A DIFFERENT CHRISTMAS MESSAGE!

A DIFFERENT CHRISTMAS MESSAGE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 21, 2009

FOR YOUR INFORMATION


Sitting here at my computer, thinking of all my readers, and the many missives I've sent their way, knowing many of you personally but many more only through this medium, I am given to reflect a little on the reality of life, living, and the tenuous nature of it all.

It is the eternal conundrum of endings and beginnings that confounds us with the passing of time. It is the reason Christmas is a time of joy but also of sorrow, as it is so easy to forget that joy and sorrow are different aspects of the same thing, as are endings and beginnings.

* * *

The "Bill" of which this note was coined is a giant of a man, physically, intellectually, and philosophically. He holds more than 100 patents reminiscent of Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the great mathematician, and has written three books that I doubt many of you have heard of much less read, but books nonetheless which were life changing experiences for me.

He has been a friend for moving on to two decades since we exchanged books in 1991. Ironies of ironies, I visited him in 1991 at his consultancy office high in the Twin Towers of New York City, and then at his home in Bayside, New York, where he invited a potpourri of very interesting people in the engineering, business and academic professions.

The book I exchanged with him was my WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS for his FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES, both diatribes on corpocracy.

* * *

As often is my wont, I attack a subject from offstage, and this is no exception. I write to Bill of my moral dilemma from the perspective of a profile of my sister, Pat. It is a Christmas and New Year reflection of one getting long in the tooth.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to each and every one of you, and may you always be well.

* * *

THE MISSIVE TO MY FRIEND, BILL:


Bill,

This past year has been a strange one, but what year isn't?

As my pragmatic sister says, "You're ahead of the game, Jimmy, if you outlive the year."

She and I were born on the same day two years apart, still working, still building her war chest and still pragmatic as ever.

She has never worried a minute of her life about the things I take so seriously, was an indifferent student in school, but loved to work since a little girl, and has more practical gumption than I'll ever have, doesn't read my stuff -- too long -- but doesn't criticize me for writing it.

She has always had her two feet planted firmly on the ground, never has given one thought to soaring, goes to bed early, rises equally early, uses a cell phone, but seldom watches television or reads a book.

She would be as happy on the Irish bog as was her grandmother, whom she resembles, and I'm telling you this, why?

I'm wondering now if such people as she have never needed course corrections in the history of society because they knew the way without knowing it.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and Carrie,

And may you always be well,

Sire

PS. Betty sends her love, too.

PSS The other two books of my friend are THE NEW PLAGUE, and HAVE FUN AT WORK.

CONFIDENT SELLING and a Glimpse of Dr. Fisher's "OPEN LIBRARY"

CONFIDENT SELLING – AS IT APPEARS IN DR. FISHER’S “OPEN LIBRARY”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© DECEMBER 20, 2009

REFERENCE:

People write and ask me how I got started writing. The short answer is that I’ve always been writing ever since a boy. The long answer is more complicated.

My first book was written while on assignment in South Africa for Nalco Chemical Company. It was called, "Sales Training & Technical Development" (1968), and was written for field engineers and salesmen in South Africa who lacked such a guide. I still hold the copyright.

When I returned to the states in 1969, a retired person in his thirties, I thought nothing would be easier than to become a writer. I acquired a national agent on the strength of some short fiction I wrote, but he was unable to place my work.

I then contacted the William Morris Literary Agency in New York City, explained my interest, and got a blistering reply from Mr. Morris. He claimed never before to have come across such a cockamamie request from somebody doing so well in the full flush of life, and wanting to give it all up for the uncertainty of being a writer. He said the writing samples I sent were promising but lacked commercial value.

Was I discouraged? No. Disappointed? Yes. If writing had been a job, I suppose I would have been discouraged, but writing was a vocation. A vocation is a journey and not an end. A vocation understands disappointments are part of the process.

So, I sat down in 1970 and turned out a manuscript in six weeks, called it "Let's Take the Worry Out of Selling," which was based in part on what I had written for the men in South Africa.

The manuscript was sent off to Prentice-Hall, Inc. without protocol. Within a month, it was accepted for publication without editing, and published as CONFIDENT SELLING in September 1970 with a 1971 copyright. Over the next twenty years, it sold roughly 100,000 copies with more than 20 printings.

CONFIDENT SELLING's incredible history is explained and what the book is about on "OPEN LIBRARY" (www.google.com) by typing in James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

CONFIDENT SELLING was printed in a monthly series in a national magazine, offered in shorter form in airline magazines, and was considered for an audiocassette and video version.

I mention the latter because the 11 o’clock television news anchor for Tampa’s ABC affiliate wanted to form a consortium around CONFIDENT SELLING to reach a wider audience. I told him Prentice-Hall held the copyright. P-H's demands proved excessive, so the project was dropped. I have never surrendered my copyright since. Trust me, an author has no rights of his own material once he gives up his copyright.

(Incidentally, I do have the copyright to this book and have had it since April 30, 1990 -- copyright registration number A 240727 -- as Prentice-Hall allowed it to lapse.)

* * *

Some of you wonder why I call the corporation “corpocracy,” or why I am so hard on the corporation. It is visceral as all my writings are based on my own experience. For example, I would not have received royalties for the serialized version of the CONFIDENT SELLING had I not seen my book on the cover at a magazine in a kiosk.

* * *

CONFIDENT SELLING'S CHALLENGE

If you're a sales person who's got what it takes to be the BEST, but you haven't proved yourself yet, or you have proved yourself, but you're finding it rough maintaining the tempo, here's a dynamic new confidence builder that helps you LEAP over the final hurdle TO SUCCESS TO CONTINUED SUCCESS! This book, your own private counselor, shows you HOW TO DEVELOP CONFIDENCE in your ability to sell. By the same token, it demonstrates WHY YOU SHOULD BE CONFIDENT. Here's the DOOR TO OPPORTUNITY -- self-reliance, self-esteem, not to mention self-discipline -- with YOU holding THE ONLY KEY to the biggest sale you will ever make, BELIEF IN YOURSELF!

* * *

FIRST SENTENCE OF CONFIDENT SELLING:
:
“This book is written for the person who has reached an impasse with him or herself.”


* * *

DESCRIPTION OF CONFIDENT SELLING

CONFIDENT SELLING is a breakthrough book in that it looks at the selling situation from the perspective of the seller, which it claims is the main obstacle in the selling situation. The assumptions the seller makes about the buyer, the buyer's interest in and ability to buy, are predicated too often on faulty information, information derived from the failure of the seller to sell him or herself on the cost benefit to the buyer to purchase the product or service.

CONFIDENT SELLING insists that selling is not a matter of intimidation or a matter of finessing the buyer into a mood to purchase the product or service being offered. On the contrary, CONFIDENT SELLING is about gauging the buyer's mood, readiness, need and ability to form a partnership with the seller. This requires the seller to think not as a seller but as a buyer, as the one that is to purchase the product or service and the consequences of such a transaction.

CONFIDENT SELLING argues that absolutely every endeavor in life is one between a seller and a buyer whether the seller is far removed from an actual selling situation of a product but is a doctor, lawyer, accountant, consultant, organizational administrator, priest, minister or rabbi, nun or teacher, factory worker, independent contractor or an employee of a public or private agency providing a service.

Selling, CONFIDENT SELLING, is saying is the noblest profession of all because it involves everyone in every pursuit every day.

* * *

The theme of CONFIDENT SELLING was elaborated with a new toolbox in the Pulitzer Prize nominated book, CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992), which is available on-line or at your favorite bookstore.

OF SPECIAL NOTE

Of Dr. Fisher's nine published books, two have been considered "breakthrough" books because they have defied conventional wisdom.

WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A View from the Trenches (1990) signaled the moving away from the manager-employee algorithm to an emphasis on the emergence of the new workforce of professional workers. Dr. Fisher argued that workers were managed, motivzated, manipulated and mobilized as if predominantly blue-collar when they were predominantly white-collar or professional. Now, twenty years later, and more relevant than ever, tradition still treats workers as if knowledge is the domain of managers when it is now primarily the domain of professionals. Knowledge is power, and workers have the power, but still behave as it they don't. Read about WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS in the "Open Library."

CONFIDENT SELLING FOR THE 90s (1992) is a breaktrhough book in that it sees the selling problem the reverse of how it is traditionally viewed. The claim here is that the obstacle to success in selling of anything by anyone in any profession is not that of the buyer, but the seller. Check CSFT90s in the "Open Library."

* * *

THE IMPORTANCE OF EVERYONE! A PLUMBER, ELECTRICIAN AND DR. STEINMETZ!

THE IMPORTANCE OF EVERYONE – A PLUMBER, ELECTRICIAN AND DR. STEINMETZ!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 18, 2009

Over the weekend, our electrical heating and air conditioning system went out. At the same time, our hot water heater went on the blink. We were experiencing a mild cold wave in Florida and were not used to being unable to take a shower, use our electrical dishwasher or even to wash our hands in hot water.

Not being handy, we have what is called “Home Shield,” which provides such services at a hefty quarterly cost, which we have been paying for nearly twenty-two years, or since we returned from Europe and made this our home.

There are two things I have learned:

(1) The things that I can do well, and

(2) The things that I cannot do at all.

In my long life, I’ve never crossed that barrier so I have saved myself the embarrassment of having to pay for the damages I caused because I tried to do something myself of which I lacked the expertise.

So, today I had an electrician and a plumber come to my house, sort out my problems and with due diligence enjoy watching them solve them with panache.

