Your mission, should you choose to accept it

I am on the right in the blue plaid shirt standing in front of the teacher, Mr. Waite, as I recall. I had a huge crush on the seated girl wearing the blue sweater over a red top. Her name is Betty. John Marshall is seated in front of me.

 

The title of this post comes from a television adventure show called Mission Impossible. The hero listened to a taped message that described the assignment and that always included this line, should you choose to accept it.

Young people accept far more these days than they did when I was their age. That’s a good thing. Whether it will be enough to save the world remains to be seen.

People my age committed ourselves to creating problems in the hope of prospering financially in the short term, and we committed to intensifying those problems we already had. We now hand these problems to young people as we sit back in our lawn chairs, congratulating ourselves.

Amazingly, young folks still send Father’s Day greetings to this crowd.

The good news is we have some resources available now that we did not have when I was young. One of the most profound and meaningful resources we have now is YouTube. I just spent a considerable amount of time learning about the sexual preferences of lesbians by watching their video presentations. In my youth such resources would have been condemned as evil, not that they would have been available at all.

YouTube makes traditional schools seem even less relevant than we thought they were, and I think they are quite irrelevant. I have a master’s degree in something I do well, and nobody cares. Perhaps you are in a similar situation. Traditional institutions just want students to owe them vast sums of money.

Facebook, as I have often said, has no moral compass. It is merely dedicated to making money. That is a dangerous path to take, and we would do well to not expect much of the organization. As solid as they seem, they have chosen a precarious path.

Young people face global warming, and vast amounts of poverty and social conflict. The hope for survival rests, I believe, in the ability to rally around each other and share the value that each person can provide to the community. We have never had so many resources that enable people to share as we do today. The volume of sharing is incredibly low compared to the need to share. This must change if you twenty-something people want to have a cordial environment when you are my age. The Earth will express its anger if you continue to provoke it.

Never has the need to participate been greater, and still the majority of people are cautious. Caution brings with it its own risks. Please consider carefully. Your choices matter.

 

 

 

 

Our shared sorrow

Nine people perished, a young man declared his life over, and a nation reluctantly examines itself. Jon Stewart speaks for us.

“By acknowledging it — by staring into that and seeing it for what it is — we still won’t do jackshit,” he said. “Yeah, that’s us. And that’s the part that blows my mind.”—Jon Stewart

Young people

I took my truck to the dealer for routine service, and I accepted a shuttle ride back home. The other passenger teaches school. She had a lot to say about the experience.

She said she loves to teach, but the circumstances in which she teaches discourage her tremendously from continuing in the field. The challenges come from the educational system itself, from the students, and from their parents.

The students, she said, have no appetite for learning. They say when they need a fact they will Google it. They are not aware that there is more to learning than facts.

The school system is interested primarily in good test scores. High scores validate the alleged effectiveness of the people of rank within the system. Emphasizing facts as a learning priority supports the powers that be in achieving the appearance of success.

Parents have largely relinquished their responsibility in two ways. The most obvious is that young students spend more time with their electronic gadgets than they do in thoughtful encounters with people. The other is that parents want to be their child’s friend, and discipline and rigor are abandoned in an effort to be popular.

In other news, I photographed a wedding last weekend as a favor to the bride. The groom was 19 years old, and he and his new wife have a two-year-old son. Several things caught my attention. One of them was the number of young people in the wedding party who smoked. Some of them held cigarettes during the formal photo taking.

Another was the use of the F word in front of children. I asked one of the men about this, and he basically said it was no big deal.

A third thing was the level of violence in the rough housing among the males before the ceremony. They operated in a frame of reference like nothing I had ever seen.

Finally, the bride and groom chose an officiate who had some behavior problems, and he demonstrated them on their wedding day.

I know many young men who I admire tremendously. Their virtues were cultivated by wise and caring parents. They were encouraged by an educational system that communicated something about the pleasures of learning.

We have to make a thoughtful choice about the future we want for young people. This is no time for people my age to sit in their rocking chairs.

Do not pass Go, go directly to jail

I repent daily, even without a street messenger to remind me.

The title of this post is from one of the drawing cards in a silly and culturally destructive game called Monopoly. I spent hours playing it as a child. In part, that explains some of the less interesting aspects of my personal weirdness. I have weirdness I am proud of, but it does not involve prisoners or judges. I learned that from out-of-touch adults.

Consider, if you will, this recent news item.

The report, published Wednesday by the National Research Council, describes the rise of incarceration in America as “historically unprecedented and internationally unique.” It found that from 1973 to 2009, the prison population grew from about 200,000 to approximately 2.2 million. With this spike, the U.S. now holds close to a quarter of the world’s prisoners, even though it accounts for just 5 percent of the global population.

