Dana Blankenhorn

Facing the Fear of Otherness

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 14 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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If you've never been to China it can be the most fearsome place imaginable. You think of communist drones, chained to machines by their slave masters, and you think of a government plotting our economic destruction.

That's not China. (I know it's horribly blurry, but these people are ballroom dancing in a park in Chengdu. We Tai Chi, they do the foxtrot.)

China is a far more complex place than you imagine. But this I know. Most of its 1.3 billion people are just like you and I. They want the same things for their children we do. They're mainly just trying to get ahead.

What they fear most, on the whole, is chaos. Chaos destroyed China throughout the last century, it took 100 years away. The chaos of the late 19th century, when China was carved up by Europe. The chaos of the warlord era, the chaos of Japanese occupation, the chaos of civil war, and the chaos Mao Zedong unleashed repeatedly, trying to beat the China-ness out of his people.

Chinese people, I learn, date the history of modern China to only 1978. In these 32 years they have built a great Industrial society, the dominant producer of goods on our planet. This has given hundreds of millions things they never dreamt of before. Cars. Refrigerators. Apartments in the sky and, for a lucky few, fabulous wealth.  (This is Zhang Yaqin in 1978. He is now global vice president for Microsoft, and heads its Chinese research group.)

What built China? Capitalism, we say. Order, they say. In fact is was both. Capitalism needs order just as liberty needs order. Our Constitution gives us Ordered Liberty, not "freedom." It is a system under which we set the limits, and where we have the power to both enforce them and change them. But there are limits. Without law and order capitalism as a system can't exist.

China's government is many things. It is complex, it is opaque, it is bureaucratic, it is powerful. The one thing it's not is communist. Chinese people have fewer guarantees of health care than we do. Everything is a competition. Getting more than a rudimentary education requires passing an ever-harder series of exams. The price of failure in anything is incredibly high. Everyone is a slave to the market, not the party, and the "oppression" we complain of there is the last thing from most minds.

But there's another absolutely vital point you must know about China. They have many more problems than we do, much bigger problems, and most people there know it. There are tensions between the fast-developing coast and the interior. There are ethnic problems. There is pollution. There is the problem of an economy that must slow and a currency whose price must rise, and wherever its leaders turn lies the possibility of chaos large and small.

There is no doubt who has the better hand to play between Hu Jintao and Barack Obama. It's Obama. It's us. (To the left, Hu's expected successor, Xi Jingping.)

It is this knowledge that needs to guide our hand.

We have an opportunity to turn today's great competition into something both sides can win. We remain the stronger side. We can make concessions.

But concessions don't matter unless they're offered in a spirit of equal humanity. We need to learn more about each other -- our governments, our elites, our media, our people. On both sides.

We need more honest translations of what Chinese are writing, and they need more honest dialogue from us. Both sides need to understand the needs of the long term, the need of our grandchildren to have a breathable atmosphere and drinkable water, and the need of China to evolve into a post-industrial society, not just an industrial one. 

The Internet is our secret weapon in that, and while we can protest China's "great firewall," is must be from an understanding that the effort is self-defeating on their part. The great challenges facing both sides require free inquiry, free minds and open hearts if they're to be solved. And solutions can come from anywhere, from anyone. Building walls against possible solutions is building a wall against yourself.

We can be more open, and from that example so can they.

My point is the enemy in this case is not China. It's not China's government, not its people, not its businesses. The enemy is fear, our fear of them, their fear of us. It's the same enemy I faced 35 years ago, the same fear my friend faces every day of his life.

Engagement is the victory. Isolation is the enemy.

Enabling Violence

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 40 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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When violent rhetoric escalates, and it's not put down, the end result is violence.

Speech is free, but free speech carries responsibilities.

I know whereof I speak. I have an ADD temper. My son has an ADD temper. To the right is what he did to the living room, moments ago, because I dared disagree with him.

Politics works the same way. And its patterns run in waves, similar to Elliot Waves. There are short-term waves based on issues, and longer-term waves based on assumptions. The biggest waves come when a generation's assumptions are not just challenged, but overthrown. This happened in last year's election, which was the first time since 1964 a liberal candidate won a clear mandate from the American people.

This fact has driven conservatives loopy. Their loopiness was indulged, even used as a weapon, during the Bush years. It is still indulged by the nation's media out of habit. A single election won't change the knee-jerk media assumption that "America is a center-right nation."

