Category Archives: Ahimsa

Marketing 101

Among the several discreet skills the would-be smiling owner of a flourishing shop must master is Marketing.  Although there might appear to be a moral component that could hold a scrupulous person back, it ain’t necessarily so.

For example, which would you rather find on your plate?

a) a perfectly seasoned and prepared dinner of succulent beef; or

b) a plateful of the sliced flesh of a badly treated and cruelly slaughtered affectionate cow

Only a fool would try to market the product as (b).  Word to the wise, yo.

The Unexpected Reward for Mild Sincerity

I have been running an animation workshop for children ages 7 to 11.   My plan, without any business experience, has been to scale up this successful experiment into a small but expanding business.  A modest income for me and a fair wage for a few assistants who I would groom to replace me as the business grows.  When adults see the workshop in action they are often amazed– the children are working independently and with great focus on any number of their own projects, a couple work at the computer editing, a few more wear headphones and record parts of the soundtrack.  Other kids collaborate at the camera stand, lighting and moving things that will become animation.  A couple of adults are casually interacting with the kids, but nobody seems to be in charge. “I love the way it challenges hierarchy,” commented one parent, an architect, a man more insightful than most.

At times singing bursts out, one kid starts singing some idiotic ditty and others chime in.  It sets my nerves on edge, sometimes, but I resist stifling them.  They are singing because they are happy, free, nobody is telling them to shut up.   They take me aside to tell me inappropriate jokes, on the sly, because I never act offended.  I don’t laugh, I nod and I agree with them that the joke is inappropriate, but I don’t censure or censor them.  They understand I will nix such things in the animation they produce, but my theory is to leave them as free to express themselves as possible in the workshop.  Creativity demands no less.

From time to time they’re wild.  Part of this is my fault– in my excitement over how quickly they took over the various tasks of the workshop I neglected to install the crucial shut-off switch that is necessary for every teaching situation with young students.  This switch is needed when they are wild– the reminder that they have to stop and calm down or there will be consequences they won’t like.  It’s a trade off, freedom and order, and without the line they cannot cross being firmly etched, things will sometimes tip over into chaos.

As they did the last few weeks.  Last week my strongest, most street-wise and no nonsense assistant was out.  I was left with only my young, sweet, talented, easily manipulated assistant. Things got out of hand.  Kids were yelling, running with scissors, calling out for me to press the TIME TO STOP AND CALM DOWN button, but it hadn’t been installed properly.  Idle threats and the sense that no adult is really in control make them even more wild in  pushing the limits.  The thing it took me a while to realize, when I was teaching a few decades back, is that children need this control from an adult when they are unable to control themselves.  They will push for it far beyond the limits of reason by acting nuts.  Nothing they were doing the other day succeeded in actually bringing things to a boil, though.   Eventually a seven year-old leaped at me from the chair at the camera stand, throwing his arms around my neck.  I turned to catch him as he launched himself.

Unbeknownst to me, and probably to him, he was clutching a 0.7 mm mechanical pencil, point up, as he flew at me.  The pencil’s sharp metal tip (which I later showed the kid is retractable and should be pulled in when not drawing with it) went into the skin of my neck and ripped a short tear upwards as I caught the kid in midair.  There wasn’t much blood, but enough to smear my fingers with, show the kid as I took him with my other hand and guided him into a corner.

“When you act like an out of control baby you get treated like one.  You have time out.  Do not move from this chair.”  I left my young assistant as the only adult in the room and walked down the hall to the sink where I washed off the gash and threw some cold water on my face for good measure.  The kid hadn’t moved from the chair, but he was fidgeting with some blocks that were nearby.

“Time out means no playing,” I said, pushing the box of blocks out of his reach.  I reminded him that there is something you say to someone after you accidentally hurt them.  He managed a sheepish, insincere apology, accompanied by a variation on the simian fear grin.  A few minutes later I set him to work cleaning up, and he did so without complaint.  When his mother came to pick him up and expressed horror at what he’d done, he was defiant, hit her and shoved past her.   I was too tired and disgusted to intervene, beyond calling after him with a rhetorical question as he rushed out the door: “You hit your mother?”

