CIGARETTES & ADDICTION (A STORY)
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 21, 2009
The accepted reason cigarettes are addictive is their nicotine content. There is truth to this. The discussion is always about the content of cigarettes never the subtext of smoking. This is a story of subtext.
Many years ago, making one of my late evening chemical engineering service calls on an obliging industrial plant that allowed me to do so, I ran into another chemical engineer who was also making a service call.
He was a chain smoker. I noticed this as he went about reading graphs with a clipboard in his hand, but always with a lighted cigarette bouncing between his lips as he studied the glassed in charts through a haze of cigarette smoke.
This was even more pronounced when we were rapping up our work for the night, which was now past midnight. As I was putting my laboratory equipment back into my cases and he was rapping up his gear, we talked. We were both exhausted. It had been a long day and we enjoyed the break before collapsing into our automobiles and moving on. He lit a cigarette on the end of a cigarette already half smoked as we sat down on a bench and sunk into our fatigue. I offered him some coffee from my thermos. He waved it off with his torch, while I gulped a cup down.
“You smoke a lot," I said.
He smiled, “You noticed. Why, does it bother you?”
“No,” I lied, then adding, “How much do you smoke?”
“At least four packs a day.”
“Wow!” I said, “It’s probably a stupid question but why do you smoke so much?
I looked at him. He was about my age, but with sallow skin, sunken cheekbones, laughing lines around his eyes and mouth, and budding bags under his eyes, probably from lack of sleep. He also had thick black curly hair that was well groomed, as were his hands, and nails, and he didn’t dress cheap. By his easy style and demeanor, I imagined he never met a stranger.
“No, it’s not a stupid question. I travel the country and this is our biggest customer. I try to call on as many clients as I can every day. My income is based on the coverage. So, I’m kind of time sensitive if you know what I mean.” He gave me a nervous chuckle. “I’m married to these machines and instruments.” He laughed again. “The only company I have other than the noise of the machines and the squiggly lines on the graphs is my cigarette. It’s good company fills my loneliness and has for years.”
“How old were you when you started smoking?”
“Oh, I expect twelve or thirteen.”
“And you’ve smoked ever since?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Have you had any illness related to smoking?”
“No, I’m as fit as a dime.”
“That’s wonderful. You’re also as thin as one, too.”
“Yeah, I’ve never been able to put on much weight.”
“You’re, what, a couple inches shorter than I am? What do you weigh?”
“I suspect so. I’m six-one and weigh 145 dripping wet.”
“That’s pretty thin.”
“What are you?”
“Oh, about six-four and 195.”
“You’ve got me by 50 pounds.”
“Yes.”
“Do you smoke?”
“Never tried it.”
“Good for you.” Then he looked me in the eye. “How do you deal with loneliness on the road?”
“You may find this hard to believe but I cherish being alone.”
“How come?”
“It gives me a chance to think.”
“What do you do when you get down?”
“I don’t get down too often but when I do I suppose I read a book. I’m never without a book always reading something if that answers your question.”
“That’s your cigarette.”
“You think?”
“Oh, yeah. You read. I smoke. How many books do you read?”
“Oh, goodness, besides those relating to my work?”
”Yeah.”
“I suppose one or two a week sometimes more sometimes less.”
“There you have it. That’s your addiction.” He nimbly tapped the last cigarette out of a pack, squashed the empty in his hand, and threw it into the trashcan. “What do you read?”
“It depends. I go in periods reading only histories than mysteries than the classics. Whenever I take a break on the road, I’m likely to find myself in some bookstore.”
“Classics? You mean the kind we were force to read in school?”
“Yes.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, Dostoyesvky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Stendhal, Hugo, Camus, Sartre, Lawrence, Joyce, then of course Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Farrell, Dos Passos, Maddox Ford, Faulkner, Lewis, Eliot, Austen and the Bronte sisters, stuff like that.”
“That’s heavy stuff. Read any dirty books?”
“Some would say ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ by Lawrence and “Ulysses’ by Joyce qualifies if that’s what you mean.”
“No, I mean really raunchy books like ‘Fanny Hill’ by John Cleland and ‘My Life and Loves’ by Frank Harris.” He looked at me. “You don’t know those authors do you?” I shook my head. He smiled. “Those will get your attention I guarantee.” He flipped ash on the floor. “You sound like a writer.”
“I’m not but I think I’d like to be one.”
“Why don’t you write a book?”
“I don’t think I have the talent. I know I don’t have the time.”
“I’ve noticed you’re always jotting into a notebook.”
“Oh, that’s my work.”
“How many notebooks do you fill?"
“At least one a week, I write down about everything that comes to mind, especially after sales calls.” A little pain came into my eyes. “No matter how bad it goes.” Then I added, “It’s surprising what an insight can register with something written down to reflect on later. Certain things stand out that you might not have noticed. It’s a gauge to go forward.”
“That’s good. I like that. Who taught you that?”
“Well, it might be back to your point about addiction. Besides always reading, I’m inclined to write when I find myself pressing. I can sit in a restaurant and lose myself writing in my notebook. I forget the time just writing away.”
“Yeah? They ever kick you out for just sitting there writing?”
“Oh, yes.”
“How do you deal with that?”
“I just go on to the next place.”
“So you see you’re as much addicted in your way as I am in my way, don’t you agree?”
“I don’t consider myself addicted.”
“Well, I certainly see that you are.”
“Em.”
“How would you describe yourself?”
“Disciplined!”
“That’s a good word. Do you think it covers the issue?”
“Probably not. But back to you, do you think good company covers your cigarette?”
“I get your point, but hey, it works for me.”
“Yes, I can see that and I think mine works for me as well.”
“Next thing you’re going to tell me you don’t drink.”
“No, I don’t. I’ve never had the inclination.”
“You’ve never tasted booze? Come on!”
“Yes, I have.”
“And?”
“It gives me a headache. I suffer from migraines as it is and don’t need an assist from booze.”
“Em, that’s interesting. Booze gives me a buzz. It’s also a pick me up. There’s nothing better when you’re dead on your feet to go into a bar order a shot of whiskey and a cold beer down them smoke a couple of cigarettes and find yourself in another country.” He laughed. “The problem is stopping there.”
“Can you?”
“Most of the time, but not always.”
“Most of the time?”
“Absolutely! You’re not going to believe this but I love my work. I love chemical engineering. I also took a degree in mechanical engineering if you can believe that.”
“I can believe it. Where?”
“Purdue. How about you?”
“Iowa.”
“Yeah, I had a double major, took me more than seven years to get them but they’ve come in handy in my work.”
“So, you’re some kind of a scientist.”
“No, I wouldn’t say that. I’m a good problem solver of automated systems and let’s leave it at that. I can read systems like you probably read books. You’re smiling, why you smiling?”
“Just a private joke.” How could I tell him I read people like an open book without offending him?
“Anyway, if God said to me, ‘Nathan, I want you to be an engineer,’ I must have heard it in my mother’s womb because I’ve always been a tinkerer since a boy. That’s about it. You get too good and they push you up into management. I’d never allowed that, see, they’ve already tried. They flattered me with this management rant to make me as stupid as the people I report to. I told them ‘no thanks.’ Keep me where I am but give me more money. They said they couldn't do that because I’m already at the top of my bracket whatever that means. Can you believe that?”
“Yes I can.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Well, not really."
"But is that when you have a few more shots and beers?”
“It might be, but I don’t need an excuse if I’m being honest. It’s part of my modus operandi. You see they don’t know it but I do. I have the best of all possible worlds. I travel the country live pretty much on my expense account and touch little of my salary. I fly and drive at the company’s expense to beautiful places. I don’t have a wife or kids to support. Hey, I don’t have any life other than work. And I love it.”
“But what if you had another friend besides the cigarette, what then?”
“I don’t think that way. Oh, I have girlfriends. Got them all over the country. Let me ask you a question: who would want to be married to a guy who is never home? As it stands now none of my girlfriends trust me.”
“Should they?”
“That’s not the point. The point is I’ve never made any of their lives more miserable for being married to me.”
“How do they feel about it?”
“They get over it.”
“Does it bother you if they have other boyfriends?”
“Hey, I encourage it. I shouldn’t tell you this but many of them have married and when I’m in town they want to see me.”
“Do you see them?”
“Now that would be telling.”
“Okay.”
He looked at me keenly blowing out a perfect smoke ring. “You may not remember me but I’ve seen you on several sites late at night like this. You sell as well as service, right?” I nodded. “So you sell chemical systems to engineers during the day?” I nodded again. “Do many people like you work late at night?”
“Well, there are 250 people like me in my division and I seriously doubt if many of them do.”
“So why do you do it?”
“Probably a lot of the same reasons you do. I like the quiet. It gives me most of the day to make sales calls rather than service calls. Service calls take up a lot of time if you do them right just as your service calls do. My sales calls are with plant managers, plant and chief engineers who are on duty during the day. I can do my service calls better in the quiet than during the day. Also, like you, I like this work because of the freedom, the independence, being my own boss to make decisions in my own way, and not have someone looking over my shoulder. My performance appraisal is satisfied customers and acquiring new business. I’m outside all the bureaucratic nonsense the same as you are, if that answers your question.”
“How about your boss?”
I laughed. “How about him! He calls every single night and when he can’t get me he waxes like a rejected Buddha. I don’t know if he doesn’t believe I’m making these late night service calls or he thinks I out doing something problematic. But that ‘s his problem.”
“What’s it like when you connect?”
“Funny you ask. There is a lot of silence. He’ll ask me how things are going. I’ll tell him and then for thirty seconds or more there is silence. I’ll ask if he’s still there and he’ll say he is. It’s maddening. Then he’ll ask me something else followed by the silence.”
“He’s checking up on you.”
“No doubt.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“Let me ask you, how would you feel?”
“Boy, I’m glad I don’t have that kind of boss. Besides, the long distant calls would be out of sight and the company’s constantly in money pinching programs.”
“What’s your expense account like with you traveling so much?”
“Pretty open.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Why?”
“From what you’ve said you living off your expenses.”
“How about you?”
“It’s surprising when you don’t drink don’t smoke don’t watch TV and stay in the most inexpensive motels there are you can eat in the best restaurants in your territory and still have the most modest expense account of anyone.”
“You like that?”
“I like that.”
“How do your colleagues feel about it?” A smile creased my lips. “You don’t give a crap do you?”
“That’s a poetic way of putting it.”
“We’re not team players are we?”
“No, I don’t think that fits our description.”
“But we’re team leaders.”
“No, I don’t think that fits either. I think we’re team partners with our customers. We’ve gotten beyond company personnel chatter if you like.”
Have you heard the 80-20 Pareto theory?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I think we’re the 20 percent that makes 80 percent of the difference.”
“If you like.”
“Well, let me ask you. You’re a salesman as well as an engineer. You have to sell as well as service, right?”
“Yes.”
“How do you stack up to others in selling?”
“I dwarf them. Are you surprised?”
“No. You know you’re going to be pushed into management.”
“I suspect I will.”
“Do you want that to happen?”
“I have a wife and four little kids.”
“You have four kids? How old are you?”
“Thirty.”
“You’ve been busy.”
“My company has the same problem as yours. I don’t think they’ll allow me to make more than my boss or my boss’s boss.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, they’ve changed my rate of commission to sales twice already.”
“Does that bother you?”
“It bothers me mightily. As matters now stand, I intend to work until I’m forty and then retire and write.”
“Now, that I would call a dream.”
“Yes. Yes, it’s a dream.”
“Why don’t you join another company?”
“That’s a possibility. If they cut the rate of my commissions one more time, I’ll resign. Then they'll have one of two options.”
“Which are?”
“Bump me up to management equivalent to my income or let me go. If they let me go, 90 percent of the new business of this region's sales I customarily generate will go. And I suspect turnover of my accounts will increase as well.”
“Meaning competitors will step in and take your accounts.”
“Meaning that is a possibility.”
“So what do you think will happen?”
“They’ll do what spineless corporations always do. They’ll push me upstairs.”
The smoker laughed taking a long drag on his cigarette and studied me through the haze as if seeing me for the first time. “If I were to judge you on the way you look, I’d say you were an easy mark with that open honest face that look of innocence.”
“It works in sales.”
“I’m sure it does, but I wonder if they see the steel in your eyes that I see now. There is something of the cynical bastard in you isn’t there?” He studied me some more. “I’ll bet once you land an account they’re not likely to quit you.”
“No, not likely.”
“So, you wear a mask?”
“Don’t we all?”
“Point taken.”
* * *
The rest of the story is that I was pushed up to corporate management, then retired at age thirty-six, read and wrote for two years on a self-imposed sabbatical, published a book, then went back to school for six years to earn a Ph.D., and then set out with a new set of addictions.
* * *
Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr. is an industrial and organizational psychologist writing in the genre of organizational psychology, author of Confident Selling, Work Without Managers, The Worker, Alone, Six Silent Killers, Corporate Sin, Time Out for Sanity, Meet Your New Best Friend, Purposeful Selling, In the Shadow of the Courthouse and Confident Thinking and Confidence in Subtext. A Way of Thinking About Things, Who Put You in a Cage, and Another Kind of Cruelty are in Amazon’s KINDLE Library.
Monday, September 21, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT --- YET ANOTHER THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT --- YET ANOTHER THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 17, 2009
* * *
A PROFESSOR WRITES:
Jim,
You are clearly speaking to a larger audience than I am as a professor. In doing so, you bring hope to me and I am sure to many others.
As I was born at the end of World War II, 1945 to be precise, I feel little kinship with the baby boomer generation. My pride is with that Greatest Generation that preceded mine.
In every generation, there is a mix of everything obviously and my confidence in this current generation is very high, not because they are so very special now but because the challenges they face will make them become very special.
Our last Great Generation had to sacrifice much for the common good; now the same challenge has been presented again at a time when society is being pushed hard to show its stuff.
Today external economic forces plus internal corrupt practices, forces that have always been with us, are pushing it. They are being challenged like we were to grow up and use their God given gifts of intellect and drive to develop our species to a higher state of being.
So, why should this path be an easy one, why should there not be differences emerging that must be dealt with, and why would they not care about leaving a better country for their children than the one that was passed to us?
As in all systems, and particularly it seems in political ones, there is a lot of noise. Also some fury and yes I agree many, many sounds that just seem bizarre, and if we move to judgment, not at all mature or demonstrating any evidence of much thinking.
But the sounds are necessary, and again from a systems perspective, we must have what I am sure you know, "requisite variety.” Our diversity is in so many ways our deepest strength.
You won’t find this in China but you will see it in India. That country "practices" democracy. India makes many of the same mistakes we make.
I have much confidence in democracy. It is a guiding principle that has a way of helping us to develop our ability to grow up and play the role of adults. For the first time in human history much of the world has this same dream of freedom. They also want a form of capitalism that makes their material lives richer as well. However, we should never assume we are a democracy, but should instead recognize that we are trying to learn how to be democratic.
Yes, it is doubtful if some adults are doing much thinking beyond the level of fear-induced frustration. Their angst is that they are not getting their way on everything. As a consequence, some of their actions appear uncivil and disrespectful. To create a truly participative version of democracy it will inevitably necessitate a lot of sound and fury.
Since my research over the last 40 years has always been concerned with how we can create and maintain democratic organizations, I am keenly aware of all of our failures. Yet I am very optimistic. I have a simple symbol to reflect my hope for the future. It is SOS. That hope is based on SELF ORGANIZING SYSTEMS. This has yet to be fully understood or developed as potential solutions to the many problems holding us back. Each day more can be learned about how to tap our ability to self-organize. It is this quest in practice and theory that keeps me energized.
