--- Walking and art to connect ---

I remember "separate but equal".

The problem, of course, was that there was nothing "equal" about it and the scars still exist. Frankly, I'm partial to separate but mixed.

I've talked about diversity in past blogs. It's necessary for a healthy community, but diffusion is a thing, too. If you add milk to water carefully without mixing them, the two will just mix themselves without any help from outside. Cultures tend to do that over time also when they mix.

There has traditionally, in the United States, been a trend toward homogenization. The typical solution for the Black/Asian/Latin/Indian Problem has been acculturation - in other words, turn them into us. The idea is that the European culture is superior to all the others, so just make sure that only the European culture remains. Very Darwinian - the fittest survives.

Of course, all that from Europeans.

I'm not saying anything new. We all know about it.

But diversity. I enjoy the color, the foods, the music of language that isn't my own, folk wisdom, stories. I would feel bereft if we were a homogeneous culture. I like to "go to" others. To experience life through their eyes and mind.

The only way to do that is to conserve cultures, to, with clear intention, say, this is valuable and it will persevere.

I've talked about appreciation as an approach to life. We usually only hear about "art appreciation" but lifelong learning demands "life appreciation".

Understanding a culture - it's folkways and history - requires a conscious and prepared approach. Entering a culture as an outsider learner requires respect and an open mind.

"Get to know me. You might like me," the old PSA said and I find that to be true, whether it's a neighbor, another culture, or "raw nature".

"Walk2Connect is an innovative worker-owned cooperative working to create whole-health walking programs focused on connection to others, to the places we live, and to ourselves." (Walk2Connect website http://www.walk2connect.com/about accessed 10/2/18) This organization sponsors walking tours to support connection between communities.

I see pedestrianism as a tool for learning, Walk2Connect sees pedestrianism as a means to build healthy community.

I lived in a mixed community where I was a member of the minority for 20 years and I mixed with impunity. I got along well with the other people in my community, I think, because I didn't  try to "blend in" and I appreciated the differences. I obviously enjoyed being around people that were different from me.

The Whittier neighborhood, named after the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier, according to the 2000 census was composed of 27% Hispanic whites, 26% Blacks, and 43% Latinos. Walking the streets now, I see a lot of Black and Hispanic families, but I also see a lot of White families from obvious European extraction and I see a few Asian. The Five Points district is nearby. Once called "The Harlem of the West", it looks like a cultural center and go-to for jazz and Southern and Caribbean food.

There have been several attempts to isolate this community. I first noticed the signs when I took the light rail to Downing Street Station in the Whittier neighborhood on a walking trip to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. I noticed that many intersections in the area were broken with strip parks. For instance, traveling south on High Street from East 31st Avenue, the street takes an abrupt 90 degree turn to the west onto East 30th Avenue. Traveling on High Street north from 29th Avenue, the street takes an abrupt turn to the east onto East 30th Avenue. Between is the Madame C. J. Walker Park, which commemorates a  successful African American entrepreneur, the first American woman to become a self-made millionaire (1867-1919), a civil rights activist, and philanthropist.

I found the street design rather strange. It effectively cut traffic from east to west. And that was exactly what it was intended to do. Streets were cut to quell gang violence in this area of Denver. Of course, the measure was ineffective and simply served to further isolate this community.

In 1914, racist letters began circulating in the Whittier neighborhood telling African-American and Jewish residence that there was no room for them there. The neighborhood, all the neighborhood, all the races in the neighborhood, felt their last straw and responded in a response of solidarity by creating a half-mile loop across four alleys that presented a gallery of murals. Now, most of the murals are gone. Two remain at the Ford-Warren library, who hosted the Walk2Connect tour of the Whittier Neighborhood. Here they are:

                               [murals at the Ford-Warren branch of the Denver Public Library]

The walk focused on the parks of the Whittier neighborhood, most of which commemorate famous African-American people.

I took the light rail into Denver and, on the way, captured the Big Blue Bear which gazes perpetually into the Colorado Convention Center. his large bruin was created by Lawrence Argent, a teacher at the University of Denver School of Art and Art History in 1993, It was originally supposed to be "Denver colored" (I think I've called attention to the brown tones around town), but an accident in copying the plans for the work created a blue finished product. The actual name for the piece is "I See What You Mean."

                                                                   [Big Blue Bear]

The train in downtown Denver seems quaint, like the older trolley cars of other cities.

                                              [Light rail on California and Stout Streets]

The hexagonal Bee-Bridge mural pattern at Madame C. J. Walker Park is the work of artist Feile Case.

