The world needs more participation trophies

When I was eight and just starting out as a young athlete, I played on a baseball team coached by a dentist. After our games, we would go by the local ice cream shop and he would buy us each a cone...double scoop if anyone caught a fly ball. That was the dream: catching a fly ball and being the hero who got us double scoops.

By seventh grade, with even more refinement in skill and separation of the good athletes from the bad, at the end of basketball season our coach presented each of us with a faux newspaper where the headline contained some accomplishment of each player from the year. (To this day, I still remember mine.) Additionally, one practice each year, usually after a game in which we got clobbered, after warmups, he would sit us down and talk a little about each of us in front of the team. It was outwardly a bit embarrassing, but inwardly, it gave me perspective and calm. Invariably, we would win the next game.

At the time, I did not know why these coaches did what they did. When I reached the age where I could coach my kids and their friends, I came to realize that they used these tools as age-appropriate ways to develop a sense of belonging, identity, and resilience. Nowadays, people just call them...

Participation trophies.

These unjustly vilified hallmarks of a "soft generation" have received a bad rap over the last couple of decades (exemplified most recently by the rant of Louisville's women's coach Jeff Walz). Those of us molded by the children and grandchildren of the Great Depression hear all about Vince Lombardi, Woody Hayes, Paul "Bear" Bryant, and others whose life mantras get summed up by "win at all costs". This ethos stems justly from living at a time when scarce resources meant that survival required winners and losers, survival of the fittest, and all that. This philosophy found root in every aspect of our lives. Sports provided the natural, but not only setting. We had to have "the best grades", "the most friends", "the best clothes", and so on. And later in life, we were told, that is how the world will operate. You either win or you lose, and if you lose, you will not survive. Life has only a small number of winners, and they get the rewards. The rest of us lose. As Alec Baldwin so eloquently delivers in Glengarry Glen Ross, "first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anyone want to see second prize? Second prize's a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired."

The truth I have learned over my years of working, coaching kids, and generally living life comes down to this: the world lied to us. Although a situation here and there presents an opportunity for winners and losers, they do not dominate life. What I see more often floats between a need for total cooperation and a delicate balance of competition and interwoven-ness. Restaurants provide some good examples: they definitely compete for customers, but no restaurant wants to have the only spot on a strip. People go out to eat more often when a strip or community has a variety of options. There is still a need to work smart on thin profit margins, but restaurants do not want a lack of competition...just a manageable amount of competition. Within the restaurant, wait staff need to hustle and work to keep things moving and (regrettably) get the bulk of their pay from keeping their customers happy. This can lead to a cutthroat atmosphere, but in large part, these workers recognize that if they do not work together and the restaurant gets a bad reputation, they will have no one to fight over.

Examples like this abound. Natural disaster occurs? Everyone pitches in to help everyone, not some randomly chosen winners. A community member gets cancer? Everyone pools resources, holds a fundraiser, cooks meals, drives them to treatments. We do not seek out these opportunities to embolden ourselves (psychopaths excepted), but rather to sacrifice ourselves for the betterment of another.

Also, I have found that another old axiom actually inspires our efforts more so than "win at all costs"...

"An honest day's work for an honest day's pay"...aka, a paycheck. The ultimate participation trophy.

Just like the ice cream cone, if you show up and give all you can, you get the reward. If you go above and beyond, you might even find a little bonus, but all in all, honest work for an honest boss gets you an honest day's pay. When we go home to our family and friends, our value comes not in how much we have won, but in how much time we give, and how truly there we are.

I have also learned that those who cannot give up the "win at all costs" mentality can cause some of the greatest pain. People who must "win the deal" at the cost of another: misanthropes who prey on the elderly or uneducated, market manipulators who play the game for the game's sake instead of identifying how best to place capital for the improvement of life, psychopaths who pollute the environment in order to minimize their costs and maximize profits. This same mentality finds its home in the kids who constantly and mercilessly attack the weakest link in their opponents, coaches who manipulate league rules to win instead of developing the talent of their players, or young people coached to break the rules so often with the thought that the refs will not call everything and the other team is likely to respond and get an equal number of penalties.

