The way forward

We are so strange. We are a generation of people probably more aware of our own failures and frailties and shortcomings than probably any other generation in history, because we are able to acknowledge them so openly. And yet our most important shortcoming is that we hold one another to impossible expectations of insight knowing that, given our propensity for lack of insight, we will likely fail those expectations. We make it remarkably hard for one another to own up for those failures, honestly, and then we persistently marvel that people do not take responsibility for their mistakes and failures of insight.

If Joe Nye, one of the most important, insightful, and serious thinkers in the world can come as close as this to believe in this war, then how in the world can we hold President Bush or Tony Blair or anyone involved to such an impossibly high standard of insight that we can't possibly forgive them when their (and our) insight fails them?

What makes us so self-flagilating that we just can't accept that peoples' humanity doesn't always give them the crystal ball into the future that we would like? Same goes for me, as I angrily deride liberals and conservatives for making the same fundamental mistake as the President in this war: arrogantly believing that others can be persuaded merely by force or pressure or bullying of your better policies and good intentions. They cannot be persuaded by force. Not really. And that goes for liberals as well as conservatives.

Force must be used in extraordinary circumstances. But it must be used as little as possible. And using it beyond that minimum undermines its credibility and undermines the authority that it is predicated upon. And, more importantly, it undermines the self-governance and self-determination that are at the heart of both liberal democratic values and are needed for self-actualizing, self-determining people to genuinely embrace and internalize values that sustain us.

As Dwight D. Eisenhower argued well (and as Andrew Sullivan posted on his blog, today):

"Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace."

I know what it's like to make serious mistakes and to not be able to take them back. I think most of us do. If we say we don't, we are generally lying and likely much more dangerous than those who acknowledge differently, because such claims are designed to make us appear more lacking in frailties than any human being can actually ever be, no matter how they might rationalize otherwise. It doesn't make us bad people or people worthy of flagilation, by ourselves or others. It makes us perpetually, and without any other alternative, human. Frail, lacking perfect or omniscient insight, foolish, failing, full of any number of shortcomings, and human. The President is no more and no less human than any of the rest of us, no matter how much he may, at times, appear, to believe to have a direct line to God. He doesn't. Which should make us more understanding and compassionate toward him and his foolishness, not more hateful or harsh.

This foolish, small-minded, narrow way of looking at the world has us locking ourselves in this unecessarily and counterproductively harsh way of dealing with the world and ourselves. It does not solve the problems we wish it to solve. And, generally very plainly if we could look on life without having to defend our and its failures, it makes many of our problems worse. But we are too afraid and too lost in defending it to consider its failures. We embrace contradictory arguments - that we are lost without strict authority and rules and the pressure and means and will to enforce them and we are lost without mercy and with too strict an overreliance on rules and a dependence on authority to resolve our problems. We think that if we embrace a nebulous "middle ground" between those two positions that we have, in fact resolved the matter. When what we are persistently doing is rationalizing whatever decisions we make in the name of whatever middle grounds that we claim (much of the time which we actively manipulate) rather than thinking harder and deeper about how and under what circumstance force should be used and what presumptions we should have for its use.

What we need, as opposed to what we will rationalize in the moment, is a clear presumption against the use of force and pressure, as much as possible, instead of the regular rationalization of its use which is so popular today. What we need is an clear embrace of liberal democratic principles - meaning principles that appreciate the underlying premises for freedom and a more democratic culture, as much if not more than more democratic institutions - and which presume against the use of force, including the force of law, to resolve important questions of conscience between us. As much as possible, our problems, as liberal democratic peoples, need to be resolved by free, independent and interdependent grown-ups, without resorting to bullying and intimidation, and force to resolve problems that are deeply involved matters of conscience.

To do otherwise demeans the conscience and the process of thought and learning and engagemement and debate and discussion that both undergird the highest liberal democratic principles and values that we have to offer and which are, necessarily, as a matter of reality, the foundation for any of our thought and action, no matter how well or poorly developed. No matter how well or not we have thought through the important matters that we face in our lifetimes, our thought and consciences are our only reliable guide, no matter how much we may wish otherwise. Even if we were to only and strictly follow the authority or guidance of others, we would still and always be subject to our own imperfect interpretations of their intent and will. There is no way out of this predicament of making judgments as a human being, nevertheless in a world that expects more independent and critical thought about the world around it.

And the saddest fact of all is that it has us now and perpetually in conflict with our family and friends and neighbors in ways that do not resolve such matters of conscience because they do not fundamentally respect that conscience and those judgments, which are much more fundamtentally important both for each of our development and ability to test and trust our judgment, and which are more fundamentally important to us than any of the particular judgments we might have to offer. This goes for those who give into cynicism about conscience and judgment as much as for those who aspire for something better (which is all of us, really, when we are honest with ourselves about that).

Our consciences are more important to us than the impositions of others for good reason. Because they are far more reliable and because they are our only real guide to the world, no matter how well or little reliable they may be in reality. Germans or others who submitted to Nazi authority on the question of whether or not to turn in Jews would be engaging in forgiveable but unspeakable evil to submit their neighbors' lives to try save their own. Free peoples who turned over slaves in 19th and 18th century America in the name of following fugitive slave laws are not acting morally in any recognizable use of that term. They are acting in a way that protects their interests and what the law deemed the property of others, not in a way that is most decent or good. Japanese internment or deplorable treatment of Native Americans or African Americans or the legally denied right to vote for women are not made more moral or defensible because they are or were defended by the rule of law. To the contrary, they all undermine the credibility of the rule of law as some guiding principle that can replace conscience as our most credible and trustworthy guide.

And we don't assert the supremacy of the rule of law, today, because we really believe that the law has reformed itself magically to replace our consciences, which the most honest of us know the law cannot, could not, and will not ever replace (nor has it ever in the past; which is how good people behave, generally, in reality, even if their rhetoric does not match their behavior). We assert its supremacy, today, because it serves our ends, even if we don't really believe it, down deep, or believe it selectively at best. We believe it when it doesn't include our own indiscretions, is the truth. And always has been. No matter how much we try to talk ourselves out of that fact of life.

This lie is one more in a long line of lies that we tell ourselves as good people to try to maintain that we are better than we actually are, rather than becoming better people than we actually are. It is more liberal democratic principles and virtues, more freedom, more self-reflection, more self-governance and self-determination, more investment in conscience and enlightenment rather than coercion and brute force, that light our way to genuine progress. What most people do today, including the most intelligent and thoughtful and self-reflective, is live amidst the contradictions, rather than search deep for a more consisent, thoughtful, integrated idea of how to resolve this serious question.

But living amidst the contradictions without resolving them leaves all of us more vulnerable to their confusion and thus more in need of one another's compassion and understanding and forgiveness, not more of its pressure and force and harshness and mean-spiritedness.

And living admidst the contradictions means that we need someone, as well as each of us, individually, to find a way through the mess and confusion, rather than pretending like its all really more resolved than it really is.

George Bush is not a perfect man. Nancy Pelosi is not a perfect woman. Neither is Joe Nye or Abraham Maslow or Amartya Sen or Francis Fukuyama or Milton Friedman or E.O. Wilson or any of the greatest minds. No leader, no thinker, no ordinary human being has more perfect insight than we would expect of them to avoid the pitfalls of judgment and life. And yet we perpetually demand of them that perfection and more, and worse, what we demand of them is that they just do what the hell we tell them, for better or for worse, even, often, if we make demands that contradict one another or our own professed goals or our whether we give or shit or not that they contradict the demands and force of other actors.

We just want what we want when we say we want it. And if our minds change, we want what we say that our minds have changed to what we want when we say we want it. It is ego run amok. And when it is a function of groupthink, very much as it was with the Nazis and the Communists and so many of the worlds' most serious abuses of power, we expect that no independent conscience will or should be able to resist it. Because if we all agree with it, it must be right. And that is the most dangerous of vanities that groupthink engages in when it wants its collective egos' appeased.

And what we want most of all is for all of that ego and self-centered orientation towards the world to be recognized as better than it really is. I do too, is the truth. We all do. It's just no good for any of us. Because it's not decent or respectful to those around us, and certainly not decent or respectful to their consciences, which are some of the more precious possessions they have, because it is who they are.

And we are going through a period where that kind of self-flattery and self-centered orientation around power is being glamourized and romanticized and popularized. There is no strong, thorough, consistent argument being made on its behalf. Nowhere that I have looked in the last 6 or 7 years that we have gone through this period have I seen such an argument. Not really. What has been going on has been one long assertion that flatters itself to think that it doesn't need defense because it has done us just fine all these years, even if it has been far from ideal and often terribly unfair, unjust, unforgiving, inhumane, indecent, repressive, and otherwise ugly in its application.

The truth is that the rule of law was and is an important progression from the law of the jungle. But it only progresses as it supports our growth and development as free and self-governing people, not as a regression to the rule of the jungle in the form of both the tyranny of the majority and legal, political, economic, and social intimidation to get our way in lieu of persuading others of our cause.

The rule of law is only meaningful insofar as it supports our highest liberal democratic values, not when it equates that principle in liberal democratic cultures and societies and governments with the rule of law in more repressive cultures and socieities and governments like Communist China or Cuba or North Korea or repressive Syria or Pakistan or even democratic but still repressive Iran with the just and moral rule of law in liberal democratic countries that take liberal democratic values more seriously.

Meaning, the important distinction between the most repressive and brutal regimes of the world and more liberal democratic cultures is not some minimum test that we aren't quite as brutal and repressive as they are.

The important distinction is the positive test that we take liberal democratic values, especially the values of free and open thought and discussion and debate and engagement and choices, as seriously as we can take them and as seriously as we and they deserve. And those fundamental liberal values should be taken more seriously than any other set of values, including the rule of law, since the rule of law makes no distinction between Nazi imposition and American or international or more liberal or democratic aspirations.

Our current political moment is one long rationalization for why what we say should go. It is not the highest values that liberal democracy has to offer.

And the first step to acknowledging that is acknowledging our own failures. In this war. In our overweaning thought and application of the principle of force during this period. In our motivations in using that principle. In our worthiness to enforce our will on others.

