Thursday, March 19, 2020
Personal Reflections ... Practical Advice ... Society ...
I believe that there is currently a wide-spread desire amidst younger people to do more in life than fight for their own welfare; they also want to help change the world for the better. And yet, not a whole lot of young or middle-aged people from affluent urban or suburban regions want to take jobs working in low-income, under-priviledged urban neighborhoods and providing human services to people and families in need. But there are some people like that, and in many cases, such people train to become social workers or counselors, or maybe nurses or other medical trades. This morning, while I was at the service station where I have my old Corolla repaired and maintained, it occurred to me that a gas station owner could also be an urban social service provider.
The gas station that I go to is in East Orange, NJ. The owner’s father emigrated from the Middle-East and started the station many years ago, when the neighborhood was largely working class, and when there were many manufacturing plants in the area. Over the past 50 years, during which time the current owner inherited it from his father and kept it in business, the nature of the neighborhood has changed quite a bit. Employment and income levels dropped, crime levels increased, buildings and homes and streetscapes are not cared for very well. There are now gangs and drugs and murders happening quite regularly in the vicinity. And yet the owner keeps on opening the place every morning, providing vehicle repairs and servicing on weekdays, gasoline all week into the late night.
I stop by for an oil change every 6 months (and if something in my car isn’t working right, I will be there during the interim). They usually get the oil change done within an hour, so I bring something to read and just sit in the front office. I usually chat with the owner for a few minutes, then let him get on with running his business. People come in dropping off their cars, and my friend usually gets into detailed discussions with them to determine what their problem is and what their options are. They sometimes mention the bad consequences that a breakdown will have » continue reading …
Tuesday, October 8, 2019
Personal Reflections ... Philosophy ...
Not long ago, the NY Times published an opinion piece in its “Stone” column, entitled “Should Work Be Passion, Or Duty?” The Stone is where the Times puts its deeper and more philosophic pieces about modern social issues. Since this article was written by a Professor of Philosophy, it seems to have landed in the right place. With regard to the meaning of work, Professor DeBrabander concludes in favor of duty over passion. In a nutshell, imagining that your career is your highest calling and the primary mission defining your life is highly over-rated, even though the notion remains quite popular amidst the better educated and more professional members of the American workforce.
DeBrabander notes the irony that people in this category usually do quite well financially, and thus should have more capacity for leisure relative to others in the workforce. And yet, many professionals work much longer hours than the average warehouse order picker or sewer pipe repair technician. Why might that be true? Because the American professional class sees their careers as the core source of meaning in their lives, perhaps the defining aspect of who they are and why they exist. And recent surveys show that young Millennial workers coming out of college have the same attitude, despite the old fogies who see them as slackers.
So let me admit – I once had the same feelings. I once dreamed of doing great and world-changing things, and I was ready to work tirelessly for it, sacrificing my leisure time and my relationships for the sake of the “cause”. Well, after college, I found out that I was not going to be employed in some great cause. I wasn’t even going to be admitted to the “American elite”, the group selected to help run the top » continue reading …
Wednesday, May 1, 2019
Personal Reflections ... Science ... Zen ...
I’ve been trying to grok the “Bell’s Spaceship Paradox” lately. Unless you REALLY know your special and general relativity, that one can really get your head spinning !! It’s a mental experiment meant to show that your intuition can be confounded by space-time relativity in more ways than you thought.
PART ONE — THE PARADOX
Bell’s Spaceship Paradox starts off with two spaceships that have equivalent weight and configuration. They will blast off and accelerate away from you, the observer, in your “frame at rest”. You have a ruler, which you use to measure the lengths of the ships and the distance between them just before they leave. Each ship has the same kind of rocket firing, and feels exactly the same force for the same length of time.
Oh, and the rockets are moving longitudinally away from you along the same line, one in front of the other. They are not side-by-side, they are moving in line. This is an important detail that isn’t always made clear in the layman’s explanations of this problem that you find on the web. Anyway, you have to imagine that the thrust from the lead rocket somehow does not affect the rocket behind it. Well, we can imagine some futuristic arrangement where that might be possible.
These rockets can go really, really fast, approaching the speed of light. And you know that weird things happen at that point. Basically, the two ships start out » continue reading …
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
Personal Reflections ... Politics ...
Here’s a quote from the diary of Dag Hammarskjold (“Markings”), one that may apply when deeply pondering Donald Trump — i.e., just who is this man? —
1951 — “Assenting to his possibility — why? Does he sacrifice himself for others, yet for his own sake – in megalomania? Or does he realize himself for the sake of others? The difference is that between a monster and a man. ‘A new commandment I give unto you: that ye love one another.'”
FINAL CONUNDRUM — if there is a “Monster”, what to do? The fastest way to dispose of a monster is to create a new monster. You may well vanquish the old monster. But then what to do with the new monster? How do you answer to that “new commandment” when dealing with a Donald J. Trump?
Friday, December 14, 2018
Personal Reflections ... Politics ...
A friend of mine recently sent me a link to an “Observation” post on the Scientific American web site entitled “Why Smart People Are Vulnerable to Putting Tribe Before Truth“. In sum, intelligent people are becoming more and more partisan, mostly on the “liberal-progressive” side although intelligent conservatives are still quite common (and just as biased). The article gives a good explanation of the driving forces behind this trend, and provides some empirical evidence from various studies to support this claim. Here’s the theory in a nutshell:
As counter-intuitive as it sounds, it is perfectly rational to use one’s reason this way in a science communication environment polluted by tribalism . . . What an ordinary member of the public thinks about climate change, for example, has no impact on the climate. Nor does anything that she does as a consumer or a voter; her individual impact is too small to make a difference. Accordingly, when she is acting in one of these capacities, any mistake she makes about the best available scientific evidence will have zero impact on her or anyone she cares about . . . But given what positions on climate change have now come to signify about one’s group allegiances, adopting the “wrong” position in interactions with her peers could rupture bonds on which she depends heavily for emotional and material well-being. Under these pathological conditions, she will predictably use her reasoning not to discern the truth but to form and persist in beliefs characteristic of her group, a tendency known as “identity-protective cognition.”
