We can't coddle our way to greatness

My Dad was the ultimate dream killer. My childhood was “interesting.”

“Wayne” he used to say. “Don’t waste your time on that if you are not fully committed.” Only he wasn’t that nice about it.

I’ve always been a creative, but it really was all I was good at. Everything else I tried could just fake it enough to get by. I played every sport he wanted me to, but at any given time I was only pushing halfway. It wasn’t what I wanted deep down I wanted to be a part of movies and television. My imagination ran wild with stories of comic characters and magic skateboards.

Although my father’s expectations would help me later in life, early on it only served to force my true potential underground.

By the time I made it to high school I was used to pretending to like everything everyone else did. Then on a whim, my Grandma Daisy convinced me Drama would be good for me to take. (Grandma’s see things us that others, including ourselves, don’t or can’t see in ourselves.)

In Drama and creative writing, it was ok for me to say the things that were really on my mind.

Wait!!! Thad, you’re getting off topic. My bad. Where was I?

Oh, yeah I can’t do anything else.

When did it become ok to not be honest about other’s skill level as a creative?

When I watch a movie I can clearly state this movie sucks, or I don’t get it. However, it’s that much better if I could reach out to M. Night and say… M…(cause we are comfortable with each other) what the hell was up with those killer trees?

I mean that is exactly what we have the opportunity to do when we know our independent filmmakers locally.

We have the opportunity; no we have the obligation as fellow filmmakers not to jerk each other off - for instant gratification but to prolong the experience for a tantric nirvana experience that will have us looking for the next chance to Netflix and chill.

Is that the correct thing the kids say, “…Netflix and chill?”

Whatever we want to call it we need to foster those who create quality.

We need to get rid of the participation trophy culture that has become our status quo. We can’t fear that our friends’ feelings will be hurt by our true and honest assessment of their work.

No, everyone’s baby is not cute. And if as a film community we want to get better, then we have to start pushing each other to do and be better. And part of that process is being able to give and accept constructive criticism.

Iron sharpens iron, people.  Iron sharpens iron.

You're asking me to cheer from home

“ We’re doing all we can on our end, but we need you guys to be better cheerleaders for this city”

Jesus, lord in heaven did they just say we need to be louder and flashy to attract business?! I scream to myself.

I guess I should’ve been a better “trick.” But momma always said, “don’t let no one put you in the trick bag.”

Recently I was in a meeting where a group of people actually moved their lips to say that we should be better cheerleaders for our city.

While this idea washed over me I felt a smoldering flame in the pit of my belly begin to grow. A fire that most won’t understand without some context, so please bear with me.

I moved to Columbia, SC from a small hamlet (okay town, but “hamlet” sounds better) in the low country. You see, in my tiny town, I was drowning in a shallow pool, surrounded by people that look at lightning in a bottle as fireflies, and tip their noses to dreams of cinematic grandeur. Like they invented the wheel, and dare you to try and implement it for you your own good. How dare you!! Le sigh (in my Pepé Le Pew voice) I guess I am a stinker, but that’s a story for another time. Anyway…

Now, a decade later I find myself in similar surroundings.

Although there are more people here like me than there were in my tiny hamlet, the power and control is still structured the same. While this place that I have come to call home is leaps and bounds ahead of where I was I am still troubled by the circumstances in which we exist here and not thrive.

There are several issues I would like to help address but the first is not in the arts community or even the concerns for small businesses. Many who know me know that those two things are at the top of my list.

No.

My concern is the lack of affordable housing for families in my Columbia. In a place where the politicians' tout that they want growth and development in the city, they’ve forgotten the most valuable resource of any company, corporate or small enterprise - the people.

You know, the workers that come in every day and turn the lights onto your business, the people you rely on to run the day-to-day operations, make your coffee, cook your food, and park your cars… wait I just broke the first rule of Fight Club.

If I was not a resident here, and I wanted to move here with my family, I could not afford to live anywhere in Columbia, anywhere safe and family friendly anyway.

FYI most of us can’t afford to live here as it is, with the commute in, overpriced rent just because you can, and no remedy for family living. This has an effect on where businesses locate, where developers come, how tax dollars and voting districts are decided. Isn’t it time that we speak truth to life about some of the root issues that plague our communities? What do you think?

