Hand Working

Once in a while, when I create something, I post a picture of it to social media.  I have a purpose:  to show folks in my social media circles that things can be built by marginally skilled folks like me.  That seems an important idea to share because I know a lot of folks who see building things as something that only professionals or talented amateurs do.  Far too many people I know think building objects is for someone else.  It’s not that they see it as beneath them.  They just don’t envision themselves doing it.

 

I spent my professional life listening, talking, reading, writing, and thinking – all very abstract work.  It’s the work I chose, and I always feel fortunate and grateful that I got to do what I wanted to do.  It had a downside, though: There typically weren’t tangible products at the end of the work.  There were schools I helped launch, programs and projects that I was part of creating, and, of course there were the thousands of people with whom I interacted as their teacher, as their colleague, or as their boss.  But education is about abstraction.  After all, even building a school or new degree program leaves more people listening, talking, reading, writing, and thinking.  It’s purely mental work.  In contrast, when an engineer or carpenter creates something, there are abstractions to that creation (like its aesthetic value or its level of functionality).  But the perceptible part of that creation is unmistakably real.  The builder sees and touches the creation. 

 

Those builders can experience the joy of creation because they have that creation in front of them.  When I look at my professional creations, they’re not as readily identifiable to me.  Over time, abstract ideas I create meld into other abstract ideas, and they change into what the people interacting with them in the moment experience.  Those abstractions mold into the needs of their current users.  That’s as it should be.  The school or degree or certificate program I helped to launch couldn’t and shouldn’t remain as it originated.  For it to be of any use, it needs to evolve with evolving demands and needs.  The lessons I taught 40, 20, or 10 years ago are out of date, and I hope the students who were in those classes evolved well beyond whatever I taught them many years before.  But the workbench I built 25 years ago is still in service, even though I no longer own the house where it sits. 

 

It's not about “legacy” or a “leaving a mark.”  Creating something that’s tangible generates a satisfaction that building in the abstract cannot.  When I use the steps or a table or a shelf I built, I see and experience the results of my creativity in ways that I cannot experience with more abstract creations.  I’ve manipulated the material world and have tactile evidence of my work.  There’s a satisfaction in that creation as I develop and use the required skills to synthesize raw materials into something where the sum of those materials is greater than their separate parts.  And the physical product doesn’t have to be complex or ostentatious.  I build to the level of my skills and take enjoyment from whatever I build.

 

I’m not somehow specially skilled.  I’ve been fortunate because I’ve had opportunities to tinker and build from childhood forward.  And I’ve been around people who were generous with their time to show me new skills.  For example, my greatest learning during my undergraduate years wasn’t in college classrooms.  Because I had some knowledge of tools, I was hired as a maintenance mechanic at a local newspaper.  The manager who oversaw the maintenance shop believed that he could fix anything; so when the press needed to be expanded, he rented a boom lift, and those of us on the maintenance crew came in during down time on the press and installed the addition.  Or when one of the loaner bicycles we kept for carriers to use came back damaged, we’d have use an acetylene torch to weld or braze it back together.  Large or small, we fixed things.  I learned a lot of new skills as a result.  While I learned about abstractions during morning college classes, in the afternoons, evenings, and weekends, I honed my mechanical skills.  In the 40+ years since, I continue to learn and expand my skills so that I can continue to build and create.

 

One worry I have about the future is that many people don’t cultivate ability with their hands.  Part of the issue is that even the simplest modern device can have complex electronics that require some knowledge of PC boards and microchips – so it’s become easier to replace than repair.  But the other part is that many folks are disconnected from the ability to tinker and build.  These folks are missing the incomparable satisfaction of building something that they can see and feel.  People don’t need to know about PC boards and software design to use a drill or chop saw.  They need a more kinesthetic set of skills that lots of folks aren’t currently developing.  I believe that the proliferation of TV builder shows comes from a yearning to build.  However, although people may watch building shows on TV, they haven’t done it themselves.  Vicariously watching creativity is very different than constructing for yourself. 

 

I’ve had former graduate students remind me that I always encouraged them to learn to work with their hands.  That encouragement comes from my own joy and satisfaction from building.  It also comes from my belief that it’s an innate humane trait to build.  Leave a child alone in a room with any object, and within moments, that child will be imagining that object as a spaceship or a bridge or a car.  Natural imagination is the root of our need to build.  From years of evolutionary adaptations, imagination compels us forward as a species to create.  While compiling software or building new organizations taps into that creativity, there’s something instinctively more satisfying when we can see and touch a finished product.  The key is to explore and develop those skills that allow us to build. 

 

I appreciate the “maker spaces” that have popped up in recent years.  They seem like an attempt to recapture the desire to build.  I wonder, though, if that’s just the latest trend in a society that seeks whatever is novel at the moment – a society that’s mimicking the latest Tik Tok dance one moment and going off to a hot yoga class the next.  The good news about maker spaces is that in many communities, they’re accompanied by tool libraries where people can borrow tools for projects.  As people master a tool, they can discover many new applications to that tool.  You can use a skill saw, for example, to build a bird house, but it can also build a full-sized house.  So maybe someone attending a maker course can find a new passion for building and extend that passion into further creations by borrowing the tools to do the work.  I’m completely in favor of anything that encourages people to develop a passion for expanding their skills to build. 

