Nerves of Steel

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The Book of the Week is “Nerves of Steel, How I Followed My Dreams, Earned My Wings, and Faced My Greatest Challenge” by Tammie Jo Shults, published in 2019.

The author, born at the dawn of the 1960’s, grew up in New Mexico and Colorado. For two years, military men in the recruitment offices of the Air Force and Navy told her she wasn’t allowed to become a pilot in their services because she was female. That was a lie. In March 1985, she was (finally!) inducted into the Navy, due to her chance meetings with honest men. She graduated near the top of her training class. Of course.

Shults was passionate about and good at, piloting aircraft, but she had to endure numerous indignities and conditions perpetrated by her bosses that were even more life-threatening than they should have been, because she was female. She was cool under fire, and her Christian faith saw her through those stressful and traumatic times of her life. Strangely, a religious quote in her book indicated she believed her God is a male!

Anyway, after her Navy service, she transferred her super flying skills to a job fighting wildfires in California. In the mid-1990’s, she learned to fly a piston-engine plane (different from the military aircraft she had been flying). She engaged in surveillance missions to alert firefighters and others on the ground to situations that were more dangerous than usual; dispensed red mud to put out the fires; and spread fertilizer so as to facilitate the growth of new vegetation.

The third leg of the author’s piloting career involved getting a job at a commercial airline. The GI Bill paid for her training in a 737 jet. Compensation and benefits for women in the military and pilots’ union are equivalent to the mens’, but in some quarters, women are still treated as second-class citizens by men who don’t like “girls” to invade their fraternity.

Infuriatingly for American women, Congress is still one such place where there are a bunch of powerful men, so even if a female were to be elected president, those men would automatically smear her, and vote against everything she did.

As is well known, presidents have had to make serious compromises in civil-rights legislation in order to further their own mandates. Attitudes are very, very difficult to change, as almost every facet of American life began with a bunch of white alpha males:

  • the Founding Fathers;
  • Wall Street;
  • the military and law enforcement;
  • professional sports;
  • science and technology;
  • business and industry;
  • most of the licensed professions, etc.,

except for areas involving family, household chores and jobs in the arts and entertainment.

So it should not have been surprising that the author encountered yet more gender discrimination with her new employer– in the late 1990’s. Read the book to learn much, much more about Shults’ ordeals and triumphs that show that America is making slow, slow progress in workplace gender equality. Unfortunately, not fast enough for politics. Not yet.

As is well known, in the 1960’s, there were impatient civil-rights activists who believed that resorting to violence would facilitate the enactment of equality-legislation. After the American Civil War to date, white males have threatened and resorted to violence in order to hinder the enactment of equality-legislation.

Not to worry. There is still plenty of time for progressive historical events this election season. Currently, it’s like the start of the fourth quarter of football games, but fans, like voters, need only check the last five minutes of the games to see the winners. Turning off the idiot box for the next month will prevent a lot of emotional trouble. There’s no need to despair, as there might just be a quarterback such as Tom Brady who will step in late in the game. Thank goodness for the last minute. If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would ever get done.

A World of Ideas

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The Book of the Week is “A World of Ideas, Conversations With Thoughtful Men and Women About American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future” by Bill Moyers, edited by Betty Sue Flowers, published in 1989. This compilation of interviews was done at the end of the Reagan Era–prior to the historical revisionism and 20 / 20 hindsight of the Clinton Era and thereafter.

David Gergen was one of the few political workers who has explicitly stated that the job elected officers should be doing is governing. This means serving one’s constituents in public service– rather than wooing voters with fantastic promises that will likely be broken– effecting wily public relations that includes propagandizing and standing on ceremony, also called populism.

Forrest McDonald, one of Bill Moyers’ interviewees, commented that America’s one president fills the roles of both government officer and populist, while England has two separate people doing those jobs, respectively: the prime minister, and the king or queen. A recent American president whose populism instilled fond memories in the minds of Americans that made them forget his wrongheaded governing, was Ronald Reagan. Around the time of the interview, the Iran-Contra hearings were all the rage, yet Reagan’s charisma was on display, as much as his amnesia.

