Category: Reflections

Call it the “Rites of Adolescence,” but every month millions of high school students will sweat through the ACT or SAT tests in hopes of earning scores that will get them in to the college of their choice.

I happen to think there’s a better way than assessing scores to determine “the worthy,” and fortunately the gig may soon be up for such tests anyway as more colleges are dropping the requirement or making it optional.

As is, the traditional way of ranking students on the basis of test results is fraught with cultural bias, even though testing originally had potential for leveling the playing field. Now all you had to do was prove your smarts, and no matter your ethnicity, gender, locale, or social-economics, you were guaranteed a place at the table. No more governing factors such as money and class. Whatever the nobility of the seminal motive, the system now in place hardly assures equity.

Consider that test results are sensitive to coaching and those who can afford it resort to this approach. Some take the test multiple times, trusting schools will consider their highest score only.

There’s also the risk of cheating as in this year’s Long Island scandal.

Additionally, some institutions wanting their way into U.S. News and World Report‘s annual rankings manipulate the data to their advantage, the most notorious example occurring at Claremont McKenna College in 2007, leading to the resignations of several administrators.

Those who defend testing contend it has value in assessing how well students will perform in their first year of college. I would counter that the new research indicates students outside the testing paradigm do fairly well so long as their grades were good in high school. After all, motivation plays a big part in succeeding as a college student, given the rigor of many college courses, and good grades throughout high school are strong markers of that needed discipline.

Advocates would also claim the tests indicate mastery of writing, reading, and reasoning, skills needed in college.

If the latter is true, you might think that SATs and the like are essentially IQ tests and you wouldn’t be wrong, since researchers have found a strong correlation. I think of IQ tests as setting up a kind of caste system, again with the more affluent at the top, reflecting greater access to good schools and high culture. It reminds me of playing Trivial Pursuit. If you win, does it mean you’re smarter than your fellow game players? On the contrary, it merely shows you may be more informed through greater exposure.

I have always thought we would do better by evaluating aptitude. We’re all different, and we all know people who are book smart, but rather clumsy at anything else. On the other hand, I’ve known everyday people with little education beyond high school whom I’ve relied upon to solve the daily complexities that often render me helpless. I don’t know about you, but I’m all thumbs when it comes to mechanics, carpentry, and things electrical. I have two graduate degrees, but I’m really horrendously bankrupt in so many areas. I may second guess my doctor, but never when it comes to my plumber!

In closing, consider the wise counsel of former Towson University president James L. Fisher:

“For more than 50-years, replicable research has indicated there is a better predictor than any combination of all the present predictors (class rank, GPA, and standardized test). The best predictor is an easily computer academic composite score derived from subjects taken in secondary schools and English, mathematics, grades received, certain science courses, foreign language and advanced placement courses with weights assigned based on grades received)”(www.tcp/news/).

Sorry Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Mark Twain, Henry Ford that you didn’t get-in. Have you thought about joining the Army?

What comes to your mind when you think of rain?  I started thinking about this the other day after taking-in a round of pop music on my iPad.  While love pervades as a music theme, the rain motif isn’t any slacker.  I think of songs like

“I’m Singing in the Rain”

“Rain Rain Beautiful Rain”

“Rain”

“Broken Umbrella”

“The Gentle Rain”

“What Have They Done to the Rain?”

“Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head”

“September in the Rain”

“Because of Rain”

“It never rains in California”

In brief, there are scores of songs featuring rain, often not apparent in song titles. So what gives?

To be sure, many of us find rain depressing.  I knew a woman years ago who lived a year in Tacoma, and found she couldn’t bear it.  Rain as a downturner is common even in some of our frequent idioms:  “I don’t mean to rain on your parade.”  Psychology confirms that rain can be a depressant and often employs a passed-around acronym, RAIN, to mark off the steps in overcoming the blues.

But that isn’t the way rain usually works for me.  Sure, I rail against it when it spoils picnic plans, etc., or when there’s too much, too long.  On the other hand, I often find rain an elixir in slowing my pace, a catalyst to deeper thought bringing me into better contact with myself and spilling over into reassessed, more appreciative relationships with loved ones.  In this sense, I think of rain as a sweetener, or sugar, that can actually enhance life’s daily brew. Rain gives me time-out.

