Saturday, April 11, 2009

Funny, Wise, Bad etc all Sayings.

  • OUR NEIGHBOR'S son Klaus would rather play foot ball than do his homework. His marks were so poor that at the end of the school year he had to stay behind. This is how we put it to his parents: "My contract with the present school class has been renewed for another year."
  • There's no worse war than a war between neighbors.
  • Love moves mountains; fear retreats.
  • Humble words are messenger of peace; proud words are messenger or war.
  • A Poor man with hope lives better than a rich man without it.
  • IF you wish to be served; serve.
NOTHING TO SAY: DURING a lengthy debate at the Legislative Council of Trinidad's pre-independence years, a leading trade union official droned on for a full four and a half hours.
When at last he ended his monologue, Councilor Sir Courtneay Hanays, Queen's Council, jumped to his feet. "My Speaker, sit" he said "Like the past speaker, I have nothing to say." He then resumed his seat.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS ...


Rising rates of occupational turn-over and the spread of rental-ism into employment relationships are formed and forgotten. This speed-up, however, affects different groups in society in different ways. Thus, in general, working class individuals tend to live closer to, and depend more on their relatives than do middle - and upper-class groups. In the words of psychiatrist Leonard Dhul, 'Their ties of kinship mean more to them, and with less money available distance is more of a handicap.' Working-class people generally take longer to establish ties and are more reluctant to let them go. Not surprisingly, this is reflected in a greater reluctance to move or change jobs. They go when they have to, but seldom from choice. In contrast, psychiatrist Duhl points out, 'The professional, academic and upper-managerial class [in the United States] is bound by interest ties across wide physical spaces and indeed can be said to have more functional relationships. Mobile individuals, easily duplicable relationships, and ties to interest problems depict this group.' What is involved in increasing the through-put of people in one's life are the abilities not only to make ties but to break them, not only to affiliate but to disaffiliate. Those who seem most capable of this adaptive akill are also among the most richly rewarded in society. Seymour Lipset and Reinhard Bendix in Social Mobility in Industrial Society declare that 'the socially mobile among business leaders show an unusual capacity to break away from those who are liabilities and from relationships with those who can help them.' And again, in Big Business Study in America, a study conducted states: 'Before all, these are the men on the move. They left their homes, and all that this implies. They have left behind a standard of living, level of income, and style of life to adopt a way of living entirely different from that into which they were born. The mobile man first of all leaves the physical setting of his birth. This includes the house he lived in, the neighbourhood he knew, and in many cases even the city, state and region in which he was born. 'This physical departure is only a small part of the total process of leaving that the mobile man must undergo. He must leave behind people as well as places. The friends of earlier years must be left, for acquaintances of the lower-status past are incompatible with the successful present. Often the church of his birth is left, along with the clubs and cliques of his family and of his youth. But most important of all, he must, to some degree, leave his father, mother, brothers, and sisters, along with the other human relationships of his past.' This so, it is not so startling to read in a business magazine a coolly detached guide for the newly promoted executive and his wife. It advises that he break with old friends and subordinates gradually, in order to minimize resentment. He is told to 'find logical excuses for not joining the group at coffee breaks or lunch.'Similarly, 'Miss the department bowling or card sessions, occasionally at first, then more frequently.' Invitations to the home of a subordinate may be accepted, but not reciprocated, except in the form of an invitation to a whole group of subordinates at once. After a while all such interaction should cease. Wives are a special problem, we are informed, because they 'don't understand the protocol of office organization'. The successful man is advised to be patient with his wife, who may adhere to old relationships longer than he does. But, as one executive puts it, 'a wife can be downright dangerous if she insists on keeping close friendships with the wives of her husband's subordinates. Her friendships will rub off on him, colour his judgement about the people under him, jeopardize his job.' Moreover, one personnel man points out, 'When parents drift away from former friends , kids go too.'

