Buzzfeed has found 10 problems it claims are exclusive to Wisconsin, including …
1. Cooler full of beer, with too many options.
It is hard making any decision when there are too many options. Then add alcohol. Trying to decide between your favorite Leinenkugels, New Glarus, Lakefront, or Miller product is almost too much to handle.
2. Grills full of too many meat options.
Wisconsinites love to grill out, but just like our beer coolers, we often end up with too many choices. How do you choose between brats, burgers, chicken, shrimp, steak, and more?
3. Trying to get to every festival.
Summers in Wisconsin are short and they go fast with everything going on. It goes faster when there is a different festival to attend every weekend. Whether it is Summerfest in Milwaukee, Oktoberfest in La Crosse, Taste of Madison, or something else, there are too many festivals going on to attend them all.
4. Deciding which friend’s cabin to go to for the weekend.
Almost every Wisconsinite knows someone with a cabin “Up North”, but there are only so many weekends free in the summer. …
6. Packers games that don’t start at Noon.
We love our Green Bay Packers, but we want to watch them right away. Having to wait is hard.
7. Can’t even get tickets to Packer’s Family Night.
First off, it is a scrimmage, not even a game, and it is still hard to get these tickets. The starters hardly play, but the 70,000+ seats are still all full.
Love em or hate em, Harley Motorcycles are everywhere. If it is a nice day outside, everyone is going for a ride.
10. And this:
Re number 9, football officials are not the only sports officials who hate the Badgers. In game 2 of the 1982 World Series, Brewer pitcher Pete Ladd was squeezed by the home plate umpire during the pivotal eighth inning. St. Louis won that game and went on to win that World Series. Had the umpire called balls and strikes correctly, the Brewers may have won game 2 and won the Series in five games, clinching in Milwaukee.
The latest in the category of Fun with Maps comes from London’s Daily Mail:
A truly captivating map that shows the ancestry of everyone of the 317 million people who call the melting pot of America home can now be seen on a U.S. Census Bureau map. …
Although the 2010 census left out questions about ethnicity, this map shows how it looked in 2000, according to Upworthy.
You’ll notice that all but three of Wisconsin’s 72 counties (and, for that matter, nearly every county in states around Wisconsin) are depicted as having Germans as their largest ethnic group. One exception is Menominee County, home of the Menominee tribe. The other two are Vernon and Tremepealeau counties, which have more Norwegians than anything else.
About us Krauts, the Daily Mail says:
49,206,934 Germans
By far the largest ancestral group, stretching from coast to coast across 21st century America is German, with 49,206,934 people. The peak immigration for Germans was in the mid-19th century as thousands were driven from their homes by unemployment and unrest.
The majority of German–Americans can now be found in the the center of the nation, with the majority living in Maricopa County, Arizona and according to Business Insider, famous German–Americans include, Ben Affleck, Tom Cruise, Walt Disney, Henry J. Heinz and Oscar Mayer.
Indeed, despite having no successful New World colonies, the first significant groups of German immigrants arrived in the United States in the 1670s and settled in New York and Pennsylvania.
Germans were attracted to America for familiar reasons, open tracts of land and religious freedom and their contributions to the nation included establishing the first kindergartens, Christmas trees and hot dogs and hamburgers.
(If Cruise doesn’t sound German to you, Cruise’s real last name is Mapother. Not sure that sounds German either, but …)
As for the smaller-portion ingredients:
35,523,082 Irish
Another group who joined the great story of the United States were the Irish and the great famine of the 1840s sparked mass migration from Ireland.
It is estimated that between 1820 and 1920, 4.5 million Irish moved to the United States and settled in the large cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco.
Currently, almost 12 percent of the total population of the United States claim Irish ancestry – compared with a total population of six and a half million for the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland today.
Irish residents of note include John F. Kennedy, Derek Jeter and Neil Armstrong and 35,523,082 people call themselves Irish. …
26,923,091 English
The next largest grouping of people in the United States by ancestry are those who claim to be English-American.
Predominantly found in the Northwest and West, the number of people directly claiming to be English-American has dropped by 20 million since the 1980 U.S. Census because more citizens have started to identify themselves as American.
They are based predominantly in the northeast of the country in New England and in Utah, where the majority of Mormon immigrants moved in the middle 19th century.
Notable American people with English ancestry are Orson Welles and Bill Gates and 26,923,091 people claim to come from the land of the original Pilgrims. …
9,739,653 Polish
The largest of the Slavic groups to live in the United States, Polish Americans were some of the earliest Eastern European colonists to the New World.
Up to 2.5 million Polies came to the United States between the mid-19th century and World War 1 and flocked to the largest industrial cities of New York, Buffalo, Cleveland, Milwaukee and Chicago. …
9,136,092 French
Historically, along with the English, the French colonized North America first and successfully in the North East in the border areas alongside Quebec and in the south around New Orleans and Louisiana.
The personal irony here is that even though I am more German than anything else, I am more non-German than German. For our oldest son’s fourth-grade genealogy assignment, my wife and I sat down to figure our genealogy, which means our children’s, of course. It took several hours and dividing down to 42nds to properly (or so we think) divide them — in my own descending order, German, Norwegian (from which comes “Prestegard,” which means, depending on whom you ask, “animal farm” or “priest’s farm”), Polish, British, French, Dutch and Irish. (Some of those are guesses because my maternal grandmother was the original multiethnic in the family. My paternal grandfather, a native of southeastern Minnesota, married a Polish–German girl from north central Minnesota. My maternal grandfather’s last name was Wellner, ja.)
The other irony is that I don’t eat much German food. (Hamburgers are American, not German, invented in Seymour. Sausages may have been invented in Germany, but Austria, Germany, Chicago and St. Louis all dispute the location of the invention of the hot dog.) My favorite ethnic food group is Italian, followed perhaps by wherever barbeque comes from.
Sept. 11, 2001 started out as a beautiful day, in Wisconsin, New York City and Washington, D.C.
I remember almost everything about the entire day. Sept. 11, 2001 is to my generation what Nov. 22, 1963 was to my parents and Dec. 7, 1941 was to my grandparents.
I had dropped off our oldest son, Michael, at Ripon Children’s Learning Center. As I was coming out, the mother of one of Michael’s group told me to find a good radio station; she had heard as she was getting out with her son that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
I got in my car and turned it on in time to hear, seemingly live, a plane hit the WTC. But it wasn’t the first plane, it was the second plane hitting the other tower.
As you can imagine, my drive to Fond du Lac took unusually long that day. I tried to call Jannan, who was working at Ripon College, but she didn’t answer because she was in a meeting. I had been at Marian University as their PR director for just a couple months, so I didn’t know for sure who the media might want to talk to, but once I got there I found a couple professors and called KFIZ and WFDL in Fond du Lac and set up live interviews.
The entire day was like reading a novel, except that there was no novel to put down and no nightmare from which to wake up. A third plane hit the Pentagon? A fourth plane crashed somewhere else? The government was grounding every plane in the country and closing every airport?
I had a TV in my office, and later that morning I heard that one of the towers had collapsed. So as I was talking to Jannan on the phone, NBC showed a tower collapsing, and I assumed that was video of the first tower collapse. But it wasn’t; it was the second tower collapse, and that was the second time that replay-but-it’s-not thing had happened that day.
Marian’s president and my boss (a native of a Queens neighborhood who grew up with many firefighter and police officer families) had a brief discussion about whether or not to cancel afternoon or evening classes, but they decided (correctly) to hold classes as scheduled. The obvious reasons were (1) that we had more than 1,000 students on campus, and what were they going to do if they didn’t have classes, and (2) it was certainly more appropriate to have our professors leading a discussion over what had happened than anything else that could have been done.
I was at Marian until after 7 p.m. I’m sure Marian had a memorial service, but I don’t remember it. While I was in Fond du Lac, our church was having a memorial service with our new rector (who hadn’t officially started yet) and our interim priest. I was in a long line at a gas station, getting gas because the yellow low fuel light on my car was on, not because of panic over gas prices, although I recall that one Fond du Lac gas station had increased their prices that day to the ridiculous $2.299 per gallon. (I think my gas was around $1.50 a gallon that day.)
