#447 – Dick Bernard: A 1977 visit to the Renaissance Festival

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Today is the last day of the 2011 Renaissance Festival in suburban Minneapolis MN.
Friday’s local news brought a story about a fire at the Festival. Several food vendors shops burned to the ground. The fireman being interviewed said that they were hampered by the fact that they had to truck in water to fight the fire: there are apparently no fire hydrants on the grounds of this seasonal event.
No modern fire control measures on-site: that’s very renaissance, even medieval.
It happened that the Renaissance Festival had come to mind recently, as I had come across an old strip of negatives which were unidentified, and I took them in to get a few prints to hopefully date the strip.
It turned out that the pictures were taken in late summer of 1977, and four of them were taken at the Twin Cities Renaissance Festival that year (remaining photos at the end of this post, click to enlarge.)

Renaissance Festival, likely 1977, rural Shakopee MN. That young lady with the Turkey leg is likely over 40 years old today.


Though I have no “evidence”, I can remember being at the first Renaissance Festival, at the then “new town” of Johnathan MN in 1971. The Festival really expanded when it moved to rural Shakopee some time thereafter, and we usually joined the throng in those early years.
Being the Renaissance Festival, the event was frozen in time. It ends today, and until I saw the news had no particular thought of going out there, but maybe we’ll make the trek across town just cuz of the news combined with those old photos.
As part of the news program, one shop owner whose nook survived the fire, noted that a concrete wall between his and the other establishments probably saved his business. That’s very un-Renaissance.
In the real Renaissance times, indeed, much, much more recently in even recent history, a fire would have meant the end of the entire complex or town.
We’ve moved beyond that, with fire departments, and communities who fund such public services with taxes.
Thankfully for those folks who have businesses at the Festival, fire rigs with water could save most of them.
And how about that little girl in the first photo (above)? She’s likely now over 40. One would bet that the vendor preparing that turkey leg back then, and today as well, is fettered (and helped) by this-or-that governmental regulation to keep everyone’s food safe….


#389 – Dick Bernard: Killing the President, and all of us.

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On frequent occasions, something in a news source catches my eye, as did this one, on Saturday. Most of us won’t all get to see these attack ads. They’re carefully targeted to certain places in the country where they are likely to do the most good (translated “bad”) against Democrats and the President of the United States.
And most of the funding will not come from small donors: it will come from people with a lot of money to invest in their special interest – keeping and increasing their personal wealth and power.
Early this morning came this always well done compilation on another side of the supposedly evil and inept government story. (The commentary is fairly long but an appropriate headline might well be: “attacking government is attacking ourselves, particularly in these troubled economic times”.) It’s worth your time.
The business of attack ads has become “as American as Apple Pie”.
The worst thing that could happen for the Republican party would be for the Democrats, especially the President, to be perceived as succeeding, so their goal remains to enhance failure. It is a cynical and effective strategy.
The only differences between now and, say, 40 years ago, is that political lying is now more accepted, and the sophistication of delivering the lies is immeasurably greater. These are dangerous times for any semblance of “the truth”.
It is killing us all, and we’re the only antidote, by refusing to buy the garbage called political advertising that is passed off as informing us.
There are endless examples…I see them most every day.
A few weeks ago I had an interesting exchange with a good and valued friend of mine in a neighboring state.
It began with one of those ubiquitous internet “Fwd’s” trashing someone I’d never heard of with text and a selected group of 13 photographs of protest signs seen at a demonstration in the recent past.
The “Fwd” had come from a younger relative of hers, who figures he knows me as a “liberal”, and he said: “Why don’t you send this to Dick Bernard and have him apply his liberal spin on it to tell us how this is all made up and these are all good righteous peaceful people.”
I took the bait.
The photos in the “Fwd” were of signs carried by (apparent) union members at a large demonstration in Los Angeles.
I’ve been in lots of demonstrations in my life and, while I rarely carry signs, it is inevitable that you’ll see signs – and people – which seem sort of out on the edge. Usually, their intention is to attract attention, and these 13 signmakers had succeeded.
The text accompanying the photos blasted a particular Union, specifically the former President of that Union, and was intended to portray the President of the United States as this union leaders lackey, and this union – of low-paid service workers – to be dragging the President around by the nose by spending an outrageous sum to get him elected.
I did the best I could to dig through to the “facts” (which is almost impossible with these kinds of things), and shared this with my correspondent. At minimum the “Fwd” was unfair and dishonest, but that was its intent. Further, it was intended to spread virally across the country, and get people outraged at the President and Unions.
Ironically, the total amount apparently contributed by over 2 million members of this union to helping elect president Obama was about the same ($28 M, about $13 per union member) as what Karl Rove will spend in the first round of attack ads against the President in the next few months ($20 M, mostly from a tiny group of very wealthy donors – see lead article) and that is just the down payment – the election is, in political terms, light years away.
My friend and I closed our conversation: “I JUST DON’T LIKE ALL THESE PROTESTS, PERIOD“, my correspondent said, and that was our last contact about it.
I made a final comment:
“I have been in lots of protests, though rarely with signs. They are part of freedom of speech, like units in parades in general are (watch your 4th of July parade this year, if you have one).
Going back to what started this particular conversation – the 13 signs at the [union] protests – I got to thinking of it in this way: Surely in [your town of about 2000] there must be one person you know (or know of) that the townspeople wish would just leave (hopefully it’s not you!) Most towns I’ve lived in I can think of such a ‘character’…
The way I think of those signs and the people who made and carried them is sort of similar to the above example: what if the symbol of [your town] became the town character.
Or, as importantly, what if that town character actually had a valid story that needed to be told – even if the townspeople didn’t like the story?
That’s how the ‘networking’ of these demonstrations goes. It is what demonstrations are covered, and what parts of the demonstrations are emphasized by the person(s) covering them.”
We – all of us – are the “Government” we like, or despise.
There are facts in there somewhere. You aren’t going to get them from political attack ads this coming year.
It is work to get informed. But worth the effort.

