The Cold Slap of Reality

Three days after the 2012 presidential election, and every news source has a campaign coroner performing an autopsy on the Romney loss.  They are scrutinizing minutia looking for the clues, the missed signs that should have been seen before ballots were cast.  Stories are published front and center that the Republican camp is shocked, stunned, even in denial that Barack Obama was re-elected with enough electoral daylight to dismiss any thought of recount as the folly of desperation.

But there's something different this time.  There isn't the usual conciliatory platitudes.  There is no, "Oh, well.  We lost, better luck next time," acceptance of the outcome.  No, Republicans are openly confused and completely unable to comprehend how they lost after being assured by their trusted sources that the election process was nothing more than a formality that guaranteed them the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  The candidate himself even admits he was so confident he didn't even write a concession speech, and it showed by his 10 minutes of exhausted midnight mumbling.

Was this arrogance?  Were these "trusted sources" looking at the wrong data?  Did the GOP feel so entitled to the presidency they fooled themselves into believing false truths?  Were there obvious signs that went ignored?  All of the above, and more.

For years, conservatives have closed ranks, circling their political wagons against the onslaught of a reality they didn't want to face, not the least of which is the cultural transformation of America.  (See earlier post "Failure to Recognize Change")  Any myth repeated often enough becomes a truth.

The candidate's 47 percent speech gave clear indicators just how disconnected his perception is from reality.  It showed him as an ivory tower CEO that has no idea what his workers do, then chastises them for being slackers.  His later comment that he lost because Obama gave "gifts" to poor people makes abundantly clear the one-term gov has still not accepted he had anything to do with the outcome.  This coming from the party that espouses the virtue of personal responsibility.

This election has brought the full weight of reality onto the Republican party shoulders all at once, and the smart ones are recognizing it.  Over half of the American people symbolically busted down the door of that smokey room of old white guys and exposed the cabal's regurgitated propaganda for what it is.  And, as a result, the media have reclaimed an investigative imperative to ask the embarrassing questions and get real answers.  The party has painted itself into the extreme right corner, and is running out of excuses while America is running out of time.  We have finally reached the tipping point.

The good news is this cold slap will finally give GOP leaders a reasonable alibi to leave their cloister and seek a reality that will let it shuffle cautiously to the left, with one eye on the tea party, the other on the 1 per centers whose deep pockets they depend on if they ever want to win a nation-wide contest.

Americans are not tea partiers, asians, gays, catholics, latinos, liberals, methodists, handicapped, white, entrepreneurs, hedge fund managers, muslims, machinists, conservatives, or atheists.  We are all of them.  This seismic election has shaken the republican party into seeing this reality, giving us all hope that the common sense and compromise we all need in our little lives will again come to Washington.

Four Questions for Four People

When my wife is away on business travel, I stream a lot of movies from Netflix and watch them on my Mac.  My monthly subscription allows me to pick titles I was curious about when they were released, but never carved out three hours of an evening to see them in the theater.  It also gives me the option to turn it off if it turns out to be a lousy show.

Last night, while my wife was in New York, I watch the most recent Star Trek installment.  I can’t say I’m a big fan of the post-6o’s productions, television or feature length, but it provides adequate escapism on a lonely February night in Wisconsin.

This cinematic chapter was about the random events that led to its main characters assemblage on the Enterprise.  The young twenty-somethings ran around in Star Fleet spandex, conveniently bending regulation minutia to advance the story.  So it was a surprise—though not totally, knowing a little about contractual arrangements of the original cast—when Leonard Nimoy shows up on screen, playing Mr. Spock from the future.  Okay, honestly, I lost belief in the script at this cheesy point, but his appearance got me to wonder what must it be like to have one’s public life defined by a popular fantasy?  He’s probably answered the question a thousand times already, but I wanted to ask him myself.

So, as I half-watched the rest of the movie, I asked myself whom else did I want to know something about, and what question did I have for them?  Here are my four questions, trivial as they are, asked of four people I am curious about.

1.     (You already know this one.) Leonard Nimoy – What are the deep feelings you have knowing that people will always associate you with a make-believe character from a never-ending futuristic story line made up in Hollywood?

2.     George W. Bush – Do you have any clue whatsoever how far backward you sent the United States in every conceivable way after your eight years of your folly as president?

3.     Elizabeth II, Queen of British Commonwealth – Do you feel more blessed or cursed being born into this life as queen, which you could not choose?

4.     Neil A. Armstrong, first man on the moon – At any point, did you ever think you wouldn’t make it back?


Hey, you four.  If you're reading this, let me know.

Failure to Recognize Change

Change affects everything in this world, yet we don’t give it the attention it deserves, or even recognize that it needs to be taken into account when deciding so much of what we do.

We often fail to identify it as the reason something works or it doesn’t.  After all, change is too hard to pin down.  It’s too vague.  How does one describe what change looks like until after it has already come through?  We want simple, tangible, predictable reasons for why things unfold the way they do.  Or, we choose simple, tangible, predictable actions to prevent it from happening.  We want control over it. What a bunch of twits.

Change is unstoppable.  Change is part of our humanity.  It is a slow and constant evolution.  It is fluid.  Change is something we have to deal with at one point or another.  Change works like osmosis, releasing transitional or transformative events based on the build up of something that wants to move somewhere else.  Why can’t we as humans see it, analyze it, comprehend it, and embrace it?

