By Valerie Tay
The right ear had turned a bright red, a stark contrast from the left. Still, the teacher tugged forcefully on the ear as the rest of the class winced.
The boy grimaced in pain but not a sound issued from his lips.
“Why didn’t you do your homework?” the cikgu screamed, her anger getting the better of her. She gave the ear another vicious tug and I feared it was going to come off. Thankfully, it didn’t but its colour deepened to a darker crimson.
The boy stood silent, hanging his head. He didn’t look frightened, just kind of resolute and resigned, like he had accepted his fate.
And that had been his daily fate on a school day. Hardly a day passed when he was not berated, had his ear pulled or had his exercise book thrown in his face.
Think it’s fiction? No, I witnessed those scenes countless times when I was in primary school.
If I remember correctly, his name was Chin Huat and he was always getting into trouble because he hadn’t done his homework.
I could never understand why he couldn’t just do his homework and avoid the humiliation and pain. Like my teachers, I’d thought I’d never seen a lazier fellow and a more hopeless case.
Then one Friday night, on a whim, my mother took me to the Haig Road hawker centre for supper. We had settled down to eat at a table when I spotted him.
Chin Huat, no longer in his school uniform, was busy at one of the stalls, serving customers and clearing tables. I watched him for a while, awed by this different side of him that I’d never seen before.
He was very efficient at his job, multi-tasking and quick on his feet, and instead of the usual quiet and sullen-faced boy I knew in school, he looked happy, smiling frequently. A confidence shone on his face like he knew he was in his element here.
It was past nine. It dawned on me that the stall wouldn’t close till late as the food centre was still packed with people and business was brisk. There was a middle-aged couple busy manning the stall as well. Was Chin Huat helping out at his parents’ stall? Did he come here to work every day after school?
I thought about all the homework that hadn’t been done and I finally knew. That very moment, I learned that, sometimes, things aren’t what they appear on the surface.
Our eyes finally met. I nodded and gave him an encouraging smile. He seemed embarrassed for a moment, before a holler from the stall brought him to a start and he resumed his duty.
With the understanding, a new respect took root in my heart. I was a lucky kid, while not so lucky kids like Chin Huat went to work after school. Overnight, my perception of him turned 180 degrees. I was the cloistered child, he was an adult living in the real world. I admired him.
He didn’t last till the Primary Six exams, dropping out of school after a few more months of ear-pulling. There was no point – he wouldn’t have passed.
He’d definitely be happier taking to work life like a responsible adult. And if he inherits his father’s hawker stall, I know he will do well and not have to owe anybody a living.
But why hadn’t he told the teacher? Explain why he could never find the time or energy to do his homework? Why didn’t he say anything to anyone? For years I couldn’t understand his reticence – till one day, I found myself in a Chin Huat situation.
Working as an executive in a large company, I was sent to a four-day workshop held at a hotel. Classes started at 9am every morning.
The first day I managed to arrive at only 9.30am. The trainer made some remarks about punctuality and continued his presentation. Of course, everyone knew the comment was directed at me.
The next day, I arrived at 9.30am again. The trainer repeated his call for punctuality, seemingly to nobody in particular, again.
I wasn’t late on purpose. It was simply no use leaving the flat earlier. On a normal working day, I’d arrive at the office at 8.45am instead of the required 8.30am. I had sought the understanding of my supervisor and he had kindly agreed to let me start work 15 minutes later and finish work later.
You see, every morning, I would be at my son’s PCF kindergarten at Bedok Reservoir (where my mother lives) waiting for the teacher to open the door at eight, drop him off and then rush off to work. I could make the office in 45 minutes by bus. My mother, who doesn’t get up till 9am, would pick my son up after school.
The workshop’s location was further than the office. I had to take a bus, then switch to the train, to get there. That was why I arrived at 9.30am.
I thought of telling the trainer about my situation, but decided to wait and see if he would take me aside to talk about it. No such luck.
My colleagues, too, did not ask, and I, too, did not explain.