Lucky for us, future generations will forgive our stubborness and intransigence on this question. They will have to. What else can they do, if they wish to move forward? And they will help us clean up our messes. But these are the kinds of messes that are best cleaned up ourselves, since doing so would meet the basic responsibility that we are so persistently demanding of others, these days: to take responsibility. And best of all, doing so might actually resolve some of the more serious problems that we share, rather than letting them fester in our polarization and our self-righteousness and our petty parochialism and our desire to get those we disagree with or oppose and the rest of the distraction that obscures more serious, mature, wise and insightful thought and discussions that might seek resolution rather than make cynical excuses for our failures.

We should embrace more liberal values to support us as much for ourselves as for future generations that will be saddled with our unresolved problems and questions absent their resolution. It is us who has to live with the consequences of our failures until we are willing to face up to them. But we should also embrace them because each time we do, we avoid both such failures and the classic folly of every generation of liberal democratic peoples: believing that we have finally arrived when it is so clear to future generations just how far we have to go.

No generation or person ever does or can escape that fate completely. To do so would require an omniscience and perfection that noone and no generation is capable of, hence why they must always be forgiven their shortcomings. But we must and would be better served to avoid this mistake as much as possible. We'll be forgiven as we fail, of course. What else can future generations do but forgive us? Unless they want to live in a bleak and lifeless past as so many in Palestine or Cuba or other repressive countries must because their present is so overcast, as we all seek out nostalgia when the present has so little to offer.

But we cannot sustain ourselves on nostalgia. It is not substantial feeding. Which is why we must slowly but surely make our way forward. The past and present are littered with mistakes as much as blueprints.

And it is from those mistakes from which we learn, when we do.

Love,
Ben

Responsibility

When it comes to responsibility, we are all so awful, aren't we?

Why would our children want to follow our example, we have to ask ourselves, when we so reluctantly take the kind of responsibility that we demand from them?

The truth is that it is hard for all of us - me, especially - to admit our failures. I have quite a few, myself. All of us do, when we're honest. Yet, somehow, we often pretend that we got to where we are by trial and no error. We've spent the last 6-7 years making it that much more difficult for us to face up to ourselves, nevertheless to others, about those failures.

The only way forward on that is to admit the bigger failure around being so harsh and aggressive with people, nevertheless the smaller failures that we want ourselves and others to take responsibility for.

I've been really disappointed with Americans and liberal democratic citizens and governments, generally, around this issue for the last few years. But my most empirically-validated hope is that liberal democracies, better than most if not all other cultures and governing arrangements, tend to take responsibility for their failures, better, with time, than do less liberal democratic cultures and societies. We didn't own up to our treatment of Native Americans or slaves or for Japanese internment immediately. It took time. And the hope in liberal democratic societies is that big failures, like the one we're in the middle of, today, in how we hyperaggressively pursue accountability much more than the war in Iraq, is that we are the most likely of cultures, most if not all others which are far more brutal, harsh, aggressive, and punitive, to own up for our failures. At some point, at least.

Reading Joe Nye's somewhat harsh assessment of the justness of the war in Iraq and assigning responsibility solely to the President, responsibility that people like Joe and Andrew Sullivan and Peter Beinart, Hillary Clinton, and many of the Administration's harshest critics share since they supported this effort publicly before it was underway, reminds me that everyone, even people as smart as Joe, have a hard time owning up for their failures. All of us do. Which is why we all need more space to do so, not more aggressive, punitive, forceful efforts to bring us down.

Our model for responsibility - for ourselves and for others - is hardly the most effective possible, given all of its failures. What we need is more of the liberal democractic values that respect our free will and appreciate our humanity to create and extend a better model than the failed one we carry around today.

It is difficult for all of us to admit our failures, especially when we are afraid of looking bad or being treated badly.

It is also the only way forward. And admitting the biggest failure - our failure to provide the space for failures, even the biggest ones, to be acknowledged openly and publicly, if at all - is the most important acknowledgment of responsibiliy that will be needed for a more genuine progress on our most serious concerns.

Love,
Ben

Joe Nye and moral reasoning

Joe Nye, the international policy scholar who coined the term "soft power," has an interesting commentary on moral reasoning and the Iraq war worth perusing.

My Lesson for this Anniversary

I agree with Joe's general argument - that moral reasoning is both more complicated, in reality, than many moralists suppose and that means and consequences are as, if not more, important in reasoning through the "goodness" of an action as intentions.

I do agree, with many conservatives, though, that many liberals are all about appreciating the complexity of moral reasoning and being compassionate about peoples' mistakes, except when a conservative is involved, a reflection of the polarizing times as much as ideological differences, I think. And as I wrote in my comments to Joe, the irony, of course, is that so many of the Administration's harshest critics about the war supported it up front, including Joe. I did not support that war, and was disappointed to read the New York Times article reporting Joe's meeting with the President and supporting the war (Joe has since indicated in communication on his blog that that February 2003 New York Times article was not correct when it indicated that Joe supported the war and that his March 2003 Boston Globe column indicates his opposition to the war), as well as the support of so many of the President's harshest critics, today, including Andrew Sullivan, Peter Beinart and the editorial board of The New Republic, and so many Democratic leaders, with special inclusion of Hillary Clinton, who supports the war, when it is popular, opposes it, when it is popular, and wants credit for "courage" in her political and moral leadership.

The saddest fact of the current political period around the issue of moral reasonsing for any honest observer is how aggressively this period is touted as a period of accountability, and yet how infrequently anyone takes responsibility, as a consequence of the aggressive efforts to secure accountability, much of the time, I am convinced, even and especially the advocates of those efforts. Joe, like others who advocate both this harsh concept of accountability and who are now critical of the war, when so many of its failures have become clearer and when it is unpopular (Joe's significant credit is that he became critical of the war's mistakes long before it was unpopular, though after his initial advocacy of the war; not something to be ashamed of, but a mistake to be responsible for and which should offer some compassion for the situation of the President who is in a similar boat).

The truth is, as I wrote in my comments to Joe, that accountability, we all seem to cynically reason during this time, is for someone else's actions, not for our own. The same critics who advocate harsh judgment, oversight, and accountability for the President for engaging in this tragic mess are not measures that these folks want for their own work, despite the fact that so many of them came to the same conclusion as the President at the war's outset.

And, consequently, we live in this bleak, harsh period of blatant moral hypocrisy, where the only thing that seems to matter, most of the time, is to take someone's, anyone's, head to end all of our problems. It's not an original idea. To the contrary, is the one of the most consistent policies of humanity for more two millenia. It has never worked. And that has never daunted us.

The following is my discussion with Joe about that matter and why I'm clear, at this point, that we have created our own failure, here, no matter how reluctant we might be to admit it.

"I definitely agree, Joe, that means and consequences need to be considered in moral reasoning (as well as classical moral virtues like forgiveness when people make mistakes).

But to be fair, Joe, you and many political observers who are now harshly judging the President's decision today supported this war publicly up front. I remember reading it in the New York Times and being disappointed because I opposed the war and thought it was a mistake that needed more discussion and debate to create a policy that included Iraqis (covert discussions with Iraqi opposition groups and alligned militias, likely) that could have developed a more coherent policy that shared risks with Iraqis for leadership if a revolution was something Iraqis were prepared to undergo (which, in all likelihood, given the desperate situation and the support from many Iraqis, they likely would have been prepared to do, in theory, had they been consulted, though unprepared to do, in reality, without the overwhelming force of the U.S. military).

The irony is to me is that at a time when it was very difficult to dissent from this war because the popularity of the war was very strong, many current critics were signing on, only to repudiate not only their support at later points when it became clearer that this war was a far more difficult venture than originally considered, but that so many have been harsh with the President over a policy that they share responsibility around.

At this point, as far as I'm concerned, we have a war that I did not support but which is a present reality to deal with and that has the potential to create some kind of workable democracy (more or, likely, less liberal), which would undoubtedly be a significant improvement over dictatorship. I think we engaged the policy wrong, and, more importantly, I think we engaged the discussion about the policy wrong, up front.

But having said that, we now have thousands of troops in Iraq that may be on the verge of a political resolution given adequate security measures to open up space for a political resolution. An oil agreement has been negotiated and the current Iraqi government has asked that we stay until they are ready to take over security for themselves (a completely reasonable request, I think, given that we, inadvertantly, created much of this mess and that our help might be needed to help try to clean it up).

It is somewhat shocking and very frustrating to me, frankly, that so many in Washington and around the country so blithely less critically supported this war, also convinced, as I was at the time, of its good intentions, and then are all washing their hands of their responsibility in the war in that way and then both laying it all at the President's lap and letting him hang for it, as if his fate is more important than the fate of the Iraqis whose security we have responsibility for in the advocacy of this war.

The real lesson in moral responsibility around this war, I think, is that when any person or any group is wrapped up in its self-righteous reactions to the world, it becomes justification for washing their hands of their own responsibilities and of persistently pecking at the splinters in the eyes of a scapegoat, even one who is ultimately responsible, and ignoring the beams in their own.

Hillary Clinton does not have the courage to oppose the war, up front, but she wants credit for having "courage" to harshly criticize the President and the war after it is unpopular?

That hardly looks like courage to me. And it certainly doesn't look like responsibility.

And during this era of accountability, it strikes me with regularlity how rarely anyone actually takes responsibility.

Accountability is for other people, we are all cynically reasoning during this period. It is not for our own advocacy or actions.

It's a sad reflection on the times, when the most important wisdom that the man who inspired our most dominant religion - that we should stop plucking the splinters from our neighbors' eyes and pluck, instead, the beams from our own - is both ignored and its opposite is treated like a moral virtue.

The best lesson in moral reasoning and responsibility, this political season, is very much a lesson in means and consequences.

This effort to aggressively hold others accountable both betrays our own general unwillingness to take responsibility and it is, generally, its source, since noone wants to face responsibility that is harsh and punitive. Contemporary critics of the Iraq War want to hold the President accountable, but none of the President's harsh critics are willing to face the same accountability for their own support of the war, up front. Which is quite reasonable, because noone wants to be treated in that manner. And that is exactly what undermines our propensity to take responsibility.

