Some believe that the media has a liberal bias.  Those lefties!  With their corporations and marketing campaigns – dominating big business (or was that the other side?).  It seems that Fox News and MSNBC have done well forming near caricatures of the politic they claim to represent.  Others seem to fall in between – but I am not convinced that the televised media is, on average, anything but a touch left of center.  Conservatives claim a stronghold on talk radio and perhaps that is true in terms of program choice.  But try to find a right of center news outlet on any station below about 95MHz on the FM tuner.  That first quartile of the FM range is dominated by NPR, APM, college stations and other liberal outlets.  So is the media biased in its politic?  Not sure – each side seems to have a study to confirm their position.  As Jim Grant writes, “(we should not) marshall anecdotes to corroborate our preexisting opinions”.

It is quite possible that those seeking to find the media’s bias are digging in the wrong place.  Watching television infrequently allows a one to see without preexisting conditions.  And one bias that is all too obvious is that of negativity.  The media way not have a common politic but they certainly have a common vantage point.  Consider the information heard and seen during a 10 minute interval on CNN.  Wolf Blitzer is standing in front of a wall of video screens.  His beard looks as though it were shorn from an actual wolf and glued onto his face.  He talks with the cadence of a newscaster – run on sentences, predicable metaphors and obvious commentary.  While he speaks the “crawl” summarizes news stories in eight word statements.  ”Housing at 30 year low”.  Wow – housing prices are at their 1979 levels?  Two years of losses erased thirty years of gains.  ”Plane crash kills 50″.  Fifty people?  Did they have names?  Should the rest of us about to board on airplane be concerned?  Any context here?  ”Mother of octuplets received food stamps”.  Even a woman who just gave birth to 8 babies is not safe from national outrage at the thought that some tax dollars were used to provide food for her tribe.  The crawl marches on with nothing but negative news.  

Above the crawl we get to hear Wolf talking about the perils of the economy.  He then shifts into a piece analyzing a six word sentence that the president uttered during a 40 minute speech.  This out of context analysis is followed by a set of tips for surviving the tough job market – life changing advise like “hone your skills” and “capture your experiences in a resume”.  The advise if followed by a chart showing the current surge in unemployment claims.  Note that every change of every indicator is a surge, crash, meltdown, tumble, plummet or unprecedented swing.  The chart on unemployment claims appears to show a very steep rise until one looks at the Y-axis and sees that CNN has chosen to shrink the scale in order to magnify the data.  No disclaimer or explanation is offered to allow the viewer to put the data in context.  There was not a single story of a business, person, city, nation, or family who was adding value to their community.  Fifteen minutes and I turned off the television.  

I experimented with more channels.  The local news – murder, fire, car chase.  Cable news – some guy named Cramer screaming about the economy, job losses, devastating wind storms, celebrity weight gain, car chase.  Is the media biased – certainly.  It is a bias towards any story that is negative, hopeless, fearful, arbitrary, trend driven (remember all those stories about the rising housing market) or violent.  No wonder public confidence is low – an alarming number of people consume this diet of news as their primary source of information.  Perhaps the economy will force some of these outlets to close their doors.

This topic would make a great PhD project – get people to fast print and televised media for 6 months and measure their mood.  I have to fight my own preexisting opinion as to the result.

I sit here on this Winter Solstice thinking about how we have conquered the shortest day of the year by providing artificial light.  But the truth of the solstice remains.  Like my experience in that small factory in New York – the core truth is not replaced or changed by the new discovery.  Sloppy language proclaims new discoveries or a new methods when in fact the “new” idea is an incremental evolution of the old or a combination of existing truths used to solve a nuanced problem.  Correcting that language is more than a minor detail because language has the power to divide resources and retard progress.  Whether in work, education, public policy, health or finance, now is not a time to call into question every truth in order to draw lines that divide.  Nor is it a time to create new divisions in order to hold on to a particular way or methodology.   New ideas need the support and wisdom of tested truths.  Imagine if the banking industry had applied that policy to their lending practices of the past decade.  New does not replace old so much as it builds on the story of what already exists.  I recall meeting with a group of the faithful in Seattle – part of a new community of faith that was just in its infancy.  During a gathered time we gave thanks for all of the faithful who had gone before us telling a similiar story, cultivating the spiritual ground and establishing a history on which we set our contribution.  We recognized then that all that had gone before us left a mark.  Some of those marks were cuts that needed to be healed; others were artful expressions worthy of admiration.  Ignoring the truths of the past was not an option.  Demonizing all that went before and all that was not of us in the moment was not an option.  Acknowleding the journey up to that point and seeking the Shalom of those around us was the right course.  I am hopeful that the trials facing our nation and world have the potential to draw us back to an understanding of continuity, incremental change and generational progression.  

