Book Review-Life’s Journeys According to Mister Rogers

It’s fitting that Joanne Rogers, Fred Roger’s wife, would open Life’s Journeys According to Mister Rogers.  Written in 2005, two years after Fred’s death and using his quotes, the book pays homage to his wisdom.  However, It’s Joanne’s wisdom and peace that is striking.  “When the day turns into night, / And you are way beyond my sight, / I think of you.”  As openings go, it’s powerful.  It sets the tone for a journey through Fred’s beliefs and his view of life.

Fascinating Journeys

One of the resounding thoughts that comes across, both here and in other works written about Rogers, is that he was always interested in others and trying to connect.  (See The Good Neighbor, The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers, and The Mister Rogers Effect for other works on Rogers.)  Rogers didn’t need a guide like James Spradley wrote in The Ethnographic Interview; he naturally looked for ways to learn about other people.  His heart seemed to have room for everyone.  Despite keeping 80 hour weeks during production season, he’d find ways to listen to anyone who he ran into – especially children.

Mentionable and Manageable

They’re the words that Rogers used in a famous congressional testimony before Senator Pastore.  He felt that emotions should be mentionable, and through that, they’d become more manageable.  He was chided for his “touchy-feely” approach.  He was teaching social-emotional learning well before it was fashionable.  Somehow, he knew that the development of a child into an adult required learning how to work with emotions.

Gentle Roots

We are too often not gentle with ourselves.  We rush through our days criticizing what we didn’t get done, what we don’t know, and how we could have – or should have – done better.  However, if we want to discover who we really are, we need to get to the roots, and roots are fragile things that need to be treated gently.  They’re the place from which we pull our nutrition and strength.  Without them, we’ll be left adrift in the journey of life.

You Contains Multitudes

It was Walt Wittman who wrote, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then, I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”  However, it speaks to Rogers’ perspective that you shouldn’t let any one thing define you.  You’re not your job description, the awards you’ve received, or even the things you’ve done.  You are unique and special “just the way you are.”  It’s too easy to simplify ourselves to the trivial and meaningless things that exist in life and, in doing so, ignore the special, unique person inside of each of us.

Pulling Away

Rogers’ son, Jim, for a time stopped talking to his parents.  Rogers commented, “the different generations within a family may have to pull apart for a while for each to find its own healthy identity.”  I don’t know that it was his recollection of the story of the prodigal son or a wisdom that his son would likely return.  It doesn’t minimize the pain that he and Joanne felt at the distance – but it affirms the need for individualization, as Erik Erikson discovered (see Childhood and Society).  Rogers and Erikson were well acquainted through work at the Arsenal Nursery School.  It would have been hard to grow up with someone so revered as Rogers as a father.  Either way, it just shows that there are reasons for temporary estrangement in every family.  (See Fault Lines.)

Speaking and Listening

“We speak with more than our mouths.  We listen with more than our ears.”  We speak louder with our actions.  There are numerous accounts of Rogers taking time that he didn’t have to make phone calls, respond to letters, or generally connect with those who were kind enough to reach out to him.  Our actions speak volumes.  (See also Heroic Leadership.)

Listening goes beyond the simple conversion of air pressure waves into electrical impulses in the brain.  Hearing and listening aren’t synonymous.  Listening involves an intent to understand what is being said, to compare it to what we know, and, most importantly, to be curious.

Transitions

This book was assembled after Rogers’ transition to death.  While death has a special level of grief associated with it, every transition has loss and grief.  (See Managing Transitions for more.)  Rogers knew that there is a final transition at the end of his life’s journey.  There’s a peace in understanding Life’s Journeys According to Mister Rogers.

Book Review-The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers

There aren’t that many television shows I remember from my childhood.  Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is one of them.  In The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers, Maxwell King speaks of the man behind the scenes.  The story is of a man who, though not perfect, lived out his life caring for and educating children on the most important parts of life, their emotions.

Sissy

Fred Rogers had his fans, but he had his critics, too.  People who felt that he wasn’t masculine enough.  People who felt all this talk about feelings made him – and the kids who watched – into “sissies.”  Part of that was a sign of the times.  A time of masculine men in Westerns who conquered the West with nothing more than a 30-30 rifle and a trusty horse.  It was, of course, make-believe.  In the real world, people didn’t wear white hats if they were good and black hats if they were bad.

But talking about emotions at the time wasn’t okay.  We’d only exited World War II a decade earlier, and that was a time when we told boys (and men) to “keep a stiff upper lip.”  Even a few decades later, Tom Hanks’ character in A League of Their Own would utter the line, “There’s no crying in baseball.”  Speaking of emotions in the late 1960s and beyond wasn’t okay.  It wasn’t the thing we did.  It was one of the counter-cultural ways that Rogers was criticized.

Competition

The other television show I remember, and the chief “competition” to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, was Sesame Street.  (See “G” is for Growing for more on Sesame Street.)  The relationship between the shows was very positive, with neither organization disparaging the other in the media though they both took a radically different approach to children’s television.

Rogers was slow and methodical.  The transitions between segments were drawn out to create space for his young audience to make the transition to a different kind of thought – or to recognize the difference between “real life” and make believe.  Sesame Street, in contrast, used fast cuts and quick changes to ensure that the child never got bored.

Sesame Street’s focus was different, too.  It was letters and numbers.  It was about the hard, tangible, measurable facts that could be crammed into children’s heads.  Rogers was more interested in what we’d today call social-emotional learning.  That is, he was concerned that children learn to accept and adapt their emotions to fit their environment.

