Month: April 2018

Reading college alumni magazines seemed a useful way to spend a recent rainy Saturday afternoon. We get two—one from UC Riverside where we earned three degrees between us, the second from the University of Washington, from which I left a three-year scholarship after only one year with a degree and a resolve not to go to school for a while. That resolve did not last long.

UCR and UW send the magazines because we give money to each every year. It seems a fair trade—a contribution for interesting information about places we once were. I have begun to think about the trade as exchanging money for memories.

Both magazines teemed with stories about the accomplishments of alumni and current faculty. The impressive, ground-breaking research, the history and development of the campuses and, of course, the athletic programs are regular features every issue.

I learned a lot. I had not known that a graduate from UCR is playing a key role in the Inland Empire to get people of different political persuasions to talk with each other civilly, ending each session by focusing on areas of agreement. That story reminded me of the students who, in 1971, got UCR into Time magazine by engaging the local citizenry in conversations about why they were upset with the war, People’s Park, etc. I’m proud that our school stands on the side of conversation rather than thoughtless confrontation.

I learned that UW was one of the first universities to establish an institution-wide office focused on minority students. A sit-in at the office of the UW President in Spring 1968 by members of the Black Student Union, who had a list of five “demands,” resulted in the creation of the new office and other changes proposed by the students, none of which was unreasonable. The story was a reminder that significant social change can result from collective action, thoughtful confrontation, especially when all parties involved are resolved to listen to each other.

By the time I arrived at UW that fall, the collaboration between authority and petitioners to deliver a real change was already underway.

Both magazines reported on physical changes on campus. UCR, now over 22,000 enrollment (there were less that 3000 when we were there), will build more dorm space in an effort to re-balance, to a small degree, the number of commuter students and campus residents. The assumption is that residents sustain on-campus student life better than commuters. We lived in dorms until we got married; our experience would support that assumption.

And it is our experiences that bubble up in memory every time I read one of the magazines. To be sure, there were challenges and disappointments that must have occurred while we were in Riverside and Seattle. They pale, if we even remember them, in comparison to the rich memories we have of those years, our relative lack of money notwithstanding.

People of a Certain Age, at what other time in our lives has it been our job to confront new ideas, especially those different from the ones we brought from home, and assemble ways of looking at the world informed by the opinions and conclusions of others? And in the company of other seekers, too?

Because college resembled a playground for our minds, Judy and I have been skeptical of the idea that those years should be focused on preparing for a specific career. We are also critical of the notion that universities should edit the content of courses to assure that no one has to hear something that might be viewed as offensive or upsetting. For us, the university was the place we learned how to respond to ideas with which we did not agree. People at my universities made me think about what I believed.

The magazines take me back to heady days, comparatively carefree, when we would try on different versions of ourselves among friends, and live almost on our own, away from our parents. All we men had to worry about was doing well enough to keep our Selective Service System student deferments.

One might contend that we were a privileged lot. We were. Perhaps not in the way of blue-blood young adults attending the family’s legacy private college as full-pay students, but we were blessed with a life-changing opportunity nonetheless that was not available to others our age.

For us, graduating college was an expectation, not an entitlement. “To whom much is given, much is also required,” whispered Mom’s voice often, and I hear it even now. For us, insuring that young people after us have the option of the privilege of attending university feels like an obligation. So we give money and receive our quarterly stimulants to happy memories.

In this UW magazine, an alumna who has written several memoirs, wrote “my persona from those days has shaped the person I am today.” The magazines remind me of how who I was and where I was has impacted who I have become.

This is the time of year when high school seniors are sorting out their options for after graduation. Many have been admitted to several colleges and universities and now must decide which one to attend. What a glorious choice to have to make!

I hope for them days in the distant future when they will sit down on a rainy Saturday afternoon to read about their alma mater and remember.

