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Moving Past Dismissive Positivity

*featured image by Hybrid on Unsplash

We’re always given encouragement that, in times of struggle and disappointment, it’s crucial for us to remain positive.

When something unfortunate occurs, we are told to ‘look on the bright side’ of things. We are told that ‘things could be a lot worse’ and that we ought to focus on things that bring us joy, rather than things that cause us to dwell on anything that is negative.

The advice is always given in good spirits. Generally speaking, people tell us to cheer up because they want to contribute in helping but unfortunately don’t really know how to do so.

There comes a time, however, when this well-intended advice is not only ineffective, but causing more harm than good. At what point does the encouragement to ‘keep positive’ stop being helpful and crosses into the point of being dismissive at best or toxic at the worst?

What is Toxic Positivity?

Psychology Today defines toxic positivity as the concept that keeping positive is the only right way to live your life. More important, the trait that can make positivity ‘toxic’ is the idea that we have to only focus on positive things while rejecting anything that may trigger a negative emotion.

At first glance, this sounds like a stretch. After all, what’s so wrong with being positive and encouraging others to do the same?

There isn’t anything wrong with keeping a positive attitude. Honestly, being able to catch yourself from falling into the pit of despair or stress in order to reason with your feelings is a huge skill that not enough of us work on.

However, toxic positivity doesn’t encourage people to reason and deal with their negative emotions but to avoid them. Being positive does not mean that you are oblivious to the world around you or the magnitude of your problems, and it certainly doesn’t mean avoiding any emotions that are unpleasant (anger, grief, sadness, etc.).

For example, right after the Christmas holiday I acquired some sort of stomach virus that had me cooped up in my apartment for the rest of the week. I wasn’t really in a condition to do much of anything. I couldn’t stand for long periods of time without getting dizzy, my stomach was in pain, I couldn’t keep my food down, nor could I digest well.

I was speaking to someone about this, and as soon as I brought up the word ‘sick’, she quickly cut me off and said “No, don’t speak that over yourself! You’re overcoming!”

And I totally understand the sentiment. She was encouraging me to speak what I want, and not what I have. It’s a principle that I am mindful of, and I appreciate her for wanting to do that. However, just because I change the verbiage does not mean I have changed fact. The fact of the matter: I was sick, I was contagious, and I needed to get better.

Positivity tells us that, despite the problem, we will overcome it. Toxic positivity tells us that there isn’t a problem to deal with in the first place. One works out of the mentality that we can acknowledge an obstacle, whereas one works out of the mentality that if we acknowledge the obstacle we make things worse.

We Can’t Avoid Difficult Emotions

Toxic Positivity’s objective isn’t to solve a problem, but to avoid negative feelings. However, doing everything we can to avoid ‘bad vibes’ or ‘negative energy’ will only make our difficult emotions stronger and more difficult to maintain.

Photo by Ahmed Zayan on Unsplash

We can never avoid difficult emotions, we can only prolong them. By avoiding our difficult emotions, we make them ‘bigger’. In other words, we’re simply just a heavily shaken bottle of Coke waiting to burst. Toxic Positivity abandons the idea that we need to process our emotions, and it emphasizes the idea of forcing ourselves to feel happy at all times (which is impossible). Toxic Positivity tells us to hide behind a smile and eventually those hard emotions will simply vanish without us dealing with them.

Another negative aspect of Toxic Positivity is that we inadvertently close ourselves off to others. This is a lesson I learned after having a conversation with a close friend about a year ago.

“You know,” he said, “I feel like you always have a lot of good stuff to say. You know a lot of stuff and you’re really good at rationalizing and being thoughtful. But I also feel like I don’t know you all the way.”

Perplexed, I asked him to elaborate.

“I don’t know,” he contemplated, “It’s like I haven’t necessarily seen you be emotional. Not like theatrics or anything like that, but just…you seem very calculative in everything you do. It just feels like there’s a wall that I don’t think you actually know is there”.

The news stunned me, but when I thought more about it, a lot of our conversations had revolved around me giving him advice or encouragement, giving him positive affirmations and just being a good all-around friend. However, in these conversations laced with positivity and encouragement, I was helping him expose himself but I wasn’t necessarily doing the same. To make it short: even though I had been friendly, I was also inadvertently making myself heavily unrelateable.

Honestly, I should have known better because I’ve been on the receiving end of this. I’ve met people who come off as if they have absolutely no problems, no struggles, no worries. It is extremely difficult to feel a true connection with people like this. In fact, I could go as far as to say people like this are really annoying. A lot of people will hear this and believe that it’s coming from jealousy. But we can all agree that, if you are breathing, you are going to deal with/will deal with some sort of struggle.

But interacting with someone who wants to think that “nothing is ever wrong and everything is always fine” is another world of frustration. Positivity says “I’ve been through something, but I’ll overcome it” while Toxic Positivity says “I’m not going through anything because I’m not letting anything get to me to the point where I feel like I’m struggling”.

Spotting the Difference

As previously stated, people who tells us to “cheer up”, “look on the bright side”, “be grateful” are all doing this with the best intentions. However, there are better things to say to someone who is going through a difficult time.

People who utilize a dismissive approach usually just don’t know how to go about helping the other person deal with their negative emotions. In other instances, they’re afraid that the negative emotions will “rub off” from the other person and would like to avoid it all together. Here are some example phrases that I find pretty helpful:

Instead of this: “Cheer up, it’s not so bad!” Try this: “I know you’re not feeling good about this right now. I’m definitely hoping/praying things get better. Tell me how you’re feeling; what’s on your mind?”

Instead of this: “I know how you feel! Something like that happened to me once” Try this: “I can’t begin to understand what you’re feeling right now. I’m deeply sorry about what happened. Are you able to talk about this right now?”

Instead of this: “Don’t get so worked up, it’s not that serious!” Try this: “This really has you upset/angry. I’d like to know what’s going through your head right now. Do you need to vent a little? I don’t want you to say or do anything you might regret later”.

These are only a couple of general examples, but what I find to be the biggest help is honestly not saying anything at all. A lot of times when we listen, we are only listening in order to craft a response. However, we should be listening to seek understanding of the other person. It’s surprising how many people come to their own conclusions and deal with their tough emotions just by talking them out, without any verbal contribution from the other party.

Think of it this way: This person has come to me with their problem. They came to me to express their sadness, their struggle, their anger, their frustration, etc. That means that this person feels vulnerable enough with me to do so. By dismissing the emotions of this person who came to me, I’m chipping away at their trust. They may feel less inclined to open up again because they feel that I’ll just shoo them away with a quick positive statement. They will feel like I don’t truly care.

The biggest difference-maker between Positivity and Toxic Positivity is that the former will acknowledge the difficulty behind a task while still going through with it. Positivity acknowledges that emotions are part of life and that they’re not inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

All of this isn’t to say that we should all be wearing our emotions on our sleeves, that we should be dragging our feet and wearing gloomy faces all the time. But what we do have to realize is that positivity isn’t a ‘quick fix’. We can’t sprinkle positive words on our situation and then expect everything to get better in a snap. Positive words are only effective when followed by positive action.

Emotional stability isn’t absence of emotions or ignoring emotions, it is acknowledging them while not allowing them to become a hindrance to your everyday life.

So yes, you can go to the pity party. But don’t take off your coat and shoes and stay a while. Stop by, feel those feelings, and leave as soon as possible.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Awkward Penguin,

– Raven

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The Pressing Cloth

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Click to Read MoreYou probably have something in your house right now with potential to become a pressing cloth. A section of an old white cotton bed sheet works fine. The older the better. Just cut it to size and, voila! It's a brand new pressing cloth.

A good pressing cloth is a necessity. It keeps your iron from contact with your fabric to avoid scorching, shiny spots and little stains. It also protects your iron when you use any type iron-on or fusible interfacing.

The Cloth

I like my bed sheet cloths because I can see through the old fabric well enough to tell what's going on under it. From one sheet, I made several cloths: a small cloth about 10-inches x 14-inches, and a large cloth about 12-inches x 30-inches. They come in handy at different times. Some people like to overcast the edges of their pressing cloths, but I leave them as is to prevent unintentionally ironing in a stitch pattern.

Click to Enlarge

You can also use a clean white cotton tea towel, napkin, or fine linen handkerchief; some people swear by a plain cotton diaper. If you make your own, don't use color-dyed or patterned fabric. You can also buy press cloths at most fabric stores. However you do it, be sure to wash your cloth first to remove any sizing.

Using a Pressing Cloth

A pressing cloth is not necessary for every fabric. Test a scrap of your fabric with your iron; if you get a sheen or a discoloration, you'll want to use your pressing cloth.

You can either lightly dampen your pressing cloth, or use it dry. When using a damp cloth, it's better not to use the steam setting your your iron. It's always a good idea to test your fabric before going too far to be sure the heat setting on your iron is set appropriately.

Press through the cloth onto the wrong side of your fabric. Avoid the right side (pretty side) as much as possible. Press your seams as you sew.

Comments (17)

4Sunshine said:
4Sunshine's picture

I'm new to your website and really love all the information & projects you have on hand.