#373 – Dick Bernard: What to believe?

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A friend of mine just returned from a trip to Washington DC. He and his wife had last been there in 1978. There was much new to see. They enjoyed the trip.
He mentioned that their tour group visited the World War II Memorial (completed 2004).
A younger member of the tour group, a college student, apparently told the group that President George Bush was responsible for building this monument. It’s one of those things common in conversation: a factoid comes from somewhere, is passed along, and soon casually becomes fact. We don’t have the time or the interest to fact-check everything, much less provide reasonable context.
We chatted a little about the topic, and later in the afternoon I decided to satisfy my own curiosity about the issue. The easily found answer is here. Succinctly, the authorization for the Monument was passed by a Democrat Congress and signed by a Democrat President in early 1993. It takes years to plan such a major project and it happened to begin construction early in the administration of a Republican President.
Forty-eight years, including 28 with five Republican Presidents (Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, George H.W. Bush) passed by without authorizing such a Memorial.
Such facts likely wouldn’t much matter to the student on the tour. The WW II Memorial is George Bush’s accomplishment. And to some degree it is, albeit initiated and made possible by other parties and other presidents and endless numbers of other people.
Such is how political discourse goes in this country: fragments pass for truth.
It happened that my friend was in DC during the week of bin Laden’s death in Pakistan. We haven’t talked about that, and since they were on vacation, and he normally is not much into politics, there probably wasn’t a whole lot of attention paid to the barrage of information and misinformation that flowed during the week. Each constituency, of course, who appears on television or in other media, has a particular and carefully prepared ‘spin’ on what the event meant or means. I haven’t changed my interpretation since I wrote my commentary the day after bin Laden was killed.
The assorted bunches are all busy making virtual ‘billboards’ of their own particular bias: it was torture that got bin Laden; President Obama is a war President; on and on and on. Each takes some fragment of truth as they see it, and busily construct it into their form of whole cloth. If you follow only the iterations of one theory you can easily be convinced, as the college kid at the World War II Memorial quite obviously was, that there is only a single reasonable way of looking at the issue: George Bush built the monument to World War II.
I see no accumulation of evidence that President Obama in any way reveres war, or sees war as the answer to human problems.

We are, unfortunately, a society that does almost revere war – try to find any peace monument in Washington, DC. I’ve been there many times. On the other hand, you can hardly walk a block there without running into some monument to War. They are as ubiquitous as churches in Rome.
We have a national attitude problem about the virtues of war. Paradoxically, as we become ever more sophisticated and dangerous in the business of weaponry, we are ever more vulnerable, and losing capacity for long term success. When one fights war from cave-to-cave, or villa-to-villa, as we did finding bin Laden, all of weaponry’s magic is lost. There are too many villas and caves to cover.

