Immigrants Are the American Dream
By George Templeton
Gazette Blog Columnist
Blue Country Gazette Blog
Rim Country Gazette Blog
Were we that way?
Here's
a thought: when someone is bugging me, it's probably in their interest,
not mine. I get many emails and quickly delete them. I don’t have
time to read them, so I’ll call them when I want something, not the
other way around.
In
the old days, you went to the brick-and-mortar store and visited the
aisle containing the thing you wanted. You saw the thing, felt it,
smelled it, and perhaps even tried it on. Armed with these facts, you
then made your decision. It was lateral thinking.
You
did not have to parse your way through an algorithm’s assumptions about
you and piles of irrelevant information. You decided in your quandary.
It is what the mathematician William Byers called our Blind Spot, and
it went round and round like a wheel, creating self-referential
ambiguity. We would find McCain’s Character and Destiny, morality, and courage on that wheel. They all depend on each other. They are our dark side and our better angels.
Does force persuade?
In
management school, we were taught to focus on overt behaviors. They
were concretely objective things that could be measured at a place and
time. The great innovation of this idea was that an employee might be
able to see how they were doing. Because your job is incomplete and
full of surprises, the employee and manager must sit together and make
adjustments.
But
even after that, important things cannot be measured. Our feelings are
proxies, indicators of something deeper that must be considered.
Most
human beings want to feel appreciated and make a difference. When we
involved the employees who were low in the pyramid of power in the
decision-making process, the change in attitude and productivity was
palpable.
Do you have free will?
It
is lonely when you must make decisions, and there is no higher up you
can defer to. You can’t be truly free unless you are also responsible.
Charles Spezzano observed, "The most free person is not the one who is free from anything, but the one who is free for everything.”
We are skeptical of things lacking evidence, but what are those? Can it be found by looking inward instead of outward?
Beliefs
That
wheel we described earlier turns round and round because we don’t know
precisely what virtue is or why it exists within our consciousness. The
“why” comforts us, giving our thinking viral contagion and deep
understanding. Why would we want a loose cannon on our ship of state?
What
is courage? It seems to depend on circumstances. It could be holding a
different opinion than your friends and neighbors and being authentic.
The
23 Psalm explains courage. When we distrust one another and fear
immigrants who want to contribute, be appreciated, and build a better
life, we miss its message. Those people are the American Dream. They
were Hitler’s Jewish scientists, the Irish, the Italians, the WW II
Japanese concentration camp Americans, the Chinese California gold rush
miners, and the unrecognized minorities who did the hard work to build
the railroads and work the plantations. There were millions of them.
They were not criminals sent by countries wanting to get rid of them.
Proverbs
26: 18-19 seems to apply to our situation. “Like a madman … is the
man who deceives his neighbor and says, “I am only joking!” The
thousand-year-old concept of the Anti-Christ viewed him as the ultimate
adversary of “goodness,” a persecuting tyrant, and a great deceiver.
The GOP has its historical policies, but they do not bind our loose
cannon. Like the reality TV apprentice, he will fire those who
disagree.
In
the 30 years of my work, I have had to move manufacturing apparatus
back and forth across the oceans, and I can tell you that those foreign
countries were not depositing to our Federal Reserve. The American
consumer pays the tariffs. I have also dealt with immigration, but I
let the lawyers handle that for me.
Is fairness and justice only about having things turn out your way?
Policies are not about crowd size. They are not games or reality TV. They are about “The Courage to Be”. It is about the joy of saying yes to our true being. It is about principle, not just money.
Some
things must be understood from the top down. For example, heat was
macroscopic initially, but then microscopic atoms were discovered.
Statistics provided the correspondence between the two viewpoints.
Consider the things providing the correspondence between the political
left and right. Is a rose still a rose from any other view? This
should bring us together again.
Understanding
from the bottom up works when you can find a simple governing
principle, helping to provide direction as you spread your wings to fly
in the dusk of our increasingly less civil politics. Unfortunately, we
might not understand democracy until it has passed away.
Fear,
distrust, and hatred are human emotions that can destroy a nation. We
must remember that the future builds upon the past, whether we
appreciate it or not. No one in 1960, in the worst nightmare, could
have dreamed that we would come to this. The generation who raised me
could not vote for Adlai Stevenson in 1956 because he was divorced, and
they did not like Eisenhower because they could not like a war general.
Today, self-interest is the dominant Republican ethos.
How To Think
Start
by thinking laterally. How would you classify your feelings? Which
bucket would you put them in? Buckets can overlap and change over time.
Good
stories involve intentions that cannot be measured. They might not be
accurate, but when they are true, we can sense that.
But
what if we think vertically, in threads? That uses big data and is not
human. The danger of artificial intelligence is that we let AI think
for us in an inhuman way that is easier than thinking for ourselves.
