You know, I know, everyone knows the saying “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime” and we intrinsically know that it’s complete bullshit. First, what the hell do we have to teach?  “Um, hey Fred, stand here and hold this long cylindrical object…now when something moves, you need to jerk it real quick, up and down.” so basically, if Fred was in front of a computer it would be called masturbation.

Really, what do you teach when you teach someone to fish? Are you teaching them to sit still?  To wait for hours? To hold a pole in their hands? Frankly people know how to do that already so if you find someone who needs to be taught those lessons, they have bigger problems than fishing.

I’ve heard this saying in relation to entitlements that the government gives out and the thinking, I’ve gleaned, is that education and job training is the important stuff that needs to be expanded but what are you teaching?  Can you teach someone to want a job?  To want to be productive? To view work as something meaningful and fulfilling?  If people do not have these feelings already, then it’s highly doubtful that any adult education course is going to teach that to them.

Those ideals and concepts aren’t taught anyway, they are instilled by society, friends and family over time and by example.  It’s fathers getting up early and going to work, by moms juggling households and work, it’s teachers having high expectations and demanding that they be met.

Um, if you need to teach someone to value their time and effort enough to know that it can be traded for a financial reward then better to teach them to sit still and wait with a pole in their hands I think.

The tragedy of charity is not
teaching a man to fish but serving
fish each and every night, unbidden
or, if teaching, never graduating a
student, never letting go, never
allowing the gratitude to subside
to ebb and wane…for without it
our guilt grows, our disdain unhides
our ambivalence…it is us

The tragedy of charity, the failure
when we give, is the imposition of
our wishes, the weight we offload
on those that receive our guilt, our
concern, our heart-felt…the
tragedy is that rarely do we ask, do
we require response and in the end
of ends, we are doing nothing for
them and everything for us.

The tragedy of charity is a mean
shadow, a distinct smell, a sad
moment sitting waiting for rebirth
for rescue but ignored, displaced
it can do nothing but hurt…we
never look where the missiles of
our largesse land the damage
done the sorrow caused by how
nice we are to our fellow man

The tragedy of charity is that by
raising ourselves, we step on the
necks of those below and feel, yes
demand, that they look up with
wide eyes with grateful sorrow
with…the tragedy is not that there
is not enough to go around but
that the price we demand from
those below is paid for with their lives

The tragedy of charity is that we,
so kind and thoughtful, never think
beyond giving, we never imagine
beyond charity because receiving
people as equals as partners as friends
denies us the ability to offload the
weight, outsource our guilt…and be
the kind gentle folk we aspire to be

To rise from the ashes, something first has to burn. Sometimes, success depends less on building as it does on destruction so learn to recognize those things that are in your way—that are preventing you from moving forward—and burn them down so that you have a clear path to your goals.

You can’t build a house until you clear the land.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

There’s this story I made up when I was a consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers to help clients with change. See, it was the 1700’s and people were heading out to explore the world, the new world, but they weren’t doing such a bang up job because they didn’t seem to have the right equipment. This one explorer convinced a king to give him money for a brand new ship, something that had never been seen before and that would allow them to go farther than they could before.

The explorer had his ship built to his exact expectations and it was soon launched. It was beautiful and well-built and was faster than anything that had gone before and the king was pleased. The explorer gathered a crew and soon set sail for new lands and quickly landed in a storm. The seas raged and the gale-force winds tried to rip the sails from the ship but the ship handled it perfectly and eventually sailed out of the storm.

Several weeks passed and the ship finally arrived at the shores of a new land and the explorer and his crew rejoiced. After spending several weeks on shore, the explorer knew that they had to go inland to explore the interior of the country. He looked at his beautiful ship and thought how well it done its job, how it transported them so effectively across thousands of mile of open water. He thought that it had done its job perfectly…so he ordered his men to lift the ship up on their shoulders and they carried it inland with them. They were only able to make 1 mile a day but they kept slogging on until one by one, the crew dropped dead until they couldn’t lift the boat anymore.

It’s a simple thing…when environments change—when the problem changes—you need to change the solution. Unions were a solution to a problem that no longer exists….they’re just carrying the boat.

One of the best definitions of a Liberal versus a Conservative I’ve found yet:

“A Liberal thinks he already knows the answer based on his station, his concern and empathy; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that only his answers will solve. A Conservative admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional and technical factors…and hopes to find answers to the individual component problems by trial and error.

A Liberal believes that outsiders–legions of experts–know enough to impose solutions regardless the stated needs of the population. A Conservative believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown…

A Liberal believes in top down; that the same egalitarian answer will satisfy every situation. A Conservative believes in bottom up; that answers must be specific to each situation.

A Liberal will say “I can help you”. A Conservative will say “You can help yourself.”

A while ago I wrote about a friend whose son was gravely ill in the hospital and that he wrote on Face Book that that was where God wanted him to be…I wondered what kind of god that is, how could a “good” god want a small boy to be in the hospital and not running and playing in the sunshine, playing baseball with his friends. There were a lot of really good responses and the discussion was really insightful…albeit unresolved for me…and I really thought deeper about my feelings about religion…at least how it affected real people, people that I know…or at least knew a while ago.

The little boy’s was Benjamin and I think he was 11 or 12 and his parents didn’t know why he was in so much pain, they didn’t know why he was hurt and in the hospital but there was a problem with his stomach and the doctors ran tests and gave him drugs and, well, they did everything that doctors do but came to no conclusions. He just kept getting sicker and sicker. I questioned prayers and people’s need to believe them and I railed quietly against the whole organized religion syndicate and the false hopes that it gave people. The over hyped expectations that it promoted…

…and from my comfortable chair in my comfortable apartment in a huge city, 600-700 miles away I asked what was the point …what was the point of belief in those fairy tales. My friends were nice in their derision of my continuing inability to square religion with science but, they stayed nice even when I raised my voice (though they couldn’t hear me) and told me their stories and their ideas.