In times of trouble, clearly an SOS is not a bad call. Yes, we do need help but we ironically are the help we need.
So how do we help to learn what can work better and help develop us as people who still have a role in this amazing world we live in?
Just as the Greatest Generation you represent gave us much to learn, the present generation will be the one that changes the world, and shows us how to use our strengths and intellect to create a more participative and less hierarchical system. It will work to create a more sustainable economy with greater transparency and justice for a larger proportion of the world's population.
If we could ever have one more "I have a dream speech" it would be the one that again points out those universal human goals but this time we have the capacity to create the actions before the speech.
It will not be easy but that is how a generation lays claim to the honor of being the “Greatest Generation.” Keep the faith. One short human life is hardly the scale needed to judge how human progress is made. Never forget that we have been far worse off. The images of the future created in the midst of WWI were dismal and bleak but look around and see what in less than 100 years we have achieved.
Ken
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Ken,
Thank you for taking the time to express your thoughts on this subject. Self-organizing systems, incidentally, are in sync with Edward de Bono's "lateral and parallel" thinking. They dovetail with my insistence that we need an internal governor and moral compass in order to be in control and make appropriate decisions.
In a 1996 book (The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend), I wrote: “We are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and our way.” Nearly a decade and a half later, I see little evidence to revise this assessment.
I am much more of a skeptic than you are, bridging on the cynical, but of course you know that. Some of my essays now in the hopper will no doubt illustrate this with some acridity.
You flatter me as being part of the "Greatest Generation.” Despite all the hype of Tom Brokaw’s book of the same title, this generation had no choice but to go to war. I was not yet a teenager at war’s end, but my uncles were in that war with one on Pearl Harbor when the Japanese bombed the islands on December 7, 1941. He survived with a broken back.
His brother operated an LST (Landing Ship Tank) carrying troops ashore in the invasions of North Africa, D-Day Invasion, and the invasion of Sicily, and of Italy at Salerno. He, too, survived but saw a lot of carnage.
I collected his letters and edited them into a book for his family of those adventures. What came through in his correspondence and diaries was a teenage kid too naive to be scared and who enlisted simply to be with his buddies, several of whom didn't survive the war.
There is a difference between then and now that I sense is gone forever.
It is an innocence and paradoxically an implicit confidence that everything will turn out all right in the end. That was then. Now, everything is an act, a dramaturgic play, and a product of subliminal stimuli on television, radio, the Internet, and in film with the constant cacophony of impulse stimulus-response to create synthetic behavior. My wonder is if anyone born after 1965 has a working center.
My reason for saying that is that I am thinking of my two cousins here, good boys who wouldn't have recognized a vice if it walked up and attempted to seduce them, strong boys, athletic and fun loving, disciplined boys, who feared their parents, the police, the government and took the Red, White and Blue for granted. They were Iowa boys used to hard work and few kudos. They were programmed to get passing grades, stay in school, get a job, marry, have kids, and stay in place. Instead, only eighteen and nineteen-year-olds, they found themselves in the navy fighting a war. They were willing to die for their country not knowing quite sure what Nazism and Communism was all about, but trusted those in charge did, people who they referred to as “solid,” an expression of the day, and worthy of the sacrifice.
The Greatest Generation was naive. All the generations that have followed have been increasingly sophisticated, political, amoral, self-serving and belligerent. A more appropriate caption for my cousins’ generation would be “The Last Generation” of regional and collective solidarity, which was committed to a sacrosanct and national American Culture. That is all gone.
We now live in a fragmented and fractured universe and all the optimism in the world is unlikely to put the pieces back together. That said if there are ten million like you in a world of six and one half billion souls even the miraculous is possible. No one can fault your great heart.
Be always well,
Jim.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 17, 2009
* * *
A PROFESSOR WRITES:
Jim,
You are clearly speaking to a larger audience than I am as a professor. In doing so, you bring hope to me and I am sure to many others.
As I was born at the end of World War II, 1945 to be precise, I feel little kinship with the baby boomer generation. My pride is with that Greatest Generation that preceded mine.
In every generation, there is a mix of everything obviously and my confidence in this current generation is very high, not because they are so very special now but because the challenges they face will make them become very special.
Our last Great Generation had to sacrifice much for the common good; now the same challenge has been presented again at a time when society is being pushed hard to show its stuff.
Today external economic forces plus internal corrupt practices, forces that have always been with us, are pushing it. They are being challenged like we were to grow up and use their God given gifts of intellect and drive to develop our species to a higher state of being.
So, why should this path be an easy one, why should there not be differences emerging that must be dealt with, and why would they not care about leaving a better country for their children than the one that was passed to us?
As in all systems, and particularly it seems in political ones, there is a lot of noise. Also some fury and yes I agree many, many sounds that just seem bizarre, and if we move to judgment, not at all mature or demonstrating any evidence of much thinking.
But the sounds are necessary, and again from a systems perspective, we must have what I am sure you know, "requisite variety.” Our diversity is in so many ways our deepest strength.
You won’t find this in China but you will see it in India. That country "practices" democracy. India makes many of the same mistakes we make.
I have much confidence in democracy. It is a guiding principle that has a way of helping us to develop our ability to grow up and play the role of adults. For the first time in human history much of the world has this same dream of freedom. They also want a form of capitalism that makes their material lives richer as well. However, we should never assume we are a democracy, but should instead recognize that we are trying to learn how to be democratic.
Yes, it is doubtful if some adults are doing much thinking beyond the level of fear-induced frustration. Their angst is that they are not getting their way on everything. As a consequence, some of their actions appear uncivil and disrespectful. To create a truly participative version of democracy it will inevitably necessitate a lot of sound and fury.
Since my research over the last 40 years has always been concerned with how we can create and maintain democratic organizations, I am keenly aware of all of our failures. Yet I am very optimistic. I have a simple symbol to reflect my hope for the future. It is SOS. That hope is based on SELF ORGANIZING SYSTEMS. This has yet to be fully understood or developed as potential solutions to the many problems holding us back. Each day more can be learned about how to tap our ability to self-organize. It is this quest in practice and theory that keeps me energized.
In times of trouble, clearly an SOS is not a bad call. Yes, we do need help but we ironically are the help we need.
So how do we help to learn what can work better and help develop us as people who still have a role in this amazing world we live in?
Just as the Greatest Generation you represent gave us much to learn, the present generation will be the one that changes the world, and shows us how to use our strengths and intellect to create a more participative and less hierarchical system. It will work to create a more sustainable economy with greater transparency and justice for a larger proportion of the world's population.
If we could ever have one more "I have a dream speech" it would be the one that again points out those universal human goals but this time we have the capacity to create the actions before the speech.
It will not be easy but that is how a generation lays claim to the honor of being the “Greatest Generation.” Keep the faith. One short human life is hardly the scale needed to judge how human progress is made. Never forget that we have been far worse off. The images of the future created in the midst of WWI were dismal and bleak but look around and see what in less than 100 years we have achieved.
Ken
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Ken,
Thank you for taking the time to express your thoughts on this subject. Self-organizing systems, incidentally, are in sync with Edward de Bono's "lateral and parallel" thinking. They dovetail with my insistence that we need an internal governor and moral compass in order to be in control and make appropriate decisions.
In a 1996 book (The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend), I wrote: “We are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and our way.” Nearly a decade and a half later, I see little evidence to revise this assessment.
I am much more of a skeptic than you are, bridging on the cynical, but of course you know that. Some of my essays now in the hopper will no doubt illustrate this with some acridity.
You flatter me as being part of the "Greatest Generation.” Despite all the hype of Tom Brokaw’s book of the same title, this generation had no choice but to go to war. I was not yet a teenager at war’s end, but my uncles were in that war with one on Pearl Harbor when the Japanese bombed the islands on December 7, 1941. He survived with a broken back.
His brother operated an LST (Landing Ship Tank) carrying troops ashore in the invasions of North Africa, D-Day Invasion, and the invasion of Sicily, and of Italy at Salerno. He, too, survived but saw a lot of carnage.
I collected his letters and edited them into a book for his family of those adventures. What came through in his correspondence and diaries was a teenage kid too naive to be scared and who enlisted simply to be with his buddies, several of whom didn't survive the war.
There is a difference between then and now that I sense is gone forever.
It is an innocence and paradoxically an implicit confidence that everything will turn out all right in the end. That was then. Now, everything is an act, a dramaturgic play, and a product of subliminal stimuli on television, radio, the Internet, and in film with the constant cacophony of impulse stimulus-response to create synthetic behavior. My wonder is if anyone born after 1965 has a working center.
My reason for saying that is that I am thinking of my two cousins here, good boys who wouldn't have recognized a vice if it walked up and attempted to seduce them, strong boys, athletic and fun loving, disciplined boys, who feared their parents, the police, the government and took the Red, White and Blue for granted. They were Iowa boys used to hard work and few kudos. They were programmed to get passing grades, stay in school, get a job, marry, have kids, and stay in place. Instead, only eighteen and nineteen-year-olds, they found themselves in the navy fighting a war. They were willing to die for their country not knowing quite sure what Nazism and Communism was all about, but trusted those in charge did, people who they referred to as “solid,” an expression of the day, and worthy of the sacrifice.
The Greatest Generation was naive. All the generations that have followed have been increasingly sophisticated, political, amoral, self-serving and belligerent. A more appropriate caption for my cousins’ generation would be “The Last Generation” of regional and collective solidarity, which was committed to a sacrosanct and national American Culture. That is all gone.
We now live in a fragmented and fractured universe and all the optimism in the world is unlikely to put the pieces back together. That said if there are ten million like you in a world of six and one half billion souls even the miraculous is possible. No one can fault your great heart.
Be always well,
Jim.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT -- ANOTHER THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT – ANOTHER THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 16, 2009
* * *
AN OD PSYCHOLOGIST RESPONSE FROM CARL SANDBURG’S CITY OF THE BIG SHOULDERS, CHICAGO!
Hello Jim,
Yes, we have problems. But, they are good problems. They come as the result of free speech. The civility cat is out of the bag, never to be caught again.
There is too much gloom and doom among our senior citizens. I'm on the edge of that myself. Lately, I have been gaining optimism for the direction we're moving. I recall my youthful days raging against the machine about wrongs in civil rights, an immoral war waged to promote capitalism, a counterculture run wild with free sex and drugs and the ambiguity of personal immorality with socio-political idealism.
Sure today's youth are wrapped up in their electronic devices, but those devices do not seed polarity, they just facilitate it. Polarity was sown in the Sixties and Seventies. Everyone who took the so called "right path" now realize it didn't get them any further ahead, by their measure, than those who took the "activist path" forsaking real jobs for social change. I assume there is a tinge of bitterness in the anger displayed by those who say the world is falling apart.
When I think of the social angst that existed 40 years ago - dramatic technological advances, black-white conflict, assassinations, a President elected in a landslide then refusing to run for a second term, the Viet Nam War, a President and Vice President resigning in disgrace, college campus unrest - and we whine today because our economy is suffering from gas. The Feds apply a couple of $700 billion bicarbonates we belch and move on. This is a great time. We haven't had a reordering of this magnitude for decades.
We should engage and revel in it, rather than complaining every step of the way.
I hear complaints about the education level of today's youth. Honestly, I am not too impressed with the education level of my peers. I see thousand of seniors march on Washington, Medicare cards in hand, to complain about government involvement in health care. When confronted by an interviewer with a microphone and asked their opinion of "Obamacare" all they could utter were one-word answers. "Ridiculous." "Expensive." And my favorite, "Socialism."
I appreciate that you continually remind us of the past. The lessons and models great leaders have left us should be the touchstone for our decisions as we move ahead. Those wise people wrote much more and gave us insight to the why of their actions.
Just as my example above, sound bites misrepresent the intent and meaning that drives people to act in support or protest. Absent awareness of that deeper force, we are left to interpret things. Our interpretations, then, come from our own personal context and bias. That person's old. That person is Black, Hispanic, Eastern European or Asian. This is what they mean when they say....
We create the lack of civility in our own minds. We react and sustain the bias-fed distrust. Simon and Garfunkel had it right forty years ago.
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening....
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
Only, the words of the prophet are no longer written on subway walls and tenement halls but on Twitter.
Stay in the light,
Michael
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS
I am a generation older than you yet your values resonate with me in substantive ways. I mention this not because it is important for your values to be congruent with mine, but to show that the clash of values has been a progressive and consequential one.
You were born after the Great War and are a member of the “Baby Boom” generation, but obviously of parents that believed in fundamental civility, decency and respect for all law abiding Americans. I come from similar parents but a most discerning mother.
My mother was never comfortable with the interment camps during that Great War, which found Japanese Americans, people born in this country, raised and educated in this country but forced to give up their professions, careers, homes, their freedom and privacy to spend the duration of the war in these camps. She shuttered to think if we had been born Japanese American.
Three things were quite apparent to me as I was grown up and only a boy during this Great War:
(1) The patriotism and communal sacrifice from the richest to the poorest in support of the common good during the Great War was everywhere apparent;
(2) The new found role of women in jobs previously the exclusive domain of men in all phases of life, but in particular in industry and manufacturing proved women were not the weaker sex;
(3) The repressed hatred and vilification of the peoples of Japan, Germany and Italy that was seeded by American propaganda during the Great War took on new forms and resembled a toxic virus that once born had no apparent antidote.
* * *
I wrote about these effects IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003) from the perspective of an eight to twelve-year-old boy. Now, in my seventies, I see how they have seeded so many false steps in our Republic, and are coming home to roost now, crippling any effort to resolve our problems, which are many.
Since I’ve written widely on these subjects, I will mention them only in capsular comments now.
POINT ONE
Being victorious in World War Two against a world decimated by the war, America had an advantage seldom known by a single nation before – the sky became the limit.
All the selfless sacrifice, all the pulling together for the common good suddenly was put aside. The standard of living of most Americans shot to the sky. Executives of industry who had done so much with so little during the war now built empires of people doing little but making loads of money. There was no restrain.
The 1950s found ordinary sorts from families that had few high school graduates, such as my own, going to college, landing big jobs and having splendid careers without much competition because we were born during the Great Depression when the birthrate was one of the lowest in American history.
CEO Charles Wilson of General Motors in 1953 had the hubris to declare, “As GM goes so goes America!” No one disputed his words.
Meanwhile, Japan, Inc. was about to eat America’s lunch in the 1960s with the American quality technology of W. Edwards Deming, J. M. Juran and Peter Drucker.
American jobs and markets shrunk in the 1960s and 1970s with NBCTV calling attention to this fact in its 1980 program with the cry, “Japan Can Why Can’t We?” To this day we haven’t come up with the answer.
* * *
POINT TWO
American women didn’t get the vote until the nineteenth amendment to the US Constitution in 1920, but came into their own during the Great War. They still lag in pay and promotion in most jobs, but are the majority of college students in American colleges and universities, and dominate the schools of medicine and education, among others.
There are more women engineers, mathematicians, chemists and physicists today because women do not shy away from tough disciplines, while more and more men go the MBA route to money and greed.
The breakthrough was World War Two when women proved they could do anything men could do and probably better. The fact that this has taken so long surprises me because I’ve found women far more able than I have found men, far more courageous and principled and able to take the heat when things go awry, and I’m speaking from experience not hypothetically.