Daniel E. White

April 30, 2018

You might recall, in The Odyssey, that Odysseus threw a javelin into Cyclops’ one eye, blinding him, in order for his men to be saved. The Greeks then hurried out toward open seas as Odysseus yelled:

“ ‘Hey, you, Cyclops! Idiot! The crew trapped in your cave did not belong to some poor weakling. Well, you had it coming! You had no shame at eating your own guests! So Zeus and other gods have paid you back.’”

“My taunting made him angrier” (continues Odysseus as he recounts the story). “He ripped a rock out of the hill and hurled it at us. It landed right in front of our dark prow and almost crushed the tip of the steering oar. The stone sank in the water; waves surged up. The backflow all at once propelled the ship landward…I told my men, ‘Row fast, to save your lives!’…We got out twice as far across the sea and then I called to him again. My crew begged me to stop and pleaded with me. “Please! Calm down…He hurled that stone and drove our ship right back to land. We thought we were going to die.’”

“But my tough heart was not convinced; I was still furious and shouted back again.”

The upshot of this scene is that Cyclops appeals to his father, Poseidon, to apply a further curse on Odysseus, and Dad happily complies.

After the fact, Odysseus acknowledged that he should have kept his mouth shut and sailed out of danger. Had he done so, the story would have been shorter, of course. But how many times do the boasts of the seemingly triumphant snatch defeat from the jaws of victory or create future embarrassment?

Remember the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln? President Bush calls that one of his most obvious mistakes as President.

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported that, in a recent baseball game, the manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks, Torey Lovullo, complained to the umpire about calls on balls and strikes and said something implying that the catcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, Yadier Molina, was treated differently than other players. Molina took exception.

“’I used a poor choice of words and he (Molina) took offense to it,’ Lovullo said. ‘I wish I could take back what I said. It really wasn’t directed at him. I was just frustrated over what I was watching.’”

People of a Certain Age, if you have never spoken words (or written them in an e-mail) that, once you have said them, you wanted to reach out and grab them, like in a cartoon, before they reached their intended target, you have lived a purer life than mine (at least in this respect). How often, too, have words spoken in anger hit an unintended target as well?

Senator Daniel Akaka died recently at age 93. He was Hawaii’s junior U.S. Senator from 1990 to 2012. One of his staff members remembered:

“Capitol Hill is someplace where you show your power, but he was so deeply respected by his colleagues because of the fact that he had these values and they could trust him…He was really focused on Hawaii and what we need to do. He wasn’t focused on making sure that everyone knew that he was the one doing it.”

That life of aloha earned him a rating in 2006 by Time as one of the worst five U.S. Senators at the time they published a story about senatorial effectiveness.

Another former staffer said: “Senator Akaka knew how to hold people accountable—without attacking…I once told him, sometimes it’s very difficult to try to get your point across unless you’re heard at a certain level. Sometimes things just aren’t fair, and you want to call people out on it. I asked him ‘how do you do that as a leader?’ He looked at me and said, ‘measure your words.’”

Think about the leaders in our history whom we hold in highest esteem: Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt. All were masters of measuring their words.

“Plant a thought and reap a word;

Plant a word and reap an action;

Plant an action and reap a habit;

Plant a habit and reap a character;

Plant a character and reap a destiny.”

On-line you can see how many people in history have been credited with this or similar wisdom. Words matter.

Perhaps I reveal my own character flaw by saying that I form opinions of people based upon the words they use. Circumstance tempers my opinions; when one is angry, one’s judgment about what to say, and how, is usually impaired. Ask Torey Lovullo about that.

Odysseus’ boastful taunting contrasts with a sign in the window of our local Army recruiting office: Heroes don’t brag.

The Star-Advertiser article about Senator Akaka’s career concluded: “Akaka was admired by colleagues on both sides of the aisle. ‘He’s a loveable person and most of us are not that lovable,” Sen. James Inhole, R-Okla, told the Advertiser in 2003.’”

“’He was a quiet man,’ said U.S. Senator Carl Levin, D. Mich. in 2012. “He was a powerful force, one of the most decent people you’d ever want to meet here.’”

Enough said.

