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Bic Generation

The Bic lighter at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Made in Japan used to mean the product was junk, until W. Edwards Deming brought his message of quality to Japanese manufacturers. We need another Deming--this time for China.

Made in China has become code for cheap--in the most negative connotation of the word:

• Appliances with a useful life of three to five years
• Napkins and tissues that shred in my hand
• Plastic bottles too thin to grip

We live in a disposable culture, where dumping something when it breaks is cheaper than fixing it.

I call it the Bic Generation, derived from the pens and lighters that started us on the road away from a fix culture to a dump culture.

Zack Whittaker writing in ZDNet, called it the iGeneration, with the "i" representing both the types of mobile technologies being heralded by children and adolescents (iPhone, iPod, Wii, iTunes) plus the fact that these technologies are mostly "individualized" in the way they are used.

“The iGeneration don't care about products lasting,” Whittaker noted. “They just want something here and now, that will do the job and something they can dispose of without it hurting their wallets when that moment comes.”

The worry, though, is not just that every thing is disposable in today’s Bic Generation. This mentality sometimes extends to every one.

The University of Minnesota, for example, found that the divorce rate hasn't declined since 1980, as was thought. When the university’s researchers controlled for changes in the age composition of the married population, they discovered that the divorce rate actually rose by 40 percent.

In reporting the story, The Washington Post wrote: “The flipside of this finding is the relative rarity of divorce among younger Americans today. In the 1970s, a couple might get married at 25 and be divorced by 30. But today, that same couple would be more likely to simply live together for a few years and then head their separate ways when things go south.”

“When things go south.” It can apply to our children, too.

Last week the National Center on Family Homelessness found that the number of homeless children in the U.S. has surged to an all-time high--nearly 2.5 million children homeless at some point in 2013. That’s one child in every 30.

The blame? The center pointed to our high poverty rate, the lack of affordable housing and the impacts of pervasive domestic violence.

But I wonder how many of these young people were thrown out of the house because they were considered “broken”--gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or pregnant?

An independent film shot last year, titled The Disposable Generation, sought to capture the writer/director’s view that today “numbness is a virtue … an apathetic youth favors the modern American dream, which doesn’t necessarily involve being awake any more.”

There might be hope. A recent Twitter exchange that I saw went like this:

We’re the “everything is disposable” generation. We dont like it we replace it. If its broke we throw it out. If its too hard we quit on it

Not quite. Dnt like it? We make it better. Broke? Make it so it doesnt break again. Too hard? Make it easier

In my next blog, “A Light from Within”

Thanksgiving at Hope Lodge

I am a counterfeit cancer patient. Not by choice, but by chance. And it's illuminated my idea of Thanksgiving.

As I’ve mentioned in some of my previous blog posts, my wife is a breast cancer survivor of 15 years. Each month, she and I visit Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan for a few days of appointments, during which time we are accommodated at Hope Lodge.

Hope Lodge is a truly wonderful endeavor of the American Cancer Society–and largely run by volunteers. The ACS maintains 31 of these free, hotel-like accommodations in cities across the nation for patients and their caregivers who must travel long distances from home when their best hope for effective treatment is in another city. Not having to worry about where to stay or how to pay for lodging enables patients to focus on getting well.

At New York City’s Hope Lodge, a significant portion of the patients are recovering from bone marrow transplants–a regimen typically lasting some 100 days, when extreme precautions must be taken to protect severely compromised immune systems.

Of course, these patients--both men and women--have lost all their hair. In addition, almost all the other patients at Hope Lodge are undergoing some measure of chemotherapy, which has stolen their hair as well.

My wife’s medication is hormonal. So she still has her thick crop of blonde hair. I, on the other hand, have a shaved head. When we meet people in the corridors or the lobby or the dining room, they invariably acknowledge us with the unvarying greeting of cancer survivors who have learned to take life one day at a time: “How is it going today?”

Except–when they ask this--they are looking at me, not my wife.

At first I thought this was funny, that they think I’m the one with cancer.

Not anymore. Especially not with Thanksgiving upon us next week. In fact, I cringe when I think of how little gratitude I offer heavenward that I am not the one bound up in the struggle against the scourge of cancer.

The bald men and women at Hope Lodge who are our new friends are thankful every day. In the dining room or the lounge, it’s not uncommon for them to join in applause for a fellow patient who is having a “good day,” or has announced some fragment of positive news about their progress.

