Monthly Archives: December 2016

Sticks and Stones

21 Wednesday Dec 2016

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As no less an authority on the universe than George Carlin pointed out, parents like to make rules. They supplement rules with various bits of seemingly sage advice. One of my mom’s favorites was “Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me.” I cannot recall the precise circumstances when I first heard this old saw, but from the very first it bothered me. I have a vague memory, perhaps confabulated, of coming in from outdoor play around the age of six because one of the neighbor kids, probably my friend Homer, had called me a “bad name.”  I’m not sure whether I expected mere sympathy or whether I thought my mom would go and extract some sort of retribution. But I didn’t get either kind of satisfaction. Instead, I got this saying quoted at me.

So, one reason I probably didn’t like it was that I didn’t find it at all satisfying in the way that a hug might have been and certainly not in the self-righteous and smug way that having Homer being punished would have done. Was this the harbinger of a new chapter in parent-child relationship? (No, I probably didn’t use the word “harbinger” back then, but I knew what “change” meant.) Instead of comfort, my parents would now dispense wisdom? Beyond that, this particular saying hurt my artistic sensibility. “Sticks and stones will break my bones.” Now, there was a rhyme scheme and scan I could related to. Nice even rhythm. Nice rhyme. But then it kind of goes to hell. “But names will never hurt…me.” ? How does that end with “hurt me.” Which syllable is unaccented? And what does “me” rhyme with here? You may as well just jam your piano hand down on C,D,E,F, and G at the same time and maybe the black keys between as well. By the way, my parents absolutely objected to that action on my part. I had to play piano “nicely” or not at all.

Beyond that, the “message” of this aphorism appeared quite cloudy if not opaque. Was my mother suggesting that if I wanted to “get back at” my buddy Homer, I should not come to her with my complaints but find a way to break his bones — perhaps using sticks and stones? I couldn’t see myself doing that. Even then I knew broken bones took a long time to heal. If I broke his bones, it could interfere with baseball, hide and seek, cops and robbers, cowboys and indians. Perhaps “names can never hurt me” provided the crux of the message and the sticks and stones were just there for contrast effects. Taken by itself, “names can never hurt me” seemed patently absurd. If I hadn’t felt hurt, I wouldn’t have bothered to tell her about it.

Even at six, the logic implied by this aphorism offended my aesthetic sense even more than the bad poetry. Yeah, true enough, sticks and stones could break your bones. That made sense. But that didn’t mean that these were the only weapons of bodily destruction. I already knew people could get hurt by guns, knives, cars, and disease. Why are the sticks and stones there at all? Why not just say, “If someone calls you a name, just ignore it.”? More subtle for a young child might be, “If someone calls you a name, whether or not that hurts you depends on how you take it.” Yeah, I might use that one today in psychotherapy with adults. I don’t think it would make much sense to a six year old. At least, I don’t think it would have made much sense to me.

As I mentioned, the sticks and stones part did make sense. Yet, I found it surprising that my mom would even mention them as possibilities. Whenever she — or any of the other moms — found us “sword fighting” with sticks, they would warn us that someone was about to lose an eye. This sounded extremely scary and yet a little intriguing. How could you “lose” your eye? Wouldn’t you just use your other eye to go find it? Did they mean you could have your eye injured? Anyway, none of us had the least intention of trying to stab someone else’s eye. And we certainly were going to to prevent our own eye from being stabbed. So what was the problem? It seemed as though adults found it very difficult to say what they actually meant. When it came to rock fights, parents seemed to focus on the same concern — losing an eye. Almost all of the boys I knew participated in both “sword” fights with sticks and in rock fights. Yet, none of us had ever lost an eye. In school, I searched the faces of kids from every grade (up to sixth) and none of the kids in the entire school had ever lost an eye. So, this seemed to me, and apparently all the other boys, to be a rather far-fetched fear.

When we had stone fights and stick fights, none of us tried to poke out an eye. Indeed, none of us tried even to break a bone. We tried to inflict a little damage on each other; we did want to make it “hurt” but not enough to break a bone. The little damage we rained on each other mostly constituted collateral damage. Our main purpose: re-enact the “battles” we had seen on TV. Drama, not pain, and certainly not injury, provided our main source of joy when it came to fights just as when we played “Cowboys and Indians” or “Cops and Robbers” we had no intention of putting a bullet through someone’s heart.

Even the nicely rhyming first part of that aphorism disturbed me. It hinted to me that a far meaner and crueler world existed out there. In that world, kids didn’t just want to throw stones and hit with sticks in order to have some dramatic fun; in that world, kids actually wanted to break each other’s bones! What neighborhood was that? I had occasionally heard my parents and grandparents talk about “tough neighborhoods.” Were those neighborhoods the ones where kids wanted to break each other’s bones? What would be the point? Wouldn’t that just make the other kid less fun to play with? If they had a broken leg, they couldn’t run. If they had a broken arm, they’d have to swing the bat with one hand. It made zero sense. Zero.

The application of any term leaves gray areas. We like to think that definitions are clear-cut, but seldom indeed does nature provide us with chip chop clarity when it comes to classes and definitions. For example, is a baseball bat a “stick”? Sometimes, baseball players refer to their bats as sticks, but in the case of well-muscled professional ball players, I always thought this provided a kind of joke. Indeed, with a (mere) “stick” they can hit a baseball well over 300 feet! But, after all isn’t a baseball bat a kind of “stick”? It’s made of wood. It’s more or less in the shape of a branch of wood.

