Please, don't say that! (1.0)

 

Avoid saying:

Good bye!

I heard it this weekend on a commercial radio station. A weekend announcer told his listeners this was it for him today. And next weekend tune in at another time and day for his new shift. 

• First, nobody cares! except for his grandmother. Then, maybe she doesn't care either.
• Second, you told anybody listening to tune out or turn off the radio. Why would you do that?
• Third, there was no forward promotion. Remember that? Increasing time spent listening? It raises the station share, making it more appealing to advertisers, contributors and underwriters.
• Fourth, it's a total misunderstanding about how radio works. The listeners chose the station because of the content, not you. Loyalty depends on consistent appeal from the station's programming.

Listening barriers

There are plenty of examples in public radio of personalities saying goodbye. That's because content people always thought in terms of 'their' show. Garrison Keillor always said goodbye twice over the last three minutes. For the longest time, the producers and editors at All Things Considered as being a show with a beginning, middle and end, while the listeners actually tuned in when they could.  That's the problem with most weekend programming, churning the audience with hello's and goodbyes. 

You better make the most of your breaks. It's your only opportunity to create tune in, recurrence and increased occasions.

Good luck, and goodbye. Oh dang, I just did it to myself!

Supply Chain Problems

Meeting Demand 

When I worked in the manufacturing world, when demand increased, and supplies were low, we all worked more hours until more people could be hired and trained. Since some of the work called for skilled machinists in the shop or skilled labor in the tool crib, or skilled people in the foundry, it might take longer to ramp up. But ramp up we did. The company offered the training for free. The idea was to offer a service our customers could rely on. We wanted to make sure we took care of their needs in a timely manner. Investing in the future kept costs down. There were no shortages to drive costs up. It was a big picture approach.

Has This Changed?

Look at the supply chain issues. This problem has been apparent since the early days of the pandemic. That's over a year ago. If there's money to be made and jobs to be had, it would seem the bottlenecks in the supply chain are an opportunity? Why does it take a pointed reminder from the president that you might need to put in more hours to solve this issue?

Super Spreaders

 12 People are Mostly Responsible

According to NPR, researchers have found just 12 people are responsible for the bulk of the misleading claims and outright lies about COVID-19 vaccines that proliferate on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

"The 'Disinformation Dozen' produce 65% of the shares of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms," said Imran Ahmed, chief executive officer of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which identified the accounts."

"At the outset of this research, we identified a dozen individuals who appeared to be extremely influential creators of digital anti-vaccine content. These individuals were selected either because they run anti-vaccine social media accounts with large numbers of followers, because they produce high volumes of anti-vaccine content or because their growth was accelerating rapidly at the outset of our research in February. "

What's the motivation?
Greed, what else?

NPR reports, for many anti-vaccine advocates with a business on the side. They promote false claims about the dangers vaccines pose, while selling treatments, supplementals or other services. Their potential market is the roughly 20% of Americans say they do not want to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, according to recent polling according to NPR.

For those with something to sell, anti-vaccine misinformation serves a second important purpose.

"One of the things that antivaxxers have to do to sell their own remedies ... is to persuade people not to trust authorities they've trusted in the past." 

"By using their debunked theories to turn people away from mainstream medicine, these entrepreneurs are creating customers: "Once they've managed to hook someone, they can then sell to them for a lifetime." -npr

Ableism

Remember this?

Trump mocking a reporter. His behavior was inappropriate. His excuse? I was just being funny. Millions in this country still think this is ok. 

A form of discrimination

From Ableism 101 by Ashley Eisenmenger, accessliving.org:

Ableism is the discrimination of and social prejudice against people with disabilities based on the belief that typical abilities are superior. At its heart, ableism is rooted in the assumption that disabled people require ‘fixing’ and defines people by their disability. Like racism and sexism, ableism classifies entire groups of people as ‘less than,’ and includes harmful stereotypes, misconceptions, and generalizations of people with disabilities.

What form does Ableism take? 

Again, from Ableism 101:

• Lack of compliance with disability rights laws like the ADA
• Segregating students with disabilities into separate schools
• The use of restraint or seclusion as a means of controlling students with disabilities
• Segregating adults and children with disabilities in institutions
• Failing to incorporate accessibility into building design plans
• Buildings without braille on signs, elevator buttons, etc.
• Building inaccessible websites
• The assumption that people with disabilities want or need to be ‘fixed’
• Using disability as a punchline, or mocking people with disabilities
• Refusing to provide reasonable accommodations
• The eugenics movement of the early 1900s
• The mass murder of disabled people in Nazi Germany

I've jumped to major aggressions with major consequences, but there are everyday micro-aggressions. Many of them are part of how we interact with people through the language we use, including people in authority.

