The Inhumanity of Creationism

I'm going to discuss (diatribe?) one of the darkest aspects of Creationism. This one has nothing do with being intellectual, nor is it an analysis of a who are we as a human race. This one is personal as well as being bad business. Please excuse the word "dark"; I'm not saying that people who think that the world is only a few thousand years old are evil. On the contrary, some of them are among the kindest people I know, so I'm asking them, if any are reading, to please continue and understand that I think the world of them, all 4.something billion years of it, if I may hyperbolize and poke the bear. I'm not saying that Creationists are evil, I'm saying that Creationism* is. It's evil because it's inhuman and unwise. The thought processes that make some of us believe in Creationism would fail spectacularly if they were used to run a business or any kind of organization. I submit that the human race likes organization in many ways, and therefore we should dispense with Creationism.

Edit: When I say "Creationism", I'm not talking about the general belief that God created the Universe, all of existence, and set everything in motion. I'm talking about the specific belief, such as the one by Ken Ham, that the Earth is only a few thousand years old, that the earth was created in 6 24-hour days, and that empirically shown data are false.

If you're a Creationist, a Young-Earther, or you think that the planet can't be more than a few dozen tens of thousands of years old ( :-) Playing with words and numbers at the same time is fun... Where else can you get that?), please stop it. There are myriad reasons to acknowledge that our planet is billions of years old, and a simple "How old is the Earth?" googling can give them to you, and many people are far more qualified than I to explain Earth's age. What I've stumbled upon in my ponderings and polite, respectful arguments with my Creationist friends is an angle that I'm not sure that I've heard before (I didn't watch the entire Bill Nye v. Ken Ham debate, so perhaps it was in there), so I'm going to share it with you.

When Dayton Moore took over as the general manager of the Kansas City Royals baseball team some 10 years or so ago, I remember the rhetoric that we fans heard... "We're going to build through the draft. We're going to do better at finding talent on the international scene. We're going to focus on player development." That was all well and good, but, in my true nature that has been nurtured even more in my barbershop director training, GMDM espoused a philosophy that is so fundamental, so considerate and kind, and so generally wise that it seems to me axiomatic: "We're going to hire good baseball people and let them do their jobs." In more generic terms, it'd be rendered, "We're going to do our best to take the advice of people who know what they're doing because... experience."

A basic misunderstanding in American culture these days is that "everyone's entitled to an opinion." While, sure, this is the U.S., and we've decided to give people the right to say what they will as long as it doesn't cause immediate physical harm, this doesn't mean that we should just go around having opinions on absolutely everything. There's a problem with me just saying, "I think that this is how reality is" if there are people who have a much better idea than I do, and wisdom is knowing that I might not have all of the answers. I'm trying to keep up with people who do know what's going on in their various fields (of the subjects that I'm especially interested in) because I don't just want to have opinions; I want to have valid opinions. And valid opinions are based on experience.

Look, supervisors don't always know what's going on in the trenches. We humans need each other, each person filling different roles, in order to get tasks accomplished. If you ask me, our paramount/chief concern should be the survival of our species for as long as possible. This involves us preparing ourselves to leave this planet when the sun expands out. There will hopefully be many thousands of generations of humans to come after the current ones, and it's probably going to take us most of their lifetimes to figure out where we can move to, how to do it, how many we can take, what other species from Earth should come with us, etc. But, none of that will come to fruition unless we learn how to get along. It's time that we started honestly buckling down and figuring out what's really going to stop the violence and asininity. We have got to stop letting students leave high school without solid foundational understanding of the universe and the history of our species. But, I digress. I'll leave the hope-for-the-future speech for another time. Back to why I brought up supervising... When those of us who aren't doing the dirty work put on a pair of boots and go supervise, we don't tell the people that we're supervising that they don't have a clue what they're doing. It makes them not want to work for us. Well, in the United States, we all watch everyone else. But, just because we're watching them doesn't mean that we understand what's going on in their work; but just because we don't yet understand doesn't mean that we couldn't someday. Our general public is, by extension, the "science supervisors". We elect people who decide how much money scientific research gets, which specific types of research get the most funding.

