Gareth’s Blog

This is a very funny commentary on the market collapse, made months before it occurred. It is quite prescient.

Dear World:

The United States of America , your quality supplier of ideals of
liberty and democracy, would like to apologize for its 2001-2008 service
outage.

The technical fault that led to this eight-year service interruption has
been located, and the software responsible was replaced Tuesday night,
November 4. Early tests of the newly-installed program indicate that we
can now operate correctly, and we expect to be fully functional by
mid-January.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage, and we look
forward to resuming full service and hope even to improve it in years to
come.

Thank you for your patience and understanding,

The USA

I find the ongoing healthcare debate shocking for a reason that rarely even surfaces. It is an issue of paradigm, and the debate proves Thomas Kuhn’s concept so right. As a society we have locked ourselves into the paradigm of regarding health as something we insure, and all discussion is constrained by that concept; we all pay our premiums, or seek an employer or state to share them with us, so that when something happens to us there is a policy ready to pay. For my part this is a sensible approach to cars and houses, but in a civilized society it seems a fundamentally wrong-minded approach to healthcare. We regard education as a right, and I have heard no one argue for “education insurance”: pay your premiums so that if you have children their education will be covered. Nor have I heard any serious argument that the provision of basic utilities - electricity, water, gas, even telephone and television - should be under an insurance policy. How can we, purporting to be a civilized society, not regard emergency care, basic vaccination programs, and basic quality-of-life treatment as an obligation of our society? As a civilized society we pay taxes for services befitting the society we choose to live in; surely the provision of basic healthcare to everyone is one of the attributes of a civilized sociiety?

I recognize the controversy of this only in the fear of the affluent being asked to “subsidize” the health of the less well-off, and in the fear of the politician finding the huge sums of money spent on this social need unavailable for local issues such as bridges, roads, and military bases that are the grease of re-election. However the self-delusion that fails to embrace education in this same wise is amazing to me.

An unnoticed effect is the perpetuation of the corporation that this enables, and I wonder if there is more to this than meets the eye. I left my corporate employment over two years ago, intending to ride out COBRA and then buy my own insurance (a misnomer, since all I really wanted to do was pay for access to the system, and have my catastrophic incidents covered). However I found that because my wife suffers from fibromyalgia, we are uninsurable. I had no interest in returning to the corporate world, but rather wanted to pursue an individual business services practice finanSight. However, I couldn’t, as a civilized man, fail to provide catastrophic health care services for my family and worried that I was trapped. Fortunately I stumbled on COBRA continuation, a Georgia state requirement enforced by the Insurance Commissioner, but had I not worked for a company with more than 50 employees I wouold have been condemned to return to the corporate world. And for my children, with the world open before them, is it right to let the possibility of congenital “defects” allow one to become immediately self employed, while the other is forced to choose between emigration and working for “The Man?”
What will it take to change the terms of the debate? Will it require some catastrophe for us to recognize how uncivilized the most advanced and powerful nation ever created by man is to its citizens? Will a real crisis (not a politicized “debate”) require us to revisit this issue at its most fundamental level and flip the debate to a new paradigm.

This was sent to me, and it took my breath away.

Watch it; it speaks for itself. In reply, a friend sent me this:

Atlanta continues to suffer from a drought resulting in the Governor’s ban on outdoor water. This is a difficult situation, but it is being worsened by the lack of public response. I can understand people not understanding water table issues and questioning a lack of water when we have had so much recent rain, but surely this should serve to mitigate any need to use water outdoors? It does not seem to do so, though.

When I sit in the car pool line at my children’s school and realize not only that mine is the only car unstained by pollen, but that it is the only one without gleaming hubcaps, I wonder what is going on. When I walk in my neighborhood and see the proud owner of a newly constructed house hosing off his front door step, or running his newly installed underground sprinkler system in the middle of the day, I really stop and pause. The other day there were two separate sprinkler systems running on my block, and a third homeowner was washing his SUV with bucket and hose. That people could show such disregard for their fellow humans testifies to the loss of community we experience and to the tragedy of the commons that put us in this mess in the first place (we’ll get to that in a minute), but that they should so prominently display it bespeaks an arrogance and self-conceit that is most distressing. I asked someone I know in the county water system what would happen if they were reported, and was told they’ll get a ticket - like a speeding fine. So for folk with a little money this is simply an honor system, and more realistically an opportunity for many to show that they have no honor but an inflated sense of their importance over their fellow man.

It is this self-conceit that condemned us to the current and I believe ongoing water crisis; if everyone would recognize water as a scarce resource and ration its use, we would have no drought; it is the gross overuse by people who drive the social norm to two showers a day, to having immaculate cars and verdant lawns, and to being members of exclusive clubs with lush golf courses that is the problem. How many people do you know who have really changed their behavior or the consumption for which they are really responsible? And do you really need to use as much water yourself, or to watch the societies and communities you support pour it away as they do?