What has saddened me is to see women when they rise to CEO status of large corporations putting aside the wide intelligence of their gender and attempt to be as resolute and amoral as men. Such women join the old boys’ club only as girls, and they invariably fail.
* * *
POINT THREE
When I was a boy, I could not understand the signs on the sides of bakery trucks, “The Only Good Jap Is A Dead Jap.”
I’d ask my mother. She would say, her cigarette smoke rising to the ceiling, “I hope you never have to go to war, Jimmy, because war is about killing the enemy, and the only way a man can kill another man who has done him no harm is to dehumanize him.”
My face would screw up in incomprehension. She would see this and add, “We have to make a person a thing because the fear is no one in his right mind could kill a person who has done him no harm.”
The “Red Scare” and the House Un-American Activities Committee followed the war. Senator Joseph McCarthy led the hysteria seeing Communist in the State Department (Alger Hess) and everywhere, even in the US Army, and of course Hollywood with actors, writers and directors. It was a terrible time. I was in college and found there were books I wasn’t supposed to read because they were written by communist sympathizers. I read them anyway.
I’ve never been a joiner or a great one for college bull sessions, but when I couldn’t avoid one I found it remarkable how vehement and hateful some students could become. They found nothing peculiar with the McCarthyism, “Better dead than Red.” I found it scary.
These many years later I sense that fear is a many-sided trigger that a person with the most bizarre credentials can use and be believed as a sage instead of as a fool. I am thinking of the talk show host Rush Limbaugh who now seems to dominate a political ideology.
Brian Williams of NBCTV recently interviewed Former President Jimmy Carter. Carter stated that the current attacks on President Barak Obama are racist in nature, and that this racism is much wider and deeper than the president. The former president sees it as the surfacing of suppressed animosity for African Americans in general and the president in particular. White Americans, he claims, cannot see a black man as qualified for the highest office in the land. I pray he is wrong about most Americans, as President Barak Obama, if given a chance, may prove to be a great president.
That said the banter of one protester in Washington, D.C. proved especially offensive. It read, “Monkey see, monkey spend,” a clear reference to the president and his fiscal policies.
How could anyone conceive much less hold up such a sign is beyond me? It was hurtful to see that sign and it saddened me deeply. I was ashamed as an American for the rest of the world to see such a sign.
I am coming to understand now in my advanced years, much as I would prefer otherwise, how a Joseph Stalin or an Adolf Hitler could ever come to power. I must reread Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), a novel about how totalitarianism took hold in the United States, a book I read as a boy.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 16, 2009
* * *
AN OD PSYCHOLOGIST RESPONSE FROM CARL SANDBURG’S CITY OF THE BIG SHOULDERS, CHICAGO!
Hello Jim,
Yes, we have problems. But, they are good problems. They come as the result of free speech. The civility cat is out of the bag, never to be caught again.
There is too much gloom and doom among our senior citizens. I'm on the edge of that myself. Lately, I have been gaining optimism for the direction we're moving. I recall my youthful days raging against the machine about wrongs in civil rights, an immoral war waged to promote capitalism, a counterculture run wild with free sex and drugs and the ambiguity of personal immorality with socio-political idealism.
Sure today's youth are wrapped up in their electronic devices, but those devices do not seed polarity, they just facilitate it. Polarity was sown in the Sixties and Seventies. Everyone who took the so called "right path" now realize it didn't get them any further ahead, by their measure, than those who took the "activist path" forsaking real jobs for social change. I assume there is a tinge of bitterness in the anger displayed by those who say the world is falling apart.
When I think of the social angst that existed 40 years ago - dramatic technological advances, black-white conflict, assassinations, a President elected in a landslide then refusing to run for a second term, the Viet Nam War, a President and Vice President resigning in disgrace, college campus unrest - and we whine today because our economy is suffering from gas. The Feds apply a couple of $700 billion bicarbonates we belch and move on. This is a great time. We haven't had a reordering of this magnitude for decades.
We should engage and revel in it, rather than complaining every step of the way.
I hear complaints about the education level of today's youth. Honestly, I am not too impressed with the education level of my peers. I see thousand of seniors march on Washington, Medicare cards in hand, to complain about government involvement in health care. When confronted by an interviewer with a microphone and asked their opinion of "Obamacare" all they could utter were one-word answers. "Ridiculous." "Expensive." And my favorite, "Socialism."
I appreciate that you continually remind us of the past. The lessons and models great leaders have left us should be the touchstone for our decisions as we move ahead. Those wise people wrote much more and gave us insight to the why of their actions.
Just as my example above, sound bites misrepresent the intent and meaning that drives people to act in support or protest. Absent awareness of that deeper force, we are left to interpret things. Our interpretations, then, come from our own personal context and bias. That person's old. That person is Black, Hispanic, Eastern European or Asian. This is what they mean when they say....
We create the lack of civility in our own minds. We react and sustain the bias-fed distrust. Simon and Garfunkel had it right forty years ago.
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening....
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
Only, the words of the prophet are no longer written on subway walls and tenement halls but on Twitter.
Stay in the light,
Michael
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS
I am a generation older than you yet your values resonate with me in substantive ways. I mention this not because it is important for your values to be congruent with mine, but to show that the clash of values has been a progressive and consequential one.
You were born after the Great War and are a member of the “Baby Boom” generation, but obviously of parents that believed in fundamental civility, decency and respect for all law abiding Americans. I come from similar parents but a most discerning mother.
My mother was never comfortable with the interment camps during that Great War, which found Japanese Americans, people born in this country, raised and educated in this country but forced to give up their professions, careers, homes, their freedom and privacy to spend the duration of the war in these camps. She shuttered to think if we had been born Japanese American.
Three things were quite apparent to me as I was grown up and only a boy during this Great War:
(1) The patriotism and communal sacrifice from the richest to the poorest in support of the common good during the Great War was everywhere apparent;
(2) The new found role of women in jobs previously the exclusive domain of men in all phases of life, but in particular in industry and manufacturing proved women were not the weaker sex;
(3) The repressed hatred and vilification of the peoples of Japan, Germany and Italy that was seeded by American propaganda during the Great War took on new forms and resembled a toxic virus that once born had no apparent antidote.
* * *
I wrote about these effects IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003) from the perspective of an eight to twelve-year-old boy. Now, in my seventies, I see how they have seeded so many false steps in our Republic, and are coming home to roost now, crippling any effort to resolve our problems, which are many.
Since I’ve written widely on these subjects, I will mention them only in capsular comments now.
POINT ONE
Being victorious in World War Two against a world decimated by the war, America had an advantage seldom known by a single nation before – the sky became the limit.
All the selfless sacrifice, all the pulling together for the common good suddenly was put aside. The standard of living of most Americans shot to the sky. Executives of industry who had done so much with so little during the war now built empires of people doing little but making loads of money. There was no restrain.
The 1950s found ordinary sorts from families that had few high school graduates, such as my own, going to college, landing big jobs and having splendid careers without much competition because we were born during the Great Depression when the birthrate was one of the lowest in American history.
CEO Charles Wilson of General Motors in 1953 had the hubris to declare, “As GM goes so goes America!” No one disputed his words.
Meanwhile, Japan, Inc. was about to eat America’s lunch in the 1960s with the American quality technology of W. Edwards Deming, J. M. Juran and Peter Drucker.
American jobs and markets shrunk in the 1960s and 1970s with NBCTV calling attention to this fact in its 1980 program with the cry, “Japan Can Why Can’t We?” To this day we haven’t come up with the answer.
* * *
POINT TWO
American women didn’t get the vote until the nineteenth amendment to the US Constitution in 1920, but came into their own during the Great War. They still lag in pay and promotion in most jobs, but are the majority of college students in American colleges and universities, and dominate the schools of medicine and education, among others.
There are more women engineers, mathematicians, chemists and physicists today because women do not shy away from tough disciplines, while more and more men go the MBA route to money and greed.
The breakthrough was World War Two when women proved they could do anything men could do and probably better. The fact that this has taken so long surprises me because I’ve found women far more able than I have found men, far more courageous and principled and able to take the heat when things go awry, and I’m speaking from experience not hypothetically.
What has saddened me is to see women when they rise to CEO status of large corporations putting aside the wide intelligence of their gender and attempt to be as resolute and amoral as men. Such women join the old boys’ club only as girls, and they invariably fail.
* * *
POINT THREE
When I was a boy, I could not understand the signs on the sides of bakery trucks, “The Only Good Jap Is A Dead Jap.”
I’d ask my mother. She would say, her cigarette smoke rising to the ceiling, “I hope you never have to go to war, Jimmy, because war is about killing the enemy, and the only way a man can kill another man who has done him no harm is to dehumanize him.”
My face would screw up in incomprehension. She would see this and add, “We have to make a person a thing because the fear is no one in his right mind could kill a person who has done him no harm.”
The “Red Scare” and the House Un-American Activities Committee followed the war. Senator Joseph McCarthy led the hysteria seeing Communist in the State Department (Alger Hess) and everywhere, even in the US Army, and of course Hollywood with actors, writers and directors. It was a terrible time. I was in college and found there were books I wasn’t supposed to read because they were written by communist sympathizers. I read them anyway.
I’ve never been a joiner or a great one for college bull sessions, but when I couldn’t avoid one I found it remarkable how vehement and hateful some students could become. They found nothing peculiar with the McCarthyism, “Better dead than Red.” I found it scary.
These many years later I sense that fear is a many-sided trigger that a person with the most bizarre credentials can use and be believed as a sage instead of as a fool. I am thinking of the talk show host Rush Limbaugh who now seems to dominate a political ideology.
Brian Williams of NBCTV recently interviewed Former President Jimmy Carter. Carter stated that the current attacks on President Barak Obama are racist in nature, and that this racism is much wider and deeper than the president. The former president sees it as the surfacing of suppressed animosity for African Americans in general and the president in particular. White Americans, he claims, cannot see a black man as qualified for the highest office in the land. I pray he is wrong about most Americans, as President Barak Obama, if given a chance, may prove to be a great president.
That said the banter of one protester in Washington, D.C. proved especially offensive. It read, “Monkey see, monkey spend,” a clear reference to the president and his fiscal policies.
How could anyone conceive much less hold up such a sign is beyond me? It was hurtful to see that sign and it saddened me deeply. I was ashamed as an American for the rest of the world to see such a sign.
I am coming to understand now in my advanced years, much as I would prefer otherwise, how a Joseph Stalin or an Adolf Hitler could ever come to power. I must reread Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” (1935), a novel about how totalitarianism took hold in the United States, a book I read as a boy.
* * *
Monday, September 14, 2009
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT -- THOUGHTFUL RESPONSES
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT – THOUGHTFUL RESPONSES
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 15, 2009
Reference:
What follows is a sampling of responses to this missive. One reader wonders at the origin of the quote of John Adams that ends this missive with these words: “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
It was taken from a letter to John Taylor with the postmark of April 15, 1814.
Imagine the times.
The War of 1812 with the British was still underway. It would not be settled until the Treaty of Ghent, which would occur eight months later on December 24, 1814.
The British had burned Washington, D.C. to the ground and the war settled none of the issues that caused what was called “the Second American Revolution.”
General Andrew Jackson did that in 1815 in the Battle of New Orleans. So decisive was his victory that he removed any European threat, be it from the British, French or Spanish ever again from American shores.
* * *
THOUGHTFUL RESPONSES
THE OWNER OF A SMALL COMPANY
You are correct. It is something to think about. I hope those in power are, but it is something we all need to think more about.
I do not know what was the basis for the statement you attribute to John Adams but it certainly has validity as we view things such as your examples of reference to Christmas and Easter and those examples are only a tip of the iceberg so to speak.
If John Adams had cognizance of the suicidal tendencies of democracy over 200 years ago, would he be surprised we are still surviving today? Would he think the end is imminent? Or would he rethink the strength and tenure of democracy?
I am not looking for answers, only sharing thoughts. You simply struck a note and I wanted to respond.
* * *
A NEWSPAPER JOURNALIST
At one time I wrote President Bush some of my thoughts.
I explained to him that I had read of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and the British Empire. I told him I also read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Knowing that not many leading nations lasted much more than 200 years I told him I lived through much of the growth of the United States and felt that now I was living in the fall of, or the decline of, the United States.
I guess no one there was interested in what I had to say for I did not receive one answer from my letter. I'm thinking perhaps I'm glad I'll be an octogenarian next year. Is America breaking up? If it isn't it is a long way from where it should be.
Take care,
My best to you and your lovely bride,
* * *
A COLLEGE PROFESSOR
You have very powerful words and thoughts behind them. I may well read this
to my class tomorrow. Just for your information here is a syllabus attached of that
seniors only class that you may find interesting.
* * *
A PROFESSIONAL WOMAN
I am not as courageous as you to write and let everyone read my opinion so I'm sorry for that. However, I wanted you to know how much I appreciated reading what you wrote. I agree with you 100% that no matter whether we voted for President Obama or not, we need to respect him and help him, not fight against what he's trying to do.
It never ceases to amaze me how people who profess themselves to be Christians can say some of the worst things against someone. Whether or not you agree with them, you can at least be civilized.
I also don't have the intelligence you have, Dr. Fisher, but I agree with you on a lot of issues. I met you at the Women's Club when you were in Clinton and sat at the dining room table with you.
God bless,
* * *
A RETIRED FLORIDIAN
A fine missive--but did I read incorrectly? Isn't Wilson a Republican and his opponent a Democrat? Keep the thoughts coming!! Thanks and regards.
The reader is correct. Dr. Fisher replies:
He is but a Republican in South Carolina and a Democrat in South Carolina are part of a one party democracy, and this was what I was trying to illustrate with both of them raising $1 million in a single week. It is a very conservative state with Democrats as conservative as Republicans. The mid-term elections here in 2010 will be a litmus test of the Obama’s presidency.
* * *
A DAUGHTER
Dad,
I agree with what you just shared. I would hope that people do read some of what you write. It is always something I have to reflect on. Reading this makes me think about how I look at everything.
Thanks,
Laurie
Note: It was nice to also hear from one of my children, especially since she doesn’t always agree with me, which is okay, too.
FINAL THOUGHTS
John Adams was perhaps our most heady Founding Father and second president. You get this sense if you read his writings. His son, John Quincy Adams, our sixth president was equally perceptive and acerbic, and I’ve quoted him generously as well in my writings.
What I find remarkable is how similar in style and eloquence President Abraham Lincoln and President Barak Obama are, and how equally they are vilified and hated in their times. The key is balancing intellect with pragmatics.
Lincoln was a great compromiser, something that is often forgotten, and would have done anything to preserve the Union. He hated slavery but vacillated on abolishing it, and considered some form of slavery to continue if it meant saving the Union.
The Great Emancipator was a man and a politician, and grew out of the soil of an emerging nation from an agrarian to an industrial society.
Obama is a man and a politician that has grown out of the soil of a collapsing world in on itself to form something akin to a single Union of a multitude of disparate parts.
Lincoln’s times required a leader of massive intellect. Obama’s times require a leader of similar gifts.
We have the luxury of Lincoln’s history, but not Obama’s.
Do the times make the leader or does the leader make the times? Books are appearing this year on the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth (February 12, 1809), and some of them are knocking him off his pedestal. Obama has not yet managed to climb on a pedestal to be either admired or knocked off. Lincoln belongs to the ages while Obama is in the midst of his.
President Obama has missed none of the implied Lincoln connection.