Unfair Fielding – the lessons of inaction

In my elementary school, during free-time PE, the boys would play a unique version of softball.  There would be fielders, a pitcher, catcher and batter, but no teams.  Because there weren’t enough children or time for two teams to play, the game was intended to be based on individual effort.  The roles of players would rotate, based on a set of rules.  If the pitcher struck out the batter, that batter would be out, and the pitcher would bat.  However, it was underhand, slow-pitch softball where the ball was relatively easy to hit.  A batter could stay at the plate for a long time, so there were other ways to rotate batters.  Kids would spread out over the field and attempt to catch hit balls.  A ground ball was worth a certain number of points, and a fly ball was worth more.  Over time, a player could earn enough points to become the batter, the most coveted role.  If you dropped balls or caught no balls, you wouldn’t get points.  So the key to becoming a batter was to get to where the balls were and catch them. 

 

There was one other rule:  If someone touched a ball but didn’t catch it, the ball was considered “dead” and not worth any points.  If a fielder caught a ball that had been already touched by someone else, that catch wouldn’t advance the fielder to the batter’s box.  Someone could say, “I touched that one” to any ball, and the fielder who caught it would get no points.  To an adult watching on the sidelines, this all apparently looked like a nice, fair game that allowed everyone the opportunity to participate.  A meritocracy, right?  Ostensibly, everyone would get a chance to bat.

 

I loved baseball as a kid.  I’d stay up late at night and listen to scratchy broadcasts of Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett calling Dodger games over the radio on a 50,000-kilowatt station from 400 miles away.  I wanted to grow up to be Willie Mays so badly that when I played in a league, I always wanted to be center fielder.  Despite what adults told me about how to catch a ball, I insisted on making a basket catch (Mays’ signature move) whenever I could.  As a Black kid living in an all-White community, players like Mays, and by extension baseball, became an important connection to my identity.  But as a Black kid in an all-White community, I learned about unfairness because of what the adults watching our play time chose not to see.

 

Like many activities which purport to be merit-based, this one never rewarded everyone’s merit evenly.  First, you had to get to the ball.  That meant that the most valuable spots were in a line just outside the infield between second and third base.  Since most batters were right-handed and most balls were hit on the ground or not very far beyond the infield, those players always caught the most balls.  The most aggressive boys and their friends quickly took those positions.  It was tacitly understood that those places were for certain people – all others were excluded.  These boys eventually all batted.  The ones left standing farther in the outfield got little opportunity unless they caught a fly ball that went over the heads of the ones standing at the edge of the infield or caught a ground ball hit too sharply for one of the closer players to make a play for it.

 

I discovered how the game was rigged whenever I tried to stand at one of the coveted positions on the field.  Other boys would come and stand directly in front of me and, over time, subtly push me father into the outfield.  Then there were times when I stood in the outfield and caught a ball hit clearly over infielders’ heads or well beyond the reach of any of them and someone would yell, “I touched that one” to deny my opportunity to bat.  No one ever directly told me that I wouldn’t get to bat, but it became clear that was an unwritten rule.  After that occurring repeatedly, I remember being angry enough with the unfairness of it all to throw down my glove and curse loudly enough for a teacher to hear and scold me.  No one saw the transgressions I experienced, but my transgressions were always visible.  After a while, I stopped going on the field completely and chose other activities where I could play alone since, as it turned out, all the group activities were similarly rigged to exclude me.  It was one among many elementary school experiences in unfairness I had as the first Black child to attend that school from kindergarten through sixth grade. 

 

So life can sometimes be unfair.  What’s the big deal?  And why am I telling stories about a children’s game?  As it turns out, childhood games teach us about life.  On my childhood playground, I wasn’t the only one excluded.  The school community had already determined a hierarchy of power and privilege that gave everyone a specific status – a status they were expected to accept.  The unfairness of a rigged process is a lesson that I, and all others around me, implicitly learned on the playground.  And I suspect that by the time we reach adulthood, far too many people, regardless of race or ethnicity, learn to expect unfairness as normative.  Some even see advantages because they’re the person who gets unfairly rewarded.  When children get so inured to the lessons of inequity which favor a select few, they learn to accept that system of unfairness as adults.  That becomes so normal that they can’t see those systems that perpetuate inequities.  It all becomes just the way things are.  And that’s the problem.  It’s a ”big deal” because too many people have become accustomed to asking “what’s the big deal?” when they see inequities.  So maybe it’s not just a children’s game if the game teaches people to accept inequities – especially as those patterns extend to systems that, when applied to a whole society, decide such important outcomes like who gets educated, who has political power, who gets appropriate health care, or who succeeds economically.  

 

I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to make that statement.  The U.S. didn’t get here by accident.  A nation where only wealthy, landowning men were franchised to vote at its founding excluded most citizens’ engagement for most of its history.  My African Americans progenitors weren’t even considered fully human during much of that history.  Only in the past six decades has the nation had any serious conversations about being fully inclusive.  As a result of its history, much of the nation developed passivity toward unjustness as a norm.  However, such a passive perspective is contrary to the demand for justice that needs to be at the center of a vibrant democracy.  If the daily lessons of life teach us to passively accept injustice, then we can be assured that injustice will continue.  It’s not just a children’s game if the lesson that children learn is the acceptance of injustice – whether that injustice is on the playground or a courtroom.  I fear that too many of us have learned acceptance instead of resistance.   