The electrician had only to check the reset button in the air conditioner, and voila, heat and cool air were back.

The plumber had only to drain the water heater and replace the heating coil, and voila, hot water returned.

* * *

The speed, agility and modesty with which these two men did their jobs reminded me of a personal favorite of mine, the irascible and cocky German-American mathematician and electrical engineer, Charles Proteus Steinmetz (April 9., 1865 – October 26, 1923), who one day found himself consulting for General Electric.

The system electrical generators were down and GE was losing money, and quickly brought Steinmetz in to solve the problem.

He examined the machines, checked them with his instruments, and then asked for a rubber hammer. He gently ran his hand over the steel skin of the cylinder, marked it with a chalk, and then gave it a single blow at that spot. The system came alive the generators kicked in and operations resumed.

* * *

Later, the Director of Operations received a consulting fee from Dr. Steinmetz for $10,000. The director contacted the consultant and said, “Your fee of $10,000 seems extravagant. Five people have to sign off on this type of request and so I will need an itemized bill describing your services.” Dr. Steinmetz said that would be no problem. Here was the itemization of his charges:

$1.00 for hitting the system with a hammer.

$9,999.00 for knowing where to place the blow.

This was reported a number of years ago in The Reader’s Digest. Steinmetz, who had more than 200 patents to his name, suffered the ignominy of dwarfism and being a hunchback. He made his mind that of a super cerebral athlete. Indeed, much of General Electric’s rise to prominence is accredited to Dr. Steinmetz's inventions in the area of artificial lighting.


* * *

I told this story to the electrician and the plumber citing how important they were in their special knowledge, as Steinmetz was with his. We need electrical engineers, but we also need plumbers and electricians as well, and none more than the other, but all equally the same.

* * *

READER appreciates IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE!

READER appreciates IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 14, 2009

REFERENCE:

A person I do not know and have never met but grew up in my hometown IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE has written a warm and moving letter about my book with that title.

The book was written as a snapshot of a time now long past in the middle of the twentieth century in the middle of the United States and in the middle of this sleepy community, Clinton, Iowa, on the banks of the Mississippi River, where young people grew up around the centrally located courthouse.

Like many other small communities across America, there was no television, no mega sports, no big automobiles, no manicured lawns because the nation was at war and there was rationing and victory gardens instead of lawns.

There was radio, movies, high school sports, in the case of Clinton, there was the Industrial Baseball League, where men too young or too old to go to war played for the fun of it. People drove old jalopies, took the bus, or rode their bicycles to work.

It was a time when the four faces of the magnificent Clinton County Courthouse clock chimed on the half hour throwing a metaphorical shadow over young people’s lives. This made certain that they would have no excuse for being late for meals prepared from victory garden staples by their mothers.

This community wasn’t the exception but the rule in that most stay-at-home mothers were homemakers in two-parent families. Few parents in this neighborhood managed to get beyond grammar school, and nearly all of the men worked in Clinton factories or the gigantic railroad yards, or on the trains from Clinton to Boone, Iowa, as this was a factory-railroad town. Divorce was as foreign as an ancestral language.

It was a time in hot weather that people slept with their families at Riverview Park, left windows open and doors unlocked, bicycles on the side of the house without locking chains. If they had an automobile, it was at the curb with keys in the ignition, knowing neither neighbor nor stranger would disturb their possessions. In winter, schools never closed even when snow banks were four feet high.

Idyllic? Perhaps. Accurate? Probably not. But it is the way it is remembered nearly sixty years later.

* * *

A READER appreciates IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE!

Dear Dr. Fisher:

RE: In the Shadow of the Courthouse

I wanted to write to you and make a few comments on your book, In the Shadow of the Courthouse. I can't begin to tell you how much I have enjoyed reading your reminiscences of growing up in Clinton and, more specifically, "In the shadow of the courthouse."

I was born in 1947 and lived at 220 1st Avenue for the first twenty-one years of my life. My father was the first baby baptized in the "new" St. Patrick's church in 1905 and was a mail carrier for over twenty years on a route that bordered the courthouse area.

When not playing ball, or skating at the Sheriff's office during the winter, I worked for Gordon Goetzle at Gordy's Standard Service across the street from the ball field. The names I remember such as Jakubsen, Cavanaugh, Witt, and many others are all a part of my history, although it came about a few years after yours. I clearly remember Gus Witt skating during the winter at the Sheriff's office and at Kahler's Marina and, as a matter of fact, I have found out that Gus still resides in the area in Camanche.

I was one of the first group of young men admitted to Mt. St. Clare and I'm proud to say that I was one of the fortunate Clinton guys to marry a "Mountie," we've been married 38 years and live in St. Louis.

I still keep in touch with the nuns from Mt. St. Clare and visited with them just recently at the Centicle. Tom McEleney was the best man in my wedding and I maintain contact with numerous other friends, especially with the advent of Facebook.

My real purpose in writing to you was to express my gratitude for your accomplishment in capturing what it was like to grow up in Clinton, no matter the time period, and how, although you may physically leave the city, you never can get it out of your mind.

I enjoyed every page and had great difficulty putting the book down. Incidentally, Howard Judd was my swimming coach for five years in high school, I swam varsity for him and the River Kings when I was a freshman and lifeguard at the pool during the summer working for Mrs. Judd (Elsie) and Howard.

Sincerely,

Steve W. Hoosack
Ballwin, MO

PS: If interested in your own copy of this book, contact www.authorhouse.com.

THE AXEMATKER'S GIFT -- THE DOUBLE-EDGED BLADE OF COMMUNITY HISTORY!

THE AXEMAKER’S GIFT – THE DOUBLE-EDGED BLADE OF COMMUNITY HISTORY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 13, 2009

We Americans may wax nostalgic but we have no commitment to the past. We treat the present as the future and ride change as a meteor to oblivion.

We cut away the way it was to a new reality, a reality that we believe finds us gaining something desired but at the expense of something lost forever, and for which we can only pine away in our dreams for it shall never return.

When there is no permanence, no central core to existence, there is no attachment, nothing is sacred, everything is expendable like worn out shoes and old clothes. We have no roots. We become a homeless mind.

* * *

I grew up in a sleepy Iowa town on the Mississippi River called Clinton, Iowa. It was a time when most of us were too poor, and our parents too worn out from suffering through the Great Depression to consider the “cut and control” consequences of change, that is, from “what is” from “what was.” Although tired and weary, they had values, beliefs, and solid faith in a just God.

All changed when they were waken from their lethargy with World War Two.

Clinton, that sleepy town on the river, was also an industrial town with many factories producing sugar from corn, buttons for clothes, seeds for flowers and other plants, garments, candy, alcohol, feed for cattle, packaged chickens, wire shelves for homes, steel tubes for sundry uses, window, sashes and doors for homes, cellophane for industry and homemakers, beams for bridges, and fresh bread baked daily by a national firm.

Overnight, Clinton became a military/industrial complex, and an important contributor to the war effort as well as sending many of its sons and daughters to military service to fight and serve across the globe.

* * *

Clinton, at the time, had more than twenty Protestant churches, five Catholic churches, and a bustling business district on Fifth Avenue South at the South End, and on Main Street at the North End. It had five parochial grammar schools and twelve public grammar schools, two public high schools, and one Catholic high school. It also had boarding schools for girls at Mount St. Clare Academy, High School and Junior College and our Lady of Angels Academy and High School. It had the magnificent Riverview Stadium and River Front Park, Root Park, Chancy Park, and many smaller parks including two picturesque parks downtown. It had the “Big Tree” that separated the North End, or Lyons from the South End, or Clinton. It had the natural umbrella of gigantic elm trees that stretched from Fifth Avenue South and Fourth Street to Bluff Boulevard. The bluff was a winding road cut from the limestone hills that abutted it with eloquent homes on its crest.

At Christmas Time, the Iten mansion would be decked out in thousands of Christmas lights with every Christmas theme imaginable rising from the bluff to the heights of the home.

The Clinton Herald was the main organ of communication of this sleepy town of 33,000, and it did its best to bring Christmas and Season’s cheer to the community with colorful and thoughtful themes throughout the holidays. KROS (Keep Right On Smiling) was the community radio station, broadcasting news, but most particularly, the athletic contests of Clinton high school teams.

And then there was the Clinton Country Club on Fourteenth Street sprawling for acres with a carefully maintained 18-hole golf course, clubhouse and meeting place for the movers and shakers of the community.

* * *

More than 100 years ago, an Irish priest came to this sleepy town on the river and created St. Patrick’s Church, Rectory and School. I attended grammar school there, and it became the roots from which everything else has sprung. The good priest also created a hospital, Mercy, a home for nuns and young girls, Mount St. Clare, a home for the aged, Mount Alverno, and was an influence in having the Davenport Diocese purchase property of an anti-Catholic organization that became Sacred Heart Church, Rectory, and Grammar School.

One hundred years ago, a series of movers and shakers started to settle in Clinton. They would starts businesses, create jobs, and build school, churches, and a solid infrastructure. They were builders of permanence, one commissioning a world famous architect to build a department store. They also built an opera house and theatre for the legitimate stage. A world famous actress and clown grew out of Clinton’s soil.

And at mid-century, because many of these booming manufacturing operations hired poor Clinton kids to work in their factories during the summer, Clinton has contributed skilled minds across the United States to become movers and shakers in their own right.

* * *

But alas, the past is dead, the present tainted, and the future left up for grabs. There are no longer five Catholic parishes but one. There are no longer twenty Protestant congregations but half that number and many of them are struggling mightily today to stay operational. Mount St. Clare and the Lady’s of Angels are penny postcards of history no longer visible in the firmament. .