He was inaugurated as the first African American president just three weeks before the two hundredth birthday of the president who issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Both men possessed limited experience in federal office before they were elected – Lincoln with a single term in the House and Obama with four years in the Senate. Both entered the White House as the nation faced grave crises.
Obama announced his presidential candidacy in 2007 in the old state capitol at Springfield, Illinois where Lincoln delivered his famous “House Divided” address in 1858.
In his campaign, Obama frequently quoted Lincoln and cited his inspiration. Obama announced in his inaugural address that this would be a new birth of freedom, which Lincoln had done at Gettysburg.
Obama took the oath of office on the same Bible Lincoln had used in his first inauguration.
It could be said, two hundred years later, that the election of an African American as President of the United States completed part of the “unfinished work” that Lincoln referred to at Gettysburg.
More than 16,000 books have been written on Lincoln. We Americans are fascinated by someone among us that is stronger, brighter, braver, more focused, forgiving, but ever resolute and vigilant and ready to take charge as commander in chief of our military, as Lincoln did, when our military wavered and became tentative in the Civil War.
The Civil War that Lincoln faced has now become a global Civil War with society and civilization in the balance.
Two hundred years from now, who knows, thousands of books may be on Kindles of Obama’s Administration.
Need I remind you it is our history, too?
* * *.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 15, 2009
Reference:
What follows is a sampling of responses to this missive. One reader wonders at the origin of the quote of John Adams that ends this missive with these words: “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
It was taken from a letter to John Taylor with the postmark of April 15, 1814.
Imagine the times.
The War of 1812 with the British was still underway. It would not be settled until the Treaty of Ghent, which would occur eight months later on December 24, 1814.
The British had burned Washington, D.C. to the ground and the war settled none of the issues that caused what was called “the Second American Revolution.”
General Andrew Jackson did that in 1815 in the Battle of New Orleans. So decisive was his victory that he removed any European threat, be it from the British, French or Spanish ever again from American shores.
* * *
THOUGHTFUL RESPONSES
THE OWNER OF A SMALL COMPANY
You are correct. It is something to think about. I hope those in power are, but it is something we all need to think more about.
I do not know what was the basis for the statement you attribute to John Adams but it certainly has validity as we view things such as your examples of reference to Christmas and Easter and those examples are only a tip of the iceberg so to speak.
If John Adams had cognizance of the suicidal tendencies of democracy over 200 years ago, would he be surprised we are still surviving today? Would he think the end is imminent? Or would he rethink the strength and tenure of democracy?
I am not looking for answers, only sharing thoughts. You simply struck a note and I wanted to respond.
* * *
A NEWSPAPER JOURNALIST
At one time I wrote President Bush some of my thoughts.
I explained to him that I had read of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and the British Empire. I told him I also read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Knowing that not many leading nations lasted much more than 200 years I told him I lived through much of the growth of the United States and felt that now I was living in the fall of, or the decline of, the United States.
I guess no one there was interested in what I had to say for I did not receive one answer from my letter. I'm thinking perhaps I'm glad I'll be an octogenarian next year. Is America breaking up? If it isn't it is a long way from where it should be.
Take care,
My best to you and your lovely bride,
* * *
A COLLEGE PROFESSOR
You have very powerful words and thoughts behind them. I may well read this
to my class tomorrow. Just for your information here is a syllabus attached of that
seniors only class that you may find interesting.
* * *
A PROFESSIONAL WOMAN
I am not as courageous as you to write and let everyone read my opinion so I'm sorry for that. However, I wanted you to know how much I appreciated reading what you wrote. I agree with you 100% that no matter whether we voted for President Obama or not, we need to respect him and help him, not fight against what he's trying to do.
It never ceases to amaze me how people who profess themselves to be Christians can say some of the worst things against someone. Whether or not you agree with them, you can at least be civilized.
I also don't have the intelligence you have, Dr. Fisher, but I agree with you on a lot of issues. I met you at the Women's Club when you were in Clinton and sat at the dining room table with you.
God bless,
* * *
A RETIRED FLORIDIAN
A fine missive--but did I read incorrectly? Isn't Wilson a Republican and his opponent a Democrat? Keep the thoughts coming!! Thanks and regards.
The reader is correct. Dr. Fisher replies:
He is but a Republican in South Carolina and a Democrat in South Carolina are part of a one party democracy, and this was what I was trying to illustrate with both of them raising $1 million in a single week. It is a very conservative state with Democrats as conservative as Republicans. The mid-term elections here in 2010 will be a litmus test of the Obama’s presidency.
* * *
A DAUGHTER
Dad,
I agree with what you just shared. I would hope that people do read some of what you write. It is always something I have to reflect on. Reading this makes me think about how I look at everything.
Thanks,
Laurie
Note: It was nice to also hear from one of my children, especially since she doesn’t always agree with me, which is okay, too.
FINAL THOUGHTS
John Adams was perhaps our most heady Founding Father and second president. You get this sense if you read his writings. His son, John Quincy Adams, our sixth president was equally perceptive and acerbic, and I’ve quoted him generously as well in my writings.
What I find remarkable is how similar in style and eloquence President Abraham Lincoln and President Barak Obama are, and how equally they are vilified and hated in their times. The key is balancing intellect with pragmatics.
Lincoln was a great compromiser, something that is often forgotten, and would have done anything to preserve the Union. He hated slavery but vacillated on abolishing it, and considered some form of slavery to continue if it meant saving the Union.
The Great Emancipator was a man and a politician, and grew out of the soil of an emerging nation from an agrarian to an industrial society.
Obama is a man and a politician that has grown out of the soil of a collapsing world in on itself to form something akin to a single Union of a multitude of disparate parts.
Lincoln’s times required a leader of massive intellect. Obama’s times require a leader of similar gifts.
We have the luxury of Lincoln’s history, but not Obama’s.
Do the times make the leader or does the leader make the times? Books are appearing this year on the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth (February 12, 1809), and some of them are knocking him off his pedestal. Obama has not yet managed to climb on a pedestal to be either admired or knocked off. Lincoln belongs to the ages while Obama is in the midst of his.
President Obama has missed none of the implied Lincoln connection.
He was inaugurated as the first African American president just three weeks before the two hundredth birthday of the president who issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Both men possessed limited experience in federal office before they were elected – Lincoln with a single term in the House and Obama with four years in the Senate. Both entered the White House as the nation faced grave crises.
Obama announced his presidential candidacy in 2007 in the old state capitol at Springfield, Illinois where Lincoln delivered his famous “House Divided” address in 1858.
In his campaign, Obama frequently quoted Lincoln and cited his inspiration. Obama announced in his inaugural address that this would be a new birth of freedom, which Lincoln had done at Gettysburg.
Obama took the oath of office on the same Bible Lincoln had used in his first inauguration.
It could be said, two hundred years later, that the election of an African American as President of the United States completed part of the “unfinished work” that Lincoln referred to at Gettysburg.
More than 16,000 books have been written on Lincoln. We Americans are fascinated by someone among us that is stronger, brighter, braver, more focused, forgiving, but ever resolute and vigilant and ready to take charge as commander in chief of our military, as Lincoln did, when our military wavered and became tentative in the Civil War.
The Civil War that Lincoln faced has now become a global Civil War with society and civilization in the balance.
Two hundred years from now, who knows, thousands of books may be on Kindles of Obama’s Administration.
Need I remind you it is our history, too?
* * *.
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT!
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 14, 2009
* * *
In the pages of my missives, I have often openly wondered if America was coming apart at the seams. As a boy growing up, now looking back as an old man, I have wondered if it was a dream it seems so idyllic.
Not everyone loved everyone else, but I rarely ran into anyone that was not civil. I am a person with strong views and yet people have allowed me to have them without being hateful towards me for the inclination.
A person of my youth has written that she becomes physically ill when she reads newspapers, magazines and the Internet for all the hate and vituperations. Although not saying so, she implies the same sense I have of the past, a past when we lived and let live while recognizing we were all part of the same whole.
By the accident of our birth many of us were young when America was jolted out of its complacency and isolationism with World War Two.
We saw how we forgot our personal pet peeves and pulled together, how we became truly one nation out of many. In my view, we have been unraveling for the past sixty-five years. That said there is hope.
Nearly 150 years ago, America was coming apart as President Abraham Lincoln entered the White House. Go to the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois and you will see the walls covered with the hate and vituperations, which have bled black ink across the pages of American newspapers of his day.
We managed that storm because of Lincoln's eloquence, tenacity and resolve that we were and would remain one nation that would not perish from the earth.
Yet the more things change the more they remain the same.
Nearly 180 years ago, Senator John Calhoun of South Carolina authored the Nullification Act in defiance of the presidency of Andrew Jackson and the federal government's right to make laws binding to all states. It was a question of States' Rights and slavery, then. The Nullification Act never became law and the Civil War did away with slavery, but not the mindset.
Last week, we had U. S. Representative Joe Wilson from the same state of South Carolina shouting out in President Barak Obama's address on healthcare to a joint session of Congress that the president lies.
Apologies have been made and accepted but the damage has been done.
How do I know? Republican Wilson and his Democrat opponent for the 2010 South Carolina Congressional seat both have accumulated campaign purses of more than a $ million a piece in less than a week. Polarity could not be more apparent.
We have elected an African American as President of the United States. If he fails, we fail. If his presidency is a disaster, it weakens the United States of America to survive in a hostile world.
When we disagree with the president on policy, and do so civilly, we are demonstrated our constitutional right as citizens of this country. When we treat the president with disrespect or disdain, we are disrespecting and showing contempt for ourselves. That is where I draw the line. I have not always voted for the man who has become my president, but I have always respected the man who has held that office.
We are a nation divided. Conservative columnist Patrick Buchanan ponders this in today's The Tampa Tribune (September 14, 2009):
"In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?
"Christmas and Easter, the great holidays of Christendom, once united Americans in joy. Now we fight over whether they should even be mentioned, let alone celebrated, in our public schools.
"E pluribus unum -- out of many, one -- was, the national motto the men of '76 settled upon. One sees the pluribus. But where is the unum? One sees the diversity. But where is the unity?
"Is America, too, breaking up?"
* * *
It is something to think about.
We have been here before. We took our heads out of the sand in World War Two and pulled together. Today, it is more challenging. Our heads are not in the sand, but engrossed in some electronic device in our hand or plugged into our ear.
There is no narcotic that can approach the mass catatonia with which these electronic devices have successfully drugged our society and world. We call this progress but how can it be progress when it seeds such blantant polarity?
How do I know this is the case? Most people won't have the inclination or time to read much less consider Buchanan's concern. First of all, young people, especially, don’t read newspapers today, but are smittened with all the suspect legends on the Internet, and secondly, they don't see such concerns as their problem.
Totalitarianism is a cancer waiting in the wings to debilitate and exploit this advantage. "Remember," said John Adams, "democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 14, 2009
* * *
In the pages of my missives, I have often openly wondered if America was coming apart at the seams. As a boy growing up, now looking back as an old man, I have wondered if it was a dream it seems so idyllic.
Not everyone loved everyone else, but I rarely ran into anyone that was not civil. I am a person with strong views and yet people have allowed me to have them without being hateful towards me for the inclination.
A person of my youth has written that she becomes physically ill when she reads newspapers, magazines and the Internet for all the hate and vituperations. Although not saying so, she implies the same sense I have of the past, a past when we lived and let live while recognizing we were all part of the same whole.
By the accident of our birth many of us were young when America was jolted out of its complacency and isolationism with World War Two.
We saw how we forgot our personal pet peeves and pulled together, how we became truly one nation out of many. In my view, we have been unraveling for the past sixty-five years. That said there is hope.
Nearly 150 years ago, America was coming apart as President Abraham Lincoln entered the White House. Go to the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois and you will see the walls covered with the hate and vituperations, which have bled black ink across the pages of American newspapers of his day.
We managed that storm because of Lincoln's eloquence, tenacity and resolve that we were and would remain one nation that would not perish from the earth.
Yet the more things change the more they remain the same.
Nearly 180 years ago, Senator John Calhoun of South Carolina authored the Nullification Act in defiance of the presidency of Andrew Jackson and the federal government's right to make laws binding to all states. It was a question of States' Rights and slavery, then. The Nullification Act never became law and the Civil War did away with slavery, but not the mindset.
Last week, we had U. S. Representative Joe Wilson from the same state of South Carolina shouting out in President Barak Obama's address on healthcare to a joint session of Congress that the president lies.
Apologies have been made and accepted but the damage has been done.
How do I know? Republican Wilson and his Democrat opponent for the 2010 South Carolina Congressional seat both have accumulated campaign purses of more than a $ million a piece in less than a week. Polarity could not be more apparent.
We have elected an African American as President of the United States. If he fails, we fail. If his presidency is a disaster, it weakens the United States of America to survive in a hostile world.
When we disagree with the president on policy, and do so civilly, we are demonstrated our constitutional right as citizens of this country. When we treat the president with disrespect or disdain, we are disrespecting and showing contempt for ourselves. That is where I draw the line. I have not always voted for the man who has become my president, but I have always respected the man who has held that office.
We are a nation divided. Conservative columnist Patrick Buchanan ponders this in today's The Tampa Tribune (September 14, 2009):
"In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?
"Christmas and Easter, the great holidays of Christendom, once united Americans in joy. Now we fight over whether they should even be mentioned, let alone celebrated, in our public schools.
"E pluribus unum -- out of many, one -- was, the national motto the men of '76 settled upon. One sees the pluribus. But where is the unum? One sees the diversity. But where is the unity?
"Is America, too, breaking up?"
* * *
It is something to think about.
We have been here before. We took our heads out of the sand in World War Two and pulled together. Today, it is more challenging. Our heads are not in the sand, but engrossed in some electronic device in our hand or plugged into our ear.
There is no narcotic that can approach the mass catatonia with which these electronic devices have successfully drugged our society and world. We call this progress but how can it be progress when it seeds such blantant polarity?
How do I know this is the case? Most people won't have the inclination or time to read much less consider Buchanan's concern. First of all, young people, especially, don’t read newspapers today, but are smittened with all the suspect legends on the Internet, and secondly, they don't see such concerns as their problem.
Totalitarianism is a cancer waiting in the wings to debilitate and exploit this advantage. "Remember," said John Adams, "democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
Be always well,
Jim
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
PRESIDENT BARAK OBAMA'S SPEECH ON BACK-TO-SCHOOL TODAY!
PRESIDENT BARAK OBAMA’S SPEECH ON BACK-TO-SCHOOL TODAY!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 8, 2009
* * *
It is the American way to speak its mind when for whatever reason it feels obliged to do so without clearly understanding why. This has been the case that has preceded the president’s address to schoolchildren today, the day after Labor Day when most all school children across the nation from kindergarten through twelfth grade are back in school.
You have read in your newspapers or the Internet, or heard on the radio or television such veiled charges that the president was out to brainwash the nation with his socialistic doctrine, that he had a hidden agenda to move independent voters into the Democratic camp, or even the blasphemy that the speech would give comfort to our enemies.
The Tampa Tribune this morning, September 8, 2009 published the speech, which will be telecast at noon today into many classrooms across the nation.
Here in Florida many schools and counties have made it clear that the speech will not be heard on their campuses. Fine. That is the American way.
I say this with regret because I’ve read the speech. It not only resonates with me but it also echoes the life I’ve enjoyed because of the tenets of the speech personified my life experience.
I am in my seventies now, and have had a very good life, a life I would not have had were it not for staying in school, studying hard, and taking responsibility as a student as the president advises in this speech.