Daniel E. White

April 16, 2018

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates

I had an unusually clean windshield from the start of our New Zealand trip until about two weeks after our return. This is not a report about a fit of the tidies on my part.

Kiwis drive on the left; all rental cars sport a sticker that says “drive left” near the steering column. Fortunately, the brake and accelerator pedals are in the same position as in a right- hand drive car. BUT the turn signal and wiper levers are reversed. So, invariably, when first driving in New Zealand, (and last spring in England), I inadvertently hit the wiper lever to signal a turn.

In such situations, one tries to remain cool, to not reveal to other drivers that you are a dufus, turning on your wipers on a hot, sunny day. Of course, no one else cares. But, you do.

Then, when you get back to the United States, after having retrained your automatic self to use the lever on the right-hand side of the steering column to signal turns, you blow it again—wipers instead of signals—until you un-train yourself from left-hand driving to what for most of your life has been an action taken completely without thought.

I have to do a lot of thinking before I act until the automaticity returns.

These wipers are a provocative metaphor, People of a Certain Age, for automatic responses about which we never think. What are the actions we take on a regular basis completely without thought, and are any of them worth thinking about from time to time?

Not one of us was born knowing on which side of the column is the lever for turn signals.

Before we moved to Hawaii, we liked watching the movie, “South Pacific.” We enjoyed seeing beach scenes filmed at Lumahai Beach where we would go to search for olivine crystals in the sand, and we chuckled at the way the movie-makers used a prominent rock outcropping near Ke’e Beach as the mysterious Bali Hai. The music is compelling, too.

Once, we invited friends to our home in Riverside, got the film from somewhere (on two reels—remember those?) and a projector from the university, popped popcorn, and spent a couple of hours with Joe, a sailor in the U.S. Navy, Bloody Mary and Ensign Nellie Forbush, a Navy nurse.

In one of the most moving songs, Bloody Mary laments the difficulty Joe will face because he is in love with a native woman by singing “you’ve got to be taught to hate.” Underscoring the point are the words “carefully taught.”

Judy tells of a time in the 1960s when she was entering a store with her mother and grandmother in Poplar Bluff, Missouri. She noticed an African-American woman about her grandmother’s age approaching the store just behind. Judy held the door open for the woman who demurred with a nervous look around her, “Oh no, missy, you go first.” It was not hard for Judy to conclude that she had just learned a lesson about race relations in southeast Missouri in the 1960s.

Confusing the accelerator and brake pedals moving from right-hand to left-hand drive could produce great harm. Trying to drive a standard shift car where the gear-shift is on the left and the “H” of gear positions is reversed can amplify the potential for dangerous driving, so I always rent an automatic. Thus, in the case of the location of the pedals, there is an agreed standard and in the other, I can choose not to confuse myself further. Turning on wipers instead of signals could slow down one’s indicating intent to others, but the flapping wipers are a quick reminder to use the other hand to engage the turn signal.

Myriad political and social commentators have opined over the past several years that tribalism is on the rise, in the United States and worldwide. They mean the term as a negative. Tribalism inhibits the creation and sustaining of the common good because tribes have a hard time agreeing among each other what is good. Historically, tribal loyalties have been the primary cause of warfare as allegiances to one’s tribe outweigh allegiances to anything beyond the tribe.

In short, in tribal society, one’s response to any situation becomes automatic, dictated by the norms and beliefs of the tribe. No one is born with those norms and beliefs hard-wired into their brain.

I wonder to what tribe I belong, or if I do belong to a tribe? What are the responses of mine that are dictated by my tribe? Instinctively, I reject the idea of being a creature of a tribe, deprived of individuality by my tribal membership. What if my tribe is comprised of those who reject tribalism? Is it sometimes useful to be a member of a tribe? Has tribal membership been an essential factor in the survival of our species?

I might benefit from having an indicator about these matters and about my own automatic responses, something like the wipers wiping when the signal should be signaling, as a reminder to think.

Daniel E. White

April 2, 2018