The whole incident left me in a foul mood.   There was absolutely no pain from the scratch and within a couple of days it healed without a trace.  But the incident left me with a certain bitterness.  The reward for my inexhaustible patience and this innovative program that allows kids to grow their little wings and fly is a kid slashing my neck?  Fuck this, fuck them, I thought.  The email from a parent who runs the program that was waiting for me when I got home did little to change my feelings.  She asked for an incident report and it was followed by a lecture about consequences for misbehaving children, like my tiny assailant, who has apparently been out of control in every one of the other after-school groups he attends.  Inquiring as to how I was after the slashing would have been a nice touch, regrettably it was neglected.

“Fuck her,” I recall thinking.  The next day I wrote her an email describing the chaotic situation her own son had done so much to foster with his surliness, uncooperative attitude and racing around after the other seven year-old who provided a bit of my blood for the actual “incident”.  I never heard back from her.

I did hear back from a woman who runs a summer day camp for an organization that has a number of after-school programs for the fall.  She was interested in having the animation workshop at the camp.  She asked me to prepare a bid, a detailed proposal laying out all kinds of things.  She needed it immediately, although she could offer no guidelines for what they pay, I would have to include the price in my proposal.  I spent the last twelve hours of my birthday and the first few of the next day writing a proposal and reaching out for advice on pricing.  I got several pieces of wildly divergent, mostly passionately stated, opinion.  I gave the most weight to the advice of a self-made millionaire businessman friend of mine, and an even older friend who has been in high end sales for years, and made my proposal.  I noticed an increasing flow of stomach acid and distress as the process wore on.

The price I quoted them was based on the value of this innovative program and also on what this group can afford, based on the tuition that kids are paying.  I quoted a fair price, much higher than they probably want to pay, and more than twice what the PTA pays for the current program, but not inflated to leave room for much negotiation.  The floor and ceiling price are fairly close to each other.  If they won’t meet the floor price I have to walk away, since I didn’t quote them an arbitrary price but one based on my actual expenses, the value of the program and their ability to pay.  But so far, no reply at all.  The only urgency, apparently, was an immediate price quote from me.

As I made my way to the workshop yesterday it was with great reluctance.  Usually I look forward to it, for the first time yesterday I’d rather have not gone.  I gathered the kids and reminded them how fortunate it had been that I was the one whose neck had been gouged the previous session, rather than one of them.  They would have been very upset, and their parents would have been very upset.  I pointed to where the metal tipped pencil had gone into my neck and showed them that one inch over it would have gone into a major artery, and that my blood would have sprayed into the air, my hand traced the spurt so they could picture it, and I’d have had to go to the hospital, in a hurry.  Or, a few inches higher and the pencil would have gone into my eyeball, and I’d be in the hospital with the possibility of losing my right eye, depending on how the pencil went in.   This is what can happen when people are out of control, I pointed out. They were uncharacteristically pensive after this little speech.

“Would you sue Max?” a kid asked a couple of times.  I turned to him and said if I lost an eye I’d have to sue Max’s parents.  “If I sued Max what could I get?  His backpack?”  The kids agreed I’d have a better shot suing the parents.  I reminded the group that anyone who was wild and could not calm down would be escorted out, that there was no room for wildness in the animation workshop.  Then I told them to get busy.

They did, and there was no wildness.  

The times that try men’s souls

These are them.  But I’ll take just one small immediate snap shot, since I don’t have much time, trying though what little time I have at the moment may be.

If you find yourself waking up as a slave, having slept poorly, dreading the wake-up hours too early, stomach filled with acid, do not despair.  You will be tempted, as I am, having slept poorly, needing a few hours more sleep, alternating coffee to wake up and Tums for the acid, to cry out.   No need for that.  It won’t help you anyway.  This is a day you have to remember that your soul is no slave, and your dream of freedom will keep you moving forward, that an isolated trying day does not a trying lot make.  Even a string of such days does not mean the end of your dreams.

Sure as this drenching thunderstorm that is hovering over the area for the next 48 hours, sure as the wildly unreasonable  demands you will be asked to meet as soon as you arrive soaked and shivering, doubled over, trying to catch your breath.  Take it to the bank that today’s beating will end, you will recover, things will be fine and your food will taste good again and the sloshing of acid in your nervous stomach will be a distant memory, if that. 

