Category: Community

Reunion

I don’t understand racism.

I mean, I do understand it. Unconscious bias is unavoidable. Fears and resentments are part of the human feature set too. Acting cautiously when faced with something unfamiliar has helped humanity survive for thousands of years. So I understand a little distance when getting a first look at someone who seems a lot different than we are.

But to then judge someone on that difference makes me more than a little uncomfortable, and to condemn them as inferior or unworthy because of it seems cruel. Plus just morally wrong. Content of character and all that. I haven’t met anyone new who didn’t have more and more in common with me the longer we talked. I believe we all have the same right to walk this earth in our own ways (provided, of course, that our own ways don’t hurt someone else). And it’s incredibly arrogant to think that we alone see the truth of the universe. Talk about hubris.

What I don’t understand is why we don’t treat the world in general and the United States in particular as a big family reunion. Think of a potluck with barbecue and mole and pumpkin curry and flatbread and honey walnut prawns and seviche and falafel and pelmeni and injera and kugel and raclette. Plus baked ziti. Lots of baked ziti.

We could have massive soccer and softball games and the world’s largest three-legged race. We will need a few billion neon t-shirts though.

I’m an introvert, but I’d go to that.

I say reunion because we all split up thousands of years ago. As we left behind our great-grandparents to the nth power back in Africa, some of us went north and some went east. Some didn’t go anywhere and stayed put. And eventually we populated the world. And as we did so, we discovered how to survive in different places. We adapted to our environments. But at our core we remained largely as we had been. Including skeptical of new people.

So whether our particular ancestors walked across the land bridge or came by boat – forcibly or not – or migrated here after settling down somewhere else for a while, we all ended up back together here in this land where we are all immigrants. We aren’t really new people, just people long separated.

So let’s have the serious discussion about how many new people our community can successfully integrate each year. I am an includer by nature, but the resource limits that constrain us are real. So we will have to prioritize among the people who want to join us. And some of those need to be people fleeing dangerous places, because we don’t want to be complete assholes.

Let’s also not lose sight of the selfish need to bring in immigrants to make up the shortfall of new people we aren’t producing ourselves.

I really hope I get to be a grandfather. I remember my father’s reaction when my elder daughter, his first grandchild, was born. The joy. The affirmation. The complete, total satisfaction. He said as he reflected that he needed nothing else from this life.

I’d like to feel that way.

But whereas my parents have nine grandchildren I will likely have two. At best. If you’re a boomer like me (or even a Gen Xer like my brother), our kids aren’t having kids. And if you’re younger, you’re not having enough kids to sustain our community. Which is fine – I believe first in maximum agency, so you do you and I’ll do me, and together we’ll adjust. And part of that adjustment, at least for all of us concerned about having a healthy community, is to find ways to provide work and care and goods and services to all of our members,. And if we don’t make our own people to help with all that, then we need to import them.

But let’s not pollute the important discussion about who can join us and when they can come with xenophobic thoughts of worth. We are all worthy. And anyone who hints that we aren’t is either bigoted, ignorant, or cynically serving themselves at the expense of the rest of us.

And in the meantime, who wants to organize this amazing and wonderful family reunion?

Credo

Everyone should have a credo. Consciously-developed beliefs, understood and articulated so that they can guide individual actions.

So what is my credo?

I believe many things, and, like any credo worth its salt, all of those things have implications for action.

First, I believe we all have equal human value, even as we are unequal in what we can contribute to the collective at any one time. No one is inherently better or worse – or worth more or less – than another because of their specific talents. The value to our community of those talents may ebb and flow, but fundamentally we are all worth the same, and as such we deserve the same basic communal benefits.

I also believe that every dog will have its day.

Meaning that we will eventually need those folks whose talents and skills and experiences are out-of-season today. We don’t know when, but their days will come, and we want them healthy and committed when they do. So we must provide to each other food and shelter and education and basic healthcare, all of those things that ensure survival and growth, regardless of what each of us contributes to our immediate needs.