Inevitably, there will come a time when our warriors will be back on horseback, or on foot, defending our village from those in neighboring villages. It is not a joy to contemplate this future for my descendants.
Consider becoming a Founding Member of the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation – I have been since 2006 – and helped build towards something positive.
Bring an image of peace to the United States Capitol, as well as to your own community.

#367 – Dick Bernard: "I Am", the documentary

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May 4, largely on the recommendation of our friend, Annelee, we went to the documentary, “I Am”, at the Lagoon Theatre in Minneapolis.
Wherever you are, I would highly recommend you see this extraordinary and thought provoking film.
Then seriously consider the implications of what you just saw.
The official website is here.
Doubtless, there are other on-line commentaries.
For me, it was one of the most powerful commentaries on the titanic clash of contemporary western culture versus the natural order of things that I have ever seen.
The film boils down, in my opinion, to a conversation about “competition” versus “cooperation”. Of course, our contemporary world is ruled by competitors, who won’t like this message (and who control the media message we daily consume). But the outcome for their descendants is inevitable…competition is a fatal disease.
In the long run, competition doesn’t have a chance and thus we who play by competitions rules don’t either.
But, see the film for yourself, come to your own conclusions, and hopefully let others know about it.
Because it is an ‘art film’ release, it is guaranteed a low audience, initially.
My recommendation: everyone should see it.
SUPPLEMENT: 100 Years
Not from the film, but (in my opinion) directly related.
For a time last fall I watched a most interesting TV ad. The actors were a Mom and her little girl. The little girl was trying to blow out a hundred candles on a birthday cake. The message was that it was really, really hard to blow out a hundred candles, and that we had at least 100 years left of Natural Gas in this country, so not to worry.
The ad didn’t play very long…I’m guessing there were people who saw it as I did.
Recently, the exact same text has surfaced, from the same company, on the same topic. The only difference is that there is a single actor, a nice/Dad-like/young middle-age Engineer Type man conveying the exact same message: we have at least 100 years of Natural Gas left, and isn’t that reassuring?
In the recorded history of humankind, 100 years is but a tiny fraction of a second in time; far, far, far less if one considers the time it took to create this natural resource now all but depleted.
But the message is everything: not to worry.
When the gas is gone there’ll be something else…or so we hope.

#327 – Dick Bernard: Part 3. The Canyon of 60 Abandon, and More Ways to Communicate Less

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In November, 1998, I was very actively contemplating retirement, and I attended a conference of the National Education Association (NEA) in the Houston area.
We were at a nice resort hotel, but the weather was – to put it mildly – awful. By the time we left we were shuttled around in large trucks due to flooding on the resort grounds.
Despite the memorable weather, what was truly memorable for me happened at the conference, where a presenter I’d never heard of, Michael Meade, gave a workshop entitled “The Canyon of 60 Abandon”. To the accompaniment of his own powerful drumming, he told the story of a society where the old were retired at age 60, then banished to a far distant Canyon, no more to be part of the society.
One family violated the rules, and hid their elder under the porch. In his myth, Meade said the King called for a competition, with a large prize going to the winner. The family with the hidden elder utilized the elders accumulated wisdom, solved the puzzle and won the prize.
In 1998 I was, truly, wondering what if anything lay beyond the long career I was finishing. Fourteen months later I did retire, and found out. And today, eleven years later, I am still finding out.
There is, indeed, a “Canyon of 60 Abandon”, but out in that Canyon, I have learned, there are huge numbers of incredibly talented people whose wisdom seems largely to go unused because…. Well, I don’t know the specifics of why. This deserves conversation.
Then there is the very matter of conversation.
Conversation between elder and younger (which seems to be defined as who is “working” or of employable age, versus who is not) is more complicated now than it has ever been. For a long time, I’ve been observing that there are “more ways to communicate less“. First evidence of that comes in a September, 2002, item I wrote for public school administrators and school public relations people.
In February, 2004, for the same audience, I enumerated some communications methods I’d seen discussed in 1991; along with an updated personal list of newer communications mediums as I knew media in 2004.
Unknown to me in 2004, because they were either just beginning or unknown to anyone, were communication methods very much in vogue today: Facebook (beginning Feb. 2004, regular messages restricted to about 420 characters); YouTube (2005, 10 minutes maximum. I use YouTube earlier in this column); and Twitter (2006, messages restricted to 144 characters). For someone from my generation, accustomed to letters to the editor (perhaps 200 word maximum) or newspaper columns (probably 600 words – this entry is almost exactly 600 words), to even communicate with someone from my children and grandchildrens generation can be dicey even if you live close by and can visit in person, which is seldom the case these days.
We have to figure out how to not only talk to each other, but how to listen, and to truly value each other.
In Michael Meade’s mythical society, the throwaway elders represented a big cost to that society; in today’s remaining society, the very real “Canyon” between youngers and the others has to be reduced.
We also need to sort out how we make societal decisions these days which seem premised solely on the Power Bargaining model: he or she who has the strongest ‘whatever’ wins, and the rest lose.
It is not much of a recipe for the long term success of our society and, indeed, world. In a world of winners over losers, everybody loses.
I close with a recent and current Facebook entry of an upcoming event. I plan to attend, and to buy the book as well.
Related posts Feb. 6, Feb. 7, and Feb. 10.

