Meeting the Locals

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Here comes the judge! 

seen on a button in the 1960’s.

Being the second half of a speech I gave at Toastmasters, with the first half, Part One, archived in July of 2017. (Yes, you can “judge” me as being “slow” in getting around to posting this, but hey, nobody said they wanted a part two, so there!)

Hello reader,

Like tourism?

Like meeting “the people?”

I’ve heard of tourists who say, “I get off the beaten path, and meet the people.”

In Part One I pointed out that if you want to “meet the locals” when you travel, and strike up a conversation with complete strangers, then it is good to first learn how to do so here at home, before you travel. Incidentally, this is a skill the new recruits for a certain secret service all have to learn, but I don’t think they are explicitly taught: I gather for them it’s “sink or swim.”

Today you’re in luck, no need to drown, because I had think through how to explain this at Toastmasters. Having dealt in Part One with faith (in people and yourself) and the first half of awareness, (of self and others) today we can do the other half of awareness, and then cover willingness.

I try to be aware of my eyes. As in Part One, I like Miranda’s findings that people will talk to you if your eyes are loose and roaming around. I would add that your eyes should ideally be soft and kind. Things are unlikely to work out for you if your eyes are remote or fixed, and you won’t ever strike up a conversation if people see your eyes as dry little coals—too scary!

I suppose there’s a Zen to it: If you are smiling inside and loose inside, then your face will be loose too, and easily prone to smiles, and surely people will respond. It is especially easy for strangers to talk to you if you have excited eyes, thinking: “Wow, I’m a tourist in Britain! Here from exotic Edmonton!” …The question then, for having conversations, is: Are you willing? 

Not if you’re in a hurry… or a snob, or an Ugly American. If American tourists seem crabby about how the “little natives” are not as good and sensible as Americans, well, I think I know the reason. Americans will tend to seem ugly, or at least “not safe and supportive,” when they have a very rigid view of the world. If people are know-it-alls, thinking, “My way or the highway,” then they tend to be threatened by anyone different. Like wearing a Here comes the judge button. Better for them to avoid strangers. They may seem crabby not just abroad, but even in their own hometown. Of course I am using “American” as a metaphor for you and me. As I said in Part One, I have my bad days, but on my good days I try to be willing to listen and talk as I come across new people.

Perhaps willingness is like art or literature. Someone told me the best way to read is to do so without judging, just accept it all as you are reading, then turn on the judgment and reflection after you put the page down: You are less likely to miss out that way. As an old grandmother said: “Live and let live.” A variation: “Accept others, and have self-acceptance.” In a way, strange adults are a bit like children and dogs: They know when you can’t accept them—you reveal yourself when you can’t listen well.

For my toastmasters speech it amused me to wear my Doctor Who T-shirt, and present this scenario: Suppose, on the Royal Mile, I am conversing with a stranger who says, “You Americans, on your TV, you have way too much crazy science fiction.” I could get defensive and say, “I’m Canadian.” I could, if I lacked boundaries, misinterpret that my ego was being attacked, and then counter-attack: “Oh ya? Well, see this T-shirt? Doctor Who is British!” Or maybe I could be accepting, point a friendly thumb at my T-shirt and laugh, “Ya, we keep showing a man who flies through space in a crazy blue box, no bigger than a phone booth…” … or, my final scenario, I could at least wait until I walk away, and only then switch on my judgment, bending forward to mumble with comical resentment. (Fun to act out on stage at Toastmasters) 

Are you willing to be interested in the world? Then the world will be interested in you. Are you bored? Then let’s face it, you are a bore. It never hurts to store up a few lively factoids to share. Earlier I mentioned faith. My belief? People want the same human contact I do. But maybe not factoids. To me, a good life-style choice is: Always leave strangers and acquaintances feeling better for having met me, never worse. And lastly, if I am momentarily feeling too afraid, one day, to act loving towards an innocent stranger, then I may take heart from the New Testament: Perfect love casts out all fear.

There you have it: You may strike up a conversation using your Faith, awareness, willingness, and spiritual faith too. 

Farewell: May the wind always be at your back, may the road go ever onwards, and maybe we’ll meet one day on the Royal Mile.

