That is called integrity. Unfortunately it is not something you can buy or steal.
- The L Word
The easiest way to understand the basic concept of integrity is: doing the right thing when no one is looking and no reward forthcoming.
The delicious irony of the second sentence of the quote is that buying someone's good will or stealing anything would be the opposite of having integrity.
Does integrity exist today or is it a virtue more comfortably left in the past?
No one can claim to be pure and noble. We all have our weaknesses and strengths. None of us is perfect. When we demonstrate moral weakness, we join the vast majority of humanity that is not consistent about integrity.
Most of us try to do our best most of the time. Whether anyone is watching is or not, whether we may get a reward or not. If we don't, we may have trouble sleeping at night, we may suffer stress and its resulting anxiety beyond what we should, our relationships with those we love will surely suffer eventually.
Our media fill our minds with examples of every kind of immoral behaviour that is anything but integrity. Yet, somehow, most of us keep trying to do what is right.
Whether we have integrity or we act the opposite way, a large part of the responsibility lies with our parents. In the first five years of life, parents teach us by example or by actively teaching us lessons to live with integrity or to work against the benefit of society as a whole to gain for ourselves. As adults, we each make decisions for ourselves. Yet most of us, especially after age 40 (usually sooner), follow the life lessons and role models given to us by our parents.
Integrity is how we survive instead of descending into chaos as families and communities and nations.
Why should we care about our community as a whole if our community seems to not care about us? Actually, it does. Communities don't have good enough social skills to express to us how much they appreciate us. What they do have is a penchant for whining and crying when its citizens misbehave. They whine and cry because they have not yet gained sufficient maturity to know what to do to solve its problems and avoid them in the future.
As sophisticated as we have become technologically and to a lesser extent scientifically, socially as communities we are just entering our adolescence. Seven billion of us live in an immature world that only our descendents will see into adulthood.
Just as we can't force an adolescent of 14 years to act like an adult in all ways, we can't push our communities to act more mature when they don't know how.
We can only do the right thing, do our small part to see that the community we belong to grows in a healthy way.
That means living with integrity.
Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children into adults who live comfortably with integrity and maturity.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
How Bad Will The Future Really Be?
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, nicknamed "the wise" Roman Emperor, (121 CE - 180 CE)
An emperor of Rome, indeed the leader of any country up to modern times, would need to be sanguine about the future because the chances of his having his head detached from the rest of his body before that body was worn out stood exceedingly high.
What about old Julius? He certainly couldn't have used all of his weapons of reason when he allowed his formerly trusted ally Brutus and his gang to slay him. Actually, he likely did. To the best of his ability.
Julius was a very ill man, suffering from a great deal of pain and loss of his abilities of perception due to disease at the time of his death. It's entirely possible that he did the equivalent of falling on his sword, just to put himself out of misery. He knew he was too sick to rule Rome, to give it his best. Yet his honour forbade him from committing suicide, even if it be for the good of Rome. It's highly likely that he knew what was about to happen when he met privately with his "enemies."
In other words, we now know that Julius Caesar likely used the best of his mental faculties to do what was best for both himself and for Rome. History hasn't recorded the event of his death that way, but history has a way of relating what its teller wants to the story to be.
Marcus Aurelius must also have used his abundant mental faculties during his almost two decades as emperor of Rome (actually king, as Rome did not call anyone an emperor). His reign was the ultimate example of Pax Romana and his death brought turmoil as to who should lead the greatest empire the world had known until then (later the British Empire was greatest in history, covering one-quarter of our planet's surface at one time).
Though Christians were still persecuted in his time in theory, in practice they seldom were. Rome (undoubtedly a brutal regime in many ways, though hardly the worst in history) really was fairly peaceful during Marcus's reign. It would have required considerable weapons of reason to make peace so effectively that the period was given its own name.
So we turn to ourselves. Every media outlet in the western world and most in other parts of the world report almost daily about how bad conditions are in the world. I have heard many young people from North America say that they don't plan to have children because the world is just getting worse and they couldn't in all good conscience bring children into such tragedy.
