tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15120210956225327962023-11-15T08:32:26.520-08:00September UniversitySept-University, in concept, is a metaphor for intellectual maturity and represents an ambitious quest on behalf of posterity. September University, the book, is a call to action, a social forecast, and above all a passionate argument that a bright future depends upon the experiential wisdom of aging citizens.Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.comBlogger21125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-3834224753709718842017-05-01T07:18:00.000-07:002017-05-23T18:53:05.402-07:00The Angst of Aging in the Age of Trump<br />
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Charles D. Hayes</span></span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">I’ve been writing
about aging and mortality for many years, and the older I get, the slower the
going and the greater the existential gravity. I’ve long believed that each of
us has a threshold for change, and that once past that threshold, we begin to
grow fond of the notion that we are ready to be out of here. Enough already.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">Okay, maybe not
fond, but warming to the idea that there is an upside to nonexistence because
it means an absence of the steady escalation of angst associated with the
physical and emotional realities of aging. It is a subtle biological gift, a
benefit of aging, a psychic legacy of sorts that reminds us that we are mortal
animals and our time is almost up. Better to cease to exist than to be overcome
by the fear and disillusionment of a world we no longer understand. It helps
explain why we say the deceased are at rest.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">The frustrations
we experience increase daily. At the social level, the music of newer
generations begins to sound like unnecessary loud noise, and the things that
interest younger generations begin to seem mindless and strange. You find their
body-art tattoos appalling and their incessant texting rude, as they lose themselves
in their cellphones while in your presence. You want to tell young people that
the things they fret about today will dissipate and seem meaninglessness in
time, but you know they won’t listen. You know they must learn from experience,
the same way you did. You become more and more appreciative of the old saying that
“youth is wasted on the young.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">Then there are the
personal frustrations I suspect some of you share, like awakening too many
times in the night for bathroom breaks. You arise in the morning and have
trouble focusing for a time because of cataracts. Rapidly failing eyesight makes
reading harder and harder. You feel you’re getting exceptionally clumsy, and you
can’t get anything open. Today’s packaging seems designed to keep contents out
of the hands of children and seniors.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">Like many, I used
to swear that I would not spend my final years engaged in daily discussions
about aches and pains. But each year, it gets harder as these ongoing little
traumas increasingly occupy the front pages of our awareness.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">More often than
not, written instructions don’t seem to make sense. Computers and smartphones
always seem too smart by half, and you can’t seem to turn anything on or click
on any button without setting off all sorts of things you didn’t request or expect.
You seem to stumble and fall more easily than ever. You drop things more often,
break dishes, and bump your head on the kitchen cabinets. You find yourself
frequently experiencing a slow burn of anger rising from a sense of losing
control, not to mention your memory, even as you realize you are affirming the stereotypical
actions of old codgers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">And then, in
moments of sincere thoughtfulness, you realize these annoyances aren’t really
problems at all. You recognize that it’s the people with devastating health
issues who qualify as having problems, that several hundred thousand seniors are
now literally being warehoused with feeding tubes in nursing homes. Some are
given psychotropic drugs to make them easy to manage because the facility has too
little staff. Many of these folks spend their days and nights just staring at
the ceiling or off into space.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">When you reflect
on this kind of existence, you may<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>recall
stating a vow<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>that if you are ever diagnosed
with dementia, you will check out before you tip over the edge, because nothing
is more frightening than the thought of being lost in the maze and dark
corridors of your own mind. But then, how will you know when you are about to
go over the edge and become truly lost?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">With so much of
the present seeming more and more alien and very little future ahead, the past
begins to loom larger. Music that was popular when we were young can bring a
flood of memories of safer, happier times. And yet, as pleasant as reflecting
on the past can be, today’s politics in America represent new concerns that
make most of our other worries seem small because we are living in an era of
angst: the age of Trump and the time of White House strategist Stephen Bannon’s
fourth turning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">Future historians will
likely refer to Trump’s election as a black swan, an event no one was prepared
for but is later described as inevitable after it’s happened. Never in our
wildest dreams did we expect that the most qualified person ever to seek the
presidency would run against the most unqualified person and not win. We were
aware of the ubiquity of misogyny, but we underestimated its depth and the
ability of the malady to hide in so many camouflage rationalizations, such as, “A
woman as president is fine, just not Hillary.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">Nothing prepared
us to be so upset, so alarmed, and so fearful for the future. Perceiving that
the current president is so unfit, so ignorant of the demands of his job as
president, and so mentally unbalanced, we feel as if we may yet live to see the
end of life in America as we have always known it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">Then it hits you
that the whole world is experiencing the same problem that comes naturally with
aging: too much of the familiar becoming unfamiliar. A workplace under siege by
digital technology. Employment uncertainty. Global warming. Health insurance on
the brink of imploding. Terrorism. Too many strangers. Too many refuges crossing
too many borders and practicing customs that seem odd and threatening. Too many
citizens ready to go to war over the nature of reality.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">Brexit and right-leaning
political movements all over the world are simply manifestations of this<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>frustration: the exaggerated angst of
uncertainty. They’re a clue that we are indeed mortal animals, but they’re also<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>a reminder of too much change too soon.
The world at large wasn’t supposed to reach its fill of the unfamiliar until
old age. Too much uncertainty arrives with fear and disillusionment, and
unfortunately, the chaos fosters a frantic need to protect one’s own worldview
from doubt. Simply put: We are suffering the fear of mortality salience, the existential
core of the human condition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">Millions of our fellow
citizens have spent most of their lives paying little attention to politics,
and now we are paying the price for that gravely unfortunate mistake in judgment.
We have been warned over and over that, as Thomas Paine put it, “what we obtain
too cheap we esteem too lightly.” And yet, the price of our existence hasn’t
been cheap at all. Arlington Cemetery stands in sharp contrast to the notion
that there hasn’t been a steep price for our place in the world. The irony is
that appreciating this reality begins to feel intuitive only when we have a
short time left and little ability to make a difference.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">At the same time,
our big-picture perspective is likely to be better than it’s ever been from a long
life of experience. We are acutely aware by now that we live by narratives and that
we always have. We live by stories that have a point in search of a plot, and
we become accustomed to expecting a beginning, a middle, and an end to make
sense of things. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">But, when we
approach the end of our own story, we like to think that when it’s over, things
will go on and on for those we leave behind and that those who survive us will be
safe, healthy, and prosperous. Reflecting about our political disorder brings
to memory the<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>millions of people
killed in wars, people who died too soon,<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">
</b>never knowing the outcome of the battle or war but having the end come in
the beginning or middle of their own life’s narrative.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt;">When<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>you think of refugees fleeing the
war-torn regions of the world and how their stories will end, you then circle
back to awareness of your physical aches and pains but determine not to let them
become a big deal. You may suddenly be overwhelmed with the thought that it might
be better to die on the battlefield than to die not knowing if America will
ever recover from the utter inanity and egregious incompetence exhibited in the
reign of Donald J. Trump. You realize that, of all the things in life that can
go wrong, the most unforgivable are those borne of the ignorance of arrogance
bathed in the rhetoric of bigotry and racism—the same strain of ignorance that
causes us to misunderstand people with customs that seem strange. This brand of
ignorance could be dispelled to a large extent<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>through education, if only all the peoples of the world were to come
to believe that all human lives matter enough to be treated as if they really
and truly do. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 107%;">Most frustrating of
all is the realization that we have learned these lessons from experience. We could
easily pass them on, were it not for the fact that youth is impervious to
wisdom, especially in the age of Trump. Let us hope the age of Trump passes
before we do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-36560052910985661802016-03-12T08:20:00.000-08:002016-03-12T08:20:09.264-08:00Life’s Purpose: Ripples
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 150%;"><strong>©
Charles D. Hayes<o:p></o:p></strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">If you ask people how they would like to
be remembered, you will likely be met with silence, often with a look of
bewilderment. Legacy is not something that most people give a lot of conscious
thought to apart from material bequests. Psychologically though, at a deep subconscious
level, how and for what we will be remembered is far important than many of us
realize. For some of us this becomes clear as time passes. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">To understand what an impact our inevitable
mortality has on our behavior, all you have to do is imagine how different our
goals, aspirations, and ambitions would be if we were truly immortal. For
example, being poor at any given time would be far less important than the
realization that, in an unlimited future, you would have plenty of time to
achieve whatever you wanted in life. If you were broke today, there would be many
opportunities to become wealthy, maybe not this year, but in a few centuries,
no problem. If you wanted to be a doctor, lawyer, or scientist, no hurry; you
could have a go at every career available.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">But such is not the case. We are time
constrained. If we are too slow to act, some windows of opportunity narrow and some
slam shut. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">The great difficulty in dealing with the
essence of mortality is that to study the subject is to be restricted
metaphorically to forever beating around the bush. We can get only so close but
never bridge the distance and come back. Near-death experiences don’t count because
they’re experiences all the same. We can imagine sleep as a time-out from
consciousness, and yet we dream. The best we can do is try to think of time
before we were born. When we do that, we can begin to grasp the consequential command
of time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">If we dig deep in psychology, what the
evidence suggests is that, on many levels and in many different ways, we human
beings are engaged consciously and subconsciously in trying to do things that are
meaningful. We seek such satisfaction not just in the moment, but for our lives
to matter in the greater scheme of things. Our impending inevitable demise
plays a big role in determining our behavior and our attitude toward others. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">Ordinary citizens often talk about giving
something back to society to compensate for the tax of their existence.
Reflecting this idea,<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>cultural
anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote about our species’ drive to be a hero while
simultaneously being prone to deny our mortality. David Solie, in his book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>How to Say It to Seniors</strong></i>, describes
behavioral evidence that many aging citizens are groping and grasping for
something to identify as their legacy without consciously realizing that this is
what is on their minds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">One of the most inspiring writers I’ve
encountered on the subject of mortality is Irvin D. Yalom, author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of
Death</strong></i>. Yalom is a highly regarded psychiatrist who has ventured farther
than most into the figurative thicket of mortality. In his first chapter,
titled “The Mortal Wound,” he pulls no punches, declaring that the supreme gift
of self-awareness comes at great cost. “Our existence is forever shadowed by
the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and inevitably, diminish and die.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">He suggests the fear of death has a long
reach, which is mostly subconscious, and that people who fear death the most
are those who feel as if they have never truly lived. Further, he points out
how Epicurus anticipated the notion of the unconscious by suggesting that
excessive religiosity and an unrelenting drive for wealth and power represent
counterfeit versions of immortality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">Yalom says of all of the ideas emerging
from his practice none has been as powerful as the idea of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>rippling</strong></i>. He describes rippling as concentric circles of influence
that we generate, often without being aware of what we are doing. These ripples
become our legacy, and the ways we can spawn them are practically endless,
bringing us back to time as a relentless taskmaster and as an overtly constraining
force governing our very existence. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">When we study the social psychology of
culture, it becomes clear that what we decide is meaningful in life is a result
of having bought into vast oceans of arbitrary assumptions. Thus, our cultural
indoctrination, even in the best of circumstances, is haphazard and
dehumanizing—dehumanizing precisely because of our suppressed anxiety and the aspirations
we view as unachievable due to time limitations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">Culture is metaphorically an hourglass
that pressurizes the act of living, while the brevity of life pits us against those
we regard as outsiders. When we are reminded of our mortality, or when our
interests appear to clash with those whom we deem to be others, what we tend to
do is to take stock of our lives defensively as we reaffirm our beliefs and
worldview. Simply put, we close ranks by distancing ourselves<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>from people we can’t relate to. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">We must loosen the grip of our respective
cultural indoctrinations in order to stop concentrating on the pressurized cultural
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>shoulds</strong></i> we have internalized subconsciously.
When we begin to experience enough freedom of thought from our upbringing to
put the remainder of our lives into practical perspective, we can create the
kind of ripples we would like to set in motion and later be remembered for, independent
of our culture’s arbitrary expectations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">This is not to say that what’s expected of
us is by nature bad, only that it’s impersonal and ultimately disinterested in
the details of how our lives actually turn out. In other words, we are expected
to do something with our lives, but rarely are we told precisely what we must do
to live them out. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">In the world of self-help advice, we’re
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so-called truth of existence. Lots of these require magical thinking, and many are
fraudulent. But, in my view, one way to gain some genuine insight into what we
would like to be remembered for is to simply ponder our most cherished
memories, compare them with our aspirations, and imagine what we would like to
accomplish if we were truly immortal. Then we can concentrate on a realistic
assessment of the time we have left to live, think it through, and set our hourglass
accordingly. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-70608648341264083472015-07-24T22:14:00.000-07:002015-07-24T22:14:46.600-07:00Atticus Finch vs. Atticus Finch<div align="center">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">©
Charles D. Hayes</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "Courier New";"><div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; text-align: left;">
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Harper Lee’s shocking revelation<span> in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Go Set a Watchman</strong></i>
offers us an extraordinary learning opportunity. Set twenty years after the
events of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>To Kill a Mockingbird</strong></i>, this
second novel discloses that Atticus Finch, the saintly hero of the first book, actually
harbored some of the racist views dominant in the early twentieth century.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; text-align: left;">
<span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">In
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Watchman</strong></i>, Jean Louise, known earlier
as Scout, returns home as an adult only to have the idealized memories of her
childhood destroyed by a reality she had been sheltered from as a child. Many
readers are crushed to learn this other side of the story, but the response is
forcing us to admit that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Mockingbird</strong></i>
has been sheltering us all for half a century. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; text-align: left;">
<span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">In
the movie version of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>To Kill a
Mockingbird</strong></i>, Gregory Peck portrays Atticus Finch as an exemplary human
being in a small town populated by white citizens, whose racial prejudice is so
deeply ingrained that they would rather convict an innocent black man than
embarrass a lower-class white family. But when you merge the Atticus of that
story with the Atticus portrayed twenty years later, what you have is a much
more convincing character in context.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span></div>
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<span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Harper
Lee’s experience bringing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Mockingbird</strong></i>
to publication in the late 1950s suggests that her editor held reformist views
about human rights and helped Lee mold Atticus into a virtuous moral icon. Now,
absent the former editor’s influence, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Watchman</strong></i>
seems more truthful to Lee’s experience growing up in the South. I’m
sympathetic with critics who suggest that the supremacy of white culture is
also palpable in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Mockingbird</strong></i>. Of
course it is, because racism was endemic in the South in those days, but the
idealism in the story moved millions.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; text-align: left;">
<span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Imagining
Gregory Peck as Atticus making racist statements is like going to the doctor
for a common cold and finding out you have cancer: it’s earth-shattering. In
the second novel, discovering the truth about the father she idealized makes a
grown-up Scout sick to her stomach. This should offer us some insight into how
people feel who are targeted for discrimination because of their race. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span></div>
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<span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Racial
bigotry is complicated, but it’s not hard to understand. Psychologist Gordon
Allport laid the subject bare six years before the publication of Lee’s first
book. His work tells us everything we need to know to function peacefully as
adults on a planet teeming with racial diversity. </span></span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">We
experience, internalize, and record bias and racial prejudice in a smoldering hotbed
of congealed and congested memories residing in our subconscious. When circumstances
pose questions about race, we rationalize because our feelings are vague and indecipherable,
existing as they do in an enormous database of conflicting experience. Our gray
matter keeps records, not of what is right, but of what it accepts as real. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span></div>
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<span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">That
we always have the upper hand in emotional matters is an illusion, especially
in social matters concerning ethnicity. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor
of our reasoning ability as a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>rider</strong></i>
and our emotional subconscious as an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>elephant</strong></i>
illustrates how we hold racial biases without being aware of the fact. The
metaphor emphasizes the power of our subconscious and the difficulty of taming our
emotions. The Atticus Finch in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Mockingbird</strong></i>
is a rider in complete control, but in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Watchman</strong></i>
his elephant rumbles and, at times, trumpets. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span></div>
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<span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">I’ve
always found it wretchedly disappointing that on a Saturday, people can read
books or watch movies like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>To Kill a
Mockingbird</strong></i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Roots</strong></i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Mississippi Burning</strong></i>, or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>42 </strong></i>and empathize and sympathize completely
with the oppressed characters in the drama. Taking in the story, they agree wholeheartedly
about the injustice being depicted. And yet, by Monday morning, their elephant
is back to humming along, murmuring low-frequency racial prejudice.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; text-align: left;">
<span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">In
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Watchman</strong>,</i> Atticus is said to be 72, my
current age, so I can relate to his being cantankerous. But more importantly, I
remember what it’s like to grow up in a racist community. It’s a context of prejudicial
social conformity with so few exceptions that I can recall none like the first
Atticus, myself included.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; text-align: left;">
<span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">In
a recent debate, I was asked if I thought we know more today about human
behavior than, say, William Shakespeare knew in his time. After some deliberation,
I had to say no. The Bard was an astute observer of human behavior, and the
research conducted in recent decades offers hard evidence supporting how
predictably we, or Shakespeare’s characters, will behave.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; text-align: left;">
<span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">What
we’ve discovered is critical for improving human relations—namely that we are
much more dependent upon context and much less firm, resolute, and unwavering
in our stalwart character than we have been taught. This is significant. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Watchman</strong></i>, instead of continuing to
idealize Atticus, Lee puts him in precise context with his time and place. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; text-align: left;">
<span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">It’s
time we stopped romanticizing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Mockingbird</strong></i>
through Scout’s childlike innocence. Public naiveté is an enormous obstacle to
overcoming bigotry. The same idealism that enables belief in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Mockingbird’s</strong></i> Atticus is an impediment
to acknowledging <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Watchman’s</strong> </i>older characterization
of Atticus and the subtle racism that’s still ubiquitous today. </span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; text-align: left;">
<span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">We
need to apply everything we know about human behavior to relegating bigotry and
racism to the dustbin of history. The objective is simple: strive to make the
first Atticus the norm, not the exception. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Mockingbird</strong></i>
is aspirational fiction; working through the disenchantment in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Watchman</strong></i> is a way to begin the dialogue
necessary to achieve genuine equality. </span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; text-align: left;">
<span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">When
Scout confronts her father and they have an emotionally aggressive exchange, it
opens the conversation we should be having now about dealing with intolerance. If
you don’t think racism is a problem today, either you are being childish or you
aren’t paying attention.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">
</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; text-align: left;">
<span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">If
you are avoiding reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Watchman</strong></i> because
you prefer the illusion of innocence in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Mockingbird</strong></i>,
I think Scout would say it’s time to grow up and speak up.</span></span><span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div>
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Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-13740315096196647162015-04-06T06:40:00.000-07:002015-04-06T06:40:10.275-07:00A Rhapsody of Falling Apart
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New";"><strong>© Charles D. Hayes</strong></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Human genetics are a roll
of the dice, and nothing highlights life’s unfairness like health issues. Some
people sail through life in great health while others never seem to get a
break, having one illness after another until they finally succumb. Needless to
say, health is a major topic of interest among seniors. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Far too much attention is
paid to the economic juggernaut but false promise of products and services
offering eternal youth. What we ought to focus on is the reality of our
demographics: Because of our aging population, we are facing an economic and
human needs train wreck of epic proportions.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Let me say first that I’ve
always promised never to let my physical condition become the dominant focus of
my conversation. But now at an age some consider elderly, I find that reaching
a period in one’s life when one seems at times to be literally falling apart is
interesting in itself to observe. At the same time, it is also a wake-up call
about America’s long-term health care predicament because millions of people
are having similar experiences, many with grave consequences. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">The sudden appearance of
new ailments cracks open a critical window on reality. The more often the
occurrence, the wider the view, and the greater the need to pay attention to the
politics of health care.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">In 2011, Laura L.
