The polarity predicament, Part 1

I have been quieter than usual lately on this blog in part because I've been making some behind-the-scenes inquiries into what responsive measures might be possible with respect to the continued open animosity between the City Council of League City and some members of the local Muslim community.  I've addressed a few facets of this issue previously in this post and this post, but as a blogger, I have yet to deal with the core issue head-on.

That is, indeed, what we have on our hands in LC on the immigration resolution issue.  

Here is one hobbling limitation that has been repeatedly emphasized by the folks with whom I have spoken thus far:  The lack of available public information on this conflict, specifically as it relates to newspaper coverage.  The residents of League City would genuinely like to know more about what's been happening, but they have few options for obtaining this information.  I have complained bitterly about this limitation on many previous occasions, to the point of establishing a blog category titled "Newspapers".  Those with whom I have spoken in the past few weeks have confirmed and even elevated my own concerns, with comments such as "I subscribe to Houston Chronicle but they are not covering League City's issues" and "Galveston County Daily News may be reporting on it, but their overall product is of such poor quality that there's no way I'm ever going to grant them the satisfaction of my subscription fee, so I really can't get any information about what's been happening."

GCDN is covering it at least in a limited sense, but that content is almost entirely paywalled.

I apologize if you find the memes distracting, but I think this discussion could benefit from some much-needed comic relief and the general not-taking-of-oneself-too-seriously, among other things.  Memes are certainly good for those purposes.  

Just as an aside, GCDN is commonly accused of indulging the usual and customary liberal media bias, but some of the most negative comments I've received recently about GCDN have been from people who self-identify as having very liberal viewpoints.  Their complaints seem to center on the quality of the investigative reporting - specifically on what they perceive as a complete lack of any intellectual perspective whatsoever - rather than on the ideological slant.

I "bereave" the liberal media - yes, I most certainly do!!
:-)

The world-renowned actor Jackie Chan undoubtedly did not approve of this internet meme, although he has been known to be outspoken on political issues.   

I am currently at a loss as to how people might compensate for this informational vacuum.  I do agree (as people have noted) that it's unworkably pricey to subscribe to both Houston Chronicle and GCDN - that's going to be out of the budget of many of the Clear Lakers who are caught in the middle, geographically and otherwise (I'm considering Clear Lake to encompass League City).  It's unworkably pricey especially because neither of those publications is located in our area and neither of them do justice to our area.  Regardless of which one is chosen, you don't receive that much relevant content for your considerable amount of subscription money, frankly.

So where does that leave us?  As I've said many times before, the newspapers royally suck and our local blogosphere is nonexistent, and I never set my blog up for the kind of generalized communicative purpose that is called for here.  Effective dissemination of this kind of information requires extensive market penetration of the kind that I originally intended to deflect rather than achieve.  Those 155,000 hits you see on the counter below are all from people who had to work to get here - to make a long story short, I was shooting for readership quality rather than quantity, which is valid for its own purposes, but it is far from effective when the objective is disseminating general public information that isn't otherwise available.

Anyway, FWIW, the latest offering from GCDN is a very formulaic editorial titled "It's bad policy to disdain the public's complaints" (paywalled).   It references the fact that a few members of City Council walked out of the public comment period during a recent Council meeting.  The public participation, as always, referenced the original "radical Islamist terror groups" clause in the resolution that has already been DEBATED TO DEATH, BUT ONLY WITHIN THE PROFOUNDLY RESTRICTED FRAMEWORK OF PREVAILING ACCEPTABLE SOCIAL POLARITY.

...but not for as long as each and every one of you insist on maintaining your current polarized positions.  

The reason why I have started talking to some people in the community is that, like everyone else, I'm sick to death of the obvious ideological stalemate.  I have specific ideas about how this issue could be (brace yourself) actually moved forward in a mutually productive way.  Unfortunately, thus far, I'm not finding many other people who feel similarly and who would be willing to contribute a bit of their time and energy in order to do something about the stalemate which is continuing to manifest like a really bad broken record in Council meetings and in the press.  Mostly what I'm finding is that people have a passionate desire to continue stamping their feet and proffering their particular polarized oversimplifications.  Most people seem to want to continue taking bi-weekly baths in their righteous indignation as they pout and hold their positions with their minds clamped as firmly shut as they can possibly muster.

Anyway, as a first measure in this regard, I started calling louder bullsh*t on the polarity in response to that newest editorial linked above.  Because it's paywalled, I will reproduce my comments below FYI.  You don't really need to read the original editorial - all it basically says is that certain City Council members are bad for walking out during a public comment period.  There's no historical or contextual weighting, no suggestion as to what else might be done to really address the underlying issues (that's what op-eds are supposed to do, isn't it? Suggest things?).  It's just that little dissociated bit - Council is bad.  And that's the polarity predicament in a nutshell.

***

What continues to amaze me about this situation is that everyone is behaving exactly as our current ultra-polarized society expects them to behave, every step of the way. 

There's not been a shred of creativity or original thinking anywhere in this equation - I feel like I've been watching a collective Dance of the Automatons, from LC City Council to the Muslim community to this local press itself.  Every single party playing their prescribed role, right on cue.  There's no room for thinking outside the box.  There's no room for asking legitimate questions (they have been in there, but were drowned out by all the BS, especially the name-calling of which both sides are guilty).  There's no room for orthogonal viewpoints.  There's no room for thought experiments in devil's advocacy.  There is no room for anything that even remotely resembles a fresh perspective.  It is simply not allowed. 

