School safety

Public health experts suggest that school re-openings can go smoothly if parents and families prepare and heed precautions to prevent the spread of Covid-19. 
Yet schools cannot neglect the most vulnerable students. At least 25 percent of children in the United States aged 2 to 8 years have at least one chronic health condition – and as many of 30 million children with one or more of such conditions could be especially vulnerable to Covid-19 infection. Some families may not realize that their children are vulnerable as some ailments like heart conditions can go undetected for years. Heart disease is the fifth leading cause of death for US children ages 1 to 5.

The American Academy of Pediatrics reports more than 300,000 cases of Covid-19 among US children, with rates rising by 40 percent during the last two weeks of July. Three states - California, Florida and Arizona - represent about a quarter of those cases. There are inconsistencies in how states collect data along with disagreements over the definition of a child. Most cases among children are asymptomatic but the long-term consequences are unknown. 

Mixed messages and inconsistencies in data collection do not help during a pandemic.

The UN Global Compact points out that the pandemic is “testing the world’s humanity and resilience at a time that is already marked by acute inequality.” Poor planning for the Covid-19 pandemic – and the failure of some communities to mandate masks and social distancing – could threaten learning and delay economic productivity for years to come.

All individuals must come to terms that schools, work and other social interactions will not return to normal any time soon, not until cases subside or public health experts develop efficient treatments and vaccines. Attempts to hide the pandemic’s consequences are futile as more families lose loved ones to the disease and communities confront ongoing hospitalizations and deaths.

One high school in Georgia learned this after administrators made donning masks a “personal choice.” At least two students posted images of a crowded school hallway – no social distancing in effect. The school suspended at least two students before swiftly, warning the student body about "consequences" for such public posts. The school swiftly reversed the punishment after the story received national attention. Communities want to know what schools look like - and will hold those political and school leaders who rush economic re-openings and skimp on protections accountable.

One suspended student explained to CNN that she understood school rules prohibited recording and posting school scenes on social media during the day without an administrator’s permission. But referring to the words of the late Congressman John Lewis, she expressed concern for vulnerable students, staff members and family members and said she regarded posting the photograph as “good and necessary trouble.”

Secrecy is not protection. School children represent about 18 percent of the US population. Communities and families pay taxes, fees and tuition for education and want to ensure that schools engage in safe practices not only for the children in attendance but also the staff and parents, grandparents, neighbors and other family members who might care for them.  The school superintendent notified parents that the district will provide staff with masks and reduce crowding in school hallways, reports the Washington Post.

Children, parents and staff will speak up because their health is at sake. All are armed with phones and cameras. Protecting schools is essential as children represent the future of society. As Mohandes Gandhi noted, “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.”

 This post was updated on August 11, 2020. 

Believable

The testimony of Christine Blasey Ford before the US Senate Judicial Committee by is liberating, if not for her then for the millions of women and men who have suffered similar sexual assaults, harassment and humiliation.

She wrote a note to her congressman in July describing an incident from 36 years ago. After a day at the country club, she joined a small gathering of teens at a Washington DC suburb. She had one beer and went upstairs to use the bathroom. Once upstairs, someone pushed her from behind into a bedroom. Two intoxicated young men entered the room with her, Mark Judge and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. She describes how Kavanaugh pushed her to the bed, placed his body on top of hers and held his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream. Perhaps they thought this was roughhousing or tom-foolery, but she described terror.

The psychologist in her testimony is credible in so many ways - providing specific and vivid details along with names of others who could corroborate her report. Specifically, she recalled running into Mark Judge shortly after the evening of the assault at his place of his work - the Potomac Safeway.

Yet Republicans declined to reopen an FBI investigation or invite potential corroborating witness to testify.

Most importantly, she explained the rationale behind her hesitation in reporting and motivation for coming forward as citizen. She tried to sound a warning before the candidate was selected from a short list. She understood that the president had a list of candidates, equally qualified, and she thought the president and the senators - not necessarily the general public - should know about her experience before making a decision. She did not want to destroy Brett Kavanaugh.

