When Did We Last Walk a Mile in Someone Else's Shoes

 

I was lucky to be invited by a work colleague of mine to a meet-and-greet with state representatives last month. Both were Republicans representing districts in or adjacent to big cities, one in western Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh and one in Northeast Philadelphia. Given how divisive things have become in politics, at a national and state and local level, someone asked during Q&A just what does it look like to work across the aisle to get things done for the state. Both politicians gave answers along the lines of making it a point to physically go to different parts of the state to meet people, for what better way to see and understand concerns at the human level so that they can use their political power to do something about it. 

It's a good answer, but one that is harder to actually than to just say. Hat tip to these two electeds for practicing what they preach, as I know they log a lot of miles, oftentimes away from their loved ones and their own constituents, in order to see firsthand what is happening all throughout the diverse communities that make up the state of Pennsylvania. 

Now, not all of us are elected officials charged with the wellbeing of an entire state. But, to the extent that we are both politically informed and want to make a difference in our generation, I think the same invitation to “walk a mile in my shoes” applies. It is all too common for all of us to lament that things don’t get done, that politics has become so toxic, and that the other side just doesn’t get it. But very few of us get to truly enclave ourselves among those just like us with no need to influence or be influenced by others not like us. 

Of course we may try. Where we live, where we bring our kids to play, and who we hang out with on Saturday night may feel like a comfort zone of others who think like us and share the same complaints and aspirations as we do. But the thing about our modern political system is that there’s no escaping the fact that everything that makes up our lives is influenced by political bodies that consist of people we voted for and people we didn’t vote for. Philadelphia, as blue a city as they come, is within the United States, whose president is the Republican candidate Donald Trump. Rural Pennsylvanians may not have any concentrations of Democrats for miles and miles, but their wellbeing is influenced in part by how well our largely blue metro areas are doing in industry and health care (and those largely blue metro areas, in turn, are depending on the reddest parts of this state for things essential to life, like energy and food). 

But here I’m speaking about relatively complicated things, which not all of us have bandwidth to weigh, like economic development policy and tax mix and immigration reform. More simply, how often have we truly walked a mile in the shoes of those whose political positions are diametrically different than ours? If you are a city mouse, would you not want country mice to see that our urban areas are not cesspools of crime and corruption but rather cathedrals of commerce and culture? If you are a country mouse, would you not want city mice to see what a more rural existence looks like, to better understand what your concerns are and why you hold them? 

I assume I am speaking to a more metro than rural audience, but let’s start with those country mice. When was the last time you spend more than 24 hours in a city, and really walked amongst its streets without getting into a car or holing up in a hotel room? If it's been a while, yet you hold negative opinions of such places informed by media or friends, how is that fair?

Now let me address the city mice. Tell me, when was the last time you hunted or fished or farmed or done any number of activities far from tall buildings and cell towers? Maybe it's been a while? Maybe never? Maybe not only never but "oh god I would never"? If so, how can you possibly claim to know or care about those different from you?

We are the fulfillment of our own worst fears of a divided society and the stalemate that causes in getting important stuff done, because we refuse to go to places different from what we’re used to. Kudos to the two state representatives I met last month. Sure, it’s partly their job to travel the state. But they were the first to say not all of their colleagues on both sides of the aisle share that commitment. Let’s hope more of them, and more of us, are more willing.

A Nation of Process, A Nation of Action

 

 

A central point of the controversial book, “Abundance,” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is that the modern Democratic Party has become the party of process rather than the party of action. As avowed left-leaning thought leaders, Klein and Thompson lament that Democrats are the ones who want government to do things for people and communities, and yet when Democrats are in power too often they block rather than stoke progress. 

I don’t agree with everything in their book, but I do see this dynamic play out at a national level with the actions of the occupant of the White House and the media response to those actions. Donald Trump is a divisive figure in many ways, of course, from his bombastic image to his reckless comments to his vindictive ways. But one way he is engendering both applause and condemnation is by flouting process and taking action. For example. the East Wing renovation project and the military capture of the president of Venezuela come to mind as recent events that provoked both horror and celebration that process was subordinated to action.

