I See, Therefore It Is

“Optimism is a force multiplier.” – zcp quoting someone else

Each morning I read the news and each morning the news backs me into a corner of pessimism. In capital letters and bold fonts, headlines scream of genocide, war, plans of war, violence - systematic and singular but always horrific – civil strife, and seemingly insolvable historic struggles. Death. Bombarded by constant reports of death the natural place to end up is that corner that does not allow hope for humanity.

Newspapers, radio stations, magazines, web sites, blogs, and TV channels – the media – scramble for an ‘angle’ that presents information about the same event in a way that is unique and distinct from the thousands of other news agencies. In this they fail, there is no diversity of opinion or perspective, all roads lead to pessimism. There are no reports of life or love, only death.

So do not read the newspaper, read the life you live and the world you see. This world is full of love, it is all around us all the time. Neglect sensationalist, oversimplified banners and look.

Perhaps we can make the case that death is the constitutive ingredient to a ‘story,’ the ingredient that makes an unfolding “newsworthy;” the conclusion of life – the definitive aspect of existence – is what makes an event consequential. But the rationale behind hourly broadcasts of death and destruction is not to honor life, the rationale is something else, something that dehumanizes and perverts our value of them. In ‘covering’ death we do not honor life.

We need to know what is going on in the world, we cannot shy away from the gruesome but neither can we allow our appreciation for this world to be blunted by pessimism. For every headline there are thousands of smiles. Indeed, what better place than from smiles, acts of kindness and love, to summon strength and fight the injustices we know.

All around me I see people trying, laughing, working, hoping, believing, helping, loving. I see skinny security guards in baggie uniforms welcoming me in unfamiliar corporate lobbies. I see a cute, fat boy punch his friend and watch them laugh with mischievous looks in their eyes.

A daughter helps her hunchbacked mother up the stairs of a restaurant for a Saturday night family dinner. I see a group of old Chinese women with up-dos to make the Golden Girls jealous, wrinkled skin and joy in their eyes as they share tea. I see a family picnic on a mat on the sidewalk, a mother holding her world, her baby, in her lap as she sleeps quietly. I see proud fathers taking their sweaty, sunburned sons home from soccer and their daughters for a special ice cream on a Sunday afternoon. An in-love couple flirts on the train. In the park, an old man does Tai Chi with no shirt on. I hear the women in our office laugh, and laugh, and laugh. I see small, family businesses struggling to get by, four generations living above their food stall and shop. I see high school students prowl the mall looking for girly girls and boyish boys for crushes and almost conversations. I see toddlers giggle as they smear ice cream all over their face, and eat some too. I see a father and son run a noodle stand and laugh the entire time.

I do not see hatred or feel malice. Everywhere around me I see infinite reasons to believe in our world. For every one, single act of hatred that we read of in the news, hear on the radio or watch on TV, there are thousands of acts of love. They just don’t make the headlines.

“If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.”
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

“Grab one thumb with the opposite hand and SQUEEZE the lemons, SQUEEZE the lemons. GREAT!” “Now,” in a tone of voice reserved for gushing at small children and orphaned puppies, the grown woman kept on, “interlock your fingers and rub. GREAT!” My hands were dripping in hand sanitizer. Mimicking her exaggerated gesticulations, I squeezed my lemons, interlocked my fingers and focused on my cuticles – a common place for virulent bacteria to hide, especially if you wipe your ass wrong.

Confident about my new hand washing skills I had learned during the last hour in the Avian Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Training, I was ready for the real deal. “Excuse me, I need to use the toilet,” I said politely. At the sink, properly lathered and squeezing my lemons, my boss walked in. Following the unwritten codes of male behavior in the bathroom – spitting in the urinal before pissing, taking a peak, clearing your throat, checking yourself out - I looked at him in the mirror and asked if he knew how to wash his hands.

“Yes, I do. My mother taught me when I was 4.”

Yea, me too. No big deal. After washing my hands and still following the guy code, I scratched my balls. I wasn’t in here for the last 40 seconds rubbing one palm with the top three fingers of the other hand. I was taking a piss and doing something really smart.

We, a group of professional adults, stood in a conference room at the regional headquarters of an international agency and learned how to wash our hands. The teachers flew in from Rome to teach us. Somehow the hand washing instructions didn’t quite match the hype of the advertised mandatory training and my lemons withered thinking about my boss as a four year old.




The training was silly, but it did ask a very serious question that the world and I grapple with hourly: how can you change people’s behavior? How do you ignore the painstakingly obvious prescriptions in policy papers and public health guidelines and address the underlying, difficult-to-change problems.

Public health tries to do exactly this: tell people that if you wash your hands thoroughly with soap and dry them on a sanitary towel you will greatly reduce the odds of contracting a fatal virus during a pandemic. If you wear a condom, you are less likely to get HIV. If you eat a balanced, healthy diet and exercise regularly you will be healthier. If you wear red-tinted sunglasses everything you look at will be red-tinted.

