Problem-Solving: Not the Time for Debating Blame

 

You’ve seen it on these pages many times.  One of our fellow bloggers who writes almost exclusively about current events or politics attempts to lay out for our consideration a solution to one of the world’s diciest problems.  And soon someone swoops in and wants to rehash the whys, wherefores, and especially, whos that lead to the dilemma in the first place.

I learned early in my career as a manager of people that the one thing that prevents reaching solutions to almost any problem is the human desire to establish blame.  I noticed that no matter how many times we circled the table and allowed team members to speculate about the cause of the problem, we never got any closer to a solution until we focused on “from this day forward.”

Some believe it is not possible to solve a problem without knowing how we got to that point.  I certainly agree, if for no other reason than to avoid making the same mistakes going forward.  But there is a vast difference between a timeline that delineates a chain of events that led to the crisis and circles on an organization chart that point out who on the chart took a misstep.  There is nothing about that activity that does anything more than make the people who aren’t circled feel safe and smug.

The screw-ups, if there are any, can be dealt with at another time, in another place.

In our current Presidential campaigns, instead of telling us what they intend to do starting on January 2, 2013, our candidates insist on talking about what did or didn’t happen during the past three and a half years.  Well, that’s fun for those of us who get off on verbal one-upmanship and blistering TV ads, but it gives voters nothing upon which to base an intelligent vote.

Even if one believes the incumbent President caused every problem the U.S. faces today –which is, of course, ludicrous – shouldn’t our next big decision be based on well-defined and specific action items aimed at economic recovery, improved foreign affairs, public education, the future of the military and the like?  Does it really make sense for those who are supporting Mitt Romney only because he is not Barack Obama to do so without first finding out what Romney plans to do?

Obama has not lived up to the hype, but he has certainly amassed a hell of a lot more experience in the Oval Office than Romney has.  If the train has skipped off the rails, the administration most capable of righting any mistakes made is the one currently in office.  While the challenger, if he should be elected, is undergoing on-the-job training, the enormous pile of problems sitting on POTUS’s desk will be no closer to solution – in fact, they will sit there and proliferate.

If ever there were a time to think about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it is now.  The blame for the mountain of problems will be sorted out by the historians of the future.  No doubt their assessments will be an amalgam of multiple administrations over multiple decades.  But in the meantime, it is imperative that our government leaders deal with the elephants on the conference room tables before they become an out-of-control, nation-ending stampede.

No amount of finger-pointing, fabrication of factoids, or vitriol is going to change the predicament of this nation.  What we need from both candidates is real leadership – right now.

50th High School Reunion A Blast

Proviso East High School Pirates, Maywood, Illinois

It felt much like one of the school dances we loved to have.  These were the times when the squares (nerds,) the hoods (hoodlums,) the social climbers, the brains and the jocks mingled relatively unmolested.  What happened outside, after the dance was over, was another story.

When I finally sashayed into the ballroom, they were are seated, eating their salads.  I had completely missed the cocktail hour.  I was informed at the reception table that my friends were frantic with worry, fearing I had broken my word and was a no-show. 

I have always been a known compulsive punctual.  I used to have nightmares about being late for school decades after leaving high school.  I would much rather arrive too early and kill time than be late for anything.

This trip had a two-pronged purpose.  It had been much too long since I had visited my mother, so the expense to travel to Chicago was easier to justify.   I flew into Midway Airport, rented a car for the weekend, and drove south for 45 minutes to Matteson, Illinois, where my mother lives.  My plan was to spend the nights there and drive the 44 miles to the reunion on Saturday evening.  Twenty-eight of those miles would be on the Tri-State Toll Road (I-294,) a roadway I used daily for many years before I left Chicago for California.

I had forgotten about Illinois’ penchant for tearing up their roadways every weekend, blocking two lanes and confusing the already über-confusing toll collection plazas and the exit ramps with orange traffic cones.  To add insult to injury, the far-too-closely spaced toll plazas represented $1.50 each.  Between exiting too soon and having to re-enter the toll road and paying yet another toll –TWICE-- I arrived an hour late and $6 poorer.