Only wish I had found it sooner. Will certainly be trying some of of the amazing projects on offer.

Thanks so much !!

Liz Johnson.Editor.Sew4Home said:
Liz Johnson.Editor.Sew4Home's picture

4Sunshine - Welcome aboard! We'll be excited to see which projects you choose to make -- keep us posted. We hope you'll come back often... and bring all your friends!

Carrie said:
Carrie 's picture

I just discovered your wonderful website!!  I have bookmarked your awesome website!  Thanks so much for sharing your talent and information.

Liz Johnson.Editor.Sew4Home said:
Liz Johnson.Editor.Sew4Home's picture

@Carrie - Thank you so much, and welcome aboard. We hope you come back often... and bring all your friends.

Wendy K Ford said:
Wendy K Ford's picture

Thank so much for this post. Very useful information for this textile painter who has had a few mishaps.

Liz Johnson.Editor.Sew4Home said:
Liz Johnson.Editor.Sew4Home's picture

@Wendy -- this is one of our earliest article; we're glad to know it's still out there helping.

CristinaP said:
CristinaP's picture

Thank you for posting these ideas/instructions on here. Weeks ago, I pressed an appliqued quilt block and accidentally scorched it. :(  So tonight I made my own pressing cloths with similar dimensions as yours, and I can already tell, it's going to save me tons of trouble at the ironing board. Thank you, again!

Liz Johnson.Editor.Sew4Home said:
Liz Johnson.Editor.Sew4Home's picture

@CristinaP - Ohhhh - ironing mistakes are so awful - we're glad to have helped you with an easy fix.

kiki998 said:
kiki998's picture

What temperature should you use to wash a store bought pressing cloth. The one i bought is 100% cotton?

Liz Johnson.Editor.Sew4Home said:
Liz Johnson.Editor.Sew4Home's picture

@ kiki998 - If it's just cotton, you can treat it like a regularpiece of cotton fabric and wash on warm and tumble dry.

Mary Ann said:
Mary Ann's picture

Thanks everyone for your comments, I had to look up the word to find out what it mean, when I did I knew all alone guess just had to refreshing my memorise.

Bead Lady said:
Bead Lady's picture

You can also use a bedskirt as they are usually white and see through. If you don't have an old one, you can pick one up at your local Goodwill for about 2 dollars! Thanks for your tips, they were very helpful.

JS said:
JS's picture

I've been using old cotton napkins for press cloths for years.  They work great, the softer and more worn the better.

de roi ltd said:
de roi ltd's picture

been using a sheet and old  pillow cases for yrs. plus nice size  remnant of muslin is useful too. very nice and useful website. glad i found it today. had emergency and found answer. thanks again. have bookmarked!!!!

Mike Calo said:
Mike Calo's picture
Exactly what I wanted to know and more! I thought - after ruining a good uniform shirt - that I probably should have used a pressing cloth; I just didn't know what to use, so I started using an old dress shirt. unfortunately I couldn't see through it, so your advice on using a well-worn piece of material for visibility is spot-on (just not on my uniform shirts any more :-) )
Mary Benson said:
Mary Benson's picture
Thank you--this is exactly what I needed to know. I need to heat-set a painted fabric, and was very apprehensive about what to use for a press cloth. You have set my mind at ease. I especially liked knowing about not hemming the edges to avoid pressing that stitching into the item being ironed! Thanks so much.
Nikon Eyewear Sunglasses said:
Nikon Eyewear Sunglasses's picture
You have a very good site, well constructed and very interesting i have bookmarked you hopefully you keep posting new stuff, many thanks.


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In an out-of-the-blue announcement, San Francisco International Airport declared that H2O in plastic bottles will no longer be welcome at SFO, the first such move for any major U.S. airport.

We’ve gotten used to being forced to dump liquids at TSA checkpoints for years, but San Francisco International Airport is making an unprecedented, and frankly laudable move to further excommunicate commonly consumed liquids. Specifically bottled water, which represents a massive global environmental nuisance. In a surprise announcement reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, SFO will ban the sale of single-use plastic water bottles at all restaurants, cafes, vending machines and shop in  the airport. You can still bring your own bottle, though shops will only sell refillable glass or aluminum bottles.

The ban takes effect August 20, less than three weeks from today.

“We’re the first airport that we’re aware of to implement this change,” SFO spokesperson Doug Yakel the Chronicle. “We’re on the leading edge for the industry, and we want to push the boundaries of sustainability initiatives.”

The Chron estimates that SFO sells four million plastic water bottles every year, so it’s a pretty significant disruption to travelers. The move is probably the most bold of any of the airport’s recent sustainability measures, which also include requiring restaurants to use compostable plates and utensils, and the addition of rooftop solar power. San Francisco International has been recognized as one of the most environmentally friendly in the country.

As ABC 7 notes, shops are already transitioning to refillable aluminum and glass bottles. And the airport already has more than 100 hydration stations for refilling, with more of those on the way.

It bears noting that bottled water is one of the most ridiculously marked up items at airports nationwide, having long passed the $5 mark for a measly 12-ounce bottle of water. That said, the reusable bottles you’ll be forced to buy instead will surely be more expensive. Traveler Tony Vargas probably captured how most of us feel about the impending bottled water ban coming to SFO.

When the Chronicle asked Vargas what he thinks about it, he said, “It’s great — kind of.”

Related: Central Valley Water Crisis Leaves Nearly 1.5 Million Without Clean Water [SFist]

Image: TheDigitel Myrtle Beach via Flickr


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Cheek fillers

Cheek fillers – all the benefits

There is no woman, who is completely pleased with what she sees in the mirror. There is always something that can be done, repaired, removed or added. We`re going to talk about additions today, so if you are up to lose some weight and remove some belly mass, this is not your reading. This is mostly a reading for women, who are charming and fitted enough but still have some genetic issues with their looks. They smile and they laugh, but there is something not so ok with their face part around a month or to tell it clearly – they need some cheek fillers.

Cheek fillers are injection procedures with long-lasting results and very good enhancement effect on a lady`s face.

Cheeks have been always considered a symbol of a woman`s grace and elegance. A woman with no cheeks is not exactly attractive. Well, she can indeed get some darker rouge, but come one – we live in the 21st century, when everything`s possible, including having cheeks to admire for a longer time than from morning till the…lunch break! You can have the cheeks to be blessed with the risk-free, fast and 100% satisfying procedure of putting cheek fillers. What are the benefits of this procedure? Find out now!

First of all, the cheek fillers will finally give that confidence you have been missing up to now. If a woman hates something about her appearance – especially about her face – she cannot just do what every woman is supposed to do or to conquer the world.

Also, cheek fillers are superb for the fact that they have long-lasting results.

If you want it to be permanent, you can repeat the procedure through the years without having any concern whether it will harm or damage or health. Putting cheek fillers today just cannot be compared to a real surgery. Because it is just not a surgery! This procedure is done, while you are awake and you can even see what`s going on. You can trust in what you have been put yourself in.

Cheek fillers are also very suitable for ladies above 30. At this age they can start losing collagen and even though they used to have good cheeks, they are losing it with time. But there is also another side of this story. Ladies with thinner faces get lots of wrinkles after this age and eventually, the cheek zone becomes a real arena for the age to kill the youth. With cheek fillers, you can stop this process!


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Ferrer ends Nadal's Slam bid in upset

MELBOURNE, Jan 26, 2011 (AFP) - Injury-hit world number one Rafael Nadal was sensationally dumped from the Australian Open quarter-finals 6-4, 6-2, 6-3 by Spanish compatriot David Ferrer on Wednesday.

Rafael Nadal sits during a break during his match against David Ferrer on January 26, 2011. AFP

The defeat ended Nadal's bid for a fourth straight Grand Slam victory after winning last year's French Open, Wimbledon and US Open. Only Don Budge and Rod Laver have held all four titles at the same time.

Nadal looked troubled by a strapped left hamstring injury which he appeared to pick up in a drawn-out second game of the match, and needed medical timeouts to see out the 2hr 33min match on Rod Laver Arena.

It was seventh seed Ferrer's fourth win over Nadal in 15 encounters and he will now play British fifth seed Andy Murray in Friday's semi-final.

Nadal later said he did not want to talk about his injury out of respect for his friend Ferrer.

"I can say nothing about the injury. Seriously, I would prefer that I don't talk a lot about the injury," Nadal said. "In respect to the winner and to a friend, I prefer to talk about the match.

"I think he played at a very high level. I congratulate him and wish him all the best for the semi-final. I think he's having a fantastic tournament.

"If he keeps playing like this, he is going to have a good chance."

It will be Ferrer's second Grand Slam semi-final after he reached the last four at the 2007 US Open.

"It's not easy because Rafael is a gentleman and he was playing injured and we are friends," Ferrer said. "He was injured in the first set but I played my game, I fought a lot and sometimes it's not easy."

Nadal dug in and played on out of respect for his friend Ferrer and to give him the satisfaction of beating him on the court, and not via an injury retirement.

It was deja vu for the top seed, who pulled out during his quarter-final with Murray on exactly the same date at last year's Australian Open with a knee problem.

