Ten Dollar Thoughts

I am from three shelves of family photo albums whose pages have grown brittle and yellow with time, a set of brass and wrought iron fireplace tools that were handed down and are worn from use, and a red and green leather bound set of the complete works of Charles Dickens.

I am from a single story ranch style home with two fireplaces, a broad deck, and an extra bedroom with blue carpet where my mother watched us in the back yard as she ironed, learning to parallel park between coffee cans on the riding lawnmower, and the sounds of the high school marching band floating through my open windows in early September.

I am from zinnias and marigolds and phlox, giant elm trees that split down the middle during the biggest ice storm of my childhood, and azaleas that flush hot pink for a fraction of a moment each spring.

I am from family vacations filled with silly putty, mint flavored Chapstick, endless games of travel bingo, and stops at every historical marker, Sunday dinners of roast chicken and mashed potatoes and “at least one green vegetable”, and unflappable precision in the matters of grammar and usage.

I am from a cultural polyglot, from operas and rodeos, minor league baseball and Broadway musicals, roadside motels and historic B&B’s.

I am from casseroles and whole wheat bread and after school snacks, bedtimes and phone curfews, and weekly chores for your weekly allowance. 

I am from the belief that life is a banquet table from which I may choose, that you address your friends’ parents as Mr. and Mrs. unless they tell you otherwise, that you don’t have to like it but you have to try it, and that maintaining relationships with family over distance is always hard and always worth it. 

I am from a childhood on horseback, fitted breeches and tall dress boots and banded collars, fringed leather chaps and size 6 7/8 hats, the number 477 pinned to my back and ribbons pinned to my bedroom wall, strong legs and a graceful torso, and greater confidence astride a mare than on solid ground.

I am from Sunday school and the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed, a large steel cross that loomed over my head in the sanctuary and whose replica sits on my nightstand, red choir robes with white stoles, and silver trays that were passed down the pews on Communion Sunday.

I am from weekend outings to tiny rural towns, chicken fried steak and cherry cobbler from rusty diners with linoleum tile floors, and the news from Lake Wobegon.

I am from a Catholic prep school with magnificently pitched roofs and a three-story tower with a spiral staircase, pep rallies for Friday night football games, unparalleled teachers, and unreasonable levels of peer competition.

I am from a small private college where everyone knows your hometown and your major, chatty sorority chapter meetings and raucous fraternity parties, and professors who were known to call your dorm room if you overslept for a final.

I am from Bob and Rosemary and Jack and Frances and Jeff and Jan, from hand-stitched quilts and homemade pie pastry, from handwritten letters, hugs and I love yous. 

I am from a family that is not perfect but whom I love, the need to carry them in my heart, and the willingness to try things my own way.

With my entire family arriving shortly for the holiday weekend, I have thoughts of heritage on the brain.  In that vein this post was inspired, with permission, by Lindsey’s poem at A Design So Vast.  As a related aside, I will be taking Friday and Monday off from blogging to spend time with my family, and I will see you back here next Wednesday.  I hope you all have a lovely holiday.

A year ago I would have cared very little about the ensuing battle over “net neutrality.”  I would have been content to let the big players fight it out either in the court of public opinion or, more likely, actual court, and wait for the verdict to be handed down.  As it is, that is still what will happen (I am not even a two-bit player on the World Wide Web) but I have a dog in the fight these days.

The moment I launched this little blog such issues suddenly mattered to me (even if I didn’t realize it at the time).  This site is exactly the type of site that would not get priority treatment in the new internet landscape that is being floated.  If I care that I can easily post and you can easily read, then I want to make sure that the web facilitates that transaction.

At any rate, net neutrality is not really my point today.  Rather, in all of my observation of the coverage of the net neutrality battle, I came across this interview with Eric Scmidt, the CEO of Google.

In it, Schmidt talks about the dangers of online anonymity.  Specifically he says, “In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you.”  This freaked me out a little at first.  There are all sorts of things that I wouldn’t want made public.  What if I Google an old boyfriend?  What if I look up the procedure for declaring bankruptcy?  What if I look up the symptoms of some horrible disease?  (All of the above are hypothetical, by the way.)