The third morning, the trainer made another exhortation for punctuality. But by then, I had grown irritated and stubbornly refused to go to him to explain.
I also pushed aside the thought of taking a taxi to the hotel. Why should I spend the equivalent of a tin of formula milk to gain the approval of the trainer? I’ll admit I do have a willful streak in me.
Then came the last day of the training, and he took his revenge. Oh, he’d saved the best game for the last.
Taking one end of a long piece of string, he invited a participant to hold the string a little distance away from him. That participant would then invite someone else, and so on, in the great string communion.
It was obviously a popularity contest, and no prizes for guessing who would be the last. I stood there waiting till the end and, in a way, I deserved it.
The trainer let a long pause develop before coolly asking the pariah standing alone, “Would you like to join in?”
”Sure,” I replied, just as coolly, with a smile. “I don’t mind.” And I stepped up smartly, confidently, to grasp the end of the string, unrepentant and defiant to the end.
I thought about Chin Huat then, and I finally understood what I had failed to understand all these years.
Chin Huat hadn’t spoken of his problem because no one had asked. No one had cared to ask. Sometimes, things may not be what they appear to be.
Next time I see a Chin Huat, I think I’ll ask.
The writer is a full-time mother who has just started to do freelance writing.
The Straits Times pg 20 Review, July 30 2007
Monday, July 30, 2007
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Do-gooders don't deserve bad press
By Matthew Pereira
I met some former university friends for a game of hard-court football and dinner last month for the first time in a long, long while.
We had all been in the same football team during our undergraduate days and this group was a bunch I had spent much time with back then. In those days, they were a madcap lot: playful, boisterous and irreverent. We had nicknames for each other - Lumps, Botak and Bowie.
And fond as we are of each other, I can't remember a time when we ever had anything good to say about each other. We used to always run each other down, in a juvenile way.
Many of us lost touch shortly after graduation, when we all became caught up with career, family and children.
That football game last month was the first meeting in more than 20 years for some of us. Not everyone from the original group was there that day, though.
Some we could not reach because we had actually forgotten their real names after calling them by their nicknames for the last 25 years.
That evening, no sooner had we met than each of us slipped into our undergrad persona. That we all hold serious jobs now did not matter. But occasionally, this playful, loud front would disappear and there would be a glimpse of the responsible people these guys had become.
It was during one of these momentary lapses that one of the guys, Lau, asked: "Anyone interested in signing up in a mentorship programme to help mould younger people?"
For a moment, there was silence.
Everyone appeared taken aback.
"Nobody, huh?" he asked.
Then he added: "Why would we be interested anyway?" He sounded almost apologetic for showing an interest in training the up-and-coming.
One of the guys quipped: "Hey, we might be rejected if they do some background checks on our undergrad days. No bigger insult than that."
I don't think that remark was made completely in jest.
I think a few of us there probably felt we did not have the pedigree to be mentors. During our university days, we had euphemistically described ourselves as "well-balanced" students but that left quite a lot unsaid.
But last month, as I looked at the group, I realised there were a few there who had become more mature and who would make good mentors.
I e-mailed Lau the following day and asked him for details of the programme and in his reply, he said: "Why? Feeling guilty? You feel you need to pay back society?"
I ignored his remark and asked why he had not volunteered. "You would make a decent mentor," I said.
"I don't think so," he replied. "I would not be able to look my mentee in the eye."
I suspect what he really meant was: "Yes, I would make a good mentor but time is a problem."
I could think of others in the group who would have made the cut. There was Raymond, highly excitable and laughs like a crazed man at his own jokes, but that aside, I could visualise him coaching, guiding and instructing with patience.
Roger, our football captain from university days, would be perfect, too. He had his head on his shoulders even when we were undergrads. Till today, I frequently address him as "Captain", out of a respect I still hold for him.
Yet, no one indicated even the remotest interest. As in Lau's case, I suspect a lack of time is probably one big reason. Most are married with teenage children.
But generally, many people seem to shun such opportunities for fear of being labelled a "do-gooder".