 

This all gets borne out in the statistics about who gets ahead and who doesn’t in the society.  However, it’s at the individual level, too.  People see someone unfairly maligning someone else, and they remain silent.  It’s as if they justify their silence because they didn’t create the injustice.  They see an unfairness being pushed onto someone or a group, and they say nothing – perhaps because they don’t see themselves as the perpetrators of that unfairness.  The problem is that silence is complicity.  People who refuse to confront injustice silently participate in that injustice. 

 

In other words, for inequity to exist, it takes more than the actions of people who create and benefit from the inequity.  It takes tacit acquiescence from everyone.  The teachers who watched the rigged game that frustrated me as a child didn’t pay close enough attention to see what was happening – or they didn’t care.  And any other children on the playground who were as excluded as I was had already learned the lesson of compliance.  “That’s just the way things are” was a lesson that they’d already absorbed.  It took the inaction of authorities, as well as those affected, for that injustice to continue.  We now see that happening on a national scale.  We have multiple reports of Republican leaders who privately complained about the 45th President when he was first elected and as he grifted his way through four years of his presidency.  Some found their voice briefly after the January 6 insurrection.  Yet they were quickly silenced into compliance and inaction. 

 

The term “inaction” is key.  If you know something is wrong, yet you don’t act, it’s like you’re standing in a town square yelling “Fire!” and just holding a water hose while the buildings burn around you.  Declaring any problem with no offered solution is always inadequate.  When the topics are injustice and inequity, a commitment to action should be at the start of any discussion.  The end of the discussion should bring a plan of action where people hold each other accountable for those actions.  That plan must include leaders and the communities they lead.  Everyone needs to be accountable not just for knowledge of the problems, but, more importantly, for their participation in actions that resolve the problems.  Being actors against inequity is what children should learn instead of the passivity that children with whom I played learned – the implied lessons that are still too prevalent today. 

 

As Republican leaders have now discovered, the time to act is when you first see the problem.  With time, the problem can become too overwhelming to address.  Go out and look for other people and organizations who share your concerns and who have a history of upholding rights.  Be part of collective action that counters this latest affront to justice.  Take an active role by volunteering your time and energy to those people and organizations.  If you’ve always been someone who expected that either someone else would do this work, or that nothing can be done, you need to change that perspective.  This is the time to act as if there is no other time in the future to keep our rights unless you act.  Unlike the childhood games that might have taught us passivity and compliance, inaction now has serious consequences for our future. 

 

Living with injustice is a learned habit, so acting for justice must be, too. 

Remembering Eugene

This is an essay that I didn’t want to write.  And if I wrote it, I didn’t know whether I’d share it.  As I write these first sentences, I’m still not convinced that I’ll share what I write.  But I’ll write and then decide.  If you’re reading this, you know what I decided.

 

I write to honor Eugene Smith, a friend/mentor/guide/teacher who taught me the most important lesson I learned as a teacher.  My almost-40-year friendship with him seems too personal to share – especially since I just learned that he passed away last October.  He was 95 when he passed.  Though we met many years ago and lost touch for a while, we reconnected in 2011.  The last time I had lunch with him was in 2020, just after his birthday and just as the pandemic was starting to keep all of us apart.  Then we exchanged e-mail messages during the pandemic until he stopped responding.  We lost touch during 2021, and while I reached out a few times, I figured the non-reply was because he was getting more frail and unable to reply.  Until that point, he remained vibrant while looking for opportunities to engage in the world around him. 

 

His retirement years inspired me.  One of the joys of my life was being able to edit one of the books he self-published in his late 80s and early 90s.  He still had words he wanted to contribute to the world even as he transitioned into his ninth decade.  His last book, for which he asked me to write a review and which I read drafts of chapters as he wrote them, was especially meaningful since it was a lightly fictionalized version of his own journey to becoming an educator.  In my review, I wrote:

 

This book is worth reading because of the connection it makes between the humanity of a teacher and the work of a teacher – and how those two complement each other.  It is not a recipe for becoming a teacher, but it does offer an image of one teacher that is inspiring enough to encourage someone considering the profession.  That image allows the reader glimpses into how that teacher has been able to sustain himself while continuing to teach well into a stage of life when people are expected not to contribute to the world around them.

 

He gave copies of that book to people who attended his ninetieth birthday celebration.  In its pages I learned much about what shaped him.  That allowed me to discover his life well beyond our professional relationship.  You can read about some of his professional accomplishments in the obituary that’s online.  However, I now choose to write about the personal journey he helped me make from someone who understood the technical skills of teaching to someone who came to see the importance and value of seeing teaching as principally an act of building relationships.

 

I’d been teaching for five or six years when I met Eugene.  At times, I hear or read someone claim that teachers had a teacher in their life who inspired them.  That wasn’t true for me until I met Eugene – well into the start of my career.  I often comment that the teachers I encountered throughout my own education taught me how not to teach.  I became a teacher to ensure that learners wouldn’t have the same soul-denting experiences I had in elementary, secondary, and undergraduate education.  Within a few years of starting my career, people told me I was successful at the work.  By the time I met Eugene, I’d figured out how to write and deliver lessons, how to organize a curriculum, how to manage a classroom, and how to create engaging sessions.  So I didn’t need anyone to teach me the technical side of the work, though he did help me add to those skills.  What I learned from Eugene was something more significant than the skills he helped me hone, though. 

