Preventing The Loss of Hope in Our Present Times

     The world is completely different than when I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. The public and private sector unions, defined pensions, and America's position as a "shining city on a hill" which once sustained our hopes and dreams of a better life for the next generation are all largely irrelevant.

     Whether you site "shining city" quote from Jesus's Sermon On The Mount or from the Puritan John Winthrop of the 17th century, there is always a sense of hope which can be gleaned from its meaning, waiting for you to notice it. It is the "exceptionalism" devoid of any religious or jingoistic tinge which I see, very similarly to how Alexis de Toqueville did in the 18th century, in his remarkable book Democracy in America. The exceptionalism and with it a "can do attitude" is a strength of the American Experiment and not something to be ashamed about. Despite many sad and disgraceful moments this country did free its slaves, give women the vote, and abolish child labor. There was always a sense of momentum that things did get better over time through hard work, enlightened social values, and governmental policies.

     I don't see it that way now.

     Instead of common values it is every person for themselves. Instead of our elites feeling and acting with a sense of generosity to those around them, we have people who took advantage, either through inheritance or financial trickery, flying private, avoiding taxes with a vengeance, and forgetful of those who are disadvantaged. Hard work is no longer a sign you'll get ahead and often is only a debilitating practice which leaves people sad and broken in spirit.

     What is there for a leader or would-be leader to do? Two things:

     1. Look for big ideas and improve upon them, even if only marginally. People who follow you will see the omissions and mistakes. In their turn they will make their own improvements for the next generation to act upon.
     2.  Interact and connect with all five generations of working people and ask that they look for what's common about all of us. The differences are plain to see but our true strength resides in our inclusivity. Once your neighbor, who was once different from you in language and customs, becomes acclimated to living in the US regard them as someone who understands they have rights, privileges, and obligations. These are expected of all of us in return for being an American. Work towards your neighbors being included and praise them for their uniqueness and useful contributions to society.

     If we all do these things we can prevent the loss of hope and re-ignite the spark of creativity. We will promote the example generosity towards all.

Russell Baker 1925-2019

    

     While at college I continued the practice begun at a young age of reading the Sunday newspapers. The New York Times was always around as well as the Ridgewood News. We usually purchased The Bergen Record along with some donuts giving us the trio of northern New Jersey periodicals each Sunday morning. The Record had the comics section where Peanuts and Blondie prominently featured on the first page.

     In the early spring of 1982 I was ensconced one Sunday morning in the Dickinson College library  reading The NY Times Book Review and noticed that one of my favorite columnists, Russell Baker, had written a memoir, Growing Up. Being on good terms with the librarian I suggested that the library purchase the book. She dutifully noted it and told me they would let me know when it arrived.

     Some weeks later a hand written note in my mailbox confirmed that Growing Up had arrived. I hustled over and immediately checked it out. I recall it being both funny and poignant. Later when the soft cover version came out I purchased a copy. It still resides on a bookshelf in my mother's house in Florida. I'll probably grab next time I visit.

When You Are Sixty

     From what I have gathered from friends who have just turned sixty, they now possess a recognition that more events lay behind them than before them. Appears obvious enough. There is less time to harbor grudges, settle old scores, or simply be mad at someone for a reason you both have long forgotten.

     I have had more than one newly minted sixty year old friend contact me in the last few months. No particular reason was offered and none was asked for by me. Something I suppose about round numbers causes us to react this way.

     If you are younger than 60 this may not make much sense. Then again I have been your age and you have not been mine. This puts you at an ironic disadvantage any older adult might readily appreciate.

     The artist Christo was seventy when he completed The Gates project in Central Park in 2005. The planning on been going on for years and the installation along took a year. It was a wonderful exhibition to stroll through and I thankfully did it many times. These excursions caused me to have a Gatsby moment of wonder. Few historians have matched the closing lines of The Great Gatsby, when the narrator reflects on how the land must have struck Dutch sailors’ eyes three hundred years earlier:

     “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity to wonder.”
 

     We should only be so fortunate to have as much inside us to share as Crhisto did. Even luckier would be to also be capable of leaving a lasting impression much as F. Scott Fitzgerald has surely imparted to me.

Everything Old Is New Again

 

Peter Allen, 1974

     Isn’t it interesting that when Boeing Corporation was having troubles building their 787 Dreamliner, they hired retired, former employees to finish the stalled, over-budget project? Boeing came to realize that outsourcing things like engineering and manufacturing wouldn’t ever be as seamless as outsourcing a call center. 