Two things I remember about that specific day: It was an absolutely spectacular day. But when the sun set, it seemed really, really dark, as if there was no light at all outside, from stars, streetlights or anything else.
For the next few days, since Michael was at the TV-watching age, we would watch the ongoing 9/11 coverage in our kitchen while Michael was watching the 1-year-old-appropriate stuff or videos in our living room. That Sunday, one of the people who was at church was Adrian Karsten of ESPN. He was supposed to be at a football game working for ESPN, of course, but there was no college football Saturday (though high school football was played that Friday night), and there was no NFL football Sunday. Our organist played “God Bless America” after Mass, and I recall Adrian clapping with tears down his face; I believe he knew some people who had died or been injured.
Later that day was Marian’s Heritage Festival of the Arts. We had record attendance since there was nothing going on, it was another beautiful day, and I’m guessing after five consecutive days of nonstop 9/11 coverage, people wanted to get out of their houses.
In the decade since then, a comment of New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has stuck in my head. He was asked a year or so later whether the U.S. was more or less safe since 9/11, and I believe his answer was that we were more safe because we knew more than on Sept. 10, 2001. That and the fact that we haven’t been subject to another major terrorist attack since then is the good news.
Osama bin Laden (who I hope is enjoying Na’ar, Islam’s hell) and others in Al Qaeda apparently thought that the U.S. (despite the fact that citizens from more than 90 countries died on 9/11) would be intimidated by the 9/11 attacks and cower on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, allowing Al Qaeda to operate with impunity in the Middle East and elsewhere. (Bin Laden is no longer available for comment.) If you asked an American who paid even the slightest attention to world affairs where a terrorist attack would be most likely before 9/11, that American would have replied either “New York,” the world’s financial capital, or “Washington,” the center of the government that dominates the free world. A terrorist attack farther into the U.S., even in a much smaller area than New York or Washington, would have delivered a more chilling message, that nowhere in the U.S. was safe. Al Qaeda didn’t think to do that, or couldn’t do that. The rest of the Middle East also did not turn on the U.S. or on Israel (more so than already is the case with Israel), as bin Laden apparently expected.
The bad news is all of the other changes that have taken place that are not for the better. Bloomberg Businessweek asks:
So was it worth it? Has the money spent by the U.S. to protect itself from terrorism been a sound investment? If the benchmark is the absence of another attack on the American homeland, then the answer is indisputably yes. For the first few years after Sept. 11, there was political near-unanimity that this was all that mattered. In 2005, after the bombings of the London subway system, President Bush sought to reassure Americans by declaring that “we’re spending unprecedented resources to protect our nation.” Any expenditure in the name of fighting terrorism was justified.
Six years later, though, it’s clear this approach is no longer sustainable. Even if the U.S. is a safer nation than it was on Sept. 11, it’s a stretch to say that it’s a stronger one. And in retrospect, the threat posed by terrorism may have been significantly less daunting than Western publics and policymakers imagined it to be. …
Politicians and pundits frequently said that al Qaeda posed an “existential threat” to the U.S. But governments can’t defend against existential threats—they can only overspend against them. And national intelligence was very late in understanding al Qaeda’s true capabilities. At its peak, al Qaeda’s ranks of hardened operatives numbered in the low hundreds—and that was before the U.S. and its allies launched a global military campaign to dismantle the network. “We made some bad assumptions right after Sept. 11 that shaped how we approached the war on terror,” says Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism research fellow at the New America Foundation. “We thought al Qaeda would run over the Middle East—they were going to take over governments and control armies. In hindsight, it’s clear that was never going to be the case. Al Qaeda was not as good as we gave them credit for.”
Yet for a decade, the government’s approach to counterterrorism has been premised in part on the idea that not only would al Qaeda attack inside the U.S. again, but its next strike would be even bigger—possibly involving unconventional weapons or even a nuclear bomb. Washington has appropriated tens of billions trying to protect against every conceivable kind of attack, no matter the scale or likelihood. To cite one example, the U.S. spends $1 billion a year to defend against domestic attacks involving improvised-explosive devices, the makeshift bombs favored by insurgents in Afghanistan. “In hindsight, the idea that post-Sept. 11 terrorism was different from pre-9/11 terrorism was wrong,” says Brian A. Jackson, a senior physical scientist at RAND. “If you honestly believed the followup to 9/11 would be a nuclear weapon, then for intellectual consistency you had to say, ‘We’ve got to prevent everything.’ We pushed for perfection, and in counterterrorism, that runs up the tab pretty fast.”
Nowhere has that profligacy been more evident than in the area of homeland security. “Things done in haste are not done particularly well,” says Jackson. As Daveed Gartenstein-Ross writes in his new book, Bin Laden’s Legacy, the creation of a homeland security apparatus has been marked by waste, bureaucracy, and cost overruns. Gartenstein-Ross cites the Transportation Security Agency’s rush to hire 60,000 airport screeners after Sept. 11, which was originally budgeted at $104 million; in the end it cost the government $867 million. The homeland security budget has also proved to be a pork barrel bonanza: In perhaps the most egregious example, the Kentucky Charitable Gaming Dept. received $36,000 to prevent terrorists from raising money at bingo halls. “If you look at the past decade and what it’s cost us, I’d say the rate of return on investment has been poor,” Gartenstein-Ross says.
Of course, much of that analysis has the 20/20 vision of hindsight. It is interesting to note as well that, for all the campaign rhetoric from candidate Barack Obama that we needed to change our foreign policy approach, President Obama has changed almost nothing, including our Afghanistan and Iraq involvements. It is also interesting to note that the supposed change away from President George W. Bush’s us-or-them foreign policy approach hasn’t changed the world’s view, including particularly the Middle East’s view, of the U.S. Someone years from now will have to determine whether homeland security, military and intelligence improvements prevented Al Qaeda from another 9/11 attack, or if Al Qaeda wasn’t capable of more than just one 9/11-style U.S. attack.
Hindsight makes one realize how much of the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented or at least their worst effects lessened. One year after 9/11, the New York Times book 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers points out that eight years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, New York City firefighters and police officers still could not communicate with each other, which led to most of the police and fire deaths in the WTC collapses. Even worse, the book revealed that the buildings did not meet New York City fire codes when they were designed because they didn’t have to, since they were under the jurisdiction of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. And more than one account shows that, had certain people at the FBI and elsewhere been listened to by their bosses, the 9/11 attacks wouldn’t have caught our intelligence community dumbfounded. (It does not speak well of our government to note that no one appears to have paid any kind of political price for the 9/11 attacks.)
I think, as Bloomberg BusinessWeek argues, our approach to homeland security (a term I loathe) has overdone much and missed other threats. Our approach to airline security — which really seems like the old error of generals’ fighting the previous war — has made air travel worse but not safer. (Unless you truly believe that 84-year-old women and babies are terrorist threats.) The incontrovertible fact is that every 9/11 hijacker fit into one gender, one ethnic group and a similar age range. Only two reasons exist to not profile airline travelers — political correctness and the assumption that anyone is capable of hijacking an airplane, killing the pilots and flying it into a skyscraper or important national building. Meanwhile, while the U.S. spends about $1 billion each year trying to prevent Improvised Explosive Device attacks, what is this country doing about something that would be even more disruptive, yet potentially easier to do — an Electromagnetic Pulse attack, which would fry every computer within the range of the device?
We haven’t taken steps like drilling our own continent’s oil and developing every potential source of electric power, ecofriendly or not, to make us less dependent on Middle East oil. (The Middle East, by the way, supplies only one-fourth of our imported oil. We can become less dependent on Middle East oil; we cannot become less dependent on energy.) And the government’s response to 9/11 has followed like B follows A the approach our culture has taken to risk of any sort, as if covering ourselves in bubblewrap, or even better cowering in our homes, will make the bogeyman go away. Are we really safer because of the Patriot Act?
American politics was quite nasty in the 1990s. For a brief while after 9/11, we had impossible-to-imagine moments like this:
And then within the following year, the political beatings resumed. Bush’s statement, “I ask your continued participation and confidence in the American economy,” was deliberately misconstrued as Bush saying that Americans should go out and shop. Americans were exhorted to sacrifice for a war unlike any war we’ve ever faced by those who wouldn’t have to deal with the sacrifices of, for instance, gas prices far beyond $5 per gallon, or mandatory national service (a bad idea that rears its ugly head in times of anything approaching national crisis), or substantially higher taxes.
