Alan Kurdi, age 3

Little Alan Kurdi (lower right photo) was found, having washed up on the beach in Turkey.  He was 3 years old when he and his brother drowned while escaping with their father from the violence in Syria.  The photos captured international attention for a few days.  In the years since, thousands more have been driven from their homes, and another 8,500 have died like little Alan did.  

When we think of the crisis in Syria,
we think in broad strokes, but it's
personal.  This is Abdul Hamid
al-Youssef whose wife Dala and
twins Ahmed and Aya were killed
in a sarin gas attack.  He released
photos of himself holding the 
lifeless bodies of his precious
twins. He lost his wife and
children and a dozen more
family members.  He wants
us all to know.

There are five million Syrian refugees now, regular folks who've lost everything, running for their lives and the lives of their children.  The Assad regime has used chemical weapons, and the civilian casualties (Ref: NC-17) are horrific. Following an attack in April, rescuers found adults and children, conscious and gasping for breath as they died before their eyes.  It was the latest chemical attack the war-torn country has witnessed. (Ref)(Ref)

A sarin gas attack in April this
year killed 89 including
20 women and
 27 children.

Hundreds of civilians have died in the last 30 days, collateral damage from strikes by all sides.

Here, if we felt that there was a need to protect our kids, we'd do a neighborhood watch or ramp up our police presence.  If folks were threatened, we'd defend them, and our community would step up and help.  If some radical group sprang up, armed and violent, we'd mobilize at whatever level was needed to squash such wickedness.  Folks in Syria have tried everything, and 400,000 have died.

How might we respond to such need so far outside our own community?

Our own disaster in Houston is on our minds, of course, and we'll respond appropriately.  Volunteers and givers and governments will step up and help.  Our neighbors in Mexico have joined in to assist like they did during Katrina.  
Let's remember the larger world as well.

There are good organizations we might support.  

The Salvation Army is perhaps at the top of the list for crisis response, in Houston as well as international work.  

With a long history of helping effectively, World Vision is among the best developmental assistance organizations.  They're extraordinary.

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"World Vision has scaled up our response in places where families have fled, and your help is needed more than ever.

We must help Syrian refugees, half of whom are children, by giving them the vital resources they need to keep their children safe, healthy, and secure. Please pray for these families, and give a gift that to help them today."

Photojournalist Steve McCurry commented , "In seeing this current global refugee crisis, it's almost like people in Europe and the US are scared of refugees. Or they simply don't want the burden of hosting them. But we forget none are actually more scared than the refugees themselves. They are forced from their country, their homes."

Preferential Opportunity

Veterans returning from WWII used their benefits to buy homes and get educated.  Owning your home was the first step in wealth-building, and the funded education guaranteed employment.  The result was an explosion of economic growth, the blossoming of suburban life, and the emergence of the American dream.

It only worked for white people.


We were trying to do well with the GI Bill, but our banks wouldn't lend to African-Americans.  Of the first 67,000 insured mortgages, less than 100 were issued to non-whites despite thousands having applied. 

In the years that followed, millions took advantage of the home loan guarantee. From 1944 to 1952, the Veterans Administration backed nearly 2.4 million home loans for World War II Veterans.  Blacks, with wages  39-52% lower than whites, were ineligible for or denied most opportunities.^(note)  

Suburban development areas often had formal or informal covenants against racial integration.^(ref)  Agents and sellers resisted sale to black families.  If an African-American did manage to buy a home in a suburban setting, whites would often sell and move out.^(ref)

Few colleges would admit African-Americans.  In the south where 80% of African-Americans lived, only a few black colleges were available.  They were generally underfunded and lower quality than the white schools.  Their limited number and capacity resulted in thousands of applicants being turned away.  Only a small percentage of African-American veterans benefited from the program.

Discrimination was aggressive for returning veterans.  Employers preferentially hired whites under most circumstances and were hesitant to promote non-whites who did manage to find employment.

An entire generation blossomed and moved ahead, and the country became a world leader through economic progress, but African-Americans were systematically held back.  It was deliberate.  The effects are visible today.  In the race to get ahead, "Whites have a hundred-yard head start in a four-hundred yard race."

