Let's talk vaginas!

But first, let's talk about Lysol.

You may be wondering, "what on earth does Lysol have to do with vaginas?"

This is a very good question.  Let's back up.

I found a very small, very old Lysol glass bottle at my family’s lake house a few years back, after a game of “Trash or Treasure?” - a project in which my Dad’s generation of the family cleaned out a house that had seen 70+ years of family vacationing rambunction - had cleared enough old bathroom products out of a vanity to unearth this cool little box that I later found while earnestly looking for Q-Tips.

Sure, we’d found our fair share of Vaseline in glass jars over the years, the jelly itself having gone a smelly shade of orangey earwax brown sometime back in 1982.  But the Lysol bottle was an epic discovery: not only had we never seen a Lysol bottle that closely resembled a small bottle of vanilla extract, but said bottle was also still in its original jaunty yellow and red box, adorned with mid-century caricatures and stylings.  Score!

For a design and branding nerd like me who also happens to really, really like the mid-century aesthetic, this weird little bottle of household cleaning product was most assuredly an overlooked treasure.

Imagining Don Draper himself envisioning this packaging, I started examining all the panels of the box.  The front of the box is straightforward enough: this is a concentrated household disinfectant that deep cleans, deodorizes and disinfects.  Check.

I then began to examine remaining three panels of the box.  They are below.  The captions will essentially take you through the internal monologue that happened as I read the box, in this order:

Ooh, I like that checkered floor... wait, new pine scent?
Did Lysol have another scent?  Huh.
Wait, Super-clean Baby's Room?  What's happening in Baby's
room that dousing it in Lysol is a good idea?
Oh, Baby Boom years.  Did you really not know any better?
Oh right, y'all were smoking in the nursery and
drinking martinis while pregnant.
Maybe not.

OK, Baby's Room was bad
enough, but... seriously?  Did moms
actually put Lysol on their kids?
Ow, and on burns?
Good God.  This is just wrong.

....um...
...
....
.....what?

Yes, you did read that right.  Lysol was guaranteed by Good Housekeeping to perform its stalwart duty of deep cleaning the easy way, whether you be tackling the big jobs of attics and basements, killing disease in sick rooms, disinfecting and deodorizing your bathrooms and kitchens, or cleansing your (dirty, contaminated) vagina after your (dirty and shameful) menstruation cycle, or a (dirty and slatternly) round of marital relations.

Oh.  Em.  Gee.

At a time when my own grandmother was using this stuff, a bunch of (white) men sitting around a mahogany table in a smoke-tinged office somewhere decided, over a few rounds of Scotch, that it would be a great idea to convince the women of America that they should feel compelled to shoot a household chemical disinfectant into their vaginas (but only after your periods or sex, of course, ladies).

I mean, Good God.  This simply wasn't all that long ago.  And the worst part about this is that some women inevitably did this.

Or maybe the worst part about this is that the people working for Lysol were so unbelievably unethical that they took it upon themselves to find more household uses for their product with a complete disregard to the actual health and well-being of the humans in that household.

Or maybe the worst part is that the people working for Lysol were allowed to be so unbelievably unethical.

Or maybe the worst part is that the people working for large household products corporations are still allowed be so unbelievably unethical, they just have better product marketing people who use photos of meaningful beach walks and names like "Country Flowers" and "Spring Waterfall."

Or maybe the worst part is that there is a magazine called "Good Housekeeping" in the first place, because the entire premise of that magazine is incredibly sexist in both its expectation that women have a duty to live up to a magazine-issued cleanliness standard (as issued by men), and in its expectation that women have the time to do this in the first place - because women don't work, of course, ha ha, weaker sex and all.  Women can be secretaries and whores, brothers, and when they're not servicing us in some way, they'd better darn well be disinfecting their odorously feculent vaginas.

Or maybe the worst part is that American society has such a deeply ingrained sense of patriarchally righteous parochial prudishness that it manifests itself everywhere, including on the suggested product uses of a household cleaning product, because the Christian tradition has somehow led to a blanket condemnation of women as sexual beings in possession of (whisper it now...) vaginas.

