Snowflakes

In time she came to understand that she was different from others. It took longer to understand that everyone was different, and that that was the the only thing everyone had in common.

Some would look almost like someone else, some would act almost like someone else, some would think almost like someone else, but like snowflakes no two were exactly the same, and therefore the loss of one was like the ending of a universe.

The arbitrary groupings were so absurd - attempts to find commonalities based on hair color, skin tone, religious beliefs, even birthdays, proved futile and absurd. After all, what do William Shatner, Bob Costas, Reese Witherspoon, Werner Klemperer and w.p. bluhm have in common anyway beyond a shared birth date, the rich diversity of human experience and variety?

"I've never met a woman named Jennifer who wasn't attractive," one man said. It never occurred to him that all women are attractive in some way or another, because all life is beautiful.

Drawing conclusions based on any grouping of people is laziness to avoid the hard work of discovering the individual.

Where to find a hero when you need one

Where are the heroes of yesteryear when we need them, we wonder?

We wait and search, asking, "I remember a hero and he/she saved us all, or at least saved enough of us to prove themselves a hero. Where are they today?"

These pretenders who step forward and declare, "Let me be your hero" – none of them are adequate. In the end, waiting for a hero to arrive is a fruitless enterprise.

Better to reach inside and do the things a hero would do if there were a hero here. In doing so, you might just make yourself a hero.

W.B.'s Book Report: Start With Why

The introduction of most products does not go down in history, even if they changed the world. Few people have seen the first advertisement for Coca-Cola or the first cellphone commercial.

But you probably remember (or have now seen) the first ad for the Macintosh computer: A dreary gray room full of gray drones, watching a large viewscreen where a man is giving a pep talk about – well, he’s so boring no one is sure what he’s talking about. It’s a scene straight out of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.

A woman in color – orange track shorts – runs up the aisle ignored by the gray drones, but pursued by gray guards, until she stops and heaves a sledge hammer at the screen, which explodes in bright light. Over the blinding sight, a narrator explains that the Macintosh is about to be introduced to the world and “You’ll see why 1984 will not be like 1984.”

The ad established that the Macintosh was going to be a revolutionary product, and it was – before then there were no windows on computers, and no mouses. It also reinforced the reason why Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple Inc. – to start revolutions, to make interaction with technology easier for individuals, to put the power in the hands of each person.

All of Apple’s products have been revolutionary – before the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the world was a very different place. The success of the company depends on remembering why its founders started the brand.

I’ve just finished a book called Start With Why by Simon Sinek, and the Apple story is one of the best examples of the author’s theme: The greatest successes occur when you are in touch with why you are doing them, and the greatest harmony occurs when your actions are in tune with that “why.”

Competence and a knowledge of what needs to be done – the “how” and the “what” of things – are also essential, and you can be successful mastering just those two parts of the puzzle. But the greatest fulfillment and the most long-lasting success, Sinek argues, happens when the “how” and the “what” are driven by a clear understanding of the “why.”

The genius of the 1984 ad, which ran over the air just once, during that January’s Super Bowl, was that it sprang from Apple’s desire to put the power of computing into everyone’s hands. They didn’t start out wanting to build a great personal computer; they understood why having such a powerful tool on each individual’s desk could make the world better.

I encountered Sinek’s idea in a talk by Michael Victorson, former president of the board of the United Way of Dane County, during United Way Worldwide’s Great Rivers Conference in Milwaukee this February. In part he was saying you can have a successful United Way that determines what it wants to do and creates a great plan how to get there, but if you start by communicating a clear vision of why you’re doing all this, you’ll inspire people to really get behind the effort.

I think that’s true in any human endeavor. We get caught up in the everyday details of the what and the how, and we neglect the basic motivation: Why are we doing this? And that overlooks the basic fact of human nature that we need to have a purpose.

Get in touch with the why, and those everyday details make more sense – or more important, if the everyday details aren’t in line with your purpose, you understand what needs to be revised, and how. Start with why, and everything else follows. And you and your colleagues will be inspired and more motivated.

I suggest, in addition to nabbing Sinek’s book to learn more, you consider taking this approach, especially if you’re feeling stuck and uninspired: Why are you doing this? And keep asking until you find an answer that excites and empowers you. Once you tap into your “why,” you’ll be ready to start changing your world.

– Door County Advocate, April 9, 2014

You are not a number

One of my life epiphanies came in the last radio studio that I worked in, talking to a gay co-worker about the issue of marriage. I was, and continue to be, of the belief that of course gay people can get married; all you need is someone willing to perform the ceremony.