McDonald correctly prophesied that more Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals would break in future decades, due to the conflicts the president faced in executing laws while worrying about protecting his reputation. Hardly any political issues have changed at least since the late 1980’s when McDonald rightly declared, “We’re living beyond our means. Congress is for sale to the highest bidder from one election to the next, the Pentagon belongs to the fixers, the President’s out to lunch, and the media are drowning us in violence, nonsense, and trivia.”

In his interview, Noam Chomsky pointed out that the United States government is comprised of two parties (Republican and Democrat) whose main policies are based on business and economics; in other words, donor-determined. All other major, developed countries of the world have a Labor Party– comprised of politicians who lobby on behalf of the poor or working class. It appeared that Chomsky was making a value judgment that the United States was wrong for allowing money to elect its public servants.

There are pros and cons to this, which are too numerous and controversial to discuss here. Suffice to say, the American government’s leadership-and-management culture is a completely different animal from that on other continents. It allows its people the freedom to practice capitalism on a much more extensive scale. Its foreign policy, shaped by globalization of course, has played a major role.

Speaking of foreign policy, Sissela Bok wished that the United States would behave in a more humanitarian manner in international conflicts. She wanted to see more Americans value all humans equally– “… so that it becomes just as awful for us to take an innocent life in some other country as it is in our own.”

Read the book to learn the opinions of mostly university professors, on American political, economics, cultural, and social issues from the 1980’s; that show the areas in which the country has regressed or progressed.

ENDNOTE: Since the book’s writing, arguably, the U.S. is slowly but slowly, progressing in terms of maintaining a democracy, more or less. One bit of evidence of this, is that the country suffered roughly ten years in a row during which a wartime president behaved like a dictator– under LBJ and then Nixon. The next occasion of that, which was seven years in a row, occurred under George W. Bush. It took four years in a row and one day (Jan. 6) for the U.S. to get tired of the next president who behaved like a dictator (Trump), and there wasn’t a war on.

Crisis-generation has always been a cliched way for leaders to keep their power, but hyper-awareness and politicization of crises has been generated in recent decades, due to the speed and reach of modern, global communications. In this way, the traumas of recent natural disasters, financial crashes, wars and celebrity anguish stay fresh in the minds of every culturally-labeled American generation, from Depression-Era babies to Generation Z.

The institutional memory of the older generation especially, allows them to detect and minimize the impact of crises sooner than otherwise. For instance, the Baby Boomers personally experienced— how LBJ and Nixon stubbornly refused to withdraw American troops from Vietnam– a war that involved unspeakable horrors in the region, causing adverse decades-long consequences there and in this country. The Boomers saw that Trump’s megalomania, secrecy and vengeance are akin to those exhibited by LBJ and Nixon. However, Trump refuses to ever give in; whereas, Nixon was shamed into resigning.

Leaders who have harnessed ways to brainwash the masses into believing they are saviors, are the ones who keep their power, at least until their enemies out their crimes in court.

There are many more indicators that our nation won’t devolve into anarchy anytime soon, that are beyond the scope of this post.

I Should Have Honor

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The Book of the Week is “I Should Have Honor, A Memoir of Hope and Pride in Pakistan” by Khalida Brohi, published in 2018.

Pakistan’s Muslim men have a tradition of arranging marriages for their prepubertal daughters to clans they deem worthy. None of the female family members have any say in the matter.

It was through a stroke of great good luck that Grohi’s father (born in the mid-1970’s) received an education, instead of facing a fate of ignorance, poverty, goat-herding and hard manual farmwork as his siblings did. Too, the author won the “world parents lottery” in many ways. Her father refused to agree to marry her off before she was born (!) Her parents provided the same resources and opportunities to her and her sisters, as to her brothers. She attended school and was allowed to do almost anything her male counterparts were allowed to do.

