The Mystery Hour

One moment you are naked on a table in a strange room; unfamiliar faces surround you. A moment later you are at home, all dressed. You don't know how you got there.

There is a large gap in your memory. A full hour has elapsed and you have no recall of the last 60 minutes. It's a mystery!

You check social media for scandalizing posts or photos... no clues... mild relief. 

You are too drowsy to investigate further. You shuffle to bed for a 3-hour nap.

You wake up hungrier than you've ever been (except for that time in China when you missed your flight twice and had no currency). As you ravage the pantry, it all comes back to you. 

You spent yesterday in the bathroom, didn't eat for 24 hours, and had a colonoscopy today.

You wonder if you hitch-hiked home with no pants...

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is an approach that focuses on creating situations that value and include people from diverse backgrounds, treating those people fairly, and providing them with equal opportunities. DEI initiatives are everywhere, but I have a couple problems with this all-encompassing movement, one of which is merely semantic, the other is more substantial. 

Now, I admit,  I may get hung up on semantics a little more often than I should. This has been a life-long trait that annoyed my siblings when we were kids. They even gave me a pejorative childhood nickname related to my precise interpretations of their casual expressions. 

In terms of semantics, it bothers me that there can be so much overlap in the meaning of these three words. In fact, if we cancelled efforts on Diversity and Equity, but did a good job on Inclusion, I think almost everything these programs aim to achieve would work out fine. 

Think about it, if work places, and communities, and organizations were focused on inclusion for all their members, then Equity would happen naturally. No one would be excluded from equal opportunities, equal pay, and equal treatment; they would be “included” on all fronts. This principle of inclusion would of course be extended to diverse members of the group which would minimize the need to specifically focus on diversity. Maybe the whole initiative could just be call "Inclusion".

On the other hand, focusing only on inclusion does seem to stop short of actively pursuing a diverse membership in certain instances when diversity should be sought. I admit that would be a weakness of an "inclusion-only" approach, but that brings me to the more concrete issue I have with DEI. Specifically, diversity is not always good. 

There. I said it. Probably getting cancelled as you read this...

Don't get me wrong. I know that diverse groups can be more creative in developing solutions to complex problems, and can also be more sensitive to how well policies will generalize across a diverse population. In these instances, diversity is clearly good. I agree.

But research also shows that groups focused on executing plans, once the creative solutions have been developed, are often more productive and efficient when they are a tightly knit, homogenous team. In those instances, forcing a diverse membership to function as a single unit can be counter-productive.

Overall, I think DEI initiatives should not be automatic nor universal, but rather, they should be selectively adopted where clearly needed and beneficial. I am not suggesting a major cutback, but a little more thought about how and where to emphasize DEI would be a step in the right direction.

And maybe we need a new acronym, derived from words whose meanings don’t overlap.

Coopers, Cobblers, and Grocery Baggers

Grocery bagger showing why he is bad at Tetris

Below is a list of ten historical occupations, nine of which required years of training to acquire the necessary skills to succeed. Consequently, those who plied these artful trades took genuine pride in their work and stood behind the quality of their output. 

The tenth, grocery bagging, took almost no training and no more than a trace of conscientiousness to find success. Heck, I mastered it at age 16 after five minutes of instruction from a man who accidentally locked himself in the bread room later that same day. Despite the easy path to skill acquisition, I believe that my co-workers and I all took a reasonable degree of pride in our work. 

Somehow, all of the trades that required tremendous expertise have became obsolete* in the face of more efficient technologies, while grocery bagging has persisted. Even more surprising is the fact that grocery bagging has endured while grocery bagging skills (a generous term) have declined precipitously. My first-hand experience suggests that the field is now mired in a sea of feckless practitioners. No need to cite examples; I am sure my imaginary readers have observed this first-world problem on their own.