Sean Crawford

Winter

Alberta

2018

Footnotes:

~The Ugly American civilians, in South Vietnam, nearly all hung around with the urban elite in Saigon. Hence they were so useless at understanding how to converse with the vast majority of Vietnamese, ordinary rice farmers, to “win their hearts and minds” for teaching them to choose democracy over communism. In Iraq the Americans repeated their history by clumping together in the isolated Green Zone, which had the payoff for them: They didn’t have to understand or respect Iraqis. 

As I see it, for success meeting people overseas, before you travel, try to at least practise being less rigid and more respectful at home. As for the fiasco of Iraq: Because of inappropriate screening, which kept out democrats with years of experience nation building in Yugoslavia, many of the Americans working in Iraq were republican-party members who couldn’t even bring themselves to respect democrats, their own fellow Americans.

~Speaking of (Doctor Who T-shirt) boundaries, I’ll be glad when American Muslims go into social work and then teach other Muslims about “boundaries.” And teach them about “victim role” too. Every time I hear “Islam is under attack” I see a flashing neon sign: victim-victim-victim. A healthy democracy, of course, requires citizens to feel a sense of “agency.” 

When Muslims in, say, Pakistan bomb to, as they say, make their country “more unstable” what they mean is to make their fellow Pakistanis feel “less agency” …because then people are less likely to resist a new dictator. History shows us that every dictator, —Nazi, communist, militarist, Islamist—without exception, always turns his country towards having fewer human rights and more fundamentalism. As in, “more Islamist.”Yes, the ignorant Islamist suicide bombers do at least know this much. 

~Of course, sometimes immaturity, such as Sunnis hating Shiites, has a payoff, so we cling to it. At breakfast some of us were telling writer Lois McMaster Bujold how folks from the cities of Edmonton and Calgary, here in Alberta, in their broad inter-city competition, would rather the national Grey Cup was won by “a team from Mars!” than by their fellow Albertan city. Lois burst out, “It sounds like sibling rivalry to me!” 

“(Blushing) Yes, well (cough).”

Questions and Homeland Security

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning. “

Albert Einstein

“Question Authority!”

Seen on a button in the sixties

Hello Reader,

Got  congressmen?

I am getting “revved up” from reading a thrilling young adult novel, Little Brother, where the hero’s code name is Winston, (A little like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four) by Corey Doctorow, a name well known in computer and literary circles. I’m confident Doctorow realized that even though the computer nerd side of him liked facts, the reality is many other people are only revved up by stories.

Here’s a story:

 You may recall how the fascists gave us good order, stopped those bomb-throwing anarchists, and made the trains run on time. And, in the case of Germany, also stopped the nightmare of runaway inflation, something the conservatives had failed at miserably. (People were bringing their paycheques home in wheelbarrows)  Sounds good. 

There was a certain “good European”: After the war, which he had hated, being a man of peace, he still did not truly believe in the horror of fascism, not even from the facts of the death camps in Poland. No indeed… not until he heard police boots clumping offstage for the story of Ann Frank.

Doctorow presents a world where the hero, a high school boy, by being arrested, has seen the iron fist beneath the velvet glove of D.H.S. … A bomb is thrown—no, that’s too 20th century—a line of bombs is set off, blowing up a bridge in San Francisco… No one else seems to grasp, or will even question, how D.H.S.  must have had plans in place to obstruct liberty before the bombing. The D.H.S., of course, is Department of Homeland Security.

Naturally Doctorow, like Einstein imagining riding on a beam of light, is only doing a thought experiment. No newspaper journalist today is saying H.S. is fascist, not yet. Furthermore, many people would say only a long haired hippie would question authority—but Albert Einstein had long hair, too. That gentle, credible man was never afraid to question. Question the Nazis, and question conventional gunpowder war. In fact, it was due to his gentle credibility that the U.S. president agreed to undertake something out of science fiction: to invent the Atomic Bomb.

If the police and D.H.S. are innocent, then they shouldn’t fear any questions, right? But no, in Doctorow’s San Francisco, after the bombing,  they want to dominate and to squelch questions from citizens. Not like a pair of police walking sternly outside a dingy “bad guy” bar, but by having many police walking throughout the boy’s entire city, as though anybody might be a bad guy, especially anybody the computer shows having unusual behaviour, as does that peace-loving loyal boy.

So the question for us to ask today is: Could the federal H.S., in the future, in our world of computers, become bad? Should we be holding that horse with close firm reins to prevent any future foolishness? 