We need the urgency of the activist, the conviction of the devout, the capacity of the intellectual, the practicality of the tradesman, the vision of the educator, the creativity of the artist, the innovation of the scientist, the efficiency of the engineer, the leadership of the statesman, the nurture of the healer and the liturgy of the clergy to work diligently at their craft without spending energy defending their right to existence or the value of their contribution.  I am grateful that today is brief so that my hope does not have time to be extinguished.

Free School caught our attention because we align pretty well with John Holt’s belief that people have an inherent desire to learn.  We also identify with the notion that education “is not about filling a container but about lighting a fire”.  And so, with some trepidation, we agreed to allow our 17 year old son to drop out of high school and become a free-schooler.  We also took our 5 year old out of traditional kindergarten and introduced him to the free school community.  And so the journey began.  A typical free school day includes a morning meeting where the students and advisers gather to develop the ethos of the community.  There are classes – none are mandatory.  There activities – again, not required.  There is no start time.  There are no bells.  There is no ending time.  Staff are at the school from about 8:00 until 4:00.  The students can be at the school anytime in that range.  There are children of all ages interacting with one another throughout the day.  Advisers connect with their students one on one to develop plans, talk about issues, address behaviors and develop community.  But how do kids learn? 

One student indicated that he wanted to learn to read.  His advisor asked how much time the student was willing to put into learning to read.  The student answered that he didn’t have any time – so, it was pointed out to this young boy that he had an interest in learning to read but was not ready to commit.  ALARMS.  What if kids are not taught to read?  I have read (in Holt and others) that most children will learn to read on their own by their ninth birthday at the latest provided that they are in a nurturing environment.  While we can teach kids to read earlier than that, we do not have to teach them in order for them to figure it out.  Reading is the big one because we have this sense in our culture that people have to start things when they are five years old or they will never develop the expertise needed to become a celebrity.  Great athletes started their sport at age five.  Great musicians taught themselves to play at age five.  Or so the legend goes.  Holt learned to play cello at forty – just to prove that people can learn after five.

But what about other subjects?  Somehow, our five year old figured out the water expands when frozen and that expansion seemed to run counter to his expectations because other things seemed to shrink when frozen.  (Our freezer is part food storage box, part laboratory).  He spends lots of time at school playing.  He has been spotted laying on his back staring into the sky deep in thought.  And he loves going to school.  So learning is happening – but it is interspersed among play, rest and socialization.

Free School is not perfect.  Parents bring all kinds of expectations to the community – and there are some odd interactions among some parents.  Kids curse.  Doing nothing is as accepted as doing something and so it is possible to avoid learning.  And often the kids do not take the ownership that the school affords them through its charter and structure.  I do not know if it will work for us over the long term.  But it has proven to be a refreshing change from the awkward cadence of public schooling.  There is something of resonance here that intrigues me and is worth further investigation and involvement.

I am an hour into the walk but not ready to return home so I pass my normal turn and continue down the main drag that divides my neighborhood.  This next section continues the eclectic mix of shops and gathering spaces.  A building devoted to Christian Enterprises sits next to a fortune cookie manufacturer.  There is a little storefront dedicated to the refilling of ink cartridges.  The place is always neat as a pin with no evidence that a customer has ever disturbed the inventory of nearly vintage ink cartridges.  I suspect this is a front for a grow house – but I may have watched one too many episodes of Weeds.   Another shop deals exclusively in darts and related paraphernalia.  I keep walking.  A comic book store and coffeeshop.  A biker bar.  A place called Blind Enterprises.  The Portland Atheist Society gathered for their evening meeting to discuss what they do not believe in.  I get home after a 90 minute walk and go to sleep.

There are not two Americas.  There are way more than two.  There are hundreds of Americas, maybe thousands or millions or hundreds of millions.  That is what I love about our nation.  A friend of mine lives on Bainbridge Island in what I imagine is a beautiful place on acreage.  His oldest child attends one of the best private schools in Seattle.  That style of education is important to my friend.  My oldest child decided to enlisted in the military after a decidely untraditional education blending unschooling, public school and free school.  That ability to choose is important to me.  My friend and I can maintain a great relationship and approach life from different angles.  Recently, I was in China having dinner with a friend from Taiwan.  I asked her a question about life in Taipei and she quickly shushed me – don’t mention Taiwan here…I forgot.  Back in Portland, a group of us met up with someone who was born and raised in Iran.  He talked about his home country and we asked questions – tell us more!  We have that kind of freedom – to talk about a country that is on the list of our enemies without fear of someone listening in and reporting us to some authority.  And that freedom comes from a framework designed at the founding of the nation that protects our freedom and fosters our individuality.  We are a nation of many individuals who contribute to the overall story that is America.  Two Americas does not do us justice.