But now, senators may quietly wonder if Kavanaugh should remain on the federal appeals court. If he had been truthful about these experiences and extended a sincere apology, if he did not have a background that includes other descriptions of his intoxication and belligerence, then many Americans might understand and forgive, especially if he could provide evidence of an ability to curtail his drinking.

Ford endured a polygraph exam. Could Kavanaugh do the same?

Absent an investigation that includes questioning of Mark Judge and an apology from Mark Kavanaugh about inappropriate behaviors including intoxication, the nomination should be withdrawn. Kavanaugh should expect to answer more questions about whether he should remain in his position with the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

No surprise

A pedophile scandal in Massachusetts - and more importantly, the response from church leaders - prompted me to abandon Catholicism in 1992. A decade later, I wrote about my decision in an essay entitled "The Church Must Change" for The Hartford Courant.

The decision was one of the toughest, but also best that I have ever made. I described growing up in a devout Catholic family in a Pittsburgh suburb, first in Ingram and Crafton, Pennsylvania, and later moving to another neighborhood that surrounded Our Lady of Grace Church in 1969. We attended church for about six months but soon afterward, my father, brothers, sisters and I started volunteering in a nearby county nursing home, Kane Hospital, assisting patients in wheelchairs to and from the Masses. The priest was one of the most compassionate men I have ever met - and in the essay, I described his tolerance and kindness. "We trusted and admired him completely and he never took advantage of that trust," I wrote, adding that many young Catholics had been less fortunate.

So I have only the vaguest memories of the parish priests assigned to Our Lady of Grace parish. The 900-page grand jury report released by the Pennsylvania state attorney general references Leo Burchianti at the church from June 1968 to May 1973: "Burchianti was alleged to have had inappropriate contact with at least eight young boys," reports the Grand Jury report, page 600. "These allegations included but were not limited to Burchianti: having anal or oral sex with them; inappropriately touching them; making suggestive comments to them; providing alcohol to them; allowing them to use drugs in the rectory; and inviting some to stay overnight to sleep in his bed with him."

Because of our volunteer work at the nursing home, I did not know Burchianti other than to watch him preside over a few Masses. I heard no stories of abuse. I had already come to view religion as more a practical means of reaching out to help others and less for personal introspection and prayer. 

I left the church years later while living in the suburbs of Boston. In 1992, the former Catholic priest James Porter was accused of molesting more than 100 children in Massachusetts New Mexico and Minnesota. Church leaders in the area did not respond well to criticism that they hid the actions of a pedophile by transferring him to new locales. In May of that year, Boston's then Cardinal Bernard Law lashed out not at Porter, but at the journalists covering the priest's crimes: "By all means, we call down God's power on the media."

That was the moment I lost all trust in the Roman Catholic Church. The leaders sought to protect an institution rather than little children. As a parent, I was immensely grateful for the media reports.

My essay for the Courant was published a decade later, March 24, 2002, when the entire nation and church reckoned with another more far-reaching scandal. I wrote about how religion, like everything else in the United States, must compete under the free-market system: "In this country, we have the privilege of free thought and speech, and we can decide which 'moral" rules imposed by religious leaders, mere mortals, should be kept and which are meant to be broken."

At the time, I was confident the Catholic Church would change: "I have no doubt that within this century, priests will be free to marry and women be encouraged to value life by using birth control." I also concluded that "if the Church waits very long, it will only be a shadow, a minor religion in this country, as it loses credibility and more Catholics discover that other religions can offer both spirituality and truth."

Ultimately, my books about religion, women and life in rural Afghanistan, Fear of Beauty and Allure of Deceit, were based on my own experiences with Catholicism and religious controls.

Once again, the church must change.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 

Grateful

"What book have you read that makes you feel as if you've been on a the journey that the narrator has taken?" Julie Lawson Timmer asked on Reddit.

A good question for finding good books. My own personal favorite is Bound for the Promised Land by Richard Marius, a story of a young man who leaves his home in Georgia for San Francisco in the 1850s, in search of his father who left for the Gold Rush, and the many characters he meets along the way.

And I'm grateful that a commenter mentioned Fear of Beauty. It's an honor to be included with the likes of The Count of Monte Christo, Heart of Darkness and The Goldfinch.

Warning !