Then I read Schmidt’s follow up comment: 

“Privacy is incredibly important,” he said, adding, “Privacy is not the same thing as anonymity. It’s very important that Google and everyone else respects people’s privacy. People have a right to privacy; it’s natural; it’s normal. It’s the right way to do things.”

And this commentary struck a chord with me.  As I thought about it I realized that many of us (at least myself, for sure) have long equated online anonymity with online privacy.  I can go just about anywhere on the web and unless my computer is hacked no one will ever know.  While that is a monumental comfort to many internet users who are up to no good (What, there are people online other than touchy-feely bloggers?  No.  Couldn’t be…) as Schmidt says, it’s dangerous.

There is a lot of private information about me out in the world.  It resides in places like my doctors’ offices, my HR department’s personnel files, my tax returns, even my fingerprints.  This is not data that I want made public, but it is data that I am comfortable residing in the hands of trusted keepers.  The strange thing about the internet is that we inadvertently make lots of different parties keepers of our private information.  Google.  Amazon.  Yahoo.  These major sites are some of the biggest players.  But any site where you’ve made an online purchase has data about you on file as well. 

In the pre-internet world I could walk into a bookstore and make a purchase without anyone logging that purchase into a catalog of previous purchases that is constantly evolving into a user profile designed to predict my preferences.  I still can.  But if I order my books online (more likely) I have to be comfortable with the knowledge that Amazon.com is amassing volumes of data about my shopping and purchasing habits.  They are one of my keepers now. 

While I think Eric Schmidt raised some eyebrows with his comments about online anonymity, I actually think he’s on the right track.  Online anonymity has facilitated all kinds of atrocities in the real world (look up some back episodes of Dateline if you’re curious…).  Online privacy, on the other hand, will protect those of us who are harmless yet don’t care to have our affairs made public.  The tricky part is deciding whom to make our keepers.  It’s hard to trust someone you’ve never met.  And yet we do it here in cyberspace every single day.

The Midwest is neither Manhattan nor San Francisco nor Phoenix.  Most of the people I see on a daily basis look an awful lot like me (minus the freckles, usually).  Because of this GAP and I feel that we have a pretty strong imperative to make sure that we raise our family in a way that exposes them to different races, religions, backgrounds, and customs.  Not everyone is a white, Midwestern, Episcopalian, with a graduate degree.  In fact, the sweeping majority are none of those things. 

So we talk a lot about how to accomplish this.  How do you expose your children to a broad range of experiences without treating that exposure like a museum trip?  How do you maintain a variety of relationships without treading down that dangerous path of filling quotas?  And perhaps most importantly in the early years, how do you talk to your kids about diversity in a way that they can understand yet doesn’t make you cringe.

As adults we speak about diversity in the most politically correct terms.  There are times when such phrasing is helpful in navigating what can be a minefield of potential faux pas.  However, there are also times when diluting our language to placate the broadest range of listeners renders it impotent.  We find that we simply cannot say the thing we mean to say.  This pitfall is apparently (and not surprisingly, when you think about it) quite treacherous when talking to children. 

I came across this article earlier in the week and was both surprised and comforted by its message.  Based on some of the key takeaways listed I can tell that we might well be misguided by our best intentions.  Abstract and politically correct language is hard to interpret and understand.  And silence isn’t silent at all.  To quote the author:

• Children’s minds start categorizing the world as early as they can identify pictures on a page and if we avoid discussing racial differences when they become evident, it becomes something they learn should not be spoken about — that it is taboo.

• As parents to young children, we should talk about race the same way that we discuss gender. In other words, comparable to how we say, “Both boys and girls can be doctors,” so should we speak about racial differences.

• We also need to be specific in how we speak with our children about race. For example, to say, “Everyone should be treated equally,” is not clear enough to children about what we are referring to.

I’m confident that I will find some way to fumble this issue; probably many ways.  So I am grateful for tactical guidance like this.  I’m inclined to believe that we complicate many things that needn’t be.  Diversity is complex enough without the added layers of my own baggage and insecurity.  Anything that can assuage those fears will always be a welcome addition to my parenting toolkit.