That's a logical contradiction, right? Shouldn't the skilled trades persist and the simple ones be replaced. Anyway, here's the comparative list:

1. Cooper - A cooper was a skilled artisan who made barrels and casks. 

2. Cobbler - A cobbler was a skilled tradesperson who repaired and made shoes and boots. 

3. Blacksmith - A blacksmith was a metalworker who forged and shaped iron and steel. 

4. Farrier - A farrier was a specialist in equine hoof care and shoeing. 

5. Milliner - A milliner was a skilled artisan who made hats. 

6. Wheelwright - A wheelwright was a skilled artisan who made and repaired wheels. 

7. Silversmith - A silversmith was a metalworker who specialized in creating silver objects. 

8. Bookbinder - A bookbinder was a specialist craftsman who bound and repaired books. 

9. Calligrapher - A calligrapher was an artist who specialized in creating decorative writing by hand. 

10. Grocery Bagger – A grocery bagger was a teenager who needed cash to keep his car running, had a modicum of spatial reasoning skills, and who understood that a gallon of milk could crush grapes. 

There are many ways to measure a country’s success. Some suggest that life expectancy is the best measure, others look at percentage of the population that lives above the poverty line, and a third group believes an index of self-reported happiness is the ultimate measure. The USA tends to fare ok on these measures relative to other industrialized countries; we’re not the best nor the worst. 

But if they ever start ranking based on grocery bagging, I fear we may be last.

___________________

*Not sure about farriers 

MMDCCLXXVI

Today's theme is: Ancient History

Now, if you didn't win the 4th grade "Roman Numeral" contest in Mrs. Riley's class, you may be struggling to figure out the big number that titles this post (of course I am only surmising here, I wouldn't really know about people like you). Anyway, the number is 2776 and it is relevant today.

Indeed, they say that on April 21, 753 BC, an enterprising fellow named "Romulus" decided that being raised by a wolf was a cool background story but it wasn't how he wanted to be remembered, so he founded a city, named it "Rome", and went about his merry way. Now, 2776 years later, the city still stands, and its residents celebrate the date of its founding. 

And speaking of ancient history, the photo of the Fortier clan above, which seems to me like I took a couple of months ago, is actually about nine years old (that's IX years for the rest of you in Mrs. Riley's class). I snapped this along the banks of the Tevere river, right in the heart of Rome, back when the city was only MMDCCLXVII years old.

Small Town Shame

Why do I get mad when the people in my neighborhood don’t stop at the stop signs on the nearly empty streets of our peaceful community? They are not driving dangerously and it really should not matter to me at all. But it does... and I think it is because I grew up in a small town.

You don't see the connection? Let me explain my theory.

We humans are a social species that evolved to thrive through collaboration. This means we are pre-programmed to establish rules that benefit the community, to hold one another accountable to those rules, and to feel shame when caught breaking them. The evolved capacity to "feel shame" is the essential glue that facilitates coordinated action and collective success for a social species. That's part one.

Small towns are the closest thing we have to the rudimentary tribes where almost all of human evolution occurred. Small groups breed familiarity between the members, which is a key ingredient for feeling ashamed when caught acting selfishly. Humans are far less likely to care about how they are judged by strangers compared to how they are judged by people they know. That's part two.

So we all evolved to hold our tribe members (neighbors) accountable to a set of socially agreed rules, but unless you spent your formative years in a tribal (or small town) setting, with reasonable familiarity across the group membership, you may be a city-slicker who never internalized this core value. Remember, identical genomes express themselves differently when nurtured in different environments, so having DNA that predisposes shame for selfish behavior does not mean you will definitely develop that personality trait. Many of my neighbors surely did not.

I grew up in a rural county with a population of about 20 thousand residents scattered across a dozen or so small towns. In that environment, adhesion to agreed behaviors became a deeply ingrained value for me. To this day, I feel a responsibility to obey the rules of my small community (neighborhood), and I often feel offended by those who break them. I see the rule breakers as selfish and, according to my evolved nature, I bear a responsibility to signal my opposition to their uncooperative behavior.  My anger is actually my DNA reacting to behavior that I perceive as "against my community".