Some of this must come from his being uncontrollably impulsive and massively egotistical. But I suspect some of this comes from the fact that the majority of America prefers action over process. I can’t quite say if this has always been the case or if it is a more recent phenomenon borne of Democratic inaction at all levels. Either way, I find it utterly predictable and potentially catastrophic. 

We are absolutely, as a young nation that is now about to turn 250, a nation of action. Restless, churning, ambitious action has characterized our country since its inception. We announced our independence from and then fought a war against the then greatest nation in the world, led the planet through both an industrial revolution and then a technological one, and for better or worse have thrown our military weight around in every corner of the globe. It is not surprising that the citizens of such a republic would want their elected leaders to “get sh*t done,” not debate policies and hold committee meetings. 

However, and this is a big “however.” We are also a nation of process. “Checks and balances” is a cheat code for reining in man’s worst impulses and fostering political stability. There are many instances throughout history in which power has been vested in one person and that person is able to make war and seize property and subjugate entire communities. Americans hate that kind of political form. Process is a dear value deeply embedded in our DNA. 

“Process” and “action” can go together but often come in conflict. China is responsible for massive human rights violations AND its centralized form of government allows it to build out infrastructure to link and power a vast country. California is a leader in progressive policies designed to protect equality and the environment, but it has not been able to build a single mile of high-speed rail in over a generation. 

I am as horrified at a government that is all process, no action as one that is all action, no process. But I am not surprised when we have the former type and some are happy and others aren’t, nor am I surprised when we have the latter type and some are happy and others aren’t. What I wonder about is if we can find it in our republic to hold our leaders to account to run a government that respects process and compels action. That is, I think, what we truly want. It is when we are not offered it, and instead only offered one extreme or the other, that we differ in what we prefer. Right now, Donald Trump is deeply unpopular with some and quite popular with others, and I think that is the reason for that.

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence," by Michael Pollan.

I filed that story away, until a year or two later, when Judith and I found ourselves at a dinner party at a big house in the Berkeley Hills, seated at a long table with a dozen or so people, when a woman at the far end of the table began talking about her acid trips. She looked to be about my age and, I learned, was a prominent psychologist. I was engrossed in a different conversation at the time, but as soon as the phonemes L-S-D drifted down to my end of the table, I couldn’t help but cup my ear (literally) and try to tune in. 

At first, I assumed she was dredging up some well-polished anecdote from her college days. Not the case. It soon became clear that the acid trip in question had taken place only days or weeks before, and in fact was one of her first. The assembled eyebrows rose. She and her husband, a retired software engineer, had found the occasional use of LSD both intellectually stimulating and of value to their work. Specifically, the psychologist felt that LSD gave her insight into how young children perceive the world. Kids’ perceptions are not mediated by expectations and conventions in the been-there, done-that way that adult perception is; as adults, she explained, our minds don’t simply take in the world as it is so much as they make educated guesses about it. Relying on these guesses, which are based on past experience, saves the mind time and energy, as when, say, it’s trying to figure out what that fractal pattern of green dots in its visual field might be. (The leaves on a tree, probably.) LSD appears to disable such conventionalized, shorthand modes of perception and, by doing so, restores a childlike immediacy, and sense of wonder, to our experience of reality, as if we were seeing everything for the first time. (Leaves!) 

I piped up to ask if she had any plans to write about these ideas, which riveted everyone at the table. She laughed and gave me a look that I took to say, How naive can you be? LSD is a schedule I substance, meaning the government regards it as a drug of abuse with no accepted medical use. Surely it would be foolhardy for someone in her position to suggest, in print, that psychedelics might have anything to contribute to philosophy or psychology—that they might actually be a valuable tool for exploring the mysteries of human consciousness. Serious research into psychedelics had been more or less purged from the university fifty years ago, soon after Timothy Leary’s Harvard Psilocybin Project crashed and burned in 1963. Not even Berkeley, it seemed, was ready to go there again, at least not yet.