The issue comes down her strong desire to convince the government to recognize the “legitimacy” of the marriage by issuing a license. And then came the epiphany.

Why do you need a license to get married? Why do you need the state’s permission, in a free society, for something as personal as a lifetime commitment to another human being? Put another way, marriage is essentially a religious or spiritual ceremony; in a country that recognizes religious freedom, what is the government’s business in regulating a religious ceremony?

I am similarly puzzled by the fuss over immigration. Why does the government need to track the whereabouts of peaceful, law-abiding, hard-working people? I understand the need to monitor criminals and terrorists, but most of us are neither. What need is served by “processing” innocent human beings as they enter or leave the country?

I understand it’s more efficient to treat us all like potential criminals and terrorists, but efficiency is not the mission of a society where all are to be considered innocent until proved guilty.

All of this processing tends to group individuals by skin color, or ethnic origin, or sex, or sexual habits, or some other category. What is the point of all this? It is to create a shorthand that obliviates the individual – “those people” tend to act and think in a certain way, and by grouping them into a category, we need not do the hard work of getting to know the individual. She is a black woman; he is a white man of European descent; he is a Republican; she is gay; he is a Democrat; she is a pro-life activist; he is a Jew – from such groupings come a host of assumptions, and you need not probe any deeper to know the person.

Six billion people live on this planet, and it is impossible to know and understand them all, and so the marketer, the government and the bigot seek a shorthand.

It may indeed be true that people who seem to belong in one of these arbitrary categories tend to think and act in a certain way, but you do yourself and the other person an injustice by assuming that he or she actually thinks and acts that way before you’ve gotten to know that person.

Take care before you consign an individual to a group, because where there are no individuals, there are no individual rights – and that may eventually include the individual you meet in the mirror every morning.

In a memorable moment in a memorable bit of speculative fiction, the lead character in “The Prisoner” tires of his captors’ insistence that his name is Number Six and screams, “I am not a number, I am a free man!” That is the whole point.

Cross-posted to Door County Advocate

I just want to go my way

One of the great characters in contemporary fiction is Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, owner of the cargo ship Serenity in Joss Whedon’s brilliant television show Firefly and the film named after the ship. At a pivotal moment in Serenity, Reynolds meets his main adversary, a nameless assassin we know simply as The Operative, and during their conversation comes an electrifying exchange that sums up Reynolds’ character in 11 words.

Operative: I have to hope you understand you can’t beat us.

Reynolds: I got no need to beat you; I just want to go my way.

Consider how powerful a message those words convey. I don’t need to convince you that my way is right and yours is wrong; I simply desire to live my life on my terms and let you live your life on your terms, as long as we do no harm to each other. There is plenty of room on this vast world for both of us.

The Operative’s response is that Reynolds can go his way if he surrenders a friend to be harmed; for Reynolds, of course, this is an unacceptable condition. There always seems to be someone who wants to place conditions on freedom.

How much grief occurs because someone decides it is not enough to live and let live: Some people must be beaten and not allowed to go their way. Six billion unique human stories on this planet; imagine if we all agreed to let those individual stories play out, restrained only by a prohibition on doing harm to others.

Enough with the grouping already

The world is plagued by injustices and people who seek to gain by inflicting evil on others. To a certain extent we empower them by fearing them and even by becoming angry at them.

Masquerading as leaders, they are sad and sorry people whose goal seems to be to subtract value from the world. They don’t recognize the inherent worth in every human life — they see only masses to be manipulated and grouped and categorized by skin color or language or gender or habits. To these people every member of a group is expendable and interchangeable.

Defy them: Fight the training that says you can draw conclusions about someone based on the group. See the individual.

Look at you, for example: Others try to define you by the company you keep. But your world view does not march in lockstep with every other person in your group, or else you are a zombie.

You resent when someone accuses you of X because “you believe in Y and everyone who believes in Y also believes in X.” “But I don’t believe in X,” you object. Exactly. So why do you, yourself, lump individuals into groups?

You only have total access to one individual — the man or woman in the mirror — and you can easily see how many ways you are unique. Now, try to wrap your mind around the fact that there are 6 billion sovereign and unique human individuals on this vast planet, each of them equipped with his or her own world view to be explored and discovered. Dismiss them because they’re one of “those people” at your peril. You miss the opportunity to know and learn from some amazing individuals.

Try to shed the idea of “those people” altogether. She is this person. He is this other person. You are yet another individual, able to add value to the world. It’s individuals who accomplish great things.

