Christmas Unhappiness

It's an "urban legend" that we have a nation-wide post-holiday depression. Whether it is true or not, in mental health centers all over the US there is a huge influx of new patients starting in December and continuing through February. Perhaps it's due to the winter season and spending more time indoors, but perhaps it's at least partially due to the Christmas gift-giving. We have a lot of pressure probably prompted by mercantile interests to buy "something nice" (i.e.expensive) to demonstrate to family members and friends that we love them. This is clearly not a function of the religion that gave birth to the custom.

It's also true that we are taught from childhood to expect happiness to come with the gifts. The build-up on tv and in legend is tremendous. Christmas morining is the most exciting morning of the year for most children. What presents could possibly match up with their expectations?

What we observe within a few hours is the inevitable let-down. Gifts may give us something to look at or to do, but they don't have the power to make us happy. Quite the contrary, in fact; the more things we own, the more the things own us, our time, our energy, our space. We have to take care of them, find a place for them, do something with them. After the first couple of ecstatic hours, we are already running down, losing our interest and beginning to wonder what to do next.

We expect too much. We are taught to expect too much, and the flood of advertising is designed to charge us up to the bursting point with lust for things. In the back of our minds we even equate getting gifts with being loved, and that there is a relationship between the cost of the gift and the amount of love.

In my opinion, Christmas is ultimately the unhappiest time of the year. But who wants to "spoil it" for others? Discouraging people in the traditional "bah, humbug" sort of way takes what pleasure they can find in it away from them. Christmas gift-giving and getting may be bad for them, but like chocolate pie, who wants to take their pie away, bad for them or not?

The Puritans Have Resurfaced

"My right to swing my fist ends at your nose", said, I think, by Mark Twain, is a good statement of the rights and responsibilies in a maximally free society. I should be able to do what I want, but with due regard to the rights of others. The First Amendment expresses the same idea in relationship to verbal utterances. I have the absolute right to say whatever I want to say, short of shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. These laws express the obvious truth that my rights are limited by my responsibility to others.

Two days ago the owners and employees of a locally owned heat-and-air business were arrested for selling oxycodone, an addictive and popular substance. In fact, 44 people were arrested, and presumably many of them will go to jail. They are accused of providing substances that the law prohibits. It's unlikely that anybody was forced to take the drugs. In fact, it seems pretty likely that the people who did the buying did so voluntarily.

So whose nose is hit? Who is harmed? At least, harmed to any degree at all greater than those who provide alcohol to voluntary buyers? Clearly we don't want people who are stoned on oxycodone driving our streets, but neither do we want drunks doing the same. Where did we get the idea that it was in our interest to prohibit voluntary actions that do not threaten us? Where did we get the idea that we even have a right to make such laws?

I don't take drugs, because I personally don't like them. I add this disclaimer to avoid sounding like an apologist for drug use. I do, however, feel strongly about the issues of governmental restrictions based primarily on a puritanical fear that somewhere, somehow, somebody is voluntarily impaired. We gave in to this idea during the era of Prohibition (of alcohol). This was an equally puritanical and stupid law that served only to fund criminal organizations and was ultimately abandoned because it was impractical. It was also out of place in a society that originally aimed at providing maximal individual freedom.

I would like to hear from anyone how I am being harmed by someone else's use of drugs in any way that does not apply to alcohol use. Clearly there are issues of lost work or harm to families, but these issues apply equally to alcohol. I would prefer that people don't use drugs or excessive alcohol, but that's a purely personal preference. I do NOT believe that there should be laws against it; I strongly favor the rights of individuals to go to hell in any way they choose that does not harm me. I think that the limiting of individual freedoms ought to have a consistent and compelling rationale.

An Inspector General

The problem with any government is that eventually it becomes more corrupt. There's too much money just lying around, too much power, too many debts and too many friendships, for supposedly impartial legislators to resist. And of course we have to consider why anyone would want to become a politician. You have to have enough money to pay for a campaign, and the amounts are such that for any national office the costs are impossible for all those not already rich. So you either have to buy the office yourself, in which case you are remarkably unselfish, or you have to buy it having the prospect in mind of return on investment. The other prospect is that of being "given" money by foundations and companies, who you then owe big-time.

When Harry Truman stepped down from the Presidency, he refused all offers to sit on high-dollar corporate boards or in any way to profit from his presidential office. That hasn't happened since.

I have proposed before that at intervals this country needs an Inspector General, with many of the powers of an emperor, whose job it will be to clean up the government. The death penalty could be used for egregious fraud and corruption. For a brief period, rights to privacy for government officials would be denied and the IG would have unlimited access to information about any public official, elected or appointed. The IG might be elected via internet nationally or appointed by the Supreme Court, kept in office for several years, but only given full powers for a few months. This would give the IG time to collect information prior to his/her period of power. Those in office would know that the IG was watching all the time.

It's important that the IG be limited, and perhaps that the Supreme Court reviewed sentences involving capital punishment, as any essentially unlimited use of power leads over time to corruption. But it's possible for someone to resist that sort of temptation for at least a brief period of time, knowing that they themselves are subject to review by the Courts and by the subsequent IG.

I'd even like to expand the IG's power to include evaluation of corporate presidents who sack retirement funds for the workers, grant themselves a huge retirement, then sell the corporation after it's been looted. Hanging in public might provide a useful and edifying example.

The Drug Trade

When a psychologist sees a repetitive pattern of behavior, one of the questions that should be asked is: "Is the behavior purposive? What does it actually accomplish?"

Many times the answer isn't an obvious one. A patient in a bad marriage who is "putting off" a divorce, may "accidentally" leave a opened condom packet in his truck where his wife can find it. When she does, the predictable happens, and the marriage comes to a hasty and messy end. Sometimes we refer to this as the "dynamite stick up the kazoo trick". The man professes shock and horror, and he is probably both shocked and horrified. But at the same time an important goal was attained and quickly at that. On some level the "accident" was purposive.

So with that prologue, we come to the drug trade. It is obvious that on the governmental level we want the drug trade to continue. As evidence, we protect the opium crop in Afghanistan. We could stop the importing of drugs in a variety of ways; the most obvious, of course, being to make recreational drugs legal and perhaps even free (or at least cheap). England has successfully accomplished this with heroin. We don't do those things. We are entitled to ask whether the behavior is purposive and what it accomplishes.

The most prominent feature is the flow of money out of the US and to some very poor countries. Historically, very poor countries have had very unstable governments, with an unruly populace prone to revolt. The flow of huge amounts of US dollars into those economies stabilizes them, raises their standard of living, and gives the poor something to lose. Here in the US the sale of drugs and their use functions as a political tranquilizer. Stoned people don't revolt and usually don't even vote.

Maybe it's simpler than that, and the motivation is just greed. Money travels a long way, and undoubtedly, as recent history has proven, some of it finds its way back into the pockets of the governing class. Whatever the real reason, we could stop it and we don't. We should keep asking why.

The dam broke and the money is flowing out

With the weakening of the boundaries limiting the flow of money and goods outside the US a lot of changes are occurring which are obvious, foreseeable and unavoidable. What they are not is "surprising". In a supra-national economy, goods, money and services flow to the "lowest points", just as water does when the dam fails. The poorer countries in the world are getting more of our money injected into their economy, and the poorer people are getting at least some of that money. At the same time, we have less money per capita. What's so surprising about that?

We raise cotton. We ship it by rail to the West Coast, by ship to China. Cheap labor in China turns the cotton into blue jeans (or whatever), and they ship it to us AND to other countries. We buy back the jeans and sell them at Walmart. The money that in the past was spent inside the US in jeans-producing factories is now in China, where the labor is cheap and the money gets spread around. The workers and business owners in China have and spend more money, and their economy improves. Overall, perhaps (and I don't believe this) our economy improves, or is supposed to, although now we can see that it isn't. The laboring class of worker in the US has less work and less money. In effect, the flow of money outside the US has resulted in redistributing the money among the working class.

While the union movement in the US was necessary, it has resulted in the working class here pricing themselves out of the world market. We no longer produce steel, because steel workers had such high salaries that the price of steel became unreasonable, and we lost our market to those who will work for less money. One of the choices our workers had was to work for less money; they elected (through their unions) to lose jobs and close shops.

Money flows where the free market directs it, and as it does, it equalizes itself all around the world. It will continue to do so until it reaches its level. During the initial period (i.e. NOW), the amount of change is very large, as when the dam initially breaks. Eventually, as it approaches a general level, small differences in costs and income will result in small and continuing readjustments in the production of goods and services.

Where we have forced a large disparity in costs through an artificial boundary, such as in the cocaine market, the money flows in exactly the same way. Our excess of money finds its way to poor countries where it becomes a major source of capital for other investments. Drug lords spend money, lots of it. That money is distributed, and at least some of it to the poor and laboring class. Even their luxury purchases like yachts and condos in Spain have to be built by workers, who ultimately get some of the money and in their turn redistribute it in their local economy. In its turn this increase in standard of living in Afghanistan or Columbia results in more stability in their government, which usually benefits us.

It's quite easy to predict how the economy is going to move over the next 50 years, always providing that the elements of the system remain about the same (e.g. no calamities, world-wide plagues, etc). The US will continue to get poorer as the money flows out. Eventually things will stabilize on a considerably lower level, but we will no longer be the "richest country in the world". In many ways this is the logical outcome of capitalism and free-market enterprise. The richer countries will be the ones who make and produce unique products and services for the rest of the world, not just for themselves. They will want more money coming in and more goods and services going out, and that will be the ONLY way a nation can enrich itself.