The company that converted corn into sugar, and was responsible for my getting a college education by employing me for five summers, is no longer a Clinton operation, but part of an international mega-corporation.

This mega-corporation has swallowed up the neighborhood of my birth, South Clinton. It no longer exists replaced by silos and hoppers, railroad tracks and loading docks.

The beautiful buildings of downtown Clinton, especially the one designed by the great architect, is now a HUD casualty. Other prominent downtown buildings have even faired less well as Fifth Avenue limps forward no longer the showcase it once was, when it bustled with droves of shoppers on a weekend. Discount stores on Camanche Avenue South on the periphery of Clinton provide staples while most Clintians visit the Quad Cities 38 miles away of a weekend for major purchases, or they gamble away their limited funds at the new Mecca, the lavish casino in the same Camanche Avenue neighborhood.

There is only one jewel left, a reminder of yesterday, a place called “Guzzardos,” a gift and bookshop. This warm and personal little shop keeps the tradition alive of picture book Clinton, stubbornly resisting change. It has also become a home for Clinton authors who return with books they have written.

The Clinton Herald, like newspapers across the country, struggles to stay in print, and is no long a Clinton paper, but a Clinton County organ, and KROS has been reduced to an AM-radio station.

Second Street, the seven-mile street connecting the North to the South is penciled with fast-food restaurants as is the case with many other small towns across America. Clinton High, which was once architecturally a beautiful campus, a landmark soft on the eyes, now looks more like a fortress than an open campus of learning.

Riverview Stadium and River Front Park, however, have been modernized, and a dike built from one end of the town to the other to prevent the raging spring waters of the Mississippi from drowning adjacent property. There are always pluses with the negatives, and this is a definite positive.

I’m not so sure the demise of the Clinton Country Club is a positive even if it is to allow expansion of the on-line university, Ashford University, an educational institution that has already erased Franciscan University, which had replaced Mount St. Clare Academy, High School, and College from the community. It may prove to be, but it worries me, at what expense?

* * *

All I do know is the “cut and control” phenomenon has become a cultural reality to this day. We take pride in progress as our most important product refusing or unable to see what we get for the progress compared to what we give up. What we give up never returns. That is a given.

Once you make the cut, you cannot mend the damage. You cut a highway through rich farmland; you cannot restore that land to productive crops. It is lost forever.

I wrote a book in 2004, NEAR JOURNEY’S END? CAN PLANET EARTH SURVIVE SELF-INDULGENT MAN? It was never published. We don’t like to think about the unthinkable. We just move through the queue like cattle to the slaughter until it is too late, and so it has been for the past 12,000 years since we moved from hunters and gatherers, taking only what we needed to survive, to agriculture and forming communities and hierarchies, developing better tools, exploiting the land, mushrooming in population . . . from past imperfect, to present ridiculous to future perfect where we believe we have answers to everything with the new god of science.

* * *

THE SILENT MAN IN THE PEW SPEAKS OUT!

The Silent Man in the Pew Speaks Out

A Plebian View of the Roman Catholic Church in Decline

PART ONE

THE ROMAN CATHOLIC LAITY IN SEARCH OF ITS CHURCH

James R. Fisher, Jr.
Written in 1968
© November 2005

___________________________________________________

NOTE: This was never published. It was written just before I took on a life changing assignment. Only in my 30s, I was being sent to South Africa to facilitate the merger of our South African subsidiary with a British affiliate and a South African chemical company.

This essay was written only days before going to South Africa. The Church was in turmoil trying to assimilate the tenets of Vatican I and II, while the US was in chaos over saber rattling in Viet Nam. The disenfranchised generation of American youth born to baby boomer parents was now eligible for the draft. My generation went into the military without protest, but this generation was inclined to burn their draft cards or escape to Canada. I was leaving this all behind to take on the South African assignment. It was early April 1968.

A devout Catholic, I would emerge from this experience a different man. I went into Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and came out of it aware of the darkness in my own heart. I am now writing a novel of that experience.

Religion was one of my anchors as a youth, and I would imagine if I were a Jew I would have been considered orthodox. Garry Wills wrote a book in 2002 titled “Why I Am A Catholic.” I found the title amusing.

Roman Catholic indoctrination is so strong that if you receive it while very young there is little chance you can ever escape it no matter what games you play with your mind. I came to South Africa sure of my faith and my identity, and left in search of the real parents of my soul.

I make no apologies for the sophomoric style of this essay. Recording it now, unchanged, for the record, I see that I was a Catholic writer before publishing my first essay or book, and I think it is fair to say, after eight books and more than 350 published essays to date, I remain true to that identity.

My novel, which is to be titled “Green Island in a Black Seas,” relates to my struggle with South African Apartheid, my company’s duplicity, my Irish Roman Catholic faith, my marriage vows, my wife and four children, and a life that brought to the fore one word to describe everything: betrayal.

Writing has provided sanctuary and retreat from confusion. Writing has made me aware you don’t have to be published to be a writer. You just have to make connection with yourself by connecting the letters of the alphabet. It is published here as an invitation to readers to ponder their own situation.


Note recorded this date: November 20, 2005


____________________________________________________________________


To a casual observer, it would seem that the Roman Catholic Church has always taken itself seriously. With an air of omniscience, it has conducted affairs of the Catholic world in a somewhat unapproachable, even unimpeachable hauteur. Wasn’t the Church man’s only means to eternal salvation?

Not long ago, this question would have been considered academic, in fact absurd, in the eyes of the average Catholic. Ecclesiastical thinking and activity had not trickled down to his level. This was not surprising. He had become conditioned to being spoon fed a definitive, catechetical approach to religious education. A comprehensive and conceptual understanding of the Church, her theology, philosophy, and history was not promulgated to the general laity.

The reason for this was quite simple. An authoritarian and paternal Church hierarchy did not feel it was needed. That is why the present remedial and ameliorating steps being simultaneously considered and implemented have been found both stultifying and confusing to many on both sides of the altar.

Church history indicates that this current situation is actually following precedence. Crises in the Church have invariably been followed by Vatican Councils, which in turn have led to new doctrines and dogma. The present contingency is similar to its historic predecessor but yet different. It differs in scope, mood, and ambition. A very real threat that mid-twentieth century man will finally reject Christianity has put the Church in a most conciliatory frame of mind. Worthy and necessary as Christian unity may be, there exists cold realities, which must be faced.

Catholicism has instilled beliefs, attitudes, habits, and practices with which only Catholics have been identified. Much of this has been somewhat symbolic, like not eating meat on Friday. Nevertheless, these are real and fixed in the minds and hearts of many who call themselves, “Catholic.” Such a preconditioned laity may attract obfuscation and conflict instead of harmony and a spirit of ecumenicism if they do not see Church history and thought in true perspective, as well as understand what is taking place today. The man in the pew must identify with the Church in transition, or all is for naught.

Born more than thirty years ago a congenial member of the Roman Catholic Church, this observer has no claim to authority. However, raised and inculcated in Catholicism in the traditional fashion has produced its effects and memories. For example, a dependence on dogma and doctrine is remembered instead of the beauty of Christianity. Even after reason prevailed, these tenets have merged and submerged, often obliterating rational clarity.

That is why an issue like birth control languishes in the mind of the Catholic, waiting, desperately waiting for Church sanction, even though logic and reason has already bombarded his mind with the answer.

Consequently, it is quite typical for the average Catholic to accept trauma, doubt, confusion, thought, and education as the natural progression to truth, understanding, and meaning as he is able to glean it.

This experience is necessarily private and usually committed to silence. But the times dictate that this must change. It is not the individual but the entire Church, which is now going through a painful reappraisal. Ultimately, it will be the cataclysm of all Catholic and Christian thought and interpretation, which will prove the destiny of this FAITH, and its relevance to this time.

Seldom does the man in the pew, the true plebian, express his will. This must not be. Perhaps one plebian view may encourage many others to unshackle their minds from wondering in silence about their world and their fate. Their responsibility to contribute to the dialogue has been obviated by history.

Three centuries after Christ’s death this did not seem so certain. The Church faced a great test. A Greek monk named Arius was preaching a doctrine that Christ was the Son of God, but neither consubstantial nor coeternal with the Father. This doctrine called Arianism was the reason for the Council of Nicaea. Here the Church solemnly proclaimed her belief in “ . . .one Lord, Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten Son, born of the Father before all time, God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not created, the same in Being with the Father (consubstantial) . . .”

Today we know this as the Nicene Creed, which has become a touchstone of sound orthodoxy and Church unity.

A period of grace, power, and growth followed for the Church, only to be tainted by the spoils of such good fortune. It was Middle Age. Simony in the papacy and the episcopacy; marriage or concubinage in the secular clergy, and sporadic incontinence among monks contributed to the view that the popes and the religious were vulnerable, fallible men; that the papacy was not a fortress of order and a tower of salvation. Even so, it would be centuries before the doctrine of infallibility and celibacy would be postulated as dogma and doctrine respectively.

Simony was the ecclesiastical correlate of contemporary corruption in politics. Although concubinage and marriage weren’t openly condoned among the general clergy, the practice was common and not subject to the pressure of public ridicule and scorn. Nonetheless, this situation did test the fiber and substance of the Church’s unity and challenge its security. Quiet reform followed, complemented by a series of wise, scrupulous and discerning pontiffs.

