So I’m reading Wait Till Next Year by Doris Kearns Goodwin (one of my favorite authors and permanent dinner party wish list guests). Unlike her other work where her incredible details and fluid writing style truly give you the sense that she just finished a personal interview with Lincoln, Johnson or Kennedy, this recount waxes prophetic on the small town of Rockville, NY in the 50’s. All the elements of a magical childhood are there: sidewalks, knowing all the small businesses by first name, the feeling of safety that comes from knowing members in your community by first name…

“This is also the story of a girlhood in which the great religious festivals of the Catholic church and the seasonal imperatives of baseball combined to produce a passionate love of history, ceremony, and ritual. It is the story of growing up in what seemed on the surface a more innocent era until one recalls the terror of polio, the paranoia of McCarthyism reflected even in the children’s games, the obsession with A-bomb drills in school, and the ugly face of racial prejudice. It was a time whose relative tranquility contained the seeds of the turbulent decade of the sixties.”

It’s debatable whether or not the 50s were simpler, but repression and cold war psychology aside, there is something about this book that is making me devour it – and it’s the nostalgia. In a climate where even Martha is lightening up, these recent headlines have to make you want to go back to a simpler time…

-          Russia Presses Into 2nd Front in Georgia

-          Man stabbed at Olympics

-          Darfur Withers as Sudan Sells Food

Last night I saw Barbara Ehrenreich at the Seattle Public Library; she was lecturing on her latest book: This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation

From Publishers Weekly
When a hospital employee whose hospital-supplied insurance doesn’t cover her hospital-incurred bill finds her wages garnished, where’s a political satirist to go for material? Feisty, fearlessly progressive Ehrenreich offers laughter on the way to tears in 62 previously published essays that show the rich getting richer and poor getting poorer. She investigates pockets of poverty among undocumented workers, military families and recent college graduates. Ehrenreich’s reach is capacious, encompassing not only unemployment, health insurance and inflation, but corporate spying, cancer studies, marriage education, the abstinence training business and Disney’s Princess products. Her passion, compassion and wit keep these excursions lively and timely—even when yesterday’s headlines provide the immediate provocation, e.g., JetBlue’s snow snafu. The vignettes go down a bit like eating peanuts—too many at one time palls, but they’re not unhealthy, unless you have an allergic reaction to Ehrenreich’s message: America is being polarized between the superrich few and the subrich everyone else. Entertaining Ehrenreich certainly is, but she raises a hard, serious question: How many ‘wake-up calls’ do we need, people…? (May)

 

Ehrenreich was unassuming, sharp and entertaining, and I had the incredible opportunity to speak with her before the lecture. I don’t know that I made many friends at my table. After waiting a polite pause or two for questions like “Where do you live” and “how was your flight,” I pretty much pounced. With her two books, Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, she has hit a nerve in me…and I believe there is a third idea out there – the burden the boomer children shoulder.

I’ve written previously on the topic of white collar layoff and would like to explore it further. So much so, that I’m starting another blog on the topic.

Back to the lecture…

Ehrenreich started the evening talking about how scapegoating is the latest tactic in taking focus away from larger issues. She posed the following thoughts:

…On the airport bathroom shenanigans that went on last year:

“Why is it that we are in a orange alert state, and there are police men with detail in airport bathrooms?”

On gay marriage:

“If you don’t like the idea of gay people getting married, don’t marry one.” 

Illegal immigration:

“There is a primitive rage at illegal workers who do all the manual work that make our lives possible.” People make $3/hr at a car wash because businesses get away with it.

She proposed a new scapegoat group: old white people. “They are lazy, play cards, lay on benches…all on the government’s dime – social security checks! What’s eating their money, drugs! We should be on the look out for geezer gangs to maintain their insulin and Lipitor habits.”

Ehrenreich went on to observe that we are in increasingly polarized society, a hot topic in books I cover in the social venture labs blog. That globalization is an excuse for pushing wages down for Americans but that the globalization trend does not affect CEO salaries. “You should put one of the border crossers in as CEO, because anyone who can get across the border has strong leadership characteristics – someone you would want in your company.”

