Unfinished

There are lots of ways to see resilience - some times it only comes to the surface in situation of terrible outcomes - Black People are, if nothing else - Resilience.

Step Two – The Art of Me in Zude

It’s more than a notion – building your brand in a virtual world. If I was building it for Corporation – I’d arrange a retreat where I would have an expensive facilitator conduct brain storming exercises to tease out some of the important concepts needed be expressed. Then, I would turn the project over to a project manager and a team of designers, writers and programmers that would be charged with developing a draft by a specific date – you get the idea.

Not so, this is much more personal. Not only do I not have the resources to engage in such a process, in some ways this is my fun that I want – need to master – because it’s me I want lay out on the screen. I still have the audience of one in mind – that stranger – that has no idea what I’m about, but gets drawn by some search engine or one off comment of a friend or through reading one of the post written about Zude.

If you read any of the reviews of Zude and there have been several: Terri Wells of SEOCHAT, David Berlind of ZDNET plus several others all tell about Zude’s team at 5g and the technology. Interesting stuff – revolutionary – gets thrown around many times in its discussion. If you want to know that kind of stuff, the guy that knows is Matt Wulkan – Director of Product Marketing. I’ve been real fortunate because when I asked a question – new people even more impressive than the last person I spoke with shows up. But I’ll spend more time focusing on the Zude team at another time

Today it’s about one of the Art Themes: Deconstruction. It’s the most difficult to explain.

“Deconstruction is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word ‘analysis’ itself, which etymologically means “to undo” — a virtual synonym for “to de-construct.” … If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyzes the specificity of a text’s critical difference from itself.”

Each image (6) was chosen to express a facet of a self analysis. There’s the multi colored Cow like those that littered Chicago’s Loop; the Male Afro Mask with brackets and other hardware and scraps taped to picture; a faceless torso with its gut split open and his face black out with a message stating “business as usual” where the face should be; a book cover with two long haired scholars – its title is “Stupidity”; there is a large multi colored scene that reminds me of a construction site; and lastly there is a abstract that looks something like a start burst.

Then there are two other elements: the video of Jacques Derrida – the French philosopher that has used the term Deconstruction throughout his work thus far; and forum titled Happiness Addiction. These are all the pieces that are in place. I will also had several others – music most of electric acid type – the Tied Tickled Trio; The Cinematic Orchestra or others. Then there will be a series of rotating essays – post that confront different subjects: politics – “How Black does Obama need be”, The future of being “Grey” – don’t worry they are intended for a audience that like post modern lit – Crit kind of stuff.

The point of deconstruction is that there is no point – it’s lost while being overdetermined.

Drug Free Happiness

It’s often the little things that catch your attention. A poster that is mandated placed on a wall that is hardly read or the pronouncements of a safety claim that most accept without giving it a second thought. That is often what happens with pieces of our lives – ideas, evidence that we just accept. I’m like everyone else I look at stuff that comes in the mail as mostly annoyances to be sifted through. It is only those few items that strike some unknown cord that sometime startle me. Take the case of the human resource type posters.

You know those statements of equity of gender, race and such. Of course everyone knows what they stand for and why those statements need to be repeated over and over. We know that because in some way there sentiment hits home. We also know that despite those signs that stuff happens that makes the poster a lie because it does not take into account the tricks and slights that clever people have invented to claim compliance without really.

In those cases happiness is predicting that placing a sign will reinforce the government’s policy maker’s intentions to eliminate substance abuse, sexual and racial discrimination. Not that I plan to look at all three, but it’s only an observation on the effectiveness of posters as sub-optimal decision making.

In recent years, decision researchers have studied directly when decisions are sub-optimal, in particular, when decisions fail to maximize happiness. They examined two general reasons for the failure:

(i) Prediction biases, and

(ii) Failures to follow predictions.

Prediction biases occur because predictors do not fully appreciate the differences between the state of prediction and the state of experience. Failures to act on predictions occur because choosers fail to reach the optimal balance between impulsively and self-control.