When I was four, my mother taught me to wash my hands.

Often dressed up in book jackets, these obvious statements are dismissed by realists, scientists, rational minds intent on a more complicated diagnosis for epidemics of violence, disease, and stupidity that can be prevented or stopped by washing our hands, caring for the people next to us, wearing a seat belt, reading books about other parts of the world, wearing a condom. That plainly stated problems are not solved by known, effective, plainly stated solutions is difficult to understand.

When I tell friends that my brother and his wife work in a research lab the thought of them is often garnered in genius flowers. And they are smart, but not geniuses; they are products of their trainings who think about discrete problems with unique solutions. But the scientific method does not apply to social problems, as calculators try to find the square roots of negative numbers the answer is not real. In science, much of the work is done in preparation, knowing biochemistry, understanding protein behavior and how to catalyze or inhibit certain things as you best guess. If you can understand the problem, a solution is possible.




Public health, the brain, individual and collective action is different. Actors in the social sciences, development, public health, and politics fields are often given plastic, scentless leis and lumped in economy class. I think it is because the problems they spend time trying to fix are so obvious, so easy to understand, and their solutions never seem to work. This process is the reverse of science, the difficulty back loaded, the solutions not unique answers to discrete problems, but far more complex, irrational and difficult to get right.

What do you do with children who are not taught to wash their hands by their mothers when they are four years old? What do you do with crumbling, violent inner cities and young people who, in their rational mind, make choices that do not value life? What do you do about non-stop headlines of civil strife and children dying of preventable and treatable diseases?

I’ve always felt a sort of impotence in the liberal arts’ response to problems. I am going to feed that starving child, the child who I am looking in the eyes right now, by taking their photo with my expensive camera and writing about her on my blog. We must do more.

And we must do more still, but these pictures are important: we need to retain our humanity. We cannot continue to force scientific thinking into non-scientific disciplines. A little free trade, 5 days in bed, be sure to sign your international trade treaties, and call me next week if the rash/revolution doesn’t go away. As we continue to try to fix the world in spread sheets and economic regression models, our calculators are spitting out imaginary numbers, imaginary beneficiaries and imaginary improvements. Human suffering, smiles, laughter, weddings, and love are lost in statistical abstraction. We must do more with our hands and hearts and understand the fundamentally complex nature of our problems in an appropriate, non-scientific way.

Change takes time, it is not conceived, summoned by biochemical reactions, grants, bonds, aid or loans. Learning science is not easy and it requires patience and skill to be a good doctor or researcher but there are, often, absolute answers. In public health, in the world, in looking that girl in the eye, I can run as many SPSS cross tabs as I want, and I remain with a best guess.

We are fallible and we will be wrong, but we must try, and try again. We must invest in individuals, take pride in our choices, and understand consequence. Our guesses must be grounded in humility and humanity.

Excuse me, I need to go wash my hands.

A Look Outside, Within

“On a day the chief executives of eight large banks were questioned about their industry’s excesses on Capitol Hill, Andrew M. Cuomo, the attorney general of New York State, raised hackles by disclosing how Merrill Lynch distributed its 2008 bonus pool. The payments, made just before Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America in December, have already stirred anger for being paid earlier than usual. And Mr. Cuomo made it clear that the bulk of the bonuses were paid to a small portion of Merrill Lynch’s 39,000 employees. “Merrill chose to make millionaires out of a select group of 700 employees,” Mr. Cuomo wrote in the letter, which was sent to the House Financial Services Committee on Tuesday night.” From The New York Times web site, February 11, 2009

If you search Wikipedia for ‘Hank Paulson,’ you find very interesting information about Henry Merritt “Hank” Paulson, Jr. His birthday, his children’s names, his religion and that he is the 74th United States Treasury Secretary. Stated clearly, he accumulated enormous personal wealth during a career at Goldman Sachs, eventually becoming the CEO. He went to Dartmouth where he was in a fraternity and All-American athlete, Harvard for his MBA.

His fraternity brothers from Dartmouth and classmates from Harvard are, coincidentally, the same men that run Goldman, the financial services firm that magically received government injections of capital to support it during the first waves of the financial crisis. In today’s globalized world, the financial systems that have created unprecedented levels of theoretical money and worth, investment services that have inflated costs and prices and replaced manufacturing economies in many Western countries, are intertwined and incredibly complex. I admit to knowing very little about the algorithms, computer models, contracts, and legal agreements that enable this world, but it is worth considering the global element of, as some call him, King Hank: what if the Goldman scenario happened in another country? Zimbabwe for example.



Robert Mugabe is, the international community agrees, a corrupt, controlling tyrant with an exhibited disdain for innocent civilians. He ruined the country, and the basic financial structures intended to stock shops, pay civil servants, capitalize banks, grant credit – facilitate the most fundamental functions of government. People in Zimbabwe go shopping in the morning because the worth of their money depreciates throughout the day.