I suspect some of the reasons for it are to do with the fact that we are humble types, and do not want to appear better than the rest. Perhaps, too, it is a fear that others will hit on us for help and support, and that we could be overwhelmed by requests.
With my guys that day, I felt it was not just lack of time that was a factor, and lack of feeling right for the role, but it also had to do with the fact that in public, they wanted to appear tough and pragmatic.
Had Lau asked each in the group privately, I am sure he would have had better luck.
Doing good can be something to be proud of, not something to conceal from friends and peers for fear of looking like suckers. I feel do-gooders should be rescued from the ridicule they sometimes receive in our culture.
We could start by having respect for, and giving support to, those who devote much of their energy to such work. As I was writing this column, a friend came over to my desk to complain about the lack of support social workers get.
He said that they slog on without recognition, no training, no skills upgrading and little reward.
I can understand if my friends or others stay clear of such responsibilities, if they are just too stretched for time. But I certainly hope that perfectly capable people such as themselves do not hold back from lending a hand simply because they fear looking like mushy do-gooders.
Because they do have a lot to offer the less fortunate in society, and should be proud of it.
Straits Times Lifestyle, pg L14, October 29 2006
I met some former university friends for a game of hard-court football and dinner last month for the first time in a long, long while.
We had all been in the same football team during our undergraduate days and this group was a bunch I had spent much time with back then. In those days, they were a madcap lot: playful, boisterous and irreverent. We had nicknames for each other - Lumps, Botak and Bowie.
And fond as we are of each other, I can't remember a time when we ever had anything good to say about each other. We used to always run each other down, in a juvenile way.
Many of us lost touch shortly after graduation, when we all became caught up with career, family and children.
That football game last month was the first meeting in more than 20 years for some of us. Not everyone from the original group was there that day, though.
Some we could not reach because we had actually forgotten their real names after calling them by their nicknames for the last 25 years.
That evening, no sooner had we met than each of us slipped into our undergrad persona. That we all hold serious jobs now did not matter. But occasionally, this playful, loud front would disappear and there would be a glimpse of the responsible people these guys had become.
It was during one of these momentary lapses that one of the guys, Lau, asked: "Anyone interested in signing up in a mentorship programme to help mould younger people?"
For a moment, there was silence.
Everyone appeared taken aback.
"Nobody, huh?" he asked.
Then he added: "Why would we be interested anyway?" He sounded almost apologetic for showing an interest in training the up-and-coming.
One of the guys quipped: "Hey, we might be rejected if they do some background checks on our undergrad days. No bigger insult than that."
I don't think that remark was made completely in jest.
I think a few of us there probably felt we did not have the pedigree to be mentors. During our university days, we had euphemistically described ourselves as "well-balanced" students but that left quite a lot unsaid.
But last month, as I looked at the group, I realised there were a few there who had become more mature and who would make good mentors.
I e-mailed Lau the following day and asked him for details of the programme and in his reply, he said: "Why? Feeling guilty? You feel you need to pay back society?"
I ignored his remark and asked why he had not volunteered. "You would make a decent mentor," I said.
"I don't think so," he replied. "I would not be able to look my mentee in the eye."
I suspect what he really meant was: "Yes, I would make a good mentor but time is a problem."
I could think of others in the group who would have made the cut. There was Raymond, highly excitable and laughs like a crazed man at his own jokes, but that aside, I could visualise him coaching, guiding and instructing with patience.
Roger, our football captain from university days, would be perfect, too. He had his head on his shoulders even when we were undergrads. Till today, I frequently address him as "Captain", out of a respect I still hold for him.
Yet, no one indicated even the remotest interest. As in Lau's case, I suspect a lack of time is probably one big reason. Most are married with teenage children.
But generally, many people seem to shun such opportunities for fear of being labelled a "do-gooder".
I suspect some of the reasons for it are to do with the fact that we are humble types, and do not want to appear better than the rest. Perhaps, too, it is a fear that others will hit on us for help and support, and that we could be overwhelmed by requests.
