Ununified

“Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state,” wrote [Thomas] Jefferson after describing his plan to remove free blacks in the event of emancipation, before answering with a litany of reasons: “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” He simply couldn’t imagine an American democracy that wasn’t fully white.
Jamelle Bouie “Racial Blindness”

This is all true enough. In the end, it's not much different than the idea that "A house divided against itself cannot stand." Where President Jefferson may have had a failure of imagination is in the idea that a multi-racial society is, by it's very nature, a house divided against itself. It's been nearly two hundred years since President Jefferson died. And if you ask me, the "Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained [and] new provocations" that Jefferson spoke of are just as real today as they were in 1818. Whether "the real distinctions which nature has made" are more than skin-deep is open to debate, but since, even at skin-depth, they are prominent enough that they have become very clear dividing lines, that debate may very well be moot. And so, the question becomes this: Why should President Jefferson have imagined a multracial America in the future?

One can argue that the convulsions between the parties have ceased in a way that didn't require the annihilation of either group, but I suspect that one would have to argue it, and in the face of any number of rational arguments to the contrary, one of which would likely be that the bombings in Austin, Texas that feature in Racial Blindness are only perhaps the most recent of an unbroken series of convulsions that has started long before President Jefferson's time. This is not to say that things haven't improved. They're much better than they used to be, even if you only consider the relatively short span of time from when I was in school to the present. But that's different from open, racially motivated violence and unrest to have effectively ended.

The whole point of Racial Blindness is to complain that American media and society treat White murderers more sympathetically than Black victims, and the article is one long list of recollections of other injuries that Black (and other non-White) Americans have sustained. While Mr. Bouie mentions President Jefferson's words as a means of indicting him for not seeing non-Whites as legitimately and properly American, he fails to rebut a single point that President Jefferson has made. There is no indication within the article that any successful effort is being made, by anyone, to heal the division of White and non-White into separate, and at least somewhat mutually antagonistic, parties. In fact:

There are important exceptions, but looking at the broad sweep of American society, to possess whiteness is still to receive, as one of its benefits, recognition as a full person even in the face of criminal behavior.

When we see a police chief defer to the self-spun narrative of a serial bomber or watch news outlets attribute misogynistic violence to lovesickness—while denying the same interiority and full humanity to black victims or offenders—we’re watching this pattern play out.

So... Where was President Jefferson actually wrong? It's been two centuries, and one can use Mr. Bouie's own words to demonstrate that President Jefferson was spot-on. Mr. Bouie argues neither that the convulsions created by prejudice, resentment, continued racism and/or nature show signs of ending anytime soon or these factors need not cause partisan divisions that threaten a broader democracy. Absent are any examples of a functioning multiracial democracy or republic that President Jefferson should or could have known about at the time. Perhaps the worst thing that can be said about Jefferson is that if he were so convinced that representative government in a multiracial society was manifestly impossible, he should have made some provision for a genuinely sovereign state for the Native American population.

Be that as it may, it still seems strange to call President Jefferson out for noting a state of affairs that's lasted for centuries and encompassed his entire life. He would have had no experience with a society in which one race or another was not dominant at the expense of non-members. And Jamelle Bouie's point is that he's never lived in the sort of society he faults President Jefferson for not envisioning, either. Given this, the Liberia project (which, incidentally, created the first modern republic in Africa) makes perfect sense, even if one notes that the repatriated former slaves and free Black people from the United States did unto the locals as Americans had done unto the Natives. (Which would only seem to further reinforce President Jefferson's point...)

In light of all this, it seems that rather than complain about an American President's prophetic words, more progress would be made by finally rendering that prophecy inaccurate.

The Truth of Lies

About a week and a half or so ago. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was being interviewed and along the way, he said the following:

I find that [Holocaust denial] deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong, but I think-

At which point, interviewer Kara Swisher interrupted to say:

In the case of the Holocaust deniers, they might be, but go ahead.

The next day, there was an article, Mark Zuckerberg Is Doubly Wrong About Holocaust Denial, on The Atlantic. In it, Yair Rosenberg says the following:

For one, surely spreading hateful misinformation about the Holocaust—designed to mislead the masses and undermine societal awareness of historic anti-Semitic prejudice—constitutes “trying to organize harm.” Moreover, even if we accept Zuckerberg’s questionable claim that some deny the Holocaust out of ignorance rather than malice, this does not absolve Facebook of responsibility for uncritically hosting and spreading that content.