The result:
The ghettos were born.  African-Americans were generally constrained to urban living, lower-paying work, and limited opportunity for improvement.  It had nothing to do with their intellect, work ethic, or virtue.  Other minorities were affected similarly.  Social stability declined predictably and inevitably in the neighborhoods.^(ref)  

Long-term impact: in 1984, the median white household has a net worth of $39,000; median black household, $3400, mostly accounted for by differences in homeownership. Nearly 70% of whites own homes, with average value of $52,000; only 40% of blacks do, with median value of under $30,000.  (Figures for net worth in 2000 are $81,000 and $8000.)

During the civil rights era, we passed laws against discriminatory business and banking practices. We changed laws regarding school admission. Today's assistance projects and equal opportunity programs are attempts to mitigate the harm done by individual and group bias, discrimination, and selfishness. We've worked hard to adjust our national attitude about accepting differences. Such cultural efforts were (and continue to be) vigorously resisted by conservative elements. 

Conscious and unconscious discrimination persists today.  It's an artificial constraint imposed without reasonable basis.  We've made progress, but our bias seems to resurface with each generation.   

This isn't a new issue for America's majority.  Without a reasonable basis to support our reasoning:
- we presumed we were superior to native Americans.
- we presumed we were superior to Africans.
- we presumed we were superior to Irish, Italian, and eastern European immigrants.  And Jews.  And Mexicans.
- we presumed men were superior to women.
- we presumed white folks were superior to non-white folks.
- we presume the comfortably established and privileged are superior to the non-wealthy.

- did you know? we've discovered in many universities today, white males are presumed to be intellectually superior to females and minorities despite performance metrics to the contrary.  These are institutions that aggressively pursue equality and diversity, so study results like this are a bit of a surprise.

What might be the root of such inaccurate thinking?
Is there a single character point that covers it?  Of course.

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Discrimination is common but fortunately not universal.  While bias persists in the culture, some have seen with clarity and deliberately pursued a different way.  By itself, information like this does little to avert a life of self-centeredness and separation.  Perhaps until we are profoundly changed, such bias will resurface throughout our lives.

What do rich people worry about?

Overall, 91% of wealthy folks say maintaining “their lifestyle” is a key concern. About 81% say it's “not being able to meaningfully enhance” their current lifestyle. That's what rich people worry about.

As Russ Prince (author, the wealth industry) describes it, it’s the mindset of, “I have the $5 million jet. I want the $10 million jet.”  But he doesn’t see it as greed.  Rather, he says, it’s simply a reflection of what everyone at every income level wants: something more.

” ‘Greedy’ is the wrong word,” Prince says. “ This is not a bad thing. This is the capitalist model. The desire to keep moving up, to enhance their lifestyle, is critical to having this entrepreneurial society.”

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Awhile ago, this young fellow came to the teacher and asked what he needed to do to finish well.  He was told to love God and obey the rules.  The guy said he'd done all of that, and the teacher told him to prove it, but he couldn't or perhaps wouldn't, and he went away unhappy.  His wealth, it seems, had tainted his thinking, his view of his lifestyle and future.  He couldn't imagine changing course to a better purpose.

It's hard, the teacher said, for a rich person to finish well.  Really hard.  Later, the teacher's friends were struggling to understand.  "If that rich fellow can't do it, how can we or anyone?"   There is a way, but it's perhaps not obvious once wealth and class obscure things.  Wealth becomes an impediment at a surprisingly low threshold.

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Interestingly, the not-rich folks are the most hospitable, the most generous, the most ethical.  The rich, not so much.  Where's the dividing line?   Around $20k/person/year is the dividing line between the richest 5% of folks in the world and everyone else.  Your $20,000 per person, per year puts you in the richest 400 million people in the world with 7.1 billion folks below you on the ladder.  Statistically, one group is normal and the other is an outlier, an aberration, and unconnected to 'normal'.  

Charlottesville

There is not a single pure heart among us, and the most judgemental are perhaps the most tarnished.

The less time we spend loving and enjoying and encouraging others, the less our life is worth living.  The more time we spend criticising and judging and blaming others, the more we corrode our minds and waste our years.

The racist extremists in Charlottesville don't need me to protest against them.  They don't need me to throw rocks at them.  They don't need me to crash my car into their midst to convince them they're on the wrong path.  It wouldn't change their minds.

They do need a better solution than the one they've got.  They need a hope that's real and healthy and noble.  The need to see magnificent life for themselves.