On occasion, the LSD produced genuine insight, as it did for Brand himself one chilly afternoon in the spring of 1966. Bored, he went up onto the roof of his building in North Beach and took a hundred micrograms of acid—Fadiman’s creativity dose. As he looked toward downtown while wrapped in a blanket, it appeared that the streets lined with buildings were not quite parallel. This must be due to the curvature of Earth, Brand decided. It occurred to him that when we think of Earth as flat, as we usually do, we assume it is infinite, and we treat its resources that way. “The relationship to infinity is to use it up,” he thought, “but a round earth was a finite spaceship you had to manage carefully.” At least that’s how it appeared to him that afternoon, “from three stories and one hundred mikes up.” 

It would change everything if he could convey this to people! But how? He flashed on the space program and wondered, “Why haven’t we seen a picture of the earth from space? I become fixed on this, on how to get this photo that would revolutionize our understanding of our place in the universe. I know, I’ll make a button! But what should it say? ‘Let’s have a photo of the earth from space.’ No, it needs to be a question, and maybe a little paranoid—draw on that American resource. ‘Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?’” 

Brand came down from his roof and launched a campaign that eventually reached the halls of Congress and NASA. Who knows if it was the direct result of Brand’s campaign, but two years later, in 1968, the Apollo astronauts turned their cameras around and gave us the first photograph of Earth from the moon, and Stewart Brand gave us the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. Did everything change? The case could be made that it had.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams," by Matthew Walker.

Through speech or song, expecting parents will often thrill at their ability to elicit small kicks and movements from their in utero child. Though you should never tell them this, the baby is most likely fast asleep. Prior to birth, a human infant will spend almost all of its time in a sleep-like state, much of which resembles the REM-sleep state. The sleeping fetus is therefore unaware of its parents’ performative machinations. Any co-occurring arm flicks and leg bops that the mother feels from her baby are most likely to be the consequence of random bursts of brain activity that typify REM sleep. 

Adults do not—or at least should not—throw out similar nighttime kicks and movements, since they are held back by the body-paralyzing mechanism of REM sleep. But in utero, the immature fetus’s brain has yet to construct the REM-sleep muscle-inhibiting system adults have in place. Other deep centers of the fetus brain have, however, already been glued in place, including those that generate sleep. Indeed, by the end of the second trimester of development (approximately week 23 of pregnancy), the vast majority of the neural dials and switches required to produce NREM and REM sleep have been sculpted out and wired up. As a result of this mismatch, the fetus brain still generates formidable motor commands during REM sleep, except there is no paralysis to hold them back. Without restraint, those commands are freely translated into frenetic body movements, felt by the mother as acrobatic kicks and featherweight punches. 

At this stage of in utero development, most of the time is spent in sleep. The twenty-four-hour period contains a mishmash of approximately six hours of NREM sleep, six hours of REM sleep, and twelve hours of an intermediary sleep state that we cannot confidently say is REM or NREM sleep, but certainly is not full wakefulness. It is only when the fetus enters the final trimester that the glimmers of real wakefulness emerge. Far less than you would probably imagine, though—just two to three hours of each day are spent awake in the womb.

Perhaps more remarkable, as we analyzed the sleep-spindle bursts of activity, we observed a strikingly reliable loop of electrical current pulsing throughout the brain that repeated every 100 to 200 milliseconds. The pulses kept weaving a path back and forth between the hippocampus, with its short-term, limited storage space, and the far larger, long-term storage site of the cortex (analogous to a large-memory hard drive).II In that moment, we had just become privy to an electrical transaction occurring in the quiet secrecy of sleep: one that was shifting fact-based memories from the temporary storage depot (the hippocampus) to a long-term secure vault (the cortex). In doing so, sleep had delightfully cleared out the hippocampus, replenishing this short-term information repository with plentiful free space. Participants awoke with a refreshed capacity to absorb new information within the hippocampus, having relocated yesterday’s imprinted experiences to a more permanent safe hold. The learning of new facts could begin again, anew, the following day.

I went on to test participants inside a brain scanner after they had slept, and could see how this delightful skill benefit had been achieved. Sleep had again transferred the memories, but the results were different from that for textbook-like memory. Rather than a transfer from short- to long-term memory required for saving facts, the motor memories had been shifted over to brain circuits that operate below the level of consciousness. As a result, those skill actions were now instinctual habits. They flowed out of the body with ease, rather than feeling effortful and deliberate. Which is to say that sleep helped the brain automate the movement routines, making them second nature—effortless—precisely the goal of many an Olympic coach when perfecting the skills of their elite athletes.

