One Red Hot Country Mama!

  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.

napkin – Every Flower is a Soul
Originally uploaded by digihuman.

I find this story about a man who made a series of 140 hand-drawn napkins for his three daughters very touching!

"I started doing the napkins while I was unemployed and making their lunches for school. I did 3 a day, one for each daughter. After many months I felt sort of depressed because, as funny as it sounds, it was the my main creative outlet, the only artwork I was doing at the time, and they were all being thrown away every day."

In the end one of his daughters saved them and surprised him with them on Father’s Day.

The story shows how present and connected fathers can be with their children (in a very creative and non-traditional way). Apparently, not only did his daughters look forward to reading them, but their friends at school looked did as well. I grew up without a father (he died when I was 6) so maybe I find it especially touching… but I think that most people can look at this guy as a great fatherly role model in a world where there aren’t enough of those.

Jargon – annoying isn’t it? Frequently, the people who use it are ones who want to appear smarter than others through using words that they don’t understand. It is also used by people who don’t really understand what is going on, so they repeat words that others have used before instead of communicating their own point. This runs counter to the whole point of communication – it should be inclusive, not made for only a specific group to understand. After all, communication should seek to elucidate, not complicate.

Excess Voice, a copy writing newsletter I subscribe to, created this hilarious Business Jargon Copy Contest where they asked readers to submit their funniest obfuscating jargon and put the winners on mugs. Here are some of the funniest entries, enjoy:

Shift my paradigm before I’ve had my morning coffee and I’ll core your competencies.

Our alliance stands alone in demonstrating the extensivity of integrated partnerships with other collaboratives.

You can take your bleeping paradigm to the next level and drop-kick it from 30,000 feet, pal.

We need consensus on the agenda ASAP — and I’m talking COB — or we’re DOA. Got that?

We appear to have begun an upstream shift while simultaneously experiencing a paddle deficiency.

Next time you are sitting in a meeting and hearing stuff like this, hopefully it will make you smile… and don’t worry if you don’t understand… the person using it might not understand what he is saying either.