Integral Input

Obama’s rock star status seems to be climaxing at the Democratic Convention in Denver. Cable TV commentators are twittering with excitement at the carnival-like features of the event, guaranteeing outstanding entertainment for their viewers. Here is a sample from this morning:

• Thanks to Joe Biden, we are still trying to get a handle on how many kitchens John McCain owns. The best guess now is seven. The thing is, I am still not clear as to the nature of the intended insult: are we to disdain McCain because he is rich (and thus has countless residences) or is the idea that he is so old that he can’t remember? Or is it that he is being sneaky with the IRS by shuffling assets under his wife’s name? In any case, McCain pertinently countered by reminding us for the zillionth time that he was a prisoner-of-war, and that for some time he had no kitchen, so if he has seven of them now ( he is still not sure, apparently), well, as a war hero he is entitled to all seven, thank you very much.

• Hillary Clinton remains a fiery wild card. Her old-school women’s lib loyalists are very pissed that their girl didn’t get the nod. One ad shows a woman who says “Hi, I am a Hillary Clinton Democrat and I am voting for John McCain…” “A Hillary Clinton Democrat” - this must be a new political species that the theorists haven’t accounted for? Or the missing link in the human evolutionary process? In any case, it was too touchy for the TV commentators, who gave the audience a knowing glance and left that critter speak for itself.

• Of course there will be lots of angles offered to fuss over the race thing, in case we haven’t run that theme into the ground yet. The latest seems to be that maybe blacks won’t vote for Obama after all, because they don’t want whites to think that everything is hunky dory in this country race wise. And yet in the event that Obama loses, racism will surely be seen as a decisive factor - talk about having your political cake and eating it, too!

• The mainstream commentators tell us that Obama may be too “far left” for American voters, while thousands of leftist anti-war protestors are engaging in military-like urban maneuvers, scooting around the back alleys of Denver to protest that Obama is too centrist. Security professionals had a scare at the report that some of the peaceniks were bearing arms, but that was a false alarm. Actually, it was the Hillary Clinton Democrats who were carrying the hardware!

• Yikes - what a mess. And keep in mind that this is the party that purports to represent the better side of society! So how are the Democrats packaging all of this? Under the fetching theme of “Unity!” of course. We are all One, but bring a bullet-proof vest, just in case.

Continue reading ‘The Democratic Carnival in Denver’ »

I am just now finishing Susan Jacoby’s “The Age of Reason”. I am generally disappointed with this book, for reasons that I may comment on in a separate post. For now I will refer to Jacoby’s writing as the start of a particular line of inquiry, one which will elaborate on the recent posts regarding green evolving to integral. (Readers not familiar with the language of a developmental stage model are invited to read the Overview of Spiral Dynamics, available at this site.) In her chapter “Junk Thought”, Jacoby reflects on the prominence of other-than-rational thinking in our society, how its manifests, and possible causes. While offering a list of examples of such thinking, Jacoby includes “… a responsibility-evading bogus apology for bad behavior (”I’m sorry that you were hurt” instead of “I’m sorry that I hurt you.” Hmmm, I can certainly line up with Jacoby’s claim that we have a lot of junky thinking as a feature of our consumer culture, but I do take issue with her example. Is it necessarily junk thought to imply that you decline less than complete responsibility for someone else’s hurt feelings? Let’s consider in detail.
Continue reading ‘Whose Feelings?’ »

Following the American media regarding major world issues can give you the sense that we Americans live in a cartoon-like world. Like the comics, there are good guys and bad guys, but if you take a closer look, it is harder to tell which is which. Take Russia’s recent invasion of Georgia - read a number of online articles and see how much information you could get during the first few days. The summary of it would go something like this: Georgia intervened when South Ossetia attempted to break away from Georgia. Then Russia invaded Georgia. Georgia and its US ally say that Russia is the bad guy. Therefore, Russia is the bad guy.

Americans are of course always the good guys. But to get more than a cartoonlike understanding of what has really happened, since we apparently can’t count on our media to inform us, maybe we can look to the comments of our political leaders for a clue. Then again, maybe not, as their comments seem to be all theater and no content. Per Bush and John McCain, (and now even Obama), we get the “hard line”: Russia has overstepped its boundaries, using “disproportionate response”, an aggression that “must not go unanswered”. The sovereignty of Georgia has been violated. President Bush spoke in the interest of “peace” and “harmony, warning the Russians that there would be a price to be paid for their egregious action. And McCain is looking presidential as hell, showing that he will not be pushed around by anybody, making poor Obama look like an inexperienced wimp.

