Tag: future

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.

New Year, New Home

2023 will be one of significant change for me (I hope).

Change in how I spend the bulk of my working day. How I earn a living. Where I earn that living. With whom I share my time. Yet as we turn the page into the new year my thoughts are with my parents, who will make just one significant change (I hope).

They are leaving their 4-bedroom home with its huge patio and multi-terraced garden in favor of a 2-bedroom apartment in a senior independent-living complex. I’ve been staying with my parents while waiting for my post-divorce life to begin, and though I was initially opposed to their move – they love their house, and my father is an enthusiastic gardener – I’ve come to see the wisdom of the move. They just don’t have the stamina they once did. My father is 87, my mother 82, and keeping up with the house and garden takes more energy than they want to give them. The reason for the move makes eminent sense. And I get it.

So they are not leaving their house kicking and screaming.

And yet it’s still not without stress.

Odds are that this new apartment will be the last place they live together. If – really, when – their health fails, it’s unlikely it will afflict them at the same time and in the same way, so even if they are in the same facility they may not be in the exact same place. And while we don’t talk about it, I think it’s clearly on their minds. How could it not be?

Mortality is the tie that binds us all. We all come face-to-face with it eventually, with varying degrees of grace. And this move for my parents is the most tangible evidence to date that they are approaching that point of their lives when their deaths are real possibilities. Not likely, but definitely possible, and more possible than it’s been before.

My father faced prostate cancer a few years ago and kidney cancer last year. He had moments of fear during each scare, but the information he got from his doctors in both cases was encouraging, and there were other options for treatment if the procedures didn’t succeed. We are eternally grateful that they did succeed. He was also in a small-plane crash in Tanzania 28 years ago, but that happened so fast he didn’t have time to reflect on his risk.

My mother has age-related macular degeneration, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Those illnesses erode her quality of life and hint of struggles to come, but none of them are currently life-threatening.

But moving into a smaller apartment with no yard to maintain is a tangible admission from them both that the scope of their remaining time is narrowing. My friend Jim’s parents lived in a retirement community that talked about the go-go years (where people were able to do anything they wanted), the slow-go years (where they could still do some of the things they wanted to do), and the no-go years (where they were limited to things in their residence). My parents are still enjoying their go-go years, but the end of that freedom is in sight, and the implications for what’s ahead are sobering to them.

And they are feeling it.

They’ll still make the move, but settling into a new community will include living with a new awareness, that, after a lifetime of moving about in the world, they might finally be in the last home they will see.

Aspirations

It seems we’ve ended this year’s third quarter with another decline in broad stock-market indices. Safe to say it hasn’t been a stellar year for equity investment returns.

I saw my friend Dave last weekend. He recently retired, and he’s a little freaked out by the market decline. He is in good shape money-wise, despite his anxieties. He has plenty of assets from his lifetime of work, and he’s worked with a financial advisor pretty extensively, so his asset allocation should allow him to weather this storm.

But he’s unusual.

First, he has assets. The median retirement savings for Americans 60-64 is about $225,000, which can reliably generate a bit over $10,000 per year in income. That’s not very much. Dave has a lot more, so he doesn’t need to eat into his principal. Eating your seed corn is only a good idea if you have no other choice.

Second, by working with a financial advisor, he’s balanced his investment risk tolerance with his desired returns. So he has investments that will provide him returns that might vary, but during times like this he should have enough cash-type assets to keep him from having to sell other assets at depressed prices.

Third, he is a frugal man. While he has hobbies, and he has an appetite for the whimsical purchase, none of that is particularly expensive. He doesn’t travel much, and when he eats out he’s content with good-quality fast food and local taquerias. He doesn’t drink to excess, his gambling is restricted to nickel poker with friends, and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t even know where to source drugs outside a cannabis dispensary.

So he’ll be more than fine financially.

I’ve often felt that we are directed to oversave for retirement. It’s obviously not working if the median 60+ year-old has only $225,000, but I contend that’s because of low earnings rather than profligacy. Professionals suggest we save enough to allow us to live to 95 years old. Yet life expectancy is in the mid-80s for those of us already in middle age. Some of us will make it to 95, but most of us won’t. So we will have oversaved by several years, depriving us of those resources we could have used during our lives.

I get the moral hazard argument, but I’m not sure data supports the idea that people shirk their responsibilities. There are anecdotes, of course, because someone somewhere has done anything you can possibly imagine, but I think people are generally honest and have good intentions. Yes, we are lazy, and yes, we often take the path of least resistance, but I think we also see ourselves as team members, and we usually want to do our part for the greater good, especially when we think others are doing so too.

So perhaps we need to rethink our savings targets and enhance social security or some other public income program for those who live beyond their projected lifespans. It would free up resources, so people wouldn’t have to sacrifice as much, and it would help that $225,000 nest egg the average person has to use.

