View from a Farley The Current Events and Opinion Weblog of Chris Farley

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

There is a light at the end of the tunnel.  My exams are nearly over, then I will be able to write again while juggling several graduation parties.  These past few weeks are making me think I need a scheduler.  For those concerned, by Diet Coke intake is at or below 4 cans per day.  Another announcement:  I’m shopping for somebody to do a custom Wordpress theme.  If you know of anybody that does a good job, e-mail me or leave a comment.

As I study for exams like science or math, it often helps me to have a TV show or movie playing in the background.  This year, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip has been satisfying my need so I’ve included an episode below.  The first embed is the pilot episode, but I think the second episode (in the second embed) is much better.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip: Pilot

 

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip: The Cold Open

Vacation!

My school’s summer vacation is just a few weeks away, but my blog vacation is starting now. But it’s not a real vacation. It’s a “vacation.”

Anybody who has ever been in school at almost any level knows that finals are the storm before the calm. A few weeks of intense studying, a few days of intense testing, and then nothing. Perhaps a few parties or graduation, but nothing that even approaches the intensity of days past.

I take my exams seriously. In fact, I’m willing to say that I take them too seriously, but I’m certainly not changing any time soon. This weekend was a crazy studying weekend (I think I should just have a truck full of index cards come to my house) and it will continue through the week. Next weekend is Memorial Day weekend and the nation will be having barbeques and setting off fireworks (or not, see here).  I, on the other hand, will be studying.

My crazy, irrational thinking is preventing me from doing anything other than studying.  Every time I start writing a blog post, I stop because I think it is an unconscionable waste of time to not be studying.  Therefore, I’m taking a little vacation.  Roughly two weeks.  But it’s not a real vacation because I will still be posting, but the posts will be less frequent and not of the depth that some have come to expect.  It’s not a vacation from writing, but it will probably turn out to be a vacation from writing well because the writing will have to fit into my odd breaks or when I have free time but can’t bring myself to study.

I ask you to stick with me during this time of flash cards, color coded study sheets, number two pencils, and most importantly, a lot of Diet Coke.

Can You Feel the Love Tonight?

I’m not writing a long post today.  In fact, I hadn’t intended to write a post at all, but when I saw that John Edwards had endorsed Barack Obama, I had to weigh in.  The past few weeks and even months have been hard to watch.  It’s been amazing to watch the process go on this long and watch voters across the country make informed decisions, but I worry about how much damage this election has done to the Democratic Party.

There’s no doubt that the bickering the country has endured between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has been bad for Democrats.  It appears that the Democrats are disorganized and childish and later on John McCain will step in as the voice of experience.  I will resist the urge to talk about John McCain, but I assure you it’s quite difficult.  I am somewhat comforted by the fact that the media has portrayed the Democratic nomination battle as sparring between the two candidates and I don’t think that has been associated with the party as a whole in media reports.  The fact that John McCain has been inactive is helping for the time being, but he will make this time come back to haunt the nominee.  The number of people who have been brought into the Democratic party by this nomination process also helps lessen the impact of the bitterness these past two weeks.  Overall, the effect on the party is probably a wash, but to some it will certainly leave an unfavorable impression of the Democratic party.

Senator Obama was briefly floundering in his battle for the nomination.  Reverend Wright took the spotlight and the Obama campaign was left scrambling for cover.  After his recent win in North Carolina and his better than expected performance in Indiana, he’s back on the road to the nomination.  Senator Clinton has shown signs of preparing for her withdrawal by stating repeatedly in recent weeks that she will work hard for whomever is the nominee.  If you do the math, the race is over.  Here’s why:

