Tuesday, July 12, 2016

How to Break Rules and Influence Good Outcomes

There’s a reason we have rules. This is something people say when not following a rule coincides with bad luck. You could break the rule a thousand times without anything bad happening, but you can bet that as soon as something bad does happen you will hear this smug phrase. Can’t you see them shaking a finger at you, talking to you like you’re a child, scolding you for not following the rules?  Man, I hate those people. I hope I’ve never been that person. There should be a rule against being that person.

Here is a quick rule-breaking story. It’s a great story because: 
1. It involves rule breaking. 2.  It involves sticking it to the man. And 3. A whole bunch of good results from the rule- breaking.

So here goes. 

I worked for a company that was becoming quite successful. The owner had invented a product that was revolutionizing the orthopedic industry.  The company was starting to make some real money.  He bought a building in an older industrial area of our city.  Distributions were being made and he was feeling flush.  He was also in a mood to share the wealth. The building was larger than the company needed, so he donated part of the building to a local Meals-on-Wheels program.  You know, the good folks who prepare food and then round up volunteers to bring that food to your Moms and Dads when they get too old to make their own dinner. Ok. This story is not living up to its promise. Not one rule has been broken yet.  But hang on, it's good when it happens.

So when this organization (No, that sounds boring. Let’s just call it Friendship Trays to make it a more fun story). So, when Friendship Trays volunteers come to pick up meals to deliver to all those hungry seniors, they need a place to park so that they can run inside, fill up their little cooler with milk cartons and pick up a bag of hot food, run back out the door, hop in their car and zoom away. 

The company had about twenty employees and the building had about about twelve parking spaces. One of the employees and the owner watched walk-in freezers and giant commercial equipment being moved into the future Operation Center for Friendship Trays. The employee decided to ask, “Where will the volunteers park?” That person had no vision at all.  The owner of the company said that he was going to build a parking lot in the back of the property. Oh. That was simple. Not a single rule has been broken yet. Maybe I should start getting to that part.

The person who clearly had no imagination or vision at all then asked, “What about the railroad tracks?” The owner said that he was just going to ask the railroad company to abandon the right of way and come take up the tracks. They weren’t using them, after all. The person who had no vision, no imagination, and obviously no sense stated, “I don’t think that they will do that.” And then, maybe, just maybe the owner considered that thought for about a millisecond or about the length of time Steph Curry has to think about whether to take a three pointer or not.

                            “No”, he said, “They will.”
                         Swish.


Unfortunately, the man at the local railroad company lacked vision as well. He could not see the future. He did not know that he was defending his tracks from philanthropy’s version of Steph Curry. He could hold up his arms, wave them around, and jump up and down. But nothing was going to stop that ball from going through the hoop. Or, nothing was going to stop a parking lot from going in a railroad right of way. The railroad man asked if there were tracks in the right of way. When he was told that there were, he replied that the Railroad does not abandon any right of way that has a track on it, whether they use it or not. He thought the game was over.

Now here is where the rule breaking happens. 

The owner of the company calls up a guy.  A guy with something called a Bobcat. If you don’t know, it is sort of like a cute little bulldozer.  The guy with the Bobcat was very excited about the impending rule breaking event.  He unloaded it from a trailer and moved railroad tracks like they were pick-up sticks.  He plucked them up and moved them to the front of the building and set them on the curb.  He then proceeded to grade a nice flat space for a new parking lot.


The owner of the company made another call to the railroad man.  Owner: “You know those tracks that were in the railroad right of way?” RR man: “yes.” Owner: “They aren’t there anymore.” RR man: “Where are my tracks?” Owner: “They are on the curb in front of my building.”  RR man, defeat in his voice, “Leave them there, we will come get them.” Owner victoriously asks, “Can I have the right of way back now?”

RR man said yes.

So sure enough they came and picked up the tracks.  

A beautiful, meal fulfilling parking lot was built.

That was twenty years ago and volunteers faithfully come to Friendship Trays and park there every day and run in grab the food and take it to people who are truly in need. Literally hundreds of thousands of meals have made their way from that parking lot to homes all across our city.


