Limits...

In so many ways, it's so appropriate that my first book will be called The Limits of Power:):)...

I've been internalizing the lessons of limits, recently...

Time, money, personal, professional, personal organizational...people's limits, generally...

It makes so much more sense, I know now, better, from experience than from intuition, to internalize limits by screwing them up rather than unreasonably expecting people to be either scared their whole lives and not learning the lesson, for real, at all...

Freedom is the best climate for learning...that's why free countries are so much stronger than unfree countries (and why free peoples and individuals, I think, are so much stronger than unfree peoples and individuals)...

And I've just been learning a whole cluster of limits over the course of the last year...and in this last summer school semester, in particular (largely because the bigger issues that I needed to learn, more, are already much more under my belt)...

And just appreciating, better, how much more sustainably we learn these lessons when we have the freedom to experiment and learn and screw them up rather than unreasonably expecting that people learn them by being afraid to make mistakes (which doesn't actually learn the lesson...it just leaves people afraid of it)...

Morality works the same way, I think...as does the law...

As does power, I think...

And America is just learning that lesson the hard way, right now, I think...which is fine, actually...sometimes the hard way is the better way...when it involves more freedom to screw it up, I think...

There are signs that we are learning our lesson on this, I think...or at least that the Administration is...

Ashton Carter and William Perry, former Secretary of Defense under President Clinton, suggested in the June 22, 2006 Washington Post that the Bush Administration strike North Korea's recently developed ICBM missile capabilities (which have range to reach U.S. mainland and which are in violation of North Korea's agreements with the U.S. and the six party negotiations on North Korea's nuclear weapons development...

Carter and Perry are in good faith...as was the Administration in Iraq...they are also almost assuredly mistaken in their belief that such an attack would not be interpreted by the North Korean people and the world community as an attack on North Korea and have very, very serious political consequences, internationally and in North Korea and very likely speed up the development of their defensive capabilities -- after being attacked, of course -- or worse, as Jack Pritchard suggests in the Washington Post following Carter and Perry's suggestion, that North Korea sells its capabilities, in retaliation, to highest or most dangerous bidders, like Al Queda...

There are just limits to power that people who are going to exercise it responsibly need to face...

And, thankfully...on this count...the Administration seems to be learning the lesson...Dick Cheney is downplaying the idea of an attack on the North Korean missile capability, quite reasonably and with much respect to Ashton Carter and William Perry...

And demonstrating that, hopefully, that the Administration is learning some of the lessons around power and its limits (though their policy toward Iran is not promising, at this point, on this count)...

Limits, I'm learning -- including the limits of power -- are often best learned by screwing them up...not by expecting, unreasonably and perpetually in serious conflict with reality, that people live their lives afraid of them and never really learning the lesson at all...

Moral, political and legal limits work the same way...

And the Administration seems to be learning this lesson, better, it seems...let's hope it's a lesson that is being internalized, more generally...

In the meantime, I'm just proud that I'm beginning to internalize these limits for myself...

I'm so sad that doing so meant losing Brandi and souring my relationship with my professors and even some of my friends...

But I'd rather sour those relationships and learn the lesson than not really ever learn the lesson, at all, which was the alternative:)...

Even my relationship with Brandi, as incredibly difficult as it is for me to say that...

I've got work to do:):)...have a great weekend, everyone:):)...

Go screw some things up and learn, this weekend, will ya:):)...

Love,
Ben

Crazy...

After this sustained, self-assured feeling about my work that I experienced, yesterday, I found myself in doubt, again, last night...

What always fuels my doubts is not any argument or logic or thinking or idea that has ever made me seriously rethink my ideas...

It's always just feeling and often perceived as so much in the minority in how force should be used...the perception that I am too soft...

Softness I regard as a good thing...as soft as is reasonably possible while still dealing constructively with serious problems and threats we face...

Clapton's Tears in Heaven reflect this kind of softness, I think...and the way it reflects greater wisdom in the face of tragedy...as does Roberta Flack's Killing Me Softly (and Lauryn Hill's really incredible, if illegal, cover), in its own way...

I've never heard someone make strong arguments against the principle of least possible necessary aggression or any of the more general ideas around force that I've articulated, that I at least can't account for better, I think, with these ideas (though I acknowledge that I need to do so in a more clear, organized way so that people understand the arguments better)...

So what's crazy it's that it's not argument, at all, that fuels so much self-doubt for me, on this one...

It's just this popular prediliction against softness and my openly alligning myself with softer, more constructive approaches, as much as possible...and the way that this gets me persistently condescended by people who haven't spent nearly the amount of time or effort thinking about these things...

I've lost a lot over the course of doing this work, so I'm decided to write the work, put it out there, and if it gets rejected for good reason that can be articulated then I'll listen and change my thinking accordingly...

But if it gets rejected because of some feeling that a defense of efforts to justify more aggressive approaches on matters of international and domestic policy and the professional and interpersonal applications that I think these ideas have isn't needed and that people can go on justifying the often terribly circular and underdeveloped ideas around the often self-centered and overbearing use of force then I guess I don't quite know what I'm going to do...

I guess I'm prepared to go do something less public and more independent than teaching and writing...

Something where I can just be left alone, as much as possible, I suppose...

But first I'll write the book...I've gone to too much trouble on this, at this point...

I just believe these ideas, too much, at this point, to give them up without hearing some really, really effective rebuttal to them...

I'm prepared to give them up for the right reasons...I just haven't heard them, yet...

I guess I'm preparing myself for either the latter...or just kind of doing something else, altogether if the silence gets too deafening or if my bosses or professors decide that I'm just too much of a hassle with all my newfangled thinking to keep around...