Your videos will fail

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Let’s be honest, I mean really honest… If you’re looking to shoot one video, commercial, or some other media content to bring in revenue for your business tomorrow, you’ve already failed. I hear people talking about new cameras, and getting the latest videos up on their websites and social media like that’s going to make everything better instantly.

Yes and no. It is better than where you were but it takes more than that to connect with people. But you have some work to do:

·      You have to be consistent – this can’t be a “whenever I need money thing.” You can’t post one thing and expect people to fall in love with you, and just start throwing money at you. That’s not going to happen.

·      Know who you’re talking to and what you want to say - this isn’t your 8^th grade art project where you just took your cousins finger paints, and threw them at a poster board and told the teacher you were inspired by convergence. There has to be a message that speaks to people.

·      You can’t be afraid to be different – How do you expect to stand out while being just like the crowd. Take chances. Aren’t there enough Lemmings in the world?

·      Understand that you are going to fail – No one jumps on a bike for the first time and rides in the Tour De France. First, you learn how to ride a bike, which involves for some of us, tearing down the driveway in the street, almost getting hit by a car, and nearly killing one of your parents. (Thankfully, they forgave me) Eventually, you make it around the block. Keep getting back on the bike until you can ride like a champion.

Video is a powerful tool but it has to be used right. Take the time to learn how to get the most from your video.

Are subprime loans socially responsible?

If subprime loans had been created to share the American dream with those who might not otherwise be able to participate; then the decline of the economy might not have triggered massive foreclosures, however that is not the case. Subprime loans were created to extract the maximum value out of homeownership (Watkins, 2011). Just knowing this information and the information presented in the two previous blog post causes us to examine two important questions to determine if subprime loans are socially responsible. The first question to consider should be is there a significant racial divide or are subprime loans proportionately distributed?  The next question should be what are the consequences from making these types of loans? First we noted that subprime loans are proportionately sold to African Americans more than any other group if we looked at the rates of subprime loans sold to African Americans with an average income between 60,000 and 90,000, over half approximately 57.3 percent are sold higher interest rate loans. While the white counterparts who are in the same average income range only account for 33.2 percent of the loans at the higher interest rates (Beeman, Glasberg & Casey, 2011). This leads us to ask about the decision makers. As institutions depend on individuals to make these decisions how is it possible that these decision are being made across the board?  Decision makers are tasked to use personal, situational, and environmental knowledge to make an ethical decision (Thiel, Bagdasarov, Harkrider, Johnson, & Mumford, 2012). However knowing that these loans are designed to increase over time it becomes easy to see the motivations for making the loans. The consequences of these types of loans can devastate a household and subprime loans in particular account for almost 50% of foreclosures of all mortgages (Johnson, 2010). However the maker of the loan still got paid, and someone will take over the loan and the lender will eventually be paid, while the borrower has suffered the loss of their home and blows to their credit that was already low to begin with.  When subprime loans are written for the benefit of all responsible parties involved they can indeed be a socially responsible investment, but they should not be entered into without careful consideration and without weighing out all of the options before hand to make sure it is best for all involved.

What is a subprime loan?

Subprime loans are loans with less favorable terms than that of a prime loan. The terms are usually less favorable because the person in question has either poor credit or does not have the necessary income to support or warrant the extension of credit. There are risks involved for the lenders, and for the borrowers. Lenders run the risk of never getting their money back or having it take a long time to see any return on their investment. So in order to absorb some of the risk there are stipulations often added to help insure the lender will get their money back. This often includes adjustable interest and ballooning payments (Smith, & Hevener, 2014) for the life of the loan.  Many of the borrowers of subprime loans tend to be African Americans. Many African Americans are served in their loans by agents that specialize in higher rate loans regardless of their total income (Beeman, Glasberg, & Casey, 2011), this speaks to the other issues of subprime loans and predatory lending that cause us to question the leadership in institutions and the ethics involved in the decision making process. However this is not just because African Americans are less likely than their white counterparts to receive home loans from any sources, because they are more likely to accept subprime loans and therefore are more likely to be victims of predatory lending (Lacy, 2012).  This begs the question of why subprime loans are pushed more towards minorities. It seems to me that the only way to grow the amount of home owners is to either allow those who can’t qualify for prime rate loans to work towards a prime rate loan, or create a separate type of loan that would provide a pathway for those who might never get to a place financially that would allow them to take advantage of a prime rate loan. However in the creation of these types of loans there should be added safety policies that protect the borrowers from those who would harm them and seek to make money off of their circumstances outside of the additional assessment of interest or payment obligations. This would assist leadership in making ethical decisions about what a borrower can afford and how they can still make money off of the transaction.