Do not worry about any of this.  Do you see me worrying?

Invitation to Writers

I invite anyone reading these words to take this quick challenge:  

choose something that makes your heart beat stronger.  Write it down, explain in a sentence why you love it, then run with it.  Let it take you where it wants.

Say music is the passion, the beat, bap! with the right note laid thickly against it, there’s nothing to compare.   We call things “like music” in order to convey ineffable levels of grace and delight.   Without music, just noise.  Music sweet music, soothing savage breast and beast alike.  On the wings of a song, every desire anyone ever had.   Without music, no dance, and gone, most grace.

Or take, say, logic.  My passion is logic, so needed in a world of competitive noise, senseless violence and a troubled dance for human connection — to clear a path through the chaos for a moment’s relief.  Once I’ve grasped the logic of something at least I’m no longer perplexed about the cause.  Take Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting a different result.  We’ll use that for a thought experiment:

Assume I tell you the same story one hundred times, the same beginning, great excitement over unlimited potential, same middle, everything going fine but something nagging, inevitable as death, same treacherous cataclysmic ending.  Identical in each story are my actions, virtually interchangeable the other person’s actions.   That I take pains to weave this seamless chronicle of betrayal would tell you the larger story of my life.  

You can predict that these repeated experiences with disappointment, the tremendously built-up hopes always dashed in a close variation on the same cruel theme, will leave a person more susceptible to bitterness than the average person.  Here’s a hypothetical to flex between your back teeth:  a possible cause of compulsively repeated painful behavior. 

Imagine the case of character A_________.   A_________, the youngest child, is routinely ignored at the dinner table.  His older siblings hold forth, sometimes pick on him when the parents aren’t around, punish him when he squeals on them, his parents dote on the others, and often tell him to be quiet, wait his turn.  A kid in this situation may easily begin to feel starved for affectionate attention.  There are millions of people in A_________’s  basic situation, in every culture, on every continent.  

The random people they interact with will make all the difference in how their lives turn out.  A mother or father who is generous, calm, one who listens well, or that kind of grandparent, or best friend, or teacher, alleviates a lot of the child’s pain as the child grows up.  A parent who’s overwhelmed, angry, preoccupied will not do as good a job in this regard.  All parents are some fluctuating combination of these and other types.  

Unless A_________ gets some encouraging outside help, he will grow up convinced that basically people don’t care about him, perhaps nobody cares about anybody.  He can give you a million examples from his own life of why this is so, with ten irrefutable illustrations of each example.  A____   is like my father, perhaps, whipped in the face as an infant, somebody who may realize, after a lifetime angrily defending himself, that he never stood a chance in this world, that it wasn’t his fault.   Or a thousand gradations, from atrocity to inconvenience to tolerance and calm.

Maybe it’s a passion for interpersonal relationships.  Most readers and writers do what they do out of a desire to connect with others.  Words from my heart, through the light filter of my mind, into your eyes, back to me.  It’s magic – sending messages of power and complexity through symbols we’ve evolved to make units of meaning we call words.  Language is a miracle, created by that deepest human need, to love and be loved in return. To be understood, and cherished, by another, a yearning that goes all the way back to earliest animal consciousness.

That’s why babies are always so much cuter than their adults.  They are created to be lovable to their parents, so the parents will take care of the baby while it is helpless.  Babies of every species who are not as cute have tended not to survive and reproduce.  Intelligent design, wot.

So the invitation is open, and I hope you all will take it, and drop a line, or better still, leave a comment below this one. a comment others could feel free to add on to.  I am flooded by Zora’s oldest of human longings, to make myself known to another.  In cyberia, that takes on strange and mutated forms.  But hey, might as well dream. 

 

Want to Feel Sick?

Here’s a cued up portion (9:00 for mac users) of one of the videos Bradley Manning is on trial for turning over to Wikileaks.  He’s already been locked up since May 26, 2010, his right to a speedy trial notwithstanding, facing a death sentence under the 1917 Espionage Act.   My father is shaking his head in his grave, uttering his famous “doesn’t it make you glad to be an American?”