Just a rant about televised game announcers

Why don't the announcers on televised football games shut the hell up? I can watch a game live and enjoy it without any commentary. Where do tv producers get the idea that we have to be talked at throughout a football game? As if any time without talk was wasted?

And the inane things they say. I can't say I would do any better, but I can say I wouldn't do it at all. They say things like (and I quote) "They'll have to make more touchdowns to win the game". Now, when there's been a tough call on the field, it's useful to have that explained and shown from various points of view. That's the sort of thing announcers at live football games do. I don't mind that. I just don't want any more talk than the live announcers make during a game. I don't want to hear about the high school team one of the announcers played on. I don't want to hear meaningless statistics from 3 years back. I don't give a damn about any of the announcer's personal history. I just want them to shut up.

"Going Green" Is Not a Solution

Pollution is rampant everywhere. Condoms float down a stream, remnants of anti-cholesterol medication flood down the Mississippi. Millions of gallons of pollutants kill the life in the lakes. The simple lack of oxygen in the Mississippi results in a "dead zone" in the ocean of hundreds of square miles. Organizations form to fight these and many, many other problems, but they are not addressing the real problem but rather the symptoms of the underlying problem.

The real problem is that there are too many people. Lacking natural limits on our reproduction or population, there is no upper limit to the number of human beings we are capable of breeding and who survive to breed again. In animal populations without sufficient predators (like wild horses) disease is the limiting factor, and comes about when the density of the animal population is sufficiently high to allow rapid passage of viruses or other disease-causing bacteria. Animals inadvertently cause conditions that stop their over-abundance. Except for humans. On some level we know that either we will limit our reproduction or at some point a "swine flu" will appear that will limit things for us. We will fight that, but ultimately there are just too many people.

There will come a point where all of us just breathing out will cause an excess of carbon dioxide. How much methane can we produce ourselves and not be the cause of the problems? How many people can pee antibiotics into the water before everything dies? It's not plastics that are the problem. It's us. We can fight nature a long time, but ultimately we have to limit ourselves or the planet won't survive. The earth may limit us if we don't take the responsibility.

In addition, judging from the papers, many people having children should not be having children. The children are abused and molested and grow up to repeat their parents offenses. When are we going to require WORLD-WIDE training and licensing for parents and compulsory sterilization for those who will not or cannot pass the examination?

Death as a personal compass

My wife feels I think too much about death. She doesn't like to think about it at all.

To be clear, I don't brood about death and dying. I'm generally cheerful and optimistic; I enjoy life while at the same time I recognize that death is inevitable and one of the foundations around which human life is constructed. Woody Allen said that he wasn't afraid of death, he just didn't want to be there when it happened.

I believe that thinking about death is an invaluable way to sort out your values and priorities. The idea of coming to the end of my life full of regrets and lost opportunities should be more frightening than death itself, because it would mean that I had wasted my chances and made the wrong choices. So I look at my awareness of inevitable death as a sort of lodestone, a standard against which I hold up the choices I make and the values I uphold, to help me see what my priorities truly are and should be.

Looking back on what has been important to me is another way of trying not to get trapped in the minutiae of everyday life. Will it have been more important to me to have never missed a day of work or to have gone with my children to the zoo or the movies? Which will I remember during my last moments? Getting the trash out to the curb or talking on the phone to my best friend? Mowing the lawn or reading an interesting book?

I don't mean that we shouldn't take care of the little responsibilities and tasks. We have to get the lawn mowed and the trash out. But we need to be careful not to let such tasks take over our lives. The knowledge of the shortness of time ahead of us can help us keep our priorities straight and remember what is truly important to us. Death makes us realize what is important and what isn't, and for that I'm grateful.

Art photography

Duh.

I feel somewhat slow to have figured out the obvious. In my previous postings re what constitutes a real wall-hanger piece of art from a large postcard, I went off on several side roads while missing the main one.

Beautiful photos of beautiful things are rarely fine art. They're nice, they are interesting to look at for a minute or even less, but how many nice photos of the Grand Canyon or a beautiful rose do you want to look at? With today's cameras, anyone can take them.

But when you look at photos that are obviously genuine art, what gradually becomes clear is that their subject matter is NOT obvious. In fact, the art in them is the skill to make a beautiful picture of a non-beautiful subject. To be able to find the beauty in a piece of junkyard metal piping is art; to take a portrait not of a model but of an ordinary person in a way that touches you is also art. A rainy street and an empty park bench can suddenly become beautiful when seen in the right way. Finding the non-obvious subjects and making them interesting and beautiful in their own way is the secret.

Ahem. The triumphant rediscovery of the obvious. That would be my middle name if the phrase were a little shorter. Anyhow, I'm satisfied with this first step in focusing what I want to do with my camera.

Bailing Out Corporations

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I just want to add my two-cents worth to the increasingly heated national debate re the economy.

I listened to a debate on public radio about a recent decision by the "Wages Czar", who issued an edict that corporations who had taken bail-out funds from the government would have a cap on their salaries. The cap represented a sizable down-sizing of their income, on the order of a 90% reduction. The response by the debater (name unremembered) was that these executives had counted on their incomes and had incurred debts which they would be unable to pay after the downsizing; as a result, the pundit added, they would likely quit their jobs and leave the corporations in the lurch.

Losing income has happened to a lot of people in the US. I feel unable to muster up any sympathy for someone whose income decreased from 5 million to 5oo,ooo. But that's really missing the point, I think. The money being grossly overpaid to these CEOs, under whose frigging brilliant leadership their corporations were disintegrating, was not voted by the stockholders. Yet the money paid to the CEOs was money that could have been distributed to the stockholders, who were actually not only entitled to some of that money but who were disenfranchised of their right to limit the salaries of the CEO.

The captain of a ship who leads the ship into an iceberg doesn't get a reward. Perhaps going down with the ship is a viable alternative. I understand the argument that if the corporations collapsed the economy would be further damaged. However, please not that the economy was already damaged severely by the greed of the CEOs; we just hadn't "taken the loss" yet. There were and are other alternatives to bailing out failing operations. For instance, as in the Telco corporate problems, perhaps corporations could be split up or dismantled into smaller but more profitable enterprises. Let the CEO of a failed corporation be dumped without compensation and without stock options. They should not be rewarded for failure caused by poor judgment and greed. Too bad if they can't pay for the villa in Capri.

And let's not forget that we carry some responsibility for the current debacle. Many people bought houses that were grossly over-appraised, knowing the house was not worth the loan. People over-bought stock on the market expecting a never-ceasing increase in value. Some fought for raises from companies barely surviving, as in the aircraft industry, even forcing some companies that paid their salaries into failure. We've lost the steel business for the same reason; short-sighted greed carried out to the point of self-destruction. We lost the automobile business the same way; greedy people make high prices and lazy ones have poor workmanship. Result: business gone elsewhere. So it's not just the CEOs who are at fault.

We can't survive as an economy unless we produce. We are becoming a service-provider country, with few real products of our own. We don't even produce as much of the raw materials as we used to. We send out the money; we ship in the products. People in other countries are benefited, but we are poorer because we can't compete in the open market for goods or services. This creates a steady downward decline with corrupt managers and politicians attempting to profit on the way. I suppose they hope to make it to that villa in Capri before the catastrophe.

What makes art "art"?

Theories abound in all fields of art. Some are simple and some more complex. We have a variety of criteria, mostly exclusionary; we have no positive defining characteristics. Even the intent of the artist has little to do with whether his/her output is perceived as "artistic"; many works of art now widely considered to be masterpieces were simply commercial ventures, things created to please the purchaser. From "Mona Lisa" to Mozart, the intent of the artist was simply to earn a living. Battles have raged among differing groups, yet no group has found a standard that cannot be contravened.

It has occurred to me after thinking about this topic most of my adult life that the failure in the attempted definitions of art arises from thinking of art as a property belonging to the artistic creation. All definitions of which I am aware focus attention on the work of art itself, attempting to ascribe its value as an artistic work to the shape, form, color, sound or skill involved.

I propose that the definition of art be focused instead on the relationship between perceiver and creation. When the creation has the power to evoke strong feeling in the perceiver, even negative feeling, the artistic creation has done something of importance. Unfortunately, such a standard is transitory; things that were highly evocative at one time may lose their power to stimulate response. What moves us and touches us varies from century to century, place to place, person to person. Many if not most people in the world are totally oblivous to the possibility of being emotionally moved by a series of sounds or shapes on paper or the written word.

And some insist that only certain feelings may be evoked. However, this is a weak argument and many instances can be found to be exceptions. Do we consider being moved to anger or disgust to be an artistic experience? How about impatience or contempt or amusement? Another problem with this definition is that it is very culturally specific. A Frenchman may be moved to tears by the sounds of the "Marseillaise", while a Chinese may not even find the sounds particularly interesting. People of all cultures tend to favor certain emotional states over others: sadness, longing, loneliness, love, tenderness, excitement and the like are universal favorites. Other feelings may not even have names, yet their effect is real and understandable. Some art is majestic, overwhelming, even glorious or tragic, but what do we call the feeling that rises up in us when we encounter it?

