All Men Are Created Equal

The history of civilization is brief. A scientific analysis of artifacts from a cave in South Africa reveals that man were carved bone tools, using pigments, made beads and even used poison 44,000 years ago. And a study of the nearly 2,000 figures of the more than 17,000 year old paintings of the Lascaux Caves in southern France, reveals symbolic dot clusters within figurative images that correlate with the heavenly constellations of Taurus, the Pleiades and the grouping known as the "Summer Triangle". But, if we limit our search to historic times apart from prehistoric times when "records of the past begin to be kept for the benefit of future generations" then we need not look further than 5,000 years ago when city-states arose in the Middle East along the Tigris and Euphrates, in the Indus Valley, and in the river valleys of China.

I say civilization is brief, for, anatomically, modern humans first appeared in the fossil record in Africa about 195,000 years ago.

We have come a long way, slowly. And, it is all the more remarkable to know that America has only been around for less than 300 years.

America is unique in the annals of human history, for it stands for the proposition that "All men are created equal".  This revolutionary idea certainly sounded good to the Founding Fathers, and to Thomas Jefferson, who included the phrase in the Declaration of American Independence.

American, and the ideal of equality, has been built generation by generation. We are a new breed, rooted in all races of the world, colored in all the colors of all the races, with all their varying creeds and beliefs - a sort of ethnic anarchy. I am reminded of this fact every time I take a taxi, driven by someone with an unfamiliar name, or visit a restaurant that offers up dishes from every continent, or walk down the main street America and see and hear someone who is unlike me. We are different, and from our differences we draw our strength. And yet, somehow in time, these differences become less and less, until we realize that we are more alike than we are different.

This fact, that, though different we are the same, comes to me every time I visit a school and watch the children of the many different races learning what it means to be American. It is the same process that countless American generations have gone thorough. And, so far, it has stood us in good stead.

All men, and women, are created equal. America is still working on this ideal.

Fear and Conscience

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all...

Hamlet, Act III, scene i (58–90).

Poor Hamlet, his uncle murders his father, the King, and marries his mother, the Queen. Hamlet beset by his father's ghost frets on what course of action he should take. Hamlet soliloquizes - "To be or not to be, ..." what makes action impossible. 'Tis “conscience [that] does make cowards of us all . . . thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

Shakespeare's Hamlet was concerned with the question of morality. Can the murder of his uncle appease the murder of his father? What then is to become of his mother? What part in the deed does she play?

What of those who are amoral, those who have no conscience? For them, the Old Man thinks that fear itself makes us cowards. It is the fear of uncertainty. What consequences do our actions engender? "Ay, there is the rub," for who knows what may come.

The Old Man is not alone to be amazed by Shakespeare's wisdom. Wisdom suggests experience. Maybe the idea for the words are created in The George Inn, 77 Borough High Street, Borough, London, one of London's oldest pubs and situated near the London Bridge. It is the Winter of 1599, Shakespeare is sitting at a table with his best friend Richard Burbage for whom he wrote many of the parts of his plays including Hamlet. The two of them have a decision to make, their theater lease is up and a new location has been found across the river. But they lack the funds to purchase the lumber for a new theater. One of them poses the suggestion, that they dismantle the theater that they currently lease, one that they built with their own funds and haul the lumber across the Thames over the ice and though the snow to the new location.

Does fear of the law, uncertainty of the legality of their act, cross their minds. Surely, it does. Fortified in the choice by a pint of bitter, was it William Shakespeare or Richard Burbage who said, "Fie on the consequences, let's do it." They did and the Globe Theater was built.

The Old Man must make a decision, indeed he makes many decisions every day whose consequences may be uncertain. This decision seems a simple one, for The Old Man is updating the web pages for Traditions Furniture. Simple as it may seem, the Old Man knows that the coding involved is extensive. Multiple pages will be added. New links and new images will be uploaded. Mistakes can be costly. Google, the monolithic god that determines search placement may not smile on the new changes.

Still, like Hamlet, the Old Man must march ahead, for to not act is to act. It is to choose the same course of action in a world that moves on. By not acting, we fall behind.

Check out the changes on Traditions Furniture and tell the Old Man if he was right.

Goals dammit

Do you tell the world what you are going to do, and include your family and friends in your dream? Or do you just put your nose to the grindstone and work without fanfare? Answer honestly before reading on.

Wray Herbert, in his column on Mind Matters states emphatically that talk is cheap, it is doing that matters. To bolster his opinion that talk is cheap Herbert refers to an experiment by New York University psychologist Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues who ran a number of experiments to test this notion. Here is the experiment as described by Herbert:

The psychologists recruited a group of law students and had them rate a series of statements from "definitely yes" to "definitely no"—statements like: "I intend to make the best possible use of educational opportunities in law." But some of the law students merely dropped the anonymous questionnaire into a box while others went over their answers with the experimenter. The idea was to create a laboratory version of the public pronouncement: that is, some made their intention to intensify their studies known while others kept their intentions private.

Then they took an unusual test. They were shown five photographs of a Supreme Court justice, varying in size from quite small to large, and they were asked: "How much do you feel like a jurist right now?" They had to respond by selecting one of the five photos. This well-tested procedure taps into automatic, unconscious self-evaluations: the larger the picture you pick, the more complete you feel. The idea was to see how much publicly declaring their intentions (or not) made them feel like an icon of modern jurisprudence.

In keeping with Gollwitzer's theory, those law students who had publicly announced their plan to read law journals and so forth tended to pick the larger pictures of their legal role models.

The results were clear. Although all of the law students were motivated, only those who kept their hopes private actually did the work needed to succeed. There is no substitute for hard work. Or, to use the old joke about how you get to Carnegie Hall, ...practice, practice, practice.