Is the U.S. unraveling? If it is, there’s already a fix in motion.

There’s an article in Rolling Stone that’s making the rounds on social media these days. The article, written by Wade Davis, reports that the U.S. is in trouble. Davis offers evidence to show that the grand democracy that is the U.S. is unraveling as evidenced by what’s happening in response to COVID-19.  Davis is a cultural anthropologist, and he offers the kind of detail that a cultural anthropologist does when making a case. Unfortunately, in this case, he’s really looking at the wrong evidence – or at least incomplete evidence.

 

If you take a picture of The U.S.’s national political landscape right now, the resulting portrait is a mess. Look at the gridlock in Congress; look at the daily circus that is the presidency; look at our international relations; look at our internal strife; there’s much to see that’s going wrong. There’s not much in that landscape perspective that’s positive. I can see where someone looking at that level would see the nation unraveling. However, I look at a different level.  To me, the strength of this nation has always been at the local level; and that’s where I look. By looking there, I see something different than Davis does. I see a vibrancy and a commitment that promises a different future than he sees.

 

The sociologist Ray Oldenburg wrote famously about “third places.” His work explained how local communities gather in informal places like coffee shops and barber shops to generate a sense of connectedness and community identity.  Donald Oliver went further and described not just the places, but the institutions that mediate interactions.  In The Primal, the Modern, and the Vital Center, Oliver and his co-authors explain that it’s not just places that are central, but also organizations and institutions.  Oldenburg and Oliver have something to teach:  A community is the sum total of the places, institutions, and people that bind it together.  Building from their ideas, it’s valuable to understand that a nation is a compilation of those communities, and the core of a democracy is always at that community level.

 

And that’s what Davis is missing. Davis misses the opportunity to look at the micro level of American society by focusing only at the macro level.  It’s at that micro level that the U.S. experiment in democracy really works. We can’t ignore the impact of the larger national political scene. As he rightly points out, the current pandemic has exposed the inequities, fractures, and mismanagement that divide the nation.  However, it’s a mistake to confuse that with a complete picture and to assume that those national issues foretell a looming destruction.

 

I know this because of what I see. I’ve been very fortunate in my career to work with leaders and organizations that focus at the local level. And I’m now fortunate to have seen decades of those efforts’ impact.  What I’m seeing now is that while the national systems are strained, local organizations and leaders are finding renewed strength. The next generation of leaders, those people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, especially, are finding the current crises as opportunities to look at how their organizations can be better at what they do. Local organizations and leaders are bringing people together; local organizations and leaders are using the power of community to build.  That looks very different than a dystopian unraveling of the nation. In fact, it looks like people gaining power through their joint and collaborative efforts.

 

What does it really look like? The picture is impressive. And rather than trying to tell all of the possible stories, I’m going to leave this statement with a list of a few organizations that are the future of this nation. Follow the links and you’ll see what I’m talking about. These are organizations that perform amazing work every day. They are committed to their communities because they are committed to people. The result is work which makes communities stronger, which makes the nation stronger.  If you want to know why I am not in despairing in a belief that the nation is unraveling, follow some of these links and see a small portion what’s going on in just one region of the country. I know it’s happening elsewhere, too. 

 

These aren’t political action groups, but their actions do have political implications. As they do their work, they change their communities to be more responsive to the needs of those communities – and that’s fundamentally a political act as more people gain the knowledge and freedom to be engaged in a community.  It’s the politics of action and change as these groups advocate for and impact their communities’ needs to be responsive to all members of a society. 

 

The brief list below contains names of organizations from my e-mail interactions in recent months.  I used that criterion to limit the list.  If I went beyond my recent personal contacts, this list could go on much longer to include many more organizations.  Take a minute and look through the list and see how these people are generating and sustaining their communities through engaged, democratic actions. Then let me know if you think the nation is unraveling. 

 

If you want to add some organizations to this list from your own experiences, include the organizations and their URL as a reply to the posting.

 

Kandelia:  https://www.kandelia.org/

 

Literacy Source:  https://www.literacysource.org/

 

Neighborhood House:  https://nhwa.org/

 

RVC:  https://rvcseattle.org/

 

St. James Immigrant Assistance:  https://www.stjames-cathedral.org/immigrant

 

Seattle Education Access:  https://seattleeducationaccess.wordpress.com

 

Seattle Goodwill Jobs, Training, and Education:  https://seattlegoodwill.org/job-training-and-education

 

South Seattle Emerald:  httpss://southseattleemerald.com

Everybody Knows – a personal reflection

Everybody knows that hate is wrong.  Everybody knows that it’s wrong to exclude and discriminate on the basis of race, gender, disability status, age, and a whole list of characteristics.  Everybody knows that limiting another person’s education or employment or financial future shouldn’t happen.  Everybody knows that people should always be given fair treatment by the law.  Everybody knows.  Yet these issues continue as if no one knows.

The overwhelming number of recent statements on injustice from every sector of the society are stultifying.  I’ve seen corporate statements and civic statements and celebrity statements.  Educational institutions all have published statements, as have sports teams and their leagues.  Politicians stumble over themselves to be the loudest voice decrying hatred, racism, and inequitable policies and practices.  Everybody wants to show that they’re aligned with what everybody knows.  But as I scan the statements, they’re mostly pretty interchangeable.  It’s like reading the results from one of those word-column exercises where you select a word from each column to form a sentence.  Pick “justice” from column A, “anti-racist” from column B, “deeply committed” from column C, etc., and pretty soon you have a statement that shows that you agree with what everybody knows.  The result is a cliché bomb of platitudes that end up saying very little about what will happen to change what exists.