It won’t stop my man Dave from worrying, but it could let a lot of others sleep better at night.

Cousin Mike

I don’t have a particularly large family, but then again it isn’t small either. Each of my parents had two siblings, and they gave me six cousins on my mother’s side and four on my father’s. All of my cousins have an appeal, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about one in particular.

My cousin Mike (on the right, above) is the oldest on my father’s side. My Uncle Edward’s four children showed musical talent, and family gatherings with them always featured guitars and banjos and singing. Everyone enjoyed it, but music to cousin Mike is like oxygen. He simply needs music to live.

He made his living as a salesperson for a big company that makes a lot of different things for buildings and machines, but whenever he had a spare moment he played music or listened to music or thought about music. He can play just about any stringed instrument, and he’s played in hobby bands throughout his life, often with other family members. He’s played for the past several years in a bluegrass band that plays regionally in the midwest, mostly northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin.

To call it a compulsion is probably accurate, but there’s something of a muddy film that coats the word compulsion. Mike really feels compelled to make music, but music brings him great joy and satisfaction. It’s not drudgery, it’s a light in his life. It’s such a part of him, fused to his identity and the goals that give his life its purpose, that he yearns to do it, so there’s no friction at all with his need to do it.

I envy that alignment, and I hope my writing becomes that for me.

I am sometimes reminded of my brother’s bachelor party when I consider questions like this one. We took Shawn to Las Vegas, where we did the expected shows and gambling and adult entertainment and extravagant meals for a long weekend. It was probably 3am on Sunday morning when I found myself with a couple other friends of his sitting in a lounge cut out of the casino. On the tiny stage was a cover band playing pop hits from the 70s and 80s.

My first thought was dismissive, bordering on disdain.

“How pathetic do you have to be to play someone else’s music in front of six people at a casino at 3am? The effort to practice, the expense of the instruments and equipment, the costumes, the opportunity cost of the time and money invested, and this is the best you can do?”

And then a second though occurred to me (not in time to save me from proving myself a judgmental jerk, of course).

“If they are playing this gig, then it’s obviously worth the sacrifices they’re making. They get to do what they love to do, and someone is paying them to do it. They are performing on stage, playing music with their bandmates, because they want to do this exact thing. And that’s such an admirable trait. Chase your dreams and appreciate the journey.”

I chose to believe that they were living the life they wanted to live, not grudgingly punching the clock on a dream with a different destination.

That Vegas trip was a couple decades ago, and I hadn’t considered my cousin Mike at that time. But thinking about him validates for me the second thought I had on that early Sunday morning: some people are lucky enough to love what they must do.

And I hope to be one of them.

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.

Dad

My father is getting old. He’s working towards 87, though you’d probably guess at least a decade younger if you saw him.

He grew up a farm boy, so he delights in physical labor. Professionally, he spent 40+ years as a geologist, hiking around mines and mountains looking at rocks. His hair is no longer red, but it hasn’t gone gray either. It’s kind of a medium brown.

He repeats himself from time to time now. And he doesn’t hear very well, so he’ll sometimes start a new conversation while another is going on. He’s lost one kidney and his prostate to cancers and a gall bladder maybe in sympathy, but he still climbs on the roof to clean off debris and goes up on a ladder to retrieve boxes of Christmas decorations despite his wife’s protestations.

He and my mother travel extensively, often internationally, often to see opera performances, and he remains curious about genetics and stock investing and politics, though the last aggravates him as much as it aggravates everyone.

He revels in family gatherings, which I understand more and more as I age too. His nine grandchildren are individually fascinating to him, and he thinks about them a lot. In the way of grandparents everywhere he expects nothing from them, and he is genuinely grateful for whatever time and attention they give him. He wasn’t quite as generous with his children, though he was always fair and attentive when he wasn’t away working.

My father is not especially articulate. He struggles to express his thoughts sometimes, and it gets harder the more wine he drinks. It frustrates him in the moment, but his frustration rarely lasts long. After all, there’s always a new idea to explore.

At his retirement party 25 years ago, one of the administrative assistants he worked with for a few years gave me a deep insight into the man I’d known by then for 35 years or so. After my father talked about his career, largely thanking people for their contributions to it, she said it was typical of my father to list his regrets as things he wouldn’t have the chance to do. He accepted everything, good and bad, that had already happened, and he never thought of changing any of it. He didn’t look back with regret, but he was sad about missing projects yet to come. That remains true. He desperately wants to ride in a self-driving car.

He hasn’t figured out most of his iPhone yet, but he’s not intimidated by it. In fact, he discovered how to emphasize delivery of texts by playing around with them, and it amused me – and probably him – when he taught me how to do it too. Our texts to each other are always delivered loud or gentle or slammed. He loves tech stocks as much for their possibilities to change our world as for the financial returns to his portfolio. He’s excited about the future. Politicians aside, of course.

