By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Jul 2, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
There is always the possibility of a tomorrow to do what is called for today
And the past is part of the present, too, but never the most important part.
So today I will live. But not too narrowly. I don’t want to miss important signs trying to guide me.
A good day for me includes working hard, living intensely, standing still, and retreating more than once into play.
A good day includes busyness and routine but also just enough down time to tempt trouble but resisting it joyfully.
Laughing is essential. Sadness may be too. Sharing always is necessary, personally and materially.
Take enough for yourself but give back just a little bit more, unless you don’t have it to give. Then take more for today
Be somebody’s hero and somebody else’s servant.
And do both well. Without acknowledging you are doing either.
Be grateful for what you have; grateful for what you have had taken away; and most of all grateful for what is still left, today.
Today is enough. And not too much.
We are, at the end of it all, painting by numbers. But don’t stress out over getting the numbers right. That’s not the point -although we always forget that.
The main thing is the colors that each of us chose for the picture of our lives that we paint a little bit of each day. And today’s little piece of the bigger picture is more important than we think …but is, ironically, most important with how it fits into the bigger picture of our lives–which we can’t see.
Think generally; act specifically; and play with all the pieces. Each piece has a place to fit that fills out the richest details of our life’s big picture and without the little something is missing .
And even though we can’t see the big picture we are painting, it is the only important job we have to do each day. And can only be painted by us today–using old colors we know and new colors we invent.
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Jul 1, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
You never know when you are getting a history or literature lesson ….so it’s always good to keep an open mind. Especially if an 11 year old is involved.
When I was 10 years old, my neighbor Kyle Hibbs, had me over to spend the night. Kyle was 11 and clearly more sophisticated than I was. I ran the Lemonade stand in our neighborhood with Kyle as my CFO and Kyle ceded basketball and a few board games to me. But when it came to culture and coolness, Kyle had an edge over me I knew I might never be able to challenge.
So when he excitedly asked me over to spend the night and watch the movie “The Odyssey” which was in channel 41 at 12:30am, I had no socially acceptable response but to pretend that sounded like an awesome idea even though it sounded suspiciously like something one of my boring school teacher aunts might recommend when I spent the night with them.
Everybody was asleep except Kyle and me and we loaded up on soft drinks and candy as our big movie was about to start.
I pretended from the start to be really into it. Even though I wasn’t. I focused mostly on the soda pop and candy and my wondered on to other more interesting topics.
And then something happened.
The story pulled me in just a little bit even though it seemed like a grown-up story. I didn’t realize that they weren’t playing fair and I was watching a classic, a timeless and age-agnostic tale. And then pulled me in a little more and a little more until I was entranced.
To this day, many years after finally reading—and loving– the full literary masterpiece The Odyssey (including the Cliff Notes), whenever the famous Homer Epic comes up, it’s the images from the famous movie starting Kirk Douglas that I see.
And also how I learned to ingeniously fend off an angry Cyclops and to escape by clinging the underbelly of scampering sheep.
I’m glad I played it cool and pretended like I wanted to watch The Odyssey —until I actually did want to watch it. And led to a life-long interest in Homer.
And having cool and sophisticated 11 year old friends who encourage us along the way to try new things that aren’t obvious or “popular” is absolutely essential.
By Loranne Ausley, on Mon Jul 1, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
So when I learned that my co-author and friend, Jonathan Miller, is heading back to Vegas today to revisit last year’s incredible 8th place finish in the World Series of Poker, it reminded me of my first gambling experience.
My dad, who I have written about several times, is an attorney and banker and still one of the most well respected political advisors in Florida. Somewhere along the way he learned a thing or two about gambling – and imparted this knowledge to me in a very memorable way.
I must have been about 12 or 13 years old and we were at our family beach house on Dog Island, Florida just off the coast of Florida’s Panhandle. It was a rainy day, so we were holed up inside and my dad was teaching me how to play backgammon. Just as I started getting the hang of it he asked if I wanted to play for money and I readily agreed.
We played game after game and I was really in the money – I was winning 3 out of every 4 games and after several hours of playing I had amassed quite a kitty of about $50 (which was a LOT in the mid 70s!).
Of course, we weren’t playing with real money because I was 13 years old and I didn’t HAVE $50 – but that didn’t matter because I was WINNING! Just as I was dreaming of all the records I could buy with that $50, my dad offered one last game – DOUBLE OR NOTHING.