There’s a deeply personal reason why I find these statements dissatisfying.  From about the age of 10, I immersed myself in politics and current events to try and understand the world around me.  The lynchings, fire hoses, and church bombings in the south that I read about then happened to people like my family and me.  The targeted murder and incarceration of justice leaders of color in the north by the federal and state government happened to people like us, too.  When I was harassed on the streets by White people or cops, I saw a direct line to what was happening in the news to people just like me.  When I faced personal and systemic racism daily in the community of my youth, I knew that I wasn’t alone because the newspapers and TV news gave me daily examples of what others faced, too.  The journalists typically didn’t filter it through my lens, but I reframed those stories from my personal experiences to decipher what was happening.  I needed the picture of the larger world that the news gave me to make sense of the one I experienced every day.  And I learned to believe people’s actions over their words. 

As I became an adult, those lessons continued as I was denied jobs because of my brown skin, or I was relegated to less important work by people in organizations where I volunteered or had interactions with people who assumed I am incapable and needed their paternalistic guidance.  Underlying all that is often a general feeling of un-safeness in public because I know that the experience doesn’t somehow end magically because someone or some organization publishes a statement of solidarity.  Despite what I accomplish, what I dress like, how I talk, or what activities I undertake, I am judged daily by a society and its systems as I negotiate each day.  It’s all a blanket that still covers my daily life as a brown-skinned man in American society.  Today and every day.  

Between what I’ve learned and what I’ve experienced, I have a mental picture of what this nation’s values are and how those values are expressed.  That image transcends statements of the moment, and the image lives in the actions I see daily.  That picture is not positive, and it’s seared into the neural networks that comprise my memory.  So I can’t watch murder porn of another man executed on the streets by police.  I can’t watch cell phone video of another privileged White woman calling 911 in attempt to create another incident that puts a man’s life in danger because he challenged her privilege.  I can’t read about people who created a fictional account of being assaulted by a Black man in order to cover their own crimes.  I’ve been seeing these for most of my life.  I don’t need to see what they look like today to be horrified.  I already have been.  For a lifetime. 

I understand people’s recent rage and disgust with a society that allows these events to continue.  Actually, that’s a rage and disgust that I’ve held since I arrived in this country at age five and heard someone identify me by derogatory words that were intended to make me less than, or when the local all-White parochial school told my parents that my sister and I would find a better fit in the public system, or when parents in my all-White neighborhood made it clear that their children shouldn’t play with me.  I’ve never surrendered those feelings and have channeled my rage and disgust into what I hope is productive action as I’ve spent a lifetime working to make things around me a little better.  In my youth, I needed those pictures to remind me I wasn’t alone.  Today, I need to rage and be disgusted without seeing more of the reason why in daily news clips because I already understand the ubiquity of the experience.  Equally, it’s impossible for me to see manufactured platitudes of support as anything of value – no matter how well-intentioned the source. 

If you read this and ask yourself why this sounds angry when you know me and think of me as even tempered and always calm, that’s because you and I may live in two different versions of the world.  In my version, expressed anger often has consequences in how people perceive and interact with me.  You may see my lack of outward anger as a calmness, but that’s not the case.  There are stereotyped perceptions of people who look like me.   In my version of the world, when I show the least bit of annoyance, I get quickly categorized and labeled as a menace either to be feared or dismissed.  So, over the years, I’ve learned to sublimate anger into positive action.  Maybe that’s healthy, and maybe it’s not.  Armchair psychology aside, it’s how I’ve been able to navigate to the point where I can have impact, and I can create small changes in my world.  I know many other professional men of color who’ve made that choice.  It’s how we cope with our experiences.  I’m not silent about my ideals, but I rarely show external anger as I express them or make demands for change.

Seems to me that there are two parts to the creation of equity.  There’s the awareness part where everyone needs to understand the histories that led to inequities; they need to see the biases that drive inequities; they need to understand who benefits from and who is limited by inequity; they need to understand how inequity shapes the experiences and perceptions of people like me.  Whether people are Brown, Black, or White, they need a formal awareness of what all that looks like.  However, that seems to be where things end in many groups that are seeking to address inequity.  Their thinking appears to be that if people get educated on the issues, they’ll take that knowledge and change the world around them. 

That intention to create change through education hasn’t worked for a lot of reasons.  Most critical is that change in groups, in communities, in long-standing practices, isn’t easy.  A nation that’s held racist and other exclusionary beliefs for 400 years isn’t going to become inclusive because of what it learns – even by watching a horrific murder on television.  And a police officer, teacher, doctor, or crossing guard isn’t going to change a lifetime of practices because that person attended a seminar on White privilege.  I’ve been an educator for 41 years, and I’ve learned some truths about the work I’ve done.  At the top of the list of those truths is that people and systems don’t change solely because of what they learn.

So the second part of addressing equity is about actions.  It has to happen concurrently with the first part because the reason for action needs to be built on what we know.  However, actions aren’t the result of what we know as much as they are a corollary to what we know.  In other words, the knowledge part of addressing equity doesn’t lead to the other.  What we know and what we do need to occur together.  The Christian Bible describes what this looks like in the Book of James 2:14-17 when it demands correlation between belief and action.  Even though this isn’t my faith, truth is truth, and this one is worth citing:

(14) What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? (15) If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, (16) and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? (17) Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

New King James Version

The writer then offers an example from the Old Testament story of Abraham who merged his beliefs and actions.  In other words, beliefs and actions have to happen together.  “Everybody knows,” but from my life’s perch that knowledge isn’t enough to counter a nation’s values that are expressed in how it has acted to establish explicit and implicit systems and rules which intend to diminish people like me. 

So what are people saying when they claim that everybody knows?  When someone says, “everybody knows,” that person may not understand that what each person knows gets filtered through the experiences that give us each different perspectives on what we each know.  That phrase, as you might guess from what you read here, has little meaning to me.  I have a similar reaction when I hear, “we’re all alike.”  It’s true that we all have a common physiology, but how we see the world gets shaped by our unique experiences.  If you understand that very important idea, then you seek to listen and to understand my experience to see what I know.  That’s very different than believing that “everybody knows.”