I am tired of hearing news reports of workers in various industries screaming that the evil company is taking their jobs out of the country.  Don’t read this wrong, I am all for treating people fairly by paying them a proper wage for work performed and the equitable distribution of profits.  But, since when does a company ‘owe’ a worker a job?  Those days are over, when three generations worked for ‘the company’, one puts in twenty-five years at ‘the company’, and ‘the company’ owes me a good life even after I retire.  Hey, guess what.  Things changed.  ‘The company’, whether driven by greed or simple survival, has new options that don’t include you.

It’s easy—lazy, rather—to be complacent about change, to stick one’s head in the sand, to convince one’s self that change isn’t really happening, or that we can control whatever pressures are building by exerting a greater counter-pressure.  It’s human nature to try to make simple sense out of complex things. 

Well-educated theory-spouting futurists can only lay out possible scenarios of what upcoming changes will be.  They cannot predict with certainty the details of change unless it is already underway.  But by then, it’s not a prediction anymore.  Change is unpredictable.

One need look no further than the recent events in the middle east to witness a perfect example of unforeseeable change.  No one could know that the emotional spontaneity of one man could topple governments across the region.  Mohammed Bouaziz, a jobless university graduate, set himself ablaze in Tunisia because he couldn’t afford to live.  The social injustice of his death was too much for his countrymen to take.  Like combustible gases filling a room, once they reach critical point, it only takes the tiniest spark to blow the whole place up.  After decades of ignoring the people they govern, all the world’s leaders are getting a wake-up call because of this one man.

No one controls change, as much as some would arrogantly like to think they do.  Bill Gates and his narrow-minded management team at Microsoft probably thought they owned change.  For a long time, the Microsoft/Intel partnership did.  They managed change into a profitability corner that was easier to work with.  When new software or hardware popped up to challenge the dominance, it was bought up and the challenge was eliminated.  That is, until the change they were trying to buy their way through happened outside even their massive sphere of control.

Change creates new business models and destroys old ones.  Change is every business’s biggest competitor and it will always win eventually.  This week, Borders Bookstores filed for bankruptcy.  Who would have thought you could go broke selling books?

Change happens at different rates and for different reasons, depending on the how much pressure exists for it and the volatility of its catalyst.  In the last twenty years, the most notable changes have been accelerated by technology, mainly because of information digitalization.  Turning books, music, and images into bits easily sent over wires and through the air spawned a revolution in creating a spectrum of means to access it.

Kodak Corporation, a business model centered on film for cameras, acknowledged change long ago and accepted it.  It is now a leader in the digital imaging industry.  England’s Royal family recognized that if they didn’t change some traditions to reflect modern thinking, their loyal subjects would revolt at paying millions in taxes to keep a bloodline in a fairytale lifestyle out of touch with reality.

In this humble writer’s mind, all of us need to be more mindful about change in our personal lives.  What changes can I make?  What changes will make me?

Laziness = Good

Laziness is a good thing.  Laziness leads to greatness.  Laziness is necessity's cousin when it comes to fostering inventions, and goes by the well known alias, 'convenience'.  We should embrace our natural drive to lay around and have machines do things for us that we don't want to do.

Some of society's most beneficial gadgets were conceived by somebody lazy.  Some lazy soul asked, "Why beat your rags on a rock when a machine can thrash them about?"  Why do we cook on a stove?  Because lazy people got sick of spending hours picking up sticks, digging out coal, and cutting peat.  I don't want to carry around six pounds of coins, jangling with a limp in search of a public telephone.  I want to carry a phone with me.

Personally, I work hard at being lazy.  I continually try to figure out ways to shorten any menial task I hate so I can get back to doing menial tasks I like.  What is the most efficient way I can fold laundry?  Can I shave off two minutes cutting the lawn if I run the mower at new angles?  Is it shorter if I take highway 16 north?  Being lazy is hard work.  It takes hours, days, even years to come up with and perfect new ways to get out of working harder than one needs.  Hopefully, we keep track of how long these new forms of sloth take to devise so we can make sure we get that time back.  

Unfortunately, some people think all these ways to take care of life's chores with less effort means they are supposed to do more.  Why do these people wreck it for the rest of us?  Do you really think 'soccer moms' would shuttle their kids all over town, to violin, ballet, Thai Chi, swim, and Chinese classes, if they had to use a horse?  After Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he took it easy for a while.  He got married and spent a year on his honeymoon before going back to work.  Johannes Gutenberg, after inventing the moveable type printing press, spent most of his life associated with printing, repaying loans, and getting sued.  Did he try inventing the Dewey decimal library system, paperbacks, or e-books?  No.  He knew he'd done enough.  Let's calm down here.

While we've become lazy enough that our bodies no longer have to labor in the ways for which they were built, and obesity will soon overtake smallpox as history's most ubiquitous agent of death, we still have room to improve.  The President, in his State of the Union address, asked for Americans to find new ways to get lazier than we are already.  What I heard him say was, "We need to win the future by inventing new ways to get out of working."

I say let's take up the President's challenge in finding the most creative ways to be lazier.  Who among us will invent '30-second Rice'?