11 posts tagged “mash”

This week I have been facilitating a Global Module with a group of students in North Carolina. We have been talking about Global Poverty, our experiences with it and our understanding of its causes. I thought I would order a Netflicks movie on the subject and so today I watched the Documentary HOME by Jeffrey Toggman. SEE TRAILER HERE.

What became evident to me is that the causes for poverty are both external and internal. There are roadblocks that helper have to help get out of the way for us and roadblocks on the inside of our heads that have to be removed before we will take that help. I don't want to spoil the movie for you but it is fascinating to watch the process by which someone who has never ever ever been given help tries to deal with the psychological crisis that being helped creates.

I am reminded of a passage in the Gospel of John where Jesus asks a man who has been lame his whole life if he WANTS to get well. And instead of saying "yes, I do" the man starts to give reasons why he CAN'T get well. In someways, a soul can adapt to a wound and even to a painful life. It is like a back that goes out and doesn't get adjusted and the muscles all conform to the abnormality. To a person like that, a chiropractic adjustment FEELS like a dislocated spine.

Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for a feast of the Jews. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed. One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, "Do you want to get well?

"Sir," the invalid replied, "I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me."

In other words, the question "Do you want to get well?" is responded to with "this is why I can't". Calvin  Miller captures this perfectly in his fantasy book, the Singer. I will have to find a copy so that I can quote it later. 

 Question for Comment: Are there any ways in which you can feel yourself afraid of achieving health or prosperity? Are their poverties of different kinds that you have grown accustomed to? Do people who care for you find you easy to help or hard to help?

The U.S. Demographic Visualizer

http://demo.idvsolutions.com/apps/censusdemo/flash/map.html

It is interesting to see the different ways in which American society is not really an "American" society. There are many Americas. I submitted the following discussion post to a class today. It makes me wonder, do we ALL agree to distinctions being made in an ad hoc way? Are we all hypocrites in some way?

"Our society likes to find ways to make distinctions between groups
of people."

What is interesting is that so many of us can find ourselves in the
position of pots calling the kettle black on this. There are some rather
weird inconsistencies. For example, social conservatives would say that
it is WRONG to draw a distinction between a baby and a fetus but would
definitely draw such a distinction between a heterosexual couple and a
gay couple. A liberal might argue that it is WRONG to draw a distinction
between a heterosexual couple and a gay couple but that distinctions
between wealthy people and Middle income people MUST be drawn for tax
purposes. 

etc. etc. 

Do we ALL do this? are we all guilty? Are any of us really consistent?
Thanks for getting me thinking. 

The following was posted by a student in one of my classes today. It occurred to me that maybe I should start a separate blog for some of my favorite student posts.

Q:

Have you ever had experiences with people holding what Steele calls “a grievance identity”? Details? Would you consider Steele’s criticism of grievance politics to be callous?  How does the learning you have done this semester impact your answer to that question?

 

A:

For those that didn't get a chance to read "The New Segregation" the author, Steele, uses  the term “grievance identity" to represent his observation that minorities today are forced  into roles in society that are defined by who they identify as the enemy.  For instance the  author, a black man, claims that being a black man with a strong cultural identity requires  that he hold a grievance against white men, support its alienation, and uphold his groups  sovereignty.  His conclusion is that this is about power not justice and that it a result of identity forming out of anger against oppression.  

 

I have had many experiences with people holding what I would call "a grievance identity."   Its always easy to remember your first encounter with something that strikes you as different, outside your comfort zone, or beyond your previous experiences.  My military career provided the environment for many of these experiences.  As a white kid (17)  coming from a small rural town in Norther Vermont with no black or hispanic population I  had almost no multi-cultural exposure before arriving at Basic Military Training.  It just so happened that I was also the only white kid in my training flight.  Everyone else was either black or hispanic. Lets just say that it was clear that I did not exactly fit in.  I received two death threats within the first 12 hrs.  One because I asked a big black kid  (Seth) where he was from and what his father did for work and one because I laughed  when my bunk mate fell off the top bunk. Let's just say that I didn't sleep well for several nights. It was made very clear by almost everyone that I was not welcome, based purely on what my skin color represented. They called me "pillow", and somehow you just know when a name is derogatory and when it is endearing. Those who did try to talk to me or where caught talking to me those first few weeks where reprimanded by others not to talk  to "pillows".  There was a clear rift in the group.  Urban black and Urban hispanic.  I was not welcome in either and represented for most of them their oppression.  But, it was one of those life changing experiences.  I had never before experienced such a degree of  dislike, disrespect, and general ill will by a group of people, and all for no justifiable  reason other than I was white and represented a world that these young black and  hispanic men where angry with.  They begrudged me my humanity in affirming their identity.  Their groups where bound on the common grievance they had against what I represented.  My reaction to this actually surprised me.  Rather than becoming angry at them I became embarrassed of what I represented in this new group dynamic.  Luckily there wasn't much time for thinking about this and at the end of the day little energy left  for words. We survived each other because we barely survived the days training. What made us different eventually became overshadowed by what we had in common (our military experience) and a new group identity formed out of our shared experiences.   Seth still calls me "pillows", but its derogatory connotation has long sense been replaced by a history of mutual respect and support.  A year ago I talked with Seth and he told me that I was the first white guy he ever asked for help and the first white guy that ever actually helped him.  In the 12 years since the day he asked me for help that thought had never crossed my mind.  I'm glad Seth doesn't allow his anger to define his identity any more, and I'm glad I don't feel embarrassed when made the subject of other people racially focused anger. 