When I finally found the hotel there was no valet parking.  Instead I had to park myself in a vast open lot -- in the farthest row from the entrance of the hotel – and walk an unspeakable number of steps in my high heels to find the ballroom.  So, in addition to being embarrassed for being so conspicuous in my tardiness, my feet were killing me and I hadn’t even danced yet.

Then the class clown, damn him, yells out “Ladies and Gentlemen, the late Lezlie H.!”

My friends from majorettes had saved me a seat at their table.  I have kept in touch with them ever since we found each other on Facebook a few years ago.  We seemed to pick up where we left off fifty years ago.  Sure we all looked older and our bodies had changed, but our chatter was easy and endless.  Two of them introduced me to their second husbands.  Their first husbands had also been in our graduating class, but they were not present. One had died. 

The third former baton twirler was still married to her high school sweetheart, John.  The two of them seem to have thrived over the years. They were youthful, glamorous, fit and happy.  It was charming and highly unusual.

My first boyfriend in life was there with his wife.  Teddy and I had been an item in pre-school at age 4.  He had given me a Captain Midnight decoder ring that he had gotten out of a cereal box to seal our union.  All through childhood, we remained close.  In high school we danced the bop every morning in the gym, before the bell to start the day.  And we danced it again to “The Jailhouse Rock,” fifty years later on Saturday night.  It was as familiar as riding a bicycle.

Also at the table were two woman with whom I have tangled politically on Facebook.  They are both ultra-conservative, but one has been restrained in her trolling on my cross-posted blog pieces on politics.  The other has not been restrained and ultimately caused me to un-friend her.  Her insults were beyond the pale. It’s so funny, though. She had nothing much to say to me at all Saturday night.  It could have been because of the fact that, after I greeted her warmly, I kept my back to her the entire time.  I don’t know. Bravado in person just isn’t the same as on Facebook, is it.?

I suspect there were far more right-leaning people at the reunion than we lefties, but no one wanted to get into verbal sparring at such a festive occasion.

Out of the 700 or so graduates in our class of 1962, 92 were deceased.  In attendance were about 150.  Out the Plus 30, the group of students I belonged to who had been selected out of the feeder schools on the basis of IQ and aptitude for an educational experiment, 17 showed up.  Two of them had gotten married to each other ten years ago.  One of them got enough drinks in him to tell me he had had a crush on me the whole time we were in the Plus 30.  I kind of got that idea without his announcement because of the way his arm kept finding its way around what used to be my waist.  I never did meet his wife, who was “around here somewhere.”

One man I didn’t recognize who was still visibly socially awkward walked up to me and said “Weren’t you a class officer?”  I nodded.  “I voted for you.”  So I thanked him profusely and moved on.  Bless his heart.

It was really big fun.  I stayed until after 11 p.m., found my way back to my mother’s house with no problems and spent the rest of the weekend learning things about my mom I never knew before.  It was a kind of oral history.  It is worthy of a book.  I hope I have the chops, because I think I’ll take it on.

Cheers to the Proviso East High School (Maywood, IL) Class of 1962.  Thanks for the memories.

Fifty Years Ago Today…

 

Proviso High School Freshman Class Officers 1958

…I had just arrived on campus, parents in tow, to begin an adventure that no one in my known lineage had experienced.  College.

I have written about some of my escapades during those idyllic four years in the prairies of Wisconsin.  I matriculated at the small liberal arts Ripon College in the small town of the same name that prides itself at being the official Birthplace of the Republican Party.  Go figure.

But this post isn’t about that.  This post is about the four years prior to that beautiful autumn day when I first heard the lovely strains of the bell tower carillon that would keep me on schedule, more or less, for the next few years.

Tomorrow morning I will catch a flight to Chicago to visit my soon-to-be-88-year-old mother…and to attend the 50th high school reunion of the Proviso East H.S. Class of 1962.

