"Don't worry about the horse being blind," coach John Madden instructed, "just load the wagon." His point was to focus on immediate concerns instead of peripheral ones, but with so much turmoil around the world in so many respects – political, environmental, religious, climatic, economic – it's hard to follow Madden's advice. Fortunately, humans invented language, and that allows us a way to better understand what's transpiring and a means of consoling ourselves. The Atlantic Magazine's "How to Worry Less and Be Happier" by Arthur Brooks is a good example. He distinguishes between worrying and ruminating: "Worrying is a recursive mental attempt to resolve a situation that has an uncertain, possibly negative outcome. As a mental operation, it is similar to rumination in that both are repetitive and self-focused and feature an inability to shift attention from negative thoughts. Both activities also harm attention, erode problem-solving, and worsen mood. The distinction between them is that rumination typically involves brooding on trouble in the past, whereas worry usually focuses on events that, to your knowledge, have not yet occurred."
Brooks provides a science-based approach to reduce worrying, including "write your worry down which helps "focus the fear by articulating it to yourself" because "naming them in a list makes them emotionally manageable." Then focus on potential outcomes; "on your worry list, write down the best outcome for each problem, the worst outcome, and the most likely outcome. Then add what you would do in each instance. This makes the source of worry specific and gives you a management plan. With that, you'll be able to park the problem mentally and experience relief from worry." Brooks also cites a hopeful Gallup poll for those of us in our golden years: "37 percent of people in their 40s report experiencing worry 'a lot of the day yesterday'; for people in their late 60s, this falls to 23 percent, and to 15 percent for nonagenarians and older. We know that people tend to become less neurotic as they age, but it is also possible that they simply have less to worry about at 90 than they did at 40."
I like to think that my old mind has a lot more to sort through to recollect something, and declining memory might be at play in a survey cited by Harper's magazine that found that 11 percent of Americans claim they have no secrets, while 33 percent of those 65 and older declare harboring no secrets, but perhaps we just have forgotten them. As long as we love them our children provide persistent sources of worry, and a new one is NEET, which the U.S. Organization for Economic and Development (OECD) defines as "the share of young people who are not in employment, education or training (NEET), as a percentage of the total number of young people in the corresponding age group, by gender. Young people in education include those attending part-time or full-time education, but exclude those in non-formal education and in educational activities of very short duration". Different countries have different NEET standards; in Japan NEET includes those between the ages of 15 and 34, but for us the OECD puts it from ages 20-24 which still totals 4 million young'uns. Geeze! Way to go ya kids ya! And get offa my lawn! Uh-oh, time for more written clarification, this time it's "The Long History of Older and Younger People Not Seeing Eye to Eye" by the Washington Post's Philip Bump. He begins by citing a host of apocryphal quotations from earliest times that lament how the decline of society is spurred on by those unruly youngsters. For instance, the Internet says the quote "There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common. Children no longer obey their parents," has been reported almost verbatim from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece, but there's no tangible proof for any of them.
There's plenty of evidence that older generations inevitably bemoan how younger generations are letting things go to ruin. When the Boomers were fresh and new in 1968, there were violent demonstrations and riots in Chicago, where the Democratic Party's presidential convention was held. That's when the "What About the Generation Gap?" panel discussion was held at the American Society of Newspaper Editors annual meeting in Chicago and chaired by Creed Black, executive editor of the Chicago Daily News who opened the discussion by quoting Plato (even though no evidence exists that the philosopher actually said it): "What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents, they ignore the laws, they ride in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decayed. What is to become of them?" He was challenged by the panel's youngest participant, Roger Rapoport, the University of Michigan newspaper editor, who replied "Far from being dismayed at the generation gap, I am pretty glad it is there. I think it offers a good deal of hope for us that perhaps we can do a little bit better than you did." We know how that turned out. Rapoport went on to become a distinguished journalist, author, and playwright, and he did make an excellent life choice by marrying a public library director.
Black's 2011 NYTimes obituary described him as "a peripatetic, pugnacious newspaper executive who enraged his native state by printing a series of articles exposing corruption on the University of Kentucky basketball team." Black was born and grew up in Kentucky and, since when he was five his father was killed by lightning, he was raised by his mother. He became a reporter at 17, served in the Army in WWII (and won a Bronze star), got his GI Bill college degree, and quickly rose up the publishing ranks, being a top newspaper executive in Nashville, Savannah, and Wilmington, Delaware where, "after the papers' owner brought in a public relations executive from the DuPont Company to help manage the news department. DuPont was by far the most important company in town, and Mr. Black accused the owner of the newspapers, a securities firm controlled by the DuPont family, of wanting to make the papers, The Morning News and The Evening Journal, DuPont 'house organs'."
As publisher of the Lexington, Kentucky Herald-Leader, Black approved his reporters' investigation of "shady practices involving one of Kentucky's most beloved institutions, its university's basketball team. The paper's editor at the time, John S. Carroll, wrote in an essay that Mr. Black 'simply said pursue the story, and if you can verify it, let's publish it' …. The reaction of Kentucky Wildcats loyalists was fierce: circulation and advertising boycotts, protest rallies and daily attacks on talk radio." Black later recalled 'We had bomb threats, had to evacuate the building once or twice, had to put security on my home for a time. A few people canceled. One of the first was a man in the mailroom who saw the papers coming off the presses and canceled his free subscription'."
His name reminded me of another minor worry: why are new parents saddling their newborns such strange names? Some answers are revealed in "The Mysterious Tyranny of Trendy Baby Names," an intriguing Washington Post article by Daniel Wolfe who explained "In America, how you spell your name says a lot about when you were born," especially the name's ending. For example, if you're female and "your name ends with '–ly, you're probably a Gen X kid. A name ending in '–ley' or '–leigh' might peg you as a Millennial or Gen Z, respectively." Now, researchers have found that infants speak in regional dialects before they can articulate actual words, "according to "Babbling Scouse Youngster Shows Babies Can Have Accents," from TheGuardian.com. Scouse is the dialect from Liverpool, England, but this is a worldwide phenomenon. Babies "have just the contours of the language that they will populate with words." And now an MIT study has answered "What Is Language For?" Using MRI brain scanning they've shown that "language is a tool for communication, not for thought," although "there is an intuitive link between language and thought." In other words, you can think without words. But without language there'd be no newspapers or libraries and much more confusion,
If only that was our biggest worry. As wise, straight-shooting Howard Zinn wrote, "To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."
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