Americans have the ability to create their own blend of politics or their own religion.  We can worship or choose not to worship.  We can speak in public or choose to keep silent.  We are compelled to do very little and yet are found to be doing much.  And while it is popular to speak of America’s demise, I still find passion, creativity and innovation in the DNA of our nation’s younger generations.  The Constitution (remember that document?) spends considerable ink hemming in the government in order to create a free people.  That is in us.  And that reality makes it impossible to talk of two Americas.  We are more interesting than 300,000,000 pawns who can be teased into one of two neat categories based on a handful of ideologies.  I refuse to believe in two Americas – that narrow view stands in stark contrast to the what I see in a 90 minute walk around one neighborhood in one city of this nation.

I see little chance of this happening because “The Man” likes to stay in power…

I recently sat in a coffee shop in Taipei listening (eavesdropping, actually) to some American Boomer explain to a young Taiwanese business man why the Internet is important and how the Asians are ruining the environment.  I wonder how the Taiwanese man processed the Asian label.  For those that haven’t noticed, Asia is a big place.  I’m guessing that the Chinese don’t care to be lumped into the same group as the Japanese.  The Koreans are not Chinese.  And I’m sure that the Taiwanese man is already up on the whole Internet thing.  Yet the American goes on and on talking about the need for more training, education and degrees.  It made me wonder how we arrived at this singularity where success and normal behavior take such a specific form – and this guy felt free to evangelize his view with such fervor.  That theme emerged in Short Bus.  Mooney questioned why the culture is unable or unwilling to tolerate diversity in the areas of intellegience (as measured by IQ) or social norms (as measured by conformance).  The short bus represents the many standard deviations of humanity that exists along with the middle of the curve that we call normal.  And I had not really thought about the way that people are segregated on the basis of their distance from normal.  The irony in the approach is that what passes for normal is spread out all over the place.

Try to find a normal body type or a person with a normal home life or normal habits.  We are, in a word, weird.  People are freaks of nature.  Singularities with some eerie resemblances to one another that have remarkably little to do with anything of meaning.  I have had meaningless conversations with very smart people and have had deep encounters with people of dimmer intellectual glow.  One of the curses that has followed me in life is the smart label.  Sometimes, I can’t tell if people are complimenting me or deriding some other aspect of my character.  ”He’s smart” can be code for “he is a jerk who happens to be full of information”.  While often meant as a compliment, the smart label suffers from a lack of clarity.  What is smart?   There are clear measurements that determine smartness in a contextual fashion – but only relative to what a culture values.  IQ is a measure of intelligence that may be used in a way that the culture views as smart.  Smart business owners are those that demonstrate an ability to make money and create wealth.  Smart researchers are able to integrate many streams of thought and experience in order to solve a complex problem.  Smart parents are adept at nurture, cultivation and unconditional love.  Smart artists connect passion with media.  But what do we make of intelligent people who do not fit into the smart category?  Or what of those who display smart behavior without the expected intelligent quotient?  The Short Bus is eye opening because it exposes the narrowness that is too often the default behavior of our institutions, workplaces and personal tolerance levels.  What if the wide distribution of human expression is God’s gift to us – grace in the form of complexity.  Valuing that complexity by relating to those who are one or two standard deviations away from the safety of self then fits the command to love our neighbors as ourselves.

This presidential season is very confusing for me.  The fact that John McCain believes that adding Sarah Palin to the ticket will draw former Clinton supporters – and the possibility that the strategy is working – is bizarre.  Why would a woman who supported Clinton and the democratic platform turn and support McCain and the republican platform simply because of the gender of the VP?  And why would white men who believe in the democratic platform switch to McCain because of Obama’s race or religion?  The crowd has gone crazy.  It’s as if a bunch of hockey fans showed up at an Olympic track meet and started cheering for the runners as if they were watch a hockey watch – “Check that guy!!!!  Knock him out!”.  Are people crazy? Or just so used to being fed their thoughts through a video screen that they have lost critical thinking and basic reasoning skills?