                                                                          [Bee-Bridge]

George Morrison was a famous jazz and classical violinist who lived for a time in the Denver area. He used his fame to help many black musicians get their start. George Morrison Sr. Park commemorates him.

                                                   [Statue at George Morrison Sr. Park]

Cole Middle School presents a monumental and strikingly beautiful piece of architecture in the Whittier Community.

                                                              [Cole Middle School]

On my trip back, I saw another stately piece of architecture, the Byron White United States Courthouse on Stout Street. It was a nice place to switch train lines.

                                                             [Byron White Courthouse]

Your community has a history and that history is preserved in local monuments, parks, and architecture. Look around and see what has happened in your town and how it has influenced the rest of the world.

A good article on the history of Five Points and the Whittier neighborhoods is here, provided by the Denver Public Library (https://history.denverlibrary.org/five-points-whittier-neighborhood-history accessed 10/2/18).

--- Notes on self-centeredness ---

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Oscar Wilde

Humans are conservative. I guess it's evolutionarily advantageous - change is bad because it requires adaptation, but then there's Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety. There's a balance required between avoidance and acceptance of diversity.

In my life I have seen a lot of change. The world forces change on us.

When Martin Luther King was looking for support, he traveled north to Chicago, hoping that he would find a more friendly environment. I remember the reports. What he found was a whole new level of virulent hatred. I lived in the South through most of that. Maybe we changed or maybe we didn't but things certainly changed around us.

Many didn't change, obviously. They just squirreled their animosities away. Probably at home where they could rant at leisure, because with the advent of the Trump Administration, they evidently thought that they had found new license for hatred.

I lived through the age of Gay acceptance. When I was in college, homosexuality was still in the DSM as a form of mental illness - now it's vanished and people rarely ever think about it. There was some rhetoric about the Bible, that book that Christians seldom read and rarely study. But most of what I heard was rhetoric about "our way of life."

And so, back to Mr. Wilde's quote above. The tacit assumption is that, if we allow others to live the way they want to, we will not be able to live the way we want to.

America is a melting pot - it always has been. Diversity has been the norm.

Maturity brings much change into a person's live. We are born selfish creatures. A baby wants what they want now and every other thing in their environment is there to supply their needs. It has to be that way because babies can't supply their own needs. But we can't continue to live like that. Other people do not want to be our overseers. They have their own lives to live and, where we do have to rely on our neighbors to a certain extent, at least we must rely on their good will, we are expected to be self-sufficient as adults.

There has been a serious disconnect. Where, even 50 years ago, when I was a child, people had to establish relationships with others in their world for purposes of survival,. Now, security and self-validation is drawn from technology and we feel that we no longer need others. It's a delusional security and I'm afraid that we will be disabused in a most inconvenient way.

--- Notes on political systems ---

It has been observed that a pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position in politics is more false than this. The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very character was tyranny.

Alexander Hamilton

When you see the suffix "-ism" on a word, you should immediately assume a double vision.

We seem to have inherited from our simian cousins a strong us-or-them mentality which is well conveyed by many uses of the "-ism". In that form, the suffix means "I'm a [whatever "-ism" is a suffix of] and we're better than everybody else." Patriotism ("I'm an American and America is the greatest country on the planet"), racism ("I'm white and white people are superior to everyone else"), male chauvinism ("I'm a man and men are superior to women") are common examples of this form.

"-ism" can also indicate a love for the group. This form is slightly different from the other and can even be laudable. For instance, I am an American and I wish greatness for my country so that it can be a  benefit to the rest of the world. I would like the American reputation to be that of friend and cooperant of the other peoples of the world.

But, like Mr. Hamilton, I don't see that democracy has worked that well in history and I can't see it as the panacea of all political ills. I have noticed that some countries have not fared so well under democratic governments.

People vary greatly in personalities so it would be very peculiar if there were not a need for a variety of governments to accommodate those differences. I think that states rights in the United States is a good idea. It would be a better idea if states did not have such a huge need to meddle in others states' business. A state is what it is and, in the US we have choice. If the political climate of one state is not to our liking, then we can move to another.

Well, that's my ideal - of course, it's my naive ideal. For instance, not everyone is mobile enough to find which state works best for them and some states, being what they are, are downright detrimental to their people. I wish people could build things such as compassion and respect for others into their governments, corporations, and such, from the inception, but unfortunately, that rarely happens.

