UNSUNG FEMALE HERO

Unless you are a woman, or a man in a fairly progressive Christian group, chances are you haven’t had much study in the book of Esther. I know I haven’t. But I have been studying the book in my morning devotionals for the past couple of weeks, and have emerged with newfound appreciation for the person of Esther and for the significance of the book in the broader message of the Bible.

Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther form a triumvirate of Jewish heroes who brought the people of Israel back to glory after centuries of oppression and siege. Ezra, by providing spiritual leadership, gave moral influence to the cause. Nehemiah, by mobilizing the people, worked on the secular side, rebuilding the city walls. But neither might have had the chance to live, let alone lead, if Esther hadn’t put her own life on the line to beg the king for mercy. Without Esther, the king’s edict – a command to destroy the Jews and a reward for whoever did it – might have stood, dooming the people of God forever.

Esther the person, then, becomes a role model for me: one who understood that she was going to die either way, and was thus able to summon up the courage to do what was right and noble at the risk of great harm to herself. And Esther the book is elevated in my mind, from that quirky book that has no mention of the name of God to an early and precious archetype of One who would come later to save the people of God from eternal damnation.

Whether you are a Christian or not, I encourage you to read the book of Esther. Nestled as it is between Nehemiah and Job, you might miss it. You’d miss out on a high drama, with characters who will warm your heart and others who will stoke your hatred. And you’d miss out on a valuable lesson: someday, we’re all going to die, so if avoiding death is out of the question, the question then becomes how are you going to live?

ALL MY THOUGHTS LAID BARE FOR ALL THE WORLD TO SEE

A blog, if the blogger is being honest, is an unadulterated window into the blogger’s thoughts: her personal opinions, her political views, her pet peeves. I think that’s why many bloggers blog: their blog becomes a canvas to put it all out there.

The thing that I’m realizing, as a blogger, is that there are people on the other side of that canvas, looking at what I’ve put down and by doing so gaining insight into how I think and dream and despair. Not that I mind it; on the contrary, I blog not just to get things off my chest but to put them on others’, to dialogue and to vent and to provoke (and, every once in awhile, to educate and to inspire).

I guess I don’t consider my views any different from anyone else’s – not the views themselves, obviously, but the fact that I have them. Everyone has an opinion on the war on terror, on gay marriages, even on the Phillies. What’s different is that I post them on the Internet, while others keep them to themselves or air them privately among friends and colleagues.

So while everyone had an opinion on the invasion of Iraq in 2003, mine is hanging in cyberspace for all the world to see. While even the most casual of sports fans had an opinion at the beginning of the football season about who’s going to win the Super Bowl, my predictions are posted online for everyone to laugh at. (Hey, Cincinnati still can make the playoffs, right?)

Usually, you have face-to-face conversations with people you see in real life, and online conversations with people you will never meet. But I’m kind of liking that these two ways of corresponding are blurring together for me. One of my best friends from high school knows a lot about me from following my blog, and I do the same with his. And my wife’s boss, my doctor, and organization’s board chair are among people who have visited my blog at least once.

The thing that’s scary and neat about blogging is that when you say something in real life, and it turns out to be wrong, most people forget that you’ve said it; but when you blog it, it’s recorded for posterity. But I think that’s why I’ve recorded my opinions at the time, is to look back and see where I was wise and where I was foolish. And like John Kerry, I reserve the right to be for something before I was against it.

THE ONLY TIME YOU’VE BEEN IN A BANK

I took six of my students to the bank last week to open business banking accounts for them. They’re the winners of last year’s business plan competition, and one of their rewards is that we open an account for them. (Another reward is we give them $500 cash, so that was their initial deposit.)

I always enjoy this trip because I like exposing my students to new things and think that field trips teach so much more than my boring lectures. As I toggled back and forth between the waiting area where most of them sat and the two clerk desks where the accounts were being opened, I observed how they took in the whole scene. Some of them seemed unusually nervous. One kept looking over his shoulder and asking me if I thought the person that had just walked in looked suspicious.

As I recounted this story to one of my co-workers this week, she suggested that the only time many of our students had seen the inside of a bank was on a TV show or movie, when it was being robbed or about to be robbed. It was only natural, she offered, for our students to half-expect a guy in a mask to burst in, shoot a few bullets in the air, and case the joint; for that was their only image of what took place inside a bank.

Well, not after last week. For six young people, another image in their head is of the day they opened their first business banking account. One told me this week how proud she was to tell a customer that they could cut her a check in the name of the business, rather than her personally. Gosh, I know people four times her age who still accept payment in the form of a check made out to them personally, rather than their business. So the bank trip was a significant milestone for our students, and one I hope they’ll remember for a long, long time.

