An Insular Nation

We are outside security. Through thick glass, we watch our son hoist his backpack onto the x-ray machine and wait to be summoned by a uniformed TSA agent through the metal detector. He looks young for his eighteen years. He could pass for 14 years. In the next 23 hours, he will fly through Chicago to Tokyo’s Narita airport and will change planes there and fly on to Bangkok. He will land there at 8:15 PM their time and hopefully find his way to a cheap hotel.

 

Two years ago, we said a similar goodbye to our 14-year old daughter when she left with her teacher to beta test a possible high school student trip up the Rio Negre in Brazil. The trip began at the confluence of the Rio Negre and the Amazon Rivers in Manaos where UVM professor Jim Petersen was murdered this year. She is 16 now and leaves for Uruguay in January to live with a local family and anneal her three years of Spanish study into conversational fluency.

 

Why all this pain of letting go and waving good bye? Why not circle the wagons and live on happily in a “gated” family. How is it that half our elected leaders in Congress have no passports as was widely reported several years ago? We are a notoriously cloistered and introverted country. We have largely given up teaching our children geography and foreign languages. Many children of all classes in Europe and Asia are fluent in 2 or 3 languages, while our own children often struggle with expression in their own.

 

We have gotten two terse and happy emails from Thailand. He is making his way there and is acquiring his own stories after listening to ours for so many years. This is the hardest gift we give our children, the gift of trust and risk taking. In nature, children are abandoned to their fate and in being abandoned learn to survive. We have grown soft, often needing our children beyond their need for us. The “rebellious teen age years” may be more about our children doing for themselves what we are unable to do for them, letting them step out into the larger world and discover it for themselves. In “Like Water for Chocolate,” the aged duenna says to her young charge that “The life led in fear is the life half-lived.” We do well to teach our children about risk, but to let them develop their own fears and not lug ours around with them.

 

[We have often thought that every high school degree should include a semester abroad. The risk- averse might choose Canada or England, the risk-seeking might go to Africa or China for their 4-month home stay. Visiting a foreign country when you are young, as veterans of AFS (AFS.org ) know only too well changes one and brings a world view to a young person that enriches their development. Overseas study is not only for the well- heeled, AFS and other programs enable children of all means to experience study abroad.] (can be deleted if need be)

 

If we are to continue to as a world leader, our children must know and experience the world they are to help lead. Our bizarre political and military misadventures in the world are often dreamt up by people in power who have no experiential knowledge of the people, systems and cultures in which they are inspired to meddle. Furthermore, they are apparently unwilling to listen to the experienced diplomatic network whose job it is to go where they have not gone and know what they do not know.

 

Letting our children move out through the concentric circles that radiate outward from family, through neighborhood, community, all-state events, national youth jamborees, a year abroad, and post-graduate, pre-employment pilgrimages of self-discovery are all part of growing up and becoming citizens of the world in which we live.

 

Having said all this, we look forward to being again outside the glass and seeing that familiar, but older and wiser face coming towards us with a wave and a smile.

Bill Schubart

Technology and Silence

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Dialer

 
Why can’t we communicate? Too much communication.

 
How do you feel while talking with someone who’s reading emails?

 

We’re in the Metropolitan Opera to hear Renée Fleming in La Traviata. As the lights dim and the crystal chandeliers are drawn up on their four-story cables towards the vaulted ceiling above the orchestra, I look over the balcony. A dozen or so Blackberries glow in the orchestra, their readers catching one last email before the curtain rises and they must suffer the pain of withdrawal that will follow when they turn off the devices, as the house manager has requested. When they do, the blue digital blither of the Blackberries — or “crackberries,” as detractors call them — is replaced by the red digital translation titles built into every seat.

Switch now to a business conference room in South Burlington. A dozen smart people sit around a large, hardwood conference table that cost more than most cars. A discreet black microphone is inlaid in the maple table surface in front of each seat at the table. A motorized camera follows the voice of each person at the table and captures the image for a table full of people at a similar table in Stamford, Connecticut. The discussion that ensues, about the fall media sales projections for a major cable TV programmer, is seemingly earnest, yet oddly distracted. How come?

