Category Archives: American culture

Allan Watts, American culture, Bill Self, da Vinci, Michael Jordan, motivation, NCAA College Basketball, Seth Davis, Shaka Smart, Thomas Edison, VCU

"Wake Up the Space"


Around Thanksgiving, VCU men’s basketball coach Shaka Smart could feel it.
Energy.
Smart was following his team onto the practice court in the Bahamas prior to the start of the early season Battle 4 Atlantis Tournament. VCU, always the underdog, was preparing to play in tournament filled with ranked and well-regarded teams like Memphis, Duke and Missouri. As in the past, VCU faced a tall order in taking on college basketball giants and super conference staples.
This was the kind of challenge the coach and his players lived for, and they had proven their mettle many times over, as NCAA Tournament darlings in 2011 and 2012, when the Rams advanced much further than expected by analysts. In 2011, as an 11-seed, they became the first team to play in the early “play-in” games to win five games and advance to the Final Four after toppling giants Kansas, Georgetown and Purdue.
So nothing about this stage was new to Smart or VCU. That’s why as the Rams made their way onto the floor in the Caribbean last fall, shouting, chanting and bouncing around, it brought a wry smile to Smart’s face.
“Let’s wake up the space!” he shouted.
As Sports Illustrated basketball guru Seth Davis has said, it’s one of my favorite sayings because of what it implies: make your presence known in the area and space around you with energy, enthusiasm and positivity. Do something unique and different.
Smart has done that, not just in his journey as coach at VCU, but also by bucking every notable trend in sports and turning down the steady flow of cash from the major conference schools who’ve courted him the past several years to stay at the school, which until joining the Atlantic-10 conference this season, played in the Colonial Athletic Association.
In other words, Smart decided to wake up the space of college basketball by staying at VCU. So many coaches have left the smaller programs for the bigger ones and look flat-out miserable in doing so. Don’t get me wrong, there’s great honor and tradition at places like UCLA, Kansas, North Carolina, Duke and Indiana.
But if you think Bill Self, who left Illinois for Kansas about 10 years ago, is happy this morning following last night’s massive debacle against TCU, I can assure you he’s not. He called his team the “worst” Kansas has ever put on a basketball floor. Now, he’s certainly attempting to motivate his team before the stretch run and it is unlikely he actually means it. Nor, I would assume, does Self necessarily regret taking the Kansas job – he’s been highly successful and won the 2008 National Championship.
Yet the point remains: what is happiness? What do we desire? What is our passion? What do we trade off each day in order to do what we think we must instead of what we should?
This does not just apply to men’s college basketball or sports. (And yes, that’s your official warning I’m about to get into the recess of your brain and make you think.)
The entirety of human existence and interaction, our American culture and government, our families – everything. Why do we sell out and sell ourselves short? Why do we conform?
Why is it so odd to us that someone like Smart didn’t take the money, the fame, the pressure and the challenge? Why do we see the Illinois job as a bigger challenge or more prestigious than building VCU into a basketball power from a small conference? Because every assumes or acknowledges it to be so? Who is everyone? Former coaches, analysts and players who couldn’t make it as far as Self?
We spend a lot of time critiquing those who do it better, instead of learning to carve our own niche.
Someone shared with me the other day a video by Allan Watts, a British-born philosopher, writer and speaker, who basically broke down Eastern philosophies for Western society in understandable ways. He theorized and spoke often about this very thing.
We’re in a bad way, as a culture and society. Current and recent events simply serve as reinforcement to this truth. And our best chance of change, hope and shifting our current individual and collective paths are those four words by Shaka Smart.
In all of human accomplishment, we have ignored what we were told could not be done or should not be done and pressed on. Why? The word impossible should not exist because we cannot completely ever prove such a thing. Oh, we have data and research and historical precedent, but the future is not known; we write our individual and collective stories with each passing day.