 

I personally don't think that Steele’s criticism of grievance politics is callous.  I think he presents a revealing and respectful perspective on modern American politics.  Yesterday, on NPR I heard a report about some public schools in America that chose to become gender segregated.  The idea is that girls and boys learn differently.  But, everyone they interviewed who supported this approach sounded angry about their daughter being frightened to ask question because boys where in the class or sons who where embarrassed to participate in class because they are worried about what the girls are thinking about them in class.  It sounds like grievance politics to me.  They interviewed an old lady who criticized this by stating that men and women are different enough as it is, and that schooling them differently isn't going to teach them how to get along, which is what they need to know.  I think thats a respectable statement, and it follows along with one of the things I learned this semester.  Diversity is important.  The more people with different backgrounds, culture, race, experiences the more value arises out of working together.  This class has been a good example of that.  We struggled with our differences amongst ourselves and with the Jordan students, but the end result was something that is arguably better than what we had before. 

 

- Ethan

Question for Comment: How do you create a safe place for diversity in your life?

Watched another Frontline documentary on the part that Dick Cheney played in the push to war.

I wish Dick Cheney would watch it and respond so that I could say that I had listened to both sides of the story.The argument is that Cheney, Rumsfeild, Wolfowitz, Pearl, etc. set up their own intelligence agency and suppressed the CIA intelligence by putting pressure on George Tennant. 

It is interesting that Dick Cheney is the one that gets the workover and not Bush in this 2006 version of the Iraq War. What is so interesting is that most of the material is ALSO in the Frontline documentary, BUSH'S WAR put out two years later. In short you can pick either video and watch either man, Bush or Cheney get blamed for the Iraq War. In 2004, Frontline put out the documentary Rumsfeld's War. In 2010, maybe it will be Condi Rices?

None are friendly to Condi Rice or Don Rumsfeld who will need to have a movie made to redeem them from eternal blame for Iraq if it winds up a total mess indefinitely. I just find it fascinating that Frontline has used the exact same movie to go after EITHER Cheney OR Bush or Rumsfeld. Its like medication that will work for either pain relief OR headaches or high blood pressure being packaged as medication for each.

Question for Comment: Who do YOU blame for the Iraq War (if anybody). 

The boys and I are about to delve into a study of capitalism and in the interest of plowing up the soil to prepare for that discussion, we watched the movie PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS the other night (about the lives of the poor and homeless) and the documentary BORN RICH today (about the lives of the kids of wealthy heirs).

If you have ever wondered what it would be like to inherit 20 Billion Dollars on your eighteenth birthday, this would be a good movie to watch. Among other things, both movies reveal how important it is not to assume that you know something about a person because they seem to belong to a group of people that you think you know.  Rich people feel pain, sometimes their wealth makes it MORE likely that they will experience it. Sometimes, their wealth makes it so that the pain is even more pronounced because it cannot be hid ... indeed, others in society LOOK for it.

Similarly, Chris Gardner, the basis of the Pursuit of Happyness movie, barely managed to climb out of the hole that people's inability to see his talent left him in. I remember living with some billionaires once and listening to them yell at each other about whether they should or shouldn't build a bowling alley in Washington D.C. I tend to think if you are not happy, money gives you something else to argue about.

As for me? I just had a chimney replaced. I took down the old bricks and the new chimney, just from the roof up ... and the liner cost $2500. It feels like I just bought a widescreen plasma TV to put on my roof. But one of the kids in this video could easily have spent that much on alcohol in one night. The same kid who said that he went to Brown University and only attended eight college related commitments in an entire semester ... and still was asked to come back.

