I Identify Wealthy

Identity is only useful if it can be verified. Imagine, for a moment, that you are in the airport, making your way to your flight. While passing through security, you present a boarding pass for Bill Miller and an ID that says you are John Smith. Then you serenely tell the TSA agent that he should ignore the measurable, observable properties of your identity and instead simply accept that you identify as Bill Miller. This would clearly not be an acceptable assertion for the purposes of TSA security.


If our self-perception includes traits that we do not possess, there is some precedent for society to correct us and tell us that we are wrong.  In the above example, TSA would surely inform John that his height, weight, date of birth, and facial features all appear to correspond to those of John Smith, and that he is not, in fact, Bill Miller.

If I attempted to identify myself as a doctor, society would step in to correct my misrepresentation, since I do not possess the certificate of completion for medical school that would make me a doctor. If I attempted to identify myself as a lawyer, the same thing would happen, as I have never passed the bar. If I attempted to identify as a was hero, the government would point out that I had never served or been decorated. In all three of these cases, I would probably face criminal prosecution for representing myself as something other than what I can be proven to be.

What about traits that are more difficult to quantify, like intelligence, or race?  In today's world, populations are mixing more widely and frequently than ever before, and the ethnicity of any given person can be difficult to guess. Even so, Native American tribes have standards of proof that must be met before someone can be admitted to the tribe. You may tell others that you identify as Native American, but unless you meet the standard of proof, the tribe will disagree.

If I told others that I were intelligent, but did not speak and act as an intelligent person would, people would probably disagree with my self-assessment. In some scenarios, they would probably allow me to believe as I choose but would decide for themselves that I am wrong. If my intelligence were of importance to my role, however, they might be forced to correct my self-perception.  For instance, if I applied for a position as a math teacher but lacked the ability to do basic arithmetic, the interviewer would be justified in telling me that I am not sufficiently intelligent to assume the role for which I am interviewing.

I think by now you can see where this line of thought is headed.  If a person identifies with a group that is defined by observable traits that they do not possess, do they really belong to that group? Recent news stories would suggest that they do not. Consider Rachel Dolezal, who identified as black despite being demonstrably white.  Consider illegal aliens who identify as being legal residents. Some Americans are positively outraged by such false assertions.

Now let me close the loop. For thousands of years, the standard of gender identity was simply our biology. If you possessed a female anatomy, you were a female. If not, you weren't. Our society has made certain allowances for people that feel different than their biology to live as a gender other than their biological one. But we have not established a standard of proof.

Now that we have allowed people to contradict the existing measurable, verifiable standards of gender, we need to decide on an acceptable standard. To avoid this uncomfortable conversation is to allow sexual predators the opportunity to gain inappropriately intimate access to members of the opposite sex by claiming to be something that they are not. Without standards, we are placing business owners in a position of being legally prohibited from throwing a wolf in sheep's clothing out of the women's room because he claims to be a woman.

Since society seems to be headed toward a place where anyone can claim to be anything and there is no accepted standard of proof, I would like to take this opportunity to tell you all that I identify wealthy. And handsome.

Your Jaw Doesn't have to Drop

Recently I was reading an article about a joint effort between MIT geneticists and quantum physicists that produced a quantum virus genetically engineered for efficient energy transport.  If that sounds interesting to you, you can read about it here.  But the article is beside the point, literally.  The point was one of the ads in the sidebar.  It was titled "The beauty of these news anchors will drop your jaw."  I was insulted.

Opposable thumbs are not the only thing that sets us apart from our simian cousins.  We are more than the sum of our urges and animal instincts.  We can feel hunger and not partake, thirst and not imbibe, fatigue and not sleep.  We can feel surprise but not exclaim, anger but not lash out, and sadness but not weep.  Given these truths, it seems intuitively obvious that we can see beauty but not lust.

But society sends a different message.  Not only are men expected to lust after attractive women, but they are encouraged to do so.  We are told that this is "normal" male behavior.  Advertising campaigns, popular music, television, movies, and fashion have all worked hard to pull in male dollars by reducing females down to the beauty of their bodies and nothing more.  Women are presented as purely sexual creatures existing to satisfy the animal desires of lustful males, and we are told that men should give in to these desires.  That it's normal.  That your jaw will drop.

Please do not let your jaw drop.

Please refuse to believe that a woman's most valuable characteristic is some part of her body (likely one that should remain covered in polite company).  Please refuse to believe that a woman must be physically attractive to have value in society.  Please refuse to believe that every woman that is paraded in front of you is an object you should feel free to desire.  Refuse to believe these lies.