Anyway...I've got work to do...just thinking...

Love,
Ben

Enjoying the moment...

I have classwork still to finish...

And I have a book to get started writing on...

I leave in mid-July to go work a high school forensics camp at Illinois State University with my best friend from my WSU forensics days, Bond Benton, who is doing impressive work these days training diplomat-type folks in intercultural communication...

But I'm enjoying the moment, for just a moment...knowing that my work is a very important contribution to the worlds of policy, psychology, education, economics, the social sciences and almost any professional field that deals with people issues (which is every professional field)...

My education work, in particular, has refined so much just from this most recent stint as a student, again:)...

I have much to write...many books in me...

But the last few weeks have been a period of recognition that for all my self-doubt over the last 4 years...that I think my work will be recognized for what it's already been in my own personal and professional life...as a very significant contribution:)...

The integration of policy and psychology work, in particular, and a better understanding of both from the perspectives of both fields and with applications of how least possible necessary aggression, as a set of principles, reflects on so many issues in both fields, at aggregate levels of understanding people and policy and politics and culture and in more intimate personal, professional, and organizational levels...

I've got work to do...but this has been an important day of appreciation, on my own part, that if my big life goal was to contribute understanding that people either can or not take advantage of...I've definitely done that...and I still have quite a bit more to go:):)...

Now if I can just find love and get my apartment clean:):)...and get some finances in order...

My life would be complete:):)...at least for now:):)...

Have a great week, everyone:):)...

Love,
Ben

The Wall...

Abraham Maslow, in the Farther Reaches of Human Nature, discusses a graphic in psychological circles that features a picture of a group of babies on one side of a page and a picture of a group of adults in a subway car, looking alienated and blank-faced on another side of the page, and the question printed below:

"What happened?"

It's a great question that adults often begin to lose track of, I think...

And Pink Floyd's The Wall, which Melissa rented for us recently, really begins to answer that question...

Pink Floyd's The Wall on Wikipedia...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Floyd_The_Wall

The alientation that people begin to feel as they build emotional defenses to protect themselves from the ways that they're vulnerabilities are exploited and as we are treated badly by the outside world...

It is the self-fulfilling prophecy that humanity faces as we grow up and face our responsibility in the dysfunctional, hurtful and controlling ways with one another...

Clockwork Orange is a very similarly dark analysis of this process of control and alienation well worth a viewing...

The only way out is to face up to our responsibility in this process and to give up the legacies of alienation, defensiveness, cynicism, control, and hurt that keep the self-fulfilling prophecy in place...

There is no real progress without facing this legacy...everything else is illusion...and powerful illusion, at that...

And The Wall is a brilliant commentary on that fantasy of trying to make the pain go away only to keep it in place...

I've watched so many friends do this that I can hardly keep count, any more...drug abuse and drug control are both a function of this kind of alienation and control...as are, much more dangerously, I think, the more paranoid elements of the gun culture as well as the more paranoid elements of the gun control culture...

We can change this...and as simple as it seems...it involves treating one another better...

And tearing down the wall...

The DVD retrospective, in particular, is a must see for educators...

Have a great week, everyone:):)...

Love,
Ben

Being sure that an idea is good...

I'm beginning to learn how to know if an original idea is any good...it's when it works over and over again...

I've had several personal and professional situations, recently, which have made me beyond a doubt, reasonable or unreasonable, sure of the application of the ideas I've been working with in interpersonal situations, nevertheless policy...meaning both that softer and least possible aggressive means deal with situations better, generally...but also that this the direction that people will take, not just that they should take...

That's what I love about policy...it's the coming together of the ideal world of moral aspirations and the messy world of real human interaction...

As Bobby Kennedy said...real moral courage is rare, truth be told...

And it isn't enhanced by power...quite the contrary, it is often eroded and undermined by power...people with power can be good people...but power can often undermine an otherwise moral or decent aim...

Real leaders of moral courage -- Jesus, Buddha, Ghandi, King...and I would include Desmond Tutu -- don't use or need power to have influence...

They use the soft power of ideas and genuine justice...

The tricky part is that none of these men have been responsible for using force to defend people from harm, inside their countries or outside...

And force is definitely needed, at times, for self-defense...or, in the case of Iraq, to remove a bloody tyrant or to protect the weak from the predatory...

But the insanity that humanity creates for itself is that once it is embroiled in the responsible use of power and wealth (a form of power) and the use of force...it often gets lost in its own rationalizations about it's need to have it and use the maximum amount of it and with as much frequency as it can...

And that is the sad and perpetual tragedy of humanity...it is not unavoidable...it is not unchangeable...

And most hopeful, it is not unchanging...

It does and is changing, as I write these words...
What is most hopeful about this tragedy...is as Bobby Kennedy quoted Aeschylus as saying...

"Pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon heart until at last in our own despair comes wisdom by the awful grace of God."

Or as Aeschylus himself said...

"Wisdom comes through suffering.
Trouble, with its memories of pain,
Drips in our hearts as we try to sleep,
So men against their will
Learn to practice moderation.
Favours come to us from gods."

I find myself, like most people, softening in my old age...because the failure to do so is arrogance and pride...neither of which are capable of leading anything...

The one most important thing I am most proud of in my life is that I will likely be a pretty good father and husband...

I'm realizing, as I grow older, that our influence in this world and even the next is very limited...but often lasting...at least it is lasting if you have something to share worth keeping...

Have a great week, everyone:):)...

Love,
Ben

A simple case for why serious thought matters in politics and life...

For those unconvinced that thought matters...one of the most brilliant policy scholars in the world makes the case...

