What I've Learned So Far

In the comments section of my earlier post on making those around you better, KCB wrote:

My kids’ bedtime reading this evening was about Gandhi. My 8-year-old, who is all about tae kwon do, fighting robots and explosions, was astounded to learn that someone could stand against an oppressor without resorting to violence. Helping the people around you — in a positive way — is definitely being the change you want to see. And yes, we need more of it.

This is exactly what I’m getting at, and indeed KCB’s example is inspiring to me. My kids are nine and six, and my son, like KCB’s, is heavily into robots, superheroes, ninjas, and so on. His little friends – all of whom have perfectly nice, liberal parents, best I can tell, share these blow-’em-up, shoot-’em-up interests. For that matter, so did I at the same age.

But I can do better.  I try to balance my son’s focus on robot battles with books about nature, and we talk a lot about doing the right things to and for those around us.  And I think we’re doing something right:  A couple of weeks ago in the car, the old Johnny Cash song “Letter Edged in Black” came on the radio, and we all sat quietly while it played.  At the end of it, the boy asked if the story in the song was true.  I said I thought it might have been made up, but it was like something that could happen.  “That was a sad story,” he said. “I got a little bit of tears when I heard that.”

Here’s hoping we can help this lad, who’s exposed to far too much violence by our entertainment culture, to keep that kind of sensibility.  Ah, but it takes more than hope: it takes the Gandhian commitment to being the change you want to see in the world.

Worth your time, if you like baseball:

–Ben McGrath’s New Yorker piece on the most accomplished right-handed hitter of this generation. Manny comes across as a flake, but he pays attention to hitting at a level few humans pay attention to anything. Thing is, he only pays attention to the act of hitting itself, not even all the events that surround it:

“[Manny] said, ‘I don’t keep track of the balls.’ He said, ‘I don’t keep track of the strikes, either, until I got two.’ Then he said, ‘Duke, I’m up there looking for a pitch I can hit. If I don’t get it, I wait for the umpire to tell me to go to first. Isn’t that what you’re paying me to do?’ “

–Seth Mnookin’s blog, which focuses primarily on the Red Sox.

–Curt Schilling’s blog, which focuses really tightly on the Red Sox, plus whatever else is on Schilling’s mind. Schilling writes just like he talks — smart, direct, and at whatever length he likes for getting his point across.

–Joe Posnanski’s blog. Posnanski may be the best baseball beat writer working. Long may he blog!

This question came to my mind today as I was trying to get over a stupid incident (not an accident) in traffic yesterday. The details don’t matter, but another driver did something ill-advised in a technical sense, and then followed it up with a nasty attitude that was far from justified. I think I’m just about over it now (30 hours and counting since it happened . . .), but it certainly skewed my outlook through the early part of yesterday.

So this driver — someone I don’t even know — made me a worse person and a worse performer yesterday. It happens often enough with those we know, too. There are the friends who bring us down, or who enlist us to share their negative views of life/the world/work/whatever. But we can choose not to engage with these folks, and choose not to carry their burdens, at least as soon as we recognize those burdens for what they are.

But why not go one step better? One of the highest forms of praise for the best team athletes — especially those whose contributions might not show up in the stat sheet — is that they make their teammates better. This is what leaders do. This is what saints do. This is what the best teachers and parents and doctors do. They spread goodness as they pass through life.

So, what have you done lately — I’m thinking of the past few hours, myself — to make the people around you better? Are you enabling and eliciting the best in them? If not, could you start? Like, right now, maybe? Given my experience in the car yesterday, it’s clear to me that we need more goodness-spreaders in the world.

My buddy Jay Koenig has started a blog. In the past couple of days he’s made two posts about the rush to judgment he sees from gun control advocates reacting to the Virginia Tech killing spree. Jay and I have our disagreements in some areas of politics and policy, but he’s a smart guy, and his opinions are well worth considering.

To my mind, the most important thing to come out of what Jay says is that the facts surrounding the V.T. shootings don’t support gun control arguments very well. For good reasons, the murders have evoked a huge emotional outpouring, but as Jay rightly points out, a wave of emotion shouldn’t be the thing that decides policy for us.

I recall a radio program I once heard (it might have been This American Life) about gun control. The story told in favor of gun control talked about a policeman who had been shot horribly, nearly to death, even though he was armed and sitting in his squad car at the time. The shooter got the jump on him, started firing, and debilitated the officer before he could defend himself. The policeman had become an advocate for gun control.

The other side of the debate was represented by a woman who was one of the patrons of the cafeteria in Kerrville — just up the road from me in Austin — that was attacked by a psychopath in the 1990s. The killer drove through the front wall of the restaurant, got out, and started killing diners methodically. The woman watched from across the dining room, where she was hunkered down under her table. Her inability to do anything in the situation galled her especially because (a) she was trained in firearms, and (b) she had a handgun . . . in the glove compartment of her car, since she didn’t want to break the law by bringing it with her into the restaurant. (Texas had not yet passed its concealed-carry law.) If she had had her gun, she could have killed the murderer from across the room, saving many lives in the process. (She’s the sort of person Jay wishes had intercepted the Virginia Tech killer.)

