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Kill Your Cat

Posted on July 30, 2013 by A Rational Woman

cat My mother’s cat died today. My mother, turning 84, is a cat person, and I’m not. It’s not just that I’m allergic to their dander. This cat, Missy, hissed at me from the start, and always threatened to scratch me or anyone who came too close.

This post isn’t really about cats, though. It’s about facing death rationally. Missy wasn’t my mother’s first cat. She lost a couple of grown felines to coyotes, a couple of kittens to hawks, and one, after my parents had moved, jumped out of a ground-floor window and ran away.

Missy was with my folks for about 16 years when her eating and drinking habits began to change. Supposedly this only began about a week ago, but I suspect she began showing her age more gradually than that. Not having taken the cat to a vet for many years, my mother wasn’t in a hurry now. I Googled the situation and figured she would regret it if she didn’t try, so we took her and her cat to a local vet that allowed walk-ins for an extra fee.

The vet, seemingly a very compassionate woman, examined Missy and told my mother (and me and my husband) that she was very sick. Could be organ failure, kidney trouble, cancer. In fact, she would probably die soon. The slim hope of temporary improvement would require expensive blood tests and a few days in the hospital.

The doctor told us that allowing her to die at home wasn’t the best choice, as it wasn’t necessarily going to be a peaceful death, that it might involve seizures and choking for breath at the end.

My mother chose not to take the vet’s advice, nor even to believe her entirely, and we took the cat home. I did some more Googling, even looking into how someone could terminate their own cat if they didn’t have a handy vet or couldn’t or wouldn’t spend the money ($117 in this case, we’d been told). That didn’t seem a viable option for my folks, and I certainly wasn’t going to do it.

I hated that the cat was going to suffer, but my mother kept saying, “She’s not going to die yet. I’m not going to have her killed.” Four days later, the cat was dead.

Our four elderly parents’ mortality was the first thing my husband and I thought about when all this was happening. Our own too, certainly. I wondered if my parents would think about that too.

It’s been an interesting lesson for me–now I have a clearer idea of what my mother has in mind for her own end. No extraordinary measures, she has written down, and she has told me it’s pain she most fears. And yet, here we have a clear example of trying to prolong a beloved pet’s painful demise.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion to share. Do you?

Follow me on Twitter @bunnyape

Posted in A Rational Woman | Tagged cat, death, euthanasia, love, rationality | 2 Comments

Art and Artifice

Posted on July 15, 2013 by Umwelt Utahpia

“Art is either plagiarism or revolution.”

─ Paul Gaugin

“Imitation is the sincerest [form] of flattery.”

─ Charles Caleb Colton

My wife Ptarmi & I are building a new house this year on a lakeside lot we bought more than ten years ago. It will be our final home, where we finish raising our kids and someday retire.

The new house will have a few more rooms than our current home. Art and decorative objects are important to us, so over the years we put aside some money for an art budget for the new house, and we’re excited that we finally will get to use it. It’s not a big budget, but we hope it’ll be enough to add items that will expand and update our current collection.

Last month, I was in New York City and had the chance to visit the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). On past visits, I marveled at the paintings by famous 19^th and 20^th century artists, but this time, I was fascinated more by lesser-known 20^th and 21^st century abstract and surreal sculptures and installations. Inspired by what I saw at MoMA, I searched for furniture that also serve as art objects for our new home. Two pieces that I really like were created by the design team Front and sold by a European furniture and lighting company, Moooi:

Rabbit Lamp designed by Front
Photo from Moooi.com

Pig table designed by Front
Photo from Moooi.com

Unfortunately, the rabbit lamp costs over $500, and the pig table more than $2,500. Rather than busting our modest art budget, I decided to improvise with a Do-It-Yourself project. I found a white rabbit lamp for a child’s room that I spray painted black and replaced the original white lampshade with a black outer/gold inner paper lampshade custom-made to my specifications by an on-line webstore. For the pig, I painted black a rustic kitchen décor item we weren’t using and drilled two screws into its back to secure a black plastic plate I bought for under $5 at a craft store.

I set my pig dish and bunny lamp on a black table from Ikea ($7.99). Ptarmi contributed to the project by giving me a cast resin black dog she had bought at a closeout sale. I arranged the animals as a loose reference to a statue commemorating the Bremen town musicians:

Statue of “Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten”
Photo from Bremen City website (http://www.bremen-tourismus.de/bremens-top-11)

The final result:

The Bremen Assemblage
Photo from: Ken Kilgore

Total cost of the project: $350. The project is not so much an installation but rather an assemblage of components, none of which have much practical value alone. Together, they create visual impact, whether the viewer personally likes the piece or not.