Carstensen published <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>A Long Bright Future:
Happiness, Health, and Financial Security in an Age of Increased Longevity</strong>. </i>More
recently, she wrote a piece for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong>Time</strong> </i>magazine
suggesting the baby pictured on the cover could live to age 142. The evidence
is clear that we are living longer, but what we aren’t doing as a society is
preparing for it.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">The baby-boom generation
comprises 78 million individuals, with more than 40 million already over age 65
and four million more adding to that number every year. The elder bulge will
continue to expand until 2029. Elsewhere I’ve written extensively about this
subject, mostly with positive expectations. We have many dedicated people
working tirelessly to meet the economic demographic challenges of aging, but we
aren’t even close to making acceptable progress. Time is running out.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">If you are introspective
and curious as you reach advanced age, you may, like me, become hyperaware of the
seasons of life: the cycles of existence, falling leaves, sunsets, magnificent
trees, and winter. All seasonal reminders of mortality and similar patterns
begin to stand out. Conditions that match your expectations seem to pop up
everywhere for perspective, and new incidents of physical pain give rise to serious
moments of thoughtfulness. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">These experiences bring
to mind the Brahodya competition, something that religious scholar Karen
Armstrong describes as having occurred among tenth-century Indian priests. In
it, a group of priests would compete to describe and capture the essence of reality.
The contest winner was the one whose comments could render the others
dumbstruck. This brief moment represented the Brahman—something akin to the
highest form of consciousness one can achieve.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Dumbstruck silent is a
condition similar to what I refer to as a time-out for thoughtfulness,
contemplation, and perspective, especially when we consider what the future
portends for aging citizens. Geriatric health care is ripe for a Brahodya
competition.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">As we age, seniors read
the obituary section of the newspaper more frequently because more and more
people we have known show up there. In so many of these cases, the individuals
featured awoke one morning with an ailment and a few months later ceased to
live. So it’s not surprising that one’s new aches and pains come with a few moments
of dumbstruck wonder, prompting the questions, “Is this it? Is this what will
take me out?” It’s an experience worthy of introspection.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Armstrong offers another
example of reflective silence when, at the end of a symphony, the last note is
played and one is left with a moment of stunning serenity. I find this
comparable to watching a great movie and realizing the end has flashed on the
screen. Stirring music is playing, the credits are rolling, and you’re still
lost in thought with at least a subliminal awareness that everyone’s story
comes to an end. These, too, are opportunities to think.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Inspirational moments often occur when
listening to beautiful music. A crescendo of emotion can be so overwhelmingly
exquisite that it seems too good to be true, beyond the capacity of music to
arouse. Such moments of stunning exhilaration are times to reflect as well.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">I’m not suggesting that
all of the circumstances giving pause for thoughtfulness are the same, only that
they are related, or that they belong to the same category of openness to
experience. Dumbstruck moments can be called an aha, a flash, an inspiration,
an epiphany, or simply a time-out, but they all yield a similar opportunity to
take stock and truly appreciate the reward of still being alive—a reminder to
help raise awareness to the problems that beg public attention. We owe this
effort to the younger generations, whose lives will be affected by the current tidal
wave of aging citizens. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">In<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> <strong>The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America</strong></i>,
published this year, Ai-Jen Poo is launching a movement promoting some very
kind, thoughtful, and practical ways to address our aging health care concerns.
But, in spite of our best efforts, the reality of aging demographics portends a
fast-approaching social catastrophe.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Ai-Jen Poo calls our
attention to the economic estimates made by the Alzheimer’s Association that
the total health care costs for Alzheimer’s over the next four decades could be
$20 trillion. That’s not a train wreck. That’s a nuclear blowout. It can’t
happen. It’s out of the question. We either have to cure Alzheimer’s or take
drastically different steps in the way we address the care of patients.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">In thirty of fifty
states, the shortage of nurses is expected to increase for decades. The
shortage of doctors in the field of geriatrics is shocking. Medical
professionals say we need a doctor-patient ratio of 1 to 300, but by 2030, the
current estimate is 1 to 3,800. That’s a derailment.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Medicare is already so
inadequately funded that it’s become harder and harder to find physicians who
will accept new patients. Eligibility for Medicaid requires proof of abject impoverishment.
We don’t even have the political command to address the long-term viability of
Social Security. More and more seniors are struggling just to get by, even as the
costs of health care escalate.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Families increasingly
can’t meet the whole burden of caring for aging relatives, and the cost of institutional
care continues to skyrocket. As a workforce, health care givers are underpaid
across the board, and the turnover rate is appalling. We have to think and act our
way out of these dilemmas. Without a political effort nationwide to meet the
demand for services, millions will suffer needlessly. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">One of the things I’ve
learned from living, studying, and talking to aging peers is that with a long
life comes affection for one’s<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>own life
experience. More often than not, the idea of changing places with someone in a
younger generation is rejected as undesirable. In and of itself, feeling a
sense of ownership of one’s experiential knowledge is worthy of a time-out for introspection.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">This might seem like a
stretch, but when you acquire new aches and pains that are inevitable with
aging, I suggest making the best of them. Consider listening more often to your
favorite music and creating an insightful emotional and intellectual rhapsody
of the whole experience. Apply some perspective to having been afforded the
life of a human being, because when you consider the odds of it ever happening,
you are inevitably dumbstruck.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Whenever we feel a new
ache or pain, we should be aware that, for every one of us still in good enough
health to be thoughtfully reflective, there are literally thousands of others
in worse shape. In nursing homes across the country, aging citizens are routinely
shot so full of stupor-inducing medication and so dependent on intrusive feeding
tubes that, in effect, they live a hydroponic existence—wearing adult diapers,
spending their days struggling simply to breathe and swallow, unable to speak
or sit up—and they do this for weeks, months, even years.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Nature seems cruel in
many instances, where aging and sickly wild herd animals end up in the jaws of predators
while still alive. And it was the custom in many tribes of ancient people to abandon
their elderly, leaving them to die in the elements without provisions. In
comparison to the nursing home scenario described above, however, nature and the
traditions of some ancient tribal cultures seem much less diabolical. If you
doubt this, visit a few care facilities, especially in low-income areas. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">In her book, Carstensen
warned about failing to meet the challenges of aging in America. I’ve always
shared her observation about taking dire warnings with a grain of salt, but a
trainload of salt is inadequate to describe what the future portends if we stay
the present course without taking immediate actions equal to the range of problems
we face. We aren’t prepared for people living as long as they do now, let alone
far past the century mark. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Of course, myriad
technological breakthroughs, from remote monitoring to distant diagnostics, can
give us hope. They include robotics and innovations in assisted living
arrangements to help aging seniors. But these are expensive, and they also
leave us open to crisis during power outages and technological failure.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">So, you may think it trite
or disingenuous of me to speak in terms of a rhapsody of falling apart,
considering all I’ve said, but death is an inevitable reality for each and
every one of us. It’s long past time that we have grown-up discussions about
the realities of aging. Products and services promising endless youth are not
the answer, and those who promote them are selling illusion.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Every time we experience
a moment of reflection for whatever reason, it’s an opportunity to think
seriously about the future, to engage in dialogue with our elected
representatives and social media, and to urge people to wake up and speak up.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Aging demographics are on
track full speed ahead, and unless we make some serious adjustments, we are bound
for an economic disaster that is likely to play out as a political blame game.
Millions of seniors will pay a price of needless suffering simply because our
political parties refuse to deal with the economic and social realities of
aging. It’s already happening, but too few are calling attention to our
collective denial.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<br /></div>
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Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-29960154681192332712014-12-12T10:28:00.000-08:002014-12-12T10:28:32.744-08:00Getting Ready for the Big Change-Out
<br />
<div align="center" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New";"><strong>© Charles D. Hayes</strong></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">If you were to die in the
next ten minutes, are there<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>things your
surviving family members would need to know but would have no way of figuring
out? Are there things that you would really want them to know? If your answer
is yes, please read on.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">For nearly four decades I
worked in the Alaska oil industry. Most of my time was spent on the North
Slope, although I worked in several other remote locations as well. All of those
positions involved sharing a job on a shift rotation schedule with equal time
off. Sharing a job in a high-stress work environment required extraordinary
cooperation in learning how to assume responsibility for the actions of others
and to communicate effectively. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">As long as both parties
were competent and sincere in their efforts to share accountability, the
emphasis focused on communication skills. The end of one shift and the
beginning of another, when alternates met to change places, was referred to as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">change-out day</i>. Invariably, even with
the best of intentions, change-out would occur with the employee who left the
job having forgotten to share something important, something the person coming
on shift would really need to know. This oversight was so common it was to be
expected, in spite of two weeks of intensive note-taking and a concerted effort
to cover everything that you thought the alternate would need to know. The
forgetfulness often resulted in follow-up phone calls to the employee at home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Keep this in mind and
just try to imagine how many things could be overlooked when a person dies
unexpectedly without having left any change-out notes. Every day thousands of
people die from cardiac arrest, traffic collisions, and myriad accidents and
ailments that leave no time for putting one’s affairs in order. The absence of
effective communication leaves a gaping void that others must struggle to fill
without any knowledge of the deceased’s intentions. The survivors will have
infinite questions they wish they had asked, but the opportunity is forever lost.
</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">In preparing for my final
change-out, I’ve had a good example to follow in my grandfather, who was born
in 1889 and died in 1982. He was sixteen years older than my grandmother, and when
he reached his seventies, he began preparing my grandmother for his demise by frequently
going over and over the things she needed to know and the things she would need
to do when he passed away. Even so, there is still a great deal I would like to
know about my grandparents, but it’s too late to ask. The opportunity is also
lost for their great-great grandchildren to know as much as they could about
their distant ancestors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Death is a subject that
most of us avoid for understandable reasons, but if you’ve ever been with
someone who had to put the necessary pieces together after a family member has
died unexpectedly, or if you’ve had this experience yourself, you know how hard
it is to answer questions when there is no one left alive who can answer them. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">All of us know we should
keep records, lists, and personal notes to keep our affairs in order,
especially as we age and our memory becomes less reliable, but does anyone else
have that information or know where to find it? Let me suggest a simple way to
keep your data for yourself and your family, just in case this information is
needed someday. Create a written file—it can be hand-written, on a computer, or
even on a cell phone as long as those who should have the information know the
file’s name and location and can attain access.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">For many of us an easy
way to do this might be to work on the data a few minutes every day, week, or
month until the file is in good shape. It’s likely that you will always be a
little behind and there will always be more things to add or details to update,
but just imagine what a difference your change-out notes can make if they are
needed someday. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Needless to say, security
is of paramount importance with this kind of information and every effort
should be made to make sure it cannot be hacked via malware or be subject to being
read by anyone unauthorized to do so. One method you can use is to print a hard
copy of the basic file, fill in the sensitive material by hand, and keep the
copy under lock and key or simply save the file only on a thumb drive. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">I’m offering my initial
template list here to serve as a guide for your planning. As with any
change-out, I’m sure I’ve forgotten some things, so I would very much
appreciate your thoughts and suggestions based on your own experience. As the
list improves over time, I will post updates. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Practical matters —
location and pertinent details for the following:</span></div>
<br />
<ul style="direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc;">
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">your will</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">life insurance</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">burial or cremation preferences and wishes</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Social Security number</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">auto insurance</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">driver’s license number </span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">health insurance</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">hereditary medical history </span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">tax documents</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">computer passwords</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">A narrative about your computer files</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">deeds, titles</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">debts and payees</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">bank accounts and investments</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">preferred charities</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">addresses and telephone numbers of people
to notify</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">personal property disposition</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">photos and keepsakes</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">an obituary draft or notes to include:</span></div>
<ul style="list-style-type: circle;">
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">education</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">military service</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">work history</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">parents’ names</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">career achievements</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">proudest moments</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">How you wish to be
remembered</span></div>
</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">your aspirations for others</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">special things you would like to share</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">favorite foods</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">favorite colors</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">favorite subjects</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">hobbies</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">fondest memories</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">favorite movies</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">favorite books, quotes, literary passages</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">favorite music</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">reading suggestions</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">regrets</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">life lessons</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">things you wish you had done</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">apologies </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Final wishes</span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">If you have a choice,
where do you want to spend your last days—in a hospital or at home? With others
around you or alone? What music would you like to hear? Would you want a visit
from the clergy? </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></div>
<div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Advance Directives</span></div>
</li>
</ul>
<ul style="direction: ltr; list-style-type: disc;">
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Living Will</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Durable Medical Power of Attorney</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">Durable General Power of Attorney</span></div>
</li>
<li style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong>My Books and Essays on Amazon</strong></span></span><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-no-proof: yes;"><a href="http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong>http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes</strong></span></span></a></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<strong>New Fiction: <em>The Call of Mortality</em></strong></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif";"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CIGJFGE" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><strong><span><span style="font-size: xx-small;">http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CIGJFGE</span></span></strong></span></a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif";"><strong>My Other Blog</strong></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif";"><a href="http://self-university.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #993300;">http://self-university.blogspot.com/</span></a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif";"><strong>Follow me on Twitter @CDHWasilla</strong><o:p></o:p></span> </div>
</span><div style="color: black; font-family: "Calibri",sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 8pt; margin-top: 0in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2;">
<br /></div>
</li>
</ul>
Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-67157522617270003922014-11-15T06:57:00.000-08:002014-11-15T06:57:13.664-08:00Aging, Aspiration, and Activism
<br />
<div align="center" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 8pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New";"><strong>© Charles D. Hayes</strong></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 1em 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">If you are getting on in years and facing
the reality that time is running out, you may experience an existential alarm
that rings erratically and gets increasingly louder. You breeze by the aging markers
of 40, 50, 60, and then, all of a sudden, it seems you are elderly. More and
more, I find instances of people being described as elderly who are years younger
than I am.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 1em 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">For some people like me, being
elderly comes with an urgent call for perspective, a pressing need to be
realistic about time. When we’re finally able to put aside all illusions about our
mortality and fully realize that we are experiencing the final chapters of
life, everything begins to look different. Many of the myths we have grown up believing
are shattered by the clarity of oblivion. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 1em 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">A large body of evidence in existential
psychology shows clearly that the prospect of death affects us deeply at both a
conscious and unconscious level. Although the most common strategy in the past seems
to have been to deny one’s approaching demise, recent research suggests that a straight-up
acknowledgement and overt conscious awareness of one’s forthcoming death can
add greatly to the quality of day-to-day experience by forcing us to see more
clearly and allowing the things we really value to stand out. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 1em 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">The realization that time is short can
seem like a meaningful civil comeuppance in that it tends to cut through all of
the platitudes and clichés we’ve heard about the ideological nature of freedom
that comes with being an American citizen and with having grown up in a country
where people are accustomed to thinking of themselves as being free in the
greatest nation on the earth. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 1em 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">The prospect of an abbreviated future
exposes the idea that genuine freedom is different from popular opinion. To be
truly free one has to have the ability to see through illusions, to defy the
herd’s desperate need to conform, and to enjoy the privilege of using one’s
time as one chooses. It means being able to pursue one’s interests and treat
the important things in our lives as if they really matter, regardless of what
others think, say, or do. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 1em 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">Once you begin to think like this, you
may find it hard to believe that you ever bought into the notion that time is
money, because you can’t buy more time. If you have enough money, you can spend
what time you have as you please, but such thinking reveals our culture to be a
social arrangement that indentures millions of its citizens to a life of poverty.
This situation has grown out of an arbitrary use and abuse of power based on
counterfeit assumptions, lip service about values, and an imagined sense of tribalistic
superiority that thrives on advantage and strives to maintain advantage with arrogance,
contempt, and a willingness to go to any extreme necessary to prevail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">As Americans we grow up being
taught a history so whitewashed, so egregiously out of sync with the realities
of the past, that it’s little wonder the stories we wind up believing about our
past are mythic fantasies. History shows that we are easily distracted, routinely
duped, and so effectively manipulated politically that we spend little time paying
attention to the things we should. Politicians in both parties routinely
practice bait and switch.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">Our future depends on high-order
technology, while the real political power lies in the psychological manipulation
of poorly educated citizens by shifting the blame for inequality to the least
powerful among us, those who are without echelons of paid lobbyists to rig an
advantage—those who are unable to effectively represent their own interests.
Scapegoats offer antagonists a reliable distraction that works nearly every
time. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">By any objective criteria, moneyed
interests have hijacked the original aspirations of America as a democracy
driven by the attributes of meritocracy and the idea that citizens require some
measure of leisure in order to become active participants in their own governance.
That America has become a plutocracy is undeniable, and claims to the contrary
are disingenuous by any standard. It’s surprising how clear this reality
becomes when one’s future is small.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">The angst that comes with age is
both a curse and an opportunity, a dreaded feeling and also a clue that there
is something to get beyond, something that can be improved. As we age,
nostalgia—if it doesn’t itself become a habit of excessive distraction—often
presents itself as a method of fixing something wrong in the present by
comparison with something worthy in the past, although care has to be taken not
to judge the past with selective memory. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">For millions of our citizens, real
freedom is little more than a cliché. There are myriad ideological excuses for
America’s growing inequality, some of which are very sophisticated and sound
convincing, but none of them are good enough to justify it. None, zip, zero. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">That a significant number of our population
can spend a lifetime of hard work at wages that guarantee poverty while a few
individuals loot America’s corporations under the phony guise of excellence is
ludicrous. What’s even more preposterous is that so many people can be persuaded
to accept such contrived inequality as adequate living conditions and be so
confused about the real essence of freedom.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">The tactic of using the virtue of hard
work as a divisive cultural weapon is rendered sterile and infantile by the
reality that much of what is done that we called work has an enormous negative economic
effect on our citizens and the planet. To claim that a significant percentage
of our population is devoid of the virtue necessary to earn above-poverty wages
is patently absurd, and to indenture generations to financial institutions to
pay for college to qualify for jobs that won’t pay enough to retire the debt is
a national disgrace.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">When the decades have stacked up
behind us like cordwood, it doesn’t take a lot of reflection to acknowledge
that many of the things we were taught to accept as truths were really
distractions manufactured to keep order by those with enough power to make people
believe that freedom is the ability to switch from one low-paying job to
another instead of having enough economic equity to have the time and leisure
to learn to become fully vested citizens. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">But then, how else could you create
a society in which executives could run companies into bankruptcy and yet walk
away with enough largesse to live freely and never work again without citizens
taking to the streets in protest? Speaking for myself, a lifetime of study
reveals that history is one longsuffering attempt to justify the power of those
with the authority to write it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 1em 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">U</span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">nfortunately, the majority of
magazines and websites for seniors these days are so superficial and so shallow
in their content that, if anything, they add to the angst of aging. So the
bottom line here is that the last chapters of life are where the whole book of
one’s life needs to end with a perspective which allows for the possibility that
one’s existence will have made enough sense that something of value might be
shared with those who will survive us. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">Imagining what life could be like
if we tamped down the contempt that results from tribalistic pretention is much
easier to do when we remove ourselves from the equation and consider the
possibility of achieving the kind of civilization where it would be commonly
accepted that everyone’s life really matters, not just those who have mastered
the ethos of greed. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Black Swan</i>, argues that many of the economic
problems we face occur because the people making the decisions have no skin in
the game, so to speak. In other words, they have nothing to lose. Then contrast
John Rawls’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Theory of Justice</i> advocating
creation of a society in which the people cutting the economic pie do so under
conditions that bar them from knowing which piece they themselves will get. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 1em 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt;">Now keep both of these notions in
mind as you consider how objective we might be in offering feasible advice for
a society that we won’t be alive to see. In other words, imagine you have no
life in the game except through your kin and progeny who will live on after you.
