When a Blog Entry Is Just a Diary Excerpt

Tuesday, 30 Dec 2008 – Rogersville, TN (limited number of crosslinks due to slow Internet access). Every culture develops ceremonies for which humans can spend time away from their assortment of usual activities, thus giving special meaning to the humans’ lives because they gain a sense of unique value while focusing on their participation or non-participation in the ceremonies. Wintertime ceremonies flourish this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere, with calendar-synched activities occurring in the warmer Southern Hemisphere. Living in the Northern Hemisphere my whole life, I’ve lost the true global perspective on how a winter ceremony that we Northerners have globalized appears to someone who’s wearing a short-sleeved shirt, swimming trunks and sandals singing “Winter Wonderland” or “Frosty the Snow Man” in the southern half of the world.

Many centuries ago, my ancestors chose to adopt the ceremonies that the Roman Empire had adapted itself to (I can see the value of a large political system changing from a multitheistic emotional support system to a monotheistic one, “proving” to the general populace that a single emperor makes more sense than competing emperors), thus participating in the rituals developed under the banner of the Christian religion, including the use of a Romanized language.

This winter, as in all the winters of my life, I received gifts on or about the 25th of December, symbolizing the rebirth of our emotional selves (our souls, if you will) in the midst of the doldrums of days with less sunlight. As I’ve grown older, I’ve given gifts to more and more people in a subconscious attempt to even out or exceed the number of gifts I’ve received, a sort of yin-yang of Christmas, if you will.

As I approached the day of Christmas, I found myself reading “Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys, a book that loosely chronicles the life of the author who grew up in the Caribbean islands. Before I could find time to finish the book, the days of gift exchange occurred and I find myself awash in more bundled pages to focus my eyes upon:

• “Outliers: The Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell
• “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives” by Leonard Mlodinow
• “The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal” by Jared Diamond
• “The Story of Chicago May” by Nuala O’Faolain
• “Revolutionary Wealth” by Alvin & Heidi Toffler
• “Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace” edited by Mark Tovey
• “The Night Before Christmas” by Clement Clarke Moore, a popup book by Robert Sabuda

I also received the following movies:

• Layer Cake
• Memento
• A Clockwork Orange

I have one CD to hear, “Cripple Creek 2007, Better Than Ever,” as well as a hunting knife to play with, a bottle of Puerto Rican rum to drink and a crank-powered LED flashlight to shine ahead of me (I think I should create my own ceremony using the items just listed, don’t you? LOL).

With all of those wonderful gifts in my possession, what did I give away? Not much, frankly. I made necklaces for my wife and mother. Every other gift which bore my name was purchased with my wife’s money this year – such is the life of a consultant in the idle part of a working 12-month calendar.

Which brings me to the reason for this blog entry, probably my last one for the year 2008.

While I sat in the hospital last night, waiting for a medical professional to stop by the hospital room where my 91-year young mother in-law lay in bed after being admitted through the ER earlier in the day for uncharacteristic body function measurements noted by a home health care worker, I flipped through some old magazines in the patient/family lounge. I skipped over the “Mature Living” and “Field and Stream” magazines I had read on previous hospital visits and picked up a copy of the September 24, 2007, edition of “Newsweek” with Alan Greenspan on the cover. The articles on Greenspan including a general business review of Greenspan’s career by Daniel Gross, an interview ('two-hour tutorial') with Jon Meacham and Daniel Gross and an excerpt from Greenspan’s book, “The Age of Turbulence.”

A paragraph from the excerpt haunted me during my dreams last night, especially the highlighted phrase below:

As awesomely productive as market capitalism has proved to be, its Achilles' heel is a growing perception that its rewards, increasingly skewed to the skilled, are not distributed justly. Market capitalism on a global scale continues to require ever-greater skills as one new technology builds on another. Given that raw human intelligence is probably no greater today than in ancient Greece, our advancement will depend on additions to the vast heritage of human knowledge accumulated over the generations. A dysfunctional U.S. elementary and secondary education system has failed to prepare our students sufficiently rapidly to prevent a shortage of skilled workers and a surfeit of lesser-skilled ones, expanding the pay gap between the two groups. Unless America's education system can raise skill levels as quickly as technology requires, skilled workers will continue to earn greater wage increases, leading to ever more disturbing extremes of income concentration. Education reform will take years, and we need to address increasing income inequality now. Increasing taxes on the rich, a seemingly simple remedy, is likely to prove counterproductive to economic growth. But by opening our borders to large numbers of highly skilled immigrant workers, we would both enhance the skill level of the overall workforce and provide a new source of competition for higher-earning employees, thus driving down their wages. The popular acceptance of capitalist practice in the United States will likely rest on these seemingly quite doable reforms. [bold/italicized emphasis is mine, not Greenspan’s]

It is not an accident that human beings persevere and advance in the face of adversity. Adaptation is in our nature, a fact that leads me to be deeply optimistic about our future. Seers from the oracle of Delphi to today's Wall Street futurists have sought to ride this long-term positive trend that human nature directs. The Enlightenment's legacy of individual rights and economic freedom has unleashed billions of people to pursue the imperatives of their nature—to work toward better lives for themselves and their families. Progress is not automatic, however; it will demand future adaptations as yet unimaginable. But the frontier of hope that we all innately pursue will never close.