It will be a few more months before the house is finished and the assemblage placed in its intended spot. If anyone asks, I’ll say I made it, having been inspired by several primary sources. But aside from the question of whether the assemblage is any good from a design perspective, I wonder whether it’s really original: aren’t some of the components just crude copies of someone else’s design? If this were a written work, would I be accused of plagiarism?

Many of the modern installation works I saw at MoMA contained components that were “found”: items that other people might have thrown away that the artist incorporated into the art. The artists gave no attributions to the original manufacturers or designers of these items.

By showing the original sources for each step of my work, I might be accused of imitating/copying/plagiarizing other people’s ideas. But if I don’t bother to show my sources, perhaps I’m actually an inspired artist who built on the works of others who came before me, like furniture by the design team Front and folktales by the Brothers Grimm? Great is the temptation to commit quiet acts of omission!

Posted in Umwelt Utahpia | Tagged art, artwork, Bremen, DIY_project, imitiation, installations, Moooi, omission, plagiarism, town_musicians | 2 Comments

Rational Woman Hates Her Body

Posted on July 13, 2013 by A Rational Woman

ugly I’m rational, right? That’s what I keep saying. But I’m also a woman, and a woman’s self-image is way too often affected by the careless comments of others, whether family, friends, or the omnipresent media. For instance, see the big media fuss over Marion Bartoli, a sports champ, and the unkind comments made about her quite normal looks.

Here’s how that sort of thing worked in my own life.

FAMILY FIRST

The process of being evaluated physically began when I was six. At least that’s my earliest memory of become self-conscious. Two of my aunts were chatting, when one of them looked intently at me before saying to the other one, “There’s nothing special about her features, but when you put them all together, she’s cute.” Oh, I thought, is that good, or is that. . . not so good?

At 11, already in the agonies of puberty, I wore glasses and had plenty of oily pimples. Dressed in pretend finery for a costume party, I showed off for my parents. My dad said, “Glasses on a vamp?” Hmm. So glasses mean you can’t be sexy. I began trying to wear contact lenses a few years later, and when I couldn’t get used to them right away, I was distraught.

At 13, Anne K. and I were friends, and we were on the outs. So I stupidly repeated what I’d heard from someone else, that dancing with her was like leading a tank around the floor. She retaliated by telling me her mother said I had piano legs. Not having a piano in my life, I wasn’t too clear on what part of my legs were flawed. Eventually I learned it had to do with my ankles, so I did countless repetitions of ankle exercises throughout my teens, none of which changed anything.

My good buddy Jill told me, at 14, that she could always tell from a distance when it was me who was heading in her direction, since I had funny legs. Bow legs. I haven’t worn shorts in decades because of that.

MEN, TOO

When I was 15, my mother took me to a gynecologist for a routine check-up. When it was over, he asked my mom, “Does she feel badly about having such small breasts?” It was the first I’d heard that I didn’t match up to expectations. But not the last. I soon had my first reciprocal crush on a boy named Ron Stevens. One afternoon this big-talking 16-year-old low-achiever whose own looks were far from those of a Greek god, announced, with hand motions to match, “You’d be just perfect if you moved all this [my hips] up here [the chest area].” That made me angry, and that’s one set of body parts I never did set out to improve (well, not counting all those chest-muscle-strengthening exercises).

One of my dates when I was 18, after drinking a good deal, pointed out that my forefinger was fat—in comparison to the slenderness of my other fingers, he added. I still think he was technically correct and, ever since, I’ve tended to believe drunken statements more than perhaps I should. My ex-husband said I had hairy toes a year after we married. He had a thing about hair, preferring his women air-brushed.

My husband Stephen has only made two inadvertently negative contributions to my body image over all the years we’ve been together. Once, when I made the mistake of handing him the movie camera and then walking in front of him at my son’s summer ranch camp, he took what he thought was an amusing shot of me (from behind) followed by a shot of a horse (from behind). Unfortunately, I sometimes get interior flashes of that sequence when I’m most tempted to feel frisky.

And then, one evening while absently fondling my right elbow, Stephen noticed it was rough. Uh, oh. Something I’d missed in my precautionary ablutions. I rubbed body lotion into those stubbornly dry elbows every night for years, and now they’re quite smooth. No big deal, really, just a suitably trivial coda to my lifelong body image problem.

Of course, I’ve heard some pleasing comments too over the years, though it’s harder to recall more than a couple of those (nice eyes, lovely lips). And, annoyingly, as soon as I began to care less about what others thought of my body and more about what I have to say in the world, I started noticing the effects of ordinary aging. Such observations compete with the quieter voice inside that insists, “What people don’t see is what you get to keep the longest.”

Feel like sharing? What parts of you have been commented negatively about by others? Was your self-image affected?