I am 32 years old.  A spry young thing in the greater landscape of the human experience, right?    I’m still younger than most of my coworkers.  I’ve only had to pluck one grey hair.  And on most days I have the energy to keep up with my one-and-a-half-year-old son.  Nevertheless, I don’t always feel so young.  Sometimes I feel downright old.

Some of my favorite examples:

• My brother-in-law (10 years my junior) didn’t know what a rotary phone was.
• In a meeting a few weeks ago we were somehow talking about how we learned of the Challenger shuttle explosion and an intern mentioned he hadn’t been born yet.
• During the opening credits of Marley and Me as REM’s “Shiny Happy People” began to play I leaned over to my brother-in-law (same BIL, he makes me feel old a lot…) and said, “I haven’t heard this song in years,” to which he responded, “I have no idea what it is.”

Moments like these make me grumble a little bit.  I remember asking my mother about “the olden days” of her childhood and naively thinking that my kids would never view my childhood era as “olden.”  We had microwaves, and Nintendo, and Swatches.  Really, how much more modern could things ever get?  Right?

Wrong.

My son will never look up a movie show time in the newspaper.  He will never have to search for a blank VHS tape.  He will never load a roll of film into a camera.  He will never mail a postcard from a vacation spot.  He will never carry an atlas in his car.  He will never wait for a friend or relative at the gate in the airport.    He will not buy new music on CDs.  He will never know a world without cell phones.  He will never even know the crackling sounds of dial-up internet service connecting.

And while it is a cathartic cliché to reflect on the ways in which the world has changed around us, these changes don’t create that large a cultural divide between us and those around us who are a generation older or younger.  My grandfather has learned how to e-mail and my mother has learned how to program her Tivo.  I have learned how to use Facebook.  And someday IEP will adopt something that hadn’t been conceived of during his childhood.  We all learn.

But in scanning headlines yesterday I came across this article which discusses how college mindsets are trending with time.  Beloit College has tracked these changes for the past 13 years in an effort to help college professors continue to relate to students whose cultural markers are vastly different from their own.  Some examples from the list:

For students starting college this year…

• Fergie is a pop star, not a princess
• Have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides
• Ruth Bader Ginsberg has always been on the Supreme Court
• Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than Dirty Harry

How fascinating and challenging it must be to spend your days trying to mold young minds using cultural reference points that draw blank stares.  How frustrating it must be not to speak their language.  The college years are at their best when book knowledge is augmented by personal experience; when someone who is older can hearken back to your own age and convey a sense of sameness based on shared experience.  Yet how do we convey the essence of a shared experience when the external trappings of that experience are so different?

Higher education is an imperfect institution on many levels.  But when it’s done right it’s a perfectly beautiful thing.  I admire Beloit College for taking these steps to bridge a generational gap.  Maybe some 19-year-old kid will walk out of a Modern American History class later this fall and feel like his professor isn’t so out of touch after all.

Every Sunday at noon I walk into a Level 3 NICU and hold babies.  I am not a doctor or a nurse.  I have no medical training at all.  But I am a NICU volunteer, and in that capacity I have learned how to keep feeding tubes, central lines, IVs, and heart monitors untangled.  I have learned which babies like to be rocked and which like to be patted.  And I have sat silently out of the way when someone’s heart rate spiked or breathing slowed. 

I tell you this not to applaud myself.  (I do what I do because I need to; because my son started his life in that very NICU and because it healed him.)  I tell you this because one result of my time in the NICU is a collection of strong opinions about prenatal care and newborn health.  I care deeply for the babies I visit each week.  And because of that deep concern and affection I feel compelled to speak on their behalf.  So it is that I am about to do something that I have disavowed in the past.  I am about to judge. 

I read earlier this week that the Duggars are ready to have another baby.