Still, we should consider that we bring ourselves, our personalities and unique histories, to the artistic creation, with all our prejudices and biases, and in spite of that, we find some creations to have the power to move us quite irrespective of where or when we live in relationship to it. I think an interactive definition is as close as we can come.

Abolish Deficit Spending!

The current major fiscal collapse was largely triggered by the banks using a new formula which allowed them to loan money based on estimates of future inflated worth. Our government does essentially the same thing. In Oklahoma, for instance, the current budget can be based on estimates of next year's sales tax and income tax revenues!

The federal government's budget is not limited to expected government income. In this way we yearly spend money we do not have, which is the definition of deficit spending. They obligate future citizens to pay for it. How did we come to give the government permission to carry out such a foolish and dangerous policy? Isn't it obvious what a disaster is ahead of us? We got a taste of it when only the banks spent money they didn't have. What will happen when the entire economy is based on such inflated valuations AND THEY COME DUE?

Every year the mint prints more paper money, which is cleverly no longer based on a gold standard. Since there is no real formula equating (amount of paper money) to (gross national product), the value of a dollar bill is both arbitrary and decreasing. More money printed for the same value equals inflation, which is the decrease in value of each dollar bill. Such a decrease in value amounts to a hidden tax, costing each citizen the amount the dollar decreases in value due to inflation.

What if the government was prohibited from deficit spending? Our legislators would be limited in spending an amount based on last year's taxes, for instance. If some urgent project required more money than was in the budget, they would then have to do what all of us citizens have to do in such circumstances: get a loan OR raise their income. Getting a loan means to add a fixed repayment amount to subtract from next year's budget, just as all us citizens have to do. Raising their income would mean they would have to raise taxes for next year, and for that they should need a special vote from the general population of voters. We would have a direct say in what the government would be allowed to spend over its current income. If we said "No", they would have to abandon the project until such a time as it could be afforded. Just as we citizens have to do.

Our dollars would not be decreasing steadily in value. Our taxes would be clearly related directly to the things we as a people wanted our money spent on. Our government would be directly accountable for its fiscal behavior and would have to answer to us for what they spent. They probably won't want to do that. No, scratch the "probably".

I think we should demand that deficit spending be prohibited and that the government should live within its budget. I don't for ONE MOMENT believe that anyone in government will vote in congress assembled to limit their spending unless we force them to, and I don't really see how to do that. Any ideas?

Tying Votes to Taxes

If we had a true democracy (which I hope will not happen) we could study each issue, see how much it would cost us, and decide about its usefulness. That would be totally impractical, of course. Have you even seen what a bill going to the legislature looks like? Thousands of pages and study results. The Health Care bill is hugely complex; can the average citizen read and comprehend the implications of all that material? Probably not. Most of us (at least those who actually can read) would never take the time or put out the effort to understand such a bill, let alone the hundreds that have to be considered each year.

So we have representatives do that for us. Actually, they hire assistants who read the bills, make summaries, look at implications and alternative, and make recommendations, and even that is overwhelming. Without all that information, we really have no right to an opinion except in the broadest of terms. I doubt if ANY of the most vocal critics/advocates of the Health Bill have read it, but they talk about its contents as if they knew what they were.

All right, we have to trust our representatives to do our studying for us, see the problems and spend our money wisely. Our only alternative is to refuse to re-elect them, but that is always a long time after the fact. With the internet, is it possible to find at least somewhat of a middle ground? Could we get the summaries provided by the assistants to our representative, and not be allowed to vote on an issue on which we have not done our homework?

And what if we had attached to each issue its cost, so that we could literally put our money where our mouth is? Example: "Are heart transplant costs to be included in universal health care? (Estimated cost for each voter: $5.00) (Total money you have indicated willingness to spend this far: $752.03)"

This would obviously work better if we had a flat tax or national sales tax; graduated income taxes are hard to figure.

I get tired of hearing self-proclaimed liberals voting for items that they are unwilling to pay for. At a recent meeting, largely populated by such liberals, I asked how many were in favor of the Health Care Bill. Every hand went up. I asked them if they were willing to vote for an additional compulsory graduated tax for every citizen which would cover the costs of such a bill. Suddenly there was a silence, and only one or two hands went up.

Amazing how easy it is to be humanitarian and liberal when you don't have to think of the cost as coming from your own pocket. It's for that reason that I think that people who don't pay taxes shouldn't be allowed to vote. No representation without taxation!

Earned Votes

It's easy to understand why we have a representative democracy, rather than a true one. Reading and understanding the laws governing the United States is a full time job, and then some. We have had to delegate this task to others and pay them to spend all of their time trying to digest and understand the laws as they are proposed. It's really impossible, of course. In fact, our representatives have a full-time paid staff to help them understand the laws; the staff read and make summaries, which is a great deal to accomplish.

Things are changing, now, however, with the advent of the internet and increasing access to all the information anytime anywhere. It is conceivable that within the next few years we might be able to move in the direction of a true democracy, with each of us in our homes reading and voting on local and national issues.

Do we want to do this? I am imagining a country run by the masses of people, the majority of whom have no interest in national issues, nor the competence to understand them. Many can't reat, of course, but the real obstacle is lack of interest and will to take such an active stance. Another objection is the amount of time required as well as the complexity of the material. The sheer volume of words is overwhelming. Possibly the most damaging objection to a true democracy is that there is no ready place for bargaining.

On the other hand perhaps that last objection is really an advantage. Would it be a bad thing if each item proposed for vote had to stand on its own merits? Does pork-barrel bargaining really benefit the country?

Moreover, the laws would have to be written in a simple and precise way. Perhaps only the practical intent and application of the law would be all that is needed. However, there could be no unrelated amendments attached, which is how bargaining worked its way into the legislature. Each proposed law would have to be limited to a single subject, and written with a fair and brief explanation of its effects.

This presupposes that we all as voters would be capable of understanding the proposed legislation and its consequences, and I am not convinced that more than 30 or 40% of the public is actually capable. At the risk of sounding elitist, many of the people that I know and with whom I am friendly are not interested, willing and/or able.

So what about leaving voting to those who are 1) interested, 2) literate, and 3) able? Suppose that votes had to be earned through examination? In that past, literacy examinations for voters were simply a way of excluding certain classes of citizens who were not encouraged to be schooled and literate. However, those days are long past, and now it seems clear that anyone who wants to learn to read and write can do so. I don't want people voting who cannot understand what it is they are voting for.

And I don't want people voting on how to spend our money who don't pay taxes. Our motto should be "No representation without taxation!" It's easy for a welfare recipient to vote for more welfare; he/she doesn't have to pay for it. An important qualification for a voting card should be that the person pays taxes and earns a living if not disabled. Perhaps additional votes could be earned or awarded for community services. For instance, it's conceivable that combat veterans could earn an extra vote; perhaps the extra vote could be limited to areas in which the person has demonstrated especial knowledge or ability.

We might end up with an electorate who are knowledgable, honest, thoughtful and literate, who have earned the right to have an opinion and whose money finances the government. Scarey thought, isn't it. Do we think that a genuine democracy could actually work?

Licensing parenthood II

In our culture, having babies seems to many people an inalienable right. Reproductive freedom is a given. Considering that raising children is the single most important job in the world, we seem to have no qualms about allowing everyone to raise them and in any quantity they desire.

We require people to get a license in order to drive. To get the license they have to show basic competence to know and understand the rules of the road as well as the physical competence to manage a car. But to have a baby all that is required is the urge and the opportunity. What’s wrong with this picture? Nothing, if you like the present situation. Just ask a DHS worker.

Might it not be a good idea to require people to get a license to have a child? It’s easy to see some advantages to such a proposal. We could require people to show minimal financial ability; we could require skills training, as we do for driver’s licenses. We could require refresher courses to cover various stages in a growing child’s life.

Low intelligence doesn’t necessarily mean disqualification (except in the extremely low range). After all, half the people in the world are below average in IQ. On the other hand, any parent has to have the capacity to understand and abide by basic parenting principles. The only grounds for disqualification for a parenting license would those behaviors or qualities that render a person demonstrably unable or unwilling to provide adequate protection and supervision for a child. Current recreational drug use or excessive alcohol abuse are obvious disqualifiers, as is a history of violence or abuse of others. If future research shows other clear connections between adult behavior and mistreatment of children, such behaviors might well also become disqualifiers.

A serious problem is how to deal with the children that are born to unlicensed parents or to parents who have become disqualified. Obviously we can’t put the parents in jail because they have to care for the child. We can’t abandon the child, either. Clearly we will still need foster homes, although to a considerably lesser degree.

Perhaps a better solution is to add some chemical to the water supply, that would render all of us temporarily or permanently sterile. On receiving a license to have a child, we could be given the antidote to the sterility medication. Essentially (in principle) children would thereby only be born to those qualified to have them.

Not only could you set at least a minimum standard for competency to have and raise children, limits on numbers of children could easily be established and enforced. It’s pretty obvious that overpopulation will lead to absolute disasters in the long run.

While this sounds a little extreme, especially for those of us who object to too much government oversight, it’s our government and our oversight. The situation is plainly out of hand, and the children who are raised by incompetent, uneducated and inadequate parents are the ones who are first to be hurt. We pay the balance of the costs, so we should have some say about what we are willing to pay for.

Licensing parenthood I

Many of the human race are poor or terrible parents. Bad parents raise screwed-up kids who become screwed-up adults faster than the rest of us can therapize, teach or coerce them into a semblance of civilization.