Then again, none of this should be a surprise. Other parts of the world hate Americans because we are more economically and politically free than most of the world. We have graduated from using those of different skin color from the majority as slaves, and we have progressed beyond assigning different societal rights to each gender. We tolerate different political views and religions. To the extent the 9/11 masterminds could be considered Muslims at all, they supported — and radical Muslims support — none of the values that are based on our certain inalienable rights. The war between our world, flawed though it is, and a world based on sharia law is a war we had better win.
In one important sense, 9/11 changed us less than it revealed us. America can be both deeply flawed and a special place, because human beings are both deeply flawed and nonetheless special in God’s eyes. Jesus Christ is quoted in Luke 12:48 as saying that “to whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.” As much as Americans don’t want to be the policeman of the world, or the nation most responsible for protecting freedom worldwide, there it is.
Today is the first day of classes at public schools and UW campuses throughout Wisconsin.
In case students don’t learn these lessons, I present them from Finer Minds:
However, if I had to a write a list of life lessons to add to my 15-year-old self’s class timetable now, these would be them:
1. Not Everyone in Life Will Be Like You (Thank God!)
The reverse side of this is, you won’t always like everyone (and sometimes you can’t even pinpoint why). All you can do is treat everyone with kindness and be yourself. If this isn’t enough, they’re not worth your time. This equally applies to friendships and dating!
2. Be Your Own Best Friend
This follows on from my above point, looking for other people’s continuous approval will lead you down a lonely path (particularly if you’re looking for it from the wrong kind of people). Be kind to yourself and focus on what your greatest strengths are. No one is perfect, so don’t waste time wishing you were. Where there is room for improvement, do what you can and listen to your inner voice.
3. Don’t Beat Yourself Up
Things will go wrong from time-to-time, it’s what makes us human. The best thing to do is dust yourself off and try again. Of course if you keep making the same mistakes, it might be time to change tactics, although sometimes our mistakes turn out to be the biggest blessings in disguise and take us down a greater path.
4. Set Goals… And Write Them Down
When your head is swarming with a list of everyday tasks, the bigger picture and less urgent goals can get pushed until tomorrow. And then the week after, and then maybe the year after that. Writing them down not only gives you a sense of purpose, it helps you realize what’s a priority in your life. Stick your goals up somewhere you can see them, so when you feel yourself going off track, they’ll act as gentle reminder.
5. You Can Be Whatever You Want (Within Reason)
The statement “you can be whatever you want” is one I’ve always been a little skeptical about. Can I really be the next Beyonce when I really can’t sing? The truth is, not matter how hard I try, probably not (my school principal will even vouch for this). But I can find what I am really good at, or something that I am incredibly passionate about, then shoot for the stars and make it happen.
7. Don’t Compare Yourself With Others
There will always be people who are better at something or have more than you do. Whether they’re more attractive or smarter than you, or have the financial freedom to live a more luxurious life. Yes, it would be amazing if we could live the “dream life” we have conjured up in our heads, however the life you’re living is the one that you have. So make the most of it and follow the kind of dreams that will bring you happiness.
8. 80% of What You Fear Will Never Happen
I’ve heard this statistic a lot over the years, and now that I’m 31 (gulp), it certainly feels this way (now why didn’t they teach us this in math class?). Knowing it doesn’t always take the worry away, but it can put things into perspective when your mind is going into overdrive with fears of “what if.”
Time is Not a Limitless Commodity – I so rarely find young professionals that have a heightened sense of urgency to get to the next level. In our 20s we think we have all the time in the world to A) figure it out and B) get what we want. Time is the only treasure we start off with in abundance, and can never get back. Make the most of the opportunities you have today, because there will be a time when you have no more of it.
You’re Talented, But Talent is Overrated – Congratulations, you may be the most capable, creative, knowledgeable & multi-tasking generation yet. As my father says, “I’ll Give You a Sh-t Medal.” Unrefined raw materials (no matter how valuable) are simply wasted potential. There’s no prize for talent, just results. Even the most seemingly gifted folks methodically and painfully worked their way to success. (Tip: read “Talent is Overrated”) …
Social Media is Not a Career – These job titles won’t exist in 5 years. Social media is simply a function of marketing; it helps support branding, ROI or both. Social media is a means to get more awareness, more users or more revenue. It’s not an end in itself. I’d strongly caution against pegging your career trajectory solely to a social media job title.
Pick Up the Phone – Stop hiding behind your computer. Business gets done on the phone and in person. It should be your first instinct, not last, to talk to a real person and source business opportunities. And when the Internet goes down… stop looking so befuddled and don’t ask to go home. Don’t be a pansy, pick up the phone.
Be the First In & Last to Leave – I give this advice to everyone starting a new job or still in the formative stages of their professional career. You have more ground to make up than everyone else around you, and you do have something to prove. There’s only one sure-fire way to get ahead, and that’s to work harder than all of your peers.
Don’t Wait to Be Told What to Do – You can’t have a sense of entitlement without a sense of responsibility. You’ll never get ahead by waiting for someone to tell you what to do. Saying “nobody asked me to do this” is a guaranteed recipe for failure. Err on the side of doing too much, not too little. (Watch: Millennials in the Workplace Training Video)
Take Responsibility for Your Mistakes – You should be making lots of mistakes when you’re early on in your career. But you shouldn’t be defensive about errors in judgment or execution. Stop trying to justify your F-ups. You’re only going to grow by embracing the lessons learned from your mistakes, and committing to learn from those experiences.
You Should Be Getting Your Butt Kicked –Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada” would be the most valuable boss you could possibly have. This is the most impressionable, malleable and formative stage of your professional career. Working for someone that demands excellence and pushes your limits every day will build the most solid foundation for your ongoing professional success. …
People Matter More Than Perks – It’s so trendy to pick the company that offers the most flex time, unlimited meals, company massages, game rooms and team outings. Those should all matter, but not as much as the character of your founders and managers. Great leaders will mentor you and will be a loyal source of employment long after you’ve left. Make a conscious bet on the folks you’re going to work for and your commitment to them will pay off much more than those fluffy perks.
Map Effort to Your Professional Gain – You’re going to be asked to do things you don’t like to do. Keep your eye on the prize. Connect what you’re doing today, with where you want to be tomorrow. That should be all the incentive you need. If you can’t map your future success to your current responsibilities, then it’s time to find a new opportunity.
Speak Up, Not Out – We’re raising a generation of sh-t talkers. In your workplace this is a cancer. If you have issues with management, culture or your role & responsibilities, SPEAK UP. Don’t take those complaints and trash-talk the company or co-workers on lunch breaks and anonymous chat boards. If you can effectively communicate what needs to be improved, you have the ability to shape your surroundings and professional destiny. …
You Need At Least 3 Professional Mentors – The most guaranteed path to success is to emulate those who’ve achieved what you seek. You should always have at least 3 people you call mentors who are where you want to be. Their free guidance and counsel will be the most priceless gift you can receive. (TIP: “The Secret to Finding and Keeping Mentors”). …
Read More Books, Fewer Tweets/Texts – Your generation consumes information in headlines and 140 characters: all breadth and no depth. Creativity, thoughtfulness and thinking skills are freed when you’re forced to read a full book cover to cover. All the keys to your future success, lay in the past experience of others. Make sure to read a book a month (fiction or non-fiction) and your career will blossom.
You may disagree with some of those. I’m not sure about “The Devil Wears Prada” example, for instance. Independent of the fact that people are hired to do jobs, not out of the benevolence of their employer for self-actualization, bosses should demand excellence, but there is a line between pushing excellence and simply being abusive. There are bullies in the workplace, and many are bosses. It would be nice if every workplace was a meritocracy, but life isn’t fair. As for that part about getting your “butt kicked,” have too many “F-ups,” and you will get your “butt kicked” out the door.
Nazar writes: “Pick Up the Phone – Stop hiding behind your computer. Business gets done on the phone and in person. It should be your first instinct, not last, to talk to a real person and source business opportunities.”