There is absolutely no room for anything other than extremely polarized cookie-cutter views that conform to established stereotypes (especially liberal vs. conservative).  And the situation is SO BAD that when I make the observation for folks that what they are doing amounts to nothing more than cherry-picking an off-the-shelf extremist view, they literally think I'm nuts.  Twice in one week in behind-the-scenes conversations, I had the unnerving experience of pointing out to different people that they have reduced a nuanced situation to an unworkable level of black and whiteness, and they responded to me, scandalized, with (paraphrased), "What do you mean?  I'm not taking an extremist view - I'm simply taking a HUMAN view."  In other words, they've totally lost touch with their own extremism, if they even had any awareness of that in the first place.

Of course, it's the height of fashion right now to join in the American polarity movement.  It's so effortless and attractive, instant gratification in the style of illegal drugs - you can get instant street cred, an instant "in", not by having any actual ideas, but just by dropping a few key words and phrases that confirm your subscription to The Group.  But at a certain point, you have to ask yourself what you're really getting out of that kind of mindset.  OK, bully for you - you're "in", and those unfathomable guys on the other side of the issue are also "in", but what are any of you actually gaining from all this polarity?  And much more importantly, what is everyone losing because of it? 

League City newspaper, Part 2

Where's Woolsey?

Search hint:  Even without red and white stripes, publisher Leonard Woolsey does bear a bit of resemblance to Waldo, especially in the glasses.  

That's the large-format portion of the pile of "mail" that I excavated from my box late yesterday afternoon, viewed as it was tossed unceremoniously onto my home office conference table.  Knowing that the League City - Kemah Connection newspaper was supposed to have been launched yesterday (paywalled), I was initially disappointed - I thought my address had been passed over (not an uncommon occurrence given the young age of our subdivision section).  I almost threw the entire stack into the recycle bin, but then I spotted it.

It looks like this.  Don't throw it away without first looking at it.  

I was a bit disappointed at the mode of presentation.  I'm afraid that people really are going to have trouble distinguishing this from the constant onslaught of junk mail with which we all must deal, and I fear that a lot of folks are going to toss it without even realizing what it is (particularly true because its launch was not well advertised, so many local residents are not expecting it and did not know in advance what it was going to look like).

It may, in fact, be the case that GCDN arranged for delivery on days when typical advertising flyers were not scheduled to be avalanching.  But here's the issue with that:  Most of us no longer check our mailboxes every day.  What's the point??  Particularly for those of us who receive all of our important correspondence, bills, bank statements, etc. electronically, plus we have the security of a USPS-issued clusterbox, checking the mail is something we often do only on trash or recycling days, and only for disposal purposes.

This postal worker hit the nail on the head with this response.  If not for eBay and Amazon, I would not traipse to my mailbox at all.  I would attempt to close it and not accept hard-copy mail delivery, period (which would be the Final Solution for the junk mail that I haven't been able to control even though I paid for a service to have it stopped).  Perhaps when Google gets its delivery drones airborne, we'll be able to take that logical next step and be done with residential USPS delivery once and for all.

Screengrabbed from this "Ask a Mailman" site. 

But there's good news in all of this, too.  My initial fear that this newspaper would be a simple post-shelf-life content recycling mechanism was apparently unfounded.  The articles are largely original.  Furthermore, they are picking up on the types of issues I've been hoping to seed on this blog (good news given that I don't reach 30,000 homes).  Cover story?  Five Corners, for which I commenced a post category earlier this year.  Additional content?  Information on the fact that there's a $200 million TxDOT project to improve SH 146 in Kemah and Seabrook, which I also screamed bloody murder about.

Perspective such as this is intended to wake up our local politicians, who arguably are not doing their jobs in getting our practical issues resolved.  The Five Corners fiasco has been lingering for far too many years now.  Screengrabbed from this April 2014 post. 

So there's the potential for the transmission of issues and ideas with this thing.  Write to the editor and publisher of this new newspaper if you have local concerns (editor@lcconnection.com; publisher@lcconnection.com).  Write to me (centerpointe.blog -at- gmail) if you think that bellowing needs to be done on a particular issue.

And incidentally, for those of you who engage in only periodic USPS mailbox excavation mostly for disposal purposes, I found a really neat product that might be of assistance to you.

It's the Barnes and Noble felt tote.  It's a very heavy but small bag.  And oh, the style is divine.  Very modern, just the way I like it.  Comes in three colors.  I like the gray.  They are available at the Clear Lake (Baybrook) Barnes and Noble on Bay Area Blvd. (at least they were as of August 29, 2014).

I think it was designed to be a "book bag" of sorts, but the size almost exactly matches the size of my USPS mail clusterbox.  Typically when I do excavations, I'm struggling with an armload of miscellaneous paper and at least one of the pieces will need to be chased madly down the street as it escapes my control and gets blown by the wind.  With this thing, I just scoop all the junk mail into the bag, which stays open by virtue of the stiffness of the thick polyester felt.  Much easier than trying to use one of those floppy re-usable canvas grocery sacks for the same purpose.  And given that this bag stands upright of its own accord, it is an excellent small receptacle for in-house paper recycling, too.  Nice stylish convenience for ten bucks.

