Category Archives: Psychology

Oct 18 2014

Ebola and Homo Politicus

Here goes Homo Politicus again.  Few of us really know anything about the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) but most of us have views about whoever is our President.

Homo Politicus says those views tell us all we need to know about the CDC’s effectiveness.

A recent survey finds 76% of Democrats and 54% of Republicans confident in the federal government’s ability to respond to Ebola while a 2006 survey about avian flu found 72% of Republicans and 52% of Democrats confident in the federal response.

The difference?  A Democratic President now, a Republican President then.

Partisanship of Disease Preparedness

We can see the swing taking place.  At the H1N1 “swine flu” outbreak in President Obama’s first year, 81% of Democrats were confident and 70% of Republicans still remained so in the federal response.

But does it matter that our expectation about the performance of government agencies is formed not on the facts but on our political bias?

It matters very much.  We panic about how we imagine our government will respond to Ebola but do little about diseases that we bring upon ourselves.

It makes no sense, for example, to panic about Ebola and at the same time smoke cigarettes.

Ebola Cartoon

And it is shameful for us to panic about Ebola being brought here from Africa when we’ve done so little to eradicate it there.

Malaria is estimated to have killed over 600,000 worldwide in 2012, 90% of them in sub-Saharan Africa.  But that death rate is estimated to be down almost 50% since 2000.

The same success could have been achieved with Ebola.  It still could.

And what is the single greatest real reason to fear an Ebola catastrophe here?  Our healthcare system.

People without health insurance who have the disease will put off visiting a doctor until it gets worse.  Of course they will.  They will infect others before they get to medical care.

We could fix that, too, but we are distracted by Homo Politicus.  How very sad it is that we listen to him.

Oct 18 2014

The Mental Illness of Homo Politicus

Our cranial roommate, Homo Politicus, identified by Aristotle long before the birth of Christ, is a trouble maker.

The following observation is true enough, but Homo Politicus latches onto one word and says “There you go again!”

“All forms of conservatism are symptoms of mental illness.  The fact that they are collective and rooted in ancient fragments of wisdom does not change the fact, just makes them more dangerous, difficult to acknowledge as pathological, and hard to treat.“

Because Homo Politicus sees everything as political and “conservative” is a political label, (s)he distracts us from what’s important, the root of the mental illness that manifests as conservatism.

What is that root?  Fear of change.

That’s important because so may of us fear change.  It’s not just Republicans, Christian and Muslim fundamentalists or others who profess conservative values.

And conservatism is not our only mental illness that manifests in politics.  Progressivism is also a delusion because we cannot in real life manage societal change.

Although our every behavior causes change, we cannot control the result.  The network of causes in which we exist encompasses everything that ever happened.  We cannot be in control because we are embedded in that network of causes.

Over-excitable Homo Politicus distracts us from the fact that knowing we cannot be certain about all its results does not mean our behavior doesn’t matter.

In fact, it is only our behavior that matters!  Because they so often guide our behavior, we must be very wary of our mental roommate’s beliefs.

It is foolish, for example, to think that those with a different political bias are mentally ill while we are sane.  That leads us to ignore important truths they point out.

And Homo Politicus blinds us to our own contradictory beliefs.  Conservatives who oppose government activism at home, for example, passionately advocate the use of force to change other nations.

There are such contradictory beliefs all across our political spectrum.

The result is we live with great social and economic inequality, inadequate access to health care, persecution based on beliefs or identity – all these ills and more – and we don’t know what to do.

We might imagine too much government got us into the mess, or stronger government could fix the problem.  But corrupt and incompetent as our government may be, it is not our primary problem.

That’s good because government’s flaws are very hard to correct but our individual problems are more tractable.  Of course we must correct our government’s flaws but we will get results faster by correcting our own.

What can we do about our insanity?  We can:

  • Reject “us-versus-them”, start building bridges across perceived divides.
  • Focus more on broader long-term consequences of our actions, less on short-term self-interest.
  • Resist appeals to fear and anger that cloud our judgment, use more analysis.
  • Assume misunderstandings result not from malice but miscommunication, practice empathy.