[In the event that you are not familiar with the Duggars, here’s the Reader’s Digest version:  They are an Arkansas-based family with 19 children ranging in age from eight months to 22 years.  Their youngest daughter, Josie, was born three months prematurely last December after Michelle Duggar developed preeclampsia.  Josie weighed 1 pound, 6 ounces at birth and remained hospitalized for more than six months before being permanently discharged.  The family stars in a TLC television series called “19 Kids and Counting” and has written a book about their life.]

My struggles with this news are many.  The biggest one, though, is a total lack of comprehension.  I just do. not. get it.  I don’t understand how 19 children aren’t enough.  I don’t understand how the rewards of a 20^th child could outweigh the risks at this point.  And I really don’t understand the convictions that Jim Bob Duggar cites when he talks about their reasons for having so many children.  As the article I read states:

Similarly daunting [to the concerns about finally having Josie at home] are the very real medical risks Michelle could face with another pregnancy – particularly a return of preeclampsia, which can lead to a stroke or prove fatal. But despite the risk – and intense criticism – the pair vow to stick to their beliefs.

“People think we are overpopulating the world,” says Jim Bob. “We are following our convictions.”

What convictions? 

After doing a bit of online sleuthing I have learned that the Duggars ascribe to the Quiverfull movement, which eschews all forms of birth control (including NFP), believes that children are blessings from God, and that having many children is the most efficient means of spreading God’s word.  (For a 2009 Newsweek article on the movement, click here.) 

I should state here that it is not the premise of a large family that bothers me.  Nor am I bothered by the religious doctrine behind it.  (I should clarify: I don’t agree with the Quiverfull movement at all, but I’m fine with the idea of developing a family around your own beliefs.)  The Duggars are entitled to their choices and they seem to manage those choices well.  They are a happy (and debt-free) family each of whose children had been born healthy until Josie arrived.  If they can follow their convictions, choose this life, and make it work then I say bravo.  But it seems to me that these convictions and choices aren’t working anymore.

According to Quiverfull doctrine, barrenness is God’s decision and something to be accepted and dealt with through prayer.  And while Michelle Duggar obviously doesn’t have any problems conceiving a child, I wonder if her inability to carry Josie to term should also be interpreted as God’s way of communicating that she should not bear more children.  (Again, these are not my beliefs; I’m just trying to apply the Quiverfull doctrine consistently.)  The Duggars, however, do not seem to think so.  They are ready for #20, and I am aghast. 

I hear this news and I think about the babies I see each week.  I think about their discomfort.  I think about how many of them struggle for months just to learn simple reflexes like swallowing.  And I think about the constant hums, dings, and flashing lights of the NICU and how it is nothing like being at home.

As I think about these things, all of which the Duggars almost certainly experienced during Josie’s six months in the NICU, I wonder how they could consider another pregnancy.  How could they possibly be willing to put another child (not to mention the rest of the family) through that experience again?  When will they say, “We have been blessed enough”?  At what point does the accumulation of God’s blessings stop being holy and start being greedy?  As far as I’m concerned, the Duggars are treading precipitously close to that line.

If you have a dog (or have in the past) would you say that your dog is tuned into you?  Would you say that she knows when you’re happy or sad or angry?  Would you say that she senses the difference between a threat and a non-threat?

Most people would ascribe these characteristics to their dogs.  (I’m not a cat person, so I can’t speak about the proclivities of the feline persuasion.)  This is due in part to the fact that after thousands years of being bred for working, sporting, and playing alongside humans, they tend to be in touch with us.  It is also because certain highly trained dogs have learned to interpret human situations with incredible accuracy.  (Did you catch this story a few years ago about the dog that dialed 911 and then opened the door for emergency responders?)

Service and assistance dogs astound me.  So do police dogs, drug dogs, and bomb-sniffing dogs.  These animals rise well above the status of “good pets” and help out mankind on another level altogether.  Many of them thrive on it.  However, apparently, such lives of thrill and danger can take their toll on dogs just as much as they can on humans.

