Raising the Bar

Over the years it seems to be getting harder and harder to scare people, harder to shock them. This is evident in so many ways to those who have enough perspective to stay calm during the constant onslaught of challenges from all sides. It shows up in movies and television, in literature, in daily life and in national and local news.

Violence on television and in the movies is getting more graphic. In the Psycho shower scene (1960), we hear scary music and see a butcher knife slashing the shower curtain as blood washes down the drain. It’s enough to hint at something very gruesome. Today with improvements in special effects the blood often comes spurting directly out of people before washing down the drain leaving body parts behind. They must use more graphic portrayals to hold our attention.

Many years ago George Carlin had a routine he sometimes called the “heavy seven,” the seven words you can’t say on television. In July of 1972 when he performed the routine in Milwaukee, he was arrested and charged with violating obscenity laws. About 10 years later I attended his show at a local club – by then it was a classic, and the audience called out for it. Today those words still don’t appear on network television, except as initialized abbreviations, but are common in movies, on cable, on the stage and all over social media. People are getting more desensitized about the language they hear.

This phenomenon of desensitization spills over into the daily news as well.

A staple of the national news is telling everyone what to be afraid of. The networks apparently think these scare tactics will guarantee higher ratings. People will tune in out of curiosity or perhaps wondering what should be added to the list.

It has finally gotten to the point where attempts to scare us have reached ridiculous levels. Diseases that affect a miniscule number of people are labeled as epidemic and something to guard against. In 2014 as Ebola ravaged western Africa, the news was so intense that some people cancelled planned trips to safaris in countries in eastern Africa, half a continent away. After the final count was in, media reported that only two people had contracted Ebola in the US.  Both were nurses who had treated an Ebola patient and both recovered, but panicked voices had warned us for months of an imminent danger.

Three weeks ago they gave us news of beaches in Florida being closed because two people suffered non-fatal shark bites. But two weeks later the danger was not from sharks but from beach umbrellas.

USA Today ran a story about the problem of flying beach umbrellas turned loose by high winds. They reported that “at least two people have been impaled by the colorful sun shades in recent weeks” one in the ankle and one in the chest. Both were recovering. “According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, about 3,000 people each year are rushed to emergency rooms for injuries involving umbrellas.” (Notice that they weren’t driven to emergency rooms or taken to emergency rooms – no, they were rushed, after being impaled!) They warn us to take precautions against this unexpected danger.

When we hear news like this we must remember a few things. Among them is that the news media are trying to upset us. That is what keeps us coming back – like to a soap opera – to find out what happens next or where this all leads! Another is that with over 300 million people in America, the incredible speed of communications and cameras everywhere, there will always be a crisis or a disaster within easy reach. They can’t tell it straight; they must build it into a shocking drama. (As politicians and social media jump on board to reinforce dire predictions, it's no wonder so many more people seem overly anxious today about every episode in Washington!) 

As all the entertainment and news media continue to raise the bar on shocking stories and images, take a deep breath and don’t be manipulated. Perspective.

What's Wrong With Peanut Butter?

Our local television news reported a few days ago that some people have started GoFundMe campaigns to pay for children carrying a negative balance in their school lunch account.  This is a noble effort.  But what shocked me was the explanation that those children are fed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches instead of the hot lunch.  They made it sound like a significant hardship.

The reason I was surprised is that throughout high school, I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, not just sometime, all the time – every single day – 720 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  My high school did not have a hot lunch program.  Everyone brought in lunch in a bag, bought something to drink and sat in the combination auditorium, gymnasium and cafeteria (without tables) to eat.  My mother packed the sandwich with a small box of raisins and I bought a carton of milk.  There was not a single time I felt deprived.

I still enjoy peanut butter sandwiches, but today, apparently a peanut butter sandwich for lunch is a tragedy.  Maybe it’s a lack of perspective.

A few years ago I wrote about another local crisis invented by the perspective-challenged.  Children eligible for free school lunch had to depend on a different program in the summer.  A local charity set up a place where the children could meet and receive a free lunch during summer vacation.  The crisis in this case was that they were forced to eat while sitting at picnic tables outside, that is, not in an air-conditioned building.  Perspective might remind us that widely available air conditioning is a very recent convenience.  For thousands of years people survived without it.  Also, some people go on picnics and eat outside in the summertime on purpose!

Finally, on the same day I heard about the peanut butter crisis, our neighborhood website brought another problem.  “There is a cat that's been hit by a car” on one of the neighborhood streets.  “Does anyone know what to do? The kids are going to see it walking to the bus stop.”  Oh, no!  The kids might see a dead cat on the way to school.  One reply suggested that the solution involved a shovel and a garbage bag, but this very sensible advice was rejected as somehow not good enough.  Perhaps it was not showing sufficient respect the to dead cat.  (You can’t make this stuff up.)

When people see that peanut butter and jelly is not good enough for a school lunch, that eating outside is not good enough for a free lunch program and that a shovel and a bag are not good enough for a dead cat (not to mention the potential trauma from seeing a dead cat on the way to school), I conclude that maybe life is not tough enough.  When these kinds of issues creep into the crisis category we perhaps don’t appreciate how good we have it and have lost perspective about what a real crisis looks like.

Refresher II

Has America peaked?  This question is on the minds of many citizens.  A standard question on opinion polls over the past 20 years has been some variation of:  “Do you think the country is headed in the right or wrong direction?” The answer to this question has been, for the most part, consistently and overwhelmingly negative.  Gallup has not gotten a positive answer since January 2004 and the result for all major polls has been about 75% negative going back to the early 1990s.