Posted in A Rational Woman | Tagged body image, rationality, sexism | 14 Comments

When Religion Probably Doesn’t Help

Posted on June 20, 2013 by A Rational Woman

“A Rational Woman” is trying something a little different today for the blog. Here are two questions (that I made up to get us started).

Dear Rational Woman:

Q: I read a study some time back that young people who are religious wear seat belts more often than the non-religious, smoke and drink less, eat better, and don’t commit as many crimes. The conclusion of the study was that these kids are trying to figure out their purpose in the world, and they turn to religion. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

A: Shortcuts are seductive. Young people (and those of all ages going through transitional periods in their lives) often shortchange their own complex and typically cyclical development. Rather than doing the hard work of thinking things through, learning about themselves, and growing in a conscious way, they instead cling to a love interest or a rigid set of beliefs.

A teenager’s longing for affiliation is particularly intense. Those who believe they’re worthless unless someone loves them become vulnerable to a would-be rescuer, perhaps a supernatural entity, who will save them from the painful search for self. It doesn’t mean they’re better people. Perhaps, rather, they’re incompletely evolved.

Dear Rational Woman:

Q: Everyone I know is getting older and more apt to become ill. It often happens that someone asks for my prayers. As an atheist, how should I respond?

A: I’ll assume it’s usually Judeo-Christian-style prayers your acquaintances want from you (I’m American, after all). I wonder if your feelings would be identical if you were asked to perform a Buddhist or Hindu rite on behalf of someone who was ill or who was mourning. (Or Wiccan or Muslim, for that matter.) Just something to consider.

Your response, in general, will probably depend on your closeness to the person asking. The less close, the less reason to do anything but say, “Of course, I do wish him well.” Or “I’m so sorry for your loss,” or whatever. Or say, “I’ll be thinking of him.” (There’s no need to add, “And a fat lot of good that will do.”)

When people I care about are suffering, it makes me ill to even try to imagine their anguish. Certainly, when people are down is not the time to push their most sensitive buttons. But it doesn’t mean you lie or go against your own deeply held beliefs. Do what makes sense to you as a rational person, perhaps taking that energy borne of sympathy to write a letter to a congressperson or a newspaper or sign a petition, at the very least.

Readers, do you agree? Do you have any questions of your own you’d like to put out there for my and others’ responses?

Note: In KYLIE’S HEEL, my new novel, you’ll find more Q&As of this type. It’s available for pre-order now at HumanistPress.com, or wait a couple months for the e-book.

Follow me on Twitter @bunnyape

Posted in A Rational Woman | Tagged a rational woman, atheism, human development, Kylie's Heel, prayer, Q&A, religion, susan k. perry | 9 Comments

Random Cultural Perspectives: Telephone Poles to Survivalism

Posted on June 15, 2013 by Umwelt Utahpia

Beijing snarl
Photo by: Ken Kilgore

In May 2013, I was in Tokyo for a business trip and had the chance to visit two of my Japanese cousins one weekend. Chie and Miyo are sisters. Since early childhood, we’ve been very close; I’m like a brother to them. We spent the afternoon catching up, showing pictures of where we’ve been since the last time we saw each other and talking about random topics.

One picture I shared was of a jumble of electrical wires and power lines outside an apartment building that I snapped in Beijing. It’s a running joke I have with my cousins that Tokyo could be a pretty city if only it would get rid of its unsightly telephone poles and power lines that mar the aesthetics of most streets.

“See, Beijing and Tokyo have something in common: attractive buildings obscured by ugly power lines,” I teased.

Appealing to my practical side, Chie replied matter-of-factly, “The municipal power company says burying the power lines would delay the restoring of power in case of earthquakes. By keeping them above ground, the power company can repair damaged lines within a few hours instead of several days. So the ugliness is deliberate.”

As if to shift the topic, Miyo contributes, “The Tokyo city government says that, since the earthquakes and tsunami in 2011, it now has the resources and readiness to restore power, water, food, medical supplies, and telephone service within three days of a city-wide disaster. People have to be prepared to make it on their own for just those first three days.”

My reply: “Where are you going to keep all your guns and ammo for those three days in this little apartment?” By my cousins’ blank stares, I could see that they didn’t get my joke. “In the U.S., some survivalists believe you need to arm yourself to fight off the hordes that’ll come after your food and resources, ” I explained.

“Why would ‘hordes’ come after your food? And why would you use guns to shoot desperate people?”, Miyo asked. Her genuine lack of understanding of the extreme American “prepper” mentality of an apocalyptic crash of society reflects Japanese survival culture in general.

After millennia of surviving and rebuilding from countless devastating earthquakes, tsunamis, fires, and other natural and manmade disasters (including a Godzilla attack or two), the Japanese have come to rely on preparedness, intelligent engineering, and self-control to get through catastrophic hardships. They believe increasing social organization is the answer to surviving disasters. Firearms are viewed as anti-social, and therefore, useless in individual survival preparation.

