Good Trouble

GDP and More Important Tools

     I'm not a big fan of GDP or Gross Domestic Product. Today we have a chart which accounts for all the ups and downs we have seen in GDP in my lifetime. Not that it is news to anyone with a pulse but we just experienced a quarter where the GDP dropped 32%. This number actually needs another number for it to make sense. But since the drop is so huge we don't really have a single number to compare it with. Let's just look at the graph and say this is the worst we will ever see. We can only go up from here.

     When I saw the previous quarter's drop I recalled "Paul's Law" in my mind. It stated you can't fall off the floor, but you can fall through it! I believe we have fallen through the floor and hit rock bottom. I have no corollaries to Paul's Law so we can all be spared the expense of me ever writing again about how bad things are.

     I'm using this down time to remind people of the many tools we have at our disposal for re-igniting our economy and making this dumb, imprecise indicator go up again. Yes, to raise our animal spirits so we can go about the business of buying and selling things.

     These tools are household names and can be downloaded for virtually nothing from the Internet. They include Zoom, Slack, Trello, and a huge list by Jeremy Caplan which he calls his WonderTools 2020

https://bit.ly/wondertools

       The list has over 100+ tools which you can no doubt use in many creative ways.

Please Cancel All Sports

     As much as I enjoy engaging in and watching sports, the time has come to close them down. The testing equipment can be used in more productive ways.

     The news out of Miami, Florida is that the Miami Marlin baseball team "will temporarily take a break as 15 players — half their active roster — and two coaches tested positive for coronavirus over the past few days."

     I'm willing to face facts that the games being played with no fans are of little interest to me. Plus, every time I see players without masks I cringe. They are young and simply don't understand what it could mean to their lives, let alone their careers, if they got sick. Time for adults to make the correct decision and send everyone home until it is safe.

A Glimmer Of Hope

     Our economic and political systems are not working for the majority of people in this country. This is different from when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. It was much clearer then what was wrong and more importantly what we could do to fix our problems. People protested. Protests and the ensuing media coverage helped to end the war in Vietnam, and to create The Great Society. I wish today we only had these as our main goals those of The Great Society: ending poverty, reducing crime, abolishing inequality and improving the environment (think Earth Day). Sounds pretty easy when you consider how Covid-19 has ravaged the world and shown us far we have to go to protect one another.

      Protests back in the day gave us hope that we could make the world a better place.

     Today our problems are much bigger. Fortunately, people are protesting. The protests are holding our attention to horrific images like the cop kneeling on a Black man's neck while staring into the camera of a smartphone. The protests are energizing people across all age groups. Some have never protested anything before, others haven't done it in a long time. I'm just glad to see them all out and giving voice to their feelings. I wish they wouldn't burn things like police cars, but there are bad apples in every group.

     The protests show me we have a glimmer of hope. Because in the end we have nothing left to lose if we give up calling attention to what's wrong with the world

Scott Galloway

     With a single report Professor Scott Galloway of Columbia University succeeded in temporarily breaking the Internet. Not literally, only by the interest his spreadsheet and info graphic generated. The huge amount of traffic was generated, quite rightly, by all 436 of the academic institutions he and a legion of graduate students had rated as to whether they would financially survive the current Pandemic.

     When I saw my alma mater among the group which will perish I was not surprised. $300,000 for a 4 year residential Liberal Arts college is quite an investment and since they run it like a business I felt no sympathy at all. I have fond memories from 40 years ago but a lot has changed, not just the price. They committed the usual sins of raising tuition faster than the rate of inflation, hiring too many administrators, and building more science buildings than they could support. On the last point, the old saying was language students supported the science students because they cost less to graduate by virtue of being able to teach them languages in any setting. The science students needed costly buildings which were always in need of being upgraded with new scientific equipment. It was necessary to "Keep Up With The Jones" or risk being seen as a less than stellar place to study organic chemistry.

     The chart is here

     The spreadsheet is here

     The six minute explanation is here

Protesting Now And Then

      Well the protests in Portland, Oregon are certainly going to continue, with or without anonymous Federal troops to try and maintain order. I suggest this because their movement just went viral on the Internet with a single photo:

     I am told it is legal in Portland to appear nude in public as part of a protest is a protected form of political expression, it's not an act of public indecency as you might think. She was only wearing a mask and a hat. She appeared from out of the haze of tear gas and pepper balls, much to the surprise of the occupying troops. In all, the woman’s appearance lasted about 15 minutes. News photographers said she slipped away, uninjured, into the crowd.

     I've written previously about the Kent State protests which ended so badly 50 years ago. Today's images are just as startling as the image below of a girl kneeling over one of her fallen classmates. Now we have color images and video, a lot more than when I was growing up. History doesn't repeat itself exactly but it does rhyme. Don't know who said it but it seems apropos today.

    

    

The Long View

    

John Lewis, congressman and civil-rights legend, never lost hope.

      “Be Brave, Bold & Courageous”

       My friend Stephanie Jones knew him and eulogized him in this way:

      "John Lewis was one of our rare angels flying low. He showed us how to move gently and fiercely through this world and how to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.

     Now he's flown away to that land where joy shall never end. Rest in peace, dear sweet good brave man."

      John Lewis who began building his legacy as a young when he was knocked unconscious while peacefully protesting. He continued adding to this legacy by serving as a Congressman and Civil Rights leader. The entire time he never lost hope or would allow those around him to do so.