That we have an insane cranial roommate whose friends and enemies are also deranged doesn’t mean we must remain deluded.  We can pay less attention to their chatter and act more wisely.  We will be happier if we do.

May 20 2014

Fireworks, Doma and Impartial Love

I began journaling when I was traveling extensively on business.  I’d see something and sense the potential for insight that would come, if at all, only after I had time to reflect.  That’s when I began making notes as breadcrumb trails to explore later.

Blogging turns out to be better.  It motivates me to try harder to uncover what I can’t see.  Also, I get help.  Some comments start me on long journeys.

Harold, for example, commented on my post several months ago:  “Buddhism is epitomized by how I treat a grandchild, with a great deal of caring and kindness.   Now for some reason as people grow older we stop treating them like we would treat our young grandchildren.”

The first note I made was:  “Caring and kindness seem to be the expression of our fundamental nature.  It manifests without impediment with young children but is obscured with adults by caution.  They are not so vulnerable and could be a threat.  It is more completely obscured with old people by fear.  They are all too obviously close to what we fear most, death.”

Then came this tangential thought:  “Like many teenagers I sought a purpose for my life.  My mental model was trading.  I imagined having an amount of time I could invest for a return and that I must decide what return I wanted and how much to invest.  Maybe this is why I went into business despite an instinct that it would not by itself offer a sufficient return.”

Presumably I added the next note because the discussion started from Buddhism:  “It is easier to see now the only certainty, a time will come when we can no longer enjoy whatever return we assemble because we will die.  We may not even live long enough to assemble any return.”

But next came a segue I couldn’t account for:  “Every October my mom would buy a few fireworks.  Then she would buy a few more.  We never had much money and my dad felt they were a waste.  That’s why my mom only bought a few.  But she loved fireworks.  That’s why she bought a few more.  Then a few more.  On Guy Fawkes night my dad worried the fireworks would set something on fire.  My mom and I enjoyed them.  My dad was relieved when they were over with no accidents.”

Those memories are happy, mostly, and they led me to search for a video of fireworks.   The unhappy aspect is my father’s worry and that his most positive feeling was relief when it was over.

Presumably, that’s what reminded me of something else:  “My mom also enjoyed putting empty toothpaste tubes in the kitchen coal stove where the air trapped inside them expanded until, after a suspenseful wait, there was a loud explosion.  My dad really hated that.”

This morning when I meandered along this breadcrumb trail once again it struck me at last how toothpaste and firework explosions relate to Buddhism.

Rainbows are used in Buddhist teaching as an example of something that is real in quite a different way from what we see.  Rainbows look almost solid.  That’s because we think things are solid even when we know they are not.  We know if we go toward the end of the rainbow looking for a pot of gold, it will keep moving away but nevertheless, the rainbow seems real.  The way we interpret it is deluded.

Our experience of the light display from fireworks is different.  The rainbow persists long enough to appear solid; the display from the firework changes fast so we don’t tell ourselves a story about its nature.   We see a firework as an experience, not a thing.

An exploding toothpaste tube is different again, long anticipation, then, with no way to know when it will occur, an instantaneous blast.  Surprise!  The whack of a stick by a Zen Buddhist master might startle me into seeing past my fog of concepts.  The recollected toothpaste blast just revealed the fundamental difference between my mother and father — one loved and the other hated surprises.

How does any of this relate to Doma?

At school in England in that time of fireworks we got religious instruction, stories from the Bible that seemed to have no relevance to our situation two thousand years later in a very different world.  Jesus’ Great Commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself” did penetrate my indifference, though.  In fact, it felt to be the most important principal of all for a good life.  But it puzzled me.  Some of my schoolmates were very cruel, always pouncing on anyone vulnerable.  Should I love them?   And while I had a couple of close friends, it  did not seem worthwhile even talking with most of the boys.

Harold’s comment about Buddhism got me thinking about my practice of prayer to “train in impartial love and compassion.”  I now see what I didn’t see when I was in school, that our actions, good, bad and neutral, are one thing and our fundamental nature is another.  Our impartial love and compassion is obscured by misconceptions and habits that we can train ourselves to discard.

