Disobey

Just out of mandatory diversity workshop at work. In this the presenter played back a media "expose" intended to demonstrate how racism still exists in society. In the piece, ABC News takes over a diner, places a blatant prejudiced man behind that counter, has a series of Hispanic actors come in and be refused service, called illegal immigrants, etc in the presence of average customers, and then watches how customers reaction to the situation. The intent being to prove the existence of racism by showing how the vast majority of people will either do nothing or agree with the man behind the counter when placed in the situation.

It is also a completely inaccurate depiction of anything to do with racism.

It represents the very kind of unscientific, overly-simplified major media fear-mongering that the American public has been inundated with for generations. It approaches a serious issue with a cavalier experimental design that makes a mockery of the very cause it is trying to draw awareness to.

The fact is that such a social scenario confounds a number of different variables yet attributes them all to the most visible attribute about the customers - namely that they are Mexican. In fact, it is discriminatory in and of itself by focusing so much attention to only one attribute.

Race, class, fear of safety, and, most critically, fear of authority are all present in this situation. I have mused on this before in prior posts and we have seen it depicted in countless social experiments: the majority of people when placed in awkward or potentially harmful situations, even when they may have a direct impact on the outcome of events, will not stand up, will not follow their better sense of conscience due largely from fear of authority, being ostracized, etc.

Stanley Milgram's studies of obedience at Yale in the 1960's. Phillip Zimbardo's prison experiments at Stanford in the 1970's. The examples of people unable to follow their better judgment when confronted with perceived authority are simply terrifying in itself. We see this in virtually all societies, generations, and organizations.

The true challenge of most societies is not forcing blind obedience to authority, but encouraging civil disobedience to it.

Gandhi said it much better, "The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within."

We need a society of people not trained to obey authority by a military with bullets, but trained to question authority via their own sense of conscience and confidence in themselves. We need citizens not asked to blindly pledge allegiance to symbols, but pledging engagement to higher ideals that are continually evolved through open dialogue and debate.

The real tragedies of our shared humanity are not resolved by attacking them in direct response. We do not solve the world's problems by naively attributing cause and effect to the first, the easiest, factor that emerges before us. We begin where and with who we are at this moment. We begin by first becoming consciously aware of the limitations of our own minds, of our own tendency to simplify by stereotype, to categorize by classification, to continually break things down into their most elemental forms. We progress by understanding how to think critically, both about our wold and about our selves.

The same man above once said, "The only devils in the world are those running in our own hearts. That is where the battle should be fought."

It is only by seeing both limits and possibilities of our shared humanity that we come to that critical point where we are free to focus our energies on those things we want to manifest in the world versus those we do not.

Belief

"The power of belief, in a sense -- it's one of the strongest of all," he said. "And like religion, if you strongly believe in something, it comes true and it becomes a reality. In acting, I find that as well. If you believe it, you discover a truth and it's quite spiritual.... Along that path, in discovering that character, you discover a lot about yourself."  

- 1994 interview with Heath Ledger

J.Allison

Beliefs are choices.  No one has authority over your personal beliefs.  Your beliefs are in jeopardy only when you don't know what they are.  Understanding your own beliefs, and those of others, comes through focused thought and discussion.  Most public dialogue is now propelled by media outlets owned by a dwindling number of multinational corporations.  A healthy democracy needs ways to bypass gatekeepers so we can communicate with one another directly, and perhaps even find common ground. 

Jay Allison

"This I Believe"

Drive Slow

How to make the most out of driving 2.5 hours for 1 ski run in the
worst snow conditions ever:

Stay hungry enough to enjoy a great meal with good friends.

Stay long enough to catch a sunset pour out over the mountains.

Drive slow enough to chase a full moon lighting up the night
clouds.

Fire

I am hurricane. I am mind fire. As I awaken to the light of this day I feel this pulse in my veins quicken, these pupils dilate, this mind come alive. I take this potential for infinite thought, of insatiable curiosity, of open-eyed wonder, and I make it my possibility. I embrace this day as all that I may ever have, all that I have ever had. I define myself here and now. I keep this mind open to the lights of others to shine upon it. I step into new worlds and understandings. I evolve from more than self, but ceaseless wonder of a wider world. I take these experiences with me down this road. I am not alone. I am, by pages turned, through sights perceived, connected to all who came before and all who come after. I leave my mark, yet I carry these experiences with me as timeless companions. In so, I am manifestation, I am amalgamation, I am the eternity of this moment.

Jump

This weekend I jumped off an ice cliff while skiing. 

It was no accident and, after doing so, I felt more liberation than any jump, mogul, or vertical incline ever provided before.  