And this is when I realized that American culture as a whole is still unreasonably afraid of vaginas.  We are so afraid of vaginas, in fact, that people will stand firmly convinced that women should be using cleaning products to wash out an orifice that is in no actual need of artificial help staying clean.

Here's the reality: a vagina is a part of our bodies.  Like most other parts of our bodies, any unreasonably bad smell is probably a sign that (1) the mouth attached to that body is ingesting food that's full of chemicals and preservatives, (2) that body isn't moving around enough to be healthy and fit, (3) a bath is in order, and/or (4) there is an infection of some sort.

Put simply, if a woman is taking good care of herself, her vagina is doing just fine.  And if there's an infection, a trip to the doctor is a better bet than shooting any sort of cleansing solution inside oneself, whether that solution is a well-known household chemical cleaning agent or a cleverly-marketed chemical cleaning agent with a scent like "Gleeful Springtime" or "Morning Meadows."

The "feminine hygeine" industry doesn't stop at interior cleansing, either: Massengill makes a "feminine cleansing wash" that's especially formulated "For cleansing and refreshing of external vaginal area."

Indeed, my external vagina (that's actually called the "vulva," boys) needs some refreshment, and I can't think of a better way to give her a pick-me-up than to gently lather her in a bunch of known carcinogens and D&C Red #33 (so she can look rosy).

Women are told that we should spend money to clean, scent and groom our vaginas; men are told that they should spend money to enlarge their penises.

And the latter is covered by insurance.

Successful marketing messages are the ones that resonate with an already-existing audience truth.  The existence of the "feminine hygiene" aisle at the drugstore that houses our Fresh Clean Innocent Springtime scented tampons, pads, and washes is, in and of itself, society's message that we women have some extra cleaning to do - and some extra products to buy to do it.

These products are there because they sell, and they sell because people believe that they are necessary.  And it's easy to believe this, because it's a pervasive message that we hear and experience one way in the Church, and in another way with our product manufacturing and packaging and marketing and advertising, and still another way throughout the media in messages and formats that have become so subtle and accepted to us that we don't even notice it.

And so, please: notice it.

And the next time someone tries to convince you that women are treated equally in this country, you might ask that person how many kinds of Penis Wash are on the shelves at the local drugstore.  Or Testicle Scrubbers.  Or razors forumlated especially to adhere to the uniquely rugged curves of a man's ball sack.

In the meantime, I'm off to start a new company for an 8-blade razor that adheres to the uniquely rugged curves of a man's ball sack.  The razors will come in mightily big silver and black packages with free condoms inside, and they will carry superhero, truck and sports-themed designs, and I shall call them "Eroshave."

Learning #38: Appreciate the Baby Steps

Tomorrow is a big day for the Gays of America, with the Supreme Court planning to hand down its rulings on Proposition 8 and DOMA.

I don't rightly know what's going to happen.  Here's what I do know: some of us will be very happy about those decisions, and some of us won't be.

Regardless of what happens tomorrow in the Supreme Court, though, it may well be the Boy Scouts who are the cultural tipping point in the American gay rights movement.

About a month ago, the Boy Scouts reversed their long-standing policy on admitting gay Scouts.  This is a policy that the organization has successfully defended, for many years, in both trial court and the court of public opinion. This is also a policy that, just 6 months ago, deprived a perfectly-qualified boy from receiving his well-deserved Eagle Scout badge.

As it happens, that perfectly-qualified boy has a Mom who knew how to use an online petition site.  His story went viral on social and traditional media, and eventually he was on "Ellen," and 4 months later the Boy Scouts reversed the policy on gay Scouts.  What the organization didn't reverse is the policy on allowing gay Scoutmasters, so - taking a cue from Menudo, who did after all bring us the fabulous Ricky Martin - once you're 18 and gay, you're out, Scout.