Because of my experiences, I have a different outlook than many of the people I know from my professional life where there aren’t a lot of folks of color who’ve shared similar experiences.  In contrast, many other people of color will see my story as typical; but that’s because we’ve had to live in what Dr. DuBois called the “double consciousness” of understanding both the larger world and our own experience.  People in the dominant society haven’t needed to understand our experience for their survival while we need to understand that society’s rules and norms – especially when those rules and norms threaten our existence.  As the nation has become more racially and ethnically diverse, and as more of us demand to be seen and heard, the dominant society has now had to start learning about our experiences in order for it to survive.  And it has to change its actions, not just its words. 

So if you want to respond to me or the events around us, start by asking yourself what you’re going to do besides being angry.  Not what you’re going to think or say or write, but what you’re going to do.  That’s what I’ll be doing – planning what I’ll do next.  If you want to tell me how you decided to act on your anger, contact me personally, and you and I can start a discussion that focuses on our actions.  Maybe we can work together on those actions.  As you might infer from what I’ve written, I’m only interested in those discussions that are about actions right now.  It’s really not enough that everybody knows.  If you really know, you act. 

But please don’t contact me with questions about what you should do.  That’s not my responsibility.  If you don’t know what to do, make your first action about educating yourself about who’s doing the work that makes a difference.  If you’ve read this essay this far, you clearly care enough to know the experience of one Black man.  But there’s more to know beyond just my experience.  Learn the history that got us to this point.  Learn about power and privilege and the impacts of race.  But most importantly, learn about the actions you must concurrently take to generate change.  As you learn, you can synchronously engage yourself humbly in that work.  Make your action your work as I have made it mine.  The most powerful statement that I read recently came in a note from a former student who’s focusing her actions as a real estate professional to promote justice.  It’s that commitment to actions in our daily lives that will move us beyond what “everybody knows” and into changes that counter the systemic oppression that now governs our daily interactions. 

And if you’re interested in what I’ll be doing about current events, know that there isn’t a new action I’ll be taking because the killing of a Black man by police or the hunting down of another by self-deputized night riders isn’t new to me.  Actually, I needed to write these paragraphs partly so that I can internally reaffirm the choices I’ve made in my life – to those actions I’ve already taken and plan to take.  In retiring from the educational work that I did in service to justice, I didn’t and can’t retire from my obligations to channel my rage against the oppression I’ve seen and experienced.  So I continue to work toward a just world; I continue to support people who need that support; I continue to help build those systems, organizations and institutions that counter oppression; and, yes, I continue to speak and write – but about action built on ideas instead of just the ideas.  Consequently, I continue to live a life forged by injustice in ways that build justice.  How about you?

An Important History to Know

The idea of a “race riot” has deep roots in the historic violence against Black folks.  Before the mid-1960s, the term was used to describe the hundreds of instances of mob and often governmentally allowed violence against the Black community.  Thousands of Black people died in these attacks, and few people were ever prosecuted for those deaths.  They happened in the south, the north, the east and west of the nation.  They were common enough to have left an imprint among the vast Black diaspora.  Every current Black family still has stories of their progenitors being attacked during a race riot.  We know about them as a part of our history.  But these events weren’t just our history.  They are the history of the nation because they form a significant thread in the fabric of the nation’s race relations. When you ask, “How did we get here?” in response to what you’re seeing on the news, the history of race riots is one part of the answer.  

You should know about them, and here’s a place to start:

https://donotforgetourhistory.weebly.com/race-riots.html

My guess is that you’ll find an event from communities you know in that list.  Additionally, I looked up some reliable sources for a few of these.  Here’s a random, geographically diverse sampling of what you can find.  It’s a gruesome history that you now have no reason not to know.

Year	Event	Link
1863	New York City Draft Riots	https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/317749.html&title=The+New+York+City+Draft+Riots+of+1863&desc=
1866	Memphis Massacre	http://www.bu.edu/bulawreview/files/2019/01/DONALD.pdf
1900	New Orleans Robert Charles Riots	https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/1451
1904 and 1906	Springfield, Ohio Race Riots	http://www.filsonhistorical.org/archive/ovhpdfs/OVH_V6N1_Blocker.pdf
1906	Atlanta Race Riot	https://www.atlantastudies.org/2019/05/14/casey-p-cater-electrifying-race-relations-atlantas-streetcars-and-the-1906-race-riots/
1919	Red Summer	https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/red-summer
1921	Black Wall Street Massacre	https://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/hbo-2019/the-massacre-of-black-wall-street/3217/
1943	Detroit Race Riot	https://detroithistorical.org/learn/encyclopedia-of-detroit/race-riot-1943

Building an Off-ramp – it takes more than money to retire

People ask me at least once a week about being retired.  “Do you enjoy it? Or “Do you find enough to do?” Or “Do you miss going to work every day?”  For the record, the answers are “Yes!” “Yes!” and “Are you kidding?”  People keep asking, though, because they hear about other folks who retired who struggle with it. 

Search the Internet with the phrase "advice for planning retirement" and you’ll find a list of articles about financial planning.  People think about preparing for the monetary part of retirement, and if they’re fortunate the finances come together.  But they often don’t think about what retirement will mean for their daily experience.  In my experience, how I prepared to use my time was as important as how I prepared financially.  

I was fortunate to have had a career that I enjoyed and that I found fulfilling.  Not every day (or sometimes month) was rainbows and daisies, but it was a good way to have spent a working life.  As an educator who spent a third of his career in as a junior high and high school teacher and the last two-thirds in community colleges and universities, I contributed to people’s lives and helped them dream and build their futures in small increments.  I even helped a few institutions move forward and think of the ways that they served or didn’t serve learners. 

I still continue to do that on a smaller scale, as I advise a few doctoral candidates as they complete their dissertations, consult with institutions on issues and programs, conduct studies that I find interesting, and write and edit articles that I believe are important for the profession.  So I haven’t disassociated from my professional life.  But what I have now is the flexibility to do the work that’s important to me without the demands of a job that requires me to be in certain places, doing certain tasks, and working at certain times.  In brief, I control my own life with few demands from external sources. 