Why? 

Because it scared the hell out of me, because every inch of my defined limitations screamed, "impossible"... yet I did it anyway. 

I cannot explain euphoria I felt the rest of that day, I cannot explain how I was OK with nearly breaking an ankle further down the trail, I cannot comprehend how a little ice in the woods could have impact it did.  But it did so for Jay too so I cannot claim to be crazy. 

What I do know is that there are times in life we can feel out of touch with our better selves, when it takes an act so apart from the confines of our predefined limits that we elevate our awareness and appreciation for things that much higher.  I would not have dreamed of jumping off an ice cliff in the middle of an unmarked trail on the last run of the day before that moment, but in that moment doing so was all that mattered. 

Charles DuBois once said...

The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.

Just love this.

broken state

It sounds almost funny, except it is not. For the past year I have been trying to pay my taxes. Not for a few months, not even for half the year, simply the entire year. What stands in the way of fulfilling this basic duty? CT General Statutes Section 12-130:

failure to send out any tax bill shall not invalidate the tax.

Take a gander at this fine piece of work. It almost makes sense... for a second. Then you read down further. "Ohh... there's what I need, I can click the little 'click here' link to see what I owe." Except that clicking on that little "click here" to look up current year taxes bring up simply, "page not found." So you are back at square one.

Translation?

We, the city tax office, have every right to totally F-up your taxes, duck behind the curtain for cinematic appeal, pull them out of a hat with a silver bunny, then go on vacation for the entire year... oh but please know that it is still your responsibility to pay your unknown sum by an unknown date in lieu of undocumented taxes.

There are few things in life that thoroughly and completely confuse me beyond any hope of comprehension, few things that appear totally broken by their mere nature. Congratulations city government, you just made the short list.

ice

I hiked up Ragged Mountain today. Just a small little mountain. Nothing like the big White Mountains I ran through as a kid in NH. But today, but this morning, it was enough to soothe a busy mind.

On arrival, I found I missed the hiking group I was to meet. Habit would have had me turn around and go home. I did not know the trails. I had never been here before. There was snow on the ground. But in lieu of a tiny little recurring dream, there was little choice but to climb.

I could say I hiked alone, but for a few friendly escorts to the top from a fluffy malamute husky and a very excited, very cold black lab. They struck me as a bit of an odd couple, the lab whimpering and squirming about, the husky quiet, observant, and paced. The talker and the walker. They made for good company, even if they were just using me for my sandwich.

The trail I took ended up running the ridge of the mountain, up the left, over the lake, then rounding up each side of the mountain to the top. I ran. I hiked. I breathed. I ran some more. I passed a couple others. As I passed the second ridge to the peak, I took a minute to absorb the scope of the snowy ground, barren trees, and quiet sky all around. It struck as me as quite strange how little of nature's sanctity we leave left in our busy lives. It was the last part, that quietness that I had forgotten the importance of, of the omnipresence and power in a mere moment of nature's silence. It came before me. It will last long after. I would have continued on with the rest of the groups I saw on the way up, but for the tranquility of the moment. It seemed only right to savor it well. Who knows if I should step on this path again? Opportunity beckoned.

I glanced over the rolling hills to Mount Southington and it's snow-covered trails. Then off the right to the UCHC. But it was not the hills that caught me this day, but kneeling down, the magnificence of the detail under my feet that took my breath away. There, frozen in one beautiful moment, a layer of water flowing over the rocks at cliff's edge, a thin layer of ice floating mere centimeters off the jagged surface. Hovering. Floating. Like a smooth, transparent skin to the rough and hard points of the rocks beneath. I pressed one section only to feel it creak and shatter under my touch. Caught in the moment, I stared at the random creation for some time. The intricacy of it's ice bubbles, the dryness of the rock beneath. Perhaps we are to this nature not so different anyway, hardened souls covered in a fragile skin or fragile souls isolated by the hardened stone we build around us? Just perhaps.

I spent some time at the top staring not out, but in.

Coming down the other side there were many points where the path got icy. Places where you could really fall hard. I found quickly that in such places you can walk softly and try to go around or you can set back and leap over with everything you have got. I walked softly coming up, so I chose to leap ahead coming down. Even if you don't know where you are going to land, sometimes just the taste of temporary flight is worth the consequence of any landing. I missed only a few times. That I would bleed a few fingers, but not break any legs was good enough a result.

