The Thomas Chronicles

Part 1 of 2

There was a memorable scene in Dead Poet’s Society when Robin William’s character asked his impressionable young students to walk around an open cobblestone courtyard in whatever manner suited them. After one or two brief roundabouts, he exclaimed, “There it is!” Naturally, without thinking, a group of his students started walking together, and then almost immediately thereafter, they began taking steps in unison. Arms, legs and feet swung and thudded against the cobblestones in lock step.

What was Robin William’s character, Mr. Keating, point in this quirky exercise? Conformity. It’s an old, well-trodden topic, but it’s one not many people are talking about lately.

What sparked this topic was a conversation I had the other day. In that conversation, a friend of mine said that the reason for all the tantrums at and around us since the dawn of the millennium is for the simple reason that we don’t conform. We don’t fit into pre-defined categories and modes of behavior and beliefs that are acceptable to the “collective”.

In my social and work environment, there is a certain amount of pressure to move along with the flow. Go along to get along, as the saying goes. One can be different as long as that difference is only topical, only surface deep. You can be “different” with the application or insertion of adventurous piercings, tattoos and have metal stainless-steel spikes coming out of your earlobes. But believe the wrong thing, state the obvious, or refuse to engage in the belittling slam dance that passes for conversation nowadays and you can find yourself in a puddle of kim-chi.

If modern social interaction were as simple as identifying concrete “do’s” and “don’ts” in any given setting, much like what was once known as social etiquette, it would be a rather simple matter of memorizing these lists of rules and adjust yourself accordingly. Then contemporary social interplay would be cake, right?

… ah, no. Not cake. Unfortunately, it ain’t even frosting.

The dynamic of many groups– social, business or otherwise– is that it is a free-floating consensus. Not quite like a beehive mentality, but darn close. It’s kind of like having a schizophrenic parent with an imperial ego asking you to push peas around the living room with the tip of your nose. Not satisfied with that approach, the schizoid parent then asks you to push walnuts, and then maybe apricots, and then– wait a minute, why push things at all? Pulling a tether with the apricot attached at one end and you on the other and with a piece of thread between your clenched teeth is much more appealing… Anyway, you get the idea.

In all these machinations, the wit and wisdom of the group must never be questioned. Unfortunately for me and others of my ilk, I like to go left when others want to go right. Part of it, I suppose, is me being a contrarian (i.e. doing it out of sheer bloodymindedness), but the larger part of it, I think (and I hope), is that I couldn’t conform even if I wanted to. And when I was younger, boy howdy, did I want to. A natural born orange in a basket full of apples, you might say, is not very pleasant at times.

When people see that I, and others like myself, don’t conform and have no intention of conforming to the beliefs of the group, there are tantrums. I’ve had it happen on the whole Global Warming shtick. I’ve had it happen on my position favoring gay marriage and gay rights. These tantrums take on many forms, but one of the more frequent reactions I receive is where they would accuse me of being a) arrogant and unwilling to listen b) uncompassionate and c) plain stupid. All this tend to be delivered in acerbic sarcasm and mockery.

I am, of course, not suggesting that people huff and puff whenever they interact with me all the time. I’m simply illustrating a pattern of behavior toward those who do not conform to the shifting beliefs of the collective group. One can be a “Winner” one minute, and a “Loser” in the next. In favor one day, out of favor the next, and there is no seeming rhyme or reason for it. The group just somehow decides it will forevermore have tea rather than coffee in the morning, and all the lemmings run out to have an English Breakfast tea with a dash of honey.

For those still having coffee, well, they just can’t quite keep up, can they? Didn’t you know that today Oceania is the enemy?

Read further in Part II

see Part I

If being chastised for not slavishly follow one particular ideology isn’t enough– liberalism, conservativism, feminism, environmentalism, whatever-ism– you can also find yourself ostracized from the group collective. At work, sometimes when someone falls out of favor with the collective, suddenly they find themselves isolated. Co-workers suddenly don’t feel like socializing with you. Your job might even be in jeopardy.

I’ve observed this time and again. So, when I ran across this article on Foxnews yesterday, I could only nod my head.