• If Clinton and Obama split the vote 50/50 in every remaining contest (Kentucky, Montana, Puerto Rick, Oregon, South Dakota) and also split the remaining super delegates 50/50, then Obama wins the nomination by 165 delegates.
• For a more realistic scenario, I used information from Pollster.com, which takes averages of all the major polls, and pretended those were actual results for the remaining contests.  I left Puerto Rico, Montana, and South Dakota as 50/50 because of the number of undecideds and lack of good polling information, which obviously makes this less useful.  However, with Clinton winning by 20 points in Kentucky and Obama leading by 6 points in Oregon, with superdelegates still split, Obama wins the nomination by 157 delegates.  This is with superdelegates still split.
• Even if Clinton wins every delegate in Kentucky, Montana, Oregon, and South Dakota, with superdelegates split, Obama wins the nomination.
• I split the remaining superdelegates 50/50 in all of the above scenarios, which is very favorable to Clinton.  Given the Edwards endorsement, Clinton will be lucky to get 40% of the remaining delegates.

The people at Clinton’s campaign headquarters can do the math better than the fun interactive tool that CNN has, so I’m sure they know this already.  Clinton should graciously bow out and support Obama or risk damaging her political future.

I’m very happy that Barack Obama has the endorsement of John Edwards.  This brings us one step closer to having closure to the Democratic nomination and defeating John McCain, which is absolutely essential.  I am officially predicting Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee and Clinton will drop out on or before June 3rd.  Now the real question is this: Will Edwards be the Vice Presidential nominee?

 

Myanmar (The Unplanned Part 2)

This is the second part to the Myanmar (which I’m now calling Burma) post. It wasn’t supposed to be in two parts, but after receiving some comments and e-mails about the first one, I’ve decided write this very opinionated post, in contrast to the last one which mostly provided basic information. I suggest you read both.

The Burmese governement is ridiculously corrupt and they operate only for self-interest, not in the interest of the people who live there. Since 1962, Burma has been under a military dictatorship and the situation has gone from bad to worse. Unfortunately, I think that there is no hope for the Burmese people unless they plot an incredibly well planned overthrow of the current government.

As things stand now, the people are being oppressed and the military is doing the oppressing. The people don’t like the current government, but they tolerate it because the government hasn’t been involved in their everyday lives for years. If they ever want to be truly free, it would require untrained citizens overthrowing a miltary government.

Right now the Burmese people need their government more than ever. I hope that the Burmese government starts letting in aid to the people who need it most. I’m sure that this will eventually happen in some form, but the relief workers will not be nearly as free as they need to be to do their jobs properly and the victims of the cyclone needed aid ten days ago. Some estimates say that if disease sets in the death toll could rise to a million. I’m sure that’s an upper limit, but either way there are thousands of people dead or dying who don’t need to be.

The international community also needs to step to the plate. I can’t support military intervention in Burma without knowing a lot more about the topic, but sanctions are a slippery slope. Some corporations have been accused of financing the Burmese government, despite their human rights violations, and the United States has considered sanctions in the past, though China is against them. So now we have to decide if offending China or hurting the Burmese government is better. I’m not really in a position to judge, but I would err on the side of no sanctions. We don’t want to offend China, but even more importantly, we could end up hurting the people of Burma rather than their government.

Given the difficulty of the situation, there are no easy solutions. It’s not a situation where convincing the right people will lead to a favorable solution. Of course, it’s possible that I’m missing something because I’m not a Burma expert, but based on what I know, an overthrow of the current government will have to be a revolution by the people of Burma.

Myanmar

Once again I enter into discussion about a topic with which I have no formal training. My opinions are based on what I have discovered in a few hours of reading, so if you disagree with me, be sure to let me know why.

Nine days after a cyclone that has or will kill anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 people the first relief flights from the United States are finally landing. If you’ve been following the news, you’ll have heard about the military leaders of Myanmar seizing all aid shipments into the country causing the United Nations to cease relief flights. The junta is apparently afraid what several thousand relief workers will do to their power in the country.