Just like that, I thought, I could have $100 – and it was so EASY!
I know it isn’t hard to guess what ultimately happened – Dad cleaned my clock…AND he made me work off the $100. Easy lesson for him to teach and hard lesson for me to learn – thanks Dad – I love you!
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Jun 28, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
Parenting Pride and Paradoxes
You know those extraordinary moments as a parent where you see your child behave in a particularly challenging situation that lets you know, “They are going to just fine as an adult”?
Those “moments” when your child acts adult-like provide a sense of satisfaction to a parent, a sense of relief and security and great pride.
And we never forget them.
And they become more frequent with time.
And begin to correspond inversely with those extraordinary moments our children experience when they see a parent behave in a particularly challenging situation that makes them wonder, “I can’t believe my parent is acting like such a child.”
Those “moments” when the child’s parent acts child-like also provide a sense of relief, security and great pride–in the children —that they can be a successful adult.
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Jun 28, 2013 at 9:15 AM ET
Sometimes, Sigmund Freud, was quoted as saying, “A cigar is just a cigar.”
And if Siggie were alive today he’d probably offer a corollary that “Sometimes same sex marriage is just same sex marriage.”
I don’t want to get all controversial about this….but this DOMA decision by the SCt has me worried.
No, not worried so much about the threat to the institution of marriage between a man and a woman caused by same-sex couples wanting to marry. We heteros have already done a fine job of that ourselves and can’t–with a straight face, so to speak–even try to blame same sex couples for piling on.
Frankly, I don’t think same sex couples care a great deal about what we heterosexuals do in our personal lives. It’s not all that interesting, I admit. But I kind of like knowing that gays are analyzing our sex life every chance they get. And lucky them! That allows gay people time to think about other things—like decorating and dressing nice. They sure got us on those two fronts.
I’d even go so far as to say we heteros could probably learn a thing or two about not always talking and thinking about gay sex and gays marrying. Maybe it does scare some of us. But I suspect anybody who talks all the time about how bad gay sex is, is talking about gay sex because, well, he just likes talking about the topic…. and it gives him a sort of cheap thrill he doesn’t get by talking about heterosexual sex.
And that’s fine. I’m not judging them. I’m really not.
Heck, when I was in elementary school I acted that way myself. At recess I’d chase girls pretending they were gross and I didn’t want to have anything to do with them. But even though I swore I was trying to avoid gettin’ the cooties, there I’d go chasing after these very girls who we thought had cooties and trying to touch, pinch or push them anyway I could. And it wasn’t a coincidence that I’d always chase and push the ones I wanted the most to like me back.
It didn’t really work out well for me. And wont for politicians talking about animal marriage this time. But on that playground I did get a little thrill out of it all and suspect these older fellers talking about gay-this and gay-that get some kinky thrill in their own way, too, when they are chasing and pushing around gay people in the political playground. I could be wrong. But I know what it looks like when someone says they don’t want girl cooties and then can’t stop chasing and talking about girls.
Read the rest of… John Y. Brown, III: The DOMA Decision
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Jun 27, 2013 at 4:00 PM ET
Recovering Pol Jason Grill writes about his love for Kansas City Royals baseball in our new book, The Recovering Politician’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis, but only this week did he have the opportunity to step on the field of the Triple-A baseball squad in his hometown.
In the picture at left, Grill receoves the Kansas City Entrepreneurial All-Star awar from Liberty Mayor Lyndell Brenton.
A hearty Mazel Tov to Jason Grill!
UPDATE: We just learned that the Kansas City Royals are a MAJOR LEAGUE TEAM.
As I argued in these pages over a year ago, a full scale retreat from racially influenced academic admissions would likely have the following impact: it would shrink the African American populations of the most elite private colleges without drying up the substantial market that would still remain for the same students: in blunter terms, fewer blacks at Harvard and Stanford, but plenty of slots for blacks who lose the Ivy League lottery available at, say, the University of Virginia and Cal-Berkeley; and a sizable, high quality pool of suitors for any reasonably strong black applicant, at institutions ranging from the University of Florida to Michigan State, from William and Mary to SMU.
