Barbara Ehrenreich on too much positive thinking

Barbara Ehrenreich argues against excessive positive thinking.

Positive thinking usually has a, well, positive connotation.

That’s a position that’s sorely unearned, according to the skeptical and prolific Barbara Ehrenreich.  In her book, Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Ruined America, she holds positive thinking responsible for everything from bad health to the recent economic collapse from which we are still trying to emerge.

Ehrenreich’s first and perhaps most potent chapter describes her battle with breast cancer.  Far from finding it a source of new meaning, she felt anger and fear, among many other emotions.  Sharing these thoughts while taking a swipe at the ribbons people wear earned her a recommendation to run, not walk to therapy from one of the excessively upbeat people.  In this chapter she also takes on Bernie Siegel and others who maintain that good cheer can lead to better health outcomes, letting us know that she has a dusty science PhD. in the process.   She does score points with me in this chapter by talking about the strain that acting cheerful when you don’t feel that way can take.

From there she moves on to trace the history of positive thinking to its Calvinist roots.  Ironically, she maintains that the philosophy of positive thinking, which got its first popular boost from Norman Vincent Peale, carries with it many of the same judgmental elements of the Calvinism it sought to shed.

Aidan get his driver’s license-pictures forthcoming!

Aidan shows off his driver's license.

His hands shook at the beginning of the road test, and the inspector had to tell him to drive closer to the speed limit of 35 miles per hour, but Aidan is now one of the latest licensed drivers in the Land of Lincoln.

The ride over to the registry where he had passed his permit test nearly a year ago was a tad ponderous.  Preparing for the test, Aidan made sure not to drive over the speed limit on Golf Road, with the result that a line of cars with impatient drivers assembled behind him in the fast lane.  After waiting through three different lines, one of which directed us to the same spot where he had taken the permit test, we both were in the car waiting for his examiner.

A few minutes later, George, a portly man with glasses and a South Asian accent, entered the car.

“Excuse me, Sir, but you have to leave,” he said after telling me that we did not need to show him the car’s registration.

Fifteen minutes and a call to Dunreith later, Aidan returned, that much closer to independence and adulthood.

He took the license picture-”a real bro shot” he said admiringly-before heading back into the car to drive us home at a much brisker pace than the first trip.

On the way back house, we started on our first post-license topics.

Were we planning to buy him a credit card for gas (Aidan’s vote was Yes, and had a different view of my idea that he would start paying for gas.)?  Should he follow the law and only drive with one passenger with  in the car? (I said Yes, while his vote was an emphatic No.)?   How often would he pick us up and and run errands for us (His answer: Never.  Mine: more often than that)?

These topics were broached amiably enough, with a few agreements to disagree and some concessions in concept on both sides.

I spoke to our insurance agent, who put Aidan on the policy.  Aidan picked up his check from his job as a camp counselor-another sign of evidence of his increased maturity-deposited it at Chase, and got ready to head out with the car to meet a friend.

I congratulated him again and we hugged before he left.

“I’m scared to be driving by myself,” he said, before reassuring me that he would do his best not to blow the car’s speakers out by the time he turned the corner at the end of the block.

“I’ll be here if you need anything,”

Aidan nodded before walking out the front door and onto the evening’s adventures.  Memories of his first day of first grade, another landmark event when he had expressed fear before moving forward, pride in his accomplishment, sadness at time’s passage and images of Dad’s taking me on the same experience 26 years before swirled around in my head.

I watched as Aidan’s form retreated like a sailboat in the ocean, less and less visible until I could no longer see him.  The crickets began their evening sonata, the sounds ascending into the overcast sky.  I closed the door.

Gov. Quinn signs nursing home reform legislation.

Surrounded by a host of lawmakers and speaking to a packed room, Gov. Pat Quinn signed sweeping nursing home reform legislation today.

Among the key provisions: an increase during the next four years in daily care for residents required skilled care from 2.5 hours to 3.8 hours.

Three of the people at the event were members of Mr. Bennie Saxon’s family.  A World War II veteran,  Saxon fell from a fourth-floor window to his death at the Alden Wentworth facility last May.   The home, and another owned by Floyd Schlossberg, the area’s biggest nursing homes operator were the site of the first two protests held by the Civic Action Network.

The law does not by itself end nursing home disparities or abuse, but it does create a legal standard to which owners, workers and residents must be accountable.

We worked long and hard with the organizers and members of the Civic Action Network on the issue of racial disparities last year at The Chicago Reporter, it feels tremendously gratifying to have been a small part of this process.

Tracy Van Slyke and Jessica Clark lay out the progressive media landscape

Tracy Van Slyke and Jessica Clark break down the progressive media scene in Beyond the Echo Chamber.

Of all the fields that have been effected by the seismic changes wrought by the advent and rise of the Internet, journalism may be among the very top.

I see it every day at The Chicago Reporter.

We are online constantly for all kinds of data and other information retrieval.  But, far beyond that, the very industry has had its underpinnings wrenched loose, with no clear destination or landing point.   In some ways, the impact can be seen most clearly with our interns, who, more and more, have their hearts in journalism, but their bodies in law or some other, more stable future venture.