Both of these appear to be based on an idea that has become so widely held that neither Ms. Swisher or Mr. Rosenberg bother to offer any support of it: That none of the people who promote Holocaust denial on the Web genuinely believe what they are saying. For me, this flies in the face of something that I believe is generally understood to be true: That a lie gains widespread (or even limited, actually) social currency only to the degree that it is inobvious that it is, in fact, a lie.

Given the fact that Mr. Rosenberg specifically describes the act of denying the reality of the Holocaust as "designed to mislead the masses," it might seem odd that he's apparently convinced that no one on Facebook has actually been mislead. But it strikes me that one could understand there to be a phenomenon that I'll call Holocaust Denial Skepticism, and that it has taken on characteristics of other purported conspiracies, such as Birtherism, Trutherism and Climate Skepticism; the understanding that the group of people who are actively involved in promoting the conspiracy and the group of people who are sincerely taken in by the conspiracy are mutually exclusive. It's as if, once someone becomes convinced that the Holocaust is actually a historical hoax, they are informed that no, it actually DID happen. Then, and only then, are they allowed to try to convince others that it was a hoax.

Part of this, I believe, comes from the idea that there is no rational reason to honestly disbelieve the Holocaust. And so all disbelief is really a form of motivated skepticism; someone who is free of any hint of antisemitism would simply realize the truth of the accepted historical narrative, and that would be the end of it. Holocaust denial, therefore, is an invention of the antisemitic mind, and an intentionally malicious one, at that.

But from an epistemological standpoint, that fails to take into account the degree to which most human understanding of the world is matter of faith. It is rarely, if ever, unambiguously obvious that any given event took place to a person who was not there to witness it themselves. It is our general belief in the truthfulness of other people that renders most of human history fact, rather than a random series of assertions that may, or may not, have any relationship to actual events. I am unable to say, with any certainty, that the world I currently inhabit is one that flows directly from the consequences of the events of, and surrounding, the Second World War, and thus, provides irrefutable proof that it happened, because there isn't an accessible parallel world, in which there was no Second World War, to compare it to.

But it's worth noting that this is a stance of epistemological skepticism, and is far from universal. What makes it interesting in this circumstance is how Mr. Zuckerberg's own skepticism concerning the origins of Holocaust denial translates into a kind of compassion for Holocaust deniers, even as it intersects with an important business consideration; namely that Mr. Zuckerberg does not was Facebook to be in the business of being an arbiter and protector of Honesty, given that he doesn't understand either himself or his organization as capable of knowing someone's inner world to a degree that would allow them to effectively police that.

Ms. Swisher and Mr. Rosenberg, on the other hand, inhabit a world in which the link between Holocaust denial and malicious antisemitism (presuming they see any other sort) is clear and present. This allows varying (but high) degrees of certainty of the latter to be deduced from the simple presence of the former.

And in the end, I think that this becomes the issue. There seems to be a consensus, one that Mr Zuckerberg may even share, that it is permissible to banish bad people from the public square. The disagreement comes in how one understands that someone qualifies.

The Renters are Coming

Suspecting what I would find there, I checked out the website, and sure enough, I found this:

This new building will encompass 134 new apartments approximately plus some retail stores. This is a big development (4 stories building) which will have a severe impact in our community as traffic will increase significantly and home value could be negatively impacted.

While it's become popular to blame Amazon and Microsoft for the run-up in housing values, factors like Washington State's Growth Management Act, which restricted the available land for housing, are largely overlook. Also overlooked is the resistance of incumbent homeowners to the large blocks of new housing that are required to keep the supply on par with demand. While this website seems to indicate that it's the size and traffic impacts of the new complex that are the culprits (in language that reads oddly like a non-native speaker of English...) the fact of the matter is that if a shortage of housing is driving prices up, alleviating that shortage is bad for you, if you're a homeowner; especially one who purchased recently.

And this, to me, is the biggest overlooked factor. The hundreds of thousands of households for whom the fact that housing stock is limited becomes a direct infusion of home equity. And not that I necessarily blame them. I know a single mother whose children's college funds are essentially the fact that she can borrow against the high value of her home. If housing prices collapse, one wonders how they'll go to school.

But it is worth keeping in mind that opportunities come at a cost to someone. And sometimes, zero-sum games develop.

Avoided

So was reading a piece about The Black Panther that included the following:

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored.