The most important lesson in moral responsibility for the current period is that the highly aggressive manner in which we have sought accountability has clearly not created a culture of responsibility that we have sought. To the contrary, not even its advocates wish to take responsibility during this cynical period. And that is a failure of moral reasoning based on means and consequences that will only reverse itself when we face what is the only true path to moral responsibility - freer independent and interdependent moral reasoning that seeks to enlighten rather than to take people down.

Today, we live with the rather bleak consequences of its popular alternative. It's strange that some of us might call it "progressive" when it has created so little real progress. And that is our most important lesson in moral consequences of our reasoning during this period."

That is the moral lesson that needs most learning, right now.

I can only hope that future generations will not be so harsh with us about our failures, in this regard, as we are with one another.

Love,
Ben

Being realistic

If there is one thing that I am most sick of hearing at my school, it is people trying to be "realistic" about a kids' future.

The reason why it fuckin' drives me crazy is not because there may not be realistic choices that kids and adults will make in their lives or realistic options that will be available given various developed intelligence, abilities, talents, etc.

What drives me up a fuckin' wall with this discussion is that it is generally one long discussion betting against kids' and their futures and all for the sake of rationalizing both a) their jadedness in a world full of disappointment, now and forever, b) their failures as teachers and as people, and c) some sense of expertise they lack diagnosing limits in kids that they have no way of knowing without kids testing those limits, and even then those limits are not known with any certainty, ever.

It's drives me crazy, because the whole thing is one long excuse for why they gave up on a kid and why they were right to give up on a kid.

And that is exactly why kids and parents should have and should take advantage of as much freedom as they have available to choose better teachers and better schools if and when they have teachers betting like this.

If you are betting against kids, you should not be teaching. Period. It is the wrong career for you. There are plenty of other more lucrative careers that you should explore and leave teaching behind.

Sadly, many, many of my colleagues bet against kids all the time. Teachers, administrators, staff. They confuse their disappointment with the reality that many kids fail in school and in life, and that many kids fail badly, with prison or serious crimes or death, with some kind of wisdom that the kids in front of them are going to fail similarly. And they don't just bet against kids to themselves. They do so openly. And they do so, frequently, against kids who need them to bet for them the most. Kids who are either already betting against themselves, or kids who have no clue how tough life is going to be for them without choosing to take seriously skills that they will need to be successful in the world.

It makes me ill is what it makes me. And it completely validates for me why kids and parents need to be able to choose better and other schools, especially when they find themselves in a situation where people are betting against them. Especially when so often what adults are rationalizing is why they can't control kids, which is exactly the problem so much of the time.

There are so many controls in schools that are counterproductive, that it becomes very difficult, over time, even as a very smart adult, to know, always, when you are compromising and when something is really a concern for kids. So often, there are so many rules for adults and kids in schools that seem to be more an excuse to control adults and kids, which I'm becoming more convinced is actually the case, much of the time. I am learning that there are many, many petty adults in schools, in groups that regulate and control and lobby schools and legislators and regulators, and in the world at large, who seek to control adults and kids often for its own sake, I'm coming to believe. Some people who don't do anything important with their lives become convinced that controlling others is some kind of worthy substitute, I'm coming to believe, as well as a rationalization for what cynical, scared people that they have become that limits their pursuing bigger opportunities. It's such a sad, sad way to live life. And it is a reality that cynical adults create and then tell you how realistically there is no other option. It's like watching Stalin kill your family and tell you how, realistically, there is no other life for you, anymore, except for one without your family.

It's so fucked up. And it is exactly why education needs a free market. So this shit doesn't get rewarded or held afloat. And so teachers who want better for kids can come and kick the living shit out of sad, pathetic schools and teachers who engage in such bullshit. You don't want to believe in something better for yourself or for kids. Well, then you can face your failure more squarely and stop trying to put it off because you're such a fuckin' whiny loser.

I grew up with a million like-minded people in the poor, white trash neighborhood and poor, white side of town I grew up in, in Wichita, Kansas. Adults who had given up on life telling their kids how dreams really can't come true. All so they don't look like the losers they were, doing the worst thing that an adult can do to any kid: kill their dream or bet against them, all so they don't have to face their own failures. It's disgusting. It's forgiveable, definitely. Everything is and must be if you want any kind of happiness in life, I'm convinced. But it's a load of shit that kids shouldn't listen to anymore than they should listen to anyone bet against them or their dreams. But parents and teachers who bet against kids' dreams are the saddest adults alive, as far as I'm concerned.

Jaded folks in the world need to get something straight. Your jadedness is your own business. It is not reality. Reality is what happens outside of your distorted worldview. And, in reality, people are defying your jadedness every day of fuckin' week, generally, if you would open your eyes and stop confusing your cynicism with something better than it is.

And why people with that kind of jaded, distorted outlook think that they should be able to impose it on others and never have to take responsibility for their failures as a consequence of actions taken on behalf of their jadedness, I have no clue, except that they are too cynical to be responsible for even this.

Luckily, back in reality, people don't put up with that shit for too long. You can be jaded all you want, but someone, inevitably, has hope for that area of the world that you have decided you just can't bring yourself to have hope for anymore and they don't give a shit that you've given up. And they don't give a shit about your excuses for why you've given up. And they don't give a shit about whatever ways that you've tried to control the situation so that you never have to face your excuses for why you've given up or your failures as a consequence of giving up.

Eventually, in my experience, no matter how much someone who is being a shithead and a loser decides that they want to hold back stronger, better folks, stronger, better folks find a way around their bullshit and to be successful despite them.

And that is the challenge of teaching in a school like the school I work in. It's not starving children or basic needs going unmet. Typically, my kids' basic needs are met and they are not starving. The biggest challenge of teaching in a school that has a lot of kids who live below the American-interpreted poverty line is that they are living amidst adults - parents, teachers, and others - who have given up, on themselves, and often, on kids.

Many of the advocates for such schools and neighborhoods have given up on them, is the truth. Or they are betting against them. And that is exactly why kids should be skeptical of such teachers and parents and adults. And why kids and parents should be able to choose different schools when they sense that people are betting against them so that they don't have to face their own failures.

That is what killed Jesus and Ghandi and King. A fucked up human race betting against them while they sought to help them, better and more lovingly, face their failures, honestly and with forgiveness.

What a shitty, petty little species we are sometimes. And one of the shittiest and pettiest things you can do in such a sad little life is bet against the dreams or opportunities or possibilities or futures of a child or an adult just so you can be right that your jadedness really is the way the world is and not some unresolved disappointment with a world that doesn't always live up to your expectations.

Fuck jadedness. You disappointed with the way the world turned out? Sit down and shut up and stop pretending like your jaded prognosticating is reality just so you don't have to find the courage to let go of the pain and disappointment that is the source of your jadedness.

And certainly, you shouldn't expect that anyone should follow your lead. Because anyone with half a brain most certainly should not.

So you definitely shouldn't be demanding or forcing it upon anyone. Because you don't deserve it. No matter how deluded you might be that the right to command people is rightfully yours.

People are stupid enough to give into that, at times, sadly. But not for long. And, no matter how long it might go on, they will eventually get it figured out. And your name will be mud, rightfully, with more historical light shed on your petty tyrrany.

Being "realistic" in this way is a code for quitting. And quitting is no basis for genuine realism. Quitting isn't the basis for anything. Quitting shouldn't be listened to at all, even by quitters. The only thing worth quitting is quitting. And people who give up on humanity or others or life should not be taken seriously as wise about anything at all, nevertheless the dreams of a child or an adult.

Jadedness is being disappointed with reality. Realism is coming to terms with realities and finding ways to aspire beyond realities that don't serve us and creating realities that serve us better. Jadedness is giving up on all of that, which is why it should be seen for the charade that it is.

And the truth, I realize, after dealing with far too much of this kind of "realism" than I think I can stomach, much of the time, especially since it impacts the lives of so many very real children and their very real futures is that is that this is exactly why I nor any person, child or adult, should give more ear to jadedness cloaked as realism than it deserves.

Fuck jadedness. And people who try to use it to rationalize why not only they have given up on life, but why you should too. There is nothing more ugly in my mind than infecting your children with your cynicism because you're too fuckin' pussy to face up to your own fuckin' choices and failures.

My kids all did better on their final state assessments than they did on their practice assessments (though most of them were on a substantially modified - easier and shorter - test than the test we practiced with). And contrary to the trend among many of the teachers I've seen - who have many kids lose ground on district tests - my kids, with one exception, all improved on their district assessments from their first testing. And that one kid we put on a faster, but more genuinely realistic track, and he improved substantially on his final state assessment. The same was true of the collaborative class I work with, substantially better than the other classes this teacher I work with teaches, she said.

Realism is looking at a fucked up situation and thinking, "Somehow we have to fix this shit and make it better." Cynicism is looking at a fucked up situation and saying, "That shit will never get better and anyone who tries will fail. Trust me."

And the sad irony is that cynicism should never be trusted. No matter how much it masquerades as realism.

Here's a big fuck you to all of the jadedness in the world. Either give that shit up or keep it to yourself, I say. Have some balls and live with this world and make it better rather than bemoaning why it sucks and tearing down people who are trying to improve things for real and not just validate your cynicism.

I've got to go drink a beer and think about what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. Have a nice spring afternoon. I know I will:).

Love,
Ben

Isn't it ironic?

Isn't it ironic that forcing our way through issues and being forced means noone ever taking responsiblity, really?

It makes total sense to me, really. The question is when we will face up.

Love,
Ben

The political philosophy of Austin Powers

Final scene: Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery.

Austin Powers: I've got you now, Dr. Evil.

Dr. Evil: Well done, Mr. Powers. We're not so different, you and I. However isn't it ironic that the very things that you stand for - free love, swinging, parties - are all, now in the 90's, considered to be...evil.

Austin Powers: No man. What we swingers were rebelling against is uptight squares like you, whose bag was money and world domination. We were innocent, man. If we had known the consequences of our sexual liberation, we would have done things differently, but the spirit would have remained the same. It's freedom, baby. Yeah.

