The Challenge of Retro-Tech

Household things tend to wear out or go bust in clusters. On a hot and humid morning earlier this week I realized that the air conditioning was not working and traced the problem to a corroded, leaking battery in the thermostat. That same day the cordless phone in the kitchen began whining that it wanted a new battery, sending me into the blister-pack jungle of phone batteries that look almost exactly alike to find the only one that would actually fit (memo to phone manufacturers: it would be really swell if you put the model number of your phone on the actual phone).

Brief Old Guy Rant here: Remember when the only difference between light bulbs was the wattage? Now I have eleven completely different kinds of bulbs in the kitchen alone, some of which cost what I once considered a reasonable price for an entire fixture. I have a considerable portion of my retirement savings tied up in spare light bulbs. Batteries may be even worse – I do not even try to keep spares on hand except for the basic AA, AAA and 9V varieties. I initially thought it was ridiculous when a chain of stores selling nothing but batteries opened, now I’m thinking there may be a wonderful franchise opportunity in stores selling nothing but light bulbs.

But the real challenge is in maintaining “legacy” products. We still have several phones with receivers connected to the phone by an actual cord. These are the only landline phones that will still work if the power goes out (at least they will until the expensive back-up battery on the cable modem gives out). One of these primitive phones is critical to my wife. It sits on a small table in the upstairs hallway, just outside her office. There is no electrical outlet there, so a cordless phone is not an option. She loves that phone; loves the solid heft of the receiver in her hand. Often she needs to take it into her office so she can pull information up on her computer while chatting with her caller. Long ago I made two modifications to the phone that make this possible – an extra length coiled cord for the receiver, and a 16-foot retractable cord for the phone line. This last item is what prompted me to write.

Retractable cords are fragile creatures. They are very thin, which is what allows them to fit into a retractor of modest size. Sooner or later they become kinked or frayed and must be replaced. I used to be able to pick them up in any hardware or variety store, but they gradually vanished from the shelves. The last time I needed a new one I had to buy it at Radio Shack. This time I learned that even Radio Shack has dropped the item from their line.

Resigned to paying outrageous shipping charges, I turned to the web. Even there the pickings were slim. Shorter retractable lines are sold for laptop users who are forced to resort to dial-up connections, but it took a lengthy search to track down the classic 16-foot length we needed. I bought two. I can’t decide whether to keep the second as a back-up or to place it on a stand and display it as an antique. I recently read that there are now more households in the US that a have a cell phone and no landline than a landline and no cell, and the trend is accelerating. Susan is apparently the last human being on earth still using a corded landline phone with a retractable line. I am living with the Queen of Retro-Tech.

St. Francis and the Rabbits

It is said that St. Francis was so pure of heart that animals had no fear of him. I am not St. Francis, and I sincerely wish that animals feared me more than they do. I am speaking specifically of rabbits. Last winter they destroyed the hedge around our patio, and all through the spring they have been munching on various flowers and plants. They are clearly doing this with malicious intent. They sense in their evil bunny hearts which plants we value the most and single them out for destruction. If it is not a plant they care to eat, they taunt us by snipping it off and leaving it lying on the ground. These are very, very bad bunnies.

We have tried putting fencing around particularly prized plants, but this creates a garden that resembles a prisoner of war camp. Susan sprinkles plants with pepper and sprays them with various magic potions, but the rabbits regard these as salad dressing. They are indifferent to plastic snakes and snicker at plastic owls. We win the occasional battle, but the bunnies are winning the war.

In my mind there is an obvious solution, but the only thing Susan detests more than rabbits are guns. While I am a strong advocate of gun control, I believe that gardeners have an inalienable right to defend their forsythia with a pellet gun. She raises grim scenarios of me shooting my eye out or being hauled away in cuffs by law enforcement. This is not an argument I am going to win.

St. Francis is often credited as author of “the serenity prayer,” which was actually written by Reinhold Neibuhr. Here is his original version of it:
God, give us grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.
Amen.

I cannot decide if rabbits are things that cannot be changed or things that should be changed. I like the second part of the prayer, the part most people have never heard. More of us should pray that “I may be reasonably happy in this life” because we are not likely to be completely happy. Not so long as there are rabbits.

