Greed May Not Be Good, But Business Can Be

 

 

I came of age in the “greed is good” 80’s, a tagline made famous by the iconic movie “Wall Street,” which came out in 1987 when I was starting high school. I was active in Future Business Leaders of America, took two years of Accounting, and actually won 1^st place in the US in Accounting at the 1991 FBLA national conference. And then I went to the Wharton School of Business, famous for minting i-bankers for Wall Street and consultants for McKinsey. And then I took a job at a small non-profit that helps minority entrepreneurs to grow their business, using my nascent business and administrative skills to run the organization and use business to create wealth and jobs in our community. 

Through it all, I never thought that capitalism was unassailable. But I did see the value of the machinery of business. Such concepts as:

1. The competitive nature of a capitalist economy ensures that businesses hustle to win customers, 
2. In a free market, people and organizations exchange when it is mutually beneficial, meaning that when something happens (whether a customer buying a product or a worker taking a job) it’s because everyone is getting something of value, and 
3. Prices (and wages, which are a form of price for the provision of labor) are set by the marketplace, such that when demand increases for something, price goes up (and/or supply goes up to meet the demand).

I am now more sober about the dangers and flaws of capitalism. But I remain supportive of the mechanism of capitalism to do good for households, communities, and nations. Look back at the three concepts I listed above, and think of how much good can be unleashed when people are free to hustle, exchange, and create value. 

I recognize that, in my city and in this generation and throughout the country, many harbor a strong anti-capitalist sentiment. I respect the opinion, borne as it is of a sense that business can be a force of human exploitation, environmental degradation, and economic inequality. One mustn’t be blind to those vulnerabilities. 

But one must not also think too ill of business, or too highly of alternative forms of organizing resources and commerce. The fact of the matter is that: 

1. The vast majority of jobs are created by the private sector,
2. The vast majority of houses are built by the private sector,
3. The vast majority of loans (for personal and business) are provided by the private sector, and
4. The vast majority of tax revenues to fund public services are paid by the private sector. 

Those who consider this fact to be the problem, and the natural solution to have the public sector render these things, are sorely underestimating the great harm that history has recorded when such systems are in place, harm in the form of unbridled power and utter famine and runaway inequality. 

In contrast, creating a climate where the business sector is nimble and strong (albeit with a layer of regulation to serve as guardrails against misdeeds) will result in the very things most of us desperately want for our communities: well-paying jobs, affordable housing, accessible capital to fund our personal and business goals, and tax revenues to fund those services we’ve decided should be borne by the public for the public. 

Easier said than done, for sure. There’s work to be done to figure out how to harness the power of business and monitor against excesses. But if, philosophically, we believe profit is evil and capitalism is broken and business is to be mistrusted, we’re not even doing the work; rather, we’re limiting ourselves either to stagnancy, which freezes in place present injustices, or worse, which is the slippery slope of totalitarianism and scarcity. Perhaps I have been long primed to believe in the positive power of business, so easier for me to see and be optimistic, and respect to those who cast a warier eye on capitalism. I reject the central premise of “Wall Street” the movie, for greed is not good. But business can be, and should be given more of a chance to be.

Giving Voice to the Asian Experience

 

This recent article by tech leader and San Francisco dad Garry Tan really resonated with me. To be sure, I don’t share all of Tan’s childhood experiences or present-day perspectives. He doesn’t speak for me, nor can I possibly understand let alone express anyone else’s opinion but my own. But there was much in his words that I could relate to and want to build on. 

What resonates is having grown up as clearly marked as “other,” which was understood and communicated in many ways. I may have been born in America but I wasn’t “REALLY from here.” My physical features and my cultural characteristics (language, traditions, food) were considered “different” and “foreign.” Even on the very issue of race and of being a minority person in the US, there was Black and white and Hispanic, but “Asian” was often minimized or even forgotten altogether, something about “they’re doing alright for themselves,” with most people incredulous that the “model minority” myth could be anything but a good thing for us. 