As much as I understand that I cannot access what so many other people hold so dearly, to call it The Void seems pretentious in the extreme. Mainly because I perceive no such yawning chasm in my life. And while this may be due to an indifference to what would lie on the other side, it also strikes me that many other people live with this same sort of phenomenon without seeing themselves as desperately incomplete.

As I understand the world, The Void is a function of an American (although likely not limited to the United States) concept that centers identity as much, if not more, on prior generations, than the here and now. In other words, people are understood to be not simply the product, but a continuation, of some arbitrary number of prior generations into the past, depending on when they finally lose interest in their genealogy. And while it's true that for many Black people in the United States, the trans-Atlantic slave trade severed their ability to trace their family trees back as far as they might like, we are not the only people in this boat. There are any number of people, whom, for whatever reason, find themselves unable to trace their family trees back as far as they might prefer. And in areas where genealogy is less important to identity, they don't perceive a yawning darkness where their understanding of their selves should be.

In the end, I realize that my own lack of perception of The Void comes from the fact that genealogy wasn't a big deal in my family. The focus was more on the present. My parents never spoke of their grandparents and to this day, I don't know my mother's birth father's name. He may as well have never existed. Being cut off from much closer generations in this way meant that my identity didn't extend much beyond my own parents. And while some people would clearly see this as a loss, I view it as a benefit, if for no other reason than it leaves me unwounded, psychically or culturally, by The Void.

Blanked Out

So I was driving along yesterday afternoon, and I encountered this protest. It was just ginning up when I arrived on the scene, and I quickly found a place to park and hurried over with my camera to find a good place to shoot from. The protesters were mainly on the corner directly across the intersection from me, but were starting to cross the streets to either side.

The fact that the bulk of the party was on the southeast corner of the street meant that they were out in broad daylight. Which had the effect of washing out the text on most of their signs, as you can see in the picture. Granted, the human eye has a better dynamic range than a digital camera, but I wasn't really doing any better at seeing what they were protesting; even when there was enough contrast, a handheld sign isn't very large at any significant distance.

I'm pretty sure that it hadn't occurred to any of the protestors that the Sun would be the enemy of their message; it wouldn't have occurred to me before yesterday. But I did find it to be amusing.

Yellow

Summer blossoms are always interesting, especially here in the Seattle area. In the spring, when it's more likely to rain, it's easy for a flower to stand out against the gloom. But when it's bright out, the flowers have to bring their color A game.

Partisan Polarity

One of the drivers of partisan strife in the modern United States is the idea of "spin." Simply defined, spin is selectively emphasizing or de-emphasizing information in order to present a particular event in a predetermined light, either positive or negative.While spin is often viewed as dishonest, it's usually different from lying, or other forms of direct deceit.

This becomes a partisan issue in that there seems to be a general assumption that there is an objective and neutral reality that everyone inhabits, and that depictions of the world that closely align with disagreeable partisan viewpoints have been spun by partisans to appear that way. Accordingly, absent any attempt to spin the data, objective truth would be evident. To the degree that people understand the political Other to be (willfully) unintelligent, credulous or immoral, all of these are generally wrapped up in spin, which has come to mean a sort of cynical dishonesty about the workings of the world.

But, in my understanding of the world, spin has little to do with partisanship. Rather, it's the fact that there's really no such animal as an objective view of the world. People interact with the world through their senses, but also through their own experiences, and this creates a necessarily biased view of the world. I read a long-form essay about New York's real-estate market and the author's perception of the impact that it was having on the spirit of the city this morning, and it soon became clear that the depictions of events were being filtered through the author's own understanding of the world around them.

To a reader who holds a different set of experiences, however, that filtering starts to look a lot like intentional spin, designed to fool the unwary. It's easy to understand a simple reason for this; the belief that experience doesn't matter. And that's an easy conclusion to come to. After all, unless color blindness is a factor, what's red for one person is red for another. And so if someone says something is blue when the observer sees red, one may be excused for asking what's going on. But politics doesn't work the same way as color.

Understanding that, I think, will result in a more productive political discourse. Of course, that leaves the thorny issue of promoting that understanding.

Imagine Luxury

You’re providing a luxury service at a bottom-wage price. This is the most galling element: Having hot food delivered on a whim is ostensibly one of the most upper-class things imaginable. It’s entirely a luxury service, but people treat it like it should be a “deal,” or at a rock-bottom price with absolutely perfect service each and every time.
Luke Gardner "I Delivered Packages for Amazon and It Was a Nightmare" The Atlantic

With all due respect, Mr. Gardner lacks imagination. When I was younger, and living, I might add, in greater Chicagoland, having hot food delivered on a whim was quite common, so long as one had a taste for pizza or Chinese. These were the foods that could charge enough to make delivery worthwhile, yet didn't charge so much that people expected a better experience than eating at home could provide.