In the last 4000 years or so during which civilization in roughly the modern form has existed, we apparently AS A GROUP have learned nothing. Individuals have become highly skilled as parents and teachers and therapists, but as a whole, we have not improved at all. We teach rage and greed and selfishness and religious bigotry; we raise criminals and killers and rapists and child abusers. We sow the wind; we reap the whirlwind. The human race, in spite of the knowledge of individuals, has chosen to remain on the first rung of parenting skills, if that. And even if we don’t know as much about positive skills in parenting as we should, we certainly know a lot of things that are flatly wrong and damaging.

I see people in my office whose parents started them on drugs or alcohol or sex before the children even knew what they were. Every day we see in the papers articles about children who were savagely beaten or killed by their parents. Girls are pimped out on the street at 10 or 12 to provide money for their parents’ drug use. These situations are, unfortunately, common; but what doesn’t often make the front page of the paper are the many instances of casual verbal and physical violence that don’t come to the attention of the authorities. The amount of psychological damage that ensues is impossible to measure.

Some young women pop out babies just to have money from DHS (Welfare, in Oklahoma); DHS pays out the money but has inadequate resources to insure adequate skills in the parents. People don't even have to know what causes babies to feel free to have them. Some young men think it is a mark of their "manhood" to father children they have no intention of helping raise. I recently saw a 20+ male wearing a lot of "bling" (real gold jewelry) who was proud of fathering 7 (at least) children whom he had seen once or twice and whom he had absolutely no intention of helping raise or support.

I'm quite sure that 3000 (or 30,000) years ago the situation was not significantly different. Perhaps the human race long ago was benefited by sheer numbers of people, regardless of quality. And that's the point: no matter what advances in science or psychology of parenting we make, we are not using them any more to raise our children than in our primitive pasts. We have increasing quantity and apparently decreasing quality.

The place to stop bad parenting is before bad or inadequate people become parents. We need to license and limit the production of babies. We need to stop human animals from breeding until they stop being animals.

What Jesus Did Wrong

There are essentially only two approaches to presenting a new set of moral values or ethics. The Preacher can go out into the populace and present his/her ideas. The masses may not know anythng about the new ideas, and their interest in them, at least at first, is likely to be minimal or negative. OR the Preacher can stay in his/her place, become a Teacher, and wait for the interested people to come to him/her.

In the first instance, the Preacher reaches a larger number of people quickly, but attracts negative attention as well as positive. The short-range outcome will almost certainly involve conflict. The Preacher's approach is an aggressive one, which tends to create tension.

In the second instance, the Teacher's ideas may spread very slowly, among those who are already pre-disposed to react positively. This low-profile approach rarely involves much conflict. The Teacher is essentially passive as regards the promulgation of his/her ideas.

Jesus was a good example of the first approach. The conflicts he created by aggressively presenting his controversial ideas fulminated into an outburst, resulting in crucifixion. Siddhartha Gautama was a good example of the second approach. He lived a long and effective life, dying in advanced old age of natural causes, and loved by all.

It's interesting to speculate about the possible outcome had each of these two exemplars taken the alternative approach.

The Stock Market and Las Vegas

I'm sure it's clear to many people that the stock market is simply a gambling establishment, appealing to the very same people that go to casinos. For some reason, this didn't occur to me until late in my life.

The value of a stock, as it is bought, sold and exchanged on Wall Street, has little or nothing to do with the value of the company on whose name it is based. When originally sold by the company owners, it was a way of raising money to improve the market share of the company, and the stock purchasers were thereby to receive a share of the future profits.

But as soon as the stock was sold, not by the orignating company, but by the most recent purchaser of the stock, its new value was now based entirely on the expectations and perceptions of the new purchaser. The purchaser was simply gambling that the value of the stock would change in a predictable way, so that it could be resold for a profit, not on the originating company's products, but simply on the expectation of exploitable change in price. Stocks go up and down in the amrket on a hourly (or shorter) basis; this clearly has no base in change in the company product value. People develop systems to predict stock prices, and they make public predictions, both of which change the expectations of potential stock purchasers and thereby the "value" of the stock.

It's a "get-rich-quick" scheme, and the suckers are those who think they can predict it. When the majority of potential purchasers believe the market is in a cycle of positive change, the price goes up, thereby proving the prediction. When the majority of potential purchasers think the market is going to go down, they act on their predictions, and lo and behold, the price goes down. The value of the company which issued the stock probably hasn't changed, but the stock value has.

I don't mind people gambling, in Las Vegas or in New York. I object to the pretentiouness, the pretense that "business" is going on there, that stock purchasers are contributing to the economy. Of course they are not. Making money on the stock market is a form of vampiristic feeding on the blood of those who actually produce goods or services of value. It's just gambling. There's nothing scientific or productive about it. It represents, as all gambling does, the hope of making money without having to work for it or produce something of value.

Perhaps it keeps the non-productive part of the populace happy and content with their hopes. I think they should just get a job.

Avoiding a rebellion

As the fiscal crisis deepens, it appears that we as a nation are dividing more and more clearly into classes. The "poor" class is really getting poorer all the time, and the upper classes are getting richer.

If we want this state of affairs to continue (which I rather favor), we should be aware that throughout history the "have-nots" have eventually risen up in rebellion and overthrown the system, usually doing away with a large percentage of the wealthy. If we don't want that to happen (and I really favor it not happening), we have to find ways to keep the poor happy. The Romans did it with entertainment, the English during the period of industrialization in the 19th century did it with alcohol. We have an even better soporific available now: drugs like marijuana and heroin.

People using those drugs readily remain stable and happy, even if their lives are somewhat shortened. However, they are there to change our tires and stock our shelves, to empty the bedpans and man the machines. We need them there, and we need them contented and happy. Let's give them free marijuana! Rising up in rebellion becomes almost impossible. Even hunger and envy won't drive them to it. And they'll think we're doing them a favor!

National Health Care

I'm astonished by the controversy over some sort of national Health Care insurance. The arguments about cost, who pays, who is entitled, go on and on. But surely it must be obvious that there is something profoundly wrong about this argument?

We are ALREADY providing health care for the indigent, the poor, the uninsured and the uninsurable. People without insurance simply go to the nearest emergency room and obtain treatment. Of course they don't go for routine examinations or really minor illnesses, but those issues are barely covered by insurance for anyone, if they are covered at all.

So the poor get free medical care. Free, that is, in the sense that they themselves don't pay for it. The hospital provides medication and facilities, physicians provide services. The hospital simply divides the cost up and raises fees for those covered by insurance so that the loss is absorbed. We pay for the indigent through higher fees to the hospital and to the physicans and nurses. Did we think that all those things were just either falling out of the skies or were being paid for by the benevolence of the hospitals?

The fees charged by hospitals and physicians will be higher in areas where more such services are provided to the uninsured. Border states, such as Texas, California and Florida, will charge higher fees than, say, Nebraska hospitals. In other words, all a national health insurance program will do is to redistribute the costs nationwide so that all medical insurance costs are coverfed more equally. That's a good deal for us border-state dwellers, not so good for those living in North Dakota.

Am I missing something here? Or is this largely a political farce?

Money, fame and corruption

Sometimes nearly unlimited money brings with it an upsurge of narcissistic indulgence, particularly in entertainers. The only real constraint on their behavior is from media exposure and lawsuits. As a result they get caught in a conflict between their desire for approval from others and their desire to engage in totally self-absorbed behavior, such as sexual exploitation of others.

Their money gives them the illusion of privacy; behind closed doors they believe they are able to indulge their most secret desires. When the illusion is broken they may suffer a severe narcissistic break in the form of depression, often deep enough to result in suicide. As members of the audience, we are willing to tolerate the most unacceptable behaviors as long as the perpetrator of those behaviors is willing to continue to entertain us. By continuing to buy tickets, we condone and even encourage those behaviors. It's as if child-molestation (for example) is tolerable if we like to watch the molester dancing or singing.

Like the Romans 2000 years ago, we will encourage and pay for savage or uncivilized behavior as long as it keeps us entertained. As a result, our society seems to have lost the power to reject those who deserve rejection the most.

Spending public moneys

This is a proposal format for ALL future ballots that involve the expenditure of public funds.

It is proposed that we fund the following project:
Emergency room treatment for indigent patients will cost $X billion for one year, beginning in January. Each year this proposal will be remade with the current costs per year attached.
I, (name here), a taxpayer in the United States, Social Security No. --- -- ----, am willing to have my income taxes increased for next year by X%. This amount is fixed and cannot be exempted and will be added to other scheduled taxes.

The above is pretty much self-explanatory. It's easy to give money to needy people, when it's in the abstract or it's other people's money. Because spending seems to be a solution to all problems, it is important that we recognize what we are doing and take responsibility for it by recognizing that the funding comes directly from us, no matter how worthy the cause. We shouldn't vote for something we're not willing to contribute to.

The Old Age Gang

When will I get "old"? Is there a line I cross without knowing it, only to look around later at a new country with old inhabitants? What are the hallmarks and identifiers of old age?

We all have images of what "old age" is like. In our minds we think of "old age" as a special group of people with common qualities. They have their own group. They associate with each other. They eat, drink, walk, communicate and share tastes with their own kind. By thinking of them as a group, we imagine group boundaries. We imagine ourselves outside those boundaries, as NOT a member of their group. We do this to distance ourselves from "them".