These days everyone is so enthusiastic about the evolution of the Web, with its free content, interesting blogs, citizen journalism and the rest of it.

Not me. The big problem, as I see it, is the decline in general perspective, which is due to the decline in the popularity of newspapers and magazines.

By perspective, I mean generalized or common knowledge.

When you pick up The New York Times and look at the front page, you get a general perspective on world events. As you page through the newspaper, you see all sorts of interesting articles that you might not have read if you were merely surfing the Net for news.

Over time, this sort of happenstance approach to information gives a reader perspective on things. You have a sense as to what the economy is doing. You know if some international disaster has occurred. You are more tuned in.

This is going away.

…

… Kids under 21 don’t read newspapers. Many adults have stopped subscribing. The newspapers themselves are cheapening their product.

The New York Times recently laid off a bunch of reporters, who were replaced by bloggers and kids who just got out of journalism school. Probably all functionally good writers, they bring no life experience perspective to the table, and they probably lack world view perspective, too. And they are the ones doling out information to the masses.

…

Meanwhile, the public continues to read about what they already know. And they hang out only with like-minded people. There are huge cadres of people who are practically duplicates of each other. They all think alike, dress alike, and go to the same group-approved places.

With the slow death of newspapers, this beehive-like behavior is only going to get worse. And schools are not helping; they tend to have a political agenda and seem to limit, not enhance, world perspective. This is worsened by a de-emphasis on actual learning and an over-emphasis on personal self-esteem.

The self-esteem movement in education has fostered underachievers who are now out in the world of business, taking on jobs as clerks and cashiers. They can’t add. They can’t spell. They have no idea where Chicago is located on a map. They can’t read a map, in fact. They are seemingly stupid and mostly incompetent.

But hey, they think they are winners just because they’ve been told they are winners. It was drummed into them.

These people eat up information from the Internet and they believe everything they read. They pass along gossip as fact. They fall for every hoax under the sun (especially the very old ones).

[Emphasis is mine.]

There is a no more partisan place, no more contentious and ideologically polarizing place on planet earth than in cyberspace. Cloned ideas for like-minded people, who often congratulate each other for the rightness of their opinions.

If you’re looking for a place where there is a basic uniformity of opinion, various internet sites and pit stops inside the blogosphere should provide you with what you’re looking for. There are a very few notable exceptions, but in most blogs and other opinion sites, absolute conformity of ideas is darn near absolute. And should one stray from the particular ideology of the blog in the “Comments” sections, other commenters would be quick to berate, belittle and even curse the errant individual into either submission or silence.

On both the liberal and conservative end, there is this peculiar litany of characteristics and position, which, according to each respective political group, one must believe in order to be liberal or conservative. To be a “liberal”, you must believe in such and such, and to be a “conservative”, you must believe in this laundry list of convictions. If you’re a liberal, you have to hate Bush, believe in environmentalism, hate the war, and hand American foreign policy over to international organizations (i.e. lose our sovereignty). If you’re a conservative, you have to hate or agree to dispossess gays, support the war, and let market forces determine everything.

This, I believe, is childish; and what is more, this kind of thinking polarizes people and increases antagonism toward those with whom you would disagree. When both conservative and liberal blogs forcefully try to correct each other into the “pure” conservatism and “pure” liberalism, you end up with extremes. And just because lots of people force each other through the pressure of conformity to believe the same thing does not make it true.

An incredible instance of this is when the Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006. Talkshow hosts and bloggers blamed it on the Republicans not being “true” enough to their “conservative values”.

This is an incredible assertion when the party of “competence” bungled Katrina; when they were caught in scandals on the Hill; when they’ve dismissed the American people’s worries over the border; when they’ve treated the American people as their servants rather than the other way around; and they’ve done all this while waving the flag in America’s face and chanting their bigotry that gays don’t have a right to exist. Purity of ideology, I’m afraid, had little to do with it.

This is antithetical to a position arrived at through objectively reasoning the facts.