Discipline your mind to see women as people with their own wants and wishes that have nothing to do with yours.  When you see another man walk by in public, do you notice his rear end?  Do you check out his legs or the prominence of his chest muscles?  Probably not.  You probably notice his face, how he carries himself, and whether or not his shoes are appropriate to his function.  In short, you saw him as a person, not as an object.  Train your mind to do the same for the women you meet.  It will take practi

ce, but it will be worth it.


By gaining mastery over this aspect of our nature, we free ourselves from one of the ties that would bind us.  No longer ignorant of our ability to choose in the matter, we can gain the ability to act rather than react.  We can decide for ourselves whether or not our jaw is going to drop.  Which will make it all the more meaningful when we finally decide to let it.

What Can A Sneech Teach?

Dr. Seuss's classic short story"The Sneetches" is one of my kids' favorites at bedtime.  It could be that it's part of a larger book and can delay the inevitable for another 15 minutes, but I prefer to think it's because the story has appeal.  It's got to have legs if I'm still reading it more than 50 years after it was first written, right?

For anyone that may not be familiar with the story, I'll give a brief summary.  The Sneetches are a group of tall yellow Seussians that come in two varieties: star-belly and plain-belly.  On the basis of this single characteristic, the star-bellies determine that they are superior (a notion that the plain-bellies inexplicably buy into), and immediately begin to limit access to their society.  Sound familiar?  

The moment that I started to look for larger meanings in the story, I began ascribing symbolism to the various characters.  There is a divisive little fellow named Sylvester McMonkey McBean who shows up to exploit the division in Sneetch society and profit from it.  It's tempting to think of him as the person or group most culpable for racism in American society today (whoever you think that might be), but there is more to McBean than first meets the eye.  The Sneetches themselves seem to represent different ethnicities, nationalities, socio-economic classes, or even sexual orientations.  Basically, they represent the many ways in which we divide ourselves.  These symbols are not exactly subtle, and don't require much deep thinking.  But my mind sometimes wanders down strange roads while my hands are busy working.  One of those paths is what this post is about.

There are a few aspects of this story that didn't sit right with me.  I know, it's ridiculous to be pointing out plot holes in a children's story, but I don't think these are plot holes.  I'm starting to think they may be the point of the story.  The first one is this: McBean brings two machines to the beach, the star-on and the star-off machines.  He invites the plain-bellies into the star-on machine, and then when the star-bellies become predictably concerned with their loss of distinction, he invites them into the star-off machine.  This ends up causing a big mess wherein nobody can really tell who started out as what.  The Sneetches, to their credit, learn from this that a physical characteristic is a poor basis for social distinction, and become a more egalitarian society.  But here's what bothers me about this.  Why were they confused even a little bit about who used to be a star-belly and who used to be a plain-belly?

Seuss gives us the impression that Sneetch society is a fairly small group of individuals in which you might assume that everyone knows everyone else.  But the evidence suggests that this is not the case.  If it were so, changing a single physical characteristic would not lead to identity confusion.  But it does.  So we must conclude that these Sneetches don't really know each other at all.  And it would seem that they didn't want to know each other.  It was enough for them that they knew who was like them and who was not.  When they couldn't tell that anymore, they had to get to know each other and be more inclusive.

So what seemed like a glaring plot-hole may actually be the main crux of the story.  Racism and other forms of discrimination are dependent on stereotypes and a lack of personal association.  And when we get to know someone personally, we tend to think of them as somehow separate from the stereotype they used to belong to in our minds.  Have you ever heard someone make a blanket statement about some group of people only to realize that one of those people is present?  Like when Kelly Osbourne made derogatory comments about Latinos in the company of Rosy Perez.  Kelly, evidently, didn't think of Rosy as part of that stereotypical group, but Rosy had different feelings about it.

The second problem that sticks in my mind is this: McBean clearly profited from the divisions in

Sneetch society, and even perpetuated them, but the Sneetches don't seem to blame him at all for his role in their problems.  It's almost as if they blame themselves and not McBean.  As they should.

McBean is perpetuating the status quo, but in the story as told by Seuss, he isn't responsible for the divisions in the first place, the Sneetches are.  We have no evidence that McBean told the Sneetches that star-bellies are desirable and that plain-bellies are not.  The Sneetches made some horrible decisions about themselves long before McBean came on the scene, and they unwound those decisions after he had gone.  So McBean is nothing more than a prop.  He's not to blame, nor does he deserve any credit.

So what conclusions can we draw from these observations?  I'll suggest two, though I suspect there is a fair bit more insight lurking in there.  The next time I am clearing weeds from the electric fence or moving hogs to a new pasture, I'll see if anything else strikes me.  For now, I have these:

1) Racism and discrimination exist because we believe things that are not true about people we do not know.  When we get to know them personally, we no longer believe those untruths about them, even if we continue to believe them about those we still do not know.  