We know, of course, that one day.... but not now. Not yet. Whatever "old" quality I find in the mirror, I deny that it is a defining characteristic. I have not yet joined the group.

Using Facebook or Twitter

I can see that I no longer belong to the "knowers", those of us who know things and understand them and thus are "in". I thought that I would always be one, and that getting old would not suddenly make me become stupid or out of touch. Short, that is, of strokes and Alzheimer's.

I don't get it. Why do people put comments on Facebook or Twitter about minor, uninteresting aspects of their daily lives? Why would they think anyone would care or be surprised to find they are "looking forward to the weekend" or "buying tomatoes at the grocery"? Clearly they are not discussing ideas, and equally clearly they are not describing the events or thoughts that might allow a degree of understanding or support or intimacy. They don't mention the fights they are having with their partner; they don't mention what the doctor found out during the exam. It's cabbages or lunch time or the current tv program.

I am coming to the conclusion that these media are not for the exchange of personal information or for better contact with friends or loved ones. Facebook and Twitter seem to be the container for the noises the tribe or pack make to stay in earshot of each other. The message is not really about the cookout, but really "I'm here, right here", and the rest of the tribe moves about their little clearing feeling reassured. And it's nice, I suppose, to think that others might care that this is true.

Sometimes I wonder if the twittering noises passed up and down our electronic synapses are the beginnings of a group consciousness, a mass mind struggling to become awake, like the random thoughts produced by our brains on the edge of consciousness. Maybe we're on the way to becoming a hive mind. If so, you'll be glad to know I just finished wastering the plants.

The Hope Addiction

We all know that the world we live in is largely fictional Behind the abstractions we are fed by politicians and corporate sales, there is very little of substance. We follow after the rainbows that are only painted on curtains, and like the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, there is nothing behind the curtain. We buy the sizzle, not the steak, the zoooooom, not the car. We rarely think of what these dreams cost us in actuality.

The stock market is a good example of a fictional world. Stocks go up and they go down, their prices mostly based on what people think other people are going to think tomorrow. People don't invest in companies because of their value, but rather because of their value in the eyes of others. The stock market is a large and more serious version of Las Vegas. People hope to become rich without effort or skill, purely because they are lucky and buy a stock that is going up and then sell it before it goes down. They tell themselves that this is because they are clever or knowledgeable, but luck is really the only factor. What they are buying with each stock purchase or sale is hope, hope for a big break, some life-changing event.

An even better example is a gambling casino. We all know the mathematics of gambling: the casinos make more than they lose, and that money comes from the gamblers. Many of the most persistent gamblers are those who can least afford it, the hard-working poor. Who can blame them for wanting to win a bunch of money? In their hearts they know that most of the people in the casino will lose some or a lot of their money, but they cling to the hope that they are "special", "lucky", "have a system", and thus will win. Even when they win they don't take their winnings home. They gamble some more. The money is not the object; the chance of winning “big” is.

Gambling is not about winning. Gambling is about the hope of winning. Working people, stuck in low-paying jobs, bills coming due, kids needing things, may see no hope in their day-to-day life of finding a way to manage. However, the casino offers them the chance, no matter how small, that a “Good Thing” can happen and all the problems can be solved. The gambler would rather lose a little money and keep the hope alive that something can change. The hope is all they have to escape despair.

Religions sell two basic things: They offer the rules for living, and they offer the hope of some after-life reward. People pay lip service to the importance of religious rules, although they rarely live by them. What keeps the horse moving forward is the carrot on the stick. What matter that the reward is never achieved or witnessed? that Heaven is never visited or photographed? The hope for Heaven is what matters, just as the hope for winning matters more than money won.

Hope keeps us waiting, rarely patiently, and keeps us tolerating ways of life that would quickly be abandoned were it not for hope. What would life without hope be like? While that may sound frightening, the thought of waiting indefinitely in misery for a promise that will almost certainly not be kept should be more so. Without hope, we would have to live in the here-and-now. We would have to pay attention now to what we do and how we do it. We would have to make each moment pay. We would ask the real price of things more often. We could still have goals and hope to attain them, but not by magic or without effort. We wouldn't wait to start having a life for Santa Claus to come.

Two right wings

A report published yesterday by the Pew Institute states that their survey showed that 62% of conservative/evangelical Christians in the US approved torture of Islamic militants in order to get information. This compares to less than 50% approval by the general population. We might expect that evangelical Christians would be less tolerant of torture and mistreatment and more accepting of others and their differences. Instead, it seems that we find the opposite. How can we make sense of this?

Christian religions teach tolerance but conservative Christians appear to have little tolerance. This is not peculiar to conservative Christians. Nany religions (including Islam) profess tolerance while their followers frequently behave with intolerance. Their behaviors are not congruent with their professed beliefs. This conflict in values can occur because intolerance is a general characteristic of all groups, regardless of the values they profess.

Intolerance results from the anxiety provoked by the threat of change in values due to exposure to conflicting values. In recent years exposure to other values has been provided by the ubiquitous electronic media. The more rigid the values, the more intolerant its followers are. Exposure to tolerant, humanist values frightens extremists because of this vulnerability. Radical Islam began being faced with an onslaught of exposure to Western cultural values, values totally different from the traditional radical Islamist position. We showered the world with television, with products, with commercials, with travel and tourists destroying isolation and separation. Intolerance can only thrive when it is sheltered from alternative values. The extremist Islamists such as the Taliban saw their young people being seduced by new images and ideas.

As the radical Islamists saw their values and beliefs being undermined by our liberal and multicultural ones, they became more anxious and ultimately angry. The "9-11" attack, like the many smaller ones before it, were not intended to destroy us. Instead, their attempt was intended to polarize us against "them" and to unify the Muslim world in a last ditch attempt to protect their toppling power and religious structures. They wanted then and they want now to provoke a religious war, which they see as their only chance to preserve their power and religious ideals.

What group in the West is most threatened by Muslim attacks? Just what you would expect: those people, religious or not, who are most intolerant and threatened by different beliefs, just like the Taliban. Our religious right was not directly threatened by Muslim beliefs; they hardly knew that Islam existed. So the Taliban (as a type) had to bring the conflict to them, which they have done by the kinds of terrorist acts which most oppose our tolerant beliefs. They behead people, they stone women, they torture prisoners, AND they release videos showing this. Why publicize these atrocities? Precisely because they will provoke the most reaction from the extremists among us. It is the very unreasonableness of their behavior that garners our attention. Like watching a magician, we see what we are meant to see.

The more they can encourage the West to polarize against them, the more able they will be to get support from the Islamist moderates. While their behaviors are repugnant to most of the Islamist moderates, that doesn't matter in the long run, because the Islamist extremists believe that as the holy war becomes more immanent, the moderates will finally pull together with the extemists. The Taliban hopes the moderates will line up behind them at last.

Religion has ultimately little to do with this. It is our tolerance and acceptance of others they cannot bear, not our religious beliefs. The beliefs of the majority of the Western world includes loving our neighbors, tolerance, returning good for evil, and so on. As we become more frightened and angered by the Taliban, we move away from our beliefs into attitudes and values that mirror theirs. Ironically we become more like those we fight.

Perhaps we should just give them more television sets and more media machines.

Showing remorse or guilt

It's not enough to acknowledge error or fault and to correct it. That should be enough but it doesn't seem to be. When I was a small child and had done something wrong, I remember my grandmother turning to my mother and saying, "Well, at least he has the grace to be sorry".

I'm also remembering how I dealt with such issues with my own children, many years ago. I had learned that being sorry was not enough, that the expression of regret or remorse was frequently a "cop-out" that stood in place of actually changing one's behavior. But while being "sorry" isn't enough, neither is just changing one's behavior, which ought to be enough in a rational world.

Judges come down hard on offenders who don't show remorse. As adults, when harmed by someone's behavior, we need to hear from them that not only will they change their behavior, they feel badly about what they have done. We seem to need both parts.

It's easy to see what the rational plan for behavioral change does for us. So why do we need so much to hear the expression of regret? It occurs to me that from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology, we NEED to hear regret or remorse from the young ones. Their ability to feel and show remorse signals us that they have genuinely internalized the "rules" and their importance, that they are not simply opportunists who have been caught, but people just like us, with the "right" rules.

A child of 6 who shows no remorse for bad actions is potentially a danger to us all. We fear the presence in our midst of a "psychopath", one who, to us sheep, is like a wolf, one who does NOT adhere to our group values and boundaries. When someone breaks a rule AND IS SORRY, we are reassured that they are not psychopaths. Judges look for exactly the same thing. Our little tribes cannot tolerate a psychopath within our group; they present a danger against which we have little protection.

What my grandmother probably meant was that when she was convinced I genuinely felt regret for my mistake, she was greatly reassured that my heart was "in the right place", that I had indeed internalized the values of our little tribe and did not present a danger to our survival.

When people don't express the "proper emotions", we become uneasy at the prospect that they may not share important human boundaries and values; the unease we feel goes directly to survival issues.

Photography as fine art

I've been an ardent amateur since I was 16. I've sold a few prints, but that only makes me a sort-of semi-pro. I've read a zillion magazines and books on photography and seen and taken another zillion photos. Okay, maybe not a zillion. More like bazillion.