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Extremists are a small fraction of of our population.  For every one such dark mind, there are a hundred or a thousand reasonable folks. So then, do we hide ... or step in? And how might we take advantage of this opportunity?

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One unusual fellow sought out the KKK members and made friends.  They ate dinner together and talked things through.  His friendship lead to two hundred KKK members changing their minds and leaving the organization.  He is Daryl Davis, the famous musician.  And he is black.

"When two enemies are talking, they're not fighting," Davis said.  A Chicago-born Christian, Davis traveled the world in his youth.  After many countries and racially mixed cultures, coming home to America where folks could throw rocks at him because of his color was confusing, to say the least.  It lead to a lifetime of confronting racism.  His surprisingly successful tactic: friendship. 

Not everyone agreed with his tactics.  Davis recounts:  I had one guy from an NAACP branch chew me up one side and down the other, saying, “you know, we've worked hard to get ten steps forward. Here you are sitting down with the enemy having dinner, you're putting us twenty steps back.”

I pull out my robes and hoods and say, “look, this is what I've done to put a dent in racism. I've got robes and hoods hanging in my closet by people who've given up that belief because of my conversations sitting down to dinner. They gave it up. How many robes and hoods have you collected?” And then they shut up.

Davis's father, a senior Foreign Service officer, believed that his son engaged with the Klan because he needed to make sense of their hatred, to seek common ground. He remarked to The Washington Post that his son "has done something that I don't know any other black American, or white American, has done."

Surprise Bias

Our educational institutions oppose discrimination, but are they unbiased?
A group of researchers ran this interesting field experiment. 

As supposed students, they emailed 6,500 professors at 250 top schools. They wrote saying, I really admire your work. Would you have some time to meet? 

The messages to the faculty were all identical, but the names of the students were all different.  Names like Brad Anderson. Meredith Roberts. Lamar Washington. LaToya Brown. Juanita Martinez. Deepak Patel, Sonali Desai, Chang Wong, Mei Chen.   Obvious gender and ethnic name differences, these were the only variants in the otherwise identical correspondence.

A review of the results is interesting.  For positive responses from professors in the business field, white male identities were at the top with a 25 percentage point gap above female and ethnic minority identities.  The same trend was visible for each academic discipline.  

Keep in mind, these are the top-of-their-field professors at the most respected institutions where equality and diversity are strongly supported and vigorously pursued.  Such bias is perhaps more pronounced in the general population. 

Numerous inquiries, both rigorously scientific and anecdotal/informal, show the same perhaps subconscious bias in culture, even among liberals.

One recent recounting from the business world has two co-workers, one male and one female, swap names on their email correspondence with customers to see if it makes a difference.  The degree of respect and agreement given the male signature was extraordinarily higher than that granted the female.  To the supposed female service provider, customer correspondence was commonly condescending, distrustful, and disrespectful, the visible opposite of what was the norm for the male.  The customer behavior was tied specifically to the male or female signature even when they switched back and forth between the two workers.

Many women in the business world have changed their official signature to just initials for first and middle name.  Why might that be? 

Examples of such deeply embedded bias are visible in every venue, and to a greater or lesser degree, we're all participants.  How do we minimize the harm done?

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Anthropologist Dan Grunspan was studying the habits of undergraduates when he noticed an unexpected trend:  male students assumed their male classmates knew more than female students - even if the women earned better grades.

Grunspan and his colleagues at the University of Washington and elsewhere decided to quantify the degree of this gender bias in the classroom.

After surveying roughly 1,700 students, they found male students consistently gave each other more credit than they awarded to their just-as-savvy female classmates.

Men over-ranked their peers by three-quarters of a GPA point, according to the study published in the journal PLOS ONE. In other words, if Johnny and Susie both had A's, they’d receive equal applause from female students - but Susie would register as a B student in the eyes of her male peers, and Johnny would look like a rock star.

From the journal:  "Female college students are more likely to abandon studies in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines than their male classmates, and new research from the University of Washington suggests that their male peers may play a key role in undermining their confidence. ...  Researchers estimate that gender bias among male students was 19 times stronger than among females."

“Something under the conscious is going on,” Grunspan said. “For 18 years, these [young men] have been socialized to have this bias.”