She has a point, it wasn’t a Mexican who took the promise for a pension or hope for social security away from so many families – it was a CEO.

The theme I’m picking up on here after seeing Ehrenreich, Florida, Friedman another others speak comes back to a lecture I went to years ago: Azar Nafisi

“American values used to mean something real and concrete. Huck Finn ponders the question: should I give Jim up? He had been taught that to harbor a slave meant that you would go to hell. But he thought about Jim in the morning and Jim in the evening and Jim was his friend. Huck made a decision to help Jim – he was “going to hell.” 

American values meant the ability to make a tough decision by way of self analysis. Now….we sleep. Imagination (innovation, alertness) is the key to development (into maturity) and we risk losing it.”

Have we lost that ability to self reflect? What will it take (how much more damage needs to occur) before we start to rally like we have in the past?

So, two Sundays in a row now…I’ll hardly know what to do when June comes – such Sun has not been available to me for so long. Though it hasn’t quite come to this, sun deprivation has struck me so deeply that I’m liable to become one of those kooky types that shed their clothes and go dance in a field or something. (nervous giggle)

Today’s headlines were interesting….

- Worries In GOP About Disarray In McCain Camp - if the republicans truly think that McCain as any issues winning, they should take a page from their own playbook and keep their mouths shut. The article mentions McCain’s lagging effort to build a national campaign organization as well as questioning whether he’s taken full advantage over the Democratic turmoil. Both very valid concerns and the primary reason I’m so taken with the Obama campaign….mentioned in last Sunday’s post: On Obama By Obama

- The Toughest Job This Year Is Finding One: about high school kids looking for work. Good luck with that, you’ll be competing with the 100’s of 1000’s of displaced workers from the white collar layoffs of the early 90s. All these charts and graphs, almost a complete page of text dedicated to teenagers not being able to find jobs…why is no one putting these two statistics together? Why aren’t these kids as interested in joining national parks, community programs or volunteering their time to those truly in need?

Confidence and responsibility – both attributes that high school kids need to learn – do not need to be purchased with pocket money that does little more than fund unconscious purchasing. Not every high school kid needs money to go to college, to help their parents make rent, or pay the bills. Some just want the money…and for what? Why not invest a little of themselves in the bigger picture, I’m sure the rewards would far outweigh the sunk costs of a volunteer gig.

Interesting that BofA is doing another wave of layoffs… perhaps they will have luck finding summer employment. I love the reference to the “psychological terror” that has haunted the corridors of troubled financial institutions since last summer. Why haven’t people come to understand by now the clause “employee at will” is just that? The BofA article goes on about these Wall St types going to counseling, how their egos are wrapped up in their jobs, etc. I can understand what they are going through – truly, however it’s fresh for each person who experiences it themselves. Then you’re in a different club, rarely to associate with the working again until you make it back in some day. 

Help me understand how a capitalist society can yield someone who thinks like this: “Someone who shows up to work each day, that should engender some kind of loyalty.” Is he serious??? That’s socialism. A job is not a right, it’s a privilege. That’s how capitalism works. How can these people, who work at pushing money through the system and are avid consumers themselves, not understand this? Because everyone thinks they are unique. People are special, not unique. This person’s sentiment of entitlement is part of the stages of acceptance of their situation, but it’s interesting to me how the first stage always comes back to a “where’s my brothers’ keeper?” sort of feeling.  People lose their identities in their work because the cycle they are part of is eating them alive, versus contributing to a virtuous cycle.

By living in this country, we are entitled to freedoms and the pursuit of happiness – not an education, not healthcare, etc. We have the right to pursue something we may never achieve. That is so much more than most countries have to start with and it is something we really take forgranted.