The author was born in the late-1980’s, although when she began to travel internationally, her later-created identity documents were inaccurate by about a year. She became fluent in English and Brahui. During her childhood, her financially struggling, ever-growing family moved around a lot. At first, they lived in multi-generational households in rural villages and later on, upgraded to the cities of Hyderabad and Karachi.

Even so, Grohi’s mother and females in her large extended family were still enslaved in a life of domestic chores, which included feeding their farm animals and making cow-dung patties to be burned in cooking-fires. In other words, in most Pakistani Muslim households, the females were kept barefoot and pregnant.

On an even more extreme note, in the single-digit 2000’s (!) the males were allowed to physically abuse their wives (for any reason they rationalized, or none at all), and allowed to kill a female who brought shame to the family through misbehavior such as eloping. The latter situation occurs about a thousand times a year in Pakistan. Gossiping is the number one activity in rural-village communities, so everyone was under pressure to conform to the elder males’ rules.

The author realized that religion, caste or tradition had nothing to do with how such a punishment was justified. The elders were simply alpha males with hubris syndrome who were insecure, or enraged at the disobedience of their daughters. Grohi tried to change that. She founded a non-profit organization that empowered females by spurring discussions in Pakistan and internationally regarding gender equality. After much trauma, she was forced to switch to a less confrontational approach– by apologizing to the males, and convincing them:

  • that physically harming females was dishonorable;
  • that allowing female family members to work outside the home would financially help the household (and for that, they might need education), and
  • that the points above were their idea.

Read the book to learn an additional slew of information on the author’s family, and her trials, tribulations and triumphs in trying to change Pakistan’s entrenched gender-segregated, cruel culture.

The Longest Race

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The Book of the Week is “The Longest Race, Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike’s Elite Running Team” by Kara Goucher with Mary Pilon, published in 2023.

Born in 1978, the author grew up in New Jersey and the Duluth, Minnesota area. Goucher became a professional runner. Like many of her fellow athletes, the author– who experienced an early childhood trauma– found at a young age that competing in footraces is cathartic.

Goucher focused on her training and reaching the finish-line first, rather than getting all worked up about the numerous stressful situations she endured in everyday living. However, she rationalized away some of the wrongs committed against her, because speaking out against them would ruin her career, her marriage, her friendships, etc.

In the United States, the way runners go professional is to convince a corporate, non-governmental sponsor to pay them to race. Goucher and her husband both signed contracts with Nike, the monster-sized corporation best known for making athletic shoes. The company provided her and her fellow runners in her working group with the best, cutting-edge scientifically and technologically advanced resources for winning races.

However, the Gouchers’ status with Nike was as independent contractors, so they had less legal recourse than that of employees with regard to any illegal goings-on in their field of work. Their coach and immediate boss was the celebrity runner Alberto Salazar. In the single-digit 2000’s, he led the “Oregon Project” which was an attempt to help Americans win races again around the world; their victories had been woefully plummeting for years.

Salazar did boost Kara’s confidence and helped her perform better than she thought she could. But, his behavior and many of his training practices were inappropriate and illegal. He and his colleagues (an alleged psychotherapist and medical doctor) wielded a lot of power over the Gouchers, who owed their careers to their sponsor. Salazar’s underlings hewed to his training methods through fear and force. “He [Salazar] got testy when called out for having a third drink. I could only guess how he would react to being called out about sexual harassment.”

As a female, Kara had to deal with Nike’s double standard of suspending her pay when she ran an insufficient number of races in a specified time period pursuant to her contract. Male runners were punished this way when they got caught in doping scandals or had injuries. She was subject to those same conditions, but she couldn’t race because she was pregnant. In connection with exploring her career options, Kara wrote, “… I found myself again and again in rooms of male executives explaining women’s running to me. There seemed to be more interest in how I would look on a poster than in how the sport could evolve.”