Look, we can choose what to believe, even if it's been shown to be wrong, if it helps us get to sleep at night (if it's just too emotionally difficult to acknowledge that our lives are truly but an instant compared to the length of the existence of our species, life, the planet, or the whole universe or for some other reason in people's heart that I don't know), but at least in the voting booth and the bank account, we should not be giving our money to people who pervert logic and reason to fund pet projects and keep their big desk and light work schedules. Following the people who twist and malign the scientific method and have a pre-teen's understanding of critical and scientific reasoning (I'd guess that mine might be slightly past adolescent black-and-white at this point in my maturation. Please don't think that I see myself as perfect.) is what's really holding our society back. Don't get me wrong; I'm not a "progress for the sake of progress" kinda guy, but I am a "let's not go backwards" kinda guy.

Creationism is wrong because, while it's fine to question scientists about the finer points of their work, like asking which is really the most accurate dating of the Earth, these people were trained on time-honored practices of scientific thought and methodology that have advanced human knowledge so much that it's insulting and shows a complete lack of trust in the people who do this work for a living to tell them that they don't know what they're doing and to let ourselves be led by people who don't understand the first thing about the scientific method or critical reasoning, and, if they do, claim to follow it but actually pervert it. It's fine to ask a painter if that's really the best that she can do, to ask a pilot if he's gotten enough rest, but it's insulting to ask a craftsman if he really knows the difference between wood and metal. When people have seen the truth through their own experience, it's fine to question them, but that questioning should operate off of a basic level of trust. A basketball coach of 20 years knows the difference between zone defense and man-to-man defense. People might openly wonder (or semi-openly wonder as anonymous internet posters) if the coach really knows what he's doing, but, if you got us all talking long enough, we'd still know that even unsuccessful coaches at, say, the college level understand the fundamentals of the game... Heck, that's why network execs hire basketball coaches to be commentators even if the coaches weren't all that remarkable. Science researchers should be given the same respect.

Stop being a Creationist. It's mean.

A request from an artist - avoid the "T" word

When I write these blog posts, I work very hard to not be prescriptivist, that is, I seek only to share my opinions while not making the assumption that I'm right about everything. What you're about to read is a simple request from a vocal performance artist. I don't like reading those lists in people's blogs that seek to establish rules for how we should behave in certain situations. Social protocol is fluid and, as Tolkien wrote through the mouth of Gildor the elf, "Advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.

When you come up to me after a performance, please feel free to tell me that I'm skilled, that you liked certain things, or anything specific, but I have a request, and it is the following:

Please avoid the "T" word. The "T" word gives artists a sense of entitlement, like, of course we're doing this, we were built to. Really? The thousands and thousands of hours that we've spent working on technique, checking out other people's work, thinking about what matters in the world and how we can apply it to what we produce... Please don't tell me that I'm talented. If I critically review my work and see lay people doing what I do but I can't find it as pleasing or meaningful as what I do, there's a darn good chance that I know that I'm "talented", that I have something that some people will never have. But, you can be darn sure that I'm going to try to teach people everything that can be taught.

You know what the other bad thing about "talent" is? It's that there are things that can be done on sheer talent, but I've watched enough karaoke to understand that what the lay person relates to is not talent; it's heart. I was a very unskilled baseball player; I couldn't hit worth a darn, had average speed, and my depth-perception issues made fielding difficult (I can throw, but that's another story.) But, I gave it my all because I loved to play. That's what I look for at karaoke. Some can sing the right notes by "talent" alone (mostly... tuning theory tells us that what some people think is in tune - the perfect-pitchers - would sometimes serve to communicate better if the pitches were higher or lower relative to the other notes in the chord. But, I digress.), but there's so much more to a performance than just doing what can be done by talent alone. There is a woman who sings karaoke where I go every Friday who is my favorite karaoke singer of all time. She always starts out with the same song, Journey's "Open Arms". She goes up there, closes her eyes, and does the song almost exactly the same way every single week. Does she occasionally sing a note a little bit under its correct pitch? Yes, about once or twice during the song. But, she feels that song in a way that I can't even understand as it's so obviously personal. She sings with more soul in those 4 minutes than some karaoke singers, these "talented" people who just go up there and imitate the original, throw blind energy with no subtext into the song, and sing the notes perfectly right probably have done in their entire life. I'm not criticizing them; it's karaoke; do what you want. But, is this woman "talented"? I'm not sure. It's hard to tell. But, her performance is so raw and so powerful that I love witnessing it every week. The woman makes art. As artists, many of us want to reach people. I hope that, someday, I can find some way to reach people the way that this lovely person reaches me. And it's got nothing to do with talent.