Rogers was adamantly opposed to any kind of marketing to children, and while Sesame Street didn’t interrupt the show with advertisements, they were more open to commercial opportunities.  Still, both programs were set apart from the others of the time.  Other children’s shows of the time featured vaudeville and slapstick humor that did nothing to enrich the viewer.  The other shows were, in effect, cheap babysitting.  That, too, was something that Rogers never wanted to be.

Loneliness and Isolation Becomes Advantage

Fred Rogers struggled with some illness and frailty growing up.  His family was wealthy and that afforded him some benefits – but also made him “different.”  The result is a relatively isolated and somewhat lonely existence for the young Fred Rogers.  However, one of Rogers’ unique talents was transforming the challenges that he faced in his life in ways that could powerfully help others.

It was in the attic of his home that he developed a fondness for the puppets that would become constant companions for his professional career.  It’s the vulnerability and loneliness he felt that made him so focused on speaking to each child as a real person, giving them full attention.  He saw in his “neighbors” the pain he had felt, and he wanted to enter their world.

Television Power

As Rogers was finishing college, he became enamored with the potential power of television to influence, shape, and educate children.  It was a time of rapid growth immediately after the development of television where people were struggling to understand the new medium.  Many were treating television as radio with pictures – defaulting to the kind of programming that worked on radio.  What children’s programming existed didn’t rise to the capabilities of the medium to educate and engage.

Rogers spent time at NBC in New York learning from some of the earliest pioneers in the business.

Josie and the Puppets

After college and his time at NBC, he returned to Pittsburgh, near his childhood home of Latrobe.  By this time, he and (Sara) Joanne were married and having children.  Being close to home was a choice for raising a family.  Rogers started at a small independent television station, WQED.  There wasn’t much of a budget at all and certainly not for children’s programming.  So, he and Josie Carey, with a small crew, began to develop a Children’s Corner program.

It was here that we met Rogers’ puppets and where Josie began to talk to the puppets as if they were real, knowing full well that they were really Rogers.  The transition, where an adult could speak with puppets as if they were real and alive, was an accident, but it worked.  It gave the viewer space to join in a less-threatening conversation and to see how people can talk in safe ways.

Josie and Rogers had different paths in life, and Children’s Corner came to an end.  However, that early work created the characters of Daniel the Tiger, X the Owl, Queen Sara, and King Friday.  These characters would serve as the backbone of the land of make believe for decades.

You Know, Fred, I’m Gay

It could be the naivete of a child.  It could be that he genuinely didn’t pass judgement on others, but it appears that he couldn’t care less about the kinds of things that would be divisive at the time.  He made a point of putting feet in a pool with a black man when the segregated South said that whites and blacks couldn’t be in the same pool.

Joanne recalls a time when Fred was trying to get a friend dates with women until he said, “You know, Fred, I’m gay.”  According to Joanne, he truly didn’t care.

The Arsenal Center

Rogers wasn’t alone in his quest to elevate the approach to children.  He studied with Dr. Margaret McFarland and then sought out her advice on how to structure his programs in ways that resonated with children.  McFarland and others at the Arsenal Center were studying what did and didn’t work with children.  Dr. Spock and Eric Ericson are some of those with whom McFarland studied and worked.  Some of the leading researchers in childhood development were available to Rogers when he wanted to get the programming right.  (It’s probably more accurate to say that he needed it to be right.)

He learned and then refined the awareness that children learn through a mixture of reality and make believe.  They learn when they can try out ideas without the risks that exist in the real world.  There’s plenty of research, especially in Play, about the value of play in children.  Some of the play is about simulating interactions and outcomes.  (See Sources of Power for simulation.)

Fred’s warm acceptance of everyone, especially children, was coupled with the best research of the time.  The result ultimately would become Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood – but not before he had made a detour to Toronto to work for the CBC.

First in Mental Health

Rogers famously testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications and Senator Pastore about appropriations for public television.  In his conversation with Pastore, he said, “And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health.”  The year was 1969.  It’s well before Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book, How Emotions Are Made, and even Richard Lazarus’ book, Emotion and Adaptation.

James Pennebaker’s work, Opening Up, is effectively what Rogers was proposing.  Pennebaker used writing to reduce the impacts of trauma, and Rogers used his platform of television to normalize the discussion of emotions.

Freddish Translation

There’s the description of the process that Rogers used to convert an idea into a workable structure for children.  The conversion process was written, directly quoted, as follows:

1. State the idea you wish to express as clearly as possible, and in terms preschoolers can understand.
2. Rephrase in a positive manner, as in “It is good to play where it is safe.”
3. Rephrase the idea, bearing in mind that preschoolers cannot yet make subtle distinctions and need to be redirected to authorities they trust.
4. Rephrase your idea to eliminate all elements that could be considered prescriptive, directive, or instructive.
5. Rephrase any element that suggests certainty.
6. Rephrase your idea to eliminate any element that may not apply to All children (as in, having PARENTS).
7. Add a simple motivational idea that gives preschoolers a reason to follow your advice.
8. Rephrase your new statement, repeating Step One (i.e., GOOD as a personal value judgment.)
9. Rephrase your idea a final time, relating it to some phase of development a preschooler can understand (i.e., growing)

Loss and Life

I have a sense of loss when I recall Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.  In part, it’s the loss of Fred Rogers.  I’d love to get a chance to meet him today.  Another part is that part of life I’ve long since passed.  In one of Rogers’ poignant episodes, he dealt with the topic of death and loss.  In it, he repeatedly reinforced that life goes on.  He didn’t just tell kids blindly that it would be okay, but rather reminded them that life goes on.