2) The media, politicians, taste-makers, and artists are not responsible for our racism and discrimination, we are.  Thus the solution lies with ourselves.  We, like the Sneetches, must not blame McBean, but we must change in spite of him.

Am I thinking too deeply about this, or am I on to something?

Can we hope to change behavior without understanding motivation?

Sometimes we try to implement policies with a particular goal in mind.  Often our policies are well intended, well thought out, and involve careful planning and consultation.  But as they say, the best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry, and our efforts only serve make the problem worse.  This is called the cobra effect.  When you see it happening, it usually means that someone tried to solve a problem without knowing the root cause.

The cobra effect is a common occurrence in the history of the US military.  Two recent examples include:

• Operation Cyclone - The US armed the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight the Russians.  Later some of those same men and weapons joined the Taliban and fought the very country which had armed and trained them.
• Operation Iraqi Freedom - This one is complicated, but it's hard to argue that it solved more problems than it created

But you don't have to confine yourself to military operations to see examples of this effect.  You could look at something as innocuous as e-cigarettes.  They are intended to reduce the incidence of  tobacco smoking, which is well known to have harmful health effects.  The stated objective was to allow people to satisfy their addiction to nicotine without putting them at a high risk for several types of cancers.  But the result has been a tripling in the number of high school students trying e-cigarettes.

With this concept in mind, consider the problem of illegal immigration.  The US has approached illegal immigration as a problem to be solved at the destination.  Build a wall.  Toughen up border security.  Deport the illegal immigrants that get caught.  Deport those illegal immigrants that commit crimes.  And on, and on, and on.  How's that working out?

Something is still creating a powerful enough motivation that immigrants are willing to risk robbery, abuse, human trafficking, incarceration, deportation, and death to take a chance at getting into the US.  Trying to fight that at the US border is looking at the wrong end of the problem.  The War on Drugs looked at the wrong end of the problem as well.  Eliminating suppliers makes it harder and more dangerous to get the product*, but does not not reduce the demand for the product.  Similarly, by making it harder and more dangerous to get to the US, you do not reduce the demand for getting to the US.

Any solution to this problem will have to consider the reason for the demand.  I won't be so naive as to suggest that I can reduce the root cause of illegal immigration down to a blog post.  But I will share an anecdote that might make you think twice before you repeat the hateful rhetoric so popular in current conservative circles.

I served a religious mission in Canada (which is a story for another post).  I was specifically assigned to work with people that spoke Spanish.  In Alberta.  It would seem like a pretty small group, but you'd be surprised.  There were two principal groups of spanish-speaking immigrants: Chileans and Central Americans.

The Chileans came Canada around the time the CIA was helping to overthrow a democratically elected Allende government.  Having been in the country for forty years, and having slightly lighter complexions than some Central and South Americans, they now look and sound like Canadians.  They are comfortable, well integrated into Canadian society, and difficult to identify.

The Central Americans, principally Guatemalans and Salvadorans, have arrived much more recently, and generally look different than Canadians.  They have darker skin, do not yet have money, and are still living in tight-knit communities where they are among others with similar backgrounds and shared experiences.  This group was easier to identify, and I had a chance to speak to many of its members about the experiences that led up to their immigration to Canada.  I will relate two.

The first was told to us by Josúe (not his real name).  He described riding on a bus through a large city and seeing a man in front of him who was sweaty and fidgety.  He had a small trickle of blood running down from his temple, but the wound was covered by a hat.  Someone pointed out the blood and asked him if he needed help, but he refused and tried to act as though nothing was wrong.  But the bus driver was suspicious and alerted authorities.  At the next bus stop, police arrested the man and found that, under his hat, he had a human hand with a gold watch and rings.  The hand had been hacked off by a machete.  He left the country soon after.

The second was told to us by a man from El Salvador named Guillermo (also not his real name).  During the course of our visit, the conversation turned to his life in Central America and why he left.  He pulled up his shirt and rolled up the legs of his pants and showed us a dozen scars about the size and shape of a cigar burn. He told us that he had a friend his age that had killed someone.  He knew this kid pretty well, and became aware of his crime by accident.  This kid's father was a person of some importance, and was able to make unfortunate things like that "go away".  One night while he was sleeping, some men came into his house and kidnapped him.  They took him outside of the city and shot him in the legs, arms, and torso.  The location of the scars showed that this was not an execution, but more of a torture/murder.  But he didn't die.  He crawled to help several miles away and spent several months recuperating.  Then he left the country.