I can't speak for dancers, martial artists, or visual artists, but all of the stretching, diet-watching, and at-home practicing that the kinesthetic folks do and the re-doing, scrapping, and constant mistake-making that the visual folks do makes me think that it's probably similar for them.

So, please, don't tell me that I'm talented. I already know that. I've done a lot of work to build my skills and done a lot of soul-searching to have the courage to get up in front of people. I'm an artist, that is, I'm curious, I want to connect with others, and I want to create things. Learning about you and having a brief moment with you after a performance is one of the best parts about being an artist. When you tell me that I'm talented, that makes it all about me. Please don't tell me how talented I am. I appreciate the affirmation, truly, and I know that you're trying to make me feel good. You've succeeded, so thank you. But, next time, tell me how you felt. Or just say thank you. Or give me a hug or a handshake or a thump on the shoulder. Tell me what your favorite part of the show was, even if it wasn't anything that I did. Meet-and-greets after shows, cheering after a karaoke song... these types of things are why we do what we do as artists... we have something that we want to give to you, to show others that something matters. Let's communicate in ways that we can all understand.

Yours in harmony, Michael.

Knowing Our Rock & Roll Roots

This gentleman apparently wanted to be an opera singer. That didn't work out, so he started pursuing a different career. My reading tells me that the song in the following link was supposed to be a ballad, but everyone got a little intoxicated and this happened.

He was to become known as "Screamin' Jay Hawkins". The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame lists "I Put a Spell on You" as one of the songs that shaped rock and roll. I see it as an early influence to bringing about the histrionics of our frontmen, sensationalist visual presentations, and vocal restraint abandonment. Screamin' Jay is seen as a pioneer of shock rock. (Alice Cooper, Steel Panther, etc.) You may recognize the song as a Creedence Clearwater Revival hit. It's very little like that, though. Enjoy.

In memoriam

Maybe these words aren't apropos. Maybe in a tragedy all anyone wants to hear is reasons to be miserable or ways to cope. But that's not fair to my cousin's memory. Maybe a part of me is mad at him for being un-vigilant in that one horrific moment. Maybe I loved his son very much, and everyone was afraid to say they felt anger. But, from what I understand, anger is a very natural thing to feel. But, perhaps in our sadness, perhaps in the no-entirely-complete devotion to his Catholic faith, perhaps in the shock of all that we went through, we completely forgot to talk about how awesome my cousin was. Perhaps the guilt floated across my mind as I thought about how, if I'd called him just to say hi as I'd meant to do in the near future (I was just sitting around at work... my call would've messed up the timing of the accident. Perhaps I was too busy holding people's hand. Perhaps I was too busy crying, and then being confused because I don't understand death, and too busy being angry that all anyone could seem to publicly talk about was my cousin's struggles or his love for his son. But, ow I'm not. I was miserable all that weekend of the funeral, and probably still am, but I think that I can see little bit clearer now.

My cousin, whose name in my older sister's rendering is nearly monosyllabic, was freaking cool. The guy was so real, and so human. When he spoke, you knew that he was being honest. You knew that he knew about his past but had come to terms with it and only wanted to move forward, have fun, and be a good dad. But, in addition to all of that, he wanted to know you. He didn't care what you believed, he just seemed to think that it was cool that you cared about something or had put thought into it. This guy was both young in his curiosity and zest (I love to remember that Jesus is quoted as having told the apostles to "be like the children") and very mature in his sense of responsibility. I'm heartbroken, in part, because I was really looking forward to becoming better friends with him. I feel like, in a tragedy of death, we're all so consumed by the loss and by missing him that we wonder if we will ever meet him again (and then make our decision about). Even to those who believe vociferously that we will see him if we choose to believe the correct thing and say the correct words, you can be damned sure that it won't be like this. Maybe it'll be better, but, in that case, knowing what it was like here on earth, with all of its shortcomings compared to heaven, was still pretty freaking cool.

I can't process the loss of his young son yet, but dammit if the boy's father didn't die living. We love to listen to songs about people who live like they were dying, but I think that he kinda was. I'm angry that he took his son with him, and deeply saddened for the even more amazing man that he was going to become that I'll never get to know, but the guy. died. living. You know who else died living? My grandma. Woman fell ill and went to her death bed while on a trip to see my brother's show. That same spirit lives in many of my family members. A different cousin went skiing the day after the funeral. And that guy is a father of multiple children. His father bicycles all around the Midwest and mountain region. And I'm glad. My aforementioned older sister is an aerial dancer. I go cliff rock jumping and take zillions of road trips.