I Have Been Talking to You for Years

Sometimes, the small snippets reflect the larger picture like fractals – always the same whether smaller or bigger.  (See Fractal Along the Edges for more.)  During the episode where Rogers dipped his feet in a kiddie pool with François Clemmons, who was portraying a black officer, he ended the show with the same words as every episode, “You make every day a special day just by being you, and I like you just the way you are.”  Clemmons looked at Rogers and was struck by the thought that Rogers was speaking directly to him.  When he asked Rogers about it, the response was, “I have been talking to you for years. But you heard me today.”

There are two important pieces here.  First is that Rogers constantly affirmed his little audience for decades.  He always ended with the enduring truth that every person is valuable just the way they are.  The second piece is that Rogers was passionate about accepting others – perhaps in ways that he wasn’t accepted while growing up.  (See also How to Be an Adult in Relationships for the importance of acceptance.)

Family

It’s important to note that one of Fred Rogers’ sons rebelled against his father.  Jim stopped communicating with his parents for a while.  While those rifts were eventually closed, many other families never recover from the fractures.  (See Fault Lines for more on rebellion, rifts, and separations.)  Understanding how the rift could start requires a more nuanced and complicated view of family, including Judith Rich Harris’ observations of the randomness.  (See No Two Alike and The Nurture Assumption.)

It also requires awareness of Erikson’s stages of development and that children need to assert their independence.  (See Childhood and Society for more.)  There is a time when children need to spread their wings before deciding whether to come back to the nest – or not.

Fear and Doubt

Fred Rogers wasn’t immune from the fear and doubt that we all feel about our abilities and contribution to the long arc of humanity.  He had doubts that his work was having the impact he wanted – or enough impact.  He wondered what more he could do to help others.

However, something stuck that his mother told him.  When disaster strikes, “there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in the world.”  Whatever the internal view that occasionally struck Rogers, many people would say that he was one of the best helpers.  He was The Good Neighbor.

Book Review-Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America

It’s not a Norman Rockwell picture.  There’s no wholesome family sitting in a well-furnished home.  It’s the picture of capitalism that created a market for weapons of destruction.  Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture, and Control in Cold War America explains the engine that’s driven America to own more guns per capita than any other country on the planet – by a wide margin.

Army Surplus

As World War II wound down, there were suddenly a large number of handguns sitting in boxes on shelves in warehouses.  When every member of the military wasn’t carrying a sidearm, they needed to go somewhere.  It turns out that some enterprising individuals, like Sam Cummings, began importing these weapons to market to the US consumer.  These weapons were cheaper than what could be produced by US firearms manufacturers for two reasons.

First, the surplus weapons were taking up space, and it was a good thing for the foreign governments to find a new home for them.  They were sold as used for prices intended to get them out of the government warehouse.  This led to some cases where the weapons were imported as “scrap” even though the importer knew they would be sold as-is.

Second, when the supply of surplus weapons was exhausted, the foreign labor rates and exchange rates made it less expensive for firearms to be manufactured.  Admittedly, this sometimes meant there was a lower quality of manufacturing; but for many, it was the difference between being able to afford a weapon and not.

Consumerism

With a supply of inexpensive firearms, it was necessary to create demand.  Marketing was rising as a powerful force in American society, and guns were no exception.  Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders explains how psychology became progressively more intertwined with advertising and how people are motivated to buy things to make them feel better about their lives.  Gun Country explains it as “chasing that elusive daydream of remaking the self through consumption.”  If only it were possible to elevate fear with a simple purchase – one of the two strategies marketed by the gun industry.

For firearms, the motivation took two paths.  The first path was the sport of hunting and target shooting.  It was the path of rebuilding the skills of marksmanship that the Army would have loved to have in ready supply before the war.  It was also the thing that we had lost as we moved to a more stable food supply through agriculture.  This was the positive approach.

The negative approach relied on a sense of fear – the same mechanism that is used today.  We know that violent crime peaked in the 1990s.  (See Bowling Alone.)  However, we also know that continued news coverage of violent crimes increased everyone’s perception of the rise of violent crimes.

Critical to the marketing of firearms was not just the increase in violent crimes but also the race relation tension that reached its peak in the 50s and 60s.  This tension increased fear and the belief that you needed a gun to protect yourself.  This fueled the sale of firearms in record numbers (for the time).

During the 1960s, it was common to see mail-order firearms, including the Carcano rifle:

That’s the exact ad that Lee Harvey Oswald responded to when he purchased the weapon that he used to kill President Kennedy.

Closing the Mail Order Loophole

The first firearms legislation was the National Firearms Act in 1934.  Largely, it restricted the sale of automatic weapons.  In 1938, the Federal Firearms Act restricted who firearms could be sold to – for instance, excluding those with a felony conviction.  However, the standard by which one could determine that someone was – or was not – prohibited was quite loose.  In fact, a child could sign a form that they were able to purchase a weapon and send it back, and no verification was done, nor questions asked.  Some enterprising reporters demonstrated that this was the case.

It was the 1968 Gun Control Act that finally closed the door for firearms sales by mail order.  Firearms, when transported, must be transported between Federal firearm licensees.  It wasn’t until the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 that we gained a comprehensive background check system.

Killing Quality

Much has been made of some firearms – particularly the AR-15 – because of its military use.  The problem is the implication that military firearms are somehow more powerful than civilian firearms.  This is largely not the case.  In some cases, the purchasing public has more discerning tastes than the governments that supply soldiers.  Take the case of the Carcano rifle that Oswald used.

It was a cheap, bolt action rifle, which means the operator flips up and back a piece of metal that sits behind the cartridge when fired.  It gains the ability to do multiple shots by a magazine mechanism under the weapon.  It’s a military rifle with a problem.  The weapon could be fired with the bolt being fully secured in place – ejecting it backwards and into the operator.  Even trained military personnel were hurt in these kinds of accidents, so it wasn’t something that was generally safe enough for the public.  The extra attention and higher risk made it something that serious sportsmen didn’t want to touch.