     He is gone now and we all must gather our wits about us. Remember the words of Kipling:

If …

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run –
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!

Beauty In All Colors

     Guest post by RHS graduate Mishti (Vidushi) Sharma

     Beauty in All Colors:

https://maildropbymishti.substack.com/p/beauty-in-all-colors?r=2jjgf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=facebook

RHS Graduation 2020

     I really like the current RHS Principal Thomas Gorman. He grew up on the west side of town like me and graduated from RHS. He has been a staunch supporter and Trustee of the RHS Alumni Association from its inception. My admiration for teachers and administrators knows no bounds because it is a very difficult job, even in a wealthy school district like Ridgewood.

     Now tell what is wrong with this photo taken on July 8th during the RHS 2020 Graduation Ceremony:

     You are observant if you ask, "Where is his mask? How about some gloves? Not the example you want to be setting during a pandemic. I can also tell you that many of the graduates in the ceremony were not wearing masks. I know it was hot and the artificial turf of the football field probably made it feel like over 100 degrees. But wear a mask. #LovingKindness

Haircuts

      We used to go to barbershops in Hohokus for our haircuts because it was closer than downtown Ridgewood. First it was Ray's Barbershop next to the Hohokus brook. This later became Joe's. When the old building was renovated and became office space I started going to Dominic and Pietro. They are still in business and are a barber studio, as opposed to a barbershop.

     I mention all this because I just had my first haircut in four months. The barber came to our house and we let him ply his trade in our garden. It was my first ever outdoors haircut. I told him this could become a trend and that forward thinking shopping malls could use their open spaces for cutting and styling hair. Not so sure it will save any shopping malls but it could be part of a new master plan. Imagine Doctor's offices, therapists for the mind and body, and anything else which can't be ordered over the Internet or accomplished via telehealth.

     The shopping mall as we know it is long overdue for a complete renovation and the introduction of some new ideas. The small stores have to give way for social distancing. Though the department stores which anchor the malls do have potential for other uses. It's worth some brainstorming because to tear all the shopping malls down would be costly and ruinous to the local tax base. Perhaps converting some of the parking lots into alfresco dining would be a seasonal option and ready-to-make meals ordered in advance and delivered to people in their cars could help re-invent the food courts.

     I'm all for some new thinking so I don't have worry about getting my next haircut outside in the rain or snow. A pop-up barbershop in the empty parking lot of a mall works for me. Ten chairs and no waiting in line. Need a new generation of portable bathrooms to keep everyone happy but they are easy enough to imagine. It will all be part of a huge period of reflection in this country and other developed nations. The old ways will have to be altered so people can get back to work and even more importantly so children can go back to school. We have to do it all while keeping public health as our top concern.

The Internet

    

     How do we deal with the effects of the Internet?

     I helped build it over the last 25 years with thousands of other people by installing routers in offices which connected networks large and small via telephone lines. We started before broadband was being offered by cable television companies and The Cloud simplified and automated the once crude process of connecting to the Internet. I used to my tell the customers who were curious as to what we were doing that I believed that the Internet would bring people together. Now I believe the truth is that the Internet drives us further apart!

      That's the question of our age.

     Our classrooms were heading in this divisive direction even before the pandemic, with each student in their own virtual space as well as going to brick and mortar buildings. Online learning was a fact of life as homework assignments and teacher conferences could be done anytime and anywhere. This was both a convenience and a necessity as both parents had to leave the home for work to make ends meet.

     Now in July 2020 we have the added uncertainty of whether to send children back to school buildings on a regular basis. We all know them to be germ factories in the best of times, but the Covid-19 virus makes this an even more chilling prospect. The younger the children the more concern we have to have as they need direction, unlike most teenagers and college students who prefer to figure things out on their own. My only suggestion is that we need to first admit our mistake, that we opened too soon. Then we need to do a better job of testing and tracing the people who are infected. All concerned need to do a better job with online learning, parents, students, teachers, and administrators. It would also be very helpful to have our federal government leading, instead of telling the states to figure things out on their own. We don't tell states to determine their own standards for bridges and highways, why would ever think that the health of our country would be any different? We are these United States of America and we have to assert our belief that we are stronger and healthier when we work together, rather than when we compete with one another and attempt to divide the benefits. My two cents. Peace.

Modern Elders

      There is an seen the African proverb: “When an elder dies, it’s like a library burns down.”

      Here’s a passage by Dr. Bill Thomas that amplifies this point of view:
 

“After a person has productively lived his or her life as an adult in the community, he or she is honored by a second initiation (with different ceremonies) into the Elder circle. This usually happens around the age of sixty-five. These Elders, now masters of the school of life, have the responsibility of facilitating the transition from childhood to adulthood of new generations. They are responsible for and oversee the process of initiation. The idea of Elders as ‘library’ also reveals the fact that only the Elders have full access to the tribe’s knowledge base. The Elders safeguard the highest secrets of the tribe and protect its medicine and inner technologies. They incarnate the wisdom of the society, which they happily share often in the form of storytelling. In the community, the older you are the more respect you receive. One of the reasons for this practice is the fact that age brings you closer to the ancestors who are themselves ‘canonized’ and seen as intermediaries between the divine beings and us.”

https://drbillthomas.org/