We had this kind of violent rhetoric and acting-out before, in my living memory. It came in 1969-70, it came from the left, and it was finally confronted, first in the words of Spiro Agnew, finally in the killings at Kent State and Jackson State.

These actions scarred the left, and still scar it. Young activists dropped out of activism, becoming yuppies, religious nuts, Reaganites, and now senior citizens. Leftists learned there were limits, not just in what they could do, but what they could say. Liberals learned that they were no longer the majority, they were the minority, and eventually comported themselves accordingly.

For nearly 40 years our politics have been an abusive relationships, with conservatives as the wife beaters and liberals as the wives. Conservatives know that by contriving anger, by throwing fits, by constantly attacking, by never backing down, and eventually by threatening violence they will force liberals to back down.

21st Century Jeeves

Think of this as Volume 12, Number 34 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Recently Netflix sent us a classic comedy from 20 years ago, Stephen Fry (now a director) and Hugh Laurie (now House MD on Fox) starring in a true-to-the-book series of P.G. Wodehouse' Jeeves stories, called Jeeves and Wooster.

Laurie played Bertie Wooster, an upper class twit who thought he was smarter than he was. Fry played Jeeves, a "gentleman's gentleman" with the remarkable ability to get Bertie out of his self-made scrapes.

This got me thinking. How might someone deliver this value, or some portion of it, in the age of the Internet?

Even when Wodehouse was alive Jeeves was becoming antique. I don't need my pants pressed. I don't need my bath run. I can't afford to have someone else in my house taking care of me.

I am not alone in asking this. You may recall that the search engine Ask.com was originally called AskJeeves, the conceit being that it would deliver, not search results, but real answers to real questions. This same conceit powers Bing, Microsoft's new search engine. (Makes me wonder why Hope and Crosby didn't do a Jeeves series, with Hope as Wooster of course.)

There is a vast distance between a full-time, live-in butler like Jeeves and a software-driven online resource called Ask.Com. It occurred to me this morning that bridging this gap can spell opportunity.

A victory too late

My son graduated from high school.

The good news is the hell he went through, and the price he paid, won't be necessary for his children.

That's because theSupreme Court ruled this week, 6-3, that your kid has ADHD and the school refuses to deal with it, you can now send him or her to a private school and send the public system your bill. The case is FOREST GROVE SCHOOL DISTRICT v. T. A.

Celebrate Your Troubles

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 21 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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When we got our  current cats, back in 2006, we decided they would be indoor meows. 

They have no problems. Their needs are all taken care of. They eat, they play, they sit by the windows or lie on our beds. 

Their placidity is in stark contrast to the neighbors' cats, both of whom are allowed outside. Those cats eye the world warily, and attack one another with ferocity. They know a truth our cats do not, that there is trouble in life, and you need to pay attention. 

What's true for cats is true for people.

Most kids today are raised with a minimum of trouble in their lives. Their playmates and playdates are chosen by their parents. They are hustled from karate to soccer to dance. They are protected and nurtured like flowers, usually in suburbs where the problems of real life are kept as distant as possible. 

People aren't cats. A lot of these suburban kids become teens and seek out trouble of one kind or another. They get cars and crash them. They feel hormones and act on them. They play at hurting one another. The best of them do as they're told, they cause no trouble for anyone, they graduate with honors, and they go on now to big-time colleges where they will experiment with sex, drugs, music, thought, and each other before settling down to lives of quiet desperation.

I didn't intend it to be like this, but there's another way to go.

Torture

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Think of this as Volume 12, Number 19 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Everyone who has been a parent, or a child, knows something of torture.

As my son John prepares to graduate high school this month, my parenting career enters a new phase. I will try out this new role on a trip to China, Taiwan and Japan starting May 23rd. Posting will be sporadic.

It is not easier for someone with ADD to parent children who have it. It's harder. My son's ADD is much like mine, only sometimes it's on steroids, and our long-term efforts to treat it have left different scars on him than my own long-term denial left on me, coming up.

I must admit here that there were times when I hit him. Hard. He could be, can be, infuriating. He has the same buttons I have, and has known how to push them since he was a small child. Parenting him has helped me deal with my own ADD, for which I'm thankful. 

But there have been times when we tortured one another, both mentally and physically.

The Big Bang of the Online Universe

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 36 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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After 25 years online, with more-and-more ways to communicate interactively being found each day, it gets harder-and-harder to actually communicate. (Picture from Steve Kay.)

