Live Your Life Be Free!

After finishing It’s the Crude Dude by Linda McQuaig (which I don’t recommend – see review on the left) I started thinking again on the track of energy independence. Although there are many flaws in McQuaig’s logic, such as ignoring  basic economic principles of supply and demand and glazing over historical events such as Saddam Hussein’s brutal treatment of his own people, she did have one shining good point… we have to find alternatives to oil to fuel our energy demand.

She states that the oil industry is actually subsidized in many ways, through:

• government subsidies to the energy sector
• car sector that encourages this mode of transportation over rail
• tax advantages promoting the use of the car
• billions of dollars on the construction and maintenance of roads (which outweighs the amount collected in gasoline taxes)

She also mentions the multi-billion-dollar invasion of Iraq as a hidden cost of oil. Whether you agree with McQuaig’s political views or not, at least one of the points above must resonate. Imagine if we leveraged even a fraction of those billions of dollars towards researching and distributing alternatives to oil such as hydrogen energy?  We would certainly be ahead of the of where we are today.

With the Global Warming Effect now nearly certain according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported by the BBC:

In 2001, it said that it was "likely" that human activities lay behind the trends observed at various parts of the planet; "likely" in IPCC terminology means between 66% and 90% probability.

Now, the panel concluded that it was at least 90% certain that human emissions of greenhouse gases rather than natural variations are warming the planet’s surface.

Why don’t we move our money and subsidies to non-polluting, renewable resources? I was happy to see at leat one US politician, Hillary Clinton, talking about the potential to move the US (who has 4% of the world population and produces 25% of the emissions according to McQuaig) in a direction of alternatives. 

This is another topic which it is easy to get discouraged by, but the fact that there are alternatives if we reach for them offers at least some optimism for our future. It also allows us to move to a world where we are relying on science for our energy rather than on a non-renewable resource at the center of many of our world conflicts.

bear on ice
Originally uploaded by Marlis1.

Many of us crave thinking in black and white… but psychology offers little of this type of guidance, with its multiple theories and interpretations. One of the few black-and-white pieces of advice they offer (cognitive behavioral theory in particular) is to not engage in the 10 cognitive distortions. You can see a list here.

For example, statements like "never" or "always" are distortions. Someone could say "I will never get out of debt" – but of course, it is possible that they could. Even if they are not very good at saving money, they could somehow get a windfall in the form of a great job or an inheritance. They could also possibly find a bag of money on the street… or a myriad of other options. Who knows, but "never" is discounting many possibilities, so if someone is saying it, it means that their thinking is distorted.

Another example is when someone labels themselves as "stupid". Maybe that person has made some stupid decisions or is stupid in some or many areas, but they are not stupid in every single aspect of their life. Even if they are not genius in any way whatsoever, they are may at least be average in some areas.

At the heart of the distortions is illogical thinking – and this thinking occurs when we are under stress. So, anyone who values thinking rationally, will like the black-and-white rule of not indulging in the distortions… and will try to battle them whenever they come up for themselves and with others.

My friend and I have a little mnemonic device to remember the distortions (which will explain the polar bear ).

It is: Polar bears fly over the globe while pretending to mind control. The end.

Or: Polar (Polarized thinking) Bears (Blame of self) Fly (Filtering-mental) Over (Overgeneralization) the Globe (Global labeling) while Pretending (Personalization) to Mind (Mind Reading) Control (Control fallacy). The End (Emotional Reasoning).

Okay, maybe not exactly inspirational, but at least it helps us recognize the cognitive distortions (which is difficult under stress), realize that they aren’t real (the definition of a distortion) and most importantly, combat them with logical thinking.

So, it seems that the black-and-white advice offered by psychologists… is to always think in greys. Leave it up to them to be so cryptic!

  I was at the gym on Sunday watching the screens while running and sweating and CBC veteran reporter Joe Schlesinger was on talking about elephants. Through the reduction in their natural habitat by expanding human settlement and increased poaching, elephants are becoming more violent, some suffering from Elephant Breakdown, a kind of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

The show went to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee (with the very cool URL of www.elephants.com) a 2,700 acre sanctuary dedicated to caring for old, sick and needy elephants. There are currently 19 living there. Some of the elephants have killed humans, a crime that would usually be punishable by death, but the sanctuary accepts elephants as the social, emotional animals that they are, with long memories and ability to recover from their stress through therapy.

A New York Times Magazine article posted on their site by Charles Siebert writes thoroughly on the subject:

All across Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia, from within and around whatever patches and corridors of their natural habitat remain, elephants have been striking out, destroying villages and crops, attacking and killing human beings. In fact, these attacks have become so commonplace that a whole new statistical category, known as Human-Elephant Conflict, or H.E.C., was created by elephant researchers in the mid-1990’s to monitor the problem.

Even in India, where elephants were considered a deity, a headline of a newspaper warns “To Avoid Confrontation, Don’t Worship Elephants.”  Why is this happening?

Elephants, when left to their own devices, are profoundly social creatures. A herd of them is, in essence, one incomprehensibly massive elephant: a somewhat loosely bound and yet intricately interconnected, tensile organism. Young elephants are raised within an extended, multitiered network of doting female caregivers that includes the birth mother, grandmothers, aunts and friends. These relations are maintained over a life span as long as 70 years.

