By Takashi Yogi
I bicycle to work daily from Live Oak to BC Tech on the
westside. The quiet stretches of my route along the San Lorenzo
River and Delaware Avenue allow me to think about problems in my work
as a medical electronics engineer. I often have to evaluate
electronic circuits to determine why they are not working well and
how they could be improved. This analysis typically looks at the
arrangement and interconnection of components rather than separating
good ones from bad ones. I often say to myself, "There must be a
better way to do this." I have spent over 50 years examining
failures in everything from toasters to computers. After repairing
thousands of these, I have found that most failures are
not random, but inherent in the design.
I tend to look at the world with my perspective as an engineer.
I see tremendous waste of resources and human lives in hunger,
poverty and war. As I pedal along, I ponder the failures and search
for alternative designs for the world. I see the great blue herons
in the San Lorenzo River and ask why our societies cannot function as
well as this bird. I see people on River Street waiting for work and
ask why this is so. I occasionally get stuck in my car on Highway 1
and have time to think about the colossal failure of this design. I
read about school budget cuts that eliminate sports and music
programs and ask why our children are not our highest priority. What
makes me sad and a bit angry is that we have the material resources,
the technology, and the people to find solutions to these problems. I
am convinced that with innovative designs, we could eliminate
poverty, hunger, homelessness, pollution, and war, and find solutions
that will last forever.
I got a glimpse of possible solutions when I traveled to Cuba as
part of group that took pianos to the schools and repaired the broken
pianos. Cuba has difficulty getting new pianos due the US blockade.
However Cuba has excellent schools where children can get free piano
lessons or violin lessons. Cuba also provides free medical care for
everyone. I visited a medical school that provides free education
not only for Cubans, but students world-wide, including some from the
US. So there are plenty of doctors in Cuba, and enough to send to
needy regions of the world. I saw a psychiatric facility that was
clean and cheerful, and the residents were engaged in sports, crafts,
and music. Another example of innovative thinking comes from
Curitiba, Brazil, where planners restructured the city to provide
transportation, affordable housing, parks, and recycling. They
converted a slum built on a flood plain into a park and moved the
people to affordable housing on higher ground. Poor people are paid
to do recycling and are given bus tokens for their work. Buses run
on dedicated lanes and are so fast and frequent that the majority of
the people ride the bus. All this was done with minimal funding and
disruption.
We can sometimes negate solutions to problems by thinking that
the process is a fight for power, where one side wins and the other
side loses, or a compromise is reached where both sides are equal
losers. Marshall Rosenberg, who developed Non-Violent Communication,
points out that we all have roughly the same needs, such as food,
shelter, security, but our strategies for meeting those need are
often in conflict. Once we accept the validity of each other's
needs, we can explore many ways to satisfy those needs mutually.
When I encounter an electronic circuit that doesn't work, I
sometimes abandon the design and start over. Radical changes may be
needed instead of minor adjustments. Sometimes a faulty design
causes a part of the machine to fail. Simply replacing the part will
not solve the problem because the part will eventually fail again.
Similarly, social problems call for critical evaluation of the
results of our policies. Perseverance can work against us if we are
headed down dead-end paths. If at first you don't succeed, perhaps
you need to try something different.
The world is changing rapidly. Globalization, energy, poverty,
and population are some of the issues that are imperative. Will we
persist in traditional solutions: more weapons, higher walls, more
police, better locks? Will we fight over the last barrel of oil? Or
will we dare to try new ways to meet the needs of all people? We
have tremendous resources available today. Will we continue to
squander those resources as we have in the past, or will we use those
resources to create an abundant and sustainable future for everyone?
Takashi Yogi
Published in the Santa Cruz Sentinel 4-29-2007
Home Page: http://tyogi.org/