A Comment on Gun Control

                        A Comment on Gun Control

There are some issues that seem to be going unanswered or at least unadvertised in the hot and heavy debate about gun control. First, I ask the reader to take a short test.

1.     If you have a 10 dollar allowance and you go to your parents and ask for a raise to 12 dollars and your mom says yes, but your dad says that he will give you 11 dollars, do you believe your dad wants to cut your allowance in half? 

2.     If 10 people have something and 2 more want to have the same thing and you prevent these 2 from getting what they want, do you believe you have reduced the overall number of the object desired?

3.     If a person commits a crime and you cannot punish that person, should you punish someone else who is not guilty to make a point?

4.     If you want to do something that you believe is right, but it is illegal to do so, and doing so has been shown to contribute no positive benefit, should you do it anyway so at least you can say you did something?

5.     Do you believe that you should eliminate temptation indulged by a very few, even though the vast majority do not give into that temptation?

6.     Do you believe that after the 2^nd amendment was passed, Thomas Jefferson got in his buggy to go tell George Washington that from now on he would have to register his long guns and could not even own a pistol?

I would like to make a few points to those who say yes to even one of these questions. 

           

1.     There are approximately 300 million guns in America.  Stopping future purchases will not actually decrease that number. 

2.     Teaching people that there are negative consequences to their bad behavior is a good social function.  Teaching people that they will be punished when someone else does something bad is a very dangerous social function.

3.     Focusing on the inanimate object associated with a crime is not going to be as effective as focusing on the person and their violent behavior.  We do not ban hammers or baseball bats, or knives or cars even though examples of terrible killing using these objects are easy to find.  

4.     There are many instances where a weapon has prevented a rape, beating or other crime, but since the prevention itself does not usually get publicly counted, one is lead to believe, falsely, that only the gun related crimes are occurring in society.

5.     Banning the fork to eliminate over weight or banning cars because there are people who drive drunk, or more serious observations such as the idea that guns don’t kill, people kill, or that the only thing that is going to stop a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun can be dismissed as silly, simple minded, just a joke or worse.  But that is a pejorative response and not a thoughtful argument. The observation that protecting kids in school necessitates having someone with a gun and appropriate training within the immediate area demonstrated a desire to protect children and the broader society.

6.     Only criminals will still have guns as the honest and compliant people are forced to give up theirs. People living in a violent neighborhood, unable to defend themselves, has not worked very well in our cities. 

7.     We could identify and help people with emotional issues that have demonstrably rendered them much more likely to commit violence.  We do not even deal effectively with violent students who are repeat offenders that attack other students and even attack their teachers.

A simple solution such as banning weapons is not going to take weapons out of the hands of those who use them to do harm but it will prevent people from defending themselves.  Instituting a mental health system that participates in early identification and consequential treatment is something we could do, but so far, we have not.

We are polarizing society when we target with punitive action a group that has done nothing wrong. When politicians impose rules that are plainly forbidden by the founding principals of our country, they run a risk of creating a much more negative situation than the one they are pretending to solve.

Some Thoughts on the Tragic Shooting of Children in Connecticut

The recent and tragic shooting in Connecticut draws out of one a number of thoughts, most of which are of no utility. This is as it should be since such incidents are the type that really should touch a person’s emotional system much more than ones intellect. Of course, at some point in one’s reaction the question of what could be done to make a second such incident impossible rises as a challenge. The first thoughts, for most of us, are something a bit like a fairy tale. Next time, the schools should protect the children better. Someone should have known and we should have listened better. Such “solutions” are tempting, but of course, by themselves they lead to nothing of any value.

After a while, our thoughts get a bit more strategic and we might think of things that really would work, if only we lived in a very different world than the one to which we are consigned. That sort of thinking leads to what is probably the most popular line of reasoning. We need to stop allowing violent people to obtain guns. If we are particularly careful we might add “like those used in this tragic incident.” So we see an effort to keep assault rifles from the hands of violent people. But, that too is a bit too open ended and it might occur to us that we are not very likely to ever identify all the violent people with whose hands the assault rifle should be kept from holding.

Making any of these strategies work would require a level of control that far exceeds our ability to exert. Will we ever identify every violent person? Will we really ever be able to eliminate the existence of all the assault rifles? Not very likely. Identifying all the violent people would require including lots of people who are not violet but share some characteristics of those who really are violence prone. Only in the excesses of the identification can we hope to include most, but even here not all the people with the propensity to do something so horrible as happened in Connecticut.

