.  I forced myself to discuss sexuality in the same tone of voice I discussed weekend activities, food preparation, art projects.  This made sexuality a safe and "normal" topic of conversation.  My goal:  later, when my daughters needed to discuss sexuality, I hoped it would be easier for them to raise the subject.  Today I have a similar goal in mind:  to make it easier for my students to dialogue about differences respectfully.  To realize they should not make assumptions.  To be brave enough to ask the questions that are on their minds.  

As the stories of identity flow, the bravery is contagious and more are told.  They are fascinating.  We start to run out of time, and I tell them we need to wrap up.  Several students say, "You forgot to call out the religions."  I do it in a rush.  Several stand when I say "Other."  I ask, "What is your religion?"  A couple of them say atheist or agnostic or secular.

Three say they are Catholic.  I say, "I wish we had time to discuss why you did not see yourselves as Christian.  I'm Jewish," I tell them, "and you all look alike to me."  They laugh.

After class, I take attendance by asking students to put their names on a piece of paper, and also to write down the most important thing that they heard this day.

Later, at home, I read their attendance slips.  One student says, I learned from the overweight student that it's ok to like myself the way I am."  Several students say they are amazed by the determination and attitude of the deaf student.  A couple comment on the incredible strength and drive of the woman who is also an orphan.  Many say they really enjoyed hearing all the stories.   They report respect and new understandings.

An overweight student writes, "Thank you for making it safe to talk about my weight. I've never done that before."

My gender queer student says it was good to be asked about herself.  These girls make me cry.  They all - all these students - make me proud to teach them.

~ ~

Now we have a good idea of all the ways we are different from each other.  In the reading, we now explore, through data sets analyzed by Dalton, how despite our differences, they share similarities with their generation that distinguish them from their parents and grandparents before them.  They are learning that their generation is not less engaged than their parents' generation.  Rather, their generation is differently engaged.  Sometimes, when we talk about this, I fantasize about playing Chicago's Teach Your Children Well.

According to Dalton, the younger generation practices what he calls "civic engagement," or a more personal, hands-on, less political approach to activism.  They volunteer in their own communities, they help neighbors, they join social networks.  They feel these activities have a far greater impact than voting.  They believe this is the better way to make a difference, while communicating with distant officials feels rather, well, distant.  They don't really believe older people will hear or understand them anyway.

Their parents' and grandparents' generations, by contrast, are more "duty" oriented.  They vote.  They support candidates.  They call their elected officials when they don't like policy.  Stuff like that.

On another day early in the semester I put up big sheets of poster paper, each marked with a different activity that might be associated with good citizenship in the United States.  Activities like,

Regularly Vote In Elections,
Accept Jury Duty Willingly,
Always buy American,
Never Break the Law,
Report a Crime if I See One,
Plan To or Do Serve in the Military,
Buy Green Products Whenever Possible,
Help Other Americans Less Well Off than I Am
Volunteer Regularly
Work on Political Campaigns
Take Active Leadership Roles
Form Your Own Political Opinions
Never Evade Taxes
Keep a Watch On Government
Help Those Worse Off Around the World
Join Community Groups

I ask my students to come up to the front of the class, where I have a selection of sticky dots, in Red, Blue, Yellow and Green.  I have them take a sheet of dots that most closely represents their political affinity.  Red if they most closely relate to Republican, Conservative or Tea Party ideals.  Blue if they most closely relate to Democrat, Liberal or Progressive ideals.  Yellow if they think of themselves as most closely aligned with Independents.  Green if they see themselves as "something other" or do not want to reveal their preferences.

I ask them to walk from poster to poster, putting a colored dot on only those posters that they feel strongly about, that speak strongly to the way they live their lives.  I tell them we are doing living research, and to group their own dots with other dots of the same color, so that we will easily be able to see our results.

When we finish, we are surprised to find that, in fact, very few of my students feel strongly about voting.  Few of my students feel compelled to report a broken law, or to obey the law themselves a hundred percent of the time.  Almost all believe in helping others less fortunate, whether overseas or at home.  A majority of them already volunteer.  Maybe a third try to Buy American.

I stop the conversation to get on my soapbox about the double-duty of buying American.  It helps maintain jobs, and it also reduces our carbon output because overseas transportation is a high carbon activity.

