A Poem by my daughter

I snub my noise at your labor of love, spit it out onto your clean floor
I want to throw dirt on you, rub my grimy hands on your freshly washed linen.
I want to rend and rip and tear its head off.
I want to throw it on the ground and smash it with my foot
I want to squish it under my thumb and grind its guts into the concrete.
I want to smear its beauty with crimson and black and blue.
I want to pinch his skin from his body and bite off his ear.
I want to rage and curse and smash my fist into your face.
I want to twist it until it severs, dig my nails into your eyes and scratch your cheeks until they bleed.
I want to grab you by the hair and pull with all my strength.
I want you to suffer the deepest horror life can muster.

Be Excellent

It's something I've not always done.  But keeping in mind that whatever I am about today, let me get it right.  Pull the string.  Turn all the stones.  Exhaust the sources.  Keep moving until it clicks.  Go the whole nine yards.

So now, the centers of my life are my little family and the next stage of my career, which is slowly defining itself.  Everything else I can loll about, pick and choose where my diversions lie, a little piano here, some Japanese there, keeping my brain active and filling up with interesting bits of this universe, letting some of it go...  There's enough time in the day, but not enough time for everything.

American Military Heroes and Criminals

I was moved to tears by Jessica Buchanan's 60 Minutes interview when she described her rescue by Seal Team 6.  There are true heroes in the American Armed Services.  I am embarrassed and disgusted when I hear the widespread reports of American military men assaulting women, including both other service members and civilians. With one and a half million service members, it's unrealistic to think we could eliminate all cases of rape and sexual assault, but according to the latest assessments, it's way too pervasive and a serious compromise of operational readiness.

It needs to be the attitude of America's fighting force to not let our desire to be a global force for good be sullied.  Overall, if every proud rescue we make is counteracted by ruining a life of one of our servicemembers through a rape or sexual assault, we are a net liability to our country.  Dammit, leaders, get this right.  Use the same mission mentality we have when we're going to neutralize the enemy to neutralize the internal enemy.  No equivocating.  No negotiating with anyone who would perpetrate harm on any one of our fighting force.

How would we react if an enemy combatant were to infiltrate our military and rape our female members?  We would route those bastards out and pillory them.  Same thing; let's do it.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Badges: Becoming Expert

When I fist started flying, keeping track of the overwhelming amounts of information about the flight condition of the airplane and the greater environment was hard.  Without an instructor pilot and/or plenty of time in the simulator, a new pilot will crash.  Period.

After a thousand hours flying, a person gets pretty good at knowing what's going on in the cockpit, outside the cockpit, on the radio, in the airspace, and in the battle space.  What used to take intense concentration to interpret and understand eventually becomes matter of course and instinctive -- a quick glance at the 10 or 15 gauges fits into a well-known pattern, and is instantly registered.  Anything out of the ordinary stands out like the a Coco-Puff in your Cheerios.

You always read about how chess masters experience a similar faculty.  They can glance at a board, read strengths and weaknesses of each side, and come up with a few quality options on where to go next.

I've been immersed in leadership and management theory, strategic thinking and planning, educational theory and the real-time operation of all of that for many years, with the constant intention to understand, learn and explore.  When I see a clear pattern of something emerging, it's not a mystery.  The influences, personalities, and potential solutions are loud in my head.  Watching others remain oblivious to problems that are so apparent is hard.  When they can't see the problems, how can they see the solution?

The "Busting Myths" Trend

You'll see articles in magazines and papers, books and webpages that are busting myths.  But often, they're just stating the tenets of a program.  When I read what they list as myths, and they are not commonly held misconceptions about their topic, it's pretty clear they're just trying to take pull in readers who think they know something about it and want to see if their myths are the same as everyone else.  When I read the mythbuster articles, I expect to see my belief busted, but there it is, just confirming what I already thought.  Disappointing.  Deceptive.  I don't fall for it anymore.

Adolescent Angst

I imagine my former students, mostly girls, but even the boys, stewing in their dorms or little apartments afflicted by some sort of depression or despair, and I think how far removed from reality their thoughts and feelings are as they swirl around in their overstimulated brains.

Their public comments show them in a state of self destructive loneliness and blind to the bright side of their world.  And isn't that just the birthing ground for many a poem or song and the reason it resonates for so many.

It's hard to believe that a part of them doesn't see the big picture, that they have many friends who would be happy to share in their experience, that they will certainly have good times sometime in the not-distant future, that maybe they're just seeking some connection that could be more honestly returned if they would just ask for or act on instead of wallowing in self pity.

I imagine riding a roller coaster of emotion and their flawed reasoning believing the cause is some preconceived idea of where that emotion is supposed to come from, like "the world has abandoned them just when they needed a friend" or some unrequited sentiment for someone, or a hundred other things, when it might just as likely be some normal neurological reaction so some typical out-of-whack behavior.  Before picking the first idea that pops into mind, why not look outside the roller coaster first.  Am I getting too little sleep?  Too much?  Is my diet balanced and healthy?  Am I getting enough exercise (daily active lifestyle, several timeweekly of vigorous exercise for thirty minutes or more)?  Am I spending enough time in physical contact with my friends?  Too much?  Am I spending enough time being still and quiet, away from social media and my phone and my computer, letting my brain unwind and reach a state of peace?  Is there some natural change of hormones due to a change of lifestyle, chemical birth control, or diet, exercise, or life situation?  Any of those imbalances could be wreaking havoc with emotions, saving you the need to pretend your life is somehow tragic.  The only tragedy might just be your unkind treatment of your precious brain.  Sometimes just admitting you don't know what's causing the feelings, and that it could just be some fluctuation of neurological balance can take the depressing edge off the feeling.  Sometimes getting the rest of your life is on track, that over which you can control (as listed above) can put everything back in order.  Sometimes just writing down the PLAN to get things back in order can relieve some of the suffering the emotions are causing you.