UNTIL YOU KNOW, YOU DON’T KNOW

My colleagues and I at work talk a lot about social capital. We use this term somewhat fluidly to mean one of two things: what people you know (i.e. the quality and quantity of your social network) and what etiquette you know (i.e. social norms that allow you to function in society). Many of the students in our program have one or two parents missing from their home lives, and combined with an abysmal public school system and an economically distressed neighborhood translate into a dearth of social capital on both fronts.

Poverty of money and of love are, to be sure, serious obstacles for people to have to overcome. But we take poverty of social capital just as seriously. In life, as in business, it’s who you know that will determine your future opportunities and your future successes. But wait, that seems so slimy, so inauthentic, no? Ah, you are probably someone who is rich in the first kind of social capital. You take for granted that you got your first job because your classmate’s mom runs the catalog department at the local Sears, your second job because your dad convinced the finance director at his office that you’d be a hard worker for him for the summer. That was me. What other social capital have I been able to trade on? My parents went to college, as did my older cousins, so they gave me a category for going to college and helped me get in. My friends have given me advice on money management, home ownership, and car insurance. My boss helped me get into a leadership class. Without social capital, I wouldn’t be nearly as smart and my resume not nearly as long.

What about this second kind of social capital: knowing what to do in certain settings? I can’t begin to tell you how many little lessons I and my colleagues have imparted on our students. That you wait until everyone has had their food brought to them before you partake in your meal. How to tie a tie. Why you have to be careful as a young man when it comes to sex. Things many of us learned by watching our parents, or our parents sat us down and schooled us, no matter how awkward the conversation. When you grow up without a dad, you can reach adulthood and not know certain very important social norms. And that can prove to be a harder hurdle to scale than being financial poor.

We like to say at work that until you know, you don’t know. I’m sure glad I’ve had people in my life sit me down and tell me what’s what, or lead by their positive example. So I sure ought to take seriously when I have the opportunity to do the same for people whose lives intersect with mine.

ELECTION WRAP-UP

Well, it looks like the presidential election is unofficially official. I’ve got enough material to fill a week’s worth of blogs, but let me spit out three thoughts real quick.

First, even though I am a Republican I am nervous that the Republicans control the Oval Office and both houses of Congress. I almost voted for Kerry for this very reason; for if he had won, he wouldn’t have been able to get anything through Congress, so the threat of the “liberal” taking office and ushering “big government” back in was an empty one. With Bush now in for another four years, I fear we’ll have another four years of pork being dished out to various special interests and signed into law. I urge people on both sides of the aisle to help me monitor our representatives to make sure this doesn’t happen.

Second, I’ve heard many complaints about the voting system, either the voting machinery itself or the electoral college system. So 2a let’s talk about the various voting systems. It is a bit disarraying that different places have different systems: punch card here, electronic there. So we have a massive upgrade issue. But you also have to come up with a system that simultaneously preserves privacy, accuracy, and verification. In other words, you have to make sure everyone gets one and only one vote. You can’t have a situation where peoples’ vote choices get into the wrong hands. And you have to be able to go back and recount the votes if there’s ever a problem. Let’s hope someone can invent such a system by 2008.

2b let’s talk about the Electoral College. After 2000, people were wondering why we didn’t just use the popular vote to decide the winner: how could we render useless 5 million Democratic votes in Texas, or 8 million Republican votes in California? The “winner take all” system of assigning electoral votes seemed to disenfranchise whole blocks of people in states where they were in the minority party. But remember that an election based on popular vote would mean the candidates would focus all their efforts on densely populated areas; some might not leave the coasts at all in their campaigning. After all, what’s the point of flying to Alaska or criss-crossing Wyoming and Iowa, when that’ll net you just a few hundred thousand votes? Heck, you can reach that many people in a one square mile tract in Manhattan. But now we have another kind of imbalanced campaigning: with most states either decidedly Republican or Democrat, candidates are spending 90% of their time in 10% of the states. So what’s the point of Bush or Kerry stumping in California, since we all know that state’s going Blue (or Texas, since that’s going Red). I’m liking Colorado’s solution, in that electoral votes would be assigned based on the proportion of votes received by each candidate in that particular state. This would mean a couple of good things. First, third-party candidates might steal an electoral vote or two, by putting a relatively strong showing in a state big enough that getting 5% of the vote meant getting a point or two. Second, candidates would have an incentive to campaign in all fifty states. It would be worth Bush stumping in California; even if he gets crushed in the popular vote, if he can swing a few percent of voters in that state into his column, that might net him a couple of electoral votes. Kerry would need to defend in California, to make sure that doesn’t happen and even to try to widen the lead and steal more than the usual proportion of voters. This solution might swing the pendulum back in favor of bigger states, but hey, smaller states have a disproportionate number of senators to begin with, so maybe this is a good counterbalance.

Anyway, I’ve gone from blogging to rambling, so I’ll stop now.