I unequivocally support a plan that makes a safe transition to Iraqi democratic self-determined and effective security and agree with conservative military historian Frederick Kagan that victory in Iraq will both take time and much more attention to the practical complications of Americans and Iraqis securing Iraq and making a thoughtful and safe transition to Iraqi self-determination...which Kagan makes a brilliant and practical case for in the Weekly Standard reprinted here in Kurdmedia.com (isn't the internet brilliant?)...

Frederick Kagan...A Plan for Victory in Iraq...

http://www.kurdmedia.com/articles.asp?id=12440

And agree with Fareed Zakaria that a legitimate political authority is the only way to promote a sustainable democracy in Iraq...

Fareed Zakaria...Our Last Real Chance...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4711931

Having said that, Fukuyama's case for the need for thoughtful and constructive deliberation and even reconsideration in politics -- and in life -- is a very welcome one...

Love,
Ben

San Jose Mercury News
April 12, 2006

Making a case for political shift on war in Iraq
By Francis Fukuyama

Seven weeks ago, I published my case against the Iraq war. I wrote that although I had originally advocated military intervention in Iraq, and had even signed a letter to that effect shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, I had since changed my mind.

But apparently this kind of honest acknowledgment is verboten. In the weeks since my book came out, I've been challenged, attacked and vilified from both ends of the ideological spectrum.

From the right, columnist Charles Krauthammer has accused me of being an opportunistic traitor to the neoconservative cause -- and a coward to boot. From the left, I've been told that I have ``blood on my hands'' for having initially favored toppling Saddam Hussein and that my ``apology'' won't be accepted.

In our ever-more-polarized political debate, it appears that it is now wrong to ever change your mind, even if empirical evidence from the real world suggests you ought to. I find this a strange and disturbing conclusion.

For the record, I did change my mind, but in the year preceding the war -- not after the invasion. In 2002, I told the London Times that ``the use of military power to push (Iraqi democracy) forward is a big roll of the dice. We may not win on this one.'' On the first anniversary of Sept. 11, I argued in the Washington Post that we should invade Iraq only with approval from the U.N. Security Council, and in December of that year, I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal warning that the project of democratizing Iraq and the Mideast might come to look like empire and that it violated the conservative principle of prudence.

But when my political shift occurred is not important: Even if it had come a year or two later, it would still not have represented a cowardly retreat or an apologia, but a realistic, intellectually honest willingness to face the new facts of the situation.

In my view, no one should be required to apologize for having supported intervention in Iraq before the war. There were important competing moral goods on both sides of the argument, something that many on the left still refuse to recognize.

The debate over the war shouldn't have been whether it was morally right to topple Saddam (which it clearly was), but whether it was prudent to do so given the possible costs and potential consequences of intervention and whether it was legitimate for the United States to invade in the unilateral way that it did.

It was perfectly honorable to agonize over the wisdom of the war, and in many ways admirable that people on the left, such as Christopher Hitchens, George Packer, Michael Ignatieff and Jacob Weisberg, supported intervention. That position was much easier to defend in early 2003, however, before we found absolutely no stocks of chemical or biological weapons and no evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons program.

(I know that many on the left believe that the prewar estimates about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were all a deliberate fraud by the Bush administration, but if so, it was one in which the U.N. weapons inspectors and French intelligence were also complicit.)

But in the years since then, it is the right that has failed to come to terms with these uncomfortable facts. The failure to find WMD and to make a quick transition to a stable democracy -- as well as the prisoner abuse and the inevitable bad press that emerges from any prolonged occupation -- have done enormous damage to America's credibility and standing in the world. These intangible costs have to be added to the balance sheet together with the huge direct human and monetary costs of the war.

The logic of my prewar shift on invading Iraq has now been doubly confirmed. I believe that the neoconservative movement, with which I was associated, has become indelibly associated with a failed policy, and that unilateralism and coercive ``regime change'' cannot be the basis for an effective American foreign policy. I changed my mind as part of a necessary adjustment to reality.

Many people have noted the ever-increasing polarization of American politics, which has been vastly amplified by Iraq: Much of the left now considers the war not a tragic policy mistake but a deliberate criminal conspiracy, and the right attacks the patriotism of those who question the war.

This kind of polarization affects a range of other complex issues as well: You can't be a good Republican if you think there may be something to global warming, or a good Democrat if you support school choice or private Social Security accounts. Political debate has become a spectator sport in which people root for their team and cheer when it scores points, without asking whether they chose the right side.

Instead of trying to defend sharply polarized positions taken more than three years ago, it would be far better if people could actually take aboard new information and think about how their earlier commitments, honestly undertaken, actually jibe with reality -- even if this does on occasion require changing your mind.

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of ``America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy.He wrote this article for the Los Angeles Times.

The secret to school success and school reform, I think...and a society committed to everyone's success, out of that...

This second time around at my Master's in Special Education has helped me see something really important, I think:):)...

You know what I think the secret to school success and school reform is, I think?...

Letting people fail...and not making a capital case out of it...just letting them fail and learn from their failures and adjust our expectations to support their success, rather than trying to coerce/force/harm them to try to make them succeed...

Any other way doesn't allow them to internalize the lessons of either failure...or success...

And both are two of the most important lessons for kids and adults to learn as they move into adulthood...

We are so intent on preventing failure and achieving success...that we will rationalize almost anything in its name, sadly...

And the saddest facet of this is that what we think is success often isn't...

And what we see as failure is often just lessons learned and opportunities opened up...

If we can open ourselves up to those possibilities...
And kids and adults, alike, need more opportunities to open up to those possibilities and to credit school as a place where they learned it...

