Wyzga On Words

Cynical Or Schmaltzy, The Olympic Stories Still Inspire Us With Universal Truths.

Like my neighbor's birthday party, it's all over but for cleaning up the trash. 

What will we remember of the 2012 Olympics? 

Each one around the globe will have his or her own story to tell.  And yet there are the Universal stories - those stories that we homo narrans collectively recognize as true because they capture universal truths no matter whether we live in Alaska or Afghanistan, Jersey or Jamaica.

Take a moment to read Frank Bruni's recollection of some Olympic highlights that remind us of who we are when we are our best selves in "The Soul of the Olympics."  These athletes gave us something to savor, like the friends and family enjoying tiramisu birthday cake together last night.

Women, Activism & The Vatican Don't Mix.

Until I read the public smack down by Cardinal William J. Levada, I was just a reader musing over the coincidence of two NYTimes articles about activist nuns published on the same day: one (Sister Megan Rice) who broke into the Oak Ridge nuclear reservation in Tennessee and the 900 nuns who met at the Leadership Conference of Women Religious this week in St. Louis, Missouri. 

Click here to read Sister Rice's story.  Excerpt:

"Now, Sister Megan Rice, 82, a Roman Catholic nun of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, and two male accomplices have carried out what nuclear experts call the biggest security breach in the history of the nation’s atomic complex, making their way to the inner sanctum of the site where the United States keeps crucial nuclear bomb parts and fuel.

“Deadly force is authorized,” signs there read. “Halt!” Images of skulls emphasize the lethal danger.

With flashlights and bolt cutters, the three pacifists defied barbed wire as well as armed guards, video cameras and motion sensors at the Oak Ridge nuclear reservation in Tennessee early on July 28, a Saturday. They splashed blood on the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility — a new windowless, half-billion-dollar plant encircled by enormous guard towers — and hung banners outside its walls."

Unable to locate any fact-neutral reports on the edict at the center of the conference meeting, click here to read a comprehensive albeit conservative view.  Click here to read the story of the conference of nuns' decision to use dialogue to resolve issues with the Vatican powers.  Excerpt.

"The decision to seek a dialogue came after more than 900 nuns spent four days doing what they call “listening to the Holy Spirit” inside a hotel ballroom. They represent about 80 percent of the 57,000 Catholic nuns in the United States. They were responding to an edict issued in April by Cardinal Levada’s office, which ordered three American bishops to rewrite the Leadership Conference’s statutes, evaluate its programs and publications, and revise its liturgies and rituals.

The Vatican accused the group of promoting “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith” and “corporate dissent” against church teachings, like those prohibiting the ordination of women to the priesthood, same-sex relationships and artificial birth control." [Emphasis added.]

Besides the tone of activism, having a voice, being visible, being heard, and the desire to use dialogue to resolve disputes, what unites these two stories with mine?  I am one of the kids who went to Catholic school where we were taught by nuns.  I'm also one of the kids who was taken to the church rectory and abused by the pastor.  No one believed me.  Years later I spoke publically to incest survivors about my experience and learned that they, too, were told to be quiet.

When it comes to the treatment and exclusion of women in the Catholic Church, Cardinal William J. Levada's dismissive retort says it all. He called the nuns’ approach a “dialogue of the deaf.”

Catholics and others are taking sides in the stand-off between the Vatican that wants to "reign in" the women religious and the nuns who want to be be “recognized as equal in the church,” to have their style of religious life “respected and affirmed,” and to help create a climate in which everyone in the church can talk about “issues that are very complicated.”

Why do they want this? The nuns expect that "open and honest dialogue may lead not only to increasing understanding between the church leadership and women religious but also to creating more possibilities for the laity, and particularly for women, to have a voice in the church.”

Who benefits?  How about society, for a start.

The Vatican certainly has its hands full if it believes that women will go away or turn a deaf ear to our common humanity.  If there is any "dialogue of the deaf," it's the Church that hasn't been listening.

It's way beyond the time that the Church fathers finally recognized "the times they are a-changing." 

 

Do Not Swim, Hike Or Go To The Hospital Alone.