In other words, one of our immediate problems is that to even approach success we need to commit our own set of excesses. Perhaps our sins would not be nearly as bad as the potential that we are trying to forbid, but still they are troubling, especially to the ones we lock up for their unrealized potential. So, one of the difficulties we immediately run into is a basic truism of most of our actions which is that there are always unintended consequences to our efforts to be good. One might argue that if we simply ban all assault rifles that would eliminate the deaths from Assault rifles. If one is not terribly thoughtful, this solution provides a good deal of hope and seems to not incur much in the way of negative consequences.

One of the problems, though, is the all too common confusion between policy and intention. In other words, we ban the sale of assault rifles in the confusion with our intent, that assault rifles will no longer be in existence and therefore will not be available for use for such tragedies. Banning assault rifles may very well decrease the number in existence in the future. This reasoning is somewhat like that used by our government to save money. We are saving money by reducing the rate at which we borrow as though that were the same as actually saving money. It is not and we are not likely to develop a way to accomplish our goal of eliminating the existence of assault rifles by reducing the rate at which they are acquired.

That the ban will not eliminate the offense from ever happening even by the cause of the misuse of assault rifles is one thing, but of course our goal is not to eliminate the murder of innocents by assault rifles, but what we want to do is eliminate the murder of innocents by any means available. If the problem is posed thusly, it has the sobering effect of making it crystal clear that we will never succeed in that goal.

There is a very useful saying that comes into play at this point, which is that perfection should not become the enemy of the good. Maybe we should be happy with decreasing the number of new assault rifles in the future and recognize that eliminating them is not possible. The application of this aphorism leads to the question of whether the problem has to do with the access to the assault weapons and whether a ban would actually decrease their availability. Maybe it would in several hundreds of years. Flintlock weapons are certainly harder to possess now, than they were when first invented. But, of course, they have been replaced by numerous more modern weapons, including the assault rifle. What will come on the market in 5 or 10 or a hundred years from now? We can only guess, but in any case it will not be a pleasant, of that we can be pretty sure if the past is any guide to the future.

Of course, that begs one of the difficult questions that assault rifles are not even the most likely weapon, let alone the only weapon that might be used for terrible actions. Africans in Rwanda, for example know that one does not need modern weapons to kill hundreds of thousands, let along 26. So, we are lead to considering other approaches or perhaps multiple approaches to at least lessen this problem. The obvious consideration might then be given to turning the problem around. Suppose we consider not how the violent ones commit their crimes, but how the victims might be given the chance to not be victims.

This line of reasoning turns us to consider protections that might be instituted. We are not likely to think that arming the 7 year old child with a carry permitted weapon is the answer, but we might consider providing armed guards at our schools, for example. We know that will not be foolproof, because that has failed before, but perhaps it will be a good solution, if the school is the place where the attack is going to be lodged. We might also consider training several people in each school to serve as defense. Guns could be locked away in several places in a school and school officials who normally work in each area be given appropriate training to respond as needed. Some airline pilots have been trained to be ready in case of an effort to take over their plane and the same idea might be instituted in the schools.

Anyway, we soon get to the point of asking ourselves why this problem is so hard to solve in a way that is really effective. Having a large number of armed “good people” seems to be a solution on the way to being good, but it is not complete or perfect, and after a while it appears obvious that we will never come to a completely effective, perfect solution. One of the reasons why this and all such problems are difficult is that we do not have a very clear and simple notion of the causality that underlies the tragedy we wish to avoid. In other words, we do not and cannot identify the cause as some simple, correctable effect, because there is no simple cause for us to find. For example if you go into a room that is dark and you wish to cure that problem, it is reasonably easy to think that a light might be the answer to eliminating that problem of darkness. So, we install a light with a light switch or if there is no source of electricity, we carry a flashlight that provides light and its own source of power.