But there’s more.  The ammunition that these weapons used wasn’t in standard use in the United States.  At the start of the imports, there wasn’t a manufacturer of cartridges (bullets) that would fit in the rifles.  The problem wasn’t that the cartridges were larger or packed more firepower (gun powder) but rather that they were smaller than typically used in the US.  The typical lever-action gun strapped to the sides of horses’ front legs in Western movies is a 30-30.  It’s larger and more powerful than the kinds of weapons that were being imported – and, incidentally, the AR-15 that is so sullied today.

In short, the weapons that were being sold to the public were cheaper, but they also had less power and were more likely to kill the operator than US-manufactured weapons of the time.

Militia

People look at them like they’re weird.  Militia (sometimes called “paramilitary”) are the result of the work done to control guns.  Gun advocates correctly saw their ability to own a gun coming to a close.  Leaning on the tiniest reading of the Second Amendment, they reckoned that they had to form a militia to keep their guns.  The literal language of the Second Amendment makes gun ownership a condition of a well-armed militia, so enterprising protectors of their rights formed them.

We’ve moved on from this interpretation of the Second Amendment to a broader interpretation that allows private citizens to have firearms with very few restrictions.  However, the militia have remained an artifact of gun control clamping down on gun owners and their natural defense of their perceived rights.

Law Abiding Citizen

Part of the fear being engendered into the American public was the concept of two kinds of citizens: the law-abiding and the non-law-abiding.  Gun owners wanted to be a part of the law-abiding type.  Much like the affinity groups that I explained in The Deep Water of Affinity Groups, they wanted to be connected to protectors of society.  As protectors, they needed to be armed to be able to overcome the force of mobs – should they ever come.

Few people stopped to ask if they really were completely law-abiding or not.  Speed limits were meant to be bent.  Stop signs were sometimes “stoptional” (stop-optional).  They’d bend the rules in a million different ways, justify the bending, and move on.  (See Moral Disengagement.)

Snipers on the Rooftops

It was 1967 in Detroit, Michigan, and it was a long, hot summer.  The primary conflict was between black residents and the police department.  What’s interesting about this event isn’t exclusively that it was one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in the United States.  Also interesting is the media’s role in creating snipers.

Numerous news outlets reported that there were snipers on rooftops.  The problem is that being able to shoot people at a distance is a skill – one that the residents were never trained for.  It’s also problematic that, in at least one of the cases, the “sniper rifle” was a 410-gauge shotgun – something that’s completely incapable of hitting the broad side of a barn at range, much less sniping.  Mostly, the rioters had handguns, and while some were on rooftops, the media’s inflammatory approach to reporting generated more fear and likely played a role in amplifying the situation.

A similar situation occurred in Newark, where there was widespread reporting of snipers that never existed.  That’s good news, since the presence of well trained and equipped snipers would have dramatically changed the police casualties, as they were often in exposed areas with no body armor on.

As a part of a broader understanding of the situation that drove gun purchasing, we need to consider how the media played a part (probably unwittingly) in the increase of fear and therefore the increase in the number of firearms sold.

Registration

However, these riots did create a unique situation.  In Detroit, gun owners were required to register their firearms.  Many were concerned with the problems seen in New York, where a registration was turned into a list of people to approach when the same weapons were later banned.  (See America’s Gun Wars.)  However, an astounding 75% of the weapons that were seized or recovered during the riots were not registered.  It means that when gun control advocates suggest that registering weapons is an effective way to get a handle on gun ownership, they’ve not paid any attention to history.

It’s data like this that makes the observation that if you restrict firearms at this point, the only people who won’t have them are the law-abiding citizens.

Controlling Emotions

A real challenge with gun control advocacy is the tendency to focus on the sensational, emotional component of the problem rather than what really matters.  Gun control proponents are fixated on the AR-15 platform.  That’s like being focused on the cars with ground effect lighting.  They’re regular cars in every meaningful way.  They just happen to look a bit different cosmetically.  (See Bullet Basics, and What is an Assault Rifle?)

Mass shootings are tragic.  There’s no minimizing the tragedy experienced by those injured and killed by mass murderers.  The impact on the families is unimaginable by most.  The problem is that, statistically, they’re an extremely small number of the deaths in the United States – and even those deaths by firearm.  You’re far more likely to kill yourself with a firearm than you are to kill another person.

Preventing suicides isn’t sexy.  It doesn’t make the news most of the time.  It’s where the results can appear when it comes to preventing firearm harm, but for most people, it’s barely an afterthought.  It’s much more engaging to talk about improving mental health screening for those who purchase firearms to prevent the tragedy of mass shootings – ignoring our complete inability to predict who will create the most harm to themselves or others.

The real problem isn’t that guns create violence.  They don’t fabricate arguments from thin air.  The real problem is that arguments can quickly become deadly in a Gun Country.

Book Review-The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

I’m concerned.  A lot of people are concerned, really.  It seems like our political system in the United States is spiraling out of control, and it’s not clear what can be done to stop it.  The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels is not completely reassuring, but it does help to put our current state into a broader historical context.

The War of Northern Aggression

As I write this, I’m sitting in a state that seceded from the United States as a part of the Confederacy.  In this border state, one can still find Confederate flags and other reminders of a time long since past.  Here, they wouldn’t speak of the Civil War.  They’d speak of the “War of Northern Aggression.”  If you’ve not heard that term before, you’ve not engaged in enough conversations while in the South.  Like the conversations that we have today, where facts are warped to support feelings, the Southerners convicted by the conflict will insist that the war was one of Northern aggression.