Unsurprisingly, not everyone was happy about the Boy Scouts' new policy, and that includes its members.  The people most unhappy about the change are generally pegged at either end of the political spectrum: the Right-Wing Conservative Christians are outraged by the imagined moral transgressions that they believe violates a Bible that they probably haven't read all the way through (and most assuredly don't seem to understand as they should), and the Left-Wing Queer-Identified feel that the Menudo policy is unjust and a missed opportunity and not enough and all the things that folks are understandably prone to feeling when civil rights are being violated.

To the first group, I can only ask that you actually read the New Testament, in particular, all the way through and find the place wherein Jesus condones bigotry, fear and discrimination.  To the second group, I will note that baby steps are more significant than you might realize.

Baby steps are intentional, and studied, and practiced, and aware. We would do well as adults to stay as present with our own forward motion as our babies do when they learn to walk.

Baby steps don't always take us as far as we'd like.  But, as a parent who watched with video-taking fascination as her own child took her first steps, I am of the opinion that baby steps are monumentally significant.  Baby steps are how human beings learn to walk and run and move through the world with ease.  Baby steps are more difficult to learn and undertake than the unconscious ones we take when we're older and more experienced.

Baby steps are an effort.

The Boy Scouts of America is a private, nonprofit organization with the words "God"and "morally straight" in its mission statement oath.  It services over 3 million active youth members and has over 1 million adult volunteers.  The 2012 annual report lists 13 million hours of community service in aggregate. This organization prides itself on community service, strength of character, integrity, merit and commitment.

In short, this is "family values" festooned with a kercheif and helping an old lady across the street.  And now that image can be personified by an openly gay kid, one who I like to imagine sashaying across the street as fabulously as he deems necessary in order to do his civic duty with pride.  There will be a generation of boys who will have gay friends at a younger age than the those before them, and - to shamelessly invoke Whitney Houston, because invoking Whitney is like the opposite of Godwin's Law, and glitter might just pour out of you screen at the mention - the children are our future.  Teach them well, and let them lead the way.

The Boy Scouts have drawn a line in the sand that says more than "gay people are accepted": the natural by-product of this means that scouts of the anti-gay persuasion are now the outsiders.  Bigots will now be the ones to leave the Boy Scouts if they don't agree with the policy.  Scout Law requires its members to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent.  At long last, the Boy Scouts have determined that few of these adjectives jibe with "bigoted."

This fundamental and voluntary policy change is a hugely important, hugely indicative, hugely surprising and a hugely welcome baby step toward an American culture that willingly accepts a person who doesn't fit neatly into a Christianity-driven hetero-normative paradigm.  Praise [insert your favorite deity].

Appreciate it.  Notice it.  Hope for more progress and work passionately towards it, too.  But don't let a seemingly distant horizon interfere with your ability to acknowledge the importance of forward motion.  It may seem slow, but it is happening.  Believe.

I myself am filled with hope for tomorrow's decision, and I'm not letting that hope affect the appreciation I have for the progress that we've made as a culture.  At some point, and perhaps sooner than many of us think, the marriage equality tides will turn because our cultural acceptance of people as fundamentally human beings will evolve.

The Boy Scouts, after all, just turned their canoe around willingly, and that boat's been paddled stalwartly in the same direction for over 100 years.

Learning #37 : Just Laugh When Things are Silly

Minnesota just became the 12^th state to legalize gay marriage, which is awesome.  Even more awesome will be the point at which, rather than “gay marriage” or “same-sex marriage,” this entire issue is more appropriately referred to as “marriage equality,” and it will be in retrospect and written about in sentences that say things like “Before the Supreme Court ruled for marriage equality, gay people were not afforded the same rights as everyone else.  Silly, right?”

But, for now, I’ll take Minnesota.

Living in the Bay Area, it’s with a great deal of fascination that I watch other, presumably more conservative states afford the same rights to everyone regardless of sexual orientation, while we in California had a San Francisco moment of freedom (thanks, Gavin Newsom!) and then a statewide 3-month tease of equality followed by, you know, Prop 8 and lawsuits and Mormons showing up at my door to tell me why marriage should be between a man and a woman and then more lawsuits and a decision and an appeal and a Supreme Court hearing and all that jazz.