The world must be getting worse, just listen to our media tell us. But it's not so.
No point in history has ever been so peaceful, with such a great percentage of people living long lives, healthier than their ancestors, in human history. The media always tell us that the world is a terrible place and leave us to conclude that the future will surely be worse. Neither is true.
Even during the dreaded Holocaust, when millions of Jews, cripples, people with much lower than average intelligence and people who simply pissed off the Germans were being exterminated, good things were happening elsewhere in the world. In the west, women who worked necessary jobs in factories earned a decent living and started a movement for equal rights for women that is still going on today. The Jews that survived got a country of their own a few years after the war, something they had not been able to accomplish for themselves for the previous 3000 years. The powers of the world came together as never before to defeat evil.
Just as Marcus Aurelius said that we will face the future as it comes to us with the same weapons of reason that we use today, we must use the weapons of reason we have available to us today. Or we will make the world a worse place to live, unsafe, unhealthy, unlivable for our children and grandchildren.
Our weapons of reason that help us to cope with today must make us realize that good things are happening in the world each day, even we if don't read about them. We must reason that just because our media report almost exclusively bad news does not mean that the world itself is getting worse. They just report what many people want to hear. Paris Hilton makes the news when she sneezes (and maybe her dress has a "wardrobe malfunction"), but we hear nothing about the millions of good people around the world and in our own communities who are doing good deeds and making good things happen every day.
It's important that we heed Marcus Aurelius's advice about the future. It won't be as bad as the fear mongers want us to believe (they make their living scaring people, remember, rather than getting "real" jobs). And the present isn't as bad as almost every source of information we have make it out to be.
We need to use our weapons of reason every day of our life, not just about the future. The more we refuse to find out information about what is really going on in the world and decline to use our powers of reason when we learn it, the worse the world will become and the worse our own lives will become.
Not learning and not thinking is what will make the world really worse. Bad guys can easily manipulate the thinking and voting of people who are ignorant and who don't want to think for themselves, who depend on others to think and to tell them what to think and believe.
We have the power within us, even those of us with the poorest of education and the most dire of backgrounds. It doesn't cost a thing to use it. We just have to try.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can think for themselves about subjects other than the limited ones taught in schools.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, nicknamed "the wise" Roman Emperor, (121 CE - 180 CE)
An emperor of Rome, indeed the leader of any country up to modern times, would need to be sanguine about the future because the chances of his having his head detached from the rest of his body before that body was worn out stood exceedingly high.
What about old Julius? He certainly couldn't have used all of his weapons of reason when he allowed his formerly trusted ally Brutus and his gang to slay him. Actually, he likely did. To the best of his ability.
Julius was a very ill man, suffering from a great deal of pain and loss of his abilities of perception due to disease at the time of his death. It's entirely possible that he did the equivalent of falling on his sword, just to put himself out of misery. He knew he was too sick to rule Rome, to give it his best. Yet his honour forbade him from committing suicide, even if it be for the good of Rome. It's highly likely that he knew what was about to happen when he met privately with his "enemies."
In other words, we now know that Julius Caesar likely used the best of his mental faculties to do what was best for both himself and for Rome. History hasn't recorded the event of his death that way, but history has a way of relating what its teller wants to the story to be.
Marcus Aurelius must also have used his abundant mental faculties during his almost two decades as emperor of Rome (actually king, as Rome did not call anyone an emperor). His reign was the ultimate example of Pax Romana and his death brought turmoil as to who should lead the greatest empire the world had known until then (later the British Empire was greatest in history, covering one-quarter of our planet's surface at one time).
Though Christians were still persecuted in his time in theory, in practice they seldom were. Rome (undoubtedly a brutal regime in many ways, though hardly the worst in history) really was fairly peaceful during Marcus's reign. It would have required considerable weapons of reason to make peace so effectively that the period was given its own name.