I continue to educate myself about current economic and research trends so that I can understand where our society is moving, giving me the insight I need to understand where my skills are best applied. Despite my continuing education, I know my level of intelligence limits my true comprehension of fields such as quantum mechanics and synthetic drug development. In other words, my ability to go from the front suite of a corporate office to the labs of a research university and integrate my knowledge of the two into an in-depth whole would not impress the deepest thinkers of the world but might fool the general person on the street. So if I, with an IQ measured many years ago at a level a standard deviation or two (but not six) above average, realize my limitations, what should I expect of the vast majority of humans living under the rest of the bell curve?

If technology complexity increases indefinitely, how do we keep unskilled workers productive?

In this season of reflection and gift giving (and cuddling up by the fire in the Northern Hemisphere, including me on the chilly December day, even if the “fire” is a set of artificial logs heated by natural gas to supplement the warm air blowing out of the vents of a home central heating/cooling pump system), I say that we skilled workers who have the ability to develop and integrate complex systems should give our unskilled workers the gift of simplifying the usability of technology systems. The gift that keeps on giving, as they say.

We stand up and protest when car manufacturers insist on putting iDrives into mass-produced automobiles. We tear up any user interface that requires more than two or three buttons to operate. We treat every system as if it was an emergency situation that can be handled with the press of a large red panic button to set into motion immediately (or stopped just as easily).

As Greenspan noted, the behemoth of the education system, like a large cruise or battle ship going at full speed, cannot be stopped and turned on a dime in a short period of time. While school experiments such as KIPP are taking place and slowly influencing the way students are taught – the bottom-up approach to building a better functioning society – skilled workers will work on building systems that anyone can use, a top-down approach that hopefully will let us meet in the middle more quickly, not only putting the current topsy-turvy economy back on its feet but make our global society more cooperative and working toward a peaceful solution to many local skirmishes that are caused by economic inequalities that can be tied to poor education and workplace training.

Change in Plans

I had planned to write this blog entry about the recent revelation concerning the contagion sweeping the world in the form of happiness. Then, I thought about the news article and realized this is not news. We have been sharing happiness, joy and a positive attitude with one another for millennia. Instead of talking about spreading the 'disease' of happiness, I have changed my daily habits so that I'm spreading happiness almost every day. [NOTE: I'll get to that in a few paragraphs]

In concert with the report on happiness, I was also going to discuss the prospect of investing in "green" technology during a worldwide recession, telling you where I had planned to put my money to ensure that not only does the economy get a boost but my portfolio grows in a green way, too. Then I realized that a recession, or a contracting economy ("contracting" as in diminishing in size, not as in formal building proposal), is a form of green technology in itself.

By letting the economy shrink and forcing many people to curtail spending on superfluous goods and services, we actually find ourselves making decisions about what's important for our survival. Then, instead of buying the "next great thing," we can see for ourselves that spending time with other people, in lieu of spending money on items that substitute for one-to-one interaction, can bring us joy and happiness.

In conclusion, I have determined that a recession causes happiness! Or at least, if we put our minds to it, we can use this economic slump to bring happiness to others via our smiling faces and personal talents such as storytelling, singing, dancing, card-playing and game-playing, instead of giving each other a gee-whiz portable music player, catch-all cell phone, all-in-one transportation device or humongogigantisaurus televising entertainment complex.

==========================
Secrets to Share Happiness -- Part One

Now, to the ways we can share happiness.

I am a technology buff and believe that ingenuity in the realm of technology brings people together in a one-to-one way we hadn't thought of 100 years ago. Who would have thought that our journals/diaries would become public announcements in the form of blogs that we would want to connect to others'? As a technology buff, I want to use the tools available to me and know that the progress of technology will continue to increase the ways people connect with each other.

At the same time, technology serves as a dilemma to those of us who recognize that the raw materials needed to support high-tech growth have to come from somewhere and usually it's from areas outside of our immediate sight. Thus, as we enjoy the world's largest LCD TV installed in our special-purpose HD theater room, we do not see the local strip mines and the low-paid workers who extract the precious metals needed for producing LCD panels. Nor do many of us see the island forests cleared to build factories and other manufacturing infrastructure in Malaysia.