Charities cannot and should not replace government. That was the message of the novel Allure of Deceit and it's also the warning from philanthropist Bill Gates in the article by Kate Hodal for the Guardian, as summarized by YaleGlobal Online: 

"Charitable giving may have created an incentive for governments to pursue budget cuts in every area, then replacing paid librarians with volunteers or relying on charities during major disasters. 'Although it is the world’s largest private philanthropic organisation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, founded in 2000, spends just over $3bn (£2.25bn) a year on development assistance,' reports Kate Hodal for the Guardian, adding this is "one-tenth of the US aid budget and almost one-fiftieth of the global aid budget, which stands at $143bn."

Charitable giving and work is wonderful, but no one should forget that individuals set the agenda. They have reasons and, with limited funds, they select the recipients. This is opposed to governments which presumably have a responsibility to the public at large. Theoretically in democracies,  the public selects representatives who set agendas and priorities.

Charitable work, often experimental, can teach governments about best practices. Yet for this very reason, the thousands of charities operating in any country often have contradictory goals and diverse approaches. As Gates notes, charity can provide only patchwork relief. Complete coverage of a nation or the globe by charities in tackling major needs - whether health care, education, or poverty alleviation - is impossible. Limited funds and uneven goals lacking in comprehensive coverage have transformed charity into a lottery - where nations and donors can tout a few good schools, hospitals, libraries, homes or more while many more must go without.  

Yet the challenges of illiteracy, disease or marginalization, as noted in Fear of Beauty, can quickly cross borders and can hurt us all.

Both Fear of Beauty and Allure of Deceit focus on the many contradictions of charitable giving and NGO work in Afghanistan, specifically with family planning and poverty. A woman who leads the world's largest foundation, taking control after the death of her son, targets program planning to figure out why he was murdered. Staff members of the foundation are intent on nurturing their own careers  while supporting a mission in Afghanistan that includes family planning - reducing the fertility rate from about nine children per woman in 2000 when the Taliban were in control to five. Values clash, and Afghan providers who are recipients of international aid - torn between the demands of rural village leaders and international donors - are resented, prompting them to commit fraud. Amid the flow of so much money, it becomes dangerous for anyone to argue that charities reinforce inequality or suggest that the public must set priorities after thorough review with taxation as the best funding mechanism.


Emphasizing government funding over charitable giving does not let individuals off the hook. In a connected world, we must lend a hand to others in need.  And efficiency is required with limited resources and more communities in need.

Quality

Donald Trump Jr's release today of an email exchange is stunning on many levels. The exchange suggests he understood that Russia wanted to support Donald Trump's presidential campaign with damaging information about his opponent Hillary Clinton. Younger Trump, along with Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, then campaign manager, met with a Russian attorney proffering the information in June 2016. After the meeting was proposed in an email, Donald Jr's response was quick: "If it’s what you say, I love it, especially later in the summer.” The response suggested he had little doubt about the type of support and few concerns about the source of such opposition research.

The lawyer, wanting to help the campaign, insinuated that Russians had been funding and supporting the Democratic National Committee, but had no proof. Trump Jr noted that the lawyer was "vague" and "made no sense" with "no meaningful information." He did not alert authorities like the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Instead, he and perhaps the other two took it upon themselves to determine the information was meaningless.

By all accounts, this is a clown show, and we may not ever really know all what was said during the meeting. The US president's response,  according to a statement read by the deputy White House press secretary: "My son is a high-quality person and I applaud his transparency."

The statement resonates with sarcasm considering that Donald Jr has revised descriptions about the meeting several times and is among Trump campaign officials, some who still work for the US government, forced to revise lists of meetings with foreign nationals.

Collusion, election fraud, lying to American voters should not be a surprise with this young presidency, not after the wearying campaign. What is surprising is that Donald Jr released these emails himself, as if he saw nothing wrong. As US Senator Mazie Hirono put it on Twitter, "When @realDonaldTrump said show us the evidence of collusion, I have to say, I didn't expect his son to answer."

One who may be a party to the patterns of a possible crime - a growing list of events being investigated by Robert Mueller and congressional committees - should not be praised for transparency after rushing to beat reporting by the New York Times. 