High school.  Mine was not the angst-filled horror so many woman of my generation report.  There was angst, though.  Plenty of it, now that I think about it.  But more memorable were the good times, the personal achievements, the great friendships…and the freedom from those gawdawful navy blue gabardine uniform jumpers with the white Peter Pan collars.  Oh how I hated that getup.

High school was the time I really had to come to terms with my mixed heritage. Until then, I had been sheltered and coddled by family and Catholic elementary school nuns who were absolutely fascinated by this social science experiment named Lezlie. None of them had been exposed to “colored” children for very long.  The half-dozen or so of black families who made the sacrifice to afford the tuition had only been allowed to enroll their kids for a few years before my arrival.

But I didn’t fit their model of a black child in almost any way.  We were all well-behaved, at least most of the time.  But not all of us were prepared for the rigors of the brand of education those nuns put down.  I was.  Little goodie two shoes, was I, with impeccable manners and an IQ that literally shocked them.  All of that fun stuff resulted in me being selected for a special high school experiment.

So I walked into that gigantic high school building with a target on my back, although I didn’t know it yet. 

Proviso East is a township high school, with feeder elementary children coming from at least six different towns.  There were 4,000 of us!  And out of that number, thirty (30) new freshman were selected based on IQ and achievement in the lower grades to join an accelerated program that became known as the Plus 30.  Now do you see the target?

Now in this horde of hormones were children from family backgrounds very typical of the Midwest at the time.  I never knew how many “colored kids” there were – people didn’t talk about things like that back then.  But I figure we wouldn’t have filled an entire study hall that seated roughly 40-50 students.

There was a large contingency of Italian Americans who grew up in Melrose Park, Illinois.  There were numerous children with unpronounceable names like Kwiatowski and Ciechanowski.   There were Jewish kids from north Maywood, the white part of the segregated town I was born and raised in.  And there were WASPS like my English/German second husband, who hailed from Forest Park.

I loved being a leader, which seemed to come quite naturally, so within the first month I decided I would run for class secretary.  I really wanted to be president, but this was 1958. Women were either vice-president or secretary, period.  I knew my “place.”  For the time being, that is.

Then it hit.  The heartbreaking, totally unexpected and utterly baffling racial backlash against me.  From the black kids in the class!

Who the hell did I think I was, they asked among themselves?  They didn’t know me because I didn’t attend the public school with them.  What they did know – Maywood was a very small town for a Chicago suburb – was that I was from “that Hurst family.” She’s light, bright and almost white… and we hate her.

Week after week, month after month, year after year, I was “the bitch” the black girls loved to hate.  At least once a week a rumor would make its way to my ears that The Girls would be waiting for me to pass the park on the walk home.  They were going to kick my yella ass.

Thank God the black boys in the class didn’t feel that way.  In fact, they would gather me up at dismissal and escort me home, past the hissing, spewing crowd of girls and home to my Mama.

So I had some decisions to make – after I cried about three rivers of tears after school in the safety of our basement recreation room.  Would I try to endear myself with these mean girls who wasted no time learning how to smoke and drink liquor in the girls rest rooms, or would I make my own way, on my own terms?

Thankfully, I had the ovaries to choose the latter.  I endured the mean-girl wrath as I won that election; became a permanent fixture on the honor roll, in spite of all those “uppity advanced classes” I had to take; became the first black girl to become a drum majorette; and was the first black student to make the National Honor Society (that I know of).

Oh how those girls hated my beige ass.

So, it has been with keen curiosity that I have approached this reunion. I’ve only attended one other – the 10th – and the Mean Black Girls maintained their snarling distance. By then, I found them both funny and just a little bit worthy of pity.  We were close to thirty years old.  I had left high school behind me.  They hadn’t, apparently.

As it turns out, it looks like I will be in a most familiar position this Saturday night.  I might be the only African American woman returning to celebrate our half-century after high school, according to the list of paid participants.  Some of my antagonists are already dead.  Others have moved to other parts of the country, like I did.  The others probably think it is beneath them…or is it above them?

