I originally wrote this post a couple of years ago, but in the Christmas spirit I decided to update it a bit. At the time I took place in a group writing project over at Babylune. The project asked bloggers to highlight their favorite charity. I thought it was a great chance to offer a little support to my favorite charity, and support a very positive writing project.
I came across the Russian Children’s Welfare Society a few years ago through an Internet search trying to identify a charity for the benefit of Russian children. Having lived in Russia for several years in the mid-90s, I’ve always had a soft spot for the country. In addition, I’ve always been very moved by the plight of the most helpless people in any society - the very young, the very ill and the very old. The RCWS has been in existence since 1926. The primary purpose - to help Russian children - has become especially critical after the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia now has nearly 700,000 children in orphanages, a sad total, but nothing compared to the estimated 2.5 million homeless children. The RCWS directs its giving in several ways (from the website):
- Medical care, the education of the Russian doctors that provide it, and supplies
- Orphanages and homeless shelters
- Rehabilitation centers for the disabled or mentally challenged
- Educational scholarships
- A Moscow “Yelka” (New Year) party during the holiday season for over 2,000 children. We believe it is the most important celebration of its kind in Russia. Each child receives a gift. For many, it is the only one they will receive for Christmas.
There are also programs specifically benefiting the survivors of the Beslan massacre. The Beslan massacre took place September 1, 2004 at a school in the North Caucasus. A group of terrorists took the school hostage, and on the third day of the standoff a gun battle broke out with Russian security forces. Over 300 civilians were killed, including 186 children. For a town with only 35,000 residents this was a horrific blow, and the need for psychological and emotional support is critical.
Most Westerners have never had to see the horror of children begging and stealing in the streets. It is truly one of the most awful things you can see, and it affects me even more deeply as a parent now. The thought of children meeting Ded Moroz (Santa Claus/St. Nicholas) at the RCWS Yelka (basically the Russian equivalent of a Christmas party) for the first time in their lives and receiving what may be for many of them the first present they’ve ever received in their lives always makes me tear up.
RCWS also helps with scholarships for older orphans, reconstructive surgery (cleft palates, etc.) and many other programs. There’s simply so much to do that I’m sure even if they received millions every year they’d still spend it all without spending a minute worrying about HOW.
RCWS spends more on direct aid to children than it takes in (as of 2005, the latest available public data). You can read more about them at Guidestar (registration required).
I know there are many important and desperate causes in the world, and everyone has to decide what is important in their own mind. Here is the contact information for the RCWS.
Russian Children’s Welfare Society, Inc.
200 Park Avenue South, Suite 1617
New York, NY 10003
1-888-732-RCWS
1-212-473-6263
Fax: 1-212-473-6301
main@rcws.org
Note 1: RCWS does not assist in adoptions in any way, shape or form. They are not an adoption agency, so please don’t assume they will help in any way, shape or form with adoptions!
Note 2: I am not in any way affiliated with RCWS other than as a donor.
And the happy ending to this post can be found here.
What are the best subjects to learn for business - and life - success? If anyone sat down to identify the perfect secondary (and maybe college) education, I doubt they would come up with today’s average American curriculum. While there are plenty of courses in basic skills (reading, writing, mathematics, and so on) many other just as critical basic skills are overlooked (personal finance, homemaking, health/physical education). What are some of the critical components missing from our national curriculum?
From my own personal experience, I can suggest a few, but there are probably many more you can think of easily. I could also bash a few courses I took, but an argument can always be made for “knowledge for knowledge’s sake.” I believe that sincerely. I have never, for example, “used” A Tale of Two Cities
in my day-to-day life, but I’m glad I was forced to read it, stuck with it and finished it. Experiences like that created a love of reading for me. Other subjects I guess can be chalked up to “generally good to know although not terribly useful.” For me this included subjects like biology and mythology (one semester of “English” was actually spent studying mythology, which apparently means “Greek mythology” since we didn’t study anything else (not even the excellent D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths
). While those subjects were sometimes interesting, I didn’t learn much from either except that I don’t like biology and that you shouldn’t steal fire from the gods.
Here are a few subjects that are very useful, and why:
1. Typing. Out of all of the courses I’ve taken in my life, this one has made the most profound difference in my daily life. I took a typing course in high school, back when it meant learning to pound out “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” 500 times on a MANUAL typewriter. However, the experience taught me how to type, and very, very well, which means I can blaze away typing even while carrying on a conversation or reading something else. I doubt I have to explain to anyone who uses a computer why lightning-fast typing speed is useful.
2. Speech. I took a public speaking class that changed my life. Before that class, like everyone, I was nervous about speaking. After it, I was still nervous, but I learned that it was a temporary nervousness and that anything was possible. We had to give speeches to groups, recite monologues, debate, take questions and almost any type of “speaking in front of a crowd” activity you can think of. To this day I am relaxed and confident speaking to any group; I have addressed 2000 people or 10 board directors or 1 interviewer with equal calm.
3. Personal finance. I didn’t ever take a personal finance course, and I wish I had. Everything I learned about finance before college came from my parents, my grandparents about money, part 1 | brip blap or my own reading. A course that taught me things they weren’t as familiar with or not as proficient with - real estate dealings come to mind - would have been a great learning experience for me. That having been said, I’m sure personal finance would use textbooks sponsored by Capital One and tout the benefit of home equity loans to consolidate credit card debt.
4. Physical education. As a varsity athlete I was exempt from physical education, but I wish I hadn’t been. Learning to do some very basic “normal” training would have been helpful. I focused all of my energy on preparation for one sport (tennis) rather than general fitness. This had disastrous results later in life.
