Tag: Colorado

Unseen hands

that manipulate interest rates, oil price, appropriate and earmark budgets for the commons.

Adam Smith must be talking about the abstract “invisible hand” of a free market, while in reality, we all feel there are levers behind the scene with successive hands, tinkling and adjusting. Some are automated, by self-improving algorithms.

One example of the devastating works of this unseen hand was seven or eight years ago, when people in Southern California driving to Arizona and Las Vegas to buy houses. People who were NINJ (No job, no income).

The unseen hand that was supposed to regulate, didn’t.

Now, they uncover a bunch of Ponzi schemes. Quickly, these poster boys are put away, or at least, taken out of their nice homes in Colorado.

I do buy things to sustain. Hence, I am a consumer, but refuse to be called consumerist. I don’t follow the cult of purchase for purchase’s sakes.

I don’t buy to stimulate anything. If the economy can’t get cranked by itself (with 7 Billion of us buying things day in and out), then all the unseen hands in the world can’t help it.

At least, there is some good news from the Michigan Consumer Confidence Index. And Wall Street chart starts looks like a slanted V-shaped recovery. Let’s hope so. Rally, rally, rally. Oil price goes up. Confidence is up. So is the temperature.

If you don’t hit the store by 10AM, forget it. The USA weather maps shows red-hot regions in the South. It’s global warming. And we need those unseen hands to regulate the thermostat as well. I am not against hands. Just encourage them to tinkle with the right buttons, while letting the market regulate itself, in the noble Adam Smith tradition.

Blind in wilderness

Years ago, I took a course in Wilderness Survival.

One of the classmates was a blind Korean guy.  The others all white males.

We were to spend the entire five days in the White Mountain of New Hampshire,

with one solo day. Our “final” was rock repelling.

I kept looking in my teammate’s eyes and wondered how in the world he could survive the course, its obstacles and the rest of his life in urban jungle.

To make a long story short. We all passed eventually, but not without a hitch.

That hitch happened to be me. I repelled down straying from everyone else’s path (of least resistance). My instructor leaned down and gave me personal feedback while I was dangling in mid-air.  This wasn’t  my first time. Later, at an MCI white-water rafting trip, I got bumped out of the inflated raft into the gushing icy-cold Colorado waters. Luckily, my teammates circled the raft and pulled me back in.

Every once in a while, when facing seemingly insurmountable  challenges, I tap into that dormant strength to overcome fear. We all learned about our inner strength from that course, including our blind teammate who said “I see” a lot.

He was an inspiration to us all (at least, he wasn’t afraid of the pitch-dark solo).

People without sight, without limp remind us that fear is an emotion to co-exist with hope.

The fear of losing face is big in societies like Vietnam‘s.

Here it is common that a company employs mostly relatives.

Or vice versa, long-time employees are regarded as families.

Your identity is that of so and so’s cousin, aunt, uncle or nephew.

The  relationship web got more entangled when your ancestors had multiple marriages. Vietnamese language has precise naming for older/younger brothers and sisters (Anh/Em).

And to be on the safe side, just address everyone as if he/she were older.

What does this have to do with wilderness survival?

I am reentering a society built on collective identity.

My atomized self needs some attitude adjustment.

Instinctively, I weighed the way I address people, reading their non-verbal responses.

To survive here, I have to flash back to that “solo”night in the mountain, without light and without human interaction. Just inner noise and inner voice.

In Vietnam, self-mastery is hailed as a core virtue and a corner-stone for leadership (Tu Than, Te Gia, Bnh Quoc, Tri Thien Ha). Super-imposing this on Western leaders today (for instance my Penn State Defense Coach, who decided to go on the offense with young boys), we probably can narrow the field quite a bit.

Every culture has its gem. But if one is blind, it doesn’t matter  wilderness or waterfront, one still can’t see.

I know one thing from that wilderness survival class: my Korean teammate did not judge me by sight e.g the color of my skin or any other outward factors.