Swaddling, Dry Baby Puke, and Self-care

"More than freedom to explore newborns need security. They need tight boundaries, like they enjoyed in the uterus, to keep from flailing and getting upset." (Dr. Karp "The Happiest Baby")

This morning I experienced the most intense teeth cleaning I have ever experienced and I did so sleep deprived wearing dry baby puke on my shoulder. The dental hygienist who scraped me clean was a smart African American lady. The kind of medical professional who seems to be a combination of Jackie-Joyner-Kersey and Maya Angelou. An Olympic-level technician with the spirit of a wise Earth mother.

I apologized for showing up late to the office and said that we have a new-born at home which has made my mornings a little rough and she responded by pointing out the baby puke.

"I figured you were a new Dad. The baby puke is in the right spot. Up high on the shoulder. Been there, it's all good."

And then she broke out some sort of hydro-sonic scraper mechanism and blasted away at my plaque.

Self-care doesn't come easy to me so I appreciated my earth-mother's humor while she applied her surgical efficiency.

"Boy this music the doctor plays is something. You got some 'Dusties' that I don't know what to do with. (Barry White comes on) But then you got this and I can go, 'okay'. Now I am going to use a tool that squirts cold water while it drills away at your plaque. It cleans better. It will get loud by your back teeth because of your ear canal. And you'll get a hint of mouth-wash. I always use a little mouth-wash in my cleaning. And don't worry about the baby puke. You got yourself a Father's Day story now."

Tomorrow will be my first Father's Day as a Father. I always thought this Hallmark Holiday would be one I enjoyed second person removed as a son or admiring uncle but life changes and I now am a Dad. I couldn't be happier.

A surprise to me in the parenting process is the appearance of instinct when my boy has irrational needs. I find myself making up songs while changing his diaper and holding him close when gas attacks. I don't mind his temper or his biology and pride myself on my swaddling technique.

Swaddling is a necessary comfort for an infant whose concept of the world has gone from closed-loop-placenta-driven to infinite-spaces and adaptation. It affords a baby the illusion of self-care they enjoyed while swimming in amniotic warmth while coming to grips with the wide world they now inhabit.

When my cleaning was done, the dentist came into the office and apologized for making me wait. He had a dental emergency that morning, someone had broken a tooth, and therefore put me in the capable and thorough hands of his number 2. They took one last look at my teeth and commended me for a boring set of choppers.

"Boring is good. You don't want to experience 'interesting dental work'."

My earth-mother-technician slipped me a bag with some floss, tooth-paste and a new tooth-brush and reassured me that the baby puke was a badge of honor. The dentist agreed and told me my nights would get easier. They both suggested however that I embrace these days driven by instinct because soon my son will be grown. They both had teenage children who, "seemed like 4-years-old two months ago."

I left feeling good that I enjoy such kind folks.

We had a storm here in Chicago last night. One of those Wizard of Oz Midwestern gales that make you glad you don't live in a tent or make a living as a tight-rope walker. Walking home I watched a boy about 4-years-old race ahead of his mom picking up broken limbs from the storm-tossed trees.

I looked forward to swaddling my son and singing him songs and sharing the instincts of self-care.

Approaching Fatherhood: Actions Speak Louder Than Words

This is a photo of me, my Dad and my sister Karen. Karen, as you can see was very sassy and I was laid-back, chilling on my hipster dad's lap (notice the black label next to him).

Jackie (my wife) and I are 5 weeks from being parents and I can't believe that I am six years older than my Dad was in that photo. I am overwhelmed with excitement and feel about as small as the little guy I was on my Dad's lap.

My Dad and I never were friends when I was growing up. About 2 years after this photo was taken I began to read and soon after that, armed with ideas, I launched arguments against the old man when I thought he had sucked down one too many and his hipster pose seemed like a shaky pretense.

Dad didn't talk much. He still doesn't. His catchphrase for why he never told us he loved us was that, "actions speak louder than words." I hated that. I'm verbal. Very verbal. Too verbal. I basically could benefit from shutting my trap more often (blogging helps).