His defeat also ended his 25-match Grand Slam winning streak going back to last year's French Open, four off the record run of 29 held by Rod Laver.

Nadal was struggling throughout the opening set and was broken three times by Ferrer, but appeared to move more freely in the second set when he broke Ferrer's second service game.

But Ferrer secured a triple service break to claim the second set and a stranglehold on the match against the stricken Nadal.

Ferrer again broke Nadal's opening service in the third set as the inevitability of defeat loomed to end his dream of his fourth straight Grand Slam.

Nadal's service was broken a total of seven times, while Ferrer hit 44 winners to Nadal's 19. The top seed struggled with 34 errors.

It had been a troubled tournament for the Spanish superstar who arrived with a virus he picked up in Doha on the way to Australia.

It was the first all-Spanish quarter-final at the Australian Open since 1997 when Carlos Moya defeated Felix Mantilla.

Other news


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    Here Are Some of the Habits of Highly Successful People

    SHAHS / May 6, 2017 / entrepreneurship

    Get into the minds and daily rituals of highly successful individuals—like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Elon Musk—with the following infographic.

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Tag Archives: change

The Venus Flytrap: Unsentimental Fool

Sometime last year, after a lifetime of oversensitivity and a positively medieval sense of the tragic, I thought I had finally become unsentimental. Which meant, in optimistic terms, that my days of weeping in restaurants might finally have been put behind me. I was quite relieved about this. I had spoiled a lot of mascara crying over spilt milk.

I thought I had become unsentimental about, for instance, Leonard Cohen, the artist formerly known as my downfall. So what was I doing at four in the morning, at the end of December, riffling through page after page of Agha Shahid Ali’s collected works to correctly source the poem from which the line that had haunted me all that day had come from – just so I could put it in a letter? And not even a real letter, the kind that sensible people write in order to communicate, but one of those hopelessly twee things I’ve called a postcard: a poem not even sent to its intended, but left in the open (because actual communication would be, you know, too much for the nervous system).

I thought I was over Cohen, but he was in my subliminal impulses, as every thing that ever crosses one’s way becomes. And there I was, having perfectly internalized his mythology, playing it out without a thought.

In any case, I could not find the line anywhere in the book. “I’ve seen how things/ that seek their way find their void instead”. I fell asleep to the realization it wasn’t at all from Ali, but from Federico Garcia Lorca, a hero both of mine and – incidentally – Cohen’s. Fitting, considering that my new year’s resolution is to fully inculcate my complete demonic self, demonic the way Lorca meant it, which is to say – not so much to consume with a mad passion, but to once again also let myself be consumed, be possessed, to stop standing in the way of life, and love, and ferocious intensity.

Which, as you might correctly surmise, might just be a noble way of saying “start crying again in restaurants, if you like”. But it goes a little further than that. What I’ve learnt from my period of emotional austerity is that yes, unsentimentality is a survival mechanism and its opposite (intensity) is a choice – but to choose to live deeply doesn’t mean to choose to live without discretion. Too much contrived emotion only results in not knowing the difference between god and chemical – every sensation inducible, and hence inauthentic.

Maybe you’ll find what I say next more diffident than demonic, but I’ll say it anyway. Today I bought a gramophone, an impulse acquisition, right off the side of a street. An unthinkably romantic purchase if there ever was one, and one I would never have made ever before. I have neither vinyl nor space for décor – and for the longest time, too much drama about anything resembling a symbolic commitment. I have, however, finally found the space in my life again for a little tenderness, a little twinkling; and enough lines in my head, and enough groove in my body, to provide the music and lyrics – but only the kind that comes of its own volition, not the kind that’s just blank noise interfering in a dense, deliciously loaded silence.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.

The Venus Flytrap: Mourning the Marina

That night, the oppari singer didn’t just stop singing when she was asked to. She wept as she stopped.

We were in a home with a small baby and no death in sight, only poetry. And still, she wept. Somebody took her in their arms and kissed her cheeks. Someone else brought her fruit.

Her work is the lament. She could not sing lullabies; her voice was too oriented in the work of grief, of allowing the bereaved to mourn.

This was months ago, at the home of a noted folkloric preservationist, and the singer was a professional mourner from Chennai’s Marina Beach. 7000 people live in the kuppams between the lighthouse and Broken Bridge. Many depend on fishing for their livelihoods. They bear every stigma that the marginalized suffer, and were Chennai’s most devastated community in the 2004 tsunami.

Last week, in conversation with someone deeply involved in the community, I came to know of what some fear is the second tsunami: eviction, dislocation, clearance.

I am told that what we are about to witness is disaster capitalism – in this case, using the tsunami excuse as a means of changing the entire face of the beach. The actual plans have not been released – but beachfront luxury properties and corporate buildings are expected to take precedence over human rehabilitation.

I went to the kuppams, just to get a feel for this change. “Of course there is sadness,” one man told me. “But the government has promised that fishing people can stay. Only ‘guests’ will be moved elsewhere.” I asked if he trusted the government. He said he did, adding, “We don’t want what happened in MGR’s period. We’ll adjust.” The incident he referred to were riots that took place during an attempted clearance of Nochikuppam and surrounding areas.

One woman saw us looking over a bare plot of land. “Fishermen’s houses will we built here,” she said, broadly smiling. But I knew, for a fact, that this is not absolute. Other intentions – some good, most not – have different designs.

I came away knowing I had only begun to scratch the surface of something enormous.

When I think of the oppari singer, I wonder if the death she was serenading that night was as much oracular as it was body-memory. A way of life is dying out, and there will be people who suffer with it as it does. It can be argued that it’s dying anyway, and it is – but to be evicted 20km from the beach means it could die even within the lifetimes of those engaged in it today.

It is more than armchair anthropology that leaves me heartsick. The battle for the kuppams along the Marina, if there is to be one, is the battle for the soul of Chennai. This cannot be overestimated. Imagine the beach overrun with high-rises, hotels, corporate monoliths, and maybe, a few discreet low-cost buildings. We may be on par with any first-world city. But we will no longer be Chennai.

Before Chennai, before Madras, were the little pre-colonial fishing hamlets along the Coromandel Coast.

This is where it all began. To lose this is to lose the origins of the city itself. Take any side you want – rationalist, sentimentalist, spiritualist, socialist, traditionalist, artist. Take the capitalist side if you must, but acknowledge what we are about to lose in this gentrification of this coast (as if a wild geographical feature can ever be gentrified – did the tsunami teach nothing?).

Perhaps nothing can be done but mourn. Then, let this be mourned the way it deserves to be. Like the oppari singer did that night. Like nothing but the song exists – because soon, nothing will.

An edited version appeared in The New Indian Express. “The Venus Flytrap” is my weekly column in the Zeitgeist supplement. Previous columns can be found here.


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Completed in 2015 in Kuwait. Images by Nelson Garrido . At its core, Box House II has a courtyard layout, with a living space on one side and sleeping quarter on the other side. This courtyard layout is...

The Woodmen's Circle Home in Sherman, Texas

Painting Brick Interior Walls Ideas | Modern bathroom design with white brick wall and wood furniture

"Berlin - Jugendstil 006" by Arnim Schulz on Flickr - This is an Art Nouveau Door in Berlin, Germany.

Guest house blocks are designed with strong reference to the ‘Yi ke yin’ residential format of Yunnan. Crafted in response to local climatic conditions, this vernacular format has central courtyards providing daily communication between r

2057 House Kekkapää / Experimental Wooden Building

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Exteriors: Long Museum West Bund, China, by Atelier Deshaus, photographed by Su Shengliang

Albert Frey (1903-1998) helped shape Palm Springs into the modern architecture mecca it is known as today, developing a style of building known as Desert Modern - with walls of glass, flat sweeping roofs and corrugated metal. ◉

9-11 Memorial Museum in New York City with 3D sculptures and buildings. To explore museum it will take min 2 hours. 9-11 Museum tickets starting from USD 24 and 9/11 Memorial tickets are free of cost.

USS Midway Museum is a maritime floating museum in San diego. USS Midway was US longest serving aircraft carrier of the 20th century. Online USS midway tickets starting from USD 21

The Ajanta Caves are 30 (approximately) rock-cut Buddhist cave monuments which date from the 2nd century BCE to about 480 CE in Aurangabad district of Maharashtra state of India.[1][note 1] The caves include paintings and rock-cut sculptures describe


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Our Greatest Social Problem

I posted the question on my facebook page recently, “What do you think is our greatest social problem in the world?” It seemed a rather lively topic, so I thought I would share my thoughts in my blog rather than attempt to nudge in one more soundbite-type response. My thanks in advance to all who posted.

I believe the single greatest social ill is our fractured relationships. Humans, in my experience, are terrible at prioritizing, communicating, focusing and nurturing healthy relationships with God, self, others and creation. When most people look at a social ill, they stare at the stalk and say, “Let’s come up with a cleaver way to pull that weed!”