Another difficulty that arises is that looking in the direction of the mental health issues becomes greatly more complex than focusing narrowly on the gun involved. Most problems are much easier to approach if one stays with the immediate and the concrete. Moving to abstract and delayed solutions is neither nearly so attractive nor so easy to think about. Putting into place a mental health system that does not duplicate the problems that John Kennedy hoped to eliminate when he virtually destroyed the mental health system in America presents a huge challenge. So, those with a great motivation to do something are likely to focus on the concrete and immediate, again, banning assault weapons, without much attention to the level of success this will result. The fact that such an approach will not likely have any serious impact on the problem that is the elimination or at least major reduction in violent deaths is not nearly as easy to consider, to grasp and to resolve.

So, to summarize, we can try several approaches and hope they will each have some rate of success. We can try to regulate guns out of the hands of violence prone individuals. We do that now, but perhaps that effort can be improved. We can arm and train more people who are good and willing to try to intercede when the need arises. We can look more closely at the problem of identifying those with the desire and willingness to (and often a history of) committing violence and take steps to prevent them from carrying out their intentions by blocking their efforts. We can also remain concerned and caring in the face of the inevitability of such horrors. We must not get to the point where we accept that such action is never going to be fully eliminated. We can continue to be observant and to report any indication of a propensity for violence and we can demand that mental health assessments be provided and acted upon when judged to be a real risk, while holding such actions to a high standard of proof.

Eulogy for Frank Jaklitsch, friend

March 19, 2012

I am honored to be permitted to speak about Frank Jaklitsch. He was a person I greatly admired and a friend of mine. He lived an exemplary life and he faced death with the same courage that he demonstrated when his health was robust. Frank was a man of honor. I have been lucky to have not faced such a circumstance very many times in the past. Of course, my parents, and my wife’s parents and our grandparents have all died, along with a few older friends. There is something about a death in the generation ahead of us that is reassuring in a strange way. That is the way it is supposed to be and I could say my turn won’t come for a while yet, because I am younger. The older people die and the young take their place. That is the way it should be and we should not be able to change the reality of that, but sometimes nature or agent orange or some other tragedy changes that reality. Of course, what one can do about this is to change the way one looks at such events although that is getting harder now that I am among that group of older people. I have become convinced that the age at which one is certified as older is much younger than it was when I was a teenager.

We can anticipate going to heaven or perhaps enjoying a rebirth as a more evolved person. I like the latter idea, myself, as long as I am allowed to skip the teenage years and the terrible twos. Frank asked me what I thought would happen when he dies. Of course, we do not really know exactly what lies ahead. What should we say to such a question from a person we care about and want to comfort and a person who knows he is going to die. What came to my mind was a conversation between the two central characters in the movie “Meet Joe Black” which was based on the novel “Death Takes A Holiday.” The man targeted for his coming death asked the collector of souls whether he should worry about what will come next. The collector said that a man like him does not need to fear what comes next. I told Frank that and I really meant it. A man like Frank does not need to worry about a judgment of his life. Any measure of Frank’s life will show him to have been an exemplary human being and I told him that was my professional opinion. I am a professor. I am not a real doctor, but I do know such things.

I first met Frank in about 1979 when he was the 9 year old soccer players’ coach and I was his assistant. We got to run around with the kids and try to have them win games while having a good time. Frank was great with the kids. My job was to give extra advice such as “Aim for the goal when you kick.” And “Kick hard with your feet.” My own kids were on Frank’s team and when I told them Frank had died, they each had the same sad reaction and they each said he was a good man. I asked them why they said that. They each said he was nice to them. He really listened to them and he treated them like he liked them, he wanted them to do well and he respected them. You all probably know the saying that relates to this. It goes something like this: “Whatever you did unto one of the least, you did unto me.” Frank was a man who gave freely of his time, his energy, his good spirit, his kindness and he did so to all who came before him.

Frank had a number of characteristics that I admired greatly. These included his generosity, his capacity for acceptance, his open admiration and support of the success of others, his fairness and fine sense of ethics. You get the idea. He had a stressful job that required great tact and a sense of right and wrong. All the knowledge I had of Frank in that arena showed me that he always advised those above him to do the right thing. Once I asked him if I could get an exception to a zoning requirement so that I could develop 30 acres that surrounded a home in an uppity northern Calvert County community. I got one of the most tactful and kind hearted NOs that I have ever received. I also got a clarification that might have been paraphrased as “it will not happen till hell freezes over.”