With my guys that day, I felt it was not just lack of time that was a factor, and lack of feeling right for the role, but it also had to do with the fact that in public, they wanted to appear tough and pragmatic.
Had Lau asked each in the group privately, I am sure he would have had better luck.
Doing good can be something to be proud of, not something to conceal from friends and peers for fear of looking like suckers. I feel do-gooders should be rescued from the ridicule they sometimes receive in our culture.
We could start by having respect for, and giving support to, those who devote much of their energy to such work. As I was writing this column, a friend came over to my desk to complain about the lack of support social workers get.
He said that they slog on without recognition, no training, no skills upgrading and little reward.
I can understand if my friends or others stay clear of such responsibilities, if they are just too stretched for time. But I certainly hope that perfectly capable people such as themselves do not hold back from lending a hand simply because they fear looking like mushy do-gooders.
Because they do have a lot to offer the less fortunate in society, and should be proud of it.
Straits Times Lifestyle, pg L14, October 29 2006
True Love: Let's calculate the odds
By Michael Kaplan
True love is like a kick in the head. No, really. It's not just that it comes out of nowhere, knocks you sideways and changes your life forever. It is statistically like a kick in the head.
Most statistics are about things that usually happen or that most people share: prices, salaries, IQs, political opinions. These qualities are called "normally distributed". If you chart them, the graph they produce is that old favourite, the bell curve.
But love is different. True love is rare; we can only hope to find it once in a lifetime, and maybe not even then. The curve that charts love is very narrow - more like a steeple than a bell. It is called a Poisson curve, and its classic exemplar was the chance of being kicked to death by a horse while serving in the Prussian calvary.
The normal distribution was discovered during the 18th century when confident Age of Enlightment types assumed that all people, places and time were pretty much alike. Statistics that produce a bell curve (like, say, the heights of everyone on your street) show a clear average, with plenty of readings within a predictable range around that average, called a "standard deviation". Common qualities, such as height, are easy to forcast.
Simeon-Denis Poisson lived in the more unpredictable 19th century. He was interested in rare events. He wanted to discover how well you could predict the chances of one such event occuring during a given time (improbable); two events (very improbable); three (like, totally improbable); or four (so improbable you can forget about it).
Years of work produced such prediction - and Poisson's successor, Ladislaus Bortkiewicz, applied it to the chances of a given calvalry regiment suffering a death by horse kick in a given year. In a triumph of mathematical prediction, the figures for the German army between 1875 and 1894 matched almost perfectly the numbers generated by theory.
While the bell curve describes things we can expect, Poisson's formula predicts things that we fear or hope for - things that, though rare, could happen at any time. In World War II, the British used it to predict the likelihood of any particular neighbourhood in London being hit by a V-2 rocket. Telephone companies use it to predict the likelihood that any particular numnber is going to ring at a particular momnet (it's low, although somehow higher when you're in the bath).
The chance that the store will run out of your cat's favourite food, that you'll have a fender bender on the way home, the chance that a war will break out somewhere today: If there's an average occurance of any event over time, Poisson's formula can predict a likelihood for the here and now.
True love is such an event. It could be today; it could be never.
All we know is that it happens to some people, sometimes. This makes me believe that the hope of meeting the love of your life is also governed by the Poisson curve. If so, it suggests some interesting conclusions.
Film director Woody Allen pointed out that being bisexual doubles your chances of a date on Saturday night - but, sadly, Poisson shows little change in response even to this drastic rise in probability.
His curve, applied to finding true love, charts two things: the chance this rare event will happen once, twice, thrice in a lifetime; but also how likely it is to happen at all in progressively more unlikely circumstances. When you move away from the back of the horse, the chance of being kicked to death falls precipitously. Similarly, edging away from the kind of people who are the current focus of your affections (in the hope that, say, a Flourentine millionaire-poet-ski champion will come knocking at your door) makes the chance of success drop away much more quickly than it would for normally distributed phenomena.
This implies that your best chances come from seeking out and sustaining friendships with the people you already like most, rather than devoting too much time to the exotic alternatives. Rare things become near-impossible once you compound their rarity - say, by buying a lottery ticket only on your birthday.