It is a fact, and an unfortunate one, that there is not equal access to opportunities. There are many things that we can do to reduce the gap for folks and will probably result in another post on the topic, but for the most part, that’s life – everyone gets their bag of rocks to carry around on this journey. The rest we have to achieve on our own. That’s what the country was founded on: self reliance, vision, ability/opportunity to achieve. If you are fortunate enough to get an education (any education, it doesn’t have to be Harvard), you are able to create opportunities for yourself. Thomas Friedman said it perfectly in his last book “It used to be that a B-student from Poughkeepsie could get a job over a PhD from China” that is no longer the case. The playing fields are leveling at a faster and faster rate.

I’m reminded of a radio interview I heard on NPR some time ago, where the question was posed: why isn’t the US scoring as many gold medals as other countries? (or something to that affect) They went on to talk about all the analysis, technical advantages and facilities the Americans had over some of the disadvantaged countries competing against it. The net-net of the conversation was: the reason those countries are honing in on our victories is because they are hungry.

If people are fortunate enough to get an education, fortunate enough to land a job, you owe it to yourself and to the company to learn as many skills as possible, to stay on that horse as long as you can, and when it bucks you (bc it will) you better figure out how to consult by the age of 50. So many people get a job and get lost in the comfort of the 4 walls they were hired in. Like athletes who become used to Olympic facilities, they forget that there are Africans halfway across the globe running barefoot for their training. If you don’t stay sharp, keep your skills fresh, you will not find a place in the economic ecosystem. It sounds harsh, but the game of musical chairs is being played with less and less chairs each decade. Those who do not have a chair any longer, have to find some other way to make it work. They have to use the skills they learned from the opportunities they were given and transfer them somewhere else.

For those who have stayed too long, the market is spitting them out when they no longer fit. This is a “harsh gift” that people are given, opportunities that shake us up can bring nothing but good things. Birth is painful, and like a new college student, those recently displaced need to figure it all out again – they will be the better for it. Their eyes will have seen more, they will have felt more, and this new empathy will benefit customers, partners, family –

-Chinese are left to ask why schools crumbled: The only thought I have when I hear about an international disaster now is “why doesn’t Amazon and all the other companies that were so up front and center during the Christmas Tsunami have a permanent “donate now to [current disaster]” button on their web sites?” People want to give, to do the right thing and we make it so hard. In the end it sounds as if the Chinese aren’t as worthy as the people in Thailand were and that just isn’t true. A husband and wife that must suffer the loss of a child are the same wherever you go – loss is loss…and to donate to one over the other is a statement. Why isn’t there a more regular rhythm to people’s giving? Why is it so arbitrary? Why is the inertia of self interest so powerful? 

- Dominican Crackdown Leaves Children of Haitian  Immigrants In Legal Limbo: Many major leaguers have emerged from here that agents keep a regular eye on even the smaller children. Ángel, 17, was only a lanky grade school boy when his coach noticed he showed all the signs of becoming a standout. Before long, the San Francisco Giants came calling with a $350,000 offer. Add politics of an under-developed country into the mix and you’ve got a thwarted visa, the Giants rescinded the offer and Angel is left with the feeling that he flew too close to the sun. What sort of message are we sending? That human baseball skills are like any other natural resource, something that can be mined for. Too problematic with this one, they will move on to the next one.

So sad that someone had a glimpse of another life only to be told he can’t achieve it. I wish the Giants and other sports teams had more of a moral center, and thought longer term when making their offers. Baseball and other sports have always been about tickets and crowds – but the aura of players, teams, sportsmanship wasn’t an accident. It stemmed from the idea of thinking big, doing the impossible, being inspiring and thinking big enough to participate in the big picture, creating a greater good. The Giants had such an opportunity here to create a business with so much more mission. These one-off contracts that teams focus on now is so narrow minded…so…small.

- A Wireless World: Three years ago, aiming to create a global wireless network, Martin Varsavsky founded FON, a company based in Madrid that wants to unlock the potential power of the social Internet. FON’s gamble is that Internet users will share a portion of their wireless connection with strangers in exchange for access to wireless hotspots controlled by others.

Um, is this guy hiring?

- Indie Films…coming: essentially widening the distribution of indie films on every device. Finally, I’ve been waiting patiently – and Hollywood has run out of ideas.