It's not their fault they don't know how to deal with the vicissitudes in life.  We're so focused on test scores, the prescribed path to success (good grades in school, college, get a "good" job), etc. that we don't have time to spend enough time on understanding this crazy organism we find ourselves inhabiting.  I think we should add a year of high school to learn how this thing works.

Inertia and The American Way

We're 330-odd million strong here in the US.  There are a handful of major changes we all know our country needs to put into a sustainable* state of affairs.  Permit me to brainstorm a little...
1.  Switch to a human healthy and Earth friendly average diet.  Taking on the aggregate, we need to eat much less overall, more natural foods, way less meat and sodium and sugar, more fiber, and a constant variety of seasonal and native vegetables.
2.  Switch to a human healthy and Earth friendly energy scheme.  Carbon release free and non-nuclear waste producing, non-toxic and resource frugal.  Living closer to work, walking or riding a bike to work, or switching to electric motor-bikes. Recycle everything.
3.  Doing more physical activity that accomplishes something (as opposed to turning our diet into heat at the local gym), and keeps us healthier.  Gardening, commuting with your own energy, social or individual sports (as opposed to "working out" alone or
4.  More involvement in civic and socially redeemable activities: Spending a little of your time contributing to the social welfare in a way you believe makes a positive impact on your fellow humans.  Helping people find work, helping homeless find shelter options that supports their active engagement in the productive side of humanity, helping others in "teach a person to fish" sorts of ways.
5.  Broaden our understanding of our world's amazing wonder.  Broad and deep.  Know a little about everything (science and nature and engineering, politics, language, anatomy and physiology, design and architecture and art, history and culture, psychology and medicine, philosophy, music, ad naseum).  The more we know, the more we are able to act in ways that align with any sort of goals.  Read, discuss, watch educational media, write (to process and share),
6.  Improve healthcare: Get costs under control, reduce the overall need by making good life health decisions, tend to our mental health, educate children from a young age on all aspects of healthy living and maintaining our health.
7.  Get a grip on the deeper mysteries.  We're going to die, how do we live to honor that fact.  Religion help many to get approximate our relation to the almighty universe.
8.  Balance our lives with respect to our careers and the above endeavors.
9.  Fix education to support the big picture, fund it adequately, and respect the sacred role it has in bringing our young into society as one of us.
10.  Establish ways to reduce the wage disparity so more Americans can be share in the fruits of their labor, improving motivation and the economic strength of our country.

But our behavior patterns are formed early and once they're set, it's hard to change.  "My dad did it, so it's good enough for me." Once we get used to something, change means work and effort, mental gymnastics.  Taken in a generational context, most real changes of attitude take a generation or sometimes many generations to shift, even if the benefits are clear.  Look at smoking, racism, taxes.  One promising example is the rapid move in attitudes toward homosexuals.  In one generation, there has been a meaningful and positive shift from negative to more positive.

Our past success as a nation has made us what we are.  Although we have some of the worlds greatest innovators and ambitious humans of the planet, and we need these specialists to do what they do with total focus, but we need everybody to rise to their potential so we can accomplish as much as we can to create the country we want.  Our innate inclination to protect our children from struggle works against us and makes us weaker.  A healthy family eliminates much of the hardship, and that is a good thing insofar as "we made it."  But for the future generations, when children grow up feeling entitled to the fruit of their ancestor's labor, their tendency to work their asses off to make it on their own and perpetuate the strength that led to their freedom from struggle.  We have to find causes worth struggling for and work our asses off to make them work.  It's a little bit of a contradiction and counter-intuitive.  Like working out in a gym producing nothing, I don't want our children to struggle on academic issues or stress out from artificially induced senses of urgency.  I would much rather they work through major problems in real life.  Couldn't being out helping to build a levee connect them to their community, get them working hard and practicing their teamwork and leadership, and accomplish something, while allowing them to work hard and see the result of their efforts?  Things like that.

But all of these major challenges facing us require a significant change of attitudes from one of "avoiding struggle" to "finding a problem worth overcoming and deciding to do it."  One belittles and diminishes is as people; the other elevates our spirit and creates real self-esteem.  At some point, we know when we're doing something real or playing a game.  How do we switch from games to reality when the whole education system, the whole generation (with a small minority of exceptions) of parents and teachers and administrators were reared in that bubble?  

*For the next couple hundred years, maybe?  Longer than that and the mere scope of human population will wreak enough changes on the biosphere that our predictions and ideas today will almost certainly not be applicable to the sorts of engineering (social and otherwise) we'll have to do to sustain some sort of normal human population.