The Dream Works Only if the Team Works

Posted on by under Career, Connection

In the past couple of years, several of my colleagues have simply vanished from the workplace.

No announcements made. No fond farewell. Just gone — some of them temporarily, some of them permanently.

I have to resort to alternative means of finding out what’s going on. Are they still in our email directory? Are they still on LinkedIn? Because asking direct questions of management or coworkers is discouraged, arouses suspicion, and often results in getting no meaningful information.

Two people’s workspaces were left as-is for months, as if they were going to return. They never did. (Finally someone was assigned to box up their personal effects and ship them home.)

Here’s the thing: we are directed by the company to think of ourselves as part of a team. Managers are even called “team leads” rather than “managers.”

But this is no way to run a team. Because teamwork requires a reasonable, bi-directional flow of information.

Imagine being a member of a sports team. One day, you show up for practice and ask “Where’s John?”

Everybody shrugs.

You ask your coach. “I can’t tell you,” he says.

Game day rolls around. “Where’s John?” Nobody knows, or nobody is talking. And this continues for most of the season.

It’s creepy and it’s unnecessary.

And it undermines trust.

Trust, of course, is essential to teamwork. To continue the sports metaphor, if you pass the ball to a teammate, you trust that they will make the effort to receive it with the overall goal of winning the game. You trust that your teammates are watching out for you to avoid injuries and pull off the win. You trust your coach to not be giving you bad advice or dangerous substances (although trust in coaches has been diminished by some very serious abuses on recent years).

In the book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, the writer Sebastian Junger explains that the essence of trust and connection is the belief that the individual is willing to sacrifice for the benefit of the group and the group is willing to sacrifice for the individual. It is a reciprocal understanding.

Here, that ain’t happening.

Which leaves me to wonder what is behind all this secrecy. Laws and regulations? Company policy? Distrust of employees? Wanting to keep employees unsettled and always guessing?

Because of it were just a matter of simple human decency, there would be more information, not less.

Books That Will Go Unwritten

Posted on by under Career, Dreams

I think I could write a book.

It probably wouldn’t get accepted by a publisher, and even if it did probably no one would read it.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I am fairly certain that I could write a book. As in, I have the knowledge and the skills and the discipline to complete the project.

But I have not actually written a book and it seems unlikely that I ever will. There are several reasons for that.

One is my career and my ability to make a living. Early on, my career was satisfying enough that it was all I really needed. I didn’t engage much in hobbies or side projects. But after I was laid off in 2009, my professional work lost its appeal and it was then that I began to think about putting my energy elsewhere (like into this blog for instance).

A related issue is my inability to find a way to write the kind of book I want to write while not going broke or starving to death. To do justice to the ideas that I have would require significant investments of time and money. I just don’t see how I could keep my job and write a decent book. Nor do I see myself financing the effort from my savings and expecting to have the cost reimbursed from the publishers and from book sales.

Many published writers in the past few decades have not had to make that kind of choice. A discussion of women photojournalists–while talking about photographers and not writers–nonetheless sheds some light on the business of publishing: “The business has been taken over by a younger generation, many of which have alternate sources of funding, such as trust funds…. [E]ditors have sought out these self-funding talents. They had little choice. The new photographers didn’t mind, they needed the validation the publications offered and in the case of trust-funders, they didn’t need the money.”

For me it would mean quitting my current job and taking a leap of faith on a project with a very small chance of success. I’m not that much of a risk-taker.

Another is that I’m only recently figuring out, late in life, what kinds of topics I  am so interested in that I’d be willing to devote the time and energy into making it a full length book. For many years I was very focused on only a few ideas that frankly had done already by other writers, and I wasn’t  expanding into anything new. I could probably do it now but few writers find success late in life and the odds are against me.

There are actually three people who I know or have known through the normal course of life who have written and published books. One is Charles Bock, with whom I went to college. Another is Ellen Prentiss Campbell, a former neighbor and someone with whom I spent a few years in a writers’ group, reading some of her early work. The third is Andrea Jarrell, another neighbor and friend. They’ve been able to get their writing out there. I’d love to find time to pick their brains about it.

