I don't get this one
The following is a conversation among several of Mike's Inner Circle. It received more interaction than all of his other posts. What do you think was meant by the quote that started the dialogue?
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"For too long we've been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present. Perhaps we see that now."
PRESIDENT OBAMA, delivering the eulogy for the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney in Charleston, S.C.
Mike
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My take was that he was speaking in the voice of "everyman".....perhaps hoping the events of this past week are in fact some kind of tipping point and attempting to speak to a collective unconscious awareness and bring it to greater consciousness.
M.
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Gosh, I don't think like this... a country with a black minority president born to a single mom in a foreign country is a past injustice becoming a present problem?
Mike
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How about this as a possible subconscious meta-meaning?
"Finally the social valudynamic more closely mirrors mine. The relief I feel gives me the impression that the condition is overdue."
A.
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Hmmm
mike
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Also:
I'm adept at shifting a larger narrative by ascribing a particular meaning to emotionally loaded events. It's an effective tactic. This is just another example.
AND
The degree of calculating cynicism and self-centeredness through which I view the world colors my perception of other's motives. We're learning more about A. in my interpretations than we are of Obama.
A.
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Hehe, I won't share what I think, so you’re brave.
Mike
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Love your reframe and/or insight A..
J.
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Like finally lowering the confederate flag... as one example of the tipping point
B.
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In a mild non-sequitur… been digging into the “original wound” – had no idea that the US was only around 4% of the total of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, most going to the Caribbean and Brazil.
And we appear to remain a species that widely uses enslavement for various ends. Current estimates are at 30 million worldwide, 60,000 in the US. Far beyond numbers enslaved during the trans Atlantic slave period of history.
Although an oversimplification, it resonates with me the profound bi-polarity of our species, capable of great generosity / compassion / empathy and also unmitigated violence and brutality toward each other. And between these poles we appear to be in relationship with each other.
J2.
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Far more are enslaved @BS and that is why it works, for the most part, all the slaves eat 3 squares.
Here is a note from a MyPAL this morning about her relatives:
“I went to their house today.
I wonder, I can’t contact her in all her contacts.
They don’t have electricity.
That’s why.
They don’t eat too.
Why there is so many poor people?”
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Most slaves had it better, things I didn't want to mention is to contrast in general the well-being of those in the USA and those left behind in Africa over time....
There is always a good and a bad side to everything.
In the USA, racism is BIG business
Mike
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Where to begin?
“Holocaust survivors, and Japanese Americans who were placed in internment camps seem to be able to not let their past define their life with negativity”. I have only my own experience growing up Jewish. By far my Jewish identity – positively and negatively - was shaped by the holocaust more than by the Torah or by God. Positively in that to some extent we generalize from being against the oppression we have experienced to being against oppression; the civil rights movement was, I believe, over-represented by Jews, including my sister. Negatively in that it perpetuates us as a victim people. For many of my relatives, criticism of policies of the government of Israel is by definition an act of anti-Semitism. I was probably 50 years old before I realized that Jews are just one more ethnic group, that we have been oppressed and perhaps in ways that others have not been, but that this does not make us unique and is largely (and appropriately) uninteresting to non-Jews. And I still am working on fully embodying that insight.
It’s not that there is no real anti-Semitism, but my life is no more hampered by it than it is by anti-introvertism. My father faced anti-Semitism applying for work as an engineer in the late 1940s, but I don’t expect that the name “K.” would keep me from being hired on Wall Street. I do think it’s time for Jews to get over the past.
I heard a story a couple of years ago, likely apocryphal, about a guy in a checkout line in a store in Arizona really bothered by the woman behind him speaking some foreign language on her cell phone. “I don’t know what language you’re speaking, but speak English or go back to where you came from.” The reply, in perfect English, “The language I was speaking is Navajo.”
H.
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Are you sure about anti-introversion. ;-)
You raised very important issues about values and values conflict.
Each of us is self-hugging for sure, except me of course...I don't think hugging is a good idea. ;-)
Mike
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Mike – I’m an introvert. I’m not sure about anything.
H
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"My point is that I understand why L.’s Black friends don’t want public places named after, and therefore honoring, Confederate heroes. Lee, Davis etc. led the defense of slavery that cost 620,000 Civil War deaths. How would you frame their actions?"
Having lived in the deep south for a huge majority of my life (36 of my almost 45 years so far), I see in some of my old classmates and friends a deeply felt allegiance to an identity that is only tangentially related to a history of slavery. Without question, a big impetus for the Civil War was the economics of slavery and financial risk to those in power in that era, but it's unlikely that it was the only one or even the primary one for many.
Perhaps ironically, those who feel strong support for civil war hero naming of streets and buildings (and the confederate flag) are apparently doing so as a way to identify as Southern-American.