“Power” is an interesting term when applied to the government of Myanmar. The capital, which is Naypyidaw, is in the middle of the country. Supposedly this is supposed to make every part of the country easily accessible, but it is about 10 hours away from other major cities like Rangoon or Mandalay. Quite simply, it’s in the middle of nowhere and public access to the capital is extremely limited. There’s a feeling that the move from the old capital city in 2005 was motivated by fears of an invasion from the United States or another Asian power. China has recently been pressuring the military government to set up a parliamentary system and they did, but it’s set up so that the military enforces all laws and can invoke martial law at any time. A bit like the system of government George Bush would set up if he could.

There is opposition to the current government in the form of the Burma Party. (Myanmar and Burma are used pretty much interchangeably. There is an international debate as to the name that should be used; I’ve used Myanmar because I’ve seen it most frequently in coverage of Cyclone Nargis). Opposition groups continue to use the name Burma as a way to show that they do not recognize the current government. Aung San Suu Kyi has pushed for democracy for years and her National League for Democracy even won an election in 1990, but was never allowed to govern. She has been kept under house arrest, but General Than, the leader of the junta, is rumored to be willing to meet with her, though it’s unclear if those rumors are genuine. Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts in 1991.

There was a professor from Carleton College on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer tonight named Tun Myint. His position was that the military was not really in power in a day-to-day way. Myint mentioned how the people of Myanmar are generally self-governing for the everyday matters that would be referred to a government entity in the United States. Because the capital is so remote (the capital is also the military base of the country), there is not much connection from the people to the government. In recent years, according to Myint, the military has lost favor with the people because they no longer view the current government as something compatible with their culture and their religious beliefs. It may also have something to do with the living conditions which were described like this:

We have seen since 1962 the mismanaging of the economy and natural resources has led Burma to now the standard of living in Burma is lower than even Cambodia and Laos.

And the UN thinks the government isn’t in control either. There are certainly worries of corruption (which is precisely why no relief organization feels comfortable just handing over their supplies to the junta), but the Myanmarese government is financed in part by a booming drug trade. The amount of drug production decreased 80% from 1998 to 2006, but the number of productive hectares has increased 29% this year because of corruption, poverty, and lack of government control. There have also been several uprisings that have been quelled, sometimes by payoffs.

In the course of doing research for a presenation I’m giving about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, I made a contact with a Princeton graduate in Thailand working as an English teacher for a few years. He remarked on how the tsunami created an enormous opportunity for immigrants from Myanmar to live in Thailand and replace the lost population. The borders are, according to him, porous and I imagine Thailand will be seeing more immigration in the coming years.

The international community is divided on how to resolve the Myanmar problem. With the cyclone and relief bringing the issue back into the spotlight, it’s likely that there will be increased calls for government reform. I doubt it will happen. The government isolated themselves specifically for the purpose of resisting rebellion or intervention of any kind. China opposes sanctions, saying “sanctions or pressure will not help to resolve the issue.” I’m guessing that’s why they’ve taken an interest in trying to make the Myanmarese government be, or at least appear, more democratic. I don’t know what their interests are in Myanmar, but China is intent on relieving international pressure for sanctions.

Confirmation

In this post I try to explain why I did not get confirmed. The decision was a reflection of my personal feeling that organized religion is not necessary, but it should not be taken as trying to belittle those who appreciate and feel the power of organized religion. I should also add that the leadership of my confirmation class could not have been more helpful and supportive.

The Background

My church is an Episcopal church, the relative of the Church of England, though the Episcopal Church of the United States (ECUSA) does not answer to the Archbishop of Canterbury. ECUSA is an independent entity, connected to, but not governed by, Anglican churches in the world. ECUSA is tolerant compared to other religious organizations (women have been admitted as clergy members and bishops for years and several churches have ordained homosexual priests), so I will give them credit for that.

At the beginning of the year, my confirmation class met only a few times. The competition with fall sports proved to be too much for the church to compete with. Even parents often placed priority on football games rather than a confirmation class. Almost immediately it became clear to me that my church handled confirmation in a completely different manner than most other churches.