I don’t know much about federal departments. Here in Calgary, more often than I visit my member of parliament, I will visit my city alderman, or my Member of the provincial Legislative Assembly. One day my MLA and I were talking in his office, the phone rang, and it was a constituent asking about finding a job. The poor guy’s accent was too strong. So then I delighted my politician by alerting him to evening classes in “accent reduction,” that he could tell job seekers about. (He phoned the constituent back right away) Here in Calgary, when you apply for a job with the city, the interviewers ask you for your stories about your past performance as a predictor of your future. 

My question: The Department of Homeland Security may be new, but to predict the department’s potential for messing up, are there any older federal departments we could look at? As Einstein would say, when it comes to H.S., can we “Learn from yesterday”?

As  Governor Sarah Palin might say, “You betcha!” … Consider the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As children we all saw the lovable Jimmy Stewart in The F.B.I. Story, a movie starting from the 1930’s. Kids would send away cereal box tops for their junior G-man badge, while Hoover’s boys were known to be wholesome, well groomed Americans we could all be proud of—so what the heck happened? 

By the early 1950’s President Truman, having contempt for the F.B.I.’s  director, J. Edgar Hoover, didn’t feel safe removing Hoover from office, partly because the F.B.I. was gathering dirt on prominent Americans. I believe President Johnson was merely quoting Truman when he told the New York Times in 1971, “It is probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.” 

The F.B.I. secretly taped John F. Kennedy in bed at night sharing his doubts and lack of confidence in things. (In fairness, they thought Kennedy’s female lover might be a communist) Even when Kennedy had become the U.S. president, with his loyalty surely beyond question, they kept the transcripts, kept them even after he was assassinated—perhaps to hold power over the attorney general— but then again, they kept the transcripts even after his brother Bobby was assassinated, too. 

This annoys me mightily because the data collected on Kennedy should have been protected by being destroyed, long ago. As local professor and computer expert Tom Keenan said, “If you collect, you have a duty to protect.” 

At the time of Bobby’s death some clean-cut agents were running dirty tricks, covert operations called “cointelepro,” against loyal non-communists such as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Even after Watergate the F.B.I. would not reform: They never did apologize for their complicity in the killing of Karen Silkwood.

If even the F.B.I.’s noble agents could decline into resorting to cointelpro, what hope is there for H.S.? Are they already starting to collect data the way the N.S.A. was doing right up until Edward Snowden’s revelations? Is your congressman allowed to even ask?  

In fairness, within the F.B.I., maybe only a small percentage of agents went over to the dark side, just as, in the Roman Catholic Church, surely only a small percentage of priests went on to be child molestors. Trouble is, as with the Church, sometimes a whole organization can be complicit. Just like in the movie Snowden, where patriotic staff see their not-so-patriotic boss on the six o’clock news lying to congress—and not one …single… solitary individual… blows the whistle.

Perhaps the way to understand government, then, is to understand individuals. I ask you: Don’t we all sometimes get too focused, too much looking down on our own pet issue, for example security, ignoring the larger issues?

Here’s another story:

Canadians were happily protecting their sacred culture, thwarting “Yankee imperialism,” by legislating that a certain per cent of their airwaves must be “Canadian content.” Dirty Canadian socialism? Not to all those self-employed business-artists who were finally able to keep their heads above water. About the time satellite phones were the size of war-time walkie-talkies, there came these giant satellite dishes filling up people’s yards. A cabinet minister, forgetting to lift his eyes to the larger issues such as the informal Right to Property, said government must control the dishes, in order to control Canadian content. To quote a Yankee: “Say-What?” He backed down.

Here’s a story:

In my city, we have a love of the environment, plus an ever-worsening shortage of landfills. (In New York City they have resorted to taking their garbage out to sea—which worked just fine, I guess, until needles wash up on the shore) One day a Calgary alderman, forgetting the principle of Citizens Deciding For Themselves, said that there should be a restriction on the number of garbage bags put out by each household. Call it “prohibition light.” A more experienced politician quashed his idea by saying that people would meet their numbers by coming out with giant bags the size of the next town. Better to use education and peer pressure.

A story:

In another year, another alderman proposed a law that garbage bags all be transparent, so peers, nosy neighbours and the government too, could all enforce recycling. The greater issue he forgot? The Right to Privacy. A fellow retorted, “Some of my constituents have adult diapers, and that’s nobody else’s business.” The man backed down.