THE DURATION OF HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS


Sociologists have referred in passing to the transitory nature of human ties in urban societies. But they have made no systematic effort to relate the shorter duration of human ties to shorter duration in other kinds of relationships. Nor they have attempted to document the progressive decline in these duration. Until we analyse the temporal character of human bonds, we will completely misunderstand the move to-wards super-industrialism. For one thing, the decline in the average duration of human relationships is a likely corollary of the increase in the number of such relationships. The average urban individual today probably comes into contact with more people in a week than the feudal villager did in a year, perhaps even a lifetime. The villager's ties with other people no doubt included some transient relationships, but the most people he knew were the same throughout their life. The urban may have a core group of people with whom his interactions are sustained over long periods of time, but he also interacts with hundreds, perhaps thousands of people whom he may see only once or twice and who then vanish into anonymity. All of us approach human relationships, as we approach other kinds of relationships, with a set of built-in durational expectancies. We expect that certain kind of relationships will endure longer than others. It is, in fact, possible to classify relationships with other people in terms of their expected duration. These vary, of course, from culture to culture and from person to person. Nevertheless, throughout wide sectors of the population of the advanced technological societies something like the following order is typical:
  • Long-duration relationships. We expect ties with our immediate family, and to a lesser extent with other kin, to extend throughout the lifetimes of the people involved. This expectation is by no means always fulfilled, as rising divorce rates and family break-ups indicate. Nevertheless, we still theoretically marry 'until death do us part' and the social ideal is a lifetie relationship. Whether this is a proper or realistic expectation in a society high power transcience is debatable. The fact remains however, that family links are expected to be long-term, if not lifelong, and considerable guilt attackes to the person who breaks off such relationship.
  • Medium duration relationships. Four classes of relationships fall within this category. Roughly in order of descending durational expectancies, these are relationships with friends, neighbours, job associates, and co-members of churches, clubs and other voluntary orginanizations.
  1. Friendships are traditionally supposed to survive almost, if not quite, as long as family ties. The culture places high value on 'old friends' and a certain amount of blame attaches to dropping a friendship. One type of friendship relationship, however, acquaintanceship, is recognized as less durable.
  2. Neighbout relationships are no longer regarded as long-term commitments - the rate of geographical turn-pver is too high. They are expected to last as long as the individual remains in a single location, and interval that is growing shorter and shorter on average. Breaking off with a neighbout might involve other difficulties, but it carries no great burden of guilt.
  3. On-the-job relationships frequently overlap friendsips, and less often, neighbour relationships. Traditionally, particularly among white-collar, professional and technical people, job relationships were supposed to last a relatively long time. This expectation, however, is also changing rapidly, as we shall see.
  4. Co-membership relationships - links with people in church or civic organizations, political parties and the like - sometimes flowers into friendship but until that happens such individual associations are regarded as more perishable than either friendships, ties with neighbours or fellow members.
  • Short duration relationships. Most, though not all, service relationships fall into this category. These involve sales clerks, delivery people, gas-station attendents, milkmen, barbers, hair-dressers etc. The turn-over among these is relatively rapid and little or no shame attaches to the person who terminates such a relationship. Exceptions to the service pattern are professionals such as physicians, lawyers and accountants, with whom relationships are expected to be somewhat more en-during. This categorization is hardly airtight. Most of us can cite some 'service' relationship that has lasted longer than some friendship, job or neighbour relationship. Moreover, most of us can cite a number of quite long-lasting relationships in our own lives - perhaps we have been going to the same doctor for years or have maintained exteremely close ties with a college friend. Such cases are hardly unusual, but they are relatively few in number in our lives. they are like long-stemmed flowers towering above a field of grass in which each blade represents a short-term relationship, a transient contact. It is the very durability of these ties that makes them noticable. Such expectations do not invalidate the rule. They do not change the key fact that, across the board, the average interpersonal relationship in our life is shorter and shorter in duration.