Fighting “City Hall” in so many different areas of life is difficult. Anyone who attempted to do so in professional running in the single-digit 2000’s would have to deal with Nike. It held a near-monopoly with overwhelming power and influence over regulators. Whistleblowers would suffer doxing and death threats.

BUT, it is an age-old truism that when more and more courageous people come forward with firsthand information about wrongdoing by an institution or a particularly powerful individual– the less the harm that will be done in the future because the collective mood of the community will shift against the wrongdoer. Eventually.

Read the book to learn lots of additional details of the Gouchers’ experiences in their professional running careers– their trials, tribulations and triumphs.

We Were the Future

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The Book of the Week is “We Were the Future, A Memoir of the Kibbutz” by Yael Neeman, published in 2016. Readers might argue that the author and her cohorts were raised in a cult– brainwashed from birth. The kibbutz movement strove for 100% socialism– the economic system in which all the people (not the State) collectively owned everything; and collectively governed themselves.

In 1947, the total population of kibbutzim as a proportion of Israel’s (Jewish) population reached a high of 7%. It waned after Israel achieved sovereignty in 1948. The first half of the 1950’s saw global historical events (the trials of: Prague [1952], the Doctors in the U.S.S.R. and the Rosenbergs in the U.S. [both 1953]) that were jarring to Jews. The kibbutz movement split over ideological disagreements, especially after Stalin died in 1953 and his crimes were revealed in 1956. Adults around the author held zero discussions about this recent history.

Neeman was born in 1960 in Kibbutz Yehiam (founded in 1946) in Western Galilee near the border with Lebanon. Her kibbutz was a branch of Hashomer Hatzair (meaning “Young Guard”), the movement’s umbrella organization that began in 1913. Their motto was, “For Zionism, Socialism and Brotherhood Amongst Nations.” Her children’s group consisted of eight boys and eight girls, who did everything together, every day. She was raised among them by women who collectively took care of the kibbutz’s children grouped by age; she visited with her biological parents, but didn’t live with them in the same building.

The lifestyle encompassed a number of major ideas:

  • “Family and education in the rest of the industrial world were considered bourgeois institutions.”
  • “Everyone knew after all, that work [on the kibbutz] was more important than school, more important than anything.”
  • Egalitarianism for all the people was key– all decisions were made by committee.

Contradictorily:

  • There was a hierarchical division of labor– upper and lower. The former consisted of high-level positions in the fields and factories; held by the founders of the kibbutz, the (mostly Hungarian) First of May group. The latter consisted of low-skilled, dead-end jobs such as peeling potatoes.
  • The kibbutz undertook a number of enterprises through the years, including a banana “plantation” which was the most “profitable.” [these words with nuanced meanings were translated from Hebrew, but even so, these were capitalist endeavors.]

Kids whose behavior was troublesome were exiled from the kibbutz, and sent to a “special institution.” At twelve years old, all the conforming kids began to attend what amounted to boarding school, located off the kibbutz campus. They had previously received an eclectic education of hands-on instruction on a myriad of topics. Beginning in adolescence, they were allowed to shape their own education, or lack thereof.

Currently, analogous experiments are underway in American education in which adolescents are placed in front of computer screens with no teachers. Educrats and profiteers expect the software to teach them. At that age, most kids have neither the judgment nor the discipline to acquire the knowledge and skills required for becoming mature, responsible adults who can financially support themselves.

Kibbutzniks were afforded too much freedom and not enough guidance and supervision within their tiny, limited community in their early childhood. So they had a rude awakening when they were permitted (on rare occasions) to see how other kids in the rest of the world lived.

One other interesting factoid: Neeman wrote, “In our biological home, we [she and her three siblings] were already allowed to smoke on Purim when we were in the first grade.”

Read the book to learn about a boatload of other ways Neeman’s upbringing was extremely unconventional due to her fledgling homeland’s exceptionalism.