Back when Great Literature and Great Journalism were being written, the market for such things was almost assured. People had few options for leisure activity but to watch TV, see a movie, listen to radio, or read a book or magazine. The publishing houses thrived on high quality material and were always needing more of it. Bookstores were commonplace.

Today the tables have turned. Lots of people write or claim to want to write, while we have fewer and fewer places where this writing will be seen. As noted above, old models of success no longer apply. And if you have a decent bookstore within 10 square miles of you consider yourself lucky.

Which has me wondering: how many books are out there living as an idea inside someone’s head that will never see the light of day because the basic pathways of writing for publication have collapsed?

Sad to think, but it could be hundreds of thousands.

Trying to Erase Palestine

Posted on by under Compassion

This is a picture of a railroad bridge in my hometown.

A few months ago, someone spray painted FREE PALESTINE on this bridge, in green and red paint. Not long after, someone — the city? the railroad? — had someone go up on the catwalk with a bucket of brown paint and a roller, and paint over PALESTINE. Those blocks of lighter brown paint are where the letters used to be. (To see this picture at full resolution, click here.)

They did not paint over FREE — you can still see it at the left side of the photo. Also, if they were interested in keeping graffiti to a minimum they would have painted over the graffiti that has been put there since they painted over PALESTINE, but they have not.

They only painted over the word PALESTINE, as if to say that there is something inherently wrong about Palestine.

This makes me wonder why.

Palestine, or more clearly Palestinians, are a people without a state. In this respect they are akin to other stateless people in the world, such as the Kurds and the Roma. While there is a team of athletes at the 2024 summer Olympic Games in Paris representing Palestine, Palestine is not a member state of the United Nations.

Yet they are an ethnicity who share a cultural identity. Millions of people in the Middle East and various countries around the world self-identify as Palestinian. Even people with Jordanian or Israeli citizenship identify ethnically as Palestinian.

Importantly, they are doctors and teachers and businesspeople. They are mothers and fathers. They are people hoping to end over 75 years of statelessness, occupation, and exile.

Perhaps those who painted over PALESTINE on the bridge truly are under the impression that there is something inherently wrong with Palestine. But it would be an ignorant mistake to think that being Palestinian equals being a terrorist and that all support of Palestinian human rights is anti-Israel.

This would be like saying that in the 1930s and 1940s, being German equals being a Nazi. (There were in fact Germans who opposed the policies of the Nazi party.)

This would be like saying being Muslim equals being a terrorist. (There are millions of Muslims worldwide who are peaceful, law-abiding people.)

This would be like saying being Black equals being enslaved. (This, of course, is unequivocally not true.)

Imagine a reverse situation: the spray painter instead painted FREE AMERICA, and then someone was offended by the word AMERICA and painted over only that word. What does that say? Does it say that the word is itself offensive? Does it say that those who identify as American do not have a right to say so? Does it mean just by asserting an American identity you are somehow threatening others?

I would like to think that in this modern era, humanity has moved beyond the idea that one nationality or ethnicity is naturally (or divinely) better than another. I would like to think that we don’t try to dehumanize people who we think are different from us. The United Nations was formed in 1945 under the idea that (with the somewhat questionable exception of the Security Council Permanent Members) all nations on Planet Earth have an equal seat at the table, have an equal stake in the outcome of international decisions, and are capable of cooperation rather than animosity.

Sadly, reality is much more complicated and less optimistic. Nationalism — the idea that nations of the world cannot work together and in fact are and ought to be kept separate — is on the rise in many parts of the world, including the United States.

And with nationalism comes the desire to define who is “us” and who is “them,” and who gets to stay, and who gets erased.

But it should not be for a town in Maryland, United States to decide whether Palestinians exist.

Truth (But Not Truth Social)

Posted on by under Connection, Purpose

In the spirit of Independence Day, I hold these truths to be self evident.

(In no particular order.)

Everyone’s well being rests on three pillars: a gainful way to make a living; access to health care; and a community of support.

There are good things decent people do when no one is looking.

If this brings me joy, and it’s not hurting you, why does it matter to you?

The world makes more sense if you realize that most people have a reason for being the way they are.

We are more alike than different. We just need to have a shared understanding of what it is we are all talking about.