When I talked about confirmation at school, the collective moans and groans of getting up early to go to church were anticipated, but my other Christian friends told me that confirmation was becoming more like another class than anything else. They had tests in confirmation! Tests on faith! I thought that was crazy because faith didn’t seem like something that should be tested, but I was also grateful that my confirmation class was structured like a discussion group. We would gather after church starting in January and discuss the structure of the church, the readings, and our questions about faith. No tests, hardly any requirements. At the end of the class, we certainly wouldn’t be able to recite bible verses, but we were able to have intelligent conversations. The confirmation leaders/teachers are members of the congregation (they lead discussions and have one-on-one conversations with confirmands) and members of the clergy would teach lessons.

The class was a good experience. Even though there was always the possibility I would not get confirmed, I did the class at my parents’ behest. A few people asked why I did the class even though I wasn’t going to be confirmed. Simply put, the experience gained through the class allowed me to make an informed to decision to not be confirmed.

 

 

Why I Didn’t Get Confirmed

Just to avoid the perception that I didn’t get confirmed because it was the easy way out, I will mention that I still sat in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for 3 hours while everyone else in my class got confirmed. The bishop likes to take his time. I guess compared to eternal peace in heaven, three hours for a confirmation service doesn’t seem like much to him. Below are the reasons I decided not to be confirmed.

Ritual

My confirmation leaders talked a lot about the right to disagree. They told us that we didn’t have to believe exactly what they believed or what the church believes. If I want to believe that communion wine is just a glorified alcoholic beverage, then that’s fine. If I want to believe that it’s Christ’s blood, I can do that too. I was told that the idea of a church is to have a community searching together, even if the beliefs of the community are not exactly the same or even wildly different.

That sounds very good and it appealed to me as a doubter, but I realized the following week as I was sitting in church with the Nicene Creed in front of me that there was a huge problem with that. The ritual. No matter what you believe, the most prominent part of a church experience is the time actually spent in church and during that time, there is a focus on some things that I do not believe in. I don’t see God as a personified figure like he is portrayed in the Bible. My view of God is more like The Force in Star Wars. I can’t reconcile my views with the views recited every Sunday.

It’s Organized

The simple fact that the Episcopal church is organized is troubling to me. I don’t think that organized religion is a good idea. We can certainly organize ourselves into communities of people who are searching, but those communities can be as small as two friends with some similar ideas. As soon as religion becomes a bureaucracy, the potential for harm becomes as great as the potential for good. We’ve seen this in things like the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. Religion is mostly a private thing for me and I want to keep it that way. I want my religious experience to be about my experiences, not the doctrines of a large group.

Superiority

At one point during the year, one of the other confirmands asked one of the clergy if they thought Episcopalianism was better than other forms of religion. They asked why the particular person was an Episcopalian. The answer was really very sad. The response was that Episcoplianism was better than other relgions, that Episcopalians have it right, and that people of other religions are in various degrees of wrong.

There is no possible way that anyone can say with confidence that their religion is better than everyone else’s. Religion is not something that people can be so sure about that they need to force others to join their religion. People gravitate towards certain religions or beliefs because they personally believe it to be the best for them. But imposing religion on somebody else is, in my opinion, immoral. It is a personal choice and there can be no certainty about which religion is the “best” religion except for each individual.

Not every confirmation leader felt that way and they certainly made that clear, but this particular person is representative of a certain group within the church. I would imagine that this is similar in most religions. Some people believe that their religion is absolutely superior (even to the point where they think everyone else will go to Hell, I’m told). This feeds back into the anti-organized religion argument.