 

I majored in English literature as an undergraduate, and that degree left me wholly unprepared to teach secondary students how to write – which seemed more critical than teaching them about Chaucer or Wordsworth.  That’s why I applied to and was accepted in a master’s degree program where I could focus my coursework in composition and rhetoric at the University of Washington.  I took courses in composition theory and rhetoric, and I met Eugene as he taught one of those courses.  In my first year in the degree program, I also applied for the Puget Sound Writing Program’s summer fellowship program where teachers from the region spent six summer weeks focusing on learning about the teaching of writing.  In the year after I finished the PSWP summer fellowship, Eugene became the program’s director.  So we had many common points of contact. 

 

I learned about grammars from him – and, no, that’s not a typo.  He was the first to teach me that grammar is an organization system, and that there are many, formal organizational systems beyond the traditional, Latin-based system that’s typically (and badly) taught in schools.  He, for example, exposed me to Chomsky’s transformational grammar that remains critical to how I think about how people learn and apply language.  And he taught me about Vygotsky and the connections between thinking and language.  It all revolutionized how I thought about what my students did when I asked them to write – and what I needed to do to support them.  But those weren’t his biggest lesson for me.

 

Because I was completing the master’s degree in summers and evening, finishing the degree took me a few years.  I outlasted two advisors (one was hired away and the other retired), and the English department eventually assigned Eugene as my advisor.  I was happy about that since I’d gotten to know him a little through his courses and as he became the PSWP director.  I didn’t need career advising since I had a pretty good idea that I’d be a secondary English teacher for the rest of my career (a good lesson to me, now looking back, on the foibles of career planning).  But I did enjoy meeting with him and talking about the work of a teacher.  He always had great insights from his own experiences and passion about teaching.  I’d share what I was doing in my classes, and we’d discuss what that was working and what wasn’t. 

 

When I met Eugene, I taught in a semi-rural area that was about 50 miles south of the university, and there weren’t any peers with whom I could have those discussions.  For example, I told him about the plays my students were writing, and how I, as a personal exercise, wrote an introductory act for one student play in the students’ colloquial dialect employing iambic pentameter to show students meter while stretching my writing skills.  At one point, he made the trek to my school to see what I was doing and spend the day with me – not as part of a course or as an evaluation.  He wanted to see what the school and kids and classrooms where I taught were like.  For two summers, he hired me to teach PSWP’s summer writing institute for kids.  He and I had a connection unlike any other I’d had with any teacher to that point.  He was genuinely interested in more than papers I wrote and comments I made in a graduate seminar.  And more than the lessons of those seminars, our connection contained the most important lesson he taught me. 

 

Eugene taught me that teaching is always about those relationships.  It wasn’t that I could or should ignore a course’s content.  Learners came to my class to learn whatever content I taught, and having the skill to create a learning environment that engaged them around that content was important.  But helping students develop a relationship to that content requires a relationship with each student where they see my care for them and their success first.  If you’ve been a student of mine, and you felt that I wanted to know you well enough to understand your needs and to address those needs, thank Eugene.  He was the one who modeled that for me and taught me the primary truth that teaching is about relationships.  I’ve worked to recreate that for the students I was fortunate to have taught because of how much his care for me meant to me.  I may not have been successful at that with all of my students, but it always has been a goal for me, whether I was teaching secondary students, undergraduates or graduate students. 

 

So this is a note of thanks to an amazing friend who taught me the most important lesson in the profession where I spent most of my working life.  And I decided to publish it because I want that thanks to be public.  Every teacher should be as fortunate as I was to have known and benefitted from such an extraordinary friend. 

Defacto secession and what I’m doing about It…

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

 

U.S. Constitution, 14th Amendment, Article 1

 

I’ve been paying a lot of attention lately to the 14th Amendment.  The last time the nation stopped a group of states from seceding, Congress passed it.  It was one of three new amendments ratified as a consequence of the long and bloody armed conflict that began with an assault by rebels on a federal fort in South Carolina.  These days, in contrast, secession is more subtle than firing on Fort Sumpter.  Instead, states are enacting legislation or imposing regulations that limit or roll back the rights of their citizens.  It’s a step backward from progress that has ensured more rights to more people over time – a step backwards that’s contrary to the demands of the 14th Amendment.  Unlike the rebellion of 1861, they’re doing it in increments that intend the same impact:  to act separately from the nation and oppress some citizens while giving increased power to others.  That was the same outcome that the southern plantation class sought in 1861 when they led the nation into armed conflict.  This time, the rebellious states aren’t taking up arms.  But they are, in fact, openly rebelling against the protections provided in the 14th amendment. 

 

In their actions, these states are seeking to stop an evolution the nation has undertaken in the past 250 years as it sought to live into the inclusive ideals established at founding.  If you’re reading this essay because you’re a personal or professional connection of mine, you most likely don’t need an explanation of that 250-year evolution’s necessity as the laws increasingly gave rights to citizens who were disenfranchised and excluded at the nation’s start.  So I won’t go through that here (but please do contact me if you need a reading, viewing, or listening list, and I’ll put one together).  Citizens’ rights have incrementally become more inclusive of more people since the nation’s founding, yet there are those who would roll back that progress to the point of subverting or ignoring the hard-won rights of the past 250 years.  Some have identified that as a backlash to progress, and I agree with that.  However, I believe there’s more to it.

