LOL
Fudo, AC, Anjin:
You guys are scaring the shit out of me! I agree with disagreeing. I agree these gals
are looking for Zen Lite, but is it necessary to answer with such bile, such venom?
We all need the stick sometimes, but do you have to slam 'em with a sequioia?
It's obvious these people are "fragile", why keep doing something that's obviously
hurting them? These people are leaving the group. You're never gonna hear from them
again! Why bother!?
Read the article below and go count some friggin breaths.
Tilting at Windbags: A Crusade Against Rank
By JULIE SALAMON (NYT) 1728 words
Correction Appended
Western society has denounced racism, sexism and anti-Semitism, mobilized against
ageism and genderism, anguished over postcolonialism and nihilism, taken arms against
Marxism, totalitarianism and absolutism, and trashed, at various conferences and
cocktail parties, liberalism and conservatism.
Is it possible there is yet another ism to mobilize against?
Robert W. Fuller, a boyishly earnest 67-year-old who has spent most of his life in
academia, thinks so, and he calls it ''rankism,'' the bullying behavior of people who
think they are superior. The manifesto? Nobodies of the world unite! -- against mean
bosses, disdainful doctors, power-hungry politicians, belittling soccer coaches and
arrogant professors.
''I wanted a nasty word for the crime, an unpleasant word, a stinky word,'' he said,
referring to his choice of the word rankism. ''Language is incredibly important in
making political change. I always go back to that word sexism and how it became the
catalyst for a movement.''
Mr. Fuller wants nothing less than moral as well as behavioral accountability from the
people in charge, whether of governments, companies, patients, employees or students.
And he pitches his quixotic notion in a book, a Web site (breakingranks.net), in radio
interviews and in lectures at universities and business gatherings that could be
considered breeding farms for somebodies.
''The theory has the potential to explain many things we just ignore as a given,''
said Camilo Azcarate, Princeton University's ombudsman, who recently attended one of
Mr. Fuller's lectures and bought several copies of his book to give to friends.
Democracy and education should concentrate on creating virtuous citizens. This is
exactly the kind of discussion we need to have.''
Mr. Fuller began postulating these theories on the Internet several years ago, and
then brought them together last year in a book called ''Somebodies and Nobodies'' (New
Society Publishers), published recently in paperback. He can't answer how, exactly,
his lofty ideas might translate into political or legal action. ''I don't see the form
the movement will take,'' he confessed in an interview at his home in Berkeley. ''But
I don't feel too bad about it because Betty Friedan told me she didn't have any idea
there would be a women's movement when she wrote 'The Feminine Mystique.' You need
five years of consciousness-raising before you find the handle.''
Ms. Friedan provided a blurb for his book. Other supporting blurbers include Bill
Moyers, the political scientist Frances Fukuyama and the author Studs Terkel. So far
the book has sold 33,000 copies (including bulk sales); and his Web site totals 2,000
to 3,000 visitors a week, his Web master, Melanie Hart, said.
Mr. Fuller's appeal nonetheless eludes some critics. In one of the few reviews of
''Somebodies and Nobodies,'' Clay Evans, books editor of The Daily Camera newspaper in
Boulder, Colo., was dismissive. Mr. Fuller's concepts, he wrote, ''were old when Jesus
was making fishers of men.''
But with others, he has struck a chord. Among the 2,000 people who had downloaded a
working manuscript of his were Mary Lou and Ann Richardson, two sisters living in
Roanoke, Va. They were so inspired by that early version that they eventually met with
Mr. Fuller after the book was published. The women, Ann Richardson said, had been
taking care of an aging mother with Parkinson's disease and were distressed by how
people's treatment of her changed after she lost her ability to speak. They were not
happy with the way their siblings responded either.
''I couldn't believe that people who loved me could harm me because of the perceived
rank they had in the family,'' said Ann Richardson, 46, who used to work as a customer
services manager for a graphic arts company in Washington, and is now studying film
and photography at Hollins University in Roanoke.