To make up for the lack of substance in Bush’s response, the media happily offered us other exciting angles to reflect on. There, in the full glory of the Olympics, the president proudly waved an American flag; he chummed around with some of the athletes; he competently threw three baseball pitches, to everyone’s delight. And when he got up to speak, “his family and staff applauded.”(Actual quote from online article.) How delightful and heartwarming! Honey, let’s watch the Olympics rather than fret about this Georgia thing. Obviously, the Russians are the bad guys, and McCain will protect us. What else do you need to know?
Continue reading ‘Good Guys, Bad Guys, and the American Media’ »

Let me begin by saying that I fully support many liberal values. Take the one that we will talk about in this post - women’s rights. I fully resonate to the notion of women’s rights, as many people do in our society. At the same time, such worthy values should not degenerate into fuzzy thinking, since less than lucid thinking is generally an obstacle to human rights, not a contributor.

A perfect example can be seen in an article published by the Santa Fe New Mexican on August 5th, 2008, by writer David R. Francis. The article is entitled “As women progress, so do developing nations,” with the subtitle “New studies show that promoting the welfare of girls is just ‘good economic sense’”. Francis’s premise - promoting the welfare of women has causal impact on economic development - is apparent from the title, but I will share several more quotes from the article so that there can be no doubt:

If a developing nation wants to make fast progress, it must educate its girls and give them more equality in jobs and economic opportunities.

Education, and particularly women’s education, is critical to economic growth, says Sandra Lawson, author of a 15 page paper given to clients by the prominent New York investment banking firm Goldman Sachs.

Okay, the premise of Francis and those he quotes might be summarized like this: If we invest in the education and wellbeing of women in developing societies, then those societies as a whole, including economic functioning, will improve. As I have already stated clearly that I stand behind the value of women’s rights, how is it that I am finding fault with this article? The fact that we may value women’s rights does not mean that we should assign causality where no causality has been demonstrated. Or say it this way: the fact that advances in the well-being of women have been shown to correlate with economic advancement does not lead to the conclusion that women’s advancement is a causal factor in economic (and general cultural) advancement.

Continue reading ‘Liberals, Women’s Rights, and Developing Nations’ »

After publishing my recent post regarding Larry King, I went online and found yet more of what I was challenging in that post - a righteous stance by gays (by some gays, I should say) that prohibits them from having perspective on what actually happened in this tragedy. I said “some” because I have made a point to discuss this matter with gays I know, and to my relief, they are appalled by the view of gays like Ellen DeGeneres that dominates the media. So let’s be clear - it isn’t a “gay thing” anymore than blocking border security is a “Latino thing”. (I have yet to discuss border security with a Latino immigrant - legal or not - who has not expressed a preference for securing the border.) Rather, it is a segment of gays (and straights) that is making all the noise, as if they spoke for all gays.

Consider this quote from DeGeneres:

“A boy has been killed and a number of lives have been ruined. And, somewhere along the line the killer, Brandon, got the message that it’s so threatening, so awful, and so horrific that Larry would want to be his Valentine — that killing Larry seemed to be the right thing to do. And when the message out there is so horrible that to be gay, you can get killed for it, we need to change the message. Larry was not a second-class citizen. I am not a second-class citizen. It is ok if you’re gay.”

DeGeneres keeps repeating this line - “It is ok if you’re gay”, apparently without realizing how inappropriate it is (in this context). Her righteousness is so severe as to prevent her from letting in what happened: Larry King didn’t die because he was “gay”; he died because he persisted in unhealthy, ill-advised behavior, and DeGeneres’ point of view is what got in the way of adults guiding Larry to contain himself.

Continue reading ‘Larry King, Ellen DeGeneres, and Social Paralysis’ »

I see that the tragedy of Larry King is back in the news, featured as last week’s cover story of Newsweek. I wrote a post regarding this subject months ago, which I titled “Gay Rights (and Responsibilities?)” to imply that there was more to this matter than the “yet another gay victim” interpretation that dominated at the time. I am pleased to see that the Newsweek article dared to look at the flip side of this standard view, acknowledging the complexities of the subject. Nonetheless, knee-jerk response continues to rule. Here is a snippet of a quote I found online, which represents the view of many readers: “This boy (referring to the alleged killer) took on a man’s role when he shot and killed Larry. Larry was killed because he was gay. We need to remember that. We have to stop the hate.”

Of course, a tragic event such as one child murdering another can trigger a lot of emotions. When a child is killed, then he is in fact a victim of a deadly act of violence, and thus it is inviting to project “good” onto him and “evil” onto the shooter. This is understandable, and yet at some point we need to clear our emotions sufficiently to think through what really happened: where did we go wrong as a society and what are we going to do about it? If we fail to take in the whole picture and thus fail to take corrective action – beyond the militant cliché of “educate the homo-phobic” - then as a society we bear passive responsibility when the next child is killed.

Continue reading ‘Understanding the Tragedy of Larry King: Beyond Political Extremism to Real Solutions’ »