This is neither a track record of competence nor "high quality" - a disturbing and tasteless phrase, one that signals division, otherness, marginalization, insecurity and reflects troubling policy proposals that target large groups of people like Muslims and immigrants. Another son, Eric, echoed such a sentiment about Democrats during an interview: "I've never seen hatred like this. To me, they're not even people. It's so, so sad. I mean, morality is just gone. Morals have flown out the window. We deserve so much better than this as a country."

The campaign capitalized on deeming common courtesy as "political correctness" and some spokespeople even fed the resentment and encouraged scapegoating. Supporters - from emotion or a lack of education - did not question shallow reasoning or quick fixes. The media honed in on supporters' crude signs, bullying and fist fights at campaign rallies. Hillary Clinton called out the alarming behavior, using a phrase that eventually came to haunt her:

"We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic - you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people - now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks - they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America." Her remarks included another age-old signal - "Right?" - so often alerting skeptical and doleful listeners to the possibility of discriminatory words and feelings that will only cause woe to the one who dares utter them, even if only once, even though followed by swift apology.

Back to "high quality" people, a phrase that suggests that some people for are innately better than other people and deserve more - money, leeway, chances, support, opportunity to complain, cut corners, make mistakes, cheat and lie. There are better descriptors. Consider an article by Forbes - "5 qualities of charismatic people: How many do you have?" The qualities: self-confidence, including optimism; the skill to tell stories; body language that is open and approachable; relying on conversation about others and being a good listener.Those who assign labels like "high quality" may think that only they can decide rules, who must follow and need not, when perpetrators should be exposed and punished or forgiven. Those who use the phrase are insecure, desperate to be regarded as better of others, deserving of a higher standard of justice even while they make mistake after mistake after mistake.

And this is a pillar in intervening and disrupting medical decisions for British infant Charlie Gard, diagnosed as terminally ill by his doctors - assuming this represents kind, magnanimity and justice - blind to any contradictions with policies blocking thousands of refugee families from Syria many with their own infants.

Russia intervened in the US presidential election, and the United States was conned, a reflection of many voters' failure to follow the news and apply critical thinking and logic to wild populist claims designed to infuriate without delivering viable solutions..

As Nicholas Kristof notes for the New York Times, it is a sad day for the country. It's also a sad day for democracy and the globe.
 

History

History and our system of government were on display during the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing with testimony by former FBI director James Comey.For the most part, committee members were serious, prepared and non-partisan - provided numerous powerful moments as role models for all citizens.

A key point to emerge from Comey's testimony: The US intelligence community reported with high confidence that Russians meddled in the US elections, with the release of false news and attempts to breach state electoral systems. US President Donald Trump has dismissed these reports.
 
But not Comey, who testified: "... we’re talking about a foreign government that, using technical intrusion, lots of other methods, tried to shape the way we think, we vote, we act. That is a big deal. And people need to recognize it."

Our response to Comey's testimony and ongoing conduct in Washington DC will shape our system for years to come. Do we want the young, our future leaders, to learn that lying, bullying, manipulation, false narratives and framing, obsequiousness in the workplace, misplaced priorities and loyalties are normal?

Joe Manchin, senator from West Virginia, was thoughtful: "what details of this saga ... should we be focusing on, and what would you recommend us do differently?"

Comey's response: "I don’t know. I - and one of the reasons that I’m pleased to be here is I think this committee has shown the American people, although we have two parties and we disagree about important things, we can work together when it involves the core interests of the country. So I would hope you’ll just keep doing what you’re doing. It’s - it’s good in and of itself, but it’s also a model, especially for kids, that we - we are a functioning, adult democracy."

One of the great challenges of parenting is to raise children with integrity, critical thinkers who strive to do what's right even when the powers over us - whether political leaders, corporations or elders in our family - do the opposite.

Fear of Beauty, set in Afghanistan, examines the dilemma for parents at the local level as extremists with bullying ways move into the small community, trying to whip up anger against a nearby American outpost. It offers lessons in recognizing  the extremists in our midst. Some are belligerent, bullying and obvious con men with endless promises. Others are more subtle. Both types try to attack strong education systems that promote independent and critical thinking. They fear new ideas, the comparisons and choices, and even curiosity and questions. They promote the importance of a few individuals over the comment good. They employ distractions and whip up irrational fear. Among the young, they rely on favoritism and resentment to train others to be followers of twisted ideologies. And they lie repeatedly and expect others to support these lies.