What’s the big deal with subprime loans?

In order to understand the impact of subprime loans, it is necessary to understand the goals that drive the economy. In this blog we cannot cover the full gambit of measures that drive the economy, so for the purpose of this blog we will focus on home ownership. One of the ways the government strives to grow the economy is through home ownership for moderate to low-income families (Avery, & Brevoort, 2015). This benchmark goal set in to motion loans for mortgages with people who were not financially in a position to actually purchase a house. Many of these people were considered a high credit risk. Many were either not making the actual income they claimed in order to afford the home, or they were not credit worthy. This lead to loans being made with adjustable rates, or ballooning interest rates. All was well as long as the economy was stable for many of these people. The American dream of home ownership seemed to finally be coming true. However when the economy began to take a down turn there was concern this dream quickly began to turn into a nightmare. In 2007 over a million homes began to be foreclosed on as a result of the failing economy (Gilbert, 2011). Many of these foreclosures took place as a direct result of the subprime loans that were made in order to grow home ownership. Many argue that the it was unethical to make such loans to people, however it is my opinion that it was not necessarily the loans, but the amounts the loans were being written for. Many loan officers may have acted unethically in the amounts they were approving and the verification of the information given. These foreclosures also seemed to effect African Americans disproportionately because many of the loans written to African Americans allowed interest rates to grow beyond the risk being assed (Beeman, Glasberg, & Casey, 2011).  So the facts those loans were being made to people who could not normally afford a prime rate loan, or a loan with an average interest rate, and were often being over sold into a house they could not afford and charged more interest than they could afford made it a perfect unethical storm when the economy began to fall and homes began to be foreclosed on. This is why subprime loans were discussed as a viable factor of the failing economy.

Making America Great Again: Public Schools

Last week I wrote the first of a series of articles on how to make America great again. This week we continue in that series by taking a look at the public school system. Are we putting our children in the best possible environment to want to learn?  In a world where our country is falling further and further behind in technology innovations how do we stimulate our youth to become the next wave of great thinkers to address the worlds growing issues?

  I come from a broken family. My parents split up when I was eight years old, and we moved from an Air Force Base and what I would later find was a far more advanced education. It was not necessarily advanced in the things they were teaching, but in the programs they had in place to stimulate how we learned.  Upon starting at my new school I found that I was slightly ahead in some of the concepts we were learning, and since I was I felt I didn’t have to work as hard. This feeling would continue through out the rest of my public school career. It wasn’t until I left high school that I found I was not remotely prepared. In the wake of my public school experience I felt lost. This was further compounded by the death of someone close to me. It took me ten years and a ton of mistakes to come full circle and return to college, this time with the end goal in mind.  This brings me to the present. Now I am currently a Ph.D candidate and doing pretty much what I love, maybe not on the level I wish I was on yet but I have to remind myself I took ten years to get back on track I cannot expect to bridge that gap in less. This also got me thinking about my children and their education.

For this article we are not really looking at the drop out rate, what we are looking at is students that can think for critically on their own. Somewhere along the way we stopped teaching our children how to think for themselves and started treating the public school system as a factory to mass-produce a product. Providing the same education as if we are all cookie cut. Why, maybe, because it is easier than the alternative. Having to pay teachers more money and create a modern system that educates our children for the new world we live in. So I offer to you a story from NPR that may get you thinking enough to spark a change for the future. 

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=432582341&m=432910352

We can not expect our children to grow up and become adults that can solve problems and think outside of the box if we have not equipped them with the proper tools. What we have done to our school system is allowed it to become stagnate like a pond cut off from the streams and rivers that once fed it and made it vibrant. We used to allow the world into the classroom to allow students to learn and not just memorize. If we are to ever get back to a level where we are competitive and productive we need to stand up demand changes and educate our children so that they may learn to truly think for themselves. I know this is a dangerous idea for the current way of life, but if we continue to travel down this road what kind of future can we really expect for our children. More and more people with a sense of entitlement, dodging their own responsibility for their lives. Let's choose the road less traveled. The harder of the two and do what is necessary to change our goals and expectations of the public school system.

Here is a funny but true sketch from Key and Peele Enjoy and think about it.

https://youtu.be/dkHqPFbxmOU