I suppose the latent psychology of this is why our movies so often foreground interims of reassessment as in The Bridges of Madison County.

It’s like this in serious literature, too, where rain often assumes the role of archetype, or innate symbolization in humanity, regardless of culture.  While rain can connote death as fate in Heminway’s A Farewell to Arms, a novel that both begins ands with rain, it more often intuits regeneration as in the ancient myths.  Rain offers hope, if there is any, in Eliot’s The Wasteland, and the poem’s thunder towards its end augurs salvation.

I can’t speak for you, but I love going to sleep at night to the soft snare drum of raindrops on the roof.  And when I can’t have it that way, I’ll resort to my iPad Nature application with its bubbling brooks, ocean surf and, my favorite–the pitter-patter of falling rain. Who needs Ambien?

Insatient Romantic that I am, I’ll often fall into these moods with the first gentle Spring rains of April, and just wish I could stay outside all day in it.

And when I’m actually caught in such a shower, I’m transposed into Gene Kelly, replete with unfurled umbrella, and I’m singing, yes, I’m singing in the rain!

rj

The voices of authority in many guises, abundant and strident, relentlessly prey upon us.  To be fair, they aren’t always sinister voices, as they sometimes serve as the glue holding a society together, establishing the ground rules by which we all get our turn or fair share.   Often they transmit the legacy of  experience, minimizing the social anarchy that results when people play by their own rules.

But frequently these voices, of tradition or culture, inhibit us from finding our best selves when they assume tyrannical shape, demonizing new ways of thinking and doing, frequently to protect a vested interest.  Often they cloak themselves in religion and demonizing politics.  We don’t hang witches anymore, but we do have Jihad abroad and demogogues at home, who would deprive women of choice and the undocumented from participation in the nation’s agenda.  Culture turns deadly when it becomes ideology, resorting to reductionism, fear and bullying.

On the other hand, healthy societies are always dynamic, open to change, adaptive to new exigencies.  As such, they exhibit similarity to the evolutionary laws that assure biological survival.  Take our bodies, for example, that slough off the old and degenerative: a new skin every month; every six weeks, a new liver; every three months, new bones (David  Agus, The End of Illness, p. 106).   Healthy societies are like that, casting of the ineffectual and regenerating themselves.

Dynamic societies know when it’s time to change their wardrobe.  In this regard, the advanced industrial nations have taken-on some remarkable transitions that, in many instances, transcend those achieved through technological savvy in contributing to well-being.  It’s one thing to have airplanes, cars, television and, now computers.  It’s quite another to abolish slavery, emancipate women, enfranchise minorities, including gays, and promote human dignity.

Material progress never guarantees the latter, anyway.  Take Saudi Arabia, for example, where a woman can’t drive, unless accompanied by a family male.

When I think about it, I sometimes find it hard to believe that American women just got the right to vote less than a hundred years ago.  Swiss women gained that right only a few years ago.

Presently the emancipation of gays is underway and in future years I’m betting our children will look askance at our malice based on custom’s insatiate dislike of divergence.

There remains much to do, both at home and abroad.  Several challenges come to mind, and I think you can add others::

1. Electing a woman president of the USA.

2.   Abolishing capital punishment.

3.   Equitable taxation

4.   Death with dignity legislation

5.   Immigration reform

6.   Population growth

7.   Resources management

8.   Animal emancipation

9.   Child abuse

10. Single payer healthcare

You may not like some of my priorities.  I’m okay with that, so long as it isn’t custom driving your censure.  Perhaps the insidious threat custom imposes is that it drops upon us like the weather and,  seemingly everywhere and always, it is what it is.  We get used to it, accepting the pattern as the norm.

Unlike the weather, we can do something about culture gone wrong.  It takes vigilance and means asking questions.  Why this and not that?  As Michael Pollan astutely observes, “Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it’s still exerting its hold on your culture” (In Defense of Food, p. 51).

Because societies can and do evolve, more so in a world of diminishing boundaries,  initial conflict is likely to ensue as universals find themselves confronted  by newly introduced alternatives.   Paradoxically, in this dissonance lie the seeds of healing, as history confirms such exchanges enrich rather than diminish.

In this new world, or global village, we might even “shake hands” as Pete Seeger sings it, and “study war no more.”