I disagree. Phone calls still have their place, of course, but the idea of picking up the phone instead of sending a message via e-mail, text or social media does not reflect my experience in the business world of today at all. Sometimes you clearly need to talk directly, but usually in that case you use other methods of communication to schedule the call, and then you have an agenda, you get to it, and you say goodbye. Gone are the days when a blind, unexpected phone call (especially if he’s talking about prospecting by cold-calling, for crying out loud) is the most effective way to initiate business communication. No way. I’m with the 20-somethings on this one.
Nazar also writes: “Pick an Idol & Act “As If” – You may not know what to do, but your professional idol does. I often coach my employees to pick the businessperson they most admire, and act “as if.” If you were (fill in the blank) how would he or she carry themselves, make decisions, organize his/her day, accomplish goals? You’ve got to fake it until you make it, so it’s better to fake it as the most accomplished person you could imagine. (Shout out to Tony Robbins for the tip)”
Maybe I’m recoiling because it comes from Tony Robbins (yeah, not a fan) but I never like advice that encourages you to mimic someone else. Learn from others, sure, but making someone else an “idol”? If it’s true that you’re uniquely you, I think it’s a much better idea to recognize things you respect about others and adapt them to your own approach. If you’re always asking what X would do, you don’t learn to think for yourself. For instance, would X go to Tony Robbins seminars? Then I won’t be emulating X!
By the time this week is done, one surmises students will be thinking fondly of this song, applicable eight to nine months from now:
When not doing commercials for Ford, Mike Rowe hosted Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs.”
Through the series, Rowe demonstrated great respect for those who do what most of us would consider to be unpleasant jobs. So Rowe felt compelled to defend those who do those kinds of jobs from snotty writers, such as MLive’s Stephen Kloosterman …
… from which Kloosterman’s story and Rowe’s Facebook response is excerpted:
Immediately under your headline I noticed a photo of me, taken on the Mackinac Bridge while filming a segment on Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe.
Given the juxtaposition of my face with your headline, a reasonable person might conclude that a “Dirty Job” and “Bad Job” are one and the same. This sentiment is not only inconsistent with my own view of hard work, it’s completely at odds with the Dirty Jobs Code of Conduct, a collection of life lessons painstakingly compiled from the men and women I’ve met on Dirty Jobs.
Over the years, the Dirty Jobs Code of Conduct has kept me from saying stupid things in the press. Today, it’s used primarily to assist writers like you with the approved use of my name and likeness. Obviously, you have never seen or heard of the Dirty Jobs Code of Conduct, since most of your article violates every clause and restriction therein. I must therefore take a moment to assure your readers that the appearance of my face in such close proximity to your headline is in no way a personal affirmation that certain types of jobs are in fact “bad.” …
Steve Kloosterman, MUSKEGON, MI – Most of us can tell a story about a job from hell somewhere in our past. There’s the first job, the one we took because our parents said, “You can’t hang around the house all summer long.” Maybe it was at a fast food place or in a retail outlet.
MR – First of all, Steve, the Dirty Jobs Code of Conduct contains a Damnation Clause that clearly and unequivocally states that my photo “can not be used in conjunction with any satanic reference, including but not limited to Lucifer, Hades, Old Scratch, Hell, Perdition, Beelzebub or Honey Boo Boo.”
Secondly, jobs don’t come from hell. They come from people with money who are willing to pay other people to work for them.
Thirdly, I have worked in both fast food and retail, and neither one reminded me of the Netherworld. (Although the Taco Bell drive-through at 2 a.m. does smell vaguely of brimstone and sulphur.)
SK – None of us expected these jobs to lead to a career, but we did them anyway because we wanted spending money, needed to build a work history, or just plain needed something to do.
MR – Jobs are different than careers, but when you suggest that one is subordinate to the other, you diminish the value of ordinary work. According to the Work Is Not the Enemy Clause in the DJCC, my image may not be used in conjunction with “any statement or action that disparages the value of hard work, regardless of nature of the job or the amount of compensation involved.”
SK – There’s the desperate job, the one we had to take because the price of gas shot up, or we bought a new car and had to make payments on it, or needed to pay college tuition. Maybe it was a second job, or something informal on the side, like fixing up and selling cars.
MR- You make the option of working a second job sound like the problem, not the solution. Under the Personal Responsibility Clause of the DJCC, my image “must not be used in association with any language or expression that attempts to portray hard-working people as helpless victims.” The DJCC maintains that meeting one’s financial obligations is an act of responsibility, not an act of “desperation.”…
SK- And then there’s the kind of job we wouldn’t take again under any conditions, no matter how desperate or bored we were. The conditions were unpleasant if not dangerous, and the pay didn’t make up for it.
MR – I understand that some jobs are beneath you. Specifically, those jobs that you find to be “unpleasant” and “low-paying.” Unfortunately, under the Hubris Clause of the DJCC, I am forbidden from endorsing “any third-party comments that could be interpreted as elitist, judgmental, haughty or condescending.” …
SK – Are they good for the people who work them?
MR – Of course they are.
SK – Are they good for the economy?
MR – Of course they are.
SK – Tell us what you think in the poll and comments below.
MR – I did. I voted and then I checked the results. Then I threw up in my mouth. Apparently, most of the respondents see no value in the kind of work you’ve described. That’s a seriously bleak outcome, and a blatant violation of all the aforementioned clauses, including the Glass Half-Empty Restriction of the DJCC, which forbids me from lending my name and likeness to anything “heartbreaking, dismal, grim, pessimistic, soul-deadening or just plain depressing.”
SK – The Muskegon Chronicle and MLive.com just finished the second segment in a months-long series of articles about jobs in the Muskegon area. In the most recent segment, we wrote about low-paying jobs, and the “shadow” economy of people who hack out a living by mowing lawns, scrounging odd jobs, and anything else that comes their way.
MR – I read it. Nowhere does the writer congratulate anyone for their resourcefulness or self-reliance. Instead, you wrote that “desperate times call for desperate measures,” a clear infraction of the Hyperbole Restriction. According to the DJCC, desperation means selling a kidney to ransom your wife and kids. Desperation is not a $10 an hour construction job with no benefits, as you suggest. That’s just work. …
SK – Some people might take an optimistic view of these jobs.
MR – Of course. Some people still see hard work as something to be respected in all its forms. The point is, fewer people share that view than ever before. The majority of people in your poll voted “no” to every question. They believe that whole categories of jobs are “bad” for the worker and “bad” for society at large. That’s a clear infraction of the Work Is Not the Enemy Clause of the DJCC, and a radical departure of the attitude I encountered in my previous visits to the great state of Michigan.
SK- Some people might say the work needs to be done and the workers are filling that need.
MR – I would hope so. Your own paper reported that 2 trillion dollars is being generated by this “shadow economy.” That’s 8% of our GDP. I’m no economist, but I’d wager an 8% drop in the GDP would start the next Great Depression. And while the Dirty Jobs Code of Conduct doesn’t address it directly, I’d prefer that my name and likeness avoid any direct association with the any type of economic collapse.
SK – Some will say that nobody forced people to take these jobs. That these jobs enable these people to earn money and pay for things that matter to them. These jobs may mean that individuals are able to rely more on their own earnings, and less on taxpayer-funded assistance programs.
MR – Now those people sound more like the Michiganders I remember! The Soo Lock workers in Sault Ste. Marie, the log cabin builders in the U.P., the mobile butchers in Holland, the Bone Black workers in Melvindale, the many good folks on Mackinac Island (in those “hellish” retail and food service positions), the craftsmen at Novadai Furniture right there in Muskegon, and of course the maintenance workers on The Mighty Mac. Those people would never look down their noses at an honest day’s work. No way.
SK – Others might take a more negative view. Advocates of living-wage policy might say that low-wage jobs are hurtful to the people working them.
MR – The world is full of well-intended people who believe that prices, wages and rents should should have nothing to do with pesky things like supply and demand. While I applaud their intentions, I’m afraid the Common Sense Clause of the DJCC does not allow my name or likeness to be associated with any views or expressions that could be interpreted as “unrealistic or childlike.”
