The Power of a Killer Smile

A few years ago I began to notice people's smiles more carefully. There are the average smiles: occasional but reserved. There's the flirt smile, for your eyes only. The awkward or nervous smile, the cocky and shallow, the goofy, the shy, the sarcastic, the psycho, the horny, the sensual, the hearty, and even the broken-hearty. You know the one... those times when tears leak from your eyes, but something manages to reach in to your heart and steal a warm feeling. So yes, there's a plethora of emojis for every smile. But then it came to me in one of those a-ha! moments: there’s a smile that matters most than any of the others, some people call it the killer smile.

I was fortunate to know Brian McMahon during the last year of his life. When I first met him, I couldn't help but notice how his face lit up upon shaking hands. It's a presence and respect he offered you instantly, without knowing anything about you. Most of us offer up a smile when we first meet someone, but it's a guarded one. Some people add an extra effort smile, which may or may not necessarily come from the heart. As a salesman myself, I know all about the extra smile. But if life has taught me anything, it's that nothing good comes from faking. Brian was anything but fake. He wasn't trying to buy you, or sell you anything you didn't need. His smile transcended the supply and demand transaction: Brian owned the killer smile. 

We spent many evenings talking, philosophizing, debating, arguing, even agreeing to disagree on some things. But through every subject, his killer smile was disarming. I felt the power of honesty in that smile. I felt his refreshing sincerity, his hunger for truth.

Brian brought his killer smile to the tennis courts. Over fifty-two weeks, from summer to summer, we played over a hundred times. Every time he would walk into the courts with his power smile, and I could already feel his advantage imposing itself before the first pop from a new can of balls. It wasn't merely confidence, something most people learn to fake. It was presence. It was respect, it was hunger. It was a love of life flowing into his racquet, which might as well had been a light saber.

During his last month, Brian had somehow managed to transform his tennis game to a new high. His serves were focused and powerful. His topspin was almost flawless, and his net game felt like a tsunami. He unassumingly took my game to a new low, as he witnessed my racquet-maiming dramatics with his signature smile. He knew I was battling demons, something I sensed he had conquered better than me so far. Of course he was human, if he weren’t I wouldn’t had been interested in his friendship. No disrespect to aliens, though he more than once wondered if I was one of them. No, I more than sensed he was quite a few steps ahead of me in that battle of the demons we all fight. I knew not just from our chats, but from the way he performed on the courts. Like in most sports, your state of mind in tennis can be just as important as your physical condition. So either way, his smile told me he understood. I like to think it told me I would also understand one day.

The last time I saw Brian, he walked out of our own "Centre Court" for what turned out to be his final time. I still play it in my mind in slow motion: his strong build, six foot plus commanding height, understated shorts and shirt, a working man's tennis player. His signature cooler on wheels faithfully rolling next to him, he opened the door of the courts, turned around, and flashed his killer smile towards me for the last time. It's a smile I will never forget, one I will spend the rest of my life trying to make my own.

Thank you for spending a good part of your last year on earth with me BMac. I'm sure by now you know how much I admired you, and love you like a brother. One day soon, I hope to be the one with that killer smile, signing off with his classic goodbye:

"Peace, Love, and Power."

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"Lost Together"

A Musical Tribute to Brian

Angel Flight

 - U.S. Air Force C-130 Angel Flight - 

Leave No Soldier Behind is a powerful military code of honor. Few nations have practiced the code as impressively as the United States. In part because the United States has been at war for 222 out of its 240 years of existence. That's 92% of the time. 102 wars, with 93 victories, 4 defeats, and 5 stalemates. I'm not exactly sure how you categorize a civil war as a "victory", with the largest single number of American casualties ever - just under half a million. Be that as it may, wars have claimed the lives of 1.1 million Americans. And that number is just scratching the surface of the impact they have had on the ones who did not die in battle.