I am looking forward to seeing my real high school friends.  I hope I’ll be able to recognize them!

Regrets? I’ve Had A Few

 

Events of the times are shutting me down.  For nearly three years now I have been spilling my story like a dental patient on nitrous oxide.  My not-so-easy childhood, my adventures as an adolescent and a young adult, my heartbreaks and heartaches.  I have tried to describe the most satisfying element, motherhood without creating toothaches and nausea for my readers.

I’ve bared my soul and gone where very few of you would dream of going. My writing, when it is applied to my memoirs, has been described as raw, brave, disturbing, authentic, disarming, and foolish.  But it is my story.  It is who I am.

The process of blogging my life has been enlightening and cathartic.  I have sorted through those things for which I blamed myself when, in fact, they were not within my power to control.  I’ve opened wounds I didn’t know were there and closed the ones I had refused to even acknowledge – until I started writing.

I’m not sure exactly what is happening to me now, but it feels as if I’ve said everything I have to say about myself and my life.  The rest has yet to happen.  It is rather sobering to think an entire life to date can be examined and documented in so short a time. 

Amid the technical frustrations provided by my blogging site of choice, I find myself disinterested in writing, unable to concentrate on the words of my blogging community and almost devoid of any creative ideas.  There are other places to blog, you say?  Yes, I know.  I have two of them. 

I believe I have succumb to sensory overload.  Too much information, not enough time to really process it, and a sense of unfamiliar helplessness have flooded my muse’s engine. I sit and play mindless computer games to pass the time while I busy my mind with worry about the world, the country, the state, the city, my neighborhood and, of course, my child.

Looking forward, something that has always propelled me through my eventful life, now only foretells more struggle, more pain, more worry.  And so I look back.

No Regrets

These are the things I’ve done in life that I will never regret, no matter how far off the rails the things around me skid:

• Being born
• Embracing education and owning my intelligence
• Staying my course, albeit with more than a few detours
• Having a son
• Nurturing seven dogs to the point of spoiling them rotten
• Rejecting the stifling, repressive and controlling tenets of not only my birth religion, but all religions
• Working hard enough to achieve what I though were relevant and honorable goals
• Taking care of the one and only body I will ever have
• Quitting smoking at age 28 and never, ever returning to the habit
• Rejecting alcohol and drugs as a means to escape reality

Regrets

These are the things it took me all my years to learn.  How I wish I could have come equipped at birth with this knowledge :

• Declining my admission to the University of Pennsylvania graduate school of psychology
• Marrying too young and too soon after meeting the groom
• Buying into the myth of the American Dream
• Equating success with acquisition of things and titles
• Suppressing my true feelings out of fear of losing things and titles
• Spending too freely and saving too sparingly
• Not having more children
• Wasting my time trying to control everything and everyone around me

I once believed, like the title of an old song, the best is yet to come.  Now, I just don’t know.  Oh, I will expound on the buffoonery of our esteemed politicians and commiserate with my writing friends over the silliness of humankind.  Something has already happened while I was writing this post that will probably spawn another post for the right-leaning readers to throw up all over.  It’s what I do,   But somewhere along the way, my heart stopped participating.

Will WWIII Be Started Online?

 

Loose Lips Sink Ships, a variation of a poster slogan used during World War Two, seems extremely relevant today, albeit in a different sense.

Back then it was a reminder to Americans to watch what they say to avoid giving away strategic war secrets to the enemy.  The “enemy” was more likely to be an individual stranger who, upon hearing some errant comment, would tip off the opponents and thwart the American plan.

In 2012, the “enemy” has very different characteristics. 

For one thing, the “enemy” is fluid, unpredictable, and sometimes illogical.

As U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton has been pointing out, the United States was hugely instrumental in liberating the people of Libya.  That, however, has failed to impress the anti-American elements who might have used the YouTube trailer of a blasphemous schlock film -- produced by some guy who allegedly duped the actors into participating and whose motives are still very much a mystery--as an excuse or a cover for a previously-planned guerrilla attack on the American embassy in Benghazi. U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, State Department information management officer Sean Smith, and former Navy Seals Glen Doherty and Tyrone S. Woods died in that assault, according to the State Department.