This semester, only three of my 60 or so feel strongly enough about military service to dot it - similar to the results in prior semesters.  This stops the class short.  We talk about taking for granted that there will be an army to protect us.  We wonder whether this class - as diverse as we now realize we are - is truly representative of today's young people.  Someone asks whether there is a correlation between wanting an education, and avoiding the military.  This is a great question, and I can't answer it.   Several students have family members who are in the service, and they speak of supporting the soldiers, but not the military.  The three students who do, have, or plan to serve in the military speak in defense of their choices, and the students ask them respectful questions.

My students are passionate about their views, but also intellectually captured by the explanations they give each other about their differences.  High levels of dedication to volunteering, helping a neighbor, being active in clubs and groups, buying green products, forming their own political opinions bear out some of what Dalton is telling them in their readings.  It proves to me that these students are far from disengaged, even if most of them don't vote regularly.

When the time comes to end the discussion, it is difficult to stop them.  Later, in their attendance statements, they will let me know, even the ones too shy to speak out in class, that this exercise was an eye-opener.

"Those dots really laid it out.  You can't fool yourself about what's happening in my generation after you see that."

Before they leave, I am upfront about my bias.  Both brands of citizenship play important roles in a healthy Democracy.  However, I would like to convince them that voting makes a bigger difference than they think it does.  I hope - if there's one thing I can change about their view on political activism this semester - it will be to drive home the importance of exercising their vote as a powerful tool to give voice to their generation's deep concern for their fellow human beings.  

Monday, September 12, 2011

Why should I pay more taxes than some lazy good for nothing?


Leonard Burman


Q: WHY DO WE TAX SUCCESS?
I am sorry I worked hard and took risks big time and now have capital gains. Why should I pay more taxes then some lazy good for nothing who cant show up for work on time and hold a job. And I can move my capital easily where i can get a more favorable tax situation. Problem with most economist like you is they live in academia and not the real world. What this country needs is one tax rate for all Americans and not the cureent tas rates that tax success and risk. W/o investment job growth is stagnant or worse and GDP tanks. Federal, state and local spending just isnt there to bail the economy out. And govt spending is inefficient and riddled with corpuption. Stop taxing success.

A:  LEONARD BURMAN
I applaud you for working hard and taking risks. However, a lot of the difference in income is due to luck. I'm paid way more than my dad because I had great parents and was smart enough to get a lot of education. Other people aren't born with those advantages. I'm perfectly happy to pay higher taxes so that hard working people without my advantages can get a break.



I lifted that segment from a Washington Post Q & A about the impact of Capital Gains tax with Leonard Burman, because the question captures the baseless hatred of one American for another - a divisive hatred that threatens to tear our country apart.  Americans who espouse it appear to be mindlessly buying into a blame theory that tosses the pain associated with our current economy at the doorstep of the less fortunate.

Burman, a Daniel Patrick Moynihan Professor of Public Affairs at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, an affiliated scholar at the Urban Institute, and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and senior research associate at Syracuse University’s Center for Policy Research, handled the question very deftly.  

Though his answer satisfied me, I doubt seriously it caused the caller to do anything other than scoff at Burman.

To read the rest of the Q&A, which was more focused on tax policy, click here.

You may not believe, as Burman does, that much of personal financial success is due to luck - lucky to have a set of parents who value higher education and make it available to their kids, for example.  Someone else might feel he or she is totally self-made.  I know a man whose parents brought him up in a modest blue collar household.  My friend is shrewd, figured out how to build a small empire, and is now a wealthy man.  Clearly, both scenarios exist.   The truth, however, is that the vast majority of Americans have rather modest means at the same time they have an excellent work ethic.  


Check this assortment of careers and the national average salaries that go with them:   


$22,000 - line cook, window glass cutter
$28,000 - ambulance driver, hair stylist
$34,000 - administrative assistance, warehouse worker
$40,000 - academic adviser, aircraft electrician
$60,000 - advertising account exec, entry aerospace engineer
$85,000 - software developer, real estate appraiser
$100,000 - dean of business school, regional sales manager
$150,000 - human resource director, research fellow


You can check out the national average salary rate for nearly any job you can think of by clicking this sentence.


Now tell me, do you believe your hair stylist, cheerfully listening to your problems despite being on her feet all day, is a laggard just because her annual salary might be under $30,000?   


And about manning those huge professional restaurant stoves till sweat pours off you like water?  Does that sounds lazy?  


And I want to believe the fellow driving the ambulance is intentional, caring and fast!   


At these salary levels, the hairdresser, the ambulance driver, the line cook, the warehouse worker are likely to be struggling to achieve a full life - full in the sense of achieving all the basics Americans want, from health insurance to mortgage payments to little league and dance lessons for their kids.  It's not hard to imagine that these Americans may feel squeezed - like there's never quite enough.   


