Ben Gordon to Detroit

In a follow up sports post, today I am very sad to find that Ben Gordon has agreed to sign with the Detroit Pistons.

As a Bulls fan this is devastating. Not having to re-sign Gordon gives them a lot of cap room to work with, but I don’t know how you replace someone who’s been such a big part of the team for the past 5 years and who was so important in the series against the Celtics.

Shaq to Cavaliers

I don’t do much sports writing, heck, not too much sports news makes the front page of the NYTimes for me to find out about. I follow my Yankees and keep general knowledge about what’s going on in football and basketball, not much else.

But even I know enough to have muttered a low – ‘Oh Shit’ when I saw the headline that Shaquille O”Neal was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers.

I’d love for Chicago to take it in 2010, but short of that I wouldn’t mind watching Lakers-Cavs fight it out. The drama.

North Korea warns of ‘fire shower of nuclear’ attack

NKorea warns of ‘fire shower of nuclear’ attack

I’m not saying I want them to, as a West Coastener I’m more at risk. And I’m sure Hawaiians don’t want them to either.  (That’s all assuming they attack the US. South Korea and Japan being more likely targets). But if they did, we could finally rid ourselves of this decades-old pest and the decades-old policy that has increasingly emboldended it. Not to mention that the people of North Korea might finally get to eat.

Michelle Obama promotes volunteerism – Transforming American Ideals

In her visit to San Francisco yesterday, Michelle Obama promoted and encouraged volunteerism among Americans. A noble undertaking that most people would agree with, at least in theory. In practice, if I may generalize from the comments on this article from the San Francisco Chronicle, most people see it as an irrational request from the First Lady.

-How on earth are we to volunteer if we’re working 40+ hours a week to make ends meet?

-Easy for her to volunteer, she’s rich. She has all the time in the world.

Things of this nature were the common response (I haven’t quoted anyone directly).

Really though, many more of us could have extra time to do things like volunteer. The vast majority of us simply choose personal endeavors over the well being of the collective (and of course, there can be some overlap between the two – people whose careers focus on promoting community values).

Indeed, there are many people around the world and in our country that work endlessly to earn the bare essentials of food and shelter. Nobody expects them to volunteer.

The rest of us are working tirelessly to attain a higher quality of life, or to maintain an elevated quality of life. Harry (made up person) needs to work 40 hours a week to afford his sunny apartment, car, and the cable, cell phone, and internet bills. Harry can work a few hours less if he gives up TV. A few more hours if he uses the free internet at the library.  And a lot more hours if he lives in a more cavernous building a few blocks away. Would Harry, or any of us, be willing to give up the small luxuries and choices we have in our lives for the betterment of our communities?

No freakin way. And why should we? The American ideal of happiness is entirely focused on the self. Each of us can only derive happiness if we have or are in pursuit of the items we want – material goods, status, power, etc. This idea is the predominant message we get, with only cursory attention given to the good of the community.

The problem of course, is self-reinforcing. Let’s say Harry gives up home internet to have a few hours to volunteer each week. He’ll go to the library to find it doesn’t work. Let’s say he really wants to commit to helping a lot so he gives up his dream apartment for a cheaper one to free up time. He’ll find himself in a neighborhood where there are more drug dealers and liquor stores than there are sunny days in a year (and he doesn’t live in Seattle). It’s probably safe to assume he’ll be back to paying for internet that works and moving out of the ghetto pretty quickly. Granted, at the moment I’m purposely drawing the starkest contrast to illustrate the point that the choice to make time for volunteering generally leads to lower individual satisfaction.  That lower satisfaction, of any degree, is poison to most of us, so we keep working a lot in order to afford everything that we consider necessary to happiness.
Part of the solution on the individual level is realizing that giving an hour of volunteer work isn’t going to force most of us to live in the ghetto. Most of us could still be reasonably happy with ourselves without that extra $10-30 each week/month (depending on individually considered circumstances). A part of this is also the realization that if enough people accept the idea of volunteering as important, then that hour is really all you need. I don’t have any empirical evidence, but I feel confident in saying that if half of a town showed up at a hospital or some other community organization for an hour a week it’d do a world of good for everyone.

More structurally, the problems build up and I have don’t have any ideas at the moment about how to correct them. For example, how many employers would allow their employees to fix two hours (adding an extra for transportation) each week as off limits? I imagine that this would be partly self correcting – if enough people are choosing to sacrifice an hour of wages to volunteer it would create a large enough need for an employer to go ahead and hire additional people to get the work done.

At the largest level we need to realize that helping the community is good for the people being helped and for the rest of us. There needs to be an ideological shift that finds a happy medium between individualism and collectivism. To use a quick example- Helping kids at an afterschool program gives them knowledge that they increasingly aren’t getting in school due to budget cuts, and it also gives the rest of us a population that is more educated and less likely to resort to crime.

I imagine that success in Michelle Obama’s campaign will come slowly and painfully. It’s difficult to imagine a point where all of us are volunteering on our own accord. I can think of people who I simply cannot see willingly agreeing to volunteer somewhere. Hopefully as awareness spreads enough people who are on the fence decide that it would be good to go out and help somewhere.

Spiders are awake

Every time I’m up late working on papers, the spiders come out climbing on walls and running across the floor. Makes me not want to sleep the rest of the time.

Picture is definitely not from my room, but it’s a creepy picture. Hopefully creepy enough to keep me awake to finish writing this paper.

SFGate and TMZ

I know times are tough, especially for the newspaper industry. SF Gate, the homepage of the San Francisco Chronicle, visibly shows the signs of a business that is ailing. For a week or two (maybe longer, I don’t remember), the front page has been linking to news articles from other local sources like the TV stations and smaller, local news sources. I can understand all this. Teamwork is a great strategy for getting the news out to people. But now they’re linking to TMZ. I read the TMZ blog on occasion, it has it’s particular place in people’s reading list. Even so, I don’t think it’s necessarily wise for the biggest paper in the area to be linking to what is essentially an entertainment/tabloid/paparrazi source for news.

I guess news is news, no matter where it comes from. Gotta check the facts with those TMZ articles though.