• “That’s so lame.”
• “He/she seems retarded.”
• "Is he/she slow?"
• "Is there something off about him/her?"
• “That guy is crazy.”
• “You’re acting so bi-polar today.”
• “Are you off your meds?”
• “It’s like the blind leading the blind.”
• “My ideas fell on deaf ears.”
• “She’s such a psycho.”
• “I’m super OCD about how I clean my apartment.”
• “Can I pray for you?”
• “I don’t even think of you as disabled.”

Phrases like this imply that a disability makes a person less than, and that disability is bad, negative, a problem to be fixed, rather than a normal, inevitable part of the human experience.

Many people don’t mean to be insulting, and a lot have good intentions, but even well-meant comments and actions can take a serious toll on their recipients. (Ableism 101)

Turning Around the Micro-Aggressions

According to Rakshitha Arni Ravishankar writing for the Harvard business review in 2020, ableist language largely influences us in three ways:

1. It reveals our unconscious bias.
2. It makes us internalize harmful bias about disability. 
3. It stigmatizes already marginalize people.

Ravishankar suggests we can start with a conscious effort to improve our vocabulary.

Acknowledge the disability around us. More than one billion people worldwide, around 15% of the population, have some type of disability. People with disabilities make up a quarter of the U.S. population. Pro-tip: Don’t try to fix disability; instead fix the oppression.

Learn! Listen more than we talk. become aware of our own biases — many of which we’ve picked up from the people we’ve met, the experiences we’ve had, and the media we’ve consumed throughout our lives — is the first step to educating ourselves. Our biases are learned behavior. That means we can learn new behaviors. Pro-tip: Educate yourself, and don’t rely on others to teach you.

Don't make assumptions about someone's identity.  Focus on the fact that people with disabilities are first and foremost, just people. An example of this would be saying “a person with a disability” instead of “a disabled person.” Pro-tip: Golden rule is: When you’re unsure of someone’s identity, just ask.

When you make a mistake, genuinely apologize. Saying something like, I'm sorry if what I said may have hurt you is not an apology. Pro tip: This isn’t about your opinions; it’s about how the other person feels.

I remember mom saying, "Watch what you say," and "Keep a civil tongue in your head." The rebukes may have stung a little, but she was right. I hope part of what she was trying to teach me stuck.

People With Learning Disabilities and the ‘System.’

jaikishan patel

There's got to be a better way

 

According to federal data analyzed by the Center for Public Integrity, students with disabilities, Black children and on some campuses, Native American and Latino children, have been disproportionately impacted by policing in schools. Leading San Diego County in law enforcement referrals were schools that serve students with behavioral or other special needs — including those who have already encountered the juvenile court system.

 

Nationwide, nearly 230,000 students were reported to law enforcement during the 2017-18 school year, the most recent data available. Black children and students with disabilities were referred at nearly twice their share of the overall student population.   (Center for Public Integrity and USA TODAY and CBS8

 

The subject of the CBS8 report was 13-year-old Joshua Savala. Savala, who went to school in San Diego, is on the autism spectrum. He was often bullied at school.   

 

“A quiet kid with autism, he struggled to be accepted by some of his peers at Lakeside Middle School — so much so that his mother says they reported 16 bullying incidents in one year.” 

 

“The last time, a student pushed Joshua from behind, causing him to fall and hit his head on concrete. He traveled to a children’s hospital in an ambulance that his mother called after he later complained of neck pain.”

 

“Other kids told school officials that Joshua made a verbal threat to “shoot up” the campus after the assault. Joshua denies the claim. Lakeside Middle reported him to police, anyway.”

 

He ended up in the system.

 

“According to the statistics the San Diego Unified School District, Black students comprised about 8% of enrollment but made up nearly 19% of referrals. Students with disabilities made up more than 30% of referrals but only 14% of the population.  

 

The bulk of the district’s alternative schools reported rates more than 20 times the national average.”  (CBS8)

A Better Future?