I personally wonder how judges can set the duration of prison sentences in advance devoid of knowledge about the rehabilitation progress of the offender. Well, I guess that is why they call them judges. They have the black robes, and a gavel. Maybe I need a gavel.

In our culture we like to judge, and we are wary of listening. Those might be the defining characteristics of our nation at the present time. At least that is my view of things.

Any thoughts you would care to share?

 

 

Dealing with wonder

I wonder at our dedication to madness. It’s everywhere. This is a shot of the San Diego freeway in Los Angeles. People will get in line to go somewhere, whether they want to or not.

On Saturday I photographed four naked ladies, at their request. The experience, apart from a little anxiety about low shutter speeds contributing to blur, was wonderful for me. The slight blur in this batch of photos I deem acceptable. I definitely had fun.

Wonder is everywhere, both for the delicious and for the weird and strange.

We need not search for beauty and wonderful things. We are surrounded by both.

My car runs on the remains of dead bodies from ancient times. I am, in a sense, a grave robber.

Fossil fuel is a general term for buried combustible geologic deposits of organic materials, formed from decayed plants and animals that have been converted to crude oil, coal, natural gas, or heavy oils by exposure to heat and pressure in the earth’s crust over hundreds of millions of years.

Using these materials promises to make life on Earth a shabby experience, but hey, why worry about something that has not happened? I’m old. It’s someone else’s problem.

We have messages from nature everywhere we look. Consider this little flower. We can look at this and not wonder about a pervasive intelligence in the universe?

But why worry about intelligence when gas is under three bucks?

 

I told you so

Me and Maysa

I will regret this post. I scold myself when I criticize young men for being timid. I always hate when I do that. Still, confessing my anxiety might help.

There is some advantage to getting old, and I celebrate it in this post.

One of the advantages is that I realize how severely stuck the world is because we have heard so very many promises of progress that were bullshit. I’ve been around through many promises.

Old people, if they have been paying any attention at all, know the hallmarks of bullshit.

We also notice that the tolerance for BS has increased during our life time. Almost everything in the public domain is now BS.

Readers of this blog, if I really have any, know that my chief criticism of people is the failure of men to be men. Males have opted, as much as possible, for acceptance, whatever that might mean to them. Boldness has vanished. Even men covered with tattoos are trying to fit in to a peer group. All males are trying to fit into a peer group except for Jon Stewart and a few companions.

I am sad for young people because my generation passed on to you so little of value. We set the bar very low, and that is all you have seen. We think the invention of Facebook is an accomplishment. Shit. That is how far we have fallen.

All the interesting energy today comes from women. All of it.

I don’t know how to fix this. If you do, please share with me. Guys, I accept and honor your silence. It’s what you know.

 

Let’s play!

I made an amazing discovery, thanks to Stuart Brown. The link will take you to his informative TED Talk.

The discovery is how my life is limited by my lack of experience playing. I began to take life seriously when I was a very young boy. His talk is a wake up call for me, and potentially for millions of other people.

We are discouraged from playing at work and at school. We are told to have a vicarious experience from watching sports teams in competition. One of the problems with this strategy is that those teams are not playing. They are deeply committed to winning, and without winning they are completely deprived of fun.

We have essentially forgotten how to play, and we have categorized play as a waste of time. Stuart Brown explains the enormous cost in quality of life when we minimize play.

Yesterday I photographed a couple who will soon celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. They asked me if I would photograph them nude. Today they will receive 87 photos of them being playful, affectionate, and tender. They were joyful during the shoot. It was a lovely reminder to me about play.

It occurred to me while watching the TED Talk that most business organizations are impervious to good advice such as using play to leverage productivity. This means that it would be very easy for progressive management to distinguish an organization by heeding what Dr. Brown has to say. An organization could easily leave its competition in the dust, but this doesn’t happen because all the managers have pledged themselves to the same tired thinking and values.

I offer these photos of people playing. Enjoy!

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Some problems with porn

People see the problems with porn differently for a variety of reasons.

Regular readers might guess that I see the main problem associated with it being our agreement not to talk about it. We reached that agreement without any conversation. We reached it by default.

One of the questions on my mind is why so many people volunteer to appear in it. I am curious about their motivations, and I would like to know something about how they overcame their squeamishness—if they had any.

I would also like to know if anyone sees significance in the failure of men in pornography to appreciate the women they work with. The beast in the sculpture accurately symbolizes the male point of view in this kind of activity.

Edouard Manet: Le dejeuner sur l’herbe, 1863

Another point I would like to explore through conversation is the massive gap between candor levels in our various channels of communication. I photographed the fine lady in the sculpture at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In contrast, Facebook has a fit over a glimpse of nipple. Pornography draws no lines of any kind. How do these conflicting points of view add to our collective confusion?