The nadir of the papacy gave way to a new day in papal authority, supremacy, and popularity. Its splendor and magnificence greatly affected the temporal states and their balance of power. Even culture, education, and wealth were somewhat in the control of the Church. So great was her dominance that the temptation to dictate to the temporal community on mundane matters was a very real problem. On occasion, she would yield to this pressure, but never without finally retreating to a less advantageous position. This would be a less painfully learned.

Meanwhile, our progenitors of that day were satisfied to accept the Church’s dictums and doctrines with blind faith. They embraced a primitive type of ritualism and colorful pageantry with veneration. Lacking education and the opportunity to better themselves, they were moved less by the reality and drama of Jesus than by the chimerical preaching of fear.

Prepossessed with the negative, sin and hell was understood and preferred over the positive of grace and heaven. The existence of these uncomplicated souls, in fact their culture, was totally God-centered. This would not last.

Much like a centrifugal force, the villain, time, would come to act on man’s conscience to drive Him out of his centric, ultimately to the periphery of his mind. More on this later.

The intrigue of the Church hierarchy and royalty was completely foreign to the laity of the middle ages. Faith was a simple and pure commitment unshackled by lust, greed, and pride. The clergy and laity were essentially of two separate worlds.

These humble brethren considered the secular clergy several stations above them and the episcopacy beyond classification. Perhaps this explains why public protest of corruption in the Church was not proffered from this quarter. Unschooled, subjugated, controlled, they went through life isolated from the storm gathering overhead, sheltered in their simple, dedicated and honest Faith. The church would not receive its challenge from them. They were, indeed, the Children of God.

Much like a vintage wine aging gave the Church a delicate bouquet. Unfortunately, it was also intoxicating. The Church became more and more indurate to the realities of contemporary life. She lost touch with her people and control of her clergy.

It was at this moment in history that a distraught monk, Martin Luther, tortured by a hatred of authority, nailed his ninety-five theses to the Wittenberg church door. The Reformation followed, concomitantly an equally significant evolvement, The Renaissance.

This explosion was of sufficient magnitude to dislodge God from the center of man’s conscience and to trigger the centrifugal force of attending events. Truly, a new day was at hand.

The rebirth of learning and culture kindled in man a new awareness of the genius within him. It marked a time when he became preoccupied with his own glorification at the expense of Christ.

In such an innocent and innocuous manner, the seeds of existentialism were planted, only to wait centuries for man to harvest them.

Though the center of man’s existence shifted to man, this was indeed a self-conscious change. A taint of guilt was manifested in his preoccupation with religious themes in a disproportionate share of his creative endeavors. Science and the “Age of Reason,” which was yet to come, would ease his conscience and liberate his intellect from this confining abstraction.

Another factor contributing to and supporting Church reform was the industrial and economic revolution. Perhaps this sustained and polarized the Church split more than the theological and ecclesiastical questions of the day.

The agrarian nature of the Church was neither prepared for nor able to cope with the emergence of nationalism. Thus, while her spiritual control was being tested, a struggle for power and national identity was further usurping her influence over the state. Accordingly, the issue of Church-State separation would come to be tete-beche obfuscated by devious maneuvering on both sides.
Frustration of this age would lead to schisms, wars, and much suffering, a pattern repeated to this day. Man’s tempo of living would continue to escalate with passing time. The formula would change little:

Progress giving birth to new wealth, exposing old poverty; freedom producing
a mutated form of servitude; opportunity awakening sleeping discrimination;
growth inadvertently causing atrophy; contentment discovering and exposing
misery . . . . . .

would concatenate its way in a quasi-convoluted fashion into mid-twentieth century life. Skepticism, nihilism, isolationism, and unbridled apathy would come to be discovered, then forgotten, and again rediscovered with a new and frenetic frenzy.

Point-counterpoint would come to weave a melody maddening in its intensity through the conscience of man’s mind to snuff out forever the pure and the simple, never again an innocent and unconscious love of God.

Were it possible to go back, one might contemplate the effect the Soul of sixteenth century man might have on modern man. Would it assist him in channeling his energetic driving renewal spirit, and simplify the priority of his preferences? One must wonder.

So often trees and forest seem to merge and submerge into unity for him that bewilderment appears to be his constant companion. Twenty centuries of Church guidance has neither allayed his fears nor reconciled him to accept Christ’s simple changeless and ETERNAL TRUTHS.

The growing complexity of life around him acts as an endless distraction. Only two horrendous world wars have staggered him to attention and awareness of the grave dangers confronting him.

The Holocaust might be imagined:

Completely shipwrecked, the flotsam and jetsam of all ages appear before us.
Fragments of cherished beliefs and ideals of centuries can be seen surfacing, but
only fragments. The heavy bulky awkward shackles of righteous Christianity;
lugubrious and somber mores; stiff and pretentious society; and presumptuous
and greedy colonialism seem to coalesce, producing new densities of meaning and
relevance. Mired in the mud of time, the tissue of man’s fantasies.

Civilized man was finally discovering how fragile, what a put on, his civility. The atrocities of war had given him a new awareness of his depravity and the bestial character existing within his nature.

A critical focus on what he was as well as what he pretended to be, precipitated by this terrifying revelation, was inevitable. Everything now was suspect. It was now considered essential to disinvest himself from the trappings of society and the conventional ideals of civilization. Change, departure from his modus operandi, would be his first step. This would overcome man’s characteristic inertia and establish the required momentum to bring him into a new day. We now find ourselves in that day.

This collision of change had to strike a cornerstone of man’s foundation, religion. It can be said that the Roman Catholic Church did not ignore the tremors nor fail to record the vibrations. Aware that the laity and secular clergy were restless, and in a changing mood, the Church allowed a questioning of basic Catholic tenets. This is still in progress.

Final positions on celibacy, papal authority, infallibility, birth control, and many other issues are yet to be given. Even so, it appears safe to assume that a new religiosity may be added to a growing list of modern improvisations, which include a new sociology, economics, and technology. A more flexible viable one is replacing the staid structure. Moreover, a new disposition has been manifested:

What has been is truly passé; what is now is of central interest; what is to be is truly blasé.

Christianity, and its promise of eternal salvation, is no longer centermost in man’s life but rather on the periphery of his existence. He is quite active and busy, not in search of God, but of himself. Truly, man is unknown, causing him to grope and stumble in the darkness of his identity. Thus, this paradox unfolds:

Hope born out of despair; opportunity out of inequity; power out of the collapse of order
and authority.

Perplexed, he is a sometime tyro pretending to be the epicurean. Whereas he once understood the “good life” to be the purifying experience of hard work, he now pays some tribute to the philosophy of hedonism as if he understood it.

Since man is happier at work than at play, this has in effect made him an alien to himself as well as an emotional cripple. The overflow of this spirit and dilemma appears to have seeped into the Church.

From this progression, a new laity has come into being, dominated by affluence and quasi-intellectualism. It seeks a new role, new image, new sense of fulfillment, and a new power.

A cry for change, for renewal, has reverberated from every quarter. Vatican I and Vatican II gave it the hope it needed and the promise for a new quintessence. Time, patience, and understanding will determine if this is a true bridge to hope and a new and unity or just another ephemera. It will also put Martine Luther and Protestantism in a new perspective. Surely, today personifies the mod and thinking of this giant of man in the Church.

A strong and vibrant middle class has suddenly discovered Luther. Nearly five hundred years late, the laity and secular clergy are intrigued with Luther’s challenge to the papacy, the doctrine of infallibility, celibacy, freedom of conscience, and even the liturgy. Perhaps the only thing that is constant is change itself.

Summarily excommunicated and painted a devil by the then Catholic world, Luther now shines out in God’s heavenly firmament. Perhaps he knows that the contemporary of his celebrated antagonist, the Catholic theologian, is presently his staunch ally and stout defender. Theologians are not only listening, reading and studying Luther’s one-time-heresies, but are considering ways to implement them quickly into Roman Catholicism. Even though this may prove to be a providential strategy and a sound policy, one must still wonder why the rush.

Many pat and reasonable answers might be given, and in many cases, have been. It has been suggested that the Church has frankly been in error; that it has been out of touch with the present world; that it is horribly out of date. It has been suggested that, indeed, she is a pillar blindly standing in the road of progress.

Despite whatever validity these evaluations may have, they are not acceptable to this observer. That is why the picture of man in continuous struggle with his heart, mind, and yes, soul, has been proffered here. Much more is at stake. Simple easy answers will no longer suffice. Christianity, not only Roman Catholicism, has been losing popularity with the common man in this uncommon age. The essence of this challenge is that Christianity, not only Catholicism, is on the block with survival in the balance. Why?

Out of the maze of conflict and confusion has arisen a new man with a new sense of destiny. He sees himself walking among gods. His genius has created the ultimate weapon, synthetic life, interplanetary machines, transplantation of human organs, etc.

This discovery of god-like powers has moved him naturally into a new sense of cosmology and theology. He now sees himself as having the power of greatness within him, reasoning that he is truly the temple of the Universal God, or more traditionally, of Jesus Christ. His body is his church. A peripatetic philosophy of introspection has seized his mind. He welcomes no guidance, no interference, and certainly no authoritative control.

An eternal adolescent, man seeks privilege without responsibility, power without control, peace without sacrifice or restrain, and contentment without struggle.

History appears to have been surgically removed from his conscience by the scalpel of pride, and candid self-glorification.

Quite often, man is found wearing the façade of contentment, the veneer of complacency, betraying the fever which continuously rages within him. Might this fever be that of total disenchantment?