Getting Confirmed Because of Pressure

The exact reason somebody gets confirmed or doesn’t get confirmed isn’t readily apparent. I’m explaining this here in hopes that someone out there has something to add to my thought process, but a lot of other people don’t get the chance to explain. I was talking to a few people after church today and they all had similar stories. One person was confirmed not because of parental pressure, but because of her grandmother. Her grandmother was adamant that she be confirmed and her parents said that after confirmation she would never have to return to church. One person was confirmed, but she almost wasn’t. She spent a lot of time with the confirmation leaders trying to make a decision. A third said they were getting confirmed because “my parents wanted me to” and “it just makes stuff easier.”

It has occured to me that when I hear somebody say they were confirmed because they were pressured, it might be because they actually did want to be confirmed, but they didn’t want to reveal that to their friends. Assuming the people who I was talking to were all telling the truth, however, I think it’s very sad. The importance of confirmation is weakened when people who don’t want to be confirmed are confirmed. I give a lot of credit to the girl who almost didn’t get confirmed. I understand that confirmation is not always about certainty, but it should definitely not be about parental pressure.

 

Why I Almost Did Get Confirmed

As I said above, confirmation is not always about certainty. In conversations with several confirmation leaders I realized that it’s about accepting some basic principles and moving on from there. I almost got confirmed because I’m not certain but I’m willing to hear new ideas. Ultimately, I found that there were some basics that I didn’t believe in, so I’ve moved on.

 

Where I Go from Here

My “faith journey” (I hate that term because it makes me think of awful self help books) is only just beginning. The conversations that I have with friends and my personal experiences will fill any gap left by church. At this point, I’m not looking for a spiritual community. What I believe is fine for me right now. It is what I believe and it works for me. When a conversation or experience causes me to question what I believe I’m sure that I will re-think.

Feel free to comment if you were brave enough to read the entire thing. I’ve been suffering from a bad case of incoherent writing this weekend so if you need clarification let me know. As always, feel free to e-mail if you want to have a longer, more detailed conversation.

Real World

I was at a dinner yesterday night where I started discussing something that I’ve been thinking about for quite some time and I completely messed up the articulation of my point. I figured I might be able to do it more clearly if I wrote it down, so here it is.

The definition of “real world” is different for everybody. For me, my real world is school, View from a Farley, and all of the other extracurricular activities I take on along with a little bit of a social life. Most of the people I know would say something similar. I often forget, however, that my real world lives in parllel to everyone else’s. I live in the same world as a dying person in Myanmar or a homeless person right here in the United States. In my day-to-day life (and I imagine this is similar for other people), the people in Myanmar are not always on my mind.

As I try to become more knowledgeable in any number of fields, I’m finding that it’s important to keep in mind all the “other people.” The people who I don’t see on a daily basis and who I will most likely never see. With so many things that seem so pressing, it is a big challenge to think of people I’ve never met. I’m trying, though.

And then I wonder if thinking about everyone else is enough. There are millions of people dying, what do they care if I’m thinking about them? Shouldn’t I be doing something? And I’m working on trying to help people as effectively as possible, but is it enough? (I’m working on some post-crisis relief for the tsunami zone, but that warrants its own blog post another time).

I’m beginning to think that my thoughts are as poorly articulated here as they were when I first expressed them, but what I’m trying to get at is a need for a complete mind shift. Instead of separate, parallel, real worlds, I need to start thinking of one real world with different parts. I need to make the parts of the real world that I don’t see part of my everyday life.

Let me know what you think. Also a hypothetical something else to think about: Is it worth thinking about something you can’t fix?

Elite

Barack Obama came under fire a few weeks ago for saying:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Obama was criticized for making “elistist” comments and being “liberal.” Interestingly enough, I always though those were good qualities, but just to make sure, I looked in a dictionary. Elitist means “one who believes society should be ruled by a certain class or group enjoying superior intellectual, social, or economic status.” Liberal means “favorable to progress or reform.”

Barack Obama was not wrong in what he said. Perhaps he could have chosen his words better had he been thinking about the political fallout from his statement, but I think it is the truth. After a streak of bad luck people tend to get bitter. In their bitterness, people are drawn to what is familiar to them, something like guns or religion. Then comes the hatred of other people who aren’t like them. Certain people are always looking for someone on which to blame their frustrations.