As always, this is a noncommercial blog presenting personal opinions only.  I accept no compensation for recommending any particular product or service.  

New League City newspaper

Actually it is touted as a League City - Kemah newspaper (paywalled), but given that LC's population is forty-seven times that of Kemah (2012 Census per Google), I'm betting (hoping?) that it will be weighted in favor of LC despite Kemah's outsized local economic impact.

For this one, apparently you won't have to subscribe - the first issue is scheduled to be delivered into mailboxes (? an interesting approach unlike those that currently prevail) on August 29, 2014.  The paper will be a project of Galveston County Daily News.    

I have long wailed about the abysmal state of local reporting; in fact, I have a blog post category devoted to that subject.

This dearth of coverage is not a local phenomenon but rather reflects the overall decline in conventional newspapers as a social institution.  This is the latest version of Dr. Mark J. Perry's famous newspaper free-fall chart, courtesy of this Carpe Diem post.  It's worth reading his analysis if you have any interest in what's happening with the industry.  And also this HuffPost article with an embedded slide show titled "Top 10 Dying Industries".

Update:  Amusingly, seven days after I posted this diagram, GCDN ran a story titled "Newspapers are still here and still making money" (paywalled money).     

I have no idea how the new paper will be structured and what degree of quality will characterize it.  When I read that it will be published only once a month, I immediately became concerned that it will largely amount to a content-recycling effort.   In other words, a vehicle by which paying subscribers will receive paywalled content in real time via GCDN, and non-paying subscribers will later receive that same content for free after its shelf life has effectively expired.  But do you know what??  Even that much would be a darned sight better than what we've got right now, where the majority of our population doesn't have good opportunities to receive local news at all.

I am a bit perplexed, however, at GCDN's initial positioning statements, which include the following:  "While not always sexy, keeping residents informed about taxes, property values and the decisions by locally elected officials is critical to a healthy community."  Geez, guys, be careful not to fall all over yourselves with your marketing exuberance!  With promotional representations like that, who needs enemies?!
:-)

Anyway, stay tuned for more analysis on this one.

It remains to be seen what that is.  

What's wrong with this CNN picture?

With the recent death of a famous American actor from an assumed heroin overdose, commercial news media, including local outlets, are replete with a reinvigorated focus on drug addiction, its consequences, and the enforcement efforts that we as a society are making to curb it.

Look familiar??  That's League City's half-built Public Safety Building in the background, a half a mile from us.  This is a screengrab from a recent Channel 13 piece that showcases the ongoing training of League City's newest drug-fighting K9.  That black blur you see in the mid-ground is another pooch practicing his pounce.  LCPD reportedly now has three drug doggies.

Screengrab courtesy of KTRK-TV.  

The problem with many of these news media offerings, in my opinion, is that they are formulaic and misleading, thereby doing a profound disservice to the public in helping to perpetuate a variety of addiction-related myths.

The most egregious case I've encountered thus far comes from CNN, in this story titled "One snapshot in a tragic national picture:  Long Island sees exploding heroin use".  This piece framed the issue in the same old tired sensationalist terms:  There are narcotic-peddling wolves in our midst, and they are zooming down a freeway near us, targeting our innocent and unsuspecting children.  Where they strike next, nobody knows, but you can bet that the results will be randomly tragic and wildly undeserved.  

No.  Someone needs to call bullsh*t on this nonsense, because that is not the typical mechanism by which kids get sucked into drug use.  And if people don't discard that kind of mass-consumption mythology and instead start coming to terms with the truth, they won't have a prayer of interceding effectively when (not if) drugs come knocking on their own family door.

I have to insert the usual disclaimers before I continue with my editorial.  I am not a psychological services professional.  I do not have any specialized education or training in the area of substance abuse.  But what I do possess is almost five decades of experience in actively opposing addiction-based lifestyles within certain branches of my own extended family, and in certain social and professional circles.

I'm also a mother who has recently had to deal with predators actively promoting drug and alcohol use to my own kid.  The same is true of every parent of an American teenager - if you have a teenager but you don't believe that your kid has been offered drugs and alcohol, then you are simply delusional.  And if your kid hasn't described either to you or to some other trusted and responsible adult when, where, what, and by whom those illegal substances were offered to them, then I strongly advise you to do whatever is necessary to build up enough security in your primary family relationships and friendships for that kind of intergenerational communication to happen.

In disclaimer sum, my history has left me with strong perceptions and opinions on the subject of substance abuse, which I will now proceed to express.  The opinions of others may differ.

I parsed the offending CNN article in the most practical and useful terms I could think of:  I analyzed it through the lens of my own child's prevailing perceptions of what might be wrong with it.

My child has a particularly vivid, visceral, and almost irrational need to see justice prevail (a characteristic that she might have inherited from her mother).  In shedding the innocence of childhood during her transition to adolescence, she began reacting negatively to a wide variety of social imperfections, including drug and alcohol abuse.  So I gave her a printed copy of that CNN article, I numbered each paragraph for ease of reference (there are 25), and provided the following instructions:

1. Mark the warning signs that the parents in this story missed.  
2. Flag the erroneous beliefs, assumptions, and harmful paradigms that most probably allowed [drug] addiction to flourish in some of these cases.  Physically mark and describe on these [printed] pages.  