Imagine!

Be well,

rj

Today is Veterans Day.  It’s a quiet Sunday morning as I write, but quieter still for those who’ve given their lives in supreme sacrifice to their country.  Not so for the many maimed physically and psychologically by war who must live daily with its ravages.

I think more recently of Iraq and Afghanistan, those strange sounding names of  places so far away most of us scarcely knew they existed, save a chance photo spread in National Geographic while waiting in a doctor’s office.  Places now as familiar as weekday names.

Something intrudes, one of those ghosts that inevitably haunt heavy thinking.  It takes shape in a poem I’ve read and taught for so many years to young adults on a college campus:  Robert Lowell’s poignant “For the Union Dead,” reminiscing the decline in enthusiasm for any cause,  military, political  or otherwise:

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston
a girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse…

The stone statues of the abstract Union soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year__
wasp-wasted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns. . .

There are no statues for the last war here:
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe,  the”Rock of Ages”
that survived the blast.
. . .
Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward  ;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

A decade ago I visited our war dead at Colleville-Sur-Mer, where the elevated resting place of our Normandy heroes overlooks that once bloodied Omaha Beach.  Ten thousand, row upon row, their graves facing Westward to their homeland, their life threads severed early.  They would not see America again or wed or become parents or enjoy the rarity of a warm November day.  Mortality is our collective lot, but for these, the shades were drawn early.

12 p.m, and the malls have just opened.   Veterans Day, like Memorial Day, now serves as commercial fodder, or like the Mosler Safe in a culture that’s found new servitude in the material quest.

Nixon ended the draft back in 1971. So now it’s become easier to forget those who defend, bleed and die for us.  I was a young fellow, a former veteran, during the Vietnam era of national division over a far-off war, spilling over into public defiance and, sometimes, violence at home.  Vietnam was a very long war. Until Afghanistan. Where are today’s protestors? How much easier to rent surrogates.

It’s a beautiful fall day, an  Indian Summer day, the autumn maples ripe in their red dress. The malls will do well.

rj

In recent weeks I’ve become a huge fan of Twitter.  In, fact, it’s now a daily staple, or something like that fast pick-up you get with that morning coffee. Forgive me, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but let me count the ways I dig Twitter:

1. It connects me to a whole lot bigger world to rattle my culture and routine beliefs against.  If I can shed defensiveness, Twitter helps me grow aware and thus become more tolerant.
2. I like that a lot gets said in very few words.  A few sips gives you the flavor.
3. I relish following people and trends I find interesting.
4. It flatters my shameless ego every time someone follows me. I  understand now why my Bichon likes being petted.  Hey, you can pet me anytime!
5. It grows my interests as I come upon how many there really are out there.
6. It feeds my fly-on-the-wall instinct to spy on newsmakers, starlets, celebrities and sports icons.  Secretly, I hope they’ll tweet me back!
7. It saves me on subscription costs as I get free admission to the big mags and splendid articles.
8. I like how it puts you in real time as things happen and people get impacted; take Syria for example and its freedom fighters or at home, recent Sandy.
9. I admire its uncensored access.  Here you’ll find the good, bad, and ugly: the saints and anarchists; tolerant and militant; the sane and, yes, the crazies.  It’s like waking up in San Francisco.
10. It helps my blog.  I can see what interests and find outlet for my own.

Twitter,  I can’t really number all the ways I’m fond of you, but suffice it to say,  Je t’aime!

Do well.  Be well!

rj

I always enjoy tuning into Fareed Zakaria’s GPS. Zakaria, who also writes for the Washington Post and Time, strikes me as a man largely free of assumptions, or political bias. Last week, for example, he provided helpful explanation of Mitt Romney’s all over the map positions, motivating Republicans, whether liberal or conservative, to be wary. Romney’s shifts lie behind retired general and former Bush secretary of state Colin Powell’s endorsement on Thursday of Obama for reelection.

Zakaria offers that Romney’s protean shifts are due to Tea Party elements within the Republican Party. It’s stratagem entirely, though one could argue this reenforces the widely-held notion Romney’s deceitful. According to Zakaria, Romney’s surge in the polls is due to his moving over to more moderate positions on key issues. In short, this is the real Romney who can now return to the middle that characterized his tenure as Massachusetts’s governor. After all, Obamacare is modeled after Romney’s historic health insurance legislation in Massachusetts. While it doesn’t get Romney off the hook, it’s analysis like this that can provide another purview.