Much of the ambivalence that many even very educated adults have towards school (Dick Cheney, a Ph.D. in Political Science, comes to mind, here) is around how they credit their successes in life despite their school failures and the ways they believe (correctly, often) that schools failed them...

My dad is one of those people...my step-mom is too, to some degree...

Many, many people are, is the truth...

And therein lies the complicated relationship that so many Americans and so many people have with school, education, and their successes and failures in life...

Schools can fix that...

But they have work to do to get there...

In the meantime...the current failures of school...are the exact ones that my very good graduate advisor, Tom Skrtic, identified in his now infamous 1991 Harvard Educational Review article, "The Special Education Paradox: Equity as the Way to Excellence"...

A commitment to equity is a more realistic and genuine commitment to the needs of all students, including top students, who get better, not worse, the more we account for the needs of all students, especially the students who struggle and fail...

Schools need to honestly recognize failure...

But they also need to make room for failure so that students can be ultimately successful without all of the obstacles to success that we create for them when they experience failure...including and especially the bitterness they often feel that they've been abandoned by people who promised to stand by them...

Whether adults want to acknowledge it or not...

It is not a few bad apples that are responsible for much of school failure...

It is the failure of all of us...students, parents, and teachers...
And in each case...our most important failure...is not having the courage the recognize that failure...our bigger failure around not maintaining a strong enough commitment to everyone's success...

That is true in schools and in the society, at large...
And it is our elitism, not our equity commitments...our harshness, not our decency and humanity...our toughness, not our thoughtfulness...

That makes all this so...

The truth is that we are all so goddamned mean to one another...and we just can't ever seem to take responsibility for that...and all the consequences it has on our lives, the lives of our neighbors, and, most importantly, the sorry-ass legacy that we leave our children, as a consequence...

The secret to a society that is committed to everyone's success, which is the only society worth having, is doing exactly what has created all of our progress over the course of human history...

To treat each other better...not worse...

We'll make progress on this one...just slowly...

And the biggest obstacle...is each of us having the courage to admit our failures to promote that progress:):)...

Have a great week, everyone:):)...

Love,
Ben

How complicated is life?...incredibly complicated...

I'm doing classwork for one of the special education classes I'm taking this summer...

And it's beginning to occur to me just how incredibly complicated this work and life, generally, are...

Even special education:):)...

I think I've gotten underneath something that really big with this work...especially with the principles of least possible necessary aggression...

But the world and life is just so damned complicated...I can barely believe that we navigate it at all, much of the time...and I'm much more sympathetic to why so many people have such a hard time navigating it, much of the time...
Because it's so damned complicated...and if you don't believe that, it's because you're not seeing it...

An important reason that we should make it easier for people to navigate, not harder...

And an important reason for why we should have more compassion for peoples' struggles navigating it, not less...

Though, ironically, the people who navigate it most successfully are often the people who have the most compassion for others' struggles in navigating it:):)...

Anyway:):)...check out the Dixie Chicks' new album when you get a chance:):)...it's really good...though Home, their last album, was one of my all-time favorite albums, period, nevertheless country...

Also...you might check out Robert Redford's new movie, An Unfinished Life...a brilliant little movie about moving on and growing up:)...and check out March of the Penguins, The Crazy Stranger, Vodka Lemon, Dick, Nothing, and Soldiers in the Army of God...

I finally sat through the entire Lord of the Rings' movies and while I wasn't nearly as impressed with this triology than most of my friends and the rest of the world, apparently, I was much more mildly entertained than the other million times I've tried to sit through that thing, it bored me so:):)...I loved watching the first one with my family and when I made Melissa sit down and watch it with me, I enjoyed it much more for what it was, a movie that everyone could watch together...I became less of a movie snob, this weekend, and embraced the Lord of the Rings triology, despite my belief, still, that The Return of the King winning Best Picture in 2004 was utter and total bullshit:):)...

But then again, as Maslow wisely observed in the Farther Reaches of Human Nature, humanity so rarely does always match rewards with merit:):):)...but we do it enough that we can trust us... as far as we can trust us, that is:):):)...

I've got work to do:):):)...

Have a great week, everyone:):)...

Love,
Ben

Having a moment...

I was having a moment, tonight...at a point in my life when I feel more settled than I've ever felt before in my life...I'm at a point in my life when I feel like I understand my parents and my teachers and older folks in my life better than I ever have...I'm just feeling like I'm growing up, I suppose...

I was having a moment, tonight, where I was really missing old friends...friends from school and from forensics, in particular...close friends...my best friends...

It's funny how I spent 4 years studying my Ph.D. in special education policy (and a Master's in adaptive special ed) and another year before that studying for my Master's in gifted education...all of which I abandoned when I left grad school...

And how a lot of my closest friends in the world I made while I was in undergrad...

Brandi was the closest friend I ever had...we met the year after I finished forensics...

But all of my other closest friends -- other than Melissa, my ex-girlfriend, Jenny, who I'm still relatively close with, my best friend in high school, Angela, and my best friend before that, Mike Coupland -- have been from that time I spent competing with the Wichita State University forensics team...

Bond Benton...Carson Brackney...Scott Wells...Brian White...Mike...Kate Cady...Tommy Patrick...Rachel Miller then Jorgenson now Asbury...Jeremy Pankratz...Jim Harrell...Skippy Flynn...Zach...Travis...Jessica...Kevin Keplar...

Jas Abramowitz -- who I met during that same time since we competed at sister schools -- and Dolly and Dave and Blick and the rest of the gang and I were close...we had a falling out...and I haven't known how to approach it without feeling like I'm gonna suckered again by the whole thing...