Clearly these people are not the "lazy, good for nothings who can't show up for work on time and hold a job,"  Burman's caller assumes people without adequate means must be.  And they are the people assisted by a progressive tax structure.  


My worry is that a large chunk of American have bought into the Ayn Rand mantra - we are all equal in opportunity simply because we were all born in America."   The wrong-headed correlary: Those who don't manage to get ahead of the economic treadmill must be lazy.   This invokes a blame mentality that pits American against American rather than focusing us on collaboratively solving our nation's economic woes.  


Woe unto us if we do not open our eyes to each other's reality, be there for one-another as fellow Americans, even in our approach to the tax code.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Lifting Up the Holy Sparks: Healing From Within


I accidentally pulled up this old post from my other blog, EcoCurious, written before I decided to separate my writings by topic into multiple blogs.  As I read this post, I barely recalled writing it.  But, here we are, just this side of Rosh Hashana, and the beginning of the Jewish Holy Days, and I cannot but think I was supposed to reread it.  And possibly reshare it. 


We began by talking about kosher wines, and how they could possibly compete in taste if the method of koshering wines involved boiling the grapes, but somehow my friend Mike Altman and I veered from that to whether the Jews believe in an afterlife, and from that to the mitnagdim and the hasidim, two competitive Jewish sects that lived in Europe during the 18th Century. The mind does wander. 


The mitnagdim were traditional Jews, and the label, "mitnagdim," means "opponents," I believe. The thing they were opposed to was the sharp rise of new hasidic sects under a Jewish mystic affectionately called "The Baal Shem Tov," or "Master of the Good (Divine) Name."

The fight between the mitnagdim and the hasidim (which means pious) was, from time to time vicious. The crux of the fight was the primacy of mind versus heart as the path to God. The mitnagdim were very traditional, and stressed the intense study of Torah and Talmud (a Jewish text containing a cross-generational discussion among learned Jewish scholars enabling later generations to continue to learn from earlier scholars). Their founder, a rabbi from Vilna called the Vilna Gaon, had supposedly learned to recite the entire Talmud by seven years of age, and was said to have studied 18 hours daily. Over the years, it became custom for rich men to wed their daughters to prominent Torah scholars, and then to support the son-in-law's family so he could continue his studies. In poorer circumstances, wives sometimes worked to support the family so that the husband could forebear from work in order to continue to learn.

Of course, I wasn't there, but stories about The Baal Shem Tov say he offered Jewish mysticism to the masses as a substitute for intense study. He did this because many of the people realized they would never be in a position to pursue the sort of intense dedication to study that mitnagdim rabbis said was necessary for a true and meaningful relationship with God.   The Baal Shem Tov roused his followers through music, dance, meditation, stories of miracles and other rituals into spiritual states, similar in effect to the sufi whirling ceremony or the sun dance ceremony of certain native american groups. 

The mitnagdim believed that the Ba'al Shem Tov's ideas would cause Jews to cease to pursue the texts, weakening the very foundation of the religion over time. Mysticism, for the mitnagdim, was to be limited to the very few truly righteous among them. In fact, the practice of mysticism among the mitnagdim was almost cultish, in a Free Mason sort of way. To participate, one had to be very learned, righteous, married, over 40 and have a sponsor/teacher. The feud was, in some cases, truly bitter.

There are still descendents of the two groups. I may be wrong, but I believe Aish, a strong Jewish outreach organization, has its theological roots in the mitnagdim, while the Lubovitch, a sect of hasidim with an outpost in nearly every city and on nearly every campus, are descendents of The Ba'al Shem Tov. Interestingly, these two groups today have nearly identical goals - reaching out to Jews who are somewhat lost or disconnected from Judaism - and have moved closer to each other theologically, as the study of the texts has taken a more prominent place in the Hasidic teachings. Even so, Aish, like the mitnagdim of the 18th Century, eschews mysticism for all but a select few, while the Lubovitch still make the rudiments of mysticism available in the form of stories, music, meditative practices, to all.