Today I had the kind of Sunday tired couples look at me longingly – and I really relished being single. I finished with a meeting this morning and got lunch at a local pub. It was sunny out and I ordered a Mojito, a Cuban sandwhich, a copy of the NYTimes (which had been previously rifled through but still complete – meaning, the ink wasn’t fresh and didn’t wear off in my hands) and had the table all to myself! omg, pure bliss. Throw in an accomodating a flirty waiter and I was in heaven.  None of that “what do you want?” “I don’t know, what do you want?” or “What are you going to have?” “I don’t know, what are you going to have?” - Not to say there aren’t great and fulfilling relationships out there and that I hope to be in one one day, but I  just was, and it was nice.

This Sunday’s articles that made me laugh out loud +/or think:

- Frank Rich had a good opinion piece: McCain Can Run, But Bush Won’t Hide starting with a priceless reference to the Godfather which almost made me inhale my drink as well as the most apt comparison of Nixon campainging for Ford -  

“THE biggest gift President Bush has given his party this year was to keep his daughter’s wedding nearly as private as Connie Corleone’s. Now that his disapproval rating has reached the Nixon nadir of negativity, even a joyous familial ritual isn’t enough to make the country glad to see him. The G.O.P.’s best hope would be for both the president and Dick Cheney to lock themselves in a closet until the morning after Election Day.”

-Normally I read The Book Review and get one maybe two suggestions, sometimes just 1 or 2 ads pique my interest. This week, the entire section stood out.

• Bag Man stood out, the review was so well written you practically felt as if you went to high school with Tonello and the intro hooked me from the start…”

“The end of the world just inched a little nearer: an eBay seller has written a memoir. About handbags.”       ‘nough said.

• Netherland seems like a Scotish version of Ian McEwan…and not just because McEwan is referenced early on he is described similarly:

“O’Neill, who was born in Ireland, raised in Holland and now lives in New York, seems incapable of composing a boring sentence or thinking an uninteresting thought, whether he’s writing about dating (“We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically”) or the darker stuff that keeps us awake at night, like the nuclear plant just up the river (“Indian Point: the earliest, most incurable apprehensions stirred in its very name”).”

One passage in particular got to me and makes me want to read the book:

“There’s a moment in “Netherland” involving a father, the son who has been taken from him, and Google Earth that’s among the most moving set pieces I’ve read in a recent novel. The father hovers over his son’s house nightly, “flying on Google’s satellite function,” lingering over his child’s dormer window and blue inflated swimming pool, searching the “depthless” pixels for anything, from thousands of miles away, he can cling to. O’Neill’s novel is full of moments like this: closely observed, emotionally racking, un-self-consciously in touch with how we live now.”

The thought that technology as guardian vs predator, that people hover over loved ones’ locations like guardian angels, really touched me. The other point made in this review made me reflect back on the opinion page (Isreal’s ‘American Problem,’ a little differently) 

“All people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket,” he explains. “What’s the first thing that happens when Pakistan and India make peace? They play a cricket match. Cricket is instructive, Hans. It has a moral angle. … I say, we want to have something in common with Hindus and Muslims? Chuck Ramkissoon is going to make it happen. With the New York Cricket Club, we could start a whole new chapter in U.S. history. Why not?”

• Counselor also looks good and was commented on in an interview by my favorite biographer, Dorris Kearns Goodwin.

Sorensen describes himself as a Danish Russian Jewish Unitarian who grew up in Lincoln. His beloved father, C. A. Sorensen, was the attorney general of Nebraska and a noted Republican progressive, who raised five children almost on his own after Sorensen’s mother was disabled by mental illness.After law school, Sorensen was drawn to public law and Washington. “I picture myself stepping off that train, greenhorn that I was: I had never drunk a cup of coffee, set foot in a bar, written a check or owned a car.” A year and a half later, at 24, he began the long association with Kennedy that was shattered in Dallas.“Counselor” tells many stories about Sorensen’s post-government work as a global troubleshooter for the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, dealing with leaders like Mandela, Sadat, Mobutu, Ben-Gurion, Arafat and Castro. After his stroke, he learned to live with almost no sight, even resuming, remarkably, his practice of walking to work in Manhattan.”