What is most shocking to me is that so many of these are young people:

• Tom, a bone marrow transplant patient, with four small children at home near Boston
• Maria from upstate New York, anxious about properly caring for her thirty-something husband, just out of three days in ICU following his transplant
• Chris, a Long Island metastatic breast cancer survivor herself, serving as caregiver for her husband, Michael, who is frightened about undergoing yet another facial surgery

These valiant people, and millions more who deal with cancer, are thankful for each day they prevail. For them, as it now is for me, every day is Thanksgiving Day.

To make a tax-deductible donation to Hope Lodge: 

https://donate.cancer.org/index?campaign=hl08nyny

In my next blog, "Bic Generation"

Psychogeography

I am standing as far east as I can and still be in America, gazing from Truro’s ocean beach across the Atlantic directly toward Spain.

It’s November, the month of transition from sultry summer to chill winter, from long days to long nights, from life to death. It’s the month of which essayist Joseph Addison, loyal subject of the restored Stuart monarchs, said: "The gloomy month of November, when the people of England hang and drown themselves."

And I am asking myself, “Can any place be new?”

In mid-Twentieth Century Paris, the Situationist movement attacked city planning as organized social isolation because it was concerned primarily with the smooth flow of automobile traffic.

Situationist Guy Debord called for research into the effects of urban and natural environments on emotions and behavior. He termed this area of inquiry “psychogeography.” 

It wasn’t long before his adherents adopted the practice of going on long, aimless walks--literally translated from the French derive as "driftings"--to experience the psychological states and thoughts generated during their ramblings.

In 2007 British journalist Will Self wrote Psychogeography, which has been called a “meditation on the vexed relationship between psyche and place.”

For Self, writing at a time when everything everywhere looks increasingly the same, walking is a way to see the world anew--often in striking ways.

Perhaps this is why his peregrinations took him beyond the cityscape, to the "Empty Quarters" outside urban boundaries and off paved paths. For him, these are the true frontiers, the last places left to discover and explore.

Which leads to my question, “Can any place be new?”

To try to find out, I’ve started to walk Cape Cod’s great Outer Beach from the old Coast Guard station in Eastham to Race Point Light at Provincetown. It’s the same route traveled by Henry David Thoreau in 1849.

This just might be the longest stretch of uninterrupted sand and surf in the world--25-miles. On my left are sheer dunes that spike up to 140 feet and on my right 3,000 miles of deep Atlantic Ocean. “There is no other landscape like it anywhere,” Robert Finch wrote in his introduction to the 1949 edition of Thoreau’s Cape Cod.

What do I hope to accomplish with this adventure? It has to be more than tramping across 25 miles of geography. Will I grow, change, gain some new wisdom? Maybe it will be something as simple as falling in love with the real Cape Cod after living here for almost 20 years–just as one falls in love with a mate in a different way after many years together, when the chemistry has calmed and one finds new affection for the reality–not just the appearance.

I know a book will emerge from this. I already have the working title: Beach Tramp. I won’t be writing so much about what I see as about what I feel. My hope is that the ideas and emotions that emerge during this long walk will be more engaging than the walk itself.

Perhaps there is another, more transcendent reason why I choose to do this in the autumn of my life, as days dwindle down. Henry Rollins, the hard-to-categorize punk legend, occasional actor, writer and broadcast host, said it for me: 

“The month of November makes me feel that life is passing more quickly. In an effort to slow it down, I try to fill the hours more meaningfully.”

In my next blog, “Thanksgiving at Hope Lodge”

The Laborers Are Few

Neighbors from Vieques recently visited us in Truro for a few days. To treat them to a real Cape Cod experience, we took them to – where else? -- Truro Vineyards. Together we helped harvest autumn’s crop of 2014 cabernet and pinot grapes.

Like my wife and I, they’re not accustomed to the sort of strenuous toil involved in stooping, plucking, filling and lugging.

Yes, there were our feeble attempts at humor: “No wonder Americans don’t want to do this kind of work.”

This stopped me cold. After all, didn’t we boycott table grapes in the Sixties to support Caesar Chavez in his fight to win social justice for migrant field workers? Didn’t we gain from him some understanding of the dignity of work?

I was reminded of the vocational training and apprenticeship programs being offered by big corporate names such as Siemens. Rooted in Germany’s long heritage of apprenticeships, these are noteworthy vocational alternatives for students who – instead of college -- want or need to begin earning a living and might enjoy the hands-on work of a high-technology manufacturing facility.