The issue surrounds Fort Sumter, which sits in Charleston, SC’s harbor.  South Carolina seceded from the United States, but the fort wasn’t relinquished from federal control, so the Confederacy attacked it.  While the Confederacy may not have felt the United States was within its rights to hold the fort, the simple fact of the matter is that the first shot was fired by the Confederacy on the United States Fort Sumter.

I start with this story not because it’s contained within the pages of the book but rather because I see it as a real and practical example about how we don’t always listen to facts when we’re choosing our positions.

Discrimination

Certainly, any historian would point to the Civil War and the resulting disruption to slavery as a contentious time in our nation’s history.  Lincoln was clear that freeing the slaves wasn’t his point.  His goal was to maintain the integrity of the Union, and if slaves were freed as a part of that process, that would be fine.  History paints Lincoln in brighter colors, but his motives weren’t as altruistic as we’d like to believe.

It would be decades of Jim Crow laws and discrimination before Harry Truman would push forward a civil rights program that included anti-lynching legislation.  It’s frightening to me that we had to enact such laws.  It was Eisenhower who Invoked the Insurrection Act of 1807, deployed the 101^st Airborne division, and federalized the entire Arkansas National Guard to ensure that nine Black students could go to school.

It would be another six years before Martin Luther King Jr. would stand at the Lincoln Memorial and share his “I Have a Dream” speech.  Kennedy’s assassination spurred Johnson toward completing the civil rights work that Kennedy had started.  Johnson stated that he was willing to lose a chance at reelection if he could get the civil rights bill passed.  Of course, this didn’t eliminate discrimination, but it codified that it was illegal and allowed for legal pressure to resolve the issues that were once an accepted part of life for Black Americans.

This is a window into the constant turmoil that we have faced as a nation for over 100 years – if we start at the Emancipation Proclamation.  While we think of the 1960s as an era of civil rights, few realize that the work began with Truman and Eisenhower.

It’s important to state that slavery in general and the length of time it took to get to our current state is a black spot in the history of the United States.  Too few people are aware of just how long the struggle took.

McCarthyism

It starts with fear.  Communism came to be widely feared throughout the United States.  We didn’t fear an invasion or attack from the communists.  We feared that they’d infiltrate us from within and destroy the American ideal.  We feared that our friends and neighbors might silently be sympathetic to communism.  We particularly feared that people in our own government were moles for communism.

Senator McCarthy played on these fears with endless theatrics that claimed to find evidence of people’s involvement only to have these baseless claims evaporate in the light of the day.  Still, few were willing to lock horns with him, because they feared the fallout if he turned his gaze towards them.  While some stood up against McCarthy, it wasn’t as many as those who should have.  While his reign of terror has since ended, it was allowed to continue for far too long.

Trumpism

What’s striking about McCarthyism is that we’re seeing it play out again.  Trump knowingly promulgated false information to the public about COVID-19.  He played on the fears of people losing their jobs to illegal immigrants “pouring” over the United States-Mexican border.  His hyperbole regarding the wall and the misinformation regarding COVID-19 cannot help but be seen in the context of McCarthy and the adeptness that he shifted from one issue to the next to prevent the American public from catching on to his shell game.

No one – including Trump – are all good or all bad.  Both McCarthy and Trump have been adept at reading the politics of a situation and adapting.  However, that’s not the thing that we need most.

Slow, Stumbling Steps

We make and have made many mistakes.  We fail to act quickly enough.  We fall prey to fear and divisiveness, and we always have.  The fact that even today there are divisions around the Civil War (over 150 years ago) is evidence that we don’t always make progress quickly.  Enlightenment exists within our boundaries, but it’s too narrowly dispersed.

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  While we cannot expect that today or even tomorrow we’ll be the country we desire to be, the expectation is that, in time, we’ll be better than we are today.  Maybe we’ll even find The Soul of America.

Book Review-After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s

I was just graduating high school as the book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s was published.  There was, obviously, a lot going on in my world, so I can’t say that the perspectives in America about homosexuals was top of mind for me.  I was aware of the fear and hatred but largely as a part of the awareness about AIDS and HIV.  For me, it was never a thing one way or another.  Within a year or two of graduating I met some openly gay and transsexual friends, and we didn’t talk much about how other people treated them.  To me, they were – and are – simply friends.

Reading After the Ball wasn’t about trying to understand homosexuality for me.  I realized that the book stirred a lot of controversy when just putting my hands on a copy was so expensive.  I learned that many of the books had been destroyed by hate groups and that drove the price of the few remaining copies up.  The reason I wanted to read After the Ball was because it was effective.  It changed the perception of gays in the 90s.  A friend of mine with a non-binary child pushed back as I was speaking with him saying that it hadn’t gone far enough.  I suppose that’s true – but it’s equally true that the ball was moved very far down the field towards acceptance of alternative approaches to sexuality.  (See The Anatomy of Love for other approaches to sexuality.)

I was hoping to find a way to bridge the gaps that were created over the past few years as the world faced COVID-19 and the divisiveness that had been created.  I wanted to find a way to help families heal from the divisions that formed Fault Lines.  I can’t say that I found those answers, but I did find some other answers that might be more valuable.

Hate Groups

Calling the religious right a hate group is likely to win me more enemies than friends but that’s what they are – or at least were.  Jesus’ directives are clear: love your neighbor; these things remain faith, hope, and love – and the greatest of these is love.  However, somehow some people get wrapped up in righteousness and pursue fear, hatred, and alienation instead.  Unable to reconcile homosexuality with their view of “right,” they lashed out and attacked – and they encouraged and legitimized psychological and physical harm towards gays.  The enlightened writing of Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind wasn’t available – and probably would have been rejected if it was.  Understanding and acceptance of others wasn’t on the agenda.