If this kind of objectivity can’t be trusted, what can? </span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-85537884781218131562014-01-12T07:44:00.000-08:002014-01-12T07:44:55.507-08:00We’re All Born to Deny Reality
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New";"><strong><span style="font-size: small;">© Charles D. Hayes</span></strong></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If you doubt that we’re born to deny
reality, you’re actually proving the point. The evidence is indisputable that
we human beings have built-in reality buffers. We smoke, drink, overeat, waste
resources, and engage in every possible kind of risk-taking activity, oblivious
to or disregarding the likely results of our actions. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">At the core of our tendency to deny
reality is the barefaced inevitability of our own death. Unless we are
threatened with imminent annihilation or given a short time to live, we are
predisposed to perceive of the future as something open-ended and unlimited,
regardless of our age. We are loath to admit our existence is finite.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Some of us are so sensitive
about the subject of death that people or practices that appear to be different
from the familiar give us pause. We reject <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">otherness</i>,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">change</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">uncertainty</i> because they represent the possibility of our demise.
Thousands of religious belief systems exist throughout the world, and yet the
adherents within each of them resolutely believe that theirs is the only
correct worldview. Similarly, conspiracy theorists prefer to believe in
string-pulling manipulation by powerful forces rather than accept the
frightening prospect that no one is in control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A recent entry in examining our
pronounced ability for deceiving ourselves is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human
Mind</i> by<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>Ajit Varki and Danny
Brower. These authors contend that the ability to deny reality is the very
psychological mechanism that has made our survival possible and that optimism
is indeed a strategy for denial. Physician and writer Abraham Verghese has
called this "the most exciting idea in evolution since Darwin." Yes,
it’s exciting, but it’s certainly not new. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Back in 1974, Ernest Becker won the
Pulitzer Prize for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Denial of Death</i>,
an examination of our propensity for self-deception about our own mortality.
And before the ideas of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and
Daniel Dennett gained prominence, we had the work of John F. Schumaker. His <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wings of Illusion</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Corruption of Reality</i> took the
subject of belief and self-deception to points that other theorists are just
now beginning to discover.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Looking deeply into our existential
predicament is a sobering experience. Our sun is a second-rate star in a modest
galaxy, where no one thing or location can be deemed more important than any
other—with the exception of those upon whose light and gravity we depend. The
earth is hurtling through space at thousands of miles per hour and appears to
be headed nowhere in particular.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The same analogy applies to our
lives as individuals. We represent an amalgamation of biology, culture, time,
and place, with no particular significance attributable to any of these
components. The only thing that is special about any of us is our uniqueness
with regard to others, which is only a matter of degree.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> We come into the world with
biological predispositions, and we absorb cultural biases and beliefs as
readily as plants photosynthesize sunlight. These factors make it impossible
for any single individual or group to claim title to precisely the right place
to be, the right things to believe, or the right things to do—although you
would never know it by the proliferation of pretense all around us.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dig deep enough into our ontological
dilemma and the evidence of cosmic chaos is overwhelming. In the face of it,
people find comfort in an illusion of permanency, which seems highly preferable
to any objective recognition of how much our lives are influenced by chance. In
a universe where disorder rules, our lives amount to nothing more than a
posture we assume, and yet, as individuals we feel that our lives represent the
ground zero of meaningful experience. In one sense, what we do means nothing,
but in another sense, it can mean everything.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In his book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An Appetite for Wonder</i>, scientist Richard Dawkins writes about how,
because of timing, something as simple as a sneeze can have a domino effect on
the future. A personal example brought this home to me recently. I intended to
call a friend one day, but I didn’t. Some hours later, that friend was killed
in a traffic accident. Now, I’m reasonably sure that if I had phoned him as I’d
intended, he would still be alive because he would not have been at the
intersection at the moment the accident happened. A matter of a few seconds
would have changed the outcome.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Imagine how different life might be
for us now if, in November of 1963, President Kennedy’s motorcade had not
driven by Dealey Plaza in Dallas. We can speculate ad nauseam, but trying to
mentally reverse past events is both futile and counterproductive. If I had
called my friend as planned, it may indeed have changed the course of his
behavior and avoided the accident. When we begin to reason like this, however,
questions persist. For instance, was it the last time I did talk to him that
somehow set him up for his misfortune? Such lines of thinking are seductive,
but they always reach a dead-end and encourage magical thinking.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> I’m not in any way suggesting
that we are responsible for unknowable future events. Only in hindsight can
events appear inevitable. The present is rife with chaotic possibilities. To
the contrary, thinking through hypothetical situations can help us inoculate
ourselves against comforting illusions that shelter us from seeing just how
precariously our lives depend upon luck. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> My sense is that everything
does happen for any number of reasons, but nothing can happen in the lives of
human beings that cannot be altered by chance. We are bound together in a chain
of chaotic events so seamlessly connected that they appear tranquil right up to
the moment when reality crashes the party. By design, our brains impose a sense
of order on a world driven by mayhem. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Subjectivity is the substance we are
made of. Our worldviews represent our social bonds steeped in emotional
experience. Our mortal fears surface when our beliefs are seriously questioned,
because the process threatens to raise a window on reality that most of us
would prefer stayed closed. Yet, in a cosmic wink, we will all be gone,
centuries will pass, and what is commonly believed today will someday be
thought quaint if not absurd.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Ecologists tell us that a
sustainable population of humans on our planet is somewhere in the neighborhood
of 1.5 billion people, but by the end of this century, the world’s population
is estimated to be almost fifteen times that amount. This statement alone
should remove any doubt about our being deniers of reality.</span></div>
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</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">John F. Schumaker says we need to
determine an optimal level of reality distortion that won’t exact the price of
civilization. In his words, "The impossible challenge is to face the truth
without panic, to derive all meaning from where we are and what we are."
Illusions aside, this is all we’ve got. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: left;">
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It’s easy to appreciate how
illusions have helped us survive. Evolution equipped us for self-deception in
part so that we would readily take risks without calculating our chances of
success. Obviously this approach has worked. </span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In centuries past, illusions have
aided our survival, but now we’re speeding forward without questioning our
assumptions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because of our burgeoning
numbers, the future, if we are to have one, demands that we trade our illusions
for objectivity. What helped us thrive as a species in the distant past now
threatens our very existence. </span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br /></div>
</span><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong>My Books and Essays on Amazon</strong></span></span><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-no-proof: yes;"><a href="http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong>http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes</strong></span></span></a></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<strong>New Fiction: <em>The Call of Mortality</em></strong></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif";"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CIGJFGE" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><strong><span><span style="font-size: x-small;">http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CIGJFGE</span></span></strong></span></a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif";"><strong>My Other Blog</strong></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif";"><a href="http://self-university.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #993300;">http://self-university.blogspot.com/</span></a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif";"><strong>Follow me on Twitter @CDHWasilla</strong><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: left;">
<o:p></o:p><br /></div>
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Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-39498031723164128692013-08-16T10:15:00.000-07:002013-08-16T10:15:26.785-07:00To Tweet or Not To Tweet <div style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New";"><span style="font-size: x-small;">© Charles D. Hayes<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Educational
philosopher<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>Robert Hutchins championed
the life of the mind, which he encouraged through the study of literature and
ongoing dialog with learned peers. He called this "The Great Conversation"
and published a book by that name in 1952. I credit Hutchins’ work, and
particularly the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Great Books</i> series
that he fostered, with motivating me to embark upon my pursuit of
self-education and to continue the course of lifelong learning that I follow to
this day. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Key
to developing a life of the mind and learning to think for oneself is the
notion of ongoing dialog. Hutchins placed great value on exposing oneself to
multiple points of view in order to formulate an opinion of one’s own. Real
learning happens not when we swallow whole what someone else believes, but
rather when we work through an issue in our own minds.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">What
has disturbed me about public discourse today, especially in social media, is
my sense that it mostly serves as an echo chamber. No one seems to talk reasonably
with anyone who has divergent ideas. Instead, disagreements become shouting
matches with voices expressed in text, in all caps, and with character bursts too
short for satisfactory explanation. Lately, though, I’ve had to admit that beneath
the media hype about polarized camps, many people are engaged in meaningful
dialog and minds are changing. The growing support for gay marriage proves the
point. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">For
months my email signature contained the assertion that "life is too short
to text and too important to tweet." My nephew, however, has convinced me
to think of Twitter as a news source, a library index card, or a subject header
that opens an opportunity for conversation and further learning. It gives me the
ability to delve deeper into a subject when it points me to material that I otherwise
would not know about. So, much to my own surprise, I’ve now removed that
statement from my signature and have activated a Twitter account. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">From
the beginning, my skepticism about Twitter stemmed from the current mania for the
brevity of bulleted lists and the admonition that everything worth reading must
be up front. Introductions and first chapters in books often turn out to be the
only text worthy of one’s time. In far too many cases, the "keep it short,
keep it simple, put it up front" practice, combined with texting and
tweeting, has appeared to result in a lack of the depth necessary for basic comprehension.
To my mind, it’s essential to know why and how a person has reached whatever
conclusion is put forth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">The<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Great Books</i> program advanced by Robert
Hutchins offered an approach to the humanities through the exploration of our
finest literature, a method that today is largely marginalized. These days,
advocates for the humanities and a liberal education increasingly attempt to
make their case by beating around the bush. Too often they fail to explain why we
should value the humanities. And yet, the argument desperately needs to be made
because the humanities contain seeds of goodwill that are capable of turning
red and blue states purple. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">The
human condition is the conundrum at the crux of civilization. Our respective
cultures provide a barrage of edicts about what we are to do in life with too little
regard for how we are to cope with the inescapable anxiety that comes with our fragile
existence. This makes us egregiously vulnerable to political manipulation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Too
many of us are ill-equipped to manage the conditions we find ourselves in, unless
we have learned enough about our species to deal with our conscious and
subconscious angst about our own inevitable demise. We come pre-programmed with
a clash-driven political nature that is due, in part, to our split-brain
architecture, which enables us to compartmentalize conflicting information. As
a result, we tend to readily hate those whom we view as different based upon
the flimsiest of criteria. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">The
promise of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">faith</i> helps some people by
offering the assurance that if you believe <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this,</i>
there is nothing to worry about. For others, though, the fact that their belief
system is not universal, in and of itself, is cause for the kind of contempt that
routinely ferments into a hatred of nonbelievers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">If
one is born into a poorly educated culture, the future portends a life of
poverty and a worldview filled with scorn and social paranoia. Taken further,
if one's culture is ignorant and socially oppressive, a life of political
zealotry may prove to be irresistible and scapegoats will be enthusiastically
provided for persecution.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">We
can't put our own lives in perspective without developing the ability to
envision ourselves in a global context. We must also realize that our
propensity to view our own respective cultures as naturally superior to all
others is a primeval short circuit that fosters ridicule and disdain.
Ultimately it can lead to self-destruction. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Life
is an existential dilemma, and it is subjective to the nth degree. For each of
us, life is an unsolvable mystery, and yet the pursuit of the puzzle can provide
enough existential relief to make living pleasurable. Learning continuously
along the way leaves plenty of room for those who view the world differently. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">We
human beings need to know all we can about being human, especially about other
cultures with differing customs, traditions, and worldviews. Knowledge of many
subjects we consider electives, such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology
is desperately needed by all citizens. Promoting that greater level of
understanding could dispel the needless social anxiety that’s born of ignorance
and perpetuated by our tribal nature for exclusiveness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Today
the amount of time that people waste hating others because of absurd
misunderstandings is astounding. The more we learn about the outer world, the
larger our inner world becomes. We are less threatened by things we don't
understand because we know that the process of trying to understand can relieve
us of needless anxiety.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">I
have joined Twitter with the goal of following not only those with whom I agree
but also those with whom I don’t agree—especially those whose messages I think
are destructive. The point of entering into a public conversation, in my view,
is not to enhance one's career, social standing, and earning potential, or to
live a life of ease made possible by magical software. It is, instead, an
aspiration to experience the kind of life that transcends our respective
cultures, a life with the independence of mind to determine value without
coercion and to develop our sense of humanity, regardless of which culture we
were born into.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">No doubt this is a tall order, and it
may indeed be overly idealistic. Still, I think it’s clear that only in
hindsight can we judge the effectiveness of something we would characterize as
a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">great conversation.</i> Steven Pinker’s
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Better Angels of Our Nature</i> offers
a compelling argument that over the long term, we are making moral progress.
All we have to do now is speed it up. Twitter has crossover potential. Maybe it
can help. Follow me on Twitter: <strong>@CDHWasilla</strong></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong>My Books and Essays on Amazon</strong></span></span><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-no-proof: yes;"><a href="http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong>http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes</strong></span></span></a></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<strong>New Fiction: <em>The Call of Mortality</em></strong></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif";"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CIGJFGE" target="_blank"><span style="color: blue;"><strong><span><span style="font-size: small;">http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CIGJFGE</span></span></strong></span></a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif";"><strong>My Other Blog</strong></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif";"><a href="http://self-university.blogspot.com/">http://self-university.blogspot.com/</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<o:p></o:p></span><br />
Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-48797782640047417512013-05-18T09:10:00.000-07:002013-05-18T09:10:30.660-07:00Movies and Memories of Our Racist Past
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<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New";">© Charles D. Hayes<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;">In 2011, Stephanie
Coontz published <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Strange Stirring</i>, a
book about the status of women at the dawn of the 1960s. Even though I lived
through those times as an adult, the memories Coontz brought to mind were
shocking. Fifty years since that era, gender inequality still exists,
especially when it comes to employment compensation, but the fact that today many
of the cultural assumptions of the ’60s seem far afield is a sign of genuine
progress.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Now comes the movie <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">42</i>
about the life of Jackie Robinson, the first African-American baseball player
to break into the major leagues. When I try to make sense of my reaction to the
film, the feelings it evokes are much deeper and much more appalling than those
I felt reading Coontz. Although I was very young in the 1940s, I lived through
those times, too, and I have vivid memories of the racism that reigned
uncensored in our society.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I grew up in a racist region of the country, in a racist
community and, I'm ashamed to say, in a racist family. Racism in those days
might as well have been in our drinking water. Assumptions of white superiority
were simply taken as gospel truth. Children parroted the same bigoted notions in
public as those spouted from the mouths of their ill-educated parents. In
hindsight, I can see that our mind-set amounted to a common form of malignant arrogance
that grows by feeding on itself as it binds one group together against another.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
dialog in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">42</i> brought to memory old
conversations that, if heard today, would be considered astounding, even, I
suspect, in the Deep South. Watching actor Chadwick Boseman portraying Jackie
Robinson at bat, trying to concentrate while a white baseball manager shouts
racial epithets, makes you want to crawl under your seat, only because you
can't get your hands on the offender.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The one thing that troubles me about the film, which I
thought was very well acted, is my suspicion that young people accustomed to
speedy media solutions will come away with the impression that acceptance of Robinson
into the white world of sports was something that occurred rather quickly,
perhaps after just a few winning games. The truth, however, was far different. Another
couple of decades of overt racial hostility would follow before the Civil
Rights era even began to take hold.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">42</i> makes
crystal clear is how shallow and superficial the strain of contempt is that
enables and sustains racism as prejudice is handed down from one generation to
the next. The process is born of fear, misunderstanding, hearsay, innuendo,
inarticulate chit-chat, frustrated exasperation, and just plain old stupidity.
Unsupported nonsense derived from stereotypes passes from one person to another,
while the veracity of what is said is waived by the power of the relationship.
In other words, if one's friend or family member said it, then it must be true,
and it will be defended by virtue of group loyalty, even if it has no validity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As I watched <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">42</i>, it
occurred to me that the whole ethos of identity politics depends upon half-truths
spoken under stress and because of the existential angst that comes with the
human condition. It's really that simple. When identity is the most important
theme at hand, nothing holds it together quite as well as old-fashioned belligerence
expressed through inarticulate gestures of discrimination aimed at gaining support
for one group at the expense of another.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Stupidity is a bonding element, and outright hatred is the
greatest unifier of all. Thus, whatever we bring together in communal disinformation
must be defended with much larger doses of deceit because nothing short of
outright lies will make sense. Watch <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">42</i>,
listen to the white baseball manager's racial rant, and you will see what I
mean.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The lesson to be learned from collective stupidity is how
to spot it, how to arrest its propagation by taking a time-out as in sports, and
how to maintain an intellectual default toward demanding more information.
Classic examples of popular ignorance as a bonding substance are the millions
of emails sent daily with the intent of binding one's group by alienating another.