Of course, that mostly rosy scenario would have its share of costs. In a society that is always one celebrity’s comments away from having its racial fissures exposed, and where attitudes on culture and politics have become more and not less racially polarized during the last several years, color-blindness seems more a quixotic than a realistic assessment of America circa the Obama era. In a political world where ten of the last twelve presidential nominees have diplomas from Harvard or Yale, and every single Supreme Court justice has the exact same credentials, it is impossible to dismiss our most elite degrees as just another inconsequential perk. Add to that mix the undeniable evidence of a growing gap between the children of highly educated parents and the rest of the social universe, and it is hard to argue that a major retrenchment on race in the admissions process wouldn’t contribute at least marginally to the level of inequality.
All of the above (and perhaps, a plaintiff’s strategy that was overly cautious) explains why even the conservative wing of the Roberts Court ultimately turned squeamish about a sweeping verdict on affirmative action. The Court’s 7-1 ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas returning a challenge to the college’s admission process to a lower court for a more demanding, but not inevitably fatal, review seems right given the still unsettled state of play around race: short term, most universities will keep doing what they are doing, with some gradual, defensible move toward weighting class distinctions more heavily and eventually, a subtle shift toward more blacks with parents who are teachers and cops rather than state legislators or partners in top 100 law firms.
There is a cautionary note, though, for critics on the left who feared that Fisher would be a disaster. For liberals, dodging a loss on race in higher education should spare some time for acknowledging an inconvenient set of truths. Roughly two generations of policies strengthening campus diversity have done nothing to close long term student achievement gaps along racial lines: those policies, in spite of their merits, are still the most top-heavy kind of success. They are measures that at their most robust only impact a cohort of talented individuals who will excel by any legitimate standard whether affirmative action lives or dies. The much needier and (numerically larger) set of minority students remains low income kids locked by geography and poverty into poorly performing K-12 schools—to date, improving their prospects attracts scant attention at best from contemporary liberals whose recent campaigns have focused on more redistributionist outcomes on taxes and healthcare, unfettered sexual autonomy, and tougher environmental rules. And when today’s liberals have waded onto the education front, it has either been in the context of expanded daycare or pre-K programs, which by definition offer first-blush, not often sustainable hits, or in the form of fending off conservative alternatives like vouchers and more testing, without offering any specific platform of their own for un-achieving schools.
To be sure, conservatives can seem out of touch when they profess to see no moral cost in wiping out the consideration of diversity by universities who are trying to make their campuses look something like the society around them. But it is the political left that has advanced an agenda that like it or loathe it, has been exceedingly ambitious on the economic, social, and regulatory front, but notably tepid in the arena of failing classrooms and barely literate eighth graders.
By John Y. Brown III, on Thu Jun 27, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
Peanut butter and honey sandwiches on toasted grain bread and I have been going strong now for 47 years….and have yet to tire of one another.
There’s not many foods that I can say that about. Except spaghetti and possibly fresh squeezed orange juice (which I was tricked into liking as a boy because one of my father’s friends– George Baker—told me it would grow hair on my chest after I asked him how he got so much hair on his chest (and back) when he took off his shirt at the pool when I was about 8 years old. I thought it looked manly and was something I’d like to have on my chest and back. Finally, after several years of drinking lots of fresh squeezed orange juice and no new hair appearing, I decided he was fibbing to me when I was about 11.) But by then it was too late. I was already hooked on fresh squeezed orange juice and still am.
But peanut butter and honey sandwiches on toasted grain bread are different because I didn’t have to be induced into ingesting them in the hopes of chest hair growth. I just liked the taste of them and still do.
Spaghetti was something I liked naturally, too, without any increased potential for chest hair growth being part of the appeal. But I didn’t like it as much as peanut butter and honey sandwiches. Which makes peanut butter and honey on toasted grain bread a little more special to me, personally.
PS. I finally did get some chest hair in my late teens but only a little. Not sure what food I ate then should get the credit. Probably pepperoni pizza given my age. But I still prefer PB&H and have never missed any chest hairs I didn’t get because I ate a lot of PB&H instead of whatever food (or juice) grows chest hair. It was worth the sacrifice. And my view of the appeal of chest hair has waned over the years. Today when I see a guy take his shirt off today and he has a hairy chest and back I wonder if he wishes he’d a little more PB&H himself.
Laughing is essential. Sadness may be too. Sharing always is necessary, personally and materially.