"What if" has always held me while "What is" has kept my Dad fixed in his idea that existence demands action if character is your goal. Dad started paying rent when he was 11. His alcoholic Dad couldn't be counted on to follow-through with the promises fathering 9 children demands. Paper boy, Pin setter, Photo assistant provided Dad action that led to survival so, when I asked him "Why" he'd shrug and say "Actions matter."

My Dad was a journey-man rough carpenter which means he built the two-by-four skeleton of residential sub-divisions. This meant early mornings of Winstons and coffee and 10 hours of pounding nails in alternating Michigan seasons of suffocating humidity and crippling cold. A good day was when you got the roof on early so you could "roll 'em up" and suck down a few cold Altes before a cross-town drive home.

Dad would stagger in at night but, he'd get up the next day at 4 AM flip through yesterday's paper and choke down a cigarette and a cup black before he'd head out to the burgeoning suburbs where the cry of "generator!" would jump-start a morning in the shadow of skeletal frames.

He lost his knees from negotiating 9 pitch roofs and his hands are calloused to the core. He fell through two stories once with a power saw in his hand and was told he wasn't needed when Reaganomics broke the unions and left Dad with a Journeyman's card facing a dead-end industry.

"Actions speak louder than words."

I remember him crying at the Kitchen table when he didn't know how he was going to pay for my education.

"Get college," he'd say so, "you don't have to be stupid like me and work with your hands."

I did. I studied and read and launched more arguments at the old man when he would offend me with his blunt response to life.

I've prided myself on being smart but that seems small now because facing fatherhood makes my Dad's philosophy immediate. Ideas without action are just empty promises. Actions speak louder than words.

I don't know what kind of father I will be. I hope to be honest and kind and fair and courageous but, I know me and more often than not I am manipulative and mean and partial and scared. I am still full of ideas but they run in tangents too often contradicting themselves and leaving me paralyzed with doubt.

The psychologist and philosophical father of pragmatism William James is attributed with saying, "One cannot think himself into good action but can act himself into good thinking," and Aristotle said that action is the "the vital principle and very soul of drama."

I hope to pass on to my son the mysteries of science and the wisdom of literature but, more importantly, I will give him the simple truth his grandfather gave me when the old man would drag his ass out of bed on a freezing February morning and flip to yesterday's obituaries to remind himself he was still alive. He'd light up a king filter, choke down some coffee black, then pull on his boots fire up his truck and say nothing. He'd kick his ass for 10 hours and take some comfort in a few cold ones and a warm bath and when his cocky book-worm son would try to get him to speak to the secrets of life and love, the old man would nod a bit and say, "actions speak louder than words."

The Christian Delusion (A Review)

I just finished reading "The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails" and found it to be very valuable. I recommend it to all who read this blog. Here's a review.

The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (TCD) is a necessary source-book for anyone who values the individual liberty found in questioning superstition for the sake of critical thought. It exposes the fallacy that Christianity's divine command authority is necessary for individual betterment or societal progress. It identifies Evangelical Christianity's superiority claims in the areas of personal transformation, theological/scriptural veracity, and ethics for the superstitious group think they are. It arms truth-seekers with intelligent answers rooted in sound scholarship that can defend them from pseudo-intellectual-Christian-apologetic-razzle-dazzle.

A truth-seeker must face a culture dripping with Christianity when assessing Evangelical "truth-claims". These "truth-claims" operate like intellectual pollution compromising healthy reason and mutating it towards emotion-laden-group-thought, devoid of logic, intellectual honesty or material ethics. American Christian Culture is aimed at end-times exceptionalism where the highest understanding of morality is obedience to whomever the masses deem the absolute authority.

The elevation of superstition to a divine commander stands in the way of individual freedom and honest scientific exploration. We see these threats realized today when Evangelical Christians deny constitutional freedoms to homosexuals and obscure useful science in the name of their divine commander, dressing up creationism as Intelligent Design. We are facing crucial times where Biblical Inerrantists, Christian Reconstructionists, and Dominionists in the state of Texas are looking to over-throw the aims to Liberty offered by the Enlightenment in favor of the Calvinist Doctrine of Total Depravity. America is in a struggle between reason and faith and too often the side of faith is given credence as good while reason is demonized. Presuppositions to invisible kingdoms indicate a healthy humility but genuine curiosity as to why reality is the way it is with an aim towards progress is considered arrogance.