I'm a social psychologist and one who looks at organizations as people in their own rights. Just as maturity brings certain characteristics - self control, empathy, compassion, responsibility, etc. - into a person's life, a healthy, mature organization will also show those qualities but they have to be part of the original design and they must be maintained as the organization develops or else, like an individual that regresses to a more infantile stage of behavior, the organization will go bad.

I've talked about Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety so it should come to no surprise that I value diversity even in the political realm. I think that there should be a variety of governmental forms, but there is good diversity and there is bad diversity. Good diversity builds up, bad diversity breaks down. In the same way, there is good government and there is bad government.

In all things, we should strive to be what makes the world a good place. That kind of -ism is well founded.

--- Adventuring philosophies ---

True enough, my final home is still out there, but this is most certainly my home range and I love it. I love every rock I fall off and tree I trip over. Even when I am close to dying from exhaustion, a beautiful sunset doesn't lose it's power to refresh and inspire me and that, in itself, is enough to save me sometimes.

W. Ross Ashby came up with the Law of Requisite Variety that states that, for a system to be able to adapt effectively to its environment, the internal complexity has to at least match the complexity of its environments. That certainly makes sense. For a system to survive an assault from outside - temperature fluctuations, stuff falling from the sky, squirrel attack, plantar blisters - the system has to respond with a defense specifically designed for that attack. Acorn bombing - umbrella. 60 degrees to 20 degrees frozen rain (remember, I live in Colorado) - packable rain gear.

Mostly, where I grew up, the environment was manageable. The exception was the third weekend in March. That was the weekend of the SEHowl. We had only two Howls with fine weather throughout. More typically, the first part of the week was bitterly cold (we had one howl where water would freeze as we tapped it out of the water carrier) and the last part was warm enough to cause you to sweat if you were active. With a change like that, you can probably figure out what the middle of the week was - torrential storms. Flash floods and tornadoes were a fairly common activity in northeastern Alabama.

But in Colorado, there are not many buffers in the environment. The Army Corp of Engineers seem to have gotten the flash floods under control on the Denver side of the Front Range but they haven't got a handle on the weather. It can still jump 40 degrees in a couple of hours. Bear Creek still rises and falls in the matter of minutes. In Alabama, the meteorologists do a pretty good job of predicting weather five days ahead. Here, weather forecasts change hourly the day before. I'm pretty sure that, if a dog pees on the ground here, the pH of the soil will go nuts.

Alabama sorta protects people against the environment. If a person falls, they're likely falling on something they can eat. Here, there are a lot of berries and such that are really good; unfortunately, there are a lot of plants that look like those edible berries but they're likely to make you quite ill.

Here, requisite variety comes into play much more strongly than in Alabama. Colorado inspires an adventurous spirit.

I wouldn't say that I live randomly. Age has forced me to be more regimented. I take three handfuls of pills everyday and two eye drops. Certain pills, if I miss the dose, I know as soon as I hit the trail. But I have ways of injecting randomness into my life. I use the roll of the dice (see my ToolBook http://www.theriantimeline.com/ToolBook.ods for a convenient randomizer) to decide a lot of my activities. I often take the "wrong way" to get to where I'm going. And it has been a long tradition of mine to just get lost. I can afford to do that with impunity here since, in Denver, it's really hard to actually get lost. Find the mountains - that's west.

I like science kits. I always have. That's what I always got for Christmas. But once you hit the trail, it's a different story. In the lab, you practically know what's going to happen when you start doing something. The satisfaction is in seeing (as Walter Lewin says on his videos) that science works. On the trail, you get surprises.

In the lab, things are clear cut. On the trail there is a phenomenon called sensitivity to initial conditions. I've recently watched a lecture series on weather and the lecturer often made the point that, not only can't we predict the weather far in advance, but we'll never be able to predict the weather far in advance. In fact, the father of chaos theory (that's the short name for sensitivity to initial conditions) was a weatherman named Edward Lorenz (that might be a little unfair since Henri Poincaré was working with chaos theory almost a century before.)

In the laboratory, if you do an experiment and then you redo it under the same conditions, as accurately as you can, you're going to get pretty much the same outcome. Outside the lab, you would have to repeat the experiment under exactly (and I do mean exactly) the same conditions to have the same outcome and it is literally impossible to be that precise. And a tiny deviation in starting conditions can lead to wildly different outcomes. That's why studies in the social sciences, ecology, and other field sciences can be so "imprecise". In the lab, you can control most of the irrelevant conditions that might contaminate an experiment. In nature, there are just way too many confounding variables.