From a story that is simultaneously heart-breaking and inspiring, I learned that a 2-year-old German shepherd named Gina has returned from a tour in Iraq with PTSD.  I won’t rehash the entire story (it won’t take you but a minute to read on your own), but the gist of it is that she left for Iraq as a highly trained but sweet and happy bomb-sniffing dog.  She returned home “cowering and fearful.”  She was diagnosed by a military veterinarian with canine PTSD which he says can affect dogs just as it affects people.

This is fascinating it its own rite.  But the aspect of the story that most captured my attention was this sentence:

But some veterinarians dislike applying the diagnosis to animals, thinking it demeans servicemen and women.

Demeans them?  Really?  Perhaps it’s because I’m a dog lover.  Perhaps it’s because I recently watched The Hurt Locker and the dangers endured by bomb squads are fresh in my mind.  But I struggle to understand how anyone who is willing to put her life in the hands of a brilliantly trained dog, and put that dog’s life at risk in the same moment, could ever claim to be demeaned by the idea that the dog might suffer the same long term effects of warfare that the soldier herself does. 

If we believe that a dog can understand how to find a bomb, or how to predict a seizure, or how to find drugs hidden inside tires at border checks, then how can we consider that the same dog couldn’t understand the context of risk and danger implicit in many of those situations?  I find it more demeaning to the dog to assert that they couldn’t have PTSD than to the soldier to assert that they could.

I’m dedicating this week’s posts to some of life’s simplest pleasures.  Ten Dollar Thoughts are great, but sometimes it’s nice to scale back.  For Monday’s installment, click here.

I realize I dealt them a glancing blow last Friday, but as I began thinking about my favorite simple pleasures I realized that TV reruns actually make the cut. 

Unless you’re watching Entourage or Mad Men, just about all television shows are in reruns right now.  Most people lament this period of TV drought, and eagerly await the start of the new season late next month.  But I secretly love reruns.  Why?  I’m so glad you asked.

I love the pleasant surprise of a great rerun.  You turn on your TV unsure of whether or not there will be anything decent to watch.  You could easily be condemned to bad TV movies or some Marie Osmond infomercial.  But instead you find the episode of Friends where Monica and Rachel gamble (and lose) their apartment; or the episode of The West Wing where Sam and Toby have to bail a Supreme Court nominee out of jail; or the episode of Seinfeld with the low water pressure.  Moments like these are akin to bumping into your best friend from college whom you adore, but haven’t seen in ages.  You want nothing more than to settle in and hear all about what she’s been up to.

I also love the familiar terrain of a rerun.  You’ve been there before and you know what’s going to happen.  You know when the best scene is coming up and whether or not you should wait to go to the bathroom.  Not only that, but the anticipation of knowing what comes next can almost make the moment sweeter.  You know that Kramer is going to fly through the door wearing, “nothing but a thin layer of gabardine,” and you get your laugh all ready to go because you’re going to need it. 

There’s something casual about old shows.  You probably didn’t plan to watch them.  You’re probably doing something else at the same time.  They don’t command your full attention, but they may make paying bills, peeling carrots, or brushing dogs a little more entertaining.  Much like hearing your favorite song on the radio, you never know when you’ll come across one, but you always know it will be a welcome addition to your day.

I’m playing catch-up from my blog-cation the past couple of weeks.  So please pardon the fact that this story may have already phased out of the national conversation, but I’m still pondering it.

Unless you live under a rock (in which case you probably don’t have internet and aren’t reading this) you know that a couple of weeks ago LeBron James announced that he would be leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers and joining his buddies Chris Bosh and Dwayne Wade in Miami.  All of South Beach celebrated, and everyone from Chicago to New York to Cleveland itself wished a pox on King James for forsaking them.  Ahhh, the drama.

But once all the loving and hating that stemmed from the initial announcement settled down two elder statesmen of the game of basketball stirred up some drama of their own.  First Michael Jordan and then Magic Johnson came out and publicly stated (as though we were all curious) “I would never have done what LeBron did.”   And this got me scratching my head.

Why does this matter?  Why is it relevant?  Why do we care what two retired players claim they would or wouldn’t have done in a different era under different circumstances with different opportunities?