Resting on the table in front of each participant is a blue Blackberry or a silver Treo. Eyes dart back and forth between the large screen at the head of the table, on which the speaker is presenting the fall programming projections, and the small PDA screens sitting on the table. Every now and then someone slyly picks up a device and slips it into his or her lap below the table’s edge. Both hands soon follow, and then the eyes, as thumbs generate an email response. Meanwhile, the person presenting goes on talking and taking questions, the answers to which have already been made clear earlier in the presentation.

The tradition of maintaining eye contact and focus during discourse is history. How do you feel while talking with someone who’s reading emails?

The question goes to the very root of human communication. Can one interact with another human being meaningfully while doing something else? Is it communication when Mom carries on a monologue about Junior’s problem at school while Dad reads the sports page and offers a litany of “uh-huhs?”

Sometimes human dialogue is urgent and mission-critical. Sometimes it’s simply an articulation of emotion or feeling. Real love, whether the love of a spouse, partner, child or friend, always deserves rapt attention. When does the obsession to receive emails, phone calls, pages all the time, in real time, become an evasion of life itself? Would you answer your cellphone while making love — coitus interruptus Nokia?

There is a lonely and narcissistic element to all this connectedness. It says, “People need to talk to me. Look at my devices. I am needed.”

In the early days of cellphones, before any etiquette was imposed, private conversations became public by virtue of proximity. My own favorite and familiar cellphone monologue was, “. . . I am boarding now, yeah, I have an aisle seat, 7C, just a minute while I stow my luggage, yeah, I am buckling in. Hope we leave on time. Oops, have to turn off cellphones.” I thought to myself, “Hey, this guy’s important, and someone equally important needed to know this.”

At around that same time, I remember riding the Metro North train out of New York to Greenwich. I overheard a number of proximate conversations, but the one being conducted by the person beside me didn’t sound normal — it lacked the rhythm and continuity of a two-way conversation. When the young woman hung up, I casually asked, “Checking in on the home front?”

She looked embarrassed, “I do that sometimes on the train,” she said. “There was really nobody there. Could you tell?”

I smiled. “Maybe a little.”

For the rest of the trip I tried to imagine the disconnectedness and loneliness that had motivated her charade. I thought of the times in my own life when I’d imagined conversations I would never have. The irony is that loneliness has a glass-half-full flip side — it’s called solitude.

Many people will tell you that the only time they can get anything creative done is at night, at either end of the diurnal cycle. Our relentless new technology and our pretense at productivity continue to make incursions on the sensual voids and silences that engender deep thought.

Human beings need silence and a place without insistent demands, a sort of hermitage, in order to think, to imagine, or even to absorb the impact of daily life. We need a place without distraction or network pursuit where we can listen intently to someone whose thoughts or affection mean something — or, even more critically, where we can plumb our own thoughts. The gifts of silence and time are getting rarer. But they’re gifts we give ourselves, and are easily afforded if we so choose.

Technology is not the enemy. The enemy is how we use it. Whether we suffer from the “Look at me” early-adopter syndrome or the “I can’t turn it off” addiction syndrome, the flaw isn’t in our technology. It’s within us.

If we are to be serious about life and love, we must make for ourselves what was the natural luxury of earlier cultures: time and space without noise or inputs. We are, after all, what we do and what we communicate. If our lives are to be something more than a series of inane text messages, we must make that quiet place and discover what we and those we love are actually thinking and feeling.

 

Bill Schubart

Head Heifer: Leadership

What should we look for when we choose a leader?

The very person in your small town who really wants to be the cop is probably the one individual you wouldn’t want in that position.

My first job, at age 12, was to let Volney Farr’s cows out to pasture before I left for school. It was well after their morning milking, which started at 4:30 a.m. After school, I’d open the pasture gate to let them in again. My only real responsibilities were to count them on their return, to ensure that all the gates were properly closed behind them, to count them again and secure them in their stanchions.

Mr. Farr explained to me that I was not their leader; “Irma” was. I should do only what I was told. Irma, a Jersey, would do the rest.

“How did Irma become the leader?” I once asked Mr. Farr.

“She just did. The other girls chose her I s’pect,” he answered, “They do that, don’cha know.”