A recent conversation with a dear friend about pornography is a perfect example. He and another friend had come up with a way to significantly hinder the porn industry’s ability to process credit cards. It seemed legal and ethical in the way they proposed it, and I believe it would have cost MasterCard and Visa financially to continue to do business with pornographers, not to mention a terrible headache for smut peddlers. I advised my friend not to proceed because I believe that the roots of the industry would have only dug deeper in the midst of an assault.

The reason porn exists is because of broken relationships. The industry depends on broken parent-daughter relationships, parent-son relationships, and primarily, because of a brokenness in our ability to serve the Lord and follow His ways. Because we also have a broken relationship with financial resources, we monetarily incentivize, to the tune of billions of dollars, the further degradation of the family through porn.

This isn’t a diatribe about one industry, so let’s move on. One response to my facebook post was that “intolerance” is our greatest social problem. This is absurd (my apologies to the author), because you simply cannot tolerate everything. Alexander Hamilton is credited with telling us that, “Those who stand for nothing will fall for anything.” The idea that you can allow everything to exist in harmony denies the fact that, when left to our own devices and desires, sin ensues. The primary Wiccan/Pagan tenet, “…do what ye will, harm none.”, is ridiculous when followed to it’s natural end. Can any social ill be done in private that does not hurt another person? At the very best, we use sin to isolate ourselves from necessary relationships, and at the very worst, we grieve the heart of God.

I do not believe we have too few rules or values in society. We have millions of laws, and most people would tell you they believe that families ought to be more loving, ought to show respect, ought to, ought to …. ad nauseum. The values aren’t gone from society. They are being intentionally rejected. My belief is that people in Western societies are filling ourselves with what is comfortable and entertaining rather than what is relationally healthy. I could really get on my soapbox here, but I’ll summarize by saying that I only have one T.V. in my house, and that might be one too many.

My friend, Brian Fulthorp, wrote the following on my facebook post: “most problems are symptomatic of broken relationships: divorce, war, fighting, killing, all that…. and like others have noted, all of that is borne out of our alienation from God our maker.” I completely agree. To his list, I feel compelled to add my personal conviction that it pleases God when we care for creation. This was a primary request of the Lord in Genisis 2:15, and I believe he is pleased when we steward the earth well.

Also to the list, and of utmost urgency, is a realization that we have to steward our relationship with ourselves. We tend to be sentient organisims that are particularly cleaver at seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, but humans were created very differently here. We should, at times, chase after the thing that causes us incredible discomfort. I believe the greatest human attribute it to boldly pursue something that inflicts tremendous pain in the act of serving the Lord and serving others in His name.

I love that someone on facebook finally asked for the solution. Although I am far from mastering the solution, I feel I am living it, to some degree. I tend to my relationships with God, self, others and creation, in that order, stewarding each and owning none.

7 thoughts on “Our Greatest Social Problem

  1. Its a great post Shawn- I’m not discounting it. I agree with it 100%, but if I had seen your fb post (which hurts me that I didn’t) I would have said the greatest social ill is selfishness. I think that selfishness is the root of broken relationships. I think the correct order of relationships is God, Others, Me. I think a lot of people think, Me, others, God.

    my two cents! Keep it up bro!

  2. Thanks, gents. There is a popular acronym in Evangelical circles; Jesus Other You. In defining service, that works. When applied to stewardship, we are more responsible for our relationship with ourself than we are for our relationship with others. The healthiest people I know are self-disciplined, which is another way of saying that they steward themselves well.

  3. Great post Shawn! I recently read a book called When Helping Hurts in which the authors propose that the root causes of poverty are broken relationships, … with God, others, ourselves, and the environment. Of course it all starts with right relationship with God. Then as we listen to Him and grow in his knowledge and grace, hopefully the other relationships improve as well.

    • I read When Helping Hurst last year, and I wholeheartedly agree with Fickert and Corbett’s thoughts about broken relationships. If you liked that book, you’d probably also like Rich Stearns’ The Hole in our Gospel and David Platt’s Radical. Thanks for reading my blog & sharing your thoughts.

  4. I am slowly coming to the realization of just how important relationships are. I think when you mentioned people looking for the easy way, or prioritizing incorrectly, you struck the nail on the head.

    However, I am curious about your views on intolerance, and how that affects the relationships you build? Especially in the case of family members, since you can choose your friends, you cannot however choose your family 🙂 From a personal standpoint, I have come to the belief that, in the case of family (especially), maybe it is best to try and support the person, even if you do not necessarily support the decision. In essence, loving that person through their decisions. Not to say that you should not state your beliefs about that person’s decisions, but not abandoning them/shunning them just because you have opposing positions. That way, if things end up falling apart for them, at least you are there next to them to help pick up the pieces.

    I guess I am really trying to ask to what extent intollerance should affect our relationships? Can it merely be a statement of disagreement, or do you believe it should extend to such actions as severing relationships? Love you, Uncle!

    • Great question. This is my gut-reaction, principally based response.

      I don’t care for the word “intolerant” because there is a societal stigma attached to those who are intolerant. I recall once that Mayor Norm Rice said something to the effect of, “The only thing we will not tolerate is intolerance”. What a foolish thing to say. There are actions, behaviors and values to which we should be intolerant, even to the point of violence. I agree that everyone should be loved through their decisions, but there are certain beliefs that are not just wrong, but dangerous and damaging to others. Why was Jesus willing to throw over the tables of the money changers in the temple? Because their actions caused harm within the community. Why should we be willing to physically defend the defenseless? Because evil will attempt to conquer the week (Kuwait in 1991, Poland in 1939, Korea in 1950). In general, I think it is more harmful to fully embrace someone in their persistent, rebellious sin then to allow that person to become the “prodigal son”. Love the sinner and hate the sin. Sometimes the hate of the sin limits your interaction with a person who is enveloped in sin. We should always be there to help pick up the pieces for anyone, not just a family member.

      Unity in the essentials, liberty in the non-essentials, and in all things, charity.

      Love you too Hannah.

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NORTH CAROLINA POLICY WATCH – Legislators close to cobbling together major sexual assault reforms

The N.C. General Assembly meets in the State Legislative Building in Raleigh. A conference committee is currently working on a package of sexual assault reforms that would go to lawmakers for an up-or-down vote. Frank Taylor / Carolina Public Press

Two loopholes in North Carolina’s sexual assault laws could close as legislators hammer out last-minute changes to three bills in a bipartisan conference committee this week.

If someone continues with sexual activity after a partner withdraws consent, it is currently a crime everywhere in the United States — except in North Carolina, thanks to a judge’s precedent-setting ruling 40 years ago.

“The General Assembly did not put this into statute,” said Skye David, an attorney for the N.C. Coalition Against Sexual Assault. “With that being said, the General Assembly has had 40 full years to change it.”   Click here to continue Special report: Our wetlands and streams are worth saving. But it’s incredibly hard to do.

Over the next two weeks, Policy Watch will publish a series of stories about a commonly used method of environmental protection for wetlands and streams called “compensatory mitigation.”

The federal Clean Water Act requires developers of residential, commercial, transportation and energy projects to offset “unavoidable impacts” to streams or wetlands. They usually accomplish this by buying “credits” from the state Division of Mitigation Services (DMS) or private mitigation banks, of which there are roughly 20 in North Carolina.

DMS and the private banks generate and sell the credits by restoring, preserving or creating environmental projects in advance within the same watershed. They use the fees in part to fund additional mitigation projects for future projects.

The Policy Watch series will examine the successes and challenges of compensatory mitigation in the Triangle, including the ramifications of environmental policies proposed and enacted by the Trump administration. Click here to continue

Latest GOP trial balloons confirm Cooper has been right to keep pushing for Medicaid expansion

It’s going to happen eventually. It may not be right away and it may not look exactly like it ought to look at first, but at some point in the not-too-distant future, North Carolina is going to expand its Medicaid program.

The momentum to move forward is too strong and the arguments against doing so are just too weak. Consider the following:

  • A growing and overwhelming majority of states – including many dominated by Republicans – have already taken the step and enjoyed extremely positive results.
  • The healthcare community is for it and the future of many hospitals depends on it.
  • A fast-growing segment of the state’s business community supports it.
  • As detailed in a recent, in-depth report, the economic benefits to the state would be huge.
  • Voters want it to happen.
  • Most importantly, it will, quite literally, save thousands of lives.

In comparison, the arguments against expansion look downright pitiful. Continue

Colorado becomes 18th state to outlaw “conversion therapy” as North Carolina’s bill goes unheard

Last week Colorado became the 18th U.S. state to outlaw so-called “conversion therapy” — a scientifically discredited practice that attempts to “cure” people of being lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.

Gov. Jared Polis, Colorado’s openly gay governor, also signed a bill that will make it easier for transgender people to get state-issued ID and other documents that correctly reflects their gender identity.