The remedy here is simple. When you receive one of these malicious messages,
ask the sender to stop. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The identity of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other</i>
changes over time, but the methods remain the same. The only variable is the
degree of vitriol. The same strain of identity culture that in one era is
focused on racial hatred is a versatile social conduit that can be utilized for
homophobia, anti-immigration, gun rights, the facile notion of imaginary
superiority purported by Ayn Rand's John Galt wannabes, or any sort of
distinctiveness revered by one's identity group.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The point is simple and yet profound: As long as large
groups of Americans rely on their sense of identity to further their political
interests, no one need bother with factual matters because they simply aren't
counted.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moneyball</i>,
another baseball movie,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>Brad Pitt,
playing team manager Billy Beane, describes the game to his players saying,
"It's a process, it's a process." Indeed it is, and so is the
furtherance of popular culture: it's a process, especially the way we pass it
on. If we can shut down the anti-intellectual aspect of the process that’s based
solely on who we think we are and choose to stop demonizing others, we can
begin to live as if reality matters more than identity. Once that happens, then
there is a possibility for achieving a livable democracy. If not, I fear the
chance is lost. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Unless people can recognize their tendency to demonize
those who seem other and are willing to correct the behavior, they can watch a
movie like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">42</i>, sympathize with Jackie
Robinson, and go right back the next day to spewing racial hatred in a milder
form so as to keep their identity intact. In a few days, the whole lesson will
be forgotten. This is why it takes generations to change what should actually
happen in the time it takes for a television commercial to play. Progress will
come only when honesty can trump identity. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">My Books and Essays on Amazon</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></span><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span> </div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-no-proof: yes;"><a href="http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes"><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong>http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes</strong></span></span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span> </div>
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<em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Websites<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></em></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><br /><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.autodidactic.com/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;"><span><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Autodidactic Press Website</span></span></span></span></a></span></b></em></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.septemberuniversity.org/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: xx-small;">September University.org Website</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></span></div>
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Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-64511914612490540532013-04-06T09:47:00.000-07:002013-04-06T09:47:05.184-07:00The Approaching Gray Asteroid
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New";">© Charles D. Hayes<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Instantaneous
annihilation by a massive object from space seems like a merciful death
compared to losing oneself day by day, moment by moment, in the passageways of
your own mind. Okay, it's not an asteroid, but what's coming is just as bad, if
not worse. I'm talking, of course, about Alzheimer's disease, and for more than
five million people the asteroid analogy is too late; it's already struck with
a vengeance. The result is nearly $200 billion a year in medical expense, with
more than 15 million people acting in the capacity of unpaid caregivers. If we
felt the full impact of these conditions at once, instead of gradually over
many years, the collective gasp of anguish would drown out most other concerns.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Alzheimer's
brings with it a gift of guilt that keeps on giving, because there are no
satisfactory solutions. If you take care of family members with the disease,
you feel guilty. If you find them a great place to be cared for, you feel
guilty. It's what this disease does to your family members that causes guilt to
follow your every decision because, no matter which option you choose, things
always get worse. In terms of the cost of stress, Alzheimer's is off the charts
for both victims and caregivers. Both are wounded. Caregivers live shorter
lives because of the emotional toll. My grandmother took care of my grandfather
at home, and the cost to her own health was enormous. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">My
asteroid metaphor is especially appropriate because of what our demographics
tell us is to come. In 2050 our gray asteroid goes from $200 billion to an
estimated trillion dollars or greater, and the cost in individual anguish
escalates by orders of magnitude that we are barely capable of imagining. If
this disease were something for which a company could be considered liable for
causing, the punitive damages in a court settlement would likely be for an
amount too great for us to comprehend because not even our government counts
that high. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Now,
consider what steps we would be taking if we were dealing with a real asteroid
whose orbit would, at some future date, bring it in direct contact with the
earth. Our efforts, of course, would depend to a degree on its size. An object
large enough to be considered a planet killer would be viewed differently than
one that would only portend local destruction in the immediate vicinity of
where it hit. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Alzheimer's
by any measure is a seismic global event. Moreover, it's only one disease that
increasingly affects an aging population. There are many kinds of dementia that
are hard to distinguish from one another, as well as some medical treatments
that actually cause symptoms that mimic Alzheimer's. A few years after my
grandfather’s death at the age of 92, I learned that a conflict in his medications
was very likely responsible for at least some, and perhaps all, of his
dementia. And I have no reason to doubt that many aging people today who are
under the care of more than one physician are still given conflicting
medications because of the pace and economics of medical practice in America. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">In
his book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The World Until Yesterday: What
Can We Learn from Traditional Societies,</i> Jared Diamond writes about
visiting a village on the Fijian island of Viti Levu. While he was there, an
islander accused him of being from a country where we throw our old people
away, referring to the fact that we often put our family members in retirement
or nursing homes. Diamond also tells us about cultures where the old are killed
or abandoned as a matter of what is considered economic necessity. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">As
for Americans, he writes, "Care for the elderly goes against all those
interwoven American values of independence, individualism, self-reliance, and
privacy." I suspect that it is no small part of this ethos that adds to
our guilt, no matter what actions we take with our aging parents and relatives.
Guilt is often an overt expression of the exasperation that comes from feelings
of utter helplessness. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">And
yet, every time we try to have a serious public discussion about the end of
life, there is a chorus of political vitriol about death panels. Speaking only
for myself, I would rather die a violent and painful death than be among those
I could only identify as strangers, while being angry, confused, and
existentially lost for what could amount to years somewhere in the shadowy
corridors of my own mind. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Long
before we experience the full effect of the gray asteroid of 2050, we need to
find a way to let individuals decide for themselves whether they want to end
their lives under medical supervision when their minds are gone and there is
absolutely no hope for recovery. I suspect if the Fiji Islanders knew more
about our society, they would declare that we often show more compassion for
our pets than our old people. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The
statistics are truly frightening. One in eight people over age 65 has
Alzheimer's, and nearly half of us who reach the age of 85 will suffer its
ravages. There are some hopeful signs in medical research for ways to fight
Alzheimer's, but nothing close to a cure or prevention as of yet, and the
asteroid gets closer every day. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">The
Obama administration is setting an ambitious goal for having an effective
treatment for Alzheimer's disease by 2025. Their budget, unfortunately, doesn't
measure up to the gravity of the challenge, but if they try to invest more
money in the effort, we surely can expect more filibusters on the horizon.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">In the meantime, if I get Alzheimer's, I would rather that the money
required to keep my body alive go instead to looking out for young people. How
about you?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">My
Books and Essays on Amazon</span></span></b></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-no-proof: yes;"><a href="http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes"><b><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes</span></span></b></a></span></div>
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<em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Websites<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></em></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
<br /><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.autodidactic.com/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;"><span><span style="font-size: small;">Autodidactic Press
Website</span></span></span></span></a></span></b></em></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.septemberuniversity.org/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: small;">September
University.org Website</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></span></div>
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<em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Blog
Sites<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></em></div>
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://self-university.blogspot.com/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;"><span><span style="font-size: small;">Self-University
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University Blog</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></span></div>
</span>Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-70920631316459514542013-01-27T10:13:00.000-08:002013-01-27T10:13:09.622-08:00Fight Indifference with Learning and Maturity
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";"><span style="font-family: Courier New;">© Charles D. Hayes<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Picture a young man who’s born and
raised in the post-war South, trained in the Marines, and steeped in the ideological
culture of Texas law enforcement. That’s who I was in the early 1960s. Like
millions of others, I had internalized the popular ideas of my geographic
region, which imbued me with a xenophobic and racist worldview as the one true
window on reality. I was up to my neck in mainstream indifference. It would be
another decade before I embarked on the process of self-education that would
enable me to begin awakening intellectually.</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Mainstream indifference is a form of
ignorance born of inattention and apathy. Depending solely upon appearances, it
is fed by pettiness and gravitation toward whatever seems easiest. It revels in
anti-aesthetics, bad faith, an absence of mindfulness, and a total lack of
reflection about matters vital for making sense of the world. Not just
half-hearted, these are half-headed efforts. Devoid of compassion, mainstream
indifference is a hostile, authoritative, and testosterone-laden environment
where the weak are ridiculed and the poor are held in contempt, regardless of
the circumstances for their plight.</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">This anti-intellectual mindset leads to
the kind of situation where, as recently as 1998, unthinking white men can
assume that it’s acceptable to drag a black man behind a pickup truck until he
is dead, as happened to 49-year-old James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, or to murder a
young man like Matthew Shepard in Wyoming simply because he is gay.</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">In effect, mainstream indifference is a
selfish, cliché-ridden, and narrow-minded refuge for racists, bigots,
misanthropes, and misogynists. It’s a psychological wasteland where thoughtless
people are bound together by a yoke of stupidity that’s wholly accepted as
plain old common sense. Such thinking frequently betrays itself, however, as
seething hatred, complete with public demonstrations of contempt for “others”
when, actually, a lack of curiosity is the real culprit. The social realm where
it thrives is anti-intellectual to the bone, feeding upon a disdain for
eloquence in literature, the arts, and all serious endeavors that require
cerebral verve.</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">This deeply internalized conviction is
often vested in superstition, intermingled with conspiracy theory, and held so
dear that it cannot be acknowledged for what it really is—a profoundly
malignant strain of despair shared by a fearful populace who are unified by
their own lack of awareness and bonded by a form of hatred so spurious that it
feeds off itself. I understand this level of relating because I was a frequent
participant before I began my own journey of self-education. I have seen how
such insensitivity infects otherwise good people who don’t set out in any way
to harm others but wind up doing so because of an inherent default to the worst
human instincts. Indifference lies at its core.</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">In 1987, Holocaust survivor and Nobel
Laureate<span style="color: #00b0f0;"> </span>Elie Wiesel put this mystery of
human nature in crystal clear perspective. He said, "The opposite of memory
is not forgetfulness. The opposite of memory is indifference. What is the
opposite of art? Not ugliness. Indifference. What is the opposite of faith? Not
heresy, but indifference. What is the opposite of life? Not death, but indifference
to life and death."</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Indeed, history has shown that
indifference is often a breeding ground for evil, allowing social relations to
deteriorate to a point where facts are less important than choosing sides. In a
democracy dependent on accountable citizenship, indifference is a spiritless
sidestepping of responsibility and a serious impediment to achieving
authenticity.</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">My perspective about learning and
relating to others stems from the advantage of seriously pursuing education
later than most, when I already had some worldly experience under my belt. Even
though it’s nearly impossible to remember what it’s like not to know something
after you’ve learned it, I still have a keen understanding of what it’s like to
internalize a racist social outlook without the cognizance to know better.
Hatred thrives on indifference, but knowledge fosters tolerance, even a measure
of tolerance for indifference. I’m quite certain that, had I not embraced
self-education as a lifelong endeavor, I would have become a frustrated and
anxious individual by now, very likely convinced that any reason there might be
for my not achieving more in life was someone else’s fault.</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Today millions of Americans have such an
outlook, and what’s so disappointing is that I know how they feel. After more
than three decades of voracious reading, writing, and reflecting, however, I’m
convinced that curiosity can overpower indifference. I also know that reaching
a level of interest about any subject powerful enough to become a
self-sustaining form of motivation can be a hard thing to do. Still, I think
for most people it’s not a question of having enough time but rather how they
choose to spend what time they do have. Intellectual maturity is a function of
deliberate learning, not of age. True adulthood is not possible without it.</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Reflective maturity involves the kind of
intellectual honesty that enables clear scrutiny of our hidden prejudices as
well as the ability to discern patterns of self-defeating behavior. This need
not be an unpleasant experience. Maturity is not the time to shrink from
responsibility; it’s the time to assume it. Later life is not a time to become
set in our ways, but rather a time to figure out how and why we have “ways” at
all. It’s a time for lifelong liberals to look for value in conservatism and a
time for conservatives to do the reverse.</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Learning in the September of one’s life
is exhilarating because of the vast perspective that years of lived experience
provide. Maturity achieved is an unspoken yet glaring declaration not only that
one has lived, but also that one has learned from the experience. (Adapted from
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of
Lifelong Learning</i>.)</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"></span> </div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">My
Books and Essays on Amazon</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-no-proof: yes;"><a href="http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes"><b><span style="color: blue; font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes</span></b></a></span></div>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-no-proof: yes;"></span><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Websites<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.autodidactic.com/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-size: small;">Autodidactic Press
Website</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.septemberuniversity.org/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">September University.org
Website</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Blog
Sites<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://self-university.blogspot.com/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;"><span style="font-size: small;">Self-University
Blog</span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://septemberuniversity.blogspot.com/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">September University
Blog</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></span></div>
</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Courier New";"><o:p></o:p></span></b>
Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-46013032566804159722012-07-22T09:04:00.000-07:002012-07-22T09:04:41.747-07:00Social Media: Meaning or Madness?<br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 10pt;">© Charles D. Hayes<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">A radio news broadcast recently reported
that we are using up natural resources at a pace that exceeds our planet's
largesse by half; if we continue, by 2050, we will require three planets to cover
the deficit. This was followed by a discussion about our enormous budget deficit
and political gridlock. These are formidable issues, although the evidence is overwhelming
that few people are paying close attention. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Albert Einstein was quick to argue that
the thinking required to solve problems needs to be greater in substance than
the thinking that allowed them to occur. And yet today, at a time when deep reading
and critical thinking are desperately needed, more and more people are devoting
time to 140-character hot-button discussions, leaving too little time for serious
analysis. Nietzsche's herd mentality comes to mind, and I can imagine Emerson
spinning in his grave at the very notion of a world consumed by chit-chat. He
was so incensed by small talk that I can picture him summing up today's chatter
with something like "twits tweet." Nietzsche, I suspect, would have
burst a blood vessel at the thought of millions of people following one another
for 140-character tidbits, when 140 pages of serious study would barely get the
job done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Now I am not a luddite. I love
technology. I'm not blind to the positive effects of a world connected by
broadband. There are too many upsides to list. But there are also downsides. Increasingly
I see young people (and some not so young) spending their days flitting this
way and that, like subatomic particles being moved by unseen forces, while
focused on a hand-held gadget. An alarming number of teenagers spend their days
in a frenzy of texting that goes on into the night, sleeping with their phone
at the ready. This flurry of activity makes David Riesman's notion of
"other directedness" in his 1950 book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Lonely Crowd</i> seem quaint and the very idea of inner-directedness
historically irrelevant. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet's
Black Berry</i> William Powers puts it succinctly: "Digital busyness is
the enemy of depth." He even suggests that in today's world deep reading
sometimes "feels subversive."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">I retired from Alaska's North Slope oil
field in the fall of 2011. In the camp, it was not unusual to dine in the
evening with people holding a fork in one hand and a gadget in the other,
seldom taking their eyes off the latter. Many of these same people, even during
work hours, could not seem to go but a few minutes without checking or sending
text messages in dialogue so trivial in content as to amount to an
inappropriate distraction and an egregious waste of company time. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Consider the public fascination with
Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. No doubt, there are positive things that can and
are being accomplished with these kinds of media, but right now polarization
seems to be a major benefit. Political echo chambers abound as group members share
email assaults on out-groups, relentlessly making fun of their opposition while
continuously upping their levels of contempt. It's hot buttons 24/7. Us, us,
them, them. Then we wonder why we have become politically dysfunctional. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Beneath the surface of all of this
frenzy of nonsensical communication is the underlying reality that there are
literally millions of people subtly coming on to us under the pretense of
friendship with the covert motivation to sell us something. I, too, have books
and essays for sale on Amazon and other vendors, and like many authors I figure
that if people like my web posts they might be interested in reading my books. I'm
not by any means against commerce, but I can't help but think that something is
deeply disturbing about a market growing exponentially for books promising to
tell sellers how to come on to customers without seeming to, so the seller can
set the hook before the buyer recognizes the artificial pretense. So much
purposeful deception is as disappointing as it is disingenuous.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Add the scams and data phishing going on
in cyberspace to the insincere dialogue and the vicious partisan politics underway,
and it makes one wonder where we are headed. Today's gadgets are going to become
obsolete and give way tomorrow to new ones. No telling how we will use them exactly
or whether they will compensate for our Stone Age minds or add further to the
venomous political contempt we are witnessing as our current technology exacerbates
our primitive political predispositions. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt
describes our human condition as a rider/elephant predicament in which the
rider represents our conscious ability to reason (with emotion) while the
elephant represents our emotions, which operate to a large extent at an unconscious
level. I would add a self and a robot to this analogy. The self, which is a
fuzzy concept neurologically, is home to both the rider and elephant, while the
robot represents our tools.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Long before the creation of cyberspace
Marshall McLuhan warned us that what enthralls us about technology is that it
represents a narcissistic extension of ourselves. The existential danger in our
enthusiasm for the latest in gadgetry is in becoming so distracted that we let
the robot take over, thus becoming lost in a maelstrom of confusion and subservient
to our tools.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></div>
<div align="center" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: 14pt;">KINDLE
Books and EBooks on Amazon:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><a href="http://www.amazon.com/September-University-Summoning-Passion-Unfinished/dp/0962197971/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251559008&sr=1-1"><b><i><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">September
University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life</span></i></b></a><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Existential-Aspirations-Reflections-Self-Taught-Philosopher/dp/096219798X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1287184976&sr=1-2"><b><i><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Existential
Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher</span></i></b></a></span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><strong><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rapture-Maturity-Legacy-Lifelong-Learning/dp/0962197947/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">The
Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning</span></a></i></strong><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><strong><i><u><span style="color: blue; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-American-Dream-Lifelong-Postmodern/dp/0962197920/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1320328018&sr=1-7"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Beyond the American Dream: Lifelong
Learning and the Search for Meaning in</span></b></a><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></u></i></strong><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Proving-Youre-Qualified-Strategies-Competent/dp/0962197912/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_6"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Proving
You're Qualified: Strategies for Competent People Without College Degrees</span></a></b></em><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Training-Yourself-Century-Credential-ebook/dp/B002CGS9SK/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Training
Yourself: The 21st Century Credential</span></a></b></em><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Self-University-Tuition-Desire-Degree/dp/0962197904/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Self-University:
The Price of Tuition is the Desire to Learn. Your Degree is a Better Life</span></a></b></em><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Portals-Northern-Sky-Charles-Hayes/dp/0962197963/ref=tmm_pap_title_0"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Portals
in a Northern Sky: A Novel</span></a><o:p></o:p></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">A Novella<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pansy-Bovine-Genius-Alaska-ebook/dp/B007QWY04C/ref=sr_1_20?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1333469464&sr=1-20"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Pansy: Bovine Genius in Wild Alaska</span></span></a><span style="font-size: small;">
<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Alaska Short Fiction Series for
Kindle<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moose-Hunter-Homicide-ebook/dp/B007EVPX5A/ref=sr_1_7?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1330709633&sr=1-7"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Moose Hunter Homicide</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">KINDLE Essays on Amazon:<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Aging-Existentially-Getting-Winter-ebook/dp/B0062OWKCE/ref=sr_1_15?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1320327838&sr=1-15"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out of
the Fall and Winter of Life</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Greatest-Enemy-Ignorance-ebook/dp/B0062OLY1M/ref=sr_1_16?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1320327924&sr=1-16"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Begs-Differ-Mistake-ebook/dp/B0060AWNCM/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319983478&sr=1-2"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to
Believe in Ayn Rand</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Class-Warfare-Real-Begun-ebook/dp/B0060OJARY/ref=sr_1_13?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319983610&sr=1-13"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or
Has It Just Begun?</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Heroism-Cowardice-National-Tragedy-ebook/dp/B005WZOK9U/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319652148&sr=1-6"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Heroism,
Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Living-Success-Credentials-ebook/dp/B005XPAZNO/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319652148&sr=1-1"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Learning A Living: Career Success Without
Formal Credentials</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Nostalgia-Why-Past-Matters-ebook/dp/B005POWRV6/ref=sr_1_12?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319652148&sr=1-12"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pursuing-Justice-Hedgehogs-Baby-Boom-ebook/dp/B005NXLK3K/ref=sr_1_8?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319652148&sr=1-8"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Pursuing
Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Why-Political-Dialog-Disingenuous-ebook/dp/B00684EK6C/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1321805623&sr=1-5"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Why
Political Dialog Is Disingenuous</span></a><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></b></em><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">NOOK Books and Essays on Barnes
& Noble<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/aging-existentially-charles-d-hayes/1107058332?ean=2940013254626&itm=6&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out of
the Fall and Winter of Life</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/americas-greatest-enemy-charles-d-hayes/1107056970?ean=2940013254510&itm=5&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1106981528?ean=2940013211681&itm=4&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to
Believe in Ayn Rand</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1107001780?ean=2940013250550&itm=3&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or
