Control or Chaos

We generally fly Southwest Airlines. We like them for a bunch of reasons. If you can't make your flight, they issue you a full credit applicable toward any future flight. All you have to do is use the credit within one year of the original purchase date. If you miss that deadline, they'll re-issue the credit for only $50. They don't charge you extra to check your luggage or sit by a window. And often the cabin crew will sing to you. There's a very funny SWA rap on YouTube: check it out here.

Another way that SWA is different is that they don't have assigned seating. Instead, they put you in a boarding group, A, B, or C which is determined mostly by when you pick up your boarding pass. They board in that order, and you are free to take any open seat. There are some problems with the system. Sometimes they run out of overhead bin space, and you have to either cram your carry-on under the seat in front of you or you have to check it. Also, since everybody wants to sit close to the front of the plane, a logjam occurs as people take the first available seat. But the atmosphere is generally friendly and they have one of the best on-time records in the industry.

I didn't realize how chaotic this system is until we boarded the first leg of our American Airlines flight this morning. They assign seating and after taking care of the first class passengers they board from the back to the front of the plane. This made for a much more controlled situation. Everything quite orderly, thank you.

I've often thought that SWA could operate more efficiently if they boarded the C group first and made them stow their luggage and sit in the back third of the plane. It would even offer them a perk: on partially full flights singles would have a much better chance of nabbing a three-row and stretching out. Our experience this morning made me realize just how right I am.

I recently talked to an SWA customer service rep about my idea and she just laughed. I guess they've tried it. The problem is that the C people won't move the back of the plane. They just stake out the prime real estate at the front of the plane. Well, I still think it could be accomplished. But then the cabin crew would have to play Cop and that would take all the fun out flying Southwest.

A Better World?

Well, I seem to have gotten myself stalled out again. Drat.

Not that I haven’t been writing a little. It’s just that for some reason I've felt averse to sharing.

I’ve been working on what is either a very long entry or sequence of entries about shopping, which seems to be one of my favorite (and most self-defeating) activities.

Perhaps my latest shopping expedition got in the way of finishing/publishing?

Ironically enough, what I bought was a new computer. No, not the MacBook Air I’ve eyed again and again in the sale section of the Apple Store. I bought an eee 901 Linux from Amazon, an entirely different kind of computer.

I bought it because it looked like the perfect travel companion: light-weight with excellent battery life and exactly the features I want on the road: internet, word-processing, music, movies and photo storage. We'll take it with us next week to Hawaii, and I'll try to write a bit from there about how well it works out.

Already I see that I got more, way more, than I bargained for. I imagined the linux operating system, in this case Xandros, would be something like a Mac. I’ll try to write later about how Xandros is and is not Mac-like. For here and now let me say that part of what makes linux cool is the anti-shopping dimension. By that I don’t mean that linux users don’t buy stuff. Obviously, they do. In fact, they must, just like everyone else. But my brief forays into the wonderful world of linux persuades me that this global community is creating a space outside of the corporate ownership model that has turned us all into a bunch of zombie consumers.

Of course, lots of people share that commitment and pursue it through a variety of means: cooperative business models, local economies, do-it-yourself and back-to-the earth movements come to mind as obvious examples.

The linux way involves figuring out how your machine works, making it work differently, and sharing the results. This is much more than a metaphor for figuring out how the Machine works in order to make it work better (or make it stop working). All this tinkering throws a monkey wrench--or rather, lots of them--into the Corporate Machine. It creates choices outside of those offered by the Corporate World (Microsoft vs Apple) and it does so in a community dedicated to deconstructing the false dichotomy of those "choices."

I doubt that linux and linux users alone can save us. But maybe community is the key to building a better world.

Bi-partisanship--and So Much More

I read that Obama doesn’t want to prosecute anyone for torture because he wants to avoid a “partisan” fight.

That seems disingenuous. First, partisanship is here to stay. We have a two-party systems and folks can, do and will stand with their party. Actually, it is beginning to seem like every time President Obama invokes “partisanship,” he is signaling his willingness to bend over backwards to make the Republicans feel good about themselves. But nobody should feel good about torture. Strangely enough, many Republicans do.

And isn’t it interesting that the debate over investigating and prosecuting those involved with the torture is shaping up along, if not exactly party lines, then certainly along the broad political ideologies that underwrite party politics. Liberals (Democrats) want to prosecute those involved; Conservatives (Republicans) want to congratulate them because they (ostensibly) saved American lives.

I wonder what they think an American life is worth, not in terms of dollars and cents, but in relationship to other lives. Ten other lives? A thousand? A million, billion, trillion? Where do the advocates of torture draw the line?

More importantly, where do you draw the line? How many human beings would you torture (or allow to be tortured) to save your own life?

Millions of Stories to Break Your Heart

Here’s a story to break your heart: the father of Rubina Ali, one of the child actors from Slumdog Millionaire, is trying to sell his daughter for £200,000.

The comments that follow the story are also disturbing. Everyone is looking for someone to blame. It’s the father. No, wait, it’s the government of India. No, no, it’s Danny Boyle for casting her in the film and not making her a millionaire.