Take e-mail. Please. A-Clue.Com started life as an e-mail newsletter. I just spent 20 minutes clearing out 24 hours worth of junk via Mailwasher. And what I came out with, after all that, was mainly semi-junk.  Even after a mass clearing of e-mails from my work and my favorite mailing list, most of them unread, I am still left with a pile that I can hardly get to.

Each "real" e-mail -- often an invitation to an interview or a news release -- takes several minutes to read and respond to cogently. I don't have that many minutes.  So a lot of that legitimate e-mail itself goes unread, or is read too late for me to do much with it.

Instead I have lately spent increased amounts of my time looking at RSS feeds. I can skip over items I'm not interested in, but even after I read just the ones I am interested in hours may have passed, and work may not have gotten done.

Attitude

Think of this as Volume 11, Number 23 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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We all have a little voice in our head saying "no, you can't." (Picture from A Year in Pictures of Working.)

Sometimes we call it our mothers. This is unfair to mothers. It is, in fact, the voice of caution, even of reason. Caution is not always a bad thing.

But in our modern world caution needs to be put in its place. Sometimes it needs to be shut down entirely. Sometimes it needs to be transformed, through adrenaline, into that which gets us through.

I have been making a study of attitude most of my life, partly because I find it so hard to adjust my own. I get nervous in front of people, always have. I can't shut down the voice. I admire those who can.

The earliest example I can offer is from the summer of 1975. I took a summer "job" selling knives, door to door. They were nice knives, I still have some. But I had no aptitude for it. I could not shut down the voices, and give myself the proper attitude.

There was one young person, of about my age, who could. Her name then was (yes it was) Candy Cotton. I remember her as short, wide-hipped, with long blond hair. And she never took no for an answer.

She was a great salesperson. She sold knives like no one's business. I like to think she learned to sell other things, and had a happy life, marrying someone with a different last name. But in retrospect maybe that name was her great ally. Forcing people to get past it, and pointing them where she wanted them to go, may have been the necessary life-skill which made her the salesperson she was.

Since then I've met many salespeople, and while most never knew it I admired them all. It's a tough life, sales. You are constantly facing the wall of "no," and you have to find a way to break it down. First in yourself, then in others.

The American Disease

I have no scientific proof of this, but I have long believed ADHD to be the American Disease.

Up to 5% of Americans are diagnosed with ADHD. I'm one of them. I'm creative, I'm quick, I tend to being a polymath. I also have trouble finishing anything longer than a blog post, I'm quick to anger, and I have enormous trouble concentrating on anything I'm told I have to concentrate on (as opposed to what I want to concentrate on). I am very difficult to compel.

In other words, I am both hyper-focused and distractable, I can be charming but I'm prone to depression. These are symptoms typical of what I call "male" ADHD, the kind you hear about and read about most often. I have likened it, most popularly, to having Robin Williams in my head. (This also brings a tendency to self-medicate. Robin's had two stints in rehab.)

There is another kind of ADHD, which may be dramatically under-diagnosed. I learned about it from my daughter. I call it "female" ADHD. In this version you become Robin's audience. You're lost in your own world, and breaking out into the real world can be a struggle. This often comes with learning disabilities -- dyslexia in my daughter's case.

So why do I call this the American disease? Partly because very few Europeans have it. To many Europeans this proves Americans are making the whole thing up. But think about it. If you were living in, say Germany or Italy 100 years ago, or in Ireland or Scotland 200 years ago, or in England 300 years ago, and you had ADHD, what's the first thing you'd think of doing?

Right, getting the heck out of there. Going to America.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

ADHD is like this sometimes.

Just when you think you have a handle on everything, that things are moving forward, the call comes and you're thrown back into it.

A science teacher this time. John argued about the answer to a question. It got personal. He got mad. He raised his voice. He ignored signals to calm down, to leave the room. The other kids were scared, and didn't know what he was going to do.

All the kind words and promises in the world won't do a lot of good at times like this. Talking to the teacher I feel like I'm talking someone down off a ledge, all the while feeling like I want to crawl out there with them.

It doesn't help to realize that this is happening less-and-less. It doesn't help much to realize that, when John came home that day, he was filled with remorse, angry at himself. He didn't want to hear my words. He had heard them too often. They were playing in his head all day.

Yet in some ways these are the best of times. We got a letter last week inviting John to apply to Yale. I have on my desk an invitation from five top schools, including Harvard and Penn, for him to attend a seminar on going to one of them. It's like being the parent of a top basketball prospect with iffy friends. He might become a star or he might fall down completely.