As a result of the irresponsible content of a low-budget film that deliberately mocks Islam’s Prophet Mohammed, protesters are airing their anti-American anger in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Morocco, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories.

So, very much like the last century’s Viet Cong, “the enemy” does not wear a uniform or dog tags, is not led by a military hierarchy, and is a mixture of surreptitious plots by organized interests and spontaneous eruptions of ordinary citizens.

A second characteristic of “the enemy” in the Information Age is instant access to communications.  Instead of armies acting upon a formal declaration of war we have a relative handful of individuals, in effect, pulling the trigger with the stroke of the Enter key on a keyboard.  One American of dubious origin and allegiance now has the ability to not only leak national secrets but also to strike the match that ignites the entire Middle East.

With everybody exercising their freedom of speech, without concern for consequences, to the billions of the world’s electronically-connected people, it is not a stretch at all to foresee a conflagration of global proportions caused by one shady ex-convict with multiple aliases who is high on hate. 

What hath technology wrought?

Michelle…Our Belle

 

Sont des mots qui vont tres bien ensemble  -- The Beatles

Our elegant, statuesque, brainy First Lady knocked ‘em dead last night.  I’m still not clear if she was using the prompter or if she was speaking extemporaneously, but one thing I am sure of is she spoke from her lovely heart.

Gee Whiz…I love that guy – Carla Thomas

I had a conversation with a friend this morning about how anyone could have ever referred to Mrs. Obama as an “Angry Black Woman.”  This woman isn’t angry.  She is in love.  She is in love with her husband, thank goodness, but she is also in love with this country.  To fail to see that is to fail to open one’s eyes and ears.

Michelle Obama is in love with her daughters, her oft-stated raison d'être. Her priorities are well-ordered and well-known.  Money?  I’m sure she thinks it’s nice to have it, but it does not seem to rank all that high on her list.  What does rank high are things we all care about (or should): health, family and other people.

There were people watching who actually zeroed in on her manicure and wondered on Twitter what the brand and shade were.  Really?  On the news this morning, I heard someone speculate that her shoes were from J. Crew!

But while the vapid were judging her wardrobe, I was moved to tears by her words and her delivery of words like these:

“Well, today, after so many struggles and triumphs and moments that have tested my husband in ways I never could have imagined, I have seen firsthand that being president doesn’t change who you are – it reveals who you are.”

One of the words that appeared most in her speech was “opportunity.”  To me, that one word is the linchpin of the American Dream we have heard so much about these past few weeks.  Most Americans don’t expect to get something for nothing, contrary to the beliefs of so many on the right.  Most Americans simply want a fair shot at achieving that dream.  They want a real opportunity to work hard and pull themselves and their families up into a decent life.

Ann Romney, in my opinion, also did an exemplary job at delivering her address at the RNC.  As a woman – a woman who is always looking for and acknowledging other women who excel – I was proud to hear myself think that Ann Romney speaks with authority and conviction.  In fact, she does so far better than her husband, the candidate.   I simply didn’t believe the words she spoke as much as I believed Michelle’s.

Whichever way this election turns out, these men who would be President in 2013 both have powerful campaigners in their life partners.  They are both smart.  They are both great mothers.  They are both beautiful.

In these times when money-grubbing television executives prefer to make millionaires out of truly angry black women by exploiting their loud, obnoxious, street-based antics – NeNe Leakes of The Real Housewives of Atlanta comes immediately to mind – it is gratifying and pride-inducing to see a black woman from humble beginnings work and choose her way to a true role model for women of any and all colors and creeds. 

I am woman watch me grow
See me standing toe to toe
As I spread my lovin' arms across the land
But I'm still an embryo
With a long long way to go
Until I make my brother understand – Helen Reddy