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Well, whether you call it a “stick” or a “bat”, I can tell you that when a baseball bat gets swung at you and hits you in the chest full force, it is more than a little painful. Homer managed this deed. We were playing baseball with nearly a full set of players down the block at a vacant lot. Homer was at bat with my baseball bat and my dad drove up telling me we had to go immediately. I walked over to get my bat but Homer stood resolute in the batter’s box. The pitcher threw and before I could back away, Homer swung the bat, swinging for the fences. Despite his name, Homer did not hit a home run or even a foul tip. He completely missed the ball although he did manage to make extremely solid contact with my sternum and ribs. It hurt. It hurt quite a bit actually, but the scarier part was that I couldn’t breathe. My dad came hurtling through the vacant lot and grabbed the bat from Homer. I still couldn’t breathe but I could tell I was still alive. I wasn’t so sure whether Homer would be for long. My dad had a very hot temper and, hit or no-hit, the idea that he would kill Homer sprang into my head and scared me even more than the prospect that I would never be able to breathe again.

Indeed, I did breathe again (this should be obvious to you) but did get to spend some long hours in the “emergency room” waiting for X-rays. Nothing was broken. Homer and I stopped hanging out. Eventually, Homer’s dad come to talk with me and explained that it was an accident. He pointed out that Homer and I played together a lot and we were both missing out. Forgiving Homer seemed pretty easy actually. I myself hate to leave a game half finished or lose a turn at bat. In baseball, you only *rarely* get to bat. If full teams are playing, you only get to bat one out of 18 times!  We seldom had a full complement of players in my neighborhood, but it was still rare that you got a chance at bat.

Indeed, “sticks” can break your bones, although luck sided with me that day and no ribs were broken. It could have been worse. Much worse. The red mark of the bat was directly over my heart. I suppose a piece of rib could have gone shooting into my heart which would not have been particularly good for anyone. But while we are on the subject of hearts, how can anyone say, “names will never hurt you”? Of course, it hurts when people call someone a hurtful name. Kids call each other names. When they do it on purpose, they are generally doing it to precisely to hurt the other kid. That isn’t universally true. As I already explained, when I had met my neighbor a few years ago and called her a S***A**, I had no idea what it meant. It was just her way of saying hello. And, sometimes, even adults call people names and mean it as a compliment when it is actually not taken as such.

For example, when I was very young, I had a hard time gaining weight even though I wanted to. This is certainly no longer true; now, I have the opposite problem. But I still don’t take kindly to people (generally women) calling me “skinny.” In fact, I don’t think any guy I know wants to be called “skinny” but women seem to think it’s a compliment. Needless to say, men are far more likely to say various things to women that are not appreciated at all. Most guys would love to be called “sexy” and find it difficult to understand why a woman would not just take this as a compliment. That’s basically because guys are typically taken “seriously” while women have to fight their whole lives to be taken seriously; that is, to be treated as a person with intelligence, goals, a unique viewpoint and so on and not simply as a “thing” whose main purpose is to please men and propagate the species.

Imagine that you overhear a guy saying something that is clearly meant to be derogatory to a woman. What would you do? Well, I guarantee that you will not win many points if you walk up to the woman right away and say, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” I don’t recommend it. I especially don’t recommend it if the woman happens to have a large stick or stone in her possession. Now, let’s imagine instead that there is one particular guy who makes a habit out of calling people derogatory names. He calls many women derogatory names on many occasions. In fact, whenever anyone disagrees with him about anything, he calls that person something derogatory. In fact, name-calling seems to be the most sophisticated type of argument he can muster. In school, we had a few kids that occasionally acted like this and we had a name for them: bullies. The few kids who were “bullies” were never very popular. They were pretty much outcasts.

Bullies act nothing like heroes. A bully is typically driven by a deep fear of being nothing. Quite probably, their parents either spoiled them silly or beat them senseless or both. Bullies had no self-esteem and so any time things didn’t go their way or someone disagreed with them, it brought up deep feelings of inadequacy. The only mechanism that they had for dealing with these feelings was to try to overpower the opposition. They would lie, steal, and cheat and scream bloody murder until they got their way. Sometimes in grade school, a bully would be particularly strong physically, but it wasn’t really a necessity. In junior high and high school, a girl was just as likely to be a “bully” as a guy although they would go about their name calling and power trips in a different way. Sometimes a whole gang of kids would get together and be bullies together. Their idea of a fun time was to pick a fight where the odds were five to one or ten to one. The whole gang would beat up someone because that way they could insure a win. Unless something happens to change such a person fundamentally, they typically graduate from being a child bully to being a teen bully in a gang to being a criminal in a criminal gang.

But not always. Sometimes such folk end up being a “boss.” They don’t primarily work as a boss because they like to make good things happen. No, they enjoy being the boss because they can order other people around. Sometimes such people end up as police and what they enjoy most about the job is ordering other people around. Because they have no confidence in their ability to solve problems or, indeed, do anything productive, they shake down others who can actually produce things. Now, please understand that most bosses just want to get things done and most police really want to help people. The “bullies” in these positions are a small minority. Sometimes, the bullies grow up to be wife beaters or child beaters or child molesters. On rare occasions, they become dictators. In this role, they use their power to enhance their power. They enjoy having things their way. They enjoy shouting down their opposition. They enjoy getting rid of their opposition. They cannot stand the idea that they may be wrong or lacking in some ability.