Dr. Evil: Face it. Freedom failed.

Austin Powers: Freedom didn't fail. Right now, we have freedom and responsibility. It's a very groovy time.

Sadly, his Shagginess spoke too soon. It turns out that the current era is about neither. But how nice a world of freedom and responsibility might be.

Groovy, baby.

Love,
Ben

Fairy tales and bikini briefs

I think I just heard some of the most profound bullshit that I have ever heard in this long, foolish period of romanticizing force.

We have a paraprofessional who drives the kids (and her colleagues, too often) crazy. She's abrupt. She's too often rude. She's far too dependent on others to make decisions for her. The kids hate her guts, is the truth, some of which she has earned.

And she's gotten a lot better. I've stood by her when others were ready to throw her overboard because I felt like everyone needs a chance to learn and get better at life.

And I just listened to this woman say that she was well-behaved as a kid because her parents forced her to behave.

And I'm thinking, "So what fucked that all up?"

Because she's got a long way toward learning to be a better behaved adult, nevertheless a kid. Many, if not all, of the adults who are caught up in the most popular craze in child-rearing - forcing, people, and among them, your kids to be good - are like this, in some relative degree. As were their parents. And their parents before them. And their parents before them. It's not really the most original idea. And it never really has delivered on the goods that it promises.

It's a big load of horseshit, is what it is. It's a lot of people pretending to be better than they really are. So of course they know what to tell everyone else to do because look how great and infallible they turned out. It's the most vomit-inducing form of undeserved self-congratulation that I've ever watched a whole society of adults ever engage in.

And this woman had the gall to say to a group of fairly real world-savvy adults that she couldn't misbehave as a kid because she was forced otherwise. And this is a woman who has a hard time getting along with teachers, some of the nicer folks in the world, nevertheless with students, who think of her as rude and overbearing, which she too often is.

The sad thing about not being honest with yourself is that it is you who suffers for that, ultimately. When you claim to be a better person that you really are to justify whatever it is that you want to justify, you are the one who starts to lose touch with reality, as your defenses for your self-image loses track of the reality of who you really are.

We all do this. Me too. I was just thinking about it yesterday morning, actually. All the ways I have to work to be the kind of person and man I would like to be. And who I am absent those qualities in the meantime. I have a long way to be my most positive image for myself.

And so do we all. Which is exactly why we are all in such need of looking after the beams in our own eyes more than forcing out the splinters in the eyes of others.

This is where Twain was brilliant and I have such a long way to go. To give us all needed shit, all in good fun and in loving seriousness, about what jackasses we so often are, especially when we are getting all worked up about one thing or another, and often when we are getting worked up about our children.

We're all a bunch of petty emperors, bossing everyone around and wearing nothing but our bikini briefs. And telling everyone about what saints we were as children because our parents had the sense to shackle us to the prevailing moral and legal order.

And the really big question is, "If we're really all so damn good, then why has the world turned out to be such shit so much of the time?"

And the other really big question is, "If this is a route that has been tried and true in the past, and has never really gotten us to the promised land, why do we keep pretending like we've crossed the Red Sea?"

I know, I know. We haven't done it enough. One elusive day, we will have used enough force and imposed enough of our will and coerced our way to higher ground and then it will finally be enough and the world will live happily ever after.

Nothing wrong with a fairy tale. But I think I'll stick with Twain.

Love,
Ben

What I want more than anything else, right now

I want someone to be nice to me.

I want a nice girl to spend quality time with. I want to go down to Wichita and hang out at the River Festival, maybe.

I want to spend some relaxing time with someone who is more interested in being decent than in being right. I like debates about important issues. And my experience is that the people who feel most comfortable with debating and arguing openly are the most sensitive and decent of the people I know.

And I want a girl like that to spend some quality time with. Lay in bed and talk about nothing. And everything. Watch a movie. Take a roadtrip. Bitch about my lousy, stressful day with someone who can be a good listener and give me a hug and not lecture me about knowing what I got myself into. Long, deep kisses with someone more passionate about being in love and about how people are doing than about any other self-righteous cause.

I want some kindness from a girl who treats everyone decently, so that I know that I can count on her treating me decently, more often than not.

If you make me choose between nice and smart, I'll choose nice, because I'd rather have someone be decent to me than someone I can verbally spar with. I'm afraid I will never really feel close to someone unless she is nice and smart and have a little courage in the world, though. Because I need someone who understands the slings and arrows of my life to be able to have any reasonable level of empathy.

I want a nice girl, because I've had quite enough of a people being rough with me. I think everyone has, no matter how tough they might be.

I want someone to be nice to me. Because having people be jaded or mean or calloused just doesn't get me out of bed in the morning. And it certainly doesn't put me to bed at night.

Love,
Ben

Why the blog?

I've only got a few moments to blog, here, because I have mucho work. This blog comes from a meme from Carson Brackney at Content Done Better, who has another blog meme that I have been meaning and wanting to do around pornography and the internet that I will try to find time to blog on this weekend, perhaps.

But, for today, the question is, "Why blog?"

Actually the questions were:

To whom are you blogging?
To whom do you want to be blogging?
Am I talking to you?

But I'm going to address them and sum them up in a more general question, "Why blog?"

Here's the why and whom I am writing to in a nutshell:

There really is only one thing in the world that I really care about, other than falling in love and having and caring for a family, and being a decent human being. And that is contributing something to the world long after my stay here. The only thing that anyone can contribute that really matters, as far as I'm concerned, is some sort of wisdom. Other stuff is great, but less important than some sort of wisdom, I think, since it is wisdom that presumably offers us a better, more fulfilling, more decent life. You can buy a lot of stuff, and seek thrills, and get your way around other stuff. But none of that offers the higher values of life that make it worth living.

Also, there is far too much needless tragedy in the world. I want to minimize my contributions to the unnecessary tragedies in the world, which reflection offers us the opportunity to do, and I want to write in a way that might teach others in the future to avoid the mistakes of current generations too stubborn or too self-centered to face their failures and shortcomings. We can avoid our own shortcomings all we please, I'm learning. But future generations can see them more clearly, because there's no reason for them to defend us. Especially when we're responsible, even inadvertantly for unnecessary tragedy. I've done enough bad in my life, as we all have, no matter how little we may reflect on our past behavior, to know not to want to contribute to any more. And I've done enough good in my life to know that this is the only thing worth contributing.

So I am writing to perhaps less jaded future generations, as much as to my own, jaded or not, to talk about everything that is and was great about this current period and current generations and to leave a record of all of the consequences of the poor choices of this current prevailing generation, of my own generation, my own choices included, and probably younger generations, as I age, by my judgment, as best as I have to offer.

It makes me sad that there are so few opportunities to talk more honestly about all of the experiences I have had that leave me with conclusions that seem counterintuitive or too good to be true to some. But life is life, and I speak as honestly as I can without being too foolish.

I do speak to current generations - average people, political leaders, journalists, policy, social science and any scholars concerned with people, teachers, parents, law enforcement and military personell and experts, historians, political junkies and wonks, and anyone who is interested in how people are more honestly than we might say out loud to one another and to understand, better, why so many important problems in our world go unresolved despite so many protestations that people care about solving them.

But I am also aware of the limitations of this current generation to speak only to them. Their pride. Their propensity to be tough rather than wise. Their propensity to either learn lessons the hard way or not at all, depending on what makes them look better, too often. Their propensity to look for evidence to support their biases rather than consider that they might be wrong. Their propensity to look more after themselves or those they identify with rather than the interests of everyone, as much as possible, and then scratch their heads and wonder why they don't understand why people respond to them and their efforts the way they do. And, most of all, this generation, their propensity to not give much or enough of shit about others around them, and then wonder why their lack of empathy has everyone pissed off at them or uncooperative or unresponsive to their demands or their examples, so often.

The next generation will have these same failings, undoubtedly. But what they will lack is the pride involved with defending the failings of the current generation. And they will, generally, be subject to the self-centeredness of the current generation, and have some empathy for others who are subject to it, today.

When I was in grad school, I asked myself a lot, "Why, 30 years after Abraham Maslow had passed away and his influence was so clearly pronounced in psychology and throughout the social sciences, which have influence on every professional field in the world, have we still ignored so many of his most basic ideas, especially around the need for love and freedom in resolving so many of the world's most serious problems? Why, 2000 years after Jesus' crucifixion, almost 60 years after the assassination of Mohatma Ghandi, and almost 40 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, have we all failed to take seriously the teachings of these men to love one another and treat humanity as we would want to be treated?"

Why do the words of wise men so often get ignored?

And the answer to that question is that each person in each new generation, having studied or taken seriously or considered that wisdom or not, each live new lives, borne of each of our choices, wise or not. Often, perhaps more often than not, our choices are not so terribly wise. That is how each of us learns many of the even very important lessons in life, after all, assuming we learn them, that is (Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Queda, Kim Jong Il, Fidel Castro, the Chinese Communist Party, and many others of the worlds' most despicable and self-centered despots and petty tyrants challenge my hope that everyone will learn the most serious wisdom humanity has to offer, though even the better members of humanity challenge this hope, for me, too often). And often, it takes many, sometimes far too tragically far too many, of our bad choices before we face up to our need to make better choices.

Wisdom is not always heeded. Far too frequently, it is not. Which doesn't make it any less wise. It just makes it unheeded, until wiser choices prevail (or they don't, which lead to stagnation, for a culture, and stagnation and hardship and perhaps worse, for individuals).

That does make me very sad when the wisdom involved can save lives or avoid harship or avoid unecessary tragedy, especially when that tragedy is imposed by some upon others whose interests and concerns they often insensitively ignore.

So I write for everyone, including those I just described, but especially for future generations who will have no interest in defending our mistakes and poor judgment and failures of compassion (except, perhaps, as it defends their own mistakes and insensitivity, just as we do today and will do every generation as we learn to let go of our most serious mistakes that we reinforce together as a culture).

I also write for friends and family and people who might be interested, for people in my fields and who might learn something, and for anyone who might be interested in my life or thoughts.