The sisters began their own Dignitarian Foundation, described on its Web site
(dignitarians.org) as ''an organization dedicated to promoting and protecting the
intrinsic right to human dignity.'' Ann Richardson said her motive was simple: ''If I
can help some people start believing in themselves, it would make the world a much
better, more peaceful place.''
This was not the role Mr. Fuller seemed destined to fulfill. Designated a math and
science whiz kid, he entered Oberlin College at age 15, expecting to follow the path
of his father, Calvin S. Fuller, a physicist at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey who
was co-inventor of the solar cell. After Oberlin, Mr. Fuller accumulated credentials
with breathtaking speed. By 18 he was enrolled in graduate school at Princeton. At 33
he was named president of Oberlin.
In between he learned about politics at the �cole Normale Sup�rieure in Paris and
economics at the University of Chicago, helped write a significant physics text
(''Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics'' (Addison Wesley Publishing Company),
taught at Columbia University, did a fellowship at Wesleyan University and was dean of
faculty at Trinity College in Hartford.
His peripatetic intellectual ambitions coincided with an era of social upheaval. Mr.
Fuller left for Oberlin as an undergraduate in 1952, thinking Dwight D. Eisenhower was
the perfect next president. By the time he returned to Oberlin as its president in
1970, he was ready to lead the college through the revolutions of the period -- making
changes in admissions policies for African-American students, abolishing course
requirements, ending parietal hours.
Then, after 22 years on the academic fast track, he quit -- at age 37. He left Oberlin
and his first wife, with whom he had had two children, and traveled around the world
for three months. Then he settled in Berkeley where, he said, ''I sat still for two
years, read 200 books and completely re-educated myself.'' Among other things, he
began to realize his role model may have been his mother, Willmine Works Fuller. ''She
wasn't very concerned about social justice, but if someone tried to step on her toes,
watch out,'' Mr. Fuller said, recalling a protest his mother organized against putting
an airport near his hometown of Chatham, N.J. ''She could not stand to be pushed
around by those in authority or bullies.'' Nor was she particularly touchy-feely: she
once kept her son confined to his room for 48 hours because he refused to eat his
spinach.
He became obsessed with the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet
Union. ''The bomb makes nobodies of all of us, that's how I put it now,'' he said.
With a new wife, and eventually two more children in tow (a third wife would come
still later) he began traveling through the Soviet Union, paying for the expeditions
by giving speeches and raising money from philanthropists. Calling himself a citizen
diplomat, he helped arrange televised discussions between Soviet and American
scientists via satellite links.
''He believes it's possible to work through the cracks of the monolith,'' said Kim
Spencer, formerly a producer for ABC News and now president of Link TV, a satellite
network that features documentaries from around the world. Mr. Spencer worked with Mr.
Fuller on the Soviet programs and remains a friend. ''When I was putting together a TV
network I had to go out for a walk with Bob to see the bigger thing,'' he added.
In 1987, Mr. Fuller found a crucial advocate for his expensive self-discovery --
Robert Cabot, a novelist and diplomat, but also heir to a family fortune. They
traveled together to the Soviet Union, Afghanistan and China and together wrote a few
articles. Mr. Cabot put money into some of Mr. Fuller's citizen-diplomacy projects,
which always struggled for financing.
One day Mr. Cabot decided to become Mr. Fuller's patron. For 15 years he paid him to
think -- and to travel, expenses paid. No rankism there: Mr. Cabot included pension
payments, which kicked in two years ago when Mr. Fuller turned 65.
How does Mr. Cabot feel about the way his money has been spent? ''I am immensely
gratified,'' he said. ''I think we are witnessing an extreme abuse of rankism in
Washington, D.C., right now. Our policy in the Middle East is rankism.''