To give just one example, consider the case of Altshuler, a Russian who invented a way of inventing called TRIZ. (You can find it on google). He was a Russian inventor who wrote a sincere letter to Stalin suggesting that Russians needed to be more inventive. To the thin skinned bully Stalin, this suggestion for how to *improve* Russia becomes an implied criticism and Altshuler was sent to Siberia where he got to cut trees into sticks and break rocks into stones. This is one essential problem with bullies. They cannot face facts and instead insist on their own version of the truth. At long last, every such bully becomes more and more dissociated from reality. Essentially, they become insane, but they are not called by that name, because no-one wants to go to Siberia. No-one wants to give them an honest assessment of a military situation so, despite their military ambitions and initial successes, they ultimately must fail. Of course, on the way to their personal failures, such people become responsible for many deaths. They would sentence millions to die rather than face their own fundamental inadequacy.

A bully like Stalin or Hitler, however, cannot possibly be a nation-wide bully without arousing the little inner bully in many of his countrymen. Stalin himself didn’t put 50 million of his own countrymen to death. He had to rely on the actions of many “sub-bullies”; people who would carry out his wishes or face the consequences (which, without the collaboration of many of his countrymen would be nothing; but with the collaboration of other sub-bullies would be significant, even deadly). So, here we have an interesting conundrum. The bully wants absolute power but cannot achieve that power without the active cooperation of hordes of other sub-bullies. The dictator needs to set up a system to help him be the biggest bully he can be. Without that help, he is forced to face up to how weak and powerless he is personally.

These types of national bullies have arisen many times in many eras and in many different nations. So we cannot blame the “Russians” or the “Germans” or the “Spanish” or the “French” or the “English” for succumbing to being a sub-bully who joins right in on the name calling, the stone throwing and the stick wielding. Nope. Too easy. And too inaccurate. We all need to look within to discover how and  why we might ourselves become a sub-bully and then to determine how to thwart that tendency. If you and I would like to become and be called something other than sub-bullies, we need to appreciate our own unique perspectives and abilities and celebrate them. As professor Mad-Eye Moody once famously said, “constant vigilance.” Look for opportunities to give, to cooperate, to provide, to learn, to commit acts of compassion and kindness to every person regardless of what they are called.

This post is another in the series called “Schooled Haze” — each is a short story illustrating how people reflect back on earlier experiences in the hope of making sense of them in the light of subsequent experiences — something an Artificial General Intelligence system would also have to be capable of.

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Nancy the Nurse

13 Tuesday Dec 2016

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Our second grade teacher at David Hill Elementary School loved contests. She had contests on naming classical pieces of music that she played on a phonograph. I won. She had contests for knowing facts about the world and about the USA. I won. She had contests on spelling. I won. She had contests for math facts but I did not win. Why? Because even though I knew all the answers, she didn’t call on me so often as she did some of the girls in the class and one of them won. At the time, I thought this wildly unfair though looking back on it, she might have been trying to encourage some of the others not to give up. She had a reading contest. I won.

And, unlike any of the other contests, the person who won the reading contest would receive a prize from her. That prize consisted of choosing whatever Golden Book we wanted. Golden Books, for those who do not recall, were small books for kids, each bound on the edge with gold. Well, it probably wasn’t actually gold, but it was gold in color. The front and back covers were also rimmed with a gold pattern. So, right off the bat, Golden Books were pretty cool! Each Golden Book also featured, on the back cover, a list of every Golden Book!  What a clever marketing ploy. Anyway, after I won the reading contest, she handed me a Golden Book so I could pick my title from the back cover. I scanned the list very carefully. One and only one came with merchandise! Yes, Nancy the Nurse, the index promised, came with real band-aids!

In order to understand the appeal of this feature, you need to understand where my family lived. Our family’s small one-story two bedroom house sat on a busy street.  Most of the block contained other small, one-story two bedroom houses like ours although they differed in the color of the roof and the siding. Our house was white with green trim. However, as luck would have it, at the very end of my block were three vacant lots! These were not mere fields of weeds or turned up dirt clods like most of the vacant lots in the area. Huge trees! Grape vines! A few dirt paths criss-crossed this forest, this wilderness, this jungle. It was Eden. Only better because our Eden lacked any adult supervision.

And therein lay both the beauty and the danger. At the end of the block, in those ancient verdant stands of oak and beech, we lived or died by our own wits every day. Well. Every day until our parents called us in for supper when it got dark. But meanwhile, we needed to fend for ourselves and prepare for every emergency.

So, a book — that is one thing. But a book that came with *real bandaids*! That meant that I could construct an emergency medical kit for our wilderness adventures! So, of course, I chose as my prize, Nancy the Nurse!  

My teacher, Miss Hall, looked at me for a moment, paused, and then quietly suggested, “I think you probably mean Tommy the Doctor.” She slid her gnarly finger down to show me the title. Well, Tommy the Doctor did sound pretty cool. Indeed, my own nickname had once been “Tommy.” However, there was nothing in the description of Tommy the Doctor that gave even the slightest hint of real bandaids so I said, “No, thanks. I’ll take Nancy the Nurse.

My teacher, Miss Hall, paused, raised her voice just a tad and asked, “How about this one? Mike the Mechanic.”  Clever the way her voice reminded me of victorious trumpets when she mentioned the name. Still, again, there was nothing there about the book being accompanied by a toolkit or indeed even a bandaid. So, again, I repeated, “No, thanks I’ll just take Nancy the Nurse.” Miss Hall made a few more increasingly desperate attempts but all to no avail. I was puzzled by all of this. She had made it very clear that the winner would be able to chose any Golden Book.  At last, she grew weary of the game as had I and she took a different tack.  “Well, I will have to check with your parents.” And so she did. To their credit, my parents had no qualms at all about my choosing Nancy the Nurse. 