Has It Just Begun?</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/heroism-cowardise-and-the-national-tragedy-of-hidden-guilt-charles-d-hayes/1106754220?ean=2940013653573&itm=8&usri=heroism"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy
of Hidden Guilt</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/learning-a-living-charles-d-hayes/1106815771?ean=2940013319592&itm=3&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Learning A Living: Career Success Without
Formal Credentials</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/nostalgia-charles-d-hayes/1105947476?ean=2940013402843&itm=3&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/pursuing-justice-charles-d-hayes/1105810586?ean=2940013421431&itm=4&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Pursuing Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the
Baby-Boom Legacy</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/why-political-dialog-is-disingenuous-charles-d-hayes/1107412899?ean=2940013471139&itm=3&usri=charles+d+hayes"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Why
Political Dialog Is Disingenuous</span></a><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></b></em><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Websites<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.autodidactic.com/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Autodidactic
Press Website</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.septemberuniversity.org/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">September University.org Website</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Blog Sites<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://self-university.blogspot.com/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Self-University Blog</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://septemberuniversity.blogspot.com/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">September University Blog</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">
<o:p></o:p></span></div>Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-80226463148458824102012-06-03T10:41:00.000-07:002012-06-03T10:41:55.232-07:00Preparing Not To Forget<br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 10pt;">© Charles D. Hayes<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">One of my greatest fears about aging is
that of becoming lost in the corridors of my own mind. I find the threat of
dementia more terrifying than heart disease or cancer. Recently the World
Health Organization published a report estimating that by 2030, the number of
people with some form of dementia is expected to double and reach 65.7 million
worldwide; 115.4 million people by 2050. The financial burden will be so staggering
as to threaten the very stability of the economy, but that will pale in
comparison to the emotional angst among individuals afflicted and the families
who care for them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">As a nation, America is clearly not
prepared for such an onslaught of helpless human beings. With each passing year,
I am more and more aware of the use-it-or-lose-it slogan with regard to one's
intellectual ability, and yet the science associated with this claim is vague
and uncertain. While it appears there are some things that may stave off
dementia, there is no proof that if you do this or that you can be certain to escape
the onset.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">A scientist I’m not, but in my own life
experience I have witnessed individuals who seemed especially vulnerable to
dementia simply because they lost interest in living long before they lost
their intellectual capacity for strenuous thinking. The gradual slide into
dementia that my own parents experienced serves as a constant reminder about what
can happen when one gives up rigorous thinking. At least that's the way it
appears in hindsight. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">For these reasons, and because of the
sheer enjoyment that an ever-expanding perspective offers us as aging
individuals, I believe September University is the apt metaphor for the last
few chapters of one's life. One of the most encouraging examples of aging and
staying intellectually active I've come across lately is Edward O. Wilson. His
new book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Social Conquest of the Earth</i>,
is one of his best works, in my view, and it represents the cutting edge of some
very contentious and controversial subjects in evolutionary social science,
namely individual versus group selection. Wilson has been kicking up a fuss
with his peers for decades, and the fact that he is still at it at age 82 is inspiring.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Some recent studies suggest that
exercise may help keep dementia at bay, but so far there is no encouraging news
about the prevention of Alzheimer's. Progress seems stalled, even though the
stakes are so high that nothing short of a Manhattan Project level of research would
seem adequate to meet the challenge and government funding is being increased
substantially. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">September
University</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">,
the book, was eight years in the making and has been in print for a couple of
years, but we’re still early in what I have argued will be a visible awakening of
senior activists who are bent on leaving the world a better place for future
generations. Indeed, they’re at it already; they’re just not getting much media
attention. Near the end of this decade, however, I'm betting their actions will
eclipse the media depictions of senior citizens shouting Tea Party slogans and pushing
inarticulate political solutions to problems that haven't been thought through
in depth. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Aristotle argued that the ultimate value
of life depends upon contemplation and that happiness is experienced in large
part as a form of contemplation and reflection. I've always thought that a
great opportunity was missed in America's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Declaration
of Independence</i> in that, if it had endorsed the pursuit of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">wisdom</i> instead of the pursuit of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">happiness</i>, the path to happiness for
everyone would have been shorter and with better results. Overt attempts to
find happiness often amount to a fool’s journey, because true happiness results
from noble purposes without regard to rewards.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">My learning suggests that perspective is
to aging as good health is to one's sense of well-being. The good news is that,
with many years of experience at our back, we have a lot to think about and a
lot of comparisons to make between<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>theory
and practice. So making sense of one's life can be thought of as a rational
method of preparing not to forget.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Apart from the value of human social
relationships as we age, nothing save intellectual perspective gives us what we
need in order to find and experience a sense of meaning that puts our final
chapters of life in context. That framework inevitably brings us back existentially
to the worth of human relationships that may have remained hidden by the
busyness of life circumstance. Perspective represents life's most exhilarating
punctuation mark. Better to leave the world with an exclamation point than a
comma.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><o:p><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></o:p></span></div>
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</div>
<div align="center" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: 14pt;">KINDLE
Books and EBooks on Amazon:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/September-University-Summoning-Passion-Unfinished/dp/0962197971/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251559008&sr=1-1"><b><i><span style="color: blue;">September
University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life</span></i></b></a><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><br />
</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Existential-Aspirations-Reflections-Self-Taught-Philosopher/dp/096219798X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1287184976&sr=1-2"><b><i><span style="color: blue;">Existential
Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher</span></i></b></a></span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<strong><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rapture-Maturity-Legacy-Lifelong-Learning/dp/0962197947/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1"><span style="color: blue;">The
Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning</span></a></i></strong><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<strong><i><u><span style="color: blue; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-American-Dream-Lifelong-Postmodern/dp/0962197920/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1320328018&sr=1-7"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Beyond the American Dream: Lifelong
Learning and the Search for Meaning in</span></b></a> </span></u></i></strong><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Proving-Youre-Qualified-Strategies-Competent/dp/0962197912/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_6"><span style="color: blue;">Proving
You're Qualified: Strategies for Competent People Without College Degrees</span></a></b></em><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Training-Yourself-Century-Credential-ebook/dp/B002CGS9SK/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2"><span style="color: blue;">Training
Yourself: The 21st Century Credential</span></a></b></em><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Self-University-Tuition-Desire-Degree/dp/0962197904/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2"><span style="color: blue;">Self-University:
The Price of Tuition is the Desire to Learn. Your Degree is a Better Life</span></a></b></em><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Portals-Northern-Sky-Charles-Hayes/dp/0962197963/ref=tmm_pap_title_0"><span style="color: blue;">Portals
in a Northern Sky: A Novel</span></a><o:p></o:p></b></em><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div align="center" style="text-align: center;">
<em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">A Novella<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pansy-Bovine-Genius-Alaska-ebook/dp/B007QWY04C/ref=sr_1_20?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1333469464&sr=1-20"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Pansy: Bovine Genius in Wild Alaska</span></span></a>
<o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div align="center" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div align="center" style="text-align: center;">
<em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Alaska Short Fiction Series for
Kindle<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moose-Hunter-Homicide-ebook/dp/B007EVPX5A/ref=sr_1_7?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1330709633&sr=1-7"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Moose Hunter Homicide</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></b></em><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div align="center" style="text-align: center;">
<em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">KINDLE Essays on Amazon:<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Aging-Existentially-Getting-Winter-ebook/dp/B0062OWKCE/ref=sr_1_15?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1320327838&sr=1-15"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out of
the Fall and Winter of Life</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Greatest-Enemy-Ignorance-ebook/dp/B0062OLY1M/ref=sr_1_16?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1320327924&sr=1-16"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
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Believe in Ayn Rand</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Heroism-Cowardice-National-Tragedy-ebook/dp/B005WZOK9U/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319652148&sr=1-6"><span style="color: blue;">Heroism,
Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Living-Success-Credentials-ebook/dp/B005XPAZNO/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319652148&sr=1-1"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Learning A Living: Career Success Without
Formal Credentials</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Nostalgia-Why-Past-Matters-ebook/dp/B005POWRV6/ref=sr_1_12?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319652148&sr=1-12"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pursuing-Justice-Hedgehogs-Baby-Boom-ebook/dp/B005NXLK3K/ref=sr_1_8?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319652148&sr=1-8"><span style="color: blue;">Pursuing
Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Why-Political-Dialog-Disingenuous-ebook/dp/B00684EK6C/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1321805623&sr=1-5"><span style="color: blue;">Why
Political Dialog Is Disingenuous</span></a> </span></b></em><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<div align="center" style="text-align: center;">
<em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">NOOK Books and Essays on Barnes
& Noble<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/portals-in-a-northern-sky-charles-douglas-hayes/1007332864?ean=2940013402614&itm=1&usri=portals%2bin%2ba%2bnorthern%2bsky"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Portals in a Northern Sky: A Novel</span></i></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1107001780?ean=2940013250550&itm=3&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or
Has It Just Begun?</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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of Hidden Guilt</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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Formal Credentials</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/nostalgia-charles-d-hayes/1105947476?ean=2940013402843&itm=3&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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Political Dialog Is Disingenuous</span></a> </span></b></em><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.autodidactic.com/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Autodidactic
Press Website</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.septemberuniversity.org/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">September University.org Website</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Blog Sites<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://self-university.blogspot.com/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Self-University Blog</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://septemberuniversity.blogspot.com/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">September University Blog</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-12067455558940414922012-03-10T10:22:00.001-08:002012-03-10T19:23:05.079-08:00An Open Letter to Richard Cordray<br />
<div align="center" style="line-height: normal; text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; vertical-align: top;">
<span lang="EN" style="color: #1f1f1f; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Mr. Richard Cordray, Director<br />
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau<br />
1500 Pennsylvania Ave. NW<br />
(Attn: 1801 L St.)<br />
Washington DC 20220<br />
<a href="mailto:info@consumerfinance.gov"><span style="color: #444444; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">info@consumerfinance.gov</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Dear Mr. Cordray:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Congratulations on your recent appointment
to head the <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Consumer</b> <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Financial Protection Bureau</b>. I'm
confident I speak for millions of people <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">when
I</b> say it's about time for this kind of effort on behalf of American
citizens.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">I have one simple suggestion that won't cost
much, but it could have a lasting positive effect on our democracy. Please
rename your agency. Stop calling us <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">consumers</i>.
We are Citizens with a capital C. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">In
addition</b>, please lead an effort to ask all kinds of media to follow suit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Nothing captures the contemporary
dilemma of political disengagement more than the commercial reality of consumer
versus citizen. So many people view the government not as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">us</i> but as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">them</i>. “We the
people” means that we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are </i>the
government, because we are citizens, not because we are consumers. Citizens are
responsible; consumers just devour.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Citizen versus
consumer is an issue that transcends political affiliation. Arguments about
inequality aside, I don’t think it’s that hard to convince the political left,
right, or center, that a return to the ubiquitous use of the word <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">citizen</i>, while scrapping the word <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">consumer</i>, would have a positive effect
for democracy. It seems like such a small thing, and some will no doubt think
it silly, but it would likely result in a paradigm shift in democratic
expectations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Sincerely,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: normal; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Charles D.
Hayes<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Wasilla, Alaska<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>autodidactic.com<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>septemberuniversity.org</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></div>
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University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life</span></i></b></a><br />
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</span></span><span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Existential-Aspirations-Reflections-Self-Taught-Philosopher/dp/096219798X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1287184976&sr=1-2"><b><i><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Existential
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<strong><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rapture-Maturity-Legacy-Lifelong-Learning/dp/0962197947/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">The
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<strong><i><u><span style="color: blue; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-American-Dream-Lifelong-Postmodern/dp/0962197920/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1320328018&sr=1-7"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Beyond the American Dream: Lifelong
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<em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Proving-Youre-Qualified-Strategies-Competent/dp/0962197912/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_6"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Proving
You're Qualified: Strategies for Competent People Without College Degrees</span></a></b></em><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Training-Yourself-Century-Credential-ebook/dp/B002CGS9SK/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Training
Yourself: The 21st Century Credential</span></a></b></em><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Self-University-Tuition-Desire-Degree/dp/0962197904/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Self-University:
The Price of Tuition is the Desire to Learn. Your Degree is a Better Life</span></a></b></em><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Portals-Northern-Sky-Charles-Hayes/dp/0962197963/ref=tmm_pap_title_0"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Portals
in a Northern Sky: A Novel</span></a><o:p></o:p></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Alaska Short Fiction Series for
Kindle<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
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<em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moose-Hunter-Homicide-ebook/dp/B007EVPX5A/ref=sr_1_7?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1330709633&sr=1-7"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Moose Hunter Homicide</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">KINDLE Essays on Amazon:<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Aging-Existentially-Getting-Winter-ebook/dp/B0062OWKCE/ref=sr_1_15?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1320327838&sr=1-15"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out of
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Begs-Differ-Mistake-ebook/dp/B0060AWNCM/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319983478&sr=1-2"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to
Believe in Ayn Rand</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Class-Warfare-Real-Begun-ebook/dp/B0060OJARY/ref=sr_1_13?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319983610&sr=1-13"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or
Has It Just Begun?</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Heroism-Cowardice-National-Tragedy-ebook/dp/B005WZOK9U/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319652148&sr=1-6"><span style="color: blue; font-size: small;">Heroism,
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<span style="font-size: small;">
</span></div>Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-6043809025470792662011-11-05T11:02:00.000-07:002012-02-02T11:15:46.944-08:00Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">©
Charles D. Hayes</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for
innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: small;">--
Albert Camus<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Why does
it matter that the past assumes greater importance for people as they age? Why
does getting older seem to cause people to discount the future, diminish the
importance of the present, and experience a longing to live in the past?
Furthermore, will this happen to you, and if it does, what will you do about
it?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
seventeenth-century Europe, nostalgia was thought to be a treatable disease. It
was an especially dreaded malady in military organizations during that period
because it provided a plausible excuse for AWOL soldiers. While it is no longer
considered an illness, nostalgia is often thought of today as an escape from
reality. It is also associated with aging, and American demographics make
nostalgia a topic that’s growing in importance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In her thoroughly
engaging book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Future of Nostalgia</i>,
Russian writer Svetlana Boym warns us that “nostalgia can be both a social
disease and a creative emotion, a poison and a cure.” She says, “Nostalgia is a
sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own
fantasy.” She reminds us that what might appear to be a longing for another
time, may in fact be an act of rebellion, or a longing for something that never
existed. Such is the case, I believe, for many of us who grew up in the 1940s,
’50s, and ’60s, as we shall see.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Imperceptible Influences<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I’ve known
many people over the years who seemed as they grew older to be lost in time,
and you may have observed something similar. My father, who was born in 1921
and died in 2002, appeared to spend the whole of his adult emotional life in
the 1950s. Of course, this was only in his attitude toward life in general and
his taste for entertainment, but the older he got, the more he seemed to
withdraw to earlier times. The days of his youth in the 1930s and ’40s were
painful, so he found comfort in the ’50s. As the years passed, the only
television programs he would watch were reruns from earlier years. He may have
set a record for watching <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gunsmoke</i>
episodes, and he did so without seeming to remember what would happen next,
even though he had seen each show scores of times.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The more
things changed in popular culture, the more my father resisted, and the same
applied to my mother. Their reluctance to participate in what was currently
happening was a mystery to me when I was growing up, but it is less so now, in
my seventh decade, as I find myself more and more reluctant to take part in
some of the new social media technologies. Puzzling over my own shift in
attitude has led me to the conclusion that the past matters because it has much
more influence on our experience of the present than we commonly think it does.
The better we understand its influence, the more we may be able to help the
next generation contend with the future. Let me explain.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The geographic
region where we grew up, the economic conditions, the prevalent ethnicity, the
social ties, the religious affiliations, America’s foreign relations—all of
these states of affairs congeal in our individual psyches in our youth and
result in our outlook or worldview. Indeed, the human relations we experience
as children very often affect our relationships with others for a lifetime.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the
past, it has been commonplace for generations shaped by circumstances to go
through life sharing opinions of a similar nature because of their common
experience. History reveals, however, that many of the things taken for granted
by generations past were based on illusion or mistaken premises. In other
words, each and every generation makes perceptual mistakes in apprehending
reality. These can lead to a lifetime of unrealistic expectations based upon
misperceptions of the times in which we’ve lived. This is why understanding the
past is so important to the present, the future, and the very quality of our
lives.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Many of us,
even in the fall and winter life, continue to be steered along a life course
that began when we were much younger. We are still impelled to act by forces we
do not yet recognize as being a part of our motivation. And thus our grasp on
the illusive nature of free will is suspect, especially in light of recent
research in neuroscience that has many scientists rethinking the whole
philosophical premise of free will and the notion of authenticity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A Search for Significance <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In his
thoughtful book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">How to Say It to Seniors,</i>David
Solie says, “When we start to realize that we’re not going to be here forever,
we become aware that it’s not clear what it meant to be here at all.” I think
this is true for many of us, but I don’t think it applied to my parents. They would
have shunned this level of introspection, refusing even to entertain such a
query, because they never learned to question their experience. They took
everything at face value, and when people do this without careful scrutiny and
critical examination, they become easily manipulated by anyone with a hidden
agenda.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Solie goes
on to describe how aging comes with a drive toward discovering one’s legacy.
Again, I think this might be true for most people, but not for everyone. That
said, I recall that before she passed away, my mother began to focus on things
no one but she took seriously, and she dwelled on them repeatedly. It was clear
to me that she was in search of something of significance, no matter how
trivial it seemed to others.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Granted,
our experiences as individuals are so varied that it’s hard to make universal
claims about our behaviors. Nevertheless, I believe it is a common occurrence
for thoughtful people to initiate a search for the things that have made their
lives meaningful when it becomes obvious to them that the time they have left
is much shorter than amount of time they’ve already lived. For many people this
seems to occur subconsciously. This is where nostalgia can lead us either to a
meaningful north or to a dead end of isolation and despair.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It makes
perfect sense that as we age we would begin at some point to long for the
things that have meant the most to us and that this experience is
metaphorically analogous to mining one’s past for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">value</i>. If this is true, then it is likely that we will find what we
are looking for by closely examining the tailings of our life experience and
how they compare with other generations. Moreover, this is something we must do
ourselves because no one else can sift through our personal life experience.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Fantasy as Reality<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Elsewhere
I’ve written at some length about how each generation longs for what it grew up
without. This novelty is intriguing when we compare our perceptions with what
really happened during the time periods we are drawn to. For example, television
family life with Ozzie and Harriet Nelson and Lucy and Ricky Ricardo in the
1950s gave the appearance of representing a much simpler and more innocent time
when there was little mystery about the notion of right and wrong. Indeed,
black-and-white television, which is all most people could afford in those
days, provided the perfect moral metaphor for the time period.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I recall
the 1950s fondly. If memory serves me right, I took some comfort in the
idealized family life portrayed on television during that period. It seemed to
me that the Nelsons’ life experience might be something to aspire to and that
mine was not a good comparison by any measure. A great many of us probably felt
similarly about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I Love Lucy. </i>Our
lives were not as much fun, but still we could hope for better times. Of
course, back then we didn’t know (at least for sure) that Lucy’s sponsor,
Philip Morris, was slowing killing many people in the audience with cigarettes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Knowing
what I know now about the history of those days, it’s hard to appreciate what
it might have been like if I had been aware that the Nelsons’ television family
life was a façade, that Ozzie Nelson was something of a tyrant, and that the
dysfunction in his family mirrored that of my own in some ways. What if we had
known that Lucille Ball was not the fun-loving nut she appeared to be on
screen, but was instead an aggressive businesswoman, obsessive about
appearances, or that Ricky was a hard drinker and a womanizer, and that Lucy
knew this but kept going for business’s sake? What might this knowledge have
meant to us back then? Would it have changed how we feel now about 1950s?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In those
days, our entertainment was aspirationally idealistic. Say what you will about
the producers of 1950s television, I think they meant well, even if the
long-term results of their efforts are not so clear. Today the quest for
realism often calls attention to the worst of the worst, as if this were
necessary for establishing a credible foundation for entertainment.