#319 – Dick Bernard: "Watching" the State of the Union

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I “watched” the State of the Union address in its entirety last night. The word is in quotes, because, while I sat in front of the TV, I mostly watched with my eyes closed.
In other words, I listened, like one would be forced to listen in pre-television and instant analysis days which in historical terms are really very recent.
I didn’t stick around for the responses of Reps Ryan and Bachmann. In historical terms, such responses are really very recent.
I have my own e-mailing list, and when I awoke this morning sent out the four overnight analyses received on internet, the first from the President himself, and advised readers that from this point out I’d send out only their own personal commentaries. The punditry and political ‘blab’ will be interminable and predictable. Talking heads, talking.
Nothing is left to chance in today’s management of news and images. Every single person sitting in the House Chamber last night knew that they were potentially on-camera every second. Their focus was likely not really listening either. Rather it was to have the appropriate stage-look: enthusiastic, bored, angry…. “You lie” was out this year, and good riddance. Rep. Gabby Giffords empty chair spoke volumes without saying a thing.
Personally, I thought the speech was very good, but that’s simply personal opinion. I’m a strong supporter of this President.

The President’s “Sputnik” comment really resonated with me: I was a Senior in high school when Sputnik launched in October, 1957, and in those years we occasionally watched Communism blink over Capitalism in the clear night sky of North Dakota: in those years, the newspaper published where and when to watch for the blink as Sputnik tumbled, reflecting light from the sun. I wish I would have kept one of those Fargo Forums including a tracking map.
I hadn’t cleared my Freshman year in college when Castro took over Cuba in 1959, and I was a Junior in college when John F. Kennedy was elected U.S. President in 1960; and in the Army during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962. I saw the transition from then history to newer history, ‘boots on the ground’.
All of that was then. Back then, the war was over ideology; today, I believe, the War is over how or whether the generations which follow mine will survive or thrive. 1957-58, even with the much-played Red Menace of the Soviet Union, was a really simple time compared to today. We couldn’t imagine, then, even the possibility of running out of things, like oil; or other things, like the internet which has already been so much a force for good…and, yes, evil.
Now the debate begins about the future.
Frankly, I have zero interest in what the pundits say, or who the politicians blame.
I will focus on two quotations, one of Margaret Mead, the other of Gandhi, which “frame” the home page of my website which acknowledges the contributions of two of my personal heroes, Lynn Elling and Prof. Joe Schwartzberg.
Our future is NOT a spectator sport.
Either we’re on the Court helping to constructively fashion the solutions for our future in small or large ways, or we have no right to complain about the results.

#259 – Dick Bernard: "Capitalism saved the day in Chile"?

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Previous post on the rescue of the Chilean miners here.
Saturday’s Minneapolis-Star Tribune carried a column by Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) entitled “Capitalism saved the day in Chile”. The column is here, though WSJ rules say it is available for only seven days from the October 14, 2010, publication date.
The column speaks for itself, as does a critical analysis of the column by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in the Media).
Personally, the WSJ column, predictable as it is, in companion with another point of view, from FAIR, is that single dimension arguments are effective only when they are conveyed in an ‘echo chamber’ accepting only a single point of view. There is always another side to the story. As FAIR points out, Henninger focuses on a single contribution of Capitalism to the rescue, essentially without comment on anything else.