I also enjoy the broad spectrum of GPS‘ panel feature with its participants drawn from neo-con to far left. Again, cool-headed analysis to extract the factual and reasonable governs Zakaria’s show.

One of my favorite, can’t wait show elements comes at very end when Zakaris gives his weekly book recommendation. I’ve actually taken him up on several of his recommended reads such as Charles Murphy’s Coming Apart: the State of White America, 1960-2010, a book by the way that supports Romney’s off-the-cuff notion of the 47% who pay no taxes and not necessarily from need. I intend to pursue this week’s recommendation of Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail–but Some Don’t.

For me, Zakaria provides a refreshing change from the pervasive mortar shelling of the current political scene, whether at MSNBC or Fox News, or among the partisans of the print media and social networks at large. After all, I like finding the truth for myself as best we humans can get at it to someone’s imposing her notion of the truth on me.

You can dismiss me as quixotic, but I find the probing almost as much fun as the finding.

Thank you, Fareed!

Be well,

rj

Twitter today did the unprecedented. It shut down a neo-Nazi site, @hannoverticker, though only in Germany at the request of the German government. Earlier in the year Twitter announced it would close down sites in conflict with local law while leaving them open internationally. I wonder if this policy is really nothing more than appeasement of religious conservatives in Islamic counties such as Iran or Pakistan. Whatever, today they exercised that option for the first time. We”ll have to see where this thing ultimately goes. Despotic governments will probably become even more adamant in demanding the same be done for them when they find their power threatened.

Think about it: Twitter has proven a catalyst for change in such countries, a jungle drums scenario that dispenses what ideologues would snuff out, the yearning of the oppressed to undo their shackles. It’s inconceivable to think of an Arab spring without the social media’s advocacy; the phenomenon of the Occupy Wall Street Movement that spread to other countries; the daily revelations of otherwise sequestered Syrian government atrocities against its own people.

Twitter, what you’ve done is a grievous wrong. I can’t really speak for your motives, but the end doesn’t justify the means.

In Turkey, world-renowned pianist Faxil Say’s trial has begun. He’s been arrested for alleged defamation of the prophet Mohammed. Ironically, the charges stem from several of his tweets. “I am not sure if you realize it, but if there is a louse, a non-entity, a lowlife, a thief or fool, it’s always an Islamist.” So much for Turkey’s aspirations to join the European Union. Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, must be turning over in his grave.

In our own land, the threat to harness our right to free speech remains under continuous attack in the current reign of political correctness and the narrow confines of political and religious ideologues bent on imposing their own views, not through better arguments, but by shutting now those who oppose them. This afternoon, In Ocala, Florida, as Republican veep nominee Paul Ryan gave a campaign speech, malingers gathered nearby, bent on disrupting the rally.

Back to Twitter. Why not protect the speech rights of tweeters like prominent African-American actress, Stacey Dash (“Clueless”), who recently urged her 200,000 followers to vote for Romney. Almost immediately, scores of threats on her life. Hey, Twitter, these are the people you need to use your broom on.

Censorship has its place against those who sanction violence, or like those just mentioned. Otherwise, as I’ve said, fight a bad idea with a better one.

John Stuart Mill was spot on when in he wrote in On Liberty, that “if all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

I suspect the roots of Twitter’s action is money. Nicholas Kulish, writing in the New York Times, takes us back to last summer’s Olympics when Twitter blocked the account of a British journalist who heavily criticized NBC’s reporting of the Games. (NBC is one of Twitter’s corporate sponsors.) Twitter later apologized and reinstated the account.

Twitter may have opened up a Pandora’s box for itself. So far, six governments have made requests for site closures.

Be well,

rj

Take a moment, in a quiet spot, and close your eyes. Visualize a scene from the past that gave you a sense of peace or relief from daily anxiety. For me, it’s hiking the trail up lofty Ben Nevis in Scotland with my wife several years ago. I can still see the narrow trail’s steep ascent, slate gray limestone fences dividing a retreating green tapestry below, snow-flaked with sheep; hear a babbling brook; feel the day’s exhilarating coolness. I find again the shepherd psalmist’s quiet waters and renewal.