 

What’s happening in these states is an attempt to secede in ways every much as real as the southern rebellion of 1861.  More than one governor in these states that are attempting secession has publicly refused to carry out federal mandates or has acted unilaterally to usurp federal power.  At the same time, these states’ legislators are creating laws and regulations that take away more rights from more people.  Action by action, these changes are, therefore, a defacto[1] secession from the laws that we’ve evolved nationally to guarantee increased equity, justice, and inclusion.  It’s a devolving return toward states’ rights to oppress their citizens.  States’ rights to oppress selected groups were litigated and decided in 1865.  The result was codified in the 14th Amendment that the nation ratified three years later.  Yet these states attempting defacto secession want to relitigate that decision and demand that they be allowed to oppress some within their borders

 

My initial reaction was to be thankful that’s not happening in my state.  Our legislature isn’t trying to remove safeguards that protect women’s relationships with their physicians; the state isn’t telling parents what kinds of medical care their children can have; lawmakers aren’t creating voting laws and voting districts that lessen the voting power of specific groups.  Even though we still have work to do, my state continues its progression to ensure more rights to my neighbors and me.  So I thought myself fortunate.  And that was that – until I thought back to 1861 and the 14th Amendment.  What would have happened if the entire nation agreed to let the southern states’ plantation class secede from the union and continue to oppress my Black progenitors because of where they lived?  What would’ve happened if there weren’t federal protections demanded by the 14th Amendment?  I’m a citizen of this nation, and any attempt anywhere to reduce anyone’s rights is an attempt on my rights – on all our rights.  At its core, that’s what the 14th Amendment is about.  My next thought was that I should boycott those states that are participating in the defacto secession as a way of voicing my concerns.  That’s when clarity came.  Even if I convinced others to participate in a boycott, what does that do to support the oppressed citizens of those states who are losing basic and critical rights like bodily autonomy, parental rights, or voting? 

 

This all came into focus for me as I planned to attend a national conference that’s scheduled for Kentucky in the fall.  As I was making plans, the Kentucky state legislature overrode the governor’s veto of a bill that prohibits medical care for trans youth while additionally banning any mention of sexual orientation or gender identity in schools.  That override makes that law the official policy of Kentucky.  It’s part of a national push by Republicans to use the trans and LGBTQI+ populations as a wedge to divide voters and solidify their radical-right base through fear of differences.  Kentucky is the perfect example where the legislature is attempting defacto secession from the union.  My initial thoughts to ignore the law because I’m in a safe state, or to boycott Kentucky, would have no impact on Kentucky legislators’ actions.  So, instead, I decided on a plan of action that would provide support to those people affected by Kentucky’s acts toward secession. 

 

My plan is to offer my time and energy to organizations in Kentucky that are battling against their leaders’ oppressive secession.  I’ve started to contact colleagues I know in the state and ask them for names of organizations where I can volunteer while I’m in the state.  As I contact these organizations, I’ll offer whatever support they feel is worth having – anything from volunteering in my areas of expertise to folding flyers for mailing to folding chairs and sweeping floors after a meeting.  No matter the level of work I provide, acting in opposition, it seems to me, makes more sense than ignoring the attempted secession by these states, or staying away from them.  So that’s what I’m doing.  I want folks in these states to know that those of us in other states are watching their leaders and are joining the people in the state as they hold their leaders accountable to the 14th Amendment.  I want folks, who must feel despair in having actions taken to marginalize them, to know that there are others who work alongside them.  Whenever I visit one of these secessionist states, I plan to do the same.  That seems a better outcome than ignoring the seceding states or boycotting them.  I’m sharing this decision publicly because I know there are others who are trying to figure out what to do.  This is my solution. 

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[1] A definition:  The term defacto, is used to describe something that exists in fact, even if it isn’t a law.  When people live, for example, in separate communities that are divided by race, that is defacto segregation, even if that segregation isn’t mandated by law.  I use the term “defacto secession” because what we’re seeing in the nation is, in fact, a secession where certain states are seceding from the rules that the nation has evolved to provide justice and equity for all. 

Life, Work, and Maynard G. Krebs

When I turned 18 and people asked me what I planned for the future, I usually said something like, “Eat, sleep, maybe go for a walk.”  It was my deflection of that tiresome question older folks ask young folks who are entering adulthood.  But the deflection also reflected my beliefs.  At 18, I really had no plans and no intention of developing any.  My favorite TV character in childhood was Maynard G. Krebs, Dobie Gillis’ ersatz beatnik friend.  If you’ve never seen The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, watch almost any episode on YouTube, and you’ll meet Maynard.  He’s the only reason to watch the show which is, otherwise, another late-1950s, dopey, teen-angst sitcom.  Whenever Maynard heard the word, “work,” he always showed a viscerally negative reaction as he repeated the word while his voice jumped an octave and his face displayed a mixture of shock and consternation.  My pre-pubescent mind thought that was the perfect response.  I’m sure the show’s producers didn’t intend for the audience to see that caricature as positive.  They likely expected that the audience would see him as a shiftless ne’er do well; but I thought of him as a role model. 

 

By the time I was supposed to enter adulthood, I was content to follow Maynard’s example and play a little music with friends, hang out, organize a rally or music event now and then, eat, sleep, and maybe go for a walk.  I lived in a commune for a while, but that became too much work when we’d have hours-long meetings about the dishwashing schedule and whether drying them afterward would spread more germs than letting them air dry.  It’s when I realized that meetings could be more laborious than physical toil.  I left the commune and enrolled in a junior college and then found that I could hitchhike to the beach after classes.  With time, I realized that I could just bypass the college and thumb a ride directly to the beach.  I didn’t see any reason to stay enrolled in college to go to the beach, so I stopped attending classes midway through that first semester.  For a good part of that year after I left high school, I successfully sidestepped anything that resembled work. 

