Hasta La Gadget!

I am an idealist, and that probably won’t change, despite my realistic and even skeptical leanings, and despite a downright pessimism at times about the way our political scenarios are going. I was depressed, or at least saddened when in high school I read Richard Hofstadter about the Presidents of the United States that had slaves. Ouch, that was just a beginning of deep sadness.

But then there were the Sixties, the decade that seemed to provide the winds of change — the retreat from Vietnam, even when Richard Nixon told the crowd on the lawn of the White House that he was watching whatever football game was on at the time, and not paying attention to any of us there.

Today I saw “CITIZENFOUR”, the documentary directed by Laura Poitros, the filmmaker trusted more than anyone by Edward Snowden — hero to me and many, and traitor to many many others. By now the information on Snowden and his revelations about the NSA and its surveillance techniques — which just about translate into the fact that the United States has access to where any of us are at any given moment at the same level that China does, are available to the public — is public for us, thanks to journalist Glenn Greenwald. Which doesn’t mean that many people know or care about the implications. And that is because — because we are compromised.

We are compromised because since September 11th, we have become a nation that values fear more than truth. The talk and the anthems about bravery suffer in comparison to the rule of fear we have suffered and that has compromised our ability to think and our willingness to do so. Snowden says, in the film footage, that he will not be bullied, implying that he can sleep at night, having learned what he did from the superheroes of his earlier involvements in the internet — that truth and integrity mattered more than anything.

Who knows all the facts of the matter? Perhaps it’s too soon for that. I do know that Snowden was smart and savvy enough to know what the government was up to in its surveillance of ordinary citizens, predicting our behavior more or less by compiling profiles of our (anyone they cared about) tendencies, and learning to have a good idea of what we would or might, do in the future. And I do know he cared.

I, the naive high school student who got depressed about the slavery of Presidents, still have that disappointment that resides in my 60 plus sophistication that should — ostensibly — leave me with a healthy amount of skepticism. But then again, what is skepticism when it comes to democracy? It can lead to a furthering of investigation of claims of purity, but it can also lead to a cynicism that becomes tired and defeated and says, “Well what do you expect anyway?”

I’m someone still seeing to try my best to figure out what on earth makes us so stuck in our refusal to collaborate in solving problems we may have solutions to. Reza Aslan is a thinker and writer who talks of our being implicated in feeling part of a sacred and cosmic set of holy wars, for which we are prepared to sacrifice the so called smaller things of life. In our case, our fighting terrorism, our setting ourselves up as the alleged moral leaders of the world, involves having fear as the most important value of any. Why meddle and examine information if it can help the “enemy”? Why have newspapers report to us that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, if it could have killed or endangered thousands of Americans — so went the argument the Bush Administration gave to the New York Times, and Washington Post, etc, — news media that followed the thread of fear to cease and desist from their pledge to us, to report the facts, and not only report but to investigate.

Much of life is hard for the best of us, even those privileged or fortunate enough to celebrate a Thanksgiving with good food and good company. It is hard because it is complicated, our interpersonal and social existence and the worries it causes us just to be human.

At the same time, I don’t want to give up my right to my own sensitivities in an age where vulnerability may be in vogue but not so much when it gets so messy, so I think.Vulnerability isn’t just a pretty word for self-help books. It is a word we need on a national level, if not a global level. I don’t want to give up my right to be sensitive, or my right to hope — passionately in fact — to be part of a democracy which values integrity, information, freedom and the right to change.

Thanksgiving, for people like me, can’t be a simple one. Our — or the early settlers — coming to America, involved genocide, and eventually involved a myth of a Christian America, better than the rest of the world. It has to be faced that we have so much work to do.

I want to be thankful, not only for the family and food at my table, but for our guts — the real bravery we need — to confront the wounds of our lives. The wounds done passively and actively to our dignity, to our freedom, the ways we are manipulated and that we manipulate in turn.

It’s American by now (ouch again!) to end in a prayer. So — without complying exactly and without irony — I’d like to say I can in my agnostic way pray for more of us with the clarity, the faith, the idealism of Edward Snowden. I hope to be thankful for more people like him, as I aspire to come as close as I can.

WASHINGTON — Lawyers and supporters of Michael Brown’s family charged Tuesday that the process that left Brown’s killer facing no charges “should be indicted” itself. And while prosecutors wouldn’t agree, they did admit in transcripts that the grand jury proceeding that brought no indictments against Ferguson, Missouri, Police Officer Darren Wilson was extremely unusual.

“Typically a grand jury will hear a whole case in a matter of 15 minutes, but that’s not the case here,” a St. Louis County prosecutor, Kathy Alizadeh, told grand jurors during their second meeting, in a Sept. 3 session.

