Fear and familiarity.

A good nights rest.

According to the American Indian author Vine Deloria Jr. “Religion is for people who’re afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who’ve already been there.” There’s some truth to this observation so long as you’re of a mind that it’s better to make the best out of the “what is” rather than to dwell on the fear of the “what might be.” As far as anyone knows, there haven’t been many who’ve visited and returned from the mythical bowels of hell and reported on the weather (even though sometimes it seems like a few demons reside in Washington).

There’s a downside to living in fear of suspected fire and brimstone as a consequence for not toeing the mark. MT captured the essence of the tradeoff succinctly: “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” And he links that fear together with one of the “Thou shalt not’s”: giving false testimony against ones neighbor. It’s always tricky to remember the twists and turns we invent to cover our backsides—“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” The mental fatigue of remembering how to untangle that web is tiring. MT’s sapient formula for getting a peaceful nights rest is this: “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” 

So there you have it. Tell the truth and sleep well, or do the opposite and have a sleepless night in the hot place.

Hard stuff first.

“If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.” MT

How often our days begin with the laundry list filled of uneven tasks. Some seem quickly done while others require more time and effort. Conventional wisdom suggests, get the little ones out of the way quickly to focus on the big ones. It’s a dice roll because sometimes what seemed like expeditious completion turns out to be onerous and disjointed. In such occasions the soon-to-be completed turns out to be lots of little, time consuming frogs.

While in the advertising business we had three inboxes: one for “must do now,” another for “after the must-do,” and the third for everything else. Ninety nine percent of the time, the everything else box was never attended and routinely sent to the circular file. Nobody cared. Nobody noticed. And the reason was that a massive amount of make-work minutia is generated by make-work people.

The not-noticed wisdom of this frog business is this: The biggest one is often big since it is the most important. Little frogs can come from little people and really don’t matter in the great scheme of human events. And if we focus on what doesn’t matter, the tasks that do matter, never get done. We can be nibbled to death by the ducks or eat the duck.

Incomparable trust.

The foundation of trust.

“Honesty is the best and the most expensive gift you can give to someone. It brings trust. It makes you trustworthy, which is priceless. Remember, trust cannot be purchased, learned or acquired. It has to be earned. Trust based on honesty is the foundation of strong and bonding relationships. Lead an honest and happy Life. Because If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything”—Mark Twain

MT’s straight-forward wisdom here looks very obscure and aberrant given the deceptive nature of our smoke and mirrors world. Style and pretense have become the common currency of human relationships, from the interpersonal all the way to the international. This latter has become so pervasive that hardly anyone can tell the difference between the prevaricator and an honest person. Not good material for building and establishing trust. And as MT says, “…trust cannot be purchased, learned or acquired. It has to be earned.” What he didn’t say (but needs to be added) is, trust is the most expensive thing in the world. It takes years to earn and a mere flash of lightening to lose. Once gone, it stays gone.

An egregiously bitter pill to swallow is when you give your trust to someone, with the assurance they will not let you down, only to discover that your confidence was misplaced. The ensuing blow to the fabric of such a relationship is crushing and forces a realignment based on doubt. Then the games begin of guarding your flank and feinting deception to preserve what’s left of the relationship. 

“If there comes a time to choose between money and trust, choose trust, because money can be earned back, but not trust.”—Kapil Jain

“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”—MT

Around and around we go.

I confess: Sometimes I become disappointed in humanity (myself included). We seem to balance on the razor’s edge between genius and stupidity. I like the first and am depressed by the latter. What is most disturbing of all is the mental attitude of denying looming disasters that have the potential to destroy us all in the seeming interest of a few. I say “seeming” because the few are part of us all and denial lays at the core of this delusion—that some will prosper while the rest of us go the way of all flesh. Granted we have to evaluate and prioritize a substantial number of looming catastrophes at the same time and it’s difficult to remember we’re here to drain the swamp when we’re up to our keisters in alligators. A certain amount of vacillation and indecision are expected. 

That said, some catastrophes have more destructive potential than others, but there are none of greater consequence than one day finding ourselves trying to survive in an environment that won’t support human life. During the cold war, we all eventually came to realize that nobody could win the nuclear arms race. There was too much threat that once begun, a nuclear attack would result in the death of everyone. We even invented the acronym, “MAD” to describe mutually assured destruction. It took some time for us to collectively come to our senses and for awhile we vacillated back and forth between the obvious and the wished for. Denial then, as now, was the enduring culprit. It was at work as well in the early Nazi era when the Jews stayed where they had lived for centuries and refused to face the growing likelihood of the holocaust.