Let's begin here.  "The Short Life and Lonely Death of Sabrina Seelig" as reported by Anemona Hartocollis for the NYTimes reads as a cautionary tale: don't take Ephedra; make sure your jury relates to the story of your dead client; be aware of struggling hospitals, and so on.

What happened?  A 22 year old college student took Ephedra to stay up all night to complete a paper.  Feeling ill in the morning she called 911, an ambulance was dispatched, she was taken to a struggling Brooklyn hospital where she was given sedatives, strapped to a bed, slipped into a coma that evening unattended by the hospital staff and died 6 days after admission.

Her lawyer lost her case for any number of reasons.  I was not there nor part of the trial team.  I do not know.  What is reported is that there was (as there will always be) conflicting testimony, an uneven balance in the gaggle of experts, blame on the plaintiff for bringing about her own death, and juror distancing:

"After a day and a half of deliberations, the jury of four men and two women returned its verdict: Wyckoff and the individuals working there had not been negligent.

The jury did not seem to identify with Ms. Seelig."

As I have written and spoken before, the decision-maker must have some connection to your client.  The decision-maker does not need to have lost a sister or daughter or loved one to death.  The decision-maker does not need to have experience with medical malpractice.  But that decision-maker must be reminded of the values of safety, trust, and vulnerability, taught the medical rules including the simple four-step process of differential diagnosis, as well as the hospital rules of charting, monitoring, and vital signs. 

So often these cases turn on the inevitability of the outcome.  Apparently, Wyckoff Heights Medical Center was just the place.  Excerpt.

"In 2007, when Ms. Seelig was a patient, the state ordered Wyckoff to hire a management consultant to improve its governance and finances. Five years later, it is still struggling. The Brooklyn district attorney has been investigating allegations of mismanagement. A three-month investigation by The New York Times, the results of which were published in March, found a history of insider dealing and positions being given to people with political ties. The hospital officials involved denied any wrongdoing. The hospital does not carry malpractice insurance." 

One thing is for sure: if we have not yet gone to an emergency room or a hospital for treatment, we know someone who has.  One day we will most certainly be there ourselves. 

Here's the rule: Do not go to any hospital alone.  If you must, let someone know where you are going and when and why.

Several years ago I created a website for Vincent DeAngelo, an accomplished, highly-regarded medical malpractice attorney in Hartford, CT.  Mr. DeAngelo insisted that his website provide critical information to the public in five areas of potential medical malpractice: Vbacs, emergency rooms, medication errors, hospital infections, and nursing homes.

Click here to access DeAngelo's educational website complete with detailed downloadable pdfs you can read to learn more about these areas and information to take with you before going to the hospital.  

Our moms were right when they told us not to go swimming alone.  From the grave Sabrina Seelig is reminding us not to go to the hospital alone.

Driving Distracted Video Is Good Reminder: Hands On Wheel & Eyes On Road.

Perhaps like me you were taught to drive with your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road.

Today we have our hands on the coffee cup, breakfast bar, newspaper, driving directions, CD changer, mascara brush, Big MAC, toothbrush, cell phone, iPad, iPhone, and the like while our eyes are engaged with what's in our hands and on our laps.

Studies - as well as the increasing wreckage on our roads and in our communities - continue to remind us that driving distracted is the new drunk driving.

Community Medical Centers Central California commissioned my friend and colleague Bonni Montevecchi to shoot a video on distracted driving as part of its National Trauma Awareness Month (May 2012).

Click here to watch this short and well-done piece on what happens in that split second when we take our hands off the wheel and our eyes off the road.  Maybe Montevecchi's work will help save a life.

Fear Or Compassion? Which Motivates Action?

I've been reluctant to kick the hornet's nest on this one.  Folks seem pretty divided on The Reptile Theory.  Like Paris - you either love it or you hate it.

The notion that we should regard jurors as reptiles to get some huge verdict out of them by playing to their fears has always struck me as cold-blooded, and not a little inhuman.  How we regard people and things becomes how we treat them.  I felt so strongly about this I co-wrote an article with Stephanie West Allen and Jeffrey Schwartz for The Jury Expert entitled "Atticus Finch Would Not Approve."  [Click AllenSchwartzWyzgaTJEMay2010 to read.]  My position has only strengthened.