In probability, we have only two ways to control fate: through standards and through opportunities. If you want to avoid a bad Poisson event (like the fender bender), you maintain high standards by driving as defensively as you can. You steer clear of certain routes at certain times to avoid giving the other idiots too many chances to hit you. Finding love too, demands high standards (this is, after all, the person who'll share your existance) but you need lots of opportunities.
Go speed dating, by all means - remembering that it only selects for a good date, not necessarily a good mate. Skew your social life towards those events where you can find out more about potential partners than whether they are just great dancers. Use every experience, good and bad, to refine your vision of that unknown ideal so that when the one chance comes, you won't let it slip away. Every step will take you closer to the centre of the Poisson curve.
The writer is co-author, with Ellen Kaplan, of Chances Are...Adventures in Probability.
This coommentary appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
The Straits Times, pg 27, October 6 2006
True love is like a kick in the head. No, really. It's not just that it comes out of nowhere, knocks you sideways and changes your life forever. It is statistically like a kick in the head.
Most statistics are about things that usually happen or that most people share: prices, salaries, IQs, political opinions. These qualities are called "normally distributed". If you chart them, the graph they produce is that old favourite, the bell curve.
But love is different. True love is rare; we can only hope to find it once in a lifetime, and maybe not even then. The curve that charts love is very narrow - more like a steeple than a bell. It is called a Poisson curve, and its classic exemplar was the chance of being kicked to death by a horse while serving in the Prussian calvary.
The normal distribution was discovered during the 18th century when confident Age of Enlightment types assumed that all people, places and time were pretty much alike. Statistics that produce a bell curve (like, say, the heights of everyone on your street) show a clear average, with plenty of readings within a predictable range around that average, called a "standard deviation". Common qualities, such as height, are easy to forcast.
Simeon-Denis Poisson lived in the more unpredictable 19th century. He was interested in rare events. He wanted to discover how well you could predict the chances of one such event occuring during a given time (improbable); two events (very improbable); three (like, totally improbable); or four (so improbable you can forget about it).
Years of work produced such prediction - and Poisson's successor, Ladislaus Bortkiewicz, applied it to the chances of a given calvalry regiment suffering a death by horse kick in a given year. In a triumph of mathematical prediction, the figures for the German army between 1875 and 1894 matched almost perfectly the numbers generated by theory.
While the bell curve describes things we can expect, Poisson's formula predicts things that we fear or hope for - things that, though rare, could happen at any time. In World War II, the British used it to predict the likelihood of any particular neighbourhood in London being hit by a V-2 rocket. Telephone companies use it to predict the likelihood that any particular numnber is going to ring at a particular momnet (it's low, although somehow higher when you're in the bath).
The chance that the store will run out of your cat's favourite food, that you'll have a fender bender on the way home, the chance that a war will break out somewhere today: If there's an average occurance of any event over time, Poisson's formula can predict a likelihood for the here and now.
True love is such an event. It could be today; it could be never.
All we know is that it happens to some people, sometimes. This makes me believe that the hope of meeting the love of your life is also governed by the Poisson curve. If so, it suggests some interesting conclusions.
Film director Woody Allen pointed out that being bisexual doubles your chances of a date on Saturday night - but, sadly, Poisson shows little change in response even to this drastic rise in probability.
His curve, applied to finding true love, charts two things: the chance this rare event will happen once, twice, thrice in a lifetime; but also how likely it is to happen at all in progressively more unlikely circumstances. When you move away from the back of the horse, the chance of being kicked to death falls precipitously. Similarly, edging away from the kind of people who are the current focus of your affections (in the hope that, say, a Flourentine millionaire-poet-ski champion will come knocking at your door) makes the chance of success drop away much more quickly than it would for normally distributed phenomena.
This implies that your best chances come from seeking out and sustaining friendships with the people you already like most, rather than devoting too much time to the exotic alternatives. Rare things become near-impossible once you compound their rarity - say, by buying a lottery ticket only on your birthday.