Some of you probably know that Frank was an excellent carpenter. He not only had lots of tools, but he knew how to use them and he did beautiful work. If you look around his house you will see evidence of that everywhere. For the purpose of this eulogy, I am going to ignore the really beautiful stained glass windows that are in several places in the house. Diane created the stained glass windows, and they are marvelous. Anyway, a great old tree fell in the woods and Frank not only heard the tree fall but he also realized that tree had the potential to be much more than it had been before it died. He took it to a sawmill and had planks made. He made stairs to the basement from that tree. Beautiful stairs. He was a perfectionist and it showed. He decided one day that his kitchen and the breakfast nook would be nicer if the area was 13 inches larger than it currently was. He then added the 13 inches to that end of his house, and it did look nicer. He was a very passionate carpenter.

I will tell you a story about the time that Frank helped me build some stairs. One day I decided I wanted to build a staircase to get from the second floor to the first floor of my house and from the first floor to the second. Two-way stairs. You could already get up and down using a circular metal staircase that was a bit better than a fireman’s pole. The biggest problem was that our dog had trouble going up and down those stairs, but anyway, I wanted to build a nice oak stairway that would make my dog proud. Naturally, I called Frank to get his help. We had to build a landing so the stairs would come down to the new landing and then take a right hand turn and go down to the floor. It was to be an L-shaped staircase with a big landing. Frank knew how to do that and suggested the plans, which I recognized were good ones.

While we built the landing, which was really a big box, we needed to nail a small two by four on the inside of the box across two pieces of plywood to temporarily hold them together. So, we did the nailing on the inside of the box that was to become the landing and it looked like a landing and we surveyed all that we had made and we declared it to be good. We then built the stringers for the stairs down to the box landing and then we built the stringers from the box landing down to the floor. We cut them out so they were all within an eighth of an inch of each other and they were perfect up and down and in every way that we knew. I knew my dog would be proud of those stairs, not to mention my wife. I was about to declare all that I surveyed to be good, when suddenly, Frank said “Oh oh… we forgot something.” I looked at him and asked what we forgot. He said we needed to open up the box for the landing and get the piece of two by four out of there since it was no longer necessary to hold the plywood together now that we had the box landing built and it was ready to support the stairs and it was now NEARLY ready to be proclaimed to be good, but for that one imperfection. I looked at Frank while I was hanging over the edge of the second floor looking down at the box and the stringers and the unseen fully covered two by four. I was covered with sawdust and I was tired. I asked Frank “Does the piece of two by four present a structural issue?” I could tell Frank knew where this conversation was going. Then I asked him “Frank, is this two by four inside and fully covered by the plywood of the box a cosmetic issue?” He hesitated for a while and finally said that “it was neither, but it really should be removed, anyway.” At that point, I declared all that we had created to be good, and swore him to secrecy and promised him that I would never tell a soul. So I ask everyone here to please keep this our little secret and don’t tell anyone else. This explains why his work was so beautifully executed and why it took a really long time to complete. Frank was a quality person inside and outside. Metaphorically, he built stairs to heaven, while my goal was to get up and down without tripping and make my dog happy.

Finally, I want to note that Frank had good taste. He picked a wonderful southern bell for a wife. Diane has been a great helper, supporter, friend, confident, and all the other things with which only a fortunate man can be blessed. Diane and her friends and family helped Frank these last few months in a truly heroic way that few would be able to match and Frank knew that. Frank knew that he was loved by his family and by his friends. Frank will be missed by all of us, and especially by his wife and children. He leaves a space in their lives that can’t really be filled. It is a space that was filled by Frank’s goodness. It was not a space of unresolved issues. He built friendships the way he built stairs.

We will all miss you Frank! We know that Diane knows that she and Frank are loved and that there are many people whom she can count on for help and support. We certainly can’t replace Frank, but we can be a source for Diane to draw upon.

Thanks for letting me try to put form to some of my feelings for Frank.

Bob Lissitz

Rex, The First Animal Doctor

Rex, finally unwound his legs and stood up and walked toward the stage slowly. It was time to get my award, he said to himself and slowly climbed the stairs at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association. He realized that the spring in his step was just not there any longer. He felt just like an old dog, he thought. He stood as tall as he could as his long time friend introduced him to the audience. Of course, everyone there knew who he was. He was probably the most famous doctor in the history of the world. He felt a little funny about that. Not like Sabin, or Fleming, he imagined, but he let himself recognize that he did deserve some sort of acknowledgment and he had grown accustomed to this sort of thing and no longer felt uncomfortable with the praise.

