Human Capital

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got human capital?

My Thesis: That it exists at the group level, and can be nourished or destroyed.

Gay bashed, 

definition: a foreboding 1980’s phrase meaning to be attacked, verbally or physically, especially to be beaten severely, even unto death.

This week the BBC did a story on The Murder That Changed America. (Link) I well remember, although it was twenty years ago: Matthew Shepherd, a young university student in Laramie, Wyoming, was beaten severely, tied to a fence, and left to die. He was discovered, still breathing, after 18 hours, only by accident, after another student fell off his mountain bike and then noticed what looked like a scarecrow. By then Shepard was braindead, and he died. His crime? Existing while gay.

On Friday October 26, 2018 Matthew Shepard was interred with honor, among other U.S. notables, such as Helen Keller and President Woodrow Wilson, (of World War I)  at the Washington National Cathedral. A collection of Shepherd’s personal affects has just gone on display at the Smithsonian. 

America changed, through peaceful dialogue, against stiff minority resistance. I well remember the majority, religious and atheist alike, arguing that not allowing human rights protection for gays did allow people to publicly hate, a hatred that would eventually lead to violence and murder. At that time, over in Germany, they had laws against hate crimes and against freely speaking of one’s own holocaust denial, because the Germans had experience of  their tolerance of hatred producing death.

History flows on. Stephen Fry tells (on Youtube) the legend of Queen Elizabeth, as a royal formality, signing homosexual rights legislation voted by parliament and saying “No one would have imagined this in 1953.” While I’m glad the public has grown in knowledge and tolerance, I am keenly aware that knowledge-growth is not quite the same as responsibility-growth. I think as the public grows in knowledge of how to be responsible, in concert with each other, the public is also growing in “human capital.” Which is the life blood of every democracy

To think through human capital, I cast my mind back to a student I was acquainted with who was bashed outside a gay bar, and put in the hospital. Keep an eye on that bedridden student, I’ll get back to him. 

The student attended Mount Royal College, MRC, now MRU. At the time I knew lots of active students, including the editor at the student weekly newspaper, The Reflector. 

Remember those student cartoons of the 1960’s? Capitalist pigs, with the buttons popping off their fat vests? I knew students with the same idealism, but instead of drawing bad guys in general, such as running dogs or lackeys, they were, a few months before the bashing, doing panels on specific individuals expressing idiocy. I forget who the hated international leaders were back then, but truly there have always been folks like North Korea’s leader. (As we said during the Cold War, “It’s a good thing governments with atomic bombs are always sane folks like us, “who love their children too”)

The student newspaper volunteer’s Big Mistake? Lampooning a nameless generic skinhead. You may recall that these angry young skinheads, losers not students, without peace or long hair, shared one important-to-them fashion: Doc Martin boots, footgear well suited to kicking someone into brain injury. The idealist's Big Mistake? Having the stupid cartoon skinhead express stupid hatred of Jews. Like the dictators, he was being lampooned for his beliefs, but this time he was not a specific individual. Not like portraying the hostage-taking hated Ayatollah Khomeini mouthing off about minorities.

The skinhead cartoon was a public scandal. You would think the “Establishment,” as in the tweed coated, calm, pipe puffing college Board of Governors, would see this as a learning opportunity, and trust their students to take action. You would be wrong. 

Granted, the governors would know that many students had apathy, from the words “a” meaning without, and “path” meaning spirit. Granted, many students didn’t read the newspaper their student fees supported, and many didn’t even know there had been any controversy, even after it was reported in “real world” daily newspapers. Many students, like today, didn’t have idealism. But many did, and they had high spirits. Wouldn’t the governors (if only from previous cartoons) have known that there were still campus idealists?

For example, there was at least one heterosexual student in the Gay club on campus, a student who, at least initially, was in the closet about being straight. (He didn’t want to claim straight privilege, even when staffing a gay club display table) I knew several Canadian-born students in the International Student Club. There was even, that year, an attempt to start up a feminist club, as already existed at the university. (By now they may have established one, and maybe started a Green Ecology club too)

I can imagine spirited students setting up a six foot table with a banner: “Ask us about the Reflector cartoon.” The active students who read the paper, and therefore knew the ongoing cartoon context, would have shared their alarm and displeasure. The ignorant ones would have just passed by the table, granted, but the spirited ones could have educated each other, some from personal experience, about how hurtful hatred still exists. 