And, with all that having been seared into our upbringing, then to bear the modern-day gaslighting of our cries for help being silenced as unnecessary, unhelpful, or outright racist. When Tan speaks of attacks on our kids and our elders, I being around his age feel that in my soul. It makes me realize it is up to me and others in our generation to own and express and fight for these feelings. Even and especially when others wish to dismiss or smear us for them. 

I want to express deep gratitude for my village, which is composed of good people from all walks of life and racial backgrounds, who have journeyed with me and expressed profoundly supportive statements of solidarity and empathy and concern and outrage. I am tearing up as I consider how fortunate I am to be cared for so well by others. Yet they and I still have much work to do, to give voice when we are being silenced, to fight for progress and safety and respect when others would seek to drag us down or look down on our perspective. So glad so many who look like me are finding their voice; it emboldens me to do the same.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral," by Ben Smith.

The Contagious Media Working Group, which met at Eyebeam, came up with another curious technical mechanism, called the reBlog. It was a clever little open-source script that, installed on your blog, allowed you to pull in a post from another site and promote it yourself. It was a version of an idea that Nick had been playing with at Moreover. Tim Shey, Jonah’s old roommate, liked reBlog enough to install it on his own blog and showed it to a young programmer, David Karp, who would implement it on a website he was developing, Tumblr. That technical trick drove Tumblr’s success, and was copied by other social networks—Facebook’s share, Twitter’s retweet. It would become the basic mechanism for a generation of amplifying everything from clever jokes to lies about elections.

Andrew told his own version years later, in a memoir called Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! In his account, Andrew hadn’t been the minion of the most powerful conservative blogger: he’d been his own man all along, a conservative who saw through the lies of liberal Hollywood, an agent behind enemy lines. Andrew’s story was so far from reality that the other Huffington Post founders couldn’t decide if he was joking or just lying. It was probably some of both—plus the fact that with his severe attention deficit disorder, Andrew had left most of the writing to a bright young assistant named Ben Shapiro. But the book offered a glimpse through the looking glass of the early internet, and a good sense of how the new Right, for a decade, would view the web that Facebook and Twitter, The Huffington Post and Gawker and BuzzFeed had created. 

In that telling, Andrew had abruptly discovered how intolerant the Democratic Party was—how obsessed with irrational hatred of George W. Bush and irrational opposition to the invasion of Iraq. He had realized that conservatives in Hollywood would be ostracized from the entertainment industry if they expressed those views, and that his highest mission would be to build a kind of underground social network of Hollywood conservatives. And “at the exact time when I was undergoing the fundamental recognition that my neighbors in West Los Angeles were acting to undermine national cohesion in a time of war, which put me in a perennial state of psychic dissonance . . . at exactly that point, I got a phone call from Arianna Huffington.”

Nick loved that self-exposure, and the traffic it brought. Holmes sometimes had to protect her writers from his excesses. Once, Nick caught wind of a date of Gerson’s that had gone horribly wrong. “Oh my God I heard about your date, you’ve got to write about that,” he told her, and she realized that “if you were working for Nick, traffic was your life.”

Nick, a purist at heart about the connection between searing exposés and traffic, also hated the mechanical way Jonah thought about the substance. Nick thought traffic was a sign of quality; Jonah simply thought it was a resource to be exploited, by whatever tactics—serious or silly, strange or brilliant, cheap or expensive—that came to hand. Where Nick had wanted AJ Daulerio’s brutal revelations, Jonah wanted journalism, sure. But he also wanted LilyBoo. 

To Jonah, and to financiers fixated on the idea of a new science of content, LilyBoo was the dream: machines, with a little human help, feeding culture back to itself, scaling to infinity. To Nick, this was pretty much the worst nightmare, an automated feed of algorithmic cuteness, harvesting traffic indiscriminately, anonymously shaped by the CEO himself. If you looked closely, sometimes the voice was a little robotic. “Just trying to think of ways to multiply cuteness,” read the caption to a list of “50 Toddlers Who Are Best Friends with Their Dogs.” As LilyBoo’s bio read, she was “obsessed with the maximally cute.” Jonah thought he might have in fact figured out how to maximize cuteness. 