I used to work with a beekeeper who insisted on calling the honeybees "really angry" when they reacted to us opening the hive boxes.  He treated them as if they were somehow "really angry."  He over-smoked them.  He was tense, jumpy and afraid.  His physical actions conveyed fear.  At the end of the day working with him I was a wreck.

And yet, there was nothing to fear.  We were suited up for the job.  We would get head-bonked by some of the guard bees; but that was normal behavior.  No bees chased us or swarmed us.  A honeybee has to be truly threatened to sting; when she does she rips out her guts and dies.  Not an action to be taken lightly. 

When I was trained as a beekeeper I was told to remember, "No jerks in the beeyard." While I have not yet gotten to the stage where I will work my hives wearing only a veil, I know that to bee Zen keeps everyone - beekeepers and honeybees - calm.

It works with people, too.  The Science of Compassion by the social scientist David DeSteno writing for the NYTimes shares the results of scientific research that shows empathy with the suffering of others is alive and well.  Excerpt:

"As a social psychologist interested in the emotions, I long wondered whether this spiritual understanding of compassion was also scientifically accurate. Empirically speaking, does the experience of compassion toward one person measurably affect our actions and attitudes toward other people? If so, are there practical steps we can take to further cultivate this feeling? Recently, my colleagues and I conducted experiments that answered yes to both questions.

In one experiment, designed with the psychologist Paul Condon and published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, we recruited people to take part in a study that was ostensibly about the relation of mathematical ability to taste perception — but that in actuality was a study of how the experience of compassion affects your behavior.

In another study, published in the journal Emotion, the psychologist Piercarlo Valdesolo and I conducted an experiment ostensibly about music perception — but that actually investigated how feelings of compassion might be increased.

Our hunch was that compassion is easiest to feel when you have a sense of commonality with someone else."

And what did the scientists find?  Excerpt:

"What these results suggest is that the compassion we feel for others is not solely a function of what befalls them: if our minds draw an association between a victim and ourselves — even a relatively trivial one — the compassion we feel for his or her suffering is amplified greatly.

What does this mean for cultivating compassion in society? It means that effortful adherence to religious or philosophical dictums (often requiring meditation, prayer or moral education), though clearly valuable and capable of producing results, is not the only way to go. There is nothing special about tapping in synchrony; any such commonality will do. Increased compassion for one’s neighbor, for instance, can come from something as easy as encouraging yourself to think of him as (say) a fan of the same local restaurant instead of as a member of a different ethnicity.

Simply learning to mentally recategorize one another in terms of commonalities would generate greater empathy among all of us — and foster social harmony in a fairly effortless way."

I am not Pollyanna enough to believe that I can buy someone a Coke and the world will live in perfect harmony.  

I agree that there is fear in the world.  Look at everything from video games to the nightly news to the most recent midnight movie massacre in Aurora, CO.  You will get more than your share of a diet of human suffering. 

But fear does nothing to improve the situation - fear causes us to hide, bar the doors, become complacent.  Ironically, when we feel an empathy, a compassion for the situation we will act - whether for gun control, mental health, local food, a jury verdict, whatever.  How does it work this way?

"What these results suggest is that the compassion we feel for others is not solely a function of what befalls them: if our minds draw an association between a victim and ourselves — even a relatively trivial one — the compassion we feel for his or her suffering is amplified greatly."

Like my friend the angry beekeeper, you get what you name.  Whether or not the honeybees were "really angry," he perceived them as such and treated them that way.  It was how he perceived them that created the expectation of harm. 

I've had enough of fear.  I prefer to be on the side of those who encourage a deep compassion for human suffering and from that place articulate for action to lessen the plight of others.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Deoderant.

A friend recently returned from a trip to Paris.  We met at a local cafe for breakfast quiche and lattes so I could see her photos and hear her stories. 