The following is a species of both:

THIS IS A DRUG FREE WORKPLACE” poster - The poster, if an employer displays it, would proclaim that their establishment is a “DRUG FREE WORK ZONE” and explain that “Tests for use of illegal drugs and/or alcohol may be required prior to hiring and periodically during your employment.” The blurb accompanying the poster graphic reads as follows:

DRUG FREE WORKPLACE

All employers should provide a Drug-Free Workplace program including a written policy statement. If an employee receives a positive confirmed drug test for illegal use of drugs or alcohol, or refuses to submit to drug or alcohol test, then the burden of proof is shifted to the employee. Substance abusing workers are:

o Five times more likely to file a worker’s compensation claim;

o 3.6 times more likely to be involved in on-the-job accidents; and

o Late for work three times as often.

o Absenteeism: Substance abusers are 2.5 times more likely to be absent 8 or more days a year.

o Lost Productivity: Substance abusers are one-third less productive

These statements make it appear as if it is reasonable to predict that substance abusers anywhere near your business is a very bad thing to be avoided at all cost. I for one want none of these kinds of problems. As an advocate of addiction counseling, I am here to proclaim a readiness to work tirelessly to affect those that would bring low any work place they happen to plague. This says noting of the sadness that associating with this kind of person would have on the organization’s culture.

But wait! As a long time organizational consultant, one of the first things I would attempt is to sort (strip out the bias) out just who these people might be so as to determine the overall effect and location of their problem performances. Then I would want to know what the cost and reward to allocate for this search and destroy process.

 

As I look closer the “data,” is problematic in a number of ways. First, there is no differentiation of use from abuse, no explanation of what exactly is meant by abuse, no clarity as to whether the numbers refer only to illegal drugs or if they also include alcohol. If they do include alcohol, is there some distinction between casual use and heavier use that can affect work performance? Presumably the alcohol tests they mention would not have the same kinds of standards as illegal drug tests, since there is no legal or prevailing cultural standard calling for teetotalism (abstention from alcohol use). It is really hard to say exactly what they are saying. I also want to know which drugs testing results are most reliable within what tolerances.

What I learn is that drug testing isn’t worth the money or the collateral costs – except as a way to covering up a blemish on the wall or a bad paint job.

According to the 1994 National Academy of Sciences report “Under the Influence: Drugs and the American Work Force” (as summarized by the ACLU):

o Research results indicate that drug use does not pose significant productivity or safety problems in the work force. In 1994, the National Academy of Sciences published results from a three year research effort compiling research resulting from all major studies of drug testing program effectiveness. The report concluded, “the data… do not provide clear evidence of the deleterious effects of drugs other than alcohol on safety and other job performance indicators.”

o Though frequently inaccurate and ineffective, drug testing is extremely expensive. Texas Instruments reports that their drug testing program costs $100 per employee. Drug testing products and services are a multi-billion dollar industry. But the incidence of drug use in the workforce is very low. The federal government reported in 1990 that only 0.5% of tested employees tested positive. The same year, the government spent $11.7 million on its drug testing program. That works out to $77,000 per identified drug user.

o The NAS looked for and was unable to find evidence of drug testing programs’ deterrent effects. Studies which appear to show a decrease in positive test rates since the implementation of drug testing programs usually don’t adjust for the expansion of such programs’ testing groups to include not only for-cause drug tests but also suspicion less drug tests. That is, as drug-testing programs have expanded, they have tested more and more people who aren’t suspected of drug use, improving their numbers and subjecting thousands of non-users to invasive testing procedures.

Well this data is a little old and it’s the ACLU that is doing the summarizing so…. Who else has looked into this problem, and just how big of a problem is it.

The Society for Human Resource Management said in a 2006 report that 84 percent of private employers conduct pre-employment testing, 39 percent conduct random screening of employees, 73 percent conduct for-cause testing, and 58 percent require drug tests after on-the-job accidents. State and federal law also requires drug testing in many public-sector jobs. So despite the evidence to the contrary the practice not only continues but has grown.

