The Optimism Illusion

by Madeleine Kando

Some psychologists say that having an optimistic attitude can make you live longer and achieve higher rates of success, fight disease and even change the outcome of future events, but if you ask me, people who are always cheerful and optimistic make me suspicious and my first reaction is to question their mental capacity. You must really be blind if you can remain cheerful in the face of so much suffering in the world.

My husband calls me negative, a sour puss, always looking at the glass half empty, but I much prefer to look adversity squarely in the face, acknowledge it and then give it a good whack with a strong dose of humor. He, on the other hand, always has something good to say about bad things. If the house were on fire, he would find the silver lining in the smoke clouds rising from the burnt rubble. Read more...

The Importance of Voting Systems

By Madeleine Kando

Depending on where you live in the world, voting systems vary greatly. In some countries, people don’t vote at all. They live in dictatorships. In some other countries, voting is restricted to certain parts of the population (usually men). Universal suffrage is shockingly recent. Before World War II, women couldn’t vote in 155 of the 195 countries in the world. Whether you lived in beautiful France, Switzerland, or sunny Spain, women had no voice. Saudi Arabia allowed women to vote only 8 years ago!

Types of Voting Systems

There are two predominant electoral systems in the world: Plurality voting and Proportional Representation.

Plurality Voting (also called “first-past-the-post” or "winner-take-all") awards a seat to the candidate who receives the most votes. It need not be a majority (50%+), so long as the candidate has a larger number of votes than all other candidates. Plurality voting does not represent all (or even most) voters. Since a candidate needs only a plurality of votes, most voters may have voted against the winner. One attempt to improve this non-representation model is a system called Ranked Choice Voting or Instant Runoff.

Proportional Representation makes the percentage of seats reflect the percentage of votes. It is the most widely used system in the world and can be found in almost every country. If a party wins 40% of the vote, it will receive 40% of the seats.

The Single Transferable Vote is an important form of proportional representation. It is used in Ireland, Australia, and Malta for national elections. Other countries use it in local elections, and even some communities in the United States (such as Cambridge, MA) use it today. According to the Democracy Index, the STV is the most democratic system in the world.

Democracy

The whole point of a voting system is to allow citizens to decide who will govern them. The word democracy was first used in ancient Athens. It is a combination of two Greek words: demos (a citizen of a city-state) and kratos (meaning ‘power’ or ‘rule’). It means ‘the rule by the people’.

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Stories for Marshall

European Holiday

Tom Kando

My wife Anita and I took a long European trip this past fall - first a couple of weeks in Holland, then three weeks in Rome. We are old and have several ailments that make travel increasingly onerous, but we have persisted. We both walk slowly and use sticks. Stairs and cobble stones are a challenge. So it wasn’t easy. And there are always “surprises.” First, let me dispose of the negatives. Then I’ll get to the positives.

For one thing, we had difficulty accessing our bed and breakfasts . They were great once you were in, but they closed before our arrival time. Another surprise was a flat tire on our second day in Holland. That’s when we learned that most advanced cars no longer have a fifth emergency wheel. Instead. our rental had a repair kit, but I had no idea where it was located and how to use it. We called a Dutch friend and she called the Dutch equivalent of the AAA to help us out. Bummer. Using my iPhone internationally was also a major challenge. 

 For some reason, I was able to use my iPhone at will in Holland, but not in Italy. When you use your American iPhone internationally, you have to start out by dialing the prefix +. This is a combination of the international access code (01) and the US exit code (1). So using a landline, which doesn’t have a + key, you must first dial 011. Then you enter the code of whatever country you are calling. For some reason I was not able to do this in Italy. 

In Rome, we took a day trip to Pompeii, just outside of Naples. This was a bus with about thirty tourists. It picked us up at dawn in front of our hotel, but dropped us off at 21:00 hours about two and a half miles from our hotel. We needed help to find a taxi stand in the dark. 

There were various malfunctions and discomforts. Our rooms were too cold, both in Holland and in Rome. At least the hotels provided an extra heater. In Rome, the toilet seat kept coming loose. They fixed it after three days. And there were the usual irritants: a last-minute change of gate for our Amsterdam-Rome flight, forcing us to run through a mile of airport. Also, a two-hour delay of our Rome-Atlanta return flight, jeopardizing our connection to Sacramento .

But enough bad news. All in all, we completed this elaborate trip without any major issues. As the cliché says, it’s made us more resilient. Plus, we have fond memories. This was a joyful experience and an achievement for two old geezers. 

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The Art of Leaving

by Madeleine Kando

My solution to being depressed as a teenager was to leave. I LOVED leaving. After high school I left for England for a year. But the therapeutic value of leaving didn’t last, maybe because London was so foggy and grey. I applied my leaving strategy to leaving England for sunny Spain.