I believe that people should be rewarded for their efforts and the positive outcomes that result (positive outcomes are those that improve collective utility). Every dog will have its day, but the dog that hunts today rather than tomorrow must get some benefit, lest that dog withhold its talents.

Why would a dog withhold its talents? And why wouldn’t we insist that it make its contribution to our collective benefit?

Because I believe in full agency. In fact, I might believe in full agency as my foundational truth.

Until our decisions and our actions hurt someone else, we must be allowed the widest discretion to choose our own paths. Each of us is uniquely human, a complex stew of ambitions and experiences, influences and knowledge, skills and blind spots, and we exist in a complex and dynamic environment. I cannot know what’s best for anyone else. I’m not sure I can know what’s best for me, given how much everything changes both within and around me. And since I cannot know what’s best for you, I cannot tell you what to do. I can suggest action, I can provide data so I feel like you’re better informed, I can share what choice I would make, but I cannot force you or even manipulate you into a decision. You must be free to choose your way, just as I must be free to choose mine.

I believe people are communal. We form tribes. Even introverts like me relish other people’s company (at least sometimes!). A shared laugh is so much more fulfilling, so much more robust than a solitary chuckle. We find meaning in community. We find purpose in working with others towards common ends. We want to belong with other people.

When someone holds themselves outside our community, it’s possible they’re just an antisocial asshole. But I believe it’s far, far more likely that they just feel rejected by the rest of us. They feel unappreciated or vilified or ignored. They feel like they’ve been treated unfairly. So when we see someone isolated, instead of asking what’s wrong with them, we should ask ourselves whether we’ve made that person feel welcome. Or, looking forward rather than backwards, let’s ask how we might help them feel welcome, so that they will join our community and strengthen it. Regardless, people must freely choose to join community, not have it forced upon them.

(If Gallup Strengthfinders is to be believed, Includer is my greatest strength, and it likely comes from this part of this fledgling credo – helping others feel like they can be part of our team. I see value in others, and I want to bring people together in a way that makes each individual feel valued.)

I believe we all strive to matter. We want to make a difference in the world around us. We want other people to know that we are here. So we strive to achieve. We create. We don’t need other people in order to achieve or to create, but other people add dimension and perspective to our accomplishments. And they allow us to achieve even greater things, more complicated things, more intimidating things when we band together with them. Many hands make light work, after all.

We can accomplish more when we work together. Not only do we have more capacity for work, we also have more creativity, more imagination, and more energy to call on. We have countless examples of individual genius, but we have many more examples of teams that accomplished amazing things because they combined the knowledge, wisdom, skills, experiences, energy, and creativity of many minds and bodies.

So put it together, and my credo is that we make community to accomplish things that benefit us collectively while recognizing the value that each of us contributes, knowing that those contributions will be uneven, always favoring some of us over others. We need to recognize those who contribute more, but we need to care for everyone so that they are ready when their turn comes and we need them. And all of it has to be chosen freely, individually, by each member of our community.

That’s my credo. Or at least the start of it. I’m sure more elements will occur to me as time marches on.

Grace

Like many other things, grace is much harder in real life than in the abstract. I was reminded again during my recent flight from San Francisco to Denver.

I noticed the large young man in the gate area waiting to board. He was tall, wide, and he wore a hockey jersey, but what really distinguished him was his flouting of social norms. He listened to hip-hop music on his phone without earphones – he wasn’t blaring it, but I could still hear it clearly. He used the phone to speak to his mother, answering her questions in the annoyed, impatient tone that all young people use with their parents. He told her in great detail about his trip to the airport and his struggles getting through TSA. His voice was loud, penetrating, impossible to tune out.

As I lined up to board the flight he passed completely from my attention. I settled into my window seat near the back of the plane, then closed my eyes and enjoyed the respite between my rush to the airport and the flight to come. I would have forgotten him had that insistent voice not trashed my calm as he stood in the aisle, asking someone which seat was his, window or aisle.

It was the window seat. And it was directly behind mine.