This is the context in which TCD has been born and it lives up to its necessary birthright by defending enlightened thought with well-researched argument. It also does this in a way to invite the reader into a non-threatening conversation prior to exposing Christianity for the collection of neurotic lies it is.

Loftus has done an exceptional job of gathering a cross-reference of experts who strategically dismantle the Christian heuristic and show the reader how the religion's revelations are both artificial and banal.

The genius of the book is in its structure so kudos to Mr. Loftus for his editorial guidance.

We are taken on a narrative which first shows us that the "born again" experience is not unique to Christianity and can be easily explained without an appeal to the supernatural. This is a wise choice in addressing the Christian Delusion because so often Christians claim their religion true due to anecdotal evidence that over-values life-transformation as proof of an in-dwelt Holy Spirit. Essays in cognitive science and perception help expose Christianity as a constructed choice in alleviating cognitive dissonance and therefore no better than any cognitive bias that allows emotional comfort in the face of randomness.

We then see how using the Bible as a transcendent document ignores its inefficaciousness in explaining reality or providing a clear understanding of the human condition. The former is evidenced in the objective description of the pre-scientific (and wrong) cosmology attested to in scripture and the latter is shown by the exposition of the sectarian Christain wars that have haunted human history.

We then make a turn and the book's tone goes from invitational to confrontaional. This shift in perspective is exciting to readers (like this critic) who have had to endure the propaganda and lies Jesus-followers dress up as scholarship. You see how Yahweh is a moral monster, how Christians have only childish answers to the inevitable suffering animals endure, how the Jesus legend is not unique, why the Resurrection is unbelievable, and how Jesus operated within a tradition of failed apocalyptic prophecy. All of these arguments use the Bible as reference, allowing the text to expose Christianity's ad hoc fallacies.

Finally we get arguments which bring us back to the thesis of this critique. The ultimate value of TCD is its ability to arm the reader with knowledge and insight to counter claims that Christianity is essential for morality and progress. This reader was delighted to be armed with retorts to each of the dog-eared Christian assertions that morality depends on religion, Hitler's atheism (rather than his Catholic Christianity) caused the Holocaust, and Science depends on Christian presuppositions.

We've seen explosive progress within modern civilization over the last 250 years which one can reasonably claim was caused by people who chose to offer empirical proof rather than divine revelation as the final arbitor of truth. The American Christian Church threatens to over-throw this progress for the sake of the safety superstitions seem to offer. They want to replace the hard work of thinking with the easy comfort of faith. TCD helps one see how this type of drive as both fallacious and dangerous. It offers intelligent argument in the face of ignorant righteousness.

How the Righteous Murder

Last night I saw "Killer Joe" at Profiles Theatre. "Killer Joe" is a play by Tracy Letts. Letts won the Pulitzer for drama this past year for his play, "August, Osage County". He writes about themes of self deception, denial and ultimately murder. The murder could be overt, as in "Killer Joe" where a desperate and resentful son seeks out his mother's insurance money so he can rid himself of her insults, avenge the fact she stole his cocaine, and safely reconcile his debt with the drug dealers he owes for the absconded cocaine he couldn't sell. The murder could be covert, as the unseen patriarch who serves as the dramatic catalyst in "August, Osage County" whose mysterious absence (a murder or a suicide?) brings together a dysfunctional and far-flung family which ignites psychological murder in the form of deceit, addiction, verbal and sexual abuse. The characters in both plays embrace a self-centered righteousness that allows them to nurture their persecution complexes rooted in real or imagined torment. They both take place in the American Southwest, Pentecostal country. The action of "Killer Joe" happens in a trailer in Texas and "August" in a home in Oklahoma. The idea of fixed "family values" seems to be challenged as the home becomes an arena where the righteous contemplate the gains murder can bring.