Love the prodigal, and be patient. See the person fully worthy of moral concern, extending love beyond the prejudices of your upbringing.

We are all on a journey toward acceptance, and some get there sooner than others.

Historically there are people who have a point of view that has been marginalized or silenced.

Science does not replace religion. But science does replace cultural traditions that masquerade as religion.

There are too many arguments that suffer from logical fallacies, based on emotion and ideology, the setting up and knocking down of strawman arguments, and the selective cherry picking and misuse of facts.

We must not support stating beliefs as “truths” that cannot be challenged.

I am divesting from militarism, from war, and investing in community, healing, and true liberation.

Liberalism creates freedom by lifting barriers and creating opportunity.

Tyranny is the arbitrary, unjust, and unrestrained exercise of power, usually executive power by few or one individual.

The State cannot demand that a pregnant person sacrifice their life, their fertility, or their health in service of “unborn life” particularly where a pregnancy will not or is unlikely to result in the birth of a living child with sustained life.

The biggest impediments to business are social inequality, civil unrest, corruption, and environmental degradation.

When high government officials have businesses, you have a conflict of interest. They are not looking at the country’s interest with these projects. They look at their own interest first.

In our times we see an increasing trend for people in the public eye to display ghastly levels of narcissism. These foul-mouthed, low-intelligence, often wealthy sociopaths, devoted to self-aggrandizement and the debasement of anything truly admirable, demand not only our unreserved celebration of their psychosis, but compliance with their ever-changing immoral opinions.

Prejudice, bigotry, and fear are setting the agenda.

The lesser man will win because he is playing to people’s ignorance. He offers empty dreams, but he is giving every voter a bag of rice, and they all want to believe him.

Criminals lie.

Beware of anyone who declares they’re the only one who can solve the crisis and seizes power indefinitely.

Being convinced of your own greatness is one of the surest signs of being crazy.

The Many-Hued, Messy Faith That is Christianity

Posted on by under Compassion

I was raised in an evangelical Christian church. I no longer identify as an evangelical. More on why that is some other time.

The thing is, when I was younger, I used to get annoyed by how TV and movies seemed to always depict Christians as Catholics.

Growing up, my church taught that Catholics were not good Christians. They spent too much time on ritual and ornamentation. There was too much memorization of formulaic prayers and not enough memorization of Bible verses. They took their orders from the Pope rather than directly from God (as interpreted by your local pastor, of course). Their faith was too impersonal.

So as a young evangelical Christian, I never identified with the Catholics portrayed onscreen. They may as well have been Muslims, as far as I was concerned.

These days, I don’t really care that “Christian” is equated with “Catholic.” I think it is just easier for the storytelling, so that the audience can readily identify the character as “Christian” and not Jewish or Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist. Of course that assumes that the audience is not seeing “Catholic” as opposed to Methodist or Lutheran or Presbyterian or Greek Orthodox or Jehovah’s Witness or Quaker or Assemblies of God.

Because Christianity does come in many, many flavors. Over the centuries, Christians have diversified into an almost countless number of denominations, sects, cults, and systems of belief. There is no more one type of Christian than there is one style of ice cream.

This is true in spite of the fact that on a regular basis, someone attempts to speak for all Christians. The Pope is a good example. The office of the Pope is intended to be the recognized head of The One Church, Universal and Catholic. What about everyone else? Don’t know; don’t care.

Another example is the increasingly insistent whine of culturally conservative people who identify as some form of Christian. They say various untrue things like “Christians are being silenced” or “Christian voters are being demonized” or “Christians don’t believe in vaccines.” They incorrectly say that to be a “real” Christian you must vote for certain candidates and be in favor of certain cultural, racial, and economic policies (Fun Fact: Jesus said none of these things.) These spokesmen, these self-anointed prophets, tell you what to think, how to read your Bible, which interpretations are approved and which are not.

But that’s just not how Christianity, as laid out by Jesus himself, is. It is varied, diverse, open to many, caring and loving.

There is a saying that’s been around a while in faith circles:

In Essentials: Unity
In Non-essentials: Liberty
In all things: Charity

We could use a bit more of that right about now.