Believability is paramount right up to the fantasy genre, at which point
nothing is too bizarre. If we had been better acquainted with the reality of
the circumstances in which we were growing up, you have to wonder whether our
ideals and aspirations would somehow be different today.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">How might
we view the 1950s if we considered our idealistic entertainment to be a
distraction from the realities that should have been acknowledged and
addressed—realities like mindless conformity, bigotry, racism, misogyny, and a
nearly total lack of awareness about how our activities affected the
environment? Was our ignorance bliss or arrogance? Answering these questions is
not a simple task, but I can’t help but think there might have been a great
deal of solace in realizing that television was portraying unrealistic
expectations of family life in America. In my own case, the knowledge might
have helped to make my family life seem less of an unfortunate exception to
normality.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Nearly two
decades ago, Stephanie Coontz published <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap</i>, a work that
should be required reading for every person who wants to truly understand the
American psyche. It explains how our egregious penchant for thinking of
ourselves as exceptional human beings on a planet of lesser individuals stems
from deep-seated illusions about who we are, where we come from, and the way
things used to be. Coontz suggests that “growing up in 1950s families was
not so much a matter of being protected from the harsh realities of the outside
world as preventing the outside world from learning the harsh realities of
family life.” She has a point. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Coontz
demolishes the historical and ideological justification for government hatred
that is so much a part of today’s politics with a narrative of what really took
place in the early days of American history, and she exposes the myth of
self-reliance for the fantasy it is. This is not to say that the early settlers
of the American West were not industrious, hard-working people. Rather, it was
railroad expansion, public subsidy, government land grants, and military
mobilization that built much of middle America and the West, along with a form
of community volunteerism that was based upon expectations of being compensated
by the government. Simply put, with almost a religious sense of admiration we
celebrate a West that never existed, and by doing so we set ourselves up for
failure because we can never quite measure up.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">All of
this romanticized history was played out in American movie theaters in the 1950s.
Not only did we celebrate a west that never was, but we continue to do so
today. As a result, we persist in holding on to unrealistic expectations about
the general cause-and-effect aspects of daily life and about human character in
particular. We readily excuse ourselves for not living up to our own idealistic
expectations simply by the nature of being who we are, while we simultaneously
project the failure to live up to historical myths onto the imperfections of
those we consider out-groups, outsiders, or freeloaders, as we are likely to
view them. All of this for the simple reason that we have difficulty relating
to people when their differences are so great we cannot accept them into our
group. This deeply unfortunate human saga repeats itself in perpetuity, as
ignorant people aspire to aggrandizing fantasy, live on misattribution, and
thrive on a form of contempt made up from legend.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Coontz
understates the case when she describes nostalgia as a potential trap; it is
that and much more. Ethnocentric contempt is magnified when groups of
individuals idealize a past that never really happened, and they do so because
the very existence of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other</i>
becomes a threat to their daydream. If human beings cannot be depended upon to
learn beyond the heresy of popular culture, then we are doomed to experience
needless anxiety and pointless conflict, especially in our politics.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Of course,
a much more realistic view of the past has long been accessible for those
adults who really care enough about the truth to get beyond the cultural
illusions that serve as protective barriers for our respective group
identities. The irony is that, even though most of what we need to know about
the past is well documented by serious historians, the record of actual
American history has been so thoroughly revised by ideologues in our public
school systems that many history books are little more than fairy tales with
regard to the truth they are supposed to represent. School boards in Texas have
been censoring history textbooks for years, and they do so openly. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the
communities where I spent my youth, racism was as prevalent as sunshine.
“Separate but equal” was anything but equal in Oklahoma and Texas. The racism
wasn’t subtle; it was overtly in your face and ruthless, if pressed. People in
Northern states sometimes express doubt as to the claims people make about the
segregated South. Unless you experienced it, the depth of social discord and
the complexity of the relationships among the races can be hard to comprehend,
both then and now.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Though I
didn’t grow up in Mississippi, Katherine Stockett’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Help</i> and the movie of the same name portray the essence of the
segregated South very much the way I remember it. The novel and the movie have
been subject to a fair amount of criticism, and the ambivalence on the part of
African Americans who view this subject with bitterness is understandable.
Indeed, the story may not represent the truth as it applies to every Southerner
or their memories about those years, or to the racism that continues to be
prevalent today. Nevertheless, Stockett raises issues that still need to be
aired and examined thoroughly by society at large. Racism is such a difficult
psychological hurdle to get beyond that regardless of which race tells the
story, and regardless of their sincerity or what they say, their efforts will
evoke criticism from the other side as a way of pushing back. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Lessons of Hindsight <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In his
book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Back to Our Future,</i> David Sirota
offers a compelling argument that the past has a tremendous effect on the
present and that today’s politics are an ideological battle, the first
significant shots of which were fired in the 1980s. About this period he
writes, “The pitting of the idealized fifties directly against the tarnished
sixties and then making that battle America’s central political cause started
right at the beginning of the 1980s, thanks to events at once calculated,
chronological, and coincidental—events that symbolized a monumental changing of
the guard.” Sirota argues that Ronald Reagan represented an ideological return
to the 1950s and a complete refutation of the 1960s. Today, the Tea Party is
resurrecting the same battle cries.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">How
strange, how odd, how ironic, and how sad that the very time period that
resulted in the civil rights era for minorities and advocacy for women’s rights
still raises the ire of many people as a period to be scorned, and that an
idealized period that was not at all what it seemed is still revered. It was a
time when standing up for one’s conscience was a common occurrence and the
Vietnam War was brought to a close, resulting in the cessation of the
unnecessary deaths of what surely would have been many thousands more of our
servicemen and women.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Warts and
all, if there was ever any social movement since the end of slavery to be proud
of it should be the 1960s. We take the positive results from those days for
granted, and yet the nonsensical things that shouldn’t matter much at all, like
long-haired hippies, still evoke a sense of rage in people who see no progress
from those years and who continue to see things that weren’t there when they
were.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It’s worth
considering here that, regardless of the period in which we grew up, the
idealized aspect of that era is magnified by the fact that, when we were
children, being free of the worries that come with adulthood made things seem
much simpler and better than they actually were. We remember the good with
emphasis and relegate the bad memories to the dark corridors of our minds. As
children most of us didn’t have an ideological political worldview that we felt
we needed to protect and defend. As adults we do.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Many of us
who grew up during the Cold War were emotionally acculturated to be so averse
to the implied threat of Communism that some of us to this day can’t discuss
any subject that veers toward anything socialistic without experiencing a flood
of emotional anxiety that in effect ends the discussion before it has a chance
to begin in earnest. This crippling expressive response is a political weapon
of choice by those factions who know how to use it, and nostalgia plays a big
part in their ruse by associating the past with things we cherish, even if they
never existed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Growing up
in Irving, Texas, I overheard adults speaking in hushed tones about the evils
of Communism and socialism. Two school teachers in our neighborhood, with what
today would be considered slightly left-of-center politics, were rumored to be
Communists or, worse, Soviet agents. If I recall correctly, they eventually
left the state to escape the stigma. Of course, bomb shelters and
duck-and-cover classroom drills helped drive home the fear that still makes it
impossible for many people to have a rational conversation about matters of
overt social inclusion for those considered outsiders. And indeed, part of our
argument about the superiority of capitalism over socialism was our access to
material wealth. Material wealth was taken as proof positive that our system
was superior to socialistic societies. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">An
abundance of material goods during the 1950s made the future look as bright as
one wanted to make it. It seemed as if every few weeks Betty Furness announced
a new kitchen appliance or household product that threatened to end housework.
This perception was so prevalent that in his book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fifties,</i>David Halberstam notes that dishwashers didn’t sell
well at first, precisely because their use seemed to call into question the
need for housewives, period.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The race
was on to the suburbs as tract houses appeared by the thousands. Millions of
people left the farm when industrialization overcame agriculture as the
mainstay of the economy. Income tax rates were through the roof (90 percent in
the top brackets), but people still got rich. The wages for many entry-level
jobs were enough to enable the purchase of a home with all the furnishings,
plus an automobile. Of course, those of us who were children at the time didn’t
know that this applied almost exclusively to white men. Not that there weren’t
a lot of clues, if one had been paying attention. In hindsight, the racial
inequality of those years stands out like a skyscraper.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
comparison to today, the 1950s seem prudish to young people, and no doubt they
were. Still, these days, when “the moment is right” Cialis commercials play
during prime time, nostalgia for the 1950s seems to me an appropriate response.
Think of how far we’ve come from a time when male and female adults could not
appear on television sitting on the same bed. It’s important to remember,
though, that the self-censoring conformity prevalent in the 1950s carried with
it a cultural reaction that would make today’s notion of political correctness
seem mild by comparison. Back then, in the community where I grew up, anyone who
even mentioned a politically controversial topic in mixed company, like civil
rights for women or minorities, was shushed to silence with a vengeance and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">put in one’s place</i>, so to speak—itself a
term laden with contempt and steeped in racial prejudice.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">So, is it
better to pretend that things are rosier than they actually are and to embrace
idealistic entertainment, or is it better to focus on the worst and appreciate
that indeed life is not really as bad as all that? I don’t have clear answers
to these questions, although I think it is a grave mistake not to ask them and
persist in finding answers that suit our individual life circumstances. Perhaps
having the answers is less important than encouraging people who lived through
those times to figure out why bygone eras have such great appeal. If those of
us near the end of our lives were to do this in large numbers, we might be able
to offer the younger generations some clear-cut advice that would ring true
loud enough to be taken seriously. It could help us decide what we might be
doing now that is worth preserving and what we should stop doing immediately.
Today the amount of material goods we have dwarfs what we had in the 1950s. We
still suffer endless distraction, but our idealism and goodwill for our fellow
Americans seems in serious decline.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If we
could get to the bottom of what is really valuable and why, perhaps we could
cease with generational battles over things that we imagined were important but
that never actually occurred or existed. Maybe we could get to the crux of what
truly matters in a free society in order to sustain freedom—not an abstract
notion of freedom, but something most of us would consider the real thing, like
not being bankrupted because of a serious illness. Economic freedom for white
males seemed very real in the 1950s. I for one would like to do whatever is
necessary to make this so for everyone today. Betty Furness probably could
never have imagined the household gadgetry we have today, and yet the American
middle class by nearly every measure seems to be in freefall toward a more
impoverished existence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the
1950s, the American economy nearly doubled, and job growth was explosive in all
sectors of the economy, while the percentage rise in wage compensation was
greater for rank-and file-workers and middle managers than for CEOs. Since the
1970s, the economy has grown exponentially at warp speed in the other
direction. Perhaps if we can shift back and recall what we thought was valuable
before we became psychologically politicized, we might be able to think our way
through today’s growing inequality.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Many of
the parents of those of us who grew up in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s themselves
experienced the hard times of the Great Depression. So, it’s not surprising
that they would want much more for their children than what they had when they
were young. And thus, it’s also not surprising that a whole generation and
subsequent generations would be given more in material comforts than any
generation in history and that we would thereafter be viewed as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">spoiled</i>. No doubt many of us were.
Perhaps we still are. But growing up accustomed to getting just about
everything we wanted had a surprising effect. Instead of being eternally
grateful as we were expected to be, hundreds of thousands of young people in
the ’60s, with the aid of college and television, began to become overtly aware
of the injustice that they had taken for granted as the way things are.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sad to
say, I wasn’t one of them. I was discharged from the Marines in 1964, after a
four-year hitch, and it wasn’t until many years later that I began to see
through the cultural façade that I had thought was a just society. The civil
rights era began in earnest in 1955, but it didn’t pick up full steam until the
’60s. Once this movement was coupled with ending the war in Vietnam, the whole
country appeared to be coming apart.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Make no
mistake in assuming that what at times seemed like a revolution underway didn’t
have its share of charlatans. The so-called Age of Aquarius yielded a seemingly
unrelenting barrage of new religions and spiritual snake-oil salesmen of every
bent imaginable, not to mention the sexual revolution generated by birth
control or the rise in drug use. The call to“do your own thing” was taken
understandably as an affront to everything the older generations had worked
for. Those who were young then but are old now can surely empathize all of the
way back to their grandparents as to why they were troubled by the chaos.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">No one had
a lock on moral virtue in the 1960s, but when the psychological dust has
cleared from that era (and I’m not sure that’s happened as yet), I trust it
will be apparent that the good that came out of the ’60s outweighs the bad in
some ways, but not in others. We are without a doubt a better society as a result
of the civil rights and women’s rights movements. But it’s not clear that we
have learned the lessons we should have from our experience in Vietnam.
Moreover, the anxiety kicked up as an aversion to the ’60s culture resulted in
a war on drugs that by any standards is a legal and moral disaster. Further
still, business malfeasance coupled with government corruption has led to greed
so scurrilous that it threatens our very way of life. If the financial meltdown
in 2008 didn’t convince us of this, perhaps nothing will.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Mining for Value<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Some noted
psychologists in the past have observed that if we could take a snapshot of the
world when we were about ten years of age, we will have found the well from
which our values spring. By that age, we have come to accept that the way the
world is, is pretty much the way it should be. So, now that we know this, how
do we make an adjustment that realigns the older adult that we have become with
a world of experience, a flawed memory, and the ten-year-old who mistakenly took
a childish worldview for an acceptable reality? I regret that there is not an
easy answer to this question. But, in my view, it’s crucial that we must ask it
of ourselves. Just as one must prime a pump to draw water from a well, we must
also question our past critically in order to learn from it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Whatever
your political views are today, I would wager that a thorough rethinking of the
past, beginning when you were about ten, can help you make better sense of our
current situation and perhaps have a positive effect on the future. If the
experts on aging are right, we are going to feel the tug of nostalgia anyway,
so why not make it worthwhile? Having been raised with blinders on, so to
speak, it should be easier for us to help the younger generations see through
the illusions that have enveloped them since birth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It’s
almost embarrassing that every time a major election rolls around, our
political candidates try to outdo one another in their claims about American
exceptionalism. We are no doubt exceptional in our arrogance: America is a land
where millions of people have adamant opinions about subjects they’ve never
seriously looked into. The fields of psychology and neuroscience have made
great strides in the past two decades in understanding the frailties of human
behavior and the powerfully dominating influence of our political identity, but
we are still far from benefiting en masse from this research. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Nostalgia,
though, is a good place to start because it cuts to the chase of what we really
value. We long for what we care deeply about. Not what we imagine was valuable,
but what we really think that matters or mattered in the past, period. Getting
to the bottom line of what stands out as being truly important in our lives is
something adults do more and more of, especially when their future is eclipsed
by the reality that the time they have left to live is short. Simply put,
nostalgia can become a comforting refuge from the ever-increasing complexity of
a world we find more and more estranged from than the one we grew up in, which
makes it enticing and a bit slippery. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active
Wisdom, </i>Mary Catherine Bateson<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>appends
a footnote, or perhaps something better described as an amendment or an add-on,
to Erik Erikson’s life stages.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>Once
an assistant life-stage teacher to Erikson, Bateson introduces us to what she
calls Adulthood II, characterized as engagement versus withdrawal, with the
basic strength being active wisdom and indifference existing as its core
pathology. Sad to say, my parents chose withdrawal and indifference. Today, as
we each become aware of such tendencies in ourselves, we can make a conscious
choice in favor of wisdom.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If the
past represents the holy grail of our values, then getting to the bottom of our
fondest memories is an effort vital to our aspirations as human beings.
Nostalgia is a key to unlocking that which was once valuable and subconsciously
still is. But even if what we value is still present and ubiquitous in popular
culture, it is often obscured by the increasing complexity of everyday life.
