I’ll keep this brief, as I’d love for you to consider taking the next 21 minutes to actually watch this video.
In The Story Of Stuff, Annie Leonard does a completely masterful job of illustrating how we get all our “stuff,” where it comes from and where it goes. To be frank, this might be the most important short film you see all year. Hopefully it will inspire you to pass it along and start the dialogue in your own specific circle.
Feel free to watch it here, below, or there’s a wonderful interactive presentation on the Story Of Stuff website.
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(I wrote this on January 9, 2009. Figured it was time to post it.)
On msnbc.com there’s an interactive map of the US, showing the unemployment rates for each state. I helped my mouse travel around the country, saddened when I noticed my wife’s parents’ home state of Michigan at 7.3%. Everybody knows that Detroit’s been hit pretty hard, but when people you love live there it gets personal, more painful. My home, California, was at 5.6%.
Then I realized the top slider was on September of 2007.
Not good.
With much hesitance, I slid the tracker along the timeline and watched the map change from lighter shades of green to darker hues, grimacing as percentages slowly climbed. Michigan turned to black first—signifying a 8-10% unemployment rate—followed by Rhode Island, and then California. We added South Carolina and Oregon to our glum ranks in November.
I realized that today in Michigan, if you have a party at your house with 10 people, one of you doesn’t have a way to pay your bills.
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I don’t know if this happens anymore, but when I was a kid we learned a song in school. It started with the lyrics: “God bless America; land that I love. Stand beside her, and guide her through the night with a light from above.”
Well, a light to cut through the darkness sounds pretty good right about now.
It doesn’t take too much time surfing across the internet news channels to begin to wonder when—or if—we will bounce back from this. And even though you and I might not be suffering, for so many of our brothers and sisters the crisis is already personal, and their anxiety nearly palpable, bleeding from the pictures we see and the stories we read.
In six days we’ll have a new president. The weight of the world will transfer to new shoulders and the country will look in his direction for something he’s promised us: hope. And even as the administration shifts, talks will likely continue in the direction towards economic growth being our panacea. But I’m wondering about a few things.
For example, wasn’t it at least partially a mentality of a perpetual growth that brought us here, to where we are? Like most strengths, I am afraid that our insatiable thirst for “more” also drags a shadow along with its unmatched productivity: greed.
If that’s true, the solution cannot simply be more growth.
Perhaps instead, might the way out be a better management of what we already have…?
Have you ever known a family to solve their problems by working longer hours? Of course not. So then, why do we think that, as a unified family of Americans, our results would be any different?
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As much as I dislike the idea, it’s good for me to remember how rich I am. Honestly, it feels much better for me to go on thinking that I am poor, that I don’t have enough; to compare myself to those who have more than I do.
We, as Americans, have a unique opportunity at this point in history to stop and realize some things. To open our eyes to the fortune in our lives. To see the abundance that constantly surrounds us. To consider that maybe it’s time we sing a new song. Maybe God’s already blessed America. And if that is true, instead of recognizing our responsibility to share that abundance with the world, we have instead simply let it inspire a hunger for more… for us.
A government cannot solve our problems; it cannot legislate a solution to something that is, at its core, a localized crisis. And as much as I might like him to, Barack is not going to stop by my house and tell me how to manage my money or teach me how to be more generous with it.
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Yes, there is hope for us. But it will not dawn with the inauguration of a new president. Hope will come when we, as a family of resilient American brothers and sisters stand tall and accept the responsibility for our own actions. It will come when we wake up and embrace the quiet resolve and mature compassion that recognizes the butterfly effects of our choices and that we, as human beings, were meant to be connected.
And that we will need each other if we want to discover a new path for a sustainable and successful life for all of us.
Hope will not come searching for us; it will not pop up from an interactive widget on the internet, arrive in the mail with a paycheck, or show up at your door to do your budget. But if we look, I have no doubt that we will find it.
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I finished reading Malcom Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers, a few nights ago.
I know what I have to say about this book is going to be completely esoteric, in the sense that you will likely have to read it before fully participating. Not that you’re not brilliant people; I’m sure you can easily make sense out of my words. But my fear is that if you haven’t read it, you may be tempted to take some of the things I say at face value, which is not how they’re written — they’re written with the mental tapestry of Outliers as a background. I’m not sure of another way to do this, as I want to attempt to take the concepts Gladwell presents in Outliers one step further.
You should probably view these initial paragraphs as much of a disclaimer as anything else, as I don’t want to “give away” the book for you. Go read it and come on back!
I enjoyed this read immensely, as I have all of Gladwell’s works, and this is perhaps even my favorite. Where all his works provide plenty of abstract intellectual fodder for my mind to gleefully process for weeks, Outliers has a sharp edge of pragmatism that makes it special. It also contains tinges of the kind of social activism that really revs my engine, turns my crank, places my soapbox before a microphone… that kind of thing. Here’s a few thoughts:
1. Education
How can the educational system continue to ignore works like this? In Outliers, Gladwell presents a bevy of facts (not to mention crystal clear logic) for how and why the college admission process, for one thing, is mostly an outdated ludicrous absurdity. But he doesn’t stop there; it turns out, the social constructs we’ve built around most organized projects (schools, sports, music, etc.) have become self-fulfilling prophecies, archetypal facades that have been built on so many layers of edifice that they can no longer even see where they began, and for what purpose.
How does one even go about reforming these magnificent disasters of greed and perpetual fragmentation? Do we even try? I’m inclined to encourage the beginning of something else; to foster and support a brand new educational model, for example, that can hopefully someday replace the current system. (Gladly, some of this discussion has already begun: P21, KIPP, etc..)
2. Self-Made BS
I love the idea that the “self-made man” is a total myth. I’ve suspected this to be true for awhile, intuitively, so it’s nice to see some logical background for it. The truth is, nobody makes it on their own. EVER.
This makes infinitely more sense to me. People don’t live in a vacuum; we are constantly “made” by our social surroundings. That’s not to say we have no control, but once we begin to realize that we need to change our surroundings and not just ourselves, I think we’ll be a long way towards undersatnding how to better create the future.
3. Social Assessments
How can we connect an understanding of the social construction component in success with studies of our own lives, past and future?
This is the issue that intrigues me the most about the implications of Outliers: is there a way to somehow extrapolate a model from Gladwell’s work to where we could analyze our own life story — our own social constructs, our family backgrounds, the month and year in which we were born, and the particular moment of history we were born into — and combine it with personal research into individual talents and strengths, and then multiply that knowledge by what we are passionate about, thereby providing a much more insigntful process into each person’s unique “place in the world”…??
Seems like a an intense endeavor, to say the least, but just imagine the possibilities if we could! We’ve already made so much progress within individualized assessments (psychological, emotional, talent, etc.); why couldn’t we develop systems to generate “social” or “contextual” assessments?
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Copyright © 2005-2012 Josh Allan Dykstra