My seat felt like a buoy on the ocean as he pushed, pulled, and jostled while squeezing himself into his seat. Oblivious to the people around him, he began talking loudly to the unfortunate man sitting next to him, detailing his trip to the airport and all the things he had to manage in preparation for the flight. Bad enough the middle seat, but what is worth this extra penance?

Our man spoke about his preference for window seats. He asked his seatmate to hold his coffee while he rummaged through his backpack for food. And when the seatmate, realizing his very bad luck, feigned sleep, our oblivious traveler got on his phone and called a friend.

The conversation – or at least the half of it that I overheard (truthfully, it was more like 80 percent, because our guy dominated it) – could not have been more banal. It covered his TSA experience again, his travel plans for the day including flight times and layovers down to the minute, his recipe for carnitas, and his delight in getting frozen shrimp for less than $8 per pound thanks to the buy-one-get-one-free promotion at the grocery store. The conversation, all at volume, lasted at least 20 minutes. All the while he fidgeted, bouncing me around in my seat. In short, I could not ignore him, and I couldn’t concentrate enough to do anything but stew in my own aggravation.

When he finally ended his phone call, he still could not sit still. So I continued to fume, piqued that my calm had been disrupted, that the bubble I cast around myself when I venture into the world had been pierced.

And then I heard it. A soft grunt. Almost a hum. Then another. And another. Every twenty seconds or so. Like clockwork.

The guy I consigned to inconsiderate jerkhood has a compulsion. I don’t know the condition – autism, Tourette Syndrome, some other neurological issue – but I realized that he couldn’t control the internal energy he generated. He was disrupting me, not out of malice, not out of apathy, but out of need. It’s just how he’s wired.

Which reminded me that whenever we enter the public sphere we will encounter people different from us. People with different behaviors, different backgrounds, different perspectives. Usually those differences are minute, hardly noticeable, but sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes, like on my flight, they are large and prominent. They can’t be ignored. And that’s when we feel uncomfortable.

We won’t always be comfortable in the public sphere. But, aside from personal safety, we don’t have a right to demand that others conform to our expectations when we’re sharing public spaces. We all have a right to be ourselves, and while we owe each other safety we don’t owe each other comfort.

Sometimes we must endure discomfort, so that we can all live in freedom. Freedom to share what’s communally ours, even if we’re not wired to notice other people’s cues. And so while my incredibly disruptive travel companion banged my seat all the way to Denver, I tried to move past my annoyance and find grace.

I wish I’d been able to do it without the reminder, but perhaps I’ve become complacent. I am, after all, an older, affluent white dude, which puts me atop most social orders. I am the norm, or at least the model around which we’ve organized our social norms. So forgive my short-sightedness when I’m inconvenienced.

I don’t begrudge the test. I just wish I had passed without the help.

Brilliance, Unlimited?

I surprised both my friends and myself during an argument over coffee the other day. My very good friend Tom is a fan of iconoclastic businesspeople, people who dream big and dare bigger – people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. I had an unusually visceral response when he complimented Musk, and I was particularly inarticulate about my thoughts.

I am a free-market guy mostly, but I also believe in vigorous oversight, because far too many businesspeople will push boundaries and take advantage.

It’s a logical outcome of the widely-held view that a businessperson’s main goal is to maximize returns to shareholders. Behaviors like price fixing, price gouging, withholding new products that will cannibalize existing products, adopting rosy economic-growth forecasts when funding benefit-defined retirement programs all reward shareholders at the expense of collective utility, which is – or at least should be – the goal of any economy. In other words, businesspeople will most often choose narrow benefits over broader benefits because their goals, performance assessments, and compensation are aligned with narrow company-specific performance rather than wider economic performance.

And that’s cool. Try to reward a CEO on a broad economic performance metric on which they will have very little impact and you’ll very quickly have an unmotivated CEO. Or need to search for a new one.