If you have a teenager who is old enough to handle this kind of exercise, I invite you to do the same, because there could scarcely be a better learning experience.  Print out the article, and have them annotate it as best they currently can.  They could also read it online but I prefer tangibility - if they print it out and write on it, that process will be more deeply symbolic of them taking ownership of the content and ideas (which is an example of the process of taking personal responsibility for something).  Writing over the top of someone else's statements is an act of physical domination, which also underscores the counter-message that your children do not, in fact, have to perceive of themselves as helpless and submissive potential targets of an impending tidal wave of Mexican heroin, as I believe this article insinuates.

Then, after they have done their best based on their current teenaged understanding of substance abuse, sit down and discuss their findings with them.  Teenagers, even the best-developed ones, won't be capable of spotting every red flag in this article, which is exactly what makes it such a valuable learning experience.  Some of the atrocities in the piece are easy to perceive, but some of them are much more subtle and derivative in nature, and thus will not be recognized except by people who have developed extensive addiction-related empirical wisdom.

I'm going to provide you with my own propaganda punch list to help you with the headwork.  I will tell you what I believe, which is not necessarily the same as what the majority of Americans believe (which, I contend, is exactly why addiction continues to play such a prominent and inconceivably expensive role in our society).  You might not agree with everything I describe here.  Some of it might take you aback or make you offended.  You can decide which of these viewpoints below you wish to consider and/or offer to your own teen.

Scope of the issue as stated by the article:  "Heroin use has exploded in what is being described as an epidemic...".  

A layperson's grasp of the word "epidemic" is along the lines of the typhoid outbreak that killed one third of the population of Athens Greece, or, closer to home, one of those miserable intervals in which fully one quarter of the kids in a public school classroom are simultaneously out sick with the flu (as happened when my daughter was in Grade 4).  We went to a wedding a few years back where 50% of the guests came down with norovirus - now that was an epidemic, let me tell you (and yes - every member of my family ended up on the unlucky side of that statistic).

In profound contrast to those examples of epidemics, only about 1.6% of Americans have ever tried heroin in their entire lives.  In their entire lives!!!  Sure, there are isolated enclaves where usage is higher than that, but to describe the present situation as an "epidemic" is irresponsible at best, and unconscionable at worst.  Perception is the most pernicious part of peer pressure, and what statements like that do is leave young people under the impression that a whole bunch of people are doing heroin.  CNN implied this, so it must be true, right?  And when naive young people think that "everybody" is doing something, they will be more inclined to try it themselves.

And don't believe everything you read on the friggin' internet either, even if it comes from a source that's supposed to be reputable.  

Overall tone of the article:  "Several factors have contributed to this "perfect storm" of addiction according to experts -- among them, proximity to major airports and transportation centers..."  with an expound provided by Paragraph 17:  "Many [who begin using heroin] are cheerleaders, athletes and straight-A students from loving homes."  

In a one-two perceptual punch, as well as being unconscionably misleading as to basic American heroin use statistics, I find this article to be sensationalistic, superficial, and fear-mongering because it insinuates that the primary drug addiction threat is primarily attributable to an exquisitely-efficient trafficking infrastructure which preys upon otherwise functional individuals.

In actual fact, a large percentage of the young people who adopt a drug-using lifestyle do not do so because they are pretty and popular blonde kids randomly seduced by a "perfect storm" of circumstances.  They do so because they are taught those behaviors within their own families.

It's very difficult for young people to "just say no" when their own families are saying "yes".  Many of those families try to impose the "do as I say - not as I do" directive.  But a parental message of hypocrisy is almost always worse than no parental message at all.  

 Sure, there are some kids who, because of conspiracy of circumstances and immaturity, start associating with the proverbial "wrong crowd" and get introduced to an addiction lifestyle through that route instead.  But I believe that they are a distinct minority.  There are no hard statistics on this that I know of because it is so difficult to measure, but my estimate from personal experience is that at least two thirds of young people who embrace addiction do so because, as a lifestyle, it is methodically handed down from generation to generation within their own families.  Usually the addictive substance of choice is not something flashy like heroin - it's usually alcohol, given that about 15% of American have a problem with the drink.  But in other cases, the culprit behavior can instead be another drug or non-drug addictions such as workaholism, sex addiction, spendaholism, or religion addiction.  The end lifestyle result is the same regardless of the addictive substance.  Only the details differ.

This is an important point because, until the true source of any given difficulty is identified and acknowledged, there is zero chance that it can be overcome.  People who point accusing fingers at Mexican and Colombian drug lords as the ultimate source of their problems are bullsh*tting themselves and everyone else, and won't be capable of helping themselves until they adopt a framework of personal responsibility through which they can come to terms with the truth.

In expanding upon this primary family-related (as opposed to drug-lord-related) focus, I'll show you red flags in the sections below and you'll see a consistent theme emerge.  I don't claim to have any intimate knowledge about the specific individuals showcased in the CNN article.  I'm using them here as stand-in representatives for what I have most commonly seen in a variety of addicted (usually alcoholic) families.  In other words, I'm "profiling" here because the practice is useful as a starting point in comprehending larger trends, not because I intend to be accusatory toward any given individual. The resulting interpretations may not apply in those individual cases, but they are instructive of larger overall addiction realities regardless.