It's crazy, isn't it?...it feels kind of lame...

But I just haven't made friends as closely as I did during that time (though I just started at my job, and that could change over time)...

My friend Kenny and I were fairly close while I worked at Amarr...as with my friends Josh and Kevin and Deway...my friend Jesse and I got close while he and his girlfriend, Melissa, lived here at 6th and Michigan:)...I made many friends in the jobs I worked...Brent McCall, who I need to get back in touch with...our mutual friend Matt, who I see when I head down to Liberty, the independent movie store here in Lawrence (Brent and Matt are aspiring directors:)...and Jenny Thunder, who I dated, and Raimi, who was my roommate for awhile...my friend Bill, from the Honors Department at Wichita State, and I were good friends...

And of course I can't forget the EMU Theater folks, here in Lawrence, who I have a very similar bond with...that we do theater for fun and to put on a great show...but we're mostly just there for one another...Andy and Rachel and Jeff and Honey and Joel and Julie and Gwetholyn and Claven and Dean and Melissa, of course:)...and everyone at EMU:):)...

But there's something about competing with the same group of folks for years together...hanging out together in motel rooms and student unions and van rides and such...without the threat of being fired or cast aside or otherwise being ostracized (not seriously, anyway) hanging over your head...that just brings people together, I suppose...

I made plenty of friends when I was in grad school...but it was a really intense, hypercompetitive environment, much of the time...there was a genuine sense of community, as well...a really strong sense of community, at times...

But it just wasn't quite the same thing, I don't think, as hanging out with a bunch of people with whom you don't have to impress...you don't have to be politically correct (that is for damned sure when I think about that common bond for our team:):):)...you don't even have to win or be successful to feel that togetherness...

You just have to be together...a lot...and be working for common goals...

And tonight I just found myself missing them...

I guess because anytime I ever catch up with any of them I am totally reminded of how strong a bond we shared with one another...more out of just being together than out of working together, I think, after doing grad school with more work-oriented relationships and as I work with people where the threat of losing your job is always looming over people...

I think other than Brandi it is the closest that I've ever felt with other people in my life, outside of my family, of course...

And I'm just missing them, right now, I think...

And that feeling that I belonged to something just because...no proving myself necessary...

We need more of that in the world...a lot more of it...

And I am reminded of a time in my life when I felt it...and it was something special...

Hope everyone has a great week...

Love,
Ben

Force versus freedom as a means...

For everyone who is unconvinced of how force undermines a cause, I would highly recommend Soldiers in the Army of God, the brilliant HBO documentary on the most violent wing of the anti-abortion movement...

It's amazing how these folks can seem so normal in every other way except in their willingness to rationalize the most serious violence and force and harm to accomplish their ends...

Most people wouldn't go so far, I imagine...

But how sad that any of us would measure ourselves as just less extreme than such fanatics...

Or any fanatics, for that matter...

The most serious mistake in free societies, I think, is how we will rationalize the primacy of being right on any particular issue over the freedom of people to choose without being imposed upon...to make judgments out of their genuinely free will...

There are many, many times that I doubt whether this is the course that humanity will choose...or whether they will continue to rationalize all the hurt and pain and threats and fear that they impose on one another...

And then I remember Bobby Kennedy's impromptu eulogy for Martin Luther King... "My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: 'Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God'...

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country...

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."

The natural course of humanity...

To tame the savageness of man...and make more gentle the life of this world...

Love,
Ben

A quiet confidence...

I haven't felt this feeling in a long time...

This feeling I've been feeling, lately...

This quiet confidence...this total certainty that I have quite the future ahead of me...

I don't know what's it's been...maybe it was the Mark Twain...reading A War Prayer and Letters from the Earth, late at night...knowing what it's like to know in your heart that your fellow man needs to make important course corrections...and to feel helpless to steer the ship except to try to give better directions...and to know that the ship will only change direction very, very slowly...

"Trimtabbing" as my friends at RESULTS would say...

Or if it's been being successful, again, in school...and having all arrows point in the direction of a very, very bright future...

Or if it was my birthday...and have more people, among them my dad, my Grandma Miller, Angela, and my Grandma Sutherland, especially -- who is a special light in my life, right now -- remember, this year, than ever before:)...

Or maybe it was doing this annotated bibliography and knowing intuitively and quickly that the first books or people I recommend are people with big ideas...and slowly feeling the quiet recognition that I would be among the ranks of people that others will recommend soon enough...

I don't know what it is...

But today has been a good day, as Ice Cube would say...

I haven't had this feeling in a long time...

Since I was in school, quite a long time ago...when Brandi and I were in D.C., together...when I had everything I could ever want, and I didn't even know it...

That quiet confidence that comes when you're in love with life, and you don't even know the difference...

I guess it's because I just know that I'm on the right track, at this point...

And it's been a long time since I've been this sure:):)...

You ever wonder what it's like to live a dream?

I think I'm getting a glimpse:):)...

Have a great week, everyone:):)...

Love,
Ben

Fresh ideas...

I have so much I've been thinking about and need to share...reading some Mark Twain, who is one of my all-time heroes and one of the most brilliant men of his time...coming to terms with some imperfections of the world that may or may not change by the end of my lifetime...

But one of the most interesting reflections I have had is about fresh ideas...

How stale old debates about ideas get...how in policy discussions, conservative and liberal romanticism of their ideologies as right and wrong, as with sectarian religions of the past and still today, is a long stale discussion unlikely to reap benefits greater than the benefits of looking for the strengths and weaknesses in various ideologies and ideas and applying ideas with the greatest strengths...