In nature, you need enough requisite variety to deal with sensitivity to initial conditions and complexity. There are always things coming at you and, if you want to record all the important stuff, you really have to stay alert. Conservation of energy doesn't go away in chaos. Nature will balance it's forces.

I've said before that you can't force nature and expect to come up with predictable outcomes. The way to handle nature is to be part of it and to influence it from inside the system. Forcing nature is like trying to patch up an old dam. Patching one leak causes pressures at another spot to create another leak somewhere else.

That's the problem of walking on black ice. If you ever start slipping, the sudden motion of trying to catch yourself throws you off balance in a new direction and you're going to go down.

They used to talk about preventing tornadic storms in the southeast. It sounds like a good idea on the surface but that is where the southeast gets it's water. I suspect that preventing tornadic storms in the southeast would turn places like Alabama and Georgia into deserts.

People keep bringing plants and animals into the US to deal with environmental problems. They figured that kudzu would deal with erosion and made it worse. Providence Canyon in Georgia is the product of erosion caused by kudzu. If you drive down there, you'd better have deer whistles on your car. Deer don't obey pedestrian laws. Game management people thought it would be nice to stock the area with white tails. Without the natural predator (wolves), the deer population went crazy. And I'd like to know which brilliant hunter thought it would be a good idea to stock Alabama with wild hogs.

So, why should the answer be "get inside and influence?"

Well, let's say you wanted a friend to go to a concert with you. You force him into a car at gunpoint and force him to drive to the concert. You get what you want, but you also get several things you don't want. You're friend pouts through the whole concert and neither of you enjoys it. Also, your friends wonders how you could do such a thing and decides that he never wants to see you again.

Here's a different solution. You know your friend well enough to know that he likes the band and will go if you are willing to pay for the tickets, so you offer to carry him to the concert and get the tickets. He agrees and you both have a great time.

The "superpower" that allowed you to find a better solution is called "theory of  mind". You're able to develop a model of people you know in your mind that allows you to predict what an other will do in response to things that you do. Part of theory of  mind is what people call empathy. If you're good at it, you can read others so well as to practically read their minds.

Does nature have a mind? If you're an animist like me, then you would say, "yes". but that's not necessary for you to be able to develop a theory of mind of nature. A theory of mind is just that - a theory. It's a conceptual model that allows you to predict what an other will do in response to what you do. It doesn't really matter whether the other mind is a real  mind or an imaginary as long as the model works.

What does matter is that you have enough information - that you "know" the other. The reason people can develop theories of mind is that people have brains that are not logical  machines like computers. Brains are pattern processors. They gather all the patterns in the world around them that are relevant to the issue at hand and they merge them into a master pattern. The master pattern behaves as a person would and if you're good at problem solving or empathy, you can read that master pattern - because that's what brains are good at.

You might think I'm talking about intuition and, yes, you would be right, but I am specifically talking about a well-trained, knowledgeable intuition.

In one of my many jobs, after my initial interview, I was talking to one of the people that would be a coworker. I mentioned that I'm a good judge of character. He asked what I thought of the person who had just interviewed me and, without pause, I said, "You mean that he's completely self-serving and that he'll do anything and surround himself with whoever he thinks will get him ahead?"

When I looked up, the guy was agape. He was used to everyone's first impression being, "Wow! What a great guy!"

You can understand nature by paying attention to how she responds to things. You can develop a cooperative relationship with her in the same way you develop cooperative relationships with anyone.

Relationships are like gardens. In order to get the results you want, you have to cultivate them. If you just let a garden develop on it's own steam, you might get the plants you want but they'll be sickly, and there will be lots of plants you don't want. A healthy garden requires nurturing and weeding. The same goes for a relationship.

People are mercurial; so is nature. Working with either requires one to be as changeable as they are. Adaptability is important in survival or evolution - it is just as important in adventuring. Surprises just happen and you have to be ready for them, therefore, you have to be able to fend off distractions.

My favorite poet is Robert Service, the "poet laureate of the Yukon." His poetry is eminently lyrical. It begs to be put to music and, many years ago, I did just that. If you want to hear the result, here's a link:

http://theriantimeline.com/Robert%20Service's%20Canada.mp3

One of the songs, "The Reckoning" has the following stanza:

"Time has got a little bill - get wise while yet you may,
For the debit side's increasing in a most alarming way;
The things you had no right to do, the things you should have done,
They're all put down: it's up to you to pay for every one.
So eat, drink, and be merry, have a good time if you will,
But God help you when the time comes, and you
Foot the bill."