Paragraph # 2:   "I was stealing money from my parents, I was doing illegal actions with my friends..." 

Most people, including teens, will be able to spot this one because it is the obvious freebie, the low-hanging bullsh*t detection fruit in the article.  Most commonly, parents who don't register significant amounts of money missing from their own wallets and the general existential impacts of five bags of heroin per day on their kid are:

1. Not in possession of basic information about drugs (most adult Americans cannot legitimately claim this as information about drug addiction is readily available in our society and is taught in most public schools)
2. Mentally, emotionally, and/or physically absent from their child's life
3. In denial, a dangerously maladaptive, personal responsibility-abdicating state of mind which may include full-blown enabling of their child's addiction
4. Engrossed in an addiction lifestyle themselves, which prompts them to interpret their child's similar behavior as normal, or
5. Some combination of the above

In a minority of specific situations, there could be other more innocent explanations, such as, perhaps a parent was battling cancer and simply couldn't be there when their child needed them.  Conversely, some addicted children have genuine un-diagnosed mental illnesses that render them beyond the reach of even the best parenting.  But extenuating circumstances such as those are the exceptions, not the rules.  Most of the time, a child's addiction is a reflection of what's going on within his own family.  Specifically, it's a reflection of the family's prevailing world view, which we'll talk about next.

Paragraph 5:  "There's a primary focus on youths taking responsibility for their own behavior."

If your teenager doesn't pick up on this red flag, try using this question as a prompt:  Can you think of a reason why it might it be necessary to isolate a young person in rehab and spend a solid year teaching him to take responsibility?

Answer:  Assuming that child has no neurological impairment, the most likely reason why that's necessary is that he was not taught to take responsibility at home.

And therein lies the number one hallmark characteristic of addicted individuals and families: A general refusal to take personal responsibility.  If you look closely, you can see this idea manifest again and again in the CNN article and in my analysis of it.

Paragraph 19:  "Heroin?  My son?  Never.  How did I not see that?"

Most likely it was denial.  My teenager picked up on this red flag with ease.

Paragraph 20:  "[The named parent] says stigma is keeping families from seeking help.  "Our children are just like every other mother or father's child and they're not junkies.  And that term needs to change.""

That one skinny paragraph is so fat with addiction world view that I almost don't know where to start.  I fully believe that I could literally write a second Master's thesis on just those three sentences even though my formal education is within the natural sciences rather than the psychological sciences.  For brevity, let me just hit a few of the highlights:

1. 'Stigma' does not keep addicted families from seeking help.  False pride, otherwise known as vanity, is sometimes what keeps addicted families from seeking help and was perhaps the phenomenon that this speaker was referring to.  Vanity is that condition which compels us to put a higher priority on maintaining a good-looking lie than on being honest about a relatively common truth of experience (addiction).  Furthermore, normal healthy people in general society do not brand others with any kind of 'stigma' simply because those people sought mental health services (although shrewd people may do so if folks are obviously in need of such services but choose not to seek them).  
2. "Our children are just like every other mother or father's child..."  No they are most certainly not, and to profess otherwise is to intensify the same denial that exacerbated the family's problem with addiction in the first place.
3. Did you pick up on the pervasive "shoot the messenger" theme in that skinny paragraph?  Did it take you aback a little bit??  It should have, especially the attack in the last line, the attack that was directed at you and every other CNN reader.  When you saw that, did you think to yourself, "Whoa, whoa, whoa - who said anything about applying a derogatory term to drug-addicted youths?  Where did THAT come from?!"  Again, this is a manifestation of the fact that people in possession of an addiction world view are strongly disposed not to take personal responsibility for a wide variety of what goes on in their own lives.  One of the hallmark behaviors by which personal responsibility is abdicated is the practice of shooting the messenger: every time someone tries to tell them that their situation calls for personal responsibility, they reflexively reply with some variant of "It's not ME who has the problem - it's YOU" in order to deflect focus away from their functional issue.  In this example, the de facto messenger got shot before any message was even delivered - that's how prominent this practice is in the lives of those caught up in addiction.  Many addicted families will go to stunning lengths to avoid taking responsibility for addiction, enabling, and the various role-related behavioral problems that accompany that lifestyle.  God Himself in His infinite wisdom could come down from Heaven and in His most compassionate and loving voice, He could inform many an alcoholic family that they could enter the Kingdom of Heaven if only they would turn their efforts to resolving their addictions, and in response to this, many of those families would reply, "Who the hell are you to judge?!  Everyone knows that you are an imperfect God not worthy of trust.  We'd be fools to listen to anything you have to say."  A complete reflection of focus away from the situation on the table and toward a general effort to discredit the messenger is often the method by which personal responsibility is side-stepped (simple avoidance is another common choice).  

Paragraph 23:  "Being able to say that I have different ways that I can manage my emotions besides getting high, it makes me very happy and excited to go through my future."

My teenager initially missed this red flag, but immediately snapped to it when I issued a prompt analogous to that for Paragraph 5:  Can you think of a reason why this young man needed to learn to manage his emotions in rehab?"

Answer:  Most likely, it's because he didn't learn to do that within his own family home.

And why didn't he learn to do that while he was in his own family?