It was most certainly a discretionary service, in that you didn't need to have the food delivered. Going to a place that didn't deliver (or one that charged extra for the service) and either eating there or taking it home yourself was an option for the slightly more frugal. But it wasn't a luxury. It wasn't something that demonstrated a certain level of wealth, sophistication and/or status for people who engaged in it, unless their peer group was quite impoverished or visiting from a third-world nation.

The fact if the matter is that people who are willing to drive food from a restaurant to a home in return for a bottom-wage are thick on the ground, for any number of reasons. And that is why the wages are so low. That, and most, if not all, of the people who use GrubHub, or have their packages delivered by Amazon are not themselves "upper-class." The upper class have better ways of obtaining hot food on a whim and more secure ways of having things delivered to them. The people whom Amazon Flex and Grub Hub are serving are looking for absolutely perfect services at rock-bottom prices because absolutely perfect service helps them to feel better about themselves and rock-bottom prices are all they can afford without worrying about their finances.

One a recent trip to New York State, a heat wave was settling in just before we were preparing to leave. The nearest retail outlet to our hotel was a Walmart, so I hopped over there to buy a handkerchief to stuff in a pocket and mop the sweat from my face when the Sun came for me. I found a packet six thin squares of cloth for the "rock-bottom" price of three dollars. As I pulled one out of the package and looked at it, I realized how desperately cheap it was. The napkins that the airline handed out to be used with dinner were miles better than this. I would gladly have taken one halfway-decent handkerchief for that same three dollars. But six, I recalled, is more than one. And so I had six nearly-worthless handkerchiefs, rather than one useful one. Because the ability to buy six handkerchiefs (certainly more than anyone needs at one time) helped Walmart customers to feel better about themselves and fifty cents apiece spared them from worrying about their finances. And thin cotton, assembled by people for whom American poverty would be considered a luxury, is inexpensive. Enough so that there's a margin to be had at six for three dollars. Because there is always more where that came from.

And that's the thing about Amazon Flex or Grub Hub drivers. There are always more where they came from. If The Atlantic's Alana Semuels never gets behind the wheel of a car again in the service of delivering packages for Amazon, Amazon will never miss her. There are thousand other people waiting for the work. And because it doesn't take any particular preexisting skill or acumen, most of them are likely competent enough that it doesn't matter to Amazon which ones they pick. My father told me that the only way one makes good money working for someone else is to do something that other people can't do, or something that other people won't do. Gig-economy courier satisfies neither of those.

And that's why the pay is so low, and the expectations are so high. Someone else is willing to claim that they can do that work both better and cheaper, and they're willing to take the risk that they can somehow make that work, because they don't have any better options. And while the services of the desperately poor may be a luxury good in that they're a discretionary purchase, they haven't been the mark of true luxury for some time.

So What About?

I was reading a comments section on an article from way back in the day - the Bush Administration, to be sure, and one of the commenters quoted a comedian: "Be careful if you have brown people in your country, because we're going to bomb you!" The response to this was trotting out the names of two Black Republicans of the time; names that often came up when Republicans felt that "the race card" was being played on them: Julius Caesar (J. C.) Watts, and Condoleezza Rice. And it reminded me of something that I hadn't had much call to think about recently; the fact that the relatively small bench of prominent Black conservatives leads to the ineffective and unnecessary tactic of naming the same people as defenses; as if their names are shields against charges of racism.

The larger Black community tends to have little use for most outspoken Black conservatives. Rice and Watts, like their contemporaries Ward Connerly and Alan Keyes, and present-day conservatives like Ben Carson, Kanye West, Juan Williams and even Bill Cosby are, to varying degrees, widely considered to be "Uncle Toms" within the Black community; people who have sold out to the White power structure for either their own betterment or, in the eyes of many Blacks, out of racial self-loathing. (Note that Connerly rejected the "Black" label as he is only 1/4 Black, which leads to the somewhat ironic situation of Black activists criticizing him for not accepting his "Black identity" - almost as if they were seeking to have the "one drop" principle applied. And Keyes couldn't seem to shake the "Uncle Tom" label no matter how often or loudly he accused the GOP of covert or overt racism. His moving to Illinois, apparently solely to mount a doomed Senate campaign against Barack Obama back in the day, didn't help matters any.) Colin Powell, another name that was commonly used to deflect charges of racism, by contrast, was widely considered an ineffectual dupe, whose appointment was mostly political cover for the administration, rather than a mark of any real respect. The fact that the Bush administration placed Blacks in three Cabinet positions (Powell, Alphonso Jackson [HUD] and Roderick Paige [Education]) and as National Security Advisor arguably did much less for them in the Black community than administration's seemingly overt religiosity and "activist conservatism." In fact, many Americans are/were completely unaware of Jackson and Paige period, let alone the fact that both were Black.