The introduction went on longer than it probably should have, but it was nice and he remembered all the effort and the prejudice that came during his journey to become a doctor. At first no one thought he could do it, but of course, he did. People did not want to work with him and he could understand that. His voice did not sound quite right to his colleagues and never would, really. He had long ago adjusted to the use of the universal translator (UT). It had been invented just a few years before his birth and he was lucky that a family that not only loved him, but also believed in him and wanted him to be all they thought he was capable of had adopted him. In fact, at times, they had more faith in him, he thought, than he did himself and he smiled about that.

His confidence changed with time, of course, as he learned more and more and learned to trust the universal translator (UT) to be reasonably accurate and even quite inventive, at times. He had a lot of help from the research from the experts on English as a Second Language (ESL), although he was really very young when he came to be surrounded by English speaking people and that helped. He also worried a lot about the dexterity issues, but the adaptive devices that were being invented by engineers for the handicapped and for surgeons, like the old daVinci system, were immediately adaptable to his own situation and he made the most of them. Fortunately, they became more advanced and reasonably portable.

The research on universal test design was also very helpful and the speech he had prepared for this honor would address that issue and give credit to the psychometricians who worked with the multicultural educators to give him a real chance to demonstrate just how smart he was. Not just in terms of raw IQ, of course, but also how much more intuitive he was than most humans. He also had great skills that were often perceived by his colleagues as paranormal, but of course they were not. His skills were just greater than theirs because of his genetic advantages, and after a while his colleagues adjusted and grew comfortable to his surprising insights.

Rex was going to talk about using odor as a diagnostic tool, just like some Doctors did once in the 1800s. Liver disease, kidney diseases and diabetes were relatively easy for him to diagnose and he secretly smiled about his skills in those areas. He tried, of course, to teach medical students to do that and they were never as good as he was, although adaptive devices helped a lot. The Smellatron aided the students a great deal, when it came on the market and he was able to share the income with the engineer who helped him perfect the device. It had been a great team effort and they both deserved the credit and the income that derived from the patents. Sometimes multiculturalism really did work, even though usually it was just silly talk. In his case, he really was different and everyone knew it and most came to appreciate that fact, and he liked to think he was actually better.

He appreciated the differences more than most, since he was the source and made the most of his strengths and minimized his inherent weaknesses. Winning the Nobel Peace prize was one of the outcomes he took great pleasure in, even though by then, nearly everyone realized that the prize was not really as meaningful as it might have been if the standards had been kept up by the various committees over the years. He really had been a very effective spokesman for animal rights organizations.

He could tell it was nearly time for him to speak and he adjusted the UT and went over a few of the short jokes that always made his speeches very popular. He liked the joke about the CAT scan involving a real cat and the PET scan being a funny joke about limiting opportunities of the creatures on the earth. The one thing he never joked about was his own image, though. For example, he always wanted to get someone to throw a stick and he would go running after it. He felt it set the wrong image, like a Black man he once read about who refused to eat watermelon in public. He did adapt a device that had been used to throw clay pigeons so it would throw sticks and in the privacy of his own estate would take it out and enjoyed himself for a few hours. It kept him in shape and that was important to him back then. Now that he was getting old, he no longer did that, but he certainly missed the exercise. Getting old and getting too busy interferes with his having fun, but he knew it was just the way life is with its yin and yang.

It was now his time to speak and he moved to the podium that was specially designed for him. He started off his speech with his usual story about the puppy mill where he was born and the wonderful family that came and adopted him. He was one of the lucky ones, but he did work hard and deserved his good fortune. The Government once tried to own him and put him on a stipend, but he ran away and won the big court case that set the precedent for all the other animals resisting Government welfare. His family knew that a German Shepherd with a little Labrador Retriever mixed in was a great combination. Eventually he became, quite literally, the first animal doctor and life was good.