Why is the network weakening?

This fabric of elephant society, Bradshaw and her colleagues concluded, had effectively been frayed by years of habitat loss and poaching, along with systematic culling by government agencies to control elephant numbers and translocations of herds to different habitats.

What happens when they lose that network?

The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans who’ve watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression. Studies of the various assaults on the rhinos in South Africa, meanwhile, have determined that the perpetrators were in all cases adolescent males that had witnessed their families being shot down in cullings.

Wow. It is hard to ignore the similarities between elephant society and human society – animal researchers strive to avoid anthropomorphism in order to stay objective, but I can see how it is hard to resist. After the show ended, I had that feeling of helplessness and discouragement that comes from watching a show like that in Toronto, where there is extremely little I can do any time soon to help. I had a stressful day to worry about at work and I have bills to pay. Now I am also worried about the human race causing an animal crisis… I am only 1 in 6 billion…

I got off of the treadmill and went to lift some weights and started thinking more about elephants. The Bronx Zoo in New York City is no longer holding elephants in captivity because of the harm that it causes them. Awareness is good. The woman who founded the Elephant Sanctuary used to manage elephants for entertainment and now she has dedicated her life to providing awareness about the elephant crisis. That is an inspiration. I choose to replace that helpless and worried feeling with compassion. And one day, who knows, maybe I can do something.

I was doing some research on creative fund raising through the Internet and found Paul Sanchez’s site, 8 Wishes. He has the big idea to raise $1 million dollars for children with dyslexia and learning differences. As a person who has suffered from dyslexia and ADD himself he understands how it can hold people back. To raise awareness, he went on a 10,000 mile solo bike ride around the perimeter of the United States in 2004 visiting 13 children with learning disabilities and uploaded a video about it to a site called Metacafe (mine had an ad at the beginning about the air force – don’t close the window – it gets better!).

Inspired by the ride, he made 8 wishes to raise money and awareness. You can see a list of the wishes here. One of his wishes has already been granted- meeting Paul Orfalea, the CEO of Kinkos who has a learning disability. Seeing Orfalea, who doesn’t read e-mails (?!) made me think about how it takes all kinds of different business people to make industry work, not just one rigid type. Paul is hinting that another wish is about to be granted soon. He also wants to be featured by 88 websites, so I am glad to contribute!

As I meet more smart people who have been held back learning disabilities, it stresses to me the importance of making our education system more inclusive. Congratulations to Paul thinking big and for bringing visibility (in a super-original way) to this issue.

snow fort by moon light
Originally uploaded by gunshot iguana.

I was talking to my 7-year-old niece the other day about what the kids are now-a-days doing for fun on the playground in the winter. After talking about sliding and throwing snow, we got to one of my favorites – the snow castle. NB for those who live in warmer places – this is a big structure created by kids, where they take snow that is usually piled up by a plow cleaning up the street or the schoolyard and create it into a fort.

I asked my niece about her experience with the snow fort, but she said she stays away from it. "Usually there is a boy there who bosses everyone around. It is always a Grade 3" she said with downcast eyes (she is in Grade 1). Then I remembered, that yes, usually there was a kid who would try to be "King of the Castle" who would stand on or near the top of the fort and boss everyone else around, ruining all of the sculpting and creative architecture that can take place, and turning people into his little slaves.

I almost blurted out "that is why your Aunt isn’t married, because she hates Kings of the Castle – she wants to do her own thing". But I resisted since I don’t want to sound jaded in front of my special little niece… although the thought crossed my mind over and over again. Author Ann Lamott expresses her dislike of being bossed by a man that she is living with beautifully and I will paraphrase: "I don’t want big foot stomping around with the TV blaring asking me what time dinner will be on the table". It is the same way that I feel. I lived with that dominating man in my mid-twenties and although I don’t relish living alone, I will never go back to a life like that.

Kings of the Castle are not only in domestic life, but they are also in the work place. They are the ones that sap all of the spirit out of projects, and choose a domination role instead of a leadership one.  It is the man who will take over the more fun strategic and visible parts of the project, and order everyone else to do their parts to his exact instructions as if they were machines… instead of allowing everyone to contribute in their own unique way and only giving them visibility if something goes wrong. It is the woman (a Queen of the Castle which is in my experience a rarer occurance than a King) who will refuse to let there be any debate or discussion, and will force her opinion on everyone, even if it is not the best course of action or it doesn’t even make sense.

So – in the school yard, I am sure there are kids who will be engineers and architects, and who can envision incredible new ways to build the castles. There are also kids who are artists, and can think of neat ways to decorate the castle with sculptures or designs. There are also natural leaders (instead of dominators) who could bring out the best in people. But somehow, the King of the Castle is on top so no one can show their true talent. Yes, there are ways to dispose of the King, but rarely does it happen. Instead most people just do what my niece does – play somewhere else.

Since in the work place that is usually not an option, most people just check out emotionally and psychologically, becoming the King’s drones instead of contributing to their highest extent. How can we get around the King without becoming a drone? I want to know too. I will do some research and some living and write it in a later post… once I figure it out.