The Evolution of "Thank You"

My latest column from the Miami Herald

 

As we were leaving, I held the door open for the couple coming into the restaurant. I could tell they were pretentious because of their clothing, perfume, watches, shoes, glasses, hairdo, height, accent, and eyelashes. Neither said thank you though, which wouldn’t have surprised me had they been from Miami, but they looked from the North East. Don’t ask me how, but I just knew it. They had an arrogant flair that comes only from certain parts of New England. Their rudeness was distinct from Miami rude, which is less haughty and more egotistical. Whereas Northerners actively ignore you, Miamians actively attend only to themselves. Whereas the former signal “you are beneath me,” the latter signal “you are beneath my augmented breasts. I can’t see you. Get out of there!”

According to evolutionary theory people are nice to you only if they think they will ever need you, which explains why a lot of people in Miami are only nice to plastic surgeons and judges. If you fall in neither category you can forget about civility, which is why I’m considering going to law and medical school, which would be easier than instilling manners in Miami-Dade County.

I would have thought that going into Thanksgiving folks would be a little more courteous, a little more generous, but everybody is going crazy. People are more dangerous than ever, especially, but not only, to turkeys. Take George Zimmerman, the poor soul is experiencing attacks from everyone: the media, prosecutors, former girlfriends; even the NRA is after him for giving the organization a bad name. Nobody says thank you George for leaving no more weapons in the stores. No wonder he is reacting aggressively. Or take Richie Incognito from the Miami Dolphins. Nobody thanks him for self-disclosing a very bad case of arrested moral development. Instead of thanking George and Richard for giving newspapers what to write about, all they get is bad press.    

Not to be outdone, the Republicans refuse to say thank you to President Obama for handing them the easiest exit strategy from their government shutdown debacle. Instead of thanking him for the botched launch of HealthCare.gov, they accuse him for failing to start something they desperately want to stop.

Intrigued by the whole thank you thing I did some research into civility. In a highly publicized study, Dacher Keltner and his research team at UC Berkeley reported that rich people are less polite and more inconsiderate than people from low socioeconomic status. While you might be tempted to believe the findings because they come from BERKELEY, to me the whole thing sounds like a communist plot. This is yet another attempt to disparage the wealthy. After all, this study was done at BERKELEY, which, need I remind you, is a hotbed of radicalism. To be convinced I would want to have the study replicated by the Heritage Foundation.

To probe further, I did some research into the history of thank you. The first person to ever say thank you was Adam. He had to go to the toilet and asked Eve for the only leaves that up to that point were covering her private parts. He said “thank you” and she said “I hope the paparazzi are not around.”

The Jewish people had a conflictive relationship with “thank you.” They were all very appreciative when Moses took them out of Egypt, but complained profusely when they realized that he had taken them on a forty year journey through the desert on a diet of water and unleavened bread.

The Romans, in turn, forced all their victims not only to surrender, but also to send Thank You cards to the Emperor for enslaving them. This Italian tradition continues to this day. The mafia requests Hallmark Love You cards from businesses under their protection plan.

I also looked into famous thank you lines to see what I can learn from wiser people and found the following from Benjamin Disraeli: I feel a very unusual sensation – if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude. Can you imagine being led by such grouch? No wonder the British Empire has been in decline ever since the twice Prime Minister was in office in the 1800s.

The most important piece of research I found though was that practicing gratitude is good for you. So here it goes: I’m thankful for living in Miami, I’m thankful for having health insurance through my employer – which I can keep -- and I’m thankful for the Nobel Prize committee for considering me.

How to Fix Education

With all the talk about the United States falling behind in international rankings of education, I decided to do some research of my own. I consulted with one of my key informants, Professor Newt Rall, from the University of Objek Teef. Excerpts from our dialogue:

Isaac: Why is the United States falling behind in reading, science and math?

Newt Rall: The United States has a much higher rate of poverty and inequality than other OECD countries. Poverty accounts for a great deal of educational failure in this country. Children from affluent communities or private schools in the US do very well in international rankings.

Isaac: Then why don’t we report just the results for rich children?

Newt Rall: That would be unethical.

Isaac: Ok then, so why is there so much poverty in the United States?

Newt Rall: Without poor children there wouldn’t be employment opportunities for all the people telling the poor how to get out of poverty.

Isaac: I hear that when community schools fail to make progress the government shuts them down. When investment banks fail and send millions of people bankrupt, the government bails them out. Why is that?

Newt Rall: The government is afraid that investment bankers will go into teaching.

Isaac: The government just cut food stamps. Did they do that to teach poor children resilience?

Newt Rall: I don’t think so.

Isaac: If another country deprived our children of food, would we invade that country?

Newt Rall: Probably.

Isaac: Preventable medical errors account for about 98,000 deaths per year. Should doctors be fired like teachers and hospitals shut down like poor performing schools?

Newt Rall: You ask tough questions.

Isaac: I hear Finland has one of the best education systems in the world. I hear they pay teachers well, teachers are highly respected, have time to prepare lessons and learn from one another. Also, I hear they don’t test kids to death. Why don’t we copy what they do?

Newt Rall: It wouldn’t work here.

Isaac: Why?

Newt Rall: Because our teachers don’t speak Finnish.

Isaac: I hear Finland is also a very egalitarian country. Why don’t we try that?

Newt Rall: Because we would have to fire a lot of people telling the poor how to stop being poor, generating unemployment among highly paid consultants. Their egos couldn’t handle that.

Isaac: I hear that a lot of these new teachers without clinical experience don’t last more than two years. Why is that?

Newt Rall: Because after two years they become consultants.