In probability, we have only two ways to control fate: through standards and through opportunities. If you want to avoid a bad Poisson event (like the fender bender), you maintain high standards by driving as defensively as you can. You steer clear of certain routes at certain times to avoid giving the other idiots too many chances to hit you. Finding love too, demands high standards (this is, after all, the person who'll share your existance) but you need lots of opportunities.
Go speed dating, by all means - remembering that it only selects for a good date, not necessarily a good mate. Skew your social life towards those events where you can find out more about potential partners than whether they are just great dancers. Use every experience, good and bad, to refine your vision of that unknown ideal so that when the one chance comes, you won't let it slip away. Every step will take you closer to the centre of the Poisson curve.
The writer is co-author, with Ellen Kaplan, of Chances Are...Adventures in Probability.
This coommentary appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
The Straits Times, pg 27, October 6 2006
Saturday, August 19, 2006
What's a bounced cheque between friends?
Years ago when I was just starting out in the working world, I bumped into an old friend.
We used to fool around in class together and hung out quite a bit. He was always immaculately dressed in nice shirts and tailored pants, and wore an impressive-looking dress watch.
He was still well-dressed and as good-looking as ever. We had not seen each other since school and decided to have lunch during which we laughed over the crazy things we used to do. He insisted on paying and we parted with plans to keep in touch.
Two days later, he called me when I was in the office. He was buying a new car, he said. There was a special discount which ended that day and he was short of cash. Would I be so kind as to lend him the money? He would return it in two weeks’ time when his salary was due. He also said he would give me a post-dated cheque for the amount. Later that day, I mentioned to my wife that I was preparing the cheque for him. She immediately fired off some questions: “Are you sure about this? Who is this guy? How come I have never heard of him? Are you sure you can trust him?” That last question for me upset and I snapped: “Don’t question the integrity of my friends.”
She knew how I valued my friends and she decided to say no more.
Two weeks later, the post-dated cheque he gave me bounced, he could not be reached on his business card (I was told he had quit the company a month earlier) and he was also moved out of the Holland Village home, the address of which he had given me. The experience was my introduction to the “real” world.
But I felt I didn’t have much of a choice. If a long-time friend asked for a loan, how could I refuse? After all, what are friends for? More importantly, what is money for? In a way, my friend’s disappearance made matters easier for me. I could not do anything about the money.
But it was not the case for a national service buddy whom I met for lunch last week.
Lim had gone into business with a mutual friend of ours. This guy had a good business proposition and asked Lim if he wanted to be a partner. Lim was to shell out a third of the start-up cost and the friend, the remaining two-thirds.
But when the time came, this friend said he did not have the cash and Lim agreed to cover the full cost. His partner promised to repay him when the company started to turn a profit.
It’s been several years not and his partner has not made any attempt to pay back. Instead, what Lim has been seeing are dubious claims for travel, entertainment and gift expenses. Every now and then, he would get a call from his staff about some strange expense bill but Lim would still give his partner the benefit of the doubt and get his staff to process the payment.
“What the heck, he is a friend. I was not going to let money come in the way of our friendship,” he said. Still, I sensed his deep unhappiness. For much of the two hours of our lunch, I listened to his woes while I related to him some of my experiences.
What struck me was that while we were ostensibly talking about money, it was not that that was a problem. It was about friend-how our friends had taken advantage of us and abused our trust. That was what upset us.
But even with the benefit of experience, if someone close comes up to me tomorrow to borrow money, I know what will run through my mind: What if I were in his place? What if I needed money badly? How would I feel about a friend who could lend me the cash but doesn’t?
Lim ranted and raved about killing off the friendship, but I know him well enough.
When it comes to money and friends, the heart quite often overrules the head. I know that I would still find it extremely difficult to make a rational and practical decision on whether to part with my money if a friend needed it.
Only this time, I will consult my wife first.
Straits Times Lifestyle, pg L12, 12 August 2006
Monday, September 12, 2005
Hurricane Katrina
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski
It took four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it also took me four long days to figure out what was going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.