And how, as my advisor at Washburn has said, fresh blood does seem to freshen the outlook of people who have been in the field awhile...

How much people cling to old ideas because they reflect a stale position that they don't recognize for its dead ends...
And how so many people are engaged in older and less meaningful debates because they think that at the end of the rainbow will be the pot of gold they've been looking for all along:

That they were right...and others were wrong...

When really...people just learn from us what they have to learn from us...and they leave behind what is less useful...

No matter who we are and what ideas, new or old, we have to offer...

As Pat Riley says in his interview at the end of Glory Road...we are all just making footprints in the sand...and no matter how lasting our footprints might be, there are always new civilizations to be built and ours will always be but a whisper in the ears of future generations...

Hubris, the Greeks whisper to us, today...

Hubris...

It makes all people overestimate their importance...and the importance of their decisions and stay here on this planet...

Though passivity makes us slaves...

I've got to get to class:):)...

Have a great week, everyone:):)...

Love,
Ben

Cynicism and self-fulfilling prophecy...

Melissa and I rented Date Movie, tonight:)...

It was a lot of predictably dumb fun:):):)...it's a lot of stupid gags and some curiously poignant social commentary about our unrealistic expectations about love and romance, our cynicism as a consequence, and a needed affirmation that even though love doesn't always look like a movie, that doesn't mean that people have to settle for less:):)...

I have to say that I do understand much of the disenchantment that many of the folks from around the world that I chat with and discuss stuff with on the internet have with America, right now...

This is the single most cynical period that I remember living through in this country in my lifetime...

Now, that may and is likely because much of my time in this country has been as a kid when adults shield you from the ugly realities of life only to bash you over the head with them as you get older to snuff out any remaining hope that you might have that people can be better:):):)...

And what I loved about Date Movie is how it makes fun of both of these sentiments when it comes to love...

Our innocent romanticism of love without pain or frustration or all of the less than pretty realities of relationships...

And our simultaneous and resulting cynicism about what love can never be:):):)...because we never did the work involved with reconciling our ideals with reality in a way that realizes ideals with a sense of groundedness in the world of the living:)...

It's so ironic, to me, that so many people have such sentimentally romantic views of life and how it should be and simultaneously nasty, ugly, cynical views on that same life...

The whole thing just seems so immature to me...so foolish...

Most of us are like this, truth be told, at some level...

But the sad thing is how we use our fears about how life might be unfair or how life might gip us or how we or someone we love might be hurt or how life might not give us the best deal...

And we use that fear to rationalize just how fucked up life might be without enough willingness on our parts to accept ugly realities and to take responsibility for improving them and correcting them with as much love and acceptance in our hearts, as possible...

There is much about the world that is wrong...there are terrorists and gangsters and power-hungry politicians and political groups and money-hungry businesspeople and investors...and all kinds of bad stuff in the world...

But the sad thing is that when we take a step back from all of it we might see that the saddest consequence of all those terrible realities that we can't control (no matter how much we try)...

Is what Pogo said about us 60 years ago...

"We have seen the enemy and he is us"...

Obviously we have to deal with serious threats and problems that face us...

But what has gone wrong in America in the last 5 or 6 years or so is not partisan or unique to any individual...it's not a few bad apples...it's not President Bush...or the Democrats...

What's gone wrong is that we've let our fears and our cynicism get the best of us...

And we've become this sad, fearful, pale image of our best selves....

What I loved about Date Movie was how it pokes fun at both sides of this tendency of ours...

The tendency to imagine the world as far better than it really is...and ourselves as far better than we really are...

And simultaneously to get lost in our cynicism which is the consequence of our failure to reconcile our dreams of how much better we can be...to each other and to ourselves...with the realities of the world and our own efforts that are persistently falling short...

It is the flaw that the Greeks held up as humanity's worst so many years ago...

Our hubris...to think that we can face problems that humanity has faced for millenia...and think that we can correct them with more of the uglier practices that we've been engaged in for a millenia...it's insanity...the thought that we can do the same thing over and over again and get the same result...

Except this time the insanity is the context in which we think about problems...the cynicism that undermines any serious effort to solve serious problems that we face...

The last few years...particularly post-911...have been a pretty bad case of that...for America...and for the world...

For America...as we persistently look like a sad, unrelenting version of Network, the 1970's era drama about news anchors losing their heads "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore"...finally going to put an end to all this terrorism and corruption and greed and incompetency by bringing down the hammer and making sure that everyone knows who's boss...it's not just Iraq...it's everywhere...it's baseball and steroids...it's gay marriage...it's calling Bush a war criminal...it's life and hard time sentences for every crime we think, foolishly, that we're going to end with such nonsense...

America looks like a land of hypocrisy and like a country that can never quite accept it's and it's citizens' falls from grace...

And an international community with cynicism enough to fan the flames...

And the sad reality of the whole thing is that it will go on...until we begin to better reconcile who we wish people were...and who they are...

Including ourselves...

The cynicism and power-hunger and retribution and and greed that has so openly animated American politics and American culture in the last few years, in particular, will not go away by trying to identify the few bad apples that let the rest of us pretend to be better than we really are...

That cynicism will only go away when we do the really tough thing that so many people seemed bound and determined not the do...

To take responsibility for it...

To own it...and to recognize how much the cynicism creates so much of the self-fulfilling prophecy that we say we want to end...

But which we persistently make excuses for why we don't give it up...

Moments like these when so many institutions in our culture seem to have eroded their trust with the publics they serve and so much of their credibility...

Eventually...if that is to change...

People have to step back and take responsibility for their part in the great big mess we've created for ourselves...