True, in this hike there was much more, but where would we then end? The wonder of getting lost in the woods? The beauty of an uncertain destination? Or a magical reservoir, golden field, forest limo, or hiker hieroglyphics? Such are stories for another day. For today, on this day, what lies within, what we need without, truth be, is enough.

psychart

For a good part of 5 years in college I spent countless hours attempting to understand the psychology of separation, of stereotypes and discrimination in societies and individuals. There are volumes of these studies out there.

And yet one visit to the local art gallery and these latent biases are similarly confronted. Trading complex social experiments for abstract creativity and images. My own assumptions of order and structure and color and form challenged with the utmost subtlety.


Images to the right of a local exhibit from the wonderful Real Art Ways...

Heather Hart
Notations of a Hybrid, 2008
Notations of a Hybrid explores context, power, literature, and intention in regards to identity development. Hart invited people to give her titles of two books that they have found most helpful in defining their identity. The selection could be based upon the book's title, content, contrast or collaboration.

Hart then obtained these books and encased them in yarn, thereby creating a portrait of each participant. Each object consists of two books that are cozied together, rendering them inaccessible. While the yarn protects these books, it also conceals and restricts their content. This collection of books becomes unusable in their utilitarian sense and become decorative evidence of an obsessive reclamation process - the yarn taking control.

rudder vs sail

It is a strange feeling. That loss of memory you incur when the jagged edge of stress and blind ambition have cut their way clear into your soul. When the pursuit has eclipsed the pursued. When the intoxication of inspired thought has devolved into the relentless repetition of recycled actions.

When you are paddling upstream.

There is wonder in the heating of the mind, of the solemn intensity of inspired thought. for the heightened sense of awareness that comes from a mind on fire, in purpose. And there is within this space that golden opportunity in transforming thought into action, into tangible substance that leaves the world a little better.

But along this road there are many diverged. So easy to lose one's way. So essential to have that rudder. To steer yourself back home.

Never forsake the rudder for the sail.

Well, hello there blog. Nice to see you again. How have you been? Oh fine, here too. Yes, I look forward to future rendezvouses with you too. 12:36am or otherwise. Welcome back old friend. Let the conversations begin anew...

Chasing Leprechauns

I caught a leprechaun today.

Coming out of work late to see a blinding wall of water amidst an ocean of breaking sunshine. Looked out a bit further and there the most fabulous rainbow just hanging around in the sky.

After chasing it around campus a bit I found myself out by Horsebarn Hill. Apparently even the horses love those little green men because they were just galloping around the fields under fading rainbow beams chasing them for now reason at all.

I mean its a Friday for crying out loud. You'd think these horses would have something better to do than chase these grumpy Irish faerie men around all afternoon. Strange things.

Other cars stopped by to watch this amazing scene too. Several in fact. A small crowd of strangers putting aside horse brushings and drives home to catch a glimpse of something magical. People with mouths open like a fireworks display on the 4th. Popping out of cars snapping photos and then back in and off again.

Leprechauns aside. It's an odd place this point and shoot world we live in. Staying just long enough to capture a moment. Perhaps not quite enough to savor.

I stayed a little longer. Sometimes these leprechauns have a bit more to share about the world than a 3 second point and shoot can capture.

melody

Melody is my medicine.

I was reminded of this on the way to work today: how there is simply no bad day bad enough, no rude driver cursing enough, no unfortunate circumstance tragic enough to overcome the effect of beautiful melody on my heart. The fact that I can't sing a note to save myself is beside the point. Just the sound of others constructing this wonderful language is enough.

Perhaps the sight, sound, or experience differs, but I believe every one of us has this direct channel, the one thing that lifts our souls beyond our selves. Our unique path to ephemeral euphoria through momentary immersion. Our own escape hatch. 

If you're stressed out, try it.

If you're still searching, find it.

What's yours?

1:10

What does it take to move you to care?

Would you come to the aid of dying man in the street?
If you said yes, you'd be wrong 9 out of 10 times.

A little more than a week ago ago in my hometown of Hartford, CT, and 10 minutes from my house, a 78 year old man was hit by two cars, thrown over the hood, and left unassisted by a small crowd of bystanders as the man lay motionless on the ground. You might have missed the story entirely if not for an actual video of the incident and top story from the New York Times circulating the net. The reaction is one of are now referring to the "scary anonymity of the modern street." The police chief himself issuing the blistering statement:

“At the end of the day we’ve got to look at ourselves and understand that our moral values have now changed. We have no regard for each other."

But it's more than it, really.

Hartford's far from being a cradle of good Samaritanism, but it's no poster child for apathy either. In times of strong emotional reaction to horrifying events, the mind has a tendency to rationalize otherwise unacceptable events by distancing itself from reality. It's a protective, knee-jerk reaction, but it doesn't make it an appropriate long-term response.