Diagnosing how many of those 102 wars could have been avoided without sacrificing freedom may very well raise an eyebrow or two. But it does nothing to honor the memory of the soldiers who bravely fought in a conflict they were told was a matter of freedom's life or death. Memorial Day is not a day for "what if's", political grandstanding, or second-guessing. Yes, peace will always trump war. Yes, war is hell on earth. But it is sometimes unavoidable, and the consequences of doing nothing can be far worse than fighting. Memorial Day is one day out of the year when we are asked to remember those who have died for a cause that a majority of citizens has sanctioned - explicitly or in silence.

It must be surreal for a soldier to come home and be left behind in ways that are just as maddening as the insanity of war. Especially a soldier who personally experienced the code of Leave No Soldier Behind. I cannot fully understand that, because I have not experienced it. Yet empathy is at the core of Leave No Soldier Behind. Empathy is not about putting yourself in shoes that may be too large for you to fit in. At its core, empathy is about respect. Respect for men and women who gave their lives in battle grounds so that we can argue over claims to the moral grounds.

Not leaving a soldier behind starts with respect. Not the empty flag-waving kind, as much as symbols have their place. Not the judgmental kind, as partially right as the judgment may be. It starts with respect for what a soldier has been through. It is respect for a soldier who was murdered by tyranny so that you may never experience it. On Memorial Day, respect for those who left home as mere mortals and came back on the wings of an angel.

The Employment Myth

Between the ages of 18 and 40 I bought into "unemployment figures". 5% to 9% seemed like reasonable single-digit numbers that could easily be overcome. The comfort that unemployment numbers are not too high is a nervous consolation, in case you ever happen to find yourself there. The strong-minded will tell themselves, get up and finish the race. When you finally do pick yourself up and get back in the race, it could even make you embrace Republican values and  "laissez-faire" capitalism. The conservative assumption is that most of that 5% to 9% could be seen as a healthy, temporary number, and some of it is inevitable human nature - a.k.a. the lazy ones. As Mitt Romney thought he was saying privately during his 2012 presidential campaign, self-proclaimed victims who unaccountably rely on the government are a lost cause.

While a part of me never really thought 5% to 9% unemployment meant that 91% to 95% of the country was employed, I didn’t quite grasp the reality that more than 50% of America's total population is unemployed. That number includes children and seniors over 70, but in at least half of that segment someone still needs to work for them. Either way it has little to do with laziness: Capitalism is simply not designed to provide for 220 million jobs – the number of Americans over 16 and under 70. According to the Current Employment Statistics and Current Population Statistics, the total number of jobs in the U.S. is about 150 million. That's a 70 million adult deficit. It boils down to 22% of the total population, and 32% of the working age population.

We could drill down further and say that only about half of the 32% really competes hard for a job. That would be under the assumption that the other half are spouses or "significant others" who play a voluntary support role. It would make the true, effective unemployment rate in the US 16%. There's just one problem with that logic: the single job that pays for one adult mouth to feed also has to pay for two. While the two halves can economize and scale all day long, the single job per couple math reaches a tipping point sooner rather than later. You can pick which end you prefer, 32% or 16%. But either way it is still a far cry from "5.5%". I choose to go right down the middle, and I call the true, effective unemployment rate of the U.S. 24%. One-quarter of the nation, one out of four, is unemployed. From a macro perspective, 170 million Americans are not formally employed.

Counting new unemployment compensation filings every month (currently at 5.5%) is a dishonest collusion that both ruling parties have engaged in for almost a century. It looks better on their leadership record, and they guilt the ordinary citizens into blaming themselves more than the system.

It needs to stop. It's neither honest nor sustainable, and neither party knows how to fix it. The best argument conservatives have is that given the right incentives, able-people will eventually get off their asses and find a way to make themselves productive. The best argument liberals have is that there are way too many unable-people in our society – not lazy, literally unable. Unable physically, mentally, or a combination compounded by a true unemployment that lies somewhere between 24% and 53%. Ignoring them will not make them go away, and labeling them “welfare queens” who don’t understand trickle-down economics amounts to conservative smugness.

Neither argument by itself will ever work. If both sides acknowledge that both arguments working together is in fact the answer, then we may yet make America a greater society.