After the wonderfully exclusive armchair tour de france, our conversation turned to work.  She has seen her hours as a storyteller get cut as school programs have turned away from music, literature, arts and the like.  There is no money to fund the extras.

Litigation consulting is no different, I said.  Fewer cases are going to trial because they are so costly; lawyers are turning away clients because of new laws on what fees and bills they can collect; lawyers tiring of the rigors of the litigation trail are themselves consulting on cases with colleagues, and the like.

Where's the hope?  She reminded me of the prayer: give us THIS day our DAILY bread.  While we would love to have the security of weekly or annual bread, it doesn't work like that.

A father who lost his daughter to a drunk driver - the first daughter in the family to graduate high school with honors and go to college - mourned that higher education is no protection.

I continue to revisit the Steve Jobs story: money is no protection from death.

And so it goes.

Why deoderant? I use a form of deodorant that dispenses the product in a dose with a few turns of a little wheel.  It's what I need for the day.  The toothpaste on the brush is what I need for the day.  The water in the bottle, the electricity that fuels my computer, the phone service that allows me to share a call with a sister.  It's just enough.

Do I want more?  You bet I  do.  And in the wanting is a humble thanksgiving that my needs are met with assets and resources moment-by-moment.

I am reminded that you can go to a brightly lit theater and not return home.  You can date a girl and never know that you will save her life.  You can lose a 6 year old daughter on the operating room table. 

May we be free from suffering and the root of all suffering - and give us this day our daily deodorant.  Thank you.

Do You Really Want & Need That High-Priced Law Degree?

Hidden on a back page of the NYTimes instead of prominently displayed on a front page is a piece by Lincoln Caplan, "An Existential Crisis For Law Schools" that bears serious attention by law students, lawyers and, most critically, law schools. 

A few decades age you went to law school, took the bar exam, passed the test and got a job.  A good job.  One that would help pay down that $50 grand of tuition debt.  Like many other things in the legal profession - one of my litigator gurus predicts no more trials in 5 or 10 years - the promise of a job after law school has shifted.  Excerpt.

"Only 55 percent of 43,735 graduates in 2011 had a law-related job nine months after graduation, said William Henderson of the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, who analyzed recent data from the American Bar Association. Twenty-eight percent were unemployed or underemployed. And at the 20 law schools with the highest employment, 83 percent of graduates were working as lawyers. At the bottom 20, it was a dismal 31 percent.

These numbers are far worse than jobs data going back a generation and should be a deep embarrassment to law schools, which have been churning out more graduates than the economy can employ, indulging themselves in copious revenues that higher tuitions and bigger classes bring in. A growing list of deans acknowledge that legal education is facing an existential crisis, but the transformation to a more sustainable model will be difficult and messy.

The number of law office jobs began to decline in 2004, well before the recession. And demand for new lawyers isn’t expected to grow much even when the economy recovers. Outsourcing of legal work to places like India and greater efficiencies made possible by smarter software to search documents for evidence, for example, are allowing firms to cut the positions of multitudes of low-end lawyers. In 2009, twice as many people passed bar exams as there were legal openings — a level of oversupply that may hold up for years. There is, of course, tremendous need for lawyers to serve the poor and middle class, but scant dollars to pay them.

Law schools have hustled to compensate for these shifts by trying to make it look as if their graduates are more marketable, even hiring them as research assistants to offer temporary employment. But those strategies won’t fix legal education, particularly when students are starting to see that a high-priced degree, financed by mountains of loans, may never pay off. The number of people taking law school admissions tests fell 24 percent in the last two years, to the lowest level in a decade. Law schools will be crushed if they don’t remake themselves, said Frank Wu, dean of Hastings College of the Law at the University of California in San Francisco. “This is Detroit in the 1970s: change or die.”"

TIP:    Law firms are slow to change; law schools are even slower.  It's up to you to decide what you want and need for your life.

TIP:    Do you cut your losses and quit or press on?  This post might give you something to think about: "Cut Your Losses Or Finish."

TIP:    A few years old, but the wisdom and observations are relevant: "A Lot Can Change In A Year."

Q&A Tuesday: How Does A Story Change By Revising The Context?