Whether it is fair to say that modern man is wandering aimlessly, uprooted and anchorless, certainly his direction, action and predilection give credence to such speculation. Arius must have felt his antichrist theology was ripe for the society of his day when it behaved in a similar fashion. The necrologists of today have sensed that society is now running concurrently with this philosophy, and therefore boldly published the obituary of God. Perhaps they have something.

Irrational as it may seem, society appears bent on feeding the fever with which it is being consumed. Once panacea were panacea were panacea. No longer would this seem to be so. Simple answers to man’s complex allusions sans struggle, sans searching, sans doubting, sans fear, sans the idea of God are offered to a deliriously receptive, hopeful battered mankind. Man is too numb and preoccupied to question their validity.

Such an attractively wrapped package of essence was certain to jar the very foundation of Christendom. Perhaps the effects it would come to have on the clergy as well as the laity, and their respective reactions to it, should have been predicted. No one was apparently watching the store.

This is not surprising. Society has come to expect professionals of all endeavors to maintain a frigid detachment in the heat of involvement. That is why the antithetical response of many religious to this situation leads one to wonder if they really understood what has taken place. Witness priests, brothers, and apostolate exhibiting their dismay and disillusion, and in many cases, defeat trying to compete for souls with the rampant iconoclasts. Thus broken, a steady stream of them can be seen quitting their rectories, convents, and monasteries for either the eerie promise of the sybarite, or to still the Siren’s call. For this lack of professionalism, they solicit sympathy and assurance while they proselytize a more comfortable faith.

Their new appeal is not to the strength in man’s heart, but to the weakness in man’s loins. Meanwhile, less conspicuous, but equally despairing are those who continue to wail from their sanctuaries and cloisters that, indeed, the religious life and priesthood of Jesus Christ is dead.

No longer is there a marriage of vocation to avocation for them, but rather a struggle betwixt the two. Perhaps there is no quiet, no true isolation. Could the clamor of the time be too much for the contemplative life? Too distracting to see what is happening and who is involved?

To a concerned plebian, this is difficult to fathom. It would seem that the mask of the time, the façade of intemperate indulgence has been accepted as the true face in the crowd, and not the disguise that it is. That a certain faction of the secular clergy has been so misled is a matter of record. Unfortunately, it seems to have cast even a larger shadow.

This is suggested sententiously from what appears to be a movement in the Church, as cautious, temperate, and enlightened practices seem to have loss their appeal at discovering root causes, while a wave of more dynamic, and expedient methods is being employed. This is disconcerting, but not the problem. The actual riddle is that compromise appears to be entertained when one knows that TRUTH cannot be mollified nor abated. Such a dilemma has developed because the Church and its obvious imperfections has become centermost when the ETERNAL TRUTHS should be.

One wonders if this rush to action is not an attempt to ameliorate symptoms rather than to treat causes. Could it be that defining the cause of man’s bewilderment in mid-twentieth century is more elusive than the problem? Perhaps this is why we hear a cry for a prophet to come forth.

Certainly, it would be reassuring to have a kind, affable, witty and sophisticated intelligence such as that of Desiderious Erasmus to step forward. The German’s had their Luther, but the Dutch had their Erasmus. In retrospect, it might be said that Luther was a good patient for his time, but a poor doctor. Erasmus might be said to be that doctor.

This quiet man, Erasmus, sympathized with much of Luther’s thinking, but chose to remain in the Church. Which man showed the greater courage?

Today this question might generate considerable discussion among the erudite, but not the common man. Luther touched man’s spirit and imagination. Erasmus touched only his mind. Albeit this tells us something of the propensities of man, it does not assuage Erasmus’s loss.

The temperament, genius and cold intellect of Erasmus produced a beautiful satirical study, “The Praise of Folly.” In a day when man was angry and threatening to his Church, Erasmus generated light rather than heat, giving man a new insight into the nature of his being. He wanted to call attention to the fact that the Church exists despite the combined inadequacies of the clergy and laity; that the Church was true because it was HIS, not ours; that the Church lived and lives because of and for HIM, not us.

Since FAITH is responsive to man’s deepest needs, he wanted to penetrate the blindness of our personal pride to see the light of the eternal Jesus. Practically forgotten today, this very slender volume is significantly apropos at this very moment in man’s history.

Erasmus illustrated man’s cynical flippancy and irresponsibility. He contented that this appears in man as the uninhibited force of natural instinct, and as the immense effort with which man struggles to achieve his ends, valueless though they may be. “Folly” reminds us that when people grow up, they suffer a loss of youthful energy and flexibility. Seeking the stoic ideal of god-like rationalism brings in its stead a sort of marble monsterism. “Folly” could also be a name for all man’s misdirected effort, for all his elaborate pains to gain the wrong thing:

There we see a woman dressed and pained, pretending to be young, valiantly chasing
a man and her spent youth; here can be seen a young man, collecting degrees, developing
impressive credentials, while responsibility and manhood fade from his sight; over there
we notice a respectable businessman, lying, cheating, misleading, and swindling the public
in order to make money so that his children can spend it in purposeless glee; and here again
we see a priest, the sacerdotal commitment found wanting, emerged in temporal life and
causes, pontificating his new theology and morality as he sinks into the quicksand of life.

This kind of contemporary imagery comes rapidly to mind as one invades the pages of “Folly.” The compulsion to wonder how Erasmus would view today is also there. Probably, it is safe to say that he would note mankind’s fumbling towards eternity with a tinge of sadness, but little surprise.

He would no doubt register only mild protestation at man’s arrogance before man. But before God? Surely, he would be somewhat alarmed. Perhaps he might indeed believe man had retrogressed. For comprehending the comedic figure of man before God was the quintessence of humility in his age. Puncturing the prideful pomposity of man was essential to understanding and tolerating oneself in the sixteenth century. Hopefully, this is not anachronistic nor hors de saison.

Even though we may not have spiritual heavyweights like Erasmus around to deflate man’s ego and give him balance, this is not so disturbing as is the knowledge that the need is neither accepted nor recognized. Rather a cult is developing to pay it homage.

New symbols, signs and aphorisms have been hastily created to demean conventional concepts, traditions and practices. Worthy as some of these new ideal and ideas may be, to summarily and willfully negate one’s heritage with a wave of hostility and condescension suggests paranoia. The symptoms are there.

Man is riding the crest of prosperity and a state of real, ideal and/or contrived euphoria envelops him. Once a slave to time, he now finds it weighs heavily on his hands. The fruits of his efforts have made time a luxury, producing a surplus of idleness, and this has made him uneasy.

Many jobs have been created with no productive end in mind, but only to fill the void. This has not been enough. Consequently, play has become hectic, demanding, serious, and more important than work. The awful rush to fill the dismal void of hours hangs like a sickness over man’s head. Consumption and possession have become obsessions; a compulsion to satiate oneself with food, sex, and material things is now viewed as a necessity. In man’s quest for life, meaning, peace, and purpose, man has often been left frantic, supported only by nerve pills and other placebos. His attention to Church, religion, family, society, state, and the old fashion values has been casually shifted to a perfunctory plateau of his mind. “Folly” is still his name.

One hears that times have changed, but that the Church’s life and function is petty, silly, anachronistic, irrelevant, and hypocritical by today’s standards. What is not said is closer to the nerve of the matter:

The Church and Christianity in general has been used by man as a crutch to shore him up
when the going got rough; when he was alone and desperate and had no one to turn to, he
could always find solace in his Church and with his God. The two were synonymous in his
mind.

Not so today. Comfortable, prosperous, modern man looks within himself for the answers. Prayer and supplication are not for him. Yet, with all that he is and has, he will readily admit to being empty, unfulfilled, and seeking, continuously seeking. This is an age when public confession of the most intimate thoughts is common. Nothing appears sacred or private between man and his God, a phenomenon that has produced an identity syndrome composed of anxiety, frustration and the essence of alienation. A common observation:

Thrusting out contemptuously, he projects and substitutes this sense of guilt to causes
outside himself. He cries for change but hopes to extricate himself from personal
involvement. His demands are implicitly or explicitly focused on the Church and her
responsibility to him.

Somehow, he has forgotten or erased from his memory that if the Church falls, he fails. If Jesus Christ is the TIMELESS TRUTH, then the answers must be there. Certainly, renewal will not suffice if man does not understand that the Church has not failed him, but that he has failed it. The Church reflects him. The bromides, platitudes, and formulae to instant happiness have never been relevant to man’s needs. They only compound his illusions and delusions. There is a danger that man’s caprice will tempt him to advocate the diminution of the Church, an ersatz Lord of Life being hastily put into focus.

A happening is not surprising in religion today. The last two generations have endured as much change as the balance of man’s history. That this ordeal of change has been a baffling experience is irrefutable. Losing his self-image, man appears to have developed myopia and a loss of depth perception as well, throwing him into punishing melancholy.

Man is restless for action, any action. One wonders if this affliction has not penetrated the staid structure of Roman Catholicism. It is one thing to articulate the ETERNAL TRUTHS in man’s vernacular, but quite another to adulterate them for palatability.

One theologian conversing with another might construe this statement to be unfair. It is, however, made by a plebian to reflect the silent dilemma of the Catholic laity. Truth is the essence of anything and cannot be altered is a dialectic he understands.

The silent man in the pew does not want to be considered a proponent of empiricism. If new insights into the TIMELESS TRUTHS of Jesus are discovered, he would prefer that they be carefully and definitively defined, painstakingly weighed, systematically categorized, and then providentially implemented into his religion. Filling the air with waves of speculation and testing the currents of acceptance will always be considered suspect and only produce chaos.

