humanity

First I want to say that I realized that in order to write without restraint, you should more concentrate on the content of what you want to say than how it will sound to someone reading it. I think one of the large goals of writing or communicating is resolving you entering a state where you notice that a condition of what is around you is not what you had once thought it to be. Observations don't stay in your mind for long, so you have to get them out, but when something really important starts to leave you, you feel with eminence that you should interact to make others notice it too. The depth of your notice will determine how far you can touch someone's mind, but the breadth and clarity will be what actually increases the chance of someone choosing to test their attention on what you have to say.

It's still unclear and should be said that there will be many who will never fully agree with you no matter how hard you try and dependent on this, some will even be fully offended in what they think you are saying.


With that said, I fully feel that people today deserve to have clarified the events and reasonings leading up to today's dissatisfactions, mislabeling, misunderstanding, hate, inequality and also calm.

Today, no one flinches when you say you believe all people are equal, but over a hundred years ago, then well respected scientists wrote hundreds of pages placing the black man, just newly being free of slavery as a sub-species of humans menacing our lands that will soon probably die out naturally by Darwinian survival of the fittest [2].

Today, it's considered inappropriate to merely exhale the word 'nigger' for fear that someone will call you a racist. People will misinterpret your text no matter the context, but just a few decades ago, 'people of color' were 'the colored', the 'Negroes' and even earlier those 'negroids' having diverged from our man long ago. I think it's amazing how much change and transformation we've gone through over the generations. Thinking about how so much has changed is very difficult. Elridge Cleaver, writing from prison some forty years ago, said the baby boomers ( the hippies? ) were the ones who rose up to challenge their parents' civil-rights-less-ness [4]. But he doesn't quite identify why.

As of now, it's quite unseemly to deny people jobs or even an education based on what you think of them, but only 80 years ago, your ability to reproduce could be legally taken away from you--by sterilization--if your mom was a prostitute, for fear that you may have children that are "morons" like you, based on how unfit for society your mom was [3].

Today, there will be a public protest if you hang a noose over a black Professor's door, but if you hung a black man in Springfield, Illinois in 1909, the mocking the birthplace and one hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, you and your hundreds of friends would walk the streets a hundred times over without any fear [1]. The distinctions are shocking.

A lot has changed, but it's difficult to notice unless you happen to be a bicenterian. But there is still so much more work to be done. I'm wondering which generation will it be that will truly be color blind. Even Malcolm Gladwell, son of parents of very different origins has identified that Harvard's Implicit Association Race Test noticed his instinctual blink of an eye race bias [5][6]. So the idea is that if you talk to people openly about race today, they will say they're liberal and they try to treat everyone the same, but many people will not admit that they have some racist-like signals going off in their brains. Barrack Obama's now famous Race Speech [7] too identifies lots of ironies. I don't want someone to take things out of context ( listen to his entire speech ), but he does identify, for example, his white grandmother's fears of black men.

I'm happy for all the open dialog out there. The more honesty that's out there, the better. When Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor started with their expletives on stage, the world started to hear what they didn't want to hear, but they knew they wanted to hear. We need to keep talking and keep listening.


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[1] DuBois, W.E.B. , Dusk of Dawn. reference to the anti-Negro riot in Springfield (223).

[2] Gould, Stephen Jay, Mismeasure of Man.

[3] Black, Edwin, War against the Weak. reference to Carrie Buck 's case in the Supreme Court (120).

[4] Cleaver, Elridge, Soul on Ice.

[5] Gladwell, Malcolm, Blink.

[6] http://implicit.harvard.edu/

[7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWe7wTVbLUU&feature=related

the push to achievement among schools had a positive intention, but it has created many leaders and not to many follower-wannabes

When your friends are competing for who will be the first to organize a group birthday present, you know motivation is formally a disease. Our school system has been encouraging leadership roles by telling us over and over again that management is hot, management is big bucks. It's actually true; I can't remember going to an interview where I wasn't asked about past management experience. But this all means that we start to think not being a leader is being a loser. Well, most of the time you just might not be the best at everything and failing sucks. Especially thinking about how you just failed at something, that sucks. This is perfectly shown in the movie, American Beauty [1], where we see Carolyn ( Annette Bening), the wife in the movie's perfect family, after not making a real estate sale, shuts the blinds so no one can see, completely beats herself up, shuts up her crying and goes on with her life.

Ambition has modified our speech. We don't say things like "I want to get an A next time, I hope I do better" to "I'll be working to make sure I get a better grade next time", or not making judgments on our spotty records at all.

Although I like what I've recently learned from the Deception episode of Radio Lab [2], that lying to yourself in the long run, makes you a happier person. They cite a study about a swim team with people who have lots of people at the same skill level, but those who did high on the do-you-lie-to-yourself test did better in the long swim. I think the whole positive thinking movement out there takes this a bit too far. I don't know much about it, but there, people say you should be a positive thinker and say things like " I am a winner" all the time. I did read a story in Time magazine about this 'new science of happiness' though [3] and they say not all of it is just hype. For example, just writing down all the things you were able to get done in the day or thinking them helped people avoid depression in a study they cite.

Speaking of doing things, this was one of the main points in David Allen's book, Getting Things Done [4]. I read this one because I wanted to find a way to manage all the things I have to do and he believes that all the positivity crap is ... crap. To feel good, you need control of your life, by managing what you have to do, lowering your expectations and preventing yourself from feeling like a failure by doing what you need to do and not planning on saving the world every day.


[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169547/

[2] http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/02/29

[3] http://www.reflectivehappiness.com/AboutUs/TimeMagazine/

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Allen_(author)