I think that, when we lose someone we love, there is a piece of us that dies and doesn't grow back. But, hopefully, if we let it, a new vitality for life springs up from the very soil of the dead piece of our heart. I have felt more feisty and sure of myself since my same-age cousin died in that accident. I can't live with enough vim for 3 high-energy guys, but I'm damned sure gonna try to use all of my own energy and live as much as I can figure out how to. I'll miss him forever, but he did not die in vain. He was real, and we were kindred spirits in some ways. I want to be real like him, and take a genuine interest in others. May my cousin's love for life inspire you, as well.

Verbosely yours, Michael

An open letter to the older generations of barbershoppers

Esteemed older-than-I gentlemen,

I am in my late 20s. I am a barbershopper, the de facto assistant director of the Central KS chapter. I’m working on my 3rd official year of membership, and have been singing barbershop for almost 4 years now. I’ve attended 3 district conventions and been to Harmony University twice.

I have come to really appreciate the Society’s way of doing things, to believe in the mission of the Society in such a way that I am trying to do what I can to help get, and keep, the world singing barbershop, harmonizing together. I am struck most strongly by barbershop when I’m at a convention or at HU and I see how many happy people are walking around. The atmosphere is saturated with jovial, relaxed people who always have singing or listening on their mind.

Our world, the barbershopping world, is a world that deserves to be preserved; in order to preserve it, it needs new members. By simple logic, we conclude that many of these members need to be younger so that there are still men to carry the torch in the years to come when we have to get by without your wisdom and guidance.

If you want to recruit the younger generations, I have a request to make, and it takes a little explaining.

First off, I know that you are trying to reach us, and are sympathetic to the fact that we want to be able to sing songs that we’re familiar with, but, please understand, contemporary pop music is not marketed to us. It’s marketed to teenage girls. It’s why so many freaked out about Miley Cyrus’s “dance move"... They were worried about the effect on girls’ expectations for themselves and how they have to act to get boys’ attention.

So, why would younger people want to be around barbershop? It’s the same reason that anyone ever has… The younger folks would join barbershop because a barbershop chord is a barbershop chord! There is so much music that has been produced in the last 120 years, and the music that endures does so because a good song is still a good song.

I am not experienced enough to be able to make a conclusive statement that I know how recruiting younger people will be most effective. What I do know is that I’ve had a number of conversations with other barbershoppers, at conventions and at Harmony U., who seem to think that the key to bringing us in is to have newer songs. Would that help? Sure, I suppose that it could. But, why do we need newer songs? A well-tuned chord a well-tuned chord. Sure, there might be rhythms and such that aren’t in the older songs, but humans love rhythm, so that’s easy enough to adjust to. Is it in the lyrics that the songs feel outdated? I suppose… we younger guys rarely say “at night, dear heart.” But, I recently met a woman whose middle name is Rose, and I find her to be a marvelous woman. If I need an image to fully express “Heart of my Heart,” I can think of her now. I went to high school with a girl named Nelly. I know where Coney Island is, and it’s not hard for me to imagine meeting a girl, having a great conversation with her and feeling almost instantly attracted to her, and wanting to sing “Hello, Mary Lou” with her in mind.

Younger barbershoppers aren’t joining as much as any of us would like, and there are other, more much logical, reasons why we haven’t yet gotten more younger barbershoppers than that there is a dearth of arrangements of new songs being performed throughout the society. Young men watch sports. They read comics. They play war videogames. They work out. The principal commonality between all of these activities is that, relaxed environment or not, loud noises or not, something is always happening. Everything has value. We’ve grown up in a world saturated with information, a world where we could talk to 6 people all around the globe at the same time. My younger brother (mid-teens) probably can’t remember a time when there was no such thing as high-speed internet. And pre-teen boys will grow up in world where there was always Netflix and Hulu ($8/month to watch a plethora of movies and shows without commercials!). It’s not that we’re too busy, that we wouldn’t be open to joining an organization where there’s singing. It’s that we’re accustomed to always being able to find something to do and something that has value to us. Perhaps there are ways to get barbershop meetings to where what goes on is so blatantly worth our time; having new music would only be a part of that.

