Bee Wise

Professor J,

It's both amusing and sad that your post, Spank Daddy is such a hit with what I'm sure must be disappointed Googlers. I have the twin post/response on my blog. I wrote one (read it here) about Vogue sexualizing a young girl with clothing, make-up, and a smoldering look. I compared it to a 1970's photo of a young Brooke Shields, topless, which is quite innocent by comparison. The amount of visitors who find my blog because they have searched for "topless little girls" is disturbing. 

While we're on the subject of travel and how (and this is sad to say) it is sometimes embarrassing to be an American abroad, I want to mention a couple more things. One is that when I'm traveling I feel the need to be as polite, culturally sensitive, well spoken, and well dressed as possible feeling the weight of representing my country and fear that I am having to make up for damage others may have done. And another is that it may not be impossible for a really closed minded person, but it is terribly difficult to hold on to some narrow American ideas when travel brings to light the fact that you've been misinformed. A trip to Mexico or Central America and conversing with the locals will bring home just how much we need immigration reform. In Europe a feeling of arrogance about the American way of doing everything being the right way evaporates quickly. If you'll recall in my dream education system international travel would be a required investment in our youth.

I've had a couple of interesting discussions lately and I find that when you really question people, they don't believe the things they think they believe. And they can't embrace nuance. It's rare to find people who want to dissect phrases or follow trains of thought to the station and watch the baggage of ideas being unloaded. Which I'm quite sure is why we don't have more readers here, where we often unpack each bag down to the smallest detail. :)

I found an interesting article this week about making decisions and what we can learn from a colony of bees. As a beekeeper, every time I open the hive I learn something and the analogies that can be drawn to all kinds of things are numerous. Decision making though, was one I hadn't thought of. The article, Five Habits of Highly Effective Hives is focusing on building a collective IQ in an organization, in this case particularly a business. Naturally though, we desperately need this kind of thinking everywhere from families to Capital Hill.  Here are the 5 take away points from the article by Thomas Seeley, Professor of Biology in Cornell University's Department of Neurobiology and Behavior:

1. Remind the group’s members of their shared interests and foster mutual respect, so they work together productively.
2. Explore diverse solutions to the problem, to maximize the group’s likelihood of uncovering an excellent option.
3. Aggregate the group’s knowledge through a frank debate.
4. Minimize the leader’s influence on the group’s thinking.
5. Balance interdependence (information sharing) and independence (absence of peer pressure) among the group’s members.

 I'm adding his latest book, Honeybee Democracy to my reading list. This list is a glaring outline of what is missing in American politics and culture. I value individualism as much as anyone, but our every man for himself, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, John Wayne mentality is killing us along with good ideas and effective solutions. There's a lot to learn from the humble honeybee. If Monsanto doesn't kill them all...but that's another post.


*Click on the title of the article above to read the article in its entirety.