• The Language of Loss for the jobless was an interesting piece – rather tame from the WSJ’s case studies on families who had suffered and are suffering the layoffs of the mid 90s. Still, it’s always nice to give prompts on how to behave among those who have lost jobs. I’ve seen some pretty tactless situations. Though, I gotta say, sorta inappropriate to have that article smack in the middle of the society style and wedding section.
• Lastly, but not least: On Obama by Obama. I was really impressed with his approach, his discipline, his eloquence and his ability to reach out. Not only has he been effective in communicating on a national platform, he did it himself. Never before have I caused, discussed issues in such depth with people of both sides, donated to a campaign – and he’s gotten be to do all three, with the hope of seeing a turning of the tides in November. This country has the ability to be great again.

Last Friday, I attended the Microsoft Office Live Small Businesses – Vision to Venture Event held on the MSFT campus. Two speakers stood out: Rich Sloan and Susan Wilson and had their tips to share.

I have to confess, there is something unique about women-only events – a different energy. My other observation is that everything is very pink -

Why is that?

I appreciate the need to distinguish babies, prepare for a wedding with the perfect blush color, and why it was chosen as an integral color in the prepster’s palette. However, I don’t get why it’s on everything “woman.” In fact, I would go so far to say:

The Susan G Kohmen Foundation has invested so much in their marketing and education efforts to have officially purchased the color pink.

There, I’ve said it. You heard it here first.

I just don’t understand why smart, well-educated people sit around a conference room table and entertain presentations that are bathed in pink and think that is the ticket to marketing effectively to women. It works for some things – but software?

So, I ghost write the Seattle Public Library Friends’ Blog and shared some notes from a lecture I attended some years ago.

The themes she discussed still resonate with me. There was some self indulgence in the beginning, but it was one of the more powerful lectures I have attended.

In particular, this passage from my notes -

People understand the importance of individual rights and individual integrity. If they quote literature it’s bc they tried to preserve the best humanity had to offer in a time when humanity was lacking. When people were deprived of everything and they were on the way to the gas chambers, they quoted Flaubert. The mind is the last frontier and cannot be conquered. Even when the oppressors have taken everything away, you have the choice of what attitude you adopt. It is a constant “no” to the banality of the totalitarian regime.

People see activism as separate from the experience of the mind. In the west, what threatens us is our sleeping consciousness. In order to have the ability to empathize, we need to produce works of imagination. She was critical for a moment, and it was most powerful when she went on to state that

“American values used to mean something real and concrete. Huck Finn ponders the question: should I give Jim up? He had been taught that to harbor a slave meant that you would go to hell. But he thought about Jim in the morning and Jim in the evening and Jim was his friend. Huck made a decision to help Jim – he was “going to hell.” American values meant the ability to make a tough decision by way of self analysis. Now….we sleep. Imagination (innovation, alertness) is the key to development (into maturity) and we risk losing it.”

Hmmm.
My rebuttle to Nancy’s question on the strength of book sales with respect to Soldier’s v Lolita.

Related Links:

• Nancy Pearl’s Web site
• Weekday Archive: Nancy Pearl’s Winter Book List, 2007
• Weekday Archive: Nancy Pearl’s Summer Book List, 2007
• Weekday Archive: Nancy Pearl’s Spring Book List, 2007
• Background on Nafisi

I read this in the NYTimes Book Review this past Sunday and in the age of reality TV, exhausted couples working 3-4 jobs to get their kids a decent education and the goings on at Capitol Hill, if we have any of de Tocqueville’s America left – sometimes I just need to be reminded of the themes that gave me hope when I was in college.