Sigh, California.  Come on, folks, seriously now.

I have a same-sex household and a 2-year-old.  She is happy, she is healthy, and she is being raised by two people who love her and put her interests first and feed her organic, locally-sourced home-cooked meals and moved to the suburbs for better schools and a safer neighborhood and, overall, take a great deal of time and energy in making sure that we parent as thoughtfully as possible.

And it is for this reason that we were just off the 5 North recently, in Patterson at the gas station, on our way back from an L.A. road trip we’d taken so that my child could hang out with her grandparents, her aunt and her cousins for a few days.

We were primarily in Patterson because we’re potty training, and as any parent knows, potty training and road trips go together like marbles and molasses.  So, off I went into the mini-mart to praise my child enthusiastically for using a public toilet and then, of course, to scrub her down thoroughly after she touched things I wish she hadn’t.  (Nerdy parenting tip: one of the few advantages of the roughness of your average gas station bathroom paper towel is that it creates a loofa effect.)

On our way through the store, we passed a group of sunburned and ebulliantly intoxicated folks wearing team T-shirts of some sort.  One group was royal blue, one group was fluorescent green.  They were carrying 24-packs of domestic and shined bleary smiles the way of my prancing toddler on our way to potty domination.

The other half of Team Bright Shirts was outside, split into two cars and hanging out in and outside of them, and one guy in particular was drunk out of his mind, standing outside the car and bellowing loudly.    As we walked out the store, he started yelling something over and over againt that I finally realized was him yelling, “Loud and proud!  Loud and proud!  Loud and proud!”  

Being a person whose uncanny grasp of the obvious is often left in her other pants, I thought, “Oh, how sad, he’s totally yelling at that gay guy, and That Gay Guy looks really upset about it.”

That Gay Guy then looked at me, stricken.  And it suddenly registered that he was wearing one of the blue T-shirts.

I then noted that most of Team Bright Shirts was looking really, really embarrassed.

And, rather belatedly, I realized something:

Um... this guy is yelling at me.

Or, to be more specific, this guy is yelling at me and my 2-year-old child, who is clutching both my hand and her congratulatory pretzels after an epic potty break on the 5^th hour of a road trip in which she’s been, truthfully, unbelievably well-behaved.

Hmm.  OK… this is… um, actually, this is hilarious.

And so I just started laughing, without any anger or defensiveness or anything in me other than an honest laugh.  There was something just so incredibly hilarious about this drunk, sunburned, logo T’d buffoon slobbering all over himself so that he could try to publicly shame a tired Mom 5 hours into a road trip and, in the process, let her tiny, sensitive, aware and present child know that something about them was worth this sort of public ridicule.

I suddenly felt like I was in the middle of a “Daily Show” sketch.  Because, really?  This is the face of “traditional marriage” and "family values?"  This is the guy in California who voted against my rights?  This guy? 

This is utterly ridiculous.

And, as someone who finds the utterly ridiculous pretty freaking funny, I laughed.  And this surprised the rest of the Team Bright Shirts, who were apparently expecting a different reaction.

As we walked by, the guy kept yelling “Loud and proud!  Loud and proud!” ever the more loudly and proudly despite his friends trying to shut him up.  So, in passing, I looked at That Gay Guy (Who Probably Wasn’t Gay After All, But Who Knows?) and made eye contact, and gestured toward his bellowing friend, and I said:

“I’ll say!”

And then I started laughing again, because the horrified faces of Loud & Proud’s friends just made the whole thing that much more vivid.

It was at this point that my offspring looked up at me and asked, “Mommy, what is that man doing?”

To which I answered, “Darlin’, he is yelling like a fool.”

Being at an age wherein agreeing with us by repeating our sentence structure is a great source of pride for her, she said, “Mommy, he is yelling like a fool!  That's silly!”

Indeed.

And so I heartily agreed with the offspring's astute assessment and, very pleased with herself now, she repeated this phrase all the way back to the truck* while Drunk Silly Guy hollered at us and I giggled fairly uncontrollably.