Most Japanese live in dense urban communities where hunting for wild food is impractical. While food and water shortages were a problem for many people beyond the areas devastated by the 2011 earthquakes and tsunami, government and foreign relief aid efforts supplied enough provisions to prevent people from becoming desperate. And when there’s little looting by your neighbors, there’s little sense of insecurity, so again, personal firearms are deemed unnecessary.

“Wouldn’t Americans do better after disasters if they used their wealth and technology to build cities and communities that rebound quickly like ours [the Japanese], rather than worrying about retreating to shelters and surviving by shooting people?”, Chie asked, enjoying that she had the more civilized argument in this discussion.

I think that is precisely what most Americans and our municipal, state and federal governments are doing. And I don’t think Japanese solutions to disaster preparedness are necessarily more intelligent, insightful, prescient, or practical than ours, and their methods may or may not work in the U.S. because our social histories, cultures, traditions, and community infrastructures are different.

But there does seem to be an obvious cultural difference in general attitude about the social consequences of disasters and how we ought to prepare for them: calm and endurance for about three days of shortages for the Japanese; potential social chaos and survivalism (or retreatism) for an indefinite period of deprivation for Americans. (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has always encouraged their members to store supplies for food and essentials in case of adversity. This is sensible advice, but the Church recommends storage of a minimum three months of supplies. Three months before any relief efforts arrive?!) This worth exploring to see how the same fundamental problems might be viewed and solved so differently by two countries.

Perhaps we Americans still have much of the frontier spirit left in us. Though likely generated mostly from pioneer myths, maybe we have in our shared cultural psyche a need to protect what’s ours from savage disasters with guns fired from behind circled wagons, or the porches of our homesteads. Or perhaps our religions—with their apocalyptic myths—instill an end-of-times expectation that is absent from the Japanese, who tend to believe more in a cyclical rebirth (Buddhism) or renewing and rebuilding of social structures (Shintoism). These speculations without any evidentiary data are fun to think about but Chie’s question still deserves to be answered: how should Americans prepare for disasters?

My own family blends my half-Japanese sensibilities with my wife’s LDS upbringing by keeping a week’s worth of food storage and emergency supplies, more or less…. We both agree that relying on our self-preparation for the short-term and on our society’s provisions for mid-term relief are more reliable, resilient and realistic in getting through a major disaster than stockpiling firearms. What’s your perspective on this and what preparations have you made?

From debating the aesthetics of power line snarls to pondering how to survive the apocalypse: may your family discussions be as equally random and satisfying!

Posted in Umwelt Utahpia | Tagged aesthetics, Beijing, catastrophe, cousins, disaster, earthquake, power line, prepper, random, recovery, survivalist, telephone pole, Tokyo, tsunami | 1 Comment

13 Neat Things You May Not Know About Humanism

Posted on June 8, 2013 by A Rational Woman

Humanist_earrings I’m going to share some humanist thoughts and resources I picked up at the 2013 American Humanist Association Conference that may be as new to you as they were to me.

First, though, in brief, what’s humanism? I don’t think I can summarize it better than this statement on the site of the AHA, which you’ll notice shares much in common with The Brights:

Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism and other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.

This was my first conference in years, and the very first humanist one I’ve attended. Why did I choose to write about 13 things? Because I’m not superstitious (and it just turned out that way). This post is far from comprehensive, and I didn’t attend every session. (We also spent some recuperative time communing with the sea lions and a duck who couldn’t decide if crossing the road was a good idea.)

13 Neat Things About Humanism

1. Commonality is delightful. It feels really good to be with fellow self-identified humanists, most of whom seem to agree they are also atheists and/or freethinkers. It’s the relaxing feeling of not being part of the unfortunately-sometimes-defensive minority. That’s in spite of the fact that not all humanists (like not all of any group) are equally intelligent, nor do we agree on everything (one woman I met was strongly anti-childhood vaccines, and two speakers justified non-monogamy).

2. I’m a wimp when it comes to declaring my beliefs in the “real” world. It has always been hard for me to state my atheism without an apologetic smile, but even when I was deciding on what humanist ornament to buy—and I ended up with gold-colored earrings (see the photo above) with the happy “H” that is the AHA’s symbol—I mentally ran through possibilities. Will I have to explain humanism to certain family members who won’t get it, or even strangers, or can these pass as symbols of just plain human beings, no deeper explanation needed? See EvolveFish for items to wear and use that may challenge your own courage or start a conversation. Or visit the Brights’ own shop.