Because I control my own life, I also decide how better to balance my professional life with my personal enjoyments.  When I’m not isolated from a pandemic, I can take time on a week night to meet a friend to play music without worrying about getting up early for work the next morning.  Or I can take a motorcycle trip along the Olympic Peninsula on a week day.  Or I can take the time to work on something I’m building, and if I don’t like my work, I can undo it and start over.  Or I can just relax at home, or have a standing, virtual cocktail party with friends from around the country – without worrying that some work demand will interfere.  After 46 years, three months, and 27 days of having a job that scheduled my life, now I’m scheduling my life.  That’s an incredible gift that I see as a privilege and a responsibility as I use my time.  If you haven’t yet deduced this, though, I’m really enjoying retirement.  So I write this in order to pass along some wise advice I received that helped me prepare. 

My already retired colleagues encouraged me, most importantly, to build what I think of as an off-ramp to retirement.  It’s important to think about retirement not being a finite point, but, rather, as a continuation, just like a freeway off-ramp isn’t a dead end.  That’s why I continue to have professional activities.  I’ve been consulting on the side for 25 years.  In the first year of retirement, my consulting practice had its busiest year ever, and its tapered a little from that in the last two years.  I don’t see that work continuing forever into the future.  But that helped me have an outlet for the professional energy that I maintained for a very long time during my career. 

Similarly, finishing out my doctoral candidates allows me to continue a teaching relationship with each of them – a relationship that I find incredibly satisfying.  Also, conducting a few studies, co-editing an issue of a professional journal, and co-writing some articles all allow me to make contributions to my profession, while I’m also mentoring the people who are working with me on these projects and helping them to gain publications that gain them status in our profession.  As I left my job and the part of identity it provided, these were the components of the off-ramp that allowed me to develop a new self-identity that’s not that much different than the one I’ve had for a long time. 

In my personal life, that off-ramp began about seven years ago as I built a music studio behind the house.  We have a small house, and there’s no space for the Hammond organ and other instruments I play with (note the phrase “play with” as opposed to “play”).  Four years ago, I replaced the older motorcycle I was riding with one that is better suited for touring because being on the open road helps me to meditate on life.  Then two years ago, we finally demolished our ramshackle garage and replaced it with a much larger one where I built a workbench with space for tools and working.     

The off-ramp also includes people – its most important component.  My wife and I’ve been fortunate to have made deep and lasting friendships over the years of married life.  Also, we both have family members who are important to us.  Although we only see some of those friends and family periodically, maintaining our connection to them grounds us in an understanding of the significance of human contact.  That’s part of the off-ramp that we started building a long time ago, and it’s one that we continue to build as we now have more time to nurture relationships.

Okay.  I understand that some of what I describe about building the off-ramp to retirement takes money.  In our case, it was the good fortune to have the resources to make choices a few years back.  As we had some extra dollars, we would invest in the off-ramp (e.g., building the studio or replacing the motorcycle with a newer one).  But that’s not any different than what we did in paying into our retirement accounts.  It was a conscious decision to understand that our lives were about to change and that we needed to prepare for that change.  In return for this opportunity, we try to live responsibly in the world around us because we understand how fortunate we have been to prepare for this time.

Like I said, I didn’t come up with this off-ramp idea.  I learned it by listening to and watching others.  None of the people who taught me did exactly what I’m doing because who they are and how they did it are all different.  The friend who retired and spent five years as a consultant with various companies providing his expertise.  The colleague who began a new research center after his retirement in his late 50s and then spent 30+ years managing that.  The neighbor who was a carpenter and now helps people with construction projects.  There are also people I know who have made their hobbies their life, or have completely reinvented themselves in retirement.  The key is that they had lives that extended from who they were to whom they became.  They built an off-ramp.

So in my third year, I’m still becoming.  It’s interesting that I had plans to do things that I haven’t yet done.  I’m okay with them never getting done.  Unlike my professional life, my goals now are now more fluid and less about an end product than they are about the experiences.  For now, I’m enjoying this latest episode of life, and I’m looking forward to seeing what it brings next as I transition through this off-ramp to whatever the fully retired me will be.  It seems to me that it’s never too late to start building that off-ramp.  Even if you’re retired already, you can start thinking of ways to bridge from where you are to where you could be.  My wife, for example, has taken up indoor gardening of late as a way to extend her enjoyment of seeing things grow without the demands of yard work.  The key, it seems to me, is to build forward to what’s next instead of looking back to see what isn’t.  After all, going to what’s next is what off-ramps provide us.

Let’s put on a show….

Those of us of a certain age will remember TV reruns of the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland musicals of the 1930s that got a lot of airtime in the 1960s as fillers for local TV stations looking for inexpensive content to air.  The plot always seemed to revolve around the need to show off the two young stars’ singing and dancing talents.  The heart of the movie revealed itself when Rooney flashed that mischievous smile he had and said something like, “My uncle has a barn we can use.  Let’s put on a show.”  The thin plot line then revolved around the rehearsals and performances that allowed Rooney and Garland to shine.

With all the talk of education moving to online formats in the current crisis, I’m reminded of those movies.  Get a barn, a group of kids, and then let them sing and dance their way into 90 minutes of entertaining frolic.  In this current circumstance, though, it’s, “We have online technology; let’s use it to teach.”  Well, just like a musical takes skills and an incredible amount of time and hard work to produce in the real world, just having a technology isn’t enough to replicate such a complex activity as learning and teaching.  In truth, it takes a lot of preparation and thought to move a course, at any level, into effective e-learning.  I worry that we’ve lost that truth in the demands to, “Let’s put on a show.”

In the past week, I’ve had a few discussions with teachers, and I’ve seen many more have discussions online, as people charged with educating children and adults are scrambling to figure out what to do as their institutions make a sudden move to online instruction.  That’s not to say that these teachers and institutions haven’t used e-learning in the past.  Most educators these days use a course management system to store content.  And many have used e-learning tools like video conferencing to connect their students to the wider world.  But it’s like putting on a musical.  We may have seen a barn, we may have seen a musical, and we may have some talent at signing and dancing.  But putting on a musical?  That requires mastering special skills that cover everything from stage design to directing to acting to marketing to a hundred other important tasks. 