“…that America was conceived in a spirit of openness, as a land where people could build new identities, grounded in the present and the future, not the past. This dream, despite current fears, has in great part been made real. And the fact that America is still a place where the rest of the world comes to reinvent itself — accepting with excitement and anxiety the necessity of leaving behind the constrictions and comforts of distant customs — is the underlying theme of Jhumpa Lahiri’s sensitive new collection of stories, “Unaccustomed Earth.” Here, as in her first collection, “Interpreter of Maladies,” and her novel, “The Namesake,” Lahiri, who is of Bengali descent but was born in London, raised in Rhode Island and today makes her home in Brooklyn, shows that the place to which you feel the strongest attachment isn’t necessarily the country you’re tied to by blood or birth: it’s the place that allows you to become yourself. This place, she quietly indicates, may not lie on any map.”

On my drive to work some time ago, I listened to a story on NPR about an animation studio farming out their Alvin & The Chipmunks to a firm in India. The image in my mind aside, I had to wonder what this culture must think of America when they are in essence helping to construct this somewhat iconic image cell by painful cell. I felt somewhat violated, like one country saw another country’s skivvies. (I would much rather the story were about story work seen on The Incredibles, Tomb Raider or some Disney animation…but Alvin, Simon and Theodore??)

While the story was celebrating the advancement in virtual meetings and time zone enabled 24 hour work schedules, I compared it to my own experience working on outsourced projects and have to claim that when all is said and done, I fail to see the real cost savings. Virtual communication advances aside (which do save time and money if used appropriately) I added up the hours it took me to complete the project, the phone calls, the additional meetings, the travel, the language and cultural issues…it’s quite expensive and in the end, the quality of the work suffered. I read the rather alarmist The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman and have to say, agree with most of his observations which basically boil down to: when it comes time for the next generation to apply for a job, a B student from Poughkeepsie will no longer beat out a PhD from China.

I haven’t been this in to politics since I saw Perot show his first pie chart.

My Dad just told me a few weeks ago that my mother had passed her interview/exam for US citizenship. I never really considered my citizenship, as one doesn’t really give a lot of thought to what comes with birth. The distinction of country didn’t really hit me deeply until I started traveling more extensively by myself, without the bubble family vacations with parents provide.  She, who immigrated to the United States as a young woman about to be married, caused me to really look at the meaning of being a true citizen, when after living more than 35 years in the States, she decided to become a citizen.

Although she understands English, and lives “American” she is not what I would consider “from America” and that is a quality I’ve come to appreciate about her. When I was younger all those experiences: paper placemats at McDonalds, traveling a certain way (wipes, everything in kits, all menu and activity moments accounted for) set us apart from the more relaxed, last minute approach to getting from point A to point B. When I traveled to see family, the whole country was like that – I understood the impact of culture in more intimate way.  

When she mentioned to me that she was preparing for her interview, I truly wished I could have helped her study for the test. It would have given me some insight into what the experience in coming here or the “bar to belong” must look like. To review things like, “What is the first amendment?” or “Who said ‘Give me Liberty or Give me Death?’”.  She would need to learn The Pledge, which I had been reciting since kindergarten. It would have been interesting to see her as the recipient of flash cards, versus the other way around.

Does knowing these facts and reciting the pledge really define citizenship?  When I consider my mother, someone who has participated in every community we’ve lived in, instilled a strong desire in her children to give back and volunteer – I don’t think The Pledge quite covers it. She has never broken the law, and along with Dad, has raised two kids on an average income, paid taxes, and hasn’t taken a vacation in years.

She passed the exam and was sworn in as an American citizen. There must be so many emotions, so many feelings about her country, what was, experiences of the past. I hope they don’t all wash all away in the desire to become recognized here. It’s another stamp, another patch in her very multi colored quilt.

She should be so proud of this and her accomplishments as a person. America is so much about forward motion; I hope her past doesn’t get forgotten with all of this. It played such a part in our development growing up. I believe she was a citizen long before the government ever recognized her and like thousands of other unrecognized “citizens” exist working for the American way of life: the  desire to have happy kids in a happy home, making sure everyone is fed, clean, dry and reading a book. I hope she is able to vote in this upcoming election - it’s the best one we’ve had in years!

I wish I could have been there to see her sworn in. But, like her entry here, she was with my father – so I suppose it was a full circle moment for them both.