Sofi, the protagonist in Fear of Beauty and mother who yearns to learn how to read, resents a the belligerent militant intimidating her remote village in Afghanistan, and she realizes that transparency is crucial: "In plan sight, the man could not commit evil." As a woman, her opinion carries little weight and she hunts for ways to resist, concluding there is "no doubt that obeying a tyrant like Jahangir, his evil plans and ruthless control of others, is as much a crime as devising those plans." 

Sofi comes to realize that children learn if their society offers comparisons that can be observed and studied - what systems, people, attitudes and approaches work best and produce the most good in daily life.

Sofi may be illiterate, but her children never have any doubt about her values and opinions for the extremists in their village - and the villages who collude with them - as a dangerous threat.

And Comey stresses the same and points to why Russian leaders fear democracy; "It’s not about Republicans or Democrats. They’re coming after America, which I hope we all love equally. They want to undermine our credibility in the face of the world. They think that this great experiment of ours is a threat to them, and so they’re going to try to run it down and dirty it up as much as possible. That’s what this is about. And they will be back, because we remain - as difficult as we can be with each other, we remain that shining city on the hill, and they don’t like it."

Comey made it clear that he longed for a special counsel to take over the investigation, and he offers hope that a quest for justice and truth will continue at the FBI:

"The organization’s great strength is that its values and abilities run deep and wide. The FBI will be fine without me. The FBI’s mission will be relentlessly pursued by its people, and that mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States.... this organization and its mission will go on long beyond me and long beyond any particular administration.... I want the American people to know this truth: The FBI is honest. The FBI is strong. And the FBI is, and always will be, independent."

It's a warning to any who seek to subvert justice and deny truth.

Bubbles

Constituents pay a price for leaders who try to avoid opponents and news that criticize their plans and policies. This is old hat for those in live in dictatorships, but it's new for the citizens of the United States and the United Kingdom.

Consider Brexit.

Former Prime Minister David Cameron made a terrible mistake allowing last year's referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union to proceed. He thought the Remain camp would win handily and this would be politically expedient for the Tories. Misinformation surged, notably that less money for EU membership would mean more funds for the National Health Service. The Leave side won and Cameron resigned.

Theresa May became prime minister, and over-confident about her abilities to negotiate a decent Brexit package, refusing to listen to valid concerns, called for a snap election. The woman who set the date for this election suggested she had no time for debate, and criticizes her opponents for their criticism.

Poor planning, misunderstanding public concerns, a lack of appreciation for the European Union, and arrogance are leaving British people with uncertainty and a flailing economy.

And then there is Donald Trump, whose campaign is being investigated along with Russian interference during the 2016 US presidential election. He will announce today whether the United States will stick with the Paris Accord, a voluntary agreement negotiated by more than 190 countries to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and combat climate change.
   
Trump promised during the campaign that he would withdraw from the Paris agreement, promising that the United States could do better by taking its own lonely path, relying on dirty coal rather htan developing clean alternative energies. 

More than 95 percent of all legitimate researchers, many businesses, most countries view climate change as a serious economic, security and environmental problem. By withdrawing, the United States will trigger a backlash. People around the globe will protest and boycott the country for rejecting what is both sound research and common sense.

Too many politicians, once in power, try to live in bubbles. They avoid critics, blame the media for raising legitimate questions. They fear open debate and town halls, hoping their contrary ways will go unnoticed or eventually be accepted by weary voters.

But so many in the world seek leaders who emphasize cooperation. Those who want to go it alone should prepare for a global backlash.  

 Photo of bubble, courtesy of  Wikimedia Commons.

Patience and vigilance

Robert Mueller, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has been appointed as a special counselor by US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein "to ensure a full and thorough investigation of the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election."

A sense of relief is sweeping throughout the country that a professional investigation will pursue the rattling claims of disruptions to US democracy.  