BuzzFeed’s editors had learned through trial and error that social media was organized in large part around identities. Write compellingly about what it was like to be born in the 1990s, or to be an Iranian from New Jersey, or a Catholic girl, or to grow up with East Asian parents, and thousands of people would share the post with the magic words “this is me.” Their friends would click for a glimpse of insight. The traffic was guaranteed, and the posts extended BuzzFeed’s tendrils into new territories. 

To reach a broader audience, we needed people who could write about varied identities. That pushed BuzzFeed, whose small staff was nearly all white in its early days, to become among the most ethnically diverse of the new media companies. But we were still missing a big piece of American identity. We didn’t have any proud young conservatives, people who could write about what it was like to grow up with guns, say, or to appreciate how the Bush family respected veterans. Benny represented, to me, an untapped new well of traffic, a new identity to plumb. And so I didn’t look much beyond that NRA post, which took the BuzzFeed formula—a list of fun, emotionally resonant images—to gun culture. There was no reason that Tea Partiers couldn’t see themselves in BuzzFeed, I reasoned, and share elements of their culture—guns, cars, Bibles—just as our progressive audience was doing. 

More than ten million Americans were talking about Donald Trump on Facebook in the first week of July. The other hot Republicans—Ben Carson and Ted Cruz—were struggling to reach one million. BuzzFeed’s political editor, Katherine Miller, tried to explain what was happening to our readers: “Imagine the Hulk doing a cannonball into a pool and, as a result, all the other people and water in that pool being catapulted from it, so that the only thing left is the Hulk.” 

And then—it stayed that way. Through the summer and early fall, we stopped writing about the Facebook data because it didn’t say anything new. Americans were talking about only two people: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. The conversation about Clinton tended to be negative. And nobody could get enough of Donald Trump. 

It’s understandable that panicked American Democrats and incredulous journalists were looking for the secret explanation for Trump’s victory. But if you zoom out from the United States in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century and look more widely, it’s hard to credit such theories. Perhaps Trump had some special sauce, or some special help—but then why would India’s right-wing populist strongman Narendra Modi similarly have become, as it was said, “King of Facebook”? Or how did Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro come to dominate the platform? What explains the social media power of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, or the surprise, Facebook-powered victory of Brexit in Great Britain? Trump was part of a pattern of confrontational, combative right-wing populism that swept the platform and the world. These leaders’ success on Facebook was no more complicated than their success on the mainstream media: they fed controversy and engagement. But while CNN and other mainstream broadcasters eventually began to rein in their own hunger for ratings as they saw Trump exploit their airtime to project a message that painted his enemies—and, ironically, those very television networks—as enemies of the state, Facebook had no comparable mechanism. Facebook measured engagement, and elevated it. It seemed perfectly logical if you were working on the internet then, doing your best to make your own posts generate engagement and go viral. Trump wasn’t doing anything to game Facebook. He simply was what Facebook liked.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations," by Simon Schama.

Haffkine is also, and unapologetically, a Jew from Odessa, and this matters. Fourteenth-century Jew-haters had accused them of poisoning wells, of being demonic instigators of mass death. But here was a Jew who, given the chance, would inoculate the world against it. 

So it was now put about in high circles of British science and government that Waldemar Haffkine was a Good Jew, and what was more, an admirable man, a saintly scientist; the very first to make an effective vaccine for humans against lethal bacterial infections. (Smallpox was viral.) A Jew to be trusted, moreover, since from the start he had demonstrated that he would recommend nothing not already tested on his own person. Accordingly, Haffkine had been the first to be inoculated in 1892 with the cholera vaccine he had developed in the Institut Pasteur.

