Flashback – Leading the Admirable Life

I have written about role models a couple of times. In this entry I pointed out in a lighthearted way the nonsense promoted by the media and others of needing a role model that “looks like me.” Not only is this unnecessarily limiting, it’s a bunch of foolishness driven by identity issues that do nothing to unify the country.  Here is the post from July 2019.

[How do you lead a good and admirable life, even if you are never going to be famous? Perhaps a good idea would be to search for and identify people who are widely admired and to try to follow their example.

With this in mind I went to the Wikipedia list of the 18 most widely admired people of the 20^th Century. The full list includes: Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Billy Graham, Pope John Paul II, Eleanor Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Henry Ford, Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher.

Indeed these are all admirable people, but immediately I run into a problem. Most of these people don’t look like me. Five are women, and three definitely have darker skin. Three have far more hair, Eisenhower has less, and Einstein’s hair – well. That certainly narrows down my options.

Maybe instead of being admired it would be better to be significant. Again there’s a list for that, this time from the Smithsonian. They have several different categories. As a Rebel or Resistor I have slim chances when I see names like Martin Luther King Jr., Robert E. Lee, Thomas Paine, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, W.E.B. Du Bois, Tecumseh, Sitting Bull, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Malcolm X. How many of these people look like me?

The rest of the categories were equally discouraging, George Washington or Abraham Lincoln (?) and especially where, listed under the athletes category, I found Secretariat!

Not to be deterred, I look for a role model under “25 Most Influential People In History By Attribute.” Bruce Lee, I don’t think so. Washington (again) was followed by Walt Disney, Louis Pasteur and Marilyn Monroe. I stopped reading. I can see this will be another dead end. Few if any of them look like me!

Yes, this essay has gotten a little silly, but it’s only to point out how silly people are to handicap themselves by believing their role models must be someone who “looks like me” to be valid. None of the originals had any role models at all. They just had to behave their way to success. We could learn a lot from them just by looking at their words and actions, yet we hear the looks-like-me mantra all the time on the news. The absence of a role model who looked like me is a favorite complaint. It seems like another excuse to portray oneself as victim, often by people who have been successful enough to be given a platform in the first place. That a role model must look like me is a limiting, negative and discouraging message to give to any child. It’s a shame that it has become such a common theme.]

What is Perspective?

What is perspective and why is it so important? 

Perspective is primarily the ability to distinguish needs from wants.  In our modern era of excess and comfort, this is not an easy thing to do.  It has two aspects.  The first is the ability and inclination to look outside yourself, to look beyond your current situation.  The second is a natural feeling of gratitude for what you have.

Looking outside yourself may come in the form of looking at history or looking at conditions in other countries.  As I pointed out many times, even those considered poor in America today have conveniences that were unheard of in the past.  Microwave ovens and color television did not even exist when I was born.  Now they are considered necessities.  A high percentage of households, including poor households, in America (over 90%) have both these items.  It doesn’t require a trip into the distant past to find a time when most Americans had no indoor plumbing.  Toilet facilities were outside and water for cooking and cleaning had to be carried in from the pump in back – at all times of year and in all weather.  Now we have running water and electricity and it’s a major hardship when they don’t work at the touch of a switch or the turn of a faucet.

Looking outside the US, we find 2 billion people still without access to a toilet.  More than half of the top 1% by income, relative to the world, live in America.  Looking worldwide Americans are the top one percent, the category we are encouraged to envy and hate in America.  You can see in the news everyday a long list of places you should be glad you don’t live, many of them in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.  Even in the ones not at war people endure hardships most of us can’t imagine.  It is only by some fluke of nature that you ended up here (or are alive at all).

All these considerations should lead to a feeling of gratitude, an appreciation for what you have.  Gratitude leads to contentment and to the ability to accurately distinguish needs from wants.  This is perspective.

Perspective is important because it protects you from making poor decisions in general.  It mitigates panic in the face of an endless stream of anxiety-filled news reports.  It enhances the ability to save money by not wasting it on unnecessary or fad items.  It allows a calm reflection and response to potentially insulting or offensive material.  It counters attempted manipulation by advertisers.  It promotes a wiser and wider choice of role models.  It leads to a proper valuation of products, services, and relationships.

Evidence of a lack of perspective is widespread.  This item from CBS News makes a good point.  Facebook is in a battle with the makers of ad-blocking software that removes commercial messages from your Facebook page.  Facebook gets their revenue from advertisers.  For all the noble talk about connecting the world, they are really in the business of helping other people sell you stuff.  Users ability to block ads is a threat to their business model.  The only reason companies would pay Facebook to post the ads is that the ads have some effect, either getting people to buy on the spot or influencing them to select those brands at the store.  Here is where perspective comes in.

Letting ads on Facebook, TV or anywhere else have that kind of influence is like going to the grocery store without a list.  You become vulnerable to your impulses and buy more than you should, more than you need.  They try to pressure you with fear or competition – telling you that everyone else is doing it.  They try to lure you in and hold your attention with jokes, mini-dramas and celebrities.  If you can’t see their ads, advertisers would stop using Facebook as a medium.

Perspective is your defense against this onslaught of ads, not only on social media, but also on radio, television and elsewhere on the Internet.  Tools to keep needs and wants in perspective include these ad blockers and the mute button, but especially a conscious perspective, which gives you the ability when all else fails to just turn them off in your mind.  Mentally tuning out the pressure, the anxiety, the come-ons and the hype yields so many benefits:  physical, psychological and financial.

The Role Model Freak Show

Sometimes being blunt and marginally irreverent is the only way to get a point across.  That’s what I’ll do today.