Benjamin is dead. He died at 4 PM today and as I read that in the status update, in my head, I screamed and screamed “why fucking why” over and over and I didn’t know him. I never threw a baseball to him or packed him a lunch or helped him with his math homework or watched from the back window as he and his friends camped on the back lawn…I never saw him standing waiting for me when I pulled up in the driveway after a long day at work, nervous to show me the A he got on his science project…I never knew him.

But his father did, his father knew all of that and more…so much more…and in his update he wrote “Benjamin is now in the arms of Jesus and His light is shining down on us all. Our nurse came in and told us that at exactly 4pm, Ben passed and set off not only his alarm, but also the fire alarm and the “hug” alarm, which is the alarm that goes off when patients are in danger of leaving the building. She said Ben had to leave us with a big bang.”

And the only thing I could think after those silent screams in my head was that maybe the power we have, the thing that is “us” in all the many realities, maybe that power can have a different name. Maybe it can be called whatever people want to call it, whatever gets them from now—writing about a son dying at 4 PM today—to tomorrow where there is life waiting to be lived. Maybe if someone wants to call that prayer, if they want to call that god, if they want to call that self…

…maybe I should just shut the fuck up and let them.

Goodbye Benjamin.

We sit at the table of humanity
pushing things back and forth
what I should have, what you
should have, the good wants
to stay with me, the bad I push
toward you…back and forth
…and I think, is this right? Is this
the way we should live, always
pushing and pulling, pretending
to share, looking very much like
we’re connected, like we’re in
this together but it’s just that
we’re nearby, in context…we’re
just passing each other…and I
continue to think that maybe,
maybe this is OK, that just being
nearby, in context, is enough
that it’s who we will always be
because love is the channel, the
conduit that when we pass, that
when we’re near, is the thing, the
reason why we’re at the table
in the first place…why we’re there
at all.

Here’s something to think about; if you don’t believe that simply by believing you can do something, that it allows you to go and do it…if you don’t believe that the power of your mind far outweighs any barrier or obstacle in your way…then do a web search for images about the holocaust and you will find some black & white pictures showing men, women, boys and girls who are in the absolutely most heinous and evil place ever to be conceived on this planet.

They have suffered unimaginably and are so close to death they can smell it and feel it next to them, in fact they see it in the bodies they step over, sleep next to, are forced to carry out to mass graves and the more you look, the more you’ll find some incredible, amazing photos of smiles and laughter, of people enjoying each other’s company and feeling good about being around other humans…

…and if you still refuse to think that just by believing something, you can make it real…then …you never will.

Believe. Go. Do.

~TrevorZen

I could not see you, could
not feel your presence and
I thought; it is me, it is my
eyes, my senses that failed
that weren’t up to the task
or it was us or it was neither
but life instructing in it’s
way, in it’s wisdom, it was
directing and selecting and
correcting and it was right
after all…saying in absent
words and silent screams
that sometimes we can’t
see ourselves for we are
standing too close, to far
inside our own shadows,
in our own way with no room
to backup, to reverse…we
find it dark and hidden, this
thing we call us, ourselves,
you, me, we stumble walking
forward, we think many things
about who we are—and not
many very accurately—
because of the darkness, the
confusion from lack of
illumination but listen to
this, we can be our own
mirror, we can be our own
reflection…we will always
have our shadow but if we
see it for what it isn’t instead
of for what it is, if we not let
it block our line of sight…we
can use it to see our outline,
the movements of our arms,
our legs…our path forward
and we can complete who
we are, who we are meant to
be…life will instruct and we
will keep walking forward
and I will see you in your
own light.

I was thinking about that story in the news about the Taliban shooting the 14 year old girl in Pakistan because she promoted education for girls. Someone posted it on FB and someone else said that you shouldn’t tar the whole bunch because of the actions of a few and I thought to myself, fuck that. Regardless of culture, regardless of religious upbringing and regardless of where, by the birth lottery, you happen to be born, there are things that are inherently right and there are things that are inherently wrong on this planet and it is our responsibility as thinking, feeling human beings to stand up to the bullshit of “cultural sensitivity” and point out these evil acts. Loudly and constantly.

Unfortunately, there is a rising chorus in this country about cultural sensitivity and the fact that we shouldn’t judge people who do obviously horrible things because that’s how their society or religion is organized and those unspeakably evil acts are what it allows and disallows it’s population to do. Again, fuck that. I don’t give a shit what god they believe in and what superstitious bullshit they were indoctrinated with, things like female genital mutilation, public square beheadings, honor killings, selling daughters to settle debts and blood feuds…and all the rest of the Neanderthal shit that is carried out in the name of anything, let alone religion…is just fucking wrong. Period. End of sentence.

I don’t have to recognize their right to follow their religion, their right to self-governance, their right to live within their cultural boundaries and whatever other bullshit rights they want to describe as a reason for killing, maiming, shuttering and repressing the weak and disempowered around them. I only have to recognize that what they are doing is blatantly and absolutely wrong and that they should be stopped from doing it again.

Does their religion preach that women are second class citizens without the inherent rights of males, that they are no more important than the goats and donkeys they own? Fuck them, their religion is wrong and they are wrong.

Does their society allow and, in fact, encourage them to settle arguments by killing those who have dishonored them, by stoning or beheading them in the streets. Fuck them, their society is wrong and they are wrong.

If they carry out these horrible, unspeakable acts, for whatever reason, then as a human being, born on this planet with the same inalienable rights and responsibilities as every other human, I judge them to be evil and wrong because what they do is nothing but evil and wrong.

Period.

End of sentence.