Thanksgiving, as usual, was great. Most people think vegetarians don't like thanksgiving because they can't have turkey. That may be true for some of them, but I loveee thanksgiving because of "all the trimmings." This year Janessa made all I need in a good meal: mashed potatoes, yummy stuffing with cranberries, cranberry sauce, lima beans and biscuits. MMMM. Awesome. She's amazing, clearly I'm the winner in THIS marriage. :)
Tofurky? Not so much. As Janessa put it to me, why would a vegetarian want something that tastes like meat? I guess some are vegetarians for health reasons, but you would think you'd lose the taste for that stuff pretty quick. Lord knows, I have. But I guess I wasn't eating Tofurky all those years... Anyways, I never liked turkey even when I ate meat. So why start now?
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. No, not just for the food (a plus), or the company (a ++), but because it seems like the only genuine, non-religious holiday left. It's true that thanksgiving started with the pilgrims giving thanks to God, but giving thanks is not confined to monotheism, thankfully. No, thanksgiving is, ideally, the day when people come together to break bread, share each other's companies, and reflect on their lives and give thanks for however much or however little they have. That's a pretty positive message especially when juxtaposed against the other big nonreligious holiday - Christmas. Black Friday? Yea, I read today that a Walmart employee was KILLED when shoppers rushed into a store and trampled on him. Now THAT's a holiday.
Anyway, taking time to reflect on things is an activity criminally underutilized in this world. The mindless zombie consumer stuff really proves the old saying that the unexamined life just ain't worth shit.
Anything that shakes people up for even a few moments is a good thing, in my opinion. Last night we watched a film called What Would Jesus Buy, all about a man named Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Church Choir, who traveled cross-country last year doing activist events against consumerism in places like Starbucks in California, the Wal-Mart headquarters in Arkansas, and Mall of America in Minnesota. Fantastic stuff. Reverend Billy looks like a southern preacher and acts like it in a kind-of pitch-perfect impression complete with grunting and flailing.
Finally, a religion worth joining.The best part about this kind of thing is that it breaks up the routines people go through. They never question a thing about where the products they buy come from - and this type of thing wakes them up from their slumber, even if just for a second, and that's invaluable.
I think the corporate economy benefits enormously from mindless behavior. Indeed, I think it actively exploits American potential to mindlessly behave and that television and mass-entertainment are major pieces of the blinders we've all started to wear. Look straight ahead for good, clean value and ignore that evil, peripheral vision. Things are black and white, not gray, and we've got all three on sale now in the menswear section.
All of these distractions successfully train us to be a good corporate citizen. We get fat because we never stop to think about what we are eating and because we eat too much, both because we're distracted (watching TV while we eat) and because marketers know how to assist this behavior. We don't exercise much because we're too busy with TV, flicks, video games, and cell phones. And that's what they want, good, passive, fat people. There aren't many better people to buy useless shit than passive, fat people.
I know none of this is news to thinking people, and that none of it is really original, but that doesn't mean it's not true, and that doesn't mean its not a problem. The Bush Administration really accelerated this dumbing down of America, of course, with its disgusting emphasis on consumerism (patriotism is spending more money than you have! a Patriot is a big SUV! No metaphor there. [or truth]).
To name a guz-guzzling overwrought SUV piece-of-shit the "Patriot" is something that defies satire. The "Patriot" is a living expression of American retardation. I'm hopeful that an Obama administration will change this direction, however it won't do it all, there needs to be an effort on the part of people to change their lives if this economy or this world is going to get on the right track again. I'm not saying that television and movies are bad and not worth watching, necessarily. But it's like alcohol - some people can handle it responsibly and some can't. It doesn't mean you should regulate it, but it does mean people need to be REMINDED to THINK now and again. Or even that THINKING is good, a controversial idea in recent days.
Although the media and corporate culture take advantage of and reinforce passivity, they don't wholly create it (though they are advertising to younger and younger kids, which is, in itself, disturbing). Schools and parents (ignorance should not be an inherited characteristic) have a lot to do with this.
We really need an entirely new model for education, one that focuses not on retention but on understanding. Law Schools teach the type of thinking I'm talking about - CRITICAL thinking - and without it, we are doomed and lost to wander from Starbucks to Starbucks. Critical thinking is the perfect example of that old truism: "teach a man to fish." That's what it's really all about, and I strongly believe critical thinking skills should be a major part of the curriciulum from the beginning of school onward.
I was fortunate enough to gain some of these because I was in gifted in elementary school and my gifted program focused on critical thinking skills. What wonderful luck! I want everyone else to be so fortunate.
In any case, despite all the things I learned in Gifted, it was a loooong time ago, and there are still plenty of important things that I did not or could not have learned back then that I wish I could have learned in school. Strangely, most of these skills and thinking models have come to me in the past few years. Even more strangely, they've come, in my opinion, as a direct result of my intense participation in no limit texas hold'em tournaments, primarily online.
What particular skills and attributes am I thinking of? Here's an incomplete list:
Simple and domplex decisionmaking & problem solving, when to use either and which variables to apply in both
Patience/calm and centeredness
Long-term perspective/keeping ego in check
Planning and thinking ahead
Thinking on your feet
The critical nature of observation and of paying attention in general
Pattern-recognition and exploitation
The value of assertiveness
The value of position
Understanding how different people think and what their motivations may be
Discipline.
to name a few.
I'm not an expert by any means, I'm an amateur, but I'm a profitable one, and I've played in well over 10,000 tournaments online, which is a drop in the bucket for many people, but enough that I feel I understand the above values. I'm going to address each of these (and whatever else comes to me) in turn in coming blogs.
My hope is to articulate the value of the particular knowledge and show how each skill is a vital part of the toolbox of any critical thinker. I will give examples of how each skill has enabled me to make better choices in my daily life, in a variety of aspects, from interpersonal relationships to self-restraint to attitudes toward daily stressers. In the end, I will make a case that a poker curriculum would be a powerful and effective way to improve elementary and secondary education and develop better, more-informed citizens, less prone to running over customers to get that $700 plasma.
-Rob