Racetracks and Shared Cognition

A friend of mine agreed to teach her 16-year-old niece to drive. She began with a brief lecture on attentive driving – keep your eyes on the road ahead at all times, but also monitor your instrument panel, glance regularly at all three rear-view mirrors, know what is going on to your left and right… A look of panic came into her niece’s eyes. “Nobody can do all that at the same time!” But we do, of course, and most of the time we are barely aware that we are doing it (although it is not wise to add things like talking on the phone or applying make-up).

I was reminded of this story recently when I had the opportunity to drive on a racetrack. It was a privately-hosted “track day” at Road America in Elkhart Lake, one of the world’s great road courses, and I jumped at the opportunity. I wisely took my son, who has had some racing experience, as my passenger and coach. I drove my little Volvo hatchback. Other participants were driving Porsches, Corvettes, Cobras and Ferraris and actually knew what they were doing, which was a bit intimidating. Oh, and it rained all day, making the track greasy and treacherous. It is a bit disconcerting to glance in the rear-view mirror and see a Corvette sliding sideways. I was also keenly aware that my insurance would not cover any mishap that occurred on the track. What made me think this would be fun?

Take all the things we normally monitor while driving and multiply them by a factor of five on a racetrack. Then add the 14 turns on the Road America course, each of which must be approached in a different manner (when and how hard to brake; where to hit the apex and in what gear, etc.) I quickly discovered I simply could not process all this information at the same time, and turned the corners over to Colin, who calmly and clearly guided me (“Move left. Don’t brake yet. Now! Second gear. Turn! Accelerate!”) I could focus on the yellow Ferrari coming up behind me and the puddle to my right and leave the corners to him. Still I needed to pit after every three or four laps because I could only maintain mental focus that long (I claimed that it was to allow the brakes to cool when it was actually my brain that needed to cool down).

Later that evening I described the experience to my wife, the psychologist, who nodded wisely. “Cognitive overload,” she explained. “You are 61 years old and you can only maintain that kind of load for so long.” I wonder how long I could have maintained it if I had not had a second (and younger) brain in the seat next to me. I got by with a little help from my son.

People who are in a close relationship over a long period of time develop something called “shared cognition,” which means that they pool their mental resources without even being aware that they are doing it. One person drives, the other reads the map. One remembers to send birthday cards to family members; the other remembers to lock the doors at night. Two heads really are better than one.

On the racetrack, I went back and forth between “what in the world was I thinking?” and “I can’t wait to do this again!” I will likely return next year. But I certainly will not try to do it with just one brain.

Commencement Speech for UW - Fox Valley

For those who requested it, here is the text of the speech I gave...

Good evening. I suspect that some of you are wondering who I am and what I am doing up here. I cannot imagine that many people who received their invitation to commencement shouted “Oh Boy - we get to hear the Goodwill chaplain!” The most honest answer to the question of why I am your speaker tonight is that Michele Obama said “no.” We really thought we had a chance to get her – she was invited long before the election and her people did not say flat-out “no” – but then some upstart college in California convinced its students to send her 6,000 personal letters begging her to come and she went there instead. So I am your speaker tonight because you could not be bothered to write to Michele Obama. Pity. So my first word of advice to the graduating class of ’09 is to be sure to write thank-you notes for any graduation gifts you receive, especially for that $20 gift certificate from Aunt Gladys. Like Michele Obama, Aunt Gladys is thrilled when she receives a handwritten note from you.

Beyond that, I want to talk about change and hope, which are pretty classic commencement speech topics. I also want to talk a bit about baby boomers, because I am a baby boomer and we still find ourselves endlessly fascinating. But let’s start with change. These past two years have brought more significant change to our society than any similar period in my lifetime. You who are completing one phase of your college education and preparing for the next are already living in a world very different from the one in which you began, and by the time you receive your bachelor’s degree it will likely be different from today.

Let’s start with the obvious: the economy. In 2008 it disappeared down a rat-hole. Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat, asked this important question in a column back in March:
“What if the economic crisis of 2008 was something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically… We created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more US T-bills so Americans would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese… We can’t do this anymore. When we look back, 2008 will be a momentous year in human history. Our children and grandchildren will ask us “What was it like?” Often in the middle of something momentous, we can’t see its significance. But … 2008 will be the marker – the year when ‘The Great Disruption’ began.”