Siemens, for example, has an apprenticeship program that’s well over a century old. Following the German custom, it sponsors one of the largest school-to-career programs in America -- combining practical and classroom training in partnership with high schools, technical schools and community colleges.

When Siemens launched an apprenticeship program in Silicon Valley several years ago, I wrote a speech for then-CEO Dr. Heinrich von Pierer in which he said, “We hope to not only equip young people against poverty, social conflict and inequality, but also to enable them to prosper in a world of change. Because with the great change taking place in today’s high-technology environment, it is the learners who will inherit the future.”

Apprenticeship programs like the one Siemens pioneers are designed to invigorate development of a hands-on, high-tech workforce, thereby fueling America’s global competitiveness.

According to the Manufacturing Institute, the manufacturing base helps drive one in seven private-sector jobs in the U. S. and accounts for about 70% of private sector research and development.

Eric A. Spiegel is the president and CEO of Siemens USA and serves on the President’s Advanced Manufacturing Partnership 2.0 Steering Committee.

“Manufacturing jobs have a branding problem,” he said after last month’s meeting of the committee. “There is an ongoing need to ensure young people understand that choosing a challenging career in advanced manufacturing is a pathway to a successful career.”

We've done a disservice to youth by suggesting that a college degree is the single path to success. The reality is eye-opening. A National Education Association study two years ago examined the U.S. labor force and students’ academic and career paths. It found:

• Three of ten do not graduate from high school
• Half of high school students do not go to college
• Close to half of college students do not complete a Bachelor’s degree within six years
• Three-fourths of our labor force do not have a Bachelor’s degree
• Only one of four workers holds a high-skill job

In a recent US News & World Report story, James Stone III, director of the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education at the University of Louisville, pointed out that middle-school students in Germany take tests and move on to either apprenticeships or university preparation.

“The system works extraordinarily well,” he says. “They have one of the lowest youth unemployment rates in the industrialized world, and going through an apprenticeship in no way prevents one from moving on to college.”

No company can guarantee a person a lifetime job. But it can bestow employability skills for a lifetime.

In my next blog, “Psychogeography”

Family Candy

“Candy corn is the only candy in the history of America that's never been advertised. And there's a reason. All of the candy corn that was ever made was made in 1911. And so, since nobody eats that stuff, every year there's a ton of it left over.”

Lewis Black

On my first day in kindergarten, Sister Mary Theresa passed around a big can of gumdrops for us to sample. I took two gumdrops even though she told us to each take one. The kid next to me snitched. That’s when I learned never to trust anybody who doesn’t like candy.

There’s something about candy that defines us in a way few other things can.

Ronald Reagan, for instance, noted, “You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans.”

When Reggie Jackson belted three home runs during Game 6 of the 1977 World Series, perhaps his greatest tribute was having a candy bar named after him.

Actor Telly Savalas built his “Kojak” character around a lollipop.

In our family, my wife’s grandfather concealed a stash of Mounds bars as a special treat just for her – always, and only, Mounds. Our daughters, however, got it into their heads as youngsters that their mother adored Necco Wafers. So each birthday, Mother’s Day and Christmas, Jo Anne would be heaped with packs of the sugary stuff. It wasn’t until the girls were grown that she confessed to them that she hated Necco Wafers.

There is a nostalgia associated with candy. Hershey's has been around since 1900. You can find a recipe for S’mores in the Girl Scout Handbook of 1927. Some of us still remember the Chuckles ad slogan, “Five colors, five flavors, five cents.” And three traditional favorites comprise the top-sellers every year:

• Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, introduced in 1928
• Snickers, introduced in 1930
• M&Ms, introduced in 1941

Here’s Dr. Samira Kawash, an expert on the cultural history of candy, in a Smithsonian interview a few years ago.

“There’s no sign of trick-or-treating at all until the 1930s and it really wasn’t until the late 1940s that it became widespread. In the 1970s, there was the emergence of the myth of the Halloween sadist: the idea that there are people out there who are going to poison the popcorn balls, put razors in the apples, etc. Anything that wasn’t factory-sealed wasn’t considered safe. There was a sense of loss of small-townness in that era of suburbanization. The neighbors were strangers for the first time.”

Today, though, children go from home to home trusting that strangers will give them something sweet. And adults feel no hesitation in giving candy to the small strangers on their doorstep.

