GoodeStreet

With all the talk about supporting police, or condemning what police have done, thought I would add a perspective from someone who has had guns pointed at his head by police officers.

I'll start with a balancing statement: While growing up in my parents house in West Seattle, a cop was our next door neighbor. When Barb and I bought our first house, on a short dead end street also in West Seattle, our next door neighbor was a cop. When we bought our second house, that one in Ashland, our neighbor was a cop. A cousin married a cop. As did my niece.

That's five cops total, in case you lost track already, who were neighbors, friends and relatives.

I've been stopped for speeding eight times during my life. Five times the cops let me go with only a warning. Five. More often than I deserved. In every instance I had been clocked going more than 20 miles per hour over the speed limit. That's not even speeding when you are driving that fast. It's brazenly flaunting the law with a who-gives-a-shit, up-you-and-yours attitude.

Amazingly, the three cops who cited me also cut me some slack and wrote tickets for only 12 to 14 MPH over. All were very polite and professional as they did their duty. In fact they were so polite, I couldn't stop myself from reflexively saying "Thank you" each time they handed me a ticket. And each time I would gaze in the rear view mirror as the cop climbed back into his cruiser, thinking "Why the hell did I just thank a cop for giving me a ticket? Are you that dense a dumb fucker?"

I've been surrounded by police for much of my life. I know there are a ton of good cops around. I met them and their cop buddies in our homes, at parties, and in neighborhoods I blasted through at excessive speeds.

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As the facts change, I change.

Imperfectly. Therefore, repeat.

An equally important principle:

If the crowd is heading north, go south.

Because there is zero chance a crowd that large is correct.

While glancing through my facebook feed, I realized that virtually nobody expresses their political beliefs in their own words. Though I suppose many think that is what they are doing.

What one most often finds, though, is a brief introduction, such as "I support (or oppose) candidate or policy (whatever)." Then comes a link to what someone else wrote, or a link to an image that someone else created, which supports the declaration made in the introduction. In the most egregious examples of avoiding an expression of their own thoughts, the author proceeds to the cut and paste large sections lifted from a linked article.*

Really? I get it. To a degree. Few of us can write like Hemingway. So don't worry. Write in your own words and I'll muddle though the slop - because we're friends.

It is also well known people don't click on Facebook links. I get that, too. But what I don't get is why you would waste an opportunity to grab my attention by devoting so much effort to an article (or image) that anybody could find if they were interested. Isn't it better to write your own thoughts, rather than miming someone else's? After all, the only reason I see your posts on FB is because we are friends of some nature. So make your case in your own words to your friend sitting here. I'l pay attention because I know you and care about you. Then, because you have intrigued me enough that your thoughts are worth delving into further, feel free to add links that you feel I'll find informative and interesting.

What it comes down to is, I follow you because I want to hear what you have to say. Your snarled up phrases and lousy spelling and horrific grammar doesn't matter to me one whit. I find it all very charming. It reminds me of you, the person I hear and recognize deep in my bones, because I know that is what I would hear if I were standing with you while sharing a beer, or hanging out in a park. I would much rather hear you, than to divine what your political mime is trying to say. Show me your nuanced self, and I'll like and respect you even more.

* There's a fine line between fair use and plagiarism. While the chance of becoming embroiled in a lawsuit claiming plagiarism due to a FB post is exceedingly low, much of what I see being copied by a few people I follow would readily fall into plagiarism territory. 

Doc Searls and Dave Weinberger released an updated version to the sixteen year old Cluetrain Manifesto. They call it "New Clues" (Dave Winer's Listicle version is here).  Take a moment to read it. The article spells out in understandable, readable detail how and why your future is at stake.

My addition to their conversation is to encourage you to question the culture we are creating with our use of the world wide web. Click-bait words such as: amazing, best, incredible, horrible, and other emotion-laden terms is only a symptom, indicative of the disease but not the cause. Reducing complex ideas to a photo containing only a few words is also only a symptom of a disease.

While at a check out counter in a grocery store, I mentioned to the college kid beside me how the "rags" of 10 years ago, The National Enquirer and similar weeklies, were nearly gone. Their spot, where impulsive purchases are made and which reflect our cultural bias, have been replaced by People, Us, InTouch, Cosmopolitan and Esquire.