The point is this: the policeman’s individual experience isn’t a good enough reason for us to change our gun control laws. I mean, it’s surely a good enough reason for him to get involved in gun control, but it’s inadequate as a basis for public policy. But on the other side of the coin, the experience of the would-be hero from the cafeteria is also inadequate, in and of itself. They are just anecdotes that fit into much larger patterns.  Different gun control laws would not have changed the situation at Virginia Tech, any more than they would have at Columbine.

The larger issues that should be drawn from the Virginia Tech murders have to do with campus security. I have intentionally avoided reading too much on the massacre, since I can’t see how it would benefit me — or how I could help the situation — by bringing more details of it into my life. But out of the reports I’ve heard, the thing that alarms me most is that the shootings took place in two clusters, in two separate buildings, over some little span of time. I predict that the lack of awareness or lack of capacity that hamstrung the V.T. authorities from preventing the second wave of attacks will be the element of this event that comes under the most fruitful scrutiny as time goes on.

We do need an enlightened national discussion on the right level of gun control. But I agree with Jay that it won’t arise from the emotions unleashed by the killings at Virginia Tech.

A friend of mine was talking with me about a taxing but enjoyable project that soaked up every bit of his time this past weekend.  He used a turn of phrase that is now lodged in my brain:  he said he had used his time “thoroughly”.

Me, I’m all to guilty of barely using my time, even though every minute is one more tiny piece of life gone down the one-way drain.  Far better to use time thoroughly, since you only get one chance at it.

A friend sent me this article/gleeful screed that Bill Maher wrote for Salon. (I mean “gleeful screed” in a good way.)

Say it loud: I’m elite and proud!

Not all of Maher’s humor works for me, and I think he slags evangelicals as a group more than they deserve, but his point here is sound: American citizens have a fair claim to expect good performance from their public officials. Sure, there must be plenty of incompetents in the Federal government — but there are plenty in every large organization, including high-performing corporations, so why would that surprise us? But the top officials in every area of the government ought to be folks with some serious chops. Without having done a full-bore study of it, it does seem that the current administration has tended to staff positions looking more for political loyalty or ideological purity than for outright competence. (Whether this makes it like or unlike previous administrations I leave as an exercise for the reader.)
I wish Maher had spent more time in his piece stressing the “elite” aspect, because I think he’s getting at an important theme in this era’s political discourse. Although the U.S. is in theory a meritocracy, where the most capable and hardest working people tend to rise, that cherished notion runs aground of the pervasive anti-intellectualism that castigates the members of the “nerd patrol” for being too smart — too smart for their own good, too smart for the nation’s good.

Mind you, smarts guarantee nothing. Paul Wolfowitz is really, really smart, but I think his overarching view of implanting democracy in the Middle East is deeply flawed because it fails to account for some (many) of the realities on the ground there. This doesn’t make him dumb, it just means his view is wrong in this case. (It’s a pretty important case to be wrong about, but let’s set that aside for now.) In general, though, I would rather have smart folks with common sense — Bob Zoellick, anyone? — staffing the high positions of government, rather than ideologues without the skillz.

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A little while back I wrote an entry called “A Commitment to Good Order”. In the weeks since then, I’ve done better — a little better, anyway — about working through some of the areas of my life where disorder drags me down.

Just about everybody I talk to wrestles with this: How do we cut through the noise in our days to achieve something meaningful?

I’ve talked before about building an empire in 10-minute increments, if that’s all you can manage. Given my fractured attention span, 10 minutes itself is sometimes a challenge. But I’m getting there, primarily with a commitment to making today better than yesterday in terms of how I organize my time and thereby focus my energy. My next 10-minute task as soon as I finish writing this: Jotting down a list of 10-minute (or shorter) tasks for the rest of the day.

This morning as I was driving to work, it occurred to me that the acronym for “a commitment to good order” is “ACTGO”. “Act” and “go” are verbs I can use more of in my life.

Expect more updates on the ACTGO front.

“There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement, for an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything, we are fixed, so to speak, for life. Moreover, when we have an alibi for not writing a book and not painting a picture and so on, we have an alibi for not writing the greatest book and not painting the greatest picture. Small wonder that the effort expended and the punishment endured in obtaining a good alibi often exceed the effort and grief requisite for the attainment of a most marked achievement.”

—Eric Hoffer

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At least in this PopMatters interview, he does.

(A confession:  I read Johnson’s blog, but I haven’t read any of his books.)

Thanks to Austin Kleon, I’ve been put on to the great work of Olivier Kugler. See his visual travelogue of a long trip from Scotland to Cuba here:

Kugler’s world

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