Irma did indeed lead the “girls” out of the barn and to the pasture, where, under her watchful eye, they dispersed to browse and chew their cud. In the evening as I opened the gates, everyone followed Irma back into the barn and then went by themselves to their particular oak stanchion. Irma would nudge cows that dawdled or got distracted, and they would follow her. I carried Mr. Farr’s big oak cattleman’s stick to give myself the illusion of a role in this daily ritual.

This somewhat Orwellian bovine allegory got me thinking the other day as I sat in front of the Trinitron watching the accelerating blitz of mostly misfiring campaign ads for the upcoming primary. How do people get to be leaders? What is it in their character that makes them suitable to lead us? What made Irma the leader? She didn’t appear to seek out her head-honcho role.

Unlike cows, people do aspire to move to the head of the herd — and for many reasons, few of which derive, unfortunately, from any intrinsic leadership qualities. The very person in your small town who really wants to be the cop is probably the one individual you wouldn’t want in that position. A party press gang may commandeer a faithful lieutenant they deem electable, regardless of the person’s desire or ability to lead. Or worse, a crusader, convinced of his or her righteousness on a single cause, may rush hell-bent into the political arena seeking a key role in order to force the issue on the general electorate. Some candidates may just need a job to augment a poorly performing trust fund. Neither missionary zeal, narcissism nor financial need is justifiable motivation.

The leaders we want have passion, but not just for one issue. They are agile in their thinking, learn from experience, listen carefully and use their leadership authority with humility. They seek and tell the truth, and have an innate ethical sense but will not constrict a diverse society by the statutes of their own religious beliefs. That is to say they can differentiate between principle and practice. They respect the variety of philosophy and religion, the imperfection of intellect and spirit.

The leaders we don’t want have a pre-set agenda, know what they want, listen little or not at all to thoughtful advice and comment, exude authority and moral arrogance, focus on getting what they want by political chicanery, and are intellectually sloppy. Learning from others about an issue only muddles their thinking on the subject, so they avoid it. We have only to look at the current administration in Washington to see this failure of leadership style.

More than ever, we need leaders who eschew ideology, demagoguery and the easily packaged sound-bite that polarizes; who are not afraid to wade into the murky “middle way;” who see compromise as a virtue rather than a retreat; who are always listening and admit to the possibility of their own error; who say “we” rather than “they;” who embrace informed risk because they care more about those they serve than their own tenure, and thus are not paralyzed by the thought of political consequence.

Vermont has had a panoply of such leaders — think George Aiken, Dean Davis, Ralph Flanders, Madeleine Kunin, Dick Snelling and Howard Dean. And it still does today. As the dominant political parties wrestle with self-image problems and seem unable to rally around any uniform vision for society or a plan to achieve it, Vermonters luckily persist in electing people, not parties. Remember when Vermonters chose Reagan, Kunin and Sanders?

Irma didn’t have to run for office — let alone stand for election every two years, as is tradition in Vermont’s statewide offices. We adhere to a biennial election calendar that others have long since abandoned and that relentlessly compromises the people we elect. Races come around so fast in the Green Mountains that it presents a major stumbling block to good leadership.

We seem to enjoy being different, even when it is wasteful and impractical. The two-year election cycle leaves too little time for political courage and execution, and demands too much time for posturing and electioneering.

Would a good candidate for an executive position in a billion-dollar enterprise wrestling with constant societal and economic change agree to take the job with a two-year employment agreement? What leader can function knowing that he or she will have to spend the last quarter of his or her tenure lobbying for the next two-year employment agreement? And why wouldn’t a leader avoid any substantive and badly needed reform that would generate pain or controversy if they knew it might endanger their continued tenure?

Is an office-holder with a 24-month mandate really going to take on transformative change — forge a strategic tax policy that rewards citizen and corporate behaviors beneficial to Vermont, simplify the educational governance problem, develop a coherent energy policy, or understand and adapt to shifts in the agricultural landscape and marketplace if the consequence of such an initiative means they will be threatened by opponents before they have a chance to complete the task?