Yea, it’s sad, isn’t it. For 99.9% of us, our views on things don’t make any difference » continue reading …
Thursday, December 6, 2018
Food / Drink ... Personal Reflections ...
I am a bit of a “foodie”, albeit a vegetarian foodie. I’m also a health food nut. I don’t like all the salt and sugar and oils found in most processed food or restaurant take-out stuff (although once in a while, I do partake of a not-so-healthy meal while dining out, as a treat; the bad stuff definitely makes food very tasty!). In order to have a regular supply of healthy and enjoyable veggie food (not quite as delicious as the high-fat/sugar/salt stuff, but still pretty good), I do most of my own cooking. But that’s OK because I find cooking to be an opportunity for experimentation and creativity. So in addition to being a “foodie”, I’m also a “cook”.
Any cook who has done anything more than boil water knows that onions are essential to cooking. Onions show up in the cuisine of humans from around the planet. You can cook without onions, but it takes more work to come up with something tasty. Sure, some people just don’t like onions, and other people have medical conditions that require abstinence. Nonetheless, onions, along with garlic, are described as the “bedrock” and the “foundation” of cooking.
To be honest, I grew up in a mostly onion-less household. My father would get stomach problems from them, and so I was mostly unfamiliar with what onions do for soups, sauces, stews, salads, etc. When I did come across onions while in my childhood, I would avoid them, as they tasted too exotic. If I got a hamburger at a drive-in that had onions, I would open the bun and » continue reading …
Thursday, November 15, 2018
Personal Reflections ... Photo ...
This was the first year that I tried to grow zinnia flowers from seed in the little garden patch that my landlord lets me tend during the spring and summer. I planted the seeds in a sunny, fertilized location in mid-April, and before long there were green zinnia shoots greeting me in the morning sun of early Spring. Unfortunately, within a month or two, the local insect population found out about these growing shoots, and just about devoured the whole crop within a few weeks. I tried spraying some stuff to stop them, but I didn’t want to use anything too poisonous, so I stuck with the more “organic” bug remedies. Unfortunately, these bugs were not impressed with my environmental concerns. They just wanted their zinnia leaves.
After a while, I realized that I just wasn’t going to grow zinnias in that spot, so I got out a little shovel and transplanted the handful of ragged stalks that still seemed potentially viable. Unfortunately, I had to put them in a more shady spot, although in an area where there seemed to be fewer insects. Some of the young plants floundered, but 4 or 5 managed to put out new leaves and carried on with their growth cycle — albeit at a slower rate.
The summer season here was not especially sunny, there were a lot of cloudy days, and so my mending zinnias were in no hurry to blossom. Finally, right around Labor Day, one plant managed » continue reading …
Thursday, September 6, 2018
Personal Reflections ... Photo ...
Thursday, February 8, 2018
Personal Reflections ... Society ...
At my office, the janitorial people work by day. Being a prosecutorial law-enforcement office, we have a good number of professional staff; over one-third are attorneys. As to the investigative people with the guns, most of them have 4 year college degrees, and some have graduate degrees. There are a lot of suits and ties (or jackets and ties, in my case) for male staff, along with heels and dresses for women. There are plenty of desktop screens, laptops, smart phones, and — despite all the talk about “going paperless” — copying machines and red-rope file folders. And wandering amidst the busy office rows and cubicles with their sneakers and smocks and gloves and refuse carts and vacuum cleaners are the janitors, usually middle-aged Hispanic women.
For the most part, this arrangement works out. The cleaning people are very considerate, although sometimes they have to get in our way. Once in a while I grumble to myself if one of them wants to vacuum the rug in my office while I’m working on a complicated financial report. But usually I just get up and take a walk over to the water cooler, and in a few minutes they are somewhere else. Another moment of consternation occurs when the cleaners close off a mens or womens room for 20 minutes during mid-morning.
Overall, there is not a whole lot of personal interaction between “them and us”. Some of the clericals who are also Hispanic sometimes get into a chat with one of them in their native language. But for the most part, we exchange polite hellos, they do their jobs, we do our jobs, and the clock ticks until the work day ends for the night. » continue reading …
Saturday, January 20, 2018
Personal Reflections ... Photo ... Spirituality ...
At my office desk, I have a little “altar” hidden away on a shelf behind my computer monitor. This little altar reflects my own spiritual philosophy that God and reality are much bigger and difficult to grasp than any human system of understanding and belief can adequately deal with. And by “system of understanding and belief”, I include all religions, modern science, philosophy, art, literature, and “the voice of nature”. I think that the best that a “seeker” like myself can do is to listen to what all of them have to say, or at least as many as you have time for.
My little altar here is a tribute to the dynamic duo of world spirituality, Jesus and the Buddha. Obviously those two figures cannot represent all of the various “systems of understanding” out there, but they are two world-class heavyweights who saw things from very different perspectives. Jesus put his faith and emphasis in love and relationship, relationship between humans themselves and between humans and God. Jesus felt that humans could, with proper effort and with God’s help, achieve fulfillment and meaning in relationship and love. His vision of a “Kingdom of God” reflected his faith that humans were up to it, with God’s countenance. But the Kingdom that Jesus saw coming would require a lot of love, the kind of love that is a lot more than a Hallmark card sentiment. Jesus was not talking about sentimental niceness, but radical justice for the poor and oppressed.
The Buddha, by contrast, » continue reading …