Michael Phelps won gold medals in swimming because he swam faster than the other athletes.  He actually reached the finish line first.  Judges watched.  Video cameras watched.  Electronic devices measured.  He really won.  The women on Korea’s archery team put more arrows in the center of targets than their competitors.  As a result, they won.  I wish the election had the same rules – I wish politicians could only talk about what they actually did (and wish the media had the guts to write clear headlines when they lied).  Imagine if an archer from the French team fired off an arrow, walked down the field, pulled that arrow out from where it stuck and moved it to a better position.  And then imagine they won the gold medal.  Every media outlet in the world would scream foul.  Yet when Sarah Palin makes up stories about her record we hear that people (white women mostly) can relate to her.  No, you can’t relate.  The average white woman in America does not run a state, fly on private jets, speak to crowds of thousands with rousing applause or have ABC news salivate as they schedule an exclusive (and non-conclusive) interview with you.  The Republicans lost me on this one.  They are pulling arrows and moving them around at will.  McCain seems to have changed all of his maverick positions to align with party doctrine.  His VP didn’t know what the Bush doctrine meant; and she oversimplified foreign policy in her characterization of the Georgian conflict.  And then came the over the top accusation that Obama wants comprehensive sex-ed taught in kindergarten.  Now, politicians lie and we all know that.  But give me a two part lie or a lie that requires me to do some calculus to figure out – modify the tips of the arrows or use bows with some questionable advantage, but stop walking down the field in plain sight and just moving things around to create a new reality that serves your purposes.

I hope the McCain team changes course and we actually hear a meaningful dialogue on real issues.  After all, we are at war, the economy has faltered, the banking system is collapsing, our infrastructure is in disrepair and our energy policy is unsustainable.  There are things to talk about – and neither team has a past record to draw on as proof that they are the right team for the next four years.  The changes that lie ahead require leadership skill rather than managerial experience.  I am more interested in how each candidate makes decisions, responds to the discontinuous change in the world and mobilizes people in the face of new and unimagined challenges.  So far, that assessment has led me to a declare a clear winner as I watch the GOP look backwards and claim that past (partially fictitious) performance is a guarantee of future success.  At the same time, I hear the Democratic ticket call for a new approach to decision making that leverages past experiences as a means of informing a new direction.  I can only hope that the best team will win.

There are several unapproved methods for transacting goods; give me this or I will break that, I will steal this, I am selling you something similar to this that will turn out to be that for the price of this (the marketing bait and switch). And then there is the oddball method where one person simply gives something to another person. Call it an act of charity, grace or generosity – the label makes no difference. But it does fall outside the normal transaction that people have accepted as a social norm. Giving is not a new concept developed by an enlightened class. Charity and generosity seem embedded in a permaculture of sorts. Yet I wonder if this unapproved exchange method poses any risks for the giver or the recipient? I will explore that idea in light of the issues of class that are seeking to find global equilibrium by breaking the conversation into several parts – the risks of paternalism, the need for new currency and the missional imperative to live beyond the market.  I will look at the issue through the lens of Christian community because that is where I sit; the issues likely speak to charitable acts regardless of faith and it that may be an interesting expansion of the conversation in the future.

The renewed awareness of Christian mission is inspiring new forms of giving and generosity as church communities find ways to tend to the practical needs of the financially poor.  Giving to the poor is not new and it is quite possible that the apparently new forms are only new to the extent that the people involved are new to the task. One example of a new form of missional giving involves adopting a classroom at a public school that serves lower income families. Enterprising people of faith open businesses with the expressed purpose of providing employment to at-risk populations. Non-profits provide tutoring, life skill training, food and shelter to non-home dwelling populations.

The mechanics of these efforts can be described in terms of collection and delivery – using market language. An agency or group collects resources (food, clothing, skills, money) and packages those resources in some discrete form (a box of clothes, an hour of tutoring, a thirty-hour per week job). The agency may choose to find a third-party to distribute the goods. As an example, a home community may collect clothes for homeless adults and then drop those clothes off at a local mission for final delivery. Alternatively, a group may choose to setup its own delivery system or partner with another group to move resources to the final destination. Consider a group of adults who want to provide mentoring and tutoring to students in an elementary school. That group pools together time and knowledge. They work with school administrators to identify the students who would benefit from their services and setup a schedule to deliver the services. The partners work together to assess the quality of the services and ensure that the group maintains a good supply/demand balance. This mechanism works as long as all three groups maintain their respective parts of the deal: the mentors provide time and skill, the administrators provide students and facilities, the students provide engagement and progress. It is a three way contract with implicit and explicit terms. No problem – right? 