One bit of good news: Vermonters vote in greater numbers than their counterparts in other states. But simply showing up at the polls isn’t enough. We are very adept at criticizing and back-benching our leaders and their difficult choices. We’re less committed to choosing them carefully in the first place. We must invest the necessary time to think about issues and positions and the caliber of the individuals we’re electing, for both national and state leadership roles. Politics alone will get us nowhere, slowly.

 

Bill Schubart

Posted Land

When I was young in Morrisville fifty years ago people did not post their land. No Trespassing signs were a rarity and were usually found around the properties of newcomers who had moved in from down south or, in a few cases, not very cunning Vermonters themselves hiding a moonshine still or, later on in the Sixties, a modest marijuana crop. But a No Trespassing sign in those days was an invitation to investigate, especially if the landowner had a reputation for secrecy or nefarious activity. Farmers with large holdings did not need to post because, on the whole, hikers, hunters, anglers and amblers respected fence lines and knew not to tromp through unmown fields. Vermonters simply did not need to post their land, and, besides, it was seen by neighbors as an inherently hostile and reproving act.

 

The advice of Robert Frost’s neighbor as Frost encounters him in his poem Mending Fence, is “Good fences make good neighbors.” This dictum sufficed for most Vermonters.

 

Why now is “posting” land so common?  Is it the staggering run up in land values and an imagined need to protect private investment? Fifty years ago the run up in land values was just as steep. A hill farm bought after the war for $3,400 could fetch $12,000 ten years later.

 

Is it our shameful reputation for believing that behind every adverse occurrence in life someone is at fault and must be held legally and financially accountable?  Is it the propensity of a few to build wealth the easy way, to sue for it? Is it a manifestation our new “ownership society?”

 

There are laws on the books that protect property owners to a degree if they have an “attractive hazard” such as a naturally occurring swimming hole or a precipitous hiking trail. A local attorney who is well informed on such matters says there are very few such actions brought and, unless a landholder is clearly and personally culpable, adverse settlements are a rarity.

 

What is behind all these yellow signs littering the landscape of Vermont? What is the impact on our sense of community? Just as so many suburban developments have become gated communities, are we in Vermont to become a posted community? What has changed?

 

Some or all of the following may, of course, play a role: fear of liability litigation, the emergence of animal rights groups dedicated to protecting wild animals, environmental concerns for wilderness areas and loss of habitat, the rise of invasive off-road vehicles such as snow mobiles, ATV’s and dirt bikes. To varying degrees, these may be legitimate concerns, but do they warrant closing off one’s land to all?

 

There are less drastic measures one can take. It is possible to selectively post against off-road vehicles for example, or against hunters and trappers. Unfortunately one cannot post against “litigious individuals.”

 

The loss of open land for hiking, cross country skiing and snow shoeing and, yes, even for hunting, marks a significant change in how we Vermonters view our property, our neighbors and the communities in which we live. We would do well to ask ourselves whether we see ourselves as just owners of our land or whether indeed we are owners and stewards of our lands, as well as members of a community.

 

My wife did the cross-England walk last year. Besides Wainwright’s well traveled “coast to coast” route there are thousands of miles of footpaths available to amblers and hikers, a tradition that goes back centuries. The paths cross hundreds of miles of private property on which tens of thousands of cattle and sheep graze and crops grow. There are “kissing gates” and stiles built into all the fences for the walkers. Walkers by tradition respect the land and landowners welcome the walkers. This much loved and venerable tradition was formally endorsed by Parliament again last year.

 

Sadly, this is no longer an American tradition. Vermonters were once free to cross one and others land for foot travel. Imagine the opportunity for environmental tourism if we had such access for cross country skiers and hikers. Some 8000 people a year walk across England through the Lake District and the Yorkshire Moors.

 

If we continue to post all of Vermont, where will our children walk, fish, explore and hunt?

 

Bill Schubart

Head Heifer: Leadership

What should we look for when we choose a leader?

 

The very person in your small town who really wants to be the cop is probably the one individual you wouldn’t want in that position.

My first job, at age 12, was to let Volney Farr’s cows out to pasture before I left for school. It was well after their morning milking, which started at 4:30 a.m. After school, I’d open the pasture gate to let them in again. My only real responsibilities were to count them on their return, to ensure that all the gates were properly closed behind them, to count them again and secure them in their stanchions.