The Strawberry Who Wanted to be a Banana

THE STRAWBERRY WHO WANTED TO BE A BANANA
ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A SMALL STRAWBERRY WHO WAS NOT HAPPY BEING A STRAWBERRY. HE SAID TO ALL THE OTHER STRAWBERRIES WHO WERE BIGGER THAN HE WAS THAT HE DID NOT CARE IF THEY WERE BIGGER. HE DID NOT CARE IF THEY TASTED GOOD. HE DID NOT CARE IF HE HAD LOTS OF FRIENDS WHO WERE RED AND HAD LOTS OF BUMPS.
HIS NAME WAS DAVID THE STRAWBERRY AND HE WAS NOT HAPPY. HIS BEST FRIEND WHO WAS NOT A STRAWBERRY ASKED HIM WHY HE WAS NOT HAPPY. HE SAID, ALVIN (WHO WAS A MARSHMELLOW) I DO NOT WANT TO BE A STRAWBERRY ANYMORE. I WANT MORE OUT OF LIFE.
DAVID THE STRAWBERRY SAID HE WANTED TO BECOME A BANANA. “I AM COLOR BLIND,” SAID DAVID “AND I CAN’T TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MY RED STRAWBERRY COLOR AND THE COLOR OF THE BLUEBERRIES.”
HIS FRIEND, THE MARSHMELLOW CALLED ALVIN, SAID, “I LIKE MARSHMELLOWS BUT I ALSO LIKE STRAWBERRIES. AND EVERYONE LIKES MARSHMELLOWS AND STRAWBERRIES, ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY ARE TOGETHER.” THEN ALVIN SAID, “WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE IF YOU WERE NO LONGER A STRAWBERRY?”
DAVID SAID, “I WANT TO BE A BANANA.” ALVIN SAID, “THAT IS SILLY. YOU CAN’T BE SOMETHING YOU CAN’T BE. YOU CAN BE A STRONG STRAWBERRY. YOU CAN BE A SMART STRAWBERRY. YOU CAN BE A HAPPY STRAWBERRY, BUT YOU CAN’T BE A BANANA.”
DAVID SAID, “I CAN BE ANYTHING I WANT TO BE. MY TEACHER MS. FRUITBOWL SAID I COULD.” I AM GOING TO GET A COAT THAT IS ALL YELLOW AND I AM DOING YOGA SO I CAN STRETCH MYSELF TO BE REALLY, REALLY TALL AND I WILL LOOK LIKE A BANANA.”
ALVIN LOOKED AT HIS FRIEND WITH KINDNESS BUT HE ALSO SMILED AND SAID, “YOU SHOULD BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE, BUT YOU CAN’T BE A BANANA. YOU CAN LOOK LIKE A BANANA AND YOU CAN EVEN GET SOME BANANA PERFUME AND YOU CAN SMELL LIKE A BANANA, BUT YOU WILL NOT BE A BANANA.”
“YES, I WILL”, SAID DAVID. “SOMEONE FAMOUS ONCE SAID IF YOU SMELL LIKE A ROSE AND YOU HAVE PRICKLES LIKE A ROSE, THEN YOU ARE A ROSE, OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT.” ALVIN LAUGHED BUT HE WANTED TO BE HELPFUL TO HIS FRIEND DAVID, THE STRAWBERRY.
ALVIN SAID, “YOU NEED TO BE PROUD OF WHAT YOU ARE AND YOU NEED TO BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE BUT YOU CAN’T EVER BE A BANANA.” BUT, DAVID WAS NOT LISTENING BECAUSE HE WAS STRETCHING SO HARD TO BECOME TALLER THAT HE WAS ACTUALLY BUMPING UP AND DOWN WITH EFFORT.
ALVIN SUDDENLY GOT AFRAID AND SAID “DAVID, YOU ARE GETTING BRUISES ON YOUR STRAWBERRY SIDES AND IF YOU DO NOT STOP YOU WILL NOT ONLY NEVER BE A BANANA BUT YOU WON’T EVEN BE KEPT AS A TOP STRAWBERRY.”
DAVID GOT UP AND LOOKED IN THE MIRROR AND SAW THE START OF LITTLE SPOTS THAT CAME FROM THE YOGA STRETCHING THAT HE WAS DOING. “OH OH”, SAID DAVID, WHO THOUGHT I BET ALVIN IS RIGHT. FROM THEN ON DAVID WORKED HARD ON BECOMING THE BEST STRAWBERRY HE COULD BE. AND, HE BECAME A GREAT STRAWBERRY, ONE OF THE TASTIEST THAT EVER, EVER LIVED.

THE END.

Written for Grandson David, July 7, 2010.