Mr. Fuller acknowledges that rankism is harder to pin down than other more apparent
forms of discrimination -- sex, race and disability. ''We try to sniff how much power
each of us has by asking: 'What do you do? Where did you go to school? Who's your
husband?' '' said Mr. Fuller. ''It's like trying to find out if someone's gay or not,
if they're a threat to us or if we can get away with abusing or exploiting them.''
Mr. Fuller isn't calling for an end to hierarchy, but neither is he simply asking for
mere politeness. Yes, national leaders should refrain from cursing at one another in
public places; executives should treat subordinates with respect. But more
controversially, he would get rid of faculty tenure at universities, which he calls
''an outdated sacrosanct privilege of a few somebodies held at the expense of many
nobodies.''
He urges people to remember that rank is mutable: you can be a nobody at work and a
somebody at home, or vice versa. And, he points out, almost everyone eventually ''gets
nobodied.''
The tall and lanky Mr. Fuller, whose presentation can be stiff and formal, doesn't
rouse his audiences with smooth patter and startling revelations of abuse he's
suffered. But his reflective, old-fashioned professorial approach to his sometimes
glib, populist theories has been taken in some quarters as a refreshing whiff of
sincerity in a skeptical age.
When he spoke at Mount Holyoke College last September, Andrea Ayvazian, dean of
religious life, was surprised to see how mixed the audience was: students, faculty
members, administrators, staff members and campus workers. ''Bob's analysis freed
people who considered themselves low in the hierarchy to tell their stories,'' said
Dr. Ayvazian, who was a student of Mr. Fuller's 30 years earlier. ''I saw this had
struck a chord in unpredictable circles.''
Correction: July 13, 2004, Tuesday An article in Arts & Ideas on Saturday about a
campaign by Robert W. Fuller, an academic, against what he calls rankism misidentified
an author who provided a blurb for his book ''Somebodies and Nobodies.'' It was Bill
Moyer, the social activist who wrote ''Doing Democracy,'' not the television
journalist Bill Moyers.
CAPTIONS: Photos: Cover illustration of ''Somebodies and Nobodies'' by Robert W.
Fuller, an expert on the nuances of status-conscious bullying. He calls it
''rankism.'' (Photo by Stephen F. Hayes)(pg. B7); Robert W. Fuller, a lifelong
academic who as a student was a wunderkind, at home in Berkeley, Calif. (Photo by
Terrence McCarthy for The New York Times)(pg. B9)
_____
<http://www.nytimes.com/info/help/copyright.html> Copyright 2004 The New York Times
Company
-----Mensaje original-----
De: AC [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Enviado el: 27/09/2004 05:21 p.m.
Para: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Asunto: [Zen] DC To AC?
From: "Agnes" > My objectives of joining the Zenforum were very simple -
enjoy peaceful, harmony and fun of sharing thoughts and ideas, give myself a
peaceful time when I can stay away from stress, frustrations and/or
conflicts/confrontation.
>
HEY EVERYONE, HAVE YOU HEARD THE NEWS? That was my objective for creating
this list! I wanted to find peace, harmony, and the joy of sharing thoughts
and ideas. I wanted to give myself a peaceful place where I could stay away
from stress, frustrations, conflicts, and confrontation.
But then a whole bunch of self-professed Zen practitioners joined the list,
and they refused to acknowledge me as their Sainted Elder, and they never
agreed with my opinions, and challenged every wise proclamation, and they
created conflicts about almost any little issue, and they generally
ridiculed and ignored me, and they never cease to frustrate me in my goal of
being recognized as The Great Wise One even on my own list.
You and I must have kindred, linked spirits. Maybe I was your father or
brother or son in another lifetime. It is amazing how Great Minds think
alike, and I am very relieved to see that I am not the only one whose dreams
and expectations have been crushed by the Unruly Zen Mob that has taken
control of this list.
Join me Agnes, let us seek shelter away from these Zen Ruffians.
Al
Noble Eightfold Path: Right View, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right
Effort, Right Mindfulness, Right Concentration, Right Livelihood
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