So the world was flat, eh? We couldn’t possibly escape the clutches of Great Britain’s massive empire? It looked like Hitler could not be defeated before World War II. How could we possibly travel to the moon? You want to build a place in space to dock a vessel, refuel and have someone stay for months at a time? Sure, we’ll call it the International Space Station.
People used to die from the common cold, now we don’t miss a day of work. We’ll always have to go outside to a shed to use the restroom. The only way to cross water is on a boat? Tell that to the Brooklyn Bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Panama Canal. What about the radio, the television, the microscope, the cellular phone, the personal computer, the internet, glasses, airplanes, cars, GPS, electricity, the light bulb, the Sistine Chapel, penicillin, vaccines, supplements and 3-D?
And so VCU was told it was impossible to advance – from the CAA, from a “play-in” game, from the 11-seed – to the Final Four. But VCU said they could. There was data to prove this theory and any evidence to the contrary looked foolish. But Smart and his team woke up the space, changed the data, wrote a new chapter in history.
Tell me again why we can’t cure cancer? Why someone won’t break some sports record? Why we can’t travel through time? Why we cannot eliminate world hunger or tackle every issue facing our society and government today?
We cannot because we don’t wake up the space. We don’t break free of our set way of thinking that someone else can do it, but I cannot. The only difference between you and that other person is they didn’t stop believing, didn’t stop chasing their passion and didn’t listen to others who had also stopped dreaming.
This is what my wife and I constantly try to remind our children. Some days I’m certain we fail and use the world can’t or shouldn’t. But we try.
Our oldest son, who’s 11, wants to play college and professional baseball. I do not know whether this will happen or not. Many others have this dream and few make it. Are the odds long, the chances small? Of course they are. Will it take extraordinary dedication, effort, persistence and sacrifice? Most certainly.
But it’s not impossible and we will never tell him so, even if everyone else around thinks it’s a pointless endeavor and unrealistic. You know what? We make our reality, that’s what it’s realistic. We will do our best to make sure our four children grow up believing that nothing is impossible and they can do anything.
Can you imagine a world different than the way it is now?
What if Edison had believed all those who said it was a waste of time to fiddle around with creating light, who told him he was playing God and it was morally wrong to do such a thing? Think of a world where Shakespeare was told to stop writing, da Vinci painting, Mother Theresa giving, Michael Jordan from shooting a basketball.
Throughout time, humans have reached a point where they stopped seeing what was and imagined what could be. Take indoor plumbing: Basically, someone got tired of going outside in the cold, the rain, the wind, to, well…you know.
We should follow our passions, our inspirations. But the vast majority don’t because we’re stuck in believing that we must have money, and having money to survive and pay for the things we need means doing things we don’t like. But do we need all that we have or want, or do they serve as placeholders and soothing agents to what we gave up in the first place?
As Watts said, “you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living – that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing – which is stupid. Better to have short life, that is full of what you like doing, than a long life spent in a miserable way.”
And as he further elaborates, really, we just perpetuate the cycle, educating our children to live the same kind of way we do – ripping away the ability to dream. We’re making drones, worker bees. And none of us want that. But do we have the want to want it bad enough to be different?
So let’s begin to change it, ourselves, in whatever ways we can.
What do we want to do most? What passions do we have? Where does your energy reside? How do you let the world know you’re here?
Can you feel it?
Let’s wake up the space.
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American culture, Benjamin Franklin, Cheers, Kevin Costner, Seinfeld, US Post Office