I first encountered the title After the Ball in the book The Marketing of Evil.  It called out the book as evil.  I was so shaken by The Marketing of Evil that I broke my process of reviewing books for it.  I didn’t want to draw attention to a book that was so inflammatory.  I still feel that way today as I realize that the worst thing that After the Ball proposes is a propaganda campaign – something that even major corporations do all the time now.

In Defense of Sacred Ideas

It’s not that the perception that the Bible finds homosexuality wrong is completely unfounded.  The hate groups can point to passages that support their assertion.  The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is where we get the word “sodomy” from.  And yet, it seems as if the context is twisted and bent to fit the desires of those who tell the story.

For me, one of the most mis-told stories in the Bible is “turn the other cheek.”  While growing up, I probably heard the sermon a dozen times or more that this meant you should not lash out to protect yourself.  However, when you raise the historical context, you’re confronted with the awareness that what was likely being said is that you should give others a chance to show who they really are.  In historical times, one hand was used for wiping your feces and the other for interacting with others.  If someone was willing to smack your cheek with their left hand it was clear the kind of person they are.

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is a story that is as much about a failing to respect others’ wishes as it is about sodomy directly.  However, it’s easy to miss this subtlety when the passages condemn the whole of cities instead of focusing on the fundamental lack of respect for one another.

Homophobia and Homo-hatred

The manifest problem isn’t a fear of homosexuality but rather is a hatred of it.  It’s not that people are afraid of homosexuality directly, it’s their lashing out against it and the decision that gay and lesbians must be somehow bad or evil.  It’s the response that causes us to separate the world into us vs. them, and homosexuals are decidedly “them.”  (See Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) for more on us vs. them.)

Hatred is the unfortunate and natural outcome of a fear.  Too few people are taught how to address their fears head-on and conquer them in a positive way with tools like desensitization.  (See The Body Keeps Score for more on desensitization.)  Instead of the fears getting smaller, the reactions get larger, and the result is the need to lash out to reduce the fear.  It’s been said, and it’s psychologically accurate, that those who lash out the most about homosexual behavior are the most drawn to it.  Their attacks on homosexuality are primarily to protect themselves from it.

The Big Lie

After the Ball calls it “the big lie.”  The lie is that homosexuality doesn’t exist.  The data puts it at about 10% of the population – and yet too many people don’t believe they know a single homosexual person.  At least, that is what the data said decades ago.  Somehow, one in ten people were homosexual, but people didn’t know anyone who was gay.  Given Robin Dunbar’s work on stable social relationships, this is statistically improbable.  (For more on Dunbar’s work, see High Orbit – Respecting Grieving.)

However, if no one knew anyone who was gay, then maybe, just maybe, it didn’t really exist after all.  We’re willing to accept that there are Yeti with shadowy, impossible to see photos that depict a dark blob, but when it comes to gays, we just can’t believe.

Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Are

“Olly Olly Oxen Free” was the call we’d make when hide and seek was over, that we had given up.  We’re still not quite there with homosexuals.  While much progress has been made with the acceptability of homosexuality, there are still prejudices and biases.  There are still stigmas and shunning, and it makes it hard for those who have homosexual feelings to come out into the open.  It’s hard coming out of the closet.

Courage is not the absence of fear, it’s moving forward despite the fear.  (See Find Your Courage for more.)  If you want to increase courage, you reduce fear.  More people put themselves at professional and personal risk by “coming out of the closet” and openly sharing their homosexual orientation.  This courage is one part of the plan for overcoming fear and hatred.  The more that gays and lesbians are seen as normal and acceptable, the harder it will be for individuals to be attacked, dismissed, and shunned.

Call It What You Will

An exasperated Abraham Lincoln was said to have asked his Cabinet, “How many legs does a lamb have if you call the tail a leg?”  The answer five came up and was quickly rejected by Lincoln. “Wrong!  It’s still four.  Calling it a leg doesn’t make it one.”  The easiest – but not the best — way to deal with a problem is to deny it exists.  The premise here is the problem that straight America just wants gays to cease to exist, and denying that they do in some distorted way makes it true.

Like Lincoln’s quote, it doesn’t make it so – but more importantly, I’m slightly disturbed that it’s framed as a problem.  Instead of looking at homosexuality as a different perspective or set of beliefs, many attempt to elevate it to a difference in values at the level of morality and immorality.  It turns out that what you call it – and how you communicate about it – really matters.

Real Immorality

Part of my frustration with it being converted into a moral issue is that I believe that immorality should be reserved for those things which violate the foundations of morality.  (See The Righteous Mind for the foundations of morality.)  Albert Bandura spoke of the conditions that lead to immoral behavior in Moral Disengagement, and Philip Zimbardo spoke of it in The Lucifer Effect.  Vicktor Frankl spoke about what he saw of the Nazi concentration camps in Man’s Search for Meaning.  The differences are striking.  The first moral foundation is care/harm, and these other examples violate care/harm in ways that all but a few deviants who happen to be homosexual haven’t done.  It should be quickly noted that there are plenty of heterosexual deviants, too.  The point is that homosexuality in and of itself doesn’t mean – or imply – that other people are harmed.

Certainly, we face issues then and today which could be called moral issues – but they’re not the issues about how we interpret the nuances of the Bible – or of other religious texts.  Because people don’t subscribe to your views and are not motivated by the same things that you’re motivated by doesn’t make them evil or bad.  It makes them different.  (See Who Am I? for more on Reiss’ 16 basic motivators and how we’re all motivated by different things.)