Clearly money talks. Sometimes too much. You can tell that money does not wreck everyone's lives, just as poverty doesn't ... but it makes it easier for either the poor or the rich to get wrecked. As the Hebrew Proverb puts it,

Question for Comment: Where do you most feel the stresses of too little or too much of anything in your life?

Frontline's A Class Divided: I can't watch this footage without thinking how insane we all are to send our kids off to school. Do we have any idea how pliable their brains are? I can't watch this without thinking about the students in the DECLINING BY DEGREES documentary I saw the other night and how they were already thinking about grades and about learning. One young man in particular explained that he didn't bother reading assignments because he could get 90's without doing so. The learning was irrelevant. The grade was important. Were we all this pliable? Are we all this pliable?

Shocked and angered by Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968, Jane Elliot, an Iowa schoolteacher who is whte, decided to teach her thrd-grade pupils a lesson on racism. Elliot divided the whte students according to their eye color. She forced the "blues" to wear armbands and to sit in the back of the classroom. She also belabored the blue-eyed chldren's failures, pointing out each mistake as it was made. Meanwhile, Elliot lavished praise on the "browns" and gave them special privileges. She ignored the brown-eyed chldren's errors, praising each of their individual accomplishments.

Elliot's treatment of the children immediately changed their behavior. "I lowered my expectations of the blue-eyed
children and they lived down to those expectations." After the blues' repeated mistakes, Elliot sneered, "See? You're all that way. I knew this would happen!" Conversely, the brown-eyed children made progress in many areas including math and reading. The green- and hazel-eyed chldren -the neutral third party -shunned the blue-eyed children in the classroom, in the lunchroom, at recess, and at the water fountain. "I watched those thud graders -all white and all Christian -who had never been exposed to different races become blatantly racist," Elliot says.
Elliot's 20-odd years of blue-eyed/brown-eyed antiracism instruction has acquired such notoriety that she has received both scorn and in some cases admiration of her fellow townspeople. She and her husband have been snubbed by friends, whle her chldren have been beaten and spit upon. However controversial and unscientific this experiment may be, Elliot's examination of racial prejudice still demonstrates, as graphically as any empirical data, racism's ability to invade and occupy impressionable minds."

Iowa Schoolteacher Demonstrates Racism as Learned Behavior
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 8. (Summer, 1995), p. 36.

In another related article, I came across the concept of "cumulative discrimination" "Discrimination at one decision point, the article notes, "may influence discrimination at future decision points." It is an obvious concept that now has a word to describe it.

Tracing the Economic Impact of Cumulative Discrimination
Rebecca M. Blank

The American Economic Review, Vol. 95, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the One Hundred Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, Philadelphia, PA, January 7-9, 2005. (May, 2005), pp. 99-103.

The Documentary of the night was Declining By Degrees: Higher Education At Risk. I would write more about it but after a 12 hour day today in my higher education job, I don't have a lot of energy. A.  portion of the documentary is about the lives of the adjunct faculty who often teach 8-9 classes a semester to make a living. Wasn't hard to relate to that. A portion was about universities full of students who can't be bothered to read their assigned texts. Wasn't hard to relate to that. A portion was about University basketball teams and how coaches are paid many times more than the University Professors and even Presidents; athletes that spend 80% of their time practicing; professors who say that for $65,000 it is insulting to tell them they need to teach kids how to write; college students who don't study more than an hour a night; professors who have to decide between promotion and educational quality.

All of this makes "sense" to me as colleges become more market driven and students are making choices about where they are going to go to college, often doing so on the basis of non-educational factors like work-out facilities, sports teams, landscaping, and dorm luxuries. As one President described it, "It's an arms race and we are going to win". Meanwhile cuts in state funding and increases in tuition are beginning to drive a selection process that places students, by means of an economic "sorting hat" regardless of merit (unless they are at the very top), in a caste system of schools based on their financial situation.

It is hard to know how to go about complaining. The documentary makes it clear that so many students are not applying themselves, are using college as a patio on which to drink and party. There is NO WAY that I want to fund their irresponsibility. No way. And yet on the other hand, you have exceptionally bright kids who are working their buts off to make it through who are being forced out or into Community Colleges.

I need to get some sleep. I have a long day of teaching ahead of me tomorrow. Its almost 2:00 in the morning. 

Question for Comment: How would you best prepare a smart kid to get a free college education?   