The modern instalment of the Black Death arrived in Hong Kong in the spring of 1894 the modern way: by steamship, coming from Pakhoi, 300 miles to the west. Along with tea, silk and cotton, their cargoes included Yunnan opium, packed in hemp bales, amid which lodged the usual stowaways: Rattus flavipectus, long-haired yellow-chested rats.1 If the hold also shared space with rice or grain, so much better for them. But the rodents were, in their turn, dining opportunities for their fellow passengers, Xenopsylla cheopsis, the biting flea. Should the flea have taken a meal from a previously infected rat, for instance in Yunnan province, where plague was endemic, the newly infected animal would die and the flea would hop off for an alternative host, animal or human.2 In 1898, another of the students in Elie Metchnikoff’s lab at the Institut Pasteur, Paul-Louis Simond, who had himself survived yellow fever in French Guiana, would discover the plague bacillus in fleas departing from dead rats, establishing the role of insect bites in transmission. But even without benefit of microbiology, the Chinese, especially in Yunnan and the south, treated the sudden appearance of a host of dead rats as the invariable herald of plague. In 1792, the sight of them moved a young poet, Shi Daonan, to write ‘The Death of Rats’: 

Rats die in the east 

Rats die in the west 

People look upon dying rats 

As if they were . . . 

A few days following the death of rats 

People die like city walls 

Do not ask how many people die 

The dim sun is covered by gloomy clouds 

Three people take less than ten steps together 

When two die falling across the road 

People die in the night 

But no one dares weep 

The ghost of plague blows 

The light turns green 

Suddenly the wind rises and the light is blown out 

Leaving man, ghost, corpse and coffin in the same dark room . . .

Just a few months later, Shi was himself infected and rode the fiery dragon into the hereafter.

Haffkine did indeed feel his authority and reputation now lay in ruins. Just two years before, he had been a figure commanding admiration, almost to the point of reverence: invited to take on the founding and directorship of an all-India Research University, funded by the Tata endowment. The government of India had gone along with the scheme to the point of asking him to draw up detailed plans for its operation.23 Now the Viceroy wanted him tried, convicted and executed. But this personal blow was as nothing (so he told himself) compared to the destruction of his life’s mission: the saving of untold numbers with vaccines. His battle all along had been to replace one kind of authority by another. What he had encountered in India was the empire of drastic disinfection, applied, for the most part, invasively, indiscriminately and coercively. He had hoped to replace it with the authority of science, specifically bacteriology, delivered through inoculation to those who consented to receive it. Persuasion rather than coercion, together with the measurable demonstration of protection and mitigation, would transform the lives of those most vulnerable to terrifying waves of infection: the poor of Asia.

It would, of course, be helpful if the two inter-connected crises of our age – the health of our bodies and the health of the earth – could break free from the distorting mirror of populist politics. But if you have got this far in the story, you will know that this is seldom, if ever, the case. The visionary advances of science, including those of virology and bacteriology, occur at an ever-accelerating pace and save lives as they do so. Hard-earned, exhaustively tested, truth, just as Thomas Nettleton, Angelo Gatti and Waldemar Haffkine hoped, always seems on the verge of overtaking error, when its exhilarating progress is sandbagged by indignation about foreign substances deviously introduced into our bodies. What could this be, it is said, other than the invasion of our veins authorised by remote ‘experts’ claiming a monopoly of medical wisdom, but who are, in fact, imposing clinical obedience in the name of Doing Us Good? To those for whom knowledge is conveyed by revelation, the accepted hierarchy of wisdom is all the wrong way round. Discernment begins with the judgements of God, followed by the urgings of common sense (especially pronounced by those on television and social media claiming to speak for it), and only then enlightened by science, always keeping in mind that much of what gets presented as irrefutable fact is, actually, just another set of opinions.

To the most frantic alarmists, champions of vaccination are demons walking among us in lab coats, disguised as politically neutral scientists.3 Pretending to be disinterested public servants, they embed themselves in the hardened silos of the Deep State, surfacing to position themselves close to power. Every so often they appear in public, behind or beside elected officers of state whom, through some dark art, they have convinced to act in ways that curtail liberties, shrink the space of daily life, and interfere in decisions properly belonging to individuals and families: the schooling of children; the choice of whether or not to wear protective clothing. 