     They had discovered that ‘everything old is new again’. 

     In my own experience, I’ve seen more than a few companies who have made the same mistake as Boeing. They believe younger contract employees with less experience and little training can produce the same results as older employees, who in the Boeing example had helped create the world’s largest aerospace company. I propose balance. 

     If this isn’t enough to make you groan, while shedding experienced workers many of these same companies state their principles include programs to enhance diversity and inclusion. Though truth be told their bromides explaining these initiatives usually fly in practice as well as Boeing’s Dreamliner, before they brought back their own retirees, to reintroduce bedrock work practices. 

     Employers with negative attitudes towards older workers is endemic across industries and locations. No revenue generating group or occupation is immune. Sometimes it’s blatantly obvious like with online application software which scans resumes for keywords to determine an applicant’s age. Or it appears in less obvious forms: when I’ve appeared for an interview in a respectful jacket and tie, I’m quickly judged by the interviewer in jeans as having a profile for which no position currently exists. No matter that I had already been through two interviews with technical staff and they had given me their endorsement for hiring. A form letter rejection was all that followed. 

     If a necktie can trigger a hiring disqualification, then what other questionable decisions are being made? How about the classic office meeting, which now routinely allows attendees to have their laptops open and cell phones ringers on. All the while the meeting presenters show PowerPoint slides on multiple screens, in an atavistic juxtaposition which only makes me ask, “Why are these people meeting in the first place?” The real question here is one of perspective, or the lack thereof, and how did someone decide that these are all good business practices. Nobody points out the obvious: people’s attention is elsewhere. 

     What’s worse, a closer look reveals a baseless preference by these companies for younger workers, who grew up in this hyperactive milieu. This choice is then combined with a quiet disdain for the very people who invented the Internet, and who can actually recall a time when the world was completely different. 

     Currently, technology’s face has mostly been young, but there are many skilled computer engineers and innovators who can lend value to a ​balanced​ workforce comprised of young, creative geniuses working side by side with these veteran techies. 

     I have lived in an incredibly bountiful age. One in which the fruits of a century’s worth of accomplishments, like giving women the vote and abolishing child labor, offer us a clearer understanding of the across-the-board benefits of being as ​inclusive​ as possible. These truths are self-evident and only a sad, tortured line of reasoning will try to defend these practices. 

     The good news: our times include five generations available to be employed by our companies. Each one with their own unique abilities and talents, all are worthy of our esteem. What we need is to grasp the meaning implicit in Boeing’s Dreamliner. It requires an acceptance by each generation of the other’s strengths, and for each to make allowances for the other’s weaknesses. Then we’ll live and work in a world where neckties are no more a sartorial blunder than a pocket protector.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2019

   
     Sadly it was the assassination of the most prominent civil rights leader of his day, which prompted the declaration of today's national holiday. It was established as a holiday in numerous cities and states beginning in 1971; the holiday was enacted at the federal level by legislation signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986.

     Very few will disagree we need a three-day weekend in the middle of January but not if it means we have to sacrifice the leader of a non-violent civil disobedience movement. The tactics he espoused were inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and have left an ever lasting mark on our society.

    The above picture is from the day he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. It is one of his most recognized public speeches that was delivered during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. In it he called for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States. Uttered to over 250,000 civil rights supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the speech was a defining moment of the civil rights movement.


    

Rambling With Gambling

We always took radio for granted, whether it was AM or later FM. It was free, though would fade in and out at inconvenient times like in a tunnel or on the lower level of the George Washington Bridge.

We don't take satellite radio for granted mostly because it's new and we pay for it, but we probably will someday. Will we notice when they stop putting AM/FM radios in our automobiles? I wouldn't know because my Mazda was built in 2000 and I have no intention of ever owning another car or truck. I'll rent them for a purpose but never own one again. Not even if its gifted to me. Too much bother and expense. It's a long gone era in which, mostly men, measured their self-worth by the kind of car they drove.

The title of this post is Rambling With Gambling and he was a fixture in our kitchen growing up and on the car radio if my mother was driving. New, Weather, Sports, and Observations was how I would describe it. A less charitable person might say that is how they filled the airtime they had been given. I know better as I was a DJ, or Radio Personality, in college. It was an unpaid job and highly coveted. You didn't want to screw up by having dead air, when no music or PSA (Public Service Announcement) was playing or the news was being read. I used to like when the teletype machine which received news stories would do a three or four ring alarm. That meant it was important and had to be read as soon as possible. I liked these when they occurred in the middle of the night, which was my preferred time slot. After 2AM one of these alarms one time sent me running to the machine only to discover it was a test. If I had read the earlier feeds I would have known in advance. Undoubtably,  I was busy wading throught the stacks and stacks of albums our station owned, WDCV 88.3 on your FM dial in Carlisle, PA. I could do that call in my sleep.