Q:    What changes when you change the context of a story?

A:     You can change the meaning.  The meaning can better suit your purpose. 

For decades now I have taught that a story in its simplest terms can be reduced to a formula: Content + Context + Value = Emotionally Meaningful Story. 

The content is all the facts, evidence, characters, relationships, and the like.

The context is the circumstances within which those facts took place, the characters came to be and how they related among and between themselves.

The value gives us the emotional juice so we can relate to the story whether it is about the Hobbit, a coach on trial for alleged sexual abuse or environmental changes.

It's all a story - and not just a story.

Apple is back in the news.  Not because it is launching another iThing but because its wages and payroll practices are pretty abysmal, "Apples Stores' Army, Long on Loyalty but Short on Pay."  How would Steve Jobs change the context of that story?

Here's an example of how he created a "high ground maneuver" that set a new PR bar, as excerpted from the book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. 

The iPhone 4 was dropping calls like crazy.  The reason was attributed to a glitch in the steel rim of the phone. If you held the phone a particular way or covered up the tiny gap that was part of the antenna mechanism, there could be some signal loss.  And it was a problem known to Jobs and the Apple engineers before the launch.

Media being what it is created "Antennagate" and Consumer Reports declined to recommend the phone after rigorous testing.

What's a CEO to do?

Jobs held a press conference.  He did not accept the advice of board members to show a little humility, damp down the pride a bit, offer an apology.  He changed the context of the story, "saying all cell phones had problems."  In a remarkably straightforward and neutral tone he said, "We are not perfect.  Phones are not perfect.  We all know that.  But we want to make our users happy."  Jobs denied the problem, dismissed the criticism, and spread the blame across the board of all smartphone manufacturers

And that was pretty much the end of that.

You could return your phone, but only a marginal few users did.

"Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon strip Dilbert, was also increduloous but far more admiring....Apple's response to the iPhone 4 problem didn't follow the public relations playbook, because Jobs deccided to rewrite the playbook," Adams wrote.  "If you want to know what genius looks like, study Jobs' words"  By proclaiming up front that phones are not perfect, Jobs changed the context of the argument with an indisputable assertion.  "If Jobs had not changed the context from the iPhon 4 to all smartphones in general, I could make you a hilarious comic strip about a product so poorly made that it won't work if it comes in contact with a human hand.  But as soon as the context is changed to all smartphones have problems,' the humor opportunity is gone.  Nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth." [page 523]

TIP:     Develop the context of your story to suit the purpose of your persuasion.

TIP:     Developing the accurate and appropriate context for your story is not lying; it owning the genius to persuade your listener or decision-maker.

TIP:    Lessons are everywhere we look. 

What's Really In That Plastic Bottle Of Bottled Water You're Drinking?

There's nothing odd about 3 corporations taking control of our drinking water.  It's just business.

Nestle, Coke and Pepsi have their eye on the future.  The future is water: who has it, who controls it, who needs it.

Mahatma Ghandi said, "There is enough water for human need, but not for human greed."

This is where we have arrived: corporate greed.

Yet, it's not all their fault.  Corporations sell what we buy.  When we stop buying we change things.

Water covers 75% of planet Earth; only 1% of that is drinkable.  In the next 15 years almost two-thirds of the human race will be struggling for clean drinking water.

Water is the new oil.

Now does it make sense?

Nestle, Coke and Pepsi are sucking the earth dry, bottling the water and selling it back to you at 1900 times the original cost to them.

What do you think goes into a bottle of Arrowhead, Ozark, Dasani or Aquafina water?  Pure mountain stream refreshment?

Over 40% of the bottled water on the shelves is merely good old-fashioned municipal tap water.

Recall a few years back when Atlanta was suffering the drought?  Lakes were down to dirt?  But the local Coke plant kept on bottling?

The joke's on us.

Compounding the problem is the petrochemicals that make up the plastic bottles that hold the water.  These cancer-causing petrochemicals leach out into the water you drink, you give your kids to drink.

And it doesn't stop there.  Not everyone gets curbside recycling service.  And even if we did there are not enough recycling plants or uses for the bottles.  So they end up in landfills where the petrochemicals leach into the soils and ground water.