What is it that makes a photograph one you would want to put on the wall in your living room where you could see it every day? Of course, the same question applies to any kind of art. Just being technically good or well-composed isn't enough. And clearly there is one's personal taste, which is probably predominant as a factor. But many that make the magazines and the books, while beautiful, are not enough to sustain one's attention over a longer period of time. I find myself paging through the books and magazines, thinking, "That one's nice/interesting/attractive", but rarely seeing one I would put over my mantel even if someone gave it to me for free.

With the advent of computer-chip controlled cameras, anybody can take a technically well-exposed picture. Technical skill was once a major part of professional photography, but not any more. What can capture and hold the interest in any picture?

How many perfectly photographed pictures of the Grand Canyon do you want? It's clear that simply photographing (however perfectly) any tourist attraction is of little interest, now that it's relatively easy to see them, and the number of good photos of interesting places and things is huge.

I find pictures that I really like and would hang on my walls proudly. Some of them are of people; some are of unusual scenes which can give real objects an abstract design quality. A picture of moss on a tree might make it. I don't know how to define what it is that I'm looking for. I hate to fall back on the old cliche about "not knowing anything about art, but I know what I like". Yet the cliche is true in the sense that if you have to know about something to appreciate its beauty, it's not that great. Knowledge can add to your appreciation but can't turn a mediocre photo into a great one.

Sometimes I think there needs to be a quality of mystery in the picture. Not a puzzle, but rather a sense that the art or photo goes somewhere and does something beyond the frame, a sense of deeper connection than is on the surface.

If anyone has an opinion about this subject, particularly if you have photos to illustrate your point, please contact me. Maybe we can post some on this blog and debate them a little.

Obesity and disability

Don't misunderstand me. I work with people with a variety of disabilities, more or less serious and chronic. I have no problem with the state providing financial aid and medical care; in fact, I'm proud that we do not let them "fall through the net".

I do have a problem with people who have a variety of bone and joint problems AND who are grossly overweight or obese. I see them walking with great difficulty and or managing with a wheelchair or canes. It's clear their obesity adds great additional stress to their joints, and increases their disability. I understand that they may have few other pleasures in life besides eating, but it seems to me that they should be doing everything they can to have a life, a job, a volunteer position helping others, or something, rather than making themselves worse.

Paying them for their self-aided disability is like forgiving a man who has killed his parents on the grounds of being an orphan. How much of the day must they spend stuffing food down their gullets? Since when is a physical disabilty grounds for endless self-indulgence?

I just don't feel any sympathy for self-inflicted wounds.

Guilt and Shame II

Embarrassment, as an emotion, belongs to the "shame" family of feelings and is an interpersonal rather than "solo" feeling. It is related in structure, as is shame, to depression more than anxiety, but certainly has anxious overtones.

Recently, in a therapy group, a member began to cry quietly, and immediately became red-faced and embarrassed. On analysis of her feeling state, she reported thoughts such as "I'm weak, and everyone knows". "People should not cry where others can see." Part of the focus of her embarrassment was her belief in how other members of the group then present would see her. She would almost certainly not be so embarrassed by the same behavior had it been in private.

In her mind she was breaking a group rule whose origins were in her original family. Breaking this rule did not result in exclusion from the group, but did result in group condemnation. The threat of exclusion was real to her as a child, though probably represented less of a threat than she thought. The threat was catastrophic, but came with a prescriptive plan that would avoid the threat being carried out. As a result, the anxiety was limited.

In embarrassment, the focus is a particular behavior which is expected to be changed. It was what she did or might do in the future, not who she was; the negative stroke was for behavior rather than self. As such, it was more limited because it was conditional. She was in effect being warned that exclusion could possibly result if she did not change her behavior. However, the feeling of being "weak" did strike at her sense of worth and self, and became an ever-present threat.

When group members were supportive and even encouraging, she was considerably relieved and less "embarrassed"; it was clear to her and those present that her embarrassment was self-inflicted. Other members of the group were certainly not thinking what she feared. The transferential nature of her feelings and reaction were obvious and could be dealt with as such.

Green propaganda

I'm in favor of green solutions, where possible. What I strenuously object to is the notion that we need some major technological advances or scientific breakthroughs to have a "green solution". There are very simple and easy things to do right now that would make a huge difference.

Here's a for-instance. I live in a middle-size university town of maybe 150,000 people. Like most towns without geographical features to limit or concentrate its growth, it spreads out over a substantial distance. Maybe it is 5 miles by 4 miles, but it's a little hard to tell because of the way subdivisions sprawl and put out pseudopods. We have some bike riders, but not a lot, because the streets are not safe for bicylists. So we drive everywhere. 8 blocks to the nearest grocery, closer than that to drugstores and cleaners, but it's worth what my life is worth to bicycle consistently.

Why is that, you ask (and well may you ask)? Because our fair city doesn't designate bicycle routes or paint safe lanes. Unlike European cities which are full of bicycles and mopeds and scooters, we have so few of them that we are not used to looking out for them. Some of the more redneck types nearby seem to think it funny to nearly miss cyclists or even just to take them out. So we have a chicken and egg problem; we need more cyclists to increase awareness of safety issues, but we can't have more cyclists until it gets safer.

So the first measure we should take would be to thoroughly designate safe cycling lanes, and then fine the shit out of any motorist crossing into them at any time, cyclists present or not. And keep doing that until we get used to staying out of the safe lanes.

Second measures even for metropolises are not that difficult. Arrange a safe parking area (or many of them) outside of town, make scooters and bicycles cheap and easy to rent, and ban all non-commercial vehicles from within the city itself. Or of course busses could go to and from town center and parking areaa.

How much could all this cost? Well, paying for the rental vehicles (which could also be electric) would cover much of the cost. How much does it cost to enforce safe biking lanes? So why don't we do something like this instead of the incessant yammering about batteries and butane or natural gas-powered vehicles or instantaneous teleporting or whatever? You can find the answer by simply obseving who opposes such moves and who profits by the opposition, and in addition one should note equally carefully the politicians who support them. Not that hard, is it?

Religion and conflict

In recent book (The God Delusion), Richard Dawson takes a hard line as not just an atheist but as an anti-theist. He regards religious beliefs as dangerous in themselves for a variety of reasons which need not be considered here.

He seems to think the world would be a better place without religion. He would regard religion as a source of the worst conflicts, the poorest quality of thinking and the cause of the prevalence of non-humanist values. He might well think we would have fewer conflicts in a more skeptical world. I think he is an optimist. As a psychologist I understand that conflicts between groups, sometimes in the name of religion, result in widespread conflict and war. I don't agree with him that religion causes these phenomena.

Instead I think intergroup conflicts are an essential part of human group conduct. Religion, like politics or race, can be enlisted in the aid of group formation and inter-group conflict. In my opinion we would have precisely the same conflicts without religion, under different heading and flying different flags. Conflict is what we humans do to establish our membership in our group. The existence of other groups is necessary so that ours can have conflicts to strengthen our boundaries. We use religion to justify this set of boundary operations, but we can and do use lots of other justifications.

In my opinion, the presence or absence of religion has little effect on intergroup conflict, which is part of the human condition, at least in this stage of our development. Religion, in fact, is essentially irrelevant even though it sometimes promulgates benevolent ideas. It's unfortunate that the majority of people professing religious beliefs don't act on or embody those beliefs, so their religion is just something to make them feel more comfortable personally. The people who talk the loudest about the religious life and religious values don't seem to have any better moral sense than non-religious people. From my standpoint religion is pretty silly, and I'm sorry to see money wasted on religious items (such as churches) when such funds could be put to much better use helping the poor or improving medical treatment or research.

If we didn't kill each other in the name of religion, we'd just find some other excuse.

Passive resistance

"I forgot".
"I was busy."
"I didn't feel well."
"Huh?"
"You never told me to.. like... do it."
"You didn't tell me what you wanted".

We call this behavior "passive-aggressive", and in past years treated it as if it were a psychological disorder. People who did this a lot were described as "passive-aggressive personalities", or even "passive aggressive personality disorders". Over a period of years, however, we began to recognize that such behaviors, while immature in manner, are part of our regular repertory of behavior, and that we all use passive-aggressive behaviors at certain times. As a diagnosis, it's not included in the current DSM.

When do we observe passive-aggressive behavior, with its characteristic body postures, voice tone and facial expressions? The first and most obvious examples are easily seen in most teen-agers. Whatever they were told to do, they didn't do it, and they have a "reason" for not being compliant. The reasons are transparently dishonest in adolescents, but when adults use them they are not so transparent.

Passive-aggressive behavior is also easily observed in a variety of situations with adults. In jails and penitientiaries the prisoners use such excuses to the people in power. The guards use them with their bosses. Office workers may use this behavior with supervisors. Soldiers use this with their superiors.

What do these situations have in common? In all of the above there is a perceived strong power differential between the person giving the "order" and the person receiving it. This power differential includes the power to punish, and the person receiving the order does not feel able or willing to openly resist. The resistance, as manifested in passive-aggressive behavior, is indirect. It is designed to provide an "excuse" so that the non-compliant person doesn't get punished or have to directly oppose the person in power. In situations in which the "power person" is reluctant to punish or is ambivalent about punishing, the "excuse" plays on that ambivalence to give the power person an "out".

In couples counseling I often see passive-aggressive behavior on the part of one of the partners. A great deal of resentment builds up in both members of the partnership. Usually the passive-aggressive partner is reluctant to deal with the issue, and for exactly the same reason they are passive-aggressive: they fear retaliation, physical or emotional.