She explained that the room they were in was hot and crowded, and not set up well, because the effort going into helping them decide whether to indict Wilson was unprecedented. “There [are] probably more people in this room than ever before,” Alizadeh told the jurors.

She also explained that, unlike in a normal case where prosecutors have laid charges against a defendant that jurors can evaluate based on evidence, prosecutors would instead present witnesses to the jurors in a careful order and explain statutes relevant to murder and self-defense so the jurors could decide on charges.

“We’re putting on witnesses in a certain order because we’re trying to make this easier for you to digest and understand the evidence as it comes in because unlike a trial, I’m not making an opening statement,” Alizadeh said. “I can’t outline for you what all the evidence is. In a trial, you know, a jury gets to hear that, that’s not going to happen here.”

The point of the careful approach was to make sure it was beyond reproach, and jurors understood what prosecutors were showing them, she said.

“There is no way after this whole process is over that anybody is going to say we rushed anything,” Alizadeh said.

Indeed, Brown supporters did not complain the process was rushed — they complained it was bizarre, and inherently flawed because in their eyes prosecutors seemed more interested in clearing Wilson than putting him in jail.

“The prosecutor is supposed to prosecute, not be the defense attorney for the person we’re sitting in judgment of,” Brown family lawyer Benjamin Crump said at a Tuesday news conference with the Rev. Al Sharpton in Missouri.

Sharpton added that St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch’s strange hourlong briefing to reporters on Monday night only showed that prosecution was not his intent.

“I’ve never seen a prosecutor hold a press conference to discredit the victim, where he went out of his way to go point by point in discrediting Michael Brown Jr., who could not defend himself,” Sharpton said.

“Have you ever heard a prosecutor go in a press conference to explain to the press why the one that did the killing is not going to trial, but the victim is guilty of several things that no one has established?” Sharpton added. “Then, to go further than that, he takes his time to methodically try and discredit the witnesses — witnesses that will still be needed going forward in the ongoing federal investigation and civil proceedings.”

Both Crump and Sharpton said the process showed why it should have been given over to federal authorities entirely.

“This process is broken. The process should be indicted,” Crump said.

Follow HuffPost’s liveblog below for more Ferguson updates

Logistical confusion and last minute overflow seating only heightened excitement among the 500+ attendees at the inaugural Mindful Leadership Summit in Washington, DC. Leadership service and an “inside out” approach fueled three days of keynote and breakout sessions on the neuroscience, practice, and workplace application of mindfulness. Throughout the summit, thought leaders from Government, Education, Health Care and Business made it clear that mindfully “paying attention on purpose” is key to successfully navigating today’s global leadership challenges. Mindful attention and awareness touch every corner of a leader’s role — from strategic insight to social intelligence, from employee engagement to personal “vertical” development. Rich Fernandez, recent head of executive education at Google and Co-Founder of Wisdom Labs, hit the mark in his final day keynote, aptly identifying workplace mindfulness a “macro-force” in today’s business economy.

How can you make a move towards mindfulness? Two key takeaways for leaders in the trenches:

As a Cultural Change Agent: Make it Practical

Take simple, small, tangible steps that stick. The Eileen Fisher Company starts every meeting with three minutes of silence, equipping every meeting room with a small chime as a visual reminder to pause for a moment of stillness. Not that everyone in the company is Jedi master – one particular manager occasionally reinforcing the chime with a practical order to “shut up” — but consistent implementation of this small pause pays off. Employees appreciate a moment to settle in, and business is more productive with increased intention and focus. Rasmus Hougaard from The Potential Project International related that clients experience similar results from their Corporate Based Mindfulness Training; The Carlsberg Group estimating they gained a 30% productivity boost in implementing mindful meeting strategies.

As a Leader in the Field: Feel it to Believe it

At the individual level, feeling is believing. Several breakout sessions pointed to the “felt sense” of breath and body as a tangible, “in the moment” way to cultivate leadership insight, open mindedness, connection and resiliency. Feeling your way to more effective leadership was the play at hand when Jeremy Hunter, PhD from the Drucker School of Management and Lili Powell from the Darden School of Business shared an exercise in leadership resiliency from their upcoming Leading Mindfully workshop. The two recruited 20 members of the audience on stage for somatic practices from yoga and theater rhetoric, literally exploring the capacity to center and re-center in action by standing in Tree Pose. Likewise, Conscious Leadership coach Jim Dethmer spoke eloquently to the “BQ” of body intelligence and the power in understanding personal somatic patterns — noting that body posture and gut feel provide crucial information for leadership development. Likewise, closing keynote remarks from Dan Goleman touched on the supporting neuroscience of proprio-intelligence, that “gut sense” that tells us if we’re doing right or doing wrong.