         Mr. Farr explained to me that I was not their leader; “Irma” was. I should do only what I was told. Irma, a Jersey, would do the rest.

          “How did Irma become the leader?” I once asked Mr. Farr.

         “She just did. The other girls chose her I s’pect,” he answered, “They do that, don’cha know.”

         Irma did indeed lead the “girls” out of the barn and to the pasture, where, under her watchful eye, they dispersed to browse and chew their cud. In the evening as I opened the gates, everyone followed Irma back into the barn and then went by themselves to their particular oak stanchion. Irma would nudge cows that dawdled or got distracted, and they would follow her. I carried Mr. Farr’s big oak cattleman’s stick to give myself the illusion of a role in this daily ritual.

         This somewhat Orwellian bovine allegory got me thinking the other day as I sat in front of the Trinitron watching the accelerating blitz of mostly misfiring campaign ads for the upcoming primary. How do people get to be leaders? What is it in their character that makes them suitable to lead us? What made Irma the leader? She didn’t appear to seek out her head-honcho role.

         Unlike cows, people do aspire to move to the head of the herd — and for many reasons, few of which derive, unfortunately, from any intrinsic leadership qualities. The very person in your small town who really wants to be the cop is probably the one individual you wouldn’t want in that position. A party press gang may commandeer a faithful lieutenant they deem electable, regardless of the person’s desire or ability to lead. Or worse, a crusader, convinced of his or her righteousness on a single cause, may rush hell-bent into the political arena seeking a key role in order to force the issue on the general electorate. Some candidates may just need a job to augment a poorly performing trust fund. Neither missionary zeal, narcissism nor financial need is justifiable motivation. 

         The leaders we want have passion, but not just for one issue. They are agile in their thinking, learn from experience, listen carefully and use their leadership authority with humility. They seek and tell the truth, and have an innate ethical sense but will not constrict a diverse society by the statutes of their own religious beliefs. That is to say they can differentiate between principle and practice. They respect the variety of philosophy and religion, the imperfection of intellect and spirit.

         The leaders we don’t want have a pre-set agenda, know what they want, listen little or not at all to thoughtful advice and comment, exude authority and moral arrogance, focus on getting what they want by political chicanery, and are intellectually sloppy. Learning from others about an issue only muddles their thinking on the subject, so they avoid it. We have only to look at the current administration in Washington to see this failure of leadership style.

         More than ever, we need leaders who eschew ideology, demagoguery and the easily packaged sound-bite that polarizes; who are not afraid to wade into the murky “middle way;” who see compromise as a virtue rather than a retreat; who are always listening and admit to the possibility of their own error; who say “we” rather than “they;” who embrace informed risk because they care more about those they serve than their own tenure, and thus are not paralyzed by the thought of political consequence.

         Vermont has had a panoply of such leaders — think George Aiken, Dean Davis, Ralph Flanders, Madeleine Kunin, Dick Snelling and Howard Dean. And it still does today. As the dominant political parties wrestle with self-image problems and seem unable to rally around any uniform vision for society or a plan to achieve it, Vermonters luckily persist in electing people, not parties. Remember when Vermonters chose Reagan, Kunin and Sanders?

 

Irma didn’t have to run for office — let alone stand for election every two years, as is tradition in Vermont’s statewide offices. We adhere to a biennial election calendar that others have long since abandoned and that relentlessly compromises the people we elect. Races come around so fast in the Green Mountains that it presents a major stumbling block to good leadership.

         We seem to enjoy being different, even when it is wasteful and impractical. The two-year election cycle leaves too little time for political courage and execution, and demands too much time for posturing and electioneering.

         Would a good candidate for an executive position in a billion-dollar enterprise wrestling with constant societal and economic change agree to take the job with a two-year employment agreement? What leader can function knowing that he or she will have to spend the last quarter of his or her tenure lobbying for the next two-year employment agreement? And why wouldn’t a leader avoid any substantive and badly needed reform that would generate pain or controversy if they knew it might endanger their continued tenure?