SK – Some might say that people working in a “shadow economy” are part of the symptoms of an economic system breaking down.
MR – I have no idea if the economy is breaking down or just evolving, but regardless, low-paying, part-time and off-the-grid jobs are here to stay. We can either talk about these jobs with a measure of dignity and respect, or we can adapt your labeling system of “Bad, Unpleasant, Dangerous, Not-Worth-Having, and Hellish.” Honestly, I don’t see the point of attacking honest work under any circumstances (although the Futility Clause of the DJCC prohibits me from expecting a cogent reply from those who do.)
SK – A few might even quote the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.”
MR – That’s very sweet. Unfortunately, the Delusional Thinking Restriction of the DJCC is very clear on this: “under no circumstances will artist’s name and likeness be used to declare or proclaim anything that might suggest the endorsement of a utopian or fairy-tale state.”
All of these jobs pay more than the “living wage.” Many provide free training and benefits. None of them are “off the grid.” They’re available right now to anyone willing to learn a new skill. Unfortunately, no one seems to want them. …
On Dirty Jobs, I met hundreds of men and women who found success and happiness by doing the “unpleasant” thing. I remember a guy in Washington whose first job was cleaning the grease trap in a Mexican restaurant. He moved on to washing dishes and then waiting tables. Today, he owns the restaurant, and six more just like it. I’d like to read more stories about people like that, and I bet I’m not alone.
Don’t get me wrong, I care about the people you write about. For what it’s worth, I run a modest foundation that’s focused on scholarships for those who are willing to learn a useful skill. But let’s not forget about the people who did it the hard way. People who took the jobs you dismissed as “not worth having” and then prospered. People who didn’t shy away from the “bad jobs,” and ultimately learned to love them. If you ever write a story about them, please feel free to use my image. According to the spirit of the Dirty Jobs Code of Conduct, that’s what it’s there for.
I’ve hired a number of people over the years. The number one thing I work for is work ethic. Practically any skill can be taught and be learned by repetition. Work ethic can be taught to kids, but not to adults.
The best Facebook comment is this:
As someone who works for ACS (the “hard” side of MLive) may I say that I think that Steve Kloosterman should spend a day doing my job in the printing/mailroom side of the newspaper. Really, I hate it when people make me feel ashamed of the company I work for.
By the way: I’m working on Labor Day. A lot of people are. Nearly all small business owners are working today. So when you see some union fathead claiming that unions brought us weekends and 40-hour weeks, feel free to give him a one-finger salute.
The Parents Television Council takes the occasion of whatever that was Miley Cyrus did at the MTV Video Music Awards to be appalled, and, according to Breitbart, call for action:
The Parents Television Council (PTC), outraged at the sexual acts displayed at Sunday’s MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) has called for Congress to pass the Television Consumer Freedom Act of 2013 (S. 912).
The act would change the way cable television is packaged and sold to the public. Currently, cable networks are joined with others by cable companies so consumers cannot buy one without buying some or all of them. The bill in question would let consumers pay for only the cable networks they want.
The MTV awards show, which was approved for viewers as young as 14, featured Lady Gaga stripping down to a thong and Miley Cyrus, wearing a flesh-colored bikini, using a foam novelty hand to simulate sexual acts and “twerking” in front of singer Robin Thicke.
PTC Director of Public Policy Dan Isett blistered MTV for marketing “adults-only material to children while falsely manipulating the content rating to make parents think the content was safe for their children.” He added, “How is this image of former child star Miley Cyrus appropriate for 14-year-olds? How is it appropriate for 14-year-olds to see a condom commercial and a promo for an R-rated movie during the first commercial break?” …
But the Television Consumer Freedom Act of 2013, which has been read in the Senate, has not seen the light of day since then. That pleases the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, which argues that the present situation gives consumers “a wider variety of viewing options [and] increased programming diversity.”
Islett concluded, “After MTV’s display last night, it’s time to give control back to consumers.”
I didn’t watch, but I’ve seen enough online outrage to comment on the bigger issues, which have little to do with Cyrus or Thicke. (Beyond saying that, as a father, Billy Ray and Alan, respectively, must be really proud. End sarcasm.)
Before a bit of TV 101, this Gen X-er (part of a group who says: MTV plays music videos?) must pass on this E! reaction from Brooke Shields, who played Cyrus’ mother in Disney’s Hannah Montana:
“I just want to know who’s advising her, and why it’s necessary,” Shield’s says of Cyrus’ VMA display. “I mean the whole finger thing and the hand and Robin [Thicke] probably at that point was going, ‘I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“[Our children] can’t watch that,” she added. “I feel like it’s a bit desperate.” …
And after Today cohost Willie Geist notes there’s a big “Disney overcorrection,” Shields wholeheartedly agrees, saying how Miley has been trying to distance herself from her Disney reputation since the end of Hannah Montana (remember “Can’t Be Tamed”?)
“We noticed that when we went to her concert with my daughters, who were obsessed, and they met her when I was playing her mother. And then we went to her Miley Cyrus concert and it was a very different vibe,” she explained. “You could see her trying so hard to go against that…She can sing beautifully, and I feel like if she lets that lead, rather than let her bottom lead….And the tongue out, and I think it’s just a little desperate… trying so, so hard.”
That reaction came from someone who (1) played a child prostitute at age 12 in “Pretty Baby,” (2) played a shipwrecked girl who discovers human biology with her same-age shipwreckmate in “The Blue Lagoon,” and (3) starred in “Endless Love,” which originally got an X rating, all before her 18th birthday. (And I know this because she was born four days before I was; the answer to whether I have seen any of those depends on whether my mother is reading this blog.)
Wisconsin Time Warner Cable subscribers who didn’t realize this before now know after having missed two Packers preseason games that neither broadcast or cable channels nor cable operators (and, for that matter, satellite providers) are on their side Every media company in this paragraph is a business interested first and foremost in making money.
MTV is part of Viacom, which owns or controls CBS, BET, CBS Sports Network, CMT, Comedy Central, Epix, Flix, Logo TV, the Movie Channel(s), MTV2, Nickelodeon and its variants, Showtime and its variations, Spike, TV Land and VH1.
If that seems like a lot, consider the holdings of NBCUniversal — NBC, Bravo, CNBC, the Comcast sports channels, E!, G4, the Golf Channel, MSNBC, NBC Sports Network, Oxygen, qubo, Style, Syfy, Telemundo, USA Network, and The Weather Channel. Fox owns or controls Fox TV, the Big Ten Network, Fox Business, Fox College Sports, Fox News Channel, Fox Sports 1 and 2, the regional Fox Sports Channels, FX, FXX (a channel geared to 18- to 34-year-old men that starts Sunday) and National Geographic Channel.
Time Warner owns cable systems and Cartoon Network, CNN, HBO, HLN, TBS, TruTV, and Turner Classic Movies. Disney owns or controls ABC, ABC Family, ABC News Now, Disney Channel Live Well, all the ESPNs and Soapnet, Disney also owns half of A+E, which includes A&E, Bio, History Channel and Lifetime.
Smaller players still own a lot of channels. Discovery Communications owns Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, Military Channel, the Oprah Winfrey Network, Science, and TLC. AMC Networks owns AMC, Sundance and WeTV. Starz LLC owns the Encore and Starz channels. Sports leagues and sports teams own their own channels too.
Bundling — that is, a package deal of a number of cable channels for a certain per-subscriber price — works for the programmer’s benefit because they provide the opportunity to reach more eyeballs. That should be obvious based on the past four paragraphs. Cable and satellite providers can turn around and inform prospective customers how many channels they get for one low monthly price.
The claim that a la carte pricing would mean consumers would pay less is probably not true from a per-channel-cost perspective. Cable companies have a way of ensuring they make money whether they supply you with 12 or 512 channels. If a la carte programming ever was instituted, cable and satellite companies would unquestionably add some kind of processing fee every month, as well as every time you added a channel, and every time you subtracted a channel. Marketing being what it is, the providers would probably charge, to use round numbers per month, $15 for five channels, $25 for 10 channels, $35 for 20 channels, and $50 for 50 channels to get customers to go for the bigger package. I can say that confidently because they’re already doing that, and a la carte pricing will not change the profit motive.