Actual Parking Lot from Story
There is a reason we have rules. 
So that we can break them and 
make good things happen.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

Enough is Enough: Black Lives Matter

We don’t want to talk about it. We have successfully tucked away our collective knowledge of how things were in the past. We feel that things have changed. We think that all people have equal opportunity and therefore the past is no longer relevant. We tell ourselves that it’s not good to divide people by race. We think that the civil rights leaders fought hard to be seen as equal and that we should all strive to be colorblind.  Now that so much progress has been made, why would the Black Lives Matter movement be asking us to throw the concept of color blindness out the window?

We are white and we work hard, so terms like “white privilege” put us on the defensive. We struggle to provide for our families and we have to watch every penny to make ends meet. Life is difficult and challenging for us, so where is this white privilege? We tell ourselves that we know that some people are born in to privilege, but simply the color of our skin does not give us any easy routes to success.

We want to say All Lives Matter because that is what we have been taught. It is what we feel to be intrinsically true. We think that saying Black Lives Matter means that other lives matter less. We are confused about what is OK to talk about and we fear being labeled racist so much that we avoid having conversations about race with anyone outside of our own white culture. Yet we don’t believe there is a white culture. We see our culture as normal.

 We want all lives to matter. 

We congratulated ourselves when Barack Obama was elected as our country’s first black president. The media rushed ahead and began talking about living in a post-racial America. This was wrongheaded and wishful thinking. We are so unaware of our white privilege that we think that electing a black President means that the dream has been fulfilled and that equality has been achieved. But the reality is that for many Americans of all colors, race does still matter.

Race matters to the black people who disproportionately live in poverty. It matters because our prisons are full of black men. It matters because a person of color is more likely to be sentenced to death. It matters because a broken taillight should not result in being murdered by a police officer.

Race matters to white people who cling to relics of the past, like the confederate flag. It matters to them because they fool themselves into believing in a golden age when things were better for everyone. It matters to them because they fear becoming the new victims of discrimination. They fear that a progressive society means that their way of life will be wiped away and that they will be forced to abandon their values and be ashamed of their heritage.

It matters to those who feel that we have gone too far in trying to correct the wrongs inflicted upon black people. It matters because they think that we have now leveled the playing field and that any further measures to improve the lives of people of color will lead to less opportunity for themselves. It matters because they think that maybe the pendulum has swung too far and that black people get unmerited opportunities.
As for myself, I will confess that I’m not always proud of how I have perceived people who are a different race from me.

What does our history tell us about the value we place on black lives? From 1619 to 1865 people of African descent were legally treated as chattel. Property to be owned and traded. After slaves were emancipated, for the next one-hundred years black people were treated as second class citizens. They could not own land, their voting rights were suppressed, they were lynched, and they were terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan. Blacks were viewed by the majority white culture as inferior. They were forced to use separate facilities. To use separate entrances to buildings. A black maid in a white household would have to use the toilet in the basement.

After 1965, Blacks had to fight to go to the same schools as whites. It was not until 1970 that the city I live in became the first in the south to fully integrate its school system after a Federal mandate was handed down from the courts.

And here we are forty-six years later and blacks are still the first to be suspected when something goes missing from an office. They are followed around by security when they enter stores. White people cross the street to avoid passing a black man on a sidewalk. They are disproportionately stopped by police whether walking or driving. And they are more likely to be killed in an interaction with police.

And what about respect? Are black people respected as equals in our society?  I have watched nearly every State of the Union Address during my adult life.  Regardless of party, the elected President has always been treated with respect during the speech by the members of Congress. During the first black President’s initial State of the Union address, Joe Wilson, a Congressman from South Carolina broke the normal decorum. He shouted out, “You Lie, You Lie.” What message did this send to African Americans about their place in this country?  

We say that all lives matter. But do our actions really demonstrate that? Have we made enough effort?  Clearly, we have historically not treated black people as if their lives mattered equally.


Have we really made enough progress to just keep saying all lives matter? People are in the streets asking us to show them through our actions that their lives matter as much as ours.