The first love we experience, love for our mother, arises because she nurtures us; it feels good but its root is selfish.  Love for our children is also programmed but is less selfish.  I have no experience as a grandparent but I don’t doubt that it does, as Harold says, tend to manifest more selflessly.  We expect to feel it, so it is programmed, but we feel less need to discipline young grandchildren so we less often trigger their selfishness.  Love for grandchildren comes with fewer expectations.

How this relates to Doma is that my experience as her sponsor was not programmed and it did not accumulate expectations.  We live far apart and she was eleven when we met.  Our interactions developed slowly and grew closer only as she became a young adult.  The feeling I have as a result of that happenstance is something I’d have to call love but it’s a different kind from any other experience I would give the same name.

The feeling that has emerged from my interactions with Doma gives me a sense of how impartial love may feel even though I cannot call what I feel now impartial.  I only help Doma because I judge her to be worthy of help.  I do now have a sense of how it would feel, though, if, instead of first making a judgment about people’s relative worthiness, I had the same powerful desire to help everyone.

What about impartial compassion?  Children love but do not feel compassion for their mother.  They lack any sense that their mother might suffer.  Parents experience compassion for their children — when they’re not feeling impatient, infuriated, disappointed or proud.  But how does impartial compassion feel?  My experience with Doma is instructive here, too.  The way it evolved helps me recognize what she’s feeling without also feeling it myself.

And how does impartial compassion relate to fireworks?  Because Doma is alert, enthusiastic and curious, she will definitely create surprises.  Mostly they will, like fireworks, be happy-making because she has good sense, but surely not all her decisions will be right.   I will need the joyful anticipation of surprises I learned from my mother to maintain impartial compassion no matter what.

Wandering from Harold’s comment about love for grandchildren via my remembrance of fireworks and exploding toothpaste tubes to my experience helping Doma has at last shown me how and why it’s so valuable to train in impartial love and compassion — because I’m not swamped by sharing Doma’s emotions when circumstances spark them, I can more clearly see how to help.

I must continue training in impartiality.

May 2018 update – Doma graduated in four years with a BA in Mathematics and Interdisciplinary Studies. 

May 8 2014

Misunderstanding Ukraine, What To Do

Reading “got some insight into my own psychology and how it colors things,” by a friend who confronted a business challenge, I recognized that what Buddhists call karma is what in the West we call psychology, our emotional and conceptual biases that lead us to misunderstand.

My focus right now is on the Nepali young woman whose education I support but I do still notice other things.

Ukraine, for example.  Psychology, which is individual karma, and culture, the karma we share, shape our ideas about current affairs by connecting them with past events that we also misunderstood.  Psychology, culture, karma, whatever we call it, is always distorting what we see and in ways that keep changing.  What is shaping our ideas now about events in Ukraine?

Having suffered 20 million or more deaths in WW2, the Soviet Union established deep buffers against another invasion — the Baltics, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, all the way to the center of Germany.  It lost those buffers when the Soviet Union collapsed and would face an overwhelming threat if the Baltics, Belarus or Ukraine in particular were to become hostile.

When the Baltics were admitted to NATO, the alliance advanced to less than 100 miles from St. Petersburg.  If Ukraine and Belarus follow, NATO will be only 250 miles from Moscow.

NATO is weak now but Germany transformed from much greater weakness in 1932 to massive power by 1938.  Russia must stop NATO from absorbing Ukraine.

Why would the US government encourage enticement of Russia’s borderland nations into NATO?  Who could that benefit?  Only our weapons manufacturers and military contractors.

Do they control the US government?  No.  But they do have influence just like other wealthy lobbyists and they have at times had insiders like former-VP Cheney whose roots are in for-profit military business.  But even then military contractors do not control foreign policy.  There’s more going on.

We, by which I mean we the American people, have come to believe it is our job to punish other nations.  And because we did not lose our Cold War fears even though the Soviet Union collapsed, we are especially ready to believe we should punish Russia’s leader.

We do not consider President Putin’s reasons for concern about Ukraine.  We simply accept the lies by our politicians and media.

Why do they lie?  Some have financial incentives but most are like us, deluded.