So we turn to ourselves. Every media outlet in the western world and most in other parts of the world report almost daily about how bad conditions are in the world. I have heard many young people from North America say that they don't plan to have children because the world is just getting worse and they couldn't in all good conscience bring children into such tragedy.
The world must be getting worse, just listen to our media tell us. But it's not so.
No point in history has ever been so peaceful, with such a great percentage of people living long lives, healthier than their ancestors, in human history. The media always tell us that the world is a terrible place and leave us to conclude that the future will surely be worse. Neither is true.
Even during the dreaded Holocaust, when millions of Jews, cripples, people with much lower than average intelligence and people who simply pissed off the Germans were being exterminated, good things were happening elsewhere in the world. In the west, women who worked necessary jobs in factories earned a decent living and started a movement for equal rights for women that is still going on today. The Jews that survived got a country of their own a few years after the war, something they had not been able to accomplish for themselves for the previous 3000 years. The powers of the world came together as never before to defeat evil.
Just as Marcus Aurelius said that we will face the future as it comes to us with the same weapons of reason that we use today, we must use the weapons of reason we have available to us today. Or we will make the world a worse place to live, unsafe, unhealthy, unlivable for our children and grandchildren.
Our weapons of reason that help us to cope with today must make us realize that good things are happening in the world each day, even we if don't read about them. We must reason that just because our media report almost exclusively bad news does not mean that the world itself is getting worse. They just report what many people want to hear. Paris Hilton makes the news when she sneezes (and maybe her dress has a "wardrobe malfunction"), but we hear nothing about the millions of good people around the world and in our own communities who are doing good deeds and making good things happen every day.
It's important that we heed Marcus Aurelius's advice about the future. It won't be as bad as the fear mongers want us to believe (they make their living scaring people, remember, rather than getting "real" jobs). And the present isn't as bad as almost every source of information we have make it out to be.
We need to use our weapons of reason every day of our life, not just about the future. The more we refuse to find out information about what is really going on in the world and decline to use our powers of reason when we learn it, the worse the world will become and the worse our own lives will become.
Not learning and not thinking is what will make the world really worse. Bad guys can easily manipulate the thinking and voting of people who are ignorant and who don't want to think for themselves, who depend on others to think and to tell them what to think and believe.
We have the power within us, even those of us with the poorest of education and the most dire of backgrounds. It doesn't cost a thing to use it. We just have to try.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can think for themselves about subjects other than the limited ones taught in schools.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Friday, July 04, 2008
Do You Know Who's Bending Your Mind?
By the age of six the average child will have completed the basic Americaneducation. ... From television, the child will have learned how to pick alock, commit a fairly elaborate bank holdup, prevent wetness all day long,get the laundry twice as white, and kill people with a variety ofsophisticated armaments.
- Russell Baker, columnist and author (b.1925)
Could Baker possibly be right? Is it that easy? Surely making contact with people who could facilitate any of the illegal situations he mentioned would prevent most people from even considering the acts as possibilities.
Children six years old can find people who will sell them marijuana and other drugs, right outside of their schools in some cases.
Anyone who knows how to use the internet can contact someone who will provide them with anything. Of course you, who are reading this, would not likely search for a web site that offers plans to make a dirty bomb, or access to fissionable materials, or war weapons of any description. You don't want those things, so you assume that no one else does either, other than very bad people.
You may even assume that web sites that offer free education within a warm brotherly group of people who will support the joiner every step of the way (perhaps until the person ignites the explosives strapped to his or her chest) are monitored by government agencies somewhere. And they are. Some. But new ones come into existence every day.
No law enforcement agency can act to indict until they gather enough evidence to prosecute the perpetrators and put them behind bars. How often do you hear of that happening? Rarely, if ever? Yet there are dozens of sites waiting to "help" people out there. (A majority of suicide bombers are rural young people who go to the city and find thsemselves lonely, without jobs or friends.)