My da with a seventh grade education struggled all his life, but my mother who graduated from high school saw to it that that would not happen to me. Chances are if I had been born in Europe I would have ended my formal education at fifteen and sent off to some trade school. That would have been unfortunate because I am not good with my hands, but far better with words and ideas, something I discovered by enjoying twelve years of compulsory education and nine years of college.
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE PRESIDENT’S SPEECH
The president tells about his own struggles as a student, and then addresses responsibility in terms of teachers, parents, and the government, but especially the student him or herself.
In the end, he says, “the responsibility each of you has for your education” is “with the responsibility you have to yourself.”
Education is an opportunity to discover what each student is good at, as every student has special talents that education reveals. “Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper … Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor … maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class … no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it.”
We don’t live in a vacuum. We live in a country. We are part of something bigger than ourselves. I’ve written many times that everyone is a leader or no one is. That said I don’t think it is necessarily political when the president says: “And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country.”
Nor do I think this is anything less than self-evident: “We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems, if you don’t do that – if you quite on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.”
He uses himself as an example of “second chances” claiming he wasn’t always focused. “I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.”
But President Obama didn’t. He got educated.
Next he addresses a problem that I can relate to, and that is influences or the lack of same at home. My da was pushed to the bottom and expected his children to stay pat, be safe hires, never cause any commotion, get in and out of school as quickly as possible and help support the family. My mother was of a different mind. On balance, my advantages were a product of her will. She meant for me to stay in school no matter what.
“Some of you might not have those advantages,” says the president. “Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.”
At the end of the day, given the immense freedom we all have as Americans, there are no excuses “for neglecting our homework, or having a bad attitude,” or taking our wrath out on our teachers.
“Where you are right now,” the president reminds us, “doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.”
Often I’ve written about the damage our celebrity culture exacts on the psyches of young people. The president addresses this observable fact: “I know that sometimes you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work – that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things. The truth is being successful is hard work … and you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.”
To illustrate his point, he uses an NBA basketball great: “Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
The president follows this with a powerful truism: “You can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you.”
Anyone who has ever been successful knows this only too well. People have come up to me after a speech, and have said, “I want to travel the world like you have, I want to write books like you have, I want to be a psychologist like you are, I want to give speeches and so on.” They see the product but are not interested in the process, which had involved a lot of hard work and many failures in the preparation for the moment.
“No one’s born being good at things,” the president reflects, “you become good at things through hard work.” There is no other way.
The president winds down his speech addressing common experiences of all good students: “Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do every day. Asking help isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something.”
Then he talks about finding a mentor: “Find an adult you trust” to help you. “Don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country…Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war, who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.”
The president ends his message saying he is doing everything he can to create the climate, develop access to and sustain the culture that promotes education as a vehicle for building the will and success of the nation.
Sixteen years ago, I published a memoir as a novel that tracked many of the points made here showing how a quite ordinary person can experience what the president outlines. No one could be less of a political ideologue than I am, so I can say with great enthusiasm, “I approve this message!”
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 8, 2009
* * *
It is the American way to speak its mind when for whatever reason it feels obliged to do so without clearly understanding why. This has been the case that has preceded the president’s address to schoolchildren today, the day after Labor Day when most all school children across the nation from kindergarten through twelfth grade are back in school.
You have read in your newspapers or the Internet, or heard on the radio or television such veiled charges that the president was out to brainwash the nation with his socialistic doctrine, that he had a hidden agenda to move independent voters into the Democratic camp, or even the blasphemy that the speech would give comfort to our enemies.
The Tampa Tribune this morning, September 8, 2009 published the speech, which will be telecast at noon today into many classrooms across the nation.
Here in Florida many schools and counties have made it clear that the speech will not be heard on their campuses. Fine. That is the American way.
I say this with regret because I’ve read the speech. It not only resonates with me but it also echoes the life I’ve enjoyed because of the tenets of the speech personified my life experience.
I am in my seventies now, and have had a very good life, a life I would not have had were it not for staying in school, studying hard, and taking responsibility as a student as the president advises in this speech.
My da with a seventh grade education struggled all his life, but my mother who graduated from high school saw to it that that would not happen to me. Chances are if I had been born in Europe I would have ended my formal education at fifteen and sent off to some trade school. That would have been unfortunate because I am not good with my hands, but far better with words and ideas, something I discovered by enjoying twelve years of compulsory education and nine years of college.
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE PRESIDENT’S SPEECH
The president tells about his own struggles as a student, and then addresses responsibility in terms of teachers, parents, and the government, but especially the student him or herself.
In the end, he says, “the responsibility each of you has for your education” is “with the responsibility you have to yourself.”
Education is an opportunity to discover what each student is good at, as every student has special talents that education reveals. “Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper … Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor … maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class … no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it.”
We don’t live in a vacuum. We live in a country. We are part of something bigger than ourselves. I’ve written many times that everyone is a leader or no one is. That said I don’t think it is necessarily political when the president says: “And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country.”
Nor do I think this is anything less than self-evident: “We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems, if you don’t do that – if you quite on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.”
He uses himself as an example of “second chances” claiming he wasn’t always focused. “I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.”
But President Obama didn’t. He got educated.
Next he addresses a problem that I can relate to, and that is influences or the lack of same at home. My da was pushed to the bottom and expected his children to stay pat, be safe hires, never cause any commotion, get in and out of school as quickly as possible and help support the family. My mother was of a different mind. On balance, my advantages were a product of her will. She meant for me to stay in school no matter what.
“Some of you might not have those advantages,” says the president. “Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.”
At the end of the day, given the immense freedom we all have as Americans, there are no excuses “for neglecting our homework, or having a bad attitude,” or taking our wrath out on our teachers.
“Where you are right now,” the president reminds us, “doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.”
Often I’ve written about the damage our celebrity culture exacts on the psyches of young people. The president addresses this observable fact: “I know that sometimes you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work – that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things. The truth is being successful is hard work … and you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.”
To illustrate his point, he uses an NBA basketball great: “Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
The president follows this with a powerful truism: “You can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you.”
Anyone who has ever been successful knows this only too well. People have come up to me after a speech, and have said, “I want to travel the world like you have, I want to write books like you have, I want to be a psychologist like you are, I want to give speeches and so on.” They see the product but are not interested in the process, which had involved a lot of hard work and many failures in the preparation for the moment.
“No one’s born being good at things,” the president reflects, “you become good at things through hard work.” There is no other way.
The president winds down his speech addressing common experiences of all good students: “Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do every day. Asking help isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something.”
Then he talks about finding a mentor: “Find an adult you trust” to help you. “Don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country…Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war, who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.”
The president ends his message saying he is doing everything he can to create the climate, develop access to and sustain the culture that promotes education as a vehicle for building the will and success of the nation.
Sixteen years ago, I published a memoir as a novel that tracked many of the points made here showing how a quite ordinary person can experience what the president outlines. No one could be less of a political ideologue than I am, so I can say with great enthusiasm, “I approve this message!”
* * *
Monday, September 07, 2009
HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU ARE SELF-ACCEPTING?
HOW DO I KNOW IF I AM SELF-ACCEPTING?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 7, 2009
* * *
Some of you found the missive "Is it More Important to be Loved or Respected" intriguing, when I claimed it is academic if you are not self-accepting. That is because your whole approach to life emanates from self-acceptance, or the lack thereof. A common question of those responding was: how can I tell if I'm self-accepting. This is my gauge:
* * *
(1) You don't have any trouble saying "no" when it is in your best interest to do so.
(2) You don't own other people's problems.
(3) You don't carry other people's burdens. You allow them to work out the consequences of their own actions or miseries without feeling guilty for doing so.
(4) You don't allow a family member, a friend, a boss or a company to compromise your values and talk you into something that benefits them and puts yourself in jeopardy.
(5) You don't buy into something that is too good to be true.
(6) You don't allow yourself to be duped by a priest, teacher, or other authority figure telling you something that is not consistent with what your past experience reveals and your gut tells you.
(7) You stay away from toxic people be they family members, work associates or anyone that demeans you in a way that you question your self-regard or that compromises your values.
(8) You're not for sale, ever!
JRF
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 7, 2009
* * *
Some of you found the missive "Is it More Important to be Loved or Respected" intriguing, when I claimed it is academic if you are not self-accepting. That is because your whole approach to life emanates from self-acceptance, or the lack thereof. A common question of those responding was: how can I tell if I'm self-accepting. This is my gauge:
* * *
(1) You don't have any trouble saying "no" when it is in your best interest to do so.
(2) You don't own other people's problems.
(3) You don't carry other people's burdens. You allow them to work out the consequences of their own actions or miseries without feeling guilty for doing so.
(4) You don't allow a family member, a friend, a boss or a company to compromise your values and talk you into something that benefits them and puts yourself in jeopardy.
(5) You don't buy into something that is too good to be true.
(6) You don't allow yourself to be duped by a priest, teacher, or other authority figure telling you something that is not consistent with what your past experience reveals and your gut tells you.
(7) You stay away from toxic people be they family members, work associates or anyone that demeans you in a way that you question your self-regard or that compromises your values.
(8) You're not for sale, ever!
JRF
Saturday, September 05, 2009
IS IT MORE IMPORTANT TO BE LOVED OR RESPECTED?
IS IT MORE IMPORTANT TO BE LOVED OR RESPECTED?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 5, 2009
“Accept yourself as you are, warts and all, and you cannot help but accept others as you find them. Self-acceptance is the hardest hurdle in life to negotiate. It is key to a success that otherwise could not but be imagined. Nothing is more important than to like or accept what one is and isn’t. Once achieved, you can read others as if an open book while others cannot take advantage of you. For a con artist to succeed he must have a willing accomplice, a fool who is a stranger to himself, and a perfect patsy for exploitation.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “Confident Selling for the 90s” (1992), nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize, and the first part of a trilogy including “The Worker, Alone!” (1995) and “Six Silent Killers” (1998) – all three books are still in print.
* * *
This sounds like a simple self-evident question, but it is actually quite complex. In fact, it is something of a conundrum. Love and respect are not nearly as prominent in the game of life as self-acceptance. Without a foundation in self-acceptance, the rest is academic.
Self-acceptance is knowing oneself and not denying the “other self” that should be known but more often than not is hidden from one’s nature. Self-acceptance indicates you like yourself. It does not mean you are narcissistic. Nor does it mean you like yourself because you have few blemishes. Quite the contrary. It means you like yourself blemishes and all.
You recognize you are fallible, vulnerable, fragile and dying a little bit every day. There is no time to be wasted on pettiness, revenge or hatred. It gives you a sense of proportion, a balance, a measure of yourself against the reality of your experience and what you say and think you are, or should be, or told you are by others. It is what you actually are.
It means you will not knowingly associate with people or be attracted to situations that are toxic to your self-acceptance. You will guard your mind as well as your body so as to thrive in a climate conducive to your health and well being. You will behave as a mature adult, not as a critical parent or petulant child.
This means you are aware that you are capable of good and evil; kindness and maliciousness; generosity and jealousy; happiness and misery; joy and despair; love and hate. It is part of your total chemistry of being, what Nietzsche referred to as “all too human.”
* * *
When I came back from South Africa in 1969, I was disillusioned, confused, and I think now in retrospect, close to a nervous breakdown. My sanitarium became a home on the west coast of Florida. There I vegetated for two years reading, writing, swimming, playing tennis, and basketball with my son’s friends after school.
Like a sojourn sailor I drove about the Tampa Bay area finding refuge in bookstores and out of the way restaurants, bus stations and railroad depots where I would observe and write. On occasion, I would park by the Tampa Bay seaport where freighters would line up to deliver produce from South and Central America, imagining myself climbing aboard a freighter and disappearing from my former self, wandering the world as Herman Melville once did. What saved me were words and ideas out of books.
It was in this scenario that I started to realize the game life had played on me, and how little I had had to do with its organization, orientation, expectations and its satisfactions. That I was a willing body playing a role that was programmed into me without my being in touch with what I call in another essay, “my subtext.”
It was as if I looked at all the positives of my life, all the awards and achievements and the incredible earning power I had generated so young coming from such an impoverished background failing to see I was locked into a life designed by others, a life I had embraced eagerly only to find myself empty for the attention.
At some level, I could accept my imperfections and fallibilities but I wanted my Irish Roman Catholicism to be above reproach, or perfect, and found it wasn’t. I wanted the preamble to be manifestly true “that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” and saw it wasn't. I was programmed to believe excellence rises to the top with those leading the most capable and competent, and I found they weren’t. I expected to find peace and fulfillment in marriage and found it a lie. I concluded I had carefully constructed a cage that I had willingly entered, and then thrown away the key.
More a matter of impulse than thought I escaped through my brashness and incorrigible personality by resigning from my programming as well as my job. This was called “dropping out” in the 1960s to smell the roses. But I was in agony and my olfactory ducts were not functioning. I did get off the merry-go-round, feeling somewhat dizzy for I had been on it all of my life.
* * *
Quite by accident, I thought I had found an anchor. I had written “Confident Selling” (Prentice-Hall 1970), which was literally accepted through the transom, as I had no author credentials. I had written the initial draft in six weeks, which was accepted and published without editing, and was in print for twenty years. I thought I was an authentic author when I was simply lucky. The window of opportunity was right as we were in a similar predicament in the 1970s as we are now.
While in New York City to be interviewed by my publisher Prentice-Hall, I stumbled on a book at a newsstand by Alan W. Watts: “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are” (1966). I read it and then every other book he had written. Watts created a philosophy of Zen and Christianity into a psychotherapy blend of the East and West. It had great impact on my porous mind. Like many authors of the time, he lived in a psychedelic haze and died in his 50s, his body and soul consumed in the moment, but he spoke to me as no one had before.
Looking back, I have to smile now because Watts was the darling of the Hippies and the counterculture and I couldn’t be squarer. Mainly living and working abroad during the 1960s I missed the tie-dye generation and the commune brigade. In 1964, I had a speaking engagement in San Francisco and visited Haight-Asbury where these Flower Children were out in force. Seeing them, I thought I had stumbled into another galaxy.
Early in the 1970s, I came across another writer, J. Krishnamurti at Haslam’s bookstore in St. Petersburg, Florida. Owner Charles Haslam wanted to meet me as I was scheduled to be on his PBS television show, “Book Beat.” Haslam’s, an independent bookstore, and the largest at the time in Florida, would become a regular haunt.
Like Watts’ title before, a seductive Krishnamurti title caught my eye: “You Are The World” (1972). You can imagine how this title hit someone as lost as I was at the time. Krishnamurti insisted:
“In oneself lies the whole world, and if you know how to look and learn, then the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself” (p. 158)
It was the perfect bromide for my troubled soul after South Africa’s apartheid. Krishnamurti speaks here of the power of a quiet mind, of the importance of letting go of thought where evil and dissipation reside. Obsessive thought he sees metaphorically as if walking blind over the cliff of despair. Life he insists is real not surreal. You must look to your feet to see what is under you and ahead of you, and go forward as the world.
Krishnamurti’s mysticism and meditation lifted me out of myself and into another dimension. It carried me into that Eastern calm of Zen that has now become so familiar to the West. Like Watts, he made sense to me. I found I couldn’t rest until I read everything Haslam’s had in stock, which was more than a score of books. I thought I had wandered unto a great man.