3. Religion in school? So-called “Good News Clubs” are in thousands of public schools across the U.S. They have kids read little books in which a black page represents where they will go if they don’t obey God’s rules. Ugh. Contrast that with Camp Quest, an atheist/humanist/secular/freethought-themed summer camp where science and rationality are taught in fun ways.

4. Richard Dawkins moderated a panel on religious child abuse, and later asked a question at the keynote address. His face and fame and brilliance and awesome outspokenness make him seem like a rock star to me (that’s just a handy analogy, as he’s way more than that), so I didn’t get up the nerve to say hello. To learn more, see his site Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

5. Are humanist and feminist aims the same? The Feminist Caucus co-chair and I discussed humanism’s aims over cheese and drinks on the private beach at the Bahia Hotel (kind of ironic, considering). It’s great for your group’s goal to be to make society more fair, with far less income inequality, a better life for women and children, and so on. But might that come across as somewhat political in these times? Might that not be antithetical (sadly) to the views of a great many otherwise amenable humanists, and atheists? So do you choose to focus on the “political” goal in the name of humanism? It’s something to think and talk about, and I found that my conversational partner didn’t agree that these ideas are now “political.” “They’re just the right thing to do and we should do them,” she insisted. http://www.americanhumanist.org/What_We_Do/Feminist_Caucus

6. Laws matter. The effort to change unfair laws is at the heart of secular humanism. Sympathetic humanist lawyers play a large role in achieving progress. To me, it almost seems that if no other kinds of activism were available, those who lobby, advocate, and focus on the legal system would still make a vast difference over time.

7. Tongue-twister initials? The LGBT (lesbian gay bisexual transgender) community has been accused of not being inclusive enough, and so now the community may be called LGBTQ. I asked speaker Jason Frye about that Q, and he replied, “It can mean Queer or Questioning.” http://lgbthumanists.org/

8. Grieving humanists may feel discomfort when theists offer prayers and similar types of consolation. The “Grief Beyond Belief” talk Rebecca Hensler gave was refreshingly candid about her own experience after the death of her infant son. He is not with the angels nor waiting for her in heaven, she told us. Grief Beyond Belief is her online grief support group, free of mythology and mysticism (currently on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/faithfreegriefsupport)

9. The journalism session by Katha Pollitt, a feminist poet, writer, and essayist (for The Nation among others), about the nuts and bolts of getting your ideas out into the world was surprisingly honest and specific. She spoke about money, including the (little) payment you can expect for your efforts in this changing news environment. I like it when writers speak publicly about their work and the fact that it IS work and needs to be paid if one is to continue doing it (and if the citizenry is to be able to read news that is more informed than the unpaid thoughts of fellow amateurs).

10. Religions affect history a LOT. Luis Granados, Director of Humanist Press (and my editor), gave a fascinating talk about the heroes and villains of the Spanish Civil War based on his book Damned Good Company. Turns out the Catholic Church wasn’t one of the good guys. (Smiley face purposely omitted.)

11. Dan Savage is the funny, frank, and, above all, rational, writer and speaker who was named Humanist of the Year. I’d never heard him speak, but have read and enjoyed his columns. His manner was very much like his voice in his writing: compassionate and self-deprecating yet bold. His latest book American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics, which has just come out (May 2013), was a pleasure to read. Though every idea wasn’t brand-new to a devoted fan, each chapter added depth to Savage’s beliefs and humanistic efforts to make society safer for the marginalized, as well as happier for just about everyone except fundamentalists who would deny him, his husband, and others full equality. Here’s his blog.

12. A “free” sign beckoned, and I picked up the last copy of 34 Million Friends by Jane Roberts. And read it with interest. And then donated a few dollars to the cause of the United Nations Population Fund that addresses women’s urgent needs around the world. Please take a look at the site: www.34MillionFriends.org

13. Physics rocks! Theoretical physicist Sean M. Carroll’s keynote address “Purpose and the Universe” was thoroughly engaging, and I highly recommend it. A link that includes his slides (they help!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcqd3Q7X_1A

Many of the sessions are available to view here: http://conference.americanhumanist.org/live/

(Note: This conference was the first time my and my husband’s new books [KYLIE’S HEEL, a novel, and QUESTIONS ABOUT GOD, poems, were on display publicly. That was cool! See www.HumanistPress.com to learn more or pre-order.)

Posted in A Rational Woman | Tagged AHA, atheism, conference, Dan Savage, ethical, feminism, freethought, grief, humanism, Humanist Press, katha pollitt, lawyers, LGBTQ, Luis Granados, physicist, religion, Richard Dawkins, Sean M. Carroll, secularism, susan k. perry, writing | Leave a comment

YES–College Is STILL Worth It!