Does that ring as true for you as it does for me? That the economy as it existed two years ago was a global Ponzi scheme that made Bernie Madoff look like he wasn’t even trying? We are told that the economy will begin to recover late this year, and I certainly hope that is true, but it is also true that many of the jobs that have been lost are not coming back and frankly should not come back because they were contributing nothing of real value to society. We are not waiting for the old economy to “get back to normal,” we are in the very early stages of creating a new economy that is sane and sustainable. Those of you who began your college career hoping to get filthy rich in jobs that involved moving fictitious money from one pile to another may want to rethink your career goals. In fact, anyone who views the value of a college degree solely in terms of increased earning potential would benefit from a bit of soul-searching. Which is the actual theme of this address and sooner or later I will get to it.

But first let’s talk about baby-boomers. It was very good to be a baby boomer in 1968; sorry you missed it. We had Jimi and Janis, the Doors and the Beatles, and all we left for you was American Idol. After a decade or so as hippies who claimed to reject materialism we discovered arugula and cute shoes and became Yuppies. We also briefly discovered disco, but we don’t like to talk about that. Moving further still from our youthful idealism, we discovered excessive consumption for its own sake – McMansions and Mercedes for everyone! - and since we did not have enough money to support all that spending we borrowed and leveraged in order to keep buying more stuff that we had convinced ourselves we needed and were entitled to. So deeply were we in the grip of consumerism that when our president urged us to respond to 9/11 by going shopping it made perfect sense to us. Run up your credit card debt or the terrorists win! We didn’t bother to save because the value of our houses and our pension funds just kept magically increasing. It was good; it was very good! Money for nothing! We spent like drunken sailors and thoughtfully passed the bills on to you. Now we are getting older and starting to worry about our health care needs. Poor, aging baby boomers! We have never settled for less than the best, so naturally we feel entitled to the highest quality health care for the rest of our lives. There are 78 million of us, and we plan to stick around for as long as possible while you pay for our social security and Medicare. On behalf of the entire baby boom generation, I want to express my gratitude to each one of you. You get to clean up the mess left by the old economy.

But let’s talk about another seismic shift that took place last year. We elected an African-American man president of the United States of America! Could any of us have imagined that happening just two years ago? Just as amazingly, many folks who do not agree with him on every issue appear minded to give him a chance and sincerely hope he can lead us in building a better nation and world. His vision is very different from that of the previous administration, particularly with regard to America’s role in the global community and how we respond to climate change. Already the rest of the world seems to be less afraid of us, and by the time you complete your bachelor’s degree they may even trust us and respect us again. They really seem to like that part where we don’t torture people anymore. The challenges we face are enormous, but many folks seem to believe this new president when he tells us that these challenges are also opportunities. We are broke and yet we are optimistic, which is an unusual combination.

One of the words we are hearing more often these days is the word “sustainability.” It is a good and helpful word, so I hope it does not get overused and diluted into meaninglessness along with phrases like “all natural.” The “endless growth economy” that died in 2008 was not sustainable, and neither was the arrogant notion that our nation could act unilaterally to rid the world of evil without descending into evil ourselves. We have been humbled, and in humility lies the beginning of wisdom and hope.

So here at what is for most of you the mid-point of your college career we are hammering the last nails in the coffin of an economy based upon growth and consumption without regard to the environmental cost or the huge chasm it created between the rich and the poor. We are trying to sort out how to build a healthy, sustainable economy for everyone, not just the rich, based upon goods and services of real worth and value. We are trading in our global cowboy swagger for diplomacy and international cooperation because it is finally sinking in that for all of its chaos, division, danger and conflict, it really is one world and somehow we need to figure out how to live on it together in peace. It is a scary and challenging time, but it is also an exciting and hopeful time to be preparing to enter adult life and begin a career.

I believe that the most important thing you can do right now to prepare for the future is to think about, talk about and dream about what really makes for a life that is rich and satisfying. I challenge you to think less about getting wealthy and more about what will actually make your life good. We – and I don’t just mean baby boomers, I mean all of us – had allowed ourselves to be seduced by pretty, shiny things. We got caught up in the culture of materialism and then wondered why we were not as fulfilled as we were supposed to be. Pundits are gravely predicting that yours may be the first generation to have a lower standard of living than your parents. But if a higher standard of living is attained at the cost of a lower quality of life, it is a poor trade. Allow me to list some of the things I believe will define what makes for a good life in the coming years:

1. Valuing relationships at least as much as we value material possessions. The culture of consumption taught us to compete with one another rather than to appreciate and enjoy one another. For too many people, “stuff” is what they ended up with in place of real friendships and committed relationships of mutual support and accountability. I challenge you to value people more than “stuff.”