Hindsight really is valuable but not for the reasons most often given. Over the
next two decades American demographics are going to make nostalgia a front-page
issue. It’s already underway in the entertainment industry, and these efforts
will pull at the heartstrings of those of us who can and will be easily
manipulated politically. Ideologues of every stripe see opportunity in the
vulnerability of public sentiment, especially among large groups of people near
the end of their lives.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
quality of the future will depend in part on whether we learn from the past or
whether we are simply manipulated by advertisers and politicians. If we can
mine the past for real value, perhaps we can gain enough existential equilibrium
to live without blaming others for our misfortune, whatever it might be. But as
long as we continue to live by historical illusions, we will continue to fail
to live up to expectations that were doomed to failure from the beginning, and
the need to find others to blame will continue to dominate our politics. There
is much about the past to treasure for good reasons. Let’s just be sure that we
know what those treasures are and whether, in fact, they are real.</span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="center" style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: 14pt;">KINDLE
Books and EBooks on Amazon:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/September-University-Summoning-Passion-Unfinished/dp/0962197971/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251559008&sr=1-1"><b><i><span style="color: blue;">September
University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life</span></i></b></a><br />
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Existential-Aspirations-Reflections-Self-Taught-Philosopher/dp/096219798X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1287184976&sr=1-2"><b><i><span style="color: blue;">Existential
Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher</span></i></b></a></span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<strong><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rapture-Maturity-Legacy-Lifelong-Learning/dp/0962197947/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1"><span style="color: blue;">The
Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning</span></a></i></strong><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<strong><i><u><span style="color: blue; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-American-Dream-Lifelong-Postmodern/dp/0962197920/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1320328018&sr=1-7"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Beyond the American Dream: Lifelong
Learning and the Search for Meaning in</span></b></a> </span></u></i></strong><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<br />
<em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Proving-Youre-Qualified-Strategies-Competent/dp/0962197912/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_6"><span style="color: blue;">Proving
You're Qualified: Strategies for Competent People Without College Degrees</span></a></b></em><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Training-Yourself-Century-Credential-ebook/dp/B002CGS9SK/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2"><span style="color: blue;">Training
Yourself: The 21st Century Credential</span></a></b></em><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Self-University-Tuition-Desire-Degree/dp/0962197904/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2"><span style="color: blue;">Self-University:
The Price of Tuition is the Desire to Learn. Your Degree is a Better Life</span></a></b></em><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Portals-Northern-Sky-Charles-Hayes/dp/0962197963/ref=tmm_pap_title_0"><span style="color: blue;">Portals
in a Northern Sky: A Novel</span></a><o:p></o:p></b></em><br />
<br />
<div align="center" style="text-align: center;">
<em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">KINDLE Essays on Amazon:<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Aging-Existentially-Getting-Winter-ebook/dp/B0062OWKCE/ref=sr_1_15?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1320327838&sr=1-15"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out of
the Fall and Winter of Life</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Greatest-Enemy-Ignorance-ebook/dp/B0062OLY1M/ref=sr_1_16?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1320327924&sr=1-16"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Begs-Differ-Mistake-ebook/dp/B0060AWNCM/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319983478&sr=1-2"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to
Believe in Ayn Rand</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Class-Warfare-Real-Begun-ebook/dp/B0060OJARY/ref=sr_1_13?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319983610&sr=1-13"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or
Has It Just Begun?</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Heroism-Cowardice-National-Tragedy-ebook/dp/B005WZOK9U/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319652148&sr=1-6"><span style="color: blue;">Heroism,
Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Living-Success-Credentials-ebook/dp/B005XPAZNO/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319652148&sr=1-1"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Learning A Living: Career Success Without
Formal Credentials</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Nostalgia-Why-Past-Matters-ebook/dp/B005POWRV6/ref=sr_1_12?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319652148&sr=1-12"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pursuing-Justice-Hedgehogs-Baby-Boom-ebook/dp/B005NXLK3K/ref=sr_1_8?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319652148&sr=1-8"><span style="color: blue;">Pursuing
Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Why-Political-Dialog-Disingenuous-ebook/dp/B00684EK6C/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1321805623&sr=1-5"><span style="color: blue;">Why
Political Dialog Is Disingenuous</span></a> </span></b></em><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<div align="center" style="text-align: center;">
<em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">NOOK Books and Essays on Barnes
& Noble<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/portals-in-a-northern-sky-charles-douglas-hayes/1007332864?ean=2940013402614&itm=1&usri=portals%2bin%2ba%2bnorthern%2bsky"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Portals in a Northern Sky: A Novel</span></i></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/aging-existentially-charles-d-hayes/1107058332?ean=2940013254626&itm=6&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Aging Existentially: Getting the Most Out of
the Fall and Winter of Life</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/americas-greatest-enemy-charles-d-hayes/1107056970?ean=2940013254510&itm=5&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">America’s Greatest Enemy: Ignorance</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1106981528?ean=2940013211681&itm=4&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to
Believe in Ayn Rand</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1107001780?ean=2940013250550&itm=3&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or
Has It Just Begun?</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/heroism-cowardise-and-the-national-tragedy-of-hidden-guilt-charles-d-hayes/1106754220?ean=2940013653573&itm=8&usri=heroism"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy
of Hidden Guilt</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/learning-a-living-charles-d-hayes/1106815771?ean=2940013319592&itm=3&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Learning A Living: Career Success Without
Formal Credentials</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/nostalgia-charles-d-hayes/1105947476?ean=2940013402843&itm=3&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/pursuing-justice-charles-d-hayes/1105810586?ean=2940013421431&itm=4&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Pursuing Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the
Baby-Boom Legacy</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/why-political-dialog-is-disingenuous-charles-d-hayes/1107412899?ean=2940013471139&itm=3&usri=charles+d+hayes"><span style="color: blue;">Why
Political Dialog Is Disingenuous</span></a> </span></b></em><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<div align="center" style="text-align: center;">
<em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Websites<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.autodidactic.com/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Autodidactic
Press Website</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.septemberuniversity.org/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">September University.org Website</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="center" style="text-align: center;">
<em><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Blog Sites<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://self-university.blogspot.com/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Self-University Blog</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://septemberuniversity.blogspot.com/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">September University Blog</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
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</div>Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-46294401540030758232011-07-23T11:52:00.001-07:002011-11-02T17:48:39.598-07:00An Essay by a Philosopher<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">
Here is an essay titled "Killing the
Things We Love" by John F. Schumaker, who is one of the cultural critics
that I admire most on this planet. I thought you might find it of interest.
Best.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/762/1/"><span style="color: #1e66ae;">http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/762/1/</span></a>
<br />
<br />
As always your comments are appreciated.<br />
<br />
Charles D. Hayes <br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="center" style="text-align: center;">
<b>KINDLE
Books and EBooks on Amazon:<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/September-University-Summoning-Passion-Unfinished/dp/0962197971/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251559008&sr=1-1"><b><i><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="color: blue;">September University: Summoning
Passion for an Unfinished Life</span></span></i></b></a></span><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Existential-Aspirations-Reflections-Self-Taught-Philosopher/dp/096219798X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1287184976&sr=1-2"><b><i><span style="color: blue;">Existential
Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher</span></i></b></a></span><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<strong><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rapture-Maturity-Legacy-Lifelong-Learning/dp/0962197947/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1"><span style="color: blue;">The
Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning</span></a></i></strong><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-American-Dream-Lifelong-Postmodern/dp/0962197920/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_3"><strong><span style="color: blue;">Beyond
the American Dream</span></strong></a></em><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Proving-Youre-Qualified-Strategies-Competent/dp/0962197912/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_6"><span style="color: blue;">Proving
You're Qualified: Strategies for Competent People Without College Degrees</span></a></b></em><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Training-Yourself-Century-Credential-ebook/dp/B002CGS9SK/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2"><span style="color: blue;">Training
Yourself: The 21st Century Credential</span></a></b></em><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Self-University-Tuition-Desire-Degree/dp/0962197904/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_2"><span style="color: blue;">Self-University:
The Price of Tuition is the Desire to Learn. Your Degree is a Better Life</span></a></b></em><span style="font-size: 14pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<em><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Portals-Northern-Sky-Charles-Hayes/dp/0962197963/ref=tmm_pap_title_0"><span style="color: blue;">Portals
in a Northern Sky: A Novel</span></a><o:p></o:p></b></em><br />
<br />
<div align="center" style="text-align: center;">
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">KINDLE Essays on Amazon:<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Begs-Differ-Mistake-ebook/dp/B0060AWNCM/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319983478&sr=1-2"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to
Believe in Ayn Rand</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Class-Warfare-Real-Begun-ebook/dp/B0060OJARY/ref=sr_1_13?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319983610&sr=1-13"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or
Has It Just Begun?</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Heroism-Cowardice-National-Tragedy-ebook/dp/B005WZOK9U/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319652148&sr=1-6"><span style="color: blue;">Heroism,
Cowardice, and the National Tragedy of Hidden Guilt</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Living-Success-Credentials-ebook/dp/B005XPAZNO/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319652148&sr=1-1"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Learning A Living: Career Success Without
Formal Credentials</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Nostalgia-Why-Past-Matters-ebook/dp/B005POWRV6/ref=sr_1_12?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319652148&sr=1-12"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pursuing-Justice-Hedgehogs-Baby-Boom-ebook/dp/B005NXLK3K/ref=sr_1_8?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1319652148&sr=1-8"><span style="color: blue;">Pursuing
Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the Baby-Boom Legacy</span></a></span></b></em><em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<br />
<div align="center" style="text-align: center;">
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">NOOK Books and Essays on Barnes & Noble<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
<br />
<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/portals-in-a-northern-sky-charles-douglas-hayes/1007332864?ean=2940013402614&itm=1&usri=portals%2bin%2ba%2bnorthern%2bsky"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Portals in a Northern Sky: A Novel</span></i></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1106981528?ean=2940013211681&itm=4&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Atlas Begs To Differ: Why It’s a Mistake to
Believe in Ayn Rand</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1107001780?ean=2940013250550&itm=3&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Class Warfare: Is It Real? Is It Over? Or
Has It Just Begun?</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/heroism-cowardise-and-the-national-tragedy-of-hidden-guilt-charles-d-hayes/1106754220?ean=2940013653573&itm=8&usri=heroism"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Heroism, Cowardice, and the National Tragedy
of Hidden Guilt</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/learning-a-living-charles-d-hayes/1106815771?ean=2940013319592&itm=1&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Learning A Living: Career Success Without
Formal Credentials</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/nostalgia-charles-d-hayes/1105947476?ean=2940013402843&itm=3&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Nostalgia: Why the Past Matters</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/pursuing-justice-charles-d-hayes/1105810586?ean=2940013421431&itm=4&usri=charles%2bd%2bhayes"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Pursuing Justice: Foxes, Hedgehogs, and the
Baby-Boom Legacy</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Websites<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.autodidactic.com/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Autodidactic
Press Website</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.septemberuniversity.org/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">September University.org Website</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Blog Sites<o:p></o:p></span></b></em></div>
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://self-university.blogspot.com/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">Self-University Blog</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
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<em><b><span style="font-style: normal; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><a href="http://septemberuniversity.blogspot.com/"><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: blue;">September University Blog</span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></b></em><br />
<o:p></o:p></div>Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-83611650101841108382011-05-09T13:01:00.000-07:002011-05-09T13:01:32.687-07:00Time for Boomers to Step Up or Matter Not<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><strong>© Charles D. Hayes</strong></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">For decades I’ve seen a spate of new books be published, almost as if the times demand them, celebrating the rewards of aging. Then a few years later, more books emerge to refute the lot of them by focusing on the darker side of growing old. I would like to think that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">September University</i> falls in the middle, although that’s for others to decide. But four recent books in the latter category come to mind and offer some insight into the realities of aging when we compare them to the positive hype we hear so often about the so-called golden years. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shock of Gray, </i>Ted Fishman’s subtitle forecasts his expectation of what’s to come: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Aging of the World’s Population and How it Pits Young Against Old, Child Against Parent, Worker Against Boss, Company Against Rival, and Nation Against Nation</i>. Fishman paints an austere image of the future, assuming we stay the current course. He cites studies showing that older adults are easily influenced by negative stereotypes associated with aging. In other words, if we are said to have poor memories because of our age, we tend to act the part. Fishman asks many provocative questions about aging demographics that only time will answer, but many portend an economically depressive time ahead if immediate actions to avoid them are not taken. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">A still darker view comes from Marc Agronin’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">How We Age: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Growing Old</i>. Agronin provides examples of aging seemingly gone wrong. He does so with the best of intentions, but it doesn’t make his observations any less dismal. One of his conclusions, though, is heartening. Agronin claims “our greatest humanity emerges in the desperate process of caring for someone old and ill.” If we could cultivate this virally as a stereotype, it could be useful. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Then comes Susan Jacoby’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Never Say Die.</i> One of my favorite authors, she reminds us of the absurdity and nonsense we experience as suggested in her subtitle: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age</i>. Jacoby breaks through the psychobabble as she always does, regardless of the subject, and stops in its tracks the hyperspin about positive aging with assertions of reality like this: “We cannot continue to base our image of old age on the extraordinary person, blessed by a combination of affluence and physiological hardiness, who remains ‘sharp as a tack’ and takes up a new youthful hobby—say, skydiving—in her nineties.” Personally I’ve heard the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sharp as tack</i> assertion from people describing an older relative more times than I care to recall; it’s a stereotype for certain and one we can do without.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Finally, the book about aging that I can’t get out of my mind is Ira Rosofsky’s, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nasty, Brutish and Long: Adventures in Old Age and the World of Eldercare</i>. Perhaps I’ve seized on the book because it’s about nursing homes, and my experience with them has been grim in the extreme. Rosofsky writes with profound seriousness, but also with humor and compassion. What he calls the “Rosofsky Law of Inverse Proportionality” is the part I find unforgettable. About professionals like himself who care for the elderly, he writes, “The more training you have, the less time you spend with patients.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">This fact speaks volumes about the lack of objectivity among healthcare providers and in nursing homes in particular. It speaks even louder about their concern for their profit margin, which too often is a more important objective than the well-being of their residents. Rosofsky’s Law bodes ill for the future of millions of people—a future where little encouragement is needed to find something to worry about on the dark side of aging. </span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Perception</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Recently I was explaining to a colleague that never in my 68 years on the planet do I recall a time when the future seemed more threatened and unstable than now: earthquakes the world over, nuclear devastation in Japan, and tornadoes by the score in the Midwest. The U.S. is to varying degrees engaged in three wars and counting, as the Middle East implodes and the threat of collateral terrorism is always a concern, especially with the death of Osama bin Laden. Financial ruin is the reality for hundreds of thousands of people as the housing meltdown continues seemingly unaffected by efforts for remedy. We still experience unemployment that rages on in spite of record profits for corporations, while compensation for the well connected is off the charts, even higher now than before the financial calamity began. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">All of this concern makes the idea of some measure of economic equality and stability for America’s middle class at large seem totally out of touch with reality. Through media sound bites and a diligent investment in political lobbyists, the rich and powerful have managed to subvert the public imagination so thoroughly that a large percentage of the electorate who are ironically near the bottom economic rung in America view the prospect of raising taxes on the rich as tantamount to a Communist plot. And raising the cap on payroll taxes for social security, which is one obvious solution to keep the payout stable, is avoided as if the idea is radioactive. Add the exponential growth of Alzheimer’s, rising medical costs, an absence of goodwill to see that everyone gets healthcare, the threat of global pandemics, and the looming shadow of ever- possible government shutdowns over simplistic ideologies in future federal budgets, and one could easily begin to worry about what’s ahead. My list could go on and on, but I need not continue because no doubt you can do that on your own. </span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Reality</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">What I do know for sure is this: In a few short years those of us in the fall and winter of life will be no more, but the effects of what we did or did not do in life will continue on like a tsunami of cause and consequence. Or what’s just as likely is a void reeking of irresponsibility, where action could have made a difference but didn’t due to collective apathy. Maybe this attitude is better characterized simply as a lack of interest, while individuals en masse play cards and strive to improve their golf game. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Depending, of course, on where you are in the world and under what circumstances you live, my emphasis on the perception above can seem trivial. Earthquakes and tornadoes, for example, have always been a part of our reality, and if you’re near the epicenter of the former or in the path of the latter, the rest of my argument is moot. But through the centuries, from the very beginning, Americans have been called on to act when action is necessary, and every generation has a responsibility to take responsibility for their times. Tom Brokaw’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Greatest Generation</i> is a case in point.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Even for those of us who are keenly aware that life is not fair, the realities of aging accentuate that unfairness with a vengeance. So much illness and so many accidents befall people later in life that spending too much time fretting about the future can rob us of what time we have left. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">September University,</i> I layout an ambitious blueprint of ways in which I hope to make a contribution to posterity. Though I’m very much aware that I may not be able to live up to my own expectations, I’m determined to do as much as I can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">while</i> I can. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Rising to the Occasion</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">In sharp contrast, I’m reminded constantly that the two people I have admired most in life, my maternal grandparents, would have thought it strange to set out to do something for posterity. In a recent episode on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Book TV</i>, Stephanie Coontz talked about her new book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s</i>. She took her book title from an opening paragraph in Betty Freidan’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Feminine Mystique,</i> where Freidan wrote of the need for women to rise to the occasion of changing their life circumstances. She described this first realization by many women as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a strange stirring</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Many of us today are likely experiencing similar stirrings but with misgivings as well. Coontz puts in perspective the difficulty of taking action when it’s called for because of how hard it can be to figure out what ought to be done. When one is beset with feelings that the status quo is unjust, the path forward can seem unclear because any action taken to correct the situation will go against the grain of custom. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Hearing Coontz describe the social mores of gender roles in the 1960s is stunning, even though I experienced them as an adult. Gradual change over many years can later seem striking with the full realization of how dramatically things have changed. A half-century ago, women’s rights were more apparent than real. Their roles were in many cases rigidly defined. Some form of oppression prevailed in most aspects of women’s lives, from being highly subservient in marriage to the kind of work women were thought to be suited for. Upon reflection, this kind of realization makes the actions of past generations more understandable. Times change and people do, too. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">My grandparents’ generation lived through the global upheaval of World War I, and my grandfather experienced the war firsthand in the trenches in France. Their generation endured the Great Depression, and to a significant degree this was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">their occasion.</i> They rose to meet it with a penchant for self-reliance that would last a lifetime. So, while my grandparents likely would have thought that openly setting out to make a contribution to society is puzzling, they did, in point of fact, rise to the occasion of the times in which they lived. Their extraordinary self-reliance stands out now as strange in contrast to the expectation of receiving some kind of aid that most people live with today whenever assistance is needed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">In an earlier essay, I wrote that my grandparents increasingly found themselves in a more alienated world, a world of strangers and of customs that seemed to grow more absurd with each passing year. And now that they have been gone for many years, the world no longer seems like a place amenable to their very existence. In other words, they were not right for now, and the world today is not right for them. There simply has been too much change. This affirms Coontz’s observations and implies that each and every generation can expect to experience enough change to require reflection and thoughtful action in response. Indeed, I would argue that, because of advances in technology, the need for reflection and thoughtful action is growing exponentially. The kinds of change that once took a century can occur in a generation, and what once took a generation can now occur in a year or two. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">My grandparents lived lives very much worthy of emulation, but my parents did not follow their example, and in many ways I haven’t either. And yet, nowadays, the lessons of their lives are constantly on my mind. Now, I realize that they rose to the occasion of the times in which they lived in the best way that they knew how. These days, the occasion in which we find ourselves calls for nothing short of a political intervention, to keep middle-class America from disappearing. Our taxes are the lowest they’ve been in a half-century, and yet public perception is so erroneously skewed that it’s considered unthinkable by many to ask that corporations and the super rich pay a higher tax rate. Wall Street captains of industry complain that we have the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world, and yet two-thirds of American corporations pay no taxes at all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">This brings me back to the biggest lesson from recollections about the last years of my grandparents’ lives. The two people I admired most in life experienced years of misery as their health deteriorated. So acute and severe was the condition of their physical health that the word <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">torture</i> comes to mind as an appropriate descriptor. My grandmother cared for my ailing grandfather at home rather than send him to a nursing home, and her own health suffered as a result. She did eventually go to a nursing home, where she died what could only be described as a wretched death. If we want something better for ourselves and our family members, we are going to have to rise to the occasion and make it happen. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">With thousands of baby boomers turning 65 each day, seldom a month goes by that some news of their life circumstance doesn’t make a media headline—how many baby boomers can’t afford to retire, for example, or how many will face poverty in old age. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">September University</i>, I put a lot of faith in the baby boom generation to use their life experience to the fullest, with the expectation that if only a small percentage of their vast demographic chooses to engage in some activist sense of rising to the occasion, it could, would, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">will</i> have a positive impact on the future. If there were ever a time for a strange stirring it is now. Time will tell. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What will your contribution have been</i>?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/September-University/dp/B0048ELC56/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1289775935&sr=1-1"><strong>September University Blog</strong></a> is now available on Kindle</div>