Russell Baker was only partly right about television being the primary source for "basic American education." What the television also purveys is propaganda (called advertising) designed to help people fall into a dependent lifestyle where they believe they need various kinds of products to make them beautiful or young, or at least to smell good all day long.
Television has nothing on the internet as a source for information and even products that most of us would call totally anti-social.
In general, what we call terrorists gather together into cults based on contacts they make over the internet. Criminals source whatever materials they need without having to see the supplier using the internet. Charitable organizations find people willing to contribute to worthy causes on the internet, though the organizations themselves may be bankers for terrorist organizations.
Organized crime gangs are the source for most of the spam we receive in our email inboxes. Yes, that same spam that takes so much of your time to delete. Yes, including the young girls who are bored and want to talk to lonely men by email: "Here's my email address!" Write so I can learn that yours is a valid address. Yes, the same outfits that send heart wrenching messages with cutesy graphics that ask you to forward it to everyone you know (and, by the way, never remove the email addresses that came with them because those emails call home to the gangs with all those addresses).
Does that mean we should close down the internet entirely and return to a simpler time? It couldn't happen. For one thing, the very organized crime gangs that send the spam and gather personal information have enough money to bribe enough politicians and bureaucrats to prevent the internet from being closed down.
Should we have a new version of the internet that is monitored by authorities to ensure that nothing bad is available to people? A new form of internet is coming, but it won't have those safeguards. The bad guys will cry "invasion of privacy" and "loss of our constitutional freedoms" in the media and in advertising so no future internet will ever be safe. They will get good people they can dupe to do the crying job for them.
I get very little spam on my computer. I could count on my fingers the number of times it gets hit with viruses, spyware or malware. Why? Because I know what to expect from the internet and I avoid the kinds of activities that will cause me grief.
Can everyone's computer be as free of viruses, malware, spam, trojans and disk-destroying codes as mine? Yes. That would require everyone to learn what I know and what others who operate their computers safely on the internet know.
Having everyone know that much requires our education systems to teach this information. It requires parents to encourage school boards to put it in their curriculum. Parents will never know enough and will never be able to keep up with advancements in technology (including rogue computer code) so it would have to be taught in classrooms.
That's not likely to happen either. Our culture teaches us not to take responsibility for anyone but ourselves. And maybe our children, which some do obsessively, making the kids permanently paranoid. Look at the number of people who daily harm their own health with tobacco, drugs, alcohol, lack of exercise and self-adopted stress to see that many people don't even look after their own best interests.
Don't expect those people to help you change school curriculum. Or to change anything.
When was the last time someone consulted you about what should be placed on the curriculum of the schools in your area? Likely never. A few people make decisions like those with very little input from outside, even from politicians.
Find out who makes the major decisions within your local school system, your department or ministry of education. Propose these ideas at political meetings where politicians meet the people, such as before elections. Speak to the leaders of Home and School associations in your area. These people can all work behind the scenes to make changes happen.
Don't go to the head of the local elected school board or the director of the local school system. These people effectively have no influence over curriculum decisions. They will listen to you, then ignore your requests.
Curriculum change is a political issue, not an education issue. If you want change, you must act in a political way. Acting in a reasonable way with well reasoned arguments with the wrong people (those who don't matter) will gain you nothing but frustration.
It doesn't require a revolution to change school curriculum. It requires people to talk about the subject they want changed, and talk and talk until enough people know about the need for change that the decision makers in the back rooms decide it's a good idea.
Change is hard, which is why school curriculum changes very little over long periods of time (though its methods of presentation change). Talking is easy.
So talk. Tell others you talk to to spread the word around as well.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who won't be naive victims of bad guys who sound really good on the television or over the internet.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Russell Baker, columnist and author (b.1925)
Could Baker possibly be right? Is it that easy? Surely making contact with people who could facilitate any of the illegal situations he mentioned would prevent most people from even considering the acts as possibilities.
Children six years old can find people who will sell them marijuana and other drugs, right outside of their schools in some cases.