An Observation On The Meaning of Prejudice

People struggle with their feelings and their pronouncements regarding their perceptions of others and especially of groups of others. Most of us do this with the hope that the internal expression and the external expressions will be more or less the same and both will be at least somewhat positive. Some people, politicians for example, do not seem to be especially troubled by such alignment, but most of us do struggle with being fair and honest. The rationalization of emotions is often impossible when dealing with a matter such as prejudice, but the best of us continue to try. We all try to keep from disclosing what our true inner feelings are if they are less than noble (i.e. socially unacceptable by ourselves and especially our peer group) and less than completely flattering to every group that comes up in a conversation. This is stressful and yet is a good struggle to engage upon. The effort can increase one’s maturity, which is something that deserves our time and energy.

The feelings that one has are often a product of very coincidental but meaningful experiences having to do with good and bad times with one or more of the various groups with which we come into contact. If one were robbed by an African-American, for example, that experience can naturally effect our view toward African-Americans. If the service you receive is especially pleasant in a Chinese restaurant, this too may lead to a particular point of view. Of course watching and listening to our parents and our friends have also had a profound impact upon our view of the others. Very few people who are trying to align the internal and external expressions of their feelings would not be affected by such experiences. In fact, one can argue that not being influenced by such exposure would itself be seen as odd distancing from one’s experiences.

There are many reasons why the alignment of these internal and external feelings is difficult, but one reason, I believe, is because people do not understand what the term prejudice really means. The relevant Merriam-Webster dictionary definitions are: “a (1): preconceived judgment or opinion (2): an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge b: an instance of such judgment or opinion c: an irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, a group, a race, or their supposed characteristics.” These definitions put a great deal of stress upon the information one does not have about a group through use of such words or phrases as “preconceived”, “without just grounds”, “sufficient knowledge”, “an irrational attitude.” That is important, but it is not, in my opinion, the primary place where people go wrong in their sense of prejudice.

Of course, some people do not have very good information about the group towards whom they hold a strong positive or negative opinion, although this could be rectified with some effort. Difficulty obtaining relevant and accurate information is made somewhat more challenging because the data are sensitive and sometimes even the definition of the group is unclear. For example, how do I know who I really mean if I think about Hispanics or about African Americans or about Jews? What groups were the people I met a member of? For example, a close relative of mine wondered about a person we frequently saw on TV was a Jew. It was only years later that I found that they were actually Italian. This difficulty is now expressed by the acknowledgment that people want choices as they characterize themselves as members of multiple groups simultaneously. One might decide that they are most comfortable being characterized as a member of the African-American, Hispanic, Jewish group, for example and this is now even encouraged by some surveys that say “Choose all that apply” or something like that in their instructions. The problem of defining the group and its membership is a real issue, and deserves some attention, but again this is not the most serious issue, in my mind.

Things were simpler when we had to pick just one group and stick with it, although the current system is a lot more honest. Also, of course the rules that are used for such self-report affirmations are very unclear to most of us who come from ambiguous backgrounds. For example I recently found that I could join a group to learn how to play bagpipes if I am Scottish. That presents no problem for me. Being a mongrel has its advantages and my cousin the family genealogical history expert (or gynecological expert, as my aunt once clarified the endeavor to trace ones background), says I have considerable Scottish heritage to claim if I should want to do so. But, again, this is important, but not the really big problem with the concept of prejudice.

In statistics there are two very basic terms that describe data about almost any matter of interest and these are the mean and the variance. The first term, the mean, has to do with the average characterization that can be applied to a group and various measures (mean, mode, and median, for example) provide indications of that, although differences in these measures are uninteresting with regards to the point of this piece. The second term, the variance, has to do with the accuracy of that average as it is used to represent or be applied to the whole of the group of interest. In other words, how much variability is there within the group? If there is a lot, then the mean is not very representative of all the members of the group and this is typically the case. Fortunately for nearly all of us, our persona shown to the outside world is really a mixture of characteristics. For example, it may be true that generally we are unkind, but occasionally we might be very kind or generally we are frugal but occasionally we are very generous. In other words using the mean to characterize a group with variance among its members is a risky matter, but even characterizing a person can be a risk. In other words, a group, on average, may be unkind, but some members of the group can be quite kind.