I tell you this because I believe our happiness should not come at the cost of ignorance. When we approach our friends and colleagues in virtual connections in the hopes of spreading happiness, let us keep in mind the cost of virtual reality. That way, as you move forward, you can with clarity ask yourself whether walking down the street to visit a dying neighbor is more important than checking the list of holiday joke emails you've received from your worldwide network of virtual friends.

With that said, during the recent U.S. Thanksgiving Day holiday, I visited my hometown, the place where I spent my days going to study reading, writing and arithmetic with my school mates. During the holiday, a former school mate of mine told me that I should connect up with other former primary school mates through Facebook. I created a Facebook profile and all of a sudden I found myself reconnecting with people I haven't seen since 1980. Facebook and other social networking sites are fun to use (I also have profiles on LinkedIn, Plaxo and Naymz).

Over the past few days, I have scanned dozens of photos from the period 1978-1980 and posted them on Facebook.

The happiness that people have expressed in seeing themselves and other school mates in photos from 30 years ago cannot substitute for much in my life, other than actual face-to-face contact with them. However, because the group of people I spent my school days with have dispersed across the globe, this is the only way we have to see each other, and for the advance in technology that has made this possible, I am thankful. I balance this virtual happiness time against the good times I spend with friends, neighbors and colleagues in my town.

So, see, there is a way to share happiness during this worldwide recession. You can physically visit with your neighbors, friends and long-lost relatives and you can visit them virtually. When engaged in the latter activity, keep in mind the cost to the environment, even if you have to stretch your unused altruistic muscles to do so -- your future neighbors, friends and long-lost relatives will happily thank you, I'm sure.

Don Quixote's not dead.

Yesterday, while ruminating about the future after eating a mesquite-smoked turkey sandwich, I remembered what I had forgotten I remembered -- the subject for a future blog entry. Therefore, the future is yesterday because the blog entry is now.

I dedicate this blog entry to a friend of mine named Ali. Ali grew up in Lebanon, the son of a Christian mother and a Muslim father. He saw firsthand the violence that religious belief causes. When he moved to the United States to earn a college degree, he saw firsthand the tolerance that religious belief causes. Ali eventually got his PhD and somewhere along the way he became a U.S. citizen, giving up the riches of his Lebanese inheritance, including a Ferrari his father promised him if he returned to his birthplace (his family is part of the ancient kingdoms of the Middle East that, frankly, I know little about). How many of us know the price of freedom that someone like Ali has paid? I see it but I can only imagine the conflicting thoughts and health-wrecking emotions that such a person goes through, to give up family ties in order to live freely.

While thinking about the main subject for this blog entry, I took a walk through the woods behind our house. A cold breeze stirred up freshly-fallen maple leaves, burning my ears that were trying to hear the sounds of spring which always warm my body frozen stiff from cabin fever. Deer tracks in the mud reminded me of the overpopulation of Odocoileus virginianus in this part of the country. We humans attempt to control the deer by shooting them for sport and to a small degree, it helps. However, the deer keep multiplying. If ever there was a problem looking for a solution, then finding a way to deliver deer meat to homeless shelters and the homes of the poor fits in there somehow...perhaps we should teach the poor to hunt for themselves. What's that saying about teaching a man to fish? Let's see, "he'll never go hungry"? No, that's not it. "He'll sit in a boat all day and get drunk"? Maybe that's the one.

While incense burns nearby, I spend a few minutes contemplating the rotation of Earth on its axis as the Sun passes by in the low southern sky. Interesting, how the problems of the world economy, the pestilence, the poverty, the history of humanity, the dos and don'ts, the haves and have nots, and all the other human-centric issues just disappear. Prayer and meditation cure many an ill.

Yesterday afternoon, I watched the movie, "The Man of La Mancha," starring Peter O'Toole, Sophia Loren, and James Coco. I wanted to see how the movie compared to the book I had read recently, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha ("The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha"). Surprisingly, the two matched up pretty well. Both had slow parts that made me wonder where the author was taking the narrative. Most importantly, the movie reminded me of today's blog entry. But first, some lyrics from the movie:

"The Impossible Dream"

To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go

To right the unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star

This is my quest
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how far

To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march into Hell
For a heavenly cause

And I know if I'll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I'm laid to my rest

And the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star

========================

For you see, the subject of today's blog entry concerns the understanding (or misunderstanding) between two religions -- an impossible dream, it seems at times. In the Western world, Christianity dominates as the form of ethical, moral and meditative education given to children and practiced by adults. In the Middle East and northern Africa, Islam dominates. Or rather, I should say that through tradition and relative success, families in these regions have found the two religions useful in producing offspring. I will not argue that one religion is more or less violent than the other. To turn a phrase, religions do not kill people, people kill people.