Society, communities and people are not neat tidy things that could be solved with a few tossed off platitudes. People are often contradictory in their beliefs and behaviors. People can do amazingly virtuous deeds on the one hand, like face down lynch mobs and tend to the sick in cancer wards, and then they can come home and do despicable things on the other hand, like beat their children and run down their spouse through constantly undermining and belittling.

We humans are NOT neat and tidy things– that’s just reality– and I am very skeptical of cure-all solutions or some idea that if we all get together and believe the same thing we can somehow transcend the seeds of corruption that is in us all.

No. We can’t.

What we need are working solutions that look to this reality, not utopias.

I think the liberal attitude of “Do as I say, when and how I want it done, because I know best” and the conservative attitude of “Take care of it yourself because I don’t want to spend the time and money on you” would both be calamities if they each get their way.

I suspect the solution is somewhere in between, and I also suspect it would be found in the least likely of places.

Read from the beginning in Part I

* Bookworm wrote a long-ish post on a related topic.

*Neo-neocon on the related subject of uniformity in academia.

Is it not interesting that US media, which has been universally acknowledge as being anti-military, anti-troops and anti-American for decades now, are backing Obama. More than backing actually. It is not the typical and historical American attitude toward politicians and Presidents, that we are voting for the lesser of two evils. Our media are in fawning rapturous support of him, so much so it’s embarrassing.

The one that immediately comes to mind is Chris Matthews describing his reaction to one of Obama’s speech as a tingling “thrill going up my leg.”

An rabid anti-American media passionately in love with Barack Obama… Doesn’t that just about say it all?

This is a story about the town that was.

Its path of destruction snaked 43 miles long and it touched ground for over one hour. It was one tornado. It was 1.2 miles wide.

In just a few second, hardly more than an eye-blink, the town of Parkersburg, Iowa was obliterated into pieces of confetti. The County Sheriff Jason Johnson said, “This town is not just torn up. It’s gone.”

Foxnews reported today:

Johnson’s home was one of more than 400 damaged here. Another 220 buildings were destroyed including the town’s high school, its sole grocery store and its only gas station. “It’s catastrophic,” Johnson told me as he reflected on the damage. “It’s amazing how much energy this storm had.”

Even more incredible is that there were only four fatalities in Parkersburg and two more in the neighboring town of New Hartford. In a town of roughly two thousand people, four seems like a remarkably small number of people. It looked like the town’s been sandblasted out of existence by Mother Nature.

Unlike China and other areas of the world afflicted with natural disasters where people die in the hundreds and thousands, we have been remarkably blessed.

Hello. This is a friendly update from Obamaland. Please refrain from wild outbursts and head-scratching as content might confuse or bewilder commonsensical people. Reader discretion is advised.

Speaking to veterans in Las Cruces, New Mexico, Obama said:

“I had a uncle who was one of the, who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps and the story in our family is that when he came home, he just went up into the attic and he didn’t leave the house for six months, right. Now obviously something had really affected him deeply but at that time there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain,” he said.

The problem is that his mother was an only child, meaning, he didn’t have an uncle.

What’s more, the Soviets liberated Auschwitz. Unless Obama had a far removed Russian uncle who fought in World War II with the Soviets, this is just plain weird.

Kind of sounds like Hillary’s nonexistent sniper fire in Bosnia if you ask me.

… But then this might be cleared up with the practiced doublespeak from the Obama camp, or the practiced doublethink some of his supporters. (No, I don’t know if that is true.)

Mini Update 5/27/08:

Why do people insist on referring to lies conducted by politicians as “gaffes“? They’re lies, not pigtailed school girls committing faux pas in polite society and laughing with their hands over their mouths. They are grown adults wanting (or threatening) to lead 300 million people, and if these folks habitually invent histories out of thin air, we have cause for worry.

It’s been a light blogging week for me. I’ll return to more substantial blogging some time later today or over the weekend.

Have you ever heard of a tornado in Denver, Colorado? Me neither…

Update 5/22/08:

Commenter, Pete (Alois), wrote that apparently tornadoes in Eastern Colorado are fairly common. Here’s a fantastic image of a tornado in Eastern Colorado last year.