The truth is that I want to be blogging and writing for everyone. I especially want to be blogging to generate a much more substantial debate and discussion about how we are handling so many of our contemporary problems in more liberal and less liberal democratic and nondemocratic societies (societies, that, thankfully, look more and more alike in ways that promote peoples' freedom, and, sadly, look more and more alike in ways that curb that freedom). I am learning about my limits within that discussion. But I am also completely clear about the failure of so many alternative approaches that are not connected to more personal, more honest, and more thoughtful discussions and debates that are more genuinely concerned with resolution of serious issues and not just defending failures.

Am I talking to you?

Undoubtedly, I am. No matter who you might be. I am not looking to cater to peoples' biases, though I would like to write in ways that are as easily accessible as possible and do some writing that is as much entertainment as substantial.

I do wonder, often, when I am so frequently out of step with popular opinion, if I am writing for anyone at all, since popular opinion prevails, generally, whether we think that is a good thing or not. Am I just a kook? Or a kindly fool?

I ask that question of myself probably more often than people ask it or think it of me.

And every time I do, I think, "Where is the stronger argument?"

I am, ultimately, always amenable to a stronger argument. Always. I think I can be proud of being one of the most genuinely open-minded and open-hearted people I know, even as I have no interest in being naive or a fool.

And I've not seen stronger arguments than those I've made around those issues where I am out of step with conventional wisdom or popular opinion. I see a world that makes mutually reinforcing assertions that they believe, in the moment, amount to something truer than they actually are. And I see a world that does that persistently, and mistakes it for wisdom, persistently. As do I, frankly. So none of us can claim any monopoly on insight, at all.

But I am always open to a stronger argument. Always. Because that is where wisdom and knowledge and the strongest understandings are derived.

So, I suppose the reality is that my blog is most especially written for those who care about and are interested in distinguishing where the stronger arguments are at. Not in affirming my arguments, necessarily, but providing stronger counterarguments when they don't find stronger arguments here.

Ultimately, the opinions I care about the most are those who have and consistently make the strongest arguments and those who understand best the matters of life that I care and write about. Often those are one and the same. Often they are not.

And, as, if not more importantly, the people I write for are those who have better arguments to offer when and if I am wrong. Because those people help me grow and learn and see my mistakes.

In fact, what I crave most in life is people who have things to teach me because of my the blind spots that are now and perpetually in my own judgment (and all of our judgments, no matter how much we might pride ourselves otherwise; a more appropriate use of the word pride I cannot imagine than assuming otherwise).

That's why I blog. And write. And argue. And debate. And discuss. And share.

Because I want to care and know. And I want others to care and know along with me. Far more than I will ever want to be right or be rewarded.

I've got to eat and work. Someone's got to pay the bills.

Love,
Ben

A personal breakthrough

I had a huge breakthrough this weekend with some work and personal priorties that has made a huge difference in getting some stuff done that I was feeling overwhelmed by and which, along with a conversation I had with a girl in a class I'm taking, gives me some very important insight into struggles that kids have in school.

The breakthrough was that I have felt perpetually overwhelmed by a long to-do list that a whole host of people - parents, administrators, other teachers, students - seem to perpetually add to, often, in the case of the administrators and other teachers - without any real input from me about whether the priorities are manageable for me or not. I've tried talking about it with administrators, but often to no avail. It's a problem that all of the teachers I work with struggle with, but I've been looking to both resolve it and be honest about it with administrators, two significant departures, it seems, from my conversations with them.

And finally this weekend, I seem to have made a significant breakthrough. And one that completely illustrates the foolishness of trying to intimidate our way through important priorities, with adults as well as with kids.

The problem I've been having is that there is always far more things on my to do list than I can ever seem to get done at any particular time. And while I was trying to get my head wrapped around that and the priority and time management and organization that I have improved light years on this year, I was perpetually getting really intimidated by the list. This goes for personal stuff at home and in my own life - cleaning, finances, personal priorities and errands - as it does for professional priorities. It's swamped me and had me feeling terribly overwhelmed and without really understanding what the problem was, and learning very slowly how to come to terms with real time and resource and energy limits and do the work one thing at a time.

And yet I was still feeling overwhelmed, which was blocking me from feeling a sense of real control or real satisfaction or seeing a clear and substantial light at the end of the tunnel (I've had faith, the entire time, that as I learned as much as I was learning about managing my priorities and my life - and I have been learned tons, in the last year especially - that I would get it figured out. But now I know what it's going to take to get me there much more).

The big breakthrough was not just learning to write everything down, to write appointments and as much down in my carefully looked after planner as possible, to keep my papers and office and life organized, to take time to do this all a little at a time rather than all in one fell swoop when a deadline creeped up on me, and to stop burning myself out and making myself a grumpy teacher by burning all my candles at both ends. These were all lessons and more that I learned this year as matters of habit and not just matters of abstraction.

The big breakthrough was to stop feeling intimidated by the big list and to do each priority one thing at a time. Now, I need to clarify. The big breakthrough was not to just do one priority at a time, which was a big lesson I learned earlier this year.

The big breakthrough was learning not to feel intimidated by all of the priorities I had to get accomplished, in my personal life as well as in my professional life. Focussing on doing one priority at a time helped me break down each thing on the list into much more manageable chunks that helped me see how everything could get done and that I could even play a manageable catch-up on some stuff I've fallen behind on, given a commitment to getting each thing done in more manageable, realistic chunks.

But the big breakthrough, ironically, for all of the intimidation that at least one former advisor and every administrator I've ever worked with (this job is my first professional job; every other job I've had have been jobs where you do the work you're told, like in junior high or middle school or high school, but which you are not ultimately responsible for completed projects) was learning to not be intimdated by the big list, to keep track of and organize and schedule all of my priorities meticulously (something that I think I've gotten very good at and that I think, within a year, I should be a serious pro at, meaning at the level of some of the more organized managers and neatfreaks and anal-retentive professionals who have always intimidated me a little, with their abilities as much as with their personalities, but who do keep their stuff organized, something that has always been impressive to me even as I have scoffed at it out of a lack of understanding of just how important keeping my life and my priorities organized and managing them well).

And as I think about my experience with this and about a conversation I had with a girl on Saturday in a class I'm taking about her feelings of being intimidated by school and academic learning, I completely understand why a lot of kids blow off school, now.

Like me, if this girl is right, which I think she is, many of them feel intimidated and overwhelmed by the work. And without a life raft to pull them out of that ocean of feeling overwhelmed - which can only come with the lesson learned, not just with teacher direction - they begin to intuitively learn to not be intimidated by the work and by the teachers, just as I've been doing. Often trying to learn to not be intimidated looks like blowing off the work. And sometimes it does involve blowing off the work. But, ultimately, the lesson involved is learning how to do the work out of a sense of self-discipline and self-direction without, in my case, feeling intimidated by all of the million things to get done and the million ways you can think to improve them. But the bottom-line, for me, at least, was that I cannot not concentrate and get the work done when I'm feeling overwhelmed or intimidated by it. Or, at least, I cannot concentrate nearly as well or as for long as if was not feeling so frustrated with it, perpetually.

That's why it's ironic that you have people trying to intimidate you or reintimidate you. Because the whole point when people do this is to not feel intimidated.

I remember in grad school have a distinct time in my studies and my life when I decided that I was tired of being scared. Of professors, of my workload, of politics and the law (which seemed a really nasty place to operate, and is far nastier today than it was when I was in school), of work life and the job market, of financial issues, of all of it. I was tired of being afraid of all of the high stakes issues in my life, after struggling with pressures of both those priorities and resolving important policy matters in my own mind and the consequences all of this had for mine and Brandi's relationship and then losing that relationship, which was more important to me than all of these things.

And today, I think I'm finally getting past all of the fear, as much a possible. And, ironically, it was all the fear and the intimidation and the feeling intimidated that was blocking up the learning that needed to take place to get to resolution on a lot of these issues.

I never fail to be amazed how often this happens. How often the fear blocks up the learning, which is what was needed in the first place. And yet how often a huge barrier to solving so many problems is the fear and intimidation and pressure imposed on people, like me, presumably to get to a resolution. And yet no matter how long the pressure tends to undermine rather than facilitate resolution, how long its proponents will maintain their advocacy of it.

The Middle East peace process is the best example of this counterproductivity that I can think of. Militants use terrorism to pressure for favorable conditions for an Israeli withdrawal. All Palestinians, Hamas and Fatah and all of the many independent Palestinians in the region, presumably want a safer, freer (of Israeli occupation, at least), more culturally and economically strong and vibrant, more respected, more self-respecting and contributing Palestine. All of which need space for engagement, discussion, debate, and learning. And yet it is all of the violence and terrorism and political pressure imposed by pressure tactics like terrorism that keeps Palestine in such shambles and at war with Israel.

It's a tragic situation, where the people most responsible for the problem refuse to take responsibility for fear of looking weak and for fear of losing their leveraging power, and for fear of being prosecuted for the murder of all of the people they have killed in the name of their cause.

In the West, we have a similar but less pronounced problem where the people most responsible for the pressure and arm-twisting that is persistently undermining resolution to so many important issues, including important security issues, liberals and conservatives among them and most people, not just a few, who rally and cheerlead such efforts, very much like in Palestine, foolishly believing that such tragedy and counterproductivity have somehow accomplished more than they clearly have not, all on the premise that enough muscle will solve a problem without ever considering if that premise is true or not, especially given the plethora of evidence that it is not true, but with a broad number of people of all kinds of authority all over the world still acting as it is more true than it is, they continue to advocate the muscle.

The only way out of it is to see the failures more honestly. And to do that means to end the denial and talk about the failures more honestly, which the pressure and the intimidation often blocks up and undermines, as well.

And in my life, and I am finally getting one area of my life where I have felt intimidated organized and under control despite and often being undermined by the efforts to intimidate me into shape, rather than facilitated by them.

And the best thing I can do for the cause of ending this sad, failed, foolish myth of muscle over mind or muscle independent of well developed thought about its use is to call it out for its failures as often as possible until the message becomes clear that it does not work.