I give you this little bit of Jewish history because one of the more entertaining things (to me) about my own brain is the way it often connects seemingly disconnected things.  Below, I've shared with you a talk given by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist. Several years ago, she suffered a stroke that basically disabled the left lobe of her brain, and left her functioning about 95 percent from her right lobe. The distinction between her left and right brain functions, as she describes this in the video, strikes me as much the same as the distinction between the mitnagdim and the hasidim.  The left brain ties the mind to the concrete and the rational, while the right brain "dissolves" into the broader universe in an intense, loving and spiritual way.  Jill Bolte Taylor, in describing her right brain experience, uses terms like peacefulness, euphoria, and "at one with all the energy that was." By the same token, she could not intellectually separate herself from her surroundings, could not identify or hold onto the meaning of words against the background noises in the space she physically occupied. Meanwhile, the five percent of her left brain function that remained kept abruptly emerging into consciousness long enough, in what she thought of as a "wave of clarity," to say, "hey, you've got to pay attention; something's wrong, you've got to get help."

Ultimately, she experienced these feelings of "expansiveness" and "enormity" and "peacefulness" as nirvana. And further, she realized that the right brain held the key to peace among humankind, if only we could work on harnessing it. But, aha! We need the left brain to do the harnessing and directing. 

Bear with me while I explain the connection between the mitnagdim and the hasidim, Jill Bolte Taylor's left and right brain functions, Judaism, and world peace.  LOL (that's "laughing out loud," Mom).  Yes, it's all connected. 

At some level, I see in all this a metaphor for what it will take to accomplish human peace-making and even saving the planet from our greedier selves. Clearly for believing Jews, connection to the Holy is a key tenant of our religion. Our "job," as Jews, is tikkun olam, or healing the earth (that includes its occupants). An incredible Jewish mystic, Isaac Luria (1524 - 1572) explained the creation of the universe as an intentional creation by God, who previous to the creation existed as formless energy. God, according to Luria, wanted more - maybe needed more - and so created the physical world.  Metaphorically (it has to be metaphorical because otherwise how could we, simple mortals, grasp this?), God's creation is a "physical vessel" into which God poured Divine energy to bring it to life, so to speak. The problem is that the physical is no match for the energy of God, and the energy burst the vessel, spewing shards of vessel everywhere. These shards are imbued with sparks of Divine, the same Divine that was poured into the vessel, attaching themselves to the shards upon shattering. These shards became  material matter (remember, we are metaphoring), but because they are imbued with the sparks of Divine energy, they are also "of God" and holy.  It is our human job to live life in a way that enables us to gather these shards and "liberate" the sparks of holiness within them, to lift the sparks up to their former holy selves, so to speak. This is the task that, by another name, we call tikkun olam, or healing the world.

The urge to liberate and lift the sparks, while having genesis in the spiritual/mystical, must be actualized physically. Liberating and lifting the sparks can take many forms.  One such form of physical actualization is taught in one of the central prayers of the Jewish liturgy, the Ve'ahavta, from Deuteronomy 6. I wrote here, http://ecocuriosity.blogspot.com/2009/08/curiosity-got-me.html,  about the connection of the Ve'ahavta to tikkun olam/healing the world, but in a nutshell, the passage tells us that we need to keep all of our physical senses and abilities focused on the game all the time. The relevent passage is here:

"5 And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. 6 And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be upon thy heart; 7 and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. 8 And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thy hand, and they shall be for frontlets between thine eyes. 9 And thou shalt write them upon the door-posts of thy house, and upon thy gates."

Healing in the natural world is both physical and spiritual.  As a physical act of healing, it might manifest as something like cleaning up an environmental spill.  As a spiritual act of healing, one might empower a child to believe in her talents.  Sometimes, an act of healing can be both physical and spiritual, like when we participate in micro-funding programs that enable the poor in third world countries to become small-time entrepreneurs, giving physical sustainance, power in the material world and a spiritual lift for both the lender and borrower. In other words, these mystical concepts have very powerful real-world repercussions. Like Jill Bolte Taylor realized when she acknowledged that she needed her left brain to harness her right brain, it is important to realize that tikkun olam requires not just the mystical, spiritual urge to liberate the sparks from the shards and to heal the world, but the concrete teachings of the texts, like the Ve'ahavta, to help us know how to act.

 Jill Bolte Taylor, by sharing her experience, seems to be offering us a kind of a knowledge gift from God, a living, scientific proof in Taylor's experience that healing the world is entirely possible - because the spiritual healing capacity is within us all - and if we can figure out how to harness it - peace is within our grasp.  To get the full possibility and power of what I mean when I say this, I urge you to listen to Jill Bolte Taylor's talk.





More about The Baal Shem Tov: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baal_Shem_Tov
More about the mitnagdim: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misnagdim
More about Isaac Luria's Kabbalah: http://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/kabbalah/section9.rhtml
Hasidic Stories:  http://tzaddikim.blogspot.com/