2. Valuing the things we own in common at least as much as they things we own individually. By “things we own in common” I mean clean air, safe water, public parks, sidewalks, schools, the internet, the court system, city hall, places of worship, public transit systems and all the other things that weave us together in common community and enrich our lives. We are rich; together we are rich! In the old economy, people sought wealth in order to insulate themselves from others, with the ultimate dream of hiding away in some exclusive, gated community. What a hollow dream! You cannot gate out pollution or climate change, nor can you forever gate out poverty and injustice. In the end we cannot thrive unless we build communities in which everyone thrives. I challenge you to think less about what you can achieve for yourself, and more about what we can achieve together.

3. Valuing the work we do not in terms of how much we earn or the prestige and power it brings, but whether it makes use of our talents and abilities in ways that fulfill us while contributing to the greater good of society. There is something truly obscene about a hedge fund manager receiving 100 times the compensation of a gifted and dedicated teacher, given their relative contributions to society, and I hope and pray that era is over for good. I want you to have careers that are driven by passion rather than greed. I challenge you to think in terms of doing good rather than doing well.

That’s three points, which are enough for a commencement address. If we are going to build a new and better world, we must live by new values and priorities, and these new values begin when we shift our focus from “me” to “us.” Across lines of age, race, creed, nation and culture, we are all in this together. Each of you has abilities and passions to contribute to building this new and better world. Spend these next two years sorting out what they are, and how you will develop them. Don’t worry about getting a job – if the passion is there, the job will be there as well. It may not make you rich, but it will make you happy, because nothing brings greater happiness than doing something you do well that makes a difference in this world. It may mean that you will accumulate less “stuff,” but you will have a life worth living. Thank you very much.

What's in a Name?

In my very first job I worked with an older kid named Jughead. That’s what everyone called him – it was months before I learned his real name. He was a good-looking guy whose head in no way resembled a jug, so I finally asked him where the name came from. He explained that many years earlier he had attended a summer camp, where the boys he bunked with all gave each other nicknames ending with “head.” His was the only one that stuck. I asked him why only his had stuck and he grinned: “because none of the others could be said in front of the adults.”

Two lessons here. First, there are obviously worse things to be called than “Jughead.” And second, sometimes when a name had been conferred on someone or something it can be very hard to get rid of it.

The current flu outbreak is a case in point. The worst flu pandemic of modern times was the Spanish Flu of 1918. We now know definitively that it began not in Spain, but in Kansas, but it will forever be known as the Spanish Flu. The current flu has a number of names. Because there is a swine component to the virus (as well as avian and human components) it quickly picked up the name “Swine Flu.” This immediately led to a great deal of confusion about pigs carrying or causing the disease, along with rumors that it had first surfaced because of the practices of factory hog farming. Fear began to spread that one could contract the flu from consuming pork, which is completely untrue. Understandably, pork producers quickly howled in protest. The pigs themselves have not yet expressed an opinion on the matter.

Jews and Muslims, whose faith prohibits eating pork products, also were unhappy with the name. They suggested that it should be called The Mexican Flu, because Mexico was where it first surfaced. Mexico, which already has enough problems on its hands, bristled at the idea of having their country permanently stigmatized the way Spain was by the 1918 pandemic.

So if it is not Swine Flu and it is not Mexican Flu, what is it? According to the Center for Disease Control, it should be called by its proper name, which is H1N1. That is certainly a more accurate and scientific term, but I am guessing it is not likely to catch on. We like simple, everyday names for things. Plus when we are frightened of something, we sometimes need to joke about our fears, and pigs make for good jokes.

So everyone, wash your hands frequently and take sensible precautions to avoid catching this flu, whatever it is called. And also be careful about giving your kids or your friends nicknames – they might get stuck with them for the rest of their lives.