So just remember, folks: when the world seems unfair and we have our social setbacks, keep laughing.  Because I have a hard time believing that anything that manifests itself in such utter silliness has a chance to stick around for all that much longer.

*Yes, it is a pickup.  Hee.

Learning #36 : Bible Clif Notes Make for Cafeteria Christians

I recently saw an article about an Oregon Bakery, Sweet Cakes by Melissa, who refused to make a wedding cake for a lesbian couple, citing Christian beliefs as the reason.

And here is where I really have to take issue with anyone with an anti-gay agenda calling themselves "Christians," because to be a Christian is to follow the teachings of Christ, and as I've actually read and studied the Bible from the time I was 5 and all the way through college, I have some jarring news for those people:

Christ was not a bigot.   In fact, Christ wasn't anti-gay at all.

As someone who was dutifully schooled in Catholicism, including attending the oldest Catholic university in the country, I really take issue with any church (and this wholeheartedly includes the Catholic church) picking and choosing a couple outdated passages, usually from the Old Testament, to try to support an anti-gay agenda that isn't part of Jesus' teaching, while ignoring more repeated warnings against, say, adulterers and divorcees and shellfish.

Picking and choosing the teachings and passages you like is called Cafeteria Christianity, people, and I'm not impressed.

Those of us who have actually read the Bible have also learned that there were 10 Commandments.  This the absolute most important rule set issue forth in the Bible, straight from God to Moses, and "Thou shalt not be gay" is simply not in there.  Other translations of the Bible (including many of the Jewish ones, which should probably be taken a bit more seriously than a later Anglo version mandated by a British King, particularly given that the King James version did away with any mention of a female apostle - gasp! - yes, earlier translations actually mention Junia the woman) entirely disagree on the meaning of the passages that the Cafeteria Christians use to make themselves feel righteous about being bigoted and afraid.

Now, these anti-gay "Christian" folks might add a little weight to their love of Leviticus if they actually lived their lives by all of its mandates, as opposed to the few they feel self-righteous about.  This of course means that any anti-gay Christian who claims to be following the Bible's word needs to immediately (1) avoid shellfish and (2) execute adulterers, which means that they have to (3) execute divorcees who remarry.

Leviticus 20:10: "'If a man commits adultery with another man's wife--with the wife of his neighbor--both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death."

Luke 16:18: "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery; and whoever marries her who is divorced from her husband commits adultery."

Mark 10:11-12: "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her. And if a woman divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery."

And, if one is going to live by every word of the good book, it turns out that you also have to stop playing football, among other things, so for those of you who want to be anti-gay on behalf of the Bible and not be a hypocrite, here is an excellent list of 11 things that the Bible bans, but you do anyway.

So, stop doing those things.  Amen.

Now, since Sweet Cakes by Melissa has refused service to the gays, I certainly expect to see this bakery refusing service to adulterers, divorcees, football players, bowl-haircutted people, the tattooed, shellfish lovers, and eunuchs.

And I do hope that these self-righteous anti-gay Leviticus-loving Christians will start a funding ballot initiatives toward outlawing divorce and instituting the death penalty for the adulterers and divorcees out there, in the name of God and all.  (Yes, this means you, Focus on the Family.)

Otherwise, these people are bastardizing the Bible to support an agenda of bigotry and hate.  

Jesus wept.

Learning #35 : Yes, of course it's the guns.

But it's the people, too.

This groovy little left-wing infographic doesn't lie: the United States has the most gun deaths per capita of any developed nation in the world.  Sure, we do better than El Salvador, but we do only slightly better than Mexico.

Mexico, people.  

I mean, really - we have border states passing laws that make it legal to racially profile brown people ostensibly because the drug cartels are so violent, and yet we're barely beating Mexico in the firearm-related death rate department.

We, the United States, lead the world in guns per capita.  So perhaps it's not so surprising that a country with 88 guns per 100 people is also leading the developed world in deaths by firearm.

Or is it?