We must demonstrate that Black Lives Matter.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Top Ten Things That are in the Top Ten Things



1. UGH!  I have been blindly enjoying writing my little blog posts and feeling all smug about the intelligent content. I have been pleased that a couple of posts seemed to get some attention that went beyond immediate family members and a few close friends.

2. I wanted to reach a larger audience. So I did a quick google search, rushed past all the keyword search engine optimization type thingies because that seemed a lot like math and I hate math. I stumbled across a fast and easy tip.  Find a Facebook Group relevant to your topic with around 7000 members and post a link to your blog in that group.  Easy-peasy. My post was about my experience with how healthcare had changed over the course of my adult life. At least from my perspective. None of the healthcare groups on Facebook seemed to match with my angle on things.  I stumbled across a group that fit the membership criteria and it was about the city I live in. Its past and present.  So I joined and posted.

3. Wham!  Instant success!  Stardom!  Discussions and threads grew from my little story.  Within 48 hours I had over 1500 views!  I had found the key to success!! Yay.  Work done.  Just churn out another one and post it in that group.  And guess what happened?  Nada. Or not much. I joined some other groups, posted and nothing.  Here I am as Yukon Cornelius again.

4. What gives?  I decided to return to trusty old google and get more tips.  Ugh!  I think I know what happened.  It's called a "catchy headline." You see my little viral phenomena happened to a post that I titled "Declining Professionalism in Healthcare." I think healthcare and declining are popular buzzwords or keywords!  Double Ugh!  Because then I read more articles about catchy headlines and realized that I have been falling for this kind of crappy bloggering for years!!  Headlines like Top Ten ways that Democrats are Better than Sliced Bread" and "23 ways to make your kids watch Kung Fu re-runs with You!"  Yikes! I'm a sucker!

5. I even saw this at work just tonight on Facebook. And in regard to serious matters. 15 things Punishable by Death Penalty if You are Black." "12  WaysYour Adopted Child will try to Push You Away"

6. It's really disgusting.  We are robots.  No we are taking orders from robots. Robots are telling us what to read!  Triple Ugh!!@!

7. And my clever links that I had been adding.  My brother was nice enough to say that no one has time to look at all those links. But guess what every article you see on the internet is full of them.  Do people actually click on them?  NO!!  They are there for SEO or Search Engine Optimization!  Marketing, marketing, marketing. Or is it manipulating, manipulating manipulating?  I have been manipulated.

8. So if the title of my post mislead you into reading this entry, then you know how I feel. You have been manipulated into reading my crappiest post yet.

9. From now on, I'm going back to my attempts at quality content and forgetting about my stats.

10. You can read it or not.

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Who's stopping me?

The World Has Gone Insane Blog has no party affiliation. It is not a political effort. It’s merely me typing thoughts and stories as they come to me. For me it’s therapeutic. For readers I hope it is relatable, accessible, thoughtful, and insightful. I was compelled to write the first entry because my soul demanded that I confess my powerlessness to help my daughter in the face of her personal hurdles and society’s expectations from her. I wanted to speak truth to injustice. In this case the state mandated end of grade test. A small injustice from the perspective of most, perhaps. But on that day at that moment it was all I could see from my perspective. And only in clearing it from my brain by scrawling it on this screen could I see past it. 

It felt good.

Just three months ago I wrote a small eulogy of sorts for my mother’s funeral . We wanted the service to feel personal. We wanted a family member to say some words. My brothers were playing music. My sister would be at my father’s side. So that left me. During the planning meeting at the church when the subject came up, I nearly let the moment pass. In a family with big personalities I am used to sitting on the sideline. I’ve been comfortable in that role. But an overwhelming desire for a personal statement from one of my mother’s children caused me to speak up. I wasn’t sure I could write anything that would measure up. I had no idea if I could speak to a congregation of what was certain to be a couple of hundred people without freezing up. I didn’t know if at that very moment I would be overcome with emotion and break down in the pulpit.