Return to Sender


Neither sleet, nor snow, nor rain or wind.
Or apparently Saturdays.
In a historic announcement that marks the beginning of the end, the U.S. Postal Service announced Wednesday that it will stop delivering letters and other mail on Saturdays. It is yet another signal of a changing time in American history, where technology and cost efficiency are intersecting and making standards of the past, well, the past.
The Postal Service made the decision in order to save about $2 billion annually, following the net loss of $15.6 billion last year, and after defaulting on $11 billion of debt last summer. It’s losing $36 million a day right now, and tracking to lose $21 billion a year by 2016.
USPS spokesman George Maffett said the agency must re-evaluate its fiscal plan moving forward in order to survive.
You think?
Somehow, I don’t think cutting Saturdays is going to cut enough. There will be more cuts, restructure and organization of this federally owned and operated entity. And this has been going on for years, as e-mail and other technology has surged in popularity.
Moreover, what’s not being said is obvious: This is the beginning of the end of an era.
In the modern age, it’s more out of habit that we use mailbox and buy stamps than anything else. It’s more efficient and less costly to pay our bills online, where we can choose when to pay and how. Birthday cards and Christmas cards can all be sent electronically now, with greater flash, pop and for much less money.
Yet I can’t help finding myself just a bit wistful in the decline of the Post Office, which can trace its roots to 1775 and the Second Continental Congress, when Benjamin Franklin served as the first Postmaster General. And there’s something quite American in the very obligation the USPS has to serve all Americans, regardless of geography, at a set price and quality of service.
That means mail is delivered to mailboxes in the shapes of roosters, cows, guns, microwaves, simulated orifices of the human and animal body, movie characters and machines. No, really. Just Google “weird mailboxes” and look at the images. It’s fascinating.
And did you know that the United States Postal Service employs over a half-million workers and operates the largest vehicle fleet in the world? This wasn’t always the case – before roads existed, the Post Office used steamboats to travel waterways between towns, then walked to deliver the mail. USPS has grown as the country has grown, using horses, boats, planes, trains and automobiles to deliver the mail.
The cost of a stamp has certainly gone up, but with good reason: for every penny increase in the price of gasoline, the USPS spends $8 million more to fuel their fleet.
Yet for over 200 years, the Post Office has been a fabric of Americana. Cliff Clavin of Cheers and Newman of Seinfeldwere Postmen. Elvis had a hit song about returned mail, the Marvelettes begged the Postman to stop and check his bag again, and Stevie Wonder signed, sealed and delivered himself with a song. Kevin Costner played a post-apocalyptic, mail-carrying hero in “The Postman” (which probably lost more money than the USPS did last year).
As a boy, I remember running to the end of our gravel driveway, where it met our Rural Route Road, and excitedly checking the mail to see if anything had come. A letter from someone, a special package, a Sports Illustrated.
But this is life in the 21st century, not the 1800s. We don’t get our water from a well anymore. The milkman doesn’t drop off at our door. And now we e-mail, FedEx delivers our special packages and I can read Sports Illustrated on an iPad for less money.
In the end, nostalgia can’t keep something relevant. The fact remains the USPS is bleeding money, somewhat needlessly with the advanced technology of the current world, and with all our country faces, most notably a massive deficit, the federal government simply cannot justify losing $21 billion by 2016 over letters, junk advertising and bills that can be paid online, even if the majority of funds don’t come directly from taxpayer dollars.
It just doesn’t make sense for them to take 50 cents to deliver something 3,000 miles. Noble, but not logical. 

So soon, very soon, after wasting time and money debating its future, how to fix it, cutting costs, employees and days, the Postal Office will seek to exist.

Where’s Kevin Costner now?
Until that time comes, we can hang on to our habit, keep the mailboxes out front and feel our tie with history, with Ben Franklin, and give a brief nod to the Post Office’s place in American and world history.
But just not on Saturdays. 
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American culture, culture war, Dodge Ram, Jeff Daniels, NFL, Paul Harvey, Society, Super Bowl commercials, Super Bowl XLVII

Americans Made a Country


An interesting thing happened during an interesting fourth quarter of an already interesting Super Bowl on Sunday night: I felt the urge to get some dirt on my hands.
Thanks to Dodge, the voice of Paul Harvey and some of the most clever and emotional advertising we’ve seen in years, we got a clear winner of the Super Bowl ad wars and a really, really good commercial that wasn’t just selling a product, but doing so much more.
It was causing us to think. 
After a weird power outage in the Mercedes Benz Superdome during the early moments of the third quarter of Super Bowl XLVII, the Baltimore Ravens saw their momentum evaporate as the San Francisco 49ers nearly eliminated a 22-point deficit, before pulling out a victory in a thrilling finish. And it was then, as the game came down to crunch time, on a night with all these interesting stories and subplots, that something much more interesting, impactful and profound occurred.

God made a farmer, Dodge made a commercial and America made its growing division all the more evident.