A controversial new anti-Koranic video was recently produced and banned in Holland. It demonstrates the problem that Islamic people are having everywhere.  It is called FITNA. I will let you go find it if you want. It essentially superimposes specific verses from the Koran advocating violence against unbelievers with images and sound files of Islamic extremists advocating the same in contemporary society.

Interestingly, the film was mentioned by a student in the Netherlands who is taking one of my online classes right now. This week, we are studying McCarthyism.You can, I think, see the connection:

"Take a walk down the street and see where this is going. You no longer feel like you are living in your own country. There is a battle going on and we have to defend ourselves. Before you know it there will be more mosques than churches!" Geert Wiliders.

This guy so reminds me of Dr. Pfander in my Masters Thesis:

"AMSTERDAM – Faction leader for the Freedom Party Geert Wilders is not considering making any apology to Saudi Arabia for his recent comments on the Koran. He said this on Sunday in response to a report in the Saudi newspaper Al-Watan, which wrote that the Islamic country has complained to the Dutch government about the comments.

A spokesperson for the ministry of foreign affairs in The Hague said on Sunday that the Saudi ambassador had in fact done so “informally.” There has not been any official complaint however, he said.

The newspaper claims that the Saudi embassy in The Hague demanded that Wilders recant his comments and apologize to Muslims. The MP said he would not even consider it.

“Are they completely mad? It is scandalous that a country that does not recognize freedom of speech is telling me what to do. They had better learn that as an MP here you are allowed to say what you want.”

Wilders said earlier this week in an interview with newspaper De Pers that Muslims should tear out and discard half the Koran if they want to live in the Netherlands."

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1787609/posts

Would the Dutch tolerate the forced censoring of large portions of the Christian Bible in the Netherlands? W hat is the difference? I suspect that Christians have, whether they admit it or not, come to the place where they no longer think that King  David's conception of God was entirely accurate. Muslims are still, apparently having that argument. I suspect that it is very unfair to produce a video that pretends that they are not and FITNA may be that video.

Questions for Comment: have you ever read the Qur'an for yourself? How does one balance its advocacy for jihad with its advocacy for peace? Is it in a different category altogether from the scriptures that Christians appeal to?

Tonight, the boys and I watched some episodes from E2, a series of documentary videos about architects and how they makes use of environmental studies to create sustainable building designs.

It is an important reminder of how knowledge can so often be, but shouldn't be, disconnected from problems solving, and even more, service to a community. knowledge was never intended to be known to pass a test. it is there to be used as a tool of service and it was refreshing to see creative, intelligent, well-educated people using their assets for the good of communities, some, as in the first episode are some of the world's wealthiest. Some, as in the second episode are among the world's poorest.

That word, SUSTAINABILITY is gaining traction everywhere. It implies that a paradigm shift is occurring whose principle feature is a change from thinking twelve months out to twelve decades out.

Sustainability may be understood by referring to a set of five core principles:

Respecting life and natural processes. Sustainability commits us to explicit considerationof the effects of our decisions and actions on the health and wellbeing of the entire community of life.

Living within limits. Sustainabilityinvolves an awareness that natural resourcesare finite endowmentsto be used with care and prudence at a rate consonant with their capacity for regeneration.

Valuing the local. Sustainabilitycommitsus to show respect for the natural components of our neighborhoods and bioregions;to preservation, restoration,and use of local knowledge; and to creation of strong, selfreliant
local economies.

Accounting for full costs. Sustainabilityrequires that we become aware of the costs generated by our products from "source to sink-to the environment and society. Product prices must reflect this awareness.

Sharing power. Sustainability demands we recognize that we are all interconnected-people, biota, and physical elements. Problems are solved by each individual assuming a share of the responsibility.

Green Destiny: Universities Leading the Way to a Sustainable Future
Christopher Uhl; Amy Anderson
BioScience, Vol. 51, No. 1. (Jan., 2001), pp. 36-42.

It makes me sit back and ask, "How will the teaching of history contribute to or inhibit the speed with which we convert to this new way of thinking? How have historians contributed to the lack of sustainability in the way we have been living? is there a historiography of sustainability yet?

The most interesting of the episodes in the series to me was about sustainable archetecture in China right now. See the trailer at: CHINA: FROM RED TO GREEN at PBS.

Question for Comment: How sustainable is your life at the moment? Is it a life that your children and grandchildren could continue living? Why or why not?

My new theme song. Grin.