Melissa and I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, this weekend, while I cleaned the apartment on Saturday, and it is amazing to me two themes of that story: how far we have come since our most primitive, unevolved days of as predators and aggressive primates, and how little we have learned in that same time, about the failure of aggression to solve so many of our problems. The reason why reducing aggression is such an important goal for pscyhological health and individual and cultural progress is because it so rarely solves problems we want it to solve, so often creates them and worsens them, and how often we fail to recognize that fact because we are too busy using the same strategy, uncritically, no matter how often it fails and no matter how much it bullies and intimidates people, in the meantime, undermining bonds of trust and love and mutual respect and responsibility and learning which are the building blocks for accomplishing more of our goals.

Realistically, there are still important places where aggression and force must be used, to deal with the clear and physically dangerous aggression of others, in particular, but we are going through a very serious period of cultural and political regression around this issue, right now, rationalizing its persistent and overwhelmingly counterproductive overuse and abuse, and not taking responsibility or account for how much it has failed to achieve our goals.

There are limits to power, as my first book will argue, and as an article I read this weekend about the frustrations of Democrats in Congress to achieve their priorities rightly argued, no matter how much we might fantasize otherwise.

The good thing is that in a more liberal democratic society, there is more open, honest reflection, discussion, debate, and room for acknowledgement for such an idea. And all of the failure, right now, is an opportunity for us to learn the lesson.

In my own life, lessons that I've been working at learning for quite a long time, now, are getting learned despite all of the fear and intimidation I've both felt that I've had people try to use to foolishly motivate me to learn and to get priorities accomplished. And, ironically, it is so much of the fear and intimidation that creates so many of the problems we seek to resolve, rather than solving them. And this is one of them.

Now I've got work to do:).

Love,
Ben

Why kids are reasonably skeptical of their parents (and why parents are reasonably skeptical of their children)

After a second viewing of Brokeback Mountain, one of the at least 5 movies in 2005 that should have outlasted the cynical racial politics of Crash for nomination, nevertheless winning, Best Picture, it all of a sudden occurred to me why kids are quite reasonably skeptical of their parents.

It's the bitterness. It's the cynicism and the pain and the bitterness that accumulates on their hearts over time (that is the answer to Abraham Maslow's question of what happened to those cute, bubbly kids who grow up to be worn down adults). Kids sense it, intuitively, even if they don't always know what it is. Adults carry it with them around pain they've never resolved in their heart when they don't practice forgiveness and letting go, which leaves them sad, angry, bitter adults. A fairly tragic way to live life, really, if you ask me.

Kids have dreams, quite reasonably. And their parents' and teachers' and other adults' bitterness and cynicism often cuts against those dreams. So they grow skeptical of those same adults, quite reasonably. Cynical too, perhaps, absorbing the pain of having adults rationalize their pain and cynicism and hurtful ways onto their children. Hopefully adults and kids work through this, over time. But, in the meantime, kids are skeptical of anyone who might talk down them or their dreams or rationalize cynical realities. And a lot of kids, sadly, probably grow cynical about the world like their parents, just cynical about their parents as much as anyone else. It's a tragic little cycle, sadly.

Parents and teachers and adults are, quite reasonably, skeptical of their children, as well. They are skeptical that they know what they are doing without adult guidance (which they generally don't, even as they are almost always completely convinced that they have never met adult guidance they can trust). Kids can be a little arrogant, in my experience, with a little knowledge being dangerous. But better adults patiently love them and guide them, nonetheless, into adulthood, the best they know how, always, no matter who they are how much better or worse they deal with their children.

Everyone thinks they know what others around them don't know and is, therefore, reason for why they should be running the show, since the folks around them are so clueless. And the same goes for kids, often, as much for adults, I think. I know I felt that way much of my life, until I realized that no matter what role you play, you still have win peoples' trust and learn how to work with them, no matter how high or low you are in the food chain. Otherwise, they just won't work with you. Not for real.

It is too bad that so many people live such sad, bitter lives. That they carry around their pain on their heart like a trophy from the past that they just don't want to let go of. But it is a fact of life that leads many people to rationalize the ugliest and most cynical realities, and which leads their children to become skeptical that they have any clue how to be happy in the world and wonder what in the world they think they are thinking that they would follow their lead or example when they are so clearly unhappy, if they would take a second to be honest with themselves.

Kids want to be happy. And they don't want to be unhappy like their parents. And so, they are, quite reasonably, skeptical of any advice from someone who would want to lead them into a life of similar unhappiness.

It's the healthiest of instincts for kids to have. No matter how cynical adults may be about their children, as they are about everyone else in the world, now that they've lived a little bit and been hurt by the big, bad world and carry their pain around like a blanket (more like a shell, typically) that they think will somehow protect them from getting hurt again.

It's a sad reality. But it is also a hopeful one that kids can, intuitively, often see through that pain and that heartache and that cynicism to see that there is something more hopeful for them and their future.

And good for them.

Love,
Ben

Being decent

Nine years ago, liberals like myself were aghast and outraged as Republican prosecutors charged President Bill Clinton with perjury and obstruction of justice in the Monica Lewinsky investigation by Kenneth Star. "There was no crime that took place," we argued. "There should have been no investigation in the first place."

"No," conservatives argued. "It doesn't matter if there was a crime involved. What matters is that the President lied under oath, crime or not."

Nine years later, those same liberals all argue that Lewis Libby should go down for the same crime, and conservatives argue for a pardon.

All's fair in love and war, you think? Not really, I don't think. Just the same old bullshit.

What we need to learn to do, all of us, is to do the decent thing. And stop playing games with politics and prosecutions and one another with some self-righteous sense that any of us have all the answers. We don't. It doesn't matter what party or what ideology or what law we operate under.

None of us have all the answers.

Which is exactly why we need to be more decent to one another, not tougher and more mean-spirited.

None of us embody that elusive perfection that we so wish that we embodied, but cannot possibly be, no matter how tough we are with one another.

We've all been kind of pricks to one another, is the truth. Not just for the last 6 years. But since the dawn of humanity. And the only way forward is to leave that tragic legacy behind.

The only way forward is to be more decent.

Everything else is us deceiving ourselves and one another. The consequence of a long legacy of forcing and repressing ourselves and one another to pretend to be better than we really are.

But if we can learn to embrace our inner pricks, and be more decent with ourselves and one another, we can move forward.

And that is the only true path of progress.

Love,
Ben

My ideal life

It's funny. My dreams for myself have both changed and stayed the same in so many ways from when I was 18.

When I was 18 and just beginning school at my alma mater, Wichita State University, I had two major goals.

To be a good dad. And to gain wisdom.

Not to terribly shabby goals for an 18-year-old, I don't think, looking back. Some pretty fine goals, actually, I think. I'm proud of that kid.

Today, my ideal life would look like this.

I'd like to teach with young people of all ages - middle school, high school, university level, and even elementary school, if I could get the opportunity though I lack the credentials, currently - and write somewhere with plenty of freedom to do both without all the pressures and limitations of departmental and school politics and with as little intrusion by other pressures, from the state and elsewhere, as possible. I'm all about openness and engaging others, inside and outside the places I work. But I want it to be as respectful and decent and intellectually honest as possible. Meaning, we can disagree as much as we agree, and noone gets their arm twisted over it.

I'd like to teach and write where I have maximum freedom to just do the best job I know how. Noone does everything well all the time. I just want to do my best job, make my best judgments, and to deal as little as possible with the pressures bearing to compromise those essential responsibilities of teaching and writing as little as possible.

I'd like to make enough money to be comfortable. And I wouldn't mind people reading my books and maybe speaking with people about my ideas, sometimes.

I'd like to fall in love with someone who makes my heart flutter and makes me want to collapse when she is gone (one day both of us will be gone for one another, no matter how well our lives together turn out). I want to raise children with her and get old with her and still feel passionately in love and feel total respect and admiration for her while we raise our children, even as I learn and know about all her flaws and mistakes and more humble qualities. I'd like to have a little house and pay for it, maybe a house my family built if I end up settling in the Wichita area, and stick with it for awhile, maybe. I'd like to be my ideal image of John Dreifort - a history professor at Wichita State that I never had but who raised a fine son in Darren Dreifort, the young pitcher for the Wichita State Shockers then L.A. Dodgers - raising a good kid, doing good work, and living a good life, humbly and as well as I can doing good with the life that I have.

I'd like to live a good life and be proud of it.

That's my ideal life. Falling in love is key to that life, since being in love, for real, is the most beautiful feeling I've ever experienced in my life and the one I'd most like to repeat.

That'd be a nice life. I could love a life like that.

Love,
Ben

The folly of infallible judgment

Charles Krauthammer writes a piece, today, that both argues well the merits of Lewis Libby's case and illustrates the arrogance of partisan efforts to take people down.

Fitzgerald's Folly

What's interesting about Charles' piece is that he simultaneously takes apart the generally politically-motivated case for putting Lewis Libby in prison and defends the poor case for prosecuting Bill Clinton and the vitriol of conservatives in going after Sandy Berger.

The bottom line is that this prosecution, like so many prosecutions of public figures, was largely political. It isn't political in a conventional sense. Patrick Fitzgerald is a Republican going after a Republican Chief of Staff for a Republican Vice President. What is political about this trial and this prosecution is that it is meant to validate a growing sense among many established journalists, politicians and advisors and legal and political folks that the Bush Administration took them on a wild goose chase in Iraq and that the Valerie Plame affair was yet another dirty-handed way of washing their hands of that fated decision. All kinds of folks both blaming the Administration for a decision to that was largely popular at the time, especially in those established circles - I thought it was a rash move and said so at a time when very few people did so publicly, certainly not very many among either Republican or Democratic political establishments - and are trying to validate their sense that something tough must be done to hold them accountable both for that decision and allegations that they outed Plame out of revenge and dirty tricks. The essence of the growing and tough-minded consensus among many political observers is that the Administration lied about the war in Iraq, that they smeared a CIA agent who dared challenge their lies, and that what is needed is for someone's head to roll.

The first claim is partly true. The Administration did, likely, exaggerate claims about weapons of mass destruction to advocate this war. We do know that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons, because he had used them before on the Kurds. But we had no clue about a nuclear program, is the truth, and the evidence for that claim was trumped up to bolster an already present desire to invade Iraq, take advantage of anger after 9/11, and "take the fight to the terrorists."