John McCain, for example, is always eager for military action.  Remember President Bush’s axis of evil — here’s McCain in that context wanting to “bomb, bomb, bomb — bomb, bomb Iran.”   He later believed, as did President Obama, that we should bomb Syria.  We’re fortunate he was not elected President because unlike Obama, he would not have been automatically blocked by Congress — and McCain now wants to take military action in Ukraine.

The majority of Americans oppose our military involvement in Ukraine and perhaps recognize that Russia had to maintain control over its Crimean naval base, but few see the great risk in Ukraine is civil war and it was our own and European Union governments who triggered that potential disaster.

I realize that even if he heard them, my words would not outweigh President Obama’s long-formed biases or the nonsense he’s now being told.  There’s little I can do on that front.

What we all can do, however, is work every day to eliminate our own emotional habits and misconceptions.  That really does make a difference.

Feb 8 2014

The Minority with No Name

Since posting about the Father of the US Constitution’s intent to “protect the opulent minority against the majority,” I’ve been seeking a name for the minority to which I belong.

Like the opulent minority, we do not identify ourselves first as Democrats or Republicans, old or young, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or anything else like that. Like the opulent minority, we are not an organized body: we just have common interests.

Unlike those who are opulent, however, there seems to be no word for us.  Suddenly I realized that is the heart of the matter – we are the minority with no name.

The insight was sparked, as they so often are, by something unrelated, a faux-news article where the writer of “A Horse with No Name”  explains “I tried singing, ‘I’ve been through the desert on a horse called Keith’ but I ran out of rhymes.”  A good joke revealed something profound.

What the minority with no name has in common includes the desire for self-reliance along with the knowledge that self-reliance is not possible for everyone or in fact, when you look more closely, for anyone.  We depend on each other: we have no choice about that, only whether we act accordingly.

The minority with no name knows we are the world’s stewards, acknowledging that while the future does not harm or benefit us, what will be possible then does depend on us just as what is possible for us is set by the world we inherited.

The minority with no name knows everything we see is distorted by what we think we saw before, that we fit this moment’s visual and other signals into what is mostly an imaginary pattern.  We need patterns to guide us: the minority with no name tries to recognize discordant facts and promptly abandon misleading ideas.

The opulent minority is small by definition but there is no metric for the minority with no name, no membership criteria.  In theory, everyone could join.

But it would be counter-productive to self-identify as one of the minority with no name.  What is productive is to act on its interests, the common interest of all present and future life.

Nov 20 2013

First Be A Good Person

One of my great heroes, Sachin Tendulkar, just retired at age 40. He was a spectacularly talented basman who first played international cricket for India when he was 16. I won`t cite his statistics because they will be meaningless if you don`t know cricket. Truly, they do have little meaning relative to the extraordinary adulation from the entire stadium at the close of his last match.

Now I`m watching Sachin respond to questions from adoring schoolchildren. His answers are always thoughtful, often humorous, most of all helpful. He`s thinking why each question was asked, how he can answer in a way the child can feel. They are spellbound.

The host asks the last question: “You have accomplished so much, Sachin, you are so famous, but you are so humble. How have you kept such humility?”

“When I was selected to play for my country for the first time, my father told me: Sachin, you have been honored today, you must do the best you can with your bat, but this is temporary. If you do well, people will like you, but there will be a time after cricket. You should want people still to like you after cricket. That means, first you must be a good person, then you can be a good cricketer.”

Sachin ended this way: “Some of you might play cricket for India, some of you might be lawyers or work in business or many other things. Whatever you do, please first be a good person.”

Oct 12 2013

Fundamentalists in the Mirror

Our media shows Muslim fundamentalists terrorizing the Middle East, shooting an Afghani schoolgirl, offering safety in Pakistan to those sworn to destroy us – a world we cannot understand whose people we have no choice but to fear.

What impression do they have of us?

An ongoing study, “The Republican Party Project”, offers a mirror where we can glimpse what they see.  It is timely since our government is now shut down by the Republican Party.  Muslims have seen us attack them with rhetoric, sanctions, drones, and armed forces.  Now they see us at war with each other.  They must have a theory about why we do these things.

Republican Party demographics suggest their idea may parallel ours about them.