Sigh. The aliens are gone. Replaced by photoshopped renditions of people we aspire to be, but of whom most, near all, will never become.

I try to imagine what it was like 10 years ago to be an editor of the National Enquirer going through a grocery store check out. For years you made your bread with articles about the crazy and sometimes nasty things that aliens do on earth. Then you look at the headlines of People, only to see what asinine things celebrities are doing.

"We dream up the most outrageous stuff that an alien could ever be imagined doing, and some dumb ass twenty-something actor comes along and makes our alien look tame? How the hell are we supposed to compete with that?!?!"

How, indeed? How could an alien top what actors, reality "stars" and politicians do - and do without a moments thought, while still being believable? How can a professional writer top the stupid acts of professional celebrity, who arrive laden with fame but without responsibility? How can writers hope to compete with, as philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, ".. composers whose sole function is [to] persuade [us] that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and perhaps as entertaining as well. There are great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say."

The age of celebrity worship, and pursuit of similar fame even if only among a select group of our peers, conceals and deflects moral questions about mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperil wars, economic disparities, and political corruption. Our efforts to make life more interesting, varied, exciting, vivid and promising has in the long run, had the opposite effect.

Note: I've been going through posts I wrote but never published, for whatever reason I decided at the time. Usually, I wanted to fact check further, or edit a section that could be made more clear. Decided to scrub that idea, and just hit the publish button. Please consider this as off-the-cuff, unedited remarks.

On the evening of May 4, 2016, during a speech on the day that marks the extermination of 6 million Jews in Nazi Germany during WWII, Holocaust Memorial Day, the deputy head of the Israeli military, Major General Yair Golan, told an audience including a government minister and survivors of the Holocaust:

“The Holocaust must lead us to think about our public lives, and even more than that, it must guide anyone who has the ability, not only those who wish to bear public responsibility.

Because if there is anything that frightens me in the remembrance of the Holocaust, it is discerning nauseating trends that took place in Europe in general, and in Germany specifically back then, 70, 80 and 90 years ago, and seeing evidence of them here among us in the year 2016. 

After all, there is nothing simpler and easier than hating the foreigner, there is nothing easier and simpler than arousing fears and intimidating, there is nothing easier and simpler than becoming bestial, forgoing principles, and becoming smug.”

A brief time after his speech, Major General Golan found himself at the center of a firestorm of criticism for his words - particularly from within Isreal.

In response, Golan felt compelled to reply to the criticism: “On Holocaust remembrance day, it is worthwhile to ponder our capacity to uproot the first signs of intolerance, violence, and self-destruction that arise on the path to moral degradation.

The IDF should be proud that throughout its history it has had the ability to investigate severe incidents without hesitation. It should be proud that it has probed problematic behaviour with courage and that it has taken responsibility not just for the good, but also for the bad and the inappropriate.

We didn’t try to justify ourselves, we didn’t cover anything up, we didn’t whitewash, we didn’t make excuses, and we didn’t equivocate. Our path was – and will be – one of truth and shouldering responsibility, even if the truth is difficult and the burden of responsibility is a heavy one.”

This is what morality and responsibility sound like.

Between 1888 and 1964 the US was involved in the Spanish-American, WW I, WW II, Korea and Vietnam wars. Our country morphed from an agrarian to an industrialized society. Corporations changed from being primarily small, local enterprises to behemoths employing thousands. Labor unions exerted their force across the country. The cold war against the Soviet Union took center stage, as briefly did the American Communist Party. Radio, telephones, television, interstate highways and jetliners made communication and travel easy. Oh, and we can't forget that our nation suffered through a Great Depression, too.

If you wanted to write a script leading to political gridlock and partisanship, you would be hard pressed to find a better recipe than to dream up those events. What this country experienced in the years since 1964 seems tame by comparison. Our flash points have been largely self-created, rather than being the result of profound, systemic change.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

There were forty-six Supreme Court appointees during the 76 years between 1888 and 1964. Forty five were approved by the Senate. That's 45 to 1. Only two percent of presidential appointees were turned down. During one of the most tumultuous periods this country has experienced.

For the years between 1965 and 2010, there were twenty-four supreme court appointees to the Supreme Court. Seventeen were approved. Seven, a forty-one thirty percent ratio, were rejected by the Senate. Why the sudden change in approval rate during a period of our history that is comparatively calm? Something to ponder during the coming months as the next Supreme Court appointment will be revealed.

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. … But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. ~Thomas Jefferson

I get the feeling I could spend a week interviewing Henry Hughes and still come away thinking I had left scads on the table yet to discuss. Mr. Hughes is a combat veteran who made a movie about his war experience. From an interesting and surprising perspective. Read this article to find out more. It will be worth your time. I know that I'm going to watch his Academy Award nominated movie - simply because the guy is so thought provoking.

The movie focuses on the female American-Muslim who was an interpreter for his combat unit. Here's a couple short quotes from his interview about the movie. Please don't grab either snippet below and blast ahead with them to bolster a particular view that you believe the short passages imply. Remember, all is not what it seems. Just my way of saying, read the entire article for the context in which they present themselves.

"Sitting here armchair quarterbacking it, I want to say that we should only be willing to go wars wherein we don’t care if one individual makes it back."

And then there is this beaut (emphasis is mine):

"I mean I totally think that in terms of courage, it takes a lot more courage to be her as a Muslim American woman surrounded by a bunch of infantrymen in Afghanistan than it is to storm up some sort of hill in combat. That’s sort of, intestinal fortitude.

You have to be from such a harsh starting point that she’s from to be able to find your own integrity and your own moral compass against … I was awarded so many times along the way with little Ranger tabs and Airborne wings and atta-boys.

She had none of that shit, man. She had to figure it out on her own what she thought was right. That’s courageous. Growing up your entire life thinking you’re going to be a soldier and risk your life, that’s not courageous, that’s just fulfilling what you were supposed to do, on some level. It takes a little bit of courage, don’t get me wrong, but nothing compared to finding your own way in the world and succeeding at it, with basically no one telling you what right is or that you’re doing a good job. In fact, most people are telling you that you’re an infidel and a traitor and females can’t do this. The best part about it is she was never in your face about it or aggressive, although I’m sure she felt cornered for a large part of her life. She didn’t wear that on her sleeve at all, and that is insane to walk through life like that so elegantly. That’s one thing I find a little bit distasteful about a lot of the war picture stuff. It’s easy to aggrandize and glorify combat. It’s trying to find the real things that are tough in life and I think this is one of them."

Provocative. And I hope it sparks your interest in reading the article.

Rather than searching through my photo library, thought I would post a few pics of my designs here so they can be found easier. I like building custom stuff on the cheap. So I hope these photos will spark your imagination of what you can do, too.

First up, our guest room with a narrow, custom-built bookcase:

The guest bathroom. There used to be a shower/tub where the window is now. The room was widened by a little less than three feet. Barb made the stained glass window.

The kitchen area, which used to be a separate kitchen and dining room. Combining the two into one made room for more seating.

The living room. The bamboo ceiling is mostly wall paper.

Our home office. You can also see the door decore and the hallway. Every room in the house has a different color. Which would be really weird unless the hallway, which snakes throughout the house, and most doors, are painted one color - easing transitions while going from room to room.

I came from the generation of kids who watched the moon landing with awe. Reading news that the European Space Agency landed a probe on a comet, after chasing the comet across the solar system for a decade, blows my mind.

But what happens a next?

I’m imagining an alien, whose sensors on a mother ship detect that some kind of a machine is resting on a nearby comet. A crew is sent to investigate.

Recently read an article about a new site called Collectively. The stated purpose of the site is "to inspire and accelerate the shift toward a more sustainable way of life."

Nice ideal ya' got there. What'cha gonna do with it?

To accomplish their goal the site solicited sponsors. Or, perhaps it came about the other way around? Collectively is a site backed by corporate sponsors, edited by an ad agency, in hope of making the world a more environmentally friendly place.

What could possibly go wrong?

Years ago this stuff was called white-washing. Then, PR. Then it was called sponsored content. Most recently it has been called native advertising.

It is still the same old shit, no matter what you call it. I call it barf.

Too bad they didn't look to Patagonia as example. Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia founder, baked environmentalism into his products and processes from the beginning, and continues to make constant, incremental change. He even turned his product company into a subsidiary of a "$20 Million & Change" holding company devoted the saving the environment. Yvon has spent a lifetime proving that actions speak louder than words.

I hope the companies sponsoring Collectively figure out what Yvon and Patagonia understand well, but doubt they will.