Does that mean you’re now paying for programming you don’t watch? Yes. You already do that even on free TV, because the cost of advertising your favorite products — on TV, radio, billboard or online, in print or via direct mail or skywriting airplane — is part of the cost of your favorite products, whether or not you see those ads. Cable channels make money by both advertising and subscriber fees passed on by cable or satellite companies.
TVs are already equipped with V-chips that, according to their advocate Bill Clinton, would keep children from watching things they shouldn’t watch according to the TV and cable ratings. More importantly, cable and satellite channels can be blocked by remote-control code. The kerfuffle over Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl halftime “wardrobe malfunction” resulted in the networks’ adopting seven-second delays on the possibility that a player might utter a naughty word upon something not going right during a game. (Listen to a radio broadcast while you’re watching the same game and you’ll see what I mean.) I found that ridiculous even before I had TV-watching kids.
This father of three thinks we should be blunt about this: The children who saw that thing Miley Cyrus did are the children of parents who didn’t care what they watched Sunday night, or watched with them. What Cyrus did was probably gross to watch, but it meets no real (including legal) definition of obscenity. Complaints about clothed gyrations are as old as the movies’ Production Code, the Television Code and Elvis Presley. Anyone who assumes the VMAs will have merely music performances has never seen the VMAs, but more importantly has not seen the career progression, if you want to call it that, of Madonna and those she has inspired, if you want to call it that. In a world with Madonna, Pink and Lady Gaga in it, we should not be surprised that Cyrus decided to step up to the line of flashing or mooning the audience to get media attention.
And do not be deceived: This is all about media attention. Cyrus is an adult who should have at least some judgment about what she’s doing, or have enough sense to employ someone to advise her on her public image. We media consumers are guilty as accessories to the extent we pay attention to such stupid concepts as “buzz,” the quest for which prompted Cyrus’ VMA performance.
The PTC, or anyone else, is perfectly free to advocate what it wishes. (And commentators are free to display their own ignorance by claiming that opposition to Cyrus’ “twerking” is sexist or, believe it or don’t, racist.) In a country that supposedly values free expression, it is up to the viewer, and to parents, to exercise responsibility. No one had to watch the VMAs, and no one has to buy a single thing Miley Cyrus sells.
With Labor Day next week, the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell writes about sports, though it may apply far beyond sports, beginning with an American Scientist paper from Herbert Simon and William Chase:
There are no instant experts in chess—certainly no instant masters or grandmasters. There appears not to be on record any case (including Bobby Fischer) where a person reached grandmaster level with less than about a decade’s intense preoccupation with the game. We would estimate, very roughly, that a master has spent perhaps 10,000 to 50,000 hours staring at chess positions…
From there …
In the years that followed, an entire field within psychology grew up devoted to elaborating on Simon and Chase’s observation—and researchers, time and again, reached the same conclusion: it takes a lot of practice to be good at complex tasks. After Simon and Chase’s paper, for example, the psychologist John Hayes looked at seventy-six famous classical composers and found that, in almost every case, those composers did not create their greatest work until they had been composing for at least ten years. (The sole exceptions: Shostakovich and Paganini, who took nine years, and Erik Satie, who took eight.)
This is the scholarly tradition I was referring to in my book Outliers, when I wrote about the “ten-thousand-hour rule.” No one succeeds at a high level without innate talent, I wrote: “achievement is talent plus preparation.” But the ten-thousand-hour research reminds us that “the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.” In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. Nobody walks into an operating room, straight out of a surgical rotation, and does world-class neurosurgery. And second—and more crucially for the theme of Outliers—the amount of practice necessary for exceptional performance is so extensive that people who end up on top need help. They invariably have access to lucky breaks or privileges or conditions that make all those years of practice possible. As examples, I focussed on the countless hours the Beatles spent playing strip clubs in Hamburg and the privileged, early access Bill Gates and Bill Joy got to computers in the nineteen-seventies. “He has talent by the truckload,” I wrote of Joy. “But that’s not the only consideration. It never is.” …
A more thoughtful response comes from David Epstein in his fascinating new book The Sports Gene. Epstein’s key point is that the ten-thousand-hour idea must be understood as an average. For example, both he and I discuss the same study by the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson that looked at students studying violin at the elite Music Academy of West Berlin. I was interested in the general finding, which was that the best violinists, on average and over time, practiced much more than the good ones. In other words, within a group of talented people, what separated the best from the rest was how long and how intently they worked. Epstein points out, however, that there is a fair amount of variation behind that number—suggesting that some violinists may use their practice time so efficiently that they reach a high degree of excellence more quickly. It’s an important point. There are seventy-three great composers who took at least ten years to flourish. But there is much to be learned as well from Shostakovich, Paganini, and Satie.
Epstein makes two other arguments that are worth mentioning. The first is about chess. He cites a study by Guillermo Campitelli and Fernand Gobet of a hundred and four competitive chess players. Epstein says that they found that the average time it took to reach “master” status was eleven thousand hours—but that one player reached that level in just three thousand hours. This is variation on an extreme scale. Does that mean that in chess “naturals” really do exist? I’m not so sure. Epstein is talking about chess masters—the lowest of the four categories of recognized chess experts. (It’s Division II chess.) Grandmasters—the highest level—are a different story. Robert Howard, of the University of New South Wales, recently published a paper in which he surveyed a group of eight grandmasters and found that the group hit their highest ranking after fourteen thousand hours of practice. Even among prodigies who reached grandmaster level before the age of sixteen, we see the same pattern. Almost all of that group reached grandmaster level at fourteen or fifteen, and most started playing when they were four or five. The famous Polgár sisters (two of whom reached grandmaster status) put in somewhere north of fifty thousand hours of practice to reach the top. …
The point of Simon and Chase’s paper years ago was that cognitively complex activities take many years to master because they require that a very long list of situations and possibilities and scenarios be experienced and processed. There’s a reason the Beatles didn’t give us “The White Album” when they were teen-agers. And if the surgeon who wants to fuse your spinal cord did some newfangled online accelerated residency, you should probably tell him no. … What Simon and Chase wrote forty years ago remains true today. In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals.
If you work 40 hours a week, you work about 2,000 hours per year, depending on how much time off you take for illness or vacation or other reasons. The 10,000-hour rule would suggest that it takes people five years — whether that’s an average or a minimum depends on whom you ask — to become good at what they do. But that number is low because not all of a 40-hour week is taken up by tasks central to your work. (Time taken in, for instance, office meetings, cleaning your work space and deconstructing the previous Badger or Packer game would subtract from that 40 hours of weekly productive work.) The opposite would be the case for someone whose work requires more than 40 hours a week. ( have worked at a 40-hour-a-week job exactly 7½ months out of 25 years in the full-time work world.)
Seven out of 10 workers have “checked out” at work or are “actively disengaged,” according to a recent Gallup survey.
In its ongoing survey of the American workplace, Gallup found that only 30 percent of workers are “were engaged, or involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their workplace.” Although that equals the high in engagement since Gallup began studying the issue in 2000, it is overshadowed by the number of workers who aren’t committed to a performing at a high level — which Gallup says costs companies money. …
The survey classifies three types of employees among the 100 million people in America who hold full-time jobs. The first is actively engaged, which represents about 30 million workers. The second type of worker is “not engaged,” which accounts for 50 million. These employees are going through the motions at work.
The third type, labeled “actively disengaged,” hates going to work. These workers — about 20 million — undermine their companies with their attitude, according to the report. …
Gallup estimates that workers who are actively disengaged cost the U.S. as much as $550 billion in economic activity yearly. The level of employee engagement over the past decade has been largely stagnant, according to researchers.
The report found that different age groups and those with higher education levels reported more discontent with their workplace. Millennials and baby boomers, for instance, are more likely to be “actively disengaged” than other age groups. Employees with college degrees are also more likely to be running on auto pilot at work.
For most of human history, the notion of job satisfaction would have seemed like a puzzling concept. Life was short and difficult. Just finding a way to survive and produce a family was a big deal. You grew your own food or hunted what you ate. The idea of a job — doing work for someone else in exchange for pay — would have seemed alien.