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We enslaved, we waged wars, we oppressed.  When we identified the injustice, we labored to end it all.  After decades of progress in law, the bias persists.

Racial, ethnic, and gender biases are deeply rooted issues that are generally unaddressed in current equality discussions.  We know the bias exists, but our understanding of why is incomplete.  Is it ignorance or perhaps a remnant of some natural (animal) trait that we as humans hope to rise above?  Is it deliberate?  Or a failure of conscience?  

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The impact of bias can be wickedly unjust, a limit to life, to happiness, to learning, to self-respect, to a chance at the one thing you most desire, for you and your children and your children's children.

Mandate: I change.  Okay, now I'm doing my best to think more clearly, but the world is the same.

  Corollary: Change the world you can reach.  Challenge the bias, pull down the walls, disrupt the norm, shine light in the dark places, .... 😉

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So a young lady we know tells the following classroom story ...

     "Street Safe instructor: Girls don't know as much about about operating machines... 
10 minutes later...
     Street Safe instructor: How many of you would speak up when a driver is distracted or driving recklessly?
     Me: Girls shouldn't say anything because they don't know as much about operating machines.
          Random dude in the front row stands up and starts clapping. 😁"

Well done, young friend.  

No problem!

Discussions of our impact on the environment are not new.  We discovered early on that we could poison the air in our cities.  We discovered spikes in the rate of cancers and a long list of respiratory problems associated with pollution. We found long-term health problems from factory products that invaded every community, even every home.  Asbestos and lead paint are the ones that most people remember.  Lead contamination of the water supply has resurfaced recently as a health problem for one city.  Air pollution is still with us.

Pumping fluids out of the ground can have an impact.  Still a relatively complex discussion, but ongoing.  Update 04/2018: Jakarta, the world's fastest sinking city ...

My personal favorite, we've discovered that about 93% of the excess heat in our environment since 1970 got absorbed by the ocean.  The ocean is now beginning to change, and the changes will persist for centuries.  The currents that bring us our stable climate will move, the biologics that feed us will change, the reefs that support and defend us will change.  It's happening rather quickly compared to such changes in the past.

Suggesting that human activity has nothing to do with what we see ... I'm always surprised when I hear that premise.  Human impact, virtually insignificant in 1700, is now the single most significant impact element within our global systems.

• Humans annually absorb 42% of the Earth’s terrestrial net primary productivity, 30% of its marine net primary productivity, and 50% of its fresh water.*
• Now, 40% of the planet’s land is devoted to human food production, up from 7% in 1700.*
• Fifty percent of the planet’s land has been transformed for human use.*

*Vitousek, P. M., H. A. Mooney, J. Lubchenco, and J. M. Melillo. 1997. Human Domination of Earth's Ecosystems. Science 277 (5325): 494–499; Pimm, S. L. 2001. The World According to Pimm: a Scientist Audits the Earth. McGraw-Hill, NY; The Guardian. 2005. Earth is All Out of New Farmland. December 7, 2005.

• Equivalent to the Exxon Valdez disaster fifty times over, continuing oil spillage in the Gulf of Guinea has cost millions their livelihood, their communities, and their water.  It's been going on, the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez every year, for fifty years.  If it ever stops, recovery will take centuries.
• Pelagics (tuna and the like) are now at risk from pollution and rampant illegal overfishing.  Total adult biomass summed across all monitored pelagic populations has declined globally by 52.2% from 1954 to 2006.  Regions like the Gulf of Guinea have seen 90% decline in marine populations bringing malnutrition and starvation among indigenous fishing communities.*

* Maria José Juan-Jordá, Iago Mosqueirad, Andrew B. Cooperf, Juan Freirea, and Nicholas K. Dulvyc, Grupo de Recursos Marinos y Pesquerías, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de A Coruña, 15009 A Coruña, Spain; Earth to Ocean Research Group, Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada; Centre for Environment, Fisheries & Aquaculture Science, Lowestoft Laboratory, Lowestoft, United Kingdom; European Commission, Joint Research Center, Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen/Maritime Affairs Unit; School of Resource and Environmental Management, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada - Global population trajectories of tunas and their relatives

You might appreciate the recent U.S. GLOBAL CHANGE RESEARCH PROGRAM - CLIMATE SCIENCE SPECIAL REPORT (CSSR) (Draft).   It's a good summary of recent research.