After writing last on balance, I had a powerful experience yesterday that brings to mind another important aspect of a healthy life. Out of the blue an old friend who I hadn’t seen for years showed up at the Zen Center. It was pure happenstance that I was there myself, for I have been an infrequent attendee in recent months. This meeting set up another matter I’ll mention in a minute and encouraged me to stay for lunch afterwards and have a delightful time. My friend had been an intense Zen practitioner for a year or more and then drifted away. I had tried to stay in touch and been a little concerned and hurt when she did not respond, but I shrugged and moved on. Meanwhile it is clear she was dealing with her own “stuff,” which has now ripened in a way that she can return with a huge smile on her face. It was a true joy to see her again.
The message was reinforced by the guest speaker, one Dr. Kim, an integrative medicine practitioner. A man of enormous breadth of education and character, he is also an impressive speaker. He told, in answer to a couple of questions, anonymous patient stories of folk who had come to see him that made the same point as above. In one situation his patient was very sick, and he said (I paraphrase), “You’re dying. Until you find out why, I can’t help you.” Eventually she found the clinical diagnosis and came back, but still that was not enough. “You have to decide if you want to live or die. Some and see me when you know.” She decided to live, and this allowed Dr. Kim to discover the root cause, grieving over death. Now, with her desire to get better, he can work with her.
The message from both of this is something Buddha was teaching 2,500 years ago; I can’t make you well and you can’t make me well, it’s something we must each do  for ourselves. I can love you, and if you come to me openly and honestly and with a positive attitude then I can certainly commit to you and maybe that will help.

This message is something I know but it is so easy to drift away from it in one’s own life. I need to practice this in relationships and in work; release the desire, just love, just do what’s there in front of me.

Blogging itself is a good example of this point; I find myself accumulating ideas and forgetting them, then in a burst composing several and interacting with others’ in a short period of time before going quiet for months. This intensity of effort comes at the expense of so much else. Far better to find a routine of sorts into which all life’s myriad activities can fit in balance.

In a previous life I found the same tendency leading me to over-commit to the corporate life at the expense of family.

I find myself truly blessed in my “Bohemian” lifestyle in that I can rise and meditate, spend time on my writing, and during the course of the day intersperse my business endeavors with social, family, and Zen activities. There are still not enough hours in the day, but with a little effort I find that I can touch all of the bases - writing, zazen, professional work, housework, family, marriage, and social - every day. The one great gap is that I would like to be doing more for the community, but I am confident that as the kids grow up and I spend less time with them, this will open up and fill the gap.

Maintaining balance still requires effort, and I often find myself becoming skew and needing to correct, but it is an effort well worth making because it also brings humility and much needed perspective.

Blogging itself is a good example of this point; I find myself accumulating ideas and forgetting them, then in a burst composing several and interacting with others’ in a short period of time before going quiet for months. This intensity of effort comes at the expense of so much else. Far better to find a routine of sorts into which all life’s myriad activities can fit in balance.

In a previous life I found the same tendency leading me to over-commit to the corporate life at the expense of family.

I find myself truly blessed in my “Bohemian” lifestyle in that I can rise and meditate, spend time on my writing, and during the course of the day intersperse my business endeavors with social, family, and Zen activities. There are still not enough hours in the day, but with a little effort I find that I can touch all of the bases - writing, zazen, professional work, housework, family, marriage, and social - every day. The one great gap is that I would like to be doing more for the community, but I am confident that as the kids grow up and I spend less time with them, this will open up and fill the gap.

Maintaining balance still requires effort, and I often find myself becoming skew and needing to correct, but it is an effort well worth making because it also brings humility and much needed perspective.

I was fortunate enough to have my trip to the UK followed rather quickly by a visit from an old university buddy whose wife is doing a stint at Harvard. Their kids, Ailish and Kieran, were even better behaved that Bill and Aedin, and we had a couple of delightful days. In addition to reacquainting myself with the old college card game of Piquet, Bill and I surprised Aedin by using evolutionary anthropology to explain to Aedin that all those guys at conferences really did want to … well, you know, and that this makes complete sense. There Moral Animal is a wonderful book by Robert Wright that explains all of this as well as anything I’ve ever read, but the punch line is that men are driven to have as many kids as possible, because their “expenditure” is quick and repeatable, and women to find the best homes to optimize the chances of success for their longer term efforts in gene propogation.

So to language. The day after Bill and Aedin left, a business colleague (Doug “SilverBulleits” Bulleit) mentioned that he had heard language evolved not for the usually offered reasons of coordinating the hunt, etc., but for gossip. A light bulb went on - why would it not have evolved around sex, the same way so much else did? Would language not be the perfect way for women to coordinate safe homes for their kids, for men to stop another aggressive male from getting too much of the action (a particular problem as man evolved to skillful tool use etc.) Without language sex could have gone completely awry. And of course the side effect that we recognize is morality and social behavior.

That, as John Cleese once said, “Is my theory, and it’s mine.”

I just returned from my long-anticipated trip to the UK to visit my mother. She has been suffering from late-stage secondary cancer for well over six months, and gave up on chemotherapy that was not working three months ago. The first stage of the trip was a few days at my childhood home, and the second the gathering of the clans: my three sisters, spouses and families, my own, and my parents in one house (albeit a very large, rented one) for a week.