 

However, by the latter part of the year after I turned 18, I started to feel to the pull of adulthood.  As an adult, especially a male adult in that era, everything around me demanded that I needed to be productive and striving.  I needed a job to pay bills, and that required that I modify my aversion to work and take a job as a warehouseman.  That left less time for strolls and more time that my boss demanded that I be at work.  To keep the job, I had to be consistently there, and I needed to perform tasks as well as those around me.  If I didn’t go to work on any day, that meant others would have to do my share – something my co-workers, all middle-aged men with families and mortgages, made certain I understood wasn’t acceptable.  So I showed up and worked and learned how to be a good warehouseman.  And I experienced the unexpected.  With time, work became interesting and eventually enjoyable. 

 

I could challenge myself to master tasks and feel good about that mastery.  Driving a forklift quickly and efficiently required some artistry, as did stacking loads onto trucks for delivery or learning how to drive those delivery trucks.  To this day, I still use a flying dutchman knot to snugly secure any truck or trailer load.  It was interesting to learn new skills, and it felt artful as I constantly adapted new ideas to perform better.  By my 19th year, I began to evolve a different viewpoint that I kept throughout my adult years until I retired.  Instead of work being a pejorative, it became one of the defining purposes to my life as working gave me purpose and direction, especially later as I became a teacher and adapted my developed sense of work as artistry to teaching.  I reversed from my Maynard G. Krebs-inspired perspective.  These days, I’m in the phase of life when going to the beach instead of contributing productively is a societally acceptable approach to any day.  But now looking back, I wonder if I went wrong in completely abandoning my childhood views on work. 

 

I now review my employed life of 46 years, three months, and 27 days and question the value of the many weeks, months, and years when I worked 60 or 70 hours a week.  It’s a pace that I began when I finally attended college in my mid-20s, and I worked full time while taking classes full time.  Once I graduated, I always had reasons to work a side job, take on additional work, operate a side business, or maintain an active consulting practice.  I was that teacher who built an after-school drama program, or advised all the school’s publications, or served on multiple committees, or taught in-service classes to other teachers.  I was the one who went on to a master’s degree in summers and evenings, and eventually a doctorate to build more skills and knowledge.  I constantly found new challenges and new opportunities to engage me, and that meant long hours of working.

 

When people asked me whether I felt any stress, I always laughed and answered “no.”  I really believed that.  Retrospectively, I now realize that I’d gotten so habituated to stress in my daily life that it felt normal to experience the pressure of time and task.  It wasn’t until a year after I retired that I understood what living stress-free felt like again.  Like the frog in the pan of water, I never knew that the water reached well past the boiling point.  But it’s not just me.  I think this is the experience of many workers.  We just feel the drive to work and don’t see what work’s dominance means to our lives. 

 

Workers in the U.S. are among the most productive on the planet.  According to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development’s annual surveys, in 2021 we were sixth in number of hours worked per GDP;  we were third in GDP per person worked.  We were also first in total number of hours worked per worker.  The average amount of paid leave that a U.S. employee is given in a year is among the lowest among developed nations.  Workers in the U.S., regardless of their income levels or education, weekly work much harder and longer than their counterparts in other developed countries.  We seem to take a perverse pride in our overwork.  We’ve bought into what social scientist Max Weber coined as the “Protestant work ethic” in the early 20th Century.  That idea came from an extreme Calvinism that valued work above all else and claimed saintly rewards to all who arrange their lives accordingly.  It’s all led to a simplistic bifurcated calculation:  Not working is slothful and sinful, so working especially hard must be virtuous.  Actually, that polarization should’ve been my first clue that something was amiss because I know that binary choices are typically false choices. 

 

And what’s the real reward for a life spent working?  It can’t be the ways in which I’m remembered – what people call “legacy.”  Now almost six years after I left the job where I retired, I’m guessing most of the people who now work there wouldn’t recognize me if I walked into the building.  A good number of others would need a second to remember my name – even though I was there a decade prior to my retirement.  Not much of a “legacy.”  It’s critical to note that’s neither good nor bad.  It’s just the way things are.  To tell the truth, I’d have to think hard about those people’s names if I saw them.  I’ve maintained some relationships from my final job, but those are relationships that continued outside of the work we did.  In those relationships, we hardly ever talk about that work.  Life goes forward and the friendships that lasted are the real legacy – not the work. 

 

For American workers, the real rewards of their overworking habits are, as sociologist Juliet Schor suggests, a shorter lifespan, more stress-related illnesses, and a more unhappy workforce than many other developed nations.  We’ve sold ourselves on the importance of work and have forgotten the importance of life.  I understand that some folks don’t have an option.  If you need to work two jobs to make ends meet, you don’t have the choice but to overwork.  But for people who don’t have to have two or more jobs, and to the employers who implicitly or explicitly demand and reward the behavior, that compunction to work seems misplaced. 

 

I’m incredibly fortunate that I’ve now been retired long enough that I’ve been able to rediscover life outside of working.  I maintain some professional interests while conducting some research, consulting on a few projects, and writing professionally.  But those are now secondary to playing music or tinkering or just hanging out – living the life I admired Maynard G. Krebs for living.  Others may not have that chance.  There’s no guarantee that people will live as long as I have and still have the ability to enjoy retirement and live as I now do.  I know far too many people who reached my age without the capacity to do what they enjoy doing, and I know as many who didn’t live long enough to retire.  I also know some who’ve come to retirement and realized that they don’t know how to do anything besides work.  According to the CDC, In 2020, the median expected lifespan of a child born in the U.S. was 76.4 years, a reduction from 78.8 years the year before that.  It’s too early to tell if that decline is a trend.  But the truth is that if the median lifespan remains the same, increases, or decreases, life is finite. 