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Umwelt Utahpia

photo credit: University of Denver via photopin cc

Photo: University of Denver (CC)

With today’s high unemployment rates and increasing student loan debt levels, many Americans question whether a college education is worth the cost. An article written by William J. Bennett and David Wilezol at FoxNews.com in May 2013 answers the question “Is College Worth It?” with an unenthusiastic “It depends”. The authors give several reasons for their ambivalent response:

Student debt is growing, as well as defaults on student loans
The cost of a college education is expensive and increasing
There is high unemployment among new college graduates
A recent study found “only 45 percent of college graduates made substantial gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills in their first two years of school”
Many traditionally challenging courses have been replaced with less rigorous “novelty” instruction on pop culture
College campuses are mostly politically liberal havens “rife with binge drinking, illegal drug use and the degrading ‘hook-up’ culture”

The authors point out that a student’s choice of major can greatly affect his or her financial future, noting that STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) majors are paid more and have better employment rates compared to other majors, like psychology, English or political science, as well as which school the student attends, since brand-name schools may offer more opportunities than other colleges.

The article ends by highlighting the shortage of workers in jobs that do not require a bachelor’s degree (but do require more than a high school diploma), such as nurses, welders, electricians, air traffic controllers, IT technicians, and plumbers.

The points in the article are the usual ones made when arguing that college degrees are no longer worth the cost of obtaining them. Typically, such arguments present just part of the picture by ignoring the alternative option of NOT getting a college education. The arguments against a college education usually depict how some graduates are struggling economically and fail to recognize that those college graduates are competing for jobs and pay not just among themselves but also against all other job seekers, including those with only a high school diploma who are struggling even more.

For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that holders of a bachelor’s degree and higher who were 25 years old and over in 2012 had an unemployment rate of 4.0%, while high school graduates without any college had an unemployment rate of 8.3%. And a Forbes.com article cites U.S. Census Bureau statistics showing that in 2011, college graduates made 82% more than those with high school diplomas. So even if unemployment is increasing and earning power is decreasing for college graduates, the figures are even worse for high school-only graduates.

The other points made by the FoxNews.com article should also be compared to the alternatives for a more complete picture. Student debt and loan defaults are growing, but how big a problem is this in the larger context of increasing mortgage defaults and credit card debt of all Americans? Is it possible that, compared to other types of debt, student loans still make better financial sense? And referring back to the article, if 45% of college juniors showed little improvement in critical thinking, reasoning and writing skills, then 55%, or the majority, DID show improvements. Did the majority of high school-only graduates likewise show advances in such critical skills two years after graduation?

Arguments about lax courses and liberal college campuses are more about a student’s lifestyle preference than whether college is worth the cost—college campuses are not the only places where high school graduates may encounter excessive drinking, illegal drugs, and liberal attitudes about sex. And while growth in the number of available skilled labor jobs that do not require a college degree (and cannot be easily outsourced to overseas workers) is a positive development, domestic workers increasingly find such jobs offer only short-term employment as automation, industry consolidation, and technological obsolescence take their toll.

Getting a college education is certainly not the only way to achieve personal satisfaction, gainful employment, and professional or financial success, and a college degree is no guarantee of future success. The cost of a bachelor’s degree is indeed great enough that careful consideration must be made about college being the right choice for a particular individual. But be sure your research looks at the entire picture and at whether the alternative of NOT getting a college education is really worth it.

Posted in Umwelt Utahpia | Tagged bachelor's, college, debt, diploma, fuel cost, graduate, income, student loans, unemployment, university | 2 Comments

3 Curmudgeonly Insights into the Good Life

Posted on May 16, 2013 by A Rational Woman

I’ve experienced the pull of positive psychology since it was called humanistic psychology, back in the 1970s or before. Newly re-packaged, with a lot of recent research backing up what to me seems, by now, like common sense, this field aims to turn self-help into a science.

You want to be happy, or happier, or live a better life? Fine, here’s what you need to know. Yet, more than just how to make life better for yourself, the full spectrum of what positive psychology can do includes making life better for others, too.

Thus, here we have a book entitled Pursuing the Good Life: 100 Reflections on Positive Psychology, by Christopher Peterson, one of the founders of the field of positive psychology. He died unexpectedly at age 62, before this compilation of his bite-sized blog posts came out.

I’ve chosen some of the ideas mentioned in the book that have perhaps been less publicized and that fit well with what makes sense to me personally as a Bright.

3 INSIGHTS:

1. Keep Your Bucket List to Yourself

Peterson may have lived his life without feeling the need to check off items on a list. Though he acknowledged that bucket lists do serve to make certain events more memorable, most such lists, in his estimation, often contained narcissistic wishes that wouldn’t necessarily make for a more meaningful life. He wrote that those items that might connect you to something larger (family or whatever) would, according to positive psychology, lead to more fulfillment.