Passive-aggressive behavior is specific to a particular relationship or set of relationships. The same person who is passive-aggressive toward his wife may not be so toward other adults. The p-a behavior is in response to a perceived power differential, in which one partner is seen as having most of the power, even as being a bully. "Bullying", in this context, may mean physical mistreatment or emotional mistreatment in the form of rage, temper tantrums, tears, threats, or withdrawal.

The problem to solve is not in attempting to change the passive-aggressive behavior. It can only be solved by directly addressing the perceived power differential and confronting it. It is surprisingly difficult to get this issue to the surface, as cultural norms do not allow adults to admit easily that they fear being bullied, especially emotionally, by their partner.

Mid-life crises

While we are young, we lack the imagination to see ourselves at the end of our lives. Our parents and teachers inadvertently teach us a rosy picture of the future: They tell us we are capable of endless achievement and unlimited options. If we work hard and do right, finally we will be rewarded with happiness. The reward at the end of the rainbow is the pot of gold that keeps us striving without too much thought about our day-to-day lives. We are on the tracks leading to a golden sunset, and all we have to do is keep on keeping on, hang on through difficult times, keep our heads down and cope with problems as they come to us.

Many of us, as we reach the latter part of our lives, become increasingly restless. We are more and more aware of the passage of time, and of how little time remains to us. We begin to see the arc of our lives, and instead of going upward forever we see it levelling out, and even glimpse the downward sweep to the end. The promise of limitless possibility no longer exists. We are forced to recognize the limits of our accomplishments. We find ourselves thinking, "Is this all there is?" Where is the pot of gold? Where is happiness and when will it be granted to us?

Even more importantly, we recognize how unimportant our lives are in the "grand scheme of things', and that we, like everyone, must end the same way, facing the dark, knowing that we leave nothing of importance behind. We fear or deny finality, limits, death, loneliness, meaninglessness, while at the same time our recognition of their reality becomes more and more unavoidable.

To avoid this awareness we thrash about, sometimes desperately and frequently unwisely. We want off the tracks down which our personal train is traveling. This is the time of life when people have affairs, not because our sexual drive has increased, but because we desperately long for new possibilites, a different life, a different outcome. We imagine or buy the famous red sports car or something else captivating to the child within us, something to calm our fears and distract our minds. We seek distraction through sex or a religion that seems to offer us an escape from the finality of death. Some chase fame or recognition, hoping to make a mark on the sands, all the while knowing how meaningless and brief such marks are.

Our existential despair is real and is frequently accompanied by anger. We have done all the "right things" without having given much thought to our alternatives. We have lived on automatic with our eyes fixed on the future without much thought. Suddenly the end of the line looms ahead and we feel cheated of our promised rewards. Where is the happiness we sought? How did we miss our opportunities? Were there other roads we could have taken that would not lead here?

There is no cure for the limits of life. Whatever path we take leads to the same terminal. We all grow old, we lose our health and our friends. We realize how little and unimportant our contributions have been, and we die. Much of our anger comes from the realization that whatever joy and happiness we have were on the way, not waiting at the end of the road.

The thoughtlessness, the automatic choices we made all along, make us realize how little power over our lives we have actually exerted. We didn't make conscious choices, and as a result we feel powerless and cheated of our opportunities. Even at this point, we can consciously begin choosing our lives, and recognizing and owning our past choices. We can recover our sense of ownership and power, even though we cannot change the end. We can know that even when we were on automatic pilot, we were making the choices that created our lives, and that we have shaped them all along. Whatever happiness and satisfaction we have, we have ourselves created. We stop being disappointed because we no longer carry the illusions of eventual reward. Our lives are our creation. They belong to us and to no-one else, and that has to be enough.

Boundary exceptions

“Rules” are values which prescribe or prohibit certain behaviors. We grow up with rules, but as adults few of us follow them rigidly. For the most part we follow our rules, but we sometimes allow ourselves to break them under certain conditions and engage in behavior that we might not normally condone. Of course, such exceptions determine the actual boundary of the rules.

Even in the law, rules are never completely rigidly enforced. Instead of mechanically imposing a consequence on a breach of rules, a human being such as a judge can consider the particular circumstances. For instance, we have a rule forbidding murder. Courts have held, however, that under certain conditions the consequences of breaking the rule can be modified or an “exception” made. Such a condition might be that the murderer was experiencing a strong emotion, such as passion, anger or fear. While we may punish a premeditated or "cold-blooded" murder to the fullest extent, a murder based on strong emotion might be assessed a lesser penalty. The rule forbidding murder may be granted an exception under these circumstances.

I chose this particular example because the “strong emotion exemption” to laws is based on a common to many cultures. We tend to excuse to some degree an otherwise illegal act if it was motivated by sufficiently strong emotion. We believe an emotion that is strong enough may justify a temporary exception to our rule. The “strong emotion” exception is of particular importance in understanding human behavior.

It's as if we said to ourselves "I will never do X", and then privately to ourselves, we add "…unless I'm very angry/frightened/depressed/sexually-aroused”. As a result, the test of all our rules is whether there is a hidden or at least unspoken "exception". As a psychotherapist, I want to know the exceptions to someone's rules and boundaries; I want to know under what conditions they are willing to make an exception to a rule they espouse. Often people are unaware of their own exceptions to their rules, or they may take it for granted that “strong-enough” emotion” automatically grants an exception.

We talk about strong "justifying" emotions as if they were something that "comes over us", that overwhelms our judgment, as if they were something outside of our control. There are truly moments like that, such as in catastrophic events or in combat, but these are fortunately rare. Other than in such emergent or catastrophic situations, much of our extreme emotion is self-induced. We increase or sustain an emotion by going over and over a series of thoughts justifying our emotions. We call this tactic “ramping”. With each repetition of these thoughts our emotion grows stronger until we stop it or until we allow it to reach the level of intensity that "justifies" breaking the rule.

A patient of mine, "Fred", who was driving on the highway was "cut off" by another driver, in what Fred felt was a rude and inconsiderate way. He was outraged. He followed the driver almost sixty miles, all the way "steaming" over his mistreatment. He pulled in behind the other driver in a parking lot, went over to the man's car, opened the door and pulled him out, with the intention of "teaching him a lesson". However, the man obviously didn't even know what Fred was talking about, and was frightened. Fred suddenly recognized the inappropriateness of his own behavior, let the man go, went back to his car and drove off. Later, in my office, Fred said "I drove 60 miles, enraged, ready to hit this guy, and he didn't even know he had done anything! That's just crazy! I don't know what's the matter with me. I would never hit another person."

Of course Fred would hit another person. His rule against hitting has an exception in it. He doesn't mention the exception because he doesn't like to think of himself as a person who hits others, but his exception is clear. If Fred feels sufficiently wronged, he goes over and over his “wrong” thereby becoming increasingly “righteously angry”. When angry enough, he allows himself an exception to his "no hitting" rule. A more precise description of what occurred shows that at the time of the “infraction”, Fred decided almost immediately that he was angry enough that he was justified in hitting the other driver. While he was driving, by going over and over his grievances, he was keeping his anger “ramped up” so that his anger could overcome his rule and allow him to strike a blow. It took a lot of energy to keep his anger going for an hour.

In the parking lot Fred realized that the offending driver was totally unaware of his driving infraction.. Another of Fred’s rules which conflicted with hitting someone popped up: "It's not right to hit someone who doesn't even know they've done anything wrong". His anger dissipated as he recognized that he had been wrong in his thinking. He no longer felt “justified” in breaking his rule. As a result, he stopped ramping his “righteous anger” to the exception point.

We can increase any emotion by ramping up in this way. Whatever the thoughts we have which create or renew our feeling, we can continue cycling through them over and over. Sometimes the rule we are considering breaking simply doesn’t fit our self-image. Someone who is normally proud of “self-control”, for instance, might mentally ramp up sadness in order to justify wallowing in self-pity or simply withdrawing for a while. In a more extreme (but not unusual) instance the self-pity might justify substance abuse or a suicidal gesture. A person who thinks of himself as “brave” might ramp up fearful thoughts in order to justify running away or “backing down”.

We might conceal our unspoken exceptions in order to hide our real intentions or plans. A depressed patient, for instance, might state that he would "never kill himself", but when pushed to state the "exceptions", said "… unless my wife left me... I couldn't stand that". Sometimes the exceptions are so clearly dishonest that the person doesn't admit them even to himself until after the exception has occurred. A married patient admitted to having sex with his wife's best friend, but commented that he "had had too much to drink, and besides, I didn't think my wife would ever find out." He would never have admitted his rationalization PRIOR to the unfaithfulness. It’s interesting to speculate what a marriage service would sound like if the prospective partners had to announce the exceptions to their vows.

The "ramping up" process is a familiar one in cognitive therapies. We use it to whip ourselves up emotionally in order to justify our breaking a rule/boundary. When we do so, we manipulate our own emotions in order to “motivate” our own behavior, rather than making a more rational and cognitive decision. Such apparently impulsive decisions, being dictated by a more primitive and emotional part of ourselves, tend to be of more or less poor quality. We may find ourselves doing things that at a less emotional time we would find unacceptable.