K-12 schools and colleges that have been successful at moving into e-learning have hired good instructional designers to work with teachers.  Good instructional designers are amazing because they help educators rethink what they do to translate their intended impact into an electronic format.  They teach a way of thinking – they offer much more than the tools of e-learning.  That’s because teaching via e-learning is a learned skill that designers can help educators develop.  There are actually benefits to e-learning and there are ways that teachers can replicate the impacts they create in their face-to-face classrooms.  However, teachers generally don’t develop those skills innately.  They need support to develop the skills they need.

A school or college that expects that its teachers will succeed at translating what they do face to face into e-learning will quickly discover the importance of supporting that translation.  Unfortunately, there aren’t anywhere near the number of instructional designers available for the sudden change that schools and colleges are now undertaking.  So rather than looking like a polished MGM musical from the 30s, many of the current efforts, I fear, will look more like a local community talent show:  some highlights, but few stellar moments and even more frustrations for teachers and learners.

What to do?  For now, there’s not much to be done.  There are some schools and colleges that have a robust instructional design department, and they will provide the support that teachers need for the transition.  But this current crisis can be a wake up for educational leaders.  For the 25 years that I’ve been leading, teaching, researching, and developing e-learning, I’ve seen the “Let’s put on a show” model as dominant in discussions of educators outside of e-learning experts.  Educational leaders who hold the purse strings are satisfied to purchase the latest tools in the expectation that the tools are what’s required.  However, just like Judy and Mickey’s barn wouldn’t work in the real world, there needs to be a concurrent effort in the future to do more than just attempt a show.  Schools and colleges need to invest in a future that does more than puts a few assignments into an electronic format and expects learning to occur.  In addition to instructional designers, schools and colleges need to invest in ongoing, job-embedded, quality professional development and support for their teachers.  This moment, as emergencies often do, offers an opportunity to rethink how better to prepare for the future. 

Reflections on December 6, 1969

The link at the bottom of this posting takes you to yet another “death of the sixties” article on the 1969 concert at Altamont Speedway that featured the Rolling Stones and other bands.  Over the last 50 years, I can’t count how many of these articles and documentaries I’ve seen – the documentary, Gimme Shelter is the most well-known.  All of them focus on part of the story to make a point – which is often to juxtapose Altamont with Woodstock that had happened a few months prior.  The general theme seems to be that Woodstock was Aquarius rising, the coming together of a generation, the embodiment of the age of peace, etc., and that Altamont signaled the end.

My first reaction is that it really does stretch reality to claim the rise and death of any social movement in the short 110 days that separated these two concerts.  Rather, neither event is emblematic of social change.  In truth, both are separate snapshots of America at a time of social change.  The elements of the experiences of Woodstock and Altamont co-existed throughout the era, a complexity that is true of any moment.  After all, don’t forget that San Francisco’s 1967 “summer of love” two years before Altamont and Woodstock was also the summer of race riots in Buffalo, Newark, and Detroit.  In a truthful history, multiple experiences and perspectives exist simultaneously.  Seeing either Altamont or Woodstock as each or jointly definitive misses the complexity of that era in an attempt to neatly categorize the time and people.  It’s a mistake to see these events as providing any more meaning than the snapshot moments that they are. 

I was at Altamont.  I went with three other people, and we were in the upper bowl of the field that sloped down to the stage – close enough to hear the music and far enough away to miss the violence and chaos that surrounded the performers.  As we arrived, people around me passed around one-gallon jugs of Red Mountain wine and joints, a young couple next to us zipped themselves into a sleeping bag and had sex (which at least seemed preferable to the ones who were okay with sex in a rocking sani-can), and folks just sat around on the grass or danced energetically whenever music played.  So the event began as just another outdoor music experience like the many that preceded and followed it.  I arrived expecting something akin to the free concerts in Golden Gate Park that I hitchhiked to see before and afterward; or the free concerts that the collective I was part of organized on the other side of the bay from San Francisco.  Music, dancing, and people getting high in the open air. 

As all of the documentaries and articles I’ve read over the years have noted, though, there was something different at Altamont.  The event quickly felt noticeably dissimilar from all the others.  My experience there and all of the articles and documentaries point to a clear reason:  disorganization.  Nothing worked.  You can read how the Grateful Dead refused to play after Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane got knocked out twice by the Hells Angels who were supposed to be guarding the stage, or the other security issues, or the poorly designed stage, or the lack of food, or long lines at the toilets.  For someone who attended, that disorganization was palpable, and it generated uneasiness in the crowd.  Pauses in the music are part of an outdoor concert, as bands set up and transition.  But Altamont’s pauses highlighted the incompetence of a hastily mismanaged event.  Rumors about who was going to play next and who wasn’t coming circulated with each pause.  It was unclear whether there would be a next act whenever one band finished.  By the late afternoon, people in the area where I watched began leaving.  The harmony that pervaded all of the other outdoor concerts I’d attended was gone by then.  Not knowing whether the concert would continue, the person who had driven my group suggested we leave, and we did before sunset, the disastrous Stones set, and the mayhem and murder that followed at the stage. 

The disorder of Altamont was followed by other, less-publicized concerts that were managed with more care.  I attended and helped to organize many open-air concerts over the next year, and nothing changed.  People came, danced, listened to music.  The failure of Altamont didn’t carry forward into those other events.  That’s not to suggest that these events were trouble free.  At one concert our group organized that following summer, we had over 20 people overdose when someone passed around pills that were laced with PCP, a hallucinogen that caused both mental and physical convulsions.  Overall, though, the concert “vibe” didn’t change at any other events I attended in the year after Altamont.  And, truthfully, nothing changed as a result of Woodstock, either. 