But without a vigorous counterpoint (i.e., public regulation) to enforce collective utility, we end up with society as a whole bearing externalities, costs that are created by individual entities but paid for by the collective. Which leads to income disparities (shareholders get all the rewards while non-shareholders get zero rewards but have to cover part of the costs), which further frays our community.

But back to Elon Musk. I have two views of him, and there is some nuance in them.

Musk is brilliant. Tesla will change our world at least as dramatically as Amazon restructured retail shopping – and I’m all in on that change. Moving our transportation economy to sustainable fueling is seismically positive. It will reorder our world, but that huge disruption will leave us in a far better place than we are now.

He is also highly skilled at building companies. Counting PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company he’s had a significant role in creating four companies that are thriving, which is a great indicator of the appeal their products and services have to people.

But.

His Twitter acquisition shows hubris. He fancies himself an expert in social media and public conversation with no evidence of his expertise. He hasn’t grown up in social media companies, learning the essential issues, understanding the wants or needs of the broader markets, differentiating among the various markets and market segments. He’s extrapolating his personal experience, assuming his experience is the same as everyone else’s, which it certainly isn’t.

People have followed him on Twitter because of his brilliance in engineering and creating companies, not because of his opinions on other topics. Like many other users, he’s using that platform to opine about stuff in which he has little to no expertise. And as long as he’s just one user spouting nonsense, then I have no issue. Free speech and all. But when he uses advantages gained elsewhere to buy influence where he hasn’t earned it, then I do have an issue with it.

The best analogy I can come up with on the fly is Microsoft buying its way into search with Internet Explorer by bundling it with Windows. Windows won its dominant position in the marketplace by its features and its marketing and its sales to personal-computer manufacturers. IE had not earned a market-leading position by its performance. So to force IE into that leadership position by power earned elsewhere undermines collective utility.

Similarly, I think, Musk views himself an expert on speech and social media. He’s transferred the appeal he has because of his engineering and company leadership into social media, but the jury is still out on the latter. He hasn’t earned a leadership position in that area.

To me this whole discussion gets into Ayn Rand territory, where she believed there exists a small number of supermen, disproportionately gifted and superior to everyone else, who need to be allowed to exercise their genius so the rest of the world can benefit from it.

But.

Those people don’t exist. There are geniuses among us, but they have no emotional or moral superiority to the rest of us. They are no less petty and no more aware about our community, its needs, and how we interact than those less blessed with brainpower or technical insights. That their genius manifests in commercial success makes them no better – and no worse – than the rest of us. I don’t begrudge these titans of industry their hard-earned rewards – and to have outsized commercial success you have to work hard – yet many of these self-same titans seem to believe that brilliance in one space equals brilliance everywhere. Musk himself seems to believe that his own brilliance knows no limits.

I respectfully disagree.

Benevolence and Local Politics

I have two friends who have won seats on our city council in the last two elections. Watching their campaigns from up close (I helped with social media for both), it’s clear to me that a benevolent public servant is essential, especially in local government.

Very few people pay attention to local political offices, and so election winners are determined more by name recognition than by political platform or priorities. An appalling (to me) number of people don’t pay attention to political offices in general – hence our embarrassingly low voter turnout numbers for all elections – but this myopia is especially pronounced at the local level.

I’m parroting my betters when I say that most people are more affected by decisions made by their city councils or boards of supervisors than they are by decisions made by the US Congress or President, yet the interest in the races for those offices are inversely correlated. The conditions of our city streets, the interactions we have with our city police officers, the demands of the city’s planning department all have more immediate impact on me than decisions about funding the military, managing relations with the European Union and ASEAN, or establishing rules about interstate trucking and immigration.

I’m not saying public healthcare policy isn’t vital or that passport services aren’t necessary or that the National Guard is irrelevant, but I am saying that my daily walk with the dog through my neighborhood park affects me far more frequently than what the federal government decides about broader issues. Both elections are important, but the local election directly affects me to a greater degree, and so it should have a proportional share of my attention and energy. Yet very few people can name any members of their local government (and, sadly, only a few more can name their federal representatives). I have to admit that absent friends of mine serving on the city council I might very well not be one of them.