Stopping ourselves from “ramping” is easy to describe: We simply recognize cognitively the cyclic pattern of our "ramping" thinking and choose to break it. By doing so we stop creating more emotion and thereby protect ourselves from arriving at the point where our boundaries have exceptions. Without using strong emotion as a justification for action, we must make behavioral choices based on intellect and logic. Unfortunately, for many if not most of us, intellectual and logical choices do not provide very strong motivation. We may not be so accustomed to making choices coolly by an act of the will. However, by acting on our more mature values we strengthen them and our own emotional maturity. Knowing and admitting our exceptions is an important step in limiting or eliminating them, and every time we are able to do this, we move in the direction of greater emotional maturity.

Self-deception

We can understand why people lie to each other. They lie for some sort of advantage, personal or financial; they lie to avoid disharmony or disagreement, to impress, to mislead. Why do we lie to ourselves?

As a psychotherapist, I spend a lot of time listening to people lie to and about themselves. Generally we lie to ourselves to maintain an image of ourselves more or less false to fact. We reassure ourselves that we are stronger, braver, more able to tolerate pain than we really are. We present to ourselves the image of ourselves we would like to have others see. We deny our age, appearance, weight, sadness, disappointment and grief. As when we lie to others, we lie to maintain a stable and manageable world, one in which we do not have to adapt nor change.

On a deeper level, we always know when we are lying to ourselves. It takes energy not to know what we know. Turning a blind eye to ourselves in spite of all the evidence is effortful.

I think it was Fritz Perls who said that change begins with who we are, not with who we want to be. We have to be willing to let go our fantasies of ourselves before we can recognize what we can or cannot change. So our conversations with others are full of dishonesty and pretense, as we try to present ourselves in accordance with our self-delusion. Others pretend to be deceived because it is easier, more comfortable, and certainly more socially acceptable to be dishonest. Besides, when we accept the dishonesty of another we have a sort of bargain that they, in turn, will accept our dishonesty in return. In this way our social and internal psychological systems remain stable and predictable.

People who promote instability and change in relationships do so by being honest and hopefully kind as well. Psychotherapists make a living by doing this, but loving friends can also serve this purpose. It takes a strong relationship to withstand much honesty, but any relationship that embodies honesty promotes change and growth. Kindness is optional in the encouragement of growth, but as I get older it seems to be a more and more important option.

Dreams in psychotherapy

Many therapists, trained in the psychoanalytic tradition, have regarded dreams as a "royal road" to the unconscious mind. Much time has been spent in the clever and creative analysis of the dreams of patients. Patient dreams are said to be the production of some inner unconscious and highly creative voice, whose stories and creations cannot be understood by the dreamer but which seem to be couched in language understandable by the therapist.

Interestingly enough, the dreams seem to be tailored to the therapy. For instance, the patients of Jungian analyists have dreams full of Jungian symbols; patients of Freudian analysts have Freudian dreams, and so on. It appears that the dream is a communication specifically aimed at and couched in the specific language most meaningful to the receiver/analyst. From whom is the meaning concealed? The patient himself. So the patient has found a way to provide information to the therapist without having to understand it him(her)self.

It's easier to understand a dream as a somewhat dishonest form of communication in which the sender does not have to recognize nor take responsibility for the content. Such deception results in the therapist knowing more about the patient than the patient knows, and the therapist is thus cast in the expert/parental mode in relationship to the therapist.

Transcripts of early sessions of dream-oriented psychotherapy leave little doubt that the therapist can eaily train the patient to speak the therapist's professional language. Patients then become extraordinarily able to express themselves without having to recognize what it is they are expressing, leaving the therapist to translate for them.

How is the patient benefitted by this indirect form of communication? By keeping the dream symbolic and indirect, the patient is in a position to deny responsibility and ownership of the content of the dream. The all-knowing therapist (like the Sibyl of Greek times) can explain the content, unscrew the inscrutable, and have his/her position of authority confirmed.

I think it better to discourage the recounting of dreams in a therapy session. The time is better spent developing a relationship in which patients can become comfortable with their own inner life and with the therapist, enough, at least, to be able to tell their secrets more openly. Honesty and directness are attainable goals, and they bring lasting benefits of increasing self-honesty to the patient. In a good therapeutic relationship, there should be no areas that are too uncomfortable to be discussed.

Therapeutic relationships

Back at the beginning of my practice as a psychotherapist, a patient once asked me why I was a therapist. I thought of several answers. Helping others is a good thing, I thought, an answer that would have pleased my grandmother. Bill, a therapist who was my consultant, laughed and said "Bullshit. It's an easy way to earn money sitting down". I thought at the time that his answer was both honest and clever. It certainly minimized altruistic and "helping" sorts of motives, both of which I was beginning to distrust. I now recognize that his answer was only partially true and in fact trivialized an important question: What does the therapist get out of doing therapy? Is it just money? Is there something wrong with enjoying one’s work?

Why had I learned to distrust altruism? Painful self-examination in my consultant’s office showed me how often other more selfish and personal motives were concealed behind the altruistic label. When I gave the "helping others" answer, I was concealing from the patient AND from myself the pleasure I got from imagining myself in a "superior" and knowledgeable position, of being the helper to a less wise person than myself. I liked the idea of being admired, of being thought of as wise. One of the problems with being paid off with admiration and humble gratitude is that there is no way to enforce being paid in that coin. My self-worth was entwined with the patient rewarding and reassuring me with gratitude. So the patient would gradually become aware that he or she owed me more than money, and that our contract had been somewhat dishonest from the beginning.

Bill's point, poorly made but valid, was that the patient owed us no reward of any kind other than money He meant we had no right to exploit patients who rely on us. The idea that the patient owes us something besides the fee, such as gratitude or admiration or even love, is a betrayal of the trust we rely on for conducting therapy. But we're not just in it for the money; Bill was wrong when he said that it was easy work. It's hard work, in fact. There are many easier ways to make money, but there are intangible rewards for me in addition to the money, even though those rewards don’t come directly from the patient.

On a surface level, it's important to me to believe that I help people, that in some way I help them diminish their suffering. On a more primitive level, I am rewarded as well by having the opportunity to gratify my interest in solving puzzles. Every time I see exactly how a patient’s previous life experiences, choices and thoughts give rise to present puzzling and complex behaviors, I have a sense of satisfaction. I see once again that there is after all a logic in human behavior. Behaviors that appear to be puzzling and even self-destructive are meaningful, sometimes in a primitive way, but they can be understood. No matter how irrational or even bizarre, they are not random. They are the direct outgrowth of decisions and choices the patient has made in the past. When the patient and I recognize this we have a sense of things falling into place and making sense. The patient recovers his sense of autonomy and power and feels less controlled by forces out of his awareness.

Patients begin the therapeutic relationship experiencing much of their own behavior as puzzling, illogical and painful. They have lost some of their sense of autonomy in their lives, and yet they do not see how they can behave differently. They experience important aspects of their lives as out of their control, and their self-deception conceals from them their own responsibility and their power to change. I often feel frustrated and alienated from them as their friends and families must be. I feel distanced by the apparent impossibility of understanding their behavior and feelings. Intellectually I am curious, then frustrated by their unwillingness to behave “reasonably”. The conflict appears to be initially between the patient and me, but is really inside the patient even though not clearly a part of their awareness. I struggle to understand them; they struggle to communicate with me more clearly, and in that struggle issues begin to clarify and emerge. The need to be honest, as honest as we can be with each other and ourselves, and at the same time to be understood by another human being, makes the therapeutic relationship more intense than others.

As time goes on and as the struggle continues, I begin to understand the patient more. Their behavior begins to make sense to me and to them. As we begin to see how the previous habitual and only partially conscious choices the patient has made have led them almost inescapably to where they now are, they begin to feel the freedom to make new choices. At the same time, I see increasingly how much alike we are, how human and essentially simple we are, and I feel re-connected to both the patient and the human race. Our struggle and attempt to be honest with each other reinforces and teaches us how to be connected.

I was recently re-reading Irv Yalom’s excellent book of therapeutic vignettes, Love’s Executioner. In particular I was struck by the recurrence of one theme: his finding a way to like and show liking to people who were not easily likable. More and more I notice that the patients who do the best in therapy, who make the most profound changes in their lives, are exactly the ones I find that I like. My liking for my patient grows with my understanding of the patient’s life. I wonder frequently if this capacity to find a way to like difficult people is something that characterizes competent therapists. Perhaps people only feel the freedom and confidence to change in an atmosphere of genuine liking and mutual respect.

In therapeutic relationships there is a built-in imbalance that is not tolerated in regular (i.e. not paid-for) relationships. In normal healthy friendships and within the intimate conversations that accompany them, there is a certain balance in the flow of revelation and honesty. We expect to share thoughts. We expect to take turns listening to one another. We need to experience mutual respect and equality of power or status in the relationship. The flow of help, understanding and tolerance must generally be two-way and over time it also must be in balance.

Therapeutic relationships, by their nature, are unbalanced. We need to find balance and reciprocity in our relationships, and when they are more one-sided, where the flow is predominantly one way, they can become toxic. Partners in unbalanced relationships experience increasing resentment and feelings of exploitation or alienation. The money or other value that changes hands serves an important role in maintaining the balance in therapeutic relationships, without which they eventually become toxic.

So Bill’s clever response has an important element of truth in it. What the patient owes me is only money. Money is an OK thing, but there are many ways to get it. What I get from the relationship (not the patient) is the chance to practice my craft well, the opportunity to grow in understanding, to solve riddles, and to become more connected to my own humanity and that of others. And it feels good to like people.