In any event, using the Rice, Keys or West et al to deflect charges of racism is undermined by the generally negative perceptions of this group within the Black community. The only way that this sort of name dropping would work is if the name were that of a prominent critic, who somehow managed to work well with (and within) the administration, an almost paradoxical situation mode more unlikely by the Bush, and now the Trump, administration's famous allergy to anything that smacks of disloyalty or criticism. But only by managing to find someone not considered to be either co-opted or shut out by the administration will Republican name-dropping meet with any success in the near term.

What tends to keep Blacks in the Democratic column is not an overall liberalism in the community (Blacks are very social conservative as a group), but the idea that Democrats will do more to advance and protect them. Blacks tend to see themselves as victims, and as George Will once put it, the Democrats have never met a victim they didn't like. Many Blacks don't distinguish between policies that hurt them because they are, for the most part, working-class or poor, and intentionally racist policies that are aimed at maintaining the American Apartheid that many Blacks are convinced exists (and are in some ways, emotionally invested in). If you ever hear some of the wilder conspiracy theories that circulate within the Black community, some of them are pretty incredible. (Interestingly, many of these theories have the overall effect of painting White America as being implacably malicious and supremely devious, but amazingly inept, in much the same fashion as hapless movie villains.) Alan Keyes was perhaps unique in managing to be both a staunch Republican, AND tightly wrapped up in the culture of Black victimhood.

If the Republicans could find a way to use shared values to break the (counter-)culture of victimization that many Blacks subscribe to, they could scoop up the vast majority of the socially-conservative community in one fell swoop. And in doing so, go a long way towards crippling the current incarnation of the Democratic party, which relies heavily on the fact that Blacks tend to feel marginalized and put upon by society at large. Many Black commentators feel that breaking the Democratic stranglehold on the Black vote would increase the community's political clout. With their votes perceived as being in play, the community could wrangle concessions out of both parties much more easily than they can now, when they are apparently taken for granted by Democrats, and written off by Republicans. I'm a bit dubious about this line of reasoning, however, if for no other reason than the loss of the Black vote would likely damage the Democratic Party to the point that the Republicans wouldn't feel the need to court new voters.

This effort may be hampered, however, by the fact that many Republicans may see their fellows as being at least somewhat racist, and willing to withdraw their support of the party if too many overt overtures are made. As a candidate Donald Trump famously asked the Black community what they had to lose, but it's telling that he didn't explicitly offer anything. He simply painted a caricature of wretchedness and implied has as President, he'd do something about it. Instead, he's become widely seen among non-Republicans as attracting, and surrounding himself with, would-be Confederates, neo-Nazis and other flavors of White Supremacists. The caricature of the GOP as political arm of the Ku Klux Klan was dying on with great difficulty; now it's come roaring back to life, or undeath, as the case may be.

In any event, holding up a succession of token Black names is unlikely to reduce the friction between Republicans and Black community. It is only through a values-based bridging of the perceived gap between themselves and the Black community (regardless of who does it, or how it happens) and a purging of openly racist elements that will lay to rest the idea (on both sides) that the GOP and Blacks are natural enemies. Jesse Jackson's intervention in the Terry Schiavo case showed where the Bush administration and the interests of the Black community intersected, and this is really the place the Republicans should focus on. We'll see if anyone ever has the desire, drive and vision to make it happen. In the meantime, conspicuously focusing on strategies and actions that create the rising tide to lift all boats may be the best path. But that would mean letting go of a culture of White grievance that sees wiley Blacks as cheating their way into undeserved non-poverty. And that's a much heavier lift than name-dropping.

The Risk Economy

Inequality has a number of side effects. One of them is that risk becomes a form of currency, in that people who have little in the way of other assets (be that material wealth or in-demand skills) start to find themselves in a position where what they have to offer is their ability (note that I'm not including willingness or readiness in this) to take on risks so that other people don't have to.