#198 – Dick Bernard: The President, BP, and Energy Policy

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I clicked on “publish” on #197 – Taking Responsibility and went to watch President Obama speak to the nation from the Oval Office Tuesday night.
The speech is short, well worth watching.
As I anticipated in #197, the instant analysis – and criticism – began immediately after the lights went down in the Oval Office.
I watched the speech on my favorite news outlet, and the fancy highly paid version of “armchair quarterbacks” or “sidewalk superintendents” weighed in immediately, slicing and dicing the Presidents every word and gesture and inflection.
I lasted about ten minutes, and left to do other things. There are better ways to spend ones time than listen to talking heads talk.
Then this morning the slicing and dicing continued on-line.
And I’m just paying attention to what President Obama’s “friends” are saying. I can imagine how his enemies are spinning this.
No doubt the President and his advisors were well aware going in that this would be a no-win kind of evening for him.
Everyone has their own particular grievance or expectation. Almost nobody truly believes that it is their problem to solve, or at minimum, most folks don’t consider themselves to have any clout beyond complaining to their friends and disciples.
My own interpretation of his brief, calm, direct remarks was, to borrow a suddenly publicly utterable word: “foks, if you want something to happen long-term, get off your collective a*sses and get to work. I can’t do it by myself.”
He wasn’t talking to his opposition: he knows they’re in it to have him fail, for their own political advantage.
He was talking to the tens of millions of us who said, a year and a half ago, that we wanted to be part of “Change we can believe in”. And the work has to be done locally and state by state, with local lawmakers, and state and national elected representatives we send to Washington.
Without our active involvement – and carping about a speech is not active involvement – our nation will continue the slide on the slippery slope to at best irrelevancy and at worst oblivion.
We cannot survive, living in the manner to which we have become accustomed, relying on the ever more elusive fossil fuels, found in ever more dangerous places, that we’ve gorged ourselves on over the last century.
I believe that most people, including those who hate Obama, know that we’re in a major crisis; that without major change we’re doomed.
Now is the time for us to act in our own self interest and help our nation change its far too long accepted self-destructive course.
President Obama advocated, last night, for moving away from our addiction to fossil fuels, and said it was possible, much like new-President John Kennedy said, years ago, that we could land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.
I had just turned 21 when Kennedy made his “man on the moon” speech in May, 1961, and nobody believed him, but the goal was attained with an outpouring of national will, July 20, 1969*. Granted, Kennedy had fear – of Sputnik, and the Soviet Unions nuclear adventures – in his corner then; but our crisis. now, is even greater.
Change can happen with energy policy in this decade as well IF we work to make it so. We can’t wait.
* – I notice the YouTube link invites a re-direct to the BP channel – something I had heard about. Ah, the information age….