I therefore wondered whether the brain during REM sleep was reprocessing upsetting memory experiences and themes in this neurochemically calm (low noradrenaline), “safe” dreaming brain environment. Is the REM-sleep dreaming state a perfectly designed nocturnal soothing balm—one that removes the emotional sharp edges of our daily lives? It seemed so from everything neurobiology and neurophysiology was telling us (me). If so, we should awake feeling better about distressing events of the day(s) prior. This was the theory of overnight therapy. It postulated that the process of REM-sleep dreaming accomplishes two critical goals: (1) sleeping to remember the details of those valuable, salient experiences, integrating them with existing knowledge and putting them into autobiographical perspective, yet (2) sleeping to forget, or dissolve, the visceral, painful emotional charge that had previously been wrapped around those memories. If true, it would suggest that the dream state supports a form of introspective life review, to therapeutic ends.

The giant insurance company Aetna, which has almost fifty thousand employees, has instituted the option of bonuses for getting more sleep, based on verified sleep-tracker data. As Aetna chairman and CEO Mark Bertolini described, “Being present in the workplace and making better decisions has a lot to do with our business fundamentals.” He further noted, “You can’t be prepared if you’re half asleep.” If workers string together twenty seven-hour nights of sleep or more in a row, they receive a twenty-five-dollar-per-night bonus, for a (capped) total of five hundred dollars. 

Some may scoff at Bertolini’s incentive system, but developing a new business culture that takes care of the entire life cycle of an employee, night and day, is as economically prudent as it is compassionate. Bertolini seems to know that the net company benefit of a well-slept employee is considerable. The return on the sleep investment in terms of productivity, creativity, work enthusiasm, energy, efficiency—not to mention happiness, leading to people wanting to work at your institution, and stay—is undeniable. Bertolini’s empirically justified wisdom overrides misconceptions about grinding down employees with sixteen- to eighteen-hour workdays, burning them out in a model of disposability and declining productivity, littered with sick days, all the while triggering low morale and high turnover rates.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard," by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.

Usually these topics are treated separately—there is “change management” advice for executives and “self-help” advice for individuals and “change the world” advice for activists. That’s a shame, because all change efforts have something in common: For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently.

To pursue bright spots is to ask the question “What’s working, and how can we do more of it?” Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: “What’s broken, and how do we fix it?”

If you are a manager, ask yourself: “What is the ratio of the time I spend solving problems to the time I spend scaling successes?” 

We need to switch from archaeological problem solving to bright-spot evangelizing.

When you’re at the beginning, don’t obsess about the middle, because the middle is going to look different once you get there. Just look for a strong beginning and a strong ending and get moving.

The growth mindset, then, is a buffer against defeatism. It reframes failure as a natural part of the change process. And that’s critical, because people will persevere only if they perceive falling down as learning rather than as failing.

Perhaps her most distinctive change, though, was to the grading system. Under her new system the only grades offered at Jefferson County High School were: A, B, C, and NY. 

Not Yet. 

In Howard’s view, the students at Jefferson had accepted a “culture of failure.” In a fixed-mindset way, they acted as though they were failures to the bone. Students often didn’t do their homework, or they turned in shoddy work. Getting a D or an F was an easy way out in a way. They might get a poor grade, but at least they would be done. 

In the new system, the students couldn’t stop until they’d cleared the bar. “We define up front to the kids what’s an A, B, and C,” said Howard. “If they do substandard work, the teacher will say, ‘Not Yet.’ … That gives them the mindset: My teacher thinks I can do better. It changes their expectations.” 