What Woodstock and Altamont highlight for me is some of the diversity of my generation that gets lost in the attempts to make these two events emblems of anything.  The 58,220 American soldiers who were killed in Vietnam were mostly from that generation, as were the members of the Black Panther Party who fed hungry children and stood up to police violence against the Black community in Oakland.  The Hell’s Angels who were given the freedom to terrorize musicians and concert goers at Altamont were of that generation, as were the trust-fund-backed financiers who paid the bills at Woodstock.  I, a politically active, high school senior at the time, was there with a college-attending acquaintance and that friend’s brother, who worked in business.  Music brought us together for that moment, but the three of us were, and I imagine still are, very different people in our outlooks and perspectives.  People who attended Altamont with me were socially connected by the music, but radically different in the cultures that really defined us.  To say that that event signaled a cultural shift is to assume that we were all of the same culture, and that’s just not accurate.

I understand that it makes a good story to write about, or make a documentary about, how events are symbolic.  But the resulting images that comprise such a story are typically caricatures.  In order to highlight the story’s moral, it typically becomes a mixture of stock characters and readily accessible plot points organized to make a statement.  That’s what has happened with the Altamont story:  The evil Hells Angels destroyed peace-loving flower children and signaled the end of that era.  Such a simplified reduction of any story always misses what’s really happening.  On the surface, the “tribe” of my generation came together at Altamont and failed to have the experience it had before.  In reality, there wasn’t one “tribe,” and the event wasn’t anything more than the failure of promoters to organize – while ceding power and control to a group of bikers who didn’t have any interest in anything more than having a good time themselves.

Everybody’s heard a Hammond organ playing, even if they don’t know what they’re hearing.  A Hammond “tone wheel” organ is an amazing piece of technology that has driven the music of R&B, jazz, blues, and the sanctified church since the 1940s.  It’s not the organ you hear at high mass in a cathedral.  It’s the one you hear as you walk by a Pentecostal holiness church.  Or a blues club.  You’ve heard that sound.  It’s immediately recognizable for its pleading emotion.  If you play one, you know something about it that other people may not:  Each key on the keyboard can produce more than one note.  By pulling out any of nine drawbars, the player adds an additional note to the note being pressed.  If you ever have a chance to sit at a Hammond and hear this, you’ll be amazed.  Press any key (black or white) and then pull out one drawbar.  Pulling that drawbar while pressing the key will add a second note to the first.  Pull a second drawbar, and you’ll have the original note and two additional notes; and so on – up to nine, harmonious notes from one key on the keyboard.  A player develops a style where the drawbars are pulled in combinations to make the sounds that sing to heavenly angels or cry from the pain of mistreatment. 

The stories of the Altamont concert seem like a parallel to what most people hear when listening to a Hammond organ.  People hear a note, but they’re unaware that each single note can include up to nine notes, and each chord is made up of notes that use sophisticated combinations to produce a unique sound.  Similarly, a simplistic analysis of any one event like the Altamont concert cannot declaim the status of a generation of people, a movement, or a societal shift.  Besides, evidence that refutes “the death of the sixties” is overwhelming.  People of that era who tried to build harmony like people experienced at most outdoor music events went on to build social movements that spread across the country that range from Cooperative Homecare Associates in New York to Breitenbush Hot Springs in Oregon.  Those who were involved in political action, continued that action.  Those who fought against injustice continued their lives fighting injustice.  I know this because I’ve had the privilege to work in the trenches with people like this for over 50 years.  Their idealism didn’t die because of a poorly managed concert; it’s only deepened and become pragmatically stronger.  That idealism evolved into action which pervaded our social systems, our religious organizations, and even our businesses. 

What these documentaries and articles on the Altamont concert highlight to me is the folly of any simplification of the past which ignores the diversity of experiences that comprise any history.  Exploring complexities and the diversity of experiences are critical lenses to use in assessing the stories we tell about the past.  So let’s start by remembering:  Altamont was a poorly organized event that led to the deaths of four people.  No movement was born or died there.  And history is far too complex to be compartmentalized into a neat package.  Full stop. 

Link to article that prompted this.

The Experienced Voice: A note on the value of my generation in leadership transitions

As I enter the last third of my 60s, and as I read articles that suggest my generation should exit the stage quietly, I’ve been pondering my role and the roles of my generational peers.  That pondering is coupled with the current election.  Some of the contenders for the 2020 presidential election are people in their 70s.  It’s interesting that of the first five U.S. presidents only one was barely older than 60 when he took the office (John Quincy Adams was 61).  We waited 227 years to elect someone initially in his 70s.  Overall, we’ve only had 10 presidents out of 44 before the current president who began office in their 60s.  It’s not surprising, then, that the more recent candidacies of Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Elizabeth Warren have begun conversations about how old is too old. 

Does age correlate to skill or level of contribution?  Of course not.  As I write this, Warren Buffet still ably leads Berkshire Hathaway, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg sits on the Supreme Court.  Both are people in their 80s and by all accounts remain skilled at what they do.  Even if these two examples are anomalies, people live longer and the lifespan of the average person’s career is much longer than it was in 1776 or even 1976.  So it makes sense that someone would be longer in a leadership role, right?

In truth, there isn’t a magic age or age range at which a leader is ready to step aside.  And stepping aside because of age actually isn’t the question at all.  Change to the next generation is inevitable.  That’s the case whether the current leadership in an organization is on the verge of moving on, or whether the current leadership is decades away from turning over control.  The most important question, whether we’re discussing the role of leading the nation or a local club chapter, is about the plans to bring the next generation into leadership.     

As we explore that planning, those of us nearer the end of our participation than the beginning need to ask what our role should be in the transition.  That’s important because the transition won’t magically happen.  While the technical skills of leadership and management can be taught in seminars, workshops, and degree programs, there’s more to leadership than the technical skills of how to manage personnel, organize a project, or generate a budget.  Those of us who’ve taken leadership and management roles in our lives had to learn the complexity required in those roles through experiences.  It’s in consideration of what we’ve learned and how we developed our skills and knowledge that we must find a role for ourselves in the transition to the next generation of leaders.  While our less experienced colleagues can learn from seminars and classes and workshops, they must also benefit from what we’ve learned. 