In North Carolina, the Mental Health Protection Act, was filed in March. It would outlaw converstion therapy, part of a rapidly growing national movement.  Despite polls showing overwhelming bipartisan support for the ban, it faced stiff opposition from religious groups and conservative Republicans and did not receive a hearing in this legislative session. No such bill has yet been passed in any state in the Southeast. Continue

“Gerrymander” is much too polite a word for what Trump and the GOP are trying to do

By Rob Schofield

For some time now, it has seemed that the widespread and growing use of the words “gerrymander” and “gerrymandering” was a good thing for our state and nation. A decade ago, these words were insider terms used only by campaign consultants and politics wonks. In recent years, however, as the public has finally started to grasp the reality of how electoral districts have come to be drawn and manipulated, “gerrymander” and “gerrymandering” have, increasingly, entered the general lexicon.

Unfortunately, while it’s certainly positive that lots of Americans now understand what gerrymandering is and that it’s to be combated, there’s a downside to the current widespread use of the term: it’s much too polite a word to describe what the Trump administration and its Republican Party allies are trying to do to our democracy.  Continue

Burr’s “I can’t remember” explanation of Mueller Report revelation strains credulity

By Rob Schofield

Throughout his long and mostly uninspired political career, Richard Burr has filled the role of a classic, inoffensive, modern day American politician. Burr is reasonably telegenic, has an affinity for platitudes, remains an enigma to his constituents, is a reliable vote for the ruling class and, after a quarter century in Washington, appears to enjoy life in the nation’s capital. One quite believable rumor has it that when Burr retires from the Senate at the end of his current term, the one-time lawnmower salesman will transition to a job as a high-priced K Street lobbyist to “cash in” like so many other politicians of both major parties who’ve preceded him.  Continue reading

U.S. Supreme Court taking up LGBTQ discrimination cases

The U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday it will take up the question of whether a federal anti-discrimination law applies to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sex. In agreeing to hear two cases dealing with LGBTQ discrimination, the nation’s highest court will address the question of whether that protection extends to sexual orientation and being transgender. Continue reading

Supreme Court weighs its role in limiting partisan gerrymandering

WASHINGTON – U.S. Supreme Court justices appeared willing Tuesday to rein in partisan gerrymandering — desperate even, for attorneys to give them some sort of manageable numeric standard by which they could determine how much politics is too much when it comes to redistricting.

It wasn’t that simple, though, and after considering three challenges to congressional maps — two to the 2016 GOP-drawn map in North Carolina and one to a Democratic-drawn map in Maryland — at least two conservative justices seemed unconvinced to expend any more judicial energy on the issue. Continue reading

The Cohen hearing: Michigan congresswoman skewers Mark Meadows’ Trump defense stunt

Lawrence ‘insulted’ at GOP congressman claiming Trump isn’t racist since he hired Black official.

The U.S. House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday was as circus-like as you’d expect with Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, taking the stand. U.S. Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-Southfield) had a big moment in which she called out a Republican congressman on a stunt during proceedings.  Continue reading

What was missing at Superintendent Johnson’s private education summit

By Billy Ball

There was much talk this week and last about state Superintendent Mark Johnson’s Tuesday night limelight, the “big” announcement you might have missed because you, like most of North Carolina, were not invited.

Public education advocates buzzed with speculation, or was that trepidation? Would the Koch brothers, billionaire union-busting philanthropists, bring their act to North Carolina? Who’s paying for Johnson’s invitation-only event at the Raleigh Convention Center? Has the superintendent found a way to coax more badly-needed infrastructure dollars out of a notoriously parsimonious state legislature? Continue reading

Why North Carolina needs state leaders, not the Koch brothers, to save public education

By Billy Ball

Public education advocates in North Carolina are ablaze these days, after a report from The Washington Post in late January teased a nebulous plan hatched by the conservative Koch network to spend boatloads of cash on a massive, as-yet-unnamed, K-12 initiative in five states.

If North Carolina is one of the five, state leaders and the Kochs are mum, even as Superintendent of Public Instruction Mark Johnson promises a “big” announcement later this month with business leaders Continue reading

The inconvenient truth about our so-called “booming” economy

We’re living through the worst “good” economy in generations, a reality that many of the rich and powerful people who have rigged the system are desperately hoping the rest of us won’t notice. The last time rich people managed to siphon off this much of the treasure that our economy generates, handlebar mustaches were a thing, and not just in hipster coffee shops.

Corporations and investors are getting rich, but most North Carolinians are just trying to get by.

Turn on the TV, scan Twitter, or peruse the business press and you’re treated to a conga line of commentators, conservative politicians, and wealthy corporate types going on and on about how great our economy is. But if things are so great, why is it so hard for most of us to make ends meet?

If you’re wondering where all of the wealth is going, two words you need to know: Stock buybacks. Continue reading

Q&A with state Court of Appeals candidates – the Calabria seat

As part of an ongoing effort to inform North Carolinians about the upcoming judicial elections, Policy Watch is publishing a Q&A with each person running for a statewide judicial office. Each of the 11 candidates was asked the same six questions, and their answers will appear throughout the week alongside those of their challengers.

North Carolinians will get to decide in November who will fill the next three spots on the state Court of Appeals. Two current judges are retiring from the court: Judge Ann Marie Calabria and Judge Rick Elmore – both have served since 2002. The third seat is a vacancy created by former Judge Doug McCullough and filled by current Judge John Arrowood. He was appointed by Gov. Roy Cooper and will be the incumbent in that upcoming race. Click here to continue reading

Guns and gore galore: Hard truths about America’s gun problem

By Lori Bunton and Bonnie Jezior

Americans comprise only 4.4% of the world’s population, but own 42% of the world’s guns (about 300 million). This means we have slightly less than one gun for every citizen – and the U.S. tops the list for gun death percentages. More than 38,000 people died from gunshot wounds in 2016 (no statistics are available yet for 2017 or 2018) and over 30,000 annually since 2012. To put it in perspective, you can sit back and expect a shooting death about every 15 minutes.

Put another way, there are 88.8 guns in the U.S. for every 100 Americans. When it comes to developed countries like Canada, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, England, France, Spain, Australia, and Japan, the closest to us is Switzerland, with a rate 45.7 guns per 100 residents. But while the Swiss own about half as many guns per capita as Americans, their death rate is less than one percent of the U.S. rate.

Japan has the lowest percentage of gun ownership at 0.6% of the population. It is also at the bottom of the list on gun deaths – typically fewer than 10 a year. Some feel that violent video games spur violence, and the Japanese are known for playing those games, but it looks like that contributes little, if anything, to gun violence.   Click here to continue reading

The appalling reality of the Trump presidency and the profound threat it poses to American democracy

By Rob Schofield

For more than a year and a half now, the appalling reality of the Trump presidency and the profound threat it poses to American democracy have combined to spur thousands upon thousands of North Carolinians to lend their time, talents and money to a burgeoning movement that is commonly referred to as “the resistance.” Across the state, in all 100 counties, caring and thinking people who once dismissed or avoided politics and political organizing have become activists for change.

Their common goal: to do something – anything – that will register their outrage about Trump and his policies and to help rescue their country. This imperative has only been heightened by the political reality in North Carolina, in which state legislative leaders have regularly done their worst to out-Trump Trump when it comes to enacting regressive public policies.

The results of the new birth in progressive organizing are apparent in myriad places – from the hundreds of house meetings that have arisen spontaneously in even the state’s most conservative counties, to the growing immigrant sanctuary movement, to the countless marches and rallies that have taken place in the state’s larger cities, to the unprecedented energy Trump critics are bringing to the 2018 elections, to the public opinion polls that predict dramatic change in November.

All that said; one obvious missing element for those who would mobilize is the lack of a central, tangible and nonpartisan objective. Sure, it’s good to be against and respond as quickly as possible to the long and destructive list of policies that Trump and state legislative leaders have advanced in Washington and Raleigh, but it’s also extremely difficult. The proposals are numerous, ever-changing, frequently buried in a haze of confusing procedural votes, and often go from back of the envelope to law in just days. [Read more…]

In this issue:

Teacher authors open letter to sponsor of controversial bill to allow municipal charters

By Stuart Egan

Editor’s note: One of the most controversial bills to come before the 2018 legislative session is House Bill 514, a proposal to allow four Mecklenburg County towns to set up charter schools. Together with language inserted into the budget bill allowing North Carolina municipalities to spend property tax revenues on any public school that “benefits the residents of the city,” including charter schools, the bill represents a potentially “crossing of the Rubicon” moment in the history of public school funding in North Carolina. The following open letter to the bill sponsor, Rep. Bill Brawley, was authored by a Forsyth school teacher and frequent education commentator Stuart Egan.]

Dear Rep. Brawley,

With the impending approval of Bill HB 514 which allows for municipal charter schools in a budget process that is intentionally kept within committee and out of democratic debate, this voter has to ask you one question (actually many): Do you realize what you have championed?

Really. Do you know what Pandora’s Box you have opened and what the lasting effects actually could be just so you satiate your political views?

1. You probably just raised everyone’s property taxes in the state. With the ability to now use local property taxes to help fund local schools (a measure which seems to conveniently appear in the budget to lay a path for HB 514), whatever the state now mandates for public schools and does not choose to specifically fund can now be passed on to local school systems.