The Anthony Faucis of this world. 

Something about inoculators, vaccinators, epidemiologists gets under the skin of public tribunes for whom nothing, certainly not epidemiology, is politics-free. Their fury swells into maddened vehemence to the point where it becomes commonplace to wish inoculators banished, imprisoned or dead. Gatti was accused of spreading the disease he claimed to fight; Lord Curzon expressed the hope that Haffkine would be hanged for what the viceroy judged to be criminal irresponsibility. But no epidemiologist has been subjected to more violent abuse than Anthony Fauci. 

We must hope so, for, even as paranoia about borders and frontiers continues to dominate populist rhetoric, the inseparability of humans – and, for that matter, the indivisibility of humankind and nature – remains the saving imperative of our beleaguered time. That has been my story and it remains my faith. Contrary to what you’ll read in tabloid headlines, or hear in the hoots and yells of social media, in our present historical extremity, there are no foreigners, only familiars: a single precious chain of connection that we snap at our utmost peril.

How Do I Read

 

I spend a lot of ink in this space talking about what I read, whether my upcoming list of books read for the year or excerpts posted through my “Too Long for a Tweet” series. But I haven’t said much about how I read, so that’s what today’s post is for. 

As I’ve shared before, reading is many things to me: knowledge, rejuvenation, and escape. So it will come as no surprise that I have a specific approach to reading. 

I’ve been trying to balance e-reading with holding physical books. On an unrelated but clearly parallel note, I’ve been trying to treat myself, including buying books for myself. So, oftentimes I am reading two books in parallel, one on my phone and one with an actual book. 

The “actual book” time is almost always at the end of the evening, at my desk. After I’ve put Asher to bed and handled all my house errands, but before I go to sleep, I find that a physical book is better than screen time, even screen time spent reading. Plus, it is a little splurge to have some time to myself to get lost in a good read. Although, unlike my e-reading (more on this below), I tend to tackle harder and denser reads with this sliver of time, since it is relaxed and uninterrupted. I wish I could go on and on, but usually I’m good for about 15 to 30 minutes before it’s time for shut-eye. Still, over the course of a full week, that’s a good two or three hours of reading. 

Conversely, my e-reading gets squeezed into different times of the week. My commute to and from work usually affords me 15 to 20 minutes each way, so combined that’s a good couple of hours per work week just there. Plus waiting at doctor’s offices, poolside during Asher’s swim class, and other random moments when there’s nothing else to do. 

Given these shorter and interruptible windows, I tend to choose easier reads; long chapters of a non-fiction topic or an entire scene from a gripping fiction book can be hard to consume in 2- to 6-minute increments. But with a poetry book, for example, it’s easy to dip in and out without losing too much flow. When I have a good book, I am constantly using these pockets of time, and I find I’m constantly surprised at how much reading I can get in in these small bits, maybe a whole hour or two total in a 7-day period. 

There will be a point in my life when I have time to luxuriate in books much more often. Still, four to six hours a week is a good investment, given all that reading does for me. Glad for the opportunities, and for a seemingly limitless list of good reads I am still trying to get to.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 468

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Saint of Bright Doors," by Vajra Chandrasekera.

“The Five Unforgivables are the major crimes as defined by your father’s ideological apparatus,” Mother-of-Glory says. She has given this speech so often Fetter knows it by heart, which is the point. “They are declared to be outside the jurisdiction of any regime of restorative or retributive justice. The Five Unforgivables are, in order of severity, matricide; heresy leading to factionalism; the sancticide of votaries who have reached the fourth level of awakening; patricide; and the assassination of the Perfect and Kind. By definition, they cannot be forgiven and cannot be redeemed. That means that if you commit any one of them, the cult will hunt you for the rest of your life, and make your name a curse for generations to come. Your mission is to commit them all. Your father abandoned us. We were unchosen, cast out of his eschatology. We are going to destroy your father’s cult and salt the earth where it falls. Now you say it.”