There is absolutely no reason why a role model has to look like me, yet politicians and the media continue to propagate this idea.  I can look up to, admire and try to emulate the positive character traits of anyone I want to.  I don’t have to get distracted by their physical characteristics.

This recent news feature bought the subject to mind.  A star wide receiver on the Florida State football team befriended an autistic middle school student.  When he noticed the young man sitting alone in the cafeteria, he "grabbed a slice of pizza and asked if he could join him."  This so impressed his mother that she posted a thank you on line, which led to the gift of a jersey and tickets to a game.  The mother said they both would be his “fans for life.”  It made no difference to anyone that they were of different racial backgrounds.

President Barack Obama is another good example.  Many people can argue with and disagree about many of the paths he followed in his life and many of the decisions he has made or failed to make as president, but there is one series of behaviors that everyone should agree were praiseworthy.  He got an education, got married and had children – in that order.  He stayed married and took responsibility to help support and raise the children.

There is absolutely no reason why a young man of any background or heritage cannot look at this and see that it is the proper course to follow.  He doesn’t have to search around for some guy of his particular race with good behavior to understand that he too can have good behavior or accomplishments.

I say behavior or accomplishments, because anyone can pick and choose what parts of someone else’s life are positive examples. A young swimmer, either a boy or girl, can look at Brian Lochte and tell that hard work and practice got him to the Olympics, and adopt the hard-work and practice as a personal goal, ignoring the arrogant, immature and dishonest behavior that came to light in Rio.  A young soccer player (boy or girl) can look at Hope Solo and see a great athlete with a sour attitude, electing to adopt the work ethic and standards of performance that made her great, while adopting the standards of sportsmanship from another source.  This is common sense.

But the media sees it a different way. They seem to believe, if the person is not of your race or gender, most people can’t figure out how to act or can’t believe that certain accomplishments are even possible.  So we hear almost daily that person A is the first woman to hold a particular position or that person B is the first Hispanic to do something.  Sometimes they even double up:  Person C is the first African-American woman to receive a certain award.  All this does is reinforce stereotypes in the minds of the so-called victims or minorities.  And those personal stereotypes can be the most destructive.  With them in place you don’t need to wait for the system or the uneven playing field to hold you back, you get to hold yourself back while you wait for someone with your physical characteristics to excel at what you always wanted to do.

So instead of encouraging folks to work hard and excel on their own, the media and politicians continue to highlight this as a kind of “accomplishments freak show.”  They hold people up as role models by emphasizing their physical traits - emphasizing differences instead of those things that bind us together and then wondering why the country is so divided.  This emphasis on appearance is reminiscent of a circus sideshow with the bearded woman and the rubber man and other oddities.  "Oh, look, it’s the first [race, gender or sexual preference] kind of person in a particular category!"  They see it as a measure of progress, but the real measure of progress would be judging people not by the color of their skin (or gender or preference), but by the content of their character.  (A 50-year-old idea that still rings true.)

Two Cases of Hype and A Question

The news media certainly have a way with headlines that get our attention and leave us misinformed if we don’t read further.

The first case blasts the headline:  “Human DNA found in hot dogs.”  Later it explains that of the “345 hot dogs and sausages from 75 different brands sold at 10 retailers, and found human DNA in 2 percent of its hot dog samples — and two-thirds of the vegetarian samples,” ten percent of which contained meat.  One wonders why they were even testing for human DNA.  Was there a suspicion of cannibalism?  The problems with the vegetarian brands would seem to be a bigger concern, especially to vegetarians, but this is glossed over.  In reality, the DNA could be an eyelash or less, and 2% found means 98% clean; but the attention-grabbing headline is designed to lead us toward panic.  Such headlines are so common, yet the media continue the practice and are never accused of crying, “Wolf.”

The next headline, also from last week, and repeated on several morning and evening news broadcasts warned us:  “Meat Is Linked to Higher Cancer Risk.”  Everyone was getting all excited about bacon and hot dogs and red meat in general.  News came from the World Health Organization, so it must be true.  The first thing to notice is the word linked, not causes, linked.  As we all should know, correlation is not necessarily causation and much more research would be required to make such an assertion.

Although the headlines imply problems with all meat the first paragraph of the NY Times article adds considerable clarification and calm.  “An international panel of experts convened by the World Health Organization concluded Monday that eating processed meat like hot dogs, ham and bacon raises the risk of colon cancer and that consuming other red meats ‘probably’ raises the risk as well. But the increase in risk is so slight that experts said most people should not be overly worried about it.”  I added the emphasis to make the points:  not all meat as the headline implies, not all cancer, most people should not be worried about the slight increase in risk, and what does probably mean?  A little further reading turns this into a ho-hum situation rather than a crisis.  The news is no different than that released almost a year ago in another report.  (There may have been a lot of panic about it back then too, but there have been so many "crises" and "emergencies" since then, it has faded in memory.)

The best advice concerning both these warnings came from one of the network medical experts:  All things in moderation.  That sounds like perspective to me.

And now the question:  In a report on the retirement announcement of Abby Wambach, one of the greatest soccer players ever, holding the record for the most goals scored in international soccer by anyone, one teammate called her an “inspiration” and “an incredible role model to women and girls around the world.”  The question:  why just women and girls?  Can an accomplished woman in any field be a role model for everyone?  Can an accomplished man of any race or nationality also be a role model for anyone who chooses to excel?  When looking for role models, why would anyone get so hung up on physical characteristics?  This looks-like-me emphasis that narrows the field and precludes opportunities to strive and set lofty targets seems misguided and such a waste.