The school was reborn. Students and teachers became more engaged, the school’s graduation rate increased dramatically, and student test scores went up so much that remedial courses were eliminated. In 2008, the National Association of Secondary School Principals declared Howard the U.S. Principal of the Year, out of 48,000 candidates.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law," by Mary Roach

With a predatory attack, the survival strategy is the opposite. The rare predatory bear attack begins quietly, with focused intent. Counter to common assumption, it’s more often a black bear than a grizzly. (Though with both species, predatory attacks are rare.) The bear may be following at a distance, circling around, disappearing and reappearing. If a bear starts to charge with its ears laid flat, you’re the one who needs to look scary. Open your jacket to make yourself look larger. If you’re in a group, get together and yell, so you look like one big, loud creature. “Try to give the message, ‘I am not going to give up without a fight.’ ” Aaron says. “Stomp your feet, throw rocks.” 

The same holds true for an attacking cougar. Take inspiration from the Kansas pioneer N. C. Fancher, who in the spring of 1871 noticed a cougar eyeing him as he stood inspecting a buffalo skeleton. As recounted in Pioneer History of Kansas, Fancher shoved his feet inside the dead buffalo’s horns, banged its femurs over his head while jumping up and down, and “bellowed desperately.” The cougar, and really who wouldn’t, took off. 

And if the animal goes ahead and attacks anyway? “Do whatever you can to fight back,” Aaron says. If it’s a bear, go for the face. Aaron points in the direction of his nose, a red chapped thing. “Don’t play dead.” If you play dead at that point, there’s a good chance you shortly won’t be playing. 

The worst thing you can do in any situation where a predator seems bent on attack is to turn and run. This is especially true with a carnivorous hunter like a cougar, because running (or mountain-biking) away triggers the predator-prey response. It’s like a switch, and once it’s flipped on, it stays on for a surprisingly long time unless a kill is made.

Deaths, when they happen, tend to occur in the half hour or more it takes for the squad to arrive. Upon discovering elephants raiding their crops, villagers rush out of their homes, yelling, throwing stones, lighting torches and firecrackers.† A village may have freelance “elephant chasers” wielding spikes and carrying out other non–Best Practices. Bulls and dominant matriarchs may charge in defense, and normally placid females and calves may panic and stampede. In the dark of unlit fields and paddies, people stumble and fall and elephants are running blind and, as my mother liked to say, somebody’s going to get hurt. 

“The elephant we can guide easily,” says Officer Raj. “To guide the people is the hard part. They are not in the condition to listen.” They’re upset, and that is understandable. Village farmers work hard and have little to show for it. A single Asian elephant may consume three hundred pounds of vegetation in a day. Between the raiding and the trampling, a small herd can quickly torpedo a season’s labor and livelihood. An elephant among the crops is a powerful impetus to unwise action. 

Throw in the wobbly judgment and dimmed impulse control of inebriation, and the results can be dire, Naha says. He squats in front of a speaker, untangling a spaghetti heap of wires. “This is what we see. A group of people are drunk. Someone wants to be the hero, so he goes in front of the animal, harasses it, and that animal in self-defense …” Naha, too, avoids the verb kill, with its undertone of intent. “There is an accident.” By his own data, 36 percent of the people killed by elephants in North Bengal between 2006 and 2016 were drunk. Later, I would see this head-line in the Hindustan Times: “Drunken Man Challenges Elephants’ Herd, Trampled to Death in Jharkhand.” (Jharkhand borders West Bengal.) “He tried to fight with them,” a forest ranger told the reporter. “Them” was eighteen elephants. 

Dangerously, an elephant also enjoys a snort. In North Bengal, elephants drink what the villagers drink: haaria, a home brew fermented and stored in quantities sufficient to inebriate an elephant. (Because elephants lack the main enzyme that breaks down ethanol, it takes less than you’d think.) According to Officer Raj, two things happen when elephants liquor up. Most just stumble away from the herd and sleep it off. But every herd seems to have an aggressive drunk—the matriarch, often, or a bull in musth. Whatever you do in this life, stay away from an inebriated bull elephant in musth.

Shweta points out that people’s ire is for the government as much as for the leopards. If there were school buses, children wouldn’t have to walk two miles at dusk, when the risk of a leopard attack is greatest. If there were hospitals and ambulances, an attack might not mean a life lost. But there are not. A leopard is an expedient outlet for their anger. 