US intelligence officials earlier released a report concluding that Russia was behind leaks, and a stream of fake news aimed at interfering in the US presidential election, specifically to benefit Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.

The interference though the spread of outlandish stories was obvious and reported before the election. Yet most analysts underestimated the power of fake news in a developed nation, assuming that citizens with a basic education - 88 percent of US adults hold a high school degree and more than half with some college education - would apply critical thinking skills and ignore bizarre and unsubstantiated reports.

But no and a prime example was Pizzagate, a false tale that Clinton and her colleagues were running a child trafficking ring in various restaurants, including the basement of Comet, a pizza shop in Washington DC. The stories inspired a Carolina man to storm the store with weapons, firing shots and announcing he was there to save the children. The young man was arrested and pled guilty, and he will be sentenced in June. Far-right conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones of Infowars, who make a living by fomenting rage, pounced on the bizarre stories. Jones has since apologized. 


Since January 22, reports and concerns emerged about connections with Russia for the Trump campaign, Trump associates and Trump businesses. The Mueller investigation will pick up on the investigation already launched by the FBI, in addition to investigations from each branch of Congress. Concern intensified after reports suggested that Trump had asked former FBI director James Comey to pledge his loyalty - an affront to the constitution - and also to pull back on an investigation of his former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, who had failed to report payments received from Russia and work performed for Turkey. Shortly afterward, Trump fired Comey. A day later, at the request of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump met with the Russian foreign minister and the Russian ambassador. Reports suggested that highly classified information was referred to at that meeting. And today, The New York Times reports that Flynn had advised the Trump transition team that he was under investigation for failing to report his lobbying work for Turkey in early January before Trump took office

The investigation will proceed and follow complex financial trails, and in the meantime the motives of this administration are under a microscope: "An uproar has emerged with worries about politicized law enforcement, a US president installed by a hostile foreign power, who then goes on to oppose science and education initiatives that truly empower the United States while favoring the problematic coal industry over alternative energies and other policies that reduce US competitiveness. Russia supported Brexit to weaken the European Union, but failed in boosting far-right candidates in the Netherlands, Bulgaria and France. The United States may no longer be a trustworthy world leader, and even allies may doubt US motives until an independent investigation is pursued and the many disturbing questions are settled."

We must be patient and vigilant in monitoring over US politics never forgetting that voters choose these leaders to work for all of us.

Photo of Robert Mueller III, courtesy of Wikimedia.

Style

A frequent look for my son and his girlfriend is"in style," but they won't be pleased. Nordstrom is selling mud-splotched jeans for $425, and the Barracuda straight leg jeans are described as "Heavily distressed medium-blue denim jeans in a comfortable straight-leg fit embody rugged, Americana workwear that's seen some hard-working action with a crackled, caked-on muddy coating that shows you're not afraid to get down and dirty."

Of course, engineers and ecologists who work and camp out in the swamps of Louisiana have plenty of these jeans and pay a fraction of the cost, after heading to thrift and Goodwill stores to buy old clothing specifically for such adventures.

The Nordstrom jeans are being met with incredulity and jokes, and probably won't sell well. Because most should realize that the image of "rugged" and "hard-working" simply cannot or should not be purchased. To acquire character traits, an individual must "do" and not "buy,"  and products like the jeans become a test of character. One can only cringe, imagining Nordstrom buyers and magazine editors chuckling over the insecurity of any who might purchase these jeans.

Explaining Buyer Behavior:  Central Concepts and Philosophy of Science Issues by John O'Shaughnessy is a book that offers explanations for such products, and he reviews many theories and models, including one from 1959 by Erving Goffman. The dramaturgical model of interactions suggests that people behave as if in on a stage before an audience, and influencing the actor's behavior are expectations from the script and role, expectations from other players and expectations from the audience, real or imagined. The model describes how individuals use purchases, aiming to portray one image and reminds that onlookers perform their own assessment, agreeing or assigning a separate category: "All of us ... are concerned with 'impression management'" and  "Goffman's key distinction is between expression given and expressions given off," O'Shaughnessy writes.

He goes on to explain that Goffman's model describes a need for consistency "since any appearance of inconsistency generates doubts about the 'performance.' As in selling, consistency is important for upholding credibility. Furthermore, we must not appear to be trying to hard or not hard enough in conveying that impression."