Soon the book came. I do not recall, but I am guessing that I did read the book. I read most everything I could get my hands on. But I recall nothing about the book. It did really come with bandaids however, and I found an old lunch pail to hold my emergency wilderness kit. However, as anyone knows, an emergency survival wilderness kit needs more than bandaids. For example, a method of remote emergency communication could prove vital. Kids back then did not have cell phones; mainly because they had not yet been invented. So, I needed another method. Something brightly colored would be good. In TV shows and movies, someone in danger often shot off a flare gun. Sadly, my parents did not own a flare gun. However, what they did have was a typewriter. And that typewriter had a ribbon with dark black on one half of the strip and a bright red on the other.

My parents never used the typewriter. And they had been very supportive of part one of my plan for the emergency kit; namely, the bandaids. I had no inkling they would be any less thrilled by my appropriation of the typewriter ribbon. And, sure enough the very first day, I had reason to use it. One of the kids found a gigantic caterpillar. I had already shown everyone my “flare” and explained its use. I removed the ribbon from my kit holder, took the ribbon cartridge in my right hand and gave a *tremendous* underhand throw. Sure enough, the red and black ribbon deployed beautifully, rocketing sky high. Maybe none of the other kids were looking and maybe as a consequence I had to yell to them to come see the caterpillar but that misses the point. The point is, it had worked. I carefully would the ribbon back up for another emergency.

I can’t recall how long life continued in this idyllic condition, but somewhere along the line, to my great surprise, my parents claimed an interest in using the typewriter. This, in turn, proved difficult precisely because there was no ribbon. They seemed perturbed to learn that the ribbon was intact, but meanwhile, rather than just sitting in the typewriter doing nothing for weeks, I had used it on multiple occasions to send emergency flares into the sky.

I suppose, by adult standards, none of the emergencies really “counted” because we were never really hurt, or lost, or attacked by wild beasts, but my point was that if any of those things had happened, we were prepared. Thanks to me. But thanks is not what I got. What I got was incredulity. What I got was yelling. What I got was a spanking. What I got was a lecture about not taking things that don’t belong to you, at least without asking.

The problem was that in my parents’ minds, the use of the typewriter ribbon was the typewriter, pure and simple. They had what I now know is called “functional fixedness.” They failed to see that a typewriter ribbon can serve as a typewriter ribbon when needed, but meanwhile can also be used as an excellent flare gun. They seemed to have a similar problem regarding the siding on the house. Yes, it could be used to form a wall that kept warm air in but it could also be used as a partner in a ball game if no-one else was around.

On the other hand, sometimes my parents teamed up with innovation. They didn’t seem to have any problem with my using old cardboard boxes and paper towel rolls to make castles or the use of short Lincoln Logs as soldiers. Using marbles as soldiers caused no problems. Using sticks and stones to make homes for toy dinosaurs was okay too. So, I’m not sure “functional fixedness” precisely named their problem. I think our main difference was that I saw things primarily in terms of their uses. Well — especially, my uses. Sure, the typewriter ribbon might be an important part of a typewriter, but if no-one ever used the typewriter and therefore never used the ribbon, why not let it become more useful by being an emergency flare gun?  If no-one ever actually wore the diamond ring in my mother’s jewelry box, why not give it to my girlfriend at school instead? My mother found out and marched up to school to demand the ring back, quite rightly pointing out that the ring had not been mine to give away.

Many years later, I discovered that the ring in question was an engagement ring from my mother’s first husband. My mother and dad fell in love in college. But when World War Two came to America, my dad lied about his age and volunteered. My mother was both angry and heart-broken. She married another older man who hadn’t volunteered to go off and fight a war. Yet, in life’s inimical and ironic ways, he was almost immediately drafted and went off to fight the Nazis himself. One day she had Army Officers appear on the doorstep to inform her of his death. Meanwhile, my dad was having his own trials and tribulations. He received a Purple Heart for a shrapnel wound in his shoulder but went back into combat. He and his squad were again shelled and my dad’s lower leg was shattered. His buddy was severely wounded and they were under fire so my dad hobbled them to safety further injuring his shattered leg. His fighting days were over and he shipped back to the USA where he and my mother were reunited. She still kept the ring as a remembrance but never wore it because, after all, she was now married to my dad.

At the time when my dad volunteered to go into the Army, he, like most Americans, only knew that we had been attacked at Pearl Harbor and that we were now at war with Germany, Italy, and Japan. Although people were certainly aware of Hitler’s rhetoric against Jews and his “White Supremacist” non-sense, the full horrors of the concentration camps and pogroms were not revealed until later. Even with all the alt-right propaganda panderings of Goebbels, the German leaders may have still have been ashamed to let the world know precisely what they were doing. It might seem difficult to believe that the German people didn’t know. However, we must remember that one of Hitler’s first moves was to eliminate the free press and put a “Minister of Information” as one of his top aides. Rather than having his second in command someone who actually knew how to make Germany more productive and wealthier, his primary  job was to make it seem as though this was happening, that Germany was winning the war, etc. and that any small remaining problems were due to a lack of patriotism and the “Jewish Problem.”

