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Sunday, March 25, 2018

March For Our Lives-March 24, 2018


As I spent my Saturday morning and afternoon watching the coverage of the March For Our Lives march, many thoughts swirl in my mind.

I am obviously moved by the courage of the Parkland high school students. It seems disrespectful to call them kids as they have seen and experienced horrors that no “kid” should ever have to experience.  But it is their response to this experience that defines them in my mind’s eye. They have so far handled themselves with aplomb and maturity that far belies their age and experience, as they have been left twirling in the piranha feeding frenzy of the media cycle and the cynical political machinations of the politicians. They showed their gut wrenching  emotions over the loss of their lost friends and school mates, as they should. In fact they have responded with greater maturity and emotional strength that I could have ever mustered in response to the right wing conspiracy theorist trolls who tried to tear them down publicly, the reactionary bobbing heads from Fox, the bottom feeding NRA, and the bought and paid for  public officials looking for photo opportunities. Yet, in spite of it all, these Marjory Stoneman Douglas students persisted.

The officialdom did their usual song and dance of thoughts and prayers, they paraded out their crocodile tears, built the same arguments against sane gun policies, and expected the Majory Stoneman Douglas students to go away. But this time it is different. By all indications, the inertia of the antipathy towards the heightening gun violence in our society has reached the saturation point. And this time,  the critical mistake that all talking heads and politicians  are making is that they underestimated these young people.

The march that is the culmination of a couple of months of work and planning came off miraculously without a hitch, it brought a great number of people together throughout the country, in numbers that twice that of the sparsely attended Trump inauguration, in 800 marches around the country. They did this without sleep, in complete PTSD from the still fresh memories of the assault on their school. They are also dealing with the realization that the tepid and ineffective responses are all that they were going to receive from the public officials, and the adults in our society had lost their courage when faced with the awesome bank account of the NRA. In their response, they have already surpassed most adults in the fair and savvy way they addressed their own privilege and became far more inclusive of those voices that have been silenced in the media because of their race and poverty. They avoided the awkward accusations made against the Women’s march by including those young people involved in Black Lives Matter and those high schoolers in the City of Chicago. This is a movement that is well thought out and intelligently conceived.

Which brings to me to my own response.

My response was shame, a shame rooted in the fact that my own generation was unable and unwilling to make our society safe for all of us. My generation also lacked the strength and determination to face down a formidable foe that is well practiced in fund raising and media manipulation. My generation did not step up when the gun lobby bought the politicians, my generation took a step backwards when they presented their nonsensical rationale for their arguments, and my generation let fear rule our thinking. My generation let it all happen. My generation let them grow large and fearsome because my generation feared the unknown more than the gun lobby, and now my generation fear both and are stuck with both. My generation let them dictate the ground rules of engagement and we let them spin the debate to their best advantage. My generation is ruled by fear.
But this generation doesn’t have the preconceived notions that my generation did, they don’t know enough to be fearful, in fact, they are more pissed off than afraid because it is their lives hanging on the line because they are the one being mowed down by assault weapons. They are in the line of fire, with no certainty of safety in sight.

I am both ashamed and inspired by their actions. I see hope that is a response to this quagmire, fully knowing that this is a long campaign and not just a single engagement. I am inspired to do more even though It is both energizing and terrifying to be led by ones so young and inexperienced in the worldly ways of media and the politics, but then again, that is their advantage: they don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t care.  This is what makes them so successful in the immediacy of now.

Being an avid student of history, I do think about what is coming next, how will the struggle evolve and develop? Will the short attention span of our collective consciousness be outlasted by the cynical entrenched establishment, who intrinsically know that history is on their side and that the fickleness of society’s attention span is their best weapon against us.

I remember the lessons from the parts of history where the unstoppable force of the young moved the immovable object that is the status quo, at least for a moment. I am thinking about the Pro-Democracy movement of the Chinese students in Tiananmen Square, the Prague Spring, anti-Vietnam war movement, the civil rights movement, and on and on.