Why would Americans be so discouraged?  Look at the messages we get every day from the media and politicians. We are constantly confronted with news of failures, dangers and crises:  our education system, retirement insecurity, the disappearing middleclass, childhood obesity, healthcare costs, gasoline prices, food contamination, campus violence, climate change, epidemics, frivolous lawsuits, Internet scams, teens not getting enough sleep and many more.  Meanwhile, advertisers play on our fears and insecurities to sell us stuff we don't really need.

This dissatisfaction goes beyond politics or which party is in power.  What is worse, discussion of these issues often deteriorates into name-calling and accusations, because we lack a model for resolving them in a calm, objective and civil manner.

The on-line essays found here arise from the fact that our contemporary crises – what newscasters emphasize, what citizens worry about and what politicians try to fix – are not the real problems.  They are merely symptoms of an underlying problem.  The core problems can be traced to common behaviors of ordinary citizens:  what they say, what they do, decisions they make and how they react to news and advertising.

Behavior has consequences.  A good decision usually yields favorable outcomes.  Problematic behavior yields the opposite.  True of individuals, this also applies to the society as a whole.  Most of those issues and crises listed above can be traced to the cumulative effects of problematic behavioral patterns in five key categories:  Understanding the economic process, Discipline, Responsibility, Critical thinking and Perspective.

To look at the many different choices and actions taken all over America every day and classify them into these few dimensions takes some skill and practice, but doing so shows definite patterns.  Americans make poor personal choices about their health and finances, encouraging others to do the same by spreading unsubstantiated fears and bad medical advice on social media.  They waste time and money and compromise their stated values by succumbing to the lure of advertisers, the hype of pop culture and the scare tactics of the media and politicians.  They seem unaware of how financial decisions and programs can be traced through society to anticipate and predict common unintended consequences.  More and more they refuse to delay gratification and look to blame others for their failings.

By classifying behaviors into these five dimensions, it is possible to pinpoint and address core problems and to make a persuasive case that improvement in these dimensions will result in a stronger and healthier society.  Identifying and addressing only the behavior, and requiring everyone else to do so, puts an end to the bickering, accusations, name calling and insults that seem to dominate the airwaves.  It leads to a civil, more specific discussion of solutions.

The bad news is that examples abound – almost 400 posts in the last 4 years with some favorites listed below.  They appear every Monday and Friday to clearly show some of the failings that lead to nearly all our societal problems.

The good news is that we don’t have to wait for the government or any other outside resource to come riding to the rescue.  If the problems result from the accumulation of poor individual behaviors, then the answers lie in changing those behaviors.  Real American Solutions are in our hands.

What Violins Can Teach Us 

Any Diet Will Do

Understanding Correlation

Behaving Your Way to Wealth

Don’t Be Fooled Again

Gratification Delay and Attention Span

Is Astrology Science?

Why Spend Extra for Sea Salt?

Childhood Obesity and Parental Responsibility

Performance Bracelets or Placebo?

What's Better Than Free?

An underlying fact of life is that behavior has consequences.  Some consequences are immediate and predictable.  Some are delayed for a short time.  Others may never arrive, but their probability is greatly enhanced.  Examples of each are touching a hot stove, crossing the street without looking and smoking cigarettes.  The truth of this statement goes beyond individual behavior and lives.  It applies to societies as a whole.  If the majority of citizens act wisely, a society will prosper.  If they act foolishly, the country will head in the wrong direction.

When ill-advised decisions and actions by 300 million people pile up, one on top of another, individual consequences grow into our societal crises.  The news media looks at trends, develops and reports on these crises:  the obesity epidemic, the failure of our schools, the retirement crisis, frivolous lawsuits, internet fraud, texting while driving and many others.  Then the politicians, thought leaders and advocacy groups arrive to tell us how they will solve the problems for us.  There is a strong implication in their message that we are not capable of solving these complex problems, and we should leave it all to them to pass laws, organize protests or initiate legal action.  They make reassuring speeches that completely miss the main point, that point being that the problems are not complex and they can only be solved by the very people who caused them.

That the direction of the country is driven by us and is solvable only by us is both reassuring and scary.  First it’s scary because we don’t get to sit back and watch someone else struggle, argue and fight to make things right.  We must take action.  We must take control.  Most of our unwanted consequences can be replaced by favorable outcomes simply by changing behavior from foolish to wise in each of the five key dimensions.

Though this is easy to say, it’s very much like a New Year’s resolution.  We must be motivated to change and that motivation must be sustained.  We cannot allow the January exercise station to become the April clothesline.  Moreover one person did not create the situation, so it can’t be solved by one person or even by a handful.  It will take a significant majority who care enough about the downward spiral of America to make and maintain the changes necessary and to strongly encourage others to follow along.

This encouragement and reinforcement takes the form of a behavioral conversation, one that recognizes good or poor behavior and addresses that behavior.  Name-calling and accusations do not fit this model.  They don’t solve anything and are a prime example of behavior that must be strongly discouraged.  When our politicians and late night comedians use this tactic, they need to be ignored.  We don’t need them anyway.  The problems are ours to solve.

There are so many examples of behavior that it would be impossible to list them all.  The purpose of this series of almost 400 short essays is not to list all the problems or errors, but to give timely examples of failures in one or more of the key dimensions to help readers identify examples from their own lives or from the news.  The skill of identifying and classifying behaviors, leads to the ability to recognize the real problems, those behaviors that have accumulated and led to the conclusion, validated by hundreds of polls over the past 20 years, that America is headed in the wrong direction.

The very best thing about the behavioral approach to changing the direction of America is that it’s free – better than free!  No government programs or personal expenses are needed.  With enough people on board it’s possible to make many of both go away.  The stronger behavior in the key dimensions will lead to less wasted time, energy and money for each participant and a stronger America for everyone.