The truth is that it is not only that we are cynical because the world is so afoul of our expectations...

It is that the world is so afoul because we are so cynical...

And the only people we have to blame for that...

Is ourselves...

And what I loved about Date Movie...was that around one little small and so important area in our lives where our cynicism undermines our intentions...

Love...

That we can take a moment...and laugh...at just how foolish and dumb we can all be:)...

I guarantee everyone that I have ever had this conversation with on this one...

There is only one way out of the great big mess of a world that we have created for ourselves, at this point...

And that is by treating each other better...

And doing so means looking at ourselves more honestly...

And acknowledging our own personal responsibility...for what insanity that we all so often engage in when it comes to dealing with the most serious problems that the world has to offer...

That can only happen with more freedom, not less...

But the world will still be a mess...

Until we both take the personal responsibility involved with our role in cleaning it up...but it also involves leaving people with more responsibility and trusting them, more, to care for problems that until now we have fruitlessly put our trust in others to do for us...
And in the meantime...we might as well relax...and learn to appreciate ourselves and one another...for all of our less noble and impressive qualities...as we do for our more noble and impressive qualities:):):)...

Joe Nye is right...that the thing that matters most in international policy and politics...is how much our ideals and our living up to our ideals reflects something to which others want to aspire...

But it's more than that...there's more than a touch of cynicism in Joe's and so many peoples' focus on how we are perceived to be living up to their ideals...

Rather than how much we ARE living up to those ideals...

And when our children...and our neighbors...and our friends...and our international neighbors...

When they watch us living up to our ideals...

They have something to aspire for...

The problem is that everyone...everyone...well, almost everyone...is simultaneously cynical about both the ideals and the freedom that is needed to achieve them...

And that cynicism, right now, has been weighing on us...

It has been focussing our visions downward on what we think is so wrong with ourselves and with one another...

And not up and outward to who we can be...and reconciling that, better, with who we are now...

The importance of idealism is that amidst our honest reflections on how disappointing the current reality can be...

That it creates a vision of how much better that reality can be with thought and effort... But mine, at least, is definitely not a messianic or even quasi-messianic vision of how some leader...some politician...some celebrity...some drill seargent...some teacher...is going to make people be the people they dreamed of being...

Because such visions are false ones...they don't exist...Jesus or Buddha or King or Ghandi can inspire us to be better people...but they can't make us be so...

We choose to do that or not...

And neither can law enforcement, political parties, church communities, bosses, parents, or teachers or anyone make us be better people...

We either choose to be...or not...

And once we make peace with this fact of life...then we can affect change on it in a way that is genuinely realistic...and not just some romantic
cynicism about some image that the world never lived up to...

When we choose to be ugly to face ugly realities of the world...

We become part of the ugliness...and there is no way around that...

Than to take responsibility for it...

And noone can make anyone do that until they are willing to face it in their own hearts...

I'm going to try to sleep:):)...have a great night everyone:):)...

Love,
Ben

The glory road to education reform...

I think I've decided that I'm going to show Glory Road the first day or first week of the school year in my two math classes next year...

If you haven't seen Glory Road, yet, I highly recommend it...it's very nice to see this trend in movies like Glory Road, Munich, and Capote of soft lighting and unobtrusive costume choices to focus audiences on the story...and it's a marvelous story...

It's the story of the 1965-66 Texas Western Miner basketball team, coached by basketball legend Don Haskins, who fielded a team of 7 black and 5 white players to improbably win the 1966 NCAA Basketball Championship...

It's a story of a group of guys, most of which nobody expected to go to college nevertheless play basketball, defying all doubts and expectations and a college basketball game very much tainted with the stain of racism...a game dominated by white coaches, journalists, and boosters who had a million excuses for why black players couldn't compete...with Texas Western, a small, modestly-funded little mining school in West Texas (now the University of Texas - El Paso) being the first team to start 5 black players, and to do so in the Championship game...and winning it all...

It is a story of an underdog team from a little known school accomplishing the impossible when noone thought they could...

And since that is exactly what my kids and I will be doing this next year and every year afterwards:):)...

I want them to get a feel for what it looks like to overcome all odds and everyone's doubts about what you can and cannot do...

I don't know how many times I hear people talk about all of the things that my kids can't do...

So we're going to build on our successes from this year and starting showing everyone what they can do...

And this movie should be inspiration for overcoming all the doubt and skepticism that these kids can do a hell of a lot more than people give them credit for...if they have teachers and coaches and parents and adults who expect and inspire more out of them...

Did I mention that I love being an underdog?...I wouldn't ever have it any other way:):):)...

I just started summer classes at Washburn University, by the way, in Topeka, Kansas, to finish my Master's Degree in special education...

My plans during and after the summer are to change the face of education, public education, and special education with the help of my kids...

And to start working on this book and go on to change the face of policy, psychology, economics, education, criminology, international relations, and really anything else I can get my hands on during this too short life...

What are your summer plans?:):):)...

Have a great week, everyone:):):)...

Love,
Ben

The central problem for humanity: control...

I've got two classes I'm taking this summer...and so many things I have going on this summer...and so many things to write/blog about...

Including a very good movie called Veronica Guerin which, quite unintentionally, (much like my experience of Bowling for Columbine, which led to stop supporting gun control and to advocate gun responsibility in the context of gun rights) illustrates to me so clearly the tragic folly of the drug war...how even the most violent elements of the organized crime element in the drug culture clearly the consequence of its illegality...

How drug dealers and lords (unjustifiably, but nevertheless) generally turn to violence to both intimidate for money as a function of an underground economy and to avoid prison, as well as all of the other petty reasons that people turn to violent crime, of course...an issue I've decided to take on squarely in the book, with a genuinely open mind to how I might be wrong and a thorough engagement with the best empirical evidence I can find on the subject...