Experts note, for example, that the tests are far more likely to detect marijuana, which stays in the body for up to a month, than harder drugs like cocaine and heroin, which are metabolized within one to three days. And few employers test for alcohol.

The tests cost have gone down from the high paid by Texas Instrument to an average of $40 each. Some employers see it as money well-spent like an insurance policy from the acquisition of drug tolerance – like sexual or racial abuse tolerance, but like the clever people that avoid the label of gender discrimination or racial discrimination the sign and policy is only for show. The critics of these type policies I suspect would agree that all such tests and posters are intrusive and ineffective.

So as it turns out the most successful candidate for testing is marijuana. This would demonstrate that the policy maker’s intention to affect by the development of this sign has all but failed accept in the case of marijuana. In that regard there is a growing movement to decriminalize the use of marijuana around the country.

Like in the case of race and gender discrimination it’s most likely the very low or slow that ever gets caught. So what the policy maker thought would bring a kind of happiness turns out to mechanism used by the clever to avoid and conceal the real issue of changing lives for the better.

Life

This prayer was written by J.F.B., State Prison of Massachusetts.

 

Life, you have beaten me, still,

With stinging wounds, I kiss your hands,

Though you have tortured me until

My joy was crushed, my hopes, my will

For things I do not understand.

Though I have trembled at your power

And wept in terror, hour by hour;

For All our struggling, hate and strife,

I love you, Life

Though what I build, you will destroy;

Though you have snatched joy after joy

From my weak hands, and, though you break

My heart and all my dreams dispel,

And silence every drum and fife

That makes my march less terrible…

I love you, Life.

And, Life, for all your cruel powers,

For all your proud brutality;

How wonderful the few brief hours,

When you are kind to me.

A Sacred YES

What is most difficult is I dare to take all things as my will and exult in my strength and deny myself the calmness of Thy Grace. There are great changes that come about in the darkest hours where there is, despite my claims, no memory of hope and the encircling gloom is terrifying to the heart. It is this difficulty where the tussle takes me. Calmness in the midst of chaos, serenity in the midst of feverish activity is on one side. On the other is my ego that takes pride in climbing high mountains to tempt the tempter, feeds on the acorns and grass of knowledge and for the sake of community, suffering a hunger in my soul with a glint of haughtiness. There must be a secret that all commanders know, the secret revealed in crisis, that the soul that is calm with controlled emotion is performing an act of faith – the battle continues.

To encounter these forces one must remember our way back into the very center of our being, to that eternal fountain of replenishment. For it is only there that our addictions can be comforted. Otherwise we block, frustrate, and delay, giving over to a frantic spirit and a mind gutted with panic – our will can not feed our heart.

It is a hard lesson; perhaps it should be an easy one.

Consider: you have a vision, however vague, of your own sense of godhood. You are bewildered, tired, impatient – willing to be more and go faster. You are limited to only glimpses far between as you conceive time. But what is a week, a month, yea, even a year? In the deep, inner quietness of your spirit, time stands still—before and after are lost in NOW, there is no movement, no action, even the outer edges of awareness blend into the surrounding calm.

It is this calmness that now you must carry with you into the maelstrom of your hectic days and hungers. Let it be remembered that Grace is your nourishing companion. It is your innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a sacred YES.

An Addict’s Prayer for Guidance

Again and again we are overwhelmed by the littleness of our lives, the personal demand - our addiction. There is often no breathing moment that permits us to lift up our heads and take the long look and sense how this struggle can possibly add to an ultimate meaning our lives are involved. Thus we see the world of need and necessity and urgency through the greyness of our addiction; through the tussle and wrestling with very great anxieties. We admit that we do not know how to deal with that which awaits us tomorrow, and in our desperation and panic we find ourselves unable to center our spirit upon the meaning of this great and significant moment - we turn to your love for guidance.