Because emotions are incredibly powerful, and making conscious and effective decisions about the ways in which you will manage your own emotions is pretty much the ultimate achievement in the realm of personal responsibility.  You have to focus on yourself (not messengers) to pull that off, and you have to take ownership of every external issue that affects you.  And for families characterized by addiction, that is their Achilles heel - they cannot and will not take that kind of responsibility.
   
I could go on, and on, and on with this analysis, but this post is long enough.  Again, my purpose here is not to criticize any specific individuals - my purpose is to call bullsh*t on the types of bad paradigms and misinformation that needlessly contribute to the loss of so many American lives to addiction.  The referenced CNN article describes numerous individuals who died of heroin overdoses.  In my view, we can best honor those souls not by engaging in mindless mass media mournography, but if we instead unblinkingly use the rich learning experiences provided by their examples to help other people avoid the same fate.  Especially teenagers, who are just entering the full flower of that stage of life in which they first learn to take responsibility for themselves.

Addiction is a lifestyle characterized by a maladaptive world view that revolves around blaming others and avoiding personal responsibility on a variety of existential levels.  The consumption of heroin, alcohol, and other substances is usually the very last step in the process of succumbing to that lifestyle - the use of substances is not the first step, and it's rarely the most consequential step.  Substance abuse is the tip of an existential iceberg - a symptom of something much more pervasive.  If we can be honest (brutally so if necessary) about what that triggering world view consists of, then there's hope for the people affected by it.

Have fun with your teenager.  Me, I'll sit here and wait for the messenger-shooting to begin.  But I don't mind being shot as the messenger, because I've had decades of time to get used to it.
:-)

Update February 17, 2014:
The morning after I posted this piece, the New York Times published "Addicted on Staten Island".  This is a paragraph screengrabbed from that article.  The NYT piece speculates, "the problems that have arisen on Staten Island would also seem to suggest a story about the stagnancy and the ailing fortunes of the working and middle classes."  Would you guess that this person described in the paragraph above became addicted in response to grief, depression or frustration arising out of a sense of economic stagnation?  Or could the fact that she spent ten years as a young child doing drug runs with her mother have had anything to do with it?

In so many of these cases, it comes from the families, not from the streets.    

What you should know about, vs. what the news tells you about

This meme is making the rounds on Facebook, with over eight thousand shares thus far.  It's a good creative idea in principle, but I think it's worth calling out what is so fundamentally wrong with this particular presentation.

Tap to expand.  This is the original version, uncredited.

In order to credit the maker and provide them with a trackback opportunity, I attempted to determine the origin of this meme, but my efforts were to no avail. Here's TinEye's analysis. Zippo.  

When one of my journalist friends shared the thing, I commented "They left (pun intended) an important one out of the "should know about" column: Why being co-opted by [mostly political] propaganda is no better than succumbing to the lure of junk culture."

My journalist friend then invited me to elaborate, which I proceeded to do in kind:

Tap to expand.  My version, off the cuff.  I added an attribution in case anyone wants to trace this one back to its source. 

The point of my version is to emphasize the following paradoxical truth:

If we take care of the little things, the big things have a way of taking care of themselves (channeling an old English proverb and a number of more contemporary like-minded sources). 

It does neither a person nor a community any good whatsoever for someone to devote time and energy to learning about some dissociated topic such as uranium depletion, especially when almost everything published on that subject has been sensationalized for the purposes of maximizing obsessive hand-wringing in the audience. 

If we instead devote our attention to community building, then we grow the energy, strengthen the moral principles, and enhance the tools that people require as prerequisites to doing things such as properly managing uranium, if they happen to be working in that specific capacity.

And while we're on the subject of what the commercial news media is and is not helping people to know about, might I remind everyone that what you see in any given newspaper bears only partial resemblance to what readers would like to see in that newspaper. 

For example, I mention faith-based organizations in my meme version above (and my definition of 'faith-based' is inclusive of all traditions, including humanist, agnostic, atheist, and polytheist).  I have another journalist friend, unaffiliated with the person who shared that original "should know" meme, who once told me that market studies consistently reveal that an *overwhelming* majority of newspaper readers want to see more faith-based content - not proselytizing, but objective information and reporting:  Who is out there, how do those groups define themselves, and what are they doing in and for the local community? 

But almost none of that type of content makes it into the average American metro newspaper - why??  Because advertisers are too afraid of being incorrectly associated with specific groups.  They don't want their ads to appear on the same pages as faith-based content because they think it would turn off and drive away readers who are associated with different faith-based groups. 

The key phrase there is "They don't want their ads to appear on the same newspaper pages as faith-based content".  There you have the kiss of content death, the reason why so little appears despite the fact that most people want it and would gladly pay for it. 

Fortunately, I don't have any advertisers to satisfy, so I can come right out and say things like that.  But we've still got a long way to go before folks cast off their uranium reality show celebrity divorce scandal addictions and start focusing on the importance of what's actually staring them right in the face.

Oh, look!!  It's a very non-dogmatic assertion, very benign and most people would agree that it contains universal truth, but it still technically falls into the category of faith-based content because its author was a famous Unitarian Minister.  But fear not - no advertisements were harmed in the posting of this quote meme.

I can't do everything, but I can launch the occasional meme refinement and I can also call bullsh*t in some of those instances where it needs to be called.  And if everybody made tiny contributions in kind, what might the net result be?