Anyone who knows how to use the internet can contact someone who will provide them with anything. Of course you, who are reading this, would not likely search for a web site that offers plans to make a dirty bomb, or access to fissionable materials, or war weapons of any description. You don't want those things, so you assume that no one else does either, other than very bad people.
You may even assume that web sites that offer free education within a warm brotherly group of people who will support the joiner every step of the way (perhaps until the person ignites the explosives strapped to his or her chest) are monitored by government agencies somewhere. And they are. Some. But new ones come into existence every day.
No law enforcement agency can act to indict until they gather enough evidence to prosecute the perpetrators and put them behind bars. How often do you hear of that happening? Rarely, if ever? Yet there are dozens of sites waiting to "help" people out there. (A majority of suicide bombers are rural young people who go to the city and find thsemselves lonely, without jobs or friends.)
Russell Baker was only partly right about television being the primary source for "basic American education." What the television also purveys is propaganda (called advertising) designed to help people fall into a dependent lifestyle where they believe they need various kinds of products to make them beautiful or young, or at least to smell good all day long.
Television has nothing on the internet as a source for information and even products that most of us would call totally anti-social.
In general, what we call terrorists gather together into cults based on contacts they make over the internet. Criminals source whatever materials they need without having to see the supplier using the internet. Charitable organizations find people willing to contribute to worthy causes on the internet, though the organizations themselves may be bankers for terrorist organizations.
Organized crime gangs are the source for most of the spam we receive in our email inboxes. Yes, that same spam that takes so much of your time to delete. Yes, including the young girls who are bored and want to talk to lonely men by email: "Here's my email address!" Write so I can learn that yours is a valid address. Yes, the same outfits that send heart wrenching messages with cutesy graphics that ask you to forward it to everyone you know (and, by the way, never remove the email addresses that came with them because those emails call home to the gangs with all those addresses).
Does that mean we should close down the internet entirely and return to a simpler time? It couldn't happen. For one thing, the very organized crime gangs that send the spam and gather personal information have enough money to bribe enough politicians and bureaucrats to prevent the internet from being closed down.
Should we have a new version of the internet that is monitored by authorities to ensure that nothing bad is available to people? A new form of internet is coming, but it won't have those safeguards. The bad guys will cry "invasion of privacy" and "loss of our constitutional freedoms" in the media and in advertising so no future internet will ever be safe. They will get good people they can dupe to do the crying job for them.
I get very little spam on my computer. I could count on my fingers the number of times it gets hit with viruses, spyware or malware. Why? Because I know what to expect from the internet and I avoid the kinds of activities that will cause me grief.
Can everyone's computer be as free of viruses, malware, spam, trojans and disk-destroying codes as mine? Yes. That would require everyone to learn what I know and what others who operate their computers safely on the internet know.
Having everyone know that much requires our education systems to teach this information. It requires parents to encourage school boards to put it in their curriculum. Parents will never know enough and will never be able to keep up with advancements in technology (including rogue computer code) so it would have to be taught in classrooms.
That's not likely to happen either. Our culture teaches us not to take responsibility for anyone but ourselves. And maybe our children, which some do obsessively, making the kids permanently paranoid. Look at the number of people who daily harm their own health with tobacco, drugs, alcohol, lack of exercise and self-adopted stress to see that many people don't even look after their own best interests.
Don't expect those people to help you change school curriculum. Or to change anything.
When was the last time someone consulted you about what should be placed on the curriculum of the schools in your area? Likely never. A few people make decisions like those with very little input from outside, even from politicians.
Find out who makes the major decisions within your local school system, your department or ministry of education. Propose these ideas at political meetings where politicians meet the people, such as before elections. Speak to the leaders of Home and School associations in your area. These people can all work behind the scenes to make changes happen.
Don't go to the head of the local elected school board or the director of the local school system. These people effectively have no influence over curriculum decisions. They will listen to you, then ignore your requests.