The transference of risk is a common project-management practice, and so it shouldn't be surprising to find that it's common in the realm of economics. What makes it difficult is the fact that it's possible to take on risks without having access to any of the means of mitigating against it, and in return for something that isn't valuable enough to mitigate the effects of risk, should a triggering event occur and the risk becomes reality.

But the other factor that should be taken into account is that pushing risk onto other people isn't confined to wealthy people. It's a common practice up and down the economic spectrum, and it may even become more common as people have less material wealth or other assets to work with, as they seek to guard themselves against risking those assets by lowering their own exposure to potential risks. But risks seldom go away completely; rather they are simply moved from one party to another. And as risk that comes to pass and depletes a person's other assets simply places them into a position where they may have to take even further risk if they want to return to the point where they started.

Perhaps the best way to manage long-term risk is with short-term risk. The willingness of a greater number of people to take risks today may mean that there will be less risk in the system in the future, although this too, is a balancing act. It's also, and this is the difficult part, a Public Goods problem, where a person can derive the greatest benefit by taking on less risk than other players, as they can often share in the benefits of the risk that others take, while sheltering themselves from the consequences of it actually coming to pass.

And the problem with a Public Goods Game is that it's hard to change the rules, as they aren't really subject to the desires of the players. This is because it's difficult to change the self-interest calculus of a large number of people all at once. The idea that it takes money to make money is a cliché at this point, but it's no less accurate for that. If we view wealth as a hedge against risk, it becomes clear that asking people who understand themselves to have little in the way of wealth to take risks now, on the chance that there will be less risk (greater wealth) later could be a very hard sell.

We have an unequal society, one that is pushing people to use their ability to take risks as an economic asset out of necessity, rather than choice. And we have this because it's side effect of large-scale societies, and the fact that human beings are more evolutionarily suited to small ones. Changing all of humanity is hard, perhaps to the point of being a fools errand. And while I'm not suggesting that we simply sit back ans watch how this all plays out, I'm not sure we can do anything else.

Arc

Just a bit of rainbow... Maybe the rest of it was waiting for rain.

For Love of Country

If "patriotism" can be described as the feeling of: "My country, right or wrong," then I'm not a patriot. My own philosophy is best summed up with a saying that I found online to the effect of: "If my country is wrong, then I will do my best to make it right." But even that sometimes feels more jingoistic than I expect I genuinely am.

I was having a conversation with an acquaintance about whether it makes sense, if one finds another nation that may be a better fit to one's temperament and/or ideology, to leave and take up residence there; or should one stay in one's home country and work to make it a better personal fit. We went back and forth for a while, until I finally asked: "Say that you and I are complete ideological opposites, to the point where you would find my perfect society an absolute nightmare. Would you prefer that I fought to implement that society here, and won, or would you rather than I moved elsewhere and allowed this place to function in a way more to your liking?" He thought about it for a moment, and then said: "I'd prefer that you stayed and came around to my way of thinking."

Of course, the way international borders are set up, simply packing up and moving to another country simply for ideological reasons is more or less a non-starter, and so many people are left to hope (or demand) that they other side gives up on their ideals and comes over to their side. But this idea that leaving one's home nation for greener pastures is a mark of disloyalty is interesting in a nation that was founded on just that very idea. While Britons may enjoy snarking at us about "Treason Day," it's not expected that anyone takes it seriously. But for many Americans, especially those who view themselves as Conservatives, the idea that someone who finds, say, Europe to to be more appealing might actually decide to move there triggers "outrage."

Unconditional love for a nation is like the unconditional love for a person; it only works when it's reciprocated. But I think that one of the issues that pops up when people speak of love of country is that many people also view it an analogous to a love for themselves. Which can make a certain amount of sense; after all, what is a nation other than its people? While a group of people can effectively be stateless, a state can not be peopleless and still exist as a state. And so it may be this instinct to take the opposition of others to certain aspects of the nation personally, and to respond as such, that drives the rancorous political debate we have today.

If so, it will be a difficult thing to solve, because it can be a difficult thing to understand. If someone mentions what they understand to be a modern problem, and I point out that the situation has, in fact, been steadily improving over the tenure of the nation, it can be difficult for me to understand why they would see that as an attack against them. While there are any number of potential reasons, none of them tend to be particularly evident in the midst of a conversation. And that inability to understand people in the moment may be one of the biggest issues that we face right now. Second only, perhaps, to the lack of urgency around finding a solution.

Ingredients