Naha has held awareness camps at many of these villages. He encourages parents to have their children walk home from school in groups. He tries to discourage people from dragging their dead livestock onto the road for the vultures, because the carcasses also attract leopards. Attitudes and behavior change slowly in a small village like this. Twenty years ago, Naha recalls, there were cases of Pauri women being nabbed by leopards as they squatted in the brush to relieve themselves at night. Indoor toilets were eventually built, but people wouldn’t use them at first. “Slowly they are understanding it’s okay to shit indoors.”

Such is the inside-out history of conservation in America. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the word came to mean what it means to us now. Wildlife and wilderness weren’t conserved for their intrinsic value. They were conserved for hunting and fishing. Mighty tracts of wilderness were protected from agricultural and other development to ensure there would always be places and things to hunt and fish. And the ducks were protected from the crows.

Least—or most fleetingly—effective is the stationary predator decoy. The internet abounds with photographs of pigeons roosting on great horned owl replicas and Canada geese relaxing in the shade of fiberglass coyotes. The classic cornfield scarecrow may actually attract birds, because they start to associate it with food. To a flock of migrating blackbirds, it’s the golden arches on the side of the highway, the Bob’s Big Boy sign, a reason to pull off for a large, fattening meal.

Drive Has Always Been the Difference

 

 

 

 

Last month Google announced “Learn Your Way,” which they state will revolutionize the educational experience by providing you with content in different forms that suit your preferred learning style. Millions of users are already using various artificial intelligence tools to do just that, like an ever-patient and all-knowing sidekick who you can feed question after question about things you want to learn more about. These aids will only get better, faster, and cheaper, and probably at an accelerated rate. 

Many are observing this progress and predicting the demise of the university as we know it. After all, isn’t that what college is for? If I can learn anything I want, effectively and instantaneously and cheaply, why would I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and four years of my life instead? 

Leave aside for a second that the traditional university experience has many other purposes, so these are not perfect substitutes. What I want to probe today is that it’s always been the case that the difference-maker for anyone who wants to accomplish anything in life – get a good job, rise up in the ranks, have real influence in the real world – is the drive to want to learn and the discipline to put in the time to learn. 

I have a friend who is a professor and loves the topic he teaches. But he understands that his students are not like him. He spent years studying his area of expertise and is now spending his entire career teaching it, researching it, and soaking it in to his heart’s content. His students, on the other hand, are not on the same track; they just want the class to get the degree, and the degree to get the job, which will in 100 percent of the cases not be as a university professor. 

And that’s ok, for that’s how education works and that’s how sorting works. But, take this to the extreme and see how it can be problematic. If I told you you could go to school for four years, go through the motions of going to class and writing papers and studying for finals, and then get a good job after, well: my friend would be horrified, because it’s the learning that is inherently pleasurable and useful, but most people would take that proposition. 

But how does the world actually work? Does it function through performance and signaling and credentials? Or does it require that people actually do things, which entails knowing how to do them, which in turn entails taking the time to learn how to do them?

 In every generation, there are the go-getters who welcome tools like “Learn Your Way” from Google. They can’t wait to accelerate their knowledge acquisition and put it to productive use solving real problems in the real world. And, in every generation, there are others for whom education is transactional: if I make a show of the educational process, then I get a degree, and if I have a degree, then I can land a job, and if I have a job, then I get a seat in the room when the real decisions are being made. 

AI tools have merely accelerated both the go-getters’ ability to get ready for their future and the slackers’ ability to mime the educational experience. What will that mean for our future productivity and equity? Time will tell.

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Here is an excerpt from a book I recently read, "The Infinite Game," by Simon Sinek.

When we lead with a finite mindset in an infinite game, it leads to all kinds of problems, the most common of which include the decline of trust, cooperation and innovation. Leading with an infinite mindset in an infinite game, in contrast, really does move us in a better direction. Groups that adopt an infinite mindset enjoy vastly higher levels of trust, cooperation and innovation and all the subsequent benefits. If we are all, at various times, players in infinite games, then it is in our interest to learn how to recognize the game we are in and what it takes to lead with an infinite mindset. It is equally important for us to learn to recognize the clues when finite thinking exists so that we can make adjustments before real damage is done.

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way," by Bill Bryson.