Curriculum change is a political issue, not an education issue. If you want change, you must act in a political way. Acting in a reasonable way with well reasoned arguments with the wrong people (those who don't matter) will gain you nothing but frustration.
It doesn't require a revolution to change school curriculum. It requires people to talk about the subject they want changed, and talk and talk until enough people know about the need for change that the decision makers in the back rooms decide it's a good idea.
Change is hard, which is why school curriculum changes very little over long periods of time (though its methods of presentation change). Talking is easy.
So talk. Tell others you talk to to spread the word around as well.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who won't be naive victims of bad guys who sound really good on the television or over the internet.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Sunday, March 25, 2007
The Only Way To Succeed
"I’d spent my whole life feeling like a freak and an outsider and that nobody understood me and suddenly I felt like it's OK to feel different."
- Madonna
You may have wondered how the performer who has reinventd herself several times to remain among the leaders of the music industry got to be the way she is.
She knew something special. She knew that she had to be among the best in her field--whatever field she chose to enter--and she committed herself to work extremely hard to the best of her ability to reach that goal and to stay there.
That may seem trite, that someone has to work hard. But in Madonna's case she worked hard in a field in which she was considered an outsider, because she was a woman, because she was aggressive, because she was talented, because she was bright and because she would not allow anyone to put her down. She was determined to be who she wanted to be.
Not many people can say that they plotted the course for their lives and have followed it through relentlessly. The reason is that most of us face too many setbacks that cause us to take detours, so many that we lose our way and become someone we didn't plan to be.
Staying the course for a lifetime is very difficult because there are always people who want to divert us, for their own reasons and often for their own benefit. Ignoring the naysayers requires a kind of devotion of its own, one in which a person must develop a kind of emotional armour to let attacks against them bounce off while they continue on their chosen path.
No doubt detours will happen along the way. Life's detours get most people lost from their course. Those who eventually reach their goals find their way back to the direction they were headed after every detour. Every time.
Along the way they find others who want to either join them or to support them. They become the few good friends that persistent goal-seekers have.
Those who succeed at anything always have fair-weather supporters and hangers-on friends. These are accepted with gratitude, with the understanding that they will disappear again when the going gets rough again.
The going has got rough again many times for Madonna. Recently it was because she wanted to adopt a child from Africa. The media searched endlessly for some way to trash what she wanted to do. To help the media, several people were prepared to lie along the way to get their share of attention.
She will win again because her attitude is "To hell with the naysayers and the trash media!"
Sometimes winners can only succeed by turning and walking away from detractors. Over the long term, the critics disappear while the winners continue on. The winners work harder and never lose sight of their goal.
Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to shine a light on the path through the mess that life can sometimes become.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Madonna
You may have wondered how the performer who has reinventd herself several times to remain among the leaders of the music industry got to be the way she is.
She knew something special. She knew that she had to be among the best in her field--whatever field she chose to enter--and she committed herself to work extremely hard to the best of her ability to reach that goal and to stay there.
That may seem trite, that someone has to work hard. But in Madonna's case she worked hard in a field in which she was considered an outsider, because she was a woman, because she was aggressive, because she was talented, because she was bright and because she would not allow anyone to put her down. She was determined to be who she wanted to be.
Not many people can say that they plotted the course for their lives and have followed it through relentlessly. The reason is that most of us face too many setbacks that cause us to take detours, so many that we lose our way and become someone we didn't plan to be.
Staying the course for a lifetime is very difficult because there are always people who want to divert us, for their own reasons and often for their own benefit. Ignoring the naysayers requires a kind of devotion of its own, one in which a person must develop a kind of emotional armour to let attacks against them bounce off while they continue on their chosen path.
No doubt detours will happen along the way. Life's detours get most people lost from their course. Those who eventually reach their goals find their way back to the direction they were headed after every detour. Every time.
Along the way they find others who want to either join them or to support them. They become the few good friends that persistent goal-seekers have.