Discussions of gun control always seem to come down to the tension between the two main reasons that Americans, more than any other people on this planet, are both so heavily armed and so inclined to use those arms, and those reasons are:

1) Because we can.

2) Because we want to.

The first is a practical consideration, the second is psychological, and neither is the only answer.  And this is how we go in rhetorical circles on gun control without actually accomplishing anything.

It's worth noting that the number of Americans committing suicide with firearms is almost twice that of our incredible gun homicide number, with almost 20,000 people ending their own lives this way every year.  Compare our numbers to Canada's, and you'll wonder how a country that has about 1/3 the number of guns that we do per capita manages to keep both their intentional and accidental gun death rates so low, despite having a similar suicide rate. 

Which is to say that while Canadians are intentionally killing themselves at the same rate that we are (though not choosing firearms as much, and it's worth noting that they do spend a lot more time than most our country in the freezing dark), they're killing each other, by all means including firearms, drastically less.  They also have far less semi-automatic weapons and a lot more hunting rifles.

So what's the deal?  Is it that Canada has stricter gun control laws?  Is it that socialized medicine gives the homicidal types access to treatment before they have access to guns?  Is it that they don't have a history of revolution, wars and genocide?  Is it that a hunting culture gives them an appreciation for what guns actually do?  Are they really just that much nicer than we are?  (And why?)

Switzerland is another country that has a lot of guns - including assault rifles - but manages to keep them from being a leading cause of death in their country.  Switzerland is also a country without a standing army, because the Swiss have opted for a citizen's militia as their national defense.

So, unlike us Americans stashing semi-automatic weapons in our bedroom closets as a home security system, the similarly-armed in Switzerland are so armed because they have been trained as a people's militia, with 2/3 of their men conscripted into military training.  As this is their national defense philosophy (their bridges have bombs in them, too, to strand any foreign invaders within the country - Willkommen, trespasser, you are now trapped and subject to a very efficient, punctual ass-kicking), it would therefore seem that folks who have been appropriately and intensely trained to manage their weapons in the event of foreign invasion are simply a lot more judicious about using them on one another.

For one thing, threat of a common enemy is a very good bonding agent.

This is what the Second Amendment, of course, was supposed to do.  The Founding Fathers did not intend for suburban mothers to be stashing assault rifles as a security system against... um, whatever it is that suburban mothers are afraid of, which in most cases is something or someone that a good dog or alarm system could scare off.

The NRA types will remind us that "guns don't kill people, people kill people."  And they're sort of right, except that they're sort of wrong.  Putting accidental gun deaths aside, there's no way around the fact that any homicidal person who intends to kill another person is going to have a much more difficult time doing so without a gun.

You just don't hear of a classroom full of tiny children being killed because of a knife throwing.  You don't hear about the kid catching a stray poison dart in a drive-by darting.  You don't hear the word "massacre" attached to the story of fistfights or baseball bats or samurai swords or grenades, even.

Guns are uniquely designed for one inherent purpose, and that is to kill.  Period.  Killing living creatures is what guns are built to do, and this is what they do effectively, and this is why the Founding Fathers created the Second Amendment in the first place, knowing that a well-armed civilian militia was the only kind of militia that would stand a chance against a British military attack.

The Second Amendment was written at a time when there was a very real threat to American citizens from an outside invading force, and the best defense against that threat at that time was to allow citizens (and by citizens, they of course meant white landowning men) to own guns.  Yes, like Switzerland, except that in Switzerland the girls can volunteer for service too.

Unfortunately, unlike the Swiss, Americans have played fast and loose with the Second Amendment without any regard to training or encouraging a people's militia against foreign invasion or a common enemy of any kind.  We in fact now have a standing military to guard against these threats, not to mention the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction on the entire planet, so who are we protecting ourselves from in the first place?

And the answer is, mostly: each other.  Because the other guy might have a gun.  And so goes the cycle.  And this is at the core of the American psychology.