#147 – Dick Bernard: Avatar

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UPDATE January 12, 2010: I have been most intrigued by the assorted interpretations, on all “sides”, about the real meaning of most everything about Avatar. About all I can say is that it serves a useful function in causing thought and (hopefully) conversation. Now, if the assorted “sides” could dialogue with each other about the diverse meanings of the film, now, that would be something. It is now a blockbuster status film. I think it deserves its status. And it is an opening for serious conversation about, particularly, American society and its relationship to the rest of the planet.
A few day ago I made reference to the new film Avatar in this blog.
At the time, I had not seen the film. I went yesterday. I would highly recommend the film as food for thought and for lots of reflective discussion for anyone with even the slightest interest in or concern about the past, present and future of humanity and the planet in general.
Avatar is a high-tech 3D film set far in the future on a planet populated by humanoids similar, I would say, to the indigenous peoples who populated this country and hemisphere 500 years ago, pre-Columbus.
The planet has been targeted for exploitation of an essential new element by a force from the late, great planet earth (to borrow somebodies phrase from long ago.
The earthlings do not, shall we say, represent us as we would like to be seen…on the other hand, they represent us pretty accurately…at least the exploiters who have moved from one objective to the next over the centuries who, in turn, have enlisted our support for things that lay waste to a decent, balanced relationship between the earth and all of its creatures, only one species of which happens to be human.
As we watch the “transformer generation” in Avatar, we are watching ourselves, today, and in especially the last 150 years or so in the U.S., far longer in exploited places like Haiti, where European exploitation began with Columbus over 500 years ago. It is not a pretty sight.
On the other hand, those who we dismiss as Third World, presumably worth less than ourselves, are portrayed well, particularly as their relationship to the earth and each other is concerned. One is reminded of the intimate relationship between the Native Americans and their environment in the time before the introduction of the things that have brought us domination and prosperity.
One can wonder who will get the last laugh as humanity lurches down the road to some final probably destructive destination, perhaps sooner than we like to imagine. Perhaps Jesus’ Beatitudes, the first of which is “Blessed are the Meek” (defined in my grandmothers Bible as the “poor”) are the ultimate inheritors of heaven, to contrast with the present hell on earth visited on so many of them.
For the rich among us, which is most Americans, even those of us who are fairly poor, perhaps we’ve got it as good as it’s going to get…in the end we may trade places with those we now dominate. Nobody knows, just a thought….
Avatar is a long film, nearly three hours, but it is gripping. I found myself wanting popcorn, but not wanting to leave the theatre should I miss something. Those with me in the theatre were equally glued to their seats. Avatar is certainly not an escapist film.
People watching this film can come to their own conclusions. It will be difficult, however, to come to the conclusion that the reality of our lives will serve future generations well.
I recommend this film.