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Why I'm Not Feeling The Bern

First, I do feel the need to point out that of all candidates, Bernie Sanders is one of the most principled politicians the United States has to offer in 2016. One of the burdens of the U.S. is the unethical purchasing of political power. If anyone is doing an impressive job at minimizing the purchase of his/her campaign, and therefore her/his convictions, it's Bernie Sanders. Even "self-financed" billionaire Donald Trump is not last in outside / "dark" money (PAC): Trump is second to last in PAC funding, at almost $2 million as of March 2016. Sanders is dead last at under $50,000. (OpenSecrets.org)

Second, I also feel the need to point out that Sanders is one of the most socially empathetic candidates in the U.S. political mix today. The shaming of social empathy has traditionally been a dark political pastime of the U.S., even by moderate liberals. Conventional wisdom dictates that survival of the fittest is seriously eroded by "excessive" social empathy, like a mother and a father who tiresomely disagree on what nurtures and what weakens the child. According to the same conventional wizards, social empathy is the damning of the poor: it makes them lazy and weak (Ronald Reagan's "Welfare Queen"). This prevalent suspicion, embedded in the American quilt, is the fundamental reason the U.S. is in the bottom half of the thirty most developed nations when it comes to social progress. (Social Progress Index)

You would think that those two significant attributes would be enough to feel the Bern. After all, haven't we always turned a blind eye towards the darker side of politicians, as long as we believed they were enlightened in matters that are most important to us? (Something future generations may call Trumping, much in the same way we use the term Machiavellian today.) But more to the point: with those two impressive Sanders attributes highlighted, is there anything about him that would even require the old blind eye?

The answer to that depends on whether you believe that the dark side of socialist democracies are the lesser of two evils. With that I am offering the reader the courtesy of not insulting his or her intelligence, by taking it as a given that ALL man-made socioeconomic systems have a dark side.

Even more importantly, the answer to the blind eye question depends on whether you believe that a vastly less homogenous nation like the U.S., vastly larger, with vastly more significant technological and scientific contributions to the planet, can or should wear the "Nordic Model" skinny jeans (the Nordic Model is the socioeconomic system of five European nations: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden). If you believe that the shiny side of the Nordic Model is not heavily fueled by a fiercely "offshore" capitalist model, then you might want to challenge your own sense of social fairness. The offshore dog-whistle by the way is in great part code for "let's do our dirty business in nations where they give much less of a shit about social fairness than we do". If you have not considered that the Nordic Model is still greatly benefitting from the war chest of its non-social heyday, then you might want to vet Bernie Sanders' idealism a little better. Don Corleone's way of life did not magically clean itself up after a whole new generation. You can put lipstick on a pig, but you're still addicted to bacon.

Here's the heart of the matter: the conservative rich are not laughing at Sanders because they think he's a dreamer; they're laughing at him because they know where the money that will be used for "free" healthcare and "free" education comes from. And they know how it's made. Because it's not your mom and pop's money from back in Pleasantville. In case that doesn't sink in, please think back to the Scandinavian heyday war chest. And to the Corleones: Bernie is like Kay Corleone (Diane Keaton), when she begs the conscience of her husband Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), "I thought you weren't going to become a man like your father... Because this all must end... this Sicilian thing that's been going on for two thousand years."  

The Corleone boys don't do lipstick, Bernie.

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This is not the election of a lifetime. The elections you make for yourself every day when you wake up are the elections of a lifetime. Stop falling in love with politicians preaching change, and be the change. These are not the droids you're looking for. 

This is also not a call for a non-vote. By all means, do vote. The democratic process, as frustrating as it may be, is still the healthiest way we have so far in our evolution to propose a general way forward. But destiny is not up to our leaders. It never has been, and it never will be. There is only one destiny, and it's the collective sum of all individual destinies. The only thing you can do to help change the world is focus on your own destiny. Only then will your vote truly count.

Just be aware of one slight rule of engagement, when it comes to focusing on yourself: the more you take without giving, whether in love or in profit, the more insignificant your destiny will be. Even if it makes you a billionaire. Especially if it makes you a billionaire.

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