Now, we can't truly discount the Second Amendment as unimportant even with a standing military, as it does still serve its purpose for the Orwellian-minded of us.  The fact of the matter is that, as unthinkable as it seems, it is possible that the United States government or some faction thereof will, at some point, be subject to a crazed ruler who will turn an armed force on the people and, without firearms, we're all goners.  Of course, our armed forces also have things like tanks and night-vision goggles and flame-throwers and bombs and other implements of destruction, so realistically, we're probably goners anyway, unless you're hiding out in your nuclear bomb shelter with your tinfoil hat and stockpile of weapons, in which case you might just eventually die a less violent but equally unpleasant death of scurvy.

But, fairly, the principle of an unarmed people existing under the governance of the most supremely armed nation in the world is philosophically wrong somehow, and it's a big worry to some people.

This probably sounds crazy to most of us.  But you know what else sounds crazy?  Color-coded terror alerts, and the actual contents of the Patriot Act, and taking your shoes off at the airport even when you're about to walk into an X-rated X-ray machine, and a man who actually ran for President standing up on what incredibly passes as a "news station" to certain parts of the country and telling America that the reason we're having school shootings is because there isn't enough God in the classrooms.

And this brings me to, perhaps, the real reason that Americans are so hellbent on arming themselves and shooting and killing one another and themselves, and that is: fear.

We are a people that thrives on being afraid of things.  Watch the news for a couple minutes and you'll hear all about the various things that should frighten us, like terrorists and superstorms and gun violence and murderers and the flesh-eating disease and the fiscal cliff and hotel bedcovers and childhood obesity and the digital divide and pit bulls and people of a different race or religion than us and Africanized bees and earthquakes and gas pedal recalls and GMO's and free radicals and the economy and global warming and balloon payments and carcinogens and Republican lawmakers and that foreign-born, non-white Communist Obama, for Christ's sake.

And this is what the 24-hour news cycle and a warmongering government has done to us.  Or, perhaps our ingrained American desire to be afraid of things has simply fed them.  Chicken, egg, rinse, repeat.  What I do know is that, having gotten rid of network television some time ago in order to simply stream Hulu and Netflix at my leisure ("Downton Abbey" has of course taught me to be afraid of Spanish Influenza, but blessedly I hear we have a vaccine now), I find myself a lot less bothered by self-serving, overly dramatic people telling me that I need to be afraid of something, right now, again.  I therefore find myself a lot less worried about all of the above-mentioned calamities, including gun violence, though I do still take those hotel comforters off immediately.

Sane, rational approaches to gun control will require sane, rational thought processes.  Unfortunately, being in a heightened state of fear does not lend itself to reason.  The human condition is such that we have a unique ability to experience great amounts of anxiety over things that have already occurred, or that haven't happened at all.  PBS has an excellent series called "This Emotional Life" that, in one episode, explores our specifically human capacity to worry ourselves to death over theoretical threats.  We call this "stress."

The show then goes on to explain that zebras don't experience this kind of stress, and that they can just hang out striping it up with each other even after a lion has just tried to eat one of them.  They're not experiencing PTSD or coming up with a defense strategy after a close call, nor are they worried about the next lion.  They're just eating grass and taking it as it comes.  This reminds me, a bit, of the folks I met when I lived in Costa Rica, another country without a standing army, and the only country in the immediate vicinity that hasn't had a civil war in over 60 years.  Pura vida, hombre, and don't bother worrying about the time either, because everyone and everything will be late, always.  Tranquilo.

And so I, like so many others, am left to wonder why the American condition is so uniquely amenable to both preemptive and reactive violence, while our Canadian neighbors and gun-toting Swiss counterparts and a Central American nation that's surrounded by 3 of the 4 most gun-violent countries in the world would seem to be a least a little more like the zebras.  Is it our history of revolution and massacre?  Our glorification of cowboys and G.I. Joe?  Our news cycle?  Our racial divides?  Our military industrial complex?  Our child poverty rate, second only to Romania's in what UNICEF calls "economically advanced nations?"  The fact that we have a standing army in the first place?

Or is it simply at this point that we have 88 guns for every 100 people, most of which seem to be purchased to guard against other Americans with guns?