The Propaganda Machine

Propaganda gets a bad reputation.  It’s been used in very evil ways.  Perhaps the greatest example is the propaganda war that Adolf Hitler waged against Jews and Russians.  (The Russians get less attention because they had an army and put up a more violent fight.)  The propaganda specifically made both groups seem sub-human.  That process created the conditions which enabled the concentration camps and the attempted genocide.

Propaganda at its most fundamental is a one-sided approach to a topic designed to persuade others that the purveyor of the propaganda’s point of view is right.  The proposed Waging Peace Campaign rests on three pillars.

#1 – Desensitization

If you want to get over fear, the technique developed by Albert Bandura may just be the thing.  Afraid of snakes?  Find safe ways to look at pictures of snakes, then be in the same room, then near them, then touch them, then hold them.  It takes time, but desensitization works.  It’s not the fear of snakes that After the Ball is trying to cure.  It’s fear of homosexuals – and the process works en mass as well as it works one-on-one.  The more that homosexuals are portrayed in mildly uncomfortable but not threatening ways, the more normal it becomes, and the less fear there is.

We know that anything that becomes common elicits less of a reaction.  If encountering openly homosexual people is common, then it shouldn’t be such an issue.

#2 – Jamming

Another, more disruptive, approach to changing perceptions is to introduce two incompatible emotional responses at the same time.  For instance, introducing the idea of a wholesome family and then revealing that the parents are homosexual necessarily creates the need for the two conflicting emotions to be reconciled.  While the process is not easy for the individual, it can be effective at causing the lesser emotion to recede.

Other approaches to jamming place a negative emotion with the positive emotion that drives bigotry.  Bigotry continues because we receive a reward for acting on our bigotry, thus reinforcing it.  (See The Power of Habit for more on reinforcement.)  However, if you spoil the reward by adding in guilt, shame, or regret, you steal the power that the engine needs to reinforce the behavior and thereby lessen it.

#3 – Conversion

While the first two techniques are aimed at reducing fear and bigotry, the third is about increasing likability.  That is, while ambivalence is a good start when you’re coming from bigotry and hatred, it doesn’t go far enough to protect against backsliding.

The real trick is to create friendships with straight people – and to allow those friendships to spread.  This is easier said than done as Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) relates how Al Campanis could like Jackie Robinson and know that he was a fine baseball player but simultaneously not believe that he’d make a good manager.

Certainly, making friends and creating affinity with others is the right strategy, the degree to which it may be generalizable is questionable.

Out Come the Freaks

One of the most direct criticisms of the homosexual movement for equality comes in the form of the visibility of the “freaks.”  That is, those people who represent the furthest extreme.  Those who would seek to shock straight America into accepting the movement do more damage than good.  It’s for this reason that Kirk and Madsen recommend that the more socially acceptable come forward (where they’re able) to be spokespersons for the movement rather than allowing parades of debauchery to be the single message that heterosexual America sees.

After the Ball divides homosexuals into two broad categories.  The “Rs” look like and can be seen like straights – and they like it that way.  The “Qs” can’t look like straights – and they don’t want to.  They want to be queer (different).  Despite the natural aversion to standing out and being recognized as gays, if desensitization is to be effective, it needs the “Rs” to take up the banner.  Without the normalcy, gays could be rejected out of hand.

Free Software

Richard Stallman was the programmer-activist who led the charge for free software.  It’s spawned a whole market of open-source and openly licensed software that has made the world better.  Yet many in the world of open-source software cringe when they hear that he’s spoken at another event or to the press.  His beliefs are so extreme that they seriously jeopardized the legitimacy of open source software.

Quietly, other voices started emerging with more moderate views and a less militant approach to finding ways to drive commerce without perceived exploitation.  This is the same approach that After the Ball proposed for improving the relationship between heterosexual and homosexual people.

The Principles

After the Ball proposes a set of principles that gays should use to improve the situation realizing that gays would have to be better than straights to gain acceptance.  They are:

1. Don’t Just Express Yourself: Communicate –Focus not just on expression but what the message is that you’re sending.
2. Seek Ye Not the Saved nor the Dammed: Appeal to the Skeptics – The greatest opportunity for any movement is to appeal to those who are interested in learning more and who have not yet developed any prejudices.
3. Keep Talking – The goal is simply to work on desensitization, and that requires a lot of low-grade discomfort. It’s the kind of discomfort that is acceptably generated through talking.
4. Keep the Message Focused: You’re a Homosexual, not a Whale – Don’t pickup every other cause like lost puppies and bring them into the fold. Stay focused on what is important.
5. Portray Gays as Victims of Circumstance and Oppression, not Aggressive Challengers – Look for support and sympathy rather than invite conflict, resistance, and battles.
6. Give Potential Protectors a Just Cause – Make it easy for others to join the cause by focusing on the fact that gays are being discriminated against rather than trying to convert others’ sexual practices.
7. Make Gays Look Good – Appearing as model citizens and pillars of society makes it easier for others to support you.
8. Make Victimizers Look Bad – Where possible and appropriate, allow victimizers’ actions to become well known, so that others are repulsed by their actions.

Civil Disobedience

After the Ball has advice for civil disobedience, from ensuring non-violence (on the part of those practicing it) to communicating the willingness and acceptance of being arrested for the disobedience and the need to connect the act of disobedience with the cause.  Unfair taxation of tea preceded the Boston Tea Party, and so civil disobedience must make the connection between the act and the cause clear.

Stand and Be Counted

Today, we’re three decades after the publication of After the Ball.  Much has changed and gotten better.  Thankfully, gay bashing has receded to rarity.  However, there are still legitimate concerns about the degree to which someone can be open about their sexuality for fear of reprisal.  In some sense, this feels like a continuing journey.  It may be that there is no after in After the Ball; you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Book Review-The History of Iceland

I’m by no means a history buff, but there’s something about Iceland that drew me in and made me want to understand the story behind the island nation in the North Atlantic. The History of Iceland is a tome about the Icelandic people and how this amazing island came to be.