Of course, I didn’t know any of this in the second grade. All I knew was that to be fully effective in our corner jungle, we would have to have a medical kit and a flare. And, I suppose when my dad was under fire in North Africa and in Italy, his unit did have medical kits and flare guns and a lot more beside. But it wasn’t enough to prevent hot shrapnel from flying through the air and maiming and killing people. And, I honestly don’t know at this juncture what can help keep people safe from the clouds of hate that threaten to hurl us back into a second Dark Ages.

You don’t need a medical degree to know that some wounds cannot be staunched with bandaids. Flare guns, we definitely don’t need. Signs and signals aplenty like bombs bursting in air overhead shot out into the night sky for months and months. But people apparently dismissed them as normal atmospheric disturbances. So that now, after the dictatorial excesses of the late 1930’s and early 1940’s led to so many millions of deaths — German, Japanese, Italian, Russian, Canadian, French, English, American and others from virtually every continent, now we stand poised to do it all again. We are ready to beat every last one of our plowshares into swords. We are sick of science and making progress on disease and understanding the earth and exploring space. Instead, we want to wallow and wade in the wickedness of self-righteous bigotry. We are ready to fray the fabric of America. Something precious has been given away. And it wasn’t even ours to give away. It belonged to the heroes of other eras. And, unlike the diamond ring, this stolen gift will not be easily retrieved.

Of course, you might want to stock up an extra supply of bandaids. I doubt it will help much, but it can’t hurt. The jungle now will not be filled with oak trees and grape vines. And it won’t just be a few vacant lots of the end of the block. Vacant lots will waste away on every block as society unravels. Even the lots with massive iron-barred mansions will only populated by the vacant-eyed. Diamond rings will all have been confiscated as gifts for a chosen few.

Well, what about “Nancy the Nurse”? Well, Nancy earned her M.D. and became head of surgery at a prestigious University teaching hospital. But when it came right down to having her perform life-saving operations, the patients opted instead for Timmy the Technician. It turned out that Timmy didn’t actually have any technical or medical expertise. But he was big and brash and beige. Patients may die but no-one will be sued for wrongful death. Indeed, every death all along that long, loveless lane will be deemed as a righteous death. After all, every righteous death shall become just another … brick …  in … the … wall.

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There’s a Pill for That!

09 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by in management, Uncategorized

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In the first grade at David Hill Elementary School in Akron, Ohio, a classmate of mine literally broke out in measles right in front of me. Sure enough, a few days later, I got the measles. I don’t recall its being too bad except that I had a high fever and I began seeing “floaters” which I had never noticed before. Unfortunately, right after getting “over” the measles, I came down with pneumonia and had another high fever. Whatever the reasoning, I found myself in a hospital ward with probably 15-20 other kids. Initially, the worst part of the experience was that I had to lie there in what was essentially a crib. I had outgrown a crib years before and it was humiliating to be caged up in a crib.

At that point in time, the medical community had decided that the best thing for everyone concerned was to limit parental visiting hours to a half hour in the middle of the day and an hour in the evening. Although I certainly enjoyed playing with my friends at school, being deprived of friends or relatives for all but an hour and a half a day was crushing. None of the kids could touch each other in the hospital but we could talk a little, and sometimes scream. One of the kids in the ward had been badly burned and they periodically came to change his bandages. Before this, I had mainly heard kids scream as a kind of protest or to get attention from their parents or teachers. This guy’s screams arose from a different place in his throat and reached an altogether different acoustic plane. His screams were not designed to get sympathy or attention; they weren’t “designed” screams at all. If you consider evolution as a kind of “designer,” then these screams were “designed” to warn every other member of his species to get the hell away from here as fast as humanly possible. Only we couldn’t. We were caged.

Occasionally, a kid would get better and be released from the prison-like hospital ward. Or, perhaps they let them out early for good behavior. I wasn’t sure, but I reckoned that good behavior couldn’t hurt. I tried, therefore, to lie still for my penicillin shots twice daily. I pretty much failed at that endeavor. It wasn’t so much that the shots were painful as that they were invasive. I still hate the idea of a needle with chemicals being plunged into my body. There is a reason, after all, that human bodies come with skin!

I soon discovered, however, that hospitals offer up even worse things than shots. I was admitted late at night and my first morning, a nurse came by and placed a capsule into an empty drinking glass beside my bed. Because I was so “sick” I was only allowed a very soft and bland diet. I did feel sick. But I also felt very much that I would have been capable of eating a hamburger, hot dog, or slice or turkey. But no. I was stuck with jello, gelatin, bouillon and juice. But my first course for the day was to be my little pill. About a half hour after the first nurse had deposited a capsule in my empty water tumbler, another nurse would come by to “give me my meds.” Her first act was to lift up the pill so carefully laid in the water tumbler. However, when she went to pick it up, the capsule stuck and then disintegrated.  “No problem,” said the nurse cheerily. “We’ll give it to you with orange juice.” Indeed, she then mixed the contents of the capsule with orange juice. I had to drink it all. And so I did. And it stayed down. For about 30 seconds. Then I threw up. There was something about this particular mixture taken on an empty stomach which I could not stomach. Just thinking about it now still nauseates me a half century later.