When I look back...the thing I regret most in my relationship with Brandi was the control issues and the fighting...Brandi and I shared mutually on this problem, but it just looks sad and foolish in retrospect...and I also regret not just respecting her choice to leave and be with someone else better...I really did try...hard...harder than anything I've ever done, I think, except try to earn her back...

I worked through some really profound jealousy and all kinds of ugly feelings to be friends...but, in retrospect, I very much wish I would have done better by her and by Greg, her husband and boyfriend at the time...I just didn't know how to understand or deal with all of the feelings that I was going through at the time...that's always true, isn't it?:)...but in this case, it meant pushing away my closest friend, quite unintentionally...

If there's one thing in my life that I regret most, it's that one...

And if there is one most important lesson I learned from my first year of teaching, that was it...

That the single most important mistake that we make with kids is trying to control them so much...or, really, trying to control them at all...which we can't do in any meaningful way...only temporarily, and with huge costs that come with it...costs in the form of serious interference within and disruptions of our relationships with kids that undermine many of the very good intentions and purposes we have in guiding them into adulthood...

And costs to them, in the form of limits on their learning and growth and maturity, which extend long into adulthood, if you notice how many adults never really take more mature, responsible relationships with others nearly seriously enough...and others who only do so when they can control others, which just starts the cycle all over again...

You can spot a really serious control issue a thousand miles away...

Charles Krauthammer has a serious control issue...David Horowitz does too, and is the common denominator between his radical left-wing days and his radical right-wing days...Hillary Clinton has a serious enough control issue...as does Bill to a much lesser degree...Ralph Nader is a good example of someone on the left with a serious control issue...

Three people that Melissa and I just watched on this Inside Deep Throat documentary, have serious control issues: Charles Keating, Larry Parrish, and Roy Cohn (in his own deeply hypocritical and dysfunctional way...it was something of an open secret that Roy was a homosexual, arguing on public airways for Harry Reems, the male star of Deep Throat, to get 5 years in prison for his role...all the while, Roy was engaged in homosexual sodomy that was both illegal longer than pornography and far more obscene to the Americans revolted by Deep Throat)...

You can see it in peoples' faces, actually...you know that look like they're persistently in battle with people?...that look of both personal suppression and like they're just persistently furious with the world?...lots of suppressed anger...and lots of unrealistic ideas and expectations of the world...

Fred Phelps, the God Hates Fags preacher from Topeka, Kansas...serious control issue...

Most politicians, even those with better intentions, often have more or less serious control issues...

Hitler had that look...as did Stalin...as does Fidel Castro...Kim Jong Il does as well if you get past that wry little smile...

Brandi and I were different in the sense that we didn't suppress our anger...which was healthy...we expressed it all the time...whatever was on our minds, typically, I think (when I reflect, the honest truth is I have no clue about how much Brandi was sharing or holding back with me...but I assume that she was sharing most of the time)...

We just needed to learn healthier ways of expressing that anger...and perspective on what was really an important issue to have conflict about...and what was more minor...and, as I've learned with Melissa, how to just let go of control issues altogether, as much as possible, since it's completely fruitless to try to control someone else who always does and always will make their own choices and decisions...

I very much regret all of the ways that I took Brandi's and my relationship/friendship for granted...most of all because she's opted, at this point, for an all-or-nothing gambit...no relationship and no friendship...she, at least, has my blog, I suppose...I have absolutely no clue what's up with her -- except that she's frosted her hair...I saw a picture on the internet:) -- since she doesn't really share anymore...one of life's minor tragedies for me:):)...

There's so much learning as a part of the living and being human...and I've experienced so much...

And if the long-term trends tell me anything its that my relationships keep getting better...the more I learn the deeper, most important lessons...

I'm looking forward to a romantic relationship with someone that has passion and has minimal if any control issues...with conflict that is constructive, generally, and challenging in a supportive way rather than in a controlling or hurtful way...

But what I'm looking forward to, most of all...is having a family where issues can be worked out closer to the way that so many of us wish they could be worked out...reasonably...decently...with better communication and more thoughtfulness rather than with more force...

Why, commentators keep asking, is America growing, economically, but we don't seem to be feeling it?...

I think this is it...and how miserable it makes us feel...how much it limits our learning and growth...and how much we rationalize it, even as we persistently complain about being micro-managed and controlled...

It's the single biggest bitch that people I know have about their work, their relationships, their families, and just about every interaction with others that they have...

And it's something that we've all been romanticizing, as of late...as much out of worry for our children as anything else, I'm sure...

And, sadly...it is generally counterproductive...

And that, more than anything else, was what I had very much reinforced for me, this year...

I always say and I very much had it reinforced this year, that if you are convinced that more punishment or more control makes kids smarter, more responsible, less trouble, nicer, more decent, less self-centered...check out the relationships between parents and kids in special education (especially for those without clear, rigorously-identified disabilities other than being behind their peers, academically, as a matter of a maturity, and/or having more serious behavior issues)...you will generally find parents who punish their kids more, control them more, and otherwise seriously undermine their maturity, learning and value for education, generally...

Most if not all parents that I've encountered love their children and want the best for them...

But some parents (and teachers) are more persistent in making foolish mistakes over and over again with their children...and reap the consequences in their children's choices and behavior...

I hope I'm learning a way out of that trap...

And I'm learning a lot about kids and people, in the meantime...

I've got homework and cleaning to do:):)...have a great week, everyone:):)...

Love,
Ben