         Is an office-holder with a 24-month mandate really going to take on transformative change — forge a strategic tax policy that rewards citizen and corporate behaviors beneficial to Vermont, simplify the educational governance problem, develop a coherent energy policy, or understand and adapt to shifts in the agricultural landscape and marketplace if the consequence of such an initiative means they will be threatened by opponents before they have a chance to complete the task?

         One bit of good news: Vermonters vote in greater numbers than their counterparts in other states. But simply showing up at the polls isn’t enough. We are very adept at criticizing and back-benching our leaders and their difficult choices. We’re less committed to choosing them carefully in the first place. We must invest the necessary time to think about issues and positions and the caliber of the individuals we’re electing, for both national and state leadership roles. Politics alone will get us nowhere, slowly. 

 

Bill Schubart

Homage aux soeurs

While visiting Québec City last week for the Fêtes de la nouvelle France, we were wandering through Place Royale surrounded by early Québec re-enactors in period pantaloons, rough linen shirts and tricorne hats with conspicuous cell phones hanging from their beautiful woven sashes. Surrounded by countless camcorder-bearing tourists visiting for the Fêtes, the International Fireworks Expo at Montmorency and the sheer beauty of this ancient outcrop in the middle of the St Lawrence River, they were demonstrating early craft skills associated with agrarian and river life. Early Québecois music played somewhere in the distance, a mixture of ribec, galician pipes and fiddle, when suddenly a small flock of elderly nuns strolled by in their beautiful off-white habits smiling broadly at us. I had not seen such a sight in years and I was inundated with memories of an earlier Vermont, my own Catholic upbringing and the extraordinary impact of nuns on our own state.

 

Jeanne Mance School of Nursing, Fanny Allen Hospital, Bishop Degoesbriand Hospital, Trinity College, the cloistered convent in Williston, Mater Christi School, Rice High School, Christ the King, Sacre Coeur in Newport and countless other reminders of the benevolence and good works of Vermont’s large population of sisters. These institutions and more were started and managed by the various orders whose sole mission was charitable works. Others were started by priests, but staffed by nuns.

 

There was in all this a commitment to good works and community, seemingly subsumed now in today’s culture of consumerism. Young woman facing poor prospects for marriage or worse, the fear of an abusive one filled with hard work, often sought refuge in a convent where they might enjoy the safety of a sisterhood, even as they faced the daunting task of helping others in need.

 

Vermonters of all faiths owe a great deal to the many orders of nuns who have been an important part of the fabric of our state, the Benedictines, the Ursulines, Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of the Sacred Heart, Sisters of Providence, Atonement Sisters, Daughters of the Holy Spirit, Sisters of St. Joseph and The Hospitallers of St. Joseph. While the male hierarchy of the Church struggles with their own misdeeds, a steep decline in their own numbers and the rise in orthodoxy that puts them at odds with many in their own flock, we can all be grateful for their female counterparts and for their simple good works of faith.

 

So often in life it is what we do rather than what we say that makes all the difference. Our children become who we are, not who we tell them to be. The exemplary life stands in stark contrast to the proffered life of harsh sermons, canon law, black and white orthodoxies and commandments.

 

Throughout the volatile history of the Catholic Church, nuns from many religious communities have suffered the edicts, politics and even retribution of the Church’s male hierarchy, getting their spiritual sustenance from helping others in need: raising orphan children, helping young men and woman in trouble find their way back into society, teaching, nursing and caring for the ill or infirm, tending the dying, feeding and caring for the poor.

There have been many leaders among the sisters themselves who have served Vermonters in government leadership positions, as college heads and hospital managers. The Bishop Degoesbriand and Fanny Allen hospitals were staffed largely by the Hospitallers of St. Joseph. Trinity College, whose early mission was to help young woman off the farm or from factory families become educated and have an economic choice beyond the first proposal of marriage was staffed largely by the Sisters of Mercy. And always behind these leaders, there were countless nuns whose only residual image might be a gentle smile, the beautiful habits of their particular order and the countless good works they have done in their community of faith.

 

In the temptation in the desert, Christ rejects the gifts of mystery power and authority in favor of the exemplary life and free will – a lesson not lost on the extraordinary nuns who have woven so much into the fabric of Vermont for 150 years. To simply care for someone without judging them is a great gift. We owe them much.

 

Bill Schubart

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