From Wikipedia:
Rambling with Gambling was a news and talk radio program that aired in New York City from 1925 through 2016, almost uninterrupted, with one name change toward the end of its run. It was hosted by three generations of people named John Gambling throughout its entire 90+ year run.

From the Internet

The Apathy of Aging

Writing thoughts in a blog is my way to resist apathy. I look backwards and try to remember what once was and give it a relevance to today's environment. I don't think I always hit the mark but by trying I at least stave off a lethargy I see in myself that didn't used to be present.

My new favorite web site is www.flipboard.com They call themselves a social-network aggregation, magazine-format mobile app localized in more than 20 languages. What a mouthful! I like the site because it scans the Internet for topics I selected as being interesting and offers suggestions based upon what I have read previously. Today they had an article on The Apathy of Aging and how to find the courage to resist it.

Inspiration... It hits you when you're not looking.

I use my new tool in Flipboard as a way to generate ideas for writing. Sometimes I just like the title of an article and it prompts me to write and other times it is the author's intent which moves me. In any event, I keep moving and that is what I am after. If in the process I accurately record a few moments for posterity then even better. I know all too well that once something is placed on the Internet it is recorded for all time. It's the greatest reference library of all time and one that will be mined for nuggets of wit and wisdom long after I am gone. Just thinking about that inspires me to continue looking for ideas I haven't commented upon. I might repeat myself and not even know it but at least it will be with my own original take on things. It takes courage to write, let along say what you believe. Courage is an unappreciated capability we all have to a degree, and one I find more compelling the older I grow, especially when I see it in others.

Middle Class Dreams

Ridgewood in the 1960s and 1970s was a middle class dream: good schools, safe streets, and plenty of land for children to explore. Moms worked hard in the home and more than a few had side gigs and/or full time jobs. Only a few children had to eat lunch in their elementary school, at least from what I saw at Willard, while everyone else went home. Now all of the schools have cafeterias. I can't say what they are eating or if its anymore questionable than the tuna sandwiches on Pepperridge Farms white bread that I recall. I'll reserve my culinary judgment and just say the teachers got a bit of a breather from their students and we got outside to burn off our excess energy.

While we used to go out and play after school and during lunchtime, many children today are inside all day and rarely inhale a breath of fresh air, unless they have a physical education class scheduled for that day. I know my nephew sometimes children did not get home until 6PM because both of his parents worked. Luckily, there were after school programs available or he might have been a proverbially "latchkey" child.

The middle class of my youth had dreams of their own children living a better life than they had. This came about because we had role models everywhere, from our teachers, to the postal delivery men, to the neighbors on our block. They showed us what hard work and denial of simple pleasures was all about. These traits would allow them to accumulate the funds needed to send their kids to college. College was always equated with earning more money over the course of one's lifetime, and that is what most strove towards.

Cheap gas, strong unions, defined pensions, and an understanding that we were in this together all helped to accommodate middle class dreams. We were not competing in some sort of slapdash race to the lowest wage that can be paid for labor that we see everywhere today, in part due to globalism. There was nobody preaching the virtues of the "gig" economy with it's lack of safety net or worker's rights. It may well have been naive to believe this dream could ever exist, but there it was and people held tight to it.

Ridgewood Public Schools App

An app for your smart phone now exists for the Ridgewood Public Schools. No more waiting around by the terrestrial radio waiting for the announcement of a snow day.

It contains a directory with email addresses of every teacher and administrator. There is a calendar of activities, parent/student handbook, athletics, news, and a button dedicated to notifications. That is, if the Twitter and/or Facebook account for every school is not enough.

No question that with all the information just being collected by Facebook that parents, students, and teachers in Ridgewood will someday see the wisdom contained in these words of Thomas Hardy. He wrote: ‘Since I discovered several years ago, that I was living in a world where nothing bears out in practice what it promises incipiently, I have troubled myself very little about theories. I am content with tentativeness from day to day.’

No need for me to point out the flaws inherent in the business model of technology companies, as it is indelibly etched into our memories by reports and their own admissions. Though wouldn't it be grand if it wasn't so! If we could be sharing information, be connected, and accomplish great societal feats in rapid fashion, without this very information being collected, analyzed, and used against us. I refer to what used to be called "tact" or the delicate and considerate perception of what is appropriate.