If the past is going to be an indicator, there does not seem to be much hope. The democracy activists from Tiananmen have either left China and become entrepreneurs in the west or are incarcerated in China. The call for Democracy has only made for the present dictatorship of Xi Jinping. Prague Spring was crushed under the steel treads of Russian tanks. The anti-War movement activists became the baby-boomers, part of the reason why we are where we are today: chasing the almighty dollar and uninterested in the future. The promise of the civil rights movement has made significant progress, but it the civil rights movement had succeeded there would not be the need for Black Lives Matter, nor necessitate the protesting of the March For Our Lives. Indeed, as an old man who had seen history unfolds in all of its disappointment, there is very little that says that this movement will succeed.

Yet, this movement feels different. I may be fooling myself, but this does have a certain firmness of resolve and clear eyed focus which, I can only, withstand the erosion of purpose from the unending waves of cynicism and entrenched inertia of doing nothing. I have hope, perhaps in the brilliance of the Majory Stoneman Douglas students, perhaps in the fresh faced resolve of Naomi Wadler, perhaps in the emotional defiance of Emma Gonzalez, perhaps in the willingness of the privileged to share the stage with the underprivileged, perhaps this is the tipping point in our lives, one of those rare moments in history where the voice of the disenfranchised majority can be shouted over the clichéd response of the establishment. Perhaps this is the Black Swan moment of change in business as usual.
I certainly hope that this is all true.

Friday, March 2, 2018

Beta Ball: How Silicon Valley and Science Built One of the Greatest Basketball Teams in History-Erik Malinowski


I ran out and bought this book when I saw the premise and the title.  Especially the sub-title: How Silicon Valley and Science Built One of the Greatest Basketball Teams in History.

The subject is the Golden State Warriors, and it promised to describe the method and thought process of how the franchise was built and nurtured by Lacob and Gruber.

Unfortunately, the book fell short of the promise made by the sub-title. In fact, the book didn’t even come close to fulfilling its promise, which is too bad because that would have made a much more interesting and much more unique sports book. The book, as I had imagined, would probably not make the amount of green that the publishers envisioned, but it would have been a more standout description of how to do the right things and being bold in accomplishing a goal purposefully.
It isn’t a bad book, in fact Malinowski does have great chops, and he has done copious amounts of interviews and research, and he has the ability to write an interesting story, His recitations of the Golden State history was better than the usual sports writing. In fact his prowess with the language is a redeeming feature of the book.

What is missing is the part about the business decisions, what made the new owners of the Warriors make the decisions they made and linking it to their successes in the Silicon Valley. To be fair, Malinowski did yeoman work in relaying the thinking  regarding the personnel decisions: general manager, coach, players, and staff. What he did not do was go further into depth into the stories of the people involved. He didn’t completely breeze by their stories, he did spend some time on Bob Myers, Steve Kerr, Stephan Curry, and other well-known figures but he failed to delve into the roles of the other assistants and how they fit into the picture, others have done much deeper stories on them since the book came out. Kerr’s unique take on the role of the assistant is partially responsible for the successes of team the last few years and the interaction is of great interest and a salient topic that would have been very interesting: how to coach the team that coaches the team.

As to the claim of science’s role in the success, Malinowski glossed over the what’s of the technology, describing in the least interesting manner possible what the technology is and what it did, he all but ignored how the coaching staff and the players used the technology to improve their games as well as any new ideas that have been sparked by having the technology. In this era of Big Data, it would have been very interesting to delve into how the statistics staff dove into the data and determined which of the data is the noise and which of the data is the signal. It is disappointing since he seemed to have good access to the entire organization, but he chose not to go into deeper investigation of those topics.

Those topics would have clearly differentiated this book from all the other sports books reciting the successes of a winning team.

This book could have put some distance between it and any of the other sports books and truly be a groundbreaking reportage of what made the Golden State Warriors the Golden State Warriors. This book could have been a contender, but it settled for sales and a role as an also-ran.