The second claim - that the Administration was trying to get revenge on Joseph Wilson - I'm not as convinced about. I'm convinced that the Administration was pretty slimy in demoting Richard Clarke as he warned the Administration that the war might inspire a new generation of terrorists and might likely be counterproductive. But I'm not convinced that the Administration was engaging in revenge against Valerie Plame. I used to think, out of cynicism, largely, but with very little evidence, that this was likely true, when this story first broke and it was Karl Rove and not Lewis Libby who was the focus of peoples' hostility. But, in retrospect, what I was largely feeling was anger both about the decision to go to war and about the denials by the Administration that things were going better than they were, when it was clear to more objective and forward-looking observers that things were not going so well, which is exactly what many important counterterrorism and international policy observers warned the President would likely happen (though, in the President's defense, important international policy scholars, like Joe Nye, signed onto this war when he first announced its possibility, only to rethink the war in retrospect). I didn't really have much evidence that the Administration was engaged in dirty tricks, but I had all kinds of suspicions with the Richard Clarke saga finding its way to front pages.

So, I have serious doubts and reservations about the second claim and have seen very little evidence, as of yet, that it is true, especially given that it looks like Valerie Plame was not, in fact, covert, something that is reinforced by the instructions by the judge to ignore the original criminal allegations in question. And the second claim means a lot to me since catching someone in a technicality when there may not be a serious wrong in the first place is itself generally dirty pool, in my estimation, very comparable to the dirty pool engaged in by Bill Clinton's impeachment prosecutors almost a decade ago.

The third claim is really the one that troubles me the most: that heads need to roll. It not only troubles me because I'm not clear that there was a underlying crime or any serious underlying wrongdoing in this situation, nor just because lying to a prosecutor when you are afraid that you might be prosecuted, even if there is no crime, is both a human and clearly, from the cases of Lewis Libby and Bill Clinton, a fairly common, human mistake made by every very good people - meaning, I think, to some degree, unless there is some other more serious issue involved, this is a far too unrealistic and perfectionistic standard to hold average and even very good people to that is done when we don't give a shit about what is realistic or decent to others and just abstract and self-righteous notions of good that are both meant to validate our own sense of self-righteous perfectionism and to validate why our dickishness is really because what good people we are trying to uphold standards of decency and law in a society that would crumble if we weren't such pricks.

Meaning, the underlying political nature of this case is a lot of pricks in established political circles all patting themselves on the back on how their prickishness really makes the world a better place, even as it has experienced such dramatic failures in Iraq, with Iran, and elsewhere.
And I just have no patience or tolerance for that bullshit and all of the self-deception and self-validation for being a self-congratulating asshole that is involved with that kind of rationalization.

This case is about people trying to make heads roll for this war and this Administration. Even if Lewis Libby was not responsible for going to war. And even if many of the very people involved in the head-rolling are much more responsible for the the push to go to war since they much more publicly advocated that move than did Lewis Libby. And it is also about validating that what this country has really needed, not just on Iraq but for everything, is for assholes like them to really make heads roll. They're just trying to keep the world safe. They're not self-righteous, self-congratulating bullies who simultaneously want forgiveness for their own advocacy for the war and who want heads to roll for the President's advocacy of that war and for his and Vice President Cheney's and Lewis Libby's presumed efforts to get revenge on their detractors. The current political era is a function of people who know what is right and wrong and are insistent that bad actors get their due, not self-righteous bullies validating their desire and persistent insistence on getting and forcing their way on whatever issue tickles their fancy. They are defenders of the law. And how dare anyone suggest otherwise.

This prosecution was political. Not just because Democrats and liberals were the chorus of folks in the press and in the blogosphere and in the discussion to take someone, anyone, down for this and the whole mess in Iraq. It was political because it validated everyone's sense that it was the Bush Administration's version of bullying that was problematic, not the bullying, itself.

Ties in those cases and in all cases of prosecution, I believe and presumption of innocence seems to imply, should go to the runner. Meaning, we should presume that people should be free, if we're not sure. And if the case involves flawed humanity that doesn't immediately hurt anyone directly or intentionally, I believe.

I just think it's worthless to go after people for the sake of going after people. And as a teacher who sees kids act poorly every single day of my life and having some experience with the criminal justice system, I'm completely convinced that the only thing that makes a difference in peoples' behavior, for real, is conscience. And in the cases of Lewis Libby and Bill Clinton and Sandy Berger (who I did not want to see prosecuted, either, even though I think he, too, looks like he was likely guilty of a relatively minor crime), you had three people who were committing crimes to avoid punishment elsewhere. In the courtroom, for Libby, in the court of public opinion and in the case for disbarment for Bill Clinton, and at the ballot box and public opinion polls, for Berger protecting President Clinton.

The truth is that this period - the Iraq war, the Libby trial, and the deeply hateful and polarizing partisanship and tough action that has characterized every political discussion of this period- has completely sapped my trust of partisans or established political folks persisently defending their own behavior and advocacy and persistently looking to take down their opponents and any arguments meant to advance a larger cause without genuine responsibility to a humbler and wiser view of human nature and reality which seeks to constructively lift up humanity and resolve serious conflicts rather than out of a hunger for power or some arrogant notion that any person, any group, any ideology, any party, any leader, anyone knows best with any kind of finality or final authority or infallibility.

There is no such thing as infallible judgment. And one of lifes' most profound tragedies is that the very people who are most convinced of the infallibility of their judgment are those most ready and willing to impose it on others and sacrafice others to their cause. The 20th century was littered with so many of such leaders sacraficing millions to their cause. The 21st century, sadly, seems poised to repeat that mistake. History repeating itself, as Marx might say, first as tragedy, then as farce.

I don't trust such people to be leaders, is the truth. And noone should, in reality. Because you will always be the person you never suspected who will be sacraficed to their cause next. I've learned this from experience, having liberals sacrafice me and my well-being numerous times when my thinking did not conform to the party line, from my liberal advocacy days until now.

The truth is that the kind of partisanship that we are witnessing today is exactly why the leadership and example of so many political leaders, journalists, activists, and even scholars and ordinary folks who follow politics should not be trusted, and certainly not trusted as worthy enough to presume to know how to run or to determine the outcome of peoples' lives. That, as much as any other reason, is why liberal democracies do, more, and should, as much as possible, presume in favor of respecting peoples' freedom and ability to self-determine their lives, rather than presume that any of the ambitious, often arrogant, and generally power-hungry folks involved in the current political dramas of the day would know best how they should run their lives.

And yet we always seek out a religious or political or intellectual messiah who will finally save us from all this free will we experience in our lives and use and abuse, no matter how many ways we try to contain that very real and staying fact of life, no matter how many rules we put in place and no matter how strictly we enforce them. We use and abuse it to learn from it, largely. And in the bigger picture, we do learn from it, when we aren't making excuses for our failures, as is the mainstay of the current political era. As individuals and as a culture, we generally learn from our failures. That is how we've made the advances we have made today that have led us to more freedom, and stronger liberal democratic institutions and values. And learning to trust that direction for our forward movement is one of the most important lessons that we are learning, right now.

The truth is that there is no leader, no prosecutor, no journalist, no scholar, no activist, no real or mythical mother or father, no religious messiah who has the infallible judgment and advice and wisdom that we seek. Which is why we must learn to determine our lives better ourselves rather than always look to some central governing body to organize it for us.

And all of our efforts to have some leader, some governing body, some group, some idea, someone or thing to finally govern all of us and standardize all of our behavior have always resulted in what we are witnessing today: hubris. The arrogance of power and the notion that it can once and for all resolve our most pressing problems and needs.

There is no such thing as infallible judgment, anywhere. And its absence is all the more reason to presume that people should have their lives governed best by their own self-direction and self-determination and freedom and as least as possible from distant powerful persons or forces.

And the fact that Scooter Libby's conviction is still being debated, as well as the 2000 election, and ideological purity and superiority, should be the clearest evidence that no power, no authority, no ideological orientation will ever resolve any question with finality, ever. Which should humble our faith in any of those means of trying to resolve such questions and turn to the one place where issues do find some humbler and more authentic resolution: in our own consciences and engagement and learning and intelligent reflection.

And the saddest fact of this period is how, at every turn when people involved should have been and should be turning to honest, engaged, open-minded and open-hearted, and thoughtful reflection, discussion, learning, and disagreement, with an eye to choices and resolutions of least hubris and claims on final rendering, we have persisently, instead, turned to maximum power and force and ideological bitterness and self-righteousness as the poorest substitute possible.

In the cases of Lewis Libby and Bill Clinton and Sandy Berger, and, at this point, virtually every important political matter, the various partisans have seen these dramas through the lenses of their ideological animus and their self-righteous claims on final understanding and loyalty to their friends and animosity towards their opponents.

And none of it serves anyone in any deepest sense.

Something tells me that this is not the best that we can do. This is not our highest humanity. And I think I understand much better, today, why the most liberally democratic minded writers that I read in high school and college and graduate school always referred to such nebulous concepts as our "highest humanity." Because the truth is that we can wallow in our basest and lowest impulses as long as we like. We can cloak them in the law, in power, in authority, and in virtually any institution we desire. The Nazi regime did this very thing in almost every institution in German society, as did Communists in Russia, Cuba, China, North Korea and around the world. The law and political authority above all else, for everyone who is romanticizing the law as some final value of a liberal society during these times, is the hiding place for our cowardice and basest impulses.

As sad as it is, ultimately, for humanity, if we choose destructive and self-destructive and dysfunctional means of dealing with one another and our shared and independent problems, there really is nothing to stop us, since the law and political authority are generally rationalized as a part of those destructive and self-destructive choices. Genocide, sectarianism, repression, apartheid, slavery, and other vices of power are regularly rationalized in the name of law and political authority.

Our highest humanity is available to us when we choose to leave behind such legacies, tragically long after they have done their worst.

This period is not our highest humanity. That can only be a plain fact for anyone with any sense of hope, at all, for our future beyond humanity's periodic tumbles. We would have to be blind to look at how we are conducting ourselves today and say this is what our highest values have to offer us. Or hopeless.