Hence we are here, Grace, with all the other addicts of shades, voices and vices - Thy children, each with his or her own life and world of need. We lay gently upon Thy altar our life as it is, and we hold it there, waiting for Thy Spirit to invade our spirits so that we shall burst into the living of our lives with the passion our addiction as sapped - whatever may be the circumstances by which our next minute and the next until those minutes become tomorrow and tomorrow, may be consumed in thriving. For this, O God, we utter in the quietness our thanks and our praise.

Together We Seek You

As my friend, I come to you, with my meditation, involving you in my far-flung needs - as we are both addicted. Some needs I recognize as part and parcel of the full or limited measure of my own responsibilities. Some needs seem far removed from where we are, they but underscore the littleness and impotence of our lives. You as my friend should know that the only reason I come to you is I trust your heart to be with me in this time of my predicament and my great striving to overcome my addiction.. So wilt you understand me and deal gently with our private life.

 

We are mindful that we are both sinners, and when we take this stand, our God knows what we are thinking of ways by which we have not owned up to the law placed in our hearts. I turned to you and ask you to say with me, before our God, that we ask as addicts to stand with us and replenishment our spirits. We ask you God because you know of our limitations - all the mean things to which, either in moments of weakness or of pride, we have yielded to our addiction. The bad thoughts that we have had even as our faces were smiling and our eyes where glowing… The things that we mean, our God, as we talk to Thee about our addiction. Wilt Thou forgive us, that we may try again to make it where we have failed before?

 

Our fears, our God, are very present. We know that there is no occasion in all the quietness to talk of the tempest and the tortures of our private fears. But they are a part of our lives: the fear of cravings, fear of sickness, fear of bodily failure, fear of desertion and loneliness, fear for our jobs, fear of the instability of our own economic lives, fear of the success that haunts us in our every step, and most of all fear that our families especially our children will not accept the smallness of your trinkets and toys as we hide all of our other fears from their sight.

 

It is so wonderful, God, that we come as friends before you. To talk with You about this, that the fears are not always present, that there are moments when we are free and our very spirits take wing, and all the things that imprison and hold us - friends nonetheless - before your Spirit. At this moment we look down on are addictions and wonder why they could hold such sway over our lives. These moments come to us and we thank Thee for them. May we remember them when, alone or together, our fears close in upon us.

 

Our dreams are before us and before Thee, the dreams which we had forgotten until, in the quietness, all the stillness before Thee brings, my friend and me, back to a friendship in this quietness.

 

O God, keeper of the dreams of Thy children, leave us not alone, leave us not alone. Be in us and between us even as Thy spirit does surround us, to the end that we may take courage, without which our spirits will surely sicken and die. O God, who will not let us go, teach us how to hold fast to each other as we hold fast to Thee.

3 Convictions

From two different angles I’ve described my personal creed of belief. In response to Ray’s question I confessed my affirmative view of existence based on God’s promise of Grace, and in a descriptive piece on leadership I embraced how God’s might deeds and man’s response as the matrix to how leadership should be measured. So now, I see it only fitting that to declare openly what I believe and why (at least in a narrative or confessional sense, given the Meta nature of such declarations).

To start, I’m going to operate from the assumption that you have not read any other piece than this. I have already offered above links back to the referred post, but I will not attempt to retell the situations that generated them. Except that I will introduce the categories defined by H. Richard Niebuhr in “Christ and Culture” – meta-types of those that follow Christ.

1. For the exclusive Christian history is the story of a rising church or Christian culture and a dying pagan civilization.

2. For the cultural Christian, it is the story of the spirit’s encounter with nature.

3. For the synthesist, it is a period of preparation under law, reason, gospel, and church for an ultimate communion of the soul with God.

4. For the dualist, history is the time of struggle between faith and unbelief, a period between the giving of the promise of life and its fulfillment.