Quote screengrabbed from this site. 

License and liability

Here's a great example of why mainstream commercial and nonprofit citizen journalism complement each other so well:  Galveston County Daily News published information that no blogger would ever be able to touch directly for fear of litigational repercussions. 

The source article is behind the paywall, but a PDF of its supporting graphic may be directly accessible to non-paying users through this link.  This is a small screengrabbed excerpt that encapsulates the bottom line. 

My first response to seeing this was "Oh... my... GAWD."  Not because of the wild increases in flood premiums which we all knew were coming, but because GCDN was able to make that statement in the first place, given that it could now be argued that they just put the kybosh on any further potential to sell the piece of real estate that they cite.

You might debate that statement by responding, "But the deleterious condition of disproportionate flood insurance burden existed prior to GCDN's reporting of same, was not caused by GCDN, and would persist irrespective of their news coverage, so why does it matter?" 

I'm not a legal expert, but according to what I've been told by others who have been involved with this sort of stuff, it potentially matters because GCDN caused a negative condition to become public which otherwise might have been contained to the far more private level of the individual sale transaction.  And in so doing, a litigator could potentially argue that they disproportionately impacted the market value of that piece of real estate relative to comparable properties.  It's as if GCDN pointed a finger and yelled, "It's the Amityville Horror house!!" only by virtue of an insurability predicament rather than purported evil spirits.

Again, I'm not an attorney or a legal expert of any kind, but I do know that commercial news media works within a framework of "freedom of the press"-style protections and insulation that the rest of us don't necessarily enjoy.  Hence they can do that kind of thing and remain unscathed where another source might find themselves being sued if they tried something similar. 

However, it's interesting to note that "freedom" also works both ways.  While commercial news sources may not be as vulnerable to litigation as the rest of us, they are very sensitive to the tastes of both their subscribership and their advertisership, and thus may voluntarily edit their content to maximize their appeal to both.  I keep in touch with a variety of journalists locally and nationally, and there have been times when, in discussing current events, I've been told, "We can't publish [that topic] because we simply cannot 'go there'.  But if you publish it, we would then be at liberty to publicize the fact that you produced commentary on [that topic]." 

Moral of the story:  As Joel Salatin strongly advises, read eclectically.  Don't confine yourself to any given commercial or nonprofit echo chamber.  You'll get the best cross-sectional exposure to both facts and ideas by being diverse in your sources. 

Blogging ethics in an imperfect world

I said something incendiary in yesterday's blog post, but I bet it's not what you think it might have been.  It had nothing to do with the League City logo.  It was actually this:

"Of course, I'm not evaluating any of this logo situation in any professional capacity - I blog solely as a private citizen and taxpayer. But I do access general life lessons in my thought processes, as every private citizen does."

After subsequently getting into a lively off-post debate with a local journalist regarding the fact that I don't openly state my identity on this blog, I thought I'd explain the difference between personal contribution and professional contribution and the impossible position in which those of us who endeavor to make *both* types of social contributions currently find ourselves.

Simply put, society hasn't provided us with a reliable means of declaring the difference between professional representations for which we are fully liable, and personal opinions and perceptions that we hold as private citizen taxpayers.  The internet in particular furnishes absolutely no means of differentiating between these two.  For that reason, those of us who are professionals are put at substantial undeserved risk every time we utter a viewpoint in a public forum. 


Even more insidious is the fact that, the more advanced our educational and career statuses, the more we are assumed to be speaking with professional authority in every instance.  So to add insult to injury, there's a strong positive correlation between seniority and liability, which is exactly the opposite of how the situation should be when viewed through the lens of morality.  Those of us who have withstood the many trials of age and experience... should we not be at greater liberty to share those lessons learned?  And yet what happens is that we end up being the most extensively muzzled by the circumstances of our inferred liability.  Is this even remotely in the public interest?!

Do you doubt these interpretations?  Observe how the liability impacts extend even into the lowest rungs of the employment realm.  How many times have you heard about someone having their employment terminated because they made some after-hours brain-fart comment on Facebook? There's a blogsite devoted to tracking some of those cases.  This woman got fired simply for calling her job "a joke".  She was held to the extremity of liability simply for stating a personal opinion on her own time (the very same opinion that about 90% of the rest of us will also declare at some point in our careers).  Case law will eventually sort that kind of thing out, but right now, there isn't a robust legal precedent for defending ourselves against this kind of reprisal. 

Oh, but it gets even worse.  Case law suggests that bloggers aren't even entitled to claim established journalistic protections.  And then, of course, there's the issue of SLAPP suits.  I could go on and on. 

So after acknowledging the breadth and depth of these very real risks, bloggers and blog contributors are left with only two valid choices:

1. Don't blog at all.  Go through public life manifesting a professional identity only.  Don't share any insight or viewpoint or make any social contribution beyond working and paying taxes. 
2. Blog, but minimize the associated risks.  Find a means of preventing disparate professional and personal representations from becoming inappropriately associated. Stop those two unrelated facets of identity from contaminating each other, given that society is currently not equipped to reinforce any part of this distinction on our behalves.

The vast majority of educated people in our society choose Option 1, but I find it to be pretty boring and downright stultifying, actually.  Not to mention being about as far removed from the public interest as you can get. 