It’s the idea of being the experienced voice.  That’s being able to share knowledge and the perspectives that take years to develop – not as rules that have to be followed, but as a source of wisdom, a word that often gets forgotten when we think of management and leadership.  If an experienced voice is part of the ongoing mixture of ideas and discussions, it can help contextualize and add perspective – it can offer wisdom.  When all people hear is that experienced voice of wisdom, the danger is that they’re only hearing the past; so it’s important that the experienced voice isn’t the only voice.  The experienced voice can’t be dominant; but it should be integrated as part of any conversation about an organization’s purpose or actions.

Of course, that means colleagues need to be willing to listen to us.   However, in my experience, that’s rarely the issue.  I have long ago tired of the “how to manage millennials” or the “unmotivated Generation X” babble that seems to be permeating current consultants’ spiels.  You know:  the ones who tell us that younger generations are self-defining and unable to take direction because they were raised on a diet of getting praised for every childhood act.  In my experiences in managing and leading people, I find that defining colleagues by the years they were born is about effective as relegating them to personality type by their astral birthdate.  Instead, I’ve found that most people of any age listen to advice and direction if it’s carefully explained and rationally justified from someone they’ve learned to trust.  Therefore, building those trusted relationships is critical to being an experienced voice. 

That means leaders need to be aware of who our colleagues are and remain committed to their success as much as the success of the organization.  In truth, those two successes are symbiotic, with one not possible without the other.  If I work with my colleagues from a position of mutual connectivity and respect, they’re more likely to see my perspectives as worth hearing about.  Will that work for every employee?  Not all of them, since some people (regardless of their generation) are self-absorbed and unwilling to listen to any other voice besides their own.  But it will work with the majority, and it’s the majority whom you need to build an organization.

Also, being an experienced voice means contributing to the future without restricting it.  We need to give control to others.  Whether the people we lead are administrative assistants or other managers, we need to be giving them opportunities to independently develop projects that they initiate and complete.  There need to be processes where people at all levels are encouraged to see their ideas merged into the strategic direction of the organization.  That means allowing administrative assistants, for example, to develop onboarding training for new employees.  Or it means allowing mid-level managers independently to reorganize their units in more effective ways.  

This is where a critical component of being the experienced voice has to happen:  Succession planning isn’t about who’ll be next at the top of the organization.  Effective succession planning requires a culture of leadership development where all people in the organization see themselves as leading.  Not in the sense that they all go in their own way, but in the sense that they control their efforts and see their efforts as moving the organization toward its aims.  People who have freedom to manage their work and make it more effective will innovate and create; and they’ll become leaders.  Their innovations will lead others and create a culture of innovation around the strategic aims of the organization.  Once all people see themselves as leaders, then finding the next executive who manages and leads the entire organization isn’t as daunting.  It becomes a natural next step in the organization’s work of self-renewal.  The experienced voice works toward that daily.

In traditional communities, we with years of experience would be named “elders” who are part of the community structure.  In those communities, we would be given the tasks of teaching and counseling, even after the time when we were done leading and managing.  That’s one place where many organizations miss an opportunity.  The current process for many organizations is to have someone retire and leave the organization to successors.  That happens for directors of non-profits as it does for corporate CEOs. While we sometimes bestow titles in that transition (in my profession, it’s “emeritus”), those titles carry little value in furthering the work of the organization.  In an era when we live longer with vibrant cognitive and physical agility, that system becomes actually a disincentive for us to leave our leadership roles.  When leaders do finally retire, they typically disconnect and the organization loses their wisdom and institutional knowledge. 

 Both as we approach the end of our formal leadership and afterward, our most important work is to develop our skills to be the experienced voice.  We need to cultivate the leadership of others in our organization as we consider what comes after our departure.  We need to find ways to become a teacher and counselor after we leave formal leadership – in ways that support the new vision that new leaders will bring.  After all, new leaders will mean a new direction that will differ from the past.  Success will mean understanding the past and building on it.  But it can’t mean replicating it.  Ask Packard automobiles or Wang or Tower Records what happened to them when they couldn’t evolve.  The important value in leadership change is that it offers the opportunity for new directions and new energy.  So those of us who are transitioning away from leadership and management need to understand and support those changes in this new role as elders providing the experienced voice.  And those who replace us need to be wise enough to understand that. 

A Budget Change You May not Otherwise See

If you’ve looked at the president’s proposed budget for education and the news accounts of it, you’ll see lots of disasters.  For example, he’s proposing to give $5 billion away in tax credits to wealthy donors who create “scholarships” to send children to private schools.  And it gets worse from there.

What you may miss is a proposed 24% reduction to adult basic education (ABE) state grants.  Not many people keep up with the federal ABE funding outside of the ABE world.  You may not even know what ABE provides.  But it’s an important component of the adult education world as programs provide everything from basic literacy to pre-employment training to GED preparation to high school completion for adults.  It’s part of the nation’s educational safety net, and the current funding already isn’t enough to serve the immigrants and refugees needing to learn English, people who left school before graduating and need to develop pathways to economic independence, parents who want to be able to read their children a bedtime story, and many more categories of adults needing basic skills.

This initial presidential budget will go to Congress and not look anything like its initial version when they’re through.  Both houses will make many adjustments in the final budget that is due in September.  As the largest funder of ABE in the nation, the U.S. Department of Education’s state grants have a major impact.  A 24% reduction to already lean funding will be disastrous.  And while the K-12 world has many supporters who will advocate against the changes proposed in the budget, the ABE funding could easily get overlooked as people focus on K-12 issues.  I encourage you to become an ally to the ABE world and offer your voice with those of us who work in this area.  A reduction in this budget is just not acceptable.

To that end, I’m including a link below to ProLiteracy’s legislative update on the president’s budget.  Please read that document and consider sending your representatives a note about this.  And please share this message widely in your networks.

http://go.proliteracy.org/webmail/288752/203525070/02eef5bfe7bed99efbb31c70870c3466c87e688e5290f8a144c4ab3409976061

President orders federal pay freeze

Isn’t it interesting that a president who claims to be for workers is willing to, during what he claims is a vibrant economy, freeze federal workers’ wages?  He touts that his policies are bringing prosperity to steelworkers and coal miners (despite evidence to the contrary).  But then the one group of workers for whom he has a direct control sees their wages stagnate. 