 

Given the finite, it seems to me that spending 40 or 50 years without nurturing your inner Maynard G. Krebs is a mistake.  Beginning in 2020, as people lived through the pandemic, I heard from multiple friends and colleagues who were still working and came to that realization.  As a result, they left jobs or changed positions or pursued new opportunities that allowed them the time to live outside of working.  That gives me some hope.  Maybe more people will discover their Maynard-ness while they still have time.  Maybe that’ll be you.  And maybe you’ll make more time to enjoy a good meal, sleep, or just go for a walk. 

Being Loud… and Wrong

The July 15, 1970, edition of the Oakland Tribune offered an example of who I was at the time in an article that began on page 1 and jumped to page 16.  As the reporter explained what happened:

 

“… the Hayward City Council was showered with balloons and protests by a group of 15 longhaired youths objecting to what they charged was police harassment and a city ban on pamphleteering in public parks.  The youths, led by Robert Hughes, said they were threatened with prosecution by city officials if they continued distributing political handbills during their free rock concerts at Hayward Memorial Park….  The youths started a carnival-like atmosphere in their protest by sailing balloons through the council chambers, wearing tiny clown caps, and staging in the council aisles a mock monopoly game they called ‘The Hayward Game,’ satirizing the city establishment.” 

 

I learned how to be in the world from folks who raised me.  As a result, my sense of right and wrong reaches back to the late 19th century through the stories that those elders told me.  That gave me a lot of history to ground me.  I suspect that those multiple generations of knowledge, mixed with my own experiences, have now given me some wisdom.  I wasn’t born wise, and I can still make foolish mistakes.  But I can apply the lessons of my years and the lessons of those who came before me to a lot of circumstances.  I don’t believe we should do something now because we did it before.  But it sure does save me a lot of headache to avoid circumstances that I’ve heard about or personally seen before.

 

That reliance on learning wisdom from the past and personal experience doesn’t seem to be universal.  For instance, consider the antics of some House members during the President’s State of the Union address.  Their reality-show theatrics got them the attention they apparently need, but it accomplished little beyond raising their profiles.  They are elected, as the Constitution defines their role, to govern as a critical part of the legislative third of the government.  In order for that part of the government to function, though, the framers seem to have hoped that we would elect people with wisdom to fulfill the role.  That didn’t happen with some congressional members who seemed to think that acting outrageously for the cameras is what they’re there to do. 

 

It’s as if UPS hired a deliver driver who came back at the end of the day with a full load and said that it was much more interesting to stop at Starbucks and make drinks for customers.  I doubt that UPS would tolerate that.  Pretty quickly, the manager at UPS is going to look for another driver who can get the job done.  The job as a member of the House of Representatives is to represent your constituents – not to become a spectacle during a Constitutionally mandated event as the nation looks on.  My Southern progenitors would call these people, “loud and wrong,” a phrase they reserved for people whose mouths outran their wisdom.

 

I understand that people can stray from what they’ve learned.  That’s certainly the case for me.  Even with the lessons that my forebearers gave me, I had to learn some on my own.  Early in my public life, I thought that being the loudest voice was important, while assuming that, of course, I was right.  I recall that event during the city council meeting in my late teens as I and my colleagues disrupted governance functions in an attempt to make a point.  I can also recall how little impact those actions had. 

 

The stunt in 1970 got us attention, but the point we were making got lost.  The speech I gave denounced the police who had recently shot and killed a Latinx young man.  We demanded accountability for that officer’s actions.  The reporter misses those important points in favor of describing our antics and the comparatively minor points about our right to distribute handbills.  Our protest was clever, innovative, and got attention enough to be in that day’s regional newspaper.  Did it resolve the issue of police harassment and brutality?  Now, over 50 years later, the nation is still having that discussion.  Nothing changed in the city as a result of what “15 longhaired youth” did in 1970.  Maybe clever, but not productive or wise.

 

The difference between the GOP loud-and-wrong crowd and me 50+ years ago is that I was a radical 18-year-old with little wisdom who eventually got some.  In contrast, the current crop of GOP rabble are elected, mid-life adults whom constituents should expect to have some measure of prudence as they focus on the job they’re there to do.  As I aged, I learned to find avenues that allowed me to create and sustain the changes I believed should happen.  I became wiser.  These folks are much older than I was when I was acting out, yet they seem incapable of learning to do more than shout and catcall their way into the national spotlight – with no agenda other than to decry the failures they claim others have had.  They offer no competing vision or direction – just anarchical complaints.  It took growing older and seeing the futility of my actions for me.  As I wanted change, I began to realize the need for more than shouting.  Unfortunately, these folks are being rewarded by accolades and additional funding.  As a result, there’s not much incentive for them to grow wiser.

 

In addition to choosing wiser actions, another lesson I learned from my elders and my own life is one that also seemed lacking at the State of the Union:  respect for others.  Not subservience to others, or belief in the superiority of others.  Respect.  I learned it from watching my aunt who was born in the late 1800s and by the 1950s owned her own grocery store.  I saw her show respect to community leaders and neighbors down on their luck with the same grace.  My learning came from watching family and friends with brilliant minds being relegated to menial tasks because of the color of their skin, yet rising to excel at those tasks until the larger world recognized them.  When they were ignored and when they later became well-known, they treated everyone they encountered with the same respect.    

