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Tag Archives: Psychology
Both sides now, and then
In the beginning, the questions came with surprising consistency:
What do you mean, you’re not Australian? I thought you were from England. You sound like a Scot.
It’s noteworthy that I didn’t fool anyone into thinking I was one of them. The Aussies knew I wasn’t Australian and the Brits knew I wasn’t English. Oddly enough, the Americans believed I wasn’t American. But few were able to successfully place me or my accent.
I hadn’t planned it that way, although my newfound cultural ambiguity did give me a certain amount of pleasure. There was something romantic, adventurous, and egalitarian about being a Citizen of the World. There was also something reassuring about being an anonymous everyman, without the baggage of preconception and the insult of stereotype.
The explanation wasn’t complicated.
Telling evil from evil
My home town of St. Louis made headlines across the country last week. Some of it was bad news; some of it was good news.
And some of it might have been fake news.
The bad news was the travesty of desecration: vandals toppled of 154 headstones in a Jewish cemetery during the night of 21 February. The Jewish community has far too much history of indignity and intimidation over decades and centuries to not react with horror, anger, and fear.
The good news was the community response. Citizens of St. Louis from across the religious and political divide came together in an inspiring show of support. Hundreds showed up last Wednesday to participate in a collective cleanup effort, including Missouri Governor Eric Greitens and Vice President Mike Pence. A crowd-funding campaign initiated by the Muslim community raised $75,000. People responded to a profane act of hate with solidarity, compassion, and brotherhood.
But what if they were missing the point?
Adios, Amigos!
I’ve never made secret my disaffection for Donald Trump. But within the dark clouds of his campaign and presidency, one bright ray of sunshine may be getting ready to pierce through the gloom:
Even before our new president began settling into the White House, a grassroots movement was already underway, gradually building momentum toward the singular goal of California seceding from the union.
According to the Washington Post, the activist group Yes California has responded to the Trump presidency by mobilizing its minions, which now constitute 53 chapters statewide, determined to gather the half-million votes necessary for getting the measure on the state ballot in 2018. I encourage readers to donate generously.
And here I offer these sage words of advice to the secessionists: look south.
Profit is not enough
“Cybercrime is out of control.”
So says Caleb Barlow, Vice President at IBM Security. And if you’re already worried about credit card fraud and Russian hacking, you may not want to read any further.
On the other hand, there’s a lesson for all of us from the world of virtual villainy.
Most of us have come to accept internet espionage, phishing emails, and scam artists as part of life, the virtual equivalent of political kickbacks, muggings, and drive-by shootings. We don’t like them; but the real world is not a perfect world, so we learn to take the bad with the good.
In a recent Ted Talk, Caleb Barlow offered a terrifying and surreal account of criminal organizations operating like professional, legitimate businesses, with English-speaking help desks and fake banking websites. They operate anonymously on the Dark Web, which most of us relate to as something from a Kiefer Sutherland thriller.
But it’s real. So real, in fact, that if you stumbled across a dark website you’d think you were shopping on Amazon or checking reviews on Angie’s List.
Excuses
If I were a tadpole, and you were a fish,
If the South China sea were a licorice dish,
If the King of Siam staged an off-Broadway play,
If the Man in the Moon weren’t afraid of the day,
If phones were not busy and lines never long,
If Fay Wray were a dozen times tall as King Kong,
If gators wore shirts with men stitched on the breast,
If the head of the pack could escape from the rest,
If the dark could be pierced by a single white flame,
If Professor Bob Knoll could remember my name,
If the sea didn’t swell and the ship didn’t rock,
If naive good intentions could turn back the clock,
If each moment could stretch to the end of our lives,
If bees came in gaggles and geese lived in hives,
If the hare beat the tortoise by less than a mile,
If the face in the mirror would give me a smile,
If the northern lights migrated south with the birds,
If my fluttering heart could be calmed by your words,
If I’d show you my heart, and you’d show me yours, too,
We’d have no more excuses.
Then what would we do?
Yonason Goldson 