Then I read, “Lives in the Shadow with J. Krihnamurti” (1991) written by Radha Rajagopal Sloss, the daughter of his mistress, and the wife of Krishnamurti’s most trusted friend. The cuckolded husband chose for twenty years to know nothing about the affair, as they all lived together in a California Ojai retreat where the great mystic conducted many of his seminars. To be fair, Krishnamurti’s friend traveled a good deal.
The Indian teacher and mystic promoted the idea of spirituality and being above lust, and having a morality of the mind that had reverence for life and transformed the individual above the mundane, yet his mistress had more than one abortion to keep his celibacy intact. You get the sense author Sloss’s mother was something of a sex slave available on demand to pleasure the mystic. It wasn’t a shock to discover he was only a man, but that he had so little regard or acceptance of that fact.
* * *
You could say I have been naïve putting certain individuals on pedestals only to find them all too human. That would be missing the point. To be authentic doesn’t necessitate being foolproof. It means being real in the life you live and project. My problem is with those that preach and teach one thing and live the exception.
That said I respect the strength of character of Krishnamurti. His benefactor wanted to make him a god and build a religion around him. For his resistance, he has been called “the reluctant messiah.” I think this was the major achievement of his life. The fact that he has clay feet only makes him more engaging. He was, after all, a manifestation of the Greeks four types of love: Eros (sexual love or lust), Narcissism (self-love), Agape (unconditional love) and Altruism (humanistic love).
* * *
And so in this brief essay I’m trying to show whatever your age whatever your circumstances, it is time to get in touch with yourself. You are most likely not as good as you think you are or as bad as you fear you might be. You’re simply a human being, coping often on automatic pilot without a clear sense of what you’re about. So, welcome to the family of man which is all too human.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 5, 2009
“Accept yourself as you are, warts and all, and you cannot help but accept others as you find them. Self-acceptance is the hardest hurdle in life to negotiate. It is key to a success that otherwise could not but be imagined. Nothing is more important than to like or accept what one is and isn’t. Once achieved, you can read others as if an open book while others cannot take advantage of you. For a con artist to succeed he must have a willing accomplice, a fool who is a stranger to himself, and a perfect patsy for exploitation.”
James R. Fisher, Jr., “Confident Selling for the 90s” (1992), nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize, and the first part of a trilogy including “The Worker, Alone!” (1995) and “Six Silent Killers” (1998) – all three books are still in print.
* * *
This sounds like a simple self-evident question, but it is actually quite complex. In fact, it is something of a conundrum. Love and respect are not nearly as prominent in the game of life as self-acceptance. Without a foundation in self-acceptance, the rest is academic.
Self-acceptance is knowing oneself and not denying the “other self” that should be known but more often than not is hidden from one’s nature. Self-acceptance indicates you like yourself. It does not mean you are narcissistic. Nor does it mean you like yourself because you have few blemishes. Quite the contrary. It means you like yourself blemishes and all.
You recognize you are fallible, vulnerable, fragile and dying a little bit every day. There is no time to be wasted on pettiness, revenge or hatred. It gives you a sense of proportion, a balance, a measure of yourself against the reality of your experience and what you say and think you are, or should be, or told you are by others. It is what you actually are.
It means you will not knowingly associate with people or be attracted to situations that are toxic to your self-acceptance. You will guard your mind as well as your body so as to thrive in a climate conducive to your health and well being. You will behave as a mature adult, not as a critical parent or petulant child.
This means you are aware that you are capable of good and evil; kindness and maliciousness; generosity and jealousy; happiness and misery; joy and despair; love and hate. It is part of your total chemistry of being, what Nietzsche referred to as “all too human.”
* * *
When I came back from South Africa in 1969, I was disillusioned, confused, and I think now in retrospect, close to a nervous breakdown. My sanitarium became a home on the west coast of Florida. There I vegetated for two years reading, writing, swimming, playing tennis, and basketball with my son’s friends after school.
Like a sojourn sailor I drove about the Tampa Bay area finding refuge in bookstores and out of the way restaurants, bus stations and railroad depots where I would observe and write. On occasion, I would park by the Tampa Bay seaport where freighters would line up to deliver produce from South and Central America, imagining myself climbing aboard a freighter and disappearing from my former self, wandering the world as Herman Melville once did. What saved me were words and ideas out of books.
It was in this scenario that I started to realize the game life had played on me, and how little I had had to do with its organization, orientation, expectations and its satisfactions. That I was a willing body playing a role that was programmed into me without my being in touch with what I call in another essay, “my subtext.”
It was as if I looked at all the positives of my life, all the awards and achievements and the incredible earning power I had generated so young coming from such an impoverished background failing to see I was locked into a life designed by others, a life I had embraced eagerly only to find myself empty for the attention.
At some level, I could accept my imperfections and fallibilities but I wanted my Irish Roman Catholicism to be above reproach, or perfect, and found it wasn’t. I wanted the preamble to be manifestly true “that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” and saw it wasn't. I was programmed to believe excellence rises to the top with those leading the most capable and competent, and I found they weren’t. I expected to find peace and fulfillment in marriage and found it a lie. I concluded I had carefully constructed a cage that I had willingly entered, and then thrown away the key.
More a matter of impulse than thought I escaped through my brashness and incorrigible personality by resigning from my programming as well as my job. This was called “dropping out” in the 1960s to smell the roses. But I was in agony and my olfactory ducts were not functioning. I did get off the merry-go-round, feeling somewhat dizzy for I had been on it all of my life.
* * *
Quite by accident, I thought I had found an anchor. I had written “Confident Selling” (Prentice-Hall 1970), which was literally accepted through the transom, as I had no author credentials. I had written the initial draft in six weeks, which was accepted and published without editing, and was in print for twenty years. I thought I was an authentic author when I was simply lucky. The window of opportunity was right as we were in a similar predicament in the 1970s as we are now.
While in New York City to be interviewed by my publisher Prentice-Hall, I stumbled on a book at a newsstand by Alan W. Watts: “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are” (1966). I read it and then every other book he had written. Watts created a philosophy of Zen and Christianity into a psychotherapy blend of the East and West. It had great impact on my porous mind. Like many authors of the time, he lived in a psychedelic haze and died in his 50s, his body and soul consumed in the moment, but he spoke to me as no one had before.
Looking back, I have to smile now because Watts was the darling of the Hippies and the counterculture and I couldn’t be squarer. Mainly living and working abroad during the 1960s I missed the tie-dye generation and the commune brigade. In 1964, I had a speaking engagement in San Francisco and visited Haight-Asbury where these Flower Children were out in force. Seeing them, I thought I had stumbled into another galaxy.
Early in the 1970s, I came across another writer, J. Krishnamurti at Haslam’s bookstore in St. Petersburg, Florida. Owner Charles Haslam wanted to meet me as I was scheduled to be on his PBS television show, “Book Beat.” Haslam’s, an independent bookstore, and the largest at the time in Florida, would become a regular haunt.
Like Watts’ title before, a seductive Krishnamurti title caught my eye: “You Are The World” (1972). You can imagine how this title hit someone as lost as I was at the time. Krishnamurti insisted:
“In oneself lies the whole world, and if you know how to look and learn, then the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself” (p. 158)
It was the perfect bromide for my troubled soul after South Africa’s apartheid. Krishnamurti speaks here of the power of a quiet mind, of the importance of letting go of thought where evil and dissipation reside. Obsessive thought he sees metaphorically as if walking blind over the cliff of despair. Life he insists is real not surreal. You must look to your feet to see what is under you and ahead of you, and go forward as the world.
Krishnamurti’s mysticism and meditation lifted me out of myself and into another dimension. It carried me into that Eastern calm of Zen that has now become so familiar to the West. Like Watts, he made sense to me. I found I couldn’t rest until I read everything Haslam’s had in stock, which was more than a score of books. I thought I had wandered unto a great man.
Then I read, “Lives in the Shadow with J. Krihnamurti” (1991) written by Radha Rajagopal Sloss, the daughter of his mistress, and the wife of Krishnamurti’s most trusted friend. The cuckolded husband chose for twenty years to know nothing about the affair, as they all lived together in a California Ojai retreat where the great mystic conducted many of his seminars. To be fair, Krishnamurti’s friend traveled a good deal.
The Indian teacher and mystic promoted the idea of spirituality and being above lust, and having a morality of the mind that had reverence for life and transformed the individual above the mundane, yet his mistress had more than one abortion to keep his celibacy intact. You get the sense author Sloss’s mother was something of a sex slave available on demand to pleasure the mystic. It wasn’t a shock to discover he was only a man, but that he had so little regard or acceptance of that fact.
* * *
You could say I have been naïve putting certain individuals on pedestals only to find them all too human. That would be missing the point. To be authentic doesn’t necessitate being foolproof. It means being real in the life you live and project. My problem is with those that preach and teach one thing and live the exception.
That said I respect the strength of character of Krishnamurti. His benefactor wanted to make him a god and build a religion around him. For his resistance, he has been called “the reluctant messiah.” I think this was the major achievement of his life. The fact that he has clay feet only makes him more engaging. He was, after all, a manifestation of the Greeks four types of love: Eros (sexual love or lust), Narcissism (self-love), Agape (unconditional love) and Altruism (humanistic love).
* * *
And so in this brief essay I’m trying to show whatever your age whatever your circumstances, it is time to get in touch with yourself. You are most likely not as good as you think you are or as bad as you fear you might be. You’re simply a human being, coping often on automatic pilot without a clear sense of what you’re about. So, welcome to the family of man which is all too human.
* * *
Thursday, September 03, 2009
WHAT IS STOICHIOMETRY? AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS!
WHAT IS STOICHIOMETRY? AN EXCHANGE OF VIEWS!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 3, 2009
A WRITER WRITES FROM GERMANY:
Jim,
We are all different in our ways of looking at life and our expectations. Obviously some people never are content and will not be assertive enough to make the effort to make a difference. You cannot change it!
Manfred
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Manfred,
We are different but the difference is more an artificial than a real factor, and the reason I write as I do.
We are different genetically, but I think that is a factor that is exaggerated more than proven. Why is it some succeed and so many others fail? Why is 80 percent of the work done by 20 percent of the people? I believe it is a battle between nurture versus nature.
Tracy Kidder, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, who wrote the wonderful book "The Soul of a New Machine" (1982), about a small group of engineers that built a computer and then were disbanded like confetti, has written a new book "Strength in What Remains" (2009).
It is about a student who took flight through Burundi and Rwanda under harrowing conditions, arrived in New York City, speaking no English, no contacts, no connections with just $200, and went on to become a doctor graduating from Columbia, one of the best schools in the United States.
You would say he was exceptional, and he was, but I believe that spirit exists in all of us, maybe not a soaring flame, but perhaps only a pilot light, yet it can be nurtured into a brilliance that otherwise might not exist.
Just as I believe freedom is endemic to the human spirit I think the will to take hold of our innate talents is there, but sometimes the mountain is too high for us to make the effort.
In Venezuela, Caracas in particular, children in the most impoverished neighborhoods are studying classical music with instruments provided by the government.
There are some 220 such centers throughout the nation with more than 400,000 young people participating. Over one million children since 1975 have participated in this program, which grows leaps and bounds each year. It has been found to assuage crime and violence, gangs and prostitution.
Those that prove the most talented perform in a national orchestra. It is likely that it is less than 20 percent of those who participate.
It is beautiful and wonderful to see a nation lift the spirit up of the people. Nothing is more beautiful than classical music, nothing more in the rhythm of what I'm trying to describe.
Many people are stuck and need a lift. They need a chance to do something worthwhile. They need stimulation consistent with their natural talent, talent perhaps far removed from music. Music in the parlance of chemistry is simply the catalyst.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
WRITER FROM GERMANY RESPONDS:
Jim,
I observe more and more people who are not driven to excel in their jobs because they say it is not worth the hassle. They are content with less money, less image and no responsibility.
To view it from another perspective, why is it not all people are eager to achieve in sports? It is because they don't care. They feel they are not born to do such exhausting things. And we accept it.
Why not accept this kind of attitude in professional life?
The only thing I consider wrong is that people not enduring the pain to produce want to get the same benefits and gratification. This is what the new political correctness is leading to.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but this is how I see it.
Best regards
Manfred
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you for your views. There is no right or wrong to a point of view. It puts us in touch with the way we think.
Your response does trigger several thoughts.
Eric Hoffer (1902 – 1983), the German-American longshoreman philosopher, experienced blindness when he was a small boy with his eyesight returning miraculously in his late teens. With little formal education, once he had eyesight, he had hunger for the word.
He went to the library and checked out the biggest book with the smallest print and read it cover-to-cover. It was a collection of essays by the French essayist and philosopher Montesquieu (1689 – 1755). He was baptized with the fire of words and ideas.
Hoffer liked physical work because it gave him ample time to think without the drudgery of contiually worrying about senseless bureaucratic tasks. He wrote many books, and I’ve read them all, but find his first, “The True Believer” (1951) enough to maintain his reputation for ages, identifying the "herd mentality" of mass social movements. The herd Hoffer showed surrendered its will to belong and for it became self-alienated.
The media, national politicians, religious gurus and corpoate leaders orchestrate this symphony as individualism has become increasingly an empty suit in a progressively one-dimensional society. That said we are stuck with what we are.
* * *
The German philosopher Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) once said, “When you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan as if composed by a novelist.” He went on to say, “Just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you.”
It is the WILL that I attempt to address.
Imagine the difficulty in determining your will if you are always looking for answers “outside” and spending little time exploring the wonders “within.”
It is possible perhaps even probable that more people than ever are living vicarious lives through other people’s careers, achievements and experiences without sensing their own.
This is the product of a celebrity culture.
What is most damaging about a celebrity culture is not celebrities. They are tinsel on a Christmas tree. It is that people become spectators to life and live through their heroes and not their own experiences.
* * *
We in the West, it would seem to me, have a moral responsibility to contribute our talent and not sit on it, especially since over three billion souls on the globe live on less than $1,000 a year. These people exist without proper shelter, sanitation, safe drinking water and enough food and clothing to keep body and soul together or free from crippling diseases.
Tuberculosis is rampant in the slums of Mumbai, which is unresponsive to any available drugs. Children are dying.
We in the West have too many floaters too many dreamers who dream of flying planes and owning fast cars as if life is a movie of celluloid dimensions. You say it is okay to be floaters, and I agree if we don’t have to bail them out or carry them into their old age.
* * *
What took the struggle out of life, the embarrassment, and the failure? I can tell you what I think. It was the social engineering idea of “self-esteem,” where little Johnny and little Susie could not have their delicate psyches wounded with a little reality, but must be rewarded however they performed saving them from struggle, embarrassment or failure in school or play.
This has resulted in there being few adults among the baby boomer generation, or the generations that have followed. We have a society essentially suspended in terminal adolescence, reacting to rather than anticipating challenges.
Tell a little girl in Afghanistan about “self-esteem,” a person who hungers to be educated, and knows every day she steps out of her home and walks to school she may be killed on the way or blown up in the schoolhouse by the Taliban because women are not meant to be educated.
* * *
You mentioned athletes. I was a four-sport athlete, not in my dreams, as many men I have met in my adult life prove to be, but a person who “paid the price,” as we used to call it, with rugged practices in football, constant laps and sprints in track, practices and games during holidays in basketball, and the same in baseball. We were all high school athletes, and if you didn’t perform you didn’t make the team. It was that simple.
I never had any illusions of being a professional athlete, but I do know this. People with whom I played who turned professional could visualize themselves as professionals before it happened. The vision came before the reality. Beyond that, “they paid the price” by working out year around to perfect their talents, taking injuries and setbacks, and failures in stride.