The issue in the transaction rests on a number of assumptions and a social power differential.  But charity is not a transaction.  It lives beyond the market.  Consider the mentoring relationship between an adult and child that is framed around provide academic tutoring.  The adult may assume that she knows what the child needs or wants.  But does she?  She may assume that the child is better off knowing basic math skills – and she would be correct from the viewpoint of employment skills.  But what is the child has a completely different life calling?  The risk is the creation of an enabling/paternalistic relationship between the tutor and the student.  What does the child have to offer to the tutor?  And the loss is that the true relationship is sacrificed in the name of service.

I am a loyal television series fan.  If I am in – I am all in.  Seinfeld, Six Feet Under, Big Love, The Sopranos, The X-Files (minus the two seasons) and Northern Exposure have all taken up hours of my time.  I don’t want any series to end because the characters and the settings become a great imaginary escape for me.  Northern Exposure is a series that brought a re-ordering of class to prime time and I’m not sure if the viewing public caught what was going on.  For those that haven’t seen Northern Exposure I will give set the table and leave it to you to scour the web for an episode or two.  Northern Exposure is set in Sicily, Alaska which, like Alaska itself, is isolated, eccentric and beautiful.  The characters include a doctor (who is serving time to pay off school and loathes the fact that he is not in NYC), a bar owner (who marries a woman 30 years younger), a former astronaut, a native Alaskan, a runaway poet, and a dreamer who owns a plane.  The interesting thing about the show is that the doctor is nowhere near the topic of the social or economic ladder.  The astronaut has material wealth but is often shown to lack wisdom or compassion.  The native Alaskan seems to be aloof yet is remarkably in tune with the reality of people’s situations.  The poet doubles as the preacher despite his lack of dogmatic certainty or exclusive religious conviction.  The bar owner maintains the primal rituals that refresh the spirit and mind.  Everything in the town flows from this very distributed sense of power and importance.  Wealth has a place – but is not the whole.  Skill has a place – but is seen to be of value only to the extent that it serves the common good.  So the doctor and the astronaut are essential without being central.  And the poet is often central because of his ability to express the collective feeling of the townspeople and even the creation that the town inhabits.  I warned you that I am a geeky fan.

Part of redefining mission – and the outflow of mission work among those of differing class – needs to include a look at the implicit assumptions and the power differential that is setup when the transaction, market mode enters the process.  The community of faith must also be a community of shared experiences and identifications.  Serving another person is not a transaction.  Those with intellectual understanding benefit from the wisdom of the more spiritual.  Those who lack resources speak balance to those who have much.  Mission is about entering into new relationships with a sense of exploration and adventure – with an eye to add to the story and listen to the story.  And that can be done outside of the transactional marketplace that so defines our daily lives.

That seems like a large number.  It is roughly half of what we will spend on the Iraq war.  In 7 years of war, the Pentagon spent two times the required investment to build-out a national hydrogen fueling ecosystem.   Exxon Mobile’s revenue for the year will likely top $400 billion by selling the world expensive, non-renewable oil.  And that is just one of the many oil companies servicing the market.  President Bush recently told us that the market is working – people are cutting down on un-needed trips.  Well, there we have it.  Leave it to the market and all will be fine.  Just like in housing, banking, food, drugs, airlines, telecommunications and power.

The auto industry is working on the problem.  Energy producers are working on the problem.  It is time for a national infrastructure agenda that admits the problem and focuses our collective resources on something other than destruction and foreign nation building.  It is ironic that the same leader who declared that insurgents use violence to keep democracy from taking root is willing to use violence in order to get democracy to take root.  That kind of leadership will never have a vision for something new.

With new leadership in the White House I hope we can turn a corner.  It would be wonderful to sit in my Portland home in 2016 and reflect on how, in just 8 years, we set a national agenda, poured in our money and built out a new energy system to power cars, heat homes and condition air in public and private workplaces.  And we built a system that moved us away from dependence on a fragile, limited and polluting fuel towards an abundant and benign fuel.  That type of innovation would give build more than an energy source.  It would also build a great market for export as we work with the Chinese, Indian and European markets to move the global economy forward.  Our current energy infrastructure supports a different world than the one we inhabit.  It is time for to play catch-up in a hurry.  And we have already shown that we can come up with $1 trillion for bombs, guns, supplies and soldiers.  How about half that for national, clean, abundant energy?