The next day, before breakfast, a nurse came in and placed a capsule into my empty water glass. I explained to her that this was not a good idea because the second nurse would break it when she tried to lift it up. She pooh-poohed that as nonsense and went on her way. About an hour later, the second nurse came by to give me my meds. I explained to her to be very careful or the capsule would break. “Nonsense,” she said, “the capsule won’t break.” So, she lifted it up and the capsule broke. “No problem,” said the nurse cheerily. “We’ll give it to you with orange juice.” Indeed, she then mixed the contents of the capsule with orange juice. I had to drink it all. And so I did. And it stayed down. For about 30 seconds. Then I threw up. There was something about this particular mixture taken on an empty stomach which I could not stomach.

And, so it went. Every day for ten days the same exact thing happened. Looking back, it is rather amazing I even survived. Eventually, either the doctor gave up on me or my parents missed me or the hospital needed the bed for a patient that provided a higher revenue source. Whatever the reason, I was eventually paroled. It certainly cannot have been for good behavior. My release, whatever the reason, was right before Easter and I weighed 48 pounds nearly seven years old. We had ham and yams and mashed potatoes and gravy for Easter dinner. I ate and ate. No doubt, the penicillin helped kill the pneumonia germs. But I really think the Easter dinner is what cured me — that, and being home in a warm house rather than caged on a ward with the screams of a burn victim and worse, the friendly banter of nurses who would never listen to a mere kid. There can be no doubt that pills are often a cure for disease. But sometimes, whatever the scale of the disease, it isn’t so much a little pill as a nourishing environment that restores the balance of health.

On today’s TV one can find advertisements for pills that promise to cure every ailment that humanity ever had as well as hundreds of other ailments no-one ever realized were ailments. “Do you suffer from wrinkly elbow skin when you straighten your arm? There’s a pill for that!” “Are there calluses on your feet? There’s a cream for that!” “You are eighty years old and you look eighty years old? No problem! We can fix that with operations and injections!” And, then, whilst someone tip-toes through a sunlit host of golden daffodils with Beethoven’s Ode to Joy playing in the background, there is a rapid recital of side-effects. “Some patients may experience slight exploding of the liver. Tell your doctor if you have ever had a beer. Cure-it-all isn’t for all patients. If you experience sudden blindness, deafness, or death, stop taking Cure-it-all and seek medical help immediately.”

I have no doubt that there have been real advances in medicines for a number of real diseases both deadly and more minor. But how much of our health care costs are really vanity costs? You have a body that adapts to the situation. If there are calluses on your feet, there’s a reason!  Many millions of dollars are spent on advertising to get small children into the habit of eating lots of refined sugar even though we know this is bad for kids and helps insure that they will overeat and likely be sick in adulthood. Many millions of dollars are spent on advertising to get adults to eat unhealthy foods. Then, millions more are spent to make you think you are a weak-willed blob if you are overweight. Then, millions more are spent to make you think that a pill will make you skinny despite a bad diet that you initially got into largely because of the advertising dollars.

What if people instead spent money and time making really nutritious meals? What if, instead of watching pro football, people went for a hike with their kids? Maybe we wouldn’t need quite so many pills, capsules, shots, and operations. Here’s the dilemma. Some pills are really useful under certain circumstances for some people. But profits will be greater if the pills are used by every person in every circumstance. The CEOs of drug companies are paid on the basis of their company’s profits. They are not paid on the basis of their company’s products effectiveness or of the cost/benefit ratio of their products. Nope. Profit. That’s it. If you were the CEO of a drug company and suppressed results about the negative or even deadly side-effects of one of your profitable drugs, that would be seen as “good business.” If, as CEO, you cornered the market on a class of drugs and then jacked the price up so that people could no longer afford a life-saving medicine and nutritious food and a warm house, tough! On the other hand, if you were an employee in a drug company and stole a couple pens, you would most likely be fired. Most large companies these days require their employees to take ethics training which explains, for example, that you shouldn’t lie or steal. Typically, such training is “introduced” by a signed letter from the CEO explaining how they take ethics very seriously and that you should too. Clearly, what they mean by “ethics” is different from what most people think it means.

If a system is broken, it should probably be fixed or replaced. Unfortunately, doing so is a little more complicated than just taking a pill. Often, the people taking actions and making decisions are far removed from those suffering the consequences. Nurse One puts a capsule in the bottom of a water glass and rushes off. Nurse Two comes in later and tries to pull up the capsule spilling the contents and concocts a nightmare-flavored orange juice. Orderly One cleans up the mess. Neither Nurse Two nor Orderly One ever tells Nurse One about the mistake. Of course, Kid One might mention it day after day, but who cares what a mere kid says?

Imagine a pill called a “Step-Back” pill. If you took this pill, you might actually listen to what a mere kid says. If you took this pill, you might take a look at the whole system of which you were a part. If you took the “Step-Back” pill, you might find yourself questioning why things are done the way they are and how they might be improved. If you took the “Step-Back” pill, you might even find yourself wonder why it is, exactly, that when very very rich people who head up drug companies and banks cheat millions of people there is no penalty but if someone robs a drug store, they will likely spend a good portion of their life in prison. Rumor has it that the “Step-Back” pill was actually invented many years ago but the drug companies were too worried about side-effects to attempt bringing it to market.

The most severe side-effect of the “Step-Back” pill is that you may well stop playing the game of behaving so as to limit your own health. But if you did that, you would not have to buy various potions, pills, and capsules to regain your health. Why rock the boat? Unfair-Status-Quo is a bitter capsule to swallow, but luckily it’s sugar coated. I’ll just rest it here at the bottom of your water glass. Someone will be along in an hour or so. They will lift up the capsule and spill the bitter insides into the glass. But you know what is really an excellent emetic on an empty stomach?