* * *
There are two words critical to this discussion: being and becoming.
Being is. Consequently, it is all about struggle, pain, disappointment, failure and ultimately some level of satisfaction, success and achievement.
I happened to have had the privilege of being in classes in high school with people of “being.” They were going somewhere. They didn’t brag about “never taking a book home,” or “never reading a book,” or implying “school work was so easy it came as if by osmosis.” They worked. They sacrificed. They paid attention. They stayed focus. And I can tell you today, nearly sixty years later, they have all done very well, “thank you very much.”
People who are obsessed with “becoming” are floaters, dreamers, never paying the price, never buckling down, looking for the angles, seeing themselves as “cleverer than the next dude by half,” and they always come up short. They are looking for breaks rather than making them.
It is a cliché but true: luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.
* * *
You may remember this. Four directors of Honeywell Europe Ltd. were having dinner in a restaurant in Amsterdam in 1988. The conversation came around to what each director would like to be if he or she had his or her druthers. Remember?
One director said he’d like to be a radio personality and singer, another said she would like to be a newspaper reporter and columnist, another said he would like to be a farmer, and I said, “I am a writer.”
That was more than twenty years ago, but I saw myself as a writer then, not in terms of success but in terms of mental set. I didn’t say I want to become a writer because becoming then as now had nothing to do with it. Like everyone else at that table, I was working for a living, which was a necessary but not sufficient condition to my fulfillment. Besides, I can recall the conversation that night as if it were yesterday.
Be always well,
Jim
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 3, 2009
A WRITER WRITES FROM GERMANY:
Jim,
We are all different in our ways of looking at life and our expectations. Obviously some people never are content and will not be assertive enough to make the effort to make a difference. You cannot change it!
Manfred
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Manfred,
We are different but the difference is more an artificial than a real factor, and the reason I write as I do.
We are different genetically, but I think that is a factor that is exaggerated more than proven. Why is it some succeed and so many others fail? Why is 80 percent of the work done by 20 percent of the people? I believe it is a battle between nurture versus nature.
Tracy Kidder, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, who wrote the wonderful book "The Soul of a New Machine" (1982), about a small group of engineers that built a computer and then were disbanded like confetti, has written a new book "Strength in What Remains" (2009).
It is about a student who took flight through Burundi and Rwanda under harrowing conditions, arrived in New York City, speaking no English, no contacts, no connections with just $200, and went on to become a doctor graduating from Columbia, one of the best schools in the United States.
You would say he was exceptional, and he was, but I believe that spirit exists in all of us, maybe not a soaring flame, but perhaps only a pilot light, yet it can be nurtured into a brilliance that otherwise might not exist.
Just as I believe freedom is endemic to the human spirit I think the will to take hold of our innate talents is there, but sometimes the mountain is too high for us to make the effort.
In Venezuela, Caracas in particular, children in the most impoverished neighborhoods are studying classical music with instruments provided by the government.
There are some 220 such centers throughout the nation with more than 400,000 young people participating. Over one million children since 1975 have participated in this program, which grows leaps and bounds each year. It has been found to assuage crime and violence, gangs and prostitution.
Those that prove the most talented perform in a national orchestra. It is likely that it is less than 20 percent of those who participate.
It is beautiful and wonderful to see a nation lift the spirit up of the people. Nothing is more beautiful than classical music, nothing more in the rhythm of what I'm trying to describe.
Many people are stuck and need a lift. They need a chance to do something worthwhile. They need stimulation consistent with their natural talent, talent perhaps far removed from music. Music in the parlance of chemistry is simply the catalyst.
Be always well,
Jim
* * *
WRITER FROM GERMANY RESPONDS:
Jim,
I observe more and more people who are not driven to excel in their jobs because they say it is not worth the hassle. They are content with less money, less image and no responsibility.
To view it from another perspective, why is it not all people are eager to achieve in sports? It is because they don't care. They feel they are not born to do such exhausting things. And we accept it.
Why not accept this kind of attitude in professional life?
The only thing I consider wrong is that people not enduring the pain to produce want to get the same benefits and gratification. This is what the new political correctness is leading to.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but this is how I see it.
Best regards
Manfred
* * *
DR. FISHER RESPONDS:
Thank you for your views. There is no right or wrong to a point of view. It puts us in touch with the way we think.
Your response does trigger several thoughts.
Eric Hoffer (1902 – 1983), the German-American longshoreman philosopher, experienced blindness when he was a small boy with his eyesight returning miraculously in his late teens. With little formal education, once he had eyesight, he had hunger for the word.
He went to the library and checked out the biggest book with the smallest print and read it cover-to-cover. It was a collection of essays by the French essayist and philosopher Montesquieu (1689 – 1755). He was baptized with the fire of words and ideas.
Hoffer liked physical work because it gave him ample time to think without the drudgery of contiually worrying about senseless bureaucratic tasks. He wrote many books, and I’ve read them all, but find his first, “The True Believer” (1951) enough to maintain his reputation for ages, identifying the "herd mentality" of mass social movements. The herd Hoffer showed surrendered its will to belong and for it became self-alienated.
The media, national politicians, religious gurus and corpoate leaders orchestrate this symphony as individualism has become increasingly an empty suit in a progressively one-dimensional society. That said we are stuck with what we are.
* * *
The German philosopher Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) once said, “When you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan as if composed by a novelist.” He went on to say, “Just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you.”
It is the WILL that I attempt to address.
Imagine the difficulty in determining your will if you are always looking for answers “outside” and spending little time exploring the wonders “within.”
It is possible perhaps even probable that more people than ever are living vicarious lives through other people’s careers, achievements and experiences without sensing their own.
This is the product of a celebrity culture.
What is most damaging about a celebrity culture is not celebrities. They are tinsel on a Christmas tree. It is that people become spectators to life and live through their heroes and not their own experiences.
* * *
We in the West, it would seem to me, have a moral responsibility to contribute our talent and not sit on it, especially since over three billion souls on the globe live on less than $1,000 a year. These people exist without proper shelter, sanitation, safe drinking water and enough food and clothing to keep body and soul together or free from crippling diseases.
Tuberculosis is rampant in the slums of Mumbai, which is unresponsive to any available drugs. Children are dying.
We in the West have too many floaters too many dreamers who dream of flying planes and owning fast cars as if life is a movie of celluloid dimensions. You say it is okay to be floaters, and I agree if we don’t have to bail them out or carry them into their old age.
* * *
What took the struggle out of life, the embarrassment, and the failure? I can tell you what I think. It was the social engineering idea of “self-esteem,” where little Johnny and little Susie could not have their delicate psyches wounded with a little reality, but must be rewarded however they performed saving them from struggle, embarrassment or failure in school or play.
This has resulted in there being few adults among the baby boomer generation, or the generations that have followed. We have a society essentially suspended in terminal adolescence, reacting to rather than anticipating challenges.
Tell a little girl in Afghanistan about “self-esteem,” a person who hungers to be educated, and knows every day she steps out of her home and walks to school she may be killed on the way or blown up in the schoolhouse by the Taliban because women are not meant to be educated.
* * *
You mentioned athletes. I was a four-sport athlete, not in my dreams, as many men I have met in my adult life prove to be, but a person who “paid the price,” as we used to call it, with rugged practices in football, constant laps and sprints in track, practices and games during holidays in basketball, and the same in baseball. We were all high school athletes, and if you didn’t perform you didn’t make the team. It was that simple.
I never had any illusions of being a professional athlete, but I do know this. People with whom I played who turned professional could visualize themselves as professionals before it happened. The vision came before the reality. Beyond that, “they paid the price” by working out year around to perfect their talents, taking injuries and setbacks, and failures in stride.
* * *
There are two words critical to this discussion: being and becoming.
Being is. Consequently, it is all about struggle, pain, disappointment, failure and ultimately some level of satisfaction, success and achievement.
I happened to have had the privilege of being in classes in high school with people of “being.” They were going somewhere. They didn’t brag about “never taking a book home,” or “never reading a book,” or implying “school work was so easy it came as if by osmosis.” They worked. They sacrificed. They paid attention. They stayed focus. And I can tell you today, nearly sixty years later, they have all done very well, “thank you very much.”
People who are obsessed with “becoming” are floaters, dreamers, never paying the price, never buckling down, looking for the angles, seeing themselves as “cleverer than the next dude by half,” and they always come up short. They are looking for breaks rather than making them.
It is a cliché but true: luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.
* * *
You may remember this. Four directors of Honeywell Europe Ltd. were having dinner in a restaurant in Amsterdam in 1988. The conversation came around to what each director would like to be if he or she had his or her druthers. Remember?
One director said he’d like to be a radio personality and singer, another said she would like to be a newspaper reporter and columnist, another said he would like to be a farmer, and I said, “I am a writer.”
That was more than twenty years ago, but I saw myself as a writer then, not in terms of success but in terms of mental set. I didn’t say I want to become a writer because becoming then as now had nothing to do with it. Like everyone else at that table, I was working for a living, which was a necessary but not sufficient condition to my fulfillment. Besides, I can recall the conversation that night as if it were yesterday.
Be always well,
Jim
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
WHAT IS STOICHIOMETRY?
WHAT IS STOICHIOMETRY?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 31, 2009
Most upsetting to me in the afternoon of my long life is how many people I meet that quander their inherent talents then suffer for it by never climbing the LADDER OF LIFE to rise out of the swamp of depression and disappointment.
Recently, I had occasion to be in the company of a young man who has a facility for languages. He is already tri-lingual, and could easily master other languages if immersed in any of them for six months. This is a talent he has never exploited.
He is a person who treats life whimsically careful not to press himself too hard. There is little sense that the clock is ticking and that one-day he will wake up an old man. All that talent, that ability will be lost, wasted.
If there is sin in life, it is waste. There is good and evil, but they are in everyone, two sides of the same coin. The side that more often surfaces is a matter of choice. Make no mistake the other side is always there. You can never be too vigilant, too certain of goodness.
This young man, now thirty-three, has never caught hold. I’m not sure how much education he has, but it is obvious he is quite intelligent.
He was talking to my grandson, a sophomore in high school, asking him about school. My grandson mentioned he is taking advanced algebra and chemistry.
“I took chemistry in high school,” the young man said, “we made stink (hydrogen sulfide) bombs and stuck them in guys lockers.” He laughed. Stink bombs smell like rotten eggs but are otherwise not harmful. My grandson didn’t laugh nor did his grandfather. Science and mathematics are not laughing matters.
I wanted to ask the young man: “Do you know what stoichiometry is?” It would give me a sense if he got anything meaningful out of chemistry. But I didn’t.
Every chemistry student knows that stoichiometry deals with chemical equations and the substances that go into chemical reactions. Chemical compounds are combined, called mole fractions, sometimes with the introduction of a chemical catalyst, to produce a chemical reaction to completion.
For example, when the hydrocarbon gas, methane, undergoes union with oxygen in complete combustion, 16 grams of methane will require 64 grams of oxygen, with the resulting reaction producing 44 grams of carbon dioxide and 36 grams of water.
CH4 (16 grams) + 2O2 (64 grams) = CO2 (44 grams) + 2H20 (36 grams)
This is presented here not as a chemical lesson but to show chemistry is basic to us all, as we are microbiological chemical factories operating stoichiometrically.
Like mathematics, chemistry cannot be denied or ignored. It is not a joke. It is not something to misuse or fail to understand. Of late, we have become familiar with its misuse.
* * *
Chemistry is being used to kill as suicide bombers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Earlier, it was used in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 when Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building with a truck bomb. It took the lives of 168 children and adults, destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 buildings, causing $652 million damage.
What motivated McVeigh and Nichols was the FBI’s handling of the Waco Siege of the religious Branch Dravidian sect at Ruby Ridge in 1993.
Chemistry, like life itself, is a two-edged proposition capable of doing wonders to extend life or take it in an instant. It is something to understand and respect.
* * *
STOICHIOMETRY OF LIFE
We are chemical equations. We are in fact human chemicals. As such, we take our talent and find a connection, hopefully, where that talent will reach fruition or completion. Otherwise, we are an unbalanced equation requiring some catalyst to complete the reaction, which we might call “motivation” or drive.
Like the chemist in the laboratory, we have to experiment with how we present our talent, how we program our talent, and how we make it a value added component to society.
The most important aspect of this equation is connecting with the right people in the right culture to drive our ambitions to completion.
The best minds don’t necessarily graduate from Harvard, Yale and Princeton elite (HYPE) schools, but such graduates do make the best connections, and that is likely with others with a similar HYPE pedigree. It is the nature of things. In terms of chemistry, it represents the optimum conditions for completion.
People with connections run society. They are elected to public office. They operate banks, brokerage houses, Forbes Corporate 500 Companies, and are the unelected but appointed members of Congress and the Executive Branch of Government. They play a prominent role in the state houses of legislation across the nation, and make up a good percentage of those euphemistically called “lobbyists” at all levels of enterprise. Most generals and admirals, who graduate from military institutions, employ HYPE personnel to the equation as strategists.
These people have put American society into the current sinkhole of despair.
We assume in this capitalistic economy if a degree cost $150,000 that that degreed person must be superior to a graduate from a state university at one-fifth the cost.
What is clear is that the connections the $150,000 graduate has compared to that state university graduate are at least ten to twenty times greater, and so perhaps the degree is worth the expense if not in terms of value added.
We are a classless society that is obsessively class conscious. It shows in media, which is enamored of the expression, “the best and the brightest” when calibrated in terms of what they are not what they do. It is the “best and the brightest” that have put us in the soup.
Culture is a mindset and this is ours.
Notice when HYPE people are interviewed on television they always make reference to how “smart” their colleagues are, not how effective they are, as if being smart is an apology for not being effective.
They represent stoichiometry as an unbalanced equation.
Talking heads speak of Obama’s “bold leadership” when he has not shown leadership at all. True, he is not a bungler as Bush was, but his finesse is in speech not in action. Afghanistan is becoming as much an embarrassment as was Vietnam. Our mindset is wrong for the times. People who should be following are leading us.
We see this in the HealthCare Reform fiasco, in the attack on Medicare and Social Security, on blaming Bush for his preemptive war, while escalating the Afghanistan War, and projecting a $9 trillion deficit in the next ten years, which will have little impact on HYPE or the class society running things, but will have great impact on most other Americans, including all those state university graduates.
Life is stoichiometry. It becomes a problem when it defies Nature, and the limits of things.
THE GREATNESS OF THE COMMON GOOD
It is no accident that people who take life seriously raise the bar only to have those in power drop it. Expertise is not enough. It must be translated into action, into results, into something that completes the reaction to benefit the common good.
Today, tens of thousands of young graduates of state universities are having difficulty finding jobs at the level of their skills and with suitable compensation for those skills. Many of them are no longer looking.
To get hired today the person has to have a mindset to make a difference, but with a caution. Remember this equation when you interview. It is how the interviewer thinks:
(1) Am I comfortable with this person + (2) will this person fit with my team + (3) is this person qualified = (4) should I hire him (her)?
The equation is always in this order of importance with qualification, the part most emphasized by professional consultants the least important in the equation. This is true of HYPE but it is also true of every other hiring situation. Let us examine these in some detail.
(1) The threshold behavior of the interviewee is critical. It is important that the interviewee dress properly but neutrally to raise no flags. Questions should be answered succinctly and candidly with no more information than is asked for.