And so benevolence becomes imperative, especially at the local level. We need public servants who will put their self-interest aside and do the best for their communities, because they won’t be held accountable at the ballot box if they don’t. And the meltdown of professional journalism that might act as a check on corrupt local officials doesn’t help our cause either.

So if you’re voting in local elections, please get informed about the candidates. Not about their policies, although that matters, but about their character. And if you have to choose between character and policies, choose character.

I am reminded often of the rueful slogan some wags in Louisiana wrote in 1991 during the gubernatorial election between the incorrigibly corrupt Edwin Edwards and the stunningly racist David Duke (former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan): “Vote for the crook. It’s important.” Sometimes it’s not about policy, it’s about decency and fairness and earnestness, about people who do the work of listening and thinking and empathizing and stepping outside their own circumstances. And sometimes the crook is the clearly better choice.

Character will be our communal salvation, and its lack will be our undoing.

Divorce, Writ Large

My wife and I are midway through a so-far amicable divorce.

(I add “so far” only to keep from jinxing us – I am a mite superstitious, and I fully expect we’ll finish it as friends, but, well, you know. . . .)

We are much – much – better as friends than spouses. We disappoint each other tremendously as spouses, but when we lower our expectations to those of friends we fit well.

While our personal situation involves just two, I think it’s analogous to our larger community. Our country – well, our world to be honest – has split into two camps, and there’s virtually no common ground between them. Call them Red and Blue, Progressive and Conservative, Flyover and Coastal, Snowflakes and Rednecks, but we have highly divergent views on how we want to live. And we’re both trying to force our choices on the other.

So I think our no-longer United States of America needs a similar remedy to the one my wife and I chose: an amicable divorce.

As sad and disruptive as a divorce is, it’s still better than burning down the house. And that’s where we’re headed if we continue to try to force half of our community to accept policies, behaviors, spending priorities that are antithetical to their beliefs. The majority – or even a significant minority – will not accept being shut out of communal decisions. When the majority – or even a significant minority – is repeatedly denied even partial satisfaction, they will respond. And when all peaceful avenues to change are blocked, violence follows. The majority – or even a significant minority – will take action, and if violence is the only action that remains, then that’s the path it will choose.

We can circumvent all that destruction though. When people have fundamentally different views on how to live they need to let each other go instead of trying to get the other to knuckle under. Respect each other’s choices and let them live the lives the want to live. Be generous, be gracious, be true to yourself, allow others to be true to themselves.

National divorce will be messy.

We’ll need to revamp all kinds of institutions and create policy from scratch. But the world has many roadmaps to separating nations. Sudan and South Sudan. Yugoslavia. Czechoslovakia. We’ll need to discuss alimony – as economies separate some have more promise than others, and it’s fair to compensate the disadvantaged partner. We’ll need to decide geography – what land corresponds to which country. And I suppose we’ll have to decide how to handle the few territories we have too, though maybe we should let the people in Puerto Rico, Samoa, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands decide where they want to go.

But the alternative is messier. Years of acrimony and recriminations that detract from our quality of life. Energy and resources wasted on trying to change minds and, when that fails (as it surely will), forcing the other to submit.

We don’t need to do that. Separation can be traumatic. It can be vicious. Or it can be kind.

I’m a believer in kindness.

My Niece

I saw my niece yesterday.

She’s had a rough go so far. She calls herself the “Queen of Bad Decisions.” Failed by adults during her formative years, she doesn’t feel worthy even now in her early-thirties. She doesn’t deserve to be happy, to find purpose, to be loved. So she punishes herself with drugs and sex and booze and people who steal from her and, recently, beat her. Badly.

After all, she’s not worthy of care, compassion, and love.

And yet, despite all of her self-flagellation, something at her core, an indomitable spirit, won’t let her succumb to desolation, won’t surrender to the voices that tell her she doesn’t deserve happiness. It insists that she matters and that she must persevere, no matter how much pain she feels.