Even with all this practice, Fetter cannot say if his skill in combat or the use of weapons improves. He eventually becomes accustomed to violence, which, he supposes, was the point in the first place. One day Mother-of-Glory pronounces him ready for the real thing. She packs him a lunch and gives him some money and a knife and a blessing, the words impatient and mumbled because she doesn’t believe in blessings, not even her own. Such things are his father’s territory. 

“Remember, son,” Mother-of-Glory says, compensating with pomposity for her deficits of piety or affection. “The only way to change the world is through intentional, directed violence.” 

And Fetter goes out into the world, armed and dangerous and thirteen.

The day your father came to our strange and wonderful island, I was the first to meet him. That was where everything went wrong.

“O monks, know that I could have named my son Glorious Victory, in truth, because he was born with the signs of a great destiny, like I was: he was born to be a prophet or conqueror, one who masters the wheel of the world. 

“But I did not name him thus, O monks, and why did I not name him thus? Because when I looked through the flesh of my wife’s distended belly and upon the face of my sleeping son within, I understood that I loved him so dearly that if I allowed it, this love for my only son would bind me tight like a chain and prevent me from reaching my own great destiny, prevent me from bringing peace to the world. So I named him Fetter, for he was the final chain upon me that I had to break before I could ascend to perfection.” 

This is how he speaks of us. This is all he ever says in public about you or me, since he broke the chain and walked away.

“I will give you a title and a rank befitting your ancestry and respectful of both lines of your heritage. You could be Luriat’s Saint of Bright Doors. I would have you be guardian of this place. I will teach you how to seal bright doors, to give you power over those that come through. You will gain much knowledge from them. You could heal this city’s fractured power structure by placing yourself at its apex. The Absent King and Absent Queen will bow their absent knees; both presidents already swear fealty to the sun and the moon, and if I were to appoint you my prince regent in the north—” 

“No,” Fetter says. It’s through gritted teeth, though he tells himself it is easy. 

"You would have the power to undo the wrongs you hate,” the Perfect and Kind says. “You could close the prisons and open the borders. You could defrock the corrupt monks and end the pogroms. You could save lives and hearts and minds. You would soon eclipse the Saint-General and the Saint-Errant in both mundane and supramundane power. Eventually, you would surpass me. I could die at peace, knowing that the Path I’ve made would continue to save this world without me.” 

Fetter shakes his head—this vision, this ridiculous vision of himself as a Saint, this thing completely opposed to anything he has ever wanted for himself, which proves that his father doesn’t know him and doesn’t care to, that his father only wants to make him an instrument, and yet, the vision of empowerment and knowledge is still tempting. He imagines himself chosen at last, invested with power and agency beyond his wildest dreams; he imagines a great expansion of his rib cage, bringing the island within his chest, being its gaoler instead of it being his. He imagines a long-held tightness inverted. What could he do with the power, no matter how ill-gotten, how tainted, how compromised, to undo even some of the wrongs of the world? Wouldn’t it be self-indulgence to turn down that chance? In his instinctive refusal, is he not placing his own choice, his assessment of what he can and cannot bear, above the suffering of others—suffering that he could alleviate, or even end?

Life Lessons from Riding a Bicycle

Riding a bicycle is for me one of life's great pleasures. There's something about the physical activity that brings me back to the happy and carefree memories of my childhood. It's no surprise one of my favorite things to do on vacation or a rare day off is to putter around by bike, whether my own community or some new destination.

I do also bike for exercise, less often than I used to but maybe once a month or so. Those outings are also fun, but there is also a purposefulness to it, to get a good weat in or to try to do a regular route just a little bit faster.

However much I push myself, bicycling is easier than running or swimming for me, so it affords me some time to let my mind wander. Sometimes I think through a current challenge I am facing, many other times I find myself daydreaming about some future leisure trip.