Today, though, survival is a given. Some of us might struggle financially — especially in an economic downturn such as this one — but we’re not worrying about starving to death. We have such a standard of living in this country that even someone who’s poor today would have been wealthy by historical standards. Our middle class families have things beyond comprehension to those in most of human history.
We’ve created a complicated economy that’s capable of delivering all this, and it’s a marvel. But there’s a dark side — and I’m wondering whether it has to be this way or if it’s an indication that most people are settling for being cogs in machines instead of making positive choices about what to do with their lives. …
I’ll tell you right up front that I don’t have a real answer to this, but it’s something I’ve thought about a lot for my own life. I know some people who don’t mind investing most of their waking hours in jobs that bring them no rewards other than pay, simply so they can watch television at night and then “party” on the weekends. There are many variations of that outlook, but none of them appeal to me.
I have a need to love what I’m doing and to feel that what I’m doing matters. I think most of us do, even if some people aren’t always conscious of it. I wonder if it was easier to feel that what you were doing mattered when you were directly producing your own food and building your own shelter, even if the standard of living was horrible. Can it feel as though your life matters if you’re sitting in an office processing paperwork for a company that you don’t care about, working for a boss who treats you in ways that dehumanize you? I doubt it. …
I think most people today are still buying into ideas about work that were a reflection of the Industrial Age models that dominated most of the 20th century. We were taught — by schools, parents and more — that the smart thing was to get a college degree and get a job with some big company, which would then take care of us for life. That model has been changing for decades now — as companies have become willing to dump workers at the drop of a hat — but workers have found it difficult to know what to replace that way of thinking with. …
I’ve been self-employed for most of my adult life. It’s sometimes been difficult. I regret some of the choices I’ve made, especially staying in politics as long as I did. But I don’t regret taking the chance of working for myself and avoiding the grind that most people endure. There have been tradeoffs — some of them pretty severe at times — but when I look back on it, I can’t say that I would have been willing to spend the last 20 years in an office obeying a boss and doing something I didn’t care about — in exchange for having a nice suburban house and cushy retirement. Trading away most of life just to have an elusive form of “security” at the end of life seems ridiculous to me.
We are supposed to work — that is, do something meaningful in the world. “Work” is meaningful by its very definition. “Jobs” may be meaningful, but apparently seven of 10 Americans put in as little work as they can at work.
Our ancestors didn’t think about retirement; they were too busy surviving to the next day. As Tim Nerenz once put it, Americans are “the perfected DNA strand of rebelliousness. Each of us is the descendant of the brother who left the farm in the old country when his mom and dad and wimpy brother told him not to; the sister who ran away rather than marry the guy her parents had arranged for her; the freethinker who decided his fate would be his own, not decided by a distant power he could not name.” Put another way, strivers, someone looking to get more for doing more.
As school begins in the coming weeks, parents of boys should ask themselves a question: Is my son really welcome? A flurry of incidents last spring suggests that the answer is no. In May, Christopher Marshall, age 7, was suspended from his Virginia school for picking up a pencil and using it to “shoot” a “bad guy” — his friend, who was also suspended. A few months earlier, Josh Welch, also 7, was sent home from his Maryland school for nibbling off the corners of a strawberry Pop-Tart to shape it into a gun. At about the same time, Colorado’s Alex Evans, age 7, was suspended for throwing an imaginary hand grenade at “bad guys” in order to “save the world.”
In all these cases, school officials found the children to be in violation of the school’s zero-tolerance policies for firearms, which is clearly a ludicrous application of the rule. But common sense isn’t the only thing at stake here. In the name of zero tolerance, our schools are becoming hostile environments for young boys. …
Zero tolerance was originally conceived as a way of ridding schools of violent predators, especially in the wake of horrific shootings in places like Littleton, Colo. But juvenile violence, including violence at schools, is at a historic low. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 2011, approximately 1% of students ages 12 to 18 reported a violent victimization at school. For serious violence, the figure is one-tenth of 1%. It does no disrespect to the victims of Columbine or Sandy Hook to note that while violence may be built into the core of a small coterie of sociopathic boys, most boys are not sociopathic.
On the other hand, millions of boys are struggling academically. A large and growing male cohort is falling behind in grades and disengaged from school. College has never been more important to a young person’s life prospects, and today boys are far less likely than girls to pursue education beyond high school. As our schools become more risk averse, the gender gap favoring girls is threatening to become a chasm.
Across the country, schools are policing and punishing the distinctive, assertive sociability of boys. Many much-loved games have vanished from school playgrounds. At some schools, tug of war has been replaced with “tug of peace.” Since the 1990s, elimination games like dodgeball, red rover and tag have been under a cloud — too damaging to self-esteem and too violent, say certain experts. Young boys, with few exceptions, love action narratives. These usually involve heroes, bad guys, rescues and shoot-ups. As boys’ play proceeds, plots become more elaborate and the boys more transfixed. When researchers ask boys why they do it, the standard reply is, “Because it’s fun.” …
Play is a critical basis for learning. And boys’ heroic play is no exception. Logue and Harvey found that “bad guy” play improved children’s conversation and imaginative writing. Such play, say the authors, also builds moral imagination, social competence and imparts critical lessons about personal limits and self-restraint. Logue and Harvey worry that the growing intolerance for boys’ action-narrative–play choices may be undermining their early language development and weakening their attachment to school. Imagine the harm done to boys like Christopher, Josh and Alex who are not merely discouraged from their choice of play, but are punished, publicly shamed and ostracized.
Schools must enforce codes of discipline and maintain clear rules against incivility and malicious behavior. But that hardly requires abolishing tag, imposing games of tug of peace or banning superhero play. Efforts to re-engineer the young-male imagination are doomed to fail, but they will succeed spectacularly in at least one way. They will send a clear and unmistakable message to millions of schoolboys: You are not welcome in school.
Of course, maybe we parents are doing everything wrong anyway, as the University of Notre Dame claims:
Social practices and cultural beliefs of modern life are preventing healthy brain and emotional development in children, according to an interdisciplinary body of research presented recently at a symposium at the University of Notre Dame.
“Life outcomes for American youth are worsening, especially in comparison to 50 years ago,” says Darcia Narvaez, Notre Dame professor of psychology who specializes in moral development in children and how early life experiences can influence brain development.
“Ill-advised practices and beliefs have become commonplace in our culture, such as the use of infant formula, the isolation of infants in their own rooms or the belief that responding too quickly to a fussing baby will ‘spoil’ it,” Narvaez says.
This new research links certain early, nurturing parenting practices — the kind common in foraging hunter-gatherer societies — to specific, healthy emotional outcomes in adulthood, and has many experts rethinking some of our modern, cultural child-rearing “norms.”
“Breast-feeding infants, responsiveness to crying, almost constant touch and having multiple adult caregivers are some of the nurturing ancestral parenting practices that are shown to positively impact the developing brain, which not only shapes personality, but also helps physical health and moral development,” says Narvaez.
Studies show that responding to a baby’s needs (not letting a baby “cry it out”) has been shown to influence the development of conscience; positive touch affects stress reactivity, impulse control and empathy; free play in nature influences social capacities and aggression; and a set of supportive caregivers (beyond the mother alone) predicts IQ and ego resilience as well as empathy. …
Whether the corollary to these modern practices or the result of other forces, an epidemic of anxiety and depression among all age groups, including young children; rising rates of aggressive behavior and delinquency in young children; and decreasing empathy, the backbone of compassionate, moral behavior, among college students, are shown in research.
According to Narvaez, however, other relatives and teachers also can have a beneficial impact when a child feels safe in their presence. Also, early deficits can be made up later, she says.
Rich Lowry has interesting observations about what is derisively called the “prison–industrial complex”:
Prison is one of the most important institutions in American life. About a quarter of all the world’s prisoners are behind bars in the United States, a total of roughly 2 million people. It costs about $60 billion a year to imprison them.
This vast prison-industrial complex has succeeded in reducing crime but is a blunt instrument. Prison stays often constitute a graduate seminar in crime, and at the very least, the system does a poor job preparing prisoners to return to the real world. Since 95 percent of prisoners will eventually be released, this is not a minor problem. …
In an essay in the journal National Affairs, Eli Lehrer sets out an agenda for reform geared toward rehabilitation, and the conservative group Right on Crime, a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, advocates a similar program.