Naziism and Communism were and are outgrowths of that kind of hopeless cynicism, I can see more clearly today as I watch it parade as the best that liberal democracy has to offer.

Our most important question at the beginning of the 21st century is are we going to let that tragic legacy persist for another generation and another century? Or are we going to more fully embrace our highest and strongest liberal democratic values?

Hubris persisently haunts humanity's history and present. And yet we limp and march forward. Sometimes too confidently. At times too timidly. Perhaps one day in a way that fully embraces everything that is best and worst in us, and chooses, over time, as individuals and as societies, to do better, despite our worst and out of a commitment to what can be best in all of us, given a genuine commitment from our free will to do so.

Perhaps by learning to embrace our worst instincts, we can learn, better to distinguish them from our best and to choose better as we learn to more honestly face ourselves and give each other greater space to face one another without fear of attack or retribution or other sources of fear that undermine our mutual trust and bonding and more genuine mutual responsibility.

For now, we use our fallible judgments and falllible institutions to yield the most good possible while we build better ones.

And the most important institution that we build in liberal democratic societies is the institution of the individual. Educated and self-governing, independent with an eye to genuine interdependence, which can only truly transpire with respect for her or his independence, confident and with eyes wide open in a world of uncertainty and far too much fear for us to continue to contribute more of it and have it continue to be so counterproductive to our aspirations, for ourselves and for one another.

Absent these kinds of aspirations, we can always count on our more power-hungry, hateful and less thoughtful, ideologically-tinged and motivated activities and institutions even in liberal democratic societies to be perpetually sprinkled with illegitimacy, lacking real public trust and credibility. They will sadly deserve that tinge, as it is and will be clear and apparent to everyone that they fail to live up to those highest aspirations, so lost are they and we living down to our basest impulses as it concerns power and one another.

We can avoid that. But it will mean being bigger. When much of the world is rationalizing being smaller.

Either way, we will live with the institutions, the governments, and the worlds that we choose.

May we choose wisely.

Love,
Ben

David Boies and Scooter Libby

Robert Novak is dead-on in his Washington Post article (which is rare for Robert, in my view, since he is, generally, such a mean-spirited, snarly son-of-a-bitch).

A Verdict on the Wilson Affair

If David Boies, the lawyer for Vice President Gore in Gore vs. Bush, is arguing that Libby shouldn't have been prosecuted because there was no underlying crime, for which I have seen zero evidence that there was and which the Judge specifically ruled inadmissable because, in all likelihood, there was no underlying crime - Valerie Plame was not likely covert, and certainly not within the 5 year timeline needed to make this the alleged crime - then liberals, Democrats, conservatives, and Republicans should be taking a second look at this case. Boises arguments are strong ones for an appeal in this case, and if they lose on appeal, President Bush should pardon Scooter Libby on the merits of the case, assuming that this is the case.

The truth is exactly what Robert Novak argues in this article. This was a political prosecution that was not sound on its own merits. If Valerie Plame was covert and Scooter Libby knew that fact and he and anyone or a conspiracy of folks in the Administration set out to expose her for political purposes, I have much less sympathy for Scooter Libby, even as I doubt this prosecution would do much good.

But the much more serious situation, here, is that it is very likely that David Boies is right. That there was no underlying crime here. And that liberals and the press have gotten wrapped up in their animus for the Administration and convicted a man for a crime for which there was no underlying crime. There is a very strong case to be made that this was a misunderstanding of an argument about the relationship between Joseph Wilson and his trip to Niger and the Administration and not an effort to out a covert CIA agent who, at this point, it does not appear was covert, and for which this case should likely be dismissed, unless evidence is produced to demonstrate otherwise. And even then, I, personally, would be open to a pardon, unless I hear a clear case for why his prosecution would do some actual good, for which I have not heard, for all of the cheerleading coverage I've heard on the conviction in this case.

The truth is that our bloodlust and eagerness to get tough and force our way through difficult issues has likely gotten the best of us in this situation. And a potentially and very likely innocent man's freedom may be hanging in the balance while we try to see past all of our animosities.

Lewis Libby still has my presumption of innocence in this case. Not because I don't think that he lied. I do think that he lied. I just think he lied about nothing out of his fear of being prosecuted, not necessarily because he had done anything illegal. The ever-feeding cycle of cynicism in this case and in Washington should not be a reason to put a man in jail. To the contrary, we should face up to the consequences of our zealous efforts to muscle our way through difficult issues if we ever want to get Washington on the better track.

Love,
Ben

The advantage of feeling like a nobody

I've had one of the shittiest months of my life. I don't know if I can quite remember a time in my life when I was told so many things that were wrong with me. Maybe when I was a kid, when my parents were constantly fed up with me. That would explain why I felt so bad at that time.

This week I've felt like a nobody. I haven't felt like that much in my life, because my life has been so full of accomplishment, at this point.

But some people are convinced that I am wrong about something they disagree with me about and all they see in me is confirmation of their thinking that I am off my nut. And I've never been told so often just how shitty people think I am. I deal with it all the time from the kids. But hearing it from adults has me feeling like a nobody this week.

And the advantage of feeling like a nobody I realize, today, is that it reminds me how much everyone needs to feel appreciated. No matter how much or little they have to contribute to the world. Everyone needs appreciation and support. But we spend a lot of time degrading and mocking people who are nicer or more supportive. I've always been a nice guy, so I've never really known much differently. But as I get older, I realize how much people see nice as weakness rather than strength, even as they view mean with suspicion and fear.

We're all so afraid, noone can get it straight, is the truth. And 9/11 teaches us that sometimes stronger people have to take a hit before the contrast is stark enough for people to see what real weakness looks like. Real weakness is killing or oppressing innocent people for power or for a cause. Real strength is being able to take the hit, even when it never seems to want to let up.

Today is a day after a month of taking the hits that never seem to want to let up.

I volunteered to take a job that most people would not want: to take the kids struggling the most and with the worst attitudes and behavior, generally, and to be committed to their success despite all the odds. And all I've gotten is shit that I have not walked on water or worked miracles to force them to be national merit scholars and doing all of my paperwork with precise exactitude after a year on the job.

Now I see why noone wants to do this work. Why so many people drop out of it and move on to greener pastures. Because it involves people from all over the place trying to leverage for results that can only be earned and cannot be forced, even if I wanted to. People become smart because they choose to take smart seriously. That cannot be forced, no matter how much we might like to try.

And today I feel like nobody. Because nobody is ever satisfied with a damn thing I do. No matter how hard I try.

And that's how many people and kids feel without someone like me telling them what a good job they're doing, all the time, even if they aren't national merit scholars.

Now I just need to hear that, every once in awhile.

Love,
Ben

The consequence of getting tough

I had a meeting for a student, today, which completely epitomizes the consequence of getting tough.

I had a student, today, who got in a fight. She also happened to be in special education. Which is a mess.

Instead of just owning up and saying that she was sorry and that maybe she just shouldn't fight again in the future (a topic around which there is, actually, quite a bit of real complexity for both kids and adults, no matter how much we try to oversimplify it with rules and laws against fighting), this kid's mom and social worker sat and made a hour's worth of excuses. She was bi-polar, she was overloaded with work, she was stressed, yada, yada, yada. There may be truth to the idea that stress makes us more prone to aggression, but I watched this girl wail on another girl in the middle of the cafeteria, provoked only by her talking and her "mean mugging," as the kids would say.

And I sat there the entire time thinking, "What good is this doing for this kid? What mom would do this? Find all kinds of excuses for a kids' behavior instead of just expecting them to say they were sorry and that they'll try not to do it again?"

But you know why people do this?

To get out of the punishment. There's no other reason, really. They may really believe it, at some level. But it is clearly to provide a rationale to keep from being punished. As surely as people rationalize popular governing philosophies to get rewarded and grab for power. They may actually believe it, too. Stalin really believed Communism. Hitler really believed Naziism. And they both rationalized the shit out of life to get what they were looking for.

Everyone does it. Kids. Adults, Politicians. Citizens. Mothers. Fathers. Employers. Employees. Teachers. Students. Scholars. Dumbasses. Everyone. We all do it. We all do it to get out of the punishment. Which is exactly what allowed the Nazis to maintain power in Germany. Because everyone was too fuckin' terrified to do otherwise. A page which contemporary liberals and conservatives have apparently taken from the playbook of Joseph Goebbels.

And we are stuck with it now and forever until people get the courage to stop doing it.

The truth is that the Commuists and the Nazis were not quite so different from us. They were just more extreme in their commitment to getting tough and forcing "progress," a mantle they both embraced as wholeheartedly as Democrats and Republicans embrace that mantle today.

The great tragedy of the 20th century was that Germans embraced that mantle of forced "progress" for more than a decade in the 30's and 40's. The Russian people, much more sadly, embraced it for more than 70 years. The Chinese and North Koreans have embraced it, now, for almost 60 years. Syria for more than 40.

And the democracies of the West whose example and criticism and engagement and fruits of freedom were so critical to the fall of the Nazis and the Communists in the 20th century and are so needed to free the peoples of China, North Korea and Syria, have, at the beginning of the 21st century, embraced the very philosophy that brought the dictators in each of those governments to power.

And the biggest lie of all was not Hitler's. It was the lie that it was all that force rather than our free will and conscience that led to more responsible lives, when it is so clearly the threat of force that leads students' like my kid, today, and those in power and everyone to avoid taking responsibility, if we could ever just be honest about that fact. With others and, much more importantly, with ourselves.

And that is the true consequence of getting tough. And it always has been. This one long lie that we've told ourselves and one another that we were and are better than we really were and are, all because of how much more people were forced to be better. The bigger lie we tell is how we are. That we are better than we are, not just that we were better in the past. All because of how others forced us to be as good as we are today. That all the force in Washington is clearly making Washington a better place, and all of America and the world a better place as a consequence. Which is why we need that power, today. To make others as good as us.

That is the biggest lie. Joseph Goebbels would be proud. For all of it. How tough we get. And all the lies we tell in its name. To others. And to ourselves.

Love,
Ben