At Halloween, we typically are not even cognizant of the sharing that is occurring. One poll showed that at Halloween most of us shop for the candy we favor, like a legacy we’re proud to leave the kids.

In the newly released film, The Judge, the title character’s passion for Bit O’Honey candies is handed down to his son, who in turn passes it down to his daughter. A powerful moment comes when the crusty patriarch is near death and his son surprises him with a handful of Bit O’Honeys. Candy becomes a tangible metaphor for the renewed affection the two men share – despite the strained relationship they’ve had for years.

For this fictional family, as for my family and perhaps yours, too, a brand of humble candy can serve as a bequest whose value defies definition.

In my next blog, “The Laborers Are Few”

The Yuck Factor

“Masks Confronting Death”

James Ensor, 1888

A couple of weeks ago, on what I now refer to as Bloody Monday, I had a molar extracted. The tooth extraction was quick and painless. But what followed weakened my squeamish knees.

The nurse told me to keep a firm pressure on the gauze covering the extraction site, periodically changing it during the next few hours until all bleeding stopped.

“Don’t go by the gauze,” she said. “It will be bloody every time you remove it. Look in your mouth to see if blood is still dripping, or get someone to look.”

That ain’t gonna happen, I thought. I’ll never be able to find somebody who 1) is willing to look in my mouth, and 2) won’t faint at the sight. 

Then I remembered. People love zombies. There’s an absolute zombie craze happening in movies and television programs. With the new season of The Walking Dead, zombie costumes will be this year’s hottest Halloween selection, forecasts Gary Lipovetsky, co-CEO of social commerce website bestie.com.

What is it that draws so many people to The Yuck Factor, I wonder. To delight in fright, to find entertainment at the sight of zombies feeding on human brains, to relish the repulsive?

We humans have at least a 2,000-year history of putting ourselves in touch with the horrible. The origin of Halloween is found in ancient Celtic festivals. Samhain commenced on the eve of October 31 and kicked off the Celtic New Year the following day. The Celts saw this as a period when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead was the most transparent, enabling the spirits of the dead to visit earth.

Dr. Margee Kerr, an expert on fear, says humans are obsessed with death because we have a hard time wrapping our mind around what happens after we die. We want a life that goes on after we die. Or better yet, we yearn to live forever. But this violates the laws of nature and is, therefore, terrifying.

Why do we like being scared so much?

People are curious about how much fear they can tolerate. There is a sense of satisfaction when we prove to ourselves that we can handle more anxiety than we had imagined. Scary situations leave us with a sense of confidence after it’s over.

There’s also a hormonal reaction when we are exposed to a threat or crisis, and this can stimulate our love of being scared. The moment we feel threatened, we feel increasingly more strong and powerful physically and more intuitive emotionally. We know this charge to our physical and mental state as an “adrenaline rush.” As humans, we are hard-wired to crave this type of feeling.

On a psychological level we’re attracted to vicariously experience the forbidden, the bizarre and the dark. Horror films in particular let us explore fear in an enjoyable and safe way. They also allow us to engage with evil without getting ourselves into trouble. Identifying with the dark side of the human condition is probably as cathartic as a Greek tragedy.

The Yuck Factor is also a philosophical line of thinking – applied especially to bioethics – suggesting that an intuitive negative response to something is evidence that it’s intrinsically harmful or evil.

So as we count down to the Halloween horrors that lie only days away – the oozing undead, the blood-thirsty vampires, the visiting phantom spirits, the worms and maggots and spiders -- let’s keep this old Scottish prayer on our lips:

From ghoulies and ghosties

And long-leggedy beasties

And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!

In my next blog, “Family Candy”

Learning to Learn

“The illiterate of the 21^st century will not be those who cannot read and write, 

but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Alvin Toffler

My father’s ambition when he was graduated from Perth Amboy High School was to be an attorney, but it was the time of the Great Depression and he entered the workplace instead, as a laborer.

He could:

• Drive a truck
• Hang wallpaper
• Paint a house
• Repair cars
• Build furniture
• Sew slipcovers for sofas and chairs, and curtains for windows
• Build a doghouse
• Put up a fence
• Work as an ironworker in constructing whole buildings
• Pass Civil Service exams to become a cop and then a sergeant
• Tend bar

When he had his heart attack, he was at work as a taxi dispatcher. 