They could have dialogued: Just as most of the high schools at the time (I knew and highly respected the “only” gay person at her school) did not have even a single out-of-closet boy or girl, but nevertheless teen gays still existed, unnoticed, without limp wrists like on TV… So too did schools here, back west, have Jewish students, unnoticed, not wearing a round beanie cap or lapel pin like on TV. The students who, during high school, had felt so sleepy during history class and the teacher’s droning on about Human Rights could now have woken up. “This is real!”

Students could have put on noon hour activist demonstrations to teach, using a microphone in the student food court, which the spirited Student Association, as the Board of Governors could have known, was already doing for various topics.

And from the talking and working for action, bonds would have formed, trust would have formed. —It’s easier to confront the bigoted Chief of Police, to tell him he enables gay bashing, if you trust someone ‘has your back’— The student body would have not merely have grown in knowledge, but in responsibility, trusting each other show up for group action, such as a noon demonstration, a rally, putting up posters, and more. The term for all this “knowledge plus shared responsibility” is “human capital.” They would have been motivated for this as their “outrageous” student paper was continuing to publish, casting shadows over the campus. Students, including the newspaper volunteers, could have done the “Yom Kipper” thing of remorse and repair. But such things would never happen. I will explain.   

One of the tragedies of the late 1960’s is how leftist students were on their own to “reinvent the wheel.” Too many leftists had been destroyed by Senator McCarthy’s witch hunts. As the man they called President Obama’s mentor, Saul Alinsky, put it, by the 1960’s, “The human capital was just not there.” Within a national democracy “of the people,” here, at Mount Royal College, was a golden chance to build human capital after the final cartoon ran.

And then, short months afterwards, during that very same school year, a fellow student, very straight looking, without any limp wrist or fashionable clothes, upon exiting a gay bar, was bashed and put into the hospital…Shakespeare would say “his blood cried out!” But the bonds of human capital, bonds of trust that could have led to mass action such as getting the public involved, or confronting politicians and police, or, at the very least, some nice student hospital visits—just weren’t there. How sad, to have no visitors, since being gay bashed, like certain other assaults, is a lonely “blame the victim” thing.

The problem was “the establishment:” the College Board of Governors. When the final cartoon edition came out, they seemingly did not trust the students to have idealism, and wanted to do everything themselves. Even though the student editor had resigned, they unilaterally shut down the newspaper, deleting it’s shadow. This without asking the Student Association. They sent press releases to signal their virtue…

I wonder now: Were they ignorant of human capital? Or were they solely concerned with a few old people in the outside community, ones who would never, ever, bother read the student’s newspaper and the previous cartoons?  Did this overrule the governors’s concern for a campus of growing students? Perhaps the governors were like certain so-called grown adults we have all met: still so full of apathy they must worry only about their image, and their fashion accessories, more than their substance.

A few months later that school year? When the bashing happened? To the best of my knowledge,  not one of those governors had the grace to apologize for how their ignorant reaction had left a student, unlike Matthew Shepherd, to suffer all for nothing, in vain… and to be lying in hospital, all alone.

Well. It was all so long ago. 

Today’s lesson, if there is one? For my U.S. readers? This: Trusting your students is like trusting your fellow citizens. Be brave. I never thought American farmers and townsfolk would ever want to use passports along the world’s longest, friendliest border. Do you really need to desperately surrender so much of your liberty, for the sake of (homeland) security?

God bless America. And Edward Snowden.

But I won’t say “God bless the governors of Mount Royal.” Am I still angry at them? How can you tell?

Oh, time to forgive. And as Tiny Tim said, “God bless us, every one.”

Sean Crawford

Proud MRC certificate holder

Proud MRC diploma holder,

Proud U of Calgary degree holder,

Proud and relieved that I paid all my tuitions as I went,

without help from parents or student loans.

October 

2018

Sad Video: 

Looking up at my name, I see a lot of parchments, over time, a lot of  changed versions of me, yet, “I will always remember when I was me, a student with ideals.”

Here (link) is a “goodby video” (under 3 1/2 minutes) of Doctor Who, on his last day, telling Clara it’s important to change, and remember. 

In this little video masterpiece of repeating feet, Clara’s role, I guess, is to witness. The children’s art pictures are an hallucination, a might-have-been, had the Doctor put down roots.

When the music swells, in the Doctor's final minutes, the heart swells too, as the lyrics were once sung by a dear young girl: "Rest now, my warrior."