Think about the class size mandate that will come around again next year. The reprieve given this year was in part due to the incredible blowback from local districts, which correctly cited the state’s having not funded it. Implementation of the class size mandate would have created a seismic rip in school system budgets. Now it seems that there is an avenue to pass the cost of any state mandate to the local LEA’s. Instead of having to field concerns about whether or not the state will fund certain mandates, the state can now just slide the financial responsibilities to cities and counties, some of whom are already economically challenged. [Read more…]

With HB 514, legislature unambiguously embraces school segregation

By Kris Nordstrom

There’s a word for what happens when majority-white suburbs pull their children from a majority-minority school district and place them into exclusionary, majority-white schools: segregation. With the advancement of HB 514, lawmakers are unambiguously embracing school segregation as state policy.

HB 514 allows four Charlotte suburbs – Cornelius, Huntersville, Matthews, and Mint Hill – the authority to create and operate their own charter schools. These suburbs can then limit enrollment in these schools to municipal residents. Cornelius is 85 percent whiteHuntersville is 77 percent whiteMatthews is 78 percent whiteMint Hill is 73 percent white. Students in these majority-white suburbs are assigned to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), where white students comprise just 29 percent of enrollment.

To facilitate the funding of the schools authorized by HB 514, a related budget provision(Section 38.8) creates a new authority allowing North Carolina municipalities to spend property tax revenues on any public school that “benefits the residents of the city,” including charter schools. As national school finance expert Michael Griffith notes, similar provisions in other states have led to school funding becoming “divided on class lines and on racial lines.”

It’s quite the one-two punch. [Read more…]

Policy Prescriptions

NC officials order dozens of campaigns to forfeit illegal PAC contributions from pharma giant

By Joe Killian

As state lawmakers convene for the 2018 legislative session, we hope you will continue reading our special series “Policy Prescriptions” researched and written by Samone Oates-Bullock. Today’s installment is on addressing North Carolina’s affordable housing needs.Read the full piece here.

In one of the largest campaign donation forfeitures in state history, 48 improper donations from the Pfizer Inc. political action committee will be forfeited by political campaigns and committees across the state.

The contributions, totaling $53,500 to 36 different committees, were uncovered in a recent audit by the State Board of Elections and Ethics Enforcement. They came on June 21, 2016 and October 16 2017 — both days when the General Assembly was in session. Under state law, contributions are prohibited during legislative sessions.  Continue reading

North Carolinians want the legislature’s judicial attacks to end. It’s time for lawmakers to listen.

By Jen Jones

When the North Carolina General Assembly convenes in a few weeks for the 2018 legislative short session, lawmakers will once again be asked to consider new judicial voting maps. At last Friday’s meeting of the Joint Judicial Redistricting and Reform Committee, members evaluated three proposals that still appear intended, as one high-ranking official said last year, to affect the partisan makeup of our courts.

Continue reading

Could smaller schools mean safer schools? One of the nation’s best teachers believes so

As the North Carolina General Assembly House Select Committee on School Safety meets again on Tuesday, one of the the America’s best public school teachers has several suggestions for improving safety.

Gaston County high school English teacher Bobbie Cavnar believes that smaller schools paired with more nurses and psychologists will enhance the safety of our classrooms.

Continue reading

Pioneering women celebrate progress in the judiciary, make the case for more at Supreme Court ceremony

By Melissa Boughton

There have only been seven women to serve on the North Carolina Supreme Court in its 199-year history. In comparison, 92 men have served during that time.

Closing the gender gap on the state’s highest court is a work in progress, but it was clear at an event Tuesday that the women who have already served are trailblazing a path for the future.  Continue reading

Why North Carolina must say “no” to school district secession

By Rob Schofield

Though they are sometimes dressed up in prettified language about “freedom” and “choice” and “market forces,” the main items at the heart of the conservative agenda on public education really haven’t changed much over the last several decades since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling inBrown v. Board of Education. When one really gets down to brass tacks, three principal and closely intertwined objectives stand out: Continue reading

Signs of hope amidst the horror
Cracks are forming in the NRA’s death grip on American politics

By Rob Schofield   2/19/18

At some point, it’s going to happen.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, shifting attitudes in the American body politic will reach a tipping point and the death grip that the gun lobby has on our government will begin to ease and, perhaps, even collapse. It’s not likely to happen right away or be pretty or pleasant – thousands more children, women and men will have to die unnecessarily and prematurely – but, it’s definitely going to happen.

The signs of this gradual change have been visible for some time and are garnering renewed attention in the aftermath of last week’s latest mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

Here are five that stand out:

#1 – A growing lack of fear amongst advocates for stronger laws and regulations – For many years – decades really – American supporters of sane gun laws have operated in a meek and fearful posture with an air of defeated resignation.

Part of this has no doubt been the result of repeated legislative defeats; it’s hard to embrace or project an air of chesty self-confidence when you’re banging your head against a wall every day. But another part is clearly attributable to the power dynamics that one would expect when advocates on one side of a debate are driven by a commitment to nonviolence and disarmament and many on the other side are prone to the use of loud, hostile and even apocalyptic language to lift up their devotion to killing machines.

Simply put: it can be frightening to be an advocate for gun control. One will, in all likelihood, be the target of intimidation tactics (name calling, hate mail, threatening social media posts) pursued by people who love weapons and own lots of them. And if you’re a politician, you can almost count on having boatloads of cash spent against you in an effort to ruin your reputation. Here in North Carolina, pro-gun groups have even gone so far as to hold “target practice fundraisers” in which the images of disfavored politicians have been affixed to shooting range targets. Even journalists who merely report on the issue have been targeted.

In recent months, however, one gets the sense that the bullying tactics employed by gun zealots are starting to lose their zip. [Read more...]

Progressive Pulse Blog:

Daily Micro-podcasts:

Weekly Radio Interviews:

By Lisa Sorg

Gov. Roy Cooper last week brokered a controversial memorandum of understanding with Dominion Power, which co-owns with Duke Energy, the even more controversial Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Under the agreement, Duke and Dominion will pay a total of $57.8 million to a mitigation fund to pay for the “unavoidable” environmental damage caused by the pipeline, as well as for “support and funding” for economic development and renewable energy in the eight counties in eastern North Carolina affected by the ACP: Northampton, Halifax, Nash, Wilson, Johnston, Sampson, Cumberland and Robeson.

To Duke and Dominion $57.8 million is pocket change. Considering the utilities will divide the cost — $28.9 million each – the financial hit is minimal.

Further dwarfing the outlay, only half of the total is due upfront. Each utility will initially pay only $14.45 million until the ACP has begun to operate.

To put the financial “burden” in perspective, consider how $57.8 million compares with these figures:

$6.69 billion: Gross income, 2017, Duke Energy

$6.98 billion: Gross income, 2017, Dominion Power [Read more…]

Progressive Pulse Blog:

Daily Micro-podcast:

Bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake: Why work requirements for Medicaid do not represent a reasonable healthcare compromise

By Rob Schofield

It’s one of the great and bitter ironies of our modern American policy debates that it is conservatives who are often the chief architects of the largest and least useful government bureaucracies. No, this is not intended as a dig at the military or our departments of transportation.  Read more

Hopeful developments in the effort to rein in gerrymandering

By Steve Ford

Progress in rooting out North Carolina’s gerrymandered voting districts hasn’t always occurred in a straight line. But the trend – thanks to federal judges honoring their duty to uphold the Constitution – bodes well for giving all voters an equal chance to help choose their leaders.   Read more

Strange bedfellows? Polluters, environmental groups form new coalition to lobby state government

By Lisa Sorg

On a cozy autumn evening at the luxurious Umstead Hotel in Cary, a medley of corporate luminaries, state lawmakers and environmentalists made small talk and mingled over drinks. The occasion: the formation of a new “unconventional partnership” with a “bold mission.”  North Carolina Forever, said Kathy Higgins, vice president of corporate affairs at Blue Cross Blue Shield, “will bring together diverse interests” to encourage  “reasonable and necessary investments” in land conservation and water protection. Read more

Is Trump [sic] finally approaching his McCarthy moment?
Latest racist attacks on immigrants could be an important tipping point

By Rob Schofield

As bleak as our national political landscape may seem right now, it’s worth remembering that it is far from the only time in American history in which a dangerous, dishonest and delusional con artist has held a position of great prominence. In the early 1950’s, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin rode his paranoid and dishonest witch hunt against supposed “communist subversion” to become one of the most famous and powerful men in the nation.

It seems hard to imagine now, but there was a time during which even President Dwight Eisenhower, the enormously popular and well-respected hero of World War II, lacked the political courage to take on McCarthy in public, even though he knew him to be a dishonest charlatan. [Read more…]

Federal judges stand up for individual rights, nix gerrymandered GOP congressional map

By Steve Ford

Grand constitutional questions in this country aren’t settled until the Supreme Court has its say, either by affirming or reversing the rulings of lower-court judges or simply by declining to hear challenges to those rulings.

So it’s too early to conclude definitively that North Carolina’s Republican-controlled General Assembly has set a sorry standard leading to a national crackdown on over-the-top partisan gerrymandering of election districts. That’s a call surely destined to be made by the justices in Washington.