No More Yo Ho Ho

Let’s see what has been happening on the Pirate Stock Exchange. In the days of the Barbary pirates their stock was very low, perhaps because they were dangerous and brutal, sending many a ship and her crew to Davy Jones’ Locker. Their stock began to rise in the era of pulp fiction and movie serials, when pirates became the center of swashbuckling adventure and romance on the high seas. For the past five years their stock has soared to unprecedented heights: we convinced ourselves that all pirates looked like Johnny Depp and were mischievous at worst. On “Talk like a Pirate Day” (admittedly a holiday that never quite broke through to the level of Valentine’s Day) many an otherwise sane and balanced person would break into a hearty “Arrrr!” and make reference to eye patches and parrots.

The Somali pirates have caused the Pirate Stock Exchange to crash even more severely than the Dow Jones; I am not sure that “Talk like a Pirate Day” will ever recover. When we had gained enough distance from piracy we remade it into something funny and romantic. Now that it is back on the front page again our perspective is more sober and realistic. Granted, these are very different sorts of pirates than those of earlier times. My understanding is that the phenomenon began when poor fisherman whose Somali government had collapsed (and therefore left them completely without protection) attempted to drive off foreign vessels that were illegally fishing Somali waters and dumping toxic wastes in them. They quickly learned that holding ships for ransom was more lucrative than fishing and, human greed being what it is, a new era of piracy was born.

Just as we lost all perspective on the horrors perpetrated by the pirates of old, we have likely overly vilified a ragtag bunch of poor, uneducated fisherman from a lawless society. The international community must put an end to their activities, of course, but the young man presently being held by the US court system is not a terrorist combatant or a criminal genius. We are so hungry for both heroes and villains that we have demonized what is likely a frightened, clueless kid.

Why is it that we always project “evil” onto whoever we regard as the enemy of the moment, then when the threat from that enemy ends attempt to convince ourselves that the evil never existed? As a kid I watched a television show called “Hogan’s Heroes” in which Nazi prison guards were portrayed as bumbling but lovable incompetents. Didn’t that trivialize evil as surely as “Pirates of the Caribbean” did? And why do we only look for evil in the other – the enemy – and not in ourselves? Do we think Jesus was way off base when he talked about our desire to remove the speck from someone else’s eye while ignoring the stick in our own?

So long as we see evil only in whoever happens to be our enemy of the moment we fail to take evil seriously. And that is a very dangerous thing to do.

Can we Challenge this Culture of Death and Violence?

There have been far too many terrible stories in the news about someone entering a public building with guns blazing, claiming many innocent lives before ultimately taking his own. The Columbine High School massacre in 1999 was not the first such incident, but it seems to have established a horrible template that has been followed many times since. A person with a grudge of some sort snaps and forms a plan to take revenge. Weapons and ammunition are attained all too easily, the disturbed person goes on a deadly rampage, and we have another tragic headline. No public setting has been spared – schools and universities, offices and factories, churches and nursing homes.

There are many things we can lament here, beginning with how pervasive violence has become in our society and our failure to come to terms with gun violence in particular. But I have become morbidly fascinated by how news coverage of these stories is affected by the identity of the victims. If they are young – high school or college students – it is front page news for many days. But a recent massacre in which 14 people died at an immigration center in Binghamton, NY, flickered briefly across the front page and quickly faded from view. Most of the victims were Hispanic immigrants: is that why this shooting was considered less newsworthy?

The week before, eight people died violent deaths when a gunman who was angry with his wife stormed into a North Carolina nursing home. This story never made the front page at all. Is it because there were “only” eight victims, or was it because they were elderly persons with dementia? One person living nearby said in an interview that it was horrible and that she felt bad for the victims, but that she took comfort in knowing that “they were going to die anyway.” Really? The students at Columbine were also “going to die anyway;” we all are.

Many things shape how we allow tragedies to impact us, including distance and time. Tragedies half a world away – earthquake victims in Italy, children starving in war-torn regions of Africa – are sad, but also a bit abstract to us. A year after floods ravage Iowa or a hurricane devastates New Orleans people are still suffering, but our attention has moved on. And I suspect we are hard-wired to view the violent deaths of children and young adults as more tragic than the deaths of older adults. But all persons are of infinite worth and no human life is more or less valuable than another. It seems to me that unless we can overcome our short attention spans and learn how to grieve, grieve deeply and truly, we will never summon the collective will needed to confront and change this culture of death and violence that we have tolerated for far too long.