Personal involvement in change is a demanding emotional experience. One must give up that which he knows and understands relative to himself for that which is unknown and perhaps feared. Shedding one’s personal integument and assuming a new posture, image, association, status quo, and identity are painless only when done without conscious insight.

Just as one is ever losing and replacing his epidermis, contented man changes bits and pieces all the time without knowing it. Each time one accepts a new idea, new concept, something is quitted, something is lost. That is why the revolution of ideas is preceded by intellectual speculation. It prepares the way.

Mounting the current Christian renewal and ecumenical movement without such cultivation would seem absurd. Yet, this is the prima facie situation at the moment. After a wave of emotional altruism and generosity of spirit, it appears that the chill of self-doubt has set in, producing a silent retreat to the more comfortable known and understood ground.

If this is questioned, one need only observe who still controls and initiates the ecumenical: the clergy. This has been frustrating for the secular clergy, but what of the bewilderment of the laity?

No improvement has ever been made in the conventional and laborious process of making wine. The implementation of a more streamlined, truly catholic FAITH is analogous to wine making. No steps can be left out or hurried.

Christianity and Roman Catholicism are not going out of business. The link between them and the non-Christian world is likely to improve, as improve it must. Nonetheless, man’s self-image and identity with his God, now more nebulous than ever, must first receive attention.

Emotional posturing and psychological speculating have proven of little value. Though he needs guidance badly, this does not mean that he wants his Church to become entombed in his quagmire. Rather, he prefers that his Church view and understand his needs with providential detachment.

An Erasmus recognized this. A Thomas Aquinas provided the rationale for making Christian theology and philosophy a viable formula for a timeless Church. Why have their voices not been heard in modern times?

Modern man is a complex and enlightened individual, disciplined and cultivated, but nonetheless a child, always a child in his religiosity. Seeing his priests caught up in the period’s social and political activism, kneeling to the pragmatic cries of the day, does not contribute to his sense of essence nor does it give him a fix on his eternal salvation.

Man wants renewal, enlightened renewal, but not necessarily change per se. This might mean the digesting of Thomistic theology and philosophy, and the essence of revelations, that is, getting inside the thoughts and ideas of the FAITH. The laity has never been fed these before. This type of renewal would require energetic pursuit on the part of the laity but would give it a foundation of essence, something now missing. True ecumenicism could then proceed with speed.

The Roman Catholic Church in transition must accept her history, understand her laity, and patiently implement a more substantive educational program before true ecumenicism might be broached. Otherwise, the body Christendom could be weakened by her arrogant disregard for the dilemma of the silent man in the pew.

The End

James R. Fisher, Jr.
Completed: 8 April 1968
Anchorage, Kentucky
USA

HITTING THE WALL -- WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT!

HITTING THE WALL – WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 7, 2009

* * *

Today I had lunch with a friend who I have known for nearly two decades, a man for whom I have been mentor, coach, counselor, consultant, as well as personal friend. We first met when I was consulting the organization in which he worked. I have watched him grow in competence and confidence, and watched his character flourish.

He recently contacted me by email, a man now in his mid-fifties, at the zenith of his career, making an excellent living, confessing he had hit a wall and was taking a month leave of absence.

Now, you would think this outrageous behavior in these perilous economic times when jobs are scarce and unemployment in Florida is more than 11 percent. You would expect him to fear being replaced.

That is the logical rational perspective, but when you hit the wall, that emotional barrier, that has no give and you constantly bounce off it bruised, battered, and disillusioned, fatigued, and depressed, you don’t think logically. You are looking for relief, as your body and soul are at war with each other.

Failure to recognize this, to deny this reality can result in physical and emotional collapse. When our health breaks, we are forced to take a time out, sometimes never to recapture our original momentum.

* * *

NO ONE ESCAPES THE WALL

Kurt Warner, the NFL quarterback of the Arizona Cardinals, suffered a concussion three games ago. He chose to sit out the next game. He is one of the premier quarterbacks in the NFL and has Super Bowl rings to prove it. Yet, his toughness was questioned when he sat out the game.

In an interview, he said that he was near the end of his career, had a wife and seven children, and didn’t want to take any unnecessary chances on his health that might jeopardize a long and productive life after football. That was a rational answer.

The irrational part was that although he hit a physical wall it made him aware of the emotional possibility of brain damage. Scientists now see a high statistical correlation between concussions of professional athletes in sport and early signs of Alzheimer’s disease. That was enough for him.

When you are that individual, and have to weigh where you are and what you are and what your real motivation for the future is, you back away from that wall. You do a retreat. In the case of Kurt Warner, it was for one game, or a week’s recuperation after the concussion.

Sunday night (December 5, 2009), the Arizona Cardinals played the Minnesota Vikings and Warner out dueled another great quarterback, Bret Favre, to a 30 to 17 victory. These two premier quarterbacks came from schools never in the national limelight, Warner from Northern Iowa, and Favre from Southern Mississippi, two individuals that have encountered and negotiated many walls in their careers, but have had the poise and creative skills to confront and dispatch them successfully.

Warner is now in the best graces of the team and fans, but has made a statement. His health and well being and that of his family comes first and everything else after that.

* * *

THE WISDOM OF RETREAT

Warner took the respite of a game while my friend has taken a month off to gain a fresh perspective before he goes forward. I was twenty years younger than my friend, only in my mid-thirties when I hit the wall in South Africa where I was facilitating the formation of a new company in 1968, taking a two-year sabbatical.

Living in South Africa's "apartheid society," being treated with colonial splendor by British South Africans, surrounded by the rich and beautiful, I no longer knew what I was working for as nothing made sense to me anymore.

I was making the equivalent of a half million dollars in today’s currency, lived on an estate in the city of Johannesburg, with four servants, including a chauffeur, gardener, house manager, and maid, all Bantu Africans, provided with two automobiles for the family, paying no taxes, and being treated as a very important person, when I knew better.

I never forgot I was the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad, and had nothing in common with these British public school colonialists other than my organizational and technical skills. Making my confusion more intense was the fact that I felt a kinship with Afrikaners, the Boers, the farmers, the white South Africans, who were very much like my down to earth people of Iowa.

Afrikaner came to power in 1948 and had instituted the draconian and appalling practice of apartheid, or separate development of the races. I could never reconcile my affection for Afrikaners with apartheid. It proved to be one of my walls.

* * *

WHAT IS THE WALL?

Walls are emotional barriers that we run into when we can no longer escape ourselves. We may delight in distractions such as toys, promiscuity, or other dalliances but ultimately there is no escape.

In such instances, we don’t engage the wall the wall engages us. We can go bankrupt because we cannot afford our toys, or our dalliances are discovered, and we are shamed, embarrassed and suffer the consequences of a costly divorce, for once trust is broken it cannot be repaired.

When we fail to acknowledge the wall, the wall acknowledges us with unintended consequences.

The wall forces us to leave the ghost of ourselves to reveal the person we have become despite our attempts to disguise that reality in so many ways. We may attempt to postpone that confrontation with alcohol, drugs, gambling, or other aberrant behaviors, but all attempts will fail. The breadth of the wall is beyond comprehension and therefore impossible to avoid. The wall extends from the beginning of our life to its end.

So, whether we encounter it forthwith or deny its existence, the wall will have its due. That is what the wall is.

* * *

WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT THE WALL?

My friend has always been creative. Throughout his life and career, he has been able to reengineer his approach to things, indeed, to reinvent himself over and over again as circumstances changed. He would develop new processes to attain his objectives.

But then he found he could no longer come up with new approaches that gave him satisfaction. He could no longer muster the motivation to take risks and endure the pain of possible failure. He had reached success and was a victim of the status quo whereas he had made his reputation helping people with bold new strategies. Now, he found himself simply going with the flow, and he resented it.

When he reached this wall, he did the wisest thing of all. He went to his boss and said, “I’m taking a month off.”

“Why?” she countered.

“I’ve run out of ideas. I’ve run out of ways to reinvent my job.”

“That’s not true,” she said.

“You say that, but you are not me.”

“Pardon me?”

“No offense intended, I’m just saying I no longer am satisfied with the job I’m doing.”

“You satisfy me and I’m your boss.”

“I’m glad I do but that’s not the bottom line. The bottom line is satisfying myself and if I can’t satisfy myself I need a time out to look at where I am, where I’ve been, where I want to go, and what I have to do to get there." He continued,

“A friend once told me when you take a time out miraculous things happen. The wall opens up and allows you to pass through and go on, happier, healthier, wiser, and more motivated than ever before.

“He warmed me that I will continue to run into walls as all creative people do as they go forward. It is not running into walls that is the problem, but what we do when we encounter yet another wall.

“The walls, he says, are simply stop signs demanding our attention. They comfort us once we are running on automatic pilot, not hitting on all our cylinders, drifting towards calamity.

“When a creative person is drifting, he says, the person is unhappy, in fact, he can become deeply depressed as nothing makes sense to him anymore: his job, marriage, family, friends, business associates, his socioeconomic status. Nothing can renew his vitality, as all his resilience is gone. He claims a person has no choice but to step back, to take a respite, not so much to think ponderously, but to relax and let his soul settle back into its normal place and space in his center.”

His boss may have been curious about his friend, but she didn’t probe. She has too much respect for him, and is looking forward to his return in a month.

* * *

THE WALL CAN BE A LIFE CHANGING EVENT

A forty-year perspective gives me the advantage of seeing how a wall can be a life-changing event.