[You can view the video by clicking here].
The culture war in America became even more evident in the moments following Dodge’s two-minute, still picture and old voice-over ad. Just examine the reactions to the spot itself. Half the country probably had tears in their eyes while the other half were rolling their eyes. Some thought it righteous (in a good way), others thought it ridiculous.
It goes beyond how brilliant the marketing strategy itself was, though make no mistake, someone at Dodge is getting a massive promotion over this. It’s the ultimate “duh” moment: who buys trucks? Farmers! What do they value? Um…let’s see…hard work, pride in how straight they plant their fields, church, passing down a farm through generations.
Who doesn’t care about any of that? Urbanized populations, big cities, corporations, people who care about gas mileage or the environment, atheists and perhaps, mostly, non-whites? Does Dodge care if they don’t care or if they don’t buy a truck? My guess is most of the people that fall into these categories weren’t driving trucks prior to viewing the ad, anyway. And if all they got out of it was Googling “Paul Harvey” to find out who he was, then really, we all came away winners.
Yet I can’t stop thinking about the reaction to the ad, the division of America and our ever-expanding cultural war.

Most commercials, especially during the Super Bowl, try a clever new way to sell you a product. And certainly, Dodge wants to sell Rams. But this, this was different. It spoke more directly to the values of middle class Americans. Think of the images they used: a church, a flag, a family praying before a meal, tractors, plows, dirty hands, open fields.

Not one single shot of the truck until the end. Not one mention of Dodge verbally, and only visually when the truck appeared. Just a tag line: “For the farmer in all of us.”
Those who chided, bristled and mocked the ad and its contents are missing the point. This wasn’t just about farmers and it wasn’t just about trucks.
There is a farmer in all of us, and probably through the generations, through our ancestors, we were all, indeed, farmers. Farming itself is an ideal and a visualization of something different: feeding people, clothing people, an honest day’s work. The open fields represent the possibility of what’s to come, of freedom, of opportunity, of doing something on your own.
Make no mistake, this message resonates with many in this country.
One part of our nation yearns for this kind of commercial, of this kind of code of ethics.
Another part of our culture posts snide remarks on social media and jokes about not knowing Paul Harvey.
One side is thankful that God was brought into our living rooms during the Super Bowl, another is offended.
And it’s this striking difference between these two groups that says the most about where we are as a society. We’ve gotten less serious. It’s why we don’t wear dresses, suits, ties and hats as we once did. We’ve desensitized ourselves to violence and sexuality. It is why we can watch the GoDaddy make out commercial without losing our lunches now.
So why is this ad about farmers and trucks, invoking so much praise and backlash at the same time? Because it serves as a rallying cry for one side of our American culture, an offensive example for the other.
The negative reaction was immediately what you would expect: too many white people, too much God. Give us more CGI-entertainment, they demanded, and don’t begrudge everyone a Carl’s Jr. commercial with some model’s chest covered in hamburger grease. Nobody seems offended when Mercedes Benz shows off its new luxury model being driven by a white 40-year-old, with meticulously coiffed hair, in Brooks Brothers clothes. The same as no one seems to mind how young and affluent blacks are targeted by Puff Daddy in Hennessy ads.
In turn, the positive reaction was also in line with generalized expectations: farmers loved it, rural populations and those from rural areas thought it was brilliant. Ignore that many migrant workers weren’t accurately represented. That’s not the point, either, really.
We’re just looking for ways to be offended so we can complain about it. And we are becoming further and further entrenched in our viewpoints. We’re so self-involved we’ve ceased to evolve.
