On Feeling Frustration With My Culture –

     I returned from China two weeks ago, after a three-week trip to three cities, two of which I spent over a week visiting.  I have little recollection of the first couple of days home, swathed in a jet-lagged fog as I must have been.  I had, as a friend’s daughter describes it, “jet legs.”

    The next few days involved what has become my standard decompression after these trips.  I’m still not sure how I work my way out of it – whether I recover, or whether I simply desensitize further each time.  Let me explain. 

     I’ve made five of these trips to China now, during which I’ve worked with an incredible foundation (halfthesky.org) in orphanages in eleven different cities.  The cities vary with the extent of western influence they’ve suffered – some are still blessedly devoid of McDonald’s and KFC and Wal-Mart; their bloated corporate shadows have already darkened others.   Those without such western “flavor” are endlessly more intriguing to explore.     

    What all the locations have in common, though, is the visual evidence, everywhere, of both a poverty we in the West can’t imagine, and a work ethic we’ve all but lost.  I watch farmers trudge into town carrying baskets of brilliant green produce fresh from their small patches of ground – a trek they repeat daily.  Some have land tucked into the nearby hills, some scratch out just enough space in the local hutong or next to a dusty construction site to get by.  

     They set up shop at …

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Modern Heroes and Modern Politicians

When did careful planning and execution become un-cool in real life? Probably about the same time it became un-cool in Hollywood. 

Think how the American hero has evolved. He used to be smart, principled and disciplined.  Not anymore.  Where we used to have student-of-the-game Ted Williams, we now have Barry Bonds.  Where we used to have Atticus Finch, Rick Blaine and Jefferson Smith we have hot-headed Lt. Daniel Kaffee (played by Tom Cruise).  Planners and careful executers include heroes as diverse as Rocky Bilboa and Gandhi.  Heroes-who-plan include soldiers from starkly different backgrounds, such as the soldiers in The Great Escape and The Dirty Dozen. 

Modern television and movies don’t offer heroes who intelligently plan and collaborate with others to save the day.  A television show offering this in the 60’s was Mission Impossible.  The Impossible Mission Force was a group of specialists who actually sat down to plan their mission at the beginning of each show. 

Modern heroes rarely sit down to plan their missions.  They bristle at the thought of collaborating.  Modern protagonists are reactive, not planners. Think of Indiana Jones, Han Solo, Terminator II.  These are individualistic hot headed rejecters of collaboration.  When they succeed in the end it is because they got lucky at that last desperate moment, not because they pondered contingencies before setting out.   Interestingly, if you want planning and execution, look to Hollywood’s villains, people such as Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader or Batman’s Joker.

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