But the bombshell Jan. 9 decision by three Greensboro-based federal judges upheld every claim that the constitutional rights of a large swath of North Carolina voters have been violated.  [Read more…]

Why North Carolinians are resisting the conservative assault on their courts

By Susan B. McClanahan

Conservative North Carolina lawmakers have pushed through a lot of radical laws and legislative proposals to dramatically remake our state in recent years. From suppressing the vote to gerrymandering legislative districts to privatizing our public schools to discriminating against LGBT citizens to altering the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches: the list is a long and troubling one.

  1. [Read more…]

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We are a one-of-a-kind magazine that provides local, regional, national and international information about women’s lives and education, performing and visual arts and writing, the environment, green living and sustainability and regional Western North Carolina business, people and events. “Villages preserve culture: dress, food and dance are a few examples. As villages grow in population and turn into towns, local cafes make way for large American chains. Handmade leather sandals are discarded for a pair of Western sneakers. Due to its small size, a village fosters a tight-knit sense of community. explains the meaning of the African proverb, “It takes a village,” by stating that a sense of community is critical to maintaining a healthy society. Village members hold a wealth of information regarding their heritage: they know about the ancient traditions, methods of production and the resources of the land. When villages become dispersed or exterminated in times of war, this anthropological knowledge disappears. Large cities are not as conducive to growing and producing foods such as fruits and vegetables. Villages, on the other hand, usually have ample amounts of land and other resources necessary for growing conditions.” The Importance of Villages by Catherine Capozzi Our Mission provides readers with information important to women’s lives and well-being. We focus primarily on the areas of education & health, business & finance, the arts & the environment. We are particularly interested in local & regional resources, organizations & events.

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Your “Financial Shock” Wealth

Understanding money, inequality, and why the tax bill is important

Imagine that today you accidentally got overcharged $1 somewhere, and a week from now they realized this and gave you your dollar back. On the whole, this might be annoying, but it probably won’t be a big deal to you. Not having that dollar likely didn’t affect your life in any material way; the “opportunity cost” you lost out on could probably be well-summarized by the interest rate on a dollar for a week.

That means that an unexpected expense of $1 basically costs you $1. If you got the dollar back later, you’d be more or less where you started.

Money!,” by Hans Splinter

Now imagine you got an unexpected expense of $5,000, which you had to pay right now. Maybe your car broke down, or you got arrested and needed to bail out, or you had a medical emergency.

Depending on what your finances look like, this may be a bigger deal. If you’ve got $5,000 sitting in the bank, you can probably deal with this: you pay the money and will need to start saving again, and if you got the $5,000 back you’d basically be back where you started. The $5,000 cost you $5,000.

If you had to take out a loan for that money, you would find yourself paying some serious interest. If you had to take out a loan that took you a few years to pay back, that $5,000 may well cost you $10,000.

If you couldn’t take out that loan, and ended up not being able to pay rent and got evicted, we’re getting into much more serious territory. Can you afford first and last month’s rent plus a security deposit, or is it going to take a while for you to get that together? Got a place to store all of your things while you’re looking for a new place to live? If not, kiss them goodbye. Does your work, or your health care, or something like that rely on you having a stable address?

Suddenly, that $5,000 may cost you a whole lot more. Possibly “everything you own.” Possibly even your life.

If $5,000 is something you could afford, ask yourself the same question again with $100,000 (fire burn down your house?), with $250,000 (cancer treatment and your health insurance kicked you off?). For everyone, there’s some number which is the largest size of a financial shock they could weather.

This number is probably the truest measure of a person’s real wealth: What is the largest unexpected financial shock you could sustain without the cost of that to you suddenly becoming ten times the original cost or more? That number isn’t something easy to calculate; it depends on whether you have a family that can help you out, on your income, on whether that shock involves losing your job (and thus your health insurance, if you live in the US), on whether you have access to any other sources of security (including public assistance).

There are people for whom a shock that’s reasonably likely to happen within a year — a car breakdown, a lost job, and so on — would be catastrophic, and there are people for whom catastrophic events happen much more rarely. Those are your two social classes.

But it tells you a lot more about someone’s wealth than the total amount they have in the bank. After all, there are plenty of people with millions of dollars in assets and millions of dollars in debts — but they aren’t worried about where their next meal is coming from, even if their “net wealth” is negative, while the person with $20 in their pocket and that’s it has a lot more on their minds.

Sit down right now and run through some estimates for your own life. How big a financial shock could you take? What would happen if you were injured and couldn’t work? What would happen if you lost your job?

Now mix in one more thought: How likely are each of these things? If a job loss would lead to big trouble, but your job is pretty secure, that’s different than if the job loss would lead to big trouble and you know that layoffs are coming.

If you want to understand economic class in the Western World today, here’s a simple rule of thumb: There are people for whom a shock that’s reasonably likely to happen within a year — a car breakdown, a lost job, and so on — would be catastrophic, and there are people for whom catastrophic events happen much more rarely. Those are your two social classes. All of the economic changes of the past few decades can be summarized as a lot of people who were previously in the second group (first factory workers, then a lot more “middle-class” jobs) suddenly found themselves in the first group (thanks to everything from the mortgage crisis to job automation).

The Financial Pump

If we can think of our individual financial situations in terms of our “financial shock” wealth, what does that tell us about financial shocks that hit the population as a whole?

Let’s say something goes wrong in the economy. 20% of people are going to get hit with a $1,000 shock. Maybe it’s a tax increase, or a change in health-care laws, or a problem in some sector of industry; some 20% will get hit in this round, and a different 20% might get hit another time. (That’s a $60 billion shock total in the US, which is actually pretty small by the scale of most major financial events we’ve seen happen)

Of those 20%, maybe 3/4 can’t weather a $1,000 shock. (That’s not a crazy number; according to the Federal Reserve, as of mid-2016, 47% of Americans couldn’t weather a $400 shock.) For them, this shock is going to spiral and lead to a lot more losses; they’re going to get a permanent negative impact from this, maybe affecting their future employment prospects, or their health, or their family. That means they’ll be less able to weather the next shock, too.

Now let’s do this over and over. Each time, a different group of people gets hit by the shock, and each time, some fraction of them gets knocked down an economic class.

What you’re doing is like taking a sieve full of rocks of different sizes and shaking it. Each time you shake, more of the small rocks will fall through. Anyone who barely survived one shake is just as much at risk from the next one; only people well above the size of any of the shakes remain safe.

What happens to the economy as a whole when this happens? To answer that, you’d have to figure out where the money goes.

But instead of trying to track where the money goes in every possible shock, there’s a simpler way to answer this. (A Stokes’ Theorem approach, for those of you who know the math) There’s a certain amount of real wealth in the economy. (Not of printed dollars, but “things of value which could potentially be owned.”) You can ask how much real wealth is being created by a process (“real things of value being made that weren’t there before”) and how much is being destroyed; the difference between those two is the net change in total real wealth. Anything that doesn’t either create or destroy real wealth must just be redistributing it.

In these financial shocks, some of the losses people experience represent destruction of real wealth. The most obvious is when people’s health suffers, or they die; this is just a plain loss, with some part of their future life simply being destroyed. It can also happen if things you own are wrecked, like if your possessions are left out in the rain when you’re evicted. But not all of the losses represent that; for example, if you lose your home, the home still exists, and you still exist. No objects of value were destroyed, their ownership was just rearranged. And no wealth is being created in this process at all, since none of it is about people actually making new things or performing new services.

That means that in each of these shocks, some wealth is lost, and the rest is redistributed. We know where it’s redistributed from — people who couldn’t afford those shocks — and so we know that wherever it’s redistributed to has to be people from outside that group, that is, people who could afford those shocks. Say, the bank that suddenly owns your home, or the person who buys it at a foreclosure auction for far less than its real value.

That is: Each financial shock will knock some set of people down a social class, destroy part of their wealth, and redistribute the rest among everyone else. Successive shocks will hit different groups of people, but ultimately everyone will be hit by a few, so the only people who won’t get knocked down are the people who have enough “shock wealth” to survive them.

This is the plain and simple way that income inequality can be created in the absence of any external forces on an economy. No new gold rush has to open up and make a few people rich; no explicit banditry has to happen. Just one financial shock after another.

Financial shocks work like a pump or a bellows: You can return the handle to where it was when you started, but the air or water that was forced out doesn’t go back in.

Cui bono?

It’s pretty easy to answer “who benefits” from this: the people who can survive the shocks. But the benefit to them isn’t just from their getting their hands on the “redistributed” wealth. It also comes from increased coercive power.

Let’s say I want my employees to work longer hours without overtime, or set targets for them that they can’t meet without dropping. If they could go elsewhere and get a better job, they would.

But if that better job might take them a week or two, or even a month or two, to find, that’s going to be trickier for them. And if they can’t afford the shock of losing a month’s wages, they’re not going to do that at all.

Situations — economic, legal, social — that give one person more coercive power over other people increase the effective value of that person’s wealth, and decrease the value of the people’s that they can coerce. It’s because that basic principle that makes free markets work: “I trade with you, and now we’re both better off; if we didn’t both feel that way, we wouldn’t have traded” only works when the second clause holds true. In particular, if I know that your failure to make a deal with me — not with the abstract market as a whole, but with me, right here, right now — is going to cost you a lot, then it doesn’t matter what competitors are out there in the field. I can make you accept less for what you’re offering.