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Seeing Seeing Double Double

03 Saturday Dec 2016

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As I recall, a bunch of us first-graders were waiting for to take our turns in some kind of race. While we waited on the edge of the playground to be called, I looked at and then through the hurricane fence in front of us. I discovered that I could look through the fence and see another fence. This second fence was gigantic and far away. Yet, it was also quite close! Indeed, it seemed as though this was no ordinary fence, but a magic fence that I could place where I liked just by changing something in my head. I know I tried to share this information about the magic fence with the other kids waiting with me but I failed to get them to see the magic fence. I didn’t have long. It was my turn to race.

And race I did — but rather badly. I was amazed to discover that I was not the fastest kid in first grade. It had always seemed to me that I ran extremely fast!  That’s how I felt inside. But many kids in my class ran faster than I did. Even many girls ran faster than I did which seemed at the time absolutely impossible. How could I feel so fast running and yet be slower than so many other kids? Even the fattest kid in the class ran faster!

Later in first grade, upon returning from ten days at the hospital, my parents bought me bunk beds and the bunk beds were covered with a green bedspread which had a repeating pattern of identical and quite stylized white flowers. I could lay on the bedspread, look at the pattern and then look through the bedspread to another larger bedspread father away. In fact, I could find several bedspreads at various distances. I experimented by getting closer or father away from the bedspread and by fooling with my eyes. I did not understand exactly what was happening, but one thing was clear. The world that I had thought was “out there” proved very changeable under my own actions and volitions. I could “change” the world out there — or at least how it appeared — by what I did in my own head.

My grandmother supervised the Sunday School at the Methodist church my family attended. Sunday School proved fairly neat. For instance, I memorized the most verses from the Bible and as a result, won a glow-in-the-dark cross. I was supposed to look at this at night and derive comfort from it. I don’t recall that working but what I did discover, which was really cool was this: if I put my eye right up to that cross in total darkness, I could see tiny flashes of light. The cross, like so many “glow in the dark” items back then included both phosphorescent paint and radium laced paint. Same with my “glow in the dark” watch. When the lights first went out, these items would glow quite brightly from the phosphorescence. But even hours later, when that effect had completely vanished, there was still a faint glow from the radium paint. When placed directly on the eye, however, there was an effect like looking at a blurry bout of heat lightening.

Our Sunday School teacher told us that when we prayed, we went to heaven! That certainly seemed kind of cool. I wasn’t exactly sure what heaven was like, but in at least some of the pictures, there were some beautiful angels and it would certainly be fun to meet them. So, I decided to test out our Sunday School’s promise. I would sit in the pews, close my eyes, and pray just as sincerely as I possibly could. When I was praying up a storm, I would suddenly snap my eyes open! And there I was! In Sunday School. I hadn’t even moved to a different seat. No clouds. No heaven. And worst of all, no angels. I would try it again. Same result. I wondered whether opening my eyes could somehow instantly bring me back from heaven to Akron, Ohio. That seemed unlikely. But I tried a few experiments where I would pray hard and then not open my eyes, but just notice whether I still felt the hard wooden pew, and smell the same musty curtain smell and hear the same kids breathing and fidgeting around me. Well, in case you are wondering, it didn’t matter which sense or senses I used, I never got the slightest hint that I had gone to heaven. It not only didn’t look like heaven; it didn’t sound like it, smell like it or feel like it either. This was disappointing because one of the angels pictured in my “Red Letter Testament” Bible Study book looked out of that book right at me! Her beautiful eyes seemed to invite me to join her in heaven. But how? I don’t think I had quite figured out that this was an “artist’s conception” of what a beautiful angel might look like (e.g., a girl and just my age!). No, I knew she was there and I wanted to meet her.

About this time, I began to notice that my grandfather never joined us at Church. This seemed odd. At last I asked about it and he said he didn’t go because he didn’t believe in God! What? This seemed pretty inconceivable to me because everyone else around me kept talking about God as though He were real and definite. The way people talked gave not the slightest hint that God was something only some people believed in. God was portrayed as definitely there. There were paintings of God, for instance. Some of the illustrations in my books looked almost photographic in their realism. It made no sense that people would treat God as real if He were not.

My next door neighbor on Johnson Street played all sorts of games with me. I don’t recall her name; she was cute though occasionally mean. She liked to tie up people or put tape over their moths. But I really didn’t have that many choices of people to play with. One day, on the way to Sunday School, my parents and I ran into her and her parents. We were all dressed, as they say, in our “Sunday finest.” So, I did the polite thing and greeted her warmly, “Hello, little S*** A**.” All at once everyone’s faces including the little girl’s exploded into horrified expressions. I just used one of the main greetings that she used. I had no idea what the phrase meant or even the individual words. Later, after I was punished, I still persisted to try to find out how these words could possibly have so much power. My parents couldn’t even bring themselves to tell me. My mother delegated this task to my grandfather. Perhaps looking back on it, his being an atheist meant he could say words like this or at least explain them.

He took me with him into the landing area in the stairway to the basement. Grandpa’s house had some of the coolest features including a “Root Cellar”, a “Coal Cellar” and a “Disappearing Stairway.” In addition, Grandpa had a rock garden, a vegetable garden, a staircase and the house had three doors. There was a front door into a small entry off the living room. The back door went directly into the kitchen from a passageway near the garage. And, there was a third door that led off the basement stairs onto the patio near the apple tree that my mom had planted as a kid. My grandfather kept that door locked and no-one was allowed to use it. And that seemed a shame because our house only had two doors. It seemed to me, if you had a house with three doors, you would want to use all three! Anyway, it was near that door as he was emptying some trash that he explained what those magic words referred to.