If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.
Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists—myself included—did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.
But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.
The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.
The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over four days last week. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency—indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.
When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).
So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:
"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....
"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.
" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "
The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows a SWAT team with rifles and armored vests riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome?
Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage one night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"—the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels—gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails—so they just let many of them loose. [Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department; see here and here.]
There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit—but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep—on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
All of this is related, incidentally, to the incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters—not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.
No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.
What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.
People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.
The welfare state—and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages—is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.
Robert Tracinski is the editor of TIADaily.com and The Intellectual Activist.
Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
by Robert Tracinski
It took four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it also took me four long days to figure out what was going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.
If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.
Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists—myself included—did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.
But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.
The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.
The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over four days last week. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.
The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency—indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.
When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).
So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:
"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....
"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.
" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "
The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows a SWAT team with rifles and armored vests riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.
What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to speed away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Superdome?
Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?
My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage one night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"—the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels—gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of those who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then told me that early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails—so they just let many of them loose. [Update: I have been searching for news reports on this last story, but I have not been able to confirm it. Instead, I have found numerous reports about the collapse of the corrupt and incompetent New Orleans Police Department; see here and here.]
There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.
There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit—but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep—on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
All of this is related, incidentally, to the incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters—not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.
No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.
What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.
But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.
People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.
The welfare state—and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages—is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.
Robert Tracinski is the editor of TIADaily.com and The Intellectual Activist.
Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
Friday, April 01, 2005
Slaves to Multitasking
When I am teaching and my students are typing away on their laptops while smiling at the screen in front of them, I know that they are more likely to be on MSN than to be with me. Every few minutes, their eyes would dart up and they would nod their heads as if what I had just said needed their approval.
Why do people bother to come to class if they are intent on doing a half-dozen other things at the same time - playing Solitaire, checking out MSN, e-mailing and writing out a last-minute assignment question they should have done weeks ago?
Our multitasking habits are a bane indeed. I can no longer have a cup of coffee with someone without feeling as though I am contesting for her time. I have dinner with Aileen while Candace calls me on my cellphone and Aileen takes that moment I'm on my phone to SMS Val, as Val feeds her daughter while working on the computer. How many times have you excused yourself to go to the bathroom, only to return to a friend busy SMS-ing, and then wondered if he preferred to be elsewhere?
Is it not a crazy thing to meet friends, then spend half the time on the cellphone with someone else? When I point out to friends that I have better things to do than to watch them SMS, they assure me they can multitask, not knowing that I do mind the waiting - and they do not multitask that well anyway. In this day, we can no longer get the full attention of people even when we meet them face to face.
Our multitasking habit creeps into other areas of life. Because we are not accustomed to concentrating on a single task for an extended period of time, books today are different in layout from the books of a decade ago. The young today can no longer read the good old courier font. They need a snazzy layout, headings in bold Comic Sans every few lines and cute balloon columns with fanciful bullet points. Depth of analysis is lost on this generation. What they want are bite-sized pieces of information - like how the Time-Out chocolate now comes in convenient popcorn-sized pieces.
We have also lost our ability to make simple commitments. We play it by ear when we want to meet. We know we can reschedule the appointment because the other person is always contactable via the cellphone. Gone are the days when we would mark our diaries and expect to keep our appointments because there was no way to change them at the last minute.
And whatever happened to waiting to speak to someone? A decade ago, when I wanted to call a friend, I would wait for her to get home. The waiting would allow me to process my thoughts. And when we talk, I would be sure she is not also playing on her cellphone.
Now, if I am irritated with someone, I would just shoot her a rude e-mail, delete it from my trash can and pretend I have not done anything bad. Postmodern connectivity facilitates an instant torrent.
I have lost the character-building habit of being forced to cool down because someone I am angry with is not within target reach.
With MSN, IM, ICQ, SMS and Blackberry, the line between aquaintances and friends have blurred. We find it easier to use these modes of communication than to call someone up. While we would not have contacted someone we were not so familiar with on the phone, these alternative modes facilitate superficial social contact. So we end up with breadth in our relations, but little depth.