This brings me to the Texas Board of Education.

The past month has shown that Letts' imagination of the righteousness formed by Pentecostal superstition in the American Southwest is not just good dramatic fodder. How the righteous murder is on full display as the Texas Board of Education seeks out a protection of family values that will kill the last 500 years of scientific advance and the last 225 years of democratic enlightened liberty. They seek to kill modernity for biblical authority as a means to protect their children from the creep of secular advance.

But, like Letts' characters they fail to see the irony and self-defeat their actions invite. They want to teach their children freedom by emphasizing John Calvin over Thomas Jefferson. The former enforced a Christianity that made it criminal for one to choose the bible he or she read while the latter liberated the American mind from Christian superstition when he invoked the promise fate provides all with "unalienable rights". Calvin dictated, for the sake of social order, that all members of Geneva embrace the doctrine of total depravity, or "slaves to sin", while Jefferson encouraged the self-evident truth that people are born into liberty. Calvin sought the persecution and murder of all those that disagreed with his doctrine while Jefferson hoped the people would be encouraged to over-throw his constitution with a new revolution every generation.

The only reason the Texas Board of Education can diminish the good son of enlightenment Jefferson for the "religious right icon" (their words) Calvin is because Jefferson ensured their personal religious liberty would be protected. They don't see that their desire to seek revenge for imagined danger has invited the murder of the ideas that generate the freedom they wish to protect.

The frightening aspect to the story, and why I use the term murder, is that Texas' size creates a power in public education with national reach. The curriculum they decide holds sway over the country's curriculum. Demand for text books is driven by what the Texas Board of Education decides should be in text books so, if Texans think that the agreed upon and well founded scientific principles of common descent are anathema to the creation story then "well-educated" American children may seek to publish sermons on how the triple-threat Intelligent Designer of Yahweh - Jesus - Holy Spirit created an opportunity for humans to walk with the dinosaurs rather than launch animal studies to initiate safety trials in service towards a cancer cure.

How the righteous murder the ideas that allow their righteousness to flourish is predictable. In "Killer Joe" the murderous son ultimately realizes that his plan to kill his mother was never his. He sees that his righteous reaction to given circumstances allowed him to be manipulated by crueler men (his step-father the beneficiary of the insurance policy; Killer Joe the hired murderer) and, he seeks to abandon the plot too late to change the dramatic action. He threatens Joe to back off and stop the plan. Joe sits in silence and calmly sips coffee while watching the son rage. The son threatens Joe that if Joe follows through then Joe will be sorry. Joe simply laughs, walks off-stage and re-enters dragging a Hefty bag full of something about the size of a dead body. Joe tells the son, "Don't open it."

The future of the Texas Board of Education will be as dark, heavy and impenetrable if they are allowed to shape education in favor of their superstitions. At the very least, emerging nations like India, China, and Thailand will surpass our collective scientific IQ and will continue the march towards technological advancement, leaving us behind in hopeful eschatology awaiting the bloody monarchy of "King Jesus" but, a darker turn could be made. The ideas of the enlightenment existed as a push back to Theocracy because Europeans became tired of suffering holy wars. They craved evidence and reason, rather than obedience to superstition, to lift them from totalitarian manipulation. If world religious trends continue and more people convert to the preferred religion, Islam, then the Texas Pentecostals will see the fruits of their righteousness. Sharia Law will not allow the expectation of a super-hero King Jesus to lift Christians from imagined persecution. It will enforce real persecution in the form of dhimmitude, the Islamic system of governing populations conquered by Jihad wars, which amounts to majority rule and slavery. The righteous don't realize that it is only the secular protections they see as evil which allow their "family values" to flourish. They don't understand that protection of the individual starts when we put aside superstitions like the obedience Calvin sought while burning heretics and instead, embrace the mind of Jefferson when he honestly said,

"Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity."

One can only hope that honest Texans will challenge the authority of those wishing to murder the ideas that allow the righteous their protections.