We can teach our children to give everything they have, develop their skills to the best of their abilities, and play the game to win....you owe yourself and your competitor to do that. But defining the result by winning and losing, by a score, but an outcome that invariably allows only half of the participants to share in the result, does not have to drive our thinking. We should drive our children to constantly improve themselves, to take risks, and to find satisfaction in giving maximum effort.

In short, we need them to find joy in the participation trophy regardless of who wins.

#WOW (Way Out Wednesday): It Takes a Village

I owe a colleague of mine credit for this one, but it's amazing in concept:

ReGenVillage
A completely off-grid experiment planned to launch this summer in Northern Europe seeks to combine the best elements of smart planning, smart design, and urban agriculture into a thriving, self-sufficient community. In their words,

There are five principles behind the ReGen Villages: “Energy positive homes. Door-step high-yield organic food production. Mixed renewable energy and storage. Water and waste recycling. Empowerment of local communities.”

They went all out on the renderings as well:

I will be keeping tabs on this as it - hopefully - moves forward.

Rethinking Scarcity

"He who does not work, neither shall he eat"  - John Smith

Few things have defined America so consistently as the Puritan work ethic so easily summarized in the Bible by Paul and famously by John Smith in the quote above. For the better part of human existence, this simple aphorism sprung forth from necessity. The provision of food, shelter, and health all required intense amounts of labor spread across every community. Our individual worth rested in how much and how hard we worked to support ourselves and the community.

Until now....

Starting with the Industrial Revolution, passing through the Green Revolution (agriculture, not environment), and culminating in the Digital Revolution, the amount of work required to deliver a minimum quality of life has dropped so precipitously that on average, we barely need to work to secure our basic needs. Add to this the increasing urbanization of the population and few of us even have the opportunity to experience "self-sufficiency" where we grow our own food, build our own housing, and share a family physician who lives down the road. The numbers bear this out:

The US food supply system wastes 40% of what it produces.
US housing stock has a housing unit for every 2.3 people.
US water supplies currently meet the domestic need of 355 billion gallons a day at under 1 cent a gallon.

However, we cling to the generations of scarcity that influence everything from interpersonal relationships to government policy. The fear that we will return to real need and want on a grand scale continues to drive us individually and collectively. We have known only the mantras of "picking yourself up by the bootstraps" and "worthless welfare queens" and "work hard, play hard" for so long that we seem incapable of understanding anything else.

And yet, we will have to.

The truth is, we will have to come to terms with an economy whereby "work" as we know it no longer exists. (Derek Thompson in the Atlantic provided a more detailed examination of the concept in his piece A World Without Work). In order to begin coping with this, we must change our views as a society and a world on three main issues:

1.  The definition of what it means to provide value
In a world where we have the ability to provide sustenance at nearly no cost, can we ethically require citizens to "work long and hard" just to participate in the basic level of quality of life. Can a person providing social services for ten hours a week qualify as a "full participant"? Examining this will require looking at ideas like guaranteed minimum income, the consumer economy, universal healthcare, and the relationship between business and community.

2.  How we view "the other" in a world without scarcity
Whether we want to admit it or not, racism, sexism, agism...these all stem from our desire to protect the "meager" resources we have for our own survival. How do we view the right to migration, open borders, and racial equality in a world without want? Conversations around this topic will include openness to reparations for past inequity, investment in quality public education, voting rights, and codifying the basic definition of human dignity.

3.  Environmental threats to resources availability
One wildcard in all of this comes from the stresses we have placed on our environment to get to this point. Although we have a country (and even a world) capable of feeding, sheltering, and sustaining ourselves, some of our choices on this path have damaged our air, water, and soil. Some others have threatened species within our food, air, and water cycles necessary for our survival. In order to maintain and improve our ability to support the world population effectively, we must rethink and reframe our relationship with, as Pope Francis calls it, "our common home".

Addressing the three issues will require drastic social change and hard conversations. The vastness of the effort will invite incrementalism, however we have seen that play out over the past forty years and have seen little result on a scale large enough to succeed. Over the coming years - or until such a time as it is no longer necessary - I will devote my writing, working, and advocacy to the three challenges: defining work and value, improving interpersonal relationships, and mitigating environmental threats.  I know I will disagree with many on individual points within each area, but I sense no disagreement on the value of the outcome. We have the means to create a truly equal world where "work" as we know it gives way to "value". Some will welcome the chance to farm, others to build, and others to heal, but these choices will not flow from necessity but from personal choice. Others will pursue the arts, or the law, or human support. And on a scale more massive that we have seen before, people of all incomes and points of origin will focus most of their time on the pursuit of "leisure".