Recently, I thought of how riding a bike is a bit of a metaphor for life. After all, like my bike routs, life is full of its ups and its downs, times when my metaphorical lungs and quads are burning and other times when I am coasting with little resistance.

To continue the analogy, let me offer a few additional life lessons that I think I can mine out of my identity as a bicyclist:

1. Building up speed on the descents gives you momentum to power up the ascents. Philly is surprisingly hilly, and I find myself pushing on the downhills to give myself a little upfront boost for the uphills. I think we can similarly prepare to gut out hard times by building up speed in advance.

2. My bike is supposed to have 3 gears (low, medium, high), but it's approximately a million years old so is stuck in high gear. Which means climbing a hill can be quite arduous minus the aid of shifting into a lower gear. I will let you to determine what is your equivalent of being stuck in high gear; I certainly have my share of personal failings that prevent me from making a hard time easier.

3. Some hills are so steep or long that, especially given that I can only ride in high gear, I'm forced to just get off and walk it. Which I resisted at first - I've known since I was a kid that you can make it up any hill if, like the little engine, you just will yourself to "think I can" - but now welcome with relief. Some hills are just too much, as our some life trials, and you just have to admit it and make it through any way you can.

What other life lessons can we glean from riding a bicycle?

A Faith-Full Zone

After being introduced to the church late in high school (my parents didn't practice any religion), I really came of faith through active participation in a Christian fellowship at Penn. Some of my closest friends date back to those exciting years of mission and friendship in a college setting.

In that phase of my life, for better or worse, most of my closest people, who I spent most of my time with, were devoted believers. But for a long time since then, that hasn't been the case. My faith is still real and strong and important. But I've been more "in the world" in my adult years, which is not unusual since the university environment is bit of a bubble from the real world but also reflects my own personal intentions to exercise influence and walk my journey in a way that is different from the more sheltered Christian circle that I ran with in my late teens and early twenties. Practically, this also means that while I go to church, I can't say I'm super involved, and the vast majority of my friends are not people that I know through some covert faith-based setting.

But that does not mean that spirituality is not thriving all around me. Indeed, a blessing of my strong friendships in my adult years is the willingness to speak candidly about our personal and corporate faith journeys. I maintain a particular faith perspective but have learned greatly from those who are more involved than I am and less involved, those of different persuasions within the Christian umbrella and those outside that particular faith family (particularly Jewish and Muslim around here). Deep discussions with my barber, life stories shared over a round of golf or a heartfelt morning coffee, even nakedly vulnerable moments where people have been broken down and lives have been changed.

In the very secular and even actively godless circles I often run in, it can be uncouth to mention God or religion or faith or spirituality. But that seems unnecessarily limiting to me. Some of my most meaningful interactions and deepest friendships have been speaking openly about the divine and its intersection with our frail existences. I hope that, if you know me or we otherwise have occasion to interact, you will find me to be an open, accepting, and curious person as it relates to your own spiritual journey. It has meant a lot to be a fellow traveler, so won't you join me?

Be Excellent

 

In honor of National Teacher’s Day, which is tomorrow, I want to share a story about Ms. Rousseau, my 4^th grade teacher and the only Black educator I had in elementary school. Due to my early prowess in math, I was routinely pulled from my grade and promoted to math class with older kids. I was also incredibly shy and awkward, so this special treatment often made me feel uncomfortable. This was compounded by the teasing I received (albeit quite harmless) from my friends my age as well as from the older kids who were amused to find a tiny Asian kid in their midst. 

Ms. Rousseau must have perceived my discomfort, because at the first parent-teacher conference with my mom, and with me present, she took the time to both praise me for my smarts, acknowledge that it had caused me some social anxiety, and assure me that it was a good thing that I was excelling and being put in a place where I could excel further. The fact that I can remember this conversation some 40+ years later, and am feeling emotional about it, tells you how powerful Ms. Rousseau’s empathy was for my sense of self. Teachers can impact our entire lives! 