No, we were never perfect as a nation – a far cry from it. We’ve got quite the history. But while we strive to be evolving socially, we’re losing out morally and ethically. We’ve just plain stopped striving to be anything more than novice social commentators, being snarky about power outages and Super Bowl ads. We do all this through unemotional ways of communicating and we wonder why we’re facing such a massive disconnect with each other.
We’ve come to a point where we are so singularly sure ourselves, we skip over the part of becoming informed. Newspapers and magazines and books are dying not because of technology, but because we’ve simply stopped reading. And what we do read is of vampires, werewolves and adolescent magicians.
We already think we know everything and therefore we learn nothing.
The same half of our country who thought that the “God Made a Farmer” ad was racist, stupid or just plain didn’t concern them will remain oblivious to the fact that, according to recent studies, the world’s food production must increase between 75 and 90 percent by the year 2050. Not sure if Wall Street or pharmaceutical giants can find a way to make up that gap. But we could always ask Siri on our iPhones to do a search on the Web.
Can you determine who liked the ad based on what they do or where they live, what they value and what they stand for – flaws and all? Certainly.
At least it clear who they are, what they do and what they value in the ad.
If I had been watching American news, however, from a foreign nation the past few months, I’m not sure what I would be able to determine about America based on recent events.
So they honor freedom, but they incarcerate the largest number of people per capita in the world? They claim to support freedom from tyranny, but they shoot each other in public schools, theaters and walking down the street? They demand and beg for innovation, yet teach their children to be employees, not entrepreneurs? They want people to venture out and start small businesses, but then the government will tax you exponentially for becoming successful and tell you that you didn’t build it? They say to give them the poor, the weak, the huddled masses that cannot defend themselves, but they allow abortion and pretend the homeless don’t exist?
Chances are, you got lost in some buzzwords there: abortion, incarceration, taxes, gun control. But odds are you missed what might be the biggest point of all: that we teach ourselves and our children to be good employees, not entrepreneurs.
Collectively, we’ve ceased to have vision or to dream – the very things our country was founded upon. No matter what generation, race, creed, religious affiliation, we dreamed and innovated and worked for things in this country. No one ever said I want to be project manager or a software security analyst when they were little. And that’s where we’ve started to lose everything else we did, or have, or should hold true.
We can shift in our seats, squirm uncomfortably and cringe when we hear God used in a TV ad about trucks, scoff at farmers and what they do, or what race makes up the majority of this working group. But as Jeff Daniels said in an epic speech on the show Newsroom a few months ago: “The first step to recognizing a problem is realizing there is one. America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.”
But it can be. We can get it back. Even if farming and Dodge trucks aren’t your thing, that’s fine.
To change our future and to make what matters most to us matter again, we’ll need to make ambition, education, truth, honesty, compassion, fairness, faith, belief, hope, logic and common sense in much larger quantities.
We can make all of these things prevalent and valued again. But we have to drive our plows straight. We have to check for weeds in our fields. We have to get up early and stay up late. We have to care for our children and others as much as we do ourselves. We have to go to the school meetings, put the flag out front and build a future where the fields are wide open with possibility. Our collective tools don’t have to be plows and tractors and trucks.
So God made a farmer. And Dodge made a commercial.
Now, our culture needs to make up its mind: what do we want to be? Let’s at least get our hands a little bit dirty, work together and find out how well Americans can make a country. 