I didn’t understand the wall the way I understand it today. Consequently, I kept battering against it hiding behind my work and my Roman Catholicism as if workaholism and faith would furnish a breakthrough. They didn’t. Instead, they exacerbated the situation.

My values, beliefs, loyalties and perspectives were disintegrating. My character was splintered and I was in shambles. It was in this quagmire that I found I was forgetting things and I had a memory like an elephant. My memory was a source of pride and it was abandoning me.

My marriage and family were in chaos; everything I held sacred was gone. When calamity clustered into a cancer, there was only one thing I could do, and that was to resign with no idea what the future would hold.

Even then, I had never forgotten my roots, never forgotten how my da’s employers had exploited him, never forgotten how the powerful treat the powerless. The irony is that I was part of the powerful but never joined the club.

My boss said, “How can you do this to us when we have done so much for you?”

“If I wasn’t doing my job, you’d fire me,” I answered, “I’m firing the company for the same reason.”

“James, you have a lot to learn,” my boss parried. “I doubt if you’ll ever be this successful again.”

He was talking about economic not spiritual success, the way he was trained to think. At the time, I didn’t understand the difference. I just sought relief from an untenable situation. I needed breathing room.

Incidentally, my boss was right about financial success. I’ve never reached that equivalent in income again, but I have been modestly successful financially. My rejuvenation has been spiritual which cannot be measured quantitatively.

Over a long life, I have gravitated to where I am now. It is where a professor told me when I was a twenty years old student at the University of Iowa I should have been from the beginning, a thinker and writer. I am not only a late bloomer but also a post late bloomer and I have to live with that. I may not live to complete my South Africa novel, as Vladimir Nabokov failed to complete his novel, “Laura” (2009), now absurdly offered in pasted together version by his son, Dmitri.

As an idea guy and writer, I’ve never been happier, never been more in tuned to my nature. I am, by nature, an introvert, not very sociable, finding people wear me out quite quickly. It took me a long time after hitting many walls to realize that I prefer privacy to social engagement, books and ideas to people, things that are free in nature rather than can be purchased in a store, that I am more a student of things than a doer of things even though my life has been engaged in doing with little time or energy left for contemplation, until these late innings of life with my Beautiful Betty, now in our twenty-fourth year of marriage.

* * *

There was a time when people would ask me what I thought, and I was so good at reading people that I would tell them what they wanted to hear. They would smile, I would get big orders, promotions, and be told, “You’re a very lucky man, James,” when I was increasingly miserable. After hitting the wall in South Africa, that all changed.

When people ask me now what I think, I tell them. The secretary to the CEO at Honeywell Avionics, when I was a psychologist there, asked me one day what I thought of her hairdo. I said it looked like a hornet’s nest. She cried. I moved on, only to be chewed out by my boss and to receive a scathing memo from the CEO, who happened to like me.

Honeywell Avionics, at the time, had one thousand engineers and scientists, two thousand professional support personnel, and one thousand blue-collar workers model building in manufacturing while creating instruments in the clean rooms.

In 1984, Honeywell Avionic’s Department of Contracts Administration (DCAS) was sponsoring a major seminar on Clearwater Beach, Florida for its customers among who were senior officers in the U. S. Air Force, U. S. Navy, Department of Defense, as well as other DCAS customers. The topic was “Participative Management,” the buzz expression of the day. A committee contacted me to give the keynote address. I said I would if I could say what I thought about participative management. The committee agreed.

In my capacity as Director of the Quality Control Circle Program, the largest at the time in the nation, I found participative management was a joke. It didn’t work because it wasn’t sincere. It was impossible to implement a system that worked in Japan, with a group oriented culture, when American workers were individualistic and resistant to enforced group norms.

Moreover, eighty percent of Japanese workers were blue-collar and only twenty to twenty five percent of American workers were. Most American workers were professionally trained and white-collar workers.

Participative management worked modestly well with blue-collar workers who were programmed to be reactive and management dependent, whereas white-collar workers saw themselves as independent contractors or in league with management.

That said the problem solving of blue-collar workers was limited to cosmetic change such as modification of workstations or the like but no substantive change in processes or procedures. White-collar workers were resistant to the idea of a contrived meeting climate of brainstorming and problem solving, feeling a sense of being patronized instead of reaffirming a partnership with management.

My speech was titled, “Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View” (It was given on March 30, 1984, and was published in this blog on its 25th anniversary).

For that speech, I was put on house arrest. My salary was frozen for 18 months. I could give no more speeches, publish no articles, and had to submit my notebooks weekly to my boss for checking. They became so voluminous that he quit checking in the third week.

Out of that 18-month confinement, the germ of a book surfaced in the notebooks. Then, as incredible as it may seem, once the eighteen months came to a close in 1986, I was promoted to Director of Human Resources Planning & Development for Honeywell Europe, Ltd. I did not seek this assignment, but was pursued for me by my new boss whom I had mentored when he first came to Honeywell in 1980. He thought it especially suited to my organizational development (OD) expertise.

Even so, I found Europe suffering an exaggeration of what I experienced in the United States. Honeywell Europe had an equal reluctance to change. This was equally true of the American management team in Europe as it was for Honeywell's European executives. I knew then I was on to something.

* * *

A good part of the book, previously only a germ, was written while on that assignment. I returned to the United States, resigned in 1990, and published “Work Without Managers: A View From The Trenches.”

The Business Book Review Journal claimed "Work Without Managers" was the most insightful and prophetic book written on management to date, a book that predicted the demise of the automotive industry and the telling consequence of a workforce suspended in terminal adolescence, which applied as much to the white-collar as the blue-collar workforce.

The importance of the book has not been acknowledged readily except for the efforts of Dr. Thomas Brown of Industry Week and The Wall Street Journal.

In a strange way, the book is even more relevant and viable in 2009 than it was when written in 1990.

It is quite apparent companies can run into walls again and again until they go bankrupt as General Motors and Chrysler, unable or unwilling to change, or go out of business, as did 100-year-old Montgomery Wards.

* * *

People write books to be published, and they publish books that will not be deemed offensive to the hand that feeds them. That is management. The real estate industry and Wall Street were running into walls, walls not acknowledged, but walls they still attempted to circumvent with suspect practices, walls that always win in the end when they are ignored whether it is in a personal or corporate sense.

Voices on the periphery cried out that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were heading for trouble; voices sounded the alarm for the reckless practices of Wall Street and the insurance industry. Some voices published their views, but nothing changed. Economists were asleep at the switch, as was the Federal Reserve and the Secretary of Treasurer. Now these appointed office holders are celebrated for their eleventh hour rescue of banks too big to fail.

* * *

Much of “Work Without Managers” addresses the fact that we are a crisis-managed society that the crises we solve are only the crises we create, having little time or inclination to look outside the box. We are a knowing rather than learning society, and suffer for the malaise.

* * *

So, I said to my friend the fact that you recognized the wall is a tribute to your integrity, your authenticity, to your dedication to make a difference. You stopped and took a time out to reassess your status when you confronted the wall, and for that the wall will open up and let you through.

* * *

I wasn’t going to write this missive; wasn't even going to walk because it was rainy and cold. I was just going to work on my novel.

Once in a while a message hits you that whether you are a bricklayer or architect, a custodian or contractor, housewife or school teacher, whether you are retired or still working, that you cannot avoid encountering walls.

We run into walls in marriage, in dealing with our children, in relating to friends and relatives, in work and in play. In one sense, we are alone as we come into the world alone, and leave the world alone, so we cannot expect others to deal with our walls. The connection with ourselves is sometimes the last connection we acknowledge, the connection that confronts the walls. Ignore the walls and love can turn to hate and hate to boredom and boredom to depression. Such thoughts came to mind today as I walked.

* * *

LIVING WHILE DYING -- A MODEL FOR US ALL!

LIVING WHILE DYING

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 4, 2009

REFERENCE:


Mary is someone I have known for many years. She was director of the Temple Terrace Library in Temple Terrace, Florida, a suburb of Tampa, Florida since the 1990s. Quiet, dignified, private, she was a human dynamo full of ideas and grace with the executive skill to make the branch library one of the busiest in Hillsborough County. She did it with love, devotion, dedication, and as it turned out, with the burden of declining health.

Mary has MSA. The acronym stands for “Multiple System Atrophy," a degenerative neurological disorder for which there is no cure. MSA is associated with the tectonic degeneration of nerve cells in specific areas of the brain. The disease causes problems with movement, balance and autonomic functions of the body, things we take for granted, such as bladder control.

The cause of the disease is unknown and no specific risks factors have been identified. Around 45 percent of cases occur in women with typical age of onset in the full flush of their productive lives, or in their 50s or early 60s. Such is the case with Mary.

Mary retired from her directorship, and went through a period of understandable emotional as well as physical difficulty in accepting the cross she has had to bear.

One day I ran into her at the library, and she said, “Jim, I’d like to get on the Board of Directors of the Friends of the Temple Terrace Library.” She was tired of nursing her disease and wanted to again be productive. I could see in her eyes the pain behind the passion and resolve. But it was only later that I learned what an ordeal ordinary daily life had become for her. A brave face has no room for self pity.

Since then, she has been an active member of that board. Thanks to her contributions, taking an active role on several committees, we are moving forward more efficiently. She is the most positive person I know, the most upbeat with a smile and a gentle laugh that melts you.