We humans naturally seek out like groups for safety and we like to mark our territory. Which generates conflict.
A.
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There is actually a larger meta theme here around the inability of most "fractional approaches" to deal with the broader accelerating complexity...
Fractional approaches "frame" reality and within that frame (usually indirectly guided by values, directly serving unconscious values)...make "assumptions about reality which are usually only "true" within the frame...
Change the frame (perspective) truth dissolves...and more important u get back to "creating more problems than you solve" outside the frame...
This is the real challenge going forward and this is clearly the reason I posted "I don't get it" to begin with...
Interesting where the dialogue went...but clearly modeled the meta theme
Mike
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Very interesting discussion going on between G. and H. I wonder how a coaching conversation will be like facing a client like either one of them. And how big the challenge will be of one of them coaching the other.
R.
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I thought about the same thing and then remembered that in large part people don't want to be coached. ;-)
But here's an idea I'm getting ready to make videos about for LeaderWARE and that is...
Each "level" has a way of framing reality in concert with their values and thus respond (as a result of what they "sense” (5 senses) differently...
What would be interesting (at least to me ALTMe [At Least To Me] is to know what each thought was "important" and scaffolds their own positions?
Mike
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E.'s buttons, ... enough for a Symphony <BG>.
Trying to limit myself to a few highlights.
I love Montreal, where people who first meet automatically inquire about the language preference of the other and try to accommodate. "Defenders" of a culture or language impose restrictive laws, regulations and often generate nasty reactions, but those are less important to me than the tolerant behaviour of the majority. The restrictions on English on commercial signs in order to "defend" French, the interdiction of wearing religious signs for specific jobs sometimes raise again to the top of the list of priorities even in political elections.
Except for a short period when my parents hid me away while they had to wear the yellow stars I had been very seldom exposed to anti-Semitic manifestations in Romania during my 28 years there. Today, after most Jews had left, Romanian web sites are full of anti-Semitic statements, not only blaming Jews for most things that went wrong there, but expressing a fundamental hate going back to religious inventions. I read that in places like Hungary and France the situation is worse. Luckily there is a lot less of that here.
I read that in old times one of the Persian emperors had his laws translated into more than forty languages so that the population could understand how to conform.
While English signs are prohibited in Quebec, street and train signs in China have the equivalent English name posted.
Where I grew up in Transylvania many people spoke more than one, often many languages. Today most Germans and Jews are gone, Hungarian is quickly losing power. I think Romania is less attractive than it used to be.
My grandfather destroyed his copies of his PhD thesis published in Hungarian in Budapest when his city was incorporated into Czechoslovakia after the first Wold War and Hungarian was no longer Kosher. There are only traces left of Hungarian spoken before in those regions. The European Union seems to add little to reduce the national animosities.
My point: I understand people who do not want to deal with other languages or cultures interfering with their customs. Especially in Montreal I have learned how accepting the strange ones does not diminish my own values, and that learning a little from them makes my life more rich. In many places where people of different backgrounds lived nearby for generations they have learned to mutually benefit. And then occasionally small sparks were sufficient to destroy the peace (Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Middle East) or to start building a new peace (Europe).
"May you live in interesting times" is sometimes a blessing. I believe that individually we can still benefit. Just think of all the pizzas, tacos, and, in Montreal, bagels <BG>.
PS: I read that Japanese refused to accept foreigners who wanted to live there. Now the population drops and Chinese are buying up housing that has lost its value in Tokyo. We live longer than earlier generations and observe the mutations that our ancestors often did not observe. Mind you, no Jews were allowed to enter Arad at the beginning of the 18th century, the city where I was later born. A census in 1942 recorded more than 9000. The last count was lower than 300. While they were there, they learned the languages of the locals, but it was not enough to be accepted. None of us here is aboriginal or black American ...
E.
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One interesting thing, among many E., is that your capability (VOLume), more than likely plays a role in your adept-ability...
Most of our solutions assume that this adept-ability is available, when in fact it's rare...and the ideas @BS both aggravate and advantage this disparity.
I've been watching a lot of things lately that all return @BS to a central theorem which is largely not shared with 95-99% of the population @BS.
This then, becomes a serious flaw in the design of almost anything I can sense @BS.
IF we designed @F-L-O-W, this "equality" theorem that undergirds BS would be reconfigured to create a different set of conditions/problems which altME...would create a new tier...
Currently the existential tier @BS is in a cul de sac and all we are doing with solutions is creating more sophisticated ways of chasing our tails because we are not at a fundamental level of algorithmic change.
We are nearing an inflection point where the tracks of our paradigms (tears) diverge...significantly that the social fabric will tear.
Mike