Isaac: Is teacher bashing working in improving education?

Newt Rall: No.

Isaac: Perhaps they are not bashing them hard enough.

Newt Rall: Oh no, they are bashing them hard alright.

Isaac: Who is next?

Newt Rall: My sources tell me they are going after parents, deans of schools of education, professors of education, janitors, children, and the Prime Minister of Finland.

Isaac: I just attended an educational policy conference where I heard that the key to educational success is for all the states to adopt the common core standards, tell liberals to stop whining about poverty, tell hungry children to toughen up, use homelessness as a bonding experience for the entire family, replace all public schools with for profit charter schools, determine teacher pay on the ability of their school to shame others, and send 28 million children from the US to South Korea to learn discipline. Do you agree?

Newt Rall: You said a lot of things. Can you be more specific?

Isaac: Oh academics! Never mind. I hear the results of the new National Assessment of Educational Progress show that there is a constant improvement in reading and math for White, African American, Asian and Hispanic children. If that is the case, why do so many reformers say the opposite?

Newt Rall: If you have good PR the truth is irrelevant.

Isaac: If minorities are not advancing fast enough to close the achievement gap, can we give rich kids a break for two years until other kids catch up?

Newt Rall: That hasn’t been tried before.

Isaac: Can we blame the educational problems of our country on the failed launch of Obamacare?

Newt Rall: That hasn’t been tried before either.

Isaac: What has been tried then?

Newt Rall: A hodgepodge of charter schools, testing, more testing, de-professionalization of the teaching profession along with calls for more highly qualified teachers, turn around consultants, and no teacher left un-bashed.

Isaac: Have these strategies been subjected to rigorous longitudinal randomized controlled trials?

Newt Rall: Yes, Finland is the experimental condition and we are the comparison group.

Isaac: So who won?

Newt Rall: Finland

Isaac: So why are we not invading Finland?

Newt Rall: The President is busy fixing the Affordable Care Act

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Culturally Clueless, Linguistically Lost

My recent column from the Miami Herald

 

With all the talk about immigration reform, it is about time I weigh in. I was way ahead of the curve on this one.

 Anticipating waves of globalization and mass migration, I decided at a young age to be more culturally clueless and linguistically lost than anybody else. I knew that eventually 7 billion people would feel that way, so I set out to beat the crowd by living in several countries and learning a few languages. If I could figure out how to survive in places and cultures foreign to me, I could monetize that by creating the First International Online Academy for the Culturally Clueless and the Linguistically Lost, better known for its simple acronym FIOAFTCCATLL, which rhymes with Quetzalcoatl, which, as everybody knows, is a midfielder in the Mexican national soccer team. 

To build the curriculum for FIOAFTCCATLL I started travelling and moving places. To prepare myself for my first move from Argentina to Israel, I went to Hebrew School for 11 years, at the end of which I could say, but not necessarily spell, three things: Shalom, Bar Mitzvah, and Yom Kippur. As if I didn’t feel incompetent enough in Hebrew, my wife’s parents were both Hebrew teachers, who subjected me to etymological colonoscopies for hours on end. They loved me so much that they wanted me to speak perfect Hebrew. 

First lesson for my curriculum: Practice selective deafness with in-laws. 

Then we moved to Canada and I finally had to study English properly. All I could say after 15 years of English study in Argentina and Israel was CNN. After 15 years in Canada I was also able to say NHL, Wayne Gretzky, and Eh?

In my eagerness to show that I was not a complete idiot, I tried to Anglicize many Spanish words, hoping they would make me sound smart. Little did I know that these “false friends” would lead me into a whole lot of trouble! 

Instead of “success” I often used the word “exit,” asking people to head for the door when I thought I was congratulating them (éxito in Spanish means success).

But I got into real trouble when I confidently asked a young lady at a store “if I may molest you?” In Spanish molestar means to disturb. La podria molestar means “may I disturb you?” I thought I was being polite by approaching the store clerk with my respectful “may I molest you.” She thought otherwise.

Lesson No. 2: Avoid false friends.

As if my linguistic challenges were not enough, I faced my share of cultural cluelessness. Nothing prepared me for what folks in North America call football, which is a strange form of wrestling played with a giant suppository. For me, there was only one kind of football, and that was soccer. 

In Australia I had to learn a bunch of new sayings, such as chuck a sickie (stay home from work pretending you are sick), chuck a wobbly (throw a temper tantrum), and crack a fat (for which they recommend Crackiagra or Crackialis). 

Lesson No. 3: Put www.australianexplorer.com/slang in your favorites. 

After Australia we moved to Nashville. The least we could do to fit into American culture was to get a DVR. After pressing buttons at random for 17 hours I thought I figured out how to record Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. It took me several months to learn how to play back what I recorded. When I finally figured it out I realized I had recorded 239 episodes of Best Monsoons in History from the Weather Channel. The Daily Show was nowhere to be found. 

Lesson No. 4: Marry a techie. 

Then we moved to Miami, the land of quitar and freakiar. I learned these from my hairdresser, who told me in Spanish about a friend who quiteo her job and started to freakiar because she had no money. 

Lesson No. 5: If you don’t know Spanglish, just add “ar” to any English verb and you will get by in Miami just fine. 

With all the talk about immigration reform, it is about time President Obama called me to lend my expertise to the country. My first move would be to teach all 117 million Mexicans proper English. The second move would be to create a wall separating the United States and China. Next, I would send all members of Congress to the Sahara desert for a six-month, team-building exercise. They would not be allowed back in the country until they came together on immigration reform. If they don’t, they will have to go through cultural sensitivity training at FIOAFTCCATLL.