He did not explain why they were powerful. He did not explain why my companion acted shocked when I used the words when I had learned them from her and she often referred to me and other playmates with this phrase. He did not explain why everyone had been upset. Once he explained what it referred to, I could kind of understand why she might not want to be called that although that was what she called everyone else. But why had her parents been so upset and why had my parents been so upset? It was one of those “explanations” that only explained the surface of a complex tangle of issues.

With a longer perspective, I can say that most so-called explanations are like that. They tell you  why someone picked a particular color to paint their car. They don’t explain how cars work or why we have so many cars in this country and such limited public transportation. When it comes to religion, most explanations seem very much about the color of the paint. It’s very hard to dig beneath that to find out how people really relate to their religion. And, this too always struck me as odd, especially for people who claim that their religion is a central part of who they are. Perhaps, it is not so much that people are unwilling to explain how religion works for them as they are unable to explain it.

After all, I was able to alter my perception of the hurricane fence and the repeating pattern bedspread long before I understood how I was doing it. In fact, I never found anyone else who either could or wanted to use this technique until much much later. In college, I read a book (I think by John Dewey but I’m not sure) and discovered that this author had also learned this same trick at an early age. Indeed, I still find it a useful skill many years later. For example, if I am sitting somewhere across from people at a table, I can “merge” the images of their heads to make a composite image. That’s kind of fun. In grad school, before “COMP” functions, I found it useful to compare hexadecimal disk dumps by putting them side to side and crossing my eyes until the two dumps overlapped character by character. Anything that changed from one disk dump to another popped out instantly. While I thought it might be a useful skill for others and explained how to do it when asked, I never felt the slightest urge to make everyone learn this skill. I never claimed it was the only way to look at the world or even the best way to look at the world.

I never seemed to get into an argument with people about forming clear double images. If I decided to see two apples — one image with each eye — instead of converging my views to see one image, it never seemed much of a big deal to me or to anyone else. If I said, “It looks to me right now like there are two apples” and someone said, “Yes, but there is really only one” then I would just say, “Yeah, I know. But it’s kind of fun to see double sometimes.” If they didn’t feel like doing that, why would that bother me?

Of course, one could argue that seeing double is just a private exercise but that religion comes into play when it comes to cooperative endeavors. For example, in a complex society like ours, there are laws, rules, customs, taxes, and all sorts of systems that require cooperation. If there are going to be taxes, there have to be some rules about the taxes. If some people believe that cigarettes and booze are “evil”, then they might argue to tax these things more heavily than say, a health club membership. This makes a certain amount of sense in the abstract, but specifically, it does not seem to explain much. For example, though America has never been nor is it a “Christian” nation in the sense of a state sponsored religion, 70% of the population identify themselves as “Christian.”  Although I have forgotten the many Bible verses that won me my radium painted glow in the dark cross, I still know that a main message of the New Testament is to love your neighbor as yourself; to turn the other cheek; to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Yet, the United States has more billionaires than any other country. And the highest incarceration rate. Odd. Meanwhile, China purports to be a “Communist” country and one of the main tenets of Communism is “from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs.” And China has the second highest number of billionaires. So, in the very places where coordination is necessary, there is a huge disconnect between what people claim are central principles guiding their lives and what they actually chose to do.

The mystery behind seeing double clearly is basically this. Our eyes adapt as we look at something near or far. When we look at something far away, our eyes are pointed at infinity. At the same time, we allow our lens to “thin” and the eyes are also focused at infinity. (There isn’t much difference in either of these beyond forty feet. When I look out my office window at the ocean, I can tell the ocean is father away than the palm trees because of other cues such as interposition (the palm trees partly obscure my view of the ocean so they are closer than the ocean) and aerial perspective (the ocean is slightly “fuzzier” than the palm trees because there is more distortion due to the air). If we look at something close, normally our eyes converge (point inward slightly toward the object) and we focus at the same time; that is, we make the lens thicker. However, it is possible to “train” oneself to separate these two actions. For example, I can converge (“cross”)  my eyes to look at my nose but accommodate (to the extent I still can) to distance so that objects in the distance look “sharp” — it’s just that there are two of them. Even though I am capable of seeing double, I don’t walk around seeing double all the time. It would be very impractical and inconvenient.

So, perhaps religion is like that for some people. Looking at things from a “Christian” perspective is, for some, something one learns to do at church, but it is too inconvenient or too impractical to keep doing it when it comes to actually interacting with other people. When you meet someone dressed in their “Sunday Finest” and they call you a S*** A**, you act really offended and shocked. But that doesn’t mean you can’t call them that the other six days of the week. And, if you own a factory where you hire young girls to paint the dials on glow in the dark watches, you encourage them to use their tongue and lips to repoint the little camel hair brushes that they use. And after a few years, they may not look much like angels any more. But you can still deny that your radioactive paint had anything to do with it. Because, apparently, although Jesus may have said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” that has nothing to do with killing actual human beings in order to maximize profit. After all, “Business is business” trumps the Golden Rule. If you’re having trouble understanding that, maybe it will help if you learn to cross your eyes. Don’t learn to see too clearly though. No, we wouldn’t want that.

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