No king of England spoke English for the next 300 years. It was not until 1399, with the accession of Henry IV, that England had a ruler whose mother tongue was English. One by one English earls and bishops were replaced by Normans (though in some instances not for several years). French-speaking craftsmen, designers, cooks, scholars, and scribes were brought to Britain. Even so for the common people life went on. They were almost certainly not alarmed that their rulers spoke a foreign tongue. It was a commonplace in the past. Canute from the century before was Danish and even Edward the Confessor, the last but one Anglo-Saxon king, spoke French as his first tongue. As recently as the eighteenth century, England happily installed a German king, George I, even though he spoke not a word of English and reigned for thirteen years without mastering his subjects' language. Common people did not expect to speak like their masters any more than they expected to live like them. Norman society had two tiers: the French-speaking aristocracy and the English-speaking peasantry. Not surprisingly, the linguistic influence of the Normand tended to focus on matters of court, government, fashion, and high living. Meanwhile, the English peasant continued to eat, drink, work, sleep, and play in English.

The breakdown can be illustrated in two ways. First, the more humble trades tended to have Anglo-Saxon names (baker, miller, shoemaker), while the more skilled trades adopted French names (mason, painter, tailor). At the same time, animals in the field usually were called by English names (sheep, cow, ox), but one cooked and brought to the table, they were generally given French names (beef, mutton, veal, bacon).

Perhaps for our last words on the subject of usage we should turn to the last words of the venerable French grammarian, Dominique Bonhours, who proved on his deathbed that a grammarian's work is never done when he gazed at those gathered loyally around him and whispered: "I am about to - or I am going to - die; either expression is used."

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women," by Kate Moore.

Katherine could see that the powder got everywhere; there was dust all over the studio. Even as she watched, little puffs of it seemed to hover in the air before settling on the shoulders or hair of a dial-painter at work. To her astonishment, it made the girls themselves gleam.

Katherine, like many before her, was entranced by it. It wasn’t just the glow — it was radium’s all-powerful reputation. Almost from the start, the new element had been championed as “the greatest find of history.” When scientists had discovered, at the turn of the century, that radium could destroy human tissue, it was quickly put to use to battle cancerous tumors, with remarkable results. Consequently — as a life-saving and thus, it was assumed, health-giving element — other uses had sprung up around it. All of Katherine’s life, radium had been a magnificent cure-all, treating not just cancer, but hay fever, gout, constipation…anything you could think of. Pharmacists sold radioactive dressings and pills; there were also radium clinics and spas for those who could afford them. People hailed its coming as predicted in the Bible: “The sun of righteousness [shall] arise with healing in his wings, and ye shall go forth and gambol as calves of the stall.”

For another claim of radium was that it could restore vitality to the elderly, making “old men young.” One aficionado wrote: “Sometimes I am halfway persuaded that I can feel the sparkles inside my anatomy.” Radium shone “like a good deed in a naughty world.”

Its appeal was quickly exploited by entrepreneurs. Katherine had seen advertisements for one of the most successful products, a radium-lined jar to which water could be added to make it radioactive: wealthy customers drank it as a tonic; the recommended dose was five to seven glasses a day. But as some of the models retailed for $200 ($3,700), it was a product far out of Katherine’s reach. Radium water was drunk by the rich and famous, not working-class girls from Newark.

But her new surroundings didn’t improve her condition. Hazel had no idea what was wrong with her: the weight was dropping off her, she felt weak, and her jaw ached something rotten. She was so concerned that in the end she asked the company doctor at her new firm to examine her, but he was unable to diagnose her illness.

The one thing she could be assured of, at least, was that it wasn’t her work with radium that was the cause. In October 1920, her former employer was featured in the local news. The residue from radium extraction looked like seaside sand, and the company had offloaded this industrial waste by selling it to schools and playgrounds to use in their children’s sandboxes; kids’ shoes were reported to have turned white because of it, while one little boy complained to his mother of a burning sensation in his hands. Yet, in comments that made reassuring reading, von Sochocky pronounced the sand “most hygienic” for children to play in, “more beneficial than the mud of world- renowned curative baths.”