(As an aside, kudos to LeBron for keeping his mouth shut and not responding, “Well, Michael, I wouldn’t have developed a massive gambling problem.”  And, “Well, Magic, I wouldn’t have caroused around having unprotected sex with random women until I contracted HIV.”  I suspect that took some real restraint on LeBron’s part.)

Because this little outburst from Jordan and Johnson perplexed me I did what most women would do: I asked my husband about it.  Not surprisingly, he had already discussed the same topic with some friends of his and so had a broader sampling of feedback than I was expecting.  According to GAP (and his buddies at work) the purpose of rejecting LeBron’s decision has something to do with the integrity of the competitor.  As it was explained to me winning isn’t enough; and going to someone else’s team, playing with a stacked deck, and then winning isn’t the same as winning on your own.  The implied message from MJ-1 and MJ-2 is that LeBron should have stayed the course in Cleveland, continued to build the team up around himself, and then proceeded to win a series of championships.  Further still, the argument apparently goes that now that he’s left the Cavs to join forces with more elite teammates he may never be able to clinch the title of “best man to ever have played the game” because whatever he accomplishes now won’t have been on his back alone.

Now please pardon me here, but I think that is bloody ridiculous.  It’s all semantics.  GAP explained that LeBron “went to Wade’s team.”  Whereas the Cavaliers was “his team” the Heat is someone else’s.  Also, now that he’s playing with other superstars LeBron’s talents will supposedly be masked and his candidacy for “the greatest player in history” substantially diluted.   And apparently in the world of patriarchy and pissing matches, this matters.

I, for one, just don’t get it.  I don’t understand why it matters to grown men who has marked what territory.  Much less do I understand why long-retired superstars who should be resting happily on their laurels are passing value judgments based on a situation they themselves never encountered (unless it’s to reclaim dying media relevance).  And as for the “best player ever” argument I see it this way: either he is or he isn’t.  Perhaps this is naïve of me, but I say that being the best player ever means exhibiting the most talent and channeling that talent into the most success.  Whoever else happens to be on the court should be irrelevant.

After a 10-day break from blogging I am rested, but I’m also struggling to hit my literary stride again.  My mind has been busy with much reading, but I have found that being on the receiving end of mental stimulation is much easier than producing it.  I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me, but to some extent it does.  I didn’t expect my time off – filled with books, magazines, and conversation – to slow the spinning of my mental wheels as much as it did.  But as I struggle today to organize and articulate my thoughts I can only help but feel that I’ve been quite lazy over the past couple of weeks.  This feels like my first trip to the gym after two weeks on the couch. 

As I’ve thought about this little phenomenon I remembered a chapter I read earlier this summer in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.  He discusses the process of lying fallow – leaving land unplanted between crops – and the ways in which it can augment or detract from agricultural yield depending on the crop.

Here in the United States we grow crops that can drain the soil of its nutrients if the same crop is planted on the same land year over year.  Eventually the soil will be so depleted that the yield will suffer and possibly fail altogether.  Farmers have long worked around this problem with crop rotation and fallow periods.  Letting a field lie fallow allows the soil’s nutrients to replenish, making the next season’s planting more productive. 

Early Americans applied this practice more broadly than agriculture, though.  As the school year was designed there was a period of lying fallow built in for children.  Today we know this period as summer vacation.  Kids are allowed to rest their minds, relax, play, and take a break from all that thinking.  As is the case in farming, the idea behind this was that the rest would prime them for more efficient learning during the school year.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Chinese also applied their agricultural practices to their beliefs about education.  What makes this parallel fascinating, though, is that because they grow rice their educational system looks very different from our own.  Rice, unlike wheat or corn, benefits from more planting.  The more batches of crop that can be planted each growing season, the better the yield.  Lying fallow would be detrimental to the productivity of the land.    

In chapters eight and nine of Outliers Gladwell addresses the well known mathematical superiority of Asian students over Americans.  The details he identifies are compelling and I won’t attempt to recreate them here because I’m no Gladwell and if you haven’t already done so you should read the book yourself.  But the net conclusion is that the American agricultural premise doesn’t hold up when applied to education.  That is, our minds become better with use, not rest.  Rice farming is labor intensive on a scale that dumbfounds me.  As the old Chinese maxim goes, “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”  That attitude applied to education created Asian school years that range from 220 to 243 days long (as compared to 180 days in the U.S.).  And students who are in school up to 35% more days per year than Americans have lots of smarts to show for it.