 

The police should not be expected to take on the full load of responsibility for these situations. The schools bear responsibility for keeping everybody safe. That does not mean the police are exempt. Here’s what one police force in Great Britain is doing.

South Yorkshire Police is committed to becoming more accessible to those with autism as part of our journey to being a recognized ‘Autism Friendly’ organization.

There are many people affected by autism across South Yorkshire.

Protecting those who are vulnerable is a force priority, and we want to ensure we can adequately meet the needs of those people who may benefit from additional support in their interactions with us.

So far as a force we have:

• Introduced Autism Alert Cards, enabling police and other emergency services to communicate with autistic residents more effectively and helping those on the autism spectrum feel more comfortable in what could potentially be an extremely stressful situation.
• Provide ‘passports’, a document you can show to people that explains your communication styles and presentations, for situations such as travel hubs or shopping malls where it may not be the police you need.
• Introduced fidget cubes and widgets - easy to read materials to explain what will happen - in custody suites, to help reduce anxiety.
• Installed autism single points of contact or ‘SPOCS’ in all districts who are able to provide specialist knowledge and support to people across the force.
• A regular presence on Local Authority Autism Boards.
• Provided Autism Awareness training across the force to front line staff and staff in custody, enquiry desk and call handler roles.
• Continue to work with NAS and Autism & Learning Disability NHS Teams on projects to improve outcomes for those that have contact with the Criminal Justice System.

Autism Alert Cards are available to anyone of any age, if they are able to provide us with a copy of their formal diagnosis from their GP, information that they are awaiting a diagnosis or similar and a passport sized photo. The cards are free.

I did not address what happens when the learning-disabled age out of the system and become adults.  In a survey of 18,185 inmates in state and federal correctional facilities, researchers found that the prevalence of disability was significantly higher than the non-institutionalized population, finding that 41% of inmates reported having a disability. Learning disabilities were the most commonly reported disability.

Information on the Prevalence of Learning Disabilities in the ...

https://jjeducationblueprint.org › examples › information

 

 

 

 

Character

 

How do you measure success? Is success measured, in part, by your character? Is your character how others measure you?

The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.

- Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

Reclaiming Patriotism

It's not about taking America back

Moving toward an inclusive future.

Voice of the day (Sojourners) In Beloved Community, radically inclusive and resilient love is the norm. It is a community in which we are constantly seeking to build and restore right relationships. - Adam Russell Taylor, A More Perfect Union (2021) I remember a debate we had in college. It was about the Vietnam War. Was it a test of our patriotism to blindly accept the justification for the war? If I was opposed to the war because of racism toward Asians and African Americans. was I unpatriotic? Or was I the patriotic one who believed in the ideals expressed at our founding, that all of us are created equal. Dr. King had expressed his opposition to the war just a few years earlier. "On 4 April 1967 Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his seminal speech at Riverside Church condemning the Vietnam War. Declaring “my conscience leaves me no other choice,” King described the war’s deleterious effects on both America’s poor and Vietnamese peasants and insisted that it was morally imperative for the United States to take radical steps to halt the war through nonviolent means." The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute This issue of defining patriotism has come up again during the Trump administration and the months that followed. Communities and common interests lead to progress and hope for the future. It's a really radical concept for whose who believe in the lone wolf approach. Teddy Roosevelt used to talk about rugged individualism, but then became a leading proponent of progressivism. The four major goals of the progressives were to promote the ideas of morality, economic reform , efficiency and social welfare. This country became stronger in times of need because we were able to work together, not alone. For more on Adam Russell Taylor's essay on radical love's rebuilding our country see his article, Is Redemptive Patriotism Possible? “Patriotism comes in many forms. Its most destructive, often nationalistic forms erode the very foundation upon which the Beloved Community is built and suffocate efforts to form a more perfect union. Redeeming patriotism requires reframing our love for the best of America’s ideals and aspirations. It requires understanding that the right to critique America is part of the brilliance of America. … Redeeming patriotism requires greater willingness to have courageous and civil conversations about the very ideals that make us love America. It refuses pointless arguments over who loves America more. As a result, redeeming patriotism represents a vital part of creating the atmosphere in which a more perfect union and the Beloved Community can breathe.” Taylor “REDEEMING PATRIOTISM REQUIRES REFRAMING OUR LOVE FOR THE BEST OF AMERICA’S IDEALS AND ASPIRATIONS.” —ADAM RUSSELL TAYLOR IN A MORE PERFECT UNION