Those who succeed at anything always have fair-weather supporters and hangers-on friends. These are accepted with gratitude, with the understanding that they will disappear again when the going gets rough again.
The going has got rough again many times for Madonna. Recently it was because she wanted to adopt a child from Africa. The media searched endlessly for some way to trash what she wanted to do. To help the media, several people were prepared to lie along the way to get their share of attention.
She will win again because her attitude is "To hell with the naysayers and the trash media!"
Sometimes winners can only succeed by turning and walking away from detractors. Over the long term, the critics disappear while the winners continue on. The winners work harder and never lose sight of their goal.
Bill Allin
Turning it Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to shine a light on the path through the mess that life can sometimes become.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Monday, January 22, 2007
Why Make Friends When Things Are Going Well?
"The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining."
- John F. Kennedy
The old song Manana (Spanish word with ~ over the first n) comes to mind. Why fix the roof on such a sunny day? Kennedy's reference was to that song.
Why fix the roof indeed when the rain is not pouring in on top of us? In other words, why fuss about problems with relatives, friends, neighbours (be they personal or at the state level) when all is going well otherwise?
The answer of course is that the midst of a crisis is not the time to worry about patching up relationships. We need to do repairs when it's possible to do them with less risk than during a crisis.
The present situation with the US is an excellent example. Its friends are those countries with whom the US has courted good relationships over the past decade or more. Its enemies are those it has insulted or viewed with suspicion (if it gave them any attention at all) over the same period. In time of war, the US could not count on any non-friends to join it in its invasion of Iraq.
The recent US friendly relationship with India follows many years of courtship during the Clinton years. The US has trade to offer to India today, but it offered respect during the Clinton years. The years of respect led to the new trade relationship. Respect built trust.
When we have a personal crisis, such as a crisis between two friends, it's hard to patch things up on the spot. With the passage of time, it may be easier, but we then would have moved on to focus on other matters and other people. Yet that smoother time would be the ideal time to rekindle the friendship because there would be no conflict involved.
Failure to do that can mean a dwindling number of friends, whether they be friendly people or friendly nations.
The best time to make friends and to re-empower old ones is when things are going well for us.
But don't depend on the media to tell us when times are good. For the media, there is no such thing as a good time. Every period is always worse than previous ones.
Assess your own good times and act on them to build while you have the time and ability.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to show the difference between real life and what the media report.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- John F. Kennedy
The old song Manana (Spanish word with ~ over the first n) comes to mind. Why fix the roof on such a sunny day? Kennedy's reference was to that song.
Why fix the roof indeed when the rain is not pouring in on top of us? In other words, why fuss about problems with relatives, friends, neighbours (be they personal or at the state level) when all is going well otherwise?
The answer of course is that the midst of a crisis is not the time to worry about patching up relationships. We need to do repairs when it's possible to do them with less risk than during a crisis.
The present situation with the US is an excellent example. Its friends are those countries with whom the US has courted good relationships over the past decade or more. Its enemies are those it has insulted or viewed with suspicion (if it gave them any attention at all) over the same period. In time of war, the US could not count on any non-friends to join it in its invasion of Iraq.
The recent US friendly relationship with India follows many years of courtship during the Clinton years. The US has trade to offer to India today, but it offered respect during the Clinton years. The years of respect led to the new trade relationship. Respect built trust.
When we have a personal crisis, such as a crisis between two friends, it's hard to patch things up on the spot. With the passage of time, it may be easier, but we then would have moved on to focus on other matters and other people. Yet that smoother time would be the ideal time to rekindle the friendship because there would be no conflict involved.
Failure to do that can mean a dwindling number of friends, whether they be friendly people or friendly nations.
The best time to make friends and to re-empower old ones is when things are going well for us.
But don't depend on the media to tell us when times are good. For the media, there is no such thing as a good time. Every period is always worse than previous ones.
Assess your own good times and act on them to build while you have the time and ability.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to show the difference between real life and what the media report.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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