A cardinal rule of fashion is the very opposite of that for shaping one's career: Don't try too hard.

Photo of jeans courtesy of Nordstrom's online catalog and photo of swamp, courtesy of TeamCrowbar.com.


 

Artificial intelligence

Each summer, the country where I grew up hied college students for the summer to fill in at offices for vacations. My grandmother arranged what was for a 19-year-old a high-paying job in a comfortable downtown government office, not far from where she had worked before retiring.

After a year of working at a bakery and then at a hospital snackshop, I was ready to work hard and pick up new office skills. Each student teamed up with two staff members, most in their 40s and 50s and who reminded me of my grandmother. The probate office filed all documents pertaining to wills. About thirty people staffed the office, and my team logged the names of the dead into a large black book as the initial paperwork arrived. No more than 50 cases were registered any day that summer - though that was when I learned the meaning of aka, also known as, for copying every possible variation of one person's name. Women had more aka's than men, sometimes thirty or more.

The task, which included listing date of birth and death, took no more than an hour, and on my first day, I finished quickly and expected another assignment. 

My teammates shook their heads, chiding me for working so fast. My writing was neat enough but they urged me to write slowly and take more frequent breaks. We could chat with our colleagues or take brief phone calls. We could not read books or take a leisurely stroll in the city. To stay busy and sane, I settled on writing long notes to my boyfriend who lived on the other side of the state. That was the summer I perfected the skill of writing backwards, forcing readers to hold the correspondence before a mirror to read the words - a technique described in a novel I had read that summer.  And because the day ended at 4 pm, I had time to find another job at a small publication in town that covered heating and cooling equipment - paid to write product summaries, working there non-stop from 5 to 7 pm five days a week. 

My speed and eagerness for extra tasks in the downtown office worried my mentors and fellow students. No one wanted to alert supervisors into examining office procedures - and risk losing their jobs. I never spoke to my grandmother about this and after my last day, I never returned to visit that office.

I went on to work with nine other employers and continued to put all my energies and ideas into every task and struggled to understand colleagues who do not do the same. Yes, my first experiences with such blatant resistance to efficiency were in a government office, but every workplace has these characters, and I remember a good friend who worked at a major bank and described similar patterns. Staff, armed each day with excuses, who arrive at 10 and leaves by 4. Employees who avoid most tasks but are quick to find fault with the completed project. Others who procrastinate for no reason at all, even when assignments are delivered early, and begin a project just before the deadline, forcing  others to wait. The managers who look on, terrible role models, either afraid to speak up or taking credit for others' work. Colleagues over the years observed how some employers encourage their staff to develop skills giving the illusion of zeal and busyness. Often, these are workers who refuse to delegate or divulge simple procedures, even passwords, so that colleagues do not discover just how little time a task might require - until new employees arrive and combat the indolence with productivity reviews and quotas, tech audits, and insistence on innovations.      

Some employees  embrace learning new skills, while others insist their duties never change. One side squirms when colleagues suggest new ideas and others start hinting about taking it slow and not working so fast. Motivation to work hard at some skill is often born in school but can also be shaped during times of desperation, rebellion, exploration or need for independence, too.

These memories of contrasting categories of work habits are reflected in two characters from Fear of Beauty.

Jahangir is much like the annoying student in the classroom, assertive and taking pride in ignorance, poking fun at anyone who relishes the hard work of learning. He criticizes the villagers for working late into the night, for listening to the ideas of village women. He cares only about the money to be made and how own power, rejecting the notion of growing crops for any other reason.  

And Sofi often toils alone, experimenting with new crops and methods. She is curious, valuing what she learns as much as the security her success brings to her family, and as the book concludes, "Beauty comes in many forms - hard work, faith, compassionate deeds and ideas - yet some fear when their senses are tested in strange, new ways." She does not allow her work to become rote and she never stops thinking about what to do next with her life, as limited as it may first seem, in big ways and small.   

Photos of  an early 20th century workplace and a woman harvesting wheat in India courtesy of Wikipedia Commons, with credit to Meena Kadri.