Now expand your thoughts to include other sources of immigrants.  Include the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, southeast Asia, and the middle east. If there were not decent expectation of the rule of law, would you not do the same?  If it were possible on any given day that your political views, personal religious beliefs, profession, or even your personal relationships could lead to your torture or murder, would you not do the same?  If it were more likely than not on a given day that your wife, sister, or daughter could be raped (and if discovered, killed for her "crime"), would you not do the same?

I do not know the answer to the problem of illegal immigration, but I am certain that it is not to smugly declare that, "I'm here now, so it's ok to close the doors to all those other poor saps."  There but for the grace of God go I.  And so do you.

*This is yet another example of the cobra effect.  The idea was to reduce the incidence of illegal drug use in the US.  The effect to was dramatically heighten the violence around the international drug trade coming from Central America.  The proposed solution didn't address the root cause of illegal drug use in the US, which is clearly not as simple as "because the drugs are available".

Trust but Verify

I'm watching world events and thinking of children.  I'm thinking that everyone in a position of authority should be treated the way parents treat teenagers: trust but verify.  People, after all, have an innate desire to serve their own interests, and must constantly be reminded of the needs of others.

If you don't remind your teenagers that you need them to be awake by ten o'clock on Saturday because you have to leave the house, they won't be.  If you don't remind your little ones to clean up their toys, they will not.  This is natural.  Sleep is good.  Cleaning up toys is bad.  It makes sense.

Why don't we apply these principles to people in positions of authority, or even just to adults?  Your employer gets it.  That's why we have time clocks.  We expect you to work a full 8 hour day, but we keep track just in case.  The government gets it.  That's why they require your employer to report your federal withholding.  We expect you to correctly report your own earnings, but we keep track just in case.  Your creditors get it.  That's why we have late fees.  We expect you to pay your bills on time, but late fees mean that doing so is serving your own interest as well as that of your creditor.

Now consider some of the problems experienced by law enforcement, educators, elected officials, religious leaders, and even coaches in athletics.  Some of the most troubling issues we face as a society today revolve around the basic responsibilities of people in these positions, things that we trust them to do, but can't verify.

Some of these problems seem to have simple solutions: if Darren Wilson had been wearing a body camera, it would have been easy to verify his version of events.

Others less so: how do we ensure that politicians are not beholden to some party other than their constituents?

In all cases, it seems to be in everyone's interest to put systems in place to verify the most critical performance metrics of the people in authority.  If we had some way to know that our police were not using more force that necessary, we would have fewer complaints of such.  Some reduction would come because we could quickly separate truth from lies.  Additional reduction would come because, monitoring performance improves performance.  If we had some way of accurately measuring the performance of educators, that performance would improve as well.  If priests and altar boys were never alone together, there would never be a need to wonder about abuse.

And that last case brings me to my conclusion.  It can be difficult and uncomfortable to be held accountable to others, but not as difficult and uncomfortable as being accused of wrongdoing by others.  So the obvious question is, why aren't the people in positions of authority leading the charge for greater accountability?  It certainly would advance their own interest.

Sort of Conservative... sort of not

Has anyone ever asked about your political views without telling you why?  Only once in my life have I had the pleasure of answering that question for someone that really, truly wanted to understand what I believe. We had many a lively debate and became good friends.  We agreed on almost nothing.

Usually the question seems like an attempt to squeeze me into one of two cubby-holes: liberal or conservative.  But I resist categorization.  I'm a Caucasian American of European descent, but I speak fluent Spanish with a slight Mexican accent.  I live on a farm in the rural midwest, but I work in a high-tech job.  I believe in God, but I don't deny that evolution is happening.

If you put me in the liberal cubby-hole, I'll tell you that I believe welfare is demeaning to the soul of man.  That abortion is not a form of birth control, but a means of escaping the consequences of choices already made.  That the government should do for the people what the people cannot do for themselves (footnote to my man, Abe).

If you put me in the conservative cubby-hole, I'll tell you that I favor a lenient immigration policy, because I would leave some of those countries too, if I had to.  That I give more than twice as much to charity as the average American.  That it is not good or right to malign 1.6 billion Muslims because of the terrorists and criminals that claim to speak for them.  That I listen to NPR.  A lot.

I think about things.  I decide for myself what I think is right.  I reexamine those conclusions whenever new information comes to light.  When I find it is warranted, I change my position.  I actually change what I believe if it conflicts with other ideas I hold to be true.

So if you ask me, you may get a non-committal answer.  Or no answer at all.  But if I'm feeling inclined, I'll probably tell you I'm sort of conservative... sort of not.  Now let's talk about the issues.