Collateral Murder

10,000 Kicks

I saw a quote from Bruce Lee recently, my man Bruce Lee.   “I do not fear the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks.  I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”  Dig it.

My father could have been woken from a sound sleep, been urged to put on a suit and rush over to the funeral home.  On the trip, even if the place was close by, he could compose a eulogy in his head to make the mourners cry, then laugh, then cry again.   It was a talent he had, something he must have given a lot of thought to at some point.   I saw his notes for a eulogy, five or six words on the back of an envelope.

He was not a professional eulogist, if there is such a job, but he was a very, very good one.   

His example may not be the best one for our purposes here, because it was somewhat innate in his case.    I am thinking of the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.   If I sometimes spent ten hours straight playing the guitar, it was not to improve my playing, it was because I couldn’t stop.  And because I couldn’t stop my fingers got more and more warmed up, I stumbled on new possibilities, parts, voicings for chords, ways to strike the strings.  So love of the thing made me improve, because the playing was  so much fun for me.  The discoveries were an organic part of how much I love to play.  Same with drawing.

This blahg is a kicking board set up in front of my cottage in dreamland.  I come out each day into the fog and kick the board once, softly but with great focus.  I stand and breathe in the cool, wet air.  I kick the board again, harder.  Then I kick it again.  After a while I am kicking the living shit out of the board, smiling as I recall Bruce Lee’s smirked rejoinder to O’Hara, the evil bully, breaking a board in front of Bruce’s face before their fight at Evil Han’s tournament.   “Boards don’t hit back,” says Bruce Lee curtly before bashing O’Hara directly in the scar on his cheek inflicted by Bruce’s father the day his sister committed suicide after fighting off O’Hara and his lecherous bully friends.

Boards don’t hit back.   But if you hit a board correctly a few thousand times you get the hang of it in a way that people who kick things randomly have no hope of ever kicking.

Living In My Own Head

An imaginary application to participate in TED talks as a 2013 TED Fellow:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF

We take this portion of the application very seriously. Please take the time to answer the questions thoughtfully, with enough detail to help us understand who you are. 

All responses are limited to 1500 characters except where noted.

What is your current primary activity? *

 

I am the facilitator of a child-run animation workshop and the Creative Director of the nonprofit wehearyou.net.  Our mission is to carefully listen to the children’s ideas and concerns and to encourage them to express these things in animation.   And they do.  The children set up the camera stand and lights for each session, create the animation, shoot all the frames, input them to a computer, edit the frames, make the soundtrack.   There is virtually no creative input from adults, whose role is to keep an eye on the clock and make sure things run smoothly.  Being this hands-off is hard work, too, and requires a high degree of calmness, alertness, discipline, attentiveness and humor.  Also, perhaps most importantly, flexibility on the fly.    

In addition to my work as lead facilitator of the workshop I am also the organization’s Director of Development, recruiter, fundraiser, corresponding secretary, trainer, marketing and branding officer, writer, webmaster, social media director, head of outreach, bookkeeper.   I also do the final edit of the weekly animations and mix the soundtracks.   (1,068 characters)

 

What are you best known for? *

Oddly enough, cool under fire, sang froid.  I’m aided in this by an overdeveloped sense of irony acquired during constant warfare in the contentious family of my childhood.   I am known for several skills and talents that I’ve made no efforts to exploit financially, to the puzzlement of many.  I am considered an inventive draftsman, I play guitar and keyboards and arrange, I’m a clear, concise and sometimes moving writer.  I am also known for dreaming and my many ideas, which I have never hesitated to share.  Also for a sometimes uncanny memory. 

In the professional realm, I am best known for variations on the above.  As a subsistence lawyer I was probably best known for my deadpan style, quickness of tongue and odd grace dancing before judges, especially when they were being disrespectful.   As a teacher I was probably best known for my easy rapport with children, candor and quickness of retort.  I also gave a high priority to the students’ creativity and took pains not to pour water on any idea they expressed.  Parents and colleagues often remarked on how creative my classes were.