By the way, the bowl of silly food—fish sticks in custard—is a callback to the amusing day the Doctor met the young girl, Amelia, back when he appeared in ruined clothes. The child called him Raggedy Man. 

She later became a grown married woman, Amy, and she made the doctor cry desperately when she passed on. Her last words, in tears and torment, had been, “Raggedy Man, goodby.” 

Nice to see Amy smiling, at peace, and caring for the Doctor. We all want to be cared for, in the end. 

Road Trip Reflections

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got insights?

If life is for learning, then road trips can sure help. I like them for clearing my head and allowing insights. Recent shockwaves from my discovery in the town of Camrose are still reverberating: I  wont’t just blurt stuff out; better I sneak up, essay-style, on my latest reflection. Which means doing something I seldom do: writing about myself, as today’s piece involves backstory about little old me.

In Edmonton 

I stayed in a fancy hotel with a flatscreen TV. How strange to watch some Star Trek episodes in color, episodes that I had seen with bated breath when they originally aired. I saw again “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” (by Robert Block) my favorite one of all: The one with the giant Ruk (He played Lurch on The Adams Family) from down in lost underground caverns, where the bad guys make an android duplicate of Captain James T. Kirk. (Cribbing from the dialogue of an episode of The Wild Wild West where they had a duplicate imposter for James T. West) I like it for the blocking, (where the actors stand) and for the karma of Professor Roger Korby and his partners in crime.

What I didn’t like, during the original airing, was my older brothers keeping their emotional distance, skeptical, “not getting into it.” When the landing party beams down and approaches the mouth of a cave my brothers said, “They should be shivering.” 

For years, with every exciting re-run, I’d recall what was said, during that original wondrous evening, by my older, wiser—no. They were fools, and I’ve chosen to drop my memories, gone forever. The reason for their silly lack of enjoyment was something I did not understand at the time,  but now I know: They had emotional insulation. Better to NOT feel. In a few years, as I insulated too, I would stand at attention, and I would sit like a pharaoh: limbs all symmetrical. Back then I might have thought I was uncreative, proper or uptight. But no: Having grown up in a destructive place, I was insulating. 

What else? I was conservative, believing in the Bible’s injunction: I would honor my mother and farther, and, in some bizarre double standard, not hurt their feelings. It was Ruk, the android lone survivor of a lost civilization, who gave me the way out, if I dared. His “Equation” was: “You can’t protect what is trying to destroy you.” … For a short while I simply avoided talking with my dear destructive relatives; for a good while I felt survivor guilt at moving on in life.

A nerd?

My hotel stay allowed me to finally catch the opening episode of Andromeda, a TV series with an interesting take on the King Arthur legends where The Commonwealth (Roman Empire) has fallen, and Captain Hunt of the warship Andromeda (an anonymous Arthur) is trying to end the dark ages. The ship is the sword Excaliber, the ship's A.I. is the Lady of the Lake... The series finale (with the Lady taking back the sword) was a delightful take on the final battle of Arthur where, as in the historic battle legend, he failed to hold back the night, as his companions, one by one, fall. (Don’t worry, their deaths are offstage) Legend tells us that King Arthur only sleeps in a cavern, and will appear again in England’s hour of need: Just as Captain Hunt and his ship had appeared, through a Black Hole time warp.

Given my interest in old history and TV sci-fi, sometimes I laugh to wonder: Why did I not grow up into a nerd who lives-in-my-mother’s-basement with a computer, and is lost behind brown pants and beige shirt, and argues on-line as a troll? I don’t know, but I have always avoided vexatious nerds. Perhaps computer trolls argue with such derision because the only thing they have going for them is a feeling of smart superiority, with web arguments as their only way to feel any passion since they don’t watch pro sports. Well. Let them argue with each other on their blog comments; I feel no guilt at leaving them to each other.

I arrived in Camrose 

Forget the stereotype of rural towns being left brain, conservative, and darkly suspicious of city slickers. No, the town is a microcosm of society, with plenty of exotic coffee houses, an art supply store, a comic book store, an awfully barren Japanese cartoon store, and hey, one of the lady’s clothing stores along main street even specialized in “unusual fun fashions.”  Camrose still has a nice second hand book store, praise the Lord, while lots of used book stores in this province are closing down.