But it wasn’t just Ms Rousseau’s empathy that positively affected me. It was also the permission she gave me to be excellent, and to be unapologetic about being excellent. As kids, and even and perhaps especially as parents, pressure to fit in is immense. Being singled out, being away from my friends, being thrown in with kids older than me was all horrifying for my 4^th grade self. I quickly learned that even something positive – being smart – was something to downplay or actively sabotage if it meant avoiding situations where I could be vulnerable to teasing. 

And, just as quickly but more powerfully, Ms. Rousseau’s words allowed me to own my excellence and not be cowed by internal or external pressures to diminish or hide it. To this day, this remains a powerful lesson for myself and for others around me, which is to be as excellent as possible and value that more than any swirling winds around us that threaten to topple us. It's what I want for myself, and it's what I exhort others to do as well.

To borrow from another post of mine, excellence is inherently isolating, so we must be comfortable with accepting that being excellent comes with costs that are not easy to bear. But there is something overwhelming better, for ourselves and for the world around us, when we allow ourselves to be as excellent as possible, to push ourselves further than our comfort-seeking selves may allow. My fourth-grade self first learned this lesson, and to this day I strive to live that lesson out as best as I can.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 467

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Hard Is Not the Same Thing as Bad: The Perspective Shift That Could Completely Change the Way You Mother," by Abbie Halberstadt.

Our children are not “something bad or unpleasant we are being subjected to,” to borrow from the above definition of suffering. And yet when we view dealing with their more challenging traits as suffering rather than as a hard-but-good opportunity to grow in Christlikeness, we gravitate toward a Motherhood of Martyrdom—an attitude sure to bleed into the way we treat our families. 

As one reader so poignantly put it, “My mother made sure to let us know we were a martyrdom she barely survived. It has been really depressing for us children.” 

I don’t doubt it. Few things crush my spirit as an adult more than being made to feel like a burden, and I’m so glad my own mother understood the importance of regularly speaking to my brother and me with the kind of language that let us know just how wanted and loved and unburdensome we were.

Rather than viewing toddlers as a hammer meant to smash our wills to mother with excellence, may we see them as a form of holy sandpaper, which smooths our sharp tongues and softens our harsh reactions, leaving behind a pliable heart poised toward the truth of God’s mercy, goodness, and love for every sinner, young and old.

When I mentioned how hard it is on a mother’s heart to know she has invested so deeply in her children’s lives only to see them reject all that she holds most dear, Kristy said something truly profound: “Yes, it’s hard on mothers. But what should truly grieve us is that someone we love is in defiance against our God. We cannot allow our feelings or our attachment to make us lose sight of the fact that the true tragedy is our child’s rebellion, not against us, but against God.”

Repentance

 

One casualty of our divisive culture is that we react to the meanness and opposition by running for the comfort of those who share our beliefs. Which, there's obviously nothing wrong with agreement and affirmation. But real progress, of our own selves and of society, usually involves some friction, some discomfort, and even some soul-searching and changing of ways.

Alas, whether in our peer groups or at larger public gatherings, I detect far too much self-congratulatory sentiments. Whoever our "we" is, when we are among our "we" we tend to pat ourselves on the back a bit too much for our enlightened views or puff our chests pretty far for our aggrieved states. Rare is the "we" member who is willing to challenge from within, to call out where "we" ourselves need to do better (and not just "the other side") and where moving the ball forward requires exercising some humility, some redirection, and some compromise.

There is a Biblical concept of "repentance" that often gets pooh-poohed for being a bit too much fire and brimstone. The most common Greek word for this in the original New Testament is "metanoia," which I understand to mean something like changing your mind or changing your direction. What a thought, in 2025, that we would change our mind or change our direction about something. 

And yet we are clearly not in a good place, and in need of "repentance." Would that we marshal the humility to be open to change, the desire to move things forward, and the perseverance to work through the expected hardship that repentance will bring to get there.