What got Senator Obama into trouble was not the text, but I think his opponents twisted his words so that it became popular belief that he was characterizing middle America. I can’t speak to what middle America is actually like, but some people are less educated than others and in their frustrations, it is not entirely unreasonable to suggest that some of those people may be exactly as Senator Obama described.

This president in particular has turned politics into something ordinary. Instead of the presidency being a job reserved for well educated people and well prepared individuals, the presidency is now an anyone-can-do-it position. My position is that elite is good. The founders had that in mind. Farmers are good at farming, lawyers are good at being lawyers, doctors are good at being doctors, so by letting them vote for people they trust, they can give up the responsibility of being intimately involved with every issue, which becomes a big loss of time. It’s the problem with direct democracy. Instead, we elect people to know the issues, then represent us. The person who makes those decisions should not be the guy you want to have a beer (sorry, a Diet Coke) with. It should be somebody who really knows what they’re doing.

Elite is not a bad word and it should not be used like one. I don’t want my president to be like me, I want my president to be smarter than me. Somehow, being smart and good at what you do has become bad and people want the friendliest guy to be the most powerful guy, even if he can barely tie his own shoe laces. Someone tell me why that isn’t messed up reasoning.

Spying on Student Grades

Privacy is an issue for everyone. It’s obvious when we express outrage over warrantless wiretapping or we get spooked when Google scans our e-mail and keeps our results. There are few things so universally valued as privacy. It is especially important as teenagers grow to become more independent and less tethered to our adult support systems. It was with outrage that I read this New York Times article describing the lengths to which parents are controlling their children’s lives.

In an environment where attendance and grading are important, it can be a nightmare for teachers and administrators to keep everything organized. Submitting attendance manually or physically writing out grades and calculating averages is a thing of the past. In an age where it is relatively easy to create software solutions for grading and attendance, it’s an unconscionable waste of time to manually do things that can be easily done by computer. The result of these new software solutions (such as PowerSchool, ParentConnect, and Edline) is a vast amount of student data stored and readily accessible.

This is an important issue for me, so I apologize if I become heated in the course of this post. The article describes Nicole Dobbins, hereafter reffered to as Big Mother, and her close relationship with her children, or rather her children’s grades. The school to which Big Mother’s children belong has decided, in an act of complete idiocy and lacking any sort of educational thought or reason, to allow parents to access the vast amount of student data at will, online, through text messages, and e-mails. A grade entered by a teacher appears instantly. Trackers can be set so Big Mother knows when her children get a bad grade.

These programs are a signal of a deeply troubling pathology plaguing the United States. Instead of Big Mother interacting with her children, she takes the lazy approach. Big Mother becomes omniscient and, while benevolent, uses misguided methods of the worst kind. Her approach to parenting is Orwellian and independece seems to be a word not found in her vocabulary. Carrying out conversations with her children is just too much work for Big Mother, it seems. Instead, she spies on her children by day and doesn’t let them forget the bad quiz grade by night. This attitude is the latest chapter in a series of stories about a parenting community that is increasingly grades-obsessed, overbearing, power-hungry, dominnering, autocratic, high-handed, despotic, and oppressive, with troubling behavior bordering on tyrannical and bullying.

Grades are important and every parent should be involved in the lives of their children, but this method of staying involved is disgusting and indicative of an education system failing the very people who it should be trying to help. School is only partly about learning academics. Especially for gifted students, learning the material required by the curriculum is only part of the day, learning to be socially independent and function apart from parental guidance is most important. This spying capability that is gained by parents is a huge step back from the goals of school.

Parents need to get involved in a way that makes a difference. Conversation about school and tests is essential. Communication with teachers is vital. It is despicable that some school districts have even cancelled their parent-teacher conferences because parents felt sufficiently informed by their spying. As I’ve said before in my post about standardized testing, learning cannot be reduced to a grade. Interpretation and understanding of grades is crucial.