And from that strange white fog Martland now understood another critical concept. Sarah was dead—but her bones seemed very much alive: making impressions on photographic plates; carelessly emitting measurable radioactivity. It was all due, of course, to the radium. Sarah’s own life may have been cut short, but the radium inside her had a half-life of 1,600 years. It would be shooting out its rays from Sarah’s bones for centuries, long after she was gone. Even though it had killed her, it kept on bombarding her body “every day, every week, month after month, year after year.”

It is bombarding her body to this day.

And Grace Fryer was never forgotten. She is still remembered now—you are still remembering her now. As a dial-painter, she glowed gloriously from the radium powder; but as a woman, she shines through history with an even brighter glory: stronger than the bones that broke inside her body; more powerful than the radium that killed her or the company that shamelessly lied through its teeth; living longer than she ever did on earth, because she now lives on in the hearts and memories of those who know her only from her story.

But not everyone was pleased with the possibility of bringing the firm to its knees. The town "bitterly resented these women's charges as giving a 'black eye' to the community." Ottawa was a close-knit and folksy town, but the girls soon realized that when it turned against you, it turned hard. "They weren't treated too nice," commented a relative of Marie with understatement.

After all, Radium Dial had long been a valued employer. With the country in the middle of its worst-ever economic depression - what some were now calling the Great Depression - communities were even more protective of the firms that could give them work and wages. The women found they were disbelieved, ignored and even shunned when they spoke out about their ailments and the cause.

"Have you an opinion as to whether this condition is permanent or temporary?"

"Permanent," he answered swiftly. Catherine dropped her head: this is forever.

"Have you an opinion," Grossman asked now, "if this is fatal?" Dalitsch hesitated and "glanced meaningfully" toward Catherine, who was only meters from him. Grossman's question hung in the air, suspended in time. Five days ago, after the examinations in Chicago, Catherine's three doctors had indeed determined that her condition had reached its "permanent, incurable, and terminal stage." Yet the physicians, who in all kindness sought to spare her, had not told Catherin Donohue.

"In her presence?" Dalitsch now asked, uncertainly.

But he had said enough. He had said enough in the way he had paused. Catherine "sobbed, slipped down in her chair, and covered her face" with her hands. At first, silent tears ran down her cheeks, but then, as though the full weight of what he hadn't said hit her, "screamed in hysteria." She screamed aloud, as she thought of leaving Tom and her children; as she thought of leaving this life; as she thought of what was coming in her future. She hadn't know; she had had hope. She had had faith. Catherine had truly believed she was not going to due - but Dalitsch's face said otherwise; she could see it in his eyes. So she screamed, and the broken voice which had struggled to speak was now made powerful in her fear and distress. Tom "broke down and sobbed" at the sound of his wife's cries.

The scream was a watershed; after it, Catherine could not keep herself upright. She collapsed and "would have fallen had not a physician nearby caught her." Dr. Weiner had leaped to his feet to hold her up, and as he did so, Tom seemed released from his paralysis. He rushed to Catherine's side as she lay slumped in her chair. While Weiner felt for her pulse, Tom's concern was only for Catherine. He cradled her head with his hand, touched her shoulder to try to bring her back to herself; back to him. Catherine was sobbing hard, her mouth wide open, showing the destruction inside: the gaps where her teeth should have been. But she didn't care who saw; all she could see was Dalitsch's face in her mind. Fatal. This is fatal. It was the first time she'd been told.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 506

 

Here is an excerpt from a book I recently read, "The Minimalist Home: A Room-by-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life," by Joshua Becker.

After minimizing, Chris and Dana felt called to adopt a Guatemalan girl. Adding Mackenzie to the family has been a wonderful blessing and they can’t imagine their lives without her. She is a beloved daughter and a full participant in their adventuring lifestyle. 

Shortly after the adoption, Dana and Chris discovered a passion to serve others overseas. In order to pursue that passion, they sold off even more things—all they had, in fact. 

Dana described it. “At the age of twenty-seven, we held an estate sale and sold everything. People would walk up to the estate sale and ask us who died. We’d just smile. Nobody had died, except maybe our former selves.” 

Over the next two years, Dana and Chris would work in ten different countries, becoming pioneers in the online church movement.