A decade ago, I was learning how to e-mail on an ugly black screen. 8 years ago, my mum got me a pager. Growing up without postmodern connectivity, I am troubled by the different world the young today grow up in. What I have mentioned are little things in themself, but if we continue in this way 24/7, the effect on us will be insidiously greater than we realise.
Have you not realised only too late when your computer is hit by a virus, and you lose all your e-mail addresses, that your reliance on the e-mail address function on your computer have robbed you of the ability to remember addresses? We used to remember people's telephone numbers, now we are totally dependent on our cellphones' contact list? And our reliance on the calculator means we cannot do mental sums when splitting a restaurant bill. So what else are we allowing ourselves to be robbed of?
The writer is a teacher at a local university.
From the Straits Times, date unknown
Why do people bother to come to class if they are intent on doing a half-dozen other things at the same time - playing Solitaire, checking out MSN, e-mailing and writing out a last-minute assignment question they should have done weeks ago?
Our multitasking habits are a bane indeed. I can no longer have a cup of coffee with someone without feeling as though I am contesting for her time. I have dinner with Aileen while Candace calls me on my cellphone and Aileen takes that moment I'm on my phone to SMS Val, as Val feeds her daughter while working on the computer. How many times have you excused yourself to go to the bathroom, only to return to a friend busy SMS-ing, and then wondered if he preferred to be elsewhere?
Is it not a crazy thing to meet friends, then spend half the time on the cellphone with someone else? When I point out to friends that I have better things to do than to watch them SMS, they assure me they can multitask, not knowing that I do mind the waiting - and they do not multitask that well anyway. In this day, we can no longer get the full attention of people even when we meet them face to face.
Our multitasking habit creeps into other areas of life. Because we are not accustomed to concentrating on a single task for an extended period of time, books today are different in layout from the books of a decade ago. The young today can no longer read the good old courier font. They need a snazzy layout, headings in bold Comic Sans every few lines and cute balloon columns with fanciful bullet points. Depth of analysis is lost on this generation. What they want are bite-sized pieces of information - like how the Time-Out chocolate now comes in convenient popcorn-sized pieces.
We have also lost our ability to make simple commitments. We play it by ear when we want to meet. We know we can reschedule the appointment because the other person is always contactable via the cellphone. Gone are the days when we would mark our diaries and expect to keep our appointments because there was no way to change them at the last minute.
And whatever happened to waiting to speak to someone? A decade ago, when I wanted to call a friend, I would wait for her to get home. The waiting would allow me to process my thoughts. And when we talk, I would be sure she is not also playing on her cellphone.
Now, if I am irritated with someone, I would just shoot her a rude e-mail, delete it from my trash can and pretend I have not done anything bad. Postmodern connectivity facilitates an instant torrent.
I have lost the character-building habit of being forced to cool down because someone I am angry with is not within target reach.
With MSN, IM, ICQ, SMS and Blackberry, the line between aquaintances and friends have blurred. We find it easier to use these modes of communication than to call someone up. While we would not have contacted someone we were not so familiar with on the phone, these alternative modes facilitate superficial social contact. So we end up with breadth in our relations, but little depth.
A decade ago, I was learning how to e-mail on an ugly black screen. 8 years ago, my mum got me a pager. Growing up without postmodern connectivity, I am troubled by the different world the young today grow up in. What I have mentioned are little things in themself, but if we continue in this way 24/7, the effect on us will be insidiously greater than we realise.
Have you not realised only too late when your computer is hit by a virus, and you lose all your e-mail addresses, that your reliance on the e-mail address function on your computer have robbed you of the ability to remember addresses? We used to remember people's telephone numbers, now we are totally dependent on our cellphones' contact list? And our reliance on the calculator means we cannot do mental sums when splitting a restaurant bill. So what else are we allowing ourselves to be robbed of?
The writer is a teacher at a local university.
From the Straits Times, date unknown
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