So, what I ask is that you give us younger folks more credit. It feels a little insulting to know that older generations hold to the idea that younger guys will join if only there are newer songs in the repertoire. Please consider the following: “My Wild Irish Rose” was published in 1899. Even allowing for the fact that it was published at a time when people bought sheet music instead of mp3s and it took much longer for a song to get imbibed into the culture, that song wasn’t new when you joined the society. It was already an “old song.” It was as old to the guys at the Muehlebach as “Annie’s Song” by John Denver and “Piano Man” by Billy Joel are to me. Show us why you love the old songs, and more of us may come to love them, too.

Finally, thank you for preserving the society so that I could be a part of it. I hope that my sharing this is a small step towards our generations’ understanding each other better. I do appreciate you trying to meet my generation’s needs. We probably do listen to some music that you would like, and, perhaps, we can share this music in the coming years.

Yours in Harmony, Michael Tate

What Reluctant, Un-trained Singers Know

There is an expression in Spanish with which many are familiar that translates closely to “I’m sorry.” We English speakers say “I’m sorry” so much (especially those of us in customer service) that I wonder if we’re becoming desensitized to its meaning. Think about it… I have sorrow… I feel miserable and downtrodden, sad that you have so much pain. The commiserating expression in Spanish, however, translates as “I feel it.” We don’t say in Spanish, “this is the condition that I’m in,” we say, “I actively feel the hurt that you feel.”

Schoolchildren are taught that humans have five basic senses, which, if one recalls the wave/particle theory of light, all have to do with physical contact… smell particles, light particles, taste particles, sound waves, and texture.

Through my work in choral music, I am discovering how much I know that I didn’t realize, knowledge that came to me gradually through my commitment to attending my classes and participating in choir, and, thus, being part of quality sound. I learned these things without always thinking about them, but I learned what they felt like. I hold a degree in formal music education, but I believe that that omnipresent teacher, experience, teaches all of us, often imperceptibly. There are things that we know without anyone having to tell us which we don’t discover that we know until we’re questioned about them. Largely as a result of my belief that we often know things without ever being told in words, I had an epiphany recently.

I attend karaoke nights at local cantinas regularly, and I, as my returning readers will know, am seeking out ways to bring more people into the Barbershop Harmony Society, a prominent singing organization. Since I feel that people have a sense for realities without always being cognizant of their awareness, I now present to you two statements that one often hears when encouraging others to sing. The first, that I hear at karaoke nights: “Maybe if I get really drunk.” The second: “I only sing in the shower.” For a time, I felt that I was hitting road blocks every time that I heard these statements, but then, about two weeks ago, my aforementioned epiphany graced me with its presence.

In etymology, we learn that, if a word doesn’t make sense to us, we often can trace its origin back to the physical world. For example, while tutoring this past school year, I learned that the word “auspices” comes from two Latin words meaning “bird” and “to look.” “Auspices” has taken on a metaphorical meaning, “under the protection of,” and, if we think about what people might look at birds for, remembering that members of our species have long observed that certain animals seem to have senses to know when dangerous things are coming, a "bird-looking" was a method of trying to divine the future. University professors might get a little more egotistical if they realized that their university thought that they could predict the future.

In my struggles to overcome people’s reluctance to sing, my reflections turned me, too, to the physical world. Combining my physical-world-has-many-answers mentality and my belief that folks know things even if they don’t know how to express them, I asked myself the simple question, “What do people know about their body that tells them that they’d sound good only in those two states, liquored-up and in the shower?” The answer, as it often does when questions with functional brevity are asked, arrived swiftly like the proverbial “thump on the head.”

We take the epiphany for both venues, first bar singing, then shower singing.

For bar singing, yes, of course, there’s the liquid courage, but where does liquid courage come from? Alcohol is a depressant, relaxing muscles and saddening our mood. When our mood is saddened, and we’re pushing ourselves toward a deathlike feeling, we do things that make us feel alive, that bring out our senses. Since singing is a powerful and personal form of expression, I submit to you that drunk singing is a body’s way of saying, “ I’ve gotta get this out before I die, so that someone, somewhere, will know at least a little bit about what it was like to be me.” Emotional release is part of it, but, as a semi-pro vocal musician, I lucidly understand the importance of relaxation in good singing. Tension in the throat and jaw severely limits free production of sound. In other words, what drunk singers know is that they do sound better when they’re drunk because their voice is freer! But, before any reader goes rushing off to take shots before a concert, remember that, while alcohol relaxes muscles, it also dehydrates. In cave –man speak, dehydration bad. Massaging of the jaw, face, temples, and throat is a much more preferable way to gain the necessary relaxation for quality sound.