In an aside, Peterson wondered how many items on some people’s bucket lists would be deleted “if he or she were not allowed to talk about them to others.”

2. Must You Be So Cheerful All the Time?

Peterson equated conspicuous cheerfulness (or glaring glee or eternal ebullience) with conspicuous consumption. He found it forced and insincere. Sometimes I wonder if it’s insincere so much as evidence of people deluding themselves, purposely putting a positive spin on everything to deny reality or because they fear that if they admitted anything less upbeat, they’d be accused of being depressed.

Peterson’s examples include when someone responds, “Great!” to how they’re doing, each and every time. My favorite example would be the way a lot of people on Facebook, Twitter, et al, seem to have, for the most part, terrific days and meals and books and relationships and lives. I feel I have to stifle any comment I might make that isn’t 100 per cent agreeable. Is positive psychology to blame? Peterson asked. And he answered that sincerity trumps satisfaction. A little less conspicuous cheerfulness might help us all achieve our real goals.

3. Small Talk Won’t Make You Happy

Peterson based his ideas about small talk—which he felt he was good at—on a single study, but I believe there’s a definite common-sense aspect to consider. Small talk is chatter about inessentials. It can be socially useful and convenient when you don’t want to get real, or really deep. But it can also be boring and get in the way of genuine engagement with another person. The study mentioned by Peterson found that the extent of small talk was negatively associated with happiness.

It’s possible that extroverts get something from a lot of small talk that introverts like me are simply missing. Maybe it’s odd, but I find a real conversation, whether with a friend or a relative stranger, vastly easier to take part in and infinitely more gratifying.

For further reading: A post of mine facetiously titled “Happiness is a Pork By-Product.” And here’s a light post: “Get Creative, Lose Weight, Find Flow and Happiness“

Kylie’s Heel, my first novel, comes out soon in paperback and e-book. Read reviews and pre-order.

Posted in A Rational Woman | Tagged bucket list, happiness, humanism, Kylie's Heel, meaningfulness, positive psychology, reality, small talk | Leave a comment

Ignored = Excluded

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Umwelt Utahpia

Voices Heard
Photo by: Ken Kilgore

15 April 2013: Boston Marathon bombing kills 3

17 April 2013: Texas fertilizer plant explosion kills 14

20 April 2013: earthquake in China’s Sichuan province kills 179

21 April 2013: “Mommy, what’s wrong with the world?!” That was the first thing my nine year old son Evan blurted after hearing about the devastating earthquake in China that occurred the day before. When asked what he meant, he reminded us that there seemed to be a lot of death and destruction lately, and the news keep getting worse.

While the causes of the deadly events of the week of 15 – 20 April were completely different and unrelated—a deliberate act of domestic terrorism, an industrial accident possibly caused by operator negligence, a naturally occurring geological phenomenon—one could forgive a child being spooked by the clustering of such incidents in a span of less than a week. Even for an adult like me, it was as though I barely had time to process emotionally the sadness and solemn sentiments of one event when the next struck me in the gut.

Though we live in Utah, far from the epicenters of these tragedies, Evan’s words show that we still feel some of the pain and despair that people involved with or closer to the events must have experienced. The emotional impact of so many deaths and injuries is somewhat diluted by distance but nonetheless can be felt by people across the globe. Maybe for a moment, this empathy binds us all together in compassion and grief.

So it is in this spirit of shared humanity that I call attention to a point of contention that might be seen as petty compared to the genuine pain suffered by the victims of these events, but deserves notice as an example of why Brights should press for participation and equality in civic affairs.

A story that has been running in several online U.S. humanist and secularist media concerns the Interfaith Service held on 18 April at Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross. This memorial service for the victims and survivors of the Boston Marathon bombing was organized by the Massachusetts Governor’s Office as a public event to help the community to heal by sharing in the grief and achieving some sense of emotional closure. Government officials such as President Obama, Massachusetts Governor Patrick, and Boston Mayor Menino spoke at the service, as well as representatives from various faiths including the Christian, Jewish and Muslim religions.

According to the stories in the secularist media, requests were repeatedly made to the organizers of the service to include representation of the non-religious residents and citizens of Boston, but these appeals were ignored. The snub was viewed as deliberate by some writers: “Humanists excluded from Boston Marathon Interfaith Service” raged Michael Stone of examiner.com; “After Boston Bombs, Atheists Denied Healing” declared James Croft on patheos.com; “Atheists barred from Boston bombing memorial attended by President Obama” blogged Stephen Best on volconvo.com.

Actually, atheists, humanists and secularists were not barred from attending the service and many did, so the more extreme headlines misrepresent the facts. But as Stephen C. Webster writes on The Raw Story, the lobbying office of the Secular Coalition for America (an advocacy group for the nontheistic in the U.S.) contacted multiple times the senior members of the governor’s staff who organized the vigil but their appeals were rejected.

