Conventional Wisdom is not Always Wise

 

Are there phrases that cause you pain whenever you hear them?  All my life I have heard phrases taken as conventional wisdom that are blunt instruments used to beat people, to push conformity on people who actually want to think.  

In her new and very thoughtful podcast "Kelly Corrigan Wonders," Corrigan begins with four episodes that show the dark side of supposed truisms many people take for granted.  I find each of the phrases wrong as generalities and hurtful when thoughtlessly pushed on others.

The first episode is the best and the most painful.  Corrigan, a cancer survivor, interviews a woman currently dealing with cancer. Both have been told "Everything happens for a reason" by people who are healthy, thoughtless and willing to cause pain simply to have something to say or to spread their own shallow beliefs.  

Both women are believers in God, which means they have people in their lives who are more apt to say "Everything happens for a reason" or "It's all God's plan for your life" or another variant of an uncomfortable phrase that comforts only the speaker.  

The relationship of Chance, Fate, Luck, and Free Will is complex in any but the worst lives, where poverty and disease and war have so limited free will and chance that bad luck and ill fate are all one has. I have thought about fate and free will a lot in the context of war. 

After listening to this episode, I don't think anyone could say "Everything happens for a reason" without embarrassment.

The next phrase, "Never Give Up" is more sympathetic for me than the other three, but only for myself. I have pushed myself not to give up knowing how much I will suffer for my obsession.  I don't often recommend others do the same.

Over the three decades I have raced bicycles, people have told me they want to race but don't want to crash. I tell them not to race.  I have enlisted four different times over more than four decades, but I have not encouraged more than a few people to enlist. As with bicycle racing, when helmets are mandatory, the activity is dangerous. I only encourage people to race or enlist, who clearly want to do something dangerous.  

Giving up is always an option. And a good option. Someone who says "Never give up" has not lain in a ditch on the side of a road seeing inside their knees or hear the crunch and felt the agony of their own splintered bones.

In "What you don't know won't hurt you" Dani Shapiro finds out in her 50s, after her parents have passed away, that she is not her father's biological daughter. It was something she sensed all of her life, but only found out with a DNA test. She was devastated. She wanted to know from her parents.  The phrase is crazy in so many other contexts. More than a century ago, my grandfather did not listen to the news and almost died by being drafted into the Russian Army--not a good place for Jews. What he did not know--that World War I had begun--almost killed him 

In the fourth episode, Google Executive Annie Jean Baptiste talks about the pitfalls and problems of trusting your gut.  She makes an excellent case of how trusting your gut means trusting that what you already know is enough for any situation--that our own limited experience is sufficient for any whatever we might confront. The wider our world the more likely our gut will be deceived. 

The public figures famous for trusting their guts are among the more arrogant Americans who every lived:  the former President, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, to name a deplorable few.  

Of course, anyone with expertise can trust their gut within the area in which they are expert: pilots in aircraft, sailors in ships, chemists in labs, etc.  But put the sailor in a plane, the chemist in a ship, or a failed reality star in the White House, and the problems happen as fast as storm lightning.  

All four episodes were fascinating for me. I am going to listen to them again.  And go further in the series.  

Confident Military Walk: Apparently My Default Setting

 

So much of who we are is what we do. When I went to the hospital to visit my son Nigel the day after he was admitted, I smiled to myself when I walked into the Intensive Care Unit. I smiled about the way I walked into the ICU.

When I am in a setting that is bureaucratic, like a hospital or a corporate office or a military headquarters, my habit is to square my shoulders, look straight ahead and walk with the even pace I learned in Basic Training. I did this from the moment I stepped through the ICU doors.

In the military, I learned that everything goes more smoothly for those look and act as if they know what they are doing. I did not need to act this way. But long habit led me to walk and act in a way that said "I know what I am doing."

I was also glad to notice that despite my all of my various injuries, I can still walk straight and confident. Nigel was in the hospital for more than a week. I walked the same way every day.

Field Guide to Flying Death, Armor-Piercing Ammo

A Soviet-built tank destroyed by an armor piercing round.

The tank in the picture above was destroyed by a cannon round that had no explosive charge.  A solid shot hit the turret of this Soviet T-72 main battle tank and destroyed it, turning the approximately ten-ton-turret on its side.  

The round that destroyed the 41-ton tank was a 25mm tungsten-carbide dart fired from a 120mm smooth-bore cannon in an American M1A1 main battle tank. The 25mm round is wrapped in 120mm casing that breaks away just past the end of the gun.  Because the 25mm round is propelled with the force of a 120mm charge, the tungsten-carbide dart flies at more than a mile per second to its target.  

The round makes a small hole when it it hits, but the mile-per-second impact can punch a hole in armor more than a foot thick at a mile or more of distance.  The impact turns the armor on the inside of the tank into hot shrapnel that kills the crew and destroys the tank.  At close ranges in can flip the turret over as in the photo above or even take the turret off a tank altogether.  

When compared to firing explosive ammo at a tank, the solid-shot APDS (Armor-Piercing Discarding Sabot) round is also more accurate.  The trajectory of an APDS round is so flat that point blank for a tank firing the round is one kilometer. 

If cannon ammo was a football, the path of an APDS round is like a screen pass thrown by a strong quarterback--it flies flat and straight to the receiver. A high-explosive round flies like a 70-yard touchdown pass that rises steadily up for sixty yards before dropping into the receiver's arms.   

I was a tank commander, before electronic computers became part of armored warfare. When my gunner fired at a tank or tank-sized target less than a kilometer away, he simply had to put his crosshairs on the target and fire.