The Project`s research finds the Party comprises 47% evangelical and religiously observant (30% evangelical), 22% libertarian-leaning Tea Party supporters and 25% moderates.  The Christian half sees an America being destroyed by cultural rot from the outside.  The libertarian quarter sees an America being destroyed by accelerating dependency on ever bigger government.  Both groups are in a desperate fight to restore a deeply valued culture.  The moderate quarter feels, and is unrepresented.

We see fundamentalist Muslims suppressing moderates “over there”.  What the mirror shows is fundamentalist Christians and libertarians suppressing moderates “over here”.

We can imagine a response like this:  “If American fundamentalists will risk plunging their economy into unfathomably deep depression, if they care so little for their people’s future, can there be any limit to the suffering they would wreak on us?”  It`s a logical question.

Our media offers a worldview of Muslims “over there” who are our enemies unto death.  It is logical to assume the media “over there” offers a worldview of Christians and other fanatics “over here” who are their enemies unto death.  They will not have forgotten the “Crusade” President Bush said 9/11 compelled us to undertake, his “War on Terror” that would not end while a single terrorist remained alive.

The infection carried by these fantasies about those “over here” or “over there” whose symptoms are fear and hatred is highly contagious.  We must reverse our rising fear and hatred of each other.  We can counter the actions motivated by fear, hatred and greed without succumbing to the same infection.

Jul 6 2013

Identity, Independence and Kindness

Although everything is in every instant changing, which means everything flawed can be perfected, that’s not what Mr. Ego sees.  He’s afraid if he relaxes even for an instant, bad things will come to pass.  He is a deluded Jeeves devoted to caring for a Bertie Wooster whose nature exists only in his imagination.  That he exists only in mine does not make his activities less real.

Mr. Ego and I have been together so long and he is so very diligent; he usually has me believing I am what he imagines.  On rare occasions I do wake up and tell him I’ll be OK, he can go on vacation, but he doesn’t because if he does, I will no longer have an identity.  He thinks that would be very scary.

Psychotherapists say Mr. Ego manifests soon after we are born and develops well into adulthood.  “Saying ‘NO’ is one of the earliest signs of individuation”, according to GoodTherapy.  “It is a statement that I am separate from you and want something different … individuation is … learning what we want to say NO or YES to [and] acting according to what we want and do not want.  It is a statement of who we are (ME) and who we are not (NOT ME).”

Mr. Ego starts by teaching us to say NO and unless we’re very lucky, it’s all downhill from there.  He teaches us to want and not want, to see everything as ME or NOT ME and to reject everything that is NOT ME.  He teaches us, in other words, to be selfish.  Therapists consider individuation normative, meaning something that should happen.

In fact, our belief that we have an identity, are part of a group and should have a home makes us unhappy and unkind.   Our imagined identity, “I am the kind of person who…”, says we are solid and we should make our situation more so, more dependable.  We should instead rejoice that nothing is solid because that means everything really can become more perfect.

A way to dispel the illusion is to recast our identifier from noun to verb.  That makes Martin Sidwell not an explorer destined always to be an explorer and implicitly never doing anything else, but an exploration taking place at this moment.  Thinking of ourselves as verbs eliminates a big part of the harm we cause by believing we have an identity.

Believing we are part of a group is also a problem.  If I think of myself as Buddhist it seems I am different from Christian but if I am practicing techniques that helped others grow more kind even to those who are abusive, I am practicing how to love and turn the other cheek.  The program that helps me is different but the goal is the same as Jesus taught.  I am not different from Christians, Muslims or others.

Keeping the goal clear is especially hard if our group’s identify is that of a people defined by its religion.  A dear friend who recently gave up her long standing role as spiritual leader at her synagogue said:  “What I realized is important is my values.  People I’m close to have the same values.  My rabbi’s are different and we’re not close.  Trying to lead those with his values to a different way can never be helpful.”  But being Jewish informs so much of what a Jewish person does, thinks and feels.  Recognizing what my friend did must have been very, very hard and acting on the recognition must take so much discipline and courage.