Right now the problem with Homeland Security is they have no shame, no, not even when a powerless senator is reduced to asking questions with sarcasm, while they just keep a straight face… Come to think of it, I read this story on BBC News, on the web—do you think U.S. newspapers carried it? I refer to the story where border agents no longer need any suspicion, let alone probable cause, regarding you taking your private cell phone or tablet across the federal border.

While every citizen’s duty is to question, surely the business world models for us the value of, and encouragement of, questions. In business, the way to remind people to stop their vested tunnel vision, and to lift up their eyes to other issues, is with questions. (For example, asking: “Have you considered the tax implications?”) It might seem rude for a top executive to ask his people this, but after they stop blushing, they’ll thank him. 

As you know, every incorporated business must legally include, besides the obvious such as a president and (treasurer) finance officer, a board of directors. Historically, the board members would be from the same field as the company. However, decades ago we learned better. Now we know boards of directors should be diverse. Not just to think outside of the box, but to ask better questions, inside the conference room. 

(But can they force you to name a financial officer? Can’t you instead, for example, have a commune of cardinals doing the finances in complete equality, socialism-wise? Answer: You can have freedom of religion, but not freedom of corporation—and legally you will need yearly audits too: Because society has learned the hard way what is needed for the “greater good.” When it comes to business, religion and yes, Homeland Security too, “we are saved not by our faith, but by the lack of it.”) 

A half-fictional story:

A company which makes facial tissues (Kleenex) was grappling with the high costs of shipping tissues across the country, focusing on various transport means, hubs and warehouses… A board member from the field of dentistry asked, “Well, can’t you just suck all the air out before you ship them, shipping concentrated kleenex, and then re-air them later?”

I am in Calgary, far away from the swelled heads in the federal capital. Here ordinary people, government people, are fully aware they are fallible, and so when they pass a new bylaw they always put in an appeals process. Only a very self-righteous individual, like the head of H.S., would assume they would get it right every time.

My concern is that H.S. has a “tunnel visioned” for security, without due humility, without lifting their eyes to the issue of Liberty, and without even having Common Sense…. To me the smoking gun for that department’s gross incompetence was when the head of H.S. publicly said that some of the 9/11 killers had crossed into the U.S. from Canada—and no, the head did not resign after that evidence of gross negligence. 

If H.S. is already beyond questions and appeals, beyond the check and balance of congress, if H.S. is trying to be both judge and jury, then I can only conclude they will follow down the same path the F.B.I. took—only greased, on skids.

Back to you, dear reader. Have you got a congressman you can ask? 

Sean Crawford

In the fourth largest city in Canada

Where the biggest minority group is U.S. citizens

February

2018

Footnotes:

~Got tunnel vision? The motto for the local university, where Professor Keenan works, translated from Gaelic, is: “I will lift up my eyes.”

~I describe in detail the role of a board of directors in my essay Olympics and Boards. You may find it in the archives for February 2013, or via clicking on the label Olympics.

~ The investigative book on The Killing of Karen Silkwood could stand alone as proof that “The innocent do have something to fear from surveillance,” as agency after agency is shown breaking the laws for surveillance, despite Silkwood’s innocence. Poor girl. I think it was a surveillance team who killed her. 

Karen was neither communist nor criminal.

~As documented in the movie (link to review) Spotlight, a “small percentage” of priests translated into 90 priests in the city of Boston alone. I won’t speculate on the percentage of “insert fear of choice” in Homeland Security.

~Link to movie review for Snowden.

~Canadians are not socialist, they can indeed buy a private satellite dish, but their constitution, despite controversy while they were writing it, back when I was a young man, does not recognize the right to property.  

~I like how Snowden, rather than try to be both judge and jury, used the check and balance of confidentially going to respected sober journalists, and then letting them rule on whether the sound of his whistle should remain secret, or whether it was appropriate to publish.

~My Kleenex story is based on real life, where I think it was an executive, not a board member, who came up with the air question during a brainstorming-like discussion. He began by curiously noting that stuff travels faster in a vacuum. 

…Perhaps he was thinking of how, before interoffice communicators, (intercoms) company memorandums (memos) flew through pneumatic tubes, typed by secretaries who would stop off after work to get a permanent wave. (perm)

~While Doctorow is Canadian, it was a well known British author, Neil Gaiman, who did the front cover blurb for Doctorow’s book, saying, “A wonderful, important book … I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year.”