This was particularly painful for Boston’s atheists because one of the victims of the bomb blasts was a respected volunteer of the Harvard Humanist Community; both her legs were amputated and her daughter was injured in the bombing. Inviting a representative of Boston’s secular/humanist/atheist community would have helped achieve the service’s goal of inclusiveness and bringing everyone together to start the healing process.

I do not expect that every minority group could or should be represented in such official memorial services. My wife’s faith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was not represented, and she didn’t complain (though her foundational Christian religion was VERY WELL represented). And some comments on the secular media sites expressed the notion that, since this was an interfaith service, there shouldn’t be a problem if people without faith aren’t represented.

But as many others have argued, this was an officially sanctioned event, organized by the staff of elected government representatives and meant to be THE official public memorial service that brings all communities together, and was attended by the mayor, the governor and the president. So even if every minority group could not be officially recognized, couldn’t there be at least an acknowledgement that people without faith also grieve and need to heal without feeling like the only way to do so is outside the larger community?

How should Brights respond? Do we demand inclusion, representation and acknowledgement of people with a naturalistic worldview in all such government sponsored events? Or do we insist that such events honor the U.S. Constitution by being completely secular, so as not to give any religion or faith official sanction? In any case, it seems clear that it will take many more voices demanding inclusion before we are heard as full members of the larger community.

References

Posted in Umwelt Utahpia | Tagged atheists, bombings, Boston Marathon, community, earthquake, exclusivity, grieving, healing, humanists, inclusivity, non-religious, secularists, service, Sichuan | 3 Comments

Does “Faith” Separate Us?

Posted on April 17, 2013 by A Rational Woman

“You ruined my life,” my mother told me. The first time she said it was decades ago, when I first married, and she’s repeated it more than once since then.

The distress I caused her (which, perhaps oddly, never seemed to impact our loving relationship), was due to my marrying a non-Jew. Nominally, he was Greek Orthodox.

He and I had two children. And, according to ancient superstition, Jewish women have a supernatural power to bestow (inflict?) a religion on their young from birth. Thus my kids became Jewish, too.

Their father thought it wasn’t a parent’s role to influence his kids’ beliefs, so he didn’t even try to answer their big questions. The boys and I celebrated all the traditional Jewish and Christian holidays in a light-hearted way. If I had to do it again, I’d make up my own rituals and my own special days.

When we divorced and I remarried 13 years later, I again chose a non-Jew, this time someone who was raised Protestant but who isn’t even certain what branch. But it didn’t matter as much to my family. You see, I’d had my tubes tied by then. The funny thing is that the only “religious” disagreement he and I ever have is over his insistence on calling himself technically an agnostic, rather than an atheist like me.

‘TIL FAITH DO US PART

I recently read ‘Til Faith Do Us Part: How Interfaith Marriage is Transforming America, by Naomi Schaefer Riley. It’s a thorough sociological look at what happens when Americans of differing religious beliefs marry, raise children, celebrate major holidays, and divorce one another (not necessarily in that order). Most of these mixed couples start out believing that love will conquer all differences, which is often the case. At least until there are progeny in the mix. And then, some adults find themselves clinging more tenaciously to the rituals and certainties they themselves were raised with.

Apparently, according to Riley’s broad research, Jews marry out of their “birth” faith most often, Mormons least, and Muslims in the middle of the range. Rates are increasing, and younger generations seem to care less about all this.

Reading Riley’s book at this stage of my own evolution was a strange experience. All those nonsensical beliefs, all those quandaries in which mixed-faith couples find themselves at different times in their relationships! And rather than finding wise relationship guidance in the words of their religious leaders and books, they are told they are going to hell if they screw up, or letting down centuries of their people who suffered and died for the faith, or dooming their children to confusion, rootlessness, and amorality. Such so-called wisdom appears obscene to me.

However, if your religious beliefs or rituals or birth culture retain any importance to you, and you’re of marriageable (or remarriageable) age, reading Riley’s book may offer you a dose of reality beyond thinking, “Oh, we’ll work it out, it won’t matter.”

Because it turns out, to many people, that intermarrying ends up mattering more than they expected. Riley herself admits to an occasional sense of loneliness when she participates, without her husband, in her local Jewish community’s events, which she began doing, well, religiously, when they had kids.

Then again, my dad won’t even go with my mom to High Holy Day services, and they were both raised Jewish. At which point she yells at him and blames him for ruining me.

There are many ways to be lonely.

Posted in A Rational Woman | Tagged agnostic, America, atheist, children, Christian, divorce, faith, intermarriage, Jewish, marriage, parenting | 5 Comments