The recognition my friend came to may be even tougher for Tibetans whose identity is so deeply associated with not only religion but also their homeland.  Home is our idea of the ultimate refuge.  As Robert Frost wrote: “Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in”.   My Tibetan friend who only ever wanted to be a nun was expelled from the nunnery by the Chinese government after the Beijing Olympics.   A third of all Tibetan monks and nuns were forced out then after Western journalists reporting the Tibetan protests went home.

Jews whose ancestors were driven from their homeland milennia ago now have Israel.  The homeland Tibetans always had began to be destroyed just as Israel was established.  No wonder Tibetans yearn for that lost world  even though there can be no such place of safety.  It is so hard for any of us to recognize that and the idea of nation makes it so much harder.

China’s rulers always try to control the lands to their north and west because invaders from there have always swept in.  The dynasty that ruled from 1644-1911 was established by invaders from Manchuria.  As soon as the Communists won China’s civil war in 1949 they set out to control all China’s peripheral territories.  Tibetans lost not just their independence as a nation but increasingly also their culture.  The monasteries were destroyed, monks imprisoned, Chinese-language schools set up and masses of Han Chinese settlers imported.  The Tibetans were to become Chinese to make China safe.

We think nations help us to be safe because nations have armed forces for defense.  By identifying with a nation, however, we feel separate from people in other nations.  We think they are different and we become afraid or jealous of our fantasy of what they are.   Our struggle for independence in fact makes us fearful.  The Chinese rulers’ treatment of Tibetans is motivated by fear, as is exiled Tibetans’ yearning for a Tibet they may never have known and that no longer exists.

There are two Tibetan words for independence.  “Rang btsan” means not dependent on anything else and signifies the freedom we associate with independence.  “Rang mtshan” means an independent self and signifies what we associate with being an individual.  Both are pronounced rang tzen, are usually spelled rangzen in the West, and both suggest more than they mean.   Nations are not truly independent and neither are people truly individual.  Geography does not define a people nor is any man an island.  Borders are just ideas that create suffering and limit our compassion.

Opening our hearts to feel the terrible suffering of Tibetans and others can lead us to feel compassion both for them and their abusers whose delusions lead them to their terrible actions.  Then we can try to help both, for only in that way can suffering be ended.  We really can do this if, as in this beautifully rendered Imagine There’s No Rangzen, we think independently.

So many ideas.  We have this relentless urge to get things identified, situated and dependable.  We’re determined to define who we are and take action against what we are not.   But it can’t work.  How could such a program succeed when nothing can be fixed, when everything is arising in every instant from an ever-changing assembly of causes?

One of the first great Tibetan teachers in the West said it this way:  “The bad news is our airplane is crashing and we have no parachute.  The good news is there is nowhere to land.”  Mr. Ego got us into a vehicle he said would take us somewhere safe, if it didn’t crash.  His fear of crashing distracted us.

That’s why it’s so hard to recognize that in fact we are crashing right now precisely because we imagine we have a fixed identity, we belong to a group whose rules are sacrosanct and we will be protected from those who are not like us by the nation where we live.  We are creating our own fear.

We could instead accept the good news, train ourselves to dispel habitual reactions that grew from our misunderstanding, and grow more happy and, more importantly, more kind.

Mar 15 2013

Seeing, Feeling, Thinking and Blogging

Last November I lost my glasses in Kathmandu.  I was taking classes and couldn’t hold texts far enough away to read, so I bought drugstore reading glasses.  With them what’s close is clear but all else is blurred.  Without them only what’s distant is clear.  The new prescription glasses I got yesterday should make everything clear but the optician said: “It will take you a couple of days to learn where things are”.

Seeing:  I’d never thought about it in that way.  I hadn’t noticed the feedback loop where my brain directs my eye muscles to change focus between what’s close and more distant.  It happens fast so I imagined everything is always in focus.  I’d have realized it’s not if I’d thought about it, but there never was a reason to.  With the new glasses I must learn to tip my head up and down so my eyes see through the right part of the lens.  That requires practice.

Feeling:  Last night I finished the first book I’ve read by Ron Rash, “The Cove”.  I intend now to read everything he ever wrote.  I knew early on how the story must end, not the specific outcome but what the situation makes inevitable.  Half way through, I wanted to stop.  I was feeling what the protagonists feel, knowing I’d do the same as those I liked, and that I share the weaknesses of those who would do harm.  The story is sadder even than I anticipated, and utterly convincing.  Why choose to experience such feelings?  Because I understand a little more.