Having grown up in an English-speaking Christian society, I celebrate when those of the majority population truly accept others who may not speak English and do not profess Christianity as their emotional foundation. At the same time, I expect acceptance of my language and other behavioral skills when they are in the minority at the local population level.

At my mother in-law's house last week, I skimmed through a stack of National Geographic magazines. I had just finished reading a local newspaper column about wrestling entitled, "WWE no doubt thankful for its money-making DVD sets," and reminisced about the conversations that Ali and I had about the old wrestling stars. There's nothing like a good rumble in the ring for fans of all backgrounds to enjoy time together. I would talk about watching the likes of Ric Flair while Ali reminded me that Ric was successful only because of the popularity of wrestlers like Dusty Rhodes, Andre the Giant and Ivan Koloff. Ali taught me much about Lebanese wrestlers, such as Sheik Ali, telling me that wrestling was as popular there as it is here. Who knew? Obviously not me.

Anyway, I came across the August 2008 issue of NatGeo that focused on Persia, "Ancient Iran: Inside A Nation's Persian Soul." There, I read an interesting paragraph:

The legacy from antiquity that has always seemed to loom large in the national psyche is this: The concepts of freedom and human rights may not have originated with the classical Greeks but in Iran, as early as the sixth century B.C. under the Achaemenid emperor Cyrus the Great, who established the first Persian Empire, which would become the largest, most powerful kingdom on Earth. Among other things, Cyrus, reputedly a brave and humble good guy, freed the enslaved Jews of Babylon in 539 B.C., sending them back to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple with money he gave them, and established what has been called the world's first religiously and culturally tolerant empire. Ultimately it comprised more than 23 different peoples who coexisted peacefully under a central government, originally based in Pasargadae -- a kingdom that at its height, under Cyrus's successor, Darius, extended from the Mediterranean to the Indus River.

So Persia was arguably the world's first superpower.

Cyrus the who? Because of my upbringing that emphasized the history of my northern European ancestors, I had never heard of Cyrus, yet here it appears that a leader had great vision millenia ago. Why don't we learn more from him in the land of the current superpower, the United States?

The NatGeo article pointed to the acts of magnanimity carved into the Cyrus Cylinder, an object that should be getting more attention than the cryptex, a cylinder supposedly invented by Da Vinci that many studied during the height of popularity of "The Da Vinci Code."

Which brings me to the main subject of this blog entry -- Islamic feminism. Yes, that's right. We spend so much time in the West worrying about Islamic terrorism that we forget about the daily lives of the majority of Muslims, who find a peaceful way to raise children, run businesses and get along with their neighbors.

In general, I do not support feminism as a force majeure because of the tendency that the word "feminism" attracts and is associated with radicals. Some say that the only way to change a society is through radicalism but I disagree. Radicalism is required only if suppression and oppression are the status quo and the general populace suffers declining health and higher death rates. I believe that feminism should be practiced (and thus demonstrated) and not shoved down the throats of those who cannot comprehend the value that women bring to a society that touts equality.

What is feminism?
Plenty of websites and blogs define feminism. You can use your favorite search engine if you want to investigate what others say about feminism. I define feminism as the attitude that women are equal to men in all walks of life, including mental and physical activities, but enjoy specific differences that enhance the relationship between the two genders.

Some activities tend toward gender bias because they concentrate on gender-specific traits but that does not mean a person of the other gender cannot participate. However, the inclusion of a member of the opposite sex in such activities requires acceptance by the group. Even with an open mind, the group may not include the other person for a variety of reasons but if the group believes in feminism then the issue of gender is not one of the reasons for excluding the other person.

Islamic feminism (or nisa'iyya in Arabic) is similar. For those who've read and practiced the teachings of Muhammed, Islamic feminism may seem like a nonissue. For them, the Qu'ran clearly makes a place for women. The same could be said about the Bible. But many people interpret the Qu'ran and the Bible in male-dominant terms. By the same token, many women are comfortable living in a male-dominated world. Religious tolerance allows for this way to live.

Religious tolerance also allows for Islamic feminism. If you are a Westerner, I implore you to consider the prospect of an Islamic feminist and smile with gladness. For when you accept the purpose of feminism, you accept the concept of equality. When you consider a man and woman as equals, then you can accept a Christian and Muslim as equals on this planet, too. And only when we learn to treat each other as humans without preconceived notions clouding our thoughts can we work together to build a better world.