The majority of states in the U.S. have made it legal for women to be topless in public. Many cities celebrate with an annual topless festival in August. There will be one in Phoenix this year although Arizona’s legal stand on toplessness is said to be ambiguous at best. Arizona, in most matters, is quite hostile and harsh in its judgments.

Meanwhile, people continue to be enormously confused about nudity, sex, and personal values associated with these subjects. The confusion endures in silence, for the most part.

As Joan Rivers famously asked, “Can we talk?”

 

 

Thank you, and have a nice day

I have been monitoring the state of courtesy all my life, and in this post I will share my thoughts about its current state.

How many times have I stood behind people in the grocery checkout line when the customer did not return the clerk’s oral greeting? Too many, by my measure.

My neighborhood is fairly civilized. This is a small, gated community. People driving the streets do not wave at pedestrians as they pass them.

This blog has 400 posts, after a pretty thorough recent pruning. It has 300 followers. I get an occasional “like” but with two or three exceptions nobody comments on the posts or any perceived virtues of the blog itself. You are all welcome to be here. I write the blog to nourish myself. I can only guess how much it might help you.

We can take this indifference up a few notches. There are cities that have declared it illegal to feed homeless people. Rich people denigrate poor people in general. My online dictionary uses that example to explain denigrate.

Last week, 90-year-old World War II veteran Arnold Abbott made national headlines when he got busted by cops in Fort Lauderdale, Florida twice in one week—for giving out food to homeless people. While serving a public meal on November 2, Abbott told the Sun-Sentinel, “a policeman pulled my arm and said, ‘Drop that plate right now,’ like it was a gun.” Abbott runs a nonprofit group that regularly distributes food in city parks. Because of an ordinance the city passed this October that restricts feeding the homeless in public, his charity work is now potentially illegal.

Simple courtesy has been in decline for a long time. I think it arises in part from the sheer bombardment of sensations that constitute modern life. We are blasted with information and sensation nearly all the time. We become defensive, and we forget to radiate kindness.

Cassandra expressing the No Hate sentiment. We are a long way from simple kindness these days.

People are also encouraged to cultivate being smug. If you, or dad, pay fifty grand a year for college tuition you can easily develop a lofty opinion of yourself.

Fringe influences such as pornography serve as models of arrogance and greed. When I was young pornography was available only in shabby theaters. Now it is a couple of mouse clicks away, there is a ton of it, and it’s free.

Common courtesy, and beyond that, kindness, will not be revived without a concerted effort. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

 

 

 

 

 

What guys have accomplished

Giving up your dream took courage, men. You should be proud.

Men dominate the business side of this nation. We also have the dominant role in setting standards of behavior in many areas. The people in Washington D.C. demonstrate this so clearly.

It is the last day of 2014, and I suggest we look back over a longer time horizon to consider some of the primary accomplishments of men, accomplishments that have left a lasting mark. This list is in no particular order.

• Tuition at Yale University is $45,800. There are other expenses too, and the university says the total is likely to be $63,250 per year. Times four that comes to about a quarter million dollars: $253,000.
• Porn, in spite of the massive amount of free content online, is still paying some bills. “Globally, porn is a $97 billion industry, according to Kassia Wosick, assistant professor of sociology at New Mexico State University. Between $10 billion and $12 billion of that comes from the United States.”
• According to USA Today the long-running war in Afghanistan is expensive. They report: “The military assault against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria is costing $7 million to $10 million a day. Stretched over a year, the price of the war could be as much as $3.7 billion, much less than what the Pentagon spends on fighting in Afghanistan.”
• Tomahawk missiles cost $52 million each, according to USA Today.
• According to the American Civil Liberties Union we are spending a lot of money to punish pot owners. “According to the ACLU’s original analysis, marijuana arrests now account for over half of all drug arrests in the United States. Of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, 88% were for simply having marijuana. Nationwide, the arrest data revealed one consistent trend: significant racial bias. Despite roughly equal usage rates, Blacks are 3.73 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana.”Arresting 8.2 million people has a cost associated with it.
• An extensive library of books have been written that guide managers in getting high performance from their organizations. These books are given a casual nod, at best. I have been let go twice from jobs that involved engaging managers in the available guidance from the wise ones.
• The costs of marijuana arrests involve a great deal more than money. The ACLU reports:

  “All wars are expensive, and the War on Marijuana has been no different. Not only have states blown billions that could have been otherwise invested, but the personal cost to those arrested is often significant and can linger for years. When people are arrested for possessing even tiny amounts of marijuana, it can have dire collateral consequences that affect their eligibility for public housing and student financial aid, employment opportunities, child custody determinations, and immigration status.”

I give men most of the credit for these accomplishments. Bravo, guys. Raise a glass or two to the new year.