Sounds better than another domain name commercial, doesn’t it?


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American culture, American People., Fiscal Cliff, Gun Control, Hollywood, Sandy Hook Elementary, Society, United States

The Unused Power of the People


Much has been made of the now-averted “fiscal” cliff, but truthfully, we’ve gone off the selfish cliff.
From almost forgetting the horror of Sandy Hook to our resignation that it’s OK to raise taxes and spending as long as it’s not my taxes, we just don’t seem to care unless we are affected directly.

What will it take for us as a people to act? We have so much more power standing collectively than fighting as individuals.

Should someone come into your home and just grab whatever money you have in your wallet or purse each night? Would that do it? Would you feel violated? Outraged?
I know several friends and family members that are completely fine with the argument that the country’s wealthiest earners should pay more in income and payroll taxes.
“I don’t make over $400,000 a year,” said someone to me recently. “Why should it bother me? And those people should pay more.”
It should bother you, me and everyone because even though it’s not you this time, it will be next time. They’re coming for more money. And they start with the rich and work their way down the line.
See, the conversation and discussion is all wrong – this isn’t just about one economic group in this nation, it’s about all income levels. Whether you pay $150 in taxes or $1.5 million, where is every dollar going and why?
What we should be asking – no, demanding – from our elected officials is this: why is there a need to raise taxes on anyone? Why do you need more of our money? We can’t trust you with what you get from us now!
The package that was passed earlier this week to avert said “fiscal cliff” will add $4 billion in debt. How is that even possible? How do you raise taxes and over time still add that much money to the deficit? What’s worse is the deal made by Congress earlier this week was seen as a compromise – of course it was. Because they created this mess, let’s all congratulate them for averting disaster and putting off the debt ceiling conversation for three months.
Well done, guys and gals.
What if we all agreed to not vote for anyone, any incumbent, who contributes to raising the debt? We might get 100 new elected officials every year for the next four years, but we’d eventually find people who do what we want them to, right? Because as crazy as it sounds, that’s what our elected officials in Congress are there for – to do the will of the people. They represent us.
Except they don’t. They represent themselves and re-elections. And as for the “us”, well, we can’t get out of our own way and get our stuff together in terms of values, guiding principles and general decorum.  
There was an article posted late Monday night about how all the staffers and members of Congress had to order out and get pizza and wings on New Year’s Eve and how depressing that was.
I laughed because I thought it was the punchline of a joke. That’s not sad. Millions of Americans eat like that every New Year’s Eve – and not by choice. Millions of Americans work late into the night on a holiday because they get triple pay for overtime. We need more because now we give more than ever before in our history.
Meanwhile, we spend less time with family, with friends, with spouses.
This vacuum is why Facebook and Twitter exist. They keep us connected to the world when we’re so wrapped up in ours. Except they dehumanize our relationships, take the emotion out and make everything instant and matter of fact.
What do we get when we spend less time with our children? Or better yet, what do they not get from us? How about our spouses? Are marriages stronger? Relationships of any kind, when less time and energy and effort go into them?
And we ask ourselves how we ended up with the massacre of elementary school students? Shootings in a movie theater? High divorce rates? Rising debt? Unmotivated masses, shrinking more each day into their own bubbles.
Wake up! We are the problem. We don’t take the time to fix it. We talk about it on Facebook and Twitter or at our holiday parties and then we move on. Next issue. On to my personal problems, right?
Wake up! Is it going to take your child’s elementary school being unspeakably shaken by tragedy before something is actually done to protect them? I mean, I’m in favor of the Second Amendment, but I’m not sure why anyone needs to be able to buy a Rambo-style machine gun and as much ammo as they can fit in their car trunk.
But Congress can’t talk about that for a few more weeks because they’re “fixing” the “fiscal cliff” they created by mismanaging our money to begin with. So what makes us think these geniuses can fix something like coming up with a logical, modernized second amendment that while protecting the rights of citizens to arm themselves, won’t allow for them to pretend they are preparing for Red Dawn, Part II?
That debate that everyone said we needed to have on gun control lasted in the media for all of 10 days – right up until Christmas and Kim Kardashian announcing she was becoming Kayne West’s baby momma.
We’re running out of time, my friends. What our ancestors and American decendants worked so hard to build in terms of values is being short-sold by our own selfishness, obsession with the material and overall failure to act. We expect others to clean up these messes, but we don’t take action – or build sustained action – ourselves.
There is great power in the people – us, the collective whole that make up our society. If we can set aside these specific arguments, say on faith, tax brackets, marriages, for a brief moment and look at the bigger picture to unite under, we’ll have a greater success at reclaiming and reestablishing our guiding principles that sustain our first world way of life and the freedoms we so take for granted.
Is this the kind of world we want to live in or leave our children with?
Case in point: a recent pollsuggests a majority of Americans don’t feel it’s necessary for Congress to force Hollywood to produce less violence in their products. Yet when every fabric of our vast knowledge suggests that violence begets violence, especially when exposed to the young, why wouldn’t we want that? What if we absolutely forbade anyone under the age of 18 from seeing an R-rated movie, even with a parent?
Our collective selfish nature says we don’t want them to take away what we, as adults, enjoy so much. Do we? Because since Sandy Hook, I can’t watch a violent movie, kudos to you who can. It’s difficult to separate reality from art now. As I said then, everything is different – and it has to be. The very essence and core of our lives is at stake.
What are we doing? What’s it going to take? What will be our breaking point?
Because we are already, quite rapidly, defining our downfall.
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