SUICIDES AND HITCH-HICKERS


Such tidal movements of human beings produce all sorts of seldom-noticed side effects. Similarly, orginazations and associations have a difficult time knowing where their members are. Within a single recent year fully one-third of the members of the National Society for Programmed Instruction, an orginazition of educational researchers, changed their addresses. Even friends have trouble keep up with each other's whereabouts. There is no social season anymore, he says, because nobody is anywhere at the same time - except, of course, nobodies. The good Count has been quoted as saying: 'Before this, if you wanted twenty for dinner, you'd have to ask for fourty - but now you first ask 200.' Despite such inconveniences, the overthrow of the tyranny of geography opens a form of freedom that proves exhilatating to millions. Speed, movement and even relocation carry positive connotations for many. This accounts for the psychological attachment that Americans and Europeans display towards automobiles - the technological incarnation of spatial freedom. ' The "auto-mobile" has become the modern symbol of initiation. The licence of a sixteen-year-old is a valid admission to adult society.' Young girls in United States, when asked what they regard as important about a boy, immediately list a car. Sixty-Seven per cent of those interviwed in a recent survey said a car is 'essential', and a nineteen-year-boy, Alfred Uranga of Albuquerque, NM, confirmed gloomily that 'If a guy doesn't have a car, he doesn't have a girl.' Just how deep this passion for automobility runs among the youth is tragically illustrated by the suicide of a seventeen-year-old Wisconsin boy, William Nebel, who was 'grounded' by his father after his driver's licence was suspended for speeding. Before putting a .22 caliber rifle bullet in his brain, the boy penned down a note that ended, 'Without a licence, I don't have my car, job or social life. So I think that it is better to end it all right now.' It is clear that millions of young people all over the technological world agree with the poet Martinetti who, more than half a century ago, shouted: 'A roaring car ... is more beautiful than the Winged Victory.' An extreme manifestation of this urge to move is found among the female hitch-hikers who are beginneng to form a recognizable sociological category of their own. Teenage girls in particular - perhaps eager to escape restrictive home environments - are passionately keen travellers. A survey of girls who read Seventeen, for example, showed that 40.2 per cent took one or more 'major' trips during the summer before the survey. Sixty-nine per cent of these trips carried the girl outside her home state, and "9" per cent took her abroad. But the itch to travel begins before the teen years. Thus when Beth, the daughter of a New York Psychiatrist learned that a friend of hers had visited Europe, her tearful response was: 'I'm only "nine" years old already and I've never been to Europe !' This positive attitude towards movement is reflected in survey findings that Americans tend to admire travellers. Thus researchers at the university of Michigan have found that respondents term travellers 'lucky' or 'happy'. To travel, is to gain status, which explains why so many American travellers keep ragged airline tags on their lugage or attache-cases long after their return from the trip. One "WAG" has suggested that someone setup a business washing and ironing old airline tags for "status-conscious" travellers. An airline executive quoted - 'In a few years I won't be living here. You plant a tree and you never see it grow.' This non-involvement or, at best, limited participation, ha been sharply critized by those who see in it a "menace" to the traditional idea of grass-roots democracy. They overlook, however, an important reality: the possibility of those who refuse to involve themselves deeply in community affairs than those who do - and then move away. The movers tax a boost rate - but avoid paying the piper because they are no longer there. They help defeat a school bond issue - and leave the children of others to suffer consequences. Does it not make more sense, is it not more responsible, to disqualify oneself in advance? Yet if one does withdraw from participation, refusing to join organizations, refusing to establish close ties with neighbours, refusing, in short, to commit oneself, what happens to the community and the self? Can individuals or society survive without commitment? The notion of roots is taken to mean a fixed place, a permenantly anchored 'home'. In a harsh, hungry and dangerous world, home, even when no more than a hovel, came to be regarded as the ultimate retreat, rooted in the earth, handed down from generation to generation, one's link with both nature and past. The immobility of home was taken for granted, and literature overflows with reverent references to the importance of home. 'Seek home for rest, For home is best' are lines form Instructions to Housewifery, a sixteenth -century manual by Thomas Tusser, and there are dozens of what one might, at the risk of terrible pun, call 'home-ilies' embedded in the culture. Thomas Hood, the poet of the poor, tells us that 'each heart is whispering, Home Home at last ...' and Tennyson paints a classically cloying picture of
An English home - grey twilight poured
On dewy pastures, dewy trees,

Softer than sleep - all things in order stored,

A haunt of ancient peace.


In a world churned by the industrial revolution, and in which all things were decidedly not 'in order stored' home was the anchorage, the fixed point in the storm. If nothing else, at least it could be counted upon to stay in "one" place.
Alas, this is poetry, not reality, and it could not hold back the forces that were to tear man loose from fixed location.