To see a non-financial version of this: Consider laws banning sex work, or drugs, or things like that. If “what’re you going to do, go to the cops?” is a legitimate thing someone could say to you, they have the power to do all sorts of things — rob you, cheat you, rape you, kill you — without risk. Unless you can afford to pay for your own protection of one sort or another, in which case that’s an expense you have to pay which they don’t. A power imbalance in one thing easily turns into a power imbalance in others, and people getting the right to expropriate you.

(Now add race to this picture. If the cops will listen to a white person but not a black one, a white person can get away with an awful lot of cheating black people. You could even expropriate an entire community, and transfer their wealth into your pockets… from which it might end up distributed across the white community as a whole, but never go back to that black community. If you ever wondered why average white wealth in the US is more than one hundred times average black wealth, that would be it right there. You don’t need any “cultural differences” to explain it; just an asymmetric right to steal. Redlining was a way to turn this into a major extractive industry.)

So if we put this together, financial shocks very strongly benefit those who can survive them: they not only take wealth away from the ones who can’t, and “redistribute” it to the winners, but they leave the losers even more vulnerable to economic exploitation, driving down their wages, reducing their ability to complain, and generally making the winners’ wealth worth more.

This means that if you’re in a position to survive shocks, and can orchestrate them as well, you have a lot of reasons to do that.

What undoes shocks?

Is this a one-way ratchet? Do the rich always get richer, the poor poorer? Not exactly. There are a few main things that can upend this.

The first if something genuinely starts to create wealth, and that new wealth doesn’t only flow into the system to those who already have it. A new technology that increases overall productivity but doesn’t specifically give a huge rate of return to having a large installed capital base — say, personal computers — can do that. It means that people who are able to profit from these changes, no matter where they were to begin with, can do so.

In the past few decades, that ability to profit has been closely tied with education: there’s a reason it was marketed as a “great equalizer.” Even though that’s becoming much less true today (a college degree will get you exactly nothing on its own except for crushing debt), it’s probably not a coincidence that a lot of wealth seems to be invested in making education either less accessible or (in the case of for-profit “universities”) both profitable and less likely to lead to any actual changes in negotiating power for its recipients.

If we look at the great expansions of the middle class in Western history, these were subtle variations on the point. While new wealth was being created in these cases, it was also being expropriated from people seen as “outside” the society. The possibility of homesteading or yeoman farming that so shaped the early US, for example, was based on the existence of all this high-quality arable land that was suddenly “available.” Of course, that “availability” was the product of thousands of years of cultivation of that land (virgin forest doesn’t make good farmland!), followed by the Great Pandemic wiping out 95% of the population, followed by the US Army wiping out nearly everybody else, and doing so on-demand. Real wealth brought into a system by stealing it from someone else looks like wealth creation from the perspective of the subsystem that stole it, but just looks like a wealth transfer (with lots of attendant wealth destruction) from the perspective of the system as a whole.

(The rise of a middle class in Renaissance Europe was in no small part a consequence of the reopening of trade routes, part of which had to do with the formation of a society stable enough to allow inter-city travel without a supporting army, and part of which had to do with the sudden collapse of the economic strength of the Islamic world after the Mongol invasions. It’s a complicated and interesting story, again combining some creation or real wealth and some very serious transfer. The economic boom for the survivors of the Bubonic Plague (after its various major outbreaks) was similar.)

The second thing that can undo a shock is if a shock is suddenly pointed in a different direction. Remember that, at the beginning of this, we talked about multiple kinds of shock. A $5,000 expense isn’t the same thing as a job loss or an injury, and those won’t affect the same people. An epidemic certainly won’t affect the same people, and the “winners” of that shock are going to be the ones who happen to be more resistant to it. Some kinds of revolution are shocks deliberately aimed in the opposite direction, and losing one’s head can be a nasty shock indeed.

(Note, however, that most revolutions ultimately aren’t. The most common outcome of a revolution is a great deal of temporary violence, then whichever groups are best-organized seize power and quickly establish themselves as the new elites. This may repeat a few times if a few groups have comparable power, as was the case in Egypt a few years ago, when first the relatively well-organized Muslim Brotherhood became the only group capable of winning an election, and then the Army decided they liked it better the old way. Two classic examples of this are Russia and France: Russia had two revolutions in 1917, one in February which toppled the Czar and another in October where the Bolsheviks seized power, and France cycled through some extremely bloody times after 1789 before ending up with an Emperor in 1804.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss; there’s a reason they call them “revolutions.”)

You might ask if there’s a third option, some kind of systematic equalization of resources across a society. It’s a fair question, and the most that I can say is that there is not yet any demonstrated way to do this in large societies. In his book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Douglas Rushkoff made a fairly compelling argument that wealth accumulation principally kicks off when there are stable ways to store wealth which don’t decay over time. (Unlike, e.g., crops which tend to do so) Generally, the phenomena described above imply that power lets you get more power, including wealth; in economic terms, it means that there’s always a positive “rate of return on wealth” (i.e., amount you can earn simply by already having money), and that except when there’s a significant influx of new wealth, this can be made to exceed the “rate of return on income” (i.e., the amount you can earn by selling your labor) simply by repeated shocks which decrease the bargaining power of anyone who doesn’t have enough wealth. (Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is essentially a study showing that while the rate of return on income exceeded that on capital between 1950 and 1975 in much of the West, that’s been changing ever since.)

My grim suspicion is that this is actually pretty fundamental: power lets you acquire more power, and this means that no matter how evenly balanced a society begins, small fluctuations — even ones created by random outside events like storms and fires — will ultimately grow. Any mechanism which suppresses those fluctuations would itself create an asymmetry, as the people who can best control or manipulate that mechanism end up with the power.

But this doesn’t necessarily imply that the fate of society must be catastrophic. In The Origins of Political Order, Fukuyama made an interesting observation: “True freedom tends to emerge in the interstices of a balance of power among a society’s elite actors.” That is, elite actors will exist in a society, but freedom and general economic well-being both tend to happen when those actors are sufficiently numerous that they can’t align with one another, and that competition between them gives other people more effective negotiating leverage in everything from their finances to their daily lives.

This was the insight which the political idea of a “balance of powers” tried to capture, and its successes and failures have largely reflected how easy or hard that is to achieve. An opportunity for the power to align with one another undoes this, and makes it easier to orchestrate shocks which further simplify the process of maintaining that alignment and that imbalance. But feudalism is not inevitable: shocks calculated to equalize power between elite actors may be more effective than shocks calculated to destroy elite actors altogether, because the latter creates a power vacuum which is quickly filled by a new set of elite actors, while the former creates a more stable balance of powers.

Your “financial shock” wealth, the size of the biggest financial shock you could weather without incurring much larger and irreversible losses, is probably the best measure of your financial stability. If that amount is smaller than a paycheck or two, you’re largely at the mercy of your employer; the larger it is, the more negotiating leverage you have in your life. Financial shocks happen on a regular basis, both by random events (“flat tire”) and systematic changes (“collapse of an industry”); each time these happen, people who can’t survive the financial shock lose some chunk of their wealth, and much of that wealth gets redistributed among the ones who survived. This slowly and steadily (or sometimes quickly and dramatically) creates not just wealth inequality, but power inequality, and fundamentally undermines people’s freedom and lives.

Because of this, even a “temporary” financial shock, like a tax bill passed and then repealed, can have lasting consequences. Each one of these can prove immensely profitable from those in a position to gain from them. They know this, and will work to create it. The question is, what we do in response.

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Small Irrigation Canal, Hayashi, Ritto City

Close-up recording of water flowing in a small irrigation canal along a rice paddy in Hayashi, Ritto City, Japan. Recording was done with an Audio Technica BP 4025 stereo microphone and an Olympus LS100 recorder at about 02:00 on 16 July 2013.

This photo of the little canal was taken later (August 4, 2013).

Small irrigation canal from upper left to bottom center
Small irrigation canal along a narrow road in Hayashi, Ritto City

Published by Greg Peterson

Professor Emeritus, Kyoto Notre Dame University. I have retired from full-time service (1977-2014) and now offer weekly lectures in interpersonal and intercultural communication. Since 1980 I have lived in Shiga Prefecture, Japan, where I enjoy outdoor activities, especially photography, hiking, and cycling.

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text:
Right now I’m in an internet shop in Lucena. I spent my new year’s here and I’ll be staying until tomorrow. Or Monday.

Most of my days here have been composed of eating and staying up late catching up with my cousins, waking up late, and then listening to and watching our drunk neighbors play with fireworks. That’s the thing I love about spending New Year’s here in Lucena. Although the fireworks in Manila are generally better visually, (not to mention much much safer), over here you get more freedom (har har har).

I really want to go back to Manila though. Compared to Lucena, it’s a lot warmer over there. I can’t go out of the house without a jacket on (I wear the jacket inside the house too).