5. For the conversionist history is the story of God’s mighty deeds engaging the corruption of man in a dramatic and continuing process. Whereas the reaction is demonstrate in man’s responses to them is mediated by the promise of Grace, and its replenishment. The conversionist lives some what less “between the times” and somewhat more in the divine “Now” than do his various brothers listed above. Eternity to the conversionist, like me, focuses less on the action of God before time and less the life with God after time and more on the presence of God in time. Hence the conversionist is less concerned with conservation of what has been given in creation, less with preparation for what will be given in a final redemption, than with the divine possibility of a present renewal.

What distinguishes conversionist is their more positive and hopeful attitude toward culture and its technology which opens up nicely with the ambitions expressed in working with Addicts to manage their life towards thriving.

So to restate more fully – I stand on three theological convictions.

1 – Christ Persist

The first of these relates to creation. The Dualist tends to concentrate on redemption through Christ’s cross and resurrection. To this follows that creation is a sort of prologue to the one mighty deed of atonement.

Whereas, I see things in the context of Paul’s words of “…all things were created through and for him”. Pointing us this way reflects the creative activity of God and Christ-in-God, neither overpowered by nor overpowering the idea of Atonement. Hence I see man the creature, working in a created world, living, as I see it, under the rule of Christ and by the creative power and ordering of the divine Grace, even through in his unredeemed mind I may believe that I live among vain things under divine wrath –

Christ does persist!

Finding the room for the affirmative and ordered response on the part of created man to the mighty deeds of God is my rock. Knowing that the ordering work of God; even though the creature may go about his work unwillingly as he tills the ground, cultivates his mind, and organizes his society, and through he may administer perversely the order given him with his existence –

Christ does persist!

Unlike those that would place emphasis on the one time back then of the story. I place the work as in the Nowness of everything in the immediate world around us, focusing on the replenishment work of God. Not that I wish to turn away from the historical Jesus to Logos that was in the beginning, or that I deny the wonder of the cross in marveling at the birth in a barn; my task is to dare to manage the ongoing process of holding together in one movement the various themes of creation and redemption, of incarnation and atonement in the face of tragedy and despair.

2 – From Corruption

The second theological conviction I support is an understanding of the nature of man’s fall from his created goodness. Some would place the notions of creation of finite selfhood or matter involved fall. To be in the body is to be away from Christ; noting good dwells in the flesh; to be carnal is to be sold under sin.

To which I take the step to separate the conditions of life in the body from creation. It is a kind of reversal of creation for me, and in no way an action of God’s. It is moral and personal, not physical and metaphysical, though it does have physical consequences.

The results of man’s defection from God, moreover, all occur on man’s side and not on God’s. The word that must be used here to designate the consequences of the fall is “corruption”. Man’s good nature has become corrupted; it is not bad, as something that ought not to exist, but warped, twisted, and misdirected.

He loves with the love that is given him in his creation, but loves beings wrongly, in the wrong order; he desires good with the desire given him and misses his true good; he produces fruit, but it is misshapen and bitter; he organizes society with the aid of his practical reason, but works against the grain of things in self-willed forcing of his reason into irrational paths, and thus disorganizes things in his very acts of organization. Hence we are a world struggling to maintain rather than bent on destruction.

Our problem is one of conversion not of replacement. This is true even if the conversion be so radical that it amounts to a kind of rebirth.

3. His Mighty Deeds Continue

The third is a view of history that holds that to God all things are possible in a history that is fundamentally not a course of merely human events but always a dramatic interaction between God and men. As stated earlier I’ll state again – for me the eschatological future has become for me an eschatological present. Eternity means for me less the action of God before time and less the life with God after time and more the presence of God in time.

Only in this sense do I have to exceed to the mystery of progress and upward movement, the rising of men’s souls and deeds and thoughts in a mighty surge of adoration and glorification of the One who draws them to himself. This is what human culture can be-a transformed human life in and to the glory of God. For man it is impossible, but all things are possible to God, who has created man, body and soul, for Himself, and sent his Son into the world that the world through him might thrive.