5. Homemaking. Don’t laugh. I think learning how to cook could save this country billions in health care costs. Imagine if people could actually prepare healthy food at home. My mother is a terrific cook, and I never had any motivation throughout high school to learn how to cook. I went straight from there to a fraternity house where meals were provided. When I finally started living on my own, my gourmet best was frozen pizza…
6. Civics. I took a civics course, but it was ridiculous. My wife, who is an immigrant, was required to undergo detailed testing before she obtained US citizenship on the Constitution, US history and civic life. Now, it may not be necessary for everyone in this country to know how many Congressmen there are or how many Supreme Court justices there are (although they should) but everyone should know the Bill of Rights and their civic duties (jury duty and so on).
Optional Bonus #7: A foreign language. Now, many people might disagree with me on this suggestion, and of course many people feel a certain nationalistic need to defend English as “America’s language” or French as “Belgium’s language” or whatever. I don’t really think most people need to become fluent in a foreign language, and I’ve been a great proponent of the world agreeing on a true lingua franca – a second language everyone would learn. As of today, that language might be English – it’s fairly easy to learn and already quite widespread. But 100 years from now it might be Portuguese, or Spanish. Who knows, who cares. The point is that foreign languages open up your mind. Studying a foreign language helps you understand that different people think differently. That’s invaluable, in my opinion. My life so far has taken a vastly different direction than it might have thanks to my study of foreign languages – especially Russian. You can see why by reading an old post of mine, “boosting your career with an overseas stint“.
You could go on, but these are some basic courses that would make a big difference in the US population. They are not taught often enough, and it’s a shame they aren’t. I am amazed to this day when I see people hunt-and-peck on the keyboard - not because I blame them, but because that’s not a basic required course for graduation from high school today. The same goes for the other 5 subjects up there. It’s hard to say when they will be required - or if they ever will be - but we can hope.
I don’t often link to contemporary news stories, but this one was worth a mention. Now, it’s a sports-related story, so bear with me. It’s about sports, but not a game summary or anything like that. As you may (or may not know) the National Football League has put a lot of emphasis (or paid a lot of lip service, at least) to injury-related issues. The sports (and even non-sports) media spent a lot of time talking about concussions and head injuries earlier in the season. One big news item arose when the autopsy of a college football player who committed suicide, Owen Thomas from UPenn, revealed that he had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition common in older football players. That condition also occurs in boxers, and the cause is simple: repeated violent blows to the head.
More recently this season, the league and media have started to pay more attention to the brutality of tackles in the game. Two football players, one pro and one in college, were paralyzed in one weekend. The pro player recovered; as I write this, the college player remains paralyzed from the neck down. The NFL saw a series of absolutely mind-numbing hits which caused a great deal of consternation, and the league promises to crack down. That’s what led me to this thought-provoking article by Joe Posnanski in Sports Illustrated. One excerpt stayed with me:
So where are we now? There’s a real momentum to stop the most bloodthirsty of hits. We do, many of us, most of us even, worry that the game is getting too scary, too painful, that it’s hard to maintain our suspension of disbelief. We want the NFL to do something about the injuries. But … what? We still want the NFL to be about pain. We want both those things, same time. And are we really willing — in that place deep down, in what Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men called “places you don’t talk about at parties” — really willing as fans to give up pain to stop injuries?
I like that Nicholson quote, as well. The movie is fairly dull, but the famous interrogation of Nicholson by Tom Cruise – the “you can’t handle the truth!” scene – is very good:
Nicholson’s rant is a bit on the “you are with us or against us” side that I find unappealing. But his point is valid, and applies to many parts of our lives. We don’t want to see how our meat is “processed.” We don’t want to experience prison life. We don’t even want to know how our wars are run. We may read exposes about Abu Ghraib, but after a brief spell of (well-deserved) collective national disgust (or, in certain quarters, glee) the news returned to the Kardashians.
But what brought this all together for me is the fact that we have to be conscious of almost everything in our lives in order to live deliberately by a set of values. Some actions are clearly negative: smoking, for example. Some are negative if not pursued in moderation: eating, drinking, working hard, religious fervor, political fervor and so on. But if you sit back and focus on more subtle activities and habits, you may realize they have a negative impact on you, too.
Now, I love football. I have never played football at any level other than after school on the high school field with a group of buddies. I played a non-team sport throughout high school (tennis). I was tall at a young age – a picture of me from tennis camp (maybe 8th or 9th grade?) has me towering over the other boys – I don’t think one head reached as high as my shoulder. My size and tennis conditioning made me a constant target of pressure from the high school football coach: every year, when getting my physical for tennis, he’d be there, telling me I could start, I could have an instant impact. My parents never signed the permission forms, though, fearing exactly the type of violence I wrote about above. I never played a team sport until, burned out on tennis, I joined the lacrosse team in college.
But despite never playing, I remain an avid fan (this blog actually ranks very high in searches for the New York Jets, ironically). But for the first time in a long time I started thinking about football, past my enjoyment of it. I don’t watch the news, although I do read some online occasionally. So the violence of war and crime come at me mostly in the form of words. But with football I bring a lot of violence into my mind. A great deal of enjoyment comes with that violence, too. I love a brutal tackle as much as the next person. You can’t love football without loving the violence that finishes every single play (with the exception of out-of-bounds, but even there you often see brutal hits). The sport shoves a great deal of violent imagery and language into my head.
I doubt I will stop watching football tomorrow, but for the first time I thought about it. I doubt I will quit many of my somewhat-bad habits even when confronted with the negatives (for example, meat eating). I still have plenty of downright bad habits to confront before I focus on those: temper, laziness, lack of focus and so on. But in confronting those bad habits – like temper, for example – it is valuable for me to understand that things like the underlying violence in a sport that brings me joy may actually be building up habits that don’t – like my temper. This observation – prompted by a Sports Illustrated article, of all things – made me think about a fully conscious and designed life for the first time.