Before Mugabe, Collins Onyeangu was president. Onyeangu is Mugabe’s father. Born into a political dynasty, Collins amassed an enormous personal fortune in the private sector before serving as director of the nation’s intelligence agency, eventually vice president, and president.

Mugabe was put forth by one of two rivaling political parties in Zimbabwe after eight years of opposition rule. The results of the election were widely contested, and international voting monitors documented fraud, irregularities in counting, corruption, and intimidation aimed at ethnic minorities. Media and official reports stated that Alfred Ganwengzi won the general election, carried largely by urban areas, but did not have a parliamentary mandate to claim the presidency. The decision, of national and world importance, was left to the courts, a highly politicized, insider’s realm.

At the time of the election, another one of Onyeangu’s sons, Mugabe’s brother Juma Wangyariri, was the Minister of Parliament of the area in dispute, Lingala Province. Lingala province is rife with corruption and criminals, and during election periods ethnic violence is common. With enough votes from Lingala Province, an area populated largely by Mugabe supporters, Mugabe could secure a court-ordered claim to the presidency.

Robert Mugabe was inaugurated president, despite Alfred Ganwengzi’s claims of corruption, brotherly favoritism, cheating, and that he won the national vote.

Mugabe’s presidency was one of the worst in the history of Zimbabwe, warring wantonly, allowing the ruination of the country’s previously sound financial system, imprisoning, spying on, and harassing citizens. With two years left in his presidency, Mugabe appointed Henry Okech, the CEO of Simbaza Securities, as Treasury Minister. Simbaza Securities is known for their egregiously high bonuses and corporate compensation, executives who wear crocodile shoes, lavish private jets, and nights on the town at the capital city’s most expensive brothels.

One of Okech’s main tasks was to save the country’s economy from a recession unprecedented in size and scope. Gigantic firms and institutional players plummeted, the stock market sank, and the economy of Zimbabwe fumbled. Okech spoke strongly in the media, but intervened randomly and haphazardly. He declared that certain firms would not get help and had to be bought out, taken over, or declare bankruptcy.

When board members from Simbaza Securities asked for help, Okech responded. Many of the board members are childhood friends from the elite Shepherd’s Academy for Boys – the most prestigious school in Zimbabwe and the source of countless politicians and business leaders. The former CEO of Simbaza Securities, Okech had a close relationship with all the executives at Simbaza, and many friendships dating back to private clubs during their school days. As other firms disintegrated, he lobbied the government to rescue Simbaza, a firm, he argued, that was so important to the financial system that its collapse would be catastrophic. Simbaza was granted the help they asked for.

After a national election, Mugabe was ousted from power, Okech is no longer the Treasury Minister, and Zimbabwe's economy is crumbling. Both men are rich. Simbaza Securities is the focus of a government query into excessive spending during economic crisis, money they received, without conditions, as a result of Okech’s actions.

These names, schools, and companies are fictitious. None of the above, except all of the info on Hank Paulson, is true.

Zimbabwe is an example, but this happens around the world all the time. We suffer from selective hearing.

If the details of the story sound familiar it is because America is watching its financial systems disintegrate as the result of deregulation, cronyism, corruption and old boys deals. Substitute America for Zimbabwe; this is our story, but we think it isn't. The thought of comparing anything between these two countries seems outlandish, but only because we are less willing to acknowledge the scurrilous when looking at America. We are armed with democratic excuses and airs of American exceptionalism.




Hank Paulson is the former CEO of Morgan Stanley, was one of the lead lobbyists in relaxing SEC oversight, control, and regulatory powers of investment banks during his time there, was cashed out before joining the government, watched Lehman, WaMu and others sink but intervened when his boys at Morgan needed help. This stinks odiously of unfair play. If this set of information was a Reuters wire story about a country in west Africa, the West’s assumption and conclusion would be corruption, greedy Africans at it again.

In the US, there seem to be fewer coincidences, reports of disdainful generals, buying voters and unethical influence in business and politics. Or, it is reported, is the lead news story for four days until a hot, young, entertainment couple gets into a fight. Or, we ignore it in a delusional bliss as something less harmful than it is. Criminal acts, acts that have inflicted seemingly irreversible damage to our country’s reputation in the world and the global financial system are not met with outrage, riots in the streets, calls for prosecution, resignation or impeachment. Our actors are as bad, or worse, but look different and we do not hold ourselves accountable in holding them accountable. Uncivilized, downright undemocratic behavior is left for the “developing” world. Actions that happen in Africa, Haiti, countries in Latin America and Asia are attacked as mockeries of electoral politics, specious contracts and phantom companies but in US nothing happens.

The West's behavior can be as reprehensible as the villains we think are so different, even though they are not. Look outside to look within, and we see absurdity consistently across the world. The least we can do is refuse selective hearing, be honest in evaluating ourselves and assessing harm, wherever it happens.