As a young man I was probably best known for my angry words.   I have been transforming myself into a more deliberate, milder person.   A quick, cutting response may be fun to make, and satisfying in the moment, but one learns (with luck) that it does little to advance a real conversation.  I am known for being someone you can have a meaningful conversation with.  I place a high value on real conversation.

 

What other achievements (not only academic) would you like to share? *

As hinted at above, my achievements are difficult to quantify, in worldly terms.   My biggest achievement to date has been my ongoing dedication to my beliefs as embodied in wehearyou.net.  My creation of and involvement with this program, which I consider radical and sorely needed, has necessitated many positive changes in my thinking and action.  

I’ve come to understand that most people are mostly preoccupied most of the time and that the modern attention span is very short.  I’ve had to learn things I’d never thought about.   I’ve had to learn, for example, that most people don’t give a rat’s ass about whether or not poor children in Harlem make animation.   I am, after a long digestive period, able to keep those perceptions in mind without letting them deter me or slow my progress.

My mission is to encourage people to listen to and respond to each other gently.  It’s a life-affirming thing for a child to be listened to attentively by an adult, to have a moment to dream out loud uninterrupted.  While this is a sadly rare thing (for anyone of any age) in our hyper digital world of virtual connection and overloaded distraction, the program and I have made some very encouraging first steps in this direction.

 

Beyond your work and studies, what are you passionate about? (e.g. hobbies, causes, activities, issues — please do not talk about your work in this section) *

I am passionate about playing music, listening and preserving the spaces in music that are where the action is.   I am passionate about improvising and helping to bring out the creativity of others.   I play the guitar, mostly, and am always most pleased when another musician comments on how much space I leave for other people’s ideas.  I also enjoy accompanying singers.

I am passionate about justice, which is one reason the law was such an unappealing detour on the road of my life.  Justice in America is largely the justice you can afford to purchase.   I can point you to the relevant provisions in our constitution which obliquely say as much.  The gulf between what is legal and what is right is an enormous, stinking crevasse.  My powerlessness in the face of recent injustice,  “the war on terror” and its related excesses, the widespread,  crippling criminality of the financial sector, led me to imagine a program that would encourage children to plan, stage, critique, problem-solve in groups.  To help them become informed, effective citizens of a democracy.

I dream of helping create articulate young citizens who are able to inform themselves about issues, argue them and organize to change intolerable conditions in our democracy.  I plan to give a digital megaphone and increased sense of agency to children, particularly those society has decided get all the help they need from programs for “at-risk” and “underprivileged” kids.   

I am passionate about letting the larger society, the one busy piously acquiring wealth, see what is in the minds and hearts of young people who are seen, if at all, as profitable widgets for privatized prisons. 

I am passionate about drawing, writing well and, whenever possible, having deep conversation.

 

Share an example of something you have been a part of (including created, led, or joined) that you consider unique, even if no one else does. Why do you think it is mould breaking? (Limit 2250 characters) * 

Not to harp on wehearyou.net, but I consider our approach unique and mould breaking.   Here’s the idea, with illustrations at the end.  The creative potential of young children is increasingly discounted.   When children are allowed to choose their projects, &  control all aspects of production, remarkable things emerge.  Week after week children ages 7 to 11 create, in the chaos of a free-form workshop, surprisingly inventive animation.   I am amazed by some break-through just about every session.

The great Sugata Mitra demonstrated children’s ability to self-organize, learn and teach each other things they are passionately engaged with.   Mitra used a computer embedded in a wall and documented the progress of illiterate children, as a group, who mastered the technology with no outside help.   Wehearyou.net is using the canvas of animation to help demonstrate the rich creative lives of children who are increasingly forced into ever more restrictive learning environments where most of them will learn failure rather than any kind of success.

In the test-prep age of No Child Left Behind children are seen as passive vessels to be filled with information and skills geared to standardized tests rather than as partners in their own education.  Kids are capable of learning much more than most educators give them credit for, particularly if license is given for their creativity to enter the classroom.