Celebrating Failure

This is not a challenge to anyone who works in TQM. One of my favorite people and role-models, my cousin Mike, is an efficiency expert, employing linear math to optimize supply chain management so, I appreciate six sigma and endorse the opportunities inherent in continuous improvement.

I just think in the face of a respect for efficiency and safety, it would be a good idea to appreciate the beauty found in failing.

I might be writing this simply because I received my performance review two days ago and am hoping this past year's failures are pregnant with potential. Pondering the possibilities within failure helps me modulate my depressive tendencies.

Businessweek ran a great story a couple of years ago entitled “Eureka, we Failed” where they posited the theory that innovation cannot happen without the necessary embrace of failure.

They state,

"Getting good at failure . . . doesn't mean creating anarchy out of organization. It means leaders -- not just on a podium at the annual meeting, but in the trenches, every day -- who create an environment safe for taking risks and who share stories of their own mistakes. It means bringing in outsiders unattached to a project's past. It means carving out time to reflect on failure, not just success."

One of the cultural practices they recommend is throwing “failure parties” where a team, that has taken a risk for the sake of innovation, shares the narrative of their failure with the organization and communicates the lessons learned. The benefits are humility, honesty and awareness.

This type of thinking seems helpful, almost necessary. There's a lot of destruction going on right now that might be creative if we realize that perfection is our enemy and failure our friend.

I think it is time we abrogate the proverbial encouragement to good behavior and re-write it for our common good, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.”

I know I work in a pressure-filled environment where I try to manage the perception of perfection but, the reality is that life is a creative art and creativity is an imperfect pursuit.

Again, the BW article,

"Most people naturally seek positive outcomes and set about trying to prove that an experiment works. But designers, inventors, and scientists, all models for companies struggling to be more creative, take the opposite tack. They try to prove themselves wrong.”

And hell, if you hate this post, prove me wrong. I'd appreciate the failure.

I am an egotistical lover of beauty who hungers for truth and change

Last week I read Stephen Jay Gould's essay, "The Median is not the Message" and in it the author says,

"Heart and head are focal points of one body, one personality,"

By which the author means that one's hope for oneself must also consider the facts about oneself but, the facts about oneself must be respectful of one's unique nature if hope for oneself is to be had.

It is helpful to understand where you fall in the bell curve and you can't be afraid to find out that you might be far from average.

George Orwell gives advice in "Why I Write" that is specific to writing but, could apply to a broader consideration of self-reflection and self-acceptance he says;

". . . there are four great motives for writing . . . they exist
in different degrees in every writer . . .

1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc. etc. It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong one . . . Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose on the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not be missed . . .
3. Historical Impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
4. Political Purpose - using the word 'political' in the widest sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that should strive after."

They all make sense to me and they are all hard to admit.

I like to make arguments that express my personal sense of who I am in the world. I feel more hopeful when I do. To sum Orwell, I am an egotistical lover of beauty who hungers for truth and change.

Gould wrote his essay when he was diagnosed in 1982 with abdominal mesothelioma, a rare and very deadly form of cancer, which technically speaking offered him, a "median mortality of eight months" to live. He took the time to understand who he was relative to the average and lived for 12 years.

His quote above is the resolution of the conflict between "what is" versus "what's possible" and, he postulates, a death sentence is only accurate if a person fails to appreciate, with head and heart, the unique variations s/he carries within. He concludes with sage advice,

"It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity. Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a time to die - and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light."

Makes sense to me.

Learning a new fallacy

My favorite blog is "Debunking Christianity" it has unseated the MLive MSU Football Forum as my Internet diversion of choice. I like it because it has introduced me to the idea of fallacies and how they operate. Watching atheist skeptics and Christian apologists debate God's reality has helped me realize how faulty my reasoning skills are.

An example of this is my new appreciation for the fallacy of equivocation. I appreciate this fallacy because I love words and their precise use. The fallacy demands one define terms if they are making a challenging argument. I like paradox also so, in the past a phrase such as, "One should be skeptical of a skepticism" would delight me.

I am a skeptic and therefore of course am skeptical of skepticism but that doesn't make me doubt my skepticism because I now understand the importance of fallacy.

You can read why I can say that here.