But I was not operating of my own accord at this point. Something or someone was intervening on my behalf and I let it happen. And in letting that happen I think a cycle was broken. That something or someone that was intervening was me. I had been stopping myself from intervening in my own life. Maybe I’m just realizing the extent to which I have interfered in my own life. Someone has been in my way. Someone has put up roadblocks. Someone has told me that I can’t write, that I can’t stand up and deliver a eulogy at my own mother’s funeral. Turns out, that someone was me. So now these thoughts are cleared from my brain. Just as I could not see past the unfairness of my daughter’s school situation until I had freed those thoughts on paper, I could not see past my own fears until I typed this keystroke just now.  


When I sat down in front of this laptop I was going to write about the real injustices that are battering us from all sides right now. I was going to speak out about violence, and hate, and my feeling of powerlessness in the face of these things. But maybe I’m not powerless. Maybe I’m stopping myself from seeing where my real power comes from. It comes from within.

So the best way I know to make a difference right now is to share what I wrote and stood solidly in the pulpit and said at my mother’s funeral:

My mother would say,

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world”

I      wouldn’t      miss     it      for     the      world

This is something that Mom said. This is something that Mom said.     A LOT!

I can hear her say it.  if I close my eyes, right now, in my head.
 (pause)
 And I can hear the way she said it. I can hear her motherly, grandmotherly, and yes her SOUTHERN way of saying it.

“I wouldn’t miss it …for the …Wor-ald” That’s two syllables in Wor-ald.

Some of you might be wondering what the heck I’m talking about.  MOST of YOU?  Probably not.  Because what         was      IT       that my mother would not miss for the world?  Well… You name it.  If it was something that was important to you as a friend, as a son, or daughter or grandchild or great grandchild…. she-was-NOT – going –to- miss it! Mom was on a journey and she did not want to miss a minute of it.
IT could be something of profound importance. Someone’s graduation or wedding. BIG Milestone birthdays for friends, cousins, nephews and nieces.  Anniversary parties, class reunions, Family Reunions, Church Homecomings, music performances by her sons, …. Any celebration of a happy event for someone that she loved, you can BET that she would not miss it! She loved to share in the happiness of others.
(pause)

But she also understood the importance of sharing sadness and grief. Just as we have come here today to share our loss with each other.
(pause)

For all the world…she would not miss offering support to those in need of comforting. She would not miss delivering meals for Friendship Trays to those who could not prepare their own. Even as she was battling her own cancer.

As reading buddies in CMS schools both of my parents made lasting and loving connections with the children they worked with. One student often called and asked to bring his family over  to visit my parents . THIS made them HAPPY! They wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Little things also were not to be missed. Would Nana come to the grand opening of Phat DJ’s, a make believe restaurant, created by her first wave of grandchildren?  She wouldn’t miss it.  Rocking the grandkids to sleep?  Giving them their bottle?  Feeding them in the high chair?  Having Papa take their picture in her own grandmother’s rocking horse? Taking the second wave of grandchildren and great-grandchildren to The Nature Museum, To discovery Place? To Ben and Jerrys? I get exhausted just thinking about all the things that she would not dreamed of missing!

I could go on and on… the traditions, the holidays, camping in the pop-up, Disney World, the Moravian Love Feast.
Through Her Example She taught us the importance of participating fully in this world that God has placed us in.
I never asked my mother if she had any regrets.
She rarely expressed her disappointments. 
As it is with all families, we have had our share of tragedies, illness, and loss. 

When Mom was diagnosed with Ovarian cancer, she began talking about being on a journey of faith.  This is language straight from the covenant drafted by Myers Park Baptist Church: It begins, “We, are a people, on a journey of faith.”.  Mom understood that each person was on a journey of their own. For her, it rarely took her beyond the borders of the Carolinas.  Hers was a journey of connecting with new and different people, a journey to express her faith through service to others.  Often to strangers.  But mostly her journey of faith was about being part of a family. A daughter, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a great-grandmother.  Her journey culminated, as our friend David put it, “in becoming the grand matriarch of the Franklin clan”

And I can assure YOU that she would not have missed that journey for the world.

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