 

From what others taught me and from my own life, I learned to respect both those with privilege and those without equally.  As a result, I listen respectfully when people speak.  If I disagree, I find the time and appropriate place to express my disagreement.  Although I now have status and privilege that exceeds where I started many years ago, I don’t abuse that privilege by disrespecting anyone.  Wisdom teaches me that waiting for that appropriate moment and venue respects the speaker with whom I disagree.  That, in turn, gives me the opportunity to share my disagreement so that was can, at the least, understand our differences.  I’m no longer interested in looking clever.  I want to see real changes, and that begins when I interact with others respectfully. 

 

This all leaves me wondering about the constituents who voted for these representatives.  In one case, it was by a small majority, but most of the others won their most recent elections by wide margins.  I’m guessing that their constituents would tell you that they raise their children to be respectful and that they themselves are respectful of others – as most adults I know try to be.  The majority of those voters might even tell you that they take some pride in doing whatever job they were hired to do.  We’re supposed to learn those behaviors from early childhood.  It’s part of the wisdom that gets passed down.  But instead of demanding that their member of Congress acts wisely and focuses on legislation effectiveness (the job they were elected to conduct), constituents cheer disrespectful and ineffective actions that are clearly antithetical to the common courtesy these voters presumably practice in their own lives.  To follow the metaphor I started above, it’s as if they tell their representative that it’s okay to make drinks at Starbucks – while being surly to the people who come to the counter – instead of making deliveries. 

 

When are these congresspeople’s bosses, their constituents who elected them, going to expect them to deliver on the job they were elected to do instead of acting like they’re auditioning to be the latest loudmouth on TV’s newest reality series?  Maybe these voters figure, “Well, at least my representative isn’t out stealing puppies from the Amish,” (as is allegedly the case for one NY Republican House member); but that makes as much sense as the errant delivery driver telling the boss, “Well, at least I wasn’t using the truck to rob banks.”  The issue isn’t about who’s worse than whom.  The voters in these congressional districts have to expect that the people they elect will act more wisely and respectfully than what we’ve seen so far from the people they elected.  They have to hold these people accountable to legislate – i.e., to do the job they were elected to do – and to do it wisely. 

Mystic or Greeting Card?

FB always asks me "What's on your mind, Bob" as I create a post.  Today, I’m thinking about two messages that I saw on the same day with the same quotation purporting to be from two different people.  It was possible that one person originally made the statement and then the second one was quoting the first – and somewhere the original attribution got lost.  After all, one of the possible sources lived hundreds of years after the other, so that seemed the most likely explanation.

 

But being an academic, I tend not to be satisfied with half of an explanation.  I wanted to know who said it.  So I went to Google as a first pass.  The first item on the list of responses gave me an answer, and other sources affirmed and corroborated that answer.  It turns out that neither of the two people who were quoted made the statement.  The statement was written by a greeting card writer who borrowed the ideas for it from a mid-20th century Irish philosopher.  The greeting card writer takes full credit for the statement and explains its origins on that writer’s web site.  She could be lying, but a number of reputable sources who extensively research the statements of the two purported originators affirmed the greeting card writer’s claim. 

 

Why do I care, and why should anyone care?  After all, if I believe something to be profound, does the source really matter?  Well, aside from a search for accuracy, there’s a problem:  Are truth and mendacity so fungible that we shouldn’t care what the source is?  If that’s the case, that sort of relative truth making suggests that whatever I believe is what makes something true.  That’s problematic.  After all, claims of “alternative truth” aside, truth isn’t relative.  We can make up our own reality, but that doesn’t make our reality true.  There’s a lot of that kind of enchanted thinking happening these days, and we don’t need to look too far into the daily news to see how false statements impact the world. 

 

Apart from the demands to know what’s true, there’s also the question of how we create false histories from our beliefs about famous people.  Our knowledge of famous people is often based on what they say.  Those images get distorted whenever their words are changed, taken out of context, or when words are created for them.  Whether it’s Martin Luther King, Jr. or Mohandas Gandhi, the false attributions generate blurry images of the person who gets attached to the words.  So people are shocked to learn that Dr. King kept a firearm for self-protection or that Gandhi’s views as a young man (which he later modified) were clearly racist.  It’s hard enough to tell the realistic view of the famous without also distributing misinformation into the mix. 

 

It does matter whether that great idea came from someone who founded one of the world’s major religions, or from a modern movement leader, or from a greeting-card writer.  The difference in authors means a difference in intent.  If the idea is intended as spiritual guidance, that’s very different than it being intended to advocate for justice and change.  Context matters so we can really understand the speaker’s intent. 

 

So maybe the next time you want to believe and pass along a wonderful quotation you saw someone post, copy the quotation and paste it into the Google search box.  You may find that the person really said it.  Or you may find that the origins are somewhere else.  And the difference matters.

 

You may wonder which quotation prompted this note.  My omission is intentional because I’d prefer that you wonder about the authenticity of every quotation you see posted somewhere.  Rather than saying, “Yeah, that one didn’t sound like something that person would say,” I’m hoping that you take time to question every quotation you see attributed online.  And you can even go check the last quotation you passed along to see if it’s the one I checked.