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<strong>My latest books:</strong></div>
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/September-University-Summoning-Passion-Unfinished/dp/0962197971/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251559008&sr=1-1"><strong><em><span class="style29">September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life</span></em></strong></a><span class="style29"><br /><br /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Existential-Aspirations-Reflections-Self-Taught-Philosopher/dp/096219798X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1287184976&sr=1-2"><strong><em>Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher</em></strong></a></span><br />
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<span class="style29"><em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0962197947/qid=1083530363/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-3033966-0633464?v=glance&s=books">The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning</a></em> </span></div>
</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span>Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-63971631891576492562011-04-08T08:26:00.000-07:002011-04-08T08:26:23.129-07:00The Other As Enemy / Is Enemy to Democracy<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">© Charles D. Hayes</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Described as “an eloquent meditation on the nature of hatred,” philosopher Sam Keen’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination, </i>published 20 years ago, should be taken down from the library shelf, reread, and republished.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It doesn’t, however need to be updated; it’s as pertinent to today’s reality as it was when it first appeared in print.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Keen opens the introduction with this observation: “In the beginning we create the enemy. Before the weapon comes the image. We <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">think</i> others to death and then invent the battle-axe or the ballistic missiles with which to actually kill them. Propaganda precedes technology.” He goes on to explain that depth psychology presents us with the “undeniable wisdom that the enemy is constructed from denied aspects of the self.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">While acknowledging the fact that there are real aggressors who qualify as real enemies, Keen calls to our attention the idea that, to produce mass hatred, the body politic must remain unconscious of their own paranoia, which, due to a predilection for thoughtlessness, never seems to be much of a problem. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Moreover, Keen acknowledges that paranoia, far from being aberrant behavior, is a normal part of the human condition and that it contributes to the ethos of tribal loyalty and patriotism. </span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Faces of the Enemy</span></i><span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;"> is rich with quotable material on nearly every page. Keen shows how utterly easy it is to alienate one’s imagined opposition in such a way as to justify any and every means of obliterating them. The reason this is so effortless is that people we observe as different in some way are easily dehumanized. Differences can be exaggerated and magnified, and once someone’s humanity has been destroyed, the way they are to be treated is no longer a matter of morality because they are no longer seen as qualifying for fair treatment. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Although I’ve said Keen’s book does not need updating, we do need to put contemporary culture in perspective through the lens of Keen’s insightful and morally profound observations. I still recall reading a few years ago about the notion of ideological amplification in academia and how stunning a revelation I thought it to be. Ideological amplification is simply an acknowledgment that when groups of people of a particular political or ideological bent get together they are apt, by nature of their association, to go further in the direction to which they are already leaning. On the face of it this seems too simple an observation to get excited about. But to the contrary, people unaware of this tendency are especially vulnerable to ideological manipulation. In my view, America is suffering mass manipulation today for perhaps the most sinister and egregious reasons ever: egoism and greed. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Each day millions of people begin their day with nothing particular on their minds other than how they will spend their time and perhaps how they will spend their evening. But in the course of the day, whether they are engaged in meaningful work or drudgery, they often tune in various media pundits as a means of staying, in touch with what’s going on in the world or simply for entertainment. Now this would seem a harmless activity, except for the effects of ideological amplification. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Many media pundits make their living by fomenting human emotion into a response ensuring enough rage to keep anxious listeners tuned in. Doing this helps pundits maintain their ratings, and thus add to their wealth, while simultaneously satisfying their narcissistic egos. Hatred, after all, is metastasized emotion, and unfortunately it plays to our worst instincts: to promote the bonding of the group so engaged at the expense of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other</i>. Hatred is one of the greatest unifiers for human beings, as philosopher Eric Hoffer frequently noted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">That millions of people willingly go along with the mass manipulation of their emotions in ways that alienate others as enemies unworthy of the respect due to our fellow man is one of the most pathetic behavioral traits of our species. We have extraordinarily sophisticated brains but make little use of them when it comes to finding simple fault in matters that aren’t simple at all when we really examine the evidence. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">What if most days, most people spent their time living up to the responsibility that democracy requires? What if instead of listening to narcissistic zealots, they listened to people looking for and working toward real solutions to problems with so much enthusiasm for the better argument that it wouldn’t matter to them from which side it was presented? Given the current state of public discourse, this may sound insanely naïve, but it would be the mature thing to do. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">If we don’t begin soon, en masse, to act like adults, our children and grandchildren are going to experience wretched lives because of our inability or our unwillingness to stop the commercial manipulation of our emotions. Generations from now (providing there is a viable future), our current society may be viewed as having been ignorant beyond credulity because of our passivity and willful inattention. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">For unscrupulous pundits, the way to a quick fortune is to read between the lines of Sam Keen’s book and think about how easy it is to turn fear into a profit center. It is embarrassingly easy, and for that we should be ashamed. The resulting incivility keeps us from being a just society, one that could leave succeeding generations something to live up to instead of an economic shambles where a great nation was once thought to stand as a living example of a viable democracy. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Pundits who decry those of us who point to vitriolic media as a major reason for incivility these days do so to protect their livelihood, not to further civil discourse. People of retirement age can recall a time when civil discourse was a reality, even when political issues were as ideologically divisive as they are today. But, with rare exceptions, those were the days before hate-radio, partisan TV, Internet echo chambers, and the commercial application of dogma for the sake of audience share. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Of course, none of this would matter, except that human beings have an overpowering predilection to argue about things they know very little about. That’s in large part why it is so easy to alienate the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other </i>in the first place. In point of fact, we have no real social problems in America that could not be readily solved if most people were educated to the level necessary to sustain a legitimate democracy. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">The greatest threat to the future is ignorance, and the first step to a better outlook is to acknowledge that those among us who promote and perpetuate ignorance are not patriots. People who attempt to gain stature through promoting fear of the other undermine the very idea of democracy. That they are able to do so without being exposed as the self-absorbed zealots they are speaks volumes about the current state of adult education in America. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial", "sans-serif"; font-size: 14pt;">But Keen offers us a way out. He writes, “There is a single secure, sacred vocation to which human beings can surrender without the fear of falling into idolatry. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">We are called to bring justice and compassion into the communal life of our species</i>. Our purpose is to create an order that is not red in tooth and claw, a commonwealth that is governed by our highest capacity for consciousness, conscience, and compassion, rather than by our lowest capacity for inventing the means for the triumph of raw power. Precisely because the ‘objective’ world does not incarnate the virtues of repentance and mercy, it is the human calling to do so. Ours is the task to so reduce the unnecessary ‘surplus’ of evil, that we will be left with the necessity of coping only with the inevitable evil of disease, tragedy, and death.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A tall order, no doubt, but one worthy of our aspirations and one that in a nutshell captures the idealism that gives purpose to the very notion of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">September University</i>. I hope you will join in the effort and begin to speak your mind. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/September-University-Summoning-Passion-Unfinished/dp/0962197971/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251559008&sr=1-1"><strong><em><span class="style29">September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life</span></em></strong></a><span class="style29"><br /><br /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Existential-Aspirations-Reflections-Self-Taught-Philosopher/dp/096219798X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1287184976&sr=1-2"><strong><em>Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher</em></strong></a></span><br />
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</div>Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-60137699691363524072011-03-07T09:05:00.000-08:002011-03-07T09:05:26.938-08:00Generosity as an Expression of Affection<span style="font-family: "Courier New";"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"> <div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New";"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">When I was growing up in the 1940s and 50s, vegetable gardens were ubiquitous. Indeed, victory gardens were encouraged in both world wars, and although I was too young to perceive an association with patriotism and gardening, it helps explain the enthusiasm for gardening I witnessed among adults when I was a child. I have clear memories of the custom of sharing food and of a time when neighbors would come for a visit bringing bushel baskets of fresh produce. My guess would be that this is still a frequent occurrence in many parts of the country today, and yet, for the most part, these customs seem to have been lost to the lifestyles of modernity and urbanization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New";"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">My maternal grandparents usually had a garden, but during the times when they didn’t, they would still purchase their produce from nearby farms. They would then spend several days each spring and fall canning a vast assortment of fruits and vegetables. Their pantry was seldom stocked with less than a year’s worth of food. Of course, people still do this, but the tradition is not nearly as common as it used to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Increasingly I wish that weren’t the case. Although it would seem we have gained from the enormous availability of food in the modern-day supermarket, there is still something lost—something important and something for which finding a suitable substitute seems difficult. Vegetable gardens engender a sense of community in a way that binds us to the land and to one another at the same time. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New";"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Moreover, the care and effort required for growing and preparing food for storage is rewarded with an appreciation for the precarious nature of our physical environment and the degree to which we are dependent upon the biological requirements for life. At a deeper level lies an ethos of sharing because most gardens produce more than one family can consume while the produce is still fresh. For many years my grandparents lived in Oklahoma while my family lived in Texas. We would travel several times a year to visit my grandparents, and without fail, when we prepared to leave and return home, we were inundated with food from my grandparents’ pantry. Thinking about this practice many years later, I realized this gesture of showering family members with the fruits of your labor was an overt expression of affection. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New";"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">My grandparents, like so many others of their Victorian generation, were not much for expressing affection verbally, but when I compare their customs to those of the present day, I prefer the old ways. But for a few changes in lifestyle, what’s to keep us from sharing as our grandparents once did? After all, we reap what we sow. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/September-University-Summoning-Passion-Unfinished/dp/0962197971/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251559008&sr=1-1"><strong><em><span class="style29">September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life</span></em></strong></a><span class="style29"><br /><br /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Existential-Aspirations-Reflections-Self-Taught-Philosopher/dp/096219798X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1287184976&sr=1-2"><strong><em>Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher</em></strong></a><br /><br />Back to </span><a href="http://www.autodidactic.com/"><strong><span class="style29">Autodidactic Press</span></strong></a></div>
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</span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></span>Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-10153604805954377582010-11-14T15:19:00.000-08:002010-11-14T15:19:40.161-08:00A Longing for Solitude<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">A few months ago, while presenting a September University workshop, I made a point of suggesting that each generation longs for something it grew up without—something that is likely to be disrespected or readily dismissed by the generation to follow. This prompted a question from a participant about today’s younger generation currently in high school and college. What are they growing up without? What will they long for and subsequently rediscover in a few years? It didn’t take long to come up with an answer—something I suspect will someday in the not too distant future seem like a profound breakthrough. The revelation hit me like a lightning bolt: what’s missing today is solitude. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">If history is a reliable measure, today’s frenzy of texting and tweeting, with cell phones and a never-ending selection of new gadgetry with which to connect oneself with the rest of the world, is going to produce a backlash. But whether the repercussion will have lasting reverberations is an open question. The rush to cities decades ago resulted in a back-to- the-land movement that seems to have subsided, even though telecommunications opens up more opportunities for living in the country than ever before. So perhaps, in the long run, multitasking will be humanity’s destiny. I’m quite confident it won’t be mine though.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Many people spend a big part of their vacations answering business e-mail. Millions upon millions of people increasingly live in a constant state of perpetual distraction, where one interesting subject of focus morphs into another before the previous matter of attention is fully satisfied or absorbed. In effect, individuals are being overwritten both by their tools and by the crowd. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal” and “It is easy to live after the world’s opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Of course, it’s doubtful that Emerson could have envisioned a society like ours, where the horde follows us to the bathroom and to bed, and awakens us in the night to connect. But I can imagine what Emerson would have said about tweeting, and I suspect it would be an eloquent expression of outrage. He had little tolerance for chit-chat. There is, however, growing resistance by more and more people to being constantly connected, and I would wager that it’s only a matter of time before this resistance begins to get wider public attention.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Scientists sometimes express annoyance when analogies are drawn to subatomic particles as a way to illustrate a point by people who don’t know enough about quantum physics to know what they are talking about. Knowing that risk, I’m going to join those ranks with regard to what’s known as the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">observer effect,</i> which says that the act of observing subatomic particles affects their behavior. Even though I don’t have a clue how this works, I am quite confident that this analogy applies doubly to human behavior. There is no doubt that our actions are affected by the eyes of others, and can influence us in the same way. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">So, if a person spends most of his or her time responding to email, texting, and participating in our vast cornucopia of social media, then what becomes of the self? What happens to our individuality and authenticity if everything we do is a reaction at the behest of another individual or group? The very thought of living one’s life as a perpetual reaction to external stimuli is disturbing, and yet at some level this is philosophically inescapable. The antidote, I suspect, exists only as a matter of degree and comes from thoughtful contemplation. Such contemplation requires some measure of privacy and quite possibly a generous serving of solitude as well, at least enough to dissipate distraction. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Philosophers through the ages have expressed the notion that there is strength and creativity to be gained from brief periods of isolation. Albert Einstein observed that we shun solitude in our youth but cherish it as we get older, and I couldn’t agree more, except that I clearly recall being fond at times of being alone during my childhood. I used to spend many hours by myself in the woods. Now, with five acres of tall timber on my property, I feel as if I live in the woods. I admit to liking e-mail and some social media, but I do not text and I will not tweet on the principle that chit-chat is an absurd waste of time. Life is much too complicated to reduce the essence of our experience to 140 characters. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">We are all affected by our interrelationships in society, and much of what we do each day is not what we started out to do. Instead, it is the result of a reaction to something someone else has done. What we think about is affected, in large part, by the media we use. Moreover, if one is not very careful, becoming subordinate to one’s tools of inquiry is a real possibility. Spending most of your waking time on Twitter is analogous to being a proton perpetually spooked by no-matter. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1289775863&sr=1-1"><strong>The Shallows</strong></a></i>, a book about how the Internet is affecting our brains, Nicholas Carr observes that Google is in the business of distraction. We think we are using it, but it may be more accurate to suggest that Google is using us. Carr discusses the fact that young people today are shying away from novels because the sentences are too long and difficult. How unfortunate that as society gets more and more complex and our problems grow exponentially, our citizens become less and less thoughtful. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">Carr writes, “A personal letter written in, say, the nineteenth century bears little resemblance to a personal e-mail or text message written today. Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.” I suspect it’s much more than that; it’s a loss of the substance of critical thought at a time when the need is so important that it’s hard to overstate the case. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 14pt;">So, anticipating a backlash that my generation may not live to see in full measure, we can only hope our children and grandchildren will someday reawaken to the realization that without setting aside sufficient time for contemplation, without a dedication to thoughtfulness, humanity’s future is suspect. While it may not seem so readily apparent now, someday soon I trust it will be clear to anyone striving to live fully that thoughtfulness is what holds society together and that some solitude is necessary in order to nourish autonomy. Otherwise there is nothing to tweet about.</span><span style="font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12pt;"> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/September-University/dp/B0048ELC56/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1289775935&sr=1-1"><strong>September University Blog</strong></a> is now available on Kindle</div>
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<strong>My latest books:</strong></div>
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/September-University-Summoning-Passion-Unfinished/dp/0962197971/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251559008&sr=1-1"><strong><em><span class="style29"><span style="font-size: small;">September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life</span></span></em></strong></a><span class="style29"><br /><br /><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Existential-Aspirations-Reflections-Self-Taught-Philosopher/dp/096219798X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1287184976&sr=1-2"><strong><em><span style="font-size: small;">Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher</span></em></strong></a><br /><br /><span style="font-size: small;">Back to </span></span><a href="http://www.autodidactic.com/"><strong><span class="style29"><span style="font-size: small;">Autodidactic Press</span></span></strong></a></div>Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1512021095622532796.post-60558729715826228552010-09-19T10:07:00.000-07:002010-09-19T10:07:14.583-07:00<br />
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September 2010</div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><span class="style20"><strong><span style="color: maroon; font-size: x-large;">Sept-U: Setting the Movement in Motion</span></strong></span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif"; font-size: 14pt;"><br class="style4" /></span></span><span class="style21" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><strong>© Charles D. Hayes</strong></span></span></div>
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One thing I think most people today would agree about is that the Internet is having far-reaching effects on society, and at this point in time, it’s difficult to predict the outcomes. Radio and television required passivity. The Internet invites participation; it promotes curiosity, conversation, and conviction. Social connectivity makes ideological amplification easy, allowing like-minded people to get together and venture further in the ideological direction they’re already leaning than they would have ventured on their own. </div>
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Regardless of the sentiment, it can be amplified in cyberspace. Any one of the above features of social media offers the possibility of revolutionary change. The Internet, therefore, can bring us together or rip us apart. Today’s communication upheaval can play to our worst instincts or our best; how we respond is up to each of us as citizens.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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During the past half-century the media sources we utilize have continued to dramatically affect the way we live. Television, for example, has entertained and educated us for more than sixty years, but in some respects it has had an anesthetizing effect. It’s managed to distort our intelligence into a sort of semiconscious stupor in which we can watch reruns over and over without recalling having seen them before. In other words, millions of people use television to relieve stress and tune out, so to speak, just as others under the stress of modernity use drugs to turn their anxiety into euphoria.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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Contrast today’s communication capabilities with the 1950s, when there were only three television networks. The differences are so profound that many young people today have difficulty imaging what life would be like without constant connectivity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Millions of people used to go to work each day having watched the same programs the night before as most of the people they worked with. This shared sense of entertainment offered the feeling that we were really in the same boat, minus the racial and gender biases prevalent at the time. Social media may seem to have a similar effect today, except that the groups are far more self-selecting and the subjects of interest more trivial in nature. After all, how thoughtful and reflective can one be when the expectation is to respond quickly in 140 characters or less?</div>
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If you had a message you wanted to communicate to the general public in the 1950s, you were pretty much out of luck. Radio, television, newspapers, magazines, and letters were about the only options. Not so today. But when you start to imagine what the results might be from turning those billions of hours of television stupor into something more productive with today’s connectivity, the possibilities are mind-bending. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, </i>Clay Shirky, who teaches in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at <place w:st="on"><placename w:st="on">New York</placename> <placetype w:st="on">University</placetype></place>, shows how using our heretofore dead-to-the-world time differently has the potential to change the world. He describes interactive media as the connective tissue that holds society together. </div>
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Shirky writes, “In a historical eyeblink, we have gone from a world with two different models of media—public broadcasts by professionals and private conversations between pairs of people—to a world where public and private media blend together, where professional and amateur production blur, and where voluntary public participation has moved from nonexistent to fundamental.” Shirky also makes it clear that we have always found the time to do what interests us and what we really care about—the same realization that prompted me to write <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">September University</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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As I make clear in that book<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">,</i> the fall and winter of life is the optimum time to reflect on our experience, to use that experience and our learning to achieve a fulfilling end to life, and to do so with enough enthusiasm that we leave something worthwhile behind. Regardless of whether you are politically left, right, or center, what is important is to set contempt and animosity aside and be willing to engage in a civil dialog with people of opposing views while maintaining a resolve to opt for the better argument.</div>
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Imagine what the Internet and all of the attendant social media could and would support, if most people used its power to find real solutions to real problems. What if more and more people were to truly care about discovering the better argument, regardless of whose side might appear to be winning? What if, instead of spending so much time posting incendiary remarks about their ideological opposition, people sent out positive messages seeking common ground? What if most people began to act as if the way we act toward one another really matters, and as if they believed we will get the future we deserve? What if a significant number of people past middle age began to focus on generativity and their legacy for the generations to follow? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span class="style22" style="font-family: "Times New Roman", "serif";"><span style="font-size: medium;">I invite you to join the discussion and to visit the <place w:st="on"><placename w:st="on"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">September</i></placename><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> <placetype w:st="on">University</placetype></i></place> Facebook page and engage. Please invite others to do so as well, and tell us how you plan<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>to<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> make the best of the rest of your life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span></span></div>Charles D. Hayeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17496818135931379312noreply@blogger.com0