An Addicts Prayer of Replenishment

A new year, an old hope: engagement. It’s time again to take stock, to say the important things that need saying or at minimum to avoid the trite that matters to no one. Here I have to ask your indulgence – a space, within and without, for restorative Justice. To relive with me the tensions we have shared with the disclosure of my addiction – between the simple exit, to withdraw, and voice, you spoke up regardless.

The balance implied in the common notion of justice calls us to “die” to the rigid walls of separation between us, which pain and fear have wrought upon heart and mind, like barred cages and rusting chains. Not forgetting, but replenishing is what holds us all in awe resisting decay. In the tension, to be open, laid open, exposing our “seed” of Justice hidden within – small and quiet.

Engagement begins on the sly, nuggets of insights shared, warped, and twisted within the deep rich ground of community. It takes root in a hope; however misguided the flesh of the story is continually revealed. It’s the coming-up-short – the dark night of false boundaries – that spawns decay instead of replenishment – that calls for grace. Above ground it trembles.

Be within and without – loyalty may rot, but early on the fruits of past experience were sweet – that the rain of our tears might heal us, binding once more into life engendering new fields of Promise. Full circle, unrepentant, its strength is its resiliency:

• I am with you despite relapses
• You have my respect, even when I fail

Counter “Blip”

One of the aims of this blog is to describe those moments when happiness breaks down - its the hiccup along the way. Not to say that we going to change our focus, but we do have a sense of humor.

The following is a statement of a great conspiracy - but instead of some attempt to bring us this time we are talking about the opposite of paranoia, “the belief that others are conspiring behind your back to help you” - proanonis “the idea that the universe is a conspiracy on your behalf”. What an idea -

PRONOIA: STARTING THE YEAR WITH THESE 13 STEPS

 

1. You have license to complain and whine about anything and everything in an intense 15-minute orgy of bitching. Having spewed all your venom in one neat ritual exorcism, you’ll perhaps be free to enjoy sweet moods and broad-minded visions for a while.
2. You locate or create a symbol of your own pain. Mail it to any you want to know you are ending your dependence on their approval.
   You then conduct a sacred ritual of purification during which time you will burn that symbol to ash. While this may not banish your suffering entirely, I’m confident it will provide a substantial amelioration which you will be able to feel the benefits of within a month.
3. You eat a pinch of dirt and an edible flower petal while affirming that you are ready to kill off one of your outworn shticks — some idea or formula that has worked for you in the past but has now become a parody of itself.
4. Using crayons, paints, scissors, glue, collage materials or any other materials, you create a piece of large-denomination paper money, good for making a payment on your karmic debt.
5. You kick your own ass 22 times.
6. You take the Smart Optimists’ Personality Test, designed to reprogram you to ask questions that increase your Pronoia Quotient (PQ).
7. You brag about yourself nonstop for ten minutes. Record it so you can listen back to it later.
8. You perform a senseless act of altruism, for instance by giving an anonymous gift or providing some beauty or healing to a person who cannot do you any favors in return.
9. You deliver a concentrated stream of praise about someone, either to that person herself or to anyone who will listen. Extra credit: You force yourself to think a kind and loving thought about someone you don’t like or feel alienated from.
10. You build an altar devoted to beauty, truth, and love in one of the ugliest places you know.
11. You watch a blank TV while making up a pronoiac story featuring plot twists that are rife with happiness, redemption, and good times — yet not boring. You may either speak this tale aloud or write it down.
12. You perform a ceremony in which you get married to yourself.
13. While making love, you periodically imagine that your physical pleasure is a carrier wave for a spiritual blessing which you beam in the direction of some particular person

First, I have to acknowledge that I borrowed this piece unfortunately I don’t remember where. The other thing I that is important about this is it counter to how I feel right this minute. So in writing this I am taking a stand for how I want to see the world. How are you seeing the world? Maybe we can change our views together.