In a New York Times article today, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton addressed the phenomenon of this psychological defense mechanism (denial) as it concerned the nuclear threat and compared it to the environmental threat of today. He said, “With both the nuclear and climate threats, the swerve in awareness has had a crucial ethical component. People came to feel that it was deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to engage in nuclear war, and are coming to an awareness that it is deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to destroy our habitat and create a legacy of suffering for our children and grandchildren.” 

It takes some vision and understanding to distinguish between the falling sky predicted by Chicken Little and the probable environmental catastrophe too awful to comprehend. But this is one of those occasions when we must rise above the alligators, because all the while we choose to remain in denial and refuse to act in a timely fashion, the environment continues to get worse. If we don’t soon face the unavoidable emerging consequences, we’ll find ourselves in the situation of the frog who became cooked in ever growing hotter water.

A smile on face of others is a reflection of the one on you.

“The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.”
-Samuel Tayor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” 1798.

That succinctly sums up MT’s 19th century assessment of the toxic conglomeration of bureaucrats, be they politicians, religious pretenders or school board administrators. He held them all in equal, slimy disdain.Undoubtedly if he were alive today he would be mortified at the proliferation of bureaucracies. He knew human nature; both the dark and light sides and while quick to castigate obstructionists and hypocrites, he nevertheless was equally quick to highlight joyous demeanor.

In his novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, MT brings to surface the religious hypocrisy in American culture. In his backhanded genius he could chop down an oak before it knew it was struck. Without ever mentioning religion, his axe was swift and on target with comments like, “It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.” Accordingly he said, “No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon,” and considered, the Christian’s Bible “...a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.” Of school boards? “God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.” Government? “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.”

On the other hand he revered humor and human kindness to warm the destitute spirit: “The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up,” and “Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”

Fattening the dog.

“Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.”—Mark Twain

That pithy observation should have been enough to guide the balancing act between education and crime, but alas we are slow learners. It really comes down to a choice between long term possibilities and short term emergencies. A sad commentary is that fear trumps hope nearly every time: a sort of bird in hand versus the two in the bush matter. When Mark Twain penned that aphorism of obviousisity in the late 19th century, publicly supported education was barely beginning. The incident of jails however began as soon as we came out of the caves. By the time he wrote this, the prison population in the United States stood at a meager level compared to today and the trade-off he spoke of was evident but not yet ripe.

I pondered long about how to gild this lily since much time has past and the institutions and both education and jails have changed much. For awhile I considered the statistical approach but in the end chose to follow the advice of MT— “There are lies, damned lies and statistics.” I could have followed the statistical path but that path is lengthy and besides, an elaboration wouldn’t change his pithy conclusion. However, in the interest of making this a small desert instead of a copious feast, I thought it prudent to follow another of his aphorisms—“It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.” I didn’t want three weeks to pass before another post.

So here is the desert: We didn’t make the right choice, and we are now in a pickle. More than a hundred years later, we spend more on feeding the dog of prisons than on the one of educating our citizenry. And there is a “duh” here: Crime is soaring like never before, funding for police is falling, (since that comes from the same coffer as education dollars), the people we didn’t educate are now living behind bars at public expense (instead of making contributions to society), costs for building and operating prisons are busting state budgets, and prisoners are being dumped back into society.

Those are facts of our misguided choices and you can do as MT suggested: “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please” and decide for yourself if the dog is fatter.

Gilding the lily.

Un-needed gilding to Twain's lilies.

It’s highly presumptuous to add to the wisdom of our greatest American philosopher and political satirist, but our contemporary times could use a little humor, honesty and indiscriminate blistering. As challenging as the mid to late 19th century must have been, we begin the 21st century with common sense in short supply. 

Mark Twain began his work with a presumption expressed in his own words: “It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” He exercised no restraint in offering up the critique that we’re all pretending to be something greater than we are, and that included himself. Acerbic deprecation was his imprimatur for himself and others. 

No one escaped his caustic wit and scolding, from President Theodore Roosevelt down to the common man. Having met TR, he commented that, “We are insane, each in our own way, and with insanity goes irresponsibility. Theodore the man is sane; in fairness we ought to keep in mind that Theodore, as statesman and politician, is insane and irresponsible.” He had a general disdain for politicians and did not suffer fools lightly. He called them as he saw them without an ounce of concern for the slings and arrows resulting from his barbs.

He displayed a much needed quality of unabashed honesty in his time and just maybe we might relearn to display a bit more moral courage by revisiting the wisdom of the man. It’s my intention, from time to time, to fit his words to today’s conditions with some gilding of my own on his lilies.