It is this lack of realization that individuals and especially groups have this almost inevitable variability that causes one to worry about engaging in prejudice. In short, it is the failure to recognize the existence of variance that gets us into special trouble with the idea of prejudice. For example, let us suppose that you dislike African-Americans because you were robbed by a member of that group. If you do some homework, you will discover that such an occurrence is not as unlikely as we might wish it to be. But here comes the importance of the fundamental statistical concepts of the mean and the variance. Feeling a negative attitude toward the average behavior of a group is often justified and hence not really prejudiced. This sort of judgment of the average of any particular group might be justified by the data or the experience that one has. That does not mean that the members of the group we are considering are all like that negative characterization of the average member. In other words, there is a variance in nearly all groups’ behavior. Some are below the mean and some are above, some are very kind and some are not. The recognition and acceptance of this essential variability is the important step to being “unprejudiced.”

It is this acceptance of the variance of the people within groups that is the check on our natural reaction to a negative experience or to seeing some unpleasant, but true data about a group. One can examine all the data one wishes to obtain and conclude that your negative perception is correct for the average, but that does not make you prejudiced if you recognize that variability exists in every group. It is this essential variability that must always be kept in mind and must become the source of the external display of our feelings as well as the internal beliefs that we hold.

The interesting thing about this concept is that it applies to the outsider and makes a lot of sense out of what we see in others, but it also applies to the people inside the group. Most group members like to think of themselves as different (and better) in some way. For examples, Blacks may think of themselves as better athletes or Jews and Asians may think of themselves as better students. No matter your view of your group, it is still helpful to remember that variance exists and some overlap with members of other groups is inevitable. This concept can help to ground you in a way that might prevent too much conceit or too much self-pity. Variance goes in all directions at once with some members higher and some lower than the average of any other group. Keeping the group idea in perspective is critical to lowering the excesses of any beliefs one entertains about superiority or inferiority. The place of the individual becomes the critical consideration, although it is also quite acceptable to recognize that data about the average of a group are neither irrelevant nor determinative.

The Squirrel and the Friend

The Squirrel and the Friend

There we were talking as we had done off and on for a long, long time. My friend was concerned because of some personal matters that made her question whether she was as free as she wished to be or as free as a person has a right to be. While we were talking I noticed something moving in the background. As it came from behind a tree I realized it was a squirrel that had apparently come from the street nearby. My friend and I continued to talk about the challenges of having lots of young children and wondering about getting a job and having a husband, etc. Lots of stresses in what she thinks is a unique life and I see as a fairly commonplace set of pressures. The squirrel continued to come toward the house staying behind her and moving surprisingly slowly for a squirrel.

We continued our conversation while I suggested that a job might be good to provide some extra cash, but more importantly it might provide a pathway to a sort of freedom. As with most freedoms it would be self imposed in response to self imposed captivity. At any rate, the opportunity to interact with adults and to be challenged to do more and do it better had much to recommend it. As we talked I better understood the problem with having underutilized motivation and unrealized creativity that contributed to the feeling of being greatly restricted. Finally I saw what was happening with the squirrel and why it seemed to move as though it were raised by a tortoise. It did not have the use of its two rear legs. Apparently the road had held something more imposing than asphalt. A car had clearly hit the squirrel.

We talked some more about what sort of jobs might be best for my friend and how her 4 kids between the ages of 7 and 2 would have to help, as would her husband. He seemed to be very supportive, and the kids would have to adapt, as kids usually do. As we talked the squirrel begin to climb a tree in the front yard, apparently afraid of being in the lawn with cats and dogs in that neighborhood not to mention all the children. We stayed focused on our conversation as the squirrel using just its front two legs stayed focused on the heroic task of climbing the tree.

My friend continued to feel trapped but at least recognized that she had many options and began to consider which ones to exercise. The squirrel, much to my amazement, actually got to a height of about 20 feet and then it began to slide back down the tree with its front claws scraping the bark and its two rear legs hanging a bit like a clock pendulum.
I was thinking that perhaps my friend would find a way to escape her sense of imprisonment as the squirrel hit the ground and did not move after that. I suggested that my friend look behind her and she saw the now dead squirrel. We looked at each other and agreed that was sort of sad. She said she would tell her husband to gather up the squirrel when he got home and he was reported to have done so and put the bag holding the squirrel into the garbage can with the lid on top. I left thinking how lucky she was to be able to climb as far as she wanted and to stay up high if that became her goal.