Each individual student needs to be in control of their lives and each individual parent has a moral responsibility to not just prepare a child for next year, but for a life of independence. Grades can’t be a substitute for real communication. A certain amount of privacy is the right of every person, including every student. Report cards, requirements for tests and quizzes to be signed, conversations with students and teachers, phone calls, e-mails to parents from teachers, and e-mails to teachers from parents are important, and they are enough. This spying is not right under any moral standard. Big Mother and other parents and schools buying into this system are doing a great disservice to students and to the future generation.

So these educational software solutions should be internal only. When it comes time for report cards or conferences, then parents can unleash their anger or express concern. This provides a balance of independence and good parenting, not laziness. Parents should always be interested, but not over-bearing.

Work Ethic and Expensive Furniture

Every once in a while, there is a person or a company or a philosophy that stands out. Most of the time it’s a tech company like Intense Debate, but this time it’s about something as non-tech as you can get. When I was in Vermont a few months ago I met two extraordinary individuals who run an excellent business.

Furniture is not generally something that I’m very interested in. My family is in the midst of redesigning our first floor and I am drawn more to the home entertainment side of things rather than the furniture side of things. My position is that when we finish the room, people are not going to care what type of arm is on the chairs so long as they are comfortable and don’t fall apart. It takes something special to warrant my attention on a matter as trivial as furniture.

Charles Shackleton and Miranda Thomas (yes, he’s related to the Shackleton of Antartic exploration fame) made me think that perhaps I should be paying a bit more attention. A bit of background: Shackleton came over from Ireland to work in the American crafts market. He started as a glass blower and worked with Simon Pearce, another Vermont craftsman. He branched out into furniture and left glassblowing permanently to start his own company. His wife, Miranda Thomas, is an amazingly talenter potter. Her work was even used by President Clinton as a gift to the Pope John Paul II during his last papal visit to the United States.

The furniture and pottery itself is stunning. If forced to make a technology analogy, I would call it the Apple of pottery. It’s simple and unadorned, but all the more attractive for it. The wood and simple construction is what makes the furniture amazing.

And yet it’s not the furniture that attracted my attention. The entire philosophy that the couple run their business on was so down to earth and unique that it amazed me. My parents and I had had a long day skiing, but in our never-ending search for a dining room table, we decided to check out (or, I suppose, they decided to check out) another furniture place. We walked in and we were greeted by Shackleton himself, who happened to be on the sales floor at the time. An hour later, we were in the middle of a full tour of the entire factory and Shackleton explained the philosophy that he and his wife share.

First, every piece of furniture is created by one craftseperson. The common practice in the furniture indsutry (in factories both big and small), is to do it assembly line style. There’s one person who does all of the saw work and one person who does all of the details work and another to do the assembly work, et cetera. At Shackleton they believe that a craftsperon should have a “relationship” with the piece of furniture they’re working on, so one person does it start to finish. They also do a lot of hand work as opposed to machine work.

Shackleton was also telling us about the community work that they do. He was explaining that when he was growing up in Ireland there were very few opportunities do something other than school work. He said he wasn’t getting a lot out of school and he needed to do something more manual. Today, they employ high school kids to do some basic stuff and give them an opportunity to work with wood and crafts.

Miranda Thomas runs her side of the operation the same way. She teaches kids to be potters and also employs great craftspeople to make pots and other clay items.

The funny part of this story is that we walked out of the factory without buying anything, but we will in the future. Their stuff is very expenive, as you might imagine. A simple rectangular coffee table is $2200. A large vase is $310!

But it’s almost worth it just to buy something because of their philosophy of work. Perhaps I didn’t do it justice when I described it, but I’ve never met two people who love their work so much. Whatever I do when it comes time for me to pick an occupation, I hope I can be as enthusiastic about my chosen work as they are about theirs.