Now that the genie has been let out of the bottle we seemingly are left with what the character from It's A Wonderful Life Mr Potter observed,

"What does that get us? A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class. And all because a few starry-eyed dreamers like (Fill in the blank with your favorite tech CEO) stir them up and fill their heads with a lot of impossible ideas."

Never thought I would see the day when Henry Potter could be considered a sympathetic character, but the amoral technology companies from Silicon Valley sure have made it much easier.

1969 Mets

While I'm no Met fan, I do like this photo from the 1969 World Series. It features the ultimate fan, Karl Erhardt, who crafted his own signs and kept fans in the stadium and on TV entertained. There is also an unnamed Met usher who personified the by-gone custom of showing fans to their seats and making sure each seat was given a quick swipe with a cloth. The first time I saw it done it left me speechless. I asked my father with a look what was going on? He simply nodded and said, "Welcome to the stadium!"

The 1969 Mets, if you ever see the recordings of the World Series, were physically inferior to the Baltimore Orioles. They didn't appear as if they belonged on the same field. Though five games later the Orioles had been dispatched and the Amazing Mets, as Casey Stengel called them, were World Champions.

The Bus to NYC

The bus to NYC passed near enough to our home that we could see it from our kitchen window. It costs $.25 to ride it into town or as far as the junior high school, which was when I first started taking it myself.

When the bus first passed our house it had almost completed its run from NYC and simply had to drive 4 blocks, turn around, and return to NYC. If the bus driver smoked and he wasn't too far off schedule there might be time for a cigarette. If he was behind schedule he smoked and drove. Some drivers smoked incessantly and had the overflowing ashtrays to show for it.

Hard to imagine smoking on a bus these days. Though in the days I'm describing, some kids regarded this ride as there chance to "smoke up" before they got to school, especially if they were underage, as were most smokers on the bus. A crowded bus on a rainy day with the windows all closed didn't stop anyone, nor did anybody mention the insanity of the dense plumes of smoke.

In high school I probably could have taken a yellow school bus if I had wanted to break the rules and walk about 1/4 mile. The rules stated loosely that you had to live about 2 miles to qualify for a free yellow bus ride to and from the high school. I never once made use of this service and walked, rode my ten speed bicycle, and bummed rides from friends or parents.

The commercial bus service I rode hundreds of times. The bus mostly had kids because the men who worked mostly took the train. I can't remember more than a few hearty souls ever riding the portion of the trip leading up to the junior and senior high schools. I suppose more than a few got on further down the line but that's just my best guess. I sure wouldn't have wanted to ride with that unruly mob of teenagers.

Greg Kostenbader

During my one and only season of participating in organized tackle football, Greg Kostenbader was a teammate. He played both sides of the ball, meaning running back and linebacker. More than once he was carted away in an ambulance during a game after running with the ball into a gang of tacklers. Probably made him decide that delivering a blow was far easier than taking one, and this helped earn him the distinction of being an all-county linebacker.

I don't watch tackle football anymore because of the shocking hits to the head and bodies that football players endure. This macho "play through pain" just seems out of step with believing we are a civilized nation.

Not saying Greg, who recently passed away at the age of 60, died as a result of brain trauma.  Though there has been plenty of research on football and brain trauma, and it always sounds an alarm in my mind when I hear about athletes dying young.

Maybe it's time for amateur athletes from earlier generations to come forward and donate their brains to science for examination after they die. Sounds contradictory since the jock has always been someone who people would make fun of behind their back for being less than bright. Might be the ultimate irony if athletes did come forward to help produce the research necessary to ban blood sports like tackle football. The game of football is loads of fun when the the gratuitous shots to the heads and bodies are not included. The highlight film hits which make us all groan aren't truly necessary for a competitive game to be played, it's just a crack-brained tradition. One which the athletes suffer for long after their glory years of playing sports have long been forgotten.

Note To My Younger Self

 
While it's impossible to write a note to you younger self, this poem about sums up what a strong effort would resemble. I've felt these words many times recently, even though I am long past my shining days. The older you grow the more you feel the missed opportunites, especially as time teaches you a great many facts about the universe and one's place in it.

 

The Lover Pleads with His Friend for Old Friends

W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939

Though you are in your shining days,
Voices among the crowd
And new friends busy with your praise,
Be not unkind or proud,
But think about old friends the most:
Time’s bitter flood will rise,
Your beauty perish and be lost
For all eyes but these eyes.