Sucking You In

My interest started with an invitation to deliver a keynote presentation to the Icelandic Records Management Association. Iceland arose from the deep recesses of my memory as a place that seemed wild and different. I accepted the invitation and began learning about the island, the people, and the history.

The more I learned about Iceland, the more interested I became.

Geography

The first bit to understand is where it is. It sits on the fault line between the tectonic plates that North America and Europe sit on. The gaps between the plates created a way for lava to flow up and create the land mass that is Iceland.

Though it’s very far west compared to European countries, the time zone that it observes is GMT/UTC. That means it’s on the same time as London, and five hours ahead of the US Eastern Time Zone. The time zone is as good as any other, since there’s plenty of light in the summer and not much in the winter due to its very high longitude.

However, the relatively low habitation means that it’s a great place to see the northern lights. (Or so I’m told — we did get to see them on our visit.)

Government

The initial settlement was by the Vikings, and because of the rugged nature and some misfortunes, the island struggled to reach and maintain a population of 50,000 people. Modern day Iceland boasts roughly 400,000 people – roughly 40% of which live in the capital of Reykjavik and the surrounding area.

As a result of their heritage – and failure to desire independence – they remained subject to the king of Norway and eventually Denmark. Independence was officially conveyed in 1944. However, in an odd turn of events, not a single shot was fired. Independence was granted without a fight.

Through the ages, Iceland had a largely decentralized government. Though subject to the King of Norway, the King largely left the Icelanders alone. It seems like no one really wanted to put up much of a fight over Iceland. In fact, the Danish rule of Iceland was overthrown by the capture of a single person.

Icelanders have, reportedly, protected their national image of neutrality and defenselessness. Having a national identity in defenselessness is to me – an American – a very foreign concept. However, for a country that’s spent most of its history largely undefended, the concept seems to make sense.

Farming and Fishing

The early history of Iceland required that everyone have or work on a farm. While it seems like fishing would be a primary commercial activity, the Icelandic people are described as sedentary pastoralists. That is, they would live off farms and livestock. Fishing, while done in the winter months, wasn’t a full-time vocation for centuries.

Today, marine products may make up 70-80% of exports, coming down from an estimated high of 90% in the 1940s through 1960s. So, while there are still many farms, most of what is grown locally is eaten locally. Fishing became so important that Iceland extended its fishing rights from 2 miles to 4 miles to 12 miles and, ultimately, to 50 miles and 200 miles. The extension of the fishing around the island was the cause for the only real “war” the island had when the British had a different idea of where their trawlers should be able to fish.

What’s in a Name

Iceland is greener than Greenland, and that’s a bit of marketing by Erik the Red. He figured if it had a good name, then men might like to come there. Iceland had no such marketing-based name, thus there’s a reversal of conditions between Greenland and Iceland.

There’s another name-based uniqueness in Iceland. They don’t use family (or sur-) names. Instead they use patronymics. That is, your second name is the name of your father or mother followed by son or daughter. To trace your lineage, you track back through the names of your ancestors one at a time instead of claiming and continuing a family name. The result, I’m told, is a propensity to just use first names, even if you’re not very familiar with the person to whom you’re speaking.

Christianity

Though initially the island was settled in pagan times with pagan chieftains, the island was converted to Christianity in 999 or 1,000 A.D. through public decree at the big meeting – called Althing – after a dispute was brought forward because of the different laws that were being followed by the pagans and Christians on the island. With a non-existent centralized government, it made sense that there needed to be an agreement on what the laws should be.

Christianity in countries outside of Iceland would ultimately prove to be a boon to Iceland because of the decision that fish didn’t count as meat when it came to fasts – particularly during Lent. There was an increase in demand for fish since it was allowed during fasts.

Christianity becoming the law of the land would ultimately drive literacy but not always in the most straightforward manner. Literacy was defined as the ability to recite Luther’s catechism (summary of principles as a question and answer), while literacy in other countries at the time was the ability to write your name. Despite this, the requirement that children be “literate” before they were confirmed started the process of learning.

Real Literacy

Real literacy came from the humble beginnings of Christianity. Children were required to be literate and this eventually transformed into the kind of literacy (reading and writing) that we expect today. However, adults were often concerned that the effort spent learning to read and write would prevent the children from doing their work on the farm. So, like all good teenagers, the thing that was forbidden became the thing they did. They would often learn how to read and write in secret despite the concerns and sometimes instructions of their parents.

Today, Iceland has a love affair with books – both reading and writing. Much of this love affair can be attributed to generations of literacy – and probably at least to some degree due to the lack of distractions. Radio and televisions service came to Iceland late – and only due to the American base.

Social Support

A network of neighbors and churches along with some interesting economic policies kept unemployment low in Iceland. Unemployment didn’t officially exist in a unified way until 1956. Perhaps that’s because being able to work – but not working – was considered a crime. It may also be related to the fact that if you had received public assistance you would likely not be allowed to marry. (Which was mostly a sign that you intended to have children.)

The other policies that led to people working was as high rate of inflation that made it useful to spend your money when you had it – generating a demand for labor – so that it would not become devalued. This high demand for labor and the societal stigma surrounding not working likely kept the rate low.

As I prepared travel to Iceland to get a chance to learn more about these amazing people and this amazing land, I looked at my research as a kind of social support as I felt more prepared to take in all that Iceland had to offer. The History of Iceland is amazing. I’m grateful to have read it before I experienced the island.