But no one is to blame. Rather, we all are to blame. Why? Because we only pretend to value human life. Most of us value our own lives and those of the people we love and perhaps our neighbors, but only the ones who look and think like us. The rest of the time? We value our ideas about how good and wise and useful we are.

If we really valued human life—and by “we” I mean all human beings—we would not have war or slavery or rape or hundreds of millions of people dying slowly of starvation or dehydration.

Actually, I’m not too worried about Rubina. She is such a special child. Someone will help her. But I am very worried about all the other Rubinas, the ones whose names we don’t know:

The 25 million children displaced annually by war

The untold numbers of child soldiers

The 5.8 million children who die everyday from hunger related causes.

The 2 – 13.5 million who have been stolen or purchased--often from their parents--and who labor in factories and fields and private homes and brothels. (2007 Trafficking in Persons Report by the United States State Department, p 10)

Who will save them?

Susan Boyle & the Ugly Truth About Beauty

Like millions of others, I am entranced watching Susan Boyle soar over the shaming (and shameful) mockery to which the Britain’s Got Talent crew and audience subjected her before her performance. I just listened to an older recording, “Cry Me a River.” The woman’s got chops, no doubt, and I am hoping that she has a great career to match her great talent.

I’ve also been intrigued by the outpouring of complaints about how quick human beings are to judge individuals based on their appearance. Some comments suggest that the fault lies with the media or the entertainment industry (pop quiz: are they any different?), or with men or the young. But there’s some research out there that suggests we are hardwired to respond to beauty: we think it's more, well, attractive.

Here is a summary of some experiments I read about long ago and far away (but researched a bit in order to write this entry).

Experiment #1: a woman made up to be deliberately unattractive stages a seizure on a crowded train at rush hour. Not a single person stops to help her. In fact, everyone walks right over her. A second woman, quite beautiful, stages a seizure on a crowded train at rush hour. She is instantly surrounded by people who express concern and desire to help.

(I’ve been unable to track down any citation for this, but there’s an interesting discussion of similar experiments in Elaine Hatfield’s book, Mirror, Mirror: The Importance of Looks in Everyday Life.)

Experiment #2: this one was trying to figure out if our reactions to beauty are innate or conditioned. The experimenters gathered up photographs of women they collectively agreed were quite beautiful and others they felt were unattractive. They made an effort to include representatives from all of the so-called races in both groups. Then they showed them to infants. Time and again the infants showed far more interest in looking at the photos of women the researchers deemed beautiful and turning away from the photos of women deemed unattractive. Thus, it would seem that we have some kind of instinctive sense of what constitutes female human beauty.

Subsequent researchers have shown that the innate preference for beauty is not gender specific or even species specific. According to these researchers even very young infants would prefer to look at the faces of pretty cats or tigers rather than ugly ones. They conclude that the preference is part of our perceptual hardware. Fortunately, our judgments can and do change under environmental influence (which explains how really ugly skinny plastic glasses suddenly look, you know, very cool).

So we can admonish ourselves to never ever judge a book by its cover, but it seems that’s exactly what we've been doing forever and what we’ll keep on doing in spite of our collective admiration for Susan Boyle. Mark my words. The next time some overweight or extremely geeky person stands up in front of Simon Cowell and waggles his or her hips and promises to wow him, he and we will roll our eyes and sneer.

So, yeah, the beautiful people get a leg up from day one. Fair? Nope, but I guess that evolution never did care about what’s fair.

Blogger's Crisis

Suddenly, I'm having a blogger's crisis. I started Tall Grass Zen as a way of keeping our sangha informed of events and inviting members to talk to each other across the spatial distances that mostly keep us from practicing together. Then I started Cave of Poison Grass as a place to think about the relationships between Zen meditation and everyday life. A bit later I started this blog, Professor Hauck, as an outlet for my sarcasm, which is the step-child of anger and powerlessness and could maybe someday dissolve if I practice hard enough. I even started a blog called Tea in Kansas in order to reflect on my tea tasting practice, which alas has devolved into getting the most flavor and caffeine with the least bitterness out of hong cha.

JW's suicide has blurred those carefully drawn lines. I'm posting here, I'm posting there, I'm posting everywhere. As I told my nephew this morning, I promised myself I would post to my blog everyday but I'm not sure which blog I'm supposed to post to or if it even counts as a daily practice if I don't post everyday to the same blog.

For now, I'm going to concentrate on this one because I'm not that fucking enlightened and trying to post to the Cave everyday would feel like falsifying the Buddhadharma.

That said, I did post something at the Cave this morning, in case you are interested.

No/Way/Out

JW’s wife spoke at the Memorial Service on Tuesday. It was very generous of her. She helped me to understand why JW killed himself.

Jayne said that for the past several years, JW immersed himself more and more in his job. He would go to work everyday, come home, eat dinner, turn on the computer and go back to work. That’s not much of a life. When he became unable to work, he had nothing to fall back on—or he felt he had nothing to fall back on.

Jayne also said that the man we were remembering was not the man she had been living with for the past four months, the man who killed himself. Unable to work, JW disintegrated into greater and greater agony.

I have an image of JW crossing a bridge. He can’t go back and he can’t imagine going forward. So finally he jumped.

Jayne says that she has felt JW’s presence on several occasions. He is in a place of peace and light now.

Thank you, Jayne.