Davison's Doodle

It’s Not About You
David Brooks | The New York Times | May 30, 2011

But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year’s graduating class has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt.

More important, their lives have been perversely structured. This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.

Today’s grads enter a cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of a life. But, of course, as they age, they’ll discover that the tasks of a life are at the center. Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.

The UnHappy White Majority
by Gregory Rodriquez | LA Times | May 30, 2011

“White Americans See Anti-White Bias on the Rise.” That was a headline in the Wall Street Journal this month, and more than any other domestic index or statistic, it’s that sentiment that should worry you about America’s future.  While many commentators saw Barack Obama’s election as signaling the emergence of a post-racial America, it might one day be seen instead as the symbolic moment all Americans became minorities.

Norton and Sommers don’t waste time pondering the veracity of that conclusion. By any metric, they write, “from employment to police treatment, loan rates to education — statistics continue to indicate drastically poorer outcomes for black than white Americans.” Instead, they figure this historic flip-flop is not about objective conditions but about how whites conceptualize bias. Norton and Sommers conclude that whites, unlike blacks, view racism as a zero-sum game, a situation in which one side’s gain automatically results only from the other’s loss.

These findings aren’t unexpected. Over the past decade, we’ve seen a rising tide of aggrieved white folks. Accusations of reverse discrimination have increased, along with high-profile court cases like the one filed by firefighters in New Haven, Conn., in which white men claimed they were denied potential promotions because of their race. (The Supreme Court agreed.)