#143 – Dick Bernard: YouTube, Elders and Youngers

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UPDATE January 7, 2010: Representative comments follow, plus a followup observation from the writer of the original post. (I have disabled comments due to an avalanche of ‘spam’. My e-mail address is on the “About” page.)
Yesterday afternoon an e-mail announced that I was on YouTube. Since I’ve not been on YouTube before (at least to my knowledge), I rushed to the link. Indeed I was there, the last minute and a half or so.
When I opened the movie, there had been no views at all, not surprising since only my friend, Lynn Elling, and I, had received the e-mail announcing it. Besides, when the young man, who was one of the founders of YouTube in 2005 (and a few years earlier a student at St. Paul MN Central HS), put up the first link of himself at the San Diego Zoo, I suppose he was the first and among the very few viewers of that famous YouTube video, too. ( I looked just now, and there have been five viewers of my ‘show’; I doubt my performance will go viral, like Minnesota Wedding, with over 37,000,000 views since last summer, but one takes what fame one can get!)
The three of us who speak on the Dec. 21 video were at a local school, rededicating it as a peace site. Lynn Elling who founded World Citizen has campaigned against the horrors of war since he witnessed the aftermath during three years as a Naval Officer in the Pacific in WWII. He’s a hero of mine. Martha Roberts is current President of World Citizen.
I wasn’t listed among the speakers, but was called on near the end, and expounded for a bit on a disconnect I was feeling in the class room of 15 year olds.
The feeling came when Mr. Elling talked about a workshop that changed his life in the late 1940s. Leader Maxwell Maltz (Psychocybernetics) convinced Lynn, then a floundering insurance salesman about to quit the trade, that if he could visualize any goal “in three dimensions, technicolor and stereophonic sound”, that goal could come to life – and it did for Lynn, who became very successful in his financial products business.
But as I was listening to Lynn, along with the 30 15 year olds, it occurred to me most of those kids had no idea what, at minimum, “technicolor” or “stereophonic sound” were; and were it not for rare movies like the current Avatar, “3 dimension” (called 3D, of course) would be equally foreign to them. So, when I was unexpectedly given an opportunity to speak, that disconnect is what I expounded about. (Most of that portion is edited out, but the reference to computers also applies.)
Lynn was in college when I was born; 40 when I graduated from college. To those 15 year olds, mostly born in perhaps 1994, I realized I was well beyond ancient as well.
Their view and their vocabulary and their skill-sets are entirely different than those of myself, or Lynn, or Martha. More so than any time in history, Elders and Youngers have relatively few life experiences or expertise in common. We live in different worlds.
It is obvious, but too seldom considered, that there exists a big generation gap between today’s Elders, who care a lot about the future for the Youngers, and the Youngers themselves.
I tried to point out to the kids I was talking to that we want to help them achieve their future, but in reality, their future is in their hands, not ours. I was speaking from the emotion of the moment, without holding back.
We have to learn how to better communicate between generations.
We’ve got a long ways to go.
Take a look at me in the movies. Enjoy the show. It’s less than 5 minutes in all, 1 1/2 minutes of me, so no time for popcorn.
(Truth be told, I looked again at the Minnesota Wedding. Now that’s interesting!)
Comment from Carol Ashley Jan. 4, 2010: You said “their future is in their hands, not ours.”
I have often heard this at graduations and it bugs me. We’ve created their future by our own actions and we still (or did before the corporate takeover) have a lot of effect on the world. I think it wouldn’t hurt if we took our cues from younger folk as we age.
If we tell young people only that the future is in their hands, do they believe it? I doubt it. Or at least not totally. They’ve not had much power up to that point. If we say it’s in their hands and we want to help them make the kind of world they want to have, then we not only let them know they have to create their future but indicate we will help. This, I would think, would be more apt to motivate them. It also focuses on a communal effort.
Better communication between young and old and in between certainly needs improvement. I so often see parents and other adults minimizing teen experience…first love, first breakup…all that stuff. If we took them seriously at all ages and really listened to them, I think they might listen to us, too. It’s easy to minimize the experiences of youth, but if we examined ourselves, we could see that those experiences are part of what makes us who we are. They are formative (to use a psychological term) and therefore very important. So I think we need to start by respectful listening. I think that applies to the split in our country, too. It’s not an easy task to listen to some one of a different political persuasion, especially if what we hear seems so untrue, but it is the first step.
This is all on the micro level. You, Dick, often have talked about those incremental steps. I’m sure those steps are important. It just doesn’t seem like they can work fast enough for the crises we see in the world today which is why I’m not very hopeful. Still, I think those steps are important wherever and whenever we have the opportunity or can make the opportunity.
Comment from Judy Berglund January 5, 2010: I took a few minutes to review the video, and I think you guys are on to something. I wish your remarks hadn’t been edited. You recognize something that few in our generation recognize: that we aren’t talking to our kids enough and we aren’t doing enough to understand how they communicate. Our kids are idealistic, and we can tap into that idealism through efforts such as your presentation. They feel powerless, and we can empower them through such presentations. Let’s do more to understand them and to help them understand us. Here’s to YouTube!!!
Comment from Lynn Elling (the other man in the video) to the person who made the video January 4, 2010: WOW!!!
Dick: It has been most interesting to review these and other comments, including the most recent one from a good friend who’s a retired teacher: “I was trying to guess their interest. Sometimes older people don’t connect with younger students so I was curious about the interest level.”
I was more “primed” for this than usual, since only a few weeks earlier I’d been to an excellent all day workshop entitled “Coming Forth as Elders: Heartening Community with the Vision of Elderhood“, facilitated by Kaia Svien and Eric Utne. Thirty or more of us had a day to sit with this topic, most of us in my age range – some a little older, most a little younger….
My audience on Dec. 22 was 10th graders. Their next stop after my little talk was lunch. I taught 8th and 9th graders for nine years, years ago so I know the species. A rock star would have his or her work cut out…! But I didn’t see anybody “cutting and running”…they were polite and well behaved. Perhaps I was sufficiently passionate so that they wondered, “where is HE coming from?” As Judy mentioned, I, too, wish that the rest of what was said was on the DVD (about 5 minutes in all, I’d guess.) But probably it is best as it is, the rest of the remarks left to each imagination (including my own).
The DVD has helped, already, to lead to conversation.
There is a communication gap between youngers and elders these days that is far greater than in the good old days, when the youngers worked the farm with their parents and were blessed (or stuck) with an environment where everybody lived life in common. With variations, other environments were similar.
Today there is a canyon between elders and youngers. Acknowledging it, and talking about it is the step to resolution. It will be slow and difficult, but it needs to happen.
Our generation has left a mess for the youngers; and while I didn’t feel at all empowered when I was 15 (in 1955); at the same time a future was being held for me when I matured. Today we are truly “spending our kids inheritance”, shamelessly. They don’t have the luxury I did.
In the e-mail exchange with the classroom teacher, I learned about an important event happening in San Jose in late March. The details are here. Check it out. Don’t be terribly surprised if you hear from me about the conference, if I can figure a way to attend…. (Find the upcoming events box and take a look, and let others know about this opportunity.)