She is extraordinarily brave. She is also often self-centered, regularly manipulative, and less-than-honest at times. I suspect much of that is survival response, but her behavior still raises questions among her family and friends, and she’s been abandoned by more than one of the people she cares about. Mostly because she treats them badly. It’s hard to think of others, to empathize with them when you feel shitty about yourself.

But no matter how much abuse she heaps on herself she always pulls back from the brink of complete self-destruction. She does cut it close sometimes. She’s been hospitalized for alcohol poisoning, and she regularly chooses people who have problems with impulse control and suffer a great deal of pain themselves. I guess those folks are plentiful when you’re living on the margins of society, but everyone needs friends, so like the rest of us you take what the universe provides. They don’t always prove to be reliable.

And she can’t catch a break. She’d worked very hard for about three years to bring herself from homelessness to a sober, employed, independently-functioning member of our community. And four months later a global COVID-19 pandemic closed the retail store where she worked, and without a job she was soon without a place to live again. The pandemic has challenged us all, but it’s one more thing on top of a staggering pile of challenges for those people like my niece.

She’s a hard worker. She likes to do things. She’s got a great sense of humor, and she laughs and jokes with people regardless of how well she knows them. But she has just a high-school diploma, and ADHD makes traditional school hard for her. And her history with adults has left her with a towering distrust of authority figures. So building skills, which requires learning from either books or from people who know how to do things, goes against her talents and life experience.

I don’t know how her story will develop. I worry that the mountain of crap into which she was born that also encouraged her dodgy decision-making will ultimately be too much for her to surmount. But I am heartened by her absolute refusal to take herself beyond salvation. I am hopeful she will find enough people to trust, enough resource to give her the knowledge, skills, and experience that will enable her to function on her own, enable her to find a tribe that values her for who and what she is.

It’s the same hope I have for all the people I love.

The Struggle

There’s a purity in selfishness.

An enticing simplicity.

A seductive ease.

I know my own desires, my own needs fully, but I’m just guessing at yours. And who knows what the guy down the street thinks. No, I know what I need, what I want, what I deserve, and that robust and certain knowing contrasted with my supposition of your thoughts – even if it’s well-intentioned – gives exaggerated weight to my side of the scale.

Plus I don’t get a direct return from investing in your satisfaction.

So I have a thorough understanding of the geography of my desires and I reap the entire benefits of what I do for myself. No wonder it’s so tempting to ignore you.

And yet.

We live communally.

I need you and the rest of our neighbors to do things for me, like build roads and schools and hospitals and parks and recreation courts and fields. I need you all to help provide police and fire protection and maintenance for those roads and schools and hospitals we built. I also want you to keep an eye on my house when I’m on vacation, and I need to have some social interactions with you to feed my real need for human connection. Plus I actually like hanging out with you. We play well off each other, you make me laugh, and we both like beer and the Bears.

So for a plethora of reasons, I interact with you, and you need a reason to interact with me. But this is where it gets complicated, I suppose. Some of my interactions are motivated by necessity – I need to be nice to you so that you will do what I want. Others are motivated by good will – I like you, and I like doing things with you. So what looks like altruism might actually be selfishness dressed up. Or it might really be altruism. Giving for the greater good.

How can we tell the difference?

I can’t know another’s heart. So I choose to believe that what looks like altruism really is altruism. That assumption creates emotional risk, of course – the good feelings end when there’s no further gain to be had – but I much prefer it to the stress and distraction to which suspicion and second-guessing lead. And I really do believe that most people are honest. Or at least guileless. They tell you what they think, perhaps shading the truth here and there, but you can generally trust what someone tells you. So I figure I’ll be right more often than not when I give the benefit of the doubt.

There will be pain, of course, because people sometimes lie. But maybe that’s selfishness talking again. If I’m worried about getting hurt and strategizing about ways to reduce that risk, then I’m just saving my ass again, and I’m not thinking about how to make life better for all of us.

And maybe that’s where we should really start.