Into this decidedly turbulent and constantly evolving landscape wade Tracy Van Slyke and Jessica Clark. The former upper-level workers at In These Times are not looking at all of media, but rather at media of the progressive stripe.

In Beyond The Echo Chamber, they combine thoughtful analysis and prescriptive strategies for how to explain, understand and have impact in our increasingly information-driven world.

Profiles in Courage, Paul Tamburello

Paul Tamburello's got plenty of courage.

Courage takes many different forms.

For Atticus Finch, courage is “when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.”

For John F. Kennedy, courage was political.  In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage, the then-future president wrote about eight past U.S. Senators who had put the country’s interests in front of their own political advancement, or even survival.

I particularly enjoyed the chapters about Daniel Webster speaking in favor of the Compromise of 1850, the third in a series of compromises that forestalled what eventually became our nation’s bloodiest conflict, and Edmund G. Ross, whose vote to acquit Andrew Johnson preserved the power of that office during a critical period in the nation’s history.

Courage also means confronting one’s physical limitations and still sucking the marrow out of life.

Fourth grade teacher, mentor and friend Paul Tamburello has been doing just that for the past 17 years.

Learning about The Power of Pull

The authors tell us about the The Power of Pull.

It’s little secret that our world has seen enormous transformation due to technology during the past couple of decades.

In addition to the billions of dollars that have been made by entrepreneurs like Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the fabled duo who reportedly created Google in their Stanford dorm room, a cottage industry of books by and about the changes wrought by technology have sprung up in recent years.

I have written about some of them, like Bernard Girard’s  The Google Way and Bill Wasik’s And Then There’s This.

John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison have written a book that does not so much look at how to maneuver within this changed world, but rather how to align one profession with one’s passion on the way to reaching our full potential.   The work discusses technology, but as a vehicle to achieve these larger goals.

The idea is The Power of Pull.

Rokeby Article, Tracy Kidder’s House

Tracy Kidder depicts the joys and challenges of home construction in House.

I spoke this morning via Skype with dear friend Dan Middleton.

In addition to being one of my favorite people on the planet, “Dano” is a former resident of Rokeby, an enormous and multi-room mansion that was the subject of a largely critical article this past week in The New York Times.  Among other charges, the piece asserts that the home’s owning family, the Aldriches, of whom one relative is Dan’s stepfather, has insufficient funds to maintain the place.  The three-page story goes on to paint a vivid picture of a largely ramshackle home that has seen far better days and that is more a bridge to an opulent past than to a vital present.

Dan’s stepfather has written a letter to the Times asking for a series of corrections, if not an editorial note, to address what he sees as factual and copy editing inaccuracies.

Although it is unclear whether Aldrich’s letter will be published, it is far more clear that homeownership is far from an undifferentiated set of joyful experiences.

Dean of Western Massachusetts writers Tracy Kidder wrote House not about the maintenance of an old home like Rokeby, but about the design and creation of a new home.   As almost always with Kidder’s books, the result is a fascinating stew of characters, technical information and the celebration of ordinary moments.

Born Into Brothels, Jon’s work at Revere, Random Family.

Zana Briski's Born Into Brothels has similarities to my brother Jon's work and that of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.

There are many incredibly painful moments in Zana Briski’s brave, wrenching and haunting film, Born to Brothels.

One of them happens when Suchitra, one of the eight children born to prostitutes in Calcutta’s slums faces the prospect, and probable reality, of being forced by her aunt to join “the line” of women who sells themselves for others’ profits.  A male voice asks the budding photographer if she sees a way out of her situation.  The girl’s face clouds as she thinks and hopes and ponders before saying, with quiet resignation, “No.”

We learn at the film’s end that Suchitra’s aunt did not allow her to leave the brothel.  Watching the film’s special features reveals that three years later her aunt had not made her join the line, and my feeling was that that was a temporary condition.

The sense of bright, beautiful and resilient children being almost inexorably swallowed up by social forces far greater than them and not of their creation pulses through Briski’s film, even as she offers photography and tenacious intervention as tiny antidotes that knock a few of the children away from their socially prescribed destiny.

The film, which garnered dozens of awards, including the 2005 Academy Award for Documentary Feature, is based on the premise that art and love can be tools for individual, if not collective, transformation.

Michele Hernandez Aces the College Application Book

Michele Hernandez's book is accessible and useful.

I have to be honest and say I was prepared to have some problems with Michele Hernandez’s book,  Acing the College Application.

After all, this was the same woman whose previous book Jay Mathews excerpted with a snarky, snooty quote about how applicants to selective schools should act when they are confronted with an interviewer who is less than intelligent than the student (The answer was not to worry because that person probably didn’t attend a selective institution anyway!).

But I will say that I found the book engaging, practical and remarkably free of those types of statements.

In straightforward prose, Hernandez marches incoming seniors through each step of the application process.  Drawing on her four years at Dartmouth,  Hernandez talks about, among other topics, the relative importance of academics and extracurricular activities, how to develop and share an activities list that will showcase the student’s talents, interview myths, ingredients and examples of effective essays, and how to handle the Common Application.

I will be interested to read what others have to say, and, so far, this has seemed to me to be the most helpful book I have yet read.

I’ve got a few left, though, and will keep you posted.

What books, articles, videos or other resources have you found helpful in the application process?