 

If you looked at the rhetoric of the right wing over the past 40 years, you’d think that the ranks of federal employees has become so large that it has choked our economy.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, federal workers comprise 1.79% of the nation’s workforce.  Despite claims of a growing and bloated federal workforce, it’s one of three employment sectors that BLS predicts will decline between 2016 and 2026.  The other two declining sectors are manufacturing and self-employed agriculture, two sectors of the economy for which the president reserves his most serious pandering.  In contrast, federal workers have been part of the right wing’s symbolism for decades.  They get pilloried along with “welfare moms” and liberals.  As is the case for all of these other generalizations, federal workers are a convenient target, and how they’re caricatured is far from reality. 

 

That’s how divisive politics works.  Reagan fired the air traffic controllers in 1981.  It was a symbolic act more than anything else as he showed his “strength” against unions.  It was politically expedient and a significant shift from his time as governor California in 1968 when he signed the nation’s first law giving public employees the right to bargain collectively.  After all, Reagan had been a union member of sorts, having served extensive terms as president of the Screen Actors’ Guild.  By 1981, though, he saw a chance to make political gains by attacking those air traffic controllers.  In the time since, right-wing politicians learned a valuable lesson as they discovered a convenient enemy that could be readily mocked, demonized, and easily blamed. 

 

It’s actually how bullies always operate:  Pick on someone whom you can defeat and call that a victory.  The belief is that then others will defer to your superiority.  Federal workers, because they are relatively few in numbers and have lost much of their collective bargaining power over the last three decades, are any easy target for a bully.

 

And that’s what’s really going on here.  Yes, the current administration gave away billions to the wealthy and now claims that there isn’t enough money to pay workers.  But that’s been the pattern for failed trickle-down Republican tax policy for decades.  This focus on federal workers is more than just that; it’s a symbolic statement.  It is intended to show that the president is powerful and in control.  It’s the fundamental lesson that any bully seeks to send.    

 

So let’s be clear here.  Federal workers have become a tool, here, for a dangerous message by a despotically leaning president who’s using them to show his superiority and willingness to push them.  The president doesn’t care that these folks have made career commitments to service.  When he was out night clubbing, bragging about assaulting women with impunity, and golfing, these folks were keeping the business of government operating and forming the steady foundation for our democracy.  It’s clear that the president doesn’t care about their cost in the overall federal budget.  As he does with most of his actions, he’s sending a message that he’s in control, and that no one other than him can lead this nation – that he, as a person of action, offers the answers.  There’s no thought to the people who will be affected or how this act diminishes their service and dedication.  It’s the same megalomaniacal beliefs that purportedly led Mussolini to declare:

 

“Democracy is talking itself to death. The people do not know what they want; they do not know what is the best for them. There is too much foolishness, too much lost motion. I have stopped the talk and the nonsense. I am a man of action. Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that some day.” 

 

Although this quotation may be apocryphal, it rings true to Mussolini’s overall approach to governance as cited in many of his speeches and writings.  The echoes to comments from the current president demand that we pay attention.

 

Refusing cost-of-living raises to federal employees is about strongman optics.  That’s done in the corporate world all the time.  A CEO will “hold the line” on workers’ wages to earn favor with the board of directors and stockholders.  It may be tolerated there, but in a representative democracy, it’s a dangerous gamesmanship that defies the nation’s egalitarian ideals.  No group should be targeted for use in politically expedient lessons.  The idea of a strongman government where the leader can so easily target one group should be abhorrent to us.  Mussolini was wrong to cavalierly dismiss democratic systems in favor of his own judgment, and so is the president. 

Intolerable Inaction

My feelings of anger, sadness, and frustration at this nation for allowing violent acts to continue leaves me numbed by each new atrocity.  Numb enough to be once again pushed into a paroxysm of grief and anger.  But not numb enough to be silent. 

First, let’s get something clear:  The U.S. has never been a safe place for people of color or for people of different faiths.  From the witch trials of the north, to the klan night riders in the south, and to the abuse and mistreatment of first peoples from 1492 onward, the history is unambiguous.  So please don’t be shocked that there are people in this country who hate enough to harm others and to do that without provocation.  

It may be hard to acknowledge, but hate-fueled action has been a consistent feature of every era.  Just ask the Jews who were attacked by the mobs incited by Father Charles Coughlin in the New York of the 1930s.  Or the victims of “race riots” where White mobs attacked Black communities with impunity from the mid-1800s into the 1940s.  And it’s not just faith that people use to attack others.  Let’s not forget the killings of Matthew Shepherd or Harvey Milk.  Violence toward people who are different has been our history.  Let’s own that.  And let’s keep working to confront and eradicate it. 

What’s definitely gotten worse is the means by which people who hate can carry out their acts.  The evil attack at Charleston’s Emanuel AME and the one recently at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life were carried out by men who were able to transfer their hate into the trigger and magazine of an assault-style weapon.  Access to such weapons means that a lone actor can inflict significantly more damage than in past generations.  Through the 2008 Supreme Court Columbia v. Heller decision that overturned 200 years of precedent, the nation has accepted a revised understanding of the Second Amendment to mean something that the authors of the Second Amendment never intended.  And here we are again.

So maybe we can’t soon change the minds of people intent on hate – at least I’m convinced that we can’t do it quickly enough to prevent the next tragedy.  But we can, as other civilized nations have, limit access to a weapon of war that even military professionals can’t touch until they complete extensive training.  So as we’re countering the debased public ramblings and veiled hate speech from a president who should be leading us, let’s also stop putting weapons of war into the hands of people who hate enough to use them.  By all measures, when the nation banned assault weapons for a decade, the number and scope of mass assaults was reduced.  It’s time to demand that these weapons are once again banned.