The problem is that humans evolved very slowly, over millions of years, to thrive in small groups. However, in a much shorter time frame, thousands of years, we transitioned to living in large cities. Evolution hasn't caught up. 

Small town values don't jive with big cities and dense populations... that makes me mad.  

A Bull and a Pig

So, news from my local newspaper back in Maine can sometimes be a little more "down home" than the news you imaginary readers probably see in your parts. Case in point, this recent story about a bull that gored a jogger on a running trail not far from where I grew up.

Now don't get me wrong; I am sorry that the jogger was mildly injured and I am sure the entire experience was frightening for her, but I am much more interested in the details about the bull. Apparently, he and his best friend, a pig, had recently escaped from a nearby farm and were living like a couple of frat brothers in the proximate woods. A curious image indeed!

I'll bet it was the pig's idea. He was probably tired of the sty-life, rolling in filth and eating slop, so he hatched a plan to go off into the world and be free. He may have realized, when he couldn't reach the gate latch, that he would need help along the way. 

I imagine he might have asked the sheep for help and learned that they were all rule followers who didn't want to cross the farmer. He probably gave no serious consideration to the chickens because they have short attention spans and were unlikely strong enough to unlatch the gate. The horse would have been strong enough to help, but probably too comfortable as a quasi-pet to consider a radical break from his cushy farm life. The goat? Nah, kind of a jerk and his kids are all hyper. I'll bet the pig settled on the bull as the logical choice after no more than a minute of contemplation.

I wonder what he used for a sales pitch: "Hey Bull, I heard the cows mocking you the other day.  The farmer too... he uses the term "bullshit" for everything he dislikes. If I were you, I'd think about breaking out of this place. I wouldn't go alone though, you'll need someone clever to help you survive on the outside."

Next thing you know, the bull and the pig are sneaking out the back gate, way over-confident and self-congratulatory to realize that, within a couple cold and hungry days, they'd be mugging joggers to steal their protein bars. Turns out that domestic, inter-species, farm couples don't thrive naturally in the Maine woods. Who knew...?

Back on the farm, the bull and the pig may have been folk heroes in absentia for a short time, but I wonder what the other animals are saying about them after their local news exposure and shameful return? Maybe they'll get a book or a movie deal out of it...

If I Were an Athlete Whisperer...

I have been annoyed many times in the recent year by journalists grilling professional golfers about their intentions to join the LIV golf tour. For the uninitiated, the LIV golf tour is a new organization, funded by the Saudi Arabian government, that has offered tremendously lucrative incentives for golfers to defect from the PGA and European tours. It has been controversial because many view the LIV tour as a thinly veiled attempt to "sports wash" the Saudi image by distracting attention from their poor record on human rights and associating themselves with a popular sport. 

The annoying part of this development is that many media members have been extremely haughty in their approach to golfers who have joined LIV. Pointed Questions about the morality of supporting Saudi's heinous plot by joining the LIV tour have been all too common. Over and again I have watched golfers on live television squirm and stumble through a response.

If I were an Athlete Whisperer, coaching these golfers on their responses, you might see something like the following exchange on this topic:

Golf Journalist: How do you reconcile your sense of morality with the knowledge that you are helping an evil government "sports wash" their image to cover up a long record of human rights atrocities?

Golfer: That's a great question and I am glad you asked it. I've reflected on this quite deeply and I've come to understand that it's not the playing of golf that will affect the country's image. After all, an imperceptibly small percentage of the world can actually attend one of the tournaments. It occurs to me that the sports washing strategy only works if the LIV tournaments are amplified by the many arms and powerful reach of the media. Perhaps your inquiry is better directed at whoever is paying you to be here covering this story and posing these important questions. Perhaps you might be better served by asking this question of yourself. Please tell us, how do you reconcile your sense of morality with your much larger role in the Saudi sports washing strategy? 

I don't know if it is ignorance, laziness, or hypocrisy, but the average level of competence in the media seems low to me.  We just may be entering the golden age of the Athlete whisperer...