8 year-old with cut-out and three foil coins asks how to make the little character juggle.  I tell him I have no idea, see what you can do.  Within moments the little cut-out is juggling, the kid is already on to the next thing, with barely a backwards glance.  Two seven year olds create a guitarist and drummer.  Passing by I suggest they cut off and move the guitarist’s arm to make him strum.   A short while later they shoot a sequence where the two tiny musicians play perfectly in sync, the guitarist strumming then flipping his guitar in the air to catch and strum it on the beat.  The drummer, meanwhile, flips his drumsticks in the air, catches them and, bam!, exactly on the same beat.  How they did it, truthfully, I have no idea.

Idea Girl, nine, with five ideas a week she is too distracted to carry out, describes sequence where character will take part of his stomach, make a basketball backboard and hoop out of it, dunk a basketball, turn a somersault, pick up the backboard, eat it, get fat and then turn into a ball.   I ask if she’ll do this with clay.  She nods.  A few hours later, when first looking at the frames they shot during the session, I am amazed to see the frames, which needed no editorial improvement, doing exactly what she described.  (2732)

 

What questions should we have asked, but didn’t? Please write them down and answer them! (in other words, tell us something about yourself that we don’t know yet). (Limit 2250 characters) *

(I’ll get back to them on this one) 

Can you share a memorable anecdote from your life that will give us a further sense of what makes you tick?

My father was brilliant and very funny but also brutally defended at all times.   I learned, at age 40, that he’d been the victim of atrocious abuse from his mother, whippings as soon as he was old enough to stand.  Learning this unspeakable secret, from Eli, an older cousin, gave me great insight I could never have had without knowing about the abuse he’d endured.

My father and I had a life-long debate about whether people could change.   He argued that only superficial things could be changed, that deeper personality traits were ingrained and set.  I said changes in response were the first step toward making the deeper changes.  He angrily denied any insights I may have thought I’d received from Eli, pointing out that his cousin was a problematic historian and tyrannical father.

At 1 a.m. on what turned out to be the last night of my father’s life I visited him in the hospital.  His first comment: “Eli hit the nail right on the head, only he didn’t tell you the worst of it.”  He hadn’t recovered from being whipped as an infant.  This brilliant man remained somehow convinced he’d been the dumbest kid in town.  He told me I was right about change.  He wished he’d had the insight to try to change himself.  “I imagine how much richer my life would have been if I had not seen it as a zero-sum war.”  

As sun set the next evening he breathed his last, I closed his eyes. The profound gift of these last moments with my father remains with me, and sustains my beliefs.  (1476)

How did you hear about the TED Fellows program?

I don’t recall exactly.  I think I stumbled on a TED talk on youTube and have watched many since.  I also subscribe to the podcast on WNYC.   Several friends, it turns out, are also great fans of TED (how can you not be?) and I have done some evangelizing and turned a few others on to these remarkable talks.  I probably learned of the Fellows program on the TED website.

 

Have you participated in TED before? If so, to what extent? (e.g. you watch TEDTalks, you’ve attended / hosted / spoken at a TEDx event, you’re a TEDTranslator, etc) 

Only to the extent of being inspired by many of the talks.  The inspirations have been too many to list in 1,500 characters, but for purposes of wehearyou.net, the talks of Sugata Mitra, Ken Robinson and Seth Godin cannot be praised enough.

Two minute drill

If no consequence is attached to evil practices such practices will continue.  If you don’t raise an eyebrow when your predecessor redefines torture to allow it to be practiced at will, nobody should be surprised when you do the same.  If you find remote control killings of enemies and innocent alike preferable to boots on the ground, you’ll do it.   If you’re cool with a government that prosecutes whistle blowers and tries them in secret, well, you’re cool with it.  It doesn’t make you a bad person, necessarily, to wink at evil, but don’t put your arm around me, brother.

Ahimsa in Practice

The cells in your body, flooded with persuasive chemicals, will tell you clearly  to kick somebody’s ass.   There are many who are adept at making these chemicals flow like a waterfall.  

Your soul will thank you if you unclench your fist, make your hand soft, and do something productive, instead of kicking the ass of someone who is begging for, and richly deserves, an ass-whuppin’.  

Best to avoid these types altogether, if you can.  If you can’t, practice effective action to neutralize them.  They can sometimes actually be made to disappear, depending on your level of skill.  

Practice.