Leaving is fine, but where you arrive has an influence on how successful leaving will be. Spain wasn’t the Promised Land for me. I didn’t identify with the Mediterranean mentality. As grey and foggy London was, it was a WASP country. And whether I liked it or not, the WASP culture had seeped into my pores.

Which made me recoil when the caballeros in Spain did everything they could to breach my ‘personal space’. Northern Europeans consider personal space as sacred. On the London subway, an unspoken rule is to sit as far way from other passengers as open seats will allow. In Spain, there was always a muchacho rubbing against you, even if half the compartment was empty.

I spent a lot of time with a rolled up newspaper in my hand, whacking Spaniards trying to invade my personal space.

I was tired of whacking, so I went back to Holland. It is as rainy and grey as England, but at least it has a WASP culture. Going back home felt like I had entered a cul-de-sac. ‘Now what’ I asked my depressed self.

It was time to face my demons, so I went to see a psychiatrist. No whacking necessary here. The therapist was unobtrusive, to the point of being shy. He was a small person, making himself even smaller by crossing his legs and hunching over during our sessions. I had a desire to take care of him, not the other way around. Read more...

POWER

by Madeleine Kando

This essay is based on Bertrand Russell’s 'Power, A New Social Analysis'. The book is very much a product of its time; a time when war with Germany was about to begin. The Western world was divided between democracies and countries led by successful revolutionary dictators. 

What is power? Is it good or bad? Or is it neutral, like a hammer when you need to put a nail in a wall? The origin of the word ‘power’ comes from the Latin word ‘potere’, which means ‘to be able’. In French, the word ‘pouvoir’ means both  ‘power’ and ‘to be able to’.

Let’s face it, without power, nothing would get done. My husband needs muscle power to mow the lawn. I need fine-motor power to move my fingers on the keyboard.

But that kind of power is self-contained; it’s neutral. The problem begins when someone seeks to exert power over others or other beings. Power over humans, non-humans, land, and other resources. There is a difference between the amount of power you need to have enough to eat and pay for a roof over your head, and the kind of power that has caused problems for our species ever since we grew frontal lobes.

There are people who crave power more than others. I myself want power over my cat. I won’t let her pee wherever she likes, and when I was a young mother, I had power over my children. I told them when to go to bed, what time to get up, etc. My husband was a CFO and had decision-making power over a small staff. We all have some degree of power, if only to control our own thoughts.

But that kind of power is barely worth the name. It is the power of men that leads nations that we should be worried about. The Stalins, the Hitlers, and the Putins of the world.

According to the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell, the desire for power is one of the strongest human motives. ‘Power is a fundamental concept in Social Science, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics. Imagination is the goad that forces human beings into restless exertion after their primary needs have been satisfied.’

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My Quest for Sleep

By Madeleine Kando

I am not a good sleeper. It is something I inherited from my grandmother. It skipped a generation, since my mother sleeps like a log as soon as she hits the horizontal plane, but reared its ugly head when I was born.

There is nowhere to go lying on your back, waiting for sleep. I could spend time in my toes or elbows but there is not much going on there, except the occasional itches or twitches.

My head is where things happen, mostly beyond my control. I approach with apprehension; a sign reads, ‘organizing strictly prohibited.’

As I walk about in that chaotic place, I stub my toes against remnants of my day scattered on the floor. Did I turn the stove off? Did I put the leftover food in the fridge? Did I close my car windows? Usually, those nasty little buggers cross my mental path when I am almost asleep, and with a jolt, I am wide awake again, heart pounding. I am back to square one.

Insomniacs are advised to establish what is known as sleep hygiene. You couldn’t come up with a more distasteful term if you tried.

To develop sleep hygiene, experts provide a lengthy list of dos and don’ts, which carries the risk of investing half your evening preparing for something that might never materialize.

It is recommended that you exercise for half an hour, then take a warm bath or shower, and top that off with relaxation exercises for another 30 minutes to an hour. Unfortunately, the don’ts list includes all of the things that I really like: drinking alcohol, watching a whodunit movie that gets my heart rate up and texting about not being able to sleep.

To make up for that, I rely on a bag full of paraphernalia that includes earplugs, a face mask, soft music, a soft pillow, scented candles, etc. I watch psychedelic movies that are supposed to put me in a trance, and if you promise not to laugh, I will divulge my secret ingredient: I knit entire sweaters in my head before I am able to fall asleep. If you knew how many sweaters I knitted, you would be proud of me. Some with rainbow stripes, some dull grey, others with a star shape. On good nights, I fall asleep in the 4th or 5th row. Other nights, my sweater looks more like a 10-foot-long scarf before I give up and throw the whole scarf in my mental trash.

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