Tomorrow’s leadership excellence requires a new kind of thinking – less harried and reactionary, more collaborative and openhearted. The good news is that cultivating a mindful leader’s mindset is as simple as an intentional pause and as easy as a relaxed breath.

People ran to the church for refuge in Medieval times. It was considered a place of safety, a sanctuary from civil punishment. In the church, one could claim a right to justice, food, water and shelter. That role was recognized by church and government authorities alike; doubtless sometimes grudgingly as the wanted escaped harsh punishments.

These days, America’s emergency rooms have filled a similar role. I’m reminded of this because the holidays are here. For the next six weeks or so, my colleague around the country will be inundated by patients in their already packed emergency departments, whether local community hospitals or major teaching and trauma centers.

During the holidays, it’s easy for physicians and nurses to get frustrated by the tasks before us. This time of year, it’s even more evident than at others that many of our patients aren’t ‘classically’ sick. At least not in ways we thought we signed up to treat. What they are is sad, struggling and frightened. And what they seek is sanctuary — as surely as their ancestors, our ancestors, knocked on the door of churches in the night.

We can re-engineer our insurance systems and try to encourage people to go to clinics and family doctors. We can create government policies to reduce the use of ‘expensive care.’ (Emergency care is actually a small portion of the total healthcare budget.) It’s all a great idea! Emergency departments struggle to bear the brunt of our national medical inadequacies, whether lack of insurance, primary care or psychiatric care.

But I doubt that much will change. Because the emergency room is available 24/7/365. And for all too many people, young and old, it’s the only cathedral they’ve ever known; and the only place you can go when you’re drunk, bleeding, stoned, shot, stabbed, abused or assaulted.

If you want a glimpse into society and its varied ills, volunteer in your local emergency room. What you’ll see is a lot of humanity. Sure, there’s plenty of sickness. Diabetes and accidents, strokes and overdoses. Broken hips and broken backs. Uncontrolled diseases and newly diagnosed tumors. But if you look closely, you’ll see that much of what passes for emergencies is brokenness, and wounds of the heart and soul.

It’s the mother at her wit’s end because the feverish baby’s father left and won’t be back. It’s the grandmother raising four grandchildren because her daughter came to love methamphetamine more than motherhood. It’s one partner, abused by another. (Abuse isn’t limited to men or women, gay or straight.) It’s the undocumented alien who doesn’t know enough English to explain that she’s being trafficked and is desperate for rescue.

Human troubles also mean loneliness. Widows and widowers with no family nearby. The man whose dementia is just starting, and who wanders out in cold nights to find the cat that isn’t there, or face the intruder who never appears. Loneliness means young people, on their own, far from family if they have any at all. So much of their chest pain, their abdominal pain, their migraines or shortness of breath is just the fact that deep inside, deep in their broken hearts, they want to go home, even if they don’t have one.

We joke darkly, in emergency rooms, that our job is mainly about fluffing pillows and handing out warm blankets and turkey sandwiches. Yet, in contrast to the lives of many of our patients, those simple things we take for granted are like silver and gold, and probably are therapies as valuable to the wounded soul as antibiotics to the sick body.

If we step back and consider where we work for a second, we’ll see that the emergency departments of America stand in stark contrast to the lives of so many. Where our patients sometimes live in darkness, squalor, danger and hunger, whether run-down trailer, homeless tent or government project, the emergency departments are different. They are places of bright lights and warmth, safety and relief; where beds are clean and food is available. And if nothing else, places where there are people who are interested and polite. Doctors and nurses, secretaries and security guards, police officers and paramedics and others who won’t hit, won’t scream, won’t manipulate, won’t seduce.

The next few weeks will be busy times for my colleagues and for me. Holidays are always crazy in the ER. Clinics will be closed, out of town families will bring relatives to be ‘checked out.’ Family arguments and anger make hospitals into Level I Drama Centers. People will be depressed and suicidal, even as others decide it’s a nice time to stop drinking and start rehab. We will still have manipulative drug abusers, violent offenders, patients who won’t follow our instructions and all the standard frustrations of life in medicine. All of us who work there will be grumpy and cynical before the new year crashes upon us.

But if we pause and consider our mad-house emergency departments and trauma centers as places of holy sanctuary, especially this holiday (Holy Day) season, maybe we’ll be less bitter as we staff our brightly lit, warm and welcoming emergency departments — beacons in the dark night of all too many hurting souls.

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