So I sit here, feeling rested but not particularly sharp.  My grey matter is a bit mushier than normal today and my quick wits have slowed.  I am inspired by the idea of constant learning, but a bit overwhelmed at the same time.  You see, I liked my break.  And, mental laziness aside, I think it was good for me.  Because if I am completely enervated I’ll have nothing left to give to my little mental escapades here.  I doubt I’ll ever go on a three month hiatus from reading and thinking and learning.  But I still contend that a week here and there do more good than harm.  Besides, it’s July which means that it’s hot and humid and utterly miserable outside.  I liken a mental break to a big glass of ice water – delicious and refreshing, but also essential for survival.

I don’t think I have to go too far out on a limb in saying that I value education.  It’s not an especially risky position to take.  I am the fortunate product of a good education, a family of readers, and a marriage filled with challenging ideas. 

These things suit me, but beyond that, I believe they make me a better person.  I believe that I improve myself every time I learn something, whether it’s the result of extensive reading or a quick Wikipedia search.  I also believe that learning and education are not exclusively achieved by enrollment in colleges and graduate schools.  They likewise come from independent reading, engaging with people, exposing yourself to new environments and cultures, and experiencing things firsthand.

Having said all this I am fully aware that there are plenty of ignorant people in the world.  Some of them yearn for better opportunities and broader experiences.  But plenty of them are content to meander through life with the knowledge they’ve already obtained, along with whatever else happens upon them without too much effort. 

It is this second category of people that GAP and I discussed over dinner Saturday night.  He has a low level of tolerance for people who don’t engage their minds.  Not for people who are uneducated.  Not even for people who aren’t very bright.  His beef is with those who don’t try; people who could ask interesting questions and think interesting thoughts, yet choose not to.  They exist in all circles of society: urban, rural, middle class suburban, wealthy, and poor. 

I am inclined to give these people a pass, of sorts.  There is a part of me that believes that their choices are not my business.  If they are happy enough in their current lifestyle, who am I to assume that my own approach to personal growth is right for them?  Additionally, ignorant bliss aside, for many of these people additional knowledge or analytical insight may not measurable improve their lives in any tangible way. 

Yet I have said it: I value education.  I think it is important.  So how can I reconcile that belief to only some subset of my society?  I would never state that vegetables and exercise are only important for people who already enjoy them.  I would never concede that open-mindedness and generosity are only valuable in people who care about those traits.  So why would I parse words when it comes to education?

I suppose it is that when it comes to advocating mental muscle there is a risk factor for snobbery that scares me.  Particularly given that I am well educated I fear that being outspoken about education (formal or otherwise), intellectual curiosity, and other aspects of knowledge and learning will imply judgment that I truly do not mean to convey.

There is a line from The West Wing (probably my all-time favorite show) that comes from a senior White House staffer in the midst of an election cycle.  The sitting president is an educated liberal from a prestigious family, fighting against a challenger who comes from more humble roots and is gaining ground on his platform of being a regular guy.  As the president grapples with how to leverage his own intellectualism the staffer says, “Before I look for anything, I look for a mind at work.”

I have always loved this line because it succinctly communicates exactly what I value.  He doesn’t say, “Before I look for anything I look for a post-graduate degree” or “a high iQ” or “analytical genius.”  He looks for a mind at work.  The range there is so broad.  It allows for so many versions.  A mind at work includes library books, The History Channel, and conversations with quirky and interesting people, as well as diplomas that read Summa Cum Laude. 

I suppose what I’m here to say is that I don’t care whether or not you have a college degree or even a high school diploma.  I don’t care if you’re a savant-like genius or a dim-witted fool.  I care if you’re trying.  I care that you get up each day and put your thinking cap on.  I care if there’s a mind at work.  And that, I hope, is a fair position to take.