Actually, pain and inconvenience are payment that you make to live in this world. You're going to get hurt and that hurt is going to leave a mark. If you place yourself in harms way, as you do when you adventure, you will most certainly end up with a collection of dints and dings. The good news is that most of the pain is not an issue.

At it's best, pain is a signal that something is wrong in the body and that something needs to be done to restore a healthy equilibrium. More often, the body thinks that something is wrong but is either mistaken or is noticing something that will resolve on it's own or will never resolve but isn't going to interfere with anything you want to do.

The trick is to pay attention to your body until you can discern which is which. I know that my feet could be bleeding with blisters and it will come to nought in three days so I can ignore them with impunity. You  may need to realize how far you can push your blisters before you really need to do something about them - and you might need to know what to do about them.

Regardless, pain isn't the issue. Injury might be an issue, cramps that immobilize you  may be an issue, but pain is just signal or noise. Pay attention and then respond appropriately.

Pain can immobilize you if you let it; so can philosophy. Philosophy is as dangerous an adventure as just about anything.

Consider Rene Descartes. He was so popular that he was invited by Queen Christina of Sweden to organize a scientific academy and to tutor her. Evidently, they did not like each other much and Descartes died there of a respiratory ailment, far from his beloved France. His claim to fame was his dictum, "I think, therefore I am." but almost as soon as it was said people started finding holes in it and Descartes had to start defending it. There wasn't much defense available. It's easy to knock it down. For instance, your thinking certainly indicates that something exists, but not necessarily you. You might just be a character in someone elses imagined story.

One of my favorites was Rudolf Carnap, a giant of symbolic logic and a member of the Vienna Circle, a group of people who believed that, if it couldn't be talked about scientifically or logically, it shouldn't be talked about at all. That philosophy, called logical positivism, like many nineteenth and twentieth century philosophies, didn't last long, quickly being superseded by Post-Modernism, which was largely a reaction to philosophies like logical positivism. Honestly, trying to dump four fifths of the Dewey Decimal System was doomed to failure.

But I did like the depth to which he developed logical systems, and I very much sympathized with his disdain of many of the central questions of philosophy; although I think he went too far. It is important to establish some understanding of the nature of existence, moral issues, and whether there is anything beyond the material world.  But a lot of the classical philosopher's conclusions seem a bit sophomoric. For instance, Kant said that the central tenant of ethics is that humans should never be a means but always an end. But that eliminates a large part of the basis of relationships. There is a such thing as good faith in use. Much of friendships and love relationships are based on common, honest use. People are the means of cultivating relationships.

Jean-Paul Sartre has always seemed to me to be a miserable individual - much more so than is called for. He said, "Hell is other people" (from his play No Exit). He taught that self-consciousness was a curse. Methinks the philosopher doth protest too much.

And B. F. Skinner, just don't get me started. I came into psychology when Skinerian behaviorism was big. I had a textbook that expounded the glories of behaviorism with the fervor of a Marxist. The authors stated flat out that all other schools of psychology would (not "should") be relegated to historical studies. Twenty years later, behaviorism had morphed into cognitive behavioral psychology and emphasis has definitely shifted to what is going on inside peoples' heads. I hope the authors of that text book are embarrassed.

I think that one big problem with philosophical thought has been that philosophers just think too much. I liken it to a treasure hunter that digs a little too far to the right and completely missed the treasure, coming up with only dirt - interesting dirt, to be sure, but dirt nevertheless.

There has been lifetimes wasted on consideration of the puzzle, "Can God create a stone too heavy for Him to lift?" The sentence looks like it makes sense purely because it is a reasonably constructed sentence; otherwise, it makes no sense at all. Many philosophical statements are perfectly good statements. They have good grammar; the words mean something; but they just don't make sense.

I was in a speech team in the 70s and it was around that time that debate judges started disallowing nihilistic arguments. It's perfectly reasonable to argue that, since you can't even argue that the things around you are really real, you certainly can't argue anything else. The problem is that, if you start with the assumption that there is no reality (or no provable reality), then you can't go any farther. Debate is dead in the water before it even starts.

But debate is important. It is the way people come to conclusions about issues that can't be solidly proven, some of the most important issues there are - issues of policy, responsibility, value.....

Even if you lock yourself in your house and never go out, there are dangers and the biggest danger is nonparticipation. Life is participation and survival is not just living. In the same way, thinking is dangerous, but not thinking is the worse choice by far and the key is to finely hone that incredible thinking tool, your brain, through learning and experience.