He laughs often and smiles more. He and I like to sit together at family dinners, and we amuse ourselves with running commentary and asides to the topics of conversation. His trademark phrase on parting with colleagues has always been, “Have fun!”

Because he does. Not every minute, but many times every day.

He is, in sum, a happy man.

I want to be like my dad.

Adulting

My daughters are going through the change.

Not menopause. (At least I hope not – I don’t have grandchildren yet!)

Their change is from learning to doing, from studying and practicing to working and producing. My oldest graduated college a couple years ago, my youngest will graduate in a few months. Their transition to full-time contributors to our society is going about as well as expected. Which is to say they are confused, anxious, and highly stressed.

Like most of us who have gone through it.

I don’t know that we’re failing our young people as they move from school into working, but I do think we’ve not been able to articulate a path that illuminates what will be different and how they will be able to successfully manage it. Which is weird, because the answer(s) seem simple.

First, find work that fills a deeply-felt purpose. If the goals of your work align with your values, then you can stand doing the boring stuff you’re going to have to do as the noob, because you know it moves the ball forward on things that are super important to you. And you don’t have to make a lot of money, because A) you don’t have a lot of expenses, and B) you’re not going to make a ton more money in another entry-level position this side of Wall Street. So embrace your ideals and find work that results in something that feels important to you.

Second, tend to your health. That’s health writ large. Get daily exercise. Pray. Journal your feelings. Meditate. Do puzzles. Eat regularly. And for God sakes, get enough sleep every night. When you keep your physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual selves in balance, you can manage the ebbs and flows of your life much more capably.

Third, tend to your relationships. Your partner. Your family. Your friends. Your colleagues. Text them. Go to lunch and dinner. Have coffee or beers. Invite them over for game night. Go for a hike or a run together. Call them on their birthdays. Share what’s happening with you, and take interest in what they’re experiencing. The more vibrant your network of people is, the more enriching your life will be, and the more support you can pull from it in your times of need. And there is always times of need. When you are present for them, they will be there when you need help too.

And that’s really it.

If we helped our young people – and ourselves – concentrate on these three ubertasks, then this whole adulting thing wouldn’t be so intimidating. There’s plenty of distractions out there to dull our focus – our phones, TVs and streaming services, booze and pot and other consciousness-altering temptations – and those are among the reasons we struggle with this transtion, but I think if we could present these simple steps in a way that resonates as truth, perhaps my daughters and their peers would heed them and save themselves a lot of agony. And just maybe this transition wouldn’t feel so daunting.

Participation

The world is full of actors and analysts.

I am an analyst.

I like to understand things. I think I really need to understand things. Which requires observation. Which I do best when I’m a little detached from what’s going on. So I sit on the sidelines, away from the action. By choice. It’s where I can observe and analyze. And understand.

Actors are in the middle of everything. They make decisions quickly, they relish the interactions, they’re always in motion. They make life fun, and make it frustrating, depending on which actions they take. But they take action.

Analysts are important. We help our communities understand what’s happening and why. Our work informs actions. We are the experts. We study, we learn, we apply our knowledge, and we explain how things work, why things happen, what we can and can’t do about things we want to change. Not everyone listens, of course, but we’re still important.

Actors are also important. We need people who will commit themselves – and ourselves – to action. They move the ball forward. They create the changes we see in our communities. They are the people in the ring. They strive, usually to make things better for us all. We don’t always agree with what they do, but we still need people to do things.

We have another group in our communities as well, however. These people aren’t particularly productive. They don’t add much of anything at all.

Spectators.

They don’t extend themselves to understand. They don’t take action to change their communities. Or themselves. They take what they earn, but they don’t give back to the broader world around them.

We have far too many spectators. People who do their work, come home to watch television, eat with their family, then do the same thing again the next day. They aren’t thinking about why the world is the way it is and how it might be better. And they aren’t committing themselves to action on behalf of others either. They aren’t extending themselves for others beyond their circle of friends and family, and that lack of effort isn’t helping – and when we have a community that is hostile to some of its members, it might actually be hurting – other people.

I’m not saying they are bad people. I do believe that the sum of each of our individual failings is the same. Our individual lots are not the issue here.

I am saying that if they engaged, it would help lighten the load that many of the other members of our community have to carry. Our collective lot is the issue. I believe that if a fellow person is diminished, then we are not optimizing our collective well-being. Is it up to that individual to make the effort to not be diminished? Yes. And it is also up to each of us in our community to make the effort so that no one in our community is diminished.

I believe we are, in part, our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper. We may not have the largest part to play in his or her individual success, but we still have a part in it.

So let’s play that part. Analyst or actor, it doesn’t matter. Just don’t be a spectator.