As for shower singing, similar to bar singing, there are two aspects (a-“spect”. There’s that Latin root of “to look” again!). The first is audibility while the second is the steam factor.

If an individual has been listening to music all his/her life, said individual is accustomed to hearing pitches. So, if we sing, at least to ourselves, we’re accustomed to trying to match the pitches we hear with the pitches which we produce. The smooth walls of a bathroom provide us with the constant feedback to ensure that the pitches that we expect to hear in songs are the pitches that are coming out of our mouths. Until a singer becomes truly advanced, knowing what different pitches feel like, it’s of paramount importance to hear the sounds that are coming out, to hear what our voice sounds like. In vocal training, singers are often instructed to record their voice and listen to it. The goal is to start to hear the difference that using technique can make. Singing in the shower gives the un-trained singer a ready-made way to accomplish this goal. As to the steam factor, this one provides a practical physical aide to improve vocal quality. The un-trained singer spends little time thinking about the environmental factors which negatively affect the voice; air conditioning, stress, soda (and alcohol), recreational drugs, milk, and lack of exercise (especially the aerobic variety) can all negatively impact a singer’s sound. The steam from showers helps negate these effects and facilitate a positive singing environment; the warmth of steam relaxes the singer, the humidity moistens the vocal mechanisms, and sweat rids the body of toxins (not to mention the pleasant, constant sound of falling water which can relax the mind and provide a steady rhythm). The un-trained singer may not realize that he/she is taking advantage of good instincts, but like the bar singer, it is highly probably that the shower singer does sing much better in the venues of porcelain and pewter.

All this established, for leaders of vocal groups, I suggest the following hypothesis:

If we draw attention to what un-trained singers know intuitively, perhaps we can succeed in encouraging them to control their environmental factors and, perhaps, lead them to our joyful form of self-expression.

Let’s get the whole world singing.

Utilizing Human Adobe

Adobe is not just a computer application for reading .pdf files. It’s a building material. Most of us learned this some time between 2nd and 5th grade. We learned that people out west, including various native tribes and white settlers, made huts out of the earthen material.

A quick wiki search reveals that adobe is used all around the world. Humans, of course, prefer shelter from the elements to un-shelter from the elements, and, being resourceful, use whatever is available to create their shelter. We know that humans can and have done many impressive things in construction. Homo sapiens has become so good at building things that outside observers might be tempted to call us homo constructus. We’ve mastered many methods of constructing in the physical world, but I believe that we could use more practice refining our methods of building up our societal organizations, of building up individuals’ skills and confidence, and in education.

Progress is not simple, but great progress starts with simple steps founded on simple logic. I don’t believe that there is such a thing as common sense (we teach children many of the “common” things that they know), but I do believe in trying to keep things simple. Using comparative logic, let’s look at what it’s like to build in the physical world. If you asked someone to build you something, would you ask said constructor to use materials that he or she cannot acquire? Certainly not. Subsequently, would you expect the individual to use the materials available as well as possible? Certain-ly. Comparing structural practices of organizations, it seems that we use pillar mentality and pleas from authority (“trust me, I know what I’m doing”) to try to increase the functionality of our organizations and to teach. I propose an approach of asking ourselves “What materials are available?”, “How do they work best?”, and then using them accordingly. For example, if I’m working with a barbershop chorus and I find that a particular singer does something really well, like, let’s say, he’s good at singing lightly and freely at E4 (the E in the top space in tenor clef), I might say to him, “Hey, I’ve noticed you doing that really well in the past. This song needs more of that feel. Could you use a little more air support and sing that note louder? You could carry us in that song.”

Therefore, I suggest a protocol of finding the tool, figuring out how it works if necessary (in my hypothetical scenario, this would be encouraging the singer to feel good about his tool so that he keeps it), and then inviting him to use it well at the appropriate time. It really is quite simple. A chorus director can build a good sound by finding quality “material” and making use of it, tweaking the material when necessary. If we want to build up individuals, and build up organizations, we simply need to do like the members of our construction and home improvement community and use what we have and improve it over time.