You diminish the individual by making assumptions based on the group you perceive them to be in. “You’re just like all the others” is an insult because no one is just like all the others, nor are all the others just alike. Break the habit of grouping and discover the personhood of each person around you. Add value to your life by giving value to each person you meet.

We're all gonna die

I repeat myself – but these thoughts are still relevant, still part of my book Refuse to be Afraid, and relevant to the new book, The Imaginary Revolution. And so I repeat myself:

My eye was caught at the antique store by a thick, well-worn book titled "Modern Medical Counselor." By its condition it was clear the book was anything but modern, and the price ($2) was right, so, figuring it would be an interesting excursion into the past, I brought it home.

What actually caught my attention was the section that I casually opened to, even before I brought the book home: "Survival in Atomic Bombing." The copyright date of the book is 1951, so browsing through this book will be a traipse through an era where communism and nuclear death were our greatest fears.

With the knowledge of what was to happen in the next 60 years, we know the fears were largely unfounded. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still the only cities ever destroyed by atomic bombs. Although the great communist bogeyman reared his ugly head many times over the years, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics fell apart under the weight of its totalitarian follies and China has decided to try burying us the good old American way, by establishing government-subsidized monopolies.

In other words, the fear that was used as an excuse to impose on our liberties never came true. Communism and nuclear catastrophe did not destroy us.

Today, the fear is of small groups of terrorists (and "rogue nations") with nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. The fear is that an influenza virus that kills birds will find a way to migrate into humans and cause a pandemic. The fear is that standing too close to a person smoking a cigarette will give you cancer. We can let those fears control us, we can let others use those fears to justify locking us into cages, or we can refuse to be afraid and live our lives as free men and women.

Here is the fear that lurks behind all of these fears: We are afraid to die. We are especially afraid to die before we experience a ripe old age.

Here is the truth: We all will die, some of us "before our time." The real choice we all have: We can live and die as slaves, or we can live and die as free men and women.

Most of our lives we exist in the gray area between freedom and slavery, convincing ourselves that we are making our choices freely: When we hand the chains to our government and our bosses and our creditors, we rationalize that we are making a free decision to enslave ourselves. And it usually is a freely made choice — in the beginning.

Like Jacob Marley's ghost, we accumulate shackles as we progress through life, usually out of fear — fear of poverty, fear of going hungry, fear of not having a reliable car. And the biggest fear of them all is the fear of death.

Accepting that you will die is the beginning of freedom. The title of the song "Live Like You're Dying"  is its message.

These thoughts, especially as I relate them in a political context, could be misconstrued as advocating violent resistance against the slave masters. Nothing could be further from the truth. The revolution I advocate is an internal one:

Refuse to be afraid. Resist the impulse to yield to the fear and let someone strip your liberty in the name of security and protection. Live like you were dying — because you are dying, someday, so better to live free than in chains.

Launch: 'Resistance to Civil Government' by Henry David Thoreau

I am pleased to announce the latest addition to my little stable of books and ebooks, a new and easy-to-read edition of Resistance to Civil Government, also known as On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.

Even a cursory reading of Henry David Thoreau’s immortal 1849 essay reveals echoes in contemporary discussions of individual rights and the limits of government in a free society.

Its themes resonate into the 21st century. Faced with a federal government that condoned the institution of slavery and was waging a war of questionable origin in Mexico, Thoreau pushed his readers to consider the responsibility of an individual with conscience.

This new edition includes “The definition of a peaceable revolution,” an introductory essay by yours truly.

You can read Resistance to Civil Government online or download the ebook at this link ...

or you can purchase a durable and permanent copy complete with this lovely cover, made from the finest of dead trees, by following THIS LINK.

If statists ran Major League Baseball

Prince Fielder has just signed a nine-year, $214 million with the Detroit Tigers, an average of almost $24 million a year.

Obviously the gap between the richest and poorest baseball players is growing. Fielder's deal amounts to more than 55 times the minimum baseball salary of $414,000.

Why should an elite few get mega-contracts while the average player struggles along on about $3 million a year? Justice demands that these fat cats be required to share a major portion of their wealth with their teammates and league mates.

Some would argue that Fielder earned his high salary through hard work and talent. This is a selfish viewpoint that ignores the victories he gained at the expense of other players. All I'm suggesting is that Fielder pay his fair share.

UPDATE: Edited to fix faulty math.

Occupy your life

I am not one of the 99 percent – and neither are you.

I am not one of the 1 percent – and neither are you.

The masses are an invention. There are no “masses.”