I look forward to thoughtful and sometimes heated discussions, and welcome any and all feedback along the way.

Why I used to be anti-abortion, but now I am pro-life and pro-choice

My senior year of college I took a Philosophy of Law course, and as my final paper, I wrote about the legal reasoning for a paternalistic policy outlawing abortion. I attended a decidedly conservative Catholic college, and after fifteen years of Catholic education (the Publics got me for 1st grade thanks to my brother who did not want to walk the block between the Catholic school and public school on his own) I held what I considered a strict but logical position on abortion: it should be outlawed under all circumstances. I received a stellar grade on the paper, but a curious comment from the professor: "Well-reasoned...I imagine your views will change over the years ahead."

I held this view for the better part of the next decade until a random event caused enough of a stir in my thinking to make my professor's words prescient. I had to re-reconcile my idealistic but ultimately flawed viewpoint in favor of something much more realistic and nuanced and - ultimately - a position that will more likely lead to the end of abortion as birth control than attempting an outright ban. (Side note: for a primer on the effectiveness of outright bans in changing human behavior, see any history of early 20th century America.)

One night, a large group of us celebrated in a public house enjoying a rousing series of conversations. Although standards of polite conversation dictate that one should avoid discussing religion, sex, or politics, we diligently ignored these standards and eventually ended up in the rounded triangle at the Venn intersection of all three: abortion. By this point, I had further solidified my thinking and sharply honed my ability to shoot down any possible argument that this country should have legal abortion on demand. As the night went on, the crowd whittled down until just two of us remained. After a few laughs recalling the evening's ongoings, my drinking partner looked at me and shared the following:

It's been a blast talking with you all tonight, but I have a story to tell you that might put a chink in your abortion stance. A couple of years back, after the birth of my first child, my wife and I found ourselves pregnant again. We were thrilled, and couldn't wait to expand our family. Being cautious, we waited to get a confirmation, and soon found ourselves at that exciting moment when you get to hear the heartbeat. We still held it close to our vest knowing you should wait until twelve weeks until you spread the word, just in case. A couple of weeks went by, and my wife sensed that something wasn't right. We went into the doctor's office and he immediately sent us for another sonogram, and to our utter devastation, we had lost the baby. Mind you, this is a Christian hospital, so our doctor went over things ten ways to Sunday to be absolutely certain of the miscarriage. He was positive. After giving us some time to come to terms with what had happened, he told us that because of how far along my wife was, we would need to get a "procedure" to minimize any risk of damage to my wife's reproductive system. He also noted that we would not be able to get that procedure at his office or the hospital because "they do not do them there". It finally dawned on us what he meant. We spent a fair amount of time talking over the potential consequences and options, and he was very patient in making sure we understood exactly what we were getting into no matter which path we choose. We ultimately chose to accept the doctor's assessment of the viability of our child, and protect my wife's ability to conceive again. We went to a clinic that the doctor identified, and afterward, bought some wine and ice cream and got a sitter for our oldest and sat in our living room crying and holding each other. We gave ourselves time to grieve, and in time, we had two more healthy and beautiful children.

No one can say for sure what exactly would have happened if we had not had the abortion procedure done. Maybe my wife's body would have handled things in its own way and she would have been fine, but there was a reasonable chance that doing nothing would have prevented her from having any more children. I cannot imagine my life right now without all of my children, and thinking that I could have missed out on these two wonderful lives because the "procedure" would have been illegal gives me pause. 

The inebriation of the night put any serious thinking on hold for me, but in the weeks that followed, I put myself in that guy's shoes. What if I had been the one who had to make that choice. By all definitions of my faith, that is abortion, no different than any other. If my wife needed that procedure, and had no access to it, what would we do? Would we sacrifice the chance to have more children in order to adhere to the letter of an opinion on Catholic doctrine?