The Cape by Guy Clark

Eight years old with flour sack cape
Tied all around his neck
He climbed up on the garage
Figurin’ what the heck
He screwed his courage up so tight
The whole thing come unwound
He got a runnin’ start and bless his heart
He headed for the ground

Chorus

He’s one of those who knows that life
Is just a leap of faith
Spread your arms and hold you breath
Always trust your cape

All grown up with a flour sack cape
Tied all around his dream
He’s full of piss and vinegar
He’s bustin’ at the seams
He licked his finger and checked the wind
It’s gonna be do or die
He wasn’t scared of nothin’, Boys
He was pretty sure he could fly

Chorus

Old and grey with a flour sack cape
Tied all around his head
He’s still jumpin’ off the garage
And will be till he’s dead
All these years the people said
He’s actin’ like a kid
He did not know he could not fly
So he did

Chorus

Risk taking. I read an interesting article lately that suggested that gender inequities can often be the result of risk taking behaviors in the negotiation process.
 
Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide by Linda Babcock and Sarah Laschever (Princeton Press). Here is a summary of its message:

"When Linda Babcock asked why so many male graduate students were teaching their own courses and most female students were assigned as assistants, her dean said: "More men ask. The women just don't ask." It turns out that whether they want higher salaries or more help at home, women often find it hard to ask. Sometimes they don't know that change is possible--they don't know that they can ask. Sometimes they fear that asking may damage a relationship. And sometimes they don't ask because they've learned that society can react badly to women asserting their own needs and desires.

By looking at the barriers holding women back and the social forces constraining them, Women Don't Ask shows women how to reframe their interactions and more accurately evaluate their opportunities. It teaches them how to ask for what they want in ways that feel comfortable and possible, taking into account the impact of asking on their relationships. And it teaches all of us how to recognize the ways in which our institutions, child-rearing practices, and unspoken assumptions perpetuate inequalities--inequalities that are not only fundamentally unfair but also inefficient and economically unsound."

The economic, social, and emotional ramifications of not negotiating are significant according to the authors, particularly in a world where people are changing jobs all the time.

• In surveys, 2.5 times more women than men said they feel "a great deal of apprehension" about negotiating.
• Men initiate negotiations about four times as often as women.
• When asked to pick metaphors for the process of negotiating, men picked "winning a ballgame" and a "wrestling match," while women picked "going to the dentist."
• Women will pay as much as $1,353 to avoid negotiating the price of a car, which may help explain why 63 percent of Saturn car buyers are women.
• Women are more pessimistic about the how much is available when they do negotiate and so they typically ask for and get less when they do negotiate—on average, 30 percent less than men.
• 20 percent of adult women (22 million people) say they never negotiate at all, even though they often recognize negotiation as appropriate and even necessary.
  
  http://www.womendontask.com/stats.html
  

One of the more fascinating conclusions they found was that the differences between men and women in negotiations resulted in pay differentials almost exactly corresponding to the difference in what men and women get paid generally. in short, this seems to be the reason for inequity more than gender discrimination.

As the authors put it:

"The most striking finding, however, was that the students who had negotiated (most of them men) were able to increase their starting salaries by 7.4 percent on average, or $4,053--almost exactly the difference between men's and women's average starting pay. This suggests that the salary differences between the men and the women might have been eliminated if the women had negotiated their offers."

One of the more interesting portions of the book to me was an experiment that the researches did with the game of boggle.

"They recruited students at Carnegie Mellon for an experiment and told them that they would be paid between three and ten dollars for playing Boggle^TM, a game by Milton Bradley. In Boggle, players shake a cube of tile letters until all the letters fall into a grid at the bottom of the cube. They must then identify words that can be formed from the letters vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. Each research subject was asked to play four rounds of the game, and then an experimenter handed him or her three dollars and said, "Here's three dollars. Is three dollars okay?" If a subject asked for more money, the experimenters would pay that participant ten dollars, but they would not give anyone more money if he or she just complained about the compensation (an indirect method of asking). The results were striking--almost nine times as many male as female subjects asked for more money.³ Both male and female subjects rated how well they'd played the game about equally, meaning that women didn't feel they should be paid less or should accept less because they'd played poorly. There were also no gender differences in how much men and women complained about the compensation (there was plenty of complaining all around). The significant factor seemed to be that for men, unhappiness with what they were offered was more likely to make them try to fix their unhappiness--by asking for more."

I suspect that there are many men who, as the world begins to put socialization pressure on them to become more feminine, will find themselves in the same boat. I suspect that I have been one of them.

"Women often don't know the market value of their work: Women report salary expectations between 3 and 32 percent lower than those of men for the same jobs; men expect to earn 13 percent more than women during their first year of full-time work and 32 percent more at their career peaks."

The moral of the story may be ... "always trust your cape".