They used to call guys like him a “Jack of All Trades.” Today we call it lifelong learning.

The annual report on mortality rates by the National Center for Health Statistics, released this week, confirmed that in 2012 life expectancy for older Americans continued to climb. People who reach 65 have an average 19.3 more years ahead of them -- an all-time high.

What are we going to do with all this newfound time? If you’re a lifelong learner – plenty, because you understand that learning is not a place, but a process whose endpoint has been extended.

Learning as we used to understand it occurs in institutions designed to deliver education. The informal learning that is lifelong is most often pursued outside the walls of learning institutions.

A lot has been written about the benefits of lifelong learning: personal development, employment and earnings, economics, sense of wellbeing – even as a defense against dementia. Governments are promoting lifelong learning as a way to nurture competitiveness, innovation and growth. Some governments see lifelong learning as contributing to social cohesion.

But what about the value of a life? Does lifelong learning heighten the value of our lives?

In 2008, Time magazine reported that a human life was worth $189,000. In 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency set the value of human life at $9.1 million. The same year, the Food and Drug Administration put it at $7.9 million. Each of these reports crunched various numbers to come up with their assessments.

My father was deft at adding value to his life by using his hands to shape the physical environment around him. Lacking his aptitude, I’ve brought value to my life through my writing. I’ve tried to add to its value through continued learning. In recent years, for example, I’ve learned to swim and to snorkel, to sail, to operate a well-regarded bed-and-breakfast. I’ve taught myself to cook well enough to serve paying guests. I’m wrestling with Rosetta Stone to learn Italian. And I’m in the process of publishing six books.

Mary Ann Evans – the acclaimed English novelist of the Victorian era who wrote under the pen name George Eliot – said it well: "It's never too late to be what you might have been."


In my next blog, “The Yuck Factor”

Fat Guy in a Fat Boat

The classic New England catboat.

“One thing about being at sea is that you don’t really get to stop. A boat simply does not allow for genuine rest. Its essential nature is peril, held in check only through enormous effort and expense.”

A Mile Down; The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea

David Vann, 2005

The year that David Vann’s disturbing book was published, I took ownership of the sailing vessel Copy Cat, the last 23-foot New England cruising catboat built by Bill Menger -- who would pass over the bar two years later.

I could write a book. So I am. Next spring – as recreational boats are being put into the water – Pamet River Books will publish The Fat Guy in the Fat Boat.

This Columbus Day weekend, however, it is being hauled out of the water for winter storage. My 2014 boating season is ended. 

Much of buying a boat is nautical foreplay:

• Obsessively driving out to the boatyard each weekend to observe the slow birthing of the vessel
• Trying to sound unpretentious in mentioning your upcoming “sea trials” to friends
• Throwing a launch party, right down to a bottle of bubbly cracked against hull

When I extended my hand to accept the keys to the boat, I didn’t appreciate the “enormous effort and expense” described in Vann’s book.

Copy Cat’s homeport, for example, is Red Brook Harbor, at the upper end of Buzzards Bay, just outside the Cape Cod Canal. Frequent brisk winds over the funnel-shaped Bay cause contrary interplay with tides in the Bay’s relatively shallow waters, resulting in a phenomenon known as “standing waves” – as high as six feet -- near the Canal. So Buzzards Bay always makes the Top Ten lists of “Most Challenging” bodies of water in which to sail.

Then there’s my own ineptitude. In the years I’ve skippered Copy Cat, I’ve kept a growing list of blunders:

• Raising the peak spar first instead of throat and peak spars together
• Forgetting to loosen the topping lift after the sail has been raised
• Confusing the 2^nd reef outhaul with the first
• Running aground
• Running out of fuel

But the heart will not be denied. From earliest times, our ancient ancestors clustered their dwellings near bodies of water – ponds and lakes, rivers, the seas. As a species, we come from water and are so much composed of water that we instinctively regard it as our natural habitat.

In her memoir, Paris France, Gertrude Stein wrote:

“Writers have two countries. The one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic. It is not real but it is really there.”

This is true not only for writers, but for sailors, too. Which of the two is our real country?

Sailors have a romantic anticipation in our mind’s eye of how we want things to unfold aboard the private little country that is our boat. But factors as simple as worsening weather or a failed shackle or a dry fuel tank wrench us back to the real.

Still, I can’t wait for spring, when I can return to the private little country that is my boat.

In my next blog, “Learning to Learn”