I found a book—I went “WOW!”—that reminded me of my younger days, back when I was losing my insulation by attending a certain weekly meeting of a 12-step recovery program. Not a meeting for substance users, (such as Alcoholics Anonymous) or families of practising alcoholics, (That would be Alanon) but a meeting for adults who had grown up in alcoholic households, becoming as crazy as a drunk without ever taking a drop. On the outside, we had jobs and marriages and dressed normal, with none of us living in Mum’s basement, but still, we loved to meet to share our experience, strength and hope. Yes, it worked: I watched people in recovery becoming functional.

At least now, as adults, we were able to get better: If staying sober helped, we would do that; if refusing to blame our parents or our society helped, we would do that too. What wouldn’t help was wimping out and not even trying for any personal growth—we had already seen such wimping in our siblings and parents. The angry loud alcoholic who says, “Be tough!” and “Quit crying or I’ll punch you” and then punches, well,  he’s a wimp. But you just can’t realize that as a child, not in a home where craziness is normal.

We learned 

Two surprising things from our sharing at meetings and our socializing afterwards: One: that we would “isolate;” and Two: that we mostly, both men and women alike, had the majority of our friends being of the opposite sex. (Not like, say, in high school or on The Flintstones) 

Isolating, as in not getting out enough, was safe. As for our having opposite gender friends, we thought this was partly a self esteem thing, as it was safer, and partly because at least we could offer our adult sexuality—we had problems around feeling self-worth. Naturally. For we had been abused and brainwashed in our childhood. 

If I like feminism (and I do have that interest listed on my blog page) then it is because, besides having female friends, I can identify with the earliest folks in Women’s Liberation struggling to overcome their brainwashing, just as I have had to. As it happens, I’m still trying to understand people in general, “normies,” let alone women. But I really do try. What made me go “wow!” in that town was something in Chapter One of For Young Women Only.

The book was in the Young Adult section. Camrose is in the Bible Belt, where it is a cliche that young rural ladies go to church, and Bible studies too. This book, by two earnest authors, was meant for such ladies.

What the authors learned 

They had a big group of young men and women, at “a singles retreat.” They had the two genders divide, going to two sides of the big room. Then they asked the young men for a show of hands, based on a question, with two bad choices, “former and latter,” for if you somehow had to choose:

The former part: Would you rather be alone and unloved in the world, 

OR

The latter part: Would you rather be inadequate and disrespected? 

You might think the young ladies would choose the latter choice, love. Who could exist unloved? For the women’s choice, you would be right. For the guys? A show of hands… they nearly all chose the former! The ladies gasped! They had no idea how much even the outwardly confident and cocky guys needed respect so desperately, even more than love. No wonder, notes the authors, that the Bible tells wives to respect their husbands, but tells husbands to love their wives. (Ephesians) So that each gender gets what they need. (And of course to be “inadequate” means to be “disrespected” by one’s self)

What I immediately thought of was all those men, and all those women, in my 12-step group, “isolating.” As a lifestyle. Putting safety over being disrespected, taking no chances, as if being judged was figuratively life-or-death. Well, for us it was. At least in my 12-step group we safely had each other, praise the Lord.

Driving out of town 

Motoring past all the pretty pastures, wheels whispering, I reflected on my own bizarre life. Oh, the people, places and love I have avoided—like I said, bizarre… … I once did an essay on Being Good at Something. (Archived June 2016) It could well be that my achieving tangible skills and material possessions has done just as much for my willingness to risk a fleeting disrespect as any abstract increase in courage and self-esteem. But that would be a topic for some other road trip…

Sean Crawford

On Alberta roads

Autumn

2018

Footnotes:

~For Young Women Only by Shaunti Feldhahn and Lisa Rice, (the former wrote For Women Only) 2006, Multnomah Publishers, Colorado. I’m too old to correctly judge, of course, but I think it’s a useful book for young people.

~My safe buddy Blair, in order to be heard from the next room, would -shout- to me and his fiancé. Blair was so charmingly normal: I had to explain to him to please stop doing that, as his dear fiancé and I would visibly flinch.   

~What I know can help is radical self-acceptance, beyond what any “normie” needs. (Let the normies have their “self-esteem.”) I remember one day, back from overseas at age 20, visiting with a teenage girl, her younger sister and her mother. The girl was back in high school after having been a runaway—everybody knew—and been living with a man. She said simply, “I am me; I won’t be either more or less.” 

~Come to think of it, I once essayed about Self Esteem and Acceptance, archived back in September of 2011.