And it doesn't end there.  Our oceans are becoming a toxic plastic stew as more and more bottles are swept into the lakes, rivers, streams and sea.  Marine life eats the broken down plastic pellets.

Here's a few sources you can check out to begin your research and then decide for yourself if it's time to give up the bottle:

Tapped - the movie. This 2009 Indie Winner examines the role of the bottled water industry and its effects on our health, climate change, pollution, and our reliance on oil. The high cost -- to both the environment and our health -- of bottled water is the subject of this documentary that enlists activists, environmentalists, community leaders and others to expose the dark side of the bottled water industry. Americans may rethink their obsession with bottled H20 when they learn of the unregulated industry's willingness to ignore environmental and health concerns, and the problems that arise as a result.  Produced by Atlas Films.  Trailer.

We made it easy for you: click here to watch Tapped, all 75 minutes of it.

Just to balance the argument a bit, here are Top 10 Reasons why bottled water is a blessing.  And from a Quaker.

Grading your bottled water.    

What We Will Miss With The Demise Of Written Letters. UVA Captures The Civil War Online.

I was going through a cardboard box the other day. It's one of many on the top shelf of a closet in my home.  It holds written notes and letters that date back 40 years.  Opening envelopes, visiting places and people, and reading long departed handwriting is more than a comfort.  The written word sets a moment in time.  I am reminded of who I was when, what I thought was important, who colored my life, and so on.

On February 20 2011, my friend and colleague Stephanie West Allen blogged about the importance of letter writing: Notes and letters - Long may they live!

She followed up that post with another on April 11, 2011, Writing Letters to the Future.

Ours are not frivolous gestures.  Or a nod to a quaint notion.  I wonder who will recall us, say 150 years from now just as we are able to recall the lives of those who lived life during the Civil War. 

Life During Wartime recounts the efforts of

"A team at U.Va.'s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library has been posting on "150 Years Ago Today," an online blog started in 2009 that features transcribed Civil War letters and diaries. Now that the nation is in the midst of the Civil War sesquicentennial, which runs until 2015, there's renewed interest in the bloody conflict. And reading the words of the participants themselves provides a new, more intimate level of understanding.

Accessible from the Special Collections home page and fully searchable by name or date, the blog features correspondence by such Confederate notables as Robert E. Lee and Gen. Elisha F. "Bull" Paxton, who briefly commanded the Stonewall Brigade. But it also includes the words of the everyday people who shouldered muskets on the battlefield, suffered deprivations on the homefront and struggled to grasp the equality promised them in the Declaration of Independence. By posting these primary source documents online, the Special Collections Library is presenting the war's daily triumphs and tragedies to the world.

This enormous project started fairly simply. "Twelve years ago, Mary Roy Edwards volunteered to start transcribing our Civil War letters and diaries," says Ann Southwell (Grad '73), a Special Collections' manuscript cataloger who heads the effort. "After a while we decided we should put them up on a blog. Then we got the idea that we could do the entire war day by day." Edwards, the wife of former U.Va. architecture professor Charles R. Edwards, eventually transliterated more than 3,000 pages from the items at Special Collections. Another volunteer, John P. Mann IV, has been diligently working on letters written by Col. Edward T. Warren of the 10th Virginia Infantry. Southwell herself works on the project every evening after work."

As you are drawn into the entries that recount the lives of those who lived life during wartime, one thing is striking: not much has changed when we go to war.  What matters most is still faith, family, friends, and the girls we left behind.

My hope is that as more of us read about the terrors and losses of war, we may shed some of our "rock logic' that makes Us right and Them wrong. Perhaps we can adopt a more fluid frame of mind that allows for more commonality, understanding and grace under fire.

The article reports on the interest generated in other countries:

"Nonetheless, the blog is attracting attention—it's received more than 20,000 hits as of early May. "We're getting a lot of hits from people in Russia, Ukraine and India," says Southwell. "I hope they're not using these letters to learn English!"" 

I hope we and they are using the letters to learn peace in our time.