For that reason, I chose Option 2.  The task that then remained was to identify the mechanism through which cross-contamination could be prevented while still maintaining a verifiable authenticity and a supportable ethic. 

One of the best precedents I've identified to date figures prominently in the very popular Houston Chronicle blog SciGuy.  The blog author has one scientific cohort in particular who makes significant contributions without revealing his identity to the public.  The journalist knows who his contributor is, the newspaper has vetted his credentials, and he's known to blog-related third-party experts as well.  But as a contributor, he simply cannot run the risk of having either his well-known guest posts or his comments be construed as reflecting any views or positions of his employer.  His employer could retaliate against him for that just as easily and as swiftly as employers can people like tuna for farting on Facebook.   

In other words, he could lose his job simply by making honest and conscientious and well-informed contributions to the public dialog on his own time and for no compensation.  That's horrifying and an unacceptable risk, and so this lesser-of-evils approach of anonymity was adopted in the case of SciGuy. 

And what a tragedy it would be if instead that contributor's voice had to be silenced because of our regrettable social circumstances.  I'm grateful that those folks got together and formulated this workaround of qualified anonymity.  I've learned a great deal from SciGuy over the years, and my learning would have been profoundly diminished if that contributor had instead been silenced according to Option 1 above. 

And so I have deployed a similar tactic.  The commercial news media knows my identity.  Many of my neighbors know my identity. Key employees and elected representatives within League City know my identity.  I never initiate or respond to a serious email without volunteering information regarding my identity.  But I can't do it here, on this blog.  At least not until society begins granting folks like me reasonable protections that are in accordance with common sense and general decency. 

Sorry, folks.  It's not fair and it's not ideal, but the cards are simply stacked against us right now.
--Your friendly neighborhood blogger. 

Microsoft clip-art.   

Newspaper newbies

'Tis the season for brain farting,

Fa la la la la, la la la la

Two unrelated random bits of newspaper-related amusing confusing here, just for grins.

First, Bay Area Citizen's confusion about League City's new police chief, title grabs from yesterday and today:

Before.

After. 

Can you blame them, really?  There's so much turn-over in League City that it's easy to get confused.  Part of me suspects that they did this intentionally, to amuse those of us who track the revolving doors. 

In case you were wondering, the correct answer is Kramm.  He seems to have an impressive resume and has definitely exhibited staying-power within our municipal system. 

Staying power to date, that is.  Let's hope they don't manage to run him off in the manner of so many other administrative leaders, such as this one, whose departure I suspect was obsurated by those allegations, or these, who made a point of leaving in tandem. 

OK, our second brain fart of the post has to do with Galveston County Daily News's confused administration of its new paywall.  I went ahead and signed up for a one month subscription, but not without an unnecessary helping of technical difficulty.

The first thing it did was refuse to associate the delivery address with the credit card billing address.  There was a radio button intended to mate the two, but I tried it twice and it didn't work, so I had to fill them both in manually. 

Here for reference is the subscription rate structure, screen-grabbed from this site:

But here is the response I got when I paid my fourteen bucks:


Four days?! 
That is one hell of an expensive newspaper.

OK, obviously their Active Server Pages were not functioning properly, but I figured that this was perhaps just an online glitch.  But I got the same information in a confirmatory email:

Good grief.
I guess I'll wait until December 17 and see whether my subscription money is actually going to disappear down a black hole.

Here is my advice for Galveston County Daily News: 

When you take money from people, especially when you take money for something that was previously free, you need to accomplish this task with grace and aplomb in order to minimize the chances that you will alienate your customers.  It's called "salesmanship" and there's nothing new about it - hundreds of thousands of internet businesses operate functional ASPs that accomplish this task seamlessly. 

The psychology of selling is surprisingly delicate and you would be wise to snap to this fact.  To give you an example, at the ripe old age of 15 when I started working six days a week as a waitress in a privately-owned Dairy-Queen style drive-in, we were rigorously taught that, if customers did not produce their payment immediately following the placement of their order, we were to prompt them with the line, "Let me give you your change" (it was a cash-only establishment).  It was forbidden to make any reference to the "taking" of money from the customer because that would offend their sensibilities - everything had to be couched in terms of what was "given". 

We would routinely encounter customers who would object to payment in advance of delivery, upon which we would apply the following psychology:  "If I wait to give you your change until after I give you your hamburger, first of all your hands are going to be full with your burger and shake so it will be awkward for me to hand you anything additional, and second of all, I'm going to have to get in line at the cash register behind the other waitresses, and I don't want your burger to get cold because you were made to wait unnecessarily."  One hundred percent of the time, that line worked to satisfy the balky customer, and they would pay promptly, up front as the system was designed. 

My point is, it's extremely important to handle the entire payment transaction in a manner that reflects maximum possible benefit for the customer.  With grace and aplomb.  This is a rule as old as human civilization itself, and I learned it thoroughly before I was even old enough to legally qualify for minimum wage (at the time, I was making $2.75 per hour - the same price as the burgers I was "giving").  There is no valid reason in this day and age why any business entity taking internet payments should screw this kind of thing up. 

With that said, may everyone have a relatively sane final mad dash to complete Christmas preparations.  May you enjoy a seamless and painless payment process wherever you shop this week.