This opened my eyes to learn more...especially about the real causes of abortion. Abortion does not exist as some sort of isolated choice, but rather, it sits as a symptom in a larger web of social issues: poverty, healthcare, separation of church and state. Outside of all of those larger issues sits this core reality that the "abortion procedure" has a place in the healthcare of pregnant women of even the strictest faith, and we have no mechanism that separates procedures like this man's wife had from those who seek abortion for other reasons.

In the years since, I have gained a better understanding of the science behind in-utero human development, prayed on the Church's view of the beginning of life as well as the approach to blending science and religion that geniuses like Einstein have shown. I have also watched as the abortion rate has declined precipitously over the past 25 years all while access remains, and understand that eliminating abortion does not provide the most effective means for ending abortion, but solving the other social issues does. I would never consider an abortion for my family, and I would advise my children heavily against it. But if I hold the view that it has to be made illegal and those who pursue it punished, then I will have sentenced a number of faith-filled families to unnecessary sterility and will have denied many future souls an existence.

And there is nothing in such a point of view that I find particularly pro-life.

Friday Five: January 20, 2017...

Our country and civilization will have to grapple with three large, looming questions if we will move past this caustic and seemingly inevitable acrimony we find ourselves in today. One centers on our relationship with 'our common home' and the natural systems within it that support our lives. We may have reached a point of no return with renewables and other life-supporting technologies, but the next five years will tell the tale.
Solar in 2017: As non-traditional markets break records, more doors open for utilities
"But utilities are not procuring solar to meet renewable portfolio standards anymore. More than 70% of the solar in the pipeline for the upcoming year reflects that trend, the report noted. Instead, the biggest driver will be smaller solar projects that qualify under the federal Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) of 1978. The policy sought to break up the utility monopoly on generation choices by requiring them to buy from smaller developers of renewable energy at their avoidable cost rate for a long-term contract, usually set for 20 years."

A second major question we must address has to do with our relationship with race. We have reached a point where we can no longer try to 'patch things up' and move onto a post-racial world...especially since many seem to want us to return to a world where we solved racism by isolating the races.
What Betsy DeVos Didn't Say about School Choice
"And an increasing body of research suggests these concerns should not be isolated to vouchers, but to school choice programs of all kinds: Nationwide, school choice programs, such as charter schools and open enrollment options, have pushed more low-income minority students into even more racially segregated schools."

The last of the major questions we face as a society deals with the question of work. Four-hundred years of Puritanical work ethic have pushed us to the point where, much like a soldier who has struggled in war so long they cannot fathom a life without it, we cannot see the looming crisis ahead. Thankfully, some have taken notice and seek workable solutions.
As robots take jobs, Europeans mull free money for all
"Finland’s small-scale, two-year trial that started Jan. 1 aims to answer a frequent question from basic income opponents: With a guaranteed 560 euros ($600) a month, will the 2,000 human guinea pigs — drawn randomly from Finland’s unemployed — just laze around?"

If people's actions ever confuse you, follow the money. Good advice.
The Hidden Reason Republicans are So Eager to Repeal Obamacare
"The two big relevant taxes, according to the TPC’s Howard Gleckman, are “a 0.9 percent payroll surtax on earnings and a 3.8 percent tax on net investment income for individuals with incomes exceeding $200,000 ($250,000 for couples).” That payroll tax hike hits a reasonably broad swath of affluent individuals, but in a relatively minor way. The 3.8 percent tax on net investment income (money made from owning or selling stocks and other financial instruments rather than working), by contrast, is a pretty hefty tax, but one that falls overwhelmingly on the small number of people who have hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in investment income."

I have a minority view among many progressives and clean energy advocates, but Rick Perry can do much good in his role as Energy Secretary. The Obama administration focused on moving research forward quickly, with Energy Secretaries who had a background in the hard science aspect of the department. Now, we get an able administrator to manage the natural plateau that comes with a Republican administration. If you expect groundbreaking advances, you will find disappointment, but the clean energy movement can gain much from a couple of years of practical market settling.
Rick Perry Pledges Support for DOE Research, Renewables as Trump Plans Drastic Agency Cuts
"I am committed to the continuation of using brilliant scientists, the private sector and universities in collaborating on finding solutions to challenges…whether on renewables or use of resources in a more efficient, safe, effective manner,' Perry said, while being questioned by Sen. Duckworth."

Happy Friday!