The interviewee will be asked if he or she has any questions.
The interviewee should be careful to ask questions in the light of an assessment of the interviewer in terms of his or her dress, manner, speech, diction, expression, as well as an assessment of his or her comfort level, and competence.
An accurate assessment of the interviewing climate is key.
Either the interviewee has been made comfortable or put on edge. Whatever the case, the interviewee should not step over the threshold of good sense, or make false assumptions.
The place of the interview is important. Is it a neutral place or the workplace of the interviewer? This tells the interviewee how personal or impersonal the interview is likely to be. It also gives a clue as to the nature of the place of employment.
The appurtenances of the office tell a story, if it is the interviewer’s workplace, about the person who is doing the interviewing.
How the interviewer handles interruptions and deals with others that may step into the office indicate the level of comfort and competence. This is all important because the interviewee does not want to be threatening, does not want the interviewer to think the interviewee is out to take the interviewer’s job.
(2) It is a godsend if the interviewee has to wait. This gives the person a chance to assess how work is done, and what the people doing the work seem to be like, how they get along, how they work, the quality of the banter between them, how they are dressed, their age, health, and efficiency, what their workstations are like, and the general climate-culture of the workplace.
Workers will be sizing up the interviewee as he or she is sizing them up. Mainly nonverbal, it gives a sense of fit from both perspectives.
(3) One of the greatest mistakes interviewees make in reading an ad for employment is seeing themselves as a “perfect fit” for the job no questions asked. They take this cockiness into the interview and are shot down and they have no idea why.
They assume because they have the education, experience, success, and moxie to do the job “right now” without any orientation or training that being hired is a matter of formality. Not!
This is a huge mistake because if you are successful with (1) and (2), whatever your qualifications and expertise, the interviewer is already trying to justify making (3) come out positive for you and the employer.
Conversely, if you have failed to convince the interviewer that you satisfy (1) and (2), he or she will be at the ready to punch holes into (3).
Remember, interviewing is likely to be a team process, each interviewer seeing you as he or she sees him or herself.
If you are truly over qualified for the position, and the interviewer doesn’t like you, chances are you will be written up as under qualified. It happens.
Most interviewers are recruited because they know the job being offered. They aren’t especially qualified to interview or assess the person being interviewed. It is a catch as catch can proposition. The person who must be professional, however, is the interviewee, and that means to tread lightly, carefully and weigh the process moment to moment and not proceed with guns blasting.
Let us say, you the interviewee is scheduled to a series of four interviews. Each is likely to be different because each interviewer operates in a private culture with a hidden agenda that is liable to be felt rather than expressed.
If the interviewer is placing more attention on (3) or qualifications when the interviewee feels this is self-evident, trouble could be brewing. It means that (1) and (2) have not been sufficiently satisfied. So, while the attention is on qualifications, the actual stone in the shoe is (1) or (2) or both.
If the interviewee catches this early enough, he or she can gauge their answers on qualifications in the rhythm that might best resonate with the interviewer. It is necessary to be careful here because the interviewee does not want to appear to be mimicking.
CASE IN POINT
This was expressed as a “cold call” interview but most interviews are conducted within companies with employees already in the system. Some rather spectacular things have happened in such an arena, and I was beneficiary of one such instance.
When I was twenty-five and a chemical sales engineer with Nalco Chemical Company, I developed a natural rapport with the Industrial Division Director, who had been, like me, a chemist in research and development. It was home to him but a foreign country to me. Moreover, he was reserved and cautious while I was aggressive and brash. He once said, “We make a complete person.”
The year I led the Industrial Division in sales he came out to travel with me. He saw how I adjusted my approach from account to account and person to person. I was now an area manager still selling but with men under me. He started to shuttle men from across the country to travel with me, and become acquainted with my style. He also arranged for me to make presentations at regional meetings.
Five years later, he was elevated to vice president of international operations. Nalco was growing more than 25 percent per year. He called one evening, and asked if I would like to come to work for him. “Doing what?” I asked. “Being my roving ambassador about the globe. Come to Chicago and we can discuss it.” I said, “You come to Louisville and discuss it with my family.” He came. I wanted him to be on my turf, not his, and to see how sincere he was.
“Aren’t you worried about promoting me over so many veterans?” I asked. “I’m hardly qualified for this assignment.” Then he reminded me of us “making a complete
person.” It was not so much that I was qualified but that my aggression complemented his hesitancy. We became a team. I was thirty-years-old.
It would eventually bring me to South Africa in 1968, and as many of you know, a period which now consumes me as I’m writing a novel about it.
There is a certain serendipity to this, which I didn’t see coming but which was consistent with my stoichiometry. In any case, it was a matter of chemistry and we are all human chemicals.
* * *
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 31, 2009
Most upsetting to me in the afternoon of my long life is how many people I meet that quander their inherent talents then suffer for it by never climbing the LADDER OF LIFE to rise out of the swamp of depression and disappointment.
Recently, I had occasion to be in the company of a young man who has a facility for languages. He is already tri-lingual, and could easily master other languages if immersed in any of them for six months. This is a talent he has never exploited.
He is a person who treats life whimsically careful not to press himself too hard. There is little sense that the clock is ticking and that one-day he will wake up an old man. All that talent, that ability will be lost, wasted.
If there is sin in life, it is waste. There is good and evil, but they are in everyone, two sides of the same coin. The side that more often surfaces is a matter of choice. Make no mistake the other side is always there. You can never be too vigilant, too certain of goodness.
This young man, now thirty-three, has never caught hold. I’m not sure how much education he has, but it is obvious he is quite intelligent.
He was talking to my grandson, a sophomore in high school, asking him about school. My grandson mentioned he is taking advanced algebra and chemistry.
“I took chemistry in high school,” the young man said, “we made stink (hydrogen sulfide) bombs and stuck them in guys lockers.” He laughed. Stink bombs smell like rotten eggs but are otherwise not harmful. My grandson didn’t laugh nor did his grandfather. Science and mathematics are not laughing matters.
I wanted to ask the young man: “Do you know what stoichiometry is?” It would give me a sense if he got anything meaningful out of chemistry. But I didn’t.
Every chemistry student knows that stoichiometry deals with chemical equations and the substances that go into chemical reactions. Chemical compounds are combined, called mole fractions, sometimes with the introduction of a chemical catalyst, to produce a chemical reaction to completion.
For example, when the hydrocarbon gas, methane, undergoes union with oxygen in complete combustion, 16 grams of methane will require 64 grams of oxygen, with the resulting reaction producing 44 grams of carbon dioxide and 36 grams of water.
CH4 (16 grams) + 2O2 (64 grams) = CO2 (44 grams) + 2H20 (36 grams)
This is presented here not as a chemical lesson but to show chemistry is basic to us all, as we are microbiological chemical factories operating stoichiometrically.
Like mathematics, chemistry cannot be denied or ignored. It is not a joke. It is not something to misuse or fail to understand. Of late, we have become familiar with its misuse.
* * *
Chemistry is being used to kill as suicide bombers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Earlier, it was used in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995 when Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building with a truck bomb. It took the lives of 168 children and adults, destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered glass in 258 buildings, causing $652 million damage.
What motivated McVeigh and Nichols was the FBI’s handling of the Waco Siege of the religious Branch Dravidian sect at Ruby Ridge in 1993.
Chemistry, like life itself, is a two-edged proposition capable of doing wonders to extend life or take it in an instant. It is something to understand and respect.
* * *
STOICHIOMETRY OF LIFE
We are chemical equations. We are in fact human chemicals. As such, we take our talent and find a connection, hopefully, where that talent will reach fruition or completion. Otherwise, we are an unbalanced equation requiring some catalyst to complete the reaction, which we might call “motivation” or drive.
Like the chemist in the laboratory, we have to experiment with how we present our talent, how we program our talent, and how we make it a value added component to society.
The most important aspect of this equation is connecting with the right people in the right culture to drive our ambitions to completion.
The best minds don’t necessarily graduate from Harvard, Yale and Princeton elite (HYPE) schools, but such graduates do make the best connections, and that is likely with others with a similar HYPE pedigree. It is the nature of things. In terms of chemistry, it represents the optimum conditions for completion.
People with connections run society. They are elected to public office. They operate banks, brokerage houses, Forbes Corporate 500 Companies, and are the unelected but appointed members of Congress and the Executive Branch of Government. They play a prominent role in the state houses of legislation across the nation, and make up a good percentage of those euphemistically called “lobbyists” at all levels of enterprise. Most generals and admirals, who graduate from military institutions, employ HYPE personnel to the equation as strategists.
These people have put American society into the current sinkhole of despair.
We assume in this capitalistic economy if a degree cost $150,000 that that degreed person must be superior to a graduate from a state university at one-fifth the cost.
What is clear is that the connections the $150,000 graduate has compared to that state university graduate are at least ten to twenty times greater, and so perhaps the degree is worth the expense if not in terms of value added.
We are a classless society that is obsessively class conscious. It shows in media, which is enamored of the expression, “the best and the brightest” when calibrated in terms of what they are not what they do. It is the “best and the brightest” that have put us in the soup.
Culture is a mindset and this is ours.
Notice when HYPE people are interviewed on television they always make reference to how “smart” their colleagues are, not how effective they are, as if being smart is an apology for not being effective.
They represent stoichiometry as an unbalanced equation.
Talking heads speak of Obama’s “bold leadership” when he has not shown leadership at all. True, he is not a bungler as Bush was, but his finesse is in speech not in action. Afghanistan is becoming as much an embarrassment as was Vietnam. Our mindset is wrong for the times. People who should be following are leading us.
We see this in the HealthCare Reform fiasco, in the attack on Medicare and Social Security, on blaming Bush for his preemptive war, while escalating the Afghanistan War, and projecting a $9 trillion deficit in the next ten years, which will have little impact on HYPE or the class society running things, but will have great impact on most other Americans, including all those state university graduates.
Life is stoichiometry. It becomes a problem when it defies Nature, and the limits of things.
THE GREATNESS OF THE COMMON GOOD
It is no accident that people who take life seriously raise the bar only to have those in power drop it. Expertise is not enough. It must be translated into action, into results, into something that completes the reaction to benefit the common good.
Today, tens of thousands of young graduates of state universities are having difficulty finding jobs at the level of their skills and with suitable compensation for those skills. Many of them are no longer looking.
To get hired today the person has to have a mindset to make a difference, but with a caution. Remember this equation when you interview. It is how the interviewer thinks:
(1) Am I comfortable with this person + (2) will this person fit with my team + (3) is this person qualified = (4) should I hire him (her)?
The equation is always in this order of importance with qualification, the part most emphasized by professional consultants the least important in the equation. This is true of HYPE but it is also true of every other hiring situation. Let us examine these in some detail.
(1) The threshold behavior of the interviewee is critical. It is important that the interviewee dress properly but neutrally to raise no flags. Questions should be answered succinctly and candidly with no more information than is asked for.
The interviewee will be asked if he or she has any questions.
The interviewee should be careful to ask questions in the light of an assessment of the interviewer in terms of his or her dress, manner, speech, diction, expression, as well as an assessment of his or her comfort level, and competence.
An accurate assessment of the interviewing climate is key.
Either the interviewee has been made comfortable or put on edge. Whatever the case, the interviewee should not step over the threshold of good sense, or make false assumptions.
The place of the interview is important. Is it a neutral place or the workplace of the interviewer? This tells the interviewee how personal or impersonal the interview is likely to be. It also gives a clue as to the nature of the place of employment.
The appurtenances of the office tell a story, if it is the interviewer’s workplace, about the person who is doing the interviewing.
How the interviewer handles interruptions and deals with others that may step into the office indicate the level of comfort and competence. This is all important because the interviewee does not want to be threatening, does not want the interviewer to think the interviewee is out to take the interviewer’s job.
(2) It is a godsend if the interviewee has to wait. This gives the person a chance to assess how work is done, and what the people doing the work seem to be like, how they get along, how they work, the quality of the banter between them, how they are dressed, their age, health, and efficiency, what their workstations are like, and the general climate-culture of the workplace.
Workers will be sizing up the interviewee as he or she is sizing them up. Mainly nonverbal, it gives a sense of fit from both perspectives.
(3) One of the greatest mistakes interviewees make in reading an ad for employment is seeing themselves as a “perfect fit” for the job no questions asked. They take this cockiness into the interview and are shot down and they have no idea why.
They assume because they have the education, experience, success, and moxie to do the job “right now” without any orientation or training that being hired is a matter of formality. Not!
This is a huge mistake because if you are successful with (1) and (2), whatever your qualifications and expertise, the interviewer is already trying to justify making (3) come out positive for you and the employer.
Conversely, if you have failed to convince the interviewer that you satisfy (1) and (2), he or she will be at the ready to punch holes into (3).
Remember, interviewing is likely to be a team process, each interviewer seeing you as he or she sees him or herself.
If you are truly over qualified for the position, and the interviewer doesn’t like you, chances are you will be written up as under qualified. It happens.
Most interviewers are recruited because they know the job being offered. They aren’t especially qualified to interview or assess the person being interviewed. It is a catch as catch can proposition. The person who must be professional, however, is the interviewee, and that means to tread lightly, carefully and weigh the process moment to moment and not proceed with guns blasting.
Let us say, you the interviewee is scheduled to a series of four interviews. Each is likely to be different because each interviewer operates in a private culture with a hidden agenda that is liable to be felt rather than expressed.
If the interviewer is placing more attention on (3) or qualifications when the interviewee feels this is self-evident, trouble could be brewing. It means that (1) and (2) have not been sufficiently satisfied. So, while the attention is on qualifications, the actual stone in the shoe is (1) or (2) or both.
If the interviewee catches this early enough, he or she can gauge their answers on qualifications in the rhythm that might best resonate with the interviewer. It is necessary to be careful here because the interviewee does not want to appear to be mimicking.
CASE IN POINT
This was expressed as a “cold call” interview but most interviews are conducted within companies with employees already in the system. Some rather spectacular things have happened in such an arena, and I was beneficiary of one such instance.
When I was twenty-five and a chemical sales engineer with Nalco Chemical Company, I developed a natural rapport with the Industrial Division Director, who had been, like me, a chemist in research and development. It was home to him but a foreign country to me. Moreover, he was reserved and cautious while I was aggressive and brash. He once said, “We make a complete person.”
The year I led the Industrial Division in sales he came out to travel with me. He saw how I adjusted my approach from account to account and person to person. I was now an area manager still selling but with men under me. He started to shuttle men from across the country to travel with me, and become acquainted with my style. He also arranged for me to make presentations at regional meetings.
Five years later, he was elevated to vice president of international operations. Nalco was growing more than 25 percent per year. He called one evening, and asked if I would like to come to work for him. “Doing what?” I asked. “Being my roving ambassador about the globe. Come to Chicago and we can discuss it.” I said, “You come to Louisville and discuss it with my family.” He came. I wanted him to be on my turf, not his, and to see how sincere he was.
“Aren’t you worried about promoting me over so many veterans?” I asked. “I’m hardly qualified for this assignment.” Then he reminded me of us “making a complete
person.” It was not so much that I was qualified but that my aggression complemented his hesitancy. We became a team. I was thirty-years-old.
It would eventually bring me to South Africa in 1968, and as many of you know, a period which now consumes me as I’m writing a novel about it.
There is a certain serendipity to this, which I didn’t see coming but which was consistent with my stoichiometry. In any case, it was a matter of chemistry and we are all human chemicals.
* * *