Thinking:  Yesterday, I heard on the radio about the Ku Klux Klan in Maine in the 1920s.  I thought it was all about white supremacy and only in the South.  In fact, it was strong here, too, but with a different target, Catholics.  There were violent anti-Catholic riots here in the 1850s.  A mob inflamed by a street-preacher calling himself “The Angel Gabriel” burned a Catholic church, a Catholic priest was tarred and feathered, and there was much more.  In the 1920s, the Klan arose.  They whipped up the ongoing conflict between descendants of the English and the Irish and French-Canadian Catholics who came later.  Klan members were elected by many towns, as State representatives and one even became Governor.  There were daylight hooded marches, cross-burnings and Catholic homes were burned.  It was unsafe to speak French in public.  The Klan fizzled within a decade but their Governor later was elected to the US Senate and became a close ally of Senator Joe McCarthy.  How can anyone think it’s OK to do such things?

Blogging:  A day or two ago, a friend said: ” I like your posts about tax.  It must take a lot of work.  Why are you doing it?”  I always enjoyed the challenge of understanding things and the elation when understanding dawns.  Our society is not functioning well and the tax system is one important factor so I want to know what big impacts it has and how it could be changed to help society work better.  “Articulating what I think I understand is my best way to test if I do understand.  That’s why I write,”  I told my friend.  “But it’s not helpful if I don’t tell anyone when I see something important that isn’t generally understood.  That’s why I publish what I write.”

Feb 7 2013

Why I Feel Like an Extraterrestrial

Maybe it’s because I don’t watch TV.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’m lying in the dentist chair.  The TV on the ceiling is tuned to CNBC.  The technician asks, “Would you like me to turn the TV off or shall I leave it on?”  I tell her it’s OK either way.  I think I don’t care and most of the time I am indifferent but every so often the moving images and voices attract my attention.  “Look,” says an intelligent looking young man, “if we eliminated the entire defense budget it still wouldn’t fix the deficit.”

The voices were being processed by my brain all the time.  Recognizing “defense budget”, something said, “heh, pay attention” and presented the entire sentence the man had spoken.  The interviewer thanked the young Congressman.  Nobody broke out howling with laughter.

We can’t know everything so maybe the Congressman didn’t know how much we spend on defense.  Maybe he didn’t know what he said was factually incorrect.  Perhaps he’s too busy to investigate what took me only a short time to learn (see this ) but can he really be a stranger to logic?

Let’s say it was true we would still have a deficit if we entirely eliminated defense spending.  Does that mean we have no choice but to continue defense spending at the same rate?  If those we elect can say such things and be treated as wise and suitable leaders, I must be an extraterrestrial.  Why isn’t anyone laughing?

The technician continues to chip away.  I try to relax, telling myself, “you’re over-reacting.  He probably knows what he said is nonsense and that many people like to hear such things.”  It doesn’t make me feel better but you can’t expect to feel all that great in a dentist chair, anyway.

The pattern recognizer alerts me again: “If we make enough laws, we can all be criminals”.  It remembers I was interested when I heard that before.  The speaker is another thoughtful looking man who also seems to be an elected representative.  He’s being asked about the President’s push for stronger gun control legislation.  He says new legislation will only make things worse.  Again, my hopes for a raucous laugh track are disappointed.

In the decade since 9/11 when 3,000 were killed, there were no additional terrorist killings on the USA mainland.  In that same ten years, 340,000 of us killed ourselves and others with firearms (40% homicides, 60% suicides).

We took action to avert more terrorist attacks.  We took too much of the wrong kind but we also took some that was both appropriate and effective.  Pretty much all of us are pleased by the results of the effective action.  Why, then, would it be impossible to take effective action to avert more firearm deaths?  Isn’t that why we elect representatives – so they will establish effective legislation?

Maybe I’ve forgotten my extraterrestrial childhood but I remember and never regretted choosing to become an American.  So what if I feel like an extraterrestrial when I watch TV or read things like this ?.  I’m committed to this society and I will keep doing everything I can to help it grow ever better.