You see when I was an undergrad I had the honor of working with man by the name of Ervin Staub. Dr Staub was a Holocaust survivor and now speaks internationally on the topic of mass violence, genocide, and international relations. What is more timely to this post is that Staub began the path to uncovering the roots of international phenomenon by studying the basic willingness of people to help one another on the side of the street. In the aftershock of the now famous Kitty Genovese case of the mid 1960's he conducted study after study trying to isolate the specific factors that motivate us to help each other. As written about by the NY Times,

In one of those now most often cited, students at Princeton Theological Seminary were asked to go to a nearby chapel and give an extemporaneous sermon on the Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan. As they walked to the chapel, they passed a man slumped in a doorway, moaning for help. About two-thirds of those who thought they had plenty of time stopped to help, but only 10 percent of the students who thought they were late did so.

9 out of 10 people are too busy to assist... even when on the way to the chapel to deliver a lesson to others on assisting others. This is not reality TV. It's real social phenomenon referred to as the Bystander Effect. It's what Staub has spent his entire life and dozens of similar studies dedicated to connecting to genocides like the Holocaust and others across the globe. It's what you and I claim would never happen in our hometown. It's what we all assume we would never let go by unnoticed. It's what happens every day, in every nation, within every generation.

It begins with everyday people observing everyday events. And ends with nations massacring millions of people in the name of ethnic cleansing or political agenda.

And if you think 1 in 10 are bad odds, think again. The number of people and cars that passed by Angel Arce Torres before a police cruiser stopped to assist him on May 30, 2008?

20.

$

As we charge head first into the epidemic otherwise known as America the Indebted, the following 7 sites provide a wonderful, free roadmap to navigating the carnage. 

(For those of you that look over NCN's resources you'll notice I cheated a bit with the list.)

:-)

No Credit Needed

All Financial Matters

Consumerism Commentary

Free Money Finance

Get Rich Slowly

Mighty Bargain Hunter

Wise Bread

PS: MacHeads... automate your financial IQ by combining all these website's RSS feeds into a single view. Great timesaver!

Not all free iTunes songs suck

White Daisy Passing
by Rocky Votolato

Great tune.

Corps

First class back in MBA program last night. 40 minutes in we're watching a Clinton era video on the effect of outsourcing and decline of unskilled assembly line workers in Oklahoma. Workers complaining. CEO's preaching about the need for eight figure incomes. The massive corporate void between have and have nots.

The lesson is The Stakeholder Theory, but I can't help feeling like I'm outside the Twin Pines Mall and Doc Brown just chucked this video out of his ice-covered Delorean. It's been only 10 years since this video was produced and it already sounds like someone speaking from another century. Have things really changed this much in the last decade?

Unskilled labor, job security, and company paid everything. Relics. As I listen to the words of these CEO's I cannot help but here the words of Cluetrain bouncing across the screen...

In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.

We need to get smarter.
The corporation is dying.

Technology has raised us as a generation with little ability to distinguish a colleague in China to a buddy down the hall. Why should it be any different in the boardroom? If my 3G cell phone is a faster route to global suppliers in Taiwan and world-class marketing in NYC, why am commuting 75 minutes through traffic each day to your fluorescent cubicle farm?

Funny how things change... my freshman year in college I remember a radical communist student speaker waxing at poetic at one of the local schools on how we would all one day become free agents in a global marketplace of products and services.

The only question in my mind is, "Why'd it take this long?"

Launch

Someone once told me that an airplane is off track 90% of the time it's in flight... yet it still lands exactly where it's supposed to. 

It's easy to look at other people's lives and assume great performance comes easy. It is a lot harder to see the real struggles we all encounter, to notice how we're all off track much of the time, and understand that it's the self-awareness and minor corrections along the way that help us find our way home.

Launch bold. 

Correct along the way.

You will get there.

Inno

Why is that innovation remains such a rare commodity? How do you reach a point, in any business, where status quo becomes defacto modus operandi?

Great talk by Kevin B. through our local young professionals group tonight. Lots to take away, but one thing in particular: how different the mindset of the successful entrepreneur is from the average cubicle monkey. Innovation has its own language. Its own perspective. You know it when you see it.

To overcome the kind of global challenges we now face, we need more of this. We need to see more eyes ignited with the fire of a fresh idea. We need to speak the language of ubiquitous entrepreneurship, of adding value to the every day. We need to produce more minds unencumbered by fear of making mistakes, of collaborating, of the unknown.

In such a perspective lie the seeds of true progress.