Most fundamentally, prisoners should be required to do what many of them have never done before, namely an honest day’s work. Fewer than a third of offenders hold full-time jobs at the time of their arrest, according to Lehrer. They won’t acquire a work ethic in prison. University of Pennsylvania Law School professor Stephanos Bibas notes that only about 8 percent of prisoners work in prison industries, and about 4 percent on prison farms.
Labor unions and businesses have long supported restrictions on productive work by prisoners for fear of cheap competition, but their self-interested concerns shouldn’t obstruct attempts to instill the most basic American norm in people desperately in need of it. Prisoners should be made to work, but be paid for it and rewarded if they are particularly diligent and skilled. As Bibas argues, some of the proceeds can go to restitution for victims, to paying for their own upkeep, and to support for their families.
Prison should align itself with other norms. Inmates with drug and alcohol addictions should be forced to get treatment. There should be maximum openness to faith-based programs, such as those run by the splendid Christian organization Prison Fellowship. Prisoners should be encouraged to keep in contact with their families rather than cut off from them through what Bibas calls “cumbersome visiting policies and extortionate telephone rates.”
Once offenders get out, there’s a good chance that they are going back. Lehrer notes that about 40 percent of ex-prisoners are rearrested within three years. The goal should be to reduce recidivism as much as possible. Offenders shouldn’t be discharged directly from solitary confinement, or discharged without a photo ID. In the job market, they shouldn’t be denied occupational licenses when the job in question has nothing to do with their crime. They should, if their crime wasn’t too serious, eventually have it expunged from the records for most purposes. …
We have proved in the past several decades that we can lock a lot of people up. The challenge now is if we can do it more humanely and intelligently and, ultimately, create less work for the prison-industrial complex.
The number one issue that comes up when claiming that too many people are in prison is the drug war, as one commenter notes:
Stop treating drug abuse as a law-enforcement problem.
We should have learned that lesson from alcohol Prohibition.
Over the years, hundreds of thousands of young men, particularly young black men, have ended up in prison on nonviolent drug offenses. Caught by the “three strikes and you’re out” laws, all it takes is three drug offenses and it’s prison for years.
Rand Paul is right about this. The “three strikes and you’re out” laws should be amended to deal with violent crime, NOT drug offenses.
Our drug laws don’t take into account anything that scientists have learned about the effects and addictive potential of various drugs. Instead, they are a cultural statement about society’s moral disapproval of certain drugs (marijuana) more than others (alcohol).
Regarding occupational licenses, one commenter points out …
Only the potential employer has the right to decide if a criminal’s crime “has nothing to do with” the qualifications of a job or that the crime in question “wasn’t too serious.”
People tempted to commit crimes need to know that not only do they end up in prison but that they are forever restricting their options for the future to jobs that involve no handling of money, no being trusted with any responsibility, and no working without direct supervision. You do the crime, the consequences are your own fault and no one is obligated to hide the fact that you CHOSE to put yourself into the situation that you’re in.
… followed up by:
Why would anyone want to hire a convict?
Would YOU?
Stealing costs businesses a lot of money. Would you hire a known thief?
It is not the employer’s responsibility to provide employment for a convict. If you are worried about their job prospects, then instead of manipulating employers into hiring them, why don’t you start a business or nonprofit and YOU hire them?
Legislation is pending in the Senate and Assembly that seeks to allow municipalities to penalize marijuana possession offenders in instances where the District Attorney has refused to prosecute.
Under state law, local governments prosecute first-time marijuana possession offenses involving 25 grams or fewer. Repeat offenses, or any offense involving a quantity of marijuana over 25 grams, is prosecuted in state court at the discretion of the District Attorney. Senate Bill 150 and its companion bill (AB 164) would allow local jurisdictions to enact ordinances allowing for municipal courts to prosecute repeat cannabis possession offenders and/or those charged with possession more than 25 grams of cannabis in cases where the District Attorney has explicitly declined to do so.
SB 150 is sponsored by Sens. Joe Leibham (R–Elkhart Lake) and Rick Gudex (R–Fond du Lac); five Republicans are the sponsors of AB 164. I guess none of those seven must belong in the conservatarian camp.
These bills seem to be an argument about local control — the ability of a city, village or town to enact stiffer penalties for a crime than state law. District attorneys prosecute violations of state law and county ordinances; municipal attorneys prosecute violations of municipal law, although in most communities county ordinances and state laws are codified in the municipal code. While this apparently is about district attorneys and marijuana, the spirit applies to, say, circuit judges who are seen as lenient on, say, underage drinking in college towns. And either opposes the concept of equal protection under law — that something that is illegal in Abbotsford is illegal in Zittau, and the penalty for the crime in Zittau is the same as the penalty for the crime in Abbotsford.
The other issue here is the public’s lack of enthusiasm for the drug war, which hasn’t reduced illegal drug use, but has sucked up government resources. Politicians may lack the guts to propose reducing marijuana-related penalties, but that’s being done in effect by police’s disinterest in pursuing recreational marijuana users, who are, after all, guilty (once proven so in a court of law) of breaking the law. Regular readers know that I am skeptical of marijuana’s supposed benefits, but I am also skeptical of marijuana’s overstated harm. Not enforcing the law, and passing laws that are unenforceable, creates disrespect for the law.
Sort of related is the push by state Sen. Alberta Darling (R–River Hills) and Rep. Jim Ott (R–Mequon) to stiffen drunk driving penalties. One bill (there are Senate and Assembly versions for all of these) would set a mandatory minimum sentence of six months in jail to three years in prison for a drunk driver who injures someone, depending on the severity of the injury. Another would set a mandatory 10-year prison sentence for a drunk-driving death. Another would make a first-offense drunk driving charge where the driver exceeds 0.15 in blood alcohol level a misdemeanor, not a traffic ticket. Another would make third-offense drunk driving a felony. Another would allow the seizure of a car driven by someone arrested for third-offense drunk driving.
Some of these seem to make more sense than others — increasing penalties for killing or injuring someone while driving drunk. I oppose the 0.15 standard because I oppose the 0.08 standard and before that the 0.10 standard. Evidence of drunk driving should be based on evidence of actual impairment, not on the results of a blood test.
With all of these, however, there is the problem the Wisconsin State Journal brought up in April:
Measures that would boost penalties for drunken driving would cost $250 million a year and send thousands more people to jail or prison, according to estimates provided by state agencies that would be charged with implementing the proposals.
The state also would need to spend $236 million to build 17 300-bed facilities to house the expected increase in people serving time for drunken driving, the Department of Corrections estimates.
Those estimates don’t include the extra costs to counties whose jails would house offenders serving sentences of a year or less.
So where will that money — $236 million or more in jail construction and expansion, and $250 million every year — come from? This is a state with a correctly measured (as in by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) deficit nearing $300 million. (Yes, the state budget is legally, not factually, balanced, which puts Gov. Scott Walker in the same place as all of his predecessors, since GAAP-balanced budgets are not required by state law). Republicans correctly blast Democrats for proposing things with total disregard for their cost. Well, this looks like the shoe on the other foot.
The biggest drunk driving problem, based on my years of covering those who get arrested for drunk driving, is repeat offenders, who apparently must be physically separated from their ability to drive. (Not merely from their own vehicle, because it is safe to assume the proposal to seize cars from drunk drivers won’t prevent them from getting another one somehow.) It is remarkable to me that we have so many repeat offenders of not just drunk driving, but operating after driver’s licenses are suspended or revoked. That seems to indicate that the punishment and the chance of getting arrested aren’t much deterrent. (In fact, one school of thought says that increasing penalties serves to encourage those who are driving drunk to try to evade police, with, as you can imagine, potentially disastrous consequences.) Further evidence is in the high failure rate of substance-abuse programs.
As a society we appear in some cases to have the wrong people in jail (for instance, those guilty of what could be called “victimless crimes”), which means we don’t have room for people who do belong in jail and aren’t in jail. Answering the drunk driving problem in a fiscally responsible way seems to require dealing with that conundrum.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 