Differences

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?

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.

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.

Divorce

My wife and I are divorcing.

We’ve been married more than 32 years. There’s no precipitating event. No outburst. No affair. No abuse. No addictions.

So why are we divorcing?

I don’t think we’ve ever been well-suited for each other. She wears her heart on her sleeve, sharing her thoughts and feelings broadly. I am very private. She tests ideas out loud, working through her thought processes verbally. When I speak, I’ve already decided. She seeks validation, and I am parsimonious with feedback. She lives spontaneously, changing her mind frequently. I make a plan and stick to it.

Early in our marriage we invested the time to resolve our conflicts and differences. And then, as time passed, we stopped trying. Cracks developed. And, unresolved, the cracks widened into fissures, the fissures into gaps, the gaps into chasms. Dawn made more of an effort than I did to fix what was happening in our marriage, but I didn’t have the emotional awareness to deal with our problems. Or the will to find it.

And so we find ourselves after 32 years not strangers but friends.

But not more than friends either. We are divorcing amicably, as you’d expect of friends, even friends who share children.

We have wounds. We don’t trust each other with our emotional well-being. I have hurt her by rejecting her (her version); she has hurt me by not following through on commitments (my version). Both have merit. Neither is the full story. As with most things between married couples.

In spite of our wounds, we don’t harbor ill will. Or at least not enough of it to complicate our dissolution. In fact, because of lower expectations with the transition from spouses to friends our relationship has been smoother. I hope it continues. I expect that we will remain friends, though it will likely be at a distance, at least until grandchildren pull us back into the same orbit. Among our differences are weather and social preferences: she likes active social scenes and cooler weather, while my ideals are warmer temperatures and few but meaningful interactions with others. Funnily enough, I’m likely to head to colder climes while she makes a go of it in the hot valleys of northern California.

Our daughters are taking the split well. We don’t blame each other, so they don’t either. And they do love us both after all. Damaging our relationships with our daughters is a worst-case scenario, and we are thankful that at least we made a very effective parenting team.

We’ve set intentions to treat each other both kindly and fairly, and we are walking that path. We have a long distance yet to go, and there are potential stressors related to our financial situations that could still roil the waters. We have engaged professionals to help us untangle our emotional wounds, handle the legal process, and counsel us on finances, so I hope that they can help us navigate those potential pitfalls (to mix a lot of metaphors!).

In our latest session, our divorce therapist asked us how we were feeling about our divorce and to what we were saying goodbye as we split. Dawn feels the loss keenly, though she fully believes it’s the preferrable outcome. I am not sad or grief-stricken but rather optimistic that we can have a more emotionally satisfying relationship once we say goodbye to the stress and tension that marked a lot of our married interactions.

Time will, of course, tell the tale. As it always does.

But I am hopeful.

“Smart”

My Uncle Jim and I will never be mistaken for each other.

I am a college graduate with a double major in Economics & Management and English Composition and a year of graduate business school under my belt. He dropped out of high school. I have lived in Canada and Chile and several of our United States, and I have traveled in South America, Europe, Asia, and New Zealand. If Uncle Jim has spent any time at all outside a 100-mile radius of Rockton, Illinois, I would be shocked. I have worked in Fortune 500 companies and start-ups, most recently launching a franchise shared-workspace business. When he worked for someone other than a neighboring farmer, Uncle Jim drove a local delivery truck.

I don’t say this either to demean this most generous man or to extoll any talents of mine. These are facts, easily provable even in this charged political environment that doesn’t seem to recognize them.

I say all this because I was having a discussion with my brother on a drive back from southern California yesterday, and we landed on the word “smart.” He said he didn’t think he was as smart as our sister (kindly, he made no comment on how he thinks she and I compare!).

I’ve thought for some time that “smart” is a uselessly imprecise term, and I feel more strongly about that with every passing year. And when a man as talented as my brother feels like he is lacking, I know why I feel that way. “Smart” is such a nebulous concept with so many variables that it cannot be commonly defined. To wit:

If you wanted someone to build a business performance model, relating processes to each other, and associating costs and revenues to products and services, then you would be far better served to hire me to do that if your only other choice was Uncle Jim. I don’t think he’d be able to even comprehend what you wanted when you started to describe it. When it comes to creating a quantified reflection of what a business does, I am much smarter than my uncle, which is to say I understand the concepts, I know how to dissect a business, I’ve mastered the technology that allows me to build a pretty sophisticated model that can accommodate many scenarios, and I can communicate my findings.

Getting a truck or a tractor to run is a completely different situation however. I don’t know how an engine works, or how that engine transfers power to move not just the vehicle but also any equipment that it uses, or what that equipment even does. But Uncle Jim sure knows. Anything you find on a farm, he knows how to get it to work, and then he knows what to do with it once it’s going. When it comes to machines or farming, Uncle Jim is way, way smarter than me.

So when it comes to being “smart,” I think any assessment has to be contextual. There is just too much difference between people and their capabilities, knowledge and experiences – to say nothing of how all of that applies to the question at hand – to be able to declare definitively who is truly smart.

I am a product of my environment.

My family. Its genes and its values. My community. Its norms and expectations. My nation. Its identity and its archetypes.

My cousin isn’t.

I sometimes wonder if she might have a better answer than me. Not more or less right, but perhaps more effective at addressing the questions at hand: what’s the best way to secure yourself? Now, and for the future.

I am biased to independence. It seems the most secure path. And it feels like the most responsible path. The most moral path.

Of course, that’s because it aligns with my environmental expectations. Be self-sufficient. Avoid risk. Don’t put yourself at the mercy of other people – they are likely to choose themselves over you. And then where are you?

I think most people, at least in this country, feel the same.

But should we?

I heard some weeks ago that we are severely overinvested in personal transportation. 92% of cars at any given moment are parked. Sitting idle. So our desire for individual convenience has created an incredible automobile glut. Nine out of 10 cars are not in use, but waiting to be used. There are significant consequences for that decision as well: we are polluting our environment, we lose time in traffic congestion, we are more isolated from each other. The waste and damage is huge compared to other, more communal solutions to moving ourselves around.

Could we be making the same mistake in securing our futures?

My cousin has found a community that seems to be highly committed to each other. Their emotional connections seem to be deep, and they seem to value each other for what they are rather than for what they can give directly in return. What my cousin gives to the older members of that community is not expected to be repaid to her by those older people. I believe her expectation is that when she is older there will be a younger person willing to give the necessary time and energy to her care.

That feels like a very risky bet to me. And probably to most people who read this. But isn’t it wasteful for us all to prepare for a future independently?

Just as all those cars sit idle, a lot of the assets we accumulate to safeguard our future won’t be used by us. We accumulate them for security, just in case we need them. Like any good actuary would tell us though, some of us will live long lives and some of us won’t. If we all prepare to live to 90 or 95, then the person who dies at 75 or at 70 or at 65 is wasting resources, saving assets he or she will never use. If we had a communal pool of assets that we all contribute to – and an actuary would be very helpful to determine what that level would be – then those excess resources being invested could be put to use for other purposes.

This isn’t an original thought. It is, of course, the foundation of our social security system – we all pay in, and we all benefit, though not in the same proportion. For this to work, for people to feel good about it, we have to accept that some of us will be lucky with our lives’ duration and some of us will be unlucky. So be it.

It requires a profound shift in our communal values and expectations, a reordering of our communal priorities, and, perhaps hardest of all, a ceding of control. I am very reluctant to trust my fellow people to take care of me when I am vulnerable. I want to control that part of my life.

Understandably, perhaps. But necessarily? I wonder.