The Case for Pragmatism

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This is a post from four years ago.  After a weekend of robotics I am plain exhausted!

You probably have a better idea about how to do something. But will it work? You’ll never know until you try. When you do give it a go, you may find that getting there requires a lot of compromises along the way before your dream is realized. Or, perhaps, you’ll simply give up – blaming your own inability to make it happen or blaming the world for being so darned unfair.

Both experiences are simply part of human nature meeting reality. We’re all idealists at heart, at least in a certain sense. Only a few people have the skills necessary to make those dreams a reality and much of the time they have to keep their eyes on the prize. A dream is one thing, but getting there requires wide-awake attention.

That is why an open, democratic political system can’t live by rigid ideology alone.

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Underestimating the Kids

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At the regional FIRST Robotics competition in Minneapolis, the Czech team had some problems. Far from home, they had to improvise to get their robot on the field in time to compete. Fortunately, our team had a big supply of encoders purchased directly from China, well ahead of the long lead-time for parts like this. It was nice to help.

Posting pictures and stories about the event, my facebook feed also contains people convinced that kids from the same generation couldn’t possibly organize a march on Washington. There had to be others, adults who made it happen. The kids just have to be nothing more than tools.

I’ve given up telling people like that what I’ve learned from this generation, so very much like the last one to grow up in a Depression. It seems as plain as sunrise to me. You ask these kids to storm the beaches at Normandy, I’m pretty sure they will take freakin’ Normandy. More to the point, they’re willing to put in the work it takes to create a world where you don’t have to storm the beaches.

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Anything is Still Possible

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I wrote this ten years ago.  The financial collapse of 2008 was still six months away and GW Bush was President.  Yet big hunks of it are more true now than they were at that time.  We have indeed stagnated in the face of “everything is possible” and decided to wallow in our own refusal to make choices on how to move forward.  Will this still be relevant in 2028?

When I was young, I lived in a time and place where just about anything was possible. It’s amazing just how terrifying that prospect was.

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It’s All About Racism

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As a movement boils up into the streets and our consciousness, guns are the issue of the moment in America. The rest of the world looks on with amazement, not understanding how it got this far in the first place. Why do Americans love guns?

Why, indeed, do we have so many unusual problems in America which are not shared by other developed nations? Why don’t we have a reliable social safety net? Or a health care system of some kind? What is it that gives the United States the color of a developing nation?

Ah, yes, color. It’s about race. Racism is the poison that affects every single public debate in this nation one way or another. White people may think that they never feel the sting of racism, but they do. We all do. We are, actually, one people – but dividing us up by race is the original sin, the disease at the center of all other problems.

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Bizzy World

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Did you see the news today? It’s hard to not simply react to the world around us. There’s too much going on, too much chaos, too much news. And that post on facebook – did you see what “they” are doing now?

There are many problems associated with this sort of life, starting with anxiety and unhappiness. Stress induced coronaries come to mind as well. But as bad as this is for a person, it’s even worse for people. Everything in our world depends on some level of planning, deliberation, and rational thought.

Good luck with that.

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