Mary sent me her "Time, MSA, and ME" that follows. I asked her if I could publish it. She said, “Yes, by all means.” Incidentally, Mary has a blog. Check it out www.mershanti.blogspot.com to learn more about Mary, the disease, and what others suffering MSA are doing. You will find they are living while dying, while, unhappily, many of us are dying while not finding time to live.

* * *

TIME _ and MSA _ HAVE MADE A CHANGE IN ME

Mary Satterwhite
© December 4, 2009

I was in session with my therapist today, talking to him about changes I have noticed in myself, especially during the past 6 months. Despite the losses in my life, right now life looks better than it ever has.

I used to be a self-driven Type A personality, always rushing and multitasking. Always busy, never idle, not able to just sit. Speeding from one thing to another. Not just speeding emotionally, but also driving. Hurry, hurry, hurry.

Now, the journey is just as important as the destination. A drive to the library is a pleasure just to be out and see other people. The grocery holds many wonders. New products, old friends, and familiar brands.

I just wish they would stop moving things around so you can no longer find what has always been right there, and now is somewhere unknown. But again, the journey takes over while you go in search of the missing item.

In the past, my dreams were of being shipwrecked and without a life vest. I held onto the rope in the hands of my therapist, hoping he could save my life. Now, I dream of swimming in a river with a strong current and know that I can exit the river at any time. I control when to leave the water.

So, as horrible as this disease is, positive things have happened to me because of it. This slow down in life, enjoying the pleasures of everyday things has occurred because life has suddenly become precious.

Where I used to want to die, now I find that life is a pleasant place to be. Simple pleasures such as the taste of an apple, watching the river flow by with leaves floating along, the ducks swimming and begging for a handout, the ospreys and their nests, and even the alligators with just their eyes protruding out of the water, all are special to me.

I am a nature lover, not a city dweller. I love the woods and the water, and not just underwater diving. I love to sit and watch the water and visit for a spell with a friend. To canoe down the river with friends, even for a couple of hours, brings me enormous pleasure, despite the physical pain that can accompany it.

When I see a path or dirt road leading back into the woods, I want to follow it. I have photos of wood paths on my screensaver slideshow. I want to go down those paths, wander along on the pine needles or oak leaves. Look up at the beautiful sky as seen through the tree canopy. What beauty there is in nature!

Things I used to feel I had to do, or people I had to do something with, no longer matter to me. I do not have to be with people who are negative or appear to try to bring other folks down.

I used to love to rain walk, back when I could walk more than 50 feet or so. I walked our two Rhodesian Ridgebacks in freezing weather, in rain, during hurricanes, and when the county was spraying for citrus canker with the helicopters dropping the poison on me.

When that happened, I would hurry the dogs under a tree where we would huddle under the canopy hoping to be missed by most of the poison. They supposedly had posted where they would be spraying every day, but somehow they managed to catch me anyway. We walked at 5 AM so I could get back and be showered and dressed and at work by 6:30. Later, I moved the walk up so I could get to work at 5:45 or 6 AM. Workaholic, Type A, hurry, hurry, hurry.

Now, I am no longer able to work and I sleep until 10:30 or 11 AM every morning. I walk the remaining Akita, Bear, from our yard to next-door and back and find that is all I can do. He appreciates even that little. My husband also walks him and spends a great deal of time with him. Without his sister, he is very lonely and appreciates every minute of attention he can get. He is still in mourning, though not as severely as we were afraid he was going to be, at least, not at this time.

You have heard the old saying, is the glass half empty or half full. I contend that it depends on whether you are looking from the bottom up or from the top down. As another saying goes, the devil is in the details.

I still long to return to Utila and revisit my old underwater haunts. To find the seahorses and the squid, to be cleaned by a cleaner shrimp, to marvel at the beauty of nature under the ocean, and, with luck, to once again be in the water with a whale shark. I realize I can no longer swim with one – but to have one pass by me as I float on the surface, to have it look me in the eye curiously as it glides by, would be a completion for me.

I have been in the water with a number of them over the years, but it has been a long, dry spell without a sighting. They come and go on their own schedule, not according to our wishes. Another unlikely wish is to be revisited by a pod of dolphin that enjoyed the company of humans. We spent 30 minutes one year with dolphin playing all around us, mimicking our every move, spiraling, leaping, diving, swimming under our arms as long as we did not reach out to touch them. What an unexpected, and awesome, experience. Yes, Utila is number one on my bucket list. I guess it always will be until I draw my last breath.

So, MSA has been a blessing in many ways. To be able to slow down, to write this journal or blog, and to hope to encourage others with MSA that there are positive side effects until the disease grabs them down and will not let them go.

To be bedridden and in pain, unable to communicate, those have been my worst nightmares, and I know many on the ShyDrager.org online support group are there already. Their caregivers communicate for them and for support for themselves as they deal with both grief and the anticipatory grief of losing a loved one, too soon. Until that time comes, I am going to keep on hanging in there and doing as much of what I love as possible. I thank my husband for making many of these loves of mine come to fruition.

Right now, life is good and that is enough.

Mary

A LETTER TO RACHEL

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 1, 2009



REFERENCE:

Rachel is my granddaughter. We have had a close relationship since she was born. Only thirteen now, and an eighth grader, she has always been precocious what I like to think as an old spirit in a young soul.

We would often go to the Mall, the zoo, the art museum, or McDonald’s, or when she turned six, to ice skating practice.

She has always been taller than other children her age, and when she was attempting to ice skate at six, falling often on her face, picking herself up, and doing it all over again, people watching might have felt that she should be more adapt not knowing how young she was, thinking her at least the age of eight.

She is now an accomplished volleyball and soccer player on her eighth grade team, as well as an outstanding student, always at the top of her class, while physically, moving towards six feet in height. Her mother, my daughter, is six-two, and Rachel’s brother, 15, is six-five so height runs in the family.

During these excursions when she was little, she would ask me such questions that I felt compelled to write down the conversations that ensued, many of which were published in PERSONAL EXCELLENCE, a national magazine. On one occasion, she saw her name in the article but with my picture, and said, “Why is your picture here when it is all about me?” She had a point.

The short piece that follows is a mea culpa. She had started to read “Fahrenheit 451” (1953) by Ray Bradbury, a class assignment, and a book written during the “Cold War” when oppression and repression were on the rise, which she found “weird” making little sense.

I wrote her an email giving her some eleventh hour perspective on the book as the assignment was due the next day and it was already going on 9 pm. I am a high-strung guy and don’t do well when pressed, and this was such a case. As my readers know, typos and other errors are familiar company to me, but seldom errors of facts.

The final comment of this letter has to do with how I withdraw into myself when my work doesn’t go well, which makes the climate tense for others, and such was the case when Rachel shared her dilemma about this book.

* * *

A LETTER TO RACHEL

Rachel,

I'm embarrassed that you shared my quickly knocked off piece with your teacher knowing you had little time to read "Fahrenheit 451."

Now, in retrospect, I must admit to two gross errors. Burgess Meredith did not write "A Clockwork Orange," but Anthony Burgess did. Meredith is an actor and his name in my haste must have come quickly to mind.

The other error is even grosser. Ray Bradbury did not see "Fahrenheit 451" a book about censorship, but quite the contrary. He was attempting to illustrate how fragile freedom of speech and expression is, and that books are the citadel of that freedom, and should be protected at all cost, as those in power, whatever their ideology, like to manage ideas which includes what is written in books.

Bradburfy went to the far side of the idea by creating a vision of books not only banned, but also burned, and that people found reading books would be prosecuted. Taking people out of their comfort sound and widening their horizons is the function of art. Without art, we are all wound up toys in a robotic universe.

As I told you when you were a little girl, I will answer your questions as accurately as I can when you seek my assistance. I failed in this instance as I was in such a hurry to provide some perspective for you to this book.

I thought of writing this note before but thought that you would have rejected my little contribution, only because you had to read the book in a couple of hours, and then, what I love about you, registering your own reaction to the book.

It was and is an important book, but it is not wrong for you to not like it, or to find it confusing, or not worthy of the hype that it enjoys. In that sense, I'd like to share a memory of mine with you.

* * *

When I was your age, my Uncle Leonard, a professor at the University of Detroit, suggested I read, "Man, the Unknown" (1935) by Alexis Carrel.

The French physician was someone my uncle had met at an academic conference in the 1930s, a man who had won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1912. My uncle felt the book might stretch me a little intellectually. I had no comprehension of a Nobel Laureate at the time much less the words that I read. I was thirteen.

I read it again when I was in college and was shocked at its message and amazed that it had been a runaway best seller.

Dr. Carrel advocated enforced eugenics, that is, the systematic development of an elite society of a biological aristocracy. Now, this may not make any sense to you now, as the book made little sense when I first read it at your age, but I wish my uncle had told me the book advocated the extinction of deviant human types such as the mentally ill, the retarded, the criminal, and so on. This is what Adolf Hitler and Nazism attempted to do in W.W.II.

I share this with you because I don't want you to be afraid to have your own mind about books or anything else, and I certainly don't want you to build on ideas because someone won the Nobel Prize or is considered a genius.

Reading the classics -- contemporary or traditional -- provides a foundation for all your other reading but it must include your own critical review based on its relevance to your own understanding.

My uncle may have meant well, but I could have gone off half cocked if I did understand and internalized some of Carrel's ideas at that earlier age, and made them part of my mantra. Thank God, I didn't. I wasn't bright enough to do so. I shall never leave you in the lurch like that, never, if I can help it.

I have not been myself of late because my writing does not go well, and I apologize for that. I will try to be more myself in the future because I love and respect you very much.

Be always well,

Papa