I honestly don't know what the all the answers are, and debates of Chicken vs. Egg never seem to end productively.  What I do know is that fixing our gun violence problem can of course be solved with less guns - this is basic math, and common sense, and possibly something for Nate Silver to address - but it's of course not as easy as that.

Numbers this high do indicate that Americans have, quite simply, a gun addiction.  When you hear statements like "You'll have to pry it from my cold, dead hand," it's very easy to imagine the town drunk uttering these very words in reference to his whiskey bottle, right before he freezes to death in the middle of the town square and the bottle is, in point of fact, pried from his cold, dead hand.

Here's the thing about addiction: there are the physical and practical components, and there is the psychological component, and the last is generally the hardest to break.  That being the case, as for the "Because we can / Because we want to" reasons, the "Because we can" is a matter of practice and practicality, and in the short term, this is both the easier and simpler problem to address.

That is to say that less guns = less gun deaths.  You can of course also say that less Americans with guns = less gun deaths, but getting rid of Americans is a lot harder to do than simply making it far less convenient for us to arm ourselves with weaponry specifically designed to quickly and efficiently kill large numbers of people.  Making this sort of purchase a lot less desirable in the first place will take a lot of time, and a lot of effort, and a huge shift in the national consciousness, and in the meantime we're killing each other at an alarming rate.

I mean, we've got to start somewhere, and the zebras aren't talking.

Learning #34 : Bring 2+ twist ties when you buy balloons

That way, you can tie them at the top and the bottom of the strings, and they won't get all tangled up  on the drive home.

Learning #33 : Good management is a honed skill

Not everybody is a good manager.  In fact, some people are pretty terrible managers. 

This is not something that’s generally discussed, officially, in a business setting.  On the contrary, the open exploration of what makes someone a really bad manager is a pretty taboo subject around the old conference room table.

And so, as someone who reads a lot of business books, I found myself genuinely surprised at the frank honesty of “Multipliers,” which tackles this sticky subject head-on.  This book teaches us that those great managers, the Multipliers, the ones under whom people stretch themselves and work their hardest and best, can increase the collective IQ and consequent effectiveness of an organization.  Whereas the bad managers - the Diminishers - suck the intelligence out of their organization, leading to a literal brain drain that dumbs down even the once-bright folks who have given up but stick around anyway.  (The "Quit and Stay," as its called in the book.)

This kind of frank discussion about both the qualifiable and quantifiable effects of bad management and bad managers, specifically, may be an uncomfortable subject for a lot of people to address directly, particularly given that the subject of bad management is most effectively addressed with the bad managers themselves.  But it’s crucial that senior management address the topic, because avoiding the subject doesn’t quell the conversation.  It just moves it.

Frustrated employees will start these conversations with peers over lunch, in carpool, behind closed doors after a particularly awful meeting, and in other secreted places so as not to be overheard by others who might either be negatively affected by their observations, or simply in a position to punish anyone making them.

Like all bad leaders, bad managers eventually frustrate and demoralize their employees.  People frustrated by an absence of good leadership will, inevitably, band together in a sort of dysfunctional camaraderie that will ultimately lead to a downward morale spiral if the root cause isn’t addressed. 

And once morale is shot, it’s really difficult to bring it back.  Bad morale systemically destroys once-healthy departments and can spread to others, the last of which is much more likely if the management dysfunction causing the problem in the first place is peppered throughout an organization.  Uninspired, unhappy people deliver, predictably, uninspired and unhappy work. 

So: to avoid creating a work environment that inadvertently rewards bad management by ignoring it, it’s imperative that we learn to recognize and discuss both good and bad management styles.  Remember, the conversations are going to happen anyway, so you as an organization should want to participate, learn, and move forward.

“Multipliers” gives us a guidebook for recognizing and understanding both excellent and terrible management, complete with charts and matrixes for those of us who appreciate such cheat sheets.  It also relies on extensive research and data to let the most left-brain of us know why this is important, as well as a staggering number of personal anecdotes to drive the point home for the right-brainers.

Basically, it’s “Goofus and Gallant” for the workplace.  Read it.