Such moments are rarer now for many of us, given the frenetic pace of modern life with its myriad stresses. The poet Auden knew this when he famously dubbed our era “the age of anxiety.” We pop our pills, vegetate before our TVs, seeking relief from deadlines to meet or places to go.

It isn’t really cancer, heart disease or the like that are killing us. It’s stress, and much of our morbidity is its result. We eat more, worry more, hurry more. Twenty percent of us suffer from acute anxiety disorder requiring professional intervention, while our media proclaims daily the social violence of those who “just can’t take it anymore.”

Here are some suggestions that have helped me and may help you ease up and enjoy your life more fully, ways of coping that may even help you live longer:

1. Change your reactions: A lot of our stress derives not from what happens, but how we respond. We can choose to adapt like that Robert Frost birch bending with the wind, rather than arching its boughs, or remain brittle like a Bradford pear, its limbs severed by the storm. Substitute a positive alternative for a negative one. What we think fosters our emotions, and emotions often generate our distress. Instead of dwelling on how awful the economy is, think of how it’s likely to ultimately get better. It’s not “that sob, he cut me off”! Instead, drivers can be rude, but most aren’t. It’s not, “What’s going to happen?, but “Let’s take it just one day at a time.

2. Get a hobby: Like birds, learn to identify them. Fond of the outdoors, join a hiking group. Enjoy games? Try contact bridge. Cooking? Attempt new recipes. Want something new? How about learning another language?

3. Take-up meditation: Clearing the mind’s clutter goes back several thousand years.
It endures because it works. Don’t know how? Check your local resources. They’re abundant now. Stress reduces the brain’s white matter (the wired area of the consisting largely of nerve fibers). The good news is that according to a published report in the Proceedings of the National Academy, just 30 minutes of meditation over a two week period showed measurable changes in the white matter, indicating that meditation facilitates healthy brain function.

4. Try biofeedback: Many find the device Resperate useful for teaching them precise breath control that produces a relaxation effect. Dividend, it reduces blood pressure. Resperate gets a thumbs up from a number of leading medical resources, including Mayo Clinic.

5. Say no! You’ve only so much time in a day. Take time for yourself. Give yourself a special treat each week. Go for that dessert! See that movie! If you can, set one day aside for yourself.

6. Read! This means shutting off that TV. Television, mostly a mind-numbing activity, doesn’t generally relieve our stress. It may even add to it. Reading expands the mind and relaxes at the same time. At bedtime, it can help you get a good night’s sleep.

7. Blog! I can speak first hand about what it does for me. When I’m writing, it seems I’ve hurled my anxieties into the deepest sea. Writing not only opens a window on the world, it brings me into touch with myself, clarifies and cleanses, while providing perspective.

8. Drink green tea:. It works because of its i-theanine content, which you can also find in pill supplements at your local health stores or at Whole Foods. Drink it several times daily, especially when you feel uptight. Taking about 30-minutes to kick-in, it’s super just before bedtime and will help you sleep like a rock.

8. Exercise: Nothing really new about this life essential, along with good nutrition, for promoting health. But exercise also relieves stress. The trick is to schedule it into your day. The preferred form should be aerobic, and the cardinal rule remains 5-days a week, 30 minutes minimal.

9. Tablets: I ‘m not thinking pills here, but of those popular devices such as the iPad. I’ve become fond of the mind-stretching game apps in particular like Sudoku. Talk about time out, diversion comes easily with a tablet. It doesn’t have to be confined to games. Tablets provide apps for virtually any interest. How far away troubles seem when you find a riveting app.

10. Turn on the music! Shakespeare rightly said, “Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.” Obviously, it works, or it wouldn’t be so popular. To promote relaxation, however, stay away from the frenzied kind. I like classical Indian music for this purpose. You might also find Enya very soothing. She works for me. Sometimes I just go for the sounds of nature: waves washing up on the